Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films
Subtext is a book club podcast for readers interested in what the greatest works of the human imagination say about life’s big questions. Each episode, philosopher Wes Alwan and poet Erin O’Luanaigh conduct a close reading of a text or film and co-write an audio essay about it in real time. It’s literary analysis, but in the best sense: we try not overly stuffy and pedantic, but rather focus on unearthing what’s most compelling about great books and movies, and how it is they can touch our lives in such a significant way.
A Map-Like Imagination in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (“The Moose,” Part 2)
Aug 24, 2026
A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map’s privileged, sweeping, bird’s eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let’s say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop’s most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination.
Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. We are currently about. Oh, I'm okay. I'm proud of us. We're just about halfway through the Moose. That's not bad compared to our usual record. We're not halfway through stanza one. We're going. You know, it's about a bus trip. It's encouraging us to pick up the pace a little bit and get to our next stop. So we were just going to pick up with the woman in stanza 13 climbing into the bus.
0:41 Wes: Before you say that, I just want to make one little observation.
0:44 Erin: Oh, sure.
0:45 Wes: Just that we get right as soon as the light goes out, it's then that we get the barking of a dog and the smell of salt. First it's the smell of salt hay and then it's the barking of a dog. So smell is introduced. And is that the first time sound is really introduced in any. You know, we get the bus starting and all that, but I think that's right. It's very visual up to that point, I think. And then as soon as we lose the light, we get these new sensory modalities. The collie just supervised this dog, gives us a nice bark, and presumably we can't even see him. We just hear him. So I just love that. I just. I love the transition into darkness. It's so.
1:26 Erin: Yeah.
1:26 Wes: I don't know how else to say it.
1:28 Erin: Yeah.
1:28 Wes: And it's then that we. This really is the midpoint of the poem because now we're going to make this transition into the world of the bus, I guess. As the woman climbs in, we have
1:41 Erin: the ship's port lantern, as you said, being an indication that it's now nearly or fully dark outside.
1:47 Wes: She says red light swims through the dark.
1:50 Erin: Yeah. I'm assuming that at this point a bus would have some form of illumination, at least for when it's stopped and the doors open for people getting on and off the bus. Right. It would. It would light up on the inside interior. Yeah.
2:03 Wes: Yeah.
2:03 Erin: Or at least maybe it would stop, certainly if it were stopping at a station or a little, you know, whatever those things are called. Those little. Yeah, there's a word for it.
2:14 Wes: We need something to see the freckles by.
2:16 Erin: Right. We need something. Exactly. But wherever they would be stopping would have some form of street light illumination or something of that order. Anyway.
2:26 Wes: But it's interesting you say this, because I didn't picture a bus station at any point in this. And I just imagine people along the side of the road.
2:34 Erin: Right. But if it were a course, it
2:38 Wes: couldn't be that way.
2:39 Erin: Well, I don't think it's a station. I think it would be a stop with a. You know, like a lean to. You know, what are those things that just.
2:44 Wes: Yeah, sure.
2:45 Erin: That just protect you from the elements.
2:47 Wes: Yeah. Bust down.
2:48 Erin: Right.
2:48 Wes: Yeah.
2:49 Erin: And that would probably have at least a street light. But anyway, then we get the moonlight. Maybe my favorite. Oh, it's so hard to say, but maybe my favorite image in the poem is the hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lambswool on bushes in a pasture. Just. There's nothing. There's no image greater than that. That's unbelievable.
3:13 Wes: There's kind of a more wildness to this. Right. The image now, the hairiness and scratchiness and splinteriness. It's a bit less Domesticated, I guess, than the previous part of the poem.
3:27 Erin: That's a really good point. I hadn't thought of that. Even a suggestion of danger, like the lamb running.
3:34 Wes: I just thought, this is where the hobbits are entering Fangorn Forest.
3:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah, yeah, the New Brunswick.
3:41 Wes: But you go a little bit more. It's a little wilder and more primal. I think once you. Even if you're on a bus, once you get into the woods, there's something different about it.
3:52 Erin: That's right.
3:53 Wes: But yeah, you're right. The idea that the moonlight could get caught in that. That's a great image.
3:59 Erin: Something giving chase to the lamb would cause it potentially to get a little ensnared in the chase.
4:06 Wes: It's as if Lambswool has, you know, a lamb is brushed up on the bramble or whatever and left its wool so that. So the moonlight, instead of making this cosmic journey and landing on articulating the environment, has been subordinated to the environment. Right. It's become. It's been captured by these hairy woods. It's caught on it and, you know, a piece of it has come off from being caught on something that's scratchy and splintery. So that. That. Yeah, this is the great reversal. And that's the place where you can really get some good sleeping. Yes, right.
4:44 Erin: Yes. And where dreamy things can happen.
4:47 Wes: Divagation. Yeah, wanderings.
4:51 Erin: I looked that up. Wandering, straying or digressing from a main course, path or topic. So like a digression as long as
4:59 Wes: the bus stays on track.
5:00 Erin: Yeah, that's right.
5:01 Wes: You do whatever you want with your mind.
5:02 Erin: That's right. And the night. I just looked on Google Maps while I was writing my little notes in the margins. And if you were to take a bus today from Great Village to Boston, it would take like 10 hours. So it definitely is a, yikes, full course of the night on this night bus. So I love what happens in stanza 16, which begins in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us, but recognizable somewhere back in the bus. So I really love that it's grandparents voices, she says, uninterrupted talking. This is where the I becomes an us.
And this is a characteristic of a bishop. I think she's rather reluctant to use an I, capital I in a poem. She's more likely to use a we or an us. And here it's as if they're all part of the same family now in the bus and the adults. It's almost like everybody on the bus who isn't a grandparent is a child and the adults in the back are talking and we are all, oh, that doesn't concern us. Just go to sleep. It's none of your business. Just stop eavesdropping on us. Right, so there's some community that's been formed already by the people who are not the grandparents talking.
Do you get that impression?
6:20 Wes: Yeah, it's a bit confusing. So, yeah, let's try to figure it out. Because it. So it begins. A dreamy divagation begins in the night. She doesn't say, I started dreaming or they started dreaming or we started dreaming. Although it seems almost like it's collective. Right. So that the bus is dreaming or everyone on the bus is dreaming together, which kind of lines up with the not concerning us later on, the gentle auditory slow hallucination. So that's a very interesting idea. Right. The dream is usually associated with subjectivity. Right. The cogito and Descartes.
Right. The dream tells us that we might have trouble distinguishing reality from what's in our own minds. And we in our own minds are very potentially cut off from reality. But it's a. It's an alienated individual position here. The dream is. Seems to be collective. And perhaps it's collective because it's partly real. Right. Is that the conversation? I thought, okay, there's a conversation going on in the back of the bus and it is old people talking. But as you're lying back, you could sort of. You can't hear exactly what they're saying. And you might have that kind of half dream, Right.
Where you're. The dream is kind of lined up with or intertwined with what's going on in reality. So she's hearing in the conversation of the old people, her grandparents voices. Is that the way you took this? Or. Or they, they're hearing the grandparents voices or. Yeah. How do we, how do we interpret this?
7:54 Erin: I interpreted it as, you know, people of the age of grandparents having a real conversation. But the idea that one could be having an auditory. I mean, we are given the word auditory slow hallucination. So the idea that there could be an auditory hallucination or kind of half dream of one's own grandparents having a conversation, or it may be superimposed on a real conversation kind of inaudible going on on the bus. I never noticed this before. The G in grandparents is capitalized. So it does seem to sit to suggest the speaker's particular grandparents rather than.
8:30 Wes: Oh, I was going to. I thought you were going to say archetypal grandparents.
8:34 Erin: Oh, yeah, I suppose it could be yeah, it could be read that way, too. I think all of these things are true, right?
8:40 Wes: Yeah.
8:40 Erin: I mean, the image works because of the, shall we say, universal particularity of this experience.
8:47 Wes: The ordinary way to write the poem would be to. And a much simpler way would be to put this in her point of view and not try to put it into a collective point of view. But that seems to be what she's doing.
8:59 Erin: Yes. The effectiveness, though, I think is the. And it could just be the speaker's perception of it, but the atmospheric quality, because everyone on the bus is going to share an experience shortly, but already they are sharing an experience and a kind of atmosphere that they're all listening to the hum and having that. You know, when you're in the car and you. Maybe when you're a kid and you put your ear up against, like, the. The car door or the window or something, and you hear orchestral music. I don't know if you ever had that. I used to always hear classical music when I would put my head up.
9:38 Wes: Yeah, I don't think I have that.
9:40 Erin: All kinds of. And I always think, like, I should write this down. But you always have, like, a hallucination of an orchestra playing songs. Different songs. Sometimes like fantastical songs. Yeah. You know, my particular experience maybe doesn't quite get at the. Yeah. The sense that this is shared.
9:57 Wes: Well, you're put into a kind of dreamy state, and yet you're getting at the auditory hallucination part. I mean, for me, I think, as a child, and this, I think, is very evocative of childhood. It's something about being half asleep or falling asleep. You're on a journey and there are adults in the car and there's some. Maybe some sense of safety, I think is very relevant to this poem. But being ensconced in the world of adults and not quite alone when you do this thing, which is potentially very lonely, which is go to sleep. And of course, a lot of kids don't want to go to sleep because that loneliness factor. But it's a much different experience if you're traveling. You're all on the way to something together. And of course, you're with people who are awake and, you know, are going
10:45 Erin: to be awake, maybe because the kids are falling asleep. Their. Their voices are lowered and softer. And maybe that also contributes Right. To the. The way in which. That lulls the children in the back simply because they're aware of not wanting to talk too loudly. Certainly that would be the case on a bus like this, where they're Having a conversation where they're talking in. In lower voices and maybe actually inducing that calm and hum for sleep in the people, the other people in the bus who aren't talking.
11:15 Wes: And the question is, what are the adults doing with their talk? Right. It's not going to work if your parents are just fighting. In this case, it's the grandparents. Voices are clearing things up and I guess bringing certain things to resolution, coming to terms with these losses. But a lot of it does sound a bit gossipy and not necessarily like the most comforting.
11:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah.
11:39 Wes: Sort of talk we could imagine. Yeah.
11:41 Erin: Well, you know, in a situation like this where you might be a child in this car, could be that you're coming back from whatever, like a, like a late night and then the adults in the car are working through whatever has just happened over the course of the night. And. Oh no, she was the one who had that long. Yeah. Who had the criminal record because of that thing, remember where they. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was like 20 years ago. So you sort of get that. But for an entire family history going back ages and ages, talking in eternity. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses.
The year he remarried, the year something happened. Oh, yeah, what year was that? Right. Something about the journey afterwards or maybe away from home. If these people are also. If their home is Nova Scotia and they're departing it, you know, then there's that backwards looking quality where something about the idea of the journey and moving away from the place is giving the opportunity to then take stock and look back. So there's this sort of like dual action happening in the poem where the further the bus goes, the further back they're kind of looking from deaths and sicknesses to then remarriage and then childbirth.
Son lost when the schooner foundered.
12:58 Wes: These are all very blue collar tragedies, right?
13:00 Erin: Yes.
13:01 Wes: He was arrested for insider trading.
13:04 Erin: No, but I mean, you know, there's a reverse order to what's happening, you know, so we get. We have death, then sickness, then remarriage, then dying in childbirth. So there's a rewind is what I mean. Yeah.
13:17 Wes: Well, we come back in the end to death. The way it's all summed up.
13:20 Erin: Insider trading. Sorry.
13:23 Wes: Huh?
13:24 Erin: Sorry, Just insider trading. That really is funny.
13:31 Wes: And he had an affair. No. A sharp indrawn breath. Half groan, half acceptance. That means life's like that. We know it. Also death, you know, and then the question, what does also death mean there? Death knows it, we also know death. But it, you know, it made me wonder at various points I wondered. Well, Is this an element here of a journey to the underworld or to the afterlife? Maybe it's a job not claiming that that's strong thematic part of this, but maybe a hint of that type of thing. Because the journey, I mean, and it does seem like journeys are good places for this or like when I travel, it produces in me a very different state of mind.
And I do find it very calming in a way, you know, especially actually being on the train or something like that, because you're in between two different locations and you maybe you're not caught up in the expectations or the constricting qualities of any particular location. If I'm at home, I have to do this and that work, or if I'm at a destination, then I'm dealing with relatives or I have to be a tourist or something like that. But there's something liberating about being in between two locations. So it does seem like a place for this type of dreamy hallucination or this reflection or this clearing of things up.
It's almost like therapy. Right? That's what all of this sounds like. People are talking through their problems, but where is it that they get to in the end here? The half groan, half acceptance. So it's not fully acceptance. It sums things up with this, maybe a degree of resignation. So yeah, I don't know. What do you make of the stanza?
15:15 Erin: Well, they're traveling west significantly. Right. I do take a lot of this to be a kind of, say, pre figurement of death, even though at the same time the fact that they're in the woods, the fact that not to jump ahead too much, the fact that the moose will come out of the woods and appear notably in the middle of the road, there is a suggestion of middle age or middleness, or midway in the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark forest. So I think it works both ways, or perhaps it's working in several ways simultaneously for the various passengers.
So maybe the speaker is experiencing something more akin to the Dante esque middle of the journey on the bus. And something about the bus journey is also, symbolically speaking, a kind of final bus journey for some of the other passengers. And that intersection seems significant, but I don't know how, just in the sense that there's a retrospective quality happening or maybe even a reversion to childhood that goes on for the speaker and the other people in the bus by virtue of the propinquity to these old people at the end of their life's journey.
Because there is very little about middleness Here, come to think of it, other than the moose appearing in the middle of the road. Right. It seems that the other people on the bus are like children and the grandparents are the adults.
16:50 Wes: I mean, I think part of what's comforting when we're children is that feeling that adults know the answers and that adults know how to cope with all the dangers and have experience doing that and therefore can protect us. The reality, of course, as we realize as we get older, is that that's not true. So what they may have is more of this acceptance that's sort of highlighted in this stanza, which is potentially a good thing, but maybe a double edged sword because it does seem to be a form of dying. It does seem to be a form of the very thing that we want to be protected from.
17:30 Erin: There's also, though, that. What I used to call my mom, the external hard drive. I used to say back before she.
17:42 Wes: She liked that.
17:44 Erin: I think now it would make her sad because she'll say, you know, very openly that she. Her memory is gone. But it used to be that she knew all the, you know, you could ask her who said that at that one. You know, there's that kind of. I mean, that's a sort of jokey, gossipy scorekeeping thing that she would keep tabs on. But there's also just the idea of long memory being the history keeper, the record keeper, the, you know, and there's sort of settling accounts over the course of this conversation. Oh, right, it was that year. Okay. And then this happened and then, then that happened. And that's important too, I think, for, you know, it situates children in a context. Not just say this idea of death that you're referring to, but also how to situate oneself in a life.
18:34 Wes: Right.
18:34 Erin: There's a. There's a sort of frame that the grandparents or the elder relatives have that whole history up until you enter the narrative and where you fit within that. We mentioned in part one a little bit about Bishop's family history just to kind of prefigure the types of story that she inserts, I think very significantly into the poem, particularly about poor Amos who just wouldn't stop praying in the store and had to be. Had to be put away. Right. Of course she does a gender swap, but yeah, we all have family stories like this, of this kind of unruly behavior or madness of some kind or other or some sort of family drama.
19:19 Wes: Yeah. So it's universal. But the way she captures it is very clever with this talk that we don't quite know whether it's just the conversation of the people, the old people at the back of the bus, or whether it's her dream or whether it's both or somewhere in between. They're interlaced, those two things. And that. That interlacing gets at this aspect of universality. Although I think by the time we get to the stanza where she's fantasizing about the grandparents and the featherbed, this, it start. Seems to become inescapably personal, which is why I think of the.
The point of view is getting more and more focused. Right. With. With time. Yeah. And potentially it's still universal, but it seems almost like a personal memory. Right. So talking the way they talked in the old feather bed. Right. The way they. Her. Her grandparents presumably in the old feather bed, peacefully on and on. Dim lamp light in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shaw. Shawl. Yeah, get another. And get another dog here.
20:28 Erin: I love this.
20:29 Wes: The collie, the barking dog. And. Yeah, so this, this stanza is wonderful. And it gets at exactly this thing that you've been talking about, which is the, like, comfort of being a kid overhearing adults talking. It really, despite this talk of death. Right. A reconciliation with death. This is the point. Seems to be the point of view of a child who finds this very comforting. And. Right. She'll say in the next stanza, now it's all right now even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights, the way in which the adult world and the safety of protective figures can make sleep okay to do. And then suddenly that's interrupted.
21:07 Erin: But I love too. I mean, yes, it's so particular, but it also just in this one stanza does so many things in miniature that the poem is doing all along, this telescoping in again to a scene which. Which even as a child, if it were her childhood in particular that she's referencing, she couldn't possibly know or see. She wouldn't be able to see the grandparents in their featherbed. She would have to be picturing them in the featherbed and she wouldn't be able to see the dog in the hall. And also I wonder if this. If the stanza in its operation is kind of doing.
I mean, this is just occurring to me now, but maybe it's doing that kind of hallucinatory work that has prior been described where we actually get a remix of, you know, this is the third dog in the poem. But it's also the elements in the stanza are a kind of recapitulation of the light, the red light swimming, the port Lantern becomes the lamp light in the hall. We get the dog barking now becomes the dog curled up in the shawl. And then maybe even because we also get kitchen, maybe the shawl is even a kind of transposition of the table, tablecloth shook out.
Right. So there's something actually in the stanza which has that hallucinatory quality that she's describing where these three elements swim in the imagination and then become the lamplight and the dog and the shawl in this half asleep kind of dream space. Maybe that's pushing things too far, but it does seem to be. It's the dreamiest stanza perhaps in the whole poem. Maybe the following one. Now it's all right now even to fall asleep. But this gets interrupted that next stanza. So this one, I think is the real depth of the dreamy or borderline dreamy or hallucinatory moment.
23:00 Wes: Yeah, this is great because it really underlines the way deviation creates the capacity for stasis or for comfort. So the deviation of a bus trip or of the dreaming. Right. Which is movement, which is dynamic and has that momentum, forward momentum that we were talking about, sort of underwrites or grounds this ability to. For stasis, for stopping, for going to sleep, for feeling comforted as a child and safe, I think. And I keep repeating that word because of the. What's going to happen. The use of the word that's going to happen in this poem later.
But yeah, I'm not sure if you were saying that explicitly, but that's what came to mind my mind as you were talking. This. The way in which this journey, divagation, motion can ground something that's going to be more static or stationary, which is what we're going to get in the moose. Because it interrupts the. It explicitly interrupts the motion of the bus and the external line of the poem in a way that parallels the comfort that's produced by the dreaming.
24:08 Erin: Yeah. In stanza 22 is where we have that break that you're describing. The moose finally appears. Well, the moose doesn't appear until stanza 23 finally appears.
24:21 Wes: We've been waiting for you.
24:22 Erin: We've been waiting for you. The title has promised that you would come and then here you are. It is foretold of your coming.
24:29 Wes: Comes through the curtains, takes his bow. Right.
24:32 Erin: We get nights, just as on all those nights. And then the moose's appearance, the lights turn on. And that rhyme you get, I mean, it's a very basic, simple rhyme. Right. But there's that sort of sudden jolt which is then also visualized where in the middle of night we have this appearance, this bright because of the headlights on it. Appearance of the moose. And it looms and sniffs at the bus's hot hood, which I'm assuming means that it thinks that the bus might be a boy moose.
25:06 Wes: No. Well, it's a very hot bus, I'll say that.
25:10 Erin: Ow. Ow.
25:14 Wes: That enamel. And it's dented and, you know, depends on if you like bad buses. No, just kidding.
25:21 Erin: Dented from its last encounter with a girl bus.
25:25 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because I wrote in my notes, but was just reading it stanza by stanza. And the previous stanza I'd said, okay to sleep, even with death looming. Looming for all of us, you know, all day one. You know, one day we all die. Looming in that sense. And then suddenly the moose is looming, standing there, looming. And I thought, whoa, that's really interesting
25:45 Erin: that I. Oh, yes, chose.
25:48 Wes: Chose that word before I even got to the next stanza. Not to give some, you know, obvious rote sort of identification of the moose with death or the experience of the moose as having something to do with that. But obviously they're coming into contact here with something quite primal and important. It's not just, oh, look, there's a nice moose, but is he sniffing or she's sniffing the buses hot hood because she thinks it might be another moose. That hadn't actually occurred to me.
26:21 Erin: I must have been infected with that reading at some point that this was a frisky moose, that it otherwise doesn't seem frisky at all. It seems pretty. Like a pretty staid, respectable moose.
26:34 Wes: But frisky and ditzy.
26:39 Erin: That's right. Hello.
26:41 Wes: What?
26:41 Erin: Oh, look, I seem to be in the middle of the road. Pardon me.
26:46 Wes: So, towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house. We're safe as houses, a man's voice assures us. Perfectly harmless. Which you presume, right, that the. The man making that assurance is. Precedes the idea of it being homely as a house and safe as houses. Even though. So. So she interestingly puts the associations before her associative responses before the actual stimulus. Right. I don't think she's the one who is thinking about how they must be safe and. And he's saying something. I mean, as far as I know. I don't know back then.
But you were warned about bison and mooses, right? Or is it mooses or moose? I think we're warned because they don't. They. They seem harmless, but they're not. And so I was quite surprised by this stanza. And I thought this idea, okay, safe as houses. Well, yeah, houses ought to be safe, but they're not always safe. The bus, the moving container of the bus turns out to be, in a way safer and more conducive to reverie and dreaming and all of that.
27:59 Erin: No matter how you slice it, whether you see the moose as harmless, truly, or not so harmless, this has got to be just a little bit of a wink, right? A man's voice assures us.
28:09 Wes: I mean, I think we're definitely meant to be skeptical.
28:12 Erin: Yeah.
28:13 Wes: This perfectly harmless line, it's not there for us to nod our heads in agreement.
28:20 Erin: Oh, yeah, he's right, right, right. I think it's more like, oh, here's another mansplainer.
28:26 Wes: He's moose splaining.
28:28 Erin: Mooseplaining this woman moose to moose splaining. Just out for a good time, having her existence commented upon by another man's voice. Probably a podcaster. One of those male podcasters has a manosphere podcast.
28:45 Wes: Girl mooses are.
28:49 Erin: Then we get these childish again. The passengers are like children and having this childlike response to the appearance of the moose, including. It's awful, plain sad. So much judgment of women's bodies.
29:04 Wes: I mean, they're not good looking creatures. Let's just. They're, you know, put that on the table. Come on. They are in an ugly sort of way.
29:11 Erin: Yeah. I mean, okay, I guess they don't follow, you know, classical proportions. They don't represent the golden mean.
29:21 Wes: They're not into beauty society societal beauty standards. All right.
29:28 Erin: They are like cartoon characters.
29:29 Wes: They're miss Positive is what they are.
29:35 Erin: Well, what I love though, about the description, you know, we get several, I suppose. Yeah. Contradictory descriptions of the moose in a way, because we get homely as a house or safe as houses. We get awful plain. But then she looks the bus over grand otherworldly, so she has some gravitas. She's like a great character actress who. Who may not be beautiful in that leading lady way, but she's Kathy Bates. Yes. Yeah, well, that's maybe a bit insulting to Kathy Bates, who I do think is a very attractive woman, but.
30:19 Wes: Sorry, Kathy.
30:20 Erin: I know, I love her.
30:21 Wes: Come on the show sometime, please.
30:24 Erin: Oh my gosh, I would die. I love Kathy Bates anyway. And then we get curious creatures. Well, first we get the idea that it inspires joy and then we get curious creatures. So there's a. The joy is then immediately undercut by a kind of ambivalence. Right. So there's just all of these descriptions of the moose combine to create a kind of ambivalent portrait, such as it is, of the animal.
30:47 Wes: Are we going to be able to answer this question? Why? Why do they feel the sweet sensation of joy? I mean, I think I would probably feel it.
30:57 Erin: Why? Why do we all feel it? I mean, they have. Well, they've successfully done what I couldn't see a moose in real life. So they're like one up on Erin. Can't wait to go back and tell her we saw moose. Yeah, I've seen certain things. I can't think of a specific example of this, but I've had plenty of instances. Whether it is a wild animal or, I don't know, like a sunset or a really spectacular natural event of some kind or other. You do get that feeling of joy, kind of excitement.
31:28 Wes: Yeah. Unfortunately, most of my encounters with large animals are at zoos. I did see a bear once. I was going to the bathroom. My mom had a house in Front Royal, Virginia, at the beginning of the Appalachian Mountains. And it was up high on a. We called it a mountain, but it was, I guess, more of a hill. But so it was out, you know, it was kind of. There was a bear on the mountain, let's just put it that way. And, yeah, I was going to the bathroom one day and looking out the window. There's a window right. You know, above the toilet. And suddenly there's bear's face looking at me. Wow. What the. So, but that, you know, and. And that was majestic. No, just kidding. That it was. I. It was surprising.
32:13 Erin: Yeah.
32:14 Wes: And there's an element of fear that involved. Even if you're, you know, even if, you know, black bears are harmless and there's a wall between you. Some. Something scary about it. I didn't have time to feel like it's majestic. Yeah. You know, like you have had these experiences in. In nature, but I can't think of a encounter like this. But it. I seem sure that if I had an encounter like this, I would feel exactly the same way. So. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? What is majestic about it? It's a big, dumb beast. And I say that with love, without any criticism in the sense that.
Right. It's an encounter with something primal. And I think we have to take into account the size of the animal as well. I mean, it is interesting to run into a fox or something like that, but it's also a matter of scale here. But. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? I mean, I think the most. The most obvious part of this is that you know, we have lost something in our humanity and becoming language using creatures and becoming self conscious creatures. And sometimes when we're confronted with an animal like this, we're confronted with that loss.
We're not as connected to the environment because of the intermediation of something like language, which poetry of course tries to overcome. It tries to put language into a disintermediating. Sorry to use these business terms. I don't know why this is happening. Into a disintermediation.
33:46 Erin: Actualize. Yeah, yeah.
33:49 Wes: When it. Yeah, right. Synergize it's agenda. Often where language might put distance between us and the world. Poetry, I think, can undo that distance. Like I was saying, with the very vivid imagery, I can undo that distance with figurative language. And maybe that distance is also undone to some extent by the dreaming or the half dreaming hallucinatory state that she was in. And the comfort of that, the return to childhood, which is also a simpler time. I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. But yeah, I wanted to try to get more at this, you know, the otherworldly status of the moose and the joy that comes from encountering it.
34:34 Erin: I was thinking to myself, is the moose's gaze really clearly encapsulated? And then I thought, yes, she regards us amicably. And then I was like, no, no, that's the passenger who gets on the bus.
34:44 Wes: Right. Does the moose have freckles? Yeah, that'd be an interesting twist, right?
34:50 Erin: But yeah, but there is one.
34:51 Wes: Turned her into a moose.
34:53 Erin: Well, I would think that this would be a more garden variety animal encounter and maybe even a more, to use a word, I don't like, problematic poem in terms of its relationship with the animal. If it were to focus on the gaze of the animal. Because I think that is the thing which is often at the core of these interactions with animals in which we project or hope to have a kind of meaningful encounter. You want to meet the gaze of the animal and in so doing understand it. Right. And of course you don't realize that you're just projecting onto it a kind of maybe mutual regard.
She regards us amicably. That you are seeing it and it is seeing you. And there's an acknowledgement and there's this, you know, spiritual encounter that you have with this animal. And all of that, of course, is often quite silly. It's often quite reductive and fanciful and unrealistic. But I am thinking of an encounter that springs to mind is in Utah. I hiked the same trail almost every day. And I Would often hike it late in order to escape the full heat of the desert sun. Which is a little dangerous, right? Because sometimes the sun would be setting and then all kinds of things come out.
And one time I was trying to get back to my car before it got completely dark. And what I thought was a wolf, but what must have been a coyote. And the coyotes in Utah are huge. They look like wolves and completely white. Came out from over a hill, crossed my path, turned, looked at me in the eyes for a very long time, turned and went over on the other side of the hill. I mean, curiously, then, of course, I got to the car and I actually found out that a beloved family member, an elderly family member of mine, had passed away. And I said, I think I just saw her.
You know, I had this feeling of, like. I don't know, the sense of this connection, inherent connection between these two. This woman who was dear to me and this encounter. But, of course, that's all silliness. And the idea that I was having a sort of interaction through the gate. Some sort of reciprocal. Right. Interaction with this animal was also entirely just my own projecting onto the animal. However, I will say that that's an instance in which I felt fear. But then there was also this, like, joy at the encounter, I think fear because it was dark.
Because I wasn't actually sure if this was a wolf because it blocked my path. It was far enough away that I didn't feel as threatened as I might have. But it was definitely a mixed perception.
37:28 Wes: You didn't shoot it and then hang it around your neck. No, because I was thinking. I just suddenly thought of the albatross poem.
37:37 Erin: Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
37:38 Wes: Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And that sort of relationship to the natural world where. I mean, I forget what we said about it, but maybe I said something about envy and wanting to kill the albatross for. Because of its freedom or something like that. I don't. I don't know. But I think it's important because, yeah, this is part of something about the encounter with the natural world. Whether it's a big moose or something else. Yes. Is otherworldly. Strangely enough, it's otherworldly to us, even though it's where we come from. It's uncanny, maybe.
And Freud actually, in the German, I think uncanny is sort of like unhomelike is what the German sounds like. And Freud made a lot out of this. I think it's home, but it's a home from which we've become alienated. We're animals, we're something more than animals. And so that primal encounter brings us back to that foundation, that natural foundation in us, but we can't fully come to terms with it. And I think the other aspect of this, I think the death. Right. So there is a link to death. Just. And I was thinking about that when you described thinking of it as seeing.
As seeing your departed loved one. Because if we could regress to that animal state, it would be a kind of death. I think that the association with the movement to the pre. Linguistic, natural foundation is something like the movement towards dying, but there's something comforting.
39:07 Erin: Yes.
39:07 Wes: Right. And we encounter that when we encounter the gaze. To have a. Have a gaze returned by an animal like that usually like, like our internal. Our entire psychological structure, what makes us self. Self conscious is the internalization of a human gaze. Right. To the extent that we. We get an animal gaze, I think we are returned to that more primal part of ourselves. And it does seem to me to have something to do with being reconciled to mortality. Right. Which is part of what the function of that dialogue between the elderly people is doing.
39:44 Erin: You're leading me into the one, say, reading of the moose that I wanted to get to. And I just want to say that I think the great thing about Bishop and about this poem and all her poems is that the moose is a moose. It's not a symbol. I hesitate to offer any kind of
40:03 Wes: direct reading, but that's her job on this podcast, though.
40:05 Erin: I know, I know. It's. Yeah. In the letters with Robert Lowell when he's writing to her about her poem At the Fishhouses, he says, alas, all my fish just become symbols.
40:16 Wes: Ah, very good.
40:17 Erin: I hesitate to reduce. I think what you've just said makes me think that it's the maternal, the mother.
40:25 Wes: Which also brings us back to the house.
40:28 Erin: Yes, the house. Yeah. It's something that comes like the clapboard churches, like clamshells seem to arise out of the ground, if you will, or are directly compared to these native creatures. The houses are then in turn used as comparisons for the moose, the maternal. The idea that this is something that returns us to nature, that this is the encounter that we would have presumably upon death. It's the loved one that is somehow comforting, maternal, and is a female moose. It's moose mom. I don't know. I don't know. Something going on there.
41:04 Wes: Moose mom.
41:05 Erin: Natural and strange at the same time, not us. And I guess that's why I. That's why I mentioned that the story of my grandfather at the beginning, because I don't know why I wanted so badly to see a moose right after my grandfather's death. But there was something, like, logical about it to me. And I was familiar with this poem, but I very much did not have. You know, it was not something that was the forefront of my mind at all. But I think there is this inherent connection, and it's silly. You know, I kind of can't believe I'm saying this, but I do.
I do think there is this kind of connection between this desire that I felt to see this animal. Like the particular kind of primordial itch that the moose in particular seems to be scratching for me in that moment. For Bishop, in this poem, something that is at once safe and comforting and from another world, natural in that kind of elemental way.
42:00 Wes: Yeah.
42:01 Erin: That all kind of coalesce in that image.
42:04 Wes: Very good.
42:05 Erin: Okay. I think that's it, Wes. All we're left with is the dim smell of moose and an acrid smell of gasoline.
42:12 Wes: Oh, you know, we should have talked about that. Maybe we can start with that on our next Bishop recording. We'll. We'll begin with the smells, the smells and the significance of that image at the end.
42:25 Erin: Nice.
42:25 Wes: That smellage at the end.
42:26 Erin: Smellage. All right. Thank you.
42:29 Wes: Thank you.
A Map-Like Imagination in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (“The Moose”)
Aug 17, 2026
A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map’s privileged, sweeping, bird’s eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let’s say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop’s most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination.
Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop. And since maps have been associated with her poetic vision, at once telescoping and binocular, and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also handheld, man made intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative and personal.
Over the next few episodes, we'll be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with the moose as expressions of, among other things, her map, like imagination. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild?
1:12 Wes: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous.
1:23 Erin: Oh, perfectly harmless.
1:24 Wes: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you?
1:38 Erin: I have not. And I actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish.
1:52 Wes: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see.
1:56 Erin: I don't know.
1:57 Wes: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild?
2:03 Erin: Really? Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to, but I. Maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see. Am just. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees, 1996 World Series sweatshirt.
2:42 Wes: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it?
2:45 Erin: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a moose on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I. I bought a moose sweatshirt in, I think Grand Teton, and I was like, I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah, and things would happen. Everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw baby moose. I'd get all excited and I would. I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me.
3:32 Wes: So you don't want to see like a magic white hart or something like that?
3:38 Erin: No, no, I just want to see him. Even the garden variety moose? No, no. Just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it.
3:49 Wes: Because they are a goofy, right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking? Are they both?
3:55 Erin: I think they're both. And I think that kind of qual quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size, and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow, as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand.
4:22 Wes: Interesting.
4:24 Erin: Yeah. They're not majestic.
4:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal.
4:41 Erin: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my grandfather. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense, because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's that she's grown up in and that she's part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on.
5:17 Wes: Okay. So maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right.
5:26 Erin: Yeah.
5:27 Wes: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading?
5:35 Erin: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and the collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower middle, upper five islands. Five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the passengers lie back, snores some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned.
Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl.
Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time.
She looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel the sweet sensation of joy? Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline.
11:05 Wes: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. It's the word read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background?
11:22 Erin: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then. And then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about More. But, yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hofmann, who wrote quite a bit about her.
And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sestina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England.
But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified.
12:53 Wes: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it.
12:55 Erin: Yeah, that's right. She started this in, I think, 1946.
13:01 Wes: And then she finished it when this
13:04 Erin: was published in Geography III. So she finished it in the 70s.
13:07 Wes: Okay.
13:08 Erin: Geography III came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, Geography III is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that.
13:24 Wes: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there.
13:29 Erin: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they Get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem. Yeah. Low rate of productivity is great to.
14:08 Wes: You know, I can relate to that.
14:11 Erin: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live. Live Large and die with a slim Collected is kind of a.
14:19 Wes: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro.
14:28 Erin: That's right.
14:29 Wes: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it this is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony.
14:38 Erin: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me.
14:45 Wes: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while.
14:47 Erin: Absolutely, absolutely.
14:49 Wes: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she. She'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip. And the. There really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven else.
15:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage.
15:30 Wes: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right. Her. Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized.
15:41 Erin: That's right, yeah.
15:41 Wes: She aged at. When she was 5.
15:43 Erin: That's right.
15:44 Wes: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead.
15:48 Erin: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from The Bight on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar.
16:23 Wes: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general?
16:28 Erin: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes as her. A scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefoot on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals.
And they took her to. Back with him to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema. And really, like, I think almost died of both at one time or other, very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved, seeing her hand and her little.
In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up. But this is a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say, too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Macedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years.
She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography III, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian poems. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed.
Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these. These beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich.
19:43 Wes: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. What are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, begins with the tides, but.
20:12 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and, you know, just the necessities and a place we learn that that is. That maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it.
21:16 Wes: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward, it's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and brought along with it towards her destination.
22:08 Erin: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there.
22:31 Wes: Well, I was going to say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my finger on it exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now? And what's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image.
23:12 Erin: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant, considering that she's talking about a tide.
23:25 Wes: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But.
23:40 Erin: And boundaries, too, right. You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border.
24:18 Wes: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But, yeah, I had the same thought to you. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as. As the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there.
24:58 Erin: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big, suddenly reduced in size to the handheld, but coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, you know, sort of springing out of the fishing industry.
25:42 Wes: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide.
25:52 Erin: That's great.
25:52 Wes: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum, and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus.
26:37 Erin: Yeah. The bus flashes pink. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content. Right. Of the road itself. So we get that combination of, like, something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area.
27:07 Wes: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Greene, who I've been reading. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses, like. So from the red clay, you can make, you know, homes from as well, and common in Sierra Leone. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up. All right. There must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah.
27:41 Erin: So that's the mineral, the.
27:44 Wes: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering.
27:56 Erin: Right.
27:57 Wes: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the.
28:12 Erin: Yes, it's coming.
28:13 Wes: The redness of the soil.
28:14 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling.
28:41 Wes: Such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading. Well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more. More vivid, definitely.
29:26 Erin: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape, makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image. And yeah, you talked about momentum, too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with.
and a collie supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak, Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I eye of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dogs.
So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the capital I.
30:49 Wes: We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting a her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop?
31:32 Erin: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass River. Right. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's content.
31:49 Wes: Content goes.
31:50 Erin: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups.
The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peas clinging. One of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from certainly from a moving bus.
32:43 Wes: Yeah, the point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important which is at the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very Beautiful.
33:12 Erin: Yeah. They compound and then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boot and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment, of 10 o'. Clock. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens poem, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so they're probably. No. No real connection there.
34:07 Wes: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving, right. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it mean, means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and it's evening is approaching and a kind of mini winter, Right. Something. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves. As evening commences, it's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening.
That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see, okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the light reflecting off the enamel bus, or not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark.
Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah, the shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime, Right?
35:39 Erin: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To Autumn, you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence. You get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind. Right. Because there's. There's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of, you know, like the evening.
Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is. Yeah. Rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is, you know, it's got to be like August, maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development.
36:40 Wes: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter. It gets colder and we see the.
36:46 Erin: Definitely.
36:47 Wes: We see the effects of it. But, yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season for.
36:53 Erin: Right. Yeah. And that point. Or that point in the transition from summer to autumn where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, the evening temperature is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get.
37:09 Wes: Shall we take a. Shall we?
37:12 Erin: Oh, yes.
37:13 Wes: Let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two.
37:17 Erin: She'll have to wait.
37:18 Wes: Let's not let her on the bus yet.
37:20 Erin: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinal rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you.
37:29 Wes: Thank you.
Curses and Colonizers in “The Mummy” (1999) – Part 2
Aug 03, 2026
The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”
Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:12 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1999 masterpiece, The Mummy, directed by Stephen Sommers, who is obviously, you know, the Orson Welles of the 90s
0:25 Wes: and also known for such movies as Van Helsing.
0:29 Erin: That's also a movie.
0:30 Wes: I like the Mummy Returns and Odd Thomas and GI Joe.
0:38 Erin: Oh, there it is.
0:39 Wes: Rise of Cobra.
0:41 Erin: There it is. Yeah. That's probably the greatest. That's probably his Magnificent Ambersons. Just to say a little bit more. Also in defense of this film, I think it's just fun. Right. You had fun watching this, I'm assuming. Yeah. There's something about it, to me that. Not just because we're talking about origins and stuff like that, that is a kind of, er, movie or the ultimate movie in terms of the fact that movies are just. There's something about them that is fundamentally silly and they're in a certain respect, like the silliest art form. And of course that makes me want to say something also about mummies as the ultimate representations of film itself, which has, I think, been a point made by people like André Bazin and, you know, all sorts of.
Susan Sontag in On Photography talks about this. Right. Just the idea of the photographic image as the preservation of dead people is. Is often the case.
1:35 Wes: And it's. You know, the chemical processing of film is like embalming.
1:40 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
1:41 Wes: Lots of parallels.
1:43 Erin: I'm just. I'm trying very slowly to construct a justification for why we are covering this on subtext. No, but I. But also. And I should. I should have said this at the beginning of the last one. This is my Gimme. My. My summer fun. In the same spirit of doing Elf at. At Christmas, I think I wanted to do a silly summer blockbuster. And of course they're also doing another. Another Mummy film soon with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Finally. She'll be back. So it's also in honor of the resurrection of the career of Brendan Fraser.
2:16 Wes: He's going to be £300 in this one.
2:18 Erin: That'll be great.
2:19 Wes: Rachel. Rachel Weisz has to roll him around. I'm sorry.
2:23 Erin: So mean. That would. That would still be fine with me.
2:28 Wes: I just going to be called Beached.
2:35 Erin: So mean.
2:36 Wes: The I love the whale.
2:38 Erin: Yeah.
2:38 Wes: I cried, like, audibly at a theater.
2:44 Erin: He's so great.
2:45 Wes: Yeah, he's great.
2:46 Erin: But anyway, back to the conversation here about what? Did I say something about Picnic at Hanging Rock. Oh, this film is kind of like the inverse of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I thought in that Picnic is about the victory of the colonized over the colonizer that you eventually get destroyed by or defeated by the forces that you try to control. You get defeated in your attempts to fashion a narrative. Yeah. What is unknowable overtakes you and destroys your efforts at a kind of mental containment.
3:19 Wes: And again, it's contact with, like, a primal origin.
3:23 Erin: Exactly.
3:24 Wes: So in a way, it's the origin of your high level of consciousness, in a way. But it's primal. And so it can defeat that.
3:30 Erin: Yeah. And this is why the Mummy is. It's almost like a fantasy that you can feel secure as a colonizer, that you will eventually figure it out, that there is something to be figured out, that ultimately all of this has a logic that you can solve the puzzle. In fact, solve it twice over.
3:47 Wes: Right.
3:48 Erin: Because you have the first. The puzzle is about bringing the mummy to life, even though it can sometimes be accidental. There's an effort of piecing something together when the mummy comes to life. And then one has to also finish solving the puzzle or solve a second puzzle in order to then kill the mummy or send it back to the underworld or whatever the. The explanation is. And along the way, one also has to at least avoid, if not defeat, the fallout of the curse. So, yeah, so it's a fantasy about overcoming all of that. And I think the idea that makes this very psychologically suggestive is just that this, the mummy, is the puzzle that comes with its own kind of solution, in the way that Picnic at a Hanging Rock is the opposite of that, in that it's stubborn and it can't be solved.
And I think the Evelyn character seems to embody this herself in that she has this maternal figure who's Egyptian, her father is English. So whatever drama is taking place with the mummy is also internalized somehow. Again, this is played with more in the Mummy Returns, which makes it stupid and weird. It turns out that Evelyn is actually the reincarnation of the pharaoh's daughter. So there's this whole Elektra dynamic thing that ends up going on. It's really, really, really ridiculous. But the female figure in the original 1932 Boris Karloff mummy, as I already said, she also has this dual heritage, this dual nature.
And so the implication of that seems to me to be the idea that we have the desire to understand our own origins. So she's both puzzle and puzzle solver, and we want to figure ourselves out in order to resolve something that in us is unresolved. I think the curse, too, operates on the same logic in a way. Like I was thinking about how the curse is kind of like a conspiracy theory. You know way more about this than I do. I know this is an interest of yours, but you're applying a kind of faulty abduction to what you think is the fallout of something that has, rather than a sort of conspiratorial, systematic explanation, it has a magical explanation.
So this idea of logic and mystery, or logic and magic, or the known and the unknown being sort of right next to each other for the purposes of one solving the other and therefore making you feel at peace and no longer cursed, no longer suffering under some lack of knowledge or understanding.
6:13 Wes: Right.
6:13 Erin: You figured it out. You've defeated these forces in yourself. That seems to be the kind of psychological underpinning in talking about abduction, which
6:21 Wes: I'm actually reading about right now. We're doing the philosopher Peirce on our show. So inference to the best explanation. You're making me think about her first reading of the spell. Is it a spell? That we would call it. Right. She's a curious seeker of knowledge, really. Really. She's not trying to give a theory of anything literally. Right. She's just out of curiosity, reading what's in the book. But if you were to make a comparison to abduction, it's almost like it produces its own theory in reality. And the theory is the. Is the backstory.
So what it does is it raises something from the dead. It's almost like breathing life into some theoretical entity that comes back to haunt you or something like that, that attacks me. And in the case of the conspiracy theory, Right, the theorized entity is a intelligent designer of a sort, but a malicious one, a persecutory one. And you get that in this case, right? There's a persecutory entity is aroused by one's curiosity.
7:25 Erin: Yeah. Just another complication to this is the fact that the mummy has been cursed to go after whoever awakens it by some sort of overarch. I mean, in this film, it's the idea that Imhotep has violated the pharaoh's mistress and he's sentenced to the Hom-Dai and all that stuff. But the mummy itself wants to be found. So that's why this is like a perfect little puzzle box for a colonizer's self Exoneration, because the mummy wants to come back to life. So it's a curse that wants you to trip the tripwire and it wants to play itself out. So it almost has this self fulfilling prophecy or self determinism element to it as well.
8:06 Wes: Right.
8:07 Erin: It's just another way I think of twisting such a thing. I mean, it's an angle that, that the films get at which the actual Curse of the Pharaohs, as it was publicized in the 20s, that angle wasn't there. But it seems like this is the further twist to get it to make Americans and, and British people and all that like, feel, feel like they're not responsible somehow or that this has some, some will to get a toehold in the human world again, that you're almost being used as a pawn in their scheme.
8:36 Wes: It's interesting that Imhotep, he's sentenced to the worst possible punishment, but there's a real like escape clause to that, which is if you're resurrected, you get to have. Be all powerful and destroy the world and get your girlfriend back. Is that the deal?
8:54 Erin: Because you got your girlfriend?
8:55 Wes: Maybe it's worth, maybe it's worth a try. Okay, I'll take that bargain.
9:03 Erin: Right.
9:03 Wes: It's an odd sort of curse and it's an odd sort of risk to take. And it speaks to the perils of vengeance. Right. If vengeance goes too far, it can, can come back at you with a vengeance. Sorry, that was another aspect of the movie that I thought was really interesting. This, which I thought you were kind of getting a little bit there, which is the oddly risk of risky form of punishment. Right. Absolute pain, but with the risk of absolute destruction of the entire world. And again, I think it's not unrelated to the perils of romantic love where, you know, again, where the world can get blotted out by a fused or codependent, let's say in modern parlance, relationship, the same thing.
You know, few parallels of fusion with a maternal object, which we've talked a lot about on this show, in relation to a failure of a paternal authority, which in this case is the pharaoh. So there's something here about not being able to mourn an object or the maternal, the ultimate beloved, and try to maintain that object high at all costs, which can lead to this kind of destruction. The reading itself bothered, you know, when she read from the book so casually and started this whole thing off, that really got to me. And she didn't get really all blamed all that much for it, like.
So it's like, oops, just got a Bunch of people killed.
10:23 Erin: She doesn't have parents, so.
10:27 Wes: Did I do that?
10:28 Erin: Yeah. I mean, when we first see her in the. In the Museum of Antiquities, and she knocks down the bookcases, which I would say is a really, like, a missed opportunity, because I had a memory. I've seen this movie so many times, and I had a memory of her doing this at Hamunaptra, that she knocked down all the columns, but that's actually not in the movie, so they never do a callback to the bookcase gag, which I think is. Anyway, would have worked well, but she knocks them all down. And then the curator, who's actually a member of the Medjai, says, give me frogs, flies, locusts, anything but you.
Compared to you, the plagues would be a joy. So, yeah, she's the Mummy. She's a tool of the Mummy. She is the mummy. She's an extension of the Mummy. She herself is a plague. She can read and write ancient Egyptian, as she says, and she can decipher hieroglyphics and hieratic. And she knows it all. She knows all about. All she needs is field experience.
11:26 Wes: Yeah. Underneath all of this is that kind of nerds fantasy that, you know, hey, reading books is going to make me powerful after all, like Prospero and the Tempest, because it's going to be magic. Right. There's a spell in there which I think is kind of partly unconsciously beneath for people who have given up worldly power for the sake of a life of the mind. Let's say there's this, I think, maybe unconscious temptation to an unconscious fantasy that there's some kind of power in this that just transcends the power of knowing. Right. Transcends the power of being a professor.
Whatever it is one. Or a writer, or whatever it is one does. One can transform the world, cast a spell. Maybe writing is supposed to be like that. Maybe. I suppose that is the writerly fantasy that you're gonna affect other people in some way, but in this case, it becomes grandiose. Right. It's all powerful, all destructive. But yes. The kind of shy librarian out in
12:22 Erin: the field, as you were saying, not too shy.
12:24 Wes: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Cause she's not really that shy.
12:27 Erin: She's sheltered a little.
12:28 Wes: Yeah. Sheltered, okay. Yeah. But they don't really play up that part of her character as much as they could. Right. She could be more. She's bookish, but she could be more nerdy than she is. She's goofy. They do make her goofy. Yeah.
12:42 Erin: Yeah. My favorite moment in the whole Movie is her drunk. I'm proud of what I am. I am a librarian, which is really.
12:52 Wes: Hear me roar.
12:54 Erin: Yeah.
12:55 Wes: Yeah. That is great. She says, look, I may not be an explorer or an adventurer or a treasure seeker or a gunfighter, Mr. O', Connell, but I'm proud of what I am. And he says, what is that? I am a librarian, and I'm going to kiss you, Mr. O'. Connell. Call me Rick. Doing his best Harrison Ford impression, she, of course, passes out before they can actually kiss. I should have let you read that.
13:19 Erin: No, no, no. It's way better that you read that.
13:21 Wes: Yeah.
13:24 Erin: She does say at one point explicitly, I think, that no harm ever came from reading a book.
13:30 Wes: Oh, yeah.
13:31 Erin: So this romance between o' Connell and Evie is, I think, part of the lasting appeal of this film, which I literally saw a car a couple years ago that had a bumper sticker on it, and I looked up the bumper stickers. Honk if you'd rather be watching the 1999 cinematic masterpiece, the Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. This is a real bumper sticker that I have seen in the world.
13:56 Wes: Does it go the whole bumper? It's a long one.
13:59 Erin: It's yellow and kind of fat. I didn't really give much thought to this, but does it have a parallel or a. An origin somewhere that we could think of? He's sort of. What's the term that people use? Like a himbo. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, he's intelligent and resourceful, right? But he's definitely the brawn and she's the brain. I guess it's just like a Beauty and the Beast thing, only he's also beautiful. So. Yeah, but, yeah, bookish girl and big, brawny guy who is sort of antagonizing her, but also who inherently respects her and does whatever she wants.
14:35 Wes: Sort of like Harrison Ford in Star Wars. I mean, even though this film is often compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the attitude of Rick is more like, I think, Harrison Ford in Star wars, where he's sort of Han Solo is kind of cynical, and I guess the Rick character. Could you call him cynical?
14:52 Erin: I mean, he's willing to go back there, and he's. For a guy who almost died by hanging, he bounces back pretty fast.
14:58 Wes: He's worldly and not idealistic, practical in certain ways and all that stuff. So he is above love in that sense. He's not explicitly that he made out to be a womanizer or something like that, but he's the bachelor par excellence. And he's in a very different position than Imhotep, who is consumed by love to the point of risking everything, not just his life, but being eternally cursed.
15:27 Erin: You're making me realize how much of a nerd Princess Leia is. I wouldn't have thought of her in that way, but that's basically what she is. She's kind of nerdy.
15:37 Wes: Yeah. With those buns, you know, she belongs in. But she's much more feisty than Evelyn, I think.
15:45 Erin: Yeah. She's angry.
15:46 Wes: Yeah. Her and Han Solo, really. Yeah. Annoy the shit out of each other.
15:52 Erin: Yeah.
15:53 Wes: In a way that. There's some of that in this, but it's much more benign, I think.
15:58 Erin: Well, I mean, we could talk maybe about the three Americans. I don't know if you have anything to say about them. They're kind of just there to be caricatures of Americans and then to get their flesh sucked off their bodies. Yeah. It does give some funny opportunities for a comment by Jonathan, for instance, which Rick seems to sort of escape.
16:19 Wes: What does he say?
16:19 Erin: You know, they're all holding. Holding a gun in each hand and shooting all the Medjai when they come on the boat. And all Jonathan says when he looks at them, he sort of looks with disgust and says, americans, you know, because they're all, like, hooting and saying, yee haw. I don't know. It just makes us look like badasses. But not for long. They're kind of fun. And I guess it occurred to me, too, in making the connection between the Mummy and the vampire, which I suppose I still haven't talked about, just the fact that you have the. In Dracula, you know, you have the three.
They're not all three Americans. Only one is American. But you have the three guys, you know, that each proposed to Mina, or whatever her name is. I haven't read this in a long time, but they're the trio that fight Dracula. So it almost seems like that's something that the movie is explicitly playing with, because these three figures, it doesn't quite line up with the figures in the 1932 mummy, so they seem to be bringing in more Stoker. But my favorite character in the movie is Dr. Bombay. Winston, are you a Bewitched fan?
17:21 Wes: I did watch Bewitched a bit as a kid, but it's been so long. Yeah. I can't call myself a fan.
17:28 Erin: Yeah.
17:28 Wes: But I did watch quite a bit of it on reruns as a kid, so.
17:32 Erin: Good. I love Dr. Bombay.
17:33 Wes: Yeah.
17:34 Erin: And I love Winston. I love that character. I was initially thinking about him as a kind of. Obviously some sort of ultimate figure of colonialism, but he's actually kind of the opposite of the Mummy.
17:46 Wes: How do you mean?
17:47 Erin: He's not at all about being obsessed with a single woman. He seems both completely uninterested in women and also interested in any woman at any given moment. He's seen with a woman on his arm and he's just getting drunk all the time. So he's this figure of dissipation and doesn't seem particularly attached to anyone. And his lack of attachment makes him just the perfect figure to want to sacrifice himself for some cause. His only attachment seems to be to die some sort of glorious and heroic death because he feels guilty for being a survivor and he just wants to go out with a bang.
So no attachments in this world. No desire to get back to some sort of past of his? Well, there is actually. Okay, now that I'm talking through this, it's interesting, right? There is a desire to sort of undo the past, to undo the fact of his survival, but it's about pressing the eject button and just getting out, getting out of this world entirely. His desire for this glorious death is about being useful and then disappearing. As the oldest maybe character in the film, he's an interesting counterpoint to the truly old characters in the film. Like Imhotep.
19:05 Wes: Yeah, he says, I just wish I could have chucked it in with the others and gone down in flame and glory instead of sitting around here rotting of boredom and booze. Yeah, well, they give him his glory in the end.
19:18 Erin: Yeah, he's just, yeah. The perfect opposite, I guess, to the Mummy. Where the film, if it does fall apart in any locatable place or if the whole thing is just kind of a silly. A silly mess. Lovable mess. Perhaps it's when the Mummy transports both Benny and Evelyn back to Hamunaptra in some sort of self created sand tornado, he becomes sand at one point to go through her keyhole. That sounded dirty. Just saying that. I regret that. Yeah, I don't know, but best not to look at that too closely. But maybe I should just use that as the way into talking about the vampire thing for a second.
The thing about the vampire is that the vampire is rapacious. Much more a figure of, say, sex rather than love. And someone who wants to constantly make new conquests. As opposed to this pharaoh who seems to only be, or not pharaoh. As opposed to this mummy who seems to only be giving his attentions to Evie as a way to secure her as some human sacrifice so he can get his girlfriend back. He still only has one woman in mind. I thought of you the whole time. I guess. Also another difference that occurs to me. So we have him sucking the life out of these American guys.
So obviously there's something vampiric about that, but it's in order to reconstitute his
20:43 Wes: own, just add American flesh.
20:46 Erin: Yeah, it's very, very Silence of the Lambs. But yeah, it's, I suppose, kind of about stealing the life force, but not really. And then I was also thinking about the vampire as being just alive forever and therefore not tied to a particular time, sort of to a place, but not really. You know, he has his castle and he does sleep in a coffin and stuff like that. But he's not really specifically identified with a particular culture. Whereas the mummy is obviously more rooted in a historical context. So it seems as though the mummy is more about both through this constant love object and through the particular culture out of which he comes. Much more about history and the past in a specific sense rather than this sort of sexualized undead threat that can appear anywhere and overtake you.
21:40 Wes: So what's our taxonomy of the undead? We have mummies, vampires, zombies, Is that it? Are there any other major undead categories in films?
21:53 Erin: I don't know if Frankenstein's monster is enough to be a category unto itself. That's a zombie, right?
21:59 Wes: He's a category unto himself.
22:00 Erin: Oh, okay.
22:01 Wes: He's not really a zombie. He's, you know, he reads Milton, right? Come on.
22:07 Erin: He's an electrical man.
22:09 Wes: Also, he's part very, very sensitive guy. Yeah, he's not very good looking. Actually. He's really good looking in the movie. Did you see the.
22:20 Erin: I haven't.
22:22 Wes: The recent movie. Yeah, they make him. No, he's a very good looking actor, which I thought was like, all right, he's still stitched together, but, you know, you got a good face and he's very tall. But any case. Yeah. So I think he's in a category of his own. Zombies. Yeah. I'm just thinking about my different feelings of the effectiveness of these different. I guess none of them really do it for me.
22:44 Erin: Vampires do it for me, really. But yeah, I maybe have to have a blood disorder to really.
22:50 Wes: Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Have you tried that for your blood disorder? Yeah, exactly, you sod. About zombie films. I don't. Philosophically, socially, it interests me because it's about the collective. What is the zombie? I think it's about old people, really, but stumbling around trying to Eat us because they envious or the dead.
23:14 Erin: Yeah, but that's also what vampires are about to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah. Basically this is all. They're all mummies is what you're saying. They're all the past trying to.
23:24 Wes: Yeah.
23:25 Erin: Trying to feast on the living and
23:27 Wes: the envy of the past for the living. So we, you know, of course, you know, we, we live by their rules. Right. All of our norms, as I was saying. Right. So the civilization is. Right. Has its formative origins and influences in these ancient civilizations. And then our dead ancestors, often the norms, at least their packaging. Right. Was determined by those who live before us. And we just sort of adopt their ways so they continue to live on in us. And sometimes we live on in very zombie like ways. It's like, well, I'm living by this code of ethics or these desires and things that I'm supposed to want and I, I don't know why I want them and I don't know who put this into me, you know, my parents or my culture or whatever.
And so we do stump, you know, sometimes stumble around in the zombie like way in the state of pseudo desire. Right. The zombie is enough, I think in that state. Can't really desire. It doesn't. I mean it's animate, but not animate anyway, you get the, you get to get the picture. But you know, we, we can feel norms, the norms given to us by the dead as persecutory. But also I think there's some sort of fear of like the guilt, survivor guilt, you know, that produces a persecutory fantasy like the dead are going to come back for us.
24:44 Erin: Hmm.
24:44 Wes: It's not enough for them to persecute us with our harsh super in the form of a harsh superego. Right. And strict mores or values. They've got to come back in person and take life back from us. So those kinds of thoughts I find very interesting. But a bunch of zombies stumbling around like I think I could get away. It doesn't do it for me. I know. They make them faster now, I guess in some movies. What's it called? The Z. What was it called?
25:13 Erin: World War Z and then the Walking Dead.
25:16 Wes: I just. Yeah, I can't explain why. It just, it has no emotional effect for me.
25:21 Erin: Yeah, I feel the same way. The key with the zombie is that it might get you and then you become one of the undead too. And you. And I think this goes to your reading of these. The idea that the zombie is the victim of large cultural forces seems to be reinforced by the fact that the zombie is always part of a larger body of people. Whereas the vampire and the mummy seem more cult of personality, like they seem more. More individualistic and they have their own specific thing that they're after or about self employed. Right, right. Where. Where in the vampire it's maybe more appetitive and in the mummy it's more about. It's more intellectual, you could say, because it's more about memory and the past.
26:02 Wes: Yeah, there's more association of lust, I guess with vampires and with zombies it's a lack of, you know, again, like a pseudo desire. And desire. Not desire to do anything except to spread the. They reproduce, but they reproduce themselves by biting. Right.
26:19 Erin: It's not.
26:19 Wes: Not sexual reproduction or reproduction through love. So. And then in the case of the mummy, I think it's more about love. Right. We have lust, we have the aggression, at least in this story. Or maybe it's about knowing, maybe it's about knowledge, you know, the kind of things that you've pointed to. We're curious, but then we're greeted with something incomprehensible. This also makes me think of Peirce because he's kind of pointing to the ways in which knowledge is grounded in the incomprehensible. Right. Because at some point some kind of raw data comes in.
It's unconceptualized and unknown. Kant calls this the manifold. And it's. Or it's the thing in itself. The alien unknowable thing in itself. Behind the manifold, perhaps. God, we have this weird situation where you're trying to cross the gap by knowing. But the very concept of knowledge implies something unknowable and alien and perhaps even persecutory. So again, once again, the curiosity, and the kind of benign curiosity of being in a museum looking at ancient artifacts could become fraught in some way.
27:24 Erin: I knew we'd get to Kant. I knew we'd be justified.
27:26 Wes: Sorry.
27:27 Erin: In choosing this film. No, I love it. I love it.
27:30 Wes: Yeah. It turns out Peirce was a big Kantian and Hegelian and it's just shocking to me how little I know about him and how profound he is. But. But anyway, final words.
27:40 Erin: I just. I hope I've proved to you how profound this film is.
27:45 Wes: I will. I will take it under consideration. No, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.
27:52 Erin: Okay, well, thank you. And careful what you read.
27:57 Wes: Thank you.
Curses and Colonizers in “The Mummy” (1999)
Jul 29, 2026
As a cinematic monster, the mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he’s not just dead, but wounded—ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative. Conveniently for the colonizer’s psyche, the mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him—not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand: the mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archeological, and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin discuss the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”
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0:11 Erin: As a cinematic monster, the Mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the Mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he's not just dead, but wounded. Ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative, conveniently for the colonizer's psyche, the Mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him, not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand, the Mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archaeological and linguistic knowledge to solve.
The very apparatus of the mummy's tomb, his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the Mummy's DNA, in Shakespearean terms, part Antony, part Cleopatra, reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Today, we're discussing the 1999 film the Mummy. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I have two questions to start us off today.
The first is, is this the silliest thing we've covered on the podcast to date, or was elf sillier?
1:41 Wes: That's a good question. It depends on what you mean by silly. Elf is sillier, but this is the most frivolous choice we've made.
1:54 Erin: I'm trying to figure out if you're mad at me for selecting this or if our listeners are going to be mad at me.
2:00 Wes: I hadn't seen it, except it might have been on in the background when I met my father when I was around 22, and he had hundreds and hundreds of VHS tapes of various movies that he had pirated. And there was always a movie on in the background when I was hanging out with my siblings. And I vaguely remember scenes from this because they were on in the background, but I had never actually seen the movie, and it didn't. I like mummy film. Horror films in general don't appeal to me, but mummy films especially, for some reason.
2:28 Erin: Oh, no.
2:30 Wes: So, yeah, it's not the kind of thing I would end up watching on my own, but it's an interesting. I could see, you know, I started. I saw immediately why it would be up your alley. Because of, like, screwball ish comedy. Right. It operates in two dimensions, so that was interesting.
2:45 Erin: This came out when I was 8 years old. We had this local video store that I used to go to to rent movies. When you walked in the door, there was a huge cardboard. I guess the technical term for it is a standee. You know, those big cardboard displays that they'll have in movie theaters or wherever to publicize a film? There was a huge display of the Mummy with different characters and right when you came in. So to me, it's sort of the ultimate summer blockbuster film because that was the thing you saw whenever you came in. And more often than not, you know, I was suggestible enough to think, oh, I could go for watching the Mummy again.
Super fun to watch at a sleepover or on a summer night. So I love this film. I mean, I'm gonna try to expand our conversation to talk about the mummy in general, which I do think is kind of an interesting concept. And maybe we could talk about why you find mummies particularly uninteresting. But that leads me to my second question.
3:41 Wes: You can analyze me a little bit.
3:43 Erin: Leads me to my second question, which is, are mummies scary? And maybe this is why you don't like them. Because I think I have an answer to this, and I think yours is going to be the same. I don't know.
3:53 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. I was thinking about this film in relation to other horror films, including Alien, because we did that one. And. And I think it's a great film. And also the Exorcist, which I think is a great film. I was thinking, well, I'm not entirely opposed to horror. I'm not into horror films, but I'm not entirely opposed to it. And those two films have, like, a solid thematic essence to them involving relationships like, you know, Regan on the verge of puberty and an absent father and then an alien. The relationships between the ship members kind of alienated.
And then this lack of a paternal authority. Just. Just like there is in the Exorcist and the ship computer called Mother. There's always a mother thing going on. It's hard not to think of that with the Mummy as well. But. So I was thinking. I'm not into jump scare films. I don't get. Although, you know, I guess I went to see it. Is that what it's called? The Clown?
4:52 Erin: Yeah.
4:53 Wes: Terrifying movie. And I actually did enjoy the. You know, because the audience would jump and then we'd all laugh at being kind of taken in. So. So maybe I do. You know, this is not. It's not very. A very fruitful analysis. We're conducting here. I'm too conflicted. But. But mummies in particular. Let's get to the point. Are mummies in particular scary? I don't think so. Horror movies used to scare me as a kid, big time. The Exorcist scared the crap out of me because even though I wasn't religious at that point, part of me believed in the devil just, just in sanctuary and I couldn't deal with it.
And then other horror films, it like got into my bones in a way they just can't do as an adult. So in general, I don't think I can be scared in the deeper way that I used to be scared when I was a kid. And then this, you know, because this is also romantic comedy, I find it hard to be. To find any of it scary. Exactly. So, yeah, say more what you mean about scary and whether mummies are scary.
5:48 Erin: I just don't think they're scary. And that's one of the reasons why I like this movie. Right. Is because it's not scary. I mean, I don't like horror movies either. Right. But I like that. I like the Mummy as a concept. It's interesting to think of it in the Universal monster movie context and the Mummy as a monster. You could approach that from a lot of different angles. It's, you know, it's a dead body come to life. I mean, I think there's elements of the zombie in the Mummy. There's elements of the vampire and the Mummy in certain ways much, much closer to the vampire.
But maybe we could tweeze that out a bit. I think the Mummy as a monster figure is scary, if you really think about it, which is a way of saying that it's not scary. So that's why you need, you know, the accompanying curse. Though maybe you can't really separate the Mummy from the curse, but you know, the Mummy that can unhinge its jaws and become sand and at some point Imhotep's little mummy army is climbing on the walls. That becomes a bigger part of the Mummy Returns, which is a truly bad film. I love it, but it's a truly bad film. So I didn't make us do that.
Peeling the flesh off of people's bones and then also you have to throw in the scarabs. So you basically need this entire cast of supporting scary things, I think, in order to make the Mummy work as a horror film. I don't quite think of this as a horror film. I mean, part of it is also just the way that the CGI has aged Technically, of course, it has horror tropes, but it's just not that scary to me. Maybe what's kind of scary about it, in a thinky way, is related to the main reading of mummies that I'm interested in exploring, which are. Which is something like the mummy as a colonial fantasy.
The colonizer goes into a place that doesn't belong to them, and then they start literally and metaphorically exhuming the culture that they've entered, either to leech off of it or destroy it. And then there's this curse idea. So they awaken this curse, which it seems anti colonial, like it's payback for disturbing the mummy. But in fact, it really kind of serves the colonizer in a way, because the mummy actually wants to come back to life. It actually wants you to disturb it. It wants you to fall into the trap of the curse. So the colonizer is kind of, in that sense, exonerated from the act of meddling in the first place and from colonizing in the first place by the psychology of this curse or the psychology of the mummy wanting to return to life.
And then the colonizer has to also kill the mummy and restore order. So they cause the problem, sort of, but it's really more the mummy's fault or the mummy was asking for it. And so they caused the problem, then they themselves are the solution. And I guess that's a scary dynamic in itself for what it reveals about the colonial or the imperial psyche. But I also think that this dynamic can be extended in all sorts of directions. So it might reflect something in each of us about our own relationships to the past. Something silly like maybe we're all colonizers and we all have mummies inside of us that want to come back to life, and our job is to kill that part of ourselves and that desire to reenact the past or something like that.
And maybe that. Maybe there's something scary about that, that element, whatever you want to call it, from something as. Maybe as simplistic as the return of the repressed to something like giving up on previous versions of ourselves or whatever the case may be. I mean, in this, in the mummy movies, it's a lost love that has to be ultimately abandoned or. Yeah, I don't know that that's scary, but that's the best I could do.
9:28 Wes: Well, I think once you start relating it to relationships, whether it's between colonizer and colonized or whether it's a love relationship, then it becomes scary.
9:36 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
9:37 Wes: Relationships are scary. But I think the key word There is preservation because the mummy, obviously, is a preserved. And I guess for the ancient Egyptians, it had something to do with preservation into the afterlife. Right. Why did they do it? Do you have firmer knowledge than me about this? Our research team was on vacation this
10:02 Erin: week, if I remember correctly. And see, this is. The other thing is, of course, I'm sure you had. Didn't we talk about this? You had an Egyptology phase, didn't you, as a kid?
10:11 Wes: Yeah, my grandmother was very into it and there were lots of books around, so I was very fascinated by it. And even today, one of the first thing I do when I go into a museum is go to the Egypt section. And the sense of being in contact with things that are that old and ancient, just crossing that gap is just very powerful for me. And you can look at the signs and it's, you know, this is 2500 BC, and yet these artifacts are so well preserved. And so you can think of. Try to place yourself back then. But the pictogram writing is so weird and alien. It almost is like aliens. And even I think some of the alien aesthetic. Right. Is in films from actual aliens is borrowed from ancient Egypt. So there's something about. Yeah. That combination of preservation and of artifacts and alienness that. That is really powerful.
11:07 Erin: Yeah. When I was a kid, I took a. I don't know if I ever told you this. I took a correspondence course on hieroglyphics from the Oriental Institute.
11:14 Wes: Oh, wow.
11:15 Erin: But, yeah, I was really into it, so another reason why I loved this movie.
11:19 Wes: Are you still. Are you fluent in hieroglyphics?
11:21 Erin: No, I can. I can recognize some things.
11:25 Wes: But apparently they did. They did speak actual, you know, reconstructed ancient Egyptian in the film. Yes, that's what I saw. Yeah.
11:33 Erin: You know, just one of the many great things about this masterpiece.
11:38 Wes: That kind of attention to detail.
11:40 Erin: Exactly.
11:41 Wes: You know, really lends itself to verisimilitude of.
11:46 Erin: The thing that always bothers me is
11:47 Wes: they say waking up and running around. Yeah.
11:49 Erin: The. The five canopic jars. And he's like, there are only four. That's such a basic thing to get wrong. But anyway, if I remember correctly, and I did not look this up beforehand, I'm sorry, but I believe that the Egyptians thought that you had three souls and that the preservation of the body involved needing a place for all of these souls to meet for you to become reincarnated.
12:12 Wes: Oh, right.
12:13 Erin: So that's funny.
12:14 Wes: We actually did a little bit of ancient Egyptian philosophy on the show. I'm part of, The Partially Examined Life, recently.
12:21 Erin: Was there anything interesting there?
12:24 Wes: Some stuff about. Yeah, there's these different souls. So we read something called the Instructions and one of the things we read was a dialogue between a man and his soul. One of the souls, the soul that was supposed to carry it off to the afterlife, I think. But it's just stuff taken from fragments of papyrus, basically. And I was surprised that so much writing survived.
12:49 Erin: I have some book on the Book of the Dead somewhere packed away in my. I have a lot of my library packed away right now. But, you know, a lot of the stuff like you can. You can read what's in there. And it's a lot of spells and a lot of protection type. It's not quite as interesting as it sounds. And of course, this is one of the controversies about, I think about the curse of the Pharaohs is that a lot of the supposed warnings about disturbing the body or else the curse will come for you were actually invented by newspapers in the 20s as a result of the fervor around King Tut's tomb.
And the idea back then. Right. You know, I didn't. I didn't get the chance to actually research this further, but I was also reading that mummies were ground up and they were kept in people's like, medicine cabinets and they were actually. Yeah. And they were actually used. So. No. Another reason why I inherently love mummies. They're actually used as a coagulant. So Which I find so interesting. I don't know what the psychology of that is about or what that's about, except that they think that mummies are dried up bodies. So it'll dry up your cut or.
I have no idea. But gross. It's also, you know, further like vampire connection, I guess, sort of.
14:04 Wes: Yeah, it's a good point. And now that, you know there's a preservation element in vampires too, right. Also to the point of eternal life. I mean, with preservation, I think we're gonna. We'll talk a bit about the love element, right? To this idea of everlasting love. I think that this movie brings in with it Imhotep and Anck Su Namun. How do you pronounce it?
14:27 Erin: Anck Su Namun.
14:28 Wes: Anck Su Namun. Anck Su Namun.
14:31 Erin: Or Marta, you can call her either one.
14:34 Wes: Oh, yeah. I know. It took me a while to figure that out.
14:37 Erin: But it's always an arrested development connection for us in every episode.
14:41 Wes: The thing that the Egyptians did with mummies is weird and gross. Right. We all know that.
14:46 Erin: Sort of. I mean, it's also kind of just Kidding.
14:48 Wes: Yeah.
14:49 Erin: Okay.
14:50 Wes: But it lends itself to the idea, okay, what are they being preserved for? Yeah, okay. The afterlife. Sure. But maybe they were being preserved for us in our museums. But also, I think, like the wrapping up in bandages, like a burn victim type thing, you know, it lends itself to the idea that, okay, well, maybe they could come back to life. And it connects to certain, I guess, folktales about the dangers of preservation. Right. Or fairy tales. I wish I could live forever, but then I live as a rotting corpse.
15:22 Erin: Or like, death becomes her. Have you seen that?
15:25 Wes: No, I haven't, actually. I know.
15:28 Erin: It's related to this idea. You live forever, but then you become disgusting and you have all these problems. Yeah, right.
15:34 Wes: It's like. It's like the. You know, the fairy tales where you have a wish and it's, be careful what you wish for. Because there's always a downside. Right. The wish is misinterpreted in some way or comes with a downside you didn't expect or something like that. But anyway, so, yeah, so there's the wish for eternal life, and then there's also the wish for eternal love, which I think this movie plays on.
15:55 Erin: It's interesting how the movie coalesces a lot of different things that are. I mean, it's almost a compendium of different symbols that the Mummy represents. So a really old idea about the Mummy is that they're a figure of pathos and a romantic figure, and they're actually a bunch of Victorian stories about people having romances with mummies or the Mummy being a figure of unrequited love. And I take this to be a really suggestive part of the Mummy's appearance, that the bandages suggest that he's somehow wounded or that he comes out of a wounded or incomplete or somehow interrupted past, or a narrative that he wasn't able to.
To carry out and sort of wrenched out of that narrative. Right. So the wrapping seemed to suggest that interrupted life or that unrequited love. That was kind of where people's minds first went with the Mummy, this idea of the romantic lover separated from the beloved by death. And in the 1932 Mummy, that film also has the unrequited love thing with the Anck Su Namun figure and then Boris Karloff. I was really surprised by this when I went back and rewatched it. It's a really boring film. The beginning has a lot of interesting ideas about colonization, that the film then drops.
But Karloff just kind of walks around, you know, trying to pretend to Be some normal guy even though he has really bad social skills. And he kind of hypnotizes the female figure in the film, the one who sort of lines up with Evelyn. He's almost like a Mesmer figure or very similar to the vampire where he hypnotizes her and draws her to him. And she is somehow. It's not really explained very well in the film, but she's somehow the reincarnation of Anck Su Namun, much like evelyn in the 1999 film. Something is made of the fact that she might be some sort of distant ancestor because she's also half Egyptian and half English like the Evelyn character.
17:54 Wes: So I think if some of that had been preserved, it could have made for a more powerful emotional content to the film. Right. Because in this case the threat is all just external to Evelyn. It's not like she is being possessed or seduced or something.
18:11 Erin: No. Well, he does kiss her at certain points and he does confuse her with Anck Su Namun. So I think they're trying to make that connection.
18:17 Wes: She kisses him too, I think.
18:19 Erin: Oh yes. To distract him.
18:20 Wes: The only completed kiss is she kisses him.
18:24 Erin: That's right. I don't want to know what a completed kiss is. Anyway.
18:30 Wes: He does get his tongue though back by then, I think. Sorry.
18:34 Erin: No, but she's supposed to be the human sacrifice for Anck Su Namun. Because one of the things that I guess I figured out about the the economy of this film is that Imhotep needs several men to become fully reincarnated. But I guess Anck Su Namun only needs one. It's just a one to one ratio for. For a woman. I really wonder about a lot of things in this movie and the logic. Like stealing the blind guys eyes and then the fact that the mummy doesn't need glasses.
19:01 Wes: But anyway, how about all you have to do is carry around the cat and you'd be good.
19:07 Erin: Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah.
19:09 Wes: And they don't. I mean the first thing I do if I found that out is round up a bunch of cats, go to the shelter.
19:17 Erin: Exactly.
19:19 Wes: So that bothered me a bit. There's some few plot or in the beginning when like does she have to kill her? I guess she's trapped. So she does have to kill herself. Like that's the. That's the logical plan for him to resurrect her. Why couldn't they just escape together?
19:36 Erin: She so believed that he. See, this is like a perfect example of oh what, what do they say now? The opposite of he's just not that into you. Like, if you. If you. Oh, if he. If he wanted to, he would. That's the. The. The current dating advice. Right. So she was so assured of his love for her that she knew that all she had to do was kill her would find a way.
19:57 Wes: Oh, she's playing hard to get. Okay.
19:59 Erin: No, no, no. She's not playing hard to get. She's expressing full trust in his ability to overcome death, to rescue her. He's devoted.
20:09 Wes: You know, it's a love that's supposed to transcend everything. And as we know, that kind of love, there's a danger to it. Right. It can kind of blot out the world. And in this case, it could literally blot out the world once it's resurrected. So I think that's one of the ideas here, whether it's well thought out, is that this level of intensity in love can be destructive. And that's offset, of course, by the relationship, Rick and Evelyn, where they have a healthy level of antagonism. This is going back to Much Ado or screwball comedies. Right? The healthy level of antagonism that prevents you from trying to mummify and resurrect and get into all that creepy stuff. You know, keep it. Keep some boundaries. A little antagonism.
21:05 Erin: Well, they're together against the forces of death. Yeah. So in a way, they have a. They have a joint project of trying to. Trying to resurrect each other.
21:15 Wes: I'd like to see what happens if they. If Imhotep had succeeded and then 20 years into their relationship. I'd like to, like, a window in on that. He's sitting on the couch watching tv, and she's yelling at him about something. No, she's like, bandages on the floor.
21:34 Erin: Yeah, it's really good. No, no. She's like, I'm going out. And he's like, where. Where are you going? Just. God, I'm just getting drinks with my friends.
21:42 Wes: Leave me alone.
21:43 Erin: I'm allowed to spend some time away from you.
21:47 Wes: There you go. Ultimately, she ends up getting a restraining order on him. I resurrected you. You belong to me.
22:00 Erin: She gets half the contents of the tomb.
22:04 Wes: Yeah, there you go. So, you know. Yeah, it's all good until you succeed. Until then, it's tragic and eternal.
22:13 Erin: I like this idea that you're maybe the claustrophobia of this kind of relationship or this idea of preservation because it' related directly to the mummification ritual. You know, the loading up the tomb and trying to create the perfect conditions whereby you can survive. And somehow the effort expended on this is fruitless. One of the ideas behind whether or not there was actually a curse of the pharaohs specifically involved in King Tut's tomb. Whether or not people who entered the tomb were more susceptible to illness had to do with the fact that they would put food in the tomb, assuming that you would have to eat once you were reincarnated or after death or whatever.
And so that food eventually, of course, went very, very, very bad. And there was bacteria found in the tomb that could cause a bunch of. A bunch of problems, including pneumonia and some of the people who entered the tomb. Yeah. But I think the idea is that there was this bacteria in the tomb, but that it wasn't enough to infect you or that it couldn't have survived for that long. You know, they found, like, the dead bacteria, something like that. But anyway, it was decomposing over thousands of years, releasing all of these acids and chemicals, and also the bugs that were eating these, you know, all of the.
The fish and the. All those things that were in there, then those bugs themselves decomposing and creating really gross things inside this little lockbox. So, yeah, there's something, I don't know, maybe accidentally, metaphorically putrid. Right. About. About that whole concept of trying to preserve something unnaturally beyond its, you know, say it's sell by date.
23:56 Wes: Yeah. Like in Frankenstein, which we'll do eventually with. Right. He's reassembling, taking pieces of corpses and putting them together. And you almost say. Reminds me of high school when we did dissection, which I hated with a passion, in part because of the formaldehyde smell you get all over you. That you couldn't just do anything about this, you know, beyond the grossness of doing the dissections themselves. But it's, you know, I imagine, like the body of Frankenstein is sort of like a. Yeah. It's preserved, but it's not preserved in life.
Right. It's preserved in death somehow. It doesn't decay. And you can do things with it, and maybe if it's your body, you can do things with it, but there's something dead about it at the same time. So the intention of seeing someone off into the afterlife, and I suppose it must have been largely symbolic, or maybe there was a. You know, did they literally believe they needed to eat? Or maybe it was a big controversy. Did they really eat the food or did they just symbolically eat. Right. The transubstantiation.
24:57 Erin: Yes. Yeah, they really believed that. Yep.
25:01 Wes: And there were factions and wars and. No. So anyway, yeah, the attempt at preservation, I think that, you know, your point is well taken. Can preserve something at the cost of its putridness. And then going to your colonialism idea. 19th century Egypt is a very different place than ancient Egypt. It's already been colonized, right, by a completely different culture. So the relationship is between the modern Egyptians of the time and that ancient culture, which is alien and also exploiters and, you know, like Napoleon and colonizers and conquerors who have that relationship not just to the local culture, but also to this ancient culture, which I think serves as a object of at least two impulses.
One of them is just for the treasure and the other is this curiosity. And maybe there's a morbid curiosity there. What is it about our curiosity when we go into a museum? What's so fascinating about all of this stuff to us? And is there something a bit pernicious about it? Right, so there's something about the incredible preservation of a culture that's so ancient that is exciting and fascinating. But then we have to think about our relationship to that and what that's about, I suppose. Is it entirely well intentioned?
26:24 Erin: It seems to me. On the one hand, part of the intention is to feel a lack of difference or to feel some connection with this ancient time, with this culture that's really different from one's own. One wants to feel a connection to this. And that's a big part of the motivation for, say, going to the museum. But then also you want that difference preserved as well. You want to feel that this is thrilling and exotic and different from you. So you want to relate to it on the one hand and also don't want to on the other, or you don't want it to relate to you. You know, that push pull is also in the figure of the mummy. I don't know if I'm characterizing that in a way you would agree with.
27:06 Wes: We're looking into the past in a way. I think we're looking at our own origins. The origins are supposed to explain something about us, right? In a way they've given. They are not just our predecessors, but our progenitors. Right. Our ancient culture, you know, you remember in history class, it's kind of taught as if these ancient cultures were sort of the right. They're giving birth to everything that follows. We are who we are as civilized, supposedly people. Our civilization is built on top of those civilizations. So we look at those origins.
It's almost like the fascination with parentage in a certain way. But also we can't overcome the alien ness of those origins. It's not unlike a relationship to deities and religion, where it's something about focusing on an origin. But also the concept of the alien is. Is ever a problem, or at least according to certain philosophers. Right. Hegel thought he was kind of solving that problem. Like faith in the Kantian sense leaves God too much of an alien presence because he's unknowable. And Hegel wants to say he's. Well, actually, he is knowable.
So in this case, it's the unknowableness of the. Of Egyptian culture. Culture because it does remain really weird and alien. It's like it's hard to get your mind. It's hard to. Just hard to imagine what it would be like to be a person back then in that kind of society. Maybe this feeling is superficial. Maybe, you know, maybe we shouldn't look at hieroglyphs and various other artifacts and the strangeness of mummification and think that it's all that different. Right. These are people who are just people and have the same everyday concerns as we do.
But I think part of it has something to do with this idea of feeling like we're trying to come to terms with a kind of origin that is nevertheless alien to us. It's no coincidence that people want to say the pyramids were created by aliens and that in a way, it's another sort of creation myth. They want to. Alien style. Where did human beings come from? Well, from aliens. You know, never mind the theological questions that arise from that. Where did the aliens come from? Why don't we just go straight to the source? We really need the middleman.
29:23 Erin: But anyway, yeah, what you were saying, even before you connected it, I was thinking, oh, yeah, this sounds. You're exactly right. This sounds just like aliens. And that, I think, is something that we also covered in our podcast on Alien. The idea that this is maybe part of what the film was exploring was obviously was sex itself or something about the sex organs themselves. And therefore also this idea of parentage and who our progenitors are, and the Egyptians are sort of filling that same role. The aliens that placed us here in some way. Yeah.
So I think that's interesting. I had thought about, you know, Mummy versus Zombie, Mummy versus Vampire, but I really think Mummy and Alien are really the closest relatives. And I should have thought of that because I was also thinking about this film in relationship to Picnic at Hanging Rock, or maybe even a mirror image of Picnic at Hanging Rock and the kind of lessons of colonization that that film has. Maybe we could start with that in part two and Then maybe transition to looking at the film a little bit more closely. Though I still have a lot to.
I feel like, to say about just the figure of the mummy itself, but we'll. We'll try to dive into it a little more.
30:29 Wes: Yeah. And get into the romantic comedy aspect too.
30:32 Erin: Sure. Thank you.
30:34 Wes: Thank you.
Existence and Expectancy in “Waiting for Godot” (Part 2)
Jun 29, 2026
Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.
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0:11 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Waiting for Godot. Erin, you wanted to say something about the typical characterization of them as tramps.
0:24 Erin: Yeah. Do you think they're as characters gaining a little bit from the association with, you know, as I've already talked about Laurel and Hardy, but also maybe Chaplin.
0:34 Wes: Yeah, I think that's meant to be an association. Yeah. Beckett actually talked about them. Right. As tramps, even though it's not referenced in the play itself. But he was involved in the production where he. I think. I think he gave some guidance on this, on their appearance and what they were supposed to be. But.
0:53 Erin: Yeah, I see. Yeah. I mean, again, I want to just argue that the comedy read is really the best way I've found to understand this is the trajectory of the Tramp. Often is this sort of dilation of time and funny business. I mean, you have in the figure of the Tramp the idea of someone who is always going, always moving and yet going nowhere. The ending, such as it is, you know, the famous idea that Godot never comes or that nothing, nothing amounts to anything in the end, is actually predicted in the Tramp trope, in which Tramp trope.
1:35 Wes: I was going to get a tramp stamp, but I decided on getting a tramp stamp.
1:38 Erin: I decided on the Tramp trope. But at the end of these little escapades, you know, these little serial adventures in the life of the Tramp, what happens? Nothing. Right. He might have a delusion of grandeur. Something might happen to him. You know, there'll be a little bit of a plot for the 20 minute silent film or whatever that he's engaged in. And then usually at the end, disappointment, back on the road, back where he began. No salvation, no social climb, no actual progress, but just movement. So movement without progress is kind of the life of the Tramp.
2:16 Wes: So at this point, right, they've just talked about, had an absurd conversation about whether to commit suicide and who should go first, you know, depending on so that the branch doesn't break for the second one and then leave them alone. And Estragon says, don't let's do anything. It's safer. And then Vladimir says, let's wait and see what he says. As if Godot is going to tell them whether they should commit suicide, or in what order they should commit suicide. Or maybe whether that there's some reason not to commit suicide. Estragon. Says who? Godot. Estragon. Good idea. Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand, says Vladimir. Do you want to go back and forth for a second here?
3:00 Erin: Sure. On the other hand, it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes.
3:05 Wes: I'm curious to hear what he has to offer. Then we'll take it or leave it.
3:09 Erin: What exactly did we ask him for?
3:11 Wes: Were you not there?
3:12 Erin: I can't have been listening.
3:14 Wes: Oh, nothing very definite.
3:16 Erin: A kind of prayer.
3:19 Wes: Precisely.
3:20 Erin: A vague supplication.
3:23 Wes: Exactly.
3:25 Erin: This is funny. And what did he reply? That he'd see that he couldn't promise anything.
3:32 Wes: That he'd have to think it over
3:34 Erin: in the quiet of his home, consult
3:36 Wes: his family, his friends, his agents, his
3:41 Erin: correspondence, his books, his bank account, before taking a decision. It's the normal thing, is it not? I think it is.
3:52 Wes: I think so too. All right, so that's fun.
3:58 Erin: These are really, really fun to read out loud.
4:01 Wes: Yeah. So strike. Yeah. So you can see all the comedy in here. Strike the iron before freezes instead of while it's hot.
4:11 Erin: The anticipation of the end.
4:15 Wes: Yeah. What did we ask him for? Nothing very definite. A kind of prayer. Precisely.
4:22 Erin: Right.
4:22 Wes: So it's not definite, but it's precise. It's vague, but exactly.
4:28 Erin: Will he come tomorrow, Surely.
4:31 Wes: Yeah. That he couldn't promise anything. But anyway, so we. We get the idea that they don't know what exactly they're waiting on. What's. It's. It's very vague. And they. They even use the word vague. And the word prayer is used. And other times the word save is used. And savior. So there's some religious association here as well.
4:51 Erin: What's funny too, is in the middle of all this, it strikes me, on page 11, Vladimir says, your worship wishes to assert his prerogatives. And prior to this, I think on the very first page.
5:02 Wes: Yeah. Where did your worship sleep tonight? Or something like that.
5:05 Erin: Right, your highness? Yeah. And because of what happens with the stickiness of language with Vladimir, he starts calling even before they decide to play at Pozzo and Lucky on day two, or in the second act, he has already started calling estragon pig, a use of the term that Pozzo uses for lucky. So one wonders if, you know, the day before this they were. Vladimir was contaged by someone who was calling someone else your highness and your worship in a. In a sort of sarcastic way or something like that.
5:41 Wes: Interesting. Yeah.
5:42 Erin: We intuit in Act 2 that he picks up on some turns of phrase from Pozzo, but. Yeah, but it's funny that it comes up in the midst of this theological conversation which doesn't occur in Act 2. So those words, I think, aren't used at all in Act 2. But maybe from the beginning, Vladimir has come into this conversation already ruminating on this idea of the thieves being saved. And that's what suggests the sarcastic your worship phrase to his mind, rather than some other characters that we haven't seen in act minus one.
6:16 Wes: It seems to me to sort of reverse their roles a bit, because Vladimir is actually the one more in charge. And he has a name which is more. There's more half to it. Right. There's actually been princes, Russian princes named Vladimir and Estragon. Again, it's a name of an herb. Yeah. You get a sense Vladimir is more in charge. So it's a weird inversion to. Suggests that Estragon is in charge. But of course, you know, there is a sense in which the person who doesn't seem to be in charge is in charge. And in fact. Right. The diminutives that they have for each other.
Gogo and Dee Dee. Right. Estragon, Gogo. And of course he wants to go all the time, but he can't, because they're waiting for Godot, which is almost like a combination of their names. Go and D. Go DD sounds like D almost sounds like this. It's like this, this, or here. Here versus Go. Go. Stasis versus motion and what Freud would call secondary process, and the kind of fixing something in one's attention and rational thought and planning, which certainly Vladimir has, versus just impulse, which is what Estragon seems to have. So to sort of say your highness or your worship is to raise the question of who's in charge.
Is it executive function that's in charge, or is it impulse and instinct that's in charge?
7:42 Erin: To give maybe credence to your idea that Estragon is maybe secretly the one in control or in charge. Pozzo's name is confused with Godot. And Gogo certainly sounds more like Godot than Didi does. Though I like your idea that the name kind of combines the two in a way so that we could say that, you know, Pozzo is the more obviously dominant one of that pair. Godot, say in the pair that he's A part of. With the boy is certainly the dominant. And then Gogo, Estragon would be along that axis. Though, of course, these dynamics shift in Act 2. I mean. Yeah. From the beginning, Vladimir is saving Estragon, or trying to save Estragon from these people that apparently beat him up all night.
8:25 Wes: Right.
8:26 Erin: Which is, like, really sad, but also
8:28 Wes: really funny because he transgresses in some way. Vladimir suggests he's doing something to.
8:33 Erin: To antagonize them.
8:34 Wes: Yeah. So the idea that there's something impulsive about Estragon that gets a natural response. So what happens when Pozzo and Lucky arrive? Well, it's kind of a relief. Okay. You know, it's like, okay, something interesting is going to happen in this play. And it's kind of a traveling vaudeville act. It's more pronounced than the vaudeville act that we've already been witnessing and more extreme. And in a way, Pozzo and Lucky seem to be exaggerated versions of Vladimir and Estragon. So, Right. There's a kind of a bit of a master slave dynamic, maybe with Vladimir and Estragon, but it's very pronounced with Pozzo and Lucky.
Lucky is literally his slave. And you can think of Pozzo as a harsh superego or as a. If you're thinking about it intrapsychically or on a social level as, you know, feudal lord or master. There's been lots of readings of this in terms of Hegel's master slave dialectic and all that stuff. So it's really quite. Quite a striking scene when they show up, right, with. So, you know, enter, Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo drives Lucky by means of a rope passed around his neck so that Lucky is the first to enter, followed by the rope, which is long enough to let him reach the middle of the stage before Pozzo appears.
Lucky carries a heavy bag, a folding stool, a picnic basket, and a greatcoat. Pozzo, a whip. And then, of course, the way he treats Lucky is quite, you know, quite extreme. Calling him pig and all that and having him give him the whip that he's gonna use to whip him. But from reading, I understand that the very first performance of this, people walked out. And I wonder where it is that they walked out, where it is that this became too objectional. Well, and I suppose maybe it's with Pozzo and Lucky, but you would think that would be the thing.
Like, okay, actually, this is getting really interesting now, but I don't know.
10:31 Erin: Well, they've been predicted. I mean, very often, Estragon is the one who's introducing New elements to the dialogue, surprising twists in the dialogue. And one of them that he introduces, the question we're not tied, which he then raises again right before Pozzo and Lucky. Come on. Estragon also has the idea of the necessity for testing the branch to determine their weight before they kill themselves on it, because he doesn't want the branch to not be able to hold whichever of them is heavier and have the heavier person go second so that they don't successfully kill themselves.
Something which it takes Vladimir a second to catch up on. Which is a surprising moment because Estragon makes sense and thinks logically about something before Vladimir can intuit it. But both of those instances are about being tied to each other or to Godot in terms of their fates and then being sort of weighed in the balance, maybe like scales connected, like the two thieves, maybe on the. On the. The crosses on either side of Christ. And then we get Lucky and Pozzo coming on to tied together by this rope. Yeah, I like this idea that they're an exaggeration of Estragon and Vladimir.
And there are some of the same elements that recur in the Pozzo Lucky dynamic, though twisted. So we get the turnip that Vladimir gives Estragon and then Pozzo with the chicken bone. I don't know. I guess maybe it doesn't really work. Erin, it's a carrot. Sorry.
12:07 Wes: Right. Accidentally gives him a turnip, but he doesn't. Estragon doesn'. I bring that up because Vladimir really does care about Estragon and is feeding him.
12:17 Erin: Yes.
12:19 Wes: Whereas Pozzo's abusing Lucky and Lucky gets the bones. Right. So the.
12:25 Erin: Right.
12:25 Wes: Right. Pozzo takes out the chicken and eats it himself instead of, you know, whereas Vladimir was offering Estragon food. And then Estragon gets the bones that usually Lucky gets. Usually gets the scraps, gets the leftovers.
12:39 Erin: Right.
12:39 Wes: Pozzo is much more imperious and pompous and condescending than Vladimir, and he's a rich man and they're on his land, except the road is free to all, which is a disgrace and blah, blah, blah. So I think that Vladimir thinks he's Godot at first, Right?
12:56 Erin: Yes. Well, they're not sure, or they hear the sound first and they think that sound is potentially Godot coming. Right?
13:03 Wes: Yeah. Vladimir Godot. Estragon says yes. And then Pozzo presents himself as Pozzo and Estragon says he said Godot. So I guess Vladimir realizes quickly that he's not Godot.
13:17 Erin: That's right. And it's in the second act. That I think they say that they're saved. And when they first hear Pozzo and Lucky coming, I think actually the two of them cower at the sound. Yeah. So you're right. He actually does think he might be Godot.
13:31 Wes: So Pozzo accuses him of Pozzo, says, you took me for Godot. And Vladimir says, no. Oh, no, sir. Not for an instant, sir. So, Lyon, who is he? Oh, he's kind of an acquaintance. Estragon? Nothing of the kind. We hardly know him is Vladimir. True, we don't know him very well. But at the same time, Estragon, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him. Pozzo, you took me for him. So. Yeah. What's this insistence on the idea that they took him for Godot? You know, it may have something to do with what I was talking about early in the first part, which is just this.
Godot could be representative of dramatic resolution or suspense or a plot point. It could be representative of some aspect within a play. So it's almost like saying to the audience, you took me for some item of significance in the play or some plot development. Well, when this play doesn't actually have a plot, or you might say, on my reading, having to do with the foolishness of being so invested in the future, or perhaps even invested in one's ambitions, which are very future oriented. You took me, the rich man, as the thing that you wanted to be or the thing that you're waiting for, expecting.
But of course, Estragon and Vladimir, too, I don't think they're not organized enough to give content to Godot in that way. If they're mistaking Pozzo for Godot, it's simply right. It's more a function of this idea that they really. Godot doesn't have any content for them, except that he might save them from something which doesn't have a lot of content either.
15:10 Erin: Right. Yeah, that's sort of suggested by the. To take something for something else. There's a sort of interchangeability or like a displacement, I suppose. But then also there's inherent in that maybe, you know, the colloquialism. What do you take me for? Yeah, I love Vladimir saying, personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him.
15:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:32 Erin: Pozzo seems incredulous at the thought that he could be taken for someone else because of his singularity or something. You know, he says disparagingly, of the same species as Pozzo, made in God's image. Yeah. The idea that other people would be the same Species as him seems like something distasteful. And so he repeatedly refers to Lucky as a pig and a hog, but says he cannot go for long without the society of my likes. Even when the likeness is an imperfect one.
16:02 Wes: He's gonna deign to, right, to hang out with these guys and, you know, have this feast in front of them, chicken and wine, without offering it to them. So at least they're, you know, they're lesser than him. He's a rich man who owns all the land. But they're. No, they're not. Lucky levels the road is free to all. Yeah. Which he then says is a disgrace. Right. So again, if we were to read this intrapsychically, we might think of it in terms of this relationship between some grandiose aspect of ourselves and then something that's been disavowed.
Lucky is the disavowed shadow self that we want to cast off. Or maybe it's the part of us that's being beaten up and abused for being less than. But I think the dynamic of that is to put Pozzo in a position. Why isn't he in his manor, right, with the Stein. He mentions the Steinway. That's where he left his watch. Why isn't he in the manor with the piano entertaining him? Well, he's off to sell Lucky at the fair, right? But he could have someone do that for him. But anyway, he gets put into the position of being a wanderer through a desolate wasteland, which is not quite what we would expect a nobleman to be doing.
You get the sense that he's right. He says it himself. What he's really looking for is company. But it's hard to have company if you are that pompous and high up and unaware of the well being of others. Right. Have company in the truest sense.
17:39 Erin: The other element or the other dynamic in his relationship with Lucky is one of the parasitism, I suppose, or as if the rope is an umbilical cord that has allowed Pozzo to leech off of Lucky. Right. Is that the implication that Lucky has previously been able to think and speak and that Pozo has learned things from him or acquired things from him until Lucky becomes hollowed out and unable to make any sort of coherent statement.
18:12 Wes: Yeah, it's quite Lucky, actually. He starts weeping because of what. What Pozzo says here, right. Which is that he's learned so much from. From Lucky. They're inquiring why he doesn't put his baggage down, right. And Pozzo ends up saying he wants to Impress him and mollify him. And then Vladimir is surprised by the idea that Pozzo would want to get rid of them. You know he's going to bring him to the fair. Then there's the whole scene where Estragon gets kicked and Pozzo gives that great speech about the tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else, another stops, right? Lucky's tears go to go to Estragon.
18:50 Erin: Underneath, Pozzo says, guess who taught me all these beautiful things? My Lucky. But for him, all my thoughts, all my feelings would have been of common things. Professional worries, beauty, grace, truth of the first water. I knew they were all beyond me. So I took a knook and Vladimir says, a knook? And I looked that up. I couldn't find anything about it, except for stuff about Waiting for Godot and where the origin of that word might be from.
19:16 Wes: Maybe it's like a niche profession.
19:19 Erin: But yeah, that was nearly 60 years ago. Yes, nearly 60. You wouldn't think it to look at me, would you? Compared to him, I look like a young man. No? So, also implying that he's physically sustained himself on the deterioration of Lucky. And then Vladimir says, after having sucked all the good out of him, you chuck him away like a. Like a banana skin.
19:40 Wes: Vladimir abuses him for the way he treats Lucky and all that stuff. And Pozzo ends up collapsing, right? Well, Vladimir even uses the word crucify. He's crucifying Lucky. But. But Pozzo's claim is that Lucky is killing him. He used to be so kind, so entertaining, so helpful and entertaining, my good angel. And now he is killing me. But anyway, I guess I wanted to kind of lead into that twilight speech that he gives. So it's another great speech. And then we'll probably have to talk about Lucky's speech as well. Let's read the whole thing. Just kidding.
So everything seems black to him today. Except the firmament, says Pozzo. But I see what it is. You are not from these parts. You don't know what our twilights can do. Shall I tell you? And then he makes sure that everyone's looking at the sky, including Lucky. Will you look at the sky, pig? Yikes. What is there so extraordinary about it? Qua sky. It is pale and luminous like any sky at any at this hour of the day in these latitudes when the weather is fine. An hour ago, roughly after having poured forth even since say 10 o' clock in the morning, tirelessly torrents of red and white light, it begins to lose its effulgence to grow pale, pale, ever a little paler, a little paler, until poof, finished, it comes to rest.
But behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging and will burst upon us. Pop. Like that. Just when we least expect it. That is how it is on this bitch of an earth. Yeah. So what is that doing? What's the function of that speech, if there is any? You get the sense that it's another bit of parody of something that we might expect to see in a. In a play, right? Some sort of crescendo, emotional crescendo, along with a great speech. So maybe it's a parody of a great speech, but it also points to the concept of death, right? And the coming of night, which seems to be the alternative to the coming of Godot.
Or somehow coupled to it, maybe.
22:04 Erin: I take it also to be this expression of balance that. That I've already talked about, the pairs expressing half of a dynamic. So in Night and Day, you have the two sides of the coin. Maybe one thing that I didn't mention, or maybe that we just alluded to, is Vladimir's obsession with his hat versus Estragon's, as we talked about with his boots. Right? And then not too long after this Night and day speech, Estragon will tell Pozzo, he, meaning Vladimir, has stinking breath and I have stinking feet. So there's a sort of heads and tails, night and day. Night and day thing is kind of like a one damn thing after the other. But it's also yin and yang balance, the cyclicality of that or whatever.
22:53 Wes: So what do we make of Lucky's monologue? So they. Yeah, they have Lucky think, right. Given the existence is uttered forth in the public works of. Is it Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God? Kwa kwa kwa kwa with the white beard. Kwa kwa kwa kawa outside time and extension, who from the heights of divine apathia Divine athambia Divine aphasia loves us dearly, with some exceptions, for reasons unknown. But time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda, blah, blah, blah, for a long time. And apparently Beckett and the production he was involved in, he wanted this to be read very, very quick, as quickly as possible.
23:32 Erin: Well, this is the most Joycean part of the play to me. Yeah, I do. I really enjoyed, actually, the Lucky speech part of the 2001. That was the only one that I saw performed. I liked the fire and brimstone kind of element of it because I think of this, or I thought of it on the page and perhaps still do as being a parody of an academic kind of treatise. So I wasn't expecting the lucky performance in the 2001 adaptation to be so preachery from the pulpit. Kind of air to it.
24:06 Wes: Yeah. So again, another evocation of religious questions and perhaps academic thinking about the existence of God or something like that. But it's all become fragmented, much like the play as a whole. Right. Maybe it's like someone took a play and took a bunch of phrases and Scrabble tiles and shook the bag and then put them back out on the board. And this is the play. This is the play you get with
24:37 Erin: the repetition of, for instance, the names or the different turns of phrase left unfinished. It is established, you know, the KWA KWA quas and all that. It somehow performs in this really absurd way, these themes of. It's like an expression of ellipses or something. Like the ellipses are somehow being contained within the words or the expressions with which he's sort of extending the time. Again, it's like this dilation. Some of the things that I just teased out that I was writing in the margins,
25:15 Wes: I have.
25:15 Erin: Waiting, uncertainty, time filling, suffering, irrationality, inability of speech. But, yeah, I don't know. Something like what you get from a lecture if you're kind of falling asleep, or maybe what you remember from something several days later. Something that was long and boring and you only caught snatches of it because you were only half paying attention. Something like the. The result of having heard a highfalutin and incomprehensible and maybe kind of boring lecture. You know, since we were on the Pozzo portion. Pozzo pulls out his pipe and smokes one.
And then. And then he decides to have another. And he says, the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. It occurred to me that this was a revision of the carrot idea that Vladimir and Estragon talk about. On page 13 in my edition, Estragon is eating the carrot and says, funny, the more you eat it, the worse it gets. Vladimir says, with me, it's just the opposite. Again, it. It two different. It's there. In other words, Estragon says, Vladimir, I get used to the muck as I go along. And then Estragon says, is that the opposite?
Vladimir says, question of temperament. Estragon of character. Vladimir, nothing you can do about it. Estragon, no use struggling. I don't know. I really love this. The change in the carrot versus the change in you as you eat the carrot?
26:47 Wes: Yeah. The more he eats, the worse it gets. And Vladimir gets used to it. Estragon's question is getting used to it. The opposite of things getting the more you eat it. Right. Because you might think the more you eat, the better it gets. Right. That's the joke. The opposite would be the more you eat, the better it gets. Not getting used to it. And then. So why is the response there? Question of temperament and character.
27:15 Erin: Because it's still possible to get used to something. You get used to the muck as you go along. So you're just getting used to it, getting worse. So the question isn't whether or not the carrot has changed. I suppose the carrot is going to get worse. That seems to be the assumption. But it's just a matter of whether or not you can get used to that quality of it.
27:33 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the suggestion is that depending on one's character, one might get used to things or get more sick of them with time. And then there's the, you know. Right. If it's character, it's fate. If it's character, it's essence. The essential doesn't change and there's no use in struggling to change. There's no use in trying to be different. At Estragon, there's nothing to be done, so you can't change yourself. So this is, you know, this is the opposite. This is sort of the foil to existentialism. Right. Existentialism is predicated on the idea that existence precedes essence.
So existence, as in the foundation to our free will, that we can freely choose something and aren't just reducible to some essence, to some deterministic essence that forces us to be one way or another. I did it because that's my character and there's nothing I can do about it. This is kind of an explicitly anti existential statement.
28:32 Erin: Well, I just took it as our way of a roundabout way of talking about Act 2 without actually having to go there. Second is never as good as the first.
28:41 Wes: Related to the pipe again.
28:45 Erin: Yeah, he says the second is never so sweet as the first. I mean, but it's sweet just the same. So he has a slightly more tinged by privilege, a more positive view of the repeated activity. Still having some savor.
29:01 Wes: You know, you can be eating raw carrots and have them go from bad to okay or bad to worse. Right. Bad to worse. Is Estragon bad to okay? Is Vladimir? Or you could be eating really good chicken and wine and having a pipe. All these things that are much better to begin with than A raw carrot. And the pleasure degrades a little bit as you go along, but it's still much better than a raw carrot.
29:31 Erin: Right.
29:32 Wes: It helps to start our heart. Start from a good height so that when you come down, you're not hitting the ground.
29:39 Erin: That's true. That's true. But I like the idea of the. The entropy inherent in repetition, which seems to be like a. Like a meta joke about the play.
29:49 Wes: So, speaking of repetition. Yeah. Things repeat in the second act and we get Pozzo and Lucky arriving again, but this time Pozzo is blind and the rope is shorter. Yeah. What's the point of repetition here?
30:03 Erin: I love when Vladimir says reinforcements at last when they come on stage Again, very much to your point, that we're. We're sort of relieved to see them.
30:12 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. He's speaking for the audience at that point.
30:15 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. This time, again, I'm really intrigued by the. Either side of the scale. So. So there's a.
30:21 Wes: By the way, there's a lot of tedium. To my mind, before they arrive, they do a question and answer routines.
30:28 Erin: They insult each other for.
30:30 Wes: Insult each other. Yeah. They try all these different things to be interesting, but it's really just boring. They exchange insults, do their exercises.
30:39 Erin: They do the hat business because there's the third hat.
30:43 Wes: Yep. Speaking of logical routine. Yep.
30:46 Erin: And the idea of the boots, whether or not the boots have been replaced, which also kind of is a recapitulation of the worst carrot, in a way. There's sort of shades of the worst carrot in that.
30:58 Wes: Right. And then there's a suggestion that someone for whom you know, has come along, whose boots are too small for their feet, and then taken Lucky's boots, which means that, you know, Estragon's boots must be. Sorry, Estragon's boots. Which means they must be bigger than that person's boots.
31:17 Erin: And yet somehow that they might fit Estragon. Right. So. But they will have simply gotten smaller. So there's.
31:23 Wes: They must be smaller and yet they fit Estragon. Yeah. So.
31:26 Erin: Right. So again, there's a. There's an entropic quality. Yeah.
31:31 Wes: It's a failure of what kind of. Maybe in math is transitivity or something like that. If A is smaller than B and B is smaller than C, then A
31:41 Erin: should be smaller than C. Exactly. And one of the things also that I just wanted to point out about the ways in which maybe the play behaving in absurd ways even extends to the scaffolding in the text of the play, the stage directions. Reading it, I Think is a really important experience in addition to seeing it. Seeing it bring something, obviously, to the text. It's meant to be seen. But also, if you were only to see it, then you would not have the experience of discovering that the characters sometimes contradict the stage directions or don't seem to acknowledge the stage directions. So if we were just to see this play, we would. Or we wouldn't know, or maybe we would question the fact that these are, in fact, just Estragon's boots from the day before. We're told in the stage direction that they are Estragon's boots, but the characters argue over whether or not they are.
32:34 Wes: And they're said to be a different color. Yeah.
32:36 Erin: Estragon and Vladimir argue over whether or not the tree, you know, the instructions that were given them, I suppose, is that Godot was gonna meet them by the tree. Then they argue over whether or not it's actually a tree. But of course, it's called a tree in the stage directions. There's another example of this, or even just the way that the tree kind of acts in a strange way that it's supposed to be the next day, but it has all these at least a handful of leaves on it now overnight. Or that Pozzo is blind overnight and Lucky is mute overnight.
That's another undermining element or an unruly element of the way that the play is working, which makes it doubly absurd or even more questionable, ultimately. Whether or not we could read this allegorically, for instance, is that even the stage direction sort of seek to undermine any kind of stability in the text. Back to Lucky and Pozzo. Now we have Pozzo being blind. And so the interesting dynamic, which is granted, made more obvious or more. More definitive in Act 1 by the fact that, of course, Lucky is loaded down with all these bags and Pozzo has a whip, is complicated.
Or maybe the. The complication that was already there in this image of the two of them yoked together by the rope is just more apparent in Act 2, where Lucky is actually preceding Pozzo, right. Going before him. And so now we can say that Lucky is leading him around in Act 2 because of Pazo's blindness. So again, there was already kind of an uncertain. I mean, it's on the one hand, very clear power dynamic between them, of course, but on the other hand, something interesting is happening visually on stage, even in Act 1, where, again, this idea of balance, or either side of the scale where they're tied together, the power dynamic, obviously, then shifts really definitively in the second act, where Pozzo is being just led around by Lucky.
34:34 Wes: Basically, we get. In the end, when Pozzo arrives, he asks what time it is. And then there's some question of whether it's, I think, evening or dawn, right? Estragon and Vladimir argue. You know, Vladimir says it's evening. But, well, Vladimir actually says something very, very interesting. It's evening, sir. It's evening. Night is drawing nigh. My friend here would have me doubt it, and I must confess, he shook me for a moment. But it is not for nothing I have lived through this long day. And I can assure you it is very near the end of its repertory.
How do you feel now? So, right, we're coming to the end of the play seems to be the suggestion, and he knows it. And then we get the stuff with Pozzo claiming that the blind. Oddly. So here's how he puts it. Don't question me. The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them, too. Vladimir says, well, just fancy that. I could have sworn it was just the opposite, right? So that he should be a Tiresias if he's blind, right? He should be a character who is prophetic, who can tell us what's in the future. But Pozzo doesn't even want to be, you know, he gets very irritable later on.
And Vladimir says, dumb. Since when? Right? They keep asking them these time questions. Pozzo says, have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? It's abominable. When? When? One day. Is that not enough for you? One day he went dumb. One day I went blind. One day we'll go deaf. One day we were born, One day we shall die. The same day the second. Is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave. The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. And then on jerks the rope and says on to Lucky. It's reminiscent of the Twilight speech, right?
Which also ends with night. But it's much more staccato. It's briefer. It's got the staccato quality. It's more impassioned and maybe authentic, less pompous. It doesn't come across as the same sort of parody. It's heartfelt and it's almost like a reduction, like in cooking, right? It's reduced more to its essence. But once again, night, Right? Yeah. Night person. And then distance between morning and night has been collapsed in Pazo's original speech, I think, right? There's. He sort of hesitates and fumbles around the idea that the light has been going all day long.
And you get some sense of some expanse of time. And here all of time is collapsed, right? You give birth astride of a grave, as if nothing happens in between. Or there's not time enough for anything to happen between. Everything is the same moment.
37:22 Erin: That's right. And then Vladimir will take that and expand on it in what I think is maybe the most Shakespearean speech. Yeah, he does dilate that a bit. So he says. So here's. Here's the full little paragraph. Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do? What shall I say of today? That with Estragon, my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot. That Pozzo passed with his carrier and that he spoke to us. Probably. But in all that, what truth will there be? He'll know nothing.
He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth down in the hole, lingeringly the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old, the air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too, someone is looking. Of me too, someone is saying. He is sleeping, he knows nothing. Let him sleep on. I can't go on.
38:28 Wes: What have I said with Pozzo? It's as if birth and death are happening in the same moment. But as you. As you point out, Vladimir dilates this, so to speak, with the forceps. Right, so. But. But it's the gravedigger is there lingering, you know, doing things lingeringly. Right, so. So it actually takes a lot. The birth takes a long time. And the whole process of birth is the duration of our lives. And we have time to waste them, to be bored, to not do anything, to kind of live a death in life, which is much worse than the thing that Pozzo was talking about.
39:07 Erin: And habit is that death. This is the second, I think, use of the term. In the play a few pages earlier, Vladimir says. All I know is that the hours are long under these conditions and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which. How shall I say? Which may at first sight seem reasonable until they become a habit beguiling the time tomorrow, sleep. All this stuff is, you know, very Macbeth also, of course, very Hamlet. But.
39:35 Wes: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I noticed this too. Yeah, the tone of the speech. Yeah, it's very high.
39:40 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah. So he becomes Vladimir, becomes Really quite profound over the course of Act 2. So maybe that's one thing that sort of pushes against the entropy reading. This idea of habit, I think, is introduced rather late. It's an interesting characterization of what's gone on. Is it habit that they've been waiting for, Godot?
40:02 Wes: Well, there's something passive about habit, right. Because we're not deliberating and we're not taking conscious action. We're just, you know, we're doing what we do out of. Out of habit. I mean, it sort of. It speaks to that whole thing with the carrot. Right. And getting used to something. Right. As a matter of habit. If you eat enough, you get used to it. And it'd be inert to whether, you know, it might be the habit of eating the carrot sort of blinds you to something that's better, something that's more tasty. And the same thing in life. You sort of get into death drive mode. And the parts of life that you know would involve more vitality, you are habituated out of. Out of seeking that, out of inhabiting that. Because you're in sort of inertia mode, I suppose.
40:52 Erin: But they don't eat the carrot out of habit, right? I mean, everything they're doing, they're doing out of a kind of desperation. And they're eating the carrot because they don't have anything better. And when they have something better, even if it's just scraps, they'll take that. Or Estragon will.
41:05 Wes: Well, they're waiting, you know, they're desperate because their attention is on. They're in expectancy. Right. To use that word that Seneca uses, a state of expectancy. And the expectancy impoverishes the present and it leaves us with carrots and turnips and raw.
41:25 Erin: Oh, I like that.
41:26 Wes: Carrots and turnips. Yeah. And as opposed to something richer, you know, all the richness is put into the future. And people really do this with their lives. Obviously, they. They're holding out right for. For the big right for the prize that will only come if they. You know, it might be the asceticism of just working hard, but it. But. But sometimes it's just neglect, self neglect. Because, you know, one is focused on one's ambitions or some other form of salvation. It doesn't have to be ambition.
41:57 Erin: Drink the wine today, people. Eat the chicken today.
42:01 Wes: Carpe diem. Yeah. You know, I gave some classical quotes from Seneca about expectancy.
42:09 Erin: Is it Horace? It's not Horace, because that's. No, I think this seems too late. To be.
42:15 Wes: No, I think you're right. But my notes seized up. Yeah, it's Horace seized up.
42:23 Erin: Good one.
42:23 Wes: All right, so. Yeah. You want to give any final words, or is there nothing left to be done?
42:29 Erin: I was going to say, shall we go?
42:34 Wes: Yeah.
42:35 Erin: No. Used to say, yes, let's go. But then we're not gonna. But then there's gonna be five minutes. Five full minutes of just dead air, and then eventually it will end.
42:44 Wes: What are we waiting for if we can't go? We must be waiting for something.
42:52 Erin: Wake me up before you go. Go.
42:55 Wes: Yeah. All right. Thank you.
42:57 Erin: Thank you.
Existence and Expectancy in “Waiting for Godot”
Jun 23, 2026
Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.
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0:11 Wes: Who is Godot? Whether God objet a or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation, even if they can't remember exactly what it is that needs saving. Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy, aspirational, libidinal, political or religious, insofar as they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible, except arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts.
If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Today we pass time by discussing waiting for Godot and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I had suggested this just because I thought it might pair with Withnail and I, which we just did. I didn't think about it very carefully. It was just an association.
And then I thought, well, also, it's something we should do, because my mom wrote her master's thesis on this at Trinity in Ireland, and for some reason she was fascinated with Beckett. I've always been afraid of doing it. Just vague associations of the avant garde and boredom. You didn't sound super excited to do it. What's your experience with the play?
1:51 Erin: I didn't like it when I was younger, I'll admit. I was recalling the other day that I was taking a class. It must have been on 20th century lit. And the final was a, you know, Blue Book exam. And we had covered a bunch of plays, and the question required us to choose one of three plays to analyze. We had to pick one and then write about it. And after the exam, just in talking with people, you know, when you're all kind of staggering out of a room, I discovered I was the only one who didn't choose Beckett.
2:28 Wes: So is that because it's. Yeah. Why is that?
2:33 Erin: I think I thought in my ignorance, or maybe in my perceptiveness, I thought it was both too easy and too difficult to write about, because I think that probably what everybody else did was they were smart to choose Beckett, and. And they did an allegorical reading which was maybe a little bit more straightforward. Is that the right way to go in terms of a really deep understanding of the play? Probably not. Was it the smart thing to do in a three hour Blue Book exam. Probably I wasn't perceptive enough to see the comedy in it. And I think the extent to which this is played for humor, I think really determines the extent to which I'm going to appreciate an adaptation of it.
So the version available online from 2001 I find to have some moments of greatness, of course, and the performances are great, but mostly dour and really difficult to get through and really bleak. And the little glimpses that I've seen from the Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen Broadway adaptation from 2013, and I think they also did an earlier one. That one seems to me like a version of Godot that I would really enjoy because I think ultimately it is sort of a black comedy version of Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin, and the humor makes it work. So probably when I was in college, I didn't understand how funny it was or how funny it could be.
4:00 Wes: Yeah. And so this 2001 version, this was Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy and Alan Stanford, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. And was it BBC? Is that.
4:12 Erin: Yeah, I think so.
4:14 Wes: Yeah. So, yeah, I really like that. It's, it's. I thought it was very good. You know, Rainn Wilson was recently in a. They did a production in la. There's no video.
4:23 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I heard that.
4:25 Wes: But they have some little teaser videos that are really interesting.
4:29 Erin: Did you take a look at any of the videos from the McKellen Stewart?
4:33 Wes: No, no, I wish I had. I didn't know about it. I didn't really didn't look at. I looked at the, you know, the one BBC one, but I didn't do a lot of research into different productions because I spent so much time with the play, which I think benefits a lot from being produced. It's not the most satisfying reading experience. I know you've taken an acting class because I know you've done some acting, right? And you can get. You do an acting class and they give you an exercise and they say, say one word over and over again, but with different emotions.
You can do a lot with little. I was going to say Beckett's giving us very little, but that's not true. Famously, they say it's the play where nothing happens twice. Right. Because everything is repeated in the second half. But quite a bit does happen. It's just that a lot of it is verbal and it's wordplay and it's unclear. I don't know. How do you capture this? How do you capture this quality of the play?
5:37 Erin: It's routine based it's like vaudeville act. That's why I think comedy works for it.
5:43 Wes: It's like who's on first for the whole.
5:45 Erin: Yes. I mean, very much so. Very much so. It's Abbott and Costello, it's Laurel and Hardy. I mean, there's also quite a lot physically that is done in the play. Physical routines, the hat, the boots, falling down, trying to hold themselves up, falling down again. You know, there's a lot of business, comedy, business. Anyway, I ultimately, I think in spending a lot of time with the play, I came to a much greater appreciation of it than I had expected. And I also found it far funnier than I was expecting to find it primed, as I was sort of halfway through by looking up some of those clips from the McKellen Stewart adaptation which people said was too funny.
You know, they were making it too funny and it should have been sadder or bleaker or something. That seemed to be at least one wing of the critical consensus about that adaptation. But I started to think, really, unless you want to be punished severely in your theater going experience, really, this should be, I think, done in a comedic way. And that seemed to be the heart of it.
6:48 Wes: Absolutely. There's plenty in the wordplay and stage directions to suggest that, yeah, you should play it up. Do a lot of this with humor. Yeah. And play it up. And you can do, you know, with much of the dialogue, you can make decisions that play it up even further. And I would say, yeah, I agree with you. The way to go is to play it up and try to breathe some life into what is otherwise potentially very sparse. Right. Put a few leaves on that tree, so to speak. In a way, it is a. It does enact desolation. Right. And it enacts timelessness and placelessness.
Perhaps you can read it. Perhaps it's just allegory, which means the characters are, in a way just ciphers for something else, which is another form of desolation. There's not enough plot for the average person and there's not enough investment. You're not induced to enough investment in the characters to have some strong emotional reaction for them or to be induced by them. Right. So there's a lack of pathos, maybe, is the way to put it, Unless you go for the comedic element. But it's interesting. Yeah. Is it an allegory?
8:05 Erin: I hope not. I hate allegory.
8:08 Wes: Why do you hate allegory?
8:10 Erin: I don't know. A one to one relationship doesn't interest me. Or the allegorical reading has infected so much of art. There's this idea, I think, that people have increasingly, with, I don't know, maybe we're contributing to it with the podcast. I hope not. But people are out there trying to retrieve information easily. The CliffsNotes version of something. They want to know, what is this really about? And this is particularly pernicious in. In poetry, you know, what is the poem really about? As though everything is just these two levels. There's the veneer and then there's whatever is underneath it.
And that's the level that you have to access. And you can ignore the veneer entirely and just sort of capture the meaning underneath. And that's the way that you have of rather, that's the way in which you can master the material. So suddenly you figured it out. You have the secret knowledge. And I think increasingly, no matter how complex or interesting or multivarious the potential interpretations of a work of art, people are looking for that sort of snappy way to get their arms around something. So people are trying to boil things down to a sort of an allegorical or something that looks like an allegorical read to me.
And so that's. I think it flattens it, I think, to say that this play is allegorical on the one hand is probably true in a way. I mean, you know, it can be allegorical. But I think it's also. It's more than that. And insofar as I think what Godot maybe ultimately represents is something like the impossibility of an easy reading or the impossibility of settled meaning itself, even if that is, say, the allegorical answer, that immediately also complicates that one to one ratio. If you. The meaning is that there is no meaning, or if the meaning is that meaning is absent, then that automatically kind of complicates that one to one ratio that allegory would seem to suggest.
10:19 Wes: Well, as you know, I unapologetically read with a view to finding out what it's about. That's why, like, Subtext is the name of the book podcast. And I do it, you know, and. And so I'm.
10:32 Erin: But you don't do it in that way.
10:33 Wes: And I think there is. Right, well, I'm about to elaborate on that. So it's. So I do think there's something, you know, that. That works of art are about, even if they don't know they're about that, or if the. The creators don't know what they've written about, and it doesn't even require attribution of some unconscious intent or something, something like that. I just Think that the material itself has a certain dynamic and has a layer of manifest content, but there's something underneath and. Or there's something that's being expressed, a sense that goes beyond the mere reference.
But in analog, right, that doesn't mean. So in other words, we can read. You know, we can read anything we want with a view to some sort of symbolic element or with a view to the thematic. It doesn't have to be symbolic or a view to the effective truth, the emotional truth that might underlie what's going on. But now, allegory, I guess, is a little bit more rigid, right? So you have the literal level, and there's this really systematic coordination between that literal level and some other. Right. So the literal level, characters and action and setting, and then what they're supposed to represent some conceptual level.
So, for instance, you know, the allegory where warriors are fighting and the warriors represent virtues or something like that, it deadens the surface layer. It kind of saps it of content, makes it desolate, Right. Much like the setting here in this place. So perhaps he's speaking to the fact in the desolation of the setting for this play. He might already be speaking to the fact or warning you that if you read this allegorically, you're. You are sapping it of content and perhaps participating in this very thing that's going to be associated with waiting or expectation of a certain kind.
So then. Yeah, then the question is, how do we read the play? I think it invites allegory, right? It certainly invites it. It strongly invites it because we get. Give me a few biblical allusions up front and. Right. It invites it because it's so sparse. It invites it because we're not learning necessarily a great deal about the inner lives of the characters and invites it because of the sparseness of the plot. I think we are tempted into simply reading it in an allegorical way. So what does Vladimir represent? What does Estragon represent? These are very suggestive names, right?
Estragon is just French for. For what is it? Tarragon for French herb, Bernaise sauce and other things. Vladimir sounds Russian, and maybe there's some kind of regal aspect to it. Vladimir is more coherent and directive, maybe like an ego or a superego. Estragon is much more disorganized and can't remember. In fact, it's not even clear that he's actually waiting for Godot. In a way, maybe it's just Vladimir because estragon can't remember enough and has to be reminded constantly by Vladimir, that they can't leave because they're waiting for Godot, so he could be assimilated to the id, or at least to some aspect of the psyche which is not rational, maybe what Freud calls primary process, something more primitive and associative and dreamlike.
And you can do that all day long with this play and do it in various different ways. And I think there's some worth to at least taking note of those parallels. Right. But if you get stuck in a Freudian reading or a social reading or one reading or another. Yeah. It quickly becomes a bit barren and unrewarding. On the other hand, how do you read a play in which. Right. Vladimir and Estragon, it seems like there aren't even full people. They do seem like psychological moments or moments within a psyche representing different psychological functions.
But on the other hand, they're not just that. So I just want to reinforce your point that it's. And I know it's a point that's been made by critics as well, but it really does put you in an odd position as a spectator or reader. Right. Is it an allegory? Isn't it? How should I receive it?
14:58 Erin: I purposely didn't look at any secondary literature because I didn't want to be. I was familiar with it way, way back when I read this in college. And of course, I'm familiar with some of the pervading allegorical readings of the play, but I was really cautious to not be contaged by anyone in particular. You know, you said it invites allegory. I think at the same time, it disinvites it for the reasons that you've already outlined. You know, the play is not really. It's not, to me, very systematic in its symbols or its series. Right.
15:33 Wes: It invites you only to confound you because it's so disorganized. But you.
15:39 Erin: You know, the biblical allusion that you talk of is also immediately toyed with, deconstructed in a way by the characters who, as you've already said, have no. You know, Vladimir also has a very limited memory. Pozzo has a limited memory. Lucky we can intuit sort of from his speech, also has a limited memory. So the fact that they're so disengaged even from their own history, and then you have the repertory quality of the play itself in that Act 1 and Act 2 are simply recapitulations of each other, but maybe with something like entropy, a bit of entropy that has happened in the second replay or what have you.
You know, this idea of a play in which nothing happens twice, or this idea of nothingness, or this idea of maybe having it both ways, allegorical and anti. Allegorical is reflected linguistically in the play quite a bit. I did a lot of tracking of words across the play. My big obsession for a while became pronouns, specifically the pronoun it and how squishy and unlocatable the referent sometimes is for for it. Which made me think a lot about nothingness and ultimately led me to a reading of the play which was almost mathematical. I started to think that the play was a lot about math and a lot about zero and nothingness.
But if we want to start, for instance, with the first line of the play, Nothing to be done. The concept of nothingness, I think ties together a lot of where we're already going. I mean, in a way that's sort of comedy. Like the question of what actually goes on in the play, whether things actually happen. They do in fact happen. One of the things that we could say happens is simply these routines of speech which ultimately don't really lead anywhere. You know, these are things which in comedy would be like vamping or distraction maybe from whatever the structure of the plot is, would be a comedy routine sort of inserted into a film.
Like the who's on first Routine.
17:50 Wes: Right.
17:50 Erin: If you've ever seen the film, which that is, in which I have seen several times and I can't think of the name of the film right now, but you know, obviously there's a scene with a baseball game and then they. They basically pause the action of the larger plot to do that who's on first routine. So it's as if the entire play is made up of those types of vamping comedy vamping moments where you do these verbal routines or these physical slapstick routines which would be a break from the plot in any other plot based film or play or whatever, but here make up the entirety of the plot, more or less.
I started thinking a lot about nothingness and idling or vamping or of some kind of stasis or looping back on yourself. Returning the song that Vladimir sings about the dog having a kind of cyclical structure to it and the cyclical nature of the entire play and whether or not the whole play is an expression of this kind of circular rather than of nothingness as negation and cancellation. The nothingness of idling and stasis, which I take to be a sort of different kind of nothingness.
19:04 Wes: The work that nothing here is doing in the beginning of the play involves estragon trying to take off his boots and not being able to. So it's nothing to be done. He's giving up. Although I think at various points in the play. I mean, okay, so this is repeated several times in the play. Vladimir says it, Estragon says it. And in fact, Vladimir says it shortly after. It's actually, it's not much further into play that Vladimir says it. He says, sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer, how shall I say? Relieved. And at the same time, appalled, Appalled.
Funny, Nothing to be done. And he's referring to that line that I mentioned before, which he says, prior to that, the last moment, hope deferred maketh the something sick. That's a reference to Proverbs. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. But when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. And so, of course, he leaves out the more hopeful second part. Although, of course, the tree of something or other is right there on the set. So what is it? You know, what is it he's referring to when he says I feel it coming? I think that's one of the questions that the play invites us to answer.
What is it they're waiting for? And there's some obvious invitations, right, Godot. God. But we might think more generally that they're waiting for some sort of salvation. They even say it, something to save them. And that salvation, right, it can be God. But people seek this in a secular way as well. Sometimes it's just associated with grandiose ambitions. Hey, when I'm a great such and such, I will be saved. I was reminded of the saying by Seneca, the fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of tears. Its course lies wholly toward the future.
He is always, and he says elsewhere, he's always getting ready to live. And the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. We are arranging what lies in fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours. Seneca, of course, was stoic. So that's a very stoic sort of idea. That kind of idea recurs through ancient classical literature. This idea that a focus on the future can kind of denature the present, that it can devitalize it. It can take you out of the present and prevent you from enjoying life, prevents you from appreciating what you have.
So I think when he says, you know, sometimes I feel it coming on. I mean, what do you. What do you think of that? Sometimes I feel it coming all. All the same. What is it referring to?
21:51 Erin: Well, I wonder that myself I, you know, it could be hope, it could be sickness. I think ultimately it is plot, really. Any kind of plot. They are waiting for the plot. That's as close as I'll get to an allegorical reading of the play, I suppose. So they're stuck waiting for something to happen to move things forward. So sometimes he feels the whatever coming to relieve him from the position that he's in of kind of not having anything to do. What you read of the Seneca also, I think speaks to that in a way. Right. You're sort of in the anteroom of action. And action is ultimately what plot is made of. And their anxiety and their heartsickness over this waiting and anticipation, their depression is over the fact that they are stuck in this anteroom before the action can commence or something like that.
22:53 Wes: Yeah. I think of them as living in the setting of the play is almost representative of the state of expectancy that Seneca talks about. I think that the sexiest way to read the play is make it self referential about playwriting. And it's the least. It's the most. Every other reading can be attacked as sort of reductive, maybe, but there's something. If it's become self referential, it's less reductive. But I'm also, I think also the sort of. The psychological essence of it, it gets at something worthwhile. So they live in a place. They don't live there, but they are in a place that is.
Right. It can't be located. It's sort of barren that There's a timeless quality to it. It's without memory. So the word utopia literally means no place. Right. The. The utopia that one might expect or might yearn for in a state of expectancy can't come. And so the shadow of that. Right. Is the. Is the sort of no place that you find yourself in that you might find yourself in psychologically. If you are oriented entirely towards a utopian future or towards a, you know, conception of the object of desire, which as something that might complete, you know, when nothing can really complete us.
Right. Just sort of these unrealistic expectations about life, they produce a desiccated present on the reading where in a way it's self referential. The state of expectancy maybe is a little bit of teasing about the state of expectancy of the audience. Right. We are kind of teased for the possibility that we might be bored in the way that Vladimir and Estragon often seem to be bored. And they're often contemplating, well, what comes next. And is this entertaining enough and, yeah, Estragon will say, yeah, that's the idea. Let's insult each other now as if they themselves are the playwrights.
But playwrights without any real memory figuring out how it is that they're going to produce some interest in the audience. And that usually is the goal. At least one of the goals of a storyteller is to introduce some element of suspense or pathos or whatever. But here we're not getting that sort of satisfaction. And so that kind of breaks down or deconstructs the typical experience of a theater audience, maybe, and speaks to, I don't know, their state of expectancy as an audience.
25:26 Erin: You're making me think about what dialogue normally, let's say, amounts to. The interiority of character. Maybe something in the past that is revealed over the course of a conversation. Maybe some conclusion. Because, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking of is that how much does really happen in a play? You know what I mean, as opposed to a film, say, how much really happens in a play at the level of action versus, say, of dialogue? I don't know. I'm going off the track of where my train of thought was originally taking me.
26:00 Wes: But, yeah, it depends. But usually it's quite confined in terms of time span and place. Not always. There are Shakespeare plays in which the. Yeah, there's a lot of different settings and scenes. And a lot he conveyed, just like a film would. There's the. The scope. That sort of background scope feels much bigger than what we actually ever see on stage. You know, we get a sense of time passing and big events going on and a world beyond. But usually we are getting restricted, quite restricted to some very local space and time.
26:39 Erin: Right? That's true. There are murders on stage. There are all kinds of things. But also, I think a lot. A lot in plays is, say, moved out of the realm of physical action and inserted into speech. It's put into speech. You know, an obvious example that springs to mind is Oedipus, where everything that he's done really kind of precedes the action of the play. And in the play, through dialogue, we're watching him come to the realization of the significance of events which predate, you know, the start of the action of the play. So, I don't know, it just occurs to me that maybe rather than doing something insanely different from what we come to expect from a play or an experience in the theater, Godot is radical for leaning into an already present phenomenon all the way.
So that the action of the play really Just does become word games, circular types of constructions where we're waiting for one or the other character to get back to their original train of thought or to think of the thing that they wanted to say, or to finish the other's, or give a counterpoint to the other's idea. In other words, maybe it's just an exaggerated. You know, it's not doing something different. It's just doing something sort of metatheatrical. Maybe that's just an obvious point and I've taken the long way to get there. But in this opening line that you've already pointed to, where Estragon is saying nothing to be done, and he's talking about the difficulty of pulling off his boot, I thought about this sentence quite a bit and the implications of it.
Nothing to be done. So, you know, it's a passive construction, obviously. It removes the actual subject from the sentence and takes the object and puts it into the subject position. So not we can do nothing, but nothing to be done. It got me thinking about, because of that, that passive construction, this difference between the idea of doing nothing and the idea of being nothing, the nothing that is idling and stasis and just sort of, say, vamping, for lack of a better term, since that's kind of a comedy word or a vaudeville wor. And then the nothing of cancellation or negation, the nothing of being.
I think with idling and vamping, what sustains the doing nothing is a kind of circularity rather than the canceling out of the being nothing. Obviously, you can't do a play about being nothing because it would just be. The curtains would open and there would be nothing there, and then you would go home, which I think Beckett, like, almost did something like that. Didn't he just do a play where there was just a mouth talking on stage and that was it.
29:29 Wes: Ye.
29:30 Erin: So he almost got there. All of that to say that Estragon starts by saying nothing to be done. It actually has a kind of application to the boot. Even though the boot ultimately leaves him nowhere, his efforts leave him nowhere. But the action of trying to pull that off and repeatedly failing, the result is ultimately nothing. And then Vladimir's words which follow. I'm beginning to come round to that opinion, hint at the circularity inside the nothingness, the sort of tempest in a teapot quality that I think recurs over and over again in these bits throughout the play.
And then the longer speech that he begins with, you know, all my life I tried to put it from me saying, vladimir, be reasonable. You haven't yet tried everything, and I resumed the struggle. So that too, I see often in Vladimir's speech a kind of circularity in it. And so in this he's describing, like, trying to get his arms around something and then ultimately failing and he's back at the beginning.
30:36 Wes: Yeah, it really reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus a bit.
30:40 Erin: Absolutely.
30:41 Wes: A lot in this. And of course, there's a lot of, you know, existentialist readings of the play.
30:45 Erin: But, yeah, I'm interested in all of these various expressions of nothingness, which ultimately are about traveling quite, quite a ways to get back to the beginning. So to get functionally nowhere versus in almost like a taxonomy of nothingness, a sort of more negative view of life. An idea of total negation that one would think would be suggested by some of this language. One of the most famous lines, certainly from the play, about giving birth astride a grave, that seems to me an expression of the idea of being nothing or of nothing being right.
The play doesn't end in a death or anything like that. Instead it ends in this sort of perpetual vamping and dilation of time. Maybe another way of putting this is they're not being metabolized in the play, though the play exists in pairs of characters. The two are not canceling each other out. They're persistent. They refuse to be defeated by the play. Neither of them ends up dead. Neither of them ends up saved either.
31:58 Wes: If you're trying to write a scene in a play or movie, you're told there's gotta be some element of conflict and struggle in order to elicit the attention of the audience. And that you're right. And that attention is very picky and discriminating and not easy to hold. And then in scenes that are very dialogue based rather than action based, right, you might introduce an element of something, some sort of visual struggle, like people might be, or even just activity. A character might be doing something while talking to another character just so that there's something happening, so that there's some sort of action.
And I think there's a kind of gesture to that, right? With Estragon trying to take off his boots in the beginning and not being able to. That's a perfectly fine premise for an entire scene, especially a slapstick scene, right? You could bake as much of that as you want. And then he gives up. And then Vladimir sort of picks up on that and thematizes it or dramatizes it. Makes it more about life, right? Assimilates it to the idea that he's been struggling and he's tried everything, but here they are again. And of course, what he actually says is, so there you are again, Estragon says.
Am I right? He seems to speaking to your concept of nothing. He seems to have forgotten whether or not he even exists or at least whether he's standing in this particular place at this particular time. You're given a little bit of hope in the beginning that, oh yeah, maybe this will be about some well defined significant life struggle, as it would be in an ordinary play, and it'll be resolved tragically in one way, or there'll be a happy ending or something like that, but it's never going to be given any content except for the waiting for Godot.
And so Godot is. The whole. Is a little. Right. The whole concept of it is a bit of a parody of suspense and dramatic resolution. Godot is just the stand in. It's a way of referring to plot structure in a way. And instead of being told the content of suspense, we are just given something, a name, something very hollow, and asked to be curious about that, whether you know, who Godot is and whether he's going to actually show up and all that. But none of that is ever going to be satisfied.
34:25 Erin: Yeah, I love that. The boot sort of being transformed in speech into life itself in Vladimir's misapprehension of Estragon. So we have something material then transposed in language into something abstract, which is then commented on for its own meaninglessness. So it's almost like the boot disappears and goes out into the ether over the course of that little exchange. And that routinely, I think, happens over the course of the play, another place maybe where we can go and sort of talk of this pronoun thing. Nothing to be done, you know, has a sort of maybe implied pronoun like nothing to be done about it, which later, Vladimir will supply.
All my life I've tried to put it from me, as we've already said, but then on page two in the discussion of, you know, maybe of suicide, which you don't really understand that it's about suicide until part of the way into it, Vladimir says, when I think of it all these years, but for me, where would you be? You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute. No doubt about it. Estragon says, and what of it? And Vladimir, it's too much for one man. On the other hand, what's the good of losing heart? Now? That's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago.
In the 90s. So the. It just keeps being. It's so actually difficult to track. It keeps being changed or displaced. But, you know, at first, when I think of it, the it there is the abuse, I guess, that's being visited on Estragon every night. He's getting beaten up, and then he says, no doubt about it. Which is. I guess you'd call that a situational pronoun where you're just referring to kind of a whole circumstance rather than any one. One particular thing. And then it's too much for one man. Again, situational. We should have thought of it a million years ago in the 90s.
And the it. We learn later when he says, hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, that it is actually suicide.
36:29 Wes: Yeah. So what is. And they wouldn't even let us up. They tried to go up and commit suicide, but weren't let up.
36:35 Erin: Yeah. Now they wouldn't let us up. He's imagining that they wouldn't be let up. Yeah.
36:41 Wes: Yeah. I was wondering if the suggestion is that again, we're being invited to give these symbolic readings, but these guys, they're in purgatory or hell because they've committed suicide. I think that seems to be the suggestion.
36:54 Erin: Oh, I see. No, interesting.
36:57 Wes: Or they were thinking about it. They're caught in the situation where they're constantly thinking about suicide. Isn't that. I may be misreading this. Isn't that the suggestion? Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. Among the first to jump off in the 90s. When was the Eiffel Tower built?
37:13 Erin: Yeah, I think in the late 1880s.
37:16 Wes: We get almost no proper name, references to places. We get this, and then we get Macon.
37:24 Erin: Yeah, I never thought of that.
37:26 Wes: Those sort of transcend this weird world that they're in. Right. It's almost like they pierce the veil and speak to some previous concrete, richer realities. So I want to point that out, even though I think you're right. We're meant to sort of reject, ultimately, an allegorical reading or a symbolic reading or it's supposed to fall apart at some point, but we certainly are invited to it in various ways, especially in the beginning, and then we'll get to this in a second. But the talk of Christ and all
37:56 Erin: that stuff, I'm really intrigued by that. I never saw it that way. So you're saying, in other words, you could take the purgatorial reading of this even more literally by assuming that they have already done this, but that they are in fact dead.
38:09 Wes: Or. What's the alternative reading of this?
38:13 Erin: We should have thought of it a million years. So we should have killed ourselves before it got to this point. So we should have killed ourselves long ago. And now we've been vamping ever since. So they're in the sort of afterlife of their usefulness.
38:27 Wes: No, I think you're right about this. And I was confused because. Yeah, I mean, literally. Right. We should have thought of it. We would have been among the first, I think. Must be what it meant, what it means. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. Yeah. So they had the opportunity.
38:42 Erin: Okay, Right.
38:44 Wes: Which is the way I initially read it. And then I thought, well, if they're in purgatory, maybe they actually did it.
38:48 Erin: So anyway, yeah, that's really interesting.
38:50 Wes: But I think, yeah, the reading that they had the chance to do and didn't, I mean, that is, you know, the reading that's more faithful to what. To what the text actually is saying. So. Well, thinking about suicide's a sin too. Just kidding.
39:01 Erin: Yeah. So another rich moment for pronouns is when they start to talk about the thieves. So we should get into that parable. This is getting alarming. Vladimir says. And then he says, one of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage, I suppose. 50% is the meaning of it. And it's a reasonable percentage because there are two thieves. Suppose we repented. I'll tell you the truth. These lines. Suppose we repented. Repented what? Oh, we wouldn't have to go into the details. Our being born is maybe the weakest part of the play for me. I'm not convinced by this part at all.
The idea of repentance. I don't know what they would have to repent for. And they don't know either, since they can't remember anything anyway. Vladimir asks Estragon, did you ever read the Bible? Estragon says, the Bible? I must have taken a look at it. Do you remember the Gospels? Vladimir asks. Estragon replies, I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Colored. They were very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy.
Vladimir says, you should have been a poet. And Estragon says, I was gesturing towards his rags. Isn't that obvious? Anyway, so Vladimir says, ah, yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story? No. Shall I tell it to you? No, it'll pass the time. Two thieves crucified at the same time as our Savior. One estragon cuts in our what? Vladimir says our Savior. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other damned estragon. Saved from what? Vladimir? Hell, I'm going. Vladimir. And yet how is it this is not boring you, I hope? How is it that four of the evangelists, that of the four evangelists, only one speaks of a thief being saved?
The four of them were there or thereabouts, and only one speaks of a thief being saved. And then a bit later, one out of four of the other three, two don't mention any thieves at all. And the third says that both of them abused him. So it seems like good odds at first. Basically, one of the thieves is saved of the two. But then it occurs to Vladimir, actually the numbers are not as promising because one of the two is saved. In one of the four of the stories and in the other three evangelists accounts, in the other three gospels, the thief being saved story is not mentioned at all.
So this, I guess, erodes his coin toss faith in salvation and turns it into more like less than an eighth of. An eighth of a chance that you would be saved. Something like that.
42:04 Wes: Right. I think we're meant to wonder perhaps whether they are thieves or, you know, that's again, what they're doing in this purgatory like place. And what they're waiting for perhaps is salvation. I mean, they even say it's to be saved and it's salvation is what they're waiting for. They'll be saved if only Godot comes. But there's also an element to this which seems like a crisis of faith, Right? Based on testimonial evidence. Is the testimonial evidence reliable? Is the Bible reliable? In other words, are we actually. Is the thing that we're waiting for, does that actually exist?
Meanwhile, estragon is not even attuned to that function of the Bible. For him, it was a vacation brochure and a very ironic one because I don't think the Dead Sea is supposed to think that you're going to slake your thirst. Right. So what are the associations of the Dead Sea in the Bible? Sodom and Gomorrah. How's that related to the Dead Sea? The Jordan Valley is once lush and fertile, and the Dead Sea is kind of the result of God laying waste. I think that might be true. I think so it's at the border of the. I mean, it's east of Eden Right.
It's on the eastern side. And I guess the prophecy is that there are prophecies concerning the sea, that it will come alive or something. I think the association is to some sort of desolation. Right. And they're in a desolate place themselves Right. Now, maybe they are at the Dead Sea, so to speak. But for Estragon, it's the fact that the maps were colored and therefore that because the Dead Sea was in blue, he took the signifier as the signified. Right. So if it's pale blue on the map, then it must be something that's going to slake my thirst.
And as usual. Right. Estragon is very attuned to this. Right. His. He's hungry or he's thirsty or this or that. He's very attuned to satisfying various bodily needs or whatever. Whereas Vladimir can get more abstract and philosophical. So here they just. As usual, they just talk past each other. I don't know why Vladimir thinks this makes him a poet. I guess that's a way of giving a very generous reading to what it is that Estragon is saying.
44:23 Erin: You don't think it's. You don't think this moment is lovely?
44:26 Wes: Yeah.
44:26 Erin: I think what Estragon says is really nice.
44:28 Wes: They do, you know, they do have a lot of affection for each other.
44:32 Erin: Yeah. Is this their honeymoon? I know it's not, but.
44:35 Wes: Yeah. Well, the word honeymoon is also an odd. Right. We'll go there for a honeymoon.
44:40 Erin: Yeah.
44:41 Wes: Lovers.
44:42 Erin: One can imagine. Yeah. That he's talking about his prior life, his prior existence. But this too makes me think of. Makes me think of Laurel and Hardy expressing a sort of male female dynamic, often in the two Men comedy routine where they're kind of in a marriage, and often one or the other of them, but primarily one will express more of the feminine characteristics of that pairing than the other, which then, of course makes me think about estrogen. But, yeah, you know, I'm sure there are lots of readings of that, but it is in Laurel and Hardy.
45:18 Wes: Yeah. With regard to estragon. So. Yeah. Meaning tarragon, which makes me think of tarragon. So it's like a, you know, very commonly used French herb or commonly used in French cooking, including in bearnaise sauce, which I immediately associated to. Just because we read it recently, Julius Caesar and Casca. Right. Brutus thinks he's dull, and then Cassius says, well, he gives sauce to his wits or something like that. By basically being like a common man and speaking the way the common people speak, almost like a Politician sauce to his wit so that it'll go down easier.
And I thought, well, maybe the idea is that Estragon is supposed to balance out the wit. He's supposed to, in a way, be sauce to the wit of Vladimir. In other words, he's much more concrete and much more focused on the body and much more. That's the kind of concreteness that you need in writing or performance to keep it too interesting. If it gets too abstract, then you lose interest. But of course, he's not very saucy. He's not rich enough to actually rise to the level of the sauce. So he's just stuck being tarragon. He's not balancing out. He's not balancing out Vladimir's wit or Vladimir's sort of rational consciousness very much.
He's just being stuck in. Or maybe he is, but I prefer Estragon.
46:49 Erin: I think he. I'm just. I don't know.
46:51 Wes: Yeah, well, I mean, I prefer neither of them, but.
46:54 Erin: No, I was gonna say. I'm just making that up.
46:58 Wes: I think the second part of the play is a bit boring. The first part, I think, is quite entertaining, actually. But to see it redone and with that entropy aspect that I think you mentioned. Right. To see it fall apart even more, there's something a bit painful about that and tedious. So I enjoy. You know, I especially enjoyed the first act and I enjoy these two characters and their relationship, but I can't say that they. Right. Are they fully fleshed out? Are they not? There's actually. That's a difficult question to answer. Again, so it's not just allegory.
They're not just symbols. You know, it's not like Vladimir is just ego and Estragon is ID or something like that. And they don't have any. They don't have a life of their own. They do have a life of their own. They are characters. It's just that they are caught in this timeless, memoryless place. Right. There's not much content that they can use to give to their characters. So, for instance, they can't really. We get the one Eiffel Tower reference and a couple of other references, but otherwise there's no memory. There's no talk of what they did in the past.
We don't know what their jobs are. If they were. Maybe they're tramps, as they're usually a bum anyway. Tramps.
48:07 Erin: Yeah. Wes, maybe we can talk just a little bit about the tramp at the beginning of part two. I do think that's an interesting element of These characters, something that helps them to maybe take on a bit more shape as characters or gives them a little bit of a history in the cultural imagination that they can use to sort of get along in our minds. That helps to advance them as characters for us a little bit.
48:33 Wes: Lucky and Pozzo.
48:34 Erin: Yes, Lucky and Pozzo. That's right.
48:36 Wes: All right, thank you.
48:37 Erin: Thank you.
The Romance of Self-Destruction in “Withnail and I” (1987) – Part 2
May 18, 2026
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the cult classic “Withnail and I,” and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it.
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0:11 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Withnail and I. We just got done discussing Danny and some of his commentary and the parallel between the end of the friendship between Withnail and Marwood and the end of the 60s thought we'd move on to the character of Monty and ultimately to a little bit what I want to discuss about romanticism and the urban versus the rural divide. But I thought maybe we should just start with Monty, since he's such a great character. They go, so Monty's with Nail's uncle and they go to his place to get the key to the cottage.
Their solution? They're going to solve everything by going out into the country. Little do we know, but behind the scenes, Withnail has actually kind of sold marwood to the uncle, who's promised him some action if they can get the key, which sets up Monty's coming out to the countryside to intrude on them. Yeah, every scene with Monty in it is just fabulous. And some of the dialogue, his pomposity and then, as you mentioned before, double entendre. So, for instance, do you like vegetables? I've always been fond of root crops, but I only started to grow last summer.
I happen to think the cauliflower more beautiful than the rose. Withnail mentions geraniums. Monty says, little traitors. I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts, prostitutes for the bees. There is, you will agree, a certain je ne sais quoi, something very special about a firm young carrot do help you anyway.
1:55 Erin: Yeah, what I love about his place is you look around the room and you realize that there's cauliflower in a vase rather than flowers, and then other vegetables are decorating the room in various places.
2:07 Wes: So.
2:07 Erin: Yeah, and it's very old fashioned English looking. So it sort of combines the brocade and the tapestries and the medieval looking England with gardening and having all these vegetables around and stuff. So he's sort of a synthesis of these wonderful English cultural touchstones in this one room. I think that when he says little traitors to Withnail's idea that he grows geraniums, I think he's calling Withnail a traitor for growing flowers.
2:39 Wes: Oh, I thought he was calling the geraniums traitors.
2:42 Erin: I wasn't sure about that. Yeah, the way that he said it, I thought it could be that. That they're traitors for growing geraniums. So there's something traitorous to one's sex about being interested in women.
2:54 Wes: Oh, yeah.
2:55 Erin: You know, that was the symbolic implication I took.
2:58 Wes: No, I think that's a good surmise.
3:01 Erin: One Withnail is going to be a pimp of Marwood just as he's a pimp, you know, over his geranium patch. Or whatever. But there's a lot about root vegetable. You know, I was thinking there's a lot about peeing in the film. There's a lot about time. We've covered all the. All the other drugs and stuff like that. But then there's a good bit about carrots. There will even be a marijuana carrot of sorts. Yeah. And he's cooking onions. He ends up killing the rats with onions. So more root vegetables.
3:29 Wes: Didn't think of that. Yeah. So when Monty comes out to the country, Right. So initially they hear him outside and they're afraid because they're worried about the poacher at this point, little do they know Monty is, at least for Marwood, the one that they should actually be afraid of. And then, of course, the, you know, they find out it's Monty ultimately. And then the next morning, our sense of what the cottage is, is transformed. I think it is almost like a rebirth because when they first get to the cottage, they've come from their squalid flat in London, Camden Town.
And of course, they're telling everyone they're, you know, in the. And the boondocks that they're not. It's not the boondocks. That's not the right term for it. But anyway, in the countryside that they're not actually Londoners, so that they won't be hated for being Londoners. But what I think they would get, thought they would get out of that has turned out to be very disappointing. You get some scenes where Marwood can appreciate the countryside, but that's a very small part of it. They end up at a cottage that there's no heat and there's no water and they're burning fire furniture to get by and they don't have any food.
And ultimately the farmer brings them a chicken they have to kill and then cook in the oven seated in a seated position.
4:48 Erin: But like unaccommodated man.
4:50 Wes: Yeah.
4:51 Erin: Poor bare forked animal.
4:54 Wes: Yeah.
4:55 Erin: This is. Again, they're a little shrunken down person. They can deal with it seems they could strangle a chicken.
5:01 Wes: Right. Although Withnail fantasizes about having shot it and then is very fond of the gun while they're there and they go out fishing to shoot fish. It sort of becomes a right. Survival's once again at stake. You get the sense in the beginning of the film it's desperate and their very survival is at stake because of the condition of the flat and the fact that they have no money. And then they get to the countryside and it's the same thing. Although the contrast with how things go once Monty's there. Making them breakfast in the morning gives you the impression that, okay, this is self imposed.
They just bring the squalor and the deprivation with them. They're at a perfectly fine cottage. It is what it is. It's in the countryside. But the sense of it having been so dire is really about them. So in the morning, there's Monty making up a really nice breakfast. And they, of course, could have just gone, I guess, grocery shopping at any time.
6:00 Erin: Well, that's. That's the one thing. Yes, definitely, and certainly they could do much better. But I also wondered how much of it had to do with the lack of money and preparation, not understanding what was in the cottage or what wasn't in the cottage. Monty's come up with a bunch of things in the car, it seems, but, yeah, they're just. They're just sort of hopeless when Monty's there. Just immediately becomes really cozy and lovely and. Yeah. And I think there's something too, about. As I mentioned, Monty's apartment in London is. Or his house in London, I guess, is a fantasy of Englishness.
And then they come up to the cottage and the cottage has portraits of George V and Mary of Teck on either side of the fireplace. So there's a. It's an older England that they've gone into. They go into the Crow and Crown, I think it is. It's the pub where they meet the. The poacher and the old English army man, who himself is, you know, very much a type similar to the. The guy I love in the Brendan Fraser Mummy, the 1999 mummy, which we should cover on the podcast at some point. It's one of my favorites. You know, the old guy, the old military man who's living out this fantasy, still believing that he's engaged in a war or something like that, who lies
7:12 Wes: about having been in the military.
7:14 Erin: Withnail with nail. Yeah.
7:16 Wes: And he says, oh, yeah, I could tell. And then, yeah. Asks where he's stationed. He's like, Ireland. He's like, oh, crack at the Mick.
7:24 Erin: Crack at the Mick. Which I take to be, you know, there's, you know, Withnail's stories, which he repeatedly invents, do show tremendous aptitude as an actor. He's always playing a role or putting on a kind of a disguise. But then also, the way that Withnail sort of advances the plot or the improvised plot twists that he comes up with do seem very associative. I took that to mean that he or I took the Ireland idea as being Adopted from the Irish guy that had confronted them in the pub in Camden. So that he's getting back at the Irish somehow by imagining this military past where he used to just. Right. So there's a wish fulfillment element to all of his little improvisations, no matter how ridiculous they are. He also says he's currently a journalist and that they're doing a story on the. On the town and small town life.
8:20 Wes: Right, right.
8:20 Erin: And then later he says that they're going to set a movie there, which is, you know, kind of more on the nose wish fulfillment.
8:26 Wes: But we are multi millionaires.
8:29 Erin: We're multimillionaires. Right. Which maybe Withnail is. He just can't access any of the money because his father's alive, withholding it from him.
8:38 Wes: Yeah. We get the sense that he's going to end up all right financially if he's still alive. And in a way, like his uncle. Right. His uncle had aspirations as well when younger and now he's fine, he's gotten his money from somewhere, but.
8:51 Erin: Yeah, that's right, that's right. Yeah. So maybe Monty is more psychologically, perhaps, just as threatening to Withnail as to Marwood. Not quite, but almost. Oh, yeah. So in the crow and crown, there are pictures of Elizabeth and Philip on the walls and there's an image of her coronation garb. So that would be the 50s. It is like they've stepped back in time. So there's something. If they're flat is the 60s and they have to escape the flat in order to find someplace that hasn't been destroyed by them in some way.
9:24 Wes: And I think that's pre modern. Right. So this is part of the romanticism. It's modernity and the urban are alienated and I'm going to find less alienated situation in the countryside with the simple folk and in being connected to nature and in a way going back in time. Which sounds like the point you're trying to make. Yeah.
9:50 Erin: It's as if the fantasy of the 60s, we're sort of seeing the reality of it. I mean, it could be that this is representative of 69 and therefore the failure of the promise of the 60s. Or this flat represents the entire decade and the fact that it's actually been downhill from the social fabric. And yes, the sort of fanciful or the loose grip on reality that the military guy represents, but still functioning and connected to real life in terms of just active, practical things like farming. That the 60s are being represented maybe as some kind of aberration in all of this.
10:29 Wes: Well, I think that the countryside doesn't turn out to be such a great thing after all. And partly, as I mentioned, I think they bring their problems with them, of course, but also we get the sense that the natural, which is supposed to be better, turns out to have its own sinister undercurrents. So, right, the bull, there's the randy bull. So it's not all great being out there in nature. There's a sexual power to nature which can be persecutory. The natural is about what grows and ultimately about the sexual. Monty is interested in carrots not just because they represent penises and not just because he's obese and likes to eat, but.
Right. He's interested in the romantic connection to nature, which is also a kind of connection to sex, I think. So they're going to be just as fearful of, say, the poacher, although he turns out to be more benevolent and initially afraid that the poacher is trying to break into the house and all that stuff. But what I'm trying to say is that. And in the figure of Monty himself, I think you get romanticism as representative as having the sinister exploitative undercurrent. So just to give an example of some of Monty's great speeches, where right in that breakfast in the morning, it seems like everything is now coming up roses.
Everything is transformed. It feels like the vacation that they wanted might be coming together because they have a nice breakfast. But then we start to get Monty's stuff. He says the old order changeth, yielding place to new. And God fulfills himself in many ways. And soon, I suppose I shall be swept away by some vulgar little tumor. Some vulgar little tumor. I love that. Oh, my boys, my boys. We're at the end of an age. We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in, shat on by Tories, shoveled up by labor. And here we are, we three, perhaps the last island of beauty in the world.
Sounds a little bit Matthew Arnold esque.
12:34 Erin: Let us be true to one another.
12:36 Wes: Right, Right. Yeah, exactly. And he's going to hit on Marwood. What else from the countryside? When they're walking in the countryside and he's talking about they do their thing where they want the finest wines known to humanity of a grapevine. So later at dinner, surrounded by trees in nature, one feels a glorious stirring of the senses, a rejection of the poisonous inhibition and a fecund motion of the soul. All the glorious trials of youth, dear boy. Because Marwood makes a comment about the fact that the squalidness of the cottage interferes with the pleasure.
He's like all the glorious trials of youth, dear boy. When I was a lad, I'd rocket off on my tandem with Wrigglesworth and we'd just ride and ride and at night we'd find some barn and fall asleep with the perfumes of nature sighing on our skin. Yeah, just great, great stuff. But in the end, right, all of that, what does Monty represent? He's given up on ambition, he tells us, but he looks at it with a certain kind of nostalgia and resignation. He's nostalgic also about the loves of his youth and he's representative of what might happen to Withnail after giving up.
But also I think he's representative of the sinister undercurrent of romanticism and the countryside, which is that it's not all just carrots and roses, carrots and geraniums.
14:08 Erin: It's also stick.
14:09 Wes: There's, you know, the natural world is dangerous, it's violent, it's driven by sexual instinct. All of that stuff comes out in Monty.
14:18 Erin: He's a bit sad, you know, the way that he leaves and all of that. I mean, he's been humiliated kind of because of Withnail. But, you know, when I say, let us be true to one another, he does have a kind of. His singular moral code seems to be faithfulness and so lets Marwood off the hook because he doesn't want Marwood to be unfaithful, untrue.
14:38 Wes: I mean, he does try to rape him, essentially,
14:44 Erin: but he has stopped.
14:45 Wes: I mean, he does have some burglary,
14:48 Erin: he does have some, some more than natural, you know, he has some guardrails. Yeah, I thought, I thought a little bit about, about the fact that they're in the Lake District and what role Capital R Romanticism is playing here. Because one would think that this is a place which historically, for the last couple hundred years anyway, hasn't been totally devoid of artistic types. You know, I love the moment when Withnail yells up at the sky in that kind of Caspar David Friedrich beautiful vista, where he says, I'm gonna be a star. So I don't know what to make of all of that or that, that particular moment where rather than appreciation of the grandeur of nature, he feels defiant and he's going to be part of the cosmos in a purely self serving way, which then the idea of a star comes back in the Hamlet soliloquy at the end of the film where it turns sour for him.
But yeah, he has a delusion of grandeur in this moment. That he's going to get the better of all of these men who have been oppressing him, you know, as if, like, you could fight a bully with this idea that you're gonna be a famous actor. But, yeah, I don't know. I was trying to reconcile all of that, what Wordsworth and Coleridge have to do, maybe with Marwood and Withnail, if the two of them are like a degraded version of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who themselves were friends living in the Lake District, who ended up having, you know, sort of difficult at times, artistic relationship.
The King Henry in Penrith is another great pub name that they go to. Another historical English emblem of masculinity. If it's Henry VIII or some other Henrys, but especially Henry vii, they've gone into town to buy Wellington's. But then, of course, they take the money and immediately squander it on booze, which seems, you know, really. They really seem beyond help to me in that moment because I realize they want to get away from Monty and just be without him for a while. But he has all that great wine back at the cottage, so why they would need to immediately squander this money on more booze is.
It's a frustrating moment for me. So anyway, they go to this pub, the King Henry. They get kicked out. They go into the Penrith Tea Rooms. And then it's just old people. It's just all these old people that are having tea and want them out and they're trying to stay, saying that they're multi millionaires, that they're working on a film up here. The owner wants to call the police on them and says, we'll keep them here until they arrive. The police arrive. Marwood and Withnail just then just walk out. They just get away because they can't possibly be held back by these old guys.
So Monty shows up in the.
17:38 Wes: In the car.
17:39 Erin: Yeah, in the Rolls, which, you know, maybe they are multi millionaires. Maybe you should have given them some cakes.
17:47 Wes: Withnail says, we'll be back.
17:49 Erin: Yeah. Have you been to the Lake District?
17:52 Wes: No.
17:53 Erin: I've been to some towns like this in England and in Scotland, and if you go into some of these places, there is. It is just like an older clientele.
18:01 Wes: Dodgy older.
18:03 Erin: They're great for that reason, but I never came roaring drunk into one, so I never had a bad time.
18:10 Wes: Have you ever gone roaring drunk into a stodgy establishment where you shouldn't be roaring drunk?
18:17 Erin: No.
18:18 Wes: Yeah. I can't remember if I. You know, I probably did, but I can't remember.
18:23 Erin: That's a great thing about these things. They take care of themselves. The embarrassment just goes away.
18:29 Wes: I know my friend Lebec and I used to quote that bring us the finest wines known to humanity. Frequently.
18:38 Erin: Yeah. And then this interesting thing with Monty happens where he admonishes Marwood, which I think must be for squandering the money, you know, it must have been.
18:49 Wes: Yeah. Monty's very upset with them.
18:51 Erin: Must be because they're so drunk.
18:52 Wes: Wellingtons and. Yeah, being drunk.
18:54 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Because they were going to tell him the story that. Oh, don't worry, we'll just tell him there was a farmer's conference and there was a run on these Wellingtons or something, so. So we couldn't buy them, so we had to squander the money. But I think when he picks them up, they must be so drunk and so out of it that he could tell what's really gone on. And so, yeah, so the suggestion is that Marwood is leading Withnail astray, which made me wonder if Withnail was leading Marwood astray throughout the film. He's certainly getting him into bad situations because of his big mouth.
19:23 Wes: I see Withnail as the bad, bad influence.
19:26 Erin: He's causing problems for Marwood. But is he actually. He's not successfully leading Marwood astray? I wouldn't say.
19:34 Wes: Well, Marwood says, what about the Wellingtons? And he says, bollocks to the Wellingtons. Right. So, yeah, there are many instances where Marwood is sort of. There's a bit of a survival instinct and you know, from the beginning of the movie to the end. And it's reflected in the fact that he actually gets an acting part. He's the one who comes to realization they can't keep going on this way. And he's going to go out and get tea. And there's a funny. When they get to the cottage, there's a funny point where he's like, okay, we're going to separate into fact finding groups.
Groups of one. You'll deal with the water and I'll deal with the fire. Something like that at least has some interest in practical problems and in solving them. But yeah, he frequently just. It seemed to me he'll just do. He's very fearful. And that terror, as I mentioned, comes across from the very beginning of the movie. And you see it. It's a great comic effect in both the them. But like with the guy, the Irishman who calls them ponces, just the level of fear that Marwood gives off in the bathroom looking at the graffiti, worried about being raped ultimately.
But, yeah, it seems to me he operates from the position of fear and is being carried along by Withnail's libertine, debauched attitude towards life, which is something Withnail can probably afford, as you mentioned, in the long run, more than he can from a financial perspective. He's got to do something, right? Withnail, in a way, can go on to be his uncle. Right?
21:13 Erin: Yeah. But I think there's something about Marwood which is really, despite Withnail getting him into scrapes and things, which is constitutionally impervious to Withnail. I mean, remarkably so. And maybe that is ultimately down to the class difference, too, that Marwood has to be more practical, has to be more scientific word he uses, or is more keyed into reality. The thing I really don't get about Marwood is why he smiles so much at Monty, which seems so unnecessary and needlessly encouraging from the beginning, when Monty is reaching around him to get into the bags. Why he doesn't just step away out of Monty's way instead of physically allowing himself to be put in this really compromising position is very.
21:59 Wes: Yeah, Withnail calls him out on this, right?
22:01 Erin: Oh, yes, yes. Yeah.
22:02 Wes: Marwood says, I got a cramp in the mouth from grinning. Stop smiling at him. I can't help it. I'm so uptight with him, I can't stop myself. But he does a lot of that. When the Irish guy comes up to them, I think they both give off. They do that smile of terror, like this terrified smile thing where they're just deer caught in the headlights and they don't know how to do anything but smile.
22:25 Erin: Well, Withnail's way of dealing with that kind of terror seems to be to out submissive himself out, you know, like he's going to go all the way in the submission direction and sort of fawn, like when he says he has a heart condition, you know, he's going to make himself into the wimpiest wimp in the world, you know, to try to get the guy to leave him alone. And then I think Marwood learns from that. He learned something about that tactic, maybe from Withnail, but one would think that he would be a better actor and he would understand. Obviously, Withnail has created a situation where Monty believes something about Marwood, which isn't true.
And in the end, Monty's humiliation is all on Withnail's head. And yet, at the same time, Marwood has also been needlessly encouraging him with this, like, weird smiling throughout the entire every single one of his interactions with Monty. And he doesn't just step out of the way. He doesn't just act as though it would just be a normal thing to step out of the way. And so it's a little frustrating to see his resignation or passivity or when he's complaining about being too high and he gets kind of whiny. It's a moment where, again, I kind of break sympathy with Marwood.
I think that for somebody who has gotten an acting part as a. No, I guess not as a soldier. That was the part that he originally went for, was the soldier, but instead he's gonna be the lead, which maybe is, you know, head soldier. But anyway, somebody who was able to successfully get this part, one would think that he would have a little more gumption, is what I'm trying to say. And yet ultimately his passivity doesn't stand in the way of him getting the part.
23:56 Wes: Well, it sounds like. I mean, he wasn't necessarily passive in that aspect of his life. From my point of view, I don't find either of them sympathetic except in a comedic sense throughout the movie. I'm not. They're both so absurdly terrified of everything and everything's an emergency, you know, running out of wine. You know, as Withnail says, we've got some very distressing news. We're out of wine. As he's pouring himself the last cup of wine.
24:26 Erin: Well, but Marwood is the one we're supposed to identify with to a certain extent. Right. We get his interiority. We.
24:31 Wes: Yeah, a bit more. But I think your point is well taken. It's kind of hard to. He's got some of the seeds of more of a more realistic orientation towards the world and towards a bit of a survival instinct and something that's working against self destructiveness. Right. Withnails is a force of pure destructiveness and self destructiveness. And Marwood seems to have been very induced by that and is almost as bad in many ways. Not as angry, not as envious and more passive than. Than Withnail, but in a similar psychologically abject state. Right. We don't see Marwood transformed as a character.
We don't get to really see the arc. It all happens behind the scenes. He's planted the seeds with an audition, and in the end he gets the part and cuts his hair and leaves. And so that's the moment where he actually does something that's not completely passive. He's going to leave with nail and he's not going to even let him walk him all the way to the station. That's the first time I think he really genuinely asserts himself in the film.
25:41 Erin: I think there is a slight moment of transformation when Monty leaves and leaves that note for them and Marwood reads it and feels quite sorry for him.
25:50 Wes: Oh, yeah, yeah.
25:51 Erin: He tells Withnail, you'll suffer for this. What you have done will have to be paid for. And then it is immediately paid for by the knock on the door, because it's the telegram telling him, Right. That he's gotten the part.
26:04 Wes: Good point. Yeah. When he tells off. Yeah, that's the big.
26:07 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
26:08 Wes: It's a big deal. When he really, really tells off Withnail. Yeah, that is a big change.
26:13 Erin: Yeah, you're right. Then he cuts his hair and refuses the drink, says that he doesn't have time. Right. This is another return to the time motif because Withnail has been driving furiously to get to London. He keeps saying that he's making time over and over again. Again, this idea that if he speeds in the car, you know, this connection to speeding. But of course, as always happens, you have to pay for it. Just like the description you read in part one of Marwood talking about speed, that eventually it catches up with you and seeps through your pores or something like that. In this, in the same way, Withnail is stopped by the police. And then ultimately, of course, getting arrested takes a lot more time, so you might as well have gone the speed limit or something.
26:57 Wes: Richard E. Grant had never. I don't know if he had never had a drink, but he had never been drunk and was a teetotaler.
27:03 Erin: Oh, no way. That's so funny.
27:06 Wes: Yeah, so Bruce Robinson, the director, writer and director of the movie, had him, insisted that he experienced being drunk. And so they got him very drunk until he vomited. You can see there's a little 20 minute documentary online if people want to look at it and see the actors talking about all of this. Yeah. So Robinson, in that documentary, talks about what a great job he thought that Grant did, pretending to be drunk and then pretending to be drunk, trying to pretend to not be drunk. Like when they get stopped by the cops. And he gives that look to the. Just the look on his face that he gives to the cops. And when he says, I've only had a few ales, they open the door and he practically falls out of the car because he's leaning so heavily in the door. So sorry to interrupt you, but I wanted to put in that little tidbit about. And Richard E. Grant is so great in this.
27:55 Erin: Yeah, he Is. Yeah, yeah, he says, you know, Marwood says, I'll be late. You know, I have to go to the station. I'll be late. And Withnail says, there's always time for a drink. This is the final part of the film, and Marwood insists that he doesn't have time. So he's gotten out of the tractor beam of. Withnail squandering time or, you know, wasting time. He's been able to not. Not waste time anymore and get out of this cycle or whatever. And then with Nell, ends with a Hamlet soliloquy which begins, I have of late, but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth.
So there's this idea of lateness and having run out of time inherent in the beginning of that speech. And then he talks about the roof fretted with golden fire and how that's all nothing, so that he seems to have lost his. This is almost like his parting speech where he, like Monty, knows that he will not play the Dane. And being a star, being the golden fire and the hanging firmament is not going to be possible for him or no longer meaningful to him.
28:54 Wes: It seems man delights not me. No, nor women neither. Nor women neither. Speaking to your point about the lack of women in the film and any romantic interests for that matter, I don't
29:06 Erin: mean to make too fine a point of that, but I think there's something really sinister about that. The lack of interest in women or discussion of women at all.
29:13 Wes: Well, it goes along with drinking lighter fluid. There's a whole collection of related sinister things.
29:20 Erin: Right. What goes along, too with, I think, creative stagnancy. I wanted to talk because him saying this speech, I guess, to the wolves reminds me of the various. Just of the names in the film. So we never get Marwood. Right. It's just on. I looked it up. How come the character's name is Marwood in this script that you sent me and it appears on a telegram. That's the only way that we know that his name is Marwood.
29:47 Wes: So the original screenplay has Marwood as the name, but I don't know if they put that in after the fact. But as you can buy it, like, if you buy the original screenplay, it'll say Marwood. It was on movies and materials related to the film during promotion. I don't know. But, yeah, it's purposefully. It doesn't come up in the movie. Is it really on the telegram?
30:08 Erin: I don't know. It just. That's what AI thinks. So take it, you know, for what it's worth.
30:14 Wes: Yeah, I think that might be a question. But anyway. Yeah. Purposefully. Right. Yeah. We don't. He's just I. Not Marwood.
30:21 Erin: Right. Well, you know, it's interesting because it is a. Like Withnail. You know, it's kind of a compound name. And so it got me thinking about names because the M is, you know, Withnail is, in a way, that upside down version of Marwood, just with the m and the W, I mean to say. And they're both. They're both compound words.
30:40 Wes: And then nail on wood and.
30:42 Erin: Yeah, right, right. Yes, that. And then also the farmer. Remember when they're trying to say, oh, don't you know, Montague Withnail, who lives in this cottage? And he's. He says, no, that guy. I think his name is French. And he calls him Adrian de la Touche, which is really, really good. But anyway, I looked up all of this because I was just interested in. So Montague means pointed mountain. And the transliteration, even in the closed caption on the Criterion Channel's version of Withnail and I, which is how I watched the movie, the transliteration of
31:21 Wes: Sisters with your captions.
31:23 Erin: No, no, I turned. No, I don't watch anything with closed caption. I turned it on to make sure that I got this right. And so he says, I. I seen a fat man, London type, queer sort. I think his name's French, or summit. And it transliterates his accent as S U M M I T. So his name is Montague. Right. Which means pointed mountain. And then the transliteration is Summit, which is really apt and then I looked up De la Touche. Touch. What would. What's that about? So it means of the touch and touch, or Touche means small patch of trees of the small wood or thicket.
So Marwood and Adrian de la Touche. And, you know, there's some clever things going on with Marwood's relationship with Withnail and with Monty, even this imaginative name that the farmer has given Monty. It seems suggestive of what's going to happen, but only if you know what Marwood's name is. So it's kind of like a little in joke, maybe in the movie. Oh, and the other. Sorry. The reason why I brought this up is because Withnail is also experimenting with different stage names.
32:33 Wes: Oh, yeah.
32:34 Erin: He says at one point, he suggests that Desmond Wolf. And I thought that was indicative. Again, because there's so much symbolic masculinity going on in the various root vegetables and other things that Woolf was a desire to maybe put on A more. More masculine identity, more aggressive, perhaps. Marwood tells him it's too like Donald Wolfit, who was a famous English stage actor. And then later he suggests another name. So he seems to have borrowed Marwood's Donald and suggests Donald Twain. But then I just looked up, I was like, what's the origin of the name Donald?
And it turns out that means world ruler, which, there's a lot to be said about that, that I prefer not to go go there. Who knew that Donald Duck, for instance, had to take one, had such a. An imposing meaning to his name. But, yeah, in the end, he's Desmond Wolf would be. Desmond Wolf is giving his soliloquy to the. The caged wolves in the zoo.
33:37 Wes: So in spite of all his rage, he's still just a Desmond Wolf in a cage. To almost quote one of my favorite songs. Are you Smashing Pumpkins fan?
33:49 Erin: I. I appreciate Smashing Pumpkins. I wouldn't call myself a fan. It's not really my cup of tea, but I've had a lot of people try to get me into it, so I've listened to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins, but.
33:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Had to be able to embrace your melancholy side.
34:03 Erin: No, I do not by smashing any type of gourd, though, in my own ways.
34:11 Wes: What's the difference between a gourd and a root vegetable?
34:14 Erin: They don't grow underground. They grow on top of the ground.
34:18 Wes: Okay. All right. Well, on that note, that's a suitable place to end the well, to quote Withnail. We can't go on like this. We'll have to stop. So.
34:31 Erin: All right, thank you. Thank you.
The Romance of Self-Destruction in “Withnail and I” (1987)
May 10, 2026
It’s 1969, and as drug guru Danny tells us, “the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over.” There will, he says, be many refugees, and the film’s implication is that Withnail—who combines self-importance and lofty ambition with substance abuse and urban squalor—will not be one of them. Marwood, by contrast, has seen the writing on the wall, in the form of the salacious tabloid stories that, while they threaten to outcompete the world’s attention for the arts, ultimately can’t be used to excuse the pair’s failure to find work as actors. Countering this attentional collapse perhaps requires getting serious: leaving bohemian pretensions behind—and along with them, as Marwood finds out in their jaunt to the countryside—a backward-looking romanticism that can be used as a cover not just for artistic paralysis but upper class predations, both economic and sexual. Wes & Erin discuss the cult classic “Withnail and I,” and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Wes: It's 1969, and as drug guru Danny tells us, the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. There will, he says, be many refugees. And the film's implication is that Withnail, who combines self importance and lofty ambition with substance abuse and urban squalor, will not be one of them. Marwood, by contrast, has seen the writing on the wall in the form of the salacious tabloid stories that while they threaten to out compete the world's attention for the arts, ultimately can't be used to excuse the pair's failure to find work as actors.
Countering this attentional collapse perhaps requires getting serious, leaving bohemian pretensions behind. And along with them, as Marwood finds out on their jaunt to the countryside, a backward looking romanticism that can be used as a cover not just for artistic paralysis, but upper class predations, both economic and sexual. Today we discuss the cult classic Withnail and I, and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin Olonick, and you're listening to Subtext.
Okay, Erin, I didn't ask you before I suggested this movie whether you had seen it or not, and I was curious about whether you'd seen it and whether you liked it, but I thought I'd wait until the podcast to learn that. So, yeah. So what's the answer to that?
1:46 Erin: I was trying to figure out if I had seen it before and my memory. I don't think I'm making this up. I think I tried to watch it and got repulsed and stopped watching it because of the whole matter in the sink thing. But I really liked it and I thought it was hilarious. As long as you don't eat anything while you're watching it, I think it's okay. But the curve at the beginning was just getting over the few gross things going on, which all kind of happen at the beginning of the film. But did you see this, like, around the time that it came out, or what's your experience with it?
2:19 Wes: I saw this in the 90s. My friend John Lebec showed it to me. I think we should dedicate this episode to John Lebeck, who liked the character that Withnail is based on, passed away young, and I think in some ways there are situations. I lived with Lebeck and he was my best friend for a long time. There were times in my life where I think we didn't quite reach the level of Withnail and Marwood in terms of squalor and dissolution. But I think we were trying. We were trying to get there. And I think there's a kind of romance in that or there's a romanticization of that, and maybe that has something to do with its association with being a down and out artist.
It's much more romantic if you can make the artist part of that work. But otherwise it just becomes, well, what is it they're feeling in the beginning of the movie? You know, terror, I think at least Mara would nail is more angry, I think. But anyway, this kind of story, yeah, it does have an appeal to me. I'm a big fan of Orwell's down and out in Paris and London, for instance. I don't know if you've read that there's another book called Keep the Aspidistras Flying by Orwell, which is the same sort of quality. The down and out story, it's not quite like this, but Bukowski, I think we talked about this before and you're not a fan, but his stories can be very much like this.
They're autobiographical and it's about him being a boozer and trying to be a writer.
3:56 Erin: But.
3:56 Wes: Yeah, so I think part of the thing I was trying to think about rewatching this was. And it has been a long time, I think I saw it in the 90s and I saw it again at some point. I think this is the third time, but it's probably more than a decade since I've seen it. But I was trying to think, what is it that's so appealing about a story like this, if it is appealing to people? And then what is it that can appeal to people about putting themselves in this state, in this position? And then the larger question of how this is related to 60s counterculture, because, of course, it's set in 1969 and they've come to an end of an era. And the final stages of this relationship, I think, in a way are meant to represent the end of the 60s and everything, the good and bad of it.
4:44 Erin: Well, what I find appealing about it is just the dialogue. There are just so many funny lines. The hysterical moment where the police officer screams, get in the van.
4:54 Wes: Yeah. That is.
4:59 Erin: I had to pause it because I was laughing so hard.
5:02 Wes: Just completely loses it.
5:04 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
5:05 Wes: In the shrillest. Yeah, the shrillest possible voice. Completely loses control of himself.
5:13 Erin: Good cop, crazy cop or bad cop, crazy cop. I don't know what. What they're doing there, but for me, the film seemed to be less about this idea of what it means to be an artist per se, and instead this hopelessness about becoming a man, that there was no route to maturity, that the future had been foreclosed for Marwood and Withnail in some way. And I think their particular artistic endeavor. So acting is about that same process. It's also about adopting another identity. Of course, they're male actors, so it's a male identity putting on another man or another life or another role, and therefore, perhaps training oneself in what it means to be that other man or in what it means to be a man in general.
And then that's played upon, it seems, with these gay jokes that pervade the film with the idea of being maybe subject to other men or under the influence of other men, or even this actorly idea of putting on another man becomes this kind of joke in which they're putting on Monty. Monty himself is a former actor, I suppose. I don't know. Maybe. As I say that, I'm thinking, well, that really is about the artist's life. What probably just characterizes it more than anything is that one is subject to outside approval regard. Very little is under one's control when one is an artist.
So. But I was more interested in this idea of manhood, masculinity and feeling like everybody wants to, yeah, screw you over and what that might mean. And kind of turning that into a joke about all the meanings of that phrase, which I'm putting politely, more politely than the film does.
6:58 Wes: Yeah. I think there's something there about the way in which a certain kind of aesthetic relationship to the aesthetic and to artistic ambitions leaves one vulnerable. Right. They get called a ponce. That's a big deal. By the Irishman in the bar. What's the name of the pub again?
7:17 Erin: There are so many great pub names. There's the King Henry, the one with the two Cs.
7:23 Wes: It's the mother black cap. They're called ponces at that point. Jake the poacher says to Marwood that he's a prancing tit and that he wants working on. Although the poacher turns out to be a bit more benevolent than they thought and ends up bringing them a rabbit in the end. So there's a certain amount of paranoia. I mean, there's a lot of paranoia in this, but there's the realistic, what turns out to be persecution by Monty, or at least towards Marwood. Monty turns out, really is after him sexually, even if it's going to mean burglary, as he puts it, which is great.
But I Think there's two components there. One is being a bit more upper class. And so being a ponce. That sort of slur is not just about sexuality, although it is. It's about being a limousine liberal. That's actually a very poor way to put it. Or maybe it's more after the times, actually, at least the times in which the movie was made, that sort of accusation. But it's about being effete and not manly. So I think that's the relationship. That's the sort of position that being actors puts them in. It's not a manly thing to do. It's more feminine.
I think that's the idea. Part of the movie is about the dangers of the romanticization of that sort of aspiration. You know, when we see Monty in the countryside, he has all these romance, right. The countryside itself, when they take that trip, there's supposed to be something romantic about it, right. In the larger sense, it's getting into the countryside and into a rural scene. Wordsworth and Keats and all that. And Monty himself has all this flowery talk, but it's a cover up for lust. It's a cover up for sexual persecution. And that's what romanticization of this sort potentially opens you.
Opens you up to. So I think you're right. Yeah, it's about. There's a lot about masculinity and homosexuality. And I'm relating it here to the larger idea of being a vulnerability created by a more aesthetic attitude rather than practical attitude towards the world.
9:44 Erin: Acting not being a manly thing is doubly implicated here, both because as an artist you're not working with your hands, but also the particular trappings of being an actor. Doing things like putting on makeup, which Monty does at one point. The idea of playing dress up and then this idea of adopting another man's identity somehow almost as if it's like a. I don't know. I was. I was trying to think through that a little bit, this marriage that happens as an actor when you're assuming someone else's identity. So you stay yourself or you're using your own body as the kind of the vessel for maybe another man's identity.
And so there's something perhaps inherently homosexual about that. But I think in every single episode in this sort of episodic film, there is some anxiety about male rape or about being bested by a man or in one instance, a bull. In every single part of the film, it happens over and over again. And when they're not explicitly talking about that, it's displaced into carrots and meat and other symbolic terminology. But the movie also has. I mean, we get Dani as someone who's their age, but also predominantly, they're just interacting with older men.
Also the farmer. The farmer is sort of more closer to their age than some of the other men in the film, but predominantly they're interacting with older men when they're not interacting with, you know, the Irish guy at the pub or the poacher, like these bigger, scarier, more obviously manly type of guys. And there are no women in the film of their own age whatsoever, which is one of the first things I notice. They yell at those schoolgirls with. With Nell, yells at the schoolgirls out the window, scrubbers. Other than that, you don't see any women of their.
I mean, not including that, you don't see any women of their generation. You only see those schoolgirls and then the older women, like, in the tea rooms in Penrith and the farmer's mother. So it's a world devoid of women and they're just really, really scared of the advances of men. And then in the cafe with the first scene where Marwood puts the kettle on and then goes down to the cafe, he's looking at the headlines in the newspaper and the first headline we see is, moment of fulfillment for local boy who became a woman. You know, the pipeline is boy to woman, nude.
It's not boy to man. Right. There's no. This is the. This seems to be the crisis. How do you grow up and become. How do you become a man? Is the central idea, maybe, that Marwood and Withnail are struggling with. Are you. You can't really become a Monty. Monty has a whole history of montiness that obviously Marwood and Withnail don't share. You can't become the old drunk military man in the pub, and they're not capable of becoming Jeff Woad or the poacher or the big burly Irish guy. What is their route to manhood? Which is a weird thing because they both look old to be thinking about that, but whatever.
12:56 Wes: Yeah. Well, I want to focus a little bit on this news theme because I think it's the way the film starts and there's a relationship here to art as well, insofar as the news is what competes for attention with the aesthetic from others. People who are reading newspapers are not reading books. And in particular, it has to do with this salacious news. Right. So there's the woman becoming a man. Then there's the nude au pair's secret life. That's another headline These are real headlines apparently from the time and the way Marwood narrates this. And this is one of the great.
There's just so much great dialogue, as you said, and some great voiceover as well. He says 13 million Londoners have to wake up to this. The murder and Albran and rape. And I'm sitting in this bloody shack and I can't cope with Withnail. I must be out of my mind. I must go home at once and discuss these problems and discuss his problems in depth. I thought it was these problems. It's written here as his discuss his problems in depth. When he gets home, Withnail is reading the news. And let's see, Curse of the Superman. Yeah, before that. There's just so many great lines in this I hate to skip over, but my thumbs have gone weird.
I'm in the middle of a bloody overdose. I feel really dreadful. And then with nails, so do I. So does everyone. Look at my tongue. Gray yellow sock. And then goes on to talk about this curse of the supermen. People taking steroids to win competitions. Athletes like Jeff Woad. So in a world exclusive interview, 33 year old shot putter Jeff Woad, who weighs 317 pounds, admitted taking massive doses of anabolic steroids, drugs banned in sport. He used to get in bad tempers, says his wife. He used to pick on me, but now he's stopped. He's much better.
In our sex life and in our general, the sex life of course comes first. And then, Jesus Christ. This huge thatch headed, this huge thatched head with its earlobes and cannonballs is now considered sane. And then Marwa would saying, please, I don't feel good with nail. That's what you'd say. But that wouldn't wash with Jeff. No. He'd like a bit of pleading add spice to it. In fact, he'd probably tell you that he was going to do what he was going to do before he did it. I'm going to pull your head off. No, please don't pull my head off. I'm going to pull your head off because I don't like your head.
As you mentioned, this sort of paranoia about it's not just about sexual assault but it's about violence in general towards other men. Comes up quite a bit and this is just one of the instances of it. But it's connected here to this idea of the salacious events of the world. And so I guess I'm trying to draw a parallel. I'm trying to draw a connection here between the idea that being an artist makes you vulnerable to not just criticism, but to violence of some sort. And then the other idea here is that news of the salacious events of the world like this, in a way, is competition for attention.
And so there's the potential to write. The real vulnerability for the artist is criticism from an audience or the disinterest, lack of interest from an audience. So that's also the kind of threat
16:34 Erin: that's being described here in this Jeff Wode instance. There's the idea too that you have to be a superman to get ahead. You have to be more than human somehow in order to achieve any kind of success in this world. And also inherent in that is this idea that you have to cheat because he's taking these, these steroids. But he's also already this huge guy, Withnail points out. Imagine the size of his balls. So there's always this, you know, imagine getting into a fight with him and that's then when he says, you know, he sort of does the imaginary dialogue.
But this idea of sexual prowess is repeatedly linked with being superhuman somehow, or gargantuan. And Withnail and Marwood are kind of on the losing end of that. It occurs to me that even the poacher has a moment of being literally superhuman when he's, when he's pulling, you know, he pulls the eel out of his pants. And then he also has. He looks bigger than he is because it turns out he has, underneath his jacket, he's being sort of puffed up with the pheasants. It's almost like he has these prostheses that are making him more than human, more than just a normal man.
And I. You know what's interesting too, in this, in the scene looking around the flat, they have these kind of Georgian style paintings on the walls. They almost look like Romneys. When Withnail is talking about the imaginary conversation with Jeff Woad, he walks over to the mirror and you see there's an illustration of kind of a medieval king sitting on the mantel that's sort of propped up against the mirror. And then there are also postcards of what look like palaces, probably. And it occurs to me that, you know, as you point out, this is also an anxiety of class.
Oddly that though Withnail, not Marwood, I suppose, but though Withnail is upper class, that somehow leaves him vulnerable to the more vital, you know, working class men that could beat him up. And come to think of it, the king as an image of that is. Is also really interesting. This model of this medieval king with a Long sword. You have to be. You have to be at the top of the heap. Right. You have to be the king among aristocrats and therefore superhuman in that kind of way, almost to escape being seen as a feat somehow.
18:51 Wes: Yeah. So I sent you a kind of transcript of the movie, including some scene descriptions. And I don't know who did that. It's of the movie as shot and the original screenplay, as always, is different. But there's a lot of great writing in the original screenplay that doesn't make it into the transcript that we have and can't even be shot. So, for instance, despite the squalor, the room is furnished with antiques, heirlooms and other quality stuff. An indescribable melange of stuff crowds a low table. A large Victorian globe of the world soars above bacon rinds. So, okay, so all this stuff can be shot. I don't remember the bacon rinds. But anyway, objet d' art and breakfast remains compete for space. Then he says Dostoevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs. That's the part that can't be shot.
19:46 Erin: That's in the scene description.
19:48 Wes: That's in the. Yeah. So he put it in there knowing, of course, this is supposed to not. You're. If you read a screenplay book, they told. Tell you you're never supposed to write stuff like that. That belongs in a novel. Right. It can't be shot, so it doesn't belong in there. But of course he put it in.
20:03 Erin: Well, it's conveys something to the scene dressers.
20:10 Wes: Yeah. He was also a novelist. Bruce Robinson, the writer and the director. And he was nominated for an Academy Award for adapting the Killing Fields. He wrote and directed how to Get Ahead in Advertising. Have you seen that?
20:25 Erin: I haven't seen it. I've seen the Killing Fields.
20:27 Wes: He worked with Truffaut as an actor. He was also an actor. He was in Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director. And part of this movie is based on that because apparently Zeffirelli sexually harassed him on set. I think we were forced to watch that Romeo and Juliet version in high school.
20:48 Erin: Everybody.
20:48 Wes: Yeah. Despite a mysterious topless scene. Yeah, well, Juliet gets topless. Right. It's like the weirdest thing.
20:55 Erin: Stories of, like, teachers just standing in front of the television screen during that. I think that's kind of a universal experience where they, you know, they like. It happens, whatever. Or you get somebody standing in front to try to block the screen for a minute.
21:13 Wes: A Lot is based on his personal life, as I've already mentioned. He really did have a roommate, much like with nail, who did drink lighter fluid at some point. And he said he's basically compressed what went on for two years into a couple of weeks. But I mention all this just because I think you've gotten that the sense in which the talk about Superman has something to do with the idea that they have to be supermen in order to get ahead. I forget how you put it. But in any case, part of this is about ambition. They, like Jeff Woad, are on drugs and they in a sense are pushing themselves to the limit to see the limits of human performance. There's something the Olympics being a bum.
22:03 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That hadn't occurred to me, oddly enough.
22:08 Wes: And once again the news is directly competition. So Withnail says at one point where he says, you've had an audition. Why can't I have an audition? This is a recurring theme with him. He's always envious, you have soup. Where's my soup? Turns out to be coffee that, that Marwood is eating with a spoon. In any case, he'll end up saying, the only program I'm likely to get on is the fucking news. So this is another point where we get this implied competition with salacious events of the world and with these manly supermen who are nevertheless cheating.
So how are you going to get ahead under those circumstances? When I was going over my, you know, after, after watching it again and going over the transcript, I thought, yeah, it's really. There's a really interesting feeling of complete desperation and paranoia and imminent catastrophe, like the world is going to end. Which again I think, you know, part of that's meant to capture the end of the 60s, but it's really about ambition. I think, you know, they complain a lot in the movie about where they are with their careers not getting parts and you know, their trying to be actors.
But you get the sense that this is kind of a portrait of ambition itself. Regardless of how one is actually doing in the real world with one's aspirations, there's a kind of desperation and potential internal psychological squalor that can crop up in relationship to one's ambitious ideals. Right. So you might neglect yourself and everything practical in life in order to, right, devote yourself to being an actor or an artist or intellectual or something like that. More generally we might neglect our well being in the service of some grandiose self conception of ourself unrealistic aspirations.
So the drug addled squalor that they're in is kind of an extreme case of that. But it's sort of. One could take it as representing this real bifurcation that happens within people, even within a psyche between an abject shadow self, as Jung would put it, and more grandiose, manic self related to the idea of the powerful great person that one might be. Or if you're completely psychotic, that you think you are godlike. Yeah.
24:47 Erin: They're taking drugs puts them in something of that kind of position perhaps. Right. Because there's the repeated idea of time in the film and that they're toying with time by taking these drugs that they can throw away a day if they want to. Right. Doesn't Marwood say that at some point we'll go, we'll have a drink and then we'll take some drug. I can't remember what it is. Some kind of antidepressant maybe.
25:12 Wes: Let me read this. It's about Marwoods doing a voiceover. Speed is like a dozen transatlantic flights without ever getting off the plane. Time change, you lose, you gain. Makes no difference so long as you keep taking the pills. But sooner or later you got to get out because it's crashing. And all at once those frozen hours melt through the nervous system and seep out the pores. Is that what you're thinking of? Such a great.
25:36 Erin: I was thinking of that. But as at a contrast to this moment, which I think I found. It's actually Withnail who says it. This is the plan. We'll get in there. This is when they're about to go into the mother black cap. We'll get in there and get wrecked. Then we'll eat a pork pie. Then we'll drop a couple of Sermontill 50s each. Means we'll miss out on Monday but come up smiling Tuesday morning. So they're planning on missing a day and just being. I think that's. That's what's going on there. That they're just going to be blacked out for a day. So there's the speeding up. Slow.
26:07 Wes: Hear about the drinking game associated with.
26:09 Erin: Yes, I did. Yeah. That's like the number one thing that came up on the search for. With nail and eye Lord try to
26:15 Wes: match with Withnail drink for drink. And at one point he orders. What is it? A quadruple whiskey and a pint or something anyway.
26:24 Erin: Right?
26:24 Wes: Yeah. You kill yourself if you really try to do it.
26:26 Erin: Yeah. But this.
26:27 Wes: Sorry.
26:28 Erin: Yeah. This. This idea of. You know. I think part of what you're suggesting about the news also. Also gets at this, right. There's a finite economy of time and attention, and. And you're trying to take a piece of that. And it occurs to me, too, that actors are among the unluckiest artists in that when you're not acting, you really do have nothing to do. You're just killing time between parts. It's not like if you're not being published or you're not getting your painting sold, that you, you know, your paintbrush is taken away from you. You could still keep working.
I mean, it's difficult to do because it's difficult to work, you know, when your ego is being destroyed by not getting any kind of recognition whatsoever. But you can technically still keep going and keep working. But if you're not being cast in something, then you just. You can't do anything at all. And so this feeling of things being. I think you said there's a sense of dread hanging over the film and things kind of being over, or the idea that they're running out of time and the suggestion that it's because of the end of the 60s. I think that's true.
But there's also the fact that the friendship is over. Right. Like, before the movie even starts, the friendship has basically ended. Because it seems like the dread from Withnail anyway is about knowing somehow that this audition is going to bear fruit for Marwood in some way, and so that has already caused the rift.
27:54 Wes: Did you sense that before the end of the movie? Cause I didn't. Yeah, I wasn't paying enough attention. So the ending caught me unawares, I guess. Yeah.
28:05 Erin: I think this is the tension between them from the beginning and the idea that Marwood is trying to establish sympathy or a connection between them by saying, we're in the same boat. And Withnail rejects that repeatedly. It's not just because Withnail's an egomaniac, though he is, and feels uniquely that he's suffering uniquely and. And uniquely entitled, though he does feel that way. It's also, I think, that he sees the writing on the wall, so he knows that Morwood is going to succeed and is on the way to some sort of success. I think that's part of it.
It's like they start a clock on the end of the friendship, starting from the beginning of the movie. And. Oh, and there's also the fact that withnail is turning 30. There's the suggestion that one only has enough time to play Hamlet. Right. And Hamlet is, of course, about. Partially about dithering and wasting time and not dealing with time the way one should. And Monty says there comes a time when you realize you're never going to play the Dane.
29:07 Wes: Do you mind if I read it?
29:08 Erin: Please.
29:09 Wes: It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, I will never play the Dane. When that moment comes, one's ambition ceases. Don't you agree? It's a part I intend to play, Uncle. Which, of course, he does at the very end of the film when he does that speech. But that's a really good. I didn't think about that. Yeah. The relationship to time and dithering and even the irony of Monty saying you wake up and realize you're out of time to play Hamlet.
29:44 Erin: So, yeah, what does that mean? You're never going to get the opportunity, or you've aged out, or both. But really it means both. And with nail is turning 30. When you're far away from somebody up on a stage, you can get away with being a lot older than the part that you're playing. So presumably With Nail does have maybe 10, if not 15, if not 20 more years to play Hamlet, depending on how ridiculous the casting director is. But spiritually, maybe.
30:12 Wes: How old was Branagh when he played Hamlet?
30:15 Erin: Too old.
30:16 Wes: Seemed a bit too old. Yeah.
30:18 Erin: Yeah. Everybody who plays it on. On screen, you know, they. They've established themselves in it, which means they've been playing it for a long time, and by the time the screen adaptation comes up. So there's this idea that you could play with time. You could play with time when you're young and taking all these drugs and drinking all this, all these tremendous quantities seems to go hand in hand with this idea of youth. And youth seems to be something that you have to inherently squander. Something of that, I don't know, quality goes on in youth or is essential to youth that you're squandering it.
And the 60s and youth culture and all of that is also running out. So I think, as Danny says, at some point they have to come down from the. From their trip with the end of the decade, and it's over now because they're selling hippie wigs at Woolworths, you know, so there's been some sort of. Some frozen in amber quality that's happening to the 60s, where it's possible to buy the trappings of the decade now in a store almost as a kind of costume, as a Halloween costume, or maybe as a, you know, a costume for an actor to then play the part of the 60s hippie.
31:27 Wes: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about Danny and then this connection that he makes between the end of the friendship and the end of the 60s. Right. So Danny is there. Maybe let's talk about the connection first, and then we'll get more into Dany's character, which is great. So Danny says to Marwood, you got the pirate man? Marwood says, I got a different one. They want me to play the lead. And then Withnail says, congratulations. And then they move on, or Dany moves on. Where exactly have you two been? Marwood Holliday, in the countryside. We don't know at this point that Danny is going to now eulogize the decade, but it's also, of course, a eulogy for the friendship.
So Danny says, that's a very good idea. London is a country coming down from its trip. We are 91 days from the end of this decade, and there's going to be a lot of refugees. So of course, Withnail is one of those who's going to get left behind. Not everyone's going to be able to make the transition from. How do you characterize the 60s counterculture and youth culture and the kinds of aspirations it represented? And with, I would say, libertinism, sex, drugs and rock and roll and all that stuff. And in the end, the promise of all that didn't really pan out.
And it's a sad moment. Right. Likewise, the end of the friendship of Withnail and Marwood is sad. And those two forms of sadness get connected. Anyway, Danny continues, they'll be going around this town shouting, bring out your dead. Reference to Monty Python. In fact, it's a reference to Monty Python, but It's set in 1969, before the Holy Grail movie was, in any case. Yeah. So going around this town shouting, bring out your dead. Which, of course, is where Withnail is at this point. And then they learn that they're going to be evicted. And it's partly because of what Danny's done with the landlord.
Some bald geezer starts coming on really bald with me, it's a callback to the beginning of the film where he has a theory of baldness and uptightness. Is that it for Danny's eulogy? That and the idea when Marwood says he's not going to smoke any more grass, Danny says, that is an unfortunate political decision reflecting these times. And then finally Withnail says, what are you talking about, Danny? And Danny says, politics, man. If you're hanging onto a rising balloon, you're presented with a difficult decision. Let's go before it's too late.
Or hang on and keep getting higher, posing the question, how long can you keep a grip on the rope? They're selling hippie wigs and Woolworths men. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.
34:20 Erin: I was having trouble reconciling Danny's hatred of bald men with his hatred of wigs. But I guess they're one and the same. You gotta just grow your own hair.
34:30 Wes: Yeah. What does he say about it? It's like the. Let's see. I don't advise a haircut man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald headed men are uptight. It's funny too, because Robinson based this character actually off a hairdresser. His hairdresser. Yeah.
34:53 Erin: When he calls a judge's wig a far out looking hat and when Withnail tells him it's a wig, he's like, no, no, this was more like a long white hat. It's like, yeah, it does look kind of weird.
35:05 Wes: It's a story about the coal man is what he calls him. Yeah. Where he goes to court and he's wearing. He has a fancy get up and then. Yeah, but that. Yeah, that's a good point. Calling the. Yeah. Not realizing that the judge's wig is actually a wig. But yeah, I just also too wanted to say a bit about Danny because in a way he's representative of.
35:28 Erin: He's a real hippie.
35:29 Wes: Yeah. But he's kind of a sage of sorts or a drug guru. The idea that somehow drugs can enlighten you, which I guess is, you know, it's an idea very much associated with the 60s and give you some special sort of wisdom. But of course, in his character he just comes across the way he's delivering his lines, which are just slow and it's obviously high. He's drug addled. But there's also supposed to be something sage about him. And he has a lot of other great lines of his own. Like St. Peter preached the epistles to the apostles looking like that.
Referring to Marwood's not having any clothes on. There are various points where he's acting in a sage like manner, like saying he doesn't advise. Right. When he. That quote I just read about not advising a haircut or his theory of bald men. And then the kind of precision that he uses when he talks about drugs. So, for instance, when he gets in this fight, this fight with Withnail, and says, don't get uptight with me, man, because if you do, I'll have to give you a dose of medicine. And if I spike you, you'll know you've been spoken to. If I'd medicine you, you'd think a brain tumor was a birthday present.
And then ultimately challenging Withnail to take this drug, which he calls phenodehydrochloride Benzorax, which I looked up and is not real street named him the embalmer. And then later on, Marwood says, give me some Valium, I'm getting the fear. And he says, you've done something to your brain. You've made it high. If I lay 10 mils of diazepam on you, you'll do something else to your brain. You will make it low. Why trust one drug and not the other? That's politics, isn't it? So all these kind of sage sounding. On the one hand, he's so laid back, it's like Daoism.
Yeah, he's a slacker. On the other hand, there's this precision. Talks about the law, gives advice, uses technical name for drugs. It's this interesting synthesis, this interesting combination of those two trends. So I thought. I just wanted to point that out about Danny because he's such a great character.
37:50 Erin: He's also emblematic of the boy at the same time that he is a sage, this sort of 60s youth who. I mean, he does have a lot of pretty insightful things to say sometimes, but he keeps himself in a state of suspended animation almost with these. With these drugs. Like, he talks about retiring and going into business, which I really love that, that phrase, which is paradoxical or. Or eboric or something. And Withnail says, I thought you were in the bottle industry. Which is great because there's this idea that he's going to retire from the drug business, which is he's going to put away childish things like being in the bottle industry, which obviously there's this suggestion of.
Of the baby bottle inherent in selling. Whatever. Selling prescription drugs out of bottles or selling contraptions to get yourself out of drunk driving charges by keeping pee in a bottle or. Right. Whatever. Whatever it is that he's involved in. And that. That kind of confusion also comes up later when he talks about papers. And he had just been talking about rolling a joint. So he has joint papers. But then he really is talking about the eviction notice. So there's a kind of double Meaning there. But anyway, he says, no, I'm gonna go into the toy.
The toy industry. That's the grown up thing he's going
39:07 Wes: to do with a doll that craps itself. Yeah, yeah, great point.
39:11 Erin: The toy idea is really rich. I mean, there is a. There's a lot in the. In the movie about peeing oddly things. Things happen when people pee first. There's this idea, you know, he also has a voodoo some point that its head comes off and it has pills in it. There's this idea of Marwood and Withnail and Dany of only able to. Only being able to deal with things that are smaller than themselves. Right? So when they're going to fight the rat and they get all charged up about fighting the rat, they have this vigor about that because they're about to confront something that's smaller than them rather than repeatedly encountering, as they do, men who are bigger than them who might fight them.
So there, there's this sort of, you know, Russian doll quality where you're picking on whatever is smaller than you. And so this interest in dolls and the shrunken down thing seems to be related to powerlessness and needing to deal with something smaller than oneself. Also there's this really interesting sort of gendered quality to this too because he says, like, oh, little girls love these dolls. They can take care of these things. They can clean up after the messes that these dolls make and they even enjoy it, Right.
40:23 Wes: If they like dolls that pee themselves, how much more are they going to like dolls that crap themselves?
40:30 Erin: Right, Right. But also, Marwood and Withnail have made just a disgusting. Just a shithole of their, of their flat. Right? And they are incapable, it seems, of cleaning up after themselves. And the women that are missing from the movie, is it their job to clean up after these men that are like children that can't clean up after themselves? You know, there's. There's something. Is this a message about why women are missing from the film or what. What role women would be playing in their lives if they had women? Or. I don't know, it's.
41:01 Wes: Would their flat be cleaner if they had girlfriends?
41:04 Erin: Yes, of course. Yeah. I mean, and they would be. And not only because the women are cleaning up after them, but because they would have to. They would, yes, clean up for the sake of the women. Right?
41:13 Wes: They would. They would have to.
41:14 Erin: So, yeah, so there's something. He's not thinking about women his own. Even Danny, right, isn't thinking about women his own age. He's thinking about these little Girls and giving them dolls almost in the interest of training them to grow up to clean after people like that, you know what I mean? Like, there's a strange hole at the center of the film where age appropriate women should be. And everything is geared in one to one extreme or the other. Children or elderly people, or people at least like Monty, a generation older than they are. So in other words, Dany is a sage, but he's also just as stunted as Marwood and Withnail in certain ways.
41:53 Wes: Don't get me wrong, Robinson based him on a hairdresser that he thought of as a complete idiot.
41:58 Erin: Yeah. No, I love Danny.
42:01 Wes: I mean, he's such a great character, but even the way he speaks supposedly is. Right. That's Robinson's direction to the actor who plays Danny to emulate that speech. Exactly. And the slowness of it and the accent and everything.
42:15 Erin: Well, he manages a lot of syllables.
42:18 Wes: Yeah. Seems like it became sort of a trope. Right. I've seen this character now many times in movies, Right. The idiot sage drug addict who's somehow precise and knowledgeable and yet drug addled and idiotic at the same time.
42:39 Erin: I was thinking of this even with Monty, his speech about being a boy and on the tandem bike with his little school chum. I was thinking that. Oh, the character of Gil Chesterton, I think is his name in Frasier. The gourmand who has the cooking or the restaurant review show. And he's always talking about romping with his school chums in Surrey or whatever.
43:02 Wes: Oh, that's funny.
43:03 Erin: That character probably was. You know, couldn't exist without Monty.
43:08 Wes: Well, let's talk about Monty for the second half.
43:11 Erin: Sure.
43:12 Wes: For the first part of the second half. And then you. I think we could use him as a segue into this theme that I raised about city, you know, the urban versus the rural and the romance of going into the countryside and the way that doesn't actually pan out for them. So, yeah, we'll talk about in part two. So we've reached the end of part one. patreon.com subtextpodcast or directly on Apple. If not, you can wait a week for part two. All right, thank you.
43:52 Erin: Thank you.
The Ethics of Seeing in Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” (Part 2)
Mar 23, 2026
Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image.
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0:12 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography. We're covering In Plato's Cave and America Seen Through Photographs Darkly, which I've been bringing in a little bit primarily, but we've just been talking about In Plato's Cave. And I want to continue talking about the implied ethics, I want to call it, of Sontag's critique of photography by speaking of the ways in which photographs inure us. I think Sontag is very subtly setting up a shadow of that in which she's implying that there might be a different relationship to photography which we could somehow inculcate in ourselves.
I wonder if we can use this essay, in other words, to spin out some theories about what Sontag would say is a more ethical relationship to the photographic image. I think there's a suggestion in a couple of places what that might be. Well, she has this idea, as we've already covered, that there is something aggressive and therefore imperialistic about photography, and also that it flattens and democratizes the world at the same time. And therefore, in a strange sort of way, I think her middle Ground, or what she might be very subtly advocating for, is a kind of aristocracy of images.
A word which I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable using. And I don't want to put words in her mouth, but a curation of images which suggests a kind of hierarchical relationship. So the place that I'm getting this. And you'll tell me if I'm crazy for drawing this conclusion, but the place that I'm getting this is when she talks about. Photographs are themselves packaged. They're a way of packaging the world, and they somehow invite packaging. And then she talks about a photograph working well in a book. Because unlike a painting, which is not smooth and not printed out, a photograph already is smooth and printed.
So when it's reproduced in a book, it keeps much of its essential quality. And she says, but still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme. For putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging and enlarging still photographs.
Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed. And there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. So that's where. That's where I'm getting this curation scheme from. You have a bunch of photographs in a book. You might open it up and flip through, and you're almost, you know, your eyes are kind of glazing over. You're not really looking at anything. You're not giving an equal amount of time to distinct images. And so she's implying that when photographs are in a film in which each photograph is given a set amount of time by some.
Some director or some curator of these images who's forcing you to look at just say one photo for 15 seconds and then the next photo for 20 seconds. That this creates a different kind of relationship to the image and the person who is making this film. Curating this selection, determining the order, determining the amount of time allotted to each individual photograph is doing you a service, it seems. That's kind of what she's implying about this Chris Marker film, in which there's an imposed order. And she says, as a result, a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact.
So to me, that implies that there is a better way to consume images. And that is by having someone who presumably knows More than we do curating that experience of images. For us, there might be some sort of curatorial relationship which is better than our current democratized, willy nilly relationship with images. Do you see where I'm getting this aristocratic.
4:24 Wes: Yeah. So there's not a lot in this essay that's positive. You know, we'll get to the way it concludes in a second. Which seems pretty globally negative. I mean, right? There are hints of the positive when she says, for instance, that after looking at Holocaust photos, I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten. Something went dead, something is still crying. So that's actually just a mixed picture right there. Grief, I think, would be a positive effect and would serve the ethical. Right. So one question is, to what extent can photography serve the political and the ethical?
To what extent can it arouse conscience? And then to what extent does it arouse all these other feelings, like manic defenses in the sense of possessing the world and that other stuff? And the point that you're focusing on, which I think is early on in the essay. Right. Gets at the fact that a more curated relationship to images could have a more positive effect. And then we have to ask ourselves, you know, what kinds of effects are we thinking of? Are we thinking of the aesthetic, the moral, the political? Do we need them to be sequenced for us and into film form?
Or is it enough to be in a museum and to have photographs by great artists? Of course, she's going to have quite an interesting critique of Diane Arbus in the next essay, and I've only read the first two essays of this book. So given that you've read the whole book, is there a more expansive, positive picture that she gives for photography?
6:02 Erin: Okay, no. And I think that's why I'm interested in trying to find the flip side of this critique. It might be that it simply just opens up a whole other can of worms, like who gets to curate? Who decides? Is it simply that there is some aristocracy of artists implied by this, say, this film director who's curated these images and set times for them? She finds this effective. So is it that artists are the ones who can curate these for us? Well, not really, because then she also has Arbus as an artist photographer. She's selecting subjects and choosing what to photograph.
And Sontag has problems, as do I, with some of those selections. So I've set a sort of impossible task for us, which is to try and figure out what Sontag might have said or might be saying in some sort of shadow, of this essay, about what a positive relationship to photographs might be. Yeah, so it's all speculative, but there is an idea of refusal as well, of refusal of looking or a refusal to inure ourselves, which seems implicit in the. At the end of Plato's Cave and the discussion of understanding, the way the
7:14 Wes: essay wraps up, which is actually quite negative. She makes a few different negative points about photography. One is so on my page 16, she'll say the ethical content of photographs is fragile. And they're fragile because the pathos of pastness kind of swallows them up. She'll say the particular qualities and intentions of the photographs tend to be swallowed up in the general pathos of time past. So whether it's a photograph from 1900 that might have had some emotional effect back then to us, just might look old timey. And the old timeiness of it is more interesting to us than whatever pathos is there in the subject matter of the picture.
And then she gets into the sort of incorporation of photography into institutions of control, like with the police, for instance, or bureaucracy. We photograph, we have to have a photographic id. And despite all that, she'll say there's an informational value to pictures in those bureaucratic contexts. But for most people, she'll say the informational value of pictures is on the same order as that of fiction. And she compares a tabloid like the Daily News to Le Monde, which runs no photographs. And the suggestion here is that by giving us pictures, the tabloid, in fact is farther away from truth than just the written word.
And I think there's something to that. So that's what I take as the first of a kind of one, two punch at the end of the essay, a negative view of things. And then the other is more generally about photography fragmenting the world and getting at, I think, what you were. You just mentioned, which is the kind of foreclosure of genuine understanding because it makes the world seem more available than it actually is. We give ourselves the illusion of knowing things by way of the camera, the photograph. But we're denying the depth behind that surface.
And so for that reason, I think she says, this is page 18 in my book. Basically, they can never give us political or ethical knowledge. So while it can goad conscience, it can finally never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. You know, there's a little bit of positive light here, the idea that it can goad conscience, for instance, in certain contexts. And we're also not, you know, we're not hearing about film, you know, except for that part that you noted about putting still photos in sequence in a film.
Is film better? I don't know.
10:06 Erin: I think it is. I think it is. She does call television a stream of under selected images, right? Each one canceling out the one before or something like that. And so that under selection seems to kind of exonerate it in a way and also make it less interesting. I should say that I think there could be more positive. I read the first four in the book for the purposes of the podcast. I've in the past read the whole book, so I could be just not remembering a more positive. She does say in one of the essays, for instance, I remember that photographs don't teach us about surprising things that are ugly.
You know, they don't surprise us really with ugliness, but they can surprise us with beauty. So that they could be a way to find more in the world, which is surprisingly beautiful. So that would be an example of something I could think of which is a positive statement about photography. But for the most part, the relentless criticism. And she's someone who enjoyed film, and film has a bunch of implications which make it fall outside of the critiques that she levies against photographs. Like just the mere fact that if it's a. If it's a film with a plot, it's not purporting to be an image of something real or of something that really happened.
I mean, it is insofar as those actors really were all standing together in a room. Maybe not anymore, but it used to be evidence that they were all standing together in a room. But I think it has just a vastly different set of moral qualities about it. But she says only that which narrates can make us understand and that we need narrative. Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no, Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.
And then later in the paragraph, only that which narrates can make us understand. So this. This very idea that we need narration is, I think, what I'm getting at here when I'm describing that she's implicitly making this argument that aristocracy is some kind of middle road. That can help, because I think that's. That's the implication of needing a narrative who is only that which narrates can make us understand. Well, what is going to narrate to us, what narration are we going to receive? Who is going to be the one who narrates? That's very opaque to me.
But it seems we do need a narrator. There are people who by implication here are in some sort of privileged position to be able to narrate these images to us.
12:40 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important. So in a way, we need a point of view. And the photograph might give us the idea that we have a view from nowhere, in a sense, but also because it can't give us all the context and it can't give us a narrative and it's outside of time in a sense. Or it doesn't cover an expanse of time. It doesn't give us the ability to fully understand, which is not by itself a problem, except that it gives us the illusion of understanding because it's. Look, there's reality.
13:09 Erin: Right, Right. And so this is where everybody is the king of their own kingdom of mental images, determining which is making up meaning from within that image world. Even though the possibility of finding meaning in a given image is entirely dependent on it being properly narrativized so that we might superimpose meanings on images which aren't really there.
13:34 Wes: She gives this great. Just around the place where you read. The camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses. In contrast to the amorous relation which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions and functioning, takes place in time and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand. I hope I didn't just reread exactly the same quote. Maybe it's worth rereading twice. So that's very important. Understanding requiring an understanding of function and therefore requiring the inclusion of time and the need for narration.
14:14 Erin: And this refusal idea, which I should tip my hand a little bit more and explain that. The reason why this stuck out to me and why I suddenly wanted to think about a positive ethics of relations of our relationship to photography is that I got into a kind of argument with somebody a couple of weeks ago when I said that I didn't like to expose myself to certain images.
14:38 Wes: Why they can't see you. Just kidding.
14:42 Erin: And I was concerned about being inured to. I mean, specifically, we were talking about Game of Thrones and I just said that I really didn't. I knew about the kinds of things that are in Game of Thrones and I did. And I realized this is obviously like dwarves, we've just been taught. Yes, exactly.
14:59 Wes: That's why you can't look at Diane Arbus either.
15:02 Erin: Exactly. No, but, you know, we were talking about that show, and I said, oh, you know, it seems like it would be a really interesting show to watch, and I just can't. I'm really hypersensitive to this. Like, I've tried to basically maintain my sensitivity by not exposing myself to certain images because I do not want to desensitize myself. And this person thought that in doing so, I was coddling myself, essentially, and that I had a fundamentally immature relationship to the subject matter by not seeing these things, which I really disagreed with.
And I. You know, all of that came back again. Somehow the Sontag came up at this interesting time where I had just had that conversation, and I thought, well, what she's really advocating for here is something similar to what I was arguing, which is a kind of hygiene of vision. Her idea seems to be that the worst thing we could do is not intervene in a situation which requires our intervention. So having a camera in our hand, I think, for Sontag, can be problematic in that there might be a situation which needs our help or our intervention. And by holding a camera, we might not be able to intervene and help someone.
We might simply be in a voyeuristic relationship to, say, a mugging. I don't know. So we should be in a position where we are able to help the person being mugged instead of just standing there going, oh, this is great. I'm capturing a mugging live on my iPhone, you know, and I'm going to broadcast it to my followers. So I think that what Sontag is saying is that we need to be able to intervene, and that is what is negative about having a camera. And that part of our ability to intervene or to even recognize that something that is happening is wrong or bad or whatever ugly or something is not being inured to those occurrences by simply being inundated with lots of examples of that so that we are no longer able to even determine that, you know, this is a very extreme example, but we're not even able to determine that a mugging is bad, right.
So that we can't even intervene in the mugging because we don't think it's particularly bad, because, well, we're inundated with images of muggings every day, so it's a normal thing. So we might as well just photograph it instead of intervening in some way. Again, that's a silly and sort of extreme example that I'm using just to illustrate what I think her point is. So something about, I think, not desensitizing ourselves seems to be important to Sontag, so that we maintain our sensitivity to things which deserve that sensitivity, so that we can be properly morally outraged when confronted with real moral outrages, and so that we can intervene when a situation needs our intervention.
I think that is ultimately what she's saying, must be preserved from the jaws of photography. But that may not be accurate and I may simply be interpreting this so as to win the mental argument that I'm still having with this person. Right. Well, I think, I mean, I think
18:09 Wes: clearly she's, you know, she's pointing to this double edged sword of the. There's the capacity of photography to arouse the conscience and then. But it can also inure us, as you're pointing out, and she points out, but. And it does that in the same way it shocks us. But then if we get shocked enough times, we can be inured. And then. So the question is, do I avoid all exposure? Do I try to titrate it? Do I try to get just the right amount of exposure? Or do I atrocity. Do atrocity porn all day? This is kind of a dilemma with the news, right?
18:48 Erin: Yes, exactly.
18:49 Wes: And it doesn't need to be photographic. I think, unfortunately, even when there's narrative, in the case of the news, it can be bad for us. So I kind of have a compromise where I look at it a little bit, but then I try not to linger over it anymore just because it's not because I have self discipline, but just because it's gotten so depressing. But it frees up a lot of time. So I want to maintain some awareness, but I don't want to harm myself by doing that. I don't want to just have my head in the sand. But on the other hand, I want to protect myself.
19:19 Erin: Just to bring in the essay here, she says to suffer is one thing. Another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. And that's really important is, I think for her is to strengthen that conscience and the ability to be compassionate, to be able to act, to be able to intervene. It can also. This is Sontag again. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more and more images. Transfix images anesthetize an event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs.
Think of the Vietnam War. But after repeated exposure to images, it also becomes less real. And I think that is a problem. She Goes on to talk about pornography and the anesthetizing that. That happens when we. When the shock of pornography wears off. And then she says in these last decades, quote, unquote, concerned photography, that is, you know, photography which is designed to arouse our ethical function by showing us atrocities that we should be outraged by. Concerned photography has done at least as to deaden conscience as to arouse it. Yeah.
So again, this sends me into, you know, this, this question of, okay, then, what is the proper amount? What is a proper comportment to images? Which sends me down that sort of aristocratic rabbit hole. Who's going to be responsible for determining what is the correct amount of exposure by the masses to these images? To a certain extent, it's. It is media corporations.
20:53 Wes: It's not going to be the sovereign. Plato in Plato's Republic. I was thinking about the argument between Plato and Aristotle earlier when you're talking about Game of Thrones, because the Platonic argument is that you could be corrupted by identifying with the person or the God doing the immoral thing. You get infected with their passions and your soul can be. Your character can be corrupted by it. And I think there's a point to that. And then the Aristotelian argument is actually. No, there's a cathartic effect. I can identify with characters, even characters doing crazy, violent things without necessarily being contaminated by them. There's a more complicated psychological relationship. I think they're both right to some extent.
21:36 Erin: Well, I think that's about the narrative element of Game of Thrones, whereas I'm concerned more with what Sontag is talking about here. I don't want those images in my head.
21:44 Wes: Yeah, well, that's a good distinction. Yeah, that's an important distinction. I was going to add to that. I do think the. It's an important point that they're talking about ancient Greek plays. Right. So there's an important visual part of this, including the masks. But leaving that aside, I think narrative is a problem too. And this came up in one of my first subtext episodes, which you were not on, but it about Slaughterhouse 5. And there's a worry in that novel about can you write about any of this without actually sensationalizing it or glorifying it in some way?
Can you do that with war? Because war is exciting. And so even for narration, I think it becomes a problem or remains a problem, let's put it that way. I think narration helps. Well, let me give another example. When I was an animal healthcare reporter, worked for the Animal Healthcare magazine, I wrote a very Positive. I'm sure I've told this story before, but I wrote a very positive profile of someone who started one of the first animal cruelty sections within a police department. Yeah. She wasn't happy with the profile because it was fictionalized.
Not because I put in any wrong facts, but just because I created a narrative. I created a story out of it, tried to make it interesting to an audience. And that by itself, even if everything is. We fact checked. We had a fact checker calling people. That by itself is distorting. That's kind of why I said you need a point of view. You need someone to be an essayist. I think in the end, whether they're doing that with photographs or with words or with a documentary. And that's the other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about sequencing in time.
And you can write. Documentaries will include photographic stills often, and then contextual narrative around it. Think of something like Ken Burns, and then you have the right music, you got it all.
23:33 Erin: Great actors to read out letters.
23:36 Wes: Good voice, good narrators. Such good voices. The problem she's identifying doesn't go away. There's something better about the idea that one is involved in an essay. One is involved in making a point or having a point of view. And that it's not just a view from nowhere. I take a picture of my cat. Yep, that's my cat. She really exists. That's objective reality. But if I take a picture of her posing. Because she's also a model supermodel and she likes to pose. Yeah, that's an opinion. I mean, it's not an opinion that she's a supermodel. That's a fact.
Or that she's beautiful. But it's. The particular posing in the photograph is an opinion. And that's a segue to chapter two, America Seen Through Photographs Darkly. Because it. Or to the second essay. Sorry, because it. Right. Part of the point is that Arbus is. She's got an agenda. She's got a certain opinion. And it's a kind of leveling thing where everything is made grotesque, whether it's actual freaks or just suburbanites. And this kind of condescending attitude towards suburbanites is something you interestingly see in contemporary streaming shows.
Isn't it quaint that people are so normal? Aren't they cute?
24:55 Erin: Yes, that's right.
24:57 Wes: But it starts from. And I mean, it's such a great essay, but it starts from this. She traces it back to kind of. To Walt Whitman's idea of a democratic embrace of all experience, where I Think the point is to lift up ordinary life and say, oh, isn't everything majestic in some sense? Or isn't everything a manifestation of God or whatever? So it's in the same tradition, but it's actually leveling down rather than leveling up. But at least we know there's curation to that. But at least we understand, even if we don't like that project, that we're engaged with someone who is engaged in that kind of what you'll call surrealist project. For depicting America as a surrealist nation.
25:42 Erin: The hyper selection of Arbus work really suggests a distinct point of view, much like the HBO imperative to deliberately show things as disgusting as they could possibly be for the purposes of titillation. But they I was most interested in. In her analysis of Arbus character, she ultimately ascribes a naivete which is both coy and sinister. She says in the photograph's acceptance of the appalling. This is at the paragraph beginning. The most striking aspect of Arbus's work is that she seems to have enrolled in one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises, concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate, but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
She talks about Arbus's aggressiveness toward the public, which has been treated as a moral accomplishment. This is just a fabulous essay. I love this essay. I think this is the best thing ever written about Arbus, who, if she did bother you before, will certainly bother you after you read this. Yeah. So the naivete of these photographs, Sontag says, is both coy and sinister, for it is based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other. Sontag says that there's a deliberate desire on Arbus part to inure us, to deaden our response to this kind of thing or to show us things that are shocking.
And then the comportment that we have, say, in the art gallery, I mean, you know, we can imagine being people in the early 60s encountering this in a gallery. We're supposed to not be horrified by this or not show that we're horrified by this. Right. We're supposed to actually affect total nonchalance in the face of some very disturbing
27:32 Wes: images like that nudist camp woman with the apron. Yes, yes, topless, but except for an apron, because you don't want to spill coffee on yourself. You want to get coffee all over your thighs. I don't know.
27:48 Erin: Right.
27:49 Wes: There's times when clothing is just necessary. Okay, maybe not stay warm, but she
27:55 Erin: calls this a Self willed test of hardness, both on the part of Arbus and I suppose on the part of the people who look at Arbus photographs. And that ultimately the intent that people like Arbus have in going out and collecting these images of pain is not to feel more, but to feel less. And that too seems to be part of an inherent part of Sontag's say, moral vision, such as we can piece it together in these two essays, which is that we should be trying to feel more, not less. So I would say that this deadening is for Sontag a very negative thing, that we should be trying to preserve some kind of sensitivity.
And because she says here, here, here is the key, it works out not as a liberation of, but as a subtraction from the self. A pseudo familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life. I think that's as much kind of the moral key for Sontag as any sentence in here. So that subtraction from the self is what happens, I think, when she's saying, when we expose ourselves to these deadening images, we actually have less self as a result of this. In a way, it's what you're describing with the belief that being photographed takes away part of your soul or something like that.
This is Sontag's transmogrification of that idea.
29:16 Wes: There's a part just for the one that you're focusing in on, where she talked about. Whitman preached empathy, concord and discord, oneness and diversity, psychic intercourse with everything, everybody plus sensual union. When he could get it is the giddy trip that is proposed explicitly over and over again in the prefaces of the poems. This longing to proposition the whole world also dictated his poetry's form and tone. Whitman's poems are a psychic technology for chanting the reader into a new state of being and then a little lower, meant to get readers psychically airborne, to boost them up to the height where they can identify with the past and with the community of American desire.
But this message of identification with other Americans is foreign to our temperament now. So yeah, with Whitman you get this impetus to merger in a way with the past and with others, this impulse to oneness. And that's precisely what you're not getting with Arbus. The monsters that she's photographing are not inviting you to identify with them. Right, Since a lot of them are ugly. People can go look at her, her photography, but it's basically like trying to create a freak show out of everything, even out of maybe a normal couple standing there, depending on the way things are framed.
So there's a kind of anti humanist message here, according to Sontag.
30:48 Erin: Yes. And Arbus doesn't want you to feel distance from that, though that's what's really interesting. Is this not. What was the word you used with Whitman?
30:58 Wes: Identification or merging?
31:00 Erin: Identification or merger. You're not supposed to feel that identification at all. But what's aggressive Sontag is saying about the photos is that she doesn't allow you to feel any distance from them. So it's like you're in close quarters with the other. And it's designed to make you feel this intense discomfort for that closeness and for the way in which these people are being photographed. And yet that feeling, that otherness, very intensely is part of it. So it's a sort of anti merger. You're put up close and it's designed to induce this reaction of discomfort, embarrassment, pain, shock, all of these things, which words which I think Sontag uses to characterize the experience of being in contact with these images.
The most interesting observation, I think for me in the whole essay is when Sontag says that Arbus's interest in freaks. This is on page 43 in my Picador edition. Arbus's interest in freaks expresses a desire to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged to vent her frustration at being safe. I love that. That's. I think that's really key. I think a lot of people are reacting against safety by trying to, say, manufacture instances in which they remain safe but which feel unsafe to try and shock themselves into some. What they perceive as being some sort of more authentic relationship with the world.
Anyway, I found that to be incredibly insightful and fascinating and it was somehow recognizable to me. It's psychologically revealing about Arbus, but it also reveals something about maybe what we might call the false promise of photography, which is to give us a sense that we've experienced something outside of our comfort zone in a way which is prepackaged and which doesn't actually come with any of the attendant, say, moral lessons that real experience might provide. Do you know what I'm saying? So there's something, I think illustrative about all of our relationship with photography in the character analysis she does of Arbus in this moment.
Though it's also very specific and interestingly revealing about Arbus particular character.
33:12 Wes: Yeah, she says that the photographs in a way are too cool for school. It's like the compassionate response to them is supposed to be irrelevant. We're not supposed to feel horrified. Right. When we look at the Pictures, we're too cool for that kind of thing. And one might see that as a kind of way to destigmatize and to level experience and say, well, nothing is really freaky or everything is really freaky. But I think she sees it as a kind of unsavory inurement to reality. Right?
33:42 Erin: Yeah.
33:42 Wes: She contrasts Arbus kind of middle class or privileged, maybe upper middle class, yes, quite privileged Jewish existence and this enhanced desire to seek out a kind of corrective for that, to seek out some sort of adversity and violate her own incidents, sorry, innocence and you know, overcome the sense of being privileged.
34:08 Erin: I think everybody is suffering from this to a certain extent in the modern era because we don't actually have enough friction in our lives. And I think we feel the lack of what we might call experiences that are meaning making or character building because we're not suffering in the ways that previous generations have suffered. I mean people are certainly, they're suffering in different ways, but ways which are maybe less legible to us than what we're used to or what we think of in our minds as being acceptable or historically ways in which we might develop ourselves.
And I think people feel the lack of that and they try to create those almost like self impose that suffering through a variety of other means. And so I think that is a little bit of what Sontag is getting at here. This is the way that Arbus is trying to do it by taking these close up shots with, with these people who look freaky and forcing us to look at it and be uncomfortable. And then we're supposed to just sort of look at it and act very nonchalant. And I remember being in a, I remember being in a museum with a, with a friend of mine from college who had none of the, I guess, training and nonchalance that people usually get at some point than going to museums or just, I don't know, learning, learning some sort of disaffected behavior from the people around them.
And so we went into some modern art exhibit. I don't even remember what it was, but I just remember her going, oh my God, you know, like, like really loudly having these reactions and calling a lot of attention to herself. And now of course reading this, I'm like, of course, you know, she was actually doing the exact right thing. And probably Sontag would approve of that reaction because it's proof that she hadn't been anesthetized. She's actually having a real authentic reaction rather than a put on of, mmm, yeah, you're looking at something horrifying and you're supposed to just shrug your shoulders and walk on to the next image and brush it off.
I think to a certain extent Sontag is saying we should maybe refuse to do that or we should recognize the falseness in doing that at least.
36:12 Wes: Yeah, there's a cynicism to it. And this maybe we can give listeners a taste of the way she ends the essay. Bringing it back to Whitman and making equivalences between freaks, mad people, suburban couples and nudists is a very powerful judgment, one in complicity with a recognizable political mood shared by many educated left liberal Americans. The subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. Only as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different, Whitman's democratic vista.
Everybody is shown to look the same. Succeeding the more buoyant hopes for America has come. A bitter, sad embrace of experience. There's a particular melancholy in the American Photographic project, but the melancholy was already latent in the heyday of Whitman esque affirmation, including Stieglitz. So I'm skipping a little bit. So the Whitman esque appetites have turned pious. The photographer now patronizes reality photographers with less ego and magnetism. than Stieglitz gradually gave up the struggle. They might continue to practice atomistic visual stenography.
The atomistic visual stenography inspired by Whitman, but without Whitman's delirious powers of synthesis. What they documented was discontinuity, detritus, loneliness, greed, sterility. So it ends in a way on the same note as the last essay with this movement towards atomism. Right. We started out with Whitman's leveling, being about a movement towards unity. And this is still a leveling, but it's more about we all end up the same level as our own little freaky disconnected atoms, rather than being somehow ennobled together.
38:03 Erin: I mean, it just gets worse from here. Right. There's no stopping this train. So maybe I've been wrong all along to look for some sort of alternative or instructions for a solution.
38:17 Wes: America has been discovered as the quintessential surrealist country. That's the one that I wanted to get to. This idea of succumbing to surrealism.
38:28 Erin: Yeah.
38:28 Wes: So quite pessimistic. And it sounds like from what, you know, the rest of the book, there's not much optimism.
38:36 Erin: Well, I mean, yeah. Though I don't want to give listeners the impression that these aren't exhilarating and really fun essays to read.
38:43 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think you're doing well as a country if you have a writer like this. Yeah, she's amazing. So. Yeah, that's why I talked about a point of view in the essay. In the end, this is an argument for being a great essayist as opposed to a stenographer. And photography lends itself to stenography.
39:05 Erin: Right.
39:05 Wes: All right. Any last words before we put America to bed? No.
39:10 Erin: No. I love that. Sontag herself is the solution. That's music to my ears.
39:18 Wes: All right. Thank you.
39:20 Erin: Thank. You.
The Ethics of Seeing in Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”
Mar 17, 2026
Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image.
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0:12 Erin: Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof, but can't, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which paradoxically atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile world in his or her head. Today we're discussing two essays from Susan Sontag's collection on photography in Plato's Cave and Seen Through Photographs Darkly, and asking what constitutes photography's ethics of seeing and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image.
This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, just coincidentally, I've been printing out tons of photographs over the last few days of my sister at various stages of her life because I'm the maid of honor for her wedding and I'm throwing her bridal shower. So, you know, we had decided to cover these essays. And then just over the last couple days, I happened to be looking through old family photo albums anyway, so it's been a strange thing to read these essays in tandem with that. And I've been thinking about how attached I am.
I wouldn't say that I take a lot of photos, but I love photos. I love photos of family. I have photos everywhere, and various apartments I've lived in have always been covered in photos. I just wonder what your relationship is. You don't strike me as someone who takes a lot of photos either. Do you have a lot of photo albums? Are there certain photos that you love looking at? Do you have attachments to photos?
2:10 Wes: I do have some photo albums and I used to curate those much more actively when I was in my 20s and maybe 30s, but because it's become much less common to actually, you know, there was a time when you had to take your disposable camera to the. To the pharmacy and have them do their magic. And you.
2:32 Erin: I'm going to the pharmacy after this to pick up. Oh, really? Yeah, because I'm making displays which are for the bridal shower, so I have to go pick up prints from CVS for the first time in years. Just later this afternoon.
2:48 Wes: Amazing. That's the.
2:49 Erin: The coincidences that. Bizarre.
2:51 Wes: Yeah. You know, and then you'd have to wait a couple weeks or whatever, and it was. But sad to say, I think the. What do you even call them? What's the thing? You keep your photos in the binder. Those are in storage. And I've digitized everything. I digitized everything. And I digitized a bunch of my mom's photos that she had kind of lying around because I wanted some of those. But she would always. She's always worried about me taking her photos. You know, like, it was always a thing with my mom and me. Like, she accused me of stealing her books, which I.
Which I did, and taking the taking as a kid, you know, like taking her books out of her room and putting them in my room or out of the living room and just putting them on the shelves in my room. But anyway, yeah, now I have a digital collection, and I can't say that I spend a lot of time looking at that, except for pictures of my cat. Those are like the main pictures that I take if I go on a vacation. So recently I was in Tucson and went up to Mount Lemmon and did various things. So I'll take a few photos. How do I put this? I don't take a lot.
I don't like the way it. It's, you know, for reasons that Sontag talks about, the way it interrupts the experience, or it feels like I'm trying to behave in an acquisitive way towards the experience or commodify it. And also, I don't know what the point is exactly. I mean, you see people taking so many photos. It's like, how would you ever have the time in your life to go back and look at all the photos that you're taking? No one's going to even have the time. It goes into the cloud, the cloud storage, and that's it. And it's reassuring to know that it exists there.
So you have that you could go back to it, but she probably won't.
4:39 Erin: It occurred to me that a lot of what Sontag covers in the essays is just even more apparent now with the iPhone. And so a lot of this seems to me to be super relevant. But one of the phenomena that I've been talking about with a friend of mine in relation to this. Yeah, just these thousands and thousands of images that live on our phones or on our computers is, I think, this further, I don't know, democratization of experience that she's talking about, which is, you know, how you go into. Into iphotos and it'll show you. Well, first of all, everything is organized by date.
There are maps, too. Like, you could look at the map of the world and see the photos that you've taken in different locations. But specifically this on this date function where it will show you what you were doing on the same day a year ago, five years ago, whatever. And Facebook does this too, right? With Facebook memories, which I was obsessed with for a while, probably around the time that it first rolled out or when I first noticed it, which might have been a long time afterwards. And it had this curious effect, specifically the days in which it would.
There was nothing that you had posted on that day in all the years that you've had Facebook, if you, if you know it's today is March 2nd, if there was nothing that you ever did on March 2nd that you posted on Facebook about it would tell you you have no memories on this day, which I thought was, you know, chilling. And it would. It almost spurs you to want to. I mean, it doesn't for me, but it would spur you to want, know what you were doing on that day or to post something so that next year, on March 2, you would have something that, you know, some evidence that you existed on that day.
But in, in relation to this, this democratization, it's as if all of these photo apps now want every day to be like an anniversary or a birthday. Every day becomes a significant day. So insofar as every experience a photograph, as Sontag says, becomes flattened. Everyone who's. Who's photographed is a celebrity and therefore everyone is a celebrity and therefore nobody's a celebrity. This tying it to a date so that you might be, you know, 50 years ago. You might be photographed every, every year on your birthday and every year at school picture day or something like that.
And other than that, maybe you don't have. And graduation, maybe you don't have very many everyday photos of your life now. It's as though every day of the year is some kind of big event. And if you don't have a photograph from that specific date, there's this black hole in your photographic record. The attempt to capture everything in your life and therefore give meaning to every moment of your life. And obviously the flip side of that is taking away meaning in every moment of your life. That creep, it just seems to get more and more like, I wonder what the next step is beyond that.
Once, once every day has become an anniversary, you know, is it going to show you what you were doing hour by hour, minute by minute, where you were what. When you go places, will it ping on your phone? Your past photographs from that particular street corner, Starbucks, hotel, me get pen, I
7:42 Wes: need to write these ideas down, because I can get AI to Vibe code this for me.
7:49 Erin: I don't know what the point of any of this is, just that, yeah, I was really interested in this idea of an imperializing democracy that Sontag pinpoints. And that's kind of the. Where I wanted to begin. But I'm going about it in a very weird way.
8:03 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. A kind of leveling that between experiences that becomes overpowering or subjects us. Is that the idea?
8:12 Erin: Yeah. She makes the point very subtly. She says on page seven, this is in Plato's cave. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning, to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. It's a bit of a stretch, but I just noted the proximity in the paragraph. I mean, they're a sentence apart from each other. Imperial and democratize.
So the sense that it's a. It's that photography is attempting to colonize the whole world. But what it's doing really is setting up the pseudo world of images which stands in parallel to the actual world. Everything in the world is captured in individual photographs. So everything is atomized, it's democratized because anything photographed becomes equivalent to anything else that is photographed. And then there's also this democracy where we're all imperial rulers over. Over the image world that we've constructed in our own heads that gives us the impression that we own it or that we understand it or that we can see it and kind of map it in our own heads, whether we've been to these places or not.
And that that's somehow given to everybody. So we're all emperors over our own internal image worlds. And the equality of that is the democratic part, I suppose. I think something like really complex is happening in the. In her use of those two terms side by side.
9:51 Wes: Right. There's a sense in which photographs become an aid to memory. And they can also become a replacement for memory. And that's part of the problem. So the minute that you're taking a snapshot of something on a vacation, it takes you out of the experience because, again, it gives you the sense that you've acquired it. And I've put it in my little box. My little. It's like taking a note now. I don't have to, really. If I don't have to rely on memory, then why let myself be as immersed in the experience as I might otherwise? Let myself be. Because that's on the record.
Something like that. But here, at the point that you were quoting her, she had just talked about how despite the fact that photographs are used as evidence and they can incriminate and they can justify and they suggest that something exists, there's always the selection. Selection becomes a kind of interpretation. We decide what we're going to photograph and when we're going to photograph them and how. And eventually, as we get into the other essay, how people are going to pose and all of that stuff. So she mentions taking shots of sharecroppers in a way that'll express their poverty and dignity, for instance.
But the other aspect here, I think that you're getting at is the kind of aggression that's paradoxically involved in passivity and ubiquity. So maybe just to read. We'll give people an idea, since she's such a fabulous essayist. I'll just read it. Images which idealize, like most fashion and animal photography, are no less aggressive than work, which makes a virtue of plainness. Like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort and mugshots, there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as it is in all the succeeding decades during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs.
Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Juliet Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron, who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. I think you already read this. Right from its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent photography in photography from its very beginning.
To democratize all experiences by translating them into images. So it's there. Interestingly, the kind of thing that the advance of technology makes possible, I think she thinks is already there from the very beginning, this democratization of experience. But it really accelerates it. And then we get into the ubiquity of it with everyone has a pocket camera, and little did she know that real it would all just be in the phone. You'd sound like a crazy person if you said that around this time. And everyone would just have phones in their pockets that were also cameras.
13:04 Erin: I guess another way of putting this is to say that photography is an aggressive imperialistic enforcement of a democratic relationship to the world, which is to say a sort of enforced equality or flattening. That paragraph, I think, is the most interesting in an essay full of just the most brilliant paragraphs.
13:27 Wes: Agreed.
13:28 Erin: In response to what you said about. About photographs becoming a replacement of memory, I think that's absolutely true, and I think that's even more true now. I mean, I think it's true in a way that Sontag never could have anticipated. I mean, she's. She's already sort of hinting at it, of course, But I do think that there's something almost quaint now, or in fact, quite quaint about actual physical photo albums. She talks about the elegiac quality of photos and photos being a memento mori, which I think is a little bit different from being an aide to memory.
You know, so you look back through a photo album and it might trigger a memory of a certain day or even how you were feeling in that moment, but really, it seems designed for pathos. And as she talks about capturing somebody at a moment which is now past or now dead or an earlier version of that person. Right. And I think now what we have is maybe rather than walking around with these image worlds in our head, these facsimiles of the world in our head, as she's suggesting, photographs supply us with. Really, we're walking around with these facsimiles of the world in our phones, and we've exported this external hard drive.
We've exported all of our memories to this object as well, so that we don't have to hold onto the memories in our heads, even in the way that Sontag is describing in the essay. You know, we've sort of gone beyond this and all of our function when it comes to recalling something. Like, it could be triggered by seeing photos in the phone. But primarily we're exporting that memory to the phone, and it's containing much vaster quantities of photos than an album could hold. So it does become like memory, like an external hard drive for our memories.
15:17 Wes: Because of that, we sort of interfere with memory. I think part of the thing is memory implies loss, right? Because the thing is no longer around and because the memory of it is going to fade. And because a memory is more than the visual experience, right? There's also the emotions involved. And you're on a family trip and people are annoying you and maybe you're bored or have to go to the bathroom. There's a lot of other stuff outside of the picture of you looking happy in front of the mountain or whatever it is. So there is a kind of manic quality, or what I would call a manic defense quality to photography.
Naturally, it's a defense against loss with actual memory. Loss is just a part of it. And that's kind of the way she begins her book, right. Talking about how photography redefines our relationship to the real world in these very. In terms of acquisition, we have the photographs on our external hard drive, on our phone. It's like appropriation, the idea that for some societies, being photographed might steal one's soul. Well, I kind of think we act as if we're sucking the soul of the world into the phone or into the camera to keep it with us. And then, of course, we can manipulate.
I mean, she talks about blowing up and retouching photographs, you know, and we don't even. We don't even do that anymore, but we can put them into digital folders or put them on social media and do all sorts of other virtual types of manipulation with them. And since the time when she wrote this essay, that the ability to share these photographs, that was enhanced incredibly by social media and Facebook and things like that. And it used to be fun. Facebook used to be fun. I don't know if people remember that now. It's just something that I. And most people I know just avoid unless they have to do something on it for some reason.
And why is that? I don't know exactly beyond politics or beyond envy of seeing people live their shiny lives on Facebook with the vacations. I don't know what it is, but it became. Something went sour with that. And part of it, I guess, is just the getting sucked into this activity of putting one's life on blast or advertising your life to other people and trying to get them to see you and them trying to get you to see them. I don't know what it is, but anyway, I kind of digress there. Really what I was trying to get at was the manic quality of this and the idea that there's some kind of power and control and acquisition in taking photos.
And even the fact that you can kind of make time stand still, as she points out. You just get a slice of time. There's an element of incredible power in
18:21 Erin: all that, I guess, to go into the personal for a second. I sometimes forget to take photographs and wish that I had taken them. But also, I think I sometimes don't take. Want to get out the phone and start taking photographs, because for me, I've always been dissatisfied by the photos that I take because I feel as though they never really capture what I'm seeing, right. Like, I guess I'm just not a good enough photographer where I feel as though anytime I capture something and then I look at it in the phone, I'm like, oh, well, that's not really what it.
18:52 Wes: You gotta put it in portrait. Portrait mode.
18:54 Erin: Gotta put it. I know you taught me that,
18:58 Wes: but I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, I know. I, That's. And that's part of my reluctance. I just know it looks so plain in the photograph, but it's so amazing, you know?
19:08 Erin: Exactly, exactly. And so then what I do is I take 45 photos of the exact same thing at slightly different tilts and then I.
19:17 Wes: You're playing paying for the cloud storage now.
19:19 Erin: Exactly. Well, no. And so then I. Well, so I have, I guess, many, many thousands fewer images than all of my friends, I think. Because then what I do is I, I don't want to take the photos because then I have to go in and choose which of the 45 I'm going to save for posterity. And I'm clicking back and forth between the one image and then the next image one inch to the left and the next image one inch to the left of that, you know, and, and so I, I think part of it is I don't take the photo because I don't want to put myself through that because I then have to edit everything and get down to the one image because I'm going, okay, I can't have 45 images of the same thing.
I just have to choose. And usually it's a very arbitrary. And just say, okay, fine, this one, you know, but none of them satisfies me. None of them ever seems to me a good encapsulation of the moment. It doesn't capture the beauty, it doesn't capture the whatever. And that's simply because, you know, as she points out in the essay, it's just a slice. It's just, you know, the frame. What's being cut out really severely limits what the photograph can capture. And what. I mean, they're really. Photos are really unrealistic. It's stupid to maybe to point out something so obvious, but they're so limited and they're so unrealistic.
Not only are they playing with scale as she talks about, but they're cutting out so much of what was live and real and, you know, obviously 3D and in the round about the experience that I think of them as being. I mean, I'm so grateful to have the certain photos that I do of people and obviously having Baby photos of people or photos of loved ones who are. Who are now no longer with us is. You know, it seems like photography is an incredible gift, but also I've always had this really frustrated relationship to it, probably because I'm just not a very good photographer.
And they seem like strangely bad approximations of the world that they're purporting to capture. Exactly. You know, I often think that light in a painting is a much, much better illustration of light.
21:23 Wes: Yeah. They can convey the power of the scene more accurately, in a sense, bring some of the emotion. I mean, a good photograph can do some of that. But. Yeah, in general, with our snapshots, it's not going to happen as well. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. So she points to this. Most photography has nothing to do with art, and it does serve this function, according to the Sontag, of memorializing family life, for instance, including weddings. It's a very important part of big events and tourism, as we've talked about. And I think the thing that she highlights is that as the society becomes more atomized and there's more industrialization and people can travel more, this becomes a kind of desperate way to deal with that fact as community fades, as communal ties are less strong, and you begin replacing that with this kind of ritual of.
Of picture taking for families. But it's not going to replace the ties that are being lost.
22:24 Erin: Yeah. That idea that photos are a kind of prosthesis of the larger family that's been lost in the reduction to the nuclear family that oftentimes all we have of those extended relations are photographs of those family members rather than those people living in the house. Say, if we were in a two or three family home or something like that.
22:46 Wes: I love this idea, too, that on vacation we might feel guilty about not being at work. Right. It gives us something to do. We have a job now. We're a photographer while we're on vacation.
22:59 Erin: Right.
23:00 Wes: But it's a way of, you know, in general of, you know, she says, refusing experience or damping down experience by using the camera, putting the camera between yourself and the experience to deal with the anxiety of that. But that includes the guilt. So she says a way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it. By limiting experience to a search for the photogenic. By converting experience into an image, a super souvenir assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter this Gives shapes to experience, stop, take a photograph and move on.
The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic. Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working. When they're on vacation and supposed to be having fun, they have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work. They can take pictures. I think that's very, very true.
24:03 Erin: It is.
24:04 Wes: It's hard just to stop and experience, you know, just the pause.
24:08 Erin: Yeah. I think of my grandfather when I read that, who. His photos are all over this. I'm in my grandmother's house right now. His photos are all over the walls of the house from all their many, many travels all over the world. And he was someone who retired very young, but he had this. He was never fully resting. You know, he was retired. But there was always something to do. You know, there was always work in the garden to do. There was always cooking and shopping to do and things to fix. You know, he had had his workbench downstairs and would always.
I never knew what he was doing, but he was always hammering at something or putting things together. And. And so I think that that must have been, you know, the picture taking must have been a kind of version of this. You know, he's on vacation, but he still has a job to do. And there are actually pictures of him with multiple cameras around his neck for different. You know, he would have like the video camera and the different lenses and was really into that and got into that actually, when he was in the army. So I also have all of these photos of his several albums of Munich in 1945 and different buildings, which.
I've always wanted to go to Germany and see if I could find the buildings that he was in. And which I have, you know, so detailed are the records that he took pictures, for instance, of street signs so you could locate the exact corner, you know, that the building was on.
25:25 Wes: Wow.
25:26 Erin: Yeah. It strikes me now is that he might have been sort of an anxious person, since a lot of this is also supposedly a defense against anxiety, which I think is. Which I think is right, too. I made a list of, across the two essays of the three sets of moral relationships and how Sontag characterizes them. The relationship between the photographer and the camera is one moral relationship that she describes which has many different characteristics. Each of these does the relationship between the photographer and the thing photograph the subject and then the relationship between people and the photographic images that they view.
So the viewer and the image, all of the things that we've talked about so far, primarily that between photographer and camera. So as you described, the appearance of participation without participation, the refusal of experience, putting the camera between the self and the event to soothe, as a defense against anxiety, to relieve disorientation, the work like activity. And then we get into a couple of things that have much deeper moral implications. So the camera as a kind of a gun, as something automated, requiring no skill or expert knowledge, as she points out.
And then also the camera as a passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions. And some of this shades into the relationship between the photographer and the photographed. But the idea that one is freed from responsibility towards those things or people or events which are photographed, that that implies a certain lack of intervention and maybe even this implicit approbation. You're saying when you take a photograph of something that you want it to keep going, which I thought was one of the most interesting elements, that. That it's encouraging something to keep happening in an implicit way.
But then also there's this distance that's required. If you're going to take a photo of something, you need to be at least a little bit distant from it in order to capture it. Right. You can't be in the middle of the action. You can't be participating in something fully if you're taking a photograph of it. And you need a little bit of physical distance in order to capture something with a lens. That dichotomy is something we might dig into a little bit more.
27:30 Wes: Yeah. She makes this transition in the essay from the right. The idea that photography seems like an act of non intervention. But if you think about what's happening in say, war photography, to maintain one's position as a photojournalist, one can't get involved. I assume a war photographer would try to save someone's life if they're bleeding out in front of them. But they're certainly not picking up a gun to get involved in the fight. So she makes the point that it is. So it is still a form of participation in the sense it's a complicity with whatever makes something interesting.
I think that's what you're getting at with you sort of encouraging something to keep happening by treating it as interesting. Yeah. And then I like this metaphor of the gun because there's something. I mean, she compares it to. She says that there's something perverse about picture taking. Right. And quotes Diane Arbus is saying it's a naughty thing to do, so it can intrude, it can obviously be exploitative and the fact that they're so automated increases this problem. And I was thinking, as you talked about your grandfather, there's a time when actually there's some skill and effort actually still involved.
I mean, she thinks what's going on is automated, but the fact that we can just take out our phones and do it, and the phone does practically everything for you, including all these effects, and cheapens it in a way. There's an important relationship between the automation of the machine that you're using and then the target. So with a gun, right, you know, machine gun life becomes even cheaper by virtue of the fact that it's so easy to expel bullets and take out so many people at once. And likewise, people seem more possessable to the extent that you can easily take pictures of them.
Right. In a way, it changes our relationship to others. She talks about it as becoming a way of turning them symbolically into objects that we possess. She says to photograph people is to violate them by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have. It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed, just as the camera is. A sublimation of the gun to photograph someone is a sublimated murder, a soft murder, appropriate to sad, frightened time. Really great.
30:00 Erin: Yeah. Well, insofar as you're suggesting, and I think really accurately so that the iPhone is now more like the machine gun, I'm wondering if this idea of the photo seeing people as they never see themselves and therefore this being akin to sublimated murder, as she calls it, if the ubiquity of this kind of murder is therefore making people more impervious, or somehow people are getting acclimated to being murdered in this way. Do you know what I mean? Like people now are taking so many selfies, for instance. I mean, the selfie is. Is one thing we might really talk about this new innovation, which is of course not in the Sontag, but if we've now become akin to self murderers or if we have become impervious to this kind of murder because we're seeing ourselves as an outsider all the time.
Right? That's really what that is, right? This idea that we're in a sense trapped inside our own bodies, which when I think about it too hard or for too long, I start to feel very claustrophobic that we're never going to see ourselves except through some apparatus outside of us, a mirror or reflection in some other surface or a photo. Therefore, people walking around have an access to us just through their own vision of us, which we can never have of ourselves. And the photograph, as you're saying, and as Sontag says, possesses us in that way so that the photographer bags us like they would game or something like that.
But now that we could flip it around, now that we have these phones that have that function where we can view ourselves through that lens pretty regularly, and now that people take, especially like teenagers take photographs of themselves all day long. Yeah. Is that equivalent to a kind of suicide? Is that where Sontag would go with the iPhone? Or would she simply say that people have now become impervious to this kind of murder? Or both? I don't know. You know, these teens, suddenly everyone knows what their best angles are, how to perfectly capture, you know what I mean?
Like, they're very savvy about this.
32:09 Wes: Yeah, you got to do. You got to do the duck. The duck lips, apparently. I don't know why people think that helps.
32:16 Erin: It used to take an entire studio system of experts in different areas of, you know, image consulting and curation to help movie stars become the best versions of themselves. And even those movie stars often were not self aware enough to know what was being captured. And now it seems everyone is their own image consultant. And this kind of knowledge is very, very opaque to me. So it's, it's shocking that somebody could apparently successfully do this. To know themselves so well from the outside and to get that kind of distance from the self. It's very eerie to me.
32:51 Wes: Yeah. I'm thinking about this idea that when she says it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed and that's a kind of sublimated murder, that people are very comfortable with doing this with themselves. Right. Symbolically possessing themselves with these selfies and the sense in which that is a kind of murder. And of course, anything that puts us into the realm of the image and the imaginary, I think it subtracts from life, you know, in ways that we've. We've talked about before because it takes us outside of the immediate experience, but it is also just concerned with one aspect of the experience, which is the visual.
So we're not even worried in that moment, you know, as we haven't. We're like. It's as if we have an image consultant. But we're not worried about our character, for instance. We're just worried about how we look in a particular moment in time in an image. And so we're imagining the other. We're more strongly oriented to the other on a specific axis of the. Involving the image. Right. So there's a lot of Ways to be caught up in how others see us or in the field of recognition that others supply. But how one looks, of course, is just a very, very thin part of that.
And to be oriented towards that, I think, is part of this murder and involved with cameras.
34:15 Erin: Oh, I see, yeah. So you're reducing the self, or you're killing off several layers of self in fantasy.
34:23 Wes: Right, yeah. There's benefits to that, because if the image is just a signifier for all the rest of it, well, that's a very controllable thing in the moment. You just have to be able to pose correctly, and then it's not actually about who you are or even how you were feeling at that particular moment. Why not? If you're feeling sad at the tourist site, why not take a picture of yourself looking sad and remember that actual feeling? That's the part of the memory that is apt to get erased by the attempt at being an image consultant to oneself. But she does talk about how the gun replacement thing, and she talks about this with safaris.
Right. It's an interesting example. So guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it has always been, what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered mortal needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot, but when we are nostalgic, we take pictures. And so this is a segue into the idea that photography is an instrument of nostalgia. There's a touch of pathos. You can do it even with a grotesque subject. There's something that photography does to dignify the subject and participate in people's mortality, because the subject is going to pass away.
So whatever you've preserved. So this runs cross current, I think, to what she's been saying, which is that this preserving quality to photographs highlights, by contrast, the mortality and temporality and temporariness of the objects or subjects that it's recording. My photos are going to live forever in the cloud, but not me. It's not fair.
36:18 Erin: Right, right. Well, once we can upload your consciousness to the cloud, then it'll all be shortly.
36:24 Wes: Soon.
36:24 Erin: Yeah. Then you'll be a collection of photos with a curating consciousness, which. Which is, I think, a little bit of what she's getting at here, but I don't want to get ahead of myself, but the idea that something about the preservation with the camera highlights the temporariness of the thing being photographed, as you put it. This is where things get kind of interestingly tricky. I'm pulling partly from The Arbus essay. This idea of the camera as a passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions. I think Sontag would argue that we need to know what we're taking in a photograph, say of a panda, that pandas are endangered, for that photograph to have some kind of moral purchase. Right. She's going to describe the narrativizing or the contextualizing need for photographs to really explain anything or to have any kind
37:20 Wes: of weight, ethical or political effect.
37:23 Erin: Right, right. It's as though the default mode of the camera is one which is anti moral. And to be put to a moral use. Photos need historical context and an overriding narrative for which they would then come in as secondary items to just furnish evidence toward an already established moral framework or position. So when we have a camera and we're taking photos of something like say we are war photographers and we're photographing people dying in front of us, something about having a camera in that moment, she would argue, justifies that position.
You know, it's okay for us to be there watching people die in front of us because we're recording it. So I think this is what she talks about with the camera being a passport. And there's no moral boundary. You know, the moral boundary that might be there that might make us say, turn away from that moment is evaporated because we're a war photographer and that's what we're there to do is photograph people dying, say. So it seems almost anti moral or outside of morality entirely to be walking around with a camera. Or it may even be pro immorality.
Like if we're, if we're, if we're taking a photograph of someone doing something which we might deem immoral. She says that the relationship of the person with the camera to the thing that they are photographing is one of encouragement. So the person might even be encouraged to keep going because they see that they're being photographed. And if we're going to contrast that with this idea of the preservation of nature or something which has maybe a moral weight attached to it, or a photograph which we want to serve a moral end, like showing a part of the Amazon rainforest which has been cut down, you know, taking pictures of the stumps of trees to serve a moral point, we would need a larger apparatus of narrative to even understand why that photo might be moral.
I mean, maybe I'm arguing against myself because when I see that, I might be sad just seeing trees cut down. But I think Sontag would argue that one would need to have it explained to them that the Amazon is being cut down because people are, you know, whatever, building McDonald's and need. Need trees cut down in the Amazon to furnish the wood to build those McDonald's. And this is a bad thing, and here's evidence of it. And then you see the image of the Amazon cut down and you're filled with moral indignation at this image. In other words, there's a default amoral or immoral position that the camera typically has.
And when put toward some kind of end, which is supposed to be propagandistic or moralistic in a sort of positive way, it needs a lot of extra help to get somebody there, to get them to a moral position, which we would consider to be on the plus side of that equation.
40:23 Wes: Yeah, you're getting at the point that she makes about the use of photographs in service of conscience and in service of political and moral feeling. And she makes this interesting point that it's different for conscience than it is for desire. So in a way, desire is ahistorical. You just need certain archetypes, like if you want to induce sexual lust, you just. There's pictures of bodies. But if you want to arouse moral feelings and historical context is very important, if you want to awaken conscience, you need a given historical situation, and the context around that has to be clear.
So she brings up, for instance, the example of Civil War battlefield photographs. Not dampening enthusiasm for the war, for instance. You're not going to just produce the feeling of revulsion for the war with a photograph. There's not already the seed of that revulsion already there. Or for instance, photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one and help build up a nascent one. And so she brings up, of course, that famous picture of the Vietnamese child who's just been napalmed, that iconic picture. And that did a lot right to increase revulsion against the Vietnam War.
But by contrast, the Korean. Well, actually, I think the point she makes about the Korean War was that there was no photographic record or not much. And there wasn't because the ideology did not allow that right. There was no space for that because of a pre existing ideology. So if we want to produce photographic evidence, we're doing that in the context of an ideology or in the context of a naming of an event or the context of an existing political consciousness. We're not just going to invent a political consciousness whole cloth by use of photographs.
And then she goes on to talk about her own personal experience seeing Holocaust photographs and how important that was to her and life changing. I mean, that was for me, actually, as a kid too. She says it divided her life into two parts and I kind of felt the same way. But the overall point, despite that example, is that it doesn't. Right. These photographs aren't necessarily going to strengthen conscience. They can also corrupt it, anesthetize it. Because through such photographs we get this repeated exposure, we get inured, we get used to atrocities and seeing things that might have once have shocked us.
The shock kind of fades. So it's really a double edged sword. She says it can deaden the conscience as much as arouse it.
43:11 Erin: She talks about the omnipresence of photographs having an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility, how we can be inured to those images. And we'll wrap up here, but in the next part, maybe we can begin by talking about what she might be implying about an ethical comportment towards photographs. Like she calls photographs themselves an ethics of seeing. They're furnishing an ethics of seeing. And I'm wondering if she is implicitly pushing back against that or showing us maybe some ways to think about how we might push back against the perhaps too transgressive mode of seeing which photographs are furnishing us with. So maybe we can dive into that at the beginning of part two. All right, thanks, Wes.
43:56 Wes: Thank you.
The Music of Longing in “Amadeus” (1984) – Part 2
Mar 09, 2026
Are Mozart’s gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri’s design, which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman.
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0:12 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Amadeus. We just got done. Sort of are still talking about Mozart's relationship to the divine and whether or not he might be something like a Christ figure. And I just wanted to talk about Salieri's own relationship with his father. We hear that his father is a man of commerce. And so Salieri, he seems to relate to God in this way, in this economic system kind of way where every prayer should be immediately rewarded and the hard work of self denial should result in God's favor. That, you know, he's making these sort of long term investments in asceticism and self denial that should see a return through the genius that God will give him and the ability to sing to him.
And so some of that seems to be a result of his relationship with his father, who is not at all interested in music. And Salieri seems to think, and even asks the priest, who we haven't even mentioned is his interlocutor through the entire film, because the whole thing is one long flashback told from Salieri's perspective. You know, wouldn't you have thought this was a sign that this miracle had happened? And the miracle, of course, is his father choking on something, probably a meatball and dropping dead. And that frees Salieri up to pursue his musical career, which his father had previously denied.
So I don't know. I just. I don't know that there's. There's much to be said about this that we haven't already said. But I'm so interested in this paternal relationship with Salieri and God, Salieri and his father, of the two being so diametrically opposed to each other in one way. Well, in terms of Salieri's relationship to them, right. Like he so doesn't care for his father that he thinks of killing him off as this huge convenience. And yet he's so in love with God and with wanting to sing to God that he gives up his whole life for his love of that paternal figure.
Of course, it's also about his own narcissism and self glorification and looking like a really big and important person. But I don't know, I find it really knotty and difficult to untie that twin strand of these two father figures in his life.
2:40 Wes: The two father figures being his father and the.
2:43 Erin: And God.
2:44 Wes: And God. Okay.
2:45 Erin: Yeah.
2:45 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting, he says about his father. How could I tell him what music meant to me? That's when, you know, he tells his father he wishes he could be like Mozart. And the father says, why? Do you want to be a trained monkey? You'd like me to drag you around doing tricks like a circus freak? Sam, I have a homicidal feeling. How could I tell him what music meant to me? And, yeah, music is everything. Music is a religious experience for him. It's his way of connecting to God. And so it means more than commerce or a practical profession.
And the miracle is that. Yeah, the first miracle is that his father dies. And we get no sense that he's sad about his father's death or that he has any sort of familial feeling, you know, typical feeling towards his. Towards his father, any love. And it's interesting he uses that word, that little transition, you know, where it's. Do you know what happened? A miracle that occurs twice in the film. The second time is when Joseph yawns. Emperor Joseph yawns, so he says. And then. And then. Do you know what happened? A miracle. With that yawn, I saw my defeat turn into victory.
Mozart was lucky the emperor yawned only once. And before that, he's really getting into the music. It's the Marriage of Figaro. So he says. The restored third act was bold, brilliant. The fourth was astounding. I saw a woman disguised in her maid's clothes, hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years simply because he thinks she is someone else. There's another really great song that. That is premised on this idea. You know the song where someone puts out a classified ad to find love and it turns then the person who responds to it is his wife.
4:45 Erin: Oh, you mean if you're into peanuts in pina coladas
4:51 Wes: getting caught in the rain. Yeah. So, anyway, I don't know which one is better. Marriage of Figaro or that one. But anyway.
4:59 Erin: So, yeah, it's hard to talk about. Okay.
5:01 Wes: So offered. We hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years simply because he thinks she is someone else. I heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theater conferring on all who sat there perfect absolution. God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable. Making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar. There's this really interesting juxtaposition in Salieri between his ability to appreciate the music and to feel almost gratitude towards it. To have this very, very authentic, appreciative relationship to Mozart's music and yet to have crippling envy at the same time.
And you see it at various points in the film where Mozart asks him, what'd you think of that? And he responds honestly, like, it's amazing. He doesn't hide that. He doesn't try to conceal that. And as part of his revenge plan against Mozart, he can't help himself. He can't help but completely appreciate and inhabit the music and even see its kind of divine nature. Right? One observation was that it contains longing. This other observation is that it contains forgiveness another sort of divine element. He makes the immediate switch from that to his envy and desire for revenge.
And the miracle, of course, it's not a religious miracle. The religious miracle in this is replaced by the miracle that serves envy or malice or the eradication of whatever gets in his way. Whatever gets in the way of his plan to make music his life. In the first case, it was his father, and now it's Mozart. His father was the impediment. Mozart is the impediment. And the miracle is the removal of that impediment. The miracle is an expression of divine authority, right? Divine power. Something that shows up in the world and breaks the rules of the laws of nature or something like that, and so forth and therefore is illustrative of God's power.
The miracle is just some chance circumstance that gets rid of an obstacle. So I thought you were talking about Father. It's not like Mozart is a father figure to him exactly except insofar as he worships him as an artist and a musician. But they do certainly stand in parallel here in being these impediments to his success which he has. To which she has to remove. Very Oedipal, as they would say in the psychoanalytic community.
7:49 Erin: Right.
7:50 Wes: Kill. Kill the father.
7:51 Erin: Right. Yeah. Well, that's a really interesting idea, that. It's almost as if Salieri is so unbothered by his own father's death because God is his. It's like a case of secret parentage, right? God is his real father because he has this extra hereditary gift that doesn't seem to really come from his father. Right. It's almost this sort of switched at birth type of thing or. And, of course, Salieri's whole identity. Well, switched at birth is maybe right, because it's as if Salieri's whole identity is about actually being this secret, divine, anointed, special boy, right.
Who likes himself because everybody likes him. He's following what he thinks is this divinely appointed mission. And then maybe the entrance of Mozart. I like this idea that he's almost kind of like a father figure, but maybe it's also this. He was really the one who was. You know, Salieri maybe really was his father's son all along. And it was like Mozart again, the sibling thing. Like, you know, oh, suddenly you have this. You find out God had a second family or something like that. And those kids all, you know, like, we're these super high achievers.
And you previously at the very. Thinking of yourself as being at the very end of the bell curve, you know, suddenly look to your left and discover that there's a whole lot more empty space. And then that other kid from that other family way into it.
9:32 Wes: The people who this has happened to kind of. But, yeah.
9:35 Erin: Oh, gosh.
9:36 Wes: Well, not finding out they have a second family, but when the parent moves on and has another family with a different, you know, with a stepmother, and then that new family is all shiny and pretty and highly accomplished, and the one that the father left is. Is not.
9:53 Erin: Of course. Of course. Right, well. And that. That would stand to reason, especially if the first family was a. Was sort of the means by which the father established himself. Right, right. Yeah. And then. Then he gets to sort of start over with a fresher. A person he feels he deserved. I just rewatched First Wives Club, so the.
10:12 Wes: I don't think I've seen it.
10:13 Erin: Oh, my gosh. And it's like, it's good. It's one of those movies that I just. I discovered that my best friend had never seen it. And I was like, how do you even know anything about me if you've never seen this movie? It's so, so important to me.
10:27 Wes: This is from 1996. Okay.
10:29 Erin: Yeah. If you look at the cast list, you understand Keaton.
10:33 Wes: Yeah. Now I. Yeah, I'm looking at. Yeah, it makes sense.
10:37 Erin: It's kind of like the ultimate boomer movie. But I Love it so much. It has nothing to do with anything. I'm so sorry. Maybe just to switch gears a little bit. There's also a lot, I think, being said here about criticism. I mean, really, Salieri's gift is this gift of appreciation. It is like a divine appreciation that nobody else has because they're too stupid to get it. Like, Salieri is just smart enough. I mean, this is the torture, right? He's just smart enough to really get the divinity of Mozart's talent but not smart enough to produce it himself. And that's kind of the. It's kind of the critical sweet spot. You know, if Salieri wanted to become a critic, a music critic I don't know if they had those in Vienna or.
11:20 Wes: He could have been a producer, you
11:21 Erin: know, or a producer. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
11:24 Wes: I'm gonna make you a star. That would have been the positive way to deal with the situation.
11:31 Erin: Right, right. And that, too, I think, you know, the idea of criticism, I mean, this is a thorny one too, but there's a parental kind of relationship which criticism or the role of the critic maybe reveals. Or there's a sort of similar mechanism, the role that he ends up playing with the Requiem to kind of bring out what he's not, really bringing out the best in Mozart. Mozart doesn't really need him to produce the Requiem. He doesn't. Certainly doesn't need him to produce anything of greatness. But that semi collaboration that happens at the end is a really interesting moment.
But there's. There's something where the first thing I thought of, and I thought the first thing that you would. You would think of in that scene is there's something vampiric, of course, about Salieri. He really is kind of a vampire figure. And I'm sure our listeners were expecting us to say this seeing as we've talked about that vampiric mechanism of envy in other episodes. But he does seem to be sucking the life out of Mozart. And so the film doesn't seem to be very appreciative, shall we say, of the role of criticism, on the one hand. But on the other, there does seem to be this sort of lost or forgotten trajectory or abandoned, maybe, trajectory that Salieri might have had of being the person who, of course, it would just be within the court of being the champion of Mozart.
The one who. And this is an important critical function, not just to criticize. Right. But to bring greatness to other people's attention. And to say, this is worth holding up, this is important.
13:07 Wes: It's an interesting Paradox. In the end. Because he wants him to produce the Requiem so he can pass it off as his own. And so he needs to keep Mozart alive long enough to do that. But he's also somehow aware that he's using this to kill Mozart. Right. Which. It's an odd way to go about killing someone.
13:29 Erin: It is, Right.
13:30 Wes: Giving them. I'm gonna psychologically torture you to death. How about that? By pretending to be your dead father and asking for this commission. Right. He's not doing anything else I. I don't know about. Right. He's not poisoning.
13:45 Erin: No. And this is. Yeah, this gets back to my opening question. Like, what is he doing here? Is he killing him? Is what is really happening?
13:54 Wes: Oh, was that your. Was that what you meant by that?
13:57 Erin: A little bit. But also other things. Sorry, it's a complicated question and there are a lot of different elements to it, but I think.
14:04 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point. He thinks he's killed him at the end of the film. But was that ever. Does he state. We don't. In the flashbacks, we don't really see him state that intention, do we? He wants to ruin him, but we don't. Yeah. Right. We don't ever see. Or do we. Do we say that he's right. We see the old Salieri say he wanted to kill him. But do we ever see the young Salieri say that? That's the question.
14:31 Erin: I don't think so.
14:33 Wes: Yeah. I don't remember him saying that. He wants to ruin him. He wants to get an opera passed off as his own.
14:39 Erin: The Mass passed off as his own. Yeah. And then he'll have this great joke. He does say. There is the implication somehow that Mozart will be dead and so he won't be found out.
14:50 Wes: Okay.
14:50 Erin: So that is part of it. I'm trying to find the exact moment.
14:55 Wes: So much of this is in the narrative. And the voiceover of old Salieri that does create the opportunity to wonder what's actually going on. Anyway, obviously he has ill intent and he cares about ruining Mozart. Or he doesn't. He certainly doesn't care about preserving Mozart's life except to the extent that it'll help him.
15:15 Erin: Yeah, here's the. Here's the Finish the opera.
15:18 Wes: But yeah.
15:18 Erin: The old Salieri voiceover. My plan was so simple that it terrified me. First I must get the death mass and then I must achieve his death. Achieve his death is actually a really great verb. His funeral. Imagine it. The cathedral, all Vienna sitting there. His coffin. Mozart's little coffin in the Middle. And then in that silence, music. A divine music bursts out over them all. A great Mass of death. Requiem Mass for Wolfgang Mozart. Composed by his devoted friend, Antonio Salieri. And this is where he almost does that. Hannibal Lecter, Salieri, like, you know, like he's sucking the life out of him.
What sublimity. What depth. What passion in the music. Salieri has been touched. Touched by God at last. And God forced to listen. Powerless to stop it. I, for once, in the end, laughing at him. The only thing that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? How does one kill a man? It's one thing to dream about it. Very different when you. When you have to do it with your own hands. And so that sort of left open. I mean, this is total insanity. This is really why we, I guess, see him in the insane asylum because he otherwise seems sane.
But the idea that he's pulling one over on God, like, you know, it's really funny.
16:34 Wes: But it does make it seem like killing would be a separate step. And then maybe he'd never had to do that just because Mozart did the job of dying beforehand.
16:46 Erin: Yeah, maybe. Something about embodying the father. Right. And hounding him.
16:50 Wes: Yeah, that's the impression I got, that the. That was. But it's an odd way to try to kill someone. I mean, so that does this. If we wanted evidence of a unreliable narrator in that sense, then that would be it.
17:04 Erin: Right.
17:04 Wes: He's recasting this whole project as. You know, it's not just, I'm gonna get the Requiem for myself but it's coming. And not just that I'm gonna ruin Mozart or interfere with his fortunes, but that I'm gonna. That I killed him as well.
17:21 Erin: Well. And in the end, he's the one who feels killed, in fact, because old Salieri tells the priest, he says, you're a merciful God. He destroyed his own beloved rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of his glory. He killed Mozart. And kept me alive to torture. 32 years of torture of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter. All the time fainter till no one plays it at all. So it's as if Mozart actually has sucked the life out of him. You know, there's a sort of reverse vampirism going on in that. Mozart getting the last laugh. But then Mozart outliving him and Salieri becoming sort of undead.
17:59 Wes: He does have that quality.
18:01 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
18:02 Wes: Well, we are talking about the vampiric quality.
18:05 Erin: Yeah, definitely.
18:06 Wes: In a way.
18:07 Erin: Yeah.
18:07 Wes: I see the Film, in a way, is about mediocrity. And that's. You know, it's a great scene at the end where he's. He's being wheeled out and mediocrities. I absolve you. As if he's the. As if he's the priest now. Priest of the high priest of mediocrity. The torture of being mediocre. Maybe almost being a genius, but not quite having it. How do you live with that?
18:34 Erin: That's the most compelling line in the film for me. Why did God give me the longing if he wasn't going to fulfill it? Salieri has some really twisted ideas about his relationship with God in which he's been almost, if you like, set up by God in a way. I mean, part of it is his own structure of thinking, but he's also been set up to believe that his relationship with God is one of wish fulfillment. But granted, he has a lot of really parsimonious, really false, really twisted ideas of who God is and what our relationship should be to the divine and magical thinking and narcissism and all this other stuff.
But that. That's the one really unanswerable question I think, that. That he asks in the film is why do I have the longing? And with that, I think, implicated in that is the just enough talent to know where you aren't. And that, I think, is a really torturous thing about being human. I think we all understand this on. On a certain level. Like on. On a level that maybe isn't still close to Salieri's.
19:48 Wes: But we didn't write 40. 40 operas.
19:51 Erin: Right, right, right. Or really understand and study and give up so much.
19:58 Wes: Right, but that's the. In a way, that's the answer to the why be given this longing if he's not going to be able to fulfill it? And the answer, in a way, is that he wants it too much. And Mozart is sort of the poster boy for not wanting it too much. And the longing goes into the art object and into what he creates, rather than stifling the act of creation itself.
20:21 Erin: Well, yes, and as I've already suggested, I think there's very little in Salieri's when he's not talking about Mozart and the beauty of Mozart's music. There's very little in Salieri's speeches talking about his own relationship to music that isn't actually just about status and wanting to be. Wanting to be the greatest. Wanting to get all the gold stars and be the smartest boy in school. And he's at the top of the heap and everybody likes him and all his teachers love him. And then of course, this exchange student comes in who's doing high level calculus in his head in the third grade and just ruining his life.
Right. So in a way, it's. He deserves it, but that, you know, I wanted to just talk about that a bit and that relationship to the other members of the court and the fact that Salieri, when he's asked whether the opera that they're commissioning, for instance, should be in German or Italian, Salieri won't offer an opinion. He doesn't. When solicited for these types of musical opinions, he offers a political answer designed to keep him in with everybody else. So he's really good at being an operator. He's really good at keeping his post and being in this really cozy and obviously extremely wealthy position.
He wants everybody to love him and to think that he's great and that he's this beloved son of God. And he has this obviously tremendous admiration for Mozart, but for him, the relationship with music seems really tied up in politics. And then we see Mozart's own relationship to politics on scales both big and small, and how inept he really is at controlling himself to get along in order to make any money. Like he has no understanding of how to deal with people. And he's also not interested in the political in his work, which is a point made when they talk about the Marriage of Figaro being banned, which is kind of an interesting scene we could go to.
22:11 Wes: Sure.
22:12 Erin: The emperor confronts him about how the Marriage of Figaro shouldn't be staged. It stirs up hatred between the classes, I think the emperor says. And Mozart says, well, I hate politics. You know, this isn't about politics. And then he goes into just the structure of this one musical piece that he really loves and where he keeps adding more and more people into the harmony and ultimately says that he sustains this for 20 minutes of continuous music. And he says, in a play, if more than one person speaks at once, it's just noise. But with opera, with music, you can have 20 individuals all talking at the same time. And it's not noise, it's perfect harmony.
22:52 Wes: Yeah.
22:53 Erin: So I love this idea. Like the idea that music is about harmony, not political strife, not about separating people. But of course, Joseph is talking about his sister Antoinette and how things are going really badly for her. So there's also something to be said for not inciting any more political strife than what he wants to deal with.
23:14 Wes: Get my sister killed.
23:15 Erin: Right, right. Salieri is Writing operas with the themes that the academy approves in air quotes. Academy approves, you know, these mythological subjects which are extra historical, which don't really get into the weeds. And Mozart is about the personal and the ignoring kind of the political in a way, or being oblivious to it.
23:38 Wes: Yeah. Joseph pivots from the whole politics objection to the idea that this is rubbish or vulgar.
23:47 Erin: Right.
23:47 Wes: He says, Mozart, music is not the issue here. This is in response to the whole 20 individuals in harmony. Music is not the issue here. No one doubts your talent. It's your literary judgment that's in question. Even with the politics taken out, it would still remain a vulgar farce. Why waste your spirit on so much rubbish? Surely you can choose more elevated themes. Right. And this is sort of in line with Salieri's idea that Mozart himself ought to be more elevated as a character since his music is. Right. So the content of Mozart's character and also the content of, you know, the libretto or the play it's based on should reflect the beauty of the music. Mozart says elevated. What does that mean, elevated? I am fed up to the teeth with these elevated things. Old dead legends. Why must we go on forever writing of gods and legends? And Salieri says, because they do. They go on forever.
24:44 Erin: That's van Swieten.
24:45 Wes: That's not Salieri.
24:46 Erin: Yeah, that's right. And Joseph. Yeah, and Joseph also isn't the one who says this. This thing about the vulgar farce. That's van Swieten, too.
24:55 Wes: Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's an error. I created a transcript using AI and I had to get speaker attributions. I had to get it to guess them. And for the most part, it did a good job. But. Yeah, it did.
25:08 Erin: Really.
25:08 Wes: All right.
25:09 Erin: Yeah.
25:09 Wes: So. Yeah. So they represent the eternal in us. Opera is here to ennoble us, Mozart, you and me, just the same as His Majesty. Rejection of the elevated theme in favor of, you know, what's going on in the Marriage of Figaro, which is something more, I guess you put it, it's more personal.
25:25 Erin: Yes, I suppose, because Don Giovanni, the reading of Don Giovanni. Yeah.
25:30 Wes: Oh, is this Don Giovanni?
25:31 Erin: Sorry, no, no, this is Marriage of Figaro. But I just mean in general, in Mozart's work, it seems that he wants or he includes or values a personal connection in the material. You can argue here. Well, he's sort of about farce and he's a farcical character, so perhaps that's the personal element that he connects with. But I'm. The Salieri interpretation of Don Giovanni as being a Very personal statement about his father that. That must be characterizing all of Mozart's work. And there must be something in this that's really speaking to him that he really loves, which he kind of indicates in his description of the scene that he read. So maybe not personal, but just. He likes it. He thinks this is something he can work with.
26:15 Wes: There's more, maybe, about human relationships. Right. It's a very. The way it's portrayed by Salieri. The relationship between the husband and the wife, for instance. Or Mozart himself gives us an account of the way it begins with the measuring for what, the bridal bed.
26:33 Erin: Yes.
26:33 Wes: Yeah. It's more involved in direct human concerns. It's more down to earth than just mythology that turns out to be actually a very good vehicle for the sublime. Right. For longing, unfulfilled longing. And the things that Salieri appreciates. You don't need the elevated themes to get the elevation, let's say. The content doesn't have to reflect that.
26:57 Erin: Yeah. And that seems to me a really good and important element of how the film understands art overall. And just Mozart as an artist. I think it's really smart about what really excites artists and how maybe how Salieri is lacking in ways which he doesn't even appreciate. He's very much coloring within the lines throughout his career. And this doesn't seem to be even a question for him of what he really connects with, what he really wants to be writing about. You know, that doesn't seem to cross his mind at all. Is there something big that we're missing here? I guess we haven't really talked about Stanzi much.
27:35 Wes: Good old Stanzi.
27:37 Erin: She's. She's kind of. Kind of great. Poor woman had to deal with a lot. Oh, I know. The too many notes idea, too. We should really get to. I wanted to talk about that, actually, in relationship to this whole criticism thing. Right. You know, this idea. You could only hear so much at once.
27:57 Wes: Yeah. So it's Orsini Rosenberg who brings this up earlier. Right. So calls his piece tiresome. And let's see. A young man trying to impress beyond his abilities. Too much spice, too many notes. The way Salieri characterizes us later on. This is the premiere of the Abduction, he says, showing off like the greedy songbird that she was, he's talking about is the woman he's into. Ten minutes of ghastly scales. Arpeggios, whizzing up and down like fireworks at a fairground. And then he's worried about the fact that Mozart slept with Her. And then when we get Joseph's reaction, it's good.
Of course, now and then. Just now and then it seemed to touch. And then Orsini Rosenberg eventually fills it in, you know, with the whole. Too many notes. Very well put. Too many notes, Mozart. I don't understand. There are just as many notes as I required, neither more nor less. Joseph, my dear fellow, there are in fact only so many notes the ear can hear in an evening. And then he asks Salieri if he's right and then Salieri agrees. So this is one of those times when Salieri is, in fact, not honest. And Mozart said, this is absurd. Later on, Salieri.
Yeah. As you pointed out, casts that in terms of the fact that Joseph is easily bored. He doesn't. What is it? The royal attention.
29:23 Erin: Too many demands on the royal ear.
29:26 Wes: Royal ear, yeah. Yeah. So Salieri understands that. Yeah. This is really a matter of their inability to appreciate. Not anything that Mozart's doing wrong.
29:39 Erin: Yeah, the too many notes idea. I suppose it's suggestive of restraint or keeping things simple. You know, Joseph is accused by Salieri of needing. Or maybe the people of Vienna, or the court, rather, of Vienna of needing to have that bang at the end of the song. So everyone knows when to clap. Or maybe that's his friend from the lower. The theater who makes that observation. I can't quite remember now. But, you know, at first we think that this is about them just being stupid, like musically stupid or Mozart being beyond all of them. But then we discover that, in fact, the common people are really into Mozart and there's a sort of, like, class distinction being made, which is odd.
So the court of Vienna is more like the. A parallel would be something like the French Academy and then, say, the Impressionists rebelling against that and portraying the common people and being interested in more lowly subjects. You know, ordinary people as subjects rather than classical myth and great heroes of history and things like that. And so something about Mozart's subject and his interest in the common people seems also to be borne out by his appreciation by the common people that we see later in the film. Though I'm not sure I buy that.
I mean, he did die poor. But anyway, you know, as we close
31:05 Wes: out here, a little history. What? Yeah. Why did he die poor? Too many notes.
31:13 Erin: I'm not 100% sure. I haven't refreshed my memory on that. I mean, he wasn't. He did feel that Salieri was pushing him out of certain things. That there was a cabal at court of people who were pushing him out of appointments. He was passed over to be the music teacher of that woman. I forget who it was. Joseph's niece. Maybe he was passed over to be her teacher. I don't think there was really a guy with a lot of dogs that he had to resort to, but certainly he was passed over for things as a result of jealousy. I don't know how much of that. I mean, Mozart was in the letters, a really intelligent and sensitive guy.
So I doubt that he had the sort of social problems that Mozart seems to have in the film of not being able to get along with people at all and being kind of a jerk. So I'm not quite sure. Well, Wes, it's time to leave genius behind and go back to mediocrity. Is that. Is that what we're all doing? This is one of my favorite movies. I love this movie so much. So I hope you enjoyed it and weren't put off by the length. I know you were. I made you watch the Director's cut.
32:21 Wes: No, I actually. No, no, I enjoyed it.
32:25 Erin: Oh, great. Great. Yeah. The stagings of the opera scenes are also just incredible. I love the Queen of the Night.
The Music of Longing in “Amadeus” (1984)
Mar 03, 2026
If an understanding of music implies a love of structure, perhaps the musician’s relationship to his art mirrors the one he has with authority, both human and divine. Salieri, whose father was a man of commerce, sees God as a kind of bank manager who records prayers and sacrifices as payments on a long-term loan of musical talent. Salieri’s economics work just fine until the arrival of Mozart, who seems to have put up no collateral—he’s ”a giggling, dirty creature” in the words of Salieri—but has received the equivalent of a billion-dollar loan. Are Mozart’s gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri’s design, which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Wes & Erin discuss the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman.
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0:11 Erin: If an understanding of music implies a love of structure, perhaps the musician's relationship to his art mirrors the one he has with authority, both human and divine. Salieri, whose father was a man of commerce, sees God as a kind of bank manager who records prayers and sacrifices as payments on a long term loan of musical talent. Salieri's economics work just fine until the arrival of Mozart, who seems to have put up no collateral. He's a giggling dirty creature, in the words of Salieri, but has received the equivalent of a billion dollar loan.
Are Mozart's gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri's design which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Today we're discussing the 1984 film Amadeus, directed by Miloš Forman. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, do you think that Salieri murdered Mozart?
1:17 Wes: Are we talking historically or are we talking within the world of the film?
1:24 Erin: Let's say both.
1:25 Wes: Well, historically, as far as I know, it's very inaccurate. Yeah, Salieri was very successful. And there's no evidence he was worried about Mozart.
1:34 Erin: Well, there's a little evidence.
1:36 Wes: Okay, all right, well, you have to tell me about it. So within the world of the film, is he an unreliable narrator? That really honestly didn't occur to me, but I guess it's possible. What do you think?
1:47 Erin: Well, his being an unreliable narrator or.
1:50 Wes: Yeah, within the world of the film, did he not kill Mozart? I mean, is there a possibility he's misreporting?
1:57 Erin: I think so. The one scene that really makes me think directly about that dynamic of this unreliable narration is actually after Salieri's opera when Mozart comes down and gives his non compliment compliments to Salieri, which I find really painful. And it occurred to me as I was watching that maybe this was something Salieri's sort of impression of what Mozart said to him, that maybe Mozart was actually giving him real compliments, in other words, and Salieri was remembering it as this cruel mockery. Like when one hears such sounds, what can one think but Salieri or something like that.
He didn't know such music was possible. And that was just a moment where I thought, well, that's really kind of a matter of perception on Salieri's part. And it just reminded me that we are getting all of this filtered through his perspective. And what else might he have misinterpreted, exaggerated? I'm not saying that that is either of those things, but it could be. I mean, Mozart himself thought that he was poisoned at the end of his life speech. Yeah. Which gave rise to the theory that Salieri had poisoned him because they were competitors.
And Mozart did think that Salieri had iced him out of certain positions. Talked badly about him, though. Salieri was really well loved. He was the teacher of, among others, Mozart's own son. So presumably there was no ill will there. But Beethoven was a good friend of Beethoven's, actually, which is not an easy thing to be good friends with Beethoven.
3:38 Wes: What did you say? I know it's more than deafness probably, but.
3:43 Erin: Yeah, yeah, just a really kind of unpleasant guy. There's a list in this article I gave you I really like and listeners will really enjoy this. Albert Borowitz, who was kind of a true crime expert, wrote lots of books about crime. He has this article from the 70s called Salieri and the Murder of Mozart. And this predates the Shaffer play by a couple of years. So it doesn't get into that. You know, maybe it even kind of precipitated that cultural moment of everyone being obsessed with Mozart again. But he gives a really great outline of the cultural milieu of Mozart and Salieri, what we actually know from the record, from letters, and then how the story of Salieri poisoning Mozart ended up kind of blowing up into this urban myth. And then Pushkin.
4:33 Wes: Did it not start with Pushkin's?
4:35 Erin: No, it was in the ether before that.
4:37 Wes: Mozart and Salieri.
4:38 Erin: Okay, yeah, it was in the ether before that. And then Pushkin took it and ran with it. And then of course, that play was the basis of Amadeus, this article that
4:47 Wes: you're about to read from. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to read it, but I do want to read it. But yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, tell us.
4:54 Erin: He writes about what a well liked guy Salieri was. He was undoubtedly one of the leading composers of his period and an important teacher of composition, counting among his pupils Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Hummel, Süssmayr, Sechter. I don't know how to say that. And Meyerbeer. He was also a famous teacher of singing. All his students loved and respected him. Friends remembered him as generous, warm and kind hearted and even had the ability to laugh at himself, at least at his difficulties with the German language. He must have had a way with people here, Borowitz says, since he apparently established a close personal relationship with the difficult Beethoven and then he goes on to say that Mozart's son was also a student of Salieri's.
And if Constanze was really that concerned about Salieri having murdered her husband, she hardly would have allowed the son to take lessons from him. But as I said, and as the article outlines, there was a little bit of rivalry between them that was recorded in the letters. And Mozart felt he had been pushed out, passed up for opportunities because of Salieri's influence. But there was a great deal of court politics going on at the time. A lot of what the film shows, actually, I think kind of accurately captures some of that. And so there's a great deal of spiritual or poetic truth about what the film captures, certainly in terms of the wider world of the court, but also really shocking and kind of unbelievable, true things.
It captures almost every detail about Mozart's funeral correctly or lack thereof. Also, the Requiem was commissioned by a masked stranger who was intending to pass off the Requiem as. As his own composition. An amateur composer, not Salieri, but the exact same dynamic. And he was kind of haunting Mozart during his last days. And Mozart literally was working on the composition on his deathbed, not with Salieri, but with another composer. So, you know, there's a lot in here, actually pretty interestingly accurate. Maybe not the pink wigs and maybe not the laugh, but.
6:54 Wes: Yeah. Where did that laugh come from? Do you know? Do you know the lore of that? The lore of the laugh?
6:59 Erin: The Tom Hulce, the director you worked with that he would not name? Yeah.
7:04 Wes: Oh, wait, say more about that.
7:06 Erin: Oh, Hulce said that he based it off of a director he worked with, but wouldn't name the guy in Adam.
7:13 Wes: Yeah, okay. But yeah, he came up with that himself. Right. Although, I guess, is it a direction within the original play to laugh like that?
7:22 Erin: I don't think so. I think it was a Hulce flourish.
7:25 Wes: Yeah. So he went from being Pinto in Animal House to being Mozart. As far as I know, that was his trajectory. Quite a force of nature with that laugh. Yeah, the giggling dirty minded creature is what Salieri calls them.
7:43 Erin: I'm curious, you've seen the film before?
7:46 Wes: Yeah, I think I saw it in the theater.
7:47 Erin: In theater as a kid.
7:49 Wes: Yeah, I saw it in the theater. Or not too long after. On vhs.
7:54 Erin: Right, right.
7:55 Wes: To date myself.
7:57 Erin: Yeah, vhs.
7:58 Wes: No, I know. I know your relationship to vhs.
8:03 Erin: You're not going to get any guff from me. Are you annoyed by Mozart? You know, I feel some people have really strong reactions to Hulce's portrayal. I find him Weirdly charming, kind of adorable.
8:19 Wes: Yeah. I think I'd find it. I don't know if charming is the word. I find it entertaining. Yeah.
8:24 Erin: It's a little strong, actually. Yeah. Entertaining. Okay. That's good.
8:26 Wes: Yeah. He falls into a category that the character, as he's portrayed. I have trouble putting him into one category or the other. Is he annoying or charismatic? I think the contrast between the beauty of Mozart's music and I suppose the kind of character that we're supposed to associate with that and then the characters he's portrayed, I think that's very effective. So it's counterintuitive. And maybe like Salieri, we wish that he were a more dignified kind of person, but I guess for the most part, it's funny. I suppose I wish he were more dignified. Right. If I'd learned this about the historical Mozart, if I. I'd be. I. That's disappointing, right?
9:15 Erin: Yes.
9:16 Wes: Or would you Would. Would you mind if Mozart turned out to really be this way in real life?
9:22 Erin: No.
9:22 Wes: Why not?
9:23 Erin: Well, the way to really think of him is he was a child star.
9:27 Wes: Right? That's a good point. Yeah.
9:29 Erin: So how surprised can we really be by crude behavior? Not only that, but much mentioned in Mozart lore is his actual love of scatological humor, which is in his letters. Though another element of that, which perhaps exonerates him a little bit, is the fact that in Vienna, people were apparently obsessed with scatological humor at the time. So he is this sort of dirty little imp occasionally in the letters, but not any different from anybody else walking around Vienna. He just wasn't this sort of lofty musician priest that F. Murray Abraham's Salieri seems to be.
10:09 Wes: Yeah. Was European civilization in its kind of kindergarten phase with respect to social transgression.
10:18 Erin: I suppose.
10:19 Wes: So they hadn't yet reached the John Belushi level of sublime transgression. They were still at the scatological phase. Just come back to the Animal House reference. Is that a movie we're going to do at some point in Animal House?
10:38 Erin: I would be very surprised if we.
10:40 Wes: Were you disappointed to find out that John Belushi was a cocaine addict. All right. So, yeah. So that's interesting. I did find that out. I did a little research into how much of this was accurate, and I did find out that, yeah, he. He liked scatological references in his. In his letters. But I'm curious about what. How those looked, actually. I don't know if you've seen details of that, but specific examples.
11:07 Erin: There's a lot of Ass related stuff.
11:11 Wes: Okay.
11:12 Erin: But yeah, I mean, nothing like, I mean, it's weird, but apparently nothing beyond the pale for what the. You know, it was like everybody was obsessed with spongebob or something. It was constantly quoting spongebob and he
11:23 Wes: really, he really was a child prodigy. And when did he compose his first symphony?
11:28 Erin: I don't know, 12 months, 13 months? No, like seven.
11:31 Wes: In the womb.
11:32 Erin: Yeah. He did something at four, something else at seven.
11:36 Wes: They were trying to play him Bach in the womb.
11:40 Erin: Cause they didn't have baby Mozart yet.
11:44 Wes: They heard Mozart coming back out.
11:46 Erin: Yeah. Baby Palestrina. Hildegard of Bingen. The child star element and the sort of arrested development quality I think actually works really well. It was funny. I was with a friend last week and I was asking her about the desert island disc selections that she would choose and talking about how, oh, it's always so easy. It's easy to pick your number one choice. The problem is when you get into the later numbers in the top 10, you know, what do you save and what don't you save? I knew that her top choice was going to be the Mozart piano sonatas. And mine was, was Judy at Carnegie Hall. And I just suddenly made the connection in my head between Mozart and Judy Garland. Like, oh, right, of course. You know, both child stars, you burn out quickly, you die young.
12:33 Wes: Right.
12:34 Erin: Both geniuses. Once in a. Once in a century, perhaps more talents. Both with really strange and difficult relationships to authority. Though that's something I want to talk about with Salieri too. I really love the flashbacks at the beginning when Salieri, who looks so much older than Mozart throughout the film is a little boy hearing of Mozart, an even younger little boy becoming famous and hearing of him. And they're both wearing blindfolds in the two parallel childhood scenes. Mozart blindfolded as he's playing the piano, this little tiny, maybe four or five year old boy, and Salieri blindfolded, playing blind man's buff in the streets with other kids at maybe 12. So not too much of an age difference between them. And so they're sort of peers or siblings vying for a parent's affection and attention. Or Salieri is vying for it anyway. But I really loved that parallel.
13:30 Wes: Yeah. So it's interesting because in a way the suggestion is that Mozart has been corrupted by being a child star. Oh, yeah. And he was taken by his father around Europe. Right. For tours and to show his tricks.
13:45 Erin: Yeah. With his sister Nannerl, in certain ways, equally gifted as a prodigy.
13:50 Wes: Okay.
13:51 Erin: Yeah.
13:51 Wes: You know, in one Sense, he's corrupted by that. Or less mature. But in another sense, he has music in his bones in a way that Salieri can never have because it's almost like a cradle language. I'm assuming Salieri probably started out young, too, but we get this impression that, yeah, Mozart is effortlessly musical. It's part of his character. It's part of his freedom being in essence. And because of that, he doesn't have to try that hard, almost. That's the way it seems. At least everything comes effortlessly. He can play from memory anything he's heard. Therefore, he gets to be in a world that's completely a world of play, as opposed to seriousness and difficult effort. And so the playfulness comes out in his character is just immaturity.
14:43 Erin: We could argue that that's a criticism we could levy against the film. We do see him writing at the pool table. Lorl, A very young Cynthia Nixon reports back to Salieri that Mozart writes all night long and he is engaged in a lot of effort. I do wonder if the film makes it seem too easy in a sort of unrealistic way.
15:07 Wes: Yeah, he works constantly. We get the idea he works constant, but he's not revising, for instance, manuscripts. It's not, ooh, I wonder what. He's just taking his genius and putting it down on the page, which takes hours and hours and hours. But, yeah, I think the film does a good job of showing both those aspects, actually. You know, the amount of labor involved, but also the lack of agonizing and worry and concern that someone like Salieri in the film would have about. Is this the right phrase or.
15:39 Erin: Yeah, yeah. It seems he's taking a sort of. I think maybe even. Maybe even Salieri uses this phrase at some point, but taking divine dictation or something like that.
15:50 Wes: Yeah. Okay.
15:51 Erin: Salieri seems to be doing that, too, when he's composing the welcome march for Mozart and has the crucifix over the piano as he's working it out and then says, grazie, signore, you know.
16:04 Wes: Yeah.
16:05 Erin: And then, of course, he'll return to the crucifix angrily later and sarcastically say, grazie, signore after Mozart has embarrassed him by improving on the march in front of Salieri and the other people in the room, including the emperor. You know, there's this interesting problem that Salieri seems to have almost as a result of his deep understanding of music and his ability to really see these structures and the difficulty so intensely. I don't know what one would call that other than, say, a problem with embodiment or Something he sees Mozart as this pure vessel for this divine dictation.
Just this spirit of God walking with this angel of God being given, flesh walking around. And the element of collaboration or of the idea that there is a tremendous amount of, say, mediation or it seems that Salieri is just externalizing. It seems as if he's skipping some sort of step of embodiment. Like we can connect artistic inspiration back to God if we're believers or to the Holy Spirit because ultimately God made us. But any inspiration is also kind of the result of our own gifts and what use we put them to and what's being channeled and what's been properly developed in us and all of these other factors that have to deal really intensely with how we are collaborating with that kind of inspiration.
And it seems like there's just this idea in Salieri that Mozart is just a vessel. And when he sees the incarnational reality of him, Salieri is so disillusioned because he doesn't somehow understand humanity in a really fundamental way which, of course means that he's never going to be a great musician by default. Right? Because he doesn't understand that embodiment element, that incarnational, if you like, element which, you know, I think there are a lot of parallels being made sort of winkingly between Mozart and Christ throughout the film. But, yeah, that incarnation, I don't know how else to put it.
It's a sort of weird thing because it's about inspiration rather than anything related to morality or something else which we might tie more distinctly to a kind of embodiment.
18:27 Wes: Well, this is, you know, it's the old question of can we separate the artist from their art? And in this case, he seems to think that the character of the Creator ought to be reflected in the character of the thing produced. Or rather, it's the other way around. So if what Mozart is producing is beautiful, why wouldn't he, as a character, be. Why wouldn't his character be beautiful, which is to say, somehow morally upstanding? And that's the kind of bargain that Salieri, early on thinks he's made with God. It's interesting because he will. He will call Mozart the voice of God which is a very different relationship to God than what he imagines himself having early on, where he says, lord, make me a great composer.
Let me celebrate your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world. Make me immortal after I die. Let people speak my name with love for what I wrote. In return I will give you my chastity, my Industry, my deepest humility every hour of my life. Amen. That's a kind of bargain where he's going to be ascetic, morally upright, in return for a gift that he can use to glorify himself, both himself and God. It's not like he produces beautiful things because he's morally upright. It's just he's gonna give me the talent, and then I'll trade you back the moral uprightness.
But in the case of Mozart, he has this expectation that a vulgar person couldn't possibly produce such beautiful things, which, you know, I'm kind of sympathetic on one level. We know it's not true. Of course we know that the character of artists and thinkers and all kinds of brilliant people, they're not necessarily such great people. Even if what they're producing is great. It doesn't work that way. But somehow it's hard to give up that wish or that expectation. I don't know what you call it, that one would match the other. And why is that? Why do we.
Well, I don't know if you feel the same way, but if you do, why do we have that need for them to line up?
20:46 Erin: Well, I'm certain I do have that need when it comes to certain people. For me, in this film, it seems important or maybe even essential that Mozart, for instance, be obsessed with scatological humor or be kind of a philanderer or be this person who's burning really brightly, living really intensely because he needs to be a kind of a rebuke to Salieri, though Salieri is not really understanding what that rebuke means or what it constitutes. I think that this bargain that you're talking about, which is. Which is a great word for Salieri and this.
This divine accounting that he seems to be doing, it's very much, of course, the result of magical thinking. It's very similar to music itself, which is, of course, the most abstract art form, which is, I think, the reason why it's so closely identified with. With the divine or why music can be called, you know, the Voice of God or something like that by Salieri. Mozart's down and dirty. Mozart's in the weeds. Mozart gets what it is to be human. And it's like Salieri only has half of himself. It's not really maternal or paternal thing, but it's as if Salieri only has one parent, one father figure, one divine, authoritarian father figure.
And we see throughout, you know, Salieri is really about conforming with authority. Doesn't challenge authority at all until he. He breaks with God. And he's still really interested in being in with the authority figures around him at the court. But it's as if he just has this one parental element in him. And he's this. This angel who turns bad. This thing which is not fully incarnated. And Mozart has. He has another interesting relationship with. With a paternal figure, an authority figure, but one of rebellion. He has, obviously, the love of structure and complexity and authority and divinity implied in his great understanding of music.
But then he's also fully human. He's about the personal. He's about pleasure. All of the messy complexity of life, cruelty, beauty, just everything mixed together. And so it seems to me that he's flawed. Of course, he's flawed in these ways which we might find annoying or even perverse. But that seems evidence to me of him being a sort of a full person in a way that Salieri is really not. And what Salieri is missing he just doesn't get throughout the entire. You know, he just sees it as. He's not been given, you know, a proper amount of gift in his sort of divine bank account from God.
God hasn't deposited enough money in his account in this imaginary accounting system. And he thinks that all he needs is just to get more of that divine money. And really he should be looking in a kind of a different direction. I don't know if that means he should be, like, actually going out and sleeping with people or, like, drinking or having a good time. I mean, Salieri, actually. It's even noted in the. In the article that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that he didn't drink. He's Italian. He doesn't drink.
23:58 Wes: But he did have eight. Eight kids and a mistress.
24:02 Erin: There you go. There you go. That's a lot better than the. Than the. The filmic Salieri. But, yeah, you know what I mean? Like, it's. It's. That seems to be the problem. He doesn't really understand people or life or fun or anything that has to do with real life. You can't really live like a priest. And I don't mean that you. You have to go out and have a lot of sex and get drunk and stuff like that. But I also don't think that you can live a fully ascetic life. And. Well, unless you're Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dickinson or something like, I don't know, like you'd have to have a really exceptionally strange personality in order to. In order to live that way and
24:44 Wes: still produce works of genius to live ascetically and still.
24:48 Erin: Yeah, I think so, yeah, I mean, in certain instances, I know it can actually maybe even be a benefit. But I'd say in Salieri's case, there's something. There's a chip missing there.
25:01 Wes: Yeah. It's kind of an interesting contrast, maybe between an obsessional character and a perverse character. Notably, he doesn't ask to be the voice of God. Right. The thing that he calls Mozart over and over again. He asks to be given a voice that can be used to glorify God, but not to have God speak through him, maybe, if I'm getting that right. And so it's not in the mode of inspiration or being taken over by the muse or something like that. It's more about work ethic and discipline. And that's where the asceticism, the moral asceticism fits in. You can't be creative unless all your energies are directed away from the lower things in life towards this one thing. So maybe this is. You know, I had this thought actually when I was watching the film. It's a comparison I don't think you're going to like, between Cuckoo's Nest and this, where it's like Nurse Ratched versus.
26:02 Erin: Oh, sure.
26:03 Wes: But it's. Yeah. So it's a little bit of a Dionysus, maybe, versus the Apollonian here, or it's not quite it, but, you know, the Dionysian versus someone who's much more rigid.
26:17 Erin: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's what I'm talking about with the fact that Salieri seems to have one parent and Mozart really two. I mean, it's sneaky, but he seems to be actually the fusion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian because he's. Because as a great musician, that Apollonian element is already baked in. Right. Those structures are already there.
26:38 Wes: Yeah. There's a lot of formal complexity and structures, as you put it. But, I mean, as a character, though, he does seem to me to be lopsided, like the Only. When does he seem like an adult? I mean, there's an adult like feeling to him when he's composing, when he's at the pool table you know, concentrating, or at the end of the film, when he's involved in creating music. In a way, a serious side of him does seem to come out in those. In those moments, because he's engaged with sublimity and this almost maybe a worshipful quality, but there's an intensity about it. But, yeah, I don't think of him. There's no maturity to him at any other point, is there?
27:20 Erin: No, I Don't think so. That's another interesting element of genius we might hone in on. Or specifically this child star kind of genius where Mozart really seems, I mean, you know, of course whenever I say that, I mean the film Mozart, he really needs a keeper. It seems he needs someone to take care of him, someone to be the responsible one. He needs some guardrail and that, you know, like Stanzi working to make sure that he's actually getting money or, you know, it seems this, this relationship with the parent and the child who is a child star, is one which hobbles their ability to really be a grown up for the rest of their lives.
And yet as you've already said, the parents determination to imbue the child with all of these gifts puts them in this other category where they can't really function in the real world, where they are not really part of normal human society. You know, they become a performing monkey, as Salieri's father says. You know, they become in essence a freak. Of course they have these, these freakish gifts already that are then also properly developed and properly channeled. It's like they're, they're lopsided or they're, you know, one can imagine that they're almost like top heavy or they have these.
If we're to sort externalize it in a kind of metaphor, part of their body is abnormally huge and they need like some apparatus to get themselves around because they have some big head and so they keep falling over and they need somebody to hold them up or something. You know, they have that kind of dynamic going on inside them and that seems to be part of what genius is or how one part of you is this freakish part. And then maybe the rest of you is underdeveloped or, or maybe even normal, but the freakish part of you is so freakish that you need some support, somebody to take care of, someone to help you navigate the world.
29:11 Wes: Yeah. And I think maybe part of the disappointment of finding out that the beauty of the artistic product is not reflected in the character of the creator. Right. Because immaturity, there's an incompleteness about immaturity. And the exceptional art object is there's a completeness to it. And maybe the wish is that we think that the creative process should be redemptive, right? To be able to be creative like that. In a way that's sort of one of the things that gives life meaning. It should be deep and transformative and make us better people and improve our quality of life overall, not just give us this thing to do when we're not drinking ourselves to death or something like that, or when.
30:01 Erin: Which you can only do when you're drinking yourself to death.
30:03 Wes: Right, right. It really is kind of a paradox, and I think Jung pointed this out very well. He makes some point, the effect that if all your energy is going into creativity, if you become obsessed with that in a way, it can lead to self neglect. There's a kind of narcissistic quality to it. And as we know, Narcissus becomes fascinated with his own image to the point of self neglect and dies looking at himself in the pool. He can't attend to the real self because he's attending to this imaginary, more perfect self. Art is. And other high cultural activities, thinking and art and all sorts of things. I mean, they're supposed to reflect a cultural maturity, I think, and supposed to reflect something that's deeply important in life, and yet they can be accompanied by self destruction, self destructiveness, self neglect.
31:02 Erin: You're making me think of. You know, I'm probably like such a. Such a Salieri, certainly in the magical thinking department, but you're making me remember a time in my life where I thought that if I wasn't. If things weren't going well for me spiritually, that I wouldn't be able to write anything that, like, if I were not doing well, like, doing all the things I needed to do spiritually, that. That kind of channel, you know, that I, like, wasn't. I wouldn't be open to inspiration if I wasn't open to grace, because these things seemed to me so twinned together.
And then I. I was obviously, you know, disabused of that notion when I must have been depressed or something, and. And, like, not maybe not going to Mass or something like that, and was then able to write something I thought was really good or something like that. Right. So it's like, wait a minute, that can't work. I mean, and like, I knew logically also that that was not the case. Like, I knew it, but there's. But still, I think when you have those religious structures in your mind, it's very, very difficult to tweeze those things out, to separate them and understand the difference between.
I mean, I still don't fully understand it. Right. Like, I don't. Like, this is why I'm kind of struggling to make the distinction in Salieri's way of thinking between inspiration and grace. Sorry. This was related directly to something that you were saying then about Mozart, which now I've, like, lost the thread now that I've embarrassed myself by telling this story. But no, it's not. But yeah, we want or we think that these things should line up because it kind of doesn't make any sense unless they do. And yet we can even see that there's a way in which creativity can have nothing to do with.
Even with what it in itself purports to be, which is a collaboration with something greater than yourself. It can ultimately be about going deeper into narcissism, as you're suggesting, even as it may be a work of. A work that shows some kind of deep insight, maybe about other people. Like a play. If you're writing a play. And I mean, this is just an example I could think of. And you're like putting in all these characters that are fully realized and really demonstrate a kind of deep understanding of other people. And one would think that this was a work of self forgetfulness.
You can still be working on it to such an extent that it's like a narcissistic. The process of creating it is really narcissistic or something. Is that kind of what you're teasing out from Jung there? Or am I mischaracterizing it?
33:31 Wes: Yeah, I mean, speaking of. Right. You had brought up the relationship between the spiritual. Having your spiritual house in order and being able to be creative. Mozart doesn't seem to think about God at all. But Salieri is obsessed with him and also thinks that Mozart is the voice of God in a sense. So he says after looking at a score of Mozart's, he says on the page it looked like nothing. Beginning, simple, almost comic, just a pulse. Bassoons, basset horns like a rusty squeeze box. And then suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note hanging there, unh, unwavering.
Until clarinet took it over. Sweetened into a phrase of such delight. This was no composition by a performing monkey. This was music I had never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me I was hearing the voice of God. So it's the voice of God, but in an obscene child. I guess that's the vehicle for the voice of God. How can you be as engaged with the sublime as Mozart is and just not even be thinking about God? How can you be the voice of God if God is not even on your radar?
34:51 Erin: Yeah, I really love that quote because I think it reveals so clearly the soul of Mozart's talent. But how it expresses itself in this way, which is at first seems simple, is childlike. And then it becomes plaintive and about longing and about beauty and I think that's kind of what Mozart is about. That understanding of music, as we've already said, seems to me to be the implicit understanding of God or relationship with God, such as it is in him, or such as he can understand that or that he cares about that or appreciates that.
35:30 Wes: That's very interesting. Yeah. Because Salieri will say later, all I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute. If he didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire like a lust in my body and then deny me the talent? Salieri's longing is to sing to God. But in for Mozart, the longing finds its way into the. The longing is in the music itself, which there's an implied relationship to the divine in that. So unfulfillable longing is necessarily relationship to the divine.
36:03 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That's great. I love that too, that Salieri mentions at one point that he's written 40 operas alone. It's like mute. I don't know, maybe. Maybe you weren't mute enough, but. Yeah, but that relationship to the childlike too is something I wanted to, I wanted to address because I do think that there are Christ like elements. Obviously, if Salieri is this, this priest or this monk of music and Mozart is its fullest incarnation or embodiment, then Mozart is already a sort of implied Christ figure. But I also thought of the holy fool element to his behavior.
And I think that that is revealed a bit in even just in that description of Salieri's the squeeze box and the childlike quality, the simplicity that then reveals this hidden depth or that starts to gather to itself some sort of profound implication as it rolls along. The Requiem scenes too are a little reminiscent to me. Maybe this is a stretch, but it occurred to me this time a little reminiscent to me of the agony in the garden, for instance, Salieri saying he won't leave him, you know, Christ sweating blood, you know, in those moments before he's arrested, before the Passion.
It's a little reminiscent of that. And of course he's working on the Mass, so one can't not think of that, that Christ like parallel anyway, Salieri kind of, kind of tending to him like one of the apostles and then eventually falling asleep, though Mozart too falls asleep. So it's obviously not a perfect parallel, but there's something of that, you know, staying up, keeping watch during the suffering and the. And in that instance, the Requiem, which is of course it's a Mass, so it's already a prayer and also the working on it for Mozart, also in that metaphor, would become a kind of prayer because Christ is in the garden praying all night.
Maybe next time we can focus more on Salieri, on Salieri's relationship to his father and of the inciting miracle of his own, the miracle that allowed his musical training to begin. He calls it this. It's a big joke in the movie. It's a great sight gag. He says a miracle happened. We see his father choking and dying. Talk about some dad issues there. But anyway, so maybe in part two, we can talk a little bit more about Salieri and then also just the court and the dynamics at court and maybe some of the really interesting political arguments that are happening as well.
38:39 Wes: Okay.
38:39 Erin: All right. Thank you.
38:41 Wes: Thank you.
The Character of Authority in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (Part 6)
Feb 23, 2026
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
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0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part six of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We just got done sort of. Well, almost. We're pretty much there with. Yeah, we got done with the funeral speeches. Anything more we want to say about that before we get to the killing of Cinna?
0:49 Erin: Just that if they've made it this far, I think I'm delighted to announce that I have a will here that will bequeath some public gardens to all the listeners who are still with us in part just to prove what a swell pair we are.
1:01 Wes: Right. So he does trot out the will at the end and so that seals the deal. And then the crowd goes off to riot, basically. Including. Put fire to the 75 drachmas.
1:13 Erin: That's it. Oh, yeah. How much does drachma is this? Like everybody gets in this class action suit? Everybody gets 43 cents.
1:21 Wes: Speaking of which, did I mention on one of these, the Ides of March coin by Brutus? I probably did. Do you remember that?
1:28 Erin: No.
1:28 Wes: Do you know that Brutus issued a coin commemorating the Ides of March? You're kidding. And there's quite a few of them in gold and silver, and I've seen them in at least one museum. Like at the bottom on one side of the coin there's a hat. There's like a freedom cap kind of thing with two daggers, a dagger on each side, and at the bottom it says EID MAR, abbreviated. And then you turn it over and I think it's a portrait of Brutus. It's either him or his ancestor Brutus, I forget which. But yeah. How crazy is that?
1:59 Erin: This is how you end up in Satan's mouth in Dante.
2:05 Wes: And he issued that coinage to pay his troops. There's a long period where they had to go up. Him and Cassius had to go out and conquer half the world, basically, to raise those armies. They had to go town by town all over the world that Rome had conquered and either demand their loyalty or fight them and defeat them.
2:22 Erin: Not that they wanted to, mind you,
2:24 Wes: acquire an army along the way.
2:26 Erin: Just humble Romans, right?
2:28 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus had actually had a job in the mint, basically. And so I don't know if that helped him with figuring out what coin he was going to mint with that to pay his troops, but that's pretty. It's just so nuts.
2:40 Erin: That's really nuts.
2:41 Wes: To commemorate the murder of someone who's basically a friend. Now, they had had their ups and downs of course, like Pompey killed Brutus father. I don't know if you know that. But for various. For complicated reasons, Brutus ended up on the side of Pompey during that civil war, but then ultimately switched to Caesar. And they traveled together, they. For extended periods, they traveled together on various quests. So it's a bit nuts. And there had been decades of this kind of crazy war stuff going on. It's like the. Whatever the Republic was to Brutus, it had been chaos with all this fighting and infighting for decades.
3:27 Erin: I think that did seem to be the impression that I got too, is just in reviewing this particular moment in history. The Republic was only ever. It was like the idea of the 1950s to a certain wing of the Republican Party. This version of events never existed. The glory of the Republic was just a fantasy somehow.
3:48 Wes: I mean, the murder of Caesar concealed the fate of the Republic. Right. That was the end. You know, the irony here is. Yeah. That Brutus act, instead of preserving the Republic, just made sure that that was the very end. It set in motion a kind of final reckoning, a final civil war that I think could only end with an emperor. Emperor. Sorry, was that responsive to what you were saying?
4:12 Erin: Yes.
4:15 Wes: All right, all right. So this scene with act three, scene three with Cinna, where he's murdered for his name, also in Plutarch, I think. Now I'm beginning to question everything that I think is in Plutarch. So listeners will have to take everything with a grain of salt. So I could be hallucinating it, but I'm pretty sure this is in Plutarch as well. In any case. Yeah, very important that the plebeians are indiscriminate in their violence. And then we get he's, I'm Cinna the poet. I'm Cinna the poet. Tear him for his bad verses. Tear him for his bad verses.
There seems to be always some kind of self deprecating reference towards bad poets in Shakespeare's plays. The idea in Nan, you know, I'm not Cinna the conspirator. It's no matter his name, Cinna pluck but his name out of his heart and turn him going. So this is almost a variation on killing Caesar's spirit. And it's too bad if we have to kill the body as well. And then on some of these other things that we've talked about with the social construction of power, where what's in a name? Right? And then Caesar's name becoming equivalent to the name King.
But what's in a Role, Right. I say you're a consul, and therefore you have such and such powers. Well, it's spooky. And I was trying to associate that in our earlier discussions with the concept of superstition. I don't usually stand on ceremony, where ceremony is ambiguous, between forms of politeness and then the kind of forms that go into the making of a state, the ceremonies of a functioning government, and then between the productions of oracles, superstition. There's something spooky and superstitious about the way that power works and the way that hierarchy works.
And here it's kind of reduced to its kind of absurd premise, which is that if you have a certain name, you could be just guilty by virtue of that, if your name is the same as that of the conspirator. So it's almost like acting on a form of superstition.
6:31 Erin: I mean, what's so complicated about this, as you're already suggesting, right, is that this is a sort of recapitulation of Caesar's murder. Right. So this crowd, inflamed with rage over the murder of Caesar, is now enacting something similar to what the conspirators have just done. And we also have that proleptic idea of what Caesar's name becomes in history being applied here with the name of a conspirator. And just a coincidence coming to haunt you, it seems to me, because it has elements of both sides kind of attached to it to imply something about the idea of art being apolitical, being perhaps the most dangerous position of all. Or one might get attacked for coincidence. And depending on what use the crowd wants to give to one's art, they'll just take it and run with it, and they'll murder the work in the process or something.
7:30 Wes: Yeah. There's actually an extra layer of irony which I really love, which is that tear him for his bad verses. Poets are guilty of the same sort of identification that the crowd is making here. Juliet is the sun. Right. That's the substance of metaphor, which is to make these identifications. Cinna. He dies by a variation of his own identifications. And those identifications can be suggestive. And it's the sort of things that are happening in Antony Speech and that can manipulate people into doing things. And the general role of art in culture, the ways in which art can influence people, as you point out, I think you were hinting at that it can be a potentially pernicious, dangerous force within society.
Plato wanted to kick the poets out of the republic. Right. Or at least to control what they were saying because they might represent the gods as being bad people, which they were. They were bad people. He wanted a better representation of the gods so that they wouldn't corrupt people. So there's something dangerous, I think, about metaphor, and we've talked about this in our Shakespeare episode, the ways in which reasoning can be grounded in metaphor and bad reasoning especially can be grounded in metaphor because metaphors, in a way, are treated almost like little scientific models.
And you can extend the metaphor and if you don't test it against reality, you can come to all sorts of absurd conclusions. So, yeah, I think there are many ways in which metaphor is a dangerous tool. Antony has just illustrated that, that this scene beautifully captures all of that.
9:13 Erin: It puts me in mind, of course, of Brutus saying, I have the same dagger for myself when it shall please my country to need my death. You know, Shakespeare's almost doing that through Cinna. He's giving the poet the same dagger. Right. And in such a way as to. It's lucky perhaps that Shakespeare has Plutarch to keep referring back to because Brutus is saying some pretty dangerous things, you know, to maybe be saying in the Globe in front of Elizabeth and. Right. All of this is also kind of covering one's bases to turn the dagger on himself and to either inflame the dramatic moment with the scene which in, for instance, in Orson Welles Mercury Theater adaptation of Caesar apparently like, brought the house down.
But then again, this is in 37. Welles was using a lot of contemporary political imagery, making Brutus a sort of anti fascist. You know, Caesar was identified with Mussolini and Hitler. Rather than being killed by a mob, I think he has Cinna killed by the secret police.
10:19 Wes: Oh, yeah, that changes it.
10:21 Erin: Right. But it brought the house down in this riotous. You know, it was considered the high point of the play. In fact, there's a very famous. I think it's sort of famous. I like Jacob Landau. I don't know how well known he is at this point. Probably not very well known. But there were, you know, artworks depicting this moment in the Welles adaptation, depending on how you want to play it. It's almost a moment of comic relief or absurdity after everything. Right. Or.
10:47 Wes: I agree, yeah, yeah.
10:49 Erin: Or in the Welles adaptation, a surprising emotional high point which seems to even. Seems to have an even greater reaction than the actual meat and potatoes of this play. You know, the two speeches.
11:02 Wes: To me, it's doing at least two different things at once, which is. It's consolidating something that's really important thematically around the name. The name, Power and the name. Yeah. Caesar. Caesar's king. Yeah. Cinna versus Cinna. And then the comments on, well, the little meta commentary on bad poetry. My impression from Shakespeare, from what I've read almost every play at this point multiple times, is that there's a kind of rough and tumble relationship between audience and players and playwright. And he was acting often, I guess, maybe early on he just went.
Not that we actually know, but he was probably concentrating on playwriting and letting other people do the acting. But I imagine, right, the grunts in the audience, there's always the question, are you enjoying yourselves? No, well, sorry, yeah, I'm not that great. And some of this is explicitly said, especially when there's people giving prologues or epilogues like the Tempest. I hope you've had a good time, if not, sorry about that. So, yeah, many references, I think, to. To bad poets and bad verses throughout his play, with the implication being that he might be one of those people.
He might be subjecting his audience to his bad verses and they might want to tear him to pieces. Right. So it calls out this, I think, real tension in art between artist and audience, because for some reason, you know how when you go to improv and it's bad and it's just like so excruciating with stand up comedy, it's just like you almost feel like it's happening to you, like some kind of empathetic connection. But I think it can arouse a certain amount of hostility in an audience, which is strange. Right. If you go to see a bad play, you want to throw tomatoes, you want to get violent, but it should be pretty low stakes.
I'm just going to try to pass some time and if it's not great, okay, it's not that great. But do you have to kill the actors? Well, but anyway, yeah, I don't know
13:20 Erin: if this is too much of a stretch, but when I think of that, when I think of tomatoes, you know, I think of the crowd at La Scala, for instance. And one of the things that these incredibly emotional and often violent crowds are responding to is a poor performance of an opera that they know well. So there's a sort of ideal in the ether of the performance, as it should be, or a singer who originated the role, who's the best, and you're not measuring up to that ideal, betraying the text somehow, the perfection contained within the material. And so I hesitated to say that because, well, that's not the case here, but it is because he's dramatizing A story everybody knows.
So there's a danger, right, of this isn't, say, an original play. It is. And it is what to add in, what to take out. You know, in a way he's doing something like what a. What a great opera singer would do, which is an interpretation of pre existing material. And the extent to which he interprets it well or doesn't is going to be what he sort of lives or dies by in this, in this. Most famous of any of his stories that he treats in any of his plays. Right. This is the most famous, I mean, I think of his Harold Bloom, who said, you know, that Caesar is the most famous person that Shakespeare will ever treat in his, in his plays.
I have the inherent feeling that there's something more to be said about that. But one of the things that tear him for his bad verses makes me think of is also in Brutus's speech a little earlier in the speech when he says, which I don't think we addressed directly, as he was valiant, I honor him, but as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love, joy for his fortune, honor for his valor and death for his ambition.
15:09 Wes: Yeah, I don't know how we missed that.
15:11 Erin: Yeah, Right. So he important. Yes. Doling out justice in accordance to his characteristics. Right. You're not, you're not a person. You're a collection of characteristics which we have to treat on an individual basis. That also reminds me of this, it reminds me of, you know, tear him for his bad verses or the coincidence incidents of having the same name. And therefore you're not really a person. You're just someone with a collection of characteristics, including a name which may or may not serve you well. And maybe something like, you know, what a playwright has to deal with.
Well, this part was really good, but then this part was bad. And so we want to throw tomatoes here, but we want to, we want to clap here. He should have taken out this part from Plutarch or added in this part, you know, I, I just. This idea that Brutus is picking and choosing what to celebrate and what to. To slay. Brutus is the severest theater critic of all.
16:00 Wes: You know, he, he thrice refused the crown and he did a bad acting job.
16:04 Erin: Or did he? Yeah, right. I mean, or we're also getting. Right, we're getting a constant critical interpretation too, is another thing which we're hearing from people. We're not actually seeing what we're, what we're really seeing and what we're being told, I think are constantly Being played with here, like the will, Caesar refusing the crown. We're getting it filtered through critics. Through criticism. We don't know if Caesar has. I mean, if Cinna has bad verses. So, you know. But we're getting an instant. Probably. Right. But we're getting an instant sort of critical apparatus around him.
16:38 Wes: Shakespeare's not interested in crafting original plots, which is. It's kind of why I'm not interested in plot either, when, you know.
16:47 Erin: Same.
16:49 Wes: Yeah. In this context, if it's a Netflix series, it better have a good plot. The context where I'm interested in the poetry of it and character and all that stuff. His plots are often quite loose. And then, like with King Lear, he just took someone else's play and rewrote it, basically.
17:08 Erin: Yes.
17:09 Wes: And with all this other stuff, he's faithfully. Yeah. He's adapting historical accounts and the magic is not in the plot.
17:17 Erin: Well, as I'm sure we've said before, in the Tudor era, these were just things that people were not interested in, and they weren't interested in having some sort of Christopher Nolan style, you know, with people who have never and will never live, you know, saying absolutely absurd things. But there's this really cool twist. Yeah. I mean, it's just a different set of values, it seems.
17:39 Wes: What would Shakespeare's version of Inception be? Right. Nolan isn't. Inception is one of his. Right.
17:43 Erin: Yeah. Well, that's his best one, I think.
17:46 Wes: Can you imagine?
17:47 Erin: Oh, no, it's not. I think it's the Prestige.
17:50 Wes: But anyway, the Tempest is the closest he gets to science fiction. Right.
17:54 Erin: Yes. And I think. But I think that. I think the plot or the genius or the, you know, what Nolan does say with the things inside of other things is always happening at the line level in Shakespeare anyway. You know, know, people being mirrors of each other, people infecting each other's thoughts, you know, all of that is simply being externalized in Nolan and leaving. Leaving the character sort of empty, but.
18:19 Wes: Right, right. Yeah. Very good. Very good point.
18:22 Erin: Not to go after him. I don't mean to. He made some good movies. I just. It's not really my thing.
18:28 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think I enjoyed them, but I. Most entertainment leaves me feeling unsatisfied.
18:34 Erin: Tear Nolan for his bad films.
18:35 Wes: Yes.
18:38 Erin: They're great. They're great.
18:39 Wes: All right. What do we want to say before we conclude about these final two acts, which we knew we weren't going to spend a lot of time on, But I compared this to the point in Jaws where they go out to look for the shark. And I don't have as much interest.
18:56 Erin: Yeah, I don't either. I think it's really funny when Cassius and Brutus break up and. And then get back together. Like it's fun at the infighting that goes on and the little power games and stuff. We could spend a lot of time on that. And I don't know that we would come up with anything more interesting than simply saying, isn't this how all these things work? Everybody's getting on each other's nerves.
19:19 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it shows how. From some of the commentary I read, I can see that scholars and critics take these acts more seriously than I have on the current reading. So there's a lot going. You could say there's still a lot going on thematically. I suppose what we're supposed to get out of them fighting is the way in which their lofty ideals have degenerated into a power struggle. Right. That's one part of this. But that big fight in the tent, right. They really get into.
19:56 Erin: Gets ugly in a way, which is so sort of petty. And it's not even really fun. You know, they're not like brandishing great zingers at each other or anything. It's. I think it's very well done. I mean, it's very. It's interesting.
20:08 Wes: And. Yeah, and they're mad at one. Cassius wanted Brutus to pardon someone. And Brutus is saying, you didn't send the gold I needed. And is accusing Cassius of being corrupt himself. Which, again, I think all of us in Plutarch. But in the end, the way they make up, it seems like it turns out all to be a miscommunication. It all suddenly just dissolves because Cassius says, well, that messenger was a fool. How does it end?
20:39 Erin: Yeah, the messenger informed you wrong. Brutus has this whole thing that he doesn't like Cassius's methods. He doesn't want to get his hands dirty. So he needs money to be raised. But he doesn't want to do it the way Cassius. Cassius is doing it. So Cassius has to do it for him because he's too honorable. And then Brutus accuses Cassius of denying him the money or something like that. And then Cassius says, I didn't deny you the money. The messenger just informed you wrong. So that. Yeah. So the whole thing was about money being raised. Yeah. So they literally go back and forth. I denied you, not. You did. I did not. Like. It's so petty.
21:15 Wes: It's so stupid. It. Yeah, yeah.
21:18 Erin: I did send to you for certain sums of gold which you denied me. For I can raise no money by vile means. I have no ways to get money myself. I'm too pure. But you can get it, because, you know, you. You don't have my scruples. And he was but a fool that brought my answer back. So, yes, the whole thing was leaving things up to messengers, and. And in fact, what this does is presages the messenger problem, which will end in Cassius killing himself.
21:46 Wes: Right. We also get another poet.
21:48 Erin: Right.
21:49 Wes: Let me go in to see the generals. There is some grudge between them. Tis not meet they be alone. Lucilius tries to prevent him. Nothing but death shall stay me. And then he comes in and he tries to, you know, tries to kind of mediate their fight. And Cassius says, how vilely doth this cynic rhyme.
22:11 Erin: Here's a bad.
22:11 Wes: I abuse the poet. So. Yeah. What is that scene for? What should the wars do with these jigging fools?
22:22 Erin: Yeah. I mean, if Cinna is a shadow of Caesar or of Brutus, or of Brutus and Caesar, then Cinna himself also needs a shadow. He needs a rhyme. This poet says, for shame, you generals. What do you mean? Love and friends as two such men should be. For I have seen more years, I'm sure, than ye. You know. He has his little cups.
22:47 Wes: Now that you read that out loud, that is really bad.
22:49 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a couple. It's. Yeah. So. So.
22:51 Wes: For I have seen more years, I'm sure, than ye. Yeah.
22:54 Erin: Everybody needs their little. Everybody needs their little pair. Their little couplet.
22:59 Wes: Yeah. So the poet is coming in to try to save the day and say, I've got something to add. I'm not just useless in war. Finally, I've found a purpose. I'm going to reconcile these two great generals. We get another scene where there's another critical mistake about military planning that is really Brutus fault. Cassius has the right idea. And then he. He's quickly overruled. I mean, he gives up very quickly. It's like Cassius has learned that he's just not gonna get anywhere with Brutus. And then we get the scene, another kind of poignant scene with music. And then Caesar's ghost. So it's kind of a tender scene between him and his slave boy, I guess, is what you would call it, Right. Lucius falls asleep with the instrument in his lap.
23:53 Erin: That's right. Yeah.
23:54 Wes: I guess I'm skipping over the part where Portia.
23:58 Erin: We get the two deaths of Portia, right?
24:01 Wes: Twice. Yeah. The two reveals.
24:05 Erin: And both times, Brutus is like, oh, that's too bad.
24:09 Wes: Yeah.
24:11 Erin: Forgive me. I'm too busy screwing up massively at Philippi.
24:15 Wes: Well, I think he shows. He shows. Shows? No man bears sorrow better. Portia is dead. No. You're not convinced?
24:25 Erin: I don't know. Brutus did a better job of memorializing Caesar, who he murdered, than his wife. But, yeah, it leaves me a little cold and ironic since Portia swallowed hot coals, but don't.
24:42 Wes: Humor. Yeah. So, Caesar's ghost. What do we make of that? Well, the music and. I mean, do you have anything to say about either of those?
24:51 Erin: There are lots and lots of echoes of Macbeth in here.
24:54 Wes: So what are the plays in which ghosts appear? Is it just. There's Macbeth and Caesar and Hamlet and. What else? I don't know if there's anything else.
25:04 Erin: There has to be.
25:05 Wes: Oh, Richard iii. Right. He's definitely in Richard ii. Just looking this up right now. Yeah. Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Richard iii.
25:15 Erin: Cymbeline.
25:16 Wes: Yeah. So that's really interesting to me that it happens so rarely in his place, I would say. I mean, it's used to good effect in Hamlet and Macbeth. Right. By the way, did you see Hamnet?
25:31 Erin: I haven't seen it yet.
25:32 Wes: Okay. That's a real tearjerker. But. But, yeah, I mean, is it being used effectively here? I mean, I hate to be a critic of good old Shakespeare.
25:45 Erin: Thy evil spirit, Brutus, to tell thee, thou shalt see me at Philippi.
25:50 Wes: I.
25:50 Erin: At Philippi. He doesn't get gray lines or anything. He's not Marley or something.
25:55 Wes: Right. I was about to say, remember me?
25:59 Erin: Your old partner? Yeah.
26:01 Wes: He could have all the winds with tongues in them speaking, you know? Really? I guess that'd be hard to pull off on the stage at the time.
26:09 Erin: Yeah. He doesn't say much. I mean, Banquo doesn't say anything in Macbeth. Right. He just shakes his gory locks at Macbeth. And, in fact, some stage adaptations don't even. They just have Macbeth responding to the empty chair.
26:22 Wes: But Macbeth is tortured with guilt, and Hamlet is tortured and Richard. So these usually happen in the context of.
26:33 Erin: That's interesting.
26:34 Wes: People racked with some interesting psychology, some sort of negative emotion, and here. Well, maybe that's the point. Maybe Brutus's kind of indifference to this is part of the point.
26:49 Erin: It's more about the haunted than the hauntee, You know, Brutus just doesn't. He shall not be moved.
27:00 Wes: Ill spirit, I would hold more talk with thee. Yeah. But other than that, it's almost like Brutus is. He's just kind of out of it. That whole scene with Lucius and the music, too, it's almost in. Like his heart is not in the project of war. Exactly.
27:17 Erin: Well, what is there for Brutus at this point? I mean, Brutus. Brutus's whole bag was opposition. Brutus needed a Caesar to rail against.
27:26 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.
27:28 Erin: And, you know, what's he going to do? I mean, he's powerless against the actual tide of the empire. You know, he's gotten rid of his personal antagonist and now dramatically, you know, he's sort of floundering.
27:43 Wes: Yeah. I don't know. I'm curious. I wonder how many people sort of know you. Yeah. Get less interested in this play, in Acts 4 and 5, like me. Is that the typical response? Or is it. Am I missing something?
27:56 Erin: It must be.
27:57 Wes: But anyway. Yeah. Do you have any final. Final words before we conclude we should
28:02 Erin: end where we began, with Antony's last words about Brutus, you know, because maybe absent Caesar and in light of, you know, when I was coming down hard on Brutus and you said, oh, you don't agree with Antony's assessment of him. Him, Maybe this. This long decline into the final. Into the final scene here at the end of Act 5, we can get here with Brutus or Antony can get here with Brutus because he's become mild in the absence of this force to fight against. Or the length of these scenes or the distance now we've traveled between Caesar's murder at the exact halfway point.
Point has kind of made us remember. I don't know. It goes against. Goes against Antony's idea that the evil men do lives after them, but the good is often interred with their bones. But maybe Antony is remembering what was good about Brutus because there's sort of been enough dramaturgical time to come back around or memorialize him. Well. And he's been softened in light of the fact that he's lost in battle. And so Antony is going to give him his due. And also, the spark has gone out of his life now that Caesar is dead and his reason for living and fighting for the republic is dead, too.
29:19 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. I want to just compare what Plutarch has to say just to get an idea. Give people an idea of how Shakespeare adapted this so from the Marcus Brutus life. Because I think it ends the same way. By the way, also, Brutus's mom was a mistress of Caesar. Servilia.
29:43 Erin: No way. Yeah, that is.
29:47 Wes: And none of that of course, none of the Hamlet type of stuff exploited
29:54 Erin: well, but Bloom says that this is even more suggestive of that sort of Freudian conflict than Hamlet. Hamlet. I mean, I think I find that an absurd statement on Bloom's part, but I think it's funny that he thinks so and yet doesn't mention that fact in his essay on Julius Caesar.
30:15 Wes: Brutus's dead body was found by Antony, who commanded the richest purple mantle that he had to be thrown over it. And afterwards, the mantle being stolen, he found the thief and had him put to death. He sent the ashes of Brutus to his mother. Servilia.
30:30 Erin: Servilia is not a great name on a couple levels, but
30:36 Wes: especially if you're dating Caesar.
30:38 Erin: Yeah. I'll do anything for you.
30:43 Wes: Oh, you know what? It's in the Antony. I think it's in the Antony life, anyway. All right, that's it.
30:49 Erin: We made it.
30:50 Wes: That's the Antony. Six hours of discussing. What do you mean?
30:54 Erin: We didn't really cover the. The last two acts.
30:57 Wes: Yeah, I don't feel. I don't feel bad about that at all.
31:00 Erin: Neither do I. Neither do I.
31:02 Wes: But this was fun. All right, thank you.
31:05 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Character of Authority in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (Part 5)
Feb 18, 2026
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
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0:32 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part five of our six part series. Right. Is that right?
0:37 Erin: I thought it was part V.
0:42 Wes: Part V, Sorry. Of our six part series on Julius Caesar. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. So I think we only. How long does a play take to perform? 3 hours. 2 to 3 hours. Anyway, so we'll have a little more than doubled actual performance time. But anyway, I enjoy it. I hope the listeners enjoy it. I hope you enjoy it. So in the spirit of taking your time, we're actually going to back up a little bit. We've gotten to the cusp of Antony's entrance. But I think before that, you wanted to say something about a line a little bit earlier. Fly not, stand still, ambition's debt is paid. Which is what Brutus, in a rather naive way, says to the people who just witnessed this horrific murder.
1:28 Erin: Just as I was reviewing yesterday, that line stuck out to me. And I thought, did we give this the attention it deserves? Because I think it's an interesting idea. The sort of bank account analogy.
1:38 Wes: Right.
1:39 Erin: And if ambition implies that Caesar felt that he was above other men, or sort of more than a man setting himself above his fellow Romans, then would the debt even be paid by his murder? I mean, we're sort of going to discover that it's not that the implications of this are going to be result in a big battle. And also that Caesar isn't even really dead. He's not dead, sort of figuratively. And also his ghost will show up, of course. But I thought this was a sort of interesting framing of the murder as a mere settling of accounts or a kind of moral math that Brutus seems to want to explain away in this easy analogy that.
Okay, we've taken care of it now, so it's all going to be okay. And yeah, I mean, maybe just your word, which I like quite a bit. His naivete is really on display here. But I think this kind of posture that he has going into the two speeches is illustrative of his cast of mind. You know, I think in parts past I've made reference to this idea of scale that's repeatedly invoked with Caesar. And here we have an interesting nod to that. Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure? I mean, first of all, there's this list of four thing that Anthony came, keeps doing, right?
His servant comes in and gives four adjectives to Brutus and four adjectives to Caesar. And then here we have conquest, glories, triumphs, spoils. And he goes on, fare thee well, I know not, gentlemen, what you intend. Who else must be let blood, who else is rank. So my note in my edition has this interesting gloss on rank, corrupt with the second sense of grown too large and thus in need of cutting, either to release diseased blood or to reduce in size. So Antony's doing this clever thing here where we have this list which sort of contains within it all of Caesar's glory.
Then this idea that it's shrunk down to just Caesar's body. And then also he, with the metaphor or with the turn of phrase, gives a nod to Brutus, as though what he's done is a sort of appropriate culling or it could be seen that way. Right? So he's being very ambiguous, I think, from the get go, even as he's seemingly straightforwardly lamenting Caesar's body.
3:59 Wes: Yeah, who else's rank is a pun on rank, as in rotten or diseased. And then who else's rank has become too powerful, right? And the idea is that Caesar's ambition and his acquisition of too much power is almost like a disease and even to the point of being unnatural, as we've said before. So bloodletting is the way to deal with this disease and also the only way to Deal with power. So that's. Yeah, it's nicely ambiguous because it leaves him uncommitted, as he is going to be uncommitted to one side or another. In a sense, through this speech, he's going to have to convince them that he's not against them and that he's.
Without simply repudiating Caesar outright, which would make him look not credible. So if he were merely even just worried about his credibility and convincing these people that he's not a threat, he can't go too hard on that. I didn't care about Caesar. He can't do that. So he's got to express an appropriate amount of distress over the death of Caesar, but some curiosity about. Well, maybe there was something I didn't see that warranted this. So why don't you guys fill me in that kind of approach.
5:22 Erin: I wonder if I'm wrong to see a little bit later, no instrument of half that worth, as though your swords made rich with the most noble blood of all this world. I wonder if I'm wrong there to see some idea of ink. Right. I feel like with Caesar's blood, ink is being repeatedly invoked. And the idea that the sword is being stuck. The sword, like the pen, is being stuck in the blood. It just reminds me, with their hands being wet, he's shortly going to like, grasp all of their hands. That hasn't happened yet, right? He hasn't greeted them. No, because he just came on, you know, he'll ask them to render their bloody hands.
Reminds me of Sonnet 111, the dyer's hand, where you become stained with the ink of. When you're a writer, your fingers become stained with the ink. The idea that it will shortly come up with these two competing speeches of authorship, I think is being invoked. Who is going to spin this? Who is going to write this story in a way which is satisfactory to us, the audience, to the crowd within the play? And I think that already ambition's debt is paid, which makes assumptions or sort of like closes down metaphorical interpretations or possibilities on the Brutus side is not going to be able to withstand that ambiguous meaning in Antony's turn of phrase with the excellence of his writing.
W R I T I N g the situation in these incredibly rich, multivalent moments when he talks to them. So it's, you know, so I keep seeing the pen or the ink and the interpretation of that as being some sort of statement about who's going to have the upper hand rhetorically, who's going to write this in the proper way or in the acceptable way that other people will determine is the correct interpretation, regardless of the actual crime or whether or not it was justified. It's sort of about the spin or the act of playwriting itself.
7:22 Wes: Yeah, very good. In a way, it's a riposte to Cassius, even though he wasn't there for that remark, but for the remark about ages hence, the enactment, the reenactment of the scene ages hence. And again, it leaves open who that reenactment is going to cast as the villain and as the hero. And I think in Shakespeare's case, he's agnostic. The play treats this as agnostic. Was it the right thing to kill Caesar? Wasn't it? It's just treated as a problematic. It doesn't try to resolve that problematic. I think some scholars would try to come down as if he's pro Caesar, pro Brutus.
I think that's a fool's errand to try to do that. But this raises the question of whose story will be told in the end. He calls them the choice and master spirits of this age. At the end of his speech, he's telling them, kill me if you need to. It would be an honorable death to die here, near Caesar. If that's what you want, just do it. Even though they've already assured him through the servant that they're not. Then he gives them this compliment, which is that they've done something which is age defining. It makes it a conquest in a way, just like one of Caesar's conquests.
And that's the standard of values that elevates Caesar, right power and conquest and glory and all those things. And it offers to them the same sort of accolade. But of course, the problem is that that's the thing that they're supposed to reject. So he's complimenting them. And he's not saying, you are the defenders of liberty against the whole ethos of power and conquest. You are master spirits, which I may. You know, it's a little bit of a reach for me to read that as. But that's the way I read it. And then Brutus is such a nice guy. Beg not your death of us, Antony.
We're not going to do that. Cassius wanted to kill you, not me. Our hearts, you see, not they are pitiful. And pity to the general wrong of Rome. As fires drive out fire. So pity, pity, you know, so pity for the public good had to made them pitiless towards Caesar.
9:29 Erin: I love that, you know, pity the abstract concept killed Caesar.
9:33 Wes: Yeah.
9:33 Erin: And also this. This. The splitting, I think, which I also. Again, I'm not sure if that's the right word, but the atomizing that Brutus always does between his thoughts and his body or of the parts of his body. So here, you know, his hands are stained with blood. But then it's not as in Sonnet 111, almost thence my nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand. Rather than taking ownership over this, it's as though he's divorcing the bloody hand from himself. He's not accepting the bloodiness of the business, even as they are dripping with this blood.
And I think it's. Again, I just want to mention that there's an element of this which loses its power when we read it. It versus seeing it on stage. They literally are covered in blood. And when they shake Antony's hand, he then gets stained with the same blood. So I think the contrast between what they're saying and what it actually looks like on stage, that power is, you know, I don't want that to be lost in our conversation.
10:33 Wes: Brutus loves Caesar. When he struck him, I doubt not of your wisdom, says Antony, let each man render me his bloody hand. And then he shakes hands with each conspirator and names them by name. Which reminds me a little bit, I think. Well, when Brutus greets the conspirators in his home, doesn't he name everyone by name? And then when Caesar greets people when they go to visit them, he names everyone by name.
10:55 Erin: That's right. Yeah. I think I had that as he greets, I think as part of the list of things that united Brutus and Caesar. But then Antony does it too. So, yeah, it's a threesome.
11:07 Wes: I don't know what to make of that, but it's an interesting way to. In a way to establish trust or ingratiate himself with everyone on an individual level rather than just speaking generically to the crowd.
11:21 Erin: Well, it gives us the opportunity to hear the name Cinna, which will come up later, and which is also, of course, a great pun on sinner, which I think is part of the reason why that character in particular is. Maybe that's in Plutarch. Cinna the poet. I'm not sure.
11:36 Wes: I think it is.
11:38 Erin: Okay, well, then even more perfect. I mean, these things really write themselves. But.
11:43 Wes: Well, actually, maybe. I'm not sure, actually, now that I think about it.
11:46 Erin: But anyway, yeah, but it's also, of
11:49 Wes: course, a lot of this is in Plutarch, including the bloody hands and let's daub ourselves in blood. And then. Yeah, a lot of this. He follows it very closely. But.
11:57 Erin: Yeah, well, and the shaking hands and saying people's names, it seems to me to be redoing or a doing in a different way or doing to its full. The non oath oath scene that Brutus enacts with the conspirators early on, you know, which I was assuming was a blood oath. Right. So here it seems like that is being toyed with, ironically, that it's not their blood, but still there's some sort of blood oath being enacted here.
12:25 Wes: It's almost as if he just loses awareness. He goes off into a reverie in the movie. Marlon Brando does a good job of this. You know, just kind of drifting off into this. These comments about Caesar as if the others aren't there. I mean, ultimately Cassius is gonna say, Mark Antony, what's going on? But, you know, I did love thee, Caesar. Oh, tis true. If then thy spirit look upon us now, shall it not grieve thee dearer than my death to see thy Antony making his peace, shaking the bloody fingers of thy foe? I think, importantly, I don't think it's not pegged as an aside.
Right. So we don't just get the idea that the others can't hear him, but we do get a bit of an idea that he's talking to himself absentmindedly with the others hearing this, I certainly don't think. And maybe I'm just influenced by the film rendition of this. He's not talking to them, he's talking to the body and almost losing. Losing sight of the others around him. And then he wants to ask, for reasons, Brutus kind of postpones that, says we will eventually. And then I think he sets up the funeral oration and Cassius doesn't want to let him do that, which is very correct.
And then Brutus sets these conditions. You're not going to blame us. And you'll say, we, it's with our permission. And then all exit. And then he gives this more famous speech lamenting Caesar. Oh, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth. This is around 250something in mine bleeding piece of earth. What do you make of that? That is such an odd phrase. I wonder if it would have sounded as odd to an Elizabethan.
14:10 Erin: I don't know what that's supposed to emphasize. The way in which he's been brought low in death and his oneness with humanity or with the earth. Antony, when everybody else was still there, does again, this thing with Scale, where he describes Caesar as being the stag. So it's sort of upends that. That initial image from the very beginning of the play of Caesar being a falcon here, he's the wounded one, he's the hunted one. But he says, oh, world, thou wast the forest to this heart, and this indeed, O world, the heart of thee. There's a telescopic quality to that.
The whole world is just in his heart. The world was his forest to play in. But then also he has a world within himself. Hart H A R T and Hart H E A R T, of course, are being played with there as well. So now that worldness, or that sense of the whole world being contained within him, that's being turned inside out here and now he's like a clod of earth. So I'm not sure if that's supposed to signal something grand about him or something about the pathos of him being brought so low here. Probably both.
15:17 Wes: Yeah. It's a kind of recapitulation of the whole. Has all your glory and conquest come to this? And here, this great spirit is now inanimate. This use of the word earth to get at the fact of an inanimate physical body. It's ashes to ashes, dusted dust and all that. But.
15:37 Erin: But also a whole. Like a. Like a piece of earth.
15:40 Wes: Yeah.
15:40 Erin: You know, I mean, that would be capital E. Right.
15:42 Wes: But part of the world, piece of piece of earth is in the planet.
15:46 Erin: Right.
15:46 Wes: Interesting. Yeah.
15:48 Erin: I mean, I don't know if you can get to that reading, but I think it's. But since he's just been talking.
15:52 Wes: Well, yeah, it's a possible. Interesting double entendre.
15:55 Erin: Yeah, right.
15:55 Wes: That I. That hadn't occurred to me.
15:57 Erin: Well, I think the same thing is happening with, you know, the wounds where Anthony said, if I had as many eyes as he had wounds, had I as many eyes as thou hast wounds, weeping as fast as they stream forth thy blood, it would be better. It would become me better than to close in terms of friendship with thine enemies. And then here they become mouths, he says, like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips to beg the voice and utterance of my tongue. So there's also. There's a. There's like a multiplicity, multiple sets of eyes. And then it's as if their mouths crying out for justice, but then they beg the voice and utterance of my tongue.
So again, it comes back to Antony. So there's this. It starts in Caesar's body, it becomes multiple, like a crowd. And Then it ends in Anthony's body. So something like that seems to be happening with this idea of scale, too, with the earth or a piece of dirt, you know, like, I don't know how to work that out exactly, but it seems that telescoping is happening here.
16:58 Wes: This wounds is mouths metaphor, by the way, is one that Shakespeare uses in several plays, including Richard iii. Henry's wounds open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh.
17:09 Erin: Oh, yeah, that's a great line.
17:11 Wes: Wow. And then it's in Macbeth as well. I was looking at AI to figure out all the places where this happens, and it didn't give me Macbeth at first. And I had said, doesn't that happen in Macbeth? Macbeth, yeah.
17:23 Erin: Isn't it that they cry for vengeance? The wounds, Duncan's wounds.
17:28 Wes: They may. There's a point. It happens in different places. There's one where Duncan's wounds speak for themselves. Do not bid me speak. See? And then speak. And then speak yourselves so that the wounds speak for themselves. But I think there's more. I think there's more places. Anyway. I just vaguely remember that. That it's in several plays that he uses this idea that I find kind of gross, actually. The ruby lips.
17:58 Erin: Right. Well, I think it's great. It's obviously quite something I was hinting at before with the Portia scene. It's also obviously quite suggestive of Caesar being made feminine by falling in this way. There's an interesting reading there, which. Which maybe is a little too obvious to go into, but the other thing it makes me think of. I'm writing a book right now, which is. A lot of it is about Tudor portraiture. And I can't not think of the rainbow portrait of Elizabeth I in which she wears a gown which has all over it human eyes and ears, which is a little creepy. You know, sort of embroidered on her. On her gown. And I think the idea is that she's. As the monarch, she sees and hears every everything or everything ultimately gets back to her in this godlike way.
18:45 Wes: And they're real eyes and ears. Right.
18:48 Erin: And I think. I think coming out, she was a cruel one.
18:51 Wes: Sorry. No, it's just a joke. My fantasy about realizing ears as if she were part of a tribe in
18:58 Erin: the heart of darkness. Yes. These are her trophies. No, I think this coming out of that same moment. I mean, 1600. Yeah. So it's literally a year later, this rainbow portrait comes out. That's nearly the same moment. Right. Because this is 1599. Caesar. I don't know. It's an interesting invocation there of this, of being covered in sense organs.
19:27 Wes: Anyway, you know, it's interesting here because it's not like the wounds speak for themselves in this case. Although he will try to display the corpse. I mean, he will display the corpse ultimately to the crowd, which is very important. Important. And another one of Brutus's mistakes to let him do that. But Caesar needs someone to speak for him. And the best that the wounds can do is to open their mouth to beg for Antony's voice. Antony must speak on Caesar's behalf. And then he works up, you know, he gets worked up into this prophecy of civil strife.
So at this point, we know, you know, we kind of get a climax here where we realize, okay, you know, this is. Antony is faking it with the others. He's really out for blood. So shall in these confines with a monarch's voice, cry havoc. And let slip the dogs of war at this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men groaning for burial. Wow. Carrion men groaning for burial. Are they dead or not, Antony? They can't be rotting if they're still alive. Yeah. Carrying men groaning for burial. There's a speech that's kind of similar in Henry V.
And for some reason I would always get this mixed up. And when I hear let's slip the dogs of war, I would associate that with Henry V. But another great let's go to war, rah, rah, rah speech. We move into the speeches, right? This is where we really want to. We want to cover these wonderful funeral speeches or Brutus. One's a funeral speech and the other is like, did I do that?
21:10 Erin: Yeah. A part that's maybe easily glossed over that just makes me laugh so hard is when Brutus. So Brutus is giving one speech, but Cassius is elsewhere giving another one. We're not privy to that one.
21:22 Wes: Yeah, that's another interesting thing.
21:24 Erin: You know, Cassius, go you into the other street and part the numbers. Those that will hear me speak, let him stay here. Those that will follow Cassius, go with him. Cassius will be in ballroom B.
21:36 Wes: And they're going to be very, very different speeches because he and Cassius are so different and they have different agendas. If I were Brutus, I would not trust Cassius to be going along with his plan. I wouldn't. Cassius, in a way, has a different plan. A more realistic.
21:51 Erin: Yeah. And then we hear public reasons shall be rendered of Caesar's death. And then we get the crowd in a moment of Brutus's fantasy wish fulfillment, actually deciding, like, I'm gonna go here and listen to this one. You go there, listen to that one, and then we're gonna compare the one moment where the crowd is what Brutus would wish, some sort of logic police, and then forget it after the. That.
22:17 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus's speech, which I guess is reputed to be the rational, logical speech. Romans, countrymen and lovers, not friends, what is it for Anthony? Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ear, your ears, your ear. So hear me for my cause and be silent that you may hear and believe me for mine honor. All right, so as Anthony is listening to this, this is the little key phrase, believe me for mine honor. And then the implication. I don't know if he says it directly here, but it's said before, right? I killed Caesar for his ambition. Ambition versus honor.
And as we've discussed over these parts, the question is, can we ground authority in some character trait of an individual or does it have to be grounded in institutions? Does it have to be grounded in some sort of. Of institutional or discursive process? Whatever goes on, right from our standpoint, from Brutus's standpoint in the republic, which is really more about guarding the rights of the aristocracy, but for our purposes, some sort of representative government or liberal democracy where the public good is balanced against the rights of individuals and all that good stuff.
So we tend to think of authority as grounded in principles, in a constitution and a form, in a process. And here the question is, well, can it be grounded in the prowess of Caesar and his greatness, in all his glorious conquests and things like that? And that's what Brutus rejects. But when he says, believe me, for mine honor, that's a real slip. Because if he's to believed for his honor, then why shouldn't Caesar be made king for his prowess? So I just wanted to call attention to that, claiming that he loves Caesar, but he did it because he loves Rome more and he was interested in being free.
By the way. Yeah, Brutus's letters that we have to Cicero are very much like this, except Brutus is not as placid. He's quite in the historical Brutus, at least as far as those letters make him look. Look, he is pretty harsh and hardcore about liberty and absolutely not compromising, not going to give the okay to Octavian, even if Octavian at that point has become an opponent of Anthony. But yeah, this focus on liberty and the public good, that is very much the historical Brutus. And then the result of that. So whether or not we see his speech is very rhetorically effective.
The crowd is pretty easily won over. Let him be Caesar. Caesar's better part shall be crowned in Brutus. So, again, the really anachronistic double entendre on Caesar as being synonymous with king, as it will later be. So let him be Caesar is almost let him be king, but in a less anachronistic, more literal sense. Is he to become. Is he just a replacement for this particular individual, which is suggestive of that previous slip where let honor but prowess be honor is honor. Prowess, prowess, honor. And I think Antony very skillfully picks up on all these things, because honor.
He's going to repeat it enough times where it just looks like the same thing, the same sort of authoritarian bent, grounding in some quality of an individual as with Caesar. So Brutus betrays himself in a way, in this, and Antony seizes on it.
26:03 Erin: I think the proudest moment of my life was when I read this for the first time as a little kid and immediately was like, wait a minute. Believe me, for mine honor, and have respect to mine honor, that you may believe that doesn't work. I was so proud of myself for realizing that that was circular logic.
26:19 Wes: It's like when people say, trust me,
26:20 Erin: trust me, trust me.
26:22 Wes: Yeah, because you said it. I'm supposed to trust you because you said, like, you're trustworthy because you said the word trust.
26:28 Erin: And now that you're invoking trust, I feel more distrustful than ever.
26:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
26:33 Erin: Just to say when the plebeians say, let him be Caesar, and then Caesar's better parts shall be crowned in Brutus. Yeah. I love your emphasis on this idea that they're already conceptualizing the role of Caesar, but also the implication, you know, Caesar's better parts shall be crowned in Brutus. Is that murder. We call it assassination. Whatever. Whatever word you want to ascribe has made him a fitter ruler than Caesar. Right. Because he. Because he ends his speech by saying with this. I depart that as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself when I.
It shall please my country to need my death. First of all, he's the judge over Caesar and himself as to whether or not he gets too big for his britches and he's going to have the wherewithal to take care of it himself if ever the need should arise. But also that there's this economy of death inherent in Brutus's action that. Like a shrub being sculpted or something. You know, the republic is ever kind of Growing out of control. And only by killing people you know, will you ensure that it stays contained and shaped in the way that you want to do.
That's not a very good metaphor, but you know what I mean. Like, you're constantly hacking out the weeds. That's a better one. And this ideal of the republic is somehow only sustained through this idea of death or killing the thing which might. Which might grow too large. It's an autocratic kind of logic. No, he's going to be the one who gets his hands dirty and. And make swift work of whoever might be standing in the way according to who he thinks deserves it.
28:15 Wes: This is the problem with revolution, right? The state has become lawless, but the rebels must be lawless in order to rectify it. And then the question is whether law can be restored after a revolution, and that. The track record for that is not very good, unfortunately. But then, yeah, we get with Antony. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. It's an interesting variation on Brutus first line. So lovers gets replaced with friends, and then friends goes to the front of the line. Lovers. I don't know what Brutus means by lovers. Lovers of the country. Lovers of. It must be lovers of.
28:56 Erin: I think it just means friends.
28:58 Wes: I mean, it could be. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that occurred to me. But our contemporary association with lovers know, makes it sound weird in that context, but that's possible. But I was thinking possibly he meant love of lovers of Rome as well. But anyway, friends comes to the front of the line. Romans and countrymen go next. We remember Brutus, right? It was all about Roman identity. That's why you don't need an oath if you're Roman. Antony privileges relationships above identity, loyalty. And so I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Another great line. Wow.
29:37 Erin: And I've brought my shovel.
29:38 Wes: Yeah, he's going to be burying the Brutus and the conspirators. That's who he's going to be bearing. The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious. If it were so, it was a grievous fault. And grievously hath Caesar answered it here under leave of Brutus and the rest. For Brutus is an honorable man. So are they all. All honorable men. Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral. Do you want to read some of this? I feel like I'm just. I think we should read all of it, but I feel guilty. If I'm going to be the one, you do a better job anyway, so.
30:16 Erin: He was my friend, faithful and just to me. But Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man. Man, I'm already being too. I'm already giving away the game here. He hath brought many captives home.
30:28 Wes: But do you use your most sarcastic voice?
30:32 Erin: Well, I want to save the sarcasm. I want to ramp up the sarcasm.
30:35 Wes: Honorable, put the honorable. Honorable man. Yeah.
30:39 Erin: Stage direction here says he hath used inverted commas with his hands. He hath brought many captives home to Rome, whose ransoms did the general coffers fill? Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man.
31:04 Wes: Good pause. Good pause. Keep going. I'm not gonna try to pronounce lupercal or no lupercal.
31:13 Erin: That is it. No, I was just wondering if. If I had something to say about that. It was pretty straightforward. You all did see that on the lupercal, I thrice presented him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition? Yet Brutus says he was ambitious. And sure, he is an honorable man.
31:31 Wes: He's an honorable man. Sure, sure.
31:33 Erin: I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know. You all did love him once, not without cause. What cause withholds you then to mourn for him? O judgment, Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason. Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it comes back to me. See, this is. I used to do dramatic readings of this for my eighth graders. Forgive me.
32:01 Wes: I'm.
32:02 Erin: I go for the obvious with. With them.
32:05 Wes: Marlon branded is a really good. Good rendition of that last part because he gets a bit verklempt, and he just kind of turns away. Bear with me.
32:12 Erin: Yeah, bear with me.
32:13 Wes: My heart is in the coffin. How does the coffin. Wait. He wasn't the godfather at that point. What am I doing?
32:21 Erin: Caesar could have been a kid.
32:22 Wes: He made him enough. He couldn't. Yeah. So great. So, yeah, he really boils the frog here and just turns it up, you know? Gradually. Gradually, the irony becomes apparent. And this transformation of the world. Word honorable, in a sense, into its opposite, or at least into something malign and maybe something synonymous with ambition.
32:49 Erin: Well, again, having the body displayed there, it's so reminiscent to me of, say, Jackie Kennedy wearing the pink suit and making sure that everybody could see what had been done to jfk, you know, so there's this, you know, what he's saying in the speech is also being bolstered visually. And so we have, again, the contrast between this ravaged corpse and this idea of honor. And it exposes, as we've already been discussing, circular logic involved in just deciding that you're honorable and therefore anything you do is going to be full of honor. Here we have the actual result of an action up against the appellation that one has given oneself.
33:33 Wes: Yeah, Brutus, in a way, this is almost like a reductio in mathematics. Reductio ad absurdum. Because Brutus's claim is, because I am honorable, what I have done must have been the right thing. Antony takes this and suggests that if it's not the right thing, then Brutus is not honorable. And then we hear about why it's not the right thing, because was it ambition? He gives some evidence that Caesar was not as ambitious as Brutus says he was. And then. So this redounds back to Brutus's supposed honor. So he approaches this more empirically. What's the evidence for or against ambition?
Brutus, as we know, didn't really do that, even though. Right. He says it's. I don't. I haven't seen any true signs yet. But he's like serpent and his egg. And we gotta nip it in the bud to mix two metaphors. Nip that egg in the bud. Anyway, Brutus's idea is that he sees signs of what will inevitably develop into tyranny. And I suppose you could say you've seen ambition. The ambition is just one of the warning signs. But we don't hear him wrestle with the contrary evidence so much. It's just obvious. I think historically it is obvious. I don't think there's any question that.
What was going on with Caesar, by the way? That Caesar was becoming a tyrant and the big. He crossed a huge line when he basically stripped those tribunes of their titles. That was kind of like, okay, this is like Trump not listening to the Supreme Court or something like that, or decimating some institution which was seen as inviolable from the standpoint of people who cared about the republic.
35:19 Erin: Yeah, I have to say, my hyperbolic love of Caesar is diminished of late. It doesn't seem as funny to argue for Caesar anymore. The first remark of the crowd after this long opening part of Antony's speech is, we get the stage direction. He weeps. I don't know if you have that in your edition. You know, his heart is in the coffin there with Caesar. And then the first thing that A plebeian says is me thinks there is much reason in his sayings, which is really funny. You know, the first. The first place they go is reason. Right. He's broken off to cry.
35:58 Wes: And, yeah, he's given this speech which is full of pathos and ethos. And the crowd is supposedly focusing on the rationale part, but of course they aren't because they're so fickle, right? They're just, well, let's make Brutus Caesar. Now it's like, Caesar was a tyrant. Good riddance. And now it's, oh, right, yeah, it's Brutus who's the bad guy.
36:23 Erin: That's right. Yeah. And I think while we're on the pathos ethos line, that was one of the things that I would talk about with my students is like, okay, what's the dominant appeal in Brutus speech? Is it logo or is it ethos? And ethos? On what grounds? So, yeah, I like that. Right now is the moment of highest pathos. And the crowd goes to logos. It was funny.
36:43 Wes: But yesterday, the word of Caesar might have stood against the world. Now lies he here, and none so poor to do him reverence. O masters, if I were disposed to stir your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage, I should do Brutus wrong and Cassius wrong, who you all know are honorable men.
37:01 Erin: Men.
37:02 Wes: I will not do them wrong. I rather choose to wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you, than I will wrong such honorable men. But there's a parchment with the seal of Caesar. I found it in his closet. Tis his will. So then this movement to the will, which is in Plutarch, Right? So it's not. I don't know. There's something anticlimactic about it for me, this whole reading of the will to kind of finally win the crowd over. Oh, he gave you his public gardens or this or that. But again, Shakespeare is following Plutarch as best he can.
37:37 Erin: What is this about, really? It's such a curious prop because, as you've been talking about Caesar's will, the other sense of will, one of many, but is the thing that maybe hangs him or the thing that condemns him. And then we have this physical document, the contents of which are unknown to us, actually. Right in the play. I mean, we have to take Anthony's word for it that his will was honorable all along, was about the people all along. Was not autocratic. Was. Whatever. I don't know. It's weird. It's like Chekhov's gun, but the opposite, because it hasn't Been hanging on the wall the whole time. It's just sort of pulled out of the back pocket. And we know we don't have a way of seeing it. We don't have any corroboration. We just have to take Antony's word for it. And really he could be pulling out a document that has nothing on it or wing dings or something. You know what I'm saying?
38:32 Wes: I do think he has it retrieved. I can't remember if that's in the Plutarch or in the play, but he sends someone to retrieve it. But the crowd can't though. But yeah, I like this double entendre and will that you're pointing out because it. Right. The gardens and whatever monies he's dispersing. That ought to be a matter of form, the governmental form and institutions working the way they should. Is it in the public good? Not a bribe from a populist autocrat. He can be an autocrat and a populist at the same time. And he was a populist. He was part of the.
I think it was the populi that was the party. And Brutus was in the conservative camp. What were they called? I forget the name. But anyway, yeah, he was a populist in a sense. But it shouldn't be a matter of his will, his personal will and the largesse that he happens to want to give the people. That shouldn't be. Why? What determines what do they get? What's due to them?
39:31 Erin: Well, I just want to say one almost thinks of. Because of this heart, the stag and the idea that the world is his forest. Suddenly I'm thinking of Wyatt. Right. So anything you kill is actually the king's. Is owned by the king. And he's giving this public land to them out of his largess. And yet was it his to give? I assume it was. And yet there's something. I don't know. I'm not putting this very well or tying it together, but like there's something sort of inherently like, I'm giving you this, but also anything on it still belongs to me. And. And it's my world. You're just living in it. That kind of quality.
40:09 Wes: Right. Antony doesn't get to the will immediately. So we get some more awesome speechifying. First. See what a rent the envious Casca made. Through this the well beloved Brutus stabbed. And as he plucked his cursed steel away, mark how the blood of Caesar followed it as rushing out of doors to be resolved if Brutus so unkindly knocked. Or knocked. Wow. What an image. What a sad, sad image. For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel. Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him. This was the most unkindest cut of all. Most unkindest. What? What?
Shakespeare. He's trying to fill out a syllable with a double comparative, or whatever you call it. For when the noble Caesar saw him stab ingratitude more strong than traitor's arms, quite vanquished him, then burst his mighty heart, and in his mantle, muffling up his face, even at the base of Pompey's statue, which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell. Oh, what a fall was there, my countrymen. Then I and you and all of us fell down, whilst bloody treason flourished over us. Oh, now you weep. And I perceive you feel the dint of pity. These are gracious drops.
Kind souls. What weep you when you but behold our Caesar's vesture wounded? Look you here. Here is himself marred, as you see, with traitors. And then he uncovers the body so they just. The right. So all this is happening. You know, they can only see him covered. And I guess there's. I guess he's covered in his own toga. And then. So you can see the blood and you can see the rents. I don't know exactly how it works.
41:59 Erin: If it's just a mantle is over him. So maybe it's a mantle. Yeah. And he's sort of lifting it up and describing what he's seeing to them, maybe, and then pulls it off. That's how I imagine it.
42:12 Wes: I mean, you would have a cloak. A cloak of some sort, which is what I'm thinking the mantle is. But I don't know. I think in the movie, I might be influenced by the movie, which is kind of the way. Way that goes. And then the final thing, which I think we ought to read is maybe that last Good friend, sweet friends. Do you want to read that one?
42:31 Erin: Yeah. Before we do, I just want to say, too, that then you and I and all of us fell down. Right. Again, we have this idea that, like Caesar is all of us, or we're all contained within him. And then we get this wound and eye, tears and blood. Parallels comes to fruition here, where he's inciting the crowd to cry over the wounds by making them sort of identify with the body as if this was done, as if Brutus was their own assassin. Yeah. So then Antony goes on. Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up to such a sudden flood of mutiny. They that have done this deed are honorable.
What private griefs they have, alas, I know not, that made them do it. They are wise and honorable and will, no doubt with reasons answer you. I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts. I am no orator, as Brutus is, but as you know me all, a plain, blunt man that love my friend and that they know full well, that gave me public leave to speak of him.
43:28 Wes: Diana, I'm just a simple southern lawyer. I don't know your big city ways.
43:41 Erin: Sorry.
43:42 Wes: Go ahead.
43:42 Erin: Pretty good. For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech to stir man's blood. I only speak. Right on, right on, right on. I tell you that which you yourselves do know. Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths, and bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus, and Brutus Antony, there. were an Antony would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue in every wound of Caesar that should move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.
44:15 Wes: Yeah. There's some interesting reversals here, because he. Right, we remember that he was supposed to speak for Caesar's wounds, and now they're going to speak for him. You know, it's like the whole speak for themselves thing in Macbeth. And then the other thing is we get an echo of Cassius saying, if I were Brutus, and Brutus, Cassius, I would not trust me. And here he's saying, if I were Brutus, if I were such a great orator, I'd put a tongue in every one of these wounds.
44:48 Erin: I would speak against myself better than I'm doing now to speak against him. Yeah. Brutus is like. Yeah. In the same way that Caesar is being used constantly as proxy for the whole world. He's. He's spread out. He's. You know, everyone is sort of like, imbued with the spirit of Caesar, or everybody makes up the body that is Caesar. Brutus is similarly, I think, used as this. You know, he's like this inert corpse that various people want to possess.
45:17 Wes: So it's wwbd. If I were Brutus, I wouldn't. Trust me. If I were Brutus, I would. Yeah, yeah. It's weird. Yeah, it is weird. This identity thing.
45:31 Erin: Well, there's a puppet show quality to it, you know, that's the only way I can. It's the metaphor that occurs to me who is going to. Especially because of the difficulty, as you're suggesting, of being able to pin down whether or not something is right or wrong. As we were also talking about the deep irony of this play. Of knowing what's going to happen, of having it. Having it all sort of predetermined in this way, which is almost suggestive of prophecy or the. Or the sort of rhetorical, schoolboy, rhetorical element of this as well. Arguing one side or the other.
You can either hold up the little Caesar puppet or the Antony puppet and argue that side. Or you could hold up the little Brutus puppet and it almost doesn't matter which. Like, you know, there's a. There's a. That changeable quality that seems to be emphasized. Or you could put on, you know, the same toga and call yourself Brutus or Antony or Caesar. You know, there's also that, you know, maybe that's worth emphasizing too, or worth thinking about anyway. The uniform quality of the visuals in terms of the fact that they're all wearing roughly the same costume.
It's very easy to costume this play. Right. I don't know if this occurred. It'd probably be difficult because of the length of the speeches. But I wonder if in repertory productions of this, if it were common for people to switch roles occasionally or. Or, oh, tonight I'll play Brutus and you play Anthony. Might have been. Yeah. This idea of somebody just taking up a body and making that speak and say what it needs to say, that idea of Antony's happening imaginatively seems to me to be a reflection of the difficulty of the entire question.
47:08 Wes: Yeah, I like that. And there's a lot of locating the argument or the speech outside of oneself. So for Brutus, it's, what did Brutus say? It's about the public good. It's about the argument. Listen to my words, not to me in particular. But then he slips and listen to the fact that I'm an honorable man. Paralipsis is the rhetorical trick where you say something by saying that you're not going to say it or hear it, and then pretend to be humble and all that. And here he locates it. He uses these hypotheticals. Well, this is what Brutus would say in a similar circumstance.
I'm not going to do that. But if I were someone else, someone else would do it in my position. What does it do? It's a different way of saying it's not about me or my opinion or my sentiment. Even though I'm conveying this through all this sentiment, it's about some other and even my enemy. It's a way of getting into the point of view of the general spectator, as the British moralists would put it, to the general other that we imagine when we're deciding questions of morality or justice. So the authority isn't personal. Once again, this question about whether authority can be grounded in something personal, including power and conquest, or whether it's got to be grounded more generally and to ground it more generally in morality, we have to appeal to law, something law like.
Or we have to appeal to empathy in this broad sense of a general spectator. And you can start doing that by appealing to it should be a general spectator. But you can go down that path by appealing in a dramatic way, by appealing to the very person, the point of view of the very person who you're opposing. That's often how we get to principle. Right? Would you do that? What would you think if I did that to you with the thing that you're doing to me?
49:16 Erin: That's a great point. I love that idea.
49:18 Wes: All right, that's the end of part five of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Please what do you do with podcasts now? Follow them, please. Follow us us. Maybe give us a rating, maybe even add a review on top of that. That helps us all. That helps us. But following helps a lot. If you've made it this far, immediately. Because I know you're sitting on the edge of your seat wondering what happens next?
49:47 Erin: What's going to happen next?
49:48 Wes: Who's going to win? Is it going to be an Empire or is it going to be Republic? But if not, you can wait a week and get Part six. All right, thank you, thank you.
50:04 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext. Next,
The Character of Authority in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (Part 4)
Feb 09, 2026
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
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0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part four of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We are just getting to the end of the section with the conspirators, and I just wanted to, before we move on, draw attention to Cassius's mention of superstition, because I want to get a little bit into this. Of course they're trying to figure out how to get Caesar, and Cassius is a bit worried because whether it's Caesar. Will Caesar come out to play? Maybe not for you. He is superstitious, grown of late quite from the main opinion he held once a fantasy of dreams and ceremonies.
Ceremonies I take to be like religious ceremonies or something like that, but it stands in also for ceremonies of state. And later on we're going to get Calpurnia. Calpurnia will say, I've never been one to stand on ceremony, which at that point she's basically saying she's not a superstitious person either. But of course, the way we use the phrase today, we're generally thinking in terms of being formal. So this double meaning is something that Shakespeare is going to exploit in this play, the ceremony of the state apparatus and then the kinds of ceremony involved in religion and superstition, because there's a way in which the state looks Like a form of superstition and it's being socially constructed.
And that same goes here for oaths as well. The fact and speech acts, right? We say, I marry. I marry you, and therefore we are married. There's something spooky about that. It's not real, Right. That's the nature of speech acts and institutions and state institutions and society in general. They're built on these speech acts. They're socially constructed. We pretend as if saying certain things makes them true. So that parallel, I think, is very important to Shakespeare because this idea that Caesar is skeptical of superstition and religion is meant to parallel the idea that he doesn't actually.
Also, he doesn't respect social convention and the institutions of the state. He's all about his own power rather than in power as it's distributed in social systems. But it will turn out right. He's generally not superstitious, but he's grown superstitious of late. And Calpurnia is quite worried as well.
2:55 Erin: That's interesting because of course, Brutus conceives of Caesar's assassination as a ceremonial sacrifice to the gods. Right. And of course, Brutus is in a way sacrificing to his family gods by killing Caesar. And also, doesn't Caesar have some sort of imagined lineage that ties him back to. I mean, I know this was later made much of, but that ties him back to the gods. That ties him back to at least Aeneas, or in his own propaganda, or his family was thought to descend from Aeneas. Maybe I could be getting this wrong, but I thought he made.
3:29 Wes: I'm not sure this sort of like
3:32 Erin: Egyptian connection to, you know, I'm divine.
3:34 Wes: I mean, the Romans in general are. What's his face? Who wrote the Aeneid?
3:39 Erin: Virgil.
3:40 Wes: Virgil. He hasn't come along yet. It'll be under the reign of Augustus. Under the reign of Augustus and the boy that he writes that. So, yeah, I don't. Is that mythology? I don't know to the extent to which Virgil invented that idea that they.
3:56 Erin: I thought it was through. It is, or it's already there through Caesar's matrilineal line. But I could be wrong about that. I'm operating off of long memory. Claimed as family, the gens Julia descended from the goddess Venus through her son Aeneas. A lineage. Lineage emphasized through the mythical. Yes. His mother's family. I was right. Wow. Also connected to Mars through Romulus.
4:18 Wes: So I wonder if Virgil's picking up on that in particular.
4:21 Erin: Oh, he must be.
4:22 Wes: Since Augustus. In order to flatter Augustus and Wasn't
4:25 Erin: it Caesar's sister's son, Augustus? So that would be further strengthening his
4:31 Wes: masterfulness nephew that he adopted as his own.
4:34 Erin: Yeah. So Brutus seems to be wanting to make this sacrifice out of respect for the state and of his, as I've already suggested, this aristocratic republicanism. But Caesar too has this connection.
4:47 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus is one to stand on ceremony. In other words, he's all about the republic. But again, the question is whether is there something spooky and superstitious about that, which is not unrelated to. Is it really envy and self interest that is hypocritically presenting itself as interest in the state, the public good? That's the question that always lingers behind altruistic motives in general, but. Or an interest in the public good. I ultimately do think that there are true altruistic motives, but I think we are always posed with that question, or at least whether our motives are mixed. But I was going to take us to scene two, but that would mean skipping the Portia scene. Did you anymore. Did you have anything to say about her being in the suburbs of his good pleasure or anything else which. I love that line.
5:40 Erin: Yeah, that's great.
5:41 Wes: Before we go to scene two, I
5:43 Erin: am interested in the gender dynamics in this play. I do think they're fascinating, but also that they're not really on the central track and therefore something we won't have much time for. But I am interested in this idea that Portia accuses Brutus of treating her in this split up way and that she seems to be recognizing in him something that he's not recognizing that he's doing, even though it's all over his speech, you know, so she, she says, I'm. I'm here for you only in these certain ways. And really I'm supposed to be your whole self. I'm supposed to be united with you in this way, which is obviously extremely post Roman that she's referencing.
But so she says that as a result of this not sharing his full life, but sort of being suburb ized, she is his harlot, not his wife. I thought that was an interesting. Just an interesting mirror, you know, here is Brutus's mirror, in a way, is Portia. She's sort of presenting to him this idea that he's treating her in this split way, which is in a sense of the way that he's looking at, you know, Caesar by wanting to kill his spirit rather than his body or something like that. By breaking people up into, you know, the ways that he wants to digest them.
Or view them. And the wound is really interesting in that way, too, because it prefigures, obviously, the assassination and even just the. The dream of Calpurnia. But let's. Let's skip to.
7:06 Wes: Well, let me just say, before we move on. Yeah. I don't. I guess I don't Kind of. I don't quite know what Portia is doing in the play. Like, she's there in Plutarch. So that might, by itself explain it. I don't know thematically what she's doing. I think it's supposed to enhance the tragedy of all of this because she ends up dying because of what he's doing. Right. He really is kind of the tragic protagonist here. But it also highlights something that you've pointed to, which is the way in which he is closed himself off in his rumination. He's not as integrated into a dialogue with others as you might think he would be, given his interest in the Republic and that kind of.
And the political. He hasn't really quite treated this as a political matter. In other words, this deliberation about whether he's going to kill Caesar in the political context of the family. She's impacted by this. She could lose him. And he hasn't paid attention to that. So he ignores that little political unit, the family.
8:16 Erin: I like that.
8:17 Wes: Which is very against principle. So maybe I do know what it's doing in the play.
8:24 Erin: Yeah. Well, you know, she becomes. In death, too. It's interesting to see his reaction, which occurs twice, or his discussion of her death, which occurs twice, which might be an error on Shakespeare's part, or it might be doing something really wonky and interestingly.
8:39 Wes: Yeah. Didn't find it very touching in the play. That's the thing.
8:43 Erin: It's not.
8:44 Wes: Yeah, well, yeah.
8:46 Erin: I mean, it's revealing in that regard.
8:48 Wes: He was supposed to be very devastated by it, historically.
8:52 Erin: Well, Brutus, the real guy, and Brutus, this guy.
8:54 Wes: Yeah. It didn't do much for me, but. Yeah. Just quickly, do you have any ideas about the wounding of the thigh and what that's supposed to do? She's trying to prove that she is capable of hearing hard truths. Right. She's got the strength to do it. So she can withstand the wound in her thigh, therefore she can withstand anything that he would communicate to her, no matter how unpleasant or terrifying, which turns out not to be true.
9:24 Erin: Yeah.
9:24 Wes: I mean, she kills herself, but yeah.
9:27 Erin: The only wound that Brutus has been interested in prior to this, other than wounding Caesar or sacrificing Caesar, is this idea of Pricking himself metaphorically in the non oath oath scene. So Portia thinks that she's appealing to him and showing some sort of manly courage by wounding herself. And in fact, I think she's hurting her argument. Because what we'll soon see, I think, with Caesar's body and what Portia should know is that the wound is a feminine symbol. Right. Brutus is all about the sword and the manliness and steeling himself with valor, as he says.
And she has wounded herself to kind of show her seriousness and show that she could be just as capable as a man of whatever she imagines he accuses her of not being able to keep a secret or something, I think is part of it. And really, she misunderstands fundamentally what Brutus idea of masculinity is about, which is about wholeness rather than being wounded. But the power of that, the power of those wounds will end up being surprising and they'll end up, you know, coming back to. Literally, to haunt Brutus. Yeah. So there's something being implied here about the wound.
Symbolically, it doesn't work, but she takes this, like, extreme action to prove that she's hardcore metal. And two, I think in the Brutus column, there's a wife who's trying to warn him of something or trying to help him or trying to whatever. And then there has to be the same thing in the Caesar column. So, you know, they're the only two that get wives. So since there's a Calpurnia, there has to be a Portia. This goes toward the whole. The mirroring between Brutus and Caesar idea. Yeah, I think so. I don't know. It works for me. It's an interesting scene because of that kind of gender dynamic and what that adds, the complexity that that's going to add to Caesar's wounds and the real Roman obsession that occurs throughout the play with being manly, you know, that seems to be like a big part of Roman identity.
11:36 Wes: Yeah. So in the next scene, it's a great scene between Calpurnia and Caesar. She, of course, Right. She's just had a dream about Caesar being murdered and cried out about it. And she wants to know why he's planning to go out in light of all the bad omens. And he says basically that he always faces his fears and that they will vanish. His fears will vanish when they see him. So it's not like he needs to be afraid of his fear. The fears are afraid of him. Caesar shall forth the things that threatened me Never looked back but on my back when they shall See me the face of Caesar.
They have vanished. Okay, what has threatened him so? Not his fears, exactly, but what might cause fear. And then she tells us, I never stood in ceremonies, yet now they fright me. And as I've explained, there's a real double meaning there. Between the ceremony of prophecy, the people who are telling them that there are bad omens, it's a religious ceremony of a sort. And then the ceremonies of state, right? So the external trappings of offices are ceremonies. And this is something that Shakespeare harps on in many plays. You know, the rituals of kingship and the gowns of the judge, as in King Lear, what people wear.
So various other rituals and forms that go. That are kind of the glue of the. Of the state. But in this case, yeah, she's saying she herself is not one to be superstitious. But in this case, she's worried. And he has this great speech, one of my favorite metaphors. Cowards die many times before their deaths.
13:19 Erin: Yes, love it.
13:21 Wes: Valiant never taste of death but once.
13:23 Erin: I have two hearts and an exclamation point. Sorry.
13:27 Wes: Of all the wonders that I have yet heard that I yet have heard it seems to me most strange that men should fear seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. So death is inevitable. Why fear it? If you fear it, in a way, you've died spiritually already. And then, true to form, he's going to interpret one of these bad omens, the missing heart of an animal, as representing the courage it would be missing if he were to stay home. So he's really putting a good face on this. And then referring to himself in the third person, he'll say he is more dangerous than danger. This is one of the sort of absolutist moments that I've been pointing out, when what Caesar says will be done. I am Caesar. And that's all you need to know. Caesar's more dangerous than danger. Fearlessness is for Caesar what honor is for Brutus, as I've pointed out before,
14:26 Erin: the way that he works. These workarounds, though, are really interesting because for one moment, he's very, l'état, c'est moi. But the one moment where he isn't is in order to justify going out where he says these predictions are to the world in general as to Caesar. So he's like, you know, why should I be worried? Because there are plenty of people in this world. It's not like these are really about me. But of course they are about him, because he is the state, which is
14:51 Wes: a dumb thing to Say, and Calpurnia has a good relationship about all of that. Right?
14:55 Erin: Right. Right. Everybody is, including Caesar, is a fan of the great man theory of history. Unless it prevents Caesar from being seen out on a nice March 15 day.
15:09 Wes: Right. Gotta go out on the ides. It's my favorite time to go out.
15:13 Erin: Gotta press the flesh.
15:14 Wes: The soothsayer already told me. But he's a dreamer. Right. We get a new omen and then some competing interpretations. Yeah. Do to. You want. Want to give that.
15:25 Erin: So Calpurnia dreamt that she saw Caesar's statue, which, like a fountain with a hundred spouts, did run pure blood. And many lusty Romans came smiling and did bathe their hands in it. And these did she apply for warnings and portents and evils imminent. And on her knee hath begged that I will stay at home today. And Decius says this dream is all a misinterpreted. It was a vision, fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes, pipes in which so many smiling Romans bathed, signifies that from you great Rome shall suck reviving blood, and that great men shall press for tinctures, stains, relics and cognizance.
This by Calpurnia's dream is signified. So, yeah, I think in. In part one or two, I talked a little bit about, or we both did, about this idea of interpretation being central to the play and to the whole story. And here we have this, like, really specific moment of deliberate misinterpretation or reading of this dream, which is designed to get Caesar to come out of the house. But it's, you know, same. Exact same image, completely different message taken from that. It just, you know, reminds me of Caesar's fainting, you know, from epilepsy that we talked about in parts one and two, and the varying impressions that people are getting from his behavior.
For instance.
16:41 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting, you know, Caesar conceives of himself as an unmoved mover. And here flattery is going to do the job. And that's precisely what Decius said when they were conspiring. And, in fact, you just flatter him by saying he can't be flattered. But here the flattery is more about his glory and the love of Romans and what he is to Rome. Before that, when Caesar has said that he's not going to go out, he says, I will not come today. Cannot is false. And therefore. And that I dare not false her, I will not come. And then Decius says, I'm going to be laughed at if you don't give Me a cause.
And Caesar says, the cause is in my will. I will not come. That is enough to satisfy the Senate. So he's an unmoved mover in the sense that he doesn't need to give explanations through his actions. It just stops with his will. And that includes his behavior is not going to be explained by fear, but it doesn't need to be explained by any other motivation as well, as far as he's concerned. And it's certainly not answerable to the public, supposedly, or to the requirements of government and the state. So he's really not answerable, in a sense, to the Senate, but he turns out to be answerable in a sense.
Right, because all you have to do is he's made answerable to the flattery of others or to the love of others. And that is what moves him. I mean, ultimately, Decius also has to say, they're going to give you the crown, or they're going to think you're afraid. So he uses other elements of manipulation as well. But there's a very stark contrast between Caesar's conception of himself as an unmoved mover, but how easily, actually, he is moved. He doesn't think he's answerable to the polity, to the public, but he is answerable. Decius proves he's answerable in a different sense to the public.
He's answerable to glory.
18:53 Erin: I read that a little more generously, because I think he's demonstrating in that. That he's answerable to truth. And he just has to say, well, in the end, I just won't do it. He won't lie. And that's kind of all that's left to him in that moment. When I. I turned back the page to try and find that moment, I saw a few other instances of will being used which are kind of interesting, you know, Caesar bids his servant to go ask the priest for their opinions of his success. And the servant exits, saying, I will, my lord. There are a bunch of these instances where the servants say, I will, that I just happened to see.
And then, of course, when Caesar gives that great speech that you just mentioned a moment ago, and doth say that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. You know, death's will is. Is also something to which we're all answerable. Right. He ultimately says, you know, after Decius convinces him, says, how foolish do your fears seem now, Calpurnia, I am ashamed I did yield to them. Give me my robe, for I will go. So he's ashamed he yielded to his wife's fear. And now he's willing himself to go rather than willing himself to stay or something like that.
20:01 Wes: He's afraid of being seen as fearful, then ironically.
20:05 Erin: Oh, yes, yes, certainly. But I think. No, just your reading of the word will, I think, is a really interesting one.
20:11 Wes: Yeah. Right. To say the cause is my will. Right. It becomes a little bit of a reflection on the philosophy of free will. Where to say that I freely act, does that mean it can be unmotivated? Of course. That's a nonsensical conception of what it means to freely act. To freely act is to act with reasons. But when we act with reasons, it seems like we are bound to those reasons, and in a sense, we are. But being bound to good reasons is not the same thing necessarily as being bound to some emotion or another like fear. Although we might have a good reason premised in fear.
But in any case. Yeah. To say the cause is my will, well, I would say it's kind of delusional. Right. And it is kind of the authoritarian way of looking at things, par excellence. That's why in Hitler's Mein Kampf, which I've mentioned a few times on this show, it's all about will, and of course, is a bit borrowed from Nietzsche and will to power. But for the authoritarian, the concept of will becomes very, very important. The grounding of authority. Authority is no longer grounded in any other cause. It's not for the public good, it's not for this, it's not for that.
It's just because I will it. The strongest will is the one that wins. And the strong man, the great leader, is the one with the strongest will.
21:38 Erin: Well, I don't want to sound like I'm supporting Hitler, but I am just. I am just saying that this is about him, whether or not he wants to go to work today. And that is often a matter of will in our own personal lives. It's not as though he's saying, will I kill you just for fun. Yeah.
21:58 Wes: But we might admit, I feel tired today, or I'm afraid because there's a bunch of people who are going to stab me. We might be able to admit that to ourselves.
22:08 Erin: That's right. I suppose I've said that interpretation is really the central idea of the play, but also will is the extent to which, to my mind, Brutus sort of wills himself into the justification for the. I mean, it's more complicated than that. But there is this idea of. I think it's about free will, in a sense. Where does the motivation come from or where does the action come from or where. In a way it's about this idea of all of this having already happened, or it being a play or it being a story that everybody already knows. In a story that everyone knows the outcome and knows what has to happen, where does the will come from?
I think the play is sort of about that. So that will being behind everybody's motivations, really, it's really. It's almost an illusion. In fact, all of this has been preordained. We all know what's going to happen and it has to happen the way that it does. So I take. Yeah, that's a long way of saying I take this moment rather lightly. I think it's a comedic moment and I think we have to know it's a comedic moment because we know he has to go to work that day because he has to get stabbed. And it's really not a matter of his will at all. You know, that's kind of the fascination.
23:12 Wes: You don't think this is an attempt to illustrate an authoritarian personality like I do? You don't?
23:19 Erin: Not quite. I think it's a funny moment, you know, because he's making light of the. I mean, I think it is and it isn't. Right. It illustrates something about him just saying. Well, because I say so, certainly. But there's something light hearted about it at the same time because he's sort of struggling to come up with.
23:38 Wes: It's definitely light hearted as well. Yeah.
23:40 Erin: And ultimately it's toying with us. It's about. There's a third or fourth order motivation here, which is about him going, I'm not going to go, but we all know he has to go. So how is he. How are we going to get him to his inevitable conclusion here? It's about toying with the audience a bit and realizing that, well, he actually has no free will in the circumstance because he's inside a play or he's inside history, which has its way with him. I mean, that's rather meta. But I think a lot of that is being played with throughout the play too. So it's funny to talk about will when you're an actor on the stage in a play, which we all know the ending to, even if we haven't seen the play.
Right. So there is something a bit comical. So I think ultimately the effect of that for me is it's often Caesar's pomposity or prayer tricks the pomposity, because we know that he has no free will at all in this particular circumstance. You Know, and it's, it's just about the mechanism of, of the form itself in a way that I think it exaggerates Brutus's bad. Like something about the form itself and Brutus's cogitations or self justifications or rationalizations, I should say, heightens his bad qualities.
24:51 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I don't. Yeah, I don't think. I agree. I think it's quite a negative representation of Caesar. And historically, a lot of critics, even shortly after the play came out, reacted, how dare you portray Caesar this way. But I get your point. Yeah, I think your point is well taken about. Well, I don't see Brutus as negatively as you. I think Shakespeare is trying to point to this parallel. Right. So they're both willful and in Brutus case, Brutus. And this comes out in the letters to Cicero, by the way, as well. Brutus is like, consequences be damned.
I don't care about my own safety. I don't care what happens. I'm going to do what's right. That's the whole honor, virtue thing. And as I said, fearlessness is to Caesar what honor is to Brutus. Fearlessness, including all the incredible stuff he's done, like killing a million Gauls, all these feats of war that he's engaged and power and prowess. And that element of his character is supposed to ground the rightness of what he's doing. And for Brutus, it seems to be honor. You could say it's for the republic, but is it really for the republic if you're also saying consequences be damned?
So motivation becomes very important here and whether one is motivated by a conception of what's right, what we call a deontological kind of motivation or a consequentialist idea, what's going to be, on a practical level, good for the republic? Maybe it's not a great idea to launch a civil war, even if not doing so will lead to Caesar having too much power. Maybe it'll be counterproductive and actually accelerate the devolution into empire. If you initiate a civil war at this point, there are all sorts of consequentialist considerations, which are the things that Brutus should have been deliberating about.
But for him, it's all about honor.
26:53 Erin: Rah, rah, rah.
26:54 Wes: The Republic, consequences be damned. I'm going to do this. So it's the same. The cause in my will is actually quite a bit closer to that, to Brutus's point of view as well. And I think, yeah, Shakespeare is deliberate, deliberately drawing those parallels. But the scene ends poignantly with. It's kind of sad because all his friends show up and they have wine together, but they're really on the way to killing him. By the way, I do want to say the other thing about something just coming from one's will. It also suggests that you're beyond the causal order, which is part of the whole idea of what's natural versus unnatural.
So you transcend the natural order of if your action can't be explained in terms of natural causes or motivational causes, if it just starts from your will. And that's that unnaturalness that is expressed in the storm. And that's part of the supposed unnaturalness of authoritarianism. It doesn't answer to anything. It's not a part of any causal order.
27:59 Erin: That's a really interesting idea because then how might we square this with the. There's. There's a pretense for getting close to Caesar in order to assassinate him, which is the banishment of cimber and Caesar. Caesar makes mention of this. You know, I. He says, I'm not going to be moved by, well, flattery. Right. We know, we know he can be
28:21 Wes: another unmoved mover, you know, self conception of him, you know, conception of himself as an unmoved mover.
28:26 Erin: Yeah, exactly. And he says he can't be. Uses this metaphor about hot versus cold blood, which is kind of interesting. And then he says at the end, no, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause will he be satisfied. He doesn't act unjustly by not allowing Cimber back. He won't let Cimber back in, pardon him without cause. But that seems to be like, what cause would he need to pardon him? That is the question. Because that seems. That idea of like, think pardoning is an interesting one because it's about the will. Right. You can only pardon someone according to.
I mean, I suppose they would have to maybe do some sort of retributive. I'm sorry. They would have to do some sort of restitution to get back into good favor. So there would be something assigned to their will in order to win them. Win their place back into someone's good graces. But if they're banished, how can they do that? It's purely a matter of. Of Caesar's will as to whether or not he would let cimber back into Rome. I introduced this with the idea that this is a false excuse to get close for the conspirators to get up close to him so that they could stab him.
29:36 Wes: Yeah. So they know he's not going to say yes, of course, but it gives them all an excuse to. And by the way, Caesar doth not wrong, but with just cause. It's meant to be funny. It's a bit of a joke because you can't justly do anyone wrong. This is the thing. Ben Jonson excoriated Shakespeare for this line. And that's what I'm looking for here. I thought I had the quotation. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said, in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, Caesar, thou dost me wrong. He replied, caesar never did wrong, but with just cause and such like which were ridiculous.
But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned. Now, that is a very big misjudgment on Jonson's part. That's a great line. It's part of Shakespeare's genius to put in someone contradicting themselves like that. Right?
30:31 Erin: Yes.
30:32 Wes: What Caesar is trying to say, there's a double entendre on wrong. He's not going to do violence to anyone unless there's a just reason for it. Although, of course, this is kind of the paradox at the center of the justice system in general. Right. We have a right to life and liberty, but we might execute someone or put someone behind bars. And so in the context of punishment, the right goes away. Well, then how is it a right? Right. So those sorts of paradoxes arise. But in this case, yeah, this is the. I think it's a great line, and it's one that Jonson doesn't like.
But he sees his lack of mercy as a virtue because he sees it as part and parcel of his incorruptibility, and even says he's not going to turn preordinance and first decree into the law of children. So he conceives of it as being in accord with the law. He's a defender of the law. The law of children is whim, and that's the law of the tyrant. The law of the child and the law of the tyrant are the same thing, which is to do things according to whim instead of actual law. But Caesar identifies, in a way his will with the law. The imperturbability of his will is the constancy that's supposed to be there in the law.
But of course, that's not the way it's supposed to go. The law has to be the imperturbable thing, and the particular actor, the leader, their will doesn't matter. They're just as beholden to the laws as anyone else. So will and law form a pair here. And the locus of authority should be in the law and not in a particular person's will. And not just in the law, but in custom, in social constructs, more generally, in ceremony. In that sense, we must stand on ceremony, even if it seems spooky.
32:23 Erin: Yeah. And the will here is also to remove Cimber from the law, remove him from the order, banish him him, in other words, so that he's no longer enfranchised. So that's an interesting idea. And he says, if I could pray to move, prayers would move me. I love this, but I'm constant as a Northern Star.
32:42 Wes: It's also a great Joni Mitchell song.
32:45 Erin: Yes.
32:47 Wes: Was it a case of you?
32:48 Erin: Yes. Do not goad me.
32:51 Wes: I just cannot read that line. I don't think of Shakespeare. I think of the Joni Mitchell song.
32:56 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. I was immediately going to start doing it. Yes, I can.
33:00 Wes: I was gonna. You gotta start doing it.
33:02 Erin: Nope, nope, nope. No.
33:04 Wes: I had to stop myself just because it would be so terrible. Would I think.
33:07 Erin: There's nothing I hate listening to more than my own impressions on this stupid podcast, so I am not going to do.
33:13 Wes: You're really depriving the audience because they are. She's really good at impressions, guys, by the way,
33:23 Erin: so I can't be flattered.
33:26 Wes: That's right. You are as constant as the Northern Star, Constantly not doing impressions.
33:33 Erin: The other. Yeah. I never, ever give in. We all know it. This time I won't. All right, so everyone does shine. Everyone. Yes. Okay. So only one holds its place, and that's me. I am the still point of the turning world.
33:48 Wes: And in particular, others are movable because of fear. I think he says, again, they're apprehensive.
33:54 Erin: Men are flesh and blood and apprehensive. But I am not man. I am Caesar.
34:02 Wes: Anyway, yeah, so I feel a bit vindicated here that he's trying to portray an authoritarian person. Oh.
34:09 Erin: Oh, totally, totally. Yeah. I just met in that particular moment. I thought it was. I thought he was being kind of funny.
34:15 Wes: Yeah.
34:15 Erin: And I think that's even maybe self lampooning a little bit. I don't know. Maybe that's a bit too far. Okay. And then he gets stabbed. Didn't see that coming. What do we have to say about that? Nothing.
34:25 Wes: They all stab him. 32. 33. It's 33, right? Jesus's age. Shakespeare changes this to be the same number of stabs as Years in Jesus's life.
34:39 Erin: See, we know what side you're on.
34:41 Wes: And I think in Plutarch, he says, you, too, child. He refers to Caesar. Well, the story is that he calls Brutus child. And it's not et tu. It's not N U. It's just. I forget what it is. But anyway, et tu, Brute? Great.
34:57 Erin: So great. Then fall, Caesar, also great. Gives his own stage direction,
35:05 Wes: right?
35:06 Erin: He becomes the playwright.
35:07 Wes: I fall because I will. Exactly. Not because I've been stabbed. I will it.
35:13 Erin: Well, it's badass. It really is. Gotta give him credit. And Brutus is telling everybody else who's witnessing this, like, don't run away. This is going exactly according to plan. Ambition's debt is paid. We're not going to kill anybody else here. Because for some reason, I don't know, they look like absolute psychos.
35:29 Wes: What comes across in these scenes following the assassination is the naivete where, okay, everyone, calm down. Nothing bad's gonna happen. Of course, they've unleashed the dogs of war, as Antony will say. I always forgot that that line is in this play as opposed to, like, one of the British history plays. But anyway, yeah, they've unleashed hell on Rome, or, you know, but they naively think that by saying liberty and freedom and. And all that stuff that they're going to get a good reception. And they underestimate Mark Antony.
36:06 Erin: Of course, Brutus does, especially after the augmented line. My second favorite love to hate Brutus moment is, stoop, Roman, stoop. And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood up to the elbows and besmear our swords. Then walk we forth, even to the marketplace, and waving our red weapons o' er our heads, let's all cry peace, freedom and liberty. Absolutely insane. Like, Brutus is insane.
36:36 Wes: They sound like hippies thinking that their protest is going to go over well with people.
36:41 Erin: Yeah, and they're covered in blood in
36:44 Wes: the middle of the road or something. And, yeah, now everyone's going to be
36:47 Erin: on our side, right?
36:48 Wes: And then the great, you know, line by Cassius, how many ages hence shall this, our lofty scene, be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown? Brutus, how many times shall Caesar bleed in sport? And then Cassius will be called the men that gave their country liberty. So they're right that it's going to be remembered and used as material for
37:15 Erin: plays and podcasts yet unknown.
37:19 Wes: Podcasts yet unknown. But they're wrong about how it's going to be remembered and certainly about the liberty part. And then the next thing is really the introduction of Marc Antony, which is really. He's now introduced into the play by a servant. In a way, this is a more consequential moment than the stabbing itself. In a sense, dramatically. Maybe I'm overstating that, but Mark Antony, who's been largely absent, is now going to take on this huge. Is he the shoe that drops?
37:51 Erin: Yes, I think in a way you're right. In another way, I think if we're reading this play rather than seeing it, then of course Antony's entrance is going to be very. It's going to overshadow the one stage direction we get, which is he dies. But of course, we have to imagine this is very dramatically done.
38:08 Wes: Conceivably, everything could have ended here. He's dead and that's it. Nothing else happens after that. But Mark Antony sets us up for he is now the main actor. He's gonna produce all the action that follows.
38:24 Erin: Yeah, there's something more to come here.
38:27 Wes: Yeah. So he's the catalyst or the igniting fuel for the rest of the play.
38:33 Erin: Yeah. And we get this really interesting proxy for Antony and his servant because Antony's smart enough to send somebody just in case they have it in for him too. And in fact, they should have. We get the list of the four adjectives which are really interesting. Brutus is noble, wise, valiant and honest. Caesar was mighty, bold, royal and loving. I really like those. The contrast between those two things, those two sets.
38:59 Wes: I should say those two sets of adjectives are right. They point to the different aspects of character that Caesar. They're self concepts. It's Caesar's might and fearlessness and courageousness. Right. Bold, fearless. That's the thing he prides himself on. And that's the thing which his authority is supposedly derived from. And for Brutus, it's honor, virtue.
39:21 Erin: And then we get. Say I love Brutus and I honor him. Say I feared Caesar, honored him and loved him. So there's an interesting.
39:31 Wes: Yeah, so why does he need to introduce the fear with Caesar? And then honor and love are reversed. Right. Loves Brutus, honors him, but honors Caesar, loves him. And then also we add fear, the
39:47 Erin: chiasmus, sort of chiasmus. Because there's, as you say, this extra thing added in, creates the sort of love sandwich here. So we begin and end with love. But it's first and therefore for secondary in the Brutus list and primary in the Caesar list, taking the last place.
40:07 Wes: Yeah. The fear seems to suggest that he didn't necessarily. Wasn't on board with everything. Caesar was doing, but was going along with it out of fear. And by implication, by leaving out the fear of them, he's suggesting he doesn't actually fear them when he. Of course he does. And he should. And he does because he sent the servant and he should.
40:29 Erin: And of course they don't want. I mean, Brutus. This is designed to appeal to Brutus. He's also emphasizing the power vacuum that's now been created, which of course Brutus cannot fill. So he's not going to fear Brutus as an emperor in the absence of Caesar. Yeah, it's designed to appeal to Brutus in a couple of different ways. Acknowledging that there's no longer anyone left to fear because Brutus is. Has restored the leaderlessness or something of Rome. Yeah. And then basically Antony wants to make sure that it's safe for him to come out and play.
And Brutus assures him that it is by saying to the servant, thy master is a wise and valiant Roman. Which I love because it repeats two words that Antony used for Brutus rather than the two words two of the four he used for Caesar. Tell him so please him, come unto this place, he shall be satisfied and by my honor depart untouched. And that's when Antony really knows that he's going to be okay because Brutus has attached this to his honor and therefore we'll leave him untouched.
41:34 Wes: Cassius is still skeptical. He still fears him. And he thinks his fear is probably going to be borne out in the consequences. My misgiving still falls truly to the purpose. And yeah, this is another, what turns out to be another one of Brutus mistakes. Well, he's already rejected Cassius's suggestion that they kill him during the. During their conspirators meeting. He's not going to do it now. Cassius is worried about it. Rightly so.
42:02 Erin: What I love is that Cassius repeats of Antony a sort of scrambled version of what Caesar says of Cassius. Cassius says, I wish we may, but yet I have a mind that fears him much. And my misgiving still falls shrewdly to the purpose of Cassius. Caesar says, but I fear him not. Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know the man I should avoid so soon as that spare Cassius, the use of yet there and much and fear.
42:34 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. Caesar fears Cassius, Cassius fears Antony. Antony fears Caesar. It's a fool feared. All right, then I am afraid we have to end there. That is part four of our 30 part series on Julius Caesar. No, hopefully we'll just do two more
42:54 Erin: parts yes, we are gonna have to.
42:58 Wes: We can do what we want. The audience is gonna have to.
43:00 Erin: If we will it, then, right. Anything's possible.
43:04 Wes: Now, we can't force people to listen.
43:06 Erin: That's right.
43:07 Wes: If we were Caesar, we could, but. All right. So thank you, thank you,
43:17 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Character of Authority in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (Part 3)
Feb 02, 2026
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
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0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part three of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at the end of part two, which admittedly is. How long ago, Erin, was that three weeks ago that we recorded?
0:45 Erin: Oh, no, was it three? I thought it was only two weeks ago.
0:47 Wes: Oh, well, maybe.
0:48 Erin: Seems longer.
0:49 Wes: I thought we might have postponed it because of the holiday, but. Oh, maybe we're jumping back in after a bit of a gap. So I think we were done or almost done talking about the end of act one with the storm. And I think the main idea there was that there's something about the storm which represented unnaturalness, the corruption of nature. Right. Things. People walking around with their hands on fire but not being bothered by it. Nature being corrupted in the sense of things not behaving as they would normally do according to their natures. According to their natural properties, hands should.
Should burn and people should be a little bit bothered by it, at the very least. And that that unnaturalness represents something about what happens to a person who's corrupted by power or to a state that's corrupted by power. And so it's interpreted in that sense by Cassius, after Cicero just kind of dismisses Casca's concerns as just superstition. And Cassius interprets it at first as representative of that kind of corruption. And so it is a warning in that sense. And then he ends with a bit of a shift to saying, well, the storm also represents the things that we're going to have to do to oppose Caesar.
The storm represents the rebellion. And there you get a little bit of the reminder that the rebellion and that Caesar's authoritarianism and whatever is going on with the rebels might be mirror images of each other. And that, I think, is what Shakespeare is actually partly reflecting on. We talked quite a bit in the first two parts about Caesar and Brutus as mirrors or mirror images of each other, where in a way, their authority. Right. In Caesar's case, his authority is supposed to be a role within a republic, but it's come to be identified with him as a person is a person who has all these great feats as a person because of his personal prowess, which is a certain kind of virtue.
It's a certain aspect of his character. And likewise, Brutus seems to implicitly want to make the claim and does in his own funeral. Well, it's not a funeral oration, but speech. Following Caesar's death, he will want to say, my authority in some sense is a function of my virtue and my honor. Brutus is an honorable man. And then that kind of appeal to character as a foundation for authority, we have the same sort of problem. And that, I think, is really what Shakespeare is onto. Over the vacation, I went and reread some of Plutarch's lives with Brutus and Caesar.
And Mark Antony didn't get to Cassius. But it's really interesting because you can kind of see, first of all, he really heavily relies on Plutarch. In some cases, some of his lines are just slightly modified variations on something that Plutarch has said. But you get to see what he's thinking about, what Shakespeare is really doing with it. And what he's doing is a very interesting thing, which he's drawing this parallel between Brutus and Caesar and wondering if, in light of the aftermath of what Brutus and the rebels did, which kind of led to The Empire, ironically, although the Republic was kind of shit show for 90 years before all this happened.
They were fighting. They were friends. It's kind of amazing to see what was going on. Brutus was writing treatises on virtue. He was a philosopher by day and by night, they were just going out and conquering half the world and fighting each other and doing all this crazy stuff. It's really quite amazing what was. Was going on in that context. And it reminded me that Brutus and Caesar were friends.
4:40 Erin: Oh, yeah. Caesar loved Brutus.
4:42 Wes: Yeah. I mean, they had been enemies at various points in the past, too. But these are people who had traveled together extensively, gone to war together. You know, it's in the background of the play that you don't. If you're not familiar with the history, it helps in a way to become familiar with it, because Brutus is. And really the rest of the conspirators are. They're involved. They're not just killing. Oh, he's. You know, it's not like some stranger is killing a. Doing an assassination of a tyrant. It's these. These people are killing their friend because he's gotten too big for his britches.
So wanted to say also, there are some extant letters by Brutus between Brutus and Cicero, and they sound very much like Brutus in the play. He is a person who is entitled, in a way, by his sense of honor. You get the sense that he may have been from Plutarch as well. He might have been kind of induced into doing this by people appealing to his relationship to his ancestor. Like all that stuff happened with Cassius putting the letters. It's there in Plutarch and sounds like he might have been manipulated by concern for his reputation into acting.
So we get this kind of question of is he acting for the republic and for the public good, or is he doing something out of his own honor? That, in a way, looks a bit like Cassius. It's a bit closer to Cassius motives which are envious, or to Caesar's motives, which seem to be about power at this point. And that's the question. But I just wanted to say Shakespeare took Plutarch and had an interesting idea, which is he wanted to reflect on the nature of power and how it's grounded and in particular, whether it's a good idea to ground power in the character of a particular actor as opposed to certain institutions.
Right. The character of whether it's Caesar or Brutus, and then the confusion between that, because Brutus thinks he's all about the Republic and he Says this in his letters to Cicero, too. And he really chews out Cicero, because at this point, Cicero is thinking on Octavius's side. And Octavius and Antony are fighting at this point. And Cicero has taken a liking to the boy, as Brutus calls Octavius as a foil to Antony. Octavius, of course, will turn out to be Augustus Caesar, the first emperor. And he chews him out for wanting to be. What are you?
You just a slave? You think he's going to be a better master than Caesar was or than Antony would be. Brutus is always on and on about freedom and slavery and honor and the republic and this and that. But is he thinking about the republic or is he thinking about his own honor and character? And it's never quite clear how you disentangle those things. And this is a very common political problem. Where am I really talking about the general good or am I talking about myself? That's kind of my recap of where we were with this.
7:35 Erin: I think, in a way, you're talking about kind of the same principles over and over again. I'm seeing, in a way to tie this all together. I'm seeing that the idea that Cassius is reverse engineering the sign of the storm to suddenly reflect him. There's this causation kind of problem, I think, that the play is dealing with up until the moment of the assassination, where cause and effect somehow seem to be reversed or confused, or maybe what the cause is kind of can't be located. So in the same way that you're describing, there's this idea of the natural and the reverse engineering of the sign that the storm represents.
There's this idea in Brutus that his republican aristocratic lineage gives him the right to do away with someone who would be king or would be emperor, and to therefore violently restore republicanism. And also this idea of being honorable, that any action one performs will be honorable if one is honorable, rather than the. The honor adhering in the action itself. So I think there's this confusion or maybe something like the stickiness of the adjective. And what I think Brutus is doing in his slippery logic, especially as we get into Act 2, Scene 1, is moving the adjective from what might be its most logical place to elsewhere.
Right. In this instance of honor, I'm using this sort of incorrectly because it can't really be applied grammatically in the passages that we're going to look at. But he's taking a quality and I think applying it where it doesn't belong, essentially. But a lot of what he does is play with grammar, I think, you know, famously in this, in line 10, it must be by his death. There's a reversal of order that keeps happening, I think, in terms of just temporally, where he puts the cart before the horse. So the. It in that line, it's very, very much like.
Like Macbeth. There's so many, I think, parallels to Macbeth throughout this, the whole play, really, but especially in Act 2, as they're planning the murder. It reminds me of in Macbeth, if it were done when tis done, then twere well, it were done quickly, the it being the murder. Right. So it must be by his death, it meaning his overthrow, I suppose. But it's a very imprecise. Obviously very imprecise pronoun. So one wonders what exactly he means by it in that line.
10:00 Wes: So it must be by his death. And for my part, I know no personal cause to spurn him, but for the general, he would be crowned, how that might change his nature.
10:08 Erin: There's the question what might happen. Let's take a proactive approach here.
10:14 Wes: But again, this, you know, this question of nature and character. Right. Something I want to keep hammering away at, where our characters are second nature. It's not nature. The property of. The natural tendency of an acorn to grow into a tree is its nature, or the property of an electron. It has a certain nature. It behaves certain ways under certain circumstances. But human character is like a second nature. It involves a set of dispositions to think and act and feel in certain ways, and it's hard to change. It's also the locus of virtue, which is pretty much what Brutus is about, but something that's hard to change, but something that can be perverted and corrupted.
And when it is corrupted, it looks like all these unnatural things that happen, like with people's burning hands. Burning. It's the burning hands and people not reacting to it are in a way, representation of something that's gone wrong with someone's character. So Caesar might have his nature change. And this is, you know, as you pointed out. Yeah. This is an interesting aspect of this because we get. We'll get several speeches in this play that kind of say, well, Caesar, he didn't really do anything yet.
11:27 Erin: Yes, right.
11:28 Wes: But he might be corrupted by this. Yeah.
11:31 Erin: Right. Well, a really great example of this is this, the Adder. And then the ladder imagery here. So we have. It is the bright, bright day that brings forth the Adder, and that craves wary walking crown him that. And then, I grant, we put a sting in him that at his will he may do danger with so, so much going on here. But first of all, it is the bright day that brings forth the adder is so fascinating because we're talking immediately about a quality that inheres in the adder itself. But first we have like these conditions that sort of create the adder in a weird way. And the conditions, the bright day, you know, in Brutus's mind, Caesar here is the snake. He's the snake in this nice scene. But the bright day might have been created by Caesar himself. Right. A favorable day, like a nice day. Oh, it's the, you know, it's the easy times.
12:23 Wes: Yeah. I think it means the glory and the adulation of the people.
12:27 Erin: Okay.
12:27 Wes: Because there are several lines, there are several comparisons like this in the the place. It's part of the same line of thought where Caesar is not, he's a colossus, but only relative to the people who cower underneath him. He's not really a colossus in and of himself. That's not his nature. And there's meant to be an explicit parallel here to you have no mirrors. You know what Cassius says to Brutus about not having a mirror, Caesar has a mirror. That's the bright day. It's the adulation of the people, it's the glory associated with his magnificent accomplishments. And that's what brings out the adder. Power corrupts, in other words, it's another way of saying power corrupts.
13:06 Erin: I see again, I think of something that I think we touched on in either part one or two, which is that I think in a way that honor isn't. Populism truly is its own defense or its own, I don't know, Popularity, I should say, is its own self evident kind of not virtue, but it's its own reward or whatever. Right. So Caesar is continually faulted for being popular or for having the love of the people. And you know, the bright day in itself has nothing wrong with it.
13:40 Wes: I think this is another part of what Shakespeare is reflecting on because Brutus is rah, rah, rah, the republic and freedom and part of that are some democratic institutions. Even though it's not not a democracy per se. It's a really complicated situation. But you have the tribunes, that's the way the play begins, chastising the people for being fickle. So if you think democracy is your way out, well, the plebeians may just have the tendency to hand over absolute power to a charismatic figure, to a strong man, to the man who has all the Glory from all his great war deeds, because they want a mirror too.
They want to be able to see themselves and the magnificence of the leader. Everyone's out for their mirrors for their own bright day, so to speak. The problem is very complicated because an appeal to the republic, Shakespeare is pointing out an appeal to democratic institutions doesn't by itself. And that's the kind of thing that Brutus does in his letters. And it doesn't get you out of the problem. Again, the plebeians can just. They might be in love with authoritarianism.
14:52 Erin: Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, continuing with that thought, Brutus goes on to say, crown him that. And then, I grant, we put a sting in him. So again, I really love this imprecise that obviously it means crown him king, crown him emperor, crown him something. But the imprecision or the lack of some kind of precise noun there, I think speaks a lot to the conjecture with which Brutus is sort of thinking about this is operating, or that there's an emptiness, there's just a possibility that he's toying with at the center of his argument. So if we crown him, then I grant we put a sting in him.
So Caesar's already an adder, but if we crown him, then we're giving the adder fangs like he didn't have them already. This is a fundamental perversion, as you're saying, of his nature somehow to do this. So again, there's some like, it's the bright day that's bringing forth the snake. But then only if we give him a crown, is he going to be a snake that we have to actually be wary of. Like there's something a little bit lumbering about this logic or a little bit broken.
16:02 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. So I think, again, yeah, the crown him, as you point out, the crown him him. That. That's a great little touch by Shakespeare, because in a way, he doesn't want to say the name that's so taboo. But Caesar's name is already becoming synonymous with king. Right. Even to say Caesar's name is to say that. So as it goes on, the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power, which I take to be, again, another form of power corrupting by a. By taking away conscience and taking away inhibitions from doing things which are unjust or terrible.
And to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affection swayed more than his reason. Right. So he's not. I haven't known him to be driven by his emotions. He's been pretty reasonable. But tis common proof that lowliness is young. Ambition's ladder, where to the climber upward turns his face. But when he once attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend. The base degrees being the lower rungs of the ladder, which include his. You know, the friends who helped him rise.
Supposedly, it says so Caesar may.
17:18 Erin: Yeah, yeah. This is such a fuzzy image, because ambition itself is the climber, not a person climbing a ladder. Right. This is 2 degrees removed from an actual human being. So we have ambition itself climbing the ladder, which is lowliness. And ambition, of course, we know, is Caesar, that's the adder. And lowliness is then added to it, like the L to the adder, to create a ladder. They're so far away from each other that they're both at the end of the line, ladder and adder. But they don't rise really with each other. Or they do, but only in this really delayed way.
And it's almost as though he's given himself a thought. And then he augments it, if you like to use a word that he'll use in a second with a different kind of thought, a different kind of image, but it's just piggybacking off of. Off of smoke, off of something he's admitted isn't really a problem or hasn't been seen to be a problem yet.
18:13 Wes: Yeah, and I mean, this is a great point. It's a great example of what I think Shakespeare is thinking about across multiple plays, which is the role of metaphor in reasoning. Shakespeare is a great deployer of metaphor, but he's also thinking about metaphor. We saw some of that in Much Ado, where Hero was so stained by her slutty behavior, supposed slutty behavior, that not even all the water of the ocean could wash her off. This kind of. And this becomes a sort of legal indictment about her character and who she is. And in this case, the use of metaphor here is with ambition.
It's ambition that's climbing the ladder. And Caesar. In a way, the argument is meant to be an indictment of Caesar, but it really is an indictment of ambition in general. It's ambition that does all this. It's ambition that turns his face and then turns his back on the lower rungs and all. All that stuff. So if Caesar is ambitious, then he might. He may do all of these things. So he's recognizing a general dynamic in ambition. And it's not to say that the argument Might not hold if Caesar is ambitious. But the reasoning is primarily about ambition.
19:27 Erin: There's something geometric happening here, too. Did you notice this? The base degrees. And we have the idea of turning one's face. So this ambition supposedly has a face, which is another thing that Brutus does. He's assigning a body to characteristics. Right. Rather than looking at a body and seeing what characteristics that body has. So ambition turns its face toward the ladder, and then climbs up the ladder, and then unto the ladder, turns his back. Well, if one climbs up a ladder, your back is already turned to the ladder. Right. Like there's something bizarre that's happening. So you climb up a ladder and you get to the top and your back is already to it. If you face the ladder to ascend.
20:12 Wes: Just to get specific about the metaphor. Right. So lowliness is like humility. Humility is young. Ambition's ladder. So ambition pretends to be humble and uses that to climb. So where to? The climber upward, turns his face. Double meaning, I think, but turns his face, as in puts on a humble face.
20:32 Erin: Right.
20:32 Wes: But also. Right. You get this idea, as you're pointing out, of facing upward as you go up the ladder. Right?
20:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And then turning, turning one's back to the ladder, which you can't do while you're on the ladder. You have to, you know, but once you walk away from the ladder. So once you've ascended, you have to kind of. You're already oriented past the ladder when you get off it with your back to it.
20:55 Wes: Yeah.
20:55 Erin: So it's natural, in other words, to not turn around and then look at the ladder. From once you came, as soon as you get to the utmost rung or whatever it is. Right. You're already going to be turning your back to the ladder just when you step off of it.
21:08 Wes: Yeah. These places where the metaphors kind of break down are also really interesting. And metaphors inevitably do as you extend them. I mean, part of the satisfaction of great metaphors is you can extend them to a great degree, to a larger degree than on average. Even though the two things in juxtaposition are often quite different, it makes them almost like a scientific model with predictive power, where you're saying one thing is structured like another, or this particular structure explains certain phenomena. And then I can empirically test it and see if the phenomena line up.
And then in the cases, metaphors, they eventually don't. Right. So if Juliet is the sun, it may be because she's the light for Romeo and she provides what's needed for him. To grow and various other things. But she's not as hot as the sun. The sun is a ten and she's a nine. Everyone knows that. So the metaphor fails at some point. And here. Yeah, and it tells us something. Here you're pointing to the point of failure. But the ladder itself is humility. Right. So when we turn our back on. On the ladder, we turn our back on the. We turn our face towards it, which I think in part means to put on a humble aspect.
To put on a humble face. And then we have this idea of turning our back on it, which means we show our true colors and become arrogant. Right. Scorn the base degrees and scorn our own humility, but also scorn the humble, the people to whom we showed humility and grace and other good qualities in order to get where we ascended to.
22:47 Erin: Yeah, I like the idea, too, that very shortly, you know, the conspirators will show up with their faces actually covered. Right. So their faces are, in fact, more turned. And Brutus will also give them instructions to sort of hide their conspiracy behind a false face.
23:03 Wes: Yeah. And to be good actors.
23:05 Erin: Exactly.
23:06 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus ends this little. This bit with something quite cynical, which is he's thinking about what he's going to tell people after they assassinate him is essentially the gist of the end of this speech. So Caesar may. Then, lest he may prevent. Right. So just. We're going to stop him before it happens. And since the quarrel will bear no color for the thing he is. Right. So the thing he is right now is not. He's not a terrible tyrant right now. And so it's not going to look that way to people fashion it thus. Which means this is the way we're going to represent it to others.
That which he is augmented would run to these and these extremities and therefore think him as a serpent's egg which hatched, would, as its kind, grow mischievous and kill him in the shell. So we nipped it in the bud, people, why did we kill Caesar? You may not have thought he was a tyrant, but he was about to grow into one. And we saw the signs of that. That. And so we nipped this in the bud.
24:06 Erin: This is the number one place I could point to in my dislike of Caesar. I'm sorry, in my dislike of Brutus. Yeah. We'll bear no color for the thing he is. Fashion it thus that what he is augmented would run to these. This is truly crazy. Right? This is so annoying. Okay, I can't really make this argument right now, but what I can say is that if he were different than what he is, then we should kill him. And that's going to be my. Like this is pure fumes. What he is augmented. I know I'm representing it a little bit more extreme than what it is, but it's nearly there. It's right. Then what he is augmented. So what he is changed would run to these and these extremities.
24:54 Wes: Yeah, Augmented by being given the crown, for instance.
24:58 Erin: Yeah, but it's. But there's a beauty to it all being on the same line. Right. Like there's what he is augmented also has that other. That sort of shadow, meaning what he isn't really. Or if he were different, then this would be a problem. And so we are going to kill him under the assumption that he might become that different person.
25:20 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because there's a. This kind of reflects an interesting problem within the philosophy of science which has to do with idealization of laws, of scientific laws. So there are laws that certain, you know, that things behave in a certain way, but they never really behave in that way because there are all these confounding factors. So the law is always idealized. And then you have to say, well, the orbit of the Earth around the sun isn't exactly what we would expect because there are these other factors involved. Right. Instance. So the law that tells us how the Earth should orbit around the sun is idealized.
And then we get other interfering factors, for instance, might not be the greatest example, but in this case, Caesar has a certain nature. Again, the thing I wanted to kind of hammer on here. And so he is disposed to behave in such and such a way, even if we don't see it, because there are confounding factors. And the confounding factors is that he just hasn't been given the crown yet, or he's not in the right circumstance, but given the right circumstances, we're going to see it happen.
26:26 Erin: Or we should see it happen, provided that. Right. In that scientific way you're describing. It should be this way, provided that XYZ and all the other letters are in the right spot.
26:39 Wes: Yeah. He thinks he knows Caesar's nature, which is odd. Historically, I think he's probably right. But Shakespeare is asking us to be a bit skeptical. That's why he's introducing all these interesting slips, saying, well, actually he is reasonable and I haven't seen him be terrible and emotional about things, but this is his nature. And so on. Part of the question here is, well, how do you know? How do you know what his nature is. Yes, this may be the general tendency for ambition and power corrupts. But how do you know this is Caesar's?
27:16 Erin: Because, particular Evans, don't you trust Brutus, the number one people person? Obviously,
27:26 Wes: he's an honorable. He's an honorable man.
27:28 Erin: The guy who just really gets what people are like, it seems. That's really what you know.
27:33 Wes: So, yeah, so this scene, I mean, it's a great unfolding of Brutus's character as a person. And we see him in a, you know, not quite as tortured as Hamlet, obviously, but he's, you know, we get a window into his ruminations and the overcoming of his reluctance to do something about Caesar. So Cassius manipulations have worked at this point, and he's talking himself into it.
27:57 Erin: Yeah, we see Cassius, or we see the one form of manipulation that Cassius has promised. So we see these letters that have been thrown into Brutus's window, which I love because they're just vague enough, like, Cassius does know human nature and knows that Brutus will fill in the blanks with what he wants to fill it in. So better. Better to let Brutus work himself up into a lather than try to write anything that might appeal to Brutus, because really only. Only Brutus can. Can reason with Brutus. So, Brutus, thou sleeps awake and see thyself shall Rome, etc.
Speak, strike, redress, shall Rome, et cetera. And then we hear Brutus, like, working out, like, oh, what does this mean? Mean, thus must I piece it out. Shall Rome stand under one man's awe. What Rome, my ancestors did from the streets of Rome, the Tarquin drive, when he was called a king. Speak, strike, redress. Am I entreated to speak and strike? O Rome, I make thee promise. If the redress will follow, thou receivest thy full petition at the hand of Brutus. So I just. I love that. I love the idea that they're like, shall Rome, etc. He's like, just like, let me fill in the blank here with what I want to hear, and then I will be convinced.
I will have convinced myself.
29:12 Wes: Yeah, it's funny, I think in Plutarch there are letters, but it's also graffiti. So his ancestor Brutus, who may, or not by the way, may or may not have been his ancestor, but everyone thought he was his ancestor, driven the. How do you pronounce it? Tarquinians. Tarquin. Anyway, it prevented the monarchy hundreds of years before and so was critical to the preservation of the Republic. There were statues of this Guy. And the graffiti was put on the statues. Oh, if only Brutus were around. And it was meant to be pointed at, of course, the living Brutus, to kind of stand up and be like his ancestor, be the kind of great man his ancestor was.
And so that's one of the ways in which supposedly Brutus was manipulated into getting involved in the conspiracy. And the conspirators wanted him involved because he had such a great reputation in Rome. He had a much better reputation than any of the rest of them. Reputation for being incorruptible. One of the few people who was thought of as absolutely politically incorruptible. And so to get him on board was quite an accomplishment. And then the question is, well, was he corrupted at that point? Was he actually corrupted by the conspirators into getting involved?
And corrupted by making appeals to the idea of his incorruptibility, which is precisely the thing that Decius is going to accuse Caesar of. Right. Caesar is flattered by the. If you tell him he's incapable of being flattered, he's flattered by that. And you get him to do anything he wants.
30:50 Erin: Yeah. That's another point toward the mirror idea between Brutus and Caesar. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that.
30:56 Wes: Yep, exactly.
30:57 Erin: Yeah. So let's jump down a little. Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar, I thought this was an interesting idea, because in a moment, Brutus is going to talk about them being swords, the conspirators being swords, in a bit of language that I particularly like. So this idea that he's being sharpened against Caesar. But he says between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream. And this is just what I was referencing a minute ago, that the acting here is second. The first motion is first. So that the. The motion is the. The proposal of the action. The idea of the action and the acting of it would be second. But here he's reversed them. He's put acting first and. And motion second in the order in which he's recounting.
31:46 Wes: Yeah. So the first motion would be the initiation of the plan, or the actual. The willing of it. Like he's made the decision to do it. So in between making the decision to do this dreadful thing and then actually doing it, it's all a hideous dream because he hasn't been able to sleep. Basically, he's tortured now, but he has made his decision. And his bed. She'll end up lying. And then we get. So the conspirators come in and he gives this really interesting speech about not having to take an oath, which I thought was quite. And I thought that was actually rhetorically powerful.
And I think we've already mentioned it in our parts one or two. But the idea in his speech is that we don't need an oath. We can just appeal to the identity of being Roman. Romans don't need oaths. Real men don't need oaths. Honorable people don't need oaths will just rest on our identity rather than our communication. And this is, again, reflective of a certain type of conception of power that's rooted in character and identity instead of being rooted in institutions. Because the saying of an oath or the making of a promise, that's a form of institution.
And it becomes more complex in the state. But the apparatus of the state, in a way, is built off of that type of thing. Contracts, for instance. He's saying, we don't need no stinking contracts. You don't need no badges. We don't need contracts, and we don't need the state. The implicit message of this is we don't need the apparatus of a state or anything like that. We just need to know that we're honorable men, that we have a Roman identity.
33:30 Erin: This oath would be a blood oath, would it not? They would wound themselves. I mean, this is pure speculation on my part. I probably should have looked this up. Now that I think of it, I don't know. I was reading it as though it were a blood oath, and he's basically saying. Because later he says, you know, to think that our cause or our performance did need an oath, when every drop of blood that every Roman bears and nobly bears is guilty of a several bastardy if you do break the smallest particle of any promise that hath passed from him. So he's saying, like, you know, all your blood is supposed to be, you know, great Roman blood and therefore incapable of betraying, so why spill a few drops of it in this circumstance? So I was reading this as a blood oath.
34:11 Wes: Okay, Makes sense. Yeah. Guilty of a several bastardy, meaning each would be guilty of not actually being a son of Rome. That's the bastard part, right? So you're not even Roman if you would betray this conspiracy. You don't have Roman blood, so why mingle blood in a blood oath?
34:31 Erin: This is where I. I think in either part one or two, I accused Brutus of being like a gnostic, or maybe like a Manichaean, or whichever one I thought was. Was probate at the moment. But you know, he seems to have this such high mindedness that he's not taking the bodily into consideration. He's not taking things like Caesar's popularity with the common people, or he's idealizing the body, or he's doing that thing where he splits everything into component parts. So I think this is how his logic is working. One of the things I just wanted to say, sort of generally speaking is that to me the right thing seems pretty obvious, which is don't do anything, wait and see.
But instead he convinces himself, you know, he's sort of the halfway point between Macbeth and Hamlet. He's not like Macbeth where he just says, okay, I'm not going to think about it, I'm just going to rush in and do it. And then be racked by guilt and have the sleeplessness be the result of guilt. But he's also not incapable of acting. But he has to convince himself that this is a good thing. And so he's going to weave this argument, in my opinion, out of very little. And in order to do that, he can't see the forest for the trees. He can't see the obvious, obvious thing.
He has to atomize everything and then build a new kind of psychological motivation or justification out of that atomization. And so I think this is what we're seeing constantly in these, in, in, you know, his, his descriptions of Caesar being like the head of a body. So we don't need to hack off Mark Antony the arm of the body. And it's like, what body? You know, he, he's not playing with a whole body, he's playing with like bits and pieces of things. And so here he has this idea that, you know, our motives are good and we don't need to spill blood in order to make this oath, because we are pure and good and whole.
And let high sighted tyranny range on till each man drop by lottery. This is a connection, I thought, to what he accuses Caesar of. Just before in the latter speech that we were just talking about, where once he attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend. Right? So that's high sighted tyranny. So looking into the clouds, but in this very moment he's saying that we shouldn't be spilling our own blood or dealing with something lowly like that. You know, we should be thinking of our own motives, our own high minded ideals in order to justify this.
Like we don't need an oath, we just need Our own high minded in order to go through with this. And so he's sort of aping the very orientation which he's at the same time deriding in Caesar. He's seeing the stars rather than dealing with the people right in front of him.
37:18 Wes: Yeah, well, you gave a good example of the perils of metaphorical reasoning with you fast forward to the point where he's rejecting, as he does a number of times, he rejects sensible suggestions by Cassius in this case to kill Mark Antony, because Mark Antony is just a limb. So if that sort of political alliance were like a human body, a truly organic whole where different parts can't change their functions, then he would be right. But that's not how the political body works, it turns out. So Antony is a huge power player and long has been in Rome and is perfectly capable of trying to, to become king himself, which is what he does historically.
But it doesn't end well for him either. But anyway, or his girlfriend. Right, that's a play we should do soon, you know, again, let's be sacrificers, not butchers, Caius. Oh, he's using his first name there. Interesting. Will stand up against the spirit of Caesar and in the spirit of men there is no blood, so. So we're killing his spirit, not him. He's just a collateral damage, right? The real Caesar, the physical Caesar is collateral damage. We're killing the spirit, which is the ambition, the tyranny, the corrupted role that's created when a king is created.
So let's kill boldly, not wrathfully. Brutus is trying to be very high minded here and make sure that no ill, nefarious motives come into this. And Cassius is just the poster boy for mixed motives. He may have some noble motives, but he's also ambitious himself and envious himself, which is what Shakespeare repeatedly makes clear in his characterization.
38:59 Erin: This is one of the moments where I think that Brutus is envious and unaware of it because he mentions envy twice in this and says he doesn't want people to think that he is envious or that they are envious. He says, you know, if we're too bloody then we're going to look like wrath and death and envy afterwards by cutting the head off and then the limbs. And then at the end of this little speech he says, this shall make our purpose necessary and not envious, which so appearing to the common eyes, we shall be called purgers, not murderers. Again, there's, there's a preoccupation with what other people think. And this repeated Idea, which I take to be pretty suggestive, you know, that we don't want to appear to be envious at all. I mean, that could. That could be legitimate. But I think Brutus doth protest too much, you know.
39:48 Wes: Yeah. And I think, well, so the way it's represented in Plutarch, the way it's represented in the end of the play. Right. Mark Antony will say, Brutus was the only one who wasn't.
39:56 Erin: You're right.
39:57 Wes: At least partly envious. And that's straight out of Plutarch. And that's the way that history is written. It makes it seem like Brutus has pure motives and Cassius has mixed motives, and the rest of them are at least partly driven not by the best motives. They might want to save the Republic, partly. But also there's other things going on. But Brutus is supposedly pure. And I think you're right to point out that Shakespeare is exploring that possibility. Is Brutus really? And even if he were. Even if Brutus were, in his own mind, purely acting out of a conception of the public good and his own virtue and honor, is that enough? Isn't he, in a way trying to be absolute himself? He's trying to be the best in one way or another, but.
40:45 Erin: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Is it possible to be as prideful as Brutus is and not be envious? And if he is a kind of mirror of Caesar in that way, I mean, we don't really see Caesar be envious, I guess. I don't really think so. But I think that there's an implication that if Brutus and Caesar are sort of of wind or something, an envious
41:06 Wes: person is worried about taking something away from another who has it. I think Brutus is worried about losing something, and that's the reputation he already has.
41:16 Erin: I see. Yeah. Which is a mysterious one because of
41:20 Wes: the letters and the right. Historically, the graffiti. It's been suggested to him, you are not really Brutus unless you act like your ancestor and stop. Your reputation is at stake here. If you don't do this, you're going to fall from this very, very high reputation that you have. And that would be the most cynical way to interpret what Brutus is doing, that it's all about maintaining his reputation. But if it is on Shakespeare's account, it is unconscious. And that's part of what Shakespeare is exploring.
41:55 Erin: The idea of being a Roman, too comes up twice in that previous speech. And that's seems to be important. Like we have to be Roman. I have to be myself if I do this. Or if I don't do this, I'm not Brutus. If I don't do this, I'm not a Roman. And yet. Yeah, I just wanted to mention, just to backtrack for one second, that he has this idea of steeling with valor, so being like a sword and basically erect and strong rather than one of the melting spirits of women. And he says, what need we any spur but our own cause to prick us to redress? So there's a, there's a slight double spur in that.
So there's this inherent idea in his metaphor of drawing blood, but it's only ever metaphorical blood. And in fact, you know, Romans need all their, all their Roman blood within them to be against the bastardy of tyranny in order to successfully fight against whatever Caesar represents. And so we're going to, to spill his blood because he's not a Roman. Yeah, so it's this, this helps me, I think, see this justification a little bit more clearly because there's so much hypocrisy in Brutus without understanding that what he's trying to do is maintain this sort of ideological or the self concept, which is whole.
And he's going to preserve that by any means necessary, even if it means literally punching holes in somebody, somebody else. So that's, that's helpful to me to understand, understand his psychology.
43:24 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think it's something we all do. I mean, it's for better or for worse. I think there are ethical theories which ground ethical action in general and a conception of identity preserving an identity, even if it's just a human identity, we cease to be human if we do certain things. And so we don't act certain ways for fear of ceasing to be human. But we also get ourselves into big trouble because we, and I think this is kind of what psychoanalysts refer to as death drive. Death drive, in a way, is about self preservation. It's about preservation of a certain identity, a certain image, even if it's at a practical level very self destructive.
We want to preserve that because. Or it wants to preserve itself and it's lodged in us. Right. It doesn't want to be destroyed. So if it's an identity that is counterproductive, that's not its problem. It wants to continue to live. All right, so that is the end of part three. patreon.com subtextpodcast or doing that subscribing right here on Apple. Or maybe it's not here. Maybe you're not on Apple. But if you are on Apple, it is here. Otherwise, yeah, you can wait a week to listen to Part four.
44:39 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter NYsubtext.
The Character of Authority in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (Part 2)
Jan 26, 2026
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
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0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We just got done with part of act one, scene two for one hour now. We did a big discussion of Brutus to start things off. And then we started diving into end of the play and we were talking about the character of Caesar. So I had pointed a little bit to this idea of what Caesar do it and it's performed and the way that's dreamlike. And then the accusation against the soothsayer. And then we move to the point of view of Cassius and Brutus. Right. This is the point where Brutus says he's not gamesome enough. Quick spirit. He's not going to the football game. He's just going to go home and feel depressed.
1:14 Erin: Yeah. And he comes down to he's a Stoic. You know, they're always such fun at parties. Vexed, I am of late with passions of some difference, conceptions only proper to myself. So, you know, leave me alone to think my precious thoughts.
1:29 Wes: Poor Brutus, with himself at war, forgets the shows of love to other men. So, you know, Cassius is saying, why have you been so distant with me lately?
1:37 Erin: Yeah.
1:37 Wes: And Brutus, I'm worried, honey. I'm worried about work.
1:42 Erin: I feel like you don't have time for me anymore.
1:46 Wes: Exactly. And then Cassius says, well, I have some things I want to share with you. I've been withholding them, these worthy cogitations because you've been in such a piss poor mood, but maybe it's time to share them. And then he brings up this idea of do you know what your reputation is? And later on. Well, no, it's right here in the scene. Brutus lacks mirrors. He doesn't see how highly people think of him. And this seems to be right. This is a very similar sort of. Well, here we have flattery. And flattery is going to be another big theme in the play.
Caesar's going to say later on he's absolutely immune to flattery. Decius says, actually if you want to flatter Caesar, just tell him he's immune to flattery and then he'll eat it all up. And flattery is the way you win over the crowd, right? Rhetorically. So this is all very important and this is what Cassius's project right now is with Brutus. Engage in a little flattery and see if that works. Oh Brutus, you're so high minded and honorable. Everyone thinks that and that will impel him to act according to the image in that mirror. Now I'm not so sure this is actually what motivates Brutus, but yeah, what do you think?
I'm not sure what Cassius is doing is actually the big motivator. And especially since his being worried suggests that he's already in this frame of mind.
3:15 Erin: Oh, definitely. Yeah. And I think you're right. I think Brutus actually picks and chooses what he wants to from Cassius. Overall spiel. I love this idea of the mirror because yeah, it's like Brutus doesn't even have a body. He's like a brain in a vat or a microchip. Brutus seems to be all about, you know, he's cogitating because he's concerned because he's of two minds. He's at war with himself and he has to resolve this, I think into a singularity. And so in a way, Cassius's method of this mirror idea seems to be the wrong move. Caesar has statues of himself everywhere.
He's populating Rome with himself. And Brutus seems to be about containment or reduction or the, or the desire to reduce himself to a single cause or a single thought. He's upset, he's melancholic, because he doesn't know what to do. He really wants to kill Caesar, but he doesn't know if he can justify it or he's really concerned about Caesar's growing power and feels conflicted about what to do. And so it seems that he needs to get to a decision. And then once he makes that decision, he then has to back it up with a lot of reasons. But like it seems that he needs to rush toward a single resolve, a single resolution.
When Cassius tells him that he has a hidden worthiness, he says it is very much lamented, Brutus, that you have no such mirrors as will turn your hidden worthiness into your eye, that you might see your shadow. So the mirrors are sort of for Brutus's own benefit to see something in himself that he isn't aware of. Then Cassius goes on. I have heard where many of the best respect in Rome, except immortal Caesar, speaking of Brutus and groaning unto underneath this age's yoke, have wished that noble Brutus had his eyes. So the first part of that is about I wish you had a mirror in yourself.
So that you could see inside your little nooks and crannies, something which is unknown to you. Then he does this sort of wider thing. Other people look at you with such admiration. If only you could see yourself in the eyes of others, then what you need to do will be revealed to you. And what does Brutus latch on to about the first part of that rather than the second part?
5:37 Wes: Right.
5:37 Erin: So he says, into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius, that you would have me seek into myself for that which is not in me? So he ignores. So this is, I think you know what you're talking about, where he's not really motivated by the flattery. He's not really motivated by this idea that other people are really, really love Brutus and really wish that he were, you know, in more control in Rome. Brutus is motivated by the thought that there might be something in him that he's not aware of. And it doesn't have to be worthiness. I mean, he's really motivated, I think, by introspection and discovering, digging up everything in himself that is in there.
Because he's obsessed with this idea, I think, of self knowledge and of being as rational as possible, which means examining oneself as thoroughly as possible. And that's what he latches onto in Cassius's speech. He goes right to this, you know, what's in me that I may not know about? And therefore, like, what mischief are you up to? Because are you going to tell me there's something in me that I'm not aware of?
6:43 Wes: Yeah. So the surface content of this is everyone thinks you're so great, Brutus, and wishes that you knew you were great, right? Everyone thinks you're great, except for Caesar. Love that little parenthetical. Everyone's groaning underneath his age's yoke and wish noble Brutus had his eyes, right, to see himself. But another way of interpreting that is wishing Brutus had his eyes to see what other people see in him, which is to say, to be responsive to the crowd the way most people are, and to be responsive to the prospect of glory and the prospect of recognition, to be able to be manipulated by the crowd in the usual way into becoming a projection of their own grandiosity.
Which is another way of saying to become an autocrat himself. I'm just taking that line of thought out to its most pernicious possible conclusion. Don't take all that at face value. And another way of reading this is just an even more sinister way. Cassius is, in a very subtle way, saying, look, Brutus, Caesar is becoming a tyrant. And everyone's saying, why hasn't Brutus done anything about it? Brutus is the go to guy. That's what he's doing. And then when Brutus responds and says, seek into myself for that which is not, you would have me seek into myself for that which is not in me.
It sounds like he's saying, you're trying to get me to think I'm great when I'm not. But maybe back to this question of flattery. I'm kind of giving another dimension to the flattery which is kind of threat, right. Brutus, the threat of loss of people's respect because he's not doing anything about Zealand. Those are two different ways of thinking about it. And I think the latter might be the thing that is more motivating for Brutus. Not that flattery is going to work on him and that Brutus wants to be seen as great in everyone's eyes or to acquire that for himself, but that he already has that and could lose it.
He could be shamed by all of this.
8:46 Erin: Yeah, I think I immediately went to a sort of deeper interpretation than the one that you're pointing to. But I think that there is concern here that there is something about himself that he's not aware of, independent of this idea that people are relying on him. I think part of the reason why the flattery angle maybe isn't working and this idea of other people's eyes being Brutus's eyes doesn't work is that Brutus isn't interested in. I'm just going to say he's not interested in other people's opinion of him, though I think he is. He doesn't understand the social component of self assessment or the importance of knowing oneself in relation to others.
9:36 Wes: And that's interesting in light of the fact that Cassius says I'm going to be your mirror. You can't see yourself, so I will be your mirror here. So I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself that of yourself which you yet not know of. Modestly. Right. He's not going to exaggerate it. He's not going to flatter. And he'll go on and say, I'm not going to flatter you. If you know that I do fawn on men and hug them hard and after scandal them, or if you know that I profess myself in banqueting to all the rout, then hold me dangerous. So if you know me to part of this is fawning and flattery.
Right. And then backstabbing after that. But he's like, you know, I'm not a flatterer. I'm going to give you an accurate representation, and I'm going to be your mirror. And I'm not just trying to manipulate you. And then there's a shouting and flourishing because we're hearing the part where Caesar first rejects the crown. And Brutus, I do fear that people choose Caesar for their king. So now we're getting into open discussion here. That's only been hinted at. And he'll go on to say, I'd rather die for the general good than have Caesar be king.
And then we get Cassius kind of reposed to that, where he says he would rather die. How does he put it? Than I had as lief not be as live to be in awe of such a thing as I myself. Right? Such a thing as I myself just being another ordinary human being. And then he gives the great account of Caesar almost drowning. And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world did lose its lustre. Ye gods. It doth amaze me a man of such feeble temper should get the start of the majestic world. And then we get this idea, right? So Caesar is either an ordinary man, or he's maybe even of more feeble temper.
He's epileptic. He was too exhausted to swim the river, and Cassius had to save him. And then we get this great speech. Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus. And we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time were masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. I don't think I ever fully understood this speech. I mean, in high school, I don't think I understood. Right. When Caesar is called a colossus, it almost sounds like he's being called a great man.
But Cassius, point is, he's not a great man. He just seems like a colossus in comparison to our cowardice. He's just an ordinary guy, or maybe even less than that. But we're a bunch of sheep and cowards here in Rome and we're letting him take over. It's interesting because he moves on from this idea that he's gonna be a mirror to Brutus that's just kind of left behind and they get into what Caesar is to them.
12:23 Erin: Well, yes, but Cassius is being a mirror to Brutus in a deeper way first. I just wanna backtrack a second and address what you said. I do fear choose Caesar for their king. That's, I think, in relation to the shouting that they're hearing. And this is Brutus's interpretation. Right. But in fact, this is a misinterpretation. So these shouts are cheering for Caesar because he's refusing to be their king,
12:47 Wes: but he was loathe to reject that crown.
12:50 Erin: That's Casca's interpretation. So it is the occasion for him to come out and say what he fears. But even that statement is only in light of what he is hearing. Then Brutus launches into this whole thing about honor. And then Cassius says, I know that virtue to be in you, Brutus, as well as I do know your outward favor. I know you're an honorable guy. Well, honor is the subject of my story. So he is being a mirror to Brutus. He's basically saying, like, let me put this in a way that Brutus is going to listen, so I'm going to cast this as a story of honor.
13:24 Wes: Ah, I see.
13:25 Erin: So he's mirroring Brutus in the way that he trying to tell Brutus what he wants to hear. And Brutus is like, oh, oh, this is a story about honor. Now I'm listening. Right.
13:36 Wes: So they're being dishonored by, you know, if they're going to be subservient to someone like Caesar.
13:43 Erin: That's exactly right. And Cassius goes on to say, you know, for my single self, for me personally, I'm just one guy, you know, But I'm just saying, right. And then he tells.
13:55 Wes: Don't know about you. I don't know if you like.
13:56 Erin: Like, I don't know if you really like being someone who's dishonored, worshiping a loser. Right. But for me, for me, it's just. I'm just saying. And then he tells the whole swimming story, which is like the. The happens in this movie Gattaca, that we're. We have to cover on the podcast eventually, which I love, but basically, you know, but he's just this guy, this sick guy, and it seems like a dishonor for us to have to deal with that guy elevated above us. And repeatedly, I will say that so much of this, so much of this idea of honor is gendered too.
I just want to point that out. Like, are we going to be beholden to this guy who is like a sick girl? He characterizes him womanish. Womanish, right. You know, how could Caesar be so great if I had to save him from the river? There's this idea of Manliness. This is also very appealing to Brutus, and it seems interchangeable. Manliness seems interchangeable with honor throughout. I just want to point that out because I think it's going to become more and more important as the play moves along. And as we see Portia, for instance. And even with the body of Caesar, what ends up happening to Caesar?
I think there's some statements being made there. And there's something that is like rebuking on a basic manhood level. That seems to be a motivating factor for Cassius's upset over Caesar and maybe also Brutus's, you know, are we gonna be men and fight back? Are we gonna do something? Or are we just gonna accept our fate? And Calpurnia is really upset about signs. And, you know, this is later, right. But are we going to look outside and say, oh, no, all these bad omens are happening. Maybe don't go to work today. Because that seems to be something that, like, a woman will do in this play, right?
Or are we going to actually take action? Are we going to be men and take action? That seems to be the kind of the binary, the implicit binary that's being set up here. So are you a real man, or are you just a sick girl? Nothing worse than a sick girl. I would hate to be one of those. So, yeah, and then we have this idea of, like, conjuring, too. But he amps it up more and more. Then he sort of gets into the perfect personal. But he uses this honor thing as a way in. And I think that. That it's connected to this idea of being a real man.
16:18 Wes: I think also at stake here, there's a little bit of what's in a name going on.
16:23 Erin: Yes.
16:24 Wes: Write them together. Yours is as fair a name which is funny. So beyond Caesar's mannish being manly or womanly or epileptic, feeble or not, there's just the fact that whoever Caesar is, this is just a role. He is just human, and this is just a role. And there's other actors in Rome. The role, you know, the executive role should never grow to encompass everything. It should be one part of the republic. So he'll say, upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he has grown so great age. Thou art shamed, Rome. Thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods.
When could they say till now that talked of Rome that her wide walls encompassed but one man? So this idea that there's no room for anyone else to be a man or to be strong or an agent or an actor in light of Caesar crowding out that possibility. Caesar becoming everything now, is it Rome indeed and room enough when there is in him but only one man? So my point there, you know, there's two points I'm making. One is about this idea of Caesar's expansion and exclusion of manhood or agency and others. But also the fact that. And I think this is going to become very important, that there is no divine right.
There's no essence here. Caesar just has this role on loan. And the man ought not. Right. The role. It might be great. The role might be very prestigious and important. The role of being a leader or a president or what does he have both consulships at this point? What's going on now at this point? I don't know his official title. I think he's got both consulships.
18:15 Erin: There's so much time collapsed here, too. I was trying to work out the
18:18 Wes: timeline, but in any case. Right. Yeah, he's not an emperor, but he's in danger of becoming one. And so the. The role is bigger than the man, and the two ought not to be conflated. The role is something like a social construct, and we ought not to lose sight of that fact. We ought not to treat metaphors as if. Or signs as if they are the things that they stand in for. There's a lot of that in this play and, of course, in Shakespeare's other plays. We ought not to treat the trapping, to think that the trappings of authority somehow confer some essential greatness upon a person. They're still human, all of that stuff.
18:56 Erin: Yeah. You know, the idea that Caesar just has this role, as you're calling it, there's such a. Such a dramatic irony throughout. I mean, throughout the whole play. But of course, the word Caesar will be synonymous with the role. Right?
19:11 Wes: Yes. No, he's consciously. Shakespeare makes great use of that irony in this play.
19:16 Erin: But yet. And I even love yours, is as fair a name. It literally isn't. Right. Brute. It's literally not as fair a name. And it will not start a spirit as soon as Caesar. It literally won't. Right. Caesar's ghost will come on stage. Caesar's name is in everybody's mouths all the time. So what I really like is the scale that happens over the course of this. We have this idea in scene one with the tribunes that Caesar is flying high above everybody's heads, and he's going to become. He's going to basically go out of sight and. And rain terror down on people without them knowing distance.
Distance is separating him from everybody. And then this colossus thing where he's this huge body that's standing astride the city. So this is a giant man. And then it's this idea that Rome has shrunk to just this one guy. So you know, that. Then this is where Cassius says, there have been other men in Rome, basically. And one of them was a Brutus who would have brooked the eternal devil to keep his state in Rome as easily as a king. So there was the Brutus who. Who was. Who founded the Republic. There have been other people. Are you going to basically let this one man, you know, not only have his way or be just the number one guy, or just be the only guy who matters, but also kind of erase.
Erase the legacy of your name and of your nobility? And this is where I'm seeing that there's this. You know, the republicans are behaving in ways which are actually more indicative, I think, of monarchy. Caesar and Antony both have this kind of divine right thing. And later, Antony, of course, will be making out a list of who's going to live and who's going to die. So there's that kind of autocratic power which is located in them, but in the republicans, there is this idea of nobility and of ancestry which seems to belie their whole bag. That seems to be the thing that's like, okay, I get, you know, that makes Brutus say, I get it.
You know, I'm not gonna think about this anymore. But I hear you. And it does seem that Brutus is motivated by the. The nobility or the desire to keep alive this. This hereditary right to republicanism, to the idea that Rome has to be more than just one guy. It has to be a bunch of people. But it's Brutus's sort of divine right or his kingly cause, his honorable cause, to be the one who preserves Rome as a place for more than one guy. So he's sort of like uniquely ordained for republicanism. It's a very weird angle to go in on, but Cassius has to take it, you know, to basically get it so that Brutus will be flattered as being the equal of Caesar, but like, the equal and opposite of Caesar.
22:07 Wes: Yeah. So this appeal to honor ends with Brutus saying he'd rather be a villager than to repeat himself, a son of Rome under these hard conditions. And Cassius, I'm glad that my weak words have struck such a show of fire from Brutus.
22:21 Erin: That passes for fire, I guess.
22:23 Wes: Yeah. Right. So then we get this different Picture of how Caesar thinks of himself. This is where we will. Caesar is now passing by and Cassius and Brutus, they're planning to get a debrief from Casca and they can see something is wrong with Caesar and Calpurnia and Cicero, they look like they've just seen a ghost or something. And then we get this wonderful scene where Caesar observes to Mark Antony that Cassius has that lean and hungry look. Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek headed men and such as sleep nights. Young Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. And then Antony says, no, he's not. And then Caesar, I think he suddenly moves to the idea that, oh, if I'm calling someone dangerous, Antony might think that I have fear. And so now he has to defend himself against an accusation that Antony hasn't made, but is in a way perhaps implicit in Antony's. Oh, no, sorry, it's not implicit fear. Him, not Caesar. Yes, it's right there in the text. Sorry, sorry, Antony does say it out loud. Okay. Antony uses this word fear. And then Caesar has to respond to that.
He doesn't like that accusation, or that would he were fatter. But I fear him not. Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know. The man I should avoid so soon is that spare Cassius. He reads much. He is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men he loves. No plays as thou dost, Antony hears no music. Seldom he smiles and smiles in such a sort as if he mocked himself and scorned the spirit that could be moved to smile at anything. He just. He smiles to mock. Smiling, I love it. But here we get a clear portrait of someone who is being corrupted by power to some degree.
He has to have this absurd belief that he is fearless even when he's detecting danger. Of course, how would you detect danger if you didn't feel any fear? How could he possibly know Cassius is dangerous if you weren't feeling fear? That's the way a normal person would do it. And then he'll end this by saying, I rather tell thee what is to be feared than what I fear. For always I am Caesar. And this is where we get one of these several allusions, that ironic allusions that Shakespeare is making to the double meaning of the name as I am Caesar, as if he's saying, I am king, but I'm Caesar.
I'm not the type of guy who could feel fear and a divinely ordained king could not either. And then another little Touch of irony. He's like, well, come over to this side because I'm deaf in this ear. So we get another. Immediately the aftermath of that is we get a little portrait of his frailty in contrast to this self conceptionist. Fearless.
25:13 Erin: Right. I mean, this is the man who crossed the Rubicon and has behaved in ways which are fearless. And he has to kind of keep that up as his body is failing.
25:21 Wes: Yeah. Have you read the Conquest of Gaul at all?
25:24 Erin: I've read parts of it. I read all of Plutarch's lives back in the day. It's been a very long time. But.
25:30 Wes: But it's a very different. Right. Yeah. It does not. This is a very different Caesar than comes across in that book or even Antony and Cleopatra. This idea of him, you know, him being kind of a little bit doddering. Right.
25:46 Erin: It makes me feel a little bit of affection for him because of the kind of the silly disjuncture between. I'm not afraid of anything. And can you also speak into this ear, please, Because I'm feeble, you know, and we've just heard Brutus say, I love the name of honor more than I fear death. You know, so there is a culture of fear as the worst thing, fear as the womanly thing. So one has to constantly pay lip service to. And that seems to be what Caesar is doing. Right. Like, I have to keep reassuring people that I don't, or I have to keep saying this out loud and hopefully it'll be true.
26:22 Wes: Could say a bit about Casca's characterization of Caesar as, you know, rejecting the crown but really wanting it. And then he has an epileptic seizure. So another pointing once again to this frailty in Caesar. And the epileptic seizure, of course, becomes the storm. And as we'll see in a. Is representative of. It's not just literally that he's sick. It has something to do with his ambition and the unnaturalness of the ambition. But I just thought we could comment briefly on this dynamic between him and the crowd, because this is another case where we're right.
The crowd is the mirror, in a way. And. And then there's the question of rhetorical tricks and flattery and all that stuff. And then Casca compares it to theater performance and he does this dramatic thing where he offers up himself to have his throat cut, but he apologizes for this fit that he has. And then the wenches forgive him. Casca says, if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, it would have been the same. So something's going on here about how he Manipulates the crowd. But it's a little bit vague to me. It's Greek to me. It's a little bit vague how all that was working.
27:46 Erin: I agree. It seems like he's almost embarrassed or he realized he overplayed to the crowd with the cutting his throat thing. Like, maybe it didn't go over that well. And then when he comes to, he's like, oh, I'm sorry if I said anything inappropriate. He's testing them by seeing how far he could take it. But at the same time, the most fascinating part of this for me is that assessment that you mentioned of Casca seeing it as like a theater performance. He says if the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him according as he pleased and displeased them as they used to do, the players in the theater. I am no true man. I thought about that for a long time because I was like, this is kind of a bizarre power dynamic, universal scene.
28:29 Wes: Yeah.
28:30 Erin: What, is Caesar throwing a fit if they don't cheer for him like he's a toddler? Or does he have one of those light up applause signs like they have during studio recordings of sitcoms? I don't think so. Right. Again, this is the failure of these conspirators to give credit to Caesar's own popularity. So rather than saying, gee, how come Caesar is so appealing to these people? They're like, what did Caesar do to get them to cheer for him like that? You know? Or like, he must have given them something. He must have given them some sign that they have to be cheering for him.
You know what I mean? It's this fascinating psychological reversal. It's very. To me, it's just very indicative of envy. You know, it's. It can't be. They can't be cheering for him because they're cheering for him. It has to be that Caesar is somehow getting them to cheer for him. Right. Like there's a circuit that their minds are doing which is leaving out that Caesar merely knows how to work a crowd. And it's bypassing that to say that he's somehow getting them to clap for him in a way which is manipulative in some far more straightforward way than simply he knows how to work a crowd.
Again, there's a discounting of Caesar's popularity, which I think is. Is really is going to be their downfall.
29:51 Wes: Yeah. Although after Brutus's speech, the crowd is quick to turn on Caesar. I mean, it does seem in line with the whole idea of fickleness. The tribunes, Right. Bring at the beginning. And I do, I kind of take Casca's account at face value because I think that's part of the point of indicating that he's kind of dull witted as to make us believe this account more. But. Right. And so here when Brutus says he has the falling sickness, Cassius says, no, he doesn't, we all have it. And then Casca is confused by that. So that's one of the reasons he gets called stupid.
But yeah, I'm still confused by the dynamic. He sees that the crowd, that Casca's theory. Right. So we can, yeah, you know, Casca's interpretation we could be skeptical of if we'd like. But he, because it is a very confusing account, he sees that the crowd was glad he refused the crown. Then he does this thing where he offers to have his throat cut, which I don't get. I don't understand why he would do that or what that means because it seems to indicate. Is he saying I'm. I don't know what the point of that is, but whatever it is, it goes too far.
That's the thing that, that dramatic gesture, I mean the whole clap in hiss thing suggests he's. Yeah, he's pandering to the crowd. He's being a performer, he's very in tune with what, what it is they want. And he's trying to calibrate everything he's doing to that. But perhaps the throat cutting thing is a little bit. He's too in touch with maybe the aggressive qualities of the crowd. Right. Because it's always a double edged sword. Worship and then sacrifice. Right. So one, you know, or he's flying too high, so to speak. He's flying a little bit too high and then he has that seizure, maybe gets frustrated.
31:38 Erin: Oh, here I'm refusing this crown for your sake. What do you want to cut my throat now? You know, maybe.
31:43 Wes: Well, that's the end. That's one possible. I guess that's the idea. It just seems like a weird, weird thing for him to do because the whole point of refusing the crown is to show that he's not power hungry.
31:57 Erin: Right. But if Cask is to be believed, then he really wants it and he's upset at having to refuse it. And that's why they've all come away upset, because Caesar's pissed that. Yeah.
32:07 Wes: Oh, I figured they were upset just because of the fact that it ended with an epileptic seizure.
32:13 Erin: Yeah, that could be it too. But then why would Caesar be angry and everybody look like they were chastised by him or something. Sounds like he came off stage and was like, what do those people want from me? And started yelling at everybody because he's a little bit of a diva or something. I mean, obviously he's a huge diva, so. Another reason why I love him.
32:31 Wes: Yeah. So we don't have to pause for a long time on any given scene, but. Or part of scene two, just where we still are. But after Brutus exits. Well, Brutus thou art. Cassius says, well, Brutus, thou art noble, yet I see thy honorable metal may be wrought from that it is disposed. Therefore it is meet that noble minds keep ever with their likes. For who so firm that cannot be seduced uses this word seduction. Caesar doth bear me hard, but he loves Brutus. If I were Brutus now, and he were Cassius, he should not humor me. So if I were Brutus, I wouldn't be won over by me.
Cassius is basically admitting here to being a scoundrel and to actually corrupting. Right. He's right. The honorable metal is being wrought in a different right from that. It is disposed away from its true nature. This idea of nature and natural dispositions and natural causality and natural explanation is very important in this play, as in many other Shakespeare plays. But Brutus has a certain kind of character, a certain type of natural disposition, a certain metal. And Cassius is bending it to his will. But. Yeah, so I just want. That's all I wanted to say about that.
Before we move on, I do want to talk about the storm quite a bit.
33:50 Erin: It.
33:50 Wes: My notes say there's a crazy storm.
33:54 Erin: Mine say man with hand on fire.
34:01 Wes: I was excited to see the. The storm in the movie, the way they would handle that. And it was pretty good.
34:06 Erin: Oh, gosh, I haven't.
34:07 Wes: But you could do more with it, obviously.
34:09 Erin: I think so. I don't remember any of that.
34:12 Wes: But if they were to do a movie today, I mean, there's so much you could do with cgi. You could really see all of these. This kind of surreal scene that's happening because it's not just any old storm. It's fire falling from the heavens and all the other stuff that they describe. But the reason why this interests me so much is because there's a series of interpretations of the meaning of the storm. Casca, Cicero, and then Cassius. Casca's naive idea, the one that Cassius is going to both Cicero in a way, and Cassius are going to scoff at, is that the storm is either caused by civil strife in heaven or the World too saucy with the gods, incenses them to send destruction.
Right. The old. The gods are unhappy with us, and so they're sending destruction. And then Cicero inquires and he gets the account of. I love the line passing by for some reason is my favorite one. The he did glaze me, just being looked at and glazed upon me.
35:13 Erin: Oh, yes, yes.
35:14 Wes: Yeah. And Casca will say, don't let anyone say that these can be explained by natural reasons. You see some of this in King Lear as well and elsewhere. But this conflict between superstition and natural causality, this is kind of the pivot point at this period in history for this modern science is beginning to flourish and superstition is looking more like superstition. And he says, these are portentous things unto the climate that they point upon. So now, Casca goes on to a different idea, that there's an element of prophecy in this, let's say. And Cicero says, well, men construe things after their fashion. In other words, you're just. This is a projection of your own character or of your own fears. Cicero is a realist. He's a stoic and he's a realist. He's not like this superstitious Casca.
36:13 Erin: Yeah. Casca's list of things I just think is hilarious because it ends with the most uninteresting. He's like, there are men on fire walking up and down the streets. And last thing in the list, even at noonday, upon the marketplace, the bird of night, the owl sat, hooting, shrieking. It's like, okay, so there was an. Also an owl in the middle of the day.
36:32 Wes: Yeah. And I don't think Cicero. Yeah, I don't think Cicero believes a lot of this stuff. Yeah, the owl, sure.
36:38 Erin: But I don't. I don't think Rome Live at five is going to be, you know, like, showing footage. An owl hooting in the middle of the day. I think it might be focusing on the men on fire walking up and down the street. But
36:52 Wes: anyway, the dead coming out of their graves, as we'll learn later on
36:57 Erin: from the lions walking around the Rome Zoo was empty that day.
37:04 Wes: Cicero, I take as the second interpretation,
37:08 Erin: which is no interpretation.
37:09 Wes: Yeah. It is indeed a strange disposed time. But men may construe things after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves. In other words, this is all people's superstitious imagination. And then when Cassius comes, it's going to be. Casca's worried about the storm, and for Cassius is a pleasing night to Honest men who have known the earth so full of faults. So here it sounds a bit like Casca's idea that the gods are going to punish us for something we've done wrong. But I think Cassius idea is going to turn out to be that there's a certain type of fault in authority per se.
This is partly why I think that the storm is Caesar's epileptic fit. And that Caesar's epileptic fit, the one that he experiences rejecting the crown, is sort of predicated on him flying too high a bit or something like that. Predicated on him being on the precipice of absolute power and then things falling apart at that point. So here's what Cassius says. Those that have known the earth so full of faults, for my part, I have walked about the streets, shows his breasts to heaven. He just says, go ahead, strike me, storm. And then Casca says, why would you tempt the heavens that way?
And Cassius, you're a dull Casca. And those parts of life that should be in a Roman you do want, or else you. Or else you use not. You look pale, gaze and put on fear and cast yourself in wonder to see these strange impatience of the heavens. And then he gives his own little list of things that are happening. Old men's fools and children calculate. I love that one. Why all these things change from their ordinance, their natures. This idea of things changing their natures is what it's all about here. Which again is in parallel to. To people changing their characters, becoming corrupt.
They change their natures and preformed faculties to monstrous quality. While you shall find that heaven hath infused them with these spirits to make them their instruments, to make them instruments of fear and warning under some monstrous state. Now I cask a name to thee, a man most like this dreadful night that thunders lightnings, opens graves and roars as doth the lion in the Capitol. A man no mightier than myself or me. He's on that track again. Caesar's really not that great, but yes. So Cassius directly compares Caesar to the storm. Later on, he's going to say.
He's going to change his interpretation of the storm and say that what it represents is the rebellion as well. It represents the assassination. And in a way, that's one of the deeper themes in this play, is that the rebellion itself, I think, is part of your point about Brutus. But the rebellion itself kind of incorporates some of the same autocratic authoritarian qualities as the thing that they're rebelling against.
40:12 Erin: I'm interested in this idea of nature that you're talking about, or bending things from their nature. Because then he says, I know where I will wear this dagger. Then Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius. So then he addresses the gods and says, therein, you gods, you make them weak, most strong therein. And you gods, you tyrants do defeat. Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron. In the corner, I have a little note to myself. Cassius loves lists, and being on a roll can be retentive to the strength of spirit. But life, being weary of these worldly bars, never lacks power to dismiss itself.
40:51 Wes: So suicide is always a possible route to freedom.
40:54 Erin: It's always a possible right. We could always free ourselves that way. That part of tyranny that I do bear, I can shake off at pleasure. So I can just shake all of this off. I could just shake life off.
41:04 Wes: So can I. So can every bondman: in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.
41:11 Erin: That's right. I can kill myself, too. We could all kill ourselves. And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf, but that he sees the Romans are but sheep.
41:22 Wes: What trash is Rome, what rubbish and what offal when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so vile a thing as Caesar. What a great line.
41:32 Erin: This is all great. I just, you know, the lion thing. Yeah. So what is this about? This is about nature reflecting Caesar. Well, there's a lion walking around here because, you know, the Romans are just. I mean, I'm conflating the two, but there's an interesting contrast. This is all messaging about how the world is so bad and Caesar is causing all this, all these problems also. What can you do? Caesar's just being. Caesar's just taking advantage of the situation. You know, there's a lot of. I don't know what this is like. I can't tell quite what mood Cassius is in or whether he's sort of setting it up. So you can answer.
42:15 Wes: Yeah, I don't know if I can answer that, but I do want to emphasize, right, he makes this point, right? Things change from their ordinance, their natures and preformed faculties, Right? Because old men aren't supposed to calculate, right? By which he means, I guess, prophesy, but from the foot. From my footnote here in my text. But I just thought of. With old men, fools and children, just being really smart, doing math, like on a chalkboard, doing, like, a Good Will Hunting type of thing, and people freaked out oh my God.
42:50 Erin: What the hell is going on?
42:51 Wes: But you know. Yeah, right. The hand, when it burns, should burn up and people should be screaming in pain. But that's not happening. So it's against nature. And somehow for Cassius, that's what is monstrous. Right. What's monstrous is what stands out. It's almost like a miracle within the natural order. It stands out as not being part of the causal order or a genetic monstrosity. Right. Something has gone wrong. So when heaven makes them, uses that as instruments of fear and warning, Heaven is trying to say something unnatural is happening. And the unnatural man is the man who's most like this dreadful night is Caesar.
There's something unnatural about him or there's something unnatural. And what's unnatural? Well, first of all, since authority is a social construct, it's unnatural in general. And then he's going to go on to make, make the case that by making the point that Caesar isn't a great man, that point is that no man can actually live up to the name, the role, the designation. We shouldn't equate the role and the authority of that role with the actual person. It's not of his essence, it's not of his nature. What's unnatural is when those two things get conflated.
We conflate a particular person with this fantasy, right? And it can be a crowd created fantasy, the crowd mirroring back to the man some sort of monstrous self image, monstrous self conception. But if, yeah, we equate this grandiose image of power and the particular, because the role of course is powerful. But in any case, the two shouldn't be equated. And so that's where we get something perverted away from its nature.
44:43 Erin: Yeah. But then he says, well, it is natural for Caesar to have become a tyrant because the Roman people cast him in the role.
44:53 Wes: You know, that's a way of saying it's socially constructed.
44:55 Erin: Yes.
44:56 Wes: And what's socially constructed is precisely the opposite of the natural. It's not part of the essence of the thing, it's just part of. It's because the crowd believes it so that it makes it so.
45:07 Erin: But, and then I think, I think though at the end he kind of comes full circle in. There's a bit of a giving way in that, Right. You know, Caesar's this awful guy, but then also he's doing something which is natural to him. And then he says the complexion of the element and favors like the work we have in hand, most bloody, fiery and most terrible. So actually the fiery sky all of the. This is like the bloody work that we have to do in order to overcome. Right. So it comes full circle. So he sort of ends up reverse engineering the very thing that he's using as the sign of.
45:44 Wes: Yeah, he keeps changing his interpretation of the storm and where it ends up is the storm. You know, on the one hand the storm represents. And all the storm, which is to say all the unnatural, monstrous things that are happening, represent the monstrosity that is Caesar and the monstrosity that is the crown, that is the making of a monarch. The monstrosity of absolute power, let's put it this way, as opposed to power that answers the people. Although in this play the monstrous power is a function of the people in a weird sense. But anyway, he changes interpretation to say, yeah, the storm actually represents the work that we as the assassins must do. Which is, you know, an incredible pivot.
46:25 Erin: Right.
46:25 Wes: In a way you could say Cassius is sloppy. But you know, I think the real point is. Right, yeah. That the rebellion mirrors the thing that's being rebelled against. It carries the same unnatural, autocratic, authoritarian tendencies as represented by Brutus. Relationship to honor.
46:43 Erin: Yeah. What I love about this is the dramatic irony that this sets up. I mean, the fact that we know what's going to happen. The fact that even the characters on stage kind of know what's going to happen. It's as if there was a prophecy, this autocratic rule, this rule by one man and they're going to. Then, you know, and this is all part of this prophecy. And of course, by trying to eliminate, trying to eliminate a king, it produces the very thing that they tried to avoid. Right. So there's something in the circuit that Cassius's interpretation undergoes that seems to reflect this self fulfilling prophecy element of every self fulfilling prophecy.
Right. And so in a way, the entire play functions that way. Or you could say the prophecy is that they're going to not be able to bring this about and die in suicide or something like that. And so it's as if the entire plot is intending to bring that about. Because it knows already what's going to happen. Because we know already what's going to happen.
47:38 Wes: So no, I think this is a really good point just because I think Shakespeare is thinking about what would have happened if Caesar had lived. You know, we know what did happen, which is just this whole sequence of events ensured that a monarchy, you know, came about and Octavius became emperor and all that stuff. What would have happened otherwise? Is it just that the conspirators made their own worst fears come true.
48:04 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, let's end with worst fears come true. That's great. Okay.
48:09 Wes: Worst fears come true. All right, on that note, we'll be doing another recording of this. We could just do another two or three. I mean, we could just do this forever. Could discuss this one. Play for the most.
48:24 Erin: We'll say there will be parts three and four, and then maybe parts five and six, depending on how fast we go.
48:29 Wes: And I'm in no hurry. I don't mind if the audience doesn't like it. They can boo and hiss and then I'm gonna fall down and have a fit. That's what I'm saying.
48:38 Erin: Sounds right.
48:39 Wes: Thank you.
48:39 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook Subtext Podcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Character of Authority in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
Jan 20, 2026
Brutus is an honorable man, but Caesar is Caesar: at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, his name is near the point of becoming synonymous with dictatorial power, and his every wish, as Mark Antony points out, has the substance of a command. For the rebels who oppose him, this identification of political authority with personal will is a perversion of republican institutions, and a form of corruption that justifies any means of putting an end to it, even if that means killing a friend. Yet Brutus’s conception of himself as unflaggingly virtuous is one he in fact shares with Caesar, and perhaps reflects the same authoritarian tendency, in grounding the legitimacy of political action in the character of a particular actor. Then again, it is not clear that democratic institutions will always forestall authoritarian tendencies, rather than enable the masses to sanction absolute power in a charismatic leader. Wes & Erin discuss Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Brutus is an honorable man, but Caesar is Caesar. At the beginning of Shakespeare's play, his name is near the point of becoming synonymous with dictatorial power. And his every wish, as Mark Antony points out, has the substance of a command for the rebels who oppose him. This identification of political authority with personal will is a perversion of republican institutions and a form of corruption that justifies any means of putting an end to it, even if that means killing a friend. Yet Brutus conception of himself as unflaggingly virtuous is one he in fact shares with Caesar and perhaps reflects the same authoritarian tendency in grounding the legitimacy of political action in the character of a particular actor.
Then again, it is not clear that democratic institutions will always forestall authoritarian tendencies rather than enable the masses to sanction absolute power in a charismatic leader. Today we discuss Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, where does this play stand in your rankings of Shakespeare plays? I almost said Julius Caesar plays. Are there a lot of Julius Caesar plays?
1:51 Erin: There are a couple,
1:54 Wes: yeah. Where is this one for you? What's your favorite Shakespeare play? Remind me. Much Ado.
1:59 Erin: Yeah, that's my favorite. In the, you know, personal opinion, it's not what I think is the best play, obviously, but it is my favorite. And then probably Antony and Cleopatra.
2:09 Wes: Oh, yeah.
2:10 Erin: And then. I don't know. This is in the top five for me. I love Julius Caesar. I was so excited to do this. It was my first play. I feel like it's everybody's first Shakespeare play.
2:18 Wes: Right.
2:19 Erin: Because so many people read it in school.
2:21 Wes: Well, do they do Romeo and Juliet first in high school, or do they do this one first?
2:25 Erin: My mom made me read this when I was, like, 11. This is her. I think this is her favorite Shakespeare play.
2:30 Wes: She loves trying to tell you. Was she, you know, she was worried about the. You being corrupted by the crown?
2:38 Erin: She was.
2:39 Wes: Are you wearing a little tiara at the time?
2:41 Erin: No. If anything, she was. She was trying to warn me about. About Brutus, which. No, she you know, Anthony's speech, I think, you know, we were talking probably about the art of persuasion or something. I don't know. I just. I remember reading this when I was really young and thinking that it was so amazing and that I was seeing something so. Or reading about something so profound. And then actually. Okay. And then this is. This is a side note that has nothing to do with anything, but it is funny. Okay. So when I. So my mom is not a cat person.
I'm a cat person. When I was 13, because my mom felt sorry for me, she got. She let me get two cats, and it was a girl and a boy, and I was 13, so I named them Caesar and Cleopatra because I thought that was great. And I got them home. And like two days later, it finally occurred to me I was not thinking about this at all. Okay. Two days later, it occurred to me that our next door neighbors had a cat named Brutus. And Brutus was awful and used to frequently try to attack Caesar, who was a little, you know, he. He had some problems. Caesar. Cleo was really sharp.
Caesar was the Caesar of Shakespeare's. Julius Caesar, a little bit in decline, had some physical problems, so. So he was a sitting duck for Brutus.
4:01 Wes: Little epilepsy.
4:02 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. And couldn't hear that. Well, I don't want to hear. Anyway, it was very funny. And then it was commented on by everyone in the neighborhood, and everyone thought I had named my cat Caesar because Brutus lived next door. And it was just the most amazing coincidence. So I love this play.
4:19 Wes: Brutus isn't. Is an honorable cat.
4:22 Erin: He's really not. And Brutus, to this day is my least favorite character in all of Shakespeare.
4:27 Wes: I was curious. I almost started by asking about your opinion of Brutus because I knew it's going to be counterintuitive. What. But before that, you must have taught this play as well because you were a high school teacher.
4:41 Erin: I tried to keep it to myself, but I would always end with Dante's description of Brutus and Cassius in hell, which, you know, it's a documentary as far as I'm concerned.
4:53 Wes: Okay. This must be why I knew you would have a different take. Yeah. So we will get to this. But yeah, the. The representation, of course, of all these characters is ambiguous. Right. So we're not simply meant to take Brutus at face value. But before we get to that, just when you teach this play, what is your. Is there something that you're focused on or how is it. How do you sell it to the kids?
5:19 Erin: I think I Did it with eighth graders. So it's been a long time. But we talked about rhetoric, you know, and different rhetorical devices. And basically the focus is Brutus versus Antony in the big speeches. I taught it as a way to show them different, how different rhetorical devices work. What are rhetorical appeals? What kinds of appeals is Brutus making, and what kind of appeals is Antony making? You know, it's not like I was teaching this to a more sophisticated audience. I think part of the reason why it's used so early on is also just because it's such an accessible play.
I mean, the language is not difficult, but they liked it. And there was a lot of performance in class I would use. So, you know, the boys got to. Got to get up and give their sort of interpretations of the speeches, which was really fun. And. And then always a little sociopath. Wanted to play Cassius. Not really, but, you know,
6:19 Wes: he is sort of the Iago.
6:21 Erin: Yeah.
6:21 Wes: Of the play, in a way. Well.
6:23 Erin: And all the boys would be like, I want to be Caesar. And then they would figure out that Caesar really didn't have that many lines, which is kind of funny.
6:28 Wes: Of feeble temper. You bring up these different types of rhetorical appeal, and I think that's important, apart from the fact that these speeches are so. Especially Marc Antony's speech, which is so incredible. But there's a lot of incredible speeches in here. There's the question of the effect on people and maybe their. Their character. Right. So the effects of rhetoric, the effects of other types of emotional manipulation, including Cassius's effect on Brutus, the effect of the. That the crown and power might have on Caesar by corrupting him, all these ideas of different ideas of how character might be changed by these different forces, but especially by rhetoric and especially by power.
And then there seems to be a parallel to the idea that character is something like nature and that there's something unnatural when people's character is perverted. So, for instance, during the storm, all these crazy things are happening, like lions strolling in the streets and people's hands on fire and not bothering them.
7:36 Erin: I always loved the hand on fire thing.
7:38 Wes: Yeah, it's funny. So this idea of things going against their nature. Right. That things have natural dispositions to behave in certain ways under certain circumstances, and that I think Cassius suggests. There's different interpretations of the storm that I want to get into, including Casca's. But Cassius's idea seems to be that, in a way, it's representative of the Caesar's corruption of character or the corruption of Caesar's character by power. So that's the part of this that interests me. Just to bring it full, a lot of this is about character. And then I look at the interesting rhetorical part of this in light of how fixed people are in their characters, how corruptible they are.
8:20 Erin: Cassius says quite a bit about this in Act 1, Scene 3. But one of the things that I was thinking about in relationship to nature is the whole play is basically about reading or misreading or interpretation or misinterpretation. And I think the reason why, one of the reasons why Brutus really bothers me is because he really gives no quarter to those parts of human nature that are not about the rational. And the signs that you're referring to, I think, are sort of like outward expressions of this irrationality which is at the heart of the other conspirators anger against Caesar.
Maybe something like, you know, the people's love for Caesar, maybe there's something irrational in that or something sort of beyond reason or super reasonable. And that idea of nature, or what one thinks of as human nature is something which I think Brutus shows time and time again that he has very little understanding of and even maybe of his own nature or his own character. He seems, on the one hand to think that he knows himself really well, and on the other hand he seems completely incapable of knowing himself. I don't know if you would agree with that.
And I think that lack of awareness of hypocrisy perhaps is the central question, because we have this idea of. Of interpretation that somebody might do something which is different from how they actually feel. You know, they might behave a certain way but have secret mot. They might say something and mean something else. And that awareness of hypocrisy, of the human potential for hypocrisy or deception, is one which Brutus has no access to, even as his level of self deception is so intense. You know, maybe. Maybe we all have a bit of Brutus in us and that's why I'm rejecting.
Rejecting him so strongly or dislike him so strongly.
10:07 Wes: So you don't think that only in a general honest thought and common good to all he. Sorry, I was trying to quote Mark Antony here. You don't agree with Mark Antony's assessment at the end of the play. This was the noblest Roman of them all, all the conspirators, save only he, did that they did in envy of great Caesar. He only, in a general honest thought and common good to all, made one of them. His life was Gentle and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, this was a man. What a great little speech. He's he really. If you're going to have a funeral oration, Antony's the one to hire.
10:46 Erin: Yeah, Antony is the bomb.
10:49 Wes: But so I bring that up because. Yeah. So nominally he's an honorable man. And of course, Antony famously makes use of that appellation to great effect in his very ironic funeral oration speech for Caesar, suggesting in a way. Right. It's almost like a reductio absurdum where he's like, they're honorable men, so what they must have done was right. And then he produces evidence to show that it probably wasn't the right thing, therefore they're not honorable men or something like that. Or the conclusion, it might not be that Brutus isn't honorable, but as you say, that he could be honorable and at the same time, I suppose, self deceived or being honorable might not be all it's cracked up to be.
In fact, for Brutus, it seems to be. We learned during the play that he's actually quite stubborn. He's corrupted a little bit by Cassius, but then all the decisions are made by him. We're not going to kill Mark Antony, we're going to attack, we're not going to defend. Basically, Cassius loses all control and Brutus turns out to be quite stubborn. But in a way, there's something autocratic about this idea of honor. As if once I designate myself as honorable, then I can do no wrong. In just the same way that Caesar's wish is everyone's command and Caesar can't feel fear.
There's a kind of parallel here between Caesar's idea that he's immovable, uncorruptible, he's like Mount Olympus, he won't even move for fear. And the self conception that Brutus has of being grounded in goodwill, honor and concern only for the public good and not motivated by envy as Cassius seems to be.
12:37 Erin: Yeah, I think that's all correct. You know, I struggle with Antony's assessment of Brutus at the end, particularly the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, this is. The element's so mixed. That's the problem I have, because I think ultimately what Antony is celebrating in Brutus is that he's a man of principle. He has these principles and he lives by them and he dies by them. And that is, I suppose, the definition of honor or of being honorable. But I think that he's principled, taken to its logical extreme.
So he's not a mixture of elements. He seems to me to be one element only. I mean, you know, I'm using this term elements in a very loose way. Right. But like, he's all rationality. The struggle that he has with himself in the early acts before he decides to murder Caesar seems to me to be about silencing or putting to death that part of himself that is emotional and human and leaving himself with just the part that is rational. But without the human, the rational is irrational. So we see him sort of not being tempered by emotion, not being able to express his emotions, not being able to be swayed by any sort of human feeling beyond what he thinks is right.
And there is something admirable about that. I think Antony is right to celebrate Brutus in a way, but the way that he chooses to celebrate him, by these elements being mixed, this idea that Brutus is this sort of perfectly balanced human being, I think is the wrong thing to celebrate about him. I think he's an imbalanced human being who is something a little inhuman about him. A little robotic, maybe.
14:22 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I didn't. I didn't see him as hyper rational, per se. So. Yeah. So now the question is. Yeah. How do we characterize Brutus's tragic flaw, so to speak? Is it because he doesn't fully understand his own motives? I'm inclined to think that he does have the right motives, or at least let's grant that for the sake of argument. Right. That he does have honorable motives. But somehow that's not enough.
14:51 Erin: Well, what would those honorable motives be?
14:53 Wes: That Caesar was ambitious. Caesar was going to become a tyrant. Caesar was going to become a dictator. They're going to save the republic. So that's one question. Are his motives fully honorable or are they mixed? And Cassius, you might say they're mixed. There's obvious envy there. And even when Cassius tries to express the same sort of point as Brutus, which is we shouldn't treat a human being as if they were a God, he puts it in these terms. I would rather die than worship someone who is like me or Caesar. Caesar is no better than me. Why should he be king and not me?
Right. You get little hints that Cassius is actually driven by envy. And this is the point that Antony is making at the end of the play, which is that Brutus is envy free. And I think that's probably right. So the flaw lies elsewhere. It's a much more obvious flaw with Cassius than with Brutus. And I think the idea with Brutus is that it doesn't matter if you're principled and you're not envious and you have the public good purely in mind. But why? That's the question. Why is that? I mean, in this case, things don't go well. There's something to be said for execution.
And a lot of the poor execution is, like I said, Brutus's fault, like not killing Marc Antony up front and all that stuff which he does out of. Because he wants to be principled. So maybe the idea is at the point where you descend to revolutionary violence or rebellion, then you're playing by different rules. And so if you say I'm such an honorable man that I. Honorable man that I need to upend the current order, then the rules don't translate. The honorable man rules don't translate into the domain of rebellion, where suddenly there's no central power and it's a struggle for power.
It's a much different world than in a world where the law is settled. And. Do you know what I mean?
16:56 Erin: Yes. Regarding this envy question, I think it's possible to read Brutus's motives as being entirely honorable. I do, however, think that he betrays signs of envy, but these are unknown to him. He's too unself aware to know that he envies Caesar. And I think that he, in many ways, is a mirror of Caesar. He has many of the same qualities, which I think you've already alluded to. Or they're sort of like the same type of quality, maybe in theory, but just vastly different expressions of the same qualities.
17:31 Wes: Well, Caesar sees himself as a realist and a pragmatist in the beginning. Right. He's not superstitious. Is that the idea?
17:38 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think they're, you know, they have these sort of mirrored. Like the play structurally sets them up in these mirrored ways. Like we see them with their wives, where their wives are both telling them, you know, not to do something, and then they do it, or to do something and, you know, to beg them something, and they don't fully listen. I think there are a lot of reasons why Brutus should be or is envious of Caesar. But the main argument for that I could think of is simply that Cassius's appeal to Brutus works. Cassius is aware of his own envy, and he uses tactics which would incite envy in Brutus to get Brutus to act.
18:20 Wes: Brutus is a mirror of Caesar. And then something about, oh, Brutus.
18:23 Erin: Yeah. I had written down a list of things.
18:25 Wes: Cassius being aware of his envy.
18:27 Erin: But here's my list. Yes. Yeah, I had a list of things they had in common. Okay. They both can't sleep. That's the thing I noticed first. I'm just like them, Caesar, just like us. This is more structural but like when they both greet the same group of men, you know, to Brutus, they're conspirators. Caesar greets them as friends. They both are vain. Brutus is vain. Brutus is extremely vain and self centered which is another reason why I think he is prone to envy. And Cassius knows this and exploits it. And Cassius says that basically Brutus is noble but that because Brutus hasn't surrounded himself by other noble people, he's still capable of being infused with a little bit of envy.
And that's exactly what Cassius does. So I think it's there. I think it's there. And Brutus is just so. His belief in his own high mindedness is so, so much about him sort of having these pure motives. But what it reveals to me is that he has an incredibly high opinion of himself and that it bothers him that Caesar is elevated above him. And he sees himself in this way which is similar to like a, like a divine kingship, only it's a sort of divine deposing of kings. Right. He sees himself as part of a lineage. He has the same name and is the ancestor of the man who killed.
Is it Cato or somebody else? He killed somebody and established the republic. And so he sees himself as having almost like a divine right of king deposing in the same way that Caesar with this sort of focus on making sure that Antony, you know, touches Calpurnia during the race. There's definitely. I think one of the reasons why he's causing people to get nervous is that there's this focus on an heir and he feels the lack of an heir. And I think that is listing towards meaning that he wants to establish an empire and a dynasty and to have someone take over the throne after him as a traditional king would.
So yeah, but I just think. I think that Brutus has very little self knowledge because he pushes out of his head anything which he deems unknowable. You know, lacking in nobility or high mindedness. And I think is. He's just not aware of these parts of himself that are ugly.
20:47 Wes: Yeah, I don't see him as envious or vain or self centered in a way. Not exactly. I think he's. Well, there's that Element of melancholy.
20:57 Erin: Everything he says, all his speeches, I, I, I. Seriously, it's in there.
21:03 Wes: I think, well, if you're as great as him, you know, you talk about yourself all the time.
21:09 Erin: What has he done? Nothing.
21:12 Wes: Just kidding. So he's just a great, he's just a great guy. Listeners can't see that. Erin is rolling her eyes. So I think I share your opinion in kind of a vague sense of there's something he's missing. There's something, there's a kind of obtuseness. I think it does have something to do with rationality, but that's not entirely it. I don't think being hyper rational is exactly the, the problem. I think it is probably there's something he doesn't know about himself, but I can say that about everyone in the play. I think it ultimately comes down to this reliance on the idea of being honorable and the pitfalls of that, as I said before, and that's something, of course, that Marc Antony makes great use of.
So there is something almost autocratic about the concept of honor. Honor is supposed to be this kind of immunity amulet, immunity idol for those who watch Survivor. He can't be voted off the island if he has it, so he can do no wrong if he's honorable, which of course is not the case. But.
22:21 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think at the base of a lot of his speeches are circular logic, syllogisms, stuff like that, where things don't quite line up. So I think you're right that, like, there's a, you know, I'm honorable because I'm honorable. You know, I mean, he says literally at one point, believe me, for mine honor, and have respect to mine honor, that you may believe something.
22:49 Wes: Yes, exactly. It's supposed to be this mark of credibility. And that's, of course, you know, that's his speech that precedes Antony's speech, and that's what Antony fixes on and just slaughters him with that whole honorable idea. But, you know, and the idea of syllogism, I see that in his, like, let's not do an oath speech.
23:10 Erin: Yes.
23:10 Wes: In his garden with the others. Because, you know, oaths are for people who are essentially dishonest. You wouldn't need an oath if you weren't defective in some way and you wouldn't even be a Roman if you broke a promise. So there's that circularity. It's almost like it's about identity and about flawlessness.
23:30 Erin: That's right.
23:31 Wes: Whereas everyone's motives in a Sense are mixed. And maybe that's part of your point, you know, saying that he has envy. No one escapes that entirely. He's just such a goody two shoes.
23:44 Erin: Well, exactly, exactly. And he doesn't. People's bad motives being invisible to him means that he also has bad motives that are invisible to him. Right. So his idea is like, oh, I have a lot of these good reasons. What I'm going to do is I'm going to write them down and make a list of them. And then you common people who are so rational, because I'm going to project my belief in my own rationality onto you guys, you're going to read this list and be convinced because I have a lot of great arguments. And Antony, who I think, you know, you mentioned that you think that pretty much every character in the play has things about themselves that they're not aware of.
And I think that's probably right. But I think Antony is the most aware of. He has the most self awareness, I think, of anybody, of any character in the play. And Antony is just like, okay, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to put on a huge show here because I know what people are really like. People really want to show. People really want to be moved emotionally. And nobody's going to take the time to read the 95 theses that he's just nailed to the door of, you know.
24:44 Wes: Yeah, but Antony is just a manipulator in that. He's just a cold coordinated manipulator that's.
24:52 Erin: He knows how to deal with people, you know, I mean his. I'm.
24:55 Wes: We're not.
24:55 Erin: I'm just talking about his motives. I'm saying, like he knows what people are. Like he knows how to manipulate people because he knows people.
25:02 Wes: He's. He parties all the time.
25:04 Erin: Yeah, he's the best.
25:06 Wes: Caesar's like, I can't believe Antony's up already.
25:09 Erin: Exactly.
25:10 Wes: Parties every night. No, I mean literally, he says, I
25:14 Erin: mean manipulation in itself is not a good thing, but in order to be successful at it, I mean, this is one of the things that. I think this will lead us right to the beginning of the play. Actually. This is one of the things that all the conspirators seem to. It's almost like being a Republican means not understanding people weirdly. Whereas, you know, having a cult of personality.
25:32 Wes: Are you a monarchist or something? What the hell, of course I am.
25:35 Erin: I'm Catholic. You know, this is why we shouldn't be allowed into this country. No, no, but like Having a cult of personality around you means you understand people. It's like sort of proof of its own success. I mean, nobody ever talks about the successful stuff that Caesar has done to get to this point. Most notably the battles that he's won and the incredible mind he has in that regard. But merely being super popular, it's its own justification, in a way that calling yourself honorable is not its own justification. Popularity is something which is its own proof of something. It is its own circular logic. You're popular because people like you. That's its own. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm sorry.
26:21 Wes: If this were high school, we know that Marc Antony is in the jock, popular jock crowd. But surprising genius is Brutus just a huge nerd. Yeah, Brutus and Cassius are nerds. This is revenge of the nerds.
26:39 Erin: Right? I mean, I think this is different. This is a little saying. High school puts it in a slightly different. I get your point. One can be popular and people don't necessarily have to like you. But Caesar is beloved. That's the thing. And there is a refusal at the beginning to recognize that he is beloved actually by the Republicans. There's a lack of understanding of the will of the people and the fact that they have seemingly anointed this guy. I mean, I'm not saying that he. That's proof that he should be dictator for life. I'm just saying that that means he has something that they don't have. Right. He has the love of the people, they don't. He's the one who everybody is celebrating. They're not.
27:23 Wes: Yeah, well, and before him, though, Pompey. Just to get us into this first scene. Pompey, right. Pompey was the one. So the first scene seems to suggest that it's. The people are fickle and easily manipulated. At least that's the opinion of the tribunes.
27:40 Erin: That's right. And there's a tremendous amount of snobbery of all the Republicans towards the people. Casca most notably discussing the reaction of the people when Caesar refuses the coronet. I won't say crown, because Casca corrects himself and says this was just a coronet. Let's get our facts straight here, people. It wasn't a crown.
28:02 Wes: Casca, who's, by the way, putting on airs as if he were a commoner, which is right. He talks as if he's a commoner. He talks as if he's in a slightly lower class English register. And in a way, Cassius and Brutus make note of this Brutus says he's grown blunt. I mean, this guy used to be really smart. Now he acts like an idiot. And Cassius says he's just putting that on in order to communicate with people better. It's sauce to his wit or something like that.
28:30 Erin: Something I made note of because Brutus.
28:33 Wes: Sort of thing that. Yeah, Brutus can't do. But it's a particular. You know, it's a very politician type of thing. I'm gonna talk like the common person.
28:39 Erin: Yeah. And Brutus doesn't even understand what Casca's doing in that moment. Like, Cassius has to explain it to him.
28:45 Wes: Although I think he does kind of turn out to be an idiot, though. Yes, Casca does. But.
28:50 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
28:52 Wes: And Cassius will accuse him of that later on because when they talk about the storm, I think it becomes clear that. But Casca's a bit. He's not the brightest guy and he's quite superstitious. And that's where Cassius makes that he says, calls him dull, I think is the word that he uses. But, yeah. So you're saying in this scene, the tribunes. There's the snobbery of the tribunes, which seems pretty. Yeah. Seems pretty clearly that Shakespeare meant to convey that. Right.
29:20 Erin: Yeah. Even though this cobbler, the mender of bad soles. The mender of bad souls is like being pretty funny, being pretty sophisticated. You know, this is the first instance, you know, as usual, in this little first scene, which doesn't feature the main characters, all of the themes are being smuggled in. And so we have this, you know, the Bad Souls homonym. Because he's a cobbler, there's a misinterpretation that results from it. So, you know, the language that produces confusion or the things which have multiple meanings and the tribunes don't.
It's unclear if they're just dumb or if they just don't expect this regular person to be able to make puns like that or to joke in that way. He makes another joke and says that they're going through the streets in celebration of Caesar. To. This cobbler says to wear out people's shoes. Like, he wants to get more work, so he wants everybody to go out and parade to make more work. And then he says, you know, but seriously, we're were on holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph. Which is just a wonderful, funny combination of sort of truth and humor in that these holidays, they generate revenue.
You know, the regular people love holidays like this because they're Good for business. Right. One of the many reasons why maybe Caesar is so popular, but. Yeah. And then immediately Marullus says, you know, you blocks, you, stones, you worse than senseless things, and starts rebuking them because they're so dumb. But they seem to know, you know, that kind of joking. And then the idea that the holiday is good for business and he's just leading people out to wear out their shoes shows a level of sophistication which nobody in the play seems to give credit to the plebs for.
31:07 Wes: Yeah, right. He makes a joke, he's gonna cobble them. He's gonna recover them in the way that he recovers old shoes. He's gonna fix them, so. Cause presumably they're worn out in the. In some sense, the Republic is worn out. But I do think, though, I think that no one really gets an unambiguous representation in this play. And that includes the plebeians.
31:31 Erin: That's right.
31:32 Wes: I think there is something sinister. Right. So they're celebrating. There's a kind of manic quality to what they're doing. And I think part of the mechanism of tyranny is, in a way, they project that sort of grandiose element into a leader, and that's what they kind of want. They want an authoritarian. They want a strong man. And that seems to be consistent with several other scenes in the play. There's kind of a. They even say it, right, When Mark Antony persuades everyone, let's make Mark Antony king. Right. Do you remember that from the crowd?
32:08 Erin: Yep.
32:09 Wes: There's an immediate reaching for,
32:16 Erin: sorry, is he single?
32:18 Wes: You right now, dressed as an ancient Roman commoner, yelling from the crowd. This urge to vest all authority in a figure with whom you can identify with a strong leader. I think that's part of this. So they're joking around, but the manic quality of that reflects their. And their urge to have a holiday and their urge to celebrate. It's more than, oh, we've had a hard day at work and now let's let go. Which I think is what one of them implies at one point. It's not just about, we work hard and now we need to let go. It's also, let's eject our. You know, we're working class and we're not going to. Obviously, none of us is going to be king, but let's enjoy that vicariously. Let's enjoy our own ambition vicariously through another. Let's have that feeling of triumph.
33:15 Erin: I like that characterization because I think it aligns with the dressing up the statue, you know, there's a manic quality to that.
33:22 Wes: Right.
33:23 Erin: We're gonna take these statues and dress them even more as if it were the real guy. And then the desire of Flavius and Marullus to disrobe the image is, you know, revealing that Caesar has no clothes taking off.
33:40 Wes: Well, also, Flavius compares them to feathers. Right. So Caesar is going to soar unless they can pluck those feathers. So the adornments off the statues.
33:51 Erin: That's right. I spent some time with that metaphor because I wasn't sure if the feathers were his supporters or the robes. There's ceremonies, I think there's scarves. They're called a couple different things, but I think scarves, okay. The note tells me so I wasn't sure. But it's interesting either way because if the feathers are his supporters, the people, then that metaphor doesn't really work. And if they're the scarves, which are lentils, why? Well, because they're.
34:25 Wes: Why doesn't it work?
34:26 Erin: Because the people are part of him. They're part of his body. So the idea that he's so remote and making himself so far above people, really, he's like a. He's like a huge plane full of people. He's taking them with him in a way, or they're part of him. Scarves, it's a little bit different, but it's. But still the scarves are bestowed upon him by the people. I mean, there is this question throughout of where Caesar gets his authority from, but they seem to be confirming that he's getting some kind of authority from the people, even as they are in this metaphor, implying that he's soaring high above the people.
35:01 Wes: And yeah, Cassius makes the point that Caesar gets his power from Romans being servile and Romans being sheep. So it's not in his. It's not something that's just a property of him. Right. It's purely circumstantial or it's socially constructed or role oriented. Right. There's going to be a lot of that in this. Right. The trappings, the same sort of thing as in King Lear. These roles that they have don't reflect their own essences. They're constructed out of human relationships and so on. In particular, what Cassius wants to say is that there's nothing great about Caesar.
He just looks great because people behave in a servile, worshipful way towards him. So their worship is the thing that makes him sore. And so the images, the robes on the statues reflect that. Right. It's about the imagination. They call the statues images. It's about creating this imaginary fantasy and then behaving as if it were true. And that's where any type of authority, of course, comes from. It's like an implicit compact. If people weren't habituated to saying yes to the person in authority, if they just said no, then the authority would.
Would cease to exist. So Cassius is right about that. And there's a kind of magic to it. It almost feels magical. In the next scene, we're going to get basically, Caesar's wish being his command, right? It feels almost like magic. Caesar says it, it's done. I forget how Mark Antony puts that exactly. Or Casca. Caesar speaks, right? And then the music immediately ceases. And then he calls the soothsayer a dreamer. But in a way, he's a dreamer, right? It's in dreams that our wishes, that the landscape is just immediately shaped by one's will or one's wish.
To be. To have that much power is almost to be in a dreamlike situation. And then, of course, the paranoia naturally sets in.
37:07 Erin: The environment is responsive to Caesar in the same way that it's responsive when Macbeth murders Duncan, if we want to interpret it that way. But here we are given an interpretation for the omens and the portents that are. That are going to follow, but we're given it beforehand. So Marullus says, when he rebukes the plebs, run to your houses, fall upon your knees, pray to the gods to intermit the plague that needs must light on this ingratitude. Just wanted to point that out because before anything actually happens, Marullus calls in a plague, basically, and says, you know, you're going to be punished for being so inconstant in your celebration of Caesar, of switching your allegiance so quickly from Pompey to Caesar.
So we're given a proleptic interpretation of what's about to happen. But insofar as Caesar's dreams can enter reality, shall we say, it does seem that he has an effect. Or his. His impending murder does have a real world effect, in the same way that the environment responds at the death of Duncan in Macbeth. And they're similar, actually descriptions to the omens in Caesar and the responsive nature in Macbeth to Duncan's death.
38:27 Wes: Yeah. So as I've said, right, Caesar speaks and then the music stops. And then he does that thing with Calpurnia, stand in Antonius' way so he can get you pregnant by touching you
38:41 Erin: as he runs, by telling you, Antony is the man, he's the man.
38:46 Wes: He just has to look at you and you might get pregnant. But yeah. And then, Antony, when Caesar says do this, it is performed. This, I think, must be the source of all the kind of way Caesar's represented in the popular imagination for centuries to come. And various films, right. Caesar says it, and then it's immediately performed. I think this is the source of that idea of what Caesar was. And of course, it's not even. In many cases, Caesar never was emperor, but it's the characterizing the later Caesars, later emperors, as having that kind of quality to them. There is, by the way, the film, the 1953 film, which is great. I'm like. There's these statues of, like, Marcus Aurelius and what's Hadrian? And I'm just like, oh, my God.
39:46 Erin: Those are not, you know, most.
39:49 Wes: Historically, it's like putting a statue of Barack Obama in a. You know, In the Civil. Lincoln's office in a Civil War movie. But, yeah.
40:07 Erin: Well, otherwise, what's Lincoln's motivation? He has nothing to do.
40:13 Wes: So it's a great start to the characterization of Caesar. Although he doesn't come across as the. He does come across as kind of feeble, I think, in the way that. No offense to the monarchist here, but in the way that Cassius suggests. And the first mistake, of course, he makes is to. He gets the soothsayer in this great iconic line, beware the Ides of March. And then he asks, what man is that? And Brutus answers the wrong question. Well, he says, a soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March. He doesn't say, oh, yeah, it's this guy over here.
It's a soothsayer guy who. He repeats the line as if Caesar can't hear, and then Caesar wants to see him. As if. I think maybe the idea is the guy won't have the courage to say it to his face. And the soothsayer says it again to his face. And then. I just love this line. He is a dreamer. Let us leave him pass. Because, of course, as I've said, in a way, Caesar is the dreamer in the sense that he is the one for whom wishes immediately become realities.
41:17 Erin: I don't know if I should throw this at you, but I. Anticipating that you would not like my.
41:21 Wes: Just. Just hand it. Hand it to me.
41:28 Erin: Anticipating that you would not like my love of Caesar, I brought a friend to help me make the case that Caesar is.
41:39 Wes: Oh, is it Harold? Harold Bloom?
41:41 Erin: Of course it is.
41:42 Wes: I thought you were gonna hold up. Plutarch's. Lives.
41:43 Erin: Yeah, I could have brought that.
41:47 Wes: Which of course is his source material. I love to imagine Shakespeare reading the Life of Brutus, the Life of Caesar, the Life of. Who's the third guy? Mark Antony and just getting a play out of it, but go ahead.
42:02 Erin: He says that Shakespeare is showing a Caesar in decline and he has a plausible mixture of grandeurs and weaknesses. Basically this is just a love letter. Bloom's whole reading of Julius Caesar is a love letter to Caesar. And he says Caesar's greatness is not in question, whatever his decline and however one reacts to his, his royal ambitions. Caesar is the grandest figure Shakespeare will ever represent. Person of most historical importance. Though sometimes silly, even fatuous, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is an immensely sympathetic character, benign yet dangerous.
He is of course self centered and always conscious of being Caesar, perhaps even sensing his deification in advance. And though he can be very blind, his estimate of Cassius shows him to be the best analyst of another human being in all of Shakespeare. Caesar is accurate and Antony is not about Cassius. He has this. The same speech indicates one of several gathering infirmities, deafness and the increasing tendency for Caesar to regard himself in the third person. But basically I was fascinated to reread that because he reads Brutus's dislike of Caesar as envy and also as an Oedipal conflict.
But, and says like, you know, the Oedipal conflict in Hamlet is nothing compared to the Oedipal conflict between Brutus and Caesar. It's like okay, Harold Bloom, but he sort of casts aside all of Caesar's infirmities and believes that he is this great character which I don't fully see on the page. Caesar's not listening to the warning. His vanity, his fatuousness, all of that is dismissed by Harold Bloom. And Harold Bloom is just like, oh, he's still amazing. He's still the greatest.
43:45 Wes: Yeah, I kind of think Harold Bloom is like the Caesar of Shakespeare.
43:48 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Like of course he's going to love Caesar. Harold Bloom is Caesar.
43:54 Wes: Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't think Caesar is really well characterized in the play. He's kind of got a bit part.
44:04 Erin: Oh, I know it was in relation to you saying that he's. His characterization as including the tendency to speak of himself as a third person, which Bloom points to. But what you had pointed to here, do this, it is performed, you know, the grandeur of his own self conception.
44:24 Wes: Well also his idea that he's fearless, which will come across here.
44:28 Erin: Right, right.
44:29 Wes: Because he's gonna say Cassius is dangerous, but Somehow he can detect danger without feeling fearful. This becomes a very important idea that's repeated in the play. And it's very much parallel to Brutus's idea that he's honorable. These, in a way, are supposed to form the immovable substance of these characters and ground a certain kind of autocratic attitude that they both share as you point their mirrors at each other. In a way. Yeah. I honestly don't think that Caesar is well characterized. And I don't. Not well characterized. Like he didn't do a good job. But I just don't think we get that much of Caesar's character. We see him worried about what's going down.
45:11 Erin: I don't think you can show that much of Caesar and have the play work. It's important that he's not seen too much or else too much might be revealed of him. And we can get a firmer grasp on what he's really like and then have too much sympathy for one side or the other, maybe. I mean, the whole play is obsessed with him constantly. You know, he. He. What's the expression? He lives rent free in everybody's head, you know, long after he's dead. So I think that shows enough or says more about him than his own person does. And I think that's. That's important too, is that he has to be more than his own person. He's more than just this guy with lines. He's an idea. He's a. He's Brutus's evil spirit, you know, which. Which sort of implies that he's like an extension of Brutus in a way or. Yeah. Brutus's mirror.
46:00 Wes: Brutus is his angel, as Marc Antony said.
46:03 Erin: Right.
46:03 Wes: The play should have been called Brutus, of course. No, it's just, you know, he needed two words for the. For the title. What are you gonna. You gonna call it, Marcus? Brutus doesn't work. Brutus. Caesar. Brutus Caesar.
46:21 Erin: Brutus Caesar.
46:22 Wes: Right. Of course. It's. Yeah. Brutus is the protagonist of the play and a tragic protagonist with Cassius as his Iago and Caesar's just Desdemona.
46:39 Erin: That's really good.
46:40 Wes: Except that Brutus doesn't get all jealous. He's, you know. Well, as you said, more robotic. Robotic about it.
46:47 Erin: Yeah.
46:48 Wes: He gets worried. Brutus is. I see him as he is, you know, I see what you're saying about him because he's so. There's the melancholic aspect and then there's him being in his head. He's kind of in his own thoughts all the Time. He's remote, and that's really important.
47:03 Erin: He doesn't sing songs or play games like Antony.
47:06 Wes: That's right. Wait, is that. No, he says that about Cassius.
47:11 Erin: No, no, no. I do lack some things.
47:14 Wes: Caesar says that about Brutus.
47:15 Erin: No, no, Antony. Brutus says that about Antony. Brutus doesn't know how to have fun. He doesn't have that quick spirit. He says that Antony has. He doesn't even watch the race. Antony's out there having fun.
47:27 Wes: Well, Brutus says, I'm not, like, I'm not into sports, right? So I. So I'm not gonna go see the race. But I think Caesar says to. To Marc Antony about Cassius that, you know, he doesn't go see plays, right?
47:41 Erin: Oh, yes.
47:41 Wes: Am I just getting that wrong? Yeah, yeah.
47:43 Erin: But that. That's. That's a slightly different thing.
47:45 Wes: He's too thin, and he's not into partying and having fun like you, Marc Antony.
47:51 Erin: That's right.
47:52 Wes: Yeah. I told you. These are just the nerds. It's Revenge of the Nerds. All right, so we. Unfortunately, we have to stop part one there. I don't know how many recordings we're gonna do of this, but we're gonna do at least two. I think things will speed up. It's kind of like Jaws, right? Once they set out for the shark, it's. It's not so, you know, once we get into all the military stuff, the play is kind of over already. But I think the play actually starts to struggle at that point. subscriber@patreon.com Otherwise, you can wait a week. Thank you.
48:33 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Society as Swindle in “The Third Man” (1949) – Part 2
Jan 12, 2026
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1949 classic film “The Third Man,” about friendship and betrayal, and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1949 film the Third man, directed by Carol Reed. I think we were still in the middle of a conversation about language and the confusions of location that it causes in the film, the difficulty that it makes understanding and people being able to make themselves understood to each other, the repeated plays on people's names. And this comes up too, in Holly's conversations with Anna. I mean, he first sees her on stage performing, of course, in German, and says that he understood what was going on, but it's clear that he's kind of lying or he's just, you know, he really doesn't know German at all, so he couldn't possibly have understood what was happening.
And later he wants to run lines with her. Right. And he doesn't even understand the difference in the script that she has between the stage directions and the actual cue that she needs. You know, the line before hers. There's a huge disconnect between them, which seems to be sort of embodied in this difficulty that he has with German. Even though she's not even Austrian, she's supposed to be Czechoslovakian. So this connection with language, the stage, Holly, as I mentioned in the last part, calling the army money stage money, and maybe even something like what you're calling the romance of post war Vienna.
Is there something stagey about the whole place? Because it's. It's being staged in another sense of the term. But it just seems that Vienna is this particular nexus which is designed for misunderstanding, and that these misunderstandings seem to be the. The only people that could thrive in these types of conditions are people who make a living in misunderstanding or in adulteration of language or in lying and manipulation of language. Maybe these army forces, too, are a little bit implicated in that, though not as. Not as strongly. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything more that we could say about that, but I just wanted to mention the importance too, of the Stage quality and how it seems to give us an early indication that the relationship between Holly and Anna is not going to work out well.
2:40 Wes: Yeah, that's an interesting relationship because, well, they think Harry is dead. Of course, it's a little fast.
2:51 Erin: One other thing I just wanted to mention too, is the papers. You need these papers to walk around the city. And that's another thing where you have like, you know, you have papers written in a certain language which claims you. Certain country. You know, again, it's language needing a script, needing a little document, a little, you know, novelette to carry around with you. And all of that too, seeming stagey or staged because it requires props and the sort of falsification that Harry can provide Anna and the help that he could provide her to make her props check out is far more useful, though it has an expiration date. It's far more useful to her than Holly not even being able to help her run her lines for her performance. One of them understands the stage and the other one doesn't.
3:40 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think there's something here about Holly is, in a way, living out his fantasy, which is to be an outlaw in a frontier situation, in a wild west type of situation. And he's gonna find out that it's not as great as he thought it was. It's much more sinister and much less romantic. So the romance, in a way, is the right. The quote unquote propaganda and the false identity, I think, which is part of what you're getting at, the staged thing. And that's what Holly is in the business of doing. And the gunfight, so to speak. What would be the big showdown between him and the sheriff?
But of course, the sheriff is really the bad guy. Turns out to be. It's a showdown with his friend and he's more in the position of the sheriff. But it doesn't turn into a gunfight. Well, I mean, it does in the very end. On the Ferris wheel at least. It's just a speech. It's a battle of words. And the winner is the one who can defeat the other with a kind of disillusionment. So we find out that Harry's big superpower is just to be ruthlessly, remorselessly amoral. And he gives that big speech with a lot of great lines. I don't know, should we talk about that now or do we want to?
4:58 Erin: Yeah, let's talk about Harry. We're just wild about Harry.
5:04 Wes: So he doesn't even really seem to care about Anna that much. Even as he traces a heart and Anna's name in the window. In the steam of the window, more empty words. Ferris wheel, carriage. Yeah, and then that's what you know. And then Holly accuses him of that, you know, not actually caring about Anna. And Harry says he has a lot on his mind. So his schemes, his rackets are bigger than anything else. They're bigger than any particular relationship, whether with Anna or with Holly. Similarly, Holly will accuse him of betraying Anna. So he's trading safety in the Russian zone for giving her up.
At a certain point, Harry gives a speech which seems designed to wisen up the kind of guy like Holly, who's kind of immersed in these fantasies of cowboys and Indians and sheriffs and all that. He'll say, what do you want me to do? Do you expect me to give myself up? Holly says, why not? Harry says, it's a far better thing that I do. Holly, you and I aren't heroes. The world doesn't make any heroes outside of your stories. I've got to be careful. And then when Holly asks the question about what? About the victims of your racket. Harry says, would you feel any pity if one of these dots.
He's pointing at people down below. If one of those dots stopped moving forever. If I offered you $20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. That's when taxes were a lot higher, I think. So if you're going to murder people for 20,000 a pop, yeah, it's a lot less enticing if there's a lot of tax. What's the marginal tax rate? And then there's some suggestion that he'll kill Holly right there, right? I carry a gun.
I don't think they'd look for a bullet wound after you hit that ground. And then he backs off that as though I would do anything to you or you to me. And then finally we get this bit about governments. Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. So why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and so have I. So he rationalizes his amorality and his exploitation by way of comparison to governments that he thinks his claim is that really the governments per se are just exploitative.
And so why shouldn't he be? Why shouldn't he put himself in that same position?
7:47 Erin: I had forgotten that he quotes A Tale of Two Cities there. He's referencing the end of A Tale of Two Cities, which is a moment of sacrifice, right? One character is dying in place of another. And he says, this is far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known. Something like that. Anyway, so the last lines of the book, and it's a moment of sacrifice. And so he's saying that. He's quoting that ironically, as if to say that it's sacrifice that's the real racket. And of course, another little piece of novelistic claptrap or something like that, right? A sort of idealized fantasy kind of relationship where one man is sacrificing himself for another. Maybe something like what happens probably in Holly's types of novels, his pulp novels, certainly, if he's trying to avenge his best friend, you know, Right.
8:41 Wes: If the outlaw is your hero in one of these novels, you are making the similar sort of argument, which is that the institutions are so corrupt that vigilante justice is the way to go, right. And then one can make a similar sort of accusation against morality, per se. Morality is the racket, right? Altruism is the racket. People are only pretending they're hypocrites and it's just a cover for exploitation. That's how you be a cynic and become enough of a cynic to steal penicillin from kids, right?
9:12 Erin: Well, the $20,000 for every dot underneath the Ferris wheel. You know, I was trying to, like, figure out this whole third man thing. You know, is there the significance to the third man? And I had always heard the third man in relationship to the idea of this phenomenon where people would be in dire straits and then someone would show up to assist them, like that would provide assistance that they would either actually physically see or just feel the presence of another person that gave them the strength to go on, say, if they were dying in the middle of the wilderness or something like that, in these really life or death circumstances where it's almost like someone, a force is sort of intervening almost like narratologically in their story to help them continue their story, to help them live this moment.
Made me think of the third person where Harry, as a black marketeer, he's the third man in a transaction, in this economic transaction where he's intervening economically between the buyer and the seller. So he's like a middleman. He's a third man in this regard. Rather than being a third man in this way that people are describing where it's almost like an angel or a divine presence is coming down to help them. He's coming in and he's intervening in this transaction to estrange these two sides from each other so that he could profit off of the, you know, the difference.
And he's also selling these tainted goods too. So he's degrading every part of this interaction and maybe even. Even doing something like, you know, changing the narration to suit him, changing the arc of the story so that both sides get especially the receiving end. Right. In terms of what he's diluting are getting a bad outcome to their story rather than a good outcome or a better improved outcome to their story, where instead of them surviving, they either die or they're left permanently maimed or something because of his intervention.
11:10 Wes: He's like the inverse of a mentor figure. Right. So often if there's a hero and an antagonist or a villain, then you might have a mentor figure in a film if you've been reading your Joseph Campbell, to help the hero mature enough to the point where he becomes capable of defeating the villain. So the third man, so to speak, or the mentor, is like a spiritual midwife. And in this case, Harry is a corruptor. Although he does. Right. He still performs that function by the end of the movie by, obviously, I think Holly is going to come away from this being less convinced of his own romanticization of the outlaw status, for instance.
So he is psychologically delivered, in a sense, by this confrontation with what Harry really is. But you're making me think now. Yeah. We should try to unpack some of these various meanings of the Third Man. So at a more literal level, they've staged or they, I guess they've run over Joseph Harbin in the street. Right. Is that what's happened to them?
12:17 Erin: Yeah.
12:18 Wes: So Harry is one of the people helping carry the body. And then they put Joseph Harbin in Harry's grave. So it's that whole, I guess, three-card monte thing at work. And then it occurs to me that the outlaw. Right. So any Thirds we can think of will be applicable here. Right. So it's not just there's the law and then there's those who are subject to the law. Right. If they're obedient to the law. Or there's the haves and there's the have nots, these Thirds. Right. You could be the outlaw, but an outlaw serving vigilante justice, or you could be a black marketeer, but not someone who's fully a villain.
Right. Just Sort of in a gray zone. Maybe. Maybe that's one other way to get at this idea of thirdness being in a gray area as opposed to a black and white area, but it's one that turns out to be more black. There's the third man in the sense of the Ubermensch, the one who is beyond good and evil. And we get a little bit of that flavor in Harry's final speech in his amoral, you know, his argument for amorality. And then he even ends it by saying, In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock. So. That we need a little corruption and conflict and all that to produce an environment that will help foster great art. And perhaps Holly's novels are more like the cuckoo clock in the end, but than they are like Michelangelo, but. Yeah, so that kind of speech makes me think of the. Right. So Harry's probably self conception as being beyond all these moral concerns of ordinary mortals. That's another type of thirdness in the sense of being not among the evil, not among the good, but just above all that.
14:24 Erin: Yeah, above it. Above it is certainly right. I like that. The idea that I had where I was thinking of this third man phenomenon, which on Wikipedia is called the third man factor or the third person syndrome. And that phrase, third person syndrome also made me think of the third person, the grammatical third person. One of the moments that stood out to me on this watch was in that early bar scene when Calloway and Holly are talking to each other. Holly says, I guess no one knew him like he did, like I did. So he drunkenly refers to himself in the third person.
Though, of course you could also read that as nobody knows Harry like Harry knows Harry. But there's a. You know, there's this idea of the narrative and what the story is, who narrating the story, you know, Holly seems to believe throughout the film that he knows that he's sort of the real narrator in a way that he's like going to uncover what's really going on and tell the real story. The true narration that Calloway somehow has closed off, doesn't want access to, isn't curious enough about. And then when we're at the top of the Ferris wheel and Harry is looking down, talking about the little dots, you know, one thinks of playing God, of course, but also of this third person Narration, looking down at people.
So rather than being in, like, an I thou relationship with someone, you know, you're looking at people in the third person as your pawns or your victims or your. I mean, actually, Harry doesn't like the word victim, as he says. Right. But. Because it sort of impugns him, but looking down on people, manipulating them. So I was also thinking about the third person to add that to your list. And then I also looked up, as I think I mentioned before, I looked up how penicillin was diluted. This is really interesting because I thought. I thought at this point, of course, you know, penicillin would be administered in a syringe.
Right. So I was thinking about water, the sewers, you know, okay. Like watery. How would they water down penicillin? And what I found was that penicillin was actually a powder, and it would be mixed with saline just before injection, but that it would exist in a powdered form. And so unless he was getting to each syringe, you know, like right before it was put into somebody's arm and diluting it individually, he would have to be diluting the powder. And how it was diluted was with chalk. Harry Lime. Right. So chalk is also the third substance, if you will.
There's the penicillin, the saline, and then the chalk would be the third substance, which would be diluting the penicillin. And so I was thinking about that in terms of lime. I mean, I also even noticed I'm a big. I'm really into trees. And, you know, I even noticed that the path, the graveyard path that Anna walks along a couple of times is lined by linden trees, lime trees. So in addition to this kind of, you know, the weirdness of his name being a fruit or a tree or, you know, a stone or a mineral where there's this kind of flexibility. I also just thought that lime could itself be the third substance, the third thing inside the syringe.
17:31 Wes: I think lime in certain situations can serve as a kind of catalyst. Right. And the point of the catalyst is to get two other things together in a chemical bond.
17:41 Erin: Ah, ha ha.
17:42 Wes: Which I don't think is literally what's going on with the penicillin, but in a way you could think in a looser sense, like the chalk is like a catalyst that helps the penicillin powder get together with the saline. Is that what you said it was?
17:53 Erin: Yes.
17:54 Wes: And as we said, the mentor figure would be a kind of spiritual catalyst. In this case, I think of adulteration or I think of the kind of Catalyst that maybe is corrosive or something like that. So instead of serving to create the right bonds, whether it's between materials or people or whatever, or institutions or the parts of institutions, to fix things in the sense of helping things function. Right. So to speak, helping the mechanisms of government or social relations work, he fixes things in the sense of. He. I don't know. It's not necessarily that he's going to prevent those ordinary operations or chemical reactions from occurring.
It could be that, I suppose. But whatever it is, he gets into the crevices of things. He gets into the. The gears, so to speak, into the machinery as a way to exploit what's going on, to exploit these interactions and reactions. So it's almost like he's a catalyst for himself. And of course, he does adulterate. I mean, in the end, what he's doing with the. He's the wrong sort of third thing for the penicillin, because what are they doing? Are they just over diluting it?
19:12 Erin: Yes.
19:13 Wes: Yeah. His own desire or greed or whatever, his own desire to exploit robs the combination of what it needs to become fully what it is to become effective, to help with sickness. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is what he's taking is, in a way, the spirit or the operating mechanisms or the interactions and reactions, the kind of the functioning itself. He feeds off of that well.
19:40 Erin: And I like this idea that he's the sort of the bad catalyst. You know, he's also narratively this catalyst as well. Right. He's bringing together the two sides of the black market transaction. And this makes me think about what we were talking about at the beginning of Part one with why is. Why is Holly here at this time? In the end, Harry loses precisely because for whatever reason at this moment, he brings Holly in to the equation. You know, he's the catalyst for Holly and his scheme, or Holly and the police or whatever, you know, to get together ultimately and cause his own destruction.
Right. So there's like a bad narrator quality where somehow getting Holly involved with this and being the catalyst for bringing Holly in, which he thinks is going to work in his favor, is the thing that actually causes the end of his story. It shuts down the narrative for him. It shuts down his racket.
20:40 Wes: Jung has this idea of a shadow ego. Have you heard of this?
20:43 Erin: Oh, yeah.
20:46 Wes: Okay. Well, then I better get it right. You have to correct me. There's a lot more pressure if you know. So I think. Tell me if this works. One might see Holly as a sort of disavowed, weaker version of Harry. Right. So when someone like Harry who's become cynical and a bit grandiose and amoral and all these things intrapsychically, they've tamped down the vulnerable dependent part of themselves. Right. They've got to be third, they've got to be beyond the dyad of the, you know, the one who depends and the one that's dependent on. They're above that, they're self sufficient and so they disavow.
So it could be an effeminate side, it could be a weak side, it could be the sucker. And that's the part of oneself that can come back to bite you. It's not always a very stable place to be in the kind of state that Harry is in. If it doesn't happen, literally, if your sidekick friend doesn't come in and screw everything up for you, it can happen intra psychically where what you've tried to repress or disavow or push to the side comes back and bites you.
22:01 Erin: I like that a lot. You're saying Holly is the shadow of Harry, not the other way around. Or could it work both ways?
22:09 Wes: Well, it could go both ways. So it's whatever. The shadow self will be a repressed unconscious part of the personality that someone rejects that they're and possibly are ashamed of. Right. So you would think normally of someone who wants to think of themselves as macho and in control and they might be trying not to acknowledge a more dependent or feminine or whatever part of themselves that they're ashamed of. They don't want to be weak, they're strong. So you could look at this. It kind of reverses the perspective and almost like puts Harry in the position of the protagonist even though he's not part of the film for until the end.
Right. So it's a bit of a reversal to think in this way. But yeah, Harry becomes the kind of tragic protagonist who is defeated by this part of himself that he thought he had gotten rid of, but that comes back to get him. And why does it come back to get him? Because, well, he thought he was going to integrate it into the racket. Right. He thought he was going to be able to make use of Holly to perpetuate the racket in some way, apparently, but instead Holly turns out to not just be a weak and repressible because there's a bit of a moral fiber there that hasn't been extinguished.
23:26 Erin: Yeah, I'm glad you're bringing this up because I was thinking a lot about Whether or not Harry is really the protagonist. And there's part of me that wants to say, I almost want to read him as not even being real or being symbolic. Right. One could argue that he's a symbol of war itself or the effects of war. I'm sure there are a bunch of other symbols that we could attach to him, but it seems like he's not quite corruption itself. Or maybe he is. Maybe he is for Holly. He represents something that might have become corrupted in Holly but hasn't for some reason.
24:02 Wes: Yeah, I think what I was saying before. So you can look at it from the perspective of Holly's psyche. Right. And see Harry as an ideal. Something that starts out as an ideal but doesn't turn out to be so great in reality. So Harry is the outlaw in one of Holly's novels, but turns out to be just a real villain. Holly's fantasy of being the outlaw but the noble outlaw turns out to be immature.
24:28 Erin: Right.
24:29 Wes: And he has to find that out.
24:31 Erin: And maybe I was thinking about this in terms of maybe Harry being something like war itself. That this idea of resistance, of authority which Holly is really attracting.
24:40 Wes: And little boys fantasize about war and suggest war.
24:43 Erin: Exactly. And it always turns out to actually be something really ugly and not at all about nobility and everything about just exploitation. And I suppose I also was thinking about Harry as war because of his psychological impact on Anna. And maybe we could transition to talking about her. Unless there's something.
25:02 Wes: Yeah, let's do that.
25:03 Erin: More that we want to say about Harry. But that ultimately seems to be what Anna is about or what her hang up is and why we all know, I think that she can't and won't move on from this relationship. And you know, Harry was good to her. She believes that he sacrificed for her or helped her out in some way. She's never going to give that up and she's never going to believe that he's anything other than noble. And so her relationship with him seems to be one which is just. She's never going to be able to get over it. She's never going to be able to have a normal life. So the effect that this relationship has on her is like someone who's just been a victim of something like a war, who can just never move on from that. They carry these psychological scars and they maybe can't form normal relationships with other people after this experience.
25:53 Wes: Yeah, this makes sense. And she does seem traumatized. I mean, I have in my notes, like, what do she and Holly see in someone like Harry? Like, you know, that's why I associated them with being callow or naive.
26:07 Erin: Oh, my God.
26:08 Wes: It does seem to me they have to be either self destructive or.
26:14 Erin: Now I can't say that I see something great in him because I, you know, it's very revealing.
26:19 Wes: Well, okay. And we all, I mean, I think there's something of admiring the outlaw in all of us. Don't get me wrong, I'm not.
26:27 Erin: Yes. And there's also just like.
26:28 Wes: I can't.
26:29 Erin: There's also just my, as I think I've mentioned before, Orson Welles. Crush on Orson Welles.
26:34 Wes: Yeah, yeah, he's great. So, yeah. Aside from his charisma. Aside from his amazing charisma, which really
26:41 Erin: makes this work, actually. I mean, that goes a long way, right?
26:45 Wes: Yeah. It definitely would not work without that. And he is the strongest character in the film and the best actor in the film and all that.
26:51 Erin: Yeah.
26:52 Wes: What do people like Holly and Anna see in someone like Harry? I think there has to be an element of self destructiveness in it. And I think maybe that's what you're getting at with Anna and her trauma, I think must proceed. You get the feeling that there's a trauma that precedes her susceptibility to someone like Harry and the trauma has something to do with the war. Although I don't think we really learn anything specific details about what she's gone through. Just like we don't learn about, you know, what were Harry and Holly doing during the war? Was Holly in the war? You know, I don't think we learn about her. I don't think we'd learn about anyone's war trauma.
27:28 Erin: Right, no.
27:30 Wes: Hers included. But she seems that way. I mean, do you get the same feeling that she seems?
27:35 Erin: Yeah, absolutely. You know, when she says that Harry never grew up, that the world grew up around him and buried him. You know, she seems to be speaking from kind of strange experience there or maybe talking about herself in a way. She's just viewing him through the lens that she wants to view him through that has no relationship to reality. I mean, there's nothing about him that seems not grown up. You know, there's nothing about him that seems boyish. Holly seems boyish, Right, Exactly.
28:03 Wes: Yeah, Very true. Yep.
28:04 Erin: And so that seems to be entirely projection on her part that she would somehow. She's been stunted.
28:12 Wes: He needs me to save him.
28:14 Erin: Yes. Yeah. Even though he's saving me or you know, like she sees him in this pure way where he's purely her savior, no matter what he is proved to have done. She won't believe it.
28:25 Wes: Well, he uses his powers for good, Right. The racket is about getting her passport. And as Popescu says. Right. Popescu talks a lot about duty, the Romanian guy. And he says some contradictory things like, oh, Harry couldn't have been part of a racket. He had a great sense. That's impossible. He had a great sense of duty. And then in another place, you have to break the rules sometimes. Humanity's duty. So it's a duty to break the rules. And he's talking specifically about Harry fixing Anna's papers there. And then, of course, also says it was the duty of the porter to give evidence. Of course, as soon as he learns about what the porter's, you know, communicating, he goes and kills him right after saying that. But anyway, Right. Yeah, so much for duty.
29:09 Erin: So I think that's. All of this together is why it's like, okay, is Harry representative of the entire war? Because we have these contradictions. You know, on the one hand, duty, duty, that's the war. That's the buzzword of the war, is doing your duty for your country or whatever. But then at the same time, well, it's also your duty to break a few eggs, right?
29:29 Wes: It's your duty to go and murder people. It's not murder, but, you know, necessarily. It could be, but, yeah, it's your duty to go do something which normally it would be your duty not to do, which is kill people, but go.
29:39 Erin: That's right. Yeah. And then we have Calloway, who wants to just make sure that Harry is dead. You know, there's really no question of due process there or anything like that, though. He has all the evidence and he's willing to put on a slideshow for Holly's benefit. Finally, in the most ridiculous. Right, exactly. You know, has him look at fingerprints and all this. All this stuff. Yeah, Great.
30:04 Wes: Great. Little montage there of Holly getting disillusioned.
30:07 Erin: Right. We see him look increasingly forlorn.
30:10 Wes: Get more whiskey.
30:13 Erin: But the. Yeah. So the whole idea of an international police, or of gosh, it seems so. It's sad to say this, and it seems so. Like such a pipe dream now, but, you know, the UN becoming so popular after World War II, and everybody thinking that that was going to end all war. The very idea of an international police seems to be this. This. This idea that, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna fight the war to end war. We're gonna police the world so that war never happens. And so Harry, you know, this sort of like Vendetta against Harry in particular, when we can imagine that people are doing all kinds of horrible things. Harry can't be the only black marketeer in Vienna who's killed people.
30:52 Wes: But it's children.
30:53 Erin: But it's children. Yeah.
30:54 Wes: Specifically, if I bring you by the hospital, I think you're gonna agree he's the worst.
30:59 Erin: I don't know. It's Orson Welles. I'm with Anna. No.
31:03 Wes: All those cute little kids. Meningitis.
31:06 Erin: Sorry,
31:11 Wes: Have you seen a meningitis baby?
31:16 Erin: See, Harry doesn't kill kids. Meningitis kills kids.
31:18 Wes: It's not. That's right.
31:21 Erin: No.
31:21 Wes: But.
31:21 Erin: Yeah, war. War kills kids too. I don't know. I thought of other things that could be that he could be symbolizing or that this whole situation could be symbolizing. There seems to be Nazism or the Holocaust. Right. People not wanting to testify, people not wanting to come forward or. Or. Or put a stop to anything or to say, you know, to help. All of these ideas of collaboration. Right. It's all.
31:46 Wes: Holly tells Popescu. The porter didn't want to get involved. I think he uses the word.
31:50 Erin: Right. And it was his duty, even though
31:52 Wes: it was his duty. So the. Yeah, a lot of people don't want to get involved because they could get into big trouble just even if they're doing the right thing.
32:00 Erin: Exactly. Anyway, I want to read Harry as more of a. He seems bigger than a man. He seems like an entire force of nature or. Yeah, I mean, he literally puts himself in the position of playing God, of course, but he seems. Yeah, he seems to have this huge outsized effect on everyone around him. But I get the strong suspicion that Anna has been traumatized by something. That she had a terrible time during the war and that she's never going to get over it. And in a way, maybe she. It's just occurring to me now. I don't know if I even believe in this, but she too, could be a sort of larger force. Like she's all of post war Europe, hopelessly in love with Harry and unable to move on from him. Destroyed by whatever has happened and sort of unable to come back from it. Have you been to Vienna?
32:49 Wes: No, I've only been to Salzburg. The hills are alive.
32:54 Erin: Yeah, it's a lot cleaner now.
32:57 Wes: Oh, really?
32:58 Erin: They picked up all the rubble, but. Yeah, it's.
33:03 Wes: Well, that's the romance of it.
33:05 Erin: I know. Well, it's.
33:06 Wes: If I can't scramble around the rubble, I'll be. People are chasing me. Or into the sewer system, for that matter. Hey, we haven't talked about that, but yeah, that sewer system might be cleaner than our aqueducts. Do we have aqueducts? Nope.
33:22 Erin: Nope.
33:23 Wes: It's pretty. Looks like a little water park, but black and white, so who knows?
33:27 Erin: Well, and Paine says at one point that it smells sweet. I'm assuming he's being ironic, being sarcastic. Right. But it really is like they're just running around in regular water.
33:39 Wes: You don't get a sense of the filth, really. But yeah, those Germans are very clean Germanics. Are we allowed to call the Austrians Germans? They were to Hitler. They were Germans.
33:51 Erin: That's right. Well, doesn't Popescu call Kurtz an Anglo Saxon too? So those Anglo Saxons, they have funny ideas or so. I don't know.
34:02 Wes: But. Sorry, you were making a point about the. Oh, it's cleaner now.
34:07 Erin: Yeah, it's pretty darn clean in the film too. Yeah. I don't know. I think this is one of the best places on film ever. Another one that I think of, actually, which is like so much later than this and still quite destroyed by the war, is the Berlin of Wings of Desire, the Wim Wenders film, which is in the 80s and it's still has that post war malaise feel to it. Yeah. Vienna just. And I was expecting it to be a little more shadowy or. You know, I think it's significant to me somehow that the pictures I have of those statues are all cleaned up and white and shiny. You know, of course that's. That's what you do, but, you know, it's very, very different feel. And it made me feel a little eerie, loving the third man as I do, being there and finding it so clean. Wide streets and everything being white and just open.
35:03 Wes: Did you go to a Mozart opera based on a flyer that someone just handed you while you're walking down the street?
35:10 Erin: I did go. I think I did go to the Josefstadt while I was there. I broke into. I shouldn't. Probably shouldn't admit this. I broke into the cemetery where I jumped the fence of the. The cemetery where Mozart was buried because it was closed and it was my last night and I didn't know that it closed early and so we broke into the cemetery. Maybe that one. I don't remember. This was a long time ago. I was 20, so 14 years ago. And I did all kinds of things. I went to the Sacher hotel. Sacher. Sacher. I still don't know how to say that. The hotel that they put Holly up in that Austrians are not allowed to go in.
S A C H E R and they have this Sacher or something torte. Which is famous. It's a famous Viennese dessert. And anyway, so you had to have that. And then there's. In the dining room, there are all the different opera stars, pictures, signed pictures on the walls of all the different opera stars that have visited there because it's right next door to the opera. So, yeah, I was in heaven. I saw all the. Everything Mozart related, you know, just. Yeah, it was filled with music. So I have no idea exactly what I did. I don't have to go back and review the photos.
36:29 Wes: Do you know the novel about Vienna right before the war, the End? Oh, the World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig?
36:36 Erin: I've not read it.
36:37 Wes: Okay. I mean, I've only read a bit of it, but it's an interesting memoir. He and his wife killed themselves in 1942 because of Hitler, basically. But he wrote it, so he wrote it just before dying and he's recounting the history of Vienna from his childhood onward and then how it changed up to the point where Hitler was ruining everything. So it's very interesting. But yeah, I was just gonna say also. Yeah. In Salzburg, which I went in 1995, I think someone. You just walk down the street and people are handing you flyers for classical music and stuff. And I ended up going to see Don Giovanni. I think it was amazing.
37:18 Erin: His best one.
37:19 Wes: The culture is everywhere.
37:21 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
37:22 Wes: So it's a very. It's an interesting. It's quite a contrast between what a place like Vienna is in peacetime and then what it can be in wartime, you know. And this is similar contrast to what Germany represented culturally versus what Germany ended up doing in World War II, which is very dark. And that, of course, is the association that Harry makes between the capacity for high culture, he thinks is supposed to be connected to the capacity for darkness and amorality. So it kind of conceals it until it comes out, you know, so all that. Right. The white statue, statuary and the culture and on this inter. You know, on this point of view conceal this darker side.
38:06 Erin: Yeah. So, okay. I think. I think we just about covered everything. I mentioned that a lime is a kind of fruit and. And it's also chalk.
38:16 Wes: Yeah. Weren't you going to say something more about that?
38:18 Erin: No, I just. I went through all the limes. There are. I'm really glad I did that because otherwise, yeah, I would have been embarrassed.
38:25 Wes: Did you get the disease or is that.
38:26 Erin: Oh, that's with a Y. But that would have been a good one since the movie deals in homophones. That would have been a good one to mention. Darn.
38:33 Wes: Doesn't penicillin help with that? Or probably not.
38:38 Erin: Certainly not the kind that I've been getting from my Vietnamese supplier.
38:42 Wes: Oh no, yeah, only good. I'll show you where you get the good stuff.
38:46 Erin: Okay, good. All right. Thank you, thank you and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
Society as Swindle in “The Third Man” (1949)
Jan 05, 2026
The so-called “third man factor” is a phenomenon in which people in dire circumstances experience the presence of an extra person in their midst who gives comfort and aid when it’s most needed—a guardian angel, perhaps, or some figure of divine intervention. Harry Lime seems to have played just such a role in the lives of Holly Martins and Anna Schmidt. But is Lime from heaven or from hell? Perhaps a less-than-angelic third man might estrange rather than bring together, muddle rather than clarify, adulterate rather than help. And indeed, as a black market middle-man, Lime has the devilish power to intervene in people’s lives for the worse—like a narrator who edits out characters and manipulates the plot. Wes & Erin discuss the 1949 classic film “The Third Man,” about friendship and betrayal, and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. The so called third man factor is a phenomenon in which people in dire circumstances experience the presence of an extra person in their midst who gives comfort and aid when it's most needed. A guardian angel, perhaps, or some figure of divine intervention. Harry Lime seems to have played just such a role in the lives of Holly Martins and Anna Schmidt. But is Lime from heaven or from hell? Perhaps a less than angelic third man might estrange rather than bring together, muddle rather than clarify and adulterate rather than help.
And indeed, as a black market middleman, Lime has the devilish power to intervene in people's lives for the worse, like a narrator who edits out characters and manipulates the plot. Today we're Talking about the 1949 classic film the Third man, about friendship and betrayal and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:28 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan.
1:30 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, what do you think Holly Martins was doing during the war? Was he a draft dodger?
1:43 Wes: You know, it's interesting. I never thought of that. The question never occurred to me. Do we know what Harry was doing?
1:50 Erin: Well, apparently just living in Vienna and cheating people. I mean, I think Holly says that the last time that he saw him was in September of 39.
2:00 Wes: Okay.
2:00 Erin: Sort of a significant timing there. So he's been gone for the entire.
2:04 Wes: So he was a war profiteer the entire time?
2:07 Erin: I think so. Or, you know, in training to become the world's greatest war profiteer. I don't know if that ultimately is what he is by the end, but he seems pretty. Seems to have a pretty good racket.
2:18 Wes: It's interesting because I. So as far as Holly goes, I do have trouble imagining him in the military. He does try to cultivate a kind of bad boy personality, which I don't think translates very well today. Seems a bit silly. And then there's his preoccupation with sheriffs. Right, we get that. And he's written a book about someone who's vindicating a friend who's wrongfully persecuted by a sheriff. See, these are Cowboy books that he writes. And of course, this he finds himself. So the Lone Rider of Santa Fe is a story of a man who hunted down a sheriff who was victimizing his best friend. Which of course happens to be the way the plot of the film begins. I love the reaction of Payne, who's the. I don't even know what Payne is. Is he an MP or the sidekick to Calloway? Do you know what, technically he is anyway?
3:14 Erin: I think he's a sergeant.
3:15 Wes: Okay.
3:16 Erin: Yeah. In this international police force. Sergeant. I know. As opposed to major.
3:20 Wes: Everyone's got a great name. Anyway, the Payne respond sounds anti British, sir. Very funny. So he's got a problem with authority now. Not that that rules out being in the army or something. My father would tell stories of how he would get in fist fights with his officer and. Yeah, talk about a problem with authority. Anyway, he was always fighting the powers that be when he was in the army, but yeah, there's just something. There's something about him that makes me think, no, I can't envision that.
3:50 Erin: Yeah, he has a little boy obsession with these stories of justice and, you know, standing up for the wrongfully accused. And so that would sort of suggest that his morality is a bit black and white, which is where I think he stumbles in his assessment of Harry. And yet in his relationship with Harry or Lime. I don't know what we should be calling these people, especially because I wrote throughout my notes, Holly Martin's name. I wrote as Holly rather than Martin's, even though everybody calls him Martins because Holly is such a ridiculous name, which is commented on in the film, too.
4:26 Wes: I wrote him as Holly just because I don't like the name. Martins is too generic.
4:30 Erin: Right, right. Yeah.
4:31 Wes: But then on the other hand, I wrote Harry because I could say Harry and Holly.
4:36 Erin: Yes.
4:36 Wes: And they alliterate, so.
4:38 Erin: And in fact, Anna herself makes that mistake calling Holly Harry. But there's something about Holly, too, that's suggestive of his personality. This boyish sort of frozen in time quality about him. Which is why I think that his efforts to be a tough guy or something like that are rather comical, really. He's kind of an alcoholic. Right. He's constantly getting drunk and he's broke
5:06 Wes: even though he's published all these novels.
5:09 Erin: Yeah. And they're the ones that are actually supposed to make money. Right. The pulp novels are.
5:14 Wes: Right, exactly.
5:16 Erin: The popular.
5:17 Wes: So he can't give a lecture on the modern novel and stream of consciousness and whatever. But he also isn't making money with his pulp Novels that people know about.
5:26 Erin: Yeah, right. Maybe the suggestion is that they're out of fashion and that he's out of step with his time, just as he's sort of living in this perpetual adolescence, which seems to color his view of Harry for most of the film. Maybe these stories that he's writing are, you know, about cowboys and sheriffs and all of this are. Have fallen out of favor in post war malaise and corruption. But anyway, yeah, it's a sort of a. It just. It made me wonder. On the one hand, he has this huge problem with authority, which Harry seems to have encouraged. On the other hand, he seems to see the world in these black and white moral terms, which would suggest that you, for instance, dodge the draft or that you probably think, you know, Nazis are bad. But who knows with him? He's a little ambiguous.
6:17 Wes: Yeah. This is puzzling, now that you mention it. A man of his age would be. Is he in his 30s or 40s?
6:24 Erin: I think he's in his. I think he's in the 1940s version of his 30s.
6:30 Wes: Which looks like 50s.
6:31 Erin: Which looks like 50s. But it's Joseph Cotten. He has a. You know, he's appealing. Not as appealing as Orson Welles, but that's another story.
6:43 Wes: Well, I think now it occurs to me that Graham Greene, who I love the two novels of his that I've read, Brighton Rock and End of the Affair.
6:52 Erin: End of the Affair, End of the Affair.
6:55 Wes: And he wrote a good screenplay here. And that's interesting because often that doesn't go well when a novelist tries to write a screenplay. But as William Faulkner found out. Yeah. It strikes me that maybe he's being clever with the name. So Holly's L's are sort of like R's, right? Holly and Harry. So that they perhaps are alter egos in some sense. And Harry is the real deal. Real. Not the leal. The real deal. He's got the R's. Harry is the real deal. And Holly is a hologram. I don't know. What does Martin associate to? There's the bird. And then I want to say fake, but my vocabulary is failing me. Is there another alternate meaning for the word Martin?
7:43 Erin: Small Eurasian bird. Any of various birds of the swallow family.
7:48 Wes: Yeah.
7:49 Erin: I spent more time with Lime than with Martin, which actually, I spent a lot of time with the word Lime.
7:57 Wes: Yeah, right. But, yeah, let's discuss that when we get to it. But for some reason I was associating to fake or something like that. But, yeah, he's a replica. It seems apparent from context that he knows that Harry is into rackets and the black market, but that he doesn't know the extent of it. So he seems to have this strong moral compass, I guess, when it comes to taking penicillin away from children.
8:23 Erin: That's where he draws the line.
8:24 Wes: Yeah, that's where he draws the line.
8:26 Erin: But if it was just tires or sugar, then he's like, come on, haven't we all resold tires at a premium
8:35 Wes: in the aftermath of the war? Haven't we all done the black market thing? Yeah. And it occurred to me he and Anna are quite naive. And then I thought of the name Calloway, because Calloway is not actually Callow, they are. So I think because Harry turns out to be such a bad guy in the end, and I don't know if the person that they say that they knew was better. Holly is very sentimental about Harry when he thinks he's dead. He was the best friend I ever had. And then Calloway accuses him of sounding like a dime store novel or something like that, being too sentimental. But it's clear that Harry was always. He had the ability to fix things, I think, is what. What Holly says. So he was doing this before the war. I can imagine them as teenagers doing this, that or the other. Right. Holly seems to admire that. So he admires this darker side. But on the other hand, he won't go the whole way.
9:31 Erin: In a private moment with Anna, Holly talks about their relationship as boys. And Anna asks, was he clever when he was a boy? And Holly says, I suppose so. He could fix anything. Which is just such a wonderfully ambiguous phrase because at first we think, you know, he maybe was good at fixing things that broke. Right.
9:50 Wes: Which is what I thought when I first heard it.
9:52 Erin: Yeah. Yes. And she says, what sort of things? Like, you know, cars or whatever. Right. Oh, little things. How to put your temperature up before an exam. The best cribs. How to avoid this and that. And then Anna says, he fixed my papers for me. He heard that the Russians were repatriating people like me who came from Czechoslovakia. He knew the right person straight away for forging stamps. And then Holly says, when he was 14, he taught me the three card trick. That's growing up fast. And Anna says, he never grew up. The world grew up around him, that's all, and buried him.
You know, it occurs to me that the only person whose opinion of Harry really changes over the course of the film is Holly. I mean, Calloway is wrong about Harry being dead, but other than that, he's right about who Harry is. Anna is wrong, but her opinion of him does not change. Regardless of evidence. Holly's is the only one, you know, and all the other guys around Harry seem to know who he is. And, you know, they all have differing stories about him, but their opinions about him don't change either. And yet what Holly's telling us here about him is remarkably consistent with the guy he grew up to be.
You know, so somehow doing these things when you're a kid, putting your temperature up before an exam so, you know, getting out of an exam, the best cribs and how to avoid things, that's what made me think of this idea of draft dodging. All of these things have to do with getting out of tests or getting out of the position that an authority figure might put you in if they had so much access to each other. You know, I'm kind of imagining them in like a boarding school, boys, boarding school kind of environment that is not in the script. But it's just, you know, there seems to be so much intimacy between them in this kind of boys school way.
And Graham Greene, as a, you know, as an Englishman probably would have that.
11:36 Wes: Was he an Eton guy?
11:38 Erin: I'm not sure, but he must have been. Right. So this whole idea of, you know, your whole life being organized around getting out of things or somehow trying to evade authority or stick it to authority, and then by having taught him the three card trick, I was thinking about that with the three card. I usually refer to it as the three card Monte. You usually need a shill for that. So he taught Hollywood maybe what these, what the three card trick was about. In other words, that he was being scammed by somebody, or maybe he taught him how to perform it with him.
In other words, that Holly was kind of an accomplice, that maybe Harry was pulling the scam on other boys in the school and Holly was the shill to help him pull it off. But somehow it seems that all of this is in good fun if you do it when you're a kid. And then there are acceptable ways that you could scam people as an adult with things like sugar and tires. But Holly can't extend himself to see that Harry might get involved deeper and deeper with more insidious black market items, even though he seems to have been a con artist from the moment Holly met him.
So it's odd that his opinion goes through the only transformation of the film when he kind of knew he had this guy's number all along. But in one instance, he sees him as a hero for doing these things. And in another, he's a villain.
13:05 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting because now you have me looking up Three Card Monte. So it's a confidence game in which the victims or marks are tricked into betting a sum of money on the assumption that they can find the money card. Okay, well, it's like a shell game
13:19 Erin: where you're moving the.
13:20 Wes: It's a shell game. Okay. There's a connection here between the third man and the three card.
13:25 Erin: Exactly.
13:28 Wes: Which I did not make.
13:29 Erin: Well, you need three people to pull it off as well. Right. You need the Conner, the shill. And the person being conned is the person being conned, Joseph Cotten. Because if Harry taught him how to recognize this trick, in other words, Harry gave him the blueprint for who Harry became. And still Holly's somehow getting conned in its full form.
13:48 Wes: 3 card Monte is an example of a classic short con in which a shill pretends to conspire with the mark to cheat the dealer while in fact doing the reverse. So they're cheating the mark. Holly is, in a sense, in the position of the mark. Right, because he gets. He thinks he's coming over to be part of a racket. Right. To be part of a con, essentially. But he's the one who gets conned because. Yeah. What's the purpose of doing that to Holly? Why do they need to trick Holly as part of this? They need Harry to seem dead.
14:19 Erin: But, yeah, I was wondering that myself. I think why all of this happens on the day that Holly is supposed to show up doesn't make any sense to me. Okay, why do this now?
14:31 Wes: That doesn't make any sense to me. And also. Right. He's about to leave when Kurtz, Baron Kurtz, basically rings him up and says, meet me at the Mozart Cafe, and then creates all this suspicion in him. So what's the point of that? I mean, he brings a book as if he's a fan. Maybe he's just a fan who wanted to meet Holly. The book, I think, had been given to him by Harry. So I don't know how much of a real fan he is and how much of a pretext that is, but it's because of Kurtz that Holly ends up staying. So it's almost like the way all this unfolds, they really ensure that Holly is going to keep asking questions and that they're going to get found out.
15:08 Erin: Well, it's as though the. The purpose of all of this is Holly's moral education or advancement, that he's going to finally grow up it's clear that Harry doesn't trust him enough. You know, he might have gone to har. To Holly from the beginning and said, listen, I had to fake my own death because they're after me and given him some story about how he was just involved in sugar and tires or whatever and not tell him the full truth, get Holly on his side and have Holly still do the job for him and then leave. Instead of. He allows Holly to be drawn into this whole thing, giving time for Holly to learn the truth about him from Calloway, and then only appears when it's kind of too late.
Maybe it's best not to look at the apparatus of that because I think there's suspension of disbelief involved. That has to. Unless we're missing some really big and important part of the way that the story is meant to function, that is Harry trying to manipulate Holly in some particular way. If that isn't the case, then maybe it's just this suspension of disbelief thing that all of this is happening when Holly just happens to be there to find it out.
16:11 Wes: Yeah. I can buy it being a coincidence, actually, but. So it is interesting. Kurtz says it's wonderful how you keep the tension in the novels, which, of course, is what's happening in that moment. Right. The tension is, he could have left and that would be the end of the story. But the tension is being maintained by. By what Kurtz is doing and then by what Holly will do. But I guess just while we're mentioning things that are confusing in looking over. So I just. Like, after I watched the movie, I looked over the screenplay or the script. Someone created, like, a shooting script that seems taken from the movie.
I don't know if people are using AI now to basically take films, because if you try to read the original screenplay, I don't know if you've tried this in one of our episodes. It's. It doesn't work because so much changes during the shooting. Right. And so I'm often using these transcripts, just finding a transcript online, but that's usually unattributed, but they seem to be getting fancier. And that's describing the shots, everything shot for shot and so on. So just looking at that and going over all my notes again, I thought, oh, yeah, I don't really know.
Why did Harry betray Anna to the Russians? Because that comes out in the Ferris wheel scene. I don't know if you remember that, because I didn't really fully understand that until looking at the script. And I was confused by it. And then I asked ChatGPT. I just said, why does Harry betray Anna to the Russians? And ChatGPT tried to claim that Harry doesn't betray Anna to the Russians. It's the opposite, blah, blah, blah. He helped her with her papers. And I said, and it gives very long rationale. This is what I love about AI. It's just like the ultimate rationalizer.
Once it's on to some point, it can just produce a wealth of evidence. And then I just said, well, in the Ferris wheel scene, Harry says he's only safe in the Russian zone. And Holly says, oh, so that's how they found out about Anna.
18:16 Erin: He traded information for his security, which
18:20 Wes: should have been obvious to me, but anyway. And then. ChatGPT, yeah, you've caught the key line that gives the game away, blah, blah, blah.
18:31 Erin: I love it when I get complimented by AI yeah.
18:34 Wes: And then later on it says, so my earlier answer was too soft. It kind of admits that it was wrong. So that should have been pretty clear and obvious to me. But it was just another thing I was confused by. And I'm just saying that because there are. It is quite intricate and the pacing is really fast with the Ferris wheel scene, the speed of that dialogue and the background noise and stuff, I really had to pause and take notes. And even then I just went back to this transcript screenplay thing and just analyzed everything that was in the speech. And it's just a lot that happens very quickly. So it's an intricate plot and there are some confusing aspects. I don't think it's really interferes with my suspension of disbelief at any point, but there's an intricacy to it.
19:20 Erin: This is one of my favorite movies, and this is the first time watching it that I noticed that the voiceover at the beginning was not Joseph Cotton's voice or Calloway's voice. And I looked it up and I was like, oh, that's Carol Reed. And there's a possibility that I could have seen an American version of it with a Joseph Cotten vo. But instead, I know I've seen this version before, so. But the memory is hard. It's really hard to keep track of everything too, because the circumstances of the central mystery, you know, the car accident scene, involve so many people.
You know, it's the third man, but it's really like the fifth man, plus the porter is a sixth man, plus Holly is a seventh man, you know, because there's also the doctor who was walking by the fact that his own chauffeur hit him. The porter having seen it, the. It's an incredibly complex. Plus, the one who was actually killed. Right. The dead body in Harry Lime's grave, who turns out to be Joseph Harbin, one of many Josephs mentioned in the film, I think, including Joseph Harbin. There are three Josephs as well. This is sort of maybe a little bit of a stretch, but Anna is an actress at the Josefstadt Theater, which is in the Josefstadt district, I believe, or neighborhood or something like that, which is named after Emperor Joseph I.
And then Joseph Harbin's body is pulled behind the Joseph statue, which I've actually been to all the locations where all of this takes place. So, you know, the entrance to what supposedly Harry's building is right there. It's actually a palace.
20:50 Wes: Did you take a picture of yourself stepping out in front of a car?
20:53 Erin: I did not, but I did take a picture of the doorway. Those beautiful statues of the four women, you know, the two on either side flanking the doorway, are now white. So I don't know if they were just covered in soot or something like that because they look almost like painted black or they look gray or made out of something that isn't white stone. But anyway, Joseph Harbin is pulled behind the Emperor Joseph's statue, which is a statue of Joseph ii, another emperor, the one from Amadeus, who says, too many notes. You know, the Mozart and Salieri emperor equestrian, huge equestrian statue that Joseph Harbin has pulled behind.
So there are sort of like three. It's like Joseph I, Joseph ii, and then Harbin is Joseph iii. So he's also kind of the third man. Anyway, I thought a lot about duplication in this film, and I have plenty more to say about that. But I'll stop there for now. But it's very confusing to keep everything straight. And, yeah, each one of the witnesses or the people who participated, Kurtz, Popescu, the Romanian doctor. Winkel, Winkel, Winkel. And then we never meet the chauffeur. But those three, their interviews, they all also give, like, differing pieces of information, different glosses on Harry's character.
Also, like Dr. Winkel has Baron Kurtz's dog, or it's actually Dr. Vinkel's dog, not Baron Kurtz's. So I remember as a kid not really understanding fully what was going on there or what had happened.
22:24 Wes: Ultimately, yeah, I had the same confusion as you about the commentator. I had the impression that it was Holly. And then I went back and looked at the. Just looking at the script, and there's a moment where the narrator says, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, An American came all the way here to visit his friend. To visit a friend of his. Martins was broke, so a friend of his. Harry Lime. Martins was broke, and Lime offered him some sort. I don't know, some sort of job. And it's a very casual, kind of jaunty, you know, ironic and funny tone.
The whole beginning is kind of. There's a fair bit of sarcasm in the way the commentator starts things. So it does say we. So we'd run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course, a situation like that. And then there's a shot, as the commentator is saying this, of a body floating in the water. A situation like that doesn't tempt amateurs. You know, they can't stay the course like a professional. So it does sound like the commentator is in on things. Yet another.
23:28 Erin: He's the 14th man in the operation.
23:33 Wes: The film isn't as comedic as the introductory tone makes it. You know, the tone that's set in the beginning isn't held. I mean, there are. I guess there's some funny things that happen, although maybe not.
23:46 Erin: Oh, I think so. I think there's a lot of silly. There's a lot of strange silliness, especially with Crabbin.
23:52 Wes: Yeah. There's the lecture, Paine punches him in the face at one point, but then is quick, very polite after that, and helps him up. Let me help you up, sir.
24:01 Erin: Right, right. The drunkenness almost immediately, Holly gets drunk in that scene. That really kind of sets the tone, too. So there's a. And the music. The Roger Ebert review of this film, which I revisited yesterday. It's in his Greatest Films collection of essays. He opens the review by saying something like, has there ever been a better soundtrack or a soundtrack better suited to its film? And he describes it as something like jaunty, but without joy.
24:32 Wes: Interesting.
24:33 Erin: Which I think is a really good way to put it, you know, so there's a. The soundtrack provides a kind of lightness.
24:37 Wes: So it's sort of a Django Reinhardt style guitar. Is that the.
24:42 Erin: It's a zither.
24:43 Wes: Oh, okay.
24:43 Erin: Yeah. And an actual Viennese zither player. Famous zither player picked up off the street by Carol Reed, ended up composing all the entire score. And so that contributes too, I think. And that also contributes to the sense of speed in the film because it's just the one instrument. And it's often. It almost has, like a silent movie type score in that it's almost reproducing Footsteps and people running, you know, chase scenes, you know, where it's almost has the effect of speeding up the action. You know, you get sort of knocked around by it. I think.
25:19 Wes: What is the atmosphere that it's trying to capture? I think there's a kind of. There's kind of a romantic. There's supposed to be something romantic about post war Vienna and the ruins and the moral. Let's call it flexibility up to a certain point. There's something romantic about that, I think. And the film was shot and actually shot in the. In the actual rubble and ruins of Vienna. So that, that. And that's the way the commentator sets things up in the. In the beginning, something about desperation and what people will do in desperation, but then some of the people aren't really that desperate.
So when Holly says to Kurtz, police have the idea that he's mixed up in some sort of racket. Kurtz says, everyone in Vienna is. We all sell cigarettes and that kind of thing. I tell you, I've done things that would have seemed unthinkable before the war. And then you think you're going to hear about prostitution or something. Instead I sold some tires on the black market. I wonder what my father would have said. Of course, he's much worse than that. So there's this idea that people are just trying to get by and the normal mechanisms of things have broken down and are finding a way, and it's morally flexible or compromised or whatever.
But it's not so terrible. It's an environment in which the necessity to survive has overridden other considerations. But the reality is, right, it's just about being predatory. At least for Harry. It sounds like for these guys, it's more than we got to get by. It's, let's dilute the penicillin and make 80 pounds a shot or whatever it is. Even if children die, the romance of the morally flexible aftermath in a place that's been destroyed quickly gets obliterated. It turns out not to be that way. So there's something. There's a kind of disenchantment in the arc of the film.
But we start out disenchanted in a way because it was a terrible war and this is the aftermath. It's destructive. But in that disenchantment there's a romance. But then we get deprived even of that romance by the end of the movie.
27:23 Erin: I think certainly the romance that we see, I mean, there's a sort of general romance to the idea of it. But then the people who are able to appreciate that or take advantage of that aspect of Vienna are those who are either not living there or who are not making money on the black market. And therefore in a financial position. It seems to not be affected by the negative elements of this place. Right. So Harry, when they get on the Ferris wheel, talks about how the kids used to love to ride the Ferris wheel. Now none of them have the money. Money to go on it. But of course he can go on and have this confrontation with Holly and feel sad.
27:58 Wes: He does. He doesn't have his. In enough of his indigestion pills.
28:02 Erin: That's right. That's right. Yeah. And Baron Kurtz is meeting. You know, is playing at the Casanova Club or meeting Holly in places called the Mozart Cafe, which get at this sort of faded neoclassical glory of the city. You know, what kind of people are going and seeing Anna at the Josefstadt Theater in that comedy of manners? Probably just the wealthy. There seems to be a play on this, too, in terms of speech. The black marketeers. Is that a term? Black marketeers, the bad guys. They have the ability to talk to Holly, or they're always kind of talking to Holly freely, even if they come up with sort of different versions of the same story. There's a kind of flexibility about them that seemed to me to be indicative of Harry being able to get away by escaping out the back of a bombed building. Like the rubble allows that escape route.
28:57 Wes: Right.
28:58 Erin: And the sewers, using the sewers. Whereas the porter can't get out. The porter is bound by virtue of his job to this building, which does seem intact and which is servicing these black market people because Harry is living there, but which seems to be servicing them specifically because it is an intact building and he is therefore murdered in the building. There's this idea of not speaking, not being able to speak. The porter's limited by not knowing very much English. And so Anna is there to translate between the porter and Holly. But also, we're told that the porter was too afraid to testify at the.
I guess it was the inquest for Harry's death. So he didn't testify to say that there was a third man there. There's this sense that these ordinary people can't speak or that they're afraid to speak or that speech will betray them somehow. I think the narrator says at the beginning that all of these forces are coming in to occupy the central sector, and yet they all don't speak each other's language. There's the French, the Americans, the Russians, and the. In the English. So I guess The Americans and the English speak the same language. And the only thing they have in common is a smattering of German or something like that.
So there's this idea that the good guys and the, say, ordinary people are maybe limited by their access to knowledge and their ability to communicate with each other. But these black market people, for them, the city has endless possibilities because they have a way of going out back doors or of. Or they have maybe a coalition or they have money that can get them in on the Russian side, even if they. Maybe they can't speak Russian. But you know, that like they. They seem to be the only ones who can travel with impunity, who can converse, who can make themselves understood, and therefore who can enjoy a city which for everybody else is closing in around them.
I wanted to just talk about the stage money, as Holly calls it, the money that. The army money. So he has even a different currency. You know, I don't know how Holly fits in with all this. And I'm not sure if I'm characterizing Interpol the right way, because they're free too, in the city in a way that the ordinary people seem not to be free. But I think maybe it's a gradient.
31:08 Wes: The international police are limited.
31:11 Erin: They're limited. But the opening narration tells us they're hobbled by not being able to communicate with the other people. Yet they don't seem as hobbled as the regular. Like they're not going to get murdered the way that this porter is going to get murdered. You know, they have some authority which enables them to be. To exist a little bit easier. And they have their own money. Now, this money doesn't really translate to any of the places within the actual city. Right. Because at some point, Hawley's told he can't use that money I think at a bar.
31:41 Wes: Well, Anna tells him at the Casanova, they don't take army money.
31:44 Erin: They don't take army money. Yeah. And he calls it.
31:46 Wes: It's money that basically Calloway is near the beginning, stuffed into Martin's overcoat pocket.
31:53 Erin: Right, Right. Yeah. And there's this whole idea too of Interpol descending and creating these sort of false conditions within the city. So they're not even in the real. Right. They're in stage Vienna with their stage money. That doesn't actually work in the city. It's the regular people who seem to be getting shafted every which way. And the Interpol and the black market people are exempt in different ways, but both exempt from that kind of the hard lives of I'd imagine, of the people who live there.
32:23 Wes: Yeah. I think it seems like the military policing and the military law that the city is under are ineffectual. And that in part has to do with its international character. And as you pointed out, the commentator makes a lot in the beginning of the fact that you have people who can't communicate with each other, trying to cooperate as a single police force, essentially. And they also have other ulterior motives. So the Russians want to claim Anna as theirs because she's Czechoslovakian, which is a weird. You know, she's got to go to the Russian sector of the city.
It's a weird preoccupation to have. Right. You got to be in my sector. So there's a way in which the varieties of nationalism are competing even as they try to be internationalist in a way and govern the city from that standpoint. So Vienna isn't, you know, Vienna has to be Viennese again fully before it's going to function, I think, is the idea.
33:20 Erin: Yeah, it does seem to be, you know, a symbol for all of Europe. And this idea, these types of silly preoccupations like we want anon in our sector are, you know, one would say, indicative of the way that Europe was carved up after World War II by FDR, Stalin and Churchill. You know, you get this part of this country, and I'll take that, and then we'll split Berlin down the middle, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, and if you're on the wrong side during the splitting process, then sucks for you.
33:52 Wes: Yeah. There were massive dislocations of millions of people from one country to another based on who ended up getting what. But, yeah, based on ethnicity.
34:03 Erin: After the war, it seems that it's the regular Joes. Right. Who are ultimately the victims of this. It's not going to be the people who are doing the carving or the people who feel that the rules don't apply to them.
34:14 Wes: Yeah. So it amplifies the ordinary. Inequalities of class get amplified in this circumstance. Right. Thought you were born.
34:21 Erin: Yes, yes.
34:22 Wes: Where. Right. You have. All the rich people can go to the theater. But also.
34:26 Erin: Yes.
34:27 Wes: Right. The beginning of the film, you know, you get all these shots of. Yeah. People looking very poor and desperate.
34:32 Erin: Right. And also just. And then these. These black market guys who maybe worked their racket, you know, and put themselves in a position to be able to go to the theater, who were not, you know, those seem to be like the social climbers in a way, who were just able to luck out during the war somehow and come into a good racket.
34:51 Wes: Yeah. In ordinary times, it would just be organized. It would just be organized crime. Right. But it almost seems a little bit more forgivable. It's not like Holly has come over to be part of the Mafia. It's just there's a more of an entrepreneurial spirit if they're just doing tires and things like that. And because social order is broken down, it's more forgivable.
35:12 Erin: Maybe this is related to Holly's idealization of Harry. So, in a way, you are. You're a successful little entrepreneur. If you could figure out how to survive under these conditions, and nobody would really fault you for it, because everybody's suffering. And so you're sort of making something of your suffering. You're pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps rather than just suffering with everybody else and following the rules or something like that. And so, you know, we see that Holly admires Harry for being able to get out of, say, tests that the other boys had to take. And he sort of admires Harry's ingenuity for being able to escape that task, that. That enforcement of authority.
35:55 Wes: Yeah. And in the. In the beginning with Calloway, you know, he wants to argue with Calloway about the seriousness of the crimes. Right. So it's just some petty racket with gasoline or something. And then Calloway accuses Lime of murder. And then that's when Holly tries to punch him. And later in the film, when Harry is finally getting wise, Holly. Sorry. When Holly is finally getting wise, Calloway will say, I told you to go away, Martins. This isn't Santa Fe. I'm not a sheriff. And you, you aren't a cowboy. You've been blundering around with the worst bunch of racketeers in Vienna, your precious Harry's friends. And now you're wanted for murder, which is another confusing thing. I don't understand the role of that little boy in getting them.
36:37 Erin: Oh, yeah. He accuses Holly of having killed the porter.
36:44 Wes: Has he put up to it?
36:46 Erin: No, I think he just, you know, he's seen Holly with the porter, and he just says, I saw that guy with him. Or he would maybe something like, he was the last one with him. My German is not that good.
36:56 Wes: How's your toddler German?
36:58 Erin: A little better.
37:01 Wes: It's romanticization of little light organized crime. But once you get to the real thing, then it's much more sinister. I don't know. Am I connecting to the point that you were just making?
37:13 Erin: Definitely. It Makes me want to think again about language, about speech and about that kind of flexibility. Because I think a consistent. Or maybe it's not that consistent. Maybe that's why I can't work it out. But I do think that there is an argument being made here about language. We have Holly calling Calloway Callahan, which puts him in a different location. As Calloway points out, he says, I'm English, not Irish, you know, so Callahan would be an Irish name. You know, we have Anna confusing the names, calling Holly Harry. We have the, you know, the confusion of the wrong body in the grave.
Right. Joseph Harbin for Harry. We have the confusion of the number of people at the scene of the accident. There's much made of the confusion actually, of American geography. They keep referring to Texas as the location for all of Holly's novels, including the Lone Rider of Santa Fe and Oklahoma Kid, but they keep referring to Texas. Right. Obviously, there's the. You know, we find out that there's the dilution of the penicillin going on. So there's a kind of passing something off or something else. It's not exactly a confusion, but I think it's sort of related.
This adulteration or this mistaken identity or something like that sort of extends to this idea of the dilution, which I looked up. I don't want to get us off track on that because I want to stick with language for a second. But I looked up how that would be done. And the other thing I was going to say is I noticed that in that first conversation, that bar scene. First bar scene with Calloway and Holly, when he lists his two. He names two novels of his. After he says that, he writes cheap novelettes. He says the Lone Rider of Santa Fe, which comes up several times in the film.
And it occurred to me that rider is also a homophone for rider. R I, D E R could be mistaken for W R I, T E, R. Right? And then death at Double X Ranch. And then he, imitating an English accent, says raunch instead of ranch, which then becomes a different word. It becomes actually, in American English, it becomes R A, U, N, C, H. Like raunchy. I'm not sure what to say about these things, but. But maybe we can make something of them in Part two. These confusions, these what. What are they?
39:29 Wes: The whole movie is a grift.
39:33 Erin: I want to say something a little bit better than that before we close out these linguistic blips or, you know, we also. We have. The other thing I just wanted to say about that was The Crabbin, the CRS of ghq. You know, the Alphabet soup. Cultural Re Education section, the importance of language. And yet the inability to properly hear each other or make ourselves understood or know where we are. Being able to locate things in language seems to be difficult. Being able to locate people or identify people properly seems to be difficult. All these linguistic problems seem to be at the center.
40:12 Wes: Yeah. So language is a racket, potentially, but at the very least, language is falsifying. But at the very least, we get the idea that this cultural stuff is a racket. So Crabbin. He doesn't know Martins. It's just based on Paine's testimony. He's gonna have him suddenly give a lecture on the novel. So Crabbin says, cultural Re Education section. Propaganda. Just what he's doing. Very important in a place like this. We do a little show each week. Last week we did Hamlet, and the week before we had something. And then Payne says. Striptease, sir?
Yes. Hindu dances. Thank you, Sergeant. First opportunity we've had of making an American author welcome. Yeah. So we get this idea that the Cultural Re Education center is not all it's cracked up to be. Then he makes a remark about Hawley's novels being popular there, even though he's never read any, and he doesn't know that. And so you could also say writing popular novels is a kind of racket. It's not the real thing.
41:19 Erin: Right.
41:20 Wes: It doesn't match up to a more serious literary pretension or aspiration. It's just about making money with silly little stories. I don't know. Is that the way to put it? That's not a great way to put it. You know, writing for money without any concern for the craft, let's say, or the. Well, no, maybe that's not the best way to put it either. Anyway, you get what I mean?
41:45 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's stop there, and we'll keep talking about the importance of language and identity, and then we'll get to maybe a more profound look at both Harry and Anna in Part two. Thank you.
42:01 Wes: Thank you.
42:05 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Meaning of Christmas Spirit in “Elf” (2003) – Part 2
Dec 22, 2025
Like many of its genre, the film “Elf” connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities, despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Wes & Erin discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of elf. We had just gotten done. Erin was talking about the mutual adaptation of Buddy and the people that he's interacting with in New York. And you had me thinking earlier about this in terms of there's a feedback loop between catalysts. So he's got to be a catalyst in a way to change people so that they in turn can be catalysts for him. What does he really need, though, since he's so happy and can eat canned syrup on syrup all day, including alcoholic syrup, what does he need? He needs. Nominally, he needs a father, although he's got a perfectly good father and papa.
Yeah. But I think one of the things we had toyed with was the idea that he needed to be with human beings, as racist as it sounds. But he stick to your own kind, not from a racial standpoint, but from a standpoint of being connected to the spirit world without being entirely absorbed into the spirit world. So coming from the spirit world to be the mediator. But he's not just a Christ figure. He's got to learn to be human, essentially, and perhaps even to be an adult to some extent, God forbid. But what's going to happen with him and Jovie and they have a kid.
Yikes. But at the end of it, how's that going?
1:58 Erin: Best not to think too deeply about that.
2:03 Wes: But in any case, so he's both angel and messenger and mediator, but the world is also that to him. And this is kind of catch 22. And you see it actually in relationships where people, in a sense, need to help each other, but to get the help you need from one person, you might need to help them do something first. In other words, you might need to help them become capable of helping you. Help me help you change at a deeper psychological level, so that then they can help you with your change. So he's going to reform Walter, make him less cynical, make him a better father, make him someone who's not going to try to cheat children out of their storybook endings, which is literally what he tries to do. It doesn't matter to him if they don't find out what happens to the. What. What are the characters?
2:52 Erin: A penguin or a penguin and a puppy.
2:55 Wes: Penguin and a puppy. And to help Michael have a father and to help Jovie be someone who can sing in public. And does he help anyone else? I mean, he's helping all the world in the sense. Right. By restoring Christmas spirit. Right, but thinking in terms of specific interactions. But these other figures that he's transforming, they're part of what he needs, so he's transforming them so they can also be something for him.
3:23 Erin: I don't know if I want to go in this direction, because it seems a little like we might be taking this too seriously. But it makes one think of theological types of questions, like, does God need us to worship him? There seems to be this same feedback loop that you're describing in the whole idea of the Incarnation, or the idea that Christ needs to come down and be human and be part of us, and that there's this. This mediation that happens between us and God. And then we're also supposed to be the catalysts, not for. Not for helping Jesus do something, but, you know, for.
For others that has to have a kind of ripple effect. But I'm cringing as I say this because I don't. I don't necessarily want to make this. I don't want to go down this path and talk about the theology of Elf. There is more I wanted to say about the whole faith and works thing having to do with Walter. But should we drill down a little bit more into Walter? Because the thing that I want to know is why? I mean, he's a children's book author. Because in the end, Buddy has to be a children's book author.
4:19 Wes: And then thematically, it's very. You know, it's nice. It's neat, that thematically. Right. He's trying to kill off storybook endings.
4:27 Erin: Right. Right. He's a children's book publisher, I should say.
4:29 Wes: Or.
4:29 Erin: Right. I don't know what he is.
4:31 Wes: Right. So he's not just cynical and depleted and sad, kind of. And he's playing the role initially as a sort of antagonist of trying to rob people of their happy magic child storybook endings. He's in a role where he should write. He should be interested in children getting a kick out of the books that he's publishing and want them to get joy out of that. But he doesn't even, you know, he can, for financial reasons, give them an unfinished book. So anyway, symbolically, thematically, it's very rich. But in terms of the psychology, the poetics of the film, we have to ask. Yeah, how did he become that way? Why is he that way?
5:13 Erin: It's interesting because he's in this role, it seems, as a means to an end. There's this idea that he's a workaholic, and yet he doesn't really care about the work. The work has become disenchanted for him. He's working a lot, it seems, for the money, but he's also not really paying attention. He's not doing a great job. So it's quite complex, actually, because he's leaving pages out of a book, and yet he's working all the time. So it's like, what is taking up his time at this job? Nominally, he's working on making these books for children. He's working all the time, and yet he's slipping up. He's making these mistakes. I like the way that you put it that he's robbing these storybook endings from children. But at the same time, there's a lack of consciousness about it. You know, he's not deliberately taking candy from children or something like that.
6:00 Wes: It's a lapse his characterization, I think, is nice and it's subtly done right. It's not over the top, but, you know, it needs to be because he's gonna have to be reformed in the end. Right. So he can't be too much of a villain. He seems more depleted. I don't know. I think you might have said that word first, but I think it's a good one. There's an element of cynicism, but it's not irredeemable. Perhaps part of the idea here is just getting back to this idea of work is right. It's at the point where it becomes an assembly line that people get dissatisfied.
It's no longer new, it's no longer creative. He's dealing with idiot writers and then also huge egos like the Miles characters who are just in it for the fame. So you can imagine it would start it out as something he was enthusiastic about, possibly. And then he's just done too much of it. He's dealt with all the bullshit and all the characters, including the receptionist who's talking about declawing kittens.
6:54 Erin: Oh, my God. Amy Sedaris in this.
6:57 Wes: I love that.
6:59 Erin: Yeah. She's so amazing in this. I love her. Anyway, and this is. She had to have ad libbed that, right? She's probably just thinking to herself, what's the sickest thing I could say in this ad libbed phone conversation?
7:11 Wes: Yeah, that would be great if it is. Is that in the trivia?
7:14 Erin: I don't. I don't. No, I didn't read that, but I wouldn't put it. I mean, she's a comedic genius, so that's exactly the kind of thing she would do.
7:20 Wes: Let's just look at this line. Oh, I don't know, Connie. I've never.
7:23 Erin: I've never declawed kittens before.
7:25 Wes: How many? Eight.
7:27 Erin: Take them down to the camper.
7:28 Wes: I don't. I don't know if I'm gonna have time.
7:31 Erin: Yeah, bring them by the camper.
7:32 Wes: Bring them by the camp. Camper. I love that. Right? Yeah. So we deal with all these, you know, the human with all these crazy characters. And it's charming from the standpoint of the film audience, but in daily life, it gets old real quick. So we. We know, you know, we're all personally familiar with how the cynicism can set in, even if it's our dream job and even if it's. Yeah.
7:58 Erin: Well, I love the connection you make to the North Pole and the assembly line idea, because the. It's actually unclear. You know, Walter has a Boss, who I think is the head of the publishing company. So Walter, presumably, would be the head of the children's book division. Maybe. Maybe this is something they say explicitly, but I don't remember it. He's not writing the books himself. He has the, as you say, these two idiot writers. One of them is Andy Richter. These two idiot writers that are actually. That he's then passing on the responsibility of making them come up with the story.
8:32 Wes: How about some asparagus children who are ashamed of the way their pee smell so good?
8:38 Erin: That is like, one of the funniest.
8:39 Wes: And it's all there vegetable ideas.
8:40 Erin: That's so funny.
8:41 Wes: But. Yeah. Sorry.
8:43 Erin: But they then pass, you know, as we already said in part one, they then pass off the responsibility to Miles Finch to come up with the idea. Drawing the connection to the elves makes me think of. This is a perfect symbol of a depleted assembly line. So rather than passing on the object to then having more things added to it, there's a sort of passing the buck. There's a. Nothing is being created, and it's just being pushed off onto somebody else. That's the assembly line quality of this. Depleted. It's not inertia, but like, you know, something that. Something that just isn't gaining any traction as it goes along. It's just becoming more and more nothing somehow.
9:24 Wes: Yeah. No. And then the person it's pushed on to, the person who's not depleted. Right. Who's still ambitious, is functioning in that way because he's completely full of himself. Right. His narcissism is his fuel. So there is spirit there in someone like Miles. Right. Where the others are just sort of there. Right. Just got to get this done. There's a kind of spirit in Miles, but it's fueled by turbines, so to speak, instead of by the.
9:52 Erin: Oh, I love that. I love that. Yeah. And it's. And it's false, too. I thought about the idea that, you know, what does being a little person mean in this context other than the opportunity to make these elf jokes that. That Buddy makes. Right. But really it's this idea, of course, that being. There's a sort of superficiality to that somehow that being small means being childlike or being close to kids or having that kind of access or having that elf like. Right. So the idea is, I think that he would be this perfect children's book author somehow, because he has that understanding or that access to the mind of a kid, and instead that's flipped on its head.
He's this deeply cynical, but also ambitious and Powerful man who is successful. I mean, he does seem to have success in accessing the mind of children, but that doesn't translate into any personal warmth or he doesn't seem like someone who would ever actually connect with kids in real life.
10:52 Wes: Right. So at that point where people are formidable. Right. So he's someone who's formidable. He's like the fixer, the hitman walking in, or the prima donna. He needs a certain car and it's got to be 71 degrees and all that stuff. But he's earned it with his talent. He's earned it with his genius. That kind of deference, that kind of treatment. He can make those demands on people because apparently he's supposed to be so great, but it's gone to his head. So, again, yeah, the spirit of narcissism, that in a weird way, it's more. Much more animated. And there's a sense in which it's close to the. It's more benign version, which comes from generosity and love as opposed to self love.
11:35 Erin: Yeah. There's a contradiction, though, in what he preaches and what his actual ideas are. He's about to make his pitch when the meeting gets interrupted and he tells the writer guy's that everyone's pushing small town rural. So another farm book would just be white noise. Right. And this is another thing I wanted to say actually in relationship to the idea of New York City becoming a small community, somehow that being invested through this catalyst interaction that you're describing with Buddy, where the city is changing too, in response to him.
Right. Like there's this moment of the shrunken community where the city becomes a little bit more like a small town and then becomes reanimated or re. You know, destroyed. Cynicized for a moment and animated with this positive, aspirational spirit, which then of course, Buddy is able to write. He writes a book that is not about small town rural. It's about the re. Enchantment of the city itself. Right. He describes himself coming through the Lincoln Tunnel as part of his journey and being in the city. So he actually ends up fulfilling Miles's directive to stay away from small town rural.
But Miles's best idea is about a peach. And what's more vulnerable than a peach? Because he also says no tomatoes. They're too vulnerable. Kids are already vulnerable. So he has these dictums that he's. That he's, you know, so one wonders what he was about to pitch in that meeting. If he was just going to throw out all these. No, small town rural, no Farm books. No vulnerable fruits. And then come out with a book about a peach on a farm. Maybe that's what he was going to do. But we don't know. We only know that.
13:13 Wes: And I think the only picture we see from that book is of a chicken. Right. So he's full of interesting. Right? Farm.
13:19 Erin: Yeah, exactly. So there's a. There's. There's something weird going on there too that he's, you know. What is his role anyway? His role is to sell an idea. Maybe that's separate from his own children's book writing career. And so he's going to deliberately lead them astray when he actually thinks small town rural is the way to go and vulnerable peach is the way to go and that he would have pitched them something else about a brobot or something. Anyway, I don't know. The point being that I think he's an extension of the city in this way that seems very much about being narcissistic, projecting these huge ambitions, but also marrying that with an incredible amount of cynicism, which involves lying or somehow being very superficial.
14:01 Wes: Yeah. Buddy recognizes him to be an elf, which is supposed to be funny. And it is. And he's not. Right. He's not trying to make a joke about it or to be insulting, even
14:10 Erin: though everything he says sounds like an insult if you just look at the words. Right. I didn't know there were elves here. Does Santa know you left the workshop? Like, they're all amazing. That dual quality is great.
14:23 Wes: And in a way, he is kind of a dark elf. That's his role in the film. Right. He's also industrious. He's also making things for kids.
14:32 Erin: I like that.
14:33 Wes: But he doesn't have the same humility. And it contrasts in a very comic way with his physical stature. But more importantly, again, just he's. He seems to be doing it out of narcissism more than love. Which is not to say that love isn't part of it. And this is always a problem. Right. We're all. If we do. Any of us who do creative work want recognition for it. But then the need for recognition can overcome the actual love of the creative work itself. So it's more about their proportion. And we know, but. Right. So someone like Walter could start out loving what he does and then just get depleted.
And someone like Miles can start out more idealistically and then be too successful and get pulled into this position of self importance. So both of those are different dangers. Losing interest and just becoming a bit depressed and then having one's interest being co opted by an interest in power, let's put it that way. Recognition in power.
15:35 Erin: Yeah. That makes me think, of course, of the Central Park Rangers too. Just to give a little nod to them. Right. Because if they're supposed to be Ringwraiths, aren't Ringwraiths elves who were. Who were corrupted. Right. And they have their own.
15:51 Wes: Given one of the rings.
15:52 Erin: Right, Right. And they have their own work ethic, shall we say? They're overly speaking of power. They seem to be on a power trip and they're. Crowd control tactics at the Simon and Garfunkel concert. Led to.
16:10 Wes: Yeah. Figures like this, you know, like the Ringwraiths. Those types of figures are. Yeah. Are representatives of the dangers of power. The psychological effects of power, how it turns. You know, they're like underneath their cloaks, right. They're kind of deathlike and skeletal. So the real self gets killed off by an interest in the real self, which includes one's own vulnerability, gets killed off by the false self that is interested only in power. So the psychological effect, ironically, is it's a certain kind of depletion.
16:47 Erin: They too have a connection to work or a certain kind of overexertion in relation to performing their job. So that's obviously inherently related to power.
17:00 Wes: Motivator like love. Maybe that's the way to look at it. These dual motivators, power and love.
17:05 Erin: I think we've landed on a powerful argument for Buddy needing to adapt to New York. New York adapts to him. But I was wondering through part of the film if the lesson is that the elves have it right and their relationship to work is actually a healthy one, relatively speaking. And that the movie is making an argument about good work and good exertion and good industriousness versus bad industriousness. I think ultimately you're right that the assembly line quality is of the elves. They're suited to this. But humans are not. And I think it's important that in the end Walter gives up his job and ends up going into work for himself.
And that Buddy's verve and enthusiasm for work is channeled in a creative direction rather than in the direction of production for production's sake. But there is a positive work message here, you know, that that needs to be channeled. But ultimately the movie is about finding and doing good work and work that you love and work that actually excites you. It's about that balance as well. But it really is this positive work message which leads me back to the direction that I Wanted to go in at the beginning about faith in works. It seems like that that's really important.
It's really important for Walter to leave his job to make a statement about his, say, his faith in his family. But it's also really important that he get a new job where that energy can be channeled appropriately. And it's really important too that even though he believes in Santa at the end and he has been converted, that he actually sings the Christmas song. He can't just mouth it. He has to actually do the work. He has to actually show up. It's not enough to just believe. It's not enough to just walk away from the job. You've got to have that desire to work and that exertion and have it properly channeled.
And you have to, you have to work, you have to do something.
18:57 Wes: Well, it connects them to the community.
18:59 Erin: That too. That too. Right.
19:01 Wes: Singing together with the crowd.
19:03 Erin: And that's part of, you know, you have to go, you have to show up. That's. This is the argument for actually going to church rather than among those who actually go to church. That is the argument that you can't just be alone in your belief. Obviously some, some people don't believe that. Some people believe that you could be just a non practicing Christian and not have to be involved in a church community. But that is the argument.
19:25 Wes: I mean, we're talking about here with work and faith. We're talking about good works. As in acts of altruism.
19:31 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And sort of to practice this idea of practice. Yeah.
19:37 Wes: Right. Okay.
19:38 Erin: So as in, as in practicing St.
19:40 Wes: Augustine, going through the motions, doing the rituals as a precursor to faith rather than. Or as a way of keeping the faith.
19:49 Erin: Right. Getting the body involved somehow in the stakes is not enough to have nice feelings. You have to actually do things to sort of support that. Whether the body goes and then the heart and mind follow or vice versa, there has to be some sort of like physical stake or backup.
20:05 Wes: Yeah. And part of what you're doing is you're representing it for others. So. Right. Otherwise faith is just abstract and invisible. And so how do we know what it is? We see other people performing these rituals, but the rituals are also symbols. So we get to see faith in the world. So that's part of my point about him singing and that being. Connecting him to the community and it also being an act of altruism. But you facilitate other people's faith by engaging in singing.
20:38 Erin: Yeah. And you're sort of backing up your words with your actions in a Way that we're describing that's. That's missing in certain elements of New York in Miles saying one thing and having it in his little bible of. His little bible of story ideas, something different, or. Or, you know, saying that something is the world's greatest cup of coffee, but not being able to back it up with the world's greatest cup of coffee or whatever. Right. That kind of disconnect or that disjuncture between what one says and what one does seems to be. It's important that that be in alignment in this film. That that re. Enchantment somehow is about the body and the spirit in agreement.
21:18 Wes: Yeah, I like that. And I like this word re. Enchantment, because I'm interested. Where are we supposed to end up? Which is part of why I asked the question about believing in Christmas as a kid. Right? Because we're not gonna end up with a belief in Christmas, and we're not gonna end up. Even if we've been graced by Buddy's angelic innocence presence. We. We are not ourselves going to become holy fools. We ourselves are not going to just simply revert into being children again. We can't become that. So we have to ask ourselves the question of what we're trying to do for ourselves and for children when we use these rituals like the Christmas.
The Christmas ritual. I think in a way, we want the best of both worlds, right? And this goes back to the city and the village, the points you're making. You don't. You don't want to go full small town rural because there are too many drawbacks to that. Vulnerability is part of it. Right. We're less vulnerable in this cynical urban world. In a sense, we're more defended. I think, as you put it, there's more vulnerability, there's more community, but there's a lot of drawbacks to small towns or to rural environments. You ever read Winesburg, Ohio?
22:27 Erin: Yeah.
22:28 Wes: Yeah. It's all about that. So we can idealize that environment, but we do want a lot of the things that come with the city. The ambition and aspiration as it's represented by the Empire State Building, even a certain kind of anonymity. Very practical things like job opportunities, things like that. There's so much to be said for the city and so much to be said for the more rural or the more small town or more village environment. And I think we would ultimately, we would like to fuse them. And likewise, we would love to be able to fuse some of that innocence or Christmas spirit or just more generally spirit that Buddy Brings with, you know, with being an adult, right?
We don't want to just become a child again. We don't want to give up our adultness. We don't really want to do that. But. But we still want something of the childlike innocence. So then the question is, how do you make those two things work together? And I think, just going back to the theme that you've been concentrating on, creative work is really one of the ways to do that. We can feel innocent and childlike in the sense of being very playful when we're doing creative work. If we're doing it in the spirit of play and love and have not become ring wraiths, right?
Have not just been. Not become miles, not been consumed by the power of it. If we're good at it, we could be wearing the ring, essentially. We could be the greatest writer in the world. And that is the ring in Tolkien's sense. And if we are wearing the ring, then beware, because the temptations of the power of being good at the work rob us of what can be so joyful about it.
24:11 Erin: That's great. I think, in the other direction as well, and thinking about the faith component and this idea of faith in. Or belief in Santa, you know, thinking about these religious conversion themes, you know, these are movies for kids. They're movies in which often the person who has to come to believe is an adult. The child already believes. Maybe that's what the Santa thing is about for kids psychologically. Maybe this is about actually practicing faith. We have to act as though we believe the things we believe in, but we also have to believe what we act.
Right? And that seems to be part of the idea of this re. Enchantment of work. You know, faith without works is dead. But also work without faith is. You know, it works in both directions. And so Walter, for instance, is reconnected to the faith element of his work. He makes these critical mistakes which mean that his works are empty without faith. So there's something bidirectional in the film's take on the importance not just of belief, but belief connected to work. So, in other words, meaningful work, as I think you're saying, which leads us, of course, back to creativity.
So I'm sort of rephrasing a lot of what you're saying, but I think that is maybe connected to this idea of belief in Santa. I don't know if this is psychologically true at all. I don't know. But helping kids sort of stay connected to childhood seems like the actual motivation for encouraging them to believe in Santa. To keep them young, to keep them out of the adult world in a way by having them believe in something which is, quote unquote, magical. But you could also read that as encouraging them or having them practice a belief in something which they can't see to help them, I don't know, believe in some sort of larger principles.
It doesn't have to be religious necessarily.
26:03 Wes: And I think.
26:04 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
26:05 Wes: To help ourselves believe in them too. Right. So we live vicariously through. Through children. And so, yeah, this is like having faith enacted in ritual so that we can reap the rewards of making it more concrete and so facilitating our own faith in general. So. Right. What are we trying to induce in children? We're trying to get them to be childlike. We're trying to get them to be more like Buddy, to maintain their innocence so that we can have that for ourselves to some extent, vicariously. So, for instance, Christmas was magical for me as a kid, even though I didn't need to believe in Santa Claus for that to be true.
I think that there's something about Christmas which involves the re. Enchantment of the family, to use your word here, re enchantment. So family life or even human relatedness in general, you could think there's something really magic about it and in the broad sense, charming about it. There's a charm to it. There's a magical quality that's there in people's. The kinds of effects that they have on each other. Or the whole concept of a relationship in a way is like, you know, where is it metaphysically? What is it? Where is it? It's magic. So, but we lose sight of that.
So family life easily becomes mundane. Children are going to school, people don't have as much time for each other. Parents at work, this, this and that. So part of what Christmas does is it gives people the opportunity to spend more time together because they're on vacation. It gives people the opportunity to enact generosity. So what's being ritualistically enacted? Giving without any thought necessarily of receiving. Although for me as a kid it was all about receiving, I guess. And if you believing in Santa Claus, it really is all about receiving.
You have this infinitely generous entity with a bottomless bag who could deliver everything in one night. One might come to the point where one doesn't even believe in generosity. And that's part of what it means to be cynical. Other people are just self interested. That's the idea. So the concept of gift giving and Santa Claus as a gift giver, that the representation of generosity there is a way to counteract that cynicism. And part of the purpose of that is to re. Enchant the feeling of family life, because cynicism degrades or breaks those bonds.
The less you believe in the good intentions of the other, the more you see their self interest at work and their flaws, which you do inevitably in a family. You see. Right. Your parents are not ideal. You find out at a certain point
28:40 Erin: in time, unless your mom is Mary Steenburgen and she's like, both hot and the nicest person ever, who's thrilled.
28:48 Wes: That's got its own set of problems that come with it.
28:50 Erin: Well, I mean, like, if you're Walter, why is it he not spending more time at home? He has the perfect wife.
28:55 Wes: Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. So the more you become aware of these ungenerous characteristics in other human beings, the more the bonds of the relationship are degraded. So I think that's. I'm just trying to explain some of these connections between the re. Enchantment of the family feeling, which I think is a big part of Christmas. And it's a big part of these movies. Right. Where you got to get the families working again. And we saw it in Die Hard, getting a couple back together. So it's often about fixing families. And I think that's part of what Kind of Christmas does. Even the aesthetic with the lights and all of that. It's just meant to create this environment of togetherness somehow.
29:35 Erin: That's right.
29:35 Wes: Yeah.
29:36 Erin: I was thinking about that in terms of trying to test this theory that all Christmas movies are about religious conversion. And I was thinking about that being true in something like, say, Home Alone, where it seems like the religion is the family togetherness. Kevin, who wants escape from his family, has to be converted back to the family by their loss. And it's true in The Santa Clause, too. Like, Tim Allen is this divorced dad who needs a better relationship with his family, and he gets one by literally becoming Santa Claus, which is a little extreme. But that's not religious conversion so much as it is religious possession. But that principle of conversion, it seems like Santa can be in that role as the thing you have to believe in, or family can be in the role too.
30:23 Wes: Yeah. And I'm trying to suggest that the psychology of believing in Santa, it really is about believing in the family and believing, I think, for children, in a way, believing in parents, believing that parents have their best interests at heart, that their parents can be essentially generous because they're going to find out that their parents have their own interests and that the parents interests diverge from the interests of the child and that that's going to create a lot of conflicts. So I think we're trying to keep children. You know, it's a harsh reality that children are going to come to, especially in relationship, in relation to their parents. So we think we want to postpone that and we want to not let it be the whole story, so to speak, before we close. Yeah. Where does this stand in the Christmas movie pantheon? Is it. Is that the right word?
31:12 Erin: Even pantheon? It's pretty high up there.
31:13 Wes: Yeah. How would you rank after Die Hard, which is obviously number one? How would you rank?
31:20 Erin: There are certain things I watch every year. It's a quirky list. This is definitely one. And we'll say that this is also an incredibly quotable film. The number one most.
31:29 Wes: Let's hear some of them quoted. We didn't do a lot of that.
31:32 Erin: Yeah, well, the number one, I'm sure
31:34 Wes: listeners will be disappointed in, but yeah,
31:36 Erin: the number one most quoted line in my family is, but the children love the books. For some reason. That's like one of the. It's not one of your headliners. That's the nun saying it to Walter who wants to take a one.
31:51 Wes: Oh, yes.
31:52 Erin: For some reason, that's the thing that caught on. My little brother, my youngest brother was. He would have been two when it came out, but he grew up with it. And he used to answer the phone, Buddy the elf, what's your favorite color? Which he thought was hilarious to do around Christmas. That was back when we still had a landline and people still answered their phones.
32:13 Wes: That's great.
32:13 Erin: Yeah. Is this up there for you?
32:16 Wes: Yeah, I'm trying to remind myself, other than Die Hard, I mean. Yeah. What counts as a Christmas movie? I'm looking at a list. I'm looking at a list here. And yeah, Trading Places, which is great, but what makes that a Christmas movie?
32:29 Erin: I'm trying to think it takes place on Christmas. I always say it has to have two conditions. It either has to take place on Christmas or it has to have an epic battle between good and evil and snow. That makes it a Christmas movie. That's why Fellowship of the Ring is a Christmas movie or the first Harry Potter movie. I don't make the rules. I just. Well, I do make the rules in that instance, but I make them. And then.
32:52 Wes: This seems a little bit too inclusive to me.
32:55 Erin: No, it's actually not that. You'd be surprised how few films have snow in them. We made the argument, remember that Die Hard does Because of the paper falling from the sky.
33:04 Wes: I remember that.
33:06 Erin: But it also took place on Christmas, so that's enough my estimation. But yeah, my favorite Christmas movie is the Thin Man.
33:14 Wes: Okay. I think we watched that together once.
33:17 Erin: Yeah. And then I think my second favorite is the man who Came to Dinner, which is another movie that. That certain people will know, and then another movie that I won't mention, and then Elf.
33:27 Wes: What's the movie you're not mentioning?
33:29 Erin: I love this movie. That maybe some of our listeners will know this.
33:34 Wes: Don't be ashamed.
33:35 Erin: Come on. It's a made for TV movie called Eloise at Christmas Time. I love the Eloise books when I was younger.
33:44 Wes: I don't like the sound of that.
33:45 Erin: No, it's really cute. They're really cute. And they. They did these two. Eloise at the Plaza and then Eloise at Christmastime. These two made for TV movies on ABC Family with Julie Andrews as the nanny of Eloise. And I love these books growing up. And the eloise at Christmastime 1, she lives in the Plaza Hotel. So it's a New York Christmas movie.
34:08 Wes: Okay, so it's not like a Hallmark movie or something like that?
34:11 Erin: No, no, they're excellent. And they have excellent cast, too. Christine Baranski's in it. Jeffrey Tambor.
34:16 Wes: So there's no reason to be ashamed.
34:18 Erin: No, but it's just like, you know, I like weird things. No surprise to our listeners that I like weird things. But that's. That has a lot of nostalgia for me, that film. So I have to watch it every year.
34:30 Wes: All right. Well, that was fun.
34:32 Erin: It was.
34:33 Wes: Thank you.
34:33 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter nysubtext.
The Meaning of Christmas Spirit in “Elf” (2003)
Dec 16, 2025
Half the plot involves a man reuniting with his father—and his species—after being raised by Christmas elves. The other involves saving Christmas itself from the growing cynicism of humanity. And so like many of its genre, the film “Elf” connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities, despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Indeed, there’s a sense in which Christmas elves are, in making gifts, hard at work maintaining the social fabric against the forces of individual selfishness. But in this story, the elf in question turns out to be a bumbling man-child—a holy fool of sorts—who helps re-enchant communal life by holding up its social deficits to a naive mirror. Wes & Erin discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Half the plot involves a man reuniting with his father and his species after being raised by Christmas elves. The other involves saving Christmas itself from the growing cynicism of humanity. And so, like many of its genre, the film Elf connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Indeed, there's a sense in which Christmas elves are, in making gifts, hard at work maintaining the social fabric against the forces of individual selfishness.
But in this story, the elf in question turns out to be a bumbling man child, a holy fool of sorts, who helps re enchant communal life by holding up its social deficits to a naive mirror. Today we discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, did you believe in Santa Claus growing up?
1:33 Erin: I did. I remember when I stopped believing.
1:36 Wes: How old were you?
1:37 Erin: I think I was maybe five. I asked my mom if Santa was real, and she said, what do you think? And that was when I knew. I think it was actually from watching so many Christmas movies in which kids don't believe. And there's actually an element of these movies that kind of gives it away for kids that are maybe too young to be watching them or not, you know, like the target audience, I think I was for many of them, but there are so many questioning children. So many, so much crisis of faith, crises of faith in these films. And I picked up on that. That's why I asked her. And then she said, what do you think? And I was like, if it's not an immediate yes, then I'm guessing it's a no.
2:22 Wes: Right?
2:23 Erin: How old are you?
2:24 Wes: I never believed in Santa Claus, actually.
2:28 Erin: That makes a lot of sense.
2:30 Wes: Really? Are you calling me a cynic? So Christmas was very, very exciting for me as a kid. Still, Santa Claus wasn't required. It felt very magical, anyway. And then it occurred to me. So, yeah, so what are we doing? Why are we deceiving children in this way? Why are we brainwashing them? To believe in something that they're going to eventually find out is not true.
2:57 Erin: Well, if that's what you took from
2:59 Wes: this movie, couldn't we just do it with all the lights and presents and the. Do we need a mythical fat man giving out the presents, going down the chimney, doing all these very implausible things that with just a little rationality you can figure out? Yeah, that's not happening. I don't even have a chimney.
3:25 Erin: That's right. I liked that element in the Santa Claus, which we'll have to cover next year. But that element where they explain. Is that the movie where they explain how Santa comes into houses without chimneys and he goes through the radiator?
3:37 Wes: I don't know that I've seen it.
3:38 Erin: The Tim Allen Santa Claus. You've not seen it?
3:41 Wes: No, I haven't.
3:42 Erin: Well, wow.
3:43 Wes: It's possible, but it would have been so long ago, but I don't remember. But I'm not a big Tim Allen fan, honestly.
3:49 Erin: Yeah, I can't say that I am either, but I think that came out when I was right at the age to watch it.
3:55 Wes: Do you still get the warm and fuzzy feeling from Christmas or.
3:59 Erin: Oh, of course. I love Christmas. I love Christmas. That's my favorite thing. I don't know if we're going to get. I'll be up front. I don't know if we're going to get more than half an hour out of this movie. Do you have a. Do you have a grand philosophical interpretation
4:15 Wes: of something you would.
4:18 Erin: I took a few years.
4:19 Wes: I did a little work on this. I did some research into.
4:23 Erin: You did.
4:25 Wes: I did some research into elves, actually. And then I thought, well, he's human. What the fuck am I doing? Like, he's not even a real elf. Why do I care? I was curious about how the history of the mythology. I didn't get too much into it. And then how that evolved into there being Christmas elves, which, you know, it turns out not to be that interesting. Someone put it in the story and Santa was called a jolly elf at one point, you know, in a story. And then he had these little helper elves. I liked the beginning of this movie where they sort of run through a few different elements of.
Well, I don't know if it's. You would call it elf mythology, but one of them is. One is straight out of the Brothers Grimm, right? The cobbler goes to sleep and then the elves make the shoes. And I didn't reread the fairy tale. I remember reading it as a kid and enjoying it. A lot. And actually, it was just a few years ago. I think I reread every Grimm fairy tale, but I don't remember any of the other details. Like why wasn't the cobbler making his own shoes? Do you remember?
5:27 Erin: No, I have not read that, I think, since I was a kid. Yeah, yeah.
5:31 Wes: But in the film, the elves, as the narrator is describing all of this, you get little vignettes. And so in this one, the elves call the guy a lazy bum, which I thought was very interesting in light of all the other little riffs that they do on the industriousness of the elves as compared to human beings. And, you know. Right. So Buddy is. He's only making 85 Etch A Sketches in the required time. Who knows? I don't remember if they said what that time is, if that's at every day, whereas the quota is 1000. Or the fact that the elves are happy being at work constantly.
And as soon as Christmas is over, they celebrate. And you think it's the time for them to relax, but they just begin working again for. For the next Christmas. So that interested me, this idea of potentially as helpers, but something that offsets the fact. So they sort of become embodiments of industriousness and complement us to the extent that we lack it. If you go backwards in the mythology, they're a little bit more sinister elves. Right. And they could help or they could hurt, but they could be causes of sickness. And it's not really until, I think, the 18th and 19th century, they get.
Well, actually, no, as early as Renaissance, and the Renaissance with Shakespeare, for instance, where they kind of get conflated with fairies. And so they might be mischievous, but not necessarily evil. Right. And then you get this evolution into what we see in Grimm and then what we see with Christmas. So they are sort of an ad hoc. A very ad hoc addition to a very ad hoc tradition, this Christmas pagan tradition that's been fused with Christianity.
7:14 Erin: I think in Tolkien, he makes this a little bit more explicit, but it's almost like they're angels.
7:20 Wes: Yeah.
7:20 Erin: You know, there's an angelic quality where they're. They're there to sort of prop up humanity. For Christmas elves, it's just on the one day, I suppose. But, yeah, there's something like they spend their whole lives, like guardian angels or something, sort of taking care of, looking after humans. And I think in Tolkien, this, the extent. I don't know if there's. If there's a vast trove of secondary literature about the 2003 elf. But all I did was look at the IMDb trivia page, which actually I had to give up. There are so many hundreds of entries on the IMDb trivia page for Elf.
But it was fascinating, and I reread the Roger Ebert review to see what he had to say, and not surprisingly, he loved it. But the IMDb trivia page mentioned that Jon Favreau put in so many Lord of the Rings references throughout the movie, which I thought I had picked up on at one point. I can't remember the exact point, but I had no idea the extent to which the two were overlapping. You know, even the. The shot of Buddy crossing the mountains, you know, the snowy mountaintop. Apparently that was footage from Lord of the Rings that I don't know.
Yeah. Like, it didn't. It didn't go into detail. So maybe. And maybe it wasn't even correct, because I know these things can be added by users. So I don't even know how it looked very realistic. It didn't look like that was digitally added, that Buddy was digitally added in. So I don't know if that's even true. But it certainly looks like the snowy mountaintop that they're all going across in Fellowship.
8:43 Wes: Yeah. And Tolkien is working off a, you know, I guess a Nordic or Icelandic tradition in which elves can be these. Well, they're angelic, as you said. At a certain point in the history, they become something more and more angelic. And in any case, they always are mediators between humanity and another. Right. Supernatural world.
9:05 Erin: That's right.
9:06 Wes: And a supernatural world that's more pagan, more associated with nature as opposed to. Right. A monotheistic, transcendent deity.
9:16 Erin: There's a reading of this film in which Walter is the protagonist and Will Ferrell, fulfilling the function of an elf in the film is kind of the Clarence who comes down to George Bailey.
9:29 Wes: I was going to make that comparison to Clarence. Yeah.
9:32 Erin: Even though he goes through his own crisis. There's the scene on the bridge that Buddy. It's clearly shot to reference It's Wonderful Life, the bridge scene where he's kind of giving up, and that's when he sees Santa's sleigh descending on Central Park. Oh, it was the Ringwraiths. That was it. It was the Central park rangers as the Ringwraiths. That was.
9:52 Wes: Oh, yes, yes, of course.
9:54 Erin: The moment that it triggered that connection to Lord of the Rings. And then I saw on the trivia page that that was quite deliberate.
10:00 Wes: Right, right. You brought up Clarence, who I think is sort of adjacent to this, there's this holy fool theme, right? So you see it in various movies, like being there, even Charlie Chaplin's Tramp. It's all over literature. Myshkin in Dostoevsky's the Idiot, Alyosha to some extent, and then film again. Forrest Gump, you know. And it's something that has deep roots in Christianity, of course, right? Mystic fools and prophets and things like that. And. And also in ancient Greece, right, The cynics who sort of ignore social conventions. So whether you're ignoring social conventions, I mean, the fool is oblivious to all these social conventions. So that sets up this interesting satire on society as we know it. Because it's too cynical, it's too self aware, in a sense. It's so self aware that it loses sight of itself. Its self awareness becomes too cynical.
10:57 Erin: When I was thinking about what we were going to talk about today on my notepad, the only thing that I had in the upper right hand corner, which is where I write themes that I'd like to talk about on the podcast, the only two words I had were cynicism and sugar. And I thought that looks like the world's most depressing breakfast cereal or something. Cynicism, sugar. But then luckily I did. I went for a walk and had a chance to sort of cogitate a little more about this. And. And I did think about certain religious connections in the film. I wanna address what you.
What you've already said about work. It occurred to me how much the film is about work. And that also then made me think about. Of course I'm gonna think about this faith in works and the idea of the religious conversion as being sort of essential to the Christmas movie. So I mean, in a way that's kind of every movie. You could argue that whatever sort of growth the protagonist undergoes maybe is a religious conversion. But because this belief in Santa thing, a common trope in these Christmas movies, and usually a cynical parent has to undergo some faith conversion over the course of the film, or maybe a cynical kid or something.
That seems like a stand in, of course, for a belief in some sort of larger religion. Larger than the belief in Santa Claus, if there is such a religion. But we could take either one of those things and I think it'll lead us back to the other eventually.
12:20 Wes: So work and faith, are you saying?
12:22 Erin: Yeah, the connection maybe between creativity and work is one which is. Which really interested me. And maybe that would kind of lead us into faith as well, this creative idea. Because as you mentioned, there's a huge emphasis on work from the Very beginning of the film. And the elves, I don't know if they comply with union guidelines about working hours and stuff like that. I mean, there seems to be a great deal of creativity in what they do or sort of implied creativity, or they're extremely resourceful, even as there's a. An assembly line quality and a literal churning things out because you're 1,900 something behind the pace.
And something about their work, which maybe in Elfland and in the North Pole seems a little bit rote to us. It translates as creativity in the human world somehow. And the elves seem very satisfied with it. This is their whole purpose. And they're really happy to make all this stuff. And they're really happy to start working again. As soon as Santa comes back from delivering all the presents, they're happy to start all over again. So I have all this energy. And so maybe creativity is slightly the wrong word. But their sort of Venn diagram, say, of this work and creativity or energy or something is sort of perfect circle.
Whereas the atmosphere in New York City seems to be one of creative depletion. And that is a theme that's revisited again and again in all the New York scenes. You know that Walter, our first introduction to him, besides taking the books away from that nun, is. You know, that he signed off on a children's book that's missing two pages. May. Somebody would watch that and say he's abandoning his own inner child or something like that. But to me, he's just not doing a good job at his work. His head writers want to bring in another writer to save the publishing house to create this new.
So the writers can't even do their job. They're sort of tapped or depleted creatively. Gimbels is kind of. We get the idea that it's sort of a sad place to work. Except for Buddy and his judging the toyland up. The supervisor assumes that Gimbels has sent someone in from corporate because it's too good. It's a little too good, I think he says. I even saw it in the world's best cup of coffee in that diner. That's sort of overly energetic and cliched marketing for what's ultimately a poor product. There's something missing. There's some spark that's gone.
And Buddy imports that from the North Pole.
14:53 Wes: Well, just to back up a little bit, the reason why I asked you about whether you believed in Santa Claus is because I thought it was very interesting that in these films, right, at a. At a literal level, the thing that people are Being converted to believe is obviously something that we none of us believe. It's supposed to be this big magical moment when Santa Claus shows up in real life as if it's like the return of Christ or something like that. But you know, how are we supposed to get much feeling out of that when it's something none of us believe in?
So I thought that was very interesting. In the end, of course it is about spirit. I think, as you were getting at, part of that is about creativity, but it's more about spirit in general. So in the movie it's specifically Christmas spirit, which depends on whether or not you believe in Santa Claus. And then probably more broadly about whether you're more generous or more cynical. And there's a lot of other associated qualities which I would just think of as maybe spirit in general. Part of the lack of spirit is about the day to day cynicism that develops because our social relations are so necessarily false.
So that's what the world, you know, the world's best cup of coffee. We simply lie all the time. You know, you can call them white lies, right. So we don't think that the putting the world's best cup of coffee on a sign. We would never think, oh, that's ridiculous. Even though it is ridiculous at a literal level. It's not only a lie, it's just a crazy lie. This is the place of the world's best cup of coffee. So when you insert a character, that environment who does take everything literally and also in a childlike way expects people to be honest, it's kind of hilarious, right?
On the one hand his naivete is funny, but on the other hand it's funny that we're so dishonest in these ways in our social interactions.
16:41 Erin: Yeah, that makes me think too of the theme of decline in the film. So there's the creative depletion in New York, but there's also the idea which we get from, from Santa, which I should say, you know, I don't know if you need Christmas spiritual of this movie or just 70s TV spirit, because I'm just happy to see Bob Newhart and Ed Asner. You know, I want to believe in Ed Asner, Lou Grant, the world's best boss. Of course he can. Of course he can inspire the troops. You know, there's this idea that there used to be an abundance of Christmas spirit, now there isn't.
We get a little bit of this 60s kind of flavor with James Caan's relationship with Susan Wells and giving up Buddy for adoption and something being Lost there culturally. Because I was thinking about the fact that we could just argue that Will Ferrell is someone from the past. You know, reminded me of the movie Blast from the Past with Brendan Fraser, where he comes out of the bunker after 30 years. And, you know, I don't think I've seen it. Okay. It's literally. It's just a twist on a time travel movie. It's this idea of an idealized past where everybody had Christmas spirit, believed in things.
You know, it was the forties or something like. And in a way, it's as though Will Ferrell's character is not from the North Pole. He's just from an idealized American past before some sort of rupture, the kind of rupture that the movie sort of gestures in the direction of with the James Caan thing, you know, with the backstory there, before some sort of rupture happened. And, you know, whatever. Vietnam and the entrance of this kind of mass cynicism and the decline of whatever mom and pop stores and apple pies cooling on windowsills or whatever.
Whatever the. The, you know, the symbol of this. Right. So that seems to be an element there as well, that there was a time where maybe that sign, world's best cup of coffee was true. And Will Ferrell is taking that. Or Buddy, I should say, is taking that at face value in a way that somebody who got out of a time machine might take it at face value that it's not just this childlike thing, but a sort of collective innocence that he seems to represent there.
18:50 Wes: Yeah. I like this idea of an idealized past because it points to the fact that the impulse is to reform ourselves in the sense of becoming less cynical and doing all the things associated with that. And I think it probably means as well, Right. Being closer to one's family. So Walter, for instance, being a better dad and a better member of his family. And that's certainly. You know, that's certainly the thing. I mentioned Christmas being kind of magical. When I was a kid, I felt closeness to my family was a big part of it. And I had, like, five siblings. I had this desire, this hope that we would all live together forever. Little did I know how. Be careful what you wish for, but not that it happened. I guess it.
19:34 Erin: My case is the be careful what you wish for.
19:37 Wes: Right. Right. You learn as you get older that the idealized versions of these relationships go away and the real ones are much more complicated. And, of course, the idealized versions of the past that we have are not real. But I Think part of this is important because also too just the location. New York City plays this role, or at least it did at the time. And it plays this role a lot in 80s movies, I think, where it's sort of the gruff exterior with a heart of gold type of place, where New York is dog eat dog and it's a place of people are going to make it and make money and all these things.
But you get this interesting combination in New York of incredible aspiration and desire to do important things, to do big things, which is really inspiring. And it's inspiring for me, just even when I'm in the city, it's an inspiring place. And then the undercurrent of cynicism that goes with that. So it's an interesting contradiction and a great location for a film like this because in some sense, what's happening right when the spirit is restored, when people believe in Santa again, you're kind of having your cake and eating it too. You're getting all this aspirational stuff, which the city already, in a sense, has.
But you're cutting out the more competitive and maybe more narcissistic element of that. So the part of work, just getting back to this work theme which involves love, or love of what you're doing, and creativity is preserved in the part that's just competitive and about narcissism. Like with the Miles character. Right. The great children's author who's full of himself. Standish. Is that his name?
21:11 Erin: Miles Finch.
21:13 Wes: Finch.
21:14 Erin: Different Miles. We just had Thanksgiving. Miles Standish is a pilgrim.
21:21 Wes: Right. That's crazy. That is crazy. Yeah. The unconscious is a weird thing. All right, so what's his name again? I can't even think of.
21:30 Erin: Miles Finch.
21:31 Wes: The real name. Miles Finch. Yeah, that's what I wanted to say. In line with your ideas about work. New York is a place of work and a place of creative work and great aspirations. And we. Part of the desire seems to be to give full voice to the parts of work that involve love and generosity and again, loving what you do. And then to de emphasize the parts that are more about self interest.
21:55 Erin: I like that. This characterization of the undercurrent of cynicism seems to have taken over the whole city. Right. With this creativity crisis that they're having. And it seems that Buddy is capable of seeing the city anew. It's almost like everybody has watched too many movies that take place in New York and they've become desensitized to the magic of the place and, you know, sort of symbolized in his Little snow globe, which.
22:21 Wes: Right. And the Empire State Building. I wanted to bring that up. Right. Yeah. This just sort of iconic symbol of emblem of ambition and aspiration.
22:30 Erin: That's right. Yeah. For me, it's the Chrysler Building. I always thought the Empire State Building was sort of ruined by being too blocky on the bottom.
22:36 Wes: Yeah.
22:38 Erin: But I still love it. I still love it. But, yeah, the snow globe, which you might think is just the kind of cheap trinket that you would get in New York. That would almost be too cliche or something to get a snow globe. Unless you're the kind of person who collects that sort of thing. But that's what he's about. Seeing the place anew. Seeing the. Rather than letting the cynicism be dominant, Letting the aspiration and the magic and the wonder of the city be dominant. And so getting excited about the elevator buttons that light up or the revolving doors or the Christmas trees, which, you know, everybody seems to be just walking by except for Buddy, who's really appreciating them, and then gets to see the Rockefeller center tree. So, yeah, I like that a lot.
23:15 Wes: I think the other aspect here, it's about family, as I mentioned, and about community. And that's something that. Right. The urban environment seems to undermine, as opposed to. Right. Smaller villages or communities. I think when you think of elves, you think of. And fairies, you think of these more rustic environments. Right. They're associated with nature, and they come from nature. And in a way, you might see it as representative of what the city excludes ultimately. So as it undermines community, it's unlivable for the spirit world.
23:48 Erin: I'd love to make more of this if we can, because I think there's something we could say about the fact that Walter doesn't even know he has this son. And in a way, that's sort of emblematic of an urban environment. Everybody is sort of estranged from each other, or strangers are living half on top of each other in this way that. I love the fact that this. That Gimbel's, you know, sort of imagined as being, I guess, in the vicinity of Macy's and therefore kind of close to the Empire State Building. That you don't quite know why Walter would be walking by the Gimbel store window on his way to the Empire State Building.
But regardless, maybe he would. But, yeah, you know, he sees Buddy asleep in the window. So there's this coincidence element of everybody, like, being kind of thrown together. I might have mentioned this in our Rear Window episode. I'm not sure if I did, but I used to see there was a time where whenever I would go into the city, I would run into people that I knew. And there was a billboard that was right over the escalator in Grand Central in a place that I would always use this particular escalator because of where my train usually this was at a time when I was taking the train into New York three, four times a week.
And the billboard said, 8 million people in this city. And you have to run into that guy or something. Something like that. You know, like the billboard was commenting on this phenomenon of somehow of everybody being half on top of you and having strangers half on top of you, but also that you could be next to on a subway, someone who you might have some sort of connection with and never know it because of the anonymity of that. So there's a closeness and yet emotional estrangement at the same time. And then the surprise when that's when you actually do see someone who you, in fact, recognize.
And how uncanny that can be, specifically in the city environment where you're passing hundreds of faces which are anonymous to you in any given moment. And I wonder if there's something to be said about the flip side of that. Like the North Pole environment. I was thinking about the fact that everybody has names that are just like Ming Ming and Choo Choo. And there's a certain. You know, they all have the double names and they all. Because they're all the same height and. Except for Buddy, obviously, because they're all the same height and they're all the same.
They have these elfin features. They all look like they're part of one family. But then there's also a kind of anonymity in that as well. Like, there are a few distinguishing features among them. I don't know whether that's a mirror of the urban environment in New York. If that's a sort of topsy turvy element, if it's pulled inside out, where you have an environment that's crowded but everybody looks like you, as opposed to a diverse, crowded environment. I'm not sure what to say about that, but I just want to bring it up because it seems relevant and it seems related to this idea of having a son you don't know about in the same city as you.
He traveled to get there. But, you know, that kind of principle.
26:39 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting. You mentioned how, in a way, Walter is also the protagonist. Right? Buddy's the protagonist. Walter is the protagonist. On the one hand, Buddy is a kind of angelic figure like Clarence and helping Walter change, or like the spirits in A Christmas Carol with Scrooge or any other sort of mentor figure or catalyst figure. Although often there it's an interesting spin on that to make that person the holy fool. So Buddy gets his own problem that has to be solved because it seems like he's. He doesn't have any problems really.
If you can enjoy pop tarts and candy on spaghetti, I don't think you need much else in life. Yeah, I guess. I guess the. The. His problem is twofold, right? Yeah. He finds himself in a. In a community. In it. Well, is it a real community? Right. It's a place of spirit, but it's a place of. If there's kind of a source of spirit in the world, that's the source. Maybe, but maybe it's too pure. Right. It's a place where people just love to do assembly line work, for instance. They've got the spirit, but it means they're willing to work 24 hours a day in the factory.
And so it turns what would otherwise be a dystopian environment. And that's what the satire of the movie is playing with, right? This idea of these industrious helper elves being essentially depressed wage slaves or something like that. Well, without even a wage.
28:08 Erin: So just regular slaves.
28:10 Wes: So. So, right. So in other words, there's. There's something potentially superficial about that environment. You know, any idealized or mythological environment is necessarily superficial in one way or another, I think. So Buddy's problem, I think is. Is threefold, right? He finds out that he doesn't belong to that community because he's not of the right race or species. I don't know, which is an interesting way to put it. But. So, so he doesn't belong. But he also doesn't belong in the sense that he's human and an other world. It's a non human world, which is.
Right. Something much more important than a racial distinction. Because the human world has this important relationship to the non human world, to the spiritual world. It needs that source, right? It needs that injection from this other world just to be the human world. The human world needs the alien in order to be what it is in this interesting way. But you can't just be off in that alien world fully and expect to belong to it. So Buddy doesn't have a community in the fullest sense up in the North Pole. He has to come back down to Earth, so to speak, to humanity to get that.
And at the same time, it's gonna mean finding A father figure within that world. Not just an infinitely benign Bob Newhart type of father, but a real father.
29:32 Erin: Yeah. That's good. That helps me to understand what's kind of weirdly similar about the North Pole and New York City. Because in the North Pole, of course, he stands out. He's six, three, or however tall he is. And, yeah, not of the same species or whatever we can say.
29:49 Wes: And he's Will Ferrell, which just adds a lot.
29:51 Erin: And he's Will Ferrell.
29:52 Wes: Craziness to him.
29:53 Erin: Exactly. And then, you know, and then in New York, he also doesn't fit in. So there are these two communities in which the elves are united by their love of assembly line work and their spirit, et cetera. And then the New York community is reunited by anonymity and cynicism. And that is also a world in which he does not. He's not a natural fit, though. He adapts and also gets it to adapt to him. I mean, there's a way that he's read immediately in the film. I mean, this is also the great thing about New York is that he could be walking down the street in this elf costume and people don't really look at him. But then he's instantly read in the Empire State Building as being a Christmas gram, you know, so there's a way in which she doesn't actually attract all that much attention.
30:36 Wes: Remarkably, there's lots of people in costumes on the streets of New York.
30:39 Erin: That's right. You could be. Be whatever type of person you are, as long as you're cynical and keep to yourself.
30:46 Wes: Freak flag. Yeah. There should have been a nightclub scene or something.
30:52 Erin: Right, Right.
30:53 Wes: He comes all the way to New York and he meets this manic pixie girl.
30:56 Erin: Well, she's not in this film, but. Yeah.
30:59 Wes: You don't think she is.
31:00 Erin: She's pixie, like, I suppose, but she's not the. She's not the typical manic pixie dream girl.
31:06 Wes: I don't know where the manic pixie girl is.
31:07 Erin: I think. You don't? No. No offense. The. The. The trope is, you know, the muse who's this dreamy, you know, gets the guy to loosen up and connect him to his creative side. And the word manic in the title, as well as she's full of energy and Vim.
31:28 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking she's kind of quirky and. Yeah, right. So he's not the cynic. So he can't.
31:35 Erin: Her Persona is. She's a sort of deflated version of herself in this film. Yeah.
31:39 Wes: Right, right. There's the manic one, right, Buddy? Yeah. It's not like he's gonna be brought out of his shell, but yeah, she's a facilitator. So she's elf. Like, maybe the word pixie is what I'm focusing on, but there is an actual elf like quality to her. She's small and she dresses up as an elf department store. I just think they're taking that too seriously.
32:00 Erin: Well, she has elfin features. You know, she has big eyes, elfin features, sort of heart shaped face.
32:06 Wes: And she's quite. What is the word? Chill.
32:09 Erin: Are elves chill?
32:11 Wes: No, but I'm thinking she stands out from the crowd.
32:16 Erin: She sings.
32:16 Wes: She sings. And that's an important part of the movie where she gets over her fear singing in public and facilitates singing with
32:24 Erin: crowd, which is what being an elf is all about.
32:26 Wes: Christmas cheer and Christmas spirit and get the sleigh running again. Let me just put it this way. She's an important mediator. And Buddy's adaptation to that environment, although I'm putting a question mark after that, is she. This is the way I was thinking of it. But does he need her in the film at all or is she just extra?
32:44 Erin: I think that in these Christmas movies, which are about belief, which is most Christmas movies, the person who's not being believed needs at least one ally. Right. Michael sort of fulfills that function. But Jovie, I think, needs to. I think it's important that he's propped up by more than one person. And, you know, it's funny because she's an elf, but she. I guess she sort of integrates the North Pole and New York perfectly in her person because she's also this personification of this cynical place with a heart of gold. Like, she's actually very mushy on the inside. And that's the appeal. That's why she's attracted to whatever it is that Buddy is offering her. A chance to not be cynical. That desire is very, very close to the surface in her, though. It doesn't seem to be.
33:28 Wes: I mean, she comes across as solemn and her water's been turned off and she's working a job that she doesn't particularly enjoy.
33:36 Erin: She can't make those six inches. We both went there right away.
33:41 Wes: Yeah. You really? Okay. It's impossible. I love that scene.
33:44 Erin: Inches. I love that guy. He's great.
33:48 Wes: Yeah.
33:49 Erin: Code word is Santa's got a brand new bag.
33:52 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. I just love the randomness of the whole. Yeah, you gotta cut the ribbons this way. It's impossible. So I guess am I trying to think of her as the mediator's mediator, in a way. But now you have me questioning whether she's really playing that role at all, any role in integrating him into this world, because. Right. So from one perspective, it's just a romantic subplot that every movie needs to have, or most movies need to have, especially comedy. But is it tacked on, or does it thematically line up in some interesting way? And I might just be working, trying too hard here.
34:30 Erin: So if the idea is that everybody needs every. Santa needs someone to believe in them in the movie when nobody believes that they're Santa or nobody believes that they're really an elf, if they need at least one person to verify their legitimacy or to prop them up a little bit. You know, I'm being a little tongue in cheek here, but maybe the idea is that New York has so many people in it that need to be converted that we need at least two people for this particular film. This film needs more. More people propping it up to believe in Buddy. And the more I think about the community element of New York, the more I think that this is really a theme in the film.
It's trying to actually turn New York, over the course of the film into a small town, in a way. And the fact that Buddy would have these converts along the way and work on the place like he would if he were in a small town or having entered a small town where he could have these personal relationships. It seems that there are these other mediators who are needed because it's his two initial converts, it's Jovie and Michael who end up helping in that crucial way to get Santa's sleigh off the ground. And we have a local news anchor. Like, there are quite a bit of indications that Jovie and Michael are really the facilitators of Santa's sleigh getting off the ground in that final scene or almost final scene.
And over the course of that scene, because of the list and because of the local news, you know, it's New York City, but it's local New York one. Right. Like, New York becomes a small town in that final scene. I think, you know, first of all, we have the fact that because they live off the park, Walter and Emily. Emily, right. I almost said Mary. Like, she's Mary Steenburgen. And it's also like Joseph, Mary, and they have a son. Anyway, you know, they are able to get there really fast because they live right off the park. And then there's this local news anchor who the guy is ribbing her for having just come from Buffalo.
So she's moved up into the metropolitan area, but it's still local news. You know, she's doing a little puff piece about people thinking that they've seen Santa. And then when Michael starts reading out the names and everybody in the area is watching, there's this recognition. And Jovie is able to come because she sees it on the news, you know, so there's a. There's that drawing things in. So it's like they live in Mayberry, is what I'm trying to say. There's an element of this which is about belief, which we have to get into, but there's also an element of this that's about recognition.
That's a crucial component of the belief, and it's about turning the stranger into someone who you know by name, which seems to be part of this de. Cynicization, you know, the way of cutting through the cynicism of New York, which seems, you know, related to. Part of what's so cynical about it is like the. The anonymity, what you can get away with because of the anonymity of the place. And so that knowing people, that recognition, knowing their name and then knowing what they want, too, that seems. That seems a crucial component of this as well.
37:27 Wes: Yeah. And that seems to be part of the way the Santa myth functions as well. Right. He's got everyone's name on a list. He knows if you're naughty or nice, and he's bringing presents to every single child in the world in one night, doing something impossible. But it shrinks everything, right?
37:45 Erin: Yes.
37:46 Wes: You're supposed to suspend disbelief and think the entire world could be one tiny community in a sense, where. Yeah. If we lived in the village, we could be Santa Claus to that village. We could go around and provide a gift to every family, for instance. So it takes this village feeling, this small community feeling, as you're saying, and makes it feel like you can globalize it.
38:11 Erin: Yeah. And that seems to be that conversion that needs to happen where the world is shrunk. That's New York City. Coming out to meet Buddy. Right. Buddy has to adapt a little bit to. To New York, but it also seems important that New York adapt a little bit to him, that he's going to be a stranger either in the North Pole or New York City, so long as there isn't this adaptation. And it seems to be a mutual one. But I love that idea of shrinking the world as being central to the Santa myth. That's great.
38:39 Wes: Okay. That's the end of part one of our discussion of elf.
38:43 Erin: Can't believe we're making it to two parts. Sorry.
38:46 Wes: Well, the second part may not be so long, but we'll see.
38:51 Erin: I'm impressed.
38:51 Wes: We will. Yeah. I'm sure. I wonder how people are reacting to the, you know, the attempt.
38:57 Erin: We're taking this seriously.
38:59 Wes: We're doing it sophisticated. Yeah. Taking it so seriously. Is that a good thing or bad?
39:02 Erin: Sure.
39:03 Wes: But anyway, it is what it is. It's the format of our show. But yeah, so we will. subscribe@patreon.com subtextpodcast or right on the Apple app. Or you can wait a week or so into the second part. Thank you.
39:17 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
“Avail” features a long prose-poem which titles the book and winds through sections of lineated, often formal poems. The prose-poem comprises a series of lyric meditations on the image of the veil—from religious and cultural veils, to veils imbedded in idiom and metaphor, to veiled women in art and classic films, to veils drawn and parted by illness and death—which slowly divulge the harrowing details of the poet’s blood disorder.
Throughout, allusions to classic film, literature, and art serve as the “veils” with which the poet attempts to obscure the self-estrangement and vulnerability her illness has induced—insecurities which follow her long after her recovery. In a poem about a break-up set during her career as a jazz singer and against the backdrop of a 1930s screwball comedy, she longs “to shake life by the martini (but stay self- / possessed), to star in the movie of myself / instead of playing second lead.” During a visit to Naples, Mt. Vesuvius becomes “a Crawford eyebrow / arched over the bay.” And in California, after a trip to the Getty Villa, she recalls Sontag’s “missive on allusion, that no part / of any work is new, that all is reproduction.” By the end of the collection, O’Luanaigh has fashioned from the sum of these various allusions her own poetic identity, unveiled in the poems themselves.
Upcoming Episodes: “The Third Man,” “Elf,” “Julius Caesar.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:08 Wes: Today we have a very special episode of Subtext. We will be talking about Erin's forthcoming book, Avail. It'll be published on January 20, 2026 by Paul Dry Books. It won't surprise listeners that this is a really wonderful book. It reflects not just Erin's mastery of her craft, but also her extensive knowledge of the arts more generally and her interest in film. You can pre order it on Amazon.com right now. If you go to subtextpodcast.com avail, you'll be redirected to that Amazon page. You can also find Erin's poems in the Yale Review, Bad Lilies, Agni, the Southern Review, Subtropics, 32 poems, Wild Court, the Hopkins Review, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.
Erin graduated from the University of Florida's MFA program. She's currently a PhD student in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she is a Steffensen Cannon Fellow and the Senior Poetry Editor of Quarterly West. She's also a co host of Subtext. Welcome to your own show, Erin.
1:14 Erin: Wow. It's great to be here. It's strange to be here in this capacity.
1:19 Wes: So we don't. Is this going to be an interview? Is this going to be a regular subtext discussion? Am I going to get in a big argument with you about what something means?
1:27 Erin: Who knows? I'm nervous. I'm nervous to be our first ever guest. It doesn't really count, does it?
1:33 Wes: Kind of counts. It's weird. You're playing two roles at once here.
1:37 Erin: I know.
1:37 Wes: Yeah, I feel a bit nervous, too. I don't know why. Like I told you, it's not my book. Why should I be nervous?
1:45 Erin: Well, thank you so much for doing this. It's really sweet.
1:48 Wes: Well, it's sweet of you to. To be here and to be a successful poet that I'm co hosting the podcast with, as opposed to a failed poet. Finally, you've proven yourself as a successful poet. But I think most listeners know you're a poet, but I don't know if they've read your poetry. It's not like we're always advertising that on the podcast. They probably many may not know how well published you are, and I think we've very rarely touched on this forthcoming book. And the other thing they wouldn't know about you is really the autobiographical element of how it is that you ended up becoming a poet.
They probably know that you're a classic film buff and that you're into the arts and maybe even at some point you mentioned being a jazz singer, but they Might be curious about how all of that comes together as it does in your book. But. But anyway. Erin. Yeah. How is it that you ended up becoming a poet?
2:45 Erin: Have I ever told you this story? Maybe I mentioned it on the podcast. The story of the $500. Did you ever hear about this?
2:50 Wes: Nope.
2:51 Erin: Oh, I got into poetry as a money making scheme like you do.
2:54 Wes: As we. As we all do.
2:57 Erin: I was a senior in college. I wanted to go on a spring break trip to. I think I'm getting this right. Lake Lure, North Carolina. Yeah. Which was one of the filming locations of the great co classic Dirty Dancing. We were all going on a spring break trip there for some reason, or there was a spring break trip planned. Someone had done the math and figured out that for all of us to go down there for a week, including the gas and everything else, if we split everything, it was going to cost $500. And the same day that they came up with this figure, the English department bulletin board had posted this poetry contest and the prize was $500.
So I thought, here's a great way that I can go on this spring break trip. I'll just write a poem. This is an absolutely true story. It's ridiculous. And I thought I was an English major. I loved reading poetry, loved literature. I hadn't really written it. I had written some things as a kid, like some sort of some juvenile. But I was singing at that point. I was really involved in the music department. I was ostensibly an English major, but turning in all my papers at the last possible minute because I was singing so much and spending so much time in the music building or traveling to shows or doing musical theater.
And so I thought, well, I'll write a sonnet because that's short. And anyway, I wrote it. I won the $500. I went to the resort where they filmed Dirty Dancing. I had just an okay time, but the point was that it gave me some.
4:19 Wes: Didn't do any Dirty. Dirty Dancing.
4:20 Erin: No, no, I did not. It was a pretty tame trip though. There was. One of my friends was waking up at 10 o' clock in the morning, walking over to the fridge and immediately cracking a beer. It was. People were drinking all day long. I wasn't doing any of that. I didn't know how to have fun at that time in my life though. That's not my idea of fun. Anyway. I don't like beer, for one.
4:40 Wes: That's true. You know, that's interesting. I'd never thought about that. I'd never seen you drink a beer.
4:44 Erin: What's the point of the story.
4:47 Wes: You won a contest.
4:48 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. And one of my professors who read the poem said, you know, you should write a couple more of these. It was a poem about one of my aunts who I was very close to. And so I wrote, I think, two other poems about two other aunts. It's convenient that I had so many. And then I just really didn't think anything of it, though. This professor said, you know, I think you might. I think you might have a talent in this, and maybe you would want to pursue an MFA program. You know, I had obviously filed it away somewhere in my mind, but I thought, you know, as soon as I graduate, I'm gonna go into jazz singing, and I'm gonna try that out for a while and see what happens.
You know, Basically, I did the jazz singing thing for a few years. It got burnt out. And I remembered what my professor had told me, got back in touch with him, wrote enough poems to make up the 10 pages or whatever that I needed to even apply to one of these places, and ended up going to the University of Florida for my mfa. You know, poetry, I think, was something that I did to back away from something else. I backed into poetry.
5:44 Wes: See, I thought you were gonna say that you found out that the money wasn't good enough in jazz, so then you had to switch to poetry.
5:50 Erin: Yeah. You know, everything I've been involved with in my life is so lucrative.
5:54 Wes: You backing into it has me flashing to Homer Simpson backing into the bushes. Exactly that meme.
6:00 Erin: Yes. Yeah. That's my whole life right there.
6:03 Wes: Happened in on something you shouldn't have stepped into and back slowly out of the room, maybe.
6:12 Erin: Yeah. So that's the story. It's silly.
6:14 Wes: That's a good segue to the book. So I wanted to ask you about the inspiration for your book because it really does bring together your many different interests, including singing and the arts and classic film, and combines that in a really interesting way with a certain autobiographical element. So including your childhood sickness with a blood disorder and your relationship with your grandfather, which was very close, and he had a role in the development of your interests in film. And then also your mother's more recent sickness. And then, of course, it's all tied together with this theme of the veil. And then the related idea of availing a V A I L, which is the title of your book. Shall we start with just how. It's a big. I know it's a big general question, but how all of that is all of that related thematically and what inspired you to. To go down that route?
7:11 Erin: Yeah. So all these poems, I think, just reflect my interest, the interest that I've picked up over the course of my life. My grandfather was a classic movie buff, and so movies were a big part of my childhood and art was too. Going to art museums with them and music, they were very big into opera especially and all kinds of classical music. When I got sick, a TV was put in my room with a little built in vcr. And my grandfather would tape. You know, he would. We didn't have cable up there, so he would. He would tape things off of TCM onto VHS tape and bring it over to me and I would then watch the VHS tapes and.
And so I became interested, even more interested in classic movies than I already was, which was which I already had a sort of natural affinity for them. I went through this experience of the blood disorder and then as soon as I got well enough to go back to school, I just didn't talk about it for years and years. A lot of people never knew that I had this problem. Even though it required maintenance and even though it's actually caused me problems on and off over the years, I always hid them. One of the things that the essay confronts was my reticence to talk about it.
I think that became part of the story. Like, why was this something that I was not comfortable talking about that ended up being the thing that I had to confront as much as the experience of the disorder itself.
8:33 Wes: On page 84 of your book, there's a prose poem titled To Cast, Throw Draw Veil over and it begins with the line, your work does not contain the necessary self revelation. The list of things you'd rather not say is long. You claim to reveal yourself by hiding in your interests. Say that the shape of your preoccupations forms the outline of the body. There seems to be a connection there between the idea of veiling and then this question of the role of self revelation and poetry, which I've heard you talk a little bit about before, and your reluctance to do that. Did you want to say a little bit more about that?
9:11 Erin: Yeah, I think, you know, I went into my MFA program so green, and I was lucky enough to have a teacher in Ange Mlinko in my very first workshop who encouraged us to think about our own origin stories or sort of personal mythologies. And this was the thing that was at the root of, you know, the blood disorder was. Was at the root of so many things that I was interested in. And yet it was something that at that time, the People who knew me really well, you know, some of my closest friends did not know about this. I had really buried it when. When someone did learn this story, they said, well, this is such a great story.
And it's. It explains why you are interested in so many. So many of these things, you know, especially the old movies. And I didn't want to talk about myself. I was. I was reticent to do that. I wanted to talk about the things that I was interested in. And I thought that perhaps that was enough, that talking about these interests was enough, and that I didn't have to really involve myself at all. And then some very smart friends said that this was starting. You know, my lack of talking about this was starting to become its own issue. It was starting to exert a kind of force on the.
On the poems. It started to become the elephant in the room. So finally, when I went into my PhD program, I thought, I really should talk about this. I really should find a way. And I realized that the way in would be to talk about my resistance, why I didn't want to talk about it. I was reading Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, in which she talks about this concept of aidos, which is this idea of having appropriate shame about something or shame in the presence of another. And this idea of decorum covering oneself, not wanting to reveal too much of oneself.
And she specifically talks about the veil as a sort of metonym or symbol of this aidos that women would use the veil to keep themselves covered in some sort of appropriate way.
11:01 Wes: Eidos as an E, I, D, O, S, the ancient Greek word for form
11:05 Erin: or A I, D, O, s. Okay. Eidos. Eidos. I'm not sure how to say it.
11:10 Wes: What is that? What is that from?
11:12 Erin: Yeah, she just describes it as shamefastness. That is the definition she gives. And this is Carson. Aidos is a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for the crisis of human contact. Instinctive and mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them.
11:30 Wes: Okay, so this is. This is a Greek goddess of modesty and shame. Yeah, so it looks like it is. It is some sort of minor goddess, but yeah, more personification.
11:40 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And she writes, a chaste wife, like Penelope in Homer's Odyssey, holds her veil up on either side of her face when confronting suitors, while Medea's decision to abandon chastity for Jason is indicated by holding her veil aside. So this use of the veil as an expression of this sense of shame or Reluctance or this idea of the boundary that had a huge influence on me. So at the same time that I'm trying to write about this thing which I feel sort of shame around or which is a painful subject for me, or which, you know, which I've historically wanted to cover up, I felt that Carson, with this concept of aidos and of the veil, was giving me a way in.
12:18 Wes: Yeah. So the veil. So there's quite a bit in here. Yeah. That says something about poetry. And one can think of poetic use of language as a kind of veil, which is a way to get at some of these things which might otherwise be too. I don't know, quote, unquote, naked, too raw to talk about. So I'm just. I'm thinking of a line from your prose poem, the Mask versus the Veil, where you end with, the mask is a narrative, the veil is a lyric. And it sounded like the mask of something. Right. It's more rigid and opaque and potentially a false self. But the lyric, the poetic has to. Has to let something through. Maybe.
13:02 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. It's the idea that you may. What do I say here? To see behind the mask is an unexpected privilege. But the veil, by its nature, creates a need for revelation. While one might wonder what is beneath the mask, one must wonder what is beneath the veil. I think that that's the. That's the tension I'm interested in in the book is the idea that the. The veil is about this desire to hide, but it's also a kind of inherent teasing. It's hiding. It could be hiding in a sort of flirtatious way or in a way which really wants to be found.
And that line I thought was so interesting. The more that I looked at veils, images of veils in. On film and in art, the more I saw quite clearly that. That tension being expressed between a woman being strong and putting on this veil to try to gird herself in the face of some obstacle, but also wanting to unveil or wanting to be seen for who she really was. Wanting to have someone look behind the veil, as it were.
14:05 Wes: It seemed like that could go for seduction or love, but also for religion. You have a prose poem about taking the veil as a. Having something to do with becoming the bride of Christ, but also something that suggests, quote, possibilities that may yet lie dormant in her. The promise of a vocation, a calling, a purpose. So the desire to be discovered in various different ways, including in one's aspiration. I think there's quite a bit in here about the concept of aspiration.
14:38 Erin: Thinking, too, about the blood disorder and what happened during that time. And having to revisit that through the essay, I think gave me. It was like excavating my past somehow gave me an insight into different parts of myself that I hadn't realized were there or had forgotten.
14:53 Wes: Yeah, I love that image of you as a bride for Halloween. How old are you in this?
15:00 Erin: I think it's five.
15:02 Wes: It included a veil that looked like a Vegas showgirl's loincloth. But I was just going to say, yeah. This picture of you in a veil, in this kind of funny way as a child, stands in some contrast to various pictures of your great grandmother and your grandmother and your mother in a veil, where there's sort of a different sentiment, really, that comes across in each of those. I don't know if I'm saying anything there that you can. You can respond to. I just. But I enjoyed this series of different snapshots or your descriptions of pictures of people in wedding veils. I sort of. I think the core articulation of the theme of the book comes on page 31, where there's two prose poems to veil and then to a Veil. Did you want to read those?
15:54 Erin: Sure. To veil, to say no. To cover the body. To hide the body. To prevent the gaze of the other. To forbid the gaze of the other. To guard the body as precious. To mark oneself as holy. To gather unto oneself, to store up one's resources. To set a boundary, to construct a barrier for the body. To sketch an outline of the body. To provide a negative image of my body. To hint at what lies beneath by limning the body's shape. To suggest, to tease, to torture, by withholding the body. To mark a potential availability, to imply a future unveiling. To signify yes by saying no.
To avail. To say yes. To see a value, to explore a possibility. To take the opportunity to make use of, to respond to generosity, to accept an overture, to help oneself, to satisfy oneself. To have one's fill, to consume, to gorge oneself, to press an advantage, to exploit, to strong arm, to throw one's weight around. To take what is there for the taking. To pillage, to breach, to cross the barrier erected by another, to unveil, to destroy, to force a retreat to. To colonize, to procure another's. No.
17:24 Wes: It's interesting you name the book avail, but I think this is the one section that is explicitly about veiling versus availing. And the word veil, I think, only occurs five times. I actually counted the word veil. You know, this Book better than veiling is being veiled. And I was interested in the fact too. You know, you got me interested in the etymology of a veil or the usage of a veil because we generally today say avail oneself of. Right. And so veiling invites that, but also disinvites it, as you put it, to procure another's. No, but the original, you know, the.
The use of the avail that is now archaic. I think it was just to. To benefit or assist. Right. So if you availed someone, you assisted them, and if something was availing, it was advantageous. And then. Right, and so the word available is related. Right. So I found it interesting that the sort of altruistic, original meaning of the word, when used reflexively became reversed into something that is potentially exploitative. Right. Or something that is potentially selfish. You avail oneself, or maybe you help yourself instead of helping someone, you help yourself to something.
And I did that. And, you know, it got me looking into, well, how and why did that transition take place? So I'm pointing to that just because I think, yeah, the explicit use of this word veil kind of falls out and it's implicit everywhere.
18:55 Erin: Just as veiling also has a veiling in it where there's this desire for revelation. It's a sort of theatrical covering. Right. And so seems to demand that one at least be interested in whatever one is covering. And that kind of attention being drawn to the covered thing is exactly what I was wrestling with in choosing to disclose this personal story as well.
19:18 Wes: Ange Mlinko connects this archaic meaning of the veil to descending and then descending into the underworld. But in this case, the underworld into which you descend is full of figures like Rita Hayworth. Much of this honors various, what I think are idols of yours from movies. I think
19:42 Erin: that's right.
19:43 Wes: That's correct to say, then, Rita Hayworth, I think she's the most often mentioned. She's mentioned in at least four or five places.
19:53 Erin: She's the sort of patron movie star of the book.
19:55 Wes: Yeah, yeah. What is that about?
19:57 Erin: In the book? It starts in Covergirl. Should I read CoverGirl? It was a hospital season, a grainy black and white reel. Exam rooms, waiting rooms, offices, hallways, my northwest facing bedroom, my closed eyes until the day you took me to the movies a Friday morning and I, the only child in a throng of gray why aren't you in school? Sat by you holding tightly to your arm and watched the whole bright world come roaring in alive so red, so red I sighed in the ice cream parlor afterward over her glorious technicolor hair, her Lips, her piked fingernails as we savored our usuals, pistachio yours and black raspberry mine at our blue window booth. While outside the pumpkin smiled back at me and the sunburnt leaves died floridly on the vine.
20:52 Wes: That's great.
20:53 Erin: That's the first thing I think I ever wrote about my illness, actually. I saw her on the big screen and this. They used to run these. They would actually bus seniors in for these Friday morning, you know, like 11am movies. And they would even give out little free mini popcorns. I think it was like $2 or maybe even a dollar to watch these movies that they got prints of. Most of them were really not good. But the first one that I ever saw was CoverGirl and on the big screen, Rita Hayworth with that red hair in Technicolor, which is. Which is more than color. You know, Technicolor is just fantastically vibrant.
21:29 Wes: And, yeah, there's an ongoing contrast in your book between the color red and the color white. And where I think whiteness is associated with pallor and nakedness and maybe the literal truth. And red gets associated with both vitality and being veiled. So, for instance, the redness of the cheek that you might have pinched to give it more vitality or, you know, lipstick being applied or makeup, something like that. And it starts in the very. I think it starts with the very first poem of the book called Snow. I don't know if you wanted to read that as well. I don't. Yeah, just stop me if I'm pushing you to read too many things, but, yeah, go ahead.
22:15 Erin: Snow. It drifts and it drifts as the finished VHS respools, its tinsel white bands flurrying across the glossy hilltop of the TV screen. A modern weather like the swirl of asbestos in Dorothy Gale's hair. The ivory soap flakes strewn over Bedford Falls, the sprayable foam it mocks, the snap pop of a stand of trees buckling under a blanket or a bucket's ice shell cracking above the heat of the tape's firelog. Its storm will kick up when I replay the movie. A grocery aisle now edged with blizzards. Anklets coated in hoarfrost. Summers forecasting a pixelated ice Age. Stanwyck snowing tears even as she smiles. And me rewinding the melting tape to the point of dissolution, whiting out each scene with a love that, like all love, distorts its object, glazes it with ice, swallows it like a mailbox in a mounting heap until the tape stops and only my Face bloodless winters, the blank screen.
23:24 Wes: And I can't help but as I was reading this partly because of what I know from you, but it's also there, just in context, provided by the book. Even when you're not mentioning your grandfather explicitly in his role in this, you see him kind of hovering behind the poem. So he's the one who, while you were sick, was giving you these VHS tapes and fostering your love of classic movies and giving you kind of a transfusion, so to speak. Something vital at a time when you were dealing with a loss of vitality.
23:59 Erin: I love that. Yeah. These films were like portals to a kind of glamour or, you know, what I imagined back when I was a kid as a kind of grown up world of sophistication and intrigue and interesting problems and beautiful faces and interesting people. So, yeah, and he supplied. He was my dealer, so. But I love. I love the idea that he was giving me these transfusions of this. This filmic vitality. Yeah.
24:27 Wes: Well, as I told you before we started recording, I did, you know, like a complete, like, thematic concordance of your book. Various themes, your illness, your mother's illness, your grandfather and I. And I. And also, as you also know, I like to find arcs and things. So I really thought I saw a progression in each sort of line. There's a lot in here about the death of your grandfather, but I think emotionally it sort of climaxes with the very last poem about him called March 27, where there's this very poignant image of him mourning for you, so to speak, because you're playing Evita and you're being paraded around in that glass casket.
25:08 Erin: Yeah.
25:08 Wes: And it made him tearful. So there's a beautiful juxtaposition of that and you confronting his death. And that includes scenes where you're seeing him in his coffin at the wake.
25:19 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. You're noticing things in the structure that I had forgotten. It's funny because this book has been done now for over a year, so it's actually, you know, I had to prepare for this podcast myself by going back and rereading the book, but you're reminding me of some choices that I agonized over, so I'm glad they are. They're coming across.
25:40 Wes: Yeah. So speaking of thematic arcs, is that even a thing? So one of my favorite poems was Pacific Palisades, and I see that as sort of another climactic moment that sort of is a culmination of different thematic concerns. Were you surprised by the way that I chose that one?
26:00 Erin: No.
26:01 Wes: Yeah. Why?
26:02 Erin: No, we share this in our Die Hard episode. We got into trouble for this, but we share an Eastern sensibility. No.
26:14 Wes: Well, I was going to ask you about this because the poem begins with this wonderful first line, and I'll have you read the whole thing in a moment. But it's California. We've reached the end of taste. And I assumed you meant the end as in the telos of taste, the highest manifest of taste, not the. But we'll talk about what that word N means, because maybe you can read it as being polysemous. I wish people had listened to our Die Hard episode that way. Talk about taking things literally. Someone made a negative comment about subtext predicated on the idea that we are slagging off California and we were merely relating a stereotype.
26:53 Erin: Well, luckily, you know, luckily all my Californian friends, when I read this out loud, were like, that's our favorite one. You know, I did a reading where there were a bunch of Californians there and they were laughing so hard at that. And the, you know, saw it for being the sort of tongue in cheek statement that it was, but we managed
27:11 Wes: to wake the one sleeping dragon. And that is a California.
27:14 Erin: Chill out, man.
27:15 Wes: California. Oh, so seriously, what's the point of being Californian if you take it.
27:21 Erin: Exactly. Sorry, Exactly.
27:23 Wes: Am I getting us in trouble again? Let's. Yeah. Do you want to read Pacific Palisades?
27:29 Erin: And sure, it's California. We've reached the end of taste. We're strolling on the Getty Villas bluff, Its merit weighed against the megalithic waste of historic reproduction. What's Egyptian about the Egyptian revival? Parisian in the Vegas strips Arc de Triomphe A supersized riff on the Villa dei Papiri the original at least was blown to ash. We console ourselves beneath a marquee hawking lattes With a lobby built to recall an excavation. Its galleries house the hall of the thinking man's robber baron. A cache of Heracleses, kouroi, hydrias A replica of a Pompeii fountain mapped with west coast shells.
The coinage of Illyria Cycladic figures, the alleged Mazarin Venus gardens with herbs of ancient Roman genus A satyr reclining as in a Kardashian snap Visitors pose so thickly in the peristyles we struggle to escape another's selfie still in an atrium frisbeed with sundials I admit equal beguilement by counterfeit and bonafide alike. Who's to say what's legit? A Roman Original is a Greek man's copy called back from antiquity to the traffic rumbling below, where mention of Inceville's studio passes for ancient history, its epics, civilization widely deemed low brow, and the Italian whose hero nosed the prow of a gondola down Venice Beaches rills or further up where once lived Brecht, Adorno, Schonberg and the Magic man, all told, the Weimar by the sea in glass decked houses out of David Hockney we list for klempt.
Out of the villa's gate, the novelist, when not apprising Hesse of his wanton lawn, the Eden in which he'd torment Leverkühn, partied with Cagney, Jack Warner, Berlin and handed Tassen to a young Sontag, soon to take the devil's bargain for her own art. We quote her missive on illusion that no part of any work is new, that all is reproduction. Across the highway, we sink through coastal sage to watch the sunset on the proper shore against outcrops dated to the Miocene age. Like good Easterners, we shield our eyes from the vulgarity of pleasure, the paradise unearned, the honest falsehood, the easily adored.
29:56 Wes: Yeah, I like the fact that we start out in a museum of sorts and then we, at some point we end up partying with famous people. This is not the only typical California. That's right, it's California. We've reached the end of taste. I love that line because I just think of manifest destiny, right, and going west and then ending up on that shore, as well as the idea perhaps, that it's the endpoint of some logical development, for better or for worse. So something like a telos, but also perhaps tastelessness. Yeah. So do you want to piss off some Californians?
30:35 Erin: No, I'm afraid. I'm afraid to put my foot in it. Yeah. There's a falseness, of course. I mean, there are plenty of qualities about California which are really just qualities about America that you could see really clearly and all very wonderful. Exactly. No, it's, you know, there's a falseness to it. It's constructed as all of America is sort of constructed. And then you also have this, you know, it's built on this, people playing make believe, you know, I mean, specifically la. Obviously there are other, other parts of California which are quite different, but, you know, and I love that about California, you know, but the, the, you know, you can't love movies as I do and hate California.
31:20 Wes: Right.
31:21 Erin: But there's a, you know, there's a guilt for me. It's not an accident. And I think this is something that's coming out in the. The next manuscript that I'm working on that, you know, a lot of my favorite actresses are actually people who had rather fraught relationships with California and who were, in fact, New Englanders, like Bette Davis, like Katharine Hepb. And so, you know, there's a sort of sensibility clash, I think, involved in the relationship of those two particular actresses to that place, but also to a lot of people's experience of California or even just their experience of being an artist and of having this. Having to have a relationship to an audience or having to, you know, there are all kinds of things I think are implicated in that.
32:00 Wes: Having to please an audience and then the danger of selling out or the danger of becoming mere pop culture. Although pop culture can be wonderful as well. Is that the idea?
32:12 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think also. I don't know, being easy on yourself too, versus being hard on yourself. Right. I think that's. That's a little bit part of the subtext. Drunk at home. That's a little part of the subtext of the. Of the poem. And I'm very afraid of that. You know, I'm someone who's, you know, is probably secretly very concerned that I might just take it too easy one day and never, never, never do anything useful or interesting again. And so I have to constantly guard against that. And so places like California where everyone is just having a good time in theory, or where the weather.
Weather is always nice, I'm just distrustful of. And I think it's hard. I think it's hard to create good work in Hollywood for lots of reasons, you know, not necessarily having to do with the climate or anything uniquely about. About California, but just. Yeah, the populism, the everything. So, yeah, so you have this. This. This Getty Villa, you know, this amazing place which has gorgeous collection of. Of ancient statues and just everything. And put in this, you know, kind of fake villa to make it look as though this was the Romans. You know, this is just part of their empire that somebody just stumbled across on the California coast.
So, you know, the real, real things mixed with fake and then something being also real. And the fakeness too.
33:34 Wes: Yeah. It strikes me that there are better and worse versions of fakeness. Right. So obviously the fakeness of art is supposed to be the highest form of fakeness, as in. Right. Fictional narrative or poetry. The creation of illusions of sorts. The kind of thing that Plato didn't like because they were not the truth with a capital T, but on a More positive interpretation, trying to get at, like, larger truths. Right. So the emotional truths, thematic truths, you could tell a fictional narrative that says something true. And in that sense, the narrative becomes the veil, I suppose, of the thing that is being gestured at.
And it can only be. It becomes. Right, trite or too simplistic, if you try any other approach. Right. So if you write a philosophical monograph on it, you lose a lot. It gets too abstract. We need appearance, we need representation, as falsifying as that might be. But in this case, it seems like there's always the danger that the level of appearance, that there's something, if it's not done right, that there could be something truly and tastelessly false about that. You're always on the edge of either making falsification serve the truth or having it to collapse into something more sinister, it seems.
So I thought maybe. Yeah, maybe some of this is also about the anxiety of influence. Because it's right. You reference the Sontag. It's all reproduction. And all we can do is to take influence and to take everything that we've taken in, artistic products and somehow metabolize that. And then either we come out with something that's original or something that's derivative, but maybe there's not that much in between those two.
35:26 Erin: I think you're leading me into Phoenicians. Am I wrong about that?
35:29 Wes: I wasn't conscious of thinking about that, but I'm sure the wiser, unconscious part of me was doing that. Shall we? Yeah, let's do that. But. Yeah. Did I. Am I getting that right? As far as what you said, yeah.
35:43 Erin: I mean, okay. You know, you even worked in a veil there. I got a. Could have you follow me around and do my.
35:52 Wes: I could be your internal narrator if you want.
35:54 Erin: There you go.
35:56 Wes: Relate everything. Any veil, any theme you want. Go ahead.
36:00 Erin: Right, here's the Phoenicians, transplants both like the palm trees that lend the landscape a tropical legibility. They live in an invented place, precarious as language. Squat, blank, rectangular, their house admits nothing, forms a single brick in a wall just one brick tall. All the neighbors seem to make a living in encryption. Their little boy can't learn the word for cloud but knows camel cactus de doo, his name for the bird that hovers over the dryscaping looking for a place to land. I walk him by the canal that runs its concrete vein through Scottsdale, feeds the pool at the Arizona Biltmore where once in a deck chair, Irving Berlin dreamt up white Christmas over a tequila sunrise, fighting the dual oppressions of happiness and heat who wouldn't long for snow, for history, for an end to the inveterate blinking of the neon signs that flash their native terms dominoes and just beneath it, guns.
But at dusk the sky runs Tyrian purple and the saguaros on the hills throw their inscrutable Alphabet shadows across serifs of agave. A living document, vigorous and prickly.
37:22 Wes: Yeah, So I love dominoes and guns. Frankly,
37:28 Erin: you'll be right at home in Phoenix.
37:31 Wes: It's a fan of the Phoenicians. Now, let's see. One of the things I loved about this poem and the reason why singled it out was just this final stanza. Inscrutable Alphabet shadows across serifs of agave. And then the other thing, you know, again, we get to party with a famous artist. We. We start out, we're in Arizona in the desert, and then all of a sudden, he's dreaming of something else. There's at least a te. I guess I'm just focusing on the drink. But it's so. I saw this. You know, you're by the canal one moment, and the next moment it's something far less mundane and more fabulous.
And it sounds like it's a way of. To talk about Berlin dreaming up longing for a white Christmas in contrast to the oppressions of heat is a way of talking about your longing for that in this context. Or you're longing for something else. But. Yeah. What is this poem about? Is that a legitimate poetry interview question? What is this poem about?
38:38 Erin: No, that's. I think you're totally right. These friends have since moved out of Phoenix. But I'd gone a couple times down to Phoenix to see them and their young son. And. I don't know. I went to Phoenix and I just. I never had a bad time there. And I tried to think of what it was that was making me have such a good time.
38:58 Wes: It's the dry heat.
38:58 Erin: They say it's the dry heat. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, and there's. Of course, we could easily make an Arrested Development joke here where you show up in Phoenix and burn your hand on the car door. But anyway, I'd rather be.
39:13 Wes: What is it? I'd rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona.
39:19 Erin: Yeah. And, you know, these are just, you know, this one in Pacific Palisades, just about living in the west and trying to find. Trying to trace back, you know, like the vein, you know, trying to trace things back to some kind of source so that I can understand where these places are coming from. What's going on here? You know, what is this place really about? And when you have a place like Phoenix, which is a tertiary settlement, which is an entirely constructed place, I mean, it's really not habitable. And they've just given it these palm trees to try to make it look like a resort place.
These palm trees are not native to the place. And again, thinking, well, none of us is native to this country unless we are Native Americans. None of us is native to this country. You know, what is this? What is this about? What's real about this? What is this trying to show me? Or what can this teach me? And then trying to find something good in it and something real. If I think it's unreal, how is it real? You know, this sort of self argument, I mean, that's just a larger insight into how I write poems, which is if I'm criticizing something, that's usually a good germ of a poem.
Anger is usually a good. Anger is too strong of a word for something like this. Right. But some sort of irritation or some sort of annoyance maybe is usually a good engine for a poem because it's active and it makes you. Pushes you into language to say, why am I feeling this way? What do I want to articulate? And then trying to talk oneself out of it and saying, okay, what's the opposite of this? How can I have a sort of dialogue with myself here? And then, of course, in a poem like this, it's also sort of turning that back on language itself and thinking about language itself and how that's working.
40:53 Wes: Yeah. It begins with this idea of inscrutability. Right. So all the neighbors seem to make a living in encryption. But the house sounds like that as well. Right. Blank and rectangular. And despite the tropical legibility. Right. Despite these palm trees that are supposed to make the landscape somehow readable or legible. So there's that setup. It's not. It makes it sound intriguing. And then we get the walk by the canal, and then we get you associating to longing for something else, which is where I stopped in my characterization. I didn't really do full justice to the structure of the poem because there's a.
Right, you get. You get to a negative characterization of dominoes and guns. But it ends with an attempt to explain what is so attractive about the place. So the sky running Tyrian purple, the cacti on the hills throwing their Alphabet shadows. But it's still inscrutable at the end. But there's something. There's a kind of vitality to it, despite the Fact that you're in the desert, it seems the prickliness, the vigorousness.
42:09 Erin: That's right, yeah. Something real here.
42:11 Wes: After all, there's vitality. And I just thought, yeah, that, that is something that comes up quite a bit. Right, so the. And something that you associate with blood. Right. And the prickly cacti, I think we can imagine pricking ourselves on them and bleeding, but it being something that is vitality inducing. And that, that reminds me of your Salome. So this is page 58. So it reminded me of Salome and then Rita. Herwit, Rita Hayworth. So yeah, I love this line. Veiling and a veiling are collapsed. John the Baptist is beheaded by a stripper. So another point that one might argue is a climactic moment in the book where things really come together.
And then you get Rita Hayworth, a flame with vitality, dancing with vigor, the dance of the seven veils, flaunting her vitality. And I take a bit of the aspiration for you to flaunt your vitality. So did you want to say something about that? There's a bit of a, there's a bit of an edge to this form of vitality though, since John the Baptist does get beheaded.
43:22 Erin: Yeah, that's right, yeah. And she flaunted in mine too. You know, there's something a little bit flaunted in my face too, I should say.
43:27 Wes: Oh, right, yeah.
43:28 Erin: I mean there's the desire for this, but there's the. You know, maybe what I am admiring in Phoenix is like it's self belief, you know, that's maybe the thing that the speaker has trouble accessing. See now I'm, now I'm saying the speaker of course separated from myself so that I have none of this is plausible deniability. Exactly right. This is me in air quotes. No, but I mean, you know, of course there's a bit of posing that goes on. So it's hard to. Or even just crystallizing something in some sort of definitive statement. There's always going to be a little bit of, you know, the real person wants to hedge a little bit and say, well, not exactly that.
Right. The question of self confidence or self belief or the desire to escape oneself is certainly a problem that the speaker eye whatever, you know, has and when confronted with someone in the, in the sort of full force vigor of their, their personality, even if it's prickly or whatever, that can sometimes be shocking or upsetting or it could feel like a taunt or even an attack. So this girl is sometimes maybe a little bit Upset with Rita Hayworth. Maybe a little bit upset over this whole situation and a little sad and maybe a little self pitying too.
Hopefully not too much.
44:45 Wes: You mentioned aspiration here, I think, and the connection to vitality, as I mentioned. I thought that comes up quite a bit in this book. And I also thought the Phoenicians. I kind of put the Phoenicians under that category as well. Several categories. Because something about associating to Berlin I thought was fit into this kind of category of aspiration. But I think my favorite reference to this is in the Awful truth on page 27. One of many great lines and ideas in here about shaking life by the martini. So what I wouldn't give for her glinty self confidence.
Not the false courage I summoned to sing when I become a chanteuse version of myself. A Persona borrowed from the record shelf of a dusty basement in Connecticut to shake life by the martini. But to stay self possessed, to star in the movie of myself instead of playing second lead and so on. Sort of like the. I was going to call it a credo, but I. Maybe that's going a bit too far.
45:45 Erin: That's right. I think you're on to something there.
45:51 Wes: Yes.
45:52 Erin: You know, it's hard to love these movies so much and have them all be full of confident women when you're just a normal woman.
46:02 Wes: Yeah, but something to aspire to. What's your favorite poem in here?
46:06 Erin: You know, you mentioned a few that I really like. I think Pacific Palisades is one of my favorites. I think Black Eyed Susie's really captures a moment in my life. I like the Phoenicians.
46:17 Wes: Frances Gumm, another line I love. She believed in love poems. The Kennedys and the Efficacy of Tears. I hope this isn't vulgar, just me pulling out my favorite bits.
46:26 Erin: No, no. That's really nice of you. Yeah. That's poor Judy. Yeah, she's my favorite. And she gets. I was a little sad that she got a little bit of a short shrift in this book, so I was happy that people liked Frances Gumm. But. Yeah, and Oxford, another one you liked. You liked a lot of my favorites, actually.
46:44 Wes: Your hair grew to Pre Raphaelite proportions.
46:47 Erin: Yes. You know this is true.
46:51 Wes: Yeah, I do, I do. It's funny because. Yeah, I've seen your hair like that. I think maybe my favorite line, though is in the Gold of Naples. Things kept reminding me of other things. I just love that as a beginning to a poem and then ending with the idea that resemblances are just the shadows of differences and I thought, has anyone ever said that? Just seems like the kind of thing that someone should have already said. And I googled it and no one has. No one has ever said that resemblances are just the shadows of differences. Yeah.
47:19 Erin: Really? I thought I was pulling that from something. I mean, in the. In the poem it suggests that it was something someone said.
47:26 Wes: And as a someone in the movie.
47:30 Erin: No, just a saying. I just thought it was a saying. Something like that.
47:33 Wes: Well, maybe in some other form it's been been said, but. Yeah, I hadn't. I hadn't heard it.
47:39 Erin: I'm glad I'm, you know, more original than I thought in this book about sort of not being original or not needing to be original.
47:49 Wes: Just remember, originality is just a shadow of.
47:53 Erin: That's right. Of unoriginality.
47:55 Wes: Yeah. Of borrowing, of stealing.
48:00 Erin: Should I end by reading the Gold of Naples and. Sure, then we'll sign off. All right. This is the last poem in the book. So people are, you know. But there are other things in here. I promise. We haven't quite, quite covered it all. The gold of Naples. Things kept reminding me of other things. The old ladies in the street were my aunts. A counterman at Cafe Mexico was Toto in a soda fountain hat. The rum babas were trumpet mutes. My hanging mocha pots were little men with barrel of monkeys arms. This garden looked like Barcelona. That piazza was a picture of a picture of Rome.
Vesuvius was a Crawford eyebrow arched over the bay. My pizza oven of an apartment was. It really was the apartment in the Gold of Naples. And I was me or some baked and dusky version of myself. And I was alone and half delirious and overweight. An Aussie tourist by a bookstall turned to me and said, those Japanese experts say this place will blow at any moment. If you thought Pompeii was trouble, I did. Just wait. From my roof I watched the sunset through a bottle of Strega. And it was a John Martin painting. One of those camp apocalyptic bugaboos.
Now, how does the saying go? Resemblances are just the shadows of differences. The end of my world is the beginning of yours.
49:23 Wes: I was hoping you were going to do the Aussie tourist in an accent.
49:29 Erin: Those Japanese. No, I can't do it.
49:31 Wes: I want to hear it.
49:32 Erin: I can't.
49:33 Wes: No, no, you can't do an Aussie accent.
49:36 Erin: I can, but I don't wanna. It would be a hate crime if
49:39 Wes: I did just say shrimp on the bar.
49:43 Erin: I'll say it off recording.
49:46 Wes: So you're associating You're. The things you're being reminded of are scenes are from a movie called the Golden Naples. Right. That's what I take this to be.
49:56 Erin: Yeah, some of it. Yeah. I was really staying in this apartment that was in this movie. Sophia Loren is in this movie. And Naples is a place that my family's from there. It's very. You know, it was an uncanny experience for me to walk around in Naples and to. Not really, you know, Naples isn't in the imagination the way that a lot of Italian cities are in American imaginations. You know, like, we could sort of see. We think of Rome, we could see the Colosseum and things like that. Naples is a very. It can be a very rough place. It's corrupt, it's.
You know, but it's also extremely vital. It's a very vital place. It's very associated for me, of course, with blood, because I'm from there and with blood of Saint Januarius and with all of these people that walk around that look exactly like your family members, in my case, they look really. I kept. I just kept thinking that I was seeing people that I knew from my own family, and a couple times they were people I knew. So there was something extra uncanny about that because, of course, you know, I was partially there to visit family and to go to ancestral houses and stuff like that.
So, yeah, I don't know, I just. It was. It was trippy. It was a trippy experience. That sense of familiarity and strangeness coming together was, I think, what I was after here.
51:15 Wes: They really thought Vesuvius was going to blow again.
51:18 Erin: Yes, it will. It will blow again. And that's the other thing, is that you're there, and at the time, I think it was fresh in people's minds. I don't know if there was some update or if some. If they had taken fresh readings on Vesuvius or something like that, but people were talking about it. People on the streets were talking about it in Italian and Napolitan, and it was like, I just got in this place and it's there. I mean, have you been to Naples?
51:45 Wes: Uh, no. Maybe Pass through, but.
51:47 Erin: Yeah, no, I had a little rooftop area that I would go up to, you know, just in the poem, and. And you look and there's Vesuvius. You know, you can't escape it. And you just think to yourself, why is everybody here? Why am I here? I don't know how many millions of people in total live in the impact zone of Vesuvius were it to erupt again, It Would be just massive catastrophic event. Started to really freak me out a little bit. The imposing. You go to Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it's very real, and it's there and it's smoking. Climbed up to the top, and it's just incredible.
52:25 Wes: So when you say the end of my world is the beginning of yours, who is the you and the yours at the end?
52:31 Erin: I think it's the reader. I think it's the reader. I'm writing to people. I think my background is a singer and a performer is. I think I'm conscious of responsibility to an audience to offer something to them. And so here I think I. You know, I wanted to end with a poem that directly gave a nod.
52:52 Wes: So resemblances of the shadows of differences, you know, reminds me of Plato. Resemblances are shadows of the. You know, things in themselves, the real. But here the difference seems to be the difference between. Between poetic imaginary world and then the reader's real world. And so the. The reader can take some of this and take it into the real world and into vitality. Is that the idea, or.
53:19 Erin: I think that's right, yeah. You know, the same thing that we were talking about with Pacific Palisades. What is really real and what isn't. What is more real? The movie that took place in this apartment or whatever took place while I was living there. You know, they're sort of both equally real and equally invisible, formed by each other. So that the representation becomes as real a part of one's experience. In the same way that I think that I'm experiencing films or artworks. In the book, you can have these formative experiences around your confrontation with the artwork.
Such that, you know, a movie or a book read, you know, at an important time in your life becomes as much a part of what was happening to you at that time as whatever was really going on in your life, in your daily life. So there's some sort of collapse. I hope that happens at the end. Where these two things become so fused together that there's no difference that, you know, like. Like veiling and availing. You know, they're sort of two sides of the same coin. And that ultimately is like, maybe the ideal encounter with art.
54:22 Wes: Well, unfortunately, we're. We've reached the end. I want to say there is a lot more in here about. Right. So everything from love and singing and acting and sleep and the whole. The whole concept of metaphor to great descriptions of the body. It's a really great description of that. You do the veins and the heart and relating that to a veil. So I highly recommend this to listeners, and I guess it's time for us to borrow a phrase of yours. Slip behind the curtain like a metaphor.
54:58 Erin: Thank you so much, Wes. It's so kind of you.
55:01 Wes: Thank you.
55:04 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Bacchic Redemption in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) (Part 2)
Nov 25, 2025
What happens when the Godzilla of superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Upcoming Episodes: Erin’s book “Avail,” “The Third Man,” “Julius Caesar.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:31 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. We just got done with an extended conversation about Nurse Ratched's personality. And I think I'll start by just adding one more thing about the glass, which I thought of, but I forgot to say, there's a kind of glassy eyed look, I think, to Nurse Ratched's.
0:50 Erin: Oh, that's good.
0:51 Wes: Yeah, the way she looks at things. And it occurred to me that some of the crowd that I roll with, the psychoanalytic crowd, would characterize her as psychotic, as kind of twisted at the point of psychotic being kind of quite out of touch with reality, or at least out of touch with emotional reality, which that glassy eyedness kind of conveys. And it occurred to me that, that, yeah, that little tiny office that she's in with the glass, sliding glass window further reflected that orientation to reality. And again, the kind of thing where she can watch from her perch while the chaos she's creating, a projective identification unfolds around her. And then she can do what she needs with that psychologically. And it's part of what helps keep her calm. That's her medication. The medication is going through the window both ways. She's handing it out, she's taking it in. Yeah.
1:43 Erin: Well, I just wanted to comment on that in relation to this Christ parallel with McMurphy, because really it's a sort of dueling religion binary between the two of them because she also, that's sort of her rectory, if you will. The medication line. I can't not think of a communion line, especially when one of the patients opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue to receive the pill on the tongue. And also with this idea which I'm, you know, I keep sort of getting around it because I'm not quite sure ultimately what big picture to draw from it, but her catering to the weaker or the weakest and the most helpless in the Name of a kind of benevolence which seems like a Christian idea.
Whereas McMurphy is about say the more militant half or the more active or engaged or proselytizing even part of Christianity, if there's a binary distinction to be made there. You know, it occurs to me that in trying to get Chief to respond to him and come out of a shell or, you know, he makes the. He tries to talk to Chief in his own language, which is a bit, a bit crass, a bit much, right. And then when he's trying to teach him basketball, he says it's an old Indian game called put the ball in the hole or something like that. And, and it occurs to me that that too is, is a.
One of the classic methods of the conversion of, you know, non Western, say groups to Christianity when you're sending out missionaries is to put the Christian story or elements of Christian themes in terms of the local culture, that particular culture's terminology. So there's something in his extremely indelicate, granted and sort of brutish way, which is an attempt to be a missionary to reach this person on their level in terms that they will understand, to familiarize something, to make something less foreign to the audience with which you were trying to engage.
There are a lot of elements. Of course, I didn't read anything about any secondary literature, so I don't know about McMurphy being a Christ figure. But of course the fishing trip was also something that. I could see it all. As soon as you said that, I started, you know, making the connection. But it occurred to me more that institutional religion was being critiqued on the Nurse Ratched side because of the communion line and keeping everybody sort of dialed docile. And you know, supposedly these are what, just sedatives to keep everybody from getting too rowdy.
4:17 Wes: They're probably antipsychotics, which are highly sedating in general. That's part of how they work. But teach a nut to fish, right, and set free, how would that saying go? But so let's say a little bit about what makes him Christ. Like, although again, I think he's more of a trickster. Satyr.
4:40 Erin: Oh, the Last Supper and the Resurrection, when they give him ect doesn't really work the second time.
4:49 Wes: And he is kind of betrayed by Billy. Billy could be Judas or maybe a combination of Judas and Peter. But I think the most self sacrificing moments involve. Well, there's two at the end, right? He's gonna, he's about to escape. He's given the men the big Party. Candy and Rose are waiting outside and he's got the window open and he's ready to escape. And then Billy is upset so he decides he's going to give Billy this sexual experience with Candy. And then at that point he, you know, he sets that up and then he sits down and you see him go into a state of reverie.
And it's hard to say, you know, what is that state of reverie about? That's the calmest we've ever, I think we ever see him in the movie, the most peaceful. And he seems to be fantasizing either about his freedom or either what he's, you know, maybe what he's done for Billy. But that leads to him passing out and not escaping. Then he has a chance to escape again. The next morning he knocks out an orderly, gets the window open again. But then we hear Billy scream or no, someone scream. Nurse Pilbow screams because she finds Billy. And then he's going to have to go see what happened and strangle Nurse Ratched because that's what Jesus would do, obviously.
What would Jesus do? Anyway, so the two self sacrificing moments are the two times he gives up escaping and then he's doing a lot of things that are helpful and therapeutic in the sense he's getting people out of their shells. The motive though, the conscious motive is, seems to be virtually entirely selfish and being subversive. Right. So why does he take the men fishing? He gets chief to help him get over the fence. He gets into the bus. I mean he could drive off and escape at that point he could go be with Candy without having any interference with his sexual shenanigans.
Instead he's going to take all these guys on a field trip, steal the bus, take them. That's a lot of work. I don't know that I would have ever done that even if it were a legit version of that. It's a lot of work. He puts in all the work to take these guys on a field trip. But it's difficult to distinguish between the transgressive motive, the fuck you to the law and order motive, and the motive that involves being helpful to these guys. Or maybe it's just wanting to see some vitality in these men, these men who are closed off. But you can see the conflict directly, right?
Because he's one minute he's showing the men how to fish, the next minute he's trying to go underneath with Candy. But then the boat ends up going in a circle and then someone's catching a fish and Then he's immediately helping them catch the fish. So he is a creature of impulse, jumping from one thing to another. But it's somehow that impulsiveness, that closer relationship to his own instinctual side, to his own sexual side, has a kind of altruistic effect, which it need not, as we know. Right. The guy is a criminal and is convicted of statutory rape and is in prison and, as I've speculated, is probably pretty strong sociopathic character traits.
But it's this part of him that they lack, which he can give them and which delights him to give them.
8:12 Erin: Yeah, I think his. For me, his motives are a little bit murkier in that I think he's. I think he feels sorry for these guys quite early on. This is later explicitly said in the scene, actually after the fishing trip, I believe, where he learns that the men are voluntarily committed. And he says, you're no crazier than the average guy out on the street. Something like that. And that's when Nurse Ratched says, those are very challenging observations, which I would love to unpack. I have. I have no idea why that sticks out so much to me. But by this time, I believe they've already gone on the fishing trip.
Cause this is rather. This is in the last third of the film. And this is going to be the scene where the fist fight happens when he punches through the window and then he gets ect. So I think that's after the fishing trip. But this idea of fishing is set up early in the film because in Dr. Spivey's office, there's the picture of Dr. Spivey with his first Chinook that he caught, holding the fish up proudly in the picture. And also the doctor in the present moment is expressing Chinooker. Okay.
9:18 Wes: Is that the way it is in the script? I have.
9:19 Erin: Okay.
9:21 Wes: He's like, you didn't weigh the chain.
9:24 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Right. You're supposed to be. Doctor, you're supposed to be in the business of weighing people's chains. Right. And yet they. He didn't think to weigh the chain, and it was extremely heavy. And again, we have the sense of the idea of strength and overcoming through physical strength, relating both to fighting and also overcoming one's sort of chains that hold one down or whatever the case may be. So all this stuff is sort of wrapped up in that moment. But I think he sees this doctor express pride in this fishing trip. And I think the seed is planted for him to later take these guys out so that they could have a little fun day of doing a guy Thing, you know, because all these guys really need to do is be guys.
Come on, let's go fishing. Let's just get laid. And that occupational therapy is one which he seems to be consciously invoking. You know, we could make the connection back to, okay, we'll have these guys feel some pride in themselves if they go out and catch a fish. And he's encouraging them, you know, when Christopher Lloyd is putting the hook through the fish's eyes, which they're a little grossed out by, he eggs them on and is, you know, encourages them to keep going. And then they. They're sort of proud of themselves, too. And he says, you're not a lunatic now.
You're a fisherman. So now I've given you a new occupation. I've given you a sense of purpose. You have a new noun to attach to yourself. I think his benevolence is about seeing that these men are not actually so badly off that they need to be committed and just wanting to give them a little bit of a push into something, some sort of liveliness or sense of fun, you know. And I think that McMurphy has this idea that if they just go out and have a good time, if they just walk, wet their whistle and watch the ball game, if they just get laid, then they will be better.
And in fact, he's right every time. I mean, he. You know, he's right about the fishing trip. Billy loses his stutter because he gets laid. You know, he gets it back again immediately because Nurse Ratched emasculates him in a horrific scene. But that. That part of McMurphy's benevolence to me is actually a little. I mean, one doesn't look at it too closely, but that good part of him seems to me to be a little bit exaggerated. I think it's not accidental what he's doing. I think he takes an interest in these guys immediately and pities them and wants to see them feel confident.
11:50 Wes: Yeah, I still think there's a good helping of selfishness there and all that. And then we could think about his motives for wanting to manipulate these guys into doing these various things. Right. He's going to be doing something similar to Nurse Ratched. He's trying to get certain elements of his own psychological dynamics to unfold outside of him. So it might feel helpful without actually being helpful. But, yeah, the question. I mean, it's a good question. You ask whether he would consciously have any subjective desire to be helpful given the kind of character he is.
He is otherwise. And then we can ask about the more realistic consequences of his actions. Because I want to say these men need structure. We had something in my house called day structure, which is actually very good for people. They had to be out of the house in the morning at 10am they had to have a job or some other way to spend 20 hours a week. Structure actually is good for people. I don't know about pacifying music or something like that, but this principle that he introduces, the more vital, instinctual sexual principle, is only good up to a point.
This is the other thing that I see when people talk about dating. If they're not emotionally stable enough, I think, okay, right. They tell me a resident of my house would tell me started dating someone. I'm like, okay, here we go. This is going to be a hospital visit soon. So I just want to introduce the idea that this is. I mean, realistically, these men are having. They're shut down and they're having some vitality introduced into their life. And Ratched represents too much superego, too little instinct, too much repression. But we don't want them turning into McMurphys.
And also, they couldn't handle it. Like the way you can't handle the truth. You can't handle being McMurphy. They couldn't handle would be destabilizing. So I don't think. I think the movie is. Or maybe I'm just viewing it this way, but I think the Nurse Ratched, as horrible as she is, the principle that she represents isn't all wrong. Exactly. Do you know what I mean? We don't see what can go wrong with the McMurphy principle, but it can be very, very destructive.
14:13 Erin: Yes, I agree with you that I personally think that Nurse Ratched is. I am sympathetic to her to a point. I think the problem that I'm finding in the film's message is I think that the film seems to be advancing the idea that these men are not sick, that Jack Nicholson is all too sane, and that we all need to take Jack Nicholson lessons like that is. And I think that's one of the reasons why I feel like this. The film lands. It's a little bit hard to believe at times, or it's a little bit hard to be on board with fully because it seems to be holding him up as this kind of paragon and therefore stepping on the wrong side of the misogyny divide.
If this is really what it means to be a man, as the film seems to be saying, that's the impression that I got from the film, is that he's this life force that he is sane. You know, he knows more than the doctors. He, you know, can identify two cliches in a row. When the other doctor can't, he knows to weigh the chain. Yeah. And I think that's what the film is trying to say. Like look at this great guy who's wiser than the system. It's too bad that he then becomes a martyr to the system, a victim of the system. But he's inspired one person to make themselves free and perhaps the others.
I know in the book that the other guys are all inspired by his example and they, you know, they're like Lazarus, they all get up and walk.
15:36 Wes: Yeah, I think to the extent that the film is saying that, that, yeah, that's not very realistic. Right. So it's one thing to say that we have to be in, we have to have more of the Dionysian principle. Right. But it's another to say that we simply go all the way to the Dionysian. So we want to offset that. And this is, by the way, this is one of Nietzsche's points. It's not that we get rid of the Apollonian or the scientific. We have a gay science, which is to say we have a Dionysian science. We have this fabulous fusion of the rational and the irrational.
We get the optimum balance between the two. And the same thing I think with romantics like Wordsworth. Right. Didn't he explicitly say something similar? So it's not just to go to the opposite extreme. So yeah, hopefully I might be too charitably reading the movie, but I think we learn in the end that we don't just learn it in the end. We know that McMurphy is quite self destructive. That's how he ended up in prison and that's how he's getting into trouble with all these shenanigans. It's just that his self destructiveness can be helpful to others in this kind of accidental way, I think.
And that becomes sacrifice for him. It becomes sacrifice because he ends up lobotomized and then ultimately dead because of it. And it's not that everyone needs this. Some people, they don't need more instinct, they need more superego and ego. They need to be repressed more. A lot of people could use a bit more repression.
17:11 Erin: That's right.
17:12 Wes: You're not just trying to liberate them from their and then let the ID run wild. But some people, yeah, they can use more life drive, they can use more vitality, they can use more instinct as long as it's Harnessed correctly and integrated with the rest of the personality in a certain way. So you could see someone like Chief. He's the one character who could really benefit from this. I think the rest of the guys actually do need to be in the institution. They're not going to do well on the outside. On a more charitable reading of this movie, it's only Chief who's really configured to fully benefit in the long term from someone like McMurphy.
Assuming that he does. Assuming he doesn't end up back in the hospital the next day. But if McMurphy can be transformative in the long term for someone, I think this is a good. Maybe it's time to talk about the Chief, this particular character that he can be especially helpful to.
18:08 Erin: Yeah. And maybe, maybe my idea that Nicholson, that the film is single mindedly on Nicholson's side is actually because I'm reading that character's effect too generously. But it seems to me that Harding doesn't need to be there. Billy is hurt by being there in the same way that he's hurt by living with his mother. Billy needs to be kind of, you know, like a lot of this is. I'm actually. In other words, maybe I see Nicholson or maybe I see the film as positing that Nicholson is having this tremendously positive influence because I see his influence as positive.
And this goes back to, I think this. You know, the idea that I had that Nurse Ratched is like this overbearing mom and Nicholson is like this licentious dad. And these guys have too much of this overbearing mom in their lives and they need the dad. They need the. The dad who's gonna throw them in the deep end of the pool. Dad who's gonna say, let's go out and do something dangerous. When they go out on the fishing trip, everything turns out fine. You know, I mean, they get in trouble. They don't like run through the streets tearing their clothes off or crying and getting hysterical or, you know, like, you know, they're capable of being out in society, it seems.
19:14 Wes: Well, but they're in a very specific circumstance. They're on a boat. Right. Which I think is important. This little, as Melville calls it, a boat is a very important little microcosm. And yeah, I don't think they would function very well for the most part in society. Just, just based on my. Okay, my experience. And I think it. So someone like Harding might be there to avoid killing his wife. In other words, they are looking for their impulses to be restrained. If they're There voluntarily. You ever watch police videos where someone. You probably don't, but I watch these sometimes because I find it psychologically fascinating where people work very, very hard to get arrested by police by being confrontational, when otherwise they're just going to be let go and they can't help themselves.
It's almost like they want to be locked up. It's almost like they're. And they're really, really out of control. And it's almost like they want someone else to keep them in control. So this dynamic goes both ways. Where Nurse Ratched wants to be a controller, some people want to be in control because they're afraid of what their impulses will do, even if they're incorrect. It might not be that Harding would kill his wife if he stays home, but as an obsessional character, which he's a perfect representative of, he could well be afraid of that impulse.
That's why there's this double play on life and wife. You know, I'm talking about my life, not just about my wife. It's also talking about her life.
20:52 Erin: I think this reminds me, I was just thinking of this little anecdote before where, when I was in college and taking an American lit class, we were reading Emerson, who I adore. And I came into class and everybody was talking about how Emerson is just this crazy egomaniac. And I found it really inspiring. And I remember the professor said, you know, that basically that most. He finds that most of his students who are healthy psychologically find Emerson to be too much, but depressed students find him. Exactly, exactly. But depressed students find him to be really inspiring and, like, need the jolt of self confidence that Emerson is dishing out in these essays.
It's good for them. That's what they really need. And so I remember walking away from that, first of all thinking, am I depressed? And second of all, really understanding, I think, what he meant by that, because there's something about, like, you need to be in the position to be able to receive that message. And, you know, Emerson is talking to the person that he's trying to reach, you know, that that particular person, which was me in part, one man's satyr, one man's Dionysus, one man's trickster, evil antichrist, whatever he is, Topsy turvy Christ, is another man's motivational speaker, you know, and another man's positive paternal influence.
And I think that what is frustrating about so many of these patients is that they. They seem to lack the ability to be decisive, to make a decision, to act, to do something. Your description of this need for control or perhaps need to be restrained as an angle, which I had not thought of. But I think more often than not, society or people's own inhibitions turns them into passive figures who need this jolt to get them out of that. And that seems to me to be something that. That principle is something that McMurphy is supplying to these men. You know, and I could be wrong, and I think, you know, maybe you're right about Harding, that he would attack his wife.
But it seems to me that he need. That all these men need some. Just some chutzpah. They need some. Somebody to just give them a little jolt of confidence. Which is why, you know, sleeping with Candy works momentarily for Billy. At least in the film, it works.
23:19 Wes: Yeah, I'm having trouble figuring out which side you're coming down on here to the Ben.
23:23 Erin: Just though I'm distrustful of the way that the film is setting up Nicholson to be a kind of a hero, I also feel as though within the universe that the film is creating, he is the hero. And that these characters, in the way that they're constructed and the way that they're responding to Nicholson are kind of proving that they need. I'm sorry to be using his name interchangeably with McMurphy, but they're, you know, one in the same. I imagine they seem to need what he's giving them. Yeah, it may not be actually true in terms of the way that what they would need in real life, but in the fictional world, they seem to need what he is supplying.
Now, I find that to be troubling and somewhat, in terms of this relationship with women, somewhat misogynistic. But I also think these men need a positive paternal influence to help them get a little decisiveness in their lives. At least in the film. That seems to be what they are lacking, these characters, and he's supplying it. But maybe this would be an opportunity for us to talk about why this works on Chief and what makes Chief.
24:33 Wes: Well, let me, before we do that. So I think it is probably part of the social. You know, there's a very kind of 1970s social commentary to the film, which is anti establishment, probably, and anti bureaucratic and maybe even, you know, not happy with the concept of mental health. You know, you have people these days who are right against all psychiatric medication or. Which is foolish, but they don't. It just reflects the fact that they don't really know what they're talking about. But it's a little unclear to me on where the film is on that but it's crafted well enough to be a bit.
It's ambiguous enough to me where you could give it a more charitable reading and say, well, they do need that in a sense, but it's very context dependent. So they can have a fun time on a boat and they are having a nice party, but that's in the hospital. They're still locked in and there's still going to be staff the next morning on a real world basis. It's not a sustainable thing for them. They do need a different relationship to the instinctual and they are shut down in various ways. The solution is not just, hey, let's be more instinctual.
Freud made a big point of this because I think people misunderstood them. He wrote a. I gotta remember the title here. Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness in which he complains a lot about the sexual mores of the time and the fact that there basically isn't even really any dating, right. And just people end up with each other and then they're very unhappy. But he also makes a point in that essay to say, yeah, just saying, don't be uptight and let's have free love and let instincts reign. That is not a good solution. To say that some people need this more Dionysian element introduced is, I think, absolutely true.
But how it's integrated is key. And it's like a long term therapeutic process. It's not enough to have this temporary paternal, lively figure. So this is a very temporary experience for these guys. It is therapeutic. Does say something about what could be different in that environment. Right. So if Nurse Ratched were a little more lively, that could be good. But of course she could be too lively. We wouldn't want Nurse ratched to be McMurphy. That would be. Yeah, not good for them either.
27:07 Erin: Well, here's. Okay, maybe this is my bias or something, but one of the things I think that is detrimental to these guys or to anyone really is talking things to death. One of the things that he's doing is not necessarily just bringing in the instinctual. He's having them do things. It's like occupational therapy, you know, instead of just sitting around and being, you know, made to talk about these things which they don't want to talk about and which make them extremely uncomfortable and which make the men around them listening to it extremely uncomfortable.
And instead of just this constant passive, this kind of like, you know, benevolent thing that Ratched is doing where you don't act at all, there's no activity and everything is suppressed. There's just the idea of let's watch the ball game together. Let's. Okay. Not necessarily getting drunk and sleeping with women and stuff like that, but going out and doing something. Just doing something. It seems that that's the big problem. These men want restraint. Well, it seems that they're already overly restrained in their behavior. They're inhibited in their behavior, and then all they want to do is talk about everything.
28:15 Wes: But we do know they're taken on field trips of some sort with that bus. We don't know exactly what they are. Right.
28:21 Erin: And they have the basketball court and they have cards.
28:27 Wes: Yeah. But it's pretty meager. Yeah, it's pretty.
28:30 Erin: Right. That seems important. And that's the role that. I mean, they're being taken on these field trips by the orderlies. Right. So it seems as though the actual therapeutic element is not incorporating this kind of thing. It seems that recreation is their break from talk therapy, which is their only recourse and their own. The only way that they're being ministered to psychologically. That, I think, is a. That's a problem for these men. I think they need to feel. I mean, I don't know. What do I know? I'm not an expert, but. But I would seem to me that they would maybe need to feel useful, that they are doing an activity that gives them some pride, like fishing. Being able to catch a fish.
29:10 Wes: Yeah.
29:11 Erin: Doing something that has an end result that they could feel accomplished. Not necessarily just sitting around and talking in circles like Harding does, or just getting embarrassed or, you know, talking all the time. Seems like something that. I mean, it's certainly something I don't want to do, you know, so if I were in this place, I wouldn't want to be constantly talking about my problems. That was. Seems to me that would be a very painful and detrimental thing if it were not broken up by some other form of therapy. Not electroshock.
29:42 Wes: Yeah. I think fishing field trips are a good idea. It's just the stealing the boat part.
29:49 Erin: Right. But I mean, like, in a directed, therapeutic way, rather than just. What are they being taken, for instance, to a movie theater to just sit passively in front of a screen? I don't know. You know, we don't really know.
30:00 Wes: Yeah. We don't see that in the film. And that's. You know, that's. I thought was interesting because we could have had this. We could have been hit over the head with this. We could have been shown a very depressing field trip. And maybe there was. And maybe that was cut out of the movie. We could have been shown orderly. You know, the orderlies are cruel and not great at points, but they're not like caricatures of cruel orderlies.
30:30 Erin: No, not at all.
30:31 Wes: And they're not even as bad as stories I've heard of, you know, institutions here in Massachusetts of what goes on. Right. So we could have been hit over the head more in the movie with that type of thing. I think it's going for a little bit more ambiguity or nuance in that respect. I think at the points where Nurse Ratched gets really cruel and humiliates Billy, for instance, there's no longer any nuance. But it's true to her. I still think it's true in a sense. Right. It's not just caricature. This is her character and it fits. And she can be in general, she's not necessarily acting out like that, but she does it.
She does in that context, in a key moment. So, yeah, I totally agree that activity helps. And I used to basically force people to do that, which they hated, including socialization time, which is one of the things they mentioned in the movie. Forced socialization, not letting people be isolated. I had to do that. And they often were not happy with that. But this is a good point about talking is not going to be enough. And part of what's therapeutic, I think the point you're making has to come from real life. So I know you would have taken them to the baseball game.
Definitely.
31:44 Erin: Of course. Of course. I mean, this is a lot of this, a lot of where I sort of agree with the film is this idea that too much. There's too much rumination. This seems to me to be the extremely prevalent problem that too much rumination, not enough action. And maybe that's easy for me to say, I don't know, because then maybe if people were just acting instead of ruminating, the world would be in chaos. But I think action of any kind, any kind of positive action. But then again, I don't want this conversation to devolve just into what I would do if I were running the institution.
32:19 Wes: But, yeah, and I'm just saying they have to be made feel safe to act. They have to feel like their action is not going to kill anyone or whatever. Dangerous things come from the use of one's impulses.
32:32 Erin: Well, and something about, actually, McMurphy coming back unscathed from ECT seems to increase everyone's feeling of safety. His resilience seems to inspire them with more courage, because that's when Cheswick gets upset over the cigarettes and fights back. And has some agency in that moment. It results in chaos because of Nurse Ratched's need for everything to be controlled and her refusal to sort of compromise with them or really listen to their concerns. I'm just interested in what you think in. Chief is particularly receptive to McMurphy. If I had to guess, I would say his being so inhibited as to not be able to speak or respond to people.
McMurphy represents something that's. For him, you know, like a depressed person. Encountering Emerson, we somehow get to normal instead of from normal person to, you know, fascist dictator or whatever. The. Whatever the worrying effects of Emerson might be on someone. Too much confidence. But McMurphy's influence on him works like a tonic.
33:37 Wes: Yeah. So let's look at. Maybe let's look at what the Chief says about what's troubling him. Because, of course, he's. He's chosen not to speak and he's chosen to pretend that he's deaf, which. Who could blame him in that environment if he doesn't really want to communicate with all those people, he's there. He's using it more as a refuge. So, anyway, let's look. I think, yeah, it could help just to look at what the Chief says. So McMurphy says to him, chief, I can't take it no more. I gotta get out of here. And Chief says, he can't. And then McMurphy says, It's easier than you think, Chief.
The Chief says, for you, maybe. You're a lot bigger than me. Which is a great line in the movie because we learn that, you know, despite his physical size the Chief thinks of himself as spiritually small, in a way. Murphy says, why, Chief? You're as big as a goddamn tree trunk. And then the Chief talks about his father. My papa's real big. He did like he pleased. So there's a reference to problems of impulse, which is one of the reasons why people shut down like this. That's why everybody worked on him. I don't know what that means exactly. The last time I seen my father, he was blind in the cedars from drinking.
What does that mean, blind in the cedars? I mean, it sounds like he drank some bad alcohol and went blind. But blind in the Cedars or that just means blackout drunk.
35:04 Erin: I don't know.
35:04 Wes: Do you know what that means?
35:06 Erin: No, I don't.
35:07 Wes: The reason why I'm going to this speech is just. Yeah. I didn't have time to parse all of it, but I thought it was something we would come to, so. And Then he said it. And then every time he put the bottle to his mouth, he don't suck out of it. It sucks out of him until he shrunk, so wrinkled and yellow, even the dogs don't know him. So his father was real big, but got smaller because of his impulses. The impulse. The release of impulses, in the case of his father did not lead right to vitality. Chief has learned the lesson that.
35:41 Erin: But people working on him, too. I think that's related perhaps to the fact that people were also sucking the life out of him. They were leeching off of that vitality. So he was somehow being victimized by the people around him in addition to being ruled by his own impulses.
35:58 Wes: Yeah, I just. Again, that's a line I find really opaque. I don't know. But, yeah, I mean, what you're saying makes sense. But he did like he pleased. Yeah. That's why everybody worked on him, took advantage of him.
36:11 Erin: Yeah. Like McMurphy, his sort of overabundance of sanity or his bigness or his capacity seems to put a target on his back. And that's the. What do they call it? Tall Poppy syndrome. Okay, you want to cut the tall poppy. The thing that stands out, stands above.
36:29 Wes: Okay, I like this. Yeah, this makes sense. So the Chief. And there are elements of McMurphy and the Chief's father, but what he saw was the destructive side of that. So his father became small by having the life sucked out of him by liquor. Right. And Dionysus is the God of liquor as well. So he seems to make himself small preemptively. And that includes by not speaking, pretending like he can't hear, not communicating with people. He's such a big, strong person, but he doesn't want to. It seems to me like, again, this is another place where he doesn't want to do something with his impulses anyway. So wrinkled and yellow that even the dogs don't know him. And then McMurphy says, Killed him. And he says, I'm not saying they killed him. They just worked on him the way they're working on you. Yeah, I don't know exactly what exactly that means.
37:26 Erin: Yeah, that sort of taking him down. So it's almost implied that he was, you know, his propensity for liquor was encouraged by the people around him. His self destruction was perhaps, you could say a setup, but that's a little bit too obvious or a little bit too naked. It would be something more envious and pernicious. But that similar relationship that ratched has to McMurphy and the tall poppy who needs to be neutralized through lobotomy because he cannot be brought into the fold or restrained in the way that she wishes to restrain or pacified in the way that she wishes to pacify him.
38:03 Wes: I mean, we do get. McMurphy becomes lobotomized, and he really is, in a sense, deaf and dumb. Right. He really is what the Chief was pretending to be. Completely out of touch. That comparison is a little bit rough, but you can see how seeing that, seeing someone else made that way in another person, I think might have put Chief in touch with the desire to not preemptively do that to himself, or not to partially be self lobotomized, so to speak, at least at a social level. So I don't know. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out here what it is about McMurphy that could have been especially therapeutic for Chief, despite the fact that this kind of McMurphy, like, character, Chief's father, really, it was. For him, it was just entirely destructive. Right. Alcohol and impulse and all that.
38:57 Erin: Maybe the desire to see McMurphy succeed where the father failed. So to see those two in parallel, and then ultimately, when McMurphy is made to fail, the decision to somehow. What can that mean? Decide that, you know, okay, if this is maybe an inevitability for those men who I find, great, then I'm going to let the world do it to me instead of doing it to myself. Perhaps. But that seems a pretty bleak way of interpreting that final act of freeing himself.
39:28 Wes: Yeah. And we know that it's not just seeing McMurphy lobotomized and then killing him. That. That's not entirely the catalyst for him breaking out. Because he says he's ready to do it, Right? He says, I knew you wouldn't leave without me. I was waiting for you. Now we can make it, Mac. I feel big as a damn mountain. So something has happened between the party and McMurphy's return to the ward. I guess that's enough for Chief to go from feeling too small to leave to feeling big enough to leave. And of course, there's that great symbolic act of throwing the. What is it, a hydrotherapy station or something? I don't know what. The big fixture. Anyway.
40:12 Erin: Yeah.
40:12 Wes: Waterfall. Taking that. Right. So he is literally physically big enough to lift it the way McMurphy wasn't and to tear it out of the floor and throw it through the window. And the parallel there, of course, is the psychological or spiritual lifting required.
40:31 Erin: Yeah. This is almost not worth saying, but if McMurphy returns from the dead with ECT. That's his resurrection. Now, this is his 40 days on earth of teaching his final lessons before he then goes off. Right. So in a way, it's like, okay, he needed. And now he's converted his faithful, and then he sort of ascends into the ether, and the work has been done. The conversion work has been done on Chief, or the work of the Holy Spirit, whatever you want to call it. And so now it's as if McMurphy has ascended. He's left, he's died, and. Yeah, ascended into whatever kind of Heaven will accept McMurphy. Aka, you know, hey, whatever direction he's traveling in, he's traveled there.
41:29 Wes: Or it's purgatory. And purgatory is just like a psychiatric unit
41:34 Erin: and he has to help Martini for the next thousand years. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So finally, teach Martini how to play blackjack.
41:43 Wes: Take people on fishing trips. Right.
41:45 Erin: That's a little too fun. It's not quite sufficiently purgatorial, especially if there's a candy on board. But anyway, yeah.
41:53 Wes: This is going to be the final word. Word. What you're saying. Oh.
41:55 Erin: Oh, no.
41:56 Wes: This Comparing.
41:58 Erin: No, no, no, no. Please, let's say something else.
42:01 Wes: This is the way the episode needs to end.
42:06 Erin: Oh, no. What did we miss? What did we. What final word can we end on
42:12 Wes: that isn't Misogynist Jesus? Misogynist Jesus. What are some other good names? Evil Jesus. I don't know. He's died for our sins. And when I say for our sins, I mean so that we can continue.
42:30 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Well,
42:36 Wes: do you have any other last words?
42:41 Erin: I can't. I feel my frontal lobe is not. Not communicating anymore with the rest of my.
42:47 Wes: Is there anything you would like to take back. For the sake of your soul?
42:57 Erin: Many things. Many things.
43:00 Wes: All right, thank you.
43:02 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Bacchic Redemption in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975)
Nov 17, 2025
Nurse Ratched likes a rigged game, according to R.P. McMurphy. And it’s true that the game he is playing—lawless and hedonistic, but also vital and free-spirited—is unwinnable on her sandlot. As their conflict develops, we seem to be asked to compare the therapeutic value of McMurphy’s introduction of the Dionysian, to Ratched’s attempt to enforce an ordered calm within the psychiatric ward over which she is absolute ruler. What happens when the Godzilla of superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Wes & Erin discuss the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Upcoming Episodes: Erin’s book “Avail,” “The Third Man,” “Julius Caesar.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Nurse Ratched likes a rigged game, according to RP McMurphy. And it's true that the game he is playing, lawless and hedonistic, but also vital and free spirited, is unwinnable on her sandlot. As their conflict develops, we seem to be asked to compare the therapeutic value of McMurphy's introduction of the Dionysian to Ratched's attempt to enforce an ordered calm within the psychiatric ward over which she is absolute ruler. What happens when the Godzilla of Superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Today we discuss the 1975 film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, what would you do if someone tried to stop you from watching the World Series? Would you start a riot?
1:21 Erin: I would and I have.
1:23 Wes: I know that baseball is very important to you.
1:25 Erin: It is, yeah. That was one of the more personally affecting moments in the film. I will say let them watch the World Series. The significance of the way he calls that imaginary game was not lost on me either. I thought, interesting that that was a series, which is a little painful for me to think about because the Yankees were swept in four games by the Dodgers. But he imagines that Sandy Koufax is being beaten by the batter, which, you know, not literally, but he's imagining that Koufax is. Is pitching and his. And the ball is being hit out of the park, which I think is, you know, a pretty anti authoritarian kind of statement in and of itself.
You know, pitching is basically fascist and batters are. Batters are trying to resist the authority of the pitcher, which, you know, baseball is also the only, I think the only sport that I know of where the defense has the ball. Listeners can correct me if I'm wrong about that. Yeah. So he imagines that the. The anti authoritarian batter defeats the great pitcher Sandy Koufax in that moment, even though it's not literally true. It is a fantasy.
2:29 Wes: Did you know that from memory that
2:31 Erin: I know that the 63. Yeah, I know the record. I know that's an infamous World Series if you're a Yankees fan. So I don't know. The play by play. Somebody might have gotten a home run off of Koufax over the course of the series, but I just thought it was interesting that he was imagining they were getting beaten.
2:51 Wes: So this is set in 1963. I don't think I knew that. It's a 1975 movie. Right. Based on a novel. Do we know when the novel was set? I mean. Sorry. When the novel was published?
3:03 Erin: Yeah, I think It's. I think 62, for some reason. So I don't.
3:06 Wes: Yeah, it is 62. Yeah. Ken Kesey. Ken Kesey.
3:11 Erin: Have you read it?
3:12 Wes: No, I haven't. I downloaded it. I thought I might read a little bit, but I didn't end up reading anything. Have. Have you. So I think that was his one big. He wrote another novel. I don't know if he had any other big successes, but. Yeah. When I. When I suggested we do this movie, I was curious about whether you were excited to do it or. Where does this movie stand for you? Well, yeah, there you go. This is what I thought I did. You didn't see that. Excited.
3:41 Erin: Is this the kind of movie I'm supposed to get excited about with? You know, I mean, I think the. The title. You know, when one thinks of this film, you don't think it's gonna necessarily be the most fun you've ever had,
3:54 Wes: but it's got Jack Nicholson, but it's.
3:57 Erin: Yeah. Acting like it has something.
3:59 Wes: Are we gonna get a Jack Nicholson impression from you?
4:01 Erin: No, no, I wouldn't dare. I wouldn't dare.
4:03 Wes: No. Because we got a compliment on your
4:08 Erin: Daniel. Plainview.
4:10 Wes: Your Daniel Plainview.
4:11 Erin: I'm slipping.
4:12 Wes: That's my impression.
4:15 Erin: No, I mean, I think I had seen it in my early 20s and it had really disturbed me. You know, maybe not the best time personally for me to be watching a movie like that, frankly, but I think the prospect filled me with a little bit of dread because I wasn't really remembering that. There were a lot of funny moments. It seemed like it might be something that would be heavy in various ways, and it was. But I just came away with a real admiration for the performances. I mean, one of the best supporting casts ever, I think. I just absolutely love those group scenes.
4:51 Wes: Danny DeVito.
4:52 Erin: I know.
4:52 Wes: Getting the ball out of the park.
4:54 Erin: Yeah.
4:55 Wes: He can act, actually.
4:57 Erin: How dare you?
4:58 Wes: Oh, no. Because you like the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Is that the.
5:06 Erin: Oh, that's. Yeah, that's the. That's the bar, huh? No, like Romancing the Stone and. I don't know any of his sitcom performances.
5:18 Wes: Yeah, but in Romancing the Stone, you know, he's just doing his Danny DeVito thing.
5:22 Erin: Yeah, but that's. That's. That's what I like.
5:24 Wes: He's a real character. He's not just himself. He's a. But. Yeah, so while I picked it, I was just looking at a list of. Maybe I was looking at that AFI list of Hundred greatest movies or something. Something I wanted to see. And specifically the 70s, of course, since that's the. For me, the golden age of filmmaking, it's gotta be in the 70s. But I didn't remember having any particular feeling about the movie, except, I mean, I think it had been so long since I watched it. I remember being impressed by it, but I remembered very little of it. I think, as I watched it, I remembered the ECT scene with Jack Nicholson. That was something that really stayed with me. The iconic final scene, of course, but also that's been parodied so much that, you know, how can you not know that scene even if you haven't seen the movie?
6:15 Erin: I had forgotten that scene.
6:19 Wes: Wow, that's interesting.
6:20 Erin: Yeah.
6:21 Wes: We'll have to discuss what that means.
6:24 Erin: That part of my brain was cut out.
6:27 Wes: The large part of you, the free. The large part of you, the big man yearning for freedom. I remembered Nurse Ratched and her general demeanor. Although I always thought her name was Nurse Ratchet, I did not realize there was a D at the end of that name. And I wonder if when I hear people say it, am I just mishearing it or are they making the same mistake? I don't know, but it's a really clever name. And maybe we should just start with that because it seems to be combination of ratchet and wretched. And I think we could say she has both of those aspects to her character.
Right. So Ratchet being a kind of wrench that you. You can move and only, you know, it's tightening will only happen in one direction. So you don't have to actually take the wrench off and put it back on and then tighten again. So if you're in a tight space, you can just do a back and forth motion. It's very convenient. So, you know, you can use it to loosen as much as to tighten. But I think we think of her as someone who is very tightened and also maybe someone who. The way she manipulates others in her very iconically passive aggressive way.
You could think of the Ratchet as being involved in that. Winding people up, so to speak, during group therapy, which is not really what you're supposed to do. And then the other part of it is just wretched, we imagine. Well, the ratchet is the way to deal with the wretchedness in her case. And we're left to speculate about what her wretchedness entails. Although we can see in her character and her personality that there's a lack of vitality. There's a kind of flatness. Therapists would say her affect is flat. She does give off a sense of peace and serenity.
I think before you get to know her. Right. You could call it a poker face of a certain sort. But we see that there's a lot of anger underneath all that.
8:24 Erin: It's one of those moments where I'm grateful to be hosting this podcast with a man, because I never would have thought of that ratchet. I don't actually know how ratchets work, so that's very helpful.
8:37 Wes: Well, you're also a big baseball fan, so I don't know.
8:41 Erin: That's one of the few things I can say.
8:44 Wes: I know pretty well. And I would not have been surprised if you were secretly a car mechanic.
8:50 Erin: I know, I know, I know. It would be very Marisa Tomei of me if I were. But alas, I'll just come out and say that I think there are some elements of misogyny in the film which bother me. I Wonder about dressing Ms. Ratched up in the Civil War nurse kind of cape at the beginning of the film. What we're supposed to ultimately glean from her character. I mean, she's certainly sadistic, and she certainly does wind these men up, and she certainly is no help to them in group therapy, and she's certainly an extremely emasculating presence. But are we supposed to get the sense from her that she believes she's helping?
9:29 Wes: Yeah, I would say at a conscious level.
9:31 Erin: Okay.
9:32 Wes: That's the impression I got.
9:33 Erin: You know, we could say that she's sort of the ultimate evil mother figure and that she seems to want to keep these men in a state of dependence on her, which seems to counteract the therapeutic intentions behind her behavior. Basically keep them in this womb where they're not going to make any progress, where they're not going to have any agency or think for themselves in any way. And she seems also to have, I mean, I think this other nurse that Miss. What is it? Pilbow? Is that her name? You know, this is sort of silent. She does say a few things at the beginning of the film, but then it seems as though she reacts to Jack Nicholson's sort of characterological force by retreating more and more into herself.
And then the only expression or noise that she makes past a certain point in the film is to scream at seeing Billy. So is her silence a result of Ratched's dominance? Is it a result of Nicholson's force, which, you know, the force of his personality which seems to cause her to become more and more submissive or more and more silent or unable to move, or the battle of wills that goes on between Nicholson or I should say McMurphy and Ratched is really interesting because I remembered it being more aggressive than what actually happens, which is, in fact, very little.
Except for when he's strangling her. There's.
11:01 Wes: Yes, yeah, maybe let's pause on that point because I think that's important, which is that if I had the same experience, if you re watch the movie, after some time, you'll think, oh, well, she's not so bad for a while.
11:15 Erin: Right, Right.
11:17 Wes: She's. What is she? You know, she's dealing with a bunch of crazy people and she's keeping her calm and, you know. Yeah, her affect and the way she presents herself is a bit creepy, but it really is kind of a slow boil, I think, with our discovery of her sadism. I mean, we do get a sense of it in the. In group therapy with her, I think, actively trying to humiliate men around romantic relationships. Right. So with Harding talking about his wife and then with Billy, Billy seems to be very ashamed of his sexuality and she's really rubbing that in, which is important because in a way, Jack Nicholson's character, McMurphy as a sort of representative of Dionysius and a satyr and a sex criminal, you know, he's very much about anti shame when it comes to sexuality.
So that's another sense in which he represents an opposing force to Ratched. So I think we can speculate that she's in a situation. This is her way of relating to men. And it may be her only way of relating to men is being with men who she has complete control over men who are vulnerable because of their mental health. And then she plays out this thing which really has something to do with her by intruding into their sex lives. Right. So normal therapy and normal group therapy is not this intrusive. You don't. I think as McMurphy later objects or someone objects, you don't try to get people to talk about these things if they don't really want to.
Yeah. So the point I was trying to get to, just to reinforce what you were saying is that she's likely entirely unconscious of her sadism and thinks that she's helping even as she's hurting. But this is something all therapists have to watch out for. So it's very easy to be convinced that what you're doing is in the spirit of being constructive and helpful. But maybe it's not right. Maybe the question you ask the patient about some detail in their life is not really about being helpful to them, but it's about your own morbid curiosity or your own even perverse curiosity, or it may be even something sadistic that's coming out some kind of enactment.
And this is something we do all the time in relationships. You know, it's not. Not just in therapy and trying to get good at noticing these enactments. I mean, that's a real art and it's a lifelong project. But, yeah, she is deep into it.
13:41 Erin: Yeah. I think certainly the group therapy sessions I saw as a form of ritual humiliation. And yet one of the things that bothered me about the film, one of the things I perceived as being perhaps misogynistic, is the fact that there's hardly a character in the film who is not there because of a woman or because of a problem with a woman. Even that opening scene where McMurphy comes in in those shackles that are attached to that, you know, that belt in the. I guess it's the atrium of the asylum, and there's that winding staircase above him and all of these matronly women in plain clothes, presumably the mothers of the patients that are visiting them, you know, looking down on him. It's like this, you know, this image of just incredible maternal oversight or overbearing.
14:34 Wes: Oh, I thought these were female patients.
14:37 Erin: They're in normal dress.
14:39 Wes: Are they?
14:39 Erin: Yeah, and I don't know that they would be. You know, we don't get any indication that there are female patients in the build, I think. Would there not be hijinks to try and get to that supply of.
14:52 Wes: Well, I was thinking they were in a different ward or unit or something, but, yeah, maybe. Sounds like I hallucinated this.
14:59 Erin: So there's the idea that these men are here because of some negative relationship with a woman. Or in McMurphy's case, it's statutory rape. But women are somehow made to be responsible for their either voluntary or involuntary commitment, possibly accepting. Chief. But still, it seems that, yeah, the purpose of harping on this in these group therapy sessions is to humiliate them around these relationships so that she's protecting, particularly exploiting this. And, you know, I wonder what the position of a female nurse is or should be to these types of patients.
Like, it seems just inappropriate to me that they would have a female nurse working with these men. I mean, that's like a huge problem right there. And then I also thought about the fact of her dress and what seemed to me to be a very clear sort of civil war coded like she looks like Florence Nightingale when she first comes into the building. There's a very Civil War era type of look to that cape. And I thought about the position of nurses historically, battlefield nurses, as women who are. They're in the position of serving men who have been wounded over the course of, you know, enacting this large scale aggression against each other.
So that seems to be sort of inverted for Nurse Ratched or flipped on its head, whereby the only way that she can relate to men is in this wounded state, as I think you've already suggested, but that the more helpless they are, the more she seems to like them. Which seems to be why she's catering her treatment to the most emasculated or denatured of the men in the ward. You know, she's insistent that even men who are not coherent have a vote for the World Series. She's insistent that the music needs to be turned up for older men who may not be able to hear it, even if it affects those men with good hearing and makes it impossible for them to talk to each other or makes them aggravated so that everything is tailored or catered to the most wounded among them.
So it seems that this is not about traditional nursing in which you would help these men get back to the state of vigor so that they could go back out and be men and fight on the battlefield in this particular case, but that you wish to keep them in a state of needing your care. And I wanted to tie that back to the fact that they seem to be there because of women. So that too seems to be a kind of, you know, she's not nursing them because they've been wounded in battle. They somehow had a wound to their masculinity. And rather than putting them in a position where that masculinity can be restored, Nurse Ratched is trying to leech more and more of that from them somehow, so that it's sort of a double bind that she has them in both in her position as a nurse and in her position as someone who's supposed to be helping men with a particular kind of wound.
18:04 Wes: Yeah, I think she has something important in common with those men, which is that she like them this is speculation, but I think this is what we're meant to believe. She, like them, cannot really be in a romantic relationship and this is a replacement. So for the men, they don't have the maturity or the mental health to do that. And that is part of why they're there. And romantic relationships, of course, features prominently in people's mental health problems or in their distress. And that includes the very first romantic relationship, the one with one's own mother, which is why.
Part of why misogyny is such a prevalent thing in men and in women. Mothers get a lot of blame, consciously or unconsciously. And she is also, in a way, a quasi maternal figure. I think it's. It wouldn't be uncommon to have a woman running group therapy. And as you know, as I've mentioned on the show, I ran a halfway house for the mentally ill for seven years and that was a live in position. And I had four staff members and usually my staff members were female. And that's just based on the applications that I was getting. And mental health now is a very female dominated field.
19:16 Erin: But even in a specifically male, like in an institutional setting with only male inmates, it's just surprising to me that there are no men that are there to administer any kind of therapy.
19:29 Wes: Yeah, I mean, there's Dr. Spivey, but we don't see him very. Is that Spivak maybe?
19:35 Erin: Is the name Spivey. Spivey or Spivey, let's call him Doc like everyone else.
19:39 Wes: Yeah, Spivy. All right, Spivey. But we don't see much of him because Nurse Ratched is one of the most capable nurses.
19:47 Erin: Right. Well, there's a. Did you see the sign at one point at the nurse's station that says if you would like to make an appointment to see the doctor, see Nurse Ratched, you have to go through her to see a male authority figure. And then those male authority figures, of course, are shown as being extremely ineffectual and ultimately under her thumb. They take her advice.
20:10 Wes: She's got a bunch of orderlies who are very much under her thumb. And then I think you're talking about the other administrators as well, anonymous administrators, because she is able to convince them to keep McMurphy there. And we'll talk about later why that's so important when they think he should be cut loose and sent loose, so to speak, and sent back to jail. I had a similar thought that it was odd in the sense that, well, the orderlies are there to deal with aggression. So there's that as Far as the safety factor goes. But there is an odd aspect of the setting in the sense that you have.
Right. She can go behind the desk and there's a window there that can be closed, as if that's some element of safety. When, as we find out, it's easy for one of the patients to just go and open the door and go into that little office. And it was relatively easy for McMurphy to punch through that window when the time comes. So the window is window dressing, so to speak. And she is often out right on the floor anyway, so there's something interesting there about the division. Her sense in which she's a spectator, where she kind of remains aloof, remains behind that window.
And the same thing with using the use of the microphone. Neither of them is really of that much use the microphone or the window. I mean, you know, she can make announcements on the yard, but it doesn't seem like there's much to do in that respect. I think it has more to do with how she needs to relate to the men, which is to have this position of control, but to do it at a distance.
21:48 Erin: Yeah. Thinking through that a little bit. The microphone allows her to never have to raise her voice so she can keep that same volume level and that sort of flat affect in the voice but amplify it through the microphone.
22:02 Wes: Very good. Yeah, very important.
22:04 Erin: I think there's probably something similar happening with the ultimate ineffectualness of the window in the nurse's station. And yet the idea that it's there to enforce some sort of sense of a barrier, even if the barrier doesn't really exist, or some sort of power distinction.
22:20 Wes: Role distinction. Yeah.
22:22 Erin: And also a sense of serenity as well. Like a sort of veneer of, you know, you have to go up and you have to knock on the window. And there's almost a. Come to think of it, you know, there's almost a kind of a courtliness about it, like they have to go up and they have to advance up to the window and make their request and, you know, Nurse Ratched has to then let down her hair or whatever, that kind of thing. There's a little bit of a fortification of her power which at the same time preserves a kind of femininity where she doesn't have to become aggressive or assert any kind of vim or vigor into what she does.
23:01 Wes: Yeah. I think the movie conveys this sense of serenity from the very beginning where we see her car driving in at a distance, you know, in the landscape. The one that Chief will end up running out into. In the end. And then she's, you know, she enters and walks down the hallway and says her good mornings. This will be bookended, you know, near the end of the movie when they find the aftermath of the party, those good mornings happen as well, but in a much different context. So she's saying her good mornings to the orderlies and then moving on to medication and then music.
So there's a lot of alliteration. And then after that, McMurphy, morning, good morning, medication, music and McMurphy. But the. Yeah, the first three are all about serenity and pacification. Pacify them with medication, pacify them with pleasant music, but music that's too loud and so is in a passive aggressive way, driving them crazy at the same time, right? And so, yeah, it's a very Apollonian world, a world of peace. Right. That McMurphy, as a representative of Dionysius, I think, will intrude upon. He's given a very contrasting entrance, right?
We see him come in through the same gate as Nurse Ratched comes in, but he, unlike her, is dancing and playing the fool and doing all that, being the satyr, being the trickster. We get that sense in the very beginning. We get the sense that these two people are characterological opposites. This power dynamic I think we're talking about, you can see it repeated in different ways. So, for instance, there's an interesting power dynamic between Harding and Cheswick, where Cheswick is almost like the helpless, dependent part of oneself. He's a bit of a baby.
He can get stressed out and start crying easily. He's impressionable, maybe, and in need of someone in control. And then Harding is very, very much in control. And they seem to be a kind of pair, feeding off of each other in the beginning in their game, although McMurphy is going to very much interfere with that dynamic. But we can think of this as an intrapsychic dynamic as well, between the powerful side of oneself, the part of oneself that's in control, and then a potentially disavowed helpless part of oneself, what Jung would call like a shadow ego.
So naturally, we'd speculate that this is a dynamic that's internal to Ratched's own psyche, her own character. And what she is ultimately fending off is her own sense of helplessness and humiliation. Something which, of course, is going to show up in the context of romantic relationships and keep her, if my speculation is correct, keep her from being able to engage in that. And the same thing for the men in this. This ward that's part of why they're not capable of engaging in these relationships because of the kinds of power dynamics involved in intimacy, surrender, helplessness.
Things that just can be too unbearable if you don't have your psychical shit together, so to speak. So now she enacts this. She enacts her role as a nurse, a mental health nurse as a kind of substitute for a romantic relationship with a bunch of helpless men that she can be a helper to nominally but also engage in sadistic control of.
26:30 Erin: That's really well put. What do we take then of the fact that McMurphy seems to feed off of her as well? I mean, I thought one of the more interesting observations that these doctors make is that the person that McMurphy is closest to is also the person he dislikes the most. Right. They're in this. It's like mom and dad. Mom and dad are always fighting in the ward. And that, I don't know, need to put a bee in her bonnet, or however he puts it. Need to. The need to dress her down somehow seems to also be the compulsion that's driving him. I mean, one would, I suppose, say that he sees her as a repressed person who it's his job to sort of antagonize or bother out of her repression.
And that's going to be his therapeutic role with her. I mean, I don't know if he sees her in those terms. He seems to view himself as a more proper therapist for the men than she is. So certainly has a therapeutic relationship to the other men. But I wonder if that extends to her as well or if he simply sees her as a sort of like, asexual, antagonistic force.
27:44 Wes: Yeah, I don't think he's thinking about being a therapeutic presence at all. I just think he inadvertently is. Right. He's, like, stealing from people. He's robbing all these people of her cigarettes. This becomes a big deal later on. And Ratched kind of has a good defense of herself. Keeping your cigarettes in the room, in the office so you won't get robbed by this guy. It's not. Not everything she's doing is completely unfair. Right. He's selfish. He's sexually. Right. He's sexually ravenous to the point of not really caring about the other person.
I assume the two women in the movie are prostitutes. I think it's clear in the book. But that's probably about the kind of relationship that he can have, is a relationship with prostitutes. So he is also, you know, impaired, I think, in this way, as the other the other men are. But with Ratched. Let's look at that moment, because there's a moment where there's a card game. This is really kind of at the end of the first act, but at the end of the first act, there's a card game that goes awry.
28:47 Erin: Is this the Martini?
28:49 Wes: Oh, yeah.
28:50 Erin: Martini, sing Hit Me over and over again.
28:53 Wes: Yes. But also, the way it starts out is hilarious because Martini wants to bet a nickel and so breaks the cigarette in half because each cigarette represents a dime. And McMurphy says, if you break it in half, you don't get two nickels, you get shit. Try and smoke it. You understand? Yes. At a certain point, this ends up with Martini impulsively asking McMurphy to hit him in blackjack. And then what happens?
29:23 Erin: He shows remarkable restraint and not hitting Martini. Same thing in the Monopoly game. I feel really bad for Harding, who
29:32 Wes: I love, by the way. So I'm just seeing this in my notes here. This is the first time, because I know some essays have compared him to a Christ figure, right? And is he Dionysius? Is he a trickster? Is he a Christ figure? And before I'd even seen any of that, this is the moment where I thought, God, this is like Jesus and the lepers. He's surrounded by all these needy people. He's inverse Jesus, of course, because he's just trying to take advantage of them, really have fun. But he is showing a certain amount of restraint towards them. And then he loses it.
And. Right. And he doesn't take it out on them. He takes it out on the Pharisees, so to speak. So he's like, jesus Christ Almighty. Do you nuts want to play cards or do you want to fucking jerk off? Sounds like a lot like a lot like Jesus. Play the game. I can't even hear myself think already here. All right. Now, there's a good reason he can't hear himself think is because Martini is saying, hit me over and over again. These guys are off their rockers, but instead he heads towards the nurses station. In fact, he goes into the office and Pilbow screams when she sees him in there and says, stay back.
Again, this is like the whole weird office thing where suddenly they're dangerous because they're in the office. You're around them on the floor all the time. But patients aren't allowed in the nurses station, as she said. So he's broken a rule. Law and order has been defied. So he has to get out of the office and get in line at the window and Ask for the music to be turned down. And then she'll say, that music is. And this is ratchet. Now, that music is for everyone, Mr. McMurphy. I know, but do you think we might ease it down a little so maybe the boys didn't have to shout?
What you probably don't realize is that we have a lot of volt. And then she gives that explanation. She's not just trying to drive them all crazy with loud music. She's trying to do a good thing for the people who can't hear. In any case, that's the. After that, he will go back to the sit down with the other guys. And then he reveals that he hasn't actually taken his medication by blowing a pill onto Harding's forehead. And then he'll say, God almighty, she's got you guys coming and going. What do you think she is, some kind of champ or something?
This way of viewing the world through the lens of sports, World Series or basketball, it's very important to understanding McMurphy's character. Is she a champion boxer? Do you think she's going to knock you out? And then Harding says, no, I thought you were the champ. And that's where he says, you want to bet? I bet in one week I can put a bug so far up her ass she won't know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch.
32:18 Erin: Yeah, that's a pretty good line.
32:20 Wes: Later on, of course, he's going to be upset with these guys. They didn't warn him. When he finds out that they can keep him here as long as they want. And he's got a lot to lose in this confrontation, he finds that upsetting. But at this point, he doesn't know that he has that much to lose. And after that first real confrontation with Ratched, yeah, he's ready to go to war, so to speak, or to be a kind of tormentor to her, to give her a taste of her own medicine in a way, right?
32:50 Erin: Well, she doesn't. He's upset because she doesn't fight fair. And this is one of the things that's really subtly done early on. For instance, with Martini and the cards, right? He's counting the queen as a number card and doesn't recognize that the queen is somehow. That logic does not extend to the queen. You know, the queen is outside of the logic of numbers, right? And to a certain extent, you know, when these guys are being antagonized by a woman, there isn't really a way for them to fight back. I mean, eventually, McMurphy will fight back physically.
You know, maybe this is related to the idea of the window I was thinking about. Okay. There's the sort of the soft window, if you will, of the nurses station and then the hard window of the outside of the building. Right. That they have to crash through. And this imagery of punching. And our introduction to McMurphy as a fighter who compares himself to Rocky Marciano and says, you know, he gets millions of dollars for fighting and how come I'm here? Because I'm a fighter. And. And again, yeah, the Ratched thing. Calling her a champ. But he's going to be upset because she doesn't fight fair.
33:51 Wes: She likes a rigged game.
33:52 Erin: She likes a rigged game, Right.
33:54 Wes: Speaking of the World Series.
33:55 Erin: Right. Because she's the queen. She doesn't have. She's not a number. She's not, you know, one of these guys with. In McMurphy's case, maybe a number plate in the cases of the other guys, one of the numberless masses of inmates. Right.
34:10 Wes: And he's referring back to the rigged vote they take about the World Series, which is that she. They unanimously vote in group therapy to watch the World Series that evening. But she wants to include all the people left on the ward who can't communicate, which turns out to be nine people. And then he has to lobby them. And finally he gets the chief to raise his hand, but by the time. To vote for watching the World Series. But by the time he does that, she says the vote. Right. The meeting was terminated and the vote closed or something like that. Some very officious bureaucratic thing to say. So she rigs the game, so to speak. She rigs the vote on the watching of the game.
34:51 Erin: Right. Again, this is the catering to the patients who are more debilitated. So keeping the volume up. Giving the catatonic patients a vote in the proceedings, even though they can't hear what's going on. And they're also, like, even too far away to hear, the majority of them, there's that old man who's always dancing, who's my favorite character, I think, but, you know, does not. Well, actually, I love Cheswick. He's. He's so adorable. I love that actor. But, yeah, the old man dancing is like a very fanciful. He seems like a fun guy. I don't know.
Anyway, they're very concerned that he's gonna tire himself out, which seems to be, like, probably a good thing if they want him to stop, but whatever. I don't know. I don't have their qualifications. So what do I know. Yeah. So she's playing these passive aggressive games which seem related to this again, this queenliness or this idea that because she's the nurse and she's in this sort of untouchable and yet literally quite touchable little fortification, she can make these pronouncements and everybody just has to adhere to her rules. And she sort of hides behind catering to the most defenseless among the men, which seems like she's standing up for them, but which is in fact this way of enforcing passivity to emasculate those who are not passive or something.
It's, it's this perverted feminine game that she is playing, which is one of the reasons why I find this, this very frustrating to watch. So she's sort of leaning on a certain kind of passive aggressive femininity as a way to enforce this control. I think, I think this is what it ultimately comes down to, though. I don't want to put things in those terms. It's like hitting a guy over and over again and saying, haha, you can't hit me back because I'm a woman. You know, there's an element of that to this dynamic.
36:48 Wes: Yeah, it's a very hidden form of violence, if you want to call it that. So I think psychoanalysts would call it project what she's doing, projective identification, where she takes emotions or parts of herself that are objectionable, like for instance, helplessness. And she finds suitable objects outside of herself to put that into. And it may already be there to some extent. Right. That makes them even more suitable. But she can create a little drama with a bunch of characters around her in this particular situation that are acting out her internal psychological dynamics so that she can see them outside of herself and get some sort of gratification from that and not have to feel as chaotic inside.
She creates the chaos outside. You know, with men, men are often more likely to be just physically aggressive. So in my house, for instance, where I was residence director, I dealt with a lot of women with borderline personality disorder where this kind of projective identification dynamic is very common. Although we all do it right. It's really about a spectrum, men and women. We all do it. Borderline personality disorder is more common in women than men, although you see a few men narcissism common in both sexes. But what I didn't have, I didn't have physically violent men because those men usually just end up in prison like McMurphy.
I had men who were schizophrenics, I had men who were depressed or bipolar, usually the aggression is turned inward in the type of people who are going to end up in a hospital setting like this, which is why McMurphy stands out. If I had a McMurphy, I could easily, and I may have been called Nurse Ratched at some point. I don't even know. Because you are trying to keep control and you're trying to keep calm and you're trying to get people to follow rules, and everyone thinks you're an asshole to some extent for doing that. So I'm very sympathetic to her.
But if I'd seen someone with sociopathic qualities and had it happened maybe on a couple of occasions, including someone who I thought was very dangerous, in which case you really have to treat that person with kid gloves and a lot of respect, even as you're enforcing the rules. You have to be careful not to humiliate, not to shame, because that's a situation. It can legitimately lead to physical violence. And you can feel it. If you have any intuition. You. You know the situation you're in and you know you have to be careful. But again, very rare in the kind of setting I was in, because men like that tend to go straight to prison if they have a propensity for physical violence.
But social violence, of course, much easier to get away with. And we all engage in it unconsciously to some extent. But what she's doing, she has a very toxic, extreme level of this. This passive aggression that Ratched is engaging in. And it doesn't help that she's in a position of power that where she can it facilitates her engaging in it. Right. Who knows if when she was younger she was in a better position where she wasn't tempted by that power to feed this part of her psyche. that@patreon.com subtextpodcast otherwise, you can wait a week to listen to it as a separate episode in the feed.
40:16 Erin: All right, thank you, thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Spirit Unbound in Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image” (Part 2)
Nov 03, 2025
What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.”
Upcoming Episodes: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. We're still talking about the birthmark. I think we're just about ready to wrap up. Wes. What have we missed? What more do we need to talk about here?
0:45 Wes: In line with the birthmark representing the instinctual or something about her affective life, is the fact that it's kind of like a mood ring, right? So it reflected every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart. And so again, I think the Hawthorne is more vague about this in it representing human frailty. But I want to highlight the sense in which it represents affective life. Emotions, feelings, the instinctual side of life. Because this is a theme that I think shows up repeatedly, right? So even in Medea with Jason and his kind of cold, he could have had acid stains on his hands, too.
Been a pale scientist, Mr. Rational Jason versus Medea, who I thought was more representative of the instinctual. And I thought in a way the play was a warning about, in the Athenian classical period, the dangers of the rejection of the instinctual as well as the traditional, arguably, and rejection of a part of life that was less rational. It comes back to bite you in the ass and maybe it will cut up your brother and throw him in the ocean. But in any case. So here again, I think the rejection of what is instinctual in women, what is sexual in women, what is physical and women, this is psychologically quite common.
And in this case, it shows up as a. It becomes a scientific project, right? What if I can turn her into a Madonna and completely spiritualize her by using science? It's like. It's almost like it's a very. Of course, it's a variation Frankenstein, which I guess was written 48 years before, right. Where he's not creating a monster out of graveyard parts. He's given up on trying to breathe life into matter and create life, but he's going to take imperfect life and create perfect spirit out of it, right?
2:50 Erin: Yeah. I think this mood ring quality that you're pointing to is what hinted to me that Aylmer is likely impotent. We have the explanation of this quality. It says in the usual state of her complexion, a healthy, though delicate bloom, the mark wore a tint of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the surrounding rosiness. When she blushed, it gradually became more indistinct and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion caused her to turn pale, there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness.
So its appearance seems relative to the extent to which she blushes. Right. So if she's reddening because of anger, which she already has by the time we read this paragraph, then it disappears. But also a blush which is obviously sexually suggestive would cause it to disappear as well. So it seems to me that the fact that it stands out so strongly because she's always pale, because she's. Because he, you know, is always examining her rather than really being in any kind of relationship to her. You know, a marital relationship, a sexual relationship, Playing.
4:05 Wes: He's playing doctor with her.
4:08 Erin: Well, but. But. But not in such a way that. That she.
4:12 Wes: Not in the fun way that kids.
4:13 Erin: Not in the fun way. That's right. That's right.
4:16 Wes: In the asexual, adult way.
4:19 Erin: Right. I mean. I mean, not to make this a little too spicy or whatever, but, you know, the idea is that if she were blushing all the time, you would never see it. You know, if he was. If he was actually paying her, shall we say, the proper attentions, then it would become less distinct. But because of his relationship to her, which is one of, like a. Like a diagnostic or critical relation causing her pallor, it stands out all the more. Not that he could just be having sex with her all the time.
4:49 Wes: That's right.
4:50 Erin: But I'm just saying that it would,
4:52 Wes: you know, the hand is glowing again. All right. Time for sex. Yeah, that's really interesting. This is. I like this. And it's like this glaring reminder he hasn't. Pleasing his woman.
5:04 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. Yes.
5:08 Wes: It's an accusation. Yeah. Why the shape of a hand? What is that about? Other than. I mean, Hawthorne does give us some ideas, but did you have any ideas? Like, ultimately, it's something that's grasping her heart. Right. But there's this infantile, creepy quality to it. Like it's a little baby hand or fetus hand or something.
5:30 Erin: A doll hand. And the sleeves of Kristen Wiig.
5:33 Wes: Yes. I sent you the. Yeah. Because I couldn't help but be reminded of that Kristen Wiig skit in. Which is it? Dooneese. And I did some research. I probably did more research on that than I did on the birthmark. But trying to figure out how did she get the idea for that skit. Because she kind of has these deformities like this huge forehead and she's in a musical group with a bunch of.
6:00 Erin: Was I looking at her through a bubble or does she attractive or is her forehead really big?
6:08 Wes: In contrast all these other attractive, well formed, let's just say women. And then she has the little, tiny, tiny hands, which are. Kristen Wiig uses these obviously fake doll hands for the tiny hands. And it is just. I remember when I first saw that skit and I just thought, I don't have any idea why this is so funny. It's just so random. But there is just something. I think the little doll hand extended all the way down into my heart and grabbed it.
6:38 Erin: There you go.
6:39 Wes: But there is a creepy quality. I wonder if that's readers reaction or if other readers have this reaction in general, whether during Hawthorne's time or contemporary readers, whether they get that same creeped out reaction to the fact that it's this little tiny hand that's on her cheek.
6:59 Erin: Yeah, well, the hand is also called pretty. We're told had she been less beautiful if Envy's self could have found aught else to sneer at he meaning Aylmer might have felt his affection heightened by the prettiness of this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart.
7:19 Wes: He does kiss it at one point, right? Gross.
7:21 Erin: He does once. He does once.
7:23 Wes: Shudders he tries to overcome his repulsion
7:25 Erin: but well, it's right as it's going to be leaving her that he sort of kisses it goodbye. In a way there's an element of fantasy, you know, it's imagined to be a fairy hand. And I think the flitting, you know, now you see it, now you don't kind of quality to it also has that sort of fantastical or magical or magical. Yeah, it's sort of toying with people. The idea that I had, I had a couple of them. But you know, one of them, of course, as I said, was this idea of the hand as sort of Aylmer's fancy or has been imprinted upon her cheek because of his desire to push her away.
So it is in a way him pushing her away. And it's. And I think in the dream too we get this idea that, you know, as he's in the dream, as he's cutting into her with a knife and the hand is then grasping around her heart, the hand is responding to his, to the movements of the knife. So it does seem to be a kind of embodiment of something in him, responsive to him. But it's almost as though he's idealized her, then married her, had sex with her, and he himself has been the one who has stained her with this birthmark. Was another idea that I had.
8:37 Wes: Right, yeah, absolutely. He took her virginity. Yeah.
8:41 Erin: The other thing, though, that I thought was, I love the descriptions of the fairy hand, as I said, but also of the men who find this to be very charming. In other words, healthy men. Yeah.
8:54 Wes: Let me just read a little bit of this, what you're referring to here. So its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana's lovers were wont to say that some fairy, at her birth hour, had laid her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand. It must not be concealed, however, that the impression wrought by this fairy sign manual varied exceedingly.
I love that fairy sign manual varied exceedingly according to the difference of temperament in the beholders. Some fastidious persons, but they were exclusively of her own sex, affirm that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Georgiana's beauty and rendered her countenance even hideous. And then he goes on to say that for some masculine observers, it heightened their admiration, as we mentioned before, and I think you were just about to speak to that.
10:01 Erin: I love the use of the word swain in that sentence. Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand.
10:10 Wes: What is a swain? Like a pirate or.
10:12 Erin: No, it's a male. It's a young attendant on a knight, I think, and also a male suitor. So there's something quite knightly and courtly about that word. And then, of course, the sentiment or the action that the narrator imagines them wishing to do, pressing their lips to this mysterious hand is itself quite gentlemanly and courtly. Right to kiss a woman's hand, only this one is on her cheek. So that's what I think. I also was interested in with the fact that it is a hand. There's a sort of, you know, mise en abyme quality where we have this image of the hand nested within the cheek.
So the gentlemanly or the courtly thing to do would be to kiss a lady's hand so that you stay. You express reverence for her and affection for her, but at arm's length, quite literally. Right. And that is then moved up close onto the face. So it seems to give permission to get closer or to think about her in more sexual terms, more intimate terms, whatever that may mean. And their fantasy of kissing it the way that they would a hand is only a fantasy because they couldn't dream of getting that close to her. They couldn't dream of kissing her on the cheek in this day and age, they would only be able to kiss the hand.
So there's a duality there that seems to unite courtly, idealized love with sexual passion or intimacy, which doesn't have to be sexual intimacy, but a real closeness. And so it seems to me to be like this perfect symbol of a wonderful, respectful, intimate and yet respectful kind of relationship to her, which only. Only certain men can appreciate. But that. That sort of duality, I think, is involved in this idea. It's. It's a hand, but it's your face. You know, a knight would only ever kiss a hand.
12:02 Wes: It's really interesting, this idea that her magical endowments have come from. Some fairy has touched her cheek when she's an infant and given her these magical endowments, one of which the ones that sway hearts. So we assume her beauty at least, which is interesting because in that sense, there's an irony in the fact that she's got this birthmark which bothers some people and. But that her beauty, the rest of her beauty, which is very pure, comes from that. And then the other endowments would be personality. And the things that I've called character before, certain quirks, certain charms, certain things that are very, very specific to her and her character.
Things that are endearing, things that someone might react to the feeling of endearment in the same way that she reacts to his scientific journal thinking. It's adorable. In that sense, the hand is almost like a belly button for character in a way. It's like as the umbilical cord is severed and we're left with that kind of aperture, that's the necessary mark of our having been created in that way, being a product of reproduction, but is also sort of like an incompleteness. Right? We haven't been fully sewed up somehow, you know. And so it gives us some sense of the cost of her beauty and character and other charms of character.
And that includes, it turns out, as the paragraph proceeds, Envy. Right. From other women. And then they can point to the. You know, they can enviously be satisfied with this idea that the hand has ruined her beauty.
13:47 Erin: Yes. And in fact, we're told explicitly that had she been less beautiful, this birthmark would not be a problem. Right. So that too seems to be about the effect of the birthmark on the beauty and either as a particularly distinguishing mark or as something which is said to mar. And the fact of her being so beautiful also seems to have that kind of double edged sword quality to it. So that the mark is the response to it, is the same in a way as the response to beauty. I like what you're pointing out about the magical quality of it in this fairy origin.
And I just wanted to point out too that Aylmer's science is repeatedly characterized as magic. Right. There's a connection between the fairy hand and what Aylmer seems to do for a living. Seems like the wrong. Seems like the wrong terminology. I don't know how he's making any money or what he's doing, but, you know, he calls himself a sorcerer. He says not to look in a sorcerer's books. When he shows Georgiana the time lapse flower, she cries out, it is magical. I dare not touch it. It seems like a lot of what he does is in fact Gob Bluth. Like party tricks.
14:58 Wes: Yeah.
14:59 Erin: So it's funny that he, you know, it's funny that this thing, which has the local reputation for being a kind of a result of magic, is one which the local magician wants to eradicate. Maybe he doesn't want competition from a fairy, I don't know. But it's funny that for all of this scientific advancement, the effects and it seems the purpose of a lot of this have a very distinct connection to the magical or the fantastical.
15:25 Wes: Yeah, well, it certainly is. It's magical thinking. And there's an element of desire for omnipotence in that. Right. To just have complete control of the world with one's mind without having to do anything but cast a spell, let's say, or to imagine what you want to happen and have it happen, or to have this fancy poison that can kill tyrants at a distance. And so that's where the magical gets this crossover into the technological into the scientific. They become hard to distinguish if the technology is powerful enough. But he makes a scientific project of getting rid of the hand on her cheek.
And I think, however we interpret the hand, whether as character or as humanity and materiality, or sexuality or instinctuality, which all these Things. This type of project is actually quite common in relationships. In a more subtle way, people are trying to do this to each other. To iron out the quirks of the other person's character. For instance, to get them to behave in a different way. Or to regulate the sexuality of the other person. Especially men with women to basically exercise some degree of control over the love object. So that it conforms to their wishes.
So that it does what the love object should do for them. And there's a whole discussion there which we don't have time to have. That discussion is around, well, what do we want from the love object? What are they doing for us? Because some of it is about intimacy. And not in the sexual sense, but in the sense of confiding and seeing and being seen. And being seen. Which significantly involves sharing one's affective life. Sharing these irrational elements of the self. And showing these non generic particular characterological parts of oneself to the other person.
And then seeing oneself through the way they see you. So that your self knowledge, your knowledge of yourself and your sense of your own existence in a way are predicated on that intimacy. You're getting some of awareness of yourself through the reflection of the awareness of the other person. So that's the ideal way to do this. And it involves a certain amount of respect for the particularity of the person and for their character. But one might want to kind of enslave the other person, right? This is what Hegel's getting at with the master slave dynamic and the phenomenology of spirit.
Not just to have the reciprocity of intimacy, but to be able to say, I need you to be the mirror for me that I want you to be. So instead of me being the mirror for your particular character, I'm actually going to perfect you in the way that I need to perfect you. So you can reflect back to me the kind of image that I need for myself. This story very much speaks to that larger reality. It's a science fiction story where he's doing something very crazy. But in a sense, it's what people will are often actually trying to do to each other. To kind of wipe out some aspect of the other person that is imperfect, you might want to say, but imperfect in the sense that it doesn't perform this mirror function adequately.
18:46 Erin: I think that might lead us in nicely to Drowne's wooden image. You know, I was thinking about the magical process through which Drowne seems to create his carving of this woman. And also the deep knowledge that comes from the love that inspires the work. Right so that he's able to so perfectly reproduce this woman who we can presume he's seen and interacted with and then sort of fallen in love with that. It gives him this special kind of knowledge of her, this insight, this new. How does he characterize it? He says, there has come a light into my mind. That's how he describes it. And this light which distinguishes this carving from all of his previous work, which he calls worthless abortions.
19:35 Wes: A little harsh.
19:37 Erin: Yeah. This light has given him the ability to produce a sculpture in wood which looks like it is a real woman. And it turns out that the woman who inspired this is real. And Drowne must have come in contact with her at some point and fallen in love with her, or else he wouldn't have been able to reproduce this so well. So that kind of the magical process, both with which the work is undertaken, where we don't really see him working at it and people are really. You know, there's a lot of gossip over what he's doing. He seems to be only working at night or at odd hours.
Nobody really sees the chisel in his hand, so to speak. So the sort of magic with which this sculpture comes together and also the magical power that his love for this woman, which seems connected to this insight and this real knowledge, this real intimacy with her, seems to inform the greatness of the sculpture as well. But there's a big empty space at the center of this story when it comes to his actual interactions with her.
20:40 Wes: Right. How are you inferring love?
20:43 Erin: Copley says it. This is Copley. He looked earnestly at Drowne and again saw that expression of human love, which, in a spiritual sense, as the artist could not help imagining, was the secret of the life that had been breathed into this block of wood. So love is the secret ingredient. It's love. It's love, you know, which is ultimately quite pat, maybe. You know, we get the explicit connection to Pygmalion, just as we do in Birthmark. As a matter of fact, we get a rumor that he has been seen kneeling at the feet of the oaken lady and gazing with a lover's passionate ardor into the face that his own hands had created.
21:22 Erin: Yeah. And then we get him called Pygmalion, explicitly. And then once it's done, once he's created it and it's been presumably mounted on the front of the ship and the ship takes off, he says that he wrought the sculpture in a kind of a dream. And now that he's Broad awake, he's going to go about his regular business, and he returns to his mechanical style, from which he was never known afterwards, to deviate. So it's as though a magical spell overtook him, and that spell turns out to be love. Here we go. The narrator tells us explicitly. We know not how to account for the inferiority of this quaint old figure, the one he's working on after the fact, as compared with the recorded excellence of the Oaken lady.
Unless on the supposition that in every human spirit there is imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which, according to circumstances, may either be developed in this world or shrouded in a mask of dullness until another state of being to our friend Drowne, there came a brief season of excitement kindled by love. It rendered him a genius for that one occasion, but, quenched in disappointment, left him again, the mechanical carver in wood, without the power even of appreciating the work that his own hand had wrought. So love has produced this magical ability in him and the magical effect of this woman.
Which seems to be alive. Who seems to be alive.
22:43 Wes: Well, we assume she's not the first beautiful woman he's run into.
22:48 Erin: That's a good point.
22:49 Wes: But he's supposed to be the most. I don't know. Is boring the right word?
22:54 Erin: And dull.
22:55 Wes: Dull and creative, but not particularly talented or inspired or passionate about what he's doing, which is a. I'd say he's a craftsman.
23:06 Erin: Craftsman, as opposed to an artist.
23:08 Wes: Yeah, right, right. I wouldn't characterize the average craftsperson as necessarily dull. He seems to be going through the motions. Right.
23:17 Erin: I just mean. Yeah, yeah.
23:19 Wes: No, I wasn't saying. You were saying that. But he's going through the motions. So when a person like this gets animated by something or inspired by something passionate about something, it's quite a contrast. There's almost like a comedy to it, when a person like this kind of comes to life, so to speak. Right. And of course, there's a direct parallel to the idea that this carved figure in the wood has come to life, as it seems to the townspeople that it may have done, or to the life that he's breathing into the wood. But it's a peculiar form of inspiration is all I'm pointing out, because it seems to be predicated on the specular. Right. It's love at first sight. He just sees her. Or at least that's what we're left to infer. It's not like he was hanging out with her.
24:12 Erin: Yes, exactly.
24:13 Wes: Watching Netflix, getting to know her, going out to coffee. She. She turns out to be a Portuguese lady of rank. So they're definitely of different classes. And so then naturally the question is, okay, well, he's seen plenty of ladies of rank. And what was it about this in particular? Not that I think the story necessarily answers this, but what about this woman in particular was so inspiring?
24:40 Erin: This is one of the mysteries for me, because, in fact, when we get descriptions of this woman, I mean, what in these descriptions stood out to you? There's the expression on her face, but then also I feel that the narrator is mostly describing her dress, her hat, the flowers in her hat, and her, you know, in other words, all of her accessories and her clothing rather than her, you know, we actually get very little of a physical description of this statue. And then when we see her real life counterpart, there's a sort of catalog of all of the items of clothing and the jewels and all the things that she's wearing that correspond to the statues.
And that's sort of how we know that she is who she is. And then we say, you know, she also wore this expression, but an expression, too, is something you wear. We do get, I think, dark eyes and something about the mouth, but we don't. I don't think we even know what color hair she has. You know, she's sort of a blank in the middle of the descriptions of her finery.
25:46 Wes: You know, he does say there's a light vivacity and sportive mischief written in her countenance. This is the loving, the living version. She was observed to flutter her fan with such vehement rapidity that the elaborate delicacy of its workmanship gave way and it remained broken in her hand. Wait, is this the statue or the woman? Well, both.
26:11 Erin: Both, because that's another thing that.
26:13 Wes: Yeah.
26:13 Erin: That lines up where the fan breaks in the real woman's hand and then soon drown, is seen to be fixing the fan in the hand of the statue, which has somehow also become broken. So it's like they share the life force or something. Or there's a voodoo doll quality, only in the reverse direction.
26:35 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. And here's another. I'm just trying to get at some of the character of her character that comes out on this. The face, with its brilliant depth of complexion, had the same piquancy of mirthful mischief that was fixed upon the countenance of the image, but which was here varied and continually shifting, yet always essentially the same, like the sunny gleam upon a bubbling fountain. On the whole, there was something so airy and yet so real. In the figure and withal, so perfectly did it represent Drowne's image that people knew not whether to suppose the magic wood etherealized into a spirit or warmed and softened into an actual woman. So I think this. Yeah, this idea of a kind of mischief is repeated several times, and I think it comes up in the description of the. Earlier on in the description of the sculpture. Is the wrong word. Right. What's the right word?
27:29 Erin: Carving.
27:29 Wes: So, you know, as you pointed out. Yeah, most of it is about what she's wearing and the kind of an illustration of the skill that goes into it. Because he captures all these subtleties. I'm trying to look for the place where he. If I can find another place where this mischievousness is mentioned.
27:49 Erin: Yeah, this is when they're describing how people, when they entered, felt impelled to remove their hats and pay such reverence as was due to the richly dressed and beautiful young lady who seemed to stand in a corner of the room with oaken chips and shavings scattered at her feet. I love that at the end of that paragraph, we get. And then her face in the dark eyes and around the voluptuous mouth. Okay, the voluptuous mouth. That's the descriptor. The mouth gets. There played a look made up of pride, coquetry, and a gleam of mirthfulness, which impressed Copley with the idea that the image was secretly enjoying the perplexing admiration of himself and other beholders.
28:24 Wes: Right. So pride, coquetry, and a gleam of mirthfulness. So, yeah, who wouldn't fall in love
28:30 Erin: at first sight, I suppose, though. And, you know, we do get that this is a beautiful woman, but. Yeah, it just. It just occurs to me that we get so much description of. Yeah. The expression she wears, the clothing she wears, the hat she wears with the flowers in the hat. And maybe. Maybe a lot of that is supposed to express how masterfully the carving is done in that in wood. He's been able to recreate all of these different textures. And, you know, because then the real woman is wearing fabric and a diamond on her finger and gold around her neck and a hat with flowers, you know, and so the fact that Drowne has been able to capture all of these different materials of vastly different quality is part of the magic of the image, it seems.
But maybe this speaks to what you're talking about when it comes to character. So we. So rather than telling us that she was, you know, she was 5, 7, and she weighed. She weighed 135 pounds and 36.
29:32 Wes: 24, 36 measurements.
29:35 Erin: Exactly. And she had an oval shaped face and almond eyes and whatever the case may be.
29:41 Wes: And she was into horseback riding, walking on the beach and. Yeah.
29:45 Erin: Pina coladas. Yeah. So she. So instead we get actually this sort of satellite description or things which are suggestive of her taste in this sort of roundabout way, rather than her vital statistics, shall we say. And that ultimately produces this image of singular realism, transcendent realism. And I think this is why I was thinking of Drowne in the middle of our conversation about Birthmark when you brought up this idea of character. Because it seems that Hawthorne is getting at something here about negative capability. Right. Because we have Drowne's other wooden carvings all having that family resemblance, as he calls it, where they all look like they're part of the same wooden family, and that they all were created by sort of like Drowne is the father and Wood is the mother.
And they look, you know, like a combination of the two. Not that they look like Drowne, but they look like something created by him. So they bear almost like too much of him as a paternal influence and also too much of the material. Somehow they haven't been transformed enough that it requires one more touch to take them from being, as Copley puts it, to take them from being wooden figures to being lifelike. We're also told that he chooses subjects which are often symbolic or allegorical in some way. He chooses, say, the female figure of Britannia.
This is colonial Boston, we're made to understand. So he chooses an admiral. And on entering the shop, Copley looks around and it says he glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander, dame, and allegory that stood around on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part partook of the stolid transformation. So he has all of these wooden images, literally wooden and figuratively wooden images of types and allegories and generic figures.
And somehow, through expressing the character of this woman in particular, which has largely come out in her dress and in her expression, which are things which are maybe not essential to her. Right. He really captures, like, a real life woman, so divorced from his kind of parental influence and just herself, without, almost. Without any kind of. Or the appearance of any kind of intervention on his part at all. Do you see where I'm drawing the connection to negative capability?
32:20 Wes: Yeah, this is really. This is really great. Yeah. So negative capability, right. As Keats put it, it's this ability to live with the unknown. With uncertainty, with doubt, without irritably reaching after facts and reasons. And that's the kind of capability that artists need. I mean, in Drowne's case, he's too wooden and too literal, let's say. And this again reminds me of the part in the. In the birthmark where pictures aren't just about verisimilitude. They have something that, you know, like a little hand imprint on them. They have a little characterological mark that makes them something special that allows them, let's say, maybe to communicate the affective part of our existence, to communicate feeling as opposed to just.
To communicate fact. So science is very different. Right. So for Aylmer and the birthmark, science is about the generic rather than the particular. And I'm sure this might be. Someone might argue with this. But science is all about reaching after fact and reaching after reasons as opposed to art. So in a way, Drowne is very much like. Or there's some similarities to Aylmer, but he's trying to do wood carvings as if he were a kind of scientist. Or he's like one of these artists you see online that try to show you how they can get picture perfect quality using pencils or whatever.
33:50 Erin: I'm sure you've seen videos online.
33:52 Wes: Yeah. There's this confusion that the height of artistic ability is about complete verisimilitude to fact, when in fact one is trying to get at something underneath. I called it affective life, or maybe you could call it spiritual as well. So the very thing that. That Aylmer is trying to do with science, which is to squeeze spirit out of matter. Right. Art, in a way, does that. It takes its medium and squeezes something spiritual out of it in a way that science can't.
34:26 Erin: Yeah. And Drowne's different relationship with this particular subject matter, which the narrator is calling love, is about letting things be exactly what they are. That is something, of course, that Aylmer is incapable of. And therefore he doesn't really love his wife. I mean, I think that's. I hope that was something we. We could take away from. From that conversation. Right. He doesn't actually love her. Right. He loves. He loves himself. He loves his idea of what she should be in his mind, which has nothing to do with her.
34:58 Wes: He loves her as the subject of a scientific experiment.
35:02 Erin: Yes. But I think he loves her insofar as. As she corresponds with what he thinks she should be, which is to say he's in love with himself. Right. That's sort of, at bottom, what idealization is. It's not about the other person at all. It's about your idea of him.
35:16 Wes: Yeah. The idealization is about creating, like I said, creating the mirror. That will help you with your own idealization of yourself, or at least help you with the kind of identity that you need for yourself to avoid feeling like you're going to fall apart.
35:30 Erin: Right.
35:31 Wes: Whether that identity is, you know, obviously idealized or not, it's always tainted with that for various reasons. But, yeah, so, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Getting so you could say, you know, I said he, as a scientific specimen, to the extent that he can make an experiment out of her, he loves her, which is the same thing. Right. The scientific project just is to create the ideal.
35:53 Erin: And Drowne is taken up with this woman in a way that seems to suggest real love. He sees her for what she really is and is able to reproduce that. Or he's captured something fundamental about her and is able to reproduce who she is as she is to the extent that people can't tell the difference between this carving in her. And so that part of that seems to involve letting her be what she is without him changing anything about her to suit the carving. Right. Which is why this is a sort of anti. Mirror image of the birthmark. That seems to be the thing that Aylmer is unable to do is accept Georgiana as she is with the birthmark.
You know, so there's a. There's a creativity that seems to imply this perfect collaboration with nature rather than Aylmer's criticism or, say, edit of Nature. You know, I think he has a critical stance towards Georgiana rather than a creative one. And what's interesting about that for Drowne is that he's working in a natural. I mean, this would be the case if he were working with stone, too, but he's working in a living. A natural and living property for his sculpture. It's not marble, it's wood. So it was formerly, at least alive. And so one would say, well, what's the difference between.
Is there a significant difference in, say, trying to edit the birthmark off of Georgiana's face and trying to edit the piece of lumber into a statue? You know, what. What would be the. The substantive difference between those two things and what we're told? Made me think of that apocryphal quote of Michelangelo's where he says something like, I saw the angel in the marble and set him free. Something along those lines. He almost certainly didn't say that, but he said something else which is related to that, which is just about how every block of stone has a statue in it, and he just has to let the statue out or cut away all that is not statue.
Right, Right. Something along those lines. A similar sentiment is ascribed to Drowne. The narrator says it seemed as if the Hamadryad of the oak had sheltered herself from the unimaginative world within the heart of her native tree, and that it was only necessary to remove the strange shapelessness that had encrusted her and reveal the grace and loveliness of a divinity.
38:16 Wes: She's like a dryad. Is that the right spirit freeing from the tree?
38:20 Erin: So that seems to me. I mean, so the difference there would be. I mean, of course, there are many differences other than the one that I'm pointing to. It's not like Georgiana is just some block of wood that he's just taking a little piece of bark off of or something. But it seems to imply a desire, the desire of this wood to be a statue in a strange kind of way. But another way of saying that is just a collaboration with nature. So he's working in tandem with his materials to create something new out of them, which is imitative of nature in a way that is respectful and admiring and which is not destructive or claiming ownership or something along those lines.
39:08 Wes: Yeah, you're reminding me of Aristotle, actually, believe it or not, who famously creates this analogy between the artist and nature because they both involve form and they both involve reproduction. So in nature, the form, it's in the. And he's thinking of biological creatures, it's in the. In the animal and the functioning of the animal, the form of the animal and all of its metabolic activities and so on. But it's also something that can be transferred from one generation to another, and we now know it as DNA. So the DNA in the animal corresponds to the artist's conception, or he's thinking especially of craftsman.
What replaces the DNA in art is the conception or the plan in the mind of the artist, and then that's transferred into matter. In both cases, the form has to be put into matter. And in nature, what makes it nature is just this ability to provide itself with its own form and do it spontaneously. Right. The acorn, you don't need drowned to come along and turn the acorn into a tree. It does it by itself. And it's very suggestive of. The teleology of. It is very suggestive. Right. So for the ancients and medievals, right. It was a slam dunk case for the existence of God.
There were other cases to be made as well, but this type of self Generating activity lent itself to an intelligent design theory where God had to be the ultimate artist. But the reason why I'm thinking of this is that I think you're. This idea that you had of the medium or the matter sort of calling out to have form put into it. Yeah. It made me think of the spontaneous ways in which, in nature, matter can just take on form without the intervention of an artist. But it also made me think that the artist must somehow respect the wishes of the matter or the medium and not do violent to it, let's say.
Which I think fits with negative capability. Where the violence would be to. Part of the point of negative capability is you don't put messages into your art, for instance, or you're not moralizing, let's say. Which is kind of funny because Hawthorne was famously an allegorist, in a way, or he's accused of that. But you're trying to respect the truth of things, but not the literal truth of things, like I said, the psychological or affective or spiritual truth of things, and communicate that without doing the violence that the artist can do. And the violence just.
Yeah, it comes from the more manic quality that Aylmer represents, in a way. I think it comes from the impulse to idealize too strongly. I think there's some of that there for the artist. But it has to be somehow tempered. Otherwise you get whatever the result is of the person, the manic person who thinks that they're a great artist and they hand you their manuscript, which is absolutely terrible. Doesn't reflect the. You know, it's not as good as they. As they think it is. So it. Do you see what I'm saying? I'm connecting negative capability to the resistance to this impulse to idealize and.
Right. Hawthorne says science can mend or mar, but cannot create. But art can create under the right circumstances.
42:42 Erin: Right. The removal of the birthmark seems to me to be the editing of the DNA. Right. So the birthmark, we might say, is an expression. It is literally and figuratively a symbol for the expression of one's genetic code or all the properties that make you you. And the idea is to capture those properties rather than to edit out the ones that we don't like and only portray the idealized person. Because I think the result of that would be pure allegory. So maybe we can say that Hawthorne does allegory one better or something like that. He's not quite there.
43:23 Wes: These stories worked very well together in a way that I hadn't actually anticipated, but. Yeah.
43:28 Erin: All right.
43:29 Wes: Thanks for recommending them.
43:30 Erin: I love Hawthorne. I could do 40 more. Not really.
43:35 Wes: So I think next time we're going to do One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then Julius Caesar and then I don't think we have a plan after that yet, but yeah. All right.
43:45 Erin: Thank you, thank you and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
Spirit Unbound in Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image”
Oct 27, 2025
The short stories we cover in this episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on Nature’s design by removing a birthmark from his wife’s otherwise-perfect face. The varying results of these efforts seem to correspond to the extent with which love, that most magical of forces, underscores them. “You cannot love what shocks you,” the scientist’s wife remarks when her husband expresses how disturbed he is by her imperfection. What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin discuss two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.”
Upcoming Episodes: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. The short stories we're covering in today's episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on nature's design by removing a birthmark from his wife's otherwise perfect face. The varying results of these efforts seem to correspond to the extent with which love, that most magical of forces, underscores them.
You cannot love what shocks you, the scientist's wife remarks when her husband expresses how disturbed he is by her imperfection. What's the difference between collaborating with nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative rather than the critical faculty? Today we're discussing two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Birthmark and Drowne's Wooden Image. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I thought we would start with the Birthmark, which I realized is one inch away from being an episode of Frasier.
I don't know if you're a Frasier fan, but I feel like this kind
1:52 Wes: of setup, I used to watch it, but. Yeah, tell me how that works.
1:55 Erin: Frasier is a perfectionist, you know, obsessively high standards. And I feel like there are a lot of these episodes where he wants to host a dinner party in his apartment or Niles wants to host a dinner party and some tiny flaw becomes their obsessive quest to fix. And then they spend the entire episode just dealing with the cascading problems that trying to fix this one little flaw causes. There's one where I think they're trying to move the father's recliner out of the living room so they could have a dinner party, and they drop it and they create a scratch on the floor.
And the next thing you know, there's a team of guys who are rewiring the whole apartment because of all the, you know, the floorboards are coming up. I think at one point in that episode, the Father says something like, not everything has to be perfect, you know? And Frasier is like, that kind of attitude is what leads to shag carpeting. So. So, anyway, I'm. I suppose I'm making a connection to the fixation on the flaw, though how we might characterize. Is it Aylmer? When I say that, it sounds like I'm saying Aylmer with a deep Southern accent, so I don't.
Aomar.
3:05 Wes: Yeah, well, it's a really different story if you imagine them both having thick Southern accents.
3:10 Erin: It's very different.
3:12 Wes: Aylmer Geddon here. Well, his claim to fame was he invented the glue. Right. Badoom poom. I was going to ask you how we're pronouncing. No, I looked up the name at some point, and then I've forgotten what the significance of the name is or what its provenance is. Is it biblical or is it.
3:31 Erin: I only found the high priest over there. His cellmate, Whatever.
3:36 Wes: Ahmedabad.
3:37 Erin: Yeah. Ahmadinejad, whatever his name is. Ahmed.
3:45 Wes: I say we bomb her. No, no bombing. Just gonna. So we don't know how to pronounce Aminadab.
3:53 Erin: Aminadab. And, yeah, like, if.
3:56 Wes: We'll call him Aylmer.
3:57 Erin: Aylmer, as in what ails you? You know, I'm assuming.
4:00 Wes: I guess so.
4:01 Erin: It's anyway, not a great name, but Georgiana isn't much better, so.
4:05 Wes: Oh, you don't like Georgiana? It's pretty fancy.
4:09 Erin: Yeah.
4:10 Wes: Just like her boudoir. In comparison to his crappy laboratory.
4:15 Erin: Well, he knows how to put a lot of effort into interior design. When put in the service of science, he puts in some effort. Anyway, I wonder what their dates were like.
4:28 Wes: So I reminded myself of the meaning of his name. It means noble, famous, renowned. It's from Old English, which makes sense, right? Because he has made himself famous, almost getting to the roots of life and getting to the point where he might be able to create life. Or. That's his claim. That's what he boasts. But it turns out, as Georgiana finds it, he does a lot of brilliant things, but he always fails to reach that aspiration. Right? To combine to make science do something spiritual, to make science, to kind of squeeze life or spirit out of matter, which would be the ultimate form of alchemy. That's his ambition and he fails to do that. But I guess that allowed him to get a woman. I love the line in here about just the very brief description of the way they get together, where he. What is it? He washes the acid stains off his hands.
5:27 Erin: Yes. He cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife.
5:37 Wes: There you go. Persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. Yeah, that's such a great sentence.
5:43 Erin: It is a great sentence, but, yeah, he's put in all this trouble to come unstained into the marriage and it's like, what does she bring to the table?
5:52 Wes: She couldn't have washed her cheek, right?
5:56 Erin: Come on, Georgiana. The entitlement.
5:58 Wes: When you're talking about Frasier, it made me think of Seinfeld, where he's always rejecting these very beautiful women because of one little quirk or another. And one of them, she has. There's like a woman with large hands.
6:10 Erin: Yes.
6:11 Wes: She's very beautiful. And then you get to see these close ups, and obviously they have a man standing in and you just see these man hands. That's the one fatal flaw that he can't accept. So if he were Aylmer, you would be. Yeah, I'm just gonna resize your hands. Aylmer is like the original plastic surgeon in a way, but, yeah, she could have ended up with looking like a really bad plastic surgery case. Huge lips and just a bad facelift.
6:45 Erin: They call that Mar-a-Lago face now.
6:46 Wes: I thought I. Right, Mar-a-Lago face. I thought I'd do a few other touch ups when I went in for the birthmark. So she suffered a better fate than that. But in any case. But I bring that up because at a certain point, Hawthorne points out that many men found the birthmark to be a kind of cute, quirky thing. And you could think about this in terms of human character as well. Often when people were attracted to each other or fall in love with each other, they find all the little quirks, including the things that they're later on going to find to be flaws and to be things that drive them crazy in the beginning.
They find them to actually be charming. So it doesn't just have to be a birthmark on the face. It could be any quirk of character. And I thought that was interesting because that's the kind of thing that we think of as chemistry. It's the kind of thing that creates a chemical bond between people. Right. A strong bond, as opposed to them just being in proximity to each other. Like in a colloid. You mix things up and they could be a colloid, as my high school science teacher would say. They're just there hanging out together, but they don't react chemically.
They don't create something New. But when people have chemistry, they come together, like the way hydrogen and oxygen come together to create water. And they create something entirely new by forming chemical bonds. But to do that, they have to be attracted to each other. And to be attracted to each other, they have to. Or maybe not, maybe have to is too strong. But often there are these little quirks of character. And so the kinds of bonds that they create. It's not like hydrogen and oxygen, where you could give generic scientific laws about what the attraction is and why the bond forms.
People are sui generis in their characters, in the way they're unique, like a fingerprint. They don't belong to some general type, so their chemical reactions are that way too. They don't happen according to some general law. But in any case, the thing that can bring people together and bond them can be the thing that later on creates friction. And in the case of this story, it becomes a lot of friction indeed. Although Hawthorne doesn't say that he in particular, that Aylmer in particular was attracted by the birthmark. He says that after they get married, he starts to get concerned about it after it.
9:24 Erin: Talks about the series of reactions that this birthmark inspires. Says masculine observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a flaw after his marriage, for he thought little or nothing of the matter before Aylmer discovered this was the case with himself.
9:45 Wes: Right. Okay, so this. This is exactly the passage I was looking for. Yeah. So men either thought it was charming or they wished it weren't there, but Aylmer just didn't pay attention somehow.
9:58 Erin: Yeah, he thought little or nothing of it before their marriage. So he's taken her on somehow with this sort of indifference. I mean, he's selected a beautiful woman to become his wife. And it seems as though he's taken, in that sentence that we read earlier, you know, more care in preparing himself for something like the wedding day than he has in selecting this woman. I mean, it turns out that they really haven't had a chance to develop any kind of chemistry with each other because he seems to know her so little. Like, over the course of trying to remove the birthmark, he gets to know her character much better than he did previously.
And she turns out to be a pretty astute and interesting and noble person, which he is discovering along with us, the reader. So it seems that he has selected this woman for the mere fact of her desirability without really Understanding anything about her and then over the course of trying to get rid of the mark, learns what makes her great. So for me, the birthmark isn't so much a sign of her, say, quirk or character flaw. The fact that he doesn't notice it until after their marriage, it seems to me to give an indication that this is really about him.
Of course this is. I actually made a list or a log of all of the possible interpretations of the mark that come up over the course of the story. I think the most compelling of any of these, I mean, you know, we have this idea that it's a sign of her own mortality and that this is something which is distasteful to him because he's involved in, you know, the scientific experiments which you've already talked about, of wanting to sort of best nature or manifest spirit in matter. And therefore, this sign of mortality is an affront to him. So it seems to be speaking to him or responding to him in a very particular way.
And one can also say it's a representation of himself somehow, that he doesn't notice it until their marriage because he, in a way, manifests it through the marriage or something. I don't know if that's taking things a little too far.
12:02 Wes: If we were to approach this with a hermeneutics of suspicion, right, in particular Freudian one, we would say, well, of course he noticed the birthmark, and of course it played a role in him getting with her. He just wasn't conscious of that. And we can speculate, right, he wanted a project. He wanted someone to tinker with. He couldn't create life. But as Hawthorne will say, at a certain point, science can't create life, but it can mend it a little or mar it. And then we have to ask the question whether he really wants to mend or mar. But, yeah, at a conscious level, this is what's so great about the. You know, he married, he found a beautiful woman. How does he put it again?
12:46 Erin: I can't even persuaded a beautiful woman.
12:49 Wes: Yeah, persuaded a beautiful woman to marry him. So, yeah, a beautiful woman runs entirely against the whole quirk of character thing that I was talking about. So she's just a beautiful woman. And any beautiful woman will do, in the same way. To go back to my chemical analogy, for any oxygen atom, any two hydrogen atoms will do when they come together to make water. It's not personal. It's very impersonal. And in this case, it sounds very impersonal, even though she has this very unique personal quality about her. And presumably has many others.
So it makes it sound as if her particular character were not that much, whether physical or spiritual, mental was not of that much interest to him, except that she be every certain very generic type, beautiful and probably of good breeding and whatever the other criteria are. And the main question, I think, from this wonderful first paragraph was whether a woman could compete with his love of science and then how he would integrate her into that type of life. At the very beginning of the paragraph, it sounds like who, not long before our story opens, had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one.
So the spiritual affinity for Georgiana. Right. But by the end of the paragraph, his love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two, but it could only be intertwining itself with his love of science and uniting the strength of the latter to its own. So we start out with the spiritual affinity being more attractive, and then by the end of it, it's a three way. Science is not going to lose out. They have to all come together as a threesome or it's not going to work out.
14:45 Erin: Right. Well, this is, I think, giving credence. I think we're kind of both pointing to the same thing, which is the idea that he either unconsciously chose this woman specifically with this birthmark, or it somehow manifested as a result of his being married to her, where suddenly it seems to him to materialize because it's a way to keep her at arm's length. I mean, we might imagine that the hand is his hand sort of pushing her away. I get a strong suspicion of his impotence in the story. And we do see, later on she
15:18 Wes: can just say, talk to the hand
15:20 Erin: and then just turn her cheek.
15:21 Wes: Talk to the hand
15:24 Erin: that is tr. I think he's doing that to her, though.
15:26 Wes: Right? Right.
15:27 Erin: You know, we see his fingerprints actually make a mark on her arm when she's gone in to look at the part of his laboratory that he hasn't turned into that crazy magical boudoir. He grips her arm and pulls her away. He's gripping her, but only to take her away from him. So again, there's a kind of like this push, pull dynamic where it seems to be about needing her to be a problem to be solved and therefore keeping her at arm's length. The birthmark is some sort of perfect excuse to register disgust with her at the very time that they should be. I mean, and the story even calls it, you know, the very time that they should be closest. He has this perfect excuse to recoil
16:09 Wes: from her the symbolism is very clear. And if it weren't clear, Hawthorne just tells us during the story what the birthmark means. So it has something to do with her mortality and her physicality and her imperfection as a human being. And we can also speculate with her sexuality, with her instinctual nature rather than her higher spiritual nature. All the things that are associated with being a physical being and menstruation, if you want to get very speculative, the sorts of things that a young virgin. Well, just kidding. Who knows? He probably saw some prostitutes before he got married. Right. I don't know how things worked back then, but he's dating it to be about in the 1700s. Right? He says in the last century.
16:58 Erin: Yes, that's right.
16:59 Wes: In any case, he's experiencing, living with a woman for the first time and coming to terms with her humanness, including her physicality. And there's the sexual attraction component of that. But then there's also the discussed repulsion component of that.
17:17 Erin: Well, we're also told that he is spirit and his assistant is matter. So, you know, we know he has problems with embodiment. Right. So, yeah, we're given a lot of interpretive help here, though I think that there's something about the plural interpretations provided both by the narrator, because there are. You know, we could splinter them out a little bit. I mean, there's an interesting part where the narrator calls it the fatal flaw of humanity, which nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain.
So from that, we could extract three different symbols. It's a symbol of mortality. It's a symbol of imperfection, which, again, we could say is maybe a subset of mortality. But it's also the symbol that perfection can only be earned somehow, and earned via suffering. So I think the narrator is actually giving us a few different interpretations. And I think that the very idea of interpretation that this mark is assigned to be interpreted seems to suggest there's literally more than what meets the eye here. I mean, it turns out, of course, to tether her.
To tether her spirit to her body somehow. It's like a knot that's tying her soul together with her flesh. But I think there's a great deal of amateur semiotics going on just among the townspeople. Ultimately, Aylmer's discomfort with the idea that this mark has the potential of multiple interpretations is part of what makes him want to eliminate it. Right. Like, I think he's disturbed by how polysemous. I don't know the mark on her face is. And he wants to have the answers, and he wants to have the. To eliminate the possibility of a knowledge which he doesn't have access to or doesn't want to understand.
Right. I think, again, this is a lot of. This is kind of just repeating what you've already said. Because I think this might be just his confrontation with a woman that is outside of his experience and which he may not have any kind of model of understanding.
19:31 Wes: Yeah. This is another way of saying that he's interested in the generic because he's interested in scientific law. And he's interested in a beautiful woman as opposed to this particular woman. And this is why he's making the contrast to character. And the idea that this is not something Hawthorne gives as an interpretation. It's my own, but that somehow the birthmark is kind of like a characterological thumbprint, but made visible. And it goes as deep as life itself. Or it extends all the way to the heart, I think, is the dream that he had. And she overheard him talking in his sleep about it.
So the seemingly superficial thing and character often manifests itself that way in certain sorts of behaviors, even as subtle as body language and facial expressions, vocal tones, all of it. Just think about all the ways in which people express character, you might say, and gender is one form of that. So think of femininity as a form of character. One can always make the accusation, oh, well, that's just a role. That's all very superficial. But there's a sense in which I think that's wrong. Because character is also about dispositions to think and feel and behave in certain ways.
Virtues like courage are examples of character, but so are pathologies like being a narcissist. That's a certain type of character. There's an outer facing aspect to it that one might say is superficial, but there's also inward part of it that has to do with the experience of the person, but also the identity of the person. So it does go deep as life itself in that sense. And to eradicate what seems to be superficial is actually to eradicate the person as a particular person. In a way, he's at war with particularity, which I think goes towards your point of wanting a single interpretation and be in the realm of the generic, of the universal, as a scientist might like to be, as opposed to being in the realm of the truly sui generis, the thing that can't be subjugated in any particular scientific law.
Because each person has their own set of laws. Each person has their own science to them. I could ascribe a lot of character traits to you, but in the end, the only legitimate description of you as a character is just to say you have Erin-ness, right? You are Erin. The rest of it is only a very, very rough approximation. And interestingly, there's a point where Aminadab Hawthorne makes the point of saying Aminadab is very comfortable with all the particulars of things. He's about doing all the precise things but doesn't know how anything works.
And I think Elmer is a big picture guy. Aminadab is the. Elmer is the ideas man and Aminadab is the one who executes. He's the worker. So that sort of lends itself to this point as well. And then there's another little piece of evidence where when Aylmer is creating these bewitching scenes using science, but it seems like magic, right? He's giving her these little figures dancing around in the air. Or he shows her. It's almost like a hologram, I think, or a three dimensional movie. But he's showing her representations of actual life and very, very accurate representations.
Representations, but they still have that bewitching, indescribable difference that makes pictures more attractive than the original. And this again is, I think, about character. This is something that art does, right? You don't just want. It's not just about doing an exact picture perfect representation of what's imitated. It's about capturing the uniqueness of what is imitated by capturing difference. And the uniqueness of the thing imitated can't be captured by perfect representation of the original. Because in a way that only gets at the generic in a weird sense, I'm not explaining that very well.
So I think all these things go together.
23:57 Erin: No, I think you're right. I was thinking about. I mean, we'll get to this in Drowne, but the extent to which particularity actually can transcend itself because Drowne had me thinking about negative capability, I suppose. And would the elimination of these types of particularities be something to be wished on a certain level? Is character something that we have to transcend? And I think ultimately what Drowne provides as an alternative to that is that it's through the particulars or through the character that you get at some sort of universal truth, right?
There's the family resemblance of his. Of his wooden carvings, which are less than the masterpiece that he creates, which seem to be particular in a way that is different from the kind of particularity that we're talking about again, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, so maybe I shouldn't leave that alone. But I think your reading is absolutely correct. I love this idea of her particularity and her character being expressed through the mark. And I think to your point, you're reminding me of the moment where she's invited to touch the flower, that he's sort of created a time lapse, you know, the holograms or whatever.
You know, I just think, like, oh, it's movies. You know, Hawthorne is such a genius. He's like predicting. He's predicting movies and cinema. And he also has, you know, this flower that's created via a sort of time lapse photography where we watch it, you know, grow suddenly and quickly out of the soil into a full, full grown flower and invites Georgiana to touch it. The narrator tells us she had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leave coal black, as if by the agency of fire. There was too powerful a stimulus, said Aylmer thoughtfully.
So even he kind of gets it right. It's not that she's sort of tainted with this birthmark and she's a sort of manifestation of original sin or of death or any of these things that we might say are these sort of garden variety interpretations, but in fact, her power, her characterological power, her distinctness, gives her so much vitality that she causes the plant created in this lab environment, this false plant, this simulacrum, to wither under her touch.
26:13 Wes: You know, the plant is living its entire life and fast forward. So in a matter of a minute, maybe, I don't know how long exactly. So we know it's about to die, and he thinks that she's going to have a chance to pluck it and smell it before it withers and before its seeds start already creating the next generation. It's all going to happen that quickly, and then it withers right after she touches it. And so we don't know whether that's.
26:40 Erin: Oh, that's a good point.
26:41 Wes: Correlation or causation. But of course, he's going to go straight to causation, like a bad scientist. He's not going to say, oh, maybe it was a coincidence, but it was too strong a stimulus. Which is an interesting thing to say, right? In light of him as a stimulus to her. Right. There's a little story being told there, I think, about him and her as well. You can reverse it as well, and she can be in the position with the stimulus and him in the position of the one being Stimulated. But there's two ways to read it, and I think on one reading, it's him destroying her with too powerful a stimulus and maybe wanting too much to control her or perfect her.
27:22 Erin: That's good. Yeah. How do we square all this, then, with the fact that she's converted by him over the course of the story? I mean, part of this is just, you know, if we wanted to pathologize this relationship, he's just subjecting her to endless amounts of psychological abuse to the point where she. She hates the. The birthmark more than he does. He seems to convert her to a mindset which values the generic over the particular. Because ultimately she characterizes love as something generic and thus loftier than reality. So we're told her heart exalted while it trembled at his honorable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had dreamed of.
So, you know, I mean, it's. It's winking at us as it. As it tells us this, right? But she comes to appreciate his love, which is one of demand and idealization rather than satisfaction and acceptance. So she's converted.
28:30 Wes: Well, it's interesting. Yeah, the conversion is a very interesting thing, because you would think the opposite would have happened. Because before all that happens, right? She witnesses him trying to show off. He does the airy figures and the fast flower, and then like a daguerreotype type of photograph that captures only the hand, and the rest of the face is out of focus. Hawthorne says, in a way, these are all failures, right. In each case, something has gone wrong. I forget what happens with the airy figures, why that would count as something going wrong.
But in any case, after that, it's like he gets manic almost. He's. He does more showing off. He comes in with this powerful fragrance. Now he's like a perfume guy. It's like your friend who's doing a different career every different day and who thinks he's going to be great at it. And then he's got a crystal globe with poison in it. And he can kill any tyrant anywhere with that poison somehow. And then there's a cosmetic for freckles, but that remedy, that's too superficial, he's got for her problem. He can't just give her this cosmetic and have the hand go away.
He needs something deeper for that. And then she reads his books and finds out that it's all about failure compared to his lofty standard, which is to make science do Something spiritual to create life or something in that domain. And the upshot of that, after reading his scientific journal, is that she trust his judgment less, Hawthorne says, but she reveres him all the more. That's the interesting way that she gets converted. She knows, in a way that he's doomed to failure in this project, but it's the thought that counts.
30:24 Erin: Yes, A for effort.
30:26 Wes: Yeah. She's impressed by the loftiness and the purity of his goal, which is really sick. Right, because he wants her to not be human. And that is a thing with men. Right. Freud's whole thing about the Oedipus complex was predicated on this idea of a Madonna whore complex, where men essentially want to idealize women as maternal figures and they don't really want them to be human and are bothered by it, are bothered by women's sexuality, are bothered by women's physicality, bothered by all these things and want to perfect them by turning them into spirits, basically, which just means killing them, ultimately. So it's a sick kind of project. But somehow she thinks, well, isn't that sweet? That's the wrong thing to say. Isn't that noble? Isn't that noble?
31:22 Erin: Well, he's succeeded in making life so untenable for her that she looks forward to the prospect of his failure as a way out. She's willing to. She expressly says that she's willing to die because life has lost any attraction for her so long as she has this birthmark.
31:40 Wes: She says something really interesting there, which is that she's like, yeah, go ahead and I'll drink this, but honestly, if it kills me, I prefer that. But the reason why is because she's become so morally advanced, she's become too good for this world. From her own perspective, she says life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Wow. Conceited much? Just kidding. But yeah, she. She fully identifies with. With this idealization and says, yeah, I'm too good for this world.
32:20 Erin: Well, in a way, she knows she knows more than he does because she's then, by that time, read all of his experiments, seen more clearly than he, I think, is capable of. How idealistic and out of whack his aspirations are. So if you like, maybe this has put her into a kind of a maternal relationship to him. She gets him now. She gets what he's about. She's seen his failures and, you know, he's. He's become like a little boy to her, and she's going to play his little game of make believe they're gonna play toy soldiers with a real gun or something like that.
33:02 Wes: That's interesting. So you don't think she really buys in? You think she's just playing along?
33:06 Erin: I don't think she's playing along. I think that the insight that she has now to him, I don't think she lies at all or that her perceptions are called into question throughout the entire story in the way that his are. And I think, yes, here we go. Who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Exactly what degree that is, she doesn't quite say. She says, were I weaker and blinder, it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured, hopefully. So she, she's, she's quite accurate in her assessment.
33:40 Wes: Yeah, I've misinterpreted that. Yep.
33:43 Erin: And I think, I think she's absolutely right. I think that by turns she's revealed herself to be more sensitive and perhaps even more intelligent than he. And I think having seen this, this record of his life, it's as though she's gone through his, his. You know those baby books where you record, where parents like record all of their kids accomplishments and you know, they said this word on this date, you know, when they were 10 months old or whatever, you know, and they take the stamps of the baby's feet, you know, and have the footprints and the handprints in the book and just a log of everything that they've done.
34:20 Wes: And you say that's adorable.
34:23 Erin: Exactly. It's his experiment book. It seems to be a record of his mind up until the point that they married. And now it's like she knows him. She knows him really well. And she knows him in a way which, you know, she's then able to, with this sort of like perfect sense of balance and accuracy, gauge how she's able to respond to that. And it seems to me that she pities him or decides that she's just going to die to please him or something. It seems to me to become very maternal.
34:58 Wes: Yeah, I'm not so sure I agree that she's dying to please him. I mean, I think this is very important what you've pointed out, because her degree of moral advancement, it's not like she thinks she's become an angel. Right. She's advanced enough to be too good for this world, but not enough to withstand the dissonance that her goodness now puts her in, in relationship to the world. That's the way I would say.
35:23 Erin: And to him I would say, yeah, yeah.
35:26 Wes: And then methinks I am, of all mortals, the most fit to die. So there is a grandiose element to that. But she's most fit to die precisely because she hasn't been perfected enough. She's been perfected enough to be put in a spot, but not perfected enough to be able to endure the predicament that she's been put in, by the way. Most fit to die, or fit to die. That should have been a James Bond movie title. Fit, Fit to die. I think she's attracted to the loftiness of his goals and the sort of tragic loftiness of his goals, their unobtainability. Let's see, when she reads his volumes.
And at that point, she realizes he's already kind of drugging her, doing things to her without telling her. She starts out by reading. There's romances, there's poetry. And then she gets into these alchemist figures who she realizes are kind of ridiculous. They think they're going to change metals into gold and all that stuff, but they also think they're going to create life and do the thing when we haven't talked about this yet, but really that only women can do but use science to arrogate for themselves this kind of reproductive capacity, this capacity to actually create life.
Or you could say a divine capacity to create life. She kind of thinks it's quaint. They falsely imagine themselves to have sway over the spiritual world. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and therefore were believed and perhaps imagined themselves to have acquired from the investigation of nature a power above nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual world. So, yes, also the subjection of the spiritual to the scientific in the material, and then moving on from there.
Right. He's recorded every experiment in this book, this journal of his. And so here's her reaction to the book. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them, yet spiritualized them all and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp, the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly than ever, but with less entire dependence on his judgment than heretofore.
I love that. Less entire dependence. Meaning, yeah, she realizes he's whacked. She can't rely on his judgment. He's whacked out but there's something admirable about it.
38:07 Erin: Yes. And this is where I get. I'm glad you pointed to her reaction to his library. And this, I think this is where I'm getting this maternal idea coming in. You know, she's now seen everything he has to offer, and she's in a position of judgment over him now. And it seems like. Yeah. You know when kids show you something that they've done and you're like, wow, that's great, honey. Good job, you know, that's wonderful. That's really cute. Oh, you want to kill me now as part of this game that you're playing? Okay, I guess. I mean, you're a huge disappointment. So what do I really have to live for?
38:46 Wes: If it'll make you feel strong and powerful. Okay, go ahead and.
38:50 Erin: Exactly, exactly.
38:51 Wes: That's what you need for your self esteem, honey.
38:54 Erin: Right, right. And the key to this, I think, is dropped in very early on when she says, you cannot love what shocks you. What I love about that. I ended up doing a little bit of reading into galvanism and things like that because I figured out what. What the early part of the story was referencing with this idea of the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of nature seem to open paths into the region of a miracle. So I was reading about galvani sending the electrical impulses through the frog's legs, Right. And getting them to twitch as if alive.
And how, I guess Mary Shelley had been just reading about that in the run up to the contest there in which she wrote Frankenstein. So I was thinking about just the great duality of that line. You cannot love what shocks you. Right. It works both ways. He can't love her and recoil at her, and at the same time, he is shocking her, so to speak. Right. He's making her the recipient of his experiments, his efforts at improvement. His critical gaze, you might say. Right. And I think so long as he is treating her like an experiment, or so long as his relationship to her is one of this desire for improvement or one in which he's somehow tinkering with her, I think the relationship would not survive even if she survived and the experiment was successful.
40:18 Wes: Right.
40:18 Erin: Because it just. It's creating this. This relationship of scientist and subject. It's creating a relationship which I think is untenable in any kind of a marriage. And I think that that's one of. That she knows or realizes that she knows at the point when she decides to die. There's no way back from this. We could say that there's no way back from him treating her like a science experiment. And maybe there's also no way back for the relationship so long as she realizes that there's something ridiculous and like a little boy about him. And they're always going to be unequal in that regard. So somehow the inequality has now gone in both directions to such an extent that the marriage can't work, can't go forward. Not that it was working before, but, you know, it's really broken.
41:08 Wes: She realizes she's just married to this unemployed crackpot.
41:13 Erin: Well, you know, the most shocking part of the whole story is finding out that he was actually respected in Europe.
41:19 Wes: You know, I mean, he's famous. It's important that he's famous in this.
41:23 Erin: Right? It's. And it's dropped in. In the middle that, oh, by the way, he was actually famous for this stuff because for a long time you think that he's just, you know, he has his, like, toy science kit that he got for Christmas one year, and he's just been. Been playing around and I guess independently wealthy enough to have a, you know, an assistant who's. Who he's paying to do his. His amateur science experiments. But turns out they're real. And though also a lot of this was undertaken a long time ago. Right. There's a strange. Something weird happens with time where it seems as though he's giving up his experiments to get married. As soon as they're married, all these problems happen. And then when she's looking back into his log, she sees that these were things that he had undertaken years and years ago. You know, so there's a. Something odd is happening with time.
42:14 Wes: Yeah.
42:15 Erin: He tries to brush off his failures as though they happened a long time ago. And now he's figured it out in the same way that I should say, too. He also tells her that he's been thinking about her birthmark for a really long time, even though they've just gotten married. That's another weird time. He wouldn't have had time to think so deeply about it. It's clearly something that is just, oh, I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm sure I could fix you. Right? And it seems to happen within like 48 hours of their wedding day that he. That this thing, which he claims not to have noticed until they've been married, is something he's somehow been thinking forever about and knows the solution for. Right. So there's a time lapse with this plant and also somehow with his own sense of his Advancement in his studies,
43:03 Wes: these things that he earlier on made discoveries about. So during his toilsome youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental powers of nature that had roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe. Seated calmly in his laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the. So he discovered the nimbus cloud, apparently, and of the profoundest minds. It's good to have a little practical engineering stuff going on. He had satisfied himself of all of the causes that kindled and kept alive the fires of the volcano, and had explained the mystery of fountains and how it.
And how it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure and others with such rich medicinal virtues, from the dark bosom of the earth. So he's investigated, high and low, everything from the heavens all the way down into the depths of the earth. And then it turns out he's discovered the human frame, what's in the middle. Studied the wonders of the human frame and attempted to fathom the very process by which nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air and from the spiritual world to create and foster man her masterpiece.
The latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside an unwilling recognition of the truth against which all seekers sooner or later stumble. That our great creative mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, results, as opposed to the mechanisms that underlie the results. She permits us indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and like a jealous patentee, on no account to make.
Now, however, Aylmer resumed these half forgotten investigations, not, of course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested them, but because they involved much physiological truth. I love that phrase, much physiological truth, and lay in the path of his proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana. I love the phrase much physiological truth because it speaks to the physiological truth of sexual interaction as well, which I think is partly what's underneath all this. But I do want to say, just going to. I like your reading a lot where she's kind of humoring him, and ultimately her self sacrifice is a form of maternal condescension, but she does.
I just want to look at one more area where she's engaged in these rapt musings about his character. This is where I thought she fully buys into his idealization. And now I'm wondering if I'm wrong about this. In Lydia, you're reading so Georgiana became rapt in musings. She considered the character of Aylmer and did it completer justice than in any previous moment. This goes to your point where she's actually, genuinely getting to know him. Her heart exalted while it trembled at this honorable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with and earthlier nature than he had dreamed of.
Yeah, so this is the part that I thought was a bit sick. She felt how much more precious was a sentiment than of the meaner kind, which would have borne with the imperfection for her sake and have been guilty of treason to holy love by degrading its perfect idea to the level of the actual. And with her whole spirit, she prayed for a single moment that for a single moment she might satisfy his highest and deepest conceptions. So this is. You know, I'm sure feminists have written about this as her kind of being in the male gaze and sort of going with it.
Right. So trying to live up to his idealization longer than one moment, she well knew it could not be, for his spirit was ever on the march, ever ascending, and each instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant before.
46:58 Erin: Okay, I love that. So one more moment seems to undo. Yeah, exactly. She's there, and then she thinks about it a little bit more, and she somehow gets beyond him. It's as though he's convinced her to, instead of loving their family dog, to love, loyalty or something. Right. He convinces her for one second to conceive of everything as being in the world of forms or something like that, and to stay up there. And then she immediately knows that nothing can stay up there and that she is never going to satisfy him, and he is never going to be satisfied. And he's just going to keep trying to climb this ladder of abstractions into the point of the singularity, into nothingness. Right.
47:47 Wes: But I do think she still is enamored of his idealism. And even though she knows she can't live up to it, and I think you're right, there's a condescension to her approach, you know, to what she does, in the end, she still finds it. And maybe it's just she finds it endearing the way, you know, as you pointed out, you might find a child's accomplishments endearing. But this paragraph suggested to me that she's excited by this idea of purity.
48:15 Erin: She's giving his behavior the most generous possible read still in this paragraph. But, you know, it's about virtue. Is what I'm trying to say. She sees this as the pursuit of the virtuous, that there's something in the generic, in the dissolving of character. If we all are just these spirit beings and we are untethered to our bodies, we can all live perfectly virtuous lives and everything will be okay. So I think she sees his aspirations perhaps as having a virtuous intent here, and then in the next moment realizes that it's also wholly impractical and that she can't follow him there.
And she's trying to understand what he's about and what attracts him to this, even as she appreciates its impracticality and ultimate folly. I suppose it's not just about trying to fix her so that he could finally touch her or whatever. It's about an ideal of virtue. I don't know if I'm. If I'm characterizing that correctly or I'm just sort of thinking out loud. But in other words, she thinks of him less as a critic in this new insight that she has into him and more of a pure idealist. And the latter she seems able to appreciate and admire, even as she understands how silly it is in practicality.
49:36 Wes: Well, yeah, I think she's kind of fatally attracted to the impracticality in a way. But over time. Let's wrap up part one and part two. We will continue our discussion of the birthmark, and if we can have time, we'll get to the other story, Drowne's Wooden Image. subscribe@patreon.com subtextpodcast or just subscribe right here on the Apple Podcast app if that's what you're using to listen. Otherwise, you'll hear the second part in a week. All right, thank you, thank you.
50:24 Erin: For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Faith and Industry in “There Will Be Blood” (Part 2)
Oct 13, 2025
What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of There Will Be Blood. We spent a long time in part one talking about Daniel and his psychology and his relationship with oil and that symbology. And I think now we're about to move into his relationship with HW and the way that that might triangulate his relationship with oil a little bit or his relationship with himself maybe, and redemption that that might represent for him psychologically, which ultimately doesn't pan out. This is another reason why I think I like Daniel as a character to a point, is that his scenes with HW before the accident are very sweet. I mean, except for when he's actively deceiving people and just using HW as a prop in the background. I should have mentioned this first thing. Have you seen the SNL There Will Be Blood excuse for Bill Hader to do an impression of Daniel of Daniel Plainview?
1:29 Wes: I probably saw it, but I don't remember it. But it sounds great.
1:32 Erin: It's so good. You gotta. I'll send you the link as soon as we're. As soon as we're done. But it's just he has a show on the Food Network where he goes around drinking other people's milkshakes at various. And Amy Poehler plays H.W. in the underrated performance of that episode. It's just that she's in the background with these huge eyes and she says nothing and just has the sort of like silent, you know, look on her face. This is a funny look. I love that episode. And Anton Chigurh is a guest on the. On the show.
2:04 Wes: Oh, wow.
2:05 Erin: So he also, like, kills somebody with a cattle gun. Anyway, so they have a surprisingly, I think, tender and wonderful relationship which. Which would seem on the surface to sort of belie Daniel's own stated principles and behaviors. But I think this gets to his. To the ambivalence of oil, which is Daniel's own ambivalence about origins and a desire for connection and a desire actually for support. As he says to Henry later, I can't keep doing this alone or I can't keep doing this by myself. Something like that. So he needs a prop at all times for being Mr. Self Made Man. He usually needs a prop.
2:47 Wes: I guess his business partner gets killed at some point. When HW is what, two?
2:52 Erin: Yeah, one or two. Yeah.
2:54 Wes: He has the boy from a young age and he's a single dad. Yeah, I think you're right. There's a lot of sweet moments. And again, I think it represents a possibility for redemption. And I think he, you know, if HW hadn't been injured, you could speculate that there would be a different course for Daniel, that he might have. It's possible that that relationship could change him. But they lose. Their ability to communicate is significantly impaired. That's one problem. So HW's ability to actually affect Daniel and to produce any change in him is compromised.
And then the other problem is I don't think Daniel likes weakness. And that's what the deafness in HW represents. And then there's the guilt. Right. He's embarrassed. Well, there's guilt and embarrassment. I think he feels guilty about what happens to hw, or maybe. But at the very least, he doesn't like how it looks. Right. So that the conflict he gets in with those other businessmen, potential business partners, is about the idea that he's not taking proper care of his family because he sent HW off by that point. Right?
4:12 Erin: I think, yeah.
4:14 Wes: So there's the implication that he didn't properly take care of his. Of HW and hw's getting injured. And then there's the implication he's not properly taken care of him by. Or that he's abandoned hw. And those two criticisms. Or that criticism, sorry, really, really bothers him. And then so we have to ask why it bothers him. Is it really part of his identity to seem to want, to seem caring to other people? I don't think so exactly. But yeah, how do we explain that? Why is he bothered so much by HW's injury and by this criticism of abandonment?
4:52 Erin: Does abandonment imply an abdication of duty or being unequal to a challenge?
4:59 Wes: That second one, I think sounds right to me. Weakness, maybe.
5:03 Erin: Yeah. So HW becomes quite a sticking point then. You're helping me see that with him. He's a symbol of weakness because he's. Because he's.
5:11 Wes: Deaf.
5:11 Erin: And therefore Daniel might become someone who's pitied for having a son with a disability, but without him, he's also accused of not being able to handle it. So HW can't exist for Daniel at all. His very existence becomes something which is inherently going to cause problems for Daniel. Now.
5:32 Wes: Yeah. Can we say more about the deafness thing. And why that's such a big problem? Because he's really cruel about that. Towards the end of the movie, flapping your lips or. No, what is he saying? Your hands.
5:43 Erin: Sorry. And your little dog talks for you or whatever.
5:47 Wes: You're beneath a bastard or worth.
5:50 Erin: Bastard in a basket. There's so many. So many lines that I just like that I say so many times, and that's one of them.
6:04 Wes: I would love to see the outtakes from that.
6:06 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
6:07 Wes: Yeah.
6:08 Erin: No, Bastard from a basket. That's what it is. Bastard from a basket. So this is the flip side. So I think that in Daniel's universe, he wants to get rid of the idea of luck. I think I'm then tweezing luck from a gift or something like that. But anything which is not the result of work, maybe anything which you might luck into or which might be given to you as a gift, Daniel hates Daniel, doesn't want any part of it. And I think what happens to HW actually proves the existence of luck, namely, like the existence of bad luck. It proves that things can happen to you that are not the result of anything that you've done to either deserve punishment or earn praise or Reward.
Right. Because H.W. is up there. Because he is kind of following his father's example by tending to the derrick. Right? He's. He's sort of like, you know, I had this idea that. That Daniel is like this shepherd of oil derricks, you know, and you could say that that's kind of what HW is doing. You know, they're all waiting for the oil to come in and sort of watching. And HW is up there, you know, like a. Like a shepherd lying in the grass in some kind of pastoral painting, only he's lying on the roof of a shed in a sort of like, hellscape in which nothing.
He's not doing anything wrong. He's not. He just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So that's proof of a force outside of the forces that Daniel wants to acknowledge. Eli, of course, will connect it to the fact that the well wasn't blessed. And then we have, I think, what Daniel is about, which is about playing God and being a creator. So I'm going to reject any connection to things that were given to me that I didn't necessarily earn, including a family. But, like, I will turn someone who isn't family into family. I like, I will make them my family member.
And it's very important that he does that. Absent of a woman. Because that would involve collaboration. So this is sort of like this Shakespearean idea of, you know, the perfect print of the father without the intervention of the woman, which can be hairy and difficult for instances of paternity and stuff like that. Right. So Shakespearean characters are very interested in the workaround for that. So the idea of a perfect self. And the only way that Daniel knows how to be himself is through this rhetoric. Right. And so he teach it. We see him teaching H.W.
telling him, here's what we're going to do. This is earthquake oil. So HW can no longer be a perfect copy of his father because Daniel can't reach him anymore. Because Daniel's not interested in becoming a different or a better person or a person other than what he is. And so that lack of communication means that Daniel would have to change and that HW can no longer be a perfect copy created by Daniel in his image.
9:08 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a very good point. I think that you're reminding me of how sweet that transition into the third act is with HW is getting signing lessons at the end of the second act, and then Mary is doing that with him, which is very sweet. Right. Daniel is not. So there's already love there. And then you jump into the third act is them getting married. So there's a big time transition as well. But there's something that is like, for me, was the most emotionally impactful moment of the movie. And there's love in that. And I think maybe this is part of the problem with hw.
You could say Daniel has done a really good thing by putting HW into a community. Right now he's used him and used this idea of community to get what he wants and to serve this envious project. But he really did all these things. He really did irrigate the land and help create a community and also give HW a community. And that, I think, has been formative for hw, and it's given him a possibility of love where there is none for Daniel. So my point here is that by the time we get to the end of the movie, then this all happens very quickly. Right?
It's sweet. He's married, and that is just horrible. But HW has been formed by forces which are more than just Daniel. This is going towards your point with printing and all that. So it's not just about that there's no woman imprinting on hw, but also that there's a competition for the communal forces. And I think that's what unconsciously would gall someone Like Daniel, HW is more than his because he's the communities. And HW is loved and can be loving, and that's not a possibility for Daniel. And in that sense, because of those things, HW can be an individual who's not just an extension, an extension of Daniel.
So it's sort of a narcissistic appendage. And that's what's represented by HW saying, I am off to Mexico with Mary and I'm gonna start my own business. And that makes him a competitor in Daniel's mind. But I think in Daniel's mind, any individual is a competitor. Anyone who's not an extension of him represents a competitive threat. So H.W. has escaped his orbit in various ways. In the external action, the escape comes with, I'm going to go to Mexico and start my own business. But psychologically, the seeds of the escape are already there in the fact that he's got these communal opportunities and opportunities for love.
And ironically, of course. Right. Yeah. Daniel puts HW into that very position. So his project of exploitation goes wrong there because he's. By making use of community, he loses control over this one person that he had a relationship with and that, you know, where the relationship was happening under his. On his terms, which is complete control.
12:24 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I just want to tease that out a little bit more because I'm thinking about the fact that he first puts HW into the community of Little Boston, giving him the ability to write, to meet Mary, the person he will marry. And then the deafness because of that lack of communication, it forces HW into a reliance on people. Right. So he ends up going. And it's. This is done so subtly and skillfully in the film, but we sort of know that the school he must have been sent to must have been a Catholic school or at least some kind of high church school. Right. Because H.W. and Mary are being married in a much more traditional looking church. Right. So we can sort of imply, intuit that the school for the deaf was one, which is probably a Catholic community. Right.
13:11 Wes: There's not any snake handling that's gonna happen.
13:13 Erin: No, I don't think so. I think.
13:16 Wes: Get out, devil. Get out.
13:19 Erin: Well, you know, I think that the film is obviously very suspicious of both Daniel and Eli. The cult of personality church, that is Eli's church, you know, in. In Little Boston, Sunday doesn't mean Jesus, it means Eli. Right. So he's gone into the, you might say, you know, the most community community of all the communities. Right. The. The Catholic Church. The one in which there is an extremely structured idea of communal responsibility, of charity, of, you know, one which would. Develops a social doctrine, etc. So I think that, you know, I was thinking about, well, why.
Well, why is Daniel upset at the end that HW is going off for himself? And why does he construe him as a competitor? Why would he not admire that? Because one would think that Daniel would actually be, you know, would create the conditions whereby HW would inherit all this money and live a life of ease and wouldn't have to work. And that would be the thing that would make Daniel resent him, would be to inherit this money. But no, I think it turns out that as you're pointing out, there's a collaboration now inherent in HW's person. So he's going to be going out and using the knowledge that Daniel gave him in those early years of training in order to drill in Mexico.
But he's also now been the. The feminine principle in him. You know, the mother or the other parent has become potentially the Catholic Church or some sort of like high church. Right. It could be Anglican. Right. Some sort of high church influence, which is representative of community, which is representative of the feminine, I think. And this weakness, this, this deafness which he's construing, which Daniel construes as weakness, that needs that community coming in and being the mother to this child, which means that Daniel can no longer sees him as a competitor.
Because you're not my kid, you know, you're your mother's kid now.
15:24 Wes: I mean, the irony here is that HW has just kind of become a regular guy. Like, he's not, as far as we can tell, doesn't have some extreme personality disorder like Daniel does. So he's really not in that sense a competitor, some raging narcissist who wants to take over the empire or something like that. He's not little Trump Jr. Or something like that with all the same personality pathologies that's going to compete with him in that sense. So competitor, in a way is a rather. At the external level is a rather weak accusation. But psychologically it's spot on. Right, Because HW has bested him. He's got a more mature personality than Daniel does. He's a bastard in the sense that he's just not completely fucking insane like his father.
16:14 Erin: Right. So how can we square this with Henry? I mean, I think I want to make sure though, that we talk about the fact that Henry represents an alternate vision, maybe. Of what? Of how Daniel might make copies of himself in the world. I think Henry is this possibility that Daniel hadn't considered, which is, if he's my brother from another mother, that's important. I think maybe he is like me, through the father, through whatever paternal forces Daniel imagines have affected him and his personality. Perhaps Henry could be the same way, coming from the same place, under the same conditions.
But having moved away like this is important, too. I think he's had this long journey to find Daniel. So both of them have moved away from Fond du Lac, which I know means bottom of the lake. So it's about water. But you can't think of Lac, Lac and Wisconsin and not also think of milk. Right. So they've both moved away from a kind of maternal force, which is also like the. You know, water is also, of course, a maternal force as well. So I think it works both ways, but they've both moved away from that. So I think that's another possibility for him.
Of course, the deception and the idea that Daniel has been made a fool of in having been deceived by Henry makes this a very different kind of family lease than the one in which he was deceiving the child, HW or other people into believing that he was the father of this boy. Daniel can't be made a fool of. So Henry has to die.
17:49 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting. He comes right at the midpoint of the movie. So it's another redemptive possibility. It's another possibility for some kind of actual relationship for Daniel. But then we quickly see that. We see that HW Intuits that there's a way in which Henry might supplant him. And so that's how you get, you know, he lights that fire. I think part of it, he's. He intuitively understands that Henry is a fraud. And I think he gets into the diary. It's a little vague for me, but you get the sense that he's. He's on to Henry in a way, but also knows that. Right. HW has been Daniel's entire life. And now here comes Henry, and that's exactly what happens. Right. Henry is then sent away. And then Daniel and Henry have their little bromance road trip, surveying for the
18:40 Erin: pipeline, which returns them to water, briefly
18:44 Wes: ending up in the ocean, splashing about like having gale time in San Francisco. Is that where they are in San Francisco?
18:53 Erin: I think they're a little further south, barking up the wrong tree there.
18:58 Wes: I guess it's rather stale to point to the homoerotic element of that, but, you know, de rigueur for criticism, but. But anyway. But it's probably a little bit legitimate to point that out and to point to the fact that it ends in violence partly because of that. But really, when all one needs say is that Daniel allowed himself to get too close to Henry and that's why Henry had to die. You know, again, there's an external line of action that justifies it. And in a way, Daniel is sort of let off the hook. Right. He has an excuse to kill off Henry, but I think that that's his fundamental impulse anyway, is to do that sort of thing, to get rid of that relationship. But in any case, Good news for HW. Well, his rival is gone.
19:45 Erin: Yes. But HW's relationship with Daniel is over. And then. Yeah, so that might have been a redemption and I think Henry might have been another one. Not as effective. But, you know, Henry makes him open up.
19:57 Wes: Exactly.
19:58 Erin: Returns him to water. Returns him to the possibility of connection with other people. Even if at the same time he's saying, I probably couldn't look at that house again, it would make me sick. He talks about the Peach Tree Dance. He actually talks about being with women. Right. He actually is suddenly open to water, to the possibility of collaboration with somebody on the basis of a family tie.
20:20 Wes: Henry is the one. He tells about his envy, he's confiding all these things. And as you said, it's the only time in the movie where we get any of Daniel's inner life through his interactions, as far as I can tell, with Henry, any sort of self. Actual self disclosure. So it is significant, it is redemptive to some extent, or it goes in that direction and then of course goes sideways.
20:44 Erin: Right. And what's so fabulous about that is that it's the exact same scenario as hw, only this time Daniel is not in control. So he's ceded a little bit of control to these forces outside of himself under Henry's influence, and then discovered that Henry was not actually his real brother and cries. He cries. That's important.
21:04 Wes: Yeah. When he discovers this, he has a fair amount of control because he. Because Henry relies on him for money. And we get the info, the hint that that money is being doled out very, very by drip, by drip. Right. That happens in the saloon where Henry has to repeatedly ask Daniel for money and.
21:29 Erin: Oh, right.
21:30 Wes: At that point Daniel is furious. And so at that point in the movie, I'm wondering, is he furious because of his dislike of sexuality? Is he furious because of Henry's weakness? Weakness for women, but also the weakness implicit in Asking him for money. The dependence. And I think that's part of it. Right. So he needs dependence. He needs people like H.W. or Henry to be dependent on him. That's the only position in which he can tolerate the relationship. But dependence is also weakness, and he doesn't like weakness. So he seems to be disgusted by Henry's weakness. I guess we're supposed to also infer at that point he already knows that Henry's not his brother.
22:11 Erin: Oh, yes, he knows.
22:12 Wes: Yeah. When does he find out?
22:14 Erin: It's the Peach Tree dance.
22:15 Wes: Okay.
22:16 Erin: He says we could get all dressed up and take him to the Peach Tree Petri. Yeah, we can get all dressed to the petri dish. Petri dish. The Peach Tree Dance. And Henry clearly does not know what he's talking about. Whatever the staple of Wisconsin Fond du Lac society is, which is so funny. And this is. So this is h. This has to be a Paul Anderson invention in the script. Right. Because remember in Sierra Madre, Curtin wants to grow. Grow peaches. And then he goes off with Cody, has that peach orchard. And so he's left his wife and this peach orchard to apparently go to seed. Unless Curtin goes there and takes his place. Anyway. Yeah. So he gets this fantasy fulfilled of this wife in the peach orchard. Yeah. So that's the tell.
23:07 Wes: I see.
23:07 Erin: And it's at that moment with this idea of women and place and connection that he realizes.
23:14 Wes: I see.
23:14 Erin: Yeah.
23:15 Wes: Yeah. I think I missed that. I mean, I think I concluded there had to have been a tell that I missed, but. Right. Yeah. It's. In a way, it provides him with an excuse, probably to unleash aggression, you know, built up irritation just with having, you know, having. Being. Being in a relationship with a person, getting close, the humiliation of having confided all those things. For instance, that in and of itself, you know, is enough to make you want to kill someone. How dare you know these things about you?
23:46 Erin: About me?
23:47 Wes: How you dare you know my weaknesses.
23:50 Erin: Right, Right.
23:51 Wes: That's the way I used to feel going to. Going to therapy. It's like, did I really. Did I really say all those things to my therapist? God. Oh, my gosh, I hate her for knowing that.
24:02 Erin: I'm just. I'm. I have no boundaries and I'm obsessed with self disclosure, so that doesn't. I'm like, oh, finally, I feel close to you now that you know all my darkest secrets. Thank you, checkout person.
24:18 Wes: Yeah. Well, self disclosure is at the very essence of. Yeah. Friendship. But it's got to be regulated.
24:25 Erin: Yes.
24:26 Wes: You say too Much the other person's got to die.
24:29 Erin: That's right. I hate it. I hate it when that happens. I've killed so many people.
24:35 Wes: That's why you got to keep a little pistol on your body at all times.
24:39 Erin: That's right. Then William Bandy always finds out.
24:44 Wes: I thought we were having a good time. Remember what I told you? Never tell anyone.
24:50 Erin: Don't tell anyone. No, but, I mean, I revisited the moment where Henry comes into Daniel's life, which is a scene that I love because it's shot from so far away, so we don't see Henry up close for a very long time. Just this real distancing effect that goes on there. And he keeps asking Henry who he is, and he keeps just saying his first name. He doesn't say Henry Plainview. So he's. And there's this. This obsession, I think, with naming and names in the film. I mean, not only because the names are so, you know, loaded, but that's a really significant tell, I think.
Henry. I'm Henry. You know, I'm just some guy named Henry. I'm not Henry Plainview. Necessary, necessarily. And then I'm your brother, which, you know, which could have a lot of different meanings. So in a way, he, like, almost doesn't lie to him. Of course he does. But, you know, in a sense. And then when he holds the gun to Henry's head and he asks him again, who are you? Henry says, I'm nobody.
25:47 Wes: This is a really good. Yeah. This is really interesting. Yeah. I hadn't thought of this fact that this kind of identity thing bookends the whole relationship. It starts out with this who are you? Thing, and then it ends with this who are you? Thing.
25:59 Erin: And the. The idea to, you know, the. Maybe the idea of making your name is part of this, too. You know, you think of the fact that hws father, you know, who you only kind of realize is the father after the fact. Because it's so difficult to tell in the oil who anybody is. Right. Because they're covered in the goop, which is. So whatever you want to say about that.
26:19 Wes: Right.
26:20 Erin: Amniotic.
26:21 Wes: Fungible and amniotic. Yep. Right.
26:24 Erin: And there are so many, you know, like, those accidents where you could be anybody, it could happen to anybody, and it literally happens to people who. You don't even know who they are. Right. Because they're working with you, but they're. You maybe know nothing about them. And that the anonymity of the west, which could be. Either you get a fresh start, or it could be you Die in a hole and nobody even knows your name, you know, versus, like, Daniel Plainview. I'm an oil man.
26:52 Wes: I'm an oil man.
26:54 Erin: Right. And becoming this guy with this enormous house on the. On the coast, making. Making your name in that way, identity. I don't know. There's. There's more to be said about that. Yeah. Making your name versus being given a name like Eli Sunday. Who. Who's. Yeah, who's all. Who's all about.
27:09 Wes: Good transition. Yeah. Let's talk about him getting bludgeoned to death.
27:14 Erin: Yeah, yeah. With the bowling pin, which is just, you know, love everything about this movie.
27:22 Wes: You hated violence.
27:24 Erin: Yeah, that part is. That part is, you know. Well, I mean, I was going to start with the joke that There Will Be Blood was the original title of my first book, but so I, you know, I do and I don't. I love blood. Under certain circumstances, I'm very interested in blood. So, father named Abel, twin brother named Paul. Very confusing moment. I remember first watching theater.
27:50 Wes: Yeah. I was very confused. I thought when Eli was introducing himself to Daniel that it was Paul and that they were pretending not to know. I was. And it turns out originally they weren't twin brothers. There was a different actor. Yeah, right. And then that actor was not very enthusiastic about his job, let's just put it that way, and even admitted that. But so anyway, he got fired. And then the actor who plays Eli, who's wonderful. What's his name?
28:20 Erin: Paul Dano.
28:21 Wes: Yeah. Paul Dano plays both parts, but they don't really. I don't think they draw attention to the fact that they're twin brothers. You just have to figure it out. Right.
28:29 Erin: Daniel and H.W. do give each other a look, because of course, they can't say, like, oh, we saw your brother Paul. He tipped us off. Right.
28:37 Wes: Yeah.
28:37 Erin: So it's very, very subtly handled.
28:41 Wes: It is very interesting. Yeah. So you have the one son who. The chosen one is the one who tips him off and goes on to make a fortune. If Daniel is telling the truth, apparently Paul becomes a oil man himself.
28:58 Erin: He doesn't. He just makes that up to torture Eli because he said he gave him $1,000 instead of 500 and.
29:04 Wes: Right, right, right.
29:05 Erin: I gave him a million dollars.
29:08 Wes: Yeah. There is this Cain and Abel element. Right. Am I wrong to read that into this?
29:15 Erin: No, you're not wrong. Even between father and son. I mean.
29:19 Wes: Right. Yes, of course. But I'm thinking between Daniel and Eli. So when. Because. Right, so, okay, so here's the. Here it is, from Genesis. Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil. Oil that is just kidding. Fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering, fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering. But on Cain and his offering, he did not look with favor, which is always just find so confusing and funny.
But so Cain was very angry and his face was downcast and I would be too. And if God didn't even tell me why, what did I do wrong? I'm the crop guy and the brother is the flock guy. Right? We. This has got to be someone for everything. Why am I the. But anyway, it. And I was looking online like why does. Why does. It's just Googling. Why does the Lord, you know, not favor Cain? And I. I saw someone on Reddit say because that's God's prerogative with all caps.
30:35 Erin: You can't argue with that.
30:37 Wes: Literally one way of looking, looking at it. And I'm sure you know a lot more about the interpretation of this than me, but. But just from my amateur point of view, it looks a little bit like the Abel is in the position, the more spiritual position with a flock. Right. And leading. Leading a flock and doing all that as opposed to taking something out of the. Or from the ground or something like that. I don't know. So I was associating Daniel's envy with Cain's envy of Abel and you know, Daniel's envy in the general sense that we talked about, but also his envy of.
Of Eli. So he envies Eli in the sense of having this position to be of being a spiritual benefactor to people. Right. To leading a flock and envious people in general, of course, in the sense of their possibility for actual connection to others. Daniel can only be connected to the ground. Others can be connected to each other. And his envy ultimately is about, you know, he thinks he needs to defeat people, but ultimately he needs to connect. And that's. That's what is torturing him. But so that's my sort of reading Cain and Abel onto this, which is the.
Why I think the bludgeoning is so apt. I don't know. Tell me, tell me what I'm getting wrong or right in that.
31:57 Erin: No, I think that's totally right. I think, you know, he envies Eli in the same way that he envies women and Fond du Lac and water and. Right. Anything that he can't control or that he isn't Totally playing God over. I mean, there's so many things I could say about this. Just one of the elements that I meant to talk about with land is also the fact that land and ownership is, of course, fundamentally. There's already a kind of mental gymnastics that you have to. That you have to do with yourself to even think about ownership of land, period. Never mind ownership of land in America or in the West.
Which is. Which is maybe a hint that when Eli calls himself, you know, the son of these hills, that's. That's what he wants Daniel to call him, and that having some authority to it is already kind of suspect. So, you know, they're both flimflam men, it turns out, right? They're both. They're both orators who are manipulating people and trying to get something out of people. They both have gift for speech in a certain way. So Eli sets himself up as being the inheritor of the land, someone who's connected to the place, someone who has territorial rights that supersede Daniel's, and someone who's also a son of God and also a father to the flock.
And I think Daniel actually envies, come to think of it, in this discussion of Abel, Eli's father, Abel. I think he also envies Abel for having a daughter like Mary. I think this is something that Daniel is interested in. I mean, you know, you.
33:26 Wes: You.
33:27 Erin: You've alluded to this already, but when Daniel pulls the switcheroo on. On Eli and doesn't let him give the blessing of the well, Daniel himself does the blessing, right? He's. He's constantly putting himself in the position of God to Eli rhetorically. And he instead positions himself. Oh, he says Mary. He steals Eli's language and says, Mary is a proud daughter of these hills. And he puts, like, his hand on her shoulder, right? So he does this leasing thing, even with Mary leasing family members, leasing land, right? Where he's like. He then installs himself as the surrogate father of Mary and therefore grandfathers himself into the town.
You know, like, I'm a member of this town, too. I'm gonna be the guy who's part of the town. Eli, I think he views the fact that he has this oil under the Sunday ranch as a gift that he's been given that he has the right to because he owns the land. And the negotiation scene where Daniel comes clean, basically, he's not just quail hunting, that I wrote down the dialogue. Eli says, we have oil here. That's worth something. Daniel says, oh, do you have someone who can drill for it. And he says, it's very expensive to drill and to get it up and out of the ground.
You ever tried that before? You know, like you don't know what you're doing, you know, you moron. How much is it? Costly. And Eli says, well, our. Our oil sits right up on top of the ground. I have this gift that everyone can see. My gift of healing people. Right. My guy, like, I'm. I'm an. I'm a child of God. I'm, you know, I'm part of the body of Christ. I'm member of a church, of a family. All of these things, I think, are twinned in there. So. So Daniel says, I believe that's called seepage. Doesn't necessarily mean there's something underneath.
35:09 Wes: Seepage versus drainage.
35:11 Erin: Seepage versus drainage. Right. Yeah. Where Eli says, what would you give us for it? And Daniel says, I don't know. And Eli goes, something? You don't know? And Daniel says, that's right. What would you like, Eli? And Eli says, $10,000. And Daniel says, for what? And Eli says, for my church. I love that moment. And. And Daniel, like, has to concede. That's good. That's a good one. Because he's expecting to be answered with, for what? Like, what do you want the $10,000 for in terms of what they already have? For what? For the land and plus the oil.
But instead, Eli answers with what he wants, what he's going to use the money for. So it's like an oil answer. I'm going to take this money, and I'm going to do this with it. Right. It's about getting you somewhere. But it's also a strategic answer in a way that is showing Daniel that Eli is a match for him, I think, because he can't object to it without objecting to the church. And, you know, he has to play ball with these people. And part of playing ball is being like, I enjoy all faiths. I
36:12 Wes: love it.
36:13 Erin: Depends on what you are. Are you a Methodist? Oh, that's what I am. You tell me what you are first.
36:19 Wes: Which one of these mixed nuts would you like? I enjoy all the nuts. Even a macadamia.
36:29 Erin: And so, yeah, so he. So he can't object with that without objecting to churches, churches, the church itself, like the community itself. And he's trying to win them over. And it ties a decision about a fair price up with charity. So again, we have this, you know, opposition between the two of them as being somehow about religion. And when. When Eli accuses Abel of having Squandered everything or given everything away. Abel says, I listened to his word. Right. So Daniel has this competing gospel that is in competition with Eli's, and Eli's is also kind of in competition with the gospel. But that's a. That's a question for another podcast.
37:07 Wes: No, these are all good points. It's. And you're reminding me of. Yeah, Eli does not come across very well in that scene. Yeah, it's the scene after. So Daniel has beaten him up or humiliated him and rubbed mud in his face. Right. And then he's going to do something similar to his father, take it out on his father, Abel. But we do see this dark side of Eli there, and we do get the sense that there's a little bit of Paul in him. Right. He's also after. His intentions are not pure. Even though he wants to use the money for the church, there's a fair amount of self aggrandizement in that. Most like he wants to be a cult leader or something like that. In the end, I think he seems less ambitious. You know, he's coming to Daniel for money, but he's really fallen, you know, his willingness to say that, what is it? I'm a false prophet and God is a superstition.
38:02 Erin: God is a superstition.
38:04 Wes: Right. So this is Daniel's revenge for Eli getting him to say earlier on that I abandoned my son, you know, over and over again. Yeah, it seems. It seems like Eli has quite different. I don't know what he's been doing out there. And Would you say he's trying to do a radio show? The podcast? What?
38:25 Erin: Yeah, he's trying to be one of these. Yeah, exactly. No, he's. He's been trying to be one of these faith healer celebrities, you know. Do you know the story of Aimee Semple McPherson? This is a. No, you got it. You just got to read this woman's Wikipedia page. That's all I have to tell you. It would take way too long. But basically, one of these people who becomes famous for being a kind of like a revival church, slash cult leader, slash, give me your money and I will, you know, keep performing miracles for people, et cetera, you know, the very, very earliest forms of a kind of a televangelist made popular by radio.
And there was always this charismatic Protestant element to it with supposed healings and stuff like that that they could perform, you know, which is. Which is the heart of Eli's supposed gift, you know, the gift of healing. And that's one of the things I actually wanted to talk about in relation to HW but in that final scene, you know, God is a superstition that's related to luck. But when he comes into the house, he says, your. Your home is a miracle, right? Perfectly designed. And maybe, maybe he doesn't even know it, but perfectly designed to really rankle Daniel, right?
Like it's a miracle. It just appeared out of nowhere. You know, you didn't do anything to earn it. That's just great way to get Daniel to already be. I mean, he's already pissed at everybody, especially Eli. But, you know, every. Everything is about this supposed communication with God, which he is special for being privy to. So in the same way that Daniel is special because he's better than everybody, he's more skilled than everybody. Eli is special because he has this gift, because he. Because God talks to him, God tells him things. But also God has mysteries and that.
That causes him some problems, as he says.
40:16 Wes: I hadn't thought about this. You know, why Daniel gets so angry at him and kills him. But this seems to be spot on about. By trying to sort of attribute Daniel's success to God in a certain way.
40:30 Erin: I wonder about Eli's flexibility, shall we say, as opposed to Daniel's. So Daniel's problem seems to be his inflexibility. Eli's problem, I think, is something a little bit different from that. Even though they're sort of mirror images of each other and they interpret things according to the same. According to similarly strict rubrics of how to interpret behavior, signs, events. They're very different rubrics, but they're very strict. But something Eli says when he. When he performs the healing of the old woman or what might be whatever, you know, the performance, which is one of the things that Daniel hates about him is that he's all show.
He doesn't actually do anything. Right. That was one hell of a show. But he introduces that by saying that God has given him a new way to heal or to cast out the ghost or however he. However he formulates it, that he's not going to cast it out with fire, but it's a gentle voice that God has given him. I thought that was really interesting in light of the fact that Daniel won't change his. His mode of communication. So this is what I'm relating to HW Daniel won't learn sign language. He won't be flexible in his mode of communication. And if you can't hear his message, he wants nothing to do with you.
You're not somebody who. He's going to Talk to like he walks away from the town that is fighting with each other because he doesn't need it, he doesn't need the trouble. And I'm certainly sympathetic to that moment when he, when he walks out because they're all fighting over who has the rights to the land and who's gonna get more money and stuff like that. But he walks away. He doesn't try to negotiate with them. I, like I said, I see that as, you know, probably a useful tactic to walk away, but he won't try a different way in. He has his way and that's it.
Eli introduces himself to us in the arena of the church as someone who is changing his voice, changing his method of approach. I don't know if that makes, if that gives him maybe something that we could say about him that is positive, that we could put in the positive column. Because Eli to me tends to be a little bit more, I mean, if it's possible, a little bit less likable than Daniel.
42:41 Wes: Yeah, he is.
42:43 Erin: And maybe that's why I think that Daniel comes out better than he does. Yeah, he's really creepy. Maybe that flexibility, maybe that's another way that he is of that he works his flim flam. Maybe that's part of it. Maybe it's to show that he has multiple voices, that God gives him multiple gifts, multiple ways of manifesting the Holy Spirit or whatever. But just that flexibility. I thought there's a, there's a very clear difference being established between the two men in that statement.
43:12 Wes: In the statement of, in the statement
43:14 Erin: of I have a new voice, God has given me a new way to communicate.
43:18 Wes: Interesting. Okay, so pointing to his greater flexibility.
43:22 Erin: Yeah. Is that just a tactic? Is that just part of his inflexible belief in himself?
43:28 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. You know, I'm, I, yeah, he's quite. Eli is quite opaque to me, actually. I mean, in the end the veil falls to some extent and he seems self serving and cynical to some degree. But that, that seems like the place to which he's gotten at that point. But yeah, I find, I find Eli opaque. I don't know psychologically.
43:50 Erin: I know a lot of people felt maybe because of the stories around that casting necessity that Dano wasn't really up to the challenge of competing with Daniel Day Lewis. But I think as time has gone on, people have admired that performance more and more. And now I think it's, I think he's the equal of Daniel Day Lewis in the film.
44:11 Wes: Absolutely.
44:12 Erin: But it's, but it's Just such a very different kind of performance, too, which is, I think, like, really essential. It's so much more obviously about performing, though. Daniel is too performing all the time for these communities, at these public assemblies, et cetera. But I did want to say that that opening scene with the silver mine, you could say, is very evocative of the film industry as a symbol. Right. He's in that really, really dark shaft, and then he comes out to the blinking, blinding sun, and there's something of, like, coming out of the movie theater with the, you know, silver.
Silver screen. It's 1898, so, you know, the infancy of films, the silver screen as a term I looked up and it says descriptions of a silver screen used in the presentation of films as early as 1897. So right around that time. And I think that drive to keep producing new things, that oil symbology is very much connected to art and the idea of, you know, sort of a dissatisfaction, always needing to be working on something. Maybe the sort of, like, egomaniacal tendency that it takes to be a film director, maybe. So a lot of. A lot of statements might be made there, but yeah, a lot of the film is just about.
I think it's about sneakily, about performance and maybe about movies, too. And that, at least in that early scene.
45:35 Wes: Interesting. Okay, well, I think that is a good final word.
45:39 Erin: Okay, thank you.
45:41 Wes: Thank you,
45:45 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters at subtextpodcast. Com. If we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
Faith and Industry in “There Will Be Blood”
Oct 07, 2025
The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family, and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he’s earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic, rather than communal, ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he's earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic rather than communal ends.
Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Today we're discussing Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film there will Be Blood. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, when I had suggested that we watch this film, I was having trouble deciding between this one and no country for Old Men, which came out in 2007, which filmed in the same place. I don't know if you read about the story where the oil derrick burning down, that whole scene was actually causing problems for no country because they were filming so close together that the smoke was getting into the no country for Old Men shots in the background.
And, you know, I know there's a lot of conversation about these two films being possibly the two greatest films of the 21st century so far. So I was wondering which. Which you think is better.
2:12 Wes: Hmm. Well, it's been quite a while since I've seen no country for Old Men, so I would have trouble saying I don't remember no country for Old Men well enough.
2:21 Erin: As much as I love There Will Be Blood, I think actually I prefer no country, strangely. But I thought this one would be, in a way, more fun to talk about. I mean, did you look at all at Oil, the Upton Sinclair novel? You know, this is, I guess, a bit more of a free adaptation, or it's just an adaptation, really, of the first hundred pages of oil. Not an adaptation in the way that no country is of its source material.
2:47 Wes: Yeah, I did look at Oil and it's loosely based on it departs pretty quickly.
2:52 Erin: But, yeah, so I thought. I thought, in a way would be easier to do because I think with no country would have to be continually looking over our shoulder at McCarthy if we were to just cover the film. But I don't know. I mean, the older I get, the more I like, the more I like There Will Be Blood. And I do wonder if it's actually more fun to watch. Like, the performances are so fun to watch, and it's so funny. But I don't know if you would agree if you found this particularly funny or what's your experience with the film, because I've seen it now quite a few times, including just recently on the big screen, which was great. Art House theater was running it. So about a month ago, I saw it on the big screen for the first time since it came out. What's your experience?
3:34 Wes: Well, it had been so long since I had seen it. I only had one memory of the film, and that was a memory of Eli killing Daniel at the end.
3:45 Erin: Oh, whoa.
3:47 Wes: I think I reversed it.
3:49 Erin: Wow.
3:49 Wes: Imagine coming with a gun and killing Daniel. So I think, you know, when I first saw it, I thought it was brilliant. Like, it didn't have the huge. A huge emotional impact on me. And I think that's because of the darkness of the Daniel character and the fact that, Right. He doesn't change very much, except that he just sort of drills in, so to speak, into his existing character structure, which involves a lot of envy and anger, and just deepens it and deepens it and deepens it. You know, it's almost. I was just thinking, now, is there something tragic about it?
I mean, he's sort of. You know, I wouldn't call tragic in the sense that he's very focused on achieving this destiny of his, which is to kind of flesh out his envy, as he puts it. He's an envious man. He's angry. He hates people. He wants to get away from people, to have enough money to get away from people. And that's his project, and that's what he does. So there's no redemption. There's little hints of what might be redemptive, for instance, in his relationship with his son. But it always goes sideways. That, for me, subtracts from the. Or it doesn't subtract from the emotional impact.
The emotional impact is just unpleasant.
5:08 Erin: You know, you don't admire him at all, though. I mean, I'm interested in the idea. This idea of envy.
5:13 Wes: And, I mean, he is very handsome. I'm just kidding.
5:19 Erin: I just looked at you with disgust.
5:21 Wes: He's got a good. He's got a good job. Oh, you don't think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome?
5:25 Erin: I think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome. I think Daniel Plain Lewis. Daniel Dayview. Daniel Days Inn, the hotel magnate.
5:44 Wes: That's great.
5:46 Erin: I think he's a little oily, actually. No, I mean, that whole opening sequence is. You know, you're on his side at first. That whole opening sequence is so incredible. I love that. You know, almost no dialogue and just him and the silver mine. You've got to admire him.
6:04 Wes: No, so I look at all that retrospectively now in terms of his larger project. Yes. But in the beginning, he's someone who is willing to put all this physical work and also to sacrifice life and limb, potentially. And he hurts his leg, of course, and has a permanent limp from it. To do what? To get rich, I think. And I. Yeah, you have to admire the sort of determination, I guess, in a way. But one of the very early scenes is of him prostrate in that office as another person is counting the silver for him. And it's a very nice visual image of the idol he's sort of bowing down to. He's prostrate before this project of becoming rich, and he's made lame by it.
6:54 Erin: Yeah, you know, it is about getting rich. Right. But I think there's also something deeper at work there which maybe speaks to the idea of oil. You know, I know we talked about gold in our episode on the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And of course, we also have silver here as kind of a foil foil to oil. I think getting rich for Daniel might be proof of a kind of competence or dominance, domination, but it's. It's almost a kind of a side effect or. Or proof of his success on a business level. So I think that that's why when he gets rich, he doesn't know what to do with himself anymore.
Or he's ultimately hobbled by that more than he is hobbled by, you know, the work itself, though literally. That's not true. But, you know, this idea of being envious. I mean, he also needs people. You know, I was thinking about the setting of the film often and the fact that it starts so relatively late in the history of Western expansion, you know, so we have. We have a person who hates people, who sees other people as competition, and yet who also has to build his entire business model around rhetoric and manipulation and sort of selling yourself and your qualifications to an audience because you're not Just one man out prospecting in the middle of nowhere.
You have a continent filling up, so you have land already owned by people. You know, you have the Sunday family, for instance, on their ranch that they own. And we have people, you know, like. Like the camping trip is such a great symbol of this, right? Like the fact that Daniel takes HW On a camping trip. That's their excuse. You know, they're camping and quail hunting, so they have their little packs on their backs. That is so interesting to me that we are now at a point in time where you could be going out in California just on a camping trip and not because you're a pioneer who's doing this because of, you know, some kind of compulsion to move into the west or for necessity, maybe.
So we have this, you know, immediate confrontation here between this lone oil man and a lifestyle which. Which is about kind of not really being part of the community. And then the most successful of those oil men are the ones who can bridge that gap with society, I think. And obviously, this is why HW is so important to give the appearance of the family business. So. So he needs them, and he's sort of reliant on them. And part of his skill is about this manipulation, both the rhetoric and ultimately what that comes down to is lies and strategizing in a way that kind of is using and manipulating people.
That ambivalence, that envying them but also needing them, goes right to the heart of his character. I think it's why he's ultimately so obsessed with family, why he becomes attracted to the idea of Henry, his brother. Because I think there's something that Eli has that Daniel is actually quite attracted to, though he doesn't maybe see it that way.
9:52 Wes: Yeah, his motive. Right. So I said, you know, getting rich. He's focused on getting rich. And yet there's another motive that goes beyond that, and that is, you know, I've called it envy. So these are the lines from the movie where his brother says no. He says to his brother or his supposed brother, are you envious? Do you get envious? And this, by the way, is one of the. Maybe the only time we try to see him confide in someone or get them to confide in him. So there's almost none of that in his life. And then Henry says, I don't think so, no.
And then Daniel says, I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. Henry says, that part of me is gone. And then he says, work and not succeeding. All my failures have left me. And then Daniel says, I just don't. I just don't care. And he says, there's times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money so I can get away from everyone. What'll you do about your boy? I don't know. Maybe it'll change. Maybe it'll change
10:57 Erin: Daniel Plainview. We have to do that.
10:59 Wes: Maybe. Yeah. I don't know how to.
11:01 Erin: I'm an oil man.
11:03 Wes: There you go. That's great. That's a great impersonation.
11:06 Erin: I do so many lines from this movie. He completely failed to alert me to the recent panic in our economy.
11:17 Wes: That's great. So there's that central. So he knows, right. He's not someone who doesn't know that part of himself, that envious part of himself. Now, one might say, well, what he really envies in others is the capacity to connect. It's actually capacity for some sort of community. I think that is the part that he doesn't quite know about himself. But otherwise he's very conscious of his envy. And he has a certain project which is to dominate people because he hates them and to be able to maintain some sort of distance from them. And, yeah, as you're pointing out, he uses the idea of community to sell himself.
And he sees this little boy that he's adopted as just a means to an end. But it's not entirely cynical. I think we get hints of the fact that this relationship, it's a real relationship in the end, he doesn't fully connect with hw. His temperamental hatred overcomes that connection in part because in a way, his pride is injured by HW's injury. He can't deal with the fact of that injury. And that's a pivotal moment in the movie where any redemptive possibility in that relationship is lost at the very moment that he's hitting oil kills off the redemptive possibility of that relationship with hw.
But the other important thing that you're pointing to, I think, is that he puts himself in the place of being someone who can provide for a community. Right. So he's in Little Boston, Right? There's no bread. Let's look at his speech real quick. To my mind, it's an abomination to consider that any man, woman or child in this magnificent country of ours should have to look upon a loaf of bread as a luxury. We're going to dig water wells here, and water wells means irrigation. Irrigation means cultivation. We're going to raise. Raise crops here where before it just simply wasn't possible.
You're going to have more grain than you know what to do with. All right, so this looks a lot like Jesus, you know, one of Jesus's miracles. And he's put himself into direct conflict with Eli here. Eli was supposed to do the blessing, wanted to do the blessing. And Daniel stepped into his place and said, look, my material providence is better than your spiritual providence. It's part and parcel of the envy and the competition that's in him. He can't have Eli being the one who's going to provide in some way for these people. He's got to be the one.
Now it puts him in a kind of constructive position with regard to others and he does have that in him. When he says there's going to be no more hitting for Mary, he has certain constructive impulses that are evident here, but they all seem to get co opted by envy. Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm joining this up in the end. I forget where you got at the end of your comment.
14:05 Erin: The idea of his ultimate desire for connection or his reliance on people ultimately.
14:09 Wes: Okay, yes. So he's also relying on people, which is something he hates and doesn't really want to do. But he's got to have workers.
14:17 Erin: Yeah. And he has to use other people's land because he doesn't have any. I mean, I think this is central too to the ambivalence within oil itself as a symbol. I'm interested in Daniel and Eli as oppositional in terms of this idea of what you earn and what's just given to you. Things we, we do and don't earn. And I think Daniel is obsessed with what you earn, that is with like acquisition on the basis of skill, of not having anything and then getting it. Whereas Eli is interested in the idea of a gift. You know, he's the faith healer. He's interested in faith, period, which is about grace, which is fundamentally something that you don't earn.
He is a pastor and therefore a maker of people to join this faith family. You know, the faith is conceived of as a, as a family and he can make more family members. Daniel believes that he gets his worth out of earning things and doing things himself. Therefore that makes him better than other people who might just luck into things or just inherit things, you know, things that we can inherit our family or land or faith or whatever. And I think this is oil too. Like oil has this duality to it where it's about. It's certainly on the one hand about luck and you can strike oil.
Some people strike it, some people don't. Some people have the gift. Right. Some people have oil underneath their land like the Sundays do, and some people don't. But we also get the idea that some places that have oil don't know how to get at it. Right. And Daniel himself introduces this idea, you know, okay, oh, you have oil here. Well, how are you going to get it? You know, it's. It's in the ground. How are you going to get it out of the ground? He repeatedly asked this question. So you can have this as a gift, but it's also about strategy about acquiring that oil, about getting it out of the ground, about management and managing of the people that own.
You know, if you don't believe in land as a representative of a kind of a legacy or an investment in a place or being a part of a community, which I think land all represents, then part of your skill and your management and your acquisition of the oil is about convincing somebody to lease you their land. So I think that kind of duality is inherent in the acquisition of the oil itself. Right. You can't just, you have this deposit and you may know it's there, but you still can't get at it because you don't have the resources to do so. Insofar as we can say you either have oil or you don't.
It's like Eli, right? You either have faith or you don't. You either have the gift to heal or you don't. But insofar as you can say that, you can either get at it or you can't. It's like Daniel in that you need the skill, the resources kind of stored up over year. Right. Because he uses the silver money ultimately to get into oil too. So it's like this long planned out, long thought out kind of strategy about being able to even have the resources to think about getting the oil out of the ground.
17:14 Wes: Yeah. But will God look favorably upon his offering? Anyway, we'll get to Cain and Abel later, but I thought a bit about Treasure of the Sierra Madre as well, and I think it's a good maybe compare and contrast for his particular motive. Because it sounds like you're pointing to the sort of industriousness in his character. Is that right?
17:37 Erin: Okay.
17:38 Wes: All right. So the hard work and that. So it had me thinking about Howard's speech in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And really he's trying to convince the other two. He's trying to get them worked up about going on an expedition, but he's doing that by saying all the wrong things. Saying how gold makes men crazy and people blow one fortune trying to find another. And prospecting is like gambling. It's physically dangerous. If you do it alone, it's too lonely. But if you do it with others, it creates this kind of paranoia and these violent rifts between people.
And that's his elevator pitch. And it gets the others excited. What they're excited by is that it is in a way like gambling in one sense, because you can go from nothing to everything very, very quickly. And as you point out, it involves an element of luck. But on the other hand, it's not just abstract, like tossing a coin or something. It's not abstract and it doesn't involve no work. You get to do work and you get to do physical work. And to be in contact with the land and all of that stuff. There's almost a wholesome element to it. If it weren't for the fact that it's exploitation of the land and trying to scoop out the resources that are in the land.
So I think in Treasure of the Sierra Madre there's something about the promise of this highly risky contact with both the physical world and the social world, right? So mining is physically dangerous and then there's the danger of paranoia. So there's social risk that you put yourself in this extremely risky situation and then if you succeed, you transcend those worlds. As with Daniel, you don't have to be around people or you're in a position where you have power over them and can control them. And the same thing with physical work. You wouldn't have to necessarily do any physical work anymore.
And there's kind of an abstractness in the power that comes with being rich. So it's a physical project. It's not like the boredom of office job or even being a stockbroker. I guess being a stockbroker is exciting, but it's not the same physically risky thing. But you get to acquire riches without the tedium that necessarily the tediousness involved. So there's that again, that element of the excitement of gambling. But with Daniel I don't see much of anything of that. With him it's almost like self punishment from the very beginning. That's the kind of vibe I get from him.
He's self hating and self punishing. It's grueling. He's doing it. There's no exciting prospect or fantasy that's leading him on except for domination of others and revenge against others and envy and all that stuff. And the point isn't even necessarily to get over his envy. It's just to deepen it. As I said, it's kind of to drill down into it. To drill down into his own character and to make it more and more what it is. More and more bitter, more and more empty. And that's what you get. Even his mansion in the end, right? That's just a place of squalor.
You can't imagine him really enjoying the luxuries that go along with being rich. And he's at the saloon with Henry. There's no indication that he's even interested in women or any of the things that money might help him get. The only thing that seems to interest him is the grueling, laborious project of getting there. So now the question is that you have me thinking about. Yeah. How does that compare or contrast to industriousness where people are just. They work hard because, I mean, there are many different reasons. Obviously, they could do that.
They might work hard just simply because they love the work. They might work hard because they're ambitious or because it alleviates anxiety for many, many different reasons. But. But in his case, I'd link it, again to envy. It's definitely industriousness, but it's tainted with that, I guess, in my view.
21:59 Erin: I know we've talked about this in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre episode as well, but you've gotten me thinking about this interesting duality inherent in any kind of treasure seeking, in which we might say that there's a strange conversion to work inherent in the mechanism of the real work, the reality of the work which was undertaken to escape work. So if that makes any sense. Right. So the fantasy is you strike it rich, you never have to work again. What happens is you have to work so hard to get the means by which you never have to work again, that what might end up happening is you're converted to the desire for work.
Suddenly having the riches and not knowing what to do with yourself is a far scarier prospect than always having another mountain to climb and, you know, something to dig up or. Right. So I think that what happens over the course of this. Because they are two incredibly grue, both gold and oil are incredibly grueling and dangerous and difficult things to acquire. I think what happens is you then get people becoming addicted to the chase, to finding the deposit somewhere new, to the excitement of what that means, and also to the satisfaction of the work itself, which then renders the fruit of that labor beside the point or even ultimately destructive.
Because once you are In a life of leisure, you have no way of exercising that whatever. I mean, if it's an addiction, it's a sort of positive one. I suppose you could become a workaholic or whatever, right? But that addiction may be to something like excitement and pride in being able to accomplish something. You know, I should say that during the filming of There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre every night. You know, so it was constantly on his mind. I think the differences here. Okay, so I've already kind of maybe made this distinction, right?
But oil is newer. Oil is about sort of. We've reached a certain point in the Industrial revolution where the acquisition of oil is occurring in tandem with the car and various other things that make its acquisition more. I mean, it was always sort of useful, right? And it was always around, but particularly pertinent. And so it's a sort of a. Later. We're talking about drilling in this film. In a continent which has already been filled up. Gold is kind of, you know, you go into the middle of nowhere or you try to find the places that people haven't been already to try and get the gold.
But the initial gold rush was at a very early stage in Western expansion, before all of those deposits were extracted and there was nothing left. Oil is required by and also demands more engagement with society, I think, than gold does. Gold panning is technically something you could do by yourself, right? I mean, you get a higher return if you have a group of guys, as they do in Treasure of Sierra Madre, than you do if you just by yourself in a river. But you could technically do it by yourself. And it is something which can be dangerous and difficult if you're going off by yourself into the wilderness to do it.
But it doesn't require, I think, an infrastructure the way the oil industry does, which, again, is that something that kind of is necessitating a community. So the work for Daniel is about scratching, I think, two kinds of itches. The oil work is both about doing something really difficult and physically demanding, and also getting to cheat other people, basically getting to manipulate them, like getting back at people. So the engagement with society that oil is necessitating is distasteful to him, but it's also giving him an outlet to get out his anger and aggression against people with these tactics of manipulation and, you know, selling.
Selling the land out from under. Under people's feet and taking something right from under their nose. That is a big part of the appeal for him as well, that kind of engagement, something like revenge Maybe, yeah.
25:54 Wes: I think there's something about, in particular about the subterranean element here that is attractive to him. It starts out with silver and then moves on to oil. And I think we know why you can't do the milkshake trick with silver. His envy. He wants to take things away from people. He doesn't want them to have it. That's part of the envy. And there's something really neat about oil, which is drainage. You don't actually have to be right above the oil deposit in order to get at the oil deposit. So you can stick your straw right into someone else's milkshake and drain it without them even knowing it.
And then they find out that they've been depleted after that. That is a perfect picture of a very sneaky kind of envy where you. It's almost something vampiric about it where you suck someone dry without them knowing it. And then when they're finally aware of it, yeah, they're desiccated, they're dry. And they don't have what's theirs. He has what's theirs. So, yeah, there's something in particular about going underground. And something that's liquid again, that can be drained out from another is almost as if it were their blood. That's really important.
27:21 Erin: That helps me understand the difference really well. Because I think ultimately in Sierra Madre, you know, the idea of management there of the gold is really about self management. I think it's. It's about, like, how do you deal with the goal? I mean, you know, there's this envy and this paranoia that comes with it. But I think ultimately what that comes down to is like controlling your own mind so that you don't get out of control and have that mind, that paranoid mind affect, you know, the actual state of things. Whereas this is a very different.
This is much more inherently about other people's minds or control of other people in this envious way that you're describing, which is, I think, very different from personal greed and the desire to sort of gather to oneself everything that is out there in the world. Right. This is about reaching out and taking from other people. You know, I think it's also about stealing from people in this. I love this way that you're describing of like sucking their blood. It's very similar, I think, to the dynamic of water in Chinatown as well, where. Where we have this.
You're stealing the future from people too. You know, you're. You're controlling the future. And I think oil is very much, very much functioning in the same way. Oil is about what. It's about finding it and then putting in your car and driving to the next destination where you can find more oil, you know, so there's sort of like a perpetual motion machine element to extends, I think, in kind of two directions. It's about the past because it's about vast deposits of decayed creatures millions of years old. But it's also. It's finite and it's consumable, but it's sort of abundant with possibility because it could be put to so many different uses.
I think water. Water sort of works in the same way where it has that duality. It's. It's sort of a finite resource in a way, because it's consumable and it could become tainted and stuff like that. But it's also sort of an infinite ecosystem. So it seems like Daniel's domination is both personal and general over people. He's draining the oil from your particular land that you are trying to sell in order to humiliate you. And he is also taking all the oil for himself in a way that is symbolic of sort of an entire community or even a country's future.
So he gets to play God in this way that is about more than like, personal vendettas. It's like a vendetta against all of. All of creation. Just as he doesn't. He's not interested in women because. Because he's not interested in. In creation that he hasn't stolen. Right. Or he's not interested in water and blood.
30:09 Wes: Right. Well, the envy, the envy, is that there are many forms of envy that would come along with that. Right? The envy of her procreative ability and the fact that she, as a woman, would have something that he wants that is always going to be outside of him, even if he's in relation to it. He needs to be more than in a relationship. He needs to suck it out, suck out the essence and keep it for himself. That's not related, that's not relational.
30:39 Erin: You're making me like him a lot less than I did going into this. Not that I liked him, but you know what I mean? Like, I thought, you know, there's something. Something to admire about him.
30:49 Wes: Well, that's a good question. I mean, is there anything that one might admire in the. In the manner that, you know, you would admire a tragic hero for all his villainous. Some of them are villainous, I guess. So Some tragic heroes you might. You might admire for their villainous traits or for their other flaws, because there's supposedly some element of greatness to them. And then the question is, is there an element of greatness here and is there something tragic about it? And I think the initial comment I made about the tragic thing here is it's a little bit oblique to that in a way. Why is that? I don't know. Do you have something to say about that? Yeah. Is this tragic? Is he great?
31:29 Erin: You know, my idea is he's missing half of himself and Eli is missing the other half. Right. Together they would be one perfect person. Maybe, I don't know. But the half of him that he has is somehow less distasteful to me than the half that Eli has, you know, because he's so controlled. I mean, that starts to slip with the whiskey drinking. Right. But he is so much in control and he has so many skills and such a. Such a work ethic. I mean, he does such a heroic thing at the beginning of the movie, dragging himself all the way into town from this mine that he was just working by himself. I can't watch that and not think every time, even though I know what's going to happen to him. Like, wow, this is a spectacular person.
32:15 Wes: Yeah.
32:15 Erin: That takes so much. What does it take? I don't know, it takes so much discipline or something. What's the right word for that? It's just skill. I just keep coming back to skill.
32:24 Wes: Well, there's industriousness and there's hard work and again the willingness to sacrifice his body and just the sheer amount of physical exertion involved. But again, I think of this partly in terms of self punishment and the desire to punish others. And then also I haven't been able to articulate it, but there's something doesn't rise to the level of tragic hero in this. Is there a greatness? Yeah, it's hard for me to want to say that there's something great about him.
32:57 Erin: Well, I think ultimately his. He's small minded in ways that I think you've articulated well. You know, all of this. If there is greatness there, it's put to such warped and twisted and small minded ends.
33:08 Wes: Yeah. One might say of someone, they had huge ambitions, but there was hubris or something like that. And his ambitions in a way are huge, but they're also not. They're very narrow.
33:21 Erin: Well, he wins in the end, but he, you know, so he doesn't have huge ambitions which are. Then, you know, usually the second half of that sentence would be but he failed. But he didn't fail. So it's, it's more about the manner that he went about acquiring and it's. Though oil, I think, has this huge symbolic weight to it. What his actions are actually about is going family by family, strategically across the area that he wants to, and getting these innocent or naive farm people who don't know about this industry, who are just. Just uninformed, to sign their land away to him.
Right. And that, I think there's an ugliness in that. Like it takes industry to go. To go, you know, family by family to do that. But ultimately, yeah, it's a. It's a bit of an ugly thing. And we discover over the course of the, you know, the first third of the film what a liar he is and how manipulative he has to be to do this effectively. So it sort of like requires selling his soul in a thousand tiny little ways every day. In the end, he gets everything, I mean, everything according to a certain standard of fantasy.
34:31 Wes: Brings me back to the contrast you're making between oil and water. Because water is sort of a paradigmatic example of something that belongs in common to the community and has to be managed at that level. And it's elemental, it's necessary to life. Right. And it's one of the ancient elements, according to the ancients, one of the basic building blocks of the universe. Oil, on the other hand, is not that, unless you compared it to the element fire. Right. Aristotle puzzles over the pre Socratics and their elements because where do you get motion from?
Where do you get force from? It's not a very dynamic picture of the world. Unless you say that fire does that. And if oil is of course, what does that, it lights these fires that can run these machines and. And produce ultimately all sorts of technology and really transform the world. But it's not necessary as such to life. It's really techne. It really is technology and it amplifies and transforms life in these radical ways. So when he takes away, what he does is he provides water to the community. Again, he's sort of like a Jesus stand in. In that sense.
He really does these things for the community. He provides for the communal, the material aspects of the communal good, which he wants to supplant the spiritual aspects altogether. He wants them to eclipse the spiritual aspects. But in doing that, that's not what interests him. He's not interested in necessarily taking that stuff away from people and maybe immiserating them or pauperizing them. Exactly. He wants this particular stuff. He's going to prevent them from being rich. He's going to take away that possibility from them, he's going to take away any possibility of them competing with him, of being rivals.
But he doesn't necessarily just want to kill them off entirely, as far as I can tell. And then again, the thing that he's interested in, this substance, you could argue this is another thing that should be part of the common good. It should be a communal possession, maybe the way it is in some Middle Eastern countries, But in this case, it's just, does your land happen to have it? Okay, you're lucky you're rich now or you don't have it, you're not lucky, you're not rich. And the whole milkshake and straw thing points to this idea that, well, does it really matter that it's under someone else's land?
Is this anyone's in particular if it can be accessed from over here? It points to this weirdness of not treating it as maybe a communal possession, given all the potential that it has to not only transform an individual person's life in the sense of making them rich, but in the sense that it's going to transform the world. It's going to radically transform the world. So that's power that he's at. He's not getting at the good, but he's getting at power.
37:37 Erin: Yeah. You have me thinking about luck and what luck would mean under these circumstances. Because I wonder if there's a distinction we can make then between the gift of oil and the luck of. Or a certain kind of luck. I mean, to me, you're lucky if you can actually make use of it. Lucky would be you have land that has oil under it and a derrick falls from the sky, and you have a way of getting it out right? Instead, I think the idea of the gift is like, okay, you have this land and you may have oil, but you may not know how to what to do with it.
Luck is something which is. Which is sort of quick activating. It's something which is a true fluke that comes with a reward instantly. You know, a gift is something that has to be. It's just something you're given and you just have to. You then have to do something with it. You know, it's like you're given a Lego set and then you have to put it together. Or gift is your family. You're born into a family, but you have to tend to that. You have to. You have to nurture those relationships. You can't just say, I mean, to a certain extent you can.
That's the whole mother thing, right? To a certain extent, you could say I'll. I could do whatever I want and I'll still have a mother. That's true. But you can't actually, with most relationships in the family, you can't treat people however you want and then. Or like, try to kill them or shoot them in the head. Okay, he's not really family, but you can't. You can. You can't do that. And then. And then still expect that gift to be something which will give you something. I don't know if that's right, because my idea of Eli is of someone who, in theory, he's a faith healer, which is something to me and probably more to you is something suspect.
Right. But if he has this gift, he has to control it properly and use it properly and give it the proper. Whatever you might call it. Cultivation seems like the wrong word, but something. He needs a control. And ultimately what we find by the end of the film is that he's. He doesn't have that ability to control the gift. Right. He squanders the gift. And that's why he's. What's the word? It seems like he's. He's tried to become, you know, a radio personality and one of the. One of these like Aimee Semple McPherson kind of figures who uses this in a mass media kind of way and then.
But has no self control and then destroys himself.
40:01 Wes: Well, he lacks the discipline that Daniel has. So maybe that's the point where we admire Daniel and we definitely don't admire Eli. Although it's not apparent in the beginning, it only becomes apparent in the end, I think how lacking in discipline he is and how susceptible he is to temptation and even lacking in integrity in the end, where he's gonna renounce God in order to get some money. But is that what you were getting at?
40:30 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And admiring Daniel, to go back to that. I mean, I think I also. I think it's this yearning spirit to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Right. You get back onto the ship and you go back out even after you just got home, after, you know, being away for 20 years. There's something about that that I really love. That's maybe what I admire in Daniel, and that's what makes the ending so tragic, is that he's achieved a level of success that means that he can no longer go out and do the striving and do the work. But that love of work, even if what the work constitutes sometimes is pretty ugly, the physical components of it and those which require strategy, that are not about manipulation and that labor and the desire to keep laboring and keep working at something.
I mean, there's a very good chance. I'm also attracted to the self punishment element of that. But there's something, I think that. Which is very admirable in that like you're never. You're never just resting on what you have. You're never just self contented and lazy. That drive, I think is what I admire in Daniel.
41:38 Wes: Yeah, I think the way I look at his industriousness and discipline. There's not a big dream there. There's not a big ambition. Because the ambition is just to want to get away from people. I mean, there's not even like an evil ambition. I'm going to take over the world and do evil things. And he's definitely not a do gooder. I'm going to do all kinds of good things. If I can do this or I'm going to. Once I have all this money, I'm going to. What does he say in Treasure of the Sierra Madre about dames?
42:12 Erin: Get the dames. Rings on the fingers of swell dame.
42:17 Wes: Swell dames. Yeah. So there's not even some sort of fantasy of pleasure seeking or love or. There's only one little narrow focus. So like when he gets the mansion, I mean, I think he talks to his brother at one point about the house. What does he say about that? Or talks to Henry about it. We get the sense that there might be some sort of ambition to have a nice house. Right. So there's the house in Fond du Lac that John Hollister built. Do you remember it? I thought as a boy that the most. It was the most beautiful house I'd ever seen and wanted it.
I wanted to live in it and eat in it and clean it. And even as a boy I wanted to have children to run around in it. And then Henry says, so there's a real. Right. That's an aspiration. That's the aspiration he has as a boy. He doesn't have that aspiration anymore. And Henry says, you can have anything you'd like now, Daniel, and you should. Where are you going to build it? Then? He said, here maybe near the ocean. Would you make it look like that house? I think if I saw that house now, it'd make me sick. And then Henry goes into wanting to get, you know, get some women.
And then they have that unpleasant time. Well, Henry's enjoying himself with the ladies, but Daniel is not. And then Henry is going to have a really bad time. Shortly after that, he's going to pay for his sins. But anyway. But. Yeah, but my point here is that there's no. That kind of aspiration is actually gone. One might think that that would be the typical kind of motivation behind all this industriousness and discipline. Even if there's workaholism and love of the work itself. And in a way, I don't. Again, because of the self punishment aspect and just his general character, I don't get that feeling of, oh, he loves the work.
And I just love being outside and in contact with mother Nature.
44:11 Erin: Oh, I think he does.
44:13 Wes: He wants to. But I think he envies Mother Nature as well. He wants to take. He wants to exploit nature and take what's in it. Yeah.
44:23 Erin: Yes. No, I'm just. Yeah. I don't think he. I don't think he loves Mother Nature. I think he gets excited by the oil coming in. I think there is. I see the love of the work. I see it when they go on the Sunday property.
44:35 Wes: But it's to me, it's like addictive, hateful. It's like it's a fulfillment of hate. Like.
44:40 Erin: Yeah, well, you're revealing to me. You're revealing to me why I. Why I think in a way he's so noble is because there is no.
44:48 Wes: His motives are very.
44:50 Erin: His motives are pure. Exactly, exactly. In that there is no motivation. The motivation is more work. Like, there's no pleasure. That. That seems to me to be the purest thing of all. In other words, I'm not doing this so that I can be rich. I'm not doing this so that I could have a nice house. I'm not doing this so that I'm going to get a lot of pleasure from it. I'm. I'm doing it. And then when I'm done doing it, I'm gonna do it again and I'm gonna do more. Just like I said with the oil thing. That's what oil is about. Oil is about getting more oil.
Oil is about finding more oil. Even the silver he gets in an oily way. He uses the silver to get to the oil. Silver and gold are ends in and of themselves, as we've talked about in the Sierra Madre episode. You know, it's about putting rings on your fingers, showing how much wealth you have in silver and gold. It's about wealth and greed itself. Oil is about working to get more oil. Oil is about going somewhere. You're always going, going, going. And that is. That is very interesting to me that there is no end.
45:49 Wes: Yeah, that's. Yeah, well, Put. I mean, I think the way I would put it is he. He's an empty person. And there's a way in which he's not. He's not just trying to fill himself up, right? He's not just trying to take what's in the earth and put it inside him in some way psychologically. He's just trying to expand his emptiness over everything else. He's trying to create emptiness in the earth by removing the oil. He's trying to be above others and away from others. So to create all this negative space that is his psyche, to push it out into the world as much as possible.
46:25 Erin: You have me thinking about the crisscross at the heart of Christianity or any religion in which there is a promised afterlife. Right. That's the reward, in a way. I mean, it always seemed to me as a kid, heaven shouldn't exist because your motives are always going to be tainted, you know? So Daniel reminds me of that, maybe that. That impulse in myself to be suspicious of heaven. So the idea is, the way you get out of that is that you're doing something for the people around you, hopefully. Now Daniel isn't doing that. He's manipulating them. But he has HW to do things with and for.
And he has this promise. I mean, maybe it's just. Ultimately, it's just about being a big man and getting other people to admire him as they. As he thinks they should so that he could give out the. You know, he can irrigate the land and give out the bread. But so long as he had this relationship with H.W. he had a way. There was not emptiness. At least he's showing the kid how to do it, too. So he's doing something for someone else, helping them in some way, even if it's just educating them in this, yeah, complicated and interesting kind of knowledge.
47:32 Wes: So, yeah, maybe let's start with that relationship in part two, then. That relationship. His relationship with Eli. Yeah. That relationship in particular has represented a possibility for redemption that doesn't come to fruition.
47:47 Erin: Okay, so we'll talk about Daniel's relationship with H.W. and Eli and Henry in part two. Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Freedom and Authority in Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” (Part 2)
Sep 22, 2025
In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education.
Upcoming Episodes: “There Will Be Blood,” “Julius Caesar,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:31 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Last time, we talked a lot about the two different conceptions of health and vitality at work in the play. One associated with the mayor and more conservative, and one associated with Dr. Stockman and more progressive. We wanted to start out here in the second part of our conversation by talking about the moment where Dr. Stockman delivers the news about the pollution of the water to his family. So in the lead up to this, we get an interesting conversation after Petra comes in and talks about slaving away while they're having fun.
1:17 Erin: And poor Petra.
1:18 Wes: But then we get this talk of one of her younger brothers saying she must be sinful because work is punishment, and says he wants to be a Viking instead, but that would require becoming a pagan, which Billing endorses. And then Mrs. Stockman says, all right, time for bed. I don't want to. Don't want the kids to be corrupted by this. And Billings says, we'll all be pagans soon. And then the younger brother, Morten says, and then we can do exactly what we want. So we get these little hints about the dangers of the progressive point of view. Right? Which is that. And the rejection of the old values, which is that there are no new values. It's just nihilism. People can just do whatever they want.
2:03 Erin: Or you might become Wallace Stevens, something like that.
2:07 Wes: Take a little existentialist solution, maybe. But then, yeah, Petra complains a bit about the hypocrisy of school and having to teach kids things she doesn't believe, presumably religion. We'll find out later. She won't translate a story for the paper because it's too religious. So it's a kind of conversation you would expect among people of a progressive temperament, let's say. And then it's after that. But Stockman, who's been in his study with his letter that he finally received from Petra because she stole it from the mailman. He would have gotten it sooner if it weren't for her. He comes in with a letter, very excited, and he says, this news will get the town talking, believe me. Exclamation point.
2:53 Erin: And of course, that's the most important thing, is to make the masses talking.
2:58 Wes: Sorry, there's a lot of exclamation points for him. And he'll make a point of telling Aslaksen that. Don't take any exclamation points out of my. The thing you're publishing in the newspaper. Steve McQueen takes all the exclamation points out as far as I can tell. Maybe in fact add a few, heats up later. Yeah, right, yeah, add a few.
3:19 Erin: Yeah, that's a great funny line.
3:22 Wes: So then he says now let them come and say as always, that it's all some fanciful notion and the ideas of a madman. Right? So we know now that he's been accused of being a flake before and he wants to prove everyone wrong. And then he says, but they'll think twice. All right, Haha, they'll think twice, I'm sure. Sorry, I know this is very bad.
3:43 Erin: No, it's great, it's great.
3:45 Wes: And then he's wishing that the mayor were there and it says, it shows how we human beings go around passing judgment like the blindest of moles, which is a bit double edged. Right. He's think he's thinking of everyone, including himself there, that blindness of judgment. But in a way we really suspect that of course it's directed at the mayor and others who don't know as much as he does. Right. He comes at this from a position of real whether or not my skepticism about the report is warranted. It's not really skepticism about the report, it's more skepticism about his attitude, which is one of utter certainty.
He's both at the level of the waters being polluted, but also for values. He is an absolute epistemic authority and he cannot be questioned. And so later on he'll say this thing. And he also delights in this reversal, in his discovery where fair is foul and foul is fair. This thing, the spa institute, that was the artery, the nerve center and billing chimes in and says the beating heart. Right, let's up the ante here. In reality, the entire spa is a cesspit. This thing that's supposed to be a source of health and life that we can later on will be obviously a metaphor for the existing norms, the existing values of society and a representative authority.
This is a. He also calls it a poison sepulcher. There's so much delight in that that that's one of the interesting things about the play. It's not as Steve McQueen delivers it, just some very sober person who's obviously concerned about the well being of the community delivering the speech. It's someone who, Ibsen puts a lot of work into making his motives suspect or at least double, you know, multi determined.
5:43 Erin: Yeah, that's right. You know, going back a little ways in the same act, you know, Stockman says several times to his brother that he's he, that a man of Science ought to live in a little style or something like that. Like, he ranks himself with the top governor of the municipality or whatever the. Whatever the terminology might be. This idea, as we've already talked about in part one of this natural aristocracy is one, you know, which he seems to espouse. But it. It's related to this idea of expertise. He's the expert, and therefore we should.
We should believe him. And he is so sure, because he's the expert. Like, there's. There's a little bit of a. There's a little bit of circular logic there. He's the doctor, so he can diagnose. And what gives him the authority to diagnose is that he's the doctor. He has this real grandiosity about himself. And then I love this idea of the blind as a mole thing that you're pointing to, because I hadn't noticed that before. And of course, it makes sense then that he would. He would take this authority upon himself as a doctor and related to this idea of being expert because he's the only one who can see it, right?
We're all blind. But because he has, you know, gotten these microbes tested which are naked to our eyes, he knows he has the expertise and only he has the eyes to see what the problem is. I mean, I think you're right that he speaks generally of being like a mole. But now his eyes have been opened, and his job is to open other people's eyes and make sure that they take his expertise, his authority seriously. And then he. The first. I think this. This might be wrong, but one of the first, if not the first metaphors that he uses. You know, you talked about the.
The cesspool and. And the. Or cesspit and sepulcher. But the way that he constructs that is he says this spa institute, which has been described as the town's artery, the town's nerve center and the devil knows what. And Billing cuts in and says, the beating heart of our town. I allowed myself once in a festive moment to. And he. Stockman cuts him off. Yes, that too. But do you know what it is in reality, this great, splendid, lauded spa institute that has cost so much money? Do you know what it is? The entire spa is a cesspit. And of course, he says this with great enthusiasm, but I think it's so key that the first thing he connects it to is a body.
The spa is a body, and he's going to diagnose what's wrong with it. So if society is a body, if whatever it is that you're looking at is a body and you're a doctor, then of course you should be number one in town. Of course you should live like the governor. You know, you're better than the governor. You could see. You could see and diagnose what other people can't. It's so important to understanding. His grandiosity is this idea of himself as being expert in this way that no one else. He has a knowledge that no one else has access to. His delight in that discovery and that knowledge seems to be part of what's really feeding his mania in this moment.
I love the note. Walking contentedly about, you know, he's like walking around the room, you know, going on and on about his great. You know, his great discovery.
8:58 Wes: Yeah. You would think. Right. Well, I've got some really bad news. Sit down. Right. Because this is going to hurt. No. Elated to deliver this news. And then. Right. And he thinks the university sample, you know, he said the samples he sent to the university for analysis, they prove there's, you know, decayed organic matter in the water infusoria, in vast quantities. It's seriously harmful to the health whether taken internally or externally. Yeah. Has the lab told him that as well? Did the lab draw that scientific conclusion about the harm? Right. Do we know that it really comes from the sludge? I think if I sent samples from my bathtub to the university, they might come back with some disturbing.
9:48 Erin: Right. As I took a drink of water
9:50 Wes: infusoria, we got a bunch of pasty bodies going into the water and bringing their own infusoria with them. Of course, there's decayed organic matter in the water. That scene in Caddyshack. Now I'm thinking of where Bill Murray finds a Baby Ruth in the pool. Everyone thinks it's these. Right. Not to be overly. Not to be gratuitously skeptical about this, but I think it fits in with the rest of the characterization of Stockman's elation and then his level of certainty about this, which we, at least as an audience, we don't get the picture that it's entirely warranted.
Right. If Ibsen wanted to make sure that we were. That we knew that we should share Stockman's certainty. You know, maybe you could say this is like the third lab I sent it to. I wanted a second opinion. I did this. We could have gotten a lot more information about the samples being tested, but in particular about the scientific opinion that they are harmful whether taken internally or externally. Right. Because we could imagine that. Yeah. This is not water you would want to drink, but this is kind of water people bathe in. Yeah, pretty much.
It could be something like that. So lots of little subtle hints here that I think are important.
11:07 Erin: Yeah, that's right. You know, one of the interesting elements of the Ray film from the 80s, and I think one of the ways in which he makes the doctor so straightforward is that there is actually a scene where he goes to. In this, it's the temple water which is contaminated. And so they have, like, all these pilgrims coming to the temple. And therefore, that's sort of how the. There's an interesting, like, faith element, you know, that comes in with that as well. Well, these are supposed to be healing waters. And how dare you say, you know, it's like saying that, you know, to put it in.
In my terms of reference, you know, don't take the water at Lourdes. It's gonna make you sick. And it's like, well, how. How would it make you sick? It's supposed to be. It's supposed to heal. You actually did not do the reverse. Right. So you actually have a scene where the Stockman figure goes down to the temple and watches the pilgrims actually sip the water, like, throw it on their face, you know, hold it in their hands. And it's a moment of real power because you actually see people in the water, you know, like the spa. There's no sense that it even exists in this.
This play. Right. I mean, of course it does, but, like, there's no real world sort of consequence, it seems. There's no scene that we get where we see people getting sick. There's no discussion, really interesting to have
12:30 Wes: The only location scene is at the printers. Yeah.
12:33 Erin: So it's so interesting that this symbology that the doctor is going to properly diagnose this town and heal this town from its problems, is actually so divorced from real bodies, the real consequences of this problem. And then by that same token, he's going to use his expertise to fix the problem, because he's going to give you, you know, he's going to write in his prescription pad. And as he says, we have to get the situation put right naturally. And Hovstad says, so that's possible. And Dr. Stockman says it has to be possible, otherwise the whole spa is unusable, ruined.
But there's no need for alarm. I'm very clear about what needs doing, as you've already pointed out. And then he later says in his conversation with Aslaksen and Hovstad, when they're talking about using this as a political metaphor, he says, we don't need to go to all this trouble and get all these people to support us and all this other stuff because he says, I feel this matter should take care of itself. Now, I don't know if that means that he has such naivete that he thinks that just presenting his findings to the spa board will mean that it'll be solved internally or if he has some idea as to exactly how the infusoria can be killed, reduced.
But the fact that he has this solution that he never ever expressly says. And then in that moment where he says the problem will take care of
13:57 Wes: itself except for moving the water pipes up higher. Right?
14:01 Erin: Moving the pipes. But isn't that really the idea that the. That the mayor gives to him?
14:06 Wes: No. I think so. It's in the. It's in the next. So after he says he's clear about what needs doing and then he's on about. He's going to tell. He wants Petra to tell the badger to tell Kiil about this because he thinks Kiil is gonna. Right. The badger sees him as a crack. As cracked in the head. The badger is gonna, you know, see that Stockman is not as cracked in the head as he thought. He's gonna have the report sent to. To the mayor. And then he says, he rubs his hands, right? As he imagines the. To do in the town, the controversy that this is going to create.
Rubs his hands and then he says all the water pipes must be relayed and moved higher up. Right. It's like a physical version of revolution. There's no incremental or partial fix here. It's got to be redone. And in light of his competition with his brother. Right. Who gets the credit for this idea? Right. The mayor is very upset when people say that Stockman gets the credit. And like, well, I'm the one who did it. So you can see that. Likewise, Stockman is annoyed by the idea that the mayor is the only one who does things. And he did things the wrong way.
He did things against his advice, and lo and behold, he did a little investigation to find out that they should have done it his way all along. And now it has to be redone according to his specifications. Very, very suspicious. But, yeah. Am I wrong about that? Did the mayor give him this idea? You're saying he might have given him this idea earlier?
15:44 Erin: I think you're right about that. Yeah. Because certainly he says, yes, all the water pipes must be relayed that's early. That's early enough that. Yes, this is his idea. And he says, I wrote opposing them when they were to start building, but back then nobody wanted to listen to me. Well, now I'll launch a broadside at them, believe me. Yes, I've written a report for the spa's board. I love the fact that he already wrote the report before getting the confirmation, too. That's key. It's been sitting here ready for a whole week. I've just been waiting for this. And now I'll go. It'll go off this instant. Look, four closely written pages. He holds it up and it's all scribbles, you know,
16:19 Wes: like. And stuff.
16:21 Erin: Right, Exactly. It's a total nonsense.
16:23 Wes: What do they call it? Someone just writes and writes and writes anyway.
16:26 Erin: Right, right.
16:28 Wes: Fia. Or something. Anyway.
16:30 Erin: But yeah, he. Well, you know, and, and, and to that point, I mean, when his brother sees the report before he meets with Stockman, he actually goes down to the engineer, or claims he does go down to the engineer to actually get an idea of the cost of this whole thing. So we have Stockman writing the report before he gets confirmation from the university. And then we have the mayor claiming that he doesn't believe the doctor. But then before he even goes to see. See him, has already gone down to the engineer to see how much this would cost. Which is an indication to me that.
That the report must be. Must show something conclusive, you know, to give a little credit to the doctor. Right. That. That seems to me like something you would do only if you really thought that this wasn't bunk to go and see what. How it would actually be. How much it would actually cost to fix things. But there's. There's sort of mirror images in that way. I mean, just as you have. Just as you have Stockman, you know, referring to his expertise, referring to the town as the body, and he's the. He's the one that's going to fix everything. You also have the mayor taking on that kind.
I mean, everyone is using this symbology, but the mayor says that he can't convince himself of the truth of Stockman's report. And he repeatedly uses. You know, I cannot get myself to believe this. I cannot convince myself. He repeatedly uses this odd sort of splitting language where he's splitting himself into two people. You know, there's him and then there's the little hostage inside him that refuses to believe that. That this report is true. And then subsequently after that, he. He. He refers to himself. He actually uses the Royal we for himself.
And he says, I've been unable to persuade myself there is any actual imminent danger. And then he says, we consider it an unavoidable necessity that you make a public statement of the kind I have demanded. We as though, you know, he's more than one person. So he becomes the people in some strange way, he becomes the town. He takes on the entire town and even the spa himself, right? Like he wants to be known as being responsible for the spa. He wants to be the thing that people come to to right themselves. He wants to be the engine of economic stability for the town.
So there were a few things too, that I won't be able to find now that indicated that he sort of identifies his person with the town. Of course, he's the mayor, so that would. That also stands to reason, but associates his person with the town and with the spa. And then the splitting seems to. It seems to suggest to me that he also is the people itself. And therefore Stockman's attempt to say that there's something wrong with the town or that there's something in the town's body that needs to be fixed or diagnosed pits them against each other in this crucial way.
Like, I'm not sick. No, you are, and I'm going to heal you, you know.
19:15 Wes: And Stockman really misreads this at the end of the first act. And Petra says, what will the mayor think? Stockman says, surely he can't be anything but pleased at such a vital truth coming to light. And then they all have this big fantasy about how he's going to be the first man in the town and everyone's going to be celebrating him. They get induced by his mania, and they have this really unrealistic expectation of how people are going to react. And interestingly, at the beginning of Act 2, this question of how the mayor will respond comes up again, right?
And Stockman gives a very different answer. So Mrs. Stockman asks him how he thinks the mayor will react. Stockman says he won't be pleased I made the discovery. I'm paraphrasing here, you know, he won't be pleased that it was I. I'm the one who made the discovery, not him. He's so damned afraid that anyone else might accomplish something for the good of the town. So we see that Stockman's kind of manic misreading of the mayor is corrected early on here. So now we get a series of other inducements. The first is Kiil the Badger, his wife's father, coming by.
And Stockman had. Had the fantasy that Kiil would see that he wasn't cracked in the head because of his discovery. And of course that was a completely unrealistic expectation because Kiil doesn't believe in little Infusoria. I don't believe in your goddamn science and these supposed microbes. But Kiil is delighted by the fact that he's going to play monkey tricks on the mayor because he has a beef with the mayor. He was kicked. Kiil was kicked off the council, who, you know, they think they're so much clever than us oldies. And he even says, I'll give you some money.
Press on with your monkey tricks. I'll give you some money. In a way you get the impression that Kiil is like, even his name sounds like he's the microbe, right? He's the creepy crawly one. Well, it's right after that that Hovstad wants to kind of expand the scope of this and will say it's not the swamp, but Mølledalen, that's critical. But it's the entire municipal life, right? Bureaucrats, authorities, stubborn bigots. And Stockman even defends them. He says, well, look, we need experts. And then Hovstad reminds him, well, they screwed up the laying of the water pipes and says putting it right will require press involvement.
Early on, Stockman hadn't thought necessarily that they needed to give a lot of bad publicity and embarrass a lot of people in the way that Hovstad wants to do. And he hadn't yet had the idea that the toxicity comes from the swamp in which our entire municipal life stands rotting. That translation into the social sickness, from actual physical sickness to the social sickness for which the physical sickness becomes a metaphor, is created by Hovstad. And then you see Stockman get induced by that. And then Billing goes even farther with revolutionary talk.
Stockman gets induced by that. It's Aslaksen who's sort of the undercurrent with the whole idea of doing what's prudent or temperate, staying with prudence and temperance. But the others drag him along into a more extreme position.
22:44 Erin: Right? I suppose the most generous reading of Stockman that we can give is just of a man who's so professorial and so delighted by science that he is, you know, an absent minded professor type, because what all of his behavior reveals is the fact that he has very little self knowledge, frankly, and of the way that he comes off and of the fact that he is so easily contaged by other people and also just very little understanding of people in general. You know, his wife is far savvier about knowing when to sort of kiss the mayor's behind a little.
A little bit and making sure that he feels not so under attack. Whereas Stockman's just. Just totally unaware of his brother's feelings or aware of them, but only in the sense that he wants to play on them when he can and toy with his brother a bit. Had he an understanding of people, he would not, for instance, I mean, if he really thought this was something that could have just been taken care of by the Spa board behind closed doors, that none of this needed to get out, or the press didn't need to be involved, the homeowners association didn't need to be involved, then of course, the first thing he should not have done is open this report when he has members of the press in his house or any outsider in his house in a small Norwegian town that operates solely on gossip and then start parading around talking about how something needs to be done about it.
If he had any understanding of people, he could have just gone to the Spa board, handled it privately.
24:10 Wes: These are the young people who are supposed to be the source of vitality, Right?
24:15 Erin: Right.
24:15 Wes: And he does, you know, he does find himself resisting Hovstad, as I've said. He defends the idea we need experts. And Hovstad said, these fine gentlemen can be dispensed with, speaking about the authorities. And Stockman says, dispensed with perhaps, but we still owe them a huge debt of gratitude, right? And you can read him as saying the same thing about values, right? The values that have been bequeathed to us. So Stockman is willing to try to be a bit. A bit moderate here. Hovstad presses the point. The myth of the infallibility of those who govern us must be shaken.
Such notions must be eradicated like any other superstition. I think Stockman's going to use this word later on, right. In a speech that makes him sound a bit like Adolf Hitler in certain places with the eradication of vermin and the people become the vermin, as you pointed out, there's an element of naivete about getting elated about his new discovery. With the press present, he's not thinking about what they might want to do with it. And then, of course, Hovstad is thinking about his own importance, right? About. Well, really, it's the agent of change here is going to be the press, not necessarily Stockman in particular.
So again, everyone wants in on it, right?
25:37 Erin: And ultimately what it comes down to is power, it seems, which is slightly different than money. But Money is a big part of it. I mean, Aslaksen, when he's talking to Stockman and is touting his position in the town, says, I come in contact with a lot of people and being known as a prudent and law abiding citizen, as you said yourself, Doctor, I have a certain influence in the town, a sort of modicum of power, I may say. And he brags that it would be a simple matter for me to get a petition together if it comes to the crunch. So it's really funny Aslaksen's position is the funniest.
You know, I interpret Stockman's defense of expertise in that moment as being a kind of defense of himself. And in fact, he sees himself as the expert. And if he goes around saying that the regular people are. Need to rise up and depose the experts, well, that would include Stockman and it would include his brother. They must come from some wealth, some family wealth or something like that, even though Stockman is not doing so well for himself before the play starts and
26:39 Wes: has apparently been supported by the mayor.
26:41 Erin: Right, right. The brothers needed to set him up in this, in this job, but they must come from, from a pro, at least a prominent, if not a wealthy family in this town, because the brother's the mayor. He's a prominent doctor by the mayor's beneficence, it seems, but still. And so he's included in this, in this aristocracy. And so, so Hovstad seems to have this idea that he has power as a result of being associated with the press and being able to form public opinion and Aslaksen curiously has, has power masses, you know, because he understands the people and is one of them.
And that gives him a power. He suggests, you know, he's, he's going to run a petition of thanks, for instance, for bringing this important public matter forward. And everything has to be done with temperance. So he's, he's like this, he gets his power from being so middle of the road that he's like right in the dead center of, of the people. And that somehow gives him, I mean, it does in practical effect give him a tremendous amount of power in this play. I mean, he's able to silence the doctor. I mean, partially because he's been made the arm of, of what the mayor wishes to do at the assembly, but still.
27:53 Wes: Right? I mean, yeah, Aslaksen will say, he wants to do a petition, but he. It should be composed with the proper temperance, so it doesn't upset the authorities. Hovstad tries to object, and Aslaksen jumps in and says, no, you know, there should can't be any disrespect towards the authorities, no opposition against the people with whom our lives are so closely bound. Not just closely bound, but in a way we stand on the shoulders of the authority of previous generations. If we're thinking about values, they are formative influences for us and we challenge them at our.
In a sense, we want to challenge them, but they're so constitutive of our identity that it can feel in a way like self destruction to do so. And then when Aslaksen leaves, Hovstad slags him off. He's one of those in the swamp, right? Stockman defends him. Yep, but well meaning. And then Hovstad says again, the worship of authority must be eradicated in this town. This grossly inexcusable error with the water system system must be made apparent to every voting citizen. Stockman will go on to say, well, I think this is just going to go smoothly.
I don't think it's going to really require this big conflict in the Hovstad. It's basically okay, yeah, we'll see. He wants a fight, he wants a fight. But yeah, as you pointed out with Aslaksen, we get someone who's in a kind of weird middle position where he's willing to challenge authority up to a point. Later on he'll say local, we can do it with the government, the national government, but local authority we have to be careful about because it's too dependent on local authority and we could end up with incompetent people if we just simply just have a revolution.
So he's willing to be more rebellious at a more global and abstract level. But if there's going to be consequences to homeowners, that's another matter.
29:46 Erin: Right? And those consequences ultimately just come down to. Yeah, to lost income. Ultimately, it's about the town losing the economic opportunity that the spa represents and then showing up late to the party if they have to delay the SPAs running by two years while they fix the pipes. I think is the two years is the amount of time. And then in the meantime, that would give the surrounding seatowns a chance to catch up and to develop their own competing resorts. It's certainly a good point the mayor makes that that once this gets out, nobody's gonna wanna come to this town, whether it's whether the pipes are fixed or not. I mean, you know, I wouldn't specifically go to this spa town even if I had every assurance that it was no longer contaminated. With toxic sludge, I would probably choose a different resort.
30:34 Wes: So, yeah, you know, you gotta sympathize a bit, I think, with absolutely the practicalities of this. I mean, I would at least get a second opinion.
30:44 Erin: I mean, amity means friendship. And really, aren't we, aren't we trying to project a certain image here?
30:50 Wes: Isn't there a shark? Who knows?
30:53 Erin: Right, right.
30:54 Wes: You know, it could have been a propeller. It's like a tooth, you know, sticking out of the flesh. Well, what's this? I think it's a propeller. But anyway, yeah, it's. They get him worked up and then the mayor comes to him and says, yeah, you know, this is. I can't convince myself and you use strident language and it's going to cost a lot. And Stockman, who's been worked up by his buddies, by the youngsters, says he has the solid majority on his side, right? So he's got the idea that he'll have the people behind him and that's where they, you know, I guess when he's having his little fight with his brother, the mayor criticizes him for his compulsion to write on every topic.
And Stockman says it's a duty for citizens to share ideas with the general public. And the mayor says the general public has no need whatsoever for new ideas. The public is best served by the good old accepted ideas it already has. Ultimately, the mayor will accuse him of, in blind obstinacy, cutting off the town's primary source of sustenance. So again, this idea that the town is made healthy economically by the existence of the spa. Stockman. The solid majority is on my side, the liberal minded press, blah, blah, blah. In act three, we get. I'm being a little synoptic here because we're running out of time, but in Act 3 we get billing involved.
And now this word revolution is coming up. Billing says we'll go on striking blow after blow until the whole feudal elite come tumbling down. When I sat in here reading this, it was as though I glimpsed the revolution coming from afar. Then Stockman's fantasizing about writing more articles and, and in this very grandiose vein, tells Aslaksen he wants his manuscript treated like it's gold. No misprints. Right. All that quickly collapses. Of course, as we know, it doesn't take much. The mayor just has to come in and chat briefly with Aslaksen and Hovstad and Billing.
They turn tail quickly and essentially betray Stockman.
33:04 Erin: Well, yeah, he says when he and his brother are having an argument, I have the Press in front of me and the, the solid majority behind me or whatever. Yeah. So he's, he's very quickly left pretty naked. I love this idea of that between the new and the old ideas. Everything is so abstract. I love the point in Act 4 when he finally gives the speech and he's going on about all these crusty old ideas. And finally someone in the crowd basically says, like, give me an example, you know, what, what are you even been talking about? Because so it's so funny that they've been talking in these grandiose terms or these rather just these abstract terms this whole time.
And then, then finally he's enjoined upon to give an example. And basically the, the thing that he says is that regular people are idiots. That's his, that's his new idea. Or, or the, the old idea is that they're great and really, in fact it's a lie because regular people are dumb. That Stock Stockman's whole bag.
34:03 Wes: Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. I mean, so he's gagged at the meeting. He's not allowed to talk about the water supply. Right. The general will is against him. And it's the editor's obligation, Hovstad will say, to, I think to promote the welfare of like minded readers. He should be more concerned with his family and needy children. And so Stockman says, well, yeah, I don't need to talk about the quote unquote trifling matter of our water supply being poisoned, our spiritual wells are poisoned, and our entire civic community rests on a plague infested ground of lies.
We get a lot of great speeches here. It'll start out with his eyes were open when he saw the idiocy of the authorities. They should be eradicated like any other vermin, which the people laugh at. That, that talks a bit about these old men with the world of dying ideas and that these dying ideas are the actual thing that are poisoning our spiritual wells. Hovstad says the majority always have the right on their side. That's when Stockman will say the majority, they never do because it's the intelligent who are the minority. And the stupid should not be ruling over the intelligent.
Now we're getting kind of republican position. Right. They're right. Thinking of ultimately of Plato's Republic, where it's the philosopher kings who should rule. Or at the very least we should have representative government and the masses should not be directly ruling over us. I agree with that.
35:37 Erin: None of us want mob rule. That's right.
35:39 Wes: Right. But he'll say the right is with myself and a few other solitary individuals, the minority is always in the right. Sounding more and more Nietzsche, here I am thinking of the few, those individuals among us who have embraced all the new, vigorous truths. They stand at outposts, truths that are newly born into the world of conscious or too newly born into the world of consciousness to have gained majority support. In any case, I just wanted to get a few of these ideas. From the end of this, he gets more and more extreme, and then we'll start insulting the. The common people as well. So he moves from disdain for the authorities to disdain for their old values, and then finally to disdain for the common people. But as you point out, it's in response to a question about an example. Do you know where that. About give us an example of this.
36:35 Erin: Oh, it's actually Hovstad who asks for an example. Stockman saying, don't talk of certain truths. The truths that the masses, the public, approve, are truths that the fighters at the outpost held to be certain in our grandfather's day. You already remember. Read that. And then Hovstad says, instead of standing there talking up in the air like that, it would be amusing to hear what these marvelous old truths are that we all live on. And thank you, Hovstad. Finally, he proves himself to be an interesting newspaperman. And Stockman says, it's the doctrine you've inherited from your forefathers that you preach mindlessly far and wide.
The doctrine that the common folk, the hordes, the masses are the nation's core, that it is the very people itself, that the common man, the ignorant and uncultivated men, member of society, has as much right to condemn or approve to govern and control as the few spiritually noble individuals.
37:21 Wes: Yeah.
37:21 Erin: So is that regular people are just stupid, you know, I wonder if there's a buzzfeed quiz you. You could take. Maybe that's an outdated reference, but I wonder if there's a buzzfeed quiz you could take. Like, am I a poodle human or a mongrel human?
37:36 Wes: Yeah, I love the contrast between poodle humans and mongrel humans, especially because poodle
37:41 Erin: just sounds so much worse. I mean, it's just a ridiculous word. And so to have it pop up in this, in this translation. I mean, maybe it sounds more dignified in Norwegian, but, yeah, if it's a
37:52 Wes: literal dog, I'd rather have a mutt.
37:53 Erin: Well, tell me about it. Like, first of all, they have, like, if we're actually comparing this to dogs, basically, like, any breed has so many physical problems that they are like, you know, genetic inbreeding. There's the Habsburg issue at the far extreme end, which he as a doctor should appreciate.
38:13 Wes: Right.
38:14 Erin: But the, you know, the end of Act 3 and going into Act 4, I just noticed, I just accidentally opened to this page. He says that he wants to see if lily livered cowardice has the power to muzzle the patriot who wants to cleanse society. And so yeah, so we have this idea of cleansing being so, so suggestive there. And yeah, I put in the margin, I just put Nazi. So them. Anyway, yeah.
38:40 Wes: And then yeah, he'll, he'll criticize like the sort of socialist pretensions of the newspaper, the. What is it called?
38:48 Erin: The People's Messenger.
38:49 Wes: The People's messenger, yeah. So he turns on the. Yeah, the socialist pretensions of these guys. And because Hovstad says, you know, he's proud to have his roots among the common folk that, you know, that are being insulted. And that's when Stockman turns to the idea. Well, it's not just, I'm not just talking about, you know, literally about lower class people. Right. The mayor is a commoner himself. So here's what he says. He thinks the thoughts of his superiors and believes what his superiors believe, people who do that are spiritual commoners.
And then he criticizes the paper for this false doctrine that the solid majority are liberal minded and moral, whereas vice and spiritual depravity ooze out of high culture. So there's sort of an anti elitist cast to the paper that includes an anti elitism when it comes to high culture. And we can kind of see that right. In the religious story that Petra doesn't really want to translate. But they're like, well, we have to give the masses their opiate a little bit so that we can. Otherwise we can kind of settle them down so that we can feed them these truths about politics.
40:01 Erin: Yeah, that's such a great tautology ultimately. Right. Like even, even the People's messenger is in a way suggestive of this because it's such an anodyne name. It's suggestive on the one hand of a socialist paper, but on the other hand it's sort of kowtowing to, you know, it's, it's a, it's in service of what the people want to hear. We have to give the masses their opiate. We have to give them their silly little stories in order to placate them. And on the other hand, they are the only true authority. We have to have them rise up. You know, there's always this there's always this fascinating blend between talking down to your core demographic and believing that they're all secretly idiots.
And also like wanting to, wanting to elevate them and put them in a position of power and give them all of this authority. It's like, which is it? Are you the, the messenger to the people or are you delivering the people the message they want to hear?
40:51 Wes: No. You know, and he also says it's not high culture that corrupts people and makes them right. Like an effete limousine liberal, to bring back a very dated phrase that was once used in our politics. But yeah, but it's the lower living condition you can romanticize. Well, people live in poverty and crappy conditions and they're the salt of the earth. But he says no, it's ignorance, poverty, ugly living conditions that do the devil's work. Like if an untidy house is bad for the soul and people lose the capacity to think or act morally. And here's another very Nietzsche phrase, lack of oxygen debilitates the conscience. Right? You got to air the house out. So when he's called the enemy of the people, yeah, he's made himself the enemy of the people, right.
41:42 Erin: In the end, he makes himself the Antichrist.
41:46 Wes: There's an equivocation there. There's enemy of the people in the sense of someone opposed to their well being, and then there's enemy of the people in the sense of someone who has their well being in mind but is willing to slag them off, is willing not to flatter their sense of worth, insult them, maybe tell a little bit of the truth about them. And this is an annoying. It's hard not to. Maybe this is a bad thing to admit, but to enjoy a lot of this, because a lot of political life involves this sort of pandering, right? You pander to the masses and oh, you're the salt of the earth and you're the best and society ought to be run by you and no society ought to be run by the elites, the experts, the people who know better.
And yeah, they suck too, in their own way. But the elitist in me sympathizes with these sorts of tirades. But of course they. He goes too far. So, yeah. So what do we make of him at the end of this? Well, I guess there's a new note at the very end when he turns to the idea of staying and fighting it out and being an educator. Right. That again, is the more positive spin on this, right?
42:58 Erin: No, but I take that final burst of loquaciousness from him at the end of the play to be evidence of his insanity. He's finally just lost it. Yeah, okay.
43:09 Wes: To me, it's ambiguous. Right. And the rest of them seem kind of pleased with him. You know, Petra grabs his hands. Mrs. Stockman is smiling and shaking her head. Oh, here he goes again.
43:22 Erin: Well, they've all been, you know, these
43:24 Wes: poor people are one of his harebrained schemes. And it's like everything's going to be. It's a comedic ending and everything's. Is everything going to be fine? Have they been through this before? His hair brain scheme goes wrong. Maybe moving up north was one of those schemes, but he always lands on his feet. You don't know whether if this were a more serious ending than the turn towards the possibility of educating people, including street urchins. You could take that seriously and say, okay, well, he's climbed down off his elitist pedestal. He's calmed down, and now he has a more realistic idea of what he can do that's constructive in this context. But yeah, as you point out, we kind of don't know because it seems like he just could just be crazy and that this is an entirely unrealistic plan that he has.
44:15 Erin: It seems like one more manic outburst, you know, oh, now I'm going to throw all this away. And now I'm going to. Now I'm going to homeschool, which is always a bad sign. No, I'm joking. I could say that I was homeschooling schooled.
44:33 Wes: Someone is homeschooled.
44:34 Erin: You know, everyone is bad. Now I just have to start my own school. And I'm going to say, you know, this is like one step away from being like, I, you know what? I'm going to. I'm going to form my own country where only smart people will be allowed
44:45 Wes: to come in, you know, start a cult.
44:47 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
44:48 Wes: Starting with the street urchins and.
44:50 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Of course, you know, everything that starts that way ends with Stockman drinking hemlock. But.
44:59 Wes: Or a bunch of people drinking Kool Aid.
45:02 Erin: Or a bunch of people drinking Kool Aid. That's right.
45:05 Wes: Which he is good at making people drink the proverbial Kool aid and getting them excited.
45:10 Erin: Is he.
45:12 Wes: The reaction to Mrs. Stockman is odd, right? Smiling and shaking her head. Oh, Tomas, no, He's just ruined their lives and now they're going to do this wildly risky thing. It's not, it's not like the end of a sitcom episode. Oh, there you go again. You know that that's not really what the moment calls for.
45:33 Erin: Could you imagine this sitcom where every single setup was like a, like a five act, you know, it's like a three hour episode where the end is like just another hare brain scheme in the life of Dr. Thomas.
45:45 Wes: Did I do that?
45:48 Erin: The next episode he starts his school and like there's an outbreak of lice and he. I don't know.
45:53 Wes: Anyway, he's like chastising the kids. You're the vermin.
46:03 Erin: No, no, but I think like, you know, Mrs. Stockman flip flops too, in the, in the play, but only because I think she's seen. Only because she sees him go through so much betrayal at the end that she's finally convinced to stand by him. Right. So, yeah, so in the end, maybe, maybe she's the one who's also gone nuts and just is like, oh, here he goes again. Because the only way she can, she can survive in this life is to just treat everything he does like some cute little flight of fancy.
46:32 Wes: Yep. And I just, you know, I think, you know, as we end, as we close here, it's just. Yet my impression is that we are, as an audience, we're left in a state of doubt where. Doubt about Stockman's credibility when it comes to the report, doubt about whether he's about to launch a more constructive enterprise or whether he's just crazy. Ibsen is not giving us an easy identification with a heroic protagonist here. It's something much more subtle and unresolved in a way.
47:09 Erin: That's right. And though I don't think this is such a. This is as great an example of this kind of phenomenon in Ibsen as, say, A Doll's House. One of the things I really love about Ibsen is that the plays always end at a moment which is not an ending so much as a threshold. So we can imagine. You know, Doll's House is like. People have written about the fact that that whole play could just be the prequel to whatever the real story of Nora's life is going to be. Right. She stands. I mean, at the end she closes, closes the door, but in so doing, she stands on the precipice of an entirely new life. And a great drama could be made out of whatever happens to her when she leaves that house. You know, maybe she goes right back in and the whole drama is moot.
47:49 Wes: But.
47:49 Erin: Right, but, but one can imagine any number of things which might happen to her after that. And I think this is not so extreme an example, but it's something of the same, Same idea here. I think this is true. The majority, if not all, of Ibsen's plays. You know what? But we could imagine a play starting right at the end of this one. Okay, this guy is hated by everybody in the community and he's cast out. What does he do? You know, it seems like the moment that Ibsen selects for the drama of his plays is always so well selected but also so resonant that one could imagine he could have chosen a different dramatic moment later on and it had been just as.
Just as successful anyway. He's just these. He's such a genius. Just the mayor complaining about indigestion in the first moments of us seeing him. And it's like, Right, it's all about acid and clogged pipes. Here we go. You know, everything is so perfect anyway.
48:45 Wes: Yeah, okay. I think that's a good place to end it. Of course, there's always the next adventure that comes after this and ending, which is a movie.
48:58 Erin: And tbd. Thank you, tbd.
Freedom and Authority in Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People”
Sep 15, 2025
In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: In Ibsen's An Enemy of the people, two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockman's is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brothers is conservative, focused on the use of authority and aesthetic self restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism and expressions of contempt, respectively, for both past and future.
Today we discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the role of education. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and you're listening to Subtext. So Erin, what do you think of that Stockman report? Do you think it's credible?
1:35 Erin: I believe it if I see it. And if these infusoria are. Yeah, I know, exactly. And they seem pretty microscopic. I just think it's all bunk.
1:45 Wes: I guess they were on the cusp at this time of believing in the little tiny creatures that we call bacteria as causes of disease. Or maybe, obviously a man of science like Dr. Stockman would believe in them, but not his father in law. He thinks it's the funniest thing in the world that anyone would believe in these things.
2:05 Erin: Well, the animals he deals with are much larger and you know.
2:09 Wes: At the tannery.
2:10 Erin: At the tannery, yeah.
2:11 Wes: Yeah. So I thought it was interesting that there are two important claims that I don't think are ever really justified very much or explored. One of them is by the mayor, his brother. That's the idea that it's going to cost $200,000 to repair the water system for the spa. And it sounded a little suspicious when he pulled that number out. I don't see him as trustworthy. And then at the end of the play in the community meeting, he says it's $100,000. So the number changes, which I think is meant to be a signal that we're not meant to actually trust that
2:51 Erin: Well, what's even more. More suspicious is that he's talking about American dollars when they live in Norway. No.
2:57 Wes: Oh, did I say dollars and not kroner?
2:59 Erin: Oh, okay. No, you're good.
3:01 Wes: Well, it's an exact one to one. For some reason. It might be actually. I don't know. Sounds. Yeah.
3:10 Erin: How much is it?
3:12 Wes: Be funny if it were just a hundred dollars, but. Right, exactly that time. A hot dog costs 5 cents, but anyway. Actually, 5 cents would be a lot.
3:25 Erin: I know.
3:25 Wes: Probably even less in the late 19th century, but. Yeah. I'm not sure about Stockman's credibility. He does get a report back from a laboratory, an independent laboratory, confirming that there's organic. Decayed organic matter. So the water is polluted. But what does that mean? How polluted is it? How dangerous is it? We don't get a lot of specifics, and also we find out that Stockman has a lot of extraneous motives. There's an element of kind of vindictiveness and almost manic elation when he first opens that letter and reports it to others. It's funny because I tried to watch the Steve McQueen version of this. Have you ever seen that? The film version?
4:17 Erin: No. I was going to watch it and I thought I just couldn't.
4:22 Wes: It's well rated, but it's. And I didn't get through that much, but I thought it was terrible, specifically terrible for McQueen's acting and the way his choices regarding Stockman, where he tries to play Stockman in this very reserved way. It's almost like he's trying to enhance the credibility of Stockman, which is hard to do given the original play, because Stockman is often kind of in hysterics and. Or a bit manic or a bit grandiose. In one way or another, I'm gonna be the savior of the community or screw the community. So in one direction or another, there's a real question around him.
He's not a sober personage, and McQueen tries to make him into this sober, melancholic, serious person. So not to dwell a lot on whether the water is really polluted or as polluted as Stockman says it is, because ultimately that doesn't matter. But I think we're meant to be a bit suspicious of Stockman or. I don't know, is there a real hero in this play? Is there a real protagonist? Because this story could have been told as a. And maybe this is what McQueen ultimately ends up doing with it. You could say this is a story about government corruption and here's someone standing up to it, and here's the very obvious hero of the story.
That's not what Ibsen does here. He makes it a lot more complicated.
5:50 Erin: That's right. I would have been interested to see, but I haven't. I'll probably watch it later. But I would have been interested to see the BBC adaptation set in Scotland, I think it is. I wonder what liberties they take with that.
6:01 Wes: I watched a bit of that. I mean, I just watched like a minute or two, and it looks very good. I didn't end up watching it because it was deviate so much.
6:10 Erin: Yeah, that's what I. I thought it might confuse me, actually.
6:14 Wes: Yeah. Then I realized, actually, after looking at it a little bit again yesterday, it actually is probably quite true to the substance I see, and maybe truer than McQueen's film, which is based on an adaptation by Arthur Miller.
6:27 Erin: I think that's one of the things I wanted to talk about with the play, because you're absolutely right this time around. Reading it for the first time in a few years, I really thought Dr. Stockman is. I think, you know, you and I both now we receive media that we know. We're going to do a podcast on, sort of like through the other person's eyes. And I remember thinking that you would think that Stockman was manic and also that maybe the report was just bunk and he was making it up. So the McQueen adaptation is based on the Miller retooling of Enemy and.
Which was supposed to be a parable about huac. And I think I had also mentioned that I had watched an adaptation by Ray set in an Indian town, in which the Stockman character. I forget what his name is in the film, but the guy who's supposed to be the Doctor is a hero fighting against the corruption of the town. And then there was a Jeremy Strong stage version, which was adapted by Amy Herzog, which I felt like I was the only person who had not seen that adaptation in New York. I know a bunch of people who saw it who all basically said that the speech of Stockman was retooled for that certain character.
A lot. A lot of times you get characters taken out, I guess, or maybe something like a collapsing of Hofstad and Billing. And basically what all of these adaptations come down to, from what I understand when they're being used toward a certain end, is to make Stockman a straightforward hero and to use the speech as, you know, to sort of insert in the filling of the Stockman speech. Whatever political opinions they want, Stockman they think are sort of adapted to the time. And so from what I heard, the Herzog adaptation was very self consciously trying to invoke the present political moment and make a bunch of statements about.
I don't know what particular political stance it was, but basically some critique of the Trump administration. You know, it strikes me that this play is so. It's treated so similarly to the way that Lear was treated in Victorian England, where they would do, you know, they would change up the ending so it wasn't so bleak. And Lear was just like this workshop for the playwright of the day to just use to kind of give it his own spin, adapt the ending in the way that whoever was retooling it saw fit. And it seems that that, like something about Lear and something about Enemy of the People inspire this desire to want to make things nicer or easier to swallow in some way.
And I think Stockman is just such, ultimately such a difficult character to root for that people have this desire to go in and turn him into something that on the page he's really not. I mean, you could see him as being the villain of the play if you wanted to. I mean, not quite. I mean, everybody's terrible. There's no, there's no good character in the. But that's one of the problems is he's not the hero, it seems to me.
9:36 Wes: Yeah, I think it's a matter of people might want this to be the kind of play that it's not right with this straightforward hero resisting the system narrative. But, you know, in light of the fact that it's not that I was curious about, well, what, you know, what is Ibsen up to here? And I think, you know, we know enough about Ibsen to say that in some ways he's identified with the character of Dr. Dr. Stockman and even in his more intemperate moments, kind of shares some of these elitist condemnations that Stockman is going to make at the end of, well, a certain point in the play where he becomes disillusioned and becomes the enemy of the people.
So here's what he said in a letter to the critic George Brandes. Well, here's one relevant quotation. What are we to say of the attitude taken up by the so called liberal press? I am more and more confirmed in my belief that there is something demoralizing in engaging in politics and joining parties. I, at any rate, shall never, never be able to join a party that has the majority on its side, Bjornson says the majority is always right. I, on the contrary, of necessity, say the minority is always right. I hold that the man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.
So very obviously identified in that quotation with the views of the Stockman character. He says in another letter that he's unsure whether it's a comedy or a drama. Here's another thing he said to Brandes. I'm still under the impression of the confusion and disturbance created by ghosts. So I had to write this new play, An Enemy of the People. It is a reaction against the mass hysteria, against the tyranny of the majority, against the lie which is enthroned in society. So I think there's a sense, and I think he basically admitted in a way that he is Stockman in a sense.
So I thought, okay, so what is he up to here? Is he just so cantankerous that he doesn't know that Stockman comes across as a hysteric? Or is he just enjoying leaning into that idea and ribbing people? I think it's the latter. That he's approaching his own proclivities with some sense of irony and enjoying the fact, right. He gets to emit all this bile through Stockman. And it is partly against society and the sorts of people that he wants to criticize. And I think this sort of attitude actually pervades those plays of his that I've read. A certain amount of bitterness towards society.
12:18 Erin: That's certainly right. I think, too, he really flirted with social Darwinism for quite seriously for a while there. I think he later. Later changed his mind. But certainly there's an element of self parody. And he takes it as far as he can. What you've noted about the play being comic is key. That's really the only way to understand this play, I think. I mean, all of Act 2 is literally a farce. The mayor is hiding in a room. You know, it could be a bedroom comedy in a way. You know, with people running in and out and people hiding behind doors. It's so ridiculous. It's so over the top. And everyone, including Stockman, is over the top. And I think we're meant to laugh at some of the things that he says in the play. Certainly in the first scene.
13:00 Wes: This is what I was hoping for from McQueen, I thought. Cause I couldn't find any other real versions available on video. And I wanted to see. Okay, is this played in the way that I think it should be played? Is this some of the farcical quality of it and the over topness of Stockman. Yeah, and McQueen doesn't do that. I think in the other thing that I found is, and this is from the critical heritage, is that early adaptations in London are the earliest adaptation in the earliest production in English in translation in English. This is in London, 1893.
They had this very oddly tall person play, Stockman, and they really amped up the comedic element. And this is what you, you know, the critics at the time. I think there's some disagreement about whether that should have been the case. Some critics really liked that a lot. Others found it questionable. I think that's a very good, that's actually a very good choice. As you point out. You were pointing out that there's a way in which it becomes farcical.
14:02 Erin: Well, it's a good visual symbol so that we immediately see that this man is self inflated, first of all. And second of all, a bit ridiculous and out of place. And I think that is important to signal, I mean, it can't be overstated how maybe a good word would be bilious, how biliously that Ghosts was received. I mean, how upset people got over that production. And you know, we mentioned a bit of this, I think in the Doll's House episode.
14:29 Wes: Well, remind me of that a little bit. Yeah. Cause I'm not.
14:32 Erin: People were horrified. I mean, it was a moral outrage. And this was the reason, I think, why people create that club or subscription service or whatever it was that allowed people to see Ibsen plays because he was considered so outrageous because of Ghosts. And Ghosts is, you know, it's such a funny play for people to have gotten so, so upset about. Like, I, I, I dislike ghosts the most of any of the Ibsen. I think I've read all of his plays and I, I, Ghosts is my least favorite because nothing happens. It's just people talking about something that happened a long time ago. And what happened a long time ago was this Mr. Alving had syphilis. And that's, that's the terrible, you know, this terrible thing.
15:13 Wes: I mean, is there not, is there any play in which someone doesn't have syphilis?
15:16 Erin: I, if there is, I don't want. Yeah, no, it's not really a play if there's no syphilis. But this was the play written immediately after Ghosts. And gosh, I'm, you know, I'm working off of long, long memory here, but I know that, I know that Ibsen said something to the effect of this one at least won't cause any controversy. I know this one's going to be okay. Like, he wrote it in response to the reaction for Ghosts in order to try and get himself back on top. So he just wanted to write a go ahead hit that would offend and bother nobody. And that's pretty incredible when you look at the content of Stockman's speech, to think that Ibsen was so sure that this wouldn't offend anybody. That can only be possible if you understand the comedic element of it.
16:01 Wes: Right.
16:01 Erin: I mean, if he's really espousing these views through Stockman in a way that people are perceiving as very serious, then I can't imagine that it wouldn't be controversial. But as it was, it was a huge hit and he was totally right. Everybody loved it and it was a big, you know, it sold big and everything. So I highly doubt that. That the. These ideas of social Darwinism were so acceptable back then. I think it had to have been that Stockman's flaws were so evident that it was not controversial.
16:32 Wes: I see, yeah. So people weren't necessarily taking all that criticism of the masses as being, what. What does he call them?
16:40 Erin: Mongrels.
16:41 Wes: Mongrels, yeah, yeah.
16:43 Erin: Animals.
16:44 Wes: They weren't taking that personally. They weren't taking that as Ibsen's considered view.
16:50 Erin: Yeah, right, right.
16:51 Wes: It seems plausible because to the extent that you identify that with. With then that sort of. I think it. To anyone, that kind of elitism is cloying, even if you can sympathize with it to some extent. Maybe at least in one's, you know, more cantankerous moments. You can sympathize with all these things that he's saying, of course, but he does sound. Start to sound a little bit like, you know, Nietzsche.
17:15 Erin: Right.
17:15 Wes: Which may be curious about whether he had read any Nietzsche and he claimed that he hadn't because, you know, he had someone write to him saying, you know, you ought to check this guy out. I think Nietzsche did read Ibsen and had a very positive opinion of Ibsen. I might have said that in our. One of our previous recordings, but, yeah. So these ideas, of course, are floating around, but some of these speeches that Stockman gives. Yeah, they could be straight out of Nietzsche.
17:40 Erin: It's a little difficult to detect in Act 1 when you're still sort of learning the characters. Right. But if you go back and you look at Stockman's very first words in the play, all of his flaws are very much in evidence. And I think one of the pieces of evidence to your point about his mania or about the fact that the report might not be legitimate. Or it might be him. What, catastrophizing or drawing a conclusion which maybe can't be drawn. I'm unsure about how to. How to characterize what might be wrong with the report. But we do know from. Granted, from unreliable sources like the mayor.
That Stockman has a reputation. For always having a bee in his bonnet about something. And also, we see in his own words, you know, when he first comes on stage. He's been out for a walk during the. Shortly after dinner. And so various people have come into the house before we see Stockman. But when he comes back in, he's waxing poetic to the mayor about. I feel so indescribably content. With all this budding, bursting life around me. Which I take to be pretty. Pretty suggestive. Because, of course, he's talking about how great this place is, how happy he is.
He's pointing out all these things, you know, which is really lovely. Pointing out all these nice things that he's been able to afford. Because he's been up in the north, really struggling. We also find out that he's been struggling. Partly because he's felt so bereft of the company of real human beings. But because he's such an elitist. He basically calls the townspeople where he was no better than animals. But, you know, he's. He's happy to be successful. He's so excited. He calls this a thriving metropolis, you know. But one laughs at this idea of.
Of all the life bursting around him. Because, of course, during this entire scene. He keeps asking if the postman has come. And we. We learn very soon that this whole time that he's been talking about how wonderful this place is. He has strongly suspected and needed the report only to confirm his suspicion that the waters at the spa are contaminated. And that, in fact, the idea of this place as being sort of teeming with life. Is, if we're to take his report seriously. A good kind of metaphor for the. Whatever the spike of microorganisms is. That has caused some problems in the water source.
So how could he be so excited about living here. And so excited about the prospect of what's going on around him. When he knows that this report is coming down the pike? It's as though he's wishing for this report. He's wishing for something to happen. He's hinting to his brother at first about what. What he's waiting on. And says there may be a great many things that are extraordinary about the circumstances. Which he's alluding to whatever is going to be in the report, or then again, absolutely nothing. It may be that it's just a figment of my imagination.
So he has all this excitement about being there, but in a certain light, it could be seen as excitement about stirring up trouble, about finding something wrong, about getting to crusade for something, as though he's wishing for. For. For there to be something wrong with the water.
20:40 Wes: Yeah. When he delivers the news to his family, he's quite elated in an inappropriate way. He doesn't think about the possibility that this might be bad news for people to find out that this thing that the town, in a way relies on or is coming to rely on for its prosperity could be, you know, built on a cesspool. I think the phrase he uses, you know, he does. And then he casually says, oh, it can all be fixed very easily, which is not clear that it can be fixed very easily. So that's. He's not thinking often. He's not thinking about a. How other people might feel about this.
He's not thinking about the fact that his brother might be right. Someone points out to him that the mayor, his brother, might be jealous of him. Making this discovery brings up the question of what the mayor will think of this. And I think Stockman says, oh, he'll be happy to learn about this. So there's a lot of naivete that's highlighted on the part of Stockman.
21:40 Erin: Well, you might almost think that if Stockman is happy about this discovery, it's because he knows that when they're building it, it's done shoddily. Or that something like this might happen. Right. Because they don't actually take his plans for the building of the pipes. So it does seem. I mean, there's a reading of the play in which all of this does come down to a rivalry between the brothers.
22:02 Wes: Right.
22:02 Erin: You know, where the mayor seems more obviously jealous of the brother. But. But really, if we look at the subtext, everybody drink at home, then the doctor is just as jealous of the mayor or just as undermining as attempting to be undermining of the mayor's authority or to prove that he did something wrong, that he's not as smart as the doctor is, et cetera. But if we are to take seriously the idea that Stockman is thrilled at this discovery, it occurred to me that his desire for there to be something wrong with the spa, regardless of whether or not it's.
It's about competing with a brother or just about his desire to crusade for something or just I don't know. Whatever it may be, it occurs to me that it's. It's quite similar to the spa itself, the sort of functioning of the spa itself. Someone talks about the fact. I think it's. I think it's the mayor in that early scene, talks about the fact that he hopes that a lot of invalids will come. And do you remember this? He makes some really funny comment, which it's clear that the mayor himself doesn't understand is funny.
23:11 Wes: Yeah. The mayor says early on, the mayor is enthusiastic about the spa as an economic foundation for the town. And there's a good flow of money between people. There's life and activity. Right. This is in direct parallel to what Stockman will say about vitality. There's two competing conceptions of vitality here, which I want to get into in a second. And then Hofstad says, oh, and the unemployment's falling. So Hofstad is thinking now not about business and the taxpayer, but about the poor people. And then the mayor turns that into the burden of the poor. Rates on the property classes has been reduced most pleasingly. So he twists it into the economic benefit to the middle class. And that's when he says the thing about invalids. Yeah, if you want to read them.
24:02 Erin: But yeah, he says, a substantial volume of visitors, a good number of invalids, to spread the institute's reputation. You know, I love this idea that. And this probably speaks to your idea of vitality, this idea that, are we building things on health or are we building things on sickness? It's reminiscent to. Of what Billing says in regards to his desire to run for a position at the magistrate's office. When Hofstad says, you know, I can assure you you won't get it, billing responds, you think I don't know that already? But that's exactly what's so dear to me, not to get it.
A rebuttal like that fires your fighting spirit. It gives you a kind of supply of fresh bile. And that can certainly be needed in a dull backwater like this, where hardly anything really rousing ever happens. I thought that was so fascinating and so maybe insightful, too, about Stockman's frame of mind, if he was wishing for there to be something wrong with the spa. So in the same way that the spa seems to be. I mean, economically, it feeds off of sick people coming to partake of it, hopefully being cured. But it needs an influx of sickness. Right, in order to produce some sort of positive result.
It seems Billing operates in the same way regarding getting riled up resistance, negativity, riles him up and gives him something to react against. And perhaps that's Stockman's idea as well, which is, oh, now I have a cause. Something's wrong with the spa. Hooray. Now I have something to get angry about, and that's going to give me this influx of energy or something so that I can live to rally another day.
25:41 Wes: Yeah. And I think this is key to Stockman's early conception of what vitality is, as opposed to the mayor's. So for the mayor, it seems to be. And this gets us back to the very beginning of the play where there's a lot of great characterization of the mayor because he's come in and he's greeted warmly. He rejects food because it would hurt his digestion. He likes a plain and economical diet. We get the impression that when, you know, Mrs. Stockman says just for once. Right. There's an indication that he rarely or never accepts those invitations to eat with them.
And then she worries that he'll think that they're spendthrifts. It's another thing that comes up again and again, I think, in Ibsen. And then the mayor says, not you. So little backhanded swipes against his brother. And then we find out that, as you pointed out, Stockman is out getting his 10,000 steps, but the mayor thinks that's unhealthy. That's really interesting. So he has this conception of health, which is conservative, you could say politically defensive. It's about what you have to preserve, or maybe in the case of the spa, it's about being sick and then bringing yourself back to baseline or preventing sickness.
So it's in that negative territory. Whereas for Stockman, it's all about vitality. And he's going to associate that ultimately with youthfulness and progressivism and change. So when Stockman arrives and then he offers the mayor a toddy, and the mayor goes, toddy too, right. So comment about the fact that they're libertines, that they're drinking. I don't partake in toddy parties. And then he criticizes the amount of food people are eating. And Stockman says it's a joy to see young people eating. And he's thinking of their appetite and the sustenance that they get, which will increase their strength because they're the ones, the quote, ones who will dig about in the fermenting stuff of the future.
So all of this warm social environment that Stockman is trying to create for the youth, who, by the way, are. There's Petra. But it's mainly Hofstad and Billing. The youngsters who will betray him and turn out not to be have any real vitality. Right. Or there's a progressivism there, but they're willing to and even a revolutionary fervor. And I think they get Stockman amped up beyond what he's originally wanting to do, but they'll abandon that very quickly. Unlike Stockman, Stockman's idea of what health is, is associated or vitality is associated with youth and overflowing and change as opposed to the more conservative position of preserving what you have.
And that'll be carried over into the realm of values. Right. Because later Stockman is going to say the old values are like the decayed organic matter in the waters. They actually make us sick. They only have a lifespan of up to 20 years. And then we need new values to become healthy again. For the mayor, it's the old values which are the healthy things and the health producing values and the sorts of values that must be preserved because they're tried and true and also because they support this top down conception of health where the authorities look out for the well being of the people.
For Stockman, it's bottom up, right. It's the young, it's those who are growing into the future. It's change. For the mayor, it's top down and it's let's keep things the same.
29:41 Erin: I wonder too if this also then goes along with this idea of using the sludge, using opposition as fuel. So it's sort of, you know, the doctor has this idea that the grit in the oyster is going to be something that produces ultimately greater strength. It's going to cause this energetic response that's going to then produce the revolutionary spirit that will result in an upheaval and a sort of cleansing. Whereas the mayor wants to get rid of the grit entirely so that things stay on that even keel, as I think you're, you're suggesting.
30:15 Wes: Yeah, I mean, this is the connection I was trying to make to what you were saying. And thanks for bringing us back there because it's important. What if there is nothing to resist and fight against? Right. What if it is just all good and then what do the young people do? Is there a form of vitality that doesn't involve yelling at your parents when you're a teenager and smoking pot and being rebellious and then overturning going to overthrow the system, man. Yeah. How do we express vitality if that's not available to us for whatever reason?
30:52 Erin: One heck of a pertinent question. What do we do except tear it all down and what do we put up in its place? But, but that's interesting, though, that, that these. That these two things are twins. Like, there's. One would think that a greater vitality and the sort of like, say the higher. Higher peaks of vitality that you're talking about with Stockman versus sort of like safe, subdued, you know, no, wa. That the mayor suggests, you know, that. That those peaks wouldn't go along with this grit in the oyster idea or this sludge idea. But maybe I'm being naive.
Maybe in order to get those peaks, you need the. You need the troughs. But one would think that, that that kind of idea of vitality would not go along with. Would not go along with this toxicity. But of course, that's the immune response, for instance, you know. Right. We spike with vitality as a way to. As a way to kill the invasion, the infection of bacteria. Of course, this is why people, you know, when they feel they're on the brink of revolution and are trying to incite, you know, the population, they're hoping that the government behaves as badly as possible so that people will be the most fed up that they can be, so that the revolution will actually happen.
Right. It sort of exists on that kind of energy. What can we make then? I mean, I don't know. I don't know the answer to this question myself, but what can we make then that. That of this rivalry piece. Both the doctor and the mayor come from the same family. You know, there's no, no talk of their parents. They seem to have sprung up out of nowhere. Both Mrs. Stockman and in a way, Captain Horster have paternal figures or the. Or the conspicuous absence of a paternal figure in their lives, which kind of hangs over the play. And this idea of inheritance seems.
What you say about this, in a way, Stockman's idea about inheritance are rather conservative ultimately. No, I mean, in his family, he. He has two radically different personalities. His wife is the descendant of three generations of Tanners, which Stockman married into. I don't know. There. There just seem to be two different tracks. We have this idea of health and of. Of preserving the present self, and then we have this idea of lineage. And what in our present selves do we owe? All of these things seem to be knotted up, and the sibling rivalry and this idea of genetics, but I don't know how to.
So I'm just throwing a lot of things at you. I'm not sure how to untangle all of that.
33:21 Wes: Yeah. He'll accuse the mayor of being a spiritual mongrel. And then we have to ask the question, right, well, why isn't Stockman a spiritual mongrel? And then you wonder, well, which is the older sibling? And you think, well, the mayor seems kind of like the older siblings sibling because he's more controlling and grown up. But in a way it would be funnier and maybe truer if he's the younger sibling fighting to be the. In Stockman and his older brother, he has not the most stable of father figures, if there ever was that. Right. If there's a bit of a gap in their ages, for instance, which might explain some difference in character.
And then you have kind of this goofy person as your secondary father figure and then overreact, becoming this kind of hard ass, tight ass, which is what the mayor is. Either way you go, yeah, you think about an interesting family dynamic in which these two different versions of the principle of vitality have shunted themselves into two different branches, right, let's say of the same tree. And we know that these are two fundamental tendencies that we have to honor. In some sense they reflect a tension within the human psyche and we can't really ultimately discard either one of them.
Right. So the more conservative instinct and the idea of relying on the values of a previous generation, which includes all the formative influences and includes culture, which is one of the things that Stockman will appeal to at the end. High culture, that all comes from the past, but also it includes, as I've said, the rear guard action of trying to heal people who are sick with the spa, but then also the financial element. So the well being of the community can. Can be measured to some extent in terms of economics, which is boring and dry, and it's the taxpayers and the housing association and all that nonsense.
And it seems almost those sorts of material conditions seem like a demeaning thing to focus on, unless you're focusing on the deprivation of the proletariat and the need for revolution to equalize this disparity between them and the authorities. One of the things I like about this play is with the way these two principles just sort of break off into these two different sibling characters. And they are siblings in important ways and they have this dynamic interaction that you were pointing to, which is that Stockman's version of vitality, which involves youthfulness and growth and progress, also involves fighting against a reaction to what has come before.
Right. He says, I think you've already quoted this, but he says, I have an infinite number of things to work and fight and to fight for. That's one of the things he's so excited about, being back in his hometown. And then the question is, yeah, can you find a form of vitality that doesn't necessarily involve that sort of fight? The other aspect of Stockman's version of vitality involves. It's another kind of overflowing, I think, which involves his prolificness as a writer and just wanting to spout every opinion that he has. So it's about speech, right?
And that could be political speech. That could be revolutionary, or it could be editorials complaining about the state of things, or however you want to think about it. It could be the thing that Hofstad and Billing are very focused on, speech for the sake of representing, let's say, politically disenfranchised. But it also can be what Stockman talks about at the end of the play, which is high culture. That's one form, ultimately, of vitality, the aesthetic, the artistic, which we don't hear a lot about in the play. But until Stockman is insulting people for being uncultured, insulting the masses for being uncultured, mongrels.
One of the themes I revisit a lot in the podcast. But, yeah, as a form of sublimation, we get a. We get a possibility of a form of vitality which isn't necessarily part of either one of these two different poles, the defensive conservative instinct or the progressive instinct. It sort of transcends it, maybe.
37:51 Erin: I think you're pointing out for me a couple of things about Stockman which are quite confused and speak to the complexity of his character, perhaps, that we have. On the one hand, I love this idea that you're pointing to of how prolific he is and how he seems to always have something to sort of rally on about. And yet, at the same time, as I think you also pointed out, he's very easily contaged by other people's ideas. It's kind of funny how little true conviction politically he actually seems to have prior to Hofstad and Billing getting to him and convincing him that this could be the vehicle for revolution.
So those two things seem to sort of work opposite each other. Like, we can imagine him as someone who writes a lot of editorials, and yet, at least in the play, and what we see of him taking up a cause on his own, it's not native to him. He becomes convinced of this idea that it speaks to a larger political problem over the course of the play, and only then does he espouse these types of revolutionary ideas.
38:52 Wes: Yeah, he's induced by. I think Billing is the more revolutionary of the two newspaper guys. Hofstad's a little bit more moderate in the beginning. Well, first of all, they get kind of contaged or induced by him. Everyone wants to get in on it. In my notes, I call them hop ons, right? You have Hofstad, Billing and Aslaksen. They all get contaged with the grandiose quality that Stockman has. Okay, I'm going to be. Now I'm an important person who's going to do something for the good of the community. They all get quite grandiose. But Stockman is carried along by this wave. Ironically, they're the ones. Billing is the one. Stockman's a little bit nervous when Billing is saying, rah, rah, rah, revolution. At first. He's carried along reluctantly at first, but he doesn't put up too much resistance. And then he's like, okay, yeah, I guess I'm a revolutionary, too.
39:45 Erin: That's right. Yeah. There's that conflict in Stockman, and then there's the other one which you're pointing to, which is this conflict between. And maybe you characterized it a bit differently, but there are conservative elements, it seems to me, of Stockman's at least of his way of life, certainly. I mean, he's not living like a bohemian. He has. He has his job at the SPA Institute. He has his private practice. He has a normal family life, a home life. And in fact, he's gone back to this unnamed town from being out in the wilderness. He's come back to it.
And if anything, if the mayor and if the doctor have a parentage, it's the town itself, right? So in a way, the town is like the Howards end of. Of. Of the play. You know, it's the symbol of maybe all of Norway or of the past or just of society itself and determining where it'll go at the end. His last words are about standing alone. So he seems to want to remove himself from society, to stand outside it, to achieve this freedom. Of course, he's not alone. That's one of the problems is that he has this family that he's affecting with everything that he does.
And we're all part of society. None of us can step outside of it. But he has this. This hatred of the masses and yet a certain reverence for, you know, as you said, culture, high culture, which is a result of civilization and of many of the things which he seems to be rallying against. And also his ideas of social Darwinism are Also I think ultimately a bit confused. He has this idea of a genetic inherited mongrelism in terms of some people are just not as good as other people, according to him. But then in the end he's going to take up this school idea which who knows if this will get, you know, catch on.
Five minutes after this plays over, maybe he'll be on to another idea. But he has this idea that perhaps these mongrel children who would be in his school would somehow have some hidden ability which you know, maybe would speak to a Darwinian idea of genetic mutation. But still it's a bit. Yeah, it's just a bit confusing.
41:55 Wes: At a certain point he wants to explain himself and say he means this spiritually rather than literally with the genetics. But yeah, the reference to education is sort of in the same line as the hopefulness about the possibility of education at the end of the play is in line with the embrace of high culture and in the embrace of aesthetic speech. He doesn't embrace that, but I've introduced that idea. Embrace of the artistic. So the idea is that it's another bottom up idea. Right. It's not like revolution exactly, but bottom up idea is that you educate people to make them amenable to good government.
This is a current theme philosophically as well. Right. Schiller wrote letters on an aesthetic education that the idea there is that revolution is not going to work if people aren't ready for it, if they don't have the virtues, if they don't have the character that you need for that. And that's why the French Revolution turned out so badly. That was the idea. So in the end you get a different. It's a more elitist conception of a bottom up approach, which is that you have to educate people. We can't just have top down authority. We can't just force society to be good if people in their characters are not good.
But we can do it from the bottom up. We can make good citizens through the right sort of education. So what it does is it really reveals that there's this elitist tendency within Stockman's conception of vitality that very much resembles his brother. His brother in the beginning, the mayor is slagging off the inferiors, the peasants. I think he accuses Hofstad of not having any tact because he's of peasant stock. And so you can see in, in the beginning Stockman is very pro masses. And then when he feels insulted, he switches and the elitist tendency comes out.
But the idea of education is a more positive possibility. That flows out of that elitist component.
43:58 Erin: Yeah, that's good. I think with this idea of hop ons as well. I love that term. The reason why we have people very, very quickly, you know, I think you've demonstrated well that Stockman sort of switches a bit, but, you know, everyone in the play ultimately will switch position except for the mayor. Is that right? And, and Horster, you know, everyone eventually will flip and join a different side. And I think part of the reason why that is is because maybe Petra, it's pretty constant. That's right, Petra. Petra is pretty constant too.
44:31 Wes: Like a rock. Sorry.
44:35 Erin: Yeah, but that doesn't work because the mayor's name is Peter too, so. Well, actually, no, it does because they both. They're both similarly. There you go. That's because I was wondering why is her name.
44:46 Wes: She's stable, right?
44:48 Erin: Yeah, but they're both. They both don't move. That's good because I kept trying to find the connection why they would have the same name. But maybe the reason for that flip flopping is regardless of party or one's ideas about the solution to the problem, you know, everyone pretty much treats the sludge, or whatever we want to call it as a symbol. No one really treats it like a real problem. It just immediately becomes the cudgel with which everyone is going to push through their own agenda. It's. It's a rhetorical device that's being used by every character to make some kind of point.
And so none of the character seems to actually care about the threat to health that this sludge potentially, I mean, if we're gonna take Stockman's word for it, that it potentially represents, and therefore this idea of the masses and of the people, you know, that too is kind of used very symbolically. I mean, the idea that the doctor is the enemy of the people too, seems to me to be signaling this. You know, we don't actually care that, that people, that real people who live in this town are going to get sick from these waters. Rather, we care about the people as an idea used as support or in defense of certain values or against certain values.
Because Stockman, from the very beginning, as we've already said, he's delighted, he seems delighted to have found this problem. And one of the reasons why he's discovered this problem is because people have already been getting sick. That seems to be the last thing on everyone's mind.
46:27 Wes: This is another thing that makes it a bit suspect because he says, at first I thought they were bringing the sickness with them, which makes sense. Right. They're sick when they come. So how do you know that they're getting sick? From the. It's a bit. He thinks he's discovered this incredible reversal. What is supposed to make healthy is making sick. And the people don't. They may come sick, but they leave sicker.
46:48 Erin: Right.
46:49 Wes: So, yeah, I think in light of what you've been talking about with the hop ons, let's just visit of those moments. I think let's visit in our second half. We're going to stop here for the first half, but in the second half we'll visit the point where maybe we can pull out a few quotes from where Stockman delivers his news just to kind of justify what we've been saying about his mania. Because maybe, I don't know if this reading is going to get on people's nerves where we're so, so hard on Stockman and we're not just reading him as a hero, but anyway.
And then we could look at those moments where other people get induced by him with revolutionary fervor and turn this right, turn the concrete issue about the pollution of the waters into something that's mainly symbolic. Right. Mainly a tool for fighting a kind of partisan political war. Listeners can listen to that right now. patreon.com subtextpodcast or you can wait a week and listen for free. Thank you, thank you.
48:05 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
(post)script: Post-Gatsby
Sep 08, 2025
Listen to more episodes of (post)script at Patreon.
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “The Great Gatsby”; the ongoing development of our approach to the discussions; Arnold Rothstein and the fixing of the 1919 World Series; Fitzgerald’s neighbors on Long Island, including Ring Lardner and Ed Wynn; the contemporary feel of the novel; the NYC movie-making scene in the early 20th century; Marilynne Robinson; and possibilities for the next episode, where because of a weird time warp we talk as if “A Woman Under the Influence” will follow “The Great Gatsby” when it has always already preceded it.
Transcript
0:00 Erin: Welcome to Postscript, the subtext after show where we talk about things related and unrelated to the week's episode. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:07 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. So we just got done talking about the Great Gatsby. How do you think that went?
0:12 Erin: I think it went pretty well. I mean, there's always a lot more to say, unfortunately, and things that occur to me as I'm reading where I say to myself, gotta mention that on the show. And then probably I'll remember what those things are later. But I still think we got to a really good sampling.
0:26 Wes: I thought it went well. I wasn't as over prepared as I am sometimes. So listeners can give us feedback on what they like, but we were trying to figure out what works. So we're trying different approaches. So with this one, we decided to. We would start in medias res anywhere we liked, and we would roam about the text as we liked and not give too much synopsis, assume readers had read it and really talk less to the listener than to each other, and let the listeners be eavesdroppers. Eavesdropping on the eavesdroppers. That's an interesting way to put it.
Eavesdropping on the conversation. And I like that. I think that works well. I hadn't thought through as many of the things that I wanted to think through as I have in some of the previous episodes, but I think that can work really well. Sometimes. Thinking out loud and not being too. Or thinking in the moment and not being too wedded to my notes and to some agenda. I come away from an episode like this feeling like I've learned something from you and from the whole process of being inspired with some thoughts and ideas as the episode goes on, which I like.
1:32 Erin: Yeah, I like that too. I always learn something from you, though, even if you have notes or whatever, you know, likewise. Unfortunately, I. Yeah, I rely far too often on the strength of my own memory, which can be really good, but there is a limit to it.
1:47 Wes: Yeah, no, that's the thing. You do have a great memory and I. I think I'd have a better memory if I weren't.
1:52 Erin: If you were more lazy like me and didn't do as much.
1:55 Wes: Well, the more obsessional you get and the more detailed, you know, like me trying to outline chapters. And it is actually better. I mean, I'm learning as we do this, like, what the best way to prepare for these sorts of conversations is because we have a limited amount of time and the quality of the podcast relies on our spontaneity. You can't be completely spontaneous and unprepared. So it's really. It's.
2:18 Erin: It's a hard balance.
2:19 Wes: It's hard. A hard balance. You know, you can kill some of the vitality. Thinking back to Myrtle again, can kill some of the vitality by overthinking it. But, yeah, if you're too spontaneous, then it's formless and you don't get a chance to really think through some of the things you might want to say about a book like this. There's so much to say.
2:39 Erin: Well, like, for instance, which it occurred to me after we had this kind of meta conversation while we were recording, I really wanted to talk more about the 1919 World Series. And then I was thinking. And then I was thinking, oh, I could just talk about that on the after show. That's what this is made for, for me to talk baseball. So the thing that I love about Wolfsheim's character is that he's supposed to be Arnold Rothstein, who was a real guy who really did fix the 1919 World Series, the Black Sox scandal, where Cincinnati Reds overtook the highly favored Chicago White Sox, then christened the Black Sox afterwards.
But anyway, I just. I love the fact that that is the association that Fitzgerald wants us to make with the kind of person that we. Wolfsheim, is. Because the 1919 scandal represented, I think, a kind of a loss of innocence similar to the Kennedy assassination. I mean, and I don't want to overstate it, but this was the loss of innocence, I think, that led to the 20s in the way that the Kennedy assassination, or maybe in 68, like the student riots and the RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations kind of led to the late 60s and 70s. So I think it's important maybe that during all of these kinds of, like, I don't know.
I have. I have a rough idea about this. I haven't really thought it through all the way, but the ways in which these eras of decadence are preceded by a loss of innocence is really important. So the Black Sox scandal really just kind of brought to light something that already existed in baseball for a long time, which is the idea of fixing things. The idea of gambling was actually part of baseball's culture from the beginning. But then once it became big business, and there was this idea of making baseball this hallowed institution with American heroes like Shoeless Joe, who Babe Ruth borrowed his batting stance from Shoeless Joe Jackson, who's considered the ultimate power hitter of his day.
And Ruth modeled his swing after Shoeless Joe's. So this idea that when baseball was kind of overtaken by money and these magnates and this big business, that it was then somehow above reproach. And it was invested with all of these spiritual qualities. I mean, some of which are inherent to the game of baseball because it's a beautiful game and everything else. But, like, once people realized that there was this sort of, you know, money making opportunity, it became almost like Hollywood, where suddenly we have to have moral messages imbued in the movies and we have to make sure everything is quote, unquote, on the up and up.
And really, of course, behind the scenes, it's just as rotten as it ever was. And then, you know, the veil drops. Anyway, sorry, I have just had that spiel trapped in my system and I needed to get it out.
5:13 Wes: But anyway, no, that's. That's good. When I was looking into the background this. I ended up pulling up a page, a Wikipedia page on Rothstein, right? You look at his life, and then he was gunned down early on. It's like a really kind of like a classic mobster type of lifestyle. And I thought, wow, I gotta read more about this guy. And then I scrolled down to see where he's been represented in film or tv. So I guess it was, have you seen Boardwalk Empire? Apparently he.
5:39 Erin: I haven't.
5:41 Wes: Okay. So I'm not sure how prominent a role he plays in that or what kind of role he plays in that. But anyway, yeah, it made me really want to learn more about what I thought was actually looking at his bio. Like, there's got to be a film, right? Someone's got to have done a film about this guy. And so that's when I looked down to all that stuff. But the other thing that interested me in the background to this is just the extent to which it's based on Fitzgerald's own life and he lived on Long island, and the new money people were actually like writers and Hollywood people.
Not Hollywood people, but writers and film people. So Ring Lardner, who I thought, yeah, Erin must know who that is, because I don't. I've heard the name, but he was a short story writer and apparently he was highly thought of by Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others. And somehow he got rich doing it. I don't know, ended up in that community. But Blue Fields, Ed Wynn. Yep, these are people. I just don't really, you know, this is all new to me, all this stuff. So.
6:46 Erin: Well, Ring Lardner's expertise extended to baseball, and he was actually one of the, you know, his Accounts of the Black Sox scandal were some of the most famous accounts. And he in particular felt really betrayed by that instance. But, yeah, these were all personalities. Like, I don't know who would be the equivalent today. The only name I could think of is Maureen Dowd, though, you know, a columnist with a particular air about her or him, as is always the case in with Fitzgerald's friends, except for Zelda, with this particular panache writing for these top papers, it was really kind of like a golden age. The twenties of the column as an art form, maybe.
7:25 Wes: Interesting.
7:25 Erin: And a lot of these prose stylists, like Damon Runyon, for instance, who wrote these popular stories, there was an appreciation for the effort and the flair that actually went into those.
7:37 Wes: You're reminding me of the fact that the novel. I was surprised how contemporary the novel seems. Part of it is just these sorts of a mob character like Wolfsheim is just. That's a contemporary trope as well. It's not dated in any way, even though we might associate it with a particular era. It's part of our cultural vocabulary. But otherwise I was with all the cars zipping around, I thought, okay, I want to see. And they're going over the bridge, I think, is it the Queensborough Bridge that they go over? At one point, I wanted to see, all right, well, what do cars.
I'm thinking, is it still Model T, Ford stuff, or is it more advancement? No, so it's. Cars look quite different by 1922. And I thought, they're talking about going to the movies or just reading the background. I was kind of thinking, God, it's amazing that people were getting famous for being in movies right before there was even sound. Or is there sound at this point?
8:31 Erin: Oh, absolutely.
8:32 Wes: And this was a hundred years ago. I'm just thinking. And yet the way the characters talk about all of this stuff, it just has the same quality as the way we would talk about it today. And then New York, what the kind of feelings that New York inspires. You know, there's that great scene going over the bridge where he describes that. Unfortunately, we didn't get to it on the regular podcast, but everything feels contemporary to me. It doesn't actually feel dated, even though the novel and the films based on it. Right. Are. The novel is an away period novel, and any adaptation of it will play that up. It feels so surprisingly contemporary.
9:06 Erin: It's important to know that, too, that. I mean, early, early Hollywood, the silents, people like Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand and all those great figures. Early Hollywood was not Hollywood. It was New York City, you know, it was an outgrowth of Broadway. There were a lot of studios in. Not a lot of studios, but there was, you know, there was movie making going on in New York.
9:26 Wes: Interesting. So I didn't know that.
9:28 Erin: Yeah. And then eventually it became, you know, transported to a place where you could have backlots with better weather and, you know, more controlled environment. But, yeah, you know, it's funny too. Like, I was thinking about. So one of the things I really hate about modern day Hollywood is just the nepotism inherent in so much of it, how so many of our young actors today are actors by right of birth. So it's interesting now how that Hollywood people maybe now are considered like, old money. I mean, you know, there's no grander name than Barrymore, you know, among the Hollywood elites.
And, you know, so I just. I wonder how long it's gonna take for Drew Barrymore's kids to get into acting or. So it's interesting too, how, you know, just by having a certain staying power. Like, I wonder if all these East Eggers are, you know, kind of rolling in their graves over the fact that now the most exclusive parts of the Hamptons have been taken over by the younger generations who would have been West Eggers, all of these Hollywood people. The Gwyneth Paltrows. You know, people are always surprised to know that Gwyneth Paltrow is the daughter of a movie star in her own right.
Blythe Danner?
10:30 Wes: Yeah, I had no idea.
10:31 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, they all come from storied backgrounds. Just to say that our perception of old money or of that kind of aristocratic heritage really does change over time.
10:40 Wes: Yeah. And he says he loves the idea of rotating between essays, film poems and narrative literature. And then he talks about Marilynne Robinson having some essays. And I've always been a big fan of Marilynne Robinson.
10:58 Erin: Oh, me too.
10:59 Wes: How about you? Yeah. So the Death of Adam. Have you read that book and those essays?
11:04 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that would be great.
11:06 Wes: So, yeah, that will go on the list. That's a good idea. I think I put her name on the list, but it's good to be reminded. Like when I was brainstorming what essayists we would read. I mean, we could read a novel of hers as well, too, of course.
11:19 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
11:20 Wes: And we do have some new patrons to thank. Elizabeth, Michael, Mary and Amor Amour has a Cupid as a profile picture.
11:32 Erin: That's great.
11:33 Wes: Could be Cupid himself. You never know. So, for our next episode, what are we doing next?
11:40 Erin: I don't know. That's a good question.
11:43 Wes: All right, let's find out. I'm already bound to a spreadsheet. It's not really up to me anymore. It's up to the spreadsheet. I guess we have some choice in this. Let's look at some of the possibilities here. Possibly A Streetcar Named Desire. No. Why not?
11:59 Erin: Oh, well, I mean, you know, eventually. I don't know if I could take that. So much American ness in that.
12:05 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. Well, there's Billy Budd, Annie Hall, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.
12:10 Erin: Oh, you know what I was thinking, though?
12:12 Wes: Or Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.
12:13 Erin: Yeah, right, right. Maybe we want to do. Maybe we want to stick to things that are more mainstream, like you said for the first ones. But I was thinking Woman under the Influence.
12:22 Wes: Yeah. Maybe we could do that. I don't think it matters.
12:25 Erin: Are you sure? Because I want to give us as much of a chance as possible.
12:28 Wes: You know, I think we should throw in, you know, wild card, off the beaten path stuff.
12:34 Erin: Okay.
12:34 Wes: Once in a while, even in the beginning, and. Yeah. Because that's been on my mind. So we should just do that next.
12:39 Erin: I know. Well, you know, it's just. It's one of those things, like, you think you're getting Mexican food, someone suggests Chinese food, and then you just have to think about Chinese food for a second, then you're in the mood for Chinese food. I don't know. Anyway, so I could adjust elsewhere, but since I just listened to our postscript episode where we mentioned that, I thought that was, like, the Mexican food that's on the brain now.
12:58 Wes: Okay.
12:59 Erin: Or the Greek food, as the case may be, for Cassavetes.
13:01 Wes: Ah, yes.
13:02 Erin: So, all right.
13:03 Wes: Good.
13:03 Erin: Great.
13:03 Wes: So let's do that.
13:04 Erin: Okay.
13:05 Wes: All right. Well, once again, thank you.
13:08 Erin: Thank you.
The American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (Re-Release for 100th Anniversary)
Sep 02, 2025
Hard to believe that Subtext has been around for five years, and Gatsby for 100. To celebrate these anniversaries (and our hiatus in recordings for a long summer vacation), here’s a re-release of one of our early episodes (from November 2020).
We all know this story, in part because it captures a period that will always have a special place in the American imagination. Prosperous and boozy, the Jazz Age seemed like one great party, held to celebrate the end of a terrible world war; the liberating promise of newly ubiquitous technologies, including electricity, the telephone, and the automobile; and a certain image of success as carefree, inexhaustibly gratifying, and available to all who try. And yet perhaps this fantasy is rooted in disillusionment, and a denial of inescapable social realities, including the impossibility of genuine social mobility. What do we mean when we talk about the American Dream? Is it realistic? Wes & Erin give an analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Containment and Play in “Jaws” (Part 2)
Aug 25, 2025
What is it about the activity of play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships, and communal strivings, without being consumed by them? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 classic “Jaws.”
Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” “There Will Be Blood,” “As You Like It,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of of Jaws. Erin had just got done talking about this really interesting parallel between the bombing of the shark and the bombing of Japan. I think we are going to ready to buy now. It doesn't undersells it the way I just put it. I've reached part two and so my energy level has started to falter. Sorry for underselling that.
0:58 Erin: No, no, no. That's what it is, unfortunately.
1:01 Wes: But now we are going to talk about Hooper and this might re energize us. Or at least me.
1:07 Erin: Because you're a big Hooper fan.
1:09 Wes: Yeah. What were you gonna say about the class element? Well, he's a little breath of fresh air. He's a little. Don't you think so? Richard Dreyfuss is just. Oh yeah, he's energetic in the way that Brody isn't. And funny. The novelist, the guy who wrote the novel. Benchley. Peter Benchley. Right. By the way. And I looked at the novel. It's not a great novel, put it that way. It's not a literary masterpiece or something. And then he wrote three screenplays and naturally it's a very different craft. And then Spielberg brought in someone else to rewrite it and in the end had a friend, I forget the name, someone with more comic chops.
He said to this guy, eviscerate it completely. Redo it, and then put some humor into this. This is the kind of thing that happened to the Die Hard script as well, by the way. And it's one of the things that makes the movie really work. And I think it's probably a good. Really, it helps any movie, almost any genre, doing this sort of thing. But.
2:11 Erin: And the improv too, we should say, right, that they also improvised and wrote. Wrote it down and incorporated it the next day. So that was pretty systematic too. Yeah.
2:21 Wes: But, yeah, Hooper is a big source of comic relief, I think. Right. He has some pretty funny lines.
2:29 Erin: Yeah.
2:30 Wes: I know that's not the thing that you are ready to talk about, but.
2:34 Erin: No, no, I'm not really ready to talk about anything with him because I'm not sure what the class thing is really about there. I mean, we have, you know, one of the other things that Jameson article talked about. It was also kind of about the Godfather, so I only read part of it. But the three main characters also kind of represent like the three ages of man, you know, youth, maturity and old age. And they also seem to represent three different classes, though maybe Quint and Brody are more. You know, they come from such different worlds. But maybe that maps out to be sort of roughly the same class or Brody maybe a little bit.
A little bit higher up than Quint. But what's the significance of. For instance, Hooper, you know, the moment that's really sticks out to me is him bringing two bottles of wine to Brody's house. Like, why is that? That's such a curious thing to do. He brings both red and white. What's that about? You know, he seems. He seems unspoiled and eager to please for being upper class. So thinking through this, maybe Hooper and Quint are both aligned in their sense of guilt. If we're. If we're agreeing that Quint has some guilt going on, Hooper maybe is guilty over his wealth.
And maybe that's a motivating factor for him to go out and study these Sharks and just sort of confront, front, like create the conditions under which he would be wrestling with real danger, real stakes in a way that his wealth perhaps has insulated him from otherwise. And maybe the bringing over of the two bottles of wine is indicative of his, of that guilt and of his desire to please and to be generous.
4:10 Wes: You know, he doesn't bring over a box of wine and he doesn't bring over some fancy, schmancy, expensive bottle of wine, but he doesn't know which wine they're going to prefer, so he hedges his bets by getting one of each. Or maybe he doesn't know which wine is going to go with dinner or something like that, right? So he's sophisticated enough to know that a white will go with some dishes and a red will go with others, but he hasn't asked them in advance. And so it's at the same time, you can see it as something, the kind of thing a wealthy person would do in the sense that it's, right, he's spending more money than he might have, but it's also a bit.
There's a down to earth element of it, right. It wouldn't be the, you know, if you showed up to another snobby wealthy person's party with two bottles and said, I didn't know which one to get, you know, that would probably would be seen as maybe a bit of an unsophisticated thing to do. But in this context, right, he knows that it's not. He does, I think he comes across as. He's right, he's a trust fund kid, right, and he doesn't have to work and this is his hobby. And he does come across, I think, as a bit spoiled, you know, and he's got all that fancy equipment that Quint makes fun of him for and he's a bit green in various ways and he doesn't want to take orders and things like that.
I mean, I think also, you know, overall he's very charismatic, likable, likable character. But you do get the sense he's a rich kid. It's not done to the point of caricature. So he's a complex character and he's not turned into a villain because of that. But it's quite a contrast to Quint. And the other contrast there is, he is, right, he is representative of the scientific impulse or of curiosity, which is the thing that you ultimately, therapeutically, you want to replace fear with curiosity. The curiosity towards sharks, right? That's the better comportment towards them than fear.
So you have these three different.
6:11 Erin: Hold on, I'm writing this down. Okay, okay, I'm joking.
6:15 Wes: Oh, sorry. Like, wow, this is really that good?
6:20 Erin: No, I mean more like teach me not to be afraid of things. Okay, thank you.
6:26 Wes: Easier said than done. But, you know, although I have had these moments, right, in therapy where you take the edge off suffering by moving into the position of curiosity. But, yeah, not easy to do. But you might see that as the journey for Brody. And he's very excited. It's one of the few times you see him excited in the movies. Excited when he blows up the shark. He's excited when Hooper shows up. You could see this as maybe this is the kind of thing that I could have done, but I didn't do something like that. But in any case, I was going to say three impulses represented in Quint, vengeance, perhaps in Hooper, scientific curiosity.
In Brody, fear, resignation, depressiveness. Something like that. And in the end, so he's reluctantly invited by Quint to do the thing that he doesn't want to do, which is to destroy the shark. He's not really that into the idea of hunting down and destroying sharks, but he's forced in that position in the end. And he obviously gets a big thrill out. I guess not getting eaten is pretty thrilling. I don't know which is more thrilling, getting eaten or not getting eaten.
7:40 Erin: Yeah, well, they seem to have forgotten that Quint was just eaten because there's, you know, it's so, like a straightforward win at the end.
7:50 Wes: They don't shed a lot of tears.
7:52 Erin: No.
7:54 Wes: Before they start paddling home.
7:56 Erin: Exactly. Just high five each other. And Brody is like. Brody is also spitting out the bloody water. He has a taste of shark blood there. It's like the sharks get. Get gotten the taste of human blood. That just grossed me out watching that. That he's, you know, you could see the blood in the water and he's like. Has his mouth open in it and spitting it out. Oh, yeah. That has nothing to do with anything. Sorry, but I'm always just like. Much of that is Quint's blood. I wonder. Anyway, Kid. Flying through the air anyway.
8:31 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the shark has a lot of people in his stomach, right?
8:36 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
8:37 Wes: Blowing out all those people, but not whole people.
8:40 Erin: That's. That's the other sick thing about the shark that I meant to say. He doesn't eat the whole person. Like, he just takes bites here and there and he leaves.
8:49 Wes: He only likes certain cuts. Yeah. I'll have the filet mignon, please. Yeah. So curiosity. Weird. And scientific impulse. That's the thing that I was associating with Hooper. And so script might have made more out of this. Right. Because you got these three characters on the boat. You might have had Hooper pulling him in one direction and saying, no, we should tag it and study it. And he does tag the shark at a certain point. Right. He sneaks the tag onto the. The barrel or something. I don't know. Or onto the. That's what I thought Hooper was doing at some point.
He's trying to do something scientific at the same time because I think maybe he thinks that they're not going to actually be able to kill it or something. But. So you could have made more out of this conflict and you could have had Brody pulled in these two different directions. I don't think it would have worked, of course, but that would have thematically done more and might have even added more tension in some ways. And Brody's arc, I don't think, is to go either the Hooper direction or the Quint direction, really. Although he does seem to get.
Have overcome his fear of water in the end. But getting back to Hooper, because I think that's. Yeah, I don't think you had your full say on that, but.
10:04 Erin: Yeah, no, no, he just, you know, he's also done away with during that. During the final confrontation. So it really is just man versus Beast.
10:14 Wes: Yeah.
10:15 Erin: Not men versus beast at the end. The fact that he has that whole missed opportunity with the harpoon and the hypodermic needle or whatever it is, you know, and ends up being off screen for the final moments or the climactic moment.
10:32 Wes: He's always dropping critical things. You know, he drops the tooth.
10:36 Erin: That's right.
10:37 Wes: He drops the hypodermic.
10:40 Erin: Yeah. I don't know. There's some crucial way in which that that's not going to be the thing. It's going to be the gun. The gun and the. And the air tank, which got some heavy criticism in this house for its. Sure, shark wouldn't blow up that way.
10:55 Wes: Well, apparently he can't really blow up a tank with a gun like that. And also, why is he just holding it in his mouth? So I'm just gonna hold the thing in his mouth for that long.
11:08 Erin: I know.
11:08 Wes: I understand why they like that idea and wanted to make that work. But it's fun. It's fun to see the shark blow up in the end.
11:18 Erin: Yeah.
11:18 Wes: What else are you gonna do? I mean, it's. Is it. Is it just gonna die slowly of its injuries and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
11:25 Erin: Is that how it was initially killed? How it was, or rather how it was killed in the book?
11:30 Wes: I actually don't remember. I don't know how it's killed in the book. It's probably just shot. But yeah, I don't. I mean, the scuba thing is. I think that was Spielberg's idea. Yeah.
11:39 Erin: Tiring it out is how you do, how you deal with the sperm whale. That's the Nantucket sleigh ride.
11:45 Wes: The shark took a lot of bullets and a lot of harpoons, I think. I don't know that it would have really survived it.
11:52 Erin: Well, in the end, it's a group effort. I mean, I guess, you know, they get there by virtue of quintessential Quint's boat, though. He makes it so that they, you know, they can't contact any help. And then it's the tank, which is a. Which is a Hooper contribution, and he has the equipment that he puts on the boat and then the. Then the gun. So there's something of another elemental clash in the. I was sort of imagining in part one that the beach is about like the being on the borderline between elements, I suppose. You know, the fact that the shark is blown up with air, like air defeats water.
The visible somehow, like defeating the. The obscured or the hidden and then, I guess, you know, science defeating nature or something. You know, all of these things, I think, are inherent in that tank idea. But it's funny that it needs the detonation of the. Of a gun. It's like hillbilly fishing or something. Like, just like shooting a shooting fish in the water. Anyway.
12:50 Wes: Well, he seemed to have the idea in the beginning that he was going to use his pole, which was pretty funny.
12:55 Erin: Right? Right.
12:56 Wes: I think they already knew how big the shark was at that point. Right. 25ft.
13:00 Erin: Right.
13:00 Wes: Actually, once caught a shark, deep sea fishing.
13:03 Erin: Wow.
13:04 Wes: Small shark, little baby shark. Like maybe four feet or something. But yeah, I'd gone out on this boat and I was very seasick and everyone around me was catching all these, like, red fish, I forget what they're called. And just having a great time, and I was catching nothing. I'm like, what's wrong with me? Why am I failing at this? Like, we're fishing in the same ocean. I'm not catching any fish. And then finally I got something on the reel and then I started. I'm like, this is pretty heavy. Start reeling it up. And then you see the shark coming out of the water and your first impulse is to. To like, okay, well, let Me go backwards on the real. I'm not reeling. And then. And then. But another part of you is like, this is the only thing I've caught all day, and it's probably the only thing I'm gonna catch. So he's coming up, bringing the shark up no matter what.
13:56 Erin: Wow.
13:56 Wes: And then, you know, got to take the picture with it and then threw it back.
14:01 Erin: Nice.
14:02 Wes: But it's a weird experience. Yeah. You have a feeling of being connected. I haven't done a lot of fishing, but. But in that moment, you know, you feel connected to something very primordial. It's almost a hypnotic quality. But. Yeah, I don't think you're gonna pull out a 25 foot. Sure, get the guns.
14:22 Erin: Yeah, it's gonna pull you out.
14:25 Wes: Right.
14:26 Erin: Right off the dock.
14:27 Wes: It's gonna pull you in.
14:29 Erin: Pull you in. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. To go back to the air tank for a second, I was also thinking about the floaties on the. On the beach. The raft, you know, the inflatable raft. And that great image of the raft being caught in the surf and, like, tumbling because the. The bite was taken out of it. Oh, my gosh. The dog. Okay, I did not know that a dog was killed in this film. That really upset me. That was. Oh, you could do anything you want, but don't kill dogs. Yeah, the dog is.
14:56 Wes: The dog was actually killed.
14:58 Erin: Yeah.
14:58 Wes: Oh, fictionally.
15:00 Erin: Oh, yeah, Obviously. Yeah.
15:02 Wes: Wait, I didn't think the dog. That. The dog was eaten. Yeah. They're calling because he can't find the dog.
15:06 Erin: Calling for the dog. Yeah. So sad.
15:08 Wes: You think the shark got the dog and the boy? And one.
15:11 Erin: Oh, yeah, Just two. Two different appetizers in one. One bite. Double fisting it.
15:21 Wes: Well, the dog is the appetizer. The boy is the main course.
15:25 Erin: Light. Light main course. He's small. Anyway, back to the beach. I'm just thinking about. I'm just thinking about the mayor. I love that actor, Mr. Robinson. Great character actor. Murray Hamilton, you know, so we. We have this whole enemy of the people. This is a preview, I guess, for our next episode. But we have this whole enemy of the people element in the first part of the film. And then it's as though the pollution becomes a charismatic megafauna that then, like, everybody is obsessed with that. That. That steals focus and becomes the main character, the pollution itself, you know, but we have this whole.
This whole idea of the greed of this guy who doesn't want the resort town to become. You know, I'm pretty sympathetic to this, you know, you don't want your entire. Like, his motivations are he shouldn't be killing people. People should be getting out of the water. But his. His motivations are justified, which is that this entire town exists off of the proceeds that they get in the summer. Right. The revenue that comes in in the summer from tourism. This could potentially just bankrupt the entire town. I don't know. What could we say about him?
The scene where he's encouraging people to go in the water. And that older couple that he talks to that I mentioned in part one. The guy's a really good actor. So terrifying when they all. Encourages them all to go. And of course, he's. He's in his sport jacket and doesn't go in himself. Yeah. We have this funny instance of Hooper dropping the tooth and then therefore, of the mayor sort of not having the smoking gun.
16:59 Wes: Right.
17:00 Erin: And then the. The sick vandalism is such a funny. Such a funny thing to say about the fact that they drew the shark fin on the billboard. It's the sick vandalism, like. And she just, you know, you expect it to be like, you know, like a phallus that somebody's drawn on this billboard. And instead it's the fin on the woman's face. It's like her eyes, I think, are bugging out and it says, help in a little.
17:27 Wes: Yeah, that's great. And we've seen that sign before, earlier in the movie. So we see it in its pristine state, and then we see it vandalized.
17:34 Erin: Right. And she's on a rat. She's on an inflatable raft. Right? In that image?
17:38 Wes: I think so.
17:39 Erin: Yeah.
17:40 Wes: But it's. Yeah. Sick vandalism. That is a deliberate mutilation of a public service message. Now I want those little paint happy bastards caught and hung up by their buster Browns.
17:51 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:52 Wes: So this is a convergence of the theme of vandalism and Brody's function in the town to keep vandals at bay. Right. So to keep up appearances, in other words. And here's something real happening, and Brody's trying to deal with it, but he's being redirected to the appearances, which is very interesting. So we were talking a little bit before about helplessness, and Brody nominally is an authority figure as the chief of police, but he's lacking in all. He really doesn't have any authority because the mayor and the town council control everything.
I think he's right. When he's confronted about closing down the beaches, Vaughn, the mayor says, martin, you gonna shut down the beaches on your own Authority. And he says, well, what other authority do I need? Well, technically, you need a civil ordinance or resolution by a board of selectmen. That's just going by the book. And then it's your first summer, you know. So the idea that they're not native islanders converges with the idea that he actually doesn't have much authority except to deal with nuisances and vandals, such that they can keep up the appearances and keep up the community life that they have.
Which I'd be pretty depressed in that situation as well. If he's coming from whatever he was doing as a New York City cop on one beat or another, if he thought this were a promotion, if he thought this were a kind of step up, he must have had a rude awakening at some point to find out that not only is he dealing with these petty concerns, but he also doesn't have that much authority. And I think that is connected ultimately to this theme of helplessness. The helplessness of sometimes in the face of our own impulses, the helplessness of being in the water with something unseen that can grab us and eat us.
Even dismemberment, right, is a very good visual representation of helplessness because our limbs are what allows us to move and to do things. So to be unlimbed. It's part of the terror of getting killed by a shark as dismemberment. We see the leg fall to the bottom of the ocean at one point. And I think part of that is about being deprived of power, or it's about being helpless. It's about being humiliated, even in some ways. It's about. So even if you live through a shark attack, right, you might not have legs, or you might be missing one leg or an arm.
Your ability to take care of yourself, your ability to move, your ability to physically function in the world is going to be compromised. So in a way, he's already at the point where we begin the movie. Brody has already been not dismembered, but not neutered, which is the next thing I wanted to say. But his authority has been softened. His efficacy in the world is not as high as it maybe he thought it would be, or maybe as it was in certain ways in New York. New York is dangerous. New York is unsafe, he says. In this town, it's completely safe.
He's nothing to worry about. Your wife saying be careful to you is just a joke. But it also means there's less to do. It's less meaningful, it's less interesting, it's safe, but it's not exciting. So that's why I wanted to get. Yeah. Get to this idea of loss of efficacy and the way the sharks. The danger of the shark as representing that loss of efficacy.
21:27 Erin: Or I agree with you. But to push back against this, because can't we also read him as the reverse of that, as the shot in the arm that this town needs? Because without him, they would all be, you know, the town itself, as helpless as he is. The town itself is also, it seems to me, suffering under maybe something like a problem of decadence or of unreality. Like there are indications that we get that this town is a bit insulated.
21:56 Wes: Insular.
21:57 Erin: It's insulated. It's insular, but it's also a bit. Maybe it's a bit dilapidated or it's not dilapidated. That's too strong a word. Its defenses are down, and that's part of the problem. So Brody comes in, his defenses are up, and that's what makes him the right person for this job. I mean, visually. So we have, like, the fencing is a pervasive, like, visual theme in the film. So we have Brody's own white picket fence. Looks a little bit dilapidated. We have the fence that. What's her name? Is it Chrissy? Can't remember Chrissy, the woman from the beginning of the film that she and the guy run along. That's sort of jagged, which is indicative of a seaside town. Like things. Things actually break down, wear down faster, right. Of course, because of the sea air, the salt in the air. So things decay or degrade faster there.
22:46 Wes: Everything's weathered.
22:47 Erin: Everything's weathered, right? And you have the kids. You have the kids karate chopping the picket fences, which, when you think about it, that's. This is a stretch. Now I'm. Now I'm really going out on a limb here. Pardon the pun, but, you know, you put your hand out straight, your palm out straight, right? And karate chop. And that's kind of a, you know, you put it on top of your head, it's like a fin, right? So there's something about the forces of decay that are within the town. The decadence of the town as represented by this mayor who's kind of like a smarmy and not the right person to lead the town.
So, like, how did he get elected? You know, that leads. That both leaves the town vulnerable to the shark. But also, it seems like, you know, with the little boys karate chopping their own fences, they're leaving themselves vulnerable and open in certain crucial ways that seem to invite something like this to happen. Much as you're postulating that the shark is almost an extension of Brody's imagination, which I think is really compelling, it's almost also a kind of an invitation on the part of the town because their defenses are down. They're too much in the holiday mindset and not enough in the New York cop mindset.
They're asking for trouble by existing in that kind of holiday space where nothing bad can really happen. So you're gonna go in the water anyway, even if there's a killer shark on the loose. Something. Something along those lines.
24:18 Wes: Yeah. I mean, he finds some efficacy as the film goes on, but at the point in the beginning where he's just. Right. Dealing with people's complaints and telling his. I guess it's his secretary, something about paperwork. You know, she's got to keep certain things off his desk if the new filing system is to work or something like that, and where you get complaints. And this is one of the charms of the movie. In the beginning, as he's going around town, he's having various people complain to him about one petty thing or another. So at that point, that seems to me would be a depressing contrast to a higher stakes job.
The stakes are lower. It's safer. Seemed to be. It turns out it's not. And so one's efficacy is lower in that sense. One is not as powerful. Not just in the sense that the town is run by the mayor at this point. His authority may increase with time, of course. Right. The longer he's there, even if he never becomes an islander, you could expect that his authority would increase. But it's not just in that sense. It's just in the sense that he has less to do. So he's less powerful because less is at stake.
25:18 Erin: Right.
25:19 Wes: And then more becomes at stake. And so his power is gradually returned. Although, again, I think he remains quite passive until the very end of the film. He's being ordered around by Quint, essentially, for most of the second half of the film. Right.
25:33 Erin: And he has to take the fall for, you know, when. When the Kitcher kid's mother confronts him. I think it's Kintner, Kitner, some K name that Alex is the kid's name. Right. When Alex's mother confronts Brody and he. You know, there's just this, like, really painful moment where he just has to. Or he just kind of accepts her criticism. I mean, there's. There's nothing you can do, really, to fight back in that scenario. And she just has to. She's a grieving mother.
26:02 Wes: Well, the Mayor says she's full of it. And then Brody says, no, she's right, Right, right, right.
26:08 Erin: But he doesn't say to her, I mean, it would be absurd to do so, but he, he doesn't say, listen, I tried, you know, whatever, whatever he, he might have said in his own defense, partially because one, one can't say anything and because she needs to just express her grief, but partially because it seems like this ineffectuality that's sort of the peak of it, the peak of his helplessness in the face of even of criticism for interventions that he was actually trying to make and couldn't.
26:36 Wes: Yeah, he could have blamed it on the mayor at that point.
26:39 Erin: Right.
26:39 Wes: He says nothing. The mayor says, I'm sorry, Martin, she's wrong. Martin says, no, she's not right. And then the mayor gives the order to cut the shark down without looking at the contents of its belly, which is crazy. Yeah. They catch a shark at this point near the midpoint of the movie, and of course it's the wrong shark.
26:58 Erin: But yeah, I feel sorry for that shark, actually. I do. It's a little hapless and a little.
27:09 Erin: Well, you know, it's a victim too of this. The real, the quote unquote, real shark. It's more like an animal than the headliner shark is the Louisiana license plate in its stomach. It's like it sort of got lost or something. You know, what's it doing up here? It's a little hapless.
27:28 Wes: Well, this is one of the spectacles of the film is right after the news of the shark goes out. Mrs. Kintner has offered a reward. After people find that out, they come from all over to go out in fishing boats. Well, I wouldn't call them fishing boats. They go out on these tiny boats like, are you insane? Right? Going out in like rowboat sized boats to try to. And even Hooper makes fun of them. At some point. Yeah, they're all going to get killed. So they go out shark hunting and you get the sense that, yeah, this is the kind of response in a way that's unhelpful.
And it's the kind of thing the film really. So I think we both looked at this documentary, Jaws at 50. Yeah. And one of the unfortunate. You know, Spielberg worked with shark conservationists when he made this movie and even got footage from them. There's not a lot of footage of real sharks the movie, but there is when, you know, the scene in the cage, for instance, that's real great white Shark footage.
28:29 Erin: That's a great advertisement for cage diving.
28:31 Wes: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. And so one of the unfortunate outcomes of this movie was to make people more scared of sharks and to increase the popularity of shark fishing. I think ultimately it was a boon because it. It also led to an interest in sharks. Right. So you have the Quint side and then you. The Hooper side.
28:51 Erin: The Right.
28:51 Wes: Aroused the Quint in people and it also aroused the Hooper. Ultimately, I think the Hooper went out more and the. Like, the major threat to sharks is from finning. Right. Fin soup.
29:05 Erin: It's disgusting.
29:06 Wes: Yeah, yeah. But you can see some of that kind of. Yeah. That knee jerk type of reaction when they go out just to catch a random shark and then say, oh yeah, this must be the shark.
29:17 Erin: Right.
29:18 Wes: It's a lynching.
29:19 Erin: Right. Yeah. And its peculiarity to be found in those waters and its size make it something they can pin things on. Yeah. But in addition to the tiger shark, you know, there's the dog. You mentioned in part one that it does seem like a typical horror film at the beginning because Chrissy is getting. Is getting eaten because of her sexuality or something. The rest of the victims. That doesn't seem to be the case. And Quint. Quint's getting eaten because that was his destiny, to get eaten. We might have expected Hooper to get eaten too, but Quint for sure.
29:53 Wes: Yeah, he is actually. I think him living is a last minute change to the script.
29:57 Erin: Oh, really?
29:58 Wes: And they changed it because the footage of real great whites they were able to get was with an empty cage and they wanted to use that. So they actually rewrote the script to have Hooper live to escape the cage first. But I think it's better. Yeah. So you might expect him to be killed. He's killed in the novel. He's killed even in a late iteration of the script. But then I think it's better if he survives him.
30:22 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, then you get an interesting outcome there, symbolically with law and order and tech defeating the shark.
30:33 Wes: You get two people paddling home in the end as opposed to one.
30:36 Erin: And that's always nicer.
30:38 Wes: Snarky.
30:39 Erin: It's nice to have company on your comment return.
30:42 Wes: I used to be afraid of the water.
30:44 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
30:44 Wes: I don't know why.
30:45 Erin: It is better. It is better.
30:47 Wes: It's like they're. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship moment.
30:51 Erin: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
30:53 Wes: It's a great little. Great little ending, but. Yeah, but go ahead.
30:56 Erin: They walk off into the sunset and then Brody has a friend on the island. So he's, he's not alone anymore.
31:02 Wes: Hooper will stay, stick around and.
31:03 Erin: Yeah, he probably will. He doesn't have to go to Australia to see the great white there. There's one right there. Hopefully they'll get more sharks for him to. Then, then Hooper is trying to lure the sharks into. To Amity.
31:17 Wes: He's rich. He can have them, you know, air dropped.
31:20 Erin: There you go.
31:21 Wes: Have them transplanted. Another great white, I mean, obviously we don't need up here in Boston. You know, we don't like. Great whites are naturally here right off of Cape Cod and off of. Yeah. So they don't need to be imported, but. Yeah, go ahead, say something about victims.
31:41 Erin: The little boy seems like the, the most high profile of all the victims. And that seems to be because of the fact that Brody has two boys. I don't know what, what else we could say about that, you know, because the other, the other murders are kind of. Murders. Yeah. You know what I mean? They're kind of, they're, they're kind of, they feel like murders. They're. They're kind of glossed over, you know, like we never see Chrissy's family. We never see, you know, we don't see her, her mother throwing up, looking at her body in a little box. I mean, nobody would show.
32:13 Wes: I think this is one of the mother.
32:15 Erin: Those types of remains.
32:16 Wes: But yeah, was subjected to the. There's not, there's not any time spent trying to build up sympathy for the victims. I think even for the Kintner boy.
32:25 Erin: Yeah.
32:26 Wes: Maybe if you're cuter. Just kidding.
32:31 Erin: Well, and partially that seems like the function of the shark, like that's the randomness that it could be anybody. And so therefore it's kind of. We can't expect who it's going to be. It seems like that's about what the shark is about. It's also about the film building suspense. We don't know, you know, we haven't like built a relationship with this little boy and then he gets killed. And so we can kind of see it coming, you know, like, it seems part of the strategy of the way that the narrative is working and the horror is popping up randomly.
33:03 Wes: Yeah. I think in a horror movie, it's not about sympathizing with the victims. The violence is not moralized. So if it's in a good guy, bad guy film, it's important, Right, that we sympathize with the victims and that we hate the villains, the bad guys for doing what they're doing. It's important because when the bad guys get killed, we have to be able to enjoy that. The violence has to be moralized in that sense. There's no moralization here, because you can't do it with a shark as much as you might want to try. And it's not going to be thrilling seeing Jaws get it in the end as it is seeing what's his face fall off the building at the end of Die Hard.
Hans Gruber. All right. Yeah. So it's not gonna. It's not gonna be. Although. What was. What was the shark's name? The model shark's name? It was Bruce. Bruce. Okay, so close. It's not gonna be as thrilling seeing Bruce get it as it is seeing Hans get it, because the shark is not really an agent. So there is no murder in this movie. I hate to tell you, Erin. There's no murderer, and there's no murderer. And we can't enjoy seeing the shark get it at the end that much. Except for the spectacle of the explosion and the fact that Brody is gonna not get eaten, I don't think it matters.
34:24 Erin: No verdure, no murder, no
34:27 Wes: perfect crime about the victims. What they're doing in the film is to represent our own vulnerability to this type of thing. I think play is always still very important. The play is going skinny dipping and then sexual play, and then the play of children. Because play implicates the release of these impulses. Right. It implicates loosening up. And then the danger is that the impulses will be too much. Or the danger is that in being less defended, we open ourselves up to outside predation and these ecstatic moments where we're not on guard. So it happens, obviously.
So I think it's important that we go. I think it's great that the movie starts with, like, this typical horror trope of teenagers, but then we move on to children. The theme, you know, we're set up with Charlie getting his hand cut with the theme of child safety. And then the child gets killed. And then it's the scout master. He gets killed trying to save the kids and Michael.
35:23 Erin: Oh, right, right.
35:24 Wes: Yeah. And then who's next? Well, Gardner gets killed off screen. Right. And that was actually a second thought that. That. Yeah. That made me jump.
35:35 Erin: Yeah. That is.
35:36 Wes: That's the only point in the movie where I jumped. And Spielberg shot that scene with his own money after the fact in a pool.
35:44 Erin: That was in the tank. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
35:47 Wes: I think that shot. Was that in the tank or was it actually. So was it in a studio tank or. It might have been in someone's pool.
35:54 Erin: Yeah, yeah, someone's pool.
35:56 Wes: The. Just the part where the head is coming out.
35:58 Erin: Yeah, right.
35:59 Wes: Might have been redone in a. In someone's private pool. But anyway, that, to me, was the scariest part of the film. Gardner, by the way, is the one that they based Quint.
36:08 Erin: Quint off of.
36:09 Wes: Off of. Yeah. Yeah. So. But. Yeah, so I think the victims. I guess the victims do get progressively less innocent after the child. But did you feel a pang at all when Quint got it in the end and.
36:22 Erin: Oh, sure, yeah. There isn't even any. As much time as we've spent with him and hearing his story. There's also the. When he destroys the radio, you know, and he. I mean, we're introduced to him with nails on a chalkboard. I mean, we're not designed to even. To really love him.
36:42 Wes: Oh, yeah.
36:43 Erin: That's.
36:43 Wes: As a characteristic moment of the film.
36:45 Erin: Yeah. Tell me about it. You know, it makes me. You know, he's much like the shark he's heard first on the soundtrack before. He's seen.
36:54 Wes: All right, we haven't. Yeah. That's another thing we have to talk about is the music. But.
36:57 Erin: Yeah. Yeah, parts of the music were funny to me. You know, they're so like the adventure music at the end.
37:04 Wes: Yeah, it's a very. Music. While they're chasing the shark. It's like.
37:10 Erin: Yeah.
37:11 Wes: You know, it's John Williams off to.
37:14 Erin: Yeah,
37:17 Wes: look, we're having fun chasing the shark. Yeah, exactly.
37:20 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. There's so much E.T. in there.
37:25 Wes: Right. I think it's almost all in the same mode. Is it the Lydian or something? All these movies are on the. What is the Lydian mode on? Is that the seventh?
37:38 Erin: Back to theory.
37:40 Wes: I don't know if that's right, if it's Lydian or another mode. But it gives it a very. This airy feel. It's very common in film music, but it just gives it. You know, it's there in Star wars, so this airy, kind of light but adventure y feeling. Yeah. And it seems a little. Seems a little out of place. I had the same. Exact same reaction, but. But the. The main theme music is just. Who knew? It's like a Spinal Tap moment. Just two notes right next to each other on the keyboard. Two notes.
38:16 Erin: It's as simple as that. Yeah.
38:19 Wes: What do you call this music? Jaws.
38:27 Erin: Oh, my gosh. It's like a heartbeat, too. So you have that.
38:31 Wes: So you get a chromatic ascent when
38:34 Erin: the shark goes away. That's when it Goes da da da da da. No,
38:40 Wes: there you go.
38:42 Erin: The Doppler shark.
38:46 Wes: So the chromatic element gives it that sinister quality. Sounds like a heartbeat. It sounds like, I don't know, it's very. It goes well with something that's hidden and unseen somehow. The drive element of that, just the two note. It's like an engine with two, two strokes or something.
39:03 Erin: And then that explosion. Yeah. And the. Very much he must have been influenced by the rite of spring.
39:11 Wes: Yeah. And then the crescendo and you know, the quickening and the crescendo as it, as the shark attacks. And then it sounds a little psycho like her, doesn't it? It's like donut, donut. I don't know how it crescendos, but. I'm sure listeners will appreciate this attempt to reproduce.
39:35 Erin: Yeah, psycho sort of same concept but on the opposite end of the scale. But yeah. And it's sort of like singular. Very few notes. Well, you know, another big victim of this film, I'm sorry to say is the film industry itself. I was thinking about how much, how much this film has to answer for and how much, how much maybe the, the death of Quint and the triumph of Brody and Hooper is like, you know, the death of. The death of the small budget, you know, the, the, the little tiny film business and the birth of the film industrial complex. I mean, you know, of course there was the studio system and that's, that's the film industrial complex.
But yeah, the birth of the, the summer blockbuster and the. I think like Star wars gets a lot of credit blame for that. But of course this predates that by two years and, and there was so much marketing and tie ins and maybe not little action figures, you know, so associated with Star wars, but lunch boxes, T shirts. That was one of the things that really stood out to me from the. The Jaws at 50 documentary was just like how much merchandise you could buy in 1975 for the fab is surprised. You know, it's something I associate with coming like in the 80s post Star wars merchandise.
It's a great film and I think Spielberg is, you know, maybe there's an argument that he's the greatest American director. And so it's kind of a curious thing that the result of this early film of his is that small budget or films that are more say on the artistic end of the scale are less likely to be made. And we have like, you know, Marvel movies are downstream effect of Jaws. There's a direct line there.
41:25 Wes: Well, apparently they, you know, the movies didn't get wide releases initially and they got a narrow, narrower release and fewer theaters. And then there was some give a chance to build word of mouth and you could do higher quality, less blockbuster y pictures. With Jaws, the marketing plan was to do a wide release after like a national coordinated media campaign. And it worked. Worked very well. So it became a highest grossing movie in history up to that point. And unfortunately, yeah, it's a model that is now chased.
42:00 Erin: Yeah. And the previous model, you know, I think was designed to give a good movie a chance to build, you know. Yeah. So would help under the radar films that didn't have these big marketing budgets find an audience. Whereas now it seems very much about this. It's. It's just become more and more a business and less and less. You know, this has always been the problem with movies as an art form, but I think it became more about business and more about trying to predict beforehand what would sell and then cramming that down people's throats and not. And not funding the little movies at all. You know, Know, until we have like now this, just A24, I guess, and that's. And then everything. All the big budget stuff. Yeah. So I don't know, as someone who's. Who's more, more, more jaded about films than I've ever been, who, you know, I kind of. I think film is over.
42:58 Wes: Well, I don't think you've seen the new, the new Superman then.
43:01 Erin: Right, Right. Yeah, yeah. I think it's. I think it's basically over. And I think a lot of people will have in the past few months have tried to argue with me and give like individual case studies and I think all of these things are death row, you know, death row films. It's over. What can we trace it back to? A lot of things we could trace it back to, you know, the death of the studio contract with the Olivia de Havilland lawsuit in 1947. You get. You know, I've found a lot of origin points in the past, but one of them is Jaws. One of them could. But, you know, that's a, that's a case that could be made. Not to end on a totally pessimistic note, but that's.
43:38 Wes: Yeah, no, I get it.
43:39 Erin: It's one of the things that makes me ambivalent about the film despite its real craft and what, what's so great about it.
43:48 Wes: Yeah, okay. I'm going to just end with one little correction on the music. It's Phrygian. Yeah. It's not, it's not. Lydia And Lydian is on the 4th, not the 7th. So like C majors. F. Lydian, C, D, E, F. Right. So the same scale, just different stopping point. But the Jaws is in B minor. The two notes are E and F, so it looks like 4 or 5. But anyway, thank you. This was fun.
44:18 Erin: Yeah, thank you.
44:19 Wes: You did enjoy it. You did enjoy the movie. Sounds like.
44:21 Erin: Oh, I did. Had a great time. Yeah, it was okay. And I successfully took a shower after without calling for help. Don't laugh at me.
44:33 Wes: I don't think he can come out of the spigots.
44:36 Erin: Comes through the wall in my imagination. Okay. And it's when my eyes are closed because I'm rinsing the shampoo out of my hair.
44:42 Wes: Candyman.
44:43 Erin: And anything can happen when you. Exactly, exactly. SNL taught us an important lesson. The threat is all around us. Of course you know the name. The name of the boat is my actual greatest fear. Which I will not say.
44:59 Wes: Orcas. Sorry.
45:02 Erin: Now that.
45:02 Wes: More afraid of.
45:03 Erin: Now that I'm scared of. Yeah, that's like really? I don't even want to.
45:06 Wes: They don't care about you. They just want a good seal.
45:08 Erin: Are you kidding me? They. So they. That's the scariest. That's the scariest animal ever. I. I just think.
45:19 Wes: Don't work. Don't work.
45:21 Erin: Scarier than a shark. A shark in a frickin mask. Okay. That's what's scary.
45:26 Wes: Pretending to be a mammal.
45:28 Erin: Yeah. And whose eyes on the mask aren't even its real eyes.
45:32 Wes: All right, let's. That's true. That's a really good point, actually. That is scary. What's the theme music for orca?
45:39 Erin: Oh, please. No. They are shooting up my spine. Goosebumps.
45:45 Wes: Okay.
45:46 Erin: I'm such a wimp. Wes. You don't even know. I have. Okay, so it's. So it's that those things. And yes, like kind of sharks. But mostly because. Okay. And sharks are scary because of the jaws and because they're really ugly and really prehistoric and all that. But I have this phobia that I didn't know was a phobia because I'm also afraid of like, you're gonna. This is so embarrassing. I'm also afraid of like the movie Titanic because. Because it turns out. Okay. Because it turns out that I'm afraid of.
46:18 Wes: New drawing.
46:20 Erin: Yes. That. Doors. Floating doors. No, I'm afraid of big things. Like I have. What is it called? Megalo. Megalomania. No, you know, Megalophobia. Yeah, something like that.
46:35 Wes: Is that a thing?
46:36 Erin: Yes.
46:37 Wes: And you're Afraid of the sublime. Well, the sublime is meant to be scary, but not scary at the same time. The not. You're missing the not scary part of the sublime.
46:47 Erin: Well, like big vistas, that's different, but like a bit like a huge thing that dwarfs you physically, you know? So that is like. I went swimming with. Did I ever tell you this? I went swimming with beluga whales and.
46:59 Wes: Oh, wow, that's.
47:00 Erin: I love beluga whales. And I think they look so sweet and great. You know, they're adorable, and they're just wonderful creatures. And the. But I started freaking out, even though I wasn't. And I was like, why am I freaking out? And anyway, I finally got the. It's just. They're huge. When you're near them, they're really, really big. And eventually I calmed down. But, yeah, it's the. It's the size thing. Feeling dwarfed by something and that even with an inanimate object. And also, like, being in the water, too, is like, you know, like big things in the water, so they're sort of like. The size is kind of obscured or even like, maybe doubled, depending on the reflection. But anyway. This is pathetic. We should. I might want to cut this out. I really shouldn't be admitting this stuff publicly, but, you know, you probably will
47:52 Wes: cut it out, even though I don't think you should.
47:54 Erin: But anyway.
47:56 Wes: All right, so what's the theme song for Orcas? It's not. It's. Is that it? Did you just do it?
48:06 Erin: Yeah.
48:07 Wes: No.
48:09 Erin: No, thank you. That's.
48:13 Wes: It's just silence.
48:14 Erin: So. The scariest music of all.
48:19 Wes: Right. Any last words?
48:20 Erin: No. Next time, we'll do the prequel to Jaws, an Enemy of the People. That's what happened to the last mayor, right?
48:31 Wes: All right, thank you.
48:32 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
Containment and Play in “Jaws”
Aug 18, 2025
We’re never told exactly how Martin Brody ended up as sheriff of a small beach community, despite his fear of the water. But his ultimate confrontation with the water, and the shark that inhabits it, have a fateful character that seems to implicate his own internal conflicts. Oceanographer Matt Hooper tells Martin that sharks are attracted to the “exact kind of splashing” human beings produce when at play in the water, and Martin himself seems to be distinctively lacking in the capacity for relaxing and letting go. What is it about the activity of play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships, and communal strivings, without being consumed by them? Wes & Erin discuss Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 classic “Jaws.”
Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” “There Will Be Blood,” “As You Like It,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:31 Wes: We never told exactly how Martin Brody ended up as sheriff of a small beach community despite his fear of the water. But his ultimate confrontation with the water and the shark that inhabits it have a fateful character that seemed to implicate his own internal conflicts. Oceanographer Matt Hooper tells Martin that sharks are attracted to the exact kind of splashing human beings produce when at play in the water. And Martin himself seems to be distinctively lacking in the capacity for relaxing and letting go. What is it about play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships and communal strivings without being consumed by them? Today we discuss Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic, Jaws. This is Wes Alwan.
1:24 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:25 Wes: This is. And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I thought I'd ask you a question which may sound like it's not really to the point, but it's something that was on my mind from the beginning of the film, which is, what is Martin Brody doing in Amity in light of his. If you had to speculate, what is it that brought them there from New York City, from the big city?
1:51 Erin: That's a really good question because he talks about the fact that there's such a low crime rate in the town that it seems this town really isn't in need of a cop. And one wonders, yeah. What he does expect to do there and why. Why does this shark need a cop to kill it? I don't. I'm not really sure what. That's.
2:09 Wes: Suicide by cop. That's a new angle. Yeah. When he's, when he's walking out to go to work, she says, you know, be safe or something like that. And he's like, in this town, as in, there's no crime. And then we find out, right, he's just beset with all these petty complaints. And he is the person who's there to resolve all these minor grievances and nuisances, vandalism, the kids are karate chopping the white picket fences or people parking in the wrong place or something like that. We can imagine his job in New York was a lot more exciting.
2:42 Erin: Yeah, I found a quote from his conversation with Hooper, he says the crime rate in New York will kill you. There's so many problems, you never feel like you're accomplishing anything. Violence, ripoffs, muggings. The kids can't leave the house, you gotta walk them to school. But it Amity, one man can make a difference. In 25 years, there's never been a shooting or a murder in this town.
3:02 Wes: Wow, I didn't remember that.
3:03 Erin: It's strange. One man can make a difference in terms of. How do you make a difference when there's no crime at all? I know, yeah. What's he saving the town from? The shark, I guess. So they have to import their crime.
3:17 Wes: Right. And it's, you know, arguably it's imported from his imagination or something. It's like he, he willed it into being or something, you know. You know, given his fears, including fear of the water, Hooper at one point says, well, it doesn't make much sense for a guy who hates the water to live on an island either. And Martin. Yeah, I'm sure you're already nodding. It's only an island if you look at it from the water. One of the great funny lines in this film.
3:43 Erin: Yeah, that's the ultimate fenced in property. Yeah, an island. And that seems to be his children are his motivation. It seems to move away from New York and get them away from crime and then they're sort of his investment in the shark. So this is his picket fence.
4:02 Wes: Right. I think we can definitely speculate that the children are part of it. Right. So the first scene in the movie involves the young woman being killed by the shark. By the way, I'm sorry for lying to you. This is a lot gorier this movie than I said it was. It's been so long since I've seen it. This time was like seeing it the first time. But as usual, every time I watched one of these scenes, like shaking my head, seeing it through you, through your eyes.
4:29 Erin: No, I really enjoyed it. I haven't seen all of the film. I will say that the scene when Quint gets murdered by the shark, I had never seen. So I don't think they showed that in its entirety. They must not have. Right. If I saw it on TV, then I never saw that scene before. I thought it was kind of awesome. I don't know.
4:48 Wes: It's cool. Wow, cool.
4:51 Erin: It helps that the shark is so fake looking.
4:55 Wes: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
4:56 Erin: That's.
4:56 Wes: Yeah. But I was gonna say. So after that scene, we start with a very typical Spielbergian. Is that a Word type of beginning, which is a kind of vignette of family life. And it's imperfect in some way or another. Sometimes it's just imperfect in the usual way that families are imperfect. It's chaotic, but it's still very loving. And that's what you have here. And that's kind of a very similar beginning. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for instance, or in ET Right. Children of Divorce, you get a really kind of touching picture of family life.
And maybe family life already had some sort of loss. So in this case, it does seem pretty idyllic, except that we get the smallest hints of conflict, right? So when he wakes up, the first thing that he says to his wife Ellen, or he's looking out the window and he says, it's a beautiful day. Instead of saying, oh, it's a beautiful day, he says, how come the sun didn't used to shine in here? It's almost like a complaint. And that's her opportunity to say, we bought the house in the fall. This is summer. So it's a great little way to deliver backstory.
As a technical matter, we learn that they're new to the community. Later on, we learn that they'll never really be part of the community. Right? You have to be born on the island to be an islander. And that seems like that's Ellen's aspiration, right. She's asked, when will we be islanders? She gets that reply. In this first scene. It doesn't seem like it's much really his aspiration to be there. But you had mentioned the kids, and I thought this is. Yeah, this seems to be an important piece of the puzzle because in the Michael Cuts his hand, right?
And then Ellen is very casually washing it off and telling him to go get a band aid, right? She doesn't put the band aid on for him. In the 70s, you got your own band aid. Just like you got to go play in the ocean without anyone watching you or, you know, the five year old on the swing, Right. I think one of the most horrifying things to a contemporary audience is probably like, the lack of child supervision.
7:03 Erin: I know.
7:03 Wes: And that's like one of the first things they ask when Ellen's like, see the K, right? The kids are already outside. They're asleep. And he's like, they must be in the backyard. So going back to the safety of the kids, right? There's this direct parallel between the young woman getting eaten by the shark and why? Because of typical horror movie trope, because of sexuality, right. There were adolescents at play and then she's running off to skinny dip with this guy. And then, of course, gets punished for it. But in the case of the children, it's a child at play, right?
Child at play hurts himself. Play can be dangerous, but it's minor. And he's going to get patched up and he's going to go right back out to the ocean. And that's happening in the background while Brody is taking a call about this missing woman. So we immediately, you know, we're alerted to the idea that the safety of the children is something that's at stake here. And it's going to become more and more pressing. Right. It's why, in the end, Brody is going to have to take action when, I mean, it's part of it when, you know, Michael ends up in the hospital.
8:04 Erin: Right, yeah. That seems crucial because Quint and Hooper don't have stakes the way that Brody has stakes. So Brody is, you know, the fact of his whole family being relocated to the island gives him more of, I don't know, more of a sense of belonging in a way even than Quint, who is sort of so islander that he's, you know, Quint is this caricature of an islander who seems to have ingested all of the island's quirks and the things about it which make it a community with its own rules. A sort of exclusive place in a sort of lower middle class kind of way, but still a place where one has to break in. Quint's sort of so broken in that he's out. He's like a shoe worn through or something.
8:56 Wes: Good old Robert Shaw. He is almost worn through at that point. Right. He has a couple of years to live.
9:01 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
9:02 Wes: A couple more years of hard living to do.
9:05 Erin: Right. I know. I was thinking, like all the people in this movie I associate with other movies, like Roy Scheider. I associate with all that jazz, frankly. And that's my background talking. And Robert Shaw. I'm like, Henry, King Henry viii. Yeah, I'm like that. This is what would happen to Henry VIII if he was not a kid.
9:27 Wes: He's amazing in that. Yeah. Talk about a force of nature. I mean, he should have played the shark.
9:31 Erin: Well, he is the. I mean, yeah, they're all, all three of them is the shark. Right. Like, there's a reading where. Where each of the main trio is the shark. Roy Scheider looks like the shark in a bunch of shots. Did you notice that he has the, like the black eyes?
9:45 Wes: I never thought of that. Yeah, he is, you know, But I. I thought he is quite passive compared to Hooper and Quint, though he's often on the sideline. I mean, he. You know, the. He doesn't really come into his own until the shark is blowing up at the very end and then he paddles back.
10:01 Erin: Yeah, he doesn't speak very much.
10:03 Wes: That doesn't speak very much. And it doesn't shark, like, immediately stand up to the council people and the mayor. Right. Eventually he does. You know, he's forced to. Right. And let me hire Quint. Reluctantly goes out on the boat, is not happy about doing the chumming, is kind of getting ordered around. Hooper is making much more of a resistance to putting up much more of a fight with Quint in the movie and outside of the movie, him and.
10:29 Erin: Yeah, that's right.
10:31 Wes: He and Robert Shaw are fighting, which is great. I love that backstory where they just hated each other, sort of.
10:37 Erin: Yeah, sort of loved each other. Sort of hated each other. But, yeah, I just. I love this idea of, like, Dreyfuss just never shutting up, just constantly talking and getting on Shaw's nerves.
10:47 Wes: Yeah.
10:48 Erin: It's a totally different dynamic. But it reminds me of in Star wars when Alec Guinness paid Mark Hamill $20 to go away.
10:58 Wes: Here's your sword. Here's $20. Get out. But yeah, so just getting back to the. Because this is on. I mean, we're kind of. Yeah. We've worked our way back to the character Brody. What I think of as his passivity. He seems kind of depressed to me through most of the movie. And this whole first line is kind of part and parcel complaining. The sun is only just showing up. And we even get a hint of the idea that they'll never be part of the community. In this very scene, when he says, the kids must be in the backyard, and she says, an Amity. You say yard.
And then he fakes a Boston or New England accent and then. And says, how's that? And she says, like, you're from New York, so there will always be New Yorkers, no matter what. They're never going to fully belong there. So I wanted just to continue a little bit the speculation about what might have brought them there. Right. Because I think in a contemporary Hollywood movie, I don't think they would be able to resist giving us more of this backstory because they would want to heighten the conflict. Right. Is there a conflict between the couple in the original script?
Right. She sleeps with Hooper, and that's the way it is in the novel, which would have been disastrous for this movie. And I'm glad Spielberg got rid of that. Like this.
12:10 Erin: Yeah. Who would sleep with Richard Dreyfuss when you're married to Roy Scheider? It doesn't make any sense.
12:15 Wes: Well, in the novel, he's this like six foot two, blonde, buff guy. In the novel, you know, who also just happens to be a scientist.
12:24 Erin: Gotcha.
12:26 Wes: Yeah, no, that would not have worked either. But the contrast between Hooper and Brody and Quint is very, very important. But, you know, you can speculate, right? It could be, hey, this is too much for the kids. New York is unsafe. Let's go to a nice, safe little beach town. It could be being a big city cop is too stressful. It could be. You know, in some movies it would be, I shot that kid in the ass. Is that. What. Is that the Blazing Saddles thing? I shot someone. I had something traumatic in my police job.
13:01 Erin: Right. Well, something did. Something did happen. We know he has. He has scars, too. I mean, we all have scars, but those three have. Have visible ones.
13:11 Wes: This doesn't sound like his choice. It sounds more like what Ellen wanted. So you can imagine, she persuaded him to do this. She thinks being like this is like going, you know, let's go to the Hamptons. Let's do it permanently.
13:24 Erin: I don't know. I don't know. You know, I think in the quote that I read when he's talking to Hooper, he's given up. He's given up on New York. You know, it seems. It seems like a personal decision to have left because he felt it was futile to stay. So he traded one island for another. He's looking for a safe community for his kids. And it is interesting that he's. I think you're right that he's depressed. I never thought of that before. He's also. He's very, you know, he's so tan, which is kind of funny because that implies being out getting sun. Right? And instead he seems like this dark cloud. Like, you know, someone calls the shark the cloud over the seaside community. But he kind of seems like this dark cloud in the middle of this sunshiny beach environment.
14:13 Wes: Sits around in lawn chairs waiting for dolly. Zooms.
14:16 Erin: Exactly.
14:17 Wes: Waiting.
14:18 Erin: What a great shot, right?
14:19 Wes: It's great. Such a great shot. Yeah, yeah. Waiting for something bad to happen. But.
14:24 Erin: Yeah, right. He's so dark, you know, and compared to. What's her name? Lorraine Gray, is it? Or Gary something. Lorraine Gray. Gary, you know, who's so blonde. Like, he seems even darker, you know, like the whole, you know, that kind of like whitewashed look of the town, maybe in more ways than one. It's so bright and he's like this dark spot.
14:48 Wes: Yeah. This could be the town also. To which the black sheriff shows up. That would be a different story.
14:52 Erin: Right, right.
14:54 Wes: The only black person. Speaking of Blazing Saddles, again, I didn't think I would be making so many Blazing Saddles references.
15:04 Erin: Well, you know, the thing I kept thinking of was Alien over and over again. And a little bit of Godzilla, which we could get into, but not that I've seen a full Godzilla film, but Alien is definitely. I know that they pitched Alien as Jaws in space.
15:16 Wes: Right, right. Well, every movie after that became Jaws in something.
15:20 Erin: Jaws in something. Right, right. Yeah. No, but I think that, you know, the Hoopers, you know, another clever way that they work in explication about the shark is the device of Hooper being the expert. And the way that he describes the shark is a perfect. You know, it's like a miracle of evolution or something. It's almost exactly what they say about the eating machine. Eating machine, right.
15:42 Wes: Which just made me think, well, that's just my average Tuesday evening.
15:47 Erin: Boy, me too.
15:50 Wes: He's a mindless eating machine.
15:52 Erin: Mindless eating machine. Yep.
15:53 Wes: Yep.
15:54 Erin: I am Lady Pac Man. Yeah. That it swims, eats, and makes little sharks. That's, I think, like it's almost word for word what they say about the alien, what Ian Holm's character says about the alien.
16:09 Wes: Oh, interesting.
16:10 Erin: Another cyborg, Richard Dreyfuss is anything but. I'm just kidding.
16:15 Wes: Right.
16:16 Erin: Yeah.
16:16 Wes: There's not really much marital conflict. You know, like this small hint of it. Like maybe she wanted to come and he didn't. But as you said, there's. There's evidence as well, but for whatever. Whatever the case, they're in a water community and he doesn't like the water. Other hints, you know, like she says, let's get drunk and fool around. And his response to me seemed pretty tepid. And it's in line in general with his reserve. Right. So he's, you know, he's not just depressive, but a psychoanalyst would call him obsessional and kind of in control and quite reserved, which is to say, you know, he has trouble letting go and he has trouble playing.
You know, you could see the whole water thing as trouble with play. Right. Water is the place where we play. This made me think of hanging rock again, too. Like the kind of danger we put ourselves in to enjoy ourselves, to be in recreation. And the way that can go wrong. Right. If you get drunk and go skinny dipping, maybe you'll just Drown, Drowned. Maybe you'll just drown, not get attacked by a shark. Or if you're a child going into the water, obviously that's dangerous. I mean, I felt just a little concerned that the kid's going out to the ocean by himself.
You know, that's just my contemporary sensibility. I'm like that 11 year old is running off to the ocean by himself. I wouldn't let a kid do that. Even though when I was 6, I was completely unsupervised 24 hours a day. I walked to school a mile away by myself, did everything by myself. But not in this day and age. I think some of this is about play and the dangers of play and more broadly, the dangers of letting go and giving in to one's impulses. Obviously, if you think of him as obsessional, he's to some extent scared of his impulses and what they can do to others.
And I'm not gonna beat this over the head so that the shark becomes representative of that, right? Becomes representative of his own impulses towards others. It's like he's, when he, that dolly take, right, he's watching. It's not just, oh, the thing that I feared is happening now or even the thing that I expected because there's some element of expectation, right. But the thing that I'm somehow causing this, my fear is causing this, or maybe I even wanted this to happen at some level. That's part of the, I think the horror of it, you know, and the island speaks to that insularity.
Like he's an island and he's hemmed in by the ocean as a chaotic world of impulse, that he doesn't want to go there.
18:48 Erin: Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I was thinking of as I was watching is what a weird thing going to the beach is. I mean, this is the, you know, there's, there's play which has its dangers. But if you say fall off a, you know, if you fall off the monkey bars, that's not such a terrible thing. Fixable, right. You know, the, the beach is such a strange. I mean, I, I grew up going to the beach. I love going to the beach. It's, it's perfect for my, my weird obsessional thing which is, you know, you get, you lie out and you, you know, so much of the beach is about not going in the water, right? And in fact, you know, I think even if there was a shark in the water, they could just have like, they could just rope it off. I have like all these solutions for how they could have fixed this without killing the shark. You know, like you could still go
19:37 Wes: sunbathing and then you put a sign up. You just go, not allowed.
19:40 Erin: Yeah, no, you just go in up to your. Up to your knees or something and that's it. And then come out. But no, but, like, you know, it's so. It's so strange. It's like you're. Anytime you go to the beach, it's like you're playing at the edge of a. Of a canyon. And it's a strange mix of the elemental because so much of it is about not going in the water. Right. It's about baking in the sun, it's about being out in the air, and then it's about going in the water. It's about the contrast sort of, you know, which is why I like it. So then you go in the water and then you get all freezing cold and wrinkled and pruned, and then you go out and you dry off and you, you know, the air, the hot air dries you and then you get too hot, so you go back in the water.
So it's like, you know, there's like perfect ecosystem of, like, contrast stimulations. It's a bizarre thing to do, I think, for that reason which, you know, come to think of it like these, these contrasts, it's like it's as much about the air and about not being in the water as it is about being in the water. And then you have this idea of this confrontation with what could be lurking in there. The shark is as much a member of this community as any of the islanders, if not more so. Right. So as one of the interesting things about the beach is that you are on the edge of an extremely dangerous natural force.
All kinds of things could be in the water. And so, you know, that's why the shark could be Brody, because it's sort of foreign to the island, but it also could be Quint because it's a prehistoric resident of the island that has this kind of ancestral belonging, you know, predates whoever considers themselves an islander by hundreds of millions of years.
21:26 Wes: Quint could have pulled off the shark more realistically than the animatronic.
21:31 Erin: I think so, too.
21:33 Wes: But, yeah, you know, I think this is really spot on. Yeah. My experience of the beach is that there's a certain amount of healthy fear. I'm not particularly fearful. I did, I don't want to call it a near drowning experience. My sister and I definitely got into water that was too deep and we were, you know, as young kids and we were getting Pulled under. And then an adult came and pulled us out. Not. Not our parents or family, of course. That was a scary experience. I. You know, I feel that routinely around nieces and nephews. I feel if we're in a pool situation or water situation, my eye.
You know, my eyes are always on the kids. And it reminds me, you know, someone was talking to me recently about the experience of taking a child into the ocean and their level of ecstasy, right, at being in the water if they're a young child. And it's still very new to them, but also mixed with some fear, right, Getting pulled out, pull me back. And the role of the parent in managing that. So it. And it is, again, it does make me think of this world of impulse where parents are also helping children manage those impulses. Right? So you have to have them.
You can't simply get rid of them. Although Brody is on his way to doing that to the extent that he's reserved. So you allow for it. You allow for the ecstatic moment and being there in the ocean and enjoying one's impulses, but you also pull them back into shore a little bit, or you manage that experience for them. If you do that successfully, then there is no shark. It's not successful if you just push it all down and avoid the water. That's when the shark. That's when the shark happens. Comes back to bite you, in other words.
23:22 Erin: That's right. Well, you know, the shark is so perfect because I was thinking so much about. I became obsessed with synecdoches watching this film. Did you. Did you feel the same way? Because the title is a synecdoche. And then I was thinking about all the synecdoche in the film, partially because of the way that the film deals in that Hitchcockian suspense kind of grammar as a way of, like, avoiding seeing the shark. So it has to be suggested, and partially because I think, like, this is kind of how horror works, that you just see something that's suggestive of the larger threat.
But, you know, I was thinking about the shark as a synecdoche for all of the potential terror of, say, the ocean or even nature. You know, we have the title of the film and the name of the shark, if you want to call it Jaws, as being, you know, so it's representative of that. The shark itself is really a terror of the mouth, though there's also the fin, which is a sort of symbol or synecdoche for the whole shark, which the kids use when they have that, like, little fake fin in the water. And that in itself, I think, kind of, it sort of repeats the curve of, like, the tooth.
So the fin to me is very toothy as well. Like, we get the single tooth that Hooper finds. You know, the island could, you know, is sort of synecdoche for an entire, you know, culture. I don't know, like little, Little, little bites of things were. Were occurring to me all over the place. Like the, the mayor's sport jacket that has the anchors on it, the barrels standing in for the. That's not a synecdoche, but, but, but it's a metonym. You know, the barrels standing in for the shark. The images of the bites taken out of the shark victims that, that Brody looks at, which is a sort of like, you know, the photo negative of the shark of its bite, of its mouth.
I don't know. All of these things which are replacements or stand ins for. For. For something else. So the shark, I mean, I think it's so polysemous in terms of what we can say it represents, but I think that's because it seems to represent the entire thread of the unknown. So it's so richly symbolic in terms of what is attached to it or what we might attach to it.
25:43 Wes: Yeah, the unknown, including, as I was saying, drive or driven side of our own nature or the instinctual side. So impulse and. And Right. In a way, a shark just looks like drive incarnate. I mean, that's part of the power of. Let's see how Hooper puts it. You know, the thing about a shark, he's got these. Well, is this Hooper speaking? This might be Quint. Yeah, this is Quint. Think about a shark. He's got these. Got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at you, it doesn't seem to be living until he bites you and those black eyes roll over white.
Or Hooper's. Again, description of it as a form of mindlessness. And this is the thing that's always threatening to take us over. Right. We manage it with our minds and it becomes represented to our minds. But the impulses themselves are mysterious. They're underneath and they come up, they rise up. And you see a fin at first, and then the next thing you know, you're eating a whole Papa John's pizza. You have no idea where that came from. Something like that. So that's one aspect, but as you point out. Yeah, it's much broader in the sense that anything in the domain of the unknown, or as a, you know, we might say the real the world as it is in its unrepresented state, which we can't really know until it's represented.
Until it reaches us and bites us, so to speak. But is there nonetheless. But I was thinking, yeah, the shark is a really good representation of drive in general. The. The fact that it has to keep moving or it dies, as Hooper says. It's just, you know, eating and reproducing. What else is it doing? It does three things.
27:37 Erin: Eats, swims and makes little sharks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is also a special shark. This is a, you know, we. We get.
27:46 Wes: Because he's. He's a big one.
27:48 Erin: Because he's big and because he's smart.
27:51 Wes: Or she.
27:52 Erin: Or she. Yeah, let's not watch it, Wes. Yeah, no, the. The tiger shark that they catch, that's your garden variety monster, you know, but the. The. The regular old man eater, they're actually
28:06 Wes: way more aggressive, by the way. So let me do the nerdy thing. And the kid. As a kid, I was into sharks. Tiger sharks are responsible for more attacks on human beings and. And cars are way more aggressive in general than white sharks, if I remember correctly. It could be, but. Yeah, but. Yeah, that's. But the. The tiger shark. The what. Meant to represent something ordinary. I love that response. Because all those. All those minor actors, right. They're just all locals on Martha's Vineyard.
28:37 Erin: Yeah. So great.
28:38 Wes: That's great.
28:39 Erin: I gotta say that the woman who plays.
28:42 Wes: Yes.
28:42 Erin: Yeah. Oh, my gosh.
28:44 Wes: I know. The councilwoman who says, you know, I don't find that funny.
28:47 Erin: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. No, I love her, actually. She's amazing. She reminds me of my grandmother.
28:53 Wes: Oh, really?
28:54 Erin: She's so great. Yeah. Because she's like. So. She's like a super, super dark tan. And the dark. It's very.
29:00 Wes: Yeah.
29:00 Erin: And she has that kind of like, sardonic voice. No, I was thinking of the mother of the boy who's killed in the black veil. She's great. She just has a great look to her that looks like she was someone who came out of a casting session, not a local.
29:17 Wes: Isn't it just. It makes it seem like acting really isn't that hard. They all might as well have been professionals.
29:29 Erin: There's a bell curve, I think. There's really good when you're an amateur and then really, really terrible when you're. When you're actually trying. But you're not that great.
29:40 Wes: Right, right. If they ever start to take it seriously, then they'd go through a phase where.
29:44 Erin: Exactly. Exactly.
29:46 Wes: And then maybe for a long time and maybe Forever.
29:48 Erin: Yes, exactly.
29:48 Wes: Maybe they would eventually come back out.
29:51 Erin: Yeah.
29:51 Wes: The other side.
29:52 Erin: And also the older couple on the beach who the mayor convinces to go in the water. That guy, fabulous actor. That local guy, you know, I'm talking about when he.
30:03 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking the. I was thinking the same thing.
30:05 Erin: Yeah. So many fabulous individual performances, but. So the tiger shark seems like this, the normal, mindless animal. But one of the problems with Jaws, with Bruce, whatever we want to call him, is, is the sort of theory of mind about him or. Or the implication that this is a shark with a. With a vendetta, with a. Eventually he's going to follow them all the way to the Bahamas. Right in like Jaws 4 or something.
30:35 Wes: Oh, really?
30:36 Erin: Okay. One of those.
30:37 Wes: This is Moby Dick meets People.
30:41 Erin: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
30:42 Wes: Which I think is not in this case. I think the movie kind of falters here. The shark doesn't make a good vendetta creature. I think maybe a whale could. But am I wrong about that? I don't. I don't find the second half of the movie as gripping as the first, even though I know for a lot of people it's the opposite. I don't find the chase same. Yeah, I think it breaks down a little bit, in all honesty, but.
31:06 Erin: Yeah, you know, this is so funny. I've. Last night I watched the Sandlot and I always forget that the last. It's almost the. It's almost the entire second half. Much like this film, it's almost the entire second half of the film is just the chase scene. When's the last time you saw the sandlot? You know, they keep hitting those baseballs into the yard of the killer dog. And then the last half of the movie really is Boy Takes a Baseball that Was Signed by Babe Ruth. He doesn't know who Babe Ruth is, so he doesn't know how. That he shouldn't be playing with this ball.
They hit it over into the yard with the killer dog and then they try to get the ball back through a series of. You know, then the rest of the movie is them trying to get the ball back, basically, and like a very long chase sequence. Oh, it's fantastic. I watch it every summer. Yeah. So we were just watching that here with my family and big group of people. And the second half of the movie is so boring because it's like, oh, right. Then they're gonna try and get it with the erector set and they're gonna rig up the vacuum cleaners and all this stuff.
And then the dog gets out and there's this long chase sequence. So the whole thing is just one big, long set piece of trying to defeat this animal, basically. And I was like, this is exactly like Jaws. It's the same. Exact same ratio of, you know, like, fun plot, great dialogue, lots of characters at the beginning, and then second half entirely just action sequence. All related to the same kind of basic premise.
32:37 Wes: And very dominated also by Quint, by Robert Shaw. He sort of just takes over the movie, which is great in some ways. You know, he's great. But also, it's too much. He's more of a force than the shark is. I think the shark is a little anticlimactic comparison to him especially, you know. And we start seeing the shark more in the second half, which undoes a lot of the movies. You know, what works very well in the first half of the movie is not seeing too much of the shark becomes a little pornographic a little in the second half. And the pornography is, you know, it's.
It's a prosthesis, essentially. Essentially. It's not real. It's pretty damn good. I mean, you know, the. You know, especially. And then, you know, factoring in that it's 50 years old. It's amazing, you know, what. What they did with the shark and all that. But we see enough of it that, for me, there's no demonic quality. Well, maybe there's two senses of demonic and, you know, it's demonic in the sense of that mindless, driven thing, but the kind of thing that we can be possessed by. You know, our minds can be taken over by mindlessness, by instincts.
But I don't think it's good. A good representative of evil.
33:43 Erin: What are we really talking about here? Evil or. Or threat. Right. Because I think there are two different things. Or. What is it about fear?
33:51 Wes: Yeah. So maybe. Maybe it's not really meant to be. Now that you say that, maybe it's not meant to be representative of evil.
33:57 Erin: Well, because. Because if it's about fear, then I think sharks are a better symbol for fear than whales. Because the fear is that we're getting eaten. The fear is that we're right. That there. No. That, like, we are prey and we are lunch. Is that. I mean, that's not my fear, per se. Like, my fear is getting, like, tortured by this thing. The way that the. You know, it's not necessarily like getting chomped down on in, like, a sudden death kind of scenario. It's the opening scene. That's. The terror is that this thing is. And that's. That's what makes this different from an ordinary shark? Because a shark wouldn't play with you like that. Like, this shark is sadistic. It's playing with this woman and dragging through the water in. In a.
34:42 Wes: In a. I used to read about shark attacks a lot as a kid. Like I said.
34:45 Erin: Okay, don't tell me.
34:46 Wes: They'll. They'll grab you and drag you down at the bottom of the ocean and.
34:50 Erin: Oh, God. Okay.
34:51 Wes: They do that whole side to side thing where they shake you around. And
34:56 Erin: I was. I was comforting myself as I was watching this, like, literally saying out loud, like, this would never happen in real life. This is just making it. Okay, all right.
35:05 Wes: No, it's terrifying. You can't. You can't see what's under there in the water. And then this is gonna ruin. End up in something's stomach all of a sudden. That's.
35:15 Erin: Yeah.
35:15 Wes: No, I find it very terr. That. Very terrifying. I get even. That and jellyfish. I don't want to get hit by a jellyfish.
35:26 Erin: Oh, yeah. Well, I've been stung so many times at this point. That's.
35:32 Wes: You're not afraid enough then?
35:34 Erin: Yeah, no, I'm not. I'm not. And I have to. I have to preserve my ability to go to the beach because that's all I. That's all I have. No, I come from, you know, I come from beach family. You know, my mom was a competitive swimmer. My parents were both super, super into scuba diving, actually. And my mom wouldn't watch Jaws because she was too afraid to, like. They were serious scuba divers. They went scuba diving on their honeymoon. Like, it was a scuba diving trip on their honeymoon.
36:04 Wes: Oh, wow.
36:04 Erin: Yeah.
36:05 Wes: So have you been scuba diving?
36:07 Erin: No, no, I was afraid. I'm. I'm more afraid of the. I've been once pressurized air and getting the bends than I am of anything in the water.
36:16 Wes: Yeah, it's scary.
36:17 Erin: Yeah. So I like just free. Free swimming, snorkeling.
36:22 Wes: Yeah. But. Yeah, so we're. We're thinking about getting Eden versus the devil, maybe. Is that what we're trying to work out? Y. Yeah. Maybe it's not meant really a representative of evil. I think they try to motivate Quint's grudge. Right. By having him be on the Indianapolis, which is a cool speech that he gives. And Robert Shaw helped rewrite that speech and, you know.
36:46 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Pretty good novelist.
36:49 Wes: Yeah. Does a great, great job with it. And I don't think we get there as far as at a visceral level identifying with his grudge against Sharks. And it's not like Ahab. Right? It's not. I don't think there's much emotional impact in all of that. And a grudge, right. I think a grudge only makes sense if you bring in the idea that it represents evil in some way.
37:16 Erin: Well, I'm very moved by the. By the Indianapolis story.
37:19 Wes: Okay.
37:19 Erin: That really works for me.
37:21 Wes: No, I mean, I think it was. I mean, I think it was great, but.
37:23 Erin: Yeah, no, but I agree with you about the grudge thing. Like, I'm not sure that it does make sense as a grudge. This is. I think what makes it so interesting, symbolically, is there's. There's too much fault on Quint's side. Like, there's so much going on on a symbolic level with the story of the Indianapolis, because they're taking little boy, I think it is, to Japan. Right. So there's. There's something about, like, that kind of implication. So if the shark represents the evil in the world or something, and then we have this story about the sharks picking off the men who took a nuclear bomb to Japan, then the sharks are also kind of like payback for evil, too.
Right. Like, there's something about. There's something about the culpability, you know, I'm talking on the symbolic level, you know, something about the culpability that these men have that the shark as revenge is about. It's almost about, like, guilt.
38:26 Wes: Yeah, I agree. Yeah.
38:28 Erin: And the working out of that guilt. So I think Quint has survivor's guilt, and I think that that is a big part of his relationship to sharks. Plural. Maybe not this shark in particular. I mean, this shark in particular is a business proposition for him. Like I said, this is why he's kind of like the shark. He's in the community and of the community, but also apart from it, because he doesn't have kids that are at the beach potentially going to be lunch for this particular shark. So it's about a monetary thing for him and kind of about this vendetta, but also maybe he can expiate his survivor's guilt over killing as many sharks as he can. That's, I think, a bit different from a vendetta. Is that right?
39:14 Wes: Yeah. No, I think this is good. This helps me understand it a little bit more. The way he delivers that speech is really great because it's with a smile, you know, all the way through, and you kind of get a sense of the pain of it, and then he ends it, you know, 1100 men in the water, 316 men can't come out. The sharks took the rest anyway. We delivered the bomb. Guilt over survival and guilt over the bomb, maybe. Right. Those two things. Right. We could broaden the concept of guilt to the idea of guilt over sexuality. So that's why you get stabbed, hacked in the horror picture.
One minute you're teenagers having fun. Right. So a lot of slasher pics, Right. Starts out with teen sex and then ends with violence. In this case, skinny dipping or as a child, you're being careless or something like that. But yeah, any. Any of these attacks could be seen as a consequence of something one has done wrong. And then how do you atone? I guess. So if you've survived it, like Quint, what do you do? You work through conscience by attacking it back.
40:26 Erin: Right. And yet. And yet Quint is. All of those men on the Indianapolis were sort of double victims because they're also the victims of the government in terms of following orders. I mean, this is something that. This is something that I think for Spielberg will really come to the fore in Saving Private Ryan, a movie I suspect we'll do eventually. Right. But there's the. There's also this idea of like, you're just a pawn, so strikes are just picking you off. There's nothing you can do about it. You have to deliver this bomb. There's nothing you can do about it.
They've decided to make it a top secret mission. Therefore your location is unknown. Right. That's. Part of it, is that they didn't even know it had been wrecked because the mission was top secret. So they couldn't get help early enough. So they were a victim of that kind of. Or they were vulnerable to a Japanese torpedo attack because of the particular way in which this mission was constructed, again, by forces outside of their control.
41:26 Wes: So the concept of helplessness looms large here.
41:29 Erin: The Indianapolis is such a fascinating cipher then, for the way to read the rest of the film. Because I think the connection of a sort of governmental authority, like doing what it needs to do to fulfill its own drive, right. Whatever its own mission is, is very much a part of, like the mayor and what the mayor is doing. And all of these things, I think are extremely. They're even more complicated by the fact that Brody himself is also, as an employee of the city and as a sort of representative of law and order, is also implic in those governmental structures as well.
So it's not. It can't be neatly parsed out. I don't think I was reading a really. The one little bit of outside Reading I did on this is this really fascinating Frederick Jameson essay about Jaws. And the idea that Quint represents sort of like small business America and a certain kind of World War II, New Deal kind of individualism, you know, doing it himself, working alone. And, you know, what's the significance of the fact that in the end, he, as this Ahab figure, dies. And then you have Ishmael sort of split into Brody and Hooper, who represent law and order and science and technology, you know, so it's as if an older economy and an older way of looking at, you know, sort of like mom and Pop store is being replaced by the military industrial complex, basically.
All of that to say that, you know, I don't think that what the film is saying about, like, government or America as expressed in the Indianapolis story is easily unpacked or simple or even sensical. The film isn't making an explicit statement about the larger, like, the American forces in World War II or anything like that. At least I don't think so, but.
43:23 Wes: Right.
43:24 Erin: No, but it's in there. I mean, it's in there and I think, like, the bomb is in there and the. I see the ending of the film as a recapitulation of the Indianapolis story. So only in scrambled order, deliver the
43:37 Wes: bomb to the shark. Right? Into the shark.
43:38 Erin: Yeah. I mean, like, in the. Like a straightforward reading, the shark is Japan, you know, like this, you know, because the shark both torpedoes the boat and gets blown up. That's the Japanese. Right.
43:51 Wes: Interesting.
43:53 Erin: So, I mean, I kind of mapped everything out. There's the. There are four sort of elements of the Indianapolis story. There's the delivery. So they successfully deliver the components for little boy, including uranium. So that's the delivery. Then they're torpedoed by the Japanese navy. Then they get eaten by the sharks. And then the fourth, you know, sort of unspoken part is the actual detonation of the nuclear bomb. So delivery, torpedo, shark, explosion. That's scrambled. Then in the killing of Jaws, but we have the shark torpedoes the boat, the shark eats Quint. The delivery of the bomb in the shark's mouth, the tank, and then the detonation from afar with the rifle shot, the explosion. So it's just. They map onto each other, just in a slightly shuffled order.
44:40 Wes: Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that.
44:43 Erin: I thought way too hard about that this morning. I was just, like, trying to figure out. I was like, enriched uranium was this, like a tank, this air in the tank? You know, because some of those tanks have. Of compressed air, it's actually enriched Air.
44:56 Wes: Oh, interesting.
44:58 Erin: I was really galaxy braining it while I was out for a walk. So.
45:02 Wes: No, that is. Yeah, that's very interesting. So we're getting the end of part one. What should we talk about in part two?
45:09 Erin: Maybe we should go into Hooper and the class distinction too. That's between. In that conversation between Hooper and Quint.
45:17 Wes: Sounds good. patreon.com subtextpodcast or doing it right on Apple. If you do it right on Apple, then part two will just follow immediately after the end of this part. If not, you can wait until next week.
45:37 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (Part 2)
Aug 04, 2025
Nora Helmer begins Act I as a devoted wife to her respectable husband, Torvald, and a devoted mother to her young children. She ends Act III by walking out on all of them and closing the door behind her. The emotional distance covered in these three acts (representing a span of just a few days in the lives of the Helmers) makes Nora one of the greatest and most coveted acting challenges in the theater. How might we mark out a route between the Nora of Act I, the charming toy of the men in her life who seems to desire nothing more than the comfort and ease her husband’s recent promotion is set to provide, and the Nora of Act III, an independent woman willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of her own self-determination? Wes & Erin discuss continue their discussion of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”
Upcoming Episodes: Jaws, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Ibsen's play A Doll's House. We're still talking about money. We're gonna be. We're gonna be talking about money the whole time. We're talking about how Nora has a different relationship to the future, shall we say, than Torvald does in her, as demonstrated by her relationship with money. I also, you know, I want to piggyback off of that and just say that Nora is aware as well of the power that her looks give her. And she's also aware that this is a finite power. So she's also investing, if you will, in the present. She talks about the fact that she might reveal the scheme of the loan to Torvald when she's old and has lost her looks. Do you remember that part?
1:15 Wes: Mm. But that's impossible. That'll never happen.
1:18 Erin: That'll never happen. You gotta love Nora's self confidence for all of her being a beggar. Oh, here we go. It's on 122. I found it. She says, yes, perhaps one day, many years from now, when I'm no longer as pretty. You shouldn't laugh. I mean, of course, when Torvald no longer admires me as much as he does now, when he no longer finds it amusing to have me dance for him, dress up and recite things. Oh, God, that is awful. Then it might be good to have something in reserve. And she breaks off. Oh, rubbish, Rubbish. That time will never come. She's smarter too, then about the present, about necessity, things that need to be done at this moment, the sacrifices that need to be made now for the future.
And also, she's smart about the Ways to get things. So she. When she recounts to Christine the moment of her husband's diagnosis, she says to Christine, good Lord, don't you understand? He wasn't even meant to know how much danger he was in. I was the one the doctors came to saying that his life was at risk, that nothing could save him except to stay in the south and only four star hotels would do now, don't you think I tried to coax him at first. I talked to him about how lovely it would be for me to travel abroad like other young wives. I cried and I begged.
I said he should please remember my condition. She's pregnant at the time, right? Is that it? I guess that he must be kind to give in to my wishes. And then I suggested that he could perhaps take out a loan. But then he almost went into a fury, Christine. He said I was frivolous and that it was his duty as a husband not to give way to me and my whims and caprices, I think he called it. Well, I thought, you've got to be rescued. And so I found a way out. So she acts the part of the frivolous wife. So she's been told he's going to die unless he goes.
He's not to be told that he will die. So she has to find a way to get him to go without telling him, it's for your own good, it's for your health. So she plays the part of, well, I want nice things, I want my trip abroad, I want my time, you know, I want my vacant, my fancy vacation. She puts it in those terms, I want to take my frivolous, extravagant vacation and you better pay for it. And so I think this is evidence that she is aware of things. You know, in the last part, I think I pointed briefly to some evidence that she knew all along that her opinions were different from him.
And I think that she was aware of. And in instances like these where she recounts him refusing to take out a loan, she obviously had a different opinion about him, about the idea of taking out a loan. And that's demonstrated by her actions. And I think she's aware of putting on the mask of the coquette, the alluring woman, and also at times putting on the mask of the high maintenance young wife who wants what she wants. All of these things are to manipulate him to do something either for his own good or for the sake of the children.
4:18 Wes: Yeah, I'm not sure if I completely agree about how aware she is of all of these things. She is making a dramatic Transformation. In the end, she's not aware of all the things that she talks about. In the end, she might be partly aware or unconsciously aware. It's a weird way to put it. Certainly the sprouts and the beginnings of awareness are there and I think they're enacted, right. They come out in the whole. The loan is not just about her loving him and wanting him to get better. It's about finding out who he is, I think. Right. It's not consciously that.
And it's also about efficacy. Right. So she says at one point, right. See Christine, aren't I also capable of something? This was her big moment of individuation and efficacy. It was her way of asserting herself and being more than a doll, being more than this powerless thing in Torvald's household. But she's also aware that it puts her husband into a kind of debt, emotional debt. He doesn't like financial debt, but it also puts him into a kind of emotional debt. Just think how awkward and humiliating it would be for Torvald with his manly self esteem to know he owed me something.
It would upset the entire balance of our relationship. Our beautiful happy home would no longer be what it is. And of course that's the whole point of this trajectory of events is to unsettle the balance of the relationship because the relationship is unsatisfactory. Is she aware that the relationship is unsatisfactory? Probably like most people. Yes and no. Right. You know, it's like she is and she isn't. She's in probably quite a bit of denial, but she's aware enough to get things going to the point of discovery. I don't know. Does that sound right?
6:05 Erin: Yes. No. I don't disagree with you and I don't think that these things are mutually exclusive. I mean, I think that she could be aware of the ways in which she's manipulating him up to a point. Right. And think that this is happiness. I mean, part of this idea is, or part of the idea of why she's doing the things she's doing is supposed to be out of this self sacrificial. She's trying to please him. She's trying to please him. Right. And that's a woman's job after all, isn't it? It's to be a wife, it's to be a mother, it's to not have an identity except in relation to these other people.
So it's to not be an individual or a human being. It's to sure put on this little performance if that's what's going to make my husband happy, because that is the number one thing, is to make him happy and to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And she only discovers at the end of the play that she had not been happy all along performing for him. Right. So she knows she's performing for him, but she thinks that this is actually making her happy to exert herself for him in this way. She realizes at that point that she's only been cheerful, not happy on some deeper level.
7:10 Wes: Right, right.
7:11 Erin: But I think her awareness is more considerable than everything being on an unconscious level, or most things being on an unconscious level. She says to Christine, for instance, when she accuses Christine of being condescending to her, says, you're like the others. You all think I'm incapable of anything really serious. She's talking about serious work, but I think she's talking about something else there, too. She expresses, in other words, a frustration.
7:37 Wes: And this is why she basically brags about the loan. This is the serious thing that she did. She wants to counter Christine's perception.
7:42 Erin: Yes, I know what I'm doing. I have efficacy, too. I understand. You know, she understands enough to lie about the macaroons, for instance. You know, she understands enough to lie in the long term to Torvald about this loan. She knows not to tell him.
7:59 Wes: Yeah, I just don't think she fully. I don't think she understands why she took out the loan. She partly understands. Right.
8:07 Erin: Yes, I agree with you.
8:08 Wes: Right. So she understands that it gives her a sense of efficacy, but she doesn't, I would say. Right. As a psychoanalyst, the two main motivations for her in doing this are to this just the sense of efficacy that it gives her in the immediate moment and the fact that it sets in motion a chain of events which will lead to her own independence and individuation. Right.
8:31 Erin: Those are still secondary to the reason, which is he needs to go south to save his life.
8:36 Wes: Well, that's the conscious. That's the conscious motive.
8:39 Erin: Okay, I see, I see.
8:40 Wes: And that, I think, is true, but it's also only part of the equation. And in a way, the two unconscious motives I've given, I think, are more. Are stronger, in a sense, and the conscious motive just masks that. Which is not to say she doesn't love him and wanted him to get well. I think there's an apt quotation here, which is. It's a variation on the. Oh, these things are so hard to keep track of or get a hold of. She'll say later on, these kinds of transactions are so extremely difficult to keep track of. And she's talking about, she's saying to Christine that she doesn't know how much she has left to pay on the loan.
But at this point, I think the play has paved the way enough that we can read the subtext of that, which is that transactions of love and honor are hard to keep track of. These are two different currencies. And Torvald in the end will say, well, no one would trade his own honor for love. Right? This is the non financial transaction that's really at issue in the play. Honor, independence, efficacy, autonomy versus love. For the sake of love. Would you trade away your independence, Torvald? No. No one would ever do that, Nora. That's what women do.
That's what this is about. She sets in motion a chain of events where he is invited to appreciate that by being subjected to a situation where he has to make a decision, is he going to sacrifice his honor for the sake of love in the way that she has been forced to? She's inviting him into that position that she's experienced as a woman. Well, she's inviting him into that, into that position and inviting him to live up to his promise that he would be self sacrificing for her. And of course he can't do it. So she's right. So there's an unconscious motivation, I think, in the very beginning or before the play even begins, to expose him for the type of person he is.
Some instinctual level. She knows something wrong is wrong with the relationship. I don't think she can articulate it, but she acts in such a way that it'll be articulated in the course of time.
10:56 Erin: Yeah, I love that, you know, in thinking through that, I wonder the extent to which these psychological questions, these unconscious motivations that you're pointing to are capable of coming to the fore in this play at this point, present moment, the moment of the play, only because it's been so long since Torvald's illness. In other words, the immediate, the conscious motivation is now so distant from the dramatic moment of the play. You know, we don't see Torvald as someone who was ever sick. And he has this distaste for Dr. Rank's illness, or for illness in general, I think as a result of the fact both that he did not know that he was ill.
11:37 Wes: Plot wise. What brings everything to a head is his promotion, because that's what makes Krogstad uneasy. He knows he's gonna get fired and so has to embark on his project of blackmail, which you know, will inevitably lead to the exposure of all this. And then. And then the real exposure, which is the exposure of Torvald.
11:57 Erin: Right.
11:58 Wes: For being the person, the type of person that he. That he is.
12:01 Erin: Right.
12:01 Wes: So this has all been hibernating, so to speak. It's unearthed by the promotion. So the happy promotion. Right. Which is going to bring them out of frugality and asceticism and austerity. Self denial, supposedly. And it's going to justify her extravagance. It's going to allow her to. Anyway. That, ironically, is the thing that brings it all down.
12:26 Erin: Right. She's finally going to be out of austerity. He has everything the way he likes it and hasn't been denied anything. So the austerity was being experienced only, it seems, by Nora.
12:36 Wes: Right. All of that in quotation marks. There's no.
12:38 Erin: Right, Right.
12:39 Wes: Well, to some extent, they've lived in austerity. If she's been making the presents out of paper or doing whatever it is she was, and they didn't have a proper Christmas tree the last. The previous year. But it's hard to tell, Right. Were they really that poor off or. Yeah, yeah. What's going on there? But in any case, whatever situation that they're in, she gets the brunt of it because she's on the allowance.
12:59 Erin: Right. And we're also made to understand that part of the austerity was as a result of Torvald refusing to take certain cases as a lawyer, which I think is very important. So in the previous part, you made this really great distinction between the kind of illness that Dr. Rank has and the kind of illness that Krogstad has, and that Torvald makes a distinction between these two. Torvald isn't even aware of himself as someone who has been physically ill in the past, nor is he aware of someone who is sort of morally ill, morally compromised. And I think that's key, that ignorance on those.
Both on both those fronts that aligns him sort of with Krogstad and sort of with Rank. But one of the reasons it seems that they have not had much money is because of his refusal to take cases which he thought were improper. So in other words, to act as a lawyer for someone who he felt was guilty is that. So he stands as judge of these clients and if he, as judge, decides that they've done something that he doesn't want to associate with because he's very concerned about being contaged by other people's wickedness.
14:10 Wes: Yeah, he and Dr. Rank share that, by the way.
14:13 Erin: Yes, yes. And he believes in both in contagion and in genetic moral disease. We have to take his word for it when he says that Nora is a spendthrift at the beginning of the play because we don't know any better really. And also because he gives a genetic explanation for her being a spendthrift, saying that her father was one as well. But we never get any evidence for this. We do, however, get an indication that the father was involved in some legal trouble and that in that instance, Torvald. Actually this is how Torvald became introduced to Nora, that he was acting as a lawyer for Nora's father and actually betrayed his principles to defend Nora's father for Nora's own sake.
So he got Nora under the conditions that he claims he's too good for. To me, there's something that's an indication of the hypocrisy at the very root of their relationship. We have this discussion of propriety at the very beginning of the play. Nora tells Christine about Torvald's promotion. Nora says how wonderful it is. And she says, as a lawyer. So prior to this he's been a lawyer, now he's been made the director of the bank. And she says, as a lawyer, one's income is so unreliable, especially when one doesn't want to handle any affairs except those that are right and proper.
And that's something Torvalds never wanted to do, of course, and I'm entirely with him there. So I take that to mean that he wants to be a judge and a lawyer, so he won't take a case unless it's right and proper, which probably means that he won't defend someone he suspects might be guilty. Is that, is that a proper interpretation of this?
15:55 Wes: Yeah.
15:56 Erin: And then we learn he defended Nora's father, who Torvald is quite, quite mean about, by the way. I mean, I wouldn't, you know, this man is dead. And I would be pretty upset if someone was saying this to about a family member of mine. But they're talking about Krogstad and Nora's talking about how afraid of him he is. And Helmer says, you're thinking of your father, of course. And Nora says, oh yes, that. That's it, yes. Remember how those evil minded people wrote in the newspapers about daddy and slandered him so horribly I think they would have got him dismissed if the department hadn't sent you over to look into it.
And if you hadn't been so obliging and helpful to Him. And Torvald replies, my little Nora, there's a significant difference between your father and myself. Your father wasn't an unimpeachable public servant, but I am and hope to remain so for as long as I am in my post. So perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but I take this to be the origin of their acquaintance. So he must have met Nora because he was defending Nora's father. Nora's father did something wrong, but Torvald must have compromised on his principles in that instance to defend the father in order to win Nora.
17:04 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because he's talking about his unimpeachability in that context. Sorry, in the context of not wanting to be corrupted by external influence, namely her influence in keeping Krogstad in his post. And that's also the point where he says he would take everything on himself if anything happened. So he says, you know, my dear Nora, I forgive you the anxiety you're going through here, even if it's essentially an insult to me. Oh, yes, it is an insult. Or isn't it perhaps an insult to believe that I would be worried about some wretched hack lawyer's revenge, But I do nevertheless forgive you because it's such sweet testimony to your great love for me.
You'll see I'm a man enough to take everything upon myself, and then a little later we'll share it. Nora as husband and wife. I think this is midway through the play, and it's like the very midpoint of the play where she suddenly gets charged with this idea of what she calls the miraculous thing. The miraculous thing is just what he described, this bit about being able to take everything upon himself, of not being worried about exposure, if that's what Krogstad desires to do. So yeah, he's much more believing in his unimpeachability at that point.
Not just in the sense of not being subject to corruption, but not being subject to bad press.
18:32 Erin: Yeah, and he said prior to this as well that he's talked about a sort of putrid environment in the home as a result of lies or as a result of parents having a negative effect on the morality of their children, which seems to be a combination of this genetic idea and this contagion idea. So somehow it seems to be inherited, but also it's the environment created by the bad behavior of a parent that can infect the child. So it's a sort of double barreled infection. And he particularly ascribes this to mothers. But he says fathers are also capable of this.
And so one then thinks about. Because he. In their final confrontation scene, he mentions Nora's father having been an indication that Nora would be not a suitable mother, not a fit mother. And so he's therefore betrayed his personal principles, it seems, by defending the father and therefore subjecting himself to sort of close contact with, you know, this infected person and also subjected his children to. No, he's betrayed both of these barrels, if you will, by getting involved with Nora, because Nora, as the daughter of her father, would have this genetic.
Sorry, I'm not, I, I, I'm, I meant to bring this back around to what you were saying in regards to bad press and things like that. And now I can't remember how I was going to do that. But anyway, I wanted to go back around back and circle back around to Nora's father and talk about that as well. But anyway, how can I, how can I just shut this down quickly and move us along?
20:13 Wes: I think this is very important about. Because Dr. Rank and Torvald, friends from early childhood, have this idea about what society is, which is to say it's something that's eroded by lies and eroded by mistrust. And this is, I think Rank is the first person to express this idea when he's talking to Nora and Christine. This is around 20 pages in, but he starts by talking about his own misery. Well, he says it's interesting because Christine was talking about climbing the stairs slowly, and he says, oh, you have a touch of the internal rots. Yeah.
And she's like, no more. It's just about exhaustion. And then he accuses her of coming to unwind at various festive gatherings. And she's like, no, I've come here to try to look for work, actually. And then he says, I suppose that's a proven remedy for exhaustion, is it? This is our introduction to Dr. Rank. I think it's such a powerful. He's such a interesting sidekick character here. But he's fun.
21:19 Erin: Oh, yeah. I love that.
21:20 Wes: His pessimism and Eeyore, like, quality is a lot of fun. Christine says, we have to live. Doctor. And this is a theme that comes up again and again. And ultimately it's referring to the material dependence of women on men because Christine had, you know, married someone she didn't love and rejected Krogstad because she needed the money, because she had to support her brothers and her mother, so she had to sacrifice the love of Croxtad for the love of her family. And then Rank says, you know, with a nice sarcasm, yes, it is Indeed, a commonly held belief that is, that such a thing is necessary, right?
Having to live. And Nora's like, come on, come, come, Dr. Rank, you want very much to live, too. And he says, yes, of course I do. However miserable I may be, I still prefer to be tormented for as long as is possible. And the same goes for all my patients as it does for the morally afflicted, too. Right now, in fact, there's just such a moral invalid in there with Helmer. So he turns us from the idea of having to live despite misery and physical illness. And then, you know, Christine having the rots because she's climbing the stairs. Slowly, he turns from that to the idea of Merle Rot and Krogstad in particular, right?
Rotten right down to the roots of. He uses this word rotten repeatedly. Rotten right down to the roots of his character. But even he started to talk as though it was of some magnificent import about his having to live. Turning Christine's words back against her. Having to live. Right. That's another area in which one might sacrifice honor for the sake of love. And then he'll end up saying, you have the kind of people who scamper breathlessly around sniffing for moral decay, only to get the individual admitted for observation in some favorable position or other.
The healthy people just have to put up with being left outside. So his idea here is that this isn't about reform or correction. That's not what punishment is about. We should find the sick people, the morally sick people, and then exclude them from society. And then when Christine says, surely it's the sick who should be brought in the fold. And Rank says, it's that attitude that turns society into an infirmary. And Nora just laughs, and he says, what are you laughing at? Do you actually know what society is? And then she says, that's boring. I'm going to talk about something else.
But it. Right. So, yeah, what is society? Society is something corrupted by sickness. Of course, you know, he's rank. His speak, and he's rank. I don't know if the double entendre is there in the original.
24:03 Erin: I was wondering about that, too.
24:05 Wes: But he's sick. He's rotten. He's rotten because of the sins of his fathers being visited upon him. And likewise, society becomes rotten in an atmosphere of lies and mistrust. At some point, Torvald makes the comment that he feels physically ill in Krogstad's proximity. So you get this interesting transition from moral illness to physical illness. And the same thing with rank. Dr. Rank, right. He has a physical illness because of his father's moral sickness, being with prostitutes and so on. Syphilis. But anyway, I just wanted to emphasize that thematic role of sickness here.
24:44 Erin: Sure. Well, let's take a closer look at Rank and at Krogstad for that matter. And Christine, by the way, this rank quotage just occurs to me. However miserable I may be, I still prefer to be tormented for as long as is possible. I'm 90% sure you have said almost that exact thing to me.
25:02 Wes: Great.
25:03 Erin: Wow, that's.
25:04 Wes: So that's the character I wanted to be compared to.
25:06 Erin: Of course. Of course. Well, I think that. I think this is Ibsen a little bit. Right. I mean, Ibsen toying with some social Darwinism is, you know, self parodying or whatever. There's a little bit of Stockman in rank.
25:20 Wes: No, yeah, I mean, I think. I think Ibsen here, this is one of the other things I was going to say is, I mean, Ibsen is Nora. Ibsen is a character in this play. Ibsen is Nora. And reading more Ibsen now and reading into the, you know, some of the background stuff, I have a much more palpable sense of how much he despises society's hypocrisy and the moralism here. And this is really an attack on that. And after the Nora dances the tarantella, Torvald becomes a critic. He says a storming success, which was well deserved, although there was something a little over natural about her rendition.
I mean, a little more than was, strictly speaking, opposite to artistic requirements. Right. The sorts of criticisms that Ibsen has heard about his own work here. So, yeah, we should, as always be conscious of the fact that this critique of the condition of women in society, although Ibsen is a little bit lukewarm about characterizing it that way, but it's also a critique of what society inevitably does to the artist or to the work of art. And Torvald is trying to do to Nora in part is to turn her into the embroidered work of art that he would like, as opposed to this thing that's been knitted, the deeper thing that's been knitted together.
26:40 Erin: Right. And the dancing is the cure, Right? It's the dancing itself. I mean, the tarantella, you know, maybe for listeners who don't know, though I think a lot of people know this, that it's this thought to be the result of being bitten by a tarantula. And you would be compelled to. To dance out, to sweat out the poison through dance. So this is the cure for these societal ills. If we could think of Nora as being contaged with illness herself, that she then has to dance out through the tarantella. The artistic response to society's ills is the primary one.
27:17 Wes: I mean, in this case, it's. The illness that Ibsen is diagnosing is precisely the opposite, in a way, of what Rank and Torvald are diagnosing.
27:27 Erin: That's right.
27:27 Wes: They want society to adhere to their very strict values. But that's where Ibsen sees the sickness. So, yeah, her doing that dance. Right. I think someone does it Rank who says she looked like she was dancing for her life. Someone says that you're dancing like your life depended on it. Oh, this is when she's practicing. I think you're dancing as if your life depended on it. And she's dancing more and more wildly. And Nora says. And it does. So, yeah, at that point. Right, right. The poison that she has to sweat out is Torvald himself. But, yeah, go ahead.
28:00 Erin: And also all of patriarchal society, if you will. Right. Part of the actual purpose for this dance was to give an outlet of intense exertion for women, a sort of emotional stress release to dance this. At least that was my understanding from older Italian women in my family telling me this is the understanding as well, that women would dance frenetically this way to kind of get out their stress. The tarantella is a perfect thing. You know, it's so funny. It kind of. I always forget that she does this, and it kind of comes out of nowhere in this Norwegian play, you know, but it's a perfect symbol for the not that Nora is trying to work out.
28:45 Wes: You know, Ibsen does give us every chance to sympathize with Torvald because he does beg and plead at the end. And, you know, I'll change. She's like, no. So he really. There's an incredible harshness to the ending. Ibsen knew what he was doing. Right. He knew this was gonna be predictably. It was gonna make people very uncomfortable. There's a justice to what she's doing, but. But he doesn't soften the blow at all or make her look compassionate in the end. She goes into clarity mode, and then she's got to do what she's got to do.
29:18 Erin: Well, she's compassionate to herself or something. She's. I don't know, Compassionate as me, me, me.
29:26 Wes: To go back to that critic.
29:28 Erin: Right, right.
29:30 Wes: That's the new woman of today. Me, me, me.
29:33 Erin: Yeah.
29:34 Wes: Yeah.
29:34 Erin: Quite a contrast to Christine. Yeah.
29:36 Wes: Who needs someone to love, and Christine needs someone to work for.
29:40 Erin: Yeah, she's a real codependent.
29:45 Wes: Gives her life meaning.
29:46 Erin: Evil husband has been dead for two seconds before she gets into relationship.
29:50 Wes: A new evil husband.
29:52 Erin: Yes, exactly. Exactly. But one who's instantly transformed by Christine's love, which that I find far less believable than Nora's ending, is Krogstad's sudden transformation.
30:06 Wes: Look, there are two shipwrecks passing each other.
30:10 Erin: Yes, exactly, Exactly.
30:11 Wes: But not in the night. And I don't know how they're moving, but they're two shipwrecks coming together and making one beautiful ship.
30:19 Erin: Isn't it better for there to be two people on the same boat, which I take to be. Then you have. When one of you dies, the other one has something to eat.
30:26 Wes: That's a. I didn't quite. I'm a man shipwrecked on a broken vessel, and I, too, am sitting like a woman shipwrecked on a broken vessel. Nobody to grieve for, nobody to provide for. What if two shipwrecked people were to cross, to reach across to each other just coincidentally, shipwrecked right near each other? Is one shipwreck big enough for both of them? You know Jack got kicked off the board at the end of Titanic.
31:01 Erin: That's an entirely different debate. Okay, let's not go there, because I feel myself itching to talk about this. That's another door that slams shut.
31:12 Wes: But in any case, yeah, you were. Yeah. Maybe the Krogstad's transformation is not that believable, but I don't know. I have a bit of a place in my heart for Krogstad because he is, after all, more honest in a way than Torvald.
31:26 Erin: Oh, of course. I think even Nora has sympathy for him on 138. She says, so that's why this poor Krogstad. So she calls him this poor Krogstad after he's just threatened her. There's this interesting idea with Krogstad, too, because he also is a friend of Thorvald's from youth. And part of Krogstad's great offense seems to be. So he's acted in a way that has betrayed his own honor or something. Or he's. Because of his forgery, which he's then somehow gotten away with, he maintains this stain on his reputation.
32:03 Wes: He had a good lawyer, Right?
32:05 Erin: Right. But part of his great offensiveness to Torvald is the familiarity with which he treats Torvald. So Torvald doesn't want this unclean person to come near him. You know, we're made to understand by the notes anyway, that perhaps what Krogstad is doing is considered too familiar, just in general. Not just for someone as snooty and picky as Torvald is, but he has known him from the time that they were young boys. And then Nora tries to pull rank on him, confusingly. Sorry, I should use a different word. But there's this whole idea of subordination and influence in their conversation, which is quite interesting.
Right. So she claims to have a certain influence over Torvald, then completely does a 180 when she realizes she's gotten herself into a bind. It becomes this race to the bottom. It's like, which of us is more abject? You, Krogstad in a subordinate position at a bank, or me, a mere woman in a subordinate position to my husband? You know, they're sort of like trying to out victim each other in Krogstad trying to sort of play on her sympathy in a way.
33:10 Wes: Yeah.
33:11 Erin: There's also a sense that Krogstad has done whatever crime he did commit, he might have had. You know, there's this question of motivation as well. Obviously this is at the heart of Nora's self defense, that she might have forged this document, but she had a good motivation for doing so. Motivation is everything, Nora points out. And Krogstad has to tell her that, you know, the law does not care about motivations. And she says, then it must be a bad law and you must be a bad lawyer. But the implication is that perhaps he also had his motivations as well.
And there's some desperation. We never know what the circumstances were of his forgery, but we are told, or it's implied that it was out of some kind of desperation. And even Torvald himself says usually when people commit forgeries, it's out of some sort of desperate motive. Krogstad says to her, but you didn't consider the fact that you were committing fraud against me. And it aligns with what Torvald says earlier about if something happened to Torvald, what would Nora do? How would she repay debts? So if they took out loans and then Torvald dies, how would Nora go about paying off those loans?
And Nora very smartly says, if something that ghastly happened, it would make no odds to me whether I was in debt or not. So if you were to die, what would I care if I was also in debt? You know, which is absolutely right. And Torvald says, perhaps so, but to the people I'D borrowed from. And Nora says them. Who's bothered about them? They're just strangers. So, like, why is Torvald thinking about her creditors rather than the situation that Nora herself would be in? Because it seems to be entirely about appearances for him. He cares about his honor after he's gone.
He cares about the ability to sort of pay back a loan and thereby secure his reputation even in death or something. But there's this sense that, like, she's focused on him, and were this terrible thing to happen, then who cares if she's in debt or not? She would be destroyed by the loss of him. And he cares about the people that she borrows money from getting back their money. Like, he doesn't care about the fact that she might be left in this terrible position, that she would be so devastated that she would have a lot more to worry about than just having creditors.
And so it seems that Krogstad and Torvald are aligned in this emphasis on the collective as opposed to the individual. Something like that. Right. The idea of repaying a loan for the sake of the person who's loaned you the money. They seem to have less of an appreciation of the personal and are more interested in this sort of societal matrix, which has to be respected and which is fundamentally impersonal.
35:56 Wes: Yeah. Although I think Krogstad is just using that in that moment. But.
36:00 Erin: Right, right.
36:00 Wes: Because he himself, of course, has committed the same violation and is committing another violation in blackmailing her. So he's appealing to a moral motive in a way by talking about fraud or legal transgression and a moral transgression. But, yeah, his behavior is amoral up to the point where he finds love again.
36:21 Erin: For someone who has a lot of kids, he seems to be kind of an incel or something because Christine left him, and then he was mad for years and years, and so finally he just gets what he wants. He gets his girlfriend back. Yeah, that seems to be the basis of his criminal career.
36:40 Wes: Cured by love.
36:41 Erin: Cured by love.
36:42 Wes: Yeah, that was fun. We're gonna have to.
36:44 Erin: Yeah, we'll have to close the door.
36:45 Wes: Slam the door on this. But, yeah, we're gonna be. I guess we'll do Jaws next, and then we'll have more Ibsen.
36:53 Erin: Sounds perfect.
36:54 Wes: So, Enemy of the People. Cool. Thank you.
36:56 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”
Jul 29, 2025
Nora Helmer begins Act I as a devoted wife to her respectable husband, Torvald, and a devoted mother to her young children. She ends Act III by walking out on all of them and closing the door behind her. The emotional distance covered in these three acts (representing a span of just a few days in the lives of the Helmers) makes Nora one of the greatest and most coveted acting challenges in the theater. How might we mark out a route between the Nora of Act I, the charming toy of the men in her life who seems to desire nothing more than the comfort and ease her husband’s recent promotion is set to provide, and the Nora of Act III, an independent woman willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of her own self-determination? Wes & Erin discuss Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”
Upcoming Episodes: Jaws, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Nora helmer begins Act 1 as a devoted wife to her respectable husband, Torvald and a devoted mother to her young children. She ends Act 3 by walking out on all of them and closing the door behind her. The emotional distance covered in these three acts, representing a span of just a few days in the lives of the Helmers, makes Nora one of the greatest and most coveted acting challenges in the theater. How might we mark out a route between the nora of Act 1, the charming toy of the men in her life, who seems to desire nothing more than the comfort and ease her husband's recent promotion is set to provide, and the nora of Act 3, an independent woman willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of her own self determination.
Today we're discussing Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, just before we started recording, you mentioned that your cat really likes treats.
1:34 Wes: And
1:37 Erin: my understanding is you make her work for them. Is that right? Like you put them in little gold envelopes on the Christmas tree and you make her do the tarantella.
1:47 Wes: Well, she actually left me recently. She had a very stern talk with me. She was like, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.
1:57 Erin: And you were like, I don't understand you. It's like we're speaking different languages. And she was like, meow, you've never respected me.
2:04 Wes: Now we're strangers. You don't understand my species. And she slammed the door. Somehow she managed, with a little paws. It was the slam heard round the block. What is it? Who came up with this? The door slam heard round the world phrase? You've heard that?
2:27 Erin: No.
2:27 Wes: Some critic must have come up with that. Yeah, that's how the end of the play is often characterized.
2:32 Erin: Oh, that's great. Have you read much criticism on A Doll's House in preparation for today? Because I did at one point, many years ago. So we'll see how much I remember.
2:42 Wes: Not much. I just went and looked at contemporaneous criticism. I always find it fun to look at the critical heritage books. These are Routledge books. And this is One on Ibsen by Michael Egan. And basically they go through major works and then responses to those major works. So Doll's House, there's like. I read all of what was available, like an unsigned notice in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily News. So this is for the performance in England, which happened in 1889, I think a few years after he published it. And one thing I think I learned from reading on background is how important translation is to Ibsen.
And he very quickly became much more than a Norwegian playwright. Right. He's Norwegian. Just get confused because Denmark and Norway were. Right. They were unified up to a certain point. But, yeah, so he started, you know, I think he made a big international splash eventually. And certainly this play, Doll's House, made a big splash in England and was the source of some critical controversy. I read something by Janet Achurch on the difficulty of being Nora that she published. She was the actress in that first English language rendition in London.
And it's very typical actress talk like this took so much out. This is the hardest but most rewarding role I've ever had. And blah, blah, blah. And then William Archer, his, I think, first English translator, published a defense in a newspaper. I think it's to Clement Scott. But anyway, yeah, there's a critic, you know, who's very strongly anti Ibsen. And as you can imagine, this play caused some controversy, not, as you might think, because of the feminist message. I think I mentioned this to you when we last talked that I think it's Scott who's kind of offended at the idea that anyone would need to be lectured about women's rights in their day and age when it had been solved for 100 years, at least in England.
Maybe in Norway you still have problems, but here in England, we don't need to be lectured. But then he goes on to. There's a typical objection to Nora's seemingly sudden transformation at the end of the play. So that's a sort of craftsmanship type of objection. There's an objection to him being too preachy. Art shouldn't be this preachy. But then there is the kind of moralistic objection to the horror of her leaving her kids behind.
5:14 Erin: Sure.
5:15 Wes: Which made me think of Medea a bit. I started thinking about Medea when I was rereading. I think I read this three times in preparation for this, and the third time took notes. I'm like, huh, this is interesting. This is. You know, there's a lot of differences, of course, and she's not a sorceress, she's just a Spendthrift. She does have the tarantella. Is that how you pronounce it? The tarantelle?
5:37 Erin: Tarantella, yeah.
5:39 Wes: Tarantella. But anyway, we can get into all that. But, yeah, that's my summary of the contemporaneous critical reaction.
5:46 Erin: My understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, this is a bit hazy, was that it was actually a bigger scandal for her to leave her husband. I know there been differing reports on this, but it was a bigger scandal for her to have left her husband than for her to leave the children. Because of the way that Norwegian society was. I mean, the children are already kind of being raised by Anne Marie anyway. It seems they just, you know, they come in for Nora to play hide and seek with them and et cetera. Though it is noted she spends a lot of time with the children.
More time than most mothers do. But it seems that the bigger scandal in the minds of certain critics, I thought, was leaving the husband. That isn't to say that, you know, maternal feeling didn't exist and that it was a bigger. Emotionally, it would have been more higher stakes for her to leave the children. But in terms of propriety and what society might have demanded, it was perhaps more scandalous for her to leave the husband than the children at that time.
6:43 Wes: Yeah, maybe it was in Norway. My impression from the English reaction was it was more about the. It was about both, but more about the children. So actually, now that I'm looking at this, I think it'd just be fun to give you a little bit of a taste of some of this criticism. Should we do that? So this is Clement Scott in Theater, the journal Theater in 1889. It is an unlovely, selfish creed. But let women hear it. Nora, when she finds her husband is not the ideal hero she imagined, determines to cap his egotism with her selfishness, which he takes to be vengeful.
Pardon. She cannot grant humiliation. She will not recognize the frivolous butterfly. The Swedish Frou-Frou, the spoiled plaything has mysteriously become an Ibsenite revivalist. There were no previous signs of her conversion, but she has exchanged playfulness for preaching. So this is one of the more technical criticisms that she had too sudden a transformation, forgets all her responsibilities and does a thing that one of the lower animals would not do. A cat or dog would tear anyone who separated from its offspring. But the socialistic Nora, the apostle of the new creed of humanity, leaves her children almost without a pang.
It is self, self, self. This is the ideal woman of the new creed. Not a woman who is the fountain of love and forgiveness and charity. Not the pattern woman we have admired in our mothers and our sisters. Not the model of unselfishness and charity, but a mass of aggregate conceit and self sufficiency who leaves her home and deserts her friendless children because she has herself to look after.
8:19 Erin: And is this guy the basis for the character Torvald or just. Is that just a coincidence? Wow. That's pretty incredible.
8:27 Wes: Yeah. So you get there's a more reasonable, nuanced. Some unsigned notices which are more reasonable. But you get the idea of what my general sense was. The thing with the children was more objectionable to this English response. But this was. I think this is six years after it came out in Norway. You know, I think there are significant differences. There were very significant differences at the time between those. Norway was a much more conservative culture at that point.
8:52 Erin: Sure.
8:53 Wes: Than England. Yeah.
8:54 Erin: Well, listeners will have to forgive me. My thinking on the play probably has been heavily influenced by a couple of people who I'll name in just a minute, but I have not read their writings on this in a very long time. I thought it would be actually better for me to kind of come in a little bit fresher because A Doll's House was my first Ibsen play and I know it a little too well or something. I don't know. I was worried about being too influenced by criticism on it. So I, in the past have read Hardwick on Nora, which I think I mentioned in our Hedda Gabler episode.
I think we read a little bit from Hardwick on Hedda and Stella Adler's lectures on A Doll's House, which I really, really recommend. I think the reason why I read Ibsen for the first time and why I read this play first was because of Hannah and her sisters. Right. Because it's mentioned that Hannah plays Nora in A Doll's House and her mother says something about how it must be hard to act like Torvald's little chipmunk without making a total ass of yourself. Or I know that it's hard, you know, like she. She mentions something about making an ass of yourself, like it's difficult to play Nora without doing so.
And then I remember having done a little reading about A Doll's House after, because I was curious the first time I had seen Hannah and her sister. The great acting challenge that playing Nora represents. I think that probably is then what inspired me to start reading Stella Adler on Nora, because I have a great many of Stella Adler's books, which I just really recommend. In general, she's kind of a hero of mine. But anyway. Yeah. So the question is. I mean, I suppose the big question of this play is how we link the Nora of the first act and the Nora of the third act together.
10:34 Wes: Yeah, good question. Yeah, good.
10:36 Erin: I believe that Hardwick. And this is why I didn't want to revisit it, because I thought it would be difficult for me to come up with my own answer to this. I believe that Hardwick identifies her innate freedom and sense of independence from the very beginning, as exemplified in her generosity, as being the sort of connective tissue. I noted a few places where she. I mean, she never tells Torvald about her sacrifice. And that, to me, is indicative of the fact that she is actually a little bit more. That the condescension between them goes both ways.
And it reveals the fact that she was never comfortable enough to divulge her secret to him, to really have this. This open communication between them. And so she gets to kind of have this little secret that she's. I mean, it's a noble one, but that she's, in a sense, taken care of him, knowing that she's taken care of him, even as he believes that he's taking care of her in the confrontation scene between the two of them. We're reading from the Penguin Classics edition, A Doll's House and Other Plays, which is. I believe it's the first one on Amazon.
When you search for A Doll's House. I like this translation quite a bit. It's translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik. Excuse my pronunciation there, but anyway, so this is on page 185 in that edition. Helmer asks her, if religion can't direct you, then at least let me stir your conscience, for surely you have some moral sense. Or answer me. Perhaps you have none. And Nora replies, oh, Torvald, that's not easy to answer. I simply don't know. I'm in such confusion over these things. I just know that my opinion is very different from yours on such matters.
So an indication that she's been disagree. She's actually disagreed with him all along and just has not felt comfortable enough to say so, or has just been lying to herself about these disagreements or hasn't been fully aware of them. So something in her, in other words, has kept her from sharing parts of herself with him. An innate distrust, an innate sense that perhaps he wasn't equal to being in this. This full understanding with her even before she was quite aware of that impulse in herself to hide it. She didn't know that she was hiding these things, but she was.
12:52 Wes: So it came out in Copenhagen in 1879, ten years before the British premiere. So I got that wrong. And then I forgot to mention, I also watched version that I actually watched was the 1992 BBC version with Juliet Stevenson. And I thought of this just because you were talking about how difficult it would have been to perform that part. And, I mean, it's an amazing version. Is there one you recommend?
13:19 Erin: No, I haven't seen one I like and I've never seen that BBC version. I think I saw the one with Jane Fonda ages ago.
13:26 Wes: Okay.
13:26 Erin: Which is a very loose, from what I remember, very loose adaptation of the play.
13:31 Wes: So check it out. I mean, I just. I think it's great. And they play Torvald more aggressively than I actually read him, but it works. And then I thought, oh, it's interesting how there's quite a range for how you might play the Torvald character, either accentuating his weakness or accentuating some of his aggressiveness. And it reminds me, we're going to read next time we're going to read Enemy of the People. Right?
13:53 Erin: Yeah. If you'd like to.
13:54 Wes: I don't know of a good. There's a movie version of that with what's his face. It's not Paul Newman or.
14:02 Erin: Oh, Steve McQueen.
14:05 Wes: Steve McQueen, yeah. But I don't know of any available. I couldn't find anything available, like, any rendition of the play that's easily available online, except for, like, you know, high school productions and stuff like that.
14:18 Erin: On Criterion, there's an Indian adaptation directed by Ray, which is quite interesting, though it really, I think, makes Stockman a far more straightforward hero. The assembly scene is kind of butchered, and then the ending is sort of butchered as well. So it's a much more straightforward. So it's sort of a disappointment, which I hesitate to say, because I love Ray. This is a late film in his career, I want to say. Came out in 89. It's an interesting film to watch.
14:46 Wes: There's also a BBC adaptation. Just again, talking about Enemy of the People. You know, it's based on the play, but it's quite different, so I didn't watch that.
14:54 Erin: But I'd recommend people watch Jaws if they want to see an Enemy of the People.
14:59 Wes: Well, Jaws is what I was suggesting that I was going to suggest that we do Jaws since it's the big anniversary now after Enemy of the People.
15:08 Erin: Okay, sure. We could. Or we could do it in between. I mean, a Lot of. I think a lot of people will see.
15:12 Wes: Or we could do it in between. That's a great idea.
15:13 Erin: The connection. If they're not already aware of, of the connection between the two.
15:17 Wes: Let's do that. We're going to need a bigger podcast. No, I'm just kidding. I was thinking, is this going to be too gory for Erin? And I thought, well, they couldn't get the shark to work, so you never see it, so it's the perfect horror movie for you.
15:31 Erin: I was just going, I was just going to watch it a couple nights ago and then I realized I was too scared to watch it. So I'm going to have to.
15:38 Wes: You have to force your. Yourself.
15:40 Erin: Force myself. I've seen it before, but never like the full, you know, I've walked out of the room. Etc. I'll have to put on my big girl pants.
15:48 Wes: Yeah. Prepare by listening to the soundtrack and then you'll be, you'll be ready for the terrible thing, the miraculous thing. Speaking of.
15:55 Erin: Yeah.
15:56 Wes: All right, so see how I brought that back around?
15:58 Erin: Very, very clever.
15:59 Wes: All right. Sorry for that long, that long detour. But the question you're asking is about how do we, how do we connect who Nora is or seems to be earlier on in the play with who she becomes later on? How do you can we defend Ibsen against these critics who say this is far too rapid a transformation and is just kind of ad hoc in serving the political message that he wants to give? And I thought it was interesting that in a way, the transformation begins offstage. It begins before the play begins, and it begins with her committing fraud in order to get the money to take, to basically take a one year vacation, which is supposed to save Torvald's life. Right. Is this how people really got off work for one year? So I'm going to die unless I get a one year vacation. We have to go to some hot springs somewhere because we don't have real medicine yet. So.
17:00 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Why have I not used this Before?
17:04 Wes: Got the 19th century version of cancer called, you know, consumptive degeneration of my liver or whatever. Get some hot springs and it'll be cured.
17:15 Erin: No, he goes to Capri. Even better.
17:18 Wes: To me, it seems like a bit that, like this is a delusional idea on her part that this vacation was actually something life saving. But I put a kind of bookmark in that because maybe it would seem more plausible to the audiences at the time. But in any case, it strikes me that we learn in the play that she is Very proud of doing that because it was an assertion of her independence. So let me just find the place. When she's telling Christine. We're going to call her Christine. When she's telling Christine about it, I think what induces her to talk about it is that Christine is sort of being condescending to her about, oh, you don't, you know, you've never seen any real problems in life, and you think the handiwork that you had to do was real work and blah, blah, blah.
You know, Christine, of course, is the one who said real problems and tragedy in her life and has had to work her ass off. And so Nora will say, and this is, unfortunately, I read the same translation as you, but my pagination is different because I used an electronic version. But this is about 14 pages in. But now I'm going to tell you something, Christine. I also have something to be proud and happy about. And then she'll go on to say that she saved Torvald's life, basically, and that she didn't rely on her father's money to do it, she raised it herself.
So she's pointing there to her own resourcefulness, her own independence and something that she can be proud of. And in doing that, right, she sets up the chain of events that will lead her to actually become independent. Because it's by doing that that she'll find out that Torvald is not the person that she thought he was. And the person that she thought he was was a person who would take the guilt onto herself. Right. That the she. Throughout the play, the various points in the play, she's talking about the miraculous thing that she's waiting for.
And Torvald directly gives her this idea by suggesting that he wants to sacrifice himself to save her and that she ever got in trouble, he would, you know, he would be there to do that. So she gets that idea eventually in her mind that, you know, if this were all found out, he would take the guilt upon himself. And it's not just a miraculous thing, but a terrible thing because she would not let that happen. And she would have to commit suicide to stop that from happening. Turns out suicide wasn't necessary because Torvald was not that kind of man.
Completely throws her under the bus. Later on, she'll say to Torvald, Torvald will say, yes, I love you, and there's a lot of things I would do for you, but no one would ever take dishonor on themselves for the sake of love.
20:01 Erin: Yes.
20:01 Wes: And she's like hundreds of thousands of women do that every day. So when she's committing the fraud and gets the idea that he will, you know, she's doing something dishonorable, maybe. Depends on what you think of the law, right? Is it dishonorable if it's for the sake of love, but she's doing a thing that could harm her reputation, harm his reputation, but it's an invitation to him in a way, to be put in the position that women, on her view, are being put in. Right? A position of dishonor, which in her case is a position where her independence and autonomy have been compromised.
So that's what she seems to be doing unconsciously by engaging in this activity. And she's going to find out that he won't join her there. And if he can't join her in the dishonor of her dependence, at least empathetically, then she will have to assert her complete independence and reclaim her honor that way. So she sets. Do you see what I'm saying? It's a really cool catalyst that gets all this stuff going, this idea that she has that she's gonna put honor at risk for the sake of love and then see what comes out of it. And it gets her out of a bad relationship.
It's one way to do it. Right. Ultimately, it sets the dominoes in motion. So I think that is part of what joins the earlier Nora to the later Nora, which is that it seems to be unconscious, but at a certain level, she is ruminating on her independence and acting on that urge for independence.
21:45 Erin: Just to be clear, the dishonor enters on the mere fact of her having borrowed money. Is that what we're to.
21:53 Wes: Well, it's mainly the fraud, Right? So the dishonor is about the fraud. So it's one thing the way it's cast at various points in the play. Yeah, it's a bad thing to be in debt. Torvald doesn't like that. But it's another thing altogether to have signed her father's name as a co signer in order to get that money and essentially to have done the same thing that Krogstad had done to get himself in trouble. Right. So there's a object lesson, right, in the form of a character in the play. What could happen if I do something like this? It's to become Krogstad, who is cast by Dr. Rank as. And by Torvald to some extent, as the sort of emblem of moral sickness which is manifested in ranks, right? Syphilitic sickness that he got from his. From his Father.
22:44 Erin: Right.
22:45 Wes: In parallel to Nora getting her extravagance and loose morals from her father. Right. There's a lot of little.
22:53 Erin: Supposedly. Right.
22:54 Wes: Neat tricks in this play. There's a lot of really, really cool stuff. It's such a tightly. You know, once you start looking at it, it's such a tight, well done piece of work. I don't know. Do people need me to tell them that?
23:05 Erin: Yes, of course.
23:06 Wes: To tell them that Ibsen is a really. Right. But anyway, that's what I'm referring to. With the possibility of dishonor.
23:12 Erin: Yes. Yeah. So she forges her father's signature because she needs a man's signature to give her permission to take the loan. Is that right? A woman can't take a loan herself.
23:24 Wes: Okay. I think I misunderst. I thought maybe he was co signer. But that makes.
23:29 Erin: Or he has to co sign the loan because a woman can.
23:31 Wes: Just because she can't do it. Okay.
23:32 Erin: Right. So she takes on her father's patriarchal authority by signing his name. I like this idea that that act is the way that she sets this plot in motion. Right. Something that's happened long before.
23:46 Wes: Let me correct it, actually. Sorry, I'm just looking at it. So Krogstad says, beneath that I added a few lines in which your father stood as guarantor for the debt. So it sounds like he was actually a co signer. As in the.
23:59 Erin: He's a cosign.
24:00 Wes: Yeah. She's taken out a loan and you know. So she doesn't have the credit. I think your point is well taken. She might not have the credit because she's Principally because she's a woman. Or clearly she doesn't. In two senses. Right.
24:13 Erin: Married women were formally with. This is from a note to. A wife can't borrow without her husband's consent. This is a note in our edition. Married women were formerly without independent legal status and were not allowed to enter into economic transactions on their own. Although this was not always adhered to in practice. So this is why she had to have a co signer. She gives herself permission, she acts as her own father to give herself permission to take the. To borrow. So there's the idea of her having committed this fraud, and then there's the idea of her having borrowed money at all.
Both of these things are seen as dishonorable to Torvald, who's very concerned with wholeness. This is one of the themes that comes up again and again for him. He does not like to owe anything to anyone and he likes things to Be whole. There are a few indications of this. He has a speech about borrowing, which we could go back to. But later on, Nora tells Christine to leave the room because Torvald's about to come in. And she says he can't bear to see mending and darning. Part of this is because he can't. He has an allergy to certain elements of feminine activity.
He does not like, for instance, to be around Nora when she's with the children. He even separates Nora from Christine in that regard. He invites Christine to leave the room with him because he can't stand to be around mothers. So rather than assigning this, rescribing this as a sort of female trait, in which case Christine would be subject to it as well. It's as if Nora as a mother is a different species. And he invites Christine to leave with him because Christine is not, in fact, a mother, right? She's had sort of like a motherly responsibility by acting as a surrogate mother to her younger brothers and even, in a way, to her own mother.
But she has not given birth and therefore is like a different species from Nora in that instance. So he has this dislike of certain elements, either of feminine activities or of activities indicative of motherhood, which we could say, psychologically, he sees Nora as being his predominantly his sexual plaything. And motherhood stands in the way, I think, of that, whatever we want to call it, his idealization of her, his objectification. That's the word I wanted to use, his objectification of her. But this mending and darning. So we can associate that, on the one hand, with his dislike of these network of activities which suggest that a mother has to do with shaping, giving shape to things, which seems to stand in competition with his sense of superiority.
And his idea that he, as a father, is really the prime mover. He's the God of the household. And the mother's authority seems to stand in contrast to that. So anything that has to do with a lack of wholeness or with turning something into wholeness that is also at the same time a feminine activity is indicative of motherhood and therefore of a force which competes with his authority. And then this is on page 151. Rank talks about his illness, and he notes that he won't tell Torvald about it because he has such a marked loathing for anything hideous.
I don't want him in my sick room, he says. So this I also take as his dislike of people in some state of disarray or things not being whole. As I said, he doesn't like to owe things to other people. He doesn't like to see people mending something. He only likes to see it in its full and sort of resolved, you know, fully constituted state. And he doesn't like to see people ill, somehow reduced from a state of perfection, because he himself is so obsessed with perfection and also of his own. His own moral authority. I'm throwing a lot at you there, but I'm trying to sort of like, tie these things together in real time, because it's connected to this, I think, this dislike of the maternal.
But it also has to do with his own sense of satisfaction, for instance, at being a better man than Krogstad, a better man than Nora's father. So it has to do with him as an individual as well. And of course, he only sees other men as being individuals.
28:32 Wes: You're reminding me that later on he'll see Christine knitting and he'll say to
28:38 Erin: her, she should take up embroidery instead. Yeah, yeah.
28:43 Wes: So you knit, do you? She says, yeah, you know what? You should embroider instead. She's like, why? Well, because it's much prettier. Look, you hold the embroidery like this with the left hand, and then with the right, you guide the needle like this out in a delicate, extended arc. Isn't that so? Christine says, yes, free, possibly. And Torvald says, whereas knitting, that can never be anything but unlovely. Look here. The cramped arms, the knitting needles that go up and down. It's got something Chinese about it.
29:14 Erin: God, what an asshole.
29:16 Wes: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it seems to go with your thesis about wholeness.
29:20 Erin: Yeah. I wonder if embroidery is about adding to ornamenting something which is already whole. Right. And knitting is about creating something. And it's also. It's indicative if it's ugly looking to him. And that kind of. I'm almost seeing what he's describing as being like legs giving birth. Right. There's something about childbirth that's recapitulated, perhaps in the posture of the hands and the needles.
29:45 Wes: Yeah, that's good, I think, right? Yeah. So embroidery, first of all, he wants to be the instructor there, so you could presume he just happens to know more about embroidery than knitting, and he wants to be the one in charge and in control and telling them what to do. Right. And he. Right. He has this relationship to Nora in which he's going to instruct her and then the tarantella and correct her. It's part of the whole theme of him treating her like a doll and a plaything and a helpless Child and all of that. But, yeah, as you point out, whereas knitting, right, you're creating something out of nothing, and it is more akin to childbirth, embroidery.
You're embellishing and decorating something. It's more akin to, you know, him dressing, right. He's the one to choose her costume for the masquerade and to essentially dress her in it. His role is to embroider or embellish Nora in order to turn her into an erotic spectacle, let's say something that's appealing to him. That's not just a matter of her appearance, but that's part of it. But also her character, right? There's the suggestion in the end that he can bring her up to be a different sort of wife. At a certain point, he says, you're not going to be allowed to bring up the children when he finds out about what she's done.
And in the end, right, she says, yeah, you're right. I'm not equipped to bring up the children, so I'm going to leave them here. So here's what he says. He says there's some truth in what you're saying, however exaggerated and emotional it may be. This is after she's accused him of treating her like a doll in a playhouse. But from now on, it will be different. The time for playing is over. Now comes the time for upbringing. Whose upbringing? Mine or the children's? Both. Yours and the children's. My darling Nora. Oh, Torvald, you're not the man to bring me up to be a proper wife for you.
And he says, and you're saying that. She says, and I. How equipped am I to bring up the children? You know, he wants to embroider her to have the kind of appearance that's gonna titillate him and turn him on, right? To kind of accentuate her feminine mystique. But that's all he knows how to do. They're not going to get into the guts of each other. I mean, that's part of the significance, I think, at the final conversation, right, where she says, we've never had a serious conversation. That's more like knitting. That's more like getting. Tearing apart and reconstructing and doing something that's not so superficial as embroidering.
32:12 Erin: That's right.
32:12 Wes: And they would have to change each other and bring each other up or. I mean, her point in the end is that they would both have to be very, very different people to get back together. And they can only become different people by being apart. He, in particular, has to be deprived of his doll if he's gonna grow up.
32:27 Erin: Yes. In that scene, Nora describes herself and the relationship that she's had with him prior to the part that you read. He promises to forgive her for having committed this, you know, terrible sin of saving his life. You know, which I think. I think we're meant to take that very seriously. And my understanding is that the climate was so inhospitable to human life that people did have to go, you know, and kind of like, dry out if they had tb. So we're just gonna have to take that seriously in the same way that we have to take seriously the idea that, you know, that Ibsen really believed, for instance, that syphilis was passed from. From father to son. And it's a. It's a point, a plot point, not only here, but in Ghosts, for instance.
33:16 Wes: Oh, that didn't. That didn't happen.
33:18 Erin: The only way that it could have happened was if the mother of the child was infected and that therefore the syphilis could be passed from mother to child, specifically, I believe, through the vaginal canal. But the idea of inherited syphilis from father to son is not accurate, medically accurate, but it is interesting, you know, so we have to take this as being, I think, for this whole plot to work and for Nora to not be, I don't know, to have done all this for nothing or to not be, like, completely pathetic. We have to understand that this was medical advice she was given and this was taken as a fact that Torvald had to go to Italy to save his life or to a warmer climate. And, I mean, wasn't this done all the time? People with TB had to go to deserts to dry out, et cetera. Right.
34:07 Wes: No, I mean, certainly people were. Yeah, yes. They were getting sick and going off to spas and spring waters and. I mean, Nietzsche just traveled around Europe, kept. He never stayed put after getting sick. So, yeah, I take that seriously. So I was a little bit tongue in cheek by calling it a one year vacation. But on the other hand, what I wonder about is that he doesn't have a specific disease, does he? It's just overwork. It's just like the guy works too hard. Torvald, you're burning the.
34:38 Erin: I thought the subtext was that it was tb.
34:40 Wes: Oh, really?
34:40 Erin: But perhaps I'm bringing.
34:43 Wes: No, Maybe. I think probably I'm the one who's just reading into it. Yeah, that makes more sense. I just. I want to see her as delusional. Right. That's the patriarchy speaking through me.
34:54 Erin: Oh, boy.
34:55 Wes: That was my impression of her early on. Right. She does come across as very frivolous
35:00 Erin: and, oh, I totally dismiss.
35:02 Wes: Added out of touch with reality and out of touch with what she's done with the loan and. Yeah, no, but we can. Okay, let me not derail you. We can discuss that.
35:13 Erin: Well, no, I mean, I think that's a really important point and maybe this will help us get there because I do think she reveals certain key elements of her. I mean, her life with Torvald has not been easy. I think this is important to note. They are just about to come into money. Things are finally turning around for them. But the. The description of previous Christmases in which she was given so little and was working herself all night, and all Torvald could think about was the fact that she was depriving him of her company and she was working herself like crazy to give the children a good Christmas on the very, very little money that
35:46 Wes: they had caused the results. Meager quote unquote.
35:49 Erin: Right, right. And then we learn, for instance, she's
35:51 Wes: trying to make, what, ornaments out of paper or something. She's making do with the best they have, their gifts.
35:56 Erin: She's trying to give the children some nice gifts. And it seems to me that they lived quite a degraded. She's trying to please him with what little he has, and at the same time she's staying up late doing copying and various other things to try and pay back this loan. The other element of this is the way that he treats her with such indignity. So at the bottom of 182, when I look at it now, I think I've lived like a pauper here, just from hand to mouth. I've lived by doing tricks for you, Torvald, but that was how you wanted it. So she's a beggar.
And we see this early on. We see that Torvald treats her with tremendous condescension and that she has to hide things from him like she's a child and she has to distract him. She plays upon her looks. She's very aware of her own attractiveness. It's something that she mentioned several times in her conversation with that early conversation with Christine. The ways in which she's traded on her looks in order to get what she wants, or the way she fantasizes about trading on her look to have a wealthy, older benefactor give her money things, things of that nature.
Obviously she's thinking in the back of her mind of rank, but it doesn't occur to her that this is what actively in her conscious mind that this is what she's thinking of. At any rate, she's aware of her attractiveness and she's aware of the effect that it has on Torvald. And she basically has to distract him and manipulate him just to be able to eat what she wants to eat. She's not allowed to eat macaroons because he says they're going to be bad for her teeth. She's living with someone who is emotionally borderline abusive and she has very, very little dignity.
37:32 Wes: I agree. I just think that she's conformed. She herself has conformed to it. Right. She's not self aware underneath and scheming to get by, but she is.
37:41 Erin: She's scheming a bit. She's. She's scheming to get what she wants. And I think she is self aware, but.
37:47 Wes: Well, in a. I don't think she knows at the beginning of the play that she's been wronged. No, she doesn't know the things that she, you know, she has an epiphany and then she sees it at the end. But before all that, you know, it's all unconscious and she's just complying and. Yeah, she's scheming in the sense of. And she's doing some lying too. It's not just the fraud. But what does she do? She says that rank or Christine brought the macaroons or something. I forget.
38:13 Erin: Yeah. Very, very childlike defense.
38:16 Wes: Yeah. But she can get away with that, right? Yeah, because she is treated like a child and she's in the position of a child and they have a. You know, I think that's one of the interesting things about the beginning of the play where especially if you see it acted, it's like, okay, is this some cute, fun little banter that this husband and wife have? You know, is it kind of endearing? Do they have a nice little relationship going? And then it just gets kind of sickening.
38:42 Erin: Oh, yes.
38:44 Wes: You know, has my little spending bird been out frittering money again? But it gets sickening in various ways. In a way it's too. Right. There's the element of condescension involved. It's involved. There's her kind of hyper feminine conformity to his condescension. But also. Right. As we learn more and more about what you've called his borderline abusiveness and that becomes more and more apparent and the ways in which she's confined by all this.
39:14 Erin: That's right. And I think that at the very. At the beginning of the play, we see her through Torvald's eyes. You know, we're getting all of this information about her. I mean, he assigns all of these, in addition to the inhuman nicknames he has for her, namely that he repeatedly calls her a squirrel, a bird, various other things that can't speak. Right.
39:37 Wes: She's one. Right. You know, is she a squirrel or a bird? Make a choice. Squirrel or a doll. What's that one?
39:46 Erin: In addition to these pet names he gives her, he's also assigning her the characteristic of being a spendthrift. And I don't take that seriously for one moment. If you look at the evidence, she's not a spendthrift at all. What he's describing, for instance, he says, you're a strange little one, just as your father was. You're forever on the lookout for ways to get money, but as soon as you get it, it's as though it slips through your fingers. You never know what you've done with it. Well, we must take you as you are. It's in the blood. Oh, yes, it is. These things are hereditary, Nora. So he ascribes her father with this flaw as well. Of course, we learn later that this is money, that she's essentially stealing from him to pay. Because it's not her money, it's his money. Right. That's the other element of this. He has no sense of sharing.
40:30 Wes: Well, he also. He ends up counting out money to her shortly after that. So Right. Shortly after he accuses her of frittering it away. He basically is using money. So he says, hmm, is my squirrel standing there sulking? And then he takes out his wallet. What do you think I have here?
40:47 Erin: Yes.
40:47 Wes: Well, it's like he's a stripper and he's going to rain down some dollars on his money.
40:52 Erin: That's exactly.
40:53 Wes: And he's like, here you are. And then 10, 20, 30, 40, which is really in the BBC production. The way they pull that off is really interesting because it's very flirty and very sexual. You're exactly right to be skeptical about his accusations of her extravagance. We don't really see any evidence of that in the play, except for the vacation, which, as you've argued, is probably necessary and is not just a vacation. But anyway, I'm already falling into the trap by calling it a vacation. So we don't see any evidence of that. But we do see evidence of his participation in this whole money thing and his use of that to kind of control her. It's a game. It's the same Sort of game as the tarantella and all the rest of it, the embroidery, it fits into the same game where he can use it to control her.
41:47 Erin: Well, we see someone with a tremendous amount of pomposity and control who accuses someone else of being a spendthrift. Instantly, we know, well, someone like that, a spendthrift, to them is anybody with a normal kind of relationship to money. We can just as easily turn it back around and say, well, how are we to know that he isn't a miser and that she isn't perfectly normal?
42:10 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I do think we get that sense that he is obsessional and the whole thing with debt. He's a bank manager, but he doesn't seem to understand how debt might work to their advantage, which it can. But if you know something about money, it's not a very sophisticated financial position to say, oh, no debt ever. Right. That betrays his flaw. But. Sorry to interrupt you.
42:34 Erin: That's right. No, but she, you know, as Nora says, there's something called quarterly interest, you know, to Christine, and she says, let's see.
42:44 Wes: It's very mysterious and magical and who can keep track of these things?
42:48 Erin: She said, they're terribly difficult to get hold of.
42:50 Wes: Yes.
42:50 Erin: Yeah. So I've had to save a bit here and a bit there, wherever I could. You see, Naturally, I couldn't put much aside from the housekeeping money since Torvald had to live comfortably. Torvald has to live comfortably, but she gets to have little things handed out to her. Naturally, I couldn't put much aside from the housekeeping money, since Torvald had to live comfortably and I couldn't let the children go badly dressed. Whatever I got for them, I had to use every bit. So Christine says. So I suppose your own necessities took the brunt of it.
My poor Nora. And she says, yes, of course. But I was also best placed whenever Torvald gave me money for new dresses and the like. I never used more than half of it, always bought the plainest and cheapest thing. It was a blessing from heaven that everything suits me so well. So Torvald didn't notice. But many a time it weighed heavily on me. Christine, she has been living like a beggar and living in such a way as to really reduce the comforts that she had to pay off this loan, while not giving any indication to Torvald that anything was amiss by not letting his quality of life suffer at all, while her suffered tremendously.
The first thing that we see her do is be generous and There's a big difference between being a spendthrift and being generous. Of course. The porter comes in with a Christmas tree and she asks, how much? And he says, half a crown. And she gives him a full crone and tells him to keep the change. That's generosity. Then when Helmer comes in, when. Sorry, I keep going back and forth because he's Helmer in the.
44:19 Wes: It's fine. Yeah.
44:20 Erin: In the script.
44:21 Wes: And she's Mrs. Helmer.
44:23 Erin: Sorry, she's Mrs. Helmer. That's right. We have several words for her relationship to money that he gives us, which is that she fritters things and that she's extravagant. These are two words. We have spending bird. But when he's. When he's talking about her spending, he calls it frittering and he calls it extravagance. Whereas when she talks about spending, she says, letting ourselves go, Torvald, surely we must be able to let ourselves go a little this year. After all, this is the first Christmas we don't need to save. So there's this implicit idea of freedom, openness.
We can relax now. We can let things go a little bit. We don't have to be so restricted. Instantly, he turns that into frittering and extravagance. I think that's key because I think this has to do with Nora's generosity of spirit, her freedom, her sense of wanting to have freedom versus what Torvald is all about, which is control and trying to reign her in constantly. She's not allowed to be herself, to follow her own light at all. She has to react to him. She has to. You know, he has to constantly tell her she's always doing something wrong, you know, and he is.
He's constantly punishing her in these little tiny ways. And so, yeah, I do think it's. I mean, I think abuse is such a. You know, it's not a word I want to say because it's overused, but I do think it's abusive.
45:49 Wes: Yeah. I think it's interesting, these kind of names that he has for her, because a squirrel, right, is actually stores up the nuts, right? It doesn't just eat the macaroons.
46:02 Erin: Yes.
46:03 Wes: It takes them somewhere and stores them. But squirrels also, you might think of a squirrel as a sort of scavenger. So, Right. She's kind of rummaging around, picking up bits and pieces. So you get the image that she's a scavenger in her own home. And that's when he counts out the money to her. That's one example. She's dependent on what she can get from him. So it highlights her lack of independence, as does, of course, the bird names. Right. So she's like a bird, like a caged bird, but also she's a skylark chirruping for him. She's there to be pretty, she's there to be an ornament.
She's there to not be free and fly and spread her wings. Right. Ultimately, the end, he's gonna think of her as wounded and he's gonna want to spread his wings over her. I can protect you. Right. But on the other hand, she's a quote unquote spending bird, which I think you're right. I don't think we can take that seriously. Based on what the evidence that we get in the play. What we do see is that in a way, her desire to spend, it's just normal housekeeping stuff, but it's also a bet on the future. You could think of it as investment. And that's the way you can look at the trip that she takes him on.
You can see it as something associated with love. And it's an investment in future possibility. I have to take out this loan to take Torvald on a trip so that he will not die, so that he will get better, so that he can be cured. You can call that extravagance if you want. And if you are initially skeptical like me and you don't think it's weird that people take one year vacations to get cured, then that's the attitude you might have, that it's merely extravagance, but if it's necessary, then it's an investment and it can reap rewards. He doesn't have that same attitude towards the future.
I just wanted to highlight that because the investment that she's made at an unconscious level is in finding out if he's the kind of person that he pretends to be. Right. He says at various points he would sacrifice everything for her. That if anything bad happened, he would take it all upon himself and she's going to prove him wrong. She sets in motion the events that will prove him wrong and show him not to be that actual person. I think that's in the end what the loan is about. But we better, we better stop part one here and then continue in our next part.
48:34 Erin: Okay, thank you.
48:35 Wes: All right, thank you
48:40 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (Part 2)
Jul 14, 2025
What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”
Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”; Jaws, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Picnic at Hanging Rock. We just got done talking about the dangers of algebra and I don't need any convincing there. And I hinted at this in part one. I just want to talk about Australia itself and its status as a curious—what is it—cipher, which I think the film is working with. Maybe Hanging Rock itself is kind of a stand in for all of Australia, but I just, you know, I was reflecting on the fact that Australia is a kind of a nowhere. Its name is from the Latin Terra australis incognita, so unknown southern land.
So I guess its southern ness is the thing that remains in the name of the place, but it's otherwise sort of unlocatable. It's of the west, and that it was colonized by the west, and yet it is not Western. It's not really east either. You know, it's sort of like too far east to be east. It's in the Southern hemisphere. So we have this topsy turvy quality to a Western sensibility in which February 14 is the height of summer. In terms of its landscape, you know, it's sort of tropical, but not really, and only on the edges. It has the outback, the bush, this arid landscape, which at the same time can't really be mapped onto the more famed landscapes in the Western imagination that are desert, like the Sahara or, you know, it has a sort of frontier quality, but it's not as recognizable or legible to us as, say, the American frontier, the American West.
And it has this history of colonization, but it's as a penal colony. So that's kind of a whole other thing. Right? So we can say that, you know, this film has attracted a lot of comparisons to something like Passage to India, which in my mind has a far more legible colonial statement, in a way. Or it's far more. Right. Like we think of India, when we think of places that were colonized by England, we think of that place as being a place which has its own long culture, its own architecture, its own sense of itself, and this extremely lush, verdant, tropical place.
And then we think of the British coming in, right, and trying to laminate on top of that some sort of something, you know, whereas. Whereas Australia just doesn't have, you know, it has obviously the aboriginal peoples, of course, but in the Western imagination, that there isn't that kind of easy parallel. We don't Think of Australia, you know, it's not the first thing that comes to mind when we think of any number of these categorizations that we have in the west of understanding either the parts of the world which are other from the west or the parts of the world on which the west has left its mark.
And I think that the fact that Australia kind of stands outside of a sort of easy narrative really makes it this ideal place for a story like this, which I'm. Which I'm suggesting is a sort of anti. Mystery or which is deconstructing the mystery story. Because in the way. In a way that's kind of Australia's whole bag. That's Australia's whole thing. It's this thing that. That can't be classified, that can't be understood, that there is no language to encapsulate. And so what happens on Hanging Rock is kind of like, you know, that mystery, that central plot point, is kind of like Australia itself.
Which then leads me to think about the kind of people who come to Australia and therefore the kind of people who end up teaching at a school like Appleyard College. Because of course, on the one hand the girls are these fascinating creatures because their teenage girls are kind of nuts and they're, you know, a lot of these girls are beautiful and they're wealthy and they're connected to nature and they're all, you know, at the bloom of youth and all that. But of course, in all of the. In every instance that is about a repressive school, of course, the most fascinating people are the teachers that are there because the teachers are in this bizarre position of being probably at best middle class and being thrust into this situation in which they have to provide for themselves by ministering to these girls who are very shortly going to entirely leapfrog over them.
And yet they have control over these upper class girls in the environment of the school. And so, and, and that I think is complicated. Or further. Yeah, further complicated. That already fascinating relationship with this idea of Australia. Like, why are these women here? You know, like in England, of course they're there because they're English and they need a job, right. But in Australia it's like, how did you get here? What's your. Greta McCraw is Scottish, you know, and there's that shade of. Because it's a penal colony, you know, and Australians have embraced this largely.
But, you know, there's that hint of, you know, even if you were born here and you didn't immigrate here, perhaps your family has this sort of Sordid history. What's your background? Why? How did you end up here? I don't know all of that to say, like the French teacher is a fascinating figure to me. McCraw is a fascinating figure, less so because she just seems to be very sour faced and very, you know, exactly the kind of person we would associate with the school. And Appleyard, too, is a fascinating figure.
5:50 Wes: I think it's a forbidding and in many ways alien environment. Don't forget the kangaroos, Right? And the koala bears and the.
5:58 Erin: Yeah, yeah, there's that koala in one species.
6:00 Wes: Lots of species we don't have.
6:02 Erin: Yes, yes, many unique, endemic. Yeah, but species that are not found anywhere else.
6:08 Wes: Right, right. We can go out west in the United States and have an experience in quite an alien landscape. But Australia takes it to a different level in some ways and it's more forbidding and more harsh and more remote. And so in that way, I think you're also pointing to more mysterious. So. Yeah. I think one wonders, given the history of it being a penal colony and people being exiled to this place, why have these girls been exiled to boarding school? Many of them are English. Right. Are they all English or. I mean, as upper class or are there any upper class Australian girls at that school?
6:45 Erin: I think Miranda. Yeah, I think Miranda.
6:48 Wes: Oh, she's, she is Australian, of course. Right?
6:50 Erin: Yes. And she, she has familiarity with the bush.
6:54 Wes: Okay, Right.
6:55 Erin: It's noted that she would probably survive.
6:58 Wes: So maybe I'm wrong. Are any of the girls English? Maybe they're all Australian.
7:01 Erin: Well, I think, I think what, what does it mean to be English in this circumstance? Right. You know, we have these colonial families, perhaps, perhaps largely military families, perhaps not. I'm not sure. My impression is in India they were largely either associated with the military or with the East India Company. In Australia, I don't know. But, you know, if you end up moving there and then raise a family there and then your kids are born there, are they Australian? You know, but there's that funny line.
7:28 Wes: I think I should backtrack here. I mean, is anyone really sending their English daughter to an Australian boarding school? I. Halfway around the world?
7:36 Erin: Perhaps not. I mean, one of the plot points, for instance, in A Little Princess, the Burnett novel that I mentioned, and others, is that the children of colonial parents in India were sent to England to boarding school because of the climate, which was thought to be not good for children. So many were separated from their parents, but in the, in the reverse direction when it comes to India, at least. And you would Think depending on what part of Australia they were in with the anxiety over malaria and various other things. I mean, maybe that's not a problem in Australia, but one could imagine, you know, if they thought heat would make you crazy or something like that, if you were a kid, then they would want to send you to a climate like England, rather send you out of Australia. And of course, England's the only place, so. Yeah. I don't know.
8:20 Wes: We get the sense though that Michael is English. He's the nephew of a colonial governor.
8:24 Erin: Yes. He's only been there for a few weeks, I think it said. Yeah.
8:28 Wes: And then he's leaving at the end.
8:29 Erin: Yeah. I love the scene with the party and the string quartet in the middle of the man made lakes in the middle of the bush. It's like, you know, talk about denial. There's just no, there's no beating that level of denial. It's really just classic English behavior.
8:50 Wes: Well, again, it's this attempt to use the natural landscape as a form of leisure. Right. Just like the string quartet, it belongs among those things. And that's what the picnic is about as well. Except that there are dangers. Classical music is a little less dangerous than going on a picnic at hanging rock.
9:11 Erin: That's right. Not to make too fine a point of this, then we can abandon the teachers if we wish. But I'm thinking about what you said with Ms. McCraw and this idea about algebra. I wondered too, what kind of education these girls are getting. Insofar as Sarah knows more than Mrs. Appleyard about poetry. It doesn't seem to be a good one. Insofar as they have that sort of really stupid looking calisthenics class that they're doing at the end or towards the end of the film. You know, I was thinking about the difference between Ms. McCraw and Mademoiselle de Poitiers in terms of the difference in the nature of instruction.
So the French teacher's appeal seems to be that she speaks French and therefore she's just going to speak French to the right one. One doesn't need any kind of special training if one is French and just gets transported to an English school. Right. So something maybe about the naturalism of that or the sort of lack of instruction inherent in that instruction, which isn't to say that the Australian girls aren't being instructed properly or don't have to exert themselves to learn French. But the difference between the difference in those two intelligences and why those two particular ones end up on this trip together, why the One with a more natural intelligence doesn't end up being spirited away.
It's just. It's a source of, I think, endless fascination for me. You have these two completely opposite women. I think I like Ms. McCraw quite a bit, and I love that actress. She has a great, intelligent face and
10:36 Wes: she has, you know, some of the best lines, I think.
10:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah.
10:40 Wes: But, yeah, it's a great contrast in characters. I think in both cases, though, we can wonder. I described the girls as exiled, not from England, but if you're being sent off to boarding school, you know, it is the thing to do. Right. And it's not necessarily a punishment, but one could ask, if it is like being sent to a penal colony, what did you do wrong?
10:59 Erin: Yes.
11:00 Wes: And then for the teachers, the question becomes even more relevant. Why would you leave France and go to Australia? Unless, you know, you really got yourself into some trouble.
11:10 Erin: Yes. Or some tragedy befell your family. Yeah, yeah.
11:14 Wes: And trouble. Trouble could mean a pregnancy that you gave up for adoption at that time. Trouble could mean a lot of things. But so. And Lumley. Yeah, I should have. Is Lumley English or Australian?
11:26 Erin: I think she's Australian.
11:27 Wes: I can't remember. McCraw, you said, is Scottish. Yeah.
11:30 Erin: Yes.
11:31 Wes: So at least in the case of McCraw and de Poitiers, what happened to them that, you know, had them end up at this school in Australia. Yeah. It's the kind of thing where you can, you know, if you got yourself into enough trouble and you're not going to do what Sarah did, what do you do instead? You just go halfway around the world and start over. That kind of feeling. Yes, that kind of thing. So you do might be something, but
11:54 Erin: without the hope, without the hopefulness of going to America. You know, like, this is part of the difference, too. You know, I think there's the narrative about America. You can go there and you can have a fresh start and everything's going to be okay. The narrative about Australia is like, you go there because you're guilty, and then what, you punish them?
12:15 Wes: Manifest destiny.
12:17 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
12:19 Wes: Foster's destiny.
12:20 Erin: Right. I mean, it's a lovely place, and I would love to go. And I just mean that there's no narrative about it that has to do with pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps or other obnoxious expressions.
12:31 Wes: So, yeah, I don't know if there's a. You know, the idea of a pioneer spirit, of course, plays a big role in the American psyche.
12:38 Erin: Yeah. There's the bushranger and the adventurer yeah,
12:41 Wes: but I don't know. It doesn't seem to mean the same thing in Australia.
12:47 Erin: That's right.
12:47 Wes: And that's why I mentioned Manifest Destiny. It doesn't.
12:49 Erin: Yes, exactly.
12:50 Wes: Yeah. What else do we want to talk about? I mean, there's Miranda's ineffable character or. I don't know how you would describe it. Dreamy and inscrutable maybe is a word I would use.
13:02 Erin: Yes. And her foreknowledge, or her. She seems connected to. I mean, of course, what she says about how she knows she's not gonna be here much longer could be related to other circumstances. In fact, she's this. In the book, the three that disappear are all senior girls. So, in fact, she's about to graduate. That's an element of it as well.
13:23 Wes: I mean, the film starts right, we have a girl's. There's credits. And as credits roll, a girl's voice. What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream. And that kind of sense of the unreal is pervasive. And Miranda, in a way, strongly exudes that. So I think we start out in Miranda's room. And there's flute music. And Miranda waking up looking very angelic. And having that kind of touched quality about her. It's a kind of self confidence, I suppose, that she exudes home with herself. Which I think you could. Could associate with class in a certain way.
But it's not like adolescent youthful insecurity. She doesn't give that off. So maybe it's kind of a version of femininity which is fully at home with itself or something like that. As opposed to some more anxious form. And then I think Sarah looks back from a window, smiling at Miranda. There's a very loving relationship between them that one might wonder. You know, there's a homosexual element. Miranda is reading from Sarah's Valentine's card. Meet me love when day is ending. And at that point, actually, Miranda has just washed her face, but not dried her face, which I thought was quite odd.
She has, like, beads of water hanging off her face. And reading that poem.
14:43 Erin: Probably because of the heat.
14:44 Wes: No, I think. You know, there's another scene where another girl has washed her face and dried herself normally. And then Miranda doesn't just leaves the water there.
14:51 Erin: But maybe Miranda's smarter about the heat because she's from the bush.
14:54 Wes: Yeah, maybe you're idealizing Miranda just like everyone else. I'm just kidding.
15:02 Erin: I think there's something to that.
15:03 Wes: Meet me love when day is ending with the Beads of water cooling your angelic Botticelli face. And then you get a shift to another scene where another girl's reading from another girl's card. I love thee for thy highborn grace. Quoting a real poem there. As opposed to one that's been written by one of the girls. Then you have Edith counting, kind of gluttonously counting all the Valentine's cards that she's gotten.
15:28 Erin: Even Edith has many admirers.
15:30 Wes: Maybe it's worth kind of going over the different cast of characters here. Because there's Sarah, who I think we've sufficiently described. And then Miranda. And then we have Irma. Right?
15:41 Erin: Yes, the dark haired girl.
15:43 Wes: At a certain point when they're on the rock. Edith wants to comment on the fact that Sarah's been writing love poetry in the dunny in the bathroom. And Miranda will say, she's an orphan. She's an orphan. And Irma compares her to a deer that she adopted that didn't live. So Edith says, Blanche said Sarah writes poetry in the dunny. She found one there on the floor. All about Miranda. Miranda, she's an orphan. Then Irma said, sarah reminds me of a little deer Papa brought home once. I looked after it, but it died. Mama always said it was doomed. Edith says, doomed? What does that mean, Irma? Doomed to die, of course. And then Edith says, I think I must be doomed. I don't feel well at all. She's the one who's not doomed.
16:32 Erin: Yeah. Anyway, anyone could tell she's the least doomed person on the expedition. Nothing could kill Edith.
16:42 Wes: And then there's Marian, who says, I wish you would all stop talking for once. And Marian has some great speeches earlier on about people being ants.
16:51 Erin: Yes, she's the little Miss McCraw. She's the class.
16:56 Wes: Right? Exactly. Whatever can those people be doing down there? Like a lot of ants. Surprising the number of human beings are without purpose. Although it is probably they're performing some function unknown to themselves.
17:08 Erin: Love that one.
17:09 Wes: And then Miranda says, everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place. And by which she meant our lives are going to end at the right time and place. The contrast that comes out here is the superciliousness of that kind of speech by Marian. But she's doing it from this kind of third person perspective. Aren't we all kind of like ants and purposeless in comparison to the forces of nature and the scale of things and all of that. And then Irma's relationship to Sarah, instead of being very compassionate, let's say like Miranda, even though there seems to be an element of condescension there for Irma, it is quite condescending and suggests.
Right. Foretells the fact that Sarah is in fact doomed like the deer. So Miranda, I think is. She's a very special case among the girls. I guess I want to point out with her character and the way she relates to Sarah and her comfort with herself and the way in which she can become this sort of Pied Piper, I think, become this sort of idealized image of femininity, maybe.
18:17 Erin: Yes.
18:18 Wes: That can lead people to their ruin.
18:21 Erin: In the book, it's clearer. But Irma is supposed to be the beautiful one in the book. And I mean, much is made of Miranda's beauty as well, but she's supposed to be the sort of traditional, not classically, but traditionally beautiful one. And she's, she's an heiress. I think the class distinction is what's preserved in her speeches about Sarah there that you're pointing to. You know, Sarah's someone to be pitied. That has as much relation to us as a deer to the, you know, it's human adoptive parents who basically can't do anything to help. You know, there's no helping the poor.
Right. The poor are poor. And that's, that's the end of it. The Marian speech, you know, that she has that curious disconnect, you know, whatever can those people be doing down there? Well, those are the people they were just with. Those are their schoolmates. There's a curious lack of recognition and as you suggest, is speaking from the third person. And I think this is where we can say, okay, Appleyard has, has permitted them to go beyond the yard into the, you know, the rock as representative of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Right.
And they have at this point ascended to some sort of knowledge. And they have a wisdom now which makes where they came from somewhat unrecognizable. And of course, this is part of what is so antagonizing about Irma when she returns. And she has that fantastic scarlet get up that she wears before she leaves because she's crossed over now. She has big girl knowledge now. She has grown up knowledge. She's been through an experience. And of course that can be just simply the result of having been through a near death experience and to come out the other side.
Or it could be the result of what happened to her on the rock,
20:02 Wes: which was, remember, she's quite intact. Quite intact.
20:06 Erin: Yes, yes, says the doctor repeatedly.
20:10 Wes: Yes, about her and Edith. And Edith, that's the Important thing.
20:15 Erin: Right. Yeah. And yet she's become a woman somehow.
20:20 Wes: But of course. Exactly. You know, as you point out, not.
20:22 Erin: Yeah. So it's as though all of these angry Eves. Children of Eve. Right. Still haven't eaten of the fruit and are quite upset about the fact that the one who has isn't sharing their knowledge with them. That seems to be the chief problem there. But I think Miranda. Miranda came into the picture already having eaten something thing. Right. And I think. I think that's the difference. So I think this is extremely common and related. You know, Miranda is the it girl there are in. Among teenage girls. And it doesn't necessarily have to be sexual or whatever, but simply this homosocial environment, which maybe exacerbates this.
But this is the. The girl crush, specifically on the older girl who seems to know things. Everything that you don't know when you're just a freshman and she's a senior and, you know, you. If you're lucky, she's not a mean girl at the same time. No, not at all. Not at all. No. It's a very, very different thing. It's a very different thing that.
21:21 Wes: Yeah.
21:21 Erin: Very rarely are the mean girls, which is to say the popular girls, deserving of that kind of. That kind of status based on anything having to do with looks or intelligence or anything. They're usually like just the terrors of the school. And that's how they get all their power. But. But on an individual. But I mean, I remember being a freshman and having senior girls that I was that in. In the theater productions that I did who, you know, when they would give me attention, it was like, oh, my gosh, it was the most, you know, incredible thing to be given attention by these girls who were beautiful, mature, knew everything were kind to me.
And, you know, I think this is. This is like a universal thing with. I don't know about the way things work with boys, but I'm sure there's probably a parallel to this. Yeah. And Miranda seems somehow to be the one that everyone in the school agrees is the top banana.
22:16 Wes: Is there anything to say about why they keep going? This is the thing that freaks Edith out so much. Right. So that they've been trekking on, and they kind of, at a certain point seem like they're walking in a kind of funk, in a kind of daze because they're so tired and hot and they lie down on the rocks looking very tired. You know, we get shots of the kind of peaks of the rock against the sky, and. And then there's a little. There's a little brief cut actually to McCraw. And the other girl's lying at the bottom of the rock. And McCraw looks up, like, what's going on up there?
And then looks back down into her. Her geometry book. And then after that shot, we see top down, the girls lying on a kind of called a courtyard or a clearing, like a rock clearing. And that shot is through this very hot air and they're lying down and, you know, it's a kind of distant shot from up high. And then Miranda wakes up and then Marian and then Irma. And it's. Right. Without being alerted by Miranda. It's not like anyone wakes anyone else up. They just sort of wake up simultaneously and get up and Edith is complaining, when are we going home?
And then Miranda goes off into a kind of a crag or crevice and the others follow her and they don't respond to Edith. Then they don't look back. And that's when Edith screams and runs down. So, yeah, what do we say there about what has happened psychologically or symbolically? I mean, what is that?
23:41 Erin: Much is made of the fact that Edith isn't looking at the rocks. She keeps looking at her feet. I might be one of them. You know, there's people who can't be hypnotized or something.
23:50 Wes: Well, it's like she counts the Valentine's cards, right? Look how many I got. She doesn't get lost in the poetry, reading them some love poem another girl's written for her. And it's just more about quantity.
24:03 Erin: Exactly.
24:03 Wes: I would be very much like Edith. Look at this stack of, you know, Valentine's girl.
24:14 Erin: She promises not to complain, but then she does. And then she says the thing about it being nasty here, which, you know, there seems to be an environment which it's not so different from where they just were with the other girls, but different enough in terms of the feel of the place, the atmosphere, that she finds it to be extremely nasty. And she never takes off her shoes, which is important, so she stays protected somehow from, you know, so her sole insulates her.
24:42 Wes: Not in touch with the rock.
24:44 Erin: That's right. She can't give herself over to the experience. Everything is about her discomfort, her this or that. She seems to be a complainer and she does not let go in the way the other girls are capable of doing.
24:56 Wes: Yeah, but what's going on with the other girls, I think was my question.
25:00 Erin: That's the million dollar question.
25:01 Wes: It might be an unanswerable.
25:03 Erin: Yeah, I Mean, have you ever been to a place like this before? I have an experience at a place like this. It was at Devil's Tower. Tower. Have you ever been to a place that was overwhelmingly beautiful in this? I mean, there are. There are places that are overwhelmingly beautiful. What happened at Devil's Tower was extremely unusual. And I think it's the closest parallel I can make to Hanging Rock, which is, nothing happened there. I don't mean to make that sound more, you know, like, oh, yes, what happened to me? At Devil's Tower.
25:35 Wes: Devil's Tower. Discovered two days later.
25:37 Erin: Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Ridiculous.
25:40 Wes: Englishman.
25:41 Erin: I'm putting this in a stupid way. No, you know what I mean. Or. Or you don't, and I'll explain it. So you go up there. If people don't know if they've ever seen Close Encounters. That's the rock formation from Close Encounters. I think it is the one that's the one with Richard Dreyfuss and his mashed potatoes, right? Yeah. So it's that, and it's enormous. You have no idea how enormous it is until you go up there. To walk all the way around it. There's a trail to walk all the way around it is like, over a mile. It's very much like Hanging Rock.
It has this long history of people engaging with it. It has, I think, in the Kiowa tradition, a sort of mythology about it, about how it was formed with this bear with the claws. Anyway, it's a sacred site, and it is the spookiest place, one of the spookiest places I've ever been. I was there in broad daylight. The woods surrounding it and the rock itself, it's indescribable. And there is a sound, a very specific sound, which is. Which I've only ever heard in Picnic at Hanging Rock. It's the only other place I have heard a sound like this. And I have footage.
I have video footage from Devil's Tower. You could hear this sound. It's like the sound of the wind going through the rock or on the flutes of the rock. It's an entirely different kind of rock than Hanging Rock, which I would imagine would create the sound because of the air holes that are probably created by the nature of the str. Of the structure. Devil's Tower is a completely different kind of rock. So I don't know why the sound was there as well, but it was an extremely loud, like, ringing in your ears kind of sound. It was extremely spooky.
You just got this sense that you were not alone there, not just because of the Other people that were there, right? Yes. And I was very taken by it.
27:22 Wes: Now, let me ask you a question. What did you do with your mashed potatoes that night?
27:26 Erin: I did. I've never played with my mashed potatoes. Thank you. I'm very civilized. Didn't leave my senses or anything like that. But I. I kept getting goosebumps all over my body. I kept getting. I was very, very affected by it. It was a strange thing. I think that what these girls are experiencing is not unlike a very extreme version of whatever happened to me at Devil's Tower in terms of just this bodily. You have a bodily response to these types of environments. And I think it's this curious case of an environment in which one feels the presence of people, even where, you know, there's this curious quality of some of these rock formations in the west.
And I'd imagine this is similar where they look like they're man made, but they're not. They're natural. And so one has this sense that it's an almost like an abandoned castle or an abandoned fortification or something, but it isn't. And that trick, too, is extremely hypnotic somehow. I don't know. This has nothing to do with anything. My personal experience is not an answer to your question. I'm sorry.
28:30 Wes: No, this is good. Can we point to any other similar stories where the hypnotic quality of nature leads them to play with their mashed potatoes, so to speak? Sorry. Leads them to their demise. Leads them to their destruction.
28:44 Erin: Not to destruction, but there's a moment which is very evocative for me in a movie which is also based on a novel called Enchanted April, in which these English women escape this particularly rainy spring by going on a trip to Italy. And there are scenes in that film and in the novel on which it's based in which the women are laying on the rocks on the coastline of Italy. And at one point, one of them is lying so still that a lizard. You know, it's a very similar scene where a lizard kind of comes in, she's actually awake, she's aware of it, and she's just lying there, but she doesn't react to the lizard kind of crawling over her and then crawling away.
It's such a peaceful moment, you know, they've all gotten their groove back in one way or another, and they're at one with nature, you know. So there's that, which I think is a trope that I've seen more times than that, but that's the one that I could think of because that's a film I love. And that's another experience that I think is extremely common. I don't. I don't think the Devil's Tower experience is extremely common because those places aren't so extremely common. That's. You know.
29:50 Wes: Yeah. I don't think I've had that experience. I don't think I've.
29:53 Erin: The Devil's Tower or just the feeling at one with nature while you're lying on the rock.
29:57 Wes: I've had the feeling at one with nature experience on a rare occasion.
30:01 Erin: Oh, you've talked about that before when we did the Wordsworth.
30:04 Wes: Oh, did I? After taking a hike.
30:05 Erin: Mm.
30:06 Wes: I was in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Yeah. After climbing. Doing a lot of climbing. Being very, very out of shape, being exhausted, but then reaching a lookout point right at sunset and sitting down and being very in the zone. But. Yeah. No. So. Well, getting to the point where I have a. Maybe I'm hypnotized to the point where I want to keep going. Enter into the fugue, whatever fugue state those girls are in. To the point where they could just take the stairway to heaven.
30:34 Erin: That's it. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. I've been in that a few. A few times.
30:41 Wes: It's like, girl, we gotta get. I'm determined to do this whole hike. We're gonna go to the top. This would be a good Chevy Chase vacation moment. Going all the way up. You know, scene where they're all dying of heatstroke.
31:01 Erin: Well, so what do we make? I mean, we haven't yet addressed, really, Michael or.
31:06 Wes: Yeah. What's his deal?
31:07 Erin: What's his deal? Yeah, yeah. So we have this sort of parallel homosocial. You know, Michael and his buddy Albert, who watch girls cross creeks and drink from the same bottle of beer, you know. So you have a sort of parallel there.
31:23 Wes: Yeah. And you wonder, in a way, if it's a bit of a curse that they've cast on the. On the girls. Right. The idea that they've. That they might have been involved in some malfeasance is not. The film doesn't seem to entertain it very seriously, at least at length. You know, we do get Albert lusting after the girls, and then he'll say something to which Michael objects, which is that she'd have a decent pair of legs. He's talking about Miranda all the way up to her bum. Michael says, I'd rather you didn't say crude things like that, Albert.
31:58 Erin: Shocking. Shocking. I say shocking.
32:01 Wes: And Albert says, I say the crude things. You just think them. So there's saying them out Loud. There's thinking them and then there's doing. There's acting on them. And as we know, people can feel guilty about just thinking them without even acting on them and think people can even have the irrational idea that their thoughts maybe are like deeds, that their thoughts might actually harm people. And so if we take that idea seriously, we can think of this concupiscence of these boys as cursing or harming the girls. If we look at it the way someone with OCD might look at it, or someone with omnipotence of thought might think about this, might wonder if it's this kind of desire which wrecks things, so that the feminine, in a way, is set up to elicit this kind of desire, but in one way or another is destroyed by it.
32:57 Erin: What do we take then, of the fact that the movie, I think, toys with and then very swiftly abandons the possibility that Michael and Irma will have a relationship? Right. Am I making that up? Yeah, I think that's right, because he saved her. So they both had this experience, and now perhaps they're going to be together.
33:20 Wes: That would be a nice natural development. And he's looking kind of fondly at her as she's lying in bed, right?
33:27 Erin: Yes. Yeah. Crucial to this development is the lack of conversation between them at all. So.
33:32 Wes: Yeah.
33:34 Erin: Then they talk and realize other than this one terrible thing that happened, they have nothing in common.
33:40 Wes: We don't. Yeah. And we don't really know exactly why Michael is so intent on finding the girls. You know, it almost is as if he feels personally responsible for what's happened to them.
33:52 Erin: I don't mean this to sound like quite as much of a condemnation as it will, but there's a great deal of paternalism there. You know, he was on the rock that day, too, and therefore what happened to them was somehow his fault, even if it wasn't his fault. I think that the film plays really cleverly with the. You know, we see his innocence at the same time, and yet we see the guilt that he carries, which looks like guilt over what's happened to them at first. But there's. Yes, there's this paternalism that something happened on his watch. He just happened to be there, and yet it's his responsibility, which I think is indicative of the kind of attitude of the colonial.
34:30 Wes: Okay. If it's colonial, he goes native in a way, because he.
34:34 Erin: Yes.
34:35 Wes: He falls subject to the same spell and ends up in the same spot, in a way, as the rest of the girls, which is he's dying on the rock. And it's only because Albert comes and gets him that he's saved.
34:47 Erin: Right.
34:47 Wes: You know, he's shaking and he's mute. Right. He can't even tell Albert that he's found Irma. He just has to, you know, hand off the piece of the dress as he's being taken away. So he's in a really bad state. But you can see how his. His fascination with Miranda, in a way, is of a piece with the fascination of the other girls. And he's been kind of led up the rock by the Pied Piper as well. And then you can contrast that fascination. So there's a hybrid quality to his interest in a way. Right. He's an investigator and he's more successful than Sergeant Bumpher.
But he also has this other fascination which motivates him, which is precisely what Sergeant Bumpher doesn't have. Bumphur seems perplexed and a bit put off. We never quite, you know, we never fully understand what's going on with him and why, you know, is he just incompetent or what's going on that. But there seems to be a way in which this whole thing. And maybe it's the possibility of a sex crime, basically that's what's. Which interferes with Bumpher's ability to do his job because it's distasteful. Anything sexual is too much to take. But he.
He doesn't have enough motivation to get the job done. And he's even right to the point where after Irma is found, there's a bit of an uprising among people in the town. Like this boy found her and you weren't able to. And what are you doing anyway? I was trying to speak to. Not to get us on the Bumpher, the sergeant, necessarily, but just speaking to Michael's complicated motivations.
36:23 Erin: Yes. Yeah, I think they're both. Bumpher and Michael are either attracted to or repelled by forces which they themselves can't name or acknowledge, but which they feel are there.
36:34 Wes: Right.
36:34 Erin: So the. The. The sexual implication for Bumpher is the. The fate worse than death. The thing that he does not want to be sort of infected by or he doesn't even want to imagine, because that. That seems to be the worst thing that this society can think of. You know, I like what you're talking about in terms of the idea of his having infected them with his thoughts. That seems to be crucial. Like there's a guilt element which is crucial here, and then also a paternalism at the same time, and the idea that he is responsible somehow for what's happened to them and for their protection, so that he's in a sort of loop of colonial paternal responsibility, which Bumpher can't sort of rouse himself to feel on behalf of these women because he was not personally taken under their spell or something, and therefore can stand a bit apart from it.
But, yeah, the spell of the girls seems to be an extension of whatever was the spell they were under that caused the disappearance in the first place. And maybe Bumpher is more like an Edith and Michael is more like, you know, one of the girls. But it does seem to be, you know, a Rorschach test for the people in the town. Their response to this, because it is so fuzzy, so utterly incomprehensible.
37:44 Wes: There's the suggestion that the uptightness and the aversion to sexuality is what makes the girls unfindable and what leads to their ruin. Right. One of the things that. So at that T where Michael's saying, you know, young ladies wouldn't be allowed to go walking in the forest like that, the last line in that scene is the sergeant saying, as the girls were jumping the creek, what were you thinking of?
38:08 Erin: Yes. Yeah.
38:09 Wes: That's the closest we get to him suggesting to Michael that he had had some illicit desires that he might have acted on. There's a class element there as well. Right. We might see the sergeant's reluctance having to do with the fact that he is not going to accuse a person of this standing, of committing a crime like this, maybe.
38:32 Erin: Right.
38:32 Wes: But at the very least, there's this aversion to the potentially sexual component. And we find out, right, we hear from Edith that McCraw was just in her underwear and that Edith saw her at a certain point. And then later on, a maid will conceal from the police the fact that Irma was, what, missing her underwear or something? Missing her corset. So maybe, you know, at a thematic level, the girls are not findable because of their sexuality, let's say.
39:04 Erin: Yeah.
39:05 Wes: And they're lost because of.
39:07 Erin: That's great. And it gets. At the extent to which the film kind of has it both ways, because we keep seeing these images of Miranda after she's gone, which. Which leads me to think a little bit more about this idea of photography. But we have, on the one hand this. Well, we have a sort of two pronged thing on the one hand, which is the Victorian idea of, you know, there's nothing. And maybe even a romantic idea that there's nothing more beautiful than a dead girl. Right. And we also have this idea that to kill the Girls or to get rid of the girls somehow is to, like, get rid of the temptation that they represent, the sexuality, they represent, whatever.
Whatever is threatening about them in Victorian society. So that's. That's sort of on the one hand, but on the other hand, we have the fact that they are gone, the fact that there's no image, so nothing more beautiful than this image. But then the image isn't there. There are no dead bodies of these girls. So that we're denied that dead girl. Beautiful dead girl. What is it? Satisfaction, you know, the dead girl satisfaction, actually. You know. You know what I mean? We're denied the image of what's. What's happened, and therefore denied the supposed beauty that accompanies this.
I hope listeners will understand I'm, you know, saying all of this in air quotes that comes from this idea of beauty cut down in its prime or. Or whatever. We're denied that image, and yet the film provides it. Right. The film keeps showing us images of Miranda and the. There's an association as well in Michael's mind with the swan, the idea that Swan might be, you know, twinned with her. So we keep seeing the swan over and over again. We do see the image in the newspaper of Miranda's face, 1900. Sort of looks almost like a sketch drawing, slightly more.
More involved than a sketch drawing. Black and white, fuzzy image of Miranda's face, a photograph printed in the paper. And it makes me think of Sontag's On Photography. You know, the idea of the photographic image is the thing which is something akin to a colonizing force, you know, the desire to own the world, to capture the world in the way that a safari hunter would try to capture something of the world and mount it on one's wall to prove some kind of dominance over it, to prove that one has had these experiences and. And preserved them, or come back with proof that the experience was.
Had this idea of capture and of making sense of a world which is scary and dangerous and nonsensical. This is another element of Sontag's essay, in which the camera is the protective screen between you and, you know, very often the foreign culture that you are encountering. So you protect yourself by taking the photo. You don't know what to do with yourself. You take a photo, you know, you come up against something which is foreign and strange, and rather than really looking at it, you put a lens between you and the thing. All of these complexities, I think, are inherent, very, very submerged, but inherent in this, with these images.
And, you know, we see people with photographs Going to the hanging rock and trying to photograph the rock in order to understand what has happened there. Right. And so, in a way, the film is like, by virtue of being a film, is working against its own message or working against the impulses which are motivating the film's plot. Because there is something being captured there. And it's about. The whole movie is about this sort of inability to capture, the inability to pin down and to quantify and categorize and colonize the ways in which it works against that, through collage, through slow motion, various other things which are manipulations, which are, in a way, sort of hyper photography.
But at the same time, they work against the singularity of the image or of easy readings of certain images.
42:47 Wes: Yeah. No, you're making me think of the imaginary in cinema. I think there's a book called the Imaginary Signifier by Christian Metz. Yeah, it's about psychoanalysis in the cinema. So just briefly, I think for Lacan, the imaginary has something to do with. He's thinking of a phase in early childhood when you see yourself in the mirror and you identify with the image and you're identifying with its cohesion physically. You know, just seeing your body and you're identifying with its efficacy. Right. Limbs that can actually do things. And we all know how toddlers delight in being able to use their bodies as they become more.
Get greater mastery over their bodies, and then that becomes the way in which they develop the fantasy of their own ego being, or subjectivity and identity being something stable and cohesive. So they use this image as a way of forming an identity. So it's a kind of identification that's the imaginary as opposed to the symbolic. And the symbolic is more representative of what happens after you are inducted into the social world and are following all. You know, get to the point where you're following on society's rules. The name of the father, Lacan would say, which he sees as metaphorical castration.
There's a wholeness in the imaginary which is disturbed in the symbolic realm. But I think so when you have these other girls identifying with. So they're taken with Miranda. But it's partly erotic in the broad sense. You could say it's partly about love, but it's also about identification, about wanting to be her, to become like her and to be as whole and perfect as she seems. But as you've pointed out, there's something deathlike about that wholeness and perfectness. So you can follow the imaginary image. Right. It's like, ultimately, Narcissus, that's what Narcissus is doing.
Right. Being entranced with himself in the pool. In the pool. The image of himself in the pool to the point where he doesn't take care of himself and dies. So the imaginary can be something with which we identify. Can be very dangerous. It can. Or another way to put this is our ideals and aspirations or ego ideal can come at the expense of our real self.
45:16 Erin: Hmm. Sure. But then how does this work for. For Miranda? Because I think part of Miranda's appeal is that she's not like this narcissist. I think you're suggesting the other girls are like that. They're idealizing her.
45:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean she just gets to be what she is.
45:32 Erin: She just is. Right? Yeah. And she doesn't have to. She's not part of that wholeness seems to be about the fact that she isn't self obsessed. So the fact that she's the ringleader.
45:42 Wes: Yeah. She comes across. I think it's important she comes across as authentic and authentically whole. Not that anyone is of course completely. But she has a self possession to her.
45:52 Erin: She's more self actualized than the other girls.
45:54 Wes: Yeah, she's. Yeah. As much as a 18 year old. Is she 18? But no. Yeah. I'm thinking of the relationship of. And she wouldn't need to be actualized of course at all. Or she just needs to give that appearance. And of course again, we can do it with our own. We don't need another person necessarily. But we kind of do. You know, if it's not Miranda, it's celebrities or it's teachers or authority figures. People you want to be.
46:24 Erin: Yeah. You have to have an identification with someone to model adulthood. Or normal. Even just normal behavior. Never mind idealized behavior. Right.
46:33 Wes: So in other words, going up the rock is like getting excited. You know, despite the fact that you're already a doctor. About becoming an actor. I'm becoming an actor.
46:46 Erin: The world's first analrapist.
46:50 Wes: You can follow your aspirations to your total destruction.
46:55 Erin: There you go. I did not know we would get to Arrested Development here. But we normally do. Okay. Well, that was fun. I hope.
47:03 Wes: Sorry to stop halfway up the mountain, but more cautious than some people.
47:08 Erin: Yes, yes. Lest we be carried away. We won't continue talking about this film and fall deeper under its spell. That wasn't nasty here at all. I'm glad I came to paraphrase and turn Edith on her head. Thank you.
47:23 Wes: Thank you.
47:27 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock”
Jul 08, 2025
It’s Valentine’s Day in the state of Victoria, Australia in the year 1900. A group from a local girls’ school goes on an excursion to the foot of an eerie, vast geological formation called Hanging Rock. Three girls and one schoolteacher climb up to explore it. All but one are never seen again. This summary constitutes the essential plot but only the first act of Peter Weir’s 1975 film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. The remaining two acts concern the surviving characters’ struggle to make sense of what happened on the rock. Yet, sense is not what the film intends to deliver. Rather, it’s an anti-mystery that dismantles the nature of the mystery story itself—its love of solutions, its neat settling of the uncertainties that crime or menace introduce. What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language? Wes & Erin discuss “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”
Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”; Jaws, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. It's Valentine's Day in the state of Victoria, Australia, in the year 1900. A group from a local girls school goes on an excursion to the foot of an eerie, vast geological formation called Hanging Rock. Three girls and one schoolteacher climb up to explore it. All but one are never seen again. This summary constitutes the essential plot, but only the first act of Peter Weir's 1975 film based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. The remaining two acts concern the surviving characters struggle to make sense of what happened on the rock.
Yet sense is not what the film intends to deliver. Rather, it's an anti mystery that dismantles the nature of the mystery story itself, its love of solutions, its neat settling of the uncertainties that crime or menace introduce. What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language. Today we're discussing Picnic at Hanging Rock. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I heard that when this film came out, it did pretty well on college campuses.
But when I was a master's student at the University of Florida, I discovered that not all college students were enamored by the film. And there was a story that one of my professors told that the students at a screening of this famously rioted and threw furniture at the screen and it was covered in the campus newspaper that they were so upset, I guess, that the film had no resolution. Spoiler alert. That it had no resolution and they were so hoodwinked and maybe possibly drunk, I don't know. So I wondered if you had seen the film before. I think you were unsure if you had, and whether or not you ended up throwing any furniture or what your reaction was.
2:27 Wes: Yeah, no, it turns out I haven't seen the film. I knew of the film, of course, but I had not, it turns out, seen it. I didn't do a lot of research, but I knew going in that it was going to be. I knew the plot and I knew it was going to be unresolved. It would be interesting to have just gone into it completely fresh and to see if it would have Been disappointing under those circumstances, but no. Yeah, it didn't occur to me to be disappointed with the lack of resolution in the ending. And overall, I suppose the film has a kind of dreamy, surreal quality that I guess there's a few hints that there might be some sort of explanation as to what happened.
So, for instance, the fact that Michael follows the girls, that there is a bit of suspicion cast upon him, but it's quite subtle and passing and not much is made of that. So I don't think the film builds up a lot of suspense, actually, about the mystery.
3:28 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. I have the Criterion set, and a while ago I watched the documentary in which Peter Weir said that he was trying to prepare the viewers for the fact that there would be no resolution to the mystery through the tone and other clues. So, yeah, so it is. It is surprising. But this is a film that I. I saw when I was probably a little bit younger than the age of the girls in the film. So when I heard that, I was so shocked, that story. Because by that time, this had long been one of my favorite films. So I was surprised that anybody would go looking for meaning from this particular story or that kind of meaning.
4:06 Wes: How old were you when you first saw it?
4:08 Erin: I was probably 14 or 15.
4:10 Wes: Okay.
4:11 Erin: Yeah. This is one of my mom's favorite films. So she introduced it to me at the right time. Age that I was. It was like the perfect age, you know, the perfect girls, boarding school kind of age, to see this film for the first time and be really affected by it. But, yeah, to this day, it's one of my favorites. And I think it's possibly the best Australian film. I haven't seen every Australian film, but I think there's something here actually to do with the nature of Australia itself, which we might talk about.
4:36 Wes: All those poisonous snakes, all the things
4:38 Erin: that want to kill you. Yeah. But did you enjoy it? I'm just, you know, I'm curious about your reaction in a more general.
4:45 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I enjoyed it. I did watch it twice. So I guess the routine now is to watch it twice so that I'm not trying to take notes during the first viewing, which can interfere with the enjoyment. But I guess because I'm thinking about recording on it, I'm not as attuned to how much I like it or don't like it. I mean, I can't say it's no Mission Impossible. It's not like Tom Cruise is doing amazing stunts and there's things exploding.
5:14 Erin: Well, it's Very. It's a very.
5:15 Wes: Yes, it's an artsy movie. So. So in other words. Yeah. I'm not equipped to the kind of an. Maybe. Maybe this way to put it. I'm so. I've been so bludgeoned by popcorn movies that I'm not as sensitive to what's going on when I'm.
5:34 Erin: That's funny.
5:34 Wes: Looking at arts here movies. And I. I can appreciate them aesthetically, but. So I appreciate it. And in fact, I think the second watching, when I was taking notes, trying to look very carefully at what was going on, in a way, strangely enough, that was more gratifying that I watched them days apart and I didn't expect to have the second time be more pleasurable because then I knew it was gonna happen. I done.
6:01 Erin: Well, for me, it's. I had never really thought so deeply about the film before until preparing for this recording. Just kind of thinking through it because for me there's nothing to do but enjoy the movie. I mean, it's so beautiful. You know, there's not. It's just. It just sort of washes over you. I can't think of a more beautiful film off the top of my head. Maybe some Merchant Ivory films or something, but I'd say they're on par.
6:25 Wes: I have a complicated relationship to beauty, I think, but so does everybody.
6:31 Erin: Don't we all? Yes. Yeah. It's so gorgeous. And I think the film. I think I watched it at such an impressionable age and it made such a huge impact on me. It's like, embedded in my psyche in some strange way. So lots of images from the film, the birds collaged with Miranda's face and various other things are extremely. Or even just the opening credits with the rock rising from the mist. Like, that's like one of the main images from that. That time in my life, maybe.
7:01 Wes: And it is. What. It's 1975, so it's right there in my. My wheelhouse.
7:06 Erin: I know, I know.
7:07 Wes: 60s and 70s.
7:08 Erin: Yeah. I thought. I thought this would have. Be a crossover hit for us, but alas. Well, maybe we'll still have some. An interesting conversation here. But anyway, it's also sort of. I'm not sure if it's propaganda for or against poetry, but certainly poetry plays a big. Plays a big part in this film as well. You know, we have the character of Sarah. Well, you know, before I even get into that, I'm also curious to know because I was sort of polling people. Who do you think the main character is?
7:35 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking about that. A little bit, because we really were getting a few different stories. In some ways, Sarah seems to be the protagonist. In some ways. Michael Albert, of course, has his own arc. In a way, the strongest arc belongs to Mrs. Appleyard herself. So maybe it's an ensemble movie. Maybe we have multiple characters or I'm sure someone has said in an essay somewhere, ooh, it's the rock, it's hanging Rock is the main character. There's a lot of fading shots in this movie where you get one image overlapping another. Right. Maybe that's the main character. Just that transition, the collage itself.
8:21 Erin: Well, there's something to that. I think the film is really interesting. Interested in photography, oddly, and also in reproductions and images and mirror images. Something about the nature of the film itself seems. Seems to be thematic. But I was thinking about that maybe lack of a main character as somehow, I don't know, somehow an expression of this idea that the genre seems to me to be an anti mystery, for lack of a better term. So we have, you know, we have a movie that's acting as though it's going to be some kind of procedural crime drama and it just routinely dismantles those expectations.
And I think we discover very soon that they aren't going to be solved or settled. But then we do get some, you know, one of the girls does come back and we do have this repeated effort on the part of the characters to solve the mystery. It becomes kind of a low key media sensation in the film. And I wonder if the fact that there is no locatable main thread or maybe the main character is Miranda who then just disappears. So then you're sort of dealing with a film in which the protagonist is simply gone and the film is trying to reckon where the story is trying to reckon with working itself out in a vacuum.
Because this girl seemed to have been such a pivotal. She has a kind of cult of personality around her at the school. And so the film seems.
9:45 Wes: She might be the antagonist.
9:47 Erin: She might be. She might be. That's right, yeah. And you know, we think that maybe the police officer is gonna, you know, come in and have a disappointment arc, at least if he's not going to solve it. But you know, I was thinking about the mystery's association with a single protagonist or with the figure of a detective or someone who comes in and solves it all and figures out who the antagonist is. You know, like part of the mystery story seems to be about figuring out actually who the. Who the characters are and how to classify them. Right. So the Fact that it is an anti.
Anti mystery, as I'm. As I'm suggesting. And the fact that the characters are all. All important and unimportant. Is this sort of an egalitarian film, in a way, is, I think, indicative of the fact that the Rock doesn't have a narrative that we can attach to it. It doesn't have the story, doesn't have something we could pull out and say this is the explanation. In the same way that we can't look among these people and say that's the most important person because that's the person that, you know, everything hinges on.
10:48 Wes: Yeah. Maybe it's worth just describing a few of the different arcs and broad brush, you know, what is Sarah's story? Sarah is an orphan and she's been separated from her brother Bertie, who turns out to be Albert. And some unknown benefactor far away is financing her attendance at this boarding school where she is quite out of place socioeconomically. Although we get an idea that there are probably other girls like her there as well. But she's certainly in the minority compared to all the posh, privileged girls she goes to school with. And she's got a defiant streak.
She's not doing her work. She wants to compose poetry rather than simply read it from memory. It gets her held back from going to Hanging Rock to getting involved in that adventure where she could well have been one of the ones who never came back. Right. She would have followed Miranda to the very end, all the way up to, you know, sex Heaven or wherever they ended up going. Oh, boy. Floated up on a red cloud into. But
12:04 Erin: into the spaceship.
12:06 Wes: And so what happens to her? Well, she loves, you know, her and Miranda have this very loving relationship. And it's a bit asymmetrical, of course. Miranda has a superior position and it looks kind of pities and condescends in a way to Sarah. And Sarah seems to look up to and idealize Miranda. But then in a way, she's abandoned. Miranda tells her, look, find someone else to love because I won't be here much longer. And explicitly, she's returning to the fact that alluding to the fact that she's going to be moving on from the school, although one and read it as a prophecy.
And this is the way Sarah later on reads it, is that Miranda knows she's not going to be coming back. This is after Miranda says, you'll have to come meet my quirky, funny family. I forget how she puts it, but one day you'll have to come visit my sweet, funny family for Yourself, which is a rather nonchalant way to put that to someone who themselves doesn't have a family. But she goes from that to the very abandoning idea. But you also have to find someone else to love. I won't be here much longer. And then Miranda does complete that abandonment.
You know, if you want to read it on some level, as Miranda purposefully, like the Pied Piper meeting everyone except Edith, who's sensibly hysteric about sex, runs screaming down the mountain, she leaves Sarah behind and Sarah is once again abandoned. And not only that, Miranda's. Again, if we read Miranda's having done all this, it leads to the school being in big financial trouble and trouble otherwise, which means Appleyard has to crack down and kick Sarah out, which leads to Sarah's suicide. So you can see why I would want to frame this dynamic in terms of.
So that's just one arc. I'm not going to go do them all. Maybe you can do the next one. We could do Appleyards or something next. But you see, the. That's one story, but it's not even the story. You couldn't say that that story, that Sarah's story. Right. Takes up a huge part of the film, or is the main thing in the film, because it's so evenly balanced between these other stories, But.
14:18 Erin: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I did some thinking yesterday about Sarah as a representative of the Romantic. The capital R romantic sensibility versus the Victorian sensibilities of the school. You know, we could think of Sarah as the antagonist to Mrs. Appleyard, or Vice versa, but we have these twin portraits that are featured semi prominently in the film, where Mrs. Appleyard has that prominent portrait of Queen Victoria in her office. I think it is. It looks like everything is so heavily upholstered in every room that Mrs. Appleyard is in, it's difficult to tell what the purpose of the room is.
She has a portrait of Queen Victoria and it, of course, takes place in the state of Victoria in Australia. Newly named, I would imagine. Not quite so newly named, but maybe. And then in Sarah's bedroom, she has the portrait of Byron. And of course, as a lover of Byron, she's obsessed with her brother, so she has this. This desire to, as you, as you've already mentioned, to write poetry herself. She writes. Is it an ode to Saint Valentine? It's not an ode to. For some reason, I thought it was Cupid for a second, but I second guessed myself. Ode to Saint Valentine.
I think it is.
15:27 Wes: Yeah. It's an ode to St. Valentine, yeah.
15:30 Erin: She writes herself, which one could imagine is a kind of Keatsian or Byronic composition, but is instead being forced to read, well, Heman's Casabianca or Longfellow's the Wreck of the Hesperus. Mrs. Appleyard is not really up on her English lit the way that she imagines that her. That she is. So she misnames or misidentifies the author of the Wreck of the Hesperus as Felicia Hemans. Both of these poems that she refers to, the Wreck of the Hesperus and Casabianca, are about young children, either in the Wreck of the Hesperus, sacrificed because of the flaws of the parent, or in Casabianca, sacrifice to duty that they perform at the behest of a parent.
So both of them are about children who end up dead. And both of them, I think, are representative of a kind of Victorian sensibility towards what we might call typical Victorian middle class values. So we have familial duty, duty to one's parents, honor, staying at one's post, doing one's job. In the Wreck of the Hesperus, this is literally she's staying at her post. Her father goes out to sea in the middle of a hurricane. He's warned against doing this, but he's too prideful. And as it's clear that the ship is going to potentially be wrecked, he ties his daughter to the mast to try and save her.
She's later found by a fisherman, dead, still tied to the mast. The ship was wrecked at Norman's Woe in Gloucester, Massachusetts. So anyway, the conflict between these two sets of values, I think, are interestingly indicative of the nature of this school, of the nature of Victorian society itself, of Australian history. All kinds of things are kind of coming together in this clash between Sarah and Mrs. Appleyard. Sarah also, you know, the name and the fact that she's an orphan at this wealthy school reminds me of Sarah Crewe and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, if familiar with that Victorian novel for children.
But essentially we have this, what do we want to call it? An aristocrat of the soul, you know, a princess in rags who represents a kind of earlier sensibility versus these, the middle class values of Mrs. Appleyard trying to run a school in which she has all of these little princesses in her charge. And it's like she's an administrator in a place where there's all this plutonium that might go off at any moment and she's the one responsible for, like, keeping the lights on and, you know, making sure. That. That everything runs according to plan.
18:06 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah.
18:08 Erin: I just want to say that I think that, you know, this romantic sensibility is very much a teenage girl sensibilities. The idea of Victorian society is to take all of these things and all of these feelings and repress them according to a kind of middle class value system which ended up being imposed from the very top.
18:30 Wes: Right.
18:30 Erin: Victoria herself is a sort of like, you know, angel of. Of middle class values. Very different from the kinds of aristocratic values which were previously ascendant in the English empire and representative of people like Lord Byron. And. And so the clash between these things is like the clash between nature and repression, between the Australian continent and the English colonizers. All of these things, I think, are represented in this clash of wills between Sarah and Mrs. Appleyard, in which Sarah is fatally outmatched ultimately, but Then so is Mrs. Appleyard in a way.
19:14 Wes: Yeah. So I like. There's a lot of different parallel conflicts here that you're pointing to. One is between parent and child when it comes to the process of civilizing children, and likewise to like a, you know, between a Victorian colonialist project and the people who are supposed to be civilized by it. Right. There's also a picture of a tiger on Mrs. Appleyard's wall. Not just Queen Victoria. So you get right. The project of the boarding school is in parallel to this, you know, colonials project. And. And then, of course, there's more broadly civilization versus nature, which comes out right in the film.
In a way, they're going up against the natural world and they're not equipped for that. And then, as I've said on the podcast before, I think femininity codes is more civilized and also more upper class. So there's a class dynamic, upper versus lower class. But then there's the whole question of what represents the very essence of civilization or moral stricture, which is in some sense the feminine. And then whatever that comes into clash with, which is not easily put right, because nature is not coded as masculine. Nature is also a raw feminine force.
But given Appleyard's project with all these dreamy, semi psychotic young girls, you know, burgeoning adolescent sexuality and writing poetic valentines to each other and reading them at the beginning of the movie, you know, to each other, there's one thing you don't want to do, which is hire a French teacher. What's her name? Is it de Poitiers?
20:59 Erin: Yes, it is. Diane de Poitiers. Which is. Which must be Mademoiselle, a reference to the famous Famous royal mistress.
21:08 Wes: She's just DP in my notes. I didn't want to write it out every time. D.P. so, mademoiselle. Now, I don't want to try to say that on the podcast each time either, but we'll just call her Diane maybe.
21:18 Erin: Yeah, sure.
21:19 Wes: Mademoiselle is the French teacher. Well, she. In a school where you have a lot of grim, tight assed women like Appleyard or Ms. Lumley, other than the lower class staff like Minnie, for instance, the French teacher stands out as she's young, she's beautiful. In a way, she's one of them. Or, you know, partly one of them. She's the one who gives them permission to go up on the rock even though Appleyard warned them before they even left. Don't do that. You're not allowed to do that. I forbid it. In a way, the French teacher participates or colludes in the whole.
This whole project by giving in to them and saying they're allowed to go up by themselves. Even to the point where when Miranda is leaving and turns back and gives that very potent goodbye, as if it's going to be her last goodbye. And what does de Poitiers say? She says, now I know she's one of. You know what I think? Is it Ms. McCraw who asked her? You know what she is? A Botticelli angel. She's been looking at Botticelli in her art book. Right?
22:35 Erin: Yes.
22:36 Wes: Yeah. Don't let these French libertines into your school if you want to keep things.
22:41 Erin: I know. Shouldn't the English know better?
22:43 Wes: Appleyard sows her own destruction with all that. So, I mean, just looking at her arc. Right. Yeah. She's tasked with this project. Her husband is dead. She's hitting the sauce on the side because of the stress. She's not without heart. She's not without a conscience. She has a little bit of a breakdown. Has to give Sarah the bad news about leaving. What is so funny about that?
23:10 Erin: You're just so funny. That is so funny. Sorry. You should do just like, you know, like. Like two minute summaries of art films. Appleyard, what's her deal? She's hitting the sauce on the side.
23:29 Wes: But it's a very tragic arc for her, of course, which is that in the end she's willing to lie. Who is it who lies in the movie? She lies. Who else lies?
23:40 Erin: Michael.
23:41 Wes: What does Michael lie about?
23:42 Erin: He says that all he did was watch them cross the creek.
23:46 Wes: Yeah, right.
23:46 Erin: But then he's. Then he mentions that the dumpy one film is so cruel to Edith, that the dumpy one was following behind after them. So we know from that that he actually. And then he later admits. And we could see why he does this, because he's a suspect.
24:01 Wes: Yeah.
24:01 Erin: But he then admits that he did follow them a little ways and he saw that Edith was trailing behind when they crossed the creek. Miranda was the last to cross.
24:08 Wes: So he kind of leaves that out until he's brought it. But, yeah. Yeah, let's just see what he says here. Yeah. Then there was a little dumpy one. And then Albert's like, crikey, wait, what is his name? What is the Australian slang? Not lassies, but.
24:29 Erin: Oh, Sheila's.
24:31 Wes: Sheila's. Crikey. Oh, Sheila's.
24:35 Erin: I wonder if anyone thought maybe the dingo ate the girls.
24:38 Wes: Anyway, so Edith is the third. And then he pauses and then said the last one was slim and fair. And then the sergeant says, that's four. So he had said three. And what the sergeant notices is that he's listed four girls. And of course, the. Miranda is the one who's the fourth, is the afterthought, in a way. And she's the one who figures so prominently in Michael's fantasies. And then Michael's explanation is that. Well, that's because the dumpy one was back a little, which doesn't quite make sense to me now, because Edith is the third one. Where does he admit to following, though? Maybe I'm. Maybe this is the wrong.
25:16 Erin: A later scene. I think he admits to it.
25:19 Wes: That's right. Sorry, Yeah, I pulled us into the wrong scene. So, yeah, a little bit later, the sergeant says this is when he's at tea with Michael. And I guess it's to the side of this party, this posh, fancy party. Sergeant says, why didn't you tell us you followed the four girls? And Michael says, I didn't exactly follow them. I just jumped across the creek and walked towards the rock for a little way. I was curious. In England, young ladies like that wouldn't be allowed to go walking in the forest. Not alone, anyway. But what if they had a French governess?
Anyway, but they'd gone by the time I'd come out of the trees, so I turned back. And we'll never know, of course, if there's more to this story. Michael, of course, seems so sympathetic with the girls. He's gonna search for them and find one of them. And, you know, it would be interesting to know if he was just a madman murderer, maybe forgot he had murdered them and left one alive. But anyway, we'll never know. But that's. Yeah, I guess we don't really know how the sergeant finds out that he followed them. Maybe Albert outed him, who knows? But he's confronted about that fact, so at the very least, he's omitted that.
But I can't think of any other direct lies. But just coming back to Appleyard, the one that she tells is unfortunate. I don't know, what's the word? It's quite a transgression because the lie is that Sarah has been picked up by her benefactor. Right. Sarah has been picked up. Picked up by her guardian and she's telling that to de Poitiers, the French teacher. Why is she doing that? Because at this point, the French teacher has become very concerned about Sarah and Appleyard doesn't want to seem like a cruel. You know, the cruel one who's kicking Sarah out of the school.
Is that right?
27:06 Erin: I think so.
27:07 Wes: I think I was just bringing that up because that's a critical mistake. That is part of why she, in the end, is done right. Once Sarah kills herself.
27:18 Erin: Yes.
27:18 Wes: And by the time they even find Appleyard, she's already dressed in what looks like a morning outfit and has everything packed. She knows she has to go. I'm not sure if she had been honest about that situation that she would necessarily have to go, but that is kind of the nail on her coffin, or am I right about that? So I'm just looking at the kind of tragic element of what's going on with her, where her need for to be overly controlling backfires in these important ways.
27:47 Erin: Yes. But at the same time, she too, is permissive. Why does she let them go to Hanging Rock? You know, this is. This. This is the big one of the big questions here. Certainly not the main big question, but
27:59 Wes: I think McCraw is wondering that in the beginning.
28:01 Erin: That's a great speech. Yeah. And, you know, and with a name like Appleyard, there are a lot of. We can make a lot of biblical connections here. She's permissive enough to let them go. And I could go in a lot of directions here. There's the nature of the picnic. There's this idea that perhaps Appleyard is so disconnected from reality, she's not actually aware of the extent to which she is playing with fire. So, you know, this is a sort of replica of a traditional English boarding school transplanted to Australia. There's this Georgian mansion surrounded by palm trees.
There are all of these traditions that seem to be kept alive here. You know, they're not allowed to Remove their gloves until they've gone through the town. It's clear that there's a townie school kind of antagonism going on here, or at least a fascination by the townspeople for the girls. And then we have a picnic itself, which is about. I mean, to the extent that I understand the origins of the practice, I think it's about mimicking the kind of al fresco lunch that the field workers would normally have. But it's an upper class tradition in which, you know, let's go outside and have a meal.
Like these people who we are, who are so far below us on the social strata. You know, let's mimic that idea because it seems like so fun to sit outside and, you know, get baked in the sun the way that these poor people are. So there's a play acting, right, involved in all of it, just like there's a play acting involved in Victorian society and maybe a willful ignorance or just an ignorance of what's really going on here. You know, so much emphasis seems to be placed on their, you know, near seclusion from the society of the town. And it seems that the homosocial aspect of this school is designed to sort of like keep anything from.
Keep any hanky panky from going on, you know, and that's the kind of ignorance, perhaps that, that we're dealing with here. And so on the one hand, we can just say it's ignorance that she doesn't understand the forces at play. She doesn't understand that, you know, nature will find a way or whatever, whatever expression we want to use there.
30:16 Wes: Say that in the voice of
30:19 Erin: Richard Attenborough. Right.
30:22 Wes: No, no, it's Jurassic Park.
30:25 Erin: That's what I was thinking of. Yeah, I thought it was Jeff Goldblum.
30:29 Wes: Yes, there you go.
30:30 Erin: Yeah, I thought, I thought it was the old man who said it, Richard Attenborough. But anyway, regardless, then there's the aspect of voyeurism that might be an explanation. You know, they're supposed to go up to the rock, they're supposed to sit at the base of the rock, but they're not supposed to touch the rock. Voyeurism seems to be a big theme in the film as well. Obviously Michael looks at the girls, the girls look at the rock, the rock looks at them. Sometimes in certain shots it looks literal.
30:56 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting because McCraw will early on point to the foolishness of going out for a picnic in a dangerous environment. So she'll say, this we do for pleasure, so that we may shortly be at the mercy of Venomous snakes and poisonous ants. How foolish can human creatures be? We could say this about any kind of excursion or anything we do for pleasure. We're increasing the risk to ourselves. We could just stay at home. You know, if we hadn't gone the walk, we wouldn't have been hit by the car and so on and so forth. It's a bit more extreme in this case. Right. Because this is Australia and this is, I guess, the. Technically the bush or something.
31:37 Erin: Yes.
31:37 Wes: And untamed nature. And they do have a lot of poisonous snakes. It's not just. I was gonna say, like, going out in Georgia, but actually, Georgia has a lot of poisonous snakes, too.
31:47 Erin: But not. But not even that.
31:48 Wes: I dealt with my share of snakes in Georgia. Yeah, go ahead.
31:52 Erin: There's an even more obvious principle at work here, which is when you're a teenager and you go to a big barbecue or something, there's always the party separate from the party. Right. The teenagers always break away. They find a way. They go up on the roof, they go behind the shed, they go, you know, whatever. Right. Like I've. Every single party I ever went to at a teenager where there were adults, you always break away and you have your own little whatever. You find a pool house. You find some room that nobody else is in, and you all hang out. And usually there's some, you know, funny business that goes on with something. I mean, even. You know. I don't mean that.
32:33 Wes: If this were an 80s movie, you know. Yeah. Someone would be topless. There'd be pool scene.
32:40 Erin: Right, Right.
32:41 Wes: It'd be a party. There'd be a. Yeah.
32:42 Erin: I mean, there wouldn't even be any parents around at all because they're just, you know, latchkey kids. But somehow the parents are always gone.
32:51 Wes: Hanging Rock would be the name of a. Name of a mall now.
32:54 Erin: Right? Exactly. Yeah. No, but you know what I mean, like, there's always. There's always something and something always happens. You know, somehow they've, you know, somebody finds liquor or something and someone either gets hurt because they're jumping off of something or, you know.
33:10 Wes: Yeah. So there's the danger represented by nature, and then there's the dame. Danger represented by their. Their impulses.
33:16 Erin: Yeah.
33:16 Wes: Which are, of course, of a piece with nature in a way, and they're the way in which we're closest to nature.
33:21 Erin: Yeah.
33:22 Wes: But instead of the external force of what might come from the outside, like a venomous snake, which is obvious, of course, it could be read as having something to do with sexuality and the dangers of sexuality yeah. What's at stake are also impulses. One of the impulses, as you said, is to. Is maybe voyeuristic, but there's also just more. Ordinarily, there's the impulse just to go outside and have fun, and then there's. There's sexual impulses, there's aggressive impulses, there's all sorts of things that maybe have more play or more range in the natural environment.
33:57 Erin: Yeah. And I suppose, you know, Appleyard, by not going, by staying at home, I mean, you know, I want to maybe interrogate why Sarah is also made to stay. I guess there's the suggestion, because of what Appleyard says later about Ms. McCraw, that Ms. McCraw was supposed to be sort of her deputy and that.
34:14 Wes: That fabulous masculine intellect of her.
34:17 Erin: That masculine intellect of hers. Yeah. Is there any other kind?
34:20 Wes: The.
34:21 Erin: The idea is that she. That they were going to be safe, that there was going to be supervision not from a French teacher, but from. But from Ms. McCraw. And yet she was the one. You know, it's like. It's like when the. It's always the most extreme people that are taken in the opposite. The opposite direction. Right. Because to me, you know, many jokes, of course, can be made about the permissive French teacher, but to me, of course, she's most normal person in the film. I think that's clear. The French teacher seems to be the most well balanced, considering that they're.
That the school environment is so repressive, bizarre. Any school environment is repressive and bizarre for reasons we could also talk about. But the fact of the matter is she seems the most normal and she has the most human feeling of anyone. And so therefore, sort of, by definition, she's not going to be susceptible to conversion in the same way that Ms. McCraw is. Of course, the movie leaves it open that McCraw might have been just following them to try to get them back. But we have the detail of her having taken off her dress. Of course, that, too may be evidence that she was trying to get them back.
It was an extremely hot day. She might have been just being practical and once she realized that the girls were gone, was trying to make an earnest effort at summiting this rock as quickly as possible to get to them. And she, too, fell, or whatever explanation we wanted to. Same might have happened here. But on the other end of the spectrum, there's the argument that McCraw, because she's so repressed, was therefore ripe to be taken in by the forces of capital, nature and capital S. Sexuality and whatever else might be going on.
35:58 Wes: Yeah, well, her first, I guess, misstep, if you want to read it as that is to kind of not say anything when the French teacher says, yeah, you can go up on the.
36:08 Erin: Yes.
36:08 Wes: She gives a look, I think as they leave, she looks a little bit alarmed or nonplussed by the French teacher saying, now I know, now I know. And you know what, you know that Miranda's a Botticelli angel. But she doesn't intervene. And she said some very. I don't know, she comes across almost as a soothsayer earlier on, right? So after that remark about what we do for pleasure, you know, not long after they've taken their gloves off and Hussie says, there she is, ladies, Hanging Rock and crosses. The mountain comes to Muhammad. A hanging rock comes to Mr.
Hussey. And I had to look up this whole idea, right? If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must come to the mountain. Which I take to be the idea is that we can't just get what we want through fantasy. We either have to work for it or we have to come to terms with reality and give up on it. But in this case she seems to be suggesting that Mr. Hussey's kind of lower class and therefore meager ambitions, right, are being somehow rewarded. And I don't know, maybe they're being rewarded in like manner with this weird monstrosity instead of a mountain, right?
Something in a way deformed or maybe something's coming to too easily to him, I'm not sure. But she goes on to give us the science behind Hanging Rock. It's volcanic and it's. Or actually Hussy says that. And McCraw will correct him and say it's not just thousands of years old, but it's millions of years old and
37:44 Erin: it's actually just 1 million years old. Relatively young, she says, compared to the rocks around it.
37:49 Wes: Oh, right, it's Hussy, right? She says a million, then Hussey says thousands. Millions. Devil of a long time away in a manner of speaking. Okay, Samwise. And then she corrects him again. One million years ago. And she'll say, quite a recent eruption, really. The rocks all around Mount Macedon itself must be all of 350 million years old. Siliceous lava forced up from deep down below. Soda trachytes extruded in a highly viscous state, building the steep sided mamelons we see in Hanging Rock. And quite young geologically speaking. Barely a million years.
38:25 Erin: Please, Wes, this is supposed to be a podcast for kids. Stop reading.
38:31 Wes: Right. So what she's describing there, it sounds like the hanging rock is kind of like it's a congealed ejaculate, right?
38:41 Erin: Yes.
38:41 Wes: Highly viscous. Or it's something almost. It's been frozen. It's a snapshot of ejaculation that's frozen in time. And now you can go climb on it if you want.
38:51 Erin: Right.
38:52 Wes: So pretty gross.
38:55 Erin: It is.
38:56 Wes: And then right after McCraw says that, a girl says, waiting a million years just for us. So why am I bringing that up? You mentioned. Okay. Her susceptibility to being converted, which had me thinking, I think for the first time of the mine ads. I don't know why I didn't think of this before, because there's a lot of dancing and frenzy and the girls are taking their. There's a shot where I think it's Miranda's taking a stocking off. They're just trying to take their shoes off, but in a very sexually suggestive kind of way. And as we know. Right.
The Maenads were followers of Dionysus, so the God of pleasure and ecstasy. Their whole shtick was to get into that state of ecstatic frenzy that we all know and love, that in the 80s movie would just be accomplished with alcohol. But. So I wonder now, I wonder if St. Valentine has actually become Dionysus. But that's another question. I wanted to point to this role for McCraw that you've pointed to as sort of the surrogate for Appleyard and an authority figure who is. She's another failure point. Right. Not just the French teacher. She's a failure point in the sense that her.
What seems like a scientific fascination is covertly, as her little speech seems to suggest, a quasi sexual fascination.
40:18 Erin: Yeah. In her book she's reading about, there's a triangle and it has a point P and point Q. So there's P's and Q's in there. I was trying to make more. I was trying to think of, you know, a dirty way to read what she was reading, but I couldn't think of one. But yes, I had the same. The same thought. I can't quite remember at this point, but in the novel it is noted that Ms. McCraw is too intelligent to be working at this school. That she's actually a first rate mathematician, like a real genius mathematician, and that it's odd that she should be working at the school.
40:51 Wes: Well, it's funny because when McCraw is coming out of the school with her parasol and the French teacher and the girls kind of close their circle. You can see McCraw is a bit of an outsider to this. And. And the French teacher speaks in French to Irma, saying, be quiet, Irma. Ms. McCraw's arriving like she's part of their little. This is part of what's inappropriate about her behavior. But anyway, yes, she's full of human feeling, but she's a little bit. She doesn't have proper boundary here. Yeah. But she says. Someone says. And I forget who it is.
I don't know. I think it's one of the girls says she wants algebra today. And then I think it's the French teacher or someone says, today. Right. And this is part of her masculine intellect, right? This interest in things like algebra or geometry and science. And, you know, today of all days, the day that's supposed to be about love. That's what she's on about. But it turns out to be not the music of the relevant interest, as you're pointing out, with the P's and the Q's and the triangles, you know, and the.
41:52 Erin: Yeah, right. The erotic is always in the triangle. The one thing I wanted to say about your point about Dionysus is that, of course, when the French teacher notes that Miranda looks like a Botticelli angel, she's looking at Venus. She's looking at an image of Venus. So not a. Not a Christian image. Right. And then we have the idea, of course, embedded in that of Venus and Cupid, of the. Of the cherub versus the. Versus the God, you know, the Christian and laminated onto the pagan. So it's just an interesting. It's not a mistake per se, but it's just an interesting thing to say, to look at Venus and say it's an angel.
42:29 Wes: Since we were talking about Saint Valentine and Dionysus, I was just thinking about what's the relationship between love or Eros and then the Dionysian. And. Right. They both, of course, involve the ecstatic. And a little bit of Dionysus is good if you want to try and get yourself to the point of Aphrodite and love. Right. Wine is conducive to sex, for instance. But in a way, the Dionysian, I think might reflect the darker side of Eros. So irrational frenzy and potentially violence. Right. The maenads actually ripped people apart, including Pentheus, people who piss off Dionysus.
And I think Plato, he wants to point to something. What's constructive about love in the Symposium and the way in which it. That can be Sublimated and lead us to higher unities and to an interest in truth or the good. I think he also indirectly is evoking this idea of the Dionysian via Diotima and his own daimon, such that there's a kind of ecstatic or manic element to higher interests, including the sorts of interests. Right. Which like the ones that McCraw have in the mathematical and the scientific. So we are always, you know, you can get a little worked up by a little too much doing too much algebra or philosophy for that matter.
It can lead you into ecstatic places and into erotic places, which then threaten a kind of regression.
44:05 Erin: That's what's convenient about being obsessed with poetry. It's just being ecstatic about the ecstatic. It's so clear.
44:14 Wes: Yeah. You're closer to the real thing. So you don't need to go kill yourself on a. On a rock.
44:23 Erin: Well, no. Instead you throw yourself through the roof of a garden shed.
44:27 Wes: But only if things go right so much.
44:29 Erin: Yes, that's right.
44:30 Wes: That's right.
44:31 Erin: My things might work out, which they always do anyway. All right. Yeah. So I think that what maybe we should start talking about in part two is a little bit about Australia itself, perhaps, and maybe some speculation as to at least talk of the backstory of Mrs. Appleyard, perhaps. And maybe the ways in which the school environment and the sort of odd culture that schools create and the colonial environment aren't so different. And maybe what. What we can glean through that about the teachers, more about the teachers themselves. Okay, so we'll continue our conversation in part two. Thank you.
45:16 Wes: Thank you.
45:20 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
“The Indian to His Love” by William Butler Yeats
Jun 30, 2025
Wes & Erin discuss “The Indian to His Love.”
Upcoming Episodes: “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and “An Enemy of the People.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part four of our four part series on Yeats. For this part we're going to discuss the Indian to his love. Erin, were you familiar with this poem before reading it for today?
0:43 Erin: I was not. I was not familiar with this one.
0:46 Wes: Yeah, it's an early poem. He wrote it when he was 23. You don't see as much written about this. I had trouble finding anything really, but I didn't look that hard. But I was looking in, you know, collections of critical essays and things like that.
0:59 Erin: You mentioned you love this poem. So I don't want to say anything bad about it, but I will say that this, this is a bit of my nightmare vision of a relationship. It scares the crap out of me, this poem.
1:12 Wes: Yeah, well, I think it's meant to.
1:14 Erin: Yes, yes, yes, I think so too, at the end. Yeah, but.
1:18 Wes: But I was curious. I was wondering if you were going to think, oh, well, this is juvenile or something like, you wrote it when he was 23. Yes, yeah, I'm too ignorant. To me it's just a nice bump advanced enough to make the distinction. So anyway, but it occurred to me, okay, yeah, others might not think this is that great maybe, but yeah, Yeats
1:41 Erin: is one of the few poets to really take a whole lifetime to. It's the rare poet who writes his best work so late in his life. Right. So there's a sort of lifetime of apprenticeship and sort of like gearing up for that great work that has to happen. So ordinarily the poem of a 23 year old super famous poet would be, you know, a Keats or something like that. In this instance, it sort of. It sort of reads to me like juvenilia, because Yeats is such a slow starter, not in terms of output but in terms of greatness, you know.
2:14 Wes: Well, I really. I think the thing that grabbed me about this poem was the last two lines of the first stanza. A parrot sways upon a tree, raging at his own an image in the enameled sea. And I know you haven't read this yet, so you should read it in a Second. Second. But I just wanted to say that. That it's. It's those two lines that I think made this a poem that I always. That I, you know, I had a weakness for. Yeah.
2:36 Erin: What's the seed of so much to come, you know? So it's interesting to see it appear here. Like. Oh, he's really interested in birds and narcissism. Narcissism and enamel. And water, apparently, that doesn't undulate at all, even though it's the same. Anyway.
2:54 Wes: Guess it's a lagoon or something. Well, yeah. Why don't you read it before we say more?
3:00 Erin: Okay. The island dreams under the dawn and great boughs drop tranquility the peahens dance on a smooth lawn A parrot sways upon a tree Raging at his own image in the enameled sea. Here we will moor our lonely ship and wander ever with woven hands Murmuring softly, lip to lip along the grass, along the sands Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands how we alone of mortals are hid under quiet boughs apart While our love grows An Indian star, A meteor of the burning heart One with a tide that gleams the wings that gleam and dart the heavy boughs the burnished dove that moans and sighs a hundred days how when we die our shades will rove When Eve has hushed the feathered ways with vapory footsole by the water's drowsy blaze. Yeah, it's hard to read. The lines are uneven, you know, in length, so the music is kind of a little jaunty.
4:04 Wes: Yeah. Very interesting images to begin with because the boughs are dropping tranquility, which I suppose they would normally be dropping. Fruit.
4:14 Erin: Yeah, I think fruit or blossoms. Flowers, depending on the season. Yeah.
4:20 Wes: So. Yeah. So what's being dropped is tranquility. And it seems to account for the smoothness of the lawn and the smoothness of the sea. The tranquility of the sea. Because for the parrot to be looking at the sea as if it were a mirror, it has to be still. Although I will say that only occurred to me preparing for this episode. I had always thought. I had always imagined this as the sea being raging as well. I was thinking of enamel, not as, like, shiny lacquer, but as like some kind of thickly painted brushstrokes. Thick brushstrokes on a canvas of a raging sea. And the parrot looking angrily into that sea and seeing himself in a more. In a less literal sense.
5:08 Erin: Ah.
5:09 Wes: So. Which is a weird idea to have, but I just hadn't thought about it very, very ever very carefully. And then. Yeah, but obviously it's something that's tranquil. The. The enamel, right. Is the. It's. It's. It's shiny enough to be a mirror that the parrot can see him, see himself in.
5:26 Erin: Yeah. There's this tension here between the natural and the sort of cultivated. Right. Because we have. The island is dreaming. We don't know of what. But I think that that self consciousness or that implication that the island has a kind of consciousness like this is almost. I mean, this is a sort of enchanted place. And then the lawn speaks to me of cultivation. You know, that's not a smooth lawn, is not a naturally occurring thing. And then we have this image of the, as you say, the still water so that the parrot can see his own reflection. But there's a self consciousness there. So there's this. The tranquility seems like this very thin enamel surface underneath which there's something going on here. And it's an un.
6:12 Wes: They might just be at a Sandals. There's no one around.
6:19 Erin: That's right.
6:20 Wes: They had a really nice resort.
6:21 Erin: That's right. That's right.
6:24 Wes: But yeah, the island dreams. Right. So I like that personification in the beginning. Although I guess one might think that's a little too cliched or something. Maybe that's why you might read this as a young poem, that kind of personification right off the bat. But I really like the image. It's dreaming in a way, and so it's conscious, but it's not fully conscious.
6:48 Erin: Yes. And it's not woken up yet, even though dawn has broken to sleeping in as well. Which is what you.
6:54 Wes: You.
6:54 Erin: What you can do with sandals if you don't have an early checkout. Just like this contrast between the natural and the cultivated. There's this contrast, I think, between tranquility and things which are not tranquil at all. I mean, we have raging is. You know, I'd imagine this is a loud parrot. This is an angry parrot. And yeah, maybe because he's not under the boughs getting tranquility dropped on him, but sitting on top of the bow, he's not the beneficiary of the tranquility.
7:28 Wes: Yeah, it really is a very sudden turn at the end of the stanza. It's all been tranquility and smoothness and peahens. And then we can imagine the swaying of the parrot. Right. Have you seen videos of parrots and how they do that swaying thing? So we can all imagine how they do that. It's not a Particularly violent image necessarily. But then, yeah, suddenly we have raging. He's seeing himself in the sea. And you know, we can imagine it like a dog seeing himself in the mirror and thinking another dog and getting angry at the other dog and barking, that kind of thing.
8:03 Erin: That's nice.
8:04 Wes: So it really speaks to kind of dynamic of narcissism involving entrapment in one's own image, but also an element of hatred. Because the image often becomes an ideal image to which one. Right. The real self can't live up to that ideal self. So the self that you see in the mirror is an ideal. And then I fall short of that and that's where the self hatred comes in.
8:31 Erin: I can't imagine looking in the mirror and seeing an ideal. But sure, I know what you mean.
8:37 Wes: So Narcissus. Yes. Narcissus can look in the. And because he's so good looking.
8:44 Erin: Yes. Must be hard.
8:45 Wes: He's gonna see. He's gonna see the ideal there and he's gonna neglect him, his real self until he dies. Because he's so enamored and entrapped in the. In the image. Right? Yeah. So for most of us, we can get what the ideal image is just an aspiration. It's what Freud called the ego ideal, or it's just that it's the person we want to be, it's the person we're striving to be. And then we in real life fall short of it. And so in that gap, conscience plays a role, but also self hate can kind of step into that gap. So if you took to go long to kind of say more about this whole narcissism thing, if you take someone who's really pathologically engrossed in that ideal image of themselves to the point where relatedness with others is.
Is discounted, where does the element of. Of rage come in? Right. So if it's some for the failed narcissist, you see the rage come in with. With self hate. But maybe the way to put it is this. Well, there's the narcissism of minor differences. Right. Another Freud rage in animals is rage against. It's not really rage, but aggression against conspecifics. Right. So a lion hunting a deer. The aggression involved is not the aggression involved in that it would have towards a conspecific. Right. If it were competing for a mate, let's say. Then you see things that resemble anger in human beings.
So we have to see a creature like ourselves in order to have this sort of rage. I'm really all over the place with this. I'm not explaining anything. I don't know. Not connecting all these threads together. The narcissism of minor differences suggest that we. There's special animosity between. From Russia to Ukraine, for instance, right now because of Putin's fantasy of being one with Ukraine. Ukraine is this part of Russia that has been lost and it must be brought back into the fold. And the way to do that is with violence.
10:54 Erin: The closer you are to something, the more conflict with that thing upsets you. It seems to be the.
10:59 Wes: Well, the more potential for conflict.
11:01 Erin: The more potential for conflict. Okay. Yes.
11:03 Wes: We make more demands on those who are like us. So for instance, Right. We make no moral demands on animals because they're not creatures who are self conscious like us. They're not like us enough.
11:15 Erin: Yes.
11:16 Wes: So we don't get mad when the dog cuts us off in his car, get attacked by a dog and bit. And I don't moralize it. But.
11:26 Erin: Right.
11:26 Wes: With human beings, to the extent that we think that we can get into the mind of another and that they ought to have certain attitudes towards us and that they're doing something wrong if they don't have that attitude. Right. That's where aggression comes in and that's where these very moralized feelings. Right. Aggression as a. And you did something wrong.
11:45 Erin: Yes.
11:45 Wes: Right. The closer we are or the more that we resemble another, the more potential there is to feel wronged as opposed to just saying, oh well, they're alien to me anyway and they don't matter to me. So yeah, let's point to the irony that the parrot is looking at himself in a calm, tranquil medium and yet feels rage at that calmness. So it's sort of. It foreshadows something a bit sinister. Right. In this paradise. I think. Yes, that's going to. That I think we're going to learn about as we get into the details of this very codependent relationship.
12:28 Erin: That's right.
12:30 Wes: Part of this is about the narcissism of lovers and getting trapped in a. With someone. Right. Who is just your mirror in a way. You love them because they are. They seem to be like you and an extension of you to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
12:47 Erin: Yes.
12:48 Wes: I think that's what's being kind of hinted at here.
12:51 Erin: Yeah. So I think what you're suggesting is the idea that they even share the same face. They murmur lip to lip, which could be one mouth. Right. The top lip and the bottom lip of a single mouth. Right. Or they're Murmuring into each other's mouths.
13:07 Wes: You're giving me an idea here that this is like the sixth sense. Like it's just. In the end, you find out it's just one person.
13:15 Erin: Yes, exactly. Exactly.
13:17 Wes: The Indian to himself.
13:20 Erin: That is his love, you know, what are they murmuring about? The point of it all? Like they would have nothing to talk about in this place. Because it seems like there's a level of cultivation here and also of self, you know, whatever we want to call it, like self consciousness. There's a level of. It's not self consciousness, it's dreaming. But that seems related to art. And the fact that this place is enam, like the sea is enameled around it means that there's something sort of constructed or, as I already said, cultivated. You know, the peahens dance. And though on first blush, that might not be. That might just be describing the way that they're moving, that can also be read as evidence of this kind of cultivation in which this whole place is not quite as it seems, or everything is about performance and.
14:04 Wes: Yeah. Or it sounds like we might be in a painting or an art object.
14:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
14:09 Wes: But the enameled part, right inside the
14:12 Erin: urn, the Grecian urn, though, there's some key hints. This is very, very different from the Grecian urn, of course, that is frozen at the point before, just before the moment of consummation, and also at a point of highest intensity. And I think it's significant that it's never really daytime on this island. One of the key things I noticed, right, it's dawn and then it's evening and night in the middle, instead of day, there's a sort of implied day, but we never get any description of full sun. So there's something that's either waxing or waning at any given moment about this place. It's never itself, which seems to me to be suggestive of the fact that it's an art object. It's not the actual thing, it's the mimetic. It's not the real or it's part of a dream.
14:58 Wes: Yeah.
14:58 Erin: Yes, yeah.
14:59 Wes: It's the dream that you're coming out of just as you wake up because
15:03 Erin: you've killed the person that you were stranded on the desert island with because you got on each other's nerves and couldn't take it anymore.
15:11 Wes: I mean, when the narrator says, here we will more our lonely ship. Right, so there's another little bit of a sinister suggestion there. Lonely and more makes me think of marooned.
15:23 Erin: Yes.
15:25 Wes: They were supposed to just be on a three hour tour. Luckily they had sandals.
15:29 Erin: All their clothes. Yes.
15:32 Wes: So this is a day excursion from the resort. It's not. But anyway. And now they're stuck together forever.
15:39 Erin: I knew this was really about the Skipper and Gilligan. Hence one needing to die. Yeah.
15:45 Wes: Wandering with woven hands, murmuring softly, lip to lip. Very romantic.
15:49 Erin: Not to me.
15:50 Wes: Great, if you limit it to part of the day. But it's kind of terrifyingly enmeshed, Right?
15:57 Erin: Yes.
15:58 Wes: And merged at another level.
16:00 Erin: Yes.
16:01 Wes: Which is again where the narcissism comes in. It's like they're the same person, they're not two distinct individuals.
16:07 Erin: Yes. And this is a great way to kill desire. And one day we'll talk about Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, which is like foundational text to me. A lot of my first book is take some ideas from this. But the idea is that what's necessary to the erotic is always some kind of triangulation, whether the third point on that triangle is your beloved's office job that keeps him away from you or a third person rabbit. She. She examines the. This one particular fragment of Sappho's in which she's watching her beloved and trying to put herself in the place of this man who is courting her beloved.
Right. And so the idea of the triangulation that she's watching someone else speak to the beloved is really important. The erotic charge, the whole idea of Eros, is that that you can't have desire for what is already yours fully. That you are fully enmeshed with. You can't have desire for that thing. That's. That's a contradiction. How can you desire what you already have? So you need to have some distance, some air, some ability to get away from that person and cultivate desire for that person in order for the relationship to work. And so I read the second stanza and it fills me.
Me with terror because this is not any. No one can love another human being under these conditions. It's too much. Right.
17:35 Wes: By the way, we should be mentioning your book more. Well, let's take a moment to talk about our sponsor for this episode, Erin and her book. Yeah, we should be mentioning the fact that you have a book coming out. When is it coming out?
17:52 Erin: January 20th, 2026.
17:55 Wes: Okay, so we have time.
17:57 Erin: Yes, we have a lot of time,
17:58 Wes: but the more episodes we mention it on, the better.
18:00 Erin: Okay.
18:01 Wes: Because we're not going to be able to insert it as an advertisement after the fact. Yeah. So that's Very cool.
18:07 Erin: Thank you.
18:07 Wes: And tell us the name again.
18:09 Erin: Avail A V A I L. Okay.
18:12 Wes: Are there any poems in it that involve this amount of codependency?
18:18 Erin: All of them end in tragedy if they do. No, no. I have a terror of my speaker, shall we say. There's always that triangulation. Useful tactic. Speaker has a terror of codependency.
18:32 Wes: Okay, good. What these two need is a good veil.
18:35 Erin: That's right. That's right. That's Eros. That's what that's about. The veil is the embodiment of the erotic. Right. It's the distancing tactic, one of many. Something so that you don't murmur lip to lip, and then you can't understand each other. It's like, what? I don't know. Very impractical.
18:55 Wes: Just get away from me.
18:57 Erin: Exactly. But then what do you need to be? If you can already read each other's thoughts, why are you even murmuring?
19:04 Wes: We've been stuck on this island for 30 years already.
19:11 Erin: Draw a line in the sand. This is your half of the island. This is mine.
19:18 Wes: I get this. Peahen. You can have the other peahen. Yeah. So I think this is intentional. I mean, I had the same reading of all this. There's too many clues.
19:29 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
19:30 Wes: And right, so murmuring, how far away are the unquiet lands? Right. Yeah.
19:37 Erin: Yes. Unlike right here, which is so quiet with the raging parrot that won't shut up.
19:42 Wes: Right. Well, the raging parrot. All the rage is inside them, just bubbling. That's the kind of quietude that they have. Right?
19:51 Erin: Yes.
19:51 Wes: Yeah. So everything's quiet and peaceful. It's the serenity now kind of thing. Right.
19:55 Erin: Yes.
19:56 Wes: Seinfeld.
19:56 Erin: Yes. Love it.
19:57 Wes: Yeah. And the parrot is just a hint of what's going on internally.
20:02 Erin: Yeah. But the focus is elsewhere, you know, I like that they're so happy. Unlike over there. Right. Which seems to me also to be indicative of trouble. You know, first of all, they have to tell themselves how happy they are all the time, which is always a bad sign. And second of all, they're fixated on. This is so much better than that place. Right. We have to keep talking about that place and how much better this place is in order to get ourselves feeling good about the situation, which is obviously really a shitty one. So.
20:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I do still find this poem romantic, don't get me wrong. Despite that some of these negative implications,
20:39 Erin: you're just a better person than I am. That's just the way it goes.
20:44 Wes: So in the next stanza, we get we alone of mortals are. So this kind of exceptionalism for the enmeshed narcissistic lovers hid under quiet bowels apart while our love grows. An Indian star. So now we get a bit of a grandiose element here. Right. So there it's. It's a star or a meteor. And I suppose as a star, it could be reminiscent of the star of David.
21:08 Erin: Oh, yeah. Or of Bethlehem. Do you mean.
21:11 Wes: Wait, Bethlehem, the guiding star that took.
21:15 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that's the star of Bethlehem.
21:17 Wes: So it becomes a. It becomes kind of a beacon for others. Their love becomes an emblem. So a meteor of the burning heart, One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam and dart. So now I think we're meant to imagine the. This star reflecting in the water as well, and the wings of birds as they fly, reflecting in the water. And then they become one. So all the things that are reflected are one in the water, which is only. Again, this is another thing that I didn't really think of until this reading that we're doing.
21:48 Erin: Yeah. The words that stick out to me in this stanza are apart.
21:53 Wes: Right.
21:53 Erin: That's a really interesting word. They're apart from what the boughs hid under quiet boughs.
21:59 Wes: Apart apart from the other mortals.
22:02 Erin: From the other mortals. Right. From the unquiet lands. But that apartness could also, you know, at first it seems to reflect that they're actually apart from each other. Immediately. It seems to reflect that it's the boughs that are apart from each other, oddly. Yeah. And then the Indian star. This is a question that I had, which is maybe a stupid question. So this. This is an Indian speaker. So to be an Indian, whether this is related to being indigenous to a place, is that. Am I. Is that wrong?
22:34 Wes: I don't know.
22:35 Erin: I know with India it has a different valence, but is this related to indigenous people? Is that where that origin comes? Is that the same origin?
22:44 Wes: I don't know.
22:45 Erin: Okay.
22:46 Wes: I don't think so. I don't. But I don't know. And I don't know the significance to Yeats, except that it's something exotic and there's an Orientalism going on here.
22:58 Erin: But at any rate, say, putting. Putting that aside, that question, aside of being indigenous, is this an Indian who comes to this island? So it is not an island that they have been to before. So this is not like part of, say, if it's India, it's not part of India. Right. It seems separate from that. It seems outside of that realm. And therefore the star that is created is linked to this couple rather than to the place that they are, even though it seems dependent upon that place as. Or part and parcel of that place as the representative of their love and their love in this particular habitat that grows out of them.
23:36 Wes: So this is something that others can see from far away. They can't have it. Right. We're special. We have our love here. We are apart from everyone, and we don't have to deal with all the noise and all the crap that goes on in the real world. But here, let's kind of hike up a flag so that everyone can see us and envy us or put up a little star. And maybe we're trying to educate people, hey, why don't you be like us? Why don't you be loving something like that? Or maybe they're inducing envy and saying, look how much better we are than all the rest of the. Right.
24:12 Erin: And yet that modifier would suggest that all the rest of them. If this is an Indian, because of his place of origin, the Indian star would be accessible to the unquiet lands as well.
24:24 Wes: Right.
24:24 Erin: Or it would be belonging to the unquiet lands.
24:27 Wes: Yeah. I wonder. I don't know. I mean, I think maybe Indian belongs to the island as well. Just because it's exotic to you and me. It's a faraway place and it's a paradise or a dreamy place or something that's unfamiliar. Whatever associations one might have at that time with India. England has occupied India. Since when? Yeah, I don't know. I couldn't figure out what. Yeah. Does Indian star. Is that an idiom of some sort? Does it mean something in particular?
25:01 Erin: No, Perhaps I'm making too fine a point of it.
25:03 Wes: But associations are.
25:04 Erin: No.
25:05 Wes: Yeah, but why don't you restate your point? Is that the Indian star would be far away from where they are, as opposed to far away from where the readers are.
25:14 Erin: No, that it would be that it seems to sort of arise out of this place which is separate from the unquiet lands. And if the speaker has taken his name from his place of origin and the fact then that the star is given this modifier, which is indicative of, like, a whole society and a whole culture which they had rejected. And therefore that it seems. Yeah, it's like original sin or something. You know, it's like followed them into Eden here. Like, perhaps this island is representative of this. The island itself is the exoticized, idyllic place. And so this is just giving it the name that it also gave those who were moored shipwrecked Whatever we want to call it on it.
At any rate, a meteor of the bur. Burning heart is quite interesting because first of all, you could read that as a metaphor of the burning heart. They're very. Two words are quite close. And also meteor seems so transient. Right. It burns out. So we have this eternality versus this sort of flash in the pan. Flash in the sky.
26:20 Wes: And it's moving like the birds. So even though not moving fast enough, probably. Well, meteor is moving fast. Right. A comet. What looks still. Yeah. So it's flashing across the sky.
26:32 Erin: Yeah. Coming right for us.
26:34 Wes: I mean, is Indian star. Is that a. Was there a time when people called. Right. Meteors or like a falling star?
26:42 Erin: I don't know. I looked this up and I couldn't find anything about it.
26:45 Wes: Same with. Same with me. Yeah.
26:46 Erin: I think of the star. Was it the star of India? Wasn't that like a diamond or something? You know, I think of like a jewel. The Star of India, not the Indian Star. No one would call it that, but. But I think of it as like a jewel which is eternal. But this is a meteor which is a hunk of rock which is. I mean, I suppose that's eternal too, depending on where it lands.
27:04 Wes: But burning up in the atmosphere. But as far as. Yeah, the burning part, it doesn't last very long, but it's interesting. Yeah. Because they're loved. They're no longer just in their love. It's become something that's being shown to others, signified to. To others. Something that. And to themselves. Something that they can see. Right. So they can see it in the meteor and they can see it in the reflection of the meteor in the water. Yeah.
27:32 Erin: And it's true, that would be. Ordinarily would be a child. Right. But the child would triangulate the relationship and therefore it has to be something that is only going to last a very short amount of time. It's going to be representative of them, but just in a flat so that it doesn't preoccupy them for too long, it seems.
27:52 Wes: Right.
27:52 Erin: But I like what you point out, that the tide gleams with this light, the wings that gleam and dart. I'm thinking of the. Again jewels, maybe the jewel toned green, perhaps of the parrot reflected in the enameled sea darting. So the parrot's moving.
28:08 Wes: Yeah. Well, we got. Who knows how many types of birds are here. We've got peacocks and doves and parrots.
28:15 Erin: Yes, the burnished.
28:17 Wes: Who's doing the flying? The flying. At this point, I don't know whose wings These are.
28:22 Erin: Well, nobody goes anywhere, so I don't think of any of them as flying. Yeah, they're all sort of stationary.
28:28 Wes: Yeah. So now we get the heavy boughs and the burnished dove, which is interesting, right, because the boughs have dropped tranquility. You might think that the boughs, if they've dropped their fruit or their flowers or whatever, that they're lightened by that. But I suppose if you drop lightness, if you drop tranquility, then you get heavier.
28:48 Erin: Oh, I love that. That's great. Yeah, okay, smart.
28:54 Wes: But also, at this point, right, it sounds like heavy brows, maybe, or it sounds like sleepiness is coming.
29:02 Erin: And then we have the burnished dove.
29:04 Wes: It's been polished, right. Similar to the enameled sea in the beginning. We have something else now that's polished and pointing to its, you know, resemblance to an artifact. And of course, one can't help. Can't help but think of sailing to Byzantium and the bird made of gold at the end.
29:21 Erin: But thus it's a sort of automaton because it. Because it makes noise and it. But it lasts only a hundred days. I couldn't think of the significance of a hundred days. Or maybe it doesn't last 100 days, but it moans and sighs for that long, which is. It seems extremely discontented.
29:39 Wes: It's also extremely irritating. I will tell you from personal experience, one of my staff meetings in the room, there's always a dove in a cage and the thing will not shut up.
29:48 Erin: What? Someone has a dove in a cage and all your staff made it. What kind of symbolism is that? That's insane.
29:59 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. I never thought about that. But anyway, he's happy you got to let the dove out of the cage occasionally, and he's happy he can fly around, but. Yeah, very annoying. Actually, doves are very, very annoying. They're moaning and sighing, so I sympathize with this word moan. So it sounds like the dove is representative of the longing of love here. And that's what they listen to for 100 days. And the moaning is about. So you might even think of the dove as singing about how when they die, their shades will rove. The dove is portending their death.
30:39 Erin: Yes. Not a symbol of peace either, because. Yeah, tranquility has been dropped and now the dove is sitting on the. On the bow. So it's. Yeah. What can we say? What can we say about that? It's confusing a bit.
30:52 Wes: Yeah. Normally we would think of the dove as representative of peace and it would go along with tranquility. But here it's moaning and sighing and introducing a bit of dissatisfaction and tension into this peaceful world. But only for a hundred days, you know, Maybe after that hundred days they just die and become shades. I don't know.
31:13 Erin: That's how long.
31:14 Wes: And they can be there.
31:14 Erin: How long it takes for one to eat the other because they have no. The peahens all run away from them.
31:21 Wes: Right. They've eaten all the birds.
31:23 Erin: There you go.
31:23 Wes: The eve has hushed the feathered ways. Right? Yeah. So the birds do. Something happens to the birds, right?
31:30 Erin: Yeah, that's right. Just a pile of feathers.
31:33 Wes: Hush the feathered ways with vapory footsole by the water's drowsy blaze. The drowsy blaze of the water still, you know, suggests. Right. Some light is still being reflected in it. The light of the meteor.
31:47 Erin: Oh.
31:48 Wes: Or the stars. No, I think of the starry sky in general. Yeah. Because the meteor is such a. Oh,
31:53 Erin: I saw blaze passing thing. Right. But drowsy because it's getting late. So I thought it was sun, like the sunset. But yeah, you're right. The vapory footsole. That's. So I'm taking that as evenings walking on the foliage and leaving dew. Is that right?
32:09 Wes: Well, there's shadows. Our shades will rove the footsole.
32:15 Erin: Oh, that's the shade.
32:16 Wes: The footsteps of the shades, I think. Yeah, vapory footsteps. So they're. Right. So they're no longer fleshy, so to speak.
32:24 Erin: Oh, they're. Yes, vapory in terms of ghostly. Yes, I get it.
32:28 Wes: Yeah. They're ghosts now. Yeah. So if they're leaving footsteps in the sand, I don't know if you've tried as a ghost to leave footprints in the sand.
32:38 Erin: That's good. Yes. I was thinking in terms of water vapor. Dumb. Yes.
32:43 Wes: Well, they're leaving some kind of trace. Right. Some kind of minimal trace, apparently, in something akin to a footstep. But whatever a ghost would. Would leave hints, maybe just a little bit of fog or smoke. I don't know. But yeah, so something vapory, I guess.
33:00 Erin: Yes.
33:00 Wes: There you go. Vapory is vapory.
33:02 Erin: I see.
33:03 Wes: And that seems to be the kind of logical conclusion of their sort of love, which is to become spirits. To become some. You know, to leave their fleshy incarnation and to become. I don't know.
33:19 Erin: Oh, this is so. This is so Paolo and Francesca, isn't it? Yeah, this is hell. Yeah.
33:26 Wes: Yeah, I thought of that.
33:27 Erin: Yeah. I didn't think of that until right now. That's. You're Otherwise would never have thought of it if I didn't think of. Shadowy. Yes. Spirit.
33:37 Wes: Yeah.
33:37 Erin: Yeah. This is a bit hellish. Interesting. Do you think. Do we think he thinks it's hellish or do we think this is just him? I mean, there's a consciousness that there's something not quite right and that this has to end or that this is just a dream. But I don't think that he's. Wink, wink. This is hell.
33:56 Wes: Yeah. And I don't want to disappoint listeners who think of this as a romantic, sweet poem, which I think it still is.
34:02 Erin: Yes. I'm sorry, I'm so.
34:04 Wes: I think it's both at the same. I mean, I think.
34:06 Erin: So jaded. Everyone should not listen to me.
34:09 Wes: There's. There's romance in this idea of merger and being so wrapped up in someone else that you. You disappear, I guess, and maybe you disappear with each other and become these shades. And so it's evocative of death and so scary in that sense. And obviously, on a practical level, it can't be done. It's bad, you know, it's hellish, as you. As you point out. On a practical level, it's not sustainable, but the idea of it is motivating to people, I think. I don't think you can get it out of romance, this type of idea.
34:44 Erin: No, no, probably not. Probably not. It's just when. When put in this kind of way, I mean, of course that's a romantic idea, but then, you know, it's. It's quite extreme.
34:54 Wes: Life will disabuse you of it. You know, when you're young, maybe. Maybe when young ends. This is young. Yeah, right. Conception of love. And then, you know, life. Life will teach you.
35:06 Erin: Well, maybe I like people too much. You know, I don't want. I don't.
35:09 Wes: You don't want them to become shades?
35:10 Erin: I don't want them to be. Exactly. Exactly.
35:12 Wes: Disappear into you.
35:13 Erin: Yeah, that's. That sounds like certainly no fun for them. That's all I have to say. There is something romantic about that idea, of course, but it's put in such a way here as to be so extreme that it really highlights what is terrifying about that prospect, or what is impossible and therefore terrifying about it.
35:29 Wes: There's this show called Man Seeking Woman, which I think I tried to show you, but you didn't. I don't think you liked it.
35:35 Erin: I don't remember.
35:36 Wes: Anyway, it's sort of. It's a show premised on taking metaphors literally. Every episode is about him trying to Find a woman. And so in one episode, he goes out on a date with a literal troll. Or in another, another episode's called Wedding from Hell. And the wedding is literally in hell. Him and his friend have to go down to hell to go to the wedding. But it's all about, like, typical, you know, trials and tribulations of being at a wedding, you know, someone's location, wedding. But in one episode, he. He starts dating someone and they immediately jump into codependency, let's say. And so they get surgically connected to each other. They become Siamese twins, basically, so that they lose their right arm and leg. So they're like, they're still. They're four limbed creature now, but they're right connected at the side.
36:26 Erin: Nice.
36:27 Wes: The very end of the episode when they break up, they just rip apart their bodies and it's just like this bloody mess. Yeah.
36:38 Erin: Nice.
36:39 Wes: So keep your distance, people. Keep your distance. Don't be like these two romantic, sweet lovers on their island, dreaming under the dawn.
36:51 Erin: Yes.
36:52 Wes: No. So hopefully this hasn't been too cynical.
36:55 Erin: I hope. I hope not. I hope not.
36:58 Wes: All right, do we have anything else?
37:00 Erin: No.
37:01 Wes: All right, thank you.
37:02 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com or patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
“Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats
Jun 23, 2025
Wes & Erin discuss “Leda and the Swan.” For paid subscribers, includes “The Indian to His Love.”
Upcoming Episodes: “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and “An Enemy of the People.”
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0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part three of our four part series on Yeats. Back in the day we did the Second Coming. That was a long time ago, I guess. Maybe 2020. I don't know. Wow. Yeah. In our last recording we covered sailing to Byzantium. And now we're gonna do for part three, Leda and the Swan and part four, the Indian to his Love, which I always thought was an Indian to his lover. That's the way I remembered it. But it's the Indian to his love and poem that he wrote when he was really young, like 23. So. Yeah, this is Leda is one of the ones you picked. Why did you pick this one?
1:09 Erin: I prefer the romance of Ley. I'm just kidding.
1:12 Wes: So romantic.
1:14 Erin: Yeah, it's incredible.
1:15 Wes: Zeus. You miss the part where he wines and dines her, but it's all implied. He puts on. What kind of music does he put on? The vinyl player.
1:26 Erin: Bird calls.
1:27 Wes: It's gotta be vinyl.
1:32 Erin: You know, I know this poem pretty well, so that's probably why I picked it. And it always reminds me of. I thought we'd get some great, I don't know, great discussion out of it. This poem reminds me of arguments about people always talking about how they want to. They would go back in time and kill baby Hitler or something. And this is.
1:54 Wes: You'd go back in time and kill Western civilization. Well, this is sort of like preventing this rape.
2:00 Erin: Yeah, yeah, this is sort of like going back and you'd have to kill his parents or give them birth control or something. But anyway, that probably sounds completely nuts now that I'm saying this.
2:09 Wes: If we were a different podcast, this podcast would all be all about the meaning of Consent and the complexities of consent.
2:19 Erin: Yeah.
2:19 Wes: But I guess we have to talk about that anyway. I guess that's in there. But before we do that. Yeah. Why don't. Can you tell us a little bit about the myth, the mythology behind us.
2:28 Erin: Yes. Okay. So. So didn't Leda have. So she had sex with her husband. Right. But then she also was raped by Zeus. And she had.
2:39 Wes: On the same night.
2:40 Erin: On the same night. And she had two eggs that she. Like, big. I don't know. I don't know how big the eggs were. I'm not an expert in that. That regard. But anyway, she gave birth to these two eggs from which hatched Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra in one and Castor and Pollux in the other. Is that right? And each of them were. Were half siblings of each other. Right. Because one. It was like one and one went to the. I don't know, there was this one
3:09 Wes: egg and one, and one went to the other.
3:11 Erin: Yes.
3:12 Wes: Half twins.
3:12 Erin: Half twins, exactly. Yes. And so then the brothers. There's a sort of complicated history with Castor and Pollux. I believe they're the twins from the constellation Gemini, but also, like, they helped. I think they helped rescue Helen from Theseus. And there was a whole they die in the Iliad, but then somehow they're still alive in the Odyssey. Like, it's very, very confusing. And then obviously, yeah, Helen and Clytemnestra are the other two, the good brothers and the bad sisters or something. Sounds like my family.
3:45 Wes: So. Yeah. So the Helen and Clytemnestra, two important figures in the Trojan War. Right. So Helen's husband is Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra's husband and murder victim. And as we saw in the Odyssey, there's a bit of, I think, worry for Odysseus about getting back home and having the same thing happen to him that. Right. Happened to Agamemnon. And there's a bit of discussion of that in the. In the underworld, but these are two. So it's a foundational myth. Yeah. What is this, you know, is just from doing a little research, it, you know, oft depicted in the Renaissance, but also for the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was on.
They found a fresco of it in Pompeii, which you can see why those libertines in Pompeii would. Would like it. But, you know, it was frequently engraved on small items, pieces of, you know, jewelry, decor, I think. So it got me wondering, well, what is the. What did it Mean, what did this myth mean to the ancient Greeks? Which I don't have a good answer.
4:48 Erin: Right.
4:48 Wes: I mean, I have a speculation. Right. Just, just the association with the Trojan War, which you could say is a foundational myth for the ancient Greeks. You know, it unites all the different tribes in the same place back in the day. But more importantly, it's what they have in common as a literary tradition. And not just literary tradition, but the first. Maybe the first thing that's written down. But Homer unites Greek culture. So sometimes I think, is it really. Yeah. Is it really the content, you know, of the Troy myth that's so important? Or is it just the fact that.
That the Iliad and the Odyssey are sort of common. You know, Homer is the, is the common possession of the Greeks and the foundation of their culture, and it's the sort of thing. But, you know, you, you get the impression from reading Plato, right, that it's like the Bible of the society. Everyone knew it and could recite long passages from it. It was just foundational to their, to their education. But so, so anything that, that touches on that, on that myth is of course, important. But I, you know, I couldn't find much. But specifically, I know we can say a little bit why it was significant to Yeats, but I'm just.
Before we do that, I don't know much more about why this specific myth got at the imagination of.
5:58 Erin: Yeah, right. Well, that, that's, you know, that was sort of my baby Hitler joke. It's like, how can we trace back to the, you know, the big terrible thing? How can we prevent that from happening? And if we scroll back to this point, could. It's, you know, and eventually it's, well, it would be better if the people involved were never born in the first place or something. Something. Right. But that, and this seems like the origin point, the genealogical basis for the myth. But of course, what we find is that it's turtles all the way down. Right.
I mean, we could say that the origin point is really the Judgment of Paris, which itself is, I think, like, very similar to this Leda and the Swan idea in which we have a story about the intervention of the gods, which seems to be just reverse engineering human tragedy and trying to find a cause for it, which is itself no cause at all. Right. So I think that tension is wrapped up in the Leda and the Swan myth in a way which holds all of the complexities of that tension between maybe something like human will, free will, and divine intervention or terror or accident or something like that.
Like are all held together in this myth in a way that they're not in the jungle Judgment of Paris. Because the Judgment of Paris is just about how the gods are just causing a lot of trouble. Like, this is about parentage, it's about accident, it's about desire. And all of these things cloaked in something that seems willed, but which is in fact just made up. It seems to me like the perfect point. Like, if we're looking for, okay, how and why did this all happen? Like the same thing with baby Hitler, you know, that's the point at which we would go in and make an intervention or his parents or whatever.
You know, this is the point where we would go in and make the intervention to stop the tragedy that happened in Homer.
7:43 Wes: But in this case, if we intervened, we intervene in the foundational myth for Greek civilization, for classical Greek civilization. So in a way, right, what this myth is about is the birth of Greek civilizations through the events that Helen engenders. That's the way Yeats saw this, although he saw it through his weird lens of 2000 year eras. Actually, I'll read a little bit just from what Yeats says about this. I don't want to spend too long on his crazy theories, but it's good
8:18 Erin: to know he demands to be taken seriously.
8:20 Wes: This is. Yeah, right. So to see this kind of thing as a weak point, in a way, in Yeats, but you know, all the stuff in his A Vision book and all his mysticism. But he says, I imagine the Annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda. So it's right that this is an annunciation for him. And we did the Second Coming, which was sort of the annunciation of the era that comes after the Christian era. This is the Annunciation of the era before the Christian era. So in Yeats's terms, this is a subjective Greek era as opposed to an objective Christian era.
And what he means by that, it's more associated in his mind with imagination and aesthetic values, whereas the objective era of Christianity is more about. Christianity is associated with dogma and the power of institutions. So there's a bit of nostalgia on Yeats's parts for the mythic and the polytheistic. And in a way, what comes after in the Second Coming in a way sounds like a bit of a return to that. So let me just continue what he says about it. I imagine the Annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda, remembering that they showed in a Spartan temple, strung up to the roof as a holy relic, an unhatched egg of hers and that from one of her eggs came love and from the other war.
But all things are from antithesis. And when in my ignorance, I try to imagine that older civilization that annunciation rejected, I can but see birth and woman blotting out some corner of the Babylonian mythical starlight, which is for him a positive thing. He also wrote in another note. I wrote Leda and the Swan because the editor of the Of a political review asked me for a poem. I thought, after the individualist demagogic movement founded by Hobbes and popularized by the Encyclopaedists and the French Revolution. So not a fan of the Enlightenment after that, we have a soil so exhausted that it cannot grow the crop again.
For centuries then I thought, nothing is now possible but some movement from above preceded by some violent annunciation. My fancy began to play with Leda and the swan for metaphor, and I began this poem. But as I wrote, Bird and Lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it. And my friend tells me that his conservative readers would misunderstand the poem. So, you know, at this point. Right. The political aspect of this is Yates's idea that democracy is on its way out at that time, and there will be violent authoritarian governments on the rise, as in the Second Coming.
So I think he's related these sorts of things. Anyway, that's all I'll say about what Yeats said. He thought about it because more important is what we. We think it means. Of course.
11:19 Erin: Well, shall I read it?
11:21 Wes: Yeah.
11:22 Erin: Okay. A sudden blow, the great wings beating still above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill. He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body laid in that white rush, but feel the strange heart beating where it lies, a shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower. And Agamemnon dead, being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air. Did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop.
12:09 Wes: Very nice. You should always end the poem with a nice cliffhanger.
12:14 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
12:15 Wes: So when you write the next poem, people will be waiting for it.
12:19 Erin: I should say what I really love about this poem, actually, are the questions. That's something didn't occur to me until I was reminded reading it.
12:29 Wes: Yeah, I like that as a rhetorical device as well. And it right at the end of the poem, any sense of a typical conclusion or climax or resolution Is it's not completely done away with. Right. But you end with attention instead of a full resolution. And it's a tension that reflects the fact that this is just a, you know, a beginning.
12:52 Erin: So it's interesting that we did Rosemary's Baby just before this because we talked in that about the Antichrist coming into the world through the rape versus the Annunciation, which is, you know, Mary's assent is crucial in that story. Yeah. What you mentioned about Yeats's ideas of these different eras and the Christian emphasizing authority and these types of structures, there's a sort of interesting paradox there, it seems to me, where one emphasizes actually free will, like despite this sort of authoritarian system or these structures which Yeats was sort of like chafing against, they seem to have in them this inherent idea of free will and of one's own, you know, of salvation on the individual level of the idea of redemption.
Whereas Greek mythology, you know, we have this rape, this idea in which things just happen to you and you just have to deal with them. So the oppression seems to come, you know, it's just interesting that there's. One is associated with authority and oppression. And then we have Leda and the Swan on the other hand, which is sort of like what? Just the oppression of these sort of cosmic faded, faceless forces which are then just given a face by structures which, as I think I said before, are just trying to. Or by the. By the society which is just trying to reverse engineer the mindless things that happen to people.
Right. In other words, like, you know, the drought happens because we didn't pray to the rain God. Right. Like there's an after the fact, a consciousness imposed upon it which is more or less authoritarian. Seems to me to be, you know, open for debate there.
14:39 Wes: Yeah, sounds very anti enlightenment and very romantic. His sympathies?
14:46 Erin: Well, those are mine. So I.
14:48 Wes: Are they really?
14:50 Erin: Yes, I'm very anti enlightenment and pro romantic for, I mean, you know, some big exceptions.
14:55 Wes: That's another discussion. I'm not sure how. I'd be curious to hear about that. But I think with ancient Greek, like mythology, right, as you're pointing out, there's this interface between the divine and the mortal, and in particular the fates of mortal beings are closely connected to the divine. So that what you might see as random chance is connected to the actions of the gods. And in those myths and in Homer, right, you have the gods impregnating mortals and having demigods. And these are demigods. Right. That the ancient Greeks could trace their lineage to Some people somewhere in a particular part of Greece could say, yes, we're the descendant of that demigod, of that hero.
And others could say the same thing. So there's this tighter connection between the divine and the mortal. And of course the gods look more, they resemble mortals more, they're less abstract and they have desires. Right. Zeus wants to come down and have sex with Leda. I don't know why he has to do it as a swan, but whatever, you know, whatever you're into. And for him, right, you get at the end of the poem, the indifferent beak drops. There's a kind of. It doesn't sound as if he cares about what fate he's engendering for the world. It's just, eh, I do what I want.
Your mortal fates are connected to my desires and my whims. It's kind of tyrannical. Right. But it's not like some sort of providence where he's imagining some future for these, for this people and then forming some covenant with them. Right. Instead it's just rape. And then what follows from that?
16:44 Erin: Yes. Yeah. So it seems to me, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems to me then that there's a closer connection in Christianity. No, I mean that the gods are more, or, sorry, the God is more involved in mortal life in Christianity, you know, I mean, there is this connection. I know what you're talking about, but at the same time, like just less.
17:05 Wes: He's just. He's not as sexually active. Should we put it that way?
17:10 Erin: Sure, sure, I see what you mean. I see what you mean. So actively coming in and changing fate in that way. Okay, okay. Because I was gonna say, like, there's. There's also like the personal relationship. There's the. I mean there's no more direct intervention in a way than the incarnation. Right. And.
17:25 Wes: Well, yeah, well, the comparison I was making is that. That's. There's more intent in that.
17:29 Erin: Oh, I see. Okay.
17:31 Wes: And providence. And so God has a plan, there's design to all of this, where for Zeus, it's not about a larger plan for the good of humanity, it's about. It's a plan, but it's a plan about his desire to satisfy his own desires. Yeah, yeah. And then there are cosmic implications for that. But the. They're kind of. But they're not intended. Although, you know, maybe there, There are. I suppose if, yeah. If you looked at Homer and ancient Greek literature, you would say you'd see counter currents to this, this idea because you see the gods sitting around and bickering about their favorite mortals and whether the Greeks are going to win the war and blah, blah, blah.
18:17 Erin: Right.
18:18 Wes: But underneath it all, just because it's so based in the subjectivity of the different gods and their particular, very human, like, desires and opinions, it doesn't. Yeah. It doesn't have the same quality as a monotheistic God who is interested in the good, in the fate of humanity in the larger sense. Right. They're not just taking sides, you know.
18:46 Erin: Yes.
18:46 Wes: Ooh, I like Odysseus. Well, I don't like it, you know, there. Or I like the Greeks, I like the Trojans. It's more about the fate of humanity as all a whole.
18:56 Erin: Right. Yeah, that's very well put. I like the psychological closeness because this is the way in which I think, you know, these. These gods are invented, if you like. I mean, I know that there's, like, so much murkiness around this that we can. We can only speculate, but I would imagine that, you know, in trying to come up with a reason why something happened and one attributed it to a God's desire, really it's just some guy's desire, you know.
19:20 Wes: Right.
19:21 Erin: It's the same. The same kind of principle. You know, people behave in this way, and it's because Hitler's mom and dad got together, you know, that Hitler was created. I keep going back to this example. Of course, it's like far more the Schickel.
19:34 Wes: The Schicklgrubers, I think, is the real name. Right. Is that Hitler's real last name? Meet the Schicklgrubers. It's a basis for a really funny sitcom.
19:44 Erin: Oh, God, yeah. Obviously, as. As you said, you know, that's. That's a far more straightforwardly just negative example to give of, you know, of an unfolding which only had negative consequences. But in this case, obviously, it's more. It's like any instance where you have kids and there's going to be some good and some bad and hopefully not. Not too much bad. But.
20:06 Wes: Should we get into the stanzas?
20:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So I. You know what I really love in this first line? So a sudden blow. I'm. You know, that seems to be. Actually, that's. That in itself, the blow is quite. Quite mysterious. I'm almost. Almost thinking of like a wind blowing, but it could also just be like an act of violence. Swans are nasty creatures.
20:28 Wes: So I. Yeah. What's hitting her?
20:32 Erin: Right, Right.
20:33 Wes: Other than the obvious. There's the phallus, there's the wings, there's the beak. I mean, we Hear about the dark webs caressing her thighs, the nape. So he's catching her neck and his bill. But, yeah, he starts out with a blow, but it's left very vague, you know, unless we think she's been hit by the wings.
20:56 Erin: Yeah, it's quite shadowy, what's actually happening. And I think that blow, too, I connect to beating still, which is also a kind of a paradox, right. Like their movement and stillness in the same image. That word still contains, you know, either perpetuation, like it's still moving or it stopped moving. So there's. And that seems to be inherent in this idea of, like, this is almost the sort of the Big Bang, if you will, for the God, for the Trojan War. But it's also. Yeah, I'm sorry, I just got it. Unintentional. It's the singular moment. But then it's also this moment of reverberation, right, that still goes on.
So it's sort of like a still image and a moving image at the same time. It's like one scene and every other scene that follows it at the same time. And so that kind of like thunder, fuzziness and the identification with the blow, what's happening where, when it's happening. Seems to me to be. Yeah, very thematic of this event, which sort of, like, happened and did not happen at the same time. Something of that intangibility is being expressed, I think, in the description.
22:09 Wes: Yeah. So there's some ambiguity here between. Famously, between rape and seduction. And so that becomes a question about power and the kind of power that's being deployed here. Right. So one can use brute force, but one can use seduction in the sense of appealing to desire. And sometimes it's the desire for force. But famously, right, Aristotle conceived of God as an unmoved mover. He doesn't push things around in the world by way of. In the same way as material, efficient causes, like us pushing a billiard ball. He is just good. And the world moves because it is moved by the good.
To try to be like the good. There's an appeal to. Ultimately to human subjectivity. So here it starts out, right, so she's caught in his bill. And it begins certainly as a rape. And then how can those terrified, vague, vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And then her fingers are vague, but the question is also vague because it's. The question is, can she do it physically? Is this physical force that can be. That's being used and she doesn't have the physical power to resist? Or is it psychological? Force that's being deployed and she can't get herself to actually do this.
23:37 Erin: I mean, it's amazing that this hadn't occurred to me before. But, you know, we have. We have staggering girl. We have helpless breast, you know, so that first stanza seems to indicate the fact that she's being overpowered. And then. But then when we get the mechanics of this in the second stanza, I think to myself, how difficult is it to fight? How big is this swan? And what.
23:56 Wes: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
23:57 Erin: There's. I guess I always conceived of this more straightforwardly, in which it's one of the many. Rape. I mean, sometimes, obviously, Zeus's rapes can be quite brutal and.
24:09 Wes: Well, it's depicted in different ways. Interestingly, you know, in some depictions, she's. I mean, you know, in the visual arts, she's. In some depictions, she's enthusiastically getting it on with the swan. And others, she's obviously being raped.
24:25 Erin: Right. Yeah.
24:29 Wes: Just notice you, you.
24:30 Erin: Yeah, I'm pretty disgusted by this.
24:33 Wes: Disgusted. Is it worse? Which one is worse? The bestiality or the. Yeah, but anyway, she's terrified. But the fingers are also vague, which gives you the idea that. Yeah. What does it mean to have vague fingers? She's not putting all her power into grasping the swan and pulling him away. Something like. Like that. You could really wring it. So you'd think you could just wring Zeus's neck really quickly.
24:59 Erin: Right.
24:59 Wes: Then have some swan for dinner. Right.
25:01 Erin: And they're terrified. They're terrified and vague at the same time. So there's a doubling there. You know, we can compare it to dark webs, which are also, when you think about it, similarly, you know, so there's this idea of when we think of the feet or whatever, you know, the webbed feet of the swan, there's. The dark web. Seems indicative of entrapment. Or if you know something that takes something into itself. Right. You can get entangled in it, but it's also blunted. So is there actually a sort of comparison being established here between the vague fingers and the sort of vague. The blunting. The webbing of the swan.
25:41 Wes: Yeah. That's really good. I hadn't thought about that. Her vague fingers, it sounds like they look like the webbed feet.
25:49 Erin: Right, yeah, well. And I think there's something to that in this not quite knowing where we are and this fuzziness in general. Right. The feathered glory from her loosening thighs. Like that could be. It takes a while to parse this and try to figure out which. And you would think that feathered would give us enough of a clue. But it seems at first maybe almost to be an adjective for her sexual rapture or something like her glory in this moment rather than the actual. The body of the swan itself. I don't know. Like, there's a bit of a confusion, at least on first read.
And the white, the white rush, that's very difficult to try and picture. I mean, I'm, you know, also like, trying not to picture this. But it's very, very difficult to figure out what that is and how she would be laid in it. Is that simply just something that's underneath him, that has nothing to do with the bird, but it has to be probably some part of the swan's body.
26:44 Wes: Right.
26:44 Erin: But what kind of tantric position are they in?
26:49 Wes: Yeah. And it occurs to me you could reverse this, right? So you could see this as, you know, he's asking the question of whether how can she but feel his beat, his heart beating? But one might wonder if it's also, how can he but feel her heart beating? I don't know. I'm not that keen on that idea of reversing it, but it just occurred to me. So you get two questions. One is about whether she can push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs. And the other is about whether it's possible to avoid feeling the beating of the heart. So it's a weird type of parallel
27:29 Erin: to make when we get the two, we get laid and lies. Right. So we get this idea that she's laid on the white. If we take this to be, say, like in his feathered wings, she is laid sort of like enclosed or embraced by his body. And then his heart is sort of enclosed within his chest. Right. The strange heart beating where it lies. I mean, that could be on top of her, but also it's sort of inside his chest. In that same way, she's being pulled
28:04 Wes: so close that she's feeling the vitality of the animal, which seems to have. And of course, feeling. And you imagine the heart is beating hard because the swan's excited. Gross. And so she's. She's feeling the excitement, right? She's feeling. She's viscerally connected to the excitement of the animal. So again, it's more suggestive of a seduction and the idea that if she feels the excitement, she might be getting excited, in which case pushing the feathered glory from her loosening thighs. It's not just a matter of her inability to conjure up the physical force, it's an inability to conjure up the will to do that.
28:46 Erin: Yeah. How is such a suggestive question. It makes a bit more sense in this first question. And the second question, it seems like it's just more of a rhetorical device, because, of course. Well, how could she not feel the heart if she's that close to him physically? And that's. I mean, how can she. But that is the. That is the question. But why is it even a question?
29:05 Wes: Because, yeah, I think the idea is. Right. The danger is in tuning into the arousal of the swan and therefore becoming aroused herself. So the tendency would be to shut oneself off psychologically from the arousal, but it's not possible. And this is one of the horrible things about rape, which is, you know, people can be. Right. Pushed into arousal by rape because it lies beyond their will and that there's a trauma just to that.
29:34 Erin: Right.
29:34 Wes: Because you're right, you're invaded at a very deep psychological level. Your instincts are taken over by someone else.
29:42 Erin: Right. But perhaps the how. Because I'm interested just in the, like, why phrase it this way? Why phrase it as a rhetorical question and just say, you know, she can't not feel. I mean, you know, that's a horrible way of putting it. Right. But why not put it in a more declarative manner? It almost seems to. Seems to be inviting us into her conflict. Into this position. Yes, exactly. So we're invited to occupy that ambiguity or ambivalence.
30:09 Wes: She's conflicted, I think, about whether or not to wring his neck and have swan's tooth.
30:17 Erin: That would have saved a lot of problems.
30:19 Wes: Right. Which I might have done. Or. Yeah. To go along with it. Gross. But that's what she did. Yeah, that's. I mean, am I reading that right? That seems to be what the questions invite. They invite us into the idea that she's conflicted. I mean, there are two different parallel ideas. One is that she might be conflicted and she's overcome psychologically. And the other is that. That she's overpowered physically. And the rhetorical questions are just a way of emphasizing the irresistibility of Zeus's physical power.
30:54 Erin: Yeah. I think even.
30:55 Wes: Even when he's in the form of a swan.
30:56 Erin: I think that's exactly right. And I think that leads us into just strange as. As a modifier as well. Because it's a swan's heart. Right. What's so interesting about that word to me is. Is the strangeness because it's an animal? Is it the strangeness because it's a God?
31:13 Wes: Exactly.
31:14 Erin: Could the strange hers, you know, because you could read it as she's feeling her own heart. What makes a heart strange?
31:23 Wes: Her mortal heart must be very strange to him, certainly.
31:27 Erin: And also, as you already have suggested, the identification between God and mortal means that the very desire that is provoking this attack is a human one. And therefore there's nothing strange about this heart at all. There's nothing strange about its motivation to us.
31:42 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah. It's alien insofar it's divine, but it's familiar in the sense that the divine is being read through the lens of human desire.
31:53 Erin: It's just got to be the fact that it's a swan heart. That's.
31:56 Wes: Yeah. And then. Yeah, if you read it as the. It's really gross. If you just think, yeah, it's strange. It's a swan's heart. It's really gross.
32:04 Erin: And swan's hearts have seven chambers or. I don't know. I don't know anything about swan's hearts. I'm just making that up. Just imagining it's a very odd organ
32:13 Wes: and they probably beat at three times the rate and, you know, even when they're not excited.
32:18 Erin: Right.
32:21 Wes: So many gross things. But, yeah. You know, and. And this speaks to. Yeah. The concept of physical difference and metamorphosis.
32:29 Erin: Well, you could even say there's sexual difference or the difference between any heart and any other heart. The difference between any person's body and my body is strange. But I like this lies again, actually, the beating, where it lies. There's the beating still, too. So there's this perpetuation and stillness in the same image.
32:48 Wes: Yeah. The wings beating and the heart beating. I didn't notice that. And still and lies. Yeah. You know, and another way of looking at this. Right. Ultimately is these rhetorical questions say something like, you know, can we resist fate?
33:01 Erin: Yes.
33:02 Wes: And I think the other. Other thing to bring in here, because I was thinking about with the fact that the foundational myth for the ancient Greeks is not so much the content of the myth, although it is, you know, so Troy. But the. It's the foundational possession of a shared literary artifact, Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey. And so you can read all of this. Right. As divine inspiration of the poet. It's Homer who got things going. It's Homer who has been impregnated by the divine. So I would just lay that out there as another level here.
33:42 Erin: Sure. Yeah. And then the strangeness would be any kind of inspirational force. Yeah.
33:48 Wes: We could think of those forces in terms of the muses or the divine, more generally. Or the. I guess it's some. Yeah, it's mousa. Andra moi ennepe, mousa is the way the Odyssey begins. Sing to me, Amuse you address her directly. She speaks. Sing to me, but sing in me. Maybe, but likewise, you could just think of that as instinct, or you could think of that as character. Everything that you've laid down in yourself, including your ability as a poet, that gets unleashed in the right moment, gets unleashed, but produces something that has a form, doesn't just produce chaos. You let go. You let instinct do its work, you let desire do its work. You let passion do its work. But it's channeled into something specific and formal and defined.
34:40 Erin: Of course. How could we not think that this is about the poem itself when we have beating still. Right. This is the still object that beats is the poem itself, Right?
34:49 Wes: Oh, yeah, good.
34:50 Erin: The Petrarchan sonnet.
34:52 Wes: And then you can always think of our inability to resist fate in a way as our inability to resist character. We're just ingrained with certain habits that we can't escape dispositions except insofar as we're redeemed, I think aesthetically by taking our character and releasing it into the object, the art object. Maybe there's. In sublimation, there's some sort of redemption for fatedness. And the whole artistic process sort of recapitulates the process of being fated, except that one is free in the sublimated version, in a sense, as opposed to just forced.
So, again, we get that ambiguity between being forced and being free. It's free if there's aesthetic. If it's an aesthetic outlet, it's forced. If it's just fate and being. Being overpowered. And so what are the gods doing with us? Have they given us the gift? Have they. Are they Prometheus bringing down the fire or are they just pushing us around?
35:55 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. Hence the. The sort of, like, weedy, you know, the unseparability of those two forces and why it seems at one moment like one and at the other, like the other. That's really interesting. Well, I think. Oh, I hate saying this. I just. I. But I have to say it, that I think that Volta is the. The point of ejaculation. Is that. Right. A shudder in the loins.
36:20 Wes: You don't like saying the word volta.
36:22 Erin: I know it's. It sounds too much like. Thank you. I just. Anything that makes this more picturable to me is disgusting. Yes.
36:36 Wes: What I know from sex ed class. What's going on here? He's impregnating her. I want to make a lot of jokes here, but I'm not going to do it.
36:52 Erin: I'm already turning a little red, so.
36:57 Wes: I thought you were using protection.
37:04 Erin: Yeah, just wait till she finds out she has two sets of twins on
37:07 Wes: the right and they're gonna come out as eggs and I guess her husband's. There's no questions asked about the. Yeah. You're giving birth to eggs. That's weird. They're all yours. Don't worry. They're all yours. Well, I have been seeing you hanging out with a swan down at the tavern. People have been talking. Completely unrelated. So. Yeah. So what's being engendered there is the fate or the. These. These great foundational events for Greek civilization. The broken wall, which I suppose is a rape in and of itself. Right. The Greeks overcoming the Trojans and penetrating the wall and burning everything down and literally raping and murdering all the men and raping all the women and taking
38:04 Erin: them slaves, inspiring the Trojans to use protection ever after.
38:10 Wes: That's great. That's fucking great. That's so perfect.
38:17 Erin: I do. Sorry.
38:22 Wes: So. And the death. And the death also of Agamemnon. Let's not leave that out. Right.
38:26 Erin: Let's not forget that there are two bad women that came out of this justice for Clytemnestra. Yeah. The. The men escape, the other egg escapes, causing all these problems.
38:44 Wes: I mean. Yeah. I think we've already kind of said.
38:47 Erin: Sure.
38:48 Wes: A bit about the meaning of this for Yeats and the possible significance of this in terms of being a foundational event. And, you know, it's a picture of fate in action, this idea of. Right. Impregnating someone with these future events in a way, almost. So it's a very rich idea. And in the end, it'll. He'll ask the question of whether it gives her a premonition, really. Right. Did she put on his knowledge with his power?
39:15 Erin: Yes.
39:16 Wes: Is he giving her knowledge as well? Is he making her a prophet of a kind, or is he just making her the mother of Greek civilization, to put it crudely.
39:27 Erin: Right. Yeah. Being so caught up seems to contradict. I mean, that in itself is a contradictory phrase. Right. She's either caught up, I. E. Trapped by him or caught up in her own.
39:40 Wes: Caught up in the moment, caught up in her desire.
39:43 Erin: Response. Sure. And then that seems to be. That also seems to be resisting at any rate. What. Regardless of the reading we give that it seems to resist this idea of knowledge. To be caught up in something seems to resist conscious Awareness outside of the immediate physical moment, whether that be one of struggles or one of desire, excitement, whatever the case may be, like that emotion seems to work in contrast.
40:08 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting because one might also read this as her understanding the significance of union with Zeus. Right. So that she might have known as things progressed what this was all about. She might have known that this was about the burning roof and tower in some sense. Right. So one question is, was she so caught up in the moment and the desire that this fated future didn't enter into her consciousness at all after the fact. After the fact of the shudder of the loins? But the other is, the other question is, did she succumb to the swanne merely out of desire? Did she sort of know was part of, in other words, was part of her arousal and, and being overcome? And was part of that about a kind of instinctual grasp of the significance of all of this? And I suppose, you know, hopefully she at least knew it wasn't just a swan.
41:11 Erin: Right?
41:11 Wes: Right.
41:13 Erin: Yeah. The emotion seems crucial. Like strangely, this being caught up seems crucial to the knowledge. Like the way that this is constructed. We have this idea of being caught up and being mastered as actually being signals that she perhaps did have this knowledge. Right. Because it's not. Yeah, it's not. Did she not put on his knowledge with his power? It's that these two things are somehow evidence for the fact that she put on his knowledge with his power. I mean, I know it's a question, so that's ambiguous in and of itself, but they seem dependent.
Like this is evidence that perhaps she did. Right. There's no negative in the construction. So that she did put on his knowledge with his power. So this, this is the strange sort of knowledge that's being suggested here, which is by being mastered by him, in other words, subject to him and also having this emotional experience, this is somehow giving way, Right. To this deeper knowledge of whatever is engendered, which is to say like the potential result of any sexual experience. Right. Like there's a sort of. There are different types of knowledge, I suppose, and whether this suggests a sort of ancestral bodily knowledge or something else.
42:24 Wes: How do you mean ancestral?
42:26 Erin: Well, you know, the idea of just what you're saying, she, that she knew this was going to happen or she knew that this was Zeus.
42:32 Wes: Yeah. The options are she, hey, it's a swan. It's a sexy swan. It's just a swan. The next one up is, well, this is a special swan. I definitely would not have sex with just any old swan. This is special. Next one up from there. Okay. It's God, right? I would not feel this way about a swan if it weren't God. And then the next level is, hey, this is a mother of the future. This is my chance.
43:04 Erin: Yeah, so. So you're saying that perhaps she did know that she was. That she was engendering the future. And I would say in that same way, any sexual encounter or any, Any desire, like even. Even before the sexual encounter has the potential to engender some kind of new future, I think is what I'm trying to say. And is that in itself a kind of a knowledge? Is that like a bodily knowledge? You know, I'm thinking of like, whatever. Anything from sort of like genes being expressed. Right. Merely the idea of sexual desire and drive as this sort of the world or humanity itself perpetuating itself into the future through us.
Therefore, like, do our bodies have some sort of knowledge that we don't necessarily consciously have? You know what I'm saying? I'm trying to connect this maybe to something. Something that goes back to this kind of pre mythological idea for which the Greeks presumably then came up with the mythology to explain.
44:06 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think we. We normally think of sexual desire as distinct from the desire to propagate. Even though, of course, evolutionarily sexual desire is there because it, because it facilitates propagation.
44:20 Erin: Yes, yes. It's primordial.
44:23 Wes: Human beings can want to propagate consciously, unlike animals.
44:27 Erin: Yes, yes.
44:28 Wes: Animals are just following their instincts or desires. And then the question is, well, to, to what extent does that desire to propagate feed into sexual desire, consciously or unconsciously? And to what extent is arousal a premonition of a twist of fate, of an alteration of the future? So we might, on some unconscious level. In other words, even if we're not intending to have kids, we might be aroused at an unconscious level by the possibility of a new future. Maybe. I don't know if that's the idea, but you're trying to get at.
45:05 Erin: Yeah, and I wonder too, if the world, you know, if it feels as though the world is. I mean, these are the forces that push the world forward, whether we're. Whether we're conscious of them or not. You know, and so this is just. What if we look, if we zoomed out and looked at this on this kind of macro level. We can almost argue that like we are the. That our individual reproductive happenings, occurrences are like the world sort of working out its own plan in which we are less than conscious participators, but which we might have some sort of insight into or like people talk about.
I don't mean to be so mystical with this, but I think that people talk about this when they have kids that like the world finally made sense to them, right? Because they were participating in some sort of. They were collaborating in some sort of vast project that they prior to this did not have access to, but which we might say looking back, they were participating in that higher knowledge even before they had the knowledge or before they were conscious of having the knowledge. Do you know what I'm trying to say? I'm being very woo woo about this just very simple idea of just having kids.
I'm perhaps putting too fine a point on something which is just very easily said, which is just that any kind of child is a new possibility. And when you have a child or when you conceive a child, you're sort of participating in the kind of the knowledge of the world or the knowledge of the future which you don't fully know that know yet, but what you know is perhaps like you're affecting the future in some way and you're affecting the world in some way. And that seems to be a sort of subterranean knowledge which is at the base of any child that's born.
I don't know.
46:44 Wes: I think I get it.
46:46 Erin: Do you? Because I don't.
46:48 Wes: I should say, since I took us down this path, this kind of alternative reading, that the straightforward reading is just that the question is about whether when, at the point where she's being inseminated, is she with his power, which is to say his seed, right? And power is potentiality with the thing that's going to open up this new future, whether she also, whether a premonition follows on that or some kind of knowledge. Zeus is, and Zeus read, is presumably omniscient in some sort of way. So. And then you could ask the same thing of the poet, whether the poet is taking on divine knowledge in some sense, when, at the moment of being engendered, inspired.
The reading that we're toying with is this idea of premonition that goes back to the beginning of the encounter and explains to some extent why she's agreeing to the encounter. I just wanted to be clear about that for listeners who. Why are they talking about. Yeah, sure.
47:45 Erin: And to that more baseline reading, you know, there's also the idea of sex is knowing someone right in the. In the biblical way that one receives some knowledge of a person through sexual encounter. And that therefore, if through sex one truly comes to know another person on some level. Which again could be, could be sort of mystical, I suppose, or one has knowledge of that other person which is intimate and if that other person is a God, then do you have that, then do you become invested with some kind of divine knowledge by virtue of that encounter? Which is again, I think like pretty straightforward, but maybe, maybe is enriched by this idea of like knowing on a. In the sexual way, which I think he's sort of toying with here from a different tradition.
48:33 Wes: Why the brute blood of the air? That's something I don't quite understand.
48:39 Erin: Yeah.
48:39 Wes: Mastered by the brute blood of the air. I mean, unless we think of the swan as a representative of the life of the air divinity.
48:49 Erin: I mean, I don't think of swans as being in the air at all, you know.
48:53 Wes: Well, he's flapping his wings so you kind of get the idea that he's. Yeah.
48:56 Erin: Hovering a bit.
48:58 Wes: Hovering a bit. But probably not for long.
49:01 Erin: Right, right.
49:01 Wes: It's hard to have sex that way, Wings flapping, all this. Yeah. We don't associate swans. Yeah. With being in the air. That's a good point. Mastered by the brute blood of the air.
49:14 Erin: The contrast too perhaps is inherent in this idea of the, you know, the divinity who is a brute, who operates according to his own appetites. Yeah. But it's this sort of mixing of the elemental. Right. Because we have brute blood which is sort of earth and then air at the same time.
49:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean we can think of brood in terms of. Yeah. The mere animality or the brutishness of Zeus's desire.
49:39 Erin: Yeah.
49:39 Wes: You know, I think we can associate the air with the gods, but the blood part I think is.
49:46 Erin: Yeah. The blood is so instantiated. It's such a strange.
49:51 Wes: And the question again, you know. Right. So she, the questions are always double. So is she mastered by the carnality or the physicality of this thing or is she mastered by her own hot bloodedness, let's say. But just the whole phrase together, I don't quite, don't quite get it.
50:08 Erin: Well, this is. I suppose we just have to relate this back to the beating and to the heart. Right. So it's the blood that's. That's pumping, that's actually operating all of this. So that's the force somehow at the bottom of the experience.
50:22 Wes: Yeah.
50:23 Erin: I don't know. I wish there was something more I could.
50:25 Wes: No, that helps. Relating it back to the heart.
50:28 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And then we get the indifferent beak, which is the, maybe the cruelest part of this whole poem.
50:34 Wes: Yeah. He never called her. He yeah, exactly. She gave him her number, but he never called her. The indifferent beak.
50:45 Erin: What a player.
50:47 Wes: So, yeah, he's just off, back off to Mount Olympus to slam, bam, thank you, Leda.
50:54 Erin: Yeah, and beak too. Like there's a poem. So it's words, but there are no words exchanged, of course, between Swan, you know, can the swan even talk? And yet beakiness seems suggestive of a mouth of words. And the idea of an indifferent beak means he's not going to call her, he's not going to speak to her. Right. There's a sort of refusal of communication.
51:19 Wes: Yeah. And brute, right? Yeah, the brutes are mute. There's always that association with the brutishness of the animals, the fact that they can't speak.
51:27 Erin: Yes, they're dumb.
51:29 Wes: Speechless. Yeah. So I like that. Yeah. This, I mean, the indifference, right? Yeah. We can read it as the indifference of animality, of, you know, of being less than human. We can read it as the indifference of the divine as being more than human. Right. So our human affairs are not the concern of the gods in a way, which is a special irony because, of course, the momentous things that follow from this union of the men, you know, and then there's the indifference of this post coital indifference. Right. Where arousal and excitement are gone and one enters a radically different world after orgasm psychologically. So there's a kind of malaise post coital malaise, let's say. So I think of those three things,
52:20 Erin: Swan's gotten what it wanted.
52:23 Wes: That wraps up part three of our four part series on Yeats. Next we're gonna do the Indian to his love for part four. subscribing@patreon.com subtextpodcast or you can just. If you're using Apple Podcasts, you can just hit the subscribe button right on Apple and listen to that immediately. Otherwise, you can wait a week and listen to the next part.
52:48 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (Part 2)
Jun 16, 2025
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” and whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity.
Upcoming Episodes: Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and “The Indian to His Love,”; “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and “An Enemy of the People.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Yeats sailing to Byzantium. We got through Stanzas 1 and 2 last time. Got to talk about those young people,
0:46 Erin: young people today and every day,
0:51 Wes: and what we should be doing with our time as we get older, which is going to the opera or something, going to classical music concerts with all the other older old people singing. Singing about our tatters. All right, so do you want to read Stanza 3?
1:08 Erin: Sure. 3 O sages standing in God's holy fire, as in the gold mosaic of a wall. Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre and be the singing masters of my soul. Consume my heart away sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. It knows not what it is and gather me into the artifice of eternity.
1:35 Wes: Okay, this stanza, I think, is a bit codependent.
1:40 Erin: Yes.
1:41 Wes: Well, this is a little bit. Yeah, the more moderate view, I think, in the fourth stanza. And I'm kind of relying on Helen Vendler's interpretation here. But this is quite extreme, right? Yeah.
1:52 Erin: Yes.
1:52 Wes: Because he's going to end up as a bird. Right. He's going to end up in a different situation than he is hoping for here in the third stanza where he's talking about having his very heart consumed by a holy fire.
2:07 Erin: Right. So this is the pre Nelly Furtado stanza.
2:15 Wes: I actually like that song. I actually like that song.
2:19 Erin: Really?
2:20 Wes: Something about it. It's so dumb. But it's just about how she wants to cheat on the person that she's with. Right.
2:28 Erin: I'd have to.
2:29 Wes: I'm a bird who's gonna fly away. It's not my fault. It's just what birds do. Or.
2:33 Erin: Oh, is that. Yeah, that's right.
2:35 Wes: Is really what that's about. That is. So she's one of the dying generations of young people.
2:40 Erin: I highly recommend just not listening to song lyrics from the early aughts.
2:45 Wes: Listen, there's more than one fish in the mackerel-crowded seas. Sometimes there's five, sometimes there's ten. It depends on. But
2:56 Erin: that's pretty good. I mean, this is what I wanted to say in the last part, but I would be jumping the gun. This is where I get the sense that Byzantium is actually just the underworld. Right. Or the land of the dead. Am I wrong about that? Right. Because that's what I wanted to say is that the.
3:10 Wes: You know, That's a good point. Yeah. There's a Hades like quality maybe to it, but yeah.
3:16 Erin: And because he has to go there, he has to make the Odyssey, he has to perform the Katabasis and go into the underworld. And this is an essential part of any artistic learning, right? You have to visit the. You have to visit the dead. You have to go back in time. You have to follow something to its source to be able to understand the monuments of magnificence. So there's a competing, I suppose, locus of attention. Because I think in the previous part, I was arguing that all one has to do is listen to and then reproduce the sensual music in order to come up with a monument of unaging intellect. And of course, that's only half true.
3:58 Wes: Right.
3:58 Erin: Because they're also monuments of their own magnificence. So one has to be aware of the sensual music and of the tatters in one's own dress, Right. Or in other words, of the material right in front of one. The landscape that one is going to paint. That's important. But one also has to know all the other landscapes that have ever been painted, you know, all the long tradition of landscape painting, the long tradition of this, like, refraction into art. So one's attention is actually pulled away from the immediate sensual reality and into this kind of.
To the tradition, to, you know, one's attention is actually pulled away from the present and into the past. And the balance of that seems important, which, if I'm understanding you correctly, the third is the furthest point from that balance. So this is where he gets sucked into the tradition, the past. Is that what you were implying? I'm just kind of trying to figure out what that could mean.
4:58 Wes: Yeah. And I'm not going to be able to relay exactly what Helen Vendler says about this, so I'm just influenced by her view. But in the second stanza, we learn that he's right. So to become an artist, he's gonna have to study the great art of the past, which I think is what you've just been talking about. Your focus goes to the past in a way. So, I mean, this is the interesting thing. It's about the object of art, right. Is the sensual music. Right. So you make music that's about sensual music. But you have to do it by making the sensual music of the past also your object.
5:36 Erin: Yes.
5:37 Wes: So why does it have to be so complicated? So it's like you want to play the blues. You have to listen to a lot of blues music and learn from it. And I prefer to play it rather than to actually listen to it. But that's what you have to do. You have to. Yeah, go ahead.
5:54 Erin: Well, no, and it seems like a very immediate reaction to a bad thing that's happened to you. Right. So it seems like it should be connected. Like it seems like there should be a straight line in the blues between, you know, woke up this morning, I was feeling bad. You know, like it should. Seems like it should just be this like direct recapitulation of experience. And in fact it is a like a highly regulated form which is based on a long tradition of people waking up and feeling really bad.
6:24 Wes: And you spend 20 years trying to learn how to bend properly, for instance, and you realize that, oh, I thought I knew how to bend on a guitar string, but I was doing it wrong.
6:37 Erin: Yep, yep.
6:37 Wes: Or I thought I was playing cleanly, but I'm not playing cleanly. You know, there's a lot of palm muting and other stuff you have to do, especially if you're using distortion.
6:46 Erin: Yeah. The number one thing you learn in singing is that like 99% of people don't even know how to breathe properly.
6:51 Wes: Exactly. Right. That's what I Learned in the one singing lesson.
6:55 Erin: Yes.
6:55 Wes: YouTube video that I watch. It's like breathing is the most important thing. But so.
6:59 Erin: Yeah.
6:59 Wes: So there's so much effort and rehearsal that goes into making something expressive where you want it to be expressive in some natural way. In some way you want it to be a recapitulation of the sensual. The unconscious, sensual music. But it has to be so. It has to be preceded by so much study and self consciousness.
7:22 Erin: Yes.
7:22 Wes: And perfecting one's craft and. Right. And has lots of rules and you know, there are scales and things like that. It's not just a free for all. But in this case. Right. He's talking about becoming the art object here. He's going to be gathered. This sounds like a fantasy of.
7:40 Erin: Yes. Yeah.
7:42 Wes: Joining the sages in the mural, which I take to be saints.
7:47 Erin: Yeah, they would have to be.
7:49 Wes: So. Yeah, so there's this gold mosaic on the, on a wall and you can, you know, you can look up images of the mosaics at Ravenna. So you pronounce Ravenna.
7:59 Erin: Yes.
8:00 Wes: And see what he's talking about. And you know, if you haven't been to places like that. So fantasy is that. Well, it sounds like, okay, they come from the holy fire, which I take to be the gold inlay or the background. And then they come out perne in a gyre. One of his favorite words. So they're twisting and turning. Be the singing masters of his soul. So they've come alive. But then he's going to be what he's going to learn in this. Right. So they've become his teachers at the point where they seem to emerge from the mural, but they are going to. He's already tatters, but now he's going to have whatever flesh is on him consumed away by the fire. And it sounds like, become part of the mural, be gathered into the artifice of eternity, so become the monument as opposed to produce the monument.
8:54 Erin: Right. And this is where I see a. You know, I mean, certainly Grecian urn is all over the first stanza, as you've already suggested. But this is really where I see nightingale being the primary key to informing this. Right. Like that I might leave the world unseen and with the fade away into the forest, dim, fade far away, dissolve and quite forget. Right. So the nightingale here is replaced with these sages in the wall. But the idea of like losing the self in the. What in Keats is the voice of the nightingale, the voice of poetry itself, the sort of eternal song.
Right. That Ruth in the alien corn was listening to and the magic casements. Right. So there's this quality of eternality expressed by the nightingale, sor. Which here is being expressed by the sages, which is an interesting contrast. Right. Because the nightingale song, it represents the song that all the other nightingales have sung and therefore it's kind of connected to it, to an artistic tradition. But here sages is far more. This is far more intellectualized. This is not the unconscious bird song. This is the. The peak of self consciousness and the pursuit of the intellectual and of these higher order concerns which would be lost on the nightingale.
But the fact that they're both still connected back to the sensual music is, I think with Yeats, as with Keats, we can never be far away really from the body. So the fact that he wants his body to be burned away seems to me to be. To make this like an extreme stanza in terms of what you had mentioned before. Yeah.
10:44 Wes: Sick with desire. Right. We think of desire and having a heart as probably essential to being a singing master.
10:53 Erin: Right.
10:54 Wes: It's interesting because he's, O sage, is standing in God's holy fire, as in the gold mosaic of a wall. So he's not starting with the literal gold mosaic in the wall and then moving to the fantasy of the sages and saying, oh, that's like sages in God's holy fire. He's doing the reverse.
11:14 Erin: Right, Right.
11:15 Wes: What we expect him to encounter in Byzantium is the gold mosaic of a wall, and then he can do with that what he wants. But here he's, you know, within the frame of the poem, he's literally encountering these whirling banshees emerging from a fire.
11:29 Erin: Oh, that's good. Yeah. Because it gives primacy to the art object, actually, you know.
11:35 Wes: Right. So in a way, he's already in it. He's identified with it. Be the singing masters of my soul. It's interesting that what you get from the sages is dancing. We don't see them explicitly sing.
11:48 Erin: Yes. They're whirl. There's the whirling dervish element here. Right. Yeah. Because they're turning. That too, is reminiscent of the urn. Right. The thing in 3D space. I mean, I have a lot that I could say about that, which I won't get into here because I don't think it's quite being. There's quite as close of a connection. But the idea of the 3D object or something turned 3D is really important in the history of ekphrasis. So the idea that the figures in the gold mosaic are actually turning somehow with that. Yeats is making a connection to roundness as part of the cyclical nature of life and of this country of the young.
Yeah. It's very subtle, I think, but I think there is a connection that he's making there between these sages, who seem disconnected from that, and the gyre, which is intimately connected to the sensual music. The country of the young, the country of country music. Who's a country music singer? Toby. Toby somebody. So these sages are just like that guy. Anyway. Can't even think of anybody. Patsy Cline is the closest I come.
12:59 Wes: Johnny Cash.
13:00 Erin: Johnny Cash. There you go.
13:01 Wes: Yeah. For good country. Let's not even think about contemporary country.
13:05 Erin: Yeah, I never. Patsy Cline's great.
13:08 Wes: That's all. Yeah. So consume my heart away Sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. So consuming desire, really. He wants to be rid of desire and rid of the body Again, this sounds like a more philosophical enterprise. This is someplace. Socrates famously compares philosophy to dying. Because ultimately you're trying to focus yourself on these eternal truths or forms that one cannot get at in the world of becoming. Knowledge in the world and becoming in the world of becoming are in a way inconsistent. One must in a way die to truly know. To truly. We get to the. To the forms, so to speak.
13:52 Erin: But also, this is. This seems to be connected to like. One can then go back and read the first stanza with quite a bit of. I don't want to. Like, anger is too strong, but bitterness. Yeah, right. Sick with desire. Like he's. Even though he's an old man on a stick, a tattered coat Upon a stick. He still has at least this envy for the young, which means that he's still plagued by his body's. What's the word? Imperatives. He's still sort of tortured by the sensual music, even though he's gotten away from. So the sensual music is inside you. The call is coming from inside the house.
14:29 Wes: Yeah. I think early drafts make it clear that kind of the impetus for this poem is he wrote it when he was 60. Part of the impetus is sexual desire or feelings of sexual frustration or something like that. Or maybe even impotence. Sexual impotence. And no longer. However you want to take it, but no longer as fully engaged with that sexual world of the young and being bitter about it and seeing art as an alternative.
15:03 Erin: Well, as we all know, Yeats wrote his best stuff from here on in. Late Yeats is the best Yeats so at all. He bins out.
15:13 Wes: So he succeeded.
15:14 Erin: He did succeed.
15:16 Wes: He got to Byzantium in the end.
15:18 Erin: Yes. Of course he had to go through all the other. All the other countries first. Otherwise we don't get. We don't get the great late unless we have the striving early.
15:31 Wes: Right. Okay. So I think in the Right. Gather me into the artifice of eternity. Something a bit different is going to happen in the fourth stanza. Do you want to read it?
15:41 Erin: Yes. 4. Once out of Nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold enameling to keep a drowsy emperor awake. Or set upon a golden bough to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past or passing or to come. This is where I got my idea of the underworld. I knew there was an even better reason and it was the golden bough. Duh. Okay.
16:19 Wes: Right.
16:21 Erin: That's what happens when the fourth stanza is on page two.
16:25 Wes: So we seem to come backward a little bit more from the. And this is, I guess, why the. The dual nature of Byzantium is kind of perfect for this, but a retreat from the Christian to the classical maybe, or to the Greco, when now we're talking about emperors and Grecian goldsmiths instead of the sages or the saints. And it's no longer that he's gonna. It doesn't. Right. That his heart is going to be consumed away and that he's going to be gathered into the artifice of eternity. He does become a. He becomes a gold bird. So take that birds in stanza one, you dying generations. He gets to have it all he's going to be a bird and he's going to be eternal. But he's still singing, right? He doesn't end up in a wall. Yes, it's better. It's a better fate.
17:19 Erin: Yeah. I mean, he becomes the art object itself, right? So if the idea is to take the sensual music and make it permanent somehow, there's no better, I guess, image of that than an automaton bird, a golden bird making an eternal mating call. But what I love about this and what made me almost laugh out loud reading it is, you know, the idea that you're still. What's it all for? Well, it's just to keep a drowsy emperor awake. So, you know, as usual, you have to make your. Your. Even when you're a golden bird in this like idealized situation, you have to. Have to find some patron to make it all, make it all possible. You're still, you're still dependent on someone's patronage who maybe doesn't really appreciate you.
18:08 Wes: But keeping a drowsy emperor awake so very much in the realm of the sensual. Yes, very much in the realm of this world, still. The drowsy emperor. The emperor who's drowsy because he's over glutted at a feast or because he's bored, you know, and probably bored because he's over gratified or over. Or it's post orgasmic or however you want to put it, right? This idea of being drowsy, it's not just a matter of, oh, it's evening and it's time to go to bed. He's being induced with drowsiness by too much pleasure, I think, and so too much sensual pleasure. And so the goal is to reanimate the emperor to wake him back up to life.
19:00 Erin: Oh yeah, I like that.
19:02 Wes: By singing. Yeah. So this is, you know, as a poet, what you can do. And so this is no longer just about becoming, you know, a monument of unaging intellect and a monument of its own magnificence. And it's timeless and it's this and that. It has implications for life. It wakes people up within life and to life. And so it's not all shits and giggles for the, for the birds and the trees, right? They. Hedonism, in other words, can be its own kind of death in life. And the artistic is not. It's not just another hedonism, right? It's not just another sensual pleasure. It's something different.
19:43 Erin: That's a much more positive reading of this than I had. I thought it was just like, you know, instead of because he's wealthy, he has the. This great example of, you know, this great monument of magnificence singing to him instead of playing Candy Crush on his phone in bed. He's.
20:03 Wes: I mean, I think there is a place for that, for that reading. I mean, it does. It seems it's kind of a ignoble fate. Humiliating compared to his ambitions, right? It's kind of humiliating. He's just a toy or it sounds like he's a toy. Do you ever see Clash of the Titans, where long Athena's owl is just this, like, little robot.
20:25 Erin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:27 Wes: Which I always thought was kind of interesting. So, yeah, he's a little fake bird and he's in the possession of someone with a lot of power. Maybe he's even a trinket. And he's there for the pleasure of the emperor, who probably can't even fully appreciate what he's doing. And yeah, I think that's a perfectly natural reading. But the more optimistic reading is that there's work, right? There's real. We're real work to do as the singer for those who are living. And so, right, he's no longer simply. He's still in Byzantium in a sense, but he's no longer simply in the country of old men. He's back here with the young, doing something for the young, which is humiliating in a way, but that's the task
21:13 Erin: when he's doing something for power, as you've already suggested. Right, yeah. So something about what he does gives. I love this idea that he lends a kind of alertness which seems like a. You know, too with the lords and ladies. Like, he's, he's. He's shaping the future of, of the country that he's in, in a small way. By being the gold canary in the coal mine or something. No, he's, he's, he's. He's. He's warning people or he's giving them a sense of perspective, right? And he's also kind of prodding them awake. So he's, he's prodding them to pay more attention somehow. So he's moving the needle slightly, right?
21:54 Wes: He's singing about what is past or passing or to come. So, right, this is again, back to the world of becoming. In the first stanza, he's singing about becoming. So as opposed to simply fleeing to the world of being and becoming pure, static, unchanging being. And the object of his art is becoming, as you've already pointed to this, right, so however timeless the Poem might be, it's right, the song, its primary object is the sensual music. So the primary object here, he's in a more realistic position where he understands that his poetry has to have content of some kind.
And the content is going to be this world of becoming and its audience is going to be in the world of becoming. These lords and ladies have replaced the teenagers listening to rock and roll in the first stanza, the more dignified version of those libertines in the first stanza. And they are the audience for what he's doing. He's not just going to say, screw you young people, I'm off to Byzantium. But he's going to be engaged with this younger generation. And so it's not just that he's leaving something for future generations in a monument, but influencing.
Although you could read it that way, I guess. I guess at the point where he's become a gold bird on a bough, he literally is dead. And that's what's left is his poetry for posterity. I guess you could.
23:28 Erin: Yeah. But he becomes a propagandist for the monuments of unaging intellect. Right, right. Yeah. Which in a way is like all poetry is sort of propaganda for poetry. So what I'm getting from this is that you're saying that there's a. That this is a sort of a different. This isn't necessarily. Oh, no, it is Byzantium. Okay. Yeah, because it is. Yeah. It's like in part three, he goes to Catholic school and in part four, he graduates and goes on to work for the. Work. For the, you know, work in the Trump administration or whatever. Oh, my God, I didn't want to go there, but there it is.
24:07 Wes: Well, who's. Yeah, the Trump. The emperor. Yeah. So God, can you imagine?
24:13 Erin: He's trying to warn J.D. vance of what's passing and what's happening.
24:17 Wes: That is a very dark. A dark ending for this poem. It would be a very, very dark ending.
24:22 Erin: Sorry, I shouldn't have gotten political there. It was just a joke.
24:25 Wes: But yeah, he's a great poet. He's an amazing poet.
24:28 Erin: The best poet in the world. We have all the best gold birds.
24:30 Wes: Best poet ever. Because he's American.
24:34 Erin: Our gold birds are gonna kill and eat all of China's goldbirds. What? No.
24:40 Wes: Well, they are AI driven gold birds. That's realistic. Yeah.
24:46 Erin: That's where we should be putting all our money.
24:47 Wes: Little robot gold plated robot birds producing poetry on the fly using artificial intelligence. That actually could easily be a real thing.
25:00 Erin: Yep.
25:01 Wes: This is an idea. This is something we could sell Yeats
25:03 Erin: Corp, started right here, people on Amazon.
25:06 Wes: They'd be like plastic, but they'd be gold colored plastic little robot birds. And then you have like singing random artificial intelligence produced by Otra in the style of Yeats.
25:24 Erin: There we go.
25:25 Wes: But not actual Yeats poems, but completely extemporaneous. The future is really horrific.
25:31 Erin: Yeah, it is.
25:31 Wes: All right, so this is part of what we're saying is relevant because he is speaking, he is singing about what is to come as well, not just what's past or passing. It seemed like in the first stanza it's all about the past, but now it's about the present, this world, what's happening, what's passing and what will be. So there's perhaps a prophetic element to it.
25:54 Erin: What do we make of the goldsmiths? So it seems like there are multiple layers of, I want to say apprenticeship, but that's sort of not like too apt of a word. Right, but he has to learn from. Right, he has to. It's important that he come from the country of the young. So it's important that he go through the sensual music. So that's kind of like one step in the, the Yeats poetic car wash, right? Like first he has to get sprayed down by the country of the young and then he has to go through the, the scrub. A dub machine of the, of, of the sages in the, in the holy fire. Or maybe, maybe, maybe he has to make the journey right to Byzantium so that. And then, then there's the sages. But then he has to be fashioned or, or he says such a kind as Grecian goldsmiths make. So he's, he's making comparison. Maybe he's self fashioned, but it seems like there is a.
26:46 Wes: He says such a form as Grecian,
26:47 Erin: such a form as Grecian goldsmiths.
26:50 Wes: That's kind of ambiguous, an ambiguous term. It could mean kind or it could mean the particular form of the object.
26:56 Erin: Right? Yeah, but something about being hammered into shape here still. Again, he's making a comparison. So, but, well, we're still.
27:05 Wes: So we still have gold, right, you know, as in the third stanza, but it's no longer fire, it's no longer a holy fire. And it is, as you pointed out, a three dimensional object which is an improvement over two dimensional eternality, eternity in a wall. And it's dynamic. He's not just static on a wall, but he can sing. But yeah, he is something that's been fashioned. And of course we could read that as he's fashioned as a Poet. By the influence of previous poets, which is the whole point of studying monuments. Right. Of its own magnificence.
27:45 Erin: Right.
27:46 Wes: To acquire that influence and to be shaped into the artist that he is. So there is this weird sense in which the artist is an art, also an art product, maybe.
27:58 Erin: Right. And something about the goldsmith and the sage together has to. There's something. Something of a different variety of apprenticeship expressed in those two.
28:09 Wes: This is far less grandiose. Right?
28:11 Erin: Yeah.
28:12 Wes: He is a product of a craft. Right. A craftsperson.
28:16 Erin: Right.
28:17 Wes: As opposed to someone who's been integrated into the. With. Into these. With these sages taught by the sages in a way, but become one of them. You could read three as kind of like, yeah, this has gone to his head a little bit. And then four, it's a little less grandiose.
28:39 Erin: No, I think you need all of them. You need the sensual, so you need the sort of like the bodily, personal experience, et cetera. Then you need this sort of like intellectual education. And then you need something practical, whether that be like just a representative of
28:55 Wes: discipline, which is representative of them.
28:57 Erin: The goldsmith taking the spun gold or something of the sages and actually applying it to some sort of practical application. So if the personal experience is perhaps too low and the sages are perhaps too high, I think you're already saying, right, this is something sort of in the middle that balances the two or that coalesces the two into something which is artisanal but practical.
29:22 Wes: 90% of it is just showing up to your job.
29:25 Erin: That's right. That's right.
29:27 Wes: And you just do it every day. And it's a job. And you're a craftsperson and you're not Shakespeare.
29:34 Erin: Well, Shakespeare showed up every day too. You know, you can't be precious about it. You can use precious metals, but you can't be precious about the precious metals
29:44 Wes: or something very good. Yeah. So less grandiose, more. More of a workman like attitude toward all of this. Perfectly willing to be right. The plaything of an emperor and to be there for the lords and ladies and the emperor, as opposed to someone who simply escaped this world. I've said this before, but I think that grandiose moment, maybe that's essential, or the manic moment that he has in stanza three. There might be. It might be something that you can't really do away with in artistic inspiration, but you also can't do away. Most people get stuck there, frankly, and they don't move beyond it.
And they don't move beyond it in the sense that they don't end up with that workaday do it every day attitude because it's imbued with too much significance. Right. This eternal significance, that's too fraught, maybe. So the movement to this point of humility, which I think is a lot of what this is about with the emperor, you know, the position of humility is really important.
30:56 Erin: Yeah. I mean, I think most people are stuck at one. I mean, most people don't care enough to get to three. Right. And that's a much better way to be.
31:05 Wes: Oh, I want to be, you know, this or that. I want to be a poet. I want to be a. Yeah. Musician.
31:12 Erin: I have a friend who was telling me, oh, gosh, I hope. I hope he's okay that I tell this story. It's not. No one will recognize themselves in it. But after reading in my program, someone. Someone came up to him and said, like, I guess this person is always attending these readings and then saying, oh, I wish that I, like, you know, wrote more and more, participating more in the literary scene around here, whatever. And my friend was, like, so exhausted from whatever he had been working on that day and so embittered by what he had been working on that he didn't. He didn't mean to say this in such a way as to slight this poor woman, but he was like, yeah, 10 or 15 years of misery and all this can be yours, or something like that. And she was very taken aback, and he felt embarrassed, but he was also trying to call attention to the fact that it was this, like, dinky little reading anyway.
32:09 Wes: Yeah, no, it makes sense.
32:10 Erin: Yeah. But there's a lot of. That captures it perfectly. There are a lot of people that come up to you at these things and are like, oh, I want to be a poet.
32:17 Wes: Yeah. I am one of those people, you know, wish I wish I could have done that.
32:22 Erin: Wow.
32:22 Wes: But I get stuck, so. And the thing that, you know, I didn't get stuck doing was the Partially Examined Life. Because it. Right. My philosophy podcast, because it's collaborative because I have to show up for that, because I'm called upon to perform. So it's good structure. So you make a necessity out of it. You impose some strictures on yourself, and then you have to do it. But different from being a right. Professional philosopher and writing, doing the very, very hard work of writing and publishing and all that.
32:58 Erin: The third part, too, it's a manic moment, but it's also. I mean, it's a fantasy. It's not real. He's making it real in the poem. But actually it's in the imperative mood. So he's commanding them to do this. But it's not as though it actually happens. Right. It's not as though one can be consumed by some sort of abstract holy fire.
33:22 Wes: This is a really good point. This is all just expressed as a wish.
33:26 Erin: Right, Right.
33:27 Wes: Doesn't actually happen. And then. But then his intent changes in four. But.
33:32 Erin: Sorry, yeah. What is that reminiscent of? Like the lie of the manic moment? The thing that you're after or the thing even. That in your moment of most intensity, you think you're actually in. You're not in it at all. It's not real. It's like a dream. You wake up from it and you're still yourself. You still have a body. You haven't been consumed by a mosaic, probably. I mean, I don't want to speak to everybody's personal experience, but it's never happened to me.
33:57 Wes: So you haven't been doing the right drugs.
34:01 Erin: I know, I know. I've seen some things on NyQuil, I gotta say. But.
34:08 Wes: No, but it's not a bad drug.
34:11 Erin: No, but you know what I mean. Like, there's a. What you're describing that people get stuck in. In three isn't anything with any kind of stuff. Stickiness at all. It's. It's a matter of perception. It's a matter of. You know what I'm trying to say. Do you or do I. Am I not making any sense?
34:27 Wes: Stickiness.
34:29 Erin: Oh, what, that's not clear enough for you? No. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't even happen in this poem. Never mind in.
34:35 Wes: Yeah.
34:36 Erin: There is no state of being in. In three. In three. The way that we're talking about three. Right. Like it doesn't exist. It's not possible. And so, you know, there is no state. There is no. In a way, there is no Byzantium. There is a Byzantium of the mind and of the. I mean, maybe that's the genius of sort of like naming it this outdated term. Right. Because it had. Byzantium only lives on in books, in. In these monuments of unaging intellect. We have this. This apprenticeship which is. Or. Which happens in the mind of. Which is not actually happening out in the real world. And so in three, he's. He's. It's still not even happening in three. He's asking it to happen, but it's not happening.
35:18 Wes: Well, there's no evidence that anything is happening except in one. This is just a curveball.
35:24 Erin: That's right. Yeah.
35:24 Wes: Because he's you know, or he says, that is no country for old men.
35:30 Erin: Right.
35:31 Wes: Why have I always read that as this is no country for. That's interesting.
35:34 Erin: Well, because he's away from it. He's traveling away from it. I'm imagining him in the ship moving in this direction, but facing this direction, looking.
35:43 Wes: I have sailed. Okay.
35:45 Erin: Yeah.
35:46 Wes: Okay. I was thinking he said I will sail and that there's no evidence that he actually did sail. But he says, I have sailed. Okay.
35:53 Erin: And come. So he's in Byzantium.
35:56 Wes: Yeah. Okay.
35:57 Erin: But everything else is.
35:59 Wes: So that's real.
36:00 Erin: Yes, is either an imperative or a future aspiration. Right, Right.
36:06 Wes: So, yeah. Then the next two stanzas, we have. We have a wish in three and then a intention. Right. A promise or a stated intent in four.
36:16 Erin: That's right.
36:17 Wes: Or three is not a wish, but it's a command. It's a command.
36:20 Erin: Yes.
36:21 Wes: That expresses a wish. So the two are. You know, you can see these two stanzas related or as one is kind of causally setting the groundwork for the other. Right. He's consumed by the fire, then he's out of nature. And then he comes back. He's like a phoenix rising from the ashes from the Grecian goldsmiths.
36:41 Erin: And it's dependent. If this. Then this. If I get consumed, then this will happen.
36:46 Wes: Yeah, It's a bit inconsistent because you think, okay, well, he's supposed to end up in the wall. Gather me into the artifice of eternity, which is at least initially what seems like the obvious conclusion there is ending up in the wall, not in a. Not in a bird. Not becoming back as a. As a golden bird. But yeah, we have these two stages. One is the. For the flesh and desire to be completely consumed away. And then there's the. And then there's the return. But I think it's hard not to read 4 as him retaining heart and desire. How could he keep singing without it?
37:24 Erin: Yes. Though I think. Yeah, I think V. The artifice of eternity is something that. Yet strange that the sages seem to have taken a form and therefore they're out of the artifice of eternity, but somehow they're in it. But yeah, it seems like he's returned to the world of potential and then can take shape anywhere. He could go into the wall, or he could go back to the country of the young, or he could do anything from this state, and instead what he chooses is the form of the bird, which in a way makes him, you know. Yeah, now I'm missing Leda and the swan. Right. Because that in a way, it makes him unto a God. And then he can actually incarnate in any form he wishes from that position of eternity. And he chooses a bird.
38:08 Wes: And he doesn't want to take the form of a natural thing. Right. An actual bird. But in a way, he is taking the form of a natural thing because it's the replica of a natural thing.
38:17 Erin: Right, right.
38:19 Wes: He could have just come back as a plate.
38:23 Erin: That's right.
38:26 Wes: And therefore I be eaten off of by the lords and ladies.
38:34 Erin: Yeah.
38:35 Wes: Set upon a table to place. Yeah. Anyway, he's found a good compromise here.
38:42 Erin: Right. To be a real bird is to get put back on the conveyor belt in one. It's just sex.
38:50 Wes: The sexual conveyor.
38:51 Erin: Yeah. That's just regular reincarnation. He wants some sort of eternal incarnation, I guess.
38:57 Wes: This is like a. This is a terminal reincarnation.
39:00 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
39:01 Wes: It's like getting an mfa. That's the end.
39:06 Erin: That's what they told me. You're four of repeats.
39:11 Wes: Some people go. Some people manage to go farther, but you could just stop.
39:17 Erin: Oh, this is painful. My Byzantium is Salt Lake City.
39:27 Wes: There you go.
39:31 Erin: My laptop is sitting on a Book of Mormon that somebody got me the first year I moved here. So that is my Gibraltar.
39:41 Wes: Someone, definitely. And I was working in room service. I've probably told this story before, but at a fancy hotel. And I ended up bringing someone complimentary champagne or wine for some reason. And I don't know. I don't remember why I did that, but I think because they're very, very friendly and nice and this and that. And then I realized that they just wanted me for my soul. It was a conversion attempt.
40:09 Erin: Oh, that's so insulting.
40:11 Wes: I just feel objectified.
40:14 Erin: I thought you wanted me for my body.
40:16 Wes: Beautiful soul.
40:20 Erin: That's the worst.
40:23 Wes: So I think I ended up with the Book of Mormon anyway. All right. I think next time we could do Leda and the Swan and then an Indian to his lover. If I'm remembering the title of that poem correctly, that was always a favorite of mine because it includes a line something like a parrot sways upon a tree, raging at its own image in the enameled sea, which is how I always felt. And we get to have another bird. Is that all right?
40:59 Erin: Sure. I love being given the bird.
41:02 Wes: Yeah. All right, thank you.
41:06 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. Go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”
Jun 09, 2025
Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, and in the final stanza is entirely a matter of artifice. The living songbird is transformed into both product and producer, with a form of singing that is gilded by a consciousness of its departure from nature. Where natural reproduction replenishes entities that are neverthless always in the process of dying, art—the speaker seems to hope—is potentially eternal. And yet the poem’s final stanza also reminds us that art is ultimately for the living, and only as alive as its audience. Wes & Erin discuss Yeats’s meditation on whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity.
Upcoming Episodes: Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and “The Indian to His Love,”; “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and “An Enemy of the People.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Yeats's poem Sailing to Byzantium begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, and in the final stanza is entirely a matter of artifice. The living songbird is transformed into both product and producer with a form of singing that is gilded by a human consciousness of a departure from nature, and where natural reproduction replenishes entities that are nevertheless always in the process of dying. Art, the speaker seems to hope, is potentially eternal. And yet the poem's final stanza also reminds us that art is ultimately for the living and only as alive as its audience.
Today we discuss Yeats meditation on whether creativity can help us transcend mortality and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I guess I thought after Rosemary's Baby, doing a little more Yeats was somehow a natural transition. Maybe the Second Coming would have been more appropriate. But we already did that.
1:52 Erin: Is this our second or our third? Yeats?
1:55 Wes: No, I think it's our second.
1:57 Erin: Okay.
1:58 Wes: I think we did two recordings on Second Coming.
2:01 Erin: That's right.
2:02 Wes: Believe it or not, we took that one poem and we did four hours.
2:05 Erin: Oh, I believe it.
2:06 Wes: I believe it or no, that was back in the day when we were doing Postscript. So we did one hour and a little bit for each one of them. But. Yeah, but Sailing to Byzantium has long been a favorite of mine. And then we'll do Leda and the Swan as well for the next part. But. Yeah. What's your experience with sailing to Byzantium?
2:27 Erin: How many knots is that from here? I guess it's further from Salt Lake City, but anyway. No, I've never sailed to Byzantium, but I love this poem. Sorry.
2:38 Wes: Well, I know you've been to Byzantium because I was in Byzantium.
2:40 Erin: We have been. We have been to Byzantium together. Yeah, I remember.
2:44 Wes: That's right.
2:45 Erin: Specifically, the sages standing in the holy fire. That was a highlight.
2:52 Wes: Well, we were in the Hagia Sophia together.
2:54 Erin: Yeah, we were. We were.
2:56 Wes: So I think even though parts of the poem are taken to refer to Hagia Sophia. I think he was inspired by murals at Ravenna.
3:03 Erin: That's a city I've always wanted to go to. Yeah.
3:06 Wes: But, yeah, we are in the Hagia Sophia together.
3:10 Erin: Yeah. I have a picture of me standing in there, and I was like, oh, Wes took that picture because I was thinking about that the other day. Yeah. I usually. I go to places alone, and then I don't have any pictures of me. So when there's a picture of me that comes up, it's like, who was with. Oh, yeah, Wes was in there. Anyway.
3:26 Wes: Well, that's what I do when I'm feeling old. I head to Istanbul, hang out in mosques.
3:34 Erin: Istanbul, Constantinople.
3:36 Wes: What's your experience with the poem? Well, as opposed to the actual act of sailing?
3:41 Erin: Well, you know, it's one of my favorite Yeats poems.
3:44 Wes: It's.
3:44 Erin: It's a classic. I must have read it in high school. I remember being really impressed by the music of it, as always with Yeats. And. And there's always, you know, Yeats is such a treasure trove of everybody's movie titles or other. You know, he's such a. He's a. He's a great glossary for references. So, of course, that is no country for Old Men. I was immediately like, oh, that's. Yeah, probably when I was 14 or something. I was like, oh, that's. That's where Cormac McCarthy got it from, or something. Or maybe I didn't learn about Cormac McCarthy until later. I don't know.
4:16 Wes: Don't forget my favorite movie, Mackerel, Crowded Seas.
4:20 Erin: Oh, right.
4:22 Wes: Russell Crowe.
4:24 Erin: That does sound like a movie he'd be in.
4:28 Wes: It's all about Alaskan fishermen.
4:31 Erin: I thought that was made into. Yeah, that was the working title of Finding Nemo.
4:37 Wes: Right, right.
4:38 Erin: What about you? Did you read this in high school?
4:42 Wes: I think I must have. I don't remember. I went through a little bit of a phase in college, or. No. Just after I graduated from undergrad, where I was reading Yeats, living in Washington, D.C. with my mom in her efficiency apartment for a little while while I got on my feet, going to a day job at a Democratic political pollster, reading Yeats at night while eating Chinese food.
5:06 Erin: Sounds good.
5:08 Wes: Yeah. Which part? The efficiency with your mother?
5:11 Erin: Yeah, that part.
5:12 Wes: It's amazing. I think I probably revisited it after reading no country for Old Men, being reminded of it and then really loving it again. And what a great first line.
5:26 Erin: Yeah. I love the bait and switch. You think that is Byzantium, but no you're sailing to Byzantium from that. That is probably Ireland.
5:35 Wes: Right. I think in earlier drafts of this poem, it's clear that it actually. Yeah, it's definitely Ireland. So there's a lot of. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things to say about earlier drafts. I didn't look very closely at that. I just looked a little bit at Helen Vendler. Name of the book, Our Secret Profession. Is that the name? No.
5:54 Erin: I don't know.
5:54 Wes: Yeah, Yeah. I think it's a book called Ars.
5:58 Erin: Is that E. Yeats book?
5:59 Wes: Yeah.
5:59 Erin: Oh, nice. She's everywhere. She's all things. She's all wise and it's great.
6:04 Wes: It's truly. Yeah. What she has to say about this is great and very helpful. And then I looked a little bit at Harold Bloom and. Which is good one.
6:14 Erin: That is no country for old men. The young in one another's arms, Birds in the trees, those dying generations at their song the salmon falls, the mackerel, crowded seas, Fish, flesh or fowl commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born and dies caught in that sensual music all neglect monuments of unaging intellect. Should we go stanza by stanza?
6:43 Wes: Yes.
6:44 Erin: Okay. With apologies to everyone for my allergy laden voice. I don't have the gravitas I need to be like Ian McKellen reading this or something. But anyway.
6:56 Wes: Well, I think allergies bring you closer.
6:58 Erin: Yeah, exactly right.
7:00 Wes: To the gravelly old person voice. Goddamn young people. That's what this first stanza really is. He's tired of their rock and roll music. These.
7:13 Erin: Well, I also imagine the country as. This particular country as being the land of allergies. So I feel the need myself to sail away from wherever things are blooming.
7:29 Wes: This is no country for people with sensitive sinuses.
7:34 Erin: Never had allergies like this before. I'm just allergic to Utah at this point.
7:38 Wes: Well, after we're done with this, we can talk a little bit about Claritin.
7:42 Erin: Oh, I'm on. I'm on the heaviest and I'm on like a steroid. Nasal spray.
7:47 Wes: Oh, shit.
7:48 Erin: It is so bad.
7:49 Wes: It's flonase.
7:50 Erin: Yes, it's really bad.
7:52 Wes: Yeah, I take Claritin every day. Cause I have a cat and I can't have a cat.
7:57 Erin: You're allergic to your cat?
7:59 Wes: She's just a little. Because she's like the most hypoallergenic cat I've ever been around. But some cats I'm super allergic to. But her.
8:07 Erin: Wow.
8:08 Wes: You know, I could get by if I had to, even without Claritin.
8:10 Erin: Oh, that's love.
8:11 Wes: It helps.
8:11 Erin: You have a cat and you're allergic.
8:13 Wes: Yeah. That's sweet, because I need to, like, be able to wear her around my neck.
8:18 Erin: Yeah.
8:18 Wes: Just have unlimited contact.
8:20 Erin: Oh, I'm allergic to not having a cat. That's my problem.
8:24 Wes: There you go. There you go. But speaking of cats, flesh instead of fish, flesh and fowl. It's kind of reminiscent of Genesis, I thought. Right. You have fish and fowl, and then the creepy, crawly things on the earth are all the. So, yeah, but it's interesting that he refers to that as flesh. I guess that has something to do with the target of his attitude towards sensuality. Right. The young in one another's arms, the birds and the trees. The bees don't explicitly make a entrance, but I suppose the birds and the bees are really what's going on here. And then the little dig. Right. Well, you're dying too. I may be old, but you're right. Among the dying generations.
9:15 Erin: I think the contrast between oldness or maturation and this begotten born and dies is an interesting one. Right. Because it seems like later in the poem, this idea of sort of immortality or eternality is expanded upon. And when one is old, well, it seems like the speaker was born old or something. But it seems like something different from being in this cycle, this perpetual cycle that's spinning around and around where you're born and you die and you're born and you die. Being old is something else. Like that's a state that. That seems that the fish, flesh and fowl never achieve old age or something. That's right.
9:57 Wes: You would think there are other old people in this country.
9:59 Erin: Right, right.
10:03 Wes: He could have other old friends.
10:06 Erin: Exactly. They, like, shouldn't they play chess in the park together or something instead? No,
10:12 Wes: old people stuff.
10:13 Erin: Old people stuff.
10:15 Wes: But yeah, so it's a. That. That is a very interesting image when you think about it. A country of the eternally young, or the idea of a country as a metaphor for the. I don't know, the psychological terrain of youth, where once you get older, you kind of leave that terrain. So there is a country, right. For young people, it's the club. It's not just kidding. It's wherever young people congregate. Whatever young people's terrain is, psychologically or otherwise. That is. That is an eternally young country because you. You leave it just by getting older.
10:50 Erin: I see, I see.
10:51 Wes: Yeah.
10:52 Erin: I sort of had this idea that it was a place where you also died. Like the 27 Club, like where everybody just dies. Young. That kind of club.
11:00 Wes: But yeah, Logan's. Logan's Run.
11:03 Erin: Right. Exactly. Yeah.
11:05 Wes: Do you remember that corny movie? No. I mean, that. That movie, he was like, psychologically formative for me. It's, like, deeply ingrained. So. Yeah. But I did try to rewatch it recently, and I do find it a bit hard. When I was younger, it was magic. But having left that country, no longer. Yeah. So this reminds me a bit of Keats. Part of the urn poem. What is it? The frozen images of young people doing young people things. Do you pipe to the spirit? Ditties of no tone. Fair youth beneath the trees Thou canst not leave thy song Nor ever can those trees be bare. So, again, this kind of timeless quality. Because it's. Right. It's on the urn, isn't it? Is this an image on the urn?
11:58 Erin: Yes.
11:59 Wes: Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss Thou winning near the goal yet do not grieve, she cannot fade Though thou hast not thy bliss forever Wilt thou love and she be fair? One of the benefits of being on an urn, as opposed to actually being in real life, being a living being, actual flesh. But here, you know, there is this. There is this dynamism in this first stanza, which he will try to get away from. Right. As he heads towards. Well, he's already foreshadowed here monuments of an un aging intellect. The monument being the thing like the urn, which is the place of stasis and something eternally what it is. So this is the last hope, in a way, for someone who's older and for the artist who's gonna try to leave something eternal and un aging behind. Right.
12:58 Erin: If the urn is just the moment, you know, it's frozen in the moment just before consummation. This seems to be frozen at the moment of consummation. Right. Which is why there's that death inherent in the orgasmic, sensual place. The salmon falls and mackerel crowded seas too. I think of that kind of extreme competition and struggle, which is. Which seems to be inherent too, in the sort of mating ritual that's happening here. Like, there are more phases of the mating ritual going on here than are described in the relatively staid and sort of, you know, the urn is singular too.
Like, it has multiple scenes. But in the one scene of courtship that's being described in that passage, it's just the one or it's just the two lovers, right? And he's straining to kiss her and isn't quite there. Whereas this is about the Teeming masses too. You know, this is about like the entire ecosystem that everyone is, in which everyone is struggling and in which there's competition. And that too I think has this kind of like, you know, the death inherent in the life giving moment. Kind of that sort of being pierced through with its opposite.
14:12 Wes: Yeah, it's the world of becoming, which. Right. As Aristotle would say, it's a combination of beingness and nothingness. Right. Because it's generation growth and then also decay. Everything's on its way to being more actualized or being out of existence. So being as we know it in the world of becoming, of the world of nature, which is. Right, very much what this is, the natural world, as opposed to the world of spirit, whether it's religious spirit or the world of art, of the aesthetic. Right. Is this world of becoming. So in a way, the first stanza is about leaving nature and it, it's, you know, you might see it as a metaphor for contemplating one's own death. I mean the world itself is not a place for old people at a certain point. So you just again you exit naturally.
15:07 Erin: Well, it's certainly not a place for self conscious people. And so that's the other thing. Yeah, yeah, that's. I think I mentioned that before, that line from Bull Durham that I love though this place has its own music, right. He calls it sensual music. It's not the kind of music he's after. And there's something neglectful about this kind of. The music produced in this kind of a place. It's too self interested, it's too harried, it's accidental, it's not studied. And so one, one needs to, to not neglect the monuments of unaging intellect if one is to be actually a self conscious person in the world.
And so one has to abandon this country to attain that kind of self consciousness. I don't know if I'm, you know, I might be using that sort of incorrectly but in Bull Durham it's where the world is not made for those of us who were self conscious or. I can't, I can't remember exactly how the line goes, but yeah. Contrasting Kevin Costner's older, more experienced ballplayer with Tim Robbins, completely wild, appetitive pitcher who's all over the place.
16:20 Wes: Salmon falls. Right. The salmon are. This is evocative of the salmon swimming upstream to mate jumping.
16:27 Erin: I think so, yeah.
16:29 Wes: Going up, up the fall.
16:30 Erin: Yes.
16:31 Wes: Ironically, mackerel crowded seas. So, so very much evocative of gener. Or there are two types of generation. Right. There's reproduction. And then there's the generation of growth of a single being. But in this case, yeah, sexual reproduction being emphasized and commending, really, in Genesis, I guess, fish, flesh and fowl are in a way commended to Adam or to the care of human beings and to the naming of human beings. In this case, it's the previous generation that commends these new beings that they give birth to, to this country, to nature caught in that sensual music. All neglect. Too busy having fun to be into higher culture.
17:17 Erin: Well, yeah, it's funny. It's funny. That line, actually, you're making me see that. The possibility of reading that. So that they neglect their own sensual music, isolated as it is on that line. Right, yeah. So they're not even aware enough to know that they are creating a kind of music with. What would that be? Mating calls. Right. They're only seeing the utility or their own desire and therefore the utility of the mating call in order to procure, to keep producing these generations that are like on a conveyor belt, it seems. And they're ignorant of the fact that it is creating music. So maybe it takes. Even takes an older person to even hear that music or to recognize it as such in retrospect. Yeah, interesting.
18:06 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm going to share, or I don't know if I've shared it before, but just mention another one of my crazy theories, which is culture itself is a result of sexual selection. And I'm not the first to think of this, but there's a good.
18:22 Erin: I kept reading that on Twitter a few months ago or something like that
18:25 Wes: been written about it. Oh, yeah, that's. People are tweeting.
18:30 Erin: Trump even haven't been on Twitter in a few months. But yeah, last time I was on there, I was like, oh, this is. Some people are really malfunctioning.
18:42 Wes: Why does the peacock have its tail? Because that's the way the women peacock women want it. Or I guess peahens is what they'd be called. So it's sexual selection and that sense. And one can make an argument that that's human. Right. So that gender and the human mind and culture and everything that goes along with it are just sort of sexual selection on steroids in a way. They're selected for not just because they help us survive, but because they're attractive. And it goes two ways in human beings in a way that's not as obvious. Say in birds, where it's the peacock, the male that looks fancy, the female, not so much.
But it's more about female Preference. But I bring all that up just because you mentioned utility. And. Yeah, so for, for animals, they're doing all of this proto artistic stuff, right? Singing for the mates. They even do, you know, if you watched some of these nature documentaries where you have the male birds doing these elaborate dances, right? Have you seen these in David Attenborough? And then sometimes they need like backup dancers and they have to rehearse and do all this stuff.
19:51 Erin: My favorite part of that is none of them ask what the women bring to the table. You know, It's a given.
20:01 Wes: What about their needs? Anyone ever think about that?
20:05 Erin: Their need is. Yeah, to get a woman.
20:09 Wes: And so there's, there's one species that practices this dance in front of a juvenile male that doesn't look yet look like a male, looks like a female because he's juvenile, doesn't have his colors yet. Anyway, then they do it for the female bird, him, the backup dancers hopping over each other, doing this elaborate ritual. And then she gives some, she looks for a second, kind of cocks her head, making a decision and she'll be like, she'll either fly off or she'll be like, all right, you can mate. Lasts like 3 milliseconds and then it's over. All that to commend what's going to come after it.
So. So obviously animals can't become conscious of that. But even in human beings, right, there's sort of that imperative and it doesn't have to be sexual per se. It can be about winning reputation or rising in others esteem. That's part of the motive for artistic production. So it's more self conscious in that sense. But there's something right, to the extent that there's a worldly component to that and maybe even winning a mate, writing love poetry or something like that, it's not as pure as this idea of actually leaving something of yourself behind as a monument.
I think they're similar, but. So maybe I'm making too fine a distinction here. I'm not sure, but. Right. Lodged firmly, firmly in the world of becoming and what's going to happen in the world of becoming but right after you're dead should. Doesn't matter, right to you personally if you're actually left behind in some sense. Shouldn't in a way. So the fantasy is taken to a different level at that point of transcending death itself, not just inducing reproduction. Right. Not just saying, okay, I can use my fine feathers, so to speak, to win a mate and then produce the next generation that's going to be left That'll be the monument.
That'll be the thing that's left when I die. But no, doing something bigger than that.
22:18 Erin: Yeah. I mean, I think that the positive spin on that. Not that creating art is not interested in other people. Because I think part of what this poem is arguing is that that is a process through which one has to become interested in other people. But I would just say that, you know, to give a point to the young people's country. It is outwardly directed. And it is about, like, finding it's not something that's made too fine a point of in this particular poem. But just. Just to your point that, you know, there is, like, a way in which the potential solipsism of artistic production is actually escaped by this.
You know, you could call it, like the utility factor of reproduction. But it's also. It's about trying to win over one other person. You know, it's about trying to please someone else. And therefore it has a kind of. I don't know, an inherent. Like, there's a selfishness to it. But there's also a selflessness which is, I think, present in artistic production as well. But it's more submer. Or it's more refracted. Right. Because you're maybe mostly communing with dead people in most cases. Or people that aren't there yet. So, I mean, there is something like.
Of a linkage. There has to be. And I think this is what this poem is arguing like there has to be caring about something other than immediate appetitive needs. Which seems to be the young people's country's prerogative. But there is something that is about more than you, even in the young country. And it's about more than satisfying that I think, like, to reduce it all to appetite or like a kind of inherent selfishness. It doesn't sit right with me because there's too much sacrifice, actually. Right. That comes with that whole process that can't be ignored.
I mean, you may be initially driven by desire, but you pay a heavy price for it. Eventually. Most people even know that when they're in the throes of desire.
24:06 Wes: I think, yeah, you pay a heavy price. You gotta be around people. People are pain in the ass. So we get tricked into being around each other.
24:20 Erin: Well, it results in children. And that, you know, especially for. For women, is quite. You know, that's quite the price to pay for Moment of fun. So.
24:31 Wes: Yes.
24:31 Erin: Yeah.
24:32 Wes: I'm just thinking of the. The female finch now trying to take that into her consideration when she's Evaluating the dance.
24:39 Erin: Well, that. But that's it, Right. It has to be worth. It has to be at least worth our while front. That's the whole point. Right. Because it's such a risk.
24:47 Wes: Shall we do the next stanza?
24:49 Erin: Yes. 2. An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick. Unless soul clap its hands and sing. And louder. Sing for every tatter in its mortal dress. Nor is there singing school but studying monuments of its own magnificence. And therefore I have sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium.
25:15 Wes: So, yeah, I like this image. An aged man has a tattered coat upon a stick.
25:20 Erin: Yeah. So cute and pathetic.
25:22 Wes: So the flesh is already disintegrating. So if you can't be in the world of flesh, hopefully you can make it into this more spiritual world.
25:32 Erin: Yeah. But there's still a. You know, the thing that confuses me most in this or that I have the most questions about in this stanza is for every tatter in its mortal dress. So the necessities to sing for the tatter, like to become when one becomes tattered, to then sing for the tatters is an interesting idea. It seems just as connected to the material in a way as the first stanza. So though there's no flesh, Right. Like, there's still a materiality which seems to govern the old man singing.
26:08 Wes: Right, Very good point. Right. So however sublime or aesthetically refined art might be, it will take the human as its object, and the human is tattered and flawed, even in the young. So art, of course. Yeah, is very much focused on our vulnerability and our mortality and on this world of becoming. It takes the world of becoming as its subject matter. And even religious art, right, has to take the spiritual as it is, as it comes, instantiated in human form. If it's pictures of Mary and Jesus, these are. Right. These are people.
26:49 Erin: We should, at some point do Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi, in which, you know, this comes up as a theme in Browning's great poem in which the great Fra Lippo is. Is making angels and various figures too, instantiated somehow. You know, he's using local models, you know, exposing certain things and the town. But, you know, there's this argument that, you know, like, he should be portraying angels in a less fleshy way, that there should be something more ethereal. And, of course, this is at the point at which, in the burgeoning Renaissance, when perspective is coming back in and figures have more of this sense of roundness and of reality, Browning imagines that Fra Lippo is causing a lot of trouble by making people look less like they did in medieval iconography and more like real people.
27:51 Wes: Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So, yeah. Just to the point of monuments of an unaging intellect. Well, what does that mean? Yeah. Because often the artistic monument is a monument of something. Subject matter that itself is not un aging. It's human.
28:06 Erin: Right.
28:07 Wes: And essentially tattered. So. Yeah. So you get this right. Explicit idea here that he's gonna sing for every tatter and somehow redeem mortality and human flaws. Nor is there singing school but studying monuments of its own magnificence. So this in a way seems to turn away from the previous idea. So you sing for the tatters, but singing school, I mean, what is this? We study previous great examples of poetry.
28:39 Erin: Yeah. I think the monuments of an unaging intellect, it seems to be the ability to freeze in time. Like to have that first stanza at all. Right. To somehow recapitulate in art the sensual music which without the person recording it would simply fade away or would just continue without any self consciousness about its own existence. And so that un agingness seems to be like. To freeze that moment in time and therefore to like intellectualize it or to make it into something to something in a poem. Those then become ranked, I suppose. Right. So you have the better and the worse efforts. And one has to then study the monuments of magnificence which represent the best examples of the frozen sensual music. Right. I'm just trying to think through this out loud. Or the frozen tatters, if it's Lear or something.
29:45 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. I'm looking back again at monuments of un aging intellect. And now it occurs to me that that is ambiguous. Right. Monuments produced by unaging intellect. Monuments to an aging intellect. So that. Right. There's something in. In the art object that is un aging because it's an expression of some part of us that's un aging and honors that. Right. Is a man is also a monument to that. So it. It expresses it. But then it also is a monument of its own magnificence. In this case, I think that sing. Right. Singing. Singing is a monument of its own magnificent.
It points back to singing. So singing versus intellect. Why have we made that transition? Maybe that's my question. Why have we gone from intellect to singing? The first thing that would naturally occur to me at the end of the first stanza is actual monuments like physical monuments. And then maybe after that, because of intellect, philosophy.
30:51 Erin: Right.
30:52 Wes: But when we get to the second stanza, now we. Now it sounds more like poetry.
30:56 Erin: Right. But this is where I think that any. Any actual intellect that he's describing in the first stanza is just this idea of this frozen sensual music or this sensual music transcribed. That's all it is. I'm gonna get this wrong, but Yeats has this poem. It's called A Prayer for Old Age. And the first four lines, God guard me from those thoughts. Men think in the mind alone. He that sings a lasting song thinks in a marrow bone. Yeah, so. So this is a really important idea in Yeats, that I don't think that there is this division necessarily between intellectual life and the sensual in that they come from different realms. I think it's simply the recording of the sensual music that distinguishes the young from the old.
31:47 Wes: Or.
31:48 Erin: Or this idea of self awareness, self consciousness, whatever you want to call it.
31:51 Wes: Right.
31:51 Erin: Because there's no. In fact, I think this. This speaks to a really profound and deep truth, which is that the only thing that makes. Makes something intellectual as such is simply the. The noticing of the sensual. Like the noticing of those qualities of life which maybe other people don't notice. The examination, Right. The dwelling upon those things which we actually all experience, but which few do notice. Remark upon, record. Write down in some way, right? So there's like an inherent connection. So he's not saying that there's some sort of higher life which the young people are divorced from.
Rather, they're participating in something which the older or the artistic person is merely noticing more intensely. Right. And so that. That, like. I'm calling it transcription, because it's like the idea of writing down the song. So you preserve something about. Like the fact that it is a song is essential. And you have to preserve the song in the handing down of the intellectual information. Because something about the song, something about the beauty is essential to that information, to understanding the country of the young. Otherwise it's not accurate and it's not a great.
It's not a monument of magnificence. So the magnificence has to have the beauty preserved.
33:19 Wes: And you're thinking here of the. So the primary beauty is the beauty of. Is natural beauty or.
33:25 Erin: Yes, yeah.
33:26 Wes: The beauty of the song that's used.
33:30 Erin: The sensual music.
33:32 Wes: Yeah, the sensual music of life.
33:34 Erin: Of life.
33:35 Wes: Right. So whatever's naturally beautiful about that, and then you're doing things with it poetically, just to keep with poetry, since I think that's largely what this is about. You do things formally. Right. To create beauty by the very nature of the structure of the poem and the way language works. So there's beauty that is not Related to the beautiful content, but somehow. Right, so it's not. It's new, but it's somehow meant to convey that original beauty which is its object. Am I getting that right?
34:11 Erin: Yes.
34:12 Wes: Right. So if you do a landscape painting, for instance, the beauty of the painting is not just the beauty of the thing that you took the picture of or made the picture of, it's the beauty of the painting. But it has to capture something about that original natural beauty. It transforms it. Obviously, you know, as an aesthetic object, the two are related. So. Yeah, this is interesting. This isn't something. I don't know if this is getting at your point. It is, but it's something I haven't thought about.
34:41 Erin: Yeah. I think part of it is the choice in what one records, Right. Like, there's the mere fact that one chooses this landscape versus that landscape and what one cuts out of the frame, et cetera. That's the thing that we've chosen to preserve the extent to which it's preserved poorly or not, or it's shown to sort of best advantage. But I think it's easier to make this connection in poetry because one could say that, you know, to use the most obvious example, the iambic pentameter is the pulse, right? So that the music in poetry as transcribed from the sensual music, the meter, somehow it gives the life to the preserved piece of sensual music on the page.
So that there's some sort of pluck something out of life which we deem worth recording, we record it on the page. And then with, you know, if we're lucky, and we produce something of great magnificence, it somehow is then imbued with this kind of divine, kind of artistic divinity in which, like, life is blown back into it through the beauty of that song. Right. But that it has, like a music in it seems to me to be related to this idea of the mating call, or even just like the heartbeat has something alive in it.
35:59 Wes: Yeah, very good. And that's why he went to Byzantium, and that's why.
36:03 Erin: So the destination is Byzantium. What that means is one thing, but also the idea of the Odyssey to get there is another. I mean, you know, the Odyssey doesn't exist, right. It's like. It's just, I have sailed the seas and come, Right? But there's some journey, some attainment that has to happen that sort of elided here. And Byzantium is the object. So why Byzantium, I suppose, is just like the most essential, Right. So it seems like this exoticized location, I suppose, first of all, I mean it's the holy city of Byzantium, so it's this meeting point between east and West. It's like the, the navel of the Western world or something like that. Or of the world. I mean.
36:45 Wes: Yeah, I mean I had this question, of course, what is the significance of Byzantium for Yeats in particular? And I think it has something to do with the monumental nature of the city. Yeah, you were talking about the Odyssey and how that can't happen yet. It can't happen until Leda gets with the swan. I know, and Helen is born and Troy is over overrun and all that. And I guess Byzantium would be not too far from Troy. I mean Troy comes to be associated through the Aeneid, Right. With the rise of the Roman Empire as well. And then as at a certain point, as the western half is failing, the Byzantium becomes the place.
But my primary association is of Byzantium with this particular type of religious art. And think of the murals that he's talking about, which seem to be, have a gold background and they're specifically Christian in nature, but they're, I mean, I guess you could say this about Christianity in general, but it's overlaid on its, you know, kind of pagan precursor.
37:56 Erin: Yeah, I mean, because of that overlay, it's the. So it seems like it's the nexus of all wisdom somehow or of all threads kind of merge there, come together there.
38:06 Wes: He had some, you know, I guess the thing we're leaving out is he had all these mystical ideas that he had that I didn't want to get into remind myself it has some significance in his system. We could just say that and these thousand year cycles or whatever or 2000 year cycles and things like that. And one of them is a specifically Hellenic, I guess era and the next is Christian and then there's the second.
38:31 Erin: Yeah, but there's also just this idea of the, you know, I mean like one could say that Rome is the same way. Right. There's the idea of the Judeo Christian and the Greco Roman and that those two things, you know, overlaid on top of each other in a particular place make it all the richer as a symbol for these types of intelligences coming together. And like in Ravenna or in, in Venice, another similar city in which these cities are places of trade and therefore where all of these various traditions came together and are reflected in the architecture. So they have, as in Venice, there's Moorish influence. Same thing in Ravenna. Right. There's a tremendous amount of east and west collision happening.
39:20 Wes: Byzantium is the city where Christianity truly becomes ascendant over ancient Rome. That's where Constantine makes it. So it certainly is that nexus point for transition from the Greco Roman to the Christian.
39:36 Erin: Right. And if you've got a date in Constantinople, she'll be waiting in Istanbul.
39:44 Wes: So I think we're. I think we're gonna spend the whole recording.
39:48 Erin: Oh, no. Okay.
39:51 Wes: I was thinking later would be be Leda and the Swan would be a kind of a backup, but maybe we could do another Yeats recording next time with Leda and then something else.
39:59 Erin: Yeah, that would be good, because I have more to say about Leda than I do about Sailing to Byzantium. Yeah, like way more, for some reason.
40:08 Wes: Well, that swan is very sexy.
40:10 Erin: Yeah. Yikes.
40:12 Wes: Irresistible. Some say.
40:14 Erin: Well, the music of sailing to Byzantium is so insane, intense that it takes, you know, like, in a way, it's such a. We're making more of it than I thought we would. Because in a way, it's a. It's so clear. Like the. The diction is so clear and yet, of course, scratch the surface for a second and everything comes out. But anyway.
40:34 Wes: Right. Yeah. Well, so that concludes part one of our recording on sailing to Byzantium. We got through exactly half, so good job. We'll do the second half in part two, stanzas three and four. Thank you.
40:51 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Evil of Banality in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) – Part 2
May 26, 2025
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satanic evil, when confronted with life’s very frightening realities—including pregnancy itself—turns out to be so banal.
Upcoming Episodes: Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “An Indian to His Love.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Rosemary. I was just asking Erin whether if she remembers on first watching, it was clear to her that this was not in Rosemary's head, that this was all real all along.
0:46 Erin: Yeah, I remember going back and forth because a book like all of Them Witches. Okay, that's a ridiculous title. It all comes down to an anagram. It's the kind of thing that you start. You start taking orders from your dog, you know, it's indicative of a kind of mental breakdown. And then there are scenes like when, like at the party, the under 60 party, just Rosemary looks so awful. I find those scenes to be extremely like, actually, those are the most upsetting scenes in the film for me to see how bad she looks. And the friends are like, this is crazy.
You know, you've been having this pain since November, you know, that is really powerful. And of course, you know, we haven't even gotten to sort of the. Whether or not the whole film is just a parable of what happens to women in pregnancy and the ways in which women are just told to accept certain things by people who supposedly know better or their feelings are dismissed, their symptoms are dismissed. Yeah. So that's a powerful moment for me. Women tell her, like, this is not normal, you know, after she's been told not to talk to other women.
It's so insidious. It's so. Yeah, I went back and forth first time I saw it. I remember not. Not really knowing. It's very, very clear the second time around that she's crazy.
2:05 Wes: She even says, this is not a dream. This is really happening.
2:08 Erin: I was just gonna say, yeah, that just makes sense. Silliest moment. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
2:15 Wes: Then you think, well, wait a minute, if she's saying that, then it can't be real.
2:19 Erin: Right.
2:20 Wes: So very expertly done then. Yeah, I think, keeping us in doubt and. Cause really the ending, I think, is kind of punchline to a setup for a joke. The whole movie is one big setup to a really funny and well delivered punchline, which is what that scene is in the end when she wanders into the.
2:40 Erin: You're going like this with the knife. Oh, yeah, yeah. You're doing that.
2:46 Wes: Right, right, yeah.
2:48 Erin: Rosemary handhold.
2:49 Wes: Yeah, she's got the knife. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of tip offs to. To the fact that this is real. But of course, to anyone else, and perhaps to us, you know, in a first viewing of the film, she seems like there's a good chance she's just someone having a paranoid episode, but she's really Being gaslighted, man, I knew you
3:07 Erin: were going to say this word and I was going to, I was going to tease you and be like, what other word works here?
3:17 Wes: So that really is gaslighting, right?
3:20 Erin: It really is.
3:22 Wes: Yeah. But disagreeing with someone's not gaslighting me. Stop gaslighting me. You're making me feel crazy for being disagreed with. Anyway, that's all very passe now. Culture war stuff. Who cares about that when the world is ending?
3:42 Erin: But you mentioned too, at the end of the last part about. About the fact that they were going to go with a different type from Mia Farrow. And I think we should talk about that and about the significance. I'm still trying to work it out. The significance of the haircut besides the fact that it's in the book. I looked at it as in the book that she gets that cut and she had it in real life. The idea that they initially wanted to go with someone more full figured. And also the fact that that Burton Taylor joke happens at the beginning of the film.
You know, there's this image of motherhood and fecundity that's associated with a type like Elizabeth Taylor or like one of the women that they wanted to cast in this part. And instead they go with Mia Farrow, who then. Who looks, you know, awful for a good portion of the film. And I don't know if that haircut is just about making her look more skeletal and sicker or what. I don't know if you have a read on that.
4:34 Wes: This is not long after they learn that they're gonna have the baby. How does she tell him?
4:40 Erin: She hands him something. I didn't get that.
4:42 Wes: She gives him a quarter because they bet a quarter earlier. Oh, what did they bet a quarter on, though? So giving him a quarter signifies that she lost that bet. And then maybe the bet was about getting pregnant.
4:56 Erin: Okay, I couldn't even tell that it was a quarter. It looked strange to me. I don't know.
5:01 Wes: Okay. Anyway, and then right after getting that news, she complains about him not being opened and he admits he's self centered, but then he does a very self centered thing and leaves off kissing her and celebrating with her because he's got to go tell the Castevets. So I got to tell my friends about this. And then brings him down to celebrate. And then it's after that point she spontaneously puts on the amulet and gets her first drink from Minnie, gets that drink prescription. And it's then that after that that she comes home to him practicing lines and she has that. She has short hair. And how does he. How does he say, you know, he says, don't tell me. Don't tell me. You paid for that. And then she goes right into having pain. I think Hutch. Right. Hutch reacts to her hair as well.
5:50 Erin: Does he or does he? It seems to me that other than Guy, everyone is reacting to how bad she looks in terms of her coloring and the lost weight.
6:00 Wes: Right. So, yeah, I'm getting this mixed up. Hutch says, my God, when he sees her, and she says, it's Vidal Sassoon. He's not talking about the hair. He's talking about how she looks.
6:11 Erin: But the hair increases before that.
6:13 Wes: Before that, someone says that it's the haircut that looks awful.
6:17 Erin: That's Guy. Guy says that.
6:19 Wes: Okay.
6:19 Erin: He says, you look fine except for the hair. Because he's trying. Happening to her as normal.
6:23 Wes: Yeah. It sets up this interesting binary between. Does she look bad because of the hair? Does she look bad because she's sick? You know, I guess we have. We might also take that haircut as a way of. As kind of a weak attempt at asserting independence from the patriarchy, from Guy. She's doing.
6:45 Erin: She's doing a modern Guy's Everywhere thing,
6:48 Wes: the 60s version of a modern woman.
6:49 Erin: She actually looks. I mean, if anybody could pull off this haircut, obviously, it's. It's Mia Farrow and Twiggy. But it seems to me to be a rejection of femininity at a time when she should be feeling. I mean, she doesn't have to feel anyway. Far be it from me to tell her how to feel. That's what everybody else is doing, but. Right, but in which one typically feels at their most feminine or could feel that way. Obviously, the vast spectrum of experiences of pregnancy complicates this because some women are just sick their entire pregnancy, you know, and they never feel great and they don't get the glow that's promised to them. But at least in the cultural consciousness. Right. It's associated with this increased. This idea of increased femininity and of sort of like being at the apex of one's female potential.
7:34 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. Because to reject that. That's one form of rejecting character. In a way, to have less hair is to have less character. It's to transcend that pigeonholing into one role or form of character or another.
7:50 Erin: Oh, I see. Oh, I see.
7:51 Wes: And if you have no hair, you can just put on a wig and be an actor. So it pushes her in that direction. That's interesting, because he is Practicing lines when she comes home to him. But, yeah, she opens up her identity a little bit. It's more fluid at that point. It's more capable of taking on new forms.
8:12 Erin: Yeah, that's great. And so in that way, it's better than. Because, again, I went back to the Burton Taylor thing, and if they wanted a more full figured woman, a woman who's more indicative of this kind of fertility, this. You know, I mean, I think of Liz Taylor as being like this, like, pagan goddess of femininity.
8:30 Wes: If it were Liz Taylor, she'd be leading the cult by the second act.
8:34 Erin: Oh, yeah. Of course. They'd be worshiping her.
8:39 Wes: Yeah.
8:40 Erin: But, yeah, so I like this idea that. Yeah, that. That's actually too limiting. That makes sense. It's satisfying to me.
8:47 Wes: You know, if she is trying to escape, you could see that as this kind of Satanist impulse. So it's no accident that she's had her first drink, maybe, and she's started to get sick. It's the right. The pain that starts right after the drink, right after the haircut.
9:06 Erin: Is there anything we can make of the tannis root and of the fungal here besides the fact that her husband is a really fun guy? No. You thought there was a bigger payoff, you said.
9:19 Wes: Yeah, when I saw. Watching this for the second time, I expected a bigger payoff for the tannis thing. I just thought based on a fuzzy memory of the first viewing. But, yeah, not much is said. Right. Except that it's kind of a fungal. A fungal witch thing.
9:36 Erin: Thinking through it now. Okay, so the woman who was in the apartment before them, whose name is Mrs. Gardenia. I guess you can only be named after plants if you live in that
9:44 Wes: apartment and have so many herbs that you're.
9:48 Erin: Yes, yes, I thought quite a bit about that after, because I thought there's so many great things that happen just in that first scene, as you already pointed out, we learn that she fell into a coma.
9:58 Wes: Right.
9:58 Erin: Rosemary, we learn, is a bit superstitious. And I see this as being, again, the sort of vestiges of Catholicism, you know? Did she die in the apartment? Not that it matters. You know, I'm not superstitious, I swear. You know, and we learn that she was in a coma for several months before passing away, which is exactly what happens to Hutch. And that moving the secretary in front of the closet, like, was there a falling out? Was she actually part of the cult or was she discarded? But the idea of the place, of the building itself being a character and of this is something I'm very, very interested in this idea of landscape or of space.
Could be this building. It could be whatever. Whatever has transpired in the long history of a place leaves its scars on that place. And I think that this is maybe related to this idea of the fungal infection that the whole house seems to have. So they're all. They're all part of the coven. And the apartment itself will get. It's connected ultimately. Right. It's connected to the apartment from which it was initially broken off from when they made the apartments smaller. I can't imagine what that apartment looked like. The idea of the fungus that's kind of like growing underneath the floorboards or the thing that's behind the wall.
Right. The silent killer, you know, mold, fungus, whatever you want to call it. Right. That seems to be as much a part of the building itself, of which the coven are almost like this outgrowth or this flowering of what's inside the walls. Right. As it is there, because the people are there. So it's a sort of chicken and egg scenario. You know, there's a reading of the film in which the building just bad or something. Right. It's, you know, the basement being a scary place. I don't know. And much is made of basements, actually. There's even a basement in the ship that she goes on in her dream where she gets impregnated.
Right. She goes below deck. So something about structure and the structure of the unconscious and all that, which is being paralleled here.
12:06 Wes: Yeah. I mean, what is the theory here about how this is supposed to work?
12:10 Erin: That it drugs her and makes her, therefore, more willing to be manipulated?
12:14 Wes: Is that.
12:15 Erin: Is that all.
12:15 Wes: That's the idea.
12:16 Erin: Yeah. That she's just kind of out of it all the time?
12:19 Wes: I guess so. I mean, I. You know, how do you. Yeah. How do you get pregnant with Satan? I guess Satan himself is the one who has sex with her, Right?
12:28 Erin: Well, no, it's. Is it John Cassavetes in Satan makeup? Those eyes.
12:33 Wes: Yeah. It seems to be some sort of hybrid of. It looks like it's him. And then you see. So, yeah, you get the idea that he's been somehow possessed by Satan.
12:43 Erin: Yeah.
12:44 Wes: And then is having sex with her as Satan with the nasty hands. Pause. Scratch. Scratching her. And then I think I always vaguely thought, well, I guess the drink and the tannis root and all that stuff. Is there tannis root in the drink as well?
12:59 Erin: I assume there is.
13:00 Wes: Right.
13:00 Erin: And then Minnie confirms it.
13:02 Wes: It's very important she get that drink. And I. And it's making her sick. But it seems like there's something more to it. Like, okay, well, yeah, if you're gonna have Satan's kid, you gotta have some tanis root. You gotta. It's the, it's the Satanist version of vitamin pills. But even more important.
13:20 Erin: Mm. Well, what you're making me realize is, okay, so if Satan himself, he needs a physical conduit to come into the world. So instead of somehow incarnating, he has, he himself needs a host. So Guy is pregnant with the devil before Rosemary is. There's also, of course, a parody of everything is just parodic attached to the fungus on Catholicism, if you will. You know, so instead of the angel appearing to Mary and asking her, you know, and her giving her assent so that its consent is received, you know, of course, like the Antichrist would have to be conceived through a rape.
The pregnancy would have to be, you know, Mary, because she's the immaculate conception, has no pain in delivery and presumably, of course in pregnancy, because these are the wages of original sin. Pain is wage of original sin. And so because Mary is the immaculate conception, she has a pain free pregnancy and delivery. Or at least that's the logic. And rather than the Holy Spirit being the thing that impregnates her, it's what, it's an actor that's the opposite of the Holy Spirit.
14:34 Wes: Happens to be her husband as well.
14:36 Erin: Happens to be her husband. Right, right. Yeah, but the Holy Spirit is part of the Trinity. So there's this three in one thing. There's this. I don't know, I'm not gonna be able to get there. I'm trying to think through it, but his part of the equation, I mean, what I wanted to say early on, and I'll come back to this, it's just that, you know, what's so interesting and sneaky about this movie is that Guy is really the main character. You know, I mean, it's all his doing. I mean, if this were a different film, it would just be a Faust story and he would be Faust. He would be the title character. So he's the one that's making all of this happen. It's with his assent that she gets pregnant. Yeah. And his sort of demonic possession preempts Rosemary's own demonic pregnancy.
15:23 Wes: There's a whole other version of this where you could lift everything that's in background into the foreground and then put what's in foreground into the background and it would be just as compelling. It would be the Faust story if, you know, we would learn of how it is that Minnie and Roman seduced him or whatever, how they got him to make this bargain. We would learn more about what's going on for him psychologically, such that he's so vulnerable to this. So we would see him get corrupted and then I guess, presumably we would see him suffer for his choice. Right.
16:00 Erin: Well, instead there's literally a blank space. Remember when she's in the kitchen washing dishes with Minnie and they look into the room and you just see the smoke because they're out of frame. So you just see the empty room with smoke coming from there, cigarettes. So of course that's, you know, that's the Faustian moment. Right. But they're not in the frame. It's like the shot of the. They're around the corner. So you just see the empty room of smoke.
16:25 Wes: I see. I didn't. Yeah, I didn't think of that. That's very cool.
16:30 Erin: Yeah. But I mean, you know, so the film is obviously, I mean, by making her the subject, I mean, this is its brilliance and this is also, you know, I wouldn't wish the film to be about Guy because that would be quite boring. And part of the reason why she is the subject is because of the feminist themes in the film. Yeah. So then it becomes a parable about this unsuspecting woman who. Around whom all these men exert control. Not exclusively men, but. Right. Older people, people in positions of authority and men exert control over her.
17:01 Wes: She is very passive and it does seem guilt ridden. Right. It does seem connected to her Catholicism. She's guilty and self effacing and self doubting and so can be pushed around in this way.
17:15 Erin: Well, I mean, the worst instance of this is her getting scratched up and it's just dropped that he raped her. She just can't even. I mean that, that is just unbelievable to me. I don't know. It's believable.
17:32 Wes: But yeah, yeah, no, I had the same. I had the same reaction. I think it played differently back then, but.
17:37 Erin: Oof. God. And then I. I don't think so.
17:41 Wes: I think notes I started to put by contemporary standards. Rape. I started.
17:47 Erin: No, no, no.
17:48 Wes: And then I thought. And then I stopped myself because I felt. I felt too guilty about even writing. Writing that. But no, I do think it. I. I think the scratches. It plays more. And it plays more ambiguously. But yeah, assume it's disturbing in 68 as well. But I think it's more potent today.
18:10 Erin: Yeah, yeah. It's set in 65 and then they have New Year's and it's 66, which I was like, okay, it's six, six, and then an upside down six with the nine. So they had to do it that way. And then he says, oh, the year one, Roman announces at the party. And I was like, that's right.
18:31 Wes: But, yeah, so it's believable that. Right, it's believable that she could be raped while she's passed out and then not give more than kind of a tepid objection to it. She objects.
18:42 Erin: And she's disturbed.
18:44 Wes: And she's disturbed. But it's. It's. Yeah, she doesn't feel like she has the right to.
18:50 Erin: Yeah, that's. I think one of the things that's so disturbing about this is that he is, like, treating her like a broodmare, you know, and he is the one who's aware of what's going on in her body more so than she is at all times in the film.
19:03 Wes: Right.
19:04 Erin: He knows more about what's happening inside her than she does.
19:07 Wes: So he could always say, but, honey, it was the devil who raped you. Sorry, it wasn't me. It was the devil.
19:14 Erin: Right, Exactly. Exactly. That's the get out of jail free card.
19:20 Wes: The devil made me do it. No, the devil did in through me.
19:24 Erin: All of them devils, they made me do it.
19:27 Wes: So I think in that sense, yeah, she's a good target for the cult. She's vulnerable. But Guy is also a good target. Right. It's trickier to take down a couple than to take down, like, someone like Terry.
19:39 Erin: Yes.
19:40 Wes: Someone who's a dope fiend or an ex dope fiend. He has to be picked up off the sidewalk and then groomed. And that seems like a simpler project in a way than trying to get a couple.
19:53 Erin: And yet she puts up a fight, but she actually has a little bit more agency than Rosemary.
20:02 Wes: True.
20:03 Erin: Yeah.
20:03 Wes: But, you know. Yeah. Guy's vulnerability, of course, is his ambition. And so, you know, you get the Faustian theme as a way to. As a kind of entry point for Minnie and Roman are a vulnerability that they can take advantage of.
20:17 Erin: This is right after she's eaten the mousse, which I did notice that they have different. The tops of their two cups of mousse are different, I guess to clue Guy into which one he should give to her. He yells at her for not wanting to eat it because she doesn't like the undertaste. And he says, there's always something wrong, you know, and then. Anyway, then they're watching the Pope on tv, or he is, and he says, it's the Pope at Yankee Stadium. And then he mentions, that's a great spot for my Yamaha commercial. So it's like. It's this wonderful moment where, you know, religion is just in service of his career, you know, which is that. That's just the encapsulation of his whole. His whole character is just putting any religious impulse he might have just simply in terms of what he can get out of it, in terms of fame and notoriety or whatever.
21:11 Wes: Right. She doesn't eat most of the mousse. Right.
21:14 Erin: Which is maybe why she waits.
21:16 Wes: Napkin. Oh, right. She's not fully. Yeah. When did undertaste become aftertaste?
21:22 Erin: I don't know. I know. She says it so many times.
21:24 Wes: Undertaste is not a thing anymore.
21:26 Erin: Yeah, yeah. It's related to the house, the basement, the fungus, the. Yeah, it's underneath. It's not after. It's under.
21:36 Wes: Right.
21:36 Erin: And it's chalky. And then she's. Someone says she looks like a piece of chalk, so.
21:40 Wes: Right.
21:41 Erin: She's all fungal.
21:42 Wes: Gross.
21:44 Erin: Yeah. So what about Hutch? We have.
21:47 Wes: I was saying the same sentence in my mind. Sorry.
21:50 Erin: There you go. We have a man of this older generation, and he writes boys adventure stories. Is that right?
22:00 Wes: Oh, is that what he does? Okay.
22:01 Erin: Oh, where did I get that?
22:03 Wes: It's when Guy is casting aspersions on him, he uses that. Right.
22:08 Erin: Yeah. Oh, those boys adventure stories are going to his head. That's what he says.
22:14 Wes: Is he reading the stories or is he writing the stories? Yeah. In any case. Yeah. He's. Well, so he's a mentor figure. He stands in stark contrast. Right. So ideally, that's what the older generation is. It's. It stands in a role of mentorship to the young people. And so Minnie and Roman are more sinister variations on that. I guess it must be Rosemary who has the primary relationship with Hutch. And I guess we don't know what the history of that is.
22:47 Erin: Is he their current landlord? So maybe he doesn't need an occupation. Maybe he's just a landlord who sits around reading these adventure stories. Or maybe he doesn't at all. And Guy is just being mean.
22:58 Wes: Well, where do we first meet him? He's getting dinner. I guess it's after they decide to take the apartment. It's about, like, seven minutes into the movie. They decide to take the apartment, and then suddenly they're with Hutch.
23:10 Erin: Yes.
23:10 Wes: I think that's their first introduction to him. And he's taking chicken out of the oven.
23:14 Erin: Lamb. It's lamb.
23:16 Wes: Lamb. Oh, well, there you go.
23:17 Erin: Yeah, that's how I know.
23:23 Wes: And what does he say? I think. Does he say, I was tempted to write the management? That you were drug addicts and litter bugs. Instead, I tried to lie and tell them you are wonderful tenants. Okay, so he's the landlord. Why are they leaving this landlord and mentor figure that they get along so well with? I suppose it's. They're planning on having children and they need more space.
23:45 Erin: Just before this, when they're still in the apartment, he says, I could walk to all the theaters from here. That's kind of ironic, because then he gets a part where he's on crutches anyway. He can limp to all the theaters. I'm just kidding. So maybe they want to have a baby. They want to be in a bigger place. They think it's time to upgrade. You took guy's lack of success or discontent as being a monetary thing. I didn't. The guy who's showing them the Bramford says, oh, that's where the money is. And he says, yeah, and the artistic thrills, too, or something like that. Yeah.
24:18 Wes: No, I was thinking of him as.
24:21 Erin: You weren't sure. Okay.
24:22 Wes: Yeah. Having ambition. Someone who has artistic ambitions, but in a way has sold out with the commercials.
24:30 Erin: Yes. Yeah.
24:31 Wes: Has not gotten rich by selling out.
24:34 Erin: Okay, he's not rich. But they're comfortable, I thought, and able
24:38 Wes: to upgrade enough to get a tiny, tiny apartment in the Dakota building.
24:46 Erin: It's just the back six or whatever the hell.
24:49 Wes: It's one tenth of what the original
24:50 Erin: apartment was back four. They live upstairs from Lauren Bacall and downstairs from John Lennon. Anyway. Yeah. And does he not want to move? He's not sold on it. She seems to be. You know, she's kind of nesting. When they move in, they really transform it. I mean, they paint it white. They. You know, there's a nursery that they assemble when she gets pregnant. So, you know. But she's kind of already doing that before she gets pregnant. So it seems to me that it's. This is the. We're gonna start a family apartment. The other one was the starter apartment, and there has to be enough money to do that.
But he doesn't want to move. I thought he's the one who's actually wary about moving, which seems to me to be about how he wants to just, yeah. Do his thing and not have a baby and all that. And I think that maybe what I wanted to say about his potential jealousy of her in part one was related to this idea that, you know, he's an actor, but she Seems to be the likable one. Like, she's the one who has the relationships. She's the one who has the friends. She's the one who's friends with Hutch. He isn't. There's something about him that maybe is related to this idea that he's not a good actor.
It's just that he's. I mean, he seems charming enough at the beginning, but, like, he's kind. He has that under. Undertaste of being a bit of a jerk and an arrogant guy who people just don't take to. And that seems to me to be connected to his bad acting.
26:12 Wes: Yeah. Who's at the party? I mean, they have a party with a bunch of people. Is it all her people?
26:17 Erin: It seems like it.
26:18 Wes: It's her party. Yeah.
26:20 Erin: Yeah. She's the one who has the guest list all set up, and he wants to invite the older couple, so he's not so interested in their friends. He's not attached to that like he can. In accepting this Faustian bargain, it seems he has very little to lose socially. Like, he could just discard people and get with this older couple, whereas she's the one who seems to have the ties, you know, so they come as a unit, but they're really friends with the wife because he's insufferable, you know, that seems. Seems part of this.
26:51 Wes: Yeah. So I think you're right. He's reluctant to move. She's enthusiastic about the apartment. He's worrying about the rent and stuff like that. She has to plea with him. Please, can we take it? You know, Guy, let's take it. Please. And he's pretty. You know, it's not like he's hard to convince or something like that, but you get some sense that it's really her desire that's driving them forward at this point. And, yeah, I think you're right. He. He would be more static if it weren't for her. So I guess. Yeah. So. So he. He's gonna find some. Some real mentorship. When he. When he moves into this new building, he falls in love with these. These old people who initially, I think he thinks they're kind of. They're gonna be a drag, right?
27:35 Erin: Oh, yes.
27:36 Wes: She's the one who agrees to have dinner with them, and he's not happy about that, though.
27:41 Erin: Then it immediately switches, and she's quite wary of them for a long time. You know, she doesn't like the fact that they're actually too nice. She sees that there's something insidious about their Generosity.
27:50 Wes: And then Guy. It's almost like an affair. I mean, Guy becomes more preoccupied with them.
27:56 Erin: Yeah. I find it very, very odd that he runs over to tell them without her when. When she's pregnant. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That he runs over and doesn't. Like, he doesn't call them over. And, you know, of course, it makes sense in hindsight that he has to go tell them, hey, our plan worked, you know.
28:12 Wes: Yeah.
28:13 Erin: Don't look too eager when you come over, because this is really for your benefit. Right. So of course he has to do that. But it's. But there's also the oddity of running over. Yeah. Like, as if to tell the mistress that the wife is pregnant or something. I don't know. That doesn't make any sense. But you know what I mean? Like, there's something about it.
28:31 Wes: Yeah. He's more excited, keeps her out with them than with her.
28:35 Erin: Right.
28:36 Wes: And then he goes and gets them and brings them back and they bring wine or champagne or something.
28:40 Erin: Right. That's the thing that is good for her, apparently, not the tannis root. As a pregnant lady, she's drinking her
28:48 Wes: daily martinis like they're in the middle of a kiss. And he cuts that short because he can't wait to tell them about the new baby. So in a way, he's more having it with them than with her.
29:02 Erin: Yeah. I guess the possession makes it work. So it's not really cuckoldry, but he is the, say, the Joseph in this unholy family. Right. And so. And so that doesn't seem to bother. You know, it's strange that that doesn't bother him because he is having the baby with Minnie and Roman, but also she's kind of having the baby a little bit without him. Psychologically, this doesn't seem to be an issue for him in the way that we would think that it would. He's getting so much out of this that I guess it doesn't matter to him. And it seems to me that he's, you know, the reason why he's so close with them is because of the transactional nature of this. Right. Like, he's not getting anything out of Hutch or any of any of Rosemary's friends. And so for him, relationships are transactional. But it's just strange that there is an element of cuckoldry here that isn't really ever dealt with.
29:57 Wes: Psychologically, he turns out to be very disconnected in a way. I'm just thinking of the party at the end. So what does he say to her? They promised me you wouldn't. So Guy comes over to her and he says, would you like a drink? And she asked for a Coca Cola. Is that right? He says, they promised me you wouldn't be hurt. And you haven't been really. Which is just a absurd, terrible thing to say. I mean, supposing you had. Had the baby and lost it, Wouldn't that be the same? And we're getting so much in return. And then she spits at him.
30:32 Erin: I think, yes. Yeah, yeah.
30:34 Wes: You would think if this were. If this were it, if he were just in it for the successful career, he wouldn't need to be at this party. Right. He wouldn't need to be a full fledged member of the cult necessarily. He was just making a deal to get them a baby. But he does seem to be a member as well. But I just was associating to that from this kind of disconnection he has. We don't ever get some strong sense of his burning ambition to succeed as an actor. We get little hints like, I'm off to be famous or whatever. But he, like the other Satanists, don't come across as tortured.
Again, in the beginning of the movie, the conflict is conveyed subtly, the conflict between him and Rosemary and whatever inner conflict or turmoil is happening with him. But he seems kind of like a good guy in the beginning of the movie. And yet, on the other hand, it doesn't come as some huge shock that he's shallow enough to have done that. I think maybe that's the way to. There's kind of a banality of evil element here. He does what he does out of shallowness, not out of angst or nefariousness. He's ultimately very disconnected from her, obviously, in her well being.
31:58 Erin: Yeah. But the performance, like the performance that he gives to her is a masterful one. And so that complicates it, of course, but. Yeah, but I love that idea that. Yeah. That it's just pure shallowness which indicates itself that. I don't know. Is there an argument to be made here that truly great actors actually can't be shallow? Maybe there's an argument that shallowness helps in some way, but you know that you need to have some depth to get the part on your own terms. And it's the shallow that have to blind their competition.
32:34 Wes: Did you see the sequel called look at what Happened to Rosemary's Baby, also known as Rosemary's Baby Part two?
32:44 Erin: Part two, the Toddler Years.
32:46 Wes: Made for television. Masterpiece.
32:51 Erin: No, I have not seen it. I'm interested in that apartment 7Amaybe that the prequel with Terry. Yeah, that sounds like it's the only thing that has a moderate IMDb rating, if I had to guess.
33:03 Wes: But Ruth Gordon is in this and this. Look at. Look at what happened to Rosemary's Baby.
33:09 Erin: Oh, shoot. Look at what happened to Ruth Gordon. That's what you know, you get a resurgence. You get Harold and Maude and then they just cast you in TV sequels.
33:18 Wes: It's got 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. Yeah. It's all about little Satan trying to trials and trying to go to a New York fancy New York school, get educated enough so he can go to Harvard and.
33:36 Erin: I've seen this movie.
33:38 Wes: Yeah, become president.
33:41 Erin: Exactly.
33:44 Wes: The would be am just looking at Wikipedia. The would be Antichrist finds himself constantly manipulated by members of his family and by a newfound love interest.
33:55 Erin: Oh no. Is he torn.
33:56 Wes: What's the point of being the Antichrist if you're just gonna get bullied by everybody? Everyone.
34:02 Erin: That is so funny. Oh my gosh.
34:06 Wes: There's no amount of divinity or anti divinity which is going to make adolescence any better.
34:12 Erin: Well, maybe the problem is that he's only half and half. Right. Because he's half Rosemary and half Satan.
34:19 Wes: Or is he thirds? Is he part guy, part Rosemary? How does it work?
34:24 Erin: There we go.
34:26 Wes: Or no, I would. 25% guy. 25% Satan, half Rosemary.
34:30 Erin: That's right. Well, 25% makeup and then.
34:34 Wes: Yeah, so if you're 25% Satan, God, it just seems like it's. You got all the drawbacks and none of the power.
34:43 Erin: That's right. That's right.
34:46 Wes: Over the 20 years later, an adult Adrian and his best friend Peter are detained by police for speeding.
34:52 Erin: Peter, of course he has a best friend. Peter
34:58 Wes: detained for speeding, confronted by his aunt over his reckless behavior. This is just. It's hilarious.
35:05 Erin: Oh God.
35:08 Wes: It's not easy being Satan.
35:09 Erin: Behave yourself, baby. Satan.
35:11 Wes: It's not easy being young Satan.
35:13 Erin: And what's Ruth Gordon doing? Just sending him checks for his birthday or what?
35:19 Wes: Bringing him mousse. Yeah, mousse. And drinks. Later that night, Roman and Minnie arrive at the casino pretending to be Adrian's aunt and uncle. Minnie drugs Adrian into unconsciousness and dresses him up in a costume and devil makeup.
35:37 Erin: How are they still alive? Wasn't Roman 79 and had terminal cancer? Yeah, we never talked about that. Is that true? And why did they leave? But they don't leave.
35:48 Wes: No, cancer's cancer is faked. And they. They're feigning leaving because Rosemary insists that they cut off contact with them.
35:58 Erin: Right, okay.
35:59 Wes: Because she's spooked.
36:00 Erin: I knew that.
36:00 Wes: And then Saperstein comes up with this plan. Okay, so Ralph Bellamy. I just. I kind of thought he was kind of unrecognizable as Saperstein, but maybe I'm not used to seeing him old, but.
36:13 Erin: Yeah, there's that other movie that he's in that I have his old face in my head from. What is it? I'm looking it up. Right. Trading Places.
36:20 Wes: Oh, right.
36:21 Erin: Cause he's the villain and.
36:22 Wes: Yeah, great movie.
36:23 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. He's good at playing either the dumb, innocent hick or the most evil person in the history of the world.
36:32 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. As a hick, he is so dumb and sweet. Sweet and innocent.
36:37 Erin: Sort of. There's an insidious quality there. I still think more so in the Awful Truth, but.
36:43 Wes: Yeah, More so in what?
36:45 Erin: In the Awful Truth than in his Girl Friday. But there is something. There's some. Some undercurrent there that they pick up on later. Same thing happened with Jimmy Stewart. You know, there was always like an undercurrent of something. And then he comes back from the war, and then he's doing Anatomy of a Murder and Rope and, you know, various things where he's playing a. Either a straight up villain or someone who's compromised because there's, like, this undertaste. I'd call it chalky undertaste.
37:12 Wes: All right, thank you.
37:13 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Evil of Banality in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968)
May 18, 2025
On the surface, “Rosemary’s Baby” is a horror film about a woman who gets taken advantage of by a satanic cult and impregnated by the Devil. In the end, it seems to be a satire on the competing entrapments of domesticity and ambition, and the boring conventionality of people who hope that opposition to convention will allow them to retrieve their lost youth. Wes & Erin discuss Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satanic evil, when confronted with life’s very frightening realities—including pregnancy itself—turns out to be so banal.
Upcoming Episodes: Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “An Indian to His Love.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: On the surface, Rosemary's Baby is a horror film about a woman who gets taken advantage of by a satanic cult and impregnated by the devil in the end. It seems to be a satire on the competing entrapments of domesticity and ambition and the boring conventionality of people who hope that opposition to convention will allow them to retrieve their lost youth. Today we discuss Roman Polanski's 1968 classic and why it is that satanic evil, when confronted with life's very frightening realities, including pregnancy itself, turns out to be so banal. This is Wes Alwan.
This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So I think I first saw this film in 2016, and I hadn't watched it before, even though it was a classic, because I'm not into horror films. And then I watched it and I realized, well, it's not really a horror film. It's kind of satire masquerading as horror. And I found it really delightful. I'd say it's one of my favorites. Yeah. So the question is, if it's not really about getting knocked up by the devil, then what is it really about?
1:46 Erin: Good question.
1:47 Wes: Yeah. What's your history with this movie?
1:49 Erin: I saw it in maybe high school or college first, so I must have seen it earlier than. Than you, which makes me happy that I saw a 60s movie before you did. You know, my attraction to the film was, I guess, what you might call the satanic attraction, because I love all the actors in it, the old actors and John Cassavetes, of course. But, you know, Ruth Gordon is.
2:12 Wes: She's great.
2:13 Erin: She's my style icon.
2:14 Wes: And then Ralph Bellamy, I thought, oh, Ralph Bellamy.
2:18 Erin: There's even a Ralph Bellamy joke, what I interpret as a Ralph Bellamy joke in the film. Do you know what I'm saying? Referring to. This is such a deep cut.
2:26 Wes: They have a few of these jokes in the film. What is the Bellamy joke?
2:31 Erin: I take the Victoria Vetri. You look like that actress Victoria Vetri, and she really is played by that actress.
2:37 Wes: Okay, well, that's the one that I was aware of.
2:39 Erin: Yeah.
2:40 Wes: Yeah.
2:41 Erin: I was like, you can't Have a movie with Ralph Bellamy in it and do that joke and not have it be sort of in.
2:47 Wes: Of course.
2:47 Erin: Yeah.
2:48 Wes: What's the movie in which that happens?
2:51 Erin: His Girl Friday.
2:52 Wes: Yeah. Yeah.
2:53 Erin: Which is itself sort of referencing the fact that he was in the Awful Truth, also with Cary Grant.
2:59 Wes: So the familiarity, layers upon layers upon layers.
3:06 Erin: Yeah. So I saw it in maybe late high school or college, and I've watched it. I think I watched it on Halloween maybe five, seven years ago, something like that. And now for this. And I had forgotten how much I loved it. So I. I'm really excited to talk about. It's hilarious. It's so funny.
3:23 Wes: It is really funny.
3:24 Erin: Ruth Gordon is. This is maybe like one of my favorite best Supporting actor Oscar wins or actress, I should say. Oscar wins. Yeah. So what do I think it's about? I kind of think it's about acting. Hmm.
3:35 Wes: Okay.
3:36 Erin: Partially. It's also about the story of a woman who finds faith in the most unexpected way. Just a story of religious conversion. It's beautiful.
3:48 Wes: To Satanism.
3:50 Erin: That's a religion. She was a lapsed Catholic. Now she's practicing.
3:59 Wes: Oh, the bar is so low these days.
4:01 Erin: Well, I know. It's like, is God dead? No, but he's very old, and he desperately needs new blood to come into the congregation. The other side's old too, and they just need new recruits. It's like, you know.
4:12 Wes: Well, they're supposed to be against organized religion, but they are quite organized, aren't they?
4:16 Erin: Yeah. I take that to be a mask or an act. I don't know. I suppose it could be taken both ways. Right. Because they would have to be pretty anti. Anti Catholic. So perhaps they're against that organized religion. But they seem to be otherwise pretty. Pretty devout. They're all in. They're fanatics.
4:37 Wes: Is it worse to be a Satanist or a nihilist? Sounds like it's worse to be a nihilist.
4:44 Erin: I think so. I might be, you know, one of the.
4:47 Wes: In.
4:48 Erin: In CCD or one of these things. You know, you're. You're always told as a little kid that every religion has some truth in it. Right. And so there's always the kid that goes, oh, yeah, what about Satanism? And then the priest goes, no, there's. There's like they believe in the devil and they have to have the Eucharist for their. For their rituals or else it doesn't work. So they actually believe in the true presence. But. Yeah, so Satanism is probably, as a religion, is probably truer than nihilism.
5:18 Wes: Yeah. I love that. What you get out of this movie is a vindication of religion. It's not. Not something that occurred to me. Yep. So the way I always took it, and I wrote like, a little mini review in 2016 when I saw it. Well, I took them to be newlyweds, which I'm not, I guess. Are they newlyweds?
5:38 Erin: I don't know.
5:39 Wes: Or are they just moving? Maybe they're.
5:40 Erin: I don't think so. They're just moving because Hutch is their landlord.
5:45 Wes: But before they've had children. So early. Early on, I guess, in the marriage. And she's so young to get a divorce from Frank Sinatra. And apparently this movie was one of the factors. He didn't want her to work, and he had her. He served divorce papers on set. I'm sure you know all this stuff, but, yeah, pretty nasty.
6:04 Erin: This ended up being the subject of conversation last night among friends. We were talking about Rosemary's Baby, and it ended up just talking about Frank Sinatra's absurd sexual history. But anyway. Yeah.
6:14 Wes: Yeah. So I. I took this to be about, well, I call it nascent marital life early on in the marriage, where things are still getting going, and this kind of ordinary conflict between domesticity and ambition. So he has ambitions as an actor, and she will complain at a certain point about not getting attention from him. And ultimately, she wants a family. So you get very. You get subtle hints of that, even from the very. In the first three minutes. There's so much subtle exposition that happens so brilliantly, so masterfully. Right. So he's asked the guy showing them in the apartment, asks him if he's a doctor, and he lies and says, yes, and she says, no, he's an actor.
And then he lies about what he's been in. It turns out he hasn't been in much, and he's kind of sold out for commercials, but it looks like he's not making a bunch of money. The movie seems to try to sell that apartment as decrepit and small or something. It's huge in the Dakota building, but whatever. So it seems to be that he's sold out. He's not as successful as he wants to be. And so it sets us up for this Faustian bargain that he makes. And then you get this intrusion into this beginning of an ordinary marital conflict. You get this intrusion of eccentric neighbors.
And this kind of reminded me of the Graduate in a way, where you have older people glomming on to the optimism and possibility of youth. And then there's pregnancy and everything that comes with that. And then how bizarre that is when you think about it, the way human beings reproduce. And then I thought of alien there and how you. You could always turn pregnancy and birth into a kind of horror show of some sort. You can always pivot off of that. But in the end, I thought isn't interesting. It kind of captures the conventionality of people trying to be unconventional.
I thought it's like, okay, it's almost like a satire on swingers. Right. You show up to the swingers party and it's not a bunch of young, beautiful people. It's just a bunch of old people who are trying. Not that I've ever been to a swingers party, by the way.
8:28 Erin: Come on.
8:30 Wes: They wouldn't let me in. But from what I've heard, or that's
8:35 Erin: what they say about nude beaches. People on the nude beach that are nude are never the ones you want to be nude.
8:41 Wes: Exactly. So, yeah, it's people having a midlife crisis or after midlife crisis, wanting to recapture their youth and wanting to be unconventional, which is really, in a way, what Satanism ultimately represents. Right. The kind of rebellion against boring convention. But then they just become. They're, in a way, it just becomes another form of conventionality and ordinariness. There's no escape, I guess, in a sense, from age. And that's partly, I guess, what Satanism is supposed to be as well. Right. An escape from mortality.
9:16 Erin: I love that. I think that's great. Yeah. Because of the parodic nature of so much of Satanism you have built in this idea that it's only ever just a reflection. Right. So Satan or the Antichrist still needs to come into the world in the same way that Christ came in. You know, Antichrist itself obviously has that implication. So I need not say more, but. Yeah. The mundanity of Satanism and of this arrangement that they have, I think is just an excellent point. Yeah. You know, you go into the Castevet's apartment and it's dark versus Rosemary lightening up her apartment.
And then at the end, you know, you have the bassinet that's covered with black instead of white. You know, you have the upside down cross. Yeah. It's quite boring. It's just this one to one ratio or this color scheme of white versus black. Just, you know, there are no like rainbow colors in between. I mean, the only rainbow colors really come From like the 60s wardrobes, which are awesome. But so you think that they're. Yeah. That they're really eccentric and fascinating people and Ultimately, it's sort of reductive or reducible to this kind of binary.
I like that a lot. I was thinking about what the implications for this might be as, say, a parable of new Hollywood. One of the acting angles that I thought of, you know, you have to. If you're a young up and coming actor or a director like Roman Polanski, then, you know, you have to make deals with these crotchety old people that have been running things for a long time who are all connected, right? Who are all insiders. And you have to do unpleasant things in order to get in with them, maybe. Or you have to pay homage to them in some way, which we could talk a little bit more about later.
But, you know, I'm on this rewatch. I was really fascinated by Guy and by Cassavetes performance, which is when you watch him in the background, you realize kind of how uncomfortable he is. And that opening scene that you, that you were talking about when the Guy's showing them their apartment, who is from the Maltese Falcon and the Big Sleep and a bunch of other. He's a veteran actor from a bunch of 40s film noir. When he asks him if he's a doctor and then Rosemary has to correct him and say he's an actor. He asks Guy if he's seen him in anything.
And then the second joke is that he's Richard Burton. He says, well, I did Hamlet a while back, didn't I, Liz? And then the Sandpiper. So the joke is that he's Richard Burton and she's Elizabeth Taylor. And I had never picked up on that before.
11:47 Wes: He calls her Liz. Okay?
11:49 Erin: He calls her Liz. And so it's a Burton Taylor joke. But that became the cipher through which I read their relationship. Actually. I wondered if there was actually a significant amount of jealousy on his side of the relationship. You know, we see Rosemary being quite. I don't know that we could call her jealous, but she certainly. She's not getting, as you, as you point out, she's not getting attention from him and she's not being treated well by him and he has to keep apologizing to her. So it seems on the one hand that she is the needy one, the grasping one, the one without the career, the one who stays at home, the one who's quite vulnerable versus, you know, Cassavetes to me is quite.
He's very handsome. He has this like rugged quality to him. It's not self sufficient though, because there's this anxiety at the base of his personality ultimately as an actor, which Makes him really interesting. But, you know, the more I thought about this Burton Taylor thing, the more that that kind of started to reverse for me. He says, I did Hamlet a while back and then the Sandpiper. That represents a pretty significant fall from grace for Richard Burton, who of course famously, you know, hooks up with Elizabeth Taylor and ends up spending all of his time being a jet setter with her, abandoning his dreams of becoming the next Olivier.
You know, it's exactly the Antony and Cleopatra parallel. And I think that even at this point it would have been well known that that was the, that the trajectory of his career was one of disappointment, one of maybe having sold out a little bit. You know, I wouldn't want to paint that, the whole dynamic of their relationship as being one of his jealousy of her. But I think there was a problem. I think there was a streak of that through their relationship. What I'm wary of in applying this reading to Rosemary and Guy is something reducible to just, you know, he's an actor, he wants to come up with all of these personae.
He wants to be able to, you know, to create new lives inside his own. So of course he would be jealous of a woman and of course pregnancy would be the sort of like bone of contention. And that seems like relatively boring to me. What I'm more interested in is the glimpses that we get of his acting, which seems to me to be pretty bad. He's kind of a bad actor. I mean, he's a great actor in life. He's a great actor when it comes to deceiving Rosemary. But when we see him rehearsing for the play, when we see him in the Yamaha commercial, he's awful.
You know, it's very, very bad versus Rosemary. Those moments when she talks to herself or she has these kinds of self aware moments in the mirror, you know, when she holds up the charm and says, tannis anyone? And it's quite an imaginative. To me. It's, you know, it's a very charming moment. And so there seems to be something. I don't know, I just, I just. Sorry, I'm throwing a lot at you, but basically I'm trying to find a way that this reading works that isn't the conventional sort of like man jealous of woman because woman can get pregnant.
Which seems to me to be pretty boring.
14:45 Wes: Yeah, you've preempted the point that I was going to make and.
14:48 Erin: Oh, I'm sorry.
14:49 Wes: Thought that was profound.
14:52 Erin: No, no, no, make it.
14:54 Wes: You're right that it is an. We've Talked about this many times on this podcast. Right. So male creative ambition is always suspect. We can always direct at it the suspicion that it is imbued, at least with some envy of female procreativity. See, there's a fancy way to say it that makes it sound less boring and ordinary, but. And then just to drill down on that a little bit, creativity is about replications, right? So there's. There's procreativity, which is creativity in its most primal sense, except perhaps for God's creativity and creating the world.
But art typically involves mimesis of one sort or another, which is a kind of replication. And the same thing with acting. Right. He's creating another person when he acts. So that detail, you know, of a. Was something I hadn't thought about before you talked about acting. And I think the point about Guy's discomfort is a good one. I noticed this, too. So he often will have. When he's not talking, when something else is going on, he'll have a preoccupied or disturbed look on his face, and then he'll come out of that and make a joke and sometimes trying to act like he's reassuring Rosemary about something.
If you're not paying attention, you might just think, oh, he's a jokey, fun guy. But you get, repeatedly get this contrast in the movie between him being. Yeah. Quite moody in the background and then being jokey on the surface. Where's Cassavetes, by the way, in his career at this point? And why is there. This seems to be another inside joke where the couple, Roman and Minnie are cast the Cassavetes.
16:36 Erin: Right. And Roman. Yeah, it's early for him still. He hasn't gotten to, say A Woman under the influence, which was 74. And that was, I think, the most commercial and critical success that he had had up to that point because of its accidental fame. I think I told this story on our. On our podcast episode on that film. It ended up actually getting nominated for Oscars and actually getting some attention paid to it, which was unusual. So that I think, would probably be considered the apex of his career. But, of course, prior to this, he was in the Dirty Dozen.
He's a, you know, he's a regular working actor in order to be able to fund his own projects. And he's been a director for quite a while up to this point. So that's one of the. I was going to say, you know, with the many documented cases of his butting heads with Roman Polanski, it's kind of like how doctors make the worst patients. So it's funny that the whole thing begins with a doctor joke. But anyway, it's also a matter of,
17:34 Wes: well, why was he butting heads with Polanski?
17:36 Erin: They're directorial styles. Polanski is extremely. I mean, there's no word for it, but anal compared to Cassavetes style, which is, you know, he wanted to improvise and just go with the flow of a scene. And he was, I guess, pretty uncomfortable in the part. Didn't like Polanski's method of acting. And then there was this anecdote, which has since become quite famous that Mia Farrow wrote in her autobiography where Polanski and Cassavetes were talking about, I don't know, maybe the marriage, the context, I don't remember. Maybe it's never supplied.
But Polanski says something like, oh, of course, you know, any monogamous relationship is doomed to fail because men can't be sexually attracted to a woman for any extended length of time. And Cassavetes flew into a rage over this and basically said, like, you know nothing about women. You know nothing about relationships. Like, if anything, I'm more attracted to my wife as time goes on. And it's one of the many reasons why. Why we. We love John Cassavetes. Cassavetes may have been the villain in the film on screen, but certainly not behind the scenes.
18:41 Wes: It's interesting. Yeah. From what I read, Polanski could do as many as 50 takes or often was doing something like 50 takes, which is just crazy, right?
18:51 Erin: That's totally nuts. Yeah. Going over budget, almost delaying Kubrick levels. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:58 Wes: Did you have a theory? Do we know? I guess I could have tried to look this up, but I didn't. Do we know why? If there's an inside joke on Cassavetes and what that means.
19:06 Erin: Yeah. I mean, it's in the novel.
19:08 Wes: Oh, it is. So it's just a coincidence, then?
19:11 Erin: It's a coincidence. But it's one of those things that is so creepy. The Victoria Vetri joke is in the novel.
19:18 Wes: That's hilarious.
19:19 Erin: And then they got her to put it. But it's Piper Laurie. It's Piper Laurie. So it's a different type entirely. And then when they cast it, I think they added in, you know, so the joke isn't that she's really Piper Laurie, of course, but there is an element of identifying the woman with an actress, and I think that's important. And so they carry that through and then make it even more meta, which is great. There's a meta element that's baked into the book, it seems, before it even comes on screen. Like it's sort of meant to be a film and the film is supposed to be.
So I've never read the book. I should. But the film is supposed to be one of the most faithful film adaptations of a novel ever. They took so many pains to even recreate color schemes I read, and just crazy stuff like they're even. I think there's even a. I read this last night and I didn't double check, but Cassavetes at one point is holding a radio or a tape recorder or something like that in one scene. And it's because a scene which was not in the film but which was in the novel with a going away party. He gets this as a present from Roman.
When Roman and his wife are leaving for Europe, they have a going away party. They give a guy this, whatever it is, and he's holding it in the following scene when they say goodbye. So even though that wasn't in the film, like they take pains to reproduce everything that goes on even interstitially in the novel. So it's extremely meticulous.
20:41 Wes: Yeah. Apparently Polanski, he read the book in one night and then had the screenplay done three weeks later. It's pretty impressive. What a work ethic. Another thing I think I thought of when I saw it years ago was that there's something in here about the concept of character. And I think I was thinking at first about Minnie and Ruth Gordon and her. Yeah, such an interesting, quirky kind of character. But then I thought, well, there's something paranormal about character in general, in the sense that it's kind of a window into the unconscious.
Well, let's put it this way. A lot of it reflects early formative forces, that's the theory. And defensive structures against the instinctual. So what's hidden in an instinctual comes out and character is revealed in a. In a different way. And sometimes. And it can look odd, it could look perverse or, you know, that would be a more obvious example. Or it comes out in these sorts of quirks that you notice, say, in Minnie. And in a way, you know, you could. You can read Satanism as a attempt to liberate those forces. In other words, it's anti civilizational.
This is about civilization and its discontents. And so instinct and the instinctual get covered up by character and repression and all that stuff. The Satanist project is to liberate them. But of course, if we didn't have character, then there'd be no point in making films and Having all these great actors, there'd be no Minnie in all her quirkiness because the instinct would just radiate out like light from the sun. It wouldn't get caught up in anything any more interesting structure. It'd just be dissipated.
22:28 Erin: So you're saying that. Let me just make sure I understand this, that Satanism would liberate us to be free to express those forces. And that these character actors who are famously quirky and stuff like that, that this is an expression of this kind of force being unleashed. No, or, or the opposite.
22:46 Wes: We can read, we can read Satanism as, you know, a form of discontent with civilization.
22:53 Erin: Yeah, right.
22:53 Wes: So they complain about organized religion. They're complaining about. The complaint is ultimately about the concept of the good and the way it binds us or the law and the way it binds us. It by it inhibits us and prevents us from doing everything we might want to do. Or it creates dependency. So speaking of envy, like in a way, I think this is the problem of Milton's Satan. It's played up for a lot of laughs because Satan just doesn't, doesn't want to be second in line. He doesn't want to be God's right hand man. And he recognizes, hopefully we'll do Paradise Lost one day.
But he recognizes that he's dependent on God as any creature is dependent on the Creator. And it's a fixed relationship. It's like an ontological relationship like property being dependent on substance. And so fighting God is as ridiculous as a property fighting substance because it's the very thing you depend on. If the substance disappears, the property disappears. If you defeat God, you defeat existence and you defeat yourself. So I think the same thing with the good in general. People are often self destructive because they don't want to be dependent on something good outside of them.
So they destroy it. That dependency is just too unbearable and anxiety producing. So my point was that if you read Satanism as in a way this disaffection with all the forces that run counter to instinct, then in a way it's ironically anti character as well. Because character is a. Is in many ways an expression of all those formative forces. Whether it's civilization or what's transferred through parenting or any other environmental stuff, it kind of accrues and sediments in our psyche and makes us who we are. So just as right, Milton's Satan is rebelling against the concept of a formative force.
So on my reading are these Satanists. And to do so is to rebel against the very concept of character. And I think you can read, you know, Oedipus in this way. You can. You can. Like, this would run through a lot of different texts. I think you mentioning acting made me think of that, because in a way, acting is all about character and the replication of character. Right. So guy wants. He's a bad actor, and he wants to take a shortcut by doing the Faustian bargain, which involves, I guess, sickening people who are competing for parts with you rather than just becoming a better actor.
Better at character.
25:33 Erin: Yeah. Why not just. Just become a better actor.
25:39 Wes: It's so simple.
25:40 Erin: Yeah.
25:41 Wes: It's practice.
25:42 Erin: This is the principle that 21st century America is based on. You're saying that it's ironic that Ruth Gordon is a Satanist because God is what has made her Ruth Gordon. I love that.
25:53 Wes: Okay, that's. Yeah, that's a more succinct. Much more succinct way of putting it.
25:57 Erin: No, I'm trying to. I'm trying to understand.
25:59 Wes: That's good.
25:59 Erin: Well, you know, one of the. Well, you know, one of the things that you're revealing to me, I thought. I wondered about the Victoria Vetri, whatever her name is, Terry, character, why she was their first choice, why Rosemary is their second choice. I think it's because they're both lapsed Catholics, and this is part of this satanic rebellion or this rebellion against the thing that forms you. I mean, they both have to be lapsed Catholics. We know Rosemary is. We can infer that Terry is. Because much is made of her being Italian. So that's why it has to be Victoria Vetri and not Piper Laurie. Right. So we know that she's Italian, and we know that she's somehow become a dope addict who had to be literally picked up off the sidewalk. It's a short trip.
26:42 Wes: I love that.
26:43 Erin: To and from the sidewalk.
26:44 Wes: Once you know what's gonna happen to her. That.
26:47 Erin: Yes, exactly.
26:48 Wes: On a second watching that, that joke becomes very funny.
26:50 Erin: Right, right.
26:51 Wes: They picked me up right off the sidewalk.
26:53 Erin: What's dope again? Which one is that? Is that cocaine or.
26:56 Wes: I think it's anything.
26:58 Erin: It's anything. Oh, okay. Yeah.
26:59 Wes: Wow. You really are of a different generation.
27:03 Erin: Well, dope people. Oh, God. Isn't that a Liz Lemon thing? And when Carrie Fisher is going, oh, we did blow in Joe Garagiola's office. And she's like, which one is blow again? That's right. Okay. I was like, where am I getting that?
27:17 Wes: Maybe it's more specific. I always thought of it as just
27:19 Erin: drugs, but just drugs in general. Okay. Well, anyway, so she's a drug addict of some kind.
27:25 Wes: A slang word. I'm looking it up for cocaine, cannabis, heroin, opioid. All right, I'm gonna take that as a vindication.
27:31 Erin: But a dope fiend is the expression. And fiendishness seems so. Oh, specific. Right. You'd have to be a fiend about one particular drug.
27:40 Wes: Yeah.
27:41 Erin: You'd be a fiend about everything.
27:42 Wes: Hopefully. You just choose one, you know, maybe.
27:45 Erin: Oh, okay.
27:46 Wes: You could choose a few, but then just have one would be your main one. It's not monogamy, but it is polyamory, I guess.
27:56 Erin: Right. Yeah. So it seems to me that they then have to choose lapsed Catholics. But unfortunately for them, what they don't realize is that once a Catholic, always a Catholic. The very structure of your dreams will betray the influence of these formative forces. If we're going to take character, what you're describing as character, to include the very things that make Catholicism such a popular subject in horror films because they have so much. Because Catholicism has so much character, because it has all the smells and bells and the outfits and the props.
You know, it has all the props. So these things I don't know if I'm wrong to associate with character, but I am. And I think that that's the. That's like the key here is that, you know, arguably, like, the very theatricality of Catholicism and its materiality and then the rebellion from that, or, say, lapsing from that, which is a soft rebellion, would seem to mark both of these women as potentially good Satanists. Catholicism seems to me to be the thing that you get the most purchase out of rebelling against. Because if your problem is rebelling against the formative forces and what you're describing as character is part of that, that's the juiciest place to rebel against.
Like, if you rebel against some religion that's like, iconoclastic, then what are you rebelling against? You know, just going to a different white room, you know, like, you have to be able to tear things down. Right. And there's nothing to tear down with some other religion. Yeah.
29:33 Wes: And Catholicism is more connected to, you know, ancient history as well, which is scarier. It's earlier. And of course, form, you know, also has a significance as formative historically. So we are the heirs of that tradition, whether we like it or not, whether we're Catholics or not. Catholicism has imprinted itself on Western civilization.
29:56 Erin: Sure. I think of it as being relatively young, actually, in the grand scheme of things. But, yes, you're right. Really.
30:03 Wes: It's not that.
30:04 Erin: Yeah, I mean, Judaism is so much older and, you know. Well, that's true paganism and Hinduism. But I just want to check that I'm right to associate what you're describing as character with these elements of the church.
30:18 Wes: Yeah, I think so.
30:19 Erin: Okay. And so this seems to be what Minnie and Roman are talking about when they're talking about the Pope. That it's all about appearance, that it's all about, I don't know, making money or acting. It's all about acting, actually is. You know, they accuse the Pope of being an actor, basically. I don't remember exactly what they say,
30:38 Wes: but that's a very good point because it reflects the fact that they don't appreciate character and the significance of character and its depth. Right, yeah. It's all just superficial. Very good point.
30:49 Erin: He says that's showbiz. Roman says this. That's exactly what it is. All the costumes, rituals, all religions. Yeah. But especially. Especially the one with all the costumes. Right. Then Rosemary actually is uncomfortable. Right. At many points. This out. Oh, that he pretends he's holy. You know, what do they spend on robes and jewels? This is an. This is another thing that, you know, it's all just this money. If they spent all their money that they spend on all these robes and jewels that, you know, there's very, very familiar criticisms. And it's right after this that there's a very, very quick turn to guy and to acting. Right. A good picture of the hypocrisy behind organized religion was given in Luther. Did you ever get to play that leading part? Guys, of course, they're fans of Luther,
31:40 Wes: you know, so Luther is like one. I don't want to get in trouble. What? I mean, he accuses the Pope of being a Satanist, essentially, but.
31:49 Erin: Right, right. But it's the same. The exact same critique. They're making a Luther esque critique here. And then we hear, my father was a theatrical producer. So it's like, pick a lane, you know, are you anti Catholicism? Are you pro Catholicism? Your father was a theatrical producer and you hate theatrics anyway. Yeah. So there's a sort of inherent contradiction, I think, going on there. But. Yeah, but the criticism of religion and then the acting go hand in hand. And of course, Mia Farrow has this, you know, vestigial attachment where she said, well, he is the Pope. You know, she has this respect that she can't get rid of because, of course, it's Catholicism changes your brain. You dream about nuns for the rest of your Life, whether you're Catholic or not.
32:32 Wes: Yeah, I just. Yeah. I like this point about acting and religion in their minds going hand in hand and being something superficial and. But it's interesting, right? So they're criticizing the concept of ritual as well. But the Satanists are very into rituals.
32:48 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And that's what makes this so confusing because I don't think they're, you know, I think that they have a great
32:53 Wes: respect for acting too and they're such great characters. So. Yeah, I think it's just gonna be. They don't know themselves very well.
33:03 Erin: Right.
33:03 Wes: And this may be part of the point that you're making when you, you know, when you see it just as a vindication of their religious impulses. You know, they are fulfilling their religious impulses even as they act out this supposedly anti religious sentiment and they are indulging character even as they act out this anti character sentiment.
33:25 Erin: Hmm. I wonder too if you know, Ruth Gordon's line readings, as Minnie are just this flood of words and this idea that they don't know themselves very well seems to me to be related to that. Like she's a very. Maybe something that gives people character is this kind of not knowing themselves thing because they, they're not aware of any oddities in their behavior or they're sort of distracted by their own behavior. Right. If they, if they were more aware of their behavior, they might eliminate certain, you know, they might train themselves out of certain things in order to be more. What, regular? More closer to some sort of mean that they, that they believe to be a behavioral ideal.
34:06 Wes: Well, you might, yeah, you might see her as a very. Not repressed kind of person. Right. Minnie. She's. She's impulsive in a way. And yeah, the way she reads her lines, I'd like this image of a flood of words. It's like run on sentences almost. Yeah. I don't know what's, what's the word for this type of character in a person? I mean, she's disinhibited. She's. It's almost childlike. Right. The way, the way her labile, that's another fancy word. Her. Any change of, you know, fluctuating mood or emotion from minute, from second to second gets conveyed. And it can be conveyed in a single speech. No single line where, you know, you could see, see fluctuations and valence just, just within, you know, a few, A few sentences.
35:02 Erin: So she's sort of a force of nature. A pint sized force of nature.
35:08 Wes: And it's very charming, of course. And so there's a lot of, you know, I guess there's a lot of room in that for the sublimation of instinct. And, you know, maybe I'm. The way I've painted characters a little bit simplistic as all these kind of static defensive structures that keep instinct at bay, you know, really, really. It's a way of satisfying instinct as well. And then someone like her, I think the point you're getting at is very unrefined. Certainly she's not a repressed person at all.
35:39 Erin: Right. She's reacting openly to everything all the time. But at the same time, you get the sense because of the speed and the quick darts and everything, she's not, like, listening to herself. You know, it's just coming out, but she's not listening. And yet at the same time, I mean, that's what we think. Right. In fact, there's a great deal of calculation in what she says. I mean, first of all, this very delivery is designed to steamroll Rosemary.
36:05 Wes: Yeah. And we see her do a lot of calculating things, and she's nosy and she's. Yeah, she's constantly.
36:12 Erin: She gets the info she needs investigating.
36:14 Wes: Yeah.
36:15 Erin: Right. And so it sounds as though it's just this stream of consciousness thing, but in fact, she's asking questions that are designed to pinpoint exactly what she needs to know.
36:25 Wes: And that, you know, it occurs to me now that none of these Satanists are very dark. Right. They are super, super ordinary. And when Guy and Rosemary first get to the apartment, we hear them bickering through the walls like any old couple. I mean, ultimately, a lot of the bickering is going to be about, you know, the project of Satanism, how it's going. You know, I guess they bicker about Terry. You know, we kind of learn that. Is that the way that we learned that Terry was. Yeah. That she was going to be the. The birth mother for Satan? I think we learned that through the wall, right, with the bickering.
37:02 Erin: Yes.
37:02 Wes: Yeah.
37:03 Erin: Only in hindsight. Of course.
37:04 Wes: Yeah, only in hindsight.
37:06 Erin: Yeah.
37:06 Wes: Yeah.
37:07 Erin: On a second watch, when Terry says that they. That she thought at first that they wanted her for some kind of sex thing, I was like, oh, yeah, they did. Yeah, exactly. They are sickos.
37:19 Wes: But they don't. Yeah. Again, and this is my whole swinger. The point of my whole swingers comment is that none of them are. Seem to have any element of, like, diabolical evil or they're not. Right. There's no dark backstory as there would be in, say, a. For a super villain. In a comic book movie, you know, there's no, oh, didn't the Joker have had a bad life? And he was teased and now he's full of resentment and angst. They're not angst ridden people. They belong to the cult, it seems, in the way that most people would just belong to some congregation because it's there and they. It's, you know, it's what they do. It's maybe a family tradition or whatever.
38:03 Erin: That's right. Yeah, they're born into it. My parents were Satanists, so I am too.
38:07 Wes: Yeah, I think they're not. They're not born into it, but it seems somehow an ordinary extension of a mundane existence.
38:15 Erin: But they are born into it. His father is the.
38:18 Wes: Yeah, they are born into it.
38:19 Erin: The hope of Satanism or whatever.
38:21 Wes: Well, who knows the backstory for all the other congregants, but like Laura, what's her name? Laura?
38:27 Erin: Laura Louise.
38:28 Wes: Lara. Laura Louise, yeah. She should be working in a DMV somewhere, making people's lives hell. Not.
38:42 Erin: Oh, man. Yeah. Patsy Kelly, great actress. What they're arguing about through the wall, I took a note up on this and I found it. It's Minnie reprimanding Roman for not doing what she said to do. So she argued for not telling Terry. She knew that she wouldn't be open minded, she says, and she wonders how Roman is the leader of anything. And so. Yeah, so you think that it's going to be. Yeah, it could be that they're bickering about, I told you not to do that and you went and did it, you know, but it's actually about this. It's about, I guess, revealing to Terry, which is why she kills herself, I guess, that they are Satanists.
You know, we could connect this to, as we already are, ordinary marital bickering. But there's also about how to play the scene. Roman's choices as a director were not the right ones. Minnie was rebelling against his directorship and saying, this is not how the scene should go. The information should not be revealed in this act or something like that. So there is something, I think, quite actory about. About the whole thing. And I just want to point out too, because otherwise I'll forget that. Also in the basement, when Terry talks about the Castevets and how wonderful they are, Rosemary responds by saying that she's glad that there are people like that.
When you hear so much about apathy and people that are afraid of getting involved, and I love that because of course, they're not. They're devout, they're not apathetic at all. Right. So, like, somehow the opposite of devotion isn't apathy here. It's devotion in the. It's devotion in support of a cause that's the opposite of the cause that you're supporting. Right? Yeah. So it's Terry and Rosemary that then seem to mark themselves as the apathetic ones that are going to be converted. It's like they have to choose an apathetic host who's not going to have a devout opinion one way or the other and be transformed.
40:27 Wes: Yeah, we can talk about that in the. In the second part, Rosemary's apathy and her passivity and all that, her waifishness, even though they were gonna go a different direction initially, you're reminding me of how much in the movie is only evident in hindsight or on a second watching. And I think when I first watched this, I didn't. I think it was unclear to me until the very end. I hadn't made a decision about whether all this was all in her head or not. And then I wondered on second viewing. Well, isn't it obvious it's not in her head. But anyway, maybe we can lead with that in the second part.
41:03 Erin: That's great.
41:04 Wes: Get your thoughts on that. All right. You can listen to that second part right away. patreon.com subtextpodcast
41:16 Erin: thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 4
Apr 28, 2025
Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine.
Upcoming Episodes: “Rosemary’s Baby,” Yeats (“Sailing to Byzantium” and “Leda and the Swan”).
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part four of our four part series on the poems of Emily Dickinson. In part three, we just got done talking about there's a certain slant of light and now we're going to cover for our Last poem, number 315. He fumbles at your soul, so I'll go ahead and read it. He fumbles at your soul as players at the keys before they drop full music on. He stuns you by degrees, prepares your brittle nature for the ethereal blow by fainter hammers further heard, then nearer, then so slow your breath has time to straighten, your brain to bubble cool deals one imperial thunderbolt that scalps your naked soul.
When winds take forests in their paws, the universe is still. So this is a wild one. It's a Shakespearean sonnet or an English sonnet, one of the few that she has sprinkled around her works. And yeah, it doesn't look like or feel like a sonnet at first. So I think when I texted you about how I wanted to do this one, I was like, it's a sonnet. Maybe when you first looked at it, you immediately discovered that. But it took me a second when I, I was introduced to this poem.
1:54 Wes: No. Yeah, I didn't.
1:55 Erin: Yeah. And there's some really cool stuff going on formally here that I could talk about. But one of the things is just, you know, we start with soul. We have the final couplet separated out from the rest of the poem. So we have this 12 line stanza and then the final couplet isolated. And in the 12 line stanza, Soul ends the first line and it also ends the last line of that stanza. But it moves from the slant or the non rhyme position, the 1 and 3 to the full rhyme position or the 2 and 4 by the end of 12. So at first it's not rhyming with anything.
And then at the end of that 12 line stanza it's in the position to rhyme. So it receives the rhyme. So cool and soul. So it's something happens over the course of that. And then of course there's this famous, you know, maybe like the best rhyme ever in Dickinson is the final couplet, paws and still, which is a. We have P, A, W, S. But of course, we could say that it's a. It's a homonym for P, A, U, S, E. And therefore it rhymes sensically with stillness still. Yeah. So some really cool, strange, subversive sonnety things going on here. But yeah.
He fumbles at your soul. Who is this? Who is it, Wes?
3:09 Wes: God playing us. That's my read on the stanza.
3:14 Erin: Yeah, that's my best guess too.
3:18 Wes: He, he, the big he. He sounds kind of pervy in this.
3:23 Erin: He's a John Donne kind of God. I think John Donne wishes that he had a God like this.
3:32 Wes: Yeah. So it's interesting, right? So God should not be fumbling, whether it's in football or the piano or with our souls.
3:43 Erin: He should know how to unhook a
3:44 Wes: bra in one movie, Right, Exactly. He was a jock in high school, but he was also valedictorian. But anyway, yeah, so really fascinating right from the get go. So again, I think, yeah, we have to think about this in terms of divine influence or maybe Providence. Right. What God, I don't want to say predestines us to do, do, but whatever influence is there from the divine. And yeah, we're not even the performance. We're just him diddling around on the piano before he gets serious. Is that what's going on?
4:29 Erin: I think so, yeah. The fumbles implies an ineptitude, obviously. But then it seems like he's just toying with us actually, because he's in control. He's quite gifted.
4:42 Wes: Yeah. It looks like ineptitude on first blush. But then we find out that he's the brooding genius who's just dicking around before he becomes. Transforms himself into a virtuoso.
4:55 Erin: The wordplay in this is really, really stunning. Your wordplay. But he fumbles at your soul. Yeah. I like this idea. Idea that the soul is the most intimate part of your body. Right. It's the inside. There's something of greatest intimacy about the soul. Yeah. So as players at the keys before they drop full music on. Yeah. So the fumbling seems. There's something inept and then suddenly it's like, oh, maybe this is actually just. What is it? A few arpeggios. He's noodling around, then he's gonna start. So it's actually something. The fumbling is actually something like literal and figurative in terms of the meaning of this word foreplay.
But it's a slow process. He stuns you by degrees. So there's this mixture, the stunning and the imagery in this, I think are marrying positive and negative Valences, as usual in Dickinson. We're stunned because we're so amazed by his talent. Or we're being clubbed over the head or something like that. We're being. We're, you know, losing. Almost losing consciousness.
6:06 Wes: Exactly. So we're stunned in the sense that we're impressed. We're duly impressed. God. But also it sounds a bit sinister because he's luring us into complacence. Right. So his whole reason for not going right into the performance is to sort of boil the frog, let's say. And we're being our brittle nature getting into the second stanza. Or substance. Is it nature in your version? Or substance? There's different versions, obviously, of these poems. Yeah. Because people altered them at first. Okay. Yeah. So our brittle natures. Our natures are too brittle to be played, so to speak, to be hammered at, like a piano key.
Right off they would shatter. So we need to be molested a little bit. Sorry. We need to be fumbled around with a little bit warmed up, I guess. Foreplay. You already got that metaphor. We need to be warmed up before he really hits us with his best shot, so to speak. I love that song. Hit me with your best shot.
7:14 Erin: That was written by Dickens. I was adapted from Dickinson poem right after her hit single, no pain, no gain. But the genius. I mean, so many genius things about this poem, but one of the most genius things is the fact that the hammers inside the piano, because, of course, it's a percussive instrument. Right. So the little hammers inside the piano actually then become the hammer of the blacksmith. The first thing I thought of was Hephaestus. Yeah, yeah. The blacksmith. So the piano keys. Right. So he goes from being a pianist to a blacksmith. One needs to be literally heated up to be manipulated by the blacksmith to be hammered, or else we will break.
So you have to be heated to a certain temperature determined by the color of the metal in the forge. Yeah. So we could say that the volta occurs just before the final couplet. But like most Shakespearean sonnets, there are a couple of voltas. So we could argue that this. This first one happens in this subtle way with the change in the imagery or the adjustment. The ethereal blow is something that I didn't put much pressure on in my research reading, but now I'm looking at it and I'm thinking. I'm thinking I should have. Do you have a reading for ethereal?
Suddenly interested in this word?
8:44 Wes: I'm thinking of my struggle now to use a different word than intangible. But Actually, ineffable was the word that I was saying.
8:51 Erin: Ineffable. Okay, okay.
8:54 Wes: But that's my fancier word for intangible. Yeah. Why an ethereal blow? Except that he's goth and he's ethereal. And we're getting a contrast here between this very concrete image of him creating us by working with the products of the earth. Right. With metals. So it's an ethereal blow by fainter hammers. And I suppose this is just because we're being pointed to the fact that this is a spiritual process.
9:20 Erin: Yeah, she's trying to make it more palatable for the censors or something like, this is ethereal, I swear. Yeah. I'm thinking of the air, ethereal. So this is related maybe to the slant of light, too, right? From the ether. So it's the blow that, like the slant of light, seems to make a rather violent entrance. And yet it's not actually a physical violation, though, much like the heft of the cathedral tunes. This is related to sound, of course. And so actually, the blow. I think we talked about this with the bell and the head, too, Right. Like, there's the hammer.
Something having to do with the functioning of the ear here. And if it's a sound, we could say that there is. In fact, even if it is ethereal, if it's a sound wave, it's still having an actual physical impact on our bodies, on our physicality in some way. I didn't think of this until now. Now, but the eardrum. Something about the drum and the right banging on the drum, and then it
10:23 Wes: gets closer and closer and it starts slowing down, which is very ominous. And now it sounds like what's happening to us is not that we're being created, but that we're. That this is about dying, right?
10:35 Erin: Oh, is that what you think?
10:36 Wes: Well, your breath has time to straighten, your. Your brain to bubble. Cool. Deals one imperial thunderbolt that scalps your naked soul so that the thing that we're being prepared for is death.
10:48 Erin: Hmm.
10:48 Wes: Yeah. How are you. How are you reading this?
10:51 Erin: Some kind of encounter.
10:53 Wes: Oh, okay. Okay.
10:54 Erin: It could be the poem itself, too. I mean, that scalps your naked soul. Of course, to the famous. You know, one of the things, along with hope is the thing with feathers. And various other Dickinson quotes that are famous are about poetry taking the top of one's head off. So you could almost read this as an encounter with the muse. Divine inspiration. When it comes to poetic inspiration. No. I thought of a few possibilities.
11:16 Wes: I think this is the best reading, the one you give Me, like just an encounter with God.
11:20 Erin: Yeah, an encounter, yeah, yeah.
11:22 Wes: So it could be. I mean, in the beginning it sounds as if we're talking about creation. Right. Him hammering us into existence. And then it also sounded a bit to me like the moment of death,
11:33 Erin: so Hammering us out of existence.
11:35 Wes: Well, yeah, that's why thought it was very weird. But this is much more sensible just to think of it in terms of an encounter with divine. So you might, you know, you could even read it as a. Yeah, well, moment of inspiration or. Faith is not the right word, but a moment where one is. Has an encounter with the divine.
11:54 Erin: I saw the primary tension, I think where you're seeing either creation or death. I saw as either an encounter, in a less fraught sense, a sexual encounter or a rape. Either one of these. Right. And I think that whether or not this is a rape for me is what is most complicated for me here because it seems the participation of the speaker and the agency of the speaker seems non existent. My favorite reading in the reading that I actually think is primary is the. This muse or poetry itself or whatever, like coming in and kind of, you know, invading us.
But the, like the level of violence here and the. It could be, you know, I think all these readings are correct. That's always the case, you know, that's always the message. It seems for us with Dickinson is that it's all correct. Right. The complication for me, the interest is the violence and whether or not it is a rape. I mean, that scalps your naked soul seems pretty. I mean, I don't know.
12:55 Wes: Batter my heart, three-personed God.
12:57 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. Right. I mean, that could be. On the one hand, I mean, it's kind of a. Am I wrong in thinking that's a very erotic line? Obviously rape and erotic are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
13:08 Wes: Yeah. So that's why you have me thinking now of the John Donne poem, this comparison of him wanting to have God's force kind of usurp him in order to instill belief in him.
13:24 Erin: Right, yes. And make it so that he doesn't really have to go through the slow process of transforming himself through conquering his passions. He's saying, God, just, you know, have your way with me and violently make me do what you want me to do. Because he himself is too weak to make himself do this. You know, he has no. He doesn't have enough self control. And so the desire for God to come in and take that control is about probably his. I think we got at this in our episode on this probably his sexual sin is the thing that he doesn't have any control over.
14:03 Wes: So he's asking, except you enthrall me. Never shall be free, nor ever chaste. Except you ravish me. Yeah, yeah.
14:11 Erin: So it's the whole waging war for peace kind of idea. A few other things that interest me here. Your breath has time to straighten, your brain to bubble cool. So she drops the word before. Right. Then so slow we would then expect before your breath has time to straighten. But this is even before the word before. And I get the brain bubbling cool. Right. Because we've had this idea that there needs to be. So we've transitioned into the blacksmith metaphor. And so this is where, before she can even cool from the heat of the forge, he then deals the final blow.
But I wonder about breath having time to straighten. I'm having more difficulty locating that. And I wonder if that has to do. That goes back to the piano metaphor somehow. Something about the rhythm of the music, the complexity of the playing, the time signature of the piano music as affecting the breath in some way. But I can't quite make those line up. I was wondering if you had a reading of that.
15:13 Wes: Yeah. I don't know. Your breath is time to straighten. You're reading the word before into this. Right. That's the missing word. So it sounds like one is breathing heavily and one's brain is hot or frantic. There's anxiety, there's fear. And before you even have time to calm down, this thunderbolt scalps your naked soul. Right. And the soul is naked. There's nothing to scalp off the soul. The soul's naked. There's no hair or scalp there to be taken off. What question were you asking about the straightening the breath Straightening? I don't make it anything else of it other than that. But yeah.
15:53 Erin: Yeah. I was just wondering if there was a musical parallel there that was.
15:56 Wes: Oh, I see.
15:57 Erin: Has time to straighten. The fumbling and then the dropping. Full music on. I'm wondering about time signature.
16:04 Wes: Yeah. One can imagine the breathing. The breathing is irregular.
16:08 Erin: Mm. Yes. Yeah. And I wondered if that was simply a connection back to the music. Yeah. Because we have the further nearer then so slow. Oh, and I also just wanted to say another little cool Easter egg in the poem is prepares your brittle nature for the ethereal blow by fainter hammers further heard. So the one in three in each one of these quatrains is a non rhyming position, except for here, nature further heard, which is a sort of slant R. And it's nature heard further Off. Right. So there's something. There's something going on there with the music of the poem where it actually, like, picks up.
It echoes. So something quite cool going on there. Yeah. So anyway, so. So mentally flummoxed, overheated, and quite vulnerable, too, in your breath and your brain, and then deals one imperial thunderbolt that scares scalps your naked soul. I think, of course, of the slant of light. Again, the imperial affliction. This is a lot more personal than affliction, which is sort of unlocatable. It's oddly depersonalized or uncorporeal kind of way of phrasing. The hurt, the heavenly hurt. This is far more. But then again, it's about soul. So there's something also, like, incorporeal about this last line as well.
But it feels super violent and personal and. Yeah. And intimate. If we're thinking of the idea of fumbling at the soul as being fumbling at the innermost part of us.
17:37 Wes: I'm looking at this in terms of the reading where this is about creation. Now, I had thought that this sounded like death because of the scalp, I guess, the moment of scalping and the breath and the brain. But, yeah, here you can imagine us on the. On the forge, or where would we be resting if we're little figurines being made by Vulcan. Right. So we've come out of the forge and. Right. We're cooling down and apparently we're already breathing, but our breathing is not yet ordered. And then God has got to zap life into us. Right. Normally, Zeus, if it's Zeus, right. It's a thunderbolt to punish you and kill you, but in this case, it's like Frankenstein. He's got to use electricity to bring us to life.
18:25 Erin: Oh, that's cool.
18:26 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. So Vulcan did his part, and now it is. Vulcan and Hephaestus are the same. Right. This image of the. The instilling of electricity into us, of. Of life on this reading is complicated by this idea that this is a scalping. Or maybe this is to say that by instilling a soul in us, God gives us something that's unprotected. Right. It's not simply located in the cranium. It's not a physical thing surrounded by a skull, but in a way, it's infinitely vulnerable, especially to God himself. It's completely naked. So that the very giving of a soul just is a scalping because it's giving us this thing that is uncovered and has no boundary around it.
19:14 Erin: I like that. So at first, though, there Is obviously there's a violence inherent to the imagery. From the very beginning. There's a studied quality because we have this. I'm imagining this concert pianist, you know, who's stunning us with his talent. And eventually by the end of the first stanza, we get this more primal, violent, just instinctual type of action. Maybe there's something that kind of goes from most to least studied over the course of the stanza. Because we could say that the concert pianist is an artist. Then we could say that the blacksmith is like an artisan.
And then we have the idea of the primal, of just the violent impulse that is not in any way reflected upon, mediated by some kind of study or some, you know, it's just an urge. It's just a. Because then in the final couple, we just get the winds, you know, the forces of nature themselves, which are unconnected from any kind of, like, personification. So it seems that there's some sort of, you know, we're going down in an elevator here somehow into. Into nature itself.
20:25 Wes: Yeah. Our artistry has become something violent, something purely savage violent.
20:32 Erin: Yeah.
20:32 Wes: Right. When we go from the hammering to the scalping, it's interesting because in the version edited by Mabel Loom, Loomis Todd and then the other person, Higginson, right. They. They changed scalps to peels. P, E, L, S. Which I guess is a bit, you know, and maybe there's meant to be double meaning, like the peeling of a bell or something.
20:59 Erin: Oh, yeah.
21:00 Wes: But also it's a bit. It's a bit of a softer image. Right. Instead of scalping, instead of this violent act, it's like, oh, here's an orange. I'm going to peel it.
21:11 Erin: Well, yeah, I mean, it's a different form of savagery. I think of someone's skin being flayed off.
21:20 Wes: Right. There's something much more casual about just peeling a person into existence.
21:25 Erin: Yeah. This is the. I'm thinking of that gross, gross scene I could never watch in Lord of the Rings where they're cutting the orcs out of the wombs. You know, those, like, disgusting.
21:39 Wes: I don't even remember that. Oh, you mean in Mordor. Right. So that's. Yeah.
21:43 Erin: Where they're being burst or Isengard. Whichever. All the. Gosh, my sister's going to come after me for not knowing. For not knowing which one. I think it's an Isengard because Saruman is overseeing it.
21:55 Wes: Oh, right, yeah. Okay. The.
21:58 Erin: He's birthing more soldiers for his army, but, yeah, they're being peeled out of that womb type structure. And obviously gross. That's something that's going on here, too. We're peeled out of the womb. I don't know. My mom had a C section After 23 hours of labor, as she loves to tell me, so. C sections. Maybe there's more peeling than a vaginal birth. Depends.
22:25 Wes: Yeah.
22:27 Erin: Now it's getting really.
22:28 Wes: All right. Is any other gross association we could make?
22:31 Erin: Wes is turning pale. I'm just kidding.
22:36 Wes: I'd rather be scalped into existence than.
22:40 Erin: Than birthed into existence.
22:41 Wes: Than naturally birthed.
22:43 Erin: Than naturally birthed, yeah. Oh, come on.
22:48 Wes: But getting away from vaginas,
22:53 Erin: you can't. You can't get away.
22:57 Wes: What is this completely left turn that she makes into. What is this? I mean, what does this couplet have to do with anything?
23:06 Erin: I was hoping you were going to tell me. Yeah. When winds take forests in their paws, the universe is still. We're suddenly cutting in a cinematic way. We cut to am an image of a forest from above. You know, a drone is taking this footage. And I'm envisioning a cloudy day because I'm thinking of cloudy, cloudy paws. The winds or something. Yeah. And so it leaves us with this. What just seems like a total non sequitur image. Why do we cut to this? Well, first of all, cloudy pause. Again, there are no clouds in here, but pause. It's like. It's something rounded.
I'm thinking of. And since prior to this, maybe the importance of hands, it's invisible because there's no use of the word hands in the first part of the poem. It's just fumbles and then players at the keys. So hands are implied. But maybe with concert pianists, it's like white gloved hand hands, you know? And so now that's what I think of when I think of the paws. Like there's something kind of blunted.
24:17 Wes: Yeah. Yeah, it does make sense. Paws are good for fumbling.
24:20 Erin: Right? Right. Keep your paws off me. Yeah.
24:23 Wes: I'm thinking of. Have you read the Confederacy of Dunces?
24:27 Erin: Yeah, a long, long time ago.
24:29 Wes: The book ends with this scene where Ignatius O'Reilly kind of paws at one of the pigtails of his romantic interest. I guess that's like. And that always. For some reason, that image always stuck with me. His hands are compared to paws. I couldn't tell you. I've forgotten most of the book, but for some reason, that particular scene really stuck with me. Does God have paws at this point? Has God been transformed into kind of some sort of sylvan type of deity? Right. Something appropriate to the Forest and an animal. Something more rustic and natural at this point.
25:08 Erin: Well, maybe I'm also thinking of the image of Jupiter and IO. Again, if we're thinking of. We've already made this connection with the thunderbolt to Zeus, and Zeus as creator. But also, of course, if we're talking about rape here, he's also serial rapist. And pawing, as I think we've already hinted at, there's the frequent association with keep your paws off me, a guy pawing a woman. There's something of. Yeah. Violation and also a little bit of fumbling of. Of. Of. Of sexual ineptitude. You know, they're. They're like making a pass, but it's a. It's a bad one. It implies a lack of sophistication or something to be pawed at.
25:49 Wes: Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape.
25:52 Erin: Aha.
25:53 Wes: To get at that quote.
25:55 Erin: There we go. Yeah, no, but the. I'm just thinking of the Correggio painting of Jupiter embracing IO with those cloudy paws. You know, they look like paws. And that's a moment of rape where she's enveloped by the cloud. So sort of uniting all of that in the same way that, I guess, Zeus unites this creator, destroyer, seducer, rapist, whatever. All of these. All these epithets we could apply to him. Yeah. I don't know if it's pawing at someone. That had to have been an idiom in Dickinson's day, in any case.
26:31 Wes: Yeah. The God in this poem does sound quite pagan, you know. Right. With references to Vulcan and Zeus. Yeah. And now some sort of. Yeah. Are we still talking about Jupiter here or. I mean, I like your. This idea of the Correggio painting, but.
26:48 Erin: Yeah. And the forest. Like the forest nymphs.
26:51 Wes: So. Yeah. Some sort of natural force. But we've been talking about the relationship between God or Zeus and. And we created ones. Whether it's the moment of creation or whether it's some moment of contact with God, maybe even rebirth, you know, within. Within life. And now the image that seems to replace that is. It's as if we've been born and it's the winds of the midwife. Maybe they're holding the newborn in their paws. We've been delivered up and now we're being held. And then the universe stands still in awe of this created scalped baby.
27:35 Erin: Yeah, but the baby is also being. We're also shaking the baby. I mean, this is the strange thing, because if the winds are taking. We have to think through that. Because if the winds are taking yes, right. It's the winds themselves.
27:54 Wes: The forest, by the way, being a stand in for us. Right. With trees representing humanity, so the created ones. And so we get a collective. An image of collective birth and being held. But yeah, so we're onto shaken baby syndrome.
28:11 Erin: There's a paradox when the.
28:13 Wes: Yes, yeah.
28:14 Erin: Between the forest and the universe. Because there's. If the winds are shaking the trees, then somehow the universe is still. That seems to be it. Or are they just not moving? Are they about to shake the trees? This is the right.
28:26 Wes: Right, yeah, no, this is good. I'm glad you pointed this out because. Yeah, we would think that the baby upon birth would be held and contained and that holding and containment happens at a psychological level as well. It's not just a physical thing. It's evocative of care. Right. What's being evoked here is the concept of care. But winds, as you're pointing out, blow. They don't hold normally. They are disorganizing instead of containing. And then the thing that is seems to get contained or held is the universe, or actually held is the universe as a whole. That's the thing that is made still by all this. Yeah, that. That's. That's really interesting. So that. In other words, just to say one more thing about that, our life on Earth, of course, is going to be full of turmoil and tumult. It's not going to be peaceable.
29:17 Erin: That's just not if you have anything to do about it. Oh, okay.
29:22 Wes: It's a lot of scalping, hammering. But one might treat this as theodicy. Right. So that for all the blowing of our force on Earth, from a grander point of view, it's all for the. We live in the best possible universe and it's all for the good. So there's some higher harmony, as Ivan would put it, in the Brothers Karamazov. Right. So the world looks evil from our perspective, or there's a lot of evil in the world from our perspective, but the universe as a whole is good and the best possible universe. So it's still in that sense.
30:00 Erin: Yeah, still. Still. Now I'm realizing how many potential meanings still can have.
30:03 Wes: Well, how were you. Yeah, remind me how you. You were reading it.
30:06 Erin: Yeah, so. So as we've already said, there are these. Universe is somehow differentiated from forest, but also wind is somehow differentiated from itself as being both the wind and the stopping of the wind. Like the image of throttling.
30:20 Wes: Yeah. I think we have to hold the contradiction there, which is that our birth into this world you know, it doesn't stop with the birth into the hands of kind midwife and swaddling. And that. That image of a newborn being held. Right. It goes beyond that and it's full of the winds of fortune blow us around, so to speak. Right. To be held on birth is for us mortals to be blown around. If we think of our whole lifespan and, you know, we would hope it would be nice if it weren't that way. And if we were just. We came out of the forge, we cool down and then someone puts us on a shelf and we're just happy forever.
But instead we're animate, we're scalped, and we're subject to all this turmoil. And it's just a very clever paradoxical image. Where we're holding is not really holding unless you look at it from this other perspective. Right. Where if we stand outside of time, maybe we could see all this buzzing confusion as a stillness from that higher perspective.
31:24 Erin: Yes. I'm beginning to think of this as just. This whole poem is just a rewriting of King Lear's blow, winds speech. Doesn't he have thunderbolts in there? There's a bunch of things in there that are the same, Right? Blow, winds, crack your cheeks.
31:41 Wes: He probably asks to be hit by one.
31:45 Erin: Yeah, yeah. He's like, oh, that. You know, when I went to that recital last night, it really moved me a bunch of other things. But also the naked soul. Right. The forked, bare, forked creature.
31:57 Wes: Oh, unaccommodated men.
31:59 Erin: Yeah.
32:00 Wes: Unclothed, uncovered up by the false pretense of culture. And so blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage. Blow. You cataracts and hurricanos, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks, you sulfurous and thought executing fires. Okay, so I think that's where we get the lightning. Right. Vaunt couriers to oak cleaving thunderbolts. All right. Forests, singe my white head. He does. He does ask to be led by light. Okay, I knew it. All right. And thou all shaking thunder, smite flat the thick rotundity of the world. Crack nature, nature's molds all. Oh, crack nature's molds. Speaking of a forge, all germens spill at once. That make ingrateful man.
32:52 Erin: Yeah, and that's dirty too.
32:54 Wes: Wow. All germens spill at once. Wow. What is Shakespeare saying with them? Let's just talk about Shakespeare for a second.
33:01 Erin: Well, first of all, I can't believe I was right, that I. That this is just a re. Like. Yeah. The more I thought about it, the more I was like, wait a minute, there's thunderbolts in there. But, like, I didn't remember anything in particular from that speech except for those, like, couple of images. But everything is in there. The trees.
33:16 Wes: Wow. Singe. My white head is very reminiscent of scalping. Wow. This is really cool, but man Shakespeare, Man Dickinson. He's got it all. He's got it all. They both got it all.
33:28 Erin: Yeah.
33:29 Wes: All right, so are we gonna. Shall we wind down?
33:32 Erin: Sorry. Oh, you truly have the Dickinsonian mind going on there.
33:39 Wes: Exactly.
33:40 Erin: All wins all wines.
33:44 Wes: That's right. That's right.
33:45 Erin: That's good. Okay, thank you.
33:48 Wes: Thank you,
33:51 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 3
Apr 20, 2025
Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine.
Upcoming Episodes: “Rosemary’s Baby,” Yeats (“Sailing to Byzantium” and “Leda and the Swan”).
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to part three of our four part discussion of the poems of Emily Dickinson. In parts one and two, we discussed I felt a funeral in my brain, and after great pain a formal feeling comes respectively. And today we're doing number 320. There's a certain slant of light. All right, I'll read it. Let's dive right in. There's a certain slant of light Winter afternoons that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes Heavenly hurt it gives us we can find no scar, but internal difference where the meanings are.
None may teach it any. Tis the seal despair, an imperial affliction sent us of the air when it comes, the landscape listens. Shadows hold their breath when it goes. Tis like the distance on the look of death. Well, none may teach it any sort of. So I guess we'll never really know what this is, but I'm feeling like this is the wrong poem to be covering today because it is March 25th. In Salt Lake City. We had a snowstorm last week. Today it is 72 degrees and sunny and gorgeous.
1:50 Wes: Oh, wow.
1:51 Erin: So I'm going to have to activate my mind of winter to bring in another poet to try and get in the mood for this here. But I do think this is describing a very specific New England phenomenon here. This particular slant of light or maybe, maybe the whole northeast. I don't know. I don't want to. I don't want to limit it geographically, but I do think in the north, that particular slant of light that she's talking about on those days where it's so too cold to snow. Right. That expression. I don't know if you're familiar with this.
2:22 Wes: It's not happening in Cancun.
2:24 Erin: Exactly. Exactly.
2:26 Wes: So, yeah, so the sun is. It's winter. So the sun is lower in the sky and obviously not up for as long. And it's that, you know. I know, exactly. It's hard to describe, but it's, you know, you kind of know exactly what she's talking about. It's that quality of winter light in Boston, you know, it's the slant of light that goes straight into your eye.
2:46 Erin: Yes.
2:46 Wes: When you're walking down the street in winter, it's just like the glare because the sun is so low in the sky.
2:51 Erin: This is exactly I think what I wrote in here, what I want to talk about, the idea that it is blinding because of that particular angle. We don't get it here in Salt Lake. It's. You know, this is really. Despite the copious amounts of snow in the winter, this is still high desert. So we get a really nice, much fuller sunshine. So I do think it's peculiar to the Northeast in the US Maybe other places in the world, but I don't know. And maybe like the Great Plains.
3:20 Wes: I bought polarized sunglasses just because of that. Like driving south in Boston because the. The sun is arcing in the southern sky and low in the sky. It's brutal.
3:31 Erin: It is.
3:32 Wes: She doesn't mention the sunglasses, but that might help.
3:36 Erin: That's 321. There's a certain slant of light for which I bought polarized lenses. That sounds like a beginning of a.
3:44 Wes: Off of zenny.com. yeah, she's frugal. I sort of think of the slant of the shaft of light that comes into a room as well, that you sort of see in the dust. Right. As it slants in through a window. That's the other association I make. So it's interesting because light should be warm, obviously, but it's almost like a icicle or something winterly that the light is doing.
4:11 Erin: I'm thinking of quartz contentment that we talked about last time. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. That's the peculiar thing. I think about this light on days when it's cloudy in winter in New England, it's usually not as cold as those days where it's clear and there is sunshine. But it's that kind of incredibly. I don't know, maybe the clouds are insulating the. The landscape or something. At least they are in my imagination. And when it's clear and the light comes in, it really is. It's like this beam of freezing cold. It's very strange. But I like what you point out about being blinded, because this is exactly what I thought of and I thought the light that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes.
I'm thinking of something that obliterates the self. We're blinded, so we kind of can't see. And in that same way the cathedral tunes A cathedral in Salt Lake. I don't know why I'm bringing back so many things to personal experience. I'm sorry to the listeners, but we have this really big, famous organ in the cathedral and we have very frequent organ recitals at my parish here. And when it's playing really, really loudly, it's this transcendent experience where you feel. Yeah. You can't move or think. It's just crowding everything else out. So that connection that she makes to me is really, really true and related to this idea that it is at that angle that blinds you and makes it so that you can.
We can't really function outside.
5:39 Wes: Right. So she gives us a nice paradoxical image of light not only weighing something, but having a heft. A heft that's oppressive, that weighs down on us. Right. So light should be warm, but it's cold, in a sense. Even though she doesn't say that it should be. Light should be. Light should not be heavy. But it's. But it's heavy. And then we get the association to. Or the comparison to cathedral tunes. So now we're on a spiritual jag, maybe. No religious jag. And it. You know, one might think that light as something intangible and something associated with the divine. Right. And there have been various associations with the divine, is something that might uplift you and warm you and put you in touch with the divine. But here it's a. It's oppressive. We're getting a bit of a critique, it sounds like, of religion as well.
6:32 Erin: Yeah. Both the tunes and the light are sent us of the air.
6:37 Wes: Right.
6:37 Erin: As she says in the third stanza. So there's this strange heft, this strange weight, which she's associating with the Light and the Cathedral tunes, which I think is related to what she would describe as this oppression of religion, this faith being this thing that has no. By definition, it has no real substance. You have to believe in something that you can't see. In this instance, there are sound waves and there are. It's visible. So it's more than. I guess, more than faith. But it's. Yeah. As the representatives or the ways in which faith is typically portrayed in, say, painting of a beam of light coming and hitting, you know, the head of a saint or something like that, is what I think of.
It's described as oppressive. What's maybe interesting or slightly more complicated about that is the fact that. That Dickinson so often writes in common meter. And common meter is the meter of pretty much any hymn. Most of the religious tunes that you would hear in a church at that time would be in common meter. And so she is herself writing in the tune that you would hear in a cathedral. It changes. We get the typical 4, 3, 4, 3 stanza in the first and fourth stanzas, but the middle two, they're shorter, they're a little truncated. So we Get a three, three in the middle.
But I wonder about that. I wonder if this is a bit of a self critique as well, or a slight wink to us.
8:03 Wes: Interesting. So a heavenly hurt. Yeah. What is that about?
8:07 Erin: Yeah, I read this as being. I don't know if there's another way to read this. The stigmata. I'm thinking about the stigmata for people that don't know. I feel like probably everybody does. But the wounds of Christ, particularly on his hands, the nail wounds, and sometimes on the feet, and sometimes in the form of wounds that the crown of thorns might have created on the, on the scalp or in the forehead, have sometimes appeared on people. Several saints in the Catholic Church received the stigmata. But receiving the stigmata does not itself guarantee any kind of canonization.
And in fact there have been instances of this that have been faked and things like that. So the church is actually quite wary of it, I think. But Saint Faustina, Saint Catherine of Siena, famously Saint Francis, you could see in the Giotto frescoes his stigmata. And in the 20th century, someone like Padre Pio received the stigmata. And that's associated usually with ecstasy and with this idea of truly joining with the suffering of Christ. So the evident, sometimes actually they get. I've heard of invisible stigmatas in the past, but for the most part they are evident.
And the scar, if you will, is right there. Sometimes it bleeds actively, sometimes it doesn't. I know in certain miraculous occasions, I mean, it is itself. If it's legitimate, of course, according to the church, then the church sees it as a miracle. But sometimes it smells sweetly, sometimes it'll smell of flowers, but yeah, a visible sign that these pious people are really participating in a very literal and active way in the suffering of Christ's passion. This is sort of an inside out stigmata, it seems to me. It's interior, so we could find no evidence of it on the outside, but it creates an internal difference.
And rather than increasing faith or having a redemptive function, this just brings despair. So it's almost a satanic stigmata, if you like, and natural and related to New England winters.
10:17 Wes: So, yeah, so light comes in, bypasses the polarized sunglasses, penetrates us, I guess. It doesn't have to be the eyes that it penetrates. And of course the stigmata points us to the hands. But anyway, so it penetrates us, but it doesn't leave a scar. And I suppose a scar would be an indication of atonement in a way, a sign of atonement. What do stigmata represent? Christ's sacrifice his atonement for our sins. It's the aftermath, of course, of an act of suffering. But, yeah. Do you have anything more to say about that?
10:55 Erin: So this is related to the idea in Catholicism that suffering is actually transformative and that you can also offer your suffering up because everyone is part of the body of Christ. You could actually offer your suffering up for someone else to help alleviate their suffering. So you don't have to have a stigmata to do this. The idea is, I don't know, if you're Wes and you're recording a podcast with Erin, and you could say, oh, God, this is gonna be such suffering. I'm gonna offer this up today for the sake of, you know, the soul's in purgatory or for the sake of my friend who is going through a hard time or something like that, because this is, you know, true suffering.
So. And the idea is that this can be. This could be redemptive in this way. It also can purify you, the suffering, if you. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's the. It's not just supposed to be like, oh, I'm like a Pharisee, you know, publicly performing a lot of, you know, the point isn't that you're wearing the hair shirt and going around going, oh, my God, I have this, you know, this stigmata. In fact, most people, you know, they have. They cover it up. They. They don't display it so that everybody knows how sort of pious they are.
Right. Yeah. So it's not so much about this visibility per se, though it is also usually visible in this really obvious way. Padre Pio wore gloves to try and cover it, but you can see it in certain pictures because it was actively bleeding. So sometimes you see bandages on his hands with. Yeah, like. Like a bleeding through that he had to keep changing.
12:25 Wes: So normally I. I suppose. Here's the way I think about it. Leaving aside the divine, we feel the sting of conscience. We do something wrong or sinful, you might call it, and if we are hurt by that, then it, you know, it could be the sting of conscience. It could be sanctioned from the community. And then I suppose if there's atonement, right, it might lead to some kind of change. Ideally, the herd is going to lead to some sort of change. As you. I think you pointed out in the case of the divine and Christ in particular, the wrongs are too great. We can't atone for them on our own. Christ has to do it for us. And I suppose so the weight of guilt is too heavy or human nature is such that there's no full atonement to be made. I'm not sure. But, yeah, I guess I'm trying to puzzle out this idea that the normal narratives. We do bad things and then heaven helps us out.
13:19 Erin: Yes.
13:20 Wes: Alleviates some of our guilt, but in this case, heaven is hurting us. And so I'm trying to figure out what that means. And so the slant of light might be like the slant of conscience, the light that exposes the thing that we've done and then hurts us. And if we can't find a scar, it sounds like we're not finding any permanent change that might come from atonement until we get to the next two lines, which are a bit cryptic. Right. We get internal difference where the meanings are, which I'm sure postmodernists and post structuralists have loved these two lines and made lots of them. Right. The post structuralist idea that meaning just is difference. So, yeah, we can get into what internal differences. So if there's any redemption here, it's in this internal difference where the meanings are. But, yeah. Do you see what I'm saying?
14:14 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And this is why I think I immediately go to the stigmata. Because what she does is locates God or the heavens as the origin of both good and evil here and. And the heavenly hurt. So the stigmata is something that it's typically. I think. I'm sorry, but like, real theologians who are gonna be listening to this, I'm probably getting some of this stuff wrong, but I believe that it has to be asked for on the part of the stigmata bearer. It's not usually given. You know, it's this really crazy niche form of suffering.
14:51 Wes: Right.
14:51 Erin: And I also hesitate to. I mean, she's obviously referencing the stigmata here, but she's also not a Catholic. How this would line up with the faith tradition in which she was steeped as a child is unclear to me. Of course she would know about the stigmata. But the idea is just what is maybe a bit sacrilegious or a critique about this is she's saying that these things come from God that locates evil and good with God in a way that is not applicable to the stigmata, where she's using this image to make a larger point about the fact that God is this, at best, this vengeful God who gives us these afflictions to test us or to purify us or whatever you want to say. And at worst, he's both God and the Devil.
15:38 Wes: Right.
15:39 Erin: Like torturing us. And I mean, there isn't even an alternative here. There isn't anything good. I don't think that comes. That comes from God in this poem, because it's just about this land of light.
15:48 Wes: Yeah. So one might accuse religion of. Of making us guilty, as Nietzsche would put it, giving us bad conscience. That religion inflicts that on us and inflicts a certain kind of pathological value system on us. A certain version of morality that's not good for us, which would again, line up the slant of light with the sting of conscience. But if we think we need a conscience, which I think we do. So one can read this as saying, well, well, heaven is this origin of the norms that have normative authority that will lead us to have something to feel guilty about if we violate those norms.
It could be something very straightforward like that. Or it could be this critique where. In other words, one could give a reading of this where it's neutral to the role of religion and it just describes something almost metaphysical or structural. It needs to happen if there are to be norms and how guilt is related to norms and things like that and involves some relation to the divine. Or one might read this and say, okay, this is a critique of religion as inducing in us bad conscience. I mean, the upside here is what do we make of internal difference where the meanings are.
Internal difference does. Well, it could suggest that it just produces internal conflict, and maybe that's guilt. But one might also think of internal difference as kind of the dialectical driver of change. And then where the meanings are. Seems to be positive.
17:21 Erin: That's true. I didn't think about the positive valence of this. I mean, I suppose any injury which then results in a scar would be, on the one hand, negative because of the fact that there's been an injury that's harmed our wholeness in some way. On the other hand, scar is indicative of something that was survived and also of something that's been healed.
17:46 Wes: Right.
17:46 Erin: It's not an open wound. I didn't think about this because I just think about her critique of religion. Really?
17:51 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think we. So we find no scar because it's not. It's on the inside. It's spiritual rather than physical light. Right. The light goes right into us. But then the other part of this is scar tissue is sort of. Of static and it's grown over. Right. And it's still somewhat painful. Whereas internal difference, where the meanings are, sounds a little bit more dynamic and alive. Whether or not we give this a You know, a darker reading or a lighter.
18:22 Erin: Sure.
18:22 Wes: You know, I don't know whether to interpret this as positive or negative or both, but. Right, yeah. Internal difference could just be guilt and internal conflict. And then in that case, where the meanings are. Well, yeah. What do we make of them? Here's one way to think about it. It's just that we think about it psychologically. So again, going to Nietzsche here, conscience just is the thing, the reason why we can't get rid of it. It is just the thing that gives us a soul, or this is the thing that gives us a psyche because it carves out that terrain.
If we simply discharge all of our instincts, our impulses, and do violent or sexual things or whatever, discharge it into the environment, then we don't. Nothing gets turned inward. And therefore the domain of the soul is not carved out of that rock. We really have to have our impulses turned back on ourselves in order to produce not just conscience but consciousness, humanness. So to be human as we know it would require this sort of dynamic of conscience, which would explain why that's the place where the meanings are. So one reading of this is just that this is what's required to even have a soul, this sort of relationship to the divine.
And even Nietzsche acknowledges this. It's not like we can go back and say, oh, we're going to get rid of conscience. We can't do that.
19:42 Erin: I was thinking of this in terms of the fact that she seems to be investing this light with this meaning. Right. She's projecting something onto the landscape which she's sort of saying isn't really there. Right. If we're interpreting this light as, say, a divine messenger, she's sort of at the same time toying with this idea and saying, well, it's only we who invest that light with that kind of metaphoric significance, and therefore the only meaning is within us, really. I don't know if that's related somehow ultimately to this idea of conscience and the idea that we're simply interpreting.
I mean, this is nature versus maybe like conscience more involves or more regularly involves things we do to other people who themselves have their own inner meanings. But, yeah, something about how it's only in the self is the reality or the subjectivity which is then cast on the landscape and interpreting, so projected. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:40 Wes: If one were an error theorist or nihilist about morality and there are no objectives, external moral norms, then that would be what one might say. Right. Is that the idea? There's a nihilistic possibility here. So we Create these meanings and we create normative meanings, but it doesn't map on anything.
21:00 Erin: Right. Well, in this word projection, you know, one sees the light kind of from within us going outwards. You know, it seems like actually the inverse of the slant of light coming in into us. You know, we're the ones who are casting the light of meaning onto the landscape.
21:14 Wes: Yeah. So we fantasize the divine and if we're giving it a religious reading, we can give it a lot of different readings. A religious reading. I think of the light as like a laser that penetrates us. And I was associating it to the sting of conscience. And that's, you know, it's a very specific way of looking at this. There are other ways, I think, but. And yet you could see that as the divine being the source of the normative on one level. But then she might be challenging that very notion, as you point out. And you reverse that and you say, well, the divine is our invention and we do this to ourselves and it's just a way of giving ourselves a metaphysical source for the guilt, Creating the problem and then solving it in the same stroke. This is again another Nietzsche. Right. We create the problem of guilt and then with the divine and then. And use the divine also to solve that problem.
22:06 Erin: Ah, how clever of us.
22:10 Wes: And I think, yeah, you know, conscience. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but concepts of empathy are very. We're doing this on the Partially Examined Life right now. Empathy is a very difficult concept to understand. We have this access to other people's mental life and we can sympathize with it, commiserate or rejoice in their joy. But that doesn't mean that we are simply taking on their feelings or simulating someone else's feelings. We preserve the independence of the other. There's something essentially non egoistic about our involvement with other people.
So if we care about someone, it doesn't reduce to egoism. It's not like if you're in pain and I'm concerned about that, it's me. Right. It's reducible to my pain. Oh, I'm in pain because you're in pain. And then all I'm ever reacting to is my own pain. Phenomenologists like the German philosopher Max Scheler, very convincing, who's by the way, a Christian as well.
23:06 Erin: They all became eventually all the phenomenologists.
23:09 Wes: Right. Edith Stein, she was Jewish and then Christian. Yeah. So very convincing arguments that there's this, there's something that's irreducible. The simple egoism in us, where we have access to other people's pain, suffering and pleasure, joy, and we can care about it without it being reducible to our own egoism. And the same thing with conscience, where so we don't not do bad things because we're afraid of the sting of conscience. Ooh, I'm going to feel pain afterwards. Because we wouldn't feel that sting of conscience if the norm didn't have authority in the first place.
The authoritativeness of the norm cannot be reduced to psychology. Psychology follows on the authoritative norm of the norm. So if I ought not to harm someone, then the sting of conscience and the guilt that follows only follows if I comprehend that norm as authoritative. It doesn't explain the authoritativeness of the norm. It doesn't explain what's right or wrong. Anyway, I'm leading us a little bit off the beaten path here.
24:13 Erin: No, I love it.
24:13 Wes: Yeah, it's salient in the sense that it seems like the question that she might be getting at is how it is that we source the normative and whether it's coming in as a slant of light or if that's just a kind of myth, are we going to be nihilists about this? In other words, are we going to accept some non nihilistic explanation, whether that's religion or something else?
24:37 Erin: Well, does then the third stanza settle the question? Is despair the result of this? Is that something that can come from within us or is that a. You know, so we have this idea of the imperial affliction and despair seems to me to be. Well, actually maybe this does play into your point. The sacrilegious part of this is the idea that despair, or sort of turning one's back on God is a thing that can be sent from God himself. Perhaps this is a further teasing out of what you're describing, which is this idea that something about the oppression with which we incept ourselves or something, or our projection of God then causes us to turn away almost the inside out idea of the Nietzsche thing like we have the guilt and then also the way to alleviate the guilt. Here we have the God who's supposed to be the merciful God, but also the despair, the turning away from that mercy. Is that right?
25:35 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's possible. Let me just think out loud about this a little bit, uncle here. Right now, none may teach it anything. Okay, so which means it can't be changed. There's no teaching that will get us away from this hurt, this heavenly hurt. And this is true, right? We could be moral nihilists if we want to, at a theoretical level. But most people are possessed by the normative, by morality in a way that. That is involuntary. It's not going to be simply the case that they stop thinking, thinking things are right and wrong. Or let's just put it more ordinarily.
Good luck getting rid of your conscience and your guilt, right? If you have that, even if you go to therapy for 100 years, it's not going to turn you into a sociopath. Hopefully you get rid of some of the excess guilt that you shouldn't, you know, that you're carrying around. But we're all, unless we're sociopaths, we're all, as socialized beings, going to have that. So none may teach it anything. Some level of guilt is ineradicable. And then that's. So that's what I take to be the imperial affliction. The divine is. What's. This is part of her reversal, right?
The divine is what's responsible for guilt. The happier picture is that the divine is what can alleviate our guilt because it gets displaced onto Christ. God takes on the punishment in a way, because there's nothing that we could ever do to atonement, atone. It's too big a burden for us to atone for. We need the divine figure himself to atone for this type of burden. So, you know, we are. We're in God's image. We're quasi divine. We have the power to earn judgment, but not to atone for it. So anyways, so yeah, that's what I take the imperial affliction to be.
And the seal, despair, I guess the seal is supposed to be, right. It's stamped on permanently. Despair is stamped on us permanently, despite the fact that it's sent us of the air. So again, we get this nice contrast between the light and the airy and the intangible and the very, very concrete thing that it does to us. And again, we can say the same thing of conscience as something that's product of the social right. And this is where you might think of difference again, as the difference of the other and the community of others come together, right?
In a way, if one is going to be a sociologist about it, norms arise out of that. So I guess when I'm just trying to reinforce the point that there's something very intangible about the whole idea of norms, good and bad, morality, conscience, all of those things, they. They are untouchable, but at the level of human character, right, they're still intangible technically, but there's or let's just think about it in terms of our own suffering and our own inner lives. Maybe, let's put it that way. We feel them very acutely. Right. They weigh on us, they have a heft.
The norms are intangible, but what they do to us are very real and concrete from our own subjective perspective.
28:43 Erin: I love all of this, but I'm really struggling to keep up because none of this occurred to me as I moved. You know, I have a very different reading of this.
28:50 Wes: Yeah, no, and I. I should say, yeah, this is me doing my very. Once I get focused on an idea, I can't stop. And then everything. I just look at it through the lens of that idea. So.
29:00 Erin: Well, no, I love it. It's far more interesting.
29:02 Wes: The listeners should take everything I say with a huge grain of salt.
29:07 Erin: It's far more interesting than what I. The reading I had, which is of the stanza, which is just the kind of within the universe of the things we were already talking about in the previous parts. So, you know, none may teach it any. This idea that the. Of the instructive connected back to. Was it he that bore in after great pain? Right. The idea that the oppressions of ritual are actually somehow anti. Instructive that it's turned in on itself. Because I think we talked about the fact that with pain there's the obliteration of the answer, the ability to take a lesson from it.
So what should be instructive? The pain that should be instructive, that should unite us to Christ is actually causing the. The inverse of that is actually obliterating the consciousness in some crucial way. And then I had this really, what I thought was this really sophisticated, far out reading of this stanza, which is nowhere near as sophisticated as yours. And now I'm a little embarrassed of it. I thought, you know, the seal, I was teasing this out. The seal that brands us, the stigmata like quality of that sealing the coffin. And then, you know, I'm just free associating.
And then I thought the seal sent us of the air. I was like, oh, does this have to do with mail? And I wanted to get back to, you know, I was like, oh, this is the Civil War angle. This is the Civil War reading.
30:23 Wes: Oh, I thought you were going to say like seals with like the flippers.
30:27 Erin: Yes, loose seals. Yeah, the seal.
30:31 Wes: That's right.
30:32 Erin: The seal sent us of the air is when we.
30:34 Wes: I had a pet seal named Despair.
30:37 Erin: When we play the. Oh, gosh, what is it called? The grabby game. That's the seal Sent us of the air that we get for army. Oh, for marksmanship. Anyway, an affliction sent us of the air like mail, like news of the dead and the Civil War. This is really bad. I'm sorry.
30:56 Wes: Well, is that. No, I mean, this is.
30:58 Erin: Because then you get news that somebody in your family's been killed and it's the Civil War. It's like airmail seal, the seal of the government, saying, anyway, I hate myself. Okay.
31:14 Wes: No, no, this is interesting. Well, before we get to the fourth stanza, I'll just say one more thing about Imperial Affliction. And just thinking of it psychoanalytically often our. And again, just kind of still riding this guilt horse interpretation I'm doing. When we are particularly guilty in attacking ourselves, it represents an attachment, according to Freud, to an ideal other and a perfect other. And what we do is we're in denial. We maintain our connection to the ideal by being in denial of its imperfections and flaws. And then we identify with the bad and then attack ourselves as if we were the bad.
So in other words, we feel guilty because God is disappointing. What we really want to do is accuse God like Job and say, why are you making me suffer so much? But instead we just inflict more suffering on ourselves and tell ourselves that we deserve it, beat ourselves up. So for people who are depressed, for instance, there's often a kind of grandiose layer underneath the self attack. There's an attachment to an idea of self and other which are more perfect. And so one might accuse religion of being in this domain of a grandiose, perfect relationship between this perfect divine parent who has done no wrong, and me, the one who can be perfected through forgiveness from this divine figure and purified by that.
But in the meantime, the way I maintain that connection is to do this very opposite thing, which is to treat myself as. As evil and attack myself and feel guilty and. And all that. So I thought the phrase imperial Affliction captures that very nicely. Of course, she's talking about, right, the ray of light that comes from God in a way. And that's why it's the Imperial Affliction. And that's the way I would unfold that.
33:13 Erin: Or it could be news from the US Government, sent by mail. No, I think actually this perfectly leads into my reading of the fourth stanza. I hope I'm going to try and think on my feet and make this connection. But we have in the fourth stanza a sort of recapitulation of the whole life cycle, of the light which was with us for the first three stanzas, and then we have the. When it comes and then when it goes, whereas the previous are describing when it's here. But the shadows hold their breath. I thought of. I think it's number 407. One need not be a chamber to be haunted, which is one of the poems in which she describes an assassin.
And the assassin hid in our apartment. And so there's a scary moment of being locked in with the assassin, or the idea of hiding from an assassin, which I think is related to this. The landscape, listens, the shadow, hold their breath. You know, the slant of light is this killer that's coming in to get us. And everybody's sort of frozen or playing dead or hiding or something. And what happens in that poem, as I said, is that it turns out the assassin is some part of us. Because the thing that the assassin is inside is the body or the mind. And I think this is actually.
This is then related to this whole idea of conscience and the idea of the call coming from inside the house. Right. I'm trying to make the connection. I'm doing a bad job. But I think if that's the way we want to read this, it's related to what you're talking about, if I'm not mistaken.
34:40 Wes: Yeah. I think this is one way of reading. I mean, you could, you know, not knowing anything about Dickinson's relationship with religion, you can read it in the nihilistic or religiously skeptical way, or you can read this in a way that's consistent with being religious. Right. Am I too optimistic about that?
34:58 Erin: I think you're too optimistic about her religion.
35:03 Wes: You know, this stanza reminded me of Genesis a little bit for some reason. And the idea of God arriving on the scene, and Adam and Eve realize they're naked. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. I think I make the association because it's almost as if God is the breeze. And there's something. Something about. I think here it's like God is such a presence. And believe me, this is just completely free association.
I'm not making any solid claims, but my own personal, free associations to the stanza. It's the idea that when God does come to Earth, in whatever form he comes, whether that's literally. If he's literally coming down to talk to Adam and Eve, or if it's just conscience, or if it's inspiration or something to do with faith. How? However you want to think about it. His presence is so potent that the landscape is personified. It becomes animated. Right. Shadows hold their breath. The landscape listens. It's as if the earth now is so alive because God's presence is so potent, even the rocks are scared.
Something like that. So if we want to give this a reading in terms of conscience again, when conscience arrives, there's nothing that can escape. It almost gets to us at a physical level. It's there in the body. Even the body listens to it. Shadows hold their breath. Wow, that's a great line.
36:35 Erin: Yeah.
36:35 Wes: Because the shadow of the thing is not even the thing. Right. Maybe. Am I so guilty? Do I feel so guilty that even my shadow feels guilty?
36:45 Erin: Is that how bad it is?
36:48 Wes: That kind of thing, you know?
36:51 Erin: Do we take this to mean, literally speaking, do we take this to mean that the shadows, how are they holding their breath? I mean, is this describing a lengthening? Or is it describing the fact that the shadows, when they hold their breath, they disappear for a second, in which case they're gone. They don't exist. They hold their breath and they destroy themselves momentarily. They black out.
37:13 Wes: Yeah.
37:14 Erin: Except they white out. They don't, you know, there's no shadow.
37:19 Wes: Yeah. It's light that casts a shadow. Right. So the light hits us. The shadow should be there. And in this case. Well, if the beam of light is just penetrating into us and becoming the imperial affliction, then why wouldn't the shadows go away? Of course, maybe all the light goes into us and there's no extra. Right, the shadow. The shadow depends on the light being present in some places and then not in others. But in a way, we humans might be a lightning, kind of lightning rod that attracts all the light, in a sense, in which case the shadows would vanish entirely.
37:53 Erin: The coming of the light, I'm imagining at the moment that it happens, the shadows are lengthening on the ground. Right. If we imagine, say, the clouds parting for a second and the light coming in and the shadows suddenly grow. To me, that's taking a breath. No, I mean, you can picture this multiple different ways. I love the idea of the shadows holding their breath. It's brilliant. And I think that implies kind of like standing still, as I'm describing with the assassin thing.
38:22 Wes: Yep. I like that. Yeah. So we have different readings. In one of them, the shadows are personified and they're having an emotional response. In another, they're just disappearing. Maybe because. Right. All of the light goes into its object and there's none to serve as A foreground or, you know, and then in this last one, they stop moving, Right? Yeah. With time, it's like time stops, time stands still.
38:50 Erin: Yeah. And then when it. When it goes to, like the distance on the look of death, I thought of the. Again, this is. That's why I was reading some Civil War stuff back into. Into stanza three, because I thought of the light going out of the eyes of the. Of someone on the battlefield. Soldier on the battlefield. So the light gone out of the eyes means it's now elsewhere, distant or something. So the corpse or the person itself is now distant from us. Whatever was inside that person is now elsewhere. So there's a distance between us now and the thing, the corpse that used to be a person or something, because it's also the look of death.
So we could see that the look of death is only visible to us insofar as it actually occupies a face. Right. It in itself is abstract. It needs to be. It needs a human to attach to so that we could see the look of death. Because I don't think she's talking about, you know, the Grim Reaper, which is, you know, he is himself, I think, faceless. Right. He's just a hood with a. With black. Right. So there is no, practically speaking, in that particular image, there is no look of death, or there is of the body, but not the face, you know, so the distance on the look of death, to me, visually, when I picture it, it has to be applied to a face, someone's face, to be active.
And I wonder if that's related to some of the things that we've been talking about prior to this. The idea that the landscape has to be animated with our own projection onto it somehow. Yeah. Just like we can be the slant of light going out, I guess we are also the look of death or something, you know.
40:30 Wes: So the distance on the look of death, if you think about the eyes of a person who has died and they have that kind of distant stare. Right. Obviously, we can tell they're no longer functioning and no longer looking at anything, no longer focused on anything. That's what I take to be this distance on the look of death. Sort of eyes that are looking into nowhere. And so it's an image for soullessness or for the departure of the spirit. Right. The body is no longer animated and there's no longer a soul or a spirit or however you want to put it. And in a way that that look, it captures that.
Right. Somehow. And of course, at that point, that's precisely when there is no more Right. The internal difference where the meanings are there is that place is gone now because I take that place to be the soul. Right. And that's what happens when the. That's the downside of the slant of light leaving. It's a seal of despair. It's an imperial affliction. But when it goes, look at what we're left with, it sounds like it's indispensable. Or has it just damaged us so much that, you know, again, one is giving a critique of religion or morality. Perhaps if we weren't so damaged by, by those such things, then this would not be the aftermath.
But as it is, we've been so shaped by it, we can't live without it, even though it is such an affliction.
41:54 Erin: I love that.
41:55 Wes: But the other way to read this is just that, right? This, this is part of you reading this religiously. This is part of the burden of freedom and free will. And we being human and being conscious and having a soul is that we, we can do right and wrong and we will do wrong and we will suffer for it. And the alternative is to not be alive.
42:14 Erin: Well, that's fun.
42:18 Wes: Either way, it's a win win.
42:23 Erin: The life giving slant of despair and affliction. This hadn't even occurred to me that it is. Yeah, I like this. This, I like both readings, but I like what you said, that it's. That it is indispensable without pain. What are we
42:39 Wes: for the next part we'll be reading Dickinson's poem, no pain, no gain. It's about her personal fitness trainer.
42:54 Erin: The slant of light that follows her around the yard. She has to outrun it. Yeah, good. Well, all right, let's leave off there and then in our final part, part four, we will discuss number 315. He fumbles at your soul.
43:09 Wes: Thank you, thank you.
43:14 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at subtextpodcast and on Twitter nysubtext.
“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 2
Apr 07, 2025
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine: numbers 340, 372, 320, and 477.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or@patreon.com. Hey, welcome to Part two of our discussion of the poems of Emily Dickinson. In part one, we talked about number 340 in the Franklin numbering system. I felt a funeral in my brain. And in this part we'll talk about number 372. After great pain, a formal feeling comes, which I think think kind of tread some some ground that we've already talked about with its boots of lead tread some ground we've already talked about in in part one. So I think kind of Makes a good pair. I guess I'll go ahead and read it first and then we'll dive right in.
1:03 Wes: Yeah.
1:03 Erin: Okay. After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs. The stiff heart questions was it he that bore and yesterday or centuries before the feet mechanical go round a wooden way of ground or air or ought regardless grown a quartz contentment like a stone. This is the hour of lead remembered, if outlived as freezing Persons recollect the snow first chill, then stupor, then the letting go.
1:42 Wes: So, yeah, we're getting this image of feeling of numbness, I suppose, that comes after great pain. Except she chooses a very interesting variation on that idea, which is formality. So it's a formal feeling. And then she's using this word ceremonious in the second line. Right. So formal as in ceremony or in social form. I suppose you could even say impoliteness. And all the. The. In the social face that we put on things, the thing that covers up are, you know, more complicated and visceral and often intense feelings that lie beneath. Is that right?
2:22 Erin: Yeah, I think so. You know, this. This poem, I wonder if it's almost describing the exact same experience as. As the poem we covered in the previous part, but just with a. With a darker valence. Because there's. There's a sense of. In the formality, there's a sense of a funeral, of the funereal. You know, the nerves sit ceremonious, so it's as if you're sitting through a funeral. But then what's really great about that is that they're like tombs. So she connects this idea of the funeral, or of the funeral, of ceremony and of formality, with stiffness, which itself is, you know, it's like a Russian doll image that itself has the implication of death and the tomb and, you know, something like rigor mortis inside it.
3:05 Wes: Calling it a tomb is. I mean, it's a really interesting image because we think of nerves as, like Mrs. Bennet, nerves.
3:12 Erin: You have no compassion on my poor nerves. They're very active. They're vibrating all the time.
3:18 Wes: Right. So, yeah, we think of nerves as, I guess, cylindrical threads, tubes high strung, like the Internet, tubes that run through our body and conveyors of pain. And so the nerves are no longer active here. So they've been very active. And now they're dead, in a sense, they've been deadened. They're tomb like. But again, we get this idea of sitting ceremonious as if the tomb is a monument to Something lost, something has died. Right. You know, I think the funeral. You know, your reference to funeral is good. Something has died and, you know, the pain that was there is gone. It's died. And it's like losing someone.
4:01 Erin: Yeah. Which is a really interesting idea if it's the pain itself that's lost. You know, I never thought about that. That's really interesting.
4:09 Wes: More ordinarily, Right. We're in pain because of what we've lost or someone that we've lost. But in this case. So I'm giving it. Yeah. A less orthodox way of reading it, which is that the pain itself is the thing that's been lost when we're in the state of numbness. Yeah.
4:24 Erin: Right. No, I really like that. I think. I hadn't thought of that. So I'm kind of thinking on my feet now, but I'm. You know, when you're in real physical pain, mileage may vary on this experience, but real physical pain, it sort of obliterates everything.
4:42 Wes: Right.
4:43 Erin: And then afterwards, that kind of like. I don't know, that resounding sense. I'm thinking of the bell from the previous stanza. Maybe something about that rings after. But you're also like. It's also hard to recall physical pain after it's over, you know, so. So there's. There's this heightened. It's. It's reminding me of what we talked about in part one, with the tinnitus crowding everything out. That's kind of like pain. And then afterwards, the silence is kind of. You know, you almost can't recall what the pain was like. And the silence becomes a kind of numbness.
I don't know. I want to. There's a better connection that I could be making there, or rather a more clear way, one, I think, between these two qualities. But I think they're all interrelated insofar as we can just say that our idea of pain, of emotional pain, probably only comes from our experience of physical pain, which is maybe. I don't know that I want to say that, but the words that we use, the fact that we would use pain for an emotional pain, which is something quite different from physical pain, almost seems to me then to be related to the idea of.
I felt a funeral in my brain. And this. This contrast that we kept making in part one between the corporeal and the spiritual, or even like the vacuum of space, all this other stuff. Right. So I think that those two senses of pain. What I'm trying to say, those two senses of pain aren't really Interrelated. And it's important that maybe both readings kind of coexist here.
6:05 Wes: Yeah.
6:05 Erin: So we have the stiff heart questions, was it he that bore? So again, we have this idea of, you know, of death, right. Because the tombs, the idea of stillness, the still heart does not beat, the stiff heart doesn't beat. And so that's another further idea of this is almost physical pain resulting in death, some physical injury that's resulted in death, and now what's left over is just this deadened state. But I was interested because these two lines I'd never given much attention to, frankly. Was it he that bore in yesterday or centuries before?
You know, it's a. It's talking about Christ's passion, right. Another one suffering as being maybe profound as that or joined to that. But on this reading, I was interested maybe in the idea of the formality inherent in this connection. Seeing oneself or trying to see oneself within a structure, the structure that Christ's Passion, say, for the Christian, tries to give to suffering an explanation, a sense of its purpose. So the idea of trying to use a structure to make sense of something, but one can't make sense of it. Trying to use a referent, a historical basis, some kind of reason, maybe even just why the suffering happens, you know, it happened because of this.
Any kind of structure to try to make sense of something seems to me to be inherent in that idea of formal.
7:26 Wes: Right.
7:27 Erin: But when the thing is actually so, so painful that it obliterates reason, you know, the formality after the fact of trying to make sense of it has less and less purchase, which is, I think, why the speaker doesn't know, can't remember, you know, what's the difference between this historical person and me? Because the structure is all, all, all confused.
7:46 Wes: So the stiff heart questions, was it he that bore? What? Bore the sins of mankind?
7:55 Erin: Yeah. Or bore the pain of the Passion, if we want to say there's another. Right.
7:59 Wes: Was it he that suffered for us?
8:01 Erin: Yes.
8:02 Wes: Yeah. So I'm wondering, is the stiff heart doubting now? Is it having a crisis of faith, or is it trying to relocate pain right to Christ? Is it Christ's pain or is it my pain?
8:17 Erin: Yeah, I think it's both of those things.
8:19 Wes: And yesterday or centuries before, so we could see, you know, if the pain that she has experienced is something recent, as in yesterday. Then the question becomes, yeah, is this my pain that I felt yesterday and now that I'm numb to, or is it someone else's pain? Sort of a bit of identity diffusion here, or is It. Christ's pain, which is interesting because it goes along with. That's kind of part of how this numbness after great pain works. Right. It's almost like you're out of your body, you're disassociated, maybe, as you were pointing out. Yeah.
It's hard to even remember what that pain exactly was like, and in what sense it's even one's own. So what's happening here? Does it become a. A vehicle to faith or a. It might be the opposite. Does it interfere with faith? I mean, it might be a vehicle to faith in the sense that you realize that the pain can be relocated to Christ. Right. And that if now that it's gone from me, the formal feeling could even be a religion.
9:23 Erin: Right.
9:23 Wes: The ceremonious feeling could be a religious feeling. But if it's a religious feeling, it's not a very passionate religious feeling.
9:30 Erin: Yeah.
9:31 Wes: I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. I didn't quite understand this.
9:33 Erin: Yeah, no, I think that's all. I think that's all, really.
9:35 Wes: Right.
9:36 Erin: And I think that that passion. I think that, you know, she's placing passion and religion on opposite ends of the spectrum. Numbness and formality in religion, I think, are kind of going together in her little drawer here. And that's one of the reasons why this religious thought occurs in this numb, formal kind of mode. When we discuss 320, there's a certain slant of light. I read that poem as making reference to the stigmata and to this, you know, to further this idea of suffering joining with Christ's suffering. And the idea is that it's a. I don't know exactly how this works in the Protestant faith because it's quite different, because Catholics, because they believe in works, they believe that suffering can actually be transformative, that you can actually offer suffering for other people.
All this other stuff that has to do with purgation and things that would not have a corollary here. So suffering is probably in Protestantism, just supposed to be instructive and unite you to Christ's suffering in some way. That is. Yeah. You're supposed to be able to understand something about what Christ did for you through. Through that experience of suffering that you kind of join with him in. And maybe. And maybe it'll also teach you something about yourself and the fact that the instructive quality has broken down here. Oh, when did that happen?
Right. If I was supposed to learn a lesson from this, but I can't even remember what the point was, you know, What? I mean, like, there's some. Something is really broken down. And so I think that what she's trying to say, you know, maybe I'm reading the biography in here a little too much. Right. But we know that she was a sort of, at times almost anti Christian person, is that if we read pain and suffering through this formal lens, there's actually a diminishment.
11:15 Wes: I see what you're saying. It seems a little sacrilegious in the sense that she's identifying this relocation of pain and I suppose, guilt maybe to Christ's sacrifice. And in that sense, it's as if we're numbing ourselves. We're using religion to numb. It's the opiate of the masses.
11:33 Erin: Exactly, exactly.
11:34 Wes: She's a Marxist.
11:35 Erin: Yes.
11:37 Wes: Yeah. So it does. Yeah. You know, on reflection, just talking to you about this, it does seem like a bit of a critique.
11:44 Erin: Yeah, I think she's frequently doing that.
11:46 Wes: You know, I imagine her sitting in church and the formality of it and just being bored and being like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna write a poem about how much this sucks.
11:57 Erin: Yeah.
11:58 Wes: But specifically, it could be the funeral service, which also can be pretty boring, honestly.
12:04 Erin: Oh, of course, of course. And I think any of that, you know, any ritualistic funeral service, communal, religious, it's all kind of related to this critique because we wouldn't have those rituals and those funerals if it weren't for the religion undergirding it. Right. So it's all bad. It's all boring.
12:22 Wes: Can feel like it hasn't. It doesn't do justice to the real person because you have someone just reciting something or. Right. You know, hopefully you have a good eulogy or.
12:33 Erin: Yes.
12:34 Wes: People speaking in. Maybe in an impassioned way to the life of the person. But to the extent that there's a priest or someone like that giving a. I don't know what they give, what they give a sermon at a funeral or homily. But to the extent you hear them speak a little bit. Right. Some are good and some are not so good. Not every priest is such a good public speaker. And so it kind of mars the whole thing, in all honesty, in my experience.
13:04 Erin: That's right. You know, she frequently. Dickinson, in her poems, compares herself to a volcano. You know, Vesuvius at home is the famous title of Adrienne Rich's. Yeah. Like she. There's this one poem that I love called A Still Volcano Life, which is one of my favorite poems of hers, in which she says that a quiet earthquake style. Well, I'm not gonna get it right. But my nature is Vesuvian side. Naples. The north cannot detect. So anyway, she compares herself with the city south and northerners, not kind of understanding the sort of, you know, Vesuvian eruption that she has going on underneath the surface. And in moments like these, and talk of funerals like these.
13:41 Wes: I do declare. Right.
13:43 Erin: No, well, yes, a different kind of Southerner. But it always. I always think to myself, like, oh, what? Dickinson's whole mind would have been changed if she'd just been to one Italian funeral because there's so performative and ridiculous. Actually, they're not anymore since. Since people have been given drugs to sedate them at this point. But, you know, nothing ceremonious about watching your great aunt throw herself into a. Into a hole.
14:10 Wes: Right, right.
14:12 Erin: And people like literally tearing out their hair. Anyway, there was. See, that's why. That's. You know, that just really. It's silly that I even bring this up. However, I think that Dickinson is looking for that kind of thing. You know, she's comparing herself to this all the time because she's like, where's the real emotion? Where's. Where's the. She's sort of like this inner Italian who needs to. Or Mediterranean person who needs to have, you know, some sort of dramatic.
14:35 Wes: Or.
14:36 Erin: If we want to think of the American south, she's like, you know, she'd love Tennessee Williams. You know, she wants to just break out and go totally crazy and flip out.
14:43 Wes: Well, who wouldn't? She's in a very puritan New England environment, Right?
14:47 Erin: Yes. There was a second great awakening at the time, and the idea that she needed to make a profession of faith which was performative and perhaps somewhat emotional, which she refused to do. But that's, I think, a very different style of emotion than the one that she might be idealizing.
15:04 Wes: But she was religious ultimately, Is that right or. No? That's the impression I got. She wasn't.
15:09 Erin: No, I would say not. I would say very much not religious. I think she's anti Christian to the point of being. It looks like religion oftentimes because she's using it as something to kind of like, push off. I think she wishes. I think she wishes she could be religious. And she's oftentimes sacrilegious. It's complicated, but I think ultimately she abandons. She's really not a typical person of her era and her place in that regard. So it's strange sometimes to read some of the poems.
15:40 Wes: So the second stanza. Yeah, it sounds like she's become Like a puppet or a marionette.
15:47 Erin: Yeah, I like that.
15:49 Wes: The feet mechanic will go around a wooden way and then that way, you know, we go. It's ground or air or odd, I suppose. Odd as in anything.
16:00 Erin: Yeah, something else. Odd else. Something else. Yeah, I guess she misspells it.
16:05 Wes: Yeah, the wooden way or whatever it is that the feet are going to be on. It doesn't have to be ground, it could be air. It could be anything really. What does that mean?
16:15 Erin: Yeah, the wooden way. You know, I'm thinking again of the creaking across the floor, you know, the floorboards of a church maybe, or of a house. The round. I guess that would have to be a track. But it's also sort of. I'm thinking of her kind of going all the way around the world. You know, the circumference that she goes out upon in another poem. But the wooden way. I thought of wood because it's regardless grown. I don't know how to read that. But yeah, it could be wood or it could be ground or you could be walking on air or something else. It doesn't matter what you're walking on because you're not paying attention because you're not engaging with your surroundings. And then I thought of. Yeah, so the floor, whether you're inside or outside, there's a singularity into which everything is collapsed into sort of meaning meaninglessness.
17:04 Wes: Right. So there is no. In a sense, there is no ground. I mean one is numb and one is. Because become like a puppet devoid of emotion, devoid of subjectivity. And then there's also no firm ground on which one is moving. And then regardless groan, which is. I suppose we're taking that to be. Well, it may be refer to the contentment itself, I don't know. Or the wooden way. Regardless. Groan. A quartz contentment like a stone. Yeah. This kind of lifelessness and formal feeling have now become a kind of contentment. And regardless grown, regardless of where they come from.
17:45 Erin: Yeah, this pushes against the mechanical. So this is the surprise one feels when the seasons change or flowers grow or something like that. And you find still things are still going on even though you expect them to have stopped because you're numb to them. Maybe it's even the speaker herself who is growing and moving on without thinking it possible. But another thing I was thinking of actually with the feet mechanical go round. Of course, this movement should. Should have alerted me to it. Right. Maybe it's the hands of the clock going around.
So the hour growing late, things, things going on, things getting, you know, the Hour growing, whatever the. The day growing dark. Something like that. And of course it's. It can also be feat. Of course, in a poem, gotta think of poetic feat. So she's still writing this poem somehow. And regardless the poem is growing, regardless of her pain, she's able to write. And what is it ought? Maybe it's the words, maybe it's the ink and paper or something like that.
18:47 Wes: Wow. Yeah, this is cool.
18:48 Erin: And to the mechanicalness though, and the provisional idea that it could be this or it could be that kind of butts up against the mechanical in that same way. I think maybe the jagged lines here. Right. Are kind of destroying the mechanics of a typical poem. Cause this is a very strange formal poem for what she's talking about. It starts with four lines of pentameter, so we almost think it's about to be a sonnet. There's 13 lines and it's not. And in the middle we get something that's almost like a ballad stanza, but broken. So we get 4, 2, 3, 2, 4 is the stress pattern over five lines.
So it's not the typical four line ballad stanza, the common meter. And then the last stanza we get three, three, and then two lines of pentameter to ant. To end. So there's something really wonky about this middle stanza. And then the poem kind of like regains its footing at the end. So it's performing something. The mechanics she's talking about are actually breaking down. And that seems to me to be related to this idea that she can't find. She's just going through the motions. But actually, what is it? What's under her feet? What's going on?
The feet are kind of. They're mechanical and yet tripping over themselves here in the middle. Just free associating here.
20:02 Wes: Yeah, Yeah.
20:03 Erin: I don't know if that's all right, but.
20:04 Wes: No, it's interesting to. Yeah. To associate it with the poem itself and the formality of the poem, the form of the poem and the question of whether it's mechanical or whether it rises to the level of expression. Right. Whether it's just nerves sitting ceremonious or whether some feeling is coming through it. But in any case, we get this quartz contentment as a correlate of the numbness that comes after pain.
20:33 Erin: I'm even wondering, looking at that first stanza, it occurs to me that there are lots of Latinate words in there and it's quite formal. So this middle stanza represents a real disturbance. And then quartz contentment on the outside. Quartz maybe. Does it look just like a regular stone. And it's when you break it that you discover that it has that kind of geode.
20:56 Wes: I'm not sure. I just think of it as looking like diamond, but I don't know.
21:01 Erin: Right. Cause it is itself quite beautiful. But if you get it just in a raw unbroken form, it can look like just a beautiful kind of milky rock. Is that right?
21:10 Wes: Right, Yeah, I mean I think it's milky. It looks kind of like you know, remember the original Superman where he his cave?
21:19 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
21:20 Wes: With all those. It's kind of like got a pillar like it's a bunch of like pillar like things clustered together. It's a really like a prototypical crystalline structure. That's what we're meant to think of as that crystalline structure. But yeah, it's some of it see through. It's not entirely necessarily see through, but I don't think it's like granite. I don't think it's like opaque rock on the outside. And then you break it open. As far as I know. I'm speculating.
21:46 Erin: No, you're right. I think it's. I was thinking it looks like a rock, but it looks like. Like it has that beautiful color but it's shaped like a rock. And then when you break it. I was, I was trying to connect this to There are two ripenings, A poem of hers where she talks about the maturing and the burr versus the outward maturing. So I thought something about like being split open. But yeah, it doesn't work.
22:06 Wes: I don't think it's like that, but I'm not entirely sure. But it is something. You know, crystalline structures are structures that grow too.
22:15 Erin: Oh, right, right.
22:17 Wes: And she would know that with her study of science. Yeah, they're almost like they're inorganic, but the way they grow and the way they work is a kind of proto organic in a weird way. It's like self organizing quality of crystals.
22:33 Erin: I see. I was really thinking of regardless grown in terms of what came above it. But of course grammatically in every other way it would refer to the quartz. The contentment.
22:44 Wes: Yeah, I mean I was thinking it could go either way. I was a little bit confused about that. But yeah, that's one possible reading is. Yeah. Contentment. Wherever it comes from, or whatever its grounds, you know, ground or air or oxygen, contentment is the outcome regardless of where it comes from.
22:59 Erin: Maybe quartz looking like ice, you know. So we could think of this as like an icy contentment, but it won't. But it's an ice that won't melt, it'll keep growing, you know, because contentment is such an odd word to use here because to be contented, you know, this is to be contented because you're dead and you don't care anymore, you know, which is not really contentment. So she's kind of using this in a slightly ironic and sort of sad way. So, yeah, thinking about that. Like an ice that doesn't melt, so it just stays or keeps growing and it's like this boxiness. The beauty of it is what I can't reckon with. So maybe it's this, you know, the iciness that we can make the connection to. Not quite beauty.
23:37 Wes: Yeah, I like this iciness.
23:39 Erin: Yeah.
23:40 Wes: I mean it's hard like a stone. It's crystalline. It's not entirely transparent, but it's not. So it's not entirely see through but of course it's not. Not completely opaque to light. But yeah, it conveys this sense of numbness has become hardness, but it's also contentment. She is a rock. She's an island.
24:05 Erin: Solitude.
24:06 Wes: Rock has no name. Is it? A rock has no name and an island never cries.
24:10 Erin: I don't know.
24:11 Wes: I mean, you can name your rock, right? I think they're wrong about that.
24:15 Erin: That's true.
24:16 Wes: Did the pet rock craze take off
24:17 Erin: right after that song? Little googly eyes on her piece of quartz. That's Emily. Yeah. No, then we get, you know, another thing I was thinking of just in terms of, you know, quartz and then stone and then lead. It seems like there's a progression happening there towards more and more bleakness. It seems like the growing, you know, which might be the quartz itself growing. I love that idea. The growing is sort of into more and more hardness and kind of. I mean, lead gets a bad rap. Lead is actually quite beautiful in its unmanipulated state. Right. In its more natural state. But the.
24:53 Wes: As long as it's not in your paint, then you're. It's great.
25:00 Erin: But it seems that there's a growing heaviness and also a growing portent in the progression from quartz to stone to lead. Words are kind of growing in the direction of the increasingly shut down, heavy, deathlike state.
25:19 Wes: Yeah. I mean we go from formality and nerves that are like tombs to a marionette which at least can still move. Right. It's a replica of a human being and it. In this wooden way. So we get these wood images and then suddenly it's stone or quartz, which is. It's not quite rock. But then suddenly we're at lead and then. Yeah. So we're making a descent here.
25:48 Erin: I like that. And tombs too. You know, I think of stone, obviously, but hollow. There's a middle cutout. But then we just get stone through and through. So there's almost like a merging of the body and the space inside the tomb with the quality of being dead itself. The whole thing becomes solid. It becomes.
26:07 Wes: Yeah. Lead is not crystalline. It's. Right. It doesn't have this replicated structure inside unless you go down to the atomic level or molecular level. And it's not transparent at all, obviously. And it's very dense and very heavy. So this is the hour of lead remembered if outlived.
26:26 Erin: I love that one.
26:27 Wes: Wow. As freezing persons recollect the snow from first chill, then stupor, then letting go. So suddenly someone's freezing to death. Do I have this right?
26:36 Erin: Yes. Yes.
26:37 Wes: And that's the image. Someone's freezing.
26:39 Erin: And I looked it up. These are, in fact, the stages of hypothermia.
26:41 Wes: Right.
26:42 Erin: So smart. Yeah. I love the remembered. If outlived. I love the conditional. If you even survive this, then here's what happens. Wow. So. So good. I love that line. And then these last two lines are probably my two favorite lines in Dickinson. I don't think anybody has written two better lines than these. Ha, ha. Anyway, I have goosebumps.
27:03 Wes: And that is true. They do say you at a certain point, don't. Supposedly you get some sort of euphoria right. Before you. Yes.
27:11 Erin: Before you die.
27:12 Wes: When you're freezing to death, or you just don't care.
27:14 Erin: Yeah. And you get really warm. Right. Because you take off everything because you get so warm after a while. That, too, I thought of not as anything like a primary or even a secondary reading, the letting go, the divesting oneself of clothes as a reaction to the cold, which is this incredibly amazing paradoxical phenomenon that happens. So I was just gonna say, isn't it, that when they find people who have died from freezing, they sometimes find them undressed? Am I making this up?
27:44 Wes: I mean. Yeah, I've heard this too. No, I think I've heard the same thing. Yeah. So she's comparing. So it's odd, right, because she's comparing. She wants to say that the hour of lead is, if you live beyond it, remembered as freezing persons. Remember the snow. But then she describes freezing persons actually dying. So, you know, I suppose if you were revived. Right. If you got to the point where you let go as a freezing person and then were revived, and then you said, tell me about how you recollect the snow freezing person,
28:21 Erin: and they would
28:22 Wes: say, oh, it's just like the hour of lead going backwards through. Right. Yeah. So what is she saying here?
28:30 Erin: Yeah, the letting go could be read as the thing that actually restores you. So this is. If you do outlive it somehow by letting go, you live through it. Right. Because that's actually the description of the being restored to life. There has to be in the parallel, there has to be the outliving. So the letting go somehow means at once restored to life and letting go of life.
28:58 Wes: Yeah. So it's another image of mourning, right? This letting go.
29:02 Erin: Yeah, but it's like the final mourning, because that you've gone through the mourning process and now you let go, even of the grief.
29:09 Wes: Mm.
29:10 Erin: I don't know.
29:14 Wes: Yeah, no, it's. It's really interesting because it. Yeah. It implies that. That outliving this hour of lead or outliving terrible pain and loss involves something analogous to the moment where you surrender to your impending death. Let's put it that way.
29:32 Erin: That's great.
29:33 Wes: Is this the five stages of grief? Is that what she's talking about? First you die in the snow, and then you.
29:40 Erin: Yeah. In your outside reading, did you see her little pamphlet, Grief and Hypothermia? A guide?
29:50 Wes: Right. This should be what they give you. Yeah. If you're going to Alaska. One of the pamphlets is how to Avoid Hypothermia. The other is Grief and Hypothermia. This is what you can make of it metaphorically.
30:07 Erin: The chapters are Chill, Stupor, and Letting Go. If you experience stupor, don't be disoriented. I'm preparing you for it.
30:19 Wes: So the way beyond the hour of lead is to let go.
30:23 Erin: But we haven't even talked about the craziest part of these two lines. As freezing persons recollect the snow, then why are they freezing? Are they freezing right now, remembering the thing that they're in right now?
30:36 Wes: Yeah. This is part of my confusion.
30:38 Erin: Did you already say this?
30:40 Wes: No, not exactly. Because it's not. It's not freezing persons ultimately. Right. First chill, then stupor. Stupor. And then letting go. It's as people who have frozen to death recollect the snow. That's the parallel.
30:53 Erin: Yes. You did say that, right?
30:55 Wes: Yeah.
30:56 Erin: The person who survived that, or their
30:58 Wes: person who almost froze to death. Yeah. And then you wake them up, but either way.
31:03 Erin: And then they're somehow still frozen. They're still freezing. This is. You know, the parallel to me now is I think I've even talked about this on the podcast before because, you know, I'm obsessed with people who get shipwrecked and have to survive on the ocean and they have to eat each other and et cetera, et cetera. When you go through that period of extreme starvation, you're hungry, like, for the rest of your life.
31:27 Wes: Oh, wow.
31:27 Erin: You can never. Yeah. This is a phenomenon that if you starve long enough, and they have recorded cases of this, that people were stockpiling food after these experiences for the rest of their lives, no matter how much they ate, they could never get hungry. It was like the body just got used to this starvation. If it's long enough, I think the body learns that you might at any moment be subject to this again, that it actually, like, burns. You know, you eat and eat and eat. And they never got fat from it, and they were always, always hungry. And so there's something. I wonder if there's something about this here where, like, okay, it's a person who survived almost freezing to death, and that makes them freezing for the rest of their lives. They've seen something. They've been almost on the other side or, you know, and now their permanent state is kind of being freezing.
32:16 Wes: Well, yeah, if the freezing is permanent. Right. That seems kind of a bleak end to this, because in a way, this is all about being frozen in the wake of pain. But a more optimistic reading is that one can get beyond the point of freezing by letting go.
32:33 Erin: How does recollection work, then? Because, you know, we could put pressure on each one of these words. So interesting. Does the recollection cause the freezing? So if we've let go, is recollection possible, or is it, at the very least, dangerous? And can the danger of recollection result in the freezing? There's almost cart before the horse in the line here because they're recollecting the snow, they're back to freezing again. So it's like a circularity that. You know what I'm saying? Because you've let it go, it should be out of you. But then if you recollect it, you get freezing again, and you have to go through the cycle of letting it go.
33:10 Wes: Okay, so here's the way I'm reading it. So suppose you did almost freeze to death and you had that experience of letting go and getting naked. I'm so warm. I feel amazing just doing snow angels right as you're about to die, and then they find you naked in a snow angel, which is really embarrassing. I don't know. How you would ever live beyond that? Frankly, I'd kill myself. Supposing you got over the embarrassment, then how would you remember the snow from that memory? What would you think of when you thought of the snow? Would you think of, oh, oh yeah, I don't ever want to be around snow again because that was freezing.
Or would you think of the euphoric moment or the moment of letting go? Would you think of it? Would you associate snow with giving in to that moment of death and accepting it and no longer fearing it? If it's the second, then that's the way. I suppose the more optimistic reading of this is that this is the way once you get through the hour of lead, which almost, almost kills you, but if you can get through it without it killing you, then you will no longer be numb, you will no longer be frozen. What you will remember about it is that you gave.
In some sense, you gave in, you gave up to the possibility of it destroying you. But it didn't. And I mean, you remember almost being destroyed, but the significance of it is not, oh, I had a near death experience, it's I accepted the possibility of death and now I have that as a memory.
34:42 Erin: Huh, I like that. I think too about this may be a stupid connection. You know, how relatively easy it is. I'm putting this in air quotes. Give up an addiction to a substance that you don't need to live on. But how difficult it is, for instance, to overcome addictions to food, which you do need. You can't give up food cold turkey to get over an addiction. Right? Well, if you live in New England, you can't really give up snow cold turkey, can you? So there's something about, there's something about death and the cyclical nature. Things like this are going to happen to you again and again.
That seems to be important. The cycle, the cyclical part. In terms of the year, it's the winter when it'll snow again and you'll get triggered remembering the time that you were found in a snow angel. But also people will keep dying. It's going to keep happening. You know what I'm saying? So the confrontation is repeatable. It's repeated.
35:34 Wes: Yeah. This isn't the only loss or moment of great pain you're going to experience in life. It's going to happen again.
35:39 Erin: Is that what yes.
35:40 Wes: You're saying? And when it comes to you. Yeah. This memory that you've had of it almost killing you, but not. And the acceptance of that becomes a new. That's, you know, you can look at future moments of pain, of great pain through that lens, or it informs the way you experience future moments of great pain. Maybe.
36:02 Erin: Yeah. And I like the idea that it's such a, you know, almost freezing to death. That's such an exceptional experience. So I like the fact that there's this. It gets at the exceptional nature of any great pain, which feels as though it is this thing that only happens to one in millions of people. That they would be on the brink of that kind of death and be saved from it somehow is an exceptional experience. And yet it's talking about something in a language of snow. We all understand hypothermia, even if we haven't experienced it. And most of us have seen snow. And we're all reading this poem, understanding something about this pain in our own. You know what I mean? It gets at that sense in which grief makes you feel exceptional, in that nobody has ever experienced this, and yet it's intensely common. It's what it means to be a human.
36:54 Wes: I live in Boston, so I have to let go every time I leave the apartment. Yep, it's freezing. I'm gonna die. It's cost of doing business. No, but yeah. Yeah, I like that.
37:07 Erin: Okay, so I think we'll end part two there. We're gonna do two more episodes on Dickinson. Maybe more if we really get addicted.
37:15 Wes: One more recording. Two more parts.
37:16 Erin: Two more parts. That's right. In part three, we're gonna cover number 320. There's a certain slant of light speaking of snow in Boston and affliction. And then we will, in part four, cover number 477. He fumbles at your soul. I think a good way to end with a crazy sonnet. All right, thank you, Wes.
37:37 Wes: Thank you.
37:40 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson
Mar 31, 2025
If only because of its seeming incongruity with a brain “wider than the sky,” the central fact of Emily Dickinson’s life has become her seclusion. As she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town.” Like the relatively modest dimensions of her poems, this self-imposed constraint—of the property line within Amherst, Massachusetts, then the Dickinson home itself, then her bedroom—proved no barrier to a cosmic poetic imagination which “went out upon circumference,” and to which no subject, tone, or emotion was foreign. Erin & Wes discuss four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine: numbers 340, 372, 320, and 477.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. If only because of its seeming incongruity with a brain wider than the sky, the central fact of Emily Dickinson's life has become her seclusion. As she wrote to Thomas wentworth higginson in 1869, I do not cross my father's ground to any house or town. Like the relatively modest dimensions of her poems, this self imposed constraint of the property line within Amherst, Massachusetts, then the Dickinson home itself, then her bedroom, proved no barrier to a cosmic poetic imagination which went out upon circumference and to which no subject, tone or emotion was foreign.
Today, in the first of a four part series on Dickinson, we're discussing four of her best loved poems whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity and encounters with the divine numbers 340, 372, 320 and 477. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, have you seen any of the many Dickinson TV shows or films that have come out in the past? I guess since I don't know, the Belle of Amherst or something, have you seen any of these kind of newer adaptations?
1:56 Wes: No. I know there's one where she's a lesbian, which I refuse to see, but
2:02 Erin: people just got into an argument about this in a class that I was in a few weeks ago about whether or not she was a lesbian. I think last summer I watched A Quiet Passion, the Terrence Davies film with Cynthia Nixon, which was pretty. I don't know. Terrence Davies movies make me feel uncomfortable for some reason. I'm sure if I, if I interrogated it there would be some explanation, but just, I don't know, the atmosphere of his films or something. And maybe, maybe that's the right thing to feel is uncomfortable. But have you been up to the house? They used the house, I think, in filming. It's so, you know, the outside, it's. I didn't check this, but no, haven't
2:37 Wes: been to the house? No.
2:38 Erin: Oh, wow, you've gotta go as a Bay Stater. Is that the demonym for Massachusetts people? I think it is.
2:44 Wes: Isn't Maryland the Bay State.
2:46 Erin: It might be. Anyway, as a Massachuted. Whatever. As someone from Massachusetts. Yeah, there you go. That's. I was too polite to say.
2:56 Wes: No, it is the Bay State. Yeah. Massa is the Bay State. All right. I just looked it up.
2:59 Erin: Okay. Okay. What is Maryland, the Ocean State?
3:02 Wes: Crab State?
3:03 Erin: No, that's. That's. That's Rhode Island. It's the. I don't know what it is.
3:07 Wes: The Old Line State or the Free State. I've never heard that. I lived in Maryland for quite a while, too. Wow. Okay, Mass. Okay. So as a Bay Stater, I should see Emily Dickinson's house. Yep.
3:19 Erin: Definitely. Are you a fan? A Dickinson fan or.
3:22 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I. You know, I'd been. Been a long time, so I can't say I'm a fan as a. As in the sense I'm terribly familiar recently. But she's amazing. I mean, you know, from what we prepared for and the other reading that I've done. Yeah, she's amazing. She's a true exceptional genius.
3:39 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. I didn't like her as a kid, and it's been a long road to kind of overcome that. I think I was trying to figure out why, and I think it was this book that I had of lives of the writers or something like that, in which I thought that she had bad manners or something.
3:57 Wes: You know, refusing to open your door to talk to people might be considered bad manners.
4:01 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
4:02 Wes: Any. Any.
4:05 Erin: Any example of someone, like, not. Not actively trying to please other people probably horrified me, but I'd love to talk to you.
4:10 Wes: I. I'll talk to you through the door. I'll write you a letter.
4:13 Erin: Right.
4:14 Wes: And I love that. I'll write you letters all day long.
4:17 Erin: Yeah.
4:17 Wes: Ten letters a day if you want, but I'm not coming out.
4:22 Erin: Awesome. Yeah. My committee chair is a huge Dickinson fan and scholar. There are a bunch of people here that are huge Dickinson scholars. So, in fact, I just went to. You know, I was preparing a lot of Dickinson for my exams, and over fall break, I went up to Amherst to see the house, which I've been many other times, but I saw that the flowers around the house, they had, you know, just, like, planted some decorative flowers, and they were all dying because it was late October. And so there was just, like, one plant that had a blossom on it that had rather a flower on it.
So I went inside and asked the woman at the desk if I could cut the flower off for a friend of mine. So I was all thrilled. So I. Yeah. So I dried it and brought it back to Utah for my professor and said it was a flower from Dickinson's head. Because she's, you know, my professor's also a gardener and, you know, very interested in Dickinson's, her study of botany. So some random plant that some docent probably put there, but it was growing in her soil.
5:27 Wes: So I was thinking, yeah, she studied botany and a lot of other things. She had a really good liberal arts education.
5:32 Erin: Yes.
5:33 Wes: And I was thinking, reading this. Yeah, this is another sort of perils of a liberal arts education story, because she's an amazing poet on the one hand, but she doesn't want to leave her room on the other. At a certain point, if your education is good enough, why leave your room? Right. Reading about her reclusion, I was thinking, yeah, maybe that's a workable solution. But how does the bathroom thing work? I assume she came out for the bathroom, but yeah, botany. No.
6:04 Erin: And just thinking about that refusal to leave her room. I mean, in a way she's. I guess you might say that she's taking the limitations that were already put on women at that time and almost like turning them into an extreme formal conceit. She's also not bending to any of the societal expectations of women at the same time. But like, insofar as a woman who is, you know, an Amherst housewife is somewhat confined to the house, you know, doesn't get to go out and have adventures and stuff like that. She's like, okay, what if I. What if I take that deadly seriously and just never, ever, ever even leave my room?
6:38 Wes: You know, Wasn't one of her. One of the people involved in the publication of her poetry or just from listening to other podcasts? I didn't listen closely enough, but was engaged in like, orgies and all kinds of sexual adventures. Do you know about that?
6:51 Erin: Yes, I did know about this. This is her brother and her. The woman that the brother had an affair with. I don't know the details of this, but the brother had an affair with a woman with a really memorable name, whose name escapes me. One of those three named people. I gotta look this up now. Mabel.
7:11 Wes: Mary Lou Retton. That's right.
7:13 Erin: Mary Lou Retton. Mabel Loomis Todd. There we go.
7:17 Wes: Okay, yeah. Yes, sounds familiar. And she and her husband had kind of an open relationship.
7:22 Erin: Yes.
7:23 Wes: Yeah.
7:23 Erin: And she had an affair with Austin Dickinson, Emily's brother, who was married to Emily's kind of best friend Susan and sister in law, obviously. Yeah. And then afterwards, Mabel Loomis Todd comes into possession of all of the fascicles. And then she edits everything so that she takes out all of the irregular punctuation and regularizes. She and Higginson, I think, regularize the meter and make all these changes. Yes. But a lot of things that we would not expect were going on in Amherst at that time. So it was not maybe the picture that some people have in their minds of some kind of staid. I mean, at least not in the Dickinson household. In the Evergreens, there was some. Some funny business going on.
8:07 Wes: So anyway, one. One way of rebelling is to get with whatever sexual subculture was available. But Dickinson chose the opposite route.
8:17 Erin: Right.
8:18 Wes: As far as we know. I know scholars would love to speculate that there must be something more. You can't just be a good poet. You have to have people having lots of forbidden sex.
8:26 Erin: Right. I think the scholarship that tended in that direction centers on the fact that some of Emily's letters to Susan were edited after her death. Yeah. So I think Mabel Loomis Todd has a lot to answer for. I mean, a lot of people hate her in Dickinson scholarship.
8:41 Wes: She was jealous, apparently.
8:44 Erin: Yes. But also, I don't know. You know, she could also maybe be credited for Dickinson's literary reputation. I mean, it took a long time for us to get back to the original. Right. But she was the one who kind of saved the stuff and who really was intent on doing something with it. And Vinnie gave it over to her, I think, you know, Vinny didn't really know what to do with it. This is. Sorry, Lavinia, Emily's sister. So if it hadn't gotten into Mabel Loomis Todd's hands, maybe we wouldn't even have the poems at all.
9:08 Wes: Right. So she was very reluctant to publish, although she was corresponding a lot with people in a position to publish her. And she got some encouragement and encouragement to publish. And she published, I think, maybe 10 in her lifetime. But one. Only one that she actually sanctioned. Just going on memory from secondary reading here. But yeah. So I think maybe she had an ambivalent relationship to the idea of publishing. I mean, I think she herself says it. What is it? It's as foreign as her. As the firmament is to fin or something like that.
9:39 Erin: Yeah. She calls it the auction of the mind of man.
9:43 Wes: Right. Okay. Yeah. So there's this anxiety about what that would do to her work if she were publishing for a wider audience. Obviously she had an audience, the people she was sending the poems to. And she was getting a lot of admiration for that. But the idea of going to something broader Seemed to create some anxiety for her.
10:04 Erin: Yeah. And yet, I think, you know, my professor, who loves Dickinson, is convinced that the poems are written with the knowledge that these are going to have a kind of eternal readership, you know, so there's just a delay, maybe. I mean, you know, if she knew Too famous, then it would have really messed up her life.
10:23 Wes: So it would have. It's better to become famous after you're dead.
10:26 Erin: Exactly.
10:27 Wes: She would have just become insufferable and.
10:31 Erin: Oh, you're so cruel about these things. You think everyone's gonna be turned bad when they become famous. There are lots of famous people who are nice.
10:39 Wes: No, I know. I'm not. I'm just joining the anxiety, which is that it seemed like her anxiety is. It would corrupt her and turn her into something insufferable. And that is a danger. But not that it happens to everyone.
10:51 Erin: That it would corrupt the work, I think. I don't know how interested she is.
10:53 Wes: Corrupt the work.
10:54 Erin: Yeah. Yeah, I see. I immediately take it as a character thing.
10:59 Wes: Well, no, I meant both. Yeah. So I was thinking of rock stars. For some reason, I had this flash of an image of her wearing leather pants, just going to the opposite extreme and being a rock star and getting into rock and roll, which would be a little early, I guess, but, you know, for that. Drugs, sex. Drugs and rock and roll. But becoming a badass.
11:23 Erin: You're doing to her what the scholarship obsessed. Obsessed with her is doing. Get Hailee Steinfeld to play her.
11:30 Wes: Yes. I insist you be less pure. Forget about the white dress. So she always wore a white dress, right?
11:39 Erin: Yeah. They have just a copy of the dress, but they have the dress on a little mannequin in the house. So you could see it sort of. Sort of standing there headless. And it's. I don't know. There's something about it that's oddly appropriate. Anyway.
11:51 Wes: That's funny.
11:52 Erin: Should we dive into the first one? I selected three poems, which are all about kind of grief and death. But it's difficult to select poems that don't have that as a theme. So I'm being only slightly facetious. Okay. So we're starting with. And we're using the Franklin numbering, which is. I've talked to several people about this, and the Franklin numbering is considered the. Really the correct numbering. So this is number 340 or I felt a Funeral in My Brain. None of the Dickinson poems are titled, so. No, we'll call it 340. Here we go. I felt a funeral in my brain and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till it seemed that sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated, a service like a drum kept beating, beating till I thought my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again. Then space began to toll as all the heavens were a bell and being but an ear and I and silence. Some strange race wrecked solitary here. And then a plank in reason broke and I dropped down and down and hit a world at every plunge and finished knowing then.
13:12 Wes: So I felt a funeral in my brain. She goes right for the bodily, right for the corporeal instead of the mind, Right?
13:24 Erin: Yeah, she has mind later. And then I have this strange lattice thing that I. You probably can't see. It's all in pencil. This strange lattice of, you know, connecting like brain. And then in the second stanza, it's mind. And then in the third it's soul. And then in the fourth it's being. And then finally in the fifth stanza, we get I. She sort of joins with this separated brain that she's talking about in the first line, right? Because there's a separation. I felt a funeral in my brain. The I and the brain are already kind of, you know, they're at opposite ends of that first line and they're sort of disconnected from each other.
Strangely, she's disconnected from her own brain or mind in this. You know, what's strange about this poem to me is that a funeral is communal and ritual and involving a community. And so sort of like figuring out who the mourners are in this parallel and what, you know, is shifting. Whereas in something like. Because I could not stop for death, you know, the allegory is much more straightforward. She's the dead person who's, you know, the ghost seeing her own grave and all that. This is much more complex. Trying to track the reference and what she might be referring to with the analogy is, I think, a little more difficult.
14:42 Wes: The use of brain is striking. She said, in my mind or something like that, it's more clearly about her imagining something. And here you kind of get the image of mourners treading about in a space that is actually a physical space. And maybe it's even evocative of being dead and having worms or maggots. I think that's kind of a far out reading. But it's an association I made. So, yeah, that's quite striking to say brain. It gives you a more interesting image and treading. Right. So the mourners are treading within her brain, and her brain is the place where the services being held.
15:29 Erin: Yeah. I like this idea, both of. Both of the maggots and of the corporeal about the brain. You know, I think in somewhere, I remember reading that this might be describing, like, a migraine. You know, somebody had that idea. You know, it seems more likely. Or. I mean, I think that reading works, actually. But I think, you know, most scholars think this is describing some kind of mental breakdown. But the use of the physical, oddly, seems to, as I think you're suggesting, seems to kind of shore up that idea that it is like a mental breakdown or that. I don't know, it calls attention to the sort of. The physicality of that of maybe of depression or of something else.
16:08 Wes: But.
16:08 Erin: Yeah, but I really like this idea of the migraine because of the ear, the ringing in the ear. You know, people, I think, have. Have. Have made that connection. Yeah, you have, I think, more regular migraines than I do. I have. Just weird. Sometimes I'll get, like, the aura without the migraine. But you get terrible migraines and weird auras. So you. You're the expert.
16:27 Wes: Well, it's under control for the most part. Yeah. I get more. The aura. And my aura is a hallucination of the smell of smoke.
16:34 Erin: Right, right.
16:35 Wes: So it's weird.
16:37 Erin: The. The burning pyre.
16:38 Wes: It's more like a fire. A fire in my brain.
16:41 Erin: Yes.
16:41 Wes: I felt a fire in my brain, and it smelled like smoke. And that ain't no joke.
16:48 Erin: That's my problem.
16:50 Wes: But, you know, and I get some nausea and maybe headache, but it's more like the more severe symptoms would be nausea and the smell of smoke, which is very distracting and disturbing. So. So, yeah, so I like this idea that this is related to a migraine, which can feel like a mental breakdown if it's bad enough.
17:07 Erin: Right, right.
17:09 Wes: And in this case. Right. And it. And it gives us. It explains this, like, beating, beating, and my mind is going numb and the treading, treading and all those types of sensations, but I think they're equally apt for describing maybe. Yeah. The onset of some kind of madness, some kind of unreason. Right. The plank in reason breaks at the end, but at the very beginning, sense is breaking through. And it seems to be the treading of the mourners that might help. Sense, breakthrough. And sense I take to be. I take that to be sense as opposed to irrationality. But sense maybe also in the sense of sensory experience, as if. Right. A ray of light might penetrate into the church where the service is being held or something like that.
17:57 Erin: Yeah. I think, you know, the primary fact about a Dickinson poem is compression, and compression in which so many possible readings can work for one line. And they're all right. You know, they're all correct. And I think, you know, you could read that sense so many different ways. But I was thinking about this idea of breaking through, because later reason is the floor. And you could take that to mean that unreason or a lack of sense is sort of like the basement of the mind. You know, the thing that you fall down when you lose your mind is that sense the floor through which the mourners actually are breaking with their force. So that the mourners are actually causing reason to break. They're causing the plank in reason to break. Right.
18:41 Wes: Oh, okay. That makes more sense, actually.
18:43 Erin: But no, but it also works the other way. Right. Which is that.
18:46 Wes: Yeah, so it reads in opposite directions, potentially.
18:49 Erin: Right.
18:50 Wes: The treading of the mourners could be helping her keep it together, or it could be the thing that's threatening to make her lose it.
18:57 Erin: Exactly. And again, like, what are these mourners? You know, are they the senses themselves? You know, are they inside the body? Are they something physical? Are they. You know, later, with the. In the next line, the service like a drum, you know, that could just be taken sort of like as one's heartbeat in one's ears, I think, you know, so are the. Are the mourners kind of just related to that? Is this the pulse? The. What exactly are they mourning? You know, that's. That's the other part of this, that we never find out what's being mourned. What's the dead thing? It becomes her only in the last stanza. It's a funeral for her, for something about her. But what.
19:32 Wes: What would be mourning that she might have said. She might have more clearly conveyed the fact that she is in mourning. But instead it's. She's displaced this onto these little homunculi who are treading around in her brain. And if the second reading, you know, if the second reading that you're proposing is right, then you can see this displacement is sort of a denial of her own mourning. And the denial is kind of crazy, making potentially in that displacement. So that's really interesting again, because then the beating of, you know, the service like a drum, which is a weird image, I don't think, of a funeral service like that. Right. Something that would beat like that. It's as if the prerogatives of mourning or the impulse to mourn. That might be the wrong word, impulse, but they're trying to break through and they're not able to do it.
20:22 Erin: The drum, I thought, was reminiscent of these larger implications of the negative elements of the communal. That's one of the things, I suppose, that's also ambivalent here, is if that fourth line gives the mourners a positive valence, then we might think of the funeral as being, you know, a way. A way to prevent the total mental annihilation of grief. On the other hand, if the funeral is assaulting the sense, the reason, then it's the reverse of that.
20:52 Wes: Right.
20:52 Erin: It's the thing that makes you go crazy. And the drum being related maybe not to funerals, as you're suggesting, but to something like war or, you know, these kinds of lower passions that are communally shared, indicated by a drum. You know what I mean? Like something to. I think, of something communal with a drum. Right. It's about what, Marching ritual.
21:15 Wes: Yeah. And she was most productive during the Civil war, right? From 1861.
21:20 Erin: Yes, yes.
21:20 Wes: 1865. She wrote most of her poems, or at least half, and she wrote a bit about the Civil War and especially about. Yeah. The death and dying involved in the Civil War. So it makes sense. It makes sense, yeah.
21:34 Erin: And one of the readings of her seclusion is that she was so affected by the people around her that were dying. So she was subjected to these funerals, and it made her want to just not participate in the communal, in the social at all. In addition to the, you know, the difficulties that she had with the sort of revivalist Christianity that was going on around her at the time and her refusal to partake in that. So I think the beating drum is indicative of both her own heartbeat, so she's sort of implicated, but also in this kind of ritualistic, social, oppressive kind of valence that something like a funeral might have for her.
22:12 Wes: I mean, I suppose a martial funeral service might have. Would there be a drum? Would there be?
22:18 Erin: I think so, yeah. Bagpiper and drums, I think, of. For martial funeral. Yeah.
22:23 Wes: And she talks about boots of lead.
22:24 Erin: Right, so, exactly. Yeah. That's. I was afraid to go all the way to the Civil War, but I kind of was thinking that a little bit. You know, one of my professors was, like, very offended with the idea that she didn't write about the Civil War. She was indifferent to what was going on, you know, So I was primed to read it this way.
22:43 Wes: Well, I think she wrote a poem where she compares dying soldiers on the battlefields of the Civil War to heaps of moan. I mean, it's not direct. I think she's in. As indirect in that poem as she is in all her poems, but.
22:55 Erin: Right.
22:56 Wes: But this heaps of moan is. Yeah, yeah, is great.
23:00 Erin: Yeah. So the mind is going numb, which is, you know, again, it's a little bit. There's a mind versus the operation of this poem. The poem itself is sort of like a supermind. You know, again, I'm just interested in this disembodiment or tweezing out of several people within the self. I like homunculi as your. As the mourners.
23:22 Wes: Well, yeah, as you pointed out before, brain becomes mind. And so the thing that's going on in her brain is what's going on in her mind. And that. Just the numbness. That last sentence of the second stanza, last line, I guess it could reverse or reinforce the last line of the first stanza. So sense was breaking through. Mind was going numb. So we gave a variety of readings for that last line in the first stanza. Sense as in reason or, you know, madness or sensory experience. And here numbness, I guess, is oblique to all of that. Numbness would be a failure to experience. And I. I think it would be different from madness or different from sense in the sense of, you know, getting it together. Right.
24:11 Erin: And we would think it would be a kind of relief. Instead, it seems like. Yeah. That the unwanted result of sensory overload that the. The beating has in the previous line. And we'll talk more. I think, you know, this. This idea of numbness will be important when we talk about 372.
24:29 Wes: Right.
24:29 Erin: So, yeah. You know, and also what you said about the. About the sentence or the line. Right. This whole. There's so much suspension going on here. I just want to talk, you know, formally for a second, because the next stanza begins with. And lots of lines begin with. And in the poem because it's, in fact, just one sentence. There's so much suspension. It's all kind of happening in this one kind of unfolding. And it's arguably not even a sentence. Right. It ends with the EM dash. So it's not really complete, as many of her poems do. There's just an unbroken progression happening here.
So then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again. Then space began to toll. So we have this idea that the. And I looked this up. Bells can have lead clappers. They don't usually, but they can have lead clappers. So I started to think of this idea of the bell, you know, space began to toll. Right. So that all of space is contained within the frame of the bell. So that's kind of a great image of a head, if that's what she's talking about. Right. Like if the whole thing is taking place within the space of her cranium, to use another corporeal term, then the boots inside are like the lead clapper that's causing the space, the vacuum there to toll.
25:51 Wes: Yeah, that's great. Right. The space, you know, now we're really far away from the brain in the sense of the. You know, the meaty thing inside the cranium. Now we have, you know, we went to mind. And now we're to space on your reading. Right. So space and. And we get this overlapping or coincidence between the cosmos. You know, space in the sense of the cosmos read. It would become the heavens. In the next stanza, or being in her own mind, those two things come together. And of course, it's a nice paradoxical image as well. Right. The idea that space itself could make a sound instead of just being the medium in which sound propagates, that something could be produced by emptiness. Right. And the bell is, of course, a funereal bell. It's a bell that's tolling for someone who's died or for what is lost. And I suppose for what it is that she's lost and represents her sense of loss.
26:52 Erin: Yeah, that's right. I think there's another. There's a third. If we think of space and air as being one kind of element in the stanza. And then the lead, the metallic another, you know, there's a third which is, you know, the elemental parallel doesn't quite work. Of box and creak. I'm thinking of wood. Right. So, like, the further complication of this is that it all must be taking place inside a church with a wooden floor. This isn't like they've gone out into the churchyard because they're not creaking on. You can't creak on earth. And the box too. Right. This isn't even a coffin. It's just a plain box. Plain wooden box.
27:29 Wes: Right.
27:30 Erin: Emphasizes that wooden quality is all. Yeah. You know, without using the word for
27:34 Wes: a moment, it leaves you confused or not. You don't quite know at first that that is a. Is a casket. Or at least if you're slow enough like me. You don't know immediately that that's a casket. And it's a bit. Right. Just the word. I was going to use the word disrespectful. But. Right. You wouldn't say, yeah, Mom's dead. Let's get a box for her, bury it, put it in the ground. It's a more ordinary and plain way that doesn't sanctify the container in which the person or thing that one or idea that one has lost, that's gonna take them to the beyond. What is the word that I'm looking for? Minimizing or what?
28:15 Erin: I don't know. Maybe you're thinking even of something like sacrilegious, you know, because there's something a little bit. She's not taking it terribly seriously, I think. Yeah. I think maybe disrespectful. Unless you're Faulkner. And then everybody's in it. But mom is always in a box. She's not even in the ground, but, you know, and smells as well. Right. That migraine aura that she creates by
28:40 Wes: her putrefaction, she did it when she was alive. She might as well do it when she's dead.
28:46 Erin: I think it's humility here. Right. Because she could put herself in a box. Maybe she'd put somebody else in a coffin. Right. But her. It's a box, and we don't even know what's in it because she hears them lift a box and creak across her soul. But what's in the box again? Who are the mourners? What's in the box? What's the floor? So there's. It's like a. It's not even really her. It is her, but it's also just a piece of her or something of her. It's her horcrux. I don't know. It's something.
29:12 Wes: If it were a Twilight Zone episode, we'd eventually see Inside the Box and we'd see her in the movie.
29:17 Erin: Right? Right. Well. And in the end, she is in the box. Right? Yeah. But, yeah, I think box is indicative of her particular kind of humility and her not taking herself seriously. Because I think it's important at this point that we say that this is kind of. I mean, it's a serious poem, but it's also a really kind of playful poem. You know, there's something really funny I find about this poem. No.
29:40 Wes: Yeah. And it's got a charm to it, but it's playful and charming and not. It's not a poem that makes you feel sad, even though, in a way. And it is about. So I think box is very apt in the sense. It's another image that gets at a resistance to mourning, because that seems to be what's going on in the poem. So to minimize or to. Mourning is turned into madness. Mourning is turning into the beating of a drum, into martial image, in that case. And of course, when you're at war, then I guess it isn't a casket, it's a hastily made pine box that they're putting people into the ground, or if you're lucky, or they're putting soldiers in the mass graves.
So in that martial context, the life becomes cheaper. And that may be one of the things that is bothering her. That's the way I'm seeing this, as a resistance to mourning. And that resistance to mourning often has a manic quality. And we all do it all the time. I think I've probably mentioned the Louis CK bit. It's a bit about how people use their devices to avoid having any feelings, especially feelings of sadness. So manic defenses like that are everywhere. Or being outraged by politics, getting into a fighting mood. In other words, into a martial frame of mind, which of course only produces more loss.
So it's a nasty cycle to avoid the feeling of loss and then to go into fighting mode and produce more destruction and then go through that again.
31:14 Erin: And you don't think there's anything healthy about the angry response at times.
31:19 Wes: It's funny. I was talking to someone about this the other day.
31:21 Erin: I was too. This is interesting.
31:24 Wes: I have a friend who claims that the paranoid schizoid position, which is a psychoanalytic concept from Melanie, a great psychoanalyst named Melanie Klein, and refers to primitive defense mechanisms that she thinks are there in everyone as infants. And then we mature out of them to some extent, but they get re aroused. And so that includes splitting, where we make people out to be all good or all bad or paranoia and projection and things like that, which you see a lot in political thinking. I think the way people think politically is often quite psychotic and primitive. And it's quite common in people who you otherwise think are very rational. The plank in reason has not broken, except when it comes to politics.
32:13 Erin: Right? Right.
32:14 Wes: It's useful if you are truly in a position where your life is at stake and you need to fight for your life, then you need to be able to demonize the other and be angry or outraged. It helps. Right. You don't want conscience interfering with killing someone if it's kill or be killed. The problem is we read lots of situations that are not existential, as if they were. And we go into kill or be killed mode when it's not actually that mode. And that includes, for instance, in the Holocaust where if you asked the interviewed Nazi soldiers or SS officers who had participated in killing infants and why did you do this?
Well, it was us or them. You know, it's not like I wanted to kill babies, but we had to get rid of the Jews or they were going to get rid of us. So people start engaging in these preemptive strikes and they can become to the point of it being genocidal. So that's the problem. You need it. You need a point where outrage is going to motivate you to resist or react. But it can also be crazy making.
33:18 Erin: Right.
33:18 Wes: So I don't know that there's a good way around. There's no solution to that. Right.
33:23 Erin: Yeah. The instance in which this came up for me was far less profound than what you're talking about. But just I have a couple people in my life who are going through sort of breakups of various forms. And it was suggested that perhaps anger is necessary so that you don't attack yourself. It's healthy to be angry toward the other person for a bit. Right?
33:42 Wes: Yeah, it's healthier than self attack.
33:44 Erin: Right. And then you can feel sadness, but there's something like sort of self preservation, something of self preservation in the anger. It was suggested that I was sort of immediately going to sadness and I needed to have a bridge in this conversation that we were talking about where we were all talking about sort of like different. Different ways that we have of coping with certain things like these breakups, be they of, you know, whatever variety. That anger was a healthier place to go to than this. Blaming oneself.
34:15 Wes: Yeah, I think if someone is prone to self attack and self hate. So that's the melancholic avoidance of mourning. You can avoid mourning by getting depressed. So it's a very different thing. According to Freud, being depressed and attacking yourself. Mourning is a process of letting go and getting engaged with memories of what you loved that you've lost. And then kind of reality testing and saying, okay, that's no longer there. And I accept that melancholia or depression, in a way you maintain you're in denial about the loss and you remain unconsciously attached to the thing and refuse to let it go.
And you identify with it. So that when you attack yourself, you're attacking the thing that you've lost. You're pretending that you are what you've lost. And the self attack is a complaint against the disappointing thing that you've lost. Right. The thing that's disappointed you by leaving you. So yeah, if you go into therapy in that Mode. The therapist should, to some extent, help you hate other people instead of hating yourself. Help me to help you to hate me? Other people, yes. But at a certain point, yeah. And no. Yeah. You get them to hate you.
35:27 Erin: Yeah.
35:27 Wes: As the analyst, you know, if you kind of get them to be willing to go into a negative. What we call a negative transference. But. But in any case, yeah. But at a certain point, people can use hatred of others or anger at others to avoid responsibility. So beyond that, there's the depressive position, which is not depression, and it's something to be worked through, but it's sort of a forgive and forget mode or some sort of repair and reparation. So you could see the other person as a person and see their flaws and mistakes, the things that they did wrong, and see your own role in it, all that therapy stuff. But at a certain point, yeah, anger. Anger is better. Certainly better than self attack.
36:13 Erin: Right. And we could talk about humor's relationship to this, but I think all of this is actually super important for when we discuss 372. So this is all great, and I think relevant groundwork for that. To go back to the poem. I think of this poem as being somewhere in the halfway point or somewhere on the sliding scale between a poem like Because I Could Not Stop for Death, which we're not covering, but which is very, very fanciful, very allegorical, very funny kind of treatment of the self dying versus, on the other end of the spectrum, something like 372, which is, I think, not really funny at all and not fanciful at all and not.
I mean, you can argue there's always a little bit of fancifulness in certain metaphors and similes. They have, you know, an element of the surreal kind of built into them. And certainly in Dickinson, they're so powerful that they are maybe more surreal than most. But I would say this is somewhere on the sliding scale between those two things, you know, because this is. The box is. And the creaking across my soul. I mean, there's something. To me, there's something funny about that image. And so we could argue, you know, anger and maybe humor, too, are kind of these defensive positions against the grief.
And I'm reading a little bit of humor as a defense mechanism in this. I could be wrong, but. Right. So.
37:24 Wes: Yeah. And the humor. Humor is a form of manic. What I've called manic defense, which we use. And we all. We all need them. It's a more mature. Yeah. The other manic forms that are less palsy.
37:34 Erin: Okay. Well, yeah, and I think there's something manic, just about the whole, you know, as I think I was kind of hinting at earlier about the whole structure of the poem, the fact that it's one sentence, you know, so the dashes both stop you and propel you forward. Right. So you could argue that the meter, you know, which is. This is a common meter. So ballad stanza 4 3, 4 3. Pretty regular, which is a sort of like, drumbeat in and of itself. But the fact that we're both sort of pausing and moving forward with the dashes kind of complicates this idea of suspension and how quickly or slowly we're moving through the sentence at any given point.
But I think it's probably a little too complex for us to talk about on the podcast because of the reliance of notation and the visual in that. But anyway, so let's go on to as all the heavens were a bell. So this is where we've already talked about this space and the sort of emptiness of that as ringing and then being. But an ear, the tree falling in the forest. We're the ones. We're the ones to ensure that it makes a sound or something like that. Being itself is the thing that sort of like, witnesses the space and gives. Or the heavens. And gives the heavens.
Bell. A sound.
38:47 Wes: You know, it's interesting because, yeah, the typical opposition is between heaven and earth or solid ground. And here the heavens have become a bell. The space has become something that produces sound and being, which I suppose I'm associating with the earth now with that other side of the opposition, with sort of substantive reality. Right. As opposed to space is the thing doing the listening. Really, really cool, innovative image. Right. And one of the things that makes her great.
39:19 Erin: It is so funny that, you know, being is like the least corporeal of any of the images used here. I mean, I think being is even less corporeal somehow than mind, because mind at least has something to attach to. I mean, I suppose being does. Right? It has a body maybe to attach to, but it's so in the ether here, except for it's an ear. So it becomes corporeal, but it becomes the thing that is itself. Maybe, you know, the helix of the ear and the structure of it maybe is itself a kind of. Gosh, I'm just thinking of this now. Inside out bell. Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We both had the idea at the same time. Or you.
40:01 Wes: No, you had thought about this and then you gave it to me. You just gave the idea. I'm Trying to take credit for it, of course, but. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Because I think she's complaining about the idea, right Being butt and ear. It's as if right being is going to crowd her out. Her and silence are some strange race, wrecked and solitary. This goes to the essence of the problem, which is that. So as an ear, right, Being would be something passive rather than active, receptive. Right. It just listens. And what does it listen to? It listens to this space itself producing a sound, or nothingness itself, or heaven itself producing the sound.
And maybe there's something of the divine in that. So we might think of the divine as sort of divine substance is sort of crowding out the reality of the individual. Think of someone like Spinoza, right, who makes all of being. God is just substance. And we are but modes of God. We are properties. We are barnacles on the body of God on his vast whale body.
41:14 Erin: I love that.
41:15 Wes: And so our reality, and this is, you know, this is sort of perennial theological problem, is the danger that God's reality, his beingness, is so expansive that we can't be much in comparison to it, or that it'll crowd us out, or that it puts us in too passive a position. So that's what it sounds like when she's comparing to being but an ear. And what is the alternative? I and silence. So she associates herself, herself with silence, which is an interesting. Right. Because that seems kind of empty as well.
41:53 Erin: Right.
41:53 Wes: But this is supposed to be the greater reality. Maybe this is about the silence of solitude and being able to think one's thoughts and being able to comprehend oneself. Right. Being able to be who you are without these other sounds distracting you and confusing you from that identity.
42:13 Erin: You know, one of the readings that, you know, I was almost a little embarrassed to say, but I think maybe you've given me a little confidence. I was almost thinking, because I was trying to think of what's the nothingness that makes a sound. And the thing I thought of was tinnitus because it happened to me. I was getting a ringing in my ears after having not slept and then listening to loud music. I was getting a little bit of temporary tinnitus. That also made me think, and this is maybe related to our martial thing. I don't know if I could get there, but that made me think.
In movies, you know, when somebody has a bomb go off near them and then the sound in the movie creates that high pitched, like, squeal, everything gets crowded out and you get this. It's this really Genius way they have in the movie of sort of like reproducing probably the ringing in the ears of the main character that we're supposed to be sympathizing with. And it also gives us this sense of wanting it out, wanting the sound to go away and to feel oneself as whole and know that, you know, that because we're sort of joining in the sympathies of the main character that, like, we've been actually unharmed by the bomb, you know, what that has gone off or something like that.
I think of that, and therefore the silence being away from that as making an inherent sense to me, if the whole world is like this bomb going off, which would be related to the Civil War imagery, as I think we're already kind of hinting at, then the silence and being away from those types of things. That threat of the world ringing out with alarm bells or something, you know, would be the desire of the I in the poem, you mentioned the maggots in the. In the first stanza. And I was thinking a little bit, but I didn't have a connection. I was thinking about Death's duel, the John Donne funeral sermon, his last funeral sermon, and talking about the worms going into the body.
Right. And so I had been thinking about Death's Duel, but I thought, that's not really relevant. And then here, of course, I see it now. There's. This is not from Death's duel. It's from one of his other meditations. I see the. The no man is an island idea in the desert island image of Silence and the I. I don't know how that's connected, but I'm wondering if the little sort of specter of Dun is going through here. And maybe, I don't know, maybe no man being an island, the I needs a companion, and that companion is silent. Every Robinson Crusoe needs their Friday.
I don't know. There's something there.
44:35 Wes: Yeah. That's really interesting. Some strange race.
44:38 Erin: Right.
44:39 Wes: She and Silence, who. Yeah. Are an odd couple.
44:44 Erin: Right.
44:45 Wes: Is Silence even a person? It's an odd couple. They live in an apartment together. One of them is messy, one of them just doesn't do anything. Silence is always complaining to her about everything. No.
44:59 Erin: Anyway, Silence is so Tony Randall. Yeah.
45:03 Wes: Yeah. So they're castaways in. In an alien world, which will become relevant because she's going to talk about dropping through worlds. It's as if this reality is one alien to her. She's a stranger in a strange land. She's been shipwrecked in this plane of Existence and belongs somewhere else. And what is the complaint about? It seems to be that the bells that toll the morning funereal bells are. Well, let her alone. And she wants to be with silence, but they keep making noise. So it may be that there's an element of mourning wrapped up with being that's inescapable. Which again would. Would speak to something about the divine, as in the corporeal absence of the divine. Right. The fact that the divine is non empirical, that we don't have ready access to it. Right. God's absence or God's invisibility is a loss.
46:02 Erin: So for me, because I was trying to understand how then in the last sentence, the I is finally merged with the body. It's finally in the box. And I wondered if it was something, you know, which you're helping me understand. I wondered if it was something about the solitude of the previous stanza that then allows her to get into the box at last to kind of merge with it, the death finally kind of happening. And maybe that's related to this idea of being sort of abandoned by the divine. Perhaps that's the final. I don't know, the last straw that then breaks the plank in reason.
46:36 Wes: Yeah. I mean, you might associate mourning and faith though, right. Faith has to overcome the absence of a physically available other. It has to do that by giving up that demand, which is a kind of mourning. I'm just thinking out loud and speculating. Obviously. I don't know if this is great reading or not, but the question is, regardless of how you read it. Yeah. That. This is the question. What is it that's bothering her? What's wrong with Emily?
47:04 Erin: It's eating Emily.
47:06 Wes: Worms Emily. Yeah. Okay. So in the end the plank of reason breaks or a plank in reason breaks and she drops down. So she succumbs to the madness, which I guess she's in some sense been resisting and dropping down into another world. There's a little bit of hint of there of Hades or something. Except for her it's multiple worlds, it seems like. Right. Inherent world at every plunge.
47:32 Erin: Yeah.
47:33 Wes: Multi dimensional. Emily Dickinson, before that sort of science fiction was in vogue.
47:38 Erin: She has a cosmic consciousness, I gotta
47:41 Wes: say, and it ends with finishing knowing. So we get. We get an association between the failure of reason and the failure of knowing. Although potentially not knowing is a positive thing. Right. It's knowledge is what gets us into trouble in several senses. Right. There's knowledge of the tree of good and evil, but there's knowingness, there's the knowing itself has kind of A manic pretense to it. By knowing things, we comprehend the world. Right. And it's much more plausible for human beings. Potential omniscience. Right. Through science and other means is something that almost feels reasonable to that.
It's not that we're ever going to be God and be able to control the universe. Right. But we might know the universe. We might know the entire universe. So knowledge is quite a power to be available to human beings. It can make us arrogant, it can make us think. We know things that we don't know, get us into all sorts of trouble. So finishing knowing, giving up on knowing is quite a good thing on one reading. So maybe this is what she needs.
48:44 Erin: I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was thinking finished could mean ended or completed. I finished my studies.
48:51 Wes: Well, no, I think that actually, I think that's better.
48:55 Erin: Well, I think, you know, plausible way to read. It's exactly the way you're reading it, which is, you know, maybe. Maybe the idea of giving up on knowing is some somehow inherent to the idea of I completed this course of study and now that's it.
49:08 Wes: You'd finish knowing. Yeah. Can mean knowing everything or stopped that project of knowing. And maybe you stopped the project of knowing because you now know everything or maybe you just found out that it's no longer relevant.
49:22 Erin: But I love this idea that it's just a plank that she falls through while reason is the perfectly constructed or not so perfectly constructed because it can break. Right. Delicately constructed, but fragile, I should say deck or something that you. I've fallen through a plank in a deck before onto ground that was just pitched. It was not like big fall or anything.
49:47 Wes: Oh, really?
49:47 Erin: It's. Yeah, it's dark under there. It's scary. And there are lots of critters. Yeah.
49:55 Wes: So, well, how does a gallows work?
49:57 Erin: Aha. Oh, you're smart. I never thought of that. Exactly. Right. Because the. That's so. Right, because. Yeah. There's usually a trap door.
50:06 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it just occurred to me. So it seems like one possibility why I hired you.
50:11 Erin: Yeah. That's such a good idea.
50:16 Wes: You know, I was just thinking. Yeah. The suddenness, as if someone is now receiving their death sentence.
50:21 Erin: Yeah. So there are trap doors. There's also, you know, the standing on the chair and having it kicked out from under you. There's. Yeah, right. Right.
50:28 Wes: And then at every plunge. Right. So it. But she. So this dropping down and down becomes multiple drops. And it's as if she's going through multiple floors, you know, multiple. So each new plunge. She breaks through to something new. And this is where I imagine Rick and Morty or some other cartoon, a multi dimensional thing where she's in one world and everyone's John Malkovich in that world, and then she's in another world and everyone's pink and she's another world. And she does that, flicks through multiple worlds indefinitely until she has known every possible world, she's seen all possibilities, maybe. And then she's done. It's like your life flashing before your eyes, but it's like the entire universe and all possible universes flashing in front of your eyes.
51:22 Erin: I love that. It's amazing. Okay, so I think we'll finish talking about I Felt a Funeral in My Brain in part two. We're going to talk about a good companion poem to this one, which we've already referenced a few times in this part, which is number 372. After great pain a formal feeling comes. So we'll talk about that in part two. Thanks Wes, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Weight of Memory in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940) – Part 2
Mar 24, 2025
Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film—part love story, part ghost story, part courtroom melodrama—centers on a poor, timid young woman who falls in love with wealthy aristocrat Maxim de Winter, a widower tortured over the death of his first wife. When the young woman becomes the second Mrs. De Winter and moves into Maxim’s estate, she finds her predecessor’s initials stamped all over the house, and its staff in thrall to her beautiful, vibrant memory. But at the heart of the first Mrs. De Winter’s legacy lies a rot, and just what that rot represents in the film—be it the oppressions of vitality and ambition, the wages of class mobility, the unruly desires of sexuality, or the latent evidence of civilizational decline—is our subject today. Wes & Erin discuss the 1940 Best Picture winner “Rebecca,” starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.
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0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of the Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca. We just got done talking about, but I think are going to continue talking about Mrs. Danvers relationship to Rebecca and specifically maybe how she's facilitated her affairs with Favell, possibly others. Just thinking about the fact that Favell calls her Dany and the fact that George Sanders has, you know, he sort of like famously had his own kinds of sexually ambiguous qualities. We did another movie with him, right?
1:04 Wes: He's a bit of a metrosexual.
1:05 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In All About Eve, he's yeah. He's seen as maybe being gay. Right. So I think there's ambiguous sexuality on the part of both Danny Danvers and George Sanders character Favell. So the fact that they're in this triad with Rebecca kind of complicates that.
1:25 Wes: Yeah. So there's a certain point where she eavesdrops on Mrs. Danvers, telling Jack not to come again. So Danvers says, I don't think it's wise for you to come here, Mr. Jack. And eventually he says, yes, we must. Well, he says, it's just like coming back home. She says, quiet it. He says, yes, we must be careful not to shock Cinderella. Goodbye, Mr. Jack, and be careful. Right. So there's indications that even though she's resisting him coming around, it's not because she has any sympathy for Joan Fontaine's character or is interested in the ethical aspect of it. It's more of a practical interest in helping him stay covert. What's that? And then, of course, he goes to the window.
2:13 Erin: Yeah, yeah, he.
2:14 Wes: And flirts with Joan Fontaine's character. Yeah.
2:17 Erin: So sort of. Sort of.
2:19 Wes: Should we call her Mrs. De Winter now? She. Is it okay to. Is it mdw. It's just too formal for her. It's too.
2:28 Erin: I know, yeah.
2:30 Wes: But anyway, so, yeah, he goes and makes references, you know, to like, Max leaving his little bride all alone. Isn't he afraid someone's going to come down and carry you off? So quite a sinister. Or it's like the wolf showing up and, you know, with drooling and.
2:47 Erin: Yeah. I take the stepping through the window to be quite a violation. He's violating a boundary. Breaking and entering, sort of. Yeah. The fact that Mrs. Danvers facilitates this relationship to like, you know, this is another indication that she puts the sort of like, vitality that Rebecca represents over and above any sort of allegiance that we might associate with her position to the reputation of the house, you know, protecting the actual master of the house and of the sort of like, ancestral line there that it represents. So again, it's as though Rebecca is this super aristocrat. Like, she's. By temperament, she is more worthy of being aristocratic than Maxim himself, even though she is not a blue blood. And so Mrs. Danvers serving her and facilitating this affair with Favell, who was a used car salesman, let's not forget,
3:42 Wes: it turns out, yeah, he's a very aristocratic seeming car salesman.
3:50 Erin: England is full of them. I guess. It's hysterical.
3:55 Wes: One must do what one can get by in these times when all the old money is dried up.
4:03 Erin: Yeah, it's such a strange thing. I had forgotten about that when I rewatched this. I was like, he's a huge star
4:10 Wes: salesman to find that out. Yeah, yeah. I see Rebecca, despite her aristocratic vitality, let's say, and polish and beauty, as introducing a bit of perversity into the house. And then Danvers seems to want to facilitate that. Right. To help facilitate it in some way, even though here she's rebuffing Jack a little bit. And then later on he'll, you know, she'll come in and he'll say, you know, Dany, all your precautions were in vain. The mistress of the house was hiding behind the door. What about presenting me to the bride? We get the sense that.
I don't know, my general sense from the entire context of the movie is that she's kind of been a facilitator of this affair and that, in a way, she's in cahoots with Favell, and her principal interest is not in serving Maxim or his interests, but in sort of being a conduit for the introduction of this. Something very different into the house, something that undermines it. Something that maybe. And maybe. And maybe you suggested this before, but perhaps Rebecca is more truly aristocratic in spirit or something.
5:26 Erin: Yes.
5:27 Wes: That's what she's bringing in, so to speak, into the house to kind of, you know, you could say, liven it up, even though it's very destructive. And you can see why Danvers, who is lacking in vitality, would be in search of what she thinks is vitality, although in this case, it's a vitality that's too indiscriminate and destructive. Right. It's not a stable vitality. It's sort of a whirlwind that's going to lead to bad things.
5:55 Erin: You're right. It's the sea itself. Right. So she wrestles with the sea. Right. And it takes her over. This is Mrs. Danvers obsession with the sea. This is why Mrs. Danvers ultimately burns down the house. I think she is disenchanted. She becomes disenchanted with Rebecca as a symbol of vitality once she discovers that Rebecca was not teeming with further life, but in fact with cancer. And what that represents. Right. The loss of vitality that that represents. I'm interested. I love.
6:25 Wes: Interesting. Okay, I didn't see that. Yeah.
6:27 Erin: The great essay by Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, has quite a bit to say about the cultural associations with cancer on the one hand and tuberculosis on the other. So the idea that tuberculosis in the cultural consciousness is something which is the result of too much vitality, you know, which burns you up, which eats you up, you know, it wastes you. Versus the ideas of cancer as being this idea of not expressing too much. You know, the idea, I think the pathology of cancer was something that you got from underusing not expressing enough vitality with sort of like keeping up stores in reserve, which then kind of rotted inside you. So you then end up becoming. Not wasting yourself away, but of sort of becoming pregnant with your own lack of vitality. Right. Expanding that the tumor is the thing that expands inside you.
7:22 Wes: Right. And you can see the analog to having a baby.
7:26 Erin: Right, Right, right. It's the twist on the baby. Exactly the way that Rebecca is using Rebecca, the film is using this twist. So the last thing we would expect would be for someone like Rebecca to have a metaphoric ailment like a tumor. You know, it's the last thing that she expected. She expected to be pregnant, which is why she was going to this doctor who is sort of implied to be an abortionist. Right. So she thinks that she's pregnant. She obviously is in some way aware of a foreign body inside her. Right. That she would go to an abortionist to get this done.
8:04 Wes: Right.
8:05 Erin: And it turns out to be a tumor rather than a baby. So rather than moral life, it is a tumor. And this seems to be the thing that breaks Mrs. Danvers because she's surprised that Rebecca did not tell her about a pregnancy, but she seems okay. And then when she discovers that it's cancer, that's when she burns the house down. Her symbol of vitality has the sort of like anti vitality symbol in her center. So something about what Mrs. Danvers has been serving has been a lie. And she has to sort of self immolate to escape that realization, Burn it all down because it was somehow rotten to the core. And maybe because then she realizes that what she was facilitating in terms of perpetuating this vitality was in fact itself a kind of rottenness. Right. A kind of perversion.
8:50 Wes: Wow. Really interesting. Yeah. I mean, it does give you a good contrast between the type of vitality which is uncontained and destructive, like potentially the ocean or cancer. Right. Because cancer is just particular cells have become immortal and disregard the boundaries of other organs in the body and will just continue to grow and grow and grow. And you can keep cancer cells alive in a petri dish forever. Right. They will just continue to divide. They don't. They don't undergo apoptosis, they don't kill themselves the way A normal cell would.
And so unconstrained vitality is destructive if you need it to work and play its part within a larger structure, within a larger stable structure, including a real relationship to someone. Her vitality, that's why I call her party Girl, presumably involved numerous relationships with different men and having, overall, in general, having a good time. And she certainly wasn't interested in the marriage and even made that clear. I'm just using you and you're stuck with me, but. Right, so if it had been a baby, it would have been more representative of the stable and renewing form of vitality as opposed to the destructive form.
So what you said. Yeah. Makes me think that Danvers had a kind of insight at the end into her confusion between one sort of vitality and the other. What she thought she loved in Rebecca or idealized in Rebecca, turned out to be something essentially destructive or self destructive. And for someone like Danvers, who's probably already pretty depressed, it's like, oh, I thought I had found a way out. I thought I'd found a solution, but it's just more of this, it's more of my bullshit, you know, or my self destructive.
10:46 Erin: And yeah, yeah, the realization that that represents for Mrs. Danvers and the fact that, you know, Rebecca didn't die sort of heroically struggling with the sea and then being, you know, reabsorbed into the wild forces from which she came, but with this cancer, I think, actually kind of disguises what is the true, for me, what is the true heroism of Rebecca in that moment. You know, one of the things that Sontag talks about in that essay is the shame associated with cancer societally. And one of the reasons why she wrote this essay when she did in the late 70s, I believe, was because she herself had cancer and was receiving her test results and updates from the doctor by mail in unmarked brown envelopes.
Because the idea is that even, and this is in the late 70s, you know, that cancer was such a shameful thing, such an unspoken thing. It was a assumed that the person afflicted with it was keeping it a secret from everybody around them. And in fact, more often than not, what you would have when it was inoperable, when it was progressed enough that there was no hope, what often happened was that the cancer was kept from the person with the cancer himself or herself. This was something that the family knew, and they would deliberately keep the person afflicted with it in the dark so that they could not be.
So that they would not be tortured by the knowledge that they had this Rapidly arriving expiration date, you know, in ways that we just can't appreciate now. In 1940, there were so many cultural stigmas surrounding cancer. And the fact that Rebecca kind of inverts that relationship, like, keeps it, she's the one who knows that she has it and she doesn't tell anybody else, is the opposite of what would normally happen if she were going to a family doctor that Maxim, say, was also going to, this almost definitely would have happened, which is that Maxim would be informed of what she has and everybody else around her would know, but she
12:48 Wes: would not know unless she walked in on the celebration.
12:51 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Right. Why is there this, like, ugly looking thing?
12:56 Wes: What's the champagne for? It's not because you have cancer.
13:02 Erin: Oh, okay then. Good.
13:03 Wes: Oops.
13:07 Erin: Right. But you know what I mean? Like her ability to face this head on. And I mean, she does this in a. She then does this by goading Maxim into killing her. Right. But there's a strange. I mean, there's a reading of this film in which she, as a kind of Byronic anti hero, is actually like this sort of triumphant main character. I think that there are things about Rebecca that are tremendously attractive for me anyway. You know, she's this great, amazing force that maybe I'm just like a Mrs. Danvers, but I can't help but admire it. Right. And so I think in death she actually, or in the confrontation with this cancer, she actually, in a strange sort of way, like, proves her mettle.
Even if Mrs. Danvers can't appreciate that or sees it as a betrayal, sees this thing, which, you know, of course you can't control as being a betrayal of her vitality, I think she kind of actually proves a sort of heroine in this confrontation. And it's just unfortunate that Mrs. Danvers can't see that.
14:03 Wes: Well, let's look at Mrs. Danvers understanding of her death. And this is at the point where Mrs. Danvers has tricked Joan Fontaine's character into wearing a dress and a costume for the ball that make her look just like a portrait of Rebecca.
14:21 Erin: No, a portrait of an ancestor of Maxims. Rebecca is.
14:26 Wes: Okay, So I think thought I understood that to be an ancestor. Yeah. Danvers is saying that was an ancestor of Maxims and then it turning out to be Rebecca. That's why everyone was upset.
14:35 Erin: No, it turns out to be Rebecca did this exact thing at a costume party.
14:40 Wes: Ah, okay. Yes, I see.
14:42 Erin: Wore the same outfit.
14:43 Wes: I get it. Okay, Right. So that leads Joan Fontaine's character to get upset and go up to. To go Upstairs. And ultimately, in the end, we get Danvers following her. And at a certain point, Joan Fontaine's character says to Mrs. Danvers, why do you hate me? What have I done that you should ever hate me? So Danvers says, you tried to take her place. You let him marry you. I've seen his face, his eyes. They're the same as those first weeks after she died. I used to listen to him walking up and down, up and down, all night long, night after night, thinking of her suffering torture because he'd lost her.
I don't want to know. And she says, I don't want to know. I don't want to know. Danvers, you thought you could be Mrs. De Winter, live in her house, walk in her steps, take the things that were hers, but she's too strong for you. You can't fight her. No one ever got the better of her. Never ever. So never, never. She was beaten in the end, but it wasn't a man, it wasn't a woman, it was the sea. So it's important to Mrs. Danvers that. That it was the natural elements that ended up defeating Rebecca, and in a way, something that was, you know, that Rebecca embodied, I guess, the sea, but that it not be another person that defeated her, and I guess defeated her in the sense of replacing her.
Replacing her in the affections of Maxim in particular. So when she finds out, out that Rebecca actually had cancer, I mean, you can view that as just another natural cause. Right. At least it's not a person. But it is also Rebecca's own body. It's something internal to her, as you pointed out, maybe something that could be something one could be ashamed of, and certainly not something that is representative, like the sea of vitality or something like that. Although, you know, as we've said, you could see it as representative of a particular kind of vitality in the boundlessness of the cancer cell.
16:45 Erin: I like that. I think you can also see it maybe as Joan Fontaine. You know, the cancer is Joan Fontaine coming. Invading. Right. Invading the space. If we think of the house itself as the body of Rebecca, if you will. Right. Like Joan Fontaine is the interloper, is the foreign body that comes in and causes some problems. Right. So. So you could say that, you know, the idea of Joan Fontaine, the idea of a second marriage that might reverse or somehow defeat the first, is Joan Fontaine as well. And we can argue, of course, that Rebecca has created the conditions in which she's going to have to be replaced by somebody else in Maxim's Affections, in the House, if we want to see Joan Fontaine as something like an inevitability, she's also, I think, or the cancer, rather, is also.
It's arguably also Maxim, or what Maxim represents, or the idea that her kind of vitality and this aristocracy can't actually cohabitate properly. You know, we should talk a bit about Maxim himself. I mean, I don't want to let him get off scot free because I think that he is the sort of the villain that the film isn't really examining too closely, but which maybe knows, maybe the film knows he is the villain. His passivity. What in him was attracted to Rebecca in the first place? I mean, in a way, Rebecca did nothing wrong. Right. She got this man to marry her because of she.
Okay, I mean, I'm going too far there, perhaps by suggesting that she did nothing wrong, she obviously tricked him into thinking that she was in love with him. But insofar as she expressed qualities which he found attractive, we can argue that she didn't do much more wrong than most any other woman in her situation, marrying someone like Maxim. Right. She wanted to make herself desirable to a wealthy, powerful man. So what in Maxim was attracted to her, and then what in Maxim has been destroyed by her? Or his. Or rather were his inadequacies simply revealed by her?
You know, what in him then needs to take a child, you know, an emotional and sort of, in terms of maturity, a child who he then can dominate in the way that he has been seemingly dominated by Rebecca. The fact that he seems to have no problem exporting responsibility to the likes of Rebecca, to Mrs. Danvers. All of these things, I think, really, really complicate him as a figure and make us wonder, like what. What happened in the first place that this marriage went on. There's something that he wasn't getting, that he wasn't seeing at the very beginning that allowed the marriage to happen.
And that. That reads to me as the kind of willful blindness of someone who's not properly tending himself and his position and his estate. Right. Like he's the one who's let in the sea. It's like he's opened all the doors and windows in a hurricane, and then he gets upset that his house is trashed. Right. You know, so I just want to kind of turn the spotlight there. Yeah.
19:44 Wes: He certainly was not cautious enough. And he's not cautious enough when he brings home the Joan Fontaine character. I mean, it's pretty reckless.
19:53 Erin: Yeah.
19:54 Wes: He subjects her to this marrying a random person. And you get the sense he probably, when he married Rebecca. He was marrying a random person. Attractive, but random.
20:04 Erin: Well, random in what way? I mean, who would fulfill those childlike conditions such that the choice is random? You know what I mean? He seems to need.
20:12 Wes: I think maybe they should gone out on more dates first. Or he should have gotten to know her.
20:17 Erin: Right? Right.
20:19 Wes: Well, he doesn't really know the Joan Fontaine character.
20:22 Erin: Well, what's there to know? To a certain extent, Right.
20:24 Wes: They've known each other a few days when he proposed.
20:26 Erin: Right. I mean, what's there to know? To a certain extent, the whole point is that she's unformed, that she's not. Right. She's not some sort of complex personality.
20:34 Wes: Well, you never know. She could be another con artist. I mean, he got conned once. You'd think he'd be more careful. And I don't know how old Rebecca was when he married her. But what you're calling a child may just be of marriageable age. There's that scene right, where she says, I wish I were a woman of 36. Of 36? Is that the age dressed in black satin with a string of pearls, which I don't quite understand. You're gonna have to explain that to me in a second. But then he says, please promise me never to wear black satin or pearls or to be 36 years old, as if that's old. It's pretty hilarious.
21:12 Erin: Well, yes.
21:15 Wes: And, yeah, not the best thing to say under any circumstance to a woman, but, yeah. So what is this. What is this idea of being a woman dressed in black satin?
21:27 Erin: I think there are undertones of Anna Karenina in that. For me, 36 seems to represent the sort of the height of sexual maturity and sophistication in a woman, that number. I don't know why that number was chosen by either Daphne du Maurier or the script writers, but to me, it is the number I associate with the kind of like full. The full shedding of the look of a young person, a young woman. But not the look of someone who's now aging. Right. Like you're most fully yourself, maybe between something like the ages of 34 and 38, where you're in that phase in which you no longer look like a girl and you don't look like a woman who has lost her looks and who is starting to age. I'm air quoting heavily. Losing one's looks. Right. So it's a sort of like eternal peak. Womanhood. 36, to me.
22:28 Wes: Yeah, this makes sense.
22:29 Erin: And the black satin and the pearls would represent what that means. A Woman at the full height of her sophistication, her desirability, her perhaps something like her cunning. All of these things which have, I think, positive valences for the most part, but which have become fraught in light of Rebecca's life or which could be fraught under the right circumstances. But, you know. But I wanna. You know, and I'm pushing. I'm trying to push against the simple reading of the film with Rebecca as the villain and Maxim as her victim, simply because it's interesting to play with that a bit.
I'm not taking this totally seriously, but one can argue that Maxim is doing to Joan Fontaine what Rebecca has done to her. That if Rebecca is the Mrs. Robinson character, you know, he's simply like repeating this cycle, right? He's. He's created conditions in which learning the truth about his marriage, his first marriage, is the only thing that can actually induce real emotional intimacy in his current marriage. And yet he's withholding that. He's withholding the possibility of them being real equals and of them having real emotional intimacy.
And then the minute that it is deployed, this information and real intimacy is affected between the two of them. He has injected Joan Fontaine with Rebecca, with a piece of Rebecca, with this story. He's inoculated her from Rebecca in a way, but only by making her a little bit more like Rebecca. And this is something, in fact, that Joan Fontaine has to do, right? She has to be able to stand up for herself. She has to be able to inhabit a more Rebecca like kind of mentality toward the world in order to survive in the aristocratic world of Maxim, right?
She can't be a little girl forever. She can't let everybody run roughshod over her forever. She has to ingest a little bit of whatever it is that Rebecca had. But that means becoming more like her. And Maxim is the one who does this. Maxim is the one who sort of taints her, who destroys her illusion.
24:36 Wes: Well, he's rough with her. Yeah. And this destroying of illusions, this is what, you know, one instance of this happens before she makes that wish. So they were driving and she is enjoying herself and says, I wish there could be an invention that bottled up the memory, that bottled up memory like perfume, or the memory like perfume. And it never faded, never got stale. Then whenever I wanted to, I could uncork the bottle and live the memory all over it again. This is reminiscent of something she said earlier on, this idea of sticking something you should stick to what is perfect if you find it some very youthful, idealistic things to Say.
And then he asks her, what particular moment would you want to keep? All of them. All these last few days, I feel as though I'd collected a whole shelf full of bottles. He says, sometimes, you know, those little bottles contain demons that have a way of popping out at you just as you're trying most desperately to forget. And then she looks dispirited, and then he says, stop biting your nails. So he's very careless. I mean, overall, you get a sense he's an impulsive guy, quickly marrying women that I think he doesn't know well enough to marry. He has anger management issues, as we'll find out.
And then he's careless and rough. This is not the only time. Time that he's really kind of callous and careless with her. So I don't know how. She's 23 in this movie, right?
26:04 Erin: I don't know. I never heard.
26:05 Wes: How old is he? How old are they supposed to be? She's supposed to be in her early 20s, and he's supposed to be.
26:10 Erin: Yeah, like 21. And he's maybe pushing 40.
26:13 Wes: Okay. Yeah. So he's with a younger woman, and, you know, he calls her a child at a certain point. Oh, you've got to be careful with children. But he's not careful at all. He's not as careful as he ought to be with anyone of any age, much less with a child. So, I mean, it's a good point. I mean, he's a victim of Rebecca in a way, but obviously there's a reason why he was susceptible to that.
26:37 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And that carelessness, I think, is indicative, too, of this aristocratic quality that he seems to embody. So he's like this aristocracy on the decline that needs the infusion. This is one of the reasons why I brought this up in part one with Mrs. Van Hopper. You know, Rebecca, in a way, represents this sort of, like, American infusion of vitality and not cash, because Maxim doesn't seem to be cash poor. And if he were, he wouldn't be attractive as a mark for Rebecca, but. Right. But she represents something like that infusion of vitality that he needs.
But he also, I think, as an aristocrat and as someone who's representative of a fading empire, has gotten into. Into this situation, metaphorically speaking, because of carelessness, because of something having to do with mismanagement and a lack of understanding about the forces with which one is contending. Yeah. So if. If Maxim is something like the British Empire itself, we could see the seeds of empire as being ones in which you know, you are. You're sort of sowing your own destruction by going around unstably, trying to. To acquire things, you know, trying to colonize young women.
Exactly, exactly. And I think that that's a position born of a kind of willful blindness and a kind of hubris that Maxim represents. Like he could just go, you know, he trusts himself enough somehow that he could just go out and find someone to marry. And then he's gonna, in fact, he's gonna do it again, right. He lucks out the second time.
28:10 Wes: It's a problem of privilege. He doesn't have to. To do enough for himself. You know, right. When they're talking at the table, like, what is she? What does she do with her time? You know, and then one of the Laceys slips up and says, well, not sailing. It's a good thing. It's not sailing, you know, what does she do? Where doing means, how do you spend all this leisure time? Maxim has someone to manage his estate, right? Crawley.
28:36 Erin: Yes.
28:37 Wes: Who's his friend. So he doesn't even have to manage his. His own estate.
28:41 Erin: That's right. And Mrs. Danvers.
28:42 Wes: Yep, and Mrs. Danvers. So you get a very typical picture of the perils of being the master or the privileged one, which is that you don't get the exercise of having to do things and having to exercise your faculties, physical or mental, and it makes you vulnerable, it makes you obtuse. So this is kind of an inherent fragility in power. And why power? Always, always one of the reasons power tends to overreach. The more power you have, the more mediated your relationship is to reality, let's say, and you become susceptible to all kinds of deception, not just to Rebecca's in the literal sense, but to drinking your own Kool Aid, so to speak, fully investing in a set of ideals that maybe one doesn't even live by.
For instance, if you could, you know, if you. This is. Then this is a point, really, I'm making Orwell's point, which is that if you could have absolute power and you could always understand your interest in it in the most cynical and self transparent of ways, as an interest in power, then you might have the flexibility to combat challenges, all challenges to power, and to maintain it, right? To create a stable authoritarian regime, so to speak. Speak. But to the extent that you have to rationalize power and say, well, what I'm doing is actually for the good of all, if I'm colonizing a country, it's for this, that and the other reason.
It's not for Just for power and greed and gain. Then you can see why you need to do that psychologically. But you make yourself vulnerable because you're engaged in a kind of self deception. And that self deception becomes the leverage for other people to take you down. In any case, this becomes a basis for Orwell's idea of doublethink, where one, the two strands in doublethink are. Because this is what would be required to maintain power to both. Two, there are reasons why we need to think of what we're doing as good, so that's not actually dispensable.
So one needs to be able to rationalize and make up stories about the terrible things one is doing. But also one needs to, to ideally also understand what one's. The real motivations for what one is doing, the real power motivations. So those are the two horns of double think of thinking a contradiction. I think what I'm doing is for the good, and I understand what I'm doing is for power. And that is the only way to sustain a fully authoritarian regime, or fully authoritarian, or totalitarian would be a better word, totalitarian mindset. It's impossible in practice, and that's what.
Why totalitarian regimes are so unstable, according to Orwell. But anyway, similarly, any sort of privilege is fragile in the same way. So I think this kind of thing. Yeah, you can see the story as a way in which this kind of thing might play out with a somewhat oblivious aristocratic guy. I don't think it's reading anything into the story to say he's made to look a little bit obtuse in the upper class, you know, privileged Englishman, manner of obtuse, but. Mm.
31:53 Erin: Well, you're making me think of the fact that in Crawley and Mrs. Danvers, he. So he has these proxies and he is also someone who is represented within the film in addition to this sort of like. Like spiritual representation that maybe Crawley provides. You know, we see his photograph on Rebecca's Vanity. We see images of. Of him and of Joan Fontaine in their honeymoon footage. You know, someone pointed out to me, a friend of mine pointed out to me that, like, you know, for a guy who likes to, you know, take video of things and photographs. We don't have any photographs of Rebecca.
You know, it's strange that, like, she's right, she maintains this sort of unrepresented quality and, you know, it seems right to me then, based on what you're saying, that maybe Rebecca represents something like this sort of impossible ideal of power, which is, by its impossibility, unrepresentable. And unrepresented in the film, whereas Maxim has all these representations of himself. Right. The other thing I'm thinking about with that is that what Rebecca reminds me of, in addition to being kind of a satanic force, you know, in that, like, she represents the sort of the Byronic anti hero that is best expressed as the, you know, Miltonian Satan of Paradise Lost.
She's also like Eve in a way. She's like a perfect. You know, one of the reasons why she might not be represented is, is that she's literally larger than life. There's this idea in Milton and elsewhere, of course, that Adam and eve are like 7ft tall. They're like these, you know, the way he describes them, they're like Scandinavian supermodels. You know, they're like 7ft tall and she has this, like, incredibly long hair.
33:33 Wes: She's in wnba.
33:35 Erin: Right, right. And one of the reasons why that is, it seems, is because of this idea that, you know, that probably goes back to Plato, that the representations that God makes, the pure form, are superior to any representation that we make. So Adam and Eve are pure creations of God, whereas we're the result of human reproduction. You know, we're the sort of like worn out stock that just is, you know, the stamp that then loses its ink after a while. Right. So we're the result of human creation and reproduction. And Adam and Eve were God's sort of like original human, human productions.
And so something about that seems to lie at the heart of why Rebecca can't be represented. She's like Eve. She's like this, you know, seven foot tall titan of woman who is bigger than everybody and better than everybody. And we're all just sort of like living in her shadow. We're all just like, you know, the imperfect stamps of her and her hand, you know, this godlike hand is stamped on everything within the house.
34:42 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think this is something that one could say this might be an aspect of every form of idealization, which is that it has the significance of a creative, formative force that lies behind us. Right. So most obvious one is a parental force. So that when we idealize a Rebecca, or when we idealize ourselves, or when we have any sort of aspiration, like a value, a potential occupation, this has something to do with an idealization of a parent or parental interest or social interest, cultural interest, something that stands above us and has shaped us as who we are, or God, a creator force. So I like this idea that she stands in that position and in some sense, I Think it fits psychologically. So what have we missed as we are approaching the end?
35:34 Erin: Maybe just a quick reference to Maxim's sister and her husband, who to me are Austen characters. You know, they're like, they fit the mold of so many Jane Austen characters. Like, say, the older couple in Sense and Sensibility, you know, which makes sense since Manderley and Pemberley are kind of rhyming with each other. The English aristocrat, sweet, harmless version of aristocracy, which is totally unlike the sort of like self destructive relationship of Maxim and Bet. Maybe they provide a kind of a model for what Maxim and Joan Fontaine might end up becoming.
36:10 Wes: You're talking about the Laceys?
36:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. In terms of the universe of the film, Maxim and Rebecca survive. I mean, sorry, Maxim and the second Mrs. De Winter survive as a couple. In the book, they don't. In the book, they never have a real relationship. It's impossible. In the book, of course, he's killed Rebecca and I suppose everybody knows. Again, I'm getting the secondhand, but everybody knows that he has done so, even though he is acquitted in the trial. So his reputation is effectively ruined. And they have to keep kind of traveling around to Monte Carlo and various other places to sort of outrun his reputation, which has been destroyed, like his estate.
36:49 Wes: That's kind of cool.
36:50 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the marriage never works.
36:53 Wes: I like that fantasy of being on the run. Not from the police or from a killer, but just from one's bad reputation.
37:00 Erin: Yeah, from, from.
37:02 Wes: And just going and to resorts, you know, oh, I'm on the run, I gotta go to the next resort.
37:10 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So, so the marriage never. The marriage does not work in the book. It can never work. And one can see kind of why that is. It seems improbable that they could live happily ever after under these conditions, but they, they, they try to sell it in the scene and in front of the fireplace where they have, you know, her growing up, but them somehow sort of being okay with that, even though she wasn't allowed to grow up. The terms of the marriage change in that scene, I think.
37:41 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter joysubtext.
The Weight of Memory in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940)
Mar 17, 2025
Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film—part love story, part ghost story, part courtroom melodrama—centers on a poor, timid young woman who falls in love with wealthy aristocrat Maxim de Winter, a widower tortured over the death of his first wife. When the young woman becomes the second Mrs. De Winter and moves into Maxim’s estate, she finds her predecessor’s initials stamped all over the house, and its staff in thrall to her beautiful, vibrant memory. But at the heart of the first Mrs. De Winter’s legacy lies a rot, and just what that rot represents in the film—be it the oppressions of vitality and ambition, the wages of class mobility, the unruly desires of sexuality, or the latent evidence of civilizational decline—is our subject today. Wes & Erin discuss the 1940 Best Picture winner “Rebecca,” starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.
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0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Alfred Hitchcock's first American film, part love story, part ghost story, part courtroom melodrama, centers on a poor, timid young woman who falls in love with wealthy aristocrat Maxim de Winter, a widower tortured over the death of his first wife. When the young woman becomes the second Mrs. De Winter and moves into Maxim's estate, she finds her predecessor's initials stamped all over the house and its staff still enthralled to her beautiful, vibrant memory. But at the heart of the first Mrs. De Winters legacy lies a rot.
And just what that rot represents in the film, be it the oppressions of vitality and ambition, the wages of class mobility, the unruly desires of sexuality, or the latent evidence of civilizational decline, is our subject today. We're Talking about the 1940 Best Picture winner, Rebecca, starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, a couple weeks ago, the great Joan Plowright passed away. I don't know if you know who she was. I feel like no one in the news media knew who she was because it wasn't very widely cover.
1:40 Wes: I don't know about her.
1:41 Erin: Well, she was Laurence Olivier's widow. And it just caused me to reflect on the kind of strange coincidence that we had decided to do this film or that I had suggested it because in a way you might say that Joan Fontaine and Joan Plowright sharing that first name, it sort of indicates that there's something of the second Mrs. De Winter, maybe about Joan Plowright. She's not a second wife, she was a third wife, but she followed his 20 year marriage to Vivien Leigh, which was extremely fraught and extremely volatile and one of the great love stories probably of the 20th century, but a difficult marriage to follow.
And Vivien Leigh didn't pass away before his marriage, so there was a divorce. But I was just thinking about that and about the casting stories behind this film, about the fact that Olivier, who was at that point having an affair with Vivien Leigh, wanted her to play the Joan Fontaine part. So there was a lot of tension on the set, which Resulted in Joan Fontaine, I think, feeling really as ostracized and as unwanted as she is in the film. It's funny because to me it seems obvious and I'm sure other people have said that Vivien Leigh would have been totally wrong for the part of the second Mrs.
De Winter, because she was Rebecca. You know, she was the one that everybody thought was the most beautiful, most incredible woman in the world. Right. So that story and how that affected the environment of the movie really interests me. A lot of behind the scenes facts about this film really interest me, like Selznick's involvement. But just thinking about this real life phenomenon of Second Wives and how they may or may not line up with actual things going on in the filmmakers own lives just interested me. But had you seen this film before I suggested it?
3:28 Wes: No, no, I had never seen this.
3:30 Erin: Yeah, you know, it's Hitchcock's first film that he made in America, which is funny because it's set in England and you know, a lot of battles with Selznick and a lot of battles with the studio over some censorship issues, which will probably get. They'll probably come up as we go through the plot. But otherwise, I think, I mean, it's a bit. It's a strange film. You know, it has these three genres, really, that it's invoking at various points and maybe some dropped threads. I don't know, we can talk about that. But it's kind of fascinating. I think it's one of his most enjoyable films, even for all of its flaws and the atmosphere and the.
Especially the performance by Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers. Classic. I forgot to send you the Carol Burnett. The Carol Burnett's gonna be good. Yeah, I think it's called Rebecky. Everyone's always going, Rebecky. Yeah. And I think, you know, Carol Burnett's the Other Woman.
4:24 Wes: Oh, yeah.
4:26 Erin: This is so bad. I can't believe it. I adore her. Anyway, she, you know, they're like having dinner.
4:31 Wes: I want to say there's an M M sound in there. Not Martha, but.
4:35 Erin: Oh, I'm good. This is so painful for me. But anyway, they're having dinner at the big table at one point and there's, you know, like a serving dish and somebody pulls the lid off the platter and it's Mrs. Danvers head, you know, in the middle, telling Carol Burnett that she should die or whatever. Anyway, really, really good spinoff. But yeah, this definitely isn't Hitchcock's best film. It is probably, though, in my top five. I want to say, like, what's your favorite Hitchcock?
5:06 Wes: I guess I'd have to say Vertigo. It's not a very interesting choice, but I don't know. I think you know Hitchcock way better than I do, so you have a lot more to choose from.
5:17 Erin: I've seen every Hitchcock film I made a point to do, so.
5:21 Wes: So this is in your top five films, or top five Hitchcock?
5:25 Erin: No, no, no. Top five Hitchcock. You know, and it's not. It's not like, probably in his best five in terms or top five in terms of best of his, but it's, you know, favorite implies a little bit of partisanship there on my part. You know, I just. I like it. It was one of the first, I think I had ever seen first Hitchcock's I'd ever seen. And I remember realizing at, like, 10 or 11 years old that, like, Joan Fontaine's character doesn't have a name, but the title is a name, you know?
5:54 Wes: Yeah. It took me while to figure out that she wasn't Rebecca.
6:00 Erin: Right.
6:01 Wes: Yeah. This is confusing. She's just Mrs. De Winter through the whole thing, which I had to abbreviate in my notes as MDW, so she just became MDW and Mrs. Danvers became MD yeah, the.
6:21 Erin: The Love Doctor is in.
6:23 Wes: Yeah. Seriously.
6:24 Erin: No, I looked up. I looked up the name Rebecca last night for the first time, and it means to tie or to bind, so I thought that was suggestive.
6:34 Wes: Is it of Hebrew origin?
6:36 Erin: Mm, yeah.
6:38 Wes: Yeah.
6:38 Erin: But it's definitely a. You know, it has a kind of romantic, sexy kind of, I think, valence to it. I don't know. I never thought about that with that name before. Too closely. But I was just thinking quite a bit about that name and what it might suggest. Just to the ear, Rebecca. Three syllable.
6:59 Wes: You know, a nice embroidered monogram. That's just an R is much more appealing than, say, an L. Yes, that's right. Or Larissa.
7:10 Erin: That's right.
7:11 Wes: It wouldn't work as well.
7:12 Erin: Well, and of course, the single R is, you know, I can't look at that, even though sometimes it's also with the. The D E and the capital W. I can't look at an R and not think Regina. Regina. You know, the monarchical cipher.
7:27 Wes: Oh, I see.
7:28 Erin: Yeah.
7:28 Wes: Okay. Right.
7:30 Erin: So she's, you know, she's the queen of the castle. She's the queen of Manderley. Manderley. Which is itself kind of a strange name. You know, it sounds like a hotel resort in, like, Cancun or something. You know, like, there's some.
7:51 Wes: That's right, yeah. I mean, there'd be a casino in there and Manderley, actually. Well, there is in Vegas. What's it called? Mandalay Bay, actually.
8:02 Erin: There you go. Maybe that's why I'm thinking that. Not that Vegas is tropical.
8:09 Wes: I once saw, like, imitation Pink Floyd concert there.
8:13 Erin: Oh, nice.
8:15 Wes: Anyway, so he lives in a jaw dropping mansion and she's a bit like Cinderella. And she's compared to Cinderella, I think by the Laceys at one point. But, you know, we start out with her in this very funny, vain and envious stepmother, Van Hopper. Although she kind of becomes a witch by the end of the first act when she kind of curses Rebecca, she suggests that Maxim is marrying her because they have already slept together. She can't be a great lady. He's marrying her out of desperation. So there's a very fairy tale quality to this. It's not just a Vegas casino or a resort in Cancun.
9:01 Erin: It's Monte Carlo.
9:04 Wes: Yeah, exactly. There you go. Well, where is Manderley?
9:08 Erin: It's in Cornwall, I think.
9:10 Wes: Yeah. Okay.
9:11 Erin: Yeah.
9:11 Wes: All right. Making sure I'm not.
9:13 Erin: Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, no. I thought you meant. Yeah, the opener. When they're. When they're in Monty. I adore Monty.
9:17 Wes: Right. She meets a knight in shining armor, except his armor is actually a little bit. Quite a bit blemished because, well, he's a knight in shining army armor who, you know, you save from suicide on your first meeting. That's what happens. Right. Am I interpreting that correctly?
9:40 Erin: Mm.
9:41 Wes: So he's a depressed knight in shining armor.
9:44 Erin: Yeah.
9:44 Wes: Which is an interesting twist.
9:47 Erin: And he's a knight in shining armor who also treats her like garbage, which is an interesting twist, too.
9:52 Wes: And he does, which seems to be. The more of these older movies I watch, it seems to be their idea of the bad boy. Like the guy who gets women. This is how you're the bad boy. You just like, you know. Shut up. Stop. Stop bawling. Stop blubbering.
10:11 Erin: Eat your food like a good girl.
10:13 Wes: Yeah, one always has to be careful with children.
10:18 Erin: That's a pretty. That's a pretty good impression. Well, I mean, I think we're meant to see him as not very nice, though in these moments. Sometimes it depends on how sympathetic you find Joan Fontaine's little, little girl lost routine. So maybe she needs to. Maybe she needs someone to take, you know, take a stern hand with her.
10:39 Wes: Modest. To A fault.
10:41 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. I find it interesting the way that she's sort of set upon by three major figures in the film and what each of those represent, all of them older women, so Mrs. Van Hopper at the beginning and then Mrs. Danvers and then Rebecca herself. But Mrs. Van Hopper, I take it's really difficult to tell, actually, because of everybody's transcontinental kind of accents. But Mrs. Van Hopper's American, right?
11:08 Wes: I thought the same thing. Yeah.
11:10 Erin: Yeah. She's.
11:10 Wes: Are they American or are they English?
11:12 Erin: Right, right. Because Mrs. Van Hopper, the actress who plays her, is actually American, but she's working really hard on some of those vowel sounds. She's kneading them into Englishness. I think from her name, Van Hopper, and from the fact that she goes to New York to see her daughter married is indicative of the. That she's American. And therefore the association that she wants to create with Maxim seems to be one of, you know, this sort of typical. Well, the sort of ugly American stereotype, right. Of the wealthy socialite class in New York.
The aristocracy of America wanting to sort of, like, further legitimize itself by connections to the, quote, unquote, real aristocracy of England and of the Continent. And, of course, these marriages to shore up America's aristocratic claims were very commonly made. Right. We have the Vanderbilts marrying Polish counts and the Churchills and the, you know, this lord and that lord and. Yeah, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers. All of those sorts of families that at one time were considered new money, even in America, are sort of trying to get their footing with these aristocrats.
And oftentimes, the aristocratic families that they married into, it was a marriage of convenience in which the English aristocrat with the huge estate didn't have the money to run the estate and needed to be sort of bankrolled by American money to keep his ancestral grounds and home alive and running properly. And so there was just something of that. I'm just thinking about this because I'm thinking about the ways in which the movie, to me, seems to be making larger claims about England as an idea in the sort of waning, you know, came out in 1940.
They were making it at the time. England was in World War II. America was not yet in World War II. And what the sort of dwindling years of empire might have to do with the house itself. Rebecca, some interesting things to tweeze out there, which I'm sure we will. Yeah. But Van Hopper is awful. And Joan Fontaine, who I'm gonna just refer to as Joan Fontaine, throughout the. Or throughout the episode, she, like, says, oh, she's. She's really a nice lady, or something like that. Like, she says something kind of positive about Mrs. Van Hopper. Even though we've never seen her be anything but, she gets increasingly cruel.
But we've never seen her be anything but dismissive, rude and overbearing to her. So maybe what counts as nice for Joan Fontaine makes Maxim look great if her standards are too low. I don't know.
13:54 Wes: Yeah. It's when they have that impromptu lunch that he inquires, is Mrs. Van Hopper a friend of yours or just a relation? Then it turns out she's a paid companion. And he said, I didn't know companionship could be bought. That's a little risque. A little risque. Bit of flirting.
14:13 Erin: And also, he definitely knew that, but okay.
14:15 Wes: Right. Of course. Then she makes that remark about looking it up in the dictionary and laughs because it means a friend of the bosom.
14:24 Erin: She's like 8 years old.
14:25 Wes: And then he says, you know, I don't envy the privilege. And that's when she calls Van Hopper kind. She's very kind, really. And I have to earn my living. So I guess it's a Cinderella who doesn't quite know that she's being abused. Right. I mean, she is an orphan. Both her parents have died. Just that there's an orphan. I don't know what age they've died as. She's a young adult, I assume.
14:51 Erin: Her mother died when she was young, and then her father died relatively recently, I think.
14:55 Wes: Yeah.
14:56 Erin: Because the father was painting trees up until. Or one tree up until recently.
15:01 Wes: Yeah. So it is interesting to think. Yeah. She's someone who, you know, you could say modest to a fault, although I do find it very winning. She has a humility about her, and you certainly don't associate that with beautiful women. And it's quite the contrast to what we learn about Rebecca, where you expect the beauty to go along with a certain type of pride or formidability in character, let's say. But she herself has that orphan quality, and she's always apologizing for herself. And I think probably not quite sure who's treating her well and who's mistreating her. She's the type of person who could see a terrible person like Van Hopper as being kind, but she's gonna get past that at, you know, at a certain point. She does assert herself in the movie with Miss. Mrs. Is it Miss or Mrs. Miss Danvers. Mrs. Mrs. Danvers.
16:00 Erin: Where's the Mr. Nobody ever saw him
16:03 Wes: again, dead in a ditch somewhere. He's probably buried in the backyard.
16:08 Erin: On their honeymoon, she convinced him to jump out the window.
16:10 Wes: Convinced him to jump, yes. Don't be afraid.
16:14 Erin: So easy.
16:16 Wes: So creepy. Carol Burnett played Rebecca. She didn't play Danvers. Yeah, that's too bad, because I want
16:23 Erin: to see her as Vicky Lawrence.
16:25 Wes: Vicki Lawrence. There you go. Was Danvers okay? I would like to see that switched, actually.
16:30 Erin: I think the mole kept moving, too. I think that was one of the best. I haven't rewatched it for this, but it's, you know, it's memorable enough that I remember the. The head on the platter thing.
16:42 Wes: She will, you know. So she does stand up to Mrs. Danvers, but is there really much of an arc for her except, you know, the external arc of what she ages.
16:54 Erin: Right. In the only real moment of passion in the film, she finally becomes, I think, something like a suitable candidate to run the house and to be Mrs. De Winter. Right. But I think that involves, in part, standing up to Mrs. Danvers. It also involves actually hearing what's gone on, because, of course, she's been about what actually happened with the first Rebecca. I mean, with the first Mrs. De Winter. And something about the discovery of. Something about losing her innocence in hearing this story seems to affect a maturation, which is interesting because it's not firsthand experience when Maxim recounts it.
And yet there's definitely. There seems to be a ghostly reenactment that happens, you know, and we, by that logic, are as matured. Or, you know, we grow up with Joan Fontaine in that moment because we see what she sees, which is this reenactment that occurs when he's recounting the fateful moment when Rebecca died.
17:55 Wes: How do you mean a reenactment?
17:57 Erin: Well, you know, they go to the scene. They, you know, there's some camera movements that kind of indicate that there's someone really standing there when there isn't. Right. And we sort of follow the camera follows the movement of where Rebecca might have been. You know, it's as if the whole thing is, as Maxim is telling it. It's as if we're watching it happen in a flashback, even though there's no figure who's motivating the camera movement, who's in the center of the frame. It's shot as if there is. As if someone's standing there, you know, so she gets caught up. She gets caught up on the story.
18:32 Wes: So this is the reenactment of the moment where he hits her and then she Falls. Right.
18:37 Erin: Yes.
18:37 Wes: Am I getting that right? Yes. Okay.
18:39 Erin: Yeah. Which, I. I've never read the Daphne du Maurier novel, but my sister informed me that she read it a few months ago. And Olivier's character, Maxim de Winter, kills Rebecca in the book, which makes a lot more sense.
18:55 Wes: And here he just manslaughters her.
18:57 Erin: Exactly, exactly. But, you know, she really had it coming.
19:00 Wes: We'll leave it to her to fall right on an anchor. Is that what she falls on?
19:04 Erin: Yeah, I think so.
19:06 Wes: Hit her head on a bit of anchor.
19:08 Erin: Yeah. It's slightly ridiculous, but I bet you never saw the double twist coming. Like, this film has a double twist
19:16 Wes: that she was an unfaithful single mother.
19:22 Erin: No, no, she wasn't. She wasn't.
19:25 Wes: No, I know. I know, but she could have.
19:29 Erin: She could have been.
19:29 Wes: She was with Saucy Jack. Saucy Jack Favell.
19:33 Erin: That's right. Rosemary's Baby.
19:35 Wes: Yeah. No, I didn't see that coming at all. And the fact that, of course, that he hated her.
19:40 Erin: Well, that's the first twist. Yeah.
19:42 Wes: You know. Yeah. Everything is kind of inverted. And the reality is inverted from Rebecca's perception of it, because part of. Right. What she's coming under when she gets to that house is. Well, it's this very grandiose setting. And now she's supposed to be mistress in a way. Although she has. You know, in Mrs. Danvers, she has someone who might be a bit of a competitor in that regard or someone who's gonna take on that role or that she could leave that role to. But what hangs over her is this idealized conception of Rebecca. And she suffers from what she thinks are people's comparisons between her and Rebecca. And I guess those comparisons are occurring. But unbeknownst to her, Max is not one of the people who. Maxim. Is he Max and Maxim or Maxim?
20:37 Erin: I think he's Maxim.
20:38 Wes: Is he always Maxim or is he also called Max?
20:41 Erin: I think he's always. Almost always Maxim from the moment. Okay.
20:44 Wes: I couldn't hear all instances. But anyway. Yeah. So Maxim, Right. Unbeknownst to her, he is not holding her up to that standard. But that is the standard. This lofty standard is now the one she has to live up to. And it's not one she ever thought she would have to live up to, given her station. Right. These are the perils of being rescued by the knight in shining armor. What are you gonna do? You get to the castle, right? And all the servants are like, oh, who's this? She's not royalty.
21:18 Erin: Well, One wonders, in fact, even what she did as Mrs. Van Hopper's companion. Right? Because there's no. I mean, she's there, of course, to be pushed around by Mrs. Van Hopper. That seems to be like the. The thing that makes their relationship happen is that Mrs. Van Hopper needs someone to bully. Right. She can't bully in a vacuum. But insofar as she would, in a less fraught version of that scenario, serve as someone who would, you know, call and make reservations, like Joan Fontaine's character strikes me as someone who would be afraid to call up a restaurant and make reservations. You know what I mean? Which is apparently the state of.
21:57 Wes: I'm sorry to bother you.
21:59 Erin: Well, this is.
22:00 Wes: Are you sure you have a seat? You sure you have a table?
22:03 Erin: I speak from experience when I say that I'm one of the few people I know under a certain age, not that I'm that young, especially anymore, but I'm one of the few people I know who is comfortable calling up and making reservations. Right. Because, in fact, people don't talk on the phone anymore. And this is. Now, you know, there's quite a bit of timidity now about this, but, you know what I mean, even just as a companion to this one woman, she seems maybe not quite up to the task, never mind as a, you know, administrator of an enormous estate.
22:34 Wes: Yeah.
22:34 Erin: And it's clear that Maxim doesn't expect her to be. I mean, he has, if you like, a wife already, and Mrs. Danvers, you know, who's carrying on the upkeep, and therefore, Joan Fontaine can be what. I mean, if it weren't for the oppressions of the staff kind of expecting her to do the things that Rebecca did, she wouldn't have anything to do all day. In fact, it's commented upon that she doesn't really do anything. She doesn't do the aristocratic types of hobbies associated with her station. So all she does is sketch a little. She doesn't ride, she doesn't paint well.
So if it weren't for everybody's expectation of her fulfilling this Rebecca like role, she could actually just be the sort of quasi ornament that she seems to be valued as for Maxim. And it's a strange sort of ornament because it's like an ornament of childhood rather than the. The way that a woman in her situation who maybe didn't have any real skills would be a trophy, you know, a trophy wife. So all she had to do was play with a hoop and a stick in the garden, and I guess she would Be fulfilling the function for which she was brought to the house.
Yeah. You know, something or playing house in some sort of, you know, in some sort of anti. Realistic way, like with an actual dollhouse, as opposed to running the household. That's what Mrs. Danvers is for. Right. She's the. She's hired to be the real lady of the house. And you don't have to do much of anything when she just carries out the, you know, the everyday tasks.
24:09 Wes: So, yeah, it's interesting. Cause we're left to imagine what Mrs. Danvers relationship with Rebecca was like.
24:16 Erin: Oh, you think? Did you imagine what it was like? Is that something the film might be hinting at, Wesley?
24:27 Wes: I mean, it's. So Maxim marries Rebecca. It's a bit of a marriage of convenience, right?
24:33 Erin: What makes you say that? It might be. I just.
24:36 Wes: Well, it's not a marriage where they were in love.
24:39 Erin: Oh, I see.
24:40 Wes: So that long speech that he gives. She was incapable of love, tenderness or decency. Four days after we were married, she stood there laughing, her black hair blowing in the wind, and told me all about herself. Everything. Things I'll never tell a living soul. I wanted to kill her. So I guess she comes clean about her cynical intentions. Maybe he loved her. And then he said, I'll make a bargain with you. You'd look rather foolish trying to divorce me now after four days of marriage. So I'll play the part of a devoted wife of this is her saying this.
Okay, mistress of your precious Manderley, I'll make it the most famous show place in England of you, if you like. And people will visit us and envy us and say we're the luckiest, happiest couple in the country. What a grand joke it will be. What a triumph. I should never have accepted her dirty bargain. Okay, so that's what I was a bit confused about when I said it was a marriage of convenience. Because I didn't fully grok that speech, you know, and I didn't rewind it. I just knew something was not. Was not good about their arrangements. So. And then she's, you know.
I think it's understood. Well, he says she began to grow careless. She took a flat in London and she'd stay away for days at a time. Then she'd start to bring her friends down here. I warned her, but she shrugged her shoulders. What's it got to do with you? She said. So I don't know if he's concerned, it sounds like she has the permission to see other people. But the thing he's upset about is the appearances. It's a little unclear to me, but obviously she sucks. According to his account, every.
26:17 Erin: Everything he says about her makes her sound awesome.
26:20 Wes: I don't know. For some reason, Mrs. Danvers idolizes her. This woman, Joan Fontaine, let's just call her that, goes from having, like a evil stepmother to having an evil mother in law. You know, that's the. The way Mrs. Danvers comes across, but also like a cross between a bad mother in law and a Igor character or something, or some kind of creepy character. And so it's an interesting pair. It's a little bit of an odd couple when you think about it. Rebecca as the sort of party girl who has just manipulated her way into getting with a rich guy, but now kind of has power and control and can do what she wants for the most part.
And this weird housekeeper who idolizes her, I assume in large part for her beauty, but for what else, you know? And is Mrs. Danvers the type of person to idolize people for her beauty? It's a little bit confusing. Yeah. So what is that relationship that we're supposed to imagine?
27:28 Erin: Yeah, I think it's for her vitality. Right. She was alive. Everything was a joke to her. Love was a joke to her. She didn't take anything seriously, and she was the most alive person in the world. It sounds like she didn't wear herself out quite. I mean, we could talk in a minute about the cancer, but she burned her candle at both ends. And something about that is what Mrs. Danvers, who we know likes candles, really found compelling and attractive. Mrs. Danvers is obviously, because of her situation, perhaps is a repressed character. Repressed, maybe in lots of ways.
You know, that hairstyle with the braid around her head kind of gives this idea of being hemmed in. She's always in black. She's a missus. So we can assume that she's a widow. So she's in this sort of permanent mourning. And Rebecca is like everything that she's not, everything that everybody wants. And she also, you know, because. And this is, I think, where the film gets really interesting in its sort of cosmology of aristocracy. You know, Rebecca is, you know, you can almost argue she's an aristocrat by merit. She's a perfect aristocrat. She does everything.
She plays the role perfectly. She does everything that an aristocrat is supposed to do, and she's great at it. And she has a kind of. She has a kind of vitality that is actually super aristocratic in that it is over and above the type of vitality that aristocrats typically have. Maxim is the tired sort of worn out aristocrat that we might be more familiar with, whereas Rebecca is this. She's like a B12 shot in the arm of Manderley. She brings the life, she makes it a house of slightly older cast in terms of the setting and the fact that she's sort of keeping alive, I think, balls and various, maybe 19th century forms, which we do see one in the film, but it's not with the frequency that Rebecca would have held balls.
Yeah. So there's this interesting twisting, I'm trying to say, where Mrs. Danvers seems to be very much about reinforcing a legacy, the legacy that Rebecca represents, but that legacy is itself a kind of anti aristocratic legacy of an interloper. Because I take Rebecca to be probably low class. There's some hints about this. She's very, very good at playing upper class, but she, you know, she goes to this sort of seedy doctor that she was. That she was seeing before her marriage. So she's kind of a social climber. In other words, she's not blue blood, she's someone who has married into it, but who is a better aristocrat than the people who are actually blue bloods.
So Mrs. Danvers, by holding up Rebecca as the symbol of aristocracy, as the symbol of this sort of dead, now dead English aristocratic vitality, it's a very interesting and sort of strange and turned in on itself kind of, kind of value that Mrs. Danvers has. But yeah, aristocrat by merit rather than by blood, you know, which doesn't exist except in this instance. I don't know what you think about that or if you think I'm. That's accurate.
30:57 Wes: Yeah. No, that's interesting. So Mrs. Danvers, the idea is that she's idealizing a certain conception of aristocracy that in a way Rebecca can make good on.
31:10 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, do you think that Mrs. Danvers seems to love the way that Rebecca could inhabit these aristocratic forms? You know, she has a kind of devotion, as most people in her position probably do. She has a devotion to running the house and to the upkeep of empire, you might say. Right. The forms of the aristocratic lady are described as being among those things that Rebecca did so well.
31:37 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it would explain why Mrs. Danvers just try to take the new Rebecca, sorry, Joan Fontaine, under her wing and have a similar sort of relationship with her, just turn her into, you know, why isn't Rebecca replaceable? You know, maybe if Maxim had brought home Another aristocrat, she would have been replaceable. But Danvers is interested in that quality in particular. And in a way it is a good kind of external depiction of what depression is psychologically, which is self impoverishment. This kind of odd couple of a middle aged Goth with a young party girl.
The self is impoverished, but everything is out there in the ideal. This is this wonderful, perfect Rebecca, who is anything but. You know, she's a shiny surface and yeah, she's got vitality, but she doesn't seem to have decency, at least by Maxim's account, if you believe it. So she's interested in status and she says things to that effect. From the beginning, her role is not. It's not like she's just there to be mean to Joan Fontaine, right, or a curmudgeonly nasty figure. She has a specific project which is to try to get her to identify with Rebecca and to be crushed by that identification, to give her the idea that she must emulate Rebecca and live up to Rebecca's very idealized image.
And if she can't, then to kill herself, right? She's trying to kill Joan Fontaine from the minute she steps in the mansion. That's her project. So she'll. Even in the very beginning when she says the only good view of the sea is from the west wing, the room's very charming. No, this is what Joan Fontaine says, the room is very charming and I'm sure I'll be comfortable. So she's got a more modest room and she's not in Rebecca's room for obvious reasons. Maxim's probably said, yeah, don't, don't, don't do that. Hopefully he just has the psychological sense not to do that, right?
He said, don't do it. But meanwhile, Danvers is trying to get her interested in that room and inhabiting that room, right? Which is another way of saying inhabiting Rebecca's role, which troubles Joan Fontaine and it troubles her, certainly does give her the idea that she has to live up to that and she'll eventually start thinking and changing her hair, which at the behest of the Lacey's, but who are also obviously comparing her to Rebecca and changing how she dresses, which turns out to be not something that Maxim is actually interested in. So it's really Mrs.
Danvers project. When Joan Fontaine's character says, I do hope we'll be friends, you must be patient with me. Mrs. Danvers says, I've managed the house since Mrs. De Winter's death and Mr. De Winter has never complained. I think I'll go downstairs now. That room in the west wing I was telling you about is there through the door. Why don't you go in there? It's not used. It's not used? No. How do you do her? Do her? It's the most beautiful room in the house. The only one that looks down across the lawns to the sea. It was Mrs. De Winter's room.
So the room with the best view, the most comfortable room, the most beautiful room. It's got everything. That's the room you want, it's not the room you've got. But why don't you go check it out and then throw yourself off the balcony? When you see how great it is, how great you'll never be.
35:08 Erin: Right, Right.
35:09 Wes: Right. So Danvers understands that the weight of any identification or desire to emulate Rebecca will be too crushing for Joan Fontaine's character. But obviously it's a similar. She's trying to induce that character with an identification that she herself has and manages somehow. Right. She lives with that idealization and it's important to her and it's very fetishistic. Right. Rubbing the fur on her face. Ooh, touch this. And showing the lingerie. It's like, wow. Creepy much?
35:44 Erin: You can't imagine until you've seen it how that got through the censors.
35:49 Wes: Tell us about the censorship. Yeah.
35:51 Erin: You can only suppose that the censors were actually too innocent to realize what was being suggested. Like it got past them because of their own naivete. But I mean, she sticks her hand inside the see through lingerie. I mean, it's just, it's. Yeah, it's unbelievable. You know, the suggestions for perversion were just like.
36:11 Wes: I didn't think it was suggesting a literal sexual relationship, but just.
36:15 Erin: Well, I think it's an infatuation of sort of. Right. Certainly it's an infatuation which has sexual overtones, though there is also arguably this, and I think how the film is trying to cover that or cover its own other potential interpretations is by having Mrs. Danvers as a sort of avenging mother. Right. You know, as you're suggesting, like this mother in law idea, you know, it's as if she's Maxim's mother in law who stuck around and nobody can get rid of her because she lives in the house. So there's that. But yeah, they supposedly took out stuff that was more suggestive of perversion, so who knows? Who knows what was going on?
36:57 Wes: Do you know what they took out?
36:58 Erin: I looked it up. This is just from the Wikipedia page. Censorship There's a whole little drawer for censorship on this movie's Wikipedia page. Okay, so three things. It's the story of a murderer who is permitted to get off scot free, so they had to change it so that he didn't quite murder her. The quite inescapable reference of sex perversion, that's supposedly the Mrs. Danvers thing. And the repeated references in the dialogue to the alleged illicit relationship between Favell and the first Mrs. De Winter. And the frequent references to the alleged illegitimate child to be sex perversion mentioned in the second point was a reference to the implied lesbian attraction felt by Mrs.
Danvers towards Rebecca. Breen, the head of censorship complained of the impropriety of Mrs. Danvers description of Rebecca's physical attributes and her handling of the various garments, particularly the nightgown. Breen insisted that in the final cut there must be no suggestion whatever of a perverted relationship between Mrs. Danvers and
37:56 Wes: Rebecca that would have been so hot.
37:59 Erin: Though, no, scholar David Boyd describes Danvers attraction to Rebecca as inescapably clear to all but the most innocent of viewers. Congratulations, Wes. Though it is, though it is unclear whether this interpretation would have been accessible to audiences in 1940. Asked about it later in life, Judith Anderson denied intentionally playing Mrs. Danvers as a lesbian, stating, quote, we never thought of such things at that time. So there's nothing in it that indicates that anything was actually cut. But you know, not in this telling, in this terrible Wikipedia version of events. But who knows what was in there that had to be cut out such that it made the sticking the hand in the see through nightgown seem tame by comparison? I don't know.
38:41 Wes: Yeah, I think the lesbian interpretation, it's a little bit too generic, you know, and it's a kind of low hanging fruit that interpreters will go for. But it. Right. There's a clearly fetishistic aspect to Danvers tie to Rebecca. But to me it comes across that the relationship that we're talking about is not. So it's not so much about love as it is about identification. So that. That Danvers idealizes Rebecca as either representative of an ideal of something to imitate, something to be right. It would be more like she wants to be like Rebecca, not to have Rebecca. And one can libidinize and fetishize, you know, those things get mixed up and sexualize that desire for identification. But it's a bit different than wanting to do Rebecca or even loving Rebecca. Right?
39:34 Erin: Right.
39:35 Wes: To me it's psychologically a bit different. So I can understand why the person playing her would say that, because as perverse as it is and as perverse as it comes across, it's a bit more complicated than, oh, there's a lesbian attraction.
39:49 Erin: Oh, I definitely agree. I think, though, that it's important that that strangeness or that creepy feeling that we get around, maybe not around sexuality, per se. I mean, certainly, I think it's a fetishized relationship that Mrs. Danvers. But I think that what it might serve, and maybe only to the contemporary viewer, is to just complicate this idea of Rebecca's sexuality and of this sort of world eating, you know, kind of quality that she has in which, like, everyone is drawn to everything, kind of goes into her tractor beam, you know. So that, I think, is important because she's associated with sexual impropriety.
And so the more that the movie can shade into that and can shade into all kinds of sexual, you know, quote unquote, sexual impropriety with others other than Maxim is important. I mean, you know, or it's not so much important as it is. It just opens up another angle on what Rebecca's supposed deviance might be.
40:46 Wes: Right.
40:47 Erin: It just sort of continues to set up interesting scenarios in which she seems to have been attracting and sort of tangling with, mentally or otherwise, everyone except for Maxim. I find it interesting in a way. I do think, though, that it is more than that she was like the child that Mrs. Danvers was too close to, that represented something that Mrs. Danvers wanted to fetishize because she didn't have it in herself. You know, the sort of, like, surprise, maybe, of a child that doesn't take after you, but takes after your sort of wildest ambitions for yourself, which you yourself cannot exercise, cannot live out because of your station and because of the limitations in your own life. Something like that.
41:28 Wes: It was a bit of a Mrs. Robinson.
41:32 Erin: Yes. Though that wouldn't quite line up because. Because Mrs. Robinson had those things and killed them off in herself. Right. And maybe that's the case with Mrs. Danvers, but it seems to me that that would be. It would be reflective of qualities which are so beyond Mrs. Danvers own station in life and seem to be so beyond her own personality that all she can do is admire them as an outsider.
41:55 Wes: Yeah. So maybe there's something in here about what it means to be a servant. She's a quintessential servant in a way, and we've seen this in some of the stuff that we've done before, but to be quintessentially a servant means to be in the position of not trying to inhabit the ideal, but just to be associated with it and to worship it, to get what you need out of it by having this type of contact with it. So there's no aspirational vector. There's no, I'm going to become like Rebecca. It's not even possible, of course, but she can kind of bathe and the light and the glory of Rebecca be adjacent to it.
But anyway, you had me a little bit earlier thinking about, like, throuple with Mrs. Danvers, Jack and Rebecca, which is a horrifying, horrifying idea. But maybe in the second part. Yeah, we should talk about that because it seems like Danvers has kind of facilitated or known about the affair with Jack.
42:53 Erin: Yeah, there's bit of a madam quality. Yeah.
42:56 Wes: Yes, I was going to say that. Madame Danvers, it's another one.
43:01 Erin: Okay.
43:02 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you.
43:08 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Part 2)
Feb 17, 2025
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “You Who Never Arrived” and “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), and whether—as Rilke suggests—death can be put in service of life, and suffering sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence.
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0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of some poems by Rilke. We discussed you who never arrived in part one. So go listen to that if you haven't listened to that already. In this part, we will be discussing be ahead of all parting. Right? Yes. Sonnets to Orpheus 2.13. All right. Yeah. Why did this make it into your shortlist for potential Rilke poems?
0:56 Erin: Because the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang is probably one of my single favorite lines in Rilke. So for that reason, this sonnet has some fascination for me and I think it's one of the best of the sonnets to Orpheus. But yeah, the whole poem is a bit of a. I don't know, a bit of an admonition to somebody like me, somebody who, like Lot's wife, is always looking behind me or something like that. And so it's important. It's an interesting and maybe important poem to me in that regard. Not to get too personal, but I mean, it's important for everybody, right? We all get stuck. So, yeah, it has some great lines.
1:38 Wes: Yeah, I like these self help poems that just Order me.
1:41 Erin: I know, I know.
1:44 Wes: This is. Yeah, it's kind of reminiscent of what he's doing and Letters to a Young Poet as well. But he's a good advice giver.
1:50 Erin: The imperative really just makes me fall into line immediately. Okay.
1:57 Wes: It's not like Jordan Peterson. It's not like, you know, make your bed. And it's be. So in a way, it's advice that's anti advice. Right. Because you don't have to do. It's less about doing and more about being. And that line, be and yet know the great void where all things begin is such a great line. Or be forever dead in Eurydice. That is, I just think, quite a startling line. And it's just one of those lines in a poem that'll wake me up a bit and think, whoa. Yeah. And that's what happened. When I heard someone recite this, I thought, that's amazing. I have to read more of those poems.
2:37 Erin: It's confident. It's so confident. It's not like if you feel like it's that maybe you should think about what does it mean to you. Maybe. I'm not saying that you should do this. I'm just saying it worked for me.
2:49 Wes: Well, look, it's easy to be confident when the person you're giving advice to is a dead toddler. I'm sorry. Right, so isn't that part of the backstory to this poem?
3:04 Erin: Okay, first of all, I think she was five. That's not a toddler.
3:09 Wes: Sorry.
3:12 Erin: Five for six, maybe. Yeah. Oh, wow, you're. That's dark.
3:18 Wes: Am I wrong?
3:19 Erin: No, you're not wrong.
3:20 Wes: This is addressed to her, right?
3:22 Erin: Yeah, it's really. Then for her parents. No, just get over it. Act like. Act like she was dead all along. Then it won't matter that much that she's not here. Jeez.
3:38 Wes: Wow.
3:38 Erin: This goes right to the top of our darkest episode.
3:41 Wes: So it was the playmate of one of his. Playmate of who?
3:45 Erin: Okay, I just want to point out that her name was Vera Ukama Knoop. What a name.
3:50 Wes: Knoop.
3:52 Erin: But Vera. Vera is the first name. Yes.
3:54 Wes: So, yeah, so it was a playmate of Rilke's daughter, Ruth. Ah. Oh.
3:59 Erin: It says vera died at 19.
4:00 Wes: Oh. So, okay, so I misunderstood this.
4:05 Erin: You're just a lot sicker. In your imagination, you made this much sicker.
4:10 Wes: That should have been obvious.
4:12 Erin: I thought she was like five or six.
4:13 Wes: The word playmate. Yeah, the word playmate caught me. Okay.
4:17 Erin: I don't know why I had that number in my head, but I was wrong.
4:21 Wes: Okay, so this is the death of a 19 year old.
4:24 Erin: Right. Which makes more sense, I suppose, but also it doesn't, because the central myth here is Orpheus and Eurydice, and that's about their marriage as two lovers of the same, you know, the same age. So how Vera fits into this is a little unclear to me.
4:41 Wes: Also, if I were writing to a dead 5 year old, I'd try to dumb down the language just a little
4:46 Erin: bit, you know, say night. Night. Okay, that's so bad.
4:52 Wes: That's the first. Everybody dies.
5:04 Erin: Good night, moon. And good night you.
5:08 Wes: That's great. Good night you. Okay, well, that makes a lot more sense. Yeah. So she's 19.
5:14 Erin: If it was a 19 year old boy, it would be called Die Hard and it would be okay.
5:20 Wes: Yeah. I think these poems go well together because we get a similar sort of paradoxical sentiment here to begin with. Although maybe. Yeah, I don't think you haven't read it yet. Yeah. Do you want to read it?
5:31 Erin: Oh, sure, sure. Be ahead of all parting as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter, that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. Be forever dead in Eurydice more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here in the realm of decline among momentary days be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang be and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that this once you may give it your perfect assent. To all that is used up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself and cancel the count.
6:28 Wes: So, yeah, I was going to say, be ahead of all parting. Similarly paradoxical sentiment. And it sounds, you know, once again, like. Well, in this case it sounds like foreclosure. On loss. It almost sounds like something that the Stoics would say, right, which is that you anticipate that everything will be lost and so you get ahead of it. Right. So in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, he thinks a little bit about, I'm going to get ahead of this today when I go out for a walk, I'm going to imagine that people are going to bump into me and get in my way.
And he really does this, by the way, and he's emperor, he's still doing this. People are going to aggravate me today and I'm just going to meditate in the morning and anticipate that, and therefore I'm going to be able to deal with it. Or if you're maybe Seneca or Epictetus, you prepare yourself for the fact that any object of attachment, person, place or thing can and will be lost. So it changes your comportment to them from the beginning. You get ahead of it. Now, I don't know, maybe we'll find out that that's not quite the right way to look at this, but that was my initial reaction.
7:38 Erin: Yeah. The line I thought of which. I don't know if this is a saying or if this is just something that Erin Sorkin made up, because it's a line that Abigail Bartlett says in the West Wing. But the idea of hold the fish loosely or it'll slip out of your hands. Right. So I'm wondering now if there are two different ideas here, because there seems to be this idea of holding the fish loosely on the one hand and then of using oneself up, of almost like bearing down with a vice grip on the other. Do you see that?
8:10 Wes: Yeah. Where are you getting that?
8:11 Erin: The crystal cup that shattered as it rang, destroying yourself. In other words, living with the knowledge that in living your life fully, you will use yourself up, but only through living fully will you actually live and therefore die with some sort of sense of satisfaction or fulfillment. In other words, without full investment, you live a kind of a half life, which will then result in death. Anyway, so there's something, I think, about being used, using yourself up here, which is a good thing.
8:42 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think this line you're thinking about here. Here in the realm of decline, which I take to be the realm of becoming and decay. It's the realm of the living, but it's the realm of the always dying. That's what we're doing, right? And momentary days, and we just have a few of them. Be the crystal cup that shattered even as. Even as it rang, which is an interesting way to put it, because you might say, be the cup that rang even as it shattered. So, you know, here you are among the mortal dying things and makes something of that. Turn that becoming and turn that dying into something ringing, into something brilliant.
But he's reversed that. So it shatters even as it. As it rings. But it. I don't know what it is. In the original German there. Klang, klang, schon, zerschlug. Clanging, I assume, is the ringing. It seems like the translator may have reversed it. Maybe Rilke didn't reverse it. Okay. Anyway, in the original. So I don't know that we can read anything into that, then.
9:48 Erin: Well, we have to get song and rang as a slant rhyme, so perhaps.
9:53 Wes: I see that that's what's going on. Yeah. Okay. Yep. All right. So let's not make anything of that reversal. So I see where you. Yeah. You were getting at this idea of being used up, I guess, which comes up in the last stanza as well. You know, I was also thinking as you were talking, this only makes sense to me so far as something that's written to someone who's alive. Yes. He says be forever dead in Eurydice, but then he addresses her as someone here in the realm of decline. And there are other parts in the poem where. I don't know. Does it seem to you like it's addressed to someone living?
10:33 Erin: Yes, it seems that this is for the living, reckoning with the loss of the person.
10:38 Wes: Okay.
10:38 Erin: This is specifically written for someone who's. Yeah. Who's undergone a loss. And that means it's for Orpheus, you know. So he is directly referencing, I think, the configuration, shall we say, of Orpheus and Eurydice on their way out of the Underworld by saying. As though it already were behind you. Right. So Eurydice famously is behind Orpheus as they're escaping from the Underworld. Right. And he turns and looks at her, and therefore she's lost forever. So this is addressed to the survivor, to the one left behind after the loss. Right.
11:15 Wes: Yeah. I was trying to figure out, on one level, it's addressed to Orpheus, and then I was wondering if on the other, it's addressed to.
11:22 Erin: To your. Yes.
11:24 Wes: I think it's both to died or to. Yeah. All right, so let's just think about Orpheus for now. Right.
11:30 Erin: I just want to say that, you know, I wonder if I'm bringing too much of my own because I love this crystal cup that shattered even as it rang line so much, and because I'm so interested in famous singers who have lost their voices or who destroyed their voices through overuse, that I am putting too much of an emphasis on this idea of burning brightly. And if that's affecting my ability to read this relatively clearly, because I'm very, very interested in that. In these.
12:00 Wes: Better to burn out than to fade away.
12:02 Erin: Exactly.
12:03 Wes: Let me just back up a little bit to the first stanza. What is. Okay. So be ahead of parting like the winter that has just gone by. So treat. A parting which apparently is forthcoming as something that's already happened. But then we are told to think of it, or to think of an endless A winner that is so endlessly winner that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. And then the question is, what does wintering through it mean? Because wintering is. Well, maybe I'm. Again, this is a problem with translation. I mean, doesn't wintering suggest somewhere you go, somewhere that's warm during the winter? No, it's not here. I guess it's just sort of hunkering down. But the winter is, I suppose, endless.
12:47 Erin: You're pointing out, I think, the difficulty of the syntax here. So there's the winter that has just gone by. So this is the cyclical, the seasonal, the winter that everybody experiences. And then I think he's referring to. For among these winters, there is one so endlessly winter. So over and above this cycle, there are winters that we personally experience. And he means to, I think, juxtapose these two things by saying, treat that winter, the winter that has come to you and the winter we all face in death. So we all have the cyclical winter that we experience every year.
We have the eternal winter that is ever ahead of us in death. And then we have these. I mean, this is my way of teasing this out. I could be wrong. And then we have these occasional winters, irrespective of place. Right. And time, which come to us because someone close to us specifically has died. Because we go through bad experiences. Right. So by winter, by wintering through that one, we can get to the other side of that. And that seems to be acceptance. And therefore the ability to kind of live in a spring knowing that this winter is sort of ever before you.
But it's paradoxical, right? Because you have to. Because there's an endless winter that you always have to be confronting, that you, at the same time have to be ignoring. Hence this idea of, you know, as I suggested, of holding the fish loosely. It's there, but you're not so fixated on it that you can't live as though it isn't there.
14:16 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think so. The endless winter is what happens after you lose someone. Which I think. Right. I'm echoing what you were saying.
14:25 Erin: I thought that was the winter we all go to. The endless winter is death. Our death.
14:30 Wes: Okay. Or it could be both.
14:32 Erin: Or both.
14:33 Wes: Right. So Orpheus in particular, I mean, I think could turn out to be a rumination on his particular approach to loss. Right? Which is to say, hey, I'm not gonna put up with that. I'm gonna go to Hades and get her back. And then at the final moment, told that he's not Allowed to look back. Looking back and losing her because of that. So the admonition to be ahead of all parting, I think, seems to be relevant to that moment. Or is it? I mean, he's supposed to be ahead of her and not like regaining her or holding onto her requires not looking back at her as he retrieves her.
15:11 Erin: Yes.
15:12 Wes: Yeah, maybe that's not connected. Maybe I can't really make this connection to being ahead of all parting.
15:18 Erin: She has this untimely death. She's bitten by the snake. So. Yeah, so she's ripped from him. And rather than accepting that he goes down to the underworld, and because his song is so beautiful, Hades allows him to retrieve her on the condition that he does not look back and he doesn't hear her footsteps. So he's worried the gods have played a trick on him. And so it seems to be you can get something back, but only once. You know, there's something about the fact that he has to make sure that she's there that causes him to lose her the second time. And the second time is the irreversible time.
15:52 Wes: Well, there's a certain lack of faith in that maybe.
15:56 Erin: Yeah.
15:57 Wes: You know, it was occurring to me, too, that this is another example of the power of poetry to retrieve the object, so to speak, the object of desire. Right. Metaphor retrieves it. We were thinking in the previous poem about transference, although I didn't specifically use that word, but the ways in which our relationships to others can be patterned on, and in a way mean some prototypical relationship with the first object of love, you know, the maternal object or paternal. And then the experience of poetry and metaphor. Right. I was suggesting, could be evocative of a.
A true merger experience, a reconnection to the love object in a way that's typically not possible. And it does that by showing us that things in the world that seem to be radically separate are on some level the same. That's what metaphor seems to suggest here. Right. So here we have him engaging in this object retrieval. So it's very apt. And he can do it by way of his song, by way of his poetry, ultimately.
17:00 Erin: But then.
17:01 Wes: But he. I mean. Or he couldn't do it. He could, partly.
17:04 Erin: Well, he can. He can retrieve it.
17:05 Wes: But.
17:06 Erin: But then the anxiety is what intervenes. Right. So. So retrieval is possible so long as you don't somehow get in your own way. Or maybe it isn't possible. Maybe. Maybe that's the. The anxiety will always cause you to falter.
17:19 Wes: Yeah, but. So why. Why is he given that command to not, you know, you can have her if you don't look back. What is that about? This is Hades himself. Right. Who gives this command, I think. Right.
17:31 Erin: What's that old, old term from the Middle Ages? Uxoriousness or something like that. Right. When one is too in love with one's wife. So there's a. You know, there's supposed to be, okay, you can have her, but only if you're not too obsessed. Something about. No, I'm joking, of course. But he's anxious that he's lost her. So, yes, there's a lack of faith and an anxiety over the fact that she might not actually be there. And by looking back, by being anxious over having lost her, that is what causes him to lose her.
18:03 Wes: Well, I think you're onto something too, with uxoriousness, because it's almost like he's a bit too eager, Right?
18:09 Erin: Yes.
18:09 Wes: He's allowed to look at her once he gets her into the.
18:11 Erin: Yes.
18:12 Wes: Up into the regular world. But this journey, this part of the journey that is in the Underworld. Yeah. For whatever reason, he ought not to look at her until that's over. And maybe it's a way of saying that the trick is that she doesn't actually exist and he needs to not notice that in order to revive her. As long as she's dead, she's not really there, even if he's leading her out of Hades. And it's not productive for you to remind yourself that she's dead by looking at a dead person. I mean, she's not alive technically, right. Until she gets out of Hades. Do you see what I'm saying? So in other words, he needs to believe in some way, maybe as the upshot.
18:54 Erin: That's right. And also he needs to follow through on that belief. He needs to have the full experience. So one of the things that the Orpheus and Eurydice mythos is invoking, though I think the Persephone myth comes later, is this idea of, like the winter in the, you know, Persephone, when she's up above, not in the underworld, right. It's spring. And when she goes down below, it's winter. Right. So the idea, you have to winter through it. You have to go all the way through. You have to make it all the way up out of winter before you can turn around and look at the object of desire. And so by not allowing himself to finish that journey, somehow by turning before he had been through, going through the winter of the underworld experience, what he hasn't allowed himself to fully experience the loss. He hasn't gone through some sort of full psychological experience.
19:46 Wes: Well, it may, you know, it may accrue to him, especially as a poet, to lose her, in other words. Right. To the extent that we do this psychologically, if we lose someone and we engage in the fantasy that they're not gone, that we've been able to retrieve them, that's not healthy. We have to do a little reality testing and figure out that they are in fact dead and let go, mourn, grief, all of that stuff. So this seems to be suggesting that grieving Eurydice is the right thing to do. And also on top of that, it allows him to seamlessly to rise into the seamless life proclaimed in his song. Right. So his ability to be a musician, a poet, is related to that ability to leave her behind and to be dead in her. Although that's a very strong way to put it, be forever dead in Eurydice. So the suggestion is almost that he would have lost his powers if he had gotten her to the well.
20:46 Erin: In fact, he did. He didn't lose them so much as because of his devastation over having turned and looked and lost her that way. He goes through a kind of artistic winter, if you like, where he's too sad to be able to return to his song. So there's this sort of artistic winter that he experiences after that where he no longer plays.
21:06 Wes: Well, you know the best way to get out of that? Just get ripped apart by the bacchae.
21:10 Erin: Yeah, that always works.
21:14 Wes: That's the way he comes to an end. Right. Like Pentheus. He gets ripped up by frenzied women. No, I think it's the.
21:21 Erin: Oh, is it? It's the Bacchae. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I'm thinking of what's his face. Orestes.
21:27 Wes: Okay, Right, right.
21:28 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he rejects them because he's so upset over Eurydice that he never. He doesn't want to ever get with any other woman. So that's part of it. He doesn't get over her.
21:39 Wes: Right. So he denies Eros its due. He denies the ecstatic and the denied Dionysian. It's due because he's stuck with not being able to get over someone. But that'll get you out of it. So in a way. Right, yeah. To be ripped up by the bacchae. It's like having the ecstatic imposed upon you from the outside. Right. If you can't do it, it psychologically, you just get it done to you
22:03 Erin: physically, it's like when all your buddies are like, okay, we're going to the strip club. Let's go. I'm not advocating for that. Don't ever go to a strip club.
22:15 Wes: I'm not into that. I just. I don't like it.
22:19 Erin: You don't have a choice.
22:20 Wes: You know what's going to happen if you don't? The strippers will rip you apart. They will find you and rip you apart. So just do yourself a favor anyway. You do it the easy way or the hard way.
22:34 Erin: So you'll more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song or be ripped at the seams into. Yes, sorry.
22:44 Wes: Yeah, very good. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a good point. Seamless is in. There's more unity and less conflict in this sort of life. So in other words, he's got. Sorry, he's gotten rid of the old ball and chain here, is what it seems like.
23:01 Erin: Well, I think what this.
23:02 Wes: He's got more time to devote to his work.
23:05 Erin: Okay, well, I think you're right. I just want to say, I think you're right, that the problem was the retrieval. Right. The whole idea that he couldn't give. Yes, Now I'm getting it. Okay. Took me a little while. Right. But the whole idea that he went after her in the first place, and of course that's impossible. She's dead. You can't get it back. You can never go home again. That is what needed to be accepted. And so he was always going to look back because the. The impulse to go and retrieve her in the first place is the looking back impulse. It's the.
23:35 Wes: Yeah, yes.
23:36 Erin: Okay, I get it.
23:37 Wes: Good point.
23:38 Erin: I can be taught.
23:38 Wes: Yeah.
23:39 Erin: I mean, well, can finally learn this myth. After all this time, I finally get it.
23:46 Wes: All right, so he's being admonished to do something that he already failed to do, which is another interesting aspect of this. Right. He's being advised to do something he failed to do. So it's almost like he's being addressed before the moment where he actually descends into Hades. He's getting this advice from an elder.
24:03 Erin: Well, this is maybe in the middle of the. Just thinking through that. I mean, this just occurs to me, maybe this is in the middle then of the anhedonia. That comes after the second. You know, this is in the middle of the point of no artistic production. And he's trying to be. Right. He's being spurred back into artistic production.
24:20 Wes: Okay.
24:20 Erin: Yeah, potentially. So that's.
24:22 Wes: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.
24:25 Erin: And then be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang, becomes the. You know, put yourself back on the line for artistic production's sake. Right. Because that's the ringing is the song, perhaps.
24:38 Wes: Yeah. So he can take his loss and make art out of it. That's the admonition. But then we get be. So this is my favorite admonition. Just be. Hey, even if it's just sitting on the couch watching tv, just be, Man. Be.
24:57 Erin: I heard a podcast where someone said you're a human being, not a human doing, which is really New Agey, but I thought it was profound at the moment.
25:09 Wes: Yeah. It's good to be reminded of that. Yeah. Really.
25:12 Erin: Especially when you're a workaholic. Yeah.
25:13 Wes: And in this case, it is really. Yeah. I just found this very touching hearing it recited. It is like a palliative. It's a little chicken soup for the soul when you hear it. But, yeah. Be and yet know the great void where all things begin.
25:31 Erin: Be and yet know that you are not being in fact, or that you know that ultimately all being will come to an end.
25:40 Wes: Well, yeah, so there's the perspective part of it. There's, you know, be and yet know you're gonna die. But that end point in debt, that is also the. That's where it all begins as well. So this is. Right. It's an interesting idea because it's an ancient one. The ancient Greeks didn't like to stop with just God, you know. Right. What's before God? Well, nothing. Nothingness and void. Although I guess there's a bit of that in the Old Testament. And then the face of the deep. Right. So, yeah. Anyway, the idea that the ultimate foundation to things is a nothingness or void or a chaos. So it's not just where we're going, but in a way, it is a source of life. It's something that we can tap into. So the infinite source of your most intense vibration.
26:26 Erin: Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. No, that actually sparked the image in my mind of, say, the pool of water that you're sort of coming out of and then going back into in a circle and that. That recapitulates. Right. The trip to the underworld and the reemergence and the bat. You know, that in itself is like the, you know, the cyclical seasons, the. Whatever we want to call it. Right. So, yeah, just that image you evoked for me is very. I think it's very apt.
26:53 Wes: So know, the great void, you know, we ought not to forget about it. And I guess I suppose that is what we do. It's part of the manic defense is to forget about mortality and I suppose to forget about the time we spent several billion years not existing. We make an awful lot of this very temporary existence that we have. It wasn't so bad before we existed, but anyway, so wanting to be connected to this before times where one is only potentiality. My existence is only part of one possible future. And there's something about being connected to that. I think that's very interesting. So it sounds like with intense vibration, right. It's supposed to be a kind of inspiration, right? This is a muse, in a way. We can be inspired by this. And why is that?
27:44 Erin: Well, arguably, I think all poetry is. I'm not the first person to ever posit this by far, but someone was saying the other day in some context that they were reading that all poetry is elegy on some level. Right? All poetry, all artistic production is. It's mourning a loss, in a way. And therefore, that is both the incitement to create and the end of that creativity. Right. So that somehow, whether it be because of the loss of something or because of the knowledge of one's own eventual loss, one is spurred into creation. And that is the source of whatever the heightened purpose that you have is that intense vibration.
That's what gives it meaning and purpose and organization. I think we talked about this in several other episodes. The idea that we wouldn't produce anything unless we knew that we were going to die. Right. Like, the idea is that you could always keep going and never actually bother to do anything because you knew you would always have more time. And it's the knowledge of mortality that actually spurs any progress at all, oddly enough.
28:47 Wes: Yeah.
28:48 Erin: I can't remember in what context we spoke about that, but I think that's. I think that's something being invoked here.
28:54 Wes: Well, we didn't do the Tempest, did we?
28:56 Erin: No. Winter's Tale.
28:58 Wes: That was the before times, but I think I've mentioned it before, that I've talked about the Tempest a bit in other episodes where one of the ideas there in the Tempest is that there's a relationship between revenge, fantasy and artistic creativity. So I wrote something called Poesis as Revenge Forsaken the idea that. Right. Because Prospero, he. In a way, he's in the position of the playwright and he's in magical control of all these people who end up on his island. And he's in the perfect position simply to take revenge on him. Revenge on them.
But he changes his mind and then gives up his rough powers. This is also part of my why we procrastinate. Course we procrastinate. Because we want revenge. Right. So in other words, we have the moment of loss and there's a manic moment in creativity, which is kind of what I was describing with merger and poetry is, you know, the metaphor is a way of accomplishing that. But the second moment is mourning and loss. And if we don't do that, we can't get there artistically. So we have to give up the rough magic part of it. And part of the way that's done is just to give the object over to another is just to make it public and something for public scrutiny.
Right. We let go of the artistic production. Does that make sense? So anyway, so that's the way I think about. Yeah, that's the way I think about here. How loss is related to this, to all that is used up.
30:32 Erin: And this is related to muffled and
30:34 Wes: dumb creatures in the world's full reserve. So when I read full reserve, I was wondering, okay, is he talking about the pre life? Right. Is he talking about the unborn? Yeah. At first I just thought, is he talking about my cat? Muffled and dumb? But then I thought, the world's full reserve. It sounds like. Because used up sounds like the dead. Oh, you think those who are part of. Or.
31:02 Erin: Yeah, that must be. It can't just be the people that have retired.
31:05 Wes: Death or people who've. Yeah. Or well, maybe people who've reached the end of their lives. Maybe not retirement, but. But reached the end of their life. But. Yeah. So in contrast to that full reserve sounds like the unborn or really those are about to be born.
31:20 Erin: That's embarrassing. I thought with muffled and dumb that reserve was something like keeping one's own countenance, but that doesn't make any sense.
31:29 Wes: Oh, okay.
31:31 Erin: The world's inexpressibility.
31:33 Wes: Right, right. Okay. Yeah. I mean.
31:35 Erin: No, no, no, no.
31:37 Wes: That's not the unsayable sums. So we have three different elements here. The used up, the unborn and the unsayable sums. Add yourself and cancel the count. So what is he adding? Add yourself to what? Which pot are you adding yourself to?
31:55 Erin: He's saying basically destroy yourself and thereby add yourself to. Somehow if you get past the fear of the void and you just decide that you're going to risk self destruction, then the void contains both the dead and the preborn, as you're suggesting. I think. So you enter back into this realm
32:17 Wes: of possibility and they may be the same. Right. As in Plato's souls, you just get recycled.
32:24 Erin: Exactly, exactly.
32:25 Wes: God is on some Schemes.
32:27 Erin: This is God's green new deal.
32:29 Wes: Yeah, this will make sense. This will make sense if the used up and the reserve are the same thing.
32:35 Erin: But.
32:35 Wes: Yeah, go ahead.
32:36 Erin: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, that will free you to both confront death, to winter through things and to emerge in spring at the same time. Right. So you go back to the cauldron where everything came from. And so if you throw yourself away, you'll find yourself in that.
32:56 Wes: Yeah. So add yourself, which is to say, I guess, embrace the realm of decline. And the canceling of the count seems to be just a matter of the fact that the used up is recycled in parallel to shattering and ringing. Right.
33:13 Erin: No, I wasn't sure if cancellation there was like both sides of the equation, like an algebraic, you know, canceling out, or if one should just stop keeping score, keeping track, you know, being very miserly, perhaps, about how much one is spending of one's energy, of one's resources. I don't know enough about math to know what exactly might be suggested there or what possibilities are being suggested.
33:42 Wes: Vernichte die Zahl seems to be the German. Yeah, I don't know. So is it an idiomatic here?
33:51 Erin: Right.
33:52 Wes: And if so, what idiom? But it sounded. Yeah, I was taking it as kind of the balancing out the sheets or. I see, again, there's a bit of a paradox here, because if we're thinking of two heaps, one used up and one in reserve, and you're being admonished to add yourself to what, to which heap they turn out to be the same heap. Heap. So they have already canceled each other out.
34:16 Erin: That's right.
34:17 Wes: And you, by adding yourself, continue the cancellation because you are recycling yourself. But more importantly, within life, by embracing the winter and the decline, you can draw inspiration. You can draw. Right. The void is also the infinite source of intense vibration. So you live more fully by drawing on this reservoir of death. Right. Because death is also rebirth.
34:46 Erin: And by giving your perfect assent to that, I think you're doing something that both. I love this. This is so helpful for me. These two piles, you are. By adding yourself to it, by actually giving your assent, you're doing something that neither pile can do.
35:02 Wes: Right.
35:02 Erin: The dead don't have a choice but to be dead, and the preborn don't have a choice because they have no will. They're pre will and the others are post will. So you can be, you know, so you can cancel the count by. With your will, choosing to cancel yourself out somehow. Right. I think that assent is important yeah, very good.
35:23 Wes: And I don't think I understood unsayable sums now here, until now, which is. Well, the word sum is evocative of count, but also it's just the innumerable number of people who have lived and will live at countless. In other words, unsayable sums as in countless.
35:40 Erin: And the sum too suggests the full circle.
35:42 Wes: Right?
35:43 Erin: Everything.
35:43 Wes: Yeah. So one adds oneself to the countless and therefore cancels the counting. I think there is something to what you were saying about that with the canceling of the counting.
35:54 Erin: Yeah.
35:55 Wes: Okay, so how does this, you know, before we end, how does this. Thought about this? With respect. You know, I guess we've addressed this with respect to Orpheus and the poetic. But can we make it relate to the death of this young girl, young woman?
36:08 Erin: I don't know, because so much of this. Well, yes, actually.
36:12 Wes: Or at least to the people who are mourning her. I guess they're in the position of Orpheus, right?
36:16 Erin: Yeah, yes, they are. And yet at the same time, right. This very quickly goes from, and I think this was my kind of confusion at the beginning, very quickly goes from this idea of like mourning a loss to sort of mourning yourself. That changes with be forever dead in Eurydice. Right. So your Orpheus and Eurydice, you have to. And I think what he's saying ultimately, just as he puts both piles in the same pile or points out that they're the same pile, anytime we mourn someone's loss, we're just mourning ourselves or we're mourning a version of ourselves with them.
Right. That would make sense. But I don't like the idea that somehow like everybody's death is just a reminder of our own death. So we're only ever mourning ourselves. But if we could say that we're mourning ourselves insofar as each of us has a self conception which is related to a certain kind of community and that any loss in that community will represent some sort of a reconfiguration of our own interiority, then that is a loss to ourselves in some way that's deeper than just now. I'm scared to die because someone near me has died and it recalls my own mortality to me.
Right. That seems too self centered. This is really about a whole universe, a whole configuration of ourselves and other people. Right. That is about things bigger than us. So all of that to say, I think that it starts out trying to help someone get over grief and then it evolves into this idea of getting over one's own death. So it's sort of like speaking to Vera from beyond the grave and telling us to sort of occupy that grave with Vera at the same time. So we're collapsed with her. Is that too woo woo or what?
38:00 Wes: No.
38:00 Erin: Okay.
38:01 Wes: I don't think so. It makes sense. Are we ready to add ourselves to the count?
38:07 Erin: Yeah, I gotta climb into the coffin.
38:10 Wes: Are we down for the count?
38:11 Erin: Yeah, that's right. That's right.
38:13 Wes: I think we're down for the count.
38:15 Erin: Think we are.
38:16 Wes: Okay, thank you.
38:17 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Feb 11, 2025
In his poem “You Who Never Arrived,” Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility, and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), he seems to claim that poetry has the capacity to redeem such losses—and retrieve them, so to speak, from their underworld. Wes & Erin discuss these two classics, and whether—as Rilke suggests—death can be put in service of life, and suffering sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: In his poem, you, who Never Arrived, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In Be Ahead of all parting, section 2, number 13 from his sonnets to Orpheus, he seems to claim that poetry has the capacity to redeem such losses and retrieve them, so to speak, from their underworld. Today we discuss these two classics and whether, as Rilke suggests, death can be put in the service of life and suffering, sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence.
This is Wes Alwan, and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I can't say I'm awfully familiar with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I did teach his letters to a young poet at some point to a freshman seminar at a small liberal arts school where I had been invited to teach and taught a class on. It was called why We Procrastinate, but it was really kind of a psychoanalysis in the arts class. It was about, but with a focus on creative blocks or really the psychology of creativity. It went over about as well as everything else I did in that class, which was not good because I hadn't taught in a long time.
My teaching experience before that was mainly as a teaching assistant at the University of Texas.
1:56 Erin: I thought you were going to say you never actually got to the Rilke because you just kept putting it off and putting it off.
2:01 Wes: No, right. Exactly. What I did is I went through it very systematically. I was very impressed by that and hopefully we'll do that at some point on this show. I was so systematic I even created a PowerPoint to accompany my lecture, which is like a very. Seems very against the spirit of Rilke in general. So yeah, beyond teaching that class, I wasn't all that familiar with Rilke. In fact, I think for a long time as a youngster, I thought he was female, even though ironically, he changed his first name from René to Rainer at the behest of Lou Andreas-Salomé, who thought Rene was too feminine. So that's my level of expertise on this, and I Was hoping. Yeah, I was hoping.
2:44 Erin: Throw me under the bus.
2:45 Wes: You would. Yeah. So hoping you would be a guide. Whether you're a guide or not, I'm sure you know a lot more about Rilke than I do. And tell me about your experience with him.
2:55 Erin: I don't think I do. I read Letters to a Young Poet a long time ago. I don't even know when. Maybe high school, maybe college. I'm familiar with some of his greatest poems. I've read Sonnets to Orpheus. I've read some of the individual poems, but I don't think I've ever read or. And I have. I think I have a copy of his Book of Hours. I've not read his novel, though. I'm interested in reading the novels of poets. Yeah. Otherwise, in terms of, you know, I had a professor who really was a big fan of Rilke, and so that encouraged me to sort of read around in his Collected Works.
Otherwise, as I told you before we recorded, I've been shredding. I've been shredding stuff to make more room, and I realized, oh, the file on Rilke, whatever I had in my brain is gone. I don't know if you know, SpongeBob. The. Yeah, the shredder imagery is something I keep returning to lately as I get ready to take my exams and something like 11 days. No, 10 days now. Oh, scary. Yeah. So, you know, he shreds everything but his name.
3:53 Wes: Or.
3:54 Erin: No, no, he threw out his name. He shreds fine dining. He shreds everything but fine dining and breathing in order to be the world's greatest waiter. So there's something. Something like that there. I. I just. I used to know a bit about Rilke, but it's either locked in somewhere deep or shredded.
4:10 Wes: All right, well, we'll have to rediscover it.
4:12 Erin: Yes.
4:13 Wes: We'll have to dredge it up and put the shreds back together, assemble them on the floor. You sent me a few different options for poems, and I thought to myself, I bet I'm going to pick the two ones that are her. That are Erin's favorites.
4:27 Erin: You just picked the one. You just picked one of the ones
4:30 Wes: that says the second one wasn't. The second one was one that. When I was in London recently, I was at someone's house at a party, and one of these people started reciting that poem. And I was very touched by it, and I was hoping it would be. I was just waiting to see. I didn't suggest it. I was waiting to see if you would Suggest it. And you did. So I thought that was very kismet. I was really happy that that was one of the ones. So, of course, I immediately picked that one.
4:55 Erin: It's a top five for me. But I thought you were gonna get one and two. But not that I have a detailed ranking system.
5:02 Wes: What was number two?
5:03 Erin: Archaic. Torso of Apollo.
5:05 Wes: Just the torso, not the rest. Just kidding.
5:07 Erin: Yeah. That's the whole point of the poem, Wes.
5:11 Wes: I did. I skimmed it. Everything else. Skimmed.
5:16 Erin: It is literally just the torso.
5:18 Wes: I do just the torso of reading each time.
5:22 Erin: Ah, that's right.
5:23 Wes: So, yeah. So you. You who never arrived, we'll do in part one and the sonnet to Orpheus, which I'll call Be Ahead of All Parting to. Is it part two? Yeah, part two. Number 13. Be Ahead of All Parting. That'll be what we'll do in part two of this episode.
5:39 Erin: Or as I like to call it, be a torso of all parting. Sorry.
5:44 Wes: Be a torso of some parts. Some parting. Of some parting. Yeah. You who Never arrived. So this is your favorite.
5:52 Erin: And.
5:52 Wes: Yeah. Tell me why that is.
5:54 Erin: The details in this, I don't know. They're very evocative to me. I hadn't reread it in a long time. And rereading it for this, I noticed that this has made its influence felt in a couple of my poems without me realizing it. I don't know if it's something that any reader would pick up on or if it's something that only I can see now. In hindsight. Yeah. But I love the idea. I think of elegy for an unrealized possibility. That kind of paradox is fascinating to me. But in the places in my own work where I see Rilke's influence are in the parts of my work which are elegy.
And I would say, like, I write a lot of elegy. And so there's something very elegiac about this poem, even though it's for someone, of course, who he has not met yet, or at least that's my reading, that he's not met this person. I don't know if you can argue that he might have met them but lost them, but maybe. Maybe that's an argument that can be made. I don't know what. What you think about that.
6:54 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Now that you say that, I can see that there's several different ways to interpret this, but. Yeah, why don't you go ahead and read it and then we can discuss.
7:02 Erin: Okay. You who never arrived in my arms, beloved, who Were lost from the start. I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me, the far off, deeply felt landscape, cities, towers and bridges and unsuspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods, all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me, you, beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house, and you almost stepped out, pensive to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon, you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence, and startled, gave back my too sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate in the evening.
8:13 Wes: You know, it's funny, as you were reading that, I was reminded of Baudelaire's the Balcony, which I was incepted, I think, by the introduction to this edition we're using, where he mentions the influence of Baudelaire, I think. Who is the author? Do you remember? We're using the Penguin, or I might be getting that wrong.
8:34 Erin: No, we're using the Vintage. It's translated by Stephen Mitchell, which I think is the most beautiful translation. It's not the most accurate, but it's the most beautiful. So accurate, in a way.
8:45 Wes: And there's an essay called Looking for Rilke at the beginning, and that is by.
8:51 Erin: Oh, is that by Robert Hass? I did not read it.
8:55 Wes: Yes, that's by Robert Hass or Haas.
8:59 Erin: No one knows, possibly.
9:02 Wes: Yeah, so he mentions that. Yeah, that Baudelaire influence. But I think he's talking about the Duino elegies. And maybe I read it somewhere else. I'm not even sure I read it in that. That particular essay. But yeah, so you who never arrived in my arms, beloved, who were lost from the start. So I really like the way you put this as an elegy for an unrealized possibility. And then the question is, how unrealized? Is it Prufrock? Did he see her but never make a move? Or is he just imagining this person? Did he never even see her? Did he never even meet someone who he thought might fit the bill? Right. This could just be an idealization. It sounds like you were taking it like it might have been. The former would have been your initial interpretation.
9:46 Erin: Yeah. There's this really interesting dance, though, I think, between what constitutes unrealized possibility in the poem and whether or not he actually is Eulogizing it, because it seems that in the second stanza he is in fact keeping hope alive. And also that meeting this love that he trusts is out there and who represents something like certainty, right, that once you meet this perfect person, then things are going to look rather set, rather decided. The flip side of that is that that means the death of possibility, right? The death of the multiple possibilities of what's still out there waiting for you.
So it's a strange thing because though he's lamenting possibility on the one hand, that is to say, the possibility of love with some particular person, he is at the same time opening himself up to possibilities sort of continually, it seems that's the theme, that possibilities are actually in fact, ever before him. Because he hasn't achieved this love that he desires or met this love that he desires. So it's sort of like possibility is foreclosed to him. And at the same time, possibility is the. It's the air he breathes, it's the realm he lives in.
Everything is possibility. Everything is charged with this potential.
11:10 Wes: So lost from the start.
11:12 Erin: Yeah, lost is, I think, the fulcrum word there. Because that would imply, right, that something was taken away, that you had it in the first place and then it was taken away from you.
11:21 Wes: Right. Which I take to be ironic or. Yeah, so there's an internal contradiction between saying from the start and lost. So it's a question how she could be lost before she's found. Except, you know, insofar as it's in fantasy, I don't even know what songs would please you. So the movement there from the idea of losing or, you know, of having never had as a kind of loss to write, what songs would please you. It seems as if the idea there is courting or seducing, and so he's attributing it to failure of courtship. Although, again, it seems like courtship itself may never have even been a possibility.
If this is just a fantasy. But it may also be the case that, you know, if we were to think about this realistically, if he doesn't have a fleshed out fantasy of what it is that he wants, of the kind of person that he wants, then he wouldn't be able to recognize her when he saw her, at least not in another person. We're going to get images of him recognizing her in a mirror, like in the distortion of his own image in the mirror or in an empty window or an empty street, things like that. But you can have a fantasy that's vague, that's projected onto absence, but not something, it seems to me, that he could project onto a particular person.
But you know, here he doesn't say, I didn't know what I wanted, so I couldn't recognize the person if I happened to run into them. He's saying I didn't have the right, I didn't know how to court this person. So again, if we are in the realm of fantasy, it's almost like saying I didn't know how to negotiate with the fantasy. I don't know. I guess the two things go together. Being able to conceive of the one you want and being able to conceive of the procedure that you would use to win them over. I guess those two things are very closely related.
13:21 Erin: Going back for one second, this is recasting beloved who were lost from the start. You know, I wonder if that implies, is it the Platonic idea of the split souls, that we're two halves of one soul?
13:34 Wes: Well, this is from the Symposium. And in the Symposium it's Aristophanes idea, but it's a model of love that Socrates rejects in that dialogue in favor of a more dynamic idea. So the Aristophanes proposal in the Symposium, a bunch of people give their proposals before Socrates gives his and rejects each proposal in turn. Although one might argue that maybe he's picked up a piece of each account and used it in his own account. And this is actually very relevant. I'm glad you brought this up. Socrates doesn't like the merger, what I would call the merger theory of love.
Oh, I found my soulmate. You complete me. Socrates is not a fan of that kind of love. And the myth for Aristophanes, right, is people were, in former times, they were joined at the back. So they were these four limbed creatures. And then the gods got angry at human beings and cut them down the back. Were they joined at the front? It makes more sense that they were joined at the front. Why have I never thought of this? This is copulation. You sort of restore the unity by copulation. Anyway, yeah, finding your other half, literally finding your other half or merging with someone, that's what Socrates doesn't like.
Socrates thinks of love more as something that's essentially reproductive, including in the aesthetic sense. It's something about beauty. So beauty induces you into a kind of activity. That is what love is. But yeah. So why did you, why did you bring that up?
15:04 Erin: Just because this idea of someone being lost from the start, I think implies this soulmate model of relationship where that person is, if you haven't met Them, yet they're both known and unknown to you. Right? There's a level of knowing that is, I think, inherent to this idea of the soulmate. It's that recognition. When I see you, I will recognize you, or when I interact with you or, you know, whatever. And when we go on our third date and I look into your eyes, I will know, right? Oh, you were the one all along. Right? You were the soulmate. That knowing and then not having met them yet would line up with this idea of being lost from the start.
I think that this is played out throughout the poem, this idea of like, oh, you were there. I know you were there. I know you were on that street, or you were just in front of those mirrors. But I just miss you, you know, I just missed the possibility of meeting you. So this implies someone who is kind of known on some level and yet who is unknown in the fact that, you know, he doesn't know what songs would please her. And so there's a specificity to this person and an anonymity at the same time. And I wonder if I don't know what songs would please you is also self criticism.
I'm wondering too if this repeated theme of him looking at the sort of the frame of the open door in the country house or looking at himself in the mirror is the signal of his own. He's not actually oriented towards trying to. Which I think is a variation in what you're trying to say. Which is. Which is he's not really oriented towards her. He's not really oriented towards this idea of knowing finding the soulmate. He's kind of thrown up his hands and said, well, you know, because I've never met you, I don't know what songs would please you. That seems to me to be both a failure of imagination in terms of imagining what, as I think you suggested what his fantasy woman, you know, what kind of woman he wants, what she would be interested in.
So sort of like failure of empathetic imagination to get into the mind of this person, even if they're imaginary. And also a failure of this soulmate theory, right? Because if she were your soulmate, wouldn't you know what song she would like? You know, it would come to you. You wouldn't be anxious about this at any point, perhaps, because, well, if you didn't know her, then maybe you wouldn't know what songs she would like. But the idea would be if you did know her, you would know because she's your. She's your other half, you know. So once you met her and you put it together, you would somehow be imbued with this knowledge.
There's a failure on the known side and on the unknown side. I think that this is. This is him being very subtly self critical.
17:42 Wes: Yeah. I think we're warmed up enough now for me to talk about psychoanalysis. It's too early.
17:50 Erin: All right, let me drink my coffee.
17:51 Wes: Because the psychoanalyst would be chomping at the bit with this. Well, especially knowing that Rilke had some exposure to psychoanalysis because he was in a situationship, I guess, with Salome.
18:04 Erin: That's as close as it comes. They shared a meal once, you might say.
18:12 Wes: So let's talk about the original beloved. The original beloved, the love object. Or isn't, oh, no, what they like to call it. Is it going to be Mommy the object. Mommy is just the object in psychoanalysis. What a wonderful way to refer to Mommy. But it becomes everyone, of course. Well, to some extent it's Mommy and Daddy. Right. But it's both for everyone in different ways. But principally the maternal object, it's an object of desire. That's why the word object is. Is used. And in the beginning, it's someone who, as an infant, they're not another subject for you because you don't have a theory of mind yet.
They have a kind of quasi divine quality. We can speculate, and they can feed you and love you and keep you alive and give you affection. So there's a purity to that. Finding out. It's kind of the Oedipus complex is really about finding out that someone, that the mother has a mind, is a subject, has her own interests outside of the infant. Right. It's not merely merger. What you find out is that it's not merely about merger and it's something that has to be mourned. The subjectivity of the other, of the mother and the other is something that has to be mourned.
So the loss from the start in this sense is the loss inherent in the inevitable failure of the ideal. Now, some people don't ever get over this loss and they have manic defenses to preserve it. So, for instance, one way of dealing with it is to imbue one's ambitions, one's apparently sublimating activities, including being an artist with the quality of being connected to the maternal object. Right. So onto this idealized object. So, for instance, you know, if I'm a writer, it's not just that, oh, this is an enjoyable thing to do. I'm, you know, sublimating my libido into Something that feels good.
It is. This is what reconnects me to that feeling of merger, that oceanic feeling, as Freud once called it. It can become grandiose. It can become. I am connected to this perfect being. I am this perfect being. Something like that. So those two things kind of go together. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is that love, in its mature form, incorporates this moment of mourning, the subjectivity of the other, and mourning what you mentioned, the merger theory, getting beyond that, because the other is an independent subject. This is, of course, something that socially is often not accomplished, which is how and why the subjection of women occurs.
Putting someone in a veil, for instance. And I think what's implicated here is this relationship to the maternal and the idea that it has to be controlled and kept pure. Right. So women aren't allowed to have sexual desire. Women aren't allowed to have an interest in work, because that's an interest that takes away interest from me. The baby.
21:18 Erin: The baby, yeah. Yeah.
21:20 Wes: She has to be only interested in me. So there's loss from the. But if he, as an adult, is going to find someone, then he's not going to find them unless his desire is relieved of its need for purity. So there needs to be loss. There needs to be an incorporation of that loss.
21:42 Erin: So how, then. I don't want to skip over the surging wave of the next moment, which is such a great line, but how are the images in him, the landscapes, everything incorporated? I think this would be the natural place to then ask you how is that part of this psychoanalytic structure that he's writing from? The idea that even these disembodied, These landscapes are. I have a reading of this, but I'm guessing it's different.
22:06 Wes: Yeah, I want to hear your reading because I'm too corrupted by this, and so maybe I'm too quick to see this structure. But I will say when he starts talking about the landscape and cities and towers. So I think ambition, and this is the moment that is supposed to separate you from the maternal ideal. It's more associated with paternal identification, but it can incorporate, as I said, the maternal imago, or this connection to a grandiose ideal object and one's own grandiosity, thereby, it can be too charged with that. And this is why often people are stuck in their creative pursuits.
This is often why they're blocked, because the stakes are way, way too high for what. What they're doing. So if you are finding. If what you're. You know, every ambitious project has the Significance of reunion, reunification with the perfect other. There are all sorts of dangers to that reunification, Right. Loss of self. It's fraught with all sorts of problems. So I thought it was quite significant that, you know, he looks at all these things which ought to separate him from her and give him enough distance, but it all. They all rise within me to mean you who forever elude me.
And they elude him precisely because they mean. I mean, she eludes him precisely because they mean her. If they didn't mean her, she would be less elusive. You see what I'm saying?
23:30 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
23:31 Wes: I. You know, I feel like that's a bit cookie cutter, and I'm. I'm just too corrupted by a certain point of view. So I want to hear what you have to say about this.
23:40 Erin: Well, psychoanalysis is always, you know, with the mommy stuff is always a bit icky for me. So now I'm afraid. I'm afraid of going into it. You know, I'd like to keep this in the realm of romantic love, but. Yeah, I just. I mean, I know it is, technically, but it just. Yeah, it's hard for me to see those things being so closely intertwined. But, no, I just kind of charted. So, you know, the landscape versus the city is nature and society. I saw the tower, right, as the individual and the bridge as the collective, you know, the reaching out. And so it sort of encompassed all modes of human existence.
In other words, that she's sort of. See, and this is very romantic when it's a woman, but, you know, she's sort of civilization. She's everything. I mean, and she's also. I mean, the deeply felt landscape, the vista conceived of for human enjoyment, I think is a landscape versus just whatever the landscape is, a kind of wilderness is different, I think.
24:44 Wes: Yeah. Well, when I look at this, I feel like I'm discussing a transcript of the patient with you now and trying to convince you that there's pathology. But the phrase immense images, right?
24:57 Erin: Oh, sure, sure.
24:58 Wes: He's thinking of something sublime and something grand and maybe grandiose. And then even at the point, at the very end, he's thinking of powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods. So he's explicitly making this reference to the divine, which I think is an important part of this, because that grandiose object with which I think arguably he's identifying, which is what keeps him alone. I'm gonna stop doing this. Don't worry. At certain point, stop pop. Psychoanalyzing this. But it's this sense of merger with the divine, which, by the way, as a therapist, you know, if you've worked in mental health with people who are psychotic and grandiose in the sense, the gods, so to speak, and their own, the divinity can often be very important. So people will often think that they are God. Right. So that just all comes out into the open.
25:48 Erin: I thought you weren't going to tell people that. Wes, thanks for outing me here.
25:53 Wes: Right. This is why I make these associations to ambition. So turns in the path. So it sounds almost like a hero going out on his voyage and he's in a mythological realm, the place where there was once pulsing with the life of gods, and he's in the landscape and he's in the city. And so it does sound like, oh, I went out to make my fortune, you know, and you start out in the fairy tale. I guess if it's a fairy tale, one or both parents are dead before they set out. I don't know. But anyway, the hero has set out to make his journey and what he's supposed to do is go kill the dragon and then rescue the princess. But instead the journey, the whole journey itself has the significance of meaning you, meaning her. They signify her. It's not this means ends type of thing where he can win her through accomplishment. Accomplishment just means her. There's no barrier between accomplishment and her
26:55 Erin: because she is poetry, it turns out. I finally got it. No, the end of the stanza. Really? Yeah. Opened that up for me. But, yeah, she's, you know, so she is aligned with, like, she is the God in the landscape. Right. Like she's the animating force behind the world for him. I can't believe it took me this long to see it, but I was fixated on the idea of the unsuspected turns in the path as being this, like, really funny joke in the middle of the stanza. And I kept tripping over the idea that there's this joke in the middle of the stanza. And then I realized, oh, the turn of the path, the unsuspected. So that it's. So that it's highlighted, broken up across the line. And you can see it in the German too, right?
27:38 Wes: Oh, that's interesting.
27:40 Erin: The unsuspected turn in the path. Of course, it's verse itself. It's the turn of the plough. It's the turn of the line. Right? It's by breaking up the word.
27:48 Wes: Oh, very good.
27:49 Erin: He calls attention to it. And of course, what would be the thing that integrates that? You know, what would be the thing that gives Meaning to everything he's ever seen. What would be the love object that eludes him, that all of his experiences add up to? It's poetry itself. Right. You don't even know what songs. I don't even know what songs would please you. You know, it's his muse. It's poetry. Right. This is, you know, all of experience, of course, added together becomes the fodder for your art. And so this whole thing could be read as a kind of. Its existence seems to fly in the face of the idea that he's suffering some sort of creative block. But perhaps it's the perfect poem, the ideal poem that he has yet to write, the thing that he wants everything to amount to, that he hasn't been able to achieve yet.
28:38 Wes: Yeah, very good. Yeah. It does seem almost like this could be in sonnets to Orpheus, if this were a sonnet. Yeah. Song, you know, Orpheus being the sort of first poet and songs being poems. Yeah. And poetry itself, though, is very. It's such a pure form of art in the sense that it's. It is closest, I think, to that merger theory of love. And I think it's closest to that because of metaphor. Where metaphor collapses these boundaries between different things, one thing can become another. You're speaking of one thing, but it is the other at the same time. And that's part, I think, of its power to be two things at once. So this is a good way of reading this as the you in this as being poetry. I think that's what you're saying, right?
29:25 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. And even, you know, I have given up a line we skipped over before, which is a good segue into stanza, too. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. You know, the line breaks are being so cleverly played with here. I don't know if that line break is in the German, but Mitchell, anyway, is genius for doing it if it's his invention, you know, so we have this constant playing with the versification. It's a free verse poem, and it's using its line breaks, I think, to great effect. But this idea of I've given up, I've given up on this, of course, I think is repeatedly gone back on or betrayed in the poem itself.
Right. In fact, everything is this next possibility. And maybe this, too, is related to the idea that the artist is always looking for the poem in the next moment. Right. Everything becomes fodder for the poetry. Everything you have, everything you do, becomes something that could be a poem. And you look for that all the time. So there's no rest in that. I was explaining to a kid the other day that being an artist means having homework for the rest of your life. Basically. You're always working, you're always doing something. So that surging wave of the next moment, there's no trough.
Right. There's never any rest. Everything is imbued with possibility when you're seeing it through that kind of perspective. So therefore she, or poetry or whatever we want to call it, the object is everywhere and just. And just, you know, he's waiting just to find the opportunity to engage with her. I love the you who are all the gardens I've ever gazed at. Longing. An open window in a country house. I think he's following this garden thought. So I'm imagining that he's writing this, like in a yard. And he's looking at this. What are you. Oh, what's right in front of me?
The garden. You know, the garden I'm looking at. And then his eyes sort of scan over to the house near the garden and she's suddenly. The open window in a country house next to the garden. You know what I mean? Like there's something kind of like he's almost creating a landscape out of these little pieces of description that he seems to be tracking with his eyes as he writes the stanza. And then he imagines she's going to come out pensive to meet me. Which. That word, pensive is really doing some interesting work in that line.
31:43 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because it begins with gardens and then it goes to open window, which seems to suggest. Right. There's no thin. It's not like she's in the window. So there's an absence there. And the almost stepped out. Right. She doesn't. There's, you know, obviously absent. And then you had just walked down the street and vanished. Right. So normally, like, vanishing is an odd term because you might be walking down a street and see someone just vanish as they make a turn. Right. Right at the end of that street. But he never saw her. She had just done that.
But it's very interesting. Or again, the mirror where he's presumably looking at himself, but they're giving back a too sudden image, presumably of himself again. Right. But it's something to do with the. There's a glitch in the suddenness of his image in the mirror or something else which is evocative of her. So that's a very. You're getting into pretty intense territory when you're reminded of your beloved Even when you're looking in the mirror, oh, it's me. No, but everything but the garden is really about absence. Right. So she's everywhere in absences, but the garden is more of a positive image.
So she's presumably abundant and verdant, like the garden, and not absent.
33:09 Erin: Right.
33:09 Wes: And that seems to me to be the one positive image we get where she's not an absence. She's not something he can't recognize in the waves, lost from the start.
33:21 Erin: She's just an image. She isn't the landscape, the cities, the towers, the bridges. She's the images of those things in him. Yeah. So there's a mirror quality to that.
33:29 Wes: Yeah.
33:29 Erin: In other words, she's in his head.
33:31 Wes: Yeah. I guess I'm. You know. I guess I see what your point is, though. I mean. Yeah. Why don't. We might see those as kind of similar to the garden. I guess the way I was thinking of them is that. Yeah. They mean her.
33:45 Erin: Oh, and she's the gardens. All the gardens he's ever gazed at. So that, too, it's like, you know, it's almost like one of those diagrams of sight, you know, where they show, like, the eyeball, and it shows how it works, where the mind, you know, turns it or whatever, and it's, you know. So, like, it'll show, you know, a beam coming out from eyes, looking at a tree, and then it'll show how that tree ends up coming into your head, you know? So she's like the image of the tree in the diagram inside the head, not the tree on the outside in the world. Right. I think that's important to give, you know, if it gives credence to this idea that she's his art, his poetry. Right. She's the image in the mind of the thing. She's the experience recounted after the fact. Right. Not the tangible object in front of him.
34:30 Wes: Yeah. And you can. You know. You can on this reading. Yeah. This is like the writer who's going around living life and thinking, okay, yeah. This goes into the novel and starts narrating everything they're doing.
34:40 Erin: Exactly.
34:42 Wes: This is how I'm gonna use it in a poem. Right. So. Yeah. Then everything. Every guard. You don't just sit and enjoy the garden. You're thinking, oh, yeah, yeah. This is how it's gonna work in the next poem.
34:53 Erin: Exactly. There are lots of people like that. And there are lots of people that say stuff like that to me all the time, like, oh, this would be a good poem, Erin, you know, thank you. Thank you for Suggesting that I love the mirror thing. That startled. Gave back your image. Because that's my experience of, you know, you're ever in a store or something and you suddenly. You look up and you get startled because you didn't realize that the wall was a mirror. And suddenly you're looking at yourself and you're. You know. So that. That's just something that's familiar to me.
35:21 Wes: Who's that beautiful person? Oh, it's me. That's my experience.
35:27 Erin: There you go.
35:28 Wes: Or I think, who's that asshole standing so close to me? God. Oh, it's me. But then to, you know. And then to have that moment and to. Yeah. Turn it into the presence of the beloved is really interesting.
35:43 Erin: Yeah. Well, and it's in the middle of this. You know, the second stanza is just a cat and mouse game. Right. I mean, he's in hot pursuit and she's always one step ahead of him. And there's this fascinating interplay, I think, between accident and intention. So, you know, streets he chanced upon. He just chanced upon them. But she was there, it seems, deliberately eluding him. She's pensive, she's thought, she has mind. And yet she's featureless, characterless. Right. So there's something. Something in this. In this tension where the cat and mouse game seems to be integral to the idea that she's sort of a thought without a form, an intention without forethought.
What's the. What am I trying to say? I don't know. He's searching after something much like me. He's searching after a point and finding. Finding it's out of grasp. But the thought that he's looking for is sort of intentionally eluding him, even if it is a thought in his own mind. I'm trying to think that through.
36:47 Wes: I like this phrase, cat and mouse that you're using. Right. Yeah. So he uses that word elude. So they mean her, the cities and the bridges and so on. But they mean her who eludes him. So they. Right. They're metaphors or signifiers for something else. But the thing signified cannot be grasped. It cannot be had in the concrete. Apparently. If we were to think of it as a woman, or if we're thinking of it as a woman, it cannot be grasped in the sense of fleshed out in any detail. As in, what kind of woman is this? He wouldn't recognize her. He doesn't know what songs would please her.
So he can't say much about her, even though he sees her everywhere. If it's Poetry, everything means something else. And that's a poetic way of looking at things. And maybe it means poetry itself, but poetry is ever elusive, I guess, in the sense in which any art form in which one is engaged with is always elusive because it's never perfectible, maybe something like that. And because it never gets you exactly what you want, that's part of its supplementing character. Right. It's kind of a workaround to sex. No, that's what Freud. That's the Freudian idea.
So cat and mouse everywhere, but nowhere. But in the end, we get. We get a kind of a new idea at the end. Right. A bird echoed through both of us. All right, so that's the first time we hear about her mind. This is why I was mentioning earlier. Right. The object is just there's no subject there. The subject doesn't have her own desire, and her desire is threatening. And now. Or maybe. Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong about this, because I'm. But now we hear about something, a way that she might be affected with the bird echoing through her.
38:43 Erin: I like that. I think that's right. I think this is the most form she gets, right. Is this idea that something can echo through. So now she finally has something like a body, something like a form. But first of all, it's cast a speculation on his part. So it's still just a figment of his imagination. Perhaps the same bird. Right. And of course, birds and their connection with poetry and the poet are something we've long talked about on the podcast. Okay, so the same poem is going through both of them. Well, if it is him and this is the poem, then that's right.
I think pensive is still the closest we get to a characterization of her because it implies that she has a mind, that she has an intentionality in this cat and mouse game, that she has a subjectivity that he doesn't have access to. Right. She's pensive, she's thoughtful about something. But what her thoughts are, we don't know. We only know that she's eluding him, that she's always a step ahead of him in this cat and mouse game, whereas the bird echoing through us, I mean, it's a beautiful image. And it does seem to imply that there is a. Or state outright that there is a connection between them, that there is a.
A body that she has and a body that he has and something that they both share. And yet, you know, pressing on that a bit, that is hollow. That's of necessity hollow. I mean, he's hollow. Too. Right. But if the bird echoed through them, that means that she's just a sort of empty form again, a hollow form for him to fill. So I think it's ultimately less. Giving her less of a subjectivity in this moment than the idea that she's pensive, that she has thoughts he doesn't have access to, and an intentional eluding of him, which implies that she's something that he doesn't.
He can't possess. He can't have the bird echoing through both of them. Yes. It implies his hollowness, but also hers. I don't know. You know what I'm saying? I'm not.
40:29 Wes: Yeah. No, I do. Yeah. I missed that. That really is the first characterization of her subjectivity, of what's going on in her mind, her pensiveness. And it does go along with the elusiveness because you can, you know, you think of someone as kind of mute in their pensiveness and perhaps not able to communicate what they're thinking or unwilling, but their thoughts are to themselves. On the other hand, it does seem like a bit of a projection, although. Right. But at the very least, this is a fantasy of who it is she might be. And that's. It's much more fleshed out than what's come before.
Although her character. Right. Is sort of predicated on absence. So when he does come up with a character trait for her, it pivots off of her elusiveness, I think. Pensiveness, Right. Arguably pivots off of elusiveness. So in a way, it's about her. Right. It's a character trait, but in a way, it's about his inability to imagine her. He can't get into her head. Exactly. She's got these thoughts that are closed off to him. And then. Yeah. So now you have me thinking about this last line where I thought. I saw it as a bit of a developmental advance.
Right. Where he's. Because here he's thinking that, right. There's some third thing outside of them that might affect both of them. And so he's thinking of her as someone who might be affected, as someone to whom something might happen. It's not just about him seeing her everywhere, or it's not just about his point of view, what's happening in his mind, or how the world affects him. It's how the world might affect her, which I think is a movement, I think gets him a bit beyond the characterization of her as pensive. I think it's more maybe of a more mature standpoint in that sense.
42:18 Erin: I think that's totally Right. Yeah.
42:20 Wes: Okay. And then they share that. You know, it's important that they. It's an experience that they share. So it's the idea. Now there's something inner subjective going on. There's a bit of a theory of mind developing, and it's this phenomenon of joint attention where they can share an object which is enormously psychologically important and is related to mothering. And it's a certain developmental stage. This is something that never happens. For instance, in chimpanzees, we did this partially examined life episode on Tomasello and Origins of Language.
So, for instance, if you have a mother sitting with a child in her lap and you're reading a book together, after a certain stage, the infant will often point to some picture on the page of the book and then turn their gaze up towards their mother to see that their mother is seeing it. Right. And to take pleasure in the idea that someone else is seeing this thing with me. And even if they raise. Even if you have human beings raise little chimp babies that. That you can get them interested in the book, but it will never occur to them that this is a shared experience.
They will never do that thing where they look up at the mother's eyes to see that she's sharing the experience with them. So, anyway, I guess that's a. I'm a little bit off the beaten path here. No, but, yeah, so I. But I'm trying. So now. Yeah. To go to your reading, I'd like to retract that.
43:41 Erin: You've convinced me. I think you're right. And a word that you used, mute. You know, the fact that she's mute makes me think of, you know, theories of otherness. So the speaker is the speaking subject who sees. Right. And the other would be the mute object who is seen. This complicates that, of course, because she's not seen. Right. The elusiveness of the object is the theme. Right. But when they have this shared experience, I think that. I think that does represent an evolution because this is otherness overcome. The idea of a shared experience, this imaginative.
Exactly what you're talking about with the chimpanzee example, this idea of being able to imagine another person's consciousness and experience independent of your projection upon them is really important. And so I think this is sort of the overcoming of otherness. The. The sense that they're not other to you anymore is important in the shared experience at the end. So you've convinced me.
44:45 Wes: So we get a glimmer of. We get a glimmer of hope.
44:47 Erin: I think yes. Yeah.
44:49 Wes: At the end. Okay. Shall we call it?
44:51 Erin: Yes.
44:52 Wes: All right, so in part two, we will discuss one of Rilke's sonnets to Orpheus 2.13. Right. Or you can wait a week and listen to it then. All right, thank you.
45:11 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Irony as Anesthetic in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H” (1970) – Part 2
Feb 03, 2025
Wes & Erin continue their discussion the 1970 classic “M.A.S.H,” and whether irony ought always to be our anesthetic, when confronted with traumas that are otherwise unspeakable.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of mash. We just got done talking about the faux suicide scene, and I think you wanted to talk about Hot Lips now.
0:43 Erin: Yeah. Unless we have anything more to say about. I guess, you know, we were more interested in the suicide part and not in the sexual part of Painless is so called redemption or resurrection, as it were.
0:58 Wes: Right. Okay, there's. That's the point, all right, that he's resurrected through things.
1:03 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
1:04 Wes: Well, he's resurrected through just waking up,
1:06 Erin: but it's okay because she. She looks at the camera later and breaks the fourth wall. So we know. We know it's all okay because she enjoyed it.
1:15 Wes: Well, she is certainly redeemed.
1:17 Erin: Yeah. Right.
1:19 Wes: Yeah.
1:19 Erin: The power of Christ compels her.
1:22 Wes: Redeemed through sin.
1:23 Erin: Yeah.
1:24 Wes: But she looks very. Looks very happy, which is the suggestion is that it's because he has a large penis, which at an earlier point in the film, they've all been lining up to look at his large penis through a crack in the wall. Lots of hijinks. Lots of fun hijinks in this film.
1:40 Erin: Yeah. We don't get them taking down the shower wall to see him naked, do we? That's the. That's the disappointing part of all of this. Disappointing for me, I guess. No. What's good for the goose, I guess, isn't good for the gander here. But the loudspeaker and how that comes in as the thing that humiliates Burns and Hot Lips, I'm really interested in that. Like I said in the last part, in Altman films, of course, sound is so important, and I can think of Nashville as being. I can't think of any of his other films that might use a loudspeaker like that.
Maybe I'm forgetting one, but I'm sure there's something super obvious that I'm not thinking of. But those two films using the loudspeaker as the Big Brother esque, but also kind of toothless demonstration of authority. And mash. It's used to advertise the sort of super dopey, rah rah patriotic films that they're apparently showing at the camp all the time to make announcements about behavior that are then almost instantly, they're either disobeyed immediately and constantly, or they're actually retracted in the course of the announcement so that whether or not they can or can't do something.
Seems to be like a flip of the coin.
2:57 Wes: Good point. Interesting.
2:58 Erin: I think they're broadcasting. I think it's Radio Tokyo is the. I wrote it down somewhere. Yeah. And they almost seem to be parodies of American jukebox songs.
3:09 Wes: Well, I think they're real. Yeah. Just Japanese versions of American songs.
3:15 Erin: And that was one of the few things that actually gave me a period feel to the film because of those songs that. And maybe, I don't know, maybe there would be less drinking and more drug use if it were a Vietnam film. Instead, they're having martinis all the time, which to me is a little. I mean, that's what I prefer. But it's a little more old fashioned than just marijuana.
3:34 Wes: Well, and again, indicative of their class.
3:37 Erin: That's true.
3:37 Wes: That class dynamic. And they're being commissioned officers.
3:41 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So the speaker as a sort of ineffectual but persistent reminder of authority. Then you have these two symbols of authority and Burns and Houlihan. Sexual encounter being broadcast over the loudspeaker is an interesting choice because, as I think I've already suggested, there is something that's already undermining about the loudspeaker to begin with. It undermines itself all the time. It's, you know, it's this kind of jokey thing that nobody really seems to listen to, take seriously, care about at all. So it's as feeble and flimsy a symbol of authority as perhaps Burns and Houlihan are themselves. It has. It seems to have no place in the MASH unit or no significance other than as an audible counterpoint to what we're seeing visually on the screen at times.
4:28 Wes: Yeah. So it is the weak voice of authority. You could think of it as, you know, like there's something interesting about a speaker that's telling you to do things because it's. It's because it's disembodied and it's almost like conscience or something like that. But in this case, no one takes it seriously. I'm reminded of Community, actually, which I think is a TV show that you like as well. I think they use the school intercom for the same sort of purpose. So they're joining scenes and it's kind of ridiculous announcements and things like that.
The loudspeaker becomes a mean of exposing hypocrisy. One of the things about Burns and Hot Lips is that they are supposedly paragons of moral rectitude, but they're doing what everyone else is doing, which is cheating on their spouses at Home. And they're doing it with each other. It's a really great scene when they're. So after Trapper John. Is it Trapper John? I always get this wrong.
5:24 Erin: That's Elliott Gould, right?
5:26 Wes: Yeah.
5:27 Erin: Yeah.
5:28 Wes: I always get the second one wrong. Anyway, after he. He kind of pisses off Hot Lips at. They have a party, and then Burns and Hot Lips run off to write a letter. And I think we only hear the conclusion of the letter. This letter has been written in the interest of army morale. As officers, we feel it is our duty to bring this unwholesome situation to your attention. We are writing this letter jointly to assure you that no one's personal feeling has in any way influenced this report. Which, of course, is BS Anyway, and then. And I think he asks her if she's hungry, and she says, ravenous, how about you?
And then his response is one of my favorite scenes in the movie because he says it in such a wooden way for you, Margaret. And then they start making out, and then she quickly pushes him off like nothing's happened and gets to go. And you see him sitting there with his face smeared with lipstick and looking quite hot and bothered, but she's done so. Yeah. It's after that that we learn about Painless Problem. And that's basically the midpoint of the movie. It's in the next act, right, that they. First they cure Painless of his problem, and then they defeat Burns and Hot Lips.
And they. The first way they do that is with the. With the loudspeaker. So they're. So the thing that they're doing, right? Their sexual interaction radar puts a microphone under it, slips the microphone into the room, and ultimately they can hear themselves and what they're doing. So then it really does become like the voice of conscience. And they can't escape their own hypocrisy, right? So you say one thing, but you do another. You're the voice of moral rectitude, and you're going to stamp out unwholesomeness at the camp. But then you're doing this thing.
And so the. The way they're taken down is perfectly matches, of course, what it is that others dislike about them, which is the pretense to some sort of moral authority or some sort of rectitude. It's not the bad behavior itself, of course, which is what all of them endorse. And I think when they endorse it, when they endorse the hedonism and the womanizing and the cheating on spouses and things like that their endorsement meant to have. I think, as you pointed out near the beginning, there's a moralism to that. They don't escape moralism. Right.
Their morals. That we're just going to be honest about our condition here. We're not going to fake it. We're hedonists. But we have a reason for doing that because it's the only way we can survive psychologically or whatever argument you want to give for that. The ultimate sin is not the sin, but the COVID up here or the hypocrisy.
8:06 Erin: Right. Yeah. To work off of that for a second and think about that feedback loop that happens. So I think we've already talked about the loudspeaker as being this expression of this bland authority. There's a blandness that we've already talked about, but also because of these Radio Tokyo versions of American songs are being played. There's this idea of an occupying force, that the loudspeaker is sort of expressing that mentality of occupation. And because no one listens to it. You could use a term for the loudspeaker. I mean, we're listening to it, but insofar as the characters inside the film seem to never pay it any mind.
And it's sometimes played in the background and has a similar effect as the overlapping dialogue, which some of it is just kind of white noise. White noise might be the word that we could use for it. However, there's an interesting contrast then that happens when you recognize yourself. It's like they're suddenly recognizing the sound of some of their own voice inside the white. White noise. Right. Like it's as though they make the transition from not listening to it or believing that they're listening to something else, something different from them, to then realizing that it's having that recognition and realizing it is, in fact, their own voices, which I think is a great expression of the fact that they're, of course, representative of this authority, as we've already said.
But one of the things that's so interesting about this moment is when the chaplain comes in and thinks that he's listening to an episode of the Bickersons. I'm trying to kind of like connect all of this up with this idea of white noise. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a couple that was always having these fights, right. On the radio. And.
9:46 Wes: And it's the kind of, daddy, why are you fighting?
9:49 Erin: Right, exactly. And it's the kind of thing that would probably just be on the radio. Nobody would pay much attention to it or whatever. But they, you know, he Thinks they've all gathered around to listen to this, which is a little funny, you know. Oh, we. We just love the Bickersons. We're gonna all gather around and listen to this tonight. So that mistake, that misunderstanding, I'm trying to think through what that's indicative of. I mean, of course, the fact that the. The sort of. What sounds like some pretty aggressive sex that they're have.
10:17 Wes: My lips are hot.
10:19 Erin: Yes. Some pretty aggressive sex that they're having. Sounds kind of like an argument.
10:24 Wes: Well, they're having trouble with logistics, let's put it that way.
10:28 Erin: Right, right.
10:29 Wes: Aren't they having trouble getting undressed and, you know.
10:32 Erin: Yeah. And so they're kind of. It's a little bit slapsticky. Right. Which would sound like maybe some sort of pots and pans banging kind of humor in a marital argument on the Bickersons. So it sounds like sort of regular aggression. I'm not doing a great job of connecting all this up. I thought I would come up with a way to connect it all the way around, but I'm, like, trying to put the pieces together of this idea of, like, it's not just about recognizing their own voices as the voice of authority, but it's sort of almost like recognizing themself at the heart of some kind of, like, ugly American culture that also has a lot of hypocrisy in it. Do you know what I'm trying to say? Like, yeah. If the whole culture is a military industrial complex and they valorize this.
11:19 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point. And it kind of lends itself to your observation about the Japanese versions of those American songs. Because what's just happened with the defeat of Japan is that two very different cultures have come into contact, and Japanese culture has been significantly affected by American culture. And Japanese culture was something much more conservative and serious before that war. And it is now, you know, within a matter of years, completely absorbed the flippancy of burgeoning American youth culture. I mean, I think you could call what's happening at this point, you know, the beginnings of youth culture, it doesn't fully dominate until the 60s.
Right. But certainly starting in the 50s, speaking of boomers. Right. The first youth culture warriors. But so there's something lost, which is not to minimize what the Japanese, the many, many millions of civilians the Japanese killed during World War II, and the, of course, the horrible aspect of that kind of nationalism that dominated Japan at that time, but also it. It was in some ways a more arguably, I think, more religious and serious and more communal. And could not be more different in many ways from American culture. And so you lose something.
You lose something when youth culture starts to dominate. And you lose something when cynicism, an ironic take on everything, you know, an ironic approach to the world, begins to dominate. There are many things that are appealing about it, and again, there are many things that are appealing about the wit of the protagonists in this movie. But I don't ultimately think that it's what's endorsed. And we get just these hints at the drawbacks of that, and it's that lack of serious. So, for instance, when they're in Japan, Hawkeye and Trapper John, right, have this fake conversation in Japanese.
Do you remember that? They're kind of mocking the Japanese language. And then the guy driving the jeep is like, goddamn army. Goddamn army.
13:18 Erin: Yeah.
13:18 Wes: So they bring that flippancy to Japan. And it's more obvious, in a way, the implications of that, of what's lost with that, than it is at the camp. There's a greater contrast. I think the upshot of that is that the innocence of the chaplain. It's quaint in a way. It's cute that he thinks it's the Bickersons, but there's something about his more wholesome attitude that arguably the film laments us losing. In any case, there are strong arguments in favor of irony in one's approach to life, but it can easily slide into nihilism, and we can actually get rid of moral authority altogether.
Again, as you pointed out, they themselves can be accused of being hypocrites or at the very least, moralists. Right? They themselves are coming at things from a certain kind of value system, and they hide the authority, or they locate it in themselves personally, or they locate it in competence as opposed to some higher moral order. But we really can't evade it. We can't evade seriousness, and we can't evade a moral order. And we can't evade. If we want to be healthy. We can't evade the feeling of sadness, no matter how productive or helpful it is to use humor sometimes.
So going back to your point about the intercom, correct me if I'm wrong. So that Burns and Hot Lips got to experience the darkness or the. Yeah, go ahead.
14:43 Erin: Yeah. They're waking up inside the white noise of the kind of Middle American culture that they themselves might valorize and realize that they have brought the sin into the Bickersons, you know, they're the ones, you know, or what would be popular at the time, you know, I Love Lucy. It's like the Truman Show. Only they're realizing, like, they're the ones that are the actors, the bad actors, as a matter of fact, you know, they're the rotten heart of bland American culture and American cultural hypocrisy.
15:14 Wes: Yeah. So I like that. That connection between their particular hypocrisy and maybe army hypocrisy and cultural hypocrisy.
15:22 Erin: Yeah. I don't think I'm going too far. I hope I'm not in connecting a show like the Bickersons or sort of, you know, what I'm calling bland American culture. It's not all bland, but, you know, the kind of entertainment that a lot of people would consume stayed really stagnant and was reflective of. You know, look at Ozzie and Harriet. You know, Ozzie and Harriet is a great, you know, the great punching bag for. For everything we can. We can say about 1950s culture and what was valorized at the time. And I think that Ozzie and Harriet culture is connected to a culture that has great respect for people like Eisenhower and General MacArthur. You know, the people whose words are on the screen at the beginning of the film. And the counterpart culture of the Vietnam era and of the boomers is very much like lumping those like Dwight and Mamie. Might as well be Ozzie and Harriet. Right.
16:12 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think we might say there's a beginning in the 50s. There are beginnings of counterculture and youth culture.
16:19 Erin: Yeah.
16:19 Wes: But it's. It comes across as quite innocent, you know, as I'm thinking of Happy Days. Right. And like the Fonz and what's considered cool. Right. What's considered, you know. Right.
16:28 Erin: Well, in the 70s, you immediately have a nostalgia for the. For the uncomplicated 50s, by contrast, because they got rid of it so quickly. Yeah, yeah.
16:38 Wes: But it is, you know, it's very much in the MASH unit, as if 60s or 70s counterculture were happening in a 1951 MASH unit. It's as if, you know, like, you sent a bunch of hippie surgeons to. Right. To that MASH unit, and this is what would happen then. They're going to be completely irreverent. In any case, I think this. So this is based on a novel. I don't. I think it's based on a novel written by someone who worked at one of these MASH units. And he says these people are amalgams of actual characters. I looked at the novel a little bit. I don't think it's a very well written novel, but a lot of the dialogue is actually lifted from the novel. So I wonder. I wonder to what extent this was the actual climate in the army. And maybe it's something eternal. Right. There's some kind of similarities to catch 22. Right. And just the absurdity of. Do you know what I mean?
17:30 Erin: Yeah. I think I was thinking a lot about birth control, actually. And I was thinking about the fact that the widespread use of birth control, whether or not that would be a problem for the realism in the Korean War versus the Vietnam War here. I think that's the only. I was just reflecting on that earlier, and I think that must be the difference here. That and maybe a more innocent culture in, say, like, the World War II era that the Korea might have been an expression of. But I think part of the more innocent culture is also because it's prior to the widespread availability of birth control and to things like what this movie comes out of or the mentality of this movie, which I see as really being just kind of an early forebearer of a movie like Porky's or something, or Animal House, is, I think, also like the Playboy magazine culture, which I associate with the 50s and after.
And I think what fuels the Playboy culture is also widespread availability of birth control. You can just have sex and just. And that's it. And there are no consequences. So. Well, other than STDs. But obviously these people don't seem to be bothered by that. Just party foul. We should talk about the football game.
18:41 Wes: Okay, let's do that.
18:42 Erin: Not that I can talk about it with any intelligence, because if it were
18:46 Wes: a baseball game, that would be something.
18:48 Erin: There we go. There we go. Don't get me started.
18:52 Wes: Would you cheerlead for a baseball game or would you be playing?
18:55 Erin: I would be the umpire.
18:57 Wes: You'd be the coach. Oh, the umpire.
19:00 Erin: Okay, the umpire. Talking about moral authority.
19:02 Wes: You wouldn't be able to coach.
19:03 Erin: Sure, I could coach. Yeah. Be the manager.
19:05 Wes: Manager or manager.
19:06 Erin: I'd be a very, very good manager. I'd be a much better manager than Erin Boone. I'm telling you that right now. Oh, she said it. I'm following all the trading going on right now in the mlb. So my brain is all baseball right now. This week especially. They just signed some people. So anyway, I know I found myself being like, oh, man, I wish it was baseball. But that, too would be a slightly older culture at this point. I was watching what's My Line the other night. I love what's My Line? Game show from the. You know, I was watching this mid-50s episode, and they were talking about they had the commissioner of baseball on as one of their mystery guests.
And the master of ceremonies, the moderator, John C. Daly, was talking to the commissioner of baseball after his identity was revealed and saying, like, oh, is it true that baseball was falling out of fashion, that the youth just don't care about it anymore? And it was like 1956 or 7 that he's saying this to this guy. This is always this idea that baseball is dying somehow. But anyway, I definitely think that if people were worried about it dying in 56 or 7, that it was representative of an older culture, even in the 50s, and that therefore football, with the violence and all of that, is a better encapsulation.
And it's the perfect sport to be playing, I think, just as golf is a great sport to be playing on the helipad, which is something we. We also didn't talk about, but something of a class difference there.
20:25 Wes: Yeah. So golf reflects again, their elite, you know, martinis and golf, their elite kind of status. And it's not just that they're counterculture and protesting war or something like that. It's. They're too good for it. They're too good for all of it. But, yeah, football is something quite different here because it's more warlike and more earnest and more. Yeah, Less elite.
20:47 Erin: Yeah. Just one quick thing about the golf thing. I also was thinking about the blase ness of that, that they can, you know, they get annoyed when a helicopter comes in because they have to clear out. And it just reminded me of something which I should have mentioned in part one, about this difference between officers and enlisted men. I forgot there was a point at which they're working on a guy and they say they're going to close up his chest. And someone asks if it's an officer or an enlisted man. And when it's hard to tell what the voice is, who's speaking, but when someone replies that it's an enlisted man, they say, make the stitches big.
So the idea that, like, he's gonna have a nice big scar, and that's a value to an enlisted man, perhaps with working class values, who wants to show off a scar versus an officer who doesn't wanna have a big scar, who doesn't wanna look super banged up after the war. So maybe what golf signifies, as I think we already suggested in part one, is sort of putting the surgeons in that kind of upper class with the officers. And I think it's part of their blaseness or the fact that they're not outwardly showing that they're affected by the war is paralleled by this idea that, you know, the officer doesn't want the scar, but the enlisted man does.
He wants proof that he's been affected by the war. That's actually a status symbol for the enlisted man that runs against this whole idea of football. But then again, football is also something that's played and enjoyed by people who are upper class as well.
22:10 Wes: It's interesting because for that soldier, Radar also goes and steals some of Blake's blood to give to that enlisted soldier. And I think from what I. If I'm getting this right, and I might not be, I think so the scenes that are cut make clear that that's Ho-Jon they're working on.
22:27 Erin: Oh, is it?
22:28 Wes: So then we have to read the blood in two different ways, you know.
22:31 Erin: Oh, for the blood scene, not that
22:33 Wes: Radar is getting blood from Blake to give to Ho-Jon. On another reading, I see he's getting it to give to some random enlisted man, which shows you the lengths that they would go to.
22:43 Erin: Right.
22:43 Wes: To save someone. So I'm not sure which is true if I'm getting that wrong. In any case, there are other scenes that make clear that at the very end of the movie, the one being taken away is Ho-Jon. Oh, no, I suspected that. Anyway, I think the viewer can, you know, if you see what's happening in the background, you suspect that is Ho-Jon taken away, who's passed away away.
23:02 Erin: Right, right.
23:03 Wes: So then we get the instruction, which kind of runs counter to that, which is to make the stitches larger for
23:08 Erin: the enlisted man versus the officer.
23:10 Wes: Yeah, yeah. And you're relating that to the scar as a status symbol.
23:16 Erin: Yeah. There's an expression of class difference there. That part of the performance that the surgeons put on is almost like they're going to do all this stuff and act as though they're not affected by what they're doing. And psychologically they're trying to not show the scars. And that seems to be. Yeah. The golf playing on the helipad where the enlisted men are landing versus making the stitches big so that the enlisted man who they save has something to show off back home and show that he's been a hero. Seems to be an interesting contrast there.
23:50 Wes: Well, you're reminding me of the. Yeah. The ethos of which is that nothing really matters, which is, in a way, what suit the suicide is painless is really just what that phrase is. The football game, in a way, gives them something they can at least pretend to believe in or take seriously. I guess they Take poker a bit seriously, but the football game, they really. They do their best to win.
24:13 Erin: Well, it's kind of like, you know, the football game is like an aristocratic hunt almost.
24:18 Wes: Right.
24:19 Erin: Like, they get to express enthusiasm for something that. Yes, doesn't really matter, but it's a way to sort of exercise that. That emotion, get it out about something that it's okay to get riled up about in ways that are socially acceptable.
24:34 Wes: Of course, they do take their surgery. You know, their work is doctors seriously. And there's an element of teamwork to that, although not as much. I think there's something important about the fact that football is closer to war.
24:47 Erin: There's gamesmanship in the way that they operate on people, too. No, I mean, they are taking it seriously, but their demeanor and maybe the circumstances of this kind of really difficult and hard to manage surgical theater, like, there's a. You know, they leave the guy that's died and they immediately move on to the next one. There's a game quality.
25:08 Wes: They're engaging in small talk, and there's a very casual quality to it. They might be joking around. There's no strong emotional response to what's happened. They're very. There's a lot that goes on in the operating room that's meant to illustrate that they are very harsh, hardened to.
25:24 Erin: Right.
25:25 Wes: What's happening in front of them. They're very used to it. They're very hardened. And they can continue chatting or being flippant or whatever it is that they're doing even while that's going on. But the task itself. Right. They're experts at that task. And that is also emphasized, you know. Yeah, it's an. It's an interesting combination. So. So, yeah. So what's different about the football game? Why is it here? Why do we need a football game in this movie? Did they run out of things to do?
25:51 Erin: Right. Well, part of it is just the hilarity of seeing and the absurdity of the uniforms and the full. Like, is that a regulation football field in the middle of Korea? Like, where the hell are they? You know? So part of that is just like this just crazy humor that comes out of nowhere, which made me laugh out loud when I saw the field and everybody's getups.
26:14 Wes: The film sort of degenerates into complete slapstick, which is interesting, given that it's all been witty, you know, it's all been wit and verbal, and now it's going to be mainly slapstick, and they're going to cheat their asses off. They're Going to.
26:28 Erin: Right.
26:29 Wes: Well, they're going to get a ringer, which the other team does as well. They're going to inject some guy with something, and then they have a trick played. But above all, we should relate this to the arc. The main arc of the movie is defeating Burns and Hot Lips. And Hot Lips is not yet defeated. This is the dragon that's being slain. Still, she's not defeated until she's with Duke. Right. In this third act, right. There's the football game. There's also. She gets with Duke, and then she becomes the cheerleader. And the game happens because Hot Lips complained to that general, and then he took it seriously enough to actually come visit, to come visit the camp.
And you think, okay, finally something's gonna happen. She might have been vindicated, Right. If the story had been different, if it had gone a different way, she might be the protagonist, and she might be the one who defeats the bad guys, the bad boys. Of course, it's not going to turn out that way. The general gets distracted by the good old the boys club. He gets sucked into the idea of a football game. And that, once again, distracts us from any moral order or moral authority into a substitute for that, which is, of course, part of the way people use sports.
No offense to baseball, but anyway, Hot Lips is defeated in a double sense. The football game is a replacement for addressing her concerns, and she is transformed into a cheerleader. So that is in the way the plot function of the football game, but also this descent into slapstick. And also something that resembles, more obviously resembles war. I think those. Those two things are important as well.
28:11 Erin: Yeah. And Hot Lips can finally achieve her raison d' etre as a hot blonde. The idea of the ringer is something that I was kind of thinking about, because I was thinking about it in relationship to being drafted. And a little bit of what you were talking about in terms of the moral authority that the surgeons have within the camp as being a result of their competence and perhaps their class, too. But the idea that they're the result of a kind of meritocracy versus whatever the army chain of command represents, which is, more often than not, probably not a meritocracy. So the idea that bringing in a ringer is something like being drafted, but drafting sort of smarter, not harder. So, you know, they. They draft this guy into the football game, but on the basis of merit.
28:59 Wes: Well, as his merit as a surgeon. I mean, they had. The way they have to get him right into the unit is to say he's. He's a great surgeon, so.
29:08 Erin: That's right.
29:09 Wes: But he's also used to be a professional football player.
29:12 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know what to say about that other than, you know, there's this kind of doubling there with the way he gets on the team and the way one gets into the war. I don't know. But all of this is also muddied, of course, by the fact that there's some racism in. In his nickname. And, I mean, there's some racial jokes being played about his nickname Spearchucker, and I'm not sure what that signifies. Like, we know that Tom Skerritt's character is a racist.
29:41 Wes: Right. And then there's a really funny scene where he's asked how he got that nickname, and he's like, oh, I used to throw javelin.
29:48 Erin: Right. Exactly.
29:49 Wes: As if they're complete. As if no one is making the connection to race, which is really funny.
29:55 Erin: Yeah, that's a really funny line. Yeah. But just the element of race being brought in is kind of a funny line complication. But I'm not entirely sure how to, like, metabolize that.
30:05 Wes: Well, we find out. I mean, it is kind of a highlighted scene where we find out that Duke is a racist.
30:11 Erin: Yes.
30:11 Wes: Because he doesn't want to live with him. They want to. Is Duke resisting the idea of getting this guy into camp.
30:17 Erin: Yes. Sharing a camp with a black guy.
30:19 Wes: Because he. Yeah, that's where they're plotting. Getting the ringer. But then Duke isn't like, where is he gonna live?
30:25 Erin: And he says it's been difficult enough for him to live with a bunch of Yankees. Never mind. And then it just trails off.
30:31 Wes: Yeah. Never mind. And then they hit it. They give him a. They. They give him a friendly hit in the shoulder or something like that.
30:38 Erin: Right. Oh, come on.
30:40 Wes: So it's disappointing. It's disappointing that the only guy from Georgia in the movie turns out to be the racist, but I guess that's accurate.
30:47 Erin: I was gonna say good old Southern
30:51 Wes: boy, but, you know, it's one of these, like, come downs. Right. So that gives us a little more that. It rounds out the film with some disappointments after everything else has been completely manic. There's the come down of Hawkeye being sad at the end about Ho-Jon's body being taken away. There's finding out Duke is a racist. Is there anything else. Is there anything else that's genuinely sad
31:16 Erin: that happens that one moment? When is it Duke that has the vision of his return home?
31:24 Wes: Yeah.
31:25 Erin: When he and Hawkeye are told that they can go home. That, I take is very sad.
31:30 Wes: Well, say more about that. I mean, there's Duke. Duke is, as I mentioned before, Duke and Hot Lips are very upset that they're gonna be taken away from each other.
31:38 Erin: Yeah.
31:38 Wes: You can tell Hawkeye is not happy as well. They're gonna lose that community. And then. Yeah. Duke has that. What is sad about that fantasy that he has of being, well. Well welcomed home as a hero. Right. Which is not gonna happen, is that way.
31:53 Erin: Yeah. And the juxtaposition of what that shot represents, something of the culture that we've already been talking about, as expressed in the Burns and Houlihan and the fact that maybe he's Then the one on the loudspeaker or something like that. Right. So he, knowing that he's a hypocrite, has to return home to what looks like a really loving, wonderful family. It reminded me of images of Vietnam soldiers, like, returning home and how most of those marriages, at least the highly publicized ones from famous photos, were ended in divorce within a couple of years. And something about the inability to reintegrate. Like, you have this emotional reunion, and then you can't reintegrate into the fabric of American life anymore because you're too. You are getting rejected by the host that you're trying to graft yourself back into.
32:44 Wes: Well, people get very attached. Attached to. When they're in an environment like that, which is highly traumatic. They compensate with these extremely close connections to the people that they're with. The bonds that they forge with those people are much stronger than they can forge with people in civilian life, because there's not the same life and death circumstance hanging over people, which points to the fact that the philandering that people are doing in the film is a little bit more than. It's not just hedonism.
33:15 Erin: Yes.
33:16 Wes: It's a closeness that's just developed under those circumstances.
33:20 Erin: And a shared project. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's a sort of. It's a work, husband and wife kind of situation. Right. Yeah.
33:29 Wes: And so they lose that, and they. As much as it sucks, they lose that. And then. Yeah. So you have lots of veterans of war who come back and they miss. They miss being at war.
33:39 Erin: Right.
33:39 Wes: They miss their comrades in arms.
33:41 Erin: Yeah.
33:42 Wes: There's a meaning. There's a more. It's more meaningfulness than I think we often get out of ordinary life.
33:49 Erin: Sure. Yeah. The heightened sense of purpose, the intensity of it is probably a rush, what they're doing in the surgical theater. You know, my. This is gonna sound downright disrespectful, but, you know, I think of when I was in high school, I worked at Dunkin Donuts, and you always wanted to get the morning shift because the afternoon shifts were killer, because you, like, barely anybody would come in. And so if you were there for, like, seven hours, you would feel every minute of those seven hours that you were there, and you'd have to do boring things.
34:22 Wes: Did they bring in the donuts on helicopters?
34:25 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
34:26 Wes: You had to rush them into the.
34:27 Erin: Exactly. No, but, like, you got to be friendly with. Well, and you wouldn't. You wouldn't get as close to people on the afternoon shift, but on the morning shift, it would go by in two seconds because you're just working nonstop. Like you. I loved working the morning shift because you'd be on for six, seven hours, but it would be six, seven hours of, like, constantly moving, constantly working. You wouldn't have to do the boring stuff, like cleaning stuff out that you do in the afternoon, and it would go by in a flash. And that's when you get, like, the kind of the machine operating of everybody, you know, everybody who was super competent was all on the morning shift together.
So we would all. And it would sometimes be dependent on people's availability or what hours they signed up for. But, like, we all would make jokes with each other. We would talk while we were doing stuff, and it would. It was. It just. It was more enjoyable. It went way faster. People were meaner to us in the morning because it's the morning. They haven't had their coffee. You're dealing with, like, the angry, entitled people that want their coffee, and so it's easier to bond under those circumstances. It's just more trying. In this extremely disrespectful example I'm giving, I'm just trying to say that, you know, the army life is like the morning shift, and your regular life is like your afternoon shift and.
Or something like that or your normal work or whatever. And. Yeah, it's just. It's just much easier to miss, you know, the excitement, and life goes faster. Things. Things happen more quickly, and so that, like, other shifts, other parts of the day don't look as. There's not that adrenaline rush that you're getting all the time. So you get kind of addicted to that. And if it's not going as fast, that's hard to adjust to. And then you just go to college, and you forget all about dealing with that until the summer when you need more money. So you go back, pick up some shifts at Dunkin, the brown visor.
36:16 Wes: Again, I mean I'm just. You have me, you have me thinking a lot of people do seek this out in their work life. Right. And whether they're surgeons or working at Dunkin Donuts, they can get that feeling of being under. They can high stress jobs. Right, Right. It's not as perfect as being at war or being in a MASH unit, but it's better than having nothing to do. No, but it. Right. You can, and you can forge camaraderie with co workers in those situations. And you can get some of that, and you can get some of it from this football, you know, from a sport. It's part of how we use sports in daily life. And so again, it's interesting that it shows up here. Team sports are one way of replicating the bonds that can only otherwise be forged in war.
37:04 Erin: That's right, yeah.
37:05 Wes: Especially when it's such a physical sport.
37:07 Erin: Well, and it's an arbitrary way to form bonds with people based on arbitrary things like proximity. So you know, you all root for the same team because you're from the same area. Even if you can't stand each other's guts, you have that in common. And that arbitrariness of where you live can actually be a non threatening way of bonding with people that you might ordinarily have nothing in common with. And so that seems to work for Hot Lips. You know, just because she's with the MASH unit, they all can bond over this and kind of get over whatever it is that divides them in a non threatening, non confrontational way where someone outside of you becomes the person that you're against.
37:50 Wes: I was thinking too, she's, she, what she shows in the end is that she's willing like them, to show that she can take take seriously what's not serious. They demand that what's not serious in a way be taken seriously. Do you know what I mean?
38:04 Erin: Yeah. She shows some understanding then arguably some kind of moral flexibility at the end.
38:11 Wes: So she gets into it and she's willing. You know, the more benign reading of it all is she's willing to step outside of the role of her own authority because she is head nurse and just be one of the girls, one of the guys, however you want to think about it. But she can put herself in a position where she doesn't take herself seriously and is willing to say dumb things about a game she knows nothing about and then be made fun of all that stuff. So there's an element of humility in It. So there's an alternative moral order, and that's what she's submitting herself to in that circumstance, which is much more. Again, more. It's more anarchist, maybe, is the way to put it.
38:46 Erin: Well, in that spirit, I'll end by saying that I did enjoy watching this movie, and it surprised me me a little bit.
38:56 Wes: Is that real? Are you. Is that true?
38:58 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad I. I'm glad I watched the whole thing. I mean, enjoyment is maybe too strong of a word.
39:04 Wes: That's a raging endorsement. Sorry, you blur the blurb. The movie. I'm glad I didn't stop halfway through.
39:15 Erin: No, I'm. I'm. I'm glad I saw the whole thing. And also, so here's some. Here's some real, like. Like deep cut Erin trivia. I should see this whole movie because I'm, in fact, named after a character from the mash, the TV show. So an unseen character. Yes.
39:33 Wes: No.
39:33 Erin: Honeycutt's daughter that he gets the letters from. You know, Hunnicutt gets letters from his wife, and the wife talks about his daughter missing him.
39:41 Wes: I don't remember the show well enough, but. Which of your parents is a fan?
39:45 Erin: Oh, well. Of mash, the TV show.
39:48 Wes: Well, who. Who named you? Who gave you that name?
39:51 Erin: My mom liked that name.
39:53 Wes: Okay.
39:54 Erin: That was a contender because of the fact that she liked Honeycutt's Letters From Home. And Honeycutt's daughter's name was Erin. So the daughter who was too young to write the wife would include, like, messages from his daughter. And my mom thought that that was really sweet. And his daughter's name was Erin. Yeah. So I was named after. At least that's the story she told me. I don't know.
40:15 Wes: Interesting.
40:16 Erin: Yes.
40:17 Wes: This kind of makes me want to go back and watch some of the TV show, MASH.
40:21 Erin: Yeah.
40:22 Wes: I do love the way Altman films things with the overlapping dialogue and the shots where there's some intervening thing like helicopter blades or the distance shots, or there's multiple things going on at once. But I guess you would call it a kind of naturalism. I just. I find it very powerful.
40:39 Erin: It's great. I mean, very Hawksian. But of course, I think that the overlapping dialogue in the 70s has a different kind of valence to it, where Altman style itself, I think, is expressive of the fragmentation of society and the idea that multiple voices and narratives competing with each other with not one individual voice being the primary one. It's kind of that anarchy or that stance that you're talking about. Is sort of expressed in his style, which I find really interesting. I think it's difficult to do, to have that carried through, even in the form and the way in which you're filming.
41:12 Wes: Yeah. Have I converted you yet into loving 70s film more than. What is your decade? 40s. 40s,
41:21 Erin: yeah. Right, yeah.
41:23 Wes: That's what I thought you would say.
41:25 Erin: Yeah. If anything, I think I've converted you.
41:28 Wes: I'm just a product of my times and you're just a product of some random time the way before you lived. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it anyway.
41:40 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. I really did laugh a little too hard at some of the stuff that Hot Lips was saying during the football game. So I'm not above it.
41:48 Wes: Yeah, it's great. I think it's a great film.
41:52 Erin: Yeah.
41:52 Wes: Deserves its place among, you know, its typical rankings, top 100 films.
41:58 Erin: Well, the acting alone. I mean, Sutherland and Gould are really fantastic.
42:01 Wes: I love those guys.
42:03 Erin: They're so good. You know, it's rare to see acting that natural on film at any point in time.
42:10 Wes: I think it comes from. I was gonna say improvisation, but now I'm thinking I read contradictory things about that. And the dialogue does match, so I don't know how it was accomplished if there's some improvisational element, because that's usually what's at work when you see, you know what I mean, things that are. That feel that natural. I saw a indie film at the Brattle Theater recently called the Black Sea, and the director and lead actor actually were there to do a talk afterwards, and it turns out the film was completely improvised. They couldn't write any of it because of the writer strike. And it's great.
42:44 Erin: I mean, that's one way to get around you, really.
42:46 Wes: But you circumvent all the problems, especially with a small film and maybe limited talent. You circumvent a lot of problems with trying to get lines to sound natural, which takes a lot of repetition and, like regular filmmaking, a lot of rehearsal, a lot of repetition before you can say something that's been scripted and have it sound natural. And you just get rid of that problem when you. When you improvise. Well, not entirely, but. You know what I mean.
43:09 Erin: Yeah. I mean, insofar as we all are thinking about what we're going to say before we say it in real life, you know, like, that's one of the kind of really dubious things about filmmaking as a medium is that improvisation can sometimes work better than something that's scripted. And where does that leave you in the classification of film? As kind of an art form. You know, it's a strange thing. I know that Altman's dialogue, you know, was not quite as meticulously planned, I think, as the Hawks overlapping dialogue, where he would deliberately give filler stuff to say, but actual content.
Whereas I think some people have said that in mash. In the background, you could hear that people are kind of spinning their wheels a little bit, as though Altman might have told them, oh, just say whatever. And they're kind of going, oh, yeah, you know, that kind of thing. So. But he does have. I know he individually mics people. That was a technique that he used. So what you are getting is a heavily edited. You know, you're getting this incredibly naturalistic feel, which, in fact, has been heavily edited and manipulated sonically by him. So I think when you have everybody's individual mic on and you want to give a room sound, but you want to make sure that the audience picks out one person or the other.
He was just changing the levels all the time. So the person you're supposed to be listening to gets the highest mic volume. And he was just doing that in the editing room. His hand is. Is very much in there. Yeah.
44:38 Wes: So what is your favorite Altman film?
44:40 Erin: Nashville.
44:41 Wes: Oh, you already said that. Okay. Yeah, so we'll have to do that one day. Yeah. Okay.
44:45 Erin: Yeah. I don't know. You know, I don't love Altman. Like, I don't. I wish I got him better. I really love sequences in Nashville. It has, for me, some really incredibly memorable sequences that have really ingrained themselves in my memory. And so, therefore, I admire the film for creating that kind of set piece in several different instances. But I'm never sure in an Altman film what it all amounts to. I think there's a lot of chaos. There's a lot of. You know, there are many, many characters. Usually it all kind of ends in some sort of denouement.
But it always leaves me feeling a little empty, a little cold as a film, sort of buying into the hopelessness a little bit too much, where I think you run the risk of tipping the balance and then saying, okay, then what was the point of making the film in the first place? To a certain extent, you know, so that. That nihilism can sometimes leave me feeling pretty dissatisfied at the end of an Altman film. I mean, maybe nihilism is an unfair. It's not total nihilism on Altman's part, but, yeah, so, like, you know, Nashville has lots of great moments, and then at the end, the super Great moment.
And then when it's over, you're like, what was really the point of any of that? You know, I don't know that the film needs one or wants. Wants a point, but maybe I'm. Maybe I'm just a little too simplistic or something. I don't know. Do you have a favorite Altman film?
46:04 Wes: Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen his other films. I wouldn't say. I wouldn't call myself, like, an Altman fan in general. And maybe if I watch those other films, I would find out that I am having a similar reaction. Like, it leaving me cold. It's not the way MASH feels to me, but I think even though I like the way he films things with overlapping dialogue and all the rest of it, that's not enough of itself. And it doesn't mean that doesn't make me an Altman fan. Exactly. But I would put this up there among my favorite films, with Annie hall, for instance.
46:37 Erin: Wow. Wow.
46:38 Wes: Anything else in the 60s and 70s, basically. Just kidding.
46:44 Erin: Well, the. The overlapping style and the. I mean, the way he works with actors and the kinds of performances he gets are unbelievable. Like, Nashville is just full of, like, 20 great performances. And McCabe and Mrs. Miller is another. I'm due for a rewatch of that. But that's. That's another favorite Altman film of mine.
47:03 Wes: Yeah, me too. Okay, thank you.
47:06 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
Irony as Anesthetic in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H” (1970)
Jan 27, 2025
It begins with the “stupidest song ever written,” as Robert Altman called it, and ends with a self-referential jab at the very idea of finding comic relief in the tragedy of war. But it is equally unserious, the film “M.A.S.H” seem to suggest, to take seriously the authority of war-making institutions, and their pretense to putting violence in service of an ideal. And so morality succumbs to mockery, love to hedonism, and military rank to the form of authority immanent in the power to save lives. Yet suicide is not in fact painless, if it means robbing others of our presence, or ridding ourselves of the capacities for grief and earnestness. Wes & Erin discuss the 1970 classic “M.A.S.H,” and whether irony ought always to be our anesthetic, when confronted with traumas that are otherwise unspeakable.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: It begins with the stupidest song ever written, as Robert Altman called it, and ends with a self referential jab at the very idea of finding comic relief in the tragedy of war. But it is equally unserious. The film MASH seems to suggest to take seriously the authority of war, making institutions and their pretense to putting violence in service of an ideal. And so morality succumbs to mockery, love, to hedonism and military rank, to the form of authority immanent in the power to save lives. Yet suicide is not in fact painless if it means robbing others of our presence or ridding ourselves of the capacities for grief and earnestness.
Today we discuss the 1970 classic MASH and whether irony ought always to be our anesthetic when confronted with traumas that are otherwise unspeakable. This is Wes Alwan and this is Erin O'Luanaigh and you're listening to Subtext. Okay Erin, when I recommended this movie, when I saw your reaction I thought, hmm, this may not be her favorite. You didn't seem that excited about it. Maybe I should have gotten more info from you before we went through with it. And then I started watching it. It is one of my favorite movies, but I haven't seen it in a very long time.
And as I watched it I started to think, oh no, this is not good. One of the problems with the movie is that so it has a group of protagonists who are all chauvinists and womanizers and there are lots of complaints one can make about the way women are treated in the film. And I think Robert Altman was asked many times about this over the years and he said, look, it's just a reflection of the times. And I think he meant the 70s, but he might have also meant 1951 when the movie is set, or some combination thereof. But the arc of the film involves this group of surgeons, irreverent anti authority surgeons, defeating two representatives of authority.
One of them is Major Burns and one of them is Hot Lips Houlihan. And part of the way the arc for her they get Burns kicked out for they provoke him into attacking Hawkeye, I think, and then he leaves in a straitjacket. But for Hot Lips, she is humiliated in several different ways, including, like, being publicly, you know, having the curtain on the women's shower taken down so she's exposed publicly, and then ultimately, she's integrated into the group. She starts dating Duke, and at the very end of the movie, when there's a football game, she's reduced to the level of a mindless cheerleader.
Like. Yeah. So I thought we'd maybe just tackle that up front. What do you. What do you think of all that?
3:29 Erin: Start with the fact that I'm. I'm a feminist scold. Can't have any fun.
3:33 Wes: Well, okay. Well, I'm not meaning to imply that.
3:36 Erin: No, I'm just teasing.
3:38 Wes: I had. Let me just say a little bit more about that. I had. When I probably saw it for the first time in 1990, and it would never have occurred to me to be uncomfortable with any of that. For. I mean, part of it's cultural, and part of it is just my age. And part of it, I think, is still applicable, which is that I looked at it through the lens of protagonists who are not meant to be likable on the one first and second, through the lens of what they're doing to deal with the horrors of war, which is not meant to be pleasant, even though, you know, it's milked for comedy.
But then it's. It's satirical, and the film makes much of the fact, which we'll get into that it. There's something more serious going on. But in any case. So I saw it as more local to the conditions of a MASH unit than as a cultural commentary. And I don't think Altman meant it as some. It's not an endorsement. It's also not even really a cultural commentary. It's not really the point. But now, yeah, I can't help but feel disturbed. And I think part of that is just the culture has. Has changed. Thank goodness it's not just about calling you a feminist scold.
4:44 Erin: Yeah. Those are your exact words. I wrote them. No, I'm just kidding. No. You think the protagonists aren't meant to be likable? Because, I mean, here's one of my big problems with the movie is I love Elliott Gould. I love everything he does. So, you know, you want to, I don't know, clarify what you mean by that, because I think that they're being presented as the heroes.
5:04 Wes: Well, they are the protagonists. Although I think thematically, the chaplain might be the kind of dark horse protagonist, like the Alyosha of the movie. And I'll say why later on, but. Right. I get a lot of pleasure out of their irreverence, which I think we are meant to get. But they are cruel and they have kind of a surgeon God complex, which is amplified by their position in the army, where they have no tolerance for what they call, quote, unquote, regular army for people who want to follow the rules or for people who are representatives of any sort of moral authority.
And I think part of that is a kind of protest against a war that they've been drafted into. And the contradiction between being part of a war and their role as healers. Right. So we have all sorts of things going on. So I think one's reaction to them can be complicated and you get plenty of pleasure out of them. And, yeah, I love all these actors as well, but I don't think the protagonists themselves could be said to be. I think, likable would be. They're bad boys. And some of it's charming, but some of it is obviously cruel. And I. I don't. I don't think an audience.
I don't think any audience, no matter how sympathetic, could escape that. But maybe I'm wrong about that.
6:27 Erin: Hmm. Yeah. Maybe likable is the wrong word. I think the film very much sides with them. I mean, you know, one of the uncomfortable things about not liking the film is that that casts anyone in opposition to the way that it portrays some of the things you're talking about as being sort of pro authority, pro army protocol, pro teetotaling. All of these things that one doesn't want to be aligned with. But it sort of like, you know, annihilates the opposition. My problem with the protagonists themselves, and maybe if I'm seeing the movie as fully aligned with their point of view and endorsing that point of view, then the movie, too, is just incredibly smug.
I think that's the biggest problem that I have with it, more even than the chauvinistic material or the cruelty. All of that, I think, is the downstream effect of this extreme smugness. And I think the MASH setup, the fact that they're three miles from the front line, but they're not ever involved in combat. And, you know, it's almost like there are civilians just that just happen to be three miles from the front line.
7:33 Wes: Right.
7:33 Erin: Like, there are so many. There's so many conditions, of course, that make this a set apart kind of place, a kind of moral no man's land. But at the same time, you know, they're not actually. They're only dealing with the result of battle. They're never, it seems, seeing battle. And so in a way, they're just like a bunch of doctors that have just been transposed into a new area and just have to deal with whoever comes in. But they get to keep their. Well, now I kind of want to go back on that. This is very complicated because of course you can argue that a lot of what their attitudes are are response to the conditions that they're seeing.
But at the same time, I think there's an element of this in which they're sort of untouched by the reality of like having bullets fly at you and stuff like that. So there's a sort of resistance element to what they're doing. And yet at the same time they're winning. They win at everything. They're always right. They always have the answer. They can usually save the patient. They're good at everything, and therefore they get away with everything. And that as existing both in and kind of separate from the system. That clash really fascinates me.
8:39 Wes: I think the word smug is right. Although I don't attributed to the movie. I attribute to attribute it to the characters. And I would. I think of it in terms of cynicism and I think certainly Robert Altman didn't think he was endorsing their attitude and part of the reason why he disliked the TV series. So it turns out he really didn't like the TV series mash, which is that all this. The harshness of it was toned down and all the characters are just likable and there's still humor, but it's much tamer and people aren't being cruel to each other.
And I think he thought he was illustrating kind of extreme behavior under extreme conditions. Which is not to say that who knows how these characters are in civilian life. One would think that, yeah, that some of the arrogance and smugness and all that stuff is there and it's not. Not to paint all doctors with a broad brush, but it's kind of one of the temptations of being a. In a very prestigious position as a surgeon in society. Right. It can go to one's head. Again, I use the phrase God complex and then you transpose that into this situation.
The result is people who are used to being the authorities and are going to rebel against the authority, which is the army, in part because it's a hypocritical authority. They're trying to create a pocket of order and sanity in the context of something that is arguably completely insane. Even if you think the war was necessary. There's something insane about war that seems like it should not be honored, even with the formalities of rank. And you treat me this way and call me this and all that. That seems to dishonor the cruel realities of war.
That seems hypocritical. And so I think these sorts of characters see themselves as warriors against that kind of hypocrisy, but it's not all positive. Right. So you get. You get these kind of ridiculous characters in Burns and Houlihan, who are their representatives of the moral. Of some sort of moral order, of some sort of impulse towards a moral order. But they are. They go too far. They quote, unquote, regular army. And one of them is religious, but arguably superficially religious. He's also cruel, and that's part of what gets him in. In trouble.
He makes one of the younger MASH unit kids cry by blaming a death on him. But on the other hand, the treatment of the chaplain, Dago Red, Is that what they're calling.
11:09 Erin: Yeah, my new. My new nickname.
11:11 Wes: Several. One of several inappropriate nicknames. But they don't have a lot of time for him in the movie. And in many instances, the uselessness of what he's doing spiritually is highlighted. Right. So he's in to give rites to someone, but someone says, come here and hold a clamp or something like that over and over again. His role is kind of minimized, but he doesn't get the same treatment in terms of ridicule as Hot Lips and Burns do. And arguably, in the end. So I think if you thought. If you think there might be a thematic protagonist to this, it would be sadness. And I think the chaplain is representative of that. So at the very end of the movie, they're all playing poker. And I don't know if you saw this. This is the first time I really paid attention to it. But in the background, the chaplain is hauling a body off.
11:58 Erin: I did not see that.
11:59 Wes: Yeah. Is taking a body away. And Hawkeye has this. Does this double take. He's looking behind him at the jeep, taking the body with the chaplain, and has this sad look on his face. And I thought, okay, well, that is really interesting in a way. That's kind of a emotional climax from the movie where you get to see some sort of remorse out of these characters who are covering up some so. Or sadness. I would say not. Not necessarily remorse, but some sort of sadness out of. Out of these characters who are kind of manically covering that up with their behavior. And it turns out in the original, this was Cut out of the movie, but the scenes were shot. That's actually the Korean kid, what's his name? Ho-Jon.
12:39 Erin: Oh, yeah.
12:39 Wes: Who they tried to save from going into the war by faking a physical and it didn't work. And then he's in the war and he ends up killed. And they just try to block that out. So that poker game, they're trying to ignore what's going on behind them, which is that Ho-Jon is being taken away and then Hawkeye can't. So it's subtle, but I think that if one were to defend the film, you would have to say that the manic behavior of these doctors is not actually being endorsed, even if we as an audience enjoy it. And many ways their intelligence, their rapier like wit, as someone makes fun of them in the film is. It's hard to resist. But at a deeper thematic level, it's the antagonist. That's my defense. I know it might sound far fetched, but.
13:30 Erin: No, it's very interesting. It's very interesting. It makes me appreciate the film a little bit more. I mean, there were things about this film I did appreciate it. Don't get me wrong. You know, Pauline Kael is so her long review of the film, I think it's in deeper into movies, which I read a couple months ago, you know, she has this real triumphalist like these. These are her protagonists that obviously reflect her attitudes about, you know, this was a film she really championed. And she was a close personal friend of Altman, too, and like, loved his films.
So she sees these men as being fully endorsed by the film. And I think that the cruelty with which someone like Burns is portrayed is also pretty incriminating as far as the attitude of the film goes. Right. He kneels down in front of them and starts praying out loud. You know, it seems to me that one of the reasons why the chaplain is spared is because I think because he doesn't seem to be intrusive. You know, Burns is teaching Ho-Jon to read out of the Bible and this is a bad thing to do. He's praying out loud, and this is an obnoxious thing to do.
And these. These characteristics paired with the fact that he seems to be in favor of a certain amount of protocol and also that he's not a good surgeon. That's a big one. He's not competent in his job. The movie has sort of Howard Hawks moral values that if you're good at your job, then you're good. And that's, you know, what we care about. The Most is someone who has extreme competence, especially in these high pressure situations. Right. So doing good work is the most important thing, which is a value system that makes a ton of sense to me.
So burn all. All burns needed, you know, to attract my ire would be being a bad surgeon and yelling at that kid, you know, but they. But they make him this really obnoxious, you know, praying out loud, making himself such a huge target in front of these guys. And so he's a hypocrite, whereas the chaplain is not a hypocrite. But of course, what I see as a flaw of the film is that the protagonists are just as stringent. Their moral code and further, they have the power to exert punishment. I mean, they don't have a God complex so much as they are little gods in this environment.
I mean, you can make an argument that they're very much like gods. They're very much like pagan gods who get to have their way with the women and do whatever it is that they want and save people's lives at will and administer justice in the form of exacting revenge or dishing out retribution for not fitting in with the moral code of immorality that characterizes their sort of cool kids club. So that bothers me. It's a little bit like a more sophisticated version of Grease where Sandy at the end has to turn bad in order to get with Danny Zuko. That's essentially what they're doing to Houlihan.
They're kind of indoctrinating her into, in this instance, a frat house. In the case of Grease, it's more like a mild mannered gang. As far as gang go.
16:37 Wes: It's worse in a way because she doesn't become one of the boys, she becomes a child.
16:41 Erin: Right. She becomes part of the harem. Yeah, yeah.
16:45 Wes: And not even. Not even. I mean, yeah, part of the harem, but. And this is a harem in which. Right, yeah. Everyone's cheating on their spouses back home. Although there is that moment, Right. Duke and Hawkeye learn that they're going home and you see the look on Duke's face and then you see the look on Hot Lip's face and it's very pained for both of their parts, which suggests that there's a real attachment. But. Right. The way she is in the football game at the end, she's traded in her competence. Not just her moral authority or her interest in a moral order or in being rules and being regular army, but also her authority overall and her competence.
She's traded that for being this airhead. Hot Lips, you nincompoop. She. What does she get wrong? Or she's singing chants like, kill, kill, kill. And she doesn't know that the other. It's not their team that scored, the other team scored. You know, things like that. She knows nothing about football, women, which doesn't.
17:43 Erin: We're so stupid.
17:46 Wes: So I think you can look at it in two different ways. One of. One of them is more benign. It's that she's not taking herself seriously. But the more sinister and probably at least a bit more accurate way of looking at it is that she's submitted. She's bent the knee, so to speak. To use a phrase that people like to use today, I guess because of Game of Thrones.
18:07 Erin: Oh, is that where that's from?
18:09 Wes: Bending the knee, as in submitting to the higher royal authority?
18:14 Erin: Never mind. Cut that out.
18:15 Wes: I'm offended that you haven't watched Game of Thrones.
18:20 Erin: Yeah. You know, incest is yet another. Another topic I love, and my media consumption.
18:28 Wes: Oh, that's the tip of the iceberg.
18:30 Erin: Yeah, I know. Yeah. No, thank you. I would like to be able to watch it, but I can barely handle certain commercials at this point. So.
18:38 Wes: Yeah. Anyway, so, yeah, Hot Lips, you were saying? She is turned in. It's like having to become one of the. One of the bad boys. But also, she's not even one of the boys.
18:48 Erin: Right. Yeah. I think, more importantly, I'm concerned with the hypocrisy of. You know, they seem desperate to root out Burns. Hypocrisy. And that very action of rooting it out is itself a great expression of hypocrisy. You know, they're sort of like militant atheists being even more dogmatic in their atheism than the religious people that they claim to hate. Right. It would be far less hypocritical for them to simply not care and just let everybody do their thing. And if they feel like praying out loud or.
19:17 Wes: Well, except that they see the moral. The moral of the order and authority in general as something bad.
19:24 Erin: Right, right.
19:25 Wes: So you could see them as anarchists who just. So they are offended. Yes, they're morally offended by someone like Burns.
19:32 Erin: Right. And here we get into the weeds a little bit. I think, about this idea of authority. I mean, how, you know, they get away with everything. The actual authority figures are not. What's the name of the captain or the lieutenant or the colonel? I keep going, the colonel who's in charge with the glasses, what's his name?
19:49 Wes: Blake.
19:50 Erin: Blake, right. You know, Blake is not much of an authority figure. I mean, they. They don't for. For people that are like, down with authority, they don't seem to really suffer the consequences of it. They see people who have suffered the consequences of it. They. They work on people who have suffered the consequences for it. So you could argue perhaps that they're fighting a kind of proxy war on Behal. These bodies that are getting shipped in to their theater. Is that something that. Is that something?
20:17 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think there's an element of anti war protest here, even though it's never made explicit. And of course, the movie came out in 1970, right?
20:26 Erin: Yeah, during.
20:27 Wes: During the Vietnam War. And I think studio executives were worried that people would not understand that it was the Korean War rather than the Vietnam War. And in fact, it's got a very 70s vibe to it. Right. It's not really like an attempt at a period representation of 1951, or maybe it's even a hybrid. Maybe it's even something weirder. And it's kind of a hybrid of the two different settings and value systems. And I think there's an undercurrent of this is. Yeah, this is meant to be a protest against the absurdity and terribleness of war and the authority figures who bring us into war. Is that what you were getting at?
21:11 Erin: Yeah, I'm just. I'm just interested in how toothless the authority that is directly represented in the film is. This isn't some version of the Great Escape in which they're managing to carry out all these hijinks and have fun in spite of the fact that, like, they're in. I mean, I know the Great Escape took place in a POW camp, but, you know, they're managing to do some sort of massive resistance in the face of the iron fist of authority. One of the things that I think is characteristic of an Altman film is the, in fact, the facelessness of authority.
And maybe this is representative of these kinds of wars. Korea and Vietnam are kind of just two expressions of the same type of conflict and the same type of region with the same type of. Generally speaking, Vietnam, I think, is, you know, much more densely jungle than Korea is. I might be wrong about that. But otherwise, in sort of the same scenery, right. Fighting for the sorts of. The same values and everything is imposed from on high. And maybe the facelessness of that iron will of authority that's. That's kind of bearing down on all of them.
Maybe that is part of the point. I'm thinking of Nashville, which is probably The Altman film I like best, in which there's a political candidate and a sort of neo fascist mold who we never see. But there are loudspeakers. Loudspeakers are another thing. It has in common with mash, but in Nashville, there are cars going down the street that have these loudspeakers that are blaring these messages from this faceless candidate that's running for office throughout the entire film. We never see him. And I think he's a member of. Oh, it's something really.
I think it's called the Replacement Party. And so we get this crazy neo fascist kind of messaging being broadcast throughout the city at various points in the film, adding to the layers of the soundtrack. So that kind of threat, or what that threat represents and the fact that it is faceless, and maybe also the fact that there's quite a disconnect. And I think this is a common theme in the sort of modern war film with a more sort of Vietnam and after kind of sensibility is the utter disconnect between the people at the top that are sending you over there and any sense of order, control, any sense that you're actually working towards a goal.
Right. Like, that breakdown seems to be indicative of a kind of post Vietnam mentality, even in films made after the Vietnam era about, say, World War II. Like, this is a theme in Saving Private Ryan as well, right? This idea that, I mean, everybody who's in control when Saving Private Ryan is pretty good at their jobs, but the orders that they get to go in and save Ryan are coming from, you know, a clean, white, you know, room in which a bunch of generals are sort of sitting around deciding what's going to look good for PR for the sake of their army, and making these guys that are covered in mud on the ground go in and all risk their lives just to pull out this one kid from behind enemy lines.
So I think that's the kind of film that can only be made in a post Vietnam world about World War II.
24:26 Wes: Yeah. I think the interesting twist on that is that, as you pointed out, right, they're not fighting, but also they are not enlisted. They're drafted in as officers.
24:38 Erin: Right.
24:38 Wes: And they're from. We're privileged classes of society. So if you watch a typical Vietnam movie or World War II movie, it's often about people who are. You know, I think you get maybe a diversity of draftees, but a lot of them are working class. And people get exceptions, right, for being in college or something like that. So I think it's true that it falls. That the brunt of this falls on lower classes. Maybe that's just my uneducated impression, but in this case, yeah, you get people who are drafted in immediately as officers, which is a much different thing. And so. And they are catered to. Actually. In a former career, I had to make a recruiting video for Army National Guard to recruit officers.
25:19 Erin: Oh, my goodness.
25:21 Wes: And I interviewed a lot of officers and basically what they wanted is doctors and lawyers. Right. They just. They need certain professions. And I was told, you know, make. Do not show like typical, like a tank coming over a hill and all kinds of like military stuff. That's not what they want. They don't. They don't want to see that in a recruiting video. These are people who are professionals and if they're going to be volunteer for this sort of thing, it's got to be. It's got to be sold in a much different way.
25:48 Erin: Wow.
25:48 Wes: Of course, in this film they don't have any choice, but. But you get the idea, right? This is a.
25:54 Erin: It's a different class distinction.
25:55 Wes: Yeah, yeah. What.
25:57 Erin: What did they have in the videos for the officers?
25:59 Wes: Well, I lost control over the process. So I. What was supposed to happen? I was a strategist and I was supposed to be basically managing the film as a product from start to finish, which means. So I wrote the concept for the film, for the video. Film for the video, wrote the concept, and then passed it on to a writing team. And then it was supposed to come back to me. And then I would, you know, we'd work. I'd work on it with the writing team and then it would go to the video team, hire actors, do all that stuff. It got all the way through rough cut of the film before I saw it, after I produced the concept. And what's the first frame? You know, what's the first sequence in the video? Tank coming over a hill, got our guns. Yep. Precisely the thing that I explicitly said not to do. You know, in the concept made its way in.
26:48 Erin: That's so funny. They are men after all. I guess. You know, that cuts across class lines. Big tank come over hill.
26:58 Wes: And a lot of it was terrible. I think I can say this since I'm not naming names, but we had. I got a. I got one. So in the screening, I think people were unhappy with me because I was unhappy with the film, but I had a whole. I cut out a whole sequence having to do with hiring medical officers because. Hiring doctors or trying to appeal to doctors. And it involved a doctor going to his Superior and saying, hey, I've been called up. Right.
27:25 Erin: So.
27:25 Wes: As if this is the way offices like hospitals work. You go into your boss's office and you're both wearing the white gowns.
27:34 Erin: You're both like this.
27:36 Wes: He sits in his office all day at his computer, and you go in to talk to and to ask him permission. Oh, I got called up. And then the boss is very unhappy. What? You can't go. We need you here. As if the boss didn't. Doesn't understand it's like a federal requirement or whatever.
27:51 Erin: And then you're my number one guy on the chest spreader. What are you talking about?
27:57 Wes: And so he has to persuade the boss to let him go. And that happens very unconvincingly and quickly. And then suddenly they're buddies and they're walking arm in arm down the hallway. And it's shot in a way, it almost looks like a scene from the Shining. So it's, like, creepy but also homoerotic at the same time. Yeah, I made fun of that scene in the meeting. And then people were not happy with me anyway. So I don't know how much of that is relevant to this, but except for the fact that.
28:24 Erin: Oh, it's relevant.
28:26 Wes: Yeah. These are officers from more privileged elements of society here. So it's not your typical war film. And so beyond the fact that they're not fighting and dying, they are trying to take care of people who are doing that. And of course, it's in one sense much easier, but in one sense, you could say psychologically much harder. And it's much harder to believe in the cause. I mean, there's a lot of nihilism and cynicism in Vietnam war movies, but in this case, they don't get the satisfaction of being able to say, I fought for my country, for instance.
29:01 Erin: Well, yes, but at the same time, they don't have to say that they shot someone who they looked straight into their eyes and had to pull the trigger. You know, like, they didn't. They don't have any of that kind of. They're not as embroiled in consequences. So they didn't fight for their country. But that means that that doesn't come with the stuff you have to do in order to fight for it.
29:23 Wes: True. I'm thinking of this from the standpoint of prestige. So there's a time when it would have been shameful. I'm thinking of a scene from Gosford park, actually, right now where someone is shamed for the fact that they didn't end up Fighting for their country. So that you're in this kind of middle. You did and you didn't. You know, you're. You're in this kind of netherworld. I don't know what the right. Right world is, where it is, but, right, they're medics, they're not fighters.
29:48 Erin: Right.
29:48 Wes: So there's something weird going on with the status and prestige element of film in the way, in one sense they're higher status people, but in another sense their status is under attack because they're not principal actors in the war. And so in a way, they don't have the right to protest. And I think that's why it comes out in the way that it does. They don't have the right to say, oh, you know, this horrible war that I'm being subjected to. They don't have the right to complain, but they still have to look at dead bodies coming in, and they still have to be in people's guts and taking care of them, which is a horrific and traumatizing thing to have to do. So it's like much of the trauma, not all of it, but a lot of it, without any right to complain.
30:29 Erin: Yeah, that's interesting. I was thinking about what you were saying in terms of being able to get out of it if you were a college. I think this is also the difference too between the mentality in World War II and Vietnam. From what I understand about World War II, it was like everybody tried to get into the war. My grandfather left college to go to the war. He had tried getting into the war when he was too young, tried fudging his age. They were all trying to do that to get in. And then you have the fact that, you know, though he was tapped to go to, whatever it's called, officer school, he asked specifically to be sent to regular army camp, basic training, because he wanted to be.
He didn't want to be. You know, there's this attitude about regular enlisted men versus officers, and officers are uppity and you don't want to be like one of them. You want to be somebody who's on the front lines being sent in to really fight for your country. So there's a. You know, there are all these divisions, even when you get into the army, you know, about who really is, and my brother has told me this too, who's in the National Guard, that there's this real culture clash and, you know, attitude that the enlisted men actually know what's going on and the officers are all very kind of, you know, full of themselves.
Right. And they don't actually know anything. And there's huge.
31:38 Wes: It's always, always been that way. Yeah.
31:40 Erin: Right, right. And so there are all of these different power dynamics which often kind of upend the actual, like, chain of command, you know, in the army anyway. This is making me think of all of that. But of course, in Vietnam it was more respectable. It seems at that point to be a draft dodger versus, you know, I used to talking to some of my grandfather's friends, like, they remember the name of like the one guy who tried to dodge the draft and his name was mud for. For the rest of his life because of the fact, you know, and it was one guy, you know, everybody else was like 4F and trying to get in and 45 years old and trying to get in, you know.
32:15 Wes: Yeah. So we don't get a lot of, I think, overt social commentary about the war in this. There's no discussion of whether is this a good war or a bad war? There's no discussion of how traumatic it is. There's everything. All of that stuff is behind the scenes.
32:33 Erin: Slightly. Just at the beginning with the words on the screen, the quotes from MacArthur and Eisenhower. And I noted that that was displayed over an image of the latrine. So there's like the latrine sign and then the words of MacArthur saying that he just went to Korea and he'll now fade away as an old soldier. And then Eisenhower's I will go to Korea. So, you know, this idea that, like, this is just a product of the war machine and it keeps chugging along and it needs more food to eat to keep going. That was a bit of commentary for me, but other than that, yeah, not much.
33:07 Wes: So one can be critical of war in general and the human stupidity and folly. The fact that we engage in these wars, that's one level of commentary. And then there's a. This war, this particular war is bad because it's not necessary for self defense or however you want to critique it. And I see those as two different levels. So, for instance, does the film have a particular opinion on the Korean War? I don't know. It's certainly anti war in the general sense. And then as I was just thinking of, as far as particular characters, as far as the characters in the film in particular, you know, what's going on internally to the film. I don't think we get any direct talk about war either, you know, criticism of war either in the general sense or in the specific sense. But correct me if I'm Wrong.
33:52 Erin: No, I think that's right. Yeah.
33:54 Wes: So that's all left out of it. Even though the general tenor of it, I think. Yes. Is very. Is very anti war, at least in the general sense. And then maybe, you know, maybe it's. The Korean War is considered a bad war as well.
34:05 Erin: Well, I know so little about. About the Korean War, frankly, that, you know, I had to remind myself who the belligerents were. Exactly. I mean, who. Who was on our side? You know, it was mostly, it seems, the UN thing that, you know, we as leaders of the UN got into. But I was trying to figure out if Japan was actually fighting with us in the Korean War. They were not listed as one of the Allies, so I was just surprised. You know the scene where they go over to Japan, I don't know how realistic that would have been if they were going to Japan for holidays and stuff like that. But that's another. You could argue, that's another tiny, subtle form of commentary that in 51 they're going over to Japan to hang out.
34:42 Wes: Yeah, well, after World War II, I think we thoroughly occupied that country and we still have military bases, right?
34:49 Erin: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's. I guess that's true. Yeah. I get the friendliness of the sort of like post war, just hanging out in Japan kind of attitude was something that struck me. I had to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be Korea in 51. So it's, you know, the quick bedfellow switching out is interesting.
35:11 Wes: I think it's. Yeah, it's worth noting the Japanese and. Right. This is six years after World War II and where Japan did horrible things all over the Pacific, but including to Korea. And it still is a sore spot even to this day. But where should we go next?
35:25 Erin: Should we go straight to how Hot Lips gets her name or should we. Should we go to the. The Suicide tableau first?
35:33 Wes: You want to start before we go, why don't we start with the song Speaking of the Suicide Table tableau.
35:39 Erin: Sure.
35:40 Wes: It's a really weird song, isn't it? It was written. The lyrics are written by Robert Altman's 15 year old son. Did you know that?
35:46 Erin: I did not know that, but then I looked it up and was not surprised.
35:52 Wes: So he wanted to write the stupidest song ever.
35:55 Erin: The stupidest song ever? Yeah, like that.
35:57 Wes: And he couldn't think of good lyrics for that. And apparently his son was able to do it very quickly. And then I forget who did the music to this. It was unfamous. But I don't know Because I grew up with mash, the TV series. I think the song is kind of, you know, in my blood, in a way.
36:12 Erin: Sure.
36:12 Wes: When I hear it, it's kind of touching in a way.
36:14 Erin: Yeah.
36:15 Wes: And I think. I didn't know that. I'd never thought about the lyrics. But I associated suicide with the suicidality of war, I think. Which is interesting in light of the vignette where that sequence where we get painless. How do you pronounce his last name? Waldowski?
36:34 Erin: Yes, I think so.
36:35 Wes: It's the Polish dentist. In light of his desire to kill himself, there seems to be a connection.
36:41 Erin: Yeah. The words always surprise me a little bit. I'm, of course, much more familiar with the TV show than the film. I've only ever seen bits and pieces of the film. I never saw it all the way through until now. So I had no idea that there was an instrumental version that played in the middle of the. I'd never seen that before. So I don't know. It's pretty funny.
36:59 Wes: And then the last. The Last Supper.
37:01 Erin: Yeah. And the reason why is pretty. Pretty wild, I guess, in a place like that. You would have to kill yourself if you were homosexual. There's no other way.
37:11 Wes: Yeah. So he has a. He has a problem with impotence and then decides that he might be a fairy, as he puts it.
37:20 Erin: Latent. So latent that he had no idea.
37:23 Wes: Homosexual.
37:26 Erin: Nearly imperceptible.
37:30 Wes: And so they stay. They have this elaborate farewell party where they're gonna give him the impression that they're helping him kill himself.
37:40 Erin: Up until the point when the Lieutenant Dish. Intervention is made.
37:45 Wes: Lieutenant Dish.
37:47 Erin: Yeah.
37:48 Wes: Forrest Gump down
37:51 Erin: until her intervention is made. I found this to be, like, pretty profound and kind of fascinating. And the chaplain sort of getting on board with it. I mean, it's difficult to say how much of it was told to the chaplain, but if it's just this idea that, like, oh, we're gonna make him think that he's killing himself, and then we just put him to sleep or something, and he wakes up the next morning and thinks that he survived the suicide attempt. And it might give him, you know, a sense of, like, I'm imagining this is the way that it was explained to the chaplain that the sexual intervention was not expressed to him. And if this were kind of the culmination of the whole thing, and he wakes up because I don't know what it is that they actually give him. I'm assuming it's just a placebo. But if it was a sleeping pill, Sleep or.
38:35 Wes: Yeah, maybe a Quaalude or something, right?
38:37 Erin: And then were he to wake up and feel as though his life was miraculously spared, that would be kind of an amazing moment.
38:45 Wes: They convince the chaplain by. They say, okay. He says, I cannot give absolution to a man who's about to commit suicide. It's a mortal sin. They say, look, dago, he's not committing suicide. He's only intending to commit suicide. So you're not dealing with an act. You're dealing with an intention. And if it works, if what we're doing works, then he will not commit suicide. So therefore you're preventing. So therefore, you're preventing a mortal sin. Okay? And then he says, well, I should check. And they're like, yeah, you check on it. So it's interesting because we do this sometimes as therapists.
We'll do something called joining. We'll join some sort of sentiment that the patient has, even if it's not a sentiment that we agree with, or even if it's not a sentiment that we think that's particularly healthy. It might even be a resistance quote, unquote. It might even be something that's keeping them from interacting authentically with therapy and maybe with other people in their lives. But the idea is, if you can't beat it, you can't beat them, join them. And you start out by becoming an ally to that. It's almost a little bit like reverse psychology.
It actually works very well. So you give them the sense that the intention. They can fully inhabit the intention and have the feeling, have the sentiment, and that actually makes it easier to not act on it. Like acting on it in some ways is a feature of the fact that the sentiment is not. Okay.
40:10 Erin: You know what I mean?
40:12 Wes: So I thought, wow, that's very interesting, because they're doing something actually that might be considered genuinely therapeutic, even though in a way it's just a product of their Seemingly a product of their sense of humor, their irony, their cynicism, their satirizing suicide, and they're satirizing death. They don't take his concerns seriously. They don't say, oh, my God, we got to get you to a psychiatrist or to a therapist. Right? We. We need to get you help. They take it on themselves. Or even that we have to get you to the chaplain. We need to get you spiritual help. They take it on themselves. Right. And there is a spiritual element which the whole Last Supper scene makes very clear.
40:48 Erin: Yes.
40:48 Wes: Which is which I love that portrayal. Right. So they take it on themselves. Not they're not just lifesavers as surgeons. They're going to do it with their particular. They're. They're going to put their irreverence to use as a spiritual cure. They're gonna not take it seriously and take it seriously at the same time. Take it seriously as a sentiment, but not take it seriously as a. As an action. I don't know if I'm getting that right, but do you see what I mean?
41:15 Erin: Yes. Yeah. Of course. It's because of the chaplain that they know that he's struggling with this. So rather than going to the chaplain, the chaplain has come to them for the intervention, right?
41:24 Wes: Oh, yeah.
41:25 Erin: And the fact they use the Last Supper as a visual for this is, you know, sort of interesting. I mean, if Christ could at any moment, in the process of his passion, decide he's had enough, he could get out of it. Right. But he doesn't.
41:42 Wes: Is that true?
41:43 Erin: Of course. Seen irreverently, change. I change my mind. Yeah, but he's not going to do that. But the point is that seen in a really irreverent way, the dentist does have something in common. The circumstances do have something in common with Christ's circumstances.
41:59 Wes: Yeah, actually. Yeah, let's think about that. Yeah. Can we make sense of Painless as a Christ figure? Yeah. As an ironic Christ figure, sure.
42:10 Erin: Okay, so let's think through this. I mean, this is pretty blasphemous, but saying that Painless can no longer be one of these men. His time has come because he's realized that he can no longer participate in their sort of antics and needs to. Well, I mean, it's not a. It's not a perfect analogy. Obviously, what needs to. Needs to take himself out of the game. Because I think part of what their skill is about or part of the way that they have of blowing off steam, obviously, is this womanizing. So because he can't do one half of it, the idea is maybe he can't fully participate even in. He can't be competent anymore as a medical professional and therefore he needs to take himself out of the game. Is that right?
42:53 Wes: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that is. I think you're pointing to something really interesting.
42:58 Erin: So he's sacrificing himself. Yeah.
43:00 Wes: Right. We're trying to think about how we might see him as sacrificing himself. He's pointing in a way to the fragility of the defense that they're using. Right. They are very dependent on their power, whether as surgeons or sexual power, as a way to cope and if that fails ever. And it doesn't, you know. Right. As you pointed out, it doesn't really fail for these guys in the movie. It always seems to work even under pretty like, risky circumstances where they're like gassing a general or was he a general that they gassed or is he just a colonel or something?
But they, you know, and sticking him in the chest with a golf club and just doing all kinds of crazy stuff where you think, okay, these guys would in real life probably get court martialed, but in the movie they get away with it. Their way of coping with things is actually very imperfect. And I think Painless, he's like a little crack in the armor or something like that. He kind of shows that there's some fragility. And to the extent that they are recruited into helping him, even though it's through their cynicism, there's something a little bit more compassionate than usual about that.
I don't know, can he sacrifice himself for their sins? Can they be redeemed through Painless's sacrifice? I don't know.
44:17 Erin: Yeah. I mean, thinking through what you said about the deleted scene with Ho-Jon at the end, it sounds like it's. That's not, that's not an effective way to go. But maybe it would strike them differently if it were someone who's on their staff, as it were. Yeah. So I think talking about this tableau and Painless makes me want to explore more about the other prank that they play on Burns and the erstwhile Hot Lips. So maybe we'll transition to that and talk about it in part two.
44:47 Wes: Okay, thank you.
44:48 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa” (Part 2)
Jan 20, 2025
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Marianne Moore's 1932 poem the Jerboa. Last time I think we talked about what toys little baby Egyptians used to like to play with. And it seems the consensus is that they liked to put badgers on camels and race them, dress them up as jockeys. And they also like to maybe feed wasps to snakes. The jury's out on what exactly they like to do with these things. But the point is. What is the point? The point is that they're toyifying nature or they are reordering for consumption and enjoyment and appropriation something that was maybe already ordered in nature. And this is therefore something quite morally fraught, I think, for Marianne Moore's idea of the proper way to treat nature, which includes treating people. People are part of nature. So.
1:30 Wes: And it's not just about survival, is what this shows. And later on we'll see that's important. You know, in the contra, when we get the contrast with the jerboa, it's
1:39 Erin: about survival for the badger, because if the badger loses, the losing jockey gets shot.
1:46 Wes: Career survival. Oh, okay. Well, that's an even.
1:50 Erin: I don't know, that's an even more
1:52 Wes: morally fraught game than I was imagining.
1:54 Erin: Got really real, really fast. I don't know why that's. That's what came to mind.
1:58 Wes: But yeah, I mean, I do remember as a kid with little groups of boys doing horrific things to frogs, for instance. Yeah, horrible.
2:07 Erin: How many people do you have in your freezer, Wes?
2:10 Wes: Yeah, exactly. But, you know, if you take them out and you put them on water, they float and you can use them like a raft. So it's the dual purpose. No, but that's actually part of my point, which is that this is right. The relationship to other animals in part is about survival. And of course other animals do this, the lions eating the gazelles or whatever. But for human beings, it goes above and beyond that to something, to a matter of dominion and a matter of a reinforcement of some sense of psychological superiority and the use of animals aesthetically, the use of animals to fuel important or as magical totems to ward off evil, all of that stuff. And then now in this next section I think you're about to read, we're going to get a transition to. Well, why don't you read it and then we can discuss it.
3:08 Erin: It was a picture with a fine distance of drought and of assistance in time from the Nile rising slowly while the pigtailed monkey on slab hands with arched-up slack-slung gait and the brown dandy looked at the jasmine, two leaf, twig and bud cactus pads and fig dwarfs here and there lent to an evident poetry of frog grays, duck egg greens and eggplant blues. A fantasy and a verisimilitude that were right to those with everywhere power over the poor. The bees, food is your food. Those who tended flower beds and stables were like the king's cane in the form of a hand, or the folding bedroom made for his mother of whom he was fond.
Princes clad in queen's dresses, calla or petunia white that trembled at the edge, and queens in A king's undershirt of fine twilled thread like silkworm gut as beeman and milkmaid kept divine cows and bees, limestone brows and gold foil wings. In some places I. You know, she's famously hard to track her reference. And sometimes I'm like, what are the dwarves? What's going on?
4:20 Wes: Where do the dwarves come from?
4:21 Erin: Yeah, where do they come from?
4:22 Wes: Remember any dwarves?
4:25 Erin: It was a picture with a fine distance. What picture? And what is it? What is that referring to? But I love it. A picture with a fine distance. It's such a wonderfully oxymoronical phrase.
4:36 Wes: Well, I think she's talking about everything that's come before. So it was a picture. This is now her. The first explicit commentary. I think that's in this poem. It's all been description of details, but. Yeah, with indirect commentary. Right. Calling well these people like small things, I guess is commentary. But these people. These people. It was a picture with a fine distance of drought and of assistance in time from the Nile rising slowly. So I assume that that is the locust, oil and stone. Locusts. I thought I understood this.
5:12 Erin: The whole civilization. You're saying this is her picture of it? Is that what you mean?
5:16 Wes: Yeah, Everything that comes before is the picture. So she's drawing this causal connection between drought and assistance in time from the Nile. Right. So there'd be drought and then the Nile would flood and it would flood over its banks and the drought would end. So it's a boom and bust kind of cycle. If all of this is a picture of that, it reflects the. Again the anxiety of dependence on that natural cycle and times when there wasn't a lot of natural sustenance to be gotten from the land. So you had to find ways to store. So I think. Right. The Egyptians had huge granaries and that's part of how cats became domesticated. They would just let them hang out around the granaries and kill mice. So this picture of drought and then assistance from the Nile while the pigtailed monkey on slab hands looked at the jasmine, two leaf, twig and bud. What is that about?
6:18 Erin: Is she comparing us and her to the monkey here? You know, so we're getting a whole picture of the civilization with a fine distance. I love that because it's fine. Could be, you know, fair, nice, but it's also fine, like detailed. And distance would work against that. So we get this, the distance also
6:38 Wes: in terms of time and the perspective that we have.
6:40 Erin: Time and perspective. Right. So we have a, you know, the sort of tocquevillian relationship to civilizations. We can see finer details more clearly for our distance from them. Strangely enough, I take her to then sort of fancifully and funnily connect us then to the monkey who looks at the little leafy civilization happening underneath him. You know, and maybe by saying, oh, you know, we're so much more civilized than that. She's sort of joking about that, that we now have this perspective because we're sort of so much more advanced than the Egyptians and we can look at them in a gimlet eyed way. By comparing us to monkeys. She's both sort of like reinforcing that and joking about it, I think incriminating us in the way that we are looking at the civilization. That's the way I'm reading this. I'm not sure if it's right.
7:29 Wes: There could well be another wall painting or representation of just the thing that she's talking about. Where in the background there's the Nile and in the foreground there's a monkey staring at this whatever it is. Jasmine, two leaf, twig and bud, cactus pads and fig. Is it a fig tree? Yeah, there's a bunch of things. But in any case, you know, you can imagine some sort of wall painting of this sort of thing. But yeah, the metaphor stands and I think you're right. It's possible that she's putting us in the position of the monkey.
8:01 Erin: You know, I think you're right to talk about representation because then we're about to get the most explicit, I think wall painting section here. You know, I think she, that she then goes into those Egyptian murals inside the pyramids most explicitly here. So we get dwarfs. I don't know who these are. I don't. Dwarfs were the painters.
8:21 Wes: Okay, I was really hoping you would explain this to me.
8:24 Erin: No, I have no idea. I have no idea. But the things that are small versus things that are big, were they dwarfs in the society? Because I have no clue. I highly doubt these are literal dwarfs. But they can't be anything but literal dwarfs because otherwise what is she talking about?
8:43 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I did find ancient Egyptian representations of dwarves.
8:47 Erin: Oh, you did a lot more research than I should have done all that.
8:51 Wes: Yeah, but I don't know. I didn't do enough research to know the significance of that or whether she's saying that the dwarves were working were the ones who created these murals or that she's metaphorically saying their existence. You know, the representation of dwarves lends a nuance to all of this. So lent to an evident poetry of frog grays et cetera. A fantasy of verisimilitude. In other words, you wouldn't characterize ancient Egyptian representations as realistic, especially.
9:26 Erin: Right.
9:26 Wes: Sort of a sideways representation of bodies. Famously. It's quite stylized. There's lack of perspective. Right. You know, where you see representations of daily life that are less. Or that are ordinary or less stylized and grand. Right. So the inclusion of dwarfs is. It's no longer just a generic person standing sideways on the wall. Right. Doing the Egyptian stance. You get a little bit more realism. So that might be what's going on here.
9:59 Erin: I see. And we're sure it is dwarfs, not just smaller representations of the animals she's been talking about, because they would be smaller than they really are on the paintings.
10:09 Wes: I don't know. But I did find what are definitely dwarves. They're not, because they have dwarf proportions. So there's a whole page I found on disabilities in ancient Egypt. And they try to trace changing attitudes between different eras, between different kingdoms, based on the representations of disabilities and various. So apparently so. I don't know. Yeah, you might be right. It's really unclear. But there's something that. A fantasy and a verisimilitude. So one in juxtaposed to the other that were right to those with. That were right. That seemed right to those with everywhere
10:50 Erin: power over the poor, the people in power.
10:52 Wes: Yeah. It's an aesthetic. In other words, it's an aesthetic sensibility that appeals to people with power. And it's one that combines this unrealistic fantasy world with little touches of verisimilitude, I guess, is the idea.
11:09 Erin: And then we get the bees. Food is your food. So the poor are connected to the bees here by proximity. So everybody, rich and poor alike, we all eat the same food. You know, we all put our pants on one leg at a time. And yet I'm including myself among the poor because if you saw where I lived, you would agree.
11:27 Wes: Because you're a graduate student.
11:29 Erin: Yes, in my garret. So those who tended flower beds and stables were like the king's cane in the form of a hand. So I've thought a lot about this. The idea is that the people are part of the king's possessions, too. So just as the pharaoh is exploiting nature, and this upper class maybe is exploiting nature, so he exploits the human labor that he uses, which are expressions of his power. We're democratized here. So it's not just that that the animals are being exploited, it's that people are being exploited like animals as well, that these things which should be honored like the bees or the people who grow the crops, therefore, are like the bedrock of civilization.
They allow for people to. To eat and to have this bounty that the pharaoh's power is built on. These things should be respected and given a voice. And instead, they're just used as a kind of cudgel against themselves. Because the pharaoh is just exploiting, not indeterminate. I suppose it's obvious in the fact that he uses slave labor to get the food and build the pyramids.
12:36 Wes: Yeah. Those who tended flower beds and stables were like. It sounds like they were an extension of the king. They are also tools. And the king's cane in the form of a hand. I don't know of any Egyptian canes that literally had a hand shape, but they have a crook in them like that. They're right. If you've seen that. They have a little circle on the top that I suppose fits to the hand. They are extensions of that hand, and they're made to fit the hand of power and to be used as a
13:05 Erin: tool that the hand that mocks them and the heart that.
13:08 Wes: Right, There you go. The bee's food is your food. You know, I suppose, again, it's like the worker bees with the, you know, what is produced by the worker bees, but it belongs to their masters. I don't know what princes clad in queen's dress is. I don't know what all that's about. Queens in a king's undershirt.
13:28 Erin: This was sort of easy for me to understand. I think this is Moore's fancy that she is seeing the look of what the pharaoh wears as being a kind of dress. You know, we could picture it, you know, the skirt, almost like a wrap skirt, you know, that they wear. And then the queens in there in the garments that look like undershirts, I could just picture it. The way that she's describing it makes sense to me.
13:49 Wes: But, you know, significantly, the undershirts are. Well, they're like silkworm gut as beeman and milkmaid kept divine cows and bees.
14:00 Erin: Oh, like they're cosplaying like people at Versailles dressing up like shepherdesses. You know, I think there's something performative in these outfits. And I take the limestone brows and gold foil wings to be, like, the makeup. Gold foil wings. Maybe I'm thinking of, like, winged eyeliner, and this is wrong. But there's, you know, there's something of, like, the face paint and the way that they're depicted as well in the paintings.
14:29 Wes: And then we move to naming. The king gave his name to them, and he was named for them, which is, you know, very much and puts him in the position of Adam.
14:39 Erin: They made basalt serpents and portraits of beetles. The king gave his name to them and he was named for them. He feared snakes and tamed Pharaoh's rat, the rust backed mongoose. No bust of it was made, but there was pleasure for the rat. Its restlessness was its excellence. It was praised for its wit and the jerboa like it. A small desert rat, and not famous, that lives without water, has happiness abroad seeking food or at home in its burrow. The Sahara field mouse has a shining silver house of sand. Oh, rest and joy. The boundless sand, the stupendous sand spout. No water, no palm trees, no ivory bed, tiny cactus. But one would not be he who has nothing but plenty. Oh, rest and joy, the boundless sand. It's so funny. She's hilarious.
15:31 Wes: He feared snakes. So the suggestion is, you know, snakes are part of their magic and feature prominently in their representations of the world. And then what did you call it? That goes on the forehead, on the head?
15:45 Erin: Uraeus.
15:46 Wes: And then so there's use of the mongoose, right, which can kill cobras to ward them off or protect the king from cobras. But she's comparing it. I don't know why it's called the pharaoh's rat, if that's mongoose, obviously is not a rat. But it allows her to associate to the jerboa. I don't know if the Pharaoh's rat is her invention or if that's the way the Egyptians thought of it.
16:12 Erin: I didn't look that up. I thought that that would just be something that the Egyptians called it. The Pharaoh's rat would be its colloquial term. This is where I think Moore makes us all equals, because I think I referenced this before. The fact that the pharaoh is afraid of the snake means that he is in a sense also afraid of and therefore oppressed by his own power. Like there's something. This power is unnatural even for those who wield it. And in a way, the pharaoh is kind of oppressing himself because there's something backward about a person having this much power. And of course, when one exploits someone else, one is also injuring oneself. She recognizes this, that it cuts both ways.
16:52 Wes: I think, well, the pharaoh has more to lose, right? And so people in power with too much abundance tend to become paranoid. So any form of superstition reflects that paranoia. Of course, partly it's the position in history and less control over nature. With technology such that they're more vulnerable to nature. And so the principal technology for controlling nature is ritual and rite and magic in which snakes have a role apparently. But then snakes are dangerous, then the
17:26 Erin: mongoose taking pleasure in killing the snake, you know, so there's a self destructive symbology then associated with the pharaoh, because the pharaoh's rat, the thing that protects the pharaoh, is the thing that kills the symbol of the pharaoh as well. The pleasure for the mongoose seems to be in overcoming this oppression, right? In overthrowing its master. Its tormentor is what gives it pleasure, sort of writing some kind of order. But the pharaoh at the center of this unstable symbology is kind of being attacked from both sides.
17:57 Wes: It was praised for its wit, which I assume means its intelligence on the one hand, but also might be a reference to its speed. If you've ever seen a mongoose tangle with a Cobra on YouTube, Cobras are really, really fast in their strikes, but somehow the mongoose is faster, which is really kind of odd if you think about it.
18:15 Erin: And overcoming oppression, I think requires wit. I mean, I think symbolically here, right?
18:19 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So power is slower and clumsier, it's heavier. And you can be crushed under the weight of it, or you can be poisoned by it, so to speak. But living under it for long enough. Yeah, the workaround is intelligence and nimbleness, maybe.
18:37 Erin: And this is the beginning of her portrait of the ideal artist. This is someone who works tirelessly, restless. So the desire to work is always there and to work without recognition. No bust of it was made. So unlike the pharaoh, who is maybe fragile in his ego, who needs to be buffeted by having these totems to protect him. These, you know, speaks to what you're talking about with the paranoia and also to be told how great he is and to be given images of himself either by proxy via, you know, an animal symbol or of just of his own person. The true artist takes pleasure in the work and doesn't need these types of things that the pharaoh needs because it seems he has no real work.
He has nothing to take pleasure in other than other people telling him how great and powerful he is. But there's a hollowness there, right, because he's not really performing a function or doing anything really important. So that's, I think, contributing to his lack of a stable self concept. Whereas the mongoose doesn't need that, as she says in the paper Nautilus, that writers can be, I think she says, entrapped by fame and tea time. Comforts or something. No, tea time. Tea time, fame and commuter's comfort. She says real artists, you know, they should reject that.
They should just take pleasure in the work itself. The creation is the thing. Or in this case, the destruction, the murder is the thing.
19:56 Wes: The best way to do that is just to fail as an artist until you die and then you get posthumous fame. That's true, because otherwise you'd be ruined if you're successful in this life. But, yeah, I mean, the representations and monuments are right. They have an aesthetic function on the one hand, but they're too intertwined with power and in particular, the praise of the power of the pharaoh and the attempt to achieve immortality for the pharaoh. Right. Filling up pyramids and tombs with art objects that even in some cases are symbolically meant to be sustenance in the afterlife.
And then with superstitious control, there's an ulterior motive. In other words, the enjoyment of these representations is not simply aesthetic. It's religious or it's superstitious or it's political thinking of dominance. It's all these other things. So I think in line with that and this transition to the desert rat, she's going to be praising a more workmanlike attention to detail as against the grandiose and the monumental. You know, the attempt to achieve immortality. Something about that attempt corrupts representation and is more akin to this exploitation of animals, for instance.
So representation versus exploitation. So, yeah, we get the jerboa, we get the desert rat, who doesn't need a lot. He just lives in his trailer, working away at his poetry. I like this image of the rest and joy. So the concept of rest, I think, is very important here.
21:43 Erin: Yes.
21:43 Wes: And then boundless sand, which. So she's combining sand in the desert, is supposed to connote a wasteland and lack of opportunity for sustenance and all that. But in this case, that boundlessness is something to be appreciated. So you could think of it as abundance of possibility. Right. It's like looking at the blank page. I don't see that as a challenge. I don't see it as a problem. I see it as an opportunity to write in real life. It's just horrific. But, yeah, you see the boundless sand as an abundance of possibility and are not weighed down by luxury, not weighed down by material luxuries. And so what does she say? The palm trees and the ivory bed and all that stuff, by all the riches that you have, but also not weighed down by psychological luxury, so to speak, by the project of being great, famous, living forever all that.
22:40 Erin: Yes. I think earlier you said it's better to fail while you're alive as an artist than to achieve success and therefore become ruined. I've been thinking about that and I think that what I didn't understand about that is you meant failing in terms of achieving success, not failing in terms of, you know, I think of the only failure as not doing the work, not completing the work. Right. So the mongoose and the jerboa both are doing the work and they're also resting. Right. Because what's interesting about this idea of the desert outside of the Nile, the fertile Nile area, is that she's building into the concept of work, this idea of the fallow period as well.
So the Nile has the period of its rising and of this abundance and then you have to go through the cycle of sort of enforced, not enforced famine, but you have to go through a cycle of a fallow period. It's built in. And she's saying in the writer's mind, I think, or in the mind of the artist, this has to be built in no matter what environment you're in. So you have to be able to do the work and also rest and have the fallow period. You have to be able to have this internal mechanism of self regulation to keep you doing the work. And that in itself means that you'll never be a failure so long as you do the work and you do good, good work.
And the recognition which is over and above that, or aside from that really not above it is beside the point. The point is to, to do the thing and to do it well and properly. And, and this is what this, this is what the jerboa does. So the jerboa is by definition, I think, the anti. Pharaoh, right. Poor but free. Free to do the work and free to do it in a self generating, self determining way. And that's, that's important to the freedom to have that regulation inside the self, to control oneself and to experience both rest and work and to have the freedom to determine it for oneself.
Not according to the dictates of the Pharaoh or even of the Nile, you know, the Nile's whims, Right. I think there's something therefore quite literally supernatural about the artist's self determination.
24:43 Wes: It's hard to rest as a human being because. Right. So she'll say the jerboa in the next, which you can read in a second, but she'll say the jerboa can rest and then do the opposite. So he can jump around when he needs to find food or when he needs to evade a predator. And you can see, if you watch nature documentaries, you see how effortlessly and smoothly animals transition between survival mode and rest mode. One minute they're running away and they're in fear of their lives, but afterwards they don't sit around processing trauma. They're just like hanging out, relaxing under a tree.
They can forget they're not aware of their mortality. In other words, human beings, with our awareness of our mortality, are in some sense always in survival mode. Ideally, our play and our artistic activities should be a form of rest. Yes, they are work, but they should be a form of rest in the sense that they are not engaged with trying to survive and they're not fundamentally appetitive. Painting the apple is not like eating the apple. It's not like I have some object I need to consume or I'm going to die. It should be an overflowing. It should come from abundance, it should come from extra time, from leisure time.
But often we end up treating those things as if they are matters of survival. I've got to be successful or else I might as well be dead. I've got to. It doesn't have to be straightforwardly artistic pursuits. It could be any career. I need prestige, I need recognition. What am I going to do without that? Which I think is intimately linked to awareness of mortality. Because the idea is, if that we live strongly enough in the eyes of others, in the minds of others, then we won't die.
26:27 Erin: How then does someone say, like, Moore who makes their art, their profession? How does that fit in? I know what you're saying sort of in terms of what our ideal relationship should be, but what happens when that becomes sort of like self institutionalized and is built, you know, that you're the starving artist, that literally, if you don't, that is your work and if you don't produce it, it is your career. And if you don't produce it, you'll starve or you'll be on welfare.
26:49 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a weird problem. I don't know how people pull that off. Although I say that, you know, with The Partially Examined Life, I think people would look at that and they'd say, I don't know how you pulled that off, how you make money off of philosophy, but it's not a lot of money. So you got to have another job, right? You got to be a teacher. I think psychologically it helps to disentangle making a living from the actual artwork. It's not like you're getting paid a fortune or something. For your poems, you get ancillary opportunities to teach. And you're paid to teach, or you're paid to do this or you paid to do that.
27:25 Erin: But that's often related to the success you have.
27:28 Wes: If you're unlucky, you'll get famous and then you will get paid. But.
27:33 Erin: Right. But these things are often dependent on. I mean, you only get the day job as a teacher because you have success as an artist in some demonstrable way. I mean, not monetarily.
27:45 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think this is a persistent problem. Like we can't get rid of ambition. But ambition can become malignant and it can become crippling. It can become. Right. Ambition can become so large that it becomes hard to even function under its weight. I think Frankenstein, in a way, which we'll do eventually, is kind of about that very topic. But I think, regardless of that. So I think what I'm doing is I'm relating the concept of rest to the aesthetic and a classic distinction between an aesthetic relation to the world and an appetitive relationship.
So this is the classic conception of art as involving disinterest. To appreciate the painting of the apple, its aesthetic form is not to have an appetitive relationship to it, not to want to eat it. Sure. I don't know if this is Kant's exact example in his third Critique, but he uses examples like that. And likewise, when we work as artists, to the extent that it's driven by a desire for recognition and fame. It's not that. Right. Everyone is driven to some extent by these emotions. I don't think it's avoidable. But if it becomes too prominent a part of one's motivation, then it can be compromising in one way or another.
Sometimes it can compromise the quality, but there are other ways it can compromise things as well. So I think the way you were putting it was very apt, which is, I think you have to love the work for the work's own sake. Right. Rather than for the ulterior motives. I think that's the point. Does that make sense?
29:17 Erin: Yeah. When you're an artist and your profession is your art, it seems that you become almost animal, like, I think, in the way that you're describing where the work is the art and the. And you rest from it by just clearing your head and allowing yourself to rest under the tree or whatever. No. So I'm just interested in when that is. Because it seems an artist, by definition, is one whose profession is their art. That would complicate this idea of using the creativity as rest. And if we're going to take the jerboa as the symbol of the artist, how is that then reflecting upon the human corollary?
29:49 Wes: Yeah. I wrote an essay once about Uncle Vanya called Being at Work, Being at Rest, because I think it's about a similar idea. And this is the Aristotelian conception of being at work as involving an organism's metabolic activity is sustaining itself, sustaining its form. And the overall form is a form of rest in a sense of persistence. I persist as a biological form. Right. I'm a stable entity. I'm not dissolving into the environment until I die. But what's hidden underneath the surface is all kinds of work that goes constantly into producing persistence, to producing rest is predicated on work.
In Uncle Vanya, there's this very strong contrast between the idea of being busy, manically busy, and then being in the state of mind where there's enough of a quiescence to produce the kind of. I don't know how to. Am I making any sense? Yeah. So that when work can serve. In other words, rest is like a telos, as in teleology. It's an end or a goal that is more integrated into one's true existence. It's not ulterior. So you can do things to be who you are, to be what you are, and for the love of the work itself, or you can be doing things for ulterior motives, as in being important to other people so that they can make you who you are through their recognition.
Something like that. So it's restless. It's a restless thing to do, to slave away in search of fame and to sell out. Right. For instance, do whatever it takes trying to get recognition. But it's a very restful thing to express yourself for the sake of the work and because it makes you what you are and you feel most actualized in doing that. I don't know. I feel like I'm not making sense.
31:40 Erin: No, no, no, you're making total sense. I think. I just disagree in. In terms of how I. I think it's far more animalistic in terms of the way that you're describing. For me, like the art is the work. The rest is the fallow period where you. You need something to feed the work, you know, so. So it's. It's animalistic in the way that you hunt, and then you have to rest to get ready for the hunt again.
32:00 Wes: Yeah, I think that's probably a better reading. I mean, I think your reading is probably more in line with what she's trying to convey. Right. Yeah, I think it's a better. It's a better reading. I'm just kind of free associating.
32:09 Erin: No, but I think the rest feeds the work in that you have to get. You can't just work and then do creative work on the side and have nothing that feeds the creative work. Right. I think the rest involves a kind of psychological process whereby you process things. It could also be stimulation. So you go out into the world and you have experiences so that you have something to write about at work time. If everything is just like work and then creative stuff, then there's no. In that binary, there's no third thing that. That actually feeds the creative.
Because the creative work needs a source too. I think it can't just be rest. And I suppose I didn't figure fame and that kind of motivation involved in that. I see it more as like a closed system in terms of what she's describing for the jerboa and for the artist, in which you go out and maybe you travel or you do something on the weekend where that gives you an experience that is restful and fun and that feeds the creative work. Like you need something to write about. And also you need time that you're not working to process. You need almost time to be in a trance to digest experience, so that then when you return to the work, there's something there that you can feed off of.
33:21 Wes: Yeah, and I think that's right, and I think that's the idea here, is that the jerboa can make this transition between work and rest in this effortless way, but also in such a way that the rest serves the work, which seems like to me a good reading of this. But also, I think at this point in the poem where she's saying, oh, rest and joy, the boundless sand, she seems to be associating rest with this lack of luxury and monument and power and ulterior motive. So that mongoose is inherently restless. It's praised for its wit, which is its restlessness.
It's mental agility, it's physical agility. It's always moving. It's a nervous little animal, as one might be if one's whole function is to kill cobras. That's its job. That's what nature made it for. And if you had that job, you would be nervous too, all the time. But it reflects the nervousness of power. It reflects the anxiety of power and the restlessness of power. There is no rest for the powerful. There is no rest for someone who can't enjoy the work except insofar as it might bring them fame.
34:32 Erin: Well, the boundless sand. You know, I referenced Ozymandias earlier, and I think of the lone and level sands stretched far away, right? That's the thing that dwarfs the attempt itself. Monumentalizing. And that's the place where the jerboa lives, not among the ruins or among the monuments that then will eventually become ruined. Right. But the sand itself, the thing that's supposed to be the absence of that, the vacuum, as you're saying.
34:54 Wes: You want to read this abundance section? I think we've talked about a lot of the ideas here already.
34:59 Erin: Here you go. Abundance. Africanus meant the conqueror sent from Rome. It should mean the untouched, the sand, brown, jumping rat, freeborn, and the blacks, that choice race with an elegance ignored by one's ignorance. Part terrestrial and part celestial. Jacob saw cudgel, staff in claw hand, steps of air and air angels, his friends were the stones. The translucent mistake of the desert does not make hardship for one who can rest and then do the opposite. Launching as if on wings from its match, thin hind legs in daytime or at night, with the tail as a weight undulated out by speed straight.
35:42 Wes: So Africanus meant the conqueror, Right? And that's. I think that's something Pompey would have been called for, conquering part of northern Africa. So it's the name given to the conqueror, but the name should be given to the conquered. It should be given to native Africans, who she is associating with the jerboa, the sand, brown, jumping rat, and the blacks. So again, you get this contrast between power, a name taken to connote domination, and power versus the name taken because it's what you are. So what's. Yeah, what about Jacob here? What's going on here?
36:17 Erin: Jacob is the one, I think, who moved to Egypt, right? When the Israelites had to leave because of famine, oddly enough, they went to Egypt. And of course, Jacob's ladder is the vision that he had, which he sort of compares or slant wise to the idea of the desert mirage. Jacob had a staff because I was trying to think through this like he was a shepherd, so he would have a staff, right? And it was also the symbol of his journey and of, you know, of him as a patriarch. And I think it was. I looked it up and I think somewhere I read, I think in the Bible, maybe it says that it was his only.
It would have to be the Bible. It was his only possession when he crossed the Jordan and then with the stones. I was reading about my. My memory of Jacob is not good. So I was. I was reading about the fact that the pillar, like he has the dream of the ladder, and then he sets up this stone that he had used as a pillow during his dream and makes that a pillar and pours oil on it and names it Bethel, that place. So the stone becomes like a symbol for him of this covenant with God. So the stones are important for reasons that are, you know, difficult to.
The idea of Egypt is now a place not just of Rome and of Egypt itself. Right. But also, like this Judeo Christian conception is brought in here with the Israelites exiled to Egypt. And therefore, I think Jacob is representative of someone who makes the environment work for him in the way that the jerboa does. Right. So again, we have, like, the connection of the alliteration jerboa and Jacob. There seem to be doing something similar. Is that the reading that you had?
37:47 Wes: You know, I was associating again to ultimately, Israel's named after Jacob. Right. We're on our way back to the promised land and to establishing a homeland for the chosen people who are very frequently in a state of exile. And there's a kind of desperation here. And so what makes it a translucent mistake is the suggestion that religion is a. I don't know if this is the critique that's being made here, but that part of this religious impulse is seemingly about survival.
38:18 Erin: No, I don't think Moore is arguing that. I think she's just shifting from Jacob's dream to the idea of a mirage. Jacob's dream is true. Something about Jacob's dream turns his friends into the stones because he can make friends with stones as the jerboa makes friends with the desert, they're sort of morally equivalent. But the mirage, I think, is set in contrast to the vision of Jacob's ladder. So I see. Neither the jerboa nor Jacob would make the mistake of seeing something in the desert that isn't there.
38:49 Wes: I see. Okay, this makes sense to me now. Yeah. So the translucent mistake of the desert does not make hardship for one who can rest and then do the opposite. So Jacob, like the jerboa could rest and do the opposite.
39:00 Erin: Right. And because he dreams the Jacob's Ladder thing. Right. So that's a vision he has while he's resting and then wakes up and acts. Right, I see. Yeah. And then we get the wonderful image of the match thin hind legs of the jerboa, which allow it to launch as if on wings. Right. So this is the thing it can do really wonderfully, is jump. Super, super. High it looks like, in fact, like a little kangaroo, which I think she says. Yeah, kangaroo speed. Should I keep reading?
39:28 Wes: Yeah.
39:28 Erin: Looked at by daylight, the underside's white, though the fur on the back is buff brown like the breast of the fawn breasted bowerbird. It hops like the fawn breast but has chipmunk contours. Perceived as it turns its bird head, the nap directed neatly back and blending with the ear, which reiterates the slimness of the body. The fine hairs on the tail repeating the other pale markings lengthen until at the tip they fill out in a tuft, black and white. Strange detail of the simplified creature. Fish shaped and silvered to steel by the force of the large desert moon.
Course the jerboa or plunder its food store and you will be cursed. It honors the sand by assuming its color. Closed upper paws seeming one with a fur in its flight from a danger by fifths and sevenths in leaps of two lengths like the uneven notes of the Bedouin flute. It stops its gleaning on little wheel casters and makes fern seed footprints with kangaroos speed its leap should be set to the flageolet pillar. Body erect on a three cornered smooth working Chippendale claw. Propped on hind legs and tail as third toe between leaps to its burrow.
And we made it through. So we get. The actual description of the jerboa is memorable to me for the fact that we get this true conglomerate animal. And in a way that seems to be reminiscent of the descriptions we get of the Egyptians who are sort of, if you like, they're kind of making of themselves these fantastic creatures that are like built out of the. The features of various other animals, right. Like a composite creature that the. The Egyptian is almost like a Swiss army knife of animal parts or something like that. And here the jerboa is described as a conglomerate, so it would seem to repeat that.
But instead it's natural, it's the result of its own unique evolution that it has these different features as part of its makeup. And that's an expression. It's natural. It's not acquired through the murder of these other animals, you know, so that it sort of like wears them on its head or anything like that. And it's not entombed in the way that the Egyptian imagery is continually of this death, entombment, reconstitution, exploitation.
41:45 Wes: You get this sense that it's very integrated into its natural environment, into its habitat, that its evolutionary origins serve it very well, its evolutionary history. Right. So its form and functional aspect of its functional aspects of its form are very suited to its environment. The way its body is shaped, which makes, you know. So she gives us that in detail, you know, we shouldn't be surprised that it's similar to other animals because evolution can converge on the same sorts of qualities. So for example, silver to steel by the force of the large desert moon.
Even something that's as far as, you know, that the idea here seems to be right, that even something that's as far as a way as the moon can affect the form of this animal. It honors the sand by assuming its color. Right. That gives us a sense of its right. Evolutionarily, its evasion of predators depends on the camouflage of it having the same color as the sand. And I think human beings, this is our predicament, we are much more than that and we are much more poorly integrated because of our self consciousness, including that awareness of mortality that I was talking about.
So we can create. I mean we can create beautiful works of art, but we can also create monstrosities or monuments to power. But then on top of that, humanity's capacity for doing horrible things, including enslaving people to make them build pyramids or war. All of that stuff is a result of a mind that has sort of jump the shark evolutionarily and that is so integrated or so flexible, put it this way, so plastic that it's not no longer tightly integrated into its environment.
43:34 Erin: The humble colors of the jerboa are set in contrast to the luxurious pinks and red of Egyptian fabrics that she describes. Right. So like we don these flamboyant attention seeking types of garments usually in order to indicate class and things like that. Right. In this context anyway. And that the humility of being evolutionarily a good fit with one's environment. These beautiful browns and whites and then the black and white tail with the tuft, which is a little like flourish on the jerboa, is still part of its environment somehow. Like it's well integrated in that respect.
And therefore it's sort of accidentally because it's perfectly evolutionarily living in its environment. It's like living within the forms and the strictures of a poem. You know, the artist becomes the art. There's a perfect integration between the maker and the thing made somehow. And that's why I think we get the description of it sort of being an accidental dancer to the flute or to, you know, she compares it, its claw to a Chippendale. So it's the leg of a chair and the pillar body, right. So we get Another connection back to both Rome, I suppose, and to Jacob with the pillar, the stone pillar, that he sleeps on the stones becoming his friend.
So it's this, like, perfect, ideal integration where you become the artwork yourself. You like that? That's like leveling up. The artist becomes the perfect work. It's reminiscent of, like, Yeats's ideal in sailing to Byzantium that you get out of your aged and paltry body and you become the hammered golden bird singing on the tree to the generations. Right. Something about that seems to be the ideal. It's through accepting the form, accepting the limitation. And that, I think, is so important in conversations about poetry, because Moore is writing at a time in which, of course, free verse is becoming.
Starting to become a dominant mode and form. Poetic form is seen as oppressive and not allowing the full free expression of one's psyche, emotions, history, whatever. Whatever the case may be. Right. And so this is a poetic argument, I think, as well as a sort of evolutionary one, an anthropological one, in which somehow the embrace of limitation actually allows for the flourishing and working within the strictures that one has, whether that be the desert or the limits of a canvas. Something like that. Right. That these are the things that actually allow for freedom and for this sort of true expression of what makes oneself as the artist and one's art form good and sort of self realized.
46:07 Wes: Yeah. I think the other thing in these last two stanzas, where she's suggesting that we. First of all, she's suggesting that the movement of the jerboa is like the unknown, even notes of a flute, and then that we should set that movement to music. So she's inviting us to a way of representing this animal. Right. And that's something the Egyptians have done a lot of. Right. This. You know, she's described all the various ways not only in which animals have been exploited, but the way they've been represented. But in this case, we're invited to think of the animal as in motion, in movement, and to capture that musically.
Right. So rather than in a static picture. And perhaps we're being invited. Right, ultimately, to, at some level move like the jerboa, and to rest, you know, to be able to transition between these states of rest and movement. But in any case, it's inviting us back to a certain type of aesthetic relationship to nature and to this animal in particular. But it seems to be something different than the Egyptian relationship that she's criticized.
47:16 Erin: Yeah, that's really good. You know, the sibling relationship between poetry and music here, I think, is maybe in contrast to the Sort of more estranged, more fraught relationship between poetry and static art. Right. Because poetry is often compared with music and the fact that it's temporal and it unfolds in time in the way that music does. And that helps me kind of, you know, the ideal of the jerboa as being a kind of. Yes, it's a beautiful little physical specimen, but that is compared to music maybe suggests this kind of, as you're saying, the patterning of rest and movement, which is what music is.
Right. It helps to put that in contrast. You know, one of the flaws that we could point out in Moore's argument is how lovingly and attentively she records these descriptions of Egyptian self indulgence. You know, like her descriptions themselves are rather indulgent. Right. And so she can be accused kind of too lovingly recording what she faults the Egyptians for. In other words, she's taken in by it too. I think that's kind of. I think she's aware of that. I think it's a little bit of a self indictment. And I wonder if the Jerboas musical connection is kind of the U turn that she takes, you know, to go in a different direction to get away from the static art which is associated with this sort of static sins, if you like, for lack of a better term, of the Egyptians and of the Romans.
I don't know. I'm putting that quite well enough because of course, image is important.
48:47 Wes: I think that makes sense. You know, the. The static being associated with weight and power as well as opposed to life and movement and freedom. Okay, all right. Any last words for the jerboa before we put it down? Sorry. Oh, the jerboa has not been feeling well.
49:08 Erin: Stuff it and turn it into a.
49:09 Wes: The kids won't take it out for a walk, so it's gotta go. We love the Jerboa, but everyone's gotta go. Yeah,
49:22 Erin: this is fun.
49:22 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you,
49:26 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa”
Jan 12, 2025
Of all the great American Modernists, the poetry of Marianne Moore is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, even the most radical, of them all—no small feat in a group of friends and admirers that included Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and HD. Moore’s preferred form was a syllabic stanza bespoke to each poetic occasion, like the unique shell of each individual snail or paper nautilus, and often containing rhyme. In these stanzas, Moore hid behind her virtuosic performance of deflection and difficulty and, of course, revealed herself in it, much as one of her pet-subjects, the exotic animal-portrait, contained a self-portrait at its heart. In her poem on the jerboa, Moore contrasts the desert mouse’s decorousness with the decadence of empire, and in so doing, distinguishes her ideal of true artistry—a vigorous, humble, and ultimately liberated response to one’s natural and formal limitations—with a false art which oppresses the natural in service of the powerful. Wes & Erin discuss Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Of all the great American modernists, Marianne Moore is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, even the most radical of them all. No small feat. In a group of friends and admirers that included Ezra Pound, T.S. eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, E.E. cummings and H.D. moore's preferred form was a syllabic stanza bespoke to each poetic occasion, like the unique shell of each individual snail or paper nautilus, and often containing rhyme. In these stanzas, Moore hid behind her virtuosic performance of deflection and difficulty and, of course, revealed herself in it.
Much as one of her pet subjects, the exotic animal portrait contained a self portrait at its heart. In her poem on the Jerboa, Moore contrasts the desert mouse's decorousness with the decadence of empire and in so doing, distinguishes her ideal of true artistry, a vigorous, humble, and ultimately liberated response to one's natural and formal limitations, with a false art which oppresses the natural in service of the powerful. Today we're discussing Marianne Moore's poem the Jerboa, first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity.
This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:49 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan.
1:51 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I'm curious. Before I suggested this poem, did you know what the Jerboa was?
2:03 Wes: I thought you were going to ask me if I knew who Marianne Moore was.
2:06 Erin: Marianne Moore was. Well, that's asking the same thing.
2:10 Wes: And I was preparing to say no, and no, I didn't know no.
2:15 Erin: Really?
2:15 Wes: Yeah. I didn't know her and I didn't know this animal. I mean, I knew of the animal. It's in Dune, right? Some version of it. Did you see that?
2:23 Erin: Okay. That's why someone made a Dune joke to me yesterday.
2:27 Wes: Muad'Dib or something. I can't remember what it's called, but anyway, I know what it's called. On the planet Arrakis, On the planet Earth. Not so much. Too much fantasy, Too little biology. When I was a kid, should I
2:48 Erin: have watched Dune in preparation for this episode? Because now I'm concerned that I'm going To be speaking out of ignorance.
2:54 Wes: You would have learned a lot.
2:55 Erin: Yeah.
2:56 Wes: But no. Yeah, I hadn't heard of her or this poem or the animal. Except I think I'd seen, you know, pictures and video of a desert mouse or desert rat. But, no, I didn't know.
3:08 Erin: Well, they're very cute.
3:09 Wes: I didn't know it under this name. Yeah.
3:11 Erin: Yeah. You know, probably. Oh, I'm gonna wanna take this back as soon as I say it. Probably. She's my favorite poet. She's certainly the poet that's had the greatest influence on my own work.
3:22 Wes: Yeah, I can see that, by the way.
3:24 Erin: Oh, really?
3:24 Wes: I noticed that.
3:25 Erin: Y. Yeah, it's my love of rats. No, her nickname was Rat from Wind in the Willows.
3:33 Wes: So.
3:33 Erin: I love Marianne Moore. Her book, which this poem is not from, but her book, Observations, is worth getting. It's one of the landmarks of modernism on par with Harmonium, Spring and all, you know, I guess. What was Eliot's book? Prufrock and Other Poems. Was that what it was called? It's in that league. I mean, I think it's just one of the landmark, foundational landmarks of modernist poetry. And since American modernism is also my favorite time period in poetry, she's tops for me. It's important for me to pitch her a little bit because I think most people don't know who she is, and then when they read the poems, they find her to be very difficult at first.
And she also gets accused often of being impersonal, which I think is completely untrue. I think these are such fascinatingly personal poems because she reveals so much of the way that she thinks in them. They're so idiosyncratic and interesting and strange. You know, I think maybe Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop, who was kind of a protege of Moore's, said, you know, she's the kind of person that you would want to walk through a museum with. It's like you could. You could hear her, like, in the Natural History Museum, sort of commenting on things in your ear as you go through.
And I think that that kind of reveals a lot more about a person than a poem in which someone is maybe being confessional and, you know, discussing their inner life, usually with, you know, a lot more fabulism than they want to admit. So how did you find the poem and her style?
4:57 Wes: There's a lot of allusions that I don't necessarily immediately get. Like, what the pine cone was, that I have to look up and find out, okay, that's at the Vatican and other things. I'm not sure I Get. Although at a certain point I'm like, okay, yeah, that's the Egyptians. I know that I've been to a museum. I feel like I'm familiar with some of these things. And then syntactically, some of the lines took me a few reads and puzzling over it to make sure I've got everything. Even syntactically, it's not easily comprehensible, I find that. But yeah, my general impression is positive. And just looking at some of the other poems I immediately struck. But yeah, this didn't immediately strike me in the same way as some of the other poems that I glanced at. So I can understand that the extreme amount of detail turns some people off. Is that what you were saying?
5:56 Erin: And the syntax and the allusion, the things you're talking about.
5:59 Wes: But overall I find it a very interesting poem. Once I felt like I understood it, I think it will have to marinate for longer before I. I can't say that it has a strong, immediate emotional impact on me, which is not to say that it wouldn't happen after longer time for marination, but. Or if I were more familiar with other parts of her work or something
6:20 Erin: like that, maybe this is projection on my part. But what I often detect in the emotion of the poem is not in the effect that it produces in me, but often in her poems, I feel this sort of underlying rage simmering beneath the surface. Not necessarily in this poem. There's a great deal of appreciation as well. And she really loves these animals that she writes about. I could feel that the images themselves are just so beautiful. I mean, I don't know of a better image in 20th century American poetry than the baboons on the necks of the giraffes picking fruit from the trees.
You know, there's just so many, and sonically it's so, so incredibly beautiful. I think it's a bit of an odd choice, I think, for a Marianne Moore poem to talk about on the podcast. Maybe, you know, her two most anthologized poems are probably poetry, which begins famously with I too dislike it. You know, famous ill used opening line. And I don't really like that poem that much. I think just because of that line, it's gotten a lot. It has some great images in it, but it's not something I think we could discuss in a sustained way over two parts.
And the other is the fish, which I have taught so much that I didn't think I would have anything fresh to say about it at this point, because it's like my go to poem to teach. So I was a little worried about that. And then, you know, her two great poems that are real landmarks of 20th century Poetry, the Octopus and Marriage, are both incredibly long and it would take many, many parts to get through just to read through them. And so I settled on this because she's known for these animal poems. Pangolin, the Frigate pelican, the paper Nautilus.
And this is probably my favorite of them, maybe because I think the jerboa is so cute. But also I love the fact that it has these two uneven parts. There's sort of like theme and counter theme. It's very musical. I don't know. They're so winningly named, these two parts. You know, this is unusual for her to have two parts and have a subtitle for each. Too much. And Abundance is, you know, just like such a typical little witty joke. And I just. I love the descriptions of art in it and of these real. Which. Which we'll have to. Which we'll have to.
To talk about these really loving, incredibly detailed, beautiful descriptions of things that she's condemning, you know, which are a little bit strange and maybe self defeating, but. Yeah. And it has the syllabics and the rhyme. So I should just point out that this is a poem of. I think the first section is 17 stanzas and the second section is nine stanzas. And the stanzas are six lines long. And they're written in syllabics. So very often the break in the line will be a bit jarring. And that's because she's just counting. She's not doing meter.
So English, of course, is an accentual syllabic language. For those of our listeners who are familiar with a term like iambic, pentameter. Iambic refers to the accent and pentameter to the syllabics, the number of syllables basically in the line. So iambic is the dun, dun, you know, the.
9:11 Wes: The.
9:11 Erin: The two. Two beat foot. And pentameter means that there are five of those. So ten syllables total in a line. Other languages are not necessarily accentual syllabic. So French doesn't have really any strong accents. They can't count their accents very well. So they don't have meter as we would think of it. They just count the syllables. And one of Moore's greatest and most ingenious innovations in poetry is to apply that French way of counting just the syllables and transpose that into English. So that's why so much of the music in this sounds so fresh and strange and interesting. So she's just counting syllables. So the pattern is 5, 5, 6, 11, 10, 7. So she starts with a 5 and ends with a 7, which will come back in fifths and sevenths later in the poem.
10:01 Wes: Interesting.
10:01 Erin: And then the rhyme scheme is something like a, A and then xx for sort of no rhyme. BB Sometimes that shifts slightly, but for the most part she holds to that. Yeah. So it produces this bespoke little object because in each one of her poems she has a different little system. And one can imagine that maybe she wrote the first couple of stanzas and liked the shape of them and then counted the syllables and said, okay, I'm just gonna stick to this for the next. You know, like a cookie cutter kind of applied it to the rest of the poem or something.
I'm just imagining that's the way that it went. I could be wrong there. Okay, so I'll start reading it and I think we'll just go a chunk at a time, if that sounds good to you. The too much. A Roman had an artist, a freedman, contrive a cone, pine cone or fir cone, with holes for a fountain placed on the prison of Sant Angelo. This cone of the Pompeys, which is known now as the Pope's passed for art, a huge cast bronze dwarfing the peacock statue in the garden of the Vatican. It looks like a work of art made to give to a Pompey or native of Thebes.
Maybe we should stop there, just talk about the pine cone.
11:16 Wes: Yeah, that's true. That's the conceptual break. So, yeah, tell us about the pinecone. This is a fountain that you can still see. I've been to the Vatican, so I suppose I've seen it in person, but it was so long ago that I didn't.
11:30 Erin: Yeah, I vaguely remember seeing it. I don't know. I didn't have any pictures of it that I could find, but I found a picture online and it's quite strange and sort of ugly. It's very strange.
11:41 Wes: It's got the peacocks next to it now, which is just kind of odd looking. But.
11:45 Erin: Yeah, yeah, the little tiny peacocks. Yeah. So it's a pinecone fountain, which is a bit strange. So we begin with this Roman, who's unnamed, and he had an artist, a Freedman, contrive a cone. We're sort of getting, I think from the way in which this is cast that she thinks negatively about this pine cone. We're not really getting a negative description of the pinecone itself, though. I think the fact that it's A pinecone fountain implies that there's something wrong about this, in Moore's view, wrong in terms of it's not natural. It doesn't make any sense to have a pine cone that is a fountain.
12:23 Wes: The word contrive seems to suggest something negative.
12:26 Erin: Definitely.
12:27 Wes: It's a contrivance. And then pinecone or fir cone suggests a lack of precision.
12:33 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:34 Wes: Which I know. I know this has been oft repeated by critics because I looked a little bit on secondary literature, but. Yeah, for a poet like her, who's very precise, that by itself suggests a certain criticism of this object.
12:47 Erin: Yeah. And so, you know, this freedman is pressed into service, you know, so his level of freedom is up for debate here because Roman had him do it. It seems he didn't have a choice. And, of course, this pinecone's original location is on a prison, which I think contributes to the sense of the lack of freedom in this artist, you know, constructing this pine cone. And, like, why a pine cone? It doesn't. You know, I thought a lot about. About the pinecone and what that might suggest. The pinecone's purpose is for seed dispersal. Here it's dispersing water, and only for aesthetic reasons, not practical ones.
I mean, not anymore, because it's no longer a fountain, but originally it was constructed as a fountain. So the pine cone's form is divorced from its function, which is always a negative thing, I think, in life and in Marianne Moore. And it's comically large. So I was thinking about, like, if a pine cone is that big, you know, based on what I was trying to figure out in terms of how big it was just from a picture and, like, how big would be the trees that it would produce? You know, they would be gargantuan. Right. So there's this subversion of the natural for what it seems for the sake of mere monumentality, like merely having things that are big for their own sake.
And I think since the poem, there's a bit of the David and Goliath story in this idea of the Jerboa being pitted against, you know, the mighty Egyptian empire or something. Things that are too big when they don't need to be big in order to function properly, I think, in themselves are a bit suspect. And so this idea of bigness, I think, is something we might track in the poem.
14:22 Wes: Yeah. So it's monumental in size. You know, if you're going to create a monument, it should be honoring something. You would think of it as a statue. Right. Or Something like that. Or something that glorifies a Roman conquest or something like that. She talks. Later on she'll talk about Africanus. Right. So a general who had conquered some part of Africa could give themselves that name. Right. Often that's what you are creating monuments to not just particular figures, but to figures engaged in conquest and to the idea of conquest in general. Which is not to say that this fountain is intended as a monument.
Exactly. But its size connotes that it runs on the same logic of excess, maybe. Yeah. So she really surpasses past for art, you know, that's another dis. Obviously not fond of the pinecone. There's no straightforward, detailed aesthetic critique here. A huge cast bronze, except for the. Perhaps the hugeness of it. Puzzling hugeness of it. The unmotivated hugeness of it. Except as a boast, maybe. Except as a kind of way of physically boasting. Look, I'm rich. I can commission this huge thing that will be visible to everyone and potentially awe inspiring, even though it's a trivial, playful subject.
15:47 Erin: Right. I do like pine cones. I think they're nice. Yeah, it dwarfs the peacock. Right. So it even dwarfs, like this symbol, the symbol of vanity, which makes me think there's something a little bit more complex going on there. There's a strange alliterative logic, I think, that's working its way through these first two stanzas, where she has, you know, the prison of San Angelo, Pompey, popes and pinecone and peacock. I mean, I guess it has to be a pine cone to work in this system. It can't be a fur cone. So all of these things I think of as being the authority figure, whether it's a Pompey or a pope, These are symbols of empire for her.
And by the way, Moore is famously devoutly Presbyterian, another P word, but she doesn't think so negatively about that one. And so she's not fond, shall we say, of what the Pope represents, that kind of authority. I think it's comparing it here to the authority of a Roman emperor and of the state. So, you know, the prison is, I think, for her, the expression of what the Pompey and the Pope represent, which is the authority to press other people into service, to imprison them, to make them do your bidding. And I wonder if this authority that the pinecone seems to represent, because it dwarfs the peacock, it's almost implying, not only that it's an even greater symbol, maybe a vanity, than the peacock is, but something about the authority of the state being even Bigger than personal vanity or being able to adopt an authority that makes you scarier and more threatening even than mere vanity would.
Would have you. It's just sort of a half baked thought, but I don't know what you think about that.
17:25 Wes: Yeah, that's. Makes sense.
17:27 Erin: Well, because I think later, you know, not to get ahead, but I think later the pharaoh, another P word, though not as percussive. The pharaoh, I think is a victim of his own power. I don't know if. If you would agree with that. I mean, we'll talk about it when we get to it. But I think that there's something here about the power that monarchy or the state or what, whatever the system is, bestows upon the person at the top that oppresses everyone, including that person, and which is therefore, I think, bigger than mere personal failing, which seems to be the representative of this peacock idea.
18:01 Wes: Just one more thing. So the reference to Pompey, she's referring to the Roman erstwhile friend of Caesar and then not friend of Caesar. Right. Just looking a little in the background. So he conquered part of Africa at a certain point, or Numidia. And he was a big fan of Alexander the Great and was called. I think he was. After that success, he was called Magnus. In the end, he tried to flee after losing the civil war to Caesar. I think he fled to Egypt and was immediately executed on arrival. But I'm just wondering why the reference to Pompey except as a.
It's the type of work of art meant to be a monument to someone who has conquered or something like that. And it allows her. In this poem, she's often free associating. So we get Pompey or native of Thebes, and so ultimately we get this association from Rome to Egypt. It's not completely random that she moves on now to the subject of Egypt, but there's an association and Pompeii is kind of the. Pompey is the kind of middle term.
19:07 Erin: Oh, I like that. Yeah, yeah, because she could as easily say Caesar. Right. But also like Pompey has. I mean, it has the P thing and it also has like the word pomp in it and pompous and. But I like this. This historical stuff, which I didn't look up. I was also looking at a native of Thebes and I was like, oh, I didn't realize what she was saying with that either. There's so much detail in here that it's easy to like. I have so much written in the margins. I don't know if you can See, it's very, very light that I think sometimes things get crowded out and it's. I miss some of the fine grained stuff.
19:39 Wes: There's a Thebes in Greece and a Thebes in Egypt.
19:43 Erin: That's funny.
19:44 Wes: Yeah, that's another point of crossover between those two worlds, you know, I don't know. Otherwise. Yeah. What to a native of Thebes? I don't know, is it a native of Egyptian Thebes or a native of ancient Greek Thebes? Well, maybe it's both in a sense. Right. So the monuments that we're going to get in ancient Egypt, of course, are quite different now than the ones that we're getting in Rome. And there are going to be more. Or are they? We'll see.
20:10 Erin: Yeah. I mean the obelisk is the thing I think of as being the, the import from Egyptian monumental statuary or architecture. I'm not sure which one it qualifies as. Yeah, but because of that, that discourse between Rome and Egypt. Discourse is what a word for it. But you know, because of that, you know, I think there's, there's actually quite a bit of. I mean, I think the argument here is that it doesn't really. That all empires share a certain kind of sensibility which is about themselves, which is this grandiosity, oppression, and that all empires have a similar life cycle. And she's looking at Egypt and Rome, I think, at the same point in their life cycle, which is decline, decadence, being overly self referential, doing things like creating a giant statue of a pine cone for no apparent reason. They've lost the plot. These empires have lost the plot at this point.
21:02 Wes: And yeah, I think at this juncture we're going Pompey fled the Ptolemaic Egypt, modern Egypt.
21:10 Erin: Right.
21:11 Wes: For those times. And now we're about to go much farther backward in time into a more ancient Egypt where I assume that's what she's talking about, where there's this particular aesthetic relationship to animals. Or more than aesthetic, but exploitative as well.
21:28 Erin: Okay, I'll keep reading. Others could build and understood making colossi and how to use slaves and kept crocodiles and put baboons on the necks of giraffes to pick fruit and used serpent magic. They had their men tie hippopotami and bring out dappled dog cats to course antelopes, dikdik and ibex or used small eagles. They looked on as theirs impalas and onagers, the wild ostrich herd with hard feet and bird necks rearing back in the dust. Like a serpent preparing to strike. Cranes, mongooses, storks, anoas, Nile geese. And there were gardens for these, combining planes, dates, limes and pomegranates in avenues with square pools of pink flowers, tame fish and small frogs. Besides yarns dyed with indigo and red cotton, they had a flax, which they spun into fine linen cordage for yachtsmen. So the others are Egyptians. It does take a long time to figure that out.
22:31 Wes: Right.
22:32 Erin: You have to trace them through their animals. You know, everyone, all the Empire people, the people in these robust civilizations have to be tracked through their objects, which I think is a great feature.
22:44 Wes: So it's a good clue that, yeah, others could build and understood making colossi and how to use slaves. So that seems like a reference to the pyramids. So from Thebes to colossi, and then, yeah, crocodiles and baboons on the necks of giraffes. How does she know they did that?
23:03 Erin: Is that in a. I have no idea.
23:04 Wes: Is that on someone's tomb or is she making that up?
23:08 Erin: What this poem lacks is one of the great features of a Moore poem. She often includes quotations from books. You know, she works in collage quite a bit. And it's been, I guess, a monumental task for her editors to go back and find the places where she lifted these quotations because she's not very good at documenting them. So she must have read this somewhere. Usually in a Moore poem, it would just be thrown in with quotation marks around it.
23:35 Wes: Well, just now, I just found one of the pictures.
23:39 Erin: Oh, yeah.
23:39 Wes: So there's one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So you can see a baboon climbing up the neck of a giraffe.
23:46 Erin: And this is a photograph from 3000 B.C. yeah, it must be in black and white.
23:53 Wes: Egyptians were more. More advanced. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bad photograph. So I assume that there's something that you could find in a museum for every one of these references, and maybe more than one. Is she conjecturing about the picking of fruit? I'm not sure.
24:11 Erin: But anyway, it seems difficult to train baboons to do this and expect them, for instance, to just not eat the fruit immediately. But it's such a lovely image, I don't want to question it. You know what I love about that making colossi and how to use slaves is it sends us back, of course, to the pinecone, but also to the freedman. So she's sort of being now more honest about what the freed man really was, which was someone who was a Slave, you know, he was nominally a freed man, but of course he was not free in his selection of his subject or anything having to do with, you know, his own self determination. And so I love the fact that by the time we get down past that anecdote, it reflects back up, you know, a more. A different gloss on what she's just said. She's tweaking herself a little bit or almost like kind of teasing us like, yeah, of course, that guy really wasn't free. Right.
25:03 Wes: Also, if you have them create a pine cone, that's a misuse of slaves. They knew how to use slaves. You use a slave properly, you should be able to produce a pyramid.
25:13 Erin: Oh, yes. Yeah, great.
25:15 Wes: More grand, right? Yeah.
25:17 Erin: Am I wrong to think that just mentally I just put this pine cone next to a pyramid and there are some similarities? No.
25:23 Wes: Yeah. It's a more frivolous attempt at connoting dominance. Is that the way to put it?
25:30 Erin: Yeah. You mean which is the more frivolous? The pine cone.
25:32 Wes: The pine cone. So the pine cone. Yeah. Right. It's less effort, involves one slave, not tons and tons of slaves, many of whom will die in its creation. It's not a. For the Egyptians. Right. There's a religious motivation. It's about the afterlife. You can entomb someone in this pyramid and I mean, I suppose, I assume colossi can refer to pyramid. I know there are other statues you would call colossi as well, but I think that the use of slaves, plural, the pyramids, were the biggest undertakings for that. And by the time you get to Pompey's Rome, which is just about the point of transition from republic to empire.
Right. So it's not Rome in its ultimate decline, the decline of the empire, but it's the decline of the republic. That's the point that we're at. And if the pine cone is dated from that time, is it? I assume it is. Then you can see it as a representation of that decline. Of course, it's a decline into something more grandiose, which is the Roman Empire. And the types of. I think what happens aesthetically under the Roman Empire, not that I know, huge amount of, hey, art of the Roman Republic versus art of the Roman Empire. I couldn't tell you much about that.
But it's a grander period overall, more pompous.
26:57 Erin: And I think the decline from Republicanism into Empire, I think is more morally fraught, probably for someone like Moore, who is very American in her sensibility and obviously cares quite a bit about freedom in this Poem which makes me think about the difference between the pine cone and the pyramid. Because I've been thinking so much because of my. I'm still in the middle of my fragment. Been thinking so much about the urn. The urn is an image. And reading an essay recently about the urn as being like the womb of death in the way that the actual womb is the womb of life.
That these two things are very, you know, the mirrors of each other. And I could say a lot about that, but I won't. But the pyramid being a kind of an urn, a giant. Giant urn. It seems slightly more logical and closer to some truth about the way that humans memorialize each other in death than something like a pine cone would. It's a matter of degrees, of course, but I think there's something much worse about the pinecone anyway. Really interesting. Structurally similar. And, you know, in the gradations of the way that the pine cone looks, of course, in the pyramid, both being not fluted.
I can't think of the right word.
28:12 Wes: But anyway, yeah, I get what you're saying.
28:15 Erin: Yeah. The layered quality and the. Yeah, and it's. They're both sort of slightly armored images. So serpent magic is something that is just kind of tossed off here. It'll come back a little bit later. But the idea of tying hippopotami so they're domesticating these fearsome animals.
28:36 Wes: You can't domesticate them. Yeah, they're being owned and controlled and.
28:40 Erin: Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And. And then they're also using, like, the baboons. And then the. The coursing of the antelopes and so on with the dog, cats. They're using animals, it seems, as their proxies. So they're sort of forcing the animals into a kind of slave relationship to them. And then the slaves are probably doing this. So there's a sort of mise en abyme slavery going on where, you know, the people are enslaving other people and then those slaves are enslaving the animals, et cetera.
29:10 Wes: Baboons on giraffes.
29:11 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. And so on and so forth. And the fleas on the baboon are
29:16 Wes: enslaving cats and dogs living together. Sorry.
29:20 Erin: That's good.
29:21 Wes: So, yeah, so the had their men tie hippopotami again. I don't know, though. You know, I'm sure this is being represented somewhere, and it's in a museum. And I think the use of serpent magic, you know, this is, again, something I had to look up. And it Comes up again later in the poem. But apparently anti snake spells were common in Egyptian texts. And there's a wand in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that's shaped like a two headed cobra. So serpents were. Had this role. At least representations of serpents had a role in magic rites. I'm not sure if serpent magic means actual snakes were used or if it's just representations of snakes.
Right. And the kind of the line gets blurred as we go forward because of course part of this is about the Egyptian domination of animals and use of animals and ownership of animals. The assertion of human superiority over animals and the use of animal products, right. Like the goose cream or whatever later on. But it's also in a animal shaped box, right. So the, it's animal, all animals all the way down. Everything's going to look like an animal and then we're going to use what animals have to offer us and, and put animals on top of animals, whatever you can do with animals.
30:33 Erin: Right.
30:34 Wes: So I find that very interesting and it's not something I have ever thought very much about. I was always interested in Egyptian, I mean in Egypt as a kid and Egyptian archeology and I think it's the type of thing, it's one of those things like dinosaurs that kids are naturally attracted to. My grandmother was into it, she had books around. It's like, wow. And I think this has something to do with it. The way animals feature in Egyptian symbology. Is that the right word in Egyptian representations is part of the visceral appeal. It's closer to some deep part of our psychology.
But it also points to this exploitative origin to culture. Right. Because domestication, I mean, cats, I think, arguably, I think the Egyptians did domesticate cats. And dogs haven't been domesticated for that long at this point in history. But whatever the case, and then the Neolithic revolution I think was 9,000 BC. So the actual use of cattle, domesticated cattle and the culture is built on the backs of animals. This exploitative relationship to nature obviously, and to animals in particular is not accidental to the development of civilization and culture.
So it's a weird sort of crime to be associated with our advances in human civilization, if you see what I mean. There's a dark underbelly to becoming civilized.
31:59 Erin: Definitely quote, unquote. Well, let me, I want to talk about that. Let me, let me read just the next, the next couple of stanzas so that we can get these boxes here. Here we go. These people liked small things. They gave to boys, little paired playthings such as Nests of eggs, ichneumon and snake, paddle and raft, badger and camel and made toys for themselves. The royal totem and toilet boxes marked with the contents Lords and ladies put goose grease paint in round bone boxes. The pivoting lid incised with a duckwing or reverted duck head kept in a buck or rhinoceros horn.
The ground horn and locust oil in stone locusts. Yeah. So what you're talking about with being deep in our psychology, I think it is this, like, relationship to childhood and to toys. You know, I think of the. I mean, the fact that the gods often have animal are animals or have animal heads. One of the first things I think of that attracted me to Egypt when I was a little kid were the canopic jars. So the jars that have the heads of animals, which is because they're the heads of gods. Right. But they look like just little jars with animal heads on them, like, you know, the world's sickest cookie jar or something.
33:12 Wes: I mean, this is sometimes my experience in a museum is, you know, and there's a. What is it in this? It's a wing. A duckwing on the lid to your face cream. And yeah, we don't have nice face cream. A box made of bone. Why don't we have that anymore? That's sometimes the feeling I get in a museum. Whereas my duckwing bone box instead, I'm getting it out of a plastic jar.
33:38 Erin: So anyway, yeah, the pivoting lid incised with a duckwing, it too almost seems as though the pivoting lid, that technology is related. Right, to the way that a wing exactly works. And so they're learning from the animals and then building off of them. I. I describe it in my note that I have here. I say case made of animal with product made from animal reconstitution via consumption. So there's something about like they're. They're taking the animal apart, taking what they want from it and then reconstituting it in some way after the fact that.
And that includes taking from it its power, whether that be. It's like its technology, you know, so the long giraffe neck to be able to get up to where you can't reach. It's appropriating its evolutionary traits under sort of false pretenses, maybe. And I think evolution is going to become a really key theme in this poem. Right. So it's exploiting the evolutionary traits of things to which it has no ownership.
34:38 Wes: So animals as tools. Right. We're used to thinking of tool use in terms of, yeah, I made my adze. I chipped away and turned this rock into an adze or something like that.
34:48 Erin: Oh, I thought you meant podcast ads.
34:50 Wes: Yeah, I get it, yeah. adze, adze. And so, yeah, animals are, I think, very clearly. She's highlighting the way in which animals are used here as tools. And so you could think of them as early forms of technology. And yeah, here we have the imitation, right. If the pivoting lid is an imitation of a duckwing and therefore incised with a duckwing. Hey, look, the lid comes out and looks like a wing or something like that. Two things are happening at once, right? We've taken goose grease. We're actually murdering these animals, stealing their ideas.
Yeah, yeah, we're not only murdering them, we're taking their inventions and patenting them for ourselves. But we are to actually eat an animal or turn it into grease or whatever that we can use on our faces. It's paint, I guess. Maybe it's not skin cream. Is it makeup? Maybe it's makeup, but in any case, that's one thing. And then these art objects, which are also, in this case useful, right? Just everyday items, they seem to honor the animal in a sense. They seem to suggest a certain amount of reverence for these animals, which I think we know that the Egyptians had and they represented their gods in that way.
And it's a bit of a self contradiction.
36:07 Erin: Is it honoring them or sort of fearing them like a begrudging respect? I think it is honoring partly. But, you know, the most consequential image for what it connects up with later in the poem is the royal totem, which is, of course, the. I think it's pronounced uraeus. It's the cobra, you know, on the head of the pharaoh. So the cobra was the symbol of royal power. And, you know, later we're told that the pharaoh, you know, famously feared snakes. And we have this again, you know, snake magic kind of running through this Egyptian anecdotes. So what's that about?
It's not killing the snake and using it for its technology, but the technology that the snake has or the evolutionary advantage it has, which is a form of technology. Right. Is getting other things to fear it and therefore leave it alone. Being scary in some way. That's a bit of a strange way of putting it, right. Because maybe other animals aren't scared of the snake. Well, maybe they are. I mean, we're afraid of snakes because they're slimy and they have no legs and they're gross and they're strange and we know they're dangerous. The extent to which we can attribute fear to the prey of the snake is maybe up for debate.
Right. But there's something scary about them and we're trying to appropriate that as a form of. Or the pharaohs are as a way of saying, you should fear me as the pharaoh. And I think that that's related to the way that the snake evolved. What makes it scary to its prey, I think might be what makes it scary to us. And that's the thing that's being. That sort of like emotional component is here. What's being appropriated in the totem, I think, which is a bit different from like the way a wing works, you know, much more technological.
37:48 Wes: Yeah. Apparently that fear of snakes is hardwired into the brain evolutionarily. It's completely instinctual. Non learned. And we share that with. Though they're animals for good reason. But. Yeah. So it sounds like you're saying we try to appropriate that fearsomeness and that power symbolically. Right. Wearing the snake on the forehead or something like that. And to be able to. I'm thinking of the rime of the Ancient Mariner here where the. In a way, casually killing albatross is a protest against our dependence on nature. And I've been thinking about this because this comes up.
We're doing young Hegelians and Marx and this whole crew of people at a certain time in philosophical history and who are. There's a lot of talk about human dependence on the natural world. In this case, you could see these symbolic appropriations as protests against that dependency. Right. We depend on animals for food and, you know, animals and plants. And there's a humiliation in that. And I mean, at the very least, there's a lot of anxiety and. Right. If the food goes away, we die if we can't get that sustenance. So we might want to engage in magic rites and rituals that ensure a good crop or ensure a good hunt or something like that.
And those rituals will often involve, I assume, imitating the animals and taking on the powers of the animals. But as more is representing it here, there's kind of an impulse to be demeaning or to humiliate in turn, to humiliate and conquer the natural world. And animals, including animals, as a kind of revenge for that dependency. So, you know, we hunt them. The list of things that she's given us, we hunt them, we use them for hunting, use them as tools. We own them, we put them on display in gardens. Right. As you know, here they are just for decoration, these living things.
And we're doing the same thing with Flora, Right. We're using cotton and other plants for linen products. And then worst of all, playthings, we're giving them to our children. I assume these are representations, though. These people like small things they gave to boys. Little paired playthings, such as nests of eggs. So the pair there would be nest and eggs. I assume it's just recalling what I've seen in museums. You see, in the Ancient Egypt section, there's always little toys, right? Animals and other representation. So ichneumon and snake, which I think is wasp.
Ichneumon is a wasp paddle.
40:22 Erin: And how you say it, you're showing me up today. I think I said,
40:28 Wes: you're probably right. It's just how confidently you say it's
40:33 Erin: Shinna Berry all over again.
40:36 Wes: Yeah, right, exactly. Badger and camel. So I assume these are little pairs of toys that she's talking about. Again, the type of things that I
40:44 Erin: thought the eggs were. I thought this was a mixture of toys and real, you know, like the eggs would be maybe if they just found a nest of eggs and gave it to the kid. I don't know how a kid would play with these things anyway, but whatever. I guess they didn't have eyeballs.
40:59 Wes: Yeah, that's my confusion here. Like the wasp and snake, they're not literally giving them actual wasps. And so here you go, kids. Go.
41:09 Erin: Maybe they did.
41:10 Wes: I told you to play with your wasps. Okay, well, maybe they did. Maybe it's dangerous. Go play with your wasps and snakes.
41:18 Erin: Well, I'm assuming that. I mean, I think this is a little sicker than. Than you seem to think it is. I mean, maybe they really gave. They were like, oh, here, this is the thing it likes to eat. Go, go.
41:27 Wes: Yeah, it's possible.
41:28 Erin: Put this wasp in front of the snake and see what happens. Like the way that you would give a cat a little cat toy, you know, and watch it destroy it and go nuts.
41:36 Wes: Yeah, it's completely possible. I was confused about it. Yeah, it could be.
41:40 Erin: But I think you're right. I mean, I think there's a slippage here between what actually is a toy, you know, it's not. They're not being literally given badgers and camels, of course, so those must be toyified. Right? But the other stuff.
41:52 Wes: Or maybe you do get the camel, you know, and the way the little girl gets the pony and you get the badger to put on the back of the camel.
42:01 Erin: Right to.
42:05 Wes: And they're not picking fruit.
42:06 Erin: Badger, the birds and the trees races
42:08 Wes: with them and the Badgers are little jockeys. You dress them up as jockeys. The rich, the ancient Egyptian elite, the effete.
42:31 Erin: Oh, my gosh. That is the funniest image. The little caps. Okay, that's like. Oh, man, that is so funny.
42:43 Wes: Sorry. They would make good looking little jockeys. And they got a little hands. They'd be easy to trim. They can hold them. They can hold the reins.
42:58 Erin: Oh, my God.
42:59 Wes: All right, on that note, I think we run out of time for the first part.
43:04 Erin: That was fast. All right, so in part two, we'll get through the rest of the poem, I think. I hope we'll go a little faster, as we usually promise to do. In part two, we'll finally get to the jerboa, which makes its grand entrance at the end of too much and at the beginning of abundance. And we'll delineate that line. Thank you, Wesley.
43:25 Wes: Thank you.
43:29 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) – Part 2
Jan 06, 2025
What can the contrast between silent and talking pictures teach us about the nature of film itself? And how might it reflect the age-old rivalries between word and image, movement and stasis, the living and the dead? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, “Sunset Boulevard.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: Or@patreon.com subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Sunset Boulevard. Last time we talked about Plato and Aristotle and the image and the word, we talked about all kinds of deeply philosophical things. So now I think we're ready to jump into the actual movie, get away from our books and into an image. But a moving, speaking image. Very confusing. You know, last time I hinted at the fact that Joe, being a writer and Joe struggling with narrative is connected symbolically in the film, or seems to be connected symbolically in the film with his car.
And the fact that he has car troubles or that his. His car is in danger of being repossessed is indicative both of his failing career, his inability to make it in Hollywood. And, of course, that's connected to the fact that he seems to be unable to come up with original, interesting scripts that will sell. So it's as though his ability to create narrative is in danger of being repossessed and his whole story as a screenwriter is in danger of being recalled as he's threatened with returning to Dayton, Ohio. Terrifying prospect. Going back to being a newspaper man.
1:42 Wes: It's always the Midwest, you know.
1:44 Erin: Yeah. That's when you go.
1:46 Wes: When you fail. Yeah.
1:48 Erin: Yeah.
1:48 Wes: All the nice people. Yeah. Anyway.
1:50 Erin: Right.
1:51 Wes: Living ordinary lives.
1:53 Erin: So he, you know, then he blows out a tire and has to hide his car, park his car so that he's no longer moving in the garage of Norma, which is symbolic to me of the fact that he enters her world for the rest of his life, really, and is taken in by her way of viewing things, which is not to progress, not to go out and drive, because, in fact, she doesn't really take her car out ever. But to sit around and live in the past in one time period, that does not move forward. So just about the image disconnected from narrative.
2:28 Wes: Yeah. So I was kind of reminded of, like, a fairy tale or something where, I don't know, Hansel and Gretel end up at the witch's house or something. It's almost like he's. He's a lost little boy being taken in by a witch who's gonna eat him or something. There's a fairy tale quality, obviously, in showing up and having her dead monkey there. And he's originally mistaken for the monkey undertaker. And then later on, he witnesses the chimpanzee's funeral. The fact that the mansion is so dilapidated in the beginning. So you get this interesting. Right.
And that image by itself is a great image of narcissism because it's its grandiosity of, on the one hand, of what has been or what could be. But then the immediate reality is deprivation because the real self gets deprived or ignored or undeveloped in comparison to some grandiose ideal. But, yeah, it also gives it this feeling, I think, which you mentioned, of being a place where time has kind of just stopped. Like he's sort of been sucked into a bit of a wormhole or what is it? A time sink. I don't know what you call him, but, yeah, you get a very firm sense of him entering into this different world.
3:48 Erin: Yeah. And I think that Norma's stasis seems to be images of water, I think, kind of predominate for her, oddly enough, because her pool is empty at the beginning of the film. She does fill it for Jo later, and she does promise him things like, oh, I can open my house in Malibu for you, and then you'll have the whole ocean. But images of water seem to fit with her, and they seem connected to her dreams. I think the fulcrum for this is her bed, which is like that insane looking. Almost like a gondola.
4:21 Wes: Yeah.
4:22 Erin: Which Jo describes at some point as being like a crazy rowboat or something.
4:26 Wes: Yeah. And apparently it belonged to an actual dancer.
4:30 Erin: Oh, really?
4:31 Wes: Yeah.
4:32 Erin: Wow. It maybe makes sense that Jo's car, as a symbol of progression, is something that she doesn't like. She disparages this car as being newfangled and made of chrome and spit or something like that, you know, so it makes sense maybe that she's associated with like a ship or a rowboat or a gondola, something that's an outmoded form of transportation and that can. You can just float. You can just stay in one temporal space and not move. And in fact, you know, the bed is. Of course, it's not actually floating. It's just shaped like a ship. So it's actually just in stasis.
And Jo compares her to a sleepwalker. So she's connected to this idea of dreams. Of course, Hollywood itself is, you know, a dream factory. I mean, I think even when they're watching Queen Kelly, when she's looking at her younger self, I think she's praying in a church or something on the screen. And an intertitle says, you know, presumably the interior monologue of her character on the screen cast out this wicked dream which has seized my heart.
5:35 Wes: I am so.
5:36 Erin: It's as if this young Norma is trying to give a message, you know, to older Norma to put her faith in something else other than the dream. But Norma is sleeping and can't wake up or something like that. And what I find interesting about this is that if we take, you know, the pool as being part of this symbolic structure, you know, the pool is something that Jo wants too, right? The pool, the swimming pool seems to be a symbol of Hollywood success. So it's something that they share. And I think it's part of Joe's attraction to Norma. I mean, it's difficult to say where precisely he is attracted to Norma.
For the most part, he seems to just be completely disparaging of her and kind of making fun of her without her really knowing. But I think that it's in this dream space, which is the space of delusion and stasis and silent film, but also the place of Hollywood success and the American dream, maybe the Hollywood dream factory, making it big, achieving your dreams that Jo is attracted to. So maybe what he's attracted to, Enorma, is the fact that she has been big, is the fact that she has been successful. She's achieved something that Jo never will.
6:47 Wes: You know, after he's been reading her script for a while and he says he feels sick to his stomach because of all the tripe that he's been reading and the, quote, silly hodgepodge of melodramatic plots. However, by then I'd started concocting a little plot of my own. This is his voiceover. So he thinks that he's going to take advantage of her by getting her to pay him for his. This rewrite of her lousy script. Of course, he's the one who's going to end up getting manipulated, in a sense. But you see at this moment the concept of a plot versus a melodrama.
These two things are put at odds with each other once again. And he thinks his plotting is gonna overcome her melodrama, but it's precisely the opposite. It's towards the middle of the movie where she tries to kill herself, right? And he ends up in her room and she's able to evoke pity from him. And then they kiss, right? And that's at the very middle of the movie. So that's the point where they become an item and where he's kind of been fully defeated by her up to that point. The bulk of the second act, the first part of the second act, is this buildup of him depending on her, like I mentioned before, his car being towed.
So he has to use her car, which is this old, fancy car, which becomes a very important point, part of the plot because the studio wants to use that car for A film, but not her. They want to. There's the car, and then there's the getting clothing for him, moving in, him finding out there's no locks on the doors and that Max is the one sending the letters to her, and then culminating in the kind of weird, pathetic New Year's party with no guests except for him. So in any case, her melodrama fully defeats his plotting by the middle of the movie.
8:40 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. You know, I thought a lot about what it means to be jaded and, you know. Cause Joe is such a jaded character. So, you know, obviously, if we're gonna take this symbolism of the car. Joe is struggling with narrative. Joe is relying too heavily on cliches. Right. He pitches the script to Sheldrake, a name that comes up again and again in Billy Wilder movies. He pitches the script to Sheldrake, which is about a baseball player who had sold himself to the mob and then wants to go straight, but the mob won't let him and he needs to throw the World Series.
Very, very common, familiar plot to anyone who's seen movies or watched baseball or watched baseball movies. So he's having trouble getting out of the realm of cliche. And I think, you know, what is being jaded but kind of viewing the world through these cliches. In a way, you think that you know all the angles, but at the same time, it kind of. It hobbles you. That very presupposition that you can predict what's going to happen because you're familiar with cliche can actually, I think, make you vulnerable to things that Norma represents. Melodrama, live emotion, you know, there are ways of that life can undercut the cliche and present something different.
I think maybe the surprise of the monkey at the beginning is part of that, is part of the fact that he should be set back on his heels a little bit by this revelation. And instead he thinks that he can just manipulate her and that he can see what's coming around the bend. I mean, on the one hand, monkeys are a trope in Gothic stories. A minor trope, but a trope. The appearance of monkeys, on the other hand, this is a very strange thing and not what he was expecting, so he should be put on his guard instead. He's not. But I think it's interesting how the film is.
Makes you pay attention to these cliches. The, you know, the repo man says to one of them, says to Joe, you know, this company's played ball with you long enough, or something like that.
10:35 Wes: Right.
10:35 Erin: Which is, of course, connected to the fact that Joe is pitching this baseball movie. And that's kind of a baseball cliche. And then, you know, he sees through Joe's story when Joe tells him, oh, the car isn't here. Oh, my friend took it down to Palm Springs. And he reads cliche into that. Like, Palm Springs, it's is a health resort town. So the repo man makes some comment like, oh, yeah, I bet he took it down there for his health. You know, he could see that Joe is lying to him. Joe thinks that he's one step ahead of everybody. He's one cliche ahead of the rest of the rest of the world.
But he's not, right after that, when he goes to Paramount, right when he takes his car out from where he's been hiding it at Rudy's, he says something like, I had an original story kicking around Paramount, but my agent told me was dead as a doornail. So once you listen for them, which as soon as he, as the repo man said the thing about playing ball, suddenly my ears perked up for listening for cliches. They pop up again and again. And noir partially, I think, operates on cliche. It's a cliche of noir that cliches abound. The film noir descriptive formula in a voiceover, you know, narrative voiceover, is, you know, she was the kind of woman who.
Blah, blah, blah, right? Insert cliche here. As Jo says about the house. This is a kind of house old movie people used to build. And he connects it to Miss Havisham, which is in itself a cliche of an older woman who's bemoaning her past. Right? So it's about kind of like having a narrative in our heads about people. But then what film noir does when it's good is that it undercuts that. It transgresses the expected narrative. It transgresses the cliche. And that's how it generates surprise, I think. And so it makes sense that Joe, who's struggling with coming up with an original story, is, as you're pointing out, repeatedly outsmarted by the story that he's in, even as he thinks he's one step ahead.
Because in the part that you mentioned where he says that, oh, you know, I had a plot for them too, he doesn't realize that this whole time while he's formulating this plot, Max has gone and gotten his clothes from his. And all his stuff from his apartment. So, like, they're one step ahead of him. He thinks he's taking advantage of her. And this whole time she's laid this plot to have him move in with her.
12:52 Wes: So, yeah, it's interesting because his cynicism and Norma's psychosis, they both have similar roots. Right. Which is. Well, for him, it's failing as an artist or failing as a screenwriter. And his solution is to be cynical and to give up, essentially. Either giving up by just selling out or giving up by just giving up and going home. I guess he's had some success, too, so. Yeah, so he's already had some success. Minor success, yeah. She's had major success and will not give up. Or maybe you could say she has in a sense and hasn't in a sense. But she's holding on to this dream, no matter how crazy it is, and writing a new script and expecting to make another film with DeMille.
But neither seems like the best solution to the struggles of being an artist, either self delusion or cynicism. I mean, the self delusion is kind of. It's a sort of idealism that she's engaged in. Right. So that's a direct contrast to his cynicism, but it's very different than, say, like, Betty's idealism.
14:00 Erin: Yeah, let's talk about Betty a bit, because she's a foil both to Jo and to Norma. I think what's interesting is that they take pains to point out that she comes from a picture family. So she has a pedigree, which maybe makes her something like Norma and less like Joe. Joe is more of a newcomer, more of an upstart.
14:20 Wes: Right.
14:20 Erin: He doesn't really belong in Hollywood. Something about this pedigree, I think, proves that Betty does have what it takes somehow. But of course, it's also her adaptability. She wanted to be a star. She even got a nose job. And then her acting wasn't any good, so she switched to being a reader and she wants to be a writer. And she has a great deal of ambition. And she's connected narratively, I think, with images of cars. Like what the script they're working on. Jo says that was running through his mind like a dozen locomotives. And then really curiously, when he smells her and tells her what she smells like, he basically says, she has a new car smell.
15:03 Wes: Didn't he say, you smell real special or something. What's the word?
15:06 Erin: Yeah, it's so, so dumb that she smells like freshly laundered linen or something. And then like a brand new automobile.
15:13 Wes: I got it exactly right, he says. Well, first he says, I will now kiss that nose of yours. Which is interesting. She Says if you please. They're doing.
15:21 Erin: They're a little jokey dialogue.
15:24 Wes: Yeah. But dangerous flirtation, given that she's a fiance.
15:28 Erin: Poor Artie.
15:28 Wes: And they said, may I say that you smell real special.
15:35 Erin: Sorry. Okay. Billy Wilder.
15:38 Wes: Not a compliment I've ever thought of giving someone. Must be my new shampoo. That's no shampoo. It's more like freshly laundered linen handkerchiefs. Like a brand new automobile. How old are you? Anyway? She's a new car.
15:54 Erin: She might need to get checked out. Her pheromones are malfunctioning. If she has new car smell.
16:02 Wes: His cynicism I find quite off putting.
16:04 Erin: Yeah.
16:05 Wes: And just looking at.
16:07 Erin: I really don't like it.
16:08 Wes: Critics have said, yeah, this is one. The film was lauded, of course, as one of the great films. And I think it received an immediately positive critical reaction. But if you find. Where you do find criticisms, I think this is one of them, which is that his level of sarcasm, I think, is what one. Cheap sarcasm, one critic may have called it. But anyway, I think they're just. They're reacting to his level of sarcasm and cynicism, which is hard to like. And especially the moment where he rejects Betty. Right. But for some reason has her come to the house to do that and then gets himself shot by continuing to rile up someone who just shown him that she has a gun and giving no concern for his own safety.
16:56 Erin: How do you feel, though, about. I mean, at this viewing, this did stick out to me. It's the most I've ever disliked Joe Gillis. But it's also really, really hard to feel any sympathy for Norma. I feel a little bit more for her. And actually, I think this time because he struck me as being so obnoxious, I ended up feeling more sympathy for her. In contrast, because he. He makes fun of her so often, but, I mean, she's a nut.
17:21 Wes: It's hard not to feel sympathy for her at the very end, though, right? When she.
17:26 Erin: Of course, or even when she goes to the studio. I mean, those.
17:30 Wes: Yeah, that's.
17:31 Erin: Those moments are so touching. When I love when DeMille says, oh, you know, he's about to break the news to her that they just wanted her car. And he says, oh, you know, I hope you still have a sense of humor. And you just look at her face and she's like crying because she's just been approached by all these people that she thought had forgotten her. And it's like, of course she has no sense of humor. If she ever did, she's lost it, you know, like there is nothing about her that isn't overly sensitive and so easily crushed. And so. And that. And that's hard to deal with because there's no sense of self awareness there.
Just a touch of it would make her a little more likeable. I mean, I'm glad they don't go there. I'm glad that she stays who she is. And I do think this is one of the great film performances of all time. I think she dares to be so unlikable, and I think that's really important for her character. Maybe Holden's choices too, are admirable and that he doesn't make any effort to be more likable either. So that there isn't a way in which he's trying to come off better than her by contrast. But it does put one in a curious position watching the film going, who am I supposed to be rooting for?
18:39 Wes: Yeah, exactly.
18:41 Erin: The rats in the swimming pool. Max. Certainly not Betty, who's obnoxious. And I should know because I played Betty in regional theater in the musical version of Sunset Boulevard. Oh, really? Yes.
18:53 Wes: Oh, wow. That's very cool. I'm surprised I haven't heard your impression of Norma Desmond yet, Max.
19:00 Erin: No, I'll do it. I'll do it for you. Off, off the record.
19:05 Wes: Words, words, words. I'll show you when you're a little dog too. No, sorry, different film.
19:14 Erin: I love my favorite scene of her in the whole movie is when she's drunk at the New Year's Eve party when she's had too much champagne and she's like, you know, it's actually really, really funny. She's frequently so funny. And I also think her Chaplin impression is really good. Yeah, she's really.
19:31 Wes: So this is one of the few moments, and this is. Ebert points this out, where she does come across as having a sense of humor and does. Yeah, you do get more of a sense of her as a real down to earth human being at that point or. That's very humanizing. Yeah, she does a great Chaplin imitation. And she's funny, genuinely funny.
19:51 Erin: Well, I don't know if we're supposed to be laughing at her with the bathing beauty little. I mean, it's funny. That is a really funny scene. And of course, Gloria Swanson is being funny. I don't know if we're supposed to take seriously the fact that Norma is like performing, being a bathing beauty with a parasol for Jo's entertainment in a deadly serious way. But the Chaplin thing is cute. It's funny. And it's funny that her references for comedy are Chaplin, slapstick, silent comedy.
20:20 Wes: And she steps outside of her need to be a beautiful woman.
20:26 Erin: Yeah, yeah, right.
20:27 Wes: She's playing a man and she's playing a tramp, and she's got a little mustache on and.
20:31 Erin: Yeah, right. That's true. That's true. Hadn't thought of that. I always loved, you know, how much I love Judy Garland, but especially any movie where she plays the Tramp, she would do something like that. And I always wanted to dress up, like, as a tramp for Halloween. And I couldn't find clothes that were, like, disgusting enough. And finally someone said to me, you know, people, like most girls try to make themselves look pretty on Halloween. Like, you should try
20:56 Wes: slutty Tramp. Right. It's always a slutty.
21:04 Erin: Well, I always thought the tramp thing is actually cute.
21:07 Wes: Tight. Yeah.
21:09 Erin: No, but there's a great tradition, I think, of women dressing up as the Tramp in a way that I always thought was adorable. So I didn't think there was anything, you know, conflicted about it. You know, there's something cute about her Chaplin impression, which is endearing. And so I think it works in a strange sort of way. It's not unfeminine, but it isn't sexy. That, I think, is the interesting distinction there, that she's not being a sex object in that moment.
21:32 Wes: Yeah. I don't think there's any point in the movie at which you could say she's sexy.
21:36 Erin: No, but she's trying to be.
21:38 Wes: She. Yeah.
21:40 Erin: Sort of. Or glamorous. Glamorous. But I'm thinking about maybe sexy is the wrong word or sex object is the wrong word. I'm thinking about the sort of the depictions of her on film when she was younger. The shots of her that we do get. She seems like an idealized. In the, say, the Madonna horror dichotomy. She's in a church. She's wearing a veil. So this seems like. And she's lit by candles. So this seems to be of the Madonna variety. But I think that her attraction to Jo, that relationship is about her believing that she is still sexually desirable. So there's an element of this in the relationship with him, which must also be the way in which she's relating to audiences, which is. As a sex symbol of some outmoded sort. But, yeah, a sex symbol nonetheless.
22:26 Wes: There's something so ravenous about her, so frighteningly ravenous. That kind of trumps all that. So all the stuff with her hands and the. It's right, the crazy look and the. The bare teeth, it is. It is almost like the threat of being cannibalized by a maternal figure who is not letting you establish a boundary. So it is. This is why I brought up the witch as well. It's like the mother who won't let you separate. And to me, she comes across much more as a kind of scary mother figure than anything. Or a witch like figure.
23:04 Erin: That's right. That's right. You know, she's a vampire too. You know, there are lots of Mrs. Robinson connections, of course.
23:11 Wes: Right, yeah. And that's. Yeah, I thought of that as well, because Mrs. Robinson is also someone who wanted to be. Who had artistic. You know, we find out, right, that she had artistic aspirations and that's part of why she wants to kind of corrupt Benjamin. It's a bit of a different dynamic here, but.
23:27 Erin: Yeah, yeah. You reminded me of several moments in the film where she does treat Jo uncomfortably like a son. Like when she tells him not to chew gum in the car or even when he gets out of the pool and she insists on drying him off, which under the right circumstances, that would probably be normal, but with her, it seems like a motherly thing to do. I like that word you use, ravenous, which I think is spot on. Sexiness maybe is, as one Walter Matthau would say, maybe about an urbanity born of disinterest or something like that. That's about maybe, you know, sexiness in a strange sort of way is about not really expressing desire.
Maybe. I mean, I've never thought about this before. Maybe I should have, but I never have thought about this too closely. But maybe something about being sexy is about having people come to you and not about being. Not about forcing yourself on people. That seems pretty obvious, you know, come to think of it. But. Right. Like, so that is kind of what you're talking about, that she's too grasping that she would have to be a little bit more withholding and let Jo come to her. I keep thinking over and over again of, you know, Sally O'Malley, the SNL skit where Molly Shannon plays the like.
Like, woman who does aerobics. And she keeps saying over and over again, I'm 50 years old.
24:42 Wes: 5.
24:43 Erin: Oh, I kick and kick. 50, 50 years old just like. Is so ridiculous. So when they're like, she's 50. Oh, my God, 50 years old. It's like, isn't JLo like 55. Anyway, it's funny. She's so old.
25:01 Wes: Right.
25:01 Erin: Meanwhile, William Holden looks like he's the same age as she.
25:04 Wes: It's.
25:05 Erin: She looks great.
25:05 Wes: Well, yeah. They were gonna make her up, huh?
25:08 Erin: Yeah. Didn't they make her up to make her look old, just like Anne Bancroft?
25:11 Wes: No, that she refused to be made up to be made to look older. So they were going to, you know, because I think she's supposed to be 60 or something in the film.
25:19 Erin: No, 50.
25:20 Wes: Well, she is. She's. She is 50.
25:21 Erin: I mean, she's 51 in real life, but they say 50 in the film.
25:25 Wes: Oh, they do. Oh, right. He says a 50. Right. When he's berating her about, you know, there's nothing wrong with being a 50.
25:31 Erin: Yeah.
25:32 Wes: How old one?
25:32 Erin: Yeah, he knows everything about being a woman.
25:36 Wes: Right, but. Okay, so I forgot. But yeah, no, I read that they were going to try and make her up to look older because she does look probably quite a few years younger than her age. She said no.
25:49 Erin: Well, she has to think about her career.
25:51 Wes: You could expect. Yeah, but, yeah, and I think that was the right. That was the right choice. I think it's just a bit too on the nose, too obvious, too. She's someone who is, you know, she's 51 or whatever, and. But she's well kept for her age, and she looks good for her age. And that is perfectly appropriate to the part, I think.
26:11 Erin: Yeah. I thought that they compromised on this idea of aging her up, and maybe not by cluing Swanson into this, but by giving her a super glamorous. A glamorous look that would just make her naturally look a little bit older because it's a little. It's slightly harsher just in terms of her makeup and her.
26:28 Wes: She's putting her face into harsh expressions all the time. And I think that's.
26:33 Erin: That does.
26:33 Wes: It's almost a grimace all the time.
26:35 Erin: Yeah, that's right.
26:36 Wes: Or were you saying something different? You were.
26:38 Erin: I think also they were trying to make her up to just be. To not put age makeup on her, but just to do. When you put on, like, hyper, glamorous amounts of makeup that can age you just with harsher lines or something. It could just make you look a little bit older than you are. I think the youngest she looks is when her. Which is really remarkable is when her face is, like, under the microscope when they're doing all those beauty treatments. And you could see her pretty much without makeup. You could see she barely has a line on her face, you know?
27:05 Wes: Yeah, I know it's crazy.
27:07 Erin: She was a health nut in real life and would, like, just put herself through all these crazy regimens to keep up her looks, which obviously worked. Seems like a huge waste of time to me, but whatever.
27:18 Wes: Yeah. And I think it's important because the movie isn't really about her being over the hill as a. Right. Like, it's not about her age exactly. It's more about the passing of the silent film era and her failure to adapt to the new and her holding on to the past. Am I right about that?
27:36 Erin: I think that is right. I think it's also true that, you know, DeMille mentions, you know, she can't be that old. She can't be. You know, don't say that she's a dinosaur or whatever, you know, because I'm old enough to be her father. And DeMille, of course, still a director, still doing, you know, stupid biblical epics. I mean, this was the set of Samson and Delilah, and he's given the script for Salome. You know, Hollywood is a cliche factory.
28:00 Wes: And that really was. That really was the set for that film. He really was. Yeah. Yeah.
28:06 Erin: Not a bad film, Hedy Lamarr. It's ridiculous, but it's a fun movie. You know, I think that being a silent film star, let's put it this way, it was not unlike being a gymnast in the 1970s. They were particularly young, egregiously young. 16, 17 was like the prime age for, you know, Lillian Gish made The Whales of August with Bette Davis in 1987, and they were supposed to be sisters of roughly the same age because Bette Davis had had strokes and had by that time, was so sick. She looked much, much older than Lillian Gish was. And I don't think she was much younger.
I mean, I think a lot of these women, had they survived the transition, would have been slightly on the older end, but within the range of the ages. Of the women that came in for the talkies, you look at someone like Irene Dunne, one of my favorite actresses who only had a career in sound, oddly enough, because she was on the Broadway stage in musicals. Mostly came over, started in movies in 1930 or leathernecking, was the first one in, I think 29. So she was just completely out of the sound era. She was born in 1898. You know, she was 39 when she made the Awful Truth with Cary Grant.
Constantly had to fudge her age to stay to get the roles that she got, probably until she retired in 1950 or 52, something like that. But very often these women were roughly the same age, but the silent girls were so young. They were truly girls. So I just think that that's a factor here that we're talking about a slightly adjusted age range in terms of. Of what the silents were really looking for. They were looking for teenage girls to be opposite Chaplin, you know, so it's almost like a teen romance kind of look to those relationships.
29:56 Wes: I think this is why Max. Part of why Max feels so guilty and why he's her servant now, even after he's her ex husband and servant and was her director. Because in a way he was a. I think at the point where he's her director, he's kind of a father figure. She's being raised up right. She's still in her formative years and film isn't just a profession for her. It's this deep formative influence. Not only is it a deep. A deep formative influence that gets very much embedded in her identity. She had this tremendous success at it and this fame at a very early age, which, as we know, can be very confusing and cause lots of problems. Right. Child stars and all that. So Max, I think, has the feeling that he's damaged her and now his penance is that he has to take care of her for the rest of her life.
30:52 Erin: Yeah, I like that. I like this idea that she's. I mean, we've already been hinting at this that she's symbolically aligned with silent pictures. But it's almost as if she is a symbol for all of them, silent movie culture itself. Right. She was there at its very beginnings and it was there, if you like, at the beginning of her.
31:09 Wes: Right.
31:10 Erin: So there's a sort of mutual origin story and mutual arc. And in a way, her asking DeMille to make a picture with her is like her asking Hollywood in 1949, 1950, to make a silent movie. There's an impossibility there that's sort of like at the core of what it is that she's about as a symbol, as a performer.
31:30 Wes: So whose close up is better? I guess it's not really a. The shot of him in the pool is not exactly a close up, but we do get a good look at his open mouthed face. And apparently they did that shot with a mirror. They tried to put the camera in the pool and it didn't work out. I mean, speaking of another parallel to the Graduate, this pool scene, but.
31:52 Erin: Right, right, yeah, pool and stasis, that's
31:58 Wes: the origin. Not just, you know, we Get a shot not just of him, but the police and photographers sort of surrounding him. It's great. It's a great shot. But that shot is kind of iconic. And then the one at the end of the movie as she, you know, she's ready for her close up. And then she approaches the camera.
32:17 Erin: Yeah. She becomes one with the celluloid. Fades into the screen, and we get the direct call out. I think these things are. Are really closely related because she references those wonderful people out there in the dark. And, I mean, what a thing that must have been to be in the audience, seeing that for the first time, you know, in a movie theater in 1950.
32:38 Wes: Probably the most terrifying thing they've ever.
32:40 Erin: Really terrifying. Really chilling. Right. You know, but there are a lot of very subtle. I mean, you know, the connection between those two shots, the cameraman and the. You know, we've talked about Norma being ravenous, but the ravenousness of the public and the fact that they demand the. The new is an element of this that we haven't touched on. One of the really subtle touches that I like is during Norma's return to the studio when the old gaffer Hog Eye trains his spotlight on her and says, let's get a good look at you.
33:10 Wes: Yeah.
33:10 Erin: You know, in that moment, he's sort of representative of an entire culture of ravenous film fans who forget you the moment you're off the screen. But also, if they remember you the moment, they want to see you now as a. You know, as a. The appeal you now have is maybe like a circus freak. Let's see how you've aged. Let's. Let's check you out. He's up high. So you might think at first that they're saying Hawkeye, you know, because he's precision. But no, it's hog eye, right? Which there's something really telling about that name and the ravenousness of the audience, of the curious public.
And so having the. The photographers and the people coming to capitalize suddenly on this story, now that it's sensational, now that it's news again, suddenly we care about Norma Desmond. And they're all there with their cameras. And the fact that Hedda Hopper, you know, famous gossip columnist playing herself, is up in Norma's bedroom, and they're all just watching her break down without helping her or doing anything to, I don't know, improve the situation in some way. I don't know what they could do, but they could do more than what they're doing.
Instead of interrogating her. When she's obviously having a psychotic break. The fact that this is a business, this is an industry that is geared towards making money, and so they have to appeal to a public. And what right a public has, what ownership they have over stars, over films, what right they should have to dictate the stories that get made? And whether or not those stories are just popcorn movies or artistic undertakings or something like that, I think is a big part of this.
34:43 Wes: Yeah, Very good. She's the mirror image of our own ravenousness, and we have to face that at the end of the movie. I like that. All right. That was fun. Thank you.
34:53 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, SubtextPodcast, and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950)
Dec 29, 2024
When the film starts, its two leads are already dead, more or less. Silent Screen legend Norma Desmond’s career is dead, and because she’s nothing more than her career, the best she can do is linger in the tomb of her former glory, hoping for a resurrection. And failed screenwriter Joe Gillis quite literally enters the film as a corpse, so, as the film’s narrator, he has no choice but to tell his story in flashback. Thus, it’s safe to say that both Norma and Joe are, well, fatally disadvantaged in the realization of their respective dreams. And yet, both achieve a kind of post-mortem success—Norma as the star of one last film, and Joe as the writer of one last, great, highly-personal tale. (In an expression of what might be the screenwriter’s secret fantasy, he even gets to star in it, to boot.) How is such life after death possible? Arguably only through the magic of celluloid, a medium ghoulishly capable of preserving humans precisely as they are—which all too soon becomes as they were. What can the contrast between silent and talking pictures teach us about the nature of film itself? And how might it reflect the age-old rivalries between word and image, movement and stasis, the living and the dead? Wes & Erin discuss Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, “Sunset Boulevard.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. When the film starts, its two leads are already dead. More or less. Silent screen legend Norma Desmond's career is dead. And because she's nothing more than her career, the best she can do is linger in the tomb of her former glory, hoping for a resurrection. And failed screenwriter Joe Gillis quite literally enters the film as a corpse. So as the film's narrator, he has no choice but to tell his story in flashback. Thus, it's safe to say that both Norma and Jo are, well, fatally disadvantaged in the realization of their respective dreams.
And yet both achievements achieve a kind of postmortem success. Norma as the star of one last film, and Jo as the writer of one last great, highly personal tale. In an expression of what might be the screenwriter's secret fantasy, he even gets to star in it. How is such life after death possible? Arguably, only through the magic of celluloid, a medium ghoulishly capable of preserving humans precisely as they are, which all too soon becomes as they were. What can the contrast between silent and talking pictures teach us about the nature of film itself?
And how might it reflect the age old rivalries between word and image, movement and stasis, the living and the dead? Today we're talking about Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I was just wondering, are you a big fan of Norma Desmond's movies? Have you seen any of them? Is she one of your favorite silent screen stars?
2:03 Wes: Constantly. Yeah, all I do is watch Norma Desmond movies. No, I'd never seen one.
2:11 Erin: Gloria Swanson. Of course.
2:12 Wes: I mean, Gloria Swanson.
2:14 Erin: Yeah. But I'm being a little cheeky there.
2:17 Wes: Yeah, I haven't seen Gloria Swanson's movies or really, yeah, any of those. I guess melodramatic female leading role silent movies. You know, looking at Wikipedia, I can see there's a ton of Norma Desmond kind of as a stand in for a lot of different possible actresses, including one which. Who's the actor? The German director actor.
2:38 Erin: Erich von Stroheim.
2:39 Wes: Yeah. So he really was a silent film director and really worked with.
2:44 Erin: Well, he worked With Gloria Swanson many times or a couple times. But yeah, in fact, he directed the movie that they watch in the film. Yeah, yeah.
2:51 Wes: There's another young actress, I can't forget her name. A very popular silent film actress that he worked with that he sort of discovered. And at the time, I think. I guess he really was of the caliber of DeMille and other directors at that point.
3:05 Erin: Yeah, I love some silent films. Actually. I used to. On tcm, they have Silent Sunday Nights or they used to.
3:11 Wes: Anyway.
3:11 Erin: I haven't been paying for TCM for a long time. In fairness, I was never paying for it. But back when I was living in a house that had cable, we got TCM and all of the Silence that I loved were all comedies. The melodramas are really. They're especially dated and they're easy to make fun of. Of course, early talkie melodramas are also kind of easy to make fun of. But what's interesting about Norma Desmond is I think that her name. I mean, of course she's based on a couple of different characters, real life actresses. But her name, I think is an amalgamation, from what I can tell of the name Mabel Normand and William Desmond Taylor.
And Mabel Normand is my favorite silent screen actress. My favorite actor is Buster Keaton. I loved Buster Keaton movies. But Mabel Normand worked a lot with Charlie Chaplin. She was just this great comedienne, actress, director. I think she was the first person to direct Chaplin as the Tramp. Of course, it was much more common then for women to be directors during the silent era. And so, you know, I associate her with, on the one hand, sort of extremely hilarity and sweetness and all sorts of things, but also with tragedy. She died tragically young.
She had a terribly tragic life. And William Desmond Taylor, who was her boyfriend, if you could call it that at the time he ended up dying from being shot. There are many theories as to who actually shot him. But I think that that is a little bit of what Norma's name is signaling. In addition to the fact that she's working on a script about Salome, you know, that might give William Holden a bit of a Wilde. But other than that, I think the fact that he will be shot by her is prefigured even in her name. Not that Mabel Normand killed William Desmond Taylor, but that her tragic association with him seems to have led to his death.
So there's a lot of screwed up stuff in silent film history. There are a lot of scandals and some really, really creepy things happened. So she's a Great encapsulation of all of that darkness and melodrama.
5:11 Wes: Yeah. You know, looking at Wikipedia, I think the list of other candidates for inspirations for this character include. Right. I don't know how many, but several silent film stars who became reclusive and crazy. So Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Mae Murray, Valeska Surratt, Audrey Munson, Clara Bow. Oh, so Norma Talmadge, according to Dave Kehr, is the quote, obvious of unacknowledged source of Norma Desmond, the grotesque predatory silent movie queen of the film. Although Norma Talmadge, I don't think she ever became reclusive or had mental problems. She's just was a young actress who was very successful and worked with. What's his name? Von something.
5:56 Erin: Stroheim.
5:57 Wes: Von Stroheim. And then tried to make this transition to the talkie era and couldn't do it, and then was kind of fine with that and like, retired, basically. You know, why this difficulty for these actors who wanted to make this transition and couldn't? I mean, is there anyone who successfully made the transition?
6:15 Erin: Yeah, there are a couple. Someone who famously didn't was Clara Bow. Her voice was not up to par. It's just a completely different skill set. And it's a completely different way of filming, too. I mean, they had to invent things like the boom mic. I believe a woman director invented the boom mic, trying to capture Clara Bow's very thin voice, following her around with a microphone, you know, putting it on. I think a fishing pole was the original boom mic, which is pretty clever. But, yeah, I mean, it was initially, it was this extremely expressionistic style in which everything had to be communicated with one's body and one's facial expressions.
And I think. I mean, I'd be curious to know what your opinion is of Gloria Swanson's performance in the film. But, I mean, the woman can really do a lot with her eyes. It's pretty incredible. And also, if you listen to interviews with her, you know, real life, you can hear how different her voice is from the voice she uses for this film. So it's actually much lighter and much. Not too much of a higher pitch. It's not like she has a Minnie Mouse voice or a little girl voice, but she just has a higher pitched, sweeter voice than the one she uses in the film.
So she was able to make the transition and she was able to train her voice to do various things for whatever reason. I mean, there was a great deal of resistance to sound at first. It seemed like a fad to a Lot of people I've just recently read. As part of my reading list, I. I read a collection of essays written by the poet H.D. called Close Up, in which she talks about the advent of sound and how startling and upsetting it is for her as, as an aesthete, as a lover of film, and as an avid film goer who, who loved silent movies. Writing this at the dawn of the talkie era, she gives a little bit of an insight, I think, into what the artistic class at least was thinking about how this transition was going to take its effect and what effect it was having on the viewers.
And HD describes it as. She describes watching silent films as like playing with a doll where you can kind of animate with your own imagination what everybody sounds like, you know, so, like when you hold up a doll, when you're playing with a doll as a kid, you might do the voices and kind of, you know, play with them in that way. And so in other words, there's great scope for the imagination in silent films. Not all the work is done for you. You have to fill in the audible elements of what's taking place on film with your own imagination. And so talking pictures seemed, you know, the chatter about it seems very much like AI, where people are very concerned that certain mental processes are going to become more automated and taken over and people's brains are going to atrophy and stuff like that.
Right. Which of course I'm sympathetic to, but. But for talking pictures, she says, it's as if your doll stands up and starts moving and talking on its own. It's as if it becomes an automaton. She argues people don't want to play with dolls that can stand up and talk on their own, that these things are uncanny and they don't leave any room for participation from the audience at the level that you were previously able to participate and that there's something about it that's creepy and strange. And so I think that this was to a certain extent the attitude of the people in the films themselves who were resistant to these changes, maybe didn't get in on the ground floor of accepting this new medium as being the new standard.
And it was easy, therefore, for executives in the burgeoning film industry because it really didn't become a full fledged industry with banking and, you know, backing it and all of that until talking pictures came in. They could say, well, you know, the people more adept to say lines are stage actors. So we're just going to bring in this new talent from New York and have The Broadway people come in and become our stock of players. And if these silent film stars are going to be resistant to it, well, we'll just replace them, you know, like a cashier at McDonald's being replaced by one of those touch screens.
So, you know, not quite, but I think all of these things were factors, more or less, the lack of training and adaptability to the new medium and maybe the mindset of the stars themselves and of the directors and producers who thought, well, we'll just bring in new talent for the new medium.
10:39 Wes: This is sort of Norma Desmond's argument. So someone says to her, you used to be big. She says, I am big. It's the pictures that got small. Oh, and I guess this is Jo. And he's like, uh huh. I knew there was something wrong with them.
10:54 Erin: Yeah.
10:55 Wes: And she says, they're dead, they're finished. There was a time when this business had the eyes of the whole world, but that wasn't good enough for them. Oh, no. They had to have the ears of the world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk, talk, talk. So I guess, yeah. The argument that you've just presented is that the lack of talking makes for a more active viewer. And a viewer is more actively using their imagination and doing something like play, rather than being passive. Which is interesting in light of the fact that Norma Desmond herself is such an intrusive and controlling figure.
And what she's doing with her face, often with her teeth kind of bared, you know what I mean? Like she's gonna, she's gonna bite you and the kind of upturned, proud chin. And then I guess the thing that she does at the end where she's coming towards the camera with her hand outstretched, it's like you get a sense of how intrusive she is. And she, she can convey that intrusiveness just through body language. And of course, that's what she's doing with Joe because she's, you know, she's a sugar mama and he's a kept man and she's dictating what clothing he wears.
And you know, gradually in the beginning, undoes all the boundaries, doesn't help him keep his car, and then moves him into the mansion because the room has a. That he's staying in about the garage has a. Has a leak in it. So this feeling of intrusion is very strong. And you might look at a silent film where a lot is going on with faces and there's all this expressiveness and feel like it's too much. Right. If a real person were interacting with you that way. I think intrusion might be, you know, it's more emotionally contagious. You might feel more helpless in the face of that.
Where there is something deader about language, the use of language, it is more mundane. It does detract from the emotional intensity in a way. It brings you more into the world of facts and it brings you more into plot and things like that. And, you know, you get a sense of some of that criticism in relation to Joe himself, right? Where he's being in the beginning, he's being held to a kind of literary standard, which is weird, right? You know, there's Betty, who kind of puts the nail in the coffin of any hopes for getting a deal with the studio in the beginning.
And then his agent, who says something like, you know, well, it's good to be a poor starving artist. This is actually going to be the best thing that's ever happened to you. Which is odd, right? In light of an industry which is. Is geared towards entertainment and not high literary standards necessarily. It's odd that he, as someone who's struggling, who does have apparently some literary talent, but is ready to sell out. They won't let him sell out. And then later, with Betty, that I was thinking of.
13:45 Erin: Are you maybe thinking of the message picture idea?
13:48 Wes: Yes, I found it flat and trite. And he's like, exactly what kind of material do you recommend? James Joyce, Dostoevsky? So again, here the literary standard comes and she says, I just think pictures should say a little something. He says, oh, one of the message kids. Just a story won't do. You'd have turned down Gone with the Wind. The studio executive says, no, that was me. Who wants to see a Civil War picture. And then she says, perhaps I hated it because I knew your name. I'd always heard you had talent. He said, that was last year. This year I'm trying to earn a living.
And then, so she says, so you take plot 27A, make it glossy, make it slick. And I think he says, those are dirty words. And then the film studio executive says, you sound like a bunch of New York critics. So, yeah, I bring that up because it in line with this being held to a literary standard, but also it conveys the idea that the plottedness of movies, right. First of all, that it's in line with Norma Desmond's idea that adding talk, there's something that takes away from some of the magic of the movies when you do that. But also that plotting per se and writing slick, glossy scripts that are meant to kind of.
There's something manipulative about it. There's something which is less honest and true about just getting the audience absorbed in the story as opposed to getting them absorbed in the emotional contagion of people doing things with their. Yeah. So then the question is, well, what do we think of that critique?
15:21 Erin: Well, that's a really good distinction. I think I was including Norma in what essentially I saw was a kind of a triangulation that the film is setting up. So we have maybe at the top point of the triangle, Betty and her obvious moral superiority, according to the writers of the film, basically saying that the movie should serve a plot that should be original, that should come from, you know, we can read between the lines and much of what she says to Jo and basically intuit that she believes that things that come from the personal, that are connected to stories that are true, that have some kind of deeper meaning, that are emotional in sophisticated types of ways, positive ways, not melodramatic or other things we might associate with emotional films, but films that have a core, a center, a heart to them and that don't operate off of cliche.
I think that would be what the film is advocating for as the best case scenario for a script. Then you have Joe, who is operating from hunger, as Betty says. She says his script Bases Loaded, is written from hunger, who is selling out, who just wants to feed the masses some cliched, trite garbage in order to make a buck. And I think that this part of Hollywood is also expressed by his agent, who, you know, I take this discussion of, oh, you know, it's good for you to write when you're hungry. The best work has been written on an empty stomach.
That's a cliche, right? He's operating off of a cliche that's convenient for him because it involves him not having to lend Joe any money. And so it's financially convenient for him to operate on this cliche. And I think, to a certain extent, viewed cynically, Hollywood makes a buck by operating on cliche, Right? So there are the stale plots, the tried and true narratives that just get rehashed over and over again with little tweaks, all designed to, yes, to entertain, but also just to keep the business end of the whole enterprise afloat because it is, after all, a business and are not geared toward the artistic.
And then I would say the last point on the triangle is Norma's vision of a script, of a plot. It's kind of the mirror image of the just satisfying the public with the cliche. And the bread and circuses kind of angle of Joe and his agent and maybe the producer, which is giving the public what they want in the form of an idol, a star. Right. We never get any dialogue or anything from the Salome script that she's written, but we can imagine that it's filled with tableaus that are designed to feature her as an object of worship. Right. She's in every scene.
And it's evident that the script doesn't make a lot of sense. It's probably all designed to showcase her at her best angles, you know, performing ridiculous scenes in which she is probably some kind of, you know, Salome is supposed to be a teenage girl, so. In which she's woefully inept to actually fulfill the role as written, but which would be designed to show her off as a raging young beauty and give her lots of grand and theatrical and exciting things to do so that the camera can sort of focus lovingly on her face. And we get lots and lots of shots of her.
And this is about. Sort of about satisfying her public, but it's really about satisfying the demands of her own ego. Right. So one is maybe on the side of like, just keeping the public kind of happy and satisfied, and the other side is keeping the stars happy and satisfied, maybe also with the downstream effect of giving the public something to worship and adore. But, of course, neither one is this artistic idealistic premium on originality and artistic resonance that I think Betty is advocating for.
19:07 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point. I mean, it's a more grandiose vision of what a good movie is. It's still. So Betty has a more sophisticated and technical idea and more well rounded, given that dialogue is allowed, which, of course, I mean, there is obviously dialogue. And she's begrudgingly. Right. Putting dialogue into this movie. She's writing and doing it very bad and poorly. We hear from both DeMille and Jo, but. Right. She has her own critique of new films and. Or contemporary films, put it that way. Contemporary for them. And so does Betty and their critiques in terms of.
What is the word? Maybe authenticity or artistic value. But for her, she's identifying the greatness of films with her own greatness. She's identifying it with the specular, to use an academic word, with the imaginary, with the image per se, and in particular, let's say, the emotional power of the image as opposed to the symbolic realm of language, which reflects a greater level of maturity. Just. Just speaking cognitively in terms of our development of. As human beings. But it is also alienating, as Hegel said, because our language is a mediating thing.
It stands in between us and the real. So that at the very moment we begin to use concepts and language with respect to individual particulars, we have abstracted, we have gotten away from concrete reality. So if you're sticking with image, images, you just. It's all concrete reality. In a way, it's a bit abstracted because it's. There's no touch and smell and things like that. It's all just image and well curated image and over the top if it's melodramatic. But it. Right. It's not just a landscape painting, so to speak, or even a portrait of someone looking stoic.
It's all this, you know, it's happening over time with all this intense emotional expression. But so my, my point there is that, yeah, it's another critique in terms of authenticity, but it's one that equates that and the greatness of film as a medium, of silent film as a medium with her own greatness. Which is to say what. What makes her great. Maybe being beautiful, it seems. But maybe that's the wrong word. Maybe it's just having a certain face. Maybe it's having a famous face. Maybe it's having this skill to do whatever it is she does with her face to convey certain emotions.
I don't know. But yeah, I'm just trying to get at your triangle there. The cynical approach that Jo has sunk into Betty's kind of idealism and then Norma Desmond's conception of what film should
21:55 Erin: be, that's so interesting. I'm thinking so many different things here because I also wanted to draw a contrast between this idea of word and image. But I have a slightly different take on it than you. I think, though, I love this idea that. I mean, to put what you said sort of hyper simplistically, like the idea that words technically are images too, but they're at one degree of remove, it seems, or one vector of remove, so that they're more sophisticated, they're more, you know, words are conveying images, but they're not image itself. So there's something more simplistic, I think is what you're saying about the image.
22:27 Wes: They can convey images, but they're conveying
22:29 Erin: concepts and also abstractions.
22:31 Wes: Yeah, concepts which are inherently non imagistic and it's hard to even say what they are.
22:35 Erin: Right, right.
22:36 Wes: For Plato, they are metaphorically imagistic because there's a sense in which we see them concepts or ideas, we look at them, but they're not visible. They're visible, but invisible. But in any case, yeah, thought and langu. Language is a mediating right. Animals don't have this alienated relationship to the natural right world. They're not mediated so much by the conceptual and linguistic. They just dig into the raw experience of sensuous reality. Whereas our experience is tempered by language and by thinking, by concepts. It's not as intense.
23:12 Erin: Right.
23:13 Wes: Once you introduce language, it's not as raw and connected and.
23:18 Erin: Well, I think a lot of what you're saying, especially the latter part of what you said about the idea of the face, one could ask oneself, what is. I mean, film, as you're getting at, is a very, very difficult medium to pin down because it is a mixed medium because it involves both narrative and image. And yet, I think, I would argue, because the photograph is really the origin story of film. Photographic capabilities are at. At the heart of what makes film possible. And that's the kind of the major. The camera, of course, is the major innovation, and it's the major piece of equipment that you need.
Unlike, say, a canvas and paint. Therefore, there's a primacy to the image in a film. And I also believe, because I have lots and lots of complicated and kind of psychotic, probably, theories about star power, that the face is more powerful than anything that appears on film. I don't know if you would disagree with that, but I just think that there's something, yes, simplistic about Norma's idea, but it's also spot on the face,
24:15 Wes: as in our experience, our direct experience. Say that again, the face is more powerful than. Yeah.
24:22 Erin: The photographed face on film. Like the closeup. I mean, I think there's a reason why the close up comes up again and again in this movie. The closeup is probably the most representational image of film because the closeup is. It's doing something different than what painting does. Right. It can show tiny, tiny gradations of expression. I do think that the star is deeply important to what film is. And I do think that some faces resonate. You know, I can't think of the right word. They project. Some faces work on film extraordinarily well. This is a common phenomenon, I think, that we all know, maybe personally, you can be very beautiful and not photograph well, and you can be sort of unattractive and photograph beautifully.
And there are just certain faces that work on camera. The telegraph. That's the word I was gonna use to further confuse. Use the technology here. But there are certain faces that telegraph on film, and then there Are also personalities, I think, involved in that. So you could have a great face and have kind of an ant personality and not have that frisson. That combination of intangible factors that make someone a great star. When you are a great star and when you are photographed on film in a closeup so that your face is enormous and way out of proportion to the normal size of a human face, that is, to me, that is film.
That's what makes film different. That's what makes a Hollywood film a Hollywood film. Because of standard practices of editing and various other conventions that are so commonplace to us that they're invisible, were invented as part of the storytelling methods of film. And this is like the prototypical film image. So though we can accuse Norma of being extremely naive and simplistic and single minded and of course, narcissistic and insane about many things, she's also, I think. Right. And that's. And that's what makes things complicated.
26:22 Wes: She's psychotically correct.
26:24 Erin: Yeah. I mean, you know, she. She's. She's getting down to the marrow of what film is about. And in a way, because she exists in the past and she has this sort of genetic understanding of how film developed, she. She is closer to the bone. Her being involved in the silent era means that she has this pure understanding, like living through a long historical era. You know, she has access to maybe the origin of how history turned out the way it did. And therefore a greater understanding of the original intent behind so many choices that were made, you know?
26:58 Wes: Yeah, well, I think that's a good point about the importance of the face and the fact that particular faces work better than others. Or maybe the way to put it is particular. You use the word personality. Particular personalities work better than other. Or really, the word I like is character. And character really does come across in facial expression and body language and in, you know, intonation and sort of formal aspects of speech where it's not as clearly as conveyed in the content of speech itself. So character is a broad category that can include.
Right. For Aristotle, virtues and vices, to be magnanimous is to have a certain character trait. Or it can be a Freudian defense mechanism. Someone has a passive aggressive character. Or it can be just something that's much finer grained and more a matter of quirks. Right. So the sort of things that Dickens was so good at communicating and communicating right in the written word, which is very, very tricky. We underestimate how much of the information we get from other people involves what I would call the formal element or that's facial expression intonation as opposed to content.
And I happen to think that there's a whole language of body language. And there's a whole language of facial expression. Which is really a system of natural signifiers built into us. And it's universal. Like smiling, for instance, is a good example. Smiling is a form of communication. Smiling means something, or it means a family. It's a family of related meanings. Depending on the context and the type of smile. But you get what I mean. It's not something we learn socially or culturally. And it doesn't differ significantly between cultures. And this natural sign system, which is smiling, is the tip of the iceberg.
It's subtle variations in facial expression that we don't even have names for, I think, really because it's all mainly conveyed unconsciously. And you could even think of certain sequences of facial expressions as sentences. And language, I think, is kind of like spoken and written language is kind of built on top of that pre existing natural language. This is also a theory that was advanced by philosopher Thomas Reid and by one of the Schlegel brothers. I forget which one. And so I'm very like. Anytime I read a philosopher who has this similar idea to me, I get excited.
I'm surprised. I don't see it come up as often in the sorts of texts I read for philosophy. What I'm just trying to underline is the importance of facial expression. To communicating character traits. To communicating some inward part of the person. And once you get into talk and dialogue, it does become very tricky. And if you take a class on writing dialogue for film, you might be told, well, just imagine the whole scene without any dialogue first. And then add in the dialogue. And then your dialogue can't be too on the nose, right? It can't just be people robotically saying what's on their mind.
There has to be subtext. And if you look at movies, you'll see this principle is obeyed religiously, Even by films that you might not think of as that. Sophisticated people are very careful about how they use dialogue. Because they're trying to avoid this exact problem of its potential for artificiality.
30:27 Erin: I want to take this and spin it out a little bit further. Then maybe in the next part we can get more into the specifics of the film. But we can kind of call this the sort of foundational philosophical underpinnings. But one of the things that this contrast, which I think is related to what you're talking about. Between silent films and talking films. One of the things it reminded me of in sort of philosophical history is this classic contest. I think it literally was the paragone in the Renaissance, the contest between painting and poetry, basically these different mimetic modes, as I think Aristotle would have called them, right.
So Aristotle distinguished between painting and poetry for the way that they imitated the means with which they imitated. So painting imitates by color and form. So I think it's the art of spatial stasis and then poetry by language and rhythm. And it's an art of temporal movement and of narrative. And so we can think about this in terms of, you know, word versus image, story that unfolds through time. Like reading a novel, like reading a poem versus looking at a painting and seeing, you know, spatially in terms of what's represented, there's simultaneity.
So in fact, some people believe that you should not show like various points of time in the same painting. Like Lessing, I was reading his. His theories from the 18th century. He was a thinker who, like, wanted very, very sharp distinctions between poetry and painting. That there should be no sort of like narrative progression in a painting. A painting shouldn't show, like. Think of it like, you know, cells of a cartoon, right. It shouldn't show people doing things in a sort of like narrative arc or order. It should show just one scene, lots of stuff going on in that scene, sure, but in the same kind of moment and narrative progression purely is the realm of the written word.
Of course, Lessing would have been driven insane by film, Right. Because all of this is muddied and he doesn't get to separate things into neat categories. And of course, there are scripts for silent films. And of course image is a big factor in talking films. But I think that it's illuminating to think about the terms that we use and the value systems of the two styles and of Norma versus Jo. I think it's useful to view it in this classic poetry versus painting kind of clash. Because so the terms we use, I mean, of course, the old fashioned term for what we would call a film back then was a picture, right?
Then it became a talking picture. But more commonly, over the course of the decades, it came to be called a movie, right? So you have a picture versus a movie gets at this contrast between representational image and narrative movement, rhythm, elements of poetry or of written stories. Norma, obviously, with her ideas about the primacy of the image is frequently shown kind of in tableau, right? She's stalled in time. So there's something of this, like temporal stasis of the image that is inherent in her whole world and the way that her world is depicted versus Jo, who is very concerned with his car and movement moving forward.
Right. And narrative and cars are often compared in the film. So there's this being stuck in one place, being sort of like trapped in an image, in a canvas, versus moving forward, moving a plot, progressing. The values of writing and of narrative that Jo seems to kind of represent. And I think that the way that this gets teased out over the course of the film, I mean, I think that Jo and Norma's attraction to each other kind of puts these things in interesting contradistinction. I think that where the film ultimately lands with this are with the values of the writer.
Because this is a movie that centers a writer. But at the same time, I think it does give a lot of credence to Norma and that value system. And maybe in the end there's something like a triumph of Norma. I'm not sure. I mean, certainly the writer ends up dead, but killed by the image, you know, so what the end of the movie is ultimately saying about this contest, you know, we could talk about in the next part. But I think it's interesting to view it. I don't think it's too far fetched of me to draw this connection between poetry and painting. Talking pictures and silent pictures.
34:51 Wes: Yeah, that seems. Right now you have me thinking also about the battle between the philosophers and the poets. And Plato expelling poets from the city.
35:00 Erin: And painters too though are. I mean, because both represent in their different ways, right? Both painters and poets are united in being considered suspect by Plato. Is that right? Because of the mimetic quality of both of their.
35:15 Wes: I don't know about painting, actually. And then even poetry is complicated, right? Because it's. There is Homer, there's lyrical poetry, but then also plays are poetry. And you get the sense that Plato's biggest objections are to. Well, and he has objections to the depictions of the gods by Homer as unethical. And his objections to drama involve the ways in which we as an audience might get contaged with the irrationality of the characters on stage and their strong emotions. And so they're as tragic figures being crazy and doing crazy things. And so we get negatively influenced by that.
So he advocated a rating system where you. No, I'm just kidding. And then Aristotle, in a way, Aristotle's poetics is a direction, direct response to that. It really doesn't mention Plato, but it's a critique of Plato. And Aristotle's point is that our identification with characters on the stage is More complicated than that. So that's where this concept of catharsis comes in. We might witness crazy people doing murderous and horrible things to each other on stage and come away from that with an actual increase in maturational step forward. He's challenging the theory that we just simply directly incorporate the art object and its content into us.
The relationship is going to be more subtle than that. But yeah, so I was thinking, you know, in relation to painting versus poetry, because it. It really is about. Right. The. The painting is the Apollonian and the poetry is potentially the Dionysian. I mean, a further complication is with the right drama you had, it was more about music and characters. They were wearing masks on their faces. So they were strictly prohibited from doing anything with facial expression. Except for the facial expression that was fixed on the mask in order to focus the audience on the actual poetry of the language.
But then the musical element. But there's the chorus and all that stuff of what was going on. So. But yeah, you could think of one. Maybe the contrast to make is a more. A more Dionysian versus a more Apollonian element, A more ecstatic element versus what? And then the question is where a silent film image fits into all that. It's not gonna all fit together neatly. But anyway, I'm just thinking out loud, right?
37:40 Erin: No, yeah. In regards to what you're saying about music, I mean, this is one of the strange things about the fact that the contest. The two major players in that are poetry and painting or writing and painting, however we wanna put it, because they're poetry and music, of course, have long been thought to be much, much closer to each other. Of course. Right. And if we look at Aristotle's idea of the means of the mimetic function, poetry and music are super close to each other. They both unfold in time. Their means of mimesis are quite similar. Right.
Rhythm, harmony, temporal, like a temporal unfolding through time. Aristotle's sort of evolution from Plato's way of thinking, which I think fits with what you're saying is this idea that mimesis was, for Aristotle, no longer a dirty word. You know, I think there was something about the mimetic itself that made Plato want to exile the poets. Right. That any kind of imitation as being not the real thing is a bit suspect. And Aristotle, I thought, was the one who kind of moved the needle on mimesis being not something that'll get you kicked out of the Republic.
38:47 Wes: But yeah. And it's potentially morally beneficial as opposed to. And morally beneficial even if we're witnessing immorality. Even if we're identifying with immoral characters, that doesn't mean we're just sucking in their immorality into us. It doesn't mean the character trait is being transferred to us.
39:07 Erin: Right, right. And Aristotle, I mean, he doesn't really make this super strong distinction between poetry and painting. He does, I think, compare them to each other in a couple of places in his Poetics, but it's really the Romans who takes Aristotle's ideas and advance them further. And we get in Horace, for instance, ut pictura poesis. Right. As in painting. So in a poem or something like that. So we get these more explicit comparisons as the sort of terms set up by Aristotle continue to be thought about and to evolve. And as you have so many paintings, inspiring poems, or poems, especially inspiring paintings, and something like film really, really confuses that because, okay, it's about photography, but it's also about telling a story. Where is the primacy. Is it in the story or is it in the image?
39:56 Wes: Right. And then the images are not static, but, yeah, they're temporal.
39:59 Erin: Right, right. And it has a runtime and it has, you know, an intermission sometimes, or you go to the bathroom, you miss something.
40:06 Wes: Right.
40:07 Erin: So.
40:08 Wes: So that's the foundations, philosophical foundations of Sunset Boulevard.
40:15 Erin: Yeah. Then we'll talk about the movie next time.
40:19 Wes: All right, so that's part one. Otherwise, you can just wait a week.
40:27 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Sublime Mundane in Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin” (Part 2)
Dec 23, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” and whether humanity’s religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale.
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Upcoming Episodes: Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” “Sunset Boulevard,” Marianne Moore’s “Jerboa.”
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0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion discussion of Conrad Aiken's Morning Song of Senlin. We just got done Talking about Stanza 2 and the role of the natural world and whether China Berry is actually pronounced Chinaberry, which it turns out it is. We solved that riddle pretty quickly. Whether the robin is repeating what the dew drops are saying. The dew drops always get plagiarized. All right, so, third stanza. Let me get some repetition here.
1:01 Erin: Ties don't stay tied. It's one of the sad facts of life.
1:05 Wes: Well, that's, you know. Yeah. You know, in my notes I said, is it the next day, question mark? Or has he failed as we all do and has to try again? Right. So for me, tying a tie. Yeah. Takes more than one time. On the other hand, he could just be, you know, it could just be the next day and then, you know, that really emphasizes the mundanity of this. Any sort of repetition, you know, emphasizes that mundane. Because that lack of novelty, that ordinariness, that connotation of, you know, isn't this boring? Is this all there is to life? Getting up, tying your tie, going to work as an accountant, which is what I imagine he does. He can't possibly be a poet or something really interesting.
1:44 Erin: He's Wallace Stevens, he works in insurance.
1:46 Wes: Right. You could do both, obviously. You can always do both.
1:49 Erin: You have to have the two sides of life. This is where I really got on board with this poem because I'm like, oh man. That's the thing that is the worst about life is that you wake up and you have to shower again and do everything all over again. It's very, it's very tiresome, especially for me. I'm like a non habit forming human being. So everything is like doing it for the first time for me. So every, every day, everything I have to do to keep myself up as a human being actually requires a tremendous exertion of will. It's very sad.
2:20 Wes: I agree.
2:20 Erin: I don't know if that's just like being clinically depressed over long periods of time or if that's just my personality at this point or both. But anyway, yeah, so here he stands by the mirror. That's the difference that I see. That is this is a different morning. Perhaps before he was standing in front of. No, a glass. Never mind. At other points I think it's my mirror. Maybe I'm getting that wrong. There's some slight changes of the versus my that occur a couple times. So he ties his tie once more while waves far off in a pale rose twilight. I looked this poem up online as well and in a version of it I saw online, the following line was crash on a white sand shore, which in your version, in mine I think we have crash on a coral shore.
Later the coral will be picked up with coral sky in stanza 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. But I like the white sand shore, even if it's a bit familiar because it Links us back to the stars more. You know, the white sand on the shore is maybe obliterated temporarily in the surf. In the same way that in the first stanza, white stars pale and die. Obliterated in the mist, saffron mist. So I don't know, but I also just really like pale rose twilight. This poem is so tightly constructed. It's not quite, but it is almost an anagram of swiftly tilting planet. As soon as I saw those two phrases, I was like, they have to have like majority of their letters in common.
And I sketched it out and I think they have like 12 letters in common and six different. Something like that. I got rid of the little scrap paper I did on. But yeah, I mean, they're really close to each other.
4:07 Wes: Yeah, really interesting. Yeah. So again, we get this, you know, whereas before we had the contrast between the tying of the tie and the swiftly, swiftly tilting planet, which I would put in the cosmic order, here it is another sublime image. So maybe is cosmic the wrong word? Is it sublime? Is that the better category? But that waves crashing far off are an image of sublimity and. Right, so something that's aesthetically beautiful but also fear inducing or awe inspiring. And the aesthetic character of it and the awe inspiring character of it are wrapped up in each other in some way.
But yeah, we get that contrast between that and the being in front of the mirror again. And then he combs his hair, which really, he's got a small and white face. Whereas again, the green earth, I guess now it's the green Earth. Right. It was swiftly tilting planet. The green Earth tilts through a sphere of air. So again, maybe this reinforces my Don Quixote reading, where it's as if the Earth has a lance and is charging.
5:17 Erin: Yeah, I like that. I can picture the hole on the model Earth, you know that that is used in school, like, you know, to show you like the. The Earth on its axis, you know. Yeah, that's really.
5:29 Wes: Oh, right, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that. Perfect. And you'd have to be deluded, right, Like Don Quixote to want to go around the sun for billions of years. For what? For no good reason
5:41 Erin: to wake up and tie your tie over and over again. Yeah, no, the.
5:45 Wes: The Earth is in love with the sun in some sense, but yeah, that's nice.
5:49 Erin: The sun is out of its league, though, but it won't stop trying.
5:53 Wes: The sun is a complete narcissist, but
5:57 Erin: the Earth is too.
5:58 Wes: But that is a blast in the context of the Poem. That's a blasphemous thing to say. You know, better call it lonely. Maybe loneliness is a better image than. Yeah, that's the problem with being God and being perfect and complete unto yourself. You can always be accused of being a narcissist and not caring.
6:16 Erin: That's right.
6:17 Wes: Why? Why don't you care about me? You know, my bagel fell on the floor this morning. Why?
6:25 Erin: Yeah, but what if you score a touchdown? Then you're Dad's favorite.
6:29 Wes: Right. So it depends on us. He's moody. Yeah. So. No, that's great. With the line through the earth as a lance, it's really.
6:38 Erin: Well, then we get. I stand by a mirror and comb my hair. How small and white my face. This is what I was referring to earlier. So before he stood before a glass. Now he stands by the mirror. And then now he stands by a mirror. So there's slight changes throughout in the prepositions and the articles. And I think these are. I think these are really smart because this is actually what gives us the sense that this is a Groundhog Day thing because of the slight differences that clue us into the fact that this is a different day, but the same thing being repeated over and over again. So I think, you know, whether or not we even notice the smallness of these tweaks, I think we get the sense that even just in the stanza now, two days are represented here.
7:21 Wes: Yeah. And the use of a definite article like the suggests that we. I mean, it's not ironclad, but could suggest that we already know the context. Right. Oh, it's the mirror that we're already familiar with from the context of the narrative. And A is more like an introduction to the object. But here we get this alternation between an assumption of familiarity and a. Right. And then an assumption that we're not familiar. So now he's in front of a mirror again. Well, didn't you just say the mirror? Don't we already know this mirror? Haven't we already been introduced to this mirror?
Is it another mirror? So I think there's this alternation also between an assumed familiarity and assumed distance. So like you said. Yeah, it gives it that Groundhog Day quality because it's almost like he's forgetting that he's told the story. He's one of those people. They're telling you a story and they're excited about it. And you're like, this is the fifth time you've told this to me. How can you not remember? I know you're standing in front of the mirror. You already told me then, all right, there are houses hanging above the stars. Or did you want to say anything more about that previous stanza?
8:28 Erin: Just that bathes in a flame of space. I don't think we pointed out that we have air, fire and water altogether in that. So there's, you know, you could just track, like, you could underline in various representational colors. Like if you did brown for earth and blue for. I don't know, you know, you could just track the elements and how they show up in the poem all mixed together. And this is one of the rare lines that we get three all in a single image, which I just really, really like. And I like the image of like
8:56 Wes: a blue, blue flame.
8:58 Erin: And maybe just to the double encasement that the implication of the speaker's position relative to the Earth now kind of gives us. So we have the sun in a shell of silence we already talked about, but the Earth too. Like, we're on the Earth, so we're on this green ball. And that green ball is itself encased in this flame. So we're sort of like doubly dwarfed, I think, in this image. And so the image of his face being small and white, which is sort of like one of the pale stars or the flecks of sand. If we go by the alternate version of the poem, he's at once like a star, so a heavenly body in and of himself. But he could also just be a grain of sand or something in between. But being dwarfed by the Earth and then being one's own little kind of dwarf star, if you will, in the mirror, I think is all kind of interestingly collapsed there.
9:51 Wes: Very good.
9:52 Erin: But yeah, the houses above the stars. I'm embarrassed to say that I wrote in the margins tree houses, question mark, because I was trying to think of things that could be like if you're looking up and you see like a tree house or. And then I wrote, God, question mark. Satellites, question mark. And I crossed that out. 1957. Aliens, question mark was another thing I wrote.
10:18 Wes: Wow, that would be cool if it were literal. Yeah. What if alien spaceships were shaped like houses? That would be confusing. So just descend A frames. They would have to be A frames.
10:30 Erin: No, no, no, no, no. They would be mid century modern. So like an A frame, but a little more squat, like a Flintstones house. That's how I picture it. Anyway.
10:40 Wes: It took me a minute to figure this out as well.
10:43 Erin: But you did.
10:44 Wes: I think he's reminding us that the Earth is a sphere. Right? Or maybe not this is my reading of it is just that the fact that the earth is right, our houses hang above Australia's stars. Maybe I'm being too literal minded about this now, but the stars hung under the sea. Australia stars are under our sea. What do you make of it?
11:07 Erin: Oh, I get it. Okay. It took me a second. First I had to picture the toilet flushing the opposite direction. Then I had. Yeah, is that. Yeah, that's good.
11:17 Wes: Is that a reasonable.
11:19 Erin: I still think Treehouses is the primary reading. No, that's great.
11:23 Wes: So, yeah, on one level, perhaps that's what he's doing is just pointing to the fact that we live on a sphere. And so our sense of up and down is relative, and therefore our sense of what is cosmic and mundane are relative. Or at the very least, it seems to. Right, Reverse. It's reversing the roles of the cosmic and the mundane. The houses hanging above the stars, the stars being under a sea, and maybe the sea will take as a representative of the natural. So we get all three domains here again, at a psychological level, we can understand how one, the mundane again eclipses or dissolves the cosmic and the divine.
We forget about God, the stars disappear into the mist coming from above. The houses, the mundane and the domestic, they hang over us, right? We have obligations, we're busy, we don't look up as much, and we can't even see the stars as much because of light pollution. Right. If we're in an urban area. So our orientation to the divine is interfered with or distracted by the project of survival and just getting along, just trying to make our way in life, just trying to make a living.
12:40 Erin: Yeah, I like that. But at the same time, it cuts both ways too, right? Because also, like, the mundane is being pierced here by the cosmic, so things are brought suddenly near at the same time, right? So we have the topsy turvy element of the houses and the star also means that, yes, those things are being obliterated, but also we're reminded suddenly, like recalled to ourselves, that as he says in the next lines, that the sun, which is far away from us in this vacuum of space, is also dappling our walls. So there's nearness to. And I'm thinking about the fact that, like, you know, I like your distinction between cosmic and sublime, with the, you know, the sublime image of the wave on the shore in the previous stanza.
But of course, also we have stars under the sea. There's like this inverted image or the stars being dipped into the cookie, into the milk or something like that. Where we have something kind of being turned inside out. Also, the sea is the origin of the natural, the origin of all. Like, we evolved out of the sea. So the fact that we can tie our ties today is thanks to the sea and the cosmic. Just as our daily rhythms, our mundane rhythms, are set by this ball of gas millions of miles away. I just want to emphasize, like, I think that there's.
For me, it's like the closeness. The poem isn't doing as much for me in terms of reminding me of the ways in which the cosmos are kind of blotted out over the course of daily life as it is doing the opposite for me. Like reminding me of the strangeness of the cosmos repeatedly intruding on these mundane images in the poem.
14:16 Wes: Yeah, well, as you point out, these are formative influences, right? Whether it's God, our creator, or the sun, which, in a sense, is our creator, or the stars. We all come from stardust, ultimately. Right?
14:29 Erin: And we, at least I do.
14:33 Wes: We are at the end of a long chain of cause and effect. We are who we are because of all these forces that have preceded us, cosmic and biological and then, you know, cultural on top of that. So. And that, of course, is part of what produces the roteness and what I've been calling the mundane. So there's something quite grand about those forces. And yet they construct us as something very ordinary in the sense of. Right. Not having the power of a God, not having that kind of freedom, except in those rare moments when we do what the things our fathers did, which is learn to do something new and exert that kind of freedom and approach to the divine and maybe, you know, are in the image of God, in our intelligence or whatever. All right, it's morning again.
15:22 Erin: Well, actually, before we do that, I just wanted to point out that one of the allusions I found in here is to Tennyson. I had this kind of earworm thing happen with the stanza. With their houses hanging above the stars and stars hung under a sea and a sun far off and a shell of silence dapples my walls for me all of a sudden, I was washing dishes, and I was like, break, break, break on thy cold gray stones, O Sea And I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me there's an exact parallel, even with the rhyme scheme of break, break, break. And that connected back to the three clear tones. Break, break, break. So I think Tennyson is being sampled here like a rap song. That's the interesting. I hear. Anyway, just wanted to point that Out.
16:07 Wes: But very cool.
16:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So we should pause for a moment of silence to remember God.
16:12 Wes: Well, that's what he's going to do.
16:14 Erin: Yeah.
16:15 Wes: Should I not pause in the light to remember God? So, yeah. What do we make of this? Upright and firm. I stand on a star. Unstable. We get this image of this cosmic and perhaps divine realm as something chaotic, right. And it's our formative origin. But we come out of chaos and we are the ordered, stable things, you know, as organic forms. Right. We persist in this very unique way. He is the one who's lonely now. He's. So there's kind of a reversal, you know, speaking of topsy turvy, there's a kind of a reversal of roles here where God is the lonely, unstable one. We are the firm ones. We are firm in our.
16:55 Erin: Right.
16:56 Wes: This defensive structure, I would call it, in this having these habits and the culture and things to do. Just by virtue of being the products of the formative forces, we get to be the stable ones, whereas the formative forces themselves are a kind of cauldron.
17:12 Erin: I like that. I like to you saying that out loud. You know, should I not pause in the light to remember God? I hadn't really realized before how that's framed in the negative. So there's almost an assumption that one. That one is ridiculous for doing these things right. This is a modernist poem. This is cast in opposition to the impulse to ignore any kind of creator. And I think by that same token, like, I think in the previous episode, I maybe suggested that this is sort of like the opposite of deism. It's also kind of the opposite of Stevens's in Sunday Morning of his kind of casting the sky as the barrier between us and God. This is like saying that the sky is like the barrier between God and us. Like, he wants to reach out to us, but he can't. He's sort of bound by his own rules or something. Like, he's sort of like.
18:00 Wes: He's shy.
18:00 Erin: He's shy. He's a non intervention.
18:02 Wes: He's also shy.
18:03 Erin: Well, lonely cloud. I mean, we don't just think of Wordsworth. If this is a God and we think of a cloud that gets lonely and wants to sometimes get with people named IO. We think of Ovid, right? Or even there's something kind of being the person who's firmly standing on a star. Unstable. I think of like us versus the thing we're standing on. I think of cloud. That's the thing that God sits on, right? Like the bearded guy sitting on a cloud. Instead, he is the cloud. So he's sort of like the. Like the foundation. I think this gives credence maybe to your reading of this idea of, like, the formative chaos out of which things come.
Like, there's something, like, rooted here in the natural, where God, like, as this kind of personified figure is being reabsorbed back into these natural images in a more progressed kind of relationship, a more modern relationship to God might just subsume him fully into the natural and not make that distinction. In other words, he starts off as being natural forces, he comes out and becomes personified. And modernism would kind of squash him back down and put him back into the cloud, if that makes any sense.
19:15 Wes: It seems to me there's an element of condescension here. So should I not pause in the light to remember God? Should I not stop to give this beggar his alms, to throw him a quarter? He's lonely after all. Why don't I give him a little something?
19:29 Erin: Yeah.
19:29 Wes: Why don't I feed him a little bit here? I'm combing my hair just for you. Seems pretty disrespectful, Senlin. But it's for him alone. For Him I will come. When I put on makeup in the morning. I don't. I'm not doing it for others.
19:49 Erin: I love the contouring, by the way.
19:51 Wes: And I'm not even doing it for me. I'm doing it for God.
19:55 Erin: I thought you were doing it for me. Since we have a zoom component to this now. I like aesthetics, but there is, okay? It's condescending and yet it's truthful, of course. Right. Because any offering we make, anything we do, is going to be small to God. That's kind of the joke, right? Whether it's combing our hair or dyeing for him, you know, very small potatoes either way. I mean, one is like, he's got a lot.
20:18 Wes: He's got a lot of fans. Anyone accept these humble offerings?
20:22 Erin: Not as many as he used to.
20:24 Wes: Silence.
20:25 Erin: Yeah.
20:27 Wes: So accept these humble offerings. Right. There's an irony in that, right? Humble as in, you know, nominally, it's him. He's the one who's being humble. But it's really the offerings themselves that are kind of meager.
20:39 Erin: Yeah.
20:40 Wes: And it seems to indicate that that's all God is worth. And then calling him a cloud of silence. All right? It's just straight up disrespectful.
20:49 Erin: It's a joke God can take.
20:50 Wes: He's lonely as a cloud now. He's a cloud of silence. So like I said, he's shy. If God talked more, he would have more friends. Let's just put it that way.
20:58 Erin: That's true. That's true. Well, that puts me in mind of a couple things. I'm thinking of two different Teresa and Therese. So Teresa of Avila saying, you know, maybe you'd have more friends if you were nicer to people. She says to go. I'm also thinking of Thérèse of Lisieux and her little way, a saint known as the little flower. And her little way was this idea that you could just offer even the most mundane things to God over the course of your day, that you didn't have to do something heroic and you didn't have to martyr. You know, be a martyr or, you know, wear a hair shirt.
That everyday life, that the mundane things like tying your tie every day are quite painful often. I certainly can understand this and that just this constant orientation. So not like this, like throwing him a bone every third Tuesday when you remember, or whatever, but a constant orientation that everything that you do, that nothing is mundane, that everything you do over the course of your day could be offered to him any tiny little inconvenience. Right. That. That is a way to holiness. The little way to holiness, as she calls it.
22:02 Wes: Right.
22:02 Erin: So this is very funny twist on that because it's at once St Therese approved and also deeply disrespectful, but in a joking way, like, maybe I'm. Again, maybe I'm reading this wrong or I'm giving the speaker too much credit. I find the speaker very winning, but it's sort of like winking at God, like, God can take the joke.
22:21 Wes: Yeah. This is why I phrased it earlier as, you know, could this be a form of reverence? Is the irony of this compatible with that? But, yeah, I also thought of these humble offerings or these more ordinary things that we do in life as being capable of being turned into a prayer. But, you know, the final note of condescension, my point of view, saying, I will think of you as I descend the stair.
22:44 Erin: That's straight up Prufrock, too, right?
22:47 Wes: Yes.
22:48 Erin: Time to turn back and descend the stair. I also just want to point out that the only slant rhyme in this entire poem is cloud and God. Everything else is really chimy.
22:57 Wes: Interesting.
22:58 Erin: Yeah.
22:58 Wes: I did not notice that. Well, we have vine leaves are back.
23:01 Erin: Vine leaves again. Yeah. And the snail track shines on the stones, which I really like. I think of that as an interesting kind of middle state thing with all these elements. You know, the snail track is like the slime, the viscous. The viscous thing. This is maybe, you know, reminiscent of that kind of chaos and the slime out of which we've evolved or something.
23:22 Wes: Yeah, good point. You know, I had associated the dew drops with night and with chaos. And it's also this kind of thing. When you walk through the grass in the morning, you get it all over your shoes. It's wet. Right. So it amniotic maybe. So it's a. Right. As you mentioned, we all come out of the sea. We all come out of the watery, the watery depths and the formless into form. So formlessness into form. Right. The inorganic dew drops and garden stones into biological forms which are more stable and are a good example, right. Of someone standing on an unstable star or unstable formative origins.
The organic attains its stability through repetition, really, through, right. Metabolic cycles, cells, you know, at the cellular level. Cellular level, all these processes that. That maintain structure against entropy. But in any case, those processes take inorganic, I mean, ultimately inorganic but non living components and produce something that's living and persistent and stable out of it. You know, in this next invocation of the vine leaves, we get the snail track shining on the stones, the organic leaving its mark on the inorganic. And then the robin is gone now and it's the dew drops on the tree.
So I don't know what to make of that because that's another. That reversal goes in the opposite direction, replacing robin with dewdrops. Hmm. Well, this one I think the organic with the inorganic.
24:58 Erin: This one I think of as being less, you know, it's less sonic because it has two less sound verbs in it. So I think of this as being the more visual. It's actually almost cinematic to me. I mean, I think of this stanza as having almost like rapid cuts between close ups of different images. Like we're getting a shot of the dew drops flashing and then a shot of this and that, you know? You know, I like this one, but yeah, the combination, or the different nouns and verbs combining in different ways maybe is just kind of formally doing some of this work of life sort of emerging from the inorganic that you're kind of talking about.
So even though the robin disappears, maybe just the combination, the new combination of words here in a slightly different order, so that there's a sort of like, expenditure of energy or new things combining. And then in the last stanza we get a return to the robin and to the organic again in the same combination. But let's do Awaking from a bed of silence shining I rise from the starless Waters of sleep. This is a really funny line to me. I don't know why I think it's. You know, I'm taking it as a little, like, tongue in cheek. I think especially because they're longer.
You know, these first lines kind of get a little bit longer. And I think they're longer than the first two lines of any other stanza. So they're a bit awkward. And maybe that's kind of mimicking the slowness of the first moments of. Of waking. But here we're actually in the bed, right? As opposed to in the first stanza. Which kind of, I think, places us maybe in the bed, but only in retrospect and shows it in light of, like, habitual action. It's more about, like, the getting up from the bed rather than being in the bed, you know, so the bed is the bed of silence as the sun is in a shell of silence.
And so I like this idea that, like, the bed is being literally made of silence or something. Not quite a bed. This encasement in sleep makes me think of a lot of different things, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. But this idea of boundaries that I think I brought up in part one is something that I see as being an essential theme in this poem. And like, transformation of states, different transformation of different states of matter or different elements kind of mutating or life forming, as I think we were talking about. One of the things that seems to evoke that for me is this bed and being asleep versus waking.
That slippage is, I think, a really crucial part of that theme working itself out here.
27:31 Wes: The suggestion seems to be that going from sleep to waking, in a way, is a recapitulation of creation or birth. And now he is the star, and he calls Earth a star at one point. So he is the one who's shining. It's almost as if it's, you know, him waking up as like a star emerging against a starless backdrop. Or maybe he's in the position of the sun itself shining. I rise from the starless waters of sleep. I'm not sure. But in any. Any case, sleep belongs to that chaotic cosmic, divine order, potentially formless order from which formed things, things come.
28:18 Erin: That reminds me of Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I think in one of the episodes that we did on that, you pointed out the fact that the sun rises up out of the ocean, right?
28:27 Wes: And then, you know, there's this emphasis. I am the same. So, I mean, this speaks to an old philosophical paradox about identity and how we are the Same. Even though we change so much over time, how our psychological identity stays the same, what the ground of that is. But he suggests that it's a matter of having the same name. But in any case, you know, you get the. You get the sense that he is sort of the stable, unchanging thing in a world of change, including the Earth, which revolves with me, which is. I take it to mean revolves. He's on with me, meaning he's on the Earth.
So he's standing on the Earth. The Earth is going around the sun. Yet relative to his perspective, he makes no motion. Right. It appears as if the sun's going around him. And, you know, we don't feel the fact that the earth is going 50,000 miles an hour out of the sun. We don't feel like we're in a speeding car. We feel like it's still. Yeah, I don't know what else to make of that.
29:27 Erin: Yeah, I think sleep and waking and the moments when we just are waking up. Or maybe. Maybe what I'm interested in, in this idea of, like, the boundary. The stars pale silently in a coral sky. So again, we have the stars kind of dying. But another way of putting this, you know, because he puts it this way with dusk in the first stanza, is that they're going to sleep, right? So as we're waking up, the stars are going to sleep. I think that there's a certain sort of heightened awareness at the boundary, at the border between sleep and waking up because we've experienced some other consciousness.
We've gone, like, where do we go? Where do we go when we sleep? We're not quite in our bodies, Right. Our bodies are in a kind of stasis. I mean, if we're. If we're lucky and we're not like, sleepwalking or something, they're in a kind of suspended state. And we go somewhere else. And then we have to be. Because we've been somewhere else. We have to be returned to ourselves when we wake up. You know, sometimes we might have the experience of waking up and forgetting where we are. Happened to me a few times over the past week because I just got back to Utah from Connecticut after break and I woke up thinking that I was in Connecticut for a second, you know.
Oh, right. I'm still me. I'm still here. I might have had a dream in which I was a vampire or whatever or I was Elon Musk or somebody. Somebody other than me. Right. And now, no, I'm actually me. I'm back. I'm here. This Is the real life. That moment when we wake up is, I think, because it's a border zone, it's where we're aware, or most aware maybe of the strangeness of our existence and the kind of instability of our identity for that reason, because of what happens when we sleep and where we go. And that I think is mimicked in what happens with the stars where they pale silently.
Like there's just like our bodies are kind of in stasis. We no longer see the stars. They're being put to sleep. They lose. There's a combination, interesting combination here between paling, which is losing color, and silence. You know, they don't have any sound. And so there's something mimicked between those two images. Then we get like. Actually I'm reading Stanza 8, which I don't want to jump ahead to, but as a dream sequence. The first part of that is like a dream. I don't know if that's how you read it. The horses neighing.
31:45 Wes: You know, you get these images of far off. Right. Compared to the mundane and local. I stand before the mirror and tie my tie once more while waves far off in a pale rose twilight crash on a coral shore that was above the sun, far off in a shell of silence. And then now the far off image is one of horses with long white manes, which is quite. It's actually, when you think about it, quite similar to the image of the ocean with the white manes of the crashing waves. Mountains flash in the rose white dusk. So I again I think of. You know, we get this alternation between sublime images, whether natural or cosmic, and then again the mundane images of what he's doing standing in front of the mirror. But say more about the dream. Why? You want to think of it as a dream sequence.
32:34 Erin: Yeah, I think because this breaks the pattern. Right. So we've had eight line stanzas interspersed with four line refrains. And in this stanza we get where there should be a four line stanza and eight line stanza, so it's like a double. And so we get this image, this extra image of the horse and the mountain. And it's very. To me, it's very dreamlike, it's very associative. It's doing this boundary crossing thing where we have horses that we can hear neighing even though they're far off. So they can't be far off from us. We have to be kind of there in that dream space.
And then the mountains flash like the dew drops flash in line 35. And so again, this Is this is because of water. So the mountains are black, but they're slick with rain, so they're flashing with light. And the rains that are falling on them. The R A I n is of course, suggestive of rains. R E I N S. Right. And the mountains is kind of like horses. And this image of black and white together, that the blackness of the rain saturating. I'm thinking of like water falling on stone. Right. And making it darker. And something about that saturation of making it darker also enables the light to shine off of it and make it white.
And we get that same image of, like, the white horse's mane with the black reins crossing it. So there's a black, white dichotomy that's also being. Yeah. Run together.
34:04 Wes: Good point. There seems to be metamorphoses here. I mean, earlier on, you know, I think the waves have become horses which become mountains. So the boundaries between things are fluid.
34:18 Erin: Right. And that's a very dreamlike thing. And then, you know. And so then he wakes up in the middle of the stanza this time. So it's as if he had just been dreaming. And then he wakes up. It is morning. I stand by the mirror and surprise my soul once more. And this is. Yeah. Where the beginning, typical beginning of the stanza, the refrain of the eight line stanza is embedded in the middle, as though. Yeah. He has to recall himself to the present from a dream state. That's. I think, what surprises his soul is this idea of, like, waking up and being oneself again after this dream where one has departed from the self. And this deja vu.
34:56 Wes: And this is the most. Sorry, go ahead.
34:58 Erin: No, just the deja vu quality of this, like, recognition, like deja vu has this doubling as well. Surprise and familiarity at the same time. Right. We're surprised in deja vu. And what we're surprised by is the sense of familiarity with something that we've seen before. It's an idea that has something both ways. It's black and white at the same time. It's different and the same. I think that's kind of a good way of describing the feeling we get when we wake up and realize we're, oh, we're here, we're the same, we're back where we were before, you know.
35:31 Wes: Yeah. I think if I had to point to a climactic moment in the poem, this would be it, this moment of surprise, because it's a new feeling and it's in a register that's quite different, at least as far as I can tell from the rest of the poem where he seems to be in a state of maybe complacency, you know, in the previous stanza, in a whistling void I stand before my mirror unconcerned and tie my tie. Although of course when he says surprise my soul once more. And maybe it's suggestive of the idea that every time one of these cosmic or sublime images enters his consciousness, that's the surprise.
But at the very least we haven't heard it characterized that way up to this point. So we're cued into the fact that this is something of some emotional or psychological significance for him. And maybe I'm wrong to think that he's as condescending as he seemed to be towards God. Right. So the moment of surprise also goes, goes along with the concept of something more oriented towards actual worship or awe, let's say. And the kind of the conceit of the poem is that these awe inspiring things seem to have been dissolved into the mundane. But here I think we get the sense that they maybe live alongside it or kind of rescue him from the mundane by capturing his imagination even when he's involved in a mundane moment.
So here he is standing in front of the mirror and he's not thinking about, oh, you know, another boring workday ahead of me. He's thinking in terms of these very interesting images, you know, blue air rushing above his ceiling, the sun's beneath his floor, which, right again, I take to be the stars above Australia.
37:13 Erin: Yeah, that's great.
37:14 Wes: Maybe that's too literal. So one might, you know, what I've called condescension, where it might think, well, if the sun is beneath him, then it's really beneath him. But in fact, one might also say it's actually just an awe inspiring idea and we ought not to take the beneathness to literally. And we ought not, I think, as you've suggested from the very beginning, take his irony to necessarily entail blasphemy.
37:39 Erin: Well, it puts him in certainly in a compromised position. He's in a high pressure, I mean, he's in a pressure cooker in a way. Right. It's almost like he's been hypnotized. You know, like these hypnosis shows where in performance where they establish that, I don't know, the person being hypnotized is like super afraid of snakes or something, or they're afraid of heights and then when they're hypnotized they go up onto a tightrope or something and then all of a sudden they look down or they realize they're On a platform and they look down when they wake up and it's like, oh my gosh, they freak out, you know, so there's something of that here.
Like he wakes up and he looks down and he realizes the precarious, terrifying situation he's in. He's in this high pressure. Literally he's being pushed down from above, right. Because the blue air is rushing above him and there are suns beneath his floor, which implies that there's this heat or pressure coming up from below as well. Right. So those moments when we're hyper aware of the perilousness of our existence, the smallness of ourselves, you know, those moments of like hyper awareness of just how vast the universe. Universe is and how small we are, are moments like that.
Like we're being woken up from a trance, you know, the trance of modern life or of just not even modern life, just life, just human existence, just kind of having to go along to get along and do various things. Right. When we wake up from that, that it's like we have to kind of suppress that if it comes at an inopportune moment because it's this feeling of intense pressure and hyper awareness.
39:05 Wes: Yeah, very good. It doesn't stand out as a. As an obvious epiphany moment, but if there were an epiphany, that would be it. Maybe this would be Senlin's version of that. And then what follows is an epilogue after that sort of psychological climax. So I ascend from darkness. So again, it seems to be another reference to creation and formative origins and coming from nothing and depart on the winds of space, for I know not where. So he may be getting in his car to go to work, or he could be walking to work, but also the Earth is moving through space around the sun, and that's the journey we're always on.
And so instead of saying, as I get up in the morning, get my car and go to work, I ascend from the darkness, I wake up, I come out of sleep. And then the more relevant journey is not what my car is doing relative to the Earth, but what the Earth is doing relative to the sun and the destination, for I know not where. Of course, there is no destination, it's just going in a circle. But it's another way of saying we don't know the point of existence. Nevertheless, my watch is wound, the key is in my pocket, right. We have these implements, we measure time and we have keys that will unlock rooms, even though we don't have keys that are going to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
40:26 Erin: Right. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. This is at the moment of highest psychological pressure. He has to suppress that. We all have to go to work. We can't sit around thinking all day about how we're just a speck of dust, dust on a marble in a vast void. And therefore it doesn't matter if we brush our teeth or go to work.
40:42 Wes: The Earth is going to be around for billions of years.
40:45 Erin: That's right, yeah.
40:47 Wes: Billions of years.
40:49 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. So we have to. We have to suppress that. We have to suppress that hyper awareness and convince ourselves that we have dominion over time and space as symbolized by the watch and the key, Right? Convincing ourselves that, no, we. It's okay. Like, we have ownership over this. We've got this. You know, we're. And of course, it's like, comically absurd, the suggestion that we would have dominion over time and space because we have a watch and a key to a little studio apartment all 200 or so square feet of it, right. That somehow that can calm us down and make us feel better about our sort of cosmic minisculeness, but it's enough to suppress that hyper awareness for the time being until the next time we wake up from a crazy dream and wonder who we are and how we got here.
41:38 Wes: There are clouds in heaven and a God among the stars. And I will go thinking of him as I might think of Daybreak. So perhaps the suggestion is that just communion with the natural world, because I think we can reconceive the cosmic in terms of the natural always. We can naturalize it so that we don't necessarily have to be thinking these deep thoughts. God is just there among the stars. I get up and, you know, if I get up in the morning and there's still stars out, and I'm. He's there, whether I'm attending to it or not, or some kind of principle like that is there.
And so I will go thinking of him as I might think of Daybreak, so that thinking of God is not just some event, right, that happens in church, but that it could be a part of ordinary consciousness. I guess that's what I. I'm trying to say, right? Humming a tune, I know something quite familiar. Not an extraordinary rupture of the fabric of our daily existence.
42:38 Erin: And it's the light and the dark, right? Because we've now established a connection between God and the sun and Daybreak and the sort of source, but also the cloud, as he explicitly says. And the shadows across the windows, I think, are the clouds in heaven. The Shadows are being made by the clouds, it seems. So there's something of both clarity and mystery involved. Like, you know, the tendency for me to imagine a God that's both cloud and sun. That's almost like, you know, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Right. But there's also the, you know, getting away from that.
There's just this idea of like, there's both clarity and mystery. There's sort of like, okay, we're going to think of God to the extent that we can think of him, which is this someone both embedded in the structure of the day and also remote from us. There are things about him that we can know and things that we can't know. And accepting that God is both the sun and the cloud, the thing revealed and the thing hidden, seems to be part of that ability to have a kind of normal or, you know, not like terrifying or crazy making relationship to the divine.
43:43 Wes: And it helps to think of him as lonely and shy. Yeah, just kidding.
43:47 Erin: And to hum. Hum a tune, you know, when you get scared of a scarier gut. Right. Like, that's almost like what you do when you're scared. You hum a song to yourself. Maybe it's the three clear tones of the robin.
44:00 Wes: It's not whistle while you work, it's whistle while you what?
44:05 Erin: While you get.
44:05 Wes: Have an existential crisis.
44:07 Erin: Well, it's like Sigourney Weaver singing you are my lucky star. At the end of Alien.
44:12 Wes: Right.
44:15 Erin: When you're getting attacked by a terrifying existential threat, you sing to calm yourself down.
44:22 Wes: Okay, so we're almost out of time, but do we have anything else to say about why the vines are trying to remind him of something again? Why they're tapping at his window? Heathcliff, let me enter your window. I'm so cold. Just give a Wuthering Heights reference. Are the vines trying to get in? Are they lonely? Tune in for the. Yeah. What is this? Yeah. Why is he ending it it this way? And you know, why is the stanza repeated almost verbatim? I don't know that I have a good answer for that. Except for the potential mediating role of the natural world and life. Right. Between the divine and the inorganic. Or the divine and the mundane.
45:02 Erin: Yeah, maybe if there was a tagline for this episode, it would be like the cosmic domesticated. That's nature, you know, that's the vine leaves tapping.
45:09 Wes: Well, I was just thinking of life will find a way.
45:11 Erin: Life will find a way.
45:13 Wes: What's his name? Yeah, who's that? Actor? Or life finds a way.
45:18 Erin: Is that the old man? Or is it Sam Neill, the Australian guy? Or Jeff Goldblum? Or the old man is Richard.
45:26 Wes: It's Jeff Goldblum. Yeah. Yeah. So just. Yeah, you gotta think of Jeff Goldblum saying that.
45:30 Erin: There you go.
45:31 Wes: In his kind of like quasi creepy, but also charming, portentous, charmingly pretentious and pretentious way. But life finds a way.
45:43 Erin: Yeah. I don't know if maybe now this is his work window that the vine is tapping on. But, you know, the only difference here between this stanza and the one that it almost copies, stanza two is, as I think we already pointed out, tap at the window rather than my window. So I thought maybe there was something here about how he learned to, like, take less ownership over the course of the poem. But that can't be right. I mean, on the one hand, the tune of the world, the tune of nature, if that's the tune that he hums, is a tune that he knows. So that suggests harmony with nature rather than separation from it.
On the other, he has to have his talismans or his, you know, his holy relics that he carries with him, his watch and his key to reassure him of his mastery over nature rather than equality with it or harmony with it so that he doesn't go insane at being, you know, in the void. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure if I can say that the slippage to the article there means that there's something evolved about the last stanza or about his relationship to nature or his consciousness somehow. But it's certainly, it's complicated by what precedes it.
46:49 Wes: Okay, that was fun. Thank you.
46:52 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listens. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Sublime Mundane in Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin”
Dec 16, 2024
Where the repetitions of ordinary life threaten to overwhelm any sense of the sublime, the poet Conrad Aiken seems to suggest that they can be transformed into a way of being connected to it. The mundane order is, after all, just a part of the cosmic. When we get ready to go to work, it is on a “swiftly tilting planet” that “bathes in a flame of space.” The sun is “far off in a shell of silence,” but its light decorates the walls of our homes. We might wonder, in light of modernity’s crisis of faith, if the sublime is meant to replace the divine, and if so whether what Aiken calls “humble offerings” to a “cloud of silence” are enough. Wes & Erin discuss Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” and whether humanity’s religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale.
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Upcoming Episodes: Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” “Sunset Boulevard,” Marianne Moore’s “Jerboa.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Where the repetitions of ordinary life threaten to overwhelm any sense of the sublime, the poet Conrad Aiken seems to suggest that they can be transformed into a way of being connected to it. The mundane order is, after all, just a part of the cosmic order. When we get ready to go to work, it is on a swiftly tilting planet that bathes in a flame of space. The sun is far off in a shell of silence, but its light decorates the walls of our homes. But we might wonder, in light of modernity's crisis of faith, if the sublime is meant to replace the divine. And if so, whether what Aiken calls humble offerings to a cloud of silence are enough. Today we're discussing Aiken's morning song of Senlin and whether humanity's religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale. This is Wes Alwan.
1:31 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:33 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I didn't ask you before suggesting this episode. So I don't really know what you think of Conrad Aiken, how much you've looked at Conrad Aiken, what your experience is with Conrad Aiken. So I thought I'd just start out by asking that.
1:53 Erin: I'd never read anything by him until I read this poem, though I'd heard of him. And I also, I believe I took a picture of his bench in the Savannah cemetery for you.
2:03 Wes: Bonaventure.
2:04 Erin: Yeah, Bonaventure. Okay. Yeah. So I knew enough to know that he was from Savannah for some reason, maybe because of you. And I knew his bench when I saw it. And. Yeah, so this is my first encounter with his work.
2:18 Wes: Yeah, Conrad Aiken was a. Is from Savannah, my hometown, and he is a friend of a guy named Joe Killorin. Joe Killorin had gone to St. John's College and then Columbia University, where he's friends with Charles Van Doren, the guy who got into the quiz show scandal. They were both professors at Columbia at the time as well. And then when Van Doren was exiled, essentially because of that scandal, Killorin went back down south to Savannah to teach at a small community college. Is that what you call them?
2:51 Erin: It Depends.
2:53 Wes: Armstrong State College was the college he taught a sort of St. John style class. Great books, style, engaging for the students. And my mother and father met in one of those classrooms and both maintained friendship with Killorin throughout the years and kind of idolized Killorin. I think my older brother had a lot of respect for Killorin and was one of his students at one point. And this is the thing. This is really the reason I ended up going to St. John's and I kind of was imbued with the kind of educational, I guess, ethos that came from that.
You know, it was reinforced at St. John's but it was there before I ever went to St. John's I was kind of raised to be a Johnny. And I think it's my bro. My older brother, really, I think, is the person I would hear from most about Conrad Aiken when I was younger. Which is not to say that I really read any of him when I was younger. And it was only later in life when I saw the poem we're reading for today in a Norton anthology, that I really read anything by him. And I liked it a lot. And you can see the influence of T.S. eliot. And those two were good friends as well.
But, yeah, so I have a kind of a personal connection to him, which I probably colors my reading of his work. But, you know, what I've read I really like. I think if you look at some of the secondary literature, you know, if you look at criticism and commentary, you'll see that he's often accused of being a bit derivative, especially of, you know, people like T.S. eliot. And this poem in particular has echoes of the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. But, yeah, I feel like he's a kindred spirit in a way. Just one other thing about his biography. He had this horrible thing happened to him when he was a child where.
I don't know if you read about
4:36 Erin: this, but yeah, yeah, I did.
4:38 Wes: His father killed his mother and then committed suicide. And that was when he is 11 years old and he heard the gunshots and discovered the bodies. It was something that he generally did not talk about. And he briefly discusses it in an autobiographical. I think he originally called an essay, but something called Ushant. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but it led to, I think, quite a bit of soul searching. And so he was. He became interested in Freud and psychoanalysis, and I assume he had an analyst. Freud knew of him in turn and read some of his work and even offered to Analyze him, which Conrad Aiken turned down. But nevertheless, those type of psychological themes appear, are kind of a staple of his work. And we get maybe a bit of that in this poem. Anyway, what'd you think?
5:27 Erin: I really enjoyed the poem. I'm surprised that he's accused of being derivative. I mean, I don't, you know, I don't have much to go off of my understanding is that he has a huge body of work and of course this is just a tiny sliver of it. You know, there's another word for being derivative in poetry and that's just being allusive. And I would say that this poem is just highly allusive. And if he's also interested in psychoanalysis and various other things, then he's eating out of the same, you know, sources that everybody else in modernism is. So, you know, it would make sense that he would have these connections to Prufrock.
I mean, of course the Prufrock is the first thing I thought of when I read this. There are plenty of other, I think, little Easter egg allusions as well within it and they're really cleverly done. And I also see this as being, you know, doing something, I think quite different from what Prufrock is doing. The way that it recycles certain images over and over again. And you know, the song quality to it, I mean, I think it's called. It was published separately as Morning Song. Morning Song of Senlin, is that right?
6:27 Wes: Yeah. So this is part of a. He published a book called the Charnel Rose and one of the poems is a 50 something page poem called A Biography. And this particular part of that longer poem is often. Yeah, I just, I think it's. It's taken out as an excerpt and called the Morning Song of Senlin.
6:47 Erin: I think, you know, it's. It's just more densely lyrical, I think, than Prufrock. I don't know if I could defend that, but yeah, the song qualities of it and the repeated lines and things that read as refrains. I think it just has a very different feel to Prufrock in certain ways. Even if thematically it might be exploring some of the same themes.
7:06 Wes: Yeah, I think comparison has been drawn between this character of Senlin and the character of Prufrock and maybe certain characters and other modernist poetry. You know, I suppose it's a very prototypically modernist character. It's Hamlet esque, maybe, or it's people who are indecisive, soul searching in some way, or maybe lost. So I suppose that sense comes across in this poem as well. Beyond the formal Similarities. Yeah. What do we make of the name Senlin?
7:39 Erin: Well, luckily, I have a note in my Norton anthology that tells me what to make of the name. The little old man that each of us must become.
7:48 Wes: Ah, yes. Okay.
7:50 Erin: Luckily, some of us are born little old men, but no. Yeah. So, like senile, right? Yeah.
7:59 Wes: Right. So it sounds like a. Yeah. Inversion of senile in a way. You know, it's funny, I didn't look at that note. We're looking at the same anthology.
8:07 Erin: Oh, yeah. And there's the note about morning song right there. I didn't think to look at that. Yeah, yeah.
8:12 Wes: I didn't look at any of these notes. You know, I think that. Yeah. So the name Senlin seems to take senile and jumble up the words at the end a little bit. You could think of it as getting old in the pejorative sense of the word or being old in the pejorative sense of the word. On the other hand, if it just connotes age, perhaps there's wisdom in that or perhaps one might just think of it in terms of senescence. Right. The process of dying and mortality in general. I think earlier on in the. You know, in Senlin a biography, he starts out younger.
And so whatever. Whatever we want to say about age, it's more of a principle. Yeah. Maybe that's the way this note is put, this way in the anthology. The old man that each of us must become, or maybe one might say is inside of us or is the sort of telos or the end point to which our life is directed. The old human being. Shall we read it first and then. Yeah. It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning when the light drips through the shutters like the dew, I arise. I face the sunrise and do the things my fathers learned to do. Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops pale in a saffron mist and seem to die.
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet stand before a glass and tie my tie. Fine leaves tap my window. Dewdrops sing to the garden stones. The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree, repeating three clear tones. It is morning. I stand by the mirror and tie my tie once more While waves far off in a pale rose twilight crash on a coral shore. I stand by a mirror and comb my hair. How small and white my face. The green earth tilts through a sphere of air and bathes in a flame of space. There are houses hanging above the stars and stars hung under a sea and a sun far off in a shell of silence Dapples my walls for me.
It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning should I not pause in the light to remember God? Upright and firm, I stand on a star unstable. He is immense and lonely as a cloud. I will dedicate this moment before my mirror to him alone. For him I will comb my hair, accept these humble offerings. Cloud of silence, I will think of you as I descend the stair. Vine leaves tap my window. The snail track shines on the stones. Dewdrops flash from the chinaberry tree, repeating two clear tones. It is morning. I awake from a bed of silence shining. I rise from the starless waters of sleep.
The walls are about me still as in the evening. I am the same and the same name still I keep. The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion. The stars pale silently in a coral sky In a whistling void I stand before my mirror, unconcerned I tie my tie, There are horses neighing on far off hills, tossing their long white manes. And mountains flash in the rose white dusk, Their shoulders black with rains. It is morning. I stand by the mirror and surprise my soul once more the blue air rushes above my ceiling. There are suns beneath my floor. It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness and depart on the winds of space.
For I know not where my watch is wound. A key is in my pocket, I and the sky is darkened as I descend the stair. There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven and a God among the stars. And I will go thinking of him as I might think of daybreak and humming a tune I know. Vine leaves tap at the window, Dew drops sing to the garden stones. The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree, repeating three clear tones.
12:18 Erin: It's very hypnotic.
12:19 Wes: Yeah, it really is.
12:21 Erin: So this is from a poem called Senlin, A Biography. And I was just kind of. I was reflecting on how I would categorize this poem. You know, I think you could call it a kind of a dramatic monologue.
12:32 Wes: Right.
12:32 Erin: Like Senlin is sort of speaking to us self consciously and the speaker of the poem is kind of. There's the speaker and then there's Senlin, and the two are kind of collapsed. Right. But it's very theatrical. I think there's a sense in which this is a character not giving a performance, but sort of performatively speaking to us and elucidating certain elements of his day that wouldn't ordinarily be spoken. So there's a theatricality to it. It's heightened, it's dramatic. But this character as a Kind of vehicle for Aiken or for Akin speaker, and the slippage between the two of them.
And the use of the word biography is just interesting to me because it's a sort of, like, dramatic monologue which is quite different from a biography, you know, where we get the person actually speaking through the text. And it's also sort of autobiographical because the speaker, who is not Senlin, has, you know, perfect access to Senlin's consciousness. So I think this. How do I want to call it? Just this slippage, I suppose, between the speaker, Slash Aiken, and the Senlin character, I think, represents a kind of boundary slippage or the slippage of borders that seems to me to be such an important theme in the poem.
13:46 Wes: Tell me more about the slippage of. This is something I hadn't thought of, the slippage of borders being a theme.
13:51 Erin: I think I can kind of illustrate this better through examples within the poem. But basically there's a repeated idea of being encased in something. You know, there are a series of kind of sharp contrasts with. Right. Between what I call in my little marginal notes here, sort of like the indoor world, which I'm associating with the world of the domestic and the mundane, with the outer world, the world of the cosmos or even the world of nature. Right. And how those things switch with each other or permeate each other. Like they have a permeable membrane between them that seems to meet, for one, in Senlin's own consciousness.
Right. So the very fact that he's in this interior world, tying his tie and yet having these kinds of, you know, grandiose thoughts about, you know, being on a marble that's spinning through a vast universe and is part of a vacuum. You know, like he's the sort of the meeting point between these sets of opposites. And so I see the blending and the ways in which different adjectives or nouns kind of shuffle and cycle through in different combinations as being also like a formal illustration of this kind of porous boundary. Things leaking into each other because you have different.
Different ideas that get recycled but bounce off each other in different ways over the course of the poem. I guess the speaker and Senlin kind of being indistinguishable from each other or blending together and then kind of, you know, stretching apart and then coming back together seems to me to be part of that theme as well.
15:26 Wes: Yeah, I have this demarcated in a similar way, I think I was thinking they're kind of three domains. One of them is the cosmic, and one of them I call the mundane, which I think you're thinking of in terms of the interior, I guess, of the home. But, you know, we get these interesting contrasts, for instance, being on a swiftly tilting planet, for instance, while tying his tie. And that sort of contrast between the cosmic and the mundane comes up again and again. And the cosmic in turn, I think, you know, stars and things, sky and things at a large scale is associated with the divine.
And then you get the natural world. And we'll have to see if we can figure out Vine leaves tapping on his window as if to remind him that, hey, here's. Here's life, here's living things. It's not just cosmos and tying ties, you know, and seem to be united in some way. And you. It's. There's something else here. I had a sense in several parts of the poem. I'm wondering is, you know, is this a God who doesn't know he's a God? He's narrating. When he says, Senlin says, it's Senlin saying, Senlin says, but he's slipping back and forth from the divine point of view and the human point of view.
Maybe that's the slippage, but I don't know. That's pure speculation. I don't know if that works, really.
16:45 Erin: I like that.
16:46 Wes: But that's just the sense I had at several points. And I don't know where that sense or that theme seems to have come up elsewhere in my reading, but I can't give any specific examples. But this idea of the God that doesn't know he's a God, or maybe there's a God, the God who's in doubt, he's a God. And maybe with Christ. And I think there are probably some references to Christianity or at least to the Trinity in here. Maybe one could think of Christ as a figure who doubts his own divinity. He's not ignorant of it. Right. But he can say things like why hast thou forsaken me? Or that's what you say. That's not what I say. Any case, I'm just speculating here.
17:24 Erin: Yeah, I took that Lonely as a cloud section to almost illustrate a kind of theology that's whatever the opposite of Deism is. So rather than a God that's unfeeling and kind of disconnected from us, like we're disconnected from him and we're the ones that are leaving him kind of out in the cold. But I like this idea. I like this. This connection to Christianity and I think too, the ways in which like a cloud is kind of in the medium place between. You know, I like what you're pointing out with the three domains. And I do think that nature, at some points in the poem, it adheres more to the cosmic, and at other points it adheres for me more to the mundane, domestic.
And a cloud is a great image of something that is right in the middle space between those two spheres. Right. It's not cosmic, it's not outside the atmosphere and it's not on the ground, and it's not connected to, you know, things like vines and things that grow and things that are more, for lack of a better term, substantial. Right. Like visually, it occludes. And repeatedly in the poem, I think we get these images of light being partially blocked. So a cloud is like a giant diffuser of light. It's above us, but it's not all the way up into the realm of the sun, which there's a lot about the sun S U N in the poem as a kind of.
Maybe that's kind of like God the Father. If that's how you were reading a sort of trinitarian symbology into the poem.
18:45 Wes: Well, the three. The repeating three clear tones from the robin's chirp. But I might be reading something into that.
18:51 Erin: Sure.
18:52 Wes: But I find that interesting, this bit about. So at a certain point he'll say, accept these humble offerings. Cloud of silence.
18:59 Erin: I know, Laugh out loud.
19:02 Wes: Which is great. God's silence. Of course, that's an. It's an ancient theme, and one might see it in a way as a central to faith, depending on your school of thought. But also this relationship between the divine and human beings. Right. So even in Medea, for instance, or at least in, you know, Euripides, one of his lines of thought was that, well, if the gods aren't well behaved, then what hope is there? You're supposed to be gods. You can't just have human passions. But the other one was pointing to the paradox in the idea of a God that needed human beings in some way, that needed their worship, or who in a way posits in creating human beings, Posits them or creates them as company for mere company.
Right. So God becomes the one who's lonely and needs us. And this sort of paradox, of course, I mean, was a. Comes up in Christian theology as well. God cannot need or lack. God must be perfect. So what was the point of creation? Those sorts of questions. Milton plays around with this idea, I think, quite a bit the idea that the sensuous world, the perceptible tangible world, the spiritual world, was not enough. And that in some sense God needed the carnal or the. At least the sensuous material world. And that one cannot create that right without.
Without evil, without fallenness, that creation is not complete without fallenness. But yeah, maybe we should go to the first stanza and go. I love this image of the light dripping through the shutters like dew, because normally we think of light as reflecting off of the dew in the morning, but dew itself is not like light. It's the product of the night. It's a product of condensation. So in a way we get something that is a product of the night off which light may reflect, identified with light. I thought that was very interesting.
21:02 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I just noted the fact that the, you know, the light is dripping and so it seems to become liquid. And this elemental slippage is another thing that I noticed happening where qualities of an element different to the one being discussed are used to describe that element. Right. So here we have, you know, light, which is, I suppose, most closely associated with air being described as water, as liquid. And then we get the shutters, which are as good an image as I could think of of the sequestered, mundane, domestic inside. Right.
The thing that's mediating the glare of the natural world, of the sun, which, you know, will come to be associated with, like, grander things that we've already discussed, the cosmos and various other things. And so that's being blocked, not fully, but it's being sort of barred and blocked. So that Senlin, when he wakes up and he rises like the sun or in response to the sun he has, we can imagine he's not getting a full face of sun, as it were, because he's facing actually the shuttered window, Right. So there's actually probably an image of like, bars over his face.
So occlusion or something of the inside world that's preventing the full light of the sun from being reflected on or in the room to him. So there's something about, like, custom, as he'll. As he'll say in the. In the next line, something about the domestic that maybe is preventing some sort of full, full harmony with the outside world. Like, understand, like, I'm not sure ultimately what. And I don't want to get ahead of myself. I'm not sure ultimately what the cosmos and what the natural world each are representing or if they're. They're representing sort of overlapping things.
But there's something about the interior domestic world that prevents the full force of whether whatever that is from invading or from affecting invading is too negative of a valence, but from from affecting Senlin and his perspective or something.
23:01 Wes: Yeah, let's take a moment to talk about our sponsor for this episode, GiveWell. How deep do you go to seek out an answer to a question? Maybe you've spent hours clicking the source links on an obscure Wikipedia page, or maybe you're even the type of person who checked out the entire shelf on the topic at your library. If you're nodding along, then check out GiveWell, an organization that researches questions about global health and philanthropy. Even if a satisfying answer might require years of reviewing studies, talking to experts, and over 300 footnotes.
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Or it's something diminishing about it. It's like, oh, isn't that cute sun, the way you have the light drip through the shutters. I mean, later on he's going to say the sun, far off in a shell of silence, dapples my walls for me. Again, I am associating the sun with the divine here. And again we get the this concept of silence, which is kind of terrifying when you think about it. It's terrifying whether it puts you in awe of the divine or whether you make makes you think that there is no such thing. Whether it, you know, think of Pascal. The silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
Thinking about the cosmic should produce awe at the sense of scale and power, at the questions of how, where does this come from? And why is it all of those questions? But he turns it in that later stanza, he turns the sun into an interior decorator. Dapples my walls. For me, it's a really interesting way of diminishing the power of any potential awe in the face of the divine or any crisis of faith or something like that. Yeah.
25:54 Erin: I mean, you don't think of that as being ironic, though. Maybe I'm reading him wrongly, but I think he's giving kind of proper. Due to this, not to overuse that word. I think he's giving proper credit to the sun's remoteness. And it's almost like this joke that it's dappling his walls. Right. I'm reading him as being almost like bemused by that. You know, the flame of space around the earth that comes up prior to that.
26:22 Wes: Right.
26:22 Erin: Is part of how I'm reading that, that, like, there are these terrifying. Right. The flame of space I read as a kind of terrifying image. And the mere fact that he would just construe like the, you know, the concentric circles of the earth. And then he's describing what I think is just like the atmosphere around it as being like a flame of space. If we could think of the earth as being surrounded by its blue atmosphere, which does. I suppose it might look like a flame if it were seen onto the right lighting or something like that. So I think he gives proper credence to the terror of that with the flame. You know, there's something funny for sure about dappling the walls, but I think he's being ironic and kind of almost making a joke out of the terror of that kind of accident.
27:08 Wes: Yeah. I think Flame of Space is an interesting image, just in the sense of. One might treat the nothingness of that as something that might burn or destroy, devour. So the earth could be right. It's bathing in that. It's green. But if it's bathing in a flame, is it, you know, why isn't it burning? So I think the. The question is, is there something reverent about this poem? Right. He stands before glass and ties his tie. The idea seems to be that the mundane perhaps could be a source of reverence. It could be a kind of prayer, maybe to do ordinary things, to descend the stairs, to tie your tie, or is it something that is irreverent?
You know, I think that for me, is the question whether. Right. Dappling the walls. It's joke, it's ironic. But what is Senlin's attitude towards the divine? Does he want to Make a joke of it? Does he want to have an ironic relationship to it? Does he want to have a reverent relationship to it? Is the argument that all those things could somehow coincide in a weird way? Maybe we'll get more of that as we go through the poem. Unless you have other thoughts on that.
28:17 Erin: You're bringing to mind Wallace Stevens's 'Sunday Morning', which is something that should have been clued in with morning appearing so many times here, right? But the image in that poem of the sky as being unfriendly. I'm trying to remember exactly what he. But basically, like, if there is a God in the heavens, then the sky is a barrier, right, between us and whatever. You know, it's like a wall between us and the real reality of the Godhead of whatever is up there, so to speak. And so Stevens, of course, in Sunday Morning is advocating that we.
We should think of the sky as friendlier than that, I. E. We should give up on an idea of God. And therefore the sky won't appear to us as a kind of a barrier. It'll just be the sky and it'll become more of a friend. I think that Senlin is. He would be what Stevens is trying to argue against, right? There is a kind of barrier here. Like, there is a blending, I think, that is happening here between these realms. But for the most part, there's sometimes a blending, but sometimes a juxtaposition whereby these two realms, like the inside of his room, his walls being dappled and the sun itself, are being put next to each other in this kind of hilarious contrast between something huge and vast and something, you know, mundane and small.
And that's not quite a blending in that case, but it's showing, like, the difference and the sort of distance intellectually between these two things or the difference in scale between these two things. And so I think it gets at more of what Stevens is trying to say with how we shouldn't think of the divine. So I think, like, this is a believer who also, at the same time, is trapped in the very trap that Stevens points out, which is not feeling close to nature or God because of the sense of nature as being a kind of veil or concealment behind which God is hiding, if that makes any sense.
30:20 Wes: You know, I was thinking with this line about the stars in the purple dusk above. The rooftops pale in a saffron mist and seem to die. You know, again, with rooftops, we get an image of the mundane and the human and something associated with survival and shelter. And I don't know if the saffron mist has anything to do with chimneys, but it's as if the stars are being dissolved into the mundane or the mundane somehow. There's a risk that the cosmic and perhaps the divine will be dissolved into that, that they will disappear and that all we will have left is rooftops and tying ties and the rest of, you know, everything else that's merely mundane.
31:05 Erin: Yeah, that reminds me of 'Aubade' by Larkin. You know, the.
31:09 Wes: Yeah, I was reminded of that. Yeah, go ahead.
31:12 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And just the. You know, dusk is such a curious word here. I mean, time could be going quite speedily through. You know, we get many cycles, I think, of mornings here, so it could literally be dusk. Or it's. You know, he's describing what I think is the dawn, but he's describing it as a. As a dusk. Right. But it's dusk for the stars and that it's the end of their. You know, the stars are dying because it's the end of their. Their life cycle, as it were, the end of their day. They're being replaced by this light of the sun, which is a competing star.
But also. Yeah, the saffron mist, which I love. The. The combination of the sort of synesthetic, like scent and sight combined in that. And I hadn't thought of chimney smoke, but that makes perfect sense. The. The artificial mist that's sort of blotting out the stars as the world is waking up and factories and various things are coming to life.
32:01 Wes: Yeah. And Prufrock, it's also yellow. Right. It's a yellow fog, something like that.
32:06 Erin: Right.
32:07 Wes: Doing the things my father's learned to do. So he arises and faces the sunrise, which is a. The phrase sun salutation immediately came to mind.
32:18 Erin: Yeah.
32:19 Wes: If you've done yoga, there's something, again, reverent, about that, potentially. And then doing the things his father learned to do will turn out to be tying a tie, I think, will be the example that we get. But of course, that's all of culture. Right. That's all of human intelligence as it's passed down from generation to generation. And at some point, those customs and morals and technology and all of that stuff reflects some sort of freedom of the human spirit to make an advance, to move beyond what it was at a previous developmental stage.
So a tie, even though, you know, it's not like the most advanced sort of technology. And a lot of it is. A lot of it is. It's merely symbolic, but once it's been created, once it's been invented, then it just becomes a kind of Soup that we swim in and take for granted. And we, the ones who act out what we've inherited from the previous generations, aren't doing that intelligently. It's just road. It's just procedural knowledge. Habit. Right. So his father's learned to do certain things, but now he just does them. And that, you know, that goes for something like language, of course.
Right. It's, you know, as an evolutionary product, it's a manifestation of an incredible leap forward and intelligence. But it also traps us in a way. We live within that structure and are heavily influenced by it, for better or for worse, whether it's language or any other cultural inheritance. It's the result of human ingenuity. And yet it can make us kind of. We just habitually follow along with it.
34:04 Erin: Yeah, I like that. That helps me understand that line much better. Because I was thinking about the idea of what my father's learned to do and this idea of convention and custom existing, I think, a bit in contrast to the rising with the sun, which feels much more organic and instinctual.
34:24 Wes: Right.
34:24 Erin: Rather than the learned custom of the tying the tie. And that contrast is kind of interesting. But anyway. Yeah, I really like that.
34:32 Wes: Yeah, I like the irony of. It's a wonderful irony, those last two lines. I find myself on a swiftly tilting planet. And I, myself on a swiftly tilting planet, stand before a glass and tie my tie. So again, cosmic and mundane. And the swiftly tilting planet just by itself is a great.
34:51 Erin: Yeah, I was like, oh, that's where this comes from.
34:54 Wes: Reminds me of Shakespeare's bawdy planet a little bit. And then. Right. But then once you start thinking about swiftly tilting planet, it becomes quite a puzzling image, unless I'm missing something.
35:05 Erin: 23.5 degrees constant.
35:09 Wes: And it wobbles a bit, but it's basically constant. So you could say, well, the Earth is swift around the sun and it tilts. Or I can't help but associate to Don Quixote tilting at windmills. I don't know if he made the same association. But that also contrasts nicely with roteness and mundanity of standing there, tying one's tie. So there's an idea. It's almost as if the locus of vitality and idealism and energy and freedom is there in the planet as a whole, and perhaps it's there in nature as well. We'll have to figure out what nature is doing in the poem, but rather than in him.
So you have this wonderfully energized little ball of earth going around a ball of fire, and then you have A human being standing there, tying their tie and presumably, I guess, getting ready to go to work. So it's this weird sense in which something so extraordinary contains something so ordinary and is the vehicle for that. Right. We are, in a way, riders. We ride the Earth maybe around the sun. I think that image will come up later with horses, but we are not the heroic ones. The Earth itself is in the heroic position.
36:31 Erin: Yeah, I really like that. You're making me think of the story that helps kids learn how to tie their shoes. Like, the bunny goes around the tree and whatever. There's almost something planetary going on with the tie tying here. Right. Because actually, I'm picturing the tie going around, like, rotating around, you know, the whatever. Like one. One part of it. I don't know what the parts of the tie are called, but, you know, like wrapping around and then being pulled through the knot. The knot. Maybe there's some. With the tying of the knot. Maybe there's some.
Almost like a little joke there where there's this repetition of the extreme miniature of whatever is happening with the Earth and the sun. Yeah, yeah. Thinking about the sun dappling the walls and his rising up and facing the sunrise and then doing the things his fathers learned to do. You're helping me kind of see that the tying of the tie is intimately connected to. I mean, there's this hilarious, humorous difference in scale, which is almost ridiculous. And yet, at the same time, like, the rhythms of our day are at their foundations due to these planetary bodies that are 93 million miles away from us or whatever.
And, you know, and we have a certain schedule. We have a certain, you know, we have a number of daylight hours that determines, you know, what we can get up to in the course of one of these cycles. You're kind of just helping me connect up this idea that, like, this is at once a kind of a joke. And at the same time, it's sort of very logical and serious that tying one's tie actually is deeply connected with the sun that is in a shell of silence millions of miles away from us. I mean, that's part of the cosmic terror and the cosmic hilarity of our situation is that, like, we do get up and tie our tie at a certain hour because of something millions of miles away from us, determining whether or not we get our coffee ready and get into our cars on time to go to work.
Not a profound realization, but a realization for me, nevertheless.
38:34 Wes: No, no. So vine leaves tap my window. It's like in getting tapped on the shoulder almost. We get dew drops again. Dew drops have a few appearances. They sing to the garden stones here. Later on they'll flash from the chinaberry tree and play the role of the robin. Except instead of chirping, repeating three clear tones, they'll repeat two clear tones later on. And then the last stanza of the poem repeats this one verbatim, I guess nearly verbatim.
39:03 Erin: Tap at the window versus tap my window. So there's a little bit more of a rat, a tat.
39:09 Wes: Yeah. What is the stanza about? I kind of have it as nature reasserts itself. I don't know why I put in reasserts, but maybe that's because the natural world, I think, kind of gets lost in between. It's kind of an in between world, even though where the earth itself, as a green natural ball stands. It's. It's unclear. Right. Does it belong to the cosmic. Exactly. Or to the natural? But I think between the cosmic and the mundane, we get this natural mediator. Right. And. And if that's the case. Right. Then that stands in the same position as Christ does in Christianity, as mediator between the human and the human and the divine. But whereas there's the flame of space and silence and loneliness in the cosmic scale and at the mundane, you know, the mundane scale I see as kind of lifeless as. Well, here we get life and vitality inserting itself.
40:06 Erin: That's great. I. I had a similar reaction. The vine especially, you know, I think of Stevens's poem. I think it's Nomad Exquisite or exquisite or whatever, however he pronounces it. But the, the green vine angering for life.
40:20 Wes: Right.
40:21 Erin: Like there's something of that, I think, energy going on here. I think of this, you know, this one. And of course, when it's repeated in the last. This is the sort of like the sonic refrain. The emphasis on this is on sound verbs. Tap, sing, chirps. That doesn't always happen, right, because we get. We get flash later. So we get things that are more visual in the variation of this refrain. Thinking, though, about how the do first appears in the second line of the poem. And then we get these unevenly spaced stanzas of 8 and 4. 8 and 4, 8 and 4.
It's almost like, with one exception, the dew. You can almost read this as a concrete poem actually, in which these. Maybe that's taking things a step too far, but in which the stanzas are like the shutters themselves and the dew is kind of like dripping through, you know, performing the action of that second line and dripping through the poem as it recurs, but the vine is tapping on the window, so it's also kind of overgrowing the window, like the shutter. But it's something that probably is letting more. I'm just picturing this one little strand of it.
Right. So it's letting more light in. So there's still something. Yeah. Some mediating force between the natural and the. Or sorry, the cosmic and the human cultural. Right. And it's not as forbidding and closed as the shutters. You know, shutters being really a product of custom and convention and involving things like privacy. You know, things that only very advanced cultures tend to be concerned with. Right. In terms of, you know, like cavemen don't care about privacy. I don't think maybe they do, but the. The vine is like. It's cutting into some of the sunlight, but.
But barely. And it's also reacting to the sunlight and growing with the sunlight and. And representative of. Of. As I think you said, of. Of a vitality that's kind of like, at cross purposes with human custom, which is more about, like, tamping down that vitality, like a shutter would, you know. So, yeah.
42:20 Wes: When you mentioned the sort of alternating between the longer and shorter stanzas, I'm actually reminded of Prufrock again, which does the same thing, although. Right. You get the longer stanza, and then you get, oh, do not ask, what is it? Let us go and make our visit. And then another stanza, in the room. The women come and go talking of Michelangelo. So a little bit more sing songy. And the four lines are kind of divided up, but quite similar in effect, I think.
42:43 Erin: You know, we just get other kind of synesthetic or personified effects here of. Of, you know, dewdrop singing. So there's a kind of transmutation and then the. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't realize it was chinaberry tree. I thought it was chinaberry tree. I'd never heard this said aloud, so.
43:00 Wes: Well, you might be right. Don't go by me.
43:04 Erin: Well, chinaberry. That seems like the way people in the south would pronounce it.
43:08 Wes: Right.
43:08 Erin: And it's an. It's an. Or it's in the South.
43:10 Wes: Yeah. Never. Never correct yourself based on something. Especially like. Especially.
43:19 Erin: Regardless. First of all, I like it because it's a compound word, and there are lots of compound words in the poem.
43:24 Wes: Yeah, you're right. It's chinaberry.
43:25 Erin: It's chinaberry. Okay. Oh, I like chinaberry. That's nice.
43:28 Wes: Yeah. Just. Just assume I'm wrong and correct.
43:30 Erin: Okay. Sorry.
43:31 Wes: On the Spot.
43:33 Erin: Well, I looked up this tree because I was trying to think, you know, what is the significance of this tree? And it's a kind of a. An interesting kind of oxymoronical kind of symbol, you know. So this is where I started really putting together this idea of, like, contrasts coming together, not just in the. His sort of interesting use of, like, clashing elements or verbs that don't quite belong with the proper sense of the noun. But its genus name is related to a tree that's called the flowering ash, which I really like, because when you think about it, that's kind of.
Flowering ash is kind of. I mean, I know an ash is a type of tree, but if taken literally, that's almost a kind of an oxymoron. And then it's also linked to the name for free or noble tree. And it's looking this up. It's a tree that's considered both ornamental and an invasive species. And it's used for timber primarily, but its berries are toxic to humans, you know, so it has use in terms of timber, you know, but not the use that is right there hanging on the tree apparent to us. So it's a sort of a puzzle box of a little symbol.
44:37 Wes: Well, I think, yeah, the. The fact that the berries are poisonous must be significant here, maybe. That's really interesting.
44:44 Erin: Yeah.
44:45 Wes: Well, if the robin is chirping three clear tones, the robin sounds an awful lot like a prophet. But they're sitting on a tree with poisoned berries, which perhaps is evocative of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I don't know. Or it says something a bit sinister about what the prophecy foretells. Should we trust the robin? Or maybe we should go with the dew drops. The dewdrops are just minding their own business, singing to the garden instead of trying to be entertainers. The robin is being a busybody. It's my interpretation.
45:20 Erin: Well, this is what's interesting about repeating. Right. Because is the robin repeating? I mean, this could be read two ways. The robin is repeating itself over and over again. Or is it repeating? How I'm reading it is. It's repeating the dew drops, the plink, plink, plink.
45:34 Wes: Right.
45:34 Erin: That's how I would. onomatopoetize this. But, you know, the dew drops falls on the garden stones, making a plink, plink noise. I thought maybe the robin is repeating the dew drops.
45:47 Wes: Interesting.
45:47 Erin: I don't know. Yeah, so it's mimicking or something.
45:52 Wes: Right, Good point. So, yeah, we could make something of that transmutation Into.
45:57 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Like nature sort of riffing off of itself or learning from itself. In another 10,000, 100,000 years, Robin's going to write a remix of this. Learning the things its grandfather.
46:12 Wes: I mean, perhaps it says something about the origin, you know, life coming, the organic emerging from the inorganic.
46:19 Erin: Nice.
46:22 Wes: All right, on that note, on that.
46:23 Erin: On that tone.
46:24 Wes: Yeah, clear tone. Yeah. We are going to end part one right here. It only took us an hour to get through two stanzas. That's what we here on subtext. That's what we guarantee. We guarantee at least two stanzas per hour.
46:37 Erin: We'll be faster next time.
46:38 Wes: Don't go to one of those 1 stanza per hour podcast. That's usually what we do.
46:43 Erin: We've achieved some critical mass here. So now it'll be.
46:45 Wes: We have, and there is quite a bit of repetition and we've actually talked about other parts of the poem already. Otherwise, you can wait a week. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
47:08 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
The Aesthetics of Death in “Beetlejuice” (1988) (Part 2)
Dec 09, 2024
Wes and Erin continue their discussion of “Beetlejuice,” and what its battle royale between conflicting aesthetic sensibilities—rustic, gothic, and avant-garde—has to say about the connections between love, mortality, and the many pitfalls of growing up.
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0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Betelgeuse. We had just got done talking about the aesthetics of death and then thinking about the way in which Betelgeuse himself, to the extent that he's in the model, adds a kind of gothic element to that. But maybe this is a good segue into talking about Betelgeuse himself and what it is he's doing in the film. Because in a way it feels quite random. And as you pointed out, he doesn't have that much to do in the film. He's not a huge presence in the film. Although when he's there, he's really there. So, yeah, what is the point of having this demonic creature? What purpose does he serve?
1:16 Erin: This is what I've been trying to figure out. I mean, he's basically the closest parallel that we could say is he's kind of like a bad nightclub act. He's like a Vegas, like a stand up. That's kind of his whole thing. He's very Vegasy in his taste and in his references. Definitely some active parallel going on there. There's so much we could say about him. The strangeness of the name, the fact that it invites mispronunciation, and yet it has to be said properly to invoke him. The look of him, the separation between him. I mean, let's say on the most basic level, if we're gonna follow this biblical thread, just this idea that he was Juno's assistant and then broke out on his own obviously has extremely biblical implications there.
2:05 Wes: Satan?
2:07 Erin: Could it be Satan?
2:09 Wes: Could it be? Yeah. Right. So in contrast to the rest of the afterlife. Well, maybe it's not such a contrast, but he plays this kind of demonic role, whereas much of the afterlife is simply this very mundane bureaucracy, which I think we'll talk about. And it's very interesting. But the demonic, I guess the demonic role he serves, I think it's perverse, Right? So Barbara, or someone even calls him a pervert at one point. So a lot of what he's doing, he's trying to kiss Barbara, feel her up, marry Lydia, I guess, because that will also get him out of there.
So to the Extent that he represents something perverse, he represents one of the dangers for any human being in the process of maturation, which is that you get stuck or regressed. There's something infantile about perversity, and there's also something deathlike and aggressive about perversity. At a fundamental level, perversity brings aggression and death into the erotic, into love. It kind of mixes it in. Right. So sadomasochism is paradigmatically perverse. And you might say some of the aesthetic in the movie is suggestive of that. Right. So, yeah.
So where love and sex get contaminated by aggression, that's where it gets perverse, and that's where he is. And there's also an element of cynicism. And so this is the way one might respond to the predicament that Lydia is in, that an adolescent is in. There are various suboptimal adult solutions that people end up in as a way of dealing with the disappointments of growing up. And one of them is cynicism, for instance. Another is perversity. Oh, there's also that. Right. I think at one point, Betelgeuse is like a flasher. He's trying to convince them that he can be scary enough to drive the Deetzes away.
And they're like, show us. And we don't see it on camera, except we see maybe what look like insect legs, Right. So we see him from behind as he opens his coat, and then they're being shown something, and it seems like it's his guts coming out or insect legs coming out or something like that. But of course, it is very evocative of him being a flasher and flashing genitalia.
4:26 Erin: I was too innocent to get that. That's really good.
4:30 Wes: So it's a very good depiction of his perversity, you know, But I. It's pretty clear just with him, what he's trying to do with Barbara. Right. And the house and all that stuff. The danger, at a surface level, the danger in the film, is that Lydia will end up with him, like, literally as a husband, but that the deeper level, the psychological danger, is that she will end up with him in the sense of end up in that psychological position, let's say, or maybe in that social position in real life.
5:00 Erin: That was another thing I really didn't remember about the film is how much of the latter part of the film is driven by Barbara and how much of Barbara's motivation is protecting Lydia from Beetlejuice. That moment when he flashes them. It's sort of parallel to when Barbara and Adam are wearing the sheets. And Lydia's like, what do you got under there? Is it like Night of the Living Dead under there? Are you all like pussy and full of blood or whatever? She says. And what I love about them is they're so innocent that they've never even seen Night of the Living Dead, which is itself kind of indicative of the fact that they're people from the 50s or something. They're from an earlier era, a more innocent era. But, you know, what's underneath is normies. Like, maybe that's the scariest thing of all, is to just be normal.
5:42 Wes: Yeah. There's the great scene where Otho is going into the closet. Him and Delia are going to the closet, and Barbara's hanging there to try to scare them. And then they react to that with a fright that turns out to be. What they're frightened of is the bad style and the lack of closet space.
5:58 Erin: That's right. That's right.
6:01 Wes: Otho says, we just have to pray the other closets are bigger than. Delia says, my God, we just have to pray the other closets are bigger than this one. Yes, look. And then he pushes Barbara aside, Right. As if she's not. As if it's just a piece of clothing, and then gets out a tuxedo. Undress and says, ozzie and Harriet. What happened to these people?
6:21 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. The Ozzie and Harriet is great for that. Later, they're wearing bedsheets to be indicative of their wit and thinks that they're more like Tracy and Hepburn. But Ozzie and Harriet is right on the money.
6:34 Wes: They're ironic ghosts.
6:36 Erin: Yeah, they have to be. Nobody can be that boring. But that contrast of, you know, what's underneath, I think highlights something that you said, which is this idea that perversity is infantile or even that it's. That it's maybe regressed somehow. Betelgeuse and Adam and Barbara are kind of laminated to each other. The couple, by virtue of them not having. They're not regressed, but they haven't quite progressed. You know, they're like children. And Betelgeuse is having regressed into something quite childlike and infantile.
7:08 Wes: Yeah, they represent the innocent side of the infantile, and he represents the sexual and aggressive side.
7:14 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And something about. Something about battling him and getting to the other side of that direction. You know, it's as though, as you're pointing out, they're worried about that possibility for Lydia, but they are also people in a precarious state because of their position. But Also kind of mentally, as being childlike, are perhaps also threatened by, or maybe even more profoundly threatened by Beetlejuice than Lydia is.
7:40 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. So there's a kind of danger inherent in sublimation. Tragically enough, sublimation should be part and parcel of maturation and a way of channeling sex and aggression in constructive ways. But the danger in it. So we talked about this a bit. Or no, I guess we didn't do the Tempest. Did we do the Tempest together?
8:03 Erin: No, I don't think so.
8:04 Wes: That was a prequel to subtext. But in the Tempest, the Danger for Prospero. Right. So in a way, Prospero is like the playwright. He kind of has control over the characters in the play and the dangers that he'll take revenge on them, which would be part and parcel of a tragedy, but it turns out not to be a tragedy. It's kind of a trap, or it's a tragedy and a comedy. It's a romance. He spares them. He spares all of his enemies. Likewise, the temptation for the artist, or at least the playwright, is to over control the characters to the point that they're actually lifeless, that they don't have any vitality, and they don't rise to the level of the aesthetic or a good effective representation.
Right? So, for instance, if you had a political opinion of one sort or another, and you had to make your readers or your watchers know that you disapproved of Richard iii, you couldn't really do justice to him as a villain. So in a way, one has to kind of become a bit amoral or agnostic in that mode. And so I bring this up because it's very similar to the Danger for Adam with a Model, right? When you're a kid, you're playing with dolls and action figures and maybe building things out of blocks and playing with dollhouses, and you're fantasizing and you're creating these narratives.
You're very much doing the type of thing that, as an adult, may become more organized, right, into poetry and novels and writing and other forms of creative expression, but they can be contaminated if the fantasy isn't mournful enough. And what I mean by that is that Prospero has to mourn the wrongs that have been done to him by his enemies and get over it. And that way he can get his daughter married. And likewise, one, to get your play done and to make it something good, you kind of have to mourn and let go of some of the control of your characters.
Let them come to life and be themselves. So what I'm trying to say here is there's something inherently positive about Adam having that model and having an aesthetic outlet, having an outlet in play. But there's also a danger in that. And the danger is that it could become an outlet for the perverse or an outlet for. Right. In Delia's case, the danger which has come to pass is that it's all about winning praise and acclaim and attention and recognition from other people. In other words, it gets submerged by the impulse for status and recognition.
And so I think that's another, as you're pointing out. Right. Beetlejuice doesn't just represent a danger to, like a psychological danger to Lydia, to an adolescent growing up in the sense of the possibility of going down a more perverse path. But he represents it for the Maitlands in their attempt to remain innocent and loving and childlike in their relation to play, for which there are many, many positive things to said. But apparently something else has to happen there. And again, Betelgeuse represents that danger and he's in the model. So it's coming from within the aesthetic itself.
The danger is inherent to it, even though the aesthetic arguably is a way out. A way out that has its own pitfalls.
11:28 Erin: Yeah, that really helps me understand his role. I think there's an interesting moment where Beetlejuice takes on Adam's clothing. He dresses in Adam's clothes. I can't remember in what context that was or why he had done that, but he mirrors Adam.
11:42 Wes: Yeah, it's like a black checkered button down shirt and khakis or something like that. Except that Beetlejuice has the belly coming out.
11:54 Erin: Right, right.
11:55 Wes: Alec Baldwin, of course, does not. Yeah, I forget that context too, that
11:59 Erin: Alec Baldwin doesn't have the belly.
12:00 Wes: Yeah, I'll give him a break. He's in the 60s.
12:02 Erin: Oh, I know, I'm just teasing. I, right off the jump, flirting with Barbara, he puts himself in the position of, you know, a prospective mate to Barbara, you know, asking. Asking Adam if, you know, a replacement for Adam. In other words, asking Adam if, you know, if he has a chance, if they were going to break up or something. So he's kind of putting himself in Adam's shoes. And if we're to go with this idea of the whole death plot, basically everything after minute eight in the movie or whatever, of being a kind of an extended dream sequence, Beetlejuice is kind of like Adam's shadow self in that this might be some sort of expression of like every inner impediment to maturation and being a father or whatever.
Like, almost like he's too young for this, but almost like Beetlejuice is like an expression of Adam's shadow self that's having a midlife crisis or something, right? With the girls and the being disgusting and being kind of. Kind of sleazy and gross, and even the car and the, you know, it's all kind of there. I think it's. Insofar as we've identified maybe a link between Betelgeuse and Delia, I think this helps to kind of just further extend that, because you've already identified a link between Adam and Delia, and so that would make sense that there's alignment there.
And Barbara is the one who's more interested in stopping Betelgeuse or more active in stopping him up to a certain point, and more interested in the projection of Lydia, you know, beyond normal, kind of like maternal instincts that she seems to already be displaying.
13:26 Wes: So she's the one who says, home, home, home. The thing that she failed to say right before they went off the bridge. But to get them out of the model, when Betelgeuse is basically harassing them, she'll say, you know, I'm not staying here another minute. Even though I think Adam is. Well, no, he's ready to go too, actually, at that point. But in general, he seems more keen on Betelgeuse's help, if I remember correctly. But, yeah, she says, hum, hum, home, and gets them. Teleports them back out of the model.
13:52 Erin: Obviously, Betelgeuse is also aligned with their state and that he's trapped in the model until they release him. Or he's trapped. Is it in the model? I mean, it's very. The physics of this don't make a lot of sense. I mean, he's also in the tv. He's somehow sending them flyers in the handbook, Right?
14:11 Wes: And then the door to the afterlife, or the netherworld, whatever you want to call it. Right? It's something they can draw on chalk on the wall. And it seems as if that's where Betelgeuse is. Or is he. I mean, is he out of there? You know, so it's unclear. But is he somehow stuck in the model? Or is the model just a portal into some area of that world? It's unclear to me.
14:35 Erin: I just have to say that when I was little, it seemed like Beetlejuice just lived in everybody's consciousness for so long. I mean, I remember in the 90s, like mid-90s, people going as Beetlejuice for Halloween all the time. And it, like being around and. But I wasn't allowed to watch it for the longest time because I guess my mom thought it was too scary or too disgusting or something.
14:54 Wes: Well, as Barbara said, I'm not exposing that little girl to that pervert down there.
14:58 Erin: There you go. There you go.
15:00 Wes: Yeah.
15:01 Erin: And so I was at a friend's house at a party in their garage that had, like, cement walls. And they tried to draw this door on the wall. And, like, they were all making. It was a Beetlejuice thing that they were trying to go into the afterlife by doing the chalk drawing of the door. And I had no idea what they were talking about. And that revealed that I hadn't even seen Beetlejuice and I was such a loser.
15:25 Wes: No, that sounds very traumatic.
15:30 Erin: No, it was. It was fine. I was just a little embarrassed.
15:34 Wes: Did that make you. Yeah, did that make you cool or a loser?
15:37 Erin: No, it was because it was around and it was. And, like, you know, there was a animated series and everything. So, like, I. I knew a lot about the movie without ever having seen the movie, as in that way that you do when you're a kid where, you know, you've just. You pick up everything through some kind of weird context clue or ask people, like, tell me about that so I can pretend that I know more about this, to seem cooler than I am, since it's forbidden, so it's obviously cool. But that was when it was revealed that I hadn't seen it and I hadn't known what they were talking about anyway, so kids were drawing. I just have to say I can testify to the fact that this was an attractive mode of entry for kids.
16:20 Wes: But, no, you've got me asking this question of where is he exactly? I guess he is in the model. I mean, his grave as down in the model. I don't know.
16:28 Erin: Yeah. And they literally. They have to dig to get to him. He's buried in there. Yeah.
16:33 Wes: Yeah.
16:33 Erin: Deep in the subconscious.
16:34 Wes: Yeah. What happens after he leaves? Right. To get out into the real world, he has to marry Lydia. I don't know. Yeah. It's a bit confusing, but.
16:44 Erin: And why does he have so many rules applied to him when he seems to be a guy without rules, who.
16:49 Wes: Yeah, it's a weird. Is this a punishment of some sort? But, yeah, he stands in some contrary contrast to the afterlife itself, to that netherworld itself that Barbara and Adam go into, which is portrayed as being this bureaucracy, which is a very interesting kind of irony. Right. So Juno is Their caseworker. I mean, it kind of feels more like maybe a DMV in the beginning. Right. And there's this huge line and these cranky tellers, I want to call them, but that's not the right word. People at the windows, you know, who are supposed to help you.
17:26 Erin: Yeah.
17:27 Wes: And you know, you take a number and the number is ridiculously large and the wait time is going to be ridiculously large. But I guess more apt is a comparison to a welfare or social services office because they need help and they need a caseworker. To do what? Figure out one of the things of course they have to do is figure out how to get the deetses out. And Juno gives them advice on that. But if it weren't for that problem, what is it exactly that they need help doing? And why are they stuck in the house for 125 years? As I suppose there's lots of questions, but I find it interesting that. So in a way, right. It's not heaven and it's not hell. And that's something that Barbara, I think, says, or maybe it's Adam. But when they're reading this book, the
18:15 Erin: Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
18:17 Wes: Handbook for the Recently Deceased. Yeah. One of them says, I don't see anything at all, anything about heaven or hell. And this netherworld comes across as a kind of possibly a purgatory. Right. And there's an element of punishment in it. And the element of punishment is just this kind of ordinary punishment to which we are regularly subjected in life, which is to have to deal with bureaucratic red tape and inefficiency. So what is that about?
18:45 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And the workers are all suicides, right?
18:48 Wes: Right.
18:49 Erin: They're civil servants in the afterlife, as Otho talks about. And I thought about that, that connection to this idea of bureaucracy. And the only word that I could think of to kind of bridge that gap is self defeating. There's something self defeating about the process of dealing with a bureaucracy and that. That somehow linked up with this idea of suicide and of defeating oneself. The bureaucracy is strange one, as a filmic space, as a set piece, it's so highly colored and so imaginative. I mean the people literally are highly colored in the waiting room and stuff.
And they're also highly representational. I mean, they're literally representing the, the manner of their death in their bodies. Evidently nobody just dies of old age in this, in this waiting room. And so it's supposed to be boring, but then like the very expression and representation of this boring place is so not Boring that, you know, one has to remind oneself that this is a bureaucracy because it's so funny and because it's so, you know, so many interesting things happen there. So that is something, like, kind of strange about this. It made me think about again, just about, like, elements of film and why certain things work on film and other things don't.
Like creative process. Watching someone. You know, we've talked about this before. Watching someone create or write or sit in a room and read and study and go through the work of building oneself as a person in an interior way that doesn't ever come across on film well. But for some reason, like, bureaucracy is super great thing to represent on film. It's visually very interesting, whether it's the apartment, you know, like the desks arranged to the vanishing point in the big room, or whether it's boring and highly symmetrical or it's wild.
20:29 Wes: I was thinking of Brazil, too. Dystopian representation of bureaucracy.
20:34 Erin: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Because there's sort of different modes of it. It reminds me of Alien vs 2001, where you have the dichotomy between clean space and dirty space or something. You know, like lived in space versus the clean, pristine. You know, I guess one would be utopian and one would be dystopian to a certain extent, at least visually. So there's the clean bureaucracy, where everything is perfectly ordered and vis. It looks very satisfying because everything is usually extremely symmetrical. And sometimes that can be indicative, of course. Right. Of a dark underbelly. But then there's the paper stacked everywhere. Super messy bureaucracy in which, like, you get lost in the shuffle easily and everything is. Everybody's incompetent and nobody knows what's going on. Both of those looks, I think, work really well on screen for different reasons.
21:20 Wes: Yeah.
21:20 Erin: I'm sort of getting away from your question, but I think I'm trying to see if I can answer it aesthetically as a way to answer it symbolically in the film. I think you're right to point out that this is something that we have to deal with in life. This is just another way of talking about life. Like this idea of the purgation that they have to go through. It's sort of implied what happens after that. There's that room of lost souls which they then become during the exorcism at the end of the movie. So maybe that's like death. Death. That's. I think the janitor calls it death after death. Yeah.
21:52 Wes: Or the death for the dead.
21:54 Erin: Death for the dead. That seems really far out there. And Weird, but something about the process of having to live in the house is definitely designed to teach the Maitland some kind of lesson. What does bureaucracy teach? Well, if it's not totally self defeating, then it might teach you, at best case scenario, it might teach you patience.
22:11 Wes: Yeah, I was giving some thought to what it is that bureaucracies generally do in real life. And I think my conclusion was that they are often about minting is the word that came to mind. They're legitimating. So whether it's actions or people. Right. So you have to get a driver's license, just thinking of the DMV in order to drive, or a license to make an addition to your home. Or if school itself, which involves going to school, involves a lot of bureaucratic elements, including getting grades and transcripts and just the application process, who gets in, who doesn't, getting licenses to do things, professional licenses, paying taxes, which is about ensuring that people are contributing towards the public good.
There are lots of ways in which bureaucracy is about determining where people stand in society and who it is, who's allowed to do what, and including who it is, you know, who's eligible for certain services, including this kind of welfare service that Juno is providing. And then I like your distinction between clean versus dirty bureaucracy, because you mentioned there being kind of a dark, possible dark side to clean bureaucracy. And the dark side, I think is the element of control. Right. So you could have a very efficient, I don't want to say German, I guess I did want to say German.
You could have a very efficient totalitarian in bureaucracy that is a very effective means of controlling people. So that's one danger. And then one of the other dangers is that the bureaucracy is inefficient and papers are stacked up, so you have to wait forever. And maybe you have to go back to the DMV three times because you forgot something or however all that works. So it's very frustrating. Or just in governmental bureaucracies, nothing gets done and change is so difficult and slow. I think there's some system related to traffic, air traffic control, for instance, which is like a program written in the 70s or something.
And they can't update that software because that's just the way the government works. It doesn't move that quickly. So we are punished by this. Right. So what does purgatory do? We were thinking in terms of Christianity and Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. Purgatory, it's punishment, but also it's like a licensing process where you earn the right to go to heaven. Right. You have to change, you have to acquire the skills. It's like going to med school or something. But in this case, instead of learning how to do surgery, your character has to change before you are eligible to move on to the next phase of life.
So I guess that's the connection I'm trying to make between purgatorial minting, let's say, between. Or you could even call it therapeutic. What happens in purgatory if punishment is supposed to change you? Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but that minting process is the connection I'm making to bureaucracy and why it might be a good way to represent purgatory.
25:20 Erin: The leader, the head of the division, or whatever it is. Juno. There's an interesting kind of contrast, I think, between. Well, I suppose if you make an appointment, you don't have to wait in that long queue. So maybe there's a workaround.
25:35 Wes: Right. If they had read the book.
25:36 Erin: If they'd read the. Yeah, exactly. You probably didn't even read the whole book yet. But certain messy qualities of the bureaucracy do kind of butt up against Juno's authority and her kind of. I mean, I'm a huge Sylvia Sidney fan, so the, you know, the fact that she. The fact that this great old Hollywood actress is at the core of this bureaucracy, it's like, it can't be all that. You know, she's. She's very good at what she does. She seems very competent. If the clean bureaucracy has the rotten thing underneath, this is like the dirty bureaucracy that actually has, like, the person who's actually trying to help, you know, just dealing with a bunch of incompetence all around her and ghosts that won't read their damn handbooks or what she represents.
Maybe she doesn't have to represent anything but what she is. I mean, she's Juno, so she's not. So the film is kind of sidestepping the idea of a biblical form of higher power with the Roman name. But thinking about the authority that she brings.
26:31 Wes: Well, she's God's wife, right?
26:33 Erin: Yeah.
26:33 Wes: Juno is Hera, right?
26:35 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the authority that she brings is in. Old Hollywood actress who. I mean, I wonder what her reaction was to seeing this script and if she had to be convinced to do this. I didn't look this up.
26:46 Wes: Apparently, a lot of people had a. Yeah, like, what the hell is this reaction?
26:49 Erin: Right, right. I can't imagine her. On the one hand, extreme competence, it seems, and on the other hand, her inability to control Beetlejuice, her. All of. All of these things that Maybe represent the kind of dichotomy inherent in the biblical God too.
27:05 Wes: Right.
27:06 Erin: Like, everything's going well, but then you have this one real pain in the ass underling who upends everything. You know, maybe there's some of that in the Bible as well, but. Yeah. And like, she doesn't seem to impress upon them as strongly as she should the danger of inviting Betelgeuse in.
27:26 Wes: And in fact, she's the only reason why they know how to pronounce his name.
27:29 Erin: Oh, that's right. Yeah. We've talked about this before. The Felix culpa, the fortunate fall, the idea that perhaps this whole thing is part of the divine plan. Anyway, obviously Beetlejuice ends up having a positive effect on the whole affair. I just really like Juno, but I love her scenes.
27:45 Wes: Yeah, she's great. She really is. If it's necessary to have a caseworker, that would be the one. Curmudgeonly feisty and like five feet tall.
27:55 Erin: Yeah.
27:56 Wes: Old and presumably wise, but not so wise as to not be feisty and curmudgeonly.
28:03 Erin: Right.
28:03 Wes: I was thinking too, in a way that something about bureaucracy is evocative of the mindlessness of the adult world. And I think to which the adolescent is somehow responding with their protest. And by mindlessness, I mean it starts out with good intentions and a system of values. Right? And that's something, as we mature, we incorporate. But they tend to take on a life of their own and to be bigger than any one person and to be difficult to change even when they become detrimental. And it's a source of political conflict all the time. Right. So business regulations are there to protect the public good, but if they get to the point where.
Or zoning regulations, let's say, if they get to the point where you can no longer start a new business without some incredible amount of red tape and jumping through certain hoops, or the point where you can't build houses anymore, there's a housing shortage in this country, then one wants to point to the regulations and say, well, this has gone too far. So the bureaucracy, it's kind of representative at an individual level of inhibition. We want to make sure we're not just acting impulsively and destroying the environment or doing other bad things.
But we don't want to be so inhibited that we don't act altogether. We want to be in control of our values and the way we're executing them. The way it might look to an adolescent. Right. Is I have parents preaching to me about don't do drugs and have Sex or blah, blah, whatever parent. Who knows? Is that even going on anymore? I don't know that parents are preaching like that anymore. But whatever values that parents are trying to instill in children that they don't themselves follow or maybe that in some ways are ill considered, it looks like a form of mindlessness.
It looks like some sort of system is running roughshod over people and overriding their critical faculties and making them inflexible. So I think in a way that's apt because I think you mentioned if the Maitlands are sort of stuck in an Edenic and childish world, it's very apt that they would have to confront. Right. The problem with leaving home is that you have to confront all this bs, all this adult stuff and the netherworld, the afterlife is very much a caricature of that of adult pain in the ass stuff. I don't know. Does that make sense?
30:33 Erin: That's great. Yeah, it does. And I think if we were to triangulate this and say there's home and then there's like the dmv, maybe another point on the triangle would be like the carnival. You know, I'm thinking of the carnival aspect that Betelgeuse brings. The explicitly carnival aspect he brings at the end where he has the carousel on his head. Hat. I don't know what's going on there. And the strength game that he uses to eject the.
30:58 Wes: Exactly.
30:59 Erin: And also the idea that maybe those two things are kind of twinned together as well. Because he's, of course, very associative. Right. So I think the reason why he ends up looking like a carnival is because of Charles's scheme as a developer to turn the whole town into an amusement park. And I think there was already. I think, as I said, maybe in the last episode, that there's already something kind of amusement park y about the Maitlands last name, as though the family home is like their own private amusement park where they just have each other. And how maybe slightly sick and perverse that is, but I'm just kidding. Sort of. It's so normie. It's so sick. I took what, Beetlejuice's expressions of carnival carniness or Carnival. Carnival, whatever. Carnivalesque. I took all of that to be riffing off of the father's amusement park pitch, since it happens in the middle of the pitch.
31:53 Wes: Right.
31:54 Erin: And I think that the father, by being a condo developer. So someone who's like, trying to make the world look more like the. I've been watching Severance. Have you seen Severance?
32:06 Wes: Yeah. I really like that. Is the new season out yet? It's just one season.
32:10 Erin: Not yet, but I've been just watching the. I finally got Apple tv. Plus I had watched the first two episodes with someone who had a subscription ages ago. And now I'm like, okay, I have to get serious about this. I'm finally.
32:22 Wes: I really like it.
32:23 Erin: Yeah. But you know what I'm talking about with the look of like the condo development as being very similar and very kind of dystopian to. Don't say anything past the first episode. Cause that's all I remember. But you know what I mean? Like that kind of dystopian look to the condo complex. And any kind of aerial view. And maybe this is related to the model, right. Like any kind of aerial view of the world. The way that things have been developed by these developers, by the sort of bureaucratic unseen mind that determines how people live. And zoning and various other things.
Right. Can look quite dystopian from above. So we get these aerial shots in severance of the condo complex looking very dystopian. And of course, the building where he works, Lumon, I think, looking very dystopian. So the fact that Charles is a condo developer is suggestive to me of like, you know, fitting as many people in as possible, but in like, agreeable ways of trying to make it so that you could zone for his. Right. That's heavily bureaucratic dwelling places. It's sort of the opposite of the Victorian that he wants to live in to escape everything.
Like, he's happy to put everybody in their little skinner boxes while he goes to this huge house in the middle of nowhere and gets to escape people. Meanwhile, he's shoveling them in and trying to make everything probably with little ets like kitchenette and all these. Right. Like in order to fit as many people in as possible to make as most as much profit as possible. And the fact that he then wants to turn the town into an amusement park is almost like the marriage, I'm trying to say, of the sort of carnival with the bureaucratic.
33:53 Wes: Well, it's when he can't sell what's his face Gulag. What's the character's name?
33:57 Erin: Oh, Maxie.
33:58 Wes: Yeah. He can't sell Maxi on the condos, but after they find out the ghosts are in the house, he can sell them on this new idea, the amusement park. Yeah, go ahead.
34:07 Erin: Yeah. No, and maybe I'm just. Maybe that's kind of connecting me back to this idea of the waiting room and of the fact that this bureaucratic place is so great because everybody is representing their manner of death. It's so almost like they're avant garde art pieces, you know? So that waiting room itself is kind of blending the carnival and the bureaucratic.
34:26 Wes: Yeah. From the audience's perspective, it's more like a carnival.
34:29 Erin: Right.
34:30 Wes: Yeah.
34:30 Erin: Carnival of death.
34:32 Wes: Yeah. Internal to the story. It's bureaucracy, but yeah. All right. Should we talk about the Day O scene?
34:40 Erin: Yes. I've had that in my head musical for Deos and Dayos now. Especially because I saw Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice in theaters.
34:49 Wes: I love it. What'd you think of that?
34:50 Erin: I loved it. I thought it was so great.
34:53 Wes: It's great.
34:54 Erin: Yeah. And it was right up to the line of what I could take in terms of disgustingness. Actually crossed it a couple times. But it's. But it was perfect. It was like a. It was. It was just enough to really upset me in a. In a fun way.
35:10 Wes: Right. So I guess the premise of this is that Adam and Barbara have been trying and failing to scare off the Deetzes. And at a certain point, they had been ready to give up and maybe use Betelgeuse. Well, after their first visit to the netherworld and meeting Juno, I think they meet Lydia and ask for her help. And then Lydia is trying to convince Delia of that there are ghosts in the attic, but Delia is preparing for this dinner party. Then there's the scene where they're pulled into the model with Betelgeuse and they're disturbed by them. They come out, and so they're not going to use Betelgeuse.
And then Barbara has an idea of how they can scare. So a new idea for scaring the Deetzes themselves, which incorporates Adam's interest in calypso music. And it's fun and playful and kind of still captures some of their innocence, but it does possess the guests at the. Takes control of their bodies. Right. I mean, it starts with Delia involuntarily starting to sing, and then everyone's dancing. Right. And they're being possessed. And it may be the scariest thing that happens is the hands come out of the shrimp, become hands. Is that what happens?
The shrimp cocktail becomes hands that grab everyone's faces, but they're still in the realm of something that's. You would think it would be effective, actually, but it turns out to be yet another ineffective attempt at being scary for the Maitlands.
36:49 Erin: They're too sophisticated, or maybe they're too miserly or something. They immediately see it as something that can be taken advantage of for entertainment purposes. Yeah. They immediately take it to be something they can capitalize on and are delighted by. Or it's like a performance art piece that they can use these ghosts to force them to sing. Yeah. There's something about the fact that this is the calypso song. So it was the song that Adam was listening to at the beginning of the movie, one of them. It's kind of a novelty song. And so there's something like performatively kitschy about it, probably for the Dietzes, where, like, the song works really well because of the absurdity of the song.
You know, like, if they were. If they were designing this as a performance art. Art piece, it pretty much checks all the boxes of things that might appeal to them, I think. Yeah. I mean, do you know anything about why they chose this particular song? Or. Because I don't know anything about the making of the film or anything like that that. Was there a reason behind it?
37:46 Wes: I don't know anything about that. But I did give some thought to it and looked up calypso music. And I don't know if it's a bridge too far. I mean, I think it's very likely the writers weren't thinking all that carefully about this, but. Right. So the song in question is the Banana Boat song sung by Harry Belafonte, which I think is a Jamaican song. The calypso music originated in the Caribbean and has slave origins in slave work songs. I think at a certain point it became a vehicle of protest and free speech concealed underneath kind of bright and happy sounding songs. So, for instance, rum and Coca Cola, which the Andrews Sisters appropriated.
38:28 Erin: Okay. Hey, now. I used to love singing that song. It was very problematic of me as a 5 year old.
38:36 Wes: I'm all for appropriation. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it. But I mean, it's originally a song that's a commentary on. On the explosion of prostitution near American military bases in Trinidad. So you get the idea. There's an element of protest. Right. And often it's protest against authoritarian colonial rule. So it's less obvious in the Banana Boat song, which is just about counting up the number of bananas at the end of the day to get wages. But it's a long, grueling.
39:06 Erin: Yeah, I work all night and I work all day. Daylight. Yeah. There are elements of it in there, I think.
39:12 Wes: Yeah. If we wanted to be very speculative, we could associate adolescent protest with that type of protest. Except that there's a very happy shiny veneer to this It's. The protest is concealed underneath it, which I think is part of why someone like Adam would be attracted to it. You also might associate it with travel, which is, you know, again, I'm thinking of Adam as the one having the travel bug and wanting to go to Jamaica, literally to go down there. So he obviously has a thing for. For Jamaica. But there's an element of travel that one can read in a sinister way.
Right. So the ugly American or someone being in the legacy of colonialism and someone being in that mode going around getting served by people. And the colonialist, of course, is a lot like the obtuse adult and unjust adult against which the adolescent is also protesting. So in other words, calypso is like Adam's version of goth, let's say, except that it. Right. Aesthetically, it's as far from it as could possibly be.
40:17 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about the mere fact that this was a 50s fad. And I think the fact that it was probably predominantly listened to by white audiences too, I think kind of fits into what you were saying. But also just okay with it being the Banana Boat song with the Edenic climate of the Caribbean. You know, maybe there's something too that calls out to that kind of.
40:36 Wes: Good point. Really good point. We can't do justice to what a wonderful scene that is by describing it. That scene really makes the whole movie with them dancing around and then Lydia kind of standing in a corner looking very delighted by it. And you can imagine those are very. Just Winona Ryder's very natural reactions to what's going on. Apparently it was somewhat improvised. I don't know how that's possible, but that's what I heard.
41:00 Erin: Wow. I love the looks on their faces of. You know, they really give the effect of not being in control of their bodies, which is great. And I love at the end, when they do jump in the line and the football players appear behind her and it's all like a bunch of chorus boys or something. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's great to get the reappearance of the ghostly. And that doesn't make any sense either. The fact that they're shown as being insubstantial types of ghosts that you could put your hand through or whatever, versus the substantial ghosts that Adam and Barbara are. But it's best not to think too hard about that. Anyway, it's a cute ending. And the levitation and using the possession as an after school reward for the goth girl is pretty funny.
41:50 Wes: Yeah. And the way it Ends, you know, Lydia comes back from school looking very happy and she's got friends and says goodbye to her friends and bikes home. And she's obviously a different person to some extent. Her mournful. I want to use the word lugubrious. Use that sat word. It's got to be able to use it at some point in your life. That mournful quality that she has has
42:15 Erin: transformed a bit now that she lives in a polycule. Everything's turned around for her. Polyamorous relationship really works out.
42:24 Wes: She's being parented by. I don't know if death is the word, but by these representatives of death. And I guess that frees her from the morbid preoccupation with it. I don't know what else to say about it. But if calypso is for Adam, it's his version of goth. Right. The shiny, happy version you could see. And if it's a version of protest in line with adolescent protest, you could see her as moving forward to some maybe more mature form that doesn't completely give up the protest element, but is a little bit more joyful.
42:58 Erin: Yeah. And the thing that she was trying to escape the house with is now the thing that she lives with. So she can't, you know, it's become, like, integrated into normal part of her life. So she can't very well desire refuge as a form of rebellion from something that now is like telling her to do her homework. I think before, there was a lot of ammunition in torturing Delia and Charles with the Goth. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they just. Maybe they completely ignored her. But there's usually an impulse in the goth look to try and deliberately goad your parents into, like, torturing them.
43:30 Wes: Yeah. Delia accuses Lydia of being miserable everywhere. You're miserable whether you're in the city or in the country.
43:36 Erin: Right, Right.
43:37 Wes: Charles is miserable in the city and Delia is miserable in the country, but Lydia is miserable in both places.
43:43 Erin: Right.
43:43 Wes: So we are queued in to the fact, the idea that she's really unhappy.
43:47 Erin: Right. Not just that, but that you goad your parents by dressing in this way, almost like to embarrass them. Yeah. And this way. It's impossible to embarrass your parents by being a Goth when your parents are dead and they're like the ultimate Goths, in a way. Yeah. So that kind of solves itself by being integrated into her own family. It's as though the whole family decided to become Goths.
44:07 Wes: Yeah. I think this concept of the integration of death is really Important because I was making the earlier association between denial of death and denial of sexuality and denial of instinctuality more generally and aggression. And that denial is strongly, I think, associated with the narcissism of someone like Delia and the status orientedness of someone like Delia, which is one of the other dates. Dangerous perversity is one danger, but narcissism of the Delia sort is another sort of danger. And the integration of death is a way of avoiding that. And it's mourning and it's part of the maturation process.
44:43 Erin: Is Delia okay in the end? Like, do we think she's gotten. She's become a better person now that she's successful or what's the deal with Delia?
44:51 Wes: Yeah, I think. Well, everyone's. Yeah. Given a bit of a happy ending, I think. Are we only get a hint? Right.
44:58 Erin: Because I like her in the sequel. I like the fact that she is just. Yes, she's now just become a nice person and it's fine. I mean, a dramatic person.
45:05 Wes: But yeah, she's still kind of problematic in the sequel, but yeah, but she's like, loving. She's not as horrible.
45:12 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. It's really hard for me to tell at this point. I mean, it's. It's Catherine.
45:17 Wes: You can't tone her down too much because she's like her hilariousness and yeah, she's a big part of what makes the movie great. So you would not want to see that toned down too much.
45:27 Erin: I would want to see her just the way she is. Don't go change. And Delia and Catherine o'.
45:32 Wes: Hara. I mean, it just makes me want to see every movie that Catherine o' Hara is in.
45:35 Erin: Oh, yeah, she's fantastic.
45:37 Wes: Yeah, Just love her. Okay, I enjoyed that. Thank you.
45:41 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook Subtext Podcast and on Twitter Njoy Subtext.
The Aesthetics of Death in “Beetlejuice” (1988)
Dec 02, 2024
Adam and Barbara Maitland are dead, but their troubles have just begun. The farmhouse decor of their home is under threat from the pretentious modernism of Delia Deetze, and her plan to remake it in her own image could turn their post-life purgatory into earthbound hell. Solving this problem leaves them with an impossible choice between figuring out how to navigate an intractable netherworld bureaucracy, or seeking the help of a renegade demon whose perverse remedies are worse than what they’re supposed to cure. Their way out of this impasse involves teaming up with Delia’s step-daughter Lydia, whose goth style seems to lend itself to communicating with the dead. Wes and Erin discuss “Beetlejuice,” and what its battle royale between conflicting aesthetic sensibilities—rustic, gothic, and avant-garde—has to say about the connections between love, mortality, and the many pitfalls of growing up.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Adam and Barbara Maitland are dead, but their troubles have just begun. The farmhouse decor of their home is under threat from the pretentious modernism of Delia Deetz, and her plan to remake it in her own image could turn their post life purgatory into earthbound hell. Solving this problem leaves them with an impossible choice between figuring out how to navigate an intractable netherworld bureaucracy or seeking the help of a renegade demon whose perverse remedies are worse than what they're supposed to cure their way out of. This impasse involves teaming up with Delia's stepdaughter, Lydia, whose Goth style seems to lend itself to communicating with the dead.
Today we discuss Beetlejuice and what its battle royale between conflicting aesthetic sensibilities, rustic gothic and avant garde, has to say about the connections between love, mortality, and the many pitfalls of growing up. This is Wes Alwan.
1:25 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:31 Wes: So, Erin, tell me about your goth phase in high school.
1:35 Erin: Ah, it was short.
1:38 Wes: So short as to be non existent and infinitesimal.
1:41 Erin: Almost couldn't detect it.
1:43 Wes: Yeah, you wore black. All black that one day.
1:45 Erin: And then I'm still in a goth phase. That's all I do is wear black. Now, I think I told you that I have a friend who calls me the Italian Widow. That is like, you know, like the idea of, like a person who is just always in mourning for the rest of their lives, always wearing black. But no, I'm afraid I was never a Goth.
2:00 Wes: I was never a Goth. I was never cool enough to be a Goth. Which tells you a lot.
2:05 Erin: Well, that was back when it was.
2:07 Wes: That would have been leveling up for me.
2:09 Erin: Oh, oh, I see. I see.
2:11 Wes: I do have. We'll just describe them as friends and. Or family to make sure we don't incriminate anyone, identify them. I did have relatives, more or less distant relatives, who were goths. And I did not quite understand the psychology of that or what it was trying to communicate.
2:28 Erin: I think it was trying to communicate that they're Goths. No, but they. Yeah. What is it trying to communicate? That they're sad and they're deeper than the rest of us, and they're closer to the sense of their own mortality. There you go.
2:41 Wes: Yeah, I thought.
2:42 Erin: Yeah.
2:42 Wes: And of course, Winona Ryder does it very well and charmingly in this movie. I'm not sure it's always so charming in real life, but I think that's right.
2:53 Erin: She makes it cool. She makes it cool.
2:55 Wes: She does. Yeah. I thought about. Okay, so what is the goth aesthetic trying to communicate? What's the point of it? And I think you just got at it. Some people who are kind of leaning into the concept of adolescent depression, because everyone's at least kind of depressed sometimes at that point and making an aesthetic of it. And then also I see it as a form of adolescent protest against adult hypocrisy. It lends itself well to that in the sense that adulthood involves a lot of denial and deception. So even denial of death, denial of sexuality, at least at the level of adults are asking, making ethical demands on adolescents regarding sexuality that they probably, at one time or another, have not lived up to themselves.
So that's what I mean by hypocrisy. It's kind of an effective aesthetic for adolescent protest, leaning into, as you put it, acknowledging one's own mortality. Because whether you think of it as adults or society in general, part of the deception in that involves people behaving manically and narcissistically in ways that are meant to sort of fend off the concept of death, to make people feel like they're going to be immortal or have some other feeling that avoids death.
4:10 Erin: Yeah. You're making me realize that Adam and Barbara's, especially Barbara's attraction to Lydia as a kind of a daughter figure is a strange one, because Lydia is a sort of. She's anti Adam and Barbara. She's the opposite of what they would ordinarily represent if they weren't dead. But because they're dead, it unites them in a strange kind of way. Right. But in life, Adam and Barbara were quite. And in death, they're quite square. They would not be the type to have a goth. Or maybe they would be the type to have a goth daughter who sort of revenge against their aggressive normalcy or whatever it is that they are.
4:44 Wes: I was talking to my brother about this, and he used the word wholesome.
4:47 Erin: Yes. Yeah, they are aggressively wholesome.
4:49 Wes: First of all, how do you remember the movie so well? And he's like, I've seen it a million times with my kids, so. And it's a word that I hadn't thought Written down. I was using the word kind of homely because I associate them at least, especially Barbara, with this idea of wanting to stay home and make a home and have this kind of homely rural aesthetic. Which is interesting in light of the fact that the major conflict in the movie in a way, is aesthetic. Right. Why do the Maitlands care about the Deetses moving in? Because Delia is going to transform the house into some kind of modernist avant garde monstrosity and they're going to be stuck living in that for 150 years, apparently.
5:31 Erin: I thought it was only 125. Okay, yeah, yeah, discount rate. That conflict really fascinated me. And the fact that the movie begins with the concept of a staycation, I think immediately puts Adam and Barbara into a position where they're going to die. There's something incriminating about, about people who want to have a staycation. Am I reading that wrong? Like they must be punished because they want to stay home. There's something really perverse about that, I think.
6:01 Wes: Yeah, I think they are being punished. And we get a lot of little hints about that. It's amazing how much is going on in this movie as far as these little hints and symbols, but in a way it forms the nugget of a kind of mild conflict between Adam and Barbara. They are very, very lovey dovey and wholesome and their relationship seems very romantic and loving and kind of new, despite the fact that they're married. Maybe it was a shotgun wedding.
6:29 Erin: Yet another pro marriage propaganda piece from Wes. Okay,
6:35 Wes: she wanted to stay home for the vacation and he obviously wanted to leave. That's something that comes out. And the critical moment where they go off the bridge, she's driving and she says there's no place like home. And she's about to say home, little wizard of Oz reference, but she doesn't get it out because Adam interrupts her to say, hey, avoid the dog or whatever, and then they go off the bridge. So, yeah, I think we're supposed to associate. Right. And then the punishment is to be stuck for 125 years at home. He even says right after they've died, she's cleaning the house and they're dead at this point and you got cabin fever.
Meanwhile, he's less focused on being at home and you get the sense he wants to travel and he's into calypso music and other things like that. But he's also got his miniature model of the town. So anyway, yeah, it seems like there's an element of punishment in this and another kind of glimpse of that is Adam is rushing into the hardware store. And I guess it's their hardware store. It occurs to me now, I thought we didn't know what they did, but that's their hardware store. And he's getting a new brush for the Manchurian tongue oil that she has gotten him as a vacation, quote, unquote, vacation gift.
And on the way in and out, he's ignoring an old man who kind of comes across as like a soothsayer figure. And I thought this act of oversight is somehow also a sin. It's a little bit unclear what it is or why the old man's asking him if he wants a haircut for his vacation, and then is going on about some other fellow who had long hair who had something to do with founding the town or something like that. But I thought, yeah, that's very interesting.
8:14 Erin: I hadn't picked up on the fact that Adam wanted to leave. He does say, are you sure you didn't want to go somewhere like. But I thought he's just as happy at home as she is, because their mutual presence for each other, the tongue oil for him to finish the furniture, his present to her, the wallpaper. They both seem happy to, like, be working on the house for him to be working on the model. Because he also, in addition to getting a brush for the tung oil, wants to buy something for the model. And I thought of the calypso music. I mean, I like what you're pointing out about this, that there's a hint of this for him.
But the calypso music for me was evidence of the fact that they're both strangely anachronistic in a way. Their outfits are such that anybody could be wearing. You know, they're sort of anodyne, but they're also outfits that could be worn by people in the 50s. Calypso music I think of as a faddish 50s music trend. And they want to live in this town that seems kind of stuck in time, that they're maybe after the simple life or something like that. Right. They want to have this nice furniture or hardware store in this little town that is all about kind of small town living.
You're right. He ignores that old man. He's probably used to. I got the impression that he's used to this old man kind of going on and on about things that maybe don't make a lot of sense. But that would be part and parcel of participating in the town life. The reason why you would go to a place like this or Want to live in a place called Winter River. I think it's Winter River. Or not Windy River. Winter.
9:37 Wes: Winter River. You should know it's in your home state. It's a fictional town in your home state.
9:43 Erin: Yet another Connecticut movie. I had remembered this taking place in Vermont because it was.
9:48 Wes: Well, it's shot in Vermont, the outside.
9:50 Erin: And it was shot of her eye. Yes. So I had forgotten that it was a Connecticut movie until watching this again. And I was like, everything comes back to connect. It is truly.
9:58 Wes: It's the crossroads of the world.
10:00 Erin: Connect. I cut. It's both everything and nothing. Yes. But the whole reason why one would want to move to a place like that is so that you could have these colorful characters like this guy who goes on and on and on, and you'd sit and listen to him, I guess. I don't know. Maybe they're over it. Maybe they've been there for too many years and this guy's too annoying. But, yeah, yeah, I saw them as being both homebodies in however incriminating degree that would be.
10:25 Wes: Yeah, I took the are you sure you wouldn't rather be on vacation in Jamaica? As a hint. So that's why I call the conflict very subtle and mild. So at a certain point, just looking at the screenplay and where vacation is mentioned, Barbara says, so clever. We're spending our vacation at home. So you get a lot of places where Barbara, in a way, is the advocate for that. When the real estate agent comes to visit, she's trying to sell their house, which is really odd. Sell their house against her will. And the rationale is that they don't have children and the house should have a family in it.
She comes over and says, I heard you were on vacation, the real estate agent. So I guess she was hoping to not find them there. And then Barbara says, that's right. A complete vacation. I think that's right, Adam. Two weeks later on, he's saying to Barbara, this is in the car. Two weeks at home. The perfect vacation, which I do not take at face value after they've died. Barbara says, perfect start for a vacation after they. They've died. But they don't realize it yet. They're just wet coming into the house anyway. So the other. The other piece of evidence I'll add here is that she's focused on cleaning the house, on updating the house.
He's focused on that model, which is very suggestive of childhood and play. So what is it about that model? What is it supposed to represent? I think it puts him in more of this aesthetic position. And it's in contra to Charles position with regard to the town. Right. Charles of Dietz is going to come and exploit and try and buy all the land and make money off it. Adam's relationship to it via this model is aesthetic. He wants to represent it and enjoy the representation and maybe kind of have a fantasy. It's like a physical, tangible fantasy in a way.
A model like that, but also evocative of an architectural model of the kind that Charles would have it. And in fact, later in the movie he'll use it in a presentation. Right. To sell a plan of taking over the town. They're both kind of childlike. I think that's kind of goes into the wholesomeness as well. Childlike, goofy. Geena Davis is very good at doing that. The kind of winningly goofy quality. But she's a bit more focused on the house and staying home. And he's a bit more focused on calypso music and travel and then this miniature town.
12:45 Erin: Yeah, they're just this side of stupid, I think. And I don't know what this side is, but. So maybe they aren't stupid. They're a little dumb. Right.
12:53 Wes: Well, the afterlife is complicated. Yeah. They can't make sense of the book.
12:56 Erin: Yeah. In fact, and this is something I think that gives credence to the connection you make between Charles and Adam. They both accuse the handbook of reading like stereo manual. Like it's too technical. They can't understand it. Lydia understands it quite readily. So 15 year old wits against theirs doesn't come out well for them. I mean, I really like what you're pointing out. It is making me look at it in a new way. I thought that the punishment element wasn't so much that they were staying at home. I mean, oddly, it's Barbara who focuses on the limitation of the space, I think more than Adam.
She's the one who ends up with the sandworms first. I think it is. No, no, he goes first. That's right. He does step out first. But she's the one who's frustrated. Granted it's for an extremely ridicul. She's the one who's frustrated about the limitations and expresses this frustration because she can't get to the garage which has the vacuum so that she could vacuum her house. She's dead and she wants to vacuum. It's very disturbing. But she.
13:55 Wes: She wants to continue to nest and homemake.
13:58 Erin: Yes, yes, exactly. And so for me it seemed that the punishment was about sharing the house. That they were both happy with the house, but it was about having to share the house with another group of people, which then, for me, gave the model and gave whole setup and the names and the last name and all of that very, very biblical implications. And the Dietzes represent. Because Adam and Barbara seem so 50s, they seem so square and so whatever. And then this new aesthetic comes in which represents something more forward thinking, more forward moving than them.
It's almost as though, even though only two months or something elapsed between their death and the dietz is moving in, it's as though the Dietzes, the entire family, are like their children. They're like the next generation. And Adam and Barbara are like their grandparents. And that seems to me to invoke this idea of an Adam and Eve scenario in which they're living in this Edenic state in which they're super happy with each other. Right. And then the question of what the twist moment or the crux moment is, is a bit murky because you could say it's, of course, them dying and going off the bridge.
You could say it's the invasion of Betelgeuse into the scene, which would be the more typical. Right. He takes on the form of a snake. But the real point of transformation, or the sore point is the Dietzes coming in, which would be this idea of having to share one's Eden with other people. And when you're Adam and Eve, those other people are your own children, subsequent generations. Right. You now have to share. You can't have everything your own way or have it the way that you would like it, or leave everything perfect and expect a bunch of kids not to come in and mess it up and get their jammy fingers on your stuff.
Yeah, so that's kind of how I was reading that. I don't know if that's. And then the model, there's a kind of a mise enabim quality to this, where part of it is like torture. Oh, they can't go past the house, but they have this model of the whole town inside their attic. And part of it is this sort of Adam being the master of all he surveys, the one given stewardship over the town. But it's just a model of a town. So it's almost a parody of the Adam and Eve Eden story.
16:09 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. I think the model is evocative of creation and there's clear parallels between them and Adam and Eve. I mean, I think when you're getting at with the word borderline stupid, I forget how you put it, really? They are quite innocent and distracted. It's as if they haven't eaten of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. So that innocent quality is very strong in them and it's what gets them in trouble. Right. So it's a bit of a deviation from the story in Genesis where the devil tempts Eve. How does he tempt Eve?
How would we explain that? Or how does Milton have him tempt Eve? The devil is quite a smooth talker in Milton. But in any case, in this scenario, it's their innocent naivete and distraction that gets them in trouble. And quite literally. Right. Distraction is what has them go off the bridge. Now you might think, I thought a little bit of Dante's lovers, Francesca and Paolo maybe. Although there is a reference to Dante's Inferno. That's the strip club that Beetlejuice ends up going into.
17:15 Erin: Oh, that's a generous term for it. Yeah.
17:17 Wes: Yeah. Whorehouse, I guess.
17:19 Erin: Maybe Juno says whorehouse.
17:21 Wes: Yeah.
17:22 Erin: We have to.
17:22 Wes: I don't think it's such a great parallel, but the one thing I associate with Dante's lovers is their kind of involvement with each other to the exclusion of the world. And maybe there's a bit of that. And Adam and Barbara, that is quite a good foil for the self involvement of someone like Delia. Right. For whom it's all about status. She's their lovers, that's their sin. And she is a narcissist where it's all just self directed love.
17:50 Erin: Yeah, I like that. I love Delia though. Who doesn't love Delia?
17:54 Wes: Yeah. But Katherine o' Hara is amazing. She's really. She's the highlight of the movie.
17:59 Erin: She really is the last name. I was thinking a little bit about the theme of theme parks in the movie and the idea that like Maitland could be the theme park for two. Just in the confines of the house, like the afterlife as a theme park in which it's just you and your beloved locked in one very large house. Yeah. There's a desire for children, obviously. I think more, maybe not more in Barbara. I mean, Barbara has that connection with Lydia right away. And Barbara seems to be nesting as though she already is pregnant or something. And obviously this is a sore spot, the fact that they don't have children. So they are trying.
18:38 Wes: Although it's never mentioned directly. We just get that one look on Barbara's face when the real estate agent mentions it and then you see the look on her face and that's it.
18:47 Erin: That's right. I love that this Movie just doesn't bother explaining anything. You know, we're just thrown in.
18:53 Wes: Yeah. There is one other. Let me correct that. There is one other scene where Adam talks about trying again to have children. So it becomes clear that it's not that they can't or that one of them wants them and one of them doesn't. It's just that it hasn't happened yet.
19:06 Erin: Yes. There could, though, be a fertility problem if they have to try. Yeah. I think there's a psychic element of this as well, because of their exclusionary. Yeah. Something inherent in what we've already been talking about.
19:18 Wes: Nothing can intrude upon their Eden on their little world. Yeah.
19:22 Erin: Right. And the representation of. I mean, you know, if this whole thing is just a fever dream that Barbara and Adam are having while they're trying to get pregnant. And, you know, we could say that if this was a dream, everything that happens after they go off the bridge. Bridge could be taken as a symbol for the invasion of a baby that ruins everything and traps them in the house and keeps them beholden to, you know, another. Another person's will and obsession and rebellion and. Right. And various other things. And their. Their efforts at scaring or spooking the.
The child would be like scaring them straight or. Or trying to discipline them, which is actually kind of a funny thing, if at all. Wear a metaphor. But just one thing I wanted to point out, a moment that really, really stuck out to me this time was when Barbara illustrates to Adam that they are dead or gives credence to the theory that they might be dead, which is that they have no reflection. And there are all those horses on the mantle. This little horse, like toy horses, which. I don't know if you had any of these when you were a kid. I had horses like this, you know, and at first I got confused and I thought, oh, has another family already moved in?
Because there are all these toy horses on the mantle, you know, so is. Oh, someone's kid has cluttered the mantle with these toys already. Beetlejuice is one of those mov. I don't know about you, but, like, it's been a long time since I sat down and just watched it again. And I had forgotten at which point the Dietz has come in. If there was an interim family or something. And then I realized, oh, it's theirs. So they. No one's come in yet. So this has to be their toy horses on the mantel. And then she picks one up and plays with it in order to illustrate
20:57 Wes: that she's Makes it kind of gallop in front of the mirror.
21:00 Erin: Exactly. And they could have done this in any other way, possible way to illustrate this. Tim Burton could have easily done any number of setups to illustrate this, but he makes Barbara do something. He makes her play with a toy. And the fact that there are toys on the mantel and that they are miniatures and the.
21:17 Wes: And the. And the model.
21:18 Erin: And the model's like a toy.
21:19 Wes: Right.
21:20 Erin: So I just mean to point out that they both have this toy thing. They both have this little kid thing. Like, they're not mature enough to be having kids. Almost from a psychological perspective, they have to go through some sort of maturation process in order to get on the other side of whatever it is that's preventable them from having kids so that they can be proper parents. So I just wanted to point out that it doesn't seem to be only Adam who has this kind of hang up, which makes me think of the expression or the phrase, because I've been thinking about it a lot right now for other reasons.
Playing house and the idea of children being in a big house or playing with a dollhouse or something where they play roles. And this obsession with furniture and with cleaning. It could be, on the one hand, a sort of nesting impulse, as I think we're suggesting for Barbara, and on the other hand, just a form of play, a form of the idea of performing adulthood rather than really being adult. Which leads me back to wanting to talk about what maturation means. Who can be said to be mature? Like the idea of death as a portal to another reality that people on Earth haven't matured to or don't have access to, and how that's kind of performing as a symbol in the film.
And maybe what Lydia's goth element shows about her maturity versus everybody else in the film. Like, it's as though familiarity with death or even the desire to be dead or being already dead is actually the gateway to being an adult human. An adult living human.
22:47 Wes: Right.
22:48 Erin: I don't know. I'm just. I'm interested in that philosophy. I don't know what we could call it.
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To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter Subtext Literature and Film Podcast at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from us here at Subtext to get your donation matched again. That's givewell.org to donate or find out more. Yeah, so in psychoanalytic theory, the idea is that maturation is a form of mourning. You mourn all the things that you lose, so you mourn. It's loss of Eden, loss of idealizations, of your parents realizing that they're flawed. And the flaw can just be very non specific. The flaw is just that they're human, that they have their own subjectivities and thoughts and feelings, that not all of their attention is on you.
You find out about adult sexuality, which can be very disturbing. And I think in part it's disturbing because it means that the formative influence, the thing that made you, is not so pure. It's not just love. And you're not just purely a spiritual being. It's sex and you're a material being. When I was a kid, even after I'd had sex education, I knew what sex was and I knew that technically that's where babies came from. But I also thought that without love it was not possible.
25:30 Erin: That's sweet.
25:31 Wes: I thought babies came from love. Basically. It was quite disturbing and depressing to find out that that was not the case, that anyone could make a baby whether there was love or not, and that the forces that form us are not all loving forces. And then there's adult hypocrisy, right? So you're trying to foster attitudes towards sexuality, especially in adolescence, that are trying to put the brakes on that. But misrepresenting sexuality in the process of doing that and misrepresenting Oneself as an adult. And then the adolescent finds out about that hypocrisy.
And, you know, it's part of why teenagers are so pissed off. They've found out that adults are full of crap, basically, and they're right. So. And then they put on. So the goth. You know, I think the gothis stuff is a good rebellion again, because all of these things, I think, can be summed up in terms of a denial of death. A denial. There's the inability to mourn, which correlates to the inability to mature, but also the element of deception about. At least at this phase, about sex and death and aggression. The way that there's a kind of a veneer put over that in social life.
So there's no better way to protest that. Well, there are various ways to protest it. One could dress provocatively, for instance. That might be the perverse route. But anyway, what Lydia is doing, I think is spot on as a. As a protest. And she's got horrible parents.
27:01 Erin: Well, so, yeah, I mean, I.
27:04 Wes: Are you gonna defend them?
27:05 Erin: I'm gonna defend them.
27:06 Wes: Defending the Deetses.
27:09 Erin: She fits in with them, though. This is one of the kind of interesting things about the movie for me, and maybe this will be our bridge to talking about the Dietzes, is that. But you know, Tim Burton, because he casts these fantastic character actors and because he has these great wild production values, this whole movie is like Revenge of the Character Actor, you know, I mean, it's named after somebody who's barely in the movie and who's playing this super character actor type of role. So the Maitlands being so boring, where they would normally be the centerpiece of a movie, they're kind of.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I like them. They're sweet, you know, they're fine. But they're not like this colorful cast of character actors of which Lydia is a member. You know, she is dramatic and artistic and performative. There's a great deal of performativity in the goth aesthetic and in the value system of that family, you know, so Delia may not be her mother, but the father is obviously attracted to women like Delia, including possibly Lydia's own mother. And the two of them are both artistic and dramatic in their own types of ways. I mean, Charles Dietz is sort of crowded out of his own family a bit because he's slightly more normal than they are.
Though it's implied that he has had some kind of breakdown that's caused him to want to go to Winter River.
28:29 Wes: But.
28:29 Erin: Yeah, no, I'm Just like purely the perspective of film casting and these types of colorful side roles versus maybe the more all American prototypical anodyne type of leading men and leading women roles. The Maitlands, I think get crowded out. And the deets for me specifically Delia and Lydia just come across and their coterie of hysterical people end up coming across as more likable than they should be. I mean, Delia more likable than she should be because she's just so funny and great and entertaining and performative. And Beetlejuice is like that too.
Like, you know, you shouldn't like him, but you do like he's. Just because he's so funny and entertaining and that. Yeah. So it's like Revenge of the character actor is the best way I can put it. Reveals something hollow about the role of leading man and leading woman and shows that the fringes, the side characters are actually kind of where all the fun is at.
29:20 Wes: Yeah. I think Barbara and Adam are right. We start with them as the protagonists and if we didn't know better, we would think that they're going to be the protagonists through the whole film. And in a way they are. But Lydia really takes over as the protagonist. I guess the three of them together are the film's protagonists and then various antagonists, including Beetlejuice. But. But to also to some extent the parents. Right. Delia is gonna and does transform the house and Charles is out to take advantage of the buy up the town, so. And Lydia needs better parents. But I think I. I guess maybe to get into the deetses a bit more, we could talk about their arrival and this. What I've. I said the primary conflict in the movie is aesthetic. The Homie, or what would you call it? There's a name for the aesthetic of Barbara and Adam. Country something or.
30:11 Erin: Yeah, Country. There's. The house is kind of. It's a Victorian. It's. Otho, when he's going around, says, lord, save me from L.L. bean or something. He says something about L.L. bean is really funny. Yeah. Country living homespun.
30:26 Wes: Yeah.
30:27 Erin: It's not. Not quite cottage core, but almost. Yeah.
30:30 Wes: When they arrive, Otho is kind of acting like he's an exorcist. Right. What they have to exorcise style.
30:38 Erin: Right.
30:38 Wes: Bad taste and bad interior design which they find scary. And it's the only thing that's scary to them. Right. The ghosts end up not being able to scare them and. And in fact, Delia will say at one point the only thing that scares her is being embarrassed in front of the few hip people who will set foot in the house.
30:58 Erin: That's right.
30:59 Wes: So that puts her in the domain of being interested more in status. So she says, art is my life and if I can't sculpt, I'll go crazy and all that stuff. But it's very corrupted by her interest in getting attention and status in a way. Like Adam, who in his model is focused on the aesthetic and the artistic. She sort of corresponds there. But again, his is very innocent and childlike and hers is very status oriented. And then Charles is quite like Barbara in wanting to. It's a corrupted form. Again, I think there are parallels here. Right. Because he wants to stay home too. Delia wanted to stay in the city. She's horrified by this move. But he's had a breakdown and he wants to be the homebody and to live in this. He doesn't want the house transformed. So you get these.
31:51 Erin: It's Green Acres. Yeah, parallels.
31:54 Wes: Yeah, there you go. But it's interesting. Yeah. Because the interest as they're going. As Otho and Delia are going around the house and marking up the walls for how they're gonna repaint them. Otho does come across as an exorcist. And you get the sense that the interest in. Let's call it fashion. I don't know if there's a better word. It's nominally artistic, but it's corrupted really by. It's really about fashion. And that almost comes across as a form of superstition. So that you can look at a room and feel scared. Like it. Like I'm almost scared of it. Almost like it's bad luck or almost like it's bad juju to. To be in the wrong environment. And the aesthetic that they favor is quite pretentious. Modernism or something like that.
32:36 Erin: And terrifying. The inside of the house is really. Yeah, it's really scary. It's the scariest part of the movie for me. But I like what they do to the outside of the house. I mean, some elements of it. It's interesting because the outside with the doubling, it's almost like they've put a shell of another of the same house around the house. You know, they have like the. The eaves. Some of them have, in the same color, another representational eve kind of over it. I mean. Yes, homonyms. Again, E, A V eaves. That idea of, like the fact that the house is almost like self representational or something is very indicative of, I think, of the type of self referential, knowing sophistication that is Maybe permeating their circles in New York, but it's also connected to the model.
Maybe, you know, if the house is kind of representing itself or even a little bit of a parody of itself, the model is that way too. You know, I made note as well of the dog at the beginning. I mean, speaking of wizard of Oz references that you noted in what Barbara had said, that dog is kind of toto, like, it's like an evil toto. There's a dog that's just. Did you catch this? There's a statue of a dog that one of the townspeople is leaning against as the dog that will later kill them crosses the street. So there's this doubling going on. And the fact that Adam and Barbara become miniatures in the model at certain points.
Not that they have miniatures, but that they shrink down and become model size. I'm still trying to figure out what's going on in terms of that element of the film and how that might form a sort of coherent statement. Maybe it doesn't, because certain things in the film don't quite line up. But thinking about that and about the fact that then later or at the end of the film, Delia will end up representing the things that happened to her, the things that happened to the family when Beetlejuice was haunting them. And that's what, sort of like she can get success in her art with the Beetlejuice hauntings being represented, that something about what she was doing before wasn't working.
The sculptures are bad. Dick Cavett seems to think they're bad. They kind of fit with the production values of the film, but they seem to be bad according to the people in the film. And then when she represents the Beetlejuice stuff that's good, that gets her a lot of money and attention now she's successful. The house, meanwhile, has gone back to normal on the inside. Anyway. I'm getting ahead of myself, but what I'm trying to say is that something about representation for Delia makes the difference for the success of her art career. So she does become a good artist at the end because she starts to represent the events of the film, oddly enough.
And I just. I just think it's so clever that the film is so. It's kind of doing this very self aware, self representational thing in the film itself. And that is what is the redemption arc for Adelia's art career, is that she ends up coming up with sculptures that look like what the people who made the film probably came up with in their production design for the film. And what I'M trying to say is in a film in which like representations and miniatures of are important. And that has to do so much probably with the production design and the. Everything that they were doing to make the film in the first place.
There's just something that is like very postmodern, very winky, very self aware, self referential about the whole film. In other words, like it's aesthetically to a certain extent, the film is very much on Delia's side in the way that it thinks about art and about itself.
36:20 Wes: So I was thinking in a way there are three kind of aesthetic modes in the film. One is Delia's pretentious modernism. The other is the homely or wholesome aesthetic of Adam and Barbara, which Delia hates. And then there's the gothic aesthetic, which is in line with Lydia and the aesthetic of, you know, Tim Burton's aesthetic, the aesthetic of the film. From what I read, Goth kind of comes a bit somewhat out of punk, which you can kind of get, except punk is more about. About, hey, let's represent aggression and goth is let's represent death. And then goth gets, I guess, a little bit into the Victorian, you know, it's kind of a mixture of death stuff and then, you know, 19th century Victorian stuff, lace.
And you know, I see goth as an adolescent rebellion in general. It's a rebellion against pretension. I said hypocrisy before, but it's a rebellion against the kind of pretentiousness that Delia represents. But I think you're right, there is a bit of overlap with some of the avant garde. Right stuff that Delia is doing. So you can see why Lydia is Delia's daughter in a way. You could sort of see the gothiness as an offshoot of Delia's aesthetic.
37:37 Erin: Definitely. I think Lydia is unpretentious for the most part in her expression of goth aesthetic. Yet goth is also something I associate with a kind of pretension. I mean, it's a kind of a backwards pretension, but it is sort of, you know, it's very much a statement. And of course, the clothes that Lydia wears are extremely attention getting. So that's a big part of it too. Like the, you know, she is, I think with her clothes and perhaps because she's somewhat of a non entity and the family is saying, look at me, pay attention to me. Justice. Delia is doing that as well. Well, it's more forgivable in a child than in a narcissistic adult.
38:16 Wes: But yeah, I mean, part of the problem with protest and Rebellion at an aesthetic level is that from the inside, it might feel like, look at me, I'm an individual and my look is a protest against the system. But of course, then a bunch of other people are doing it, and it's a form of conformity. And one could also read it as pretentious. Anything can kind of get sucked into. But I think you're right. Lydia does not have that quality. Yeah.
38:42 Erin: And I like what you point out, too, about the connection with the Victorian in the clothes, because she is like a child of both the Deetses and the Maitlands. You know, if we can associate this. I mean, it's a Victorian house. And because the Maitlands are dead, they have this Gothic strain in them, if you will. You know, it's a Victorian haunted house. And so for that reason, Lydia fits right in. But not with the performativity and the statement making that comes from the Dietzes, it seems, but the modernism on the inside of the house anyway, the style, the art direction of the inside of the house, it's certainly different from the afterlife design in that it's maybe more austere in a way.
It's not as cluttered. You know, the afterlife is extremely cluttered. But I see there being a parallel there with the extremes of color, you know, the vibrancy. It's almost as though the Dietzas bring a little bit of the afterlife into the house rather than the Maitlands bringing that. When Delia's work starts to reflect the look of Betelgeuse, it does seem like it's kind of a natural outgrowth of the abstract, but still sort of like remotely scary types of sculptures that she does, which are. They're almost like Louise Bourgeois sculptures. I don't know if you're familiar with her work.
She's a fantastic modernist sculptor who has things like huge spiders that might encompass, you know, almost like the size of a gazebo, where they have a tiny body and these really big long, spindly legs coming out of the relatively small body, so that they're sort of mostly these sort of like spiny looking spider fingers, usually very large scale, very interesting kind of scary sculptures. And so Delia already kind of seems in the neighborhood of the macabre, of the creepy, crawly things associated with death and with the afterlife. And so it does seem like a kind of a natural progression for her art to take that direction if we're to take her seriously as an artist, which I kind of do, because her art is the art of the film.
It's the art of the production, yeah.
40:52 Wes: One of her sculptures looks like an insect, and she almost gets killed by it early in the film because she gets trapped by it against the wall of the house as the movers are very clumsily trying to put everything together. And it becomes a. Towards the end of the movie, when Lydia is in danger of being married to Betelgeuse, that same sculpture, I think, becomes a. It's turned in. Betelgeuse turns it into a seat, and the insect, like legs kind of wrap around her to trap her there. So, yeah, I think that's very interesting, what you point out, which is this intersection between Delia's aesthetic and then the maybe Tim Burton aesthetic of death. I was actually thinking about calling this episode the Aesthetics of Death. That's great, but I didn't know. I was still uncertain about that. But maybe that's what it will be.
41:46 Erin: The insertion of Betelgeuse into the model and the little goth element that he brings to the model. Almost as though the model has, like, a little goth section, little area. You know, the cemetery is in a different style from the rest. You know, that happens at the same time, I mean, because the Dietz has come in. But it's more or less concurrent with the arrival of the Dietzes and with their changing of the aesthetic of the inside of the house. So we could already see, or we could already postulate that Delia and Betelgeuse are parallel to each other in some way, that what they bring to the house is similar. I mean, it's the whole deetsus. But Delia is the one that really changes the inside of the house, as we're saying. And Betelgeuse makes substantive or rather significant, significant changes to the model.
42:29 Wes: Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, that's a good place to start in part two of our recording on Beetlejuice.
42:35 Erin: Don't say it too many times. It's too late for us.
42:40 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you,
42:45 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
A Strange Fashion of Forsaking in the Poetry of Thomas Wyatt (Part 2)
Nov 25, 2024
Wes & Erin discuss Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee from Me.”
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0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of two poems by Thomas Wyatt. Last time we discussed Whoso list to hunt, which got us into kind of a hunting mood, but also kind of put us out of a hunting mood. I think it's, you know, it's difficult to say whether or not this seems like how we're going to be spending our Saturdays from now on, but the next poem we'll talk about is they Flee from Me. I think I mentioned in the last episode that this is written in rhyme royal, which I believe is a form that was invented by Chaucer.
This is a rhyme scheme of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. This is a seven line stanza, so sort of like half a sonnet. And the rhyme scheme is A, B, A, B, B, C, C. So there's a kind of button at the end of each stanza with the CC rhymes that kind of come out of nowhere after the five lines of either A or B. Yeah, so there's a. I think there's something kind of similar here to, you know, we talked in the last episode about how Whoso list to hunt, which is a sonnet and mostly a Petrarchan sonnet, ends with that couplet that kind of prefigures the Shakespearean or English sonnet.
The button at the end of the sonnet with the seven line stanza and the form of rhyme royal. I think there's something like that going on here too, where we get a little bit of A, but at the end of every stanza. And maybe we'll talk about how that's functioning in terms of the content of the stanza because I think they work together really brilliantly.
2:06 Wes: Yeah. Do you want to read it?
2:08 Erin: Sure. They flee from me that sometime did me seek with naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame and meek, that now are wild and do not remember that sometime they put themself in danger to take bread at my hand. And now they range busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise 20 times better, but once in special in thin array after a pleasant guise when her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, and she me caught in her arms long and Small therewithal sweetly did me kiss, and softly said, dear heart, how like you this. It was no dream I lay broad waking. But all is turned through my gentleness into a strange fashion of forsaking. And I have leave to go of her goodness, and she also to use new fangledness. But since that I so kindly am served, I would fain know what she hath deserved.
3:12 Wes: Bit evocative of an aubade. Am I wrong? The parting of lovers.
3:17 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
3:20 Wes: So great. First two lines. They flee from me that sometime did me seek with naked foot stalking in my chamber. Is this a. Is this a many they or is this someone with they, them pronouns, or is this a neuter they?
3:38 Erin: Well, it's hard to say because he does, you know, that sometime they put themself in danger. So. So they do have a singular self in that line. But yeah, I think this is a horde of. Of women. You know, he used to really.
3:50 Wes: My notes say it could be birds. Could be women. Or deer.
3:54 Erin: Yeah, I think some people say squirrels as well.
3:59 Wes: Or horde of women. I like the way you put it.
4:01 Erin: Horde of women. Yeah, yeah.
4:04 Wes: The image of a. Of a naked. Naked foot, which works very well with any of these images, including birds, but in human beings it's quite poignant, right, because it's suggestive of someone who's seeking him out and they're in a state of vulnerability. And you know, there might be a beggar or poverty stricken. Right. So there's. Someone who's. Or they might have, you know, just been let out of the madhouse. There's someone who's been depleted by their desire. And in this case, right, he is the hunted. He's the one being stalked in his chamber.
4:41 Erin: That's right. Is there anything here of maybe this is one too far? Because if this were the case, I suppose someone would still have a stockinged foot and not a naked foot. But I thought maybe there was something here too about taking off one's shoes to disguise one's footfall. Like a sneak attack to stalk in that. In the sense. Yeah, I don't know if that quite works.
5:05 Wes: That's probably a more logical reading.
5:08 Erin: No, no, I don't think so, because it is a naked foot. It's not in their stocking feet or something. I like this idea of the. The beggar, because they are taking food from his hand. He has something to offer them. They're in some sort of depleted or lesser position.
5:24 Wes: I was also thinking of someone sticking their foot through his window to touch his face while he was sleeping. Wake up. Wake up. I told you not to do that. Told you not to wake me up that way. So, yeah, this transition from, okay, so he's the hunter, they flee from me. But at one time he was the one being sought out. So we have an interesting reversal.
5:50 Erin: Yeah. And it isn't quite a reversal again. I mean, it's complicated because they flee from me. I mean, that's like Frankenstein's monster would write a poem called they flee from
6:02 Wes: me,
6:05 Erin: you know, so that sometime did
6:08 Wes: never seek me out. More like me. And they were always terrified of me.
6:11 Erin: Exactly.
6:13 Wes: Interesting pump.
6:16 Erin: But. But running from him because. Okay, so the implication is he's fallen out of favor now they don't want to be seen with him. But that's not quite the same as he is at once the hunter and the hunted in his previous state. And now he's just a pariah. That's quite different from being the hunted. He might be hunted by someone not in the poem, which is making him a pariah to everybody. Everybody else. Right. But there's a sort of a third state, I think that that complicates this easy kind of dichotomy a bit.
6:48 Wes: So he could be talking about, you know, it doesn't necessarily need to be about lovers, at least this far into the poem. I mean, the imagery later on is much more obvious. But, you know, it could be a matter of his standing within the court.
7:01 Erin: Yeah. I mean, I think when I was a teenager, I was very confused by this poem because I thought that the first stanza was about him with a bunch of other men. And then I was confused as to why all of a sudden, then he's with a woman in his bedroom. Because not that I thought the first stanza was about anything homoerotic, but just that there was something about the men of power in the court, that these were the people that were seeking him out. I think because of the stalking and the aggressive language.
7:31 Wes: Yeah. The pivot point of the poem means we do have some flexibility in the way we read the first part because it could be about women, or a woman in particular, but it could just as much be about courtly life, because the pivot point is thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise. And then he turns to a thought of love. And there's the contrast there, obviously, but it doesn't need to be about the same person or the same circumstance. The contrast is in the emotion. But we'll get to that.
7:59 Erin: I guess it would have been easier if he just said, these girls flee from me that sometimes I. I would have been. I would have been more satisfied.
8:11 Wes: That's in his original version. Then he crossed down because he'd been cryptic. Was going to be better.
8:17 Erin: I know I like to push the meter, but this is too far. They.
8:21 Wes: Girls flee from me.
8:22 Erin: Yeah, Girls flee from me that sometime. Didn't you see? That's a.
8:26 Wes: That's good.
8:27 Erin: That's a. That's a very different kind of poem.
8:30 Wes: So I have seen them gentle, tame and meek. So we get, we end in the last poem, the concept of tameness in contrast to wildness. And we get it here again. So he's seen them tame, but they now are wild.
8:43 Erin: This is a little, again, a little frightening. I don't know why this tame, wild stuff is frightening to me, but it's also indicative to me if we're following through on the metaphor of learned behavior and memory in animals. I think I read somewhere once that cats have something like a 19 hour memory. It always seemed very unlikely to me because cats can go without seeing you for a day and remember who you are, but anyway, much longer. Yeah, yeah, I didn't believe that at all. But for animals that are less. I mean, cats really aren't domesticated.
But for animals that are less domesticated, who knows how long their working memory is. And though they may be, you know, taking food from your hand one day, if you then don't see them for a while or whatever, maybe they wouldn't recognize you. Maybe they would, I don't know. But anyway, one thinks of the fact that this maybe something like an out of sight, out of mind phenomenon in an animal where they don't remember you anymore is implying something rather uncomplimentary about whether this be about like the nature of women themselves. I think there's something obviously of that in there.
This idea of newfangledness and changeability and unreliability, but also about the fact that a real lack of gratitude in the Tudor court in which people could so quickly forget, like an animal that owes you nothing or that thinks it owes you nothing because it knows nothing of debt. You know, as soon as they're not getting what they want from you or they've been away from you for a while, they can just entirely write you off, forget whatever they might owe to you and put their allegiance elsewhere.
10:27 Wes: Yeah. So this is evocative of a breakup of some kind, whether it's with a lover or friend or friends or courtly allies, acquaintances. And those things can overlap, of course, and we get the stark Contrast between the gentleness of people when we are on good terms with them and their seemingly civilized nature and even courtly nature being very refined and curtsying and bowing and doing all that stuff. And the next minute they're chopping your head off.
10:59 Erin: Right.
11:00 Wes: They're wild and do not remember. And. And so the memory part seems to have something to do with attachment. Is the attachment feigned in the initial case, or is it just that people can be so fickle, they can put any attachment aside that they can be your friend one moment and not your friend the next?
11:19 Erin: Yeah. And I suppose I'm wondering, you know, I keep wanting to kind of turn this back around on the speaker and wonder, okay, what does the speaker feel he's owed? You know, the quid pro quo nature of this implies that the speaker believes that he's owed something. And, I mean, that seems true. You know, I just. I want to interrogate the speaker's attitude because I wonder to what extent he is depending on the nature of these relationships, he is entitled to the loyalty that he seems to desire. I mean, if we're talking about ratting someone out to their potential death, that's one thing.
11:55 Wes: Yeah. That sometime they put themselves in danger to take bread at my hand, and now they range, busily seeking with a continual change. So he has fed them in the past, and they put themself in danger to be fed by it. You know, it's kind of. It makes you think of the deer, Right. You know, you hold out the bread and the deer will come up to you, and.
12:15 Erin: Mm.
12:15 Wes: It's a dangerous thing for a deer to do. They don't know if you're a hunter or have bad intent. So that was then and now they range. Right. So it's evocative of a. Like a deer ranging as in eating grass. So it's a different. So ranging as in dispersing, but also taking sustenance from elsewhere, taking sustenance from the ground, busily seeking with a continual change. So this suggests inconstancy and maybe moving from relationship to relationship. Again, whether it's lover or benefactor or ally, however you want to see it. But it's evocative of fickleness, faithlessness, and movement outside of a particular dyad. Relationship dyad.
12:59 Erin: You know, if this is a hunter feeding deer, then what is his motivation here? What does this say about the speaker? Why is he giving out this bread? What's he getting from this? You know, it's clear what the deer are getting. What exactly is the speaker doing here? Is he encouraging the deer to. You know, it's a dangerous enterprise on some level. So that means he has to at least theoretically pose a kind of threat to the deer, which means he could kill them if he wanted to. Well, why doesn't he want to?
13:27 Wes: He could kill them or he could take sexual. You know, if it's women, take sexual advantage of them, get them killed by their maniacal husband.
13:39 Erin: Well, the. The murder of them would be the. The metaphor for. For sex. But he's not. Sort of. Not claiming that, but he sort of is implying it at the same time. I don't know. It's just. Yeah, I've never. I've never turned so hard on him. I've never. I've never turned so hard on him as in this moment now. I'm like, hey, what is this? What's this guy doing actually? What's his game? You know, because he's as canny of a courtier as anyone, so he seems now kind of to be bested in the very, very game that he was playing in the first place. I just want to point out here, for the purposes of discussing the rhyme royal, that, you know, danger here rhymes with chamber.
It's supposed to be the B rhyme, but then we get kind of a slant rhyme with the C rhymes, right? So there's a twist. And now they range busily seeking with a continual change. So the turn does happen there in that final couplet of the stanza that kind of thematically sets it apart from the rest. So it uses the form to advantage, but it also has that connection back to danger. Now, maybe he's the one in danger, and we're meant to kind of see, see that connection? It almost looks like a CCC rhyme at the end. Anyway, I like the fact that as he's talking about them changing, we go into the C rhyme.
So the form of the stanza is kind of performing the content.
15:05 Wes: Okay, so now we get a twist. Now we get a turn. Thanked be fortune. It hath been otherwise. So it hasn't always been this way. This whatever rift or whatever led to the picture we've gotten is of some connection that's been severed. It's not always been this way. And again, like I said before, you can read this as being directly about the same relationship or relationships, or you can think of this as another relationship altogether. So he could be thinking about courtly betrayal and then thinking of another lover, or he could be thinking of the same person. So it could have been otherwise with this particular person or people, or it could have been otherwise in the sense of there was a different person. So it hath been otherwise 20 times better. But once in special, which I take to mean once in particular.
15:55 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
15:57 Wes: So 20 times better. Why use 20 times here?
16:01 Erin: It's a numbers game.
16:03 Wes: Better in 20 cases or write one case that was 20 times as good.
16:10 Erin: Yeah. I read this as he. Thank goodness. I used to have actually a lot of conquests. I was quite the hot commodity, I'd like you to know. And of course, you know, that was wonderful for me. But actually only one, one time in particular is the one that really matters. There's one that really he really remembers that was the one that got away or that was the special case. Right. So I think it kind of immediately comments on the nature of this, you know, this player guy who's like, oh, I used to be able to get all these women really of that doesn't matter. You just need the once in special time that makes all the other ones worth it or something. Right.
16:54 Wes: Yeah. And apparently he's the one getting dipped at the end, right?
16:57 Erin: Yes, yes, we'll find out.
17:00 Wes: So it's an interesting reversal of roles.
17:02 Erin: That's right.
17:03 Wes: Okay, so the one particular case which was the best apparently really interesting way of putting this in thin array after a pleasant guise. So the question is, what does that mean immediately? Thin array makes me think of a nightgown after pleasant guise. Could be nakedness. Or is the pleasant guise clothing and thin array nakedness or nightgown? It's unclear to me. What do you think of that?
17:30 Erin: Well, I look this up and it could be it's after a pleasant party. The guise, they've come home after this evening out and she's just wearing this thin nightgown now. But it's confusing and I think it maybe is meant to double as either they came home after some sort of ball, a masquerade or something like that, perhaps. Or she herself could be dressed up in some Persona, some masquerade clothing or something after coming home from the. Right.
17:57 Wes: Well, I like this way of reading it as, yeah, pleasant guys being, you know, you were dressed up for the ball and now you're in thin array. The nightgown. The pleasant guise is a bit suggestive of duplicity and deception. It's a guise. And of course you're representing yourself maybe as more attractive than you are in general. Not in this case. So we get ourselves made up and dressed up so that we can put on our best face to other people, so to speak. Thin array. We're not in that position if we're unclothed or almost unclothed. So I find that a very interesting way to put this. Right. This sexual, romantic moment. Thin array is conveying a certain vulnerability because it's no longer behind the mask, the social mask.
18:50 Erin: Yes. And then we get really the naked truth here, right? Because then we have the loose gown from the shoulders did fall. So, you know, he thinks he's seeing to the heart of her underneath the trappings. You know, this would be the real woman he's getting underneath that guise. But then maybe not, because maybe that too is a kind of front or falsehood, because it doesn't seem to have lasted. So he sees her in her nakedness in one sense, and in another sense, maybe not. But she catches him in her arms and then says, dear heart, how like you this, which is lovely.
And of course, heart, I think this is what you were referring to earlier, is a homonym for Hart H A R T, which makes him like the deer, like the hunted one in the first stanza. And I think it's worth noting that. And this is where I think that Wyatt is connected pretty interestingly to Donne. John Donne was. The speaker doesn't move in the poem. He's passive. People are fleeing from him, or they're taking things from him. He only sees. He sees others. He has an outstretched hand, but he doesn't stretch it out at any point. They just, you know, the deer are more actively taking from him rather than him reaching out to them.
And then he's caught in this woman's arms. And then later, he's just laying, broad waking, but he doesn't move at all. Everybody else around him is changing, ranging, moving, and he's passive. It's reminiscent to me, I'm thinking in. There are a couple examples, I think, in Donne. Well, many examples of gender reversal, but a couple of explicit moments of passivity. You know, he's. He's always trying to be the powerful one and the one who convinces the woman to sleep with him, but he's always failing to his mistress going to bed when he's trying to get her to take off her clothes.
But I think in the penultimate line, he says something like, you know, to teach thee, I am naked first. So the poem ends with, you know, he's tried to get her to take off his clothes, but in the end, he's the only one who's naked. She's still standing there, presumably fully clothed. So something about that reversal and that passivity or the futility of the man and trying to win over a woman. I like that twist. It's this very vulnerable. She's very vulnerable in this image. But he, I think, is, in truth, in the broader context of the other two stanzas.
Right. Is the one who turned out to be the vulnerable one.
21:17 Wes: Yeah. When her loose gown falls from her shoulders, you expect him to catch her in his arms. And then she catches him in her arms. Long and small.
21:28 Erin: Yeah.
21:29 Wes: It's a very interesting contrasting image. Right. I think we can think that long arms are arms that can reach. So they can reach deep within him, for instance, as in the long arm of the law. In this case, the long arm of love.
21:43 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Good.
21:46 Wes: But also small because she's a woman and really interesting image, but also, if she's catching him. Right. It's long and maybe small, but also strong. And he can be. He can be held strong. Yeah.
22:00 Erin: Which is surprising.
22:01 Wes: So, you know, and on the one hand. Right. It evokes the feminine physically weaker form at a literal level, but at a spiritual or psychological level, it's her strength that overshadows his.
22:17 Erin: Yeah. I never thought about that before. The smallness, too, would imply, you know, they could be, I suppose, long relative to her smallness. But I'm also thinking of, like, thin arms, which would seem to undercut. You know, the smallness is thinness, which would seem to undercut her strength. So the surprising strength is also indicative of a kind of a guise. She doesn't look it, but she's stronger than she. She's different from how she actually looks. So I think there's the betrayal of the nakedness or the seemingly vulnerable moment with him that turns out to be. Well, she leaves him in the end. She might have betrayed him. We don't quite know. But circumstances are quite different now from this intimate moment. So the way she looks, even in nakedness, is not revealing of her interior.
23:01 Wes: And we don't, you know, we don't have to imagine, as I jokingly suggested, that she's dipping him, holding him and then kissing him.
23:10 Erin: I do like that, though.
23:11 Wes: Clark Gable. Wait, who's the character?
23:15 Erin: Rhett Butler and Scarlett o' Hara dipping.
23:19 Wes: She's Rhett Butler in that circumstance. No. So we don't, you know. But she catches him in some way. And of course, we're pointed to the metaphor of catching again, as if he's the hunting one, but catched and presumably held. And then she kisses him. So, again, role reversal. She's the one with the agency here, and she's the one making the romantic comment, how like you this. So then we get. You know, we get, it was no dream. Well, you never said it was a dream. You never said you thought it was a dream. Why is this a twist here that it turns out not to be a dream?
23:58 Erin: Well, he's doubting it. He's doubting its veracity because, well, we get two adverbs. Sweetly did me kiss and softly said. And that second stanza breaks off with Wyatt, or the speaker, I should say, ventriloquizing her. I mean, with her words, which seems to produce such a strong emotion in him and yet also such bitterness, because something must be very different now. So he's having to reaffirm to himself, no, that wasn't a dream. That that really happened. Whatever happened after that must have been such a contrast that he questions. He questions reality.
24:33 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it's. It's almost. Is this the morning after they make love? He wakes up. It was no dream. I lay broad waking. We have him now laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, worrying about all this in the past. But afterwards, we find out that there's some sort of rift. There's a forsaking, and we have to figure out what this means. But all is turned through my gentleness into a strange fashion of forsaken. Sorry. Of forsaking. And I have leave to go of her goodness. And she also, to use newfangledness. All right, so what does that mean? All is turned through. Right. Is it through?
25:18 Erin: Yeah. Tharough
25:21 Wes: thorough. Always turned tharough thorough. Imagine. So what is his gentleness? Right. How does his gentleness lead to forsaking? We get the image of having leave to go of her goodness. Right. As if she is a master or mistress and he's the servant. You have leave to go, but he's being dismissed from goodness. Right. So there's the interesting. Yeah, but go ahead.
25:49 Erin: There's an implication that he's, in this instance, rather than being Mr. Swagger, you know, who has all these conquests, he's allowed himself to be the conquest here, right? So because he's let his guard down and been gentle almost with himself, Right. And with his own emotions, he's had to forsake, what, security in the court, because now something's changed, so that now he's out of favor, so he's allowed his own emotion, perhaps, to get the better of his better judgment, I don't know. And has to give everything up, has to forsake everything else because of this mistake, letting his guard down with this woman who's turned out to be a betrayer, I think.
26:31 Wes: Yeah, I think so. I mean, so gentleness, Right. Could be gentlemanliness and courtliness. It might be evocative of the passivity and gender role reversal he's already mentioned. Right. Being the one who's being kissed and held and caught, all that stuff. That could be what it means for him to be gentle. And then the suggestion is, well, that didn't work. It's turned into a strange fashion of forsaking where she has the power and she's dismissed him, but almost as if, okay, your services are no longer needed.
27:07 Erin: And it's a fashion of forsaking. So she's almost playing the role like she's. So she says, well, I'm going to have to give you up now or something. And, you know, to her this was all some kind of game or some kind of, you know, she was going through the motions or trying to win him through some sort of ruse maybe about the strength of her actual affection for him. Or maybe it had to do with, you know, maybe what he suggests isn't just a fancy he has about himself, but the truth that he's some kind of player and she has hooked. She's tamed the player.
And she did this only because it would make some kind of a good story or something. And her rejection of him is either pretending to forsake him, all for a joke so that she could go back and tell her girlfriends what she did. Right. In a further kind of gender role reversal, or he's now, well, strange fashion of forsaking. Yeah, I think that works. But I think it would also work to just say, well, she felt she had to give me up because it was fashionable at the time to now be interested in someone else. So the strength of her affection in the first place is also in doubt.
Either way, I think the once in special was special only for him.
28:26 Wes: Yeah. So the fashion of forsaking could be form read as form of forsaking, but could it also be read as a trend?
28:35 Erin: Yeah, this year we're giving up.
28:37 Wes: He started, you know. Yeah, right. Doing a dry January.
28:43 Erin: Yeah. Deer are all the rage this season.
28:46 Wes: So in fashion to come from man to man, but it could be fashion in the sense of something he set the precedent for himself.
28:55 Erin: Possibly that would be Right. I mean, this time is different, but this is a case of reaping what he sows in that instance.
29:02 Wes: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What's confusing here is just it said it's turned through his gentleness. So, I mean, it would make Sense if it through his caddishness. Right. Became a fashion of forsaking. But why, through his gentleness, as if he's getting punished for being the nice guy, which we know he's not.
29:20 Erin: Right. Oh, well, only in this instance has he ceded the power to allow someone to turn it back on him.
29:26 Wes: Right.
29:26 Erin: So there had to have been. Yeah. There had to be a moment of letting his guard down to allow the real emotion for the real emotion to be played upon.
29:35 Wes: So it's strange in the sense that he's not used to being the one that's getting rejected. He's used to being in the other. The other position.
29:42 Erin: Yeah.
29:43 Wes: And I have leave to go of her goodness. And she also to use newfangledness. All right, what does that mean? She also to use newfangledness.
29:53 Erin: She has leave. Is that the grammatical connection here? She also has leave to use newfangledness. So she can also do what she wants. What do I care? I don't know.
30:09 Wes: So newfangledness is. What is it literally? Newfangledness or its inconstancy or. Yeah, this runs, of course, against the word fashion. Or with maybe, but.
30:20 Erin: Yes. Hold on. I looked this up. I have it in a tab somewhere. I found it in the oed.
30:26 Wes: Yeah, I saw that.
30:28 Erin: And I think Wyatt is. No, never mind. It's Chaucer first. Yes. Chaucer first uses newfangledness. So he invents the word. Chaucer does.
30:37 Wes: Yeah. So how is he using it? They should abstain From All Newfangledness. 1487. The King's subjects inclined to newfangledness have spoken with the Same Elizabeth, Act 25, Henry VIII. Bancroft, you, through your rashness and following of every spirit, are grown to a wonderful newfangledness. This newfangledness proceedeth from an inconstant mind.
31:01 Erin: The etymology is a dead end. It just says newfangle plus ness. Okay, newfangle. Let's see the etymology here. I like it because it's newfangled land. It's from Middle Dutch. Nuvingle. Different stem vowel. Oh. Difficult to relate directly to the English word. Perhaps compare also to Faroese fangla. To try to catch hold of. Aha. To try to catch hold of.
31:28 Wes: Hmm.
31:29 Erin: We know that. But I like it because it's related to fashion. It sounds like something spangled. And we also have the word fang in it, which I think, you know, maybe I'm over reading, but. But I think that's, you know, now. Now it's like newfangled is like, almost has a. Like a down home, you know? Oh, that newfangled Tesla over there. Whatever. Newfangled cyber truck. Yeah. But I. I like that it has almost like a sparkly kind of quality to it. Like spangled. Something being spangled. Something being fashionable and having a shiny ext. Like almost like a mirrored.
This is just what I'm thinking in terms of, like, word association games in my own mind. It has nothing to do with anything, you know, but a. But a veneer that. That hides something underneath. We have the word fang in it, which I think is important. And if we say things that are. What did I say? That can't be caught, that you try to catch hold of hold of something and can't catch it, then of course, that's very Wyatt esque.
32:33 Wes: Okay, so he has leave to go of her goodness, and she has leave to use newfangledness. She's being charged with two contradictory crimes. One of being good. And so he gets separated from that goodness. But the suggestion of newfangledness. I mean, newfangledness here suggests that she has leave to be modern and to, you know, go between guys. Right. To be. Is that the implication? To be less constant? Less.
33:00 Erin: I think so, yeah.
33:01 Wes: Okay.
33:02 Erin: And to use it as well. It's a. It's a bit. It's different from saying she has. She also. To even have newfangledness or to be newfangled wouldn't work for the rhyme. But some other verb in front of that would read quite differently. But using it implies that it's yet another guise that she could put on. She's just employing this for whatever end she. She's working for that day. So even her changeability is changeable depending on the circumstances and depending on which mode of attack she wants to use.
33:37 Wes: There's already something newfangled. Right. About their relationship if she's the one. If they're, you know, if we're right about the gender role reversal.
33:45 Erin: That's right.
33:45 Wes: I kind of imagine her wearing a suit, a tuxedo, I think.
33:52 Erin: A viola in my head.
33:54 Wes: Yeah. You know, and then dipping him and kissing him and then going off and with her newfangled ways, dressing like a man. Or maybe she's just a flapper from the 20s or something like that. But since I am so. So since. But since that I so kindly am served, which I take to be sarcastic, I would fain, correct me if I'm wrong, but I would fain know that she hath deserved what she hath deserved. So. Sounds a little bitter. Am I reading that right. What is he saying?
34:30 Erin: Yeah, I think. Well, I think kindly works couple ways, like everything here, because served in kind.
34:38 Wes: Yep.
34:39 Erin: So since she hath done unto me as I have done unto every other woman around, every other deer in the. In the forest, I really don't know what she deserves, you know? Well, there's a reading of that last line, which is, you know, who am I to say? Because maybe I just deserve it too. And then there's a really bitter reading as well.
35:00 Wes: Yeah, we know kindly has several contradictory meanings because he has been kindly served. That's the whole vignette, right? It's about him being kindly served with the kiss and also her goodness. There's plenty to suggest that he really has been kindly served, but there's also plenty to suggest that he's sarcastically talking about his rejection and the strange fashion of forsaken and the newfangledness. So it must be both, I think, to be kindly served. And then again, as you said, it must also refer to the way he has served others. But I find the last line really cryptic, even in light of all that I would fain know what she hath deserved.
35:41 Erin: He really maybe doesn't know, because I think you're right to point out that he was kindly served. And he doesn't seem to have a great track record for treating other people with kindness, as you also said. So, yeah, so this is sarcastic, it's bitter. But I think he's also saying, how should I know what she deserves? Because maybe he still doesn't know her true nature. He still hasn't seen her quote, unquote, naked because there was even a guise in her nakedness.
36:10 Wes: So he may be getting his just desserts for all his caddish behavior, but the question is, you know, if his just desserts involve someone doing to him what he did to hit them or to others, then don't. You know, it's just an endless cycle of people using each other or whatever, or taking advantage of each other, however you want to think of it, right?
36:34 Erin: And what. What she deserves, his inability to know that could be because she's operating on this higher plane that she was able to, you know, to trap him. So who knows the level of comeuppance she deserves? Or he's truly wondering whether or not she is actually good. Or maybe he's even doubting her ultimate complicity in his downfall. So uncertain is he of her true
36:58 Wes: nature, he says instead of saying know what she deserves or whatever form of that, he would put it in, know what she hath deserved. That's a really interesting way to put it because it suggests it's about what she deserved in the past retrospectively, not what she deserves. In light of him being so kindly served.
37:18 Erin: Well, he's so. Perhaps he's so far outside of court happenings now because he's been so ostracized that he doesn't even know if she has received any comeuppance. That could be something I'd fain know
37:31 Wes: what she hath deserved. Yeah, that's an interesting idea.
37:34 Erin: Yeah, I'm in the tower. Maybe she's here in another part of it, but I don't know.
37:39 Wes: Ah, yeah, very interesting. Okay, that makes sense.
37:42 Erin: But I think, you know, I mean, you're right to point out the odd tense there, but.
37:46 Wes: Yeah, well, it suggests what she has deserved since.
37:48 Erin: Yeah, I mean, one envisions the answer to this. I have to put on my historical fiction kind of way of thinking now. But he writes this last line and then he looks out the window and he sees her getting her head chopped off.
38:04 Wes: Right.
38:04 Erin: Oh, that's what she hath deserved. Right.
38:08 Wes: Wow.
38:09 Erin: Maybe all of this is written inside the tower and then he sees her.
38:12 Wes: Okay, yeah, it's a distinct possibility. All right, we're almost out of time, but do we want to just by wrapping up, way of wrapping up, say, anything about the connection between the first and second parts of the poem? It's not entirely clear. Right. There's quite a contrast between the first part and the second part. And the other question is why? The flashback is supposed to be to something comforting. So he's in the situation of having others flee from him that were once friendly with him. The fickleness and faithlessness of those people, presumably. And then, thankfully, it's been otherwise. There have been better times, but the better times turned out not to be so much better, it seems. Or. Yeah, I don't quite know how to join up these two parts.
38:59 Erin: I don't know that I do either. The best I can say is I see this as being just as conversational and performative as Whoso list to hunt. So I envision that he's saying this to an audience, maybe one guy in particular, at the dive bar they're now frequenting after being kicked out of the better bars. He has a little bit of a pose in the first stanza, again, maybe true, maybe oppose, in which he says, you know, they didn't appreciate that they put themselves in danger when they. But overall, the first stanza reflects something a little bit too pathetic about his state.
So I see the second stanza as him having to assure the listener. But, you know, by the way, I used to be quite the player, you know, so don't. You know. So he has to kind of restore his ego a little bit and say, hey, you know, it wasn't always like this, and maybe in the future things will be better for me. But just so you don't think I'm this pathetic, I just want you to know it was 20 times better before. And then, interestingly, over the course of the stanza, he gets kind of caught up in the telling of the story and realizing that that too, ultimately, even though he has this kind of, like, fond memory because of this profound erotic experience that he had, that also leaves him the same place as where he started, which is in a degraded position.
40:26 Wes: Yeah. It's like the snake is catching its own tail at the very end. Right. Is this the very circumstance that led to his downfall? Right. So he's flashing back to the very.
40:37 Erin: Yeah, wait till I tell you about this.
40:38 Wes: Yeah, it's been really. It hasn't always been this terrible. It was way better back in the day. And then he recounts the way better that led to this terrible.
40:47 Erin: Yeah, because it was the peak and the immediate downfall. Yeah. So I see it as a little bit of posturing, which then ultimately is as futile in the end, is undercutting the initial intent of telling the conquest story to try and make himself look better. It catches him in the end. Yeah.
41:04 Wes: Right.
41:05 Erin: But, yeah, I mean, the transitions between stanzas here are really sharp. Even between the second and third, you know, it's pretty sharp because as you rightly point out, which I didn't even think of, you know, he's never claimed that this was a dream, you know, so you might say that this turn between second and third stanza, something like, you know, no, this really happened. Assuring the listener that it really wasn't a dream. I mean, the second half of the line doesn't really bear that out, but I think there's something of. Maybe there is no listener.
There's just an internal performance, an internal reassurance, kind of bargaining with himself. But, yeah, you have to. The transitions for me are a little papered over. If you think of this as being a real conversation, a real mind animating the twists and turns. You know, the twists and turns. You have to really think about the interiority of the speaker.
41:53 Wes: Okay. All right. Next time we're going to do Beetlejuice.
41:56 Erin: Fun.
41:57 Wes: I don't know what we're doing after that, because I think. Wait. Oh, it might be my turn to pick.
42:01 Erin: It is. Choose wisely.
42:03 Wes: Oh, I had mentioned Conrad Aiken, so that's a. Maybe I'll talk to you about that. But okay, but don't definitely Beetlejuice. All right, thank you, thank you.
42:13 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter joysubtext.
A Strange Fashion of Forsaking in the Poetry of Thomas Wyatt (Part 1)
Nov 18, 2024
As an advisor to Henry VIII and ambassador to France and Italy, poet Thomas Wyatt was something of a professional court-surfer, practiced in riding the peaks and troughs of royal favor. Such were his verbal and diplomatic gifts that, though twice accused of and imprisoned for treason, he was twice released. His poetry reflects all the intrigue, paranoia, airlessness, and downright cruelty of the Tudor Court, where a misplaced word or an ill-timed look might see you not just out of favor, but a head shorter. In two of his most celebrated poems—which might draw upon the affair he might have had with Anne Boleyn—certainty is suspect, irony thick, allegiance changeable, and hunters apt to find they’ve become the hunted. Wes & Erin discuss Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee from Me.”
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2:23 Erin: You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. As an advisor to Henry VIII and ambassador to France and Italy, poet Thomas Wyatt was something of a professional courtier, practiced in riding the peaks and troughs of royal favor. Such were his verbal and diplomatic gifts that though twice accused of and imprisoned for treason, he he was twice released. His poetry reflects all the intrigue, paranoia, airlessness and downright cruelty of the Tudor court, where a misplaced word or an ill timed look might see you not just out of favor, but a head shorter in two of his most celebrated poems, which might draw upon the affair he might have had with Anne Boleyn.
Certainty is suspect, irony thick, allegiance changeable, and hunters apt to find they've become the hunted. Today we're discussing Thomas Wyatt's who so list to hunt and they Flee from Me. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I think we'll start part one of our episode with whoso list to hunt and then move on to they Flee from Me in part two. And as I'm sure you know, Wyatt is credited with bringing the sonnet into English by way of his really transformative translations of Petrarch. He was interested in many other forms as well, but, you know, he's really credited with bringing the sonnet over.
I've just been reflecting on the fact that the English poetic tradition is built almost entirely on borrowed goods, you know, on forms from other traditions. I mean, I think one of the rare exceptions to this actually would be the rhyme royal stanza, which Chaucer originated and in which they flee from me is written. But yeah, it just occurs to me that English is a dubious sort of stolen, covetous, grasping kind of, you know, they're retrofitting various forms from other traditions into English and very often kind of making do. You could tell that the form is not native to the English tradition.
Like in Terza rima, which is something that Wyatt also wrote in, in English, you know, terza rima, a form in which rhyme you have to do a triple rhyme, which is very easy to do in Italian, but which is very difficult to do in English. So it's not something that English take. I'm just thinking about how apt that might be for Wyatt's subject matter for the Tudor court in which all of this is being transposed into England at the time. They're sort of, you know, building the plane of courtly aspiration in the air as Henry VIII is kind of bankrupting the court to try and keep up with the grander courts of France and Italy and Spain.
And there's something maybe a little bit false about the whole enterprise that Wyatt is kind of playing on. And I think it has something to do with this pilfering, this stealing things and kind of retrofitting them to you that don't quite fit. I mean, I think it worked out rather well for the English poetic tradition in the end, but it's just Funny that there's such dubious grounds on which the whole enterprise is built.
5:39 Wes: So it seems like he's playing with the courtly tradition, which by at this point is relatively old. How do we date the courtly tradition?
5:48 Erin: Is that at least to Eleanor of Aquitaine? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's not interested in Arthurian legend, say, you know, he's more. Wyatt is very much a European continental oriented poet, as much as I think he admired Chaucer. So he's interested in playing, I think, on these courtly tropes. But whoso list to hunt in particular. Right. Is actually just a very, very loose, very subversive translation of Petrarch's Sonnet 190. So he's as much in the sort of Italian Petrarchan tradition as he is playing on the courtlier themes of the poem.
6:28 Wes: Yeah. So I think subversion is a good word. So he's taking a tradition which is rather idealistic about love, and he's introducing something dark into it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's still, still an element of longing and romance. But it's more fallen maybe, and it's more. Well, I don't know if it's more overtly sexual. Well, I guess we'll get into that
6:53 Erin: in the poems, but certainly, I think.
6:55 Wes: Okay. And then in the background, as you pointed out, there's all the stuff with Henry viii and, and Wyatt himself. Right. Was imprisoned for a while, I think he was, for supposedly getting with Anne Boleyn, but apparently she was getting with everyone in town. So they executed five. Well, of course not. That's his insane mind, but Henry VIII's insanity. But five, five of them got executed and, and then plus Anne Boleyn, apparently it's possible that Wyatt saw it from the tower in which he was imprisoned. Crazy stuff. So, yeah, if this is even in a veiled way about Anne Boleyn, he's really doing something risky.
7:37 Erin: Yeah, I mean, you can always, you can always say it's a Persona poem. Right. The eye isn't. Isn't me. You know, I've never met this guy before.
7:46 Wes: Who's that other guy you already executed.
7:48 Erin: Right. It's covered so many Thomases, you know, one of them, they all get lost in the shuffle eventually. But it's super risky. Yeah, the, the very sexual nature, I think. I mean, I think it's safe to say that especially they flee from me, but also to a certain extent, who. whoso list to hunt is definitely such a radical transformation of the Petrarch, because, you know, in Petrarch it's all about Laura, or Laura, you know, being this like, chaste ideal, you know, she's the Beatrice to his Dante. Right. And so she's, you know, she's transformed into these animal figures, you know, the doe, the sacred doe.
But it's almost like it might as well be, you know, it could all just be an allegory for, you know, the soul ascending to the divine or whatever the case may be. Right. So there's something very, very different in nature and in tone to what Petrarch is doing in his description of this pure white hind that appeared to him versus Wyatt as this exhausted would be lover going, ugh, you know, I can't run after this woman anymore is very different tonally. And yeah, I think it's definitely suggestive that it's not doing her any favors if it's implying that everybody is running after her and she has lots of opportunity, that's for sure.
9:09 Wes: When you say building the plane of courtly aspiration out of thin air or in the air, I think is what you said, do you mean in some sense they're trying to preserve that tradition even as times are kind of changing, or is this something new?
9:23 Erin: What I mostly mean is that the Tudors come to an English throne which they are conscious of being not highly regarded among European courts. I mean, they are the true backwater. Yeah. So they're trying to build up an artistic tradition. They're trying to be splendid and grand. They're trying to rival the courts of Europe. He was patron of many different artists, was, was always putting on these really lavish, over the top kinds of, you know, what we might now recognize as being nouveau riche gauche kinds of performances of courtly splendor. Because he was, he was really conscious of being, especially the Italians and, you know, but I think you're right to point out that word courtly is also being suggestive of a certain kind of English tradition.
And I think that the Tudors are now at the point where they're using that tradition in this hyper aware, sophisticated, self conscious kind of way. Right, Yeah.
10:21 Wes: I was thinking of the word irony and the way the English Renaissance kind of introduces or not at least heightens that sensibility. You see it in Shakespeare especially.
10:33 Erin: Right. And it becomes a kind of a deadly game, you know, a really deadly game in the Tudor court in which everything is about this just really, really subtle and intricate pecking order in which everything is about performance, everything is about, you know, there's a lot of, you know, I think of like feigned sincerity when I think of the Tudor court, like these performances of being sincere, which everyone is aware are performances, and you get credit for how well you perform sincerity, just the layers of irony that involve being a part of the court, I think, were actually really kind of maddening, and I think implied that you just really could never trust anyone because you never knew who was lying to you, who would rat you out for an advancement, a favor or a position.
And women, as well as men were doing this and very, very conscious of their playing, their identity in some way. You know, they were, in a sense, walking Persona poems. You know, their Personas were highly constructed. So, you know, I think they make us look us with our. With our Internet avatars and our, you know, the things that we hide behind on the Internet. I think they. They make us look pretty tame, actually, by comparison. But maybe that's overstating.
11:50 Wes: If you look at the bio for Wyatt, it's just a very matter of fact him being in and out of favor. One minute he's in prison, the next minute he's out. So with the alleged adultery of Anne Boleyn, he was in the Tower of London and then released, apparently because of his relationship with Thomas Cromwell. Later on, I think he was back in prison. Who was it? How did he get out of that one? I don't know. He was briefly in prison again.
12:16 Erin: I think it was Cromwell again.
12:17 Wes: Okay. I think Katherine Howard herself about to be executed had something to do with it. I don't know.
12:24 Erin: And this is what's so confusing about the fact that he's in and out of favor. The fact that he's in at all after a certain point is pretty remarkable because he was really Catherine of Aragon's man and then was in an odd position when she was kicked out. I think he favored Mary on the throne.
12:45 Wes: So by 1540, he was again in the king's favor as he was granted the site and many of the manorial estates of the dissolved Boxley Abbey. Reading from Wikipedia here, however, he was charged once more with treason in 1541. The charges were again lifted, but only thanks to the intervention of Queen Catherine Howard, and on the condition of reconciling with his wife, granted a full pardon, restored to his duties as ambassador. So it's almost as if these very, very serious charges that could get your head lopped off were really just political tool and could be retracted on a whim. You know, it could be used on a whim, but then retracted on a whim. Oh, okay. Well, I guess I still need you or someone else. Is intervening on your behalf. So.
13:29 Erin: Right.
13:30 Wes: You're not a traitor anymore until I say so.
13:33 Erin: This is what happens when your country is run by a violent psychopath.
13:37 Wes: It's good to be the king.
13:41 Erin: I mean, really, he's, you know, Henry viii. I mean, Katherine Howard is, you know, I recommend looking into her a little bit more to see. Exactly. It's easy to kind of think of Henry VIII as this, like, you know, jolly guy who's always eating a leg of mutton or whatever. But, you know, he was. He was terrifying. And Katherine Howard was a child. And, I mean, it makes sense maybe that she intervened for Wyatt if he was part of this entrenched Catholic contingency, actually, because she was from a Catholic family and, you know, she's like, a generation younger than Henry.
So various things have gone on in the interim between Catherine of Aragon and. And Katherine Howard. But, I mean, Katherine Howard herself is one of the saddest stories of Tudor England. She was a child when she married him. She was still basically a child when he put her to death. And she was so terrified over getting her head lopped off. And this is something that I went and I saw this just recently. So I was just at Hampton Court Palace. I was just, you know, I've been so deep in Tudor lore lately. But, you know, one of the most poignant. Some of the most poignant stories are stories of Katherine Howard, like how she was nervous about the date of her execution and wanted to appear br.
So she had a servant bring her a block so that she could practice kneeling on it. And, you know, it's just, oh, anyway,
14:59 Wes: maybe at some point we'll do A Man for All Seasons, the movie where Robert Shaw plays King Henry VIII in such a great portrayal, I think, because you get a sense of the volatility of this character who could be your best friend one minute and ready to kill you the next.
15:16 Erin: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I just, you know, it's. It's worth. I think it's worth mentioning because it's just. It's so easy now to say, oh, you know, isn't it quaint that they all had, you know, they're all sending each other letters and little, you know, little tokens and little portraits and, oh, we had six wives and. Ah, we love that. We love the little, you know, rhymes about it, really. It was a dangerous, awful.
15:38 Wes: Well, Henry VIII wrote a defense of Catholicism, I think. Right. Didn't he write a. Immediately afterward is having Thomas More executed, who was his mentor, in a way, and all that. Stuff. So, yeah, it's nuts. One minute you're sending a nice poem, the next minute, sorry, poetry group is canceled today. You're going to be executed.
16:06 Erin: Well, and sometimes I think he would kill people on both sides just to scare everybody. It can't be overstated how truly awful he was. And the weakening of that into something like this jolly old fat man, I think, is we have to wake ourselves up from that and remind ourselves the very real stakes involved in Wyatt's poems, for one.
16:28 Wes: Yeah. So why. I know you had done this in school recently. Yeah. How did you get introduced to Wyatt, and why did you choose Wyatt for an episode?
16:40 Erin: Well, I fell in love with these poems in high school. I think these are just on my reading list because.
16:46 Wes: Okay, so you put them on. You put them on your reading list. Right, okay.
16:49 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And they're important, I think, you know, in the history, of course, of English poetry, of the lyric tradition. Important for my obsession with form and, you know, sort of tracing the lineage of forms into English. But also. Yeah, these two poems in particular, but also several other Wyatt poems. I remember first reading them and being kind of thrilled by them. Like, they seemed so chatty to me. You know, his conversational style is, I think, often talked about. But, yeah, they felt like, modern and, like, had this electricity in them and.
Yeah, so I just. I remember reading them and being. I've been interested in the Tudors for a long time. My mom was really obsessed with the Tudors. I had a teapot as a little girl. When I used to play every afternoon. I used to like to have tea, which was usually just like, I would have milk in a teapot and. And like, have a little Debbie cake or something with it. And anyway, I had a teapot that had Henry and his six wives on the teapot. And I, I. It's still, still somewhere. It's in my parents attic somewhere. I was at the. An exhibit of the six wives of Henry VIII in the.
I think it was. Gosh, I went to so many places now, I can't remember. I think it was in the National Portrait Gallery this summer in London. And it included a room that had, like a pop culture, you know, six wives of Henry VIII in pop culture section. And there was my teapot among the paraphernalia of, you know, sort of like kitschy, fun, like little cultural artifacts. And. Yeah, so I. I really liked that. And I thought, like, oh, the teapot with all the pretty women on them, like in pretty dresses. I was like 4. But anyway, my mom got me that because she was interested in the Tudors.
And so I think Wyatt was someone who I was aware of much younger than I might have been ordinarily because of my interest in Elizabeth I. And just the whole Tudor dynasty was really interesting to me. Were you aware of him?
18:50 Wes: No, I wasn't. Yeah. I mean, yeah, who knows? I may have been exposed to him at some point when I was younger, but. No. One last question before we dive in. So I think, yeah. Listeners, when they look at these poems, will recognize the Renaissance English style. I don't have a lot of specifics on how that evolved, but has anyone made an argument for his direct influence on someone like Shakespeare? I guess that would be too difficult. I mean, it's setting a tone in a style that I think is recognizable. Right. And later poets, but definitely sort of a general cultural trend. But I don't know. You know, would Shakespeare have read someone like this? Yeah.
19:28 Erin: I don't know. It was collected in. Was it Tottel's Miscellany, which Shakespeare might have read? I think that would line up correctly. I think of a direct descendant of Wyatt as being someone like John Donne. And I could talk a little bit more about why I think that is. I think there's something surprising going on with these male speakers, which will.
19:47 Wes: Right.
19:48 Erin: Which I'm sure we'll get into. And that's a theme in Donne as well. Maybe that's just because conceit or, you know, various other things. But I think the speaker has something in common with Donne. I'm not sure that Shakespeare's speaker and his sonnets, because they're so often in the imperative mood. Most of the sonnets, they just feel quite different in tone. Like, the speaker just seems very, very different from a Wyatt speaker. Maybe more so in the Dark Lady Sonnets, of course. But for the bulk of the sonnets,
20:16 Wes: the Young man sonnets, there's more resignation, maybe.
20:19 Erin: Yeah. There's just a lot of character. Like, you really get the sense of who Wyatt man from these. I think even though we can't quite trust it or, you know, we assume there's some obfuscation going on, but.
20:34 Wes: Yeah.
20:34 Erin: Yeah.
20:34 Wes: Should we start? So you wanted to start with whoso list to hunt. Do you want to read four lines and then discuss and then four lines. How do you want to do that? Or do you want to read the whole thing first?
20:43 Erin: Well, let's read the whole thing. It has such a great sweep. And then we'll kind of go a couple lines at a time.
20:50 Wes: Okay.
20:50 Erin: Yeah.
20:51 Wes: So Let me just. Before you do that, you said this is rhyme royal. A, B, B, A. Is that what that is?
20:56 Erin: No, this is a sonnet. They flee from me. Is rhyme royal?
20:59 Wes: Oh, they flee from me.
21:01 Erin: Yeah.
21:01 Wes: Okay. Well, all right. So you can tell us what that. Tell me and the listeners what that is when we get to that. So this is a borrowed rhyme scheme. It is, but it's the Italians. But okay.
21:11 Erin: It's twisted, though, so it's almost a Petrarchan sonnet. But it's actually kind of listing toward. Not to misuse that word, but it's kind of listing towards the Shakespearean sonnet because it has a twist. So it has the Abba. Abba. Traditional Petrarchan or Italian octave. And for the sestet, it's C, D, D, C, E, E. So it has the little couplet at the end, the button on the end that's characteristic of the Shakespearean sonnet.
21:38 Wes: Okay.
21:38 Erin: So it's kind of like. It's like halfway through its mutation, it's like Jeff Goldblum, half Jeff Goldblum, half fly. I love that.
21:49 Wes: Pretty good.
21:50 Erin: Got to be the first time those two things have ever been connected. All right, here we go. Whoso list to hunt. I know where is an hind but as for me, alas, I may no more the vain travail hath wearied me so sore I am of them that farthest cometh behind yet may I by no means my wearied mind draw from the deer. But as she fleeth afore fainting, I follow, I leave off. Therefore sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind who list her hunt I put him out of doubt as well as I may spend his time in vain engraven with diamonds and letters plain There is written her fair neck round about Noli me tangere For Caesar's I am and wild for to hold Though I seem tame, I like
22:36 Wes: big hinds and I cannot lie. Sir, wait, that's not the double entendre.
22:43 Erin: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. That's the true poetic legacy of Wyatt.
22:46 Wes: Yeah. Well, I was gonna say when you said terza rima is hard to do if you're a rapper. It's not. Because you can just use the same word over and over and over again. Rhyme words with themselves.
22:58 Erin: Or you can rhyme terrible words with each other. The badness is no impediment.
23:05 Wes: Bad rhymes are acceptable.
23:06 Erin: Right.
23:07 Wes: All right. But hind in this case. So we're getting. So the images of a deer and a hunt, I guess. Is there a double entendre? I was going to say there was. Other than the one I made with behind. I think I'm thinking of the next poem, but.
23:29 Erin: Oh, the heart. Yes. Yeah. No, unfortunately, I don't think there's anything having to do with.
23:35 Wes: Yeah.
23:36 Erin: With big butts here.
23:37 Wes: No, no, I know.
23:39 Erin: I'm just easy.
23:42 Wes: Okay. So hunting is a metaphor for the pursuit of love, in this case, sort of. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah, go ahead, complicate it.
23:51 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean. I mean, that's what's so. Right. That's what's so immediately interesting about this. It's like, okay, when they get the deer, if this is the metaphor, then the killing of the thing that you're pursuing. Right. Becomes what? Literal marriage. It works, right? Yeah.
24:14 Wes: You both die in a way.
24:15 Erin: Sexual congress. People still say that anymore? I don't know.
24:21 Wes: Yeah. Petite mort.
24:23 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
24:23 Wes: The little death of orgasm, but the death of single life and the death of longing.
24:30 Erin: Yes.
24:30 Wes: Potentially.
24:31 Erin: Yeah.
24:32 Wes: And other. You know, the death of individuality. You know, the boundary problems that arise. All of that stuff. It evokes all that stuff. So.
24:41 Erin: But with little of that adhering to the hunter. Right. The hunted is.
24:46 Wes: Well, I think the hunter. Yeah. Becomes the hunt. Head. Sorry.
24:49 Erin: Yes.
24:50 Wes: Sorry to say that.
24:51 Erin: I already said that in my.
24:54 Wes: Did you already say that?
24:55 Erin: I did. I couldn't. I can't say it. Yeah. I mean, there's no other way.
24:59 Wes: I didn't hear that for some reason. Okay. Now I'm just. Plagiarism.
25:02 Erin: Yeah, that's right.
25:02 Wes: I invented that phrase because I had never heard it before.
25:08 Erin: Yeah. I take full credit.
25:10 Wes: But. Yeah. What I'm trying to say is we'll find out, I think, in the second poem. Yeah. That there are the implications that follow for the hunted in some ways fall for the hunter. Right.
25:21 Erin: Certainly.
25:21 Wes: Yeah.
25:22 Erin: I mean, I think immediately there's this. By line three, the vain travail hath wearied me so sore. It's like, this is not fun anymore. This is not providing any satisfaction for this whole group of people. They're getting tired out. So rather than, I guess, tiring out the deer in the hunt, the opposite is happening. So already they're being almost taken advantage of in some way by the deer. Like, the deer is kind of enjoying this and everyone is just tiring themselves out and running after her. It, however, the deer's tease.
25:53 Wes: Let's just.
25:54 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think. I think so. Right. And I mean, I think it's worth saying if this is Anne Boleyn, Wyatt was married when he first met Her. This was a terrible marriage, I guess, and he wanted nothing to do with her. After a couple of kids, no one knows what happened there, but that's simply to say, you know, how free he was. To be hunting is also something, you know, one wonders about this group of hunters and what their situation is. But it seems to me that if someone is.
26:20 Wes: Honey, can I go out hunting this weekend?
26:24 Erin: If someone is hunting.
26:25 Wes: You hunted last weekend.
26:28 Erin: Well, she's wise to be running from at least one member of this particular group. If we are to take this as Wyatt Bowen.
26:35 Wes: Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting that it's a group thing. So that's sort of where. If we were to take this strictly as a metaphor for the pursuit of a beloved, there's a bit of a breakdown. I mean, breakdown is maybe the wrong word, but there's a bit of darkness introduced by this idea that he's part of a group and he's the one lagging behind.
26:57 Erin: Yeah. There's something of the guy who looks around and slowly realizes that he's the oldest one at the club. You know, he's been going there every night for 20 years, and suddenly he realizes that he's older than everybody else and he's at the back of the herd who.
27:14 Wes: So list to grind. I know. The great club.
27:20 Erin: Alas, I. Yeah, no, but all that to say, I mean, is wearying and wanting to. I mean, certainly he's obsessed, and therefore he's already been kind of captured by this hind, and therefore, in a way, perhaps becomes something like the hunted. But I think more than that, it's this. No, I'm going to stop. I can't do this anymore. It's this, his wearing himself out and then kind of having a renewed interest and then wearing himself out again.
27:49 Wes: The other aspect of this is it's a really interesting way to begin. And these sorts of tensions are what make these poems interesting. But he's a hunter, but he knows where the hind is. So I found that immediately arresting who so is to hunt. I know where is in hind. He could tell you exactly where it is. It's not that. Right. I think typically on a hunt, you have all your hound dogs and they're sniffing out the hind. The hind. You don't know where it is. You're out to find it. In this case, he knows where. And so the hunt means something else.
28:20 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. It's also. He's not doing a great job advertising this hunt either. I mean, if you like to hunt, but you don't expect to catch anything then. You know, if you like the pure chase. That's not quite a hunt either, you know, I mean, I think you hunt to kill. You hunt so that at the end of the day, you have something to eat or something to sling over your shoulders and throw onto the table of King John or whoever.
28:44 Wes: Maybe it's catch and catch and release. Catch and flirting, in other words, which is you could think of as a vain travail. Right. So it's a kind of hunting, but unconsummated.
28:55 Erin: Yeah, well, he addresses someone, you know, it's. It's. It begins with an apostrophe. And we, I suppose, are the person he's talking to. So I love how we're immediately in his confidence. Like this is. You know, we're immediately talking. Having an intimate conversation with someone at this bar, going like, man, I've been trying to. Trying to get with this woman over there, and I can't do it, you know, and, yeah, it's just. It's very. It's very chatty. I like it a lot. And I like the vacillations in it. Because by line two, as for me, alas, I may no more.
He's not swearing off it entirely. He's like, I don't know if I could keep doing this. That's something different from saying, I resign. You can have my place in the back of the pack and hope that you work your way up to the front eventually, but don't expect to hold your place there. So, yeah, I like the fact that the certainty of his giving this up is in question.
29:45 Wes: Oh, I see. So I was taking May as well. I can't. I may no more as I can't. And you're taking it as I might not.
29:52 Erin: Might not.
29:52 Wes: Yeah, Might not be able. Well, the other thing, you know, if you are sitting in the bar, it's not just, I'm after this girl and it's very tiring. It's. Yeah. If you're interested in someone, I know just the girl for you. It's the one that I'm after.
30:03 Erin: Right.
30:05 Wes: And I'm just too tired, so I'm gonna. Why don't I pass this on to you? Do you have energy? All right, you go for it then.
30:13 Erin: It's true. Why didn't I think how weird that is until you put that up?
30:16 Wes: It's very weird.
30:18 Erin: Yeah.
30:19 Wes: He's advertising the beloved to others.
30:22 Erin: Yeah, well, and that's the thing. She's obviously not the beloved. Maybe. I mean, maybe that's that's what we could take from this.
30:27 Wes: The would be beloved. Yeah. I don't know how to put it, but yeah, yeah.
30:30 Erin: I mean, this is about not something like real love, but maybe just acquiring status of having this particular notch on the belt or whatever. Right. So this is about really the other men. They're competing with each other maybe for the prize. And it's not so much about the prize as it is about showing the other men, hey, look, I was the one who did it. And yet still in that scenario, there is something self defeating about inviting more men in. But maybe there isn't, because then you have a bigger audience when you do get the, you know, there's something to be gained from having more and more and more people after the trophy.
Sure, he's fallen to the back of the group now he's of them that farthest cometh behind. But may I by no means my wearied mind draw from the deer. But as she fleeth afore fainting, I follow. So the thought pursuit that still happens even as he's taking a break, sitting this one out in the bar instead of being on the dance floor or whatever, getting a drink, resting.
31:33 Wes: I like that. Thought pursuit.
31:35 Erin: Yeah. He's still even just out of it, he's fainting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
31:41 Wes: So he can't actually pursue, but he can't draw away his mind. I like, yeah, I like this idea, this fainting. I follow as if in a way, fainting were a way of following. Fainting as in losing consciousness, being so invested in the other, invested in the object of one's desire, that one loses consciousness of oneself and perhaps consciousness altogether. It's a completely ecstatic state of mind, in other words.
32:11 Erin: Oh, I love that. Yeah. And it's occurring to me that now if he's in his mind, he might console himself with thoughts of what would happen if he caught her or with the goal in mind instead. Even in his mind, she's running from him. She fleeth afore of fainting. I follow. So he's being tired out even in the thought pursuit of it. You know, he's not fantasizing about what's gonna happen when he gets her. He can't draw his mind from the deer, and the deer is still running in his mind, so he can't even envision, I think, a scenario in which he actually, you know, what will he do when he gets her? Maybe because of the metaphor, she has reason to be.
32:51 Wes: n/a I leave off therefore sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind. So then he does leave off. Sithens being an interesting word for sense. Right. I don't know where that. I don't know the etymology, but in a net, I seek to hold the wind. So that's a new idea. This idea that the object being pursued in a way cannot be held. There's something intrinsically about her that is uncapturable.
33:21 Erin: Yeah. And yet he's. You know, he's saying he's leaving off, but then we know he'll return to it again, you know, so he's. This is just another example of his waffling. I might not do this anymore. I'm gonna. I think I'm gonna stop, but I can't even stop thinking about her. But no, no, no. Okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna stop now. It's like trying to hold the. You know, he's bargaining with himself or something. Or, you know, he's not doing a great job of selling this either. You know, the whole point is that he's. He's. He's trying to sell a man a bridge or something. But I leave off, therefore, sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind. And then we have. So that's line eight. So that's the octave. So then we need. We need a volta right here to get away from that. The twisting and turning of his sort of bargaining with himself now has to twist back again with this turn.
34:08 Wes: Before you get to that twist, I just want to say one more thing, which is that in the second stanza, in the first stanza, whereas in the first stanza, there's this weird presence of others and the implication that he's trying to incite them to pursue the object of his desire, that's gone now in the second stanza.
34:28 Erin: So, I mean, in the second quatrain.
34:30 Wes: Sorry, quatrain. Yeah. I realize this is not stanzas. I just made the separations. I turned it into stanzas in my notes. That's the problem. And then I put next to the title, no stanzas. So I would not make that mistake. But then I just made a note.
34:44 Erin: I do that too. It's easier to note it.
34:47 Wes: So, yeah, the second quatrain, he now is by himself. And I don't think the idea of others comes up again.
34:54 Erin: Well, in line nine, who list her hunt?
34:58 Wes: Oh, yeah. No, Right.
34:59 Erin: Well, yeah.
35:00 Wes: Immediately contradicted. Yeah. No, of course. Yeah.
35:03 Erin: Well, you know, what's the difference between who so lists to hunt and who lists her hunt? He's not quite speaking directly to a person. I Mean, I didn't mean to put that quite so strongly that we're envisioning that he's speaking to a person in particular. This is more of a kind of a general warning, educational session. So if you want to hunt her, whoever you are, I put you out of doubt. So it does become more specified with the pronouns, and it also crystallizes what's come before it in a way.
35:34 Wes: So he's going to relieve. Yeah, for anyone who's interested in hunting her and of course, her right. Specific object with desire on the one hand, but of course, could stand for any, you know, it could stand more generally. So he could be. Right. He could be admonishing someone. Let me just, you know, if you were going to do that, if you're going to make that mistake, let me just tell you right now, let me put you out of doubt about whether this is a good idea. So one could be giving that admonition about a particular love interest, or one could be saying that about men or women in general, about the pursuit of love interests in general. If you're agreeing to this, let me give you the cynical truth. This is a waste of time.
36:16 Erin: Yes. And yet doubt seems to be the theme of the day here, you know, is he going to be able to give this up? He doubts it, it seems, but he seems to say, here, I'll put you out of doubt about what a doubtful pursuit this is. It's a strange kind of twist. I mean, he is and is not. It's all tongue in cheek, right? Because he's saying, sure, if you want to. If you want to do this, go ahead, in this very rather sarcastic manner.
36:39 Wes: Well, the doubt part is, you know, I think is if you are wondering whether this is a good idea for you. So in the first stanza, he's invited someone to take up the pursuit stanza. In the first quatrain, the beginning of the poem, he's invited someone to take up this pursuit. Now he's saying, you know, in case you think this is a good idea. So the doubt being, in case you're wondering, then, okay, so he's invited that. Then he's given good reasons why someone would be doubt that that's a good idea. Like that's trying to catch the wind with a net. But if you're still not convinced, which is really what this line means, that that's a bad idea. Let me tell you about the diamonds. Let me tell you about what's actually written on her. Yes, the message is explicit. You don't have to read between the Lines. It's right there in diamonds. Yeah.
37:33 Erin: Yes, but I'm interested in the agency of the speaker here. I put him out of doubt. The whole thing is ironic, of course, you know, oh, if you like to hunt, I'll tell you how to, you know, how to have a good time. Right. So the whole thing is. Can be read as sarcastic or really ironic, but the idea that he is then advertising his ability to provide certainty for this person who he's enticing and not enticing when he himself does not have certainty and when he himself has no agency, as if he has the right to say, I know this situation. Take it from me, I'm putting you in this.
In this particular headset, you know, the agency he's taking over. This other person's relationship to the hind I find interesting. And to say that I put him out, I know I'm cutting off the, you know, the full extent of the. Right. But like the. The ownership he's taking over kind of the mental landscape around this hind is an interesting one because it implies a measure of authority which he himself claims not to have in the poem.
38:39 Wes: Right. This is a do as I say, not as I do moment. Yeah. It's like being lectured by a drug addict about, this is how you stop the drugs.
38:48 Erin: Yes. Or I'm the one that farthest cometh behind, and yet I'm the one that knows the nature of this pursuit better than anybody else. And I kind of know this hind better than anybody else. I mean, what authority does he have to be discouraging, encouraging other suitors? Of course, the whole nature of this poem is a form of encouraging discouragement, because if you really wanted to discourage someone, you wouldn't have to say anything at all. You could just hope that they never find out about this hind and move on. You don't have to say, hey, I have something for you, but don't do it. That's a little bit defeating itself.
39:27 Wes: Well, they might be discouraged by the implication, which is that he's captured this hind before because he knows where is an hind. And also he knows he has intimate knowledge of the diamond letters that are round about her fair neck.
39:43 Erin: That's right. That's true.
39:44 Wes: So there has been a catch and release.
39:47 Erin: Uh oh, has this guy gotten away or have we, you know, can we still ground him up and throw him back in the tower? Because now I'm seeing how incriminating this is.
39:55 Wes: Right. Yeah.
39:56 Erin: And just. Someone just put a flea in my ear about this Wyatt character again. Maybe I can't Trust him. Yeah. So as well as I may spend his time in vain.
40:07 Wes: So whoso, as well as I, might waste his time on this project, I'll put him out of doubt. And then. So then we get the story about the image of the diamonds with. You can't touch this.
40:21 Erin: Well, I just wanted to say that. In vain. Well, I think Caesar is prefigured in this. In vain. This is my little. You know, take this for what it's worth. But, you know, I was just thinking about he may spend his time in vain. Okay. Unprofitably, of course. But also I was thinking of taking the Lord's name in vain. Right. It's irreverent. Something improper. So I think there's a hint of the betrayal of the Almighty already before we even get the final four lines and the explicit words of the Caesar figure.
40:52 Wes: Yeah. So by bringing up Caesar, this evokes, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Caesar's I am. Which is. It's a way of saying, I belong to the things of this world as opposed to the things of the spiritual world, so don't touch me. Which seems to be contradictory, but. Yeah, enlighten me on this. If I'm getting this wrong.
41:10 Erin: I think that's correct. I think that there's also. And I should have looked this up before, but I did not. There is an apocryphal story about someone finding a white hind with a collar on it years and years after the death of the Caesar that put a collar around its neck, saying something like that. Like, there were. This was a practice of maybe it was Augustus Caesar to actually claim ownership via a collar of some kind over the deer belonging to him. And there's some apocryphal story about something like 200, 300 years after, say, if it was Augustus Caesar, two or 300 years after Augustus Caesar's death, someone finding a living deer with this color.
Wow, that's cool. So, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's chime here is part of this. But also, I think it is literally invoking a fanciful story that might have. Well, that obviously still, I think, had some currency in Wyatt's time or was known.
42:12 Wes: Yeah. Really interesting. So do not touch me. For Caesar's I am. Again, the implication seems to be. One might. I think it would be more straightforwardly understandable to say something like, do not touch me. I am representative of some higher spiritual realm. But in this case, it seems to be precisely the opposite so going beyond the apocryphal story to what this is supposed to represent. Do not touch me for Caesar's I am, it seems to suggest again, the. There's something this worldly about love and passion. So this would be an inversion of a more traditional courtly trope in which love represents, I think, as you already mentioned, a relation to the divine. Doesn't this invert that?
43:01 Erin: I think it does. I think it's also a bit more scary and frightening for the deer itself, or the metaphorical deer in the original Petrarch. The translation I have says touch me not in diamonds. And Topaz was written round about her lovely neck. It pleased my lord to set me free. So this is quite a twist on that. Touch me not for Caesar's I am and wild for to hold Though I seem tame. So it has pleased my Lord, or, sorry, it pleased my Lord to set me free. So don't touch me because I'm free. And we do get the Lord, but the Lord is quite different from, you know, this is still in the touch me not, no limit realm of Christ, but then with Lord, which could mean, you know, your run of the mill, everyday Lord, there's still a Christ like implication, that duality.
Caesar, you don't get that duality of Lord. That's a different kettle of fish altogether. So there's a nightmare quality. What I'm trying to say is there's a nightmare quality to the end of this poem, I think, because the inscription ends not with the words of the beloved, who would be implied to have some agency if she were to have the final lines of the poem attributed to her, but really the words of Caesar ventriloquizing her and implying that she is not free in the sense that the Petrarchan deer is free, but she belongs to an earthly power and therefore can't be touched because she belongs to someone else, not because she's been set free in some sort of divine metaphor in which she belongs to Christ alone and she's protected by the divine, or something like that.
The idea here is, I think that one thinks that this deer is a real tease. She loves to run these men ragged and she has all this agency and instead what they find when they do catch her. Because as I think you rightly point out, the speaker must have had a catch and release thing going. What you find when you finally get her is actually that she doesn't even belong to herself. She's already been claimed by someone.
45:18 Wes: I mean, one way of reading that is as disappointment in the promise of love as the promise of the beloved. Being something evocative of the divine. Being more than mundane. Right? So that's one way. That's one sort of warning. Don't touch me. Not because I'm divinely untouchable, but because I am a thing of this world. The last line, which is really interesting, right? Wild for to hold. Though I seem tame. So why would a deer being pursued. Why would one think of that deer as tame? I think if we're associating the deerness with a feminine beloved.
One could associate tameness with the feminine. And the feminine turns out to be, not as advertised, too wild for to hold. And the feminine is generally associated with higher ideals, including the divine. So I put tameness and divinity and femininity together. And I see the hunter as finding out, disappointedly that this is just, you could say just a human being. Just a creature of this world. Wild for to hold. Which suggests possessed of its own passions. Possessed of its own lack of tameness. Right? Too wild. So it could also, you know, it could be an expression of a disappointment that there's even a subjectivity to the other, which is a very Oedipal thing, right?
The impulse is to objectify and control the beloved. And to have it exist only for you. But you find out that there's person with their own desires underneath.
46:56 Erin: That's really interesting. I thought that the tameness is sort of just implied by the fact that it's wearing a collar. But then you get close enough to see the fine print, right? And you realize that you're getting a warning that things are wilder than they may appear. The inscription on the collar undoes the collar itself to a certain extent.
47:15 Wes: That's interesting.
47:16 Erin: I don't know what that means. Just for the fact of the collar. That seems more important than what's advertised on it. Just like the reality of the situation. The quote, unquote reality. Reality of the situation that the speaker claims to be in is more real somehow more substantive in some way than the poems. Function as an advertisement to the would be pursuer. In other words, both are kind of faux advertisements. Perhaps I'm wilder than I look. Well, no, you're not, because you're wearing somebody's collar, you know, so really, you have no. You have no agency of your own. You're claimed. And if you put a foot out of line, you're gonna get your head chopped off in some clubs.
47:59 Wes: The collar is a signifier of wildness. It's the wilder girls who wear the collar.
48:09 Erin: Are you familiar with the Sonnet? No, Swan so Fine by Marianne Moore. No, it's about a candelabrum, a Louis XV candelabrum that she sees in Versailles. And it has a swan on it with swart blind look askance. I used to have it memorized. I can't remember. But anyway, it's a chintz china swan with fawn brown eyes. So the doe is. She's obviously thinking of Wyatt. She's saying it's a swan, but has eyes that are brown like a doe and a toothed gold collar on to show whose bird it was, I think is how the line goes.
48:52 Erin: That's right. Interesting. Yeah. So even in the fake in Versailles, the swan that's part of this candelabra, which is just an art piece, an overly ornate art piece, he still has to proclaim that the images of animals on his china belong to him. Him. There's like a double dose of the Wyatt doe somehow, obviously, is referencing this poem. But. Yeah. So the desperate need. And maybe actually in light of that, I mean, maybe the desperate need of Louis the 15th to claim even the inanimate objects around him. Maybe we should be reading this inscription.
Just maybe we should be more gimlet eyed about this. That, in fact, the need to put the diamond collar around the neck actually implies that Caesar has less power than he'd like to believe. And that's also part of the inherent issue here of the fact that, okay, she has been claimed. Then why does she have so many men running after her? Something isn't adding up. She's not quite as owned, perhaps.
50:00 Wes: I mean, the Caesar's I am. Can be. And maybe you've been suggesting this all along, but I haven't been paying attention. But a way of saying I belong to Henry viii. Is that the idea?
50:11 Erin: Sorry, I don't know if I ever explicitly said that.
50:14 Wes: And wild for to hold, though I seem tame. Which one could read that broadly as why is she wild for to hold? On one level, it could just mean that this is dangerous.
50:25 Erin: Beware, do not approach.
50:27 Wes: Deal with the guardian.
50:29 Erin: If you mess with the deer, you'll get the horns. No, that's okay.
50:33 Wes: So I was reading it at a more metaphorical level as Caesar as being representative of what you render unto Caesar the things of this world as opposed to the spiritual world. And I'm associating wildness and desire and sexuality and all those things with the this world, with the Caesar's world, and then contrasting that with tameness and spirituality and femininity. So to suggest that the admonition is that you will find out that your idealized beloved is not so ideal if you catch them.
51:07 Erin: Okay, so we'll leave off our discussion of who so list to hunt there. And in part two of our discussion of the poems of Thomas Wyatt, we'll build, I think, on many of the themes established in who so list to hunt with another poem that's kind of about hunting, they flee from me. So we'll cover that in Part two. Thank you, Wes, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Formal Meets Feral in “A New Leaf” (Elaine May, 1971) – Part 2
Oct 28, 2024
Henry Graham belongs to the most exclusive clubs, dines regularly at the most lavish restaurants, drives a Ferrari, employs a butler, and owns something called a Montrazini—in short, he capitalizes fully on his inheritance, despite having little understanding of what “capital” actually is. The very ignorance of practicality that his wealth affords turns out to be his undoing, as soon finds that he’s run out of money and must bid goodbye to the high life—unless, that is, he can find a single, wealthy, isolated woman to marry and, for the sake of preserving his refined, hermetically-sealed existence, murder. Enter Henrietta Lowell. Similarly stunted by her own inheritance, she’s friendless, awkward, and utterly helpless: the perfect mark… But Henry soon discovers that protecting his own interests also means protecting hers, that competence can grow out of the exigency incompetence creates, and that practicing love for someone turns out to be just as good as actually loving them. Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1971 film “A New Leaf,” written and directed by Elaine May.
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Upcoming Episodes: “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice,” Conrad Aiken (“Senlin” Section 2 of II. His Futile Preoccupations).
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Elaine May's 1971 film a new Leaf. Wes, I think we ended last time by talking about how the fern that Henrietta discovers and names for Henry is kind of like her. It's kind of like their surrogate child, but it's something in which he takes an interest and which represents some sort of progression on his part from things, inanimate things, to living semi animate things encased in plastic, but still formerly animate. And I think we also. So we wanted to talk now about this idea that Henrietta, who we haven't really focused on too much yet, that she is very repulsive to Henry at first because she's feral and primitive and what that might mean.
1:19 Wes: Yeah, So I think that, yeah, the question is, what helps him change and turn over a new leaf? And I think part of that is that he, in service of her, actually gets to confront the form of philistinism that he truly hates. And the representatives of that turn out to be Henrietta's servants and her lawyer and his own uncle. Right. So in a scene with his uncle where he's asking the uncle for the money, the uncle, very humorously is eating like a pig during that whole scene and just indulging himself. The servants are made to look like very seedy and self indulgent.
And the lawyer, of course, is in on it. They're trying to exploit her. So they are genuinely exploitative. And they genuinely, I think, fall under the category of primitive and philistine. And so they kind of arouse in him a certain kind of contempt. And some of the energy that he is devoting towards murdering her is diverted to taking care of these parasites. Essentially at a certain point with the servants, I thought, you know what he is. You mentioned Roundup. And she's the weed that he's gonna get. It turns out they turn into those weeds. He becomes the poison, the Roundup that is going to get rid of the weeds, who are the servants.
So that's an interesting redirection. And of course she's not A philistine in the same way, she's well educated, she's a biologist, botanist, intelligent, and certainly not exploitative. So I think my point is that we get in the beginning for him what is primitive or regressed. His interest in form is lumped in with a deeper contempt for philistinism more generally that shows up in his interest in art. So that what he's calling primitive and regressed in her is just all this form stuff. So that when she spills her tea at the club and the hostess is really angry with her and is laying into her, he can come to the rescue.
Now, on one level, he's just. This is part of his plan to exploit her. And deep down he is. He's just as concerned about appearances and form as the hostess who's chewing out Henrietta. But on another level, the contempt for lack of form conceals a deeper contempt for the sort of the unrefined, unsophisticated exploitativeness of people like the servants. Henrietta's servants.
3:47 Erin: That's so great. Yeah. You know, I'm going to say something a little crazy, which I'm better able to locate. The fact that what I might love about this has a little something to do with, like, my love of religion, shall we say, which is a strange thing. But thinking about form and thinking this through, form extends to the marriage, the marital contract, right? A marriage takes a relationship and makes it formal. So because he's entered into this form of the marriage with Henry, Henrietta taking care of his finances means now taking care of her finances.
He's inherited her and her baggage, and that includes all these servants that are taking advantage of her, right? And by virtue of the marriage, he now has to deal with this. So. So, so the money comes with problems just like anyone in a marriage, right? Comes with baggage, comes with problems. So he starts to take care of the problem and to. To destroy the weeds that are choking his financial interests. But this has the same effect as taking care of Henrietta, because they're her interests too, because of the virtue of the form, that is the marriage in which they are taking part.
The same thing is true with all of his courtship of her. I mean, he's decided to enter into the form of a courtship which very quickly becomes the marriage, right? They only know each other for a few days before they marry. He's doing it to take advantage of her. But whether he was doing it to take advantage of her or because he wanted to legitimately be chivalrous, the effect for her is the same. You know, this is this is what people don't. Don't understand. I think about. About love, that like, you know, love is something about something like having good feelings and thoughts about somebody in your head.
This proves that, like, you can love someone and absolutely hate them because the, you know, the expression of it is what matters. Right. The action is what matters, the outward form. And so, you know, so. So it makes me want to connect this idea to, like, religion and this idea of being a philistine. You know, we're all philistines, right? Because of propriety and standards of behavior, we all are good people. Not so long as we have no negative thoughts about anything. But so long as we behave ourselves and treat other people with respect, that is sort of obeying the form under which society puts us.
And I think religion in particular, you know, and Catholicism in particular is accused of having a kind of inherent hypocrisy because of things like, you know, the Catholic calisthenics, as they call it, you know, kneeling, standing, sitting at various times of the Mass. Right. Having, like, making your body perform certain things over the course of the Mass. And then one is accused of being purely performative. But I think what, you know, what religion understands is that performance is like 90, 95% of anything. Right. And so the idea is that there is something pious about just looking pious.
Like going through the motions carries you through 95% of, you know, it gets you very close to being there. So regardless of how you actually feeling or whether or not you actually believe or are, you know, your internal state comports with your outward state. I think what religions that are traditional in this way and that have these outward structures are for is to show you that no matter how you're actually feeling on the inside, you're still giving due. You're still paying a kind of tribute to reality that your body is assenting to, even if your mind isn't or something like that.
I'm putting this very badly. Right. But I think you understand what I'm trying to say.
7:17 Wes: No, no, no. This is great. Yeah.
7:20 Erin: And it turns out that that's actually what matters and that actually following, you know, I think there was a. Like, I might have been Aquinas or somebody said that, like, you know, actually just going through the motions and putting your body in those positions, St. Augustine is. It proves.
7:34 Wes: So this. Yeah, you were reminding me of this in St. Augustine. Yeah. Sort of fake it till you make it.
7:38 Erin: Exactly. Because of the power of the physical.
7:40 Wes: Yeah. The power of ritual and going through the motions of someone who has faith until you can develop the correspondent inner. Inner experience that goes along with those ritual activities.
7:53 Erin: Exactly.
7:54 Wes: I think this is in his confessions and I think this is the way, by his own account, that he developed faith. I mean, I think it was very personal for him, if I'm not misremembering that. And of course it is. The over focus on rituals you pointed out will get Catholics accused of hypocrisy. And that of course is that the very origins of the Protestant revolution is a big deal. And even someone like Erasmus, right, who's getting into it with Luther and. And ultimately is not a Protestant, but is highly critical of the Catholicism of the time once some sort of reform, because of the sorts of things that monks do going around flagellating themselves or going through the motions, but being incredibly corrupt in their spare time.
And the same thing with popes, right? The same thing that would had Luther using the printing press to make copy after copy of pamphlets that showed the Pope having sex with the devil or something like that. I forget exactly what it was. But so hypocrisy, you know. Yeah, that subject of hypocrisy is really interesting, as you point out, because we are all hypocrites in the sense that we all have these conflicting impulses and we can hate and we can love at the same time, you know, in a way.
9:06 Erin: Whereas a society, I think, laboring under the implications of the Protestant revolution, which became an entirely internalized mental process of constant self examination and asking oneself like okay, am I a member of the elect or not? You know, in Calvinistic strains of Protestantism, right. And that constant self inquiry of, you know, am I having the right kind of thought? Am I having that it became entirely mental and not at all registered in the physical. And I think to a certain extent there are of course things that are useful about. About self examination and all of these things that that perhaps represents.
But that also means the constant fear that one is lab under a misapprehension about one's own salvation. And it doesn't live in the physical at all. And I think that in a way it can become a means of self torture. When all you have are your own thoughts to go off of. And when nobody has pure thoughts and when nobody can always think perfect things all the time because we're seldom, we are sometimes, but not all the time responsible for our thoughts. This can get us into a lot of trouble. This can get us into a place where we can even just outside of our responsibility to other people and our behavior.
You know, it can cause us to be. Be in a state of despair just all on our own. Whereas some deference to the physical or the idea that the physical somehow matters, that there's something, that there is a physicality to faith, to sacramentals and various other things, take some of that responsibility out of our own heads and shows that there's something having to do with. It's not just faith. It's faith and works. Right. There's something outside of you that you can use to kind of get along when you're in a tough spot mentally, so long as you.
You continue to do good things and pay attention to the forms, even if you're faltering in your faith, as we all do, you could use that to coast along, you know, until the feeling returns. Because our thoughts are so fickle. Right. So all of that to say that I think like this idea of marriage now as being something that, like, well, when I'm no longer feeling love or any kind of relationship, when I'm no longer feeling love, then the marriage is over. That, that. That somehow your thoughts are reality, that your feelings are reality. I think this puts the lie to that.
The way that I view religion and obligations to people in relationships and stuff. I mean, I don't always practice this, but the way that I view it is regardless of how I feel, I'm going to still do the thing that I don't want to do. Right. I'm still like, that's what really matters. Whether or not I practice this is beside the point. Right. But the ideal is that no matter how you feel about someone, someone can anger you, but you're going to still care about them and not want to hurt them and take them to the airport if they need a ride to the airport, even if you're mad at them, you know, whatever.
Whatever the case may be. Right.
11:45 Wes: I wouldn't take anyone to the airport under any circumstances. But that's just. That's just my. They can get an Uber.
11:52 Erin: Oh, wow. Okay.
11:53 Wes: See, this is why I can't be a Catholic.
11:56 Erin: No, but you know that.
11:58 Wes: Time to personally connect to Jesus.
12:00 Erin: Exactly. Yeah.
12:02 Wes: No, but, yeah, I think this is very well put. These are great points. There's a lot to be said for form, and there's a lot to be said for going through the motions, even though one might just think they are the motions. So here's another way to put it. So you might consciously think you hate someone, but if you're doing kind things for them, then you might be said to have at least part of you you could say that those kind things are quote, unquote, loving. It doesn't, doesn't need to correspond. It doesn't need to have the conscious feeling of love going along with it.
Because the mind is much bigger than what's happening consciously at one moment or another. One can love unconsciously or non consciously. And one might think of love more deeply as something that is habituated into the character of a person or the comportment of a person. So that you. If you really want to know what's going on with someone, right, you look at their. You look at their behavior, they may not know that they're loving someone. In which case, because Henry doesn't know it through most of the movie, but we kind of know it.
13:10 Erin: That's right.
13:11 Wes: Well, before he does. So I think, again, just to get back to what you're saying, there's really something important about form. And so the fact that Henry is a stickler for form turns out to be very important. There's a scene with his uncle while his uncle is being disgusting with the food and cutting a banana with a knife and fork and doing weird things and questioning his ability to get a wife in such a short amount of time. Henry says, I can engage in any romantic activity with an urbanity born of disinterest.
13:44 Erin: One of the better lines in the
13:46 Wes: film, which is just great. But his disinterest allows him to power through the forms, right? And as you're pointing out, marriage is also a form. He is going through the motions, you know, apparently, because he's going to exploit and kill, but nevertheless, he's going through the motions and he's habituating himself into something new.
14:07 Erin: I very briefly and very casually dated someone once who, you know, like, wouldn't respond to my texts or take me out or do anything nice for me, but would tell me that, and I would be like, oh, I don't think you really like me that much. And he would be like, what are you talking about? Every night before, before I go to bed, you know, I look at your picture on my phone and I was like, that's it. What does that have to do with me? Like, you don't get points just for having nice feelings about somebody. You know, I would rather like. It made me realize I'd rather. I'd rather be with someone like Henry who wants to murder me.
14:35 Wes: Faith not works and.
14:38 Erin: Exactly.
14:39 Wes: He had faith, right?
14:40 Erin: Like I, you know, what an incredibly solipsistic way to claim that. It's like, how am I Like, are you going to Send me footage of you looking at my picture every night before. Anyway, I'll probably want that cut out eventually. But no.
14:55 Wes: What is your love language?
14:57 Erin: It's silent prayer gifts.
14:59 Wes: Or is it me staring at your picture at night?
15:02 Erin: How is that helping me? You know, like you could at least say something nice to me for once. You know, it was so weird. It was so weird. And. And I thought, you know, like watching this film as so many times it's occurred to me, you know, I would rather have someone like Henry than most of the people probably out there. Because what does it matter if you feel like killing me as long as you're nice to me and treat me well, you know, I mean, I don't see any conflict about this. But what makes Henrietta so appealing is that she's so. And maybe what makes this easy to identify with for me somehow is, you know, you see her as someone who's.
Who's really starved for love and positive attention. And Henry is lying. But it doesn't matter because all she needs is someone to stand up for her. You know, all she needs is someone to take her side against a world that sees her as someone from whom they can either extract resources or someone who they could just ignore and pity and use to kind of feel better about themselves. By contrast, what does it matter if he hates her and wants her to die, as long as he's complimenting her?
16:16 Wes: It's just like every marriage, right?
16:18 Erin: No, no, he's, you know, so long as he's complimenting her. Podium trained, perfectly modulated voice. And her soft, well informed eyes.
16:27 Wes: Oh yeah, that's so great.
16:31 Erin: And keeping everybody away from her so that they don't pillage their joint account, which brilliantly were all made joint before the wedding so it wouldn't look like he's marrying her for her money.
16:42 Wes: So this is scene where she's spilled something on his carpet, I guess he's about to propose and then he spills his drink on the floor to make her feel better about having done that. Although later he kvetches about she should be arrested for that.
16:56 Erin: You know how many llamas died to make that rug?
16:59 Wes: But what he says to her. So this is one of the great, ironically great courtship speeches in film and literature. Can you possibly believe for one moment that what happens to this foolish hairy floor covering matters to me when I have you sitting beside me, looking at me with your beautifully soft yet highly intelligent, well informed eyes, talking to me in your gentle yet perfectly modulated podium trained voice?
17:27 Erin: This is the most beautiful Thing ever.
17:29 Wes: That's great. That's really great.
17:32 Erin: Oh, my gosh. I mean, because he's. He's not objectifying her. He's seeing her the way that she wants to be valued, which is as an intelligent person who.
17:41 Wes: He's not lying to her. He's actually finding true things to compliment.
17:44 Erin: Right, sure. Yeah.
17:46 Wes: He's being a little bit over.
17:48 Erin: I mean, he's.
17:48 Wes: Right. So she's mousy and soft spoken and he's turning that into perfectly modulated podium train. So it's a little bit of a distortion. But, you know, you get the idea. He's not just straight up lying to her.
18:00 Erin: No, no. And I mean, it's ridiculous, but it's also. It's extremely sweet. I mean, he's managing to compliment her, the beauty of her eyes and also fit in something about her character and her intelligence and the, you know, the ineffable qualities about her that she obviously values. So it's a compliment that works on multiple different vectors, that activates different things about her that she's looking to be complimented on all at once. You know, and she is someone who's, you know, she can't take care of herself. But to be fair, like, she doesn't need to be working, she doesn't need to be a botanist, she doesn't need to be teaching at the local college.
Right. So she's actually like, she values education and not. She's not Henry just sitting around like, enjoying being wealthy. She does have interests to be complimented on and aspirations that she cares about, and he identifies those and properly modulates his compliments to align with them. But as we're talking about this and the idea of him kind of seeing her properly and appreciating her in a way that's true in these compliments if interpolated. I'm sure I've said this before, but often in the course of doing the podcast, I found that, like, the arbitrary order of our episodes can reveal some really surprising connections between totally unrelated things.
And it just. Sure enough, I never would have thought of this if we hadn't just covered it. But I was thinking about how a new leaf is like an anti Medea in a way. I mean, in terms of the Jason Medea relationship. And one of the things I liked best in your analysis of Jason and Medea's relationship and what really helped me understand that dynamic is when you pointed out that Jason never really saw her her to begin with or properly appreciated her. He had just used her out of convenience and for what she could do for him. And that's kind of what made her disposal, something he could carry out without really losing a night's sleep.
I found that so poignant because, as I think I said, you know, I think this is a pervasive fear that is probably universal.
19:57 Wes: Right.
19:57 Erin: That the person you're with might just choose you because you were there or because you were convenient or because you had money and they needed money, or because you had magical ability that allowed them to get out of a scrape or. You know. Right. Whatever the case may be. But that.
20:10 Wes: That you're a witch. You know, you're. Yeah. I swear to God, it's not because you're a witch that I love you. And for your potions, it's you.
20:19 Erin: Right, Right. And, you know, this film essentially follows the reverse trajectory of that Jason and Medea relationship. And what happens when, you know, you just. You're trying to take advantage of someone you don't really see or care about them or understand them and then find that you can just discard them. What if you started out by just wanting to get rid of them and then you actually realized that you truly care about them and you actually start to really be able to see them? Yeah.
20:47 Wes: Does this kind of fall into a comedy of remarriage a little bit, maybe, category, in the sense that he wants to get rid of her first and then kind of backs into the relationship? Yeah.
20:57 Erin: Yeah. I mean, this is a really extreme example of that. And that has a U shape where this just has a. It's just half a parabola. You know, it's just.
21:05 Wes: Right.
21:06 Erin: You know, they didn't. They don't start out in love, fall out of it and, you know. You know, typically the movie would begin with a divorce, but it's implied that they had a good relationship at some point. Right.
21:15 Wes: You know, unless we construe the meeting as unconscious love. Right. He meets her and then he's.
21:22 Erin: Oh, I like that.
21:23 Wes: Right. Smitten. But consciously he hates her and then spends most of his time trying to get rid of her until he figures it out.
21:30 Erin: He sees her and he says she's perfect. Which is funny because that's what his financial manager says about him. Right. You're perfect.
21:37 Wes: Exactly. You're perfect. Yeah, she's perfect. She's a perfect. Right. So he's perfect, the financial manager, in the sense. He's such a perfect idiot. Obtuse ass. She's perfect in the sense that she's the perfect object of exploitation, but really she turns out to be the perfect complement in the sense that her helplessness arouses his care.
21:57 Erin: I absolutely love that scene in the Cunliffes' sitting room.
22:01 Wes: So I was thinking that was like a country club, but that's.
22:04 Erin: There are scenes in country clubs, but yeah, that's Gloria Cunliffe's sitting room. I pay attention to the names.
22:09 Wes: Yes. The whole Hitler thing is hilarious. Yeah.
22:12 Erin: Oh, do you know the Boston Hitlers? No, we're from Glen Cove.
22:18 Wes: Yeah. Actually, let's just give it a little bit of that. This is Lucy Sylvester and our neighbors, Dr. And Mrs. Darrell Hitler, Johnny Sylvester and Freddie. And of course, you know, excuse me, you're not by any chance related to the Boston Hitlers. That is perfect. That is so perfect. So I think, you know, part of it, of course, is a send up of the obliviousness of the rich. But we expect someone to react to that name and then they do. But it's. It's not the Hitler Hitlers, but the Boston Hitlers. Not the Adolf Hitlers.
22:54 Erin: Yeah, there's another Nazi joke when the little girl who sort of represents Elaine May's character, you know, invades what she thinks is the bathroom. And it's, it's Henry getting ready to, you know, and having a freak out over actually having to marry this woman. And she turns out to be Professor Himmler's daughter, Dodi.
23:10 Wes: Dodie. Heinrich.
23:11 Erin: Heinrich, yeah. And it's Professor Heinrich. That's it. Yeah. It wasn't Himmler, it was Heinrich. There's a Nazi in my. Anyway, someone's in.
23:21 Wes: He's invited some Nazi to the wedding. Yeah, his relationship, that little girl is really interesting because he calls her the little woman. A woman and a little woman, they're all the same. He's worried that she's a spy, she's an intruder, she's touching his things. This little girl brings out his most extreme paranoia.
23:41 Erin: This'll be what it's like. She'll be there touching, touching things, talking to me. Always talking.
23:47 Wes: And it's the flower girl, I think. Right? Dodie is the flower girl. This is right before he's about to be walked down the aisle by. Who walks him down the aisle?
23:57 Erin: Her lawyer.
23:58 Wes: Some guy.
23:58 Erin: Jack Weston walks her down.
24:00 Wes: No, she's walked by her lawyer.
24:03 Erin: He's with the friend with the plane.
24:05 Wes: Oh, that's the guy. Okay.
24:06 Erin: Yeah. And then the one with the crown. Gall is also. Is also in attendance. And Gloria Cunliffe is there. So apparently they got over the interesting. Her being slighted by told that her erotic obsession with her carpet was certainly the most boring thing he'd ever witnessed.
24:25 Wes: Madam, I have seen many examples of perversion in my time, but your erotic obsession with your carpet is probably the most grotesque and certainly the most boring I have ever encountered.
24:36 Erin: That's it.
24:39 Wes: So it's that ability. Yeah. That ability for condescension somehow turns out to be a redeeming quality.
24:45 Erin: Yeah. Because it's really.
24:47 Wes: It helps him save her in that moment he's slaying the dragon, so to speak, with that. Yeah.
24:52 Erin: He doesn't take crap, and she takes too much crap, and somehow between them, they get it done. The sweetness of her character and the moments of. What's excellent about the verbal comedy is, I think, matched in her physical comedy. It is so funny when she's trying to take the cup and saucer. No, the glove out of her hand and. Or keep holding on to the glove and she's taking the cup and saucer anyway, like, there's this great moment where her glasses are falling off her face and this cup is, like, repeatedly falling out of her hand. And we watch, like, the spoon slowly go over the side. And she's watching it, and she just has this hopeless look on her face, like she knows it's happening and there's nothing she could do about it because she's just such a klutz.
25:31 Wes: Yeah. She really. It's. For her. Her. It's almost all physical comedy. Right. That's what she's trying to do with that character.
25:38 Erin: She's really adorable.
25:40 Wes: The klutz. Playing up the. Playing up the klutziness.
25:43 Erin: Yeah. So, you know, maybe we should talk about the moment. Well, where they really connect, actually, in the car. Because I do think they end up having a conversation that he enjoys when they're. You know, he's actually batting the ball back to her when she talks about wanting to discover a true species. And he seems to get into that idea.
26:00 Wes: Yeah.
26:01 Erin: And says, oh, you know, like. Like Parkinson's disease being named after James Parkinson and bougainvillea being named after Louis de Bougainville and then. Or Bougainville and then Brussels sprouts, I think. Yeah. And so he's. He's. He's getting into it. He's. He gets what she's saying. He. This. This appeals to him, the idea of naming a new species of plant after oneself.
26:24 Wes: Yeah. Carbon on the valves. Right. Also turns out to have a redeeming quality because it's because his car has broken down that they can get to know each other in this way. And I think they spend the whole night right before it's towed in the car. So it creates an unexpectedly romantic moment. And of course, he's not aware of the romance yet, but that's actually what is happening. And part of how that happens, you know, he says, tell me about yourself, Ms. Lowell. Your work, your hopes, your dreams. And there's almost a cliched quality to that. And again, at the conscious level, he just needs to know those things so he can exploit her. He's going to find out that she's in the botany, and he's going to go try to learn everything he can about botany. And then as a side project, he can use that to try to poison her.
27:09 Erin: Too bad she's into the organic method, right?
27:12 Wes: Right. There you go. He needs to know what she likes in order to use that against her. But there's something very, very connecting about the sharing of aspirations. Because when people in that moment share their aspirations, there's kind of an implied possibility of a shared future that's inherently romantic. So you know her. She says, my hope is to discover a new fern. I don't know what my dream is. Do you think it could be the same as my hope? Right. Which calls out the cliched quality of that. You know, what are your. What are your hopes and dreams? Wait a minute, aren't they the same?
27:47 Erin: But she's never heard this cliche. But she doesn't know it's cliche because nobody ever bothered to ask her before, you know, and so she takes it. She reads it totally at face value and takes it seriously.
27:57 Wes: And then she says, my work and my hope in any way. That is my work and my hope, except for my dreams, which I'm not certain of. Really Great, great line. So innocent and so, so cute, honest and vulnerable. But she, you know, her hope is to have something named. Have a discovery named after her. So it's. It's quite an aspiration. But, yeah, what I wanted to do, point out, I think this is spot on to kind of focus on this scene because unbeknownst to him in yet another way, the carbon on the valves is actually working in a kind of transformative way. It gets him stuck in a car with this woman, and then things are happening that will ultimately lead him to not murdering her.
28:38 Erin: It's important when she very excitedly comes home and announces to him that she has found a true species, he takes some consideration for her. He's worried about her because he. She's so overexcited and, like, has lost her breath and can barely talk. And he encourages her to sit down and calm down and tell him what's going on. So he kind of helps her regulate her emotions in that moment. And then she finally gets it out that she found a true. A true species that the Alsophila grahamii, as she calls it, that they found on their honeymoon that she found while he was.
Fantastic shot. It's my favorite shot in the whole movie where she's tied to a rope and hanging off the edge of. Of a cliff. And he has his back turned to her and is reading a book on toxicology and doesn't see that if he had just turned around that he could have just gotten rid of her right then. Anyway, so she finds this fern. It's a true species. And then she tells him he's very proud of her. Before he even knows what the punchline is. He's very impressed. You could see that she's done something worthwhile, and he feels that, and he takes a kind of delight, which is totally unselfinterested, I guess.
I mean, maybe it isn't, because I
29:46 Wes: got the same thing from this. Yeah. This is kind of a breakthrough moment for him. Yeah.
29:50 Erin: Yeah. And they're. And they're married, so that, too, you know, maybe that. Maybe that also shed some light on him. I mean, I don't think he's thinking of that in this moment that, you know, that he cares about having bragging rights over this woman. But. But it is a reflection on him in a way, I think, not in a way that he. He's conscious of. Quite. And then she. She gives him the credit and says that he's. She's named it for him. He at first thinks that she's named it for herself under her married name. And he says, you fool. You know, he immediately, can't you do anything right?
And she says, no, no, no. I named it for you, for Henry Graham. And he's very impressed by that. And then says, are you sure that you want to do that? Because it's not right, actually, you know. And she says, no, no. Remember when you. When we got together and you said that if being with you was going to give me confidence, then I would be a very confident botanist. And that confidence had allowed her to find the fern in the first place. And this is. Yeah, this is the real turn that she would be so generous as to give this to him, that she kind of recognizes something he's done for her, and he gets a reward out of it.
In the atlases under G. And as A footnote. So what can we say about that? I suppose he. One of the things that appeals to him about this aspiration of hers is, you know, he expressly says it involves having a sort of immortality in an extremely minor way. But it's immortality. It has to do with status, maybe, or just feeling as though. I mean, maybe he recognizes the transience of not having any kinds of attachments to relationship, anything based on relationships. So maybe he recognizes on some unconscious level the hollowness of a life which for all intents and purposes, he seemed completely satisfied with.
And, you know, his whole motivation for getting into the marriage was to perpetuate it. But maybe this shows that he's actually more about relationships. And maybe the immortality piece has to do with a desire for procreation and actually being in relationship with people. Maybe.
31:52 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the way I saw it was he was kind of touched by the element of sacrifice in that. And in general, up to this point, you know, beyond having money, he has tended to be the one to take care of her, quote, unquote, in various ways, including, right. Cutting tags off of clothing or whatever, because she's childlike. So I think this is a moment where she has a power that he doesn't have and she can use that to confer something on him. There's almost like a Wizard of Oz element to this. Like, you know, when the. The wizard is handing a medallion to someone, here's your courage, here's your brains, here's your whatever.
So it's as if when she gives him that token, she's handing him the capacity to love or to feel something. He says, it's very thoughtful of you, Henrietta. I believe. I am pleased. So in a way, maybe it's her thoughtfulness being given to him and it's the token capacity for thoughtfulness. And it's also interesting in light of the fact that it comes after a scene with the butler. It's a very funny scene in which he's packing for the trip to the Adirondacks and there's all kinds of weapons that the butler is, just knives and hatchets and a gun that the butler is handling very casually.
And the butler is becoming increasingly concerned about what's going on here. And then gives him a bit of therapy. So Henry, right, says, she's not good natured, she's regressed. And then the butler says, do you remember some weeks ago, sir, when you told me that you'd lost all your money and you had no skills and no ambitions, but it seems you do have skills and ambitions. I mean, look at how you've taken over the house. You've learned to handle the accounts and grapple with taxes, and you've tidied up Mrs. Graham.
33:40 Erin: There weren't so many crumbs around Mrs. Graham. You know, like, if she had a different name that wasn't a cracker that created so many crumbs, maybe she'd be.
33:47 Wes: Yeah.
33:47 Erin: Sorry.
33:50 Wes: Well, they even said, was she free of crumbs? Only slight sprinklings, sir. I brushed her up. But he goes on to say that this very helplessness has been the stimulus of your own amazing new competence. We asked that as a question. Don't you think, I mean, very often, sir, that what we dislike most in other people is only a reflection of our own inadequacies? Sir. So the butler just lays out a whole bunch of thematic stuff that you might have let the audience figure out on their own, but just puts that out there. And then is also playing psychologist and therapist.
So we're in the third act here, and there's a lot happening that's supposed to make his transformation believable, which, weirdly enough, I think it is in the end. But this is one of those moments. Of course, it's not enough. Right. So he's being given a little bit of. Bit of a talk about what's going on psychologically and how she's changing him, but that's not going to be enough. And then the next moment, she's giving him the credit for the fern and the token, and that gets him even a little bit deeper, hits him at an even deeper level. And then it's the.
The final straw, so to speak, is. Right. Seeing the species that she has discovered as she's drowning. And then that all brings it somehow together. And he can become conscious of. I think love is. Love would be a strong word above. But not wanting to let her drown, he reluctantly comes to that.
35:14 Erin: Well, he's been loving her all.
35:16 Wes: What does he say about that? I know. Yeah. I think. Yeah, yeah.
35:20 Erin: I'll make the dinner. And what will I do? You'll eat dream.
35:24 Wes: Right. From now on, I'm going to make the coffee. From now on, I'm going to make the dinner. Right.
35:28 Erin: Even though he's miserable. Yeah. Now, we would call this weaponized incompetence. Yeah.
35:33 Wes: His pompousness and his concern about form and quality, all that. Right. That's what lures him into that position. You can't do it. Right. So I'm going to do it for you.
35:43 Erin: I mean. Yes. There's that. And then there's also real necessity that. I mean, I think most listeners will have been in a situation, I'm sure you too will have been in a situation where, you know, especially in a foreign country, maybe where you're with someone who's freaking out and all of a sudden you have to just step up to the plate and you become excellent at dealing with whatever, whatever problems arise and you just become. I mean, this happened to me and, you know, I took control, took the reins and dealt with everything. And somehow like having one person be in a state of need and be in a state of, you know, be in a freakout or something, I think naturally inspires the other person to step up and take control and help, even if they were scared in the first place and had no, you know, they have no aptitude for it.
Like, this is just, I think, a true dynamic about the way, the way that people work, that when in a vacuum, something happened like, like there's something ignited in, in someone where they step up and didn't know they were capable of it. I mean, and this is like immensely gratifying, I think, for the person in his position. He's not getting nothing out of it. You get the feeling that you can handle things. And that is a much bigger reward, I think, than being. Because I've been on both sides of this, this equation, right? And I think like the self satisfaction of feeling competent and feeling like you can handle things, that when everything is going wrong and your flight got canceled and you have to suddenly come up with something, the feeling of satisfaction in oneself that rising to the challenge creates is much deeper and I think more meaningful than the person who's just freaking out and somebody else is like, okay, I've got this.
So there's a tremendous reward for the person, I think, who's able to step up in that moment. And the whole relationship, I think, is just an expression of this phenomenon of, okay, both of us can't be floundering, so I'm going to be the. I'll do it, you know, and next thing you know, you're an expert and you feel great.
37:41 Wes: Yeah. When the movie begins, he's exploiting himself, in a sense, and he's also relatively helpless. He's not the guy who can take care of the family.
37:50 Erin: The finances aren't hired to do.
37:54 Wes: He's just taken care of. Yeah. By servants. All right, we're almost out of time. But before we. I just wanted to point to one more speech. When he's proposing marriage and he's talking about what they have in common. And he goes through a list of biological categories. We are both of the same division. Vertebrata, class, order, family, genus, homo, species sapiens. And then the same variety of class, by which I think he means they're upper class. So he's gone from biology to money status. And she's like, I don't think there's a class of variety. Or a variety of class maybe, is what she says. And then he goes on to say, in fact, the only difference between us is that I'm a man and you're a woman. And we don't have to let that interfere if we are reasonably careful. That's great. So I couldn't resist reading that, even if that's a little bit of a non sequitur.
38:49 Erin: That is one of the best lines. Yeah. I mean, it speaks to the really. The real asexual element. And I mean, even at the very end, I mean, just before the sweet moment where he uses his body heat to warm her up, as we've already talked about. I mean, just moments earlier, he has fished her out of the river by her hair. Like he's pulling up a weed, actually. But.
39:14 Wes: Right, yeah, great point. I didn't think about that. Yeah.
39:18 Erin: Yeah, it's weird. Yeah. So what do you think, Wes? Is it romantic movie? Is it the most romantic movie you've ever seen? Am I right or am I just as disturbed as you always knew?
39:28 Wes: Is it romantic? Could I call it romantic? I mean, I guess it is. It's 10. I guess the word I want to use is tender for some reason relative than romantic. Such a tender word because Henry is so stiff and curmudgeonly. Oh, well, it's for both of them, because they're such characters. The word romantic somehow doesn't. I mean, it is romantic, don't get me wrong. But I mean. Right, so let's contrast it to what. What's a more straightforwardly romantic movie?
39:53 Erin: Casablanca.
39:55 Wes: Because I think when you say it's the most romantic movie ever, you understand the irony.
39:59 Erin: Right?
39:59 Wes: So what's it. What a. More obviously, let's try to get at what the difference is. What's love actually? Or what's a Hugh Grant movie? Or.
40:10 Erin: Oh, like that. Notting Hill.
40:12 Wes: Notting Hill, yeah. And that's one where it's rags to riches type. Right. So he's working at a bookstore or.
40:18 Erin: Yeah, no, I don't think that's as romantic at all because she's already famous and he gets his sort of like wish fulfillment Thing, you know, like, what makes this romantic is that he hates her until he doesn't. I love the hate to love track. That's a. That's a. That really does it for me. Yeah. And. And she's a. You know, the Julia Roberts character in Notting Hill is a fantasy and she's not real. You know, the people. Like, I love the fact that Walter Matthau is so stiff in this. And so, you know, like, that's what makes it special, is melting someone like that.
40:53 Wes: Yeah. What's a paradigmatically romantic movie? What is. I guess they're all romantic comedies unless
40:59 Erin: they're a tragedy, like a.
41:00 Wes: What is the eidos of romantic comedy? What is the ideal romantic comedy?
41:05 Erin: I mean, most of them involve some kind of. When they're good, they involve some kind of triangulation usually. So, like Philadelphia Story or Harry Met Sally.
41:14 Wes: What about that?
41:15 Erin: Yeah, sure. Yeah.
41:16 Wes: And that's also. That's another one where. Well, is it a comedy of remarri. I mean, that's the ex lovers coming
41:21 Erin: back together, and they both have personality quirks and foibles and various other things that they have to kind of get over. I like the sweet, adorable, mousy woman who is sort of like inherently lovable with an unlovable curmudgeon. It's not a great analogy because she's quite different, but there's something very, you know, he's kind of a latter day Spencer Tracy in certain ways. He's less attractive Matthau, but he has some of that gruff, rough, curmudgeon energy. Right. And so there's a. There's a real yin and yang element to, like the Tracy Hepburn films.
You know, he's gruff and rough and curmudgeonly and she's refined and, you know, and she has the tomboy stuff and she had, you know, there are things that align with him where they work really well together, but mostly it's playing off the contrast of her being sort of upper crust and being a little prickly and uppity and. And him being salt of the earth. Right. And so obviously that's not a. That's not a perfect parallel here, but I like the fact that they're, you know, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, I don't think are that far apart. They are in certain ways.
And they, you know, I think the film uses that to advantage, obviously, but they're both like yuppies, you know, of the same kind of general. You know what I mean? Whereas, you know, they're of the same class. Henry and Henrietta. But they're such different physical types, and they're so. There's such different personalities, and I really like that. That contrast was very, very Tracy Hepburn for me. And they're kind of my ideal, those two. So I like that intense contrast. I like the fact that he's a big curmudgeon who's melted by this strange little girl woman who's so cute and has to be vacuumed every time she eats.
43:06 Wes: All right, so next we are doing Wyatt.
43:09 Erin: Yes. Thomas Wyatt. We're doing Whoso List to Hunt. And they flee from me, probably.
43:16 Wes: And then after that, I think we'll do Beetlejuice.
43:19 Erin: Yes.
43:20 Wes: Is that okay?
43:20 Erin: That's great.
43:21 Wes: Like Beetlejuice.
43:22 Erin: Love it. Don't say it again.
43:22 Wes: Have you seen the new one yet?
43:23 Erin: No, I haven't. I'm excited, though.
43:27 Wes: The new one is great.
43:28 Erin: Oh, yeah? Is it? I didn't even realize it was out yet, actually. I'm so disconnected from. From what's happening.
43:34 Wes: It has another great musical scene. Oh, cool. Which really takes the cake, so to speak.
43:45 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Formal Meets Feral in “A New Leaf” (Elaine May, 1971) – Part 1
Oct 21, 2024
Henry Graham belongs to the most exclusive clubs, dines regularly at the most lavish restaurants, drives a Ferrari, employs a butler, and owns something called a Montrazini—in short, he capitalizes fully on his inheritance, despite having little understanding of what “capital” actually is. The very ignorance of practicality that his wealth affords turns out to be his undoing, as soon finds that he’s run out of money and must bid goodbye to the high life—unless, that is, he can find a single, wealthy, isolated woman to marry and, for the sake of preserving his refined, hermetically-sealed existence, murder. Enter Henrietta Lowell. Similarly stunted by her own inheritance, she’s friendless, awkward, and utterly helpless: the perfect mark… But Henry soon discovers that protecting his own interests also means protecting hers, that competence can grow out of the exigency incompetence creates, and that practicing love for someone turns out to be just as good as actually loving them. Wes & Erin discuss the 1971 film “A New Leaf,” written and directed by Elaine May.
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Upcoming Episodes: “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice,” Conrad Aiken (“Senlin” Section 2 of II. His Futile Preoccupations).
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Henry Graham belongs to the most exclusive clubs, dines regularly at the most lavish restaurants, drives a Ferrari, employs a butler, and owns something called a Montrazini. In short, he capitalizes fully on his inheritance, despite having little understanding of what capital actually is. The very ignorance of practicality that his wealth affords turns out to be his undoing, as he soon finds that he's run out of money and must bid goodbye to the high life. Unless, that is, he can find a single, wealthy, isolated woman to marry and.
And for the sake of preserving his refined, hermetically sealed existence, murder. Enter Henrietta Lowell. Similarly stunted by her own inheritance, she's friendless, awkward, and utterly helpless. The perfect mark. But Henry soon discovers that protecting his own interests also means protecting hers. That competence can grow out of the exigency incompetence creates, and that practicing love for someone turns out to be just as good as actually loving them. Today we're discussing the 1971 film A New Leaf, written and directed by Elaine May. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:39 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan.
1:40 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, what if I told you that A New Leaf was not the first movie written by Elaine May that we have covered on this podcast?
1:52 Wes: Really? Wow. That's crazy.
1:55 Erin: Now I'm putting written in quotes, but could you guess?
1:59 Wes: Nichols was her partner, right? Did she have a role in the Graduate?
2:03 Erin: No, I don't think so. Though I think her shadow looms over that film with a character named Elaine and various other things going on there. Various psychosexual mind games perhaps happening between Nichols and May. I'm just joking.
2:17 Wes: I know we didn't do Ishtar.
2:19 Erin: We didn't do Ishtar. Not yet. Not yet, but you're on the right track. It's Tootsie. As I think I've mentioned before, you know, I'm a huge Elaine May fan, so this recording is like a dream come true for me. But, you know, I'd known for a long time that she was an uncredited script doctor on several classics, including Tootsie. But I never really knew the extent of her contributions to that script until I read the recent biography of her that came out this year, Miss May Does Not Exist by Carrie Courogen, which gives a complete picture of what exactly her edits entailed.
And it turns out that she's, she's basically responsible for most everything that's great about that film. I mean, she didn't just punch up dialogue here and there, she kind of overhauled it. I mean, she was single handedly responsible for the Bill Murray character in the film. She added all the poignancy to Teri Garr's character. But she was the type of person who never wanted credit and was always trying to keep her name off movies like the one that we're covering today. Sadly, as a result of this, little is known about the extent of her contributions to a lot of films.
And yeah, so I don't know if we can quite say, I mean, it's pretty extensive, extensively covered in the biography, but I think it seems to be as much her film as whoever was credited as the screenwriter.
3:31 Wes: Who's the credit? Do you remember who's credited?
3:33 Erin: Murray Schisgal. I guess she didn't want to upstage him or be, you know, not be a good fellow writer by taking credit for something that she helped out with.
3:41 Wes: But yeah, the great Murray Schisgal.
3:44 Erin: Yes, of Schisgal and Ebert.
3:47 Wes: Schisgal and Ebert, yeah. Why was she so reticent about putting her name on movie scripts?
3:52 Erin: As a script doctor? I think she didn't want to steal credit also probably because, you know, she, she doesn't seem to be someone who wants to be very well known. Like she would not be happy that we're doing a podcast episode on a new leaf, a movie which she has, you know, basically disowned.
4:06 Wes: She disowned it? How? And well, how did she do that?
4:09 Erin: Well, so a lot of stories about making of her films is really crazy. So basically what happened was she had a three hour edit of this film. You might have noticed that there's, especially in the last third of the film, there is some strange ed choices made. Basically she had a three hour cut of this film that included I think two, maybe three murders that the Walter Matthau character actually carries out. So he actually is a murderer. And it was, it was like three hours long and she was editing it and the studio got so frustrated with her that they took the film away from her, edited it themselves and she ended up suing them.
They took it to court and not since, I guess since Justice Stewart's verdict about Louis Malle's The Lovers from 1958 was the law so famously brought in to assess a film. So they played the Paramount. I think Paramount Studios is the one. Anyway, the studio played their edit that they had done and the judge was like, this is hilarious. You lose Elaine May. And so she was upset that she didn't get to do what she wanted with the film, and she basically wanted her name taken off of it, but. But it was too late at that point. But there's the element of her, I think, not getting to do what she wants to do with the films.
Like, she always ends up having some studio wrestle it out of her hands or having not as much control as she would like. And then maybe there's just this idea that if something doesn't go well, you don't get blamed for it or, you know, you get to disavow it a little bit or. It seems to me like she just really cares about the work and she doesn't care about getting credit for things.
5:42 Wes: So her cut doesn't exist. It's gone.
5:45 Erin: It's. Sadly, it looks like it's gone. I'm still, like, crossing my fingers that someday it's going to turn up. But the conventional wisdom is that it's lost. But this is one of the mythic. Along with the film that Orson Welles lost on the train in South America. This is one of the great mysteries of what happened to this. Where did it go? And it might be just. Even if they find it, it might be deteriorated somewhere. I don't know if they're going to find it in some sort of properly stored place after all these years.
6:12 Wes: But what do you think of this cut? I thought it was. I thought it was pretty good.
6:16 Erin: I mean, this is one of my top 10 favorite films, so I'm a fan.
6:20 Wes: I think an hour and 42 minutes is the perfect length for a comedy.
6:23 Erin: I think so, too.
6:25 Wes: Although they're often shorter. Even shorter these days.
6:27 Erin: That's right. That's right. You know, I mean, it's an amazing. I mean, you can tell that it's been chopped up a little bit strangely in the last third. I think it explains some of the strange choices that are made with his sort of fantasy sequences where that crazy music plays.
6:45 Wes: Right. That does seem to come out of nowhere. Yeah. There's not much precedent for it. Yeah.
6:50 Erin: But I mean, for a first film and for a situation in which she was not supposed to direct this film, I mean, she was kind of strong armed into directing it. She didn't want to be a Director. This was 69, I think when she had taken a story from, I think, called the Green Heart, I want to say from like an Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazine article, and adapted it into the screenplay. And she was just looking to sell the screenplay. And at the time, there was a big, you know, this was like right before peak era era where the studios were reckoning with the fact that they hadn't produced a new woman director since Ida Lupino.
And they were trying to push to get more women directors on projects to kind of improve their image as an industry. So they told her that she could direct the screenplay herself if she wanted. And they also figured that this would be a great way of paying her less, because whatever they were going to pay her for the screenplay, she would also get the same amount of money for being a director or something like that. So they would save money and look better. And I guess they must have gotten the idea because Mike Nichols, her former comedy partner at this point, had already made who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the Graduate and was successful as a director.
From what I understand, she was widely considered to be the great genius. Between the two of them, Nichols is just this incredible wunderkind who just like conquered all before him. And then Elaine May walked into his life and made him look like an idiot compared to her. So she was the one who was supposed to have the great career, and she was kind of floundering, and so she was selling the screenplay and they were just like, okay, you have to direct it. And then she got Matthau and they wanted Carol Channing to play the Henrietta character. And Elaine May said, no, this is really the man's movie.
The woman has to just disappear into her role. The whole focus has to be on the Matthau character. So Carol Channing would be wrong for it. They said, okay, then your only other choice is you can play it. So she was strong armed into directing, strong armed into starring in it, I think all ultimately for the bundle of the one fee that they had originally offered her or something. And so I guess she showed up on set and was like, barely knew what the camera was and just started directing this thing. And it went. They doubled the budget and went way, way over time filming.
But in the end, it made money back and then some. I think it was a big hit. It was popular. Yeah, Got great reviews and people really enjoyed it. And Matthau was big box office draw at the time, so it did really well. But she was really unhappy because she didn't get to do what she wanted to do with it.
9:22 Wes: So it Got nominated for some Golden Globes, Best Picture, Best Actress, and also nominated for Best Adapted Comedy for the Writers Guild of America.
9:34 Erin: And I think Elaine May was the fourth woman ever to be a member of the Director's Guild. Just a crazy statistic.
9:42 Wes: Wow. So her other films are. Well, she directed the Heartbreak Kid.
9:47 Erin: Yeah. From a Neil Simon script.
9:49 Wes: Neil Simon. How is that? Is that any good? I love Charles.
9:52 Erin: That's fantastic. Yeah. It's definitely the best movie ever made off of a Neil Simon script. And it's very much a. With her kind of humor. So it's far less of a Neil Simon feel to it than most. I mean, it feels much more modern than some of the dated qualities of Neil Simon. She pretty much, like, eliminates whatever the downsides of a Simon's script tend to be. As much as I like him, it feels like the very first true cringe comedy. She's basically inventing cringe comedy. So it's a fascinating film for that reason. It's a great movie.
10:24 Wes: And then there is, of course, Ishtar.
10:26 Erin: Yes.
10:28 Wes: But apparently so just, you know, looking at Wikipedia. So she's writer and director for Ishtar, but she's got a co writing, uncredited co writer of Tootsie now. I see that. And Of Reds, which is really interesting.
10:41 Erin: Yeah. She was friends with Beatty.
10:42 Wes: Okay.
10:43 Erin: And Nichols used her on a lot of things. Like she did the Birdcage, which I don't know if you know. The Birdcage. That's another fantastic movie. Great script. Yeah. And then there's Mikey and Nicky, which was her third of her four films that she. That she directed. And that's another fantastic film. It's out with Criterion, and that stars Peter Falk and John Cassavetes, who were also big fans of hers and very supportive. And I guess John Cassavetes was always, like, trying to give her money so that she could do the project she wanted because everybody became a big fan of hers after A New Leaf.
And that's just a fantastic, really dark film. She bats a thousand, basically. I mean, you know, listeners might be surprised to hear this, but I think more and more it's become part of the public conversation how falsely maligned Ishtar was when it came out, how, you know, the studios were planting negative stories about the reception of the film before it was even released. You know, Elaine May famously says that if any, if everybody who hated Ishtar had actually seen it, I would be a rich woman today. You know, so if you actually go and watch it, it's really funny.
It's a really good movie.
11:46 Wes: Is it? I saw it in the theater as a kid. I can't remember how I felt about it, but my standards were lower. Is Ishtar the thing that led her? I mean, she didn't direct again after that, right?
11:58 Erin: Yeah, yeah, they basically tanked her.
12:00 Wes: Is that why is that?
12:01 Erin: Yeah, I mean, she. She didn't play ball with people. You know, she was always Heartbreak Kid was an exception. That seemed to be a movie that went pretty smoothly and was studio backed and was a big hit. And it was, you know, it was fine. Mikey and Nicky, there were problems with it going over and with her having crazy amounts of film that she had sh. Her like, you know, stealing footage and bringing it to her friend's garage to try and get the studios away from it. And, you know, so there were some issues there. And then Ishtar, yeah, it seems like that was really the final nail in the coffin.
But I mean, there was a long break between Mikey and Nicky and Ishtar, so it was kind of like her last chance, I guess. I guess when you're a woman director, you get much fewer chances to screw up than if you're a man, unfortunately. And so she's not like most directors in that she doesn't really want to compromise. She doesn't really have great people skills or schmoozing skills. I think, like, she just is pretty uncompromising about her vision and that ends up causing her to run into problems. And people just don't trust her because, you know, they didn't trust her because of the fact that she, you know, for a lot of reasons.
We could blame sexism in the industry for most of them, probably. Yeah. So she just ended up mostly writing plays and doing various other things. Like she could have been, you know, she acted in a bunch of things. I think she could have had a great career as an actress if she wanted to, but she kind of floated around and. And didn't do much, but she did a lot, but not, not much that was public facing. But luckily we have these four films and now she's 92. I was lucky to see her on Broadway in the Waverly Gallery, which she won Tony for best actress in that performance a few years ago.
That was amazing experience to see her live. And she was just fantastic in the play.
13:48 Wes: Very cool. Yeah, you showed me some sketch comedy with her and Mike Nichols, which is really good. So listeners should find that on YouTube. It kind of shows here. There's a sketch like quality to some of the scenes and they're really funny. And that includes the first scene where the gag is that Walter Matthau's character, Henry. Henry Graham, seems to be in a hospital, but it turns out to be a garage. Eventually we figure out that it's a garage, and it's. He seems to be in hospital because I think the starting visual and audio is basically sounds.
Looks like a heart monitor. And so, yeah, so we find out that actually it's his. His car is at stake. And then that the problem with his car is that there's carbon on the valves, which is what the mechanics tell him, to which he responds, yes, there always is. As if he's ignoring the fact that they're giving him a diagnosis and that means he should take better care of his car. And he's curious about why they would tell him something he already knows, which is, in a way, trying to tell us something about the complacency of rich people. But of course, at a thematic level, carbon on the valves is just as much.
Right. Where. So it's not heart disease. Right. It's not arteries covered in plaque, but rather it's car valves covered in carbon. And it tells us just as much about him. So it works as a gag on the one hand, but it also works as a metaphor.
15:23 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Like he cares about. You know, you think he really cares about someone who's being hospitalized, but of course he cares about things, not people. Um.
15:31 Wes: Right.
15:32 Erin: And the fact that he, I guess, has a Ferrari in the city. I mean, I guess his. His friend that has a plane has the same problem, which is that they're. They're. They're conspicuously consuming things that don't actually fit their lifestyle very well. I mean, I suppose the reason why there's carbon on the valves is because it's a Ferrari and he's not. You know, he's not taking it up to the red line, as they say. So, you know, he can't really use a Ferrari the way it's meant to be used if all he's doing is puttering around the city or driving out to Long island or something like that.
So there are things that he doesn't seem to understand about how even the objects that he loves more than people should be treated or should be kept up properly. And then we'll see very soon after this that he spends money but doesn't know how it works. And this seems to be part and parcel of that, that he has all this, you know, expensive taste and nice things, but he doesn't understand that he's actually Kind of destroying them in his inadequate use of them.
16:34 Wes: So the joke is that. Well, he has to take the car in two to three times a week.
16:38 Erin: Every time he takes it out, which
16:41 Wes: is basically every time he takes it
16:42 Erin: out,
16:45 Wes: and he's told not to drive it, ever drive it under 3000rpm in a forward gear, otherwise you get carbon on the valves. So he's got to be more active and he's chosen a car which requires more energy. It's a more energetic vehicle than his character. Right. His character is very slow and curmudgeonly wooden. It's an interesting character because he. Well, I can't say he's completely unlikable, but he's in danger of being a character that is simply too unlikable to be the main character. But really, it's. Walter Matthau is the kind of actor that can pull that off because there's some kind of charm that's poking through even under all those layers.
17:28 Erin: Yeah. It's an amazing thing that he manages to be in his scenes of courtship after he learns. I'm jumping ahead a bit, but after he learns that he needs to marry a wealthy woman. I don't know about you, but I just. I've never watched that sequence of his bad dating. Two bad dates that he goes on, or two women that he's sort of pseudo courting and not taken his side, even though one of the women is the great Renee Taylor. But, you know, somehow everything he finds really annoying about these women is exactly what we're meant to find really annoying about them.
So, you know, you want to, like, see him succeed. You want to. I don't know. I just. I do. Like, I want him to get his money so that, you know, he can't possibly be poor. He doesn't have the constitution for it. So, you know, I have a vested interest in. Despite the fact that he's an awful character, I have an interest in seeing him get what he wants somehow. And his curmudgeonliness does seem apt at times. And he's not as bad as his uncle, so there's that.
18:27 Wes: Right. Yeah. Well, his uncle and the servants who turn out to be exploiting Henrietta, they are quite a good contrast for him because he's, at least in the beginning, exploiting her, trying to exploit her, or thinks that's what he's doing. He's going to exploit and then murder her. It's not the same sort of thing as the servants and the uncle, who have a much more perverse quality. And they kind of know what they're doing, they know how to do it. They're not as obtuse in many ways as he is. Right, so she's supposed to be the one who's kind of an idiot and socially obtuse and a mess and can't take care of herself and childlike in many ways, but of course, he actually shares that with her.
They're both people who can't take care of himself. And the whole premise of the movie is he has not been able to handle his finances. He's just ignored it. He's lived on 200,000 a year when he should have been living on 90 or something like that. And so it depleted all of his capital. So in a sense, he's exploited himself, he's exploited his own capital base. He's killed a goose that lays the golden egg by killing off the thing that produces all the interest in his trust that could have sustained him. And that'll all get undone when his nominal, his exploitation of Henrietta involves learning how to do all these things that he had neglected, like taxes and the books and all of those things.
So ironically, the whole project of exploiting another in the process of learning to do that, he learns how to actually take care of another person. So that's the interesting thing thematically, I think, about the movie, the way. The way this planned exploitation turns into him unwittingly transforming himself into someone who cares.
20:17 Erin: Yeah, that's exactly what I love about the film. But thinking through what we're talking about in terms of his relationship to wealth, you kind of can't blame him for his own ignorance. In a strange way, like what seems to Mark, maybe, you know, the uncle. This doesn't apply to the uncle. But what seems to Mark the hangers on of Henrietta is the fact that they're not upper class, but they're greedy and aspiring to that. And they seem to aspire to just like pure exploitation for its own sake. And in a strange kind of way, Henry's responsibility for his own, you know, stultified relationship to money is rather minimal.
You know, he's obviously inherited this wealth. He comes from a wealthy family and this very inheritance, and the very fact that this is just the air that he breathes means that he never had to learn how to deal with money. You know, it was just given to him. It wasn't like he had to learn how to save or learn how to spend properly. I mean, he's been warned, but he hasn't really paid attention. And interestingly too, his spending doesn't have to do with, you know, in a sense, the word that might apply to him is like a playboy because of his conspicuous consumption.
But he's not a playboy in any other sense of the term. You know, he doesn't care about people. He doesn't care about using the wealth, it seems, for any nefarious means other than acquiring beautiful things and exercising his refinement of taste. And I think that actually positions him in a strange sort of way to be appreciative of Henrietta in a way that, you know, we could argue that the other characters in the film, other than Henrietta, who are all to a certain extent obsessed with money, aren't in a position to appreciate someone else. I mean, he has to learn how to love.
He is a misanthrope. But I wonder if this desire just for beautiful things for their own sake and for a certain kind of, you know, his taste. His taste is indicative of someone who, though he's very twisted in on himself in certain ways, does have something in him that is appreciative, outwardly focused.
22:26 Wes: Yeah. I was thinking just before you. It's interesting, just before you used the word playboy, I was thinking of some of the parallels to the movie Arthur. And the operative word or concept at work in Arthur's family was ruthlessness. So you have a bunch of rich people, in a way, who know how to be rich. They know how it works. And then you have someone like Arthur who's just the childlike beneficiary of that, for better or for worse. On the one hand, it means a kind of immaturity, on the other hand, and some negative qualities that come with that.
But on the other hand, it means not being inducted into that same habit of ruthlessness. Whereas Henry is a terrible person and doesn't care about people and is potentially a murderer and all these things, as you're pointing out, he has a certain kind of refinement. His butler at one point says, so this is at the point where Henry is just about given up. He's in despair because he's run out of money and he realizes he has no skills, he has no resources, no ambitions. All I am or was is rich. That's all I ever wanted to be. Just contemplating suicide.
And the butler, I guess it's the butler is the only one who is the one who suggests marriage. It's the only way to acquire property without labor. It's pretty cool. I jotted down a note to myself.
23:51 Erin: I hadn't thought about that avenue, not just for women. Yeah,
23:56 Wes: right. So here's what the butler says, by way of encouragement. Well, first of all, he's talking about the fact that he would be out of a job. I mean, how many men these days require the services of a gentleman's gentleman? How many men have your devotion to form, sir? You have managed in your own lifetime, Mr. Graham, to keep alive traditions that were dead before you were born. Don't give up the fight, sir, just because the Philistines are upon thee. So that's a really funny. There's a lot of really funny bits of dialogue and gags in this. It's pretty consistently funny throughout. But it's interesting because this, you know, this pointing to the concept of form and tradition and Philistines. What it turns out Henry hates, what he says he hates in Henrietta is the fact that she's quote unquote regressed and she's quote unquote primitive. What other words does he use for her?
24:48 Erin: Feral.
24:49 Wes: Feral. There you go, that's the best one. She's not just primitive, she's feral.
24:53 Erin: She doesn't deserve to live. Forget I said,
25:00 Wes: yeah, she doesn't deserve to live. So his snobbiness, in a way, is a bit of his. It's his saving grace. He hasn't been able to take care of himself, but he's developed at least a little bit of refinement. And her helplessness, as his butler points out, eventually will arouse a sort of caretaking urge in him that maybe he's only directed towards objects thus far. And she gets him by the end of the very end of the movie. She gets him to at least contemplate the idea, for instance, of being a history professor, because he had studied history. So what gets the carbon off the valves, I guess, is finding someone.
He thinks that he's going to exploit them because they're helpless. But in fact, her helplessness brings out. It gives some utility to his snobbery, which for the most part, has resulted in withdrawal. Right. He's completely terrified of being around people. There's that great scene with one of the women where she's taking her breasts out. We just find this.
26:01 Erin: No, don't let that happen.
26:02 Wes: After water. After her water skiing. And again, this kind of hits on the theme of the primitive, because during the water skiing, she says, I eat, I sleep, I swim, I dry off. It's also simple, perhaps primitive. And it satisfies me. And he has kind of a look of horror on his face with all these candidates. He's not going to be able to do what he does with Henrietta because not Only are they primitive, but they're not as helpless as her. And their desire and their vitality is too strong. Right. She says, I need on the lawn at night. I need. I desire love. That is what a woman is born for. I love. I wish love. I am human. I am woman. Henry. So while he's getting eaten up by mosquitoes. And then, yes, the. No, don't let them out, the breasts.
26:52 Erin: This movie is endlessly quotable in my growing up. And one of the things we used to love to say is, I have found peace in Connecticut. This says at the back of the water ski.
27:05 Wes: Oh, right. That's awesome. I left that. Yeah, left that part out. That's awesome.
27:10 Erin: A few other things as well as. Harold. She's unscrewing my Montrazini. But, yeah. So many quotable lines in here. But, yeah, the scene that you pointed to with Harold talking about his devotion to forms and not giving up the fight just because the Philistines are upon me. This is where, I mean, for the most part, I really deeply identify on a cellular level with Henrietta. But this is the moment where I'm like, oh, I'm a little bit Henry, too. Keeping a lot of things in Project before you were born. But no, but I like the reference to the Philistines because one would think that maybe he's a little bit of a Philistine because he's devoted to outward appearance.
But he also. He's a true believer. I mean, he's an aspiring murderer, but he's also sort of not morally compromised in a way. He just truly loves being rich. And he has no pretensions other than pretension itself. And that devotion to form. Yeah. Means that he can appreciate something in Henrietta which, you know, which maybe we'll get to. I mean, you know, it does have to do with her helplessness and stuff like that. But he's poised to properly appreciate things. Not people things, but he has the capacity for appreciation on a certain level. And that, I think, really is the key to his reluctant transformation.
But, I mean, I think this is. You're gonna. You're gonna laugh at me, but I think this is one of the most romantic, if not the most romantic movie I know of. And there are a coup reasons why that's absolutely crazy. I mean, first of all, it's a dark comedy about a murder. And also, you know, it's kind of a deeply unsexy movie. I mean, we can talk about. This is, I guess, part of the Renee Taylor scene where she's, like, throwing herself at him. And she has too much. I like your description of her excessive vitality. But you know, Henry and Henrietta make, you know, they make like June and Ward Cleaver look like a couple of sex maniacs or something.
I mean there's a wedding night scene that's played for gags and there's a minor reference to sleeping in the same bed. But sexual motivations don't play any role in this relationship at all. I mean it seems like actually kind of asexual.
29:18 Wes: Yeah.
29:19 Erin: And yet I find this movie so romantic. Maybe. Maybe for the fact that it's so pure or something.
29:26 Wes: Yeah. I mean she's so childlike in her mentality that there's something almost repellent about the idea of her being sexual. The one hint of that is that we get is after the marriage when they're on their honeymoon in a cabin and he's sitting muttering to himself aloud. Basically his to do list for poisoning her, spreading an emulsifying agent. Soap gelatin, deflocculating agents get poison from gardening while she's standing right there. So this is their wedding night. And she comes out, I think she's brushing her hair. She's in a nightgown which turns out to conceal another nightgown underneath.
30:13 Erin: No, it's just a lining. Oh yes. Oh no, she has a. Yes, she does have tied at her throat a little bit of like a cover up. Yeah. And there's the Grecian.
30:24 Wes: Well, she takes off one nightgown and then it turns out she's got this other thing where she's got her head through the armhole. Greece. She calls it a Grecian style nightgown.
30:34 Erin: Yeah, it is.
30:35 Wes: And so he ends up having to help her out of that. And she's very awkward and so. Yes. So the Potentially. Right. And they're. They're about to have dinner together and there's. There's champagne and there's the two separate beds sitting there. But a potentially romantic sexual moment becomes very awkward and it's very childlike.
30:57 Erin: Right.
30:57 Wes: Because he's trying to help her like a kid, you know, like a child who's put their head through the wrong armhole. He's essentially trying to undress her and dress her in a very non sexual way. And Yeah. I don't you. Whether or not, you know, it's not straightforwardly romantic but it becomes tender or it's at least unintentionally brings out a tenderness in himself of which he's not really aware until the very end of the movie. But. Right. He's just been planning to poison her one moment, and the next moment he's having to take care of her because she's so helpless and awkward that it brings out that urge in him to do them.
31:35 Erin: Yeah. Gosh, that is such a funny scene with a Grecian style nightgown and the setting of their little cabana in Jamaica or someplace in the Caribbean. It seems she finds a fern that seems to exist in that particular climate, you know, but with the style nightgown she's wearing and the fact that she has a hibiscus flower in her hair, you know, she's a sort of symbol of. She's a very inept wood nymph for, you know, she herself is the flower that he's trying to take the proverbial roundup to. Well, it's hard to say this without. Without wanting to go back on what I'm about to say, because she's not. It's not that she's a symbol of, like, fecundity or of anything having to do with a flowering in her. I mean, she does go through a flowering.
32:27 Wes: Well, she's a fern. So what does that mean, that she's a fern rather than a flower? Yeah. What is that? I mean, but that says something very important.
32:34 Erin: Yeah, right. Well, she's. I mean, she's a wallflower, but as a fern, you know, she's something that doesn't have. She's not flashy, she's not decorative. She has good lines. Henry believes that, you know, the fern that she discovers and names for him has. Has good lines for a fern. So she has a kind of structural integrity to her. She's a good person and a sweet person who's. For all of her flaws, I mean, she's very generous. I mean, she can't stand up for herself. That's part of her generosity. But she has an inherent sweetness and goodness that makes her a prime target for other people's manipulation and control fern reproductions.
33:13 Wes: The one thing I remember from high school biology is it's really weird, right?
33:16 Erin: Yeah.
33:16 Wes: It's not asexual. It's still sexual, but I think the spores that it releases, instead of the birds and the bees cross pollinating or something like that, it just produces these spores which have both male and female structures inside of them that can end up producing a new plant. So it's almost like asexual reproduction. It's almost hermaphroditic. It produces a spore that has the sperm and the eggs in it, and then one fertilizes the Other. Anyway, listeners can let us know if I'm completely wrong about that.
33:50 Erin: Right. It's similar to that kind of propagation.
33:54 Wes: I think so, yeah. And maybe it is something that's more primitive than the average plant. Although in general, of course, plants are quite primitive. Yeah.
34:02 Erin: But I think it's especially ancient and.
34:05 Wes: Yeah, yeah. She comes across as quite asexual herself and fragile. Like a, Like a fern. Unadorned, like a fern.
34:15 Erin: Shaggy, bad haircut.
34:16 Wes: Yeah, exactly. There you go. You were going to say something else there before I interrupted you. I just wanted to enter. Yeah, no, interpolate that.
34:25 Erin: No, that's good. That's good. Yeah, yeah. I think of the fern as like, you know, glasses, googly eyes, something like that. The moment that I'm thinking of as well, having to do with this tenderness towards her mixed with this strange, I won't say sexual, but romantic scenario is just after his proposal when she's been indulging and she has the, The. The Mogen David mustache because she's been drinking her Malaga coolers with some.
34:50 Wes: I had to look that up. So it's called Mogan David's Heavy extra heavy Malaga wine. And then I looked that up and then I saw that there's MD 20/20. Right. So I remember Mad Dog 20/20 from college. Is that the same thing? Mogen David 20/20 or is that.
35:05 Erin: Yeah, this is. It's. It's hard to find the, the extra heavy Malaga wine I've had. I've made this cocktail before or as close as I could get to it, and it is absolutely disgusting.
35:16 Wes: Is it just like. Because in college, right. MD 20/20 was the thing that you. The disgusting thing you drink to get drunk.
35:22 Erin: Oh, really quickly.
35:24 Wes: Yeah. We'd like go out and get MD 20/20. I think it's the same maker. I think it's Mogen David md.
35:30 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like any.
35:32 Wes: It's a different.
35:33 Erin: I mean, like, you know, we would have Manischewitz or something in the house. Like that's, you know, but it's the same.
35:39 Wes: So high alcohol wine. Is that what it is? I mean, anyway, I, I think that's what it is. College students. She says her college students. No, I mean with the Mogen David.
35:48 Erin: Yeah.
35:49 Wes: Or MD 20/20. Like her college students. She says introduce her to this drink. It's basically like a. Or. Or correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought, okay, this is like a college student drank for getting messed up. And he's particularly appalled and horrified by this.
36:03 Erin: Oh, I, I see it as More of like a. I mean, it's a wine cooler. So it's, it's inherently. I don't think it's a great way to get drunk, especially if you're watering it down with soda and lime juice.
36:13 Wes: It's just a super sweet philistine. Either. Either way. Okay.
36:16 Erin: It's like drinking cotton candy, you know, like he says, why don't you just. Why don't you just drink grape juice? And she says, well, grape juice isn't as sweet. Like.
36:24 Wes: That's Right, right, right.
36:26 Erin: This is a drink for people who don't drink, who don't like the taste of alcohol because it's bitter or something, you know, because they like never developed beyond a certain point when it came to like their taste buds, you know, like, like when you hit a certain age and you're supposed to finally like things that are, you know, dark chocolate, whatever. So this is like a little kid sugar rush kind of cocktail.
36:48 Wes: I see.
36:49 Erin: So she has her, her mustache from drinking it because she asked him first, do you have any straws? But he doesn't, so.
36:55 Wes: Straws?
36:57 Erin: No, no straw.
36:58 Wes: No straws.
37:00 Erin: So she has her Mogen David mustache. And after he's proposed to her on broken glass, he stands up and he wipes her mouth and he says, you're a good girl. It's really, actually really incredibly sweet. Maybe that's screwed up, but it's a really sweet way. You're good. You're a good girl. And when he's done wiping off her mouth, he kisses her. And so it's this bizarre blend of, you know, he's just proposed to this woman and also treated her like she's his five year old daughter. You know, it's bizarre but sweet. I don't know.
37:37 Wes: There's another scene like that where he takes something out of her hair, something like cotton that's gotten. And that's. I think that's around the point where he's firing her servants.
37:46 Erin: Yeah, that's a sweet moment when he's, when he's checking her for tags. When he cuts the tags off her sleeves and he lifts up her arms like he's. Yeah, it's like putting a coat on a little girl or something.
37:57 Wes: Yeah.
37:57 Erin: And then my favorite thing when they're camping in the Adirondacks at the end of the film and she spilled honey all over herself so her hands are sticky and she does that little kid thing of like going, going like this and spreading out her fingers because she's sticky and she doesn't know what to do with herself. And he takes her hand and, like, puts it in the water. Takes the other, Puts it in the water and says he'll make the dinner.
38:21 Wes: Yeah. And we get something that is sort of simultaneously childlike and innocent, but evocative of sex, which, for all we know, they've never literally had in the movie. But the stickiness. And also it's honey, like birds and bees, which, of course, are not a factor in fern reproduction, but.
38:38 Erin: Right. And I think the way that she looks at him in that last scene of the film, there's something. There's a spark there for sure, that's a bit different from the rest of the film. Like, there's something that's progressed about the relationship.
38:49 Wes: Yeah.
38:50 Erin: At that point where you think. Not just because that's the resolution of the. Of the tension in the film.
38:55 Wes: Well, him. Him deciding not to murder her or let her die is a big progression.
39:01 Erin: Yes. Yes.
39:02 Wes: The relationship could have ended right there. Sorry.
39:04 Erin: When she's all. You know, when they're both soaking wet and he has to hold her for warmth. You know, the way that she looks up at him, there's a. There's a shift in something. There's something going on there. Finally.
39:16 Wes: Yes. He's like, well, I better hold you. My body should provide some warmth. And that very wooden. And then she says, I'll always be able to depend on you, won't I? And he says, I'm afraid so. Yeah, I know.
39:28 Erin: I realized.
39:30 Wes: And then I'm not going to teach history, probably.
39:34 Erin: And then he very quickly says that he will.
39:36 Wes: Yeah.
39:36 Erin: He says he wouldn't mind it very much.
39:38 Wes: Terribly. Not terribly, terribly much to do that. And importantly, it's not just about teaching history. Going to the university with her in the mornings, grading term papers, Spending all day with her. Her at night. Yeah.
39:51 Erin: He's. He's obsessed with her, you know?
39:54 Wes: Yes.
39:55 Erin: When Elaine May talked about reading this story that she decided to adapt, she said that she was reading it and she was going, oh, my God, this guy is going to kill this woman. And he doesn't even realize that he likes her so much. And that was what inspired her to write the screenplay. It is really sweet. It's like he goes from wanting to kill her to being like, all right, I guess I'll spend every waking moment of my day with you. That doesn't seem too bad. I guess I won't mind. The whole crux of the reason why he has to pull her out of the water is because he realized that he needs her next to him so that he could comment on things. He turned around to say, oh, look, it's the fern. And she wasn't there.
40:34 Wes: Right.
40:35 Erin: He's getting a lot out of this too. I mean, besides the money.
40:37 Wes: He's kind of forced to have something in common with her. Her act of saying, I'm gonna name this fern after you, and I'm gonna give you this token with the bit of fern inside it. Right. She could have given a locket with her picture in it, something like that. But this is about. This is as good. Right. Because it's a piece of fern lodged in glass that he can put around his neck.
41:02 Erin: Oh, I like that.
41:03 Wes: So it's her. It's still her, but it's not just a. And he's lost that. At the end of the movie, he notices he's lost that which concerns him. Even as he's letting her drown. It's his way of becoming aware that he doesn't want her to be gone and he doesn't want her to drown. But the other factor there is just this idea that it's also a stand in for a child. Something they've done together, even though he hasn't really done that with her. He went with her on the trip. Right. Is that where she discovered it? But in any case, their honeymoon. Their honeymoon, yeah.
41:37 Erin: But she says she never would have discovered it if it wasn't for him, him giving her confidence. So in a way it is.
41:44 Wes: Well, there you go. Okay.
41:45 Erin: And I think that's. I think that's right.
41:47 Wes: Yeah. So they have something in common. And maybe it's a, you know, metaphorically a child. And that's in general what he doesn't. He doesn't have with people. In a way, he has more in common with things, or at least that's where his, his interest lies. And he's surrounded by terrible rich people. But in that moment he can find out that he has something in common with someone that he wants to share with them. I guess it's like him wanting to. Well, you know, so suddenly he shares her interest in the. In the ferns. And then she ought to be. She ought to be there to share it with him. Yeah. So I'm gonna let you live so that we can enjoy ferns together. Anyway.
42:30 Erin: Yeah. And the fern has his name. Right. So that's another thing. It's her with his name. It's a child with his name. Yeah. And I think there's something to be said for the fact that he is shown on a horse at some point. And there's a funny scene at the beginning of the film where somebody's horse breaks down. There's a friend who has the car,
42:55 Wes: the plane, and then the horse, the
42:56 Erin: car, the plane, the horse, yeah. And then there's a friend who's interested in trees. And his orchard has crown gall and then it has sooty blotch. So his trees are breaking down. And Henry does, he does, he does pet the arm of his butler in a way that indicates that the butler is one of his many possessions. But he's not, with the exception of the butler, he's not really connected to living things at all. You know, his friends have the horses, the crown galled orchards, but Henry doesn't have anything that's alive except for the butler. But as he tells Henrietta, servants are not people.
Somehow the movement from Ferrari to fern, from the thing with carbon on the valves to the little hand, like dendrite. Is that, is that the right word? The dendrite? That represents some sort of significant progression, I think, on his part to move to things that are actually alive and therefore things that can't be controlled as easily as. I mean, he can't really control the Ferrari either. But things that aren't mechanical, things that have their own will to the extent, I mean, it seems stupid to say about a plant, but you know what
44:06 Wes: I mean, are animated, have their own internal force animating them and are not as usable. That's end part one there. And listeners can subscribe. Do a paid subscription to listen to part two immediately. Or you can wait a week and then you'll be able to hear part two, I think in the next part. I want to start by getting into going back to the concept of being a primitive or philistine and break that out, because I think there are different types of that. Right? Turns out she's not really that in the way that he thinks she is, but we'll get into that.
44:40 Erin: Okay, thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 6)
Oct 14, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
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2:36 Wes: All right, welcome to the sixth and final part of our time discussion of Medea. We just got done talking about Medea deceiving Jason, convincing her to try to persuade Creon to let her kids stay. Really, it's a plan to of course, poison Creusa and Creon. Ultimately, after she persuades Jason and Jason leaves, the chorus realizes what's up, even though the chorus leaders seem to not really understand. But, but at this point, this is still on page 76. I think the chorus leader understands what's up and says, well, there's no more hope. The children will live.
Or the bride Creusa is not going to live. And the antistrophe says she'll be persuaded by the brilliance of the gowns and quote, dress for her wedding in the company of the dead, which is a beautiful line. And she's a poor fool. She's a bridegroom of sorrow. So another nice image. And then we get a little generalization about human beings being deceived in your destiny. So we make all these plans for the future. Little do we know we're being poisoned.
3:45 Erin: Yeah. And that your own kids are going to be the agents. You know, this is an element too of the poisoning that I had neglected to mention in the previous part, which is the kids are the ones that bring the gifts too. So I mean, they don't know it, but children rarely ever know the damage they cause. But yeah, this idea of destruction coming from unexpected places, of course also to me points to what's going to happen to Jason in the end, at the end of Jason's life, not just at the end of this play.
4:17 Wes: Right.
4:17 Erin: Because isn't he killed by a falling beam from the Argo? So there's something about maybe that's connected to the children as well, that's sort of the. Of what one's legacy is or what one thinks one's legacy is. Might betray you, deceive you, might be used to false ends, or might be not much of a legacy at all. Or something along those lines.
4:39 Wes: A focus on legacy can become self destructive.
4:42 Erin: Even better.
4:42 Wes: Again, like the myth of Narcissus, because that's partly what is getting him into trouble here, is his ambitions.
4:51 Erin: Right.
4:51 Wes: The antistrophe Grieves for Medea, but it recognizes that what's happening to him is punishment for quote, unquote, lawless abandonment.
5:00 Erin: Yes.
5:01 Wes: Which is interesting. Of course, she's engaged in vigilante justice, but there is, of course, an element of justice to it. Her children ought not to have to suffer for her to get her justice. And perhaps we today would be less inclined to think of vengeance as a form of justice. But in any case, and I think this is part of the logic you were talking about earlier, there's a sense in which this is sort of the logic of Jason's behavior bringing down ruin upon himself.
5:33 Erin: Yeah.
5:34 Wes: The tutor, meanwhile, is confused. Tutor's not in on it. Tutor doesn't why. So why is she still unhappy? The gifts worked.
5:44 Erin: And I like this. The clueless tutor, just like, you know, Jason, Mr. Logic is called, as you pointed out, you know, you poor fool. Someone who's deceived and the tutor can't be taught. He just doesn't get it. Yeah.
5:59 Wes: And. And meanwhile, Medea has a really great line here. So the tutor says, then why these downcast looks, these tears you weep? Sorry. The tutor has delivered a message, which is that the gifts have worked and that the children won't be banished. I think I forgot to mention that. And then. So he expects her to be happy about that and she's not. And then he's like, was I mistaken in thinking my message a happy one? Your message was such as it was. I have no fault to find with you, the tutor. And then why these downcast looks, these tears you weep?
And then Medea has a great line here. I have no choice, old man. None at all. All this is what the gods and I devised. I and my foolish heart. So you have three layers here of potential causality for action. There's the mythic layer, gods and fate, potentially. There's the psychological layer, my foolish heart. Right. I'm impelled by internal psychological forces. And then there's the free will layer. This is what I devised. This is my plan. This is my will. Wonderful, wonderful. Little bit of complexity that I think Euripides is obviously deliberately introducing there.
How do we explain her behavior? Here are all the different options, and of course, they can be made to coincide. Right. So Eros is the God that corresponds to the foolish heart.
7:20 Erin: I love this, too. And it points to what she'll say on the following page, which is, I think, a very famous line, when she. The last thing she says, I think, before she kills the kids, which is, I am well aware how terrible a Crime I am about to commit. But my passion is master of my reason. Passion that causes the greatest suffering in the world. This seems to chime with that in that she's sort of acknowledging a lack of choice, which might be because this is the story and this is the way it has to go, because this is what the gods want. But also because she's overruled by her own emotion.
And in a way it's like a legal defense. Like there's an argument that can be made here about provocation and the fact that she's maybe been provoked into committing this act because she can't control herself, because she's so upset. So it seems like it has. Like there are. Yeah, these layers kind of come into that. The sort of self justification statement for committing the crime as well.
8:21 Wes: Yeah. Now we get her wrestling with whether or not she's going to actually be able to do it. So we get the great little monologue which after the tutor is gone and she's just there with her children. So on top of page 78, line 1040, so she starts out the whole speech earlier by saying, oh, this stubborn heart of mine, what misery does cost me. It is all for nothing. Then, children, that I reared you. There's a lot of that that's very interesting to me in this. All the effort that you've put into creating these little beings. She'll be robbed of their company. And as she gets older, you will look no more at your mother with those eyes I love once you have passed on to another form of life. So it's a very poignant right. She has all these very tender feelings for her children.
9:12 Erin: So sick. Yeah.
9:13 Wes: Yeah. Oh, no, no. Why do you fix your eyes on me, children? Why smile at me with that last smile? Ah, the pain. What shall I do? My heart dissolves, ladies, when I talking to the chorus. When I see the shining faces of my children, I could not do it. Goodbye to those plans I made. And then a little later on, right, flips. And yet, what is the matter with me? Do I want to become a laughingstock by letting my enemies off scot free? So this is the struggle I was talking about between pride, humiliation and then love for the children.
9:47 Erin: This is literally when you read. I don't know if you can see, but I literally have goosebumps when you read. Why do you fix your eyes on me, children? Why smile at me with that last smile? Oh, yeah.
10:00 Wes: Smile at me with that last smile. Kids have got to be going. This doesn't sound promising. Last.
10:09 Erin: Well, is she Is she alone?
10:11 Wes: Last smile.
10:11 Erin: No, no, no. They are there. Yep. This is all addressed to them. This is so. It's actually so much worse. So much worse than them being on stage.
10:21 Wes: So off with you, children. Now into the house. I shall not weaken my hand. And then the next, you know, flipping again. Ah, stop, my heart. Do not do this deed. Let them be poor. Fool. Spare your children. And then, no, I will not leave my children to the mockery of my enemies. And so on. And then. Very poignant. 10, 70. Give me your hands, children. Give your mother your hands to kiss. Oh, hands I love so much. Dear, dear lips, my children, my pretty ones, with your face is so noble. Jason will say something very similar near the end of the play, actually, because he wants to touch them after they're dead and she won't let him. You have lost this world thanks to your father. And then the children go into the house. So the children, depending on how smart they are, either must be confused or they must know what's coming.
11:11 Erin: Gosh.
11:11 Wes: I know. It's terrible.
11:12 Erin: I'm sorry. This is so painful.
11:15 Wes: Wow.
11:16 Erin: It's so powerful. Yeah. And this waffling that she does. Doesn't Aristotle go after Euripides for this and say, this is why Medea doesn't really work? Because he, you know, Aristotle, in a moment of Jason, like, emotional perception, says she should just do it. Make up her mind, why does she cry about it when she, you know, decides to do it? Am I making that up? But he says that in the Poetics. I read it a few months ago.
11:44 Wes: Yeah. I don't know. That sounds right, though. I mean, that sounds familiar, what you're saying. Yeah. Which is weird, because this is. This, in a way, is the most psychologically realistic part of the play and one of the more probably more psychologically realistic depictions we get.
12:01 Erin: I mean, this is so this sort
12:02 Wes: of thing in the ancient Greek literature. Yeah. And it sort of feels very modern. Right. You could be reading something very similar in Shakespeare, for instance. Yeah.
12:12 Erin: I mean, she has to, you know, she waffles and stuff, but it's also. It's also a way of talking herself into it and psyching herself up for what she's about to do. It takes very seriously the. Rather than being unserious about the crime that she's about to commit by showing her waffling and such, which is, I think, Aristotle's part of Aristotle's accusation. And listeners can correct me if I'm wrong about this. Yeah. Take seriously the severity of the crime. She's about to commit by showing how one has to. To really self delude to do something this. This disgusting. And it really shows how disgusting it is. I mean, the. The ending lines. Oh, how I love to hug them. The softness of their skin, the sweetness of their breath, my darling ones. Oh, you know, it's really.
13:00 Wes: Yeah, it's very real.
13:02 Erin: Yeah, it's a little true crime documentary, you know. I don't know if you've ever watched one of these things.
13:08 Wes: I always think of the mother with the station wagon backing it into the lake or something.
13:13 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. And the. The diary entries where they're like, I loved them so much. You know, it's. Yeah, yeah, I love them so much
13:21 Wes: I had to kill them.
13:23 Erin: That's the way it goes, man, when you got to prove a point, you got to prove a point.
13:27 Wes: Women who love their kids to death.
13:30 Erin: It's like Darla. Is it Darla in the. In the Looney Tunes that. But I'll hug him and squeeze him and hold him tight where she holds the little animals until they can't breathe.
13:41 Wes: Oh, yeah, yeah.
13:43 Erin: Strangles them.
13:44 Wes: A little bit of Mice and Men there as well. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So the chorus's reaction now is interesting. So we get a little bit back into the sexual commentary. Many times, or as they would call it today, gender commentary. Many times there now I have entertained thoughts more subtle and. And engaged in arguments more weighty than the female sex should pursue. Euripides hadn't heard of gender yet. We also have a me. We also have a muse, you see, who accompanies us and tutors us in wisdom. Not all of us, but a handful you might find among many who are not strangers to the muse.
And I declare that in the matter of happiness, those mortals who have produced children are less fortunate, fortunate than those who have no experience at all of parenthood, and so on forth. So the childless are spared many trials and people with children are worn away each day by passing anxiety. So we get this interesting commentary from the course. It's a mixture of. On the one hand, there's the remark about. Medea has just made a remark about passion being the master of her reason. And that's a bit. The passion versus reason thing is touched upon, of course, at various points.
And then there's a bit about the chorus's idea that when it gets into its own deep thoughts, into its reflection, that they are more weighty than the female sex should pursue. So this little bit of ironic commentary about sex and then the commentary about
15:13 Erin: parenthood you reading this aloud highlights for me the kind of interesting contrast between what's said and how it's expressed in a strange way. I mean, they're talking about how. How these are things that women and they are women don't really know about or shouldn't really pursue, and yet it's expressed in this sort of hyper. I mean, legalese is not quite the right word, but sort of like as a legal argument, it's almost presented in this strangely emotionally disconnected way. I declare that in the matter of happiness, in the case of people without children versus people with children, here is our verdict.
So there's that element of this speech which I find find pretty interesting. And then there's the idea of who is more fortunate there. I mean, so. So what are they trying to get at here? It's better to not have children at all or just to do away with them because they're more trouble than they're worth and eventually they're going to die anyway. So that is also an argument espoused here. This is the why you shouldn't get a puppy argument. I'm not saying kids are dogs.
16:09 Wes: They're not as.
16:10 Erin: They're not as rewarding, they're not as cute. No, they're cuter, but. Well, they can be anyway. Actually, the cutest thing is a puppy and a baby together. But the friendship. You know those videos. Yeah. I don't know where I was getting
16:33 Wes: out with it, but it's like. I think maybe some of the. Part of the point of this is the children are. What? Yeah. So it's a unique form of love, obviously, and. And a unique form of worry. And there's a way in which it's as if she's. Medea has created these extensions of herself.
16:53 Erin: Maybe that's the legal argument element of this here. It's almost carrying out that kind of impulse in Medea to make the case to herself in a strange way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:04 Wes: It's after this that we get the tale of the poisonings, which is. This is in the text. It starts at line 1122. The messenger comes in and tells Medea to flee. And she's like, no, I don't. I don't need to worry about that. I just need you to give me all the juicy details. Then the messenger gives her all the juicy details. So he says the princess is newly dead and she and Creon. And she's like, there's a welcome piece of news. Then the messenger acts surprised.
17:33 Erin: I put in the margins there. No poker face. Exactly.
17:37 Wes: This is the one place where I didn't. In my notes it just says, ask him to tell the story of the deaths. Page 80. He does pages 80 to 82. I don't resummarize any of it in my notes. I didn't want to relive it more times than I had to. But as you said, it is deliciously
17:59 Erin: detailed and horrific and it reveals some pretty fascinating things about Creusa and what a delightful stepmom she is.
18:08 Wes: Yeah. Did you want to highlight any of this account? Yeah. Yeah.
18:12 Erin: So the two sons had come in and the people in the palace were like greeting them and being really sweet to them. One of us was kissing the children's hands, another their golden heads. As for me, such was my delight, I followed the children right into the ladies quarters. The mistress who now wins our reverence in place of you did not at first notice your two children, but kept her eyes lovingly on Jason. But then at their entrance, she showed her revulsion, covering her features with a veil and turning away a white cheek. Your husband tried to dispel the young woman's anger and resentment with these words.
Do not regard my family as your enemies. Do stop feeling angry and look at them once more. Please consider worthy of your love all those who enjoy your husband's love, accept their gifts and entreat your father to spare my sons the penalty of exile for my sake. So really interesting things going on there. I think I might have suggested in a previous part that part of the problem with the Medea, Jason marriage is or might be that Medea was too in love with Jason. And that's one of the reasons why she's willing to use the children as these means of revenge, because she poured everything into Jason.
It was all about Jason. Like she was too obsessed with him, maybe to the exclusion of any other, any attention paid to the kids. And that's kind of what allows her to discard them, because she sees them just less as little people in their own right and more as the evidence of the love between her and Jason and therefore of something that needs to be destroyed on that basis as too painful of a reminder of her, you know? I see. You can, you can argue that she's someone who's maybe like, has. Has a sexual obsession with Jason. That's, I think, what Pasolini tries to get at in his adaptation.
And it seems that Creusa is the same way. So I don't know what Jason has going on, but he's got big.
20:00 Wes: He's got big hero muscles. That's All.
20:02 Erin: Yeah, there you go. There you go. He's a, he's a beefcake.
20:05 Wes: He's a good looking guy.
20:06 Erin: He's a beefcake. That's, that's what Pasolini does with him as well. And, and so there's a similar dynamic going on. But add to that the sort of evil stepmother quality too, you know, of the second wife who just wants nothing to do with the kids. And the kids are the reminder. And in this arrangement where you have a second wife coming in, the kids are a reminder of the same thing they are for Medea. Jason's former passion for someone else. Evidence of him having a sexual passion for someone other than you, if you're Creusa. And also I think a real deep immaturity on Creusa's part that she would treat little kids this way is indicative of all of the worst stereotypes we could throw at the second. Younger, superficial.
20:56 Wes: She's a bimbo, let's just face it. Yeah, there's a juxtaposition here to her. So, yeah, she comes across as shallow and mean. There's a juxtaposition to her being mean to the kids. And then suddenly now when she saw the finery, she could not restrain herself, but agreed to everything her husband said.
21:17 Erin: Yeah.
21:17 Wes: And then the golden coronet she placed upon her curls and began to arrange her hair in the gleaming mirror, casting smiles the while at her lifeless reflection, another great line, her lifeless reflection. So again, highlighting the vanity as the.
21:34 Erin: One of the best modern day versions of this is just the parent trap. The two kids coming in and pretending to play nice. I mean, these kids don't know that they're about to kill her, but there's something of the sort of little Lindsay Lohan quality. I know the original was Hayley Mills, but one of my favorite movies of all time is the 1998 Nancy Meyers' Parent Trap. I don't know if I ever mentioned this to you. And Meredith Blake is very much a Creusa type figure. And so if you can imagine a comic version of this where the two Lindsay Lohan twins come in with something that's designed to make her. They give her in the movie bug spray, which is just sugar water. So she gets eaten alive by mosquitoes on a camping trip. This gets some traction later in cute Disney movies.
22:23 Wes: Well, what happens here is a little bit more uncomedic, horrific.
22:28 Erin: She gets eaten alive. All right. Yeah.
22:29 Wes: But then we were exposed to a horrific sight. A horrific sight. The color left her face and with her limbs trembling, she lurched Backwards towards the throne and collapsed on it, barely stopping herself from falling on the ground. And then it gets very, very graphic. Just burning up and foam trickling from her lips and eyes rolling and screams and devouring fire. Yeah. Not a. Not a fun. Flesh melting away from the bones like resin from a pine tree. Any. Anything else we want to highlight?
23:06 Erin: Oh, how about blood congealed with fire was dripping from the top of her head.
23:10 Wes: There you go.
23:11 Erin: Just like a Roman candle.
23:13 Wes: This gets for a game of Game of Thrones here.
23:15 Erin: Yeah. And the poisons. I love this. The poison's jaws worked away unseen. The flesh melted away from it. But then the pine tree. Yeah. Because there's something. The best part about it is that it's like she's melting in front of you, but the agent that is melting her is invisible. It's like this invisible fire. So you're watching it, and she gets
23:36 Wes: up from the throne and she's all aflame and she's running and tossing her head and trying to get rid of the crown by. You know, but. But she can't. And then each time she shook her head, the flame burned twice as fiercely.
23:49 Erin: So cool. Sick. And then the father Creon. This is another element of her which is also an element of Meredith Blake in Parent Trap. She's. She's Daddy's little princess.
24:00 Wes: So
24:02 Erin: the psychology of this is really. Parent Trap is quite an ancient tale. But the father. Yeah, great description here with him, too. When he had ceased his weeping and wailing, he tried to raise his aged frame, but he stuck to her fine dress. Oh, so he's thrown himself on her. He stuck to her fine dress. As ivy clings to laurel branches. Very Ovidian. Right. There's a little bit of a metamorphosis type. His struggles appalled us. Try as he might to lift up a knee, she clung to him. Him. Save me, dad. And each time he used force to extricate himself, he tore the withered flesh from his own bones.
At last, the wretched man could strive no more against his awful predicament. He. He gasped and breathed his last. Together they lie in death, old man and young daughter. There's an element to this that. That I didn't notice before, which is isn't just that he's sort of caught the flame, the invisible flame from her, but also that she's grabbing him and pulling on him. And that's part of the. Her grasping is part of what kills him. So she takes him down, too. It's sort of a reverse Medea, actually, when you think about it. She's taking some people with her.
25:17 Wes: And then we get a little moral at the end. No one in this life of ours knows happiness when fortune's tide flows toward him. One man may surpass another in prosperity, but you should not call him happy.
25:31 Erin: Yeah. When she melted all the way down, there was a fortune cookie. All that was left was a fortune cookie. He opened it, and that was on the inside.
25:38 Wes: That's amazing.
25:38 Erin: Yeah.
25:39 Wes: That's awesome. Oh, my God. It's too bad she forgot to do the fortune cookie. All right, so now we are in the final three pages of this. And Medea.
25:56 Erin: Oh, we made it.
25:56 Wes: Messenger leaves. Medea's. Well, the chorus leader says, this day it seems that heaven has rained many blows justly on the head of Jason, which is an interesting alignment. You know, the chorus has kind of resisted this plan largely. And then Medea is now very decisive. I will kill my children.
26:14 Erin: Well, and just to interrupt for one second, I mean, it really does. This really does make Jason the main character, doesn't it?
26:20 Wes: It.
26:20 Erin: It's. It's really all about Jason. People have just died, and it's like, oh, Jason's had a tough break today. You know, Actually, Creusa and Creon maybe had a tougher break, but.
26:30 Wes: Yeah, exactly, you know, so. So with the children, they must be killed. There is no other way. Come, my heart. This right, this is another. Well, is it evocative of Shakespeare at all? Come, my heart, put on your armor. We must not hesitate to do this deed, this terrible, yet necessary, necessary deed. Come, wretched hand of mine, grip the sword. Grip it onto the starting line. A painful race awaits you now.
26:55 Erin: Great stuff.
26:56 Wes: Yeah. For one day, one fleeting day, forget your children. There will be the rest of your life for weeping. For though you will put them to the sword, you loved them well. Oh, I'm a woman born to sorrow.
27:08 Erin: It's so Macbeth. You know, I'm thinking of vaulting ambition, too. Right, Right. Just got to do this and get over the hurdle to the end and then worry about other things later.
27:19 Wes: Stick your. What is it? Screw your courage. The sticking place.
27:24 Erin: Yeah, or stick your courage to the screwing place. Whichever.
27:28 Wes: Whichever works. Whatever helps you get it done. Whatever.
27:33 Erin: Yeah. Avenge the bridal bed. And anyway, Sorry, pun on the screwing place. Anyway,
27:42 Wes: all right, so now we get the infanticide. And, well, first the strophe, of course, asks the Sun, her grandfather, to restrain her. And then the antistrophe echoes something she's already said, which is gone. For nothing is a toil. You spend on your children. Why? And then why this lust for. For blood? So both sides of the chorus are, you know, are hoping to. For this somehow to be prevented. And after that, we get, I guess, a quite very brief but horrible scene of her killing the kids off stage. The kids. You know, one of the children saying, oh, help, can I escape my mother's hands? And we are about to die, or we are to die. And then, of course, what horror. What further horror could match this? Oh, how many troubles caused by the loves of women? How many sorrows you have brought on mankind before now?
28:33 Erin: That's immediately where I wanted to jump. You know, they make reference to the dark clashing rocks. Like, you went through so much to get here to this point, so why are you trying to sort of unravel, like, as though the. As though Medea getting through the clashing rocks was part of the material that went into the children. In a strange way, the story they acknowledged. Yeah. What Medea is doing, which is she's kind of rewinding the tape. She's undoing the story. And they're saying, you know, but you. You put all of this effort in for this particular plot thread, so why are you trying to undo the plot now?
And it's a really interesting way of looking at it, you know, then afterwards, as. As you say, you know, how many. How many troubles caused by the loves of women? So they're. They've rewound to the beginning of where this plot thread started, which is when she first falls in love with Jason and all of this bad stuff happens. Yeah. She successfully kills off that thread of the plot and leaves the chorus to bemoan the sort of start of it all. I'm really interested in that move because it seems to take seriously what Medea does as a way to kill off Jason's future and kind of her past with him.
It seems to give credence to almost to the necessity of her doing what she does, which is killing the children as a way to kind of clean up the story or something like that, you know?
29:55 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it makes this reference to Ino. So I guess it's saying there's only one other woman who's done this type of violence to her own children, which is surprising. Is that true in mythology?
30:07 Erin: Yes, it is. I looked this up, and this is supposed to be. Yeah. Ino. In the glossary in the back of the Penguin edition, we're using Sister of Dionysus, mother Semele, driven mad by Hera. She jumped into the sea with one of her children both died, but in some versions were transformed into sea deities. In some versions, she gets away with it, too.
30:28 Wes: Okay, so there's the station wagon origin story. It's the back. The station wagon end version.
30:36 Erin: This is supposed to show that this has happened. This is like a Greek has done this too. So lest you say this is a Colchian kind of problem.
30:46 Wes: Right.
30:47 Erin: We've actually been here before.
30:49 Wes: Right. Not all Colchians. Well, it's surprising if this is unique to Greek mythology. And also, we know. We're almost certain that Euripides is just making this up. Right. He's adding to the myth as it already exists. This is the first time anyone would have heard this story told this way as having her kill the children.
31:12 Erin: And he's saying there is a precedent here in Greece.
31:15 Wes: Right?
31:15 Erin: Yeah.
31:16 Wes: Right. So very interesting.
31:18 Erin: I wonder if we could tie that into this idea of unraveling the plot. Because here he's sort of. Yeah. If Medea kills the kids to undo the mythology. And here Euripides both sort of expands the mythology and contracts it at the same time by making Medea perform this action, which seeks to blot out her history with Jason. Yeah. He's both building on and destroying the myth at the same time by making her into such a monster here.
31:47 Wes: Yeah. I mean, what is he trying to do as a poet here? What motivates this retelling? Right. Why do this with Medea and put her in this role of having killed her children? There seems to be some connection to the critique of Athenian rationality said. Right. To the critique that the. That the audience would feel as a reproach to not honoring the instinctual side. Our instinctual side. Something about not honoring our instinctual side is kills off. Right. So we think of ambition in terms of legacy, of what we're going to leave to the future, whether it's our own children or our own work.
But there's some sort of legacy seems to be terminated by repression or by dishonoring the instinctual. And maybe that's creative products. Right. You throttle your own. The products of your own creativity. If what. I don't think I'm making sense here. That doesn't work thematically because she's supposed to be the representation of the instinctual. But, you know. Right. So given proper. Right. Yeah. If she hadn't been. Been disrespected, if she hadn't had such injustice done to her, then the sons could flourish. So, yeah, ultimately, it's the dishonoring of the instinctual which can have these Unpredictable effects on legacy.
I don't know. Can you clean that up? Can you make that sound better?
33:13 Erin: Yeah. I mean, all it's doing is making me think of, you know, to go back to this idea of Medea's sorcery and taking the children as representatives of some kind of creative act or creative gift of hers. Right. So if we want to say that Medea is herself, you know, if her sorcery is writing plays and these children are her plays, and then Jason, you know, doesn't like the fact that Medea is a better playwright than him, and she burns the plays in order to prove some kind of point. You know, that's. That's kind of.
33:43 Wes: And also. Well, he's trying to represent them as his own plays, maybe.
33:46 Erin: Right.
33:46 Wes: I don't know. Right. In a way. Or they collaborate, they collaborated on them, Quote, unquote, collaborative.
33:52 Erin: Exactly. And if it weren't for my being your muse because you fell in love with me, then you wouldn't have written such great plays, in fact. Right. Yeah. So I think that's.
34:02 Wes: Now it's starting to sound like Woody Allen.
34:05 Erin: This is, to me, the most compelling explanation for the sorcery, the giftedness, what the kids represent. It's a marriage of unequal artists.
34:15 Wes: Yeah. That's great.
34:16 Erin: And that has some really serious consequences when the one who's better is the woman. As I think I already suggested in part one, it doesn't work in this direction, unfortunately.
34:26 Wes: Yeah. There's a part where the chorus says, don't go into business with a family member. Never works out. Just thinking about it. Yeah. They kind of work together, which is part of the problem.
34:35 Erin: Right, Right.
34:36 Wes: Or they did work together when they were doing all the dragon slaying. Right.
34:41 Erin: The other question, why this story? I mean, it is that Jason is such a scumbag and there's an opening, therefore, and because he's not quite. I think there was a question of whether or not he was maybe partially divine, I think you said at some point. But, you know, you can't go after Zeus for being a scumbag.
34:58 Wes: I think he's related to the wind, ultimately.
35:02 Erin: Okay. But he's more. More. He's more normal than not. And I think that I had mentioned in a previous episode that there is another story like this, and it's Theseus's betrayal of Ariadne. And in fact, after I said that, I looked it up on Wikipedia, for what that's worth. And Theseus is the son of Aegeus, and when he returns, he finds that Aegeus and Medea are together. So actually the. So actually you have, in a very short span of time in the mythology and very. In very close quarters, two faithless oath breaking, just kind of scumbaggy men that are using women.
And Ariadne, too, is, you know, is representative of a lot of elements of female creativity because of the ways in which she helps him. She's associated with weaving, for instance, because of the way she helps him get out of the. She gives him the string to get out of the labyrinth, betrays her own family to help him, and he's deeply. And he abandons her on an island somewhere.
36:02 Wes: Wow. Amazing idea. I didn't think about that. Yeah. Like a perfect repetition.
36:05 Erin: Yeah. What do you want to call it? Within the mythology, there's this little sub theme that just happens in this cluster of interlocking stories that is about faithless men betraying the women who helped them and the creative impulses that got them through trials. It was a very smart thing for Euripides to mine.
36:25 Wes: Athens is built on lies.
36:28 Erin: Yep. Yeah, well, everything is.
36:31 Wes: So it's a very subversive what Euripides is doing here as far as his Athenian audience. All right, so here we are at the final scene, the scumbag, wherein the scumbag gets his comeuppance. In all honesty, I do find this also very poignant and feel quite sympathetic
36:49 Erin: to Jason in this scene.
36:51 Wes: I think it's written in that way so that we don't.
36:53 Erin: Well, but Jason, I just. I love when he says. When he comes on, rushes on stage and says, you know, wonders if Medea has fled from Corinth. And he says, for she must either hide herself below the earth or soar on wings into the vault of heaven if she is to escape the vengeance of the royal house. And I just wrote, good guess. Those are her two choices and she will choose one of them. Thank you.
37:18 Wes: I love this way he refers to as that arch criminal Medea.
37:22 Erin: Yeah, right. This woman of. I don't know her, you know, Criminal.
37:26 Wes: Yeah. And the chorus, you know, he comes on and then he's. I fear for my children. So he's, you know. You know, But. And of course, he's just seen what's gone down with his Creusa and Creon. But chorus leader Jason, you are to be pitied. You have no idea of the depth of your misfortune. These words of yours would never have been been uttered if he knew that's when she appears in the Chariot. Yep. Or shortly afterward.
37:53 Erin: And this isn't just some chariot. This is a chariot drawn by dragons. This is. Right, of course, A Thunderbird with flames on the side.
38:02 Wes: Yeah, it's a Trans Am. It's a Trans Am. Or is that what you meant by Thunderbird? Yes, Thunderbird is a car too. Okay, why am I changing the.
38:13 Erin: Well, whichever, that's insert for a favorite car here, such as the chariot that the Sun, my father's father has given me. This is so annoying. The son, my father's father. Again with the homonyms. It's ridiculous. I wish we could just say Helios and get it over with anyway, but yeah, it's a hand me down chariot. It's a classic car, so. That's what I'm trying to say.
38:39 Wes: Yeah. And again, Euripides is famous and oft criticized for this deus ex machina on stage. It would have been really interesting. They had a mechanism to raise an actor above the stage.
38:53 Erin: It's great.
38:54 Wes: And usually, I guess they would be descending. In this case, of course, she's just going to go into warp speed and take off somewhere. So then they have, you know, while she's. While she's, I guess, hovering about of the stage in her chariot, they have this final fight in which there's a
39:09 Erin: bit of a recapitulation of how the play opens with the nurse saying, if only this had never happened. Right. If only, you know, I hadn't taken you here as part of this exchange program, you know. Ridiculous. The spirit of vengeance for your crimes has been sent by the gods to punish me. Now I see it clear. But what a fool I was before when I brought you from that house of yours, that house of yours in a barbarous land to a. To a home in Greece. I'm imagining a palace just like, ah, that little brought you out of that shack in the bayou to a home in Greece. A deadly passenger who had betrayed your father. In the country that reared you. The spirit of vengeance for your crimes has been sent by the gods to punish me.
39:52 Wes: I see.
39:53 Erin: Why would that be? Could it be because they're married and he collected her debt upon the marriage?
40:00 Wes: Exactly. Well, he collaborated with her and of course he had her commit crimes for him.
40:07 Erin: Yeah, see, the gods don't recognize divorce.
40:10 Wes: This is important, Medea. I would have spoken at some length in reply to those words, were it not that Father Zeus knew what kind of treatment you had from me and I from you. It was not for you or your princess to trample on my love and live a life of pleasure laughing at me. I think she's. It's a way of saying it's just. It's justice. Right. So nothing else was compatible with justice. Zeus saw what happened. Zeus knew what kind of treatment you have had from me. And I have had. Oh, well. So the first thing is to say that, you know, I don't need to justify myself because God knows what really went down.
40:47 Erin: The highlighting of the laughing at me and the, you know, my pain is canceled now that any mockery of yours is silenced.
40:53 Wes: We're repeatedly reminded of her motive, which is to avoid humiliation and mockery. So I guess, you know, after this point, then they get into a dispute about whether he can have the children to bury or at least be able to touch them. I guess this is on page 86. Allow me to bury my dead and weep over them. Never. I will bury them with these hands. I will not have them subjected to mockery by one of my enemies, violating their tombs. She's going to bury them elsewhere.
41:25 Erin: They're going to have a festival, which I guess was. Was a thing. They were honored after their death or something.
41:32 Wes: She'll establish a solemn festival with ritual observances to atone for this impious bloodshed in years to come. And. Yeah, so this is supposed to be at Hera of the Cape, which is Cyprus. Is that where that is?
41:44 Erin: And there is. There is a temple to the boys. There was a temple, wasn't there?
41:48 Wes: It sounds familiar. I don't remember.
41:50 Erin: Yeah, I mean, you know, all of this coming from someone who's standing in a chariot drawn by dragons really takes the whole question of right or wrong out of it or even of motivation. The visual, I suppose, would be one where. And a lot of modern day adaptations, I mean, the one that I saw, they do away with this entirely. She just walks off with the children over her shoulders, walks off into the mist, sort of. So some people do away with this, but I suppose the effect would be that ultimately Medea is just an agent of some kind of divine justice.
I mean, she's almost extracted as a character from the, you know, family drama, this Albee play, right. And just becomes, you know, the hammer that falls on Jason and leaves him with nothing. She becomes something else entirely. And so one is left to. To see this as being, you know, it might have been the plague that killed the kids. It might have been the right, like the. Like she's just almost completely extracted from the play, I think, at a certain point from the drama. I mean.
42:53 Wes: Yeah. So can we save Euripides from criticism of this whole Deus ex machina thing, Is it just lazy and sloppy at the end? And does he just want to spare a tragic hero their tragic fate or is there a point to it? I guess in most plays it would be a God coming down to save the hero, right? Rather than the hero getting lent out their grandfather's thunderbird to take off in. But the same effect. So what's the point of doing this? We're remind. I mean, as you pointed out, we have gone from a kind of naturalized view of mythological figures and their psychology to this very stark reminder that this is just mythology and there's something otherworldly about it or divine.
Right? So it's like watching who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And at the very end, spaceship just takes off with one of them and that's the. That's the way it's all resolved. Why do that? What's the point? Is there a point to that? I think if you're to justify. I mean, it has to be. In a way, it just seems like it must be. Be avant garde for the time. It must be kind of a weird avant garde twist on the right. It's not like Sophocles didn't do that, Aeschylus didn't do that. This is like his brand. So what is he doing? I mean, and of course, the other.
The other aspect for Euripides is this kind of critique of gods as. It's almost like a critique of mythology, right? That at least the way. Or Homeric myth. Homeric accounts where the passions of the gods make them seem too human and it's hard to square their divinity with their rashness and all the misdeeds they're engaged in. And Euripides has made some rather, in various plays, rather direct critiques of that. So I don't know. I don't know what to make of it.
44:49 Erin: I love it. I mean, I think it's perfect and I can't quite express why that is. I don't know if I can even attempt it. But on 86 around line 1367 or so in this back and forth, they're still kind of squabbling. Even as she's in the spaceship, Medea says, no, it was your lustful heart. In the new marriage of yours. And that new marriage of yours, Jason says, what? You decided to kill them Because I loved another Medea. Do you think this is a minor annoyance to a woman, Jason? Yes, if she is sensible.
45:19 Wes: But.
45:19 Erin: But to you it is all that is evil. So it's like he still doesn't get it? And maybe the fact that she escapes and leaves, and leaves him with nothing and has this sort of perfect revenge rather than being. We're talking about, you know, realistic and unrealistic means and ends. Uses unrealistic means to show the quite realistic ends of your actions actually have consequences. What you do and how you behave and what you choose to ignore or not to take seriously, it does actually matter somehow. And it uses this really unrealistic device, which I love because it's just.
I love it for the pure badassery of it, you know, Chariot drawn by dragons. Like, come on, that's amazing. Right? But it uses this mythological crazy image to prove the realness of realism or something like that. Like to prove it all matters in the end or something. You can't just lie to yourself and get away with things or you can't just break an oath or, you know, I mean, that's a little too simple. But do you know what I'm trying to say? Like, it kind of. Or it suggests that there's a kind of a divine tally, maybe not for the gods, but for you.
For you average immortal person. Right. And in the end it'll get you.
46:36 Wes: Right. We're just about to end here. But. But what do you think of the very final line by the chorus or two lines? Which on the surface to me is a little bit lame and it's moralizing, but many are the things Zeus on Olympus has in his keeping. And many things do the gods accomplish beyond men's hopes. What men expect does not happen for the unexpected. Heaven finds a way. And so it has turned out here today unexpected things happen.
47:06 Erin: Yeah.
47:06 Wes: Best laid plans of mice and men. So it almost sounds like a justification of someone wants to say, well, that's a kind of lame way to end a play like this. The chariot picks her up and she goes off. That's not.
47:20 Erin: No.
47:21 Wes: Satisfying.
47:21 Erin: And.
47:23 Wes: And the.
47:24 Erin: Yeah, See, I don't. Yeah, I think it's too badass to be lame, as I said. But I. But I do think that this. I mean, I see these morals and maybe I shouldn't be seeing them this way, but I see them as the lip service that Euripides is paying to convention. So I'm going to do this crazy thing and then I'm going to end with my little fortune cookie thing.
47:43 Wes: Yeah, I kind of am inclined actually to see it that way as well. Including some of the commentary on women. Right. Some of the choruses. Commentary on women, even though they are women. This is beyond my ability to reason that kind of thing. I don't know. I think you'd have to know more about the context, the social context, to understand. Is that meant ironically? What is that? How is he using that rhetorically? Because, of course, so much of the play is really about Medea's point of view and obvious feminist overtones to it.
48:13 Erin: Right. And her literal divine superiority and ascent. So those sections are almost tongue in cheek on the part of the chorus. Whereas this feels more like a more private way in which Euripides is being tongue in cheek towards convention. You know, this seems like a layer deeper of commentary where Euripides is not expecting people to get that they're being a little dissed or made fun of or that the certain conventions of the plays themselves are being kind of made fun of here. Whereas maybe he's expecting some people to get the tongue in cheek commentary on women like here. It's at a level of convention so deeply ingrained in these plays that people might not even notice that they're being fed a platitude at the end, because that's kind of what they're expecting to get. It would take knowing something about knowing, knowing really deeply what people would have expected.
49:07 Wes: Right. All right, do you have anything else before we wrap up?
49:12 Erin: Not with a bang, but a whimper? Do I. Do I slink out of the.
49:19 Wes: We need our own chariots?
49:20 Erin: I'm not even allowed to see this play, so. Yeah. But, yeah, I need to hit the bricks.
49:28 Wes: All right, thank you.
49:30 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 5)
Oct 07, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
Upcoming Episodes: “A New Leaf” (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to Part five of our six part series on Medea. We had just gotten done discussing Medea's escape plan, which involves kindly old Aegeus from Athens, Athens to save the day, even though he apparently is not fully aware of her moral character. I know you want to defend her, but we'll fight about that later. I think where we concluded in the last part is I mentioned the aspersion kind of cast on Athens, or the shadow cast over Athens by the potential association of Medea with Athens, where Athens is representative of these new ideals, or I don't know how new they are, but they've become very important in light of Socrates at the time that Euripides is writing.
So ideals of temperance and rationality and associated ideals and Medea, in a way I think represents more of the instinctual side. So if you wanted to really look at this play in the at the most general thematic level level, you might say what Euripides is doing is he's giving a critique of Athenian norms, Athenian mores, which is not unusual for him. And the critique is that the focus on rationality, on temperance, on the type of things that Jason thinks he represents. Although of course he's portrayed as foolish in this play. Overly focusing on that can make in fact make one foolish like Jason and doesn't pay sufficient respect to the instinctual side of human nature.
And when you don't pay respect to the instinctual side of human nature, it comes back to kill your children by way of your Own hands.
2:22 Erin: I have my blood red nail polish on right now, too. To really drive the point, I just clawed into the.
2:29 Wes: For listeners. Yeah, Erin just showed her claws. Sorry, we're gonna call them. That was where we left off. And now I think we are kind of at the midpoint, the very midpoint of the play here and the next stage, as we move from the scene between Medea and Aegeus to her deceiving Jason, killing the royals, all that stuff.
2:51 Erin: At some point in one of the previous parts, I tried to make the argument, though, that there was something sort of hyperlogical and rational about Medea's infamous act. And I think in the end, it kind of, you know, as we were talking about with other elements of Medea's character, it sort of swings all the way around. So she ends up having it both ways. She ends up being a sort of figure of both masculinity and femininity, of logic and irrationality, of. But maybe you weren't really convinced by that, But I was looking at, you know, just after Aegeus leaves, which is, I think, where we're gonna pick up anyway, when Jason comes and Medea pretends to play nice.
You know, I was reflecting on her performance of apology and pretending to be okay with everything, and I see this as being a really important prelude to the act of killing the children. So, you know, it seems to me that because Jason won't take her pain, her anger, her humiliation seriously, her sort of irrationality seriously, she has to find a way to be taken seriously. And that seems to involve the need to shock. Yeah, she must shock him. Wake him up in a way. And so to do this, I think she first, as a. As a prelude, dons the disguise of the agreeable, weak woman.
You know, she says, what a perverse creature I am. Why do I madly resent those who have my interests at heart? Why do I view as enemies the rulers of the land and my husband, who is doing what is best for me in marrying a princess and fathering brothers for my children? Shall I not give up my anger? What is the matter with me? Are the gods not generous? Do I not have children? Have I forgotten that I am in exile and in need of friends? When I reflected on this, I realized the full extent of my folly and the futility of my anger. So now you have my thanks.
Indeed. I consider you showed good judgment in making this new match for us. I have been the foolish one, you know. So she, you know, you're smart, I'm dumb, you're sane. I'M emotional and crazy, silly me, you know, and so she leans into this, you know, stereotype of womanhood to, I think, to make the shock of contrast all the greater when she then hits Jason with that surprise attack. And what's the most surprising, least stereotypical thing a proper woman, a proper wife, a proper mother would do, of course, is kill her own children.
5:13 Wes: Wait, why is that? Why is that most proper?
5:15 Erin: No, what's the most surprising, least stereotypical thing a proper woman would do? You know, so. So she pulls the rug out from under Jason and from out from under the stereotype that she momentarily leans into in order to provide this kind of contrast.
5:32 Wes: I think, yeah, she's displaying. She's displaying the quality, I would call it the quality of rukh ruthlessness, which one might think is quintessentially powerful or masculine. There's a question, you know, we could have a conversation about, well, how accurate is that? But one might think ruthlessness is. And that certainly is the quality, I think, willing to do anything to accomplish one's goal, no matter what it costs, even if it's one's own children.
6:00 Erin: I mean, she does it seemingly even though it hurts her much more than it hurts him. Him. But I'm interested in the logic of that, you know, in basically saying, okay, you want to treat me like I never happened. You want to throw everything away and start over, you want to erase my contributions to your life, then even if it hurts me more than it hurts you, I'll do it. I'll show. I'll carry out the consequences of your thoughts. And so, you know, in a way, what she does is a kind of hyper real, hyper logical conclusion to Jason's desire for freedom and for extricating himself from his oath.
And at the same time, while being crazy, it therefore also takes seriously Jason's misogynistic beliefs about the craziness of women. You know, you think I'm crazy, I'll show you crazy. You know, I'm so crazy I will kill my maternal impulses and act as cold blooded as a man to get what I want. So it both plays on and against these misogynistic stereotypes by using her sort of crazy feminine insanity to show how strong and cool and unemotional a woman can be. So I do think she has it. She has it both ways with the murders. Thematically, it's really complex and fascinating to me both ways.
7:14 Wes: And you mean rational and irrational?
7:16 Erin: Yeah, I mean, and it's both misogynistic and anti misogynistic.
7:19 Wes: So it could Be rational. It can be rational relative, relative to a certain goal.
7:24 Erin: Right. That's what I mean. Yeah.
7:26 Wes: Right. So there's hypothetical reason, or what's called instrumental rationality, where it's just, if I do this, then this, and you figure out what's going to get you what you want. And what you want can be as crazy as I'll get out. But the rationality is in the method, and if it works, it works to get you what you want. So there's a question of the rationality of the means and then the rationality of the goals. And then when you look at the goals, you can think of Kantian terms, of Kantian categorical rationality. What do I have to do, regardless of whether it's going to make me happy, regardless of my goals?
It's just morality and then morality in the more contemporary sense. And if you were thinking in terms of ancient Greek virtue ethics, happiness would be the ultimate goal. And the. That for Aristotle, to some extent Plato and Socrates, it involves a certain. Well, for Aristotle, it's activity in accordance with virtue. There's this close tie between one's virtue in this broader ethical sense than Kantian strict morality. So it could be courage, it could be magnanimity. These are the relevant virtues or forms of excellence that complete human character that constitute a good for human character.
So the critique in terms of. Right, we're just talking about Aegeus and Athenian, the Athenian concept of rationality, the critique in terms of that sort of rationality as well. Is she temperate? Is her soul properly balanced? And the balance, right, is between. There's the rational side, and then the irrational side is double. For the ancient Greeks, it's. It's eros, it's love, and then it's honor or spiritedness. Thumos. And one of the interesting kind of lines of reflection in this play is if, if she is irrational, is this about love or is it about pride and honor?
Because those two things are so often mixed up and. And as I've said many times, we often don't know which is at stake psychologically. We are often quite confused about that. That. Right. So if she loses, is she upset because she's losing Jason and Jason is just so wonderful, or has she been dishonored? I think it's really more about dishonor. And again, this is a theme for Euripides. Right. The Bacchae is all about Dionysus being dishonored. People don't pay him sufficient respect. He is also a representative of the instinctual. I think this is Kind of Euripides whole line of thought, which is quite ironic in that that's Nietzsche's critique of Euripides, is that he doesn't pay enough respect to the instinctual, to the Dionysian side of things.
But leaving that aside. So anyway, just going back to. So, yeah, I think there are many different conceptions of rationality at work. And I think if you want to point to her rationality, she's got plenty of instrumental rationality once she's decided what she wants in accomplishing it. She's got a lot of rhetorical ability, the ability to persuade with Creon, with Jason, as we'll see here in a second with Aegeus. And I think maybe the rationality that you're pointing to, how do we categorize that? She's sort of exposing the destructiveness of Jason's logic.
She's bringing that out in the open for him to see. So is that just revenge? What is that right, if we say let me show you what you're doing to me, or let me show you what you're like by externalizing the emotional dynamic, making it more obvious, killing the children. It's one very good way to externalize anyway.
11:13 Erin: Yeah, I like that. The exposure of the. Maybe, maybe the lie of logic or the consequences of logic. She's trying to expose what is corrupt in Jason's own behavior, what his behavior actually signifies. He's telling himself, right, that he's doing this for logical ends, but he's taking an irrational route, perhaps, or not irrational, I suppose, an immoral route to get to his end, which is, as we've already discussed to this, this higher status in society that he desires because he's a social climber. And it seems to me Medea, therefore, you know, if her goal is maybe a two pronged one, I think it's to hurt Jason because he has humiliated her, and also to show that she's not weak, which is basically an extension of revenge against the humiliation visited on her.
So those I think are pretty rational ends for me. Okay, I want to hurt someone who hurt me. But the means by which she does this is irrational. So killing the kids so that she hurts even herself in order to get back at someone.
12:21 Wes: Well, why is hurting someone who hurts you rational?
12:25 Erin: Well, I suppose it's understandable.
12:28 Wes: Destructive.
12:29 Erin: Okay. Yeah, so. So you don't think that's rational at all? I mean, I. I guess I don't mean like capital R rational. I mean like it's.
12:34 Wes: Well, it's natural. It's natural to have that feeling. Yeah. Okay.
12:37 Erin: I mean, it's more natural because it's truer to a kind of a real emotion than Jason is being. And that. That's kind of. I think the contrast. One of the contrasts that I want to draw is that Jason is kind of lying to himself. And in a way, he's. We've already suggested this, that he's acting as though emotions don't matter at all. And though Medea's goals are kind, emotional goals, there's something truer, I think, about what she's trying to accomplish or. Or maybe not. I mean, you know, obviously they're. They're both terrible. Like, we've, We've already said this, but I think there's something of a corrective about what Medea does that is like a lesson that Jason has to learn in a.
In a way. And she's. And she's. She's one hell of a teacher. So. So she functions as a kind of a thematic corrective to his banishment of. Of emotion and feelings from his considerations. Something like that.
13:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think we have to. So for each of the categories, Eros and reason and Pride, Honor, spiritedness, whatever you want to call it, from the critical standpoint, we treat them as neutral. So we don't presume that rationality is the right way to go. We don't presume that love is the right way to go. Because presumably Euripides is critiquing the rosy picture of rationality that his contemporaries seem to have bought into. So he wants to look at the dark side of quote, unquote, rationality. And in that sense, maybe rationality, too much rationality, looks unreasonable because it's not plugged into social reality.
Jason ignores that it's illogical to ignore the fact that someone is going to be hurt, that their pride is going to be wounded, and that they're going to be otherwise hurt by your own behaviors. You can have all the rationality in the world, but if you can't get into the head of another person, there's a data point, an important data point that's missing. Right. If you can't empathize fully, then you don't have the data right to. Or the premises to plug into your syllogism or algorithm in order to get the right output. So if Jason is disconnected from emotional and social reality, he can be as rational as he likes, and it's not going to do him any good.
And maybe part of the lesson is to. Not just for Jason, but for all of us, is to Give us a very visual, very, very startling and concrete representation of those other sides of our nature and the fact that they cannot be ignored. And Jason's own goals, of course, are quite right. It's not as if. As if he's any different. Different from Medea in the sense that he may or may not be after a young hottie, may or may not be after love. He disputes that. He certainly is after his legacy. Right. So he's also after pride and honor. He says he's after security, which.
That's his excuse, really. Right. I'm just trying to get security for both of us. Because his legacy in terms of children with the new wife, that doesn't help Medea any. And he can't harp on that too much. Look, I'm doing a great. Medea's only benefit out of the. He can get all kinds of status embellishment through his connection to the royal family. She gets nothing. In fact, she gets the opposite. In a way, she's humiliated by contrast. So all he can do to sell all this whole package is say, oh, this is about safety. This is about security. This is about us having a homeland to stay in.
Since we are essentially homeless. We are essentially people without a country. He has to. So in a way, he's leveraging this vulnerability, this predicament that Medea's in, in the sense that she doesn't have a country and the thing that she did to herself for him. She sacrificed home and homeland in order to help him. And now he's saying to her, well, look, I can provide you with that, but only if I betray you. So it's a sick contradiction.
16:43 Erin: It's very sick. And I think it bears emphasis as perhaps we already covered, because it's important. And Medea makes this point. She, as a consequence of this, would have to serve Creusa as the female head of the household. This is really crucial because this is representative, I think, of what a tremendous status this is. This is not a divorce where, okay, you have to watch the second wife, maybe move into your old house and kind of take your place, but at least you can move to a condo in a neighboring town and try to start over. And not, you know, this is, you're still in the house and you have to wait on her hand and foot. You know, it's. This is a level of humiliation which is actually psychologically unbearable, especially when you're royal and divine and better than everybody else.
17:34 Wes: Well, getting on, getting cut off in traffic is psychologically unbearable for me. So to think of, yeah, this level of humiliation is.
17:45 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I think it's important because I think that, you know, so. So often in these stories or, or in ancient Greek culture, male humiliation is treated with great seriousness and as something which is almost physical in its very real consequences. And yet where there actually are in many cases, or I don't know if in many more cases, but truly in many cases demonstrable physical consequences for women to great loss in status, it's somehow not treated as psychologically of the sort of same weight as a man who's been reduced in status.
And I think that this play shows that women can be humiliated too, and they might get a little upset though. That said, one of the things that strikes me as you're talking about this as being corrective for Jason, a way of externalizing consequences for Jason. It makes very apparent to me how Jason, I suppose, is the actual tragic hero of this story because he's not the titular character of the play, but he is the one who experiences the recognition and reversal. No, I mean, he's the one who fulfills, you know, the Aristotelian precepts for the Greek tragic hero, the central figure.
19:00 Wes: Interesting. Well, that's part of the weirdness of Euripides.
19:04 Erin: Yeah, right.
19:05 Wes: She is the quote unquote tragic hero. But of course the tragedy is self inflicted in the end. Right. The tragedy for her is losing her children. Even though she kills the children, she does it to get Jason, but that's what she loses.
19:20 Erin: Yeah, that's true.
19:21 Wes: The unusual part is for her not to lose everything. The tragic hero is supposed to lose everything and preferably to die. But she gets lifted out by the chariot of the sun and she's going to be.
19:34 Erin: How's that for social climbing? Climbing up to the sky.
19:37 Wes: Yeah, it's one of the critiques of Euripides. It's one of the odd things about his plays. So, you know, the question is, well, what is he trying to say with that? It can't just be he's being sloppy and he knows what's supposed to happen to the tragic hero. He's playing with that idea and they're getting away scot free. So they don't learn the lesson. We learn the lesson. Somehow Jason learns the lesson. But also we learn the lesson. The audience becomes the. The receptacle of. Or some other character, I suppose, becomes a receptacle of whatever transformation the tragic hero is supposed to undergo or the.
Or of a sense of loss. And if it's us, it's the loss of. I Suppose the sense of moral certainty, it's a sense of our ethical bearings, like, okay, rationality and temperance and all that stuff is good. That's our framework. If Euripides is trying to of make us unsettled by that, then. Right. The loss sort of stands outside of the play in a way.
20:41 Erin: Yeah. Another big lesson is be nice to your wife, if only out of fear because she could be a lot crazier than you think. So, you know, maybe be nice to her every once in a while.
20:53 Wes: Well, he already knew she was pretty crazy. He'd seen her do a lot of crazy shit. So for him. And he had benefited.
21:00 Erin: I can't say this enough.
21:01 Wes: Yeah. And he had benefited. Benefited from all that. So, yeah, if you're in a Bonnie and Clyde situation and your wife is doing a lot of illegal, murderous stuff for you, including to her own family, that's a red flag. Well, it's a red flag. You know, then if you have to part ways, if things don't work out, when you take care, you use some caution now. You approach that.
21:26 Erin: You know, I want to reframe this, I want to refrain reframe this. It's like, okay, so, so Medea's the heavy because, you know, she actually has the means to. To murder people in creative ways, but she's doing it for Jason, so. So they're not so much Bonnie and Clyde as. He's Charles Manson. Okay, so she's the one who's actually carrying out the murders, but he should still be held responsible too. He's going to be thrown in jail too. She does it for him. I mean, come on.
21:50 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I, I'm not trying to absolve him of responsibility.
21:56 Erin: No, he's crazy too.
21:57 Wes: But I, I just think. Yeah. The Charles Mansell Mansion Manson example, though the power in a way was with Manson and the others were just.
22:06 Erin: But she is brainwashed by love.
22:08 Wes: Brainwashed. She has the power. That's the important thing to understand.
22:12 Erin: That's right.
22:13 Wes: She's the magician. She's the granddaughter of the sun. Yes. And her downfall is Eros, you know, at first, but then also thumos. So she's made to fall in love and that comes into bitter conflict with her pride. But we would expect her to be proud being a semi divine and having all these powers. So. Yeah. Did you want to say anything more about how she does that? This is the third now kind of deception that she's engaged in rhetorically.
22:46 Erin: This is the most effective part of the play for me because it's so painful because she's being. She's crying over the children, and we, the audience, imagining that we don't know the outcome, and we're sitting there for the first performance, you know, believe that she's crying for one reason. And, you know, we're kind of the people against which the irony, the dramatic irony is being affected in a way. Jason as well. But Euripides and Medea both are kind of tricking us. The children come out on stage and Medea cries over them. Right.
23:17 Wes: You know, she explains her crying by saying she's thinking of her future sorrows, when, you know, as the sorrows that are going to come with exile. But also I think the happiness that the quarrel is over is that Right. And then the chorus leader says, fresh tears spring from these eyes of mine as well. I pray that this trouble may not proceed to greater lengths from now. Which is a bit odd because the chorus knows her plan, but it seems to be taken in as well.
23:49 Erin: Yes. You know, another. Another element of this complexity in her crying is Medea says to Jason, when he kind of notices that she's started crying. It is nothing. I was thinking about these children. Jason says, no more fears now. I will settle this business. Well, Medea says, I will do as you say. I will take you at your word. A woman is a soft creature, made for. For weeping. You're real soft. And Jason says, why all these sighs over the children now? It is too much. She says, I gave them birth. When you prayed for a long life for them. I felt a pang of pity at the thought that this might not happen.
But I have touched on only some of the reasons for your coming to talk to me. The rest I will come to now, since it is the royal will that I be banished from Corinth, and I am well aware this is the best course for me not to continue living here as an embarrassment to you in the. The king, with people thinking I am bitterly opposed to the royal family, I will leave this land for exile. But to ensure that your hands guide our children's upbringing, ask Creon to waive banishment for them. She gets Jason to commit to allowing the children to stay so that they won't be banished, which really seems.
I mean, we can argue about whether or not it would be possible for the children to have any kind of good outcome if they leave with Medea, considering that she's going to go somewhere else where she's going to get kicked out of. She seems to be routinely kicked out of places for her behavior.
25:09 Wes: Well, she's Got Athens set up at
25:10 Erin: this point, she does, but then she gets kicked out of Athens too. In the mythology, what does she do
25:16 Wes: to get kicked out of Athens? How many people does she kill?
25:20 Erin: I don't remember what she does something with Aegeus.
25:23 Wes: Oh, wait, don't they get involved?
25:27 Erin: Yeah. Doesn't she end up. Up becoming the other woman over there?
25:30 Wes: Yeah, yeah, she gets involved with him. Yeah.
25:32 Erin: Yeah. She doesn't learn. I guess they have.
25:34 Wes: They have offspring as well.
25:37 Erin: Right.
25:37 Wes: Anyway, little Medea blood in the Athenian line.
25:42 Erin: Yeah. So she does what's best for the kids before she does the opposite of that. But the effect is the same for her. I mean, it's not literally the same because in one instance they live. She just doesn't see them anymore. In another instance, since they don't live and she just doesn't see them anymore, but the outcome for her is the same.
26:01 Wes: She could have brought them with her, though, right?
26:03 Erin: Well, yeah, but that's what I'm wondering about is, is that something that would be good for them? I mean, not that death is better than that. You know, this is the kind of. The almost comical element of this, but would that even be a good outcome for them? If her whole project is about not becoming humiliated, dragging around these kids and having a sort of visual symbol, more obvious visual symbol of her abandonment by Jason than anything else, would that even be possible for her? In addition to the problems, she.
26:37 Wes: That's her rationale, which is that to let the kids live is not. Will lead to her being laughed at and humiliated. And that even though she doesn't want to lose her children, losing them is better than the alternative, which is humiliation and mockery.
26:55 Erin: That's important to note. But I just wonder what the consequences for single motherhood, you know, wandering single motherhood would be in a kind of. In a more real sense, I don't know. Like, I don't know if what allows her to have a kind of an easy, initially easy acceptance into Athens is the fact that she's starting over. She doesn't have two kids in tow, so she ingratiates herself better with Aegeus. And that's how. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking or reading this too literally, but I think it partially invites us to do that. Right, so by sort of taking the myth and thinking too hard about it in the first place.
27:32 Wes: Yeah. We seem to be encouraged to think of them as ordinary people in a way. Ordinary faults. I mean, the gods are known to have all their Faults, but this really naturalizes them to an incredible degree and psychologizes them, gives them psychological depth. So, yeah, so she comes, she convinces Jason to, you know, first he resists, he doesn't think it'll work, to try and convince Creon to waive the punishment. And then she suggests going through Creon's daughter, Jason's wife, to be. And he's like, oh yeah, I expect I'll win her around. All right, point.
If she's a woman like all the rest. So in a way, she appeals indirectly to Jason's vanity and the idea that he can persuade this woman. Then she talks about the gifts that she's going to give, which have their source and the sun and Helios. And Jason's like, are you kidding me? That's way too. You can't give away gifts such as these there. And these are already rich people. Why would you give them that? That, you know, this is Jason. This is a kind of send up of Jason's focus on practicality, right. And money and security and all that.
28:41 Erin: And he says, if I count for anything in my wife's eyes, she will prefer me to wealth, I have no doubt.
28:48 Wes: Right.
28:48 Erin: Nothing wrong with his ego as usual.
28:50 Wes: And then Medea's argument is that the gifts would, quote, win over the gods themselves. And gold is worth more than words to mortals, which I guess does the trick. So this is her way, of course. These are going to be the poisoned. These gifts are going to be poisoned. These are the gifts that are going to do the killing. So it's very important for her to convince Jason to allow the children to take those gifts to the Creon family. It's an interesting sort of argument that these very precious things are going to be more persuasive than words. And I think it's important because the gifts also play upon vanity.
Right. Ultimately, Creusa is gonna stand in front of the mirror and look, oh, look how pretty this gown is. And crown. And the way to get to people, in other words, is not by appealing to their sense of pity or charity or fairness or justice, but to appeal to their vanity. That's the thing that Medea seems to know works best.
29:58 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. That's a funny metaphor there for sort of getting on the gold standard. Like you gotta, gotta back things up with things people can understand, which are, you know, physical things and their own vanity, you know, you've got to back things up. Is kind of murder of the kids as well. Comes out, comes out of that. I'm thinking Too, about the fact that these things are poisoned. I mean, I want to have a better reading of this than I do. I don't have one yet, but I'm just thinking about the two different methods of murder also kind of make me feel as though Medea really encompasses all things, both ends of the spectrum.
Because, you know, I've been reading quite a bit lately about Catherine de Medici, and I was just in Scotland and I got on a little bit of a, you know, Mary Queen of Scots kick and thinking about her relationship with Catherine de Medici and about a lot of how much of the reputation that Catherine de Medici had was the result of French xenophobia against Italians. And this was the origin of a lot of these stories of her being the serpent queen, the poisoner, you know, responsible for the atrocities at the massacre of the Protestant at the wedding.
I can't remember the name of the incident, but Very famous incident that I should remember the name of. But anyway, this idea of poison and treacherous femininity, of course, very closely aligned. Like you kill someone sort of from afar via an intermediary agent. And Medea does that, and then she actually just stabs the kids. Right. So she commits a sort of a female murder and then a male murder.
31:35 Wes: She actually says earlier on, if I don't have a plan of escape, then I'm going to do a direct. I'm going to do a murder. So do something with a knife and then it doesn't matter what happens to me.
31:46 Erin: Right.
31:46 Wes: But if I can get away, then I'm going to use the poison route. So she entertains going the more direct route, but if she goes the direct route, then I think she seems to think, well, that's the suicidal route as well.
31:58 Erin: Yeah. And just thinking about the difference between these two types of murders, what we're talking about with Gold as being something sort of literalized, it bears the agent of death, the poison agent, in the form of a kind of symbol. Therefore, it literalizes certain elements of Creusa and arguably Jason's personality, their vanity, et cetera. But it does so via an object and a kind of symbology. Whereas the murder of the kid is just direct. There's no, you know, there's no transport, there's no. There's no symbolic meaning behind that. And I just wonder about, you know, obviously one. One is culturally coded as feminine, one is more masculine. But I just. I kind of wonder about the way that the poison uses Creusa's vanity against her in this really clever way, in this literalizing way.
32:54 Wes: Well, I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but perhaps there's an element of poetic justice in that, right? The poisonous thing becomes vanity and pride. And it's. Even though Medea is. Is the one in the play with the great excess of pride and the sense that she's going to do so many violent things on because of it. Pride, right. It's one of the parts of the human soul, as I've said, and it's. You can see it at work in everyone else's motivations, including Jason's motivations. And of course, it's the thing that's often at work in tragic downfall, hubris and pride.
Although in Euripides it looks a bit more ordinary. That's why I use the word vanity. So, yeah, with Creusa reminds one of the tale of Narcissus, where he's so in love with himself and his image in the still pool of water that he neglects his real being, his real physical self, his own good, his own true good and perishes. The lesson, right, for the narcissist is one can get wrapped up in image and status so much in this fantasy world of status that you neglect your own what is truly good for you and suffer greatly because of that. And people do that on all the time.
It's very, very ordinary, which I think is one of the interesting things. So if that's right, we don't need big, fancy tragic situations to understand how. Right. In other words, the problem of downfall from pride is not just this thing writ large with these big characters. It's just such an ordinary part of the human condition and human psychology. And with Euripides, it seems as if we get that ordinary psychology is more present here, maybe, than in the other Greek playwrights. I can't stand behind that. I would need to know more. But that seems to be what he's known for.
So I don't know if that's what you're trying to get at with what it means that she would be poisoned by her own. By looking in the mirror, having something to wear while she looks in the mirror.
35:01 Erin: Yeah, I like the poetic justice part of it that you called attention to. And I guess what I'm interested in is the fact that that though the appeal of poison is the distancing effect it provides by having this intermediary agent so you don't have to be present to kill someone with poison, yet in this instance, it is somehow revelatory. It reveals. And what it reveals is actually something rotten about Creusa's character. So it almost has a double effect. And it is therefore, I think, almost kind of having it both ways. The poison is having it both ways.
It's not done in secrecy. It does occur off stage. But we actually. We get an extremely graphic description, which is one of my favorite descriptions in ancient Greek literature because it's just so disgusting and awesome, you know, and this is set up in contrast with the murder of the kids, which is immediate. Right. In a way that. Still off stage in a way that the poisonous not. And yet it happens off stage. Yeah. And you don't. And for very obvious reasons relating to, you know, it would be horrible. Of course, you can't have that on stage.
And it's really not spoken of in any. You know, it's Creusa that gets the big. The big cinematic description. Of course, you can barely even talk about what Medea does. Nevermind depicted on stage. And there's a kind of interesting twist. Twist there. The poison ends up being revelatory. The thing that's immediate ends up happening behind closed doors and is very kind of hushed and unspoken in a way that's almost more suggestive of poison than the poisoned jewelry, an outfit or whatever. Yeah. So I like that Even. Even in that kind of binary, they're a bit twisted, I think, is what I was.
What I was trying to get at before.
36:48 Wes: So that'll end part. Part five of our series and part six. We're gonna have to get busy because we still got to kill the kids and we gotta taunt Jason, then pull out. Pull out on the Chariot rip. You know, with our.
37:05 Erin: With our fake passports and our wigs.
37:07 Wes: Yeah. And the dead kids hanging over the side. That's. That's the way it's often depicted.
37:13 Erin: Yeah, I know, I know.
37:14 Wes: I sent you those. Well, I sent you a video about. Yeah. The depiction of this in ancient.
37:19 Erin: No, you didn't.
37:20 Wes: Greek art.
37:22 Erin: Oh, you did. You did. You did. You did. I never watched it.
37:25 Wes: Yeah, so in some of the depictions. Yeah. The kids are just hanging over the side of the chair.
37:32 Erin: In the stage version I saw, which had had a kind of a modern setting, their dead bodies were in sleeping bags, bloody sleeping bags. It was really. She carries that over her shoulders.
37:44 Wes: Okay, so we'll do that in part six.
37:46 Erin: Sounds fun.
37:47 Wes: Yeah. The whole play is bare lives. All right, thank you.
37:51 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 4)
Sep 30, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
Upcoming Episodes: “A New Leaf” (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part four of our discussion of Euripides Medea. We just got done talking about Medea making her revenge plans and the chorus sort of thematizing that as a revenge of women against men, not just Medea against Jason. They're a bit conflicted about it. What seems to appeal to the chorus of women is is this idea of vindicating women. And that's the point where Jason enters and at this point we are on page 62 of the Davie translation. He's going to portray himself as this very calm and collected and cool and beneficent person, as opposed to her being out of control and crazy.
Cast himself as practical and concerned about security and material well being and the willingness to submit to authority, in this case the king. She in turn will fight back by casting him as spineless, ungrateful for her help, and a violator of oaths. So which is it? Which one is it? Is he just a calm, practical guy or is he?
1:43 Erin: Wes, is now a good time to tell you that I'VE been radicalized by the chorus, so I'm taking over from now on. You can just be quiet. No. Yeah. Okay. I love when he comes in.
1:57 Wes: It's great. There's a surly temper.
1:59 Erin: Is incurable evil? Yeah.
2:01 Wes: Is that what you're talking about?
2:04 Erin: Yeah, he's quite. I mean, he's quite sarcastic. No, I'm envisioning all of this. Or. Or in my mind's ear, I'm hearing it as him being like, please, you know, continue to tell the world about that arch criminal Jason. Yeah, he's a piece of work. Yeah.
2:19 Wes: I. The. My. Yeah. I have this same reaction. I. When I see. Because sarcasm is quite rare in my experience in ancient Greek literature. And when you see it, it's like, wow, someone is being scathingly sarcastic. I mean, listeners can correct me if I'm wrong. People who have. Sure, there are people who've read more than I have, but that's been my. My experience of it. So I almost like, wow, that's quite something. Yeah.
2:42 Erin: It immediately makes him deeply unlikable. It's not fun sarcasm. This is not great. And, you know, we've been set up to, like, be really against this guy, not only because of the mythology, but because of the really clear sympathies of the other characters, not just Medea. So, you know, he talks of her speaking against the royal house. So again, we get. You know, we're getting a lot of metonyms all the time, but I really like when she sort of lays out her case and also tells him what she believes are his real motivations. So first we get a history of their relationship from her perspective. So I have. Oh, now I know what word it was. I have in the. In the margins. Preach.
3:23 Wes: Preach.
3:25 Erin: You owe your life to me. I wrote preach.
3:27 Wes: Okay, well, before you preach, I just want to say he ends his speech with this very. Don't silence Jason, Erin. Sorry, Jason shall not be silenced.
3:36 Erin: Slinking away.
3:36 Wes: But to say something critical, he. He ends his speech with this very smarmy, passive aggressive, you know.
3:44 Erin: Oh, yes.
3:45 Wes: Even if you hate me, I could never wish you anything but good. After berating her and talking about her stupid attitude and her, you know, surly Temple temper. Shirley Temple. It's a good choice.
4:00 Erin: That's an alcoholic Shirley Temple with, like, bourbon.
4:05 Wes: That's right. I have a Surly Temple. You want a Shirley Temple? No, I want the alcoholic version of the Surly Temple.
4:13 Erin: This is scotch, probably.
4:16 Wes: I'm feeling not so much like Shirley today, a little bit more like Surly Shirley. You can't be serious. Sorry. So I just wanted to set that stage for. Yeah, so go ahead with her side of this.
4:29 Erin: Yeah, that's a really important part. I have three exclamation points and several frowny faces next to him. This is really quite cathartic. And, you know, she.
4:41 Wes: She.
4:41 Erin: I love this. This moment right at the beginning where she says that she thanks him for his visit. She says, my heart will gain some relief once I have told you what I think of you. And further, my words will make painful listening for you. It's like, you know, all she really wants is closure. Right. This is.
4:57 Wes: And this is. Right. And this is analogous to poison, by the way. So this would be a better form of poison if he could take it. It might sicken him a little bit, but if he could hear it, it might persuade him and make the use of literal poison less necessary. But. Sorry, go ahead.
5:13 Erin: Yeah, so just to kind of outline this speech, she. She goes back through the mythology, you know, and talks about how I betrayed my own father, my own family, to come here with you to Iolkis under Pelion, showing more eagerness than sense. That's certainly true. Yet you have betrayed me, you unfeeling monster. More to back up your reading of him. You have taken a new wife, though we have children of our own. For if you still had no sons, it would be something I could forgive. This desire you have for a new bride, if you had a Henry VIII style motivation, maybe I'd be able to forgive you.
But you don't. And then she knows that, or she feels that he no longer loves her and that a lot of this is motivated by his lust for Creusa. Because she says, you know, if I had. I can't. I will confide in you as if I had your love. In other words, I don't anymore. And she says, where am I to turn now? You know, I can't go anywhere.
6:03 Wes: Where.
6:03 Erin: Where shall I go? What shall I do? And he says, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. And she ends. This is my favorite part. Maybe she ends by saying, oh, Zeus, why is it you have given men clear ways of testing whether gold is counterfeit, but when it comes to men, the body carries no stamp of nature for distinguishing bad from good. You know, along the lines of things we already said in part three? But, you know, I really like that she can't fall in love based on. Again, this works if he's really handsome and stuff, right? But like the body, basically, she's fallen in lust with him. And there's no way to tell your body. Okay. And this is not an emotionally astute man, so forget it. She's. She's a slave to her passions, and now she's regretting it.
6:50 Wes: Yeah. I don't know if the ancient Greek of what men is translating there, if it's anthropos, which would mean human beings in general, or I think, is it a Nair? A Nair would be the word for men, but so specifically. But yeah, but it's a really. Regardless, it's an interesting predicament that we're all in, which is that we are, in a way, trying to read the signs. We are engaged in the fortune telling or divination when it comes to other people. And the signs are supposed to be indications of character, and they are quite subtle and interesting. Right. It's. It's what they say, but it's also how they say it, the tone of what they say. And it's body language and facial expression. Everything that might stamp someone. Right. Is that the word she uses?
7:39 Erin: Yes.
7:40 Wes: You know, everything that might stamp someone as often. And often, of course, there are people who are good at. At portraying a character which is not really what's there on the inside. The truth in general, I think will out. Obviously, you know, the longer you're with someone, you find out eventually. But, yeah, really, really great line. And then his response, which. This is another great line. So he does have some really great lines. I must trim the edges of my sail to run before the tempest of your noisy protestations. God, I just. You just. Just for our audience, you just rolled your eyes.
8:18 Erin: Wes is writing all down. Like, next time I want to really insult a woman, I'm going to pull some of these out. I'm going to trim myself. No.
8:26 Wes: So great little. Great little metaphor. And I just imagine Euripides writing that and thinking, yeah, I'm good.
8:32 Erin: I'm good. I love when he says, where you did give assistance, it was of some benefit.
8:40 Wes: Yes. So, yes, great, great, great characterization in this dialogue. Yeah.
8:46 Erin: But in fact, in saving me, you gained more than you gave, as I shall tell. Stay tuned for more. In the first place, instead of an uncivilized country, your dwelling is now the land of Greece, where you have come to know justice and the use of law instead of being subject to force. Oh, really, Jason? This is justice? Thanks a lot. Where I come from, people at least stay true to their word. But I don't know, maybe you haven't heard of that in Greece. Okay,
9:13 Wes: this is good. You Should. You could do a rewrite. You could do.
9:16 Erin: I could do a dramatic reading of this entirely. Yeah. This is. I love this play. Like, there is not psychology like this. I don't think in any other, you know, Sophocles and Aeschylus, it's just not the same. This is why this is my favorite. He makes me so mad. And it's rare for me to have an emotional reaction like this to an ancient Greek mythological figure. Right.
9:39 Wes: He'll say, you know, you became famous for your special gifts here. Which he suggests is not something she could do in an uncivilized country, which I don't think makes much sense. But he says he acted like a true friend to her in getting married and to his children, which is an interesting way to put it. And then he says, look, this is a huge stroke of luck to be able to marry the king's daughter. I'm not doing it because I'm out of love or that I want more sons. I just want to live comfortable. And I want us to live comfortable. I'm doing it for us, honey. I'm doing this for us. It's good planning. So again, he characterizes all of this as just very practical, very ordinary. What are you worried about? You're just jealous. And then he makes his complaint against women. The world should be rid of women. There should be some other way to reproduce.
10:30 Erin: Well, first he yells at her to calm down. Every woman's favorite thing.
10:44 Erin: This guy hits every single thing. And he even says, and I quote, the fact is that you women have reached the point where you think your happiness is complete when love smiles on you. But should some misfortune mar that love, you take all that is good and beautiful in life and turn it into grounds for bitter hatred. I mean, I just. I love the fact that he says, you women, you always do that. It's like an episode of Designing Women where. I don't know if you've ever watched
11:11 Wes: that show, but, like, not in a long time. But I never watched much of it.
11:16 Erin: Yeah, that is like one of my favorite. I feel like you would really love that show. Sometimes it's a little much, but one of the main characters played by Dixie Carter, Julia Sugarbaker, she always goes on these rants and she has her real life husband plays her boyfriend. And there's this exchange where they're arguing, they're having a battle of the sexes thing, and he's like, you women. And she just, like, gets enraged and starts going after him. And it's really fun. He's a great guy in the show and a great. It's not anything like this. They have a loving relationship. But. But the.
11:45 Wes: The.
11:45 Erin: For. I'm just saying the formula, like, for everything is right here. This is just such a strange sentence, actually, when you look at it. So what is he saying? You. When you think your happiness is complete is when you have love. But then if someone takes away that. That love, then you ruin your life and. And become really mad about it. It's like, well, that sounds logical to me. I don't know. You know, he's.
12:12 Wes: He's criticizing the idea of putting everything into the libidinal.
12:17 Erin: Right.
12:18 Wes: As opposed to what Freud would call ego instincts. So there's security, safety, taking care of oneself, practical stuff, being handy around the house. Jason's wearing a tool belt at this point.
12:30 Erin: Oh, please. She fixes everything.
12:33 Wes: And then there is passion. And so there's. Right. So there's this energy that's kind of pointed outward toward the world towards objects of one's passion, towards people in particular. And then there's questing, and then there's. Yeah. Social climbing and, you know, making sure they have money and can buy a Lexus and have high status in society and all that. So, you know, that's another aspect of the interesting conflict that's being represented here. And he's not just in this, in a way. He's not just abdicating love in her eyes. He's abdicating honor and oaths.
Right. He's violating his oaths and behaving dishonorably and, of course, betraying her. She. And she uses this word honorable. I think there's something about the dishonor of it. Him trying to take, you might call it sleazy, but behavior which is essentially dishonorable and cast it as something. This is just ordinary practicality. And what are you talking about? That really enrages her.
13:33 Erin: Yeah, And I like the fact that there is also, you know, if we're to take seriously, which I do, the idea that what is also motivating this is lust for Creusa, then of course, that thread makes this speech hypocritical as well. And he's already invoked this idea of her own fame and her special gifts, becoming famous among the Greeks. He will repeatedly make claims to either giving her certain benefits, which he, in the process of this place, events, is actively undoing.
14:05 Wes: Right.
14:06 Erin: Well, I brought you here. You should be Grateful to me. Well, he's about to do something that is ensuring her exile. Right. Well, I made you famous and I made you your special gifts. Well, he's about to vacate this advantage she gave her by basically casting her to the four winds so that she'll become obliterated. Right, Right. So there's a hypocrisy here. When he mentions what he did for her, he's also, by that same token, undoing it with this action that he's taken. When he mentions the things that are wrong with her, they're also the same thing is also, at the same time wrong with him. And, you know, he. He is trying to have everything both ways. She is, too. I mean, she talks about how the criminal with a gift for speaking deserves the worst of punishments. Right. Of course. That's. That's her. You know, Jason isn't as good as a speaker. Well, he's just.
14:56 Wes: Yeah, she's responding to the I must trim the edges of my sail and all his. You know, at a rhetorical level, he's given a fancy speech, sure.
15:03 Erin: But of course, he's. He's not convincing anyone. He's not convincing the chorus.
15:06 Wes: Well, he'd. Actually, the chorus does say at the end of it, which is interesting. They say, you make good arguments, Jason, but you betrayed your wife and you're behaving unjustly. That's what they basically, basically say. It's a really interesting conflicted answer to give. So they, In a way, they have to, like, begrudgingly admit that there's a logic to what he's saying. But, you know, it all rests on him not giving any value to love. He even says she's. She said, you know, I helped you with all these things. And he says, no, the one who helped me was Aphrodite.
You may be smart, but it was love that compels you to do all these things. So you weren't even acting of your own free will. So why should I credit you with doing anything out of love? Love is a force beyond us. So very interesting. Right, because in a way, he's trying to reduce her to her psychological impulses. It's almost like pathologizing her. But on the other hand, he literally does mean also Aphrodite. It's reduction to fate or to the forces, to the actions of the gods. So I could say that to anyone. I don't owe you anything. Because you just did it because you were psychologically determined to do it.
So why are you asking for me for anything in return? So if you don't drill down to the basic assumptions of the argument, his arguments fit together. It's the assumptions that ultimately are perverse. And the chorus doesn't drill down that far and can only say, okay, you're good at arguing, but basically, it doesn't change the fact. The one thing that the chorus can hold on to is that they know, like Medea, that he has behaved dishonorably and broken his oath, whatever rationale he wants to give them.
16:46 Erin: I like that a lot. I think. I mean, I think this is what. This is what Medea literalizes in her crimes. Jason wants to start over with somebody else, wants to cast her out, and she's saying, okay, if you want to act like we've never been married and never had kids, I'm going to take this literally. You are sort of literalizing everything. I'm going to, in a way, carry out your own desire, your own thought experiment of, imagine if I wasn't tied down to this barbarian woman and could start over here with it. Right. So she.
17:21 Wes: That's really interesting. Yeah. He's a very literal person. And it's like, well, I'm going to unpack the literal significance of the attitude that you have. And part of it. It's an attitude. One thing I also wanted to say, it's an attitude of abandonment. So it is on top of the abandonments that she's feeling in the sense of not having her home and her home country, not having her family and now losing him at the level of, you know, he's going to have another woman, but also she's been psychologically abandoned, which, of course, he was never there to begin with.
But she's. She's realizing that. Abandoned in the sense. Right. He makes no. We never see him in the play, make an effort to say, oh, I'm sorry, or it's going to be all right, or he plays no soothing, comforting role to her. The first time we see him, he's already just fed up, and it's like. Or we don't see him appealing to Creon, and we don't hear about him having appealed to Creon to say, you know, hold on, let me try to fix this. And you could assume that went on or not, but I think the. The implication is that he just doesn't care that much.
He's ready to see her exiled by Creon and not make any intervention to save her. Which is. Which makes the deus ex machina at the end of the play all the more poignant. Right. Because it's a It's a powerful inversion of the wish to have someone intervene something that he does not do. So again, a psychological abandonment. And I think what the end of the play points to is the only because. Right. Euripides was criticized for the deus ex machina thing by Aristotle and by many others. As you know, it's unrealistic, it's cheap. What are you doing?
Right. And they would literally on stage, they would have a mechanism to raise something above the stage and a God would come down. Or in this case, she's on the chariot. Right. And save. The tragic hero is supposed to suffer an ill fate. But in this case, for Euripides, some of these tragic heroes, they just get saved at the end. It's like, what are you doing? It's either cheap or you just have to read it as very avant garde. I think clearly he's just doing something quite avant garde for his time. But what I will say about the deus ex machina in this case is that again, it's a powerful symbolic visual inversion of abandonment.
She's still alone in a sense, but she has her. The chariot of the sun. She's back home in a sense. Right. Her sun is her grandfather and that's the only place she could go.
19:47 Erin: Yeah, I think that's a great point. You know, one last thing I wanted to just focus on in this exchange between Jason and Medea, or maybe more than this, but is at the top of page 66, around line 589. He's just said, and I think we made mention of this before that or sorry, she has just said that if you were a man of honor, you should have won my consent to this new marriage instead of keeping it a secret from your own family. So you should have told me about this before. And he says, oh yes, you would be supporting this proposal wholeheartedly, I imagine, if I had to told you about the marriage.
Another moment of sarcasm. If I had told you about the marriage when you can't bring yourself even now, to abandon the anger that sears your heart so you know better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. He was just going to go ahead and do what he wanted to do anyway. And she says this was not your motive for saying nothing. I really like this. It was marriage to a foreigner that you felt would detract from that great name of yours as old age drew near. And then he kind of tells on himself. He says, be assured of this right now. No woman's charms are the cause of this royal match I have made.
No, as I said, before now, my intention was to make you safe and to father princes who would be kindred to my own sons and so provide security for our family. So he almost completely ignores what she just says. Right. So. So he's saying, well, I couldn't tell you because you would never have agreed to this. You know, I did this for you. But also, you hate this plan and you never would have liked it. It. And Medea says, no, it was, you know, you didn't want to say anything about this to me, and it's all about the fact that I'm a foreigner and you wanted to make your name here and not be associated with me anymore, so you wanted to just cut me off.
And he completely. And I. I think it's. This is my theory here. He almost plays a word association game with what she says. So he follows it up by kind of changing the subject and saying, it's not because I'm in love with Creusa, which is like classic. Classic, like, he's definitely in love with Creusa kind of tactic. Right. Because it's a non sequitur, what follows. And I think that it's Medea's use of the phrase old age or whatever in the Greek. Right. That triggers this word association in his own head that makes him defend himself against the charge basically, of running after a younger woman.
22:08 Wes: Interesting.
22:08 Erin: So he's. He's like cottoned on to this phrase and then he's using this sort of preemptive strike, which is, of course, exactly what's making him look guilty. Right. Beside. No, no, no, it wasn't because it was, you know, I'm running after this younger woman. Right. And of course, meanwhile saying also that his motivation was to make her safe. But by doing this, you know, this entire plan, even if it went according to plan and she was fine with it, for some crazy reason, he's made her expendable and thus inherently unsafe. He's not my favorite.
22:39 Wes: I'm just as critical of Medea as I am of him for different reasons. That's all.
22:44 Erin: Just as critical. You don't think she's.
22:47 Wes: Well, just. Just because she's badly treated, that's all. Just because she.
22:50 Erin: Well, right now she's only. She's kept it in the family.
22:54 Wes: She already murdered her. Yeah, she. She's telling you, you know, it's sort
22:57 Erin: of like a help yourself situation of it's just your own family, but it's. When you kill people outside the family, like Creon and Creusa, they're kind of
23:03 Wes: In a Bonnie and they've been in a Bonnie and Clyde type situation. Yeah. Running off and killing people and wreaking havoc.
23:10 Erin: And now he wants to go straight and marry. Marry the daughter of a police officer or something. I don't know.
23:18 Wes: The whole, you know, the whole project was to get his rightful kingdom. That. That was the whole point of all the fleece stuff and her helping him. And that failed. So now he's on to plan B and Medea is no longer relevant to his career aspirations, let's just put it that way. The next thing that happens is. So this is. I'm looking at 67 to 68. The chorus praises. And I think I mentioned this in the. One of the first two parts of our discussion mentions that. So the strophe says, passions beyond measure bring neither glory nor greatness. So they're pointing to the way the conversation ended between Medea and Jason before he exits is she basically says, go screw your bride.
You'll regret it. That's in so many words. That's what she says. Why don't you go? Yeah. He says, you're indifferent. All the advantages that I'm getting this way. And she's like, go, just go off and have sex with your bride. And that's when strophe seems to be critical of her right in talking about passions beyond, beyond measure. And then it'll praise a peaceful marriage. So may I never love a stranger and have that inflict me with moves, but rather have a peaceful marriage and let love show respect for marriages where peace reigns and judge with a shrewd eye the loves of women.
Then the strophe. That's the antistrophe. Strophe. May I never know. Exile. So we get all these things thrown together, the kind of a critique, the idea that love must be tempered, our passions must be tempered, but also that if you are going to take the risks involved in love again, you need these anchoring points. You can't simply be stripped of your homeland, your city, your friends. There's no friend to show you pity when you have suffered. Suffering's worst quote unquote. Because if you love right, you're going to lose. You're definitely going to experience loss.
And when you experience that, you need something to fall back on. You need a wider social safety net, let's put it that way. Sit down, do a Bonnie and Clyde thing. Don't just run off with a stranger, murder up some people and then find yourself in the aftermath. So the larger interesting theme here is the fact that the story is Also at a more general level about the perils of abandoning affectionate familial attachments for sexual attachments. The thing that people do when they leave home and go get married, you know, getting rid of what's familiar the family with a lover that is a stranger.
I mean, this is one of the things that the chorus is highlighting here. May I never simply just fall in love with a stranger. It's a really odd paradox. They are a stranger, and yet you're going to have this intense feeling for them that you don't even have for your own. You know, you don't have it in the spirit with the same. Right. Intensity in. And in the same sexual way as you do for your own family members. So it highlights something really odd about erotic and romantic love and the way in which it has to be balanced out with affectionate ties to family members.
26:22 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. I mean, in fact, it's necessary that they are a stranger in a way. I mean, not just in a sort of psychosexual kind of.
26:29 Wes: Well, yeah, but yes, there's some genetically necessary.
26:33 Erin: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also, like, this is. This is the seat of those kinds of passionate feelings is that, you know, there's a, you know, whatever we want to call it, a yin and yang quality right. To the relationship. That's what creates the spark. I mean, you know, and you could argue that in. In heterosexual relationships, like, someone of the opposite sex is always going to be a stranger to you because they don't share this understanding on some cellular level. Right. So that seems really true in a way. The Bonnie and Clyde thing, too.
And this peaceful marriage. This sounds really boring. I mean, they're advocating for this, but what's funny is that this doesn't. Just like the marriage to a cousin or someone you're too familiar with spells disaster. Peaceful marriage spells the end of Greek tragedy, for one. You know, there's nothing. There's nothing dramatic in peaceful marriage where nothing happens and everything is okay. So, you know, the chorus is sort of, in a strange way, arguing for their own obliteration if they're repeatedly arguing for what the kinds of good behavior they hope to see in the world.
I mean, of course, this is. This is impossible. People aren't capable of behaving well all the time anyway. Yeah. I mean, that's why Bonnie and Clyde is such a. Such a fun movie and a good story. So then, right after the chorus finishes, Aegeus comes in. This is an old friend, a very old friend. Someone who doesn't Know anything that's really happened in Medea's life, but is for some reason just stopping in for tea. Hasn't seen her in many years. I don't know how they know each other. Maybe he was in Colchis on a business trip.
28:15 Wes: Well, you know, I think they're famous people. I think they saw each other at the Oscars or something. They both.
28:19 Erin: Oh, okay. Okay. Well, this is where.
28:22 Wes: So he's a king of Athens and she's a famous criminal.
28:26 Erin: Right, Right.
28:27 Wes: Yeah. How do they know each other?
28:29 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Business trip to Colchis. I don't know. The G8 summit. The Greece 8? I don't know. No, Colchis is in Greece. Okay, whatever. The ancient world summit. The. Aw. You know, you mentioned that this is a deus ex machina element to the play. And I think, if I remember correctly, in part one of our discussion, I talked about how this reminds me of the Coen brothers a little bit. Medea. Certain Coen brothers elements here. This is the scene that I'm thinking of as a really Coen brothers type scene. And I can't help but think of Fargo. The scene in Fargo where Marge has lunch with her friend from high school, the Asian guy who.
She's pregnant, and they have lunch at the buffet, and he ends up kind of confessing his love for her. And there's all this really weird stuff that happens in that scene. And it's in the middle of all of this, the murder plot and everything happening with the investigation. So it's this sort of, like, slow moment that a lot of people I know when Fargo came out were like, why is this in the movie? Like, this seems like the only. I mean, it's a funny scene, but it's. And it's kind of crazy and it seems sort of expendable. Like, why does this guy suddenly show up?
And of course, famously, I think Roger Ebert said, no, this is where Marge gets the idea that the William H. Macy character was lying to her. So Marge has this fundamental goodness. She doesn't understand that maybe she needs to go back, that William H. Macy's character might have been deceptive. And it's because she has lunch with this old school friend who ends up lying to her repeatedly about things that don't really matter, that she gets the idea to go back and re interview him. And that's kind of what breaks open the case. But this is very subtly done.
And I think this scene, like, I think the Coen brothers had to have read Medea somehow because they. This scene has the exact same function. Yes. It has the more obvious way out for Medea. And one thinks that that is the hinge of the scene. Right. She has a place to go now. So there's a much more obvious element of the plot that this contributes to. But I think that Aegeus is the one who really gives her the idea to kill her kids. And this is the point at which the story really becomes. The mental story switches from I'm going to kill Jason to no, that's not going to hurt him the most.
What's going to hurt him the most is killing the kids. So I just immediately understood this through the sort of Fargo paradigms. I'm sorry, it took me a long time to get there, but I felt like I had to explain that where it was just this really strange, total recognition, like, oh, this is just like that buffet scene in Fargo.
31:21 Wes: Well, how does she get that idea? From Aegeus.
31:23 Erin: So when Aegeus shows up, he's just been. He's on his way back from seeing the oracle, and she asks him, why did he go there? And he says, children, to ask how I might father offspring. Medea says, what? You mean you've been childless for all these years? And he says, I have no children because some God has willed it so he's married, and still he doesn't have children. So he's gone to the oracle to tell him what's wrong. He's made this journey. And she intuits that. That one of the ways that she might assure her being taken in by Aegeus is to say that she can offer him children, that she could put a stop to his childlessness and give him the power to father sons.
And this is really what convinces him. He says, there are many reasons why I'm ready to oblige you in this request. That is her request to come to Athens, chiefly the gods, and then your assurance to me of the birth of children. For in this matter, I confess myself completely helpless. So he's made this effort to go all the way to the oracle to try and figure out what's wrong, why he doesn't have children. And then the assurance of children is really what makes him want to take Medea in. First, of course, you know, the gods, and then. Then what he's going to get out of this.
And so I think this is the moment where Medea realizes, like, oh, Aegeus is really depressed because he doesn't have kids. Kids, because there's nothing worse than being a father with no sons, I guess. And this is like, okay, now she's changing her. The direction that she's moving in after the scene, after this is when she starts talking about killing the kids. The nurse has made mention of keeping the kids away from her because the nurse realizes that she is dangerous and might harm them. But this is the point at which what Medea says out loud starts to change.
And she realizes there's a way to hurt Jason worse than just killing him. And this is it.
33:16 Wes: Yeah, that's really interesting because this scene importantly parallels her scene with Creon. She's engaged in both scenes in convincing a powerful man to let her do something with respect to location. Right. Creon, it's let me stay one more day with Aegeus. It's about, let me come stay with you, let me come over.
33:39 Erin: That's right, yeah.
33:40 Wes: And also she has to engage in a bit of rhetorical finesse to persuade them in both cases. And that rhetoric, I think, as you're pointing out, involves children. So in the case of Creon, it was, you know, have pity on my children, let me stay a day. And in this case, well, she does two things here, right? She's promising to help him have children. She also promises, I think she suggests that she can interpret this cryptic message that he's gotten from the oracle that he doesn't really understand. But in any case, she says, I can use my charms, quote, unquote, her magic, to help him father sons.
But then she asks something of him, and this is where she has to be persuasive. She wants him to promise. She wants him to actually make an oath that he can't go back on, to let her come to Athens. And in light of her experience with oath breaking, you might say, okay, well, it's understandable. She, I mean, she wants someone to say they're gonna, you know, it's, it's, it's a double edged sword, right? Because Jason made an oath, apparently, and now he's breaking it. So when, you know, does she. She's putting herself in this position again of asking a man for an oath.
But any case, she's right to be very cautious. And he, I think he's a bit. Aegeus is a bit taken aback in the beginning. And then she gives him a very good reason to take this oath, which is that if people come hunting her, he may be forced to become their friend and comply with their demands. Or this is from her perspective, he might end up saying, okay, well, I was trying to do you a kindness, Medea, but here are some people who are now more important to me. Now they're my quote unquote friend. Now I have a bond to them. So she's got to create something which is much more like a marriage vow.
Marriage bond. Something unbreakable. That can't just be right. He can't just say, okay, you know, I have a new lovers now. They came here in their ships and they want, you know, they're looking for you and they want to take you away. And then Aegeus sees what's in it for him. What's in it for him is that he doesn't have to make that decision. He doesn't have to say to the Corinthians when they come for her. He doesn't have to make a decision about whether to hand her over. He can just say to them. Them, he says it's an excuse to present to your enemies.
He can just say to them, look, I'm a man of my word and I made an oath, so my hands are tied here. So he can abdicate any decision making in the process. So he can let her come to Athens. He can get the benefit of being able to father children, but he doesn't have to worry about being blamed by whoever it is that Medea is going to do something to. Right. Obviously, the implication is he knows she's going to be up to some no good right, in Corinth and that there are going to be a lot of angry people looking for her. But now he has a really good excuse so he can get what she wants and she can get what she wants.
So I don't know if that's the foresight on her part. Right. I mean, it was very much clear with Creon that she found the weak spot. I mean, and it's clear here that the weak spot is with, you know, helping him have kids with Creon. It's pity my kids here with Aegeus, it's, I'll help you have k. But also, you need to take an oath. And at least he sees the advantage of that as of getting him what he wants, but also absolving him of any responsibility for them.
37:03 Erin: There is one pretty interesting piece of textual evidence that might back up this claim about her foresight, because she. When Aegeus asks her, what has he done? Tell me more plainly, what has Jason done? Medea says he has taken a new wife and given her authority over me in his home, which I'd like to come back to. Medea says, make no mistake about it. He loved me once, but now I stand for nothing. Aegeus says, has he fallen in love? Does he no longer find you attractive? Medea says, oh, yes, passionately in love. Loyalty to loved ones is not his way. And there was a puzzle in that line for me. Right. Because she uses love twice. Yes, he's fallen passionately in love, but he has no loyalty to loved ones. So the people who are in the state of being loved at any given moment are not in that state for long. There's an instability to love and to his oath. And I think that.
37:54 Wes: And it's erotic versus familial love too, that contrast. Yeah.
37:58 Erin: Yeah. So I like what you're saying there. I think that the double use of the word, at least in this translation, highlights that. Who's to say in the original Greek if this. You know, it's maybe it's almost a case of her sort of overhearing herself say the word love in these two different senses and realizing how quickly one's lover can become one's discarded loved one, that makes her want to get an insurance policy on Aegeus offer. I think that's a little clue that maybe she knows she needs one.
38:29 Wes: Yeah. The other parallel here is that as I divide the play up, the Creon plot point is what leads us into Act 2, which starts with her being in a manic, diabolical, hahaha mode. I'm going to get revenge. Same thing here. This is the plot point that puts us into Act 3, and it starts out on page 71 with her reveling in the idea of triumphing over her enemies. So another repeat of something we've seen before. But now we get an elaborated plan, as you point out. Right. This is. Now she's gonna. She's adding the kids into the mix. She's not just gonna kill the king's daughter and the king.
And in fact, she's, you know, in the original plan, at the Beginning of Act 2, Jason was in the mix. She's gonna kill Jason, the king and the king's daughter. Now it's the king's daughter and her own children to wreak havoc on all Jason's house. So she has gone from kill Jason to let him live and suffer from not having a quote unquote, house a lineage.
39:31 Erin: And it's a much more effective plan when you think about it. You know, you don't wanna put him out of his misery. You wanna make sure that he's gonna be tortured forever.
39:38 Wes: Yeah. I have a very sexist title for this section called Triumph of the Shrill. Oh, it's just because it rhymes with will. I just couldn't resist it. But really, all it is, it's just she is. It's another great manic moment for her and imagining wreaking havoc on Jason's house. And I'm not going to suffer the mockery of my enemy or. She says, to suffer the mockery of my enemies is not something I will tolerate. No one will think of me as a quote unquote, weak and feeble woman. And then she says, it's people like that, you know. Right. So I am not. I am a generous friend, but I'm an enemy to be feared, is the upshot of what she says. And that is the key to fame.
40:22 Erin: Yes, exactly.
40:23 Wes: And this has come up a few times. Jason's like, you know, I helped you be famous over here in Greece. You know, what about that? And he's also. He's motivated by that importance of fame and reputation. And here, once again, yeah, she's going to guard her reputation well.
40:42 Erin: And I like what you're pointing out about the similarity of the pattern, because with Creon, she has to kind of degrade herself a bit. She has to beg. Right. She has to put herself in the supplicating position, which is humiliating to her because she's. She should technically be higher up in the status chain even than Creon.
41:02 Wes: Right.
41:02 Erin: Because she's divine. She's part divine. She knows that she has more powers than these people. She's a sorceress. She's right. So she then has to kind of recover from that, it seems, from being in a position which kind of challenges her ego by having this, you know, what you're describing as this sort of manic moment of plotting and bouncing back and Aegeus as well, like, she needs something from him, so she has to kind of offer him something. And maybe this is less complicated for her because she, of course, doesn't hate Aegeus, but there is something in, I think, the telling of her shame that inspires the manic response after.
And I do really like. And I, you know, I just want to point out that, you know, she gives a really succinct summary of what he's done. When Aegeus asks her, she says he has taken a new wife and given her authority over me and his home. And that's. This is another kind of angle that we haven't really heard expressed prior to this, I don't think, which is that, of course, by now, marrying Creusa and casting off Medea, even if she were allowed to stay, which she does subsequently tell Aegeus that on top of this, she's been exiled, so she now has nothing.
If she were allowed to stay, she would have to be subject to this new woman, this younger woman, this less experienced woman, this less quote, unquote, gifted woman in what was formerly her own home, and she would have to now take a subservient position to this. You know, I'm imagining her as like a girl.
42:32 Wes: Yeah.
42:32 Erin: Though she's not supplicating and getting on her knees and begging in the way that she was with Creon. I think, like the mere rehearsal of what's happened to her and the fact that she harps in this particular instance with Aegeus on the status hit, specifically that she's taken, this triggers her to kind of like, live it in a more present way when she has to tell the story. And that then causes the manic defense or the manic moment to then be triggered right after. So I like the fact that both of these kind of have the same. Like, you're pointing out that symmetry, which I hadn't noticed.
43:09 Wes: Yeah. And I think in light of what you just said about her now being a concubine to Jason once he has a new wife and subject to the authority of that new wife. This is actually the introduction to the Davie translation makes something of this. Euripides is known for tying the plots of these retelling of myths to contemporary Athenian concerns. And apparently it wasn't too long ago in Pericles Athens, that there was a law passed that the sons of foreign wives could not inherit.
43:43 Erin: Wow.
43:44 Wes: Even Pericles himself, who had a foreign wife, was forced to marry a native Athenian. So I think they. Yeah, they changed laws about inheritance. So all this stuff is a social commentary, is meant to be unsettled. It's meant to be social commentary and it's meant to be unsettling. And in fact, the way this scene ends, I call this section Athens Embarrassed. The chorus is now uncomfortable with the fact that Athens has. This is going to be tied to Medea, Right. It says, Athens is the place where love sits by wisdom's side, inspiring all manner of excellence.
How could Athens give someone who kills their children a home? So this is meant to be a very unsettling scene for Athenians. By the way, before it goes into the bit about being embarrassed on. On Athens behalf, the chorus leader says, please don't kill your kids. So they are trying to dissuade her from doing that. But then they move to this concern about the reputation of Athens, which again, ties into this larger concern that Medea has about her own reputation and the mockery of enemies and all that.
44:56 Erin: Well, and I think this something that you were pointing out about, and I'm gonna mischaracterize what you said in part one, but insofar as we can see Athens as being the sort of representation of logic, you know, I do. I do think that this is a kind of a full circle moment, because I do take what Medea does, the killing of the children, as an almost hyperlogical conclusion based on a cold observation of the facts and of what will hit Jason the hardest. So she almost takes her emotions and personal concerns off the table in making this decision.
And even knowing that it will hurt her more than anyone, she decides that she still has to do it to get back at Jason most effectively. So it's a sort of hyperlogical motivation on her part. And also this idea of taking what Jason has done to her literally and the motivation there of a kind of hyper logic. So it's kind of fitting that she should then go to Athens. Athens, I think, you know, this is. It's. It's sort of the hyperlogical crime that looks like the hyper emotional, irrational crime that seems to have a fitting home in a place like.
Like Athens. Maybe. Like they don't want to think of themselves this way, perhaps, but this is in a way, the expression of Athens taken to a kind of logical extreme or something like the full circle moment of the irrational rational.
46:25 Wes: Yeah, I think you're getting at a very important theme. And of course, this is what later philosophers picked up on. And Euripides himself is grappling with this question of the conflict between reason and love and rationality and irrationality. But he's accused of being a spokesperson for the Socratic and for the logical and for the overly rational, even though his plays are often explicitly concerned with that conflict. So. Right. So Nietzsche, he's the villain for Nietzsche. He represents a turn from the Dionysian to the Apollonian, I will say that.
So I think Euripides is quite careful about the way he has the chorus portray this. They talk not just about wisdom. Right, Sophia, as in philosophy, but also love and wisdom sitting side by side. So we have the two complementary principles and they're supposed to get along. Logic, reason and love, reason and passion. Athens is supposed to be the place where they get along. And if you look at Medea and Jason's conflict as having something to do with a conflict between passion in its most extreme form and reason in its most extreme form, then why would.
Would One of them end up in Athens. What does that mean for Athens? That one of them would end up in Athens. Athens is supposed to be the place of temperance and balance, not bipolarity, borderline personality disorder.
47:54 Erin: But anyway, too much temperance, I guess, produces.
47:59 Wes: Right. As possible.
48:00 Erin: Yeah, right.
48:01 Wes: And that is what it is, a critique. Right. Jason is casting himself as a temperate, practical person. So you can read some of this as a critique of Athens. And one other thing I will say, speaking of the Dionysian, is that this whole theme of someone saying, you better respect my authority, or really, you better respect my reputation or you're going to reap the whirlwind. That is a repeated theme for Euripides. So for the Bacchae, for instance, in the Bacchae, the whole inciting incident is that they're not paying Dionysus enough respect. They are saying he's not really the son of Zeus, he's not a God.
And then Dionysus comes down and kicks some ass. Right? And then Pentheus ends up getting dismembered by the women who have become Dionysus's followers. So there's a whole parable there in respecting the instinctual side of one's nature, the Dionysian side of one's nature, lest one be destroyed by that. So I just wanted to put that in here. This whole idea of respecting, honoring someone who deserves that honor and respect or suffering vengeance. And it's not just the Bacchae, of course, they're multiple plays, but this is a preoccupation for Euripides.
But yeah, Athens also has something to fear here. Athens. So he's drawing in the audience into this predicament of. Of honor and respect. Is the status and honor of Athens compromised by this association? It ups the stakes.
49:32 Erin: Bonnie and Clyde May. Welcome to your town.
49:38 Wes: Okay, so that ends part four of our discussion of Euripides. Is it Euripides or Euripides?
49:48 Erin: Say quickly and then no one will know. Know. That's my solution for everything.
49:51 Wes: So that ends part four of a discussion of Euripides. Of Medea by Euripides.
49:59 Erin: Solved it.
50:00 Wes: So we're going to have two more parts, five and six. We will be discussing how Medea makes.
50:08 Erin: Nice, but only for now
50:11 Wes: how they all just apologize and make up and nothing bad happens. Yeah. To discuss how Medea deceives Jason, does all her killing and escapes. It's really.
50:23 Erin: Next time is a bloodbath.
50:24 Wes: It's the funnest part of the play.
50:26 Erin: Yeah.
50:26 Wes: So thank you.
50:28 Erin: Thank you. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 3)
Sep 23, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
Upcoming Episodes: “A New Leaf” (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part three of our discussion of Euripides. Medea. Did I get that right? Is Euripides and not Aeschylus?
0:42 Erin: That's right.
0:43 Wes: Thank God. Can't keep any of them straight. But I think the way we ended it the last time, we had gotten through a few pages. A few pages of the play.
0:52 Erin: One or two.
0:52 Wes: Yeah. And we'd gotten a little bit into the battle of the sexes element that runs through the play. And the fact that there. And we will touch on this as we move forward, there are various complaints that Medea. Very interesting complaints that, especially in light of the time, interesting complaints about men and the role of women in society. And then also complaints that Jason has. More predictable. And I want to say dunderheaded for some reason, which is like a very archaic term, but not archaic in the right way, but dunderheaded. Is that even a word? Complaints that Jason has about.
1:31 Erin: Yeah, I think that is about women.
1:33 Wes: But I wanted to start out just a little bit because in light of thinking about women in this play, which is, by the way, you know, it's an explicit theme that Euripides is harping on this play. It's not a let's be academics and look at gender in a play approach. And it's, again, especially interesting in light of the times. And I think it is one of the reasons, as we said in the first part of our discussion, that Euripides was kind of a radical, in a way, for his time. So I think it's worth looking at the role of the chorus early on. It's a chorus of Corinthian women.
Sorry, you gotta stop me from doing that chorus of Corinthian women. And the one thing I noted, and this is on pages 54 to 56 of this Penguin translation we're using by Davie. Pretty early on in the play, we get this chorus of women sympathizing with Medea and her sorrows and the sorrows of, quote, unquote, the house. And interestingly, the nurse will say, well, there is no house. The pairing between Medea and Jason no longer represents a house in the sense of this, a dynasty, of a lineage. That lineage, in a sense, is coming to an end, which.
Which is very prescient. Right. I mean, they don't know yet that she's gonna kill the kids, but that's what Medea is planning on doing. So she's going to. And Medea will even put it in those terms, she's going to extinguish the house extinguish the lineage by killing their kids. At that point, she's wishing for her own death. And the strophe for the chorus. And I'll say briefly, the strophe and antistrophe, they represent two different perspectives generally, often conflicting perspectives. It's the same chorus, but they're moving from right to left during one speech and left to right during another.
So you see this alternation, and sometimes there's a bit of an argument between the two sides, sometimes more subtle, sometimes more explicit. But it's a great way, in a play, to represent inner conflict of the kind that normally you'd have to. Right, you'd have to write a story or a novel to represent. To do it in a play is much harder unless you use this little trick. So the strophe appeals to Zeus to listen to her laments, but not to her wish for death. So grant some of her wishes, but not all of her wishes. And the wish that it reinforces is her.
Is her desire to see justice done. Because Zeus, after all, is the God
4:12 Erin: of justice, though his record has been spotty.
4:16 Wes: Yeah, yeah, right.
4:17 Erin: He's officially tough on crime, but.
4:20 Wes: Right, right. It's also a master criminal. And then it also suggests she not grieve. You know, forget about Jason. Don't grieve about that. But constant, don't kill yourself, but concentrate on seeing justice done. So this is a point where I put in my notes, okay? So it's interesting, in a sense, they're actually. And that's really the only time I think they do that. Well, it's subtle, but for the most part, Right. They're trying to slow her down. They're horrified when they find out that she's going to kill the kids. And they're trying to stop all that. They're really trying to put the brakes on all that. But there are subtle ways in which they reinforce her desire for justice. And then this, I thought this is an interesting little pivot point where they kind of nudge her from the idea of suicide to the idea of revenge.
5:05 Erin: Yeah. They tell her. I mean, they're, I think, deeply sympathetic to her for most of the play until there's that turn where you. That you pointed out. You know, they're telling her in this moment to sort of offload justice. Don't take it into your own hands. Zeus will see it done. And just prior to this, Medea has said, if only a flaming bolt from heaven would pierce my head. She references this a couple of times. You know, here it's a metaphor. But then, of course, at the end of the play, spoiler alert, there is a quite real deus ex machina intervention, you know, and she. She also is half God or a quarter God. I'm not sure how we're. How that's determined. Right. So is she really offloading justice onto the gods if she doesn't take revenge herself? Would taking revenge herself be a form of divine justice? I'm interested in. In what you're pointing to with the nurse saying there is.
6:03 Wes: God helps those who help themselves.
6:04 Erin: That's right.
6:05 Wes: I should say Zeus.
6:06 Erin: God helps those who are also gods also.
6:09 Wes: He's not gonna just come down and kill the children for you. You gotta do a little work.
6:14 Erin: Well, I, you know, where, you know, you're pointing out some. Something really interesting about this chorus, that, you know, the point at which the. They stop becoming someone who's on Medea's side or reflecting something of Medea's psyche, and they detach in a way and become external to Medea's decisions to her. They're no longer sympathetic to her. They're no longer in the sisterhood together of solidarity. Right. They're no longer really on her side. I fixated on the there is no house line. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to draw this connection very well.
But I think that these things are all related. This. The thunderbolt idea. There is no. I was interested in that as an expression of metonymy. So obviously she's speaking of the house, as you already pointed out, as in the metonym of a royal lineage. She also, just. After this, the nurse says that Jason is captive of a princess's bed, which is another metonym in which Jason is made captive or subject not just to Creusa, but to an item of furniture and thus sort of to his own lust. So I'm interested in that function, that metonymic function, that reality seems to be just an expression of or made up of one's own passions.
That passions are like the furniture, the reality of the mind, if you will. I think this is important because of the preponderance of ship metaphors in the play as well that we know that Jason is, of course, famously associated with the Argo. The Argo lends to its name to the sailors that travel on it. Right. The Argonauts. A piece of the ship will fall and kill Jason. So he's killed by an inanimate object. And there are lots of ways we could spin this out and think about this. His ship is his movable home in that story in the Argonautica. Right.
It's the security that he takes with him. And he always seems to land on his feet up until this play. Right. And rise to sort of greater and greater heights. He also kind of uses Medea as a vehicle with which to perform his deeds. And now he seems to be using Creusa as a vehicle for further ascending the societal ranks in Corinth. That's where he is. Right. Corinth. We've talked about this, I think, in the previous parts, we talked about him as a social climber. So Medea is without a house. She has no nothing to rescue her from this sea of troubles, I think she calls it.
And she describes herself as Jason's plunder. And anyway, all of this to say, I want to tie all this together, and I'm not going to do a great job of it, but just that I want to say something about physical reality and the idea that everything in the play is somehow, like, literalized. Yeah. So I'm just interested in these metonyms and whether or not they tell us something about the way that the plot is functioning. Like, we have a magical dress that will end up changing the course of the plot. Like, objects seem to be quite magical in and of themselves in a play which is otherwise really modern, as we were already saying, and kind of without magic.
And maybe that points to the fact that at the end, this chariot will come down and kind of save her, you know, so, like, talk of lightning. Lightning bolt, on the one hand, seems very divorced from a kind of a physical reality. And on the other hand, there's a way in which the play sort of makes good on the magic or the divinity, if you like, of physicalizations of various ideas in the play. I'm not sure if I'm expressing this right, but yeah.
9:54 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point. So you're drawing a parallel between the externalization that I'm pointing to with the chorus as an externalization of aspects of her psyche and then these other objects that are externalizations as well, which makes a lot of sense. It reminded me of Kant's concept of what he calls heteronomy, which is to say that when we are in the throes of our passions or our desires, and therefore not free, in a sense, we are subject to the objects of desire and the external environment. We are slaves to desire, but really that means being slaves to what is hetero. Right. To what is outside of us, as opposed to the law that is Internal to us. And that is what makes immorality unfree.
10:44 Erin: That is a great way of taking everything. I was trying to say and giving it the very generous aegis of Kantian. Yes.
10:55 Wes: No, but I. But I do think it's important. Yeah. As we go forward, to pay attention to these metonymy and to these various objects and what they are doing. Right. So the Creusa, in a sense, she will burn up in the fire of Medea's rage. Right. So the metaphor becomes reality. And.
11:20 Erin: Yeah.
11:21 Wes: And which is appropriate because she is the granddaughter of the sun. She's genetically 25% the sun. Okay, 25% genetically. And these gifts are, I think, associated with the sun in some way. I forget because Jason's like, are you out of your mind giving these gifts of this? You know, these are magical gifts that I think heirlooms of your grandfather, maybe. And why would you be giving this away? So. So if he were smarter, of course he would have taken that as a sign that something's not right. But, yeah, so I think. Yeah, you know, as you were saying, all these different items play their role in these psychological externalizations.
In this particular scene, I think the thing that I'm getting at. So I write, I'm bringing up something very early on, before Medea has even come out. And I'm assuming she might be overhearing the chorus and that they are subtly egging her on. It gets a little bit more explicit at the end of the scene where after the nurse kind of takes a poke at poets. Well, musicians. But we take that as Euripides poking at himself for not creating happier, more cheerful songs. That'll do something for us in circumstances where we're really suffering. Then the nurse exits.
And that's when the chorus explicitly, more explicitly, takes note of Medea's lamentations and cries and her calls for justice, which it associates with Themis. Actually, this is trying to find this part. Themis, who's the child of Zeus, is more specifically the protectress of oaths. And I point that out because more generally, right, Zeus is the God of justice, but more specifically, it's going to be Themis. And then, you know, the question for me at the very end of this little scene is the question of whether they're trying to calm things down or rile things up.
But in any case, that's when Medea comes out and says, I decided to come out because I'm worried you guys are blaming me in some way. If you keep to yourself, people will be quick to judge you. All that stuff that we already talked about in the previous parts. And what's the progression there? Well, I think the one thing that we didn't bring up in this next part is the very famous speech. So she comes out and she's worried about being a foreigner and about people who keep to themselves being judged, and she wants death, and her husband is a traitor.
But then she gives a speech about women in general. And I think this is on page 56. So this is, I think, really where this ongoing theme of the plight of women is introduced. It's at line230.56 in our translation. Of all creatures that have life and reason, we women are the most miserable of specimens. In the first place, at great expense we must buy a husband, taking a master to play the tyrant with our bodies. This is an injustice that crowns the other one. And here lies the crucial issue for us, whether we get a good man or a bad. For divorce brings disgrace on a woman, and in the interval, she cannot refuse her husband.
Once she finds herself among customs and laws that are unfamiliar, a woman must turn prophet to know what sort of man she will be dealing with as husband, not information gained at home. Now, if we manage this task successfully and share our home with a husband who finds marriage a yoke, the yoke he bears with ease, our lives are to be envied. But if not, we'd be better off dead. When a man becomes dissatisfied with married life, he goes outdoors and finds relief for his frustrations. But we are bound to love one partner and look no further. They say we live sheltered lives in the home, free from danger while they wield their spears in battle.
What fools they are. I would rather face the enemy three times over than bear a child once. Probably the most famous line in the play, I'd say. So here we have. In what year are we in 331bc a feminist manifesto.
15:12 Erin: Yeah, well, Euripides was really good friends with Simone de Beauvoir. Well, how much of this? So this idea of buying a husband, obviously this is a reference to the dowry. Right. But I found this speech to be very modern, very moving, but also Greek women had it particularly bad.
15:35 Wes: So
15:37 Erin: I think it's important to make that.
15:39 Wes: Yeah, it's likely there are no women in the audience for this play.
15:43 Erin: Yeah. And no women on stage, of course. These are Corinthian women in quotes. This is Medea, the wife and mother in quotes.
15:50 Wes: This is a drag brunch.
15:51 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
15:55 Wes: Watching the play at a drag brunch.
15:57 Erin: Yeah, that would be kind of amazing. Yeah. I mean, not being able to leave the house and things. I mean, these are. These are quite literal. You know, no one nowadays looks back with fondness. No woman would look back with fondness on the Greek Empire and say, wow, I'd love to be back there. Roman Empire.
16:13 Wes: You.
16:13 Erin: You could maybe if you were a wealthy woman, sure. You'd have some freedom. Right. But. But Greek women were treated. Treated particularly badly. That said, I think there are really timeless elements of the speech. I'm afraid of saying something terribly controversial, but I don't know. I mean, I find this to be deeply sympathetic, and I. I can't be in the minority in that feeling. I don't know. Do you. Do you find these concerns? I don't want to say sympathetic, because I feel like I'm setting you up to. To get yourself in trouble. What do you think?
16:45 Wes: Don't sympathize with women and all.
16:47 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
16:48 Wes: Women. I'm on Jason's side.
16:50 Erin: Right, right.
16:51 Wes: Yeah. I mean, of course. Yeah. So this is a really masterful statement of the plight of women. And I've. I looked at the original Greek a little bit just to try and get the poetry of it, but, yeah, you could say this is one of the great statements of that plight. And it's universalizable in a sense. You know, things obviously have changed since ancient Greece, but there are constants here, and some of it is about the nature, I think, of relationships between men and women more broadly, and the nature of the feminine versus the masculine. And, you know, so, for instance, the idea of a man being a tyrant to a woman's body.
And of course, divorce brings disgrace, slut, shaming more broadly. But. So the other thing I wanted to bring up here, which I find is interesting, is the. When she finds herself among customs and laws that are unfamiliar, because this is the other recurrent thing that comes up. There are several plights, again, as we mentioned in the first two parts of the discussion, that she has, being gifted and being a woman. But being a foreigner is a big part of this. And being a foreigner is intimately related to the marriage situation, because one leaves one's family, one leaves what one knows one's customs.
Of course, normally you don't leave your country with its customs, customs and laws, but there are familial customs as well. In her case, that plight, which is inherent to marriage, in a way, creating. It's almost like founding a country, getting married, creating a new. You have to get used to the foreignness of another person and their ways of doing Things. And ultimately, you create a new way, a new set of customs and laws that your kids will inherit, in a sense. So it's a weird foundational moment at an ethical or normative level. And her marriage plight is enhanced by the fact that she's not even Greek.
She doesn't even have the rights of a Greek woman. She's a barbarian. And she doesn't have her home to fall back on and family to fall back on. Part of which is it's partly her fault, you know? So I said she did cut up her brother, so she can't call him up and say, hey, Jason's being a real.
19:08 Erin: Yeah, he can't come and beat up Sonny in the street. You ever touch my sister again.
19:16 Wes: Exactly. So. So she has cut off what's his.
19:20 Erin: Sorry, Carlo, I'm getting my godfather stuff.
19:23 Wes: Right? Yeah. But, yeah, at a thematic level, right, there's the myth in which she does that. And plot wise, right, it's extreme, and it marks off an extreme character, but thematically, it's just. It's a great representation of the trauma of leaving home behind, of leaving family behind, of severing those relations. Even if you don't sever your brother's limbs, and even if, of course, the relationships aren't completely severed, they're altered in this very important way. So we all, in a sense, in relationships. And it doesn't even have to be a love relationship, each relationship, because it's a formative moment where interrupted, influenced by other people, where we're habituated to new ways of doing things.
Every new relationship as an influence is this is a recapitulation of this sort of trauma. Marriage is, of course, much more significant, and then a marriage in which you leave your own country even more significant. So it's very important in this play that Medea is a foreigner. And in a sense, she is homeless because that is a big part of her rage. She, in a way, has given up everything for Jason. It's more than him owing her fidelity as per a marriage vow. Right. He owes her for helping him do all his magic tasks, things that should have gotten him a kingdom but didn't.
And now he's gonna do it in a much more slimy, backdoor way by marrying a king's daughter. All else failed, and he owes her for this enormous sacrifice that she made. The suggestion is that in a different circumstance, she could have just packed up and gone home and not gotten into some more killing, not gone on another killing spree, but she's truly backed into a corner she's truly here in a desperate state.
21:17 Erin: Yeah, the idea that there is no house anymore, so Jason becomes her home, and when he no longer wants to be the home, that leaves her with nothing. I mean, that's a very common. I think I made a joke in the last recording that if she just hooked up with Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn, and Diane Keaton, everything would have been okay because there was, you know, First Wives Club, which is just one of my comfort movies. I just love that movie so much. You know, they're all able to kind of band together, but they all get, you know, you lose everything, of course, as a woman, especially if you're a certain type of woman with a certain type of marriage or family situation in which you might be a stay at home mom or something like that, right?
When someone decides to dump you, you're left with nothing. The switch that happens here in the speech with her metaphors is a really interesting one. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I think it reveals something of what we're talking about here in that, you know, she first speaks of the husband, as you said, playing tyrant with our bodies. It's taking a master to play the tyrant with our body. So in this metaphor, the woman is so, you know, subject to the husband that it's like a master slave relationship. And then shortly thereafter, she talks of a husband who finds marriage a yoke he bears with ease.
So in that metaphor, the husband is kind of like a beast of burden that has to be taught to plow the field or to do, you know, so. So there's both someone who is like a master and also someone who is a creature that has to be sort of tamed into the relationship. Strangely, one would think that those two things would be opposed, but I think they express the same type of thing which is. I mean, they express two sides of the same coin, which is the danger for a woman of marrying the wrong type of man. Like the. Like the. The very real danger that you see on.
On, you know, Hulu documentaries about the perfect couple. And it turned out, right, that he. He ended up killing her or, you know, God forbid, or was, you know, abusing her behind the scenes or something like that. Right. In these. These two metaphors that she uses. On the one hand, there's this idea of the man kind of running the house. On the other hand, there's something about the house that might be anathema to a certain type of man that he might want to escape, that he might not take to the marriage. Well, you know, that he might like go after you and.
And. And then once he has, you behave quite differently to you once you are in a. Relate in an actual marriage, you know, with paperwork etc, that might behave quite differently to you than he did when he was trying to court you. Right. The idea that one's reality in a relationship fundamentally changes, you know, for. I'm speaking in very broad generalities, but for women, you know, the life and the relationship kind of begins with the marriage and sometimes for men it ends with the marriage. Right. So all of these things are. I think they're factors, they're sort of universal, broadly speaking, sort of universal generalities about the way that, shall we say, a man might want to play the tyrant, but he also might believe that he is actually being placed into certain strictures within the marriage.
And in fact he is. Right. And he might be quite reluctant to live under those very necessary, in most cases, strictures. And so there's this kind of odd contradiction where his desire for having power might also mean a desire to escape the sort of bonds and obligations under which the marital state sort of naturally places you. And so all that to say that I think it's interesting that she used that the metaphor kind of changes, or she rather that she uses two different metaphors, but that they actually work, I think quite well in tandem and they express two things that are difficult for a woman who's married to the wrong man.
25:16 Wes: So I think that's very well put. I'll make one more note about this little scene before Creon comes in, which is that she asked the chorus for silence when it comes to. So she says, talking about being abandoned and homeless. She says, there's one small kindness I ask of you if I devise some ways and means of making my husband pay for the suffering of mine. Your silence. Women are timid creatures, for the most part, cowards when it comes to fighting and at the sight of steel. But wrong a woman in love. And nothing on earth has a heart more murderous.
Hell hath no fury, hath a precedent, apparently. So what's interesting here is she's asking the chorus to move a bit out of the role of sympathizer to become co conspirator. So that's why I call this the section a conspiracy of women. So the women of Corinth are hopefully supposedly going to be on her side, you know, and. And they will agree to that ultimately, up to the point where they figure out that that includes killing the kids. They're not so on board with that. But anyway, just to make the transition to the next scene, this is where we get the interaction between Medea and Creon.
We talked about this a little, a bit in the last parts of the episode. And the talk about, you know, she adds the problem of being gifted in a very famous speech. The problem of being a foreigner and a woman. And, you know, the conflation of her very. Her magical powers with intelligence, which is really interesting. But what she does at the end of the scene I thought was kind of magical in a sense. So her power is not just magic in the literal sense, but she has a certain amount of rhetorical power, which is very important for Euripides because that's, in a way, what he's most interested in, is the power of the rhetorical.
And Creon will even say, so she's trying to argue. She's asking him not to exile her. And he comes in very determined to do that. Get out. You know, this is it. Don't even talk to me about it. And she makes her case. And then he says, I have this gut feeling she's hatching an evil plan. And that makes me trust her even less. And the fact that she's such a good speaker, clever in controlling her tongue, as he puts it, makes it only seem even more devious. Which of course, he's. Ultimately, he's. He's right about it. And then he says, you can't change my decision with words.
And here's how she gets him. She ultimately will get him to agree to let her stay for one day before exile. And she does it by invoking love of country. So she says she yearns for Colchis. And then that's when Creon. And that. So this is the masterful point where Creon says, you're right. Only my children win more love from me than my country. Well, so here, in a way, she's. It's not masterful yet. I think she's poking around, right? So she brings up this yearning for her homeland and Creon associates to children. And that's where Medea sees an in by appealing to the plight of her children to get Creon to let her stay one more day.
So that's when she gets on her knees and begs and says, at least show my children pity by allowing us to stay one more day while we get things in order. And Creon says, yeah, this is probably a bad. Not a good idea what I'm going to. Doing. I'm inviting disaster, but I'm just going to do it anyway. She got Me with the children thing. Anyway, I thought that was very, very well done by Euripides that you see these arguments playing out. You see the, the rhetorical combat play out in an interesting way, and you see how she gets him to switch his position.
So there's a site, there's an interesting psychological realism to the way Euripides presents this.
29:05 Erin: I love that you're pointing this out. I'm about to say something very, very controversial, which is that I think this play in this moment and then in the awful deed, right. Demonstrates what can be really bad about love, like how love can be an incredibly destructive thing. And I'm not necessarily talking about lust or whatever it is that Jason and Medea seem to feel for each other or what Jason seems to now be feeling for Creusa and not for Medea, which is related to this, I think, but it's not quite the same thing. Creon says, I'm no tyrant in my heart, but a king.
Yet in showing respect to petitioners, I have too often invited disaster. And now too, woman, I see my own error. But for all that, your wish will be granted. So he's basically allowing himself to be moved emotionally in spite of his better judgment because of pity he feels for Medea because of what she's invoked and because of his love for his child, which is obviously, you know, he obviously is a father who loves his daughter, right. And so Medea's ability to play on his heartstrings is what will be his undoing. And I. It just, it strikes me now that I'm looking at this section and what Creon says, how similar it is to what Medea says when she is about to kill her children.
She says, I am well aware how terrible a crime I am about to commit, but my passion is master of my reason. Passion that causes the greatest suffering in the world. In Medea's case, of course, this passion is not something that is elevated in the. In the way that Creon's error originates from a kind of high caliber emotion, right? Pity, sympathy for her, empathy for her, love for his daughter, but they have the same outcome. And I think this is something that's really astute, which is that sometimes love can be really bad. Having nice feelings towards things actually can be really.
I'm not. This is not my manifesto against love. I think there's something really true here about the way that emotion, even positive emotion, when it clouds reason, that's where love becomes. Becomes something that could be quite dangerous and quite twisted.
31:13 Wes: You know, if you were to cast this character, you cast him as someone who is a pushover, not a strong guy, but who's. When he walks in, in this scene, he's trying to represent himself that way. But you can see it coming. You can see that he's gonna not be able to hold up. That would be the way, you know, I think, to play this. If you were putting on a live performance and then it, you know, he's coming in, he's all bluster, but in the end he can have his heartstrings pulled. And you know, I'm no tyrant in my heart, but a king. Yet this could be disastrous.
I mean, you could speculate that there's something psychologically self destructive about him. I actually thought reading this about the many times as a residence director of a transitional home for the mentally ill where I was in this position where I had be people begging me not to kick them out and sometimes crying. I've literally been in this position of
32:09 Erin: oh, no wonder why you're not sympathetic to Medea the way I think you should be.
32:15 Wes: After seven years of that, you get a very thick skin. So.
32:18 Erin: Yeah. But Medea is really gifted though.
32:19 Wes: You also begin to react against the manipulation of your feelings. And there were, there were moments in which I had they this very, this Creon moment where I said where someone was crying and I'm like, oh man, I'm going to give this person another chance. Even though I know this is just going to be bad. It's going to be bad, but I'm going to do it. And I learned not to do that. I learned to repress the Creon instinct just to give in to feelings of pity.
32:48 Erin: Well, what you point out in the quote is perhaps his self concept is at stake. The part you focused on was I'm not a tyrant, I'm a king. So this is someone who's attacked to having to align with certain positive feelings about himself and not having his self concept threatened. And of course there's going to be something. There's going to be an internal conflict if he believes that he is a good and just and whatever king and he throws out this woman and her two children. Right. Even if she is a dangerous, scary quarter sun kind of woman. Should we then move to her confrontation with Jason? This is just like her having several different confrontations with men.
33:32 Wes: Right. So the. Yeah, before that. So we get into. So this is what I call. I, I think Creon exits and that's the end of Act 1. In my, in the way I've divvied Things up. The next thing that happens, before we get to the fight with Jason, there's a little scene with the chorus where the chorus is worried about where she's going to go. What are you going to do? And the chorus is. Is not in a happy place. And. But Medea is now a little bit manic. She's quite elated. She even says, my present situation is by no means terrible. It's the first time we've seen her in a good mood.
And. Right. So she's just gotten a big win and now she's. She's ready to scheme and to figure out, you know, how she's going to get her revenge. And she defines it, you know, I'm going to kill him, which he doesn't end up doing, which is an interesting thing we can discuss, but I'm gonna. And I'm gonna kill the princess and I'm going to kill the king. She fantasizes how to do it, and we'll do it with poison. And then she goes on to thinking about where to go, which at the end of this act will be solved by a little bit of a mini deus ex machina.
But in the play, when Aegeus will show up, little mini deus ex machina, and she will convince him to let him let her come to Athens, which it turns out to be, you know, which is very significant. And Euripides calls attention to this on the fact that it might not shed such a positive light on their wonderful Athenian city. And then again, think about the connection between Corinth and Athens. Right? That's their conflict. That really leads to the whole Peloponnesian War. So she kind of waxes in the, you know, here about the, you know, ha, ha, ha.
This is what I'm going to do. This is the evil I'm going to perpetrate. And she'll even say, you know, she has the knowledge to do this. And what's more, we are women, quite helpless in doing good, but surpassing any master craftsman in working evil can't win them all.
35:26 Erin: Women who are listening to this episode, Euripides can only do so much.
35:32 Wes: Yeah. One of the other things she brings up here is they're worried about being mocked, which comes up over and over again as a key motivation for killing her children and the revenge that she's going to get. The thing that she seems to worry about most is, is not losing Jason, but the kind of status injury involved. And she's being disrespected, which as 25% the sun you do not let yourself be disrespected.
35:57 Erin: Yeah. I think this is crucial, and this is something that is really. You may laugh at this, but this, to me, is part of why she's so sympathetic. I mean, basically, Jason has left her because he wants to sleep with a younger woman. And we're even told explicitly in the text that. That this is a younger blonde woman. This is deeply humiliating.
36:17 Wes: Well, this is her right. Her. Her claim is he wants to sleep with a younger woman. His claim is that he wants power and status.
36:26 Erin: He's. Yeah. Involving sleeping with a younger woman. That's. That's what the. That's 90% of what the status is about. And. And I don't take any. Anything he says in. In the subsequent scene to be totally without. I mean, she's being manipulative and being evasive and stuff, but he is, too.
36:45 Wes: See, I give him more credit because he is marrying into a royal family, and I don't.
36:51 Erin: Yes, but the nurse knows from the beginning that he has the hots for Creusa. The chorus knows it. You know, like, everybody knows his true motivation.
36:59 Wes: Yeah. Don't get me wrong. He probably has the hots. Yeah, I have no doubt he has the hots for her. But, I mean, the question psychologically for Medea is, is it jealousy because he loves another, or is she being disrespected? And those are two different. Those are two different things. And of course, psychologically for him, yes, he might want a trophy wife, but he also could feel just lustful towards someone who's younger and then also want to marry into family. All those. Those are three different motivations.
37:30 Erin: I don't see how those are two different things for Medea, though.
37:32 Wes: So I think, because one might lament the loss of someone else's love, and then one might lament the disrespect and mockery and humiliation. So I see humiliation and loss of love, the feeling of loss of love as being on as. You know, they often get fused together and people have trouble disentangling them in the same way that people have trouble disentangling what Freud called ordinary suffering from wounded pride. So, yes, they're very hard to disentangle. But what I'm saying, what I'm pointing to is a distinction between ordinary suffering, the loss of a lover, and then wounded pride, which is surplus suffering on top of that, which is what she's very focused on, which is not uncommon.
This is what I get focused on. What many patients and people I've worked with in mental health get focused On. They're very focused on. On this question of justice and pride and humiliation, and they suffer tremendously for it. So they suffer for that far more than they suffer for the underlying grievance, which is, I just didn't get what I want.
38:36 Erin: I mean, certainly I see the distinction between these two things. I'm thinking about the unities here and how quickly this play moves and how quickly after her abandonment, all of this takes place. And I guess I just. I don't. She doesn't give herself enough time to feel sad about, you know, she's in the middle of the, like, immediate aftermath of this, which is just. You're just going to see red, right? You're just going to be enraged because she hasn't even really registered the loss of this person yet. I mean, she has enough to be angry, but not enough to be sad. It would take more time for that to actually happen. Because right now, she's in. She's in anger mode.
39:15 Wes: Yeah. Sadness. And sadness is the most advanced emotion.
39:19 Erin: Yeah.
39:19 Wes: And this circuit. It's the most mature and advanced emotion that it's. And. And it's often the one that people are allergic to. And. And because it's. There's a powerlessness to it. And the power position is to be angry and to think about revenge. The power position is to think of. Think of the situation in terms of a slight, as Aristotle would say. For Aristotle, there's always a slight involved in anger. There's always a narcissistic injury, a wound to one's pride, a disrespect. She's been dissed. So there's much more power in inhabiting that, you know, you.
Don't you mess with me. Well, now you're gonna reap the whirlwind. That's a power position. But saying I'm. I lost something and I'm sad about it, of course, is not. Of course. Yes, in the long run, of course, we're far better off with sadness, Unless we have a chariot who's gonna come pick us up? Like, you know, Chariot Uber, you know, from the sun. Hey. Yeah. What? I'm gonna kill everyone. Then could you pick me up right afterwards?
40:17 Erin: Well, I mean, a further complication to this is there almost. There almost can't be a mature sadness because there was never a mature love in the first place. I mean, this is the. This is. The problem is that she loves Jason far too much, if we can even call it love. Right. She's obsessed with him. She's willing to throw everything away for him. She has an unbridled, you know, any. Any moderate modifier that we can use to describe the way that normal love is, does not apply here.
40:44 Wes: Yeah.
40:44 Erin: And. And this is what is so essential to the killing of the children, is that she loved Jason and therefore hates him now more than she loves the children. You know, this is a. This is a couple that is obsessed with themselves, and meanwhile the kids are just, like, doing whatever, kind of being ignored. I mean, this is the way I have like a very, you know, I have like a detailed picture in my mind of what I think this marriage was like when it was quote, unquote, working. You know what I think Jason's deeper motivations are? I'd like to think that it's all there in the text, but I am reading a lot of modern types of paradigms into this perhaps, but I do think that Madea has too much love for Jason, that this was a couple that probably, like, ignored their kids and their kids just had to hang out by themselves while their parents got it on because they were too busy, you know, concerned about themselves and their relationship.
And that's the way that I understand the crime at the end. So because of that, because this was never a mature relationship, she's not going to have a mature response to losing it, basically. And she's not going to have a measured, sad, adult mature response, not only because of the time in which she does, you know, she doesn't have the time to develop that, to get past those initial emotions, but. But because this relationship was toxic, you know, to use that term. Right. It's a toxic relationship. It was overly in mental enmeshed, and she loses too much of herself.
42:09 Wes: Right.
42:10 Erin: In the loss of the relationship.
42:11 Wes: So we get an exaggerated version of the selflessness, which is part of any relationship to some degree. But. But this is exaggerated and it's totalized because. And she does give up everything, right?
42:24 Erin: Yeah.
42:25 Wes: Which is part of what betraying her father and killing her brother represents. And then she gives up everything, and then he's all. He's all she has. She. He is not just lover, but he is home, he is country, he is Homeland. And to lose him is to lose all of that, all anchoring points psychologically. And these are identity, right? These are points of identification. Country, family. It's about more than love. It's about who you are. Her, who she is became Jason. And I think in one version of the myth, it's basically she's been given a potion or something.
Right. It's not even a natural, like the love is induced naturally. Right. It's just she's been. Yeah, she's been drugged into this crazy state of mind towards Jason. And the way Euripides represents him in this play, I don't think it's a modern. You know, it's modern at all. It's very explicitly. He's very explicitly characterized as a douchebag and as obtuse, as emotionally obtuse. I think that's very important because his deficits, in a way, are a mirror of hers. You can call her overly involved in emotion or passion, whatever you want to say, but he's too uninvolved in that.
Which is how he gets his wife or his wife to be and her father killed. And which is part of why he riles up Medea so much. It's not. Not just the act. She'll even say to him, you know, if you come to me and talk to me about this beforehand, and he'll say, oh, yeah, you really would have been reasonable about this if I had done that. But she does have a point, which is that it's not just that he loves another. He is really is disrespecting her. She's not seen by him. She, in a way, has had all the power, and he doesn't know it. Right. She's the magician.
She's the one who did all the great deeds, really. And he doesn't even see that he's obtuse to that. So this is someone waking up to the fact that not just that this person doesn't love her, but he's never this. This person who's the anchor of her identity, has never even actually seen her for who she is.
44:30 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. You know, one wonders why he's with her in the first place, except for just, you know, that she was. She was there.
44:38 Wes: I mean, he's a user. I mean, I just think that that is the characterization. I don't think I'm reading into the play to say he's characterized as a user. And that's what Euripides makes Euripides so interesting. He's taking that myth and he's giving us this very realistic and unflattering psychological portrait. Okay, let me take this mythological character who is that person psychologically, and boom, you get this everyday, ordinary person on stage.
45:07 Erin: Yeah, you're really helping me to understand your characterization of him and as emotionally obtuse, because I saw him in the exchanges with Medea as being really manipulative and basically just trying to justify the lust that he feels for this younger woman and make Medea look bad and crazy. And I mean, she. She is crazy, of course, but, like, to make her look worse than she is, to make her, in her very justified rage, this, like, oh, you're just this crazy, emotional woman. Like, what are you on your period? You know, like, that kind of thing.
45:38 Wes: It is. It is a very ordinary male female dynamic, too, which is part of what makes it so interesting. It's exaggerated, but it is also very ordinary.
45:46 Erin: Yeah, well. Well, but what I love about what you're showing is that it's like, of course. But he is obtuse, though. Like, he could do that sort of attempt, feeble attempt at manipulation and also be deeply obtuse. And I think you're right that he doesn't realize the fact that he is playing with a quarter fire and then.
46:01 Wes: And that obtuseness is stereotypically masculine. And I think there's a grain of truth to that. So it is exaggerated here, which is why I called him autistic or on the spectrum.
46:10 Erin: Yeah.
46:11 Wes: Which hopefully people don't take offense at. But that is kind of like if you. If you amp up masculinity to a certain degree and. Right, right. Masculinity is supposed to be heroic here. I have the big muscles. I'm going to slay the dragon. But at a psychological level, if you amp it up too much, it's just, oh, you're on the spectrum. So he's a big jock. Yeah, but he.
46:31 Erin: And she's a crazy harpy.
46:33 Wes: Yeah, yeah, but he doesn't get it psychologically. Yeah. And also, she really is also crazy, right?
46:40 Erin: I mean. Yeah, like. Like kind of crazy in quotes. I think it's important that she's not. I do think she's kind of in her right mind with most of the decisions that she makes, but that's splitting hairs at this point, for the purposes of this conversation. She is crazy. Yeah. I mean, this is. This is like a woman's. A woman's worst nightmare. Like waking up and realizing that the person that you're with actually never understood you or doesn't appreciate you at all in any kind of complex or deep or satisfactory way that they just. You were the one who was around and was convenient at the time that they wanted to commit to someone because it was expedient.
Right. And this is like a very, very deep and real psychological fear. But I think that what Pasolini does really well in his adaptation of the story is makes Jason just like a beautiful man. That's the Only way that this makes any sense. So, yeah, of course, yes, he's a jock, right? But yeah, like this is. He is a hunk. He's gorgeous. So it's like, okay, we get it, Medea. Because otherwise it just doesn't like on the page, you know, you just think to yourself, like, you know, how did she even find him appealing? Because he's so, you know, so, so the, the, the beauty angle, the, the male beauty piece of this.
If we're going to imagine someone who has, you know, the look of a Greek hero that works in the Pasolini version on paper, he's just. It's just like Medea. Why, like you. Yeah, you could have had anyone. Why didn't you just, you know, go to Colchis University and find. Find a professor who might have appreciated your intellectual talents. Instead you fell for this. Just meathead.
48:23 Wes: So we're almost to the fight between her and Jason. I just want to point to one more thing before that happens, because it is part of this whole battle of the sexes theme. She, right, she's laid out her diabolical plans and she's in a very manic ha, ha, ha type of state. And then the strophe, you know, associates those plans with the deceit involved in those plans with Jason's breaking of oaths. So it's noting with displeasure, I think, the deceit involved in what she's doing. But then it also says, recompense is coming for the female sex. No more shall women endure the burden of ill repute.
Which is, of course, an interesting, quite psychologically interesting given that what she's doing is going to be horrific and involve. Involves some deceit. The antistrophe agrees with the strophe in this case. And men will cease to harp on our. Or songs. All the poetry in general will cease to harp on our faithlessness. And if women had musical ability, then she. I think the antistrophe is saying this would have made. So antistrophe is speaking for women here. She would have made my song ring out against the sex of men. The Rolling Ages have much to tell our side much as well as men's.
And then they kind of repeat her stuff about, you know, having no husband, being in exile and all that stuff. So very explicitly, her revenge is supposed to be against Jason is supposed to be representative of women's revenge against men. And the an is saying, if only, you know, if I were a poet, this is the way I would do it. And of course, you know, it's. It's a joke. It's it's, it's tongue in cheek at this point. Euripides is doing that, right? And then that's when Jason will come in and we will get the big showdown.
50:14 Erin: But first they form a union. Solidarity now. Anyway, yeah, should we end this episode and start talking about.
50:24 Wes: Yeah. So that's the end of part three of our discussion. Part four, we will get into the A verbal showdown between Madea and Jason.
50:35 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 2)
Sep 16, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
Upcoming Episodes: “A New Leaf” (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part two of Medea. In part one, we gave a lot of background on Euripides and the political and historical climate at the time. And we got a little bit into beginning of the discussion of the play, including we got a bit into A discussion of Jason's rationality, or let's just say whether or not he's rational is overturned. His embrace at a conscious level of the idea that he's rational and that he has these reasons versus the idea that Medea is just a representative of irrationality, what that meant for the play at a thematic level and maybe psychologically. So, Erin, you would want it to move from that to the significance of the fact that she's a sorceress. Yeah.
1:21 Erin: So I was just trying to think, like, what can we insert for magic? Like, how can we solve for X to give a psychological explanation for what it is about Medea that might make one resentful of her, fearful of her after a period in which this magic actually served you right. So something for which you're at first grateful, which then sours if you're Jason. And like, I think motherhood. Right, is something we might insert for magic here. I mean, forgive me if I'm oversimplifying this, but this seems like something that could be. That could cause conflict in Jason.
1:55 Wes: Right.
1:55 Erin: You want to have kids, and maybe you're grateful at first to a wife that has those kids or that you think you want them, and then they cause all sorts of problems in addition to motherhood. I think artistry or any kind of creativity we can insert for magic and for her sorcery. And I think the way I'm understanding this is that Jason got a lot of benefit from Medea's. Her genius, her artistic excellence, you know, whatever you want to call it, this creative capacity. He got all this benefit from it, and now he resents her for it and is threatened by it. And he knows, yeah, but he had
2:35 Wes: the muscles and the sword just get
2:39 Erin: well, and now he wants to discard her. He has this potential for. He got a lot of success because of Medea's magic. He has potential for even more success. And he wants to discard the sort of compassion complexity that comes with Medea's sorcery, magic, whatever that might mean, whether that means, like, just scuttling his first family and the difficulties that come with being part of a family and being responsible for a family. So he doesn't want anything to do with them anymore. He wants to start over with someone who's younger. Right. So he wants to, like, just get this out of his.
Out of his life so that he can try again and hope that it's going to be less complicated. Or we could say, you know, that he has this wife who is threatening in some way in terms of her creative ability. And therefore he wants to be with someone who threatens him less. That's essentially what. What is my. My reading of this and why, therefore, he's getting rid of her and why he finds Creusa attractive. Now he's still attracted to Medea because there's still something in her that he is. You know, he was attracted to this in the first place. Right.
So that's not going to totally go away, but basically, like, he wants someone who's less complicated. This is a 30. This is my favorite 30 Rock episode with Carrie Fisher where she plays. I don't know if you remember this episode, but she sort of plays Liz Lemon's kind of ghost of Christmas future, like Liz Lemon's idol who comes back into her life. And Liz Lemon tries to kind of, you know, maybe help her get a job on TGS or something. Like, because Carrie Fisher's character has fallen from grace and is now kind of insane. And one of the things she says to Liz is, you pick up guys that are smart and funny, and they end up leaving you for someone less complicated.
Something along those lines. Right. So Jason wants someone less complicated. Medea means complicated. That's what we could say. Insert for magic is comp. She's complicated.
4:37 Wes: Yeah. And also a murderer for him. No, I. I'm just kidding. I like. I like your. You know, I think that's a legitimate reading. So in a way. Right. Okay.
4:49 Erin: So she.
4:50 Wes: Let's just think about Jason's motivations. Her claim is that, yeah, Jason is just once a new, younger woman, and that it's lust or the desire for novelty. And his claim is that he is just trying to make an alliance and be a social climber and get himself kind of set up and a kingdom which is not his own by marrying the king's daughter, which I think is actually perfectly reasonable argument. Which doesn't change. Right. So even if that's true, it doesn't change, as the chorus of women point out many times. It doesn't change the fact that he has broken an oath and he's a betrayer in some way.
It doesn't matter if his motive is the one he says it is or it could be a mix. So there could be a lot of different motives working at the same time. Not wanting a woman who's that complex, being envious of her creativity, being envious of her power. There's evidence for that. Part of it is she has really been the one with power. And this is the first point where there's been a real power reversal. In his marrying the king's daughter. What does magic mean? I think in some sense, magic in the broadest sense is, in this case, a representative of femininity.
I think there are only two witches in ancient Greek mythology. Right. There's Medea and Who? Circe.
6:11 Erin: Yeah. Who I think Medea is related to.
6:13 Wes: Right, right. And she's related. So witches don't. This is. And I got this from Edith Hamilton's introduction to her mythology book, but I was really surprised. I had never thought of that fact, that this particular type of feminine power doesn't play a role in Greek mythology generally. It's kind of rare. But, yeah. You could see the idea of witchery and sorcery has something to do with feminine power. And it's the power to procreate, but it's also the power to attract. And it's all of the power implied in feminine signifiers. So not just like having a certain type of body, but having a gender, having a certain psychology, which, of course, has gotten a bad rap over the millennia.
Right. It leads to accusations of it being a falsity, of it just being a facade under which there's nothing. In other words, femininity is itself a kind of deception and a trick. That's the idea. So that I think you could point to that at the broadest level. There's a lot of interesting misogyny in Jason. And it's directly commented on and pointed to by the chorus. Right. The contemporary views of women and what they are. It's fascinating because there's what's obviously a very direct critique of that here in Euripides. It receives direct attention, and we'll get more into that.
But the other thing I thought of initially, because I have a section in my notes called the Plight of Being Gifted.
7:46 Erin: This is what I want to get to.
7:48 Wes: Yeah, this is on page 57, which is. You find line numbers here. And I want to go back. I kind of want to touch on other parts of the play before that. But this is around line 250. I'm thinking of pages 57 to 60, starting around line 250. She is in the kind of scene before that. She's been talking to the chorus, and she's been lamenting the plight of foreigners, and she's been lamenting the plight of women. And then at this point, she will, in a very famous passage, lament the plight of being a gifted person. So let's see where she does this. Okay. Maybe it's on page 58. So she'll say, so Creon is just entered around.
8:29 Erin: Ah, yeah.
8:30 Wes: After line 270. And the whole point of this scene is that she's going to convince Creon. And this is rhetorically fascinating how she does this, but she's going to convince Creon to give her an extra day before he exiles her. He comes in, very firm. I'm going to exile you. Get out of here. Don't talk to me anymore. But she really works on him. And so. Right. You can see how magic is also a stand in for rhetorical power because she has it, which we're no stranger to. In many of the texts we've read, this comes up and again and again, the rhetorical power of women. So for instance, who is it in. What's that Shakespeare play we read?
9:07 Erin: Winter's Tale? Hermione.
9:08 Wes: Hermione, yes.
9:09 Erin: And Paulina.
9:10 Wes: Paulina, yep. So that kind of rhetorical power. But in any case. So he comes in, says, you're out of here, you're out of here. Medea says, I'm utterly ruined. And why are you doing this? And he says, I'm Creon says some very prescient and reasonable things, which is, I think you're going to harm me and my daughter. Basically. I've been hearing you make threats and that's word has gotten back to me. And so here's a little wonderful passage around 2, starts at 292. Little wonderful speech by Medea. Ah, this is hard to bear. This is not the first time, but one of many, Creon, that my reputation has hurt me and caused me serious harm.
Serious harm is translating mega kaka, many evils. This is one of the. One of the ways when I was looking for translation, I'm like, how creative are these people getting with just a phrase like mega kaka. And in many cases I just couldn't bear the translation. And even in this case, serious harm. I mean, why not just say many evils? I don't know, Mega kaka. All right? My reputation has hurt me and caused me serious harm. Any man of good sense should never have his children. Or maybe it's megala kaka. So anyway, yeah, my ancient Greek is terrible.
Anyway. Any man of good sense should never have his children taught to be unusually clever, for apart from being good for nothing, into the bargain they invite the envy and hostility of their fellow citizens. Present fools with clever new ideas, and they will think you useless and a born fool yourself. And those with a reputation for fine intelligence will regard you with hatred if the city judges you are their superior. I myself have fallen victim to this misfortune, because I have special knowledge. Some view me with resentment, others, again with distaste.
Now, I want to point out, given all the background we gave to this, Euripides, in a way, could be talking about himself.
11:08 Erin: Yeah, sure.
11:09 Wes: He's the one who's right there to corrupt the youth with his cleverness and his skepticism about gods and what you might think of as a kind of rough magic or dark magic, whatever it is, that's transforming society at this point, which turns out to be a form of rationality, arguably, strangely enough, that has a corrosive magic power that can be, in a sense, thought of as a potion. But anyway, I thought here. This is an interesting new complaint that she's adding. It's not just that I'm a woman, it's not that I'm a foreigner, an immigrant. I'm a gifted person. What do you think of that?
11:47 Erin: Well, if we want to take our word for it, there's a question about this. But I do think I find this so fascinating. I really do. I mean, there's a conventional wisdom I've heard expressed in art school that you really shouldn't get into a relationship with anybody who's your peer in art school, because if, God forbid. If you're a woman and God forbid, you end up doing better than he does, then the relationship will be over. If you get married and he ends up doing better than you, then everything is fine. Right. But in a way, Medea and Jason are like. They both went to the same art school. They're both mythological figures. Right. They're both famous.
12:29 Wes: But she's semi divine.
12:30 Erin: But she's semi divine.
12:31 Wes: He might be related to the wind God, I can't remember, but I think he is related to Aeolus. So maybe he does have the same status. The way I was reading this, she, in a sense, starts out with the higher status, and then it's reversed. Right?
12:45 Erin: Well, it's reversed how?
12:46 Wes: By him getting her to Corinth and then saying, screw you. I'm gonna go with the king's daughter now.
12:54 Erin: Okay, yeah, that's what I thought.
12:57 Wes: Until she's kind of isolated in that environment, she has all the power, as far as I can tell, up to that point. Because on a seafaring adventure, that's all that counts, right? If they're in a pioneer mode, if they're in the Wild west, all that matters is the force that you can bring to bear. Right?
13:16 Erin: Yeah. So I agree with you.
13:18 Wes: Sorry I say that, but I'm not wedded to That I don't know,
13:24 Erin: that was my sense as well, that she's
13:26 Wes: doing inclination is to read it as she starts out. And there is other evidence in the play to support this, but she is actually starting out in the top position and that's what makes this so unbearable is this reversal. And then he turns out to have no gratitude for all that she's done to help him with her power.
13:45 Erin: This reversal seems to me to be psychologically necessary for him as someone who we could read as a figure of the insecure man who can't handle the fact that his wife is of a higher status than he is. So he has to discard her and find someone, you know, for whom he could be a person of higher status who could make him feel bigger. Right.
14:06 Wes: Well, she. The question is, can she do anything for him in this environment now, in a civilization, as he calls it? Right. He saved her from the barbarian. Look, what everything I've given you, including civil Greek civilization.
14:18 Erin: Yeah.
14:19 Wes: This is, you know, you ungrateful barbarian. That's essentially what he says to her later on. But yeah, one thing is very clear. He's in this depiction, he's just a user. He's just a cold blooded user and she can't really do anything for him in this particular context.
14:35 Erin: Yeah, I mean, this is a little complicated because I don't know, you know, I made mention of the Pasolini, Medea and the fact that they show Colchis as being like Cappadocia. This is not the physical climate that Colchis would be my understanding. I mean, I don't know, you know, Colchis as a location in the imaginations of Greeks in 431 BC. I don't know what kind of of significance it has.
14:59 Wes: It's not vodka and furry hats.
15:02 Erin: I do know that being on the Black Sea, it would at least be a place of great. I mean, it's the location of the Golden Fleece. It's a place of great, great wealth. Right. I mean, I would imagine this is a lush place with a lot of resources. So I suppose I'm skeptical of his entire argument here. Of course there's a.
15:20 Wes: But they're. They're exotic, right? They're exotic. She's an exotic foreign woman. She might as well, you know.
15:26 Erin: Right, right.
15:28 Wes: She's from a different. Right. So it's just, it's not that she's just a foreigner. She's not from another Greek island or something. She's.
15:33 Erin: This is like Cleopatra.
15:35 Wes: There you go. Yeah.
15:36 Erin: The societies have very different value Systems. Obviously this play has to say certain things, you know, true things. Right. About Greek civilization's emphasis on rationality and various other things. Right. So Cleopatra is from a more exotic coded civilization which has its own rich history and its own way of looking at the world. And Romans disdained it.
15:57 Wes: We should say she was essentially Greek. Right. Part of a Greek aristocracy that was ruling Egypt. So it's.
16:03 Erin: Right. But she was seen still exotic. Yes. And she was viewed with great xenophobia at the time. There was a lot of anxiety over whether or not the Egyptians, Greek. Egyptians would come into the rulership of Rome and also Mark Antony's betrayal of Roman values by associating with Cleopatra. So a very similar situation, I think, just as we can't say that Cleopatra comes from a backward society, rather she comes from a society that is just looked upon through xenophobic eyes by the Romans. Right. I don't know what the situation is in Colchis, if it's a good parallel here. I don't know what kind of society they were thought to have by the Greeks at this time. If it's just supposed to be. It's almost like fairy tale land.
16:46 Wes: Land.
16:46 Erin: It's like far away fairy tale land. Right.
16:49 Wes: Barbaros is the ancient Greek word, but, you know, the barbarians is basically everyone who's non Greek.
16:54 Erin: Right. So.
16:55 Wes: So, I mean, he gives it the pejorative implication by saying, you know, this is civilization. That's not civilization.
17:02 Erin: Right.
17:03 Wes: This is part of what I've given you. This is a great bargain for you.
17:06 Erin: Right. But it depends on what you value. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:10 Wes: So, but, but that's his. So that's his point of view. But whether.
17:12 Erin: Yeah, and I think he's full of it. Right.
17:14 Wes: I don't know enough to know whether Colchis is a backwards society or not, but probably. He's probably full of it.
17:22 Erin: Well, it behooves Jason to. Yeah, he's full of it in this argument, Right. Because it behooves him to make Colchis look like a backward place in this. You got such a great deal out of coming here with me argument. Right. So who knows what the situation really is? But the point is he has to spin it.
17:38 Wes: But in this case, you know, I think getting back to sorcery, she makes this explicit connection between her magical powers and it's an interesting conflation, right, because she's a magician. She can do things which are almost divine in their level of power with these potions. Right. So there's almost a technological aspect to it as well. But it's, on a surface level, completely magical. So she makes it out to be, well, I'm not hated because I killed my brother or did all these horrible things. It's not because I'm this notorious criminal that I'm hated. It's because I'm a gifted person and you guys all envy me.
18:17 Erin: But that is true, Wes. That is true.
18:20 Wes: But it's also. Yeah, but it's so. It is also true. Yep. But so. So there is a comic. I think there's explicitly a comic element here. Any good man, a good sense should never have his children taught to be unusually clever. As if that's it. Oh, I'm just this unusually clever person. So Creon is perfectly. It's perfectly rational for him to fear her. And what he says is that you've been tossing these threats around. Then it's gotten back to me. So it's not in his imagination. But she's made this segue to what is a very interesting grievance which identifies magic and intelligence and makes this connection I've been talking about to rhetoric and to the climate of the time.
And that becomes an argument for her being associated with the power of rationality rather than irrationality. And it's. Right. And science and technology and the corrosive effects that they might have on a society and their effect on power dynamics and the envy of people who can excel by way of their intelligence, all that stuff gets implicated as well. This is not the way she wins her argument with Creon. This is really just the first step.
19:26 Erin: Yeah, I mean, that does. Associating her with technology and these other qualities you're describing complicates this a little bit. But I do think that there's a way in which we can read her, not just as a kid in the gifted class or as someone, as I'm suggesting, who kind of like goes to art school with Jason and then she ends up being the better painter or whatever. And he's therefore upset by this because all of his paintings are bad, or he's been passing hers off as his or, you know, however. However, we could come up with some sort of corollary here.
Right. But we could also just discuss. Associate this, and I think it's logical to do so with the fact of her being a woman. Right. Like this. This, I think, is very much tied to this foreignness or exoticism and also to, you know, the pain of labor and various other things that she connects in this speech. Like, I do think of it as being coherent. If we Want to read her genius as the genius of any woman who has children, that she is the Other. Right. Like that. Women are the. Are the Other in this. They have a secret knowledge. They have the ability to give birth.
And therefore there's something. Right. Feared and exotic about their kind of quote unquote, divine intelligence that men don't have access to. Right. So there's a reading of this which is, like, far more straightforward maybe, than just being gifted, in which she's just the female, the woman who is threatening and unknowable to a man and who has a power that man doesn't have. Right.
20:49 Wes: Maybe. Let's go back a little bit in this first, this first act, and then it's in the scene before this that she really talks about the plight of women.
20:57 Erin: I still want to talk about the nurse
21:00 Wes: on page two, which is part of this. So we'll get back a little bit. But I think for this scene, one thing I'll say about what you just said is civilization is coded as feminine. And I even think. And I'll probably be saying this even though I can't prove it right now, but in an evolutionary sense, culture as we know it is a product of gender, and it's specifically the feminine. And culture gets coded as the feminine. Right. The more civilized you are, the more weak and feminine you are. And so as civilization advances, and that's what's happening in ancient Greece right now, the threat of the feminine increases.
The more civilized the society is, the less oppressed women are, and the more the arts and even the sciences arguably are ascendant, the more the feminine is actually ascendant. And I'm pointing to this because I think there's an ambiguity. What is it that Medea. What is the threat that she represents in the threat of the feminine? Is it just the crazy instinctual on the one hand, or is it the civilizational and the rational on the other? And in a sense, it's both. She's a representative of the destructiveness of the instincts. And then what it is that civilization might do to instinct, I think both get represented there.
Even though for the most part, the play is going to set up Jason and Medea as representatives of the instinctual, the overly instinctual and the overly rational, respectively. We could treat her as embodying that very conflict, I think, in her own character.
22:36 Erin: So you're saying my reading is wrong of. I mean, if we took out. So say that. Say we took out barbarism from the equation. And I think I'm kind of suggesting that Maybe this is a tainted accusation that Jason is flinging around just to suit his own end. So if we take out this idea of civilization versus barbarism and we just said exoticism, would that apply to my idea of this connection between this gifted argument, exoticism and the feminine? In other words, how would exoticism fit into this gender divide? How is it coded? Is it not coded as feminine? Or am I?
23:13 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think it can be. I think. You know, what I'm pointing to is I'm pointing to two conflicting interpretations that associate her with these. Civilization on the one hand, and the exotic or the foreign on the other, and with the instinctual on the one hand or the rational on the other. I'm saying that maybe it ultimately doesn't make sense, but I'm saying that a conflict that at a more overt level in the play, one in which she represents the irrational. Right. You can see it, that conflict actually as internal to her own character. So when she's talking about this is like the relationship between alchemy and chemistry. Right. Is it magic or is it science? Those two things, they cross over.
23:53 Erin: Okay.
23:53 Wes: Science becomes the highest representative of the dark arts. Science fulfills the dark. That the whole idea of the dark arts, for instance.
24:01 Erin: I see. So I see how you're saying that these things become entangled, but I guess I was wondering, if we tweeze these out, are there coherent readings on either side? Is there a system in which she is representative of, say, barbarism and exoticism and femininity and also rationality and culture and femininity? And I guess I was just wondering if there are coherent readings on this and what you're saying is ultimately not. Not just that they're conflicting with each other in the play, but that they ultimately run together or that they tip over into the other side, they get twisted together.
24:33 Wes: Yeah. So I'm making maybe what's a confusing point, but because I think overall the play is going to make her the representative, at least in. So maybe it's a question that the play is raising. Right. So on one level, it seems as if. And in some senses, it's obviously so because she's a murderer and does all this crazy shit. Right? Right. She's fucking crazy. But let's not play that down. But
24:59 Erin: I think it's important that she's not crazy, but.
25:02 Wes: Well, she murders her kids.
25:04 Erin: Yeah, but I think it's important that that. I mean, isn't this a big question about the play, whether or not this is an actual insane act? We can't just take for granted that she's crazy. Right. She seems totally rational in her decision to do this.
25:18 Wes: I don't. Yeah, I don't see a good argument for the killing of the kids, except that.
25:23 Erin: Well, I don't see a good argument for it either, but.
25:27 Wes: Except for the paranoid idea. Right. Her idea is that she's going to be mocked. She's extremely paranoid, extremely narcissistic. If we do want to pathologize and get into contemporary psychology, both she and Jason are incredible narcissists. And the only reason to kill her kids is to prevent people from laughing at her. Which is. Which is a ridiculous reason. And she's just as concerned with status as Jason is.
25:50 Erin: Oh, absolutely.
25:51 Wes: Status observed.
25:52 Erin: I think, though, there's a lot I want to say about this. And I derailed you by opening this can of worms. So you were saying. Because I want to get to this, but we'll have to get to it later. But you were saying prior to that in relation to this idea of ultimately what the play is saying about these things is conflicted.
26:06 Wes: Yeah. I mean, okay, so maybe on one level, it's supposed to be obvious, he's on the spectrum, she's borderline, and this is a conflict that plays out. But as we see it becomes a question, it gets more subtle. And that's what I was pointing to. But it gets confusing. Okay. And just because I'm calling her crazy and saying, right, that's just external plot. So we got to think about this at the thematic level and then at the plot level, just in plain plot level stuff, she's nuts. But thematically, something else could be the opposite. But I think we'll definitely get more as we get into the play.
But I think you were pointing to. Maybe we should just give a little bit more of this whole, what I'm calling the first act, which is what ends with Medea and Creon. But basically, right in the beginning, we got the setup of some background with the nurse and the tutor. And then there's some interesting back and forth between the nurse and the tutor. And then I guess the children are there, and Medea's still in the background. She hasn't come out yet, but there's.
27:07 Erin: She's still screaming inside the house.
27:08 Wes: Yeah, right, right. The tutor comes and says, why are you just talking to yourself out here? And she's like, well, I'm so upset by everything that's going on. I have to tell it to the earth and the sky. And there's a little reflection here. And this is the interesting part on the idea that. Okay, so the tutor says, old ties of affection give way to new. This house has no claims on that man's heart. Now. So, right. There's a lot of general psychological observations at various points in the play, and this is one of them. So the tutor is thinking about this in terms of the fact that people are fickle and their affections change.
And also he'll say later on, no one loves his neighbor more than himself. So he'll just say people are actually just selfish. And the nurse's idea is that Jason is just someone who's treacherous, so he's a traitor. It's not just that. You could talk psychologically about fickleness and selfishness, or you could talk moralistically about someone who's just an oath breaker and a traitor. And those are two different ways of looking at it, the psychological and the moral. The nurse sends the children inside and says, stay away from your mom. I'm scared what she would do to you.
Medea is still lamenting her suffering from the inside, from inside the house. At this point, Medea is saying things like, her children should die and send Jason's house to ruin. So the prime. This is around page 54 in this penguin edition. Early on we learn she wants to kill the children. That she has a motive to do it, which is to ruin his project. His project, right, is to kind of get status for him and ultimately his offspring. And she can do that by killing the kids. But I guess what I'm working up to here is the psychological observation by the nurse, which is that it's better.
She sets up an opposition between modesty and excess. So this is one of the important. We've already talked about it a bit, but one of the important themes here, it's better to live in modesty or in moderation and inequality and not in excess. And excess is something that she associates with royal blood because people who are upper class or royals, they always get what they want. So they don't learn to deal with deprivation and they become immodest, they become excessive. So these are, again, I think, some very. Bringing up the concept of moderation.
That's a very philosophically in vogue concept. And it's the idea that the gods or the heroes are being immodest. Right? This is one of these themes in Euripides that he's going to say, well, we thought you were better than this. You don't actually represent the heroic isn't heroic, it's just excessive in one Way or another.
29:46 Erin: Yeah, I'm really interested in this moderation discussion. She says those of royal blood, they have frightening natures. Those of royal blood. So she's talking about both Jason and Medea there know the nurse is concerned with hierarchies, and she, she often connects the family's behavior here back to class, which I think is interesting. I think, as I think I suggested before, the nurse is kind of like a cliche machine, or she, she seems to be just spouting, you know, this conventional wisdom about like moderation or whatever the case may be. And I think that.
That she's often kind of proved right, but in that the play takes what she says and almost kind of riffs on it. So this idea of not living in equality with your neighbors is something that I see actually picked up in that speech that you point to where Medea talks about herself as a gifted person. So that what the nurse points to as being connected to class, Medea almost takes as like the slings and arrows of a meritocracy in which she's at the top of the. Of the meritocracy or something. So Medea would argue that she can't live on equal terms with her neighbors, right, because she is actually better than her neighbors.
In other words, the nurse is trying to give a sort of traditional read on the situation and saying, you know, well, these are, you know, these are mythological figures, right? Or these are. These are kings and queens. And so they're of a different class. And therefore they have not the right kind of relationship perhaps to the people around them. In fact, they don't have the right relationship to people around them. But it doesn't have to do with class. It has to do with other factors that may have to do both with their actual set apartness and also their psychological extremeness.
31:26 Wes: So, yeah, I mean, they might not have anything. I mean, in some cases they don't have anything to do with class. But the subversive idea, right, is that being a God or a hero implies being psychologically messed up because absolute power corrupts absolutely, or put it that way, or. But it's also subversive to say, I think in this context that being part of the upper class is not good for you psychologically because you don't suffer enough deprivation. You're spoiled, essentially. Now, of course, there are other. Is that right at this point, she kind of compares it. She talks about what she wants for herself. How does she put it? We're looking at pages 52 to 54.
32:08 Erin: Better to have formed the Habit of living on equal terms with your neighbors. Certainly what I want for myself is to grow older, old in secure and modest
32:14 Wes: circumstances for moderation in the first place. Sounds more attractive on the tongue and in practice is by far the best for man. I think. Yeah. What you're pointing to is the sense in which it comes across as a.
32:27 Erin: Like a moral. Yeah, yeah.
32:29 Wes: It's a moral platitude and it's very self serving. Like, you know, I look at me, I'm just the nurse.
32:35 Erin: Right.
32:35 Wes: Unlike these fancy people, you know, I have these down to earth values and blah, blah, blah.
32:40 Erin: Exactly.
32:41 Wes: I think we're supposed to have some skepticism in us aroused by her simple take on things. It's interesting, the chorus, which for the most part is on Medea's sides, right. It's a chorus of Corinthian women wearing Corinthian leather. What is that from? Corinthian leather? Isn't that like a car commercial or something?
33:03 Erin: I think so.
33:04 Wes: With. Do you remember that? What's his face? The guy with the accent.
33:09 Erin: Is it Ricardo Montalban?
33:12 Wes: Yes. Corinthian women. So chorus of Corinthian women. And for the most part on her side. But they do give little hints here that they're going the other way and that not to jump us forward. But after, in what I'm calling the second act, towards the end of that, after, Jason and Medea have had this big fight, basically. And that part of it is there's a whole battle of the sexes element to this. Women versus men, women suck, blah, blah, blah. Jason does a lot of that. The chorus comes in and will say, basically, passions beyond measure bring neither glory nor greatness.
But if love is tempered, there's nothing better. This happens pages 67, 68, that's the strophe and then the antistrophe basically says, yeah, may I never love a stranger. This is part of why I was emphasizing this whole idea of loving a stranger and have that inflict me with the kind of stormy moods that come with that. I'd rather have a peaceful marriage. And love should show respect for marriages where peace reigns and judge with a shrewd eye the loves of women. And then the strophe moves on to the concept of exile and homelessness. Not having friends, not having family.
So these things are always in tension. The storminess and irrationality of romantic love versus the security and stability of a more rooted familial love, which is what marriage can become. Right. If it moves out of the merely the stormy romance. Let's chop up your brother phase. Let's do crimes together. If it can move beyond that phase. So you get little. Right. So this whole thing about moderation versus excess will recur in the play. But I wanted to stick with what the nurse is doing here, because she will. 190 blockheads, witless fools, that's all you can call them, those men of earlier days who thought up songs to cheer our lives at feasts and banquets and at dinner, without one of them ever inventing music of song or tuneful lyre to banish the hateful sorrows we mortals know, those that lead to death and the cruel strokes of fortune which overthrow homes.
So actually, that's a little bit different. She's complaining there. That. Right. So she's making a complaint against poets and musicians, which is very significant. Playwrights, implicitly, that all you do is write cheerful songs for cheerful times. But shouldn't you do something that will help people who are in a bad mood, like Medea, people who are depressed? Can't you create a form of art that is essentially an antidepressant for times like this? And yet how much our lives would be improved if we could cure these ills by the remedy of song?
So, getting us a little bit off track there, but that's sort of the end of that scene with the nurse.
35:59 Erin: Yeah, I mean, that's a little. That's her low point in terms of accidentally making sense, but a couple times. Well, actually, one of them is the tutor. The tutor has a kind of similar role, I suppose, because he says, you know, she's talking about how Jason is a traitor and the tutor says, is he so different from the rest of mankind? You made mention of this before. Has it only just dawned on you that no one loves his neighbor more than himself? Have these children not lost their father's love because he now loves elsewhere? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot in here.
Again, it's like a platitude, but actually it contains a lot of interesting information. No one loves his neighbor more than himself. There's this interesting idea of who is your neighbor when you're married to a stranger, when you're married to someone who doesn't come from your own country? And don't your children at least count as closer than a neighbor? Aren't you supposed to love your children more than you love yourself? Right, so there's a. There are a lot of tangled things here that actually are quite pressing on the sort of thematic pulse point of what the play is actually about.
Who does qualify as one's neighbor. Jason's lack of love for his children is actually, you know, his willingness to discard them in favor of this new wife is actually deeply unnatural. Even though the tutor seems to. To suggest here that it's natural that you just love yourself above anybody else. And, you know, it's. That's not natural. It's natural for Jason, I suppose. Right. But I don't think that's natural in any other circumstance. When it comes to at least how a father should be. Another instance of this cliche is as complicated Theme is when the nurse says to the tutor that she's upset over the break that's happened between Jason and Medea.
And she's upset on Medea's behalf. She says, when the dice of life fall badly for a man, Master, a good slave's heart shares the pain. So there's this sort of idea of the downstream effect of pain as pain. That's something that befalls, goes from the top down and affects everybody in the household.
37:52 Wes: So the next thing to happen here after the chorus exits is I think we get a kind of call for, sorry. The nurse exits. And the chorus kind of takes note of Medea's lamentations from inside the house. And. And here's her call for justice. And then Medea. Okay, this is where I was accusing her of paranoia, essentially, or one of the several places. But Medea comes out of the house, and basically she says, ladies of Corinth, Corinthian women, I've come out of doors, in case you may be blaming me in some way for I know that arrogance is a common trait in people, whether it is noticed or kept private.
But it happens, happens too, that some win a bad reputation for idleness Simply through keeping their own company. For there's no justice in the eyes of men. A man who has done them no harm may be hated on sight. Before they have formed a true assessment of his nature. And in the case of one who has made his home in a strange city, he must take pains not to alienate the community he has joined. Even the citizen should be criticized. If he is a law unto himself. And offends his fellows by his lack of finer feelings. So we get one of these speeches, for which Euripides, I think, is famous, where she's making a sophisticated argument to the effect that she stays to herself.
She could elicit anger and ire on part of the community that she's isolating herself from either because it might be taken as arrogance. She's a law unto Herself, or it might be taken as idleness. And in general, people are quick to judgment and they may come to fear someone, even someone who may do them no harm, especially given the fact that she is a foreigner. I find that interesting. I mean, it's all realistic in a way, but also there are other reasons why people fear her at this point, which is that people are aware. At least the nurse is aware.
Creon is aware that she's been threatening him. And. And the nurse seems to be aware that she might want to kill her kids. And Medea has said things like, yeah, my kids shouldn't be alive any longer. You see what I'm saying? Her kind of agitated mental state is the thing that's concerning people. But she comes up with all these ideas about it's. She might be read as arrogant, her isolate. You see what I'm saying?
40:07 Erin: Yes. Though I give more credence to her reading of the situation, I think, than you do, because I think there's evidence for it.
40:14 Wes: I think, like I said, I think it's realistic. It just leaves out. Yes, yes, it part which is that she's depressed and.
40:21 Erin: Right. And is making a lot of threats against people. And she's killed. She's killed once, she killed again.
40:29 Wes: She's capable. She's very capable. This is the point that I wanted to get to, where she makes a speech about women in general. So this starts the theme of, you know, the role of women in society, which I guess we should just wait. We could start with that next. On the next.
40:43 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
40:44 Wes: This is basically pages 56 and 57 that will start with next time around, lines 200 and. 200 and something.
40:52 Erin: Okay.
40:52 Wes: But she has a very interesting relationship with the Chorus. We'll find out. They try to dissuade her at certain points from doing things. At other points. It looks like they're inciting her or scheming with her. There's lots of interesting stuff going on in her relationship. The. The Corinthian women, the Chorus.
41:13 Erin: So.
41:13 Wes: But I guess we'll start with that next time.
41:15 Erin: Okay.
41:16 Wes: All right. So that ends part two of our series on Medea. Part three will be out in a week. Thank you.
41:24 Erin: Thank you.
Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 1)
Sep 09, 2024
Known for casting mythical heroes in human proportions, Eurpides has his hands full with Medea—homocidal sorcerous, granddaughter of the sun, and a woman who does not take betrayal lightly. Nevertheless, the poet is able to capture the agony of someone who has given up everything for love—family, home, and homeland—only to find her passion disregarded, and her sacrifices unappreciated, by a man who robotically puts practicality above all else. But can we sympathize with a woman who would kill her own children, just for spite? Wes & Erin discuss Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
Upcoming Episodes: “A New Leaf” (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Known for casting mythical heroes in human proportions, Euripides has his hands full with Medea, homicidal sorceress, granddaughter of the sun, and a woman who does not take betrayal lightly. Nevertheless, the poet is able to capture the agony of someone who has given up everything for love, family, home and homeland, only to find her passion disregarded and her sacrifices unappreciated by a man who robotically puts practicality above all else. But can we sympathize with a woman who would kill her own children just for spite? Today we discuss ancient Greece's most notorious battle of the sexes and Euripides, rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
This is Wes Alwan, and this is Erin Olanik, and you're listening to Subtext. So Erin, I was thinking of calling Euripides the Edward Albee of ancient Greek playwrights tragedians, but then I was reading one of the few secondary sources I read it is in the Michael Collier translation, which is not the translation we're using today. It's one of the ones I read. We started out with that. It's a more poetic translation. It's really lovely. I highly recommend it. There's an introduction there, and I don't know who that is by. Maybe it's Alan Shapiro, who's one of the editors, but I think I already thought of the Edward Albee comparison before I read that.
Let's hope that I'm not just plagiarizing that. But whoever wrote that introduction, which is not Collier himself, says it's not going to turn out to be a who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Which I thought was an interesting thing to say in light of the fact that it is quite a knockdown drag out fight between Medea and Jason.
2:21 Erin: Does that make Sophocles the Arthur Miller of playwrights and Aeschylus, Eugene O'Neill or something?
2:28 Wes: Exactly.
2:29 Erin: That might actually line up a little.
2:32 Wes: It well could. Right, so we have three ancient tragedians for whom we have extant plays, and Euripides is the last of those tragedians. And so. Right. The first is Aeschylus, who in a way is a kind of throwback to a more archaic period. And then Sophocles is a transitional figure. And then Euripides is kind of a controversial figure. He has a reputation for being newfangled, for being representative of a very important transition in the culture of ancient Greece in Athens, one that's also represented by Socrates and by the Sophists. So you have this sort of cultural transition to valuing rationality, valuing the rhetorical, and a culture that is more skeptical of the gods.
And it all shows up in Euripides. So historically, he's been attacked a lot for that. That starts with Aristophanes. He was ridiculed in several plays by the comic playwright Aristophanes. He was criticized by Aristotle, also praised a little bit, but criticized for being psychologically unrealistic. The Romantics, one of the Schlegel brothers, attacked him. Nietzsche ended up attacking him and making him, along with Socrates, the representative of this cultural turn towards asceticism, which he also associated with Christianity, to the ascendance of the rational over the Dionysian.
And of course, so you can see why the Romantics would attack him and see a bit why Nietzsche in the Birth Tragedy would lay so much of his critique at the feet of Euripides.
4:12 Erin: So then why is this my favorite Greek tragedy?
4:14 Wes: Is this really your favorite Greek tragedy?
4:16 Erin: Yeah, that's the million dollar question. And why did it get third place out of three in the competition? That is what I know about it, is that it got last place in the competition.
4:27 Wes: Right, it did.
4:28 Erin: Presumably because people didn't want to be told. Here's a warning. Here's what might happen to you if you. Yeah. If you're not nice to surrounding your woman. Yeah, yeah, right. It's a cautionary tale.
4:38 Wes: Listen, if you want to marry another woman, you should ask your wife first. That's what I've gathered from this play. At a certain point, she says you should have. If you're really being honorable, you should have consulted me in advance.
4:49 Erin: But that's true.
4:51 Wes: Yeah. So this is one of the things he's noted for. Either he's a misogynist or feminist, depending on your interpretation, as Bernard Knox points out. So this is one of the other things I read in Bernard Knox. Also really wonderful entry on the Aeschylus. Sorry, I do this all the time on Euripides. They all sound alike to me. It's all Greek to me. But great entry on Euripides in the Cambridge History of Classical Literature. And by the Way that entry, I looked at the Wikipedia page as well for Euripides and for Medea, and by far the most cited source on that is this entry from Bernard Knox, who's a really wonderful classicist, wonderful writer.
Okay, so this is what Knox says about Euripides. He was a problem to his contemporaries, and he is one still, over the course of centuries since his plays were first produced, he has been hailed or indicted under a bewildering variety of labels. He has been described as the poet of the Greek Enlightenment and also as Euripides the irrationalist, as a religious skeptic, if not an atheist, but on the other hand, as a believer in divine providence and the ultimate justice of divine dispensation. He has been seen as a profound explorer of human psychology and also a rhetorical poet who subordinated consistency of character to verbal effect, as a misogynist and a feminist, as a realist who brought tragic action down to the level of everyday life, and as a romantic poet who chose unusual myths and exotic settings.
He wrote plays which have been widely understood as patriotic pieces supporting Athens, war against Sparta and others, which may have been taken as the work of the anti war dramatist par excellence. Even as attacks on Athenian imperialism. He has been recognized as the precursor of new comedy and also what Aristotle called him, the most tragic of poets. And not one of these descriptions is entirely false. So that's a really great summary of the contradictions within. And I don't know if this explains some of what makes you fond of his play. I don't know if it's his plays or this play in particular.
So he's rhetorically very advanced. He's known as a kind of an intellectual. His poetry is influenced, like I said, by the budding philosophical tradition in Athens at that time, including Socrates. In fact, he was accused by one of his critics of having Socrates as a co writer to his plays. Euripides appears as a character in some of our stuff plays, and there's so many great little jibes against him. But Aristophanes also accuses him of having someone else as a playwright. So he becomes kind of a representative, even at the time, of intellectualism, rationalism, sophistry, skeptical comportment of the gods, the sort of things that got Socrates executed, right?
Corrupting the youth. He's a newfangled liberal, in other words, and he's a threat to the conservative and more traditional tendencies at the time.
7:49 Erin: Yeah, I'm not quite sure why this is my favorite Greek tragedy, but it is, I don't know it very well. I mean, I don't. Except for Antigone and Oedipus Rex, because I've taught them before. I don't know Greek tragedies very well in general. I've read a bunch of them, but I haven't paid close attention to a lot of them. But this one I have seen in performance. It didn't strike me as who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The thing I thought of was Fargo, oddly enough, for reasons I'll maybe get to later. But it does strike me as something that could be filmed by the Coen brothers or maybe has been filmed by the Coen brothers in part over the course of several films of theirs.
So it strikes me as modern. And I think. I just. I like the speeches. I'm a simple fan in that way. I like Medea's speeches and the psychology, which seems to me to be just much more complex than any other Greek tragedy that I've read.
8:36 Wes: Yeah. So that's part of what he's known for. He gets much deeper into the psychology of his characters. He represents, in fact, gods and goddesses as if they were ordinary people driven by ordinary human emotions, which Bernard Knox says, well, really, that's actually a throwback to Homeric gods, because that is kind of what the Homeric gods were like. I think Aeschylus and Sophocles tried to elevate the gods a bit, to rationalize them as something more noble than as the way they appear. I don't know if this is true, but the way they appear in Homer. But we get much more crazy, passionate, irrational gods. And Euripides. And it's pointed to directly. So he'll have characters criticize the gods and say, you know, you're supposed to be gods. Why are you acting like human. Like crazy, irrational human beings with all these passions. How does that make any sense?
9:27 Erin: And Medea is a God herself. No.
9:29 Wes: Yeah.
9:30 Erin: You know, I found myself trying to come up with corollaries for what her magic therefore represents. The way that she's portrayed in the play lends the magic, I think, to a kind of metaphorical interpretation, because she doesn't seem to be divine in any other way. Right. So what's the purpose of giving this person. I mean, besides the fact that he's saddled with this mythological story, what's the purpose of making her someone with supernatural powers if not. Because it's trying to express something about. Actually about the situation she's in, about her psychology, about her marriage, about the threat that she faces from Creusa. Perhaps. Right. So for me, I found myself trying to figure out metaphorical corollaries, what this might represent.
10:11 Wes: That's a really good point. So, I mean, you're getting at. And we'll discuss this more as we discuss the play, should note for listeners, we're kind of doing something unusual here which involves me concentrating more on giving a lot of background. So it's kind of restraining us a bit from jumping directly into the play and hopefully that'll be helpful. Normally we're just jumping in these days, so let us know if that is helpful. But yeah, I think you're getting at. So he's doing something interesting with her magical power. Right. It's not just a mythological feature.
It has psychological implications. Maybe it's a representative of the power of the feminine or the power of the rhetorical. As the introduction to the Collier translation, I think points that out. You could see it as representative of the power of language. Of course, both Medea and Jason will talk like seasoned lawyers as they argue their cases. But I think just to get back to what you're saying about psychology. Yes, there's this tension, and this is what Knox is pointing to, between the sophistication of Euripidean psychology and his featuring of the human irrationality and divine irrationality and the types of speeches that make it into his plays.
These speeches that are accused of being overly rationalistic and philosophical. So here's for instance, what Aristophanes says about him in the Frogs. He's accused him of having a co writer who's influenced by Socrates. And then he says, so what's stylish is not to sit beside Socrates and chatter. Casting the arts aside and ignoring the best of the tragedian's craft to hang around killing time in pretentious conversation and hair splitting twaddle is the mark of a man who's lost his mind. So that's a representative of a number of Aristophanes direct attacks on Euripides.
Aristotle criticized the psychological component specifically in Iphigenia at Aulis. Too quick of a turn from him where Iphigenia is trying to avoid being sacrificed, but then suddenly says, okay, I'll do it. He didn't like that.
12:13 Erin: Well, these women are too complicated and all they do is talk, talk, talk, you know?
12:17 Wes: Yeah. So the other argument is that these reversals actually reflect human irrationality and human psychology.
12:23 Erin: Oh, so you're saying women are irrational, Wes? Is that what you're saying?
12:28 Wes: Yes. So you can tie yourself, you can fall into a number of traps
12:33 Erin: when talking To a woman, you can fall into many traps.
12:38 Wes: Is this where this is headed? So Sophocles also has a character complain that Euripides convinced men that the gods don't exist. In the frogs, he has Euripides pray, to quote, unquote, other gods, air my nourishment and intelligence. Basically, to himself, it's made out to be a irreligious narcissist. So he was accused of the types of things. Yeah, Socrates was accused of. I think the other important aspect of Euripides is the way in which his plays are supposed to speak to contemporary political life and to contemporary intellectual controversies.
So we see that. I mean, women have extremely important roles in his plays. And he is often commenting on the place of women in society, but also on other political issues. And again, you can see this as a product of the political turmoil of the time and the transformation of a society by its kind of burgeoning intellectual renaissance. All right, so that's some background on Euripides. I don't think I mentioned that historically, this play was put on in 431 BC. So that is the year the Peloponnesian War started. And in fact, the war broke out, I think, just a few weeks before the festival Dionysia.
13:56 Erin: You could see why this lost then.
13:58 Wes: It's significant because the kinds of events that Thucydides describes that leading up to the war had been going on for some time. And they include a conflict between Athens and Corinth, Corinth, which is an ally of Sparta, in a way. It's a conflict between Corinth and Athens, which drags Athens into this conflict with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, one that will turn out to be very disastrous for Athens. So that's just starting up. Attentions have been there for a while, so it's significant. Right, but this is set in Corinth. Also that Medea is an immigrant, essentially at a time when Athens naval supremacy has led to a lot of immigration, shifting social relations and power relations in Athens.
So many political and social problems that we would recognize today. So I really got sucked into this background because of all that. The more you read about that, the more fascinating it is. But we should shift to the mythology itself. Just very briefly, give a background on the mythology. I don't know how much you have there. I can keep going.
14:58 Erin: I know a lot about it. I've read the Argonautica and just. Generally familiar with the mythology.
15:04 Wes: Yeah. So who is. Who is Medea? Who is Jason? How did these two crazy kids get Together.
15:11 Erin: It was really funny. Just, I told my sister, I'm in her office right now, and I told her I was going to be recording on Medea, and she just immediately goes, like, literally, without missing a beat. Medea did nothing wrong. My sister's a therapist too, by the way. So anyway, has she treated someone who
15:29 Wes: murdered their own children yet or.
15:33 Erin: She was being performative.
15:35 Wes: That's a mandatory reporting.
15:37 Erin: I know, right? She laughed as she said it, but yeah. So Medea is the secret of Jason's success, it turns out. So Jason and the Argonauts go to find the Golden Fleece. They sail across the Black Sea to what is now modern day Georgia, to a kingdom called Colchis. And his reasons for needing to get the Golden Fleece are that his uncle has usurped the throne of Iolcus, which is where Jason is originally from. Right. So his uncle usurped the throne, and his uncle says something. Forgive me if I'm misremembering, like, sure, if you get the Golden Fleece, like, you know, sure, if you do X impossible thing, then I'll give the throne over to you. Right. So assuming that he can never do this.
16:23 Wes: Yeah. Jason has actually grown up in exile, I think, because his uncle had tried to kill off anyone who would have a claim to the throne, so wrongfully took the throne from Jason's father, Aeson. Is that how you pronounce it?
16:37 Erin: Yeah. Is it like Jason with an I or.
16:40 Wes: It's A, E, S, O, N. So Aeson, just call him Aeson.
16:43 Erin: Okay.
16:44 Wes: Jason without the J. Yeah. Added a J for his son's name. Not very imaginative, but. So he was protected by his mother. His mother pretended he was stillborn, and then he was sent off. And then there's a prophecy that Pelias the uncle, knows of, but the contender to the throne will be someone with one shoe, one sandal. And Jason actually returns and loses a sandal on the river. That's when Pelias, who's the half brother, is the uncle. Right. Let's make sure I'm not mixing this up. Right. Aeson is Jason's father. The bad uncle is Pelias. And Pelias is the one that says, yeah, go get me the Golden Fleece from Georgia. Right, Georgia. Why don't you go down to Georgia, get me a pecan pie, bring it back, then you can have. Then you can be mayor. Mayor of the city. Wait, if he's sending them down to Georgia, he wouldn't have a Southern accent.
17:45 Erin: He's from Tennessee. We'll allow you. Yeah. So Jason goes to get the Golden Fleece with the Argonauts in the Argo.
17:55 Wes: Bunch of heroes, including Heracles and, and Atalanta.
17:59 Erin: It's pretty cool. They go to Colchis and Medea is there. She's. Is she, is she a princess too?
18:07 Wes: So they go to Colchis. Yeah. And the, the king of Colchis is Aeetes.
18:12 Erin: Oh, and that's her father, who's the
18:14 Wes: son of the Sun.
18:16 Erin: Yes, that is.
18:17 Wes: She's the granddaughter of the Sun. He's the son of the Sun.
18:19 Erin: Right, because what we, what we need to add. What we need to add to all these names are some homonyms. Yes. So she, he is the son of the Sun. S U N. And she has a brother. That's important. So she's a princess and she has a prince as a brother. Right. And her father is the king of this land, I think. And anyway, so Jason wants the Golden Fleece and Medea sees him. And I think there's some speculation as to whether or not she was actually hit with Eros's arrow or if she just fell in love with him. I don't know. Of her own volition. To the extent that one can have
18:59 Wes: volition, it's either we, you know, we give a psychologically reductive explanation, which Jason in a sense, tries to do. Well, he tries to do both at the same. Either explanation is reductive. But in the play she'll say, you know, you're ungrateful for my help. And he's like, well, you didn't have any choice but to fall in love with me because of Aphrodite hits, you know, her son or whatever hits you with an arrow. So. But yeah, she's the daughter of Aeetes who says to Jason, you can have the Fleece if you perform these three impossible tasks. Impossible. Unless you have the help of my sorceress daughter, who will use her magic basically to help you do each one. He doesn't say that, but that's what turns out to be true.
19:37 Erin: He could not have done any of that. You know, like the, like the faithful wife who waits tables so that her husband can go to medical school. Medea helps him with all of his tasks and irons his shorts, probably.
19:51 Wes: Well, no, even worse than that, she takes all his tests for him and performs all his surgeries.
19:56 Erin: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's, that's even better.
19:58 Wes: So he has to do things like, you know, he has to use fire breathing oxen to plow field, for instance. And she gives him ointment to protect him from the fire. Stuff like that.
20:07 Erin: I just remember the dragon. The dragon teeth thing. Part of this is like common sense, or not common sense, but being clever.
20:14 Wes: Yeah. It's common sense to wear sunscreen if you're going to go out. And I mean, she's the. She's the granddaughter of the sun, so she knows that very well. So that is like SPF 300,000 ointment that she gives tonight from the sun, of course.
20:36 Erin: So. Oh, my God.
20:42 Wes: Sometimes it can go the other way, like burning up Jason's wife later on. But we'll tuck. Yeah. So there's also. Yeah. The drag sewing the.
20:52 Erin: The dragon's teeth in the ground. And then soldiers pop up the field
20:56 Wes: and they spring up as warriors and she tells them how to.
20:58 Erin: No, she tells him to throw a rock right among them. And then they all start fighting with each other. Turns them against each other, and then they all kill each other.
21:05 Wes: There's a dragon guarding the fleece, and she gives them a sleeping potion to put the dragon to sleep. This is a dragon that never goes to sleep otherwise. But.
21:13 Erin: Right.
21:13 Wes: She gives them potion, they get the fleece, and what's the next step here? What do they. To flee?
21:19 Erin: Well, he wasn't expected to get the Golden Fleece. Right. You know, Medea has betrayed her father by allowing this to happen in this way. She's very similar to Ariadne. This is a similar story with Ariadne and Theseus, where Ariadne helps Theseus escape the labyrinth and sort of betrays her own family to do so. And he's a jerk to her, too, so he gets it. With her help, they have to flee. She decides that she's going to leave with him on the Argo. And I guess the only way to get the father to stop trailing them, to overtake them, is she has to kill her brother and chop him up into pieces. And because I think of funereal laws about having all of the pieces of a body together to be buried, her father has to stop and pick up each piece of his son.
22:09 Wes: Yeah, you know, they do. They kidnap him or to just say, hey, come on, we're going on a road trip. You want to. You want to come along? I don't know which it is, but originally he's just along for the ride, and then, hey, my father's coming after us. What's the best way to distract him? Let's cut up your brother and throw him out into the ocean. That'll do it.
22:29 Erin: And this is really. I mean, it's all important. It's all important backstory. But she really can't go back to Colchis after this. She's probably not going to be welcomed back with open arms from people there. This is her farewell tour with no hope of a second farewell tour.
22:45 Wes: It's like hooking up with the criminal who came to rob your family. Right. Of their heirloom, the Golden Fleece, which is a really important history for Colchis. It's the ram that rescued Phrixus and Helle.
22:56 Erin: Oh, right, of course.
22:58 Wes: From their stepmother, Ino.
22:59 Erin: Good family friends of mine. Yeah.
23:01 Wes: Sent by their mother, Nephele. So Helle fell off the ram on the way to Colchis and died and held the Hellespont as named after her. Phrixus survived, married Aeetes' daughter, Chalciope. So Medea is basically the sister in law of the guy that the winged ram saved by flying to Colchis. So anyway, where were Phrixus and Helle from? I don't remember.
23:27 Erin: Alabama.
23:28 Wes: Alabama. Yep. To continue that. So anyway, it's an important fleece, and I don't think Aeetes wanted it stolen or taken. And that's why he put these impossible tasks together. So his daughter became an accomplice in that and then killed her brother. So the things people do for love. Right?
23:46 Erin: That's right. And then on the return journey, she also saves Jason a couple times. Right. I mean, I know she does the thing with Talos. So there's this large bronze man that's supposed to be. He's kind of like the Colossus of Rhodes. So I'm not really sure, but he's some sort of deity because he has ichor instead of blood. He's going to kill them. And Medea tells them, hey, there's this stopper at the bottom of his foot or something. Or in his ankle. I can't remember that. If you open it, all of his ichor is going to. You're going to exsanguinate him and kill him. And so anyway, that they do that and then they're saved and then.
24:26 Wes: And then. Does she get them through the clashing rocks which come up again and again?
24:29 Erin: I think so.
24:30 Wes: So I think at the Bosphorus, there's supposed to be these rocks that kind of bang together as ships try to go through them. So you got to time the ship going through. This is brought up again and again by the chorus. You know, you did all that you had the children, you raised them and. And you got through the clashing rocks, and now you're gonna throw all that away. I think. Jason lets a dove fly between them to help time it. The dove, like.
24:51 Erin: Oh, he actually does something, gets it
24:53 Wes: loses its tail feathers, and then he ends up getting the ship through with losing only, like, part of a stern ornament at the end. But I don't know what her role is in that.
25:03 Erin: So then they go to Iolcus. And so Pelias is like, oh, crap, you actually got the Golden Fleece. I was not expecting this. Deal's off. Just kidding. Forget it. I still want to be king. And so Medea. This is the best.
25:20 Wes: So no one lives up to their bargains in this particular mess. Yeah.
25:24 Erin: Medea's like, I'm going to get rid of Pelias for you now. So Pelias has two daughters. And Medea does a magic trick for them where she takes this old ram and she cuts it up and puts it into this magic cauldron. And then a young ram jumps out. And I guess Pelias at this point is pretty. You know, he's looking like the king of Rohan, whatever his name is. Like when before Gandalf comes and. Thank you. And performs at exorcism. He's. He's on his last leg. I can make some contemporary references here. Never mind. So it's like, what if. What if you could have the Biden of 1970? No. Okay. So the.
26:09 Wes: Look, just jump in this cauldron and I'll turn you into Kamala.
26:13 Erin: So she. So Belleus, his daughters are amazed, and they're like, wow, definitely do this for our dad, who's aged and infirm. So she's like, okay, just cut him up into pieces and I'll put him in the cauldron. Only this time, she doesn't do the magic ingredient, whatever it is. And so instead, they just cut up their dad. And then it doesn't work. And then they have to flee from Iolcus. And so they end up in Corinth. And the beginning of the Euripides play is that they've been in Corinth for a while now, I suppose, and have two sons. I know it's a matter of. You know, there's some inconsistency about how many children they actually had. According to myth, I read somewhere that it was seven sons and seven daughters. Anyway, in this play, they have two sons. Unless they have daughters that just don't deserve mentioning.
26:59 Wes: I'm not sure if Euripides has modified the myth there. I mean, I think it's widely accepted that in the original myth, Medea isn't actually the one who kills her children. That is Euripides invention.
27:11 Erin: Yeah, that's the big invention. Right. That he adds to the myth. So, in a sense, Jason is kind of a hero under false pretenses. He's not really responsible for his own success in any real way. He goes in the Argo and he takes this voyage. But everything that happens once he lands in Colchis, including the return journey and how he ends up in Corinth, it's all because of Medea's help and intervention.
27:34 Wes: You know, I think traditionally, an Athenian audience would have just thought of this, okay. These are mythological heroes, and there's a certain amount of honor that goes along with that. And part of the shock of Euripides is this kind of naturalizing or deflationary thing that he does where it looks pretty sordid. Right. Jason is now going to try to take a new wife, and he's going to turn out, in Euripides retelling to be this kind of cold on the spectrum type of guy who can rationalize his betrayal. And then Medea is going to be someone with borderline personality disorder, basically. So two insane people.
28:10 Erin: Oh, I don't read either of them that way, but okay.
28:13 Wes: Okay. All right, well, we'll have to discuss that, But I don't think either of them, of course, comes across as looking very good. So if the mythology is something that you've been raised treat with some sort of reverence, I think this is a pretty Euripides treatment of these things is pretty radical. And it is in general, in his plays, the way his treatments of the gods and heroes and demigods. All of that, I think would be shocking.
28:37 Erin: I think that's a good summation of where we are when the play's action starts. Wes, do you want to talk a little bit more about background?
28:45 Wes: Well, I just wanted to add one more, to read one more quotation to kind of set the mood for what it would have been like to actually see this perform formed in Athens at the time. We've gone a little bit into the political background, the mythological background, so I think that was important for kind of understanding how this would be received. But now just. I think this is kind of a charming description in the introduction to the Collier translation of what it would be like to see the play. So here it is as the sun rising above Mount Hymettus lights up the packed wooden bleachers on the south slope of the Acropolis, some 15,000 Athenian citizens and resident aliens, their retinues and guests from abroad, revived by warming wine, readjust their cushions, pull their cloaks around their shoulders against the early morning chill, and gaze down at the wide circle of the deserted dance floor, or orchestra, as it's called.
A short while before, just after dawn, it has been a bustle with purifications, libations poured by generals, chief among them Pericles, announcements of gold chaplets awarded to the city's benefactors, panoplied war orphans eligible for the first time to bear arms against the foe, and buckets of gold and silver tribute from subject states. But now the tribute has been removed and all the VIPs have taken their seats at the foot of the hill in the front row, toes to the orchestra's rim. The year's most prominent office holders and other notables flank the priest of Dionysus at the center and the 10 judges chosen by lot, who will soon cast their votes for the year's winning poet, not destined to be Euripides, who will come in third or dead last.
Nearby stands the old wooden statue of the wine God, brought in procession to the festival and thought to be as eager as the human spectators to watch the show. The trumpets have sounded. Anticipation has settled into stillness. In the backdrop spanning the rear of the dance audience, palace doors open. The Medea, a new play by the notorious Euripides, is about to begin. What a lovely description. So the play begins by giving us a little bit of this mythological background. Not a lot. And that's kind of the excuse in the beginning to have the characters of the nurse and the tutor having a little conversation about that.
In the beginning, it starts with the nurse saying, I wish the Argo had never gone to Colchis, and I wish the Jason and the Argonauts had never gone to get the fleece as Pelias commanded, and so on and so forth. It's an interesting way to do the background. It's about as interesting a way as you can do it, I guess. I don't know.
31:25 Erin: Yeah, it does a good job of summarizing things. There's some nice language here. I mean, she's like, you know, oh, if only none of these things had happened. And then she says, then we wouldn't be here, where Medea has won warm welcome by being such a good wife. And then she's like, you know, this is what keeps a marriage intact more than anything. She says, when a husband can count on complete support from his wife, okay, so Jason has already left Medea, who has supported him completely. So already we're getting into some complicated territory here where the nurse seems to be spouting. You know what I find interesting about this character is she's spouting a lot of. I don't know what you want to call it. Conventional wisdom, maybe, or cliche. That doesn't seem to be fun fitting this circumstance at all.
32:11 Wes: It's an odd turn. I mean, I made note of this myself because she's there to give some background, and she's saying the gist of it is, if only this wouldn't have happened, this mythological background hadn't been there, she wouldn't have done all those awful things as the implication, including killing her brother, and she wouldn't be living in exile here. And as we have to have found out, she wouldn't be so vulnerable to the betrayal of her husband. So oddly, she tacks onto that. She says, but she's been warmly welco here. And what does she say about. What is it exactly? She says about pleasing your husband as good wives do. How does she turn to that? I don't have good enough notes to. We got to look at the play here. Can you give me a page number as well?
32:52 Erin: This is. Well, I have this edition. It has three.
32:55 Wes: Page one.
32:56 Erin: Yes, page one.
32:57 Wes: Oh, yeah, so we forgot to mention we're using, I think, the Davie translation. The Penguin. Devi translation. There are multiple Penguin translations, I think.
33:05 Erin: Yeah.
33:06 Wes: And the Davie. It's a prose translation. It's really excellent. I've mentioned the Collier poetic translation, but this is the one I would recommend as being more literal, closer to the original ancient Greek. I looked at a lot of translations. I was not happy with them. This, in my opinion, is the best for accuracy.
33:23 Erin: Yeah, so she says she's an exile who won a warm welcome from her new fellow citizens and who seeks to please her husband in all she does. This is what keeps a marriage intact more than anything.
33:33 Wes: Sorry, what's the page again?
33:35 Erin: 51, I think.
33:37 Wes: Okay, so the very first page.
33:39 Erin: Yeah. This is in the first paragraph of the speech of the play.
33:43 Wes: Sorry, so she's bemoaning, you know. Yeah, she's bemoaning. I wish this had never happened and that she hadn't come here to be
33:49 Erin: warmly welcomed, implying she has a good reputation, which also is a little suspect. We come to learn she's not been accepted, perhaps in the way that the nurse believes she's been accepted. Maybe that's part of the problem.
34:00 Wes: Well, Medea doesn't Think she's been accepted. Yeah. But also, I think Medea's quite paranoid. But Medea will have lots to say about.
34:08 Erin: I don't think she's paranoid at all. Creon comes to her and basically says, you've never really been. You know, we've always been afraid of you.
34:14 Wes: Yes. I mean, it's both. Right. Her standing as an outsider is bleak, and that's important. But she also says many things which I'll point to as we go on. You know, I'll show you where I think, you know, when we get to it, where I think she goes beyond the reality into this sense of something persecutory. And in essence, she's.
34:32 Erin: But.
34:32 Wes: But we'll get there.
34:33 Erin: Well, she's a little upset too. You know, she's. She's not in a great frame of mind.
34:38 Wes: She's been betrayed by her husband. She's dependent on him. She's a foreigner in a strange land.
34:43 Erin: He's. Currently, she's getting married to another woman.
34:46 Wes: Right.
34:46 Erin: Right in front of her. So she's obviously very. You know, I hate to pathologize in this way, but she's obviously very depressed. Someone calls her depressed in the play. Forget about. If only she hadn't done this, that or the other. If only she had gone to college with Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton. She'd have a support system of first wives bent on financial revenge. And then she wouldn't be alone. But she's very alone.
35:10 Wes: Well, she killed her support system. Right. So that's a big part of the play is this tension between having family and having a homeland, those two things, and having a lover and romantic love. So there's familial affection. There's affection for one's homeland, one's nation, fatherland, motherland, however you want to put it. Those two things are quite related. Those affections are contrasted to the affections involved in romantic love, which, when you think about it, are really strange because it's a stranger. At some point, I think this is pointed out, the person you fall in love with is a stranger. Your family you've been raised with, you have a common culture. Same thing with the nation, in a sense. There's a very, very significant groundwork that. That undergirds familial affections. But running into some guy who's there to take an heirloom from your father.
36:01 Erin: She loves a bad boy, saying, okay,
36:03 Wes: that stranger is now the center of my world, and then running off with him. That's the problem. And in doing so. Right. So the mythology. And then, as Euripides plays it, he wants to really, really ramp up the factor of. Okay, well, I've burned my bridges with my family now, and all I have is this romantic partner whom I'm dependent on. And not just in the typical way of, okay, I've become dependent on this person for affection. Right. But I'm dependent on. Because I now live in a foreign country and it's not even his country. Right. I can't even hang out with his family.
There's no family to rely on. There's no one to fall back on. Not my own, not his. We're just foreigners in this kingdom and at the mercy of others. So they are, in a way, fugitives. And all they have is each other. And then he abandons her and betrays her. But also she put herself there. And in fact, she, you know, she chummed her brother and threw him into the ocean. So you gotta keep that in mind.
37:04 Erin: Okay. Yeah.
37:08 Wes: Don't chum your brother if you want to go back home for Thanksgiving.
37:11 Erin: Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, this is the bedrock of Internet dating. I don't know.
37:16 Wes: All right, say more about that. I like that.
37:18 Erin: Well, you know, you call someone up on your. On your magic rectangle, you know, who you don't know anything about, especially if you don't have good Google stalking skills or whatever. And then, you know, you both move to Denver and you pray that he doesn't kill you. I don't know.
37:38 Wes: Denver, the Corinth of the American.
37:42 Erin: Yeah. Imagining that, you know, your families live on either coast and you, you go to Denver to work at a startup.
37:48 Wes: Oh, yeah.
37:48 Erin: And.
37:48 Wes: Right. Very good.
37:49 Erin: You know, he's a transplant. You're a transplant. You hope bad things don't happen.
37:54 Wes: Yeah. Don't move to Denver for someone.
37:55 Erin: Yeah. And all you have in common is that you both love craft, beers and rock climbing. That's why Denver is your chosen city.
38:03 Wes: Before you know it, before you know it, you're killing your own children.
38:06 Erin: Yeah.
38:06 Wes: Let that be a lesson to everyone.
38:09 Erin: Just saying, you know, don't jump into anything. That is what this play hinges on.
38:15 Wes: That's a good point. Yeah. So that, that factor of. That the romantic partner is a stranger.
38:21 Erin: I mean, everyone's a stranger. You know, that's the thing.
38:24 Wes: No, but I was just. I just was saying I like your dating app comparison. I think that's very apt. Because that more than. Maybe this is about what you're about to point to, but. Yeah. There were traditionally your Potential partner was less of a stranger because they might have been a cousin, half sister. No, they could well have been related to you. They would have been someone you grew up with, knew, very likely in a different society at a different time, or you would have had the containing effect of a political alliance between families, arranged marriages, all that stuff. So there is something about dating apps which accentuates this strangeness factor.
39:03 Erin: This is also the attraction with Jason, right? I mean, this is part of the attraction is that he is. I mean, sure, Medea likes a bad boy and part of the. Part of the bad boy appeal, right, is the person that you don't know who's. You don't know what they're going to do. They're a wild card. I mean, this is part of this strangeness is what's needed in the romantic relationship. I mean, she has the very same. You know, we can argue that she has a quote unquote exotic appeal for him by this very same token, right? Because she is from. You know, this is why I love the. I mean, there's so many reasons why I love the Pasolini Medea, did you watch it? Did you?
39:43 Wes: No.
39:44 Erin: Oh, okay.
39:44 Wes: Not yet. I do want to see it.
39:46 Erin: But it really highlights the strangeness of the culture in Colchis. Everything feels really strange and foreign in that film, including the culture in Corinth, as it should, Right? Because it does. It feels like really far removed from us. But Colchis is especially strange and disturbing and the fashions are super different. The landscape is really crazy. You know, he uses Cappadocia, I think, for Colchis, which is not the right kind of feel at all for something that I imagine would be really lush on the Black Sea. And, you know, Cappadocia is instead quite stark looking, but it's a great shorthand for just a place that's really different from this beautiful kind of stone edifice and very blank stone edifice of Corinth where the action takes place in that city.
And. Yeah, so you get the sense that this is part of. I mean, you don't. Within the myth, like it's Medea falls in love with Jason. I don't know that there's any psychology commensurate to that in him in which he, you know, she suddenly just is like, along for the ride. Because I guess, you know, she's such an asset to him that he figures it's good for her to be around. But we don't. We don't get the sense that he really loves her.
40:57 Wes: I mean, as Euripides portrays it. He uses her, and he's a robot. I mean, again, I. I think you disagree with this, but hopefully I'll persuade you he's on the spectrum.
41:07 Erin: He's a. I think he's a social
41:09 Wes: climber and he's a social climber. And. Yeah, I mean, that's probably the more prominent aspect.
41:13 Erin: I think very few people who are social climbers are on the spectrum.
41:17 Wes: But he argues he's emotionally obtuse in the way that he presents his arguments. So. And so, yeah, obviously it's a joke. I'm joking that he's on the spectrum.
41:26 Erin: No, no, no, no, no.
41:27 Wes: I mean, he's, you know, he's a representative of logic and rationality, but he takes it to an extreme and it's almost comic in its effect. Yeah, or it could be comic. I mean, there's a lot. Right. Euripides has been. I think one of the refrains that I got out of the background literature is that he pushes these characterizations in their realism or naturalism to the point of the. Of being comic. And so he's not. When he's naturalizing gods and heroes, it's in a way that you might see as debasing. It's almost, at some points, it's like laughable. Like, they turn out to be worthy of mockery, essentially.
41:59 Erin: I think he's a really selfish, obtuse man who wants what he wants, and he's just willing to cut people out of his life when it serves him to get something else. And he uses this logic idea to calm down this crazy woman who wants to stand in the way. Like, I think he's a narcissistic, obtuse male who is upset that Medea is upset with his behavior because it really puts a crimp in his special day.
42:26 Wes: Yeah, she's not unreasonable for being upset, but she is also unreasonable.
42:31 Erin: Yes. I mean, there is a.
42:33 Wes: In the degree to which she takes. I mean, they are both pictures of excess in a way. Excessive, quote, unquote, moderation. Right. So Jason is representative of this new ethos that has taken over Athenian culture. And it's part. Socrates is in part responsible for it, and the Sophists are to some extent responsible as well, but moderate. The concept of moderation is idealized and idolized, and so increasingly is rationality. So what's getting a bad rap? The irrational passions. Right. And by the time Plato is going to write the Republic, he's going to be attacking the poets, attacking this depiction of irrational human behavior on the stage.
Because it's corrupting. So, oddly enough, he's going to make this argument about corruption in the opposite direction. That's the people who are inflaming the passions of their audiences by representing these irrational characters on stage who are having the corrupting effect. So I think Euripides is using this myth to play out this conflict or to explore this conflic between these two opposing cultural forces now in Athenian society, one which is more representative of their Homeric heritage and what the divine represents in Greek culture, which has something to do with the instinctual and the irrational, and then the new rationality that is set in opposition to it and is deflationary with respect to the gods.
And could be the sorts of accusations that were leveled at Euripides. They're explicitly explored in his plays what it means for a society to become philosophical and be threatened with loss of its core beliefs, belief in the gods. So, anyway, sorry to interrupt there. I don't know if I interrupted or not because I talked so long that I forgot.
44:25 Erin: No,
44:28 Wes: but, yeah, that's what I was trying to get at is these sense in which both Jason and Medea are sort of limiting cases. They're representations of different types of. Of excess, and they allow Euripides to explore this very interesting social conflict, cultural conflict.
44:44 Erin: What I find compelling about this is that it feels so modern to me. So therefore, perhaps I'm bringing a reading to Jason which is overly contemporary or which is reliant on what I think I understand about a marriage like this. I'll put that in quotes to maybe be discussed at length later. But what I see is Jason using Jason having passions, having a strong desire for Creusa. So I actually think he's, you know, he's throwing Medea over because she's older and he's not interested in her anymore. And I think that. I mean, there are complex reasons for this, but I think that basically he desires a younger, less threatening woman.
I think this is politically expedient for him, of course, but I think also he desires Creusa. And he's using. So he has these passions and he's using a logical defense to try and get the better of Medea and highlight her passion. So he's cloaking himself in this sort of logical argument to try and make Medea look and feel crazy and irrational for having the. What I think is a fairly. I mean, up to a point, a fairly, like, realistic, psychologically realistic reaction, obviously, very quickly goes off the rails. Right. But she's devastated. Yeah, she really was in love with him, is still in love with him, and he's leaving her for a younger woman, and she has no one.
Yeah. So I think he's. He's motivated by passion. I have evidence for this. Not just, you know, the fact that I think this is a kind of familiar story for some people. Yeah. And I think he's using this. This logical defense of, like, hey, you know, I'm just doing this because this is good for us. Like, you know, this is, you know, this sort of classic psychological manipulation tactic is essentially what I'm trying to convey here with. With how I. How I see this working.
46:32 Wes: I mean, I think it's. It's complicated because she's the granddaughter of the sun. She is nuts. It's also. She's. It's perfectly understandable. It's perfectly understandable. Human passion. Right. Euripides is mixing all these things up in a cauldron. That's a perfectly psychologically realistic depiction of the anguish of rejection and also of powerlessness and being alone in a foreign land. All those things. But she's someone who chummed her brother, betrayed her father, did all this terrible things. She is actually a sorceress. So I think that's the tension here.
On the one hand, she's the representative of human irrationality, and it's its limits, its passions, I should say, because there's an irrationality to Jason's rationality as well. But also, she is, to some extent, was meant to be a psychologically realistic depiction of someone who might as well be a human being. Right. It's not just mythology anymore. She's not just a cipher. She's not just a representative of some psychology. She has that psychology. There's something more naturalistic and realistic about it. So he's doing those two things at once.
In other words, the context for the plot is very unrealistic. It's mythology and it's granddaughter, the son and all that. And then there's an interesting tension when you try to introduce psychological realism into that and in particular, these horrible murderous acts. Because the psychology of being upset by rejection is one thing, but then the psychology of what I've called her paranoia and her worry about being a laughingstock and people making a mockery of her, that's something else.
48:16 Erin: Oh, I have so much to say about this.
48:18 Wes: The psychology that leads you to kill your children is also something else entirely. But I'm eager to hear your defense of Medea.
48:25 Erin: I have, by the way, a lot to say about this.
48:29 Wes: You're saying Medea?
48:30 Erin: No, I said no, no, no, no, no. When I say it out loud, I say Medea. When I say it in my head, I say Medea. So one time, I think it slipped out a couple times just to.
48:40 Wes: All right, just make sure I'm not.
48:41 Erin: No, no, no. Okay, well, we should probably end here. So I'll just say maybe it would be useful to talk about how this magic, how her sorcery is working as a metaphor. Maybe how I see it working as a metaphor. I don't know if you have a reading of this, but this divine element of Medea, maybe that's something we could begin part two with of our discussion and talk a little bit about the significance of the sorcery to the marriage. That's what I'll say as a teaser.
49:07 Wes: All right, so we got through page one. That's the end of part one of our 37 part series on Euripides. Medea. No. So I think this will be a four. We'll do two recordings, which will mean four parts. So this is the end of part one. Otherwise you can just wait a week. Okay, thank you.
49:33 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Love and Loneliness in “Arthur” (1981) – Part 2
Sep 02, 2024
It’s awful being alone, according to millionaire playboy Arthur Bach, and nobody should be alone. And so he forestalls this feeling by getting drunk, picking up prostitutes, and laughing at his own jokes. Yet love in its true form can be a lonely business, as his servant Hobson reminds him, because it involves growing up, getting serious, and taking care of someone other than oneself … only to lose them—in one way or another—to the inevitable advance of time. What is it about working class Linda Marolla, whom Arthur first encounters in the process of shoplifting a tie for her father’s birthday, that gets him beyond this impasse? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Steve Gordon’s 1981 romantic comedy “Arthur,” and why, if you want to learn to become independent, sometimes the best that you can do is to fall in love.
Upcoming Episodes: Medea (Euripides), A New Leaf (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt)
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: All right, welcome to part two of our discussion of Arthur. We had just got done talking about Arthur's first encounter with Linda and how he fell for her at first sight because she was committing the perfect crime and why it is that that interested him so much. So I had just said something about Hobson's and his family's misinterpretation of Arthur's capacity for love and in particular, his relationship with Linda and how it was important that Arthur show them it was something real in order to win the day. Ultimately.
1:06 Erin: Yeah, I'm thinking about that ending and how I know some people have problems with it. You know, the whole conflict of the plot dissolves instantly where the grandmother just changes her mind and decides to give Arthur the money anyway. But, yeah, it's interesting that it's framed in terms of his speaking with Linda about their children, like the possibility of future children. Right. And of those children being raised working class in addition to him having to get a job and doing various other things that the grandmother finds abhorrent. I think there's an explicit discussion of children in that last scene.
And so that moment, I guess, for the grandmother hearing that this next generation is going to be raised working class is what makes her see Arthur as an adult, like someone who's capable of having children, which is interesting, considering how much she sleeps around, that now suddenly he's capable of having a child. Right. But I think you're right that this shows that he's signaling futurity in his capacity for sacrifice and in his love for Linda, and that therefore, he's capable of bearing a legacy, and therefore the family legacy has to be bestowed upon him now that he can be the torchbearer and pass it on to another generation.
Right.
2:13 Wes: Yeah. So the grandmother saves him from being murdered. Don't mess with me or don't fuck with me, Bert.
2:21 Erin: Yeah, this is a crazy grandma.
2:24 Wes: Yeah, yeah. And then he goes out and. And, you know, onto the stage. What do you call it in a church? What is the stage?
2:34 Erin: The altar.
2:36 Wes: Because the whole thing is the altar. No.
2:40 Erin: Yeah.
2:42 Wes: All right, well, he's on the stage. Everyone's in their pews watching and in
2:49 Erin: their seats, in the orchestra.
2:50 Wes: Yeah, yeah. And tells him, you know, there's not going to be a wedding. Everyone's shocked. And then we get a fade out. Then he collapses and we get a fade to Linda. Helping him with his wounds and putting iodine on him. And that hurts. Stop it. You know, him being like a little boy. And the grandmother is watching from one of the pews in the middle of, you know, so. So the. It's empty except for her watching. And they're proceeding as if they don't know she's there. Almost. You know, it's almost like they get married right there. She says, you know, do you promise to love me and obey me and be a good boy?
And right after she says that, the grandmother cuts to the grandmother and she's Martha, who's wonderful. And she's suddenly very, very alert. So I think it's a convincing transition. And then he says, do you promise never to put that stuff on my face again? And she says, I do. And so those are their vows. And the grandmother, as a witness to their little quasi wedding after he says, don't put that stuff in my face again. I do. And she gets up and he pushes off her head, yeah, just like, don't mess with me. And then he gets up to starts just soliloquizing and fantasizing about, oh, God, it's going to be great.
We're going to be like one of those poor couples on the subway who hold hands, and then he's, I'll get a job. Just all these new possibilities that being poor opens up. And of course, that's realistic in a sense, right? Not being able to use the money as a crutch is an actual pathway to adulthood and independence. But when he says, I get a job, the grandmother, that's when she really perks up again. And so that, nominally, is what pushes her to say, no Bach has ever had a job. I'm going to make you take this money. But in reality, of course, she's just witnessed the authenticity of his love.
He's willing to make the sacrifice, clearly. So if he's willing to make that sacrifice, there must be something true about it. And again, it's almost as if she's been the lone audience member to an actual wedding.
4:56 Erin: I like that a lot. Saying Bach kind of reminds me. I forgot to. I don't know, to just ponder this a little bit and make something of it. But I was just thinking about a job he could get as a concert pianist. He can make a killing that way, right? He has this. He has this musical last name. And the more I thought about it, the more he really reminded me so much of Mozart and Amadeus with the, you know, like, Mozart's kind of insane laughter and the, I Just wondered if there was something to be made of this connection between, you know, maybe not the piano playing, but something of.
Not of genius per se, but something out of proportion to normal human life, like a gift that you have that makes you different. I just. I wonder about wealth making Arthur a kind of savant, you know, like if there's a parallel that could be drawn there between the type of person Mozart is in the film Amadeus. Of course.
5:51 Wes: Yeah.
5:52 Erin: And the same personality traits in Arthur. Being a little boy, being ebullient. Right. You know what I'm trying to say. I'm not sure how I can. You know, Amadeus came out after this. Like, I'm sure the play, I think, was probably happening around the same time because it was a play first. And of course, it has a long history of various adaptations of the story. Though what the film does with making Mozart into this really obnoxious, cackling little kid is maybe a bit different from what had been on the stage. I'm not sure. But they're near contemporaries, these two films. I think Amadeus is 84, I think.
6:27 Wes: Yeah. I mean, there are benefits to. Well, in this case, this is not a parallel exactly. But what I like about the film, as we discussed in the beginning, is it pointing to his wealth and his ability to rely on money and family and servants as something that's been stunting to his growth as a person. But it also points to the strengths of that. And there are real strengths. You know, he's had a good education. He's obviously had piano lessons. He's funny and witty. And of course, some of his. You know, he has other capacities which come from his interactions with servants.
Especially Hobson. Right. Hobson calls him son, and he calls Hobson father, I think, and that's the truth of it. And it's a father. That interaction with a servant means he got to have a father who, despite being snobby and English, was not a rich person himself. Which, of course, one can say this is part of why Arthur would be attracted to someone like Linda. He has a strong enough identification with the servants. Right. Not just with the masters. He could be totally corrupt and spoiled and nasty, just someone who is all about himself and being served by other people.
But he has somehow been able to develop this relatedness through his relationships with servants. I think. I think one could say that in general, this is a general theme in his psyche, but especially, of course, with a father figure like Hobson. So this may be the thing that ironically, has saved him in a relationship that is potentially purely Exploitative. He got some elements of character which allowed him to move beyond that, which is not something one can say. Right. For his father or Susan's father. These people are just portrayed as purely exploitative rich people.
I don't know if that's what you're getting. I mean, you were getting at, I think the parallel to Mozart. You were talking about genius, Right. There's a genius. Arthur has a kind of genius. I think that's true as well. Yeah.
8:29 Erin: It's interesting when he does at the engagement party and you see him kind of command a room, it's like, oh, he could be a nightclub entertainer actually, you know, like the comedic genius and the, you know, I love his line about poets drinking. Something about, you know, very, very poetic construction of, of what he says about, you know, some of us drink because we're not poets. Right.
8:52 Wes: Oh yeah.
8:53 Erin: But in fact, he's as close to, to one as you can be probably without being a poet. Right. His one liners are pretty, pretty great. So yeah, there's something special about him. And I wonder too. Yeah. If the ability to handle the wealth so well as you're suggesting is also a kind of genius shifting a bit. I want to talk about the preponderance of father figures in the film and how the Linda and her father relationship is a pretty interesting one too. And I think the reason why I probably loved this, it took me watching this for the podcast and thinking it through to realize why I like this movie so much.
And it's just because it could have been made in 1936. You know, this is basically just one of the movies that I really, really like where, you know, there's a high class people that drink all the time and have fun. And Linda, you know, there's this class crossing thing which happens in the Lady Eve and some of those romantic comedy films from that era. There's the, you know, the playfulness that unites central couple, which is really important to that couple's sort of concept as a couple that they have a sense of humor that unites them that other people can't access.
So we know that, you know, Susan, because she doesn't get the joke or she doesn't get that Harold is a made up person that Linda was trying to cover with some improv. This marks Susan as being an unsuitable partner for Arthur. Right. Whenever someone is humorless, doesn't get the joke, that's supposed to signal that the main couple is right for each other and the alternatives are not right right for them.
10:26 Wes: And the upper class high Status is associated with humorlessness.
10:29 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. And there's usually like, even in the Awful Truth, you know, Irene Dunne becomes the low class fake sister of the Cary Grant character in order to basically, you know, burst the balloon of Cary Grant's wealthy fiance's pomposity and her family's pomposity. Right. There seems to be in these films a great. Even though there's a high premium put on leisure and things associated with being high class, there's a great deal of, I think of refreshment and reinvigoration that occurs with the sort of cross pollination between classes. And having the lower classes.
Right. Mixed with the upper is really important to these films and to what makes the relationship kind of either stay sexy because the. Because the main couple is high class and they have. Have some infusion of more vivacity in this kind of role play of being lower class or whether it's like a very literal marriage between classes.
11:33 Wes: Yeah. The lower class isn't more in touch with reality. Right.
11:37 Erin: Yeah.
11:37 Wes: Because the reality principle is more a factor in their lives. They have to survive. So wealth detaches one from reality and it becomes a kind of psychosis inducing ultimately. And you need the lower class to bring you back down to. To earth to reintroduce reality, including relatedness,
11:55 Erin: including actual love and real ingenuity. Right. Like there's usually an association with almost a kind of atrophy, mental atrophy of the upper classes. Right. Whereas you have to be scrappy, you have to be quick on your feet. You have to be, you know, all these things that seem to make one also a good lover. Like a good, you know, a good romantic lead. Someone who can think quickly, can hit the ball back in the verbal exchanges. Right. You have to have a kind of mental flexibility and quickness and acuity in order to kind of play at the level of these couples. And I think Arthur and Linda are the same way. But I'm also thinking about the fact that another really obvious sign that this is part of that 30s family of romantic comedies is that Linda doesn't have a mom. You know, she just has the father. Like all these women in those movies are missing their mothers.
12:47 Wes: Yeah. And this is really interesting and maybe you can say more about this, but I thought of Pretty in Pink. I think that's a movie where Molly Ringwald is with her father and there's no mother in the picture. And I don't. This seems like a very, very 80s thing or this type of. And maybe again, I'm right. Correct me if I'm wrong. Or at least it's not after that. First of all, the two elements. So class plays a big role in 80s comedies, and it plays a big role in Pretty in Pink as well. Class differences in a way that I just don't see in contemporary or more recent films.
But you can correct me if I'm wrong about that. But. But also the same thing with this scenario of a single father with a daughter and that relationship being highlighted. Isn't that relatively rare these days? You're saying it's. It's there in older movies, but am I wrong to think that that went away for the most part, or.
13:40 Erin: No, not at all. I mean, I think, you know, 80s movies are basically just operating in 30s and 40s, 40s tropes. Right. Like, we even have the return of 1940s fashion in the 80s. Right. So 30s and 40s are obsessed with class because of the sort of equalizing nature of the Depression. You know, I mean, in a way, I think we're trying to catch up to 20s and 30s notions of equality in our current culture. Right. 40s, we were set back, in my opinion, we were set back in terms of gender equality and various other things post World War II. But that sort of like dream period between the end of what's called pre code movies.
So a burst of movies that are romantic comedies that have these class elements started being made in 1934 with the restrictions of the Hays Code, where they basically couldn't be as explicit in films about sex and various other things about relationships. It became very verbal, and the conflict and the sexiness had to come from other places. So that was kind of like the perfect conditions under which these highly verbal, intelligent comedies were being made. And then up until just about 44 and 45, when people started coming home is when that kind of fell apart.
The latest, I think, example of this kind of film in the 40s era is Adam's Rib from 1949, where Hepburn and Tracy play lawyers. They're married lawyers that are trying opposite sides of a case. And that's a pretty rare film for a lot of the Tracy, Hepburn stuff. Kind of survived longer into the post war years because they had a sort of established team during the war years. So anyway, so then those films kind of went away, and then they had a resurgence in the 80s. I'm not sure why that. Maybe because of the depression in the 70s, right. And then people starting to.
The economy starting to accelerate in the 80s. Maybe the conditions were just similar in the country. And literally, like the shoulder Pads. Everything from the 40s just came back just with brighter colors.
15:39 Wes: It's funny, you want to live in the 30s film and I want to live in the 70s and 80s and I already did live in the 70s and 80sie, so it makes no sense.
15:46 Erin: Well, women have a much better deal in the 30s than they do in 70s and 80s films.
15:51 Wes: Women do, yeah.
15:52 Erin: They're far more complex characters in the 30s. I think there's also just a richer pool of talent. These 30s and 40s actresses, you know, 70s and 80s post New Hollywood, where they kind of gutted the film industry of interesting women. You have exceptions to this, of course. Right. Diane Keaton in Woody Allen films, like basically any Woody Allen film, is an exception to this rule. That's one of the reasons why it was so, you know, it's so painful as a film industry to lose him as a mainstream talent because he was giving basically all the great.
He was directing more women to Oscars than I think almost anybody else, certainly to Oscar nominations and giving women interesting roles. Right. But New Hollywood was about men and criminality and to a certain extent the exploitation of women. And I don't think we've really bounced back from that since the 80s were a bit more complex, but the roles just aren't there for women anymore. And then franchises exploded and now we are where we are. Actually the 90s had more interesting roles for women. There was a little bit of a resurgence in the 90s.
16:50 Wes: Yeah. In this movie. Linda, obviously strong female role by any standard. And nothing is made of this fact in the movie. Right. There's no explicit message about gender roles in the movie. She just happens to be that and he happens to be what he is. It's an interesting dynamic because. Yeah, there's no caricature there. She's the strong woman and he's the passive guy. They're both assertive and passive at different moments. Right. There's a nice complexity to that.
17:23 Erin: I assume you mean to place this in contrast to modern day movies in which this is more self conscious or something.
17:29 Wes: Yes. So for instance, in contemporary films even romance is kind of verboten because for women in films, unless it's explicitly a romantic comedy. So for instance in retellings of fairy tales, because it's supposedly demeaning for women to be interested in men in films. What is that test?
17:49 Erin: The Bechdel test.
17:51 Wes: So you see this a lot now where there are films now with no romantic subplot, which is extraordinary because there's supposed to be something demeaning about. Even though this is just a central part of human life, something demeaning for women about being interested in men. So that to me is an overreaction.
18:05 Erin: Yeah.
18:06 Wes: Or the portrayal of women as just kicking incredible amounts of ass in films, which is more forgivable because, you know, the portrayals of men kicking incredible amounts of ass in action films is also unrealistic. No one can do that.
18:21 Erin: Right.
18:21 Wes: Jason Bourne can't do that. And there are no Superman.
18:25 Erin: Well, there's Stallone. That I believe, but there's Stallone. But he always loses.
18:30 Wes: But anyway, this very. This very self conscious attempt to make women strong in a way that is very one dimensional and to me, just as, you know, not great for women either. So. Right. So Linda is what she is. She's a complex character. She's not just, oh, I'm the strong woman and you're the weak man. That is undermined control. It's a much more natural, dynamic relationship. Yeah.
18:55 Erin: Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Because there's no. Yeah. There's no paradigm for that for decades. Yeah. This is why I don't really watch any contemporary films. So I don't have a. I just sequester myself from that kind of stuff and I get to live in a world where things are still normal, a world of my own creation.
19:11 Wes: She's tough as nails in a way. It's part of the class distinction. He's a bit soft because he's upper class, but there's, you know, there are pockets of toughness psychologically for him and pockets of softness psychologically for her. Their interaction is much more interesting than it would be if it were just pure caricature, which I do think contemporary movies are much closer to that in general because they're trying too hard.
19:35 Erin: I agree. Yeah. I mean, I think there are a lot of complicated reasons why that is, some of which is just a backlash from films in the. In the aughts. Right. And the preponderance of, you know, the teen movie tradition from back in the 80s and various other kinds of backlashes, and then just agendas also sort of confusingly mixed with that so that you end up getting some sort of denuded product that bears no relation to actual film. It's just been put together by a committee, you know. But back to what this has in common with 30s films and the lack of the mother character.
You know, of course Cavell has a lot to say about this, but this is just a Shakespearean convention. Right. So the 30s films are really interested in Shakespearean comedy and romance. 80s films in drawing on these types of conventions are also, therefore, drawing on a kind of Shakespearean heritage in which we have, like Miranda and Prospero, we have Hero and her father. I can't remember his name in Much Ado. And Beatrice actually having. No. No parents. But Hero's father, her uncle is kind of a surrogate parent. And various other examples of this.
Right.
20:40 Wes: Also King Lear. Right. Another absent mother.
20:43 Erin: Right, Right. Yeah. That's a little more complicated, I suppose. Yes, yes. But the idea in the 30s films, the way they sort of work this, is that the father is not an impediment to the daughter's desire for marriage and for romance. The signal of the ineligible man for the woman in 30s comedy is a man who has a mother who's overly involved. Right. We see this in all the Ralph Bellamy iterations. Right. Ralph Bellamy always has a MA who he's really attached to. And the idea is that when he marries the woman who's considering him as an option, that they're going to go live with his mother.
So she's going to be highly involved, and this is going to be an impediment. You know, this is all unspoken, but this is going to be a great impediment to their sex life. So basically, we can't envision the main woman in these comedies having a truly adult relationship with one of these men that she's trying out as the alternative to the Cary Grant character or whoever it might be. We can imagine. We can't take it seriously because they don't seem like enough of an adult, this alternative man, because they're so attached to the mother. And this connection between a man and his mother is seen as.
As something that's, you know, it's connected with tragedy more often than not when it is portrayed. It's not particularly healthy in theater and in film. It could be pretty unhealthy. There's something about the girl father dynamic that works. So you get some guidance. You get a loving parental figure who has an investment in a daughter's happiness, and it's not restricting. And it sort of signals her. Her availability to make a new life with a man because her mother isn't there, which, you know, I don't know what that says about. About mothers.
It's unfortunate. Cavell has this idea that because women were so independent in the 30s, they latched onto the Shakespearean convention as a way to just do away with the obligations one might have to the previous generation, that these women could be totally independent, could have. Could make these marriages of love and that. That what the mother signaled, which was connection to a kind of shared past and a cultural past, could just be done away with entirely by eliminating mothers from these films. Fathers are more flexible in that way. And the fathers in the 30s films are always on the side of the young woman having the romantic relationship with the suitable man, with the Cary Grant with the romantic hero.
In other words, they're not impediments to their daughters basically being like a romantic sexual being. And it's funny how in this film that's kind of used as a. I mean, that's certainly there. That trope is there, but the father is also, like, really, really stands to gain, too, from her marriage to Arthur. And his desire for her to be with him is. Yes. It's, of course, motivated by her happiness. And we kind of. We know that he's this. We sense that he's a wonderful guy in addition to being Jerry Seinfeld's dad. We sense he's a wonderful guy.
Right. And that he actually has her best interest interests at heart. But also he's motivated by the wealth that Arthur can provide for her, which is a perfectly normal and natural thing to be motivated by. Right. So it's just funny that there's this element of class there as well. Like, it's quite different, you know, even from Charles Coburn's relationship with Barbara Stanwyck and the Lady Eve, in that he balks at her desire to actually go straight and marry Henry Fonda, even if that means financial independence for her because it will restrict the freedom of her spirit or something.
Right. Linda's father is far less complex and far more accepting of this wealth for him and his daughter.
24:20 Wes: So, yeah, I was also going to say, I think with missing mothers. Right. So there's lots of psychological implications to that. And in the case of a daughter, a lone daughter with a father, there's the danger of the father not letting her go is a greater danger because she becomes a substitute for the mother and because there's no point of identification for the daughter. Not that there's no point, but the mother as a node of identification for the purposes of growing up, is not there. And so she could be left simply with her attachment to the father.
So another way of having one's development arrested. And you can read like Shakespeare's Tempest, is all about the psychological dynamics of that and how it is that Prospero, right, when he abjures his rough magic and his sense of omnipotence and his grandiose sensibilities, it's also about his capacity to give up his daughter. In this case. Yeah. Linda's father. You get a sense of a very nice relationship between them. It's not a dynamic. And I think, in part probably because they've had to focus on survival. So that's a whole new third element.
That, in a way, the mom is still in a picture, in a sense, if one is worried about meeting one's basic needs and they have to do that together. So the father, of course, is comically interested in Arthur's money. And in the she gets with a rich man, the scene where he's listening outside the door when they're having a fight. When he showed up to the apartment drunk and they're having a fight in the room and she's like. Like that. Turns down the $100,000. He just makes that noise and then bites his fist. It's great.
26:04 Erin: So great.
26:05 Wes: But I think it's also worth pointing out. So I guess Arthur's mom is not in the picture either. So we have two absent mothers and we never, of course, learn why or what's going on with that. Which is great. Right. I'm glad we don't get any backstory on that. And maybe Arthur is better off. Maybe Arthur is better off having had Hobson. You can really. If being a mama's boy is one of the dangers, then that could have been the nail in the coffin for Arthur.
26:34 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. It's interesting that so much of the film operates just on this innate feeling of goodwill we have towards the characters and the sense that these characters are good people. Because Linda's father's eagerness to get her married off that's something that actually can usually signal disaster in a Shakespeare production. Right. Like, this is a theory that some people have about Much Ado actually, is that Hero's father is actually too eager to get her married off. He's too eager to have Claudio take her. And then when her reputation is falsely trashed, Claudio somehow has this innate lack of confidence in Hero's own worth because of her father's willingness to marry her off without giving him a proper task.
Right. And this is actually what undermines Claudio's belief in Hero's good character. So these things can actually be dangerous for a woman if their father is too willing to get rid of them. Right. It's, you know, the hasty goods gotten rid of, you know, too quickly is danger. That's discussed in Jane Austen novels as well. Right. What are you trying to get away with if you're trying to foist your daughter on somebody. And instead, like, because we just have this belief in Linda's father's goodness and in Linda's character, you know, when she says at some point, I think very early, when she's about to get on the bus, right after they've had the, you know, the little improv moment on the street, she says something like, you know, I'm a wonderful person.
It's like, we absolutely believe that. You know, she definitely is. She's just been stealing a tie in Bergdorf's and then lied profusely. And we're like, yep, she is wonderful.
28:14 Wes: She.
28:15 Erin: She's Liza, you know, we get it. So that so much of the film is operating on these characters charm to cover up what might otherwise, you know, in a different casting situation, might have been disastrous.
28:27 Wes: Right.
28:28 Erin: I think it points just to what you said about Dudley Moore at the beginning and how adorable he is. Like, he gets away with everything in this film because he's so adorable. It's never obnoxious for me.
28:36 Wes: Yeah, same for me.
28:37 Erin: His laughter. It's. Yeah, it just. It works.
28:40 Wes: It's interesting, you know, in light of the missing mothers, this whole refrain in the film about being alone. Nobody should be alone. It's awful to be alone. Right. If we want to be psychologists about it, we would say, well, something happened to Arthur's mother. Something has happened to make him feel alone. And the drinking is a big part of how he deals with that.
29:01 Erin: Right.
29:02 Wes: And one that has also prevented him from finding, you know, real connection to a real person. In this case, there's got to be a kind of person who's going to break through that. And it turns out to be Linda, who is not quite in a similar predicament, but is also missing a mother. But not to make too much of that, but this concept of aloneness that is sort of repeated several times in
29:24 Erin: the movie, it's really noticeable when you have Arthur, Linda and Susan all missing a mother. So we have this grandmother who's this sort of like wellspring of the family. Right. She's at the root of the whole tree. So that seems to sort of balance things because Arthur has a good relationship with her. And I suppose because it's a grandmother, there isn't this danger of having this overly close relationship which might, I think, as you suggested, which might end up turning him into someone very spoiled or someone with a very different type of temperament.
Right. Or personality, I should say. But, you know, where we have this interaction with Bert, Susan's father, that seems to be the locus of a lot of. Of the film's preoccupation with relationship to parents. And he seems like someone who is. He needs a wife to get him to stop murdering people or to calm down. I don't know. Like, what can we say about that? That disastrous lack of a feminine principle in his life. It's too much of a coincidence that neither point on the love triangle has a mother.
30:25 Wes: Yeah. Looking here, where this, you know, the idea of being alone pops up in the movie. And early on when he's in the bath, Arthur's in the bath and says to Hobson, who's in there, stay with me a minute, Hobson, you know I hate to be alone. And he says, yes, bathing is a lonely business. And Arthur says, except for the fish, but the fish tend to eat one another. So that's a great representation of the conflict around being with others versus isolating oneself. Being alone is terrible, but if you're with others, you have to subject yourself to their aggression as well.
It's not all just love. It's not all just shits and giggles. It's all the bad stuff that comes with it. And at a certain point, right after Hobson, I guess it's still in the bath and Hobson takes off Arthur's hat and hits him with it and says, I don't want you to be alone. And Arthur says, I'll never be alone. I have you. Which is very sweet and, of course, untrue. And as we gradually learn during the movie, Hobson is dying. And so there's a really critical incentive for Arthur to actually find someone else. I think Hobson is the only person that Arthur really has in the sense, right, that without him, he really would be alone.
And at dinner with Susan, she says, I know how alone you are. I know how I hate how alone you are. And then a little later, you're never going to be alone again because I'm never going to leave you.
31:56 Erin: It's like a horror film when it's said by the wrong person.
31:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah. It's not the right kind of togetherness. It's right after that that he says, you're such an asshole. Which is a really strange thing to say to someone like Susan. And then he says, some of us drink because we're not poets. As if he suspects that she's trivializing his drinking. This is the one moment where there is some suggestion, some real. And it's quite a poignant moment in between a bunch of really funny jokes like, will you take my hand? That would leave you without Leave you with one. Which, when I saw this, these were like.
I was laughing to the point of pain in my stomach when I was a kid watching every one of these lines hit with me. But in between, there's this real one poignant moment where he's trying to convey to her the fact that the drinking is not trivial and she cannot solve it just by being in proximity to him or for them to have this institutional arrangement to say, okay, we're married, therefore I'm not alone. It doesn't work like that. And she doesn't get that. So he knows something about himself. He knows he needs something. Something authentic. And he knows that because he's had it with Hobson.
He's had a real relationship. And it's when Hobson dies that he's going to have to truly confront aloneness in its most real sense. Hobson will say, I'm sorry, Arthur. And Arthur says, for what? And he says, for leaving you. Arthur says, you're not leaving anyone. And then he gives them the basketball. So starts to treat Hobson as if he's a child giving him a bunch of toys, including a toy like a basketball which you can make a pun on the word dribble. Right. If I feel the urge to dribble, I can always call the nurse. So Arthur is moving into this parental role.
And what you get from all of this is that the key to not being alone is not to be taken care of. Not to have this completely giving person like Susan, just, I accept all your flaws. I'm going to be here for you no matter what. That's not the cure for loneliness. The cure for lo. Loneliness is to care about someone else and to take care of someone else and to have the urge to do that because they need to be taken care of. Which someone like Susan, you get the sense she doesn't need that, right? At the level of financially. Of course she doesn't.
You get the sense psychologically, she doesn't either. She's not looking for that. She's looking for someone to baby. He's a baby. And she's looking for someone to baby. And with another spoiled rich kid that might have been a perfect match for him. There's something else going on that makes him allergic to that.
34:39 Erin: Well, there's my favorite joke in that dinner with Susan which, just thinking about it was making me laugh a little bit. I'm like, author. Sometimes I just think funny things is when she says, a real woman would stop you from drinking or something like that. And he says it would have to be a real big woman. And, you know, that's such a cringe moment, Right. Because it's like, God, like, you know, it's not. It's not your responsibility to fix him. Right. It relies on this kind of, you know, just really infantilizing view of where, like, the man is the one who has to be taken care of, rather than that the man can be changed by a woman in a romantic relationship in which she has some sort of, like, mothering influence on him.
Right. This is extremely distasteful to me and I think to most. Right. And it's operating on this really just sick idea. And she said something relatively benign, but we can see how there's this babying element to it, which is interesting because she doesn't seem to be, you know, she seems to be someone who has been babied herself. Right. So it's interesting that she does have this desire to extend that to someone else. But, you know, babying is good for babies, but. And it's not good for adults. She could maybe get someone to baby, but. Yeah, it shouldn't be Arthur, but she's spoken of by the father.
Like, I love. Another thing that always gets me, that makes me laugh so hard, is when he's talking with the father in the study and he says, where's the rest of this moose? That one. And when he goes to attack them, he takes a knife out of the cheese and he's like. Like he's taking my father the cheese. You think he wants some cheese?
36:22 Wes: You think he wants some cheese? Yeah, absolutely.
36:27 Erin: Oh, my gosh. Such a good line.
36:30 Wes: And every line delivered perfectly. And.
36:32 Erin: Yeah. So good.
36:34 Wes: But, so. But imagine Al Pacino saying, that could have been Al Pacino.
36:39 Erin: Well, you know, and. And lest we forget, like, Liza's delivery is amazing in this.
36:44 Wes: Of course.
36:45 Erin: So underrated. I mean, she's.
36:47 Wes: Yeah, who else could. I mean, another. Again. Yeah. Perfectly cast. It's just.
36:52 Erin: Yeah, it's a role. I love that. Arguing with the guy. Anyway, the scene with Bert where he talks about, like, killing that guy. Like, I. I thought we would make so much hay out of this. Maybe it's a little too obvious, right? Killing off one's childhood at 11. You know, he made his first million by the time he was 18. So this is a guy who is lower class, right. Who's transcended his earlier circumstances to become this super wealthy guy who's now making almost like a feudal or royal kind of connection between households in this match of his daughter to Arthur.
37:27 Wes: Well, he's taken the path of ruthlessness, which in a way is, I think, the opposite of the path of love, even more than hate, in a weird way, because ruthlessness is really ultimately about the willingness to do anything for. Well, nominally for survival, but really ultimately for status. So I recently read Hitler's Mein Kampf, which is a weird association to make, but if you want the psychology of ruthlessness and the philosophy of ruthlessness, that was preeminently the Nazi ideology, and it was. It was celebrated as something that is protective.
If you let down your guard, you're going to get screwed in the way that the Treaty of Versailles screwed Germany. You're going to get taken advantage of, and you can't give in to softer emotions. You can't get into sympathy and empathy. Mein Kampf, he says, Hitler means many things by struggle, but one of the struggles was to overcome his sympathy, empathy for other people. He treats it as a triumph of the will that he's able to get to the point where he's no longer capable of empathy. So that's one. So if you're in a position of privation and need, which, by the way, motherlessness is representative of that, one reaction to that is to deny love, but not just in the sense of going to hate, but in the sense of putting oneself in a place where you eliminate empathy within yourself for the sake of some very narcissistic goal, a greatness, admiration, money, status, all of that stuff.
So I think that's really spot on to point to that scene in this concept. And the word ruthless is used. It's used by Arthur's father and it's displayed in that scene with Susan's father. But critical, I just think, psychologically spot on to put that in opposition to love, but go ahead.
39:27 Erin: Yeah. Well, you're perfectly contextualizing Bert's discussion of Susan in which she becomes his possession. Right. He says, she's my gold, she's my treasure. Right. And he says, I protect what's mine in an ugly way. Right. So it's about like, she is, in a sense, not a daughter, but kind of a status symbol for him. And he. He is ruthless in his protection of that. So where we might, you know, that's really helpful because where we might locate soft feelings that he has for her, instead they're these, like, highly guarded, like, attack dog type type feelings that have to do with preserving the status that she seems to lend him. Scary stuff. Yeah.
40:11 Wes: We don't learn a lot about why the parents are so keen on those two getting married.
40:16 Erin: Good for business. Something about business at the beginning, I
40:19 Wes: can't remember, I was thinking, I mean, yeah, if this was royalty a few hundred years ago, it might make sense, unite the two houses or whatever. But I don't know what practical purpose it serves.
40:35 Erin: Right. That's what's so funny about this in a way. Any kind of American joining of families. It's always a bit of an aping anyway of European convention. And so we have this Dudley Moore as this actual little English prince in the sort of more genteel, plays the piano. I mean, he has, you know, he's a little aesthete in a way. He has those baser interests and attractions. Right. But you know, he's this little pawn in the parents kind of cosplay of European aristocracy. There's no there there. Ultimately the whole constraint that is the primary conflict of the plot is a false one ultimately.
Right. As I think I suggested in part one, really that's just about Arthur overcoming his own kind of psychological impediments towards maturation. Right. It's presented as this external constraint, but really it's about him being willing to give that up and to say, okay, I'm going to take responsibility for myself and be an adult. So it's sort of strangely externalized, but it's really entirely about Arthur's own. His own desire to stay a little kid in a way. And as false as that constraint is, or as flimsy as it is, or as much of a kind of faux constraint as it is, there's also like this even more false ideology undermining it, which is just the fact that these two families uniting is some sort of play at being.
Being aristocratic. And it's as though Arthur, by giving up the money is putting the lie to the whole idea that in America there is anything that separates us ultimately from each other. Right. Like there's a sort of like beautiful undermining of any kind of faux class distinction in the marriage, which is like this really American ideal of marriage across those types of boundaries or that erases those types of boundaries. In other words, like a kind of meritocracy marriage. But I don't know, I don't want to make too fine a point of that.
42:38 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I got the sense that Susan is daddy's little girl and she wants what she wants. And so her dad is going to get that for her. And then Arthur's father, Arthur is a problem for him. And so in a way they can. It's like price fixing or corporate corruption. In this case, it's not Right. Where two businessmen get together to fix something and not let market forces work the way they're supposed to work. But in each case, they're solving a problem for each other. And, yeah, that scene where. The scene where Mr. Johnson, Susan's father, is threatening Arthur, is so perfect because the moose head on the wall is, of course, standing for Arthur. And Mr. Johnson, right, a certain point, is putting away a rifle as he talks to Arthur.
43:29 Erin: And he mimics killing the guy who's coming in to steal their food.
43:33 Wes: And Arthur is trying to use humor, which in this case, this is the place where humor goes to die. And that's made clear from the very beginning of the scene when he's trying to even be funny with the very slow and humorless butler. So in a way, Arthur's trying to do a standup routine through all of it, and he can't get any laughs. He says to the butler at one point, are you sure you want to be a nightclub comic? And so at the point where he sees the moose and he says, where's the rest of this moose? And the father says, arthur, I think it's time we got to know one another.
And Arthur tries to make a joke. I do, too. That's why I had you come over today. And then he says that this is a tough room because the father, of course, Mr. Johnson, doesn't laugh. And then Arthur says, this is a tough room. Then looks at the moose and says, I don't have to tell you that. Looks at the father and says, you must have hated this moose. So just.
44:27 Erin: Just because the father doesn't drink, he
44:29 Wes: doesn't know how to have fun, but all. Just a perfect, you know, everything. Everything visual and circumstantial. Right. It's not just there in the dialogue, but that's why I think it's such a great screenplay. There's a lot of this where apart from all the really funny gags and lines, visually, everything is set up so wonderfully. Arthur's identification with the movie. And then the hunter, ruthless hunter father, who just basically sets up a threat that Arthur is going to get killed by him. And of course, as you pointed out, it's set up further by the account of killing someone when he is 11 years old.
45:05 Erin: Yeah, I'm thinking, you know, there's something to be made over the fact that he pulls the knife out of the cheese. You know, there's a lot of food going on. I'm thinking of when he's at dinner with Susan, and Susan isn't drinking either. Right. Because as, as Bert says, no one in my family drinks. I think at one point, he orders another drink. This is when he tells the waiter, I think that he has a medical condition that he has to drink every hour. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, so to keep it coming. And so he says he'll have another drink. And then he asks Susan if she wants another fish.
Because she's gotten. She's gotten fish. Yeah. There's something a little bit too. Or something about the way that Susan and her father are. And this, you know, they've too much food, too much security or food is tied to violence in this, you know, explicitly by the father and then with the cheese knife going after him. Right. I don't know. I don't know what that is, but there seems to be something there.
45:59 Wes: And humorlessness and living in a world that's very literal.
46:04 Erin: Yeah.
46:04 Wes: Right. Which is why, even at the end, she hasn't put two and two together about Linda's fake. What's his name? Harold.
46:14 Erin: Yeah, Harold and the kids. That's great.
46:17 Wes: Her fake husband. Yeah.
46:19 Erin: The butler in Susan's house. That's the Thin man reference. I think it's also used in Young Frankenstein, you know, the Walk this Way with Igor following him into the castle. But, yeah. When Arthur imitates the butler's loping walk, which he doesn't seem to be doing consciously, it seems to be because of his state of drunkenness.
46:38 Wes: The butler says, follow me. Yeah, walk. I think in Young Frankenstein, it's like, walk this way.
46:44 Erin: Walk this way. Yeah. This is a similar. This is a joke from the Thin man, one of the Thin man movies.
46:51 Wes: Oh, it is.
46:51 Erin: Nick Charles. Yeah. Does imitates the walk of a very slow moving butler. And this is, I think, the nod to that film, the screenplay is, you know, it's so smart about those 30s conventions. And, I mean, it's such a tragedy that Steve Gordon died so young.
47:07 Wes: Yeah. So the only film he directed, and I think he died in 47 or 48.
47:11 Erin: Right. I think it was 44.
47:12 Wes: Oh, even earlier.
47:14 Erin: Yeah. Died of a heart attack.
47:15 Wes: So you get the impression he could have done. Yeah. Made many great films. And then Dudley Moore himself developed a neurodegenerative condition which, strangely enough, the symptoms, the early symptoms kind of mimicked drunkenness.
47:32 Erin: Yeah. And so people thought he was like his character. Right. And. Yeah. And he actually wasn't a drinker at all.
47:38 Wes: Yeah.
47:38 Erin: Yeah. Too tragic.
47:41 Wes: Well, on that happy note.
47:45 Erin: Well, we do have to transition to something less than happiness, seeing as we're gonna Talk about Medea next week or next time. But after that, I wanted to cover A New Leaf, which is Elaine May's film from 1971, so a decade earlier than this film. You know, I think this film is indebted. I think Arthur is indebted to A New Leaf a bit. There's nothing about drunkenness in that film. But the main character is rich. He's played by Walter Matthau. He's rich. He loses his fortune through his own profligacy, and then he finds himself having to marry a woman that he doesn't love in order to get her money.
But it's all about, like, his favorite hobby. His whole raison d' etre is his wealth. He says to his butler, and he has a trusty butler, and he says to his butler, at some point, I have no skills, no resources, no ambitions. All I am or was is rich. And that's all I ever wanted to be. So wealth for wealth's sake is the theme of the string of movies.
48:42 Wes: Yeah. I love the scene in Arthur where the florist asks him what it's like to have how it feels to have all that money. And he's like, really good. It feels great.
48:52 Erin: Stupid question.
48:54 Wes: I mean, the florist is like, yeah, that's a stupid question.
48:56 Erin: Yeah.
48:57 Wes: What did I expect from this? But you expect, of course, someone say, oh, money's not everything, and it's not the key to happiness. So another nice touch in this film that it does not simply try to go that route in a very caricature, ish sort of way. And at the end. Right. It's also acknowledged that, yeah, it would be crazy to turn down the $750 million. Yeah. So we'll be doing that Elaine May movie after that. We'll do Wyatt, right?
49:27 Erin: Yes. So Euripides. Elaine May Wyatt. Clear trajectory.
49:33 Wes: Your talk of the butler made me think, should we read Wodehouse at some point?
49:37 Erin: Oh, of course. Yeah, that would be great.
49:39 Wes: Some Jeeves action.
49:41 Erin: That'll be a great treat when I'm done with my exam. Let's make that, like, the first thing I read once I'm done with my exams and hopefully in November or December. Read some more Wodehouse.
49:50 Wes: Okay, thank you.
49:52 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Love and Loneliness in “Arthur” (1981) – Part 1
Aug 26, 2024
It’s awful being alone, according to millionaire playboy Arthur Bach, and nobody should be alone. And so he forestalls this feeling by getting drunk, picking up prostitutes, and laughing at his own jokes. Yet love in its true form can be a lonely business, as his servant Hobson reminds him, because it involves growing up, getting serious, and taking care of someone other than oneself … only to lose them—in one way or another—to the inevitable advance of time. What is it about working class Linda Marolla, whom Arthur first encounters in the process of shoplifting a tie for her father’s birthday, that gets him beyond this impasse? Wes & Erin discuss Steve Gordon’s 1981 romantic comedy “Arthur,” and why, if you want to learn to become independent, sometimes the best that you can do is to fall in love.
Upcoming Episodes: Medea (Euripides), A New Leaf (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt)
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Awful being alone, according to millionaire playboy Arthur Bach. And nobody should be alone. And so he forestalls this feeling by getting drunk, picking up prostitutes, and laughing at his own jokes. Yet love in its true form can be a lonely business, as his servant Hobson reminds him, because it involves growing up, getting serious, and taking care of someone other than oneself, only to lose them in one way or another to the inevitable advance of time. What is it about working class Linda Marolla, whom Arthur first encounters in the process of shoplifting a tie for her father's birthday, that gets him beyond this impasse?
Today we discuss Steve Gordon's 1981 romantic comedy Arthur, and why, if you want to learn to become independent, sometimes the best that you can do is fall in love. This is Wes Alwan, and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, it struck me watching this film again recently, rewatching it. I think I had seen it many, many times as a child. I would have seen this not long after coming to the United States in 1980. And I think it was probably on HBO or something. And that was something my little sister and I did. This is back when they had little guides, little like actual physical guides to what was on hbo.
The same thing would be on like seven times at different times of the day. And my sister and I probably watch watched the same movie multiple times, a lot of hbo. But anyway, I've probably seen Arthur countless times. And so it's sort of one of those movies that's, you know, kind of woven into my psyche because of my childhood experience with it. I hadn't seen it for many years after that, and I don't know recently I what it is that it occurred to me that I wanted to watch it again. But I did. And then I suggested it to you for an episode and I was surprised when you said you were a fan, although it sounds like we had talked about it before and I had forgotten you were a fan or something.
But yeah. What's your history with this movie?
2:39 Erin: My mom loves it, I think, and my, my grandparents too, maybe. So I grew up watching it, like if it was on or something. I would watch, and I always thought it was really funny, and then I understood it a little bit better when I was a high schooler or something like that. Watched it a few times, like, probably had it on in the background at a sleepover or something. It's just one of those movies that, like, was around growing up with my. Yeah, when I think about it, it's similar to several movies that my family really likes. Our official family movie, you know, we should have a sponsorship or something, is My Cousin Vinny. But this one's up there for movies that my family enjoys. And another one is the Thin man, which is a similar. You know, the subgenre of alcoholic comedy is. We can place this in the Thin man in that category, I think, which
3:27 Wes: we're gonna do soon.
3:29 Erin: Yeah. Yeah, we should do it around Christmas.
3:30 Wes: And we should do Lost weekend.
3:34 Erin: Less. Less of a comedy, more of a documentary. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know why. Like, I think this. I think, like, Dudley Moore's whole shtick in this is just really funny. There was a comedian back in the day who used. I forget his name now. Gosh, my dad will be so mad at me that I forgot this. But anyway, he was always on, like, the Dean Martin show, like, the roasts, or. He was always on TV, like, television specials in the 70s. And he was this guy who. His shtick was that he would always play a drunk person, you know, so during one of the celebrity roasts, he would come up and he would be totally sloshed, giving a tribute to whoever they were roasting.
And he would always, like, not know who was being roasted and, you know, would get confused multiple times. And I wish I could think of this guy's name. Anyway, my grandfather couldn't stand him. Hated him, like, thought he was awful, thought that he wasn't convincing as a drunk. But he loved the Thin man, and I think he. I think he really liked this movie. Like, he. He would like the John Gielgud character in this movie best of all. But he had a high bar for what was acceptable drunkenness in acting. And that guy from the 70s did not cut it, but this apparently did.
4:39 Wes: Yeah, it's a real challenge even to do, I think, a drunk for a skit. I just see that as a very challenging thing to do as a sketch comedian actor. But to sustain it for a whole movie and also to make the character sympathetic, not only an extreme alcoholic, but sympathetic, and to have the whole effect be comedic is really, really quite an accomplishment. Dudley Moore. It's Interesting. I didn't know much about his career other than this movie. It turns out he's a composer and he was in this sketch comedy troupe in England that I think predated Monty Python or overlapped, but predated.
It's called beyond the Fringe. I don't know how much you know about him, but he was a diminutive 5 foot 2 guy. He had, had, had, I think a club foot in childhood that he got made fun of for and a limp that he got rid of but was always self conscious of. What I'm trying to get at is there's a number of qualities he has that I think makes him one of the few people that could have pulled off this role. It's an amazing screenplay, I think. I think it's like a very close to perfect type of screenplay, but I just, I can't imagine many people pulling it off.
So just looking at the Wikipedia page on the movie, Moore was not the top candidate for, for this role. Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, John Travolta, Richard Dreyfuss, James Caan. It would have been a dis. I mean, I can't imagine the film not being a disaster.
6:09 Erin: Seems like the standard for that is men who were alive in 1981. That's what they were looking for.
6:15 Wes: I mean, they also considered John Belushi. Okay, yeah, but even, even John Belushi. I think part of the problem is the character has to be adorable because there's no way to pull off someone who's so alcoholic. And the implied layer of deep sadness and tragedy underneath that and the potential destructiveness of that. I mean, you have a number of tasks, right, to make the film believable. You have to be able to say, this guy, despite being such an incredible alcoholic, has all these redeeming qualities and is capable of love in the right circumstances and all of that. And then the other part of it is just for him to be likable at all, in spite of his being a drinker and a playboy. Anyway, I just think this is a case of a movie where fortuitous, perfect casting really makes it work. Makes it incredible.
7:06 Erin: I think that's right. I guess I think of this movie, though, as like an advertisement for alcoholism. Like it's a happy alcohol movie in that way. It's like the Thin Man. The comedy comes from the drunkenness, like most of the comedy comes from it. What I like about this film is that it doesn't contain the usual plot contrivances of contemporary romantic comedy. Right. So extended duplicity on the part of one or both of the people in the central pair, there's some sort of misunderstanding that creates comic situations and then conflict. So in a more typical plot, we might expect that Arthur would conceal his engagement from Linda.
You know, their relationship would develop, and then there would be a dramatic scene. You know, he would be, like, dodging calls from Susan, you know, whatever, you know, and then there would be a dramatic scene in which she would find out the existence of Susan, but, you know, run off before Arthur could explain. And then he would be forced to choose Linda and poverty in order to win her back. Instead, like, he tells her almost immediately that he's engaged to somebody else. So the comedy has to come from something else. It basically comes from the alcoholism and the one liners.
And in that regard, I think it's, you know, it's really, really similar to the Thin, which is a comedy murder mystery. So the weight of the comedy there. There's no romantic comedy plot like in the Thin man. The main couple is already married. And the comic elements are just that while they solve the murder, they like to drink all day long, basically, and flirt with each other. So that's it. And so the comedy is just one liners and alcohol and one liners about alcohol. So, yeah, I think there's even an oblique reference to Thin man at some point.
8:48 Wes: Oh, interesting.
8:48 Erin: In Arthur.
8:49 Wes: Yeah. Looking at old review reviews of this movie, I saw one negative review that just saw it as a bunch of gags strung together, which is inaccurate, and then another one which was appalled by the treatment of alcoholism as if it was just this casual, unimportant thing, which is a moralistic approach. And of course, yes. Could this movie be made today without highlighting the out and making something, a serious subplot of the alcohol? Of course not. Because the moralistic tendency in the culture is far too strong to let the alcoholism kind of fly under the radar in the way it does in this movie.
This is one of these movies which could be made in the 80s, but probably not anymore. I know they tried to remake it with Russell Brand. I didn't look at that. It sounds like it was a disaster. And as you can imagine. And again, Russell Brand is not the right type of guy to do that. If he is adorable, he's not adorable in the right kind of way. There's got to be almost an innocent boyish quality, which is precisely what Dudley Moore has. But, yeah, I don't think it's a real criticism of the film to say that they don't make enough of the alcoholism.
I think it would have ruined the film if they tried to. And it's obviously a problem. And it's a problem that he has to overcome by finding love. And he convincingly does that. And the roots of the fact that that's possible for him are right. In Hobson and his relationship to Hobson, he had someone who could play a real parental role in his life in the way his ruthless parents did not. This is another interesting tidbit. I think the director was bothered by the fact that Dudley Moore had an English accent in the film. It doesn't quite make sense because the father has an American accent.
But it was too much to play the drunk and do the American accent at the same time. I think for more. And so they left it. And then one could take the implication, well, he got the accent from Hobson, so it kind of works out perfectly. But you have these two countervailing forces of someone who is spoiled and lonely and uses alcohol to deal with that fact, and then the possibility of love. And if it becomes about the alcoholism as a kind of pathology, some sort of pathologized mental health thing, and the way we might treat it today, you lose out on the, that very important thematic element that love is what's missing and love is what has to save the day.
11:19 Erin: I sort of assumed that after the credits roll, he sort of keeps drinking. Like he doesn't, he doesn't have to stop drinking. You know, it's very tied to the money, it seems to me. Like the movies that have happy drunk.
11:31 Wes: He promises Linda he's going to be a good boy.
11:35 Erin: He's, he's a good boy when he drinks. It's fine. No, these movies work where there's so called happy. Alcoholism is where people have money, right? And they don't have to work, so they can afford to drink all day. Like it doesn't become tragic because they're missing work or they're, you know, they're going on a bender and nobody can find them and meanwhile their family is starving or something. Right. Like the money and the alcohol, I think, are tied together. This is the same in the Thin Man. Like they basically like solve the murder plots either while drunk or just like in between drinks. But they're super wealthy couple, so that's what makes this funny.
12:10 Wes: But drinking is a competitor for intimacy in a way. It's like they, they bind to the same receptors, so to speak. The two compete with each other and people substitute the social with alcohol, which is interesting because of course, socially, culturally, socializing and alcohol are associated with each other. Alcohol can make it funner, easier, whatever. But alcohol in a way can become the object of desire. It can give one a sense of togetherness, of not being alone because of its disinhibiting effects. It can kind of create a sense of togetherness even when no one is there. So in that sense, I don't think the potential tragedy is avoidable. Even if he's rich.
12:55 Erin: Well, I just mean that in the end he doesn't have to give up the wealth. Right. And for me, in the film, the way that alcoholism and wealth are together, the way they kind of have to be together, it seems to me to be like he can still have his. He could still have fun, right? He could still be rich and avoid poverty and have fun. And that seems to me to be tied with like the money and the alcohol are kind of a two. They're kind of a package deal.
13:22 Wes: Yeah, don't worry. I'm not envisioning him joining AA and becoming one of the people who's for whom sobriety is drink so much. That does not sound like fun.
13:33 Erin: Well, we see him use alcohol to cope, right? Like he has to get drunk in order to meet his father. He, you know, whenever he goes into a situation he doesn't want to be in, he has to be drunk in order to force himself to, to do these things. Right? And we see that he gives it up when he's taking care of Hobson. But yeah, a teetotaling life seems like a, like a sad one for him as much as a drunken life.
13:54 Wes: Well, yeah, and I think we should take your idea seriously that his drinking is over determined. We can give it some pathological explanations, but it can also just be fun. You get a sense of that fun through the entire movie. He likes to laugh, he likes to joke around, he likes to have fun, he likes women. And then so, you know, the movie starts with his laugh. He's in a car and you just hear. Before you see Arthur, you hear this maniacal laughing as the opening credits roll and the wonderful romantic theme song. This is an incredible. I love this song. How do you feel about it?
14:29 Erin: It's okay. No, Soft rock is not.
14:32 Wes: Burt Bacharach co wrote this.
14:34 Erin: Yeah. I hate Burt Bacharach.
14:35 Wes: You don't like Burt Bacharach? Oh my God, I didn't know that.
14:40 Erin: But anyway, I wasn't raised in an elevator. I don't like Burt.
14:45 Wes: Interesting. Yeah, so the first thing we hear is his laugh. And then of course, that's something that continues through the Whole movie. And I don't know. Do we hear it at the end? At the end, we hear him. We get a reference to the driving through the park. You know, how I love the park. Which he says it's a callback to what happens in the beginning of the movie, I think, when he's just picked up a prostitute. Yeah. So we kind of get bookended with the park, which is a kind of romantic image, but it's uncompleted when the movie begins. It's romance that is unfulfilled and at the end, fulfilled.
A nice image, I think. But I think we're not getting the same book ending with his maniacal laughter. I mean, what we do get is him. I think Linda has the last laugh, actually. He makes a joke about. Well, he says he turned down the money. And then she takes it rather casually, actually. I felt like the father in that moment, you know,
15:42 Erin: so great.
15:42 Wes: You know, even rewatching it, it's. And then, of course, you know, I took the money. I mean, I'm not crazy. And then she laughs. And I think, that's the. That's the last laugh in the movie. But. But laughter pervades all of this. And the gags, I think they're not just cheap and disconnected and sketch comedy bits strung together.
16:00 Erin: No, not at all. I paid a lot of attention to that opening scene with Gloria, which is, I think, the name of the prostitute. Right. And. Well, first of all, that in itself is a little bit of an advertisement for alcohol. Like, she's definitely not amused with him until she starts drinking his Scotch and then she really gets on board. It's like. It's like telling us how we should be watching the movie or something. Like, just have a glass of Scotch in your hand and you'll think this is hilarious. I really like what happens in that opening sequence when he goes to the Plaza and he runs into his aunt and uncle.
And I guess it's his Uncle Peter and his Aunt Pearl. But because of his accent and it's slurring his words, it sounds like he's saying Aunt Paul, like Peter and Paul. Anyway, it's this great microcosm of the plot because they are trying to tell him to grow up, you know, and they could see how drunk he is, and they're kind of, like, annoyed with him, and he just ignores them and takes it in stride. But anyway, this one one liner I was really interested in when he says to Gloria, well, Gloria asks him, how rich are you? And he says, I wish I had a dime for Every dime I had.
I love that, I love that. I tried to pick it apart and I was thinking, okay, so there's like longing and satisfaction within the same one liner, right? Like the fantasy one liner is like, I wish I had a dime for what. But actually he does have so many dimes, right? So it uses like this apparatus of this fantasy wish fulfillment expression to actually express what is like a reality for Arthur. And I was thinking about how this drunkenness too, like, you know, connecting his being drunk and saying this to his wealth, it seems less like a desire to escape at times in the film.
There are times when he uses it to escape, but in this instance and in these ebullient moments, it seems less like a desire to run from this wealth or this responsibility than an expression of the wealth itself. Since he does take so much satisfaction too from being rich. Right. It allows him to have a lot of fun and to have a lot of toys. I see this something as like I wrote, I wrote in my notes like a high of satiety or something like that rather than an escapist high, like the ebullience he gets from having his needs met or having a good deal of them met anyway.
And something similar I think is happening in the script when he jokes and then immediately pronounces his joke funny. It's like he's fulfilled. Like he's comedian and audience, right? So he's immediately like he wishes for something and then he finds that he already has it. You know, I wish I had a dime for every dime I have. Oh, I actually have everything I need. Like I'm totally self fulfilled. So this high of like a sense of completion or a sense of fulfillment, obviously he needs something. The whole plot is about the fact that he actually needs someone.
He needs Linda, and to a certain extent he needs Hobson. Right, but that gets, well, he needs him quite a bit. But I mean, going forward that sort of gets transferred a bit. But there's something here about his desires being met and him pronouncing that fun and good rather than he's not inherently corrupted by this. He maintains like a childish love of having his needs met and a satisfaction at that rather than becoming gimlet eyed about it or becoming corrupted by his needs being met all the time.
19:13 Wes: Yeah, one could say, well, he's spoiled, his development has been arrested and he's a man child. But there are benefits to staying a child as well, which is he can hold on to his playfulness. He's not ruthless like his family as his father or his grandmother says, we are a ruthless people. He's not status driven. He's not money driven. Ironically, I mean, he is and he isn't. He doesn't want to lose the money. And I like the fact that the movie, you know, in the end, of course he takes the money. But yeah, he doesn't have to worry about money and he doesn't have to worry about status.
So there's that self satisfaction, as you're calling it. I think that's important. The dime joke captures that perfectly. And as you pointed out, and then also finding his own jokes funny, so he can be perfectly happy with making himself laugh. And he laughs in the car at some point with Gloria and she's like, what are you laughing at? And he's just like, oh, sometimes I just think funny things. And then he's laughing in his sleep later on. It's kind of a pure playfulness because he's not just trying to manipulate other people or to use his humor and funniness to get something out of them.
It's kind of a self sufficient. He's entertaining himself. He can be good with that. That doesn't of course, solve the problem of love, but it's not a bad thing to have. Not a lot of people have that. You know, there's another element here which is related, which is the class element. So I think it's important that Linda will end up being from working class in the beginning of the movie. Right. There's a kind of gravitation towards people who have different social and economic status than him. So that's the immediate thing we get in the movie is this contrast, this rich guy, these aren't high class call girls.
He's just pulling up on the street and picking up street prostitutes. And the other thing we get at the beginning is this sense that alcohol, in a way, he's using it to obliterate his ability to make discrimination. So he says, would the more attractive of you please step forward? Which is great in a sense, it points to a desire to not discriminate, to not make one person feel rejected or left out. But on the other, it points to the fact that his own desire is sort of being obliterated by alcohol, his own ability to discriminate. Then he says, no, actually you're both attractive.
With the one who thinks I'm attractive, please step forward. You know, so then it takes into account what it is they want. And then it gets rather poignant because he talks about, I think she says, you know, what do you have in mind? And he starts out with VD and then he says, you know, I want to spend the evening with a stranger who loves me. Which is quite a significant way to put it, right? A stranger who loves me.
22:02 Erin: Yeah. You know the thing about drinking affecting your decision making? That's what Susan's father says to him, right? I don't drink because drinking affects your decision making. And he's like, you may be right, I can't decide. And he says, no one in my family ever drinks. I'm kind of thinking about Susan as the kind of, kind of the mirror image of Arthur actually. Right. Like she doesn't drink, but she's totally self fulfilled. Like she wants Arthur. It's really unclear why that is, but
22:27 Wes: she's entirely self sacrificing.
22:29 Erin: Is that what it is? I think Susan is low key, the most fascinating character in this film because she's so opaque, you know, I mean, you think when you. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be watching this for the first time and the way that she's described by Arthur, you think that she's going to be this really ugly, terrible, bad mannered. Like he calls her an asshole. You know, he implies heavily that she's very ugly. And then you see her and she's fine. She's Jill Eikenberry, right. The only way I can understand her character is by assuming that she just really wants to get married.
She's devoted to this idea of having a big wedding and of going through the motions of life and she figures that Arthur is a good person to do that with. So no matter what Arthur does or how he treats her, she's going to be happy because he's wealthy and she gets to have her little like, you know, she's a bit of a princess, right? So she gets to have this big princess wedding and he's the means for her, her to do that. I think that's how we can understand her. But that kind of means that she is also a bit of a cul de sac of a human being who doesn't.
I mean, he wants to reach out, right. And make a connection, but is sort of, kind of also thwarting his ability to do that. And his family is thwarting it too, though that's presented as an external constraint that he has to bury Susan. But of course it's entirely internal constraint. It's just Arthur growing up and deciding not to care. Susan is kind of the same way. Like she seems to have no outwardly directed desire. She wants to have a wedding. It's going to be with Arthur, but you could probably replace him with someone else and she wouldn't know the difference.
She doesn't seem to really need him or anyone. Right.
24:10 Wes: Well, she's there to serve, you know, when we first hear about her. And this is part of the way the plot element with Gloria is used in the beginning, right? So after the interaction with his aunt and uncle, they're at the table together. And this is where we learn, you know, what the central conflict is. Says there's only one woman for me and I can't stand her. Which is great, right? We don't learn why he can't stand her specifically. We don't know their history in detail. We don't know what it is she sees in him, except that this is just an arranged marriage and their fathers want them to get together and she's going to comply with that.
And he doesn't want to comply with that. He wants real love. And it seems as if for Susan, love is all about self erasure or masochism or being a servant, which sounds, in a way, perfect for Arthur. In fact, in that same scene, he says, aren't waiters wonderful? You know, right after he talks about, my father wants me to marry her, but I'm not going to. And then after the waiter comes, he says, aren't waiters wonderful? You ask them for things and they bring them. Same principle as Santa Claus. So he's surrounded by servants. And there's a lot in the movie, of course, that focuses on this relationship between the wealthy and the people who serve them.
And Susan seems to want to put herself in the position of a servant. You know, she'll say to him, you know, don't you get it, Arthur? I'm not going anywhere. No matter what you do, I will be here. I'm paraphrasing. I haven't found a place in the script. You know, you'll never be alone. There's nothing you can do to drive me away. And she holds that line to the very end of the movie. The only thing that turns her is when he finally rejects her and says, there's another woman. And when that other woman, Linda, has, you know, has shown up to the wedding.
So it's pretty. At that point, it's pretty clear. And then the call is to Daddy. So she reveals herself to be a bit like Arthur in the sense that she's another rich person whose development has been arrested because her capacity for independence, just like his, has been compromised by the fact that there's not enough necessity in her life. Right. Money vitiates necessity that people, they don't have to work, they don't have to become independent, they can rely on daddy all their lives if they want. Or the equivalent $750 million, whatever it is, when he's being threatened by his father, he's going to lose that 750 million.
And then another comedic moment. Actually, Susan is a very nice girl. Have you ever seen her face when the light catches it just right? Of course, you can't depend on that light. It's really great. And of course, yes, it's not that she's not good looking, it's that for whatever reason, he's not in love with her. There's not that chemistry. And what we get from the movie is that chemistry for him involves someone of a different class, a different socioeconomic status. And so we should think about how does that complement him. It's right after the scene where his father says, you got to marry Susan that he meets Linda in Bergdorf Goodman.
27:19 Erin: Yeah. I don't think about Bergdorf Goodman as like a site of gift buying. In fact, Linda is there to get, not buy a gift for her father. Right. And yeah, I thought quite a bit about the frequent Santa Claus references in the film and how this maybe, maybe this ties into this laughing at his own jokes thing. Right. Like he seems to be able to be both child and Santa Claus. Right. Like he can bestow his gifts upon himself, but what he really wants to do is be the Santa Claus for someone else that seems to be important
27:48 Wes: to take care of another person.
27:50 Erin: Right, Right.
27:51 Wes: I think he says that to her, to Hobson. I've never taken care of someone else. He says it to Hobson. He's only been taken care of.
27:58 Erin: Yeah. And I guess the fact that Susan doesn't, I mean, it's fascinating that Susan doesn't need him at all. Right. Like she doesn't. It's not like she's a gold digger and needs his money or anything. She is self sufficient on that score. So the class element seems to involve him needing to find someone whose life could actually be improved by his money. Someone who could be helped in that way.
28:16 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's interesting when he sees her, it's really funny what attracts him to her. Right. He sees her, he's like, Hobson, did you see that she stole that tie? It's the perfect crime. Girls don't wear ties. So the idea is that maybe she's a kleptomaniac.
28:36 Erin: It would be perfect if she murdered the ties.
28:38 Wes: You're right. She's just stealing for fun. She's stealing for no reason. So I think you're right to associate this with the dime joke and the finding his own jokes funny because there's a certain self sufficiency. She's not stealing something because she needs something, but she's in that moment, it looks like she's stealing something just for no reason, for the fun of it. It turns out. Right, it's a variation on that. She's stealing to give. She's stealing because out of love. She's stealing to give something to her father. But it's still not selfish.
It's still not oriented towards herself. So his way of this, in a way is his pathway to love or to the concept of selflessness. He has to go through the phase. What he's seeing is potentially an act of extreme need at least and selfishness of committing a crime. But then he sees it as something else. He sees it as playful. Playful is the mediating term between need and love. So it's really an act of love. So he's misperceiving it, but he's getting at something important. And I think it's also important to say again with his. I think it's with his father.
At some point his father says we're all criminals and, and we get what we want. So there's a parallel to the. Whatever criminal element there is to being filthy rich and to being ruthless and to this low grade criminality of someone who's working class, poor and committing a crime not in the service of exploitation and wealth and status but a crime in the service of love. And then Hobson says something, which is great, by the way, this. Because of course he's noticing that Arthur has misinterpreted the concept of perfect crime. And he says if she murdered the tie, it'd be the perfect crime, strictly speaking.
So he says it's not a perfect crime, but it's a good crime.
30:31 Erin: Yeah, I hadn't realized that element of. But of course that he's attracted to her because she's stealing. See, when I watch the scene, I can just tell like she's in this really garish outfit. Right. So she just looks like someone. I mean, that's why she attracts attention. That is a kind of a fascinating. Yeah.
30:49 Wes: Wearing a red hat, a yellow jacket, Cowboy hat. Yeah, Right, red. What color are her pants?
30:56 Erin: I think they're white. Maybe they're white. But she's wearing, you know, she's wearing primary colors actually, come to think of it. I think Is Gloria wearing blue? Sort of like blue and then red and yellow. It's like.
31:07 Wes: It's like red spandex tights and a blue top. Yeah. Very garish.
31:15 Erin: Yeah.
31:16 Wes: Very similar, actually to Linda. Yeah.
31:17 Erin: It's like Arthur is just this little kid who's looking at primary colors on a mobile or something, you know, like he's truly distracted by the shiny object.
31:25 Wes: She's wearing a blue and red striped shirt, a red hat and a yellow coat. And she has this red bandana tied around her neck.
31:32 Erin: Yeah.
31:33 Wes: For some reason I didn't write down the color of her pants, but they're also very contrasting.
31:38 Erin: But anyway, it's obvious to me watching that scene that she's stealing something out of need because of the fact that she doesn't, you know, she's dressed in this really garish way in Bergdorf Goodman. And, you know, Susan has. I think she's usually seen in white.
31:53 Wes: It's like a low class conception of what style would be.
31:57 Erin: Yeah, I mean, she looks fabulous, but that's. She's Liza.
32:00 Wes: That's. Well, okay.
32:03 Erin: But I mean, if you're going in there and you're trying to look like, sedate, like someone who shops at Bergdorf's, then you don't look, you know, and. And if you're trying to steal something, you don't wear something that makes you look like a stop sign that attracts a ton of attention in the store. Unless you think that that is like a kind of reverse psychology that you figure you're trying to call so much attention to yourself that no one will suspect you. But.
32:27 Wes: Yeah, hidden in plain sight.
32:29 Erin: Yeah, but. Yeah, so. So I immediately registered the class difference and therefore never thought about the fact that she, you know, that what. What you're talking about, that she doesn't need the tie, she's just stealing it for fun. I never put that together because to me it's obvious that she is not someone who ordinarily shops at Bergdorf's and is just trying to get something for some reason, you know, presumably a. Because she can't afford it.
32:51 Wes: He's caught her eye. Yeah. She's working class, she's dressed garishly. From my point of view, she's committing the perfect crime, which is an unselfish crime, broadly speaking, whether it's because girls don't wear ties or because she's buying and getting it for someone else.
33:08 Erin: This isn't Diane Keaton. Right. Then we'd say it's not a perfect crime.
33:12 Wes: Right, exactly. And in the end, he seems to like her chutzpah, her toughness, her directness. And this is a very. Especially at the time in the 80s. I mean, in a way, this is how working class is coded and especially New York City. New York City plays a similar role in a lot of 80s movies including, by the way, Ghostbusters, which we'll do soon. But in a way, it was sort of seen as the gruff but heart of gold essence of the nation. That's sort of the psychical role that New York City had at the time. I can tell you, as someone who lived at the time. So this is not just about what I've gleaned from movies, but I remember this being the psychological significance of movies. And it's changed. I don't think people understand what New York means in the same way you were born more recently.
33:59 Erin: I associate that with working class Italians. That's basically the city became Italian Queens, the Bronx, certain parts of Brooklyn, though that was already changing in the 80s a bit. She's Linda Marolla, she's Liza Minnelli. She's, you know, that's what's being coded there, Jews and Italians.
34:17 Wes: But the idea is gruff but lovable New York City directness and harshness. But there's really something ultimately sweet about it. And it's closer to the core of American identity than wealth and being upper class and being refined. So it's almost like a kind of Eastern urbanized version of the American spirit in the sense of pioneer spirit. I think it's that sort of conception of Americanness. Ultimately, Hobson says about her she does have a certain Eleanor Roosevelt quality that says she's sensational.
34:56 Erin: Usually I have to go to a bowling alley. To meet a woman of your stature?
35:02 Wes: Yeah. In a way, him and Linda are quite alike. And she'll say, I like this guy. They are sort of reality principles for Arthur and they perform that function through sarcasm and directness in a humorous way. So Hobson has no trouble being very, very insulting in a funny way. And the other thing I want to just point to in this initial interaction when they've followed her and that the security guard has followed her out onto the street. And then they follow and watch. And then Arthur saves her from the security guard by pretending to be with her.
Then they do this little improv scene and she slides right into it with no problem. Which is good because she's training to be an actress. Right. She says this is also part of the dynamic. This is mirrored later on in the movie when Susan catches them in the stables and she Comes up with a silly melodramatic skit, that improv skit that he can. Yes. And. And then immediately jump into seamlessly. And that's something that they have from the very beginning, this ability to seamlessly enter this imaginative reality together, even if it's one that involves deceiving.
Deceiving a security guard, deceiving Susan. It's the perfect crime, you might say. The crime of two ness Creating this. Yeah.
36:23 Erin: All acting is lying. Yeah. I love when. At the end, when Susan is like, what about Harold? When they're in the wedding scene and she's like, harold, oh, you're. For me, it was like, clearly this was just used as an excuse to, like, help her, you know, exit the scene. And one that she never thought Susan would take seriously. And in fact, she hasn't put two
36:50 Wes: and two together even at that point. Yeah. He says, we were shopping together, and she's like, where the hell have you been? That's great. And then, of course, he uses that to kiss her, which, you know, this is another thing that you couldn't do in a movie today. But she says, not in front of these people, dear. They might think you're an animal.
37:07 Erin: Oh, sure. You could do that. I'm sure you could do that in a movie. It's a cute moment.
37:11 Wes: Well, I think today it would be treated as sexual assault.
37:13 Erin: I don't think so. I think it would work fine. Okay, she's just stolen something, so she deserves it. I'm just kidding.
37:23 Wes: I have a feeling that that's a line that you're going to want cut out.
37:26 Erin: Okay, forget it.
37:27 Wes: We'll cut it.
37:28 Erin: We'll cut it.
37:29 Wes: But I know I don't want it cut out. So let me just say that on record right now. If it stays in, I'm fully for that.
37:36 Erin: All right, so she's an actress. She's training to be an actress. That, to me, shows that she's capable of, like, having fun of. You know, she has a. She has a healthy imagination. And so she's someone who, though she is. She's in a bad situation. You know, this is treated really lightly in the film. But her father is out of work. He can't find a job. You know, she's working at this diner to make ends meet. They're not comfortable. They're not living a comfortable life. And the father seems really torn up about his inability to get a job, though it's all handled really lightly.
So this is someone who maybe would ordinarily have practical concerns that would make her Less inclined to be fun and goof around. Like, this is a kind of, you know, she's in a situation that isn't very funny. And instead, her being an actress and her quick wit and everything in the scene shows that in spite of those circumstances she is capable of having fun at the Arthur idle rich kind of playful level because of this capacity for imagination. I think this playfulness, which for him, as we've already said, involves alcohol, she can join in on that.
She knows how to have fun in a similar way that he does. And some of that is just kind of indulging him a little bit. Like when they go on the date to the arcade and she mostly just kind of watches him do his thing. But she seems to get pleasure out of that. Yeah. So she has a high capacity for. Or else tolerance for his level of fun.
39:03 Wes: Yeah. One other thing I want to say about this scene is that Hobson misinterprets what's going on. He misinterprets it as a situation in which he has to protect Arthur from riff raff the way it's implied that he has been doing for a very long time and does with the prostitute. Right. So in the morning, he basically says, get out to the prostitute. We're done here. Hobson has to stand in. You get the impression Arthur could actually easily be taken advantage of if Hobson weren't there to be mean to people on his behalf and to set up boundaries and barriers on his behalf.
And that's what Hobson thinks he's doing in this situation. Right. He's saying a lot of mean things. Apparently, they're going to be partying and she says. He says to her, good luck in prison. And then she gives him this look, which is absolutely priceless. But she doesn't get defensive. She takes it all in stride. This is something genuine for Arthur. It's not just another woman he's picking up. And it takes Hobson a while to realize that. I don't think he fully realizes it until Arthur goes off on him for saying mean things about Linda later on and, you know, says, listen, old man, blah, blah, blah.
And it's not only Hobson who will have to come to see that, it's everyone else. So you get the impression that the same dynamic is going on with his family. His grandmother ultimately relents and says, okay, you know, you can have the money and marry Linda. But she only relents when she sees that it's something genuine. In other words, Arthur's family doesn't take seriously his capacity to love and to have a real relationship. So the arranged marriage is a workaround to that. He's going to stay a child forever. He's not capable of real relationships with people.
So we're going to stick him in this marriage. It's the best we can do. But in fact, the best that you can do is fall in love. Sorry, I just thought of that. That's very corny. It's not the best he can do. The best he can do is fall in love.
41:05 Erin: Profound words.
41:07 Wes: Hobson and his family, they underestimate his capacity for love, but not without reason. Of course. It's based on what they've observed for a very long time and his alcoholism. But it will turn out he has a greater capacity than they thought. And it involves finding this particular type of woman who he can laugh with and engage in a shtick with. But also it involves things that he's gotten clearly gotten from Hobson. Hobson has been a real father to him. Hobson sounds like has been his one true, real loving relationship. And as Hobson is on his way out, he's able to shift the affection that he has for Hobson to a new person and go from being taken care of to being a. Being a caretaker. All right, anything else we want to say before we end part one?
41:56 Erin: Lots. But I'll bring it up in the next episode in part two.
42:06 Wes: patreon.com subtext podcast. Or you can wait a week and part two will come out.
42:12 Erin: Thank you, thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Courtly Reciprocity in “Laustic” and “Guigemar” by Marie de France (Part 2)
Aug 19, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of two of Marie de France’s most famous lais—”Laustic” and “Guigemar”—and how their narratives marry the “flesh” of text, art, and symbology, to the “spirit” of the spoken word (via dialogue, oaths and covenants, and authorial commentary), in order, perhaps, to communicate something of the mysterious and dangerous union that is romantic love.
Upcoming Episodes: Arthur (1981), Medea (Euripides), A New Leaf (Elaine May).
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of the Lays of Marie de France. Last time in part one, we talked about Laustic or the lay of the nightingale. And today we're going to talk about the lay of Guigemar, or Gugamar, as
0:49 Wes: I thought it was called.
0:51 Erin: No, Guigemar, which is somebody's name. So that's a cruel trick.
0:56 Wes: Gugamar, the caveman knight. He was frozen in a block of ice. I don't know your society. I'm just an ordinary caveman.
1:08 Erin: Well, this knight is a caveman when it comes to one element of. No, that's a terrible transition when it comes to one element element of his knightly duties, which is he doesn't know love.
1:18 Wes: Yeah, I mean, his cavemen are gay, maybe.
1:23 Erin: Oh, is that how you interpret this?
1:25 Wes: Well, no, not necessarily, but of course, I'm sure that that would be the go to interpretation of the average academic, especially one who's using a psychoanalytic paradigm. Oh, you know, it's. But, you know, it's something. It's a little bit suspicious. Right.
1:38 Erin: Just make fun of me, why don't you? Calling me average.
1:40 Wes: And no, you're not the average academic. And I don't. You're not an abuser of the psychoanalytic framework for that, but for Interpretation, but I could be much more accused of that. So, well, do we want to tell the tale real quick?
1:56 Erin: Great.
1:56 Wes: I could do it this time, and I'll just do it at a very, very sketchy level. So this guy doesn't date, never had a girlfriend. Then he meets this deer. No, just kidding. Well, I mean, you're not wrong. She starts out talking about the envy of the singer, which I think we can.
2:16 Erin: Marie de France, not the dear Marie Frost.
2:19 Wes: And so we'll talk a little bit about that little preamble, that cool preamble that she gives. And as always, the Bretons have made a lay of this before she did, before she wrote her poem. So she's going to talk about this night in Arthurian times. Guigemar, who went to the knight, he's a very promising young lad, went to the court of King Arthur. And then I guess once you've trained up, you just get sent on your way. They're like, see ya. Just go wherever. You're a knight now. Wander around. So he went to the Netherlands, where people don't get along very well at that time.
So everyone's killing each other. And that's your best prospects for moving up in the knight world, climbing the knight ladder, whatever that is. But interestingly, he had one fault since of love. He took no care, even though women were all over him. Any one of them would have said, yep. He's like, no, it's not for me. Men deemed him a strange man and one fallen into a perilous case. So I took that to be a hint of homosexuality, or at least the danger that other, you know, others interpreting. Whatever the case, or asexual or whatever, just not, you know, not.
Not your typical guy. He goes on his adventure, comes back to see his family, comes back on spring break.
3:31 Erin: Sorry, more spring break poems.
3:34 Wes: Yep, more spring break. And wanted to go hunting. And he's pursuing a stag, but he overruns the chase. And this is where you get kind of a cool. If you were making a film of this, it's very cool, surreal kind of scene where he's gone farther than his comrades, I guess, who are chasing the actual stag. And he finds himself alone, at least initially, with a doe who has antlers, which, as far as I know, only happens if there's a hormonal problem. I looked this up and it does happen. But it's like when there's, for some reason, there's a hormonal problem. The doe is secreting testosterone, which is what makes the antlers form so it's an interesting androgynous kind of picture in the doe.
4:17 Erin: I like this idea of a Doe with an overactive thyroid or something.
4:21 Wes: Okay. She's got hormonal problems, which is also why she can speak, which is what she ends up doing. Tries to kill her, and he does grievously wound her, but the arrow also bounces off her hoof somehow. This is like the magic arrow. The arrow. There might have been another someone else firing from the grassy knoll, but somehow he kills the doe and is grievously wounded himself. I was trying to figure out how that happened. The doe kind of curses him and says, I curse you to. Falling in love is basically what it is. Your wound is not going to be healed until you find a woman, and you will both suffer a lot.
Now let me die in peace. And he ends up taking this kind of enchanted trip and finds a woman who's being basically held. Another woman who's imprisoned by her husband, held hostage by her much older husband. He has a secret relationship with her for a year and a half before they're found out.
5:23 Erin: And he falls in love with her. Yeah.
5:24 Wes: Sorry. They date casually for a year and a half. Yeah. So they immediately fall in love with each other, and they're found out. And then instead of being killed, he's sent home on the enchanted ship that I may not have mentioned, but that brought him to this ancient city, this location where he met his lady. The critical part of this story is that when they are found out, his lady worries that he will move on without her. You will find another love and I'll be left alone with my thoughts. So she creates a knot in his shirt that only she knows how to untie.
And he gives her a clasp to go around her waist. Right. That only can unclasp girdle. So it's almost like this lock in key situation. There's a very Cinderella. There's a big Cinderella component to this story. Right? Cinderfella. They make each other promise. Right? You're not going to get with anyone unless they can untie the knot or undo the clasp. It's really interesting. Wouldn't they just recognize each other? But it's suggestive of the possibility that some other lover might be suitable if they can fulfill that same role. If they know that same trick.
So he's sent back on his ship. He returns home, and the lady herself escapes and ends up in the same country. She's taken captive by another knight. And long story short, they end up meeting again. That knight refuses to give her up. And Guigemar goes to war and kills the knight, lays waste to his castle and gets her back, and they live
7:07 Erin: happily ever after in a bigamous relationship because she's still married to the. To the other guy. But I guess that's the fine print.
7:16 Wes: It's eternal courtly love. And, you know, they keep a nice big ancient wall between them and. Get on the parapet. Get on the parapet and the. But it's. Yeah. So I really overestimated my ability to tell that story in a brief. In a story.
7:31 Erin: It's a long story. It has lots of moving parts, literally and figuratively. Yeah. So let's. Let's start with this doe, I suppose. Right? Because I think this is a clear. This is why I wanted to do laustic first, because I have an idea that the doe is the child that predates the. The relationship. Maybe I'm right.
7:50 Wes: Maybe. Interesting.
7:51 Erin: Crazy. This is a back to the future doe. This is. This is. Do you see where I'm going with this?
8:00 Wes: Does the doe try to sleep with anyone, you know?
8:05 Erin: Well, you know, it's a. It's a doe from the future, perhaps, that comes back in time in order for his parents to meet and fall in love.
8:12 Wes: Love, Right. Interesting.
8:14 Erin: Maybe there's nothing to indicate, by the way, that this is a futuristic doe. I'm. I'm just. I'm.
8:19 Wes: Well, the doe does speak, so I think, you know, that's true. No holds are barred here.
8:26 Erin: Yeah, no, but I think, you know, the fact that this is, you know, barring any hormonal problems, the fact that this is a doe that has antlers. Right. Means that it's a combination doe. Right. It. It combines male and female qualities and in that way. Right. It's a kind of symbol of a child who combines a father and mother in itself. Maybe.
8:48 Wes: Yeah.
8:48 Erin: So the death of the doe is sort of the inciting incident. It's the ability for Guigemar to be able to like God and actually love. So there's something about this kind of. Its death communicates something about the necessity also for sacrifice in love, I think. So it teaches him a lesson and draws his blood as a way to. By the way, I read somewhere, I can't remember where now, that the thigh is always a euphemism for the genitals in medieval literature. So when it notes that he's wounded in the thigh, we're actually supposed to think that he's been wounded.
9:18 Wes: The loins. The old loins.
9:20 Erin: Genitally in the loins. Exactly. The death of the hind and the wound it produces in Guigemar opens kind of a reality to him. And I think this is also, you know, this is related maybe to, like, Christian symbolism. I think there are a lot of Eucharistic parallels going on in the story, which we can get into later. But it allows him to kind of enter the realm of love by virtue of recognition of his mortality. Like, I see that as being part of his inability to love at the beginning, that he's too. He's flying too high. He doesn't realize he's going to die. And maybe you need to recognize your own mortality in order to love. I don't know.
9:55 Wes: You're reminding me of. Is it a Grimm's Fairy Tale, the boy who left Home to find out about the shivers. Are you familiar with that? I can't remember the story well enough to retell it, except that he wasn't capable of fear, I think. And he goes on a journey to try to feel fear. It's not unlike a kind of Pinocchio story where someone who's not fully human, someone who's a bit wooden, is trying to flesh themselves out, to become fully human by getting their full range of emotions, amplifying their desire or their emotional life. So in this case.
Right, so he, he's not interested in women. So obviously, what are you going to do about that? You go to the doctor and you get shot in the loins. You get an injection in the loins. No, but. So the wound. Yeah, the wound in his thigh is representative of the wound that is desire. He. He's not feeling it until he's given a physical signifier of it. So he needs a woman. Right, to search the wound. What does that mean? I mean, I presume it means it involves healing it. And, you know, it's not stitching it, it's searching it. It's. It's strange. So.
So there's a bit of an inversion of the male and female there. Right. So the wound, because the wound is evocative of. Yeah. Female genitalia. And he, in a way, has to be filled. Just as with the. The antler bearing Doe, you get this confusion between roles and ultimately we'll get another representation of copulation. I think in the lock and key situation with their identities. Right. They kind of have to be able to fit each other precisely to get back together. But we'll get in, we'll get into that.
11:38 Erin: Yes.
11:39 Wes: So I don't know, am I joining up with what you were just saying?
11:42 Erin: Definitely, definitely. And I Think there's an interesting equality that happens in the course of the falling in love. Right. Because then they both have both of these lock and key scenarios with which they outfit each other, have a kind of chastity belt quality to. Yeah, I think that there are a lot of elements. You know he's Sleeping Beauty when he is wounded on the bed, right?
12:02 Wes: Yeah, he's Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
12:05 Erin: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So he's put it repeatedly into a sort of. It seems at the beginning that his spurning of love means that he needs to be filled. He's not putting himself in a situation of potential. He's not allowing himself to get hurt and feel his feelings and to risk something in this way. And then he's repeatedly put into these sort of passive situations where he's Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to say too, that not only does the doe have some of that quality of the nightingale in Laustic, in terms of it being perhaps a symbolic child, that's what I'm advancing here, anyway, but it also bears a message.
Right. So there's the physical element that it induces the wound in him, and it is also itself wounded, like the nightingale, but it also bears a message, as the nightingale does. Only this time it's not a message that's been covered. It's been covered in by some kind of human artistry. It's a superhuman, magical, maybe even divine kind of message. So, again, there's a combination of word and spirit or physicality. And if we want to say the message that it speaks is kind of spiritual, of the physical and the spiritual combining here. And I think that if we're going to see Guigemar's maturation as being a need for him to combine other qualities that are foreign to him and integrate them into himself, I think that's a really good symbol for this integration that has to happen on his part personally, in order to become a real boy or whatever kind of Pinocchio parallel we want to make there.
13:38 Wes: Integration of the feminine and the masculine. Is that what you.
13:42 Erin: Feminine? Yeah, I think so, yeah.
13:45 Wes: It's interesting because you're not supposed to kill the doe, right? They're chasing the stag and you kill the stags, but you leave the does alone. But he finds himself in a ambiguous situation. Normally it would be something transgressive, and it still is. Right. He knows it's a doe, and I think you're not supposed to shoot the doe, so he's doing something wrong.
14:05 Erin: It's a doe with a Fawn, too. It's kind of a double.
14:08 Wes: Yes, exactly. So it's. Yep, exactly.
14:11 Erin: Yeah. So he wants to kill this part of himself. He doesn't want to be dependent on a woman or to open himself up to love. He wants to kill this, you know.
14:17 Wes: Yeah, yeah. He's violating a taboo. And I'm thinking also. And this is because of the pernicious influence of psychoanalysis, but, you know, it may represent envy. The thing that might play a role in holding him back from desire for the opposite sex is envy, which theoretically is psychologically universal. We're kind of stuck on one team, as they would say in Seinfeld, and we want to be on both teams. We want to have it all, which is just another way of saying we don't want to be incomplete. We don't want to be one side of the. That lock and key. We want to be the key and a lock unto ourselves. So it is perhaps a good representation of his envy. The doe represents the hermaphroditic entity that he might like to be, and yet he's also trying to kill it. So I don't know.
15:05 Erin: As the doe wounds him with the ricochet, there's again, a consolation in art, I think, right? Because not only does the doe tell him that he is going to suffer more than any. Any other person has suffered, and also his lady will suffer, but that he notes that they will suffer such great things that not a lover beneath the sun, or lovers who are dead, or lovers who yet shall have their day but shall marvel at the tale. So the doe offers him immortality in art, Again in art, as the result of this love. You know, this child analogy isn't perfect, but, you know, there's this idea that maybe if you fall in love, you are.
I think I'm advancing this idea, which isn't fully formed, that Guigemar also doesn't want to subject himself to love because he doesn't want to be wounded, perhaps. And there's something here about a desiring immortality or maybe staying in this premarital state forever and thereby sort of advancing one's having Peter Pan syndrome, right? Getting to be a young bachelor guy forever is perhaps appealing to him. Him. And that perhaps entering into a love relationship means subjecting oneself sort of admitting that one is subject to the forces of time and decay.
And the consolation for that, perhaps, is children, right? That you live on through your children. And so here there's no mention of a child, but there is a mention of the tail that will live on after him, a sort of Immortality, not via children, but via art.
16:36 Wes: The object of art becomes the complete thing, or at least a signifier of that.
16:41 Erin: Yes, yeah. And again, we have, like the nightingale in Laustic, we have the art that lives on after the love relationship has died or after the characters have died. So the poem itself becoming a kind of consolation prize for what the people in it have suffered, which is an interesting sort of meta idea.
16:59 Wes: The art object combines the element of control and the element of release because it's. It is something crafted and something into which one puts oneself. It's crafted and it's a very controlled thing and yet it's released to the audience. Let's just say in that sense it's different from the love object. That's just that you try to keep under control.
17:20 Erin: That ties perfectly into the next episode of the story. So if you have more to do, you have more to say about.
17:25 Wes: Okay, one more thing about this is just that it's a weird sort of curse. You're going to get the starring role in the story and you're going to fall in love. Although we don't really know that at this point. I was waiting for a bad ending, especially after reading Laustic, and I was quite surprised, like, well, it's not much of a curse, but yeah.
17:45 Erin: What you're talking about, though, with the art object being released, I mean, this is immediately what happens to him. You know, you're helping me understand this enchanted ship thing. We're given such incredible ekphrastic descriptions of the beauty of this magical unmanned ship. The rich pavilion of silk, the planks of ebony, and then this bed on which he lays, which is wrought of cypress wood and white ivory, reminded me very much of episodes in the Odyssey in which Odysseus is given this really
18:16 Wes: rich welcome, tables of polished wood to eat off of.
18:21 Erin: Yes, yeah. And it's adorned with gold and precious gems. So it's also as if the wounded knight is the nightingale getting his own little reliquary. Right. But he enters this art object and then he just has to be subjected to its forces. He's then launched or released with it out into the world. He has to accept the fact that when he explores this ship and then goes into this bedchamber to look around and then comes above deck to walk off of it, he has to accept the fact that, oh, it's magical and it's now away from shore and in fact it's lost sight of land and so he has to just go with it.
This first step in his. His Journey of passivity. And anyway, it reminded me so much of what you said about the art object that he has to allow this symbol of artistry to be released into the world and to, you know, have it go where it's going to go. Not that he's the maker of the ship, but there's. I think there's something of that in here.
19:19 Wes: Yeah. Well, it starts out with him saying, thinking there is no lady in his life to whom he could run for pity.
19:25 Erin: Oh, that's what women are good for.
19:27 Wes: Yeah, yeah, exactly. He's just been given the task of finding someone who's gonna help him heal the wound, but he doesn't have anyone. And for some reason, you know, we already know that there's plenty of women that he could have. But instead he sends his men away on a faux errand, I think, and then wanders off on his horse. So he is still not in a position to directly seek out women. Instead, he becomes a kind of wanderer in the. In the desert, so to speak. And then he finds a ship which is like. Looks like something that Liberace would have made if he had a ship, which is also very suspicious.
It's not to harp on the homosexual theme. It's very suspicious. And the rich ancient carved bed and of cypress and ivory adorned with gems, the sweet linens, the soft pillow, piano shaped swimming pool. Even the saddest person, right, the swimming pool. It's actually a luxury cruise ship. Shuffleboard on deck, the ghost crew straight out of Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
20:31 Erin: You know, he watches a really bad production of Godspell in the theater.
20:38 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So finds himself at open sea, as you pointed out. You know, slept as one dead until the ship drew to the haven where he might find the healing for his hurt, which of course turns out to be a married woman. What are you going to do?
20:53 Erin: Can't have everything.
20:54 Wes: Yeah. He arrives at the ancient city. There's a lady of tender age with a jealous king. I like this line. Such is the wont of age from much it fears that old and young cannot mate together and that youth will turn to youth. This is the death in life of the old.
21:11 Erin: Very Mrs. Robinson. Very, very reminiscent of our graduate discussion. Yeah.
21:17 Wes: But this sort of commentary, let's say, is kind of rare in these. So it really stands out when Marie de France makes that kind of statement. And it's a very interesting one. So she's explaining the jealousy of the king, that the marriage arrangement is a bit artificial and it runs against the natural Inclinations involved in love, which is that youth gets with youth and the beautiful people get with the beautiful people and sort of mating and all that. So it creates a tension. And that's why you got to keep them in a tower or behind an ancient wall.
You got to really lock them up. In this case, though, Right. There's a fatal flaw to the situation, which is that her prison, which involves. Right. So there's a tower, there's an orchard, there's a wall of green marble, and there's only one gate, and it's watched night and day, so she can't really get out. But there's an ocean. Right. Does the orchard open onto an ocean? So it's. That's your Achilles heel.
22:15 Erin: Exactly.
22:16 Wes: Don't imprison a woman next to an ocean where there's just the world of possibility. Had he never heard that There are many fish in the sea.
22:25 Erin: Right, right. And the primal force of the sea will come and steal her away. Right.
22:31 Wes: Yeah.
22:31 Erin: Yeah. I love that she's another nightingale in a reliquary because we get a really detailed description of her. Her prison, her casket, including the bedchamber, which is painted with this mural of Venus teaching men how to loyally serve their ladies.
22:48 Wes: And also throwing Ovid's book into the fire and pronouncing against it.
22:52 Erin: Yes. Yeah, I looked this up. This is Remedia amoris, which counsels people how not to be swept away by love. So Venus is like, forget that. Get swept away by the ocean or whoever arrives on the ocean.
23:06 Wes: So for some reason, the jealous king let her have her chambers painted with this kind of agit prop in favor of love. Favor of romantic love. Right. It's very rebellious. It's like having the Communist Manifesto put on the wall.
23:26 Erin: I was gonna say it's like all these Soviet realists. Super beefy Venus. Yes. And the only man who has the key is the old priest to say mass and bring her some food. I love that detail, that this ancient priest that can barely walk is the only one who's allowed in there.
23:45 Wes: And the maiden, who's her niece.
23:47 Erin: Yes.
23:48 Wes: Well, not a man. Okay. But yeah. So that's her company.
23:52 Erin: Right. So the ship washes up. The niece goes aboard. The niece is the first. She's the first one to make contact with the mystery. She goes aboard and finds Guigemar sleeping and thinks because he's. Because of his pallor, that he's dead. Sleeping Beauty situation. So she goes. Or Snow White, rather. So she goes out to tell the queen, and the queen says, you know, we'll check. And if he's really dead, if he's only partly dead, maybe he could tell us his story. But if he is dead, we'll give him a funeral. So she goes aboard, she sees the sleeping Guigemar and she stops dead, it says, for joy and grief at what she saw. And her heart is quote, unquote, ravished with his beauty, which is very interesting.
24:34 Wes: And she sorrowed beyond measure because of his grievous hurt.
24:38 Erin: Yes. Yeah.
24:39 Wes: Because this interesting combination of pity. Right. He found his pity. Pity and desire. Reminds me a little bit of the Tempest. It's almost like this is the Brave New world moment where it's raining men. Maybe she's never seen a young man before.
24:55 Erin: Right, right.
24:56 Wes: A brave new world that has such. What is it? Creatures in it.
24:59 Erin: Yes.
25:00 Wes: As if the man is, you know, a young man is almost like an alien who's. Who's descended on her. But yes. So Guigemar turns out to be a very good looking guy.
25:09 Erin: Well, she touches him. She touches his breast to see if his heart is beating. And at that he wakes up. So it's again, it's like Snow White's kiss or something. But this is gonna mirror the moment at the end of the story where he has to touch her in order to believe that it's really her. He has to touch and feel the girdle. Right. So there's a little bit of a Doubting Thomas kind of element to that. He has to stick his fingers into the wounds to believe.
25:31 Wes: We could talk about that now or later. But that is a weird element of the story and also of Cinderella, this idea that one cannot identify the lover after parting. But should we wait to talk about that?
25:42 Erin: Yeah, let's wait. The part that I'm really fascinated by is there's an obsession in this story with speech and hearts being too fearful for speech and things needing to be spok in order. For there's a really strong consent narrative in this story where verbal contracts need to happen.
26:04 Wes: Sign here in triplicate.
26:06 Erin: And it's a really interesting part of this. So his heart is too fearful for speech. But then the narrator actually does intervene again and says that love is a wound and that he who will not tell of his sore may not hope for balm to his hurt. So, you know, if. Unless you're a squeaky wheel, you're not going to get the oil.
26:24 Wes: Yes.
26:25 Erin: So you, you have to speak it. You have to. You have to speak out loud what you're feeling. That's a really Important component of. Of this solution to elements of the story. So at last he speaks, and he says, I die for your love. Not literally, of course. This is just speech. I'm not literally dying. I'm in fever because of my wound. Oh, maybe that is literal. And if you care not to heal my hurt, I would rather die. Fair friend, I pray you for grace. Do not gainsay me with evil words. You know, he's actually wounded, but also he's wounded. His wound is love. And she smiles at his speech and says, yea is not a word of two letters. Which. It's a word of just one more letter than that, but whatever. Anyway, she doesn't usually grant this prayer every day of the week. In other words, she's not this kind of girl. So she's, you know, she needs a little bit more.
27:13 Wes: Which translation is this?
27:14 Erin: This is the Gutenberg. Yeah.
27:16 Wes: Okay. She also says, must you have your gift so quickly? She has to play hard to get, otherwise she'll seem like a loose woman. And he basically says, look, it makes you look like a loose woman. If you have to pretend and protest like this, Just go say what you mean. If you're in love, I'll believe you.
27:35 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So there's something of this ascent that was reminiscent to me of a couple of things I'm thinking of. One thinks of the Annunciation, right? The angel Gabriel coming to Mary. And she has to say, yes, I will do this. But of course, I think of, like, the end of Ulysses, James Joyce's Ulysses, in which the Penelope figure Molly Bloom says yes over and over again to the sort of reconsumation of their relationship. And Joyce wrote that he thought that yes is the most feminine word in the English language that women are about. Yes. And opening themselves up to experience. So she wavers and then says yes. And then they have this relationship, but she has to say the words in order for it to happen.
28:18 Wes: And then there's the explicit sex scene.
28:20 Erin: Exactly.
28:21 Wes: There's a kiss. She grants him her love. And a kiss, which is nice.
28:26 Erin: Yeah. She granted him her embrace and tenderness, as is the wont of lovers when alone. That's really spicy stuff.
28:33 Wes: That's the explicit sex scene. The wont of lovers. They do what lovers do, right?
28:39 Erin: And they do it for a year and a half straight.
28:41 Wes: That's a long time to just hang out without the jealous king finding out, Right?
28:46 Erin: Well. And she senses that they're going to be found out before they actually are, right? So they make this pact, and again she. So she ties the knot in his shirt, and also provides the words that form the verbal part of the contract. Right. Which is that he never loves a woman except the one who can first unfasten this knot. And she says that he'll keep true to her because so cunning will be my craft, that no woman may hope to unravel that coil, either by force or guile, even with her knife. So there's a very explicit earlier with the preamble, which maybe we skipped over Marie de France's preamble at the beginning of the tale.
29:24 Wes: Yeah.
29:24 Erin: When she talks about how the singer shouldn't spoil music with unseemly words. But she mentions craft. That craft is really hard. And so if the singer does well, everybody should applaud him because he deserves some recognition for it. So, anyway, I just think of the word craft as appearing here. And then she's crafty in this knot that she ties, which ties her also to. Figuratively ties her to the idea of the tapestry, the woman as weaver. The textile is the artistic craft associated with women, which Marie de France is kind of invoking as a woman poet. Right. Spinning her tail, her yarn.
30:01 Wes: Okay, so it's odd, right? Just like Cinderella is odd. It assumes that they're not going to be able to identify each other except through this cryptocurrency algorithm. This. This password, essentially, it's like, here's your password. Here's my password. Put in the password if you want to unlock me. Again, we see this in the Odyssey as well. Right. But at that point, they haven't seen each other in a long time. And Odysseus is also testing people for loyalty. He knows Penelope is his wife, but what he's really doing is testing her love. She's testing his identity. Right. So he has to know that the house has been been. Or the bed has been built around a tree trunk.
30:45 Erin: Right. But it's also. It's not just that they're not going to recognize each other. It's also an insurance policy against infidelity. So rather than him just having to be true to her and her having to be true to him, they're preventing others from being able to have access while they're away from each other. Right. So it has a double purpose, it seems.
31:03 Wes: Yeah. Okay, so that's interesting. You take the promise of fidelity and you turn it into something. Something physical. But I think the other element of it is that after a year and a half, they've kind of become molded to each other in a way. So people become alike, each other, their characters change In a way, each person has a formative effect on the other person's character, so that in a way, their love becomes so configured that there is only. Ideally. Right. There is only one person who can unlock it after that point. So that seems to be given physical representation as well in the knot and the clasp. I don't know. Is that making sense?
31:44 Erin: I like that. Yeah, it does. You're putting me in mind of the. In a way, it's. Now that the relationship is sort of sacramentalized or that there's a marital knot that's being tied here. Right. It seems to elevate the marriage so that then when he wins her at the end, you know, mention of this old king that she's actually married to sort of flies out the window. Now they can have a sacramental marriage, it seems, because of what's gone on here with the tying of the marital knot between them. But another thing I was thinking of in relationship to this, and the fact that they're verbalizing the terms of the contract and sort of signing on the dotted line at the same time, similar to what I hinted at with the Doe as well, is this idea also of kind of a Eucharistic.
It's not to talk about the marital sacrament. You know, maybe it's a stretch to hop to a different sacrament, but I'm just thinking about the Liturgy of the Eucharist and the fact that, first of all, the Mass, which. She's at Mass when he decides that he's going to verbalize his love for her. Right. But the Mass has the two components, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. And then within the Liturgy of the Eucharist itself, transubstantiation has to happen because two conditions have to be satisfied. So you have to have the physical substances that are there, the bread and the wine, which are going to become the Body and Blood of Christ.
And you also need the priest to speak the words in Persona Christi to affect the transubstantiation. I just. I can't help but think of that Eucharistic parallel here with. So often the conditions in which the relationship is formed are those of, like, physical love. So they have, like. They're obviously physically intimate with each other, as seen in the.
33:21 Wes: In the sex scene, which is obviously part of what. Yeah, the whole lockdown.
33:26 Erin: Exactly.
33:26 Wes: Key thing is, you know, evocative of here, too.
33:29 Erin: Yeah. So there's a physical component and there's a verbal. There's a spoken component that. That needs to happen. And we'll see this again later, too, when he has to tell his story. There's a lot of, like, speaking of the story words, you know, really crucial as much as the physical. So he can't just unclasp the girdle and she can't just untie the knot. There needs to be something spoken to. It's very strange.
33:51 Wes: Yeah, well, it seems to be a reflection on different sorts of bonds of love, ways in which people can be betrothed. The other way, right. Is complete control of the love object. Putting them in a tower or an orchard or whatever. Imprisoning the love object, in other words, imprisoning the woman. It's unidirectional. It's not consenting, except nominally. Right. She consented to get married, but not really. It's a use of force. And here we get a reciprocal bond. It's already there in the idea of a clasp or a knot, this reciprocal bond. The two parts, at least in the clasp, bond each other.
They create a restraint on the other. And then the nature of the bond of fidelity that's created is a bit more open because instead of saying, you are mine, don't. They don't sleep with anyone. You're mine. It creates the possibility that some other person could fit the bill. Maybe he could find someone who can untie the knot in the sense that she has the particular qualities she's good enough. In other words, it's a way of saying don't get with anyone unless they're good enough, because there's no guarantee, obviously, that they're going to meet each other again.
And instead of consigning him to fidelity for life, she's just putting these very, very stringent conditions on any future love. That's one way of looking at it. I'm reminded of a Larry David episode where his wife Cheryl, they're redoing their marriage vows. Do you watch Curb on TV?
35:20 Erin: I've watched a little bit, but, yeah, not this episode.
35:23 Wes: They're redoing their marriage vows and she puts something in there about how they're going to be together for eternity. And he balks at that. And he's like, well, till death do us part. He honks at that idea as if they're really going to be stuck with each other for eternity. But in any case, I think it's important that it's not just this kind of controlling imprisonment. The bonds are created by the love relation. They're created by the suitability of one lover to the other lover. Does that make sense? They fit each Other. And that's what creates the bond. It's not. Artificial enclosure.
35:58 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I'm thinking, too, about the conditions under which their love is found out. It's. The lord sends the message to the queen. So it's sort of unidirectional. Right. We don't know what the message is. Again, like the actual words of the servant in Laustic, we don't know exactly what's spoken.
36:15 Wes: I'm coming for my quarterly visit to your chamber.
36:20 Erin: In fact, we don't find out what the message is either, just like in Laustic.
36:23 Wes: Right.
36:23 Erin: Because the servant was meant to come and deliver a message to the queen, which, again, this lord seems like he's opening himself up to lots of potential problems here, because the servant could get with the queen, if that's what the.
36:36 Wes: Yeah, it doesn't make any sense, but.
36:37 Erin: Right, doesn't make any sense, but the servant sees. He looks through the window and sees Guigemar with the queen, and that's how he's found out. And so then when the king comes and says, how did you get here? You know, there's some ink spilled over this conversation. So the king looked earnestly upon the fearless knight, inquiring of him who he was and where he was born and in what manner he came to dwell within this house. So Guigemar told over to him this story of his fate. He showed him of the beast that he had wounded to his hurt, of the knave and of his bitter wound, of how he came within the realm and of the lady's surgery.
He told all to the ancient lord to the last moment when he stood within his power. The king replied that he gave no credence to his word, nor believed that the story ran as he had said. If, however, the vessel might be found, he would commit the knight again to the waves. He would go the more heavily for the night seining, and a glad day would it be if he made shipwreck at sea? When they had entered into this covenant together, they went forth to the harbor and there discovered the barge, even as Guigemar had said. So they set him thereon and prayed him to return to his own realm.
This is fascinating to me because again, Guigemar has just entered into what is called explicitly a covenant, you know, a verbal covenant, and this physical covenant with the object of his love. And then when the king comes and Guigemar again has to tell the story, it's not told in dialogue, but it is kind of told at some length. What Guigemar covers the king, doesn't believe him, you know, gives no credence to his word, you know, so there's this disbelief, but he has to see it then to believe it. So he's like, all right, if the ship is there, I'll put you on it.
And it's a covenant, like a verbal covenant. And then turns out the ship is there.
38:15 Wes: Right.
38:15 Erin: But this repeated disbelief or even the fact that then Guigemar enters into a quote unquote covenant with the king immediately after entering into a covenant with the queen. It's just a really, really interesting detail. Like every, every interaction seems to follow the same trajectory, even when it's not the romantic one. It's strange, you know, it's one sided here though. King controls the terms. Right. Maybe that is reflective of what you're saying. That like this is not a mutual thing. And he's eager to get rid of Guigemar. So it turns out to be convenient.
The ship is there though, he could kill him otherwise. So yeah, the one sidedness, the fact that, you know, Guigemar doesn't have a say in what happens to him is, is maybe why that parallel happens, but it's missing, you know, it's illustrative of the fact that the King only enters into these one sided arrangements. And that's what differentiates Guigemar.
39:07 Wes: Yeah, it's bound to get him, get the king in trouble. It's, it's the kind of plot hole that bothers me in any story where, you know, you just. If you capture Bond, you kill Bond. You don't set him up on a table with a, a move slowly moving towards a buzzsaw or whatever so he can escape and then beat you. Just don't keep them prisoner, just kill them right away.
39:28 Erin: Exactly.
39:29 Wes: But yes. So it's an interesting unexpected twist that this jealous king is actually just going to let him go. And then it's the same sort of odd situation with Meriadus. Am I pronouncing that right? Yes, because when she escapes, she's picked up by this guy Meriadus, and he's in love with her. And he is, you know, he finds her lovely beyond mortal measure and sets her up in his sister's chamber and goes frequently to see her, to cheer her with mirth and speech by reason that he wished to gain her love as a free gift and not by force. So this guy is a bit of a.
He's not just an uncomplicated villain, he's a bit of a villain, but it's kind of obvious he's not forcing himself on her. He is curious about Guigemar, right? He invites Guigemar to the court. He sets it up so that they can meet each other. He lets them do the whole clasp and knot thing. Why does he go through that whole routine only when they find out, only to deny them when it turns out that they are the long lost lovers. Why do all that?
40:34 Erin: He shoots himself in the foot. Because again, it's about speech. It's about the fact that they've been discovered. Because she shows him her girdle and explains that she can't give her love to a man except who could unloose its buckle without harm to belt or clasp, right? And Meriadus says, hey, I've heard of this guy who won't take a woman as his wife, except she first untied the knot, right? So. And then she swoons and can't get enough air. And it turns out she can't even get any air to her brain because this girdle is tied so tightly. But anyway, yeah, so he. He like, tells on himself precisely because this. They've already become famous enough that he's heard this story. Because every woman who wants to get. Get with Guigemar doesn't have the right size shoe, you know, to fit his foot. Right.
41:18 Wes: Trying to put the slipper on his danger foot.
41:21 Erin: Yeah. So there's this idea that, like, their tale is already becoming canonized. It's already, you know, part of literature. It's already part of the discourse that he's heard of the story, which is such a great story that it's traveled to him. And so, you know, he says, hey, I'd wager that this is the guy that these two ends of the story actually match up. And so it's because the story has been publicized, because it is such a good tale, that Meriadus, in a way, is like the lock and key, right. He's the one that figures out that the two ends of the tale are actually. They actually fit together.
41:57 Wes: Interesting.
41:58 Erin: And then he's a conduit for their reunion. So he calls this great joust.
42:02 Wes: Hold on one second. So it's like meeting two famous people, basically, who have been in a film that he's, you know, seen. And he's so. He's curious, you know, he's curious. And he's going to allow this, so to speak, in his court.
42:18 Erin: Right? But. But it's against his own interest.
42:20 Wes: He wants to see how this develops. But. But in the end, yeah, he's. He wants to keep her but that's very interesting. I mean, you're pointing to an important thing, which is it's almost as if the lay has already partly been written and publicized. So the artist has a role here.
42:35 Erin: Yeah. And he's so taken by the tale that he wants to see the end of the tale, even when it goes against his more immediate desire, which is for this woman who he can't have. So the power of the story is such that he serves art before his own sexual desire and puts them into contact with each other because he just has to know what's going to happen next.
42:53 Wes: Yeah. And he sets up this wonderful reunion between them, and she tells a story and says, mariatis has kept me in all my honor. Right. He hasn't tried to do anything. And Guigemar says, I have found my friend. I like this way they refer to each other as friend. You know, my friend with benefits. And then, you know, he says, okay, thanks for getting us back together, Meriadus. Can we go our way? And Meriadus is like, no, I will defend my right against you in all your power. And there's something about Meriadus. He set up the be this. Right. Warlike prince, he's called.
He likes fighting. And in fact, Guigemar, part of the reason he's come to the court is to help Meriadus fight another lord, another warlord. So it's almost. I don't know, it seems a bit perverse what Meriadus is up to, but. But of course, it doesn't work. And Guigemar goes and goes to Meriadus's enemy, and then they come back and lay siege and.
43:46 Erin: Yep, I'll just go fight against you, then.
43:48 Wes: Get her back. Yeah. So it's those odd elements to the story that really add to the quality of enchantment or the fairy tale quality. So maybe I think the way you put it is best. It's like this idea that Meriadus is not just a character in the tale, but he's become part of the audience now, too, and wants to see it unfold, to see how it ends, you know?
44:11 Erin: So when Guigemar and the queen, who never gets a name, by the way, the lady. The lady. Lady. That chick?
44:16 Wes: Yeah, the dame.
44:19 Erin: When they see each other, they have to also, like, recite the tale to each other again. It's just this compulsion to speech. And when he's doubting if it's really her, he says to himself, I must have speech of the lady. So it's just this compulsion to tell the story, to unravel the yarn the way that the knot must be unraveled.
44:37 Wes: Oh, that's great. I like that.
44:39 Erin: You know, it's so self conscious that these moments. Yeah, I think they do like, as you say, I think they elevate the story because they're so there's a strangeness to them and just a self conscious quality of, I guess, meta commentary. Right. Tied to the preamble at the beginning of saying, this is a tale that I have inherited, that I've heard. Maybe she's heard it from Meriadus or whoever. And now I'm transmitting it to you. And the attention paid to her own narration and partially this kind of like the self confidence that she has, like I'm Marie de France and I'm telling you this story, you know, that concern with narration and who the narrator is, where the story is coming from, and the repeated mention of the story itself will ultimately point back to her and it increases her kind of street cred as the one who's keeping this tale going and, you know, holding the torch.
So, yeah, I just, I love it as this, you know, it turns into this really bizarre meta commentary on narration itself, on storytelling itself and. And how stories keep themselves going.
45:43 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So she gets revenge on her naysayers after all the people that in the beginning she compares to mad dogs by brand them as they deserve, as mad
45:55 Erin: dogs, cowardly and felon.
45:58 Wes: She says, verily, they are in their right to speak ill of me. So, yeah, it's this extended, you know, extended preamble, preemptively defending herself against envy. Envy, which is. Right. So that's an important component of being a lover and an artist. Envy is the thing that can really interfere and it's the thing that, you know, I was speculating that Guigemar is subject to in the beginning. Envy of the opposite sex, but really envy of the thing that's needed to complete oneself. Right. You resent the fact that it's outside of you and you almost want to destroy it.
And to be in denial of need of something that's external and say, I'm just complete unto myself. I also want to say before we end. Yeah. I just want to repeat that for listeners who are not excited by the idea of medieval literature, these are very charming and pleasurable to read and I don't quite know how it's accomplished, but there's a delight in reading these. And I think that's kind of at the center of this sort of craft. And it's hard to pull off. It's easy to lose sight of that. I think as A writer and a storyteller or the central role of that.
You know, there should be something delightful. I think delight is the word about it.
47:09 Erin: I agree. That's well put. I also just want to call attention to the fact that she, you know, she has this preamble. Then she has another preamble where she says, hearken, O gentles, to the tale I set before you. And she says, I will not do it harm by many words. So she is a better narrator than the people in her own story or what? But I love the. I can only describe it as a Perd Hapley quality to this, according to the text in Scripture. Now I relate a certain adventure which be chanced in the realm of Brittany in days long gone before, you know, here is the commencement of the matter.
Like she's, you know, the story of this story is that it is a question, and that is what is the story? You know, Perd Hapley does that, like meta commentary on his own role as a news reporter. There's something of that here which is, I think, adds to its charm. Just as Perd Hapley, a charming guy. So I've been rewatching a little bit of Parks and Rec, which makes the connection. Anyway.
48:05 Wes: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that that is part of it. This reference to the predecessors. I mean. Yeah, I just find that quite this, you know, the Bretons have already made a lay, and it seems like every one of these lays begins that way. Right. And every one of her poems begins with this reference. The Bretons have already made a lay. Is that right? I haven't looked at it. I mean, I've looked.
48:23 Erin: Most of them start that way. Yeah. There are 12, I think, total, and I don't know how many start this way, but I know it's the vast majority.
48:31 Wes: So she's giving credit to her predecessors, but she's doing something new and creative, which is where the possibility of inducing envy lies.
48:40 Erin: Cool. Okay. Well, before we go, I just want to ask our listeners to keep sending us questions because we've gotten some. And we want to do a question episode. So if you could think of one, please send them to us and we'll do a special Q and A episode for subscribers. And next time, we're going to do a couple of episodes on the great Preston Sturges film the Lady Eve from 1941, which is one of my favorites. I'm really excited about that.
49:08 Wes: Yeah. You know, and I forgot to ask you in this episode about whether there's some kind of relationship between screwball comedy. And was it tales of remarriage, marriage, and this sorts of infidelity that goes on with this courtly love stuff? But we can talk about that next time.
49:23 Erin: So many connections. Yeah, I'm excited. All right, thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
Courtly Reciprocity in “Laustic” and “Guigemar” by Marie de France (Part 1)
Aug 11, 2024
The lai, a short narrative poem from the Middle Ages that treats themes of courtly love, was originally accompanied by music and sung by minstrels. But in the 1170s, poet Marie de France translated a series of Breton lais into French and, in so doing, converted an oral tradition into text. It’s no wonder, then, that her lais’ narratives are so often preoccupied with methods of communication: both the spoken word, with its spiritual, incantatory, or even magical qualities, and the written word—physical, embodied, and analogous to the art object (particularly and, appropriately, the textile, a medium associated since antiquity with female artistry). Wes & Erin discuss two of the poet’s most famous lais—”Laustic” and “Guigemar”—and how their narratives marry the “flesh” of text, art, and symbology, to the “spirit” of the spoken word (via dialogue, oaths and covenants, and authorial commentary), in order, perhaps, to communicate something of the mysterious and dangerous union that is romantic love.
Upcoming Episodes: Arthur (1981), Medea (Euripides), A New Leaf (Elaine May).
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Lay, a short narrative poem from the Middle Ages that treats themes of courtly love was originally accompanied by music and sung by minstrels. But in the 1170s, poet Marie de France translated a series of Breton lays into French and in so doing converted an oral tradition into text. It's no wonder, then, that her lais narratives are so often preoccupied with methods of communication, both the spoken word, with its spiritual, incantatory, or even magical quality, and the written word, physical, embodied and analogous to the art object, particularly and appropriately the textile, a medium associated since antiquity with female artistry.
Today we're discussing two of the poet's most famous lays, Laustic and Guigemar, and how their narratives marry the flesh of text, art and symbology to the spirit of the spoken word via dialogue, oaths and covenants, and authorial commentary, in order perhaps to communicate something of the mysterious and dangerous union that is romantic love. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:40 Wes: Point of order. This podcast was a Breton lay, or the Bretons made a lay of this podcast, and now we are just adapting that.
1:50 Erin: We're adapting it.
1:51 Wes: Yeah, she was a great adapter.
1:54 Erin: Yeah. And I wonder, actually, I wonder how much she just came up with herself, where she was like, you know, wanted to give herself the mantle of authority by saying, this is a Breton lay and I'm taking it. And I'm, you know, the Bretons wrote about this. It's totally. She made it up. You're getting to how I wanted to start this conversation, which I was going to ask if you had heard of Marie de France prior to me suggesting this because.
2:15 Wes: Well, it's a coincidence, because I was going to ask you who she is. Tell us who she is and what she's about. I hadn't. No, I had not, actually. Not at all. And I had read some medieval romance stuff like Le Morte d'Arthur, which I was very into in high school, and Arthurian legend type stuff, which this seems to be related to. But I think this is. I don't know if this is categorized as medieval romance exactly, or it's adjacent to it. Yeah. Tell us about her and how you happened upon her.
2:49 Erin: One of the professors on my committee for my PhD qualifying exams is a medievalist and suggested this because the special topic for my qualifying exams is poetic ekphrasis. So if people aren't familiar with. With that word, it's just the vivid description of, usually of a work of art. The Greeks took it to mean any kind of description that brought something vividly before the eye, I think, is what the rhetoric manuals from ancient Greece say. But typically now it's associated with a very vivid description of a work of art, usually some kind of visual art, be it a painting or a statue within a text.
So poetic ekphrasis within a poem. So it's kind of an artistic turducken, you might say, one art form encased in another. The classic example is, of course, Homer's description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. And so anyway, you know, I have a historical section of my reading list which encompasses a broad swath of texts from antiquity to, you know, sort of the early modern era, and have this wonderful medievalist on my committee who suggested Marie de France's poems because they have many instances of ekphrasis in them, particularly in these.
These two poems. So, as I think will become clear over the course of our conversation, I'm particularly interested in the descriptions of art here and how these maybe tie her to a classic feminine tradition, like, especially in Laustic, I think, where, as I'm sure you probably caught this connection, where the body of the nightingale is wrapped in the lady's woven message to her lover, which is obviously meant to reference the tale of Philomela in Ovid. And so that places her within a particular kind of tradition. But anyway, yeah, I was really disappointed that I hadn't heard of until there was a book that came out about her a couple years ago, that was when I first heard of her.
And I had heard of Lanval, one of her lays, but not her name associated with that Arthurian story.
4:39 Wes: And it's about Guinevere.
4:41 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think so. It's a knight, I think, who maybe. I think he spurns Guinevere.
4:47 Wes: Maybe it's not another name for Lancelot. Right? It's a different one.
4:51 Erin: No, no, it's a different knight. Yeah. And so medieval. It isn't, you know, isn't my specialty by any means, but the fact that I hadn't heard of her really exposed a huge. Either a huge gap in my education or just a sad lack of recognition for Marie de France. Or both, probably. But if it's the latter. I wonder if it's because she's a woman. I mean, partially. It has to be. Right. But also perhaps she's not writing at length like so many other medieval poets. Most of these are really short, though. Certainly they have the quality of little epics. But. Yeah. So I suggested this because it's on my reading list, and I was bowled over by these. But did you enjoy them or were you as impressed as I was?
5:31 Wes: Yeah, I enjoyed them a lot. I was pleasantly surprised, actually. I don't get excited by the phrase medieval literature, despite. Le Morte d'Arthur is medieval, right? It's like, 15th century. Well, it's not technically. How do you categorize Le Morte d'Arthur? It's sort of at the end of that, but, yeah.
5:48 Erin: You don't like Chaucer.
5:50 Wes: Yes. I mean. I mean, but it's been a long time. We have to do Chaucer. Yes. And sure, I think as an adult, you know, it's been. Since I was basically. Well, I guess, yeah, I did it in college. Honestly, I was too young to fully appreciate it.
6:03 Erin: Sure.
6:03 Wes: But I think I would now. Definitely. What are some of the other medieval big hits? Beowulf.
6:09 Erin: Beowulf, the Pearl poet. The Gawain poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I really love. And then Dante for the other side of the coin.
6:19 Wes: Right. Yes. So all things that we should do. I found these very charming. And this is the sort, again, the sort of thing I was into as a kid and in high school, mainly by way of Tolkien and C.S. lewis and Le Morte d'Arthur and a book called the Once and Future King by TH White, which this kind of. The tone of it reminded me a bit, even though it's not the same. But the use of enchantment and fairy tale, maybe what I'm thinking of is fairy tale to some extent, which I was also very into, but I don't know how you describe it, but the mood or tone of enchantment is very immersive and winning. And it's like this era's version of magic realism in a way. It's hard not to kind of be delighted by it, despite the fact there seems to be a real interest in infidelity as the only true form of love. Who wants to be married?
7:15 Erin: Yeah.
7:16 Wes: Yeah.
7:17 Erin: Well, courtly love continues to fascinate and kind of horrify me. But, yeah, maybe I've talked on the podcast before about my love of Tennyson, and so I was introduced to all this stuff through Idylls of the King and, you know, especially the lady of Shalott and also the musical Camelot, which actually has a lot of, you know, sort of classic qualities of these poems. And then some of the stuff I then read in high school, like the, you know, Chaucer and stuff like that. But anyway, yeah, I mean, you know, and I'm surprised. Cause my mom was really into the medievals, so I'm surprised that this is someone who I. Because I asked her and she hadn't heard of her either. So. Justice for Marie de France.
7:52 Wes: We are going to revive her.
7:54 Erin: Yes, yes.
7:55 Wes: Via this podcast.
7:56 Erin: I hope so.
7:56 Wes: I mean, I'm sure there's an academic sub field now, but yes, for the general public.
8:01 Erin: Well, I think we're going to start with Laustic, which is shorter and it'll just get us right to the heart of condoned infidelity, or infidelity as maybe an important spiritual practice. I don't know. But before we do. So, I found these translations online from. I think it was a 1910 or 11 translation, which actually transposes the poems into prose. And I thought they were pretty good, pretty interesting translations. But there's also one that I found through Wikipedia, which is a verse translation of Laustic that was done in 1991. Which one did you favor or did you read? Both.
8:37 Wes: So I did the Gutenberg translation. I looked a little bit at the others and maybe. Do you want to, since these are short, just give a very high level sketch of the story.
8:48 Erin: Sure.
8:48 Wes: Which is so short it won't take long. But then also, if you want to read some lines from the original from the translation that is closer to the poetry of the original to give the flavor of that. Sure, maybe that's good. Before we do that, did we want to say anything else about Marie de France? Not much is known about her, but apparently she might have been part of the court of our old friend Henry ii, who we seem to keep revisiting. Yes, an old lady, the old Eleanor of Aquitaine.
9:18 Erin: Yeah, we love those courtly ladies. I mean, I suppose we should say that she was living in England. I mean, this is where things get a little confusing because she's taking these Breton lays, translating them into French with maybe quite a bit of her own spin, her own flavor. But she's living in England and so I think that's somewhere. I read that that's why she calls herself Marie de France. Otherwise it would be odd to say, like, I'm Wes, United States, when. Right.
9:49 Wes: So this distinguished her and the Bretons in particular. So there was a Celtic culture. Breton is sometimes called Little Britain. Right. As opposed to Great Britain.
9:59 Erin: Right.
9:59 Wes: And not to mention the fact that a century early, earlier, the Normans had conquered England. Right. And so all the upper classes were French speaking. I don't know what's going on at this point in history, but French and the earlier Celtic and Anglo Saxon admixture of cultures have now undergone their own mixture. But there's a special relationship between this part of northern France and England.
10:23 Erin: Yeah, a special, special colonial relationship. It's special violence. Yeah. No, I think that. I think you're highlighting something which is. Which is also really complex about the heritage of these stories. Right. Because they came originally from Celtic. They came into the Breton language, into Brittany, and then they're sort of fed back to, you know, so they're leached from. And then fed back to this abused population in the United Kingdom. Right. Filtered through French and regurgitated back to the colonized people.
10:57 Wes: Oh, yeah, we can't forget that Beckett, that the fictional version of Becket. Right. Was one of these aggrieved, colonized people. Yeah, forgot about that.
11:05 Erin: Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. No, but, you know, there's something really weird that goes on with these Arthurian legends because of the fact that they're filtered through France, so Heav. And through. You know, there's a whole strain of this also that goes into Italy. And so it's, you know, it's sort of like if we really adopted we as Americans, you know, who came Europeans, if in the 1700s maybe adopted, like the full mythology and different narrative stories within, you know, an indigenous tribe, a Native American tribe, and then made that, like part of our self myth and then like taught the, you know, subsequent generations of Native Americans these stories as if, like, we had come up with them or something. You know, there's a little bit of a mind. They're screwing around with people's minds going on here.
11:56 Wes: I was thinking of William James being the one who wrote Huckleberry Finn or something, but maybe that's not the. Right. The English were communicating American ness back to Americans. They were the great transmitters of. I don't know, is that analogous or
12:13 Erin: maybe not William James, but I think
12:15 Wes: you're thinking of someone else closer to. Well, I'm just picking a random.
12:20 Erin: Oh, sure, sure.
12:21 Wes: Think of. But he's not close enough to who's a writer. English writer. That's closer to Twain's time.
12:29 Erin: Dickens, if Dickens is older. Yeah, I know.
12:31 Wes: There you go.
12:32 Erin: Yeah.
12:32 Wes: Which he probably could do. A really good job of, actually.
12:34 Erin: Probably. Yeah. See, that's. That's part of the problem is, like, you know, these were these Breton minstrels just better at telling these stories. We don't know.
12:44 Wes: Maybe we would be better off as Americans if our self concept. No, I think Twain is. Twain did a good job. So let's. But we would. You know, it would be cool.
12:54 Erin: Yeah, for sure.
12:57 Wes: But anyway.
12:58 Erin: Okay, so it's kind of like when. Here. Here we go. It's when Daniel Day Lewis plays Lincoln in a Spielberg movie. Something that people in my family have still not gotten over. They couldn't find an American to play that part. I'm like, okay, anyway.
13:12 Wes: And also, didn't you need someone with Lincoln's specific condition, whatever that was? I can't remember what it is.
13:18 Erin: Tallness.
13:19 Wes: That made him.
13:20 Erin: Stovepipe syndrome. I don't know.
13:24 Wes: All right, so. Yeah. So it is a very interesting cultural history behind this. So thanks for sharing some of that.
13:31 Erin: Sure.
13:32 Wes: Shall we jump to. You want to summarize and. Yeah, give it a little bit of the flavor of. Yep.
13:37 Erin: Okay, so here's a. Here's a story. There. There are two knights. They're living in adjoining castles. Sort of adjoining.
13:42 Wes: Right.
13:42 Erin: They're butting right up against each other. One is married, one isn't. The bachelor is in love with a married knight's wife, and she's in love with him.
13:50 Wes: It's kind of like an odd couple type. No, I'm just kidding. It's not.
13:54 Erin: Yeah, well, she.
13:57 Wes: One of them is messy. The other one is.
13:59 Erin: No, well, one of them is nice, apparently, and the other one is mean.
14:02 Wes: It turns out to be mean. Surprise, but go ahead.
14:05 Erin: Yeah, yeah. There's something. Something rotten in the marriage. So the unmarried knight, she loves him because the deeds that he was famous for, but also apparently because he lived next door. And there are courtly love prescriptions for honorable adultery. And one of them is, you know, love the one. Maybe not the one you're with, but the one that's nearby with a nice
14:25 Wes: big wall in between.
14:28 Erin: Yeah.
14:29 Wes: Parapets and balconies and kinds of indirect ways of communicating.
14:34 Erin: Yeah, well, they mostly. Yeah, they mostly just talk to each other out their window or they look at each other out there. There's a lot of looking.
14:41 Wes: This could revolutionize dating apps. Instead of this, you know, you just arrange times to kind of gaze at each other from afar through windows and over walls. Let courtly love. Courtlylove.com. that's your new dating app.
14:54 Erin: Didn't they do a Study that. Looking into someone's eyes for something like two or three uninterrupted minutes actually induces love. Like, that's how you fall in love. You just have to stare at them and you can't look away. They made people do this.
15:07 Wes: Either that or they just think you're autistic. I don't know which. But no, I read about going from the eyes to the lips to the eyes. Again, I don't know.
15:16 Erin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. I read about that, too. I can't remember what that's about. Anyway, whatever it was, they were doing it, obviously because they were really in love with each other. After a few months of staring at each other. Okay, so she would get up at night from her bed where her husband was sleeping, and she would go to the window and she and her and the night next door would stare at each other through the window all night long until morning came. And this was the time of year in which the nightingale was singing.
So the husband got upset, asked her why she was getting up out of bed and sitting at the window all night. And she said, well, it's just to hear the nightingale's song. So I just want to listen to it all night long. It's like the dopest track there is. So he makes this plan to trap the nightingale so that he gets all his servants to set sticky traps and snares and nets in every tree on the grounds. And soon they catch the bird. And the husband brings it to the wife and says, see, I caught the bird that kept you awake all night. Well, never again.
And he breaks the bird's neck and throws its body at the woman in sort of the climax of the story. And it's noted that she gets blood, the bird's blood on her breast, on the front of her garment. She picks up the body of the bird and weeps and says, oh, no, I'm never going to be able to look out the window at my lover again. And then she worries that because she won't be at the window, her lover will doubt her faith. So to send him the message of what has happened, she covers the bird with the fold of samite in all precious gold. And I looked it up.
Samite is like a silk woven fabric. She embroiders it and inscribes it, presumably with a message, some kind of indication of what's happened. And she has a servant deliver it to him along with the servant also says something to him. We don't know what it is, but the Servant delivers a verbal message. So there are sort of two messages inscribed, or one inscribed, one delivered verbally. And the knight was very sad and he orders a smith to mold a tiny little casket out of pure gold and precious stones and put the nightingale's body inside as a sort of reliquary that he could carry with him always as memory of their love affair.
So presumably the affair was over forever. And I should say, I don't know if I specified this, but the husband obviously had cottoned on to what was really going on between his wife and the guy next door. And so he kills the nightingale to sort of say, haha, now you can't. You can't use an excuse anymore. You can't see him anymore.
17:40 Wes: Oh, is that. Is that okay? Well, we'll talk about that. That's interesting. I don't know if I picked up on that.
17:45 Erin: Oh, maybe that's my interpretation.
17:47 Wes: No, that's interesting because I was just interpreting it as this weird unexplained sadism.
17:52 Erin: Oh, that's a lot more interesting than him being smarter than the total dumbass that he appears to be.
18:00 Wes: Yeah, right, Men. Yeah, we got to bring them back. This word dolent. You said the night was sorrowful or something, and in my translation it's dolent.
18:13 Erin: Nice.
18:13 Wes: Speaking of which, do you want to give some of a. Maybe even of the original French, if you have it, but some of the English translation that captures the poetry.
18:23 Erin: Sure, yeah. I don't have the old French, unfortunately. So this is the Judith Shoaf verse translation. Near St. Malo there was a town somewhere thereabouts of great renown Two nights knights lived there, no lowly vassals in houses that were built like castles. These barons were so good their fame gave their village goodness's own name. One of them had married lately, polite and polished Such a lady she was wise to her own worth, Normal in ladies of high birth. The other lord was a bachelor, Famed for prowess and for valor Loved by all, for he knew how to live, Joust a lot, spend a lot what you have, give away freely.
He loved the wife of his neighbor he begged so much and prayed yet more and goodness was his striking feature. So she loved him more than any creature because of the deeds he was famous for and because he lived in the castle next door. Before the tale actually starts, there is a little bit of a preamble that Marie de France adds where she gives us sort of a history lesson of the word for nightingale. So laustic is the Breton word for nightingale in French. She says they Call it a Rossignol. And in good English, nightingale. So we get the three.
We get three nightingales in the little preamble to the poem. I like how these stories start with real self consciousness on the part of Marie, of the narrator. She likes to take a kind of authorial credit for what comes, even though she gives nods to, you know, this is a popular lay in Brittany. She also centers herself at the beginning, so, you know, you know who you're hearing this from. She likes to give herself credit. And she also maybe calls attention to the fact that it comes from an oral tradition. So she's, you know, she's giving a little spiel at the beginning that maybe the minstrel would do.
So maybe she's kind of transposing that into the text, just as she's sort of, you know, translating the Breton tradition into French in terms of the content of the story.
20:18 Wes: And just in case anyone accuses her of stealing, she's covered. Preamble to Guigemar is quite. We'll talk about that. But that's quite an extensive bit of preemptive self defense against the envy and bad wishes of listeners.
20:33 Erin: Exactly.
20:34 Wes: So maybe there's an element of that as well. It would be embarrassing for me to try to read some of this old French.
20:41 Erin: Okay, so this is in the old French, une aventure vous dirai dont li Bretun firent un lai. Right.
21:01 Wes: I mean, it would be, say, in contemporary French. Right. Just.
21:05 Erin: Yeah,
21:17 Wes: So I don't know if they use.
21:19 Erin: Oh, vieil. Vieil. I see, I see. Yeah. Okay.
21:23 Wes: Anyway, so that. Yeah, so that gives a good flavor of the weird French.
21:27 Erin: It's actually not. It's not that different from regular French. It's a little hard to read because the U's are V's or the V's are U's rather. But otherwise, you know, the vocabulary isn't like an adventure. I will tell you, it was what the Bretons made into a la. You know.
21:46 Wes: Yeah.
21:46 Erin: Like, it's not. It's actually pretty straightforward. I'm surprised. I thought it was going to be way more foreign.
21:50 Wes: Yeah, I did, too. Yeah.
21:52 Erin: I could kind of read it, but not say it.
21:54 Wes: So. Quite charming. Quite charming. And even reading it in this Gutenberg translation, which is a good translation, but the charm, you know, even if you're not getting this sing songy poetry, it's still very charming. All right, so. Yeah. What is this about in the Gutenberg translation? So one night, they're both honorable, I guess I got a very positive impression of the two nights at the beginning, which made it a surprise that one of them ends up being a terrible person. And maybe both of them are. I don't know. It depends on how you interpret the infidelity.
But the bachelor knight set his love upon his neighbor's wife and then woos her. She requites it. And then they are private and careful in their loves, so no one notices. And I thought here there's something about the importance of privacy. And maybe the conception of love as something private as opposed to something public. Because you get the impression these women have been married, right. They're not married for love. They're married, and maybe often to older men for political reasons. Which seems to be what makes fidelity implicitly acceptable in these tales.
As an expression of courtly love. Real love which is suppressed within the confines of the thing that's publicly acceptable or publicly sanctioned in marriage. As if this is a chance for infidelity. In the situation, including the. The way things are set up with the houses next to each other and the wall and all that. It creates a situation in which romantic intimacy is actually possible in a way that is just not possible within the context of an institution at this time. Or maybe it's not as possible. I don't know.
23:38 Erin: I like that. Yeah. There's something, though, a bit arbitrary, right. About the fact that he sets his love on her. I think because of the fact that we get this description at the beginning that there's well spoken and reputed of all, so everyone likes him. Then we proceed to get a much, much longer description of the bachelor knight and of his particular virtues. So maybe that's why I didn't remember this preliminary section in which. Oh, they're both good guys, right? And then we get this really long list of how wonderful the bachelor knight is.
Something about the fact that there are two and that they're in houses right next door to each other. There's definitely not just a fairy tale, but like a nursery rhyme quality to this. That they're these two exact the same guys. They live in the same houses, you know, plagued by the same mouses or, you know, whatever. Whatever. Right. And then it's proximity. I mean, I should mention that in the Shoaf translation. I can't find it in the prose one. It has a note that when she writes or translates. So she loved him more than any creature because of the deeds he was famous for.
And because he lived in the castle next door. A very helpful footnote tells us that there were books on the art of courtly Love. And they had basically stipulations for what was proper or honorable when one undertook adultery. So there was dishonorable adultery and honorable adultery. Right. And one of the characters of honorable adultery is propinquity. So it's supposed to be part of the formal considerations in love that lovers should, according to Shoaf, should live close to each other to maximize opportunities for intimacy. So on the other hand, it's noted in these guidebooks that proximity can breed contempt.
And also that frequent opportunities to meet are also occasions for discovery, which makes it a risky business. So here, you know, she notes that here proximity brings about disaster. But there's something in the arbitrariness of the fact that there are these two nights. And also, if we're taking into consideration these larger precepts of courtly love, you're supposed to take into account who is closest to you. That also seems to be relatively arbitrary, especially as the woman. Right. You're just going wherever your husband lives. You don't have any choice in the matter.
You can, in other words, rent an apartment that, you know, is, you know, in a building that's filled with really cute guys. So then propinquity doesn't become that much of a problem.
26:01 Wes: Rule number one, you do shit where you eat.
26:03 Erin: Exactly. Though it's. Though that causes problems. So they do admit that it's going
26:09 Wes: to end tragically, but that's part of the package.
26:12 Erin: Well, I can't help, perhaps because of the rapidity of the way in which the story is told. I can't help but doubt the strength of this love. Actually, at the same time, I think that there's an inherent safety in this setup. The relationship doesn't seem to be physical in nature. Like it doesn't seem to be, let's say, consummated the adultery. Right. They can lean out of the window. They can kiss each other out of the window. We're also told that they can lean from the casement and speak together, kind of whisper to each other. And they also throw messages in writing and diverse pretty gifts, the one to the other. So they throw things to each other out the window, including messages in writing, which I kind of love.
26:49 Wes: It's like being in prison, right? Throwing the message over the wall. Attached to some floss or something.
26:54 Erin: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
26:56 Wes: Folded up piece of paper.
26:59 Erin: Right. There's intimacy and containment and prophylactic inherent in this arrangement. Right?
27:06 Wes: Yeah. So there's a high, ancient wall. I like that double adjective there. And the idea that it's ancient, being important. And then Yep. The casements, the writing, the gifts that they're sending. Little, I think little gifts. It's important that they not be too lavish. But they could not, quote, unquote, take their pleasure together. And in fact, when the husband was gone, she was even more guarded. He knew. He knew not to. He knew not to trust her. But. Yeah. So I like this, I like what you're saying about the prophylactic creates this opportunity for intimacy. It's for non sexual intimacy. Yeah.
27:47 Erin: And maybe, maybe I'm also attributing the arbitrariness or the sort of, you know, reflex quality to this, to this love. Because also it's associated with spring. I mean, it predates the actual springtime. But then when spring comes and they have the excuse of the nightingale to commune with each other overnight, that seems to represent a kind of full flowering of their love for each other. So, you know, much is made of the transition into springtime. The season, it's noted, became warm and sweet. It was the time when meadow and copse are green, when orchards grow white with bloom and birds break into song as thickly as the bush to flower.
And this will become important, right, because the nightingale is the pretext. And so at this time is really when their relationship is taking up the majority of their time. You know, this is where the relationship then takes up a huge chunk of time. Because they're looking at each other all night long. I don't know when they're sleeping, probably during the day. So this is when, this is when they really come alive, just as the world is coming alive. And so she yearned for sight and speech of her friend. And at night, when the moon shone clearly in the sky and her lord lay sleeping at her side, often the dame slipped softly from her bed and hastening to the casement, leaned forth to have sight of him who watched the greater part of the dark.
They kept vigil together for. Very pleasant it is to look upon your friend when sweeter things are denied. And then this happens so often in the lady rose so frequently from her bed that her lord was altogether wrathful. This is the first indication that he has an anger problem. And many a time inquired the reason of her unrest. And so she tells him that there is no dearer joy in this world than to hear the nightingale sing. And in fact, now they don't say. They don't say dearer joy. I wondered if this was repeated from earlier. Just as very pleasant it is to look upon your friend.
But there's a, you know, the idea of joy from the natural world and from the rites of spring and joy from the lover are in tandem there. One is the excuse for the other. And I think there's something therefore seasonal maybe about the love itself. She just had spring fever and she really wanted to go to spring break in Miami and he wouldn't let her go. So she had this little at home affair instead.
30:02 Wes: Yeah, this is the way Trojan virgin condoms started out, by the way. Selling ancient walls. Get your walls right here.
30:12 Erin: Oh, that's good.
30:14 Wes: Yeah. So spring is here. Everyone's horny. No, just kidding. Everyone's feeling romantic. It's may, but what you said something about the natural world and the nightingale. I was connecting this a little bit to the albatross because I think we had concluded that the albatross in rime of the Ancient Mariner was to some extent representative of our dependency on natural forces in that context, on the types of forces like the wind that determined whether or not your ship is going to get somewhere. Life and death forces. But in this case the nightingale seems to be a representative.
Well, there's a few different things and you can help me with this obviously, but it's representative maybe of the other lover or of their love or of her. You know, you could say all of these things, but I. Or you could say it's a representative of spring and the types of natural forces that lead people to seek each other out in this way. So that the significance of the crazy husbands, rageful of husbands act in the end is to extinguish those forces because those forces aren't really what matters. It's the contract of marriage and his and the property relation, let's say, that matters and not the romantic feelings or sexual feelings that courtly love seems to celebrate as something that has its own prerogatives.
Something that is more important than the institution of marriage. So in a way I thought whether or not he's cottoning onto the actual affair, intuitively he seems to understand it. Intuitively he seems to understand that her being delighted by the nightingale is being means being delighted by these natural forces that are inherently dangerous to the social arrangement that they're involved in.
32:02 Erin: I think that's right. I think also the way that she describes listening to the nightingale song is so indicative of her guilt. I mean, she's talking about it as if it's like her wedding song that she's, you know. Or that's their song.
32:15 Wes: Right.
32:15 Erin: She says there's no dearer joy in this world than to hear the nightingale sing. It is to hark hearken to the song that rises so sweetly on the night that I lean forth from the casement. What tune of harp or viol is half so fair? Because of my delight in his song and of my desire to hear, I may not shut my eyes till it be mourn. I mean, she sounds like someone who's love addled, right? Who's been listening to too many romantic songs.
32:36 Wes: Well, it's when she called him the nightingale during sex that he really got suspicious.
32:42 Erin: Well, of course.
32:43 Wes: Oh, nightingale, nightingale.
32:47 Erin: Well, of course, it puts me. It puts me in mind of the classical association of the nightingale with the perfect singer, the perfect artist. And this means that there's an association between the nightingale and the poet herself, Marie de France, or the poem itself. So, like the nightingale, the poem is the place where these two lovers are coming together and meeting. It's the field of artistry in which these people come together and then come apart, like the nightingale too, with this third body, this third being introduced into the relationship, of course, I can't help but think of a child. This is the vessel, the third being, in which the love of these two people is meeting.
33:32 Wes: Right?
33:32 Erin: So in a way, it has the quality of a child to it. And I think that there's something significant in the fact that so often the unhappy marriages, it seems, in Marie de France's poems are childless, right? So there's no shared. There's no communion between husband and wife. There's communion in terms of this surrogacy, the surrogate child between wife and lover that maybe then helps us understand the anger, maybe, of the husband against the nightingale, almost as like an evidence of his own cuckoldry. Right. Wrong bird, but same, you know. You know, here the nightingale is the cuckoo, and therefore he must destroy it almost as a matter of propriety or justice, maybe in his own mind.
34:16 Wes: Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought of that. And you're making me think of the parallel to the envious and potentially outraged readers or listeners to Marie de France's poem, Right. Their potential hostility towards the poem. Because I'm making the association between nightingale and child and poem. Right. So this is the further symbol that you're introducing, which is that the nightingale can be seen as representative of the poem. And the poem is the thing that celebrates love and celebrates desire. So we can see how there's an interesting vindication, right, in her writing the story and then wrapping the bird in that to give it to her lover.
So the killing of. I mean, this is all, you know, I hadn't thought of any of this until you said it. But the killing of the bird then is like the killing of an infant that potentially is not his, that he suspects is not his child. And one might say the same for if she's. For the development of her interests, including potentially creative interests, right. That transcend her obligations in marriage, those would be threatening as well, right? So it's not just an interest in the. Her interest in the guy next door that's threatening its interest in work or its interest in being a poet to the extent that he understands that unconsciously that he's induced with the urge to kill all of that off, whether so it's child or poem or sublimating faculties or whatever.
35:39 Erin: I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think, you know, you're calling my attention to a couple of things. First of all, you know, so they're both knights, but we get long descriptions of the bachelor knight's deeds and his goodness as a knight, right? So one thinks, as I did, that this is supposed to indicate his worthiness as a romantic partner for the lady. But what it also does, right, is it shows actually that he knows how to be a knight, you know, the other one maybe because he doesn't read these nightly tales because he doesn't really care about these types of forms of, you know, a lot of being a knight is about recognizing the art of life, about living in a way that it's informed by these types of cultural values.
We're told that he gave hospitality gladly, he bestowed gifts of all that he had. So, you know, being a knight is a cultural construct largely in which you're supposed to behave according to certain forms. You're supposed to dress yourself, you know, with flair. And there are these various, you know, texts also, which tell you how to be a knight. And so to be a knight also means being interested in stories that are informing how it is that you are to behave. You know, another significant moment you're making me think of is just this thing that's mentioned very offhand, which is while her husband was sleeping beside her.
She's getting up to the window. It's like, of course, he's not listening to the nightingale. He doesn't care about how beautiful the evening is. And he's not wooing her. He's not. He's not romancing his wife. He's sleeping. You know, this is a great image of, you know, a frustrated wife, right, whose husband is sort of ignorantly sleeping beside her. And of course, the other night knows how to pay a lady proper attention and how to, you know. And he'll sit there at the window and look at you all night if that's all you want to do. He understands something of what it is to be a knight.
And I think that readiness for love and for care and for attending to ladies and appreciating these types of feminine concerns, that's tied into what the husband wants to kill in the nightingale. I think not being a proper knight and wanting to kill poetry, it's like the same thing, Right?
37:49 Wes: Very good. You're making me think the grass is greener on the other side of the ancient wall, or the knight that's on the other side of that wall is always more attractive.
37:58 Erin: Right? Right.
37:59 Wes: Not the one in bed next to you. So on my reading, the killing of the nightingale kind of came out the of nowhere. And it's because it's so cruel. So, right. He catches the bird and says, you know, you're not gonna have to worry about this bird waking you up anymore. And she's, please give it to me as a gift. And his answer was to wring its neck so fiercely that the head was torn from the body. Then, Right. Foully he flung the bird upon the knees of the dame, such a fashion that her breast was sprinkled with the blood, which is a wonderful detail that you already drew attention to. Very important. So, wow. It went kind of into Tarantino territory there all of a sudden.
38:40 Erin: Well, this had to happen, right? I mean, the nightingale, as much as it's associated with poetry or with singing being the perfect singer, it's also associated with pain, Right. Both of these things are twinned together in the Ovid story. So this is the idea of being hurt into poetry or hurt into art. I'm riffing off of Auden on Ireland. Apparently, he says of Yeats, mad Ireland hurt you into poetry, right?
39:03 Wes: Oh, yeah, right.
39:04 Erin: But this idea of hurt into artistic making or artistry, as being a sort of cry from, you know, a cri de coeur, we'll put it in the French way, appropriate, is based in the Philomela story in Ovid. So Philomela is brutally raped by Tereus, who's married to Procne, her sister. She's kept prisoner by Tereus for a year or something. And he cuts her tongue out because she says, I'm going to tell my sister what you've done to me. And he cuts her tongue out so she can't speak. And so she weaves the story of her capture and of Tereus' crimes against her in A tapestry and sends it to Procne.
And Procne rescues her sister and they get revenge on Tereus by killing Procne's son with Tereus and feeding him his own son for dinner. And when Tereus discovers that he's just eaten his own son, he flies into a rage. And as this happens, the gods transform Procne and Philomela into a swallow and a nightingale. And the sweet song of the nightingale has to do with the pain of Philomela's story and of her. And it's also associated with the tale that she wove and the tapestry, this idea that the nightingale's beautiful song has this origin and horrific pain, and that's part of what makes it so beautiful.
So obviously this is being referenced here at the end of the story, when the dead body of the nightingale becomes also the conduit for the tale that she weaves into the cloth and is conveyed to the night. So all of that to say, I mean, the nightingale, I suppose, has to die. Right. This has to be a sad tale if there's a nightingale in it, maybe.
40:38 Wes: Sorry, your character's only lasting one season. It's important that you die.
40:44 Erin: Right, Right. One season is right too, you know. How long would this have lasted? How long would this have lasted anyway? Yeah, it seems like then fall comes and you can't sit at the window all night because it's too cold. So maybe this love affair would have died a much less magnificent death otherwise. So here the nightingale is also. Yeah, it's like the child, but it's imbued with a message via sort of human artistry that goes into this. And then it's like the nightingale in the story, or like Philomela's pain, which then is transposed into a nightingale, so that somehow the nightingale song preserves this story forever and keeps it going forever.
The knight, out of, again, a kind of proper reverence for the nightingale, for poetry, for love, makes a casket for the bird and carries it as a reliquary in memory of their love that, you know, sort of preserves even if the love is not preserved. He preserves the memory of the love forever in this beautiful object that he has commissioned.
41:50 Wes: Yeah, that's really interesting. I was thinking a bit with both these stories about this urge to possess and control and imprison the love object. Whereas in actual courting and the actual process of courting and courtly love and desire and its initial stages, it's all indeterminacy and becoming in one does not fully possess the other, and one is Always engaged in the process of. Of trying to win over the other, which is the thing that ends. Well, ideally, it wouldn't end in marriage. Right. In small ways, the courtship process would be sustained.
But in a bad marriage to the bad knight like this, it's not sustained. And instead you just end up in a prison because he's mate guarding. And it seems to me there's a parallel between this kind of imprisonment and then what he does with the bird. Oh, which is to put it in a box. Right, point. He's not imprisoning an actual person. He's not trying to preserve the relationship by controlling the love object. He's trying to sustain it by sustaining memory and therefore sustaining desire. So the thing that has to be preserved is not the person, not the love object, but the relation, the desire, and a certain kind of open.
Not an open marriage. That's not what I was about to say. But an openness, an open quality to the relationship.
43:13 Erin: I like that. I mean, what do we make of the fact? What do you make of the fact? Because I don't quite have an answer to this, of the fact that the. So the nightingale was the conduit for their relationship in life, in death, it's the conduit of this message. The knight gets three messages. We're told that the message is embroidered somehow in the coverlet made for the nightingale. Seeing the dead nightingale would also convey a kind of symbolic message. And then we're told that the servant told over to him the story and bestowed the nightingale upon him.
And then when all had been rehearsed and shown to him, and he, the knight had well considered the matter, the knight was very dolent. So, you know, he gets three. The verbal message from the servant, which the lady tells him to convey verbally what has happened. The written message and the symbolic message of the nightingale, the nightingale's body itself. And I just. I wonder about freighting. Like, why is this bird so freighted with three different messages? Wouldn't it be enough to have the servant go and tell the knight what happened? Do we need the body?
Or wouldn't it be enough for somebody to just drop off the. Okay, the nightingale and the little funeral vestment that she's embroidered with the story on it. And we don't know the text either of what's written on the. The vestment for the nightingale or what actually the servant says to him. We don't know. And in other. We know in Guigemar, sometimes we hear exactly what somebody says to someone else, even when we've Already seen what's gone on in the story. We overhear the dialogue where someone is telling a person exactly what's happened to them.
And it's not shortened by saying he told them what happened to him. And then he. No, sometimes he goes on for five, six sentences telling the full story. So it's just. It's so interesting. What is. What's left out here?
45:03 Wes: Well, you imagine that she could be the original author of the Breton lay, or there's some recursive quality with the very thing that's written. And it is this story, which is cool.
45:15 Erin: Exactly. Right. This calls attention, if anything. Yeah. To the fact that she's taking an oral tradition and making it a text object and making it, you know, turning it into something now that people are holding in their hands as a, you know, the text now is the reliquary for the story and of the bird. It contains the bird, literally, because it's, you know, as she takes great pains at the beginning, she has the three languages for nightingale, just as we get the three messages at the end. And she has three nightingales, therefore appear in three different languages contained within the text itself.
45:47 Wes: So the three messages are the embroidered tale, the nightingale itself, and then what the messenger says, the servants.
45:55 Erin: The servants told to relate.
45:58 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting because. Right. She's anxious that he's going to think, right. She's not going to be able to communicate with him anymore. So she needs to make one last communication and she needs to tell this tale because she needs him to know that she didn't fall out of love with him. Now, you know, one might think, well, is she inviting violence and revenge? Is she inviting the other night to take action? But of course, we get this line in no wise would he avenge himself wrongfully. Which I was kind of disappointed by.
46:26 Erin: Yes.
46:29 Wes: And I was prepared for a bad outcome in Guigemar as well, but that one had a happier ending. But if one interprets mass violence to win over a lady as happy, but she needs him to know there's the prospect of an invitation to violence. But that doesn't seem to be. Overall, the purpose and the relationship is transformed. Right. It's transformed from courtly love to writer or artist. Artist and audience. You get this interesting transformation. And now he can carry around. Well, there's the potty of the nightingale. So it's a little weird. It's not just like she gave him a poem that he can carry around and say, it's my favorite poem now I'm going to keep it with me.
At all times. But it's something sacred and it kind of of calls back to this idea that they were keeping a vigil earlier on, as if there's an inevitability to the death of love and one has to mourn it in a way that's ongoing, which you know, which may be a part of the preservation of desire as well, oddly enough. So you, you don't imprison the love object, you don't preserve it in that way. But as the relationship progresses, things change and you mourn what's past, but you create room for what's in the future. Of course, in this case, there is no future beyond this moment, beyond this perpetual act of mourning that he's engaged in by carrying around this chest.
47:49 Erin: What I love in the Shoaf translation is she notes that I had the exact same reaction. Oh, surely he's going to take revenge. That's going to be his nightly duty to kill the guy who presumed to kill this little bird. Maybe that would have been too much. But Shoaf writes, when he, the servant had told the story and shown the bird, the knight who'd listened to every word was sad as could be at how things had turned out. No vile churl, he though no lazy lout. He ordered the best smith to mould a tiny vessel, all pure gold, no iron or steel, and good stones, precious ones, expensive ones, and make a good tight fitting lid inside the laustic he hid.
Then he sealed up this reliquary to ever after with him. Careful. So I really liked this, that he's, he's no vile churl, no lazy lout. So he takes action. It's, you know, this is, this is the antithesis of not acting or of not avenging or properly responding to this. Actually, the best response is to make art. And art of the highest quality. We're told it's all pure gold, no iron or steel, and precious stones. So the highest quality vessel for this dead bird seems to be part of the performance of the duty of the knight toward the relationship.
And again, it seems that this is indicative of his quality, that he understands the value of a beautiful reliquary for befitting the memory of this love. So it's his respect for art that again sets him apart.
49:19 Wes: Here, the best revenge is a laustic served cold.
49:24 Erin: The best revenge is living well by carrying a beautiful gold box around your neck.
49:29 Wes: Yeah, okay, that's better.
49:32 Erin: Okay, so we'll end our discussion of Laustic there. And in part two of our discussion of the lays of Marie de France. We'll cover Guigemar. Thank you, Wes.
49:42 Wes: Thank you. If you're a subscriber, you can listen to part two right now. Otherwise, that'll be out in a week.
49:51 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Sight and Solitude in Le Samouraï (1967) by Jean-Pierre Melville (Part 2)
Aug 05, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 noir thriller “Le Samouraï,” and the surprising power of love to capture its fugitives, even if it means finding them in the most shadowy of underworlds.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Le Samouraï. Say it in your Frenchy voice. Is it different?
0:40 Erin: No, the samurai. That's it.
0:45 Wes: Okay.
0:45 Erin: You could say it really obnoxiously like the samurai.
0:49 Wes: Well, there you go. That's what I'm going for. I. Yeah, I'm just terrified of trying to do it. Yes. So we were just done talking about. About what might have been the midpoint of the film. I'm not sure, but the scene in which Jane's apartment is invaded by the police and she holds up under pressure.
1:09 Erin: You like a three act structure. I'd say that's probably right at the end of act two.
1:13 Wes: Okay. I marked the end of act two. So I mocked. But this may be wrong because I wasn't actually paying attention. But I marked him confronting the assassin guy in his apartment as the end. But that, that may be wrong. Either one of them, I guess, could make sense as leading into act three, but whatever.
1:30 Erin: Sure.
1:31 Wes: All right. So we had also been talking about the love relationship of whatever sort between him and the Pianist and the way that set him on the path to getting him out of his life of crime in a very indirect way. Very direct in the end. I mean, the end is the directest way you can get out of a life of any kind.
1:50 Erin: But he opens the airlock on the spaceship and gets sucked out. He presses the eject button on the life of crime.
1:59 Wes: It is the best way to take one's leave of life. Go out with a bang or three or four. Yeah, right. One of the other things I wanted to talk about was the question of competence. So here's the reason I asked that. So in contemporary films like action or films about mobsters, whether it's an action film or film about a mobster, I think often what's highlighted is the extreme competence. So you get a scene of a hit where someone comes up on someone and then shoots them with their silencer on and then walks away and casually tosses away the gun. Or if it's an action film, they're just badass fighters who can defeat 50 people or various sorts of extreme competence that might play a role.
And then the same thing with technology. Technology generally serves that same purpose. You know, more. Maybe more in action films, cool guns and maybe other gadgets. If it's a spy film. In this film, though, the way he's breaking into a car, he doesn't hotwire the car. He has to go through a ring of keys by trial and error. And it's the same thing with the police later on getting into his apartment. And these are very extended scenes, which adds the charm of the film, Right? There's no attempt to rush through this. And you're gonna sit there and watch him try a few keys.
Maybe it's the third key that he gets in. But it feels like, you know, you're waiting a while for him to find the right key to the ignition of a car that he's stealing. And then the same thing with the scene with surveillance. They break into his apartment, put up an enormous transmitter behind the curtain.
3:37 Erin: That's so good.
3:38 Wes: You know, today it would be this invisible thing, right? But. Well, I guess it's not that it is small, but it's still a little.
3:45 Erin: No, no, they use. They use a huge one first. Then they realize this is first.
3:49 Wes: And then they. Yeah.
3:49 Erin: Comically large. This is the wrong genre of film. Let me switch it out. Slightly smaller one.
3:56 Wes: You know, it strikes me that this film kind of downplays the sense of competence among both criminals and police. It's not. People don't seem like such experts at what they're doing. And even with the, you know, in the case of, say, Jeff confronting the blonde guy, the guy is supposed to give him money on the bridge. It's just a quick fight, right? There's no badass kung fu fight or any. Anything like that. It's just a quick scuffle, which is more. Much more realistic, of course. Quick scuffle. Jeff gets shot, the guy runs away. So I don't know if you made anything of that. You know, you could call It. Yes, there's a kind of realism to that, but I. Seems like there's almost a commentary on that here.
4:38 Erin: Yeah. I'm not sure what to make of the key thing. I mean, I do think that we're meant to think of Jeff as a master of his profession. You know, like we're meant to think of him as being very good at this, unfortunately, because he's destabilized by the piano player. So early in the film, we see him just start to screw up. Almost as soon as we're introduced to him, he makes another crucial error. Maybe not a crucial error. I don't know. It's an odd moment when he takes that wadded up ball of bloody gauze and he just throws it.
5:08 Wes: Exactly.
5:09 Erin: On the sidewalk or on the, you know, presumably in the gutter, but there's no gutter nearby. So.
5:13 Wes: Yeah, it's really odd.
5:14 Erin: It is an odd moment.
5:15 Wes: And then is he trying to, you know, is he trying to let them know that he's get tailed at that point? I mean, maybe. Maybe from the point he sees her, when he first sees her onward, he's playing out this thing that he knows. He's. He knows the way it's going to end.
5:29 Erin: Right.
5:29 Wes: I don't know.
5:30 Erin: I think I mentioned in part one of our conversation that the pianist not calling him when she said she will was the first of two things that I really didn't understand. The second is when the blonde guy lets him get away. That seems to be what's happening in that. I mean, Jeff is shot, he's down, he's. I think the blonde guy was there to take him out.
5:52 Wes: Gets the gun away from him.
5:53 Erin: Or is that what happens?
5:55 Wes: Jeff has the gun? Yeah, I think.
5:57 Erin: Well, because at some point the blonde guy lies. So when he goes to the mob boss and gives his report of what happens, he says that Jeff got away from him. In fact, he ran away from Jeff. Right. So there's something. I mean, maybe he wants to save face with that. He doesn't. If Jeff, in fact, got the gun from him, and I suppose that would make sense because he's gotten rid of the gun with which he shot Marty. Right. He's thrown that into the, the. Into the river. So maybe he doesn't have a gun at that point. Doesn't he have his own gun or, I don't know, a backup?
6:29 Wes: I don't think so. And I think he leaves, he wrestles the gun. I mean, I may be imagining this, but I. He leaves that scene with a gun, which I Assume was the blonde guy's gun.
6:39 Erin: But I guess I. I just wouldn't think that he would show up to an encounter like that unarmed.
6:44 Wes: But we don't see him arm himself. And he's gotten rid of that other guns, right? I don't know.
6:48 Erin: Right, yeah.
6:50 Wes: And also he just think he's gonna. He thinks he's being paid, but sure, yeah.
6:54 Erin: So maybe that's the case and maybe the blonde guy is just saving face. But I do think that to a lesser extent than the identification between Jeff and the pianist, but still, to a certain extent, there is an identification between Jeff and this blonde guy. They're essentially in the same position. They're both ancillary contract hires, perhaps by the spirit by this mob boss. They have that encounter in Jeff's apartment in which they sort of trade places, and then the blonde guy ends up sort of comically tied up in the corner with almost like a noose around his neck, practically.
There's a moment I made note of in the mob boss's apartment. When the blonde guy is there, when the mob boss is going on about how he's wounded, he'll leave a trace. Now we have to get rid of him in quick. Since the police won't find the killer, they won't let him off the hook. He's still there, main witness, by which I mean their main suspect, which is interesting, will keep on his trail as well. And he walks over to the. To the blonde guy and he says, make sure he doesn't give you the slip again. And I noted that the blonde guy is. And this is the moment that I interpreted that the blonde guy must have lied because Jeff, in fact, didn't give him the slip.
It was, you know, the blonde guy who ran away from him. But the blonde guy is holding his arm in this strange way, almost as if he's wounded in the arm in the same place that Jeff is wounded.
8:13 Wes: He might have been.
8:13 Erin: Yeah. I just made note of that body language. It could be because of the scuffle that he got in with Jeff. But it's interesting that it's the same part of his arm that he's kind of holding his, you know, he's kind of bracing one arm, holding it by the elbow.
8:26 Wes: Yeah. They could have been wounded by the same bullet in that scuffle.
8:29 Erin: Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
8:30 Wes: In the same place.
8:32 Erin: Yeah. It just increases the sense of identification between them and, you know, reminds one of the fact that they're in kind of interchangeable positions in terms of the jobs that they've been hired to do, you know. Now he's the sort of the hitman for the hitman. He's like the Woody Harrelson character in No Country for Old Men, a movie that I thought of. I also. I love how you brought up Collateral in the part one, because it's obviously a movie that must have been influenced by this one and several others I could think of that bear traces of this, probably in their DNA.
9:00 Wes: So the blonde guy does something that Jeff says he would never have done, which is he gives up his. Puts his gun away, right? So Jeff convinces a blond guy at the scene later on where the blond guy shows up at his apartment. So Jeff says, I never talked to a man holding a gun. Blond guy says, is that a rule? He says, it's a habit. Blonde guy puts the gun away. Jeff punches, takes a gun, pistol, whips him, holds a gun on him. And then he says, I'll answer you the question. Who sent you? I'm not free to tell you. You were free to kill me on the overpass.
I won't ask you a third time. And then he finally gives it away. It's Olivier Rey, right? Gives up the address. And then Jeff says, that's how you ended up out of work. He makes some quip. I guess it's not in my notes, about the lack of professionalism. Anyway. I forget the specific remark, but Jeff makes a note of the lack of professionalism. The guy for putting away the gun and getting himself caught, you know, getting himself overcome. What I'm trying to point to, I guess, is that, yeah, I think that there's that identification. But blonde guy is the less professional of the two, or the blond guy maybe is more of a person.
Is, you know, it's not. Is not as cold as Jeff, not as unrelated and as him. So Jeff couldn't have been persuaded to trust someone, in other words, with a blonde guy can, Right?
10:18 Erin: Yeah, that's a good. That's a good point.
10:20 Wes: But you know, the other thing here you were talking again about that scene where the employer and other mobsters are plotting. And that's something which I thought, okay, this is another thing which is. Doesn't quite make sense because they hired him because he makes these airtight alibis. And the whole point of that is that he can stand up under police interrogation. That's supposed to be his. One of his key features as a hitman, but now they're going to kill him for that. They're going to kill him for using this wonderful alibi thing, skill that he has.
And then they bring up. So let's get some of the flavor of the scene. So they're plotting. Can't leave them out there on the loose. He was picked up and held for several hours. He might still be a suspect. And then another guy, another mobster says, I doubt it. He has a terrific alibi, which is, it's almost comic in a way. And then I think it's the employer who says, well what if it doesn't hold up? And then the other guy says it's impossible, it's a two part alibi and they don't connect. And then the employer says, I admit they don't come any smarter.
That's why we hired him. I think another person says he's a lone. I think the other part of why they hired him is because he's a lone wolf, but now he's a wounded wolf. So they're making use not just of his, his alibi talent but his. The fact that he's isolated again. But two things which I thought were kind of intention. But he's a lone wolf. Airtight alibis. But the alibi thing turns out not to be so important. And the lone wolf idea, it almost seems to make him less trustworthy because he's a wounded wolf and he might do anything. So he's not bound by mob omerta or whatever it is, you know, there's no loyalty in other words.
And that, that seems to be an asset. But now it's something that's creating some paranoia on part of the employer.
12:02 Erin: Well, I like the fact too that this aligns with the too airtight quality of the alibi, actually making him more of a suspect to the police captain. When you think about it, it really isn't that airtight at all. I mean it's, it hinges on the wor. This one girlfriend who of course is going to lie for him if she's
12:25 Wes: in love with him, who has another boyfriend visiting the same evening.
12:28 Erin: Has another boyfriend visiting the same evening. Yeah. And then. Yeah. And I suppose Wiener's, you know, that element is another part of this. So there is a third party. Because otherwise the two halves that connect up are the girlfriend who sort of inherently can't be trusted for reasons involving her personal relationship with him and the group of guys playing cards, all of whom have got to be criminals. Right. And they all seem to be part of this. Yeah. So you know, really Vinair, seeing him in the hallway is the only time that he is deliberately seen in passing that he's made you Know, made the choice that he's going to be seen.
He's not able to construct an alibi because it would be impossible of him, you know, walking around in a big crowd of people and creating an abundance of witnesses to make his alibi super airtight. Or the nature of the alibi is itself actually a bit flimsy. For all the discussion of it being so wonderful, all it really hinges on is was he with his girlfriend the whole night or not? And they have to take just her word for it. And that's it. There's not much of an alibi. I was home with my wife all evening, you know, and like, it's your wife, it's your girlfriend, it's your, you know, it's not really an objective standard by which to measure the greatness of an alibi.
So.
13:47 Wes: And it, yeah, it all rests on her talents, not his. How good is she under?
13:53 Erin: Right, right.
13:54 Wes: And.
13:54 Erin: And she doesn't fold, though. Though they know that the police captain says he knows that she's lying. And he, and he, he makes some, some pretty ridiculous comment after that, saying, the truth is what I say it is or something like that, you know, he too, I guess, is a. A great professional. What marks, you know, greatness in a police captain, I suppose it's having a great nose for what the truth is, being able to size up the situation. The girlfriend accuses him of not being a very good psychologist. In fact, he's wonderful one. He puts his finger right on the nature of their relationship, the nature of her relationship with Wiener, the, you know, the, the nature of the relationship, as we already discussed in the previous episode with the pianist, you know, so he's slimy and unpalatable for sure. But he's good at what he does, though. The sting operation to trail doesn't go very well.
14:42 Wes: Yeah. And this, I was just, you know, I was reading this trailing operation that they do with people following him around. And that's a point in the film, at the very end of the film where there's a lot of cutting between these different scenes of. Between the police and him. Police in the field and then the police at the station central headquarters monitoring everything that's going on where the pace is really picked up and there's a more frenetic quality, I think, to the film. But this is one of his other virtues I was thinking about. Okay, so what is it that makes him good as a hitman? He's got the alibis, he's great looking. He's a fast draw. Right. He Basically gets in three gunfights, I think, where he has to draw quickly. Or is it three? So he draws on. I don't understand the wisdom of going up to Marty and saying, I'm here to kill you. And then he has to.
15:33 Erin: It's stylish, Wes.
15:34 Wes: They draw on each other.
15:36 Erin: It's epic.
15:36 Wes: And then it's very similar with the employer. Is that it? Are those the two, or is there another? I mean, he gets in the scuffle in any case. Yeah. So he's quick draw, but then he's got this subway system talent. He's got the Paris Metro down by heart, and he knows how to move around in a way where he's going to be able to evade anyone. So I thought. I was thinking. Well, actually, the most important talent that he has in the film is his talent for evasion. Physically and psychologically. He can shake people, he can shake a tail. And at a psychological level, I think what he's doing is for someone who's sort of cut off socially and is so stoic and without much affection in his life, there's a form of evasion in that the one person he doesn't evade, obviously, is the pianist, as we've said. She catches him, so to speak, and there's nothing he can do about that.
16:33 Erin: I like this because it's. Evasion also suggests a certain passivity, and that seems to be a fundamental feature of the way that he operates. This exposes maybe a little bit of the paradox of the actor. You know, the actor is actually a passive figure. I mean, this is something that, like, lots of people used to talk about in interviews about actors, how, you know, the actor turned director. You know, oftentimes these male figures are sort of taking revenge on the passivity of the situation that acting has put them in. You know, they want to be more proactive and less reactive or something.
That seems inherent to this, you know, parallel that I'm trying to draw between, you know, Jeff the contract hitman and Jeff the virtuoso performer. It involves being activated. You know, when you're an actor, you're given. You're given a script, you're told where to stand, you're directed, you're photographed by people. Then there's always a conflict. I think, for some people who are more sensitive about the passivity inherent in this, especially if they're really good looking, because you feel you're an object. Right. And Delon himself is sort of like this ultimate super handsome, almost pretty boy figure who perfectly fits this mold.
So where Am I getting at with this? Well, you know, I'm thinking about.
17:47 Wes: Are you thinking of Paul Newman here?
17:49 Erin: I'm thinking of Paul Newman quite a bit. There are lots of people who've been bothered by it. Redford, Anne Bancroft, in an interview with Charlie Rose talked about how Sean Penn basically felt like the acting profession is fundamentally unmanly. And I've heard this expression that it's, you know, it's somehow unmanly in some, some way because they're, you're, you're being told what to do by a bunch of people. And that speaks of a certain level of insecurity to me on the one
18:14 Wes: hand, and on the other hand, ranch wrangling some cows.
18:17 Erin: Right, right, exactly, exactly. I'm, I'm, I'm just the reporter here, but, but I do, you know, I do think there can be a conflict for people with more desire to actually be active. Like this is the interesting paradox in the word, right. They're actors, but they're not. They're fundamentally sort of reacting in this
18:40 Wes: world of make believe, this world of fantasy where nothing is happening in there.
18:44 Erin: Right, right. I want to connect this up to actually the role of technology in the film, you know, the key ring. Okay, so, so what does he have to do when he steals a car? Well, we see him the first time he goes out to steal a car. He steals them twice in the film. Right. He has to wait on the street for someone to walk away from a car because then he knows that it's unlocked. So he goes into the unlocked car. He doesn't have to break it open. He doesn't have to. Right. And then he tries the key, you know, the keys in succession. There's something a little bit, what's the term?
Low, low tech. I don't know, whatever the opposite of high tech is. Right. It's certainly low tech way of. And it's a little bit old fashionedy, you know, and it's also, he has, he just has to sit there until he gets it right. And then he takes the car and he goes into the garage. And sure, it's cool the way he does the turn and gets right into that garage. Right. But then he just has to sit there while somebody else changes the plates and hands him the gun. Again, it's passive. You know, the moments when, you know, when he's being trailed on the subway.
I'm thinking about the receivers that they have to switch on and off when they, they catch sight of him. Their receiver is hooked up to this kind of comical map. With light up lights that the police captain is following. And what does he have to do? He has to be able to tell if a plainclothes officer is actually a police officer, if a person who looks like a normal person is actually a plainclothes police officer. And it turns out to be pretty obvious. Right. But they're sitting there following him around and he's like the rat in the Skinner box.
And they're flicking this thing on and off. And the bug as well in his apartment. They've infiltrated his space, they've put the bug on the wall and then he has to sort of find the bug. He has to react to the situation that the technology and the infiltration of the. Of the police has imposed upon him, that he then has to sort of reckon with, deal with. We've totally also glossed over the fact that it's hilarious that they bug the apartment of a man who lives alone and who is, you know, says three words in the whole movie.
20:44 Wes: Then they just get to hear the, the bird chirping.
20:46 Erin: Right, right. And he finds it immediately, first looking in all the more logical hiding places and then can just go to some phone booth and make the phone call from there, which if he had made it in the apartment, she wouldn't have picked up anyway. He never had to say anything at all.
21:01 Wes: And what would they, you know, and how much detail would there have been and.
21:05 Erin: Right, right.
21:06 Wes: But he's so stoic and impassive and apparently he's looking for something from her. Right, so she would have been the one doing the talking.
21:12 Erin: Exactly, exactly. You know, I want to connect those two things. This seems to be the operative going rogue, turns this dynamic on its head. The passive one goes rogue and becomes the more active one. But then of course, in the end, it's a sort of further. I mean, suicide by cop is yet another kind of passive act. You know, I'm wanting to connect this with the intrusive and the sort of more assertive use of technology on the. The part of the police and occasionally the mobsters, which then is repeatedly undercut by the very passivity that it's trying to thwart. You know, I don't know what we could say about that.
21:54 Wes: Yeah, well, you're making me think of a lot of different things and hopefully this will come out as something coherent. Mix it up in a pot and see what happens. Here's a little thought, gumbo. I was thinking about surveillance versus evasion. Right. So that's the kind of thing that we're getting at here. Where his skill for evasion is up against someone else's skill for surveillance, which is often technological. This had me thinking about the fact that something you see in paranoid schizophrenics frequently is this idea that they're being surveilled, often with technological devices.
So there have been some famous papers written about this, but they will. You know, I once had someone in my capacity and working in mental health who thought that he was constantly being surveilled and that everyone on the street was an actor and this was all designed just for him. And that there were. There was a powerful person who controlled radio antennas everywhere, who's putting thoughts into his mind, things like that. Technology often plays this role because. Or reading his mind as well. So it's putting things into your mind and also reading your mind.
Technology plays a role because it makes more plausible the idea that this sort of thing could be happening. It's not just magic. It's not just there's a shaman out there reading your mind, but technology makes it possible, makes these paranoid ideas much more plausible. So when Freud wrote about this in a famous paper called On Narcissism, his Some Preliminary Thoughts on Schizophrenia, which is, like, in Freud's theoretical framework, like the most extreme form of narcissism one can have. But his idea is that when people hear voices, so this is another aspect of schizophrenia.
It's as if they're the voice of conscience, which we all have. We know, in a way, it's our own voice. It isn't. It isn't right. It's society's voice. It's the voice of norms, abstract norms that have kind of been implanted in us, the things with our values. But it feels like us. And to a schizophrenic who's hearing voices, it literally becomes a voice of another that they can hear still berating them for the things they do wrong or telling them what to do. So it serves a very similar function to conscience. And the same thing with paranoia, where you feel like you're being monitored.
Someone's monitoring me. That's what conscience does. It monitors you. So surveillance, in other words, is an externalization of the concept of conscience, which is something as a hitman. To the extent that he's sociopathic, he lacks that. So you could say this is another one of his things that he's talented at. He can evade. He can evade physical capture. He can evade at a social level, but he can also evade his own conscience and the symbolic representation of conscience. So I was going to try and Connect that to your idea that going rogue makes him more active.
So.
24:50 Erin: Well, in theory, it would.
24:52 Wes: Here's another idea, right? So he's supposed to be a samurai. So he does have a system of values. So maybe to say he doesn't have a conscience is too strong because he has a code that he lives by. And the code apparently, is to. I don't know what is for samurai, literally, to obey the emperor, to obey their lord, do the bidding of their lord. They're obviously not hitmen. The ronin are the hitmen, the people who live outside of the code of the hitmen. So it's a weird. It's a weird idea that. That he's a samurai with a code, but he seems to be living according to some sort of code that involves solitude and all the rest of it.
And he's messed up. He messed up by getting seen by that woman. To the extent that he's involved with her, interested in her, he's messed up. He's no longer living by his code of isolation. He's going to mess up by killing the employer. I don't know if that stands inside or outside the code, but you conceivably could think of it not being part of the code. So what I'm trying to say is you can think of. Just because he's killing people doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't have a conscience, because he does have a system of values, and he seems invested in living up to that system of values.
But he doesn't, which is one of the reasons you would think he has to commit suicide at the end. For samurai, right? It would be a loss of honor, and then you commit seppuku. I think there might be something like that going on with him. But again, the one thing he can't evade is love here. So love is the thing that actually captures her love. Not the police, not the mobsters, but her love is the thing that he can't evade.
26:22 Erin: Yeah, No, I like this a lot. I mean, I'm sure you've read this opening quote about the, you know, the samurai, that Melville just made that up
26:29 Wes: from a fake book.
26:31 Erin: Right. I love that. The one thing I read on this, as far as, you know, any kind of secondary literature goes, is just the Roger Ebert review, which I had in his. My collection of his movies reviews. Yeah, yeah. And he mentions this conflict, and I like the fact that you seem to be kind of resolving it more. You seem to be making more connections between the film and the. And the actual, you know, the samurai structure. Maybe we should call it rather than an honor code, it's more of just living your life with a kind of structure of values that Jeff seems to live by.
Whereas Ebert has said, you know, this doesn't really line up. He's not really killing somebody according to traditional samurai values of honor and et cetera. I like the idea that the lone wolf quality, the loneliness, the solitude is itself a kind of code and that sparing this woman out of this kind of identification slash love at first sight, or, you know, whatever we want to call it, the decision to spare her actually is what violates his own sort of backwards set of standards. Like, we would see this as being a good thing, that he spares somebody's life, you know, even though it would have saved him to kill her.
And we find in the end that he's going to spare her a second time and kill himself rather than. Rather than kill her. So, yeah, I like all that. And I think you're explaining for me more that, you know, I hadn't connected. This is so stupid. I'm loathe to admit it, but I hadn't connected the suicide at the end with seppuku. But of course, that's like a hallmark of the samurai that does in fact happen at the end.
28:02 Wes: What's the point of being a samurai if you can't commit seppuku?
28:04 Erin: Right, right, right. Yeah, I hadn't. I hadn't even thought of that. Of course, in the end, he's a true samurai.
28:11 Wes: Yes, I stole this idea. I'm not sure if I had the idea about. If I. If it occurred to me before reading the Ebert review that this conflict between, you know, the fact that samurai aren't hitmen, basically.
28:24 Erin: Right.
28:26 Wes: I think it. I mean, that seems pretty obvious. But yeah, Ebert highlights this and then he says. So I'll just read a bit from the review because I think there's another point here to be made. But as Stanley Kauffmann points out in his review, a samurai did not accept commissions to kill merely for money. Honor and ethics were involved. Perhaps he should have taken his text from a real book. He Melville, the Code of the samurai from 16th century Japan. It begins with the words Melville might have quoted. One who's a samurai must, before all things, keep constantly in mind, by day and by night, the fact that he has to die.
This is his chief business. So the samurai must live. And I'm just reading elsewhere, reading some things about samurai. They have to live as if they've already died. They're basically preparing themselves to die honorably. So that would be Another form of mastery for him. Right. His mastery of alibis and evasion. Anything else we want to say about him? Is that something that he's done? Well, he lived his life keeping in mind that he. That he. Or in other words, he set things up so he could die honorably. I don't know there's a better way to put that, but go ahead.
29:32 Erin: I love this, because at the beginning, it really is like he's dead. You know, you barely even in that opening shot. It takes a while for you to even realize there's somebody in that room. Right. I think light slowly maybe filters through a little bit, and that's what gives us the sense that there's someone in there and we start to see the curl of smoke.
29:50 Wes: Right.
29:51 Erin: But he might as well be dead. And in a way, it's the. It's the identification with the. With the pianist that sort of makes him flicker to life or something. I was reminded, too, of. I don't know why I was. I was reminded a little bit of Blade Runner, but maybe in that there's this idea of the. Oh, what's the. What's the term? That. For the people who aren't really people, but they're.
30:09 Wes: Well, they're androids, essentially.
30:10 Erin: Android.
30:11 Wes: I forget what they're called.
30:12 Erin: Oh, it's such a famous word, too.
30:15 Wes: It's on the tip of my tongue.
30:16 Erin: I'll just look it up.
30:17 Wes: Why don't I look it up on Google and pretend. Replicant.
30:19 Erin: Replicant. Yeah.
30:20 Wes: But I was just going to pretend
30:21 Erin: that I. Yeah, good. Pretend.
30:24 Wes: Yeah. So would he pass that test? Would he pass the Blade Runner replicant test? I don't know.
30:29 Erin: Right. But. Yeah, but there's something like. Yeah, or there's a Pinocchio quality maybe, you know, he becomes a real boy when he. When he sees her in the hallway.
30:38 Wes: He's. He's autistic or they would say schizoid in my business. Or there's a psychological impoverishment that has to do with his lack of connectedness to people. A dead inner world.
30:51 Erin: Yeah. And that's what makes him so effective. The lone wolf, as the boss says. Right. But now he's a wounded wolf. It's as if the wound is not the one that they're thinking of. It's as if he's been wounded into reality, into real engagement with the world via. You know, I mean, the scene we keep pointing to in the hallway is so short and it's so. You know, I hesitate to put as much weight on it as we're putting. Because there's no indication in his face or, you know, he's a mask the whole time. There's no indication that he really falls in love with her. And yet he looks stunned. He's stunned by her. He's stunned by her presence. Why is she there? It could just be stunned because he didn't expect anybody to be there. Right. And yet we're putting so much weight on this. But I think It's.
31:35 Wes: What's that C.S. lewis book? Is it called Surprised by Joy?
31:38 Erin: Yes. Yeah. Because his wife.
31:40 Wes: Isn't that about meeting his wife?
31:41 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
31:42 Wes: Surprised by Joy.
31:44 Erin: Yeah.
31:44 Wes: In a better world, it could have been him settling down and leaving a life of the hitman. I mean, it's not as if he has no social life. You know, he has a social engagement here or there. It's just that the person ends up dead, usually right after.
31:59 Erin: He could have been her. Her agent. She becomes a recording star and he sets the terms of her contract and makes sure that she's getting the best deal when she goes into the recording studio. Yeah.
32:11 Wes: And he would.
32:11 Erin: He checks everything out. Yeah. All right, well, let's talk about this.
32:15 Wes: Jeff Costello, inventor of the airtight contract.
32:19 Erin: Exactly.
32:20 Wes: Perfect on the musician side of things. Yeah.
32:23 Erin: Everybody in the recording studio turns around like, oh, he's been there the whole time watching us, making sure we do it.
32:28 Wes: That's right.
32:29 Erin: Okay, so let's take a close look then at this final scene. So the blonde guy is tied up in his. In his apartment and he does his.
32:37 Wes: Yeah, I was worried about the blonde guy for the rest of the movie. Right?
32:40 Erin: Yeah. Nobody ever found out. I'm more concerned about the bird. That poor bird is not going to get fed. It's already living such a sad little existence. He throws the blonde guy's gun on the bed, out of reach before he puts on his hat and does his little stylish ritual and takes his keys and does look at the bird, I think before he leaves. It's his goodbye.
33:01 Wes: Yeah. Gives it this pensive goodbye look.
33:03 Erin: Yeah, yeah. They communicate telepathically.
33:06 Wes: Obviously they kiss for, of course, they also kiss right before he leaves.
33:11 Erin: Right, right.
33:12 Wes: Don't leave that part out.
33:14 Erin: It's just a peck.
33:15 Wes: A passionate. Oh, okay, I was gonna say passionate.
33:19 Erin: I knew where you were going with that. I had to cut you off at the peck.
33:21 Wes: It's peck on the cheek. No, peck on the cheek is a much better way.
33:24 Erin: Make a bird joke. Yeah. Okay, so he does the key trick with the car. He goes to Jane's apartment. He says, don't worry, it'll all work out, or whatever. Puts on the white gloves in an elevator, and he kicks the door open and we see it's the same. He's now inside the pianist's apartment, which is also the boss's apartment. We see the hallway with the paintings. And then there's this really awkward moment where he runs down the hallway at the boss and pushes him. It's awkward, I think the mob boss asks him if he accepts the new contract, and Jeff says yes. And then the boss says, you shouldn't have come. And he says, I'm leaving. He pulls his hands out of his pockets. We see that they're empty. The guy turns around with a gun, and Jeff still beats him to it. So that's it.
34:10 Wes: Yep.
34:10 Erin: Really quick draw.
34:11 Wes: He always wins. Yeah.
34:13 Erin: Okay. So then he. From there. So he's just killed the mob boss. He goes, drives up to the Club Idols in his car outside, he looks ahead, sort of straight ahead in this blank, kind of haunted way I thought. And then he pulls out his gun, and he looks at the bullets in the chamber. And luckily it's a revolver, so he could look at the bullets in the chamber. And he sees that the chamber is full.
34:33 Wes: So we see it's full. Yeah.
34:35 Erin: But then it quickly cuts. It cuts to people exiting the club.
34:38 Wes: As he enters, we get tricked.
34:40 Erin: Get tricked? Yeah. And he looks. I think he looks very pale. I think actually that he's very good at looking really wounded after he gets shot. And he. He does seem to deteriorate over the course of the film. He becomes a sort of diminished version of himself. And at this point, I think he's looking very pale. I like the shot we get. Just every single shot in this whole movie is just so amazing. I love Melville. We see him stop opposite the hat check girl, but we see her in the mirror in that shot. And he walks up to her. He gives her his hat. So he checks his hat, she gives him the ticket, and he just leaves it on the counter. So it's like, okay, that's weird, right?
35:15 Wes: So he's saying goodbye to his hat, which is almost as painful as saying goodbye to his bird.
35:22 Erin: These are his two best friends.
35:24 Wes: Farewell hat.
35:25 Erin: Yeah.
35:26 Wes: I'll see you in the afterlife.
35:29 Erin: So he walks over to the bar. The bartender, who we know is on the hitman's payroll, walks over. And we do see in the background, this is how I noted it, we do see a different piano player up on stage with a combo. The music stops and Then a beat later, the pianist makes her grand entrance to applause. And we see very clearly something which we got glimpses of before, but this time it's really clear, like the horizontal sort of white bars around the black backed stage. So she walks sort of behind these bars to sit at the piano. There's so many bars in this film.
Like, I don't know if you notice the bars on the glass inside the police station, the various rooms. There's this sort of striated bars that block the view. And they're the columns inside Marty's office. Like there's so many clever things. There are two. This is apropos of nothing, I'm sorry, but the room is divided by this set of columns, divides Jeff from Marty sitting at his desk. And Jeff stands right at the sort of threshold of these columns and right where he stops. There are two paintings of each of a woman on the walls. And the women are.
Their faces are turned so that they both seem to be looking at Jeff as he stands there between them. And one woman has her hand on a. Like kind of rested on a book with her index finger sort of extended on the top of. It's either a book or a block, something. But it just. It gives the effect that she's actually pointing at Jeff as he's standing there.
36:55 Wes: Interesting.
36:56 Erin: Sort of like the two women in his life, you know, like maybe one of them kind of looks like the pianist and one looks like the girlfriend. I don't know. Have to go back and check. But anyway, okay, so she comes out. Jeff walks over to the piano and rests his arm on it as the piano player turns and sees him. And the smile kind of fades from her face and he looks at her very strangely and she smiles at him in this kind of benevolent way and says, don't stay here.
37:20 Wes: Yeah.
37:20 Erin: She continues playing through this. He pulls his gun out and cocks it, points it at her and she just still playing through this and says, why Jeff?
37:30 Wes: She has a. She has a sad look on her face.
37:32 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I thought it was sort of like resigned to her face. Like she's. Again, she's another kind of valley woman.
37:38 Wes: She looks disappointed in him. I thought. Reminds me of on the Waterfront where the Brando character, his brother, pulls a gun on him and he just has this disappointed look on his face. It's much more pronounced with Brando. But anyway, maybe I'm reading into it, but she looks sad or disappointed and says, why Jeff? And he says, I was paid to.
37:57 Erin: Yeah. She looks sort of surprised and then he's suddenly shot by three policemen who have been waiting in the wings who he hasn't seen. They've managed to be as invisible in that club as he was at the beginning of the film. But he knows this is going to happen, of course, because then the police captain comes out, looks at the gun, you know, the policemen are telling her that she had a close call and if it wasn't for them, she'd be dead. And the police captain says, wrong. And he opens up the gun to show that there are no longer any bullets in the chamber.
So he's emptied the gun. So presumably the reason why he has done this, he's cleaned up the plot threads that he's opened up. So he's neatly tidied everything up by the end of the film by getting killed. But also this public encounter, this public confrontation with her has allowed him to warn her that she was the mark. So he's been able to tell her that she's next so that she could. Presumably so that she could extricate herself from this relationship with the mob boss and get out in time. So he tries to. He's. In other words, he's trying to save her in the end by warning her.
Is that correct? It's hard to say.
39:00 Wes: Yeah. I don't know why he has to die to do that, but I think it also serves as a warning to her, definitely. So let's take the idea that, yeah, she represented the presence of love in his life and in that sense was a mentor, but is also an antagonist because it's too much for him. You know, it's gonna. Inevitably it kills him. Not just because he's engaging in a necessary self sacrifice to save her life. Right. It didn't. Doesn't seem to be necessary to do that, but because love is too much for him. So he was isolated for a reason and now he's been turned on to, I guess, the possibility of connection with someone in a way that is psychologically overwhelming.
You know, if we have to come up with a psychological theory, I think this might be it. And also, you know, if he does have a code of. And the code, the code of the samurai involves isolation, he's been compromised by any feeling of love and so suicide would be indicated. I think in real life, samurai had wives, right? They were allowed. I don't know if were they. Or were they monks? I don't know.
40:04 Erin: I don't know.
40:04 Wes: But yeah, in this case, it's be lonely or it's loneliness or bust. Isolation or bust. So I think you have to infer that in some way he's been compromised. That's the. You could call it ethical compromise, psychological compromise, something that necessitates suicide. Is that right, or am I.
40:25 Erin: No, I think that's great. I hadn't thought of that at all. I thought he realizes the fatal mistake by not killing her at the beginning means he's going to be running for the rest of his life.
40:36 Wes: Oh, okay.
40:36 Erin: So he figures.
40:37 Wes: So that's a more reasonable explanation, actually.
40:40 Erin: Well, so he figures his last act, even though it's a passive one, he's going to take control. He's going to star in a scene that for once he's directed.
40:48 Wes: Yeah, I like this idea a lot, too. And. And I didn't think of this in preparation for this recording, but once you talked about the idea of the police inspector as a director and them being on stage in the lineup, it occurred to me that in this final scene, it kind of breaks the fourth wall because you see them taking down the. At the end, you see them, like, the last thing to happen is the band starts taking its stuff off stage. They start packing up as if you're watching the film crew pack up at the end. So.
41:18 Erin: Exactly.
41:19 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
41:21 Erin: The bass player takes his bass off the stage and the drum player walks off with his drumsticks. But before he does. He even does a little. A little riff, a little bit umps. Not quite that obvious, but almost that obvious before he takes his drumsticks and walks off and it's. Yeah, it's like the end of a set.
41:38 Wes: Yeah. So highlighting the fact that we've just seen the end of a performance and the performance comes to an end. I like this idea a lot that, you know, your idea a lot about. It's his action that produces the end of the performance. So he's not just following the script or the director. It's an act. It's a free act of his own at the very end that terminates the performance. And so obviously, we could draw analogy to our own lives and the extent to which it feels like we are following a script. Whether it's the rules or our own habits of character and the desire to break free of that, to do something that's truly free.
I don't think it requires suicide. I think you can do it without committing suicide, although you can't. You know, suicide is the only way to escape character. It is the only way to escape. There are lots of ways in which, of course, we are confined by a script. There are therapeutic methods for trying to free that Up a little bit, but we don't transcend it except by dying.
42:36 Erin: I don't know if this is going to be a funny connection or a useful one or if it's just totally crazy, but I can't help but think. Thinking, but watching this. Think of the old adage in the music world, you know, don't shoot the piano player. He's doing his best. This is an old expression which. Then Truffaut, in 1960, made a film called Shoot the Piano Player. So when I see him not shoot the piano player, in other words, follow the. Follow the adage. Like here he moves as if to shoot the piano player, and instead he has shot himself.
43:08 Wes: And.
43:08 Erin: And it's a gesture towards. I don't know, allowing the performer to do his thing. You know, he spares the piano player, as one is directed to do by this expression. To me, it seems there's almost a joke in that, that he's about to shoot the piano player and then he is shot. It's like a gag from a silent film.
43:25 Wes: Well, in this sense, I mean, you could see her as the representative of life in a way. Not just of love, but life. And we are living as long as the musical performance is ongoing. So she. In a way, you know, she could be fate as well. Life or fate. But I like that to shoot her and to arrange it, that he will be shot or to commit suicide are the same thing.
43:45 Erin: You know, just to talk a little bit about Melville at the end, I think you'd really enjoy army of Shadows. That's my favorite film of his, and I love him as a director. He's fabulous. But, you know, this is a film about the French Resistance that shows, you know, it's very similar to this in that it's about process and it's about how various things. Things are carried out. But you never see any of the Resistance fighters do anything heroic. It's basically like they're all just. It's just how they deal with each other and how they deal with. With defectors or traitors.
You know, they're all kind of like moving themselves around a chessboard, you know. But you don't actually see them take out any Germans or do anything that's actually like the work of the Resistance that you assume they would be doing. So it's this very demoralized, bleak, similarly sort of grayscale look to this film. And, you know, motivation is sort of taken out. I mean, it's a very Pro de Gaulle film, which. Which caused a lot of controversy when it first came out, it didn't get a release in the United States until 2007, very famously so what happened was, you know, it was made in 69 and caused a lot of controversy in France, then wasn't released in the US until, at which point it was.
That was its official American release. So all these American critics were putting it on their, you know, top 10 films of the year list for 2007. It was a kind of a funny, you know, out of, out of time. Also, it's a World War II movie made in 69, so it's sort of a double displacement. But Melville himself was in the Resistance and was quite a hero, as far as I know. And he had also a brother and sister who served in the Resistance as well. And this famous story about his brother was that his brother was taking money for de Gaulle over the Pyrenees into Spain.
And his guide, who was supposed to be helping him obviously, find his way through the Pyrenees, shot him and took his money. And Melville didn't find out that he was dead until after the war was over. There's just this very bleak betrayal. People being a traitor to you. Ultimately, it all kind of amounting to nothing. Like how this film doesn't really. It doesn't matter what the mob boss is up to. It doesn't matter that, you know who the good guy or the bad guy is. Right. That sort of moral complexity is. It's almost sort of elided or just pushed to the side in favor of just watching people at work do what they do.
And he almost reminds me of Hawks in that way. Howard Hawks being just obsessed with, like, people who do their work well, no matter what that job is or how. How morally suspect the job may be. And I'm just. I'm fascinated by him as a. As a figure and the films that come out of these experiences that he had.
46:22 Wes: Yeah, this was the first time I. I've seen this. I haven't and I haven't seen any other films by him.
46:27 Erin: He's just the best. This is just the most stylish film.
46:30 Wes: Yeah, it occurred to me because it was playing at the Brattle, I think this indie. Well, you know, it. This indie film place here in Cambridge.
46:39 Erin: Did you see it on the big screen?
46:41 Wes: I didn't. Oh, a lot of gray opportunity. But then I suggested it to you, but.
46:46 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
46:47 Wes: So, yeah, I agree. I think, yeah, this is great. Thank you.
46:50 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Sight and Solitude in Le Samouraï (1967) by Jean-Pierre Melville (Part 1)
Jul 29, 2024
Jef Costello is a hit-man with airtight alibis, impeccable style, and a strict code of honor. Add to this a masterful ability to evade his pursuers, mobsters and authorities alike, and a simple but effective home alarm system in the form of a bird. But what he cannot orchestrate, control, or evade is the improvisational nature of a genuine encounter with another person, which he unexpectedly finds with the jazz musician who witnesses him leaving the scene of one of his crimes. Wes & Erin discuss Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 noir thriller “Le Samouraï,” and the surprising power of love to capture its fugitives, even if it means finding them in the most shadowy of underworlds.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Jeff Costello is a hitman with airtight alibis, impeccable style and a strict code of honor. Add to this a masterful ability to evade his pursuers, mobsters and authorities alike, and a simple but effective home alarm system in the form of a bird. But what he cannot orchestrate, control or evade is the improvisational nature of a genuine encounter with another person, which he unexpectedly finds with the jazz musician who witnesses one of his crimes. Today we discuss Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 noir thriller Le Samouraï and the surprising power of love to capture its fugitives, even if it means finding them in the most shadowy of underworlds. This is Wes Alwan.
1:20 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:22 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, there have been times in my life when I have been a bit of a loner and haven't left the apartment for a while. And it occurs to me, other than needing, I should get more, should have more of a social life. But also, if I were accused of murder, I'd be screwed. They'd be like, where were you on the night of such and such? I know exactly where I was. I was sitting in front of the tv. I haven't left my apartment in a week. Well, who are you with? No one. I would have no alibi. And it occurred to me in this movie, it's an interesting tension because one of the key skills of our protagonist, Jeff, one of the reasons he's a sought after hitman in the Parisian underworld, is that he creates these perfect alibis.
But he's a loner. He's living the life of the samurai, the life of isolation, a life of solitude. Right. The film begins with that quotation, no greater solitude than that of the samurai. Those two things work against each other so that his alibis have to be manufactured. Of course, they would anyway have to be manufactured because he's really out killing. But it's a bit easier if you are plugged into some sort of social fabric to manufacture alibis than it is if you're a complete loner.
2:45 Erin: Well, you would pass muster, I think, for this police captain, because it turns out that the more perfect the alibi the more he suspects you. It reminds me of in the Lady Eve when Henry Fonda is told that Barbara Stanwyck, if she was trying to disguise her identity, would put on a fake nose and would do her hair differently or something. But because she doesn't disguise her identity and looks exactly like the woman from the ship, also played by Barbara Stanwyck, then she must not be the same person. There's a perverse logic to this, but, yeah, I mean, I guess you're okay as long as you have a bird, right?
Because the bird actually fulfills several functions that maybe other ancillary characters would fill in a movie of this kind where somebody, a friend of his, would tip him off. Instead, his bird tips him off. And conveniently, the bird probably doesn't eat a lot at the craft services table and doesn't have to be paid. So it's a great way to go when you're casting a movie.
3:51 Wes: Yeah. There's the wonderful scene at the beginning where. So it opens on him lying in bed, and we have the chirping of the bird. So the bird, I think, is centered in the room, right in the little cage. And you get this sense that these are concentric spheres, the cage of his apartment and then the cage of the bird. And there's an obvious identification between him and the bird. It amplifies the sense of his solitude. There's also a lot of silence in the film, especially at the beginning. And the first thing we hear is this chirping. And it goes on for quite an extended period. The bird may have more lines in the film than Jeff.
4:31 Erin: I think that's right. If only Charles Schulz was transcribing everything and we'd get some indication of what he's saying. How's it going? Oh, you're still lying in bed. Okay.
4:42 Wes: So the bird is. You know, it reminds me a little bit of the pigeons and on the Waterfront in the sense that it's something that Jeff can show care and concern for. At least that's what we get in the scenes where he feeds it. It turns out also to be an alarm system. A very effective alarm system, and more effective than a lot of the kind of fancy technologies in the film that are used for surveillance and for other purposes. Ironically, the bird as a kind of canary in the coal mine is very effective in that sense. But, yeah, as a quasi companion or familiar. It's like the tiniest amount of companionship you could craft for yourself. You know, just one little bird in a cage. So that accentuates the Sense of his isolation and loneliness, I think. But I think there's more care and concern for the bird from him than there is for his girlfriend, if she is a girlfriend. Jane.
5:37 Erin: Yeah.
5:37 Wes: What relationship? Yeah.
5:39 Erin: What's that relationship about?
5:41 Wes: She likes to be needed.
5:43 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. She's pretty chill as far as girlfriends go. She's what you might call low maintenance if you were Billy Crystal, I guess. But no, no. I was thinking a lot about the. What should I call it, the sonic landscape of this film? The bird acting like a timekeeper or a metronome, sort of staying relatively steady with its chirps. And then we know it's been agitated or that someone's been in the apartment. Right. Because I think the rapidity of the chirps increases. And also the feathers in the cage show that it's been worked up, I think. But how important sound is in the film, how clickety clackety his shoes are in the sequences where he's walking and how kind of regular the sound is in most places.
And then, of course, the main action of the film takes place in a jazz club. I spent some time trying to figure out why it was that he wouldn't have known that the piano player wasn't still on stage. And it's because the piano is still playing when he goes through the hallway. So she comes off stage, there's another pianist who is filling in for her in the combo. Not much attention is paid to that detail, but, you know, he must have still been hearing the piano and thinking that everybody who was on stage was on stage. But really she's a soloist who comes out and we see the.
We see that there's another piano player and some horn players as well that occupy the stage while she's not on it. Then she makes an entrance at one point later in the film. That's something he didn't pay attention to, maybe. I think the metronome quality of the bird, or the bird as a timekeeper telling us that something's happened in between is significant in a story which takes place over the course of three days. Right. It's sort of like a ticking time bomb, the threads of the story coming together at the end of. Is it Monday? I think everything starts on Saturday.
It goes through Sunday and then Monday. It's difficult to tell since it always seems to be this roughly the same time of day throughout most of the film. And it's pretty gray outside. Gray blue, like everything else.
7:38 Wes: So I think you're getting at the importance of sound in the film and part of it is the fact that she wouldn't have been alerted to. Or he wouldn't have been alerted to the fact that she might have left the stage because someone else took over for her.
7:51 Erin: Yeah. Though they sound quite different, the two pianists. If you listen closely, their styles are quite different. She's highlighted more. She's more of a featured performer, so she plays usually with just a rhythm section, whereas the other piano player plays with horns, where the horns are more heavily featured. But he's never been to that club before and he's not familiar with her style, so.
8:10 Wes: Well, that's a good point. So we can't blame him for his musical ignorance. No, we can blame me for my musical ignorance. That I such a thing.
8:18 Erin: You know, one of the things I was thinking about as maybe a corollary for this role, this Jeff Costello role, he's, you know, he's kind of a master stylist. He's a great performer. Right. I'm sure you. You probably cottoned onto the obvious parallel that one would want to make in the interrogation scene, or rather in the police lineup scene, where the suspects go up onto a stage and they seem to have an audience. You know, chairs lined up, many, many chairs, considering how few people are occupying them, where they're almost, you know, the casting.
They're casting for the part of the killer. You know, the police captain as a kind of director and the mob boss who hired Jeff as a sort of, I don't know, competing director. You know, they're both kind of interchangeable. Right. Both after the same thing. And the police captain's hunch about Jeff being the murderer seems to be based on this idea that he's just so perfect for the part. You know, he's just. He fits the bill perfectly. A little too perfectly. And that what that connection also to the idea of performance and being a performer and having style, how that kind of connects him implicitly to the piano player.
So that though we get very little information about these people, his quasi identification with her in the hallway, that sort of spares her life. Right after he makes that hit on Marty, that sets the whole plot in motion. That seems right to me. They seem set apart from the rest of the people in the film in a certain way. I don't know if you felt that way.
9:43 Wes: Interesting. You know, I hadn't really thought about the lineup as the analogy between that and casting. And were you saying that the police detective and the employer, they're in competition for the role of director? Is that what I.
9:58 Erin: Well, there are two Kinds of directors. And they're interchangeable. Right. We get a couple of scenes where Melville is making a clear identification between the head honcho who has hired Jeff to commit the murder and the police captain. At one point, the head honcho is pacing back and forth across the room and there's a seamless cut to the police captain pacing and talking to his men. And we see the police use the same tactics as criminals. Right. With their. The key ring.
10:27 Wes: Yeah. I was actually confused at that point whether it was the police or mobsters breaking into his apartment. It took me a while.
10:33 Erin: Yeah. You don't know at first until you. Until a later scene when the police captain makes a mention of the fact that they, you know, he found the bug that they had planted. Yeah, yeah. And the plainclothes officers too. You know, you don't. You don't know at any given moment what someone's allegiance is. Yeah, right.
10:48 Wes: But, yeah, the other thing that you mentioned is the sense in which he's a master stylist. I think I read in one review, it talked about his. The grace of his movement. He's very good looking. It must be very time consuming to be a hitman when you're also a model and consulting to the Paris Metro system on the way their system is put together. But he looks good. He always looks good doing what he's doing. I will say. Okay, so I do want to talk about also the other thing that you mentioned is his relationship to the Pianist. Because I think I said maybe the bird is his closest.
The person that he's closest to. But obviously there's an important relationship to the pianist. In a way. She's the one who kind of defeats him. She sees him. So she's the antagonist in a sense, but she's also the mentor in a sense. It's one of these movies, I think, where you could argue the antagonist is the mentor. There's a movie called Collateral, I think it is with Tom Cruise. Yeah. So you know what I'm talking about. Jamie Foxx. Tom Cruise is basically the mentor. He's like a Yoda figure through that whole movie. He's mentoring the Jamie Foxx character.
Tom Cruise character is. But ultimately the Tom Cruise character has to be killed by Jamie Foxx, has to be defeated. So I always try to make note of that when I see a mentor is the antagonist situation. It might be a bit of a stretch here, but you wonder when she first sees him if he's going to kill her. So there's a moment of anxiety. Oh, my God. Does she? Is she going to be now collateral damage? But he spares her, and then she becomes someone to whom he develops a kind of relationship. There's a certain point he's using her, of course, to try to figure out who it is or why the employer tried to kill him.
And he's trying to use her to get to the employer. But I think there's a moment when he's talking to her where he kind of brushes her hair or he touches her to her head or something. It looks quasi affectionate. And then, of course, he spares her in the end and ends up essentially doing suicide by cop, even though he's been given a contract on her. So there's an important relationship there, which I think we'll get into more. But the other thing I wanted to say about this is one other aspect of the film that I was thinking about, which is related to this being id'd in the hallway by her, is that maybe you wouldn't need such airtight alibis if you weren't so careless and out in the open about your hits.
He's walking around the club being, you know, recognized by everyone or being seen by a lot of people. He's a handsome guy, right? So he stands out. He's well dressed. This goes back to the sense in which, you know, as you said, he's a master stylist. You don't really want to look that good and be that out in the open as a hitman. So it's another. It's another odd paradox that he's a loner, right? If you're a loner, that's a perfect situation for wandering around unrecognized and doing everything on the down low. But that's not his modus operandi.
His modus operandi is to be out in the open, but to craft these airtight alibis.
13:47 Erin: Yeah, that's something I thought about a lot. His style seems partly to allow him to blend in, but to blend into the universe of the Melville film. The color scheme, the, you know, the environs, right? Almost everything is black, white, or that sort of slate, bluish gray. And then when we find that he's, you know, in the lineup of all the other suspects, we find that Paris in 1967 was actually full of people who are wearing the same basic color patterns that he's wearing. Of course, none of them look as good as him. I think you're right about that, but I think that's part of the hat and the way he keeps his head down.
So what you'll notice is he's only seen once. He becomes destabilized by the encounter with the piano player, who he spares. He spares twice in the film. So when he first comes in, he goes past the hat check girl unseen. And I watch this in slow motion to make sure that he wasn't seen by anyone. In fact, it's very, very carefully choreographed. He then is about to kind of run into those. Those two older couples that go into the club. He's about to sort of be in the foyer with them before they go into the club, or the. Whatever it would be called, the anteroom.
Before the actual opening into the larger club space. In order to avoid being seen by them, he ducks into a bathroom, keeps his head down and his collar up, with his hat down low, so that when two men enter from the other side of the bathroom, he looks like he's washing his hands. And there's a great moment when he, you know, lifts up his hands with the towel in them. And we see that he's wearing the white gloves of death that he wears when he's about to make a hit. So he slips out. He goes along the side of the club to the back door that leads into the hallway.
And no one has seen him up until that point. He manages to be invisible. But that very invisibility, I think, is woven in with this sense of style of his. You know, he fits the color scheme, he fits the world of the film. And it's almost as if the film itself, in its starkness, in the colors that it uses, which are picked up in the various elements of Jeff's outfits. It's almost as if the. The world of the film is an extension of his own sort of personal style in which he's. Like this flourish inside it, the pocket square in the film or something.
And then when he has the encounter with the piano player in the hallway after he's killed Marty and he spares her, then he's thrown off. Then he runs back into the club. And the camera very briefly focuses on each one of the faces. And I made sure that they all lined up right. Each one of the people who ends up being in the witness room in the police station and then the interrogation rooms, et cetera, are all the people that see him, including then the hat check girl on his way out. So he's been totally thrown off. And something about this, yeah, has, you know, he didn't expect to see her.
I think the key, again, is the fact that the music had piano in it. In the background. And he really didn't expect to see her there. He thought she was still on stage.
16:37 Wes: So that's a great detail. Yeah, that I didn't remember that I remembered him being ID before he makes the hit. But looking at my notes reminds me of, you know, I don't know. Do you have a photographic memory? Is that. How are you? How are you doing all this?
16:52 Erin: I do. I do have a very good memory. You know, I've seen the film a few times before.
16:56 Wes: We.
16:57 Erin: We've done it for this episode, and it's a Melville film and everything with him, it's like. It's like a watch, you know, it's. Right. Perfectly timed. It is difficult at first to, you know, it takes a few times watching it, I think, to really get your bearings in the film. Because, I mean, when, if you're watching this for the first time, you hardly know what's going on or what the background. And you keep expecting to get exposition that, of course, never comes, because thank God, it's not an American movie, it's a French movie. And you don't need to know any of that because it's all extraneous. Right. So. So you're just thrown into the situation.
17:29 Wes: You killed my father.
17:30 Erin: Right, sorry, right, yeah. And you're thrown into the situation and then you get all these faces, and then the faces, you know, you kind of recognize them when they recur again, but you don't put it together that it's like, oh, that's the guy that actually made eye contact with him in the half a second when he first walked out of the room. And that's the guy that made eye contact with him 10 seconds after he walked out of the hallway. It's really like a novel, the film that rewards rereading, you know, to catch all the details because it's just. It goes so quickly.
17:59 Wes: So, yeah, I just want to highlight this point that you're making, which is that my thesis about his carelessness, he's really. Is really actually an effect of the Pianist in the film. So it's not something that we can just say is habitual for him, that that's the way he operates as a hitman in general. And this is the thing that I missed, which is that he's careful going in. And then as he leaves, that's when you get all these moments that are accentuated by the director of him being looked at and seen by the various club people who will end up being interviewed by the police.
This does, however, strengthen the idea of the Pianist as a antagonist slash mentor. So she's already produced the seeds of a change in him. It's going to be something that leads to him dying. He's not just arrested by the fact that she's a witness to the murder, that she's. She can ID him. She's not a witness to the murder directly, but you know what I mean. It's something about her. And that's, you know, when we first see her, you get these close shots of her and she has this very joyful look on her face as she's playing the piano. And I don't think we see that look of joy and that relaxed kind of spirit from anyone else in the film ever.
Am I wrong about that?
19:18 Erin: No, you're not.
19:19 Wes: She's. He has this kind of grace about him in the way he moves and the style, as you pointed out. And maybe they're a match in that sense. She has some of that, but she's got the more thick and substantive psychological version of that. He has that on the surface, but she has it in spirit.
19:41 Erin: I'm thinking about her outfits. The club is black and white. He at first is wearing the typical kind of tan color of the trench coat. She wears white outfits or outfits that have, except for when she's. She's at home. White outfits or outfits that are sequined or have like glass elements. Like when she wears the white dress, it has around the collar and around one sleeve because it's one. One shoulder gown has almost glass looking type bobbles. So things that refract light, things that shine on her, that make light bounce off her. But it's very much indicative, I think, of the same kind of mysterious center that Jeff has.
We don't know what's on the inside. Right. She's able to sort of reflect her surroundings, blend into her surroundings while still standing out as a stylish or someone well suited to those surroundings. You know, it makes me think about the significance of the fact that they meet in the hallway in that first scene when Jeff is lying on the bed and the credits roll and then he gets up and he gets ready to actually perform this hit. He ritualistically puts on his jacket and his hat and he puts his hat on every time with a bit of a flourish when he kind of runs his hand along the brim and, you know, we get a sense that this is someone who knows, that he knows he cuts a good figure.
Right. And he's interested in this style and the appearance that he makes and his arena. If he's a performer. If we're going to go with this director idea, he's an actor who's been cast in this role of the hitman. He's been activated by the director, that is the mob boss. Right. So now he goes out onto his stage and he puts on his costume and he gives his performance, which is an odd kind of performance because it's about. As we're suggesting, it's about being unseen to a certain extent or blending in perfectly. And the pianist, too, is performer.
And there are doors in the hallway. I notice marked privé, private. So, you know, she too, probably gets ready, puts on her nice outfit and then goes out and she has a sort of public presenting face in which she does her performance. And then, you know, when she comes backstage to take a breather or whatever she's doing, right. That mask is dropped maybe a bit. And so they meet each other in this unfinished hallway, which is. Looks like cinder blocks, basically, with very unfinished, unpolished hallway in between these two spaces, which are highly polished.
The Marty's office is quite elaborate for the film. And the club itself is, of course, this little jewel box of black and white and glass. They both meet at the moment that their masks slip as performers and they see each other. And I think there's a kind of. Yeah, I think that's key to it. I mean, I'm really interested in this idea that she becomes a mentor to him, which I hadn't thought of, and I'd be interested in hearing more about that. But I think, too, that they're both like. They're on each other's level. And then we find out, of course.
Right. That she's actually her employer. Could be the same as his, in fact. Right. She seems like she's sort of being kept by this mob boss and that the club is actually an extension. You know, it's maybe a front maybe for some kind of criminal operation. We don't know for sure. But she's living with this guy, Right. And so, in fact, her employer may be his employer. She's another puppet in the theater of particular man. So, yeah, I don't know if I'm making too fine a point of this, but I think it's. That's. I think what then the final action of the film hinges on.
But I don't want to get there quite yet, this idea of, you know, the actor then becoming the director, you know, taking control of the scene. Interesting talk about this mentorship idea, because I hadn't thought of that.
23:19 Wes: Well, their interactions are sparse in the film. So it's a bit of a stretch, but I think this moment where they meet, which you've described very well in this unfinished hallway between two polished places where the shields are down, so to speak, he's caught unawares. And the thing to do in that situation would have been to kill her, but he doesn't. He sees something in her. It's not, is it, love at first sight? I was reminded of Groundhog Day a little bit when he first sees what's her face while he's doing a fake satirical weather report. When he gets that look, you know, the protagonist gets that look on his face.
Bill Murray. So not necessarily love at first sight, but something that is transformative, something about her personality which sets him on a different track, ultimately. A track that's going to be fatal, but changes his course. And that begins with not killing her, not with not rubbing out the witness. And then they have. Let's just think about their few other interactions in the film. Maybe we could just trace that arc and see if we can make a case for mentorship. I say she's also the antagonist because nominally it's the. It's the police and the boss.
I mean, the employer and all that, but she's really the one who defeats him in the end. All right, so what's the next scene where they meet? There's the meeting in the hallway, and then he goes into the club. He goes in quickly and leaves again.
24:44 Erin: Right, so the next time she sees him would be when he's. He's in the lineup on the stage, so to speak.
24:49 Wes: Right.
24:50 Erin: Yeah. And she says something like, you know, he wasn't wearing a hat like that. The hat he wore was darker. So she's trying to, you know, sow doubt into the mind of this police captain. And we get her saying explicitly, I think, at that point, that it definitely wasn't him either there or in the. Subsequently, in the offices of the police.
25:09 Wes: Yeah. I think in the later scene, she's. She's more definite about it. She doesn't overact.
25:14 Erin: Yeah, I like that. Yeah.
25:17 Wes: She's pretty subdued in the way she approaches that.
25:20 Erin: Yeah. And the police captain makes it clear that, you know, she is their key witness. And so it all hinges on her word. And she says it definitely wasn't him.
25:29 Wes: So he saves her, and she returns the favor by saving him.
25:33 Erin: Yes.
25:34 Wes: Although, you know, it turns out it seems to be motivated by a command from the employer, who is perhaps her boyfriend.
25:41 Erin: Yes.
25:42 Wes: We don't know, but it's not all that clear what's going on, you know, what's motivating her? Is there an element of altruism in it? An element of the desire to save him? Or is it purely just about being in cahoots with the boss? It's not clear.
25:59 Erin: Well, if it's immediate, I mean, he seems to have some effect on these women. Right. And rightfully so. So she wouldn't be the first woman with an older lover to want to. Want to get with Jeff on the side if she was.
26:12 Wes: Jeff on the side.
26:12 Erin: Jeff on the side.
26:15 Wes: Alibis. Friends with alibis or something. Alibis with benefits.
26:20 Erin: Right.
26:20 Wes: You provide the alibi, I'll provide the good looks.
26:24 Erin: That's right. I think in the police offices, after she says it's definitely not him, he thanks her and she says it was nothing.
26:31 Wes: Right.
26:31 Erin: Probably there's significance in that, but I won't. I won't split hairs, but I think it's to say they speak. Yeah.
26:37 Wes: He says, merci, and she says, well, it's translated as the least I could do.
26:43 Erin: Oh, really? Okay.
26:44 Wes: But it might have been. If you're listening to the French, it might have been de rien or something like. I mean, what, de rien?
26:50 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Then the next time he sees her, he goes into the club because he goes twice at the end, at the fateful point, right? But he also just walks in to order the whiskey that he doesn't drink. He never. I think, you know, we see him pretty continuously for three days. He gets shot and stuff, but we don't really see him eat anything or. And then he doesn't drink the whiskey. He doesn't drink the whiskey.
27:15 Wes: He's the Terminator, basically. He's the.
27:17 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He drinks. He drinks Evian and smokes. Smoke cigarettes and otherwise he doesn't need. He doesn't even need sunlight. Yeah.
27:25 Wes: That's all the Tin man needs, that. An oil for the joints.
27:28 Erin: Right, Right. She sees him and shakes her head kind of no at him, like, you know, get out of here. You know, and then he waits outside. And that's when she comes out after her evening is over, you know, concluded at the club, right. And she goes to get into her car and he ends up getting in with her. And they have a pretty interesting conversation on the drive back to her place. That sequence is the longest that they see.
27:50 Wes: So he asks, you know, why did you say you didn't recognize me? And she says, why did you kill Marty? He says, I was paid to do it. She says, what did he do to you? Nothing at All, I didn't even know him. It's the first and last time I saw him. And then she says, Quelle sorte d'homme êtes-vous. I think that's what she says. What kind of man are you? Did I get the French right on that?
28:10 Erin: Yeah.
28:10 Wes: So that, you know, that's an interesting exchange in light of the fact that it makes it sound like she didn't know that Marty was going to get killed, which is plausible because why would she go back there at that particular time? I don't know. She doesn't know that that's going to happen. So I don't know. I don't. I'm trying to figure out the extent to which she's acting on behalf of the employer. Then why. Why does she become a target in the film? Why must. Why does she have to be killed?
28:35 Erin: I assume because of this exchange. They must have known, right? The police know. The police captain. I pretty much have figured out, I think, that anything the police captain knows, you could pretty much assume the mob boss also knows. When one says something, you know, you could assume that it's. It's known on both sides. They both seem to operate via the same methods and have the same information and are pretty much, you know, morally equivalent. If not. Sometimes the police captain, I think, is a little worse. But anyway, the police captain, when he goes to the girlfriend's apartment, Jeff's girlfriend's apartment, you know, he goes through a series of interesting techniques to try and ingratiate himself with her or to get her to talk.
At one point, he mentions to her that right now Jeff is in the piano player's apartment and that they've been, you know, he embellishes it and says they've been inseparable ever since, trying to insinuate that they've started an affair as one of his tactics to get the girlfriend to rat out Jeff. So if the police captain knows that he's been at her place, then presumably the mob boss knows. And also we know that the club into which Jeff has walked that same evening, and after which he ends up getting into the car with a woman. The club is all stocked with these mob people who show up in the apartment with the mob boss having a conversation.
The bartender being the most obvious or maybe the only example. Right, but we know the bartender sees everything and he's. He's obviously on the mob's payroll for this. I'm assuming it's a mob, but you don't know some criminal enterprise calling it a mob for just to call it
30:01 Wes: what do they call the mob in France?
30:03 Erin: Le Mob, Just like Le Samouraï.
30:05 Wes: Le mob.
30:06 Erin: Yeah. No, I'm making it up.
30:09 Wes: Oh, no, I believe it's probably true, actually.
30:13 Erin: Yeah, probably those American words.
30:15 Wes: Well, let's. Okay, so she has to be killed because. Why? What's the theory again? Because the boss knows. The employer knows that. What?
30:23 Erin: Yeah, that she's been fraternizing with Jeff and knows too. She becomes a liability. Something like that.
30:29 Wes: Okay, so what could she do, though? I mean, what could she say to Jeff that's a problem? I mean. Okay, so let's look at. Maybe he's worried about the pianist. Maybe the employer is worried about the pianist revealing his location, which turns out to be the pianist location. Right? So after getting in the car with her. And by the way, these scenes of him, he enters the club. Okay. And then he leaves. And then there's that home invasion scene with the police breaking into his place. And then he meets the pianist outside the club. And then you see you get a scene of the police being quite desperate at the police station, interrogating someone, saying, you knew Marty. And guy's like, I was driving back to Paris or something like that.
31:09 Erin: That's. That's you not having a good alibi. I was just hanging out.
31:13 Wes: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then cut to the pianist's apartment, which turns out to be the employer's home. But we don't know that at this point. He says, I have to know who hated Marty enough to kill him. She says, why should you care? He tried to kill me at the payoff. Gotta find them before they find me. She's like, you know them. They hired you. And he says, I only saw a go between. So she starts playing now while they're talking. And she has this ability to play while other things are going on, including at the end when he's coming to kill her and holding a gun on her.
31:47 Erin: She's a professional.
31:48 Wes: She ever stopped. She's a professional. Yeah. And he says, you didn't identify me for one of two reasons. You enjoyed playing with the police or you were told not to recognize me. And that's when he touches her hair and neck, which is the only time I think we see him being affectionate, except with the feeding of the bird. And he ultimately says to her, if the person who hired me is a friend of yours, I'll find him through you. And then she just says mysteriously, call me here in two hours. I don't know what that means. And then she doesn't pick up the call.
32:20 Erin: Yeah, that's one of two things.
32:21 Wes: Call me here in two hours. Like she is gonna rat out the employer and then changes her mind. And maybe that's why she becomes a target. I don't know. What the. Is she under surveillance? What's going on?
32:33 Erin: Right. Yeah, yeah. That's one of two things in the movie that really, really bother me. You know, the other thing I didn't think of is of course she's wearing, or until this moment, she's wearing that black robe with this, you know, the sort of Japanese sy on the back identifying her as another samurai, potentially. Right, but I suppose the implication of that might be that they slept together. No, maybe I'm reading too much into that. But she's suddenly wearing a robe. I just. I just thought of that right now. So maybe.
33:03 Wes: No, that's a good point.
33:06 Erin: So she's also cheated on the boss.
33:08 Wes: You know, I'm the guy who had trouble figuring out it was a prostitute. He was sleeping with a prostitute. And notes from the underground. So I'm not surprised. I didn't think of it in this case.
33:17 Erin: You're so innocent.
33:18 Wes: The settled sexual subtlety does not work decorum. And. And, yeah, but. Okay, no, that makes sense. So she's cheated on him, she's cheated on the employer.
33:30 Erin: Perhaps. But also they seem to have a desire to just get rid of anybody associated with this particular hit to contain the. The spread of I don't know.
33:39 Wes: Right. So if he has asked her to not identify Jeff, then she also becomes. She knows something.
33:46 Erin: He's not in any state of undress, but maybe he's a never nude. I don't know. Has to be wearing an impeccable suit all the time.
33:54 Wes: I mean, he's lying in bed, right? I mean, we've seen him lying in bed, but only with. Is he still wearing his button down? He's definitely wearing his pants and his button down shirt as well.
34:05 Erin: Yes, I think so.
34:06 Wes: It's only the coat, only the blazer and the hat that come off. Really.
34:10 Erin: In the trench coat, though, he does seem more relaxed there than he has seen anywhere else. And, you know, lounging around as. As he would in his own place. So.
34:20 Wes: All right, so I want to. I want to go with the sex thing. Yeah, I like that. I like that for him.
34:24 Erin: Yeah.
34:25 Wes: So the mentorship, you know, I think I had suggested. Yeah. That there's some kind of love at first sight thing going on in the very beginning. And mentorship, you know, that's inherently part of what it means to be mentored in this is to be transformed by love, basically, which is what's going on.
34:42 Erin: Oh, I see.
34:43 Wes: It is the thing that also defeats him because it's not in a way something that's compatible with him as a samurai. Right. As an ultimate loner. It's not going to work for him. It has to destroy him.
34:55 Erin: Right.
34:55 Wes: So the two things become one. Some people are healed by relationships and some people are healed then killed by them. Well, healing then death.
35:06 Erin: Well, I like the idea then that the police captain, when he's interrogating the girlfriend is actually correct. And his, you know, he says they've been inseparable since that night. And he says something like, seems like true romance. Right. Sometimes he uses a phrase like that. True romance. Or they seem like they're soulmates.
35:23 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.
35:25 Erin: Maybe he says that the girlfriend is the soulmate of Jeff and Wiener, her older lover, is just there to pay the bills. I can't quite remember. But, you know. So it's interesting then that he's actually kind of correct in his. As he is in his assessment of pretty much everybody in the film and the situation. He sizes everybody up pretty quickly. So this thing that we think he's using to induce, you know, a confession out of her is actually correct.
35:51 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point because I thought he. I just assumed he was lying.
35:55 Erin: Me too.
35:55 Wes: But whether or not he's lying, he's certainly capturing at least a grain of truth. So. So that scene where he's trying to turn Jane basically in her apartment, that actually has the most dialogue, I think, of any part of the film. It's very, very dialogue heavy, unlike a lot of the rest of the film. And it might be the longest. I don't know if that translates into it being the longest scene, but at least felt like that.
36:17 Erin: Well, it certainly shows that he's not writing dialogue free scenes because he can't write dialogue because this is a great scene. He uses every possible angle and yeah, he's just running through.
36:27 Wes: I used to be zealous when I was younger. And now you're a fatalist.
36:31 Erin: Exact them all so well, he's. He plays bad cop, good cop, dad cop, boyfriend cop, slimy cop, you know, rapey, rapey cop. Yeah, yeah, creepo.
36:44 Wes: So the scene. Yeah, it works at a. Like a metaphorical attempted rape in a way. Oh, I think so. It's interrogation as psychological. An attempted rape which she successfully resists. I don't know. Is that too strong?
36:58 Erin: No, I mean.
36:59 Wes: I mean, because of the insinuations that he's making and. Sorry. Yeah. The fact that he's talking about his daughter. And it's just the creepy thing that you were identifying.
37:09 Erin: Yeah. It's a very, very uncomfortable scene. And it makes him so. He was already unlikable from the beginning. Likable and unlikable at the same time. Sort of. This actor, I think, normally plays comic part. So this is a casting grain for him. Yeah. And you do get that sense at first that he's sort of affable guy, and then he just, you know, we're on Jeff's side, so of course we're looking for Jeff to get away. So the police captain is put in the villain role by reason of our identification with Jeff. But then he really. His doggedness, his insistence on going after Jeff starts to curdle our opinion of him, I think. And then it just gets more and more. Ugh. And then this scene. Yeah, this is pretty gross.
37:51 Wes: Yeah. This might be the midpoint of the film. I don't know if you remember if it is or not, but. But it would make sense because it's sort of a psychological nadir for the film in the sense of this kind of disgusting sleaziness. This is sort of the last stand for any sense of moral decency or moral order. And it's defeated. Right. The police can. If you thought they were representatives of something noble or good in distinction to criminals. Right. You're disabused of that at this point in the film.
38:22 Erin: And this is the point right after this is when Jeff returns to his apartment and finds the bug that the police themselves have planted. So both of these strands of their moral dubiousness kind of coexist at the
38:35 Wes: same time in the film and attempts at intrusiveness. You know, this is part of, I guess, where I got the rape thing from. They're both attempts at intrusion. Right. The surveillance as well. And you could see the surveillance as something creepy and sexual as well, ultimately, if you wanted to. But something prurient or something perverse, you could add that as an underlying motive. But in her case, Right. They come in and part of what's so shocking about it is just they start tossing out the dresser contents. Right. And it's upper drawers of her dresser.
I think it's underwear. And that's the kind of sexual component of this. So in her case, it's surveillance and investigation and searching. That's the nominal. That's the manifest content. That's the thing that they're doing on the surface level. But on Another level, it's just intrusion into private life, which comes out in the way he talks to her, like he shouldn't be talking about his daughter. And then, you know, he's making something of, you know, I thought you were a nice girl and making a thing of her having two boyfriends or possibly being a prostitute and having to call the vice cops on her.
And of course, she's feisty and she doesn't succumb to any of that. She's good at resisting maximal psychological pressure and says, you know, you're trying to. Basically, you're trying to get me to perjure myself by threat of arrest, and I'm not going to give into that.
39:57 Erin: You know, another. Another tactic, actually, that I just thought of. They pretend to be Jeff at the door, too, right? So that's. I think that lends credence to this. This reading of the scene. And then one of them even does a yes or, you know, like imitates Jeff's voice and then. And they burst through the door. Sort of false pretenses of being the lover. She resists all of their tactics and remains loyal to him, even though when he does come and see her, you know, he doesn't look particularly tender towards her or anything. Like, she's getting very little out of this and yet maintains this ultimate loyalty at the cost of, you know, quite a bit. So she's sort of the heroine of, you know, of the film in a way that she doesn't give in to the police.
40:40 Wes: I think she needs to look for some nicer men to date. But, well, she's got. Is it wiener? Wiener, yeah, she's got Wiener. Who apparently is rich. Got wiener. The spirit of the. Got milk.
40:58 Erin: Well, she doesn't. She doesn't have him for.
41:00 Wes: It's a campaign to get women to choose better men.
41:03 Erin: Right.
41:04 Wes: Got wiener.
41:07 Erin: That's why I prefer to say the French pronunciation from the virgin air.
41:10 Wes: Wait, so what is it?
41:12 Erin: It's vinair. That's how they say vinair.
41:14 Wes: Okay.
41:15 Erin: Yeah.
41:15 Wes: All right, so why don't we. Yeah, why don't we break here? Unless you have any final thoughts on that, and then we will do part two.
41:22 Erin: Yeah, let's leave them with gut wiener resounding in their ears.
41:24 Wes: Got wiener. Thank you.
41:38 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
“Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: An Anatomy of Human Self-Destructiveness (Part 2)
Jul 22, 2024
What is the cause of human self-destructiveness? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Notes from the Underground,” and its agonized rumination on whether freedom can be reconciled with love, individuality with virtue, and action with reflection.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Dostoevsky's notes from the Underground. We just got done talking about how much civilization sucks.
0:42 Erin: Yep.
0:43 Wes: And the underground man's case in particular, which is extreme. But I think the idea was that he is concerned in particular with his status relative to other people and that's what's blocking him from connecting to other people. But in part two, we're going to see a very tragic and ill conceived attempt to make those sorts of connections.
1:07 Erin: Yeah, I don't know much about civilization, except in theory because I've been underground podcasting here for so long that I don't remember what it's like. But I do think that. Okay, if I wanted to put this in a really obnoxious way, using terminology that I greatly dislike, we could make the distinction between the underground man and. Is it Zverkov?
1:33 Wes: Yeah, I think I called it Zherkov and Zherkov part, but it's actually Zverkov.
1:38 Erin: Zverkov.
1:39 Wes: Z, V. Yeah. Z, V, E, R, O. Yeah.
1:42 Erin: Anyway, it's.
1:45 Wes: It sounds like a. Like he's from the planet Vulcan or something.
1:50 Erin: Yeah. So we could argue maybe.
1:51 Wes: Maybe he's a Klingon. I don't know. Who's. Isn't there a Russian? Didn't Star Trek have like A Russian coded alien species. I don't remember.
2:01 Erin: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
2:02 Wes: I mean, they were Romulans, I guess they were just Romans.
2:05 Erin: Right, right, right. Yeah. If there was any. Anyway, any justice, they would be Remans. No.
2:17 Wes: Yeah, I think Remans and Romulans. There'd be both. And they'd be talking all the time.
2:21 Erin: Exactly. No, Ferfitchkin is the Klingon as far as the verb goes. No, but anyway, if I wanted to put this in a terrible way that I hate. Okay, I hate this distinction. What I'm setting up is I hate the distinction between EQ and iq, but I will say, right, that's. Zverkov is someone who has high eq. If we had to put things that way, which, again, I'm sorry for doing. So am I wrong to think that his character is portrayed quite sympathetically when we actually see him in action? No. There's the story that we're told of what he was like when they were kids by the underground man, who's very biased, let's put it that way.
And then there's how he actually behaves when the underground man invites himself to this dinner in which he knows that he is not wanted, but is putting himself in the situation to make everyone hate him even more and give him more ammunition against himself. Right. And I think that Zverkov actually treats him quite well under the circumstances. No.
3:23 Wes: Yes. I mean, I think for the most part he behaves in a way that's relatively reserved and doesn't take the bait on some of the. The underground man's provocations. I think in the end, of course, they don't. They're not all that nice to him. They laugh at him and they ignore him and. And do all of that stuff. But what else they have done in that situation? They didn't, you know, they didn't beat him or kick him out or.
3:46 Erin: And they're not nice to him only when he is being extremely rude. And then has the hysterical drunken episode of stomping his feet up and down the hall for three hours while they're on.
3:59 Wes: Three hours while he perspires.
4:03 Erin: It's deranged.
4:03 Wes: Funny dealing with someone who's deranged. Yeah, it's funny. It's. It's hard to read. It's him humiliating himself.
4:13 Erin: It's funny in. In the way that, like the first episodes of season one of the Office are funny, you know?
4:19 Wes: Yeah.
4:20 Erin: It's painful. Yeah.
4:21 Wes: Yeah. It's hard not to be repulsed by him and feel sorry for him at the same time, time, because he's someone who is so low functioning, let's use that phrase, add that to low EQ and to the EQ IQ distinction. He's low functioning socially, he doesn't have social graces. And that is what Zverkov actually has in spades, this ability to navigate the social world. So the way the underground man puts it, and this is in chapter three, is that he hated him for these quote, unquote, gifts of nature. He was pretty, he was playful, he was well liked, swaggering, vulgar, but good natured.
So all of his, all of his classmates. So this is, this is his account of him while they were at school together and all of his schoolmates groveled before Zverkov, quote, unquote, simply because he had been favored by the gifts of nature. Moreover, it was, as it were, an accepted idea among us that Zverkov was a specialist in regard to tact and the social graces. This last fact particularly infuriated me. I hated the abrupt, self confident tone of his voice, his admiration of his own witticisms, which were often frightfully stupid. Though he was bold in his language.
I hated his handsome but stupid face, for which I would, however, have gladly exchanged my intelligent one, and the free and easy military manners in fashion in the 40s. And then Zverkov, you know, there are things about him which are not all that appealing, but just because he's a young man, I mean, he's boasting about how he's going to have all these conquests of women in the future and do all these duels, and the one particularly unsavory thing he tells his schoolmates, he's going to, you know, he inherited an estate with a bunch of serfs and serfs, and he's basically saying he's going to rape all the female villagers and raise the taxes on the serfs if they, if they resist, and then the underground man attacks him for that.
But he will say, not out of any compassion or moral concern, but just because he's envious of him and how the others are applauding him like an insect. So lest we think that there's any moral dimension to the underground man's resistance to people like Zverkov, he wants to assure us that in fact there's not. But I think the upshot of this is just that life is unfair in so many different ways, and it's not just about looks or innate talents, but whatever happened to the underground man as a kid? And he alludes to the fact that it's not good. He's socially impaired, and that impairment is not easy to get rid of.
It's a matter of habit. You know, you call these things social graces, but he is habitually related to people in a way that he's disposed to look at people in a way that makes it impossible for him to have any real relationships with them. And the only, you know, the fantasy is that he's. Can impress everyone, that he can do these things that he. He does in his own idealized fantasy world, which is to win their respect and admiration by acts of gallantry or whatever it is that he thinks is gonna. Gonna work. It's very rigid and delusional. It doesn't show any actual awareness of how it is that one connects to people in reality.
So in other words, it's a narcissist. It's a narcissist or a very impaired narcissist's idea of how one relates to people. And he doesn't have the status or the talent to pull it off, so it's not going to work for him.
8:08 Erin: Yeah. The story about Zherkov marks him as a sociopath, but not any more sociopathic than anybody else in this school, it seems. They're all. I think the underground man says they were all deranged children. But I like this quote that you're pointing to that you read that you said they worshiped him and groveled, not from any interested motive, but simply because he had been favored by the gifts of nature. That's as good a reason as any. No, I mean, you know, the underground man wants to be admired because of his intelligence, which is also a gift of nature.
If we're to believe that he's intelligent, as intelligent as he says, which is apparently, you know, so intelligent that he can't even do anything right. Like almost as though Mozart and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky himself and, you know, and all these great geniuses are at the, you know, the fat part of the bell curve. And he's. He's at the very top, right, living in his hovel, not being able to function, but. Right. That's a perfectly reasonable mark of superiority to be favored by the gifts of nature in this way. Right. The fact of the matter is that if he's handsome and charming, people will like him better.
9:20 Wes: Yeah. All is fair in love and war, right? This is what this points to. So whether or not people are going to love you or even like you depends on some things that in ways are really trivial. Like your looks, for instance. Or just your mannerisms, whether they have a quote, unquote transference to that. Right. Is that reminiscent of something that was appealing to them in their early situation with their parents? Okay, that's great. This is what I like. And it's completely irrational and completely arbitrary. And for someone who's socially impaired, it can't simply be figured out and it can't be replicated by rigid status maneuvers if you don't have those social graces.
But it also can't even be rectified by being a good person. Like being a good person is not necessarily a way to be as Zverkov and to get, you know, to win friends and influence people. Yeah, you know, because social graces are not about morality. It's about how you navigate the social world in a way that people to like you. And of course, some genuinely good people know how to do it and genuinely bad people know how to do it, but it's independent, independent of morality. And then there are lots of people who are rigidly, quote, unquote, you know, moral.
Right. But in the sense that they're harmless and maybe even to the point where they can't even stand up for themselves in social situations. And asserting oneself in those situations is a big part of actually being attractive to people in some way. Being able to deploy one's aggression. For him, aggression is either not there or it just comes out rigidly in these moments where he wants to challenge someone to a duel. For an ordinary person, the aggression might come out as a joke, like the kind that Zverkov is probably good at. You do release some aggression, or you do have these ways of nudging people a little bit in social situations to maintain one's boundaries or one's individuality.
But yeah, they're nuanced. For the underground man, it's just all or nothing. He has to retreat or it's going to be. The only way he can keep a sense of self in these social situations is to insult people or challenge them to duels or whatever. I don't know. Does that make sense?
11:34 Erin: It does. I. This is neither here nor there, and I don't think we would have time to go into it. I don't think the social graces are actually divorced from whether or not you're a good person or from some semblance of morality. I mean, I do think that there are social niceties that are there for a reason that have to do with making other people feel comfortable. Right. And making them feel seen and respected that can be co opted for various Ends, of course. But I do think that the social forms are there, for. They may become unloosed from their. From morality, but they. They are there. They are inherently tethered to a kind of morality.
12:09 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point.
12:10 Erin: You know, politeness, I think, is tethered to morality for, you know, on a
12:15 Wes: basic level and also for the most part, people. Yeah, there's. There's some. There's something reflected in the capacity to have social graces that it has something positive to say. To say about one's character, even if one also happens to be a sociopath.
12:31 Erin: Yes, yes. I do think that making other people like you or being someone. Not making other people like you, that sounds too forced. But being someone that other people like. I think some. Sometimes you could be a terrible person and people love you. That's. That's absolutely true. But other times it has to do with. It actually has to do with making people feel good when they're around you. And even if you're doing it, even if you are inducing this feeling in other people purely as a way to manipulate them, it involves not talking about yourself all the time or bragging or being obnoxious and generally putting your immediate desires, giving those a backseat in favor of giving other people a chance to speak or to talk about themselves or.
You know what I mean? So there is, like, even if you want to take the most jaundiced view of it, right. There is, I think, a way in which you have to be a little bit. You have to seed a little bit of your consideration and evacuate your ego a little bit. Even in the worst cases, usually in order to get someone to like you or to write.
13:36 Wes: Be attuned to what's going on in other people's heads.
13:39 Erin: Yes, yes. And in a positive way, as opposed to in the way that the underground man does. Right. And that involves. Yeah. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes. He wants to do that. You know, as much as he dreams and fantasizes about his moments of glory, he also condemns himself beforehand with what people are going to do that's bad to him. So. So he has these dream people in which all of them worship him. And then prior to getting into a situation which he anticipates is going to be bad, he anticipates the bad behavior of the people he's going to.
You know, he. He does the opposite of that. He tries to get into people's heads in order to read bad motives into what they're going to do that are all about him and that are all about how they hate him and they're all a reflection on him and responding to him negatively. So he's not interested in, like, I'm going to go to Zerkov and I'm going to get him to like me by asking him about his job and he's going to talk about himself and that's going to make him feel good. And therefore he's going to associate talking to me with positive feeling about himself.
And that's how I'm going to nefariously win him over, you know, because that would actually take too much concern and care about what Zverkov actually likes and what Zverkov actually wants to do. And the underground man is incapable of that. So he, you know, he. And he's. He's invited himself to the dinner, he's anticipating what's going to happen, and he says with despair, I pictured to myself how coldly and disdainfully that scoundrel Zverkov would meet me with what dull witted, invincible contempt. The blockhead. Oh, this is the worst name.
Trudyolyubov. Trudy. Trudelyubov would look at me with what impudent rudeness.
15:27 Wes: The Trudaliabiv.
15:30 Erin: Trudaliabov, okay. Would look at me with what impudent rudeness? The insect. The insect. Ferfitchkin would snigger at me in order to curry favor with Zverkov. How completely Simonov would take it all in and how he would despise me for the abjectness of my vanity and lack of spirit. And worst of all, how paltry, unliterary, commonplace it would all be. This guy's just like this insufferable. He's like an 18 year old who goes home and is like, you know, nothing compared to what I now know as a result of taking, you know, freshman level philosophy, right?
But, but he's. He's populating their minds with an obsession with him. Like as if all anybody does is sit around and think about what an insect he is, you know, this is truly, truly sick. You know, he can't even. This makes actual people who are actually, you know, social manipulators look good, I think, you know, and then he's. Then he says, what is more, even in the acutest paroxysm of this cowardly fever, I dreamed of getting the upper hand, of dominating them, carrying them away, making them like me, if only for my elevation of thought and unmistakable wit, they would abandon Zverkov.
He would sit on one side, silent and ashamed, while I Should crush him, right? So then he has this further dream that they're going to worship him and he's going to get the upper hand of. Of Zverkov. And, you know, this is just. It's just brutal. I mean, this guy is so self obsessed, but also hates himself so much. These are painful episodes to read, you know. I then want to kind of puncture the scene and talk about the way he's reading what Zverkov is saying. And is it really so bad? I mean, knowing. So this is the setup. We know that he's going in assuming that everyone is thinking about him all the time and thinking terrible things about him.
So then when Zverkov sees him and they've exchanged some words, Zverkov says, and how thin you've grown, how you have changed. Added Zverkov with a shade of venom in his voice, scanning me in my attire with a sort of insolent compassion. I think that's so interesting. Insolent compassion, I think. I mean, I'm picturing in my head the underground man looking really, really bad. Right. He's taken this terrible job. He's dirt poor, you know, I almost don't want to trust his. Right. He's just told us what he thinks is going to happen. We know he's unreliable.
And then he's assigning something called insolent compassion, right. To Zverkov's speech. So I don't know, I distrust his take on this whole scene. And it makes me actually like Zverkov or makes me think that maybe he's really. He's looking at this guy and going, oh, my gosh, you know, what happened to him? We know he, at least from the underground man's telling that he had a little bit of admiration for the underground man. He knew that there was something special about him that he didn't have. Right. He was interested in him on a certain level and interested in his intellect.
So he has enough in him to actually recognize what could be good in this man who. Or this boy at the time who was a social outcast. And that shows a little bit of perception on his part. He's not just a. Whatever, a dumb jock who would never take any kind of notice or be interested in anybody who, you know, you wouldn't just dismiss him as some kind of weirdo nerd. Right. To put it in modern terms, you know, so we know he has a little bit of sensitivity. And I don't think it's beyond the pale to suggest that he might be looking at him genuinely concerned and when we hear that he has this insolent compassion, I think it's.
We could say, is this the underground man giving this the most ungenerous possible read? Because he's expecting that everyone hates him and wants to take him down.
19:04 Wes: I mean, I think he's obviously paranoid and at a certain point, the behavior of others, it's believable that they would react negatively, obviously, the way he's behaving. So that. That's not surprising. But, yeah, I think you're right. You get these initial moments where the others seem to be open. You know, I think it's well conveyed that the others are actually open to him. In a way. It's odd that he's invited himself on this dinner. And in fact, he's the one who cut them off. They didn't cut him off, so he took a different job so he could cut off his classmates.
And then I think when he went to see Simonov, he hadn't seen him in like a year or something. And there had been a point where it sounds like Zverkov had actually tried to be his friend. That's what I got from this. And he has had kind of blown him off. And then he had this idea that Zverkov got too big for his britches, was successful, and was cutting him off in the street. But I think we can take that with a grain of salt. And he's, you know, Zverkov might have said, okay, yeah, this guy doesn't want to be my friend. That's okay, and then ignores him in the street.
And then the underground man is taking. Taking offense at that. So that's a good point. I think the, you know, the level of paranoia in the underground man definitely makes him an unreliable narrator.
20:22 Erin: What I really like too, about the fact that he's inserted himself into this situation and the fact that this whole episode is illustrating the ways in which he invites the kind of behavior that he seems to want to receive is when he gets there and he's an hour early, they've moved it off by an hour, and he gets there at five. Now it's starting at six. And, you know, you do feel sorry for him because he's so pathetic. And he's sitting there and he, you know, he's just getting angry. And then by the time they show up, he's so grateful that he can't pretend to be annoyed by.
Annoyed by them or better than them or disdainful when they come, he's so happy to see them that he blows his cover. But I love Simonov's reaction to, you know, he's. He's saying, hey, you know, I. How come you didn't tell me? I got here an hour early. You know, I've been sitting here and he's expecting Simonov to, like, fall all over himself to apologize. And you kind of feel. I don't know if you felt this way, but I, as a reader, kind of for a second was like, yeah, you know, how come Simonov isn't just saying, gee, I'm sorry I didn't let you know?
And Ferfitchkin and Zverkov and the other guy, whose name I won't venture to say again, are saying, you know, they're taking up for him a little bit and saying, oh, gee, that's unfair that you've been waiting here an hour. Oh, what a thing. You know. And Simonov says, well, I don't even know where you live. Like, why do you. You know, how could I have let you know? It's like, oh, of course, you know, this whole thing is about the fact that he doesn't even know these guys. Simonov doesn't even know where he lives. You know, it highlights the fact that he's inserted himself into the situation.
So even these rare moments where we have not totally rare moments. I mean, I. I feel sorry for the underground man for a lot of reasons, complex reasons, right throughout. Throughout these. These narratives. But even in the moments where we think for a second that in the right. Or that someone might be really treating him unfairly, it turns out that the reason that that is is actually because of something that the underground man did to shoot himself in the foot in the first place. You know, in other words, he's the prime mover for his own suffering, except for the scenes in the street where he's.
He's treated terribly. And when, of course, the. The. The inciting moment, I think, for the. For the whole section is when. Which has happened to me before. This is. I swear, this is a very. Women know this. When the guy moves him by the shoulders out of the way, rather than asking him to move or tapping him on the shoulder. But when he's physically moved, that is just terrible. And that's, you know, and I understand why it incites not that level of spite, but a remarkable level of upset. But otherwise. Yeah, I like the fact that we then see that there are these situations in which he's been the author of all of his problems.
23:12 Wes: Well, he's trying to. He's trying to make himself visible. I think that incident where he's moved out of the way. He had seen some officers fighting, I think, yes, in a bar, and said, okay, I want to go in there and see if I can get someone to fight me. And then stood directly in someone's way. And the guy. Instead of. He expected the guy to be insulted and to say, get. Get the. Get the hell out of my way. If that had happened, at least someone would have seen him and respected him as someone, even a worthy adversary. I think he wants to be seen even as a worthy adversary or even as someone capable of offending someone.
There's a certain point where. So at the end of the dinner, he's remorseful and he begs for their forgiveness and says to Zverkov, I insulted you. And Zver says, insulted me. Understand, sir, that never, under any circumstances could you possibly insult me. So he's not as enough of a presence in the world to even be felt as an insult to others. So that level of invisibility, that level of social powerlessness, this is the type of thing, by the way, which is. Motivates people who do school shootings. It's complete lack of. It's like being the invisible man.
There's this complete lack of. Of social efficacy in the world, social power. One cannot make one's presence felt to others. And so the only way to do that is violence. Violence becomes a substitute for social power, for the ability to affect other people. Well, now you're gonna know that I exist. Now you're gonna understand that I'm, you know, another subject and capable of doing things, capable of being effective, you know, if not socially effective, murderously effective. And then after that. So he begs, you know, Simonov. Simonov for six rubles and humiliates himself again.
And Simonov flings at him and says, you have no sense of shame. And then he has this idea that he's gonna go and follow them to the brothel and slap in the face and get into a duel. Hopefully, if I could just only get into a duel, and then I'll fire the bullet into the air and be very gallant and they can shoot me. So I guess maybe there is a school shooting element explicitly in the air. Except he wants to do it the chivalrous way and ultimately be the one who ends up getting shot. But this is where the story takes a turn and he meets Liza.
25:48 Erin: Well, before we get there, two things. One thing is, you know, it strikes me that your. Your reading of this moment with Zverkov, where he says, you couldn't possibly have insulted me. I mean, that's you know, I wanted to cheer for Zverkov because, you know, it reminds me of how people advise one to behave when one is being targeted by a bully. Right? You let the bully know that they have no effect on you. You know, you don't even see them. You don't even. It doesn't even register, in other words, that if the bully feels that they're not getting anywhere with you, then they'll leave you alone or something, you know, you, you dismiss them, you. You behave as though you're not, you're not even noticing what they're doing.
26:25 Wes: Well, in this case though, it's a. It's a way of saying you're insignificant, you know?
26:30 Erin: Yes, yes, certainly. But I mean, I think that the fact of the matter is that the underground man is behaving in a hectoring. If I'm bullying. A hectoring way.
26:38 Wes: Right. Well, he's the. I think of him as the bullied kid though, who just lashes out.
26:43 Erin: Yes, yes.
26:44 Wes: He doesn't have the status to be a bully in the strict, you know.
26:47 Erin: I see, I see. Yeah. I still feel, I mean, perhaps I'm not registering the full. I didn't register the full import of that, of that moment for the underground man, because it is a little bit passed over in the text as well. You know, he says it and then immediately someone else speaks and they're all kind of talking to each other and then they decide to take off to the brothel. So we don't get a moment where the underground man says how he felt about that, you know, so to me it was just like, haha, you know, good for you, Zverkov, you got your shot in.
You know, just regarding the moment when he, when he's moved by the officer. I wasn't sure if I had read that correctly and in fact I don't think he did anything to induce the officer moving him. He says I was standing by the billiard table and in my ignorance blocking up the way and he wanted to pass. He took me by the shoulders and without a word, without a warning or explanation, moved me from where I was standing to another spot and pass by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.
So that's the, you know, he's mad because he's not noticed. But again, it's just that. And the, the. The stuff in the street I, that I get.
27:52 Wes: Yeah, and, and I think the next stage in this, his desire to be seen and even to dominate People. At certain point, he says he wants to. You know, the fantasy of going to the dinner with people he's really lost contact with. Is it so it's very pathetic. But is that he can impress them and. And gain their friendship by quote unquote, dominating them in the sense of being witty and. And winning their admiration. Which is part of why Zverkov is such a difficult figure for him, because Zverkov is the person who can do that. Zverkov, you know, does win their admiration and they all fawn on him.
And that's what who. The underground Mount, Underground ground man wants to be like. Within meeting Lisa, there's an opportunity here for him to put this desire to dominate into effective use by being sort of a mentor or teacher figure. In the end, of course, we'll see that collapses into a sort of sadism and it doesn't work. Right. But this is his invitation to love. Essentially. In this last part of the novella, he's invited to the possibility of inviting a different form of freedom that involves love. And that specifically, there's an element of this that makes it more possible for him than a typical situation, which is he's dealing with a prostitute that he can look at as being lower in status than him and fallen.
And as someone who he can, depending on how you look at it, either educate or manipulate. And he looks at it in different ways, depending on his mood. But this becomes, you know, the foundation is laid for a. For a real relationship. And he moves in that direction, at least on the surface, before it collapses. So this is in. I guess it's chapter five. At the end of that, he arrives at the brothel and he's doing all these nasty things. The sledge driver, which is really like punching him in the back of the neck and urging him on. The peasant's like, what the hell are you doing?
So I thought that was very amusing. But. So when he gets there, the other guys are basically. Have all gone off with women, by the way. It took me a while to figure out. It took me an embarrassing long time to figure out that this was a brothel.
30:14 Erin: I knew as soon as they said they were off to see Olympia that they were going to the brothel.
30:18 Wes: Of course. I mean, should have known. Yeah. Fancy name and all that. But Madame Olympia. Is she the madam?
30:27 Erin: Yes. Who once refused. Once refused the underground man.
30:31 Wes: Yeah.
30:32 Erin: Which I think is hysterical.
30:34 Wes: Yeah. You're not good enough for the madam.
30:36 Erin: Yeah.
30:37 Wes: But anyway, so they. Yeah. On going in, he sees Lisa, the girl with the fresh. The young pale face, the grave eyes. It's one of the things that really captures him. Simple and good natured. Good looking or looking, sorry, strong looking. Not necessarily especially good looking. Well built. Kind of sounds like a horse at that point. And then by comparison, he can look. He looks in a mirror and sees himself as harassed. You know, my harassed face struck me as revolting in the extreme. Pale, angry, abject, with disheveled hair. But then he was glad to seem repulsive to her.
And then in six, you know, we cut to him waking up after, I guess they've had sex again. Took me a while to figure this out. Like, what the hell is going on? This has all gotten very surreal. Like what? You know, he wakes up. I thought he'd fallen. Just fallen asleep or something. So, you know, so he wakes up to. The clock began. Okay, the clock began gasping as though squeezed hard as though someone were strangling it. This is an odd bit of flowery language, actually. It's really the first. Yeah, I just think it introduces something new, very new at that point into the novella.
That level of. That interesting, let's say imagery, Imagery that he's used there.
32:02 Erin: This is the origin, I think, of something I mentioned in the last episode about the re. Enchantment of the world, but in a sick, twisted way.
32:11 Wes: Right.
32:12 Erin: He sees oppression everywhere. He sees meaning everywhere, but the meaning is involving his. His oppression. That's. That's. I wish I had thought of this moment because I was thinking of this subconsciously, you know, in that. I think in developing that. That impression that maybe in the bureaucratic Petersburg society, he wants to. He wants to see in a place, you know, void of meaning. He wants to see meaning in these. These various places. I think it's very interesting that it comes at this hinge moment though, and he's lying in the dark and you know, again, he sees everything as an extension of his own oppression here. I think he's going to rhetorically strangle Liza.
32:51 Wes: Right.
32:52 Erin: So he's actually the. He's performing a complicated function here. But one of them, you could say is he's kind of trying to oppress Lisa into some kind of realization.
33:02 Wes: Yeah, I mean, yeah, you could say he's looking in the mirror again, actually. So the clock, you know, this element of projection and paranoia. But he's now doing it with an inanimate objects, gasping clock. Someone strangling it. Shrill nasty, rapid, rapid chime. He's seeing himself in clock form. And this. I think if we were to break this down into acts, a three act structure. This is the beginning of act three. So the plot point that leads into this is sleeping together. And now he's sort of waking up in a. In a different world. Yeah. I think it's a good point you make about the fact that there's a kind of foreshadowing here of he's a strangled figure, in a sense, but he's going to do some strangling of his own.
So, let's see. Suddenly I saw beside me two wide open eyes scrutinizing me curiously and persistently. The look in those eyes was coldly detached, sullen, as if it were utterly remote, it weighed upon me. Then he says he sees something unnatural in those eyes. And then they mentions that they hadn't said a single word to each other in two hours. Now I suddenly realize vividly the hideous idea, revolting as a spider of vice, which, without love, grossly and shamelessly begins with that in which true love finds its consummation. So sex, you know, ideally follows love and is its physical consummation, but in this case, the physical consummation has preceded love, is the cart is put before the horse, in a sense, and as such, it inverts all of it.
Instead of something good, it's something vicious. This whole opportunity for love starts backwards, of course. And now the task is sort of to rewind thinking of the clock again. And what he's got to do is rewind Lisa. He's got to try to unprostatize her. He's got to make her over in his own image as someone who. He's got to reform this young lady and make her a good girl.
35:08 Erin: I love your connection to the clock. And I also. Oh, poignant that she's only been a prostitute for, she says, a fortnight. Right. So there's something so hideous about that detail, you know, I don't know why, but I want to, but I have to point that out. I feel compelled. I don't know, is it because she's still. So he's telling her what's going to happen to her? She is. He repeatedly makes mention of the fact that she's barely wise to what he's saying. I mean, he reads a lack of intelligence in her looks, which I don't think we can trust. She's clearly naive, but I don't know that she's unintelligent.
And he fast forwards the clock for her and shows her what's going to happen to her at the end in this section, which is. Which I find to be extremely cruel and sadistic and also just so upsetting on so many levels because he's, you know, he's ascribing a moral choice to her circumstances when, you know, this is not a profession that women choose. And then we. Then we learn on top of that that she's actually been sold into prostitution by her family, which is so hideous. But he fast forwards the tape for her to show her what her life is going to be like and why she needs to get out now while she still has a chance.
There's this duality to this idea of the two weeks that she's somehow, like, maybe she could still get out, but also that, like, she's just started, she's at the very beginning of a death sentence, basically, you know, and she has the whole long decline yawning before her. This idea that she could still save herself, she could still get out. It seems like a pipe dream to me. And he's just torturing her with the idea that she could maybe that she wouldn't rack up as much debt and could potentially pay her way out now. But I'm not quite sure how the system works.
37:08 Wes: He gives her two different visions of two different possible futures, right? One of them is if you stay and then you'll die and no one will care about you and you get consumption and blah, blah, blah. And then the other one is this vision of a hopeful future with love and a family. And he paints this free, this very nice picture for her. Yeah, the way the conversation starts off is he talks about seeing them carrying a coffin from a basement and it's another prostitute who's died. And then he talks about it, it's a nasty day to be buried. And Lisa's like, it makes no difference.
And he talks about graves being waterlogged and asking her, don't you mind how you die? And that's when he gets into the story about how this particular prostitute was in debt to her madam, which he admits. He admits some of this is he's just making up people gossiping and laughing about her after she's died. And. And the girl, Lisa keeps saying, why should I die? I'm young, so I'm not about to die. Why would you. Why are you trying to worry me about that? And then that's when he launches into the. This idea that she's still long young, but you're not always going to be young.
And what about marriage? Lisa says, not all married women are happy. And then underground man says, yes, but you can with love. You can live even without happiness. And then. Then there's the part about you giving up your freedom, you're in an accursed bondage, you're in debt to your madam. You'll never buy your freedom. It's like selling your soul to the devil. So I. I wanted to bring up this part in particular just because this ties us into the general seam of freedom in the. In the novel. For him, fantasy, he's. There's a. In a way, he's stuck in a similar situation because it's a degraded one.
But his position of fantasy, in some sense is a form of freedom, as we've discussed, because it keeps all possibilities open and because fantasy is a train in which you have absolute power. But in many ways, right, it's just inaction and. And bondage. And I think the same thing in her situation. She's free from her family and her terrible family circumstances. And so that's, in a way, what she's sought out is liberation from oppression and the fact that she can eat right, and in some sense support herself. But it's bondage in this other sense that he's trying to portray.
So I don't know, are there other ways that we can fit that into the general question of freedom? I think the love thing, you know, again, I'm just going to repeat this because it came up in the first part, but love represents another possibility for freedom other than fantasy and rational decision making about one's own good and so on. So that's what this is leading up to.
40:06 Erin: Talk of freedom in this context, I think is interesting because looking at the sort of overall structure of how the episode works, his stories are powerful because they're playing on a kind of sentiment. And, you know, I mean, I think, like, there are. There are beautiful moments in the second story, of course, and I don't mean to just paint it with a broad brush and say that it's just entirely manipulative, but it's. But its mode is. I mean, its purpose is a kind of manipulation of her. So, you know, I don't want to say something that makes it seem as though any kind of enlightenment is ultimately a manipulation.
Maybe that's the truth. Any kind of education is manipulation just to some particular end. But to look at the superstructure of what he's doing, basically, he's telling her these two stories designed to make her kind of break down into tears, which she does right there. It's like watching a Hallmark movie that's designed to play on her emotions. Actually, you know, playing on her emotions makes me think of a piano key or an organ. Stop. Right. He's trying to induce a certain kind of emotional reaction from her, which he then receives. So he succeeded in emotionally manipulating her into believing in what he is saying.
And then he gives her his address. And. And in fact, she. She's so touched and she's. She has a desire to escape her circumstances, so she does come to his house, which creates another set of problems, as we know.
41:30 Wes: But yeah, even in these stories, there's lots of flourishes which are like the infant with the clean, tiny little nails and the way it's at the mother's breast and then flings its head back to look at its father and laugh. Or it's biting the breast and then looking sideways to say, look, I'm biting. All of these very sentimental details imagined by and related by someone, of course, who has no business lecturing anyone about love and family life and hasn't experienced it and can't even have a friend right, absolutely fantasize about this. All this stuff.
He can imagine an idealized version of all this stuff and then get another person charged up on that same ideal. It reminds me he had that one friend in school. He said that he would try to dominate, but he would try to make that person cynical. He'd try to win that person over to his own cynicism. In this case, he's kind of. He's trying to win her over to the other horn of the dilemma, which is this potent idealized vision of the. Of the future.
42:35 Erin: Yeah, that. That story about his friend is so harrowing. But, you know, the, the manipulation is made even more twisted by the fact that we know that he doesn't respect this woman. He's just availed himself of her services, and yet he feels so superior to her. And he says she's not being nice enough to him at first, which angers him. Then he says he feels sorry for her. And when she says no need, she wish she whispered hardly audibly, and again made a faint movement. He says that incensed me at once. What? I was so gentle with her and she, you know, I'm being so nice to her.
How come she doesn't like the fact that I'm saying that I feel sorry for her and I'm being so condescending. You know, it's, it's. It's absurd. Or the, you know, this. These little moments I noted when she's being reflective and he says so she too was capable of certain thoughts. And then at the. At the bottom of the same. Of the same page, he's saying something that's inducing Some thought in her. And he. He says, I waited again. Perhaps she doesn't understand. I thought, because she's not responding right away, she's thinking, perhaps she doesn't understand, I thought, you know, but she's always assuming that she's not understanding.
And really what he's done is he said something that's triggered a thought in her about her own. We learn that she's been sold into the situation by her parents, and he's providing this beautiful, idyllic view of or overly sentimental view of family life, which she has not experienced, nor has he experienced it. Right. Sounds like he was gotten rid of by his family, though he's not in such a bad, bad way, is she? So the manipulation by all that. I mean to say that the manipulation of these sentimentalized rhetorical flourishes seems even more painful in light of the fact that he doesn't have any respect for her.
And because we know from this other episode with a friend that he doesn't actually understand love as he's. As he freely admits. He only understands wanting to dominate someone. And as soon as he got that other friend totally, you know, he totally bent him to his will and dominated his spirit and broke him down. He no longer had any respect for him and went away. And we know that's the same thing that's going to happen with. With Lisa. So in light of these conversations about freedom, it seems to me that this type of tugging on the heartstring rhetoric is quite complicated.
It seems to be to try to induce her to a state of awareness by which she might seek her own freedom. At the same time, it's something that seems designed to manipulate, which is kind of taking away of her freedom.
45:01 Wes: Yeah, I think there's a parallel here between his underground and her underground. Right. And by trying to get her out of hers, he's trying to get him out of his. And there's a therapeutic method in both cases. So right in the end, she's going to end up sobbing. So, yeah, it's kind of like the end of a good therapy session where he's transformed her in some way, it seems like. And of course, that's what he's trying to do, he says to himself, with this particular story. But unfortunately, he transforms her and then abandons her because he can't join her, he can't transform himself and so become the other part of the love couple, the other part of the dyad, the erotic dyad, let's say.
But you're right, highly manipulative in doing this. He does this good cop, bad cop thing, which is like a really. It's a sign of someone who is engaged in this sort of manipulation. Right. The very positive, idealized story. And then he says, you know, I did speak with real feeling. And. And he's worried about her laughing and she's silent, but she starts and to say something and stops. And he hears a quiver of something different in her voice, something soft, something shame faced, which made him feel ashamed and guilty. And then she says, you speak like a book, with a note of irony in her voice.
And he says, I did not understand that she was hiding her feelings under irony. That this is usually the last refuge of a modest and chaste soul. People when the privacy of their souls is coarsely and intrusively invaded. And that their pride makes them refuse to surrender to the last moment and shrink from giving expression to the feelings of their feelings before you.
46:38 Erin: That's a great element.
46:40 Wes: Yeah, yeah, It's a good observation. And this is. It's kind of typical. There's. He mixes up. He's such a mix of terribleness and insight and there is compassion there, but there is also at the same time cruelty. And they're just. They're so mixed up with him, he has to alternate between them. So he just cycles so rapidly between them. But in this case, he's coming to understand her particular type of reserve and irony and the type of thing that he might normally feel wounded by because he says, you know, he's worried about having his vanity wounded at this point.
And her silence was kind of dangerous. Right. But he's coming to understand that it's not all about him. Her irony is not just to tease him or to insult him. And he's not insulted by the you speak like a book thing, which is a big step forward for him. He sees it in terms of her own suffering, her own defenses, what she needs to do to get by. But then it's right after that that he says, an evil feeling took possession of me. So then he does the bad cop thing and tells this horrific story about, again, it's nominally in the service of getting her to get out of bondage.
You're making a slave of your soul and body. You don't have a right to dispose of it in this way. But he paints this picture of disease and the people, even at the brothel, instead of being compassionate towards her when she's older and diseased, seeing her just as a burden, and berating her and showing no appreciation of the years of service that she's given that brothel there's no retirement plan. And then at the end of that, he gives this. And this is kind of in parallel to the very touching moment with the infant. This is sort of the corresponding part of that in the Bad Cop story, which is that.
And there your memory on earth will end. He's talking about her death now. Other women and children. Other women have children to go to their graves. Fathers, husbands. While for you neither tear nor sigh, nor remembrance, nor one in the whole world will ever come to you. Your name will vanish from the face of the earth as though you had never existed, never been born at all. Nothing but filth and mud. However you knock at your coffin lid at night when the dead arise, however you cry, however you cry. Let me out, kind people, to live in the light of day.
My life was no life at all. My life has been thrown away like a dishcloth or dish clout. I don't know. I think it's dishcloth. It was drunk away in the tavern at the Haymarket. Let me out, kind people to live in the world again. And of course he's talking about himself right into the light of. Light of day, right? He's. He wants to be let out. And that's when she. She despairs and sobs and thrusts her face into the pillow and she's wailing and clenching her teeth and even bites herself, I think. And he's gives this very compassionate rendition of that and her contorted face and half insane smile, all of that.
And then that moment where he gives her his. His address. But. Yeah, go.
49:51 Erin: Yeah, well, then. Then the next day. I mean, it's. It's interesting that he has the same. Though he's not the one who is sobbing. He's. She sobbed. It follows the same trajectory as one of his flights of fancy or one of his dreams where then he. Right, so. So to your point, I think he. He induces in her what he would otherwise have induced in himself. And then the next day, there's the. There's the hangover from it, you know, he says, I was positively amazed at my last night's sentimentality with Liza or Lisa, at all those outcries of horror and pity to think of having such an attack in.
Of womanish hysteria. Pah. You know, so he. It's interesting. He assigns the womanish hysteria to him, even though he's made a woman hysterical. You know. You know, there's a. There's a kind of duality there. I mean, to that. To that point. And I don't want to pivot too quickly. From Lisa, if we want to stay with her. But what you're putting me in mind of is Apollon. And I wonder if Apollon even exists because he seems to just be, you know, the double of the underground man. You know, he seems to serve. His only function. Seems to be almost like as a projection of an oppressive creature from the underground man's own mind.
Right. I think it's fascinating that we get the picture of him so late. He's in the underground man's space with him, you know, watching him from behind a screen, and he doesn't come out until the end. Like he's buried the lead this whole time. And it's like, is this guy really just this. This. His shadow. This. The shadow puppet on the wall, you know, tormenting him, who doesn't really exist? And he's, you know, the underground man is so having drunken hallucinations that he has the servant who's. Who's oppressing him. I don't know what we could say about that, but I think it's.
I do love. I love Apollo. I love his. I love his whole thing. He's great.
51:47 Wes: Yeah. He's like the. Well, he's a harsher version of. Who's the John Gielgud character in Arthur.
51:54 Erin: Yes, I love him.
51:55 Wes: That's his name. Do you remember the. Anyway of the butler who's dealing with the rakish.
52:03 Erin: You know, that's one of my favorite movies.
52:06 Wes: I love that movie. We should do that.
52:07 Erin: Oh, let's definitely do that movie.
52:10 Wes: Yeah.
52:10 Erin: I have to find his name or. I'm very upset. Set it's on the. Hobson.
52:17 Wes: Okay.
52:17 Erin: Which is great.
52:18 Wes: So. Yeah. So Hobson, obviously is a more caretaking, compassionate, caretaking figure, but also, you know. No, no nonsense. And Apollon is, according to the underground man, just. Just basically rude and despises him and looks down on him. And we get the funny account of him when he doesn't get to get his wages. Basically just coming up to the underground man and staring at him and kind of reminds me of my cat.
52:46 Erin: We can assume from Apollon what the underground man's name actually is. Right. It's got to be Dionysus.
52:55 Wes: No, he'd be better off if he were. Yeah. Dionysus.
53:00 Erin: He can't even be lazy. Yeah.
53:02 Wes: Vulcan. If he's underground, but There you go.
53:04 Erin: Vulcan's a nicer guy than this, but. Yeah.
53:07 Wes: Yeah. And more productive. But yeah. During this time. Right. He's worried that she's going to come. So. Actually, there is another scene with Lisa Right before he leaves, where she comes to him with this. It's very touching because she has a letter from some guy she met dancing, who wrote her love letter. And she showed it to. This is her first real moment of vulnerability. Well, after the sobbing. But showing it, you know, he's. He's. Gavin given her his address. And so she said, I will come. But then shows him this letter. And to show him that she, too, was honestly and genuinely loved and had been addressed respectfully, she would keep this letter all her life.
Her pride and her justification. So very touching. But now, of course, at this point, now that he's back home with his servant, he's depressed and he's worried that she's going to come and see him and see his wretchedness, see his poverty, see his torn house robe. Whatever he's wearing around the house is not very nice. So I guess even with a servant, you can be living in poverty in this world. And then he alternates between that and dreaming of being her salvation and, you know, her flinging herself at his, reforming her and her flinging himself at his feet and.
And just ridiculous ideas of love. And this is all interspersed with dealing with Apollon's rudeness. And then, of course, she arrives and there's the horrible denouement, or maybe you call this a climax.
54:45 Erin: I love the back and forth of his mind in this. It's fascinating. He's reflecting on the effect that he's had on her. He says, and how few. How few words I thought in passing were needed. How little of the idyllic and affectedly, bookishly, artificially idyllic, too, had sufficed to turn a whole human life at once according to my will. That's virginity, to be sure. Freshness of soil. So he ascribes virginity to her after he had this conversation in which he slept with her. Right then he's saying he's imagining what he's going to say to her. You are mine.
You are my creation. You are pure, you are good. You are my noble wife. And then. Then not two sentences later, besides, they won't let her out, the hussy. I thought insanity. And then, you know. But I love. I love the turns because they seem totally. Now, we've had such a. Such a clear picture of this extremely disturbed human being that somehow these turns are. They seem exactly right, you know. And then he's talking about Apollon. He was the bane of my life, the curse laid upon me by Providence. You know, this is in itself, is a little bit of that.
You Know sentimental, bookish language. Of course. Right. The description of him is. Is wonderful and how he's. He's so obsessed with himself. But. But anyway. Sorry. The thing I wanted to get to is his lisp. What I loathed particularly was his lisp. The underground man says, and. And he's made fun of someone's speech before. Zverkov, he thinks, has now an affected way of speaking. Right. So he was making fun of the ways Zverkov was. I think it was Zverkov and not Simonov was speaking in that way where it's transcribed in the Garnett translation as, like, multiple vowels strung together with hyphens.
So he makes fun of this speech. And I just wonder about that, what there is to say about that. It's just occurring to me now that the fixation on the lisp, making fun of Zverkov's speech pattern, speaking like a book, the highly sentimentalized speech in order to sway Lisa, the affected speech that one puts on, the delight that he thinks that Apollon takes in his own lisp, as though he's, like, proud that he has a lisp. This connection between speech and control and affectation, I don't know what we can make of that, but it's just something that.
I'm sure much ink has been spilled about this in journals maybe.
57:07 Wes: But anyway, yeah, you know, after the stuff with Apollon, Lisa arrives and it's. You know, I kind of dreaded.
57:17 Erin: Oh, I know.
57:17 Wes: Reading this. It's just like a horror movie and you know what's gonna happen.
57:21 Erin: And this is like, truly the beginning of cringe comedy. Yeah.
57:24 Wes: And of course, what he does is terribly cruel. It sounds like they may have had sex again.
57:31 Erin: They definitely did. Yeah. Hence the. The money changes hands. That's his insult.
57:37 Wes: Right. And then he tries to pay her and she throws it away, leaving. But. So she came to him. You know, he won her over and got her to be very vulnerable and come to him. And then he acted like a crazy man and sobbed on the sofa for 25. I mean, for 15 minutes straight. And she was very sympathetic, but ultimately rejected her.
58:02 Erin: He gives her the money in such a way that he describes as. As affected, actually. It's an affectation to give her this money. It's so. It's such a cruel flourish or such a. It is like something out of a book or. It's like a lisp, if you will. You know, he says, I did that cruel thing purposely. It was not an impulse from the heart, but came from my evil brain. This Cruelty was so affected, so purposely made up, so completely a product of the brain of books, that I could not even keep it up a minute. So he gives her this money as an affectation of cruelty.
So, you know, I think there's a connection here somehow. Back to the lisp, though I won't draw it fully. But then, you know, the last paragraph, the last sad, pathetic paragraph in which he. Oh, no, it's not the last paragraph. I'm sorry, it's the penultimate or third to last. He imagines that this action of giving her money is going to. To be better. The resentment that she's going to carry over his insult is going to be better for her ultimately, than if she had gotten involved with him romantically because he would have inevitably treated her poorly and things would have ended badly between them.
He wouldn't have been able to be good to her for long. And now this way, she has a resentment. She can cherish her whole life. So he's. He's infected her like a vampire and. And made her, you know, he thinks that he's given her some of his venom and now she gets to cherish it the way he cherishes his. So he's. He's making other. You know, he's. Or like the zombie disease. He's turning everybody around him into a zombie, too. Yeah, scary.
59:34 Wes: I mean, he's. The way he puts it. Will it not be better that she should keep the resentment of the insult forever? Resentment? Why? It is purification. It is a most stinging and painful consciousness. However, the loathsome, the filth that's awaiting her quote, the feeling of insult, will elevate and purify her. By hatred, perhaps, too, by forgiveness. What is better? Cheap happiness or exalted suffering? Yeah, Very dark vision. And this is. This is what stops him from, you know, he goes out, he pursues her a little bit, but he draws himself up short because apparently this will be better for her.
1:00:11 Erin: Yeah.
1:00:12 Wes: Before that, he had talked of, I think, part of what motivates him to reject her. Well, he says there's a hatred born of envy. And then he says, with me, loving meant tyrannizing and showing my moral superiority. It consists of the right to tyrannize a love object. He didn't imagine love except his struggle. So this. I think he understands that his own envy and sadism make love impossible for him. But this idea of envy is important because, of course, it's because she's outside of him and he can't control her, that ultimately he can't stand the idea of having her as a love object, unless it can be completely controlled, it's too much for him. So he would rather leave her with the insult.
1:00:59 Erin: Oh, in this way he gets to control her in a way. I mean, it is his affectation of giving her this money has now induced. It's infected her with his consciousness, which we know, we've already said is self consciousness. So now if she ever does have, you know, some kind of boyfriend or some relationship where she thinks it's actually more than just under the auspices of her services, she's going to be afraid that she's going to get paid, that she's just being used. Right. So he's made her self aware, you know, given her a bit of his self consciousness to take with her into the future.
1:01:33 Wes: He's impaired her ability to trust again.
1:01:36 Erin: Yes, yes.
1:01:37 Wes: So made her.
1:01:38 Erin: And ours too. Yes.
1:01:40 Wes: Right.
1:01:42 Erin: We'll never be the same.
1:01:44 Wes: So then he moves into. So the very end of this. So this experiment in therapeutic truth telling, where we're the therapist, he comes back to the idea that this is an evil memory. This is, I think, the phrase that he uses before he starts this whole account and then says it's a mistake in writing it down and it's not literature but a quote, unquote, corrective punishment. So this has gone from therapy to punishment. I guess it's two different, really, conceptions of confession. Confession is therapeutic versus confession as confession to a crime that he can be punished for.
And I guess our awareness of it is just the punishment. And then that whole bit about novels needing a hero but he's an antihero. And then he says what matters most. It all produces a most unpleasant impression. For we are all divorced from life. We are all cripples, every one of us more or less. We're so divorcement. We feel loathing for life. We see it as effort, we see it as hard work. It's better in books. Why are we perverse? Why do we ask for something else we don't know? Relax the control and we would be begging for petulant. Prayers are answered, we're answered.
Relax the control. And we'd be begging to be under control at once. Again at once. So we don't really want freedom. And then this is. I just want to read this whole paragraph that comes next. I have only carried to the extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry halfway. And what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves so that perhaps after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully. Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is and what it is called.
Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join onto, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. It's a burden to us even to be human beings, men with our own real body and blood. We are ashamed of it. We think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible, generalized man. And here's a line which I really think is great. We are stillborn and for generations past have not been begotten by living fathers. And that suits us better and better.
We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow of an idea. So what's going on now? Suddenly we got into cultural criticism. And is it that we're too. It sounds like we have too much civilization, too much history behind us, too much culture, too many books, such that we are becoming more and more divorced from life. So it's not just him who's the underground man. We are all on the underground spectrum. Or maybe it's a feature of human self consciousness and culture. Right. Yeah, thanks. I like that. I just popped in my head the underground spectrum, but.
Yeah, but it seems. It surprised me. I didn't know that it was going to become about us in this sense that he was just a limiting case of something that was supposed to be about. About us. We're getting punished as well.
1:04:57 Erin: I guess he says at the very beginning that, you know, civilization doesn't make us any better, it just makes us worse, you know. So I suppose this has to be the. This has to be the denouement that not only are we not improvable, but we're the opposite. You know, we're actively getting worse by civilization. And it's strange because he seems to be part of the. Insofar as he uses an idea out of a book to make Lisa nourish a resentment forever. You know, he seems to be part of this infection that he also is railing against or you know, he seems to be putting this insofar as he is, you know, a man of his age and a super civilized man.
He seems to be part of the spread of the disease rather than, I don't know, is. And the Notes from Underground itself is a way to kind of disseminate these ideas. Right. So he's ostensibly retreated into the underground. At the same time, he's able to sort of infect everyone else like a zombie. You know, we're all. Lisa's listening to this, listening to this story and becoming affected, infected by self consciousness as a result. So, you know, if the purpose of Dostoevsky's writing this was to refute the utopian ideal, it's interesting that what he responds with, though performative, is so ultimately nihilistic that we're not.
You know, I'm not sure what to take from it in the end.
1:06:30 Wes: Well, I think the implication is still that love is the way out. And that seems to be there in the Brothers Karamazov as well.
1:06:36 Erin: Yes, but here it can't be.
1:06:38 Wes: The nihilist is always the foil for him, but he does lean into it in a way that makes him sound like the same thing with Nietzsche. Nihilism is the foil, but it sounds awfully convincing coming out of their mouths.
1:06:50 Erin: Right, right, right, right.
1:06:52 Wes: So we get the hint that love is the way out, but that fails catastrophically. And then we're told there is no way out. There is no possibility for freedom. And it's no longer even just about our physicality or about the fact that we are machines in the world. It's about the fact of self consciousness, which might seem like human culture and self consciousness and civilization might be seen as manifestations of freedom, but he's warning us that in fact, they just confine us even more. So in a way, we're confined by our own freedom. Freedom. We're confined by our self consciousness, we're confined by our rationality, etc.
But yeah, why not end on a more positive note about love? He's the underground man, so of course it can't end on a positive note. Of course, maybe, maybe he could have given us. Given us a postscript anyway. All right, so no postscripts anymore for us. What did we call them?
1:07:54 Erin: That's what we call it.
1:07:55 Wes: We call it postscripts. Right?
1:07:56 Erin: Yeah, but we'll still do them. If people want to send us questions, we could do. We could do a show of just
1:08:03 Wes: for subscribers sending questions, and if we get enough, we'll answer them on there.
1:08:08 Erin: Yes. All right, thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.
“Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: An Anatomy of Human Self-Destructiveness (Part 1)
Jul 15, 2024
What is the cause of human self-destructiveness? According to Dostoyevkys’s underground man, this “most advantageous advantage” is designed to save freedom from the constraints of rationality, and vitality from the quiescence that follows success. Yet he himself finds freedom only in spite and fantasy, while in real life he oscillates between failed and humiliating attempts to dominate or ingratiate himself with other people. Wes & Erin discuss “Notes from the Underground,” and its agonized rumination on whether freedom can be reconciled with love, individuality with virtue, and action with reflection.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: What is the cause of human self destructiveness? According to Dostoevsky's Underground man, our most advantageous advantage is designed to save freedom from the constraints of rationality and vitality from the quiescence that follows success. Yet he himself finds freedom only in spite and fantasy. In real life, he oscillates between failed and humiliating attempts to dominate or ingratiate himself with other people. Today we discuss Notes from the Underground and its agonized rumination on whether freedom can be reconciled with love, individuality with virtue, and action with reflection. This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, you know, I had actually never read this book.
1:25 Erin: Neither had I.
1:26 Wes: And I didn't know what I was getting into when I suggested it. Why did I suggest it? Do you remember? Did I tell you why I suggested this?
1:34 Erin: We were looking for short fiction, right? Maybe we were due for a novella. Is that it?
1:39 Wes: No, I mean, I wasn't actually actively searching for something. I came across a mention of this, I think, but I can't remember where I came across it. But in any case, I'm a big fan of the Brothers Karamazov, which I've read a few times, and we did a live show on it for the Partially Examined Life. And I thought, wow, it'd be interesting to do to see what it's like when Dostoevsky writes something short. But there's a way in which this doesn't quite feel short. And perhaps that's because of this division into two parts, the second part of which is an actual story, the first part of which is just this philosophical ranting, let's say. And the character, the Persona, the narrator who's doing that ranting is not an attractive guy. And you have to live with him for what, I don't know. Is it 120 pages that you have to be with this guy?
2:33 Erin: Seems like 240, but yeah.
2:35 Wes: Yeah, so it definitely feels longer than it actually is. What was your overall general reaction to this?
2:43 Erin: Disgust? Anger. I mean, it was fascinating. I particularly like. I liked the second half, though. That is what made me angriest. I also hadn't read it. And I thought that I had. I've read, I guess then the Idiot and not this. I'd gotten the two confused. So I've read the Idiot, Crime and Punishment and Brothers K. I guess I'm the idiot in that case. I don't know.
3:06 Wes: So idiot's a little bit longer than this, but it's protagonist is a nicer guy, let's put it that way.
3:13 Erin: Well, and this is, you know, the. The forerunner, I'm assuming, to what's his name? Raskalnikov. Raskolnikov. Yeah.
3:21 Wes: And there's a bit of Ivan in here too, I think.
3:24 Erin: You know, I'm glad I read it. It felt like a slog. The other element to this is, I think I told you that I've been sick with. I've had this. This really bad cold that won't go away, which is why I might sound a little bit nasal to our listeners. I'm not sure how this is going to come out, but I've had a sinus infection and two ear infections and one ear in particular is in a lot of pain. So as he was talking about pain people have in their toothaches, I was. It was making me angry.
3:52 Wes: Are you. Are you getting pleasure out of moaning?
3:55 Erin: I don't moan, but I don't get pleasure out of my. My ear again. I was on a plane yesterday, so I'm. It's. It's really aggravated right now. I'm on antibiotics. It's fine. But. Yeah, no, I just. I see his. I see his point in certain instances, but I. There's going to be a lot of subjectivity in this episode. I can feel it. Me subjectively arguing with Dostoevsky, which I always say that I. Or not with. With the Underground man, which I always say that I don't enjoy doing when I actually do. So maybe I'm. I'm perverse too.
4:26 Wes: Well, I think I've been induced with a little perverseness because I think when you were talking about your different ailments, I was thinking of what Oscar Wilde would say.
4:34 Erin: What?
4:35 Wes: Yeah, like what's his quip about the death of parents? The death of one parent is a misfortune, but the death of the second parent is a. I always forget how that ends.
4:45 Erin: That's from.
4:46 Wes: Which is telling.
4:47 Erin: Importance of Being Earnest. Yeah. It seems like carelessness. Is that it?
4:52 Wes: Yes,
4:55 Erin: I know. Too many infections.
4:56 Wes: That's a very unsympathetic reaction. But I'm going to blame it on the Underground Man. Or is he unsympathetic I don't know. But I think one of the challenges of this is going to be connecting the first part and the second part. And I think in typical Dostoevsky style, there's a lot going on thematically and then with philosophy explicitly brought into the mix, but it's not all that clear how it's all related and how much care he's putting into a tight relationship between all these things. You just get the sense he just throws everything into a bucket and then, you know, it gets mixed up and somehow it works.
But he's not the most. He's not the most careful writer. Right. I think he was with the Brothers Karamazov. He was essentially dictating it and working against deadlines, trying to get it out into a magazine as quickly as possible. I get the sense that's part of what's so, you know, that's what in some sense is so appealing about his writing is the. Is the lack of. I think there's almost a lack of inhibition, but gives his characters a feeling of being real. They're not overly crafted, which is interesting because, you know. You know, you always have the suspicion that these types of characters.
There's a lot of Dostoevsky in him. And I think what I know of his personal life, he was kind of a weird, unpleasant guy, at least in some contexts. Probably read some contemporaneous accounts of what. How people. What people actually thought of him. And so I think, yeah, I say that it's interesting because the. This underground man is all about inhibition. In the first part of the novella, we hear about his spitefulness and inhibition and envy and pride and vengeful fantasies, and then also a philosophical theory regarding freedom which is somehow connected to that.
6:51 Erin: Yeah. I think part of the difficulties that you're describing about pinning down this person, I think, you know, I think we can attribute them to realism. I think we can attribute them to Dostoevsky style. But also he builds in a lot of inherent contradictions into the character. Right. I mean, this is a very unreliable narrator who constantly contradicts himself or says, no, that's, you know, I was lying just then, you know, or. I don't actually believe any of this, but I think. I think inhibition is an interesting word. It's not one I would use because I think he's the narrator in the first part.
He's describing all of this, you know, this freedom to do bad and everything, but ultimately what it is, is seems freedom to freedom not to act. So I think of him as a very well, you're right. Yeah. No, he's an inhibited person. Yes, I agree. How do you think that's distinct from the second part? Like, why do you think the two parts aren't working?
7:42 Wes: Well, I do think they work together. Ultimately. It just, it wasn't easy for me to figure out. There's not. The connection isn't all that obvious to me. But between. So in the first part, so I'll say inhibition, right, because he is stuck in fantasy land and he calls himself inhibited, as opposed to the man of action. In the beginning. And that's the very first part of the first part one, chapter one, he's contrasting the man of action with the intelligent man, the man who's too conscious, self conscious, such that he can't become anything. And when he feels slighted, he can't act.
Because unlike the intelligent man, he is full of doubt. Sorry. Unlike the man of action, he is full of doubt. The man of action can view any conflict through the lens of justice and automatically sides with himself. And so if he wants to take vengeance, he can just automatically take vengeance. It sounds a lot. There's a lot in here that sounds like Nietzsche. And obviously this has very much influenced Nietzsche in both its style and content. Right, because it's the. This uninhibited man, this man of action, sounds like, you know, the Nietzsche master or blond beast who is running around killing peasants and not feeling bad about it.
They are, they are. They exist before the advent of conscience, before the advent of morality in our sense. So. But I see why you're puzzled at me saying he's inhibited because he does things. He's impulsive in a lot of ways and self. Self indulgent. And the impulsivity. Part of the impulsivity, right, involves going to prostitutes, but for the most part he was drunk. Those are his two. In the first part, those are his two occupations, reading and going to prostitutes. So he lives in this world of fantasy. And when he steps outside of this world of fantasy, it's generally.
It sounds like for prostitution, which he doesn't explicitly refer to, I don't think in the first part, but talks about a filthy vice and wanting to go unseen and all of these other stuff. So you get the gist in the first part that he's visiting brothels.
9:58 Erin: Maybe this doesn't bode well for the rest of our conversation, but you're absolutely right. I was thinking uninhibited when you had said that, even though I was saying inhibited, I thought that you meant uninhibited Oh, I see. Yeah, I'm just being a little slow. Slow as we're getting started. But I think you're absolutely right. That is how I would characterize him fundamentally. But I do think that my mistake does point to this compulsive need that he has in the second half to ostensibly to exert a kind of control or mastery over others. He doesn't understand how to have real relationships with others.
He wants to be worshiped and adored and admired. But I would think that the psychological motivation for these encounters is more of he's deliberately enraging people or committing social faux pas or somewhere in between as a way to confirm his own biases against people, or as a way to be hated by people and thereby justify his own retreat from society, it seems. So he goes out, I think, into the world in the second half as a way to retreat deeper into his own solipsism and into his inhibitions further, if you will. Because this is also, what, 15 years before.
The events he describes predate the writing of this text by 15 years. And at this point, he seems to have made a full retreat into his underground, his hidey hole, whatever you want to call it. His man cave has been his man cave. Right, right. Where he. He trolls on Reddit and. Yeah. And has retired also. So he's not even engaging in work.
11:43 Wes: Well, why is it called. Yeah, why is it? Why underground? I think this is a question that we'll probably come back to as we go through the novella.
11:51 Erin: But is this a reference. This is a direct reference to the. This is a direct response, I think, to the Crystal Palace.
11:59 Wes: So the Crystal palace is the way he describes this idealized realm where, what is it, morality reigns. Is that the way to put it?
12:10 Erin: Yes. And this sort of utopian ideal of acting in. So this is from Nikolai Chernyshevsky's what Is To Be Done, which is a utopian novel which advocates for enlightened self interest, I think, is the. And rational. Rational egoism. And I believe there's a specific line from that book which I can no longer find, in which a character says, you know, come out from your. From your underground, or something like that. And this, in a way, is like a direct response. This is sort of the opposite of the ideals espoused in that novel. Dostoevsky is responding to them from the position of the underground man as a.
I see. Yeah. As a counter to these ideas, but I don't know enough about enlightened self interest to. To speak on it, other than the ways in which it's attacked in Notes from Underground. I don't know enough about Chernyshevsky's novel. I haven't read it though it's, it's inspired Lenin and you know, a lot of, a lot of Russian thought.
13:16 Wes: Yeah. So this first comes up in chapter seven, actually. So here's. This is just a few pair. Well, this is all what you say. New economic relations will be established, already made and worked out with mathematical exactitude so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the Crystal Palace will be built then. In fact, those will be the halcyon days. Of course, there is no guaranteeing, this is my comment, that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then.
And for that will one have. For what will one have to do when everything will be calculated according to tables. But on the other hand, everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course, boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking gold pins into people. It's a reference to something earlier, Cleopatra. But all that does not matter. So, okay, so I see the note here in this Constance Garnett edition that I have the Crystal palace figures and the picture of the future socialist society. What's to be done? And this is a recurrent thing with Dostoevsky not liking socialism.
And it's in the Brothers Karamazov as well. And it's all over this. And he's associating socialism with, interestingly he's associating a bunch of different philosophical theories. So one of them is this socialist idea, the ideal of a socialist utopia. But another one sounds a lot like Plato. So he attacks in chapter three, maybe he really gets into it in chapter seven. So it's in chapter seven that he brings up this idea that human beings only do nasty things because they don't know their own real normal interests. And this is an echo of Plato's idea that no human being knowingly does evil.
But if we knew that to know what the good is is to be motivated to do the good. And that's the idea that he's going to challenge here. But he associates it with conflicts between free will and determinism. He doesn't. One of the theses, one of the underground man's theses, is that human beings are self destructive just because it can be a manifestation of freedom. That if we are so, if we are thinking about the good in terms of as something that's accessible by reason, something that we can reason our way to. Then in a way we're bound by the laws of rationality and we're not free to do the thing that we seem seemingly decide to do because we've deliberated about it.
And that the only way to rebel against that is to do something that is not in our best interest or not, you know, isn't explicitly about our good. Something that is self destructive. Which is an odd idea because traditionally in early modern philosophy, say, including for instance Leibniz's theodicy, but all over the place that there's this idea and I think it's in Augustine, St. Augustine as well. But the idea is that you can. That there's a sense in which rationality is the only way to be free, which is to say to be unfree is to be a slave to one's desires and to be, you know, again, we can think about this in terms of determinism.
We're, you know, we're material beings in a world of physics and chemistry and it's perhaps the case that we're marionettes because of that, that everything that we do is determined by that. But if there is any freedom, according to many philosophical schools of thought, it comes about by way of our capacity to be conscious of the good and conscious of reasons that in a way is a way out. Even though reasons are binding, reasons limit our freedom in some sense, or they seem to. The traditional idea is, in fact they are the only way out, they are the only path to freedom.
But for the underground men, in fact, these reasons and rationality are bonds and they're associated with determinism because apparently he's associating them with scientific determinism where we figure out the correct course of action according to say, mathematical tables or our scientific understanding of what's in our own best interest. And if we do that, we don't really have any choice in the end. I don't know if I've put that
17:38 Erin: very well, but yes, definitely, I think you're exposing for me what's so difficult about this word rational or reason. In the same way, I think consciousness is a word that's very tricky in this book because when he says. When he says consciousness and that consciousness itself is a kind of a disease, I think what he actually means is self consciousness. I wonder if the same thing can be applied to this rationality or that reason. The kind of reason he's talking about is actually far, far more narrow than the word actually suggests. He sees, you know, sort of scientific rationality on the one hand and chaos, disorder and destruction on the other.
And says the only way to escape these things are through chaos, destruction, disorder, sticking gold pins in someone. Right? So this, this example that he gives, that Cleopatra just stuck gold pins in the breasts of her servant girls just for the pure pleasure of watching them scream, right. With, with pain, like she, she derived some satisfaction out of this. I'm assuming this story is apocryphal. I don't know. So that the opposite of this scientific rationalism would be, you know, in air quotes I'm using that incorrectly, would be chaos, destruction, disorder.
But you know, maybe, maybe his terminology is wrong, maybe his thinking is wrong. I mean, I agree when he says on, in chapter eight, he says reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature. While will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is of the whole human life, including reason and all the impulses. I would agree with that. But I think that we don't just have the impulse to do wrong, we also have. We can also exert our will beyond reason for irrational impulses which have positive ends. He seems to be taking only the negative view.
Am I wrong there? Like, you know, you could argue that maybe love is irrational or that, you know, for some reason what comes to mind is someone who, like in the Aurora, Colorado shooting, you know, the mass shooter who killed everyone. Right. There were all those, those boys, teenage boys that were on dates with their girlfriends who threw themselves on top of their girlfriends, saving their girlfriends lives and they were murdered. I think four of them were murdered. Right. I'm assuming that in the kind of reason he's talking about, whatever it is, rational egoism or whatever they would, that would be acting in one's.
Against one's own self interest to die for someone else.
20:12 Wes: Yeah, I think this, I think this is good because it, you know, I had this thought and connecting the first and the second part, the second part. In the second part, he's experimenting with the idea that human relationships, including love, are in fact the only way to gain freedom. And he has a germ. He never says it explicitly, but he seems to have a germ of that idea and even says that to Liza, the prostitute. He will basically say to her, you are in bondage and the way out is to get married and to be in love. That's the way out. It's not advice he ever explicitly gives to them, to himself.
And it's obviously not advice he can take. As we find out, the second part, the attempt to leave his fantasy world and to find a version of freedom which is not fantasy. Because that for him amounts to what freedom is. Right. Just living in a fantasy world is freedom. And his attempt to find this other form of freedom, which I think is set off as the. In opposition to the fantasy version of freedom is. Is love. So that, and that attempt, Sorry, is. Doesn't go well for him for obvious reasons.
21:24 Erin: Right, right. Well, yeah, so I, I just, I think that I want to make the connection with consciousness and self consciousness and maybe, maybe this is just a, you know, too obvious of a distinction. Right. But it seems that the reason he's talking about that he wants to fight against, you know, what he's describing is like a tantrum, like a self interested tantrum that where you're reacting against reason, there are lot people react against or people do things that are beyond reason or even against reason for the sake of others that involve emptying the self, reaching out beyond the self.
Even when you think about something like, you know, faith, faith that is beyond reason. Right. Like faith in a higher power that's putting trust in something beyond the self. Whereas anything that he sees as anti rational is ultimately solipsistic. And about, ultimately it's about exerting one's will over and above other people or other, or objects. Right. Even if it's just like smashing the crystal palace or you know, going to one of those places where you, where you throw axes at things or destroy things with baseball bats in order to get out your aggression.
Right. That seems to be the only anti rational impulse that he's interested in exploring, which is a destructive selfish one. Yeah. So I mean it's difficult. So these things are weedy, Right. Because I think we do have more in us than the rational, but more also than he is willing to discuss.
22:46 Wes: Yeah. I think part of the complication is that if we are determinists in the modern scientific sense, right. And we see ourselves as the product of the fact that we're material beings run by physics and laws of nature, as he puts it, and he uses this phrase the laws of nature over then we have no freedom to act. And that lack of freedom manifests itself as just all these natural sentiments that we have. And desires were driven by desire, for instance, including altruistic desires, including not just aggression, but by love. All of, all of these things could be relegated to a deterministic picture of what it is to be human and then what is it to be free on that picture?
For him, the reason why it involves self. Well, okay, so then there's the one way out of that deterministic picture, as I mentioned, is to think of rationality as the key to being free. So one deliberates rationally and that includes being attentive to what is good for you. And then one can do the thing that is good for you. And the rebellion for him is to do something that's not good for you. And then the question that you're asking is, well, why can't love be just as much a, a rebellion? And the other question is do we need, do we need a rebellion at all?
But yeah, so I think we get all these different, we get all these different varieties of potential freedom. Being self destructive or running out and trying to be spiteful towards people or being loving.
24:28 Erin: The rebellion seems to me to be from people who say that you're a machine, right? You are just these, these chemicals and you know, this he says a piano key or an organ stop. And your circumstances just play on you. And they make you, you know, they make you jump or do various things according to the laws of nature. So the rebellion is against people who would want to think us a machine. And so I wonder if, I mean, he doesn't address this, but I wonder if the underground man would, would say that religion too treats humans as, as machines and that therefore this, you know, the only way to rebel is to have the machine break down or to make it, you know, to make HAL turn on you instead of doing your bidding.
You know, Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. So would he critique the Platonic suggestion that. Would he, would he critique morality and say that morality just turns us into do gooding machines or.
25:30 Wes: I don't know enough about this idea and that's the one that I'm calling odd, but actually now I'm reminded of Blood Meridian novel. We did a Partially Examined Life show on where this sort of idea is at play as well. The idea that morality as a system of rules based on reasons is just confining and makes freedom impossible. When again, the traditional philosophical view is that morality just is freedom, that is, and being reasonable just is freedom. The argument here is no, that's not the case. And in fact not only does it not free us from determinism, it is of a kind with determinism because it's deterministic forces in science that tell us what's good for us.
Ultimately, I think the idea is, so maybe there's a kind of moral naturalism to this. All we have to do is figure out all the laws of nature and by doing that we Know what's good for human beings and then we are bound just to do that. So rational freedom just collapses back into scientific determinism. I think that's the idea. And all that's left for us is to rebel. Because once you have this conflation of determinism with a concern for one's own good, then it seems like self destructiveness is the only way out. But again, I think the novel, clearly the thesis of the novel is that he's wrong about that and that love ultimately is the way out.
But he ignores that.
26:58 Erin: Yeah, that's good. That helps me understand. I'm looking to it when he actually explicitly lists the advantages that reason in his estimation works towards. And he says they're prosperity, wealth, freedom and peace. So I was wondering if freedom was in there. And it is. So, you know, he's advocating freedom from freedom. This is very, you know, two plus two equals five, of course, immediately makes me think Orwell. And now, now I'm realizing he even mentions that.
27:26 Wes: Right. Sometimes it's pretty. It's nice to make two plus two equals five.
27:30 Erin: Yes, exactly.
27:31 Wes: Brings up that idea.
27:32 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So Freedom from Freedom is another possibly Orwellian ancestor of the underground man.
27:41 Wes: Sounds like a country song. Freedom from Freedom.
27:48 Erin: I think. Yeah. I'd like freedom for that kind of freedom.
27:52 Wes: Right. Freedom means driving a massive pickup truck and doing deer hunting or I don't know, what other writing facile associations can I make with that?
28:06 Erin: Terrible songs with simplistic chord progressions. Yeah,
28:12 Wes: yeah. So maybe we should backtrack a little bit too, to this idea. You know, the famous first lines, which I think I had seen a reference to this and then I wanted to remind myself and opened it up and saw the first few lines. I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased and I'm like, wow. Yeah, let's read this next. This will be fun. But he associates this position that he's in as this spiteful, sickly man with consciousness, which as you point out, it's probably better described as self consciousness.
And that includes for him being capable of aesthetic and moral refinement, being especially intelligent. He had been a good student and that was kind of his only way out of being socially alienated. I think he associates this intelligence and self consciousness and inhibition. He associates that kind of lack of freedom with science. You can see the connection between these two ideas. The idea that concern with morality inhibits freedom, science inhibits freedom. And then his own Intelligence and level of refinement and consciousness is an inhibition of freedom.
In fact, it's a disease.
29:28 Erin: This is insufferable. I think he demonstrates, especially in the latter half of the novel, that he's not as intelligent as. Or rather Dostoevsky demonstrates for us, Right. That he's not as intelligent as he thinks he is. But, you know, I'm very taken with this idea that he's. That he's used to comfort himself, that self consciousness produces inertia. I mean, it's, you know, I think it's true on its face, right. That any kind of self consciousness impedes action, but he takes it as itself a sign of his own intelligence and therefore of his own superiority.
And he wants to say at once that he's, you know, a mouse and not a man, that he's. He's not superior because of his inability to act. And yet that inability to act is itself a marker of intelligence, which is itself a marker of his superiority above others. Right. So there's a. There's a circular logic. He'll also argue the other way and say that his inability. Or maybe I already said that, but. Right. Like at first he says intelligence produces inertia, therefore not doing anything is a sign of intelligence. And then he says that inertia is itself a sign of intelligence as well.
He argues it in both directions. I'm trying to. I'm trying to say.
30:35 Wes: Right.
30:36 Erin: And you know, and he argues, he argues that he's a characteristic man of his age, that the 19th century man is also plagued by this, which is in itself perhaps a contradiction, unless he thinks of himself as being the one man of his own age who's, you know, who's also somehow the prototypical man. But he says in the first section, yes, a man in the 19th century must and morally ought to be preeminently a characterless creature. A man of character, an active man, is preeminently a limited creature. This, of course, put me in mind of our frequent discussions of Hedda Gabler. Right. And the idea that you remain in the. Yeah, you remain in the. The realm of all possibilities are open to you if you don't act.
31:24 Wes: Right.
31:24 Erin: But this is so striking coming from someone who is sitting in his. His underground hole, right. Doing nothing, saying that a man who is capable of action is. Is limited, you know, So, I mean, this man does nothing all day but sit and dream and then write this manifesto, which is in itself an argument against. Right. He's actually accomplishing something by writing this. He says he does nothing but he's writing this. So in a way it's. It's a sort of. The entire novella is a self contradiction. But I mean, what do we. What more can we say about this idea of limitation in action or through action?
32:07 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting idea. So. And again, that's the question is where freedom lies. So the people he's calling direct persons of action are the real normal man as opposed to what he is, which is the retort made man, which I love that phrase, the retort made man, that is his antithesis and acutely conscious mouse. So obviously he's the one who's impotent and inhibited. And you have all these other real normal men running around doing what they want, like the Zverkovs, as we'll find out, being active in the world. And that seems to be another picture of freedom.
But on the other hand, one might think of that kind of freedom as just people behaving instinctually and without any self conscious and therefore being cogs in the deterministic machine of reality of not obtaining any freedom at all. In that way they're more active, they're less inhibited, but their freedom is an illusion. So I think everywhere you turn, freedom is foreclosed. And as you pointed out, I think the fundamental idea is that the realm of ultimate freedom is fantasy, which is, I think, what the underground is. It's. It's a fantasy world in which one actually does nothing but daydream.
He daydream, you know, he has all these fantasies about being the hero and riding in on a white horse and all that ridiculous stuff that he's gotten from himself from reading books. But on the other hand, he's going to explore the idea that writing and fantasy can be turned into something therapeutic. So in the last chapter of the first part he essentially says, well, let me try to tell this story. Maybe that'll be helpful. How does he put it? He's going to basically experiment with telling the truth. So he'll start out the chapter by saying chapter 11 in the first part, it's better to do nothing to stay in the conscious inertia of the underground.
But he says, no, actually I'm thirsting for something different. I don't believe what I just wrote. As you pointed out, he's always contradicting himself, saying he doesn't believe it. And then he has this part where he imagines the readers attacking him, which he does frequently. We're all brought into this story, he imagines us attacking him and then he says, well, why am I writing as if the readers are addressing me back? And then he'll say part of that, I mean, part of that is just because he's being pompous. But part of it is that he wants to remember things that he's too afraid to tell himself.
Which is to say he wants to use the fantasy of a reader as something like a therapist. Right. I can't tell this to myself, but maybe I can tell it to another person. He's going to experiment to see if he can tell the whole truth. Yes, true autobiography is impossible. And it may even be the case that he's going to exaggerate all the bad things that he did out of vanity. Right. So we can't even necessarily believe that he's being as terrible as he says he is in his story. But perhaps there will be relief in writing, especially for this one memory that haunts him.
So the interesting thing here, he's read a lot of novels. At the end of this he'll tell us a novel should really have a proper hero. But I'm a terrible person. I have all the makings of an anti hero. So why. It's just not such a fun story to read. But it's interesting that the writing a novel or novella is an exercise in going into a fantasy world. And he's several, you know, several times he's going to blame the world of books and ideas and man's, the advancement of culture to a certain point with putting kind of trapping people in a fantasy world.
But this novella in particular is experimenting with the idea that some sort of brutal self confession and honesty in which one comes across terribly and is an anti hero, that that somehow can be therapeutic for the writer even if it's not so fun for the reader. And so that, you know, that gives us another path towards freedom. There's love, but then there's also the potential for a therapeutic path. And the therapeutic path still goes inward in a sense. Right. It's still an exploration. It's not trying to make us less conscious, it's trying to make us more conscious.
Right. If we're doing actual therapy, maybe even making things that are unconscious, conscious. And the goal is a certain type of freedom to gain a certain type of freedom. And the freedom to be gained is typically love of some sort. The freedom to love that's being inhibited by one's hang ups. Now this therapy session of course doesn't work.
37:01 Erin: It ends tragically, I was going to say.
37:04 Wes: And then he tells us, you know, he tells us off and tells us, us we're all essentially in the same boat at the end. We'll have to go into that, into detail in the second part.
37:14 Erin: But yeah, yeah, this is interesting because it seems that from something you said before, it seems that he's motivated by self punishment in pretty much all of the actions that he takes. With the exception perhaps of writing this, though there is an element of that as well. The idea that he wants the reader to attack him or is anticipating the reader's attack. But I like this idea of the writing of the book as a, as a therapy session which maybe then escapes the continual pattern of looking for punishment from the world and then being satisfied when he receives it.
It seems that this as conceived as a therapy session is the one act which is, which could be redemptive rather than self punishing. And then at the end we find that he's been cut off by, by the Dostoevsky figure, you know, who, who also is sort of like, well, he goes on, but we don't need to read any more of this. The therapist walks away from the session before the time is up or something, or says, I have to drop you as a patient because you're too depressing. But yes, and also he's obviously learned nothing from his past mistakes, but his ability to sort of recognize in the present the mistakes of the past is, is, is also not, not allowed to him.
So, you know, but, but I'm interested in this idea that all that, all of his, his actions that his, he's expressing a desire at times to dominate people, to lord things over people, to be like the Cleopatra sticking pins in. But it seems that ultimately he wants to be both Cleopatra and the, the servant girls who get the pins stuck in them. Right? He, he, he has this extreme desire to punish himself. And I think ultimately, like he seems one of the reasons why this is so, so painful to read is because he obviously hates himself so much. Right?
He routinely puts himself in situations where he's going to be punished or humiliated and then use that as, as sort of ammunition against the world and in favor of his continual retreat from it.
39:28 Wes: Right.
39:28 Erin: But in this first part, you know, talking about being a man of his age, like, I think, I think the, the idea that he's a, he's a bureaucrat in a ministry in Petersburg and he talks repeatedly about how Petersburg has all of the necessary characteristics of a place that would produce a man like him. You know, thinking about why this is, you know, this is a place where these bureaucrats seem to routinely take Bribes. Right. So there's a. This is a denatured corrupt society. This is a government that's not functioning properly. I mean, that's not unusual.
But this seems to be particularly. A particularly bad instance of a sort of governmental charade. Right. And which outward appearance contradicts reality. There's a lot of empty show that takes the place of real action. So there's no real government activity going on. It seems a real legislation, no reform, what have you. Everything is about back scratching, paying people off and not really doing any work, just sitting in an office and receiving a salary for nothing. Right. And I'm wondering about that, connecting that, and I'm sorry to be throwing this to you when it's a half baked thought of mine.
Connecting a sort of charade society. So say Petersburg being the, you know, if we want to take Dostoevsky's word for it or the underground man's, the ultimate example of a society that's sort of all show and no substance. Connecting that to the magical thinking of the underground man in which the mechanism for his self punishment seems to be to imagine that everyone in the world is against him, that everyone hates him, and then getting, then inducing behavior in other people to reinforce that belief. Is this an outward extension of Petersburg or is this a.
Is what he's doing in an almost kind of perverse animation of the world a sort of like negative re. Enchantment of the world to try and get it so that everyone is against him? And is that almost like a. Like a, you know, the opposite of redemption? Do you know what I'm trying to say? Like. Like he's trying, he's trying to make things have meaning again even if the meaning is that everything has no meaning and everyone's against him. Do you know what I mean?
41:46 Wes: Yeah.
41:47 Erin: Or am I wrong to be connecting these things?
41:49 Wes: No, I think, I mean, that sounds right. I think. Well, he lives, obviously he lives in a society in which status is very important and it's manifested even in what people do when they're walking by each other on the sidewalk. Who's gonna move to the side?
42:05 Erin: Oh, this is the problem. This is the one thing.
42:08 Wes: Yes.
42:09 Erin: Oh my gosh. I was gonna say, like. No, no woman who, who reads this could not be moved by that particular instance. Right. Because I feel like this is particularly. I talk about this with women all the time, especially shorter. I'm. I'm on the shorter side. And for. I'm not telling you, I guess I'm telling the listeners, but I'm on the shorter Side. And oftentimes people don't even see me. And I feel very much like this. Really sorry to interrupt with everyone does it. I just. I feel like there are just people who walk around there like they own the sidewalk. And then there are people like me who get out of everyone's way and then feel really resentful. And then sometimes, no, I don't.
42:50 Wes: I don't get out of anybody.
42:51 Erin: Barge into people.
42:52 Wes: The underground man thing. But I'd stay on the right side of the sidewalk. See, I try to follow the rules.
42:56 Erin: I do too.
42:57 Wes: But if someone's gonna cross and then it's. It's a showdown. If someone wants to walk on the left side of the sidewalk, then it's a showdown.
43:05 Erin: I'll see. What happens is I'm always walking on the sidewalk and then there are always like three guys walking abreast, taking up the whole sidewalk, who then I have to move out of their way. And then sometimes I'll just like walk right at them in this game of chicken. Exactly what he's describing. And I've. I've actually had men like almost knock me to the ground and then be surpr. Surprised.
43:23 Wes: Yeah. No, I mean, it happens.
43:25 Erin: No such thing as chivalry anymore.
43:29 Wes: Yeah, I experience the same thing. And then I wonder if I'm crazy. Am I crazy? I don't know if you ever have that feeling. But is this actually happening? Or am I the one who's just being too inflexible here? Or are people just really, really unaware of what they're doing? But yeah, so there is that. So that I think is in the domain of politeness and considerateness of others. And it's hard not to be a bit paranoid. I think most people are probably just going about their lives and not being. They're not just not being especially careful and they're not paying much attention to others.
And that's really the way this all unfolds. But it's hard not to look at that and say, well, you're offending me. You're not respecting me. And for him, I think it's even more. It's more intense because it's a more stratified society in some ways, and lower ranked people are actually expected to step aside for the higher rank people, which really bothers him. And he himself was a good student and he had been set up with a promising job. But partly because he wanted to cut off all the people he had gone to school with, he turned down that job and took a job that wasn't as good.
Which one gets the sense that this is a big part of the problem. He doesn't feel successful, and his pride has been wounded, has been injured by that. And so he's obsessed, in a way, with his low status in society, and he can't get beyond that. So all the things that he does revolve around status and pride and, you know, wanting to get people to notice him, wanting to get in. Wanting to be the one who doesn't have to step aside and, and wanting to get in fights and challenge people to duels and, and. And whatever it is. He essentially feels humiliated, but humiliated by himself.
45:31 Erin: I mean, he's, he's done this to himself.
45:33 Wes: But I think I was trying to draw a connection to your point about this being at least his claim. Right. St. Petersburg is the perfect place for this type of story. Right. And I mean, really, you could just say civilization in general is the location of the story. And it's just a story about civilization and its discontents. And being discontent with it is because it is inherently humiliating in certain ways. We are put into competitive situations. We are in certain hierarchies. And it may not be as explicit as it is in St. Petersburg at this particular time, but we are all subject to it.
It's just that we don't end up necessarily scurrying underground as a. He can't face up to it. He has to retreat for various, you know, various reasons. But the conditions that create the impetus to retreat, I think they're a natural part of civilization as we experience it. And the type of thing that, by the way, wouldn't go away if we had communism, if we had perfect economic relations, these problems of status and pride and who's better at this or that, all of that stuff would still remain. So he's pointing to something important. So he in particular is an extreme case.
But I think we all, you know, one could argue that we are all to some extent prone to the maneuver that he's making, this retreating maneuver and especially the retreat into fantasy and sometimes into envy and despite. Into all these other pride and emotions that we're familiar with. So I guess he's an extreme case. It's a limiting case in a way. He doesn't do. He doesn't do a school shooting or something. But. So that's good. But.
47:27 Erin: Well, we haven't read the rest of it. We don't know how Dostoevsky came into possession of these documents.
47:34 Wes: All right, so in Part two, we will get more into the nitty gritty of the story in part two, the novella. And you can listen to that right away by becoming a subscriber. Or you can wait a week and listen to it then.
47:51 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Staking Claims in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) (Part 2)
Jul 08, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion John Huston’s 1948 classic, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Hey, welcome to Part two of our discussion of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. We talked for quite a while on gold and the contrast between gold and oil and the economic systems that the film seems to be setting up its anti capitalist bent. Perhaps we'll continue talking about that while we address some other elements of the film. But I wanted to start with the bar fight scene, really more than the work that Curtin and Dobbs do for McCormick and the Oil derrick. I'm interested in this revelatory early scene in which Dobbs and Curtin beat the crap out of.
Out of this guy who's exploited them and then take just the money that they are owed out of his wallet and throw the rest of the money down. Dobbs does and what this reveals about his character. I mean, this is an early moment we could point to and say that gold does have a corrupting influence over the course of the film. I think I'm advancing a thesis that Dobbs is not in fact corrupted, that he starts out corrupted and just sinks deeper and deeper into a system which has corrupted him. But I don't know if you have any thoughts about that and about his increased corruption over time.
1:45 Wes: I mean, Curtin, of course, is in the same position as Dobbs and is not corrupt. In fact, comes across as a bit of a Christ figure.
1:54 Erin: Yeah, I was gonna say he has a baby face.
1:56 Wes: Even gets raised from the dead.
1:57 Erin: Yeah.
1:58 Wes: And. Oh, and he has a baby face.
2:00 Erin: Yeah, he's a cutie. So he's not a baddie. Like, like Fred C. Dobbs. We know them by their faces. That's the biblical quote. No.
2:10 Wes: Anyway, yeah, we get these glimmers of hope for Dobbs and I think watching the film for the first time, you might expect that when you see him take only the money that he's owed, that's setting us up to see him redeemed ultimately, which is not what happens. So he just sinks deeper and deeper into his paranoia.
2:32 Erin: Yeah, I'm thinking too about the delight he takes in killing the bandits when they attack the train.
2:38 Wes: Yeah, I made a note of that myself. There's something childlike about it because he's like, I got three. I got three. See, Dad, I got three.
2:44 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:45 Wes: It's cowboys and Indians.
2:47 Erin: He's a mixed bag for sure. I don't know that I would call him an interesting character because he's so childlike in this way, but I do
2:54 Wes: think that he's very repellent, I think.
2:57 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And this, this moment when he, when he throws down the money, what's keeping him in line in this instance? I mean, they've, they've beaten this guy so badly now that they figure, okay, they, they'll just have to leave town anyway. Is it the consequences of the fact that if he just took all the money then he would just be thrown in jail? He knows that there's an immediate stick, you know.
3:17 Wes: No, I mean, I think it's supposed to be, I think it's supposed to be an ethical moment for him. So there is some grain of possible good in him. The investment doesn't pay off.
3:28 Erin: Yeah, well, you know, the incident, the incident with, with McCormick though is, I think it's part of the, the, it's deeply revealing of the, of the anti capitalist spirit of the film. Right. That you put in a hard day's work and you're still going to potentially be exploited. Like somehow putting in a hard day's work is as risky. I mean, I'm not, I'm overstating this, but in a sense it's as risky as buying a lottery ticket. So long as you are not. What would be the flip side? Like sharing in the, in the value of the goods and the. You know what I mean? Like, like it's. As long as you're working for somebody else or you're getting money or money is your value or you're working for something outside of yourself or a part of the system, you're.
4:09 Wes: You're being exploited by the system.
4:11 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. You know, so I guess gold is just, you know, then when they get to the mountain and they don't, you know, they put in the hard work and they still don't get the payoff. You know, gold is just, it's sort of like at the top of the hierarchy of exploitation. Like gold is the ultimate exploiter. Yeah. So maybe gold itself is like the symbol, the symbol of capitalism, which dobbs like I said, I see him as sort of like going deeper and deeper or maybe to a higher and higher floor of the. Of the capitalist pyramid. And that's what sort of changes his character, if you will, or causes him to sink deeper or whatever the metaphor is, into this degraded state, but not necessarily because of anything inherent in him.
Though I do take your point that he's flawed from the beginning and more flawed than Curtin, though we do see this glimmer of goodness in him. But of course, we also are set up for the expectation that he's going to have a fall. When in the flop house, he says, not me, I wouldn't, you know, I would take, you know, just a good payout and then leave. I'd be able to walk away from the roulette table. Right. The vagaries of his nature. I think it's a. It's pretty realistic that he would think really highly of himself, maybe especially because he's just.
Is that before or after he throws down the rest of the money? It's got to be before, you know, but maybe he's. Maybe he's thinking, you know, I'm a good guy, I'm, you know, and the taking only what he's owed and throwing the rest down on McCormick, even though it's a little bit, you know, it's not like he's being benevolent or something, throwing the money on this guy that he's just beaten up. But maybe it's part of this idea of his self concept which then corrupts over the course of the film.
5:50 Wes: Yeah, I mean, obviously he comes to the story with a certain character and he's pretty rash, inflated in a way. He's got all these bad qualities, but he has some glimmers of hope. So the whole scene with the bar fight represents that very well because he can be very violent and so can Curtin, but he can also do the right thing. He's not completely immune to the lure of doing the right thing, but he doesn't have enough of that in him ultimately. And in particular, he's not himself a very charitable person, it turns out. So Cody, in a way, right, is in the position of the beggar when coming to camp and then being rejected by Dobbs in particular.
And Dobbs convinces the other two that they have to kill Cody. And also further, the whole idea of giving Cody's widow 25% of their money. Right. That seems absurd to him. Or when Howard is going to go off to perform an act of altruism for the Indians to save a Little boy. Dobbs thinks that's ridiculous as well. So at every point in the film where the possibility of charity or altruism comes up, Dobbs is very contemptuous of it.
7:02 Erin: Yeah, I mean, the most shocking moment is when he goes after the little boy who wants to sell him the lottery ticket. Though it could be argued that he knows that that little boy is going to grow up to murder his wife. But anyway, juries decided on that one. But no, the incident with Cody. I mean, let's go to him. I think I was. I think it was the Roger Ebert review of the film that calls him like a likable character or soft spoken or moral character or something like that. I find him so annoying. It's like, get off our mountain. Yeah, yeah, I do too.
But he's a fascinating figure because of what the slower moment, one of the slower moments of the movie reveals about him in the letter that we see from his wife. He's living the fantasy that Curtin wants in which Curtin controls the means of production, that is the fruit trees. And so Cody has a fruit orchard and a wife and child and what seems like a pretty idyllic pastoral existence outside of Dallas.
8:04 Wes: And Howard, at the very end of the movie, basically sends Cody off to bring some money and the wallet back to Cody's widow. There's a nod and wink to the effect that also she's single now and there's the orchards. So maybe you two will get together. It's not said explicitly, but it's obviously there. So Curtin potentially end up taking the place of Cody. Right.
8:29 Erin: Because Cody's been greedy himself. He's been going down to try and strike it rich in Mexico, even though it seems he has a perfectly happy situation up in Texas. You know, Curtin is filling Cody's shoes maybe, you know, better than Cody could. Because we know that Curtin has this fantasy which seems actually very beautiful. I mean, there's some typical kind of misogyny in it. But, you know, there's a. Most of what he describes is pretty beautiful. A lot of the fantasy is about wanting to be waited on hand and foot by women. That seems to be the, you know,
8:59 Wes: pervading theme for all that's in Curtin as well, I think.
9:04 Erin: So doesn't he mention something about the women and the fruit trees and the. I think there's a little too close of a connection there, but I'd have to go back and look. But anyway. Yeah, yeah. So Cody, I don't think is a great guy. He's willing to take a gamble Himself, I mean, right. He's willing continually to go down to Mexico, but he's also willing to throw his fate into the hands of these three men, lay out his options and potentially take, you know, he has a 33 and a third chance of being murdered. And he even tells them how to do it in such a way that'll relieve their consciences.
9:43 Wes: So.
9:46 Erin: Right, right. And then only because the bandits come does he get. Well, he dies anyway, but. Spoiler alert. But, yeah. Why is he there? The movie is, you know, it's a long movie. Why is he there? Why is this guy with a sort of prototypical American Western name, why does he show up? And, you know, it's just another illustration, I suppose, of what happens. You know, there would have to be somebody that would try to get in on it, that would figure out what they're doing. And he's just another sort of vignette in the illustration of the character of Dobbs thematically, too.
10:22 Wes: Yeah, he's in a position of beggar. And so we can see Dobbs turning away a beggar. It's similar to what happens on the waterfront front with, you know, I'm a bum, but I'm going to turn away the bum in the park.
10:37 Erin: Yeah, that's right. Wow.
10:39 Wes: Yeah. So it tells us quite a bit about Dobbs. And then one of the other interesting things about Cody is he's on a lot about, hey, these federales are so efficient at dealing with crime. They're judge, jury and executioner. Just immediately take the bandits out and shoot them. And Cody seems very fond of that idea. And of course, the federales are efficient. They do end up saving them, except for Cody, from the bandits chasing the bandits off. So there's something. Right. I think we have to bring the federales into it as well. And they, of course, are the representatives of law and order, which is part of the fantasy of exploitation, of course, is being outside of that.
There's something perverse about that. Well, perversion would mean kind of being at the edge of the law. So in the gray area. And that's where they are with the mining claim. Right. They don't want to stake a claim because then more people are going to come. And so. And then also staking a claim is a matter of who gets there first. And so it's a weird, weird legal area. They're on the frontier again between civilization and wilderness and between lawlessness and law. So Cody, in a way, heralds the introduction of a legal principle into the film.
But the principles of altruism and. And the League, you know, legal stuff. Or the federal.
12:02 Erin: I really like that.
12:03 Wes: Yeah.
12:04 Erin: Yeah, I really like that. Because it's, you know, it is this sort of American story, displaced in Mexico. But Cody comes in and he's like the, you know, the embodiment of, say, a town like Deadwood itself, where, you know, you have this kind of mix between. Have you seen the show? Do you. You know that. A little bit, yeah. Like. Like this sort of like. Yeah. Extreme justice on the one hand and the extreme lawlessness on the other, which is united in these mining towns in. On the frontier where, you know, they. They don't have time to wait for, you know, for someone to send out a jury duty summons or something like that. You know, you're just. They just took care of it.
12:43 Wes: Yeah. There's that great scene near the end where the Bandit is getting executed. Then he's like, hold on, can I get my sombrero? Put that on before you shoot him. Do you remember that? Yeah.
12:52 Erin: Gold hat. Yeah.
12:54 Wes: One of the few elements of comic relief, I think, in the film. Or am I right about that? There's not that much comic relief, is there, in the film?
13:02 Erin: Yeah, there's some. I mean, you know, Walter Huston, Howard, he can be, I think, pretty funny.
13:09 Wes: Yeah. That's why I paused there for a second, so I had to think about it.
13:12 Erin: Yeah, I know.
13:13 Wes: Because the manic elements in the film do involve a bit of humor.
13:17 Erin: Yeah.
13:18 Wes: And Howard himself is such a great character because he's so glib and talkative. I don't know how you talk that fast. But that, in and of itself, is a talent just to keep going like that and to make it look. I mean, if that's all scripted and he can just do that so smoothly, that's quite something.
13:34 Erin: That's such a great performance. We should talk about Curtain's death. Death scene when he's then raised from the dead. Is that something. Should we go to the Gila monster first?
13:44 Wes: Yeah. Is that how you pronounce it? Are they saying Gila monster or Gila?
13:49 Erin: I think they're saying Gila monster, but that's how I would say it. But they're saying gia, like turning.
13:56 Wes: Let's just call it the lizard. The poisonous lizard.
14:00 Erin: Yeah. So, yeah, it's usually two Ls that become a Y.
14:05 Wes: This is a scene which is supposed to illustrate the amping up, the gradual amping up of the paranoia that is afflicting Dobbs. More significantly. Yeah.
14:14 Erin: I like the very clear illustration of where his paranoia goes, which is actually entirely coiled in around itself, right? Because he presents a scenario under which he is being exploited. Someone refutes that scenario and says, you know, why would I do that? Or they say, fine, then I'll do it this way. And then he sees that as, you know, the flip side is also the exploitation, right? So whether he stays and doesn't go into town, that's exploitative. If he then goes into town, then that's also exploitative. Like there is no. There's no safe place.
And I think that the. The lizard maybe is. I mean, it's a. It's an obvious visual symbol that this lizard is coiled among the. The bags of gold. Right. But it also, I think, is a symbol of the sort of the lizards and Dobbs's mind, the poison that is lurking wherever he tries to turn. Like it's the, you know, it's the corruption of his thoughts that everything is poisoned. Everybody is a lizard. No one can be trusted. Even if they've just saved your life, you can't trust them to not kill you in the next breath, you know.
15:26 Wes: And it's guarding the gold like a little dragon in the end, right? So when the rock is lifted up, there's a dragon on the gold and. And then curtain shoots it, right? So there's something inherently poisonous about the gold and poisons. What it poisons really is the mind, as Howard puts it. I know what gold does to men's souls and I think it poisons men's souls because it instills this or it animates this fantasy, not just of getting rich, but again, it's the something for nothing fantasy or it's the thing that you can use to adorn women, connection to Mother Earth, all of that stuff. But sorry, I think I got us off track. You were bringing up this event, the
16:08 Erin: murder of Curtin, the attempted murder, what happens in that scene? So they're separated from Howard. We get this kind of like the Orchard fantasy. We get this alternative society, this alternative anti capitalist society in which, oddly enough, what must be paid is what must be repaid. Like, you know, there's this reciprocity principle at the heart of the system. And so they're forced. They force Howard to receive their generosity. He has to go back and, you know, be the. Be the beneficiary of their altruism in response to his altruism or something. And.
16:47 Wes: Yeah, so this is what the Indians are doing in the film. They're kind of the representatives of communism, or at least community.
16:53 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
16:55 Wes: Howard is taken Away to be part of a community. And then you have Dobbs and Curtin who can't survive without him.
17:01 Erin: Yes. And who are left to handle his burros. Which Dobbs says that, oh he's, we've been stuck with the burros. It's always Howard's burros that are going off the track and that have to be reeled like, like the, you know, and actually I wonder, does this make sense? Because they're maybe they've become attached to Howard and they're, they're confused so they have to constantly, you know, like maybe it's not just a fantasy, but he's reading it as like, he's reading it as like the evil legacy that Howard has left them with. Like haha, my burros are gonna, you know, they're gonna screw you over.
And so it's like the exact mirror image of what the Indian society is doing which is like, you know, you've done this for us and now we must repay you lavishly because we're so grateful to you versus like, you know, something happening in among Dobbs and Curtin. Like everything is a punishment. Everything is like I'm being repaid with more punishment.
17:56 Wes: This is a really interesting point because one of the moments of what I would call mania in the film is the point where Howard is being dragged off by the Indians. So I think this is the second point in the film where Dobbs uses the word dames. So he says, yeah, and look out for those Indian dames. They tell me they're pretty smart. One of them squaws might marry you. And then Howard says maybe I'll do just that. Pick me out a good looking squaw and marry her. They're easy to dress and feed and entertain. They don't nag at you either. Anyway, so I, I guess Dob seems very excited by this idea of Howard leaving and enjoying himself with the Indians.
Although later on he's going to resent that. He's going to. Well he's off basically at the spa getting his spa treatment while we here doing all his work for him. That's the way he will later on represent it. So what's the fantasy and the, you know, so what's the manic fantasy that later on gets repaid with poison or the manic fantasy? I think it has something to do with not having to depend on Howard anymore, which they don't really know consciously that they can't. I mean it's pretty clear on the way there that they're exhausted and they can't.
There's Not a lot that they can do without Howard. They really do depend on him. And then they find that out in a. In a big way after he's taken off by the. He's taken by the Indians. But it seems to me that Dobbs thinks that Howard leaving. You know, maybe part of it is this unconscious idea. Okay, well now his gold is ours. But I think another part of it is just the idea of. Well, he resents being ordered around by Howard. He resents not having to depend on. I mean he resents having to depend on Howard. So I think this is also the part of the fantasy of the gold and something for nothing and striking it rich is just not having.
Being completely self sufficient and not having to depend on anyone. That's why Dobbs is excited. And then he quickly finds out that they did, you know, depend on Howard and that they're going to have a hard time without him. And that's when the paranoia really amps up to the point where he's willing to try to murder curtain. I don't know. Does that make sense?
20:15 Erin: Yes, it does.
20:17 Wes: So Curtin himself says this is our first day without his help. Referring to Howard. Once we get a handle on it, it'll be easy. And then very quick. Dobbs is laughing maniacally at this point and. And he has a new fantasy here of keeping all of Howard's good. He thought he was going to let us do all the sweating for him. We'll show him. And then that quickly escalates because Curtin says I'm not going to let you touch Howard's stuff, his goods, his gold and then Dobbs get off your soapbox. I was right about my suspicions. I can see through all that. There's something when Curtin's innocence and his moralism just make how Dobbs paranoia worse because he is too cynical to. Right. He says all your Sunday school talk about protecting people's goods. He's too. From his cynical standpoint, talk of conscience and morality and all the rest of it just induces more suspicion.
21:16 Erin: Yeah, I like that. I think too, you know, Curtin is. Can we argue that Curtin improves over the course of the film? Like they have sort of reverse trajectories. The exception to this I think would be when Cody comes in and they vote on whether or not to kill him. And Curtin is actually the deciding vote for the firing squad. But there's something about. What can I connect it to? Sluicing. You know, there's something about the pressure of Dobbs's evil that Seems to make Curtin better, to purify him.
21:47 Wes: Interesting.
21:48 Erin: It's an argument for gold, for going to find gold if you could find someone worse than you to go get it with.
21:54 Wes: I thought you were saying it's an argument for hanging out with evil people, because
21:59 Erin: that's part of it, too. Yeah, I know. It's a strange. It's a strange thing. It flies in the face of pretty much every other experience or illustration of this. I'm thinking too, about. I want to connect this back, and I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it to Dobbs's optimism at the beginning of the film. Not just about his own morality, but about the fact that he kind of. He doesn't know how statistics work. In a way. I think he says something like, oh, the more money we have to. When we go out to find the gold, the more money we have to start out with, the longer we'll be able to stay out in the elements.
You know, the more provisions we'll have to stay longer to then have a better chance of striking it rich. In other words, that it's only a matter of time and they just have to last long enough. I feel there's an inherent connection here, and I'm not going to be able to make it, between his sort of optimism about time and then his, you know, this idea of not being able to get away from the roulette table, being sucked in. I mean, Curtin is the one who suggests right before the confrontation that leads to Curtin getting shot, that, okay, why don't we just split up now and then we won't have to worry about this.
And somehow Dobbs still has. Dobbs doesn't want to do that. It's like he still has an optimism, even just about the fraternity between them in a way that is fatal. If they had split up.
23:29 Wes: Well, Dobbs, I think, is paranoid about Curtin setting ambush for him on the path or following him.
23:35 Erin: Yes, yes. But he. Yeah, so it. But it's one of those things where he's, you know, the yes is the wrong answer and the no is the wrong answer. Right. Because he also makes an argument for splitting up. That seems like a pretty good argument. And Curtin's suggestion that they do that would have at least saved Curtin from being shot. I don't think it would have saved Dobbs, seeing as he doesn't last very long by himself, but he would have had half the Burrows to contend with, so maybe he would have been more fleet of foot and gotten away from the Bandits.
24:01 Wes: Right.
24:01 Erin: But it's a strange thing because it's not necessarily connected to greed so much as it is connected to optimism. For me, it seems to be. Be the case.
24:14 Wes: Optimism in the sense that. About what?
24:17 Erin: That like a risk is going to keep paying off. So long as you make the risk, all you have to do is wait it out and it'll. It'll pay off. Yeah. And even when that's disconnected from gold or like actively like feeding a slot machine, you know, even when it's just like staying together with Cody, I mean that does quickly get twisted. But like there's. I mean he meets, as you point out, he meets the situation with Howard at first with optimism that Howard is going to. That it'll be fine, that they'll take the burros. Like he keeps taking on more because he's optimistic about what his own capacity.
Even though they're useless without Howard, he's optimistic about his chances of getting out. You know what I mean? Like he just has. I don't know what it is. It's not necessarily greed, it's a separate thing. But it's related perhaps more to self regard. Maybe it just goes back to your point about mania and the idea that like he is self sufficient. Maybe the, the fact that he has
25:13 Wes: money depend on anyone or Howard and
25:15 Erin: Yeah, yeah, and the money at once makes him paranoid, but it also gives. But it's like it's a double edged sword. Right. Because it's also. Well, now I have money, so now I'm sort of impervious. Even though I'm driving myself insane with my paranoia. I'm interested in that kind of mindset because I think that the optimism is what. That's the key ingredient that makes the person go out and try to find the gold in the first place. Not so much the greed as the optimism about one's chances, which is maybe tied back to the mania point you made in the previous episode.
25:49 Wes: Yeah, the willingness to take a risk and to believe. I mean I think your word optimism captures this belief that maybe fate will smile on you and you know that you'll have the winning lottery number or something like that. And that's the way you want things to happen. You want things to happen because fate or chance is smiling on you. Not for any other reason that ties you to work or to society. All these things that hamper you, hamper your freedom. It should happen outside of that. So complete independence of all the things that bind us in the world, human relationships and the rest of it. Fate, if it smiles on Us can save us from that.
26:31 Erin: It's kind of how they get. Sorry to keep going back to this. I'm kind of fascinated by the McCormick incident, but it's kind of how they get involved with McCormick in the first place, right? They're told by the guys in the bar that McCormick is notorious for skipping out on payments. They only learn this after the fact, right when he's made the appointment to meet them in the bar with the money. That he says something like only foreigners and half baked Americans fall for his schemes or something like that. You know, the fact that they just agree to like get carted up, I mean they're literally, it's like they're like sheep getting onto this barge or cattle being, being corralled.
And at one point when they're kind of grousing, rightfully so, over the fact that they've been working 16 hours a day or something like that and haven't seen, you know, Dobbs says, I haven't seen a buck out of you yet or something like that. McCormick says, don't worry, we'll, I'll pay you. And he says, anyway, what can you do with money out here except gamble and lose it is what he says, you know, so the very fact that they put in with McCormick or that they like trust him implicitly gets them into this situation. McCormick being an exploiter and someone sort of above them who maybe doesn't have their optimism is like, well, why, what do you want with money anyway?
Because you'll just gamble and lose it. Which is exactly what they will do. But they think they won't and it's actually exactly what they do do, right? Yeah. And so, so it's like if you're in a position of authority, then you have this disdainful but absolutely correct view of the shortsightedness of the people that are just trying to like, you know, like taking multiple strides to keep up with your big ones because you're in a position of power. You know, these are the scramblers, the scrappy people that will in fact be overly optimistic and lose it all.
Whereas McCormick is like somehow smarter because he's, he's better able to exploit people and thereby has like gone up the totem pole enough that he has a slightly wider view and can see exactly what, exactly what the little guys are going to do with their money, you know, But I guess, I mean, the question is if he's right about Dobbs, the question is if he's right about Curtin and the Sorry, I'm getting us off track because I wanted to get to this scene where he does try to bump Curtin off and the fact that Curtin actually he's not only wrong about Curtin's character, but man, if there's somebody in the, in the film who's lucky or there's some mechanism that comes out, the deus ex machina that comes out and saves Curtin, it's the Indian.
28:50 Wes: It's the fact that Dobbs is a. Well, yeah, good point.
28:54 Erin: Yeah.
28:54 Wes: Indians ex machina.
28:56 Erin: Yeah, Indians X something and they take him to El Dorado there where they hang out.
29:03 Wes: Yeah, right.
29:05 Erin: No, but you were going to say Dobbs.
29:06 Wes: Dobbs is kind of a loser. So of course he can't just kill him. He's an inherently self destructive person. So he's always sowing the seeds of his own self destruction. So botching the murder is just part and parcel of that. And I think he thinks to himself, well, maybe I need to go out and do one more shot to make sure he's dead. But he doesn't end up doing that. And then in the morning thinking, well, I should go out and check to see if he. He's there. And then initially leaving, Right. Leaving things to fate, leaving things to chance because that's how he likes to do it. He wants everything to be up to fate and chance and not his own effort. But then saying, oh, okay, well, right. He ends up going back and checking.
29:48 Erin: Yep.
29:49 Wes: And then convincing himself that maybe a tiger carried him on. What the hell? What tigers? Are there tigers in Mexico? I don't.
29:57 Erin: Yeah, that's the big game that they're hunting, right? Or lions. I'm like, what, what universe is this?
30:04 Wes: Yeah, I guess Dobbs just doesn't know there aren't tigers in Mexico. But yeah, mountain lion or whatever. But there's something, I find it believable that he would mess up the murder in just the way that he did and create another avenue for his own destruction. But of course, ultimately it's the bandits who will end up doing him in.
30:26 Erin: I like this idea that he's both sowing the seeds for his own destruction and at the same time convincing himself that he is being lucky. Like I think part of the paranoia seems to be connected almost to like the Wallace Shawn character in the Princess Bride who is, you know, like he thinks he's anticipating the poison being in the other cup. So it's luck, but it's also this belief that he's smarter which is like fatal. Right. So, oh, oh, you're going to take advantage of me in this way. And they say, okay, Then we'll do it this way. Oh, no. Then you're going to take advantage of me. Me. That way the poison's gonna be in there. And really, he's not smart enough to, you know, to realize he's doing a
31:05 Wes: galaxy brain thing, as they call it.
31:06 Erin: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And then. And in the same way, he's reading the disappearance of Curtin's body as like he's thought himself into what he thinks is a smart and lucky outcome or read of the scene, which is, oh, a tiger has come and taken his body away. And isn't that perfect for me? Because now there won't even be any bones left to betray me.
31:33 Wes: Right.
31:33 Erin: Which is like Saint.
31:34 Wes: The wizard of Oz, buddy,
31:38 Erin: but it's connected, you know, it's at the nexus of both his belief in his own luck and his belief in his own cleverness. Like, somehow, if he comes up with a good enough story, then he'll think his way into luck. It'll be true.
31:51 Wes: Yeah. At the point where he says a tiger must have dragged him off, that's another point where he starts laughing maniacally and he says, done as if by order.
32:01 Erin: Yes. Yeah, yeah.
32:02 Wes: This is our opportunity to bring up omnipotence of thought again. And the idea that just by thinking it, he made it happen. But I don't know why is Tiger meant to reveal the fact that he's ignorant or deluded or something? I don't know why the word. You know, in the script he's using the word tiger. It's really interesting.
32:25 Erin: A tiger is like, to me, it's almost a creature of fantasy. Right. It shouldn't exist somehow, even in the places where it does exist. Right.
32:34 Wes: Yeah. Right.
32:35 Erin: Yeah. I mean, we could really play this out and think, okay, like, it wears bars. It's. It's almost a manifestation of his guilt that's come to take curtain away. It's also sort of.
32:46 Wes: It's not bright.
32:48 Erin: It's exactly. I know, that's what I was thinking. No, but it's also like symmetry. Symmetry. It's not as classical. What do you want? A lion is classical, you know?
33:04 Wes: Yeah.
33:04 Erin: A tiger has designs on you. It's. A tiger is shady. It's. It's stripes market as something that's morally dubious or. Right. Like purely symbolically. I think it's a fascinating place that his mind went.
33:19 Wes: So I think before we reach the end, we should talk about what the bandits are doing. In a way, I think the lead bandit is the best actor in the movie. And it's the best role in a way. And I mean, how would I rank the roles? I mean, I think after that maybe it's Howard, although there's another character that I was thinking of. But in any case. Yeah. So what are the bandits for? I mean, plot wise, of course, they play an important, important role. But thematically I think, I guess perhaps it's about. Bandits represent lawlessness, federales represent the law.
And then the miners. Dobbs and Howard and Curtin are somewhere in between that it's unclear whether they're merely exploiters like the bandits, pure exploitation or whether they are in some sense on the side of the law or productive members of society. Right. What are they? Are they gamblers or are they investors? Maybe that's the way to put it. Are they bandits or are they something closer to civilization? So in the end, the bandits, of course, end up being their undoing. For Dobbs, they're an end to his life. And then for the others, they don't recognize the value of the gold and spill it all over the ground because it looks like sand.
And then there's that pathetic moment. I think when I. I was looking at was. I think I finished up the film last night and one of the bandits is lifting up Dobbs's trousers to look at his boots. And I didn't get it at first. I'm like, why is he lifting his trousers like that? I don't know why I was so slow on the uptake. I think when I originally saw the film years ago, I don't think I was that slow on the uptake about that. But I didn't get that what he was after was the boots until after Dobbs is dead and the two bandits are fighting over the boots.
And one has one boot and one has the other boot. Which in a way is a good illustration of how pathetic the life of exploitation is. Because it can't recognize what's valuable. It's impaired in that recognition and it always ends up being right. So the bandits can't recognize that the gold has the value that it has. And they're caught worrying about bare necessities. They're always engaged in kind of trying to remediate their own down and out ness. Right. That's one thing that they have in common with Dobbs. They're always on the edge of not having anything.
So this is not like cartel bandits. This is just like people who are poor and they. Even in the. You know, when they first. When you first encounter the bandits, they're just looking for guns. So they're not very well organized, they're not doing very well. And you know, you could think of them as a variation on the idea of the beggar. Instead of just asking for money, they're there to take it. And they start out by asking.
36:07 Erin: That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this connection to how poverty keeps you in a state of having no foresight because all you're doing is trying to alleviate immediate physical demands, needs, you know, whatever. And so you can't, you don't have the luxury of thinking ahead. And in a way, you know, the bandits with the boots, it really explains like why, you know, first thought gambling, you know, for the hard luck. Americans in Tampico, they sort of aren't thinking ahead. They can't think past the get rich quick scheme because quick is the only speed that they can function at.
Right, right. So the. So the bandits are kind of that. That same way. But I really like this dichotomy you're drawing between gambling and investing. And I'm thinking about this actually in connection to language. One of the things I'd forgotten was how much Spanish is in the film and how it's not given any subtitles. How much I admire that choice that Huston made, how much dignity it gives to the Spanish speakers, to the. How much it takes away from the audience not being in a position of supremacy in that moment and realizing how like we are put in if we don't know Spanish, we're put in the position of Dobbs.
So we're people who are thrust into a country where we're looking for handouts, we're looking to exploit something, and yet we haven't even bothered to make the investment into the language. Right. Dobbs doesn't bother to speak it, Curtin doesn't speak it, but the head bandit speaks English and I'm interested in that. Like the language as currency.
37:41 Wes: Yeah. I was wondering, I'm like, am I. Are there supposed to be subtitles? Because I bought it through Apple tv and then I found that my Spanish was good enough to understand most of what was said, just mainly because they were speaking slowly enough and simply enough, which I think is by design, so that if you just have a bit of Spanish, then you could probably get by. Which is interesting. Yeah, I think it's interesting to put listeners either in the position of, well, you're figuring things out by context or by the sign language and events that are accompanying language, or if you have probably a bit of Spanish, which a lot of Americans are probably in that position, then you're just getting by a bit.
So you have that position of being in a foreign land or foreign place, but you can get by or you can communicate just enough. So I don't know what that says about the film except that Dobbs and Curtin and Cody, they're all, in a way, I suppose they're illegal immigrants. I don't think they have a gold mining visa. Right. They're not there on a student visa and then just trying to make an extra buck. So I think they've probably overstayed their tourist visa.
38:56 Erin: And I like how they started out. You know, I can see a version of this where he's a bum because he started out as a grad student at, you know, University of Mexico. Now he's. It's like, ah, Visions of Erin's future. Okay, yes.
39:11 Wes: I was there to study English Literature.
39:14 Erin: First mistake.
39:14 Wes: Which is why studying English Spanish.
39:16 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
39:18 Wes: Even though I was in Mexico, that's. Everyone there just speaks English all the time. So, yeah, that's how I became a bum. But this is a doctor, you know. But, you know, part of that's part of what's interesting about the film is this idea of spare fellow American or stake a fellow American to a meal. Because there's that camaraderie or it's almost like a familial relation. And we all feel it when we go abroad, right. You see an American if you're traveling alone, or at least when I was younger, that's the way it was. You know, if you're traveling alone and you run into Americans and it's immediate camaraderie and oh, look, we speak the same language.
There doesn't seem to be much of that in the film. Right. So Cody curtain running into Cody Curtin is just irritated now. He's got this guy who's gonna try to come to the camp. There's nothing about their fellow American ness that comes up. Or when Dobbs is begging, you know, he knows it's, hey, there's a fellow American. But it doesn't create the basis for any sort of social relationship. It's purely just about getting money out of.
40:26 Erin: Well, Cody does that. He uses the same tactic though, right? He's, oh, I've just. I've been dying to just see a fellow American, you know, I haven't seen an American in these parts. Right. Yeah. So in a way he's doing the same thing as would you stake a fellow American to a meal? It's like just, would you stake a fellow American to a gold mine?
40:45 Wes: Yeah, like that.
40:46 Erin: Yeah, that's. That's the more American question, frankly. But. Yeah, the.
40:51 Wes: You gotta do that in the Humphrey Bogart voice.
40:54 Erin: What'd you say? A fellow American. Yeah, I can't. I can't. I don't. I don't have a deep enough voice or a paralyzed lip. But have you seen the Bugs Bunny parody of this, by the way? I'll send it to you as soon as we're done.
41:06 Wes: Yeah, send it to me.
41:07 Erin: Yeah. Howard's ability to speak the language and to be the translator and to be the. You know, that's what sets him up as, like, he then gets to be taken into the arms of the. You know, what? We can consider the idealized system, the system that's placed at the top of the hierarchy that the film sets up. The Indian society.
41:27 Wes: Yeah. It's communitarian, at the very least.
41:28 Erin: Able to be absorbed, but. Right. And he. And he's able to be absorbed into that system, even though he's a. You know, he's acknowledging that he's kind of exploiting it, too. Right. Like, he's going to be the. What is the word he uses? Not witch doctor, but the medicine man or something, you know?
41:44 Wes: Yeah.
41:45 Erin: And he says, like, oh, it's all just fake.
41:48 Wes: Howard says, yeah, I'm going to be a medicine man, and I'll be worshiped like a high priest for telling people things they want to hear.
41:55 Erin: Yeah.
41:56 Wes: Now, and he saved the boy, but that was just Boy Scout tricks. So he's minimizing and, you know, he's behaved in a genuinely altruistic way, but he's minimizing that quality in himself and acts like he's going to be in the position of an exploiter when that's not really the role that he's playing, at least not fully. Yeah.
42:15 Erin: I'm thinking about telling people what they want to hear. That's a. Like, what is that? The flip side of gambling? Getting people to think they're gambling. Yeah. That's a good.
42:25 Wes: You're gonna be a capitalist. You need to learn what.
42:28 Erin: Yeah, but. No, but. But. But it's sanctioned by the film, so it's not right, because. So it can't be capitalist, because I truly believe that this film is shutting out anything that's kind of. I mean, maybe. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe it's, you know, maybe it's more complicated or it's more.
42:42 Wes: Well, yeah, but. But Howard is casting it as marketing and as exploitation when it's not.
42:47 Erin: Right, Right.
42:48 Wes: But he has to think of it that way. And maybe in order to think he's in the driver's seat when, of course, it's the Indians who have hauled him off. And yes, he's going to stay in that society, but society is what binds us. And yeah, so that's part of the significance of them being in Mexico. Right. Winning freedom. They want to be outside of not just the law, but normal, typical social ties. And you can do that in a. Much, much more easily in a foreign place, which is why running into another American is potentially irritating in that context.
But what Curtin and Howard both realize, right, they realize that society and social bonds are more important in the end than gold and the freedom that it gives us. So. And the irony, of course, is that they realize that they're helped to realize that by the bandits. It's because the bandits don't know the value of the gold that Curtin and Howard can learn that the gold doesn't have any value. It's because the bandits don't know the gold has value that Curtin and Howard find out it doesn't have value, at least not in this ultimate sense that the fantasy deludes one into thinking that it has.
So it's not mommy, it's not breast. It's not the thing that's going to make you free of the world and all its social demands and the demands of work.
44:07 Erin: Well, I really like this because that means that perfectly sets up, I think, the sociability on a. The opposite trajectory of gambling. Like, it puts them actually at opposite ends of some of this, you know, equation that we're kind of setting up here or that you're.
44:24 Wes: Yeah. Instead of entrusting yourself to fate, you entrust yourself to other people.
44:28 Erin: Right. And, and, and being part of the social fabric to a certain extent means. Right. Like telling people what they want to hear. Gambling is the opposite of that. Gambling means you're always being told no, no, no. Right. Telling people what they want to hear is. Is being told, we have a winner, we have a winner, you know, over and over and over again. Right. You're massaging people's egos. You're. You're not putting them in a situation where they're like, gambling makes them into people who are constantly being disappointed. Right. You're really just a loser all the time if you're a gambler.
Right, right. And telling people what they want to hear is making someone feel like a winner. That, you know, gambling isn't interested in that and exploitation isn't interested in making someone, the exploited person, feel good about Themselves. Maybe if you're a really skilled exploiter, then then that does something for you. But then that kind of means you're in a social relationship with them. And it's not quite, you know, it's. It's a little bit different. You're not just exploiting, you're sort of massaging somebody's ego. And that kind of implies a sort of better bargain than exploitation.
But, yeah, I think it's interesting that Howard's being able to speak Spanish and being able to be absorbed into the system by telling people what they want to hear, which is something that's sort of, you know, now that I say it again, it's based in language, right? It's. It's based in the sort of linguistic element of sociability and being part of a group versus the bandits learn English so that they can better exploit the Americans that are there and take, you know, obviously it's behooved them to learn to learn English. So they are. They're learning English as a kind of antisocial behavior to try and better, to better threaten, to better exploit, to better get what they want out of people.
So one is directed towards communication in the form of giving other people what they want, and the other is expressing communication in the form of taking something from other people.
46:12 Wes: I think this is important because this is why people who are paranoid or people who view the world as exploitative, essentially exploitative, people who are that cynical have trouble because there's a grain of truth in it. So that. Right. So what does it mean to tell people what they want to hear? That could be completely manipulative and exploitative, or it could just be part of daily social relations. Of course we do that. There's a lot of white lies, or there's a lot of lies by emission as a matter of social lubricant. In order to get along with people, we can't just be open about all the negative or aggressive feelings that we're having.
So the civilization is built on the repression or suppression of unsavory thoughts and feelings, at least on the suppression of their expression. And so there's an inherent dishonesty in the social. And part of growing up and maturing means accepting that fact. And if you can't accept that, then it's just black and white. There's either everything that. All of that is just exploitation. So I must get outside of the system. Same thing on the waterfront. And every social relation, every work demand that's just being exploited by the system. And the only way to Transcend, that is to become an exploiter, which is to say to become an infant.
To regress completely and reject the whole concept of maturity and seek out. Just want to get the gold out of the mountain.
47:40 Erin: You're reminding me, too, that the social system, which involves a lot of this lubricant, these kinds of small lies and stuff like that, it's also, it's also the very system that protects us, right? We're not just being like. There's a reciprocity about that where we're not just being, say, exploited in small ways, we're also being helped in small ways. Or we're being. I'm reminded of the moment when, right, when Dobbs first suggests that they start dividing up the gold, when they start to make quite a bit of loot or produce a bit of gold. Dobbs is starting to get a little bit into.
This is the first blush, I think, of his paranoia. And he says the thing about going into town and provisions and who's gonna be taken advantage of in that scenario. And Howard says something like, well, he's old and slow, so he can't run away from the. Even though that's not true, right? We know it's not true, but it's this idea that trustworthiness means simply lacking the opportunity to betray someone. And what the social order does is reduce the opportunities that one has to betray someone. Like you. You betray people maybe on. In the small ways, but that you're.
You're kept in line in the larger constructs, right? And, and actually, like, this is what people need to. So say that, say society keeps you just metaphorically speaking, old and slow and therefore unable to betray in various ways. Right? It keeps you from, you know, the law maybe keeps you from betraying someone and thereby being trustworthy, even if it's an outside mechanism. It just keeps you in line. That isn't just that you are being exploited or your freedom is being infringed on, it's also that you are being prevented from being yourself exploited by other people and having them infringe on you.
Right? So it's like it's, it's, it's. It's a system of small sacrifices that actually are supposed to protect you versus being, as you're saying, like, totally outside that, in which case all bets are off. Then you're. Then it's like open season. And sure, you could exploit anybody, but that also means that you could just be hacked to death by a machete and that's the end of it. Right? So, yeah, sorry, Maybe that's not a profound realization. I'm just resting.
49:55 Wes: No, no, that's good. Now I think that's important because you're bringing up this trade off between the enforcements of rights, you know. Right. So all of our. And this is John Stuart Mill puts us very well in on liberty is everything that we call a right depends on infringement, on the liberty of others. I have a right to not be murdered. But that means you're not allowed to murder me, which is pretty frustrating sometimes.
50:23 Erin: You're damn right. No.
50:26 Wes: So that's the trade off at work here. But do we want to say anything, anything else before we wrap up? I think we alluded a little bit to that wonderful ending where Howard is maniacally laughing about losing the gold. And this is really. I said this is a different maniacally. Yes, but it's no longer mania because it's about accepting a loss. Mania denies the loss, the possibility of loss. And the loss here is really about revelation that they have what they need, that they don't need the gold and that they're free of that.
51:05 Erin: That's right. Curtin does say that he hasn't lost anything, but Curtin doesn't know that time is money. I'm not so bad off as I was before. I'm just out the money for the supplies or whatever.
51:17 Wes: Right, right, right.
51:19 Erin: Meanwhile, they've been out there for how many months? Anyway?
51:24 Wes: Yeah, I wouldn't want to go into. Into business with Curtin.
51:28 Erin: Well, it's really just all about the friendships you make along the way. But
51:34 Wes: if I have to choose between him and Dobbs. Sure.
51:36 Erin: Yeah. I like the windstorm. I think that would be called a haboob, maybe appropriately for the theme of the mountain woman. Yes. H A B O O B. I see them a little bit. I've seen them around here, around these here parts because I'm a westerner and see a lot of wounded. This is quite true, actually. You see a lot of wounded landscapes around here. You see a lot of abandoned mines and things that you know. Yeah. And it's a shame because forests grow back but not blasted out mountains.
52:07 Wes: Right.
52:07 Erin: But anyway, yeah, the dust storm and the idea that unto dust the gold dust shall return as gold dust WOMAN plays in the ending credits. It's a beautiful moment because of the. What's kind of the genius of black and white cinematography. Right. Because it really is just. Just like grayscale, just like everything else, you know, it's all just a gradient and it really doesn't even. It doesn't glimmer. It doesn't anything. Right. And so the luster.
52:41 Wes: We can't see. We can't see the color gold in the film. Yeah.
52:44 Erin: Right. Yeah.
52:46 Wes: Anyway, yeah. So I thought we could maybe try to play a little bit of this to close it out. Unless you have anything else.
52:54 Erin: No.
52:55 Wes: Yeah.
52:55 Erin: A bit of what? Hopefully not the score. The worst score of all time.
53:00 Wes: No, no, just some of this interaction between Curtin and Howard at the end when they realize they've lost the gold. Or fate or nature, whatever you prefer. But whoever. Whatever blit is certainly had a sense of humor. The gold has gone back to where we found it. This is worth 10 months of suffering and labor, this joke is. So I think that's a fitting way to end. All right, well, that was fun. Thank you.
53:43 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Staking Claims in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) (Part 1)
Jul 02, 2024
It’s considered the definitive film on greed, a demonstration of just what the lust for gold can do to a man’s heart. Fred C. Dobbs starts out as a down-on-his-luck panhandler in a poor Mexican town and comes into a fortune of over $100,000 before the film’s end. Yet, in more ways than one, Dobbs never stops panhandling, never stops being subject to the vagaries of fate, to forces that might just as soon give as take away his fortune, and to the darkness within himself that he can neither understand nor control. Perhaps the film doesn’t chart his moral corruption and gradual descent into greed-fueled madness so much as it critiques the system that turned Dobbs into a beggar in the first place—a system which, the film might argue, teaches all of us to stick out our hands (and our necks) in the pursuit of profit. Wes & Erin discuss John Huston’s 1948 classic, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. It's considered the definitive film on greed, a demonstration of just what the lust for gold can do to a man's heart. Fred C. Dobbs starts out as a down on his luck panhandler in a poor Mexican town and comes into a fortune of over $100,000 before the film's end. Yet in more ways than one, Dobbs never stops panhandling, never stops being subject to the vagaries of fate, to forces that might just as soon give as take away his fortune, and to the darkness within himself that he could neither understand nor control.
Perhaps the film doesn't chart his moral corruption and gradual descent into greed fueled madness so much as it critiques the system that turned Dobbs into a beggar in the first place. A system which the film might argue teaches all of us to stick out our hands and our necks in the pursuit of profit. Today we're discussing John Huston's 1948 classic, the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and this is Wes Alwan and you're listening to subtext. Wes, I've been thinking a lot about gold as a symbol in Treasure of the Sierra Madre and about the difference between gold and oil.
Oil as in black gold, Texas tea. But I wonder if you have any thoughts about gold and what makes it a particularly. I'm thinking a lot about There Will Be Blood. I read an article that mentioned that Paul Thomas Anderson, when he was making that film, was watching Treasure of the Sierra Madre, you know, something like every day and just the differences between oil and gold. Which is the more definitive symbol of a particular kind of American aspirational wealth and which is the more effective one? I think it is gold. But I'd just be curious what you think maybe between the two or three, just about how gold is working as a symbol in this film.
2:20 Wes: Well, personally, I think what it's good for is it's something to put on the fingers and necks of swell dames.
2:27 Erin: Yeah, I do. I remember thinking, wow, that sounds exactly like something Wes would say. Yeah, you're always talking about swell dames and how to deck them out.
2:36 Wes: Swell dames isn't that one of the. Isn't that one of the phrases that Woody Allen repeats or in his impersonation of Humphrey Bogart or swell, swell dames. I just love that. It's too bad we don't have that anymore. We don't say things like swell dames. I guess that would be a very sexist.
2:56 Erin: Depends on who says it.
2:57 Wes: I don't know if it would. Broad dames. What else? It's interesting because. So that's the way Dobbs initially. Well, it's not the way he initially thinks of it. Well, yeah, it's when they're. It's when he and Curtin are fantasizing. They're trying to make a decision about whether to go with Howard or to ask Howard to take them and to seek out gold. And there's a lot of interesting shots in that scene. I think they're in the park and you get this looks of reverie on the face of Dobbs. So that's one way of looking at it. Of course, when they talk to Howard before that scene for Howard, he makes a remark that it's only good for making gold teeth or jewelry.
So he does mention jewelry. Jewelry. But he doesn't put as much stock in the implications of that as Dobbs does. And overall, he gives in this really incredible speech that Howard gives in. What is it? Is it a hotel or a flop house? A hostel? Flophouse. There you go. Where the swell dames don't hang out. So, in fact, I think I thought I would try to do something different, which is to try to actually play this and see if it comes out on the podcast. So I'm going to do that. And it's just an experiment. We could do more of that if it works.
4:22 Erin: Ooh, I like this.
4:23 Wes: So this is the speech that when they walk into the flophouse that Howard is giving about gold and what it means. So I'm going to play a bit of that and then I'll. Then we can talk about it. They're few and far between. That take a lot of finding. So you answer me this, will you? Why is gold worth some 20 bucks an ounce? I don't know. Because it's scarce. A thousand men, say, go searching for gold. After six months, one of them's lucky. One out of the thousand. This find represents not only his own labor, but that of 999 others to boot. That's 6,000 months or 500 years scrabbling over mountains, going hungry and thirsty.
Ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the finding the getting of it. Never thought of it just like that. Well, there's no other explanation, mister. Gold and stuff ain't good for nothing except making jewelry with gold teeth. Ah, gold's a devilish sort of a thing. Anyway, you start out, you tell yourself you'll be satisfied with 25,000 handsome smackers worth of it. So help me, Lord, and cross my heart, firm resolution. After months of sweating yourself dizzy and growing short on provisions and finding nothing, you finally come down to 15,000, then 10.
Finally you say, Lord, let me just find $5,000 worth and never asked for anything more the rest of my life. $5,000 is a lot of money. Here in this joint it seems like a lot. But I tell you, if it was to make a real strike, you couldn't be dragged away. Not even the threat of miserable death would keep you from trying to add 10,000 more. 10, you'd want to get 25. 25, you'd want to get 50. 50, 100. Like roulette. One more turn, you know. Always one more. It wouldn't be that way with me. I swear it wouldn't. I take only what I set out to get, Even if there's still a half a million dollars worth lying around waiting to be picked up.
I've dug in Alaska and Canada and Colorado. I was with the crowd in the British Honduras, where I made my fare back home and almost enough over to cure me of the fever I'd caught. Dug in California and Australia. All over the world, practically. I know what gold does to men's souls. You talk as though you struck it rich sometime or another. Okay, I know what gold does to men's souls. So one of his theses is that gold is only worth the labor that's put into it. So he has sort of a Karl Marx labor theory of value, although I guess it's there to some extent in Locke as well.
But that's much different than the idea that is often introduced by Dobbs and is introduced at a critical moment later on in the film when he's upset with Curtin, which is that whoever puts more investment in should get more out. So the idea that kind of connects to a more capitalist conception of economics, where the value of something is simply what people think it's worth. Simply a matter of demand. So that's one aspect of what he's saying. He's also saying it's addictive. It's like gambling. It makes men crazy. He. Even at one point, it's not in the part I played but they ask him why he's down and out if he's been digging for gold before and seen success.
And he says, that's the gold, that's what it makes of us. And he warns them about all the risk involved to one's physical safety and loneliness, but also the paranoia it induces in people who are doing it cooperatively. But again, you can't do it alone because it would be too lonely. So he really doesn't paint a great picture. He's selling it, but he's selling it by way of this idea that it's a curse and it's self destructive. But for some reason that really mesmerizes Dobbs and Curtin. So I haven't directly answered your question about why gold has the worth that it does to people.
I think it's Curtin who says, well, it's rare. And then you could give a standard theory of why gold is worth what it is. It's pretty and it's rare. But I don't know, what were you going to say about that?
8:07 Erin: Yeah, it's rare, but it's not too rare. Right. There's a point of diminishing returns. If it's too rare, then not everybody could have it. And it can't be quite such a widely disseminated status symbol. Yeah, you know, I. Oil is something I've been thinking about a lot with a friend's creative project that he's been working on and, and this contrast with There Will Be Blood and this idea of like what is the ultimate golden calf. I suppose the answer is in there, you know, for American society. And I think I took for granted for a long time that it is oil. But oil is, you know, more immediately useful and practical. I mean, gold does have practical uses other than gold teeth and jewelry. Right. I mean the why it's effective for teeth is because of its malleability and certain other properties are desirable in gold.
8:56 Wes: It doesn't rust.
8:58 Erin: Yeah, non corrosive, it's not toxic, it has high level of ductility. But just thinking about the fact that oil, I mean oil in a sense is quite beautiful too, but it's not classically beautiful in the way that gold is. It's shiny and immediately aesthetically appealing and yet as the movie points out, it's difficult to recognize. It just looks like sand when it's not refined. So there's something there, I think, about hidden value. Oil is that way too. You know, you could be walking over vast deposits of oil right under your feet or you know, several hundred Feet down or, you know, a mile down.
I don't know. It's too closely tied to use. Oil is. I think, though, I think Howard gets his wires crossed a little bit in this speech and kind of contradicts himself, as I think you're pointing out, with this labor theory of value jutting up against kind of what he's saying about gambling, which I want to get into as well. I do think that the thesis of the film is that gold is not useful or inherently useless or it's been assigned a kind of arbitrary value. And that, I think, within the structure of the film, makes it such a fascinating object of desire because it's entirely tied to, you know, these economic value conditions under which demand determines, you know, it's all.
In other words, it's all. It's all fake. That it's, you know, forget about the fiat system, even the gold system is itself. It's turtles all the way down. There's no bottom to the arbitrariness of the value system. Right. I'm just interested in that. This vicious circle of wanting things literally because you've been told to want them, of going after things because you've been told you should go after it, of this being on the hamster wheel, all these various metaphors I could use here to describe ultimately the futility, utility, and the stupidity or the emptiness of the entire enterprise.
Yeah. But I do think that he. He does contradict himself over the course of that speech. Right. It's. It's worthless. There is no real value in it. The labor lends the value, but also it's supply and demand. And also it's like the roulette wheel. I mean, panning is like the roulette wheel. But he also mentions luck. When it comes to one in a thousand gets lucky. So 999 other people are paying for the labor that they put in and are getting nothing out. So that's not quite right.
11:27 Wes: Well, he's saying that the one person. So it's not even just worth the labor of the one person who digs it up or the few people who dig it up. It's worth the labor of all the people who failed.
11:38 Erin: Right.
11:38 Wes: The collective of the people who tried and failed. Yeah.
11:40 Erin: Right. Right. But they're not getting any. Of course, they're not getting minimum wage in. In thanks for. For the effort that one gets. So it is like buying a lottery ticket. You know, I'm. I'm jumping all over the place here because I see it all as being part of the system that I Have pretty much determined is basically just. I was shocked watching this, what an anti capitalist film it is. I.
12:04 Wes: Right, it is. I was thinking these guys. Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't get in trouble up in the red scare or whatever.
12:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And I, I started to see that more and more that, and this is a slightly separate issue, but that, you know, Dobbs is basically bad from the beginning. I think this isn't really about necessarily his corruption so much as it is what it's about what, what happens to you when you get to higher and higher levels of the, you know, the capitalist board game that they're playing. And yeah, so something about this idea of going after the worthless thing or the thing whose worth is just socially constructed and the position that puts one in when one is also just a beggar buying a, buying a lottery ticket, hoping to strike it rich in a way that's, I think that's an expression for what the film thinks the entire capitalist system does to one.
Oh, I hope, I hope my small business makes it and that people decide to come and, you know, I hope I strike it rich with this idea for, you know, designer popsicle sticks or whatever, whatever the case may be. And I hope that I hit on some million dollar idea that's going to get people to come into my store. The film seems to suggest that everyone is just begging for money.
13:17 Wes: patreon.com subtextpodcast
13:22 Erin: Sorry, I'm rambling. I'm going in many directions.
13:25 Wes: No, no, no, I think that's spot on. But I want to address your earlier question first, which is the difference between oil and gold. And I liked your talk about one being closer to use. And oil is also dirtier. Of course, gold is pretty, but yeah, you can use oil for lots of things. We're probably wearing oil right now. There's so much, you know, these microphones are made of oil, anything that's made of plastic. And so that, that's one thing. It's of course, what does it mean to be useful to people? Some of it is about right, we need food to survive, but then beyond that we have things that are a matter of convenience and then things that are a matter of luxury.
And gold stands out. But because I think what you were saying is that it gets its value purely by way of being a signifier of something. It's not just that it's pretty in and of itself and can be used for jewelry, but there's something about its capacity to signify something. So it becomes a way of you know, if you have this thing that is both pretty and rare and you can give it to someone, you know, like a ring, for instance, as a symbol of their value to you, then it takes on a different significance. Gold, like oil, right. You get it out of the ground, out of Mother Earth.
At a certain point, Howard says we have to repair the wounds that we've created. And it's a mountain which is very. Sorry to be a psychoanalyst for a second, but very breast like so this idea of something that you can dig out of Mother Earth, that's not just a matter of sustenance, but that is really special. So ultimately you could say that it signifies this profound connection to the maternal or something like that. But the other thing that you're getting at is the anti capitalist trend in the film. And it plays on a few different ideas. And it starts from the very beginning of the film where Dobbs is running around saying, can you stake a fellow American to a meal?
This idea of a stake. Yep, as if. So what is it? So he's begging on the one hand, he's suggesting to someone who might give him money that they're making an investment, right. They're taking a stake in something. But of course we get that immediately tied to the lottery. He's losing at the lottery. So there's an element of gambling. And of course, Howard's theory of the labor value of theory in a way is about the investment of work into something that makes it worth something. Gold mining. Right. They have a stake in the share of the enterprise, they stake a claim over the land.
And even this idea, you know, the fact that he's saying a fellow American because he's essentially a foreigner or a temporary immigrant, I guess, in another country. It's almost as if there's a, you know, you're. You're investing in a fellow American or. Well, let me put it this way. What is one investing in? Potentially, if you give money to a beggar, you can think of it in a few different ways. You're investing in the idea that they may become self sufficient. They may use that money to set themselves up and not have to beg anymore. The suggestion might be that it's an investment in society.
If everyone becomes self sufficient because of your charity, society is improved, or it's an investment in the conscience of the one who gives. You'll feel better about yourself, you did the right thing. You can think of investment in all these different ways. But on the other hand, it really is a gamble because for the most part that's you know, if you're expecting a return on your investment, other than feeling good about yourself, you're bound to be disappointed. It's not a great investment, right. To give money out to people who are begging.
So he's suggesting it's investment, an investment, but he's really asking them to gamble on him. And so, yeah, the confusion of all these different ideas. Begging, investing, gambling, work, gold mining, all of that gets run together.
17:21 Erin: Well, I like this a lot, but say we do see that Dobbs sometimes uses money to get a shave and to get his hairpiece greased down. But otherwise he was totally bald during the filming of this movie. And he had a team of people who were involved in putting his hairpiece into various states of disarray. Suggestive of insanity. Over the course of the. Over the course of the film. And then I guess he got B12 shots and his hair grew back. But, you know, I was thinking about the fact that he is hungry. So the question to me is more of like, what does that investment mean when you're just, what, you're.
Basically, he's asking someone to become his patron insofar as he's able to just keep his own life going. He's almost selling a privatized stake in himself. If I keep going, then what? You'll have given me some seed money or something? And it was funny because I, watching him get a shave, I was thinking to myself, well, that's not a very good use of that money because you're, you're still a bum. You're not like going to a job interview, you know, so that hair is going to grow back and you will have wasted the money. Like, it's just, you know, it's just.
You're just running through it like water. But then again, like, you eat and then a few hours later you're. You're hungry again. You know, it's, it's hard to, to, to keep yourself up in this world where everything costs. So you could argue that, well, he could just skip another meal. I mean, you know, it's.
18:48 Wes: Yeah. In fact. Right. He asks three times from the same person.
18:52 Erin: Yes.
18:52 Wes: And I think the third time he's like, well, here's one final one. But, you know, don't do this again. Get yourself together. Is it after the third time that he gets the shave and all that?
19:01 Erin: I think it's the second time.
19:03 Wes: Maybe it's the second time. Right. Yes. Okay. And incidentally, that's what. Later on when they're all fantasizing about what they're going to do with the money. And Howard and Curtin talk about settling down. Essentially. He's like, I'm gonna go do a Turkish bath. And they get primped up, get a nice suit, go eat a lot, and then it kind of trails off. And then the subject of women comes up because it's obviously what Dobbs is thinking about. And then I think it's Howard who says something like, you know, well, don't. Don't worry about that, because that'll ruin your life.
That's only trouble. The dames. Dames are only trouble. Which is interesting in light of the. Even if they're swell, they're swell for a while. But it's interesting in light of the fact that when he gets his shave, he comes out and he has this flirtatious moment where there's a woman looking at him and I guess he kind of ignores her. But you. You're wondering if there'll be some payoff to that interaction. What's going to happen with that? And I think she's the one who's with the guy who deceives them. Is that right? Is that. Does she reappear?
20:04 Erin: I don't. I don't think that's the same woman.
20:07 Wes: I. I was unclear on that, and I didn't go back and look. Ok, so maybe that's just a complete throwaway scene where he has this interaction with a woman after he's gotten all dolled up, and then that's it, that's gone. So that's very telling, I think.
20:21 Erin: I think prostitution is like the right. That's the theme at the bedrock of this film that actually never, almost never gets directly addressed. But what you're pointing to with the mountain and with this idea of sort of like privatizing people or. I mean, in a way, it's reversed with Dobbs. In a way, he's treating the. The person from whom he's begging as a kind of object. So there's a kind of reversal there where he gets a little bit of power over them, maybe by exploiting their conscience in the way that you're suggesting, where they're making an investment in their own sense of ethics or the belief that they're a good person.
But insofar as one can, you know, buy someone a meal and thereby have a stake in them, have an investment in them, the suggestion of bodies and other people's bodies being owned by someone. Yeah. Giving away a stake, a share, an afternoon, an evening, you know, however long you want to invest in that person's. Body, I think, is directly connected as well to the mountainous woman. To the mountainous wounded woman. That has to be restored to some sort of original state out of respect at the end of the film, as Howard suggests, they have to close the mine and close, I believe he says, close her wounds.
And this is, again, something like, you know, we're all human beings, right. We should all be free in the same way. I think, like, you know, the mountain is. It's. It's not owned by anyone in particular. It's not necessarily theirs to exploit, but over the course of the investment that they make in it, it kind of. It becomes theirs. They are. They feel entitled to it. They've. They have, in a sense, mentally privatized it so that when Cody wants to come and take a share, it's like, no, it's our mountain. We're getting what we need out of this.
Right. And so I wonder if. Yeah. If what they're doing to the mountain is we can tie that to the sort of exploitation of bodies. But it's a tricky thing. This idea of the meal, I think, is I can't quite draw the squiggly line back to what it's saying about panhandling, you know.
22:25 Wes: Yeah. So when I was thinking about all this, these different meanings of stake, and in light of can you stake an American, fellow American to a meal? I was thinking about staking a claim and how that worked. And I looked it up, and here's a little quote from what I found online. The process of staking a mining claim began in 1849 with the California Gold Rush, where, in the absence of government regulations, miners adopted their own rules to claim and mine land. The law was based on prior appropriation, which means that the first person to put public land to beneficial use was granted a claim.
While the regulations have since adapted, the basis of finding a mineral deposit and staking a mining claim, so long as the land is available for such claims and does not have a current active claim, remains essentially the same. Which really surprised me. It has me searching all over Cambridge for mineral. Mineral deposits. Now, I find that interesting because it doesn't belong to them by law, but in a way. Well, they are in Mexico, right? Are they out? Did they go to. Yeah, they're in Mexico. So it's a more complicated situation. But if they were in California, in a way, the law, it sort of stands outside of the law.
Or they're on the frontier between civilization and lawlessness, which is an important part of the movie. But I think this idea of Staking a claim, a mining claim, is basically appropriation based on putting the land to beneficial use. It's kind of connected to Howard's idea of the way labor gives something value. So it also gives you some sense of ownership, which is something, by the way, you can do with yourself. Right. So you put yourself to productive use. You lay claim to yourself. And that's supposed to be the return on investment for someone who's engaged in charitable giving or giving to a beggar.
Right. Ideally, they lay claim to themselves and become more independent. But, yeah, I guess I'm not getting. I'm not. I'm not making the connection. You were back to this concept of exploitation of the land. But I think the concept of exploitation is very important. So it reminded me a little bit of on the Waterfront, because in both cases, you have. Right. It turned out that mobsters have to work very hard, and they have to even have accountants. And they're basically running a business, so why not just run a legal business? And here it's a very similar thing.
Howard tells them how difficult it is, how dangerous it is, how they could get killed. And what do they do? Well, let's just start a business, and they start a successful business. They come up with the money to invest in the equipment, blah, blah, blah. Why not just do something easier? Well, it can't be easy because of the fantasy that it should be easy. One of the fantasies is just the fact that gold is just something you can find in the hills or find in the mountain, and it's potentially liberating. If you find enough, it could liberate you from work forever.
You're not answering to anyone. But I ultimately think just as the mobsters are attracted to exploitation and living outside of the law, that's part of the appeal here, is that they can just exploit the mountain. The idea is that there's something easy and passive about that. It's like begging. Even though in reality it isn't right, it turns out to be very hard. And you have both Curtin and Dobbs complaining about how hard it is. And when Howard leaves them, everything falls apart because they can't hack it.
25:46 Erin: Yeah. I think, you know, it's the money tree fantasy, you know, that you could just. And I think that moment when Howard does the little jig and, you know, because they're literally treading on gold, you know, the mountain is, in a sense, paved with gold. Yeah. I like the fact that it's so that they're doing something that seems easy but is actually so incredibly difficult. All because of a sort of mental construct about a money tree scenario in which, well, it's just out there for us to take. So that seems easier if we just go out there and take.
It doesn't matter the effort that it takes to, to actually go out and get it. I'm thinking too about how difficult it is to panhandle and maybe, maybe this is an indication that Dobbs isn't quite understanding its full difficulty or maybe is taking some kind of easy way out. It would be actually the most difficult thing in the world to beg for money because it's puts you in such a degraded mental state to be subject to others charity like that and to be, you know, I think that must be one of the hardest things in the world to put oneself through.
26:46 Wes: Yeah.
26:47 Erin: And it doesn't bother Dobbs, but that's because he doesn't even look at the person that he's, you know, it puts you in a, in a comportment of being subject to other people's mercy. And yet he's taken gratitude completely out of the equation. There's a very strict code of conduct around it too. Right. You know, you're in this degraded position and then somehow if you're not grateful enough to the person that gives you charity, that can prevent you from other people giving you charity. Right. If they see that you're this sort of like ungrateful beggar, so you're sort of testing their character.
And also like people are testing your character and seeing if you are, you know, maybe it's a case of like if you're, if you're fool's gold or real gold, you know, are you the right kind of person to give money to and how do we determine whether or not you're the right kind of person. Person that I'm investing in? Right. And so you have to be maybe displaying your worth to receive someone's charity. You have to be putting on this kind of moral performance. And this is the part of the social contract that Dobbs is ignoring. Right. Because he's not even grateful enough to care about the person that is giving him the money and put, or, or to even pretend to care and look someone in the eye and say thank you.
He's just treating the person who's, who's handing him the money like the money tree. Yeah, he's, he's kind of exploiting the, the John Huston character, the man in the white suit. I'm switching gears here a little bit, but it's an indication to me of the fact that Dobbs is Bad from the beginning, and that the system is a bad system. That we're all, on a certain level, we're all put in these degraded positions by the capitalist system, the film seems to be saying, in which we're all, in a sense, just begging other people for their charity, begging other people for their money, their patronage, their.
You know, whether they're. Whether it's on the up and up or something seedy or something sort of outside the system of trade. We're all basically just looking for. I don't know, for a handout or to feel good about ourselves. Whether that be because we're handing the beggar money or because we get the money and then we get to spend it making ourselves feel good. You know, in Dobbs, sort of fantasy, just say, like, I think the first 25 minutes of this film, before they even go to the mountain, are some of the best. That's like one of the best sequences ever in film, I think.
Just the Tampico scenes, and they are dark as hell. It's awful.
29:01 Wes: They are. I think this idea, your connection of begging and exploitation is important. So Dobbs is. He's a bad guy. He turns out to be a very paranoid guy and a guy with an impaired conscience. I won't say he. Why are you smiling? Because of my. My. I like the word paranoid, the way you said it.
29:22 Erin: It was just. It was juicy word. Yeah.
29:26 Wes: I wouldn't say he doesn't have a conscience. I'd say his conscience is wounded, it's impaired. So you see glimmers of conscience, but it's tortured. And he can do terrible things, it turns out. And as a beggar, yeah, the beggar is exploitative. So I'm going to say that even though it's politically incorrect, and I'm using the phrase politically incorrect just because it's no longer in vogue. So people will have to look that up to see what I mean. But, yes, when you're begging, you are in an exploitative position, because that's all the other person is to you, is what they're going to give you.
And that's my experience with panhandlers on the street, is largely that I have a visceral negative reaction to the feeling that I am nothing to a person except what it is I can give them. And it creates a lot of conflicted feelings in me about, you know, pity and guilt and irritation. But, you know, Dobbs himself is. He's somewhat ashamed by his position or humiliated by his position, but he's running past that feeling as quickly as Possible and, you know, so he can get himself to the barber or whatever and look good and so feel good. He does have a bit of a look of shame, I think, the third, second or third time or maybe both, when he's getting the money from the guy in the white suit.
So it's at the. At least it's embarrassing to him that it's. That he's in that position, but he's not giving any real thought to that and how to get out of that in a sustained way. And he has the ability, right? As it turns out, he can be part of a business venture, he has the ability, but something is keeping him in that. And I. And my thesis, again, it's the same as it was with on the Waterfront, is that there's an attraction to the concept of exploitation. There's a. An attraction to the idea of getting something for nothing, because it's very much like being a child at the breast, an infant at the breast.
There's something inherently exploitative about that, in fact. Right? Taking sustenance from the mother's body and giving nothing in return. The selfish little babies, no, but all we are to them is milk and sustenance. But anyway.
31:37 Erin: But the mother gets something out of that too. This is the whole. I mean, this is the complication nature
31:43 Wes: has tricked her into.
31:45 Erin: Oh, there is something darker than this film. And it's your mom. Okay. No, but this idea of getting something for nothing, though, I'm thinking, isn't this the fantasy? I mean, this is something you've talked about on previous episodes, like, I'm a good person, I should be rewarded. I mean, isn't this the fantasy of living? It's that somehow by continuing to exist as a body on this rock, you're owed something. Especially if you have bad experiences over time. I mean, who. Who would say that in striking it rich, that Bogey's character is really getting something for nothing.
He has suffered. I mean, that's why I want to, like, you know, turn this around on the. You know, in sort of seeing the panhandler job as being so awful for the panhandler, you know, because more often than not, thank the Lord I've been in a position where I'm not the person begging for money, but I can imagine how awful it would be to be in that degraded position and what their mindset must be like, how degraded they must feel as human beings in order to be in this. In the circumstance. And what we know from. From. From Bogey, if we want to say, you know, something about his character, or whatever we see early in the film that he is someone who is.
Who is looking for honest work. Right. He does go and work very hard for that guy that's setting up what but oil derricks. Right, right. And ends up just taking what he is owed because he simply wants what he is owed. We come in in the middle of things, we have no idea what his past history is, how he became a bum in the first place, but we can look at his life and say, that's a very hard life. You know, he suffered. In other words, I'm just interested in this idea that, like, what does it mean to get something for nothing? What's the right kind of.
This isn't to say that one should get a. A payout in response to one's level of suffering, but I think there's something in that. You know what I'm trying to say? Like. Like, is it. Is it really getting something for nothing or is it finally getting rewarded after years of being just a cog in the machine or someone trampled by society? When you finally win the lottery and you're someone who's been begging your whole life, is there not a kind of justice in that? Or maybe the fact that, you know, in that case, everybody who suffered should be getting a handout in.
In proportion to the level that they have suffered. Right. I. You know what I'm trying to say, and you know that it's. That it's ridiculous, but is there not actually, like a deep psychological truth at the bedrock of this? That getting something for nothing is really never getting it for nothing?
34:08 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think we all at some level have that feeling that because life is full of so much suffering, that in a way we are owed recompense.
34:18 Erin: Yeah. You might be entitled to a class action.
34:21 Wes: Yeah. Some entitlement, some level of entitlement. And the more narcissistic we are, the more that level of entitlement.
34:28 Erin: Well, in a way, this is the Christian. I mean, this is the promise of religion. Right. Life sucks. But maybe if you're lucky and you do the right thing at the end, you'll receive restitution. I mean, now I'm getting really. I hope listeners know that I'm not necessarily agreeing with myself, but I think it's like. I think it's useful to sort of exercise these thoughts or see how far they go. I don't know.
34:53 Wes: Yeah, I haven't thought a lot about this idea. I mean, that you've brought up about does he deserve something now because of his suffering? I had been thinking of this in terms of his. He has a repetition compulsion that keeps him suffering. And now I'm speaking from personal experience, right? He's doing self destructive things to keep himself down and out. Because if you do that, if you keep yourself down and out, you can have this fantasy of rescue, this fantasy of winning the lottery or getting something for nothing. And I think you, and probably I certainly am, and most people are very familiar with that fantasy of winning the lottery.
I don't fantasize about starting a company and getting rich that way. That's boring. I fantasize about just enormous amount of money suddenly appearing in my bank account. That's part of the appeal. This appeal of being given something, of being the infantile, completely infantile position where someone else, whether it's mother or fate or whatever, caters entirely to not just one's needs, but anything that one might want. And what's important is that it be exploitative, that it be, at least in fantasy, something that can be accomplished without any effort.
It's just something visited upon you by fate, which at the very end of the movie, Curtin and Howard have a huge laugh about the trick, quote, unquote, trick, that fate or nature or God or whatever you want to call it, this is the way Howard puts it, has played upon them.
36:22 Erin: It's funny.
36:22 Wes: I don't fantasize the reason why. Oh, you don't fantasize about winning the lottery?
36:26 Erin: I think that was. No, I don't think so. I think that would be so embarrassing
36:33 Wes: to win the lottery. You got to keep it a secret.
36:37 Erin: Yeah, I fantasize about winning. I fantasize about like winning a competition that has a big monetary prize. But like, it's about the.
36:45 Wes: You want to deserve it.
36:47 Erin: Yeah, I'm absolutely no fun. I mean, this is like, I think this is telling on myself worse than fantasizing. Because who doesn't fantasize about winning the lottery? But I don't.
36:57 Wes: I mean, that's interesting.
37:01 Erin: I want to be recognized by a jury of my peers. I mean, money means nothing to me.
37:07 Wes: I want to win all the money and then keep it a secret until people are like, wes, why, how are you driving a Lamborghini? Why are you wearing all these garish suits that are supposed to be fashionable but they're ridiculous?
37:23 Erin: Well, just want someone to love me, that's all.
37:28 Wes: I mean, as part of that fantasy, I do think about, okay, I'd give this much money to that relative and this much money to another relative and, well, less for you. Because I don't like you as much, but everyone would get at least a million dollars. And I don't know what to call that. Is that altruistic or is that a fantasy of being the giver rather than the beggar? I don't know. I haven't thought about that. But I don't think it's necessarily. That's something that speaks to a virtue. And I think from people I've talked to, this is also a very typical part of the win a billion dollars fantasy is, okay, I'm going to distribute some of this largesse, going to be the distributor, but.
All right, well, that's interesting to know that you don't have the lottery fantasy that you want to. You're more connected to working hard to get genuine recognition, which I am, too, which is why I have a podcast and not an oil refinery or something.
38:30 Erin: I think I'm just missing a. Some. Some chip, but.
38:33 Wes: So you would not be heading up into the mountains?
38:37 Erin: No. I can't think of anything more mortifying than to actually. To do that and actually find gold. How embarrassing. I don't know why that just feels. That's. Yeah.
38:46 Wes: I think part of the fantasy is that you're not. Yes, you're getting lucky, but also fate has ordained it. Fate has smiled on you and that it was meant to happen or something like that. Well, I'm trying to. I'm thinking now, you had me thinking about this whole jig that Howard does when he finds out and he's relaying to the Curtin and Dobbs. You have no idea. At that point, the land is full of gold and that Howard has the knowledge to know that it's kind of a manic state. Right. And again, what I'm trying to get at here, it's not really just about, okay, we're rich, that's part of it.
But it's not just about being rich. It's about the fantasy involved, what it signifies. Right. What gold signifies, what money signifies. The fantasy of being given something, being given something by the. By the earth, of not working for something, ironically, again, that's weird because they really do work hard for it, but. And ultimately of merger with a fantasy of a maternal principle, so being completely reunified with a nourisher, let's say, and not having to want, not having to desire, having all of that completely fulfilled, not having to work ever again.
39:56 Erin: I want to connect all of this back to then, to the lottery ticket that he buys at the beginning of the film and the way that undercuts this idea of the labor theory of value inherent to the gold seeking. Right. Because does the lottery ticket as a symbol give the lie to that? In other words, it's just like winning the lottery. You either find it or you don't. There's no inherent value attached to the gold because a bunch of people have. I mean, I guess. Wait a minute. I guess if it's a lottery where the winnings come from what everybody pays into it, and then just one person wins.
So maybe it does work. I don't know. But there is something that just seems like Howard's like a mountain goat, right? And he sees everything and he's very wise, and he's lasted longer than anybody else, it seems. He's not terribly old, but I can't imagine. The life expectancy in Tampico is very high. And he sees what they can't. He lets them know what it is that they're treading on. There's something that seems to me to be, therefore, of value in him and in, you know, when he gets his just desserts of what, being waited on by women. Again, this is like the ultimate prize in the film, it seems.
Right. That seems to be a little bit more justified than not, because he has this inherent wisdom. If they were out there by themselves, they would have just walked all over the gold and then gone home. Because they don't see anything that looks very shiny. Well, actually, they would have just taken home the pyrite and found out later exactly how big of a fool they were. So it seems to be more than just, say, effort. Right. Dobbs and Curtin put in a lot of effort in their pursuit of gold, but they need someone who's smart enough to show them where it is, what it is.
That's smarts. That's not just being a workhorse, but they are workhorses to their credit. Right. So where does the lottery ticket fit in? Where does this idea of something for nothing, like pure nothing or this labor theory of value, like, how could we fit that into the movie schema or can we?
41:56 Wes: Well, the lottery ticket is a more pure representative. Right. Of the. Of something for nothing. The weird thing about the gold mining is even though it's predicated on the something for nothing idea, it's. The fantasy is enhanced by that. It's in reality, it's hard work. And they find out they want to give up very early. Right. Howard is the goat man who can just climb endlessly and never gets tired. And these two younger men can barely keep up. But yes, I think part of the fantasy of winning the lottery. It's not just that you're lucky, it's that you're special and that again, it's a matter of fate. I deserve this part, maybe because I've suffered so much, as you pointed out, you know, maybe you have that idea that you've suffered so much, you deserve it. But I'm special and special just by virtue of my own relation to myself. Being me is a very special relationship.
42:49 Erin: So you're reminding me.
42:51 Wes: Dobbs wants fate to smile on him. He wants to. Yeah, go ahead.
42:59 Erin: No, no, I was just going to tell a personal anecdote which has nothing to do with anything.
43:02 Wes: Sorry, yeah, no, no, go ahead.
43:04 Erin: No, I would, I just. This has been very psychologically revealing for me. I just, I'm. I am, as I think I've mentioned in other episodes, I am an incredibly unlucky person. And what you're reminding me of is the one time that I ever won a raffle, it was a church raffle and they had like, you know, hundreds of prizes, so it was like statistically impossible that I finally, I got into a situation where if I didn't win something, it would have been bizarre. I actually won like a very nice little trinket and I had to go up to accept it. And I was so mortified that I won this thing that I realized that I wonder if I was making, making myself, like putting myself in positions where I would keep myself down and not win anything because I actually didn't want to win anything.
I actually just wanted to, you know. You think that, oh, I'm so like. I complain all the time about how unlucky I am when it comes to like games of chance or anything like that. My grandfather would always buy a scratch off tickets for, for Christmas, which was fun because it was fun to scratch things off with a little coin. But I think if I had ever won a good amount of money, it would have been bad anyway. I don't know what this reveals about me. I feel someone now is going to listen to this and say, you are a basket case. And so this is all just like
44:20 Wes: you have a strong conscience. And the idea of being unlucky, which is an idea I have as well, is it's connected to punishment. Fate punishes us or ought to. And the connection to punishment is also, ultimately it's a way of connecting to parents. So one of Freud's ideas is that when people are self destructive, they're maintaining a connection to this fantasized connection to parents via punishment. If I'M self destructive destructing if I'm losing, if I'm getting unlucky. I've even seen this with people I've worked with in my, my mental health role.
Yeah. Who in a more pathological way, have this idea that they're unlucky and they're always getting into accidents. But yeah, I mean, I think ultimately this is about conscience. Right. If you have a stronger conscience, you're going to be less amenable to this whole idea of getting something for nothing. That the opposing idea where I deserve to get something from nothing. That's the positively manic feeling. It's grandiose because of course, no one deserves anything more than anyone else. Right. So even if you make a lot of money in business and what's one's relationship to people who are poorer than you or even to beggars, you have to convince yourself that you deserve it.
You've put all this hard work into it. That it's not just the fact that I was luckier than someone else because that is naturally going to make us feel guilty.
45:44 Erin: Yeah. And isn't mania just a defense against, I mean, you know, one in say, Dobbs's position probably has to be manic in order to just survive on a daily basis. Like, you know, you have to believe that you're going to get out of it in order to. Not my understanding of mania. Well, Dobbs is mostly against depression.
46:04 Wes: Yeah, yeah, it's a defense. I mean, so you can think of mania in different ways. Right. It can be a full blown, you know, someone can be bipolar and have manic episodes in which they're positively psychotic. But also the manic defense is something we, we all employ to avoid feelings, even, even just feelings of sadness or maybe even feelings at all. So we stimulate ourselves, say, by looking at our phone or something like that. That's a, you know, you could arguably call that a manic defense. But I think for Dobbs, he is right that, you know, you could say, well, there's a manic element to him going and getting dressed up and shaved and all that.
Instead of tending to using the money that he's getting to get himself in a better position to get a job, for instance. Although arguably looking better would help him. But I think the true manic moments in the film are when, for instance, Dobbs gets animated by this idea of getting the gold or when Howard is doing that jig. That's really the spirit of the mania in the film. And also in the moments I think of laughter, maniacal laughter, which Has a much different quality at the end of the film than earlier on. So earlier on, I guess. And Howard's laughing again.
What it reflects is this both mania and depression in psychoanalytic theory are about connection to the. The object. Right. Ultimately to initially to the mother or someone in that role. In the depressive position, you are. You're beating yourself up because you want to preserve the object in idealized form. So all the complaints you have against the object are turned against yourself so that you don't have to be disappointed with the object. That's the depressive reaction. The manic reaction is to say, I am the object. I am the ideal one. I can be my own perfect mother or fate can be that.
So I can get the gold out of the hill for nothing. I don't have to work. I'm not depending on anyone outside of me. I'm all powerful. I'm God. All those things go to being mother or being God or being above work. Those are all manic manifestations of the manic.
48:18 Erin: So I'm writing this down as part of my self help ritual. Be more manic. Okay, I get it.
48:24 Wes: Yeah. So mania doesn't work. Depression doesn't work. Those are both, again, these kind of impaired relationships. Relationships to the maternal. But I feel like I'm getting too psychoanalytic in this.
48:37 Erin: Okay, well, in the next part I think we'll touch on. Is it McCormick? Is that the guy that they work for in the oil derricks? I'd like to talk about him a bit maybe. And then we'll talk about other elements of the film. Cody.
48:49 Wes: Bandits. Federales.
48:51 Erin: Badges.
48:52 Wes: Cody.
48:53 Erin: Badges. Badges. And yeah, I don't want to get it wrong because the line we have in our heads I. Is not the right line.
49:02 Wes: It's the one from Blazing Saddles. Is that right?
49:04 Erin: Yes. Yeah.
49:05 Wes: Yeah. That's why I'm always confused when I see this film. And I was like, wait a minute.
49:09 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we'll touch on all those things and more and get out of maybe the first 25 minutes of the film while we're at it. Okay, thank you.
49:17 Wes: Thank you,
49:21 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Psychedelic Regrets in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Part 6)
Jun 24, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to Subtext. We are finishing up our discussion of Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This is part six in our six part series, so help us God. And we are starting with part six of the poem. The last, last two parts are part six and seven. So we're going to be kind of speeding through them. So here is the opening section of Part 6. First voice but tell me, tell me. Speak again, thy soft response Renewing what makes that ship drive on so fast. What is the ocean doing? Second VOICE still as a slave before his lord, the ocean hath no blast his great bright eye.
Most silently up to the moon is cast, if he may know which way to go, for she guides him smooth or grim. See, brother, see how graciously she looketh down on him. First VOICE but why drives on that ship so fast Withouten wave or wind? 2nd the air is cut away before and closes from behind. Fly, brother, fly. More high, more high, or we shall be belated. For slow and slow that ship will go. When the mariner's trance is abated. I woke and we were sailing on as in a gentle weather. Twas night, calm night, the moon was high. The dead men stood together.
All stood together on the deck for a charnel dungeon fitter all fixed on me, Their stony eyes that in the moon did glitter. The pang. The curse with which they died had never passed away. I could not draw my een from theirs, Nor turn them up to pray. And in its time the spell was snapt and I could move my een. I looked far forth, but little saw of what might else be seen. Like one that on a lonely road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round, walks on and turns no more his head, because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.
2:26 Wes: I'm going to start referring to my eyes as een from now on. I know.
2:29 Erin: It's just. And it's so ugly. It's an ugly sound to. I just. I cringe every time I have to read that.
2:36 Wes: Yeah, I have. Blue een. Blue een. Where does that. Where does. Do we know where that comes from? Is that just made up or is that a Scottish thing?
2:44 Erin: I think it's a Scottish thing. It's. Yeah. I'm not going to be able to find it now in the notes because it was used so early on, but I think that is what I remember from the Glosses.
2:54 Wes: So I like, in this section that we. They're going to try and tell us why the ship is moving. We've speculated a lot about that. And I thought we found out the spirit was doing it. Why does the ship move so fast without wave or wind? And then we get two weird suggestions about what's causing it to move. The air is cut away before and closes from behind. Well, isn't that just what the wind is? Or is there something, some kind of vacuum thing going on? Is it getting sucked forward, so to speak? And then this. We find out that the ship will go slower when the Mariner's trance is abated. So it's as if the Mariner's trance itself is moving the ship. He's got, like, Carrie powers. He's got telekinetic powers, which just by. And virtue of being in a. In a trance, which has something to do. Right. With the whole zombie crew situation and life and death that is moving the
3:47 Erin: ship reminds me of light speed. Like when the Millennium Falcon seems to disappear into space and then reappear. It's just.
3:54 Wes: Or dune folding. Folding space or something. Yeah, yeah, Warp speed.
3:59 Erin: You know what's funny about these voices, though, I just have to say is that it's. It reminds me of, like, children's catechism or something like, you know, asking why, you know, why did this happen? And then there's like a little response that comes in. Or there's some. There's something it's reminding me of that I didn't think of it before, so I didn't look it up, but something of something of that nature, like, why did God create little children? And then there's like, an answer, you know, God created little children because he so loved the world.
That. Right. So this. It's like there's something of that almost kind of childlikeness that is indicative and. Or. Sorry. It's something like that childlike quality of these two voices speaking to each other, where it reminds me of, like, a children's song or of a sort of children's catechesis, and we get. We get an actual little answer. So that's, you know.
4:46 Wes: Yeah.
4:47 Erin: Very strange moment in this poem, which I had completely forgotten about until. Until I reread it for. For the podcast.
4:53 Wes: Yeah. So his Trance is ablated, abated. Sorry. And it kind of wakes up sailing on in gentle weather. But now all the dead men are staring at him. So I don't know what's the good of not being in a trance anymore if this is still happening. And I suppose in staring at him and fixing their stony eyes on him sounds like they're asking to be put out of their misery. Which is not something he really has the power to do. So he can't take his eyes off them. They're staring at him. He can't take his eyes off them until a certain point where the smell is smell as the spell is snapped. And then what happens? He sees something. I looked far forth but little saw of what might else be seen. I guess he doesn't see anything like one that on the lonely road doth walk in fear and dread.
5:43 Erin: Yeah, he feels the presence of something behind him, but he doesn't. He doesn't know what. So he keeps turning around and seeing nothing. And basically, you know, at some point there's going to be a jump scare. But yeah, he can't see it. I just. I just point out that the. The stony eyes that glitter in the moon, it's indicative of the eye of the mariner, which holds the gaze of the wedding guest. Right. So. So something. It's almost like something happens here where what the zombies do to the mariner is what the mariner ends up doing to the wedding guest in the future. Right.
6:15 Wes: Good point. All right, you want to read on?
6:17 Erin: Okay. But soon there breathed a wind on me. No sound, no motion made Its path was not upon the sea in ripple or in shade. It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek like a meadow gale of spring it mingled strangely with my fears, yet it felt like a welcoming. Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, yet she sailed softly too. Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze on me alone it blew. O dream of joy. Is this indeed the lighthouse top I see? Is this the hill? Is this the kirk? Is this mine own country? We drifted o' er the harbor bar and I with sobs did pray. O let me be awake, my God, or let me sleep alway.
The harbor bay was clear as glass, so smoothly it was strewn and on the bay the moonlight lay and the shadow of the moon, the moonlight bay was white all o' er till Rising from the same full many shapes that shadows were like as of torches came a little distance from the prow those dark red shadows were. But soon I saw that my own flesh was red as in a glare. I turned my head in fear and dread. And by the holy rood, the bodies had advanced. And now before the mast, they stood. They lifted up their stiff right arms. They held them straight and tight.
And each right arm burnt like a torch. A torch that's born upright. Their stony eyeballs glittered on in the red and smoky light.
7:40 Wes: Did you say you have a cat?
7:41 Erin: I do.
7:42 Wes: Do you have one where you live? In Utah or Just a. Your parents?
7:46 Erin: My. My. Just my parents. My cat's 18. She's.
7:50 Wes: Okay.
7:51 Erin: She's really senile and too old to. To make the trip out, so. Yeah.
7:55 Wes: Well, I have a cat that when she gets bored, will just sit and stare at me in the most annoying way until. And sometimes meow and sometimes come up and paw me, but for the most part, will just sit and stare at me until I play with her. And that's what this reminds me of. He gets some good news. The wind is finally back. He's moving. It's great. It's getting to land. And then, lo and behold, for me, this is like me trying to sit and enjoy a TV show. Then you look over and someone's staring at you expectantly. Okay, so he's still beset with these. These very needy zombies.
8:36 Erin: Yeah. And then. Well, I mean, I suppose we haven't gotten to that point yet, but it's rather. I find this section to be rather confusing when the torch bearing arms of the zombies become actual torches from outside the boat of the hermit, etc. The pilot and the pilot's boy or whoever. Right. Who come aboard. So it seems like there's a.
8:56 Wes: Each right arm burnt like a torch. Right. Okay.
9:00 Erin: Yeah. It's really nuts. Strange. Yeah. Something like. What does that remind me of? Some logo of something.
9:08 Wes: Right.
9:09 Erin: Not just like, you know, the Olympic torch, which would make sense, but is there a logo that somebody has an arm burning? I don't know.
9:16 Wes: Anyway, well, you're reminding me of the thing outside auto dealerships where the dancing. Big inflatable dancing person with the arms almost look like burning flames.
9:25 Erin: Yes. I love those things. I have a. I have a poem with one of those guys in it and.
9:31 Wes: Oh, really?
9:32 Erin: Yeah. Nobody's ever picked it up. It makes me really mad because I love that stupid thing. Anyway.
9:38 Wes: All right, you want to continue?
9:39 Erin: Okay. I prayed and turned my head away Forth looking as before. There was no breeze upon the bay, no wave against the shore. The rock shone bright. The Kirk, no less, that stands above the rock. The moonlight steeped in silentness, the steady weathercock. And the bay was white with silent light. Till rising from the same full many shapes that shadows were in crimson colors Came a little distance from the prow those crimson shadows were. I turned my eyes upon the deck. O Christ, what saw I there? Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat. And by the holy rood, a man all light, A seraph man on every corse there stood the seraph band.
Each waved his hand. It was a heavenly sight. They stood as signals to the land, each one a lovely light. The seraph band. Each waved his hand. No voice did they impart. No voice. But, oh, the silence sank like music on my heart. But soon I heard the dash of oars. I heard the pilot's cheer. My head was turned perforce away and I saw a boat appear. Then vanished all the lovely lights. The. The bodies rose anew with silent pace. Each to his place came back the ghastly crew. The wind that shade nor motion made on me alone it blew the pilot and the pilot's boy.
I heard them coming fast. Dear Lord in heaven, it was joy the dead men could not blast. I saw a third. I heard his voice. It is the hermit Good. He singeth loud his godly hymns that he makes in the wood. He'll shrieve my soul. He'll wash away the albatrosses blood.
11:12 Wes: Hmm.
11:13 Erin: This is just so. At this point, it's like, you know, we've already had, like, the wind blows and then it stops, and then it blows. Then, you know, they're on the. They're on the, you know, roller coaster, and then the ship stops, and then it's this, that, and the other. And now it's like they're dead. Nope. They're back. Nope. They're dead. Nope. They're reanimated again. Nope. Now there's, like, seraph man standing on every single corpse or corse. Gee, why does and then they're back
11:41 Wes: have to be left out?
11:43 Erin: I don't know. And it's so. It seems that they're flickering. I mean, tell me if this is wrong. They're flickering, signaling to the land with their own light in a way. So they're like, signaling for some kind of intervention. But then they go back into the bodies and continue to work the ship, seemingly eliminating the need for someone to come and help the mariner.
12:07 Wes: Well, I suppose if they see a lighthouse, are they supposed to signal with lights or something? They're supposed to. I don't know.
12:13 Erin: Oh, maybe, Maybe.
12:14 Wes: So you signal back to the land to say you're coming in, but I don't know.
12:20 Erin: Okay, that could be true.
12:21 Wes: A Dash of oars.
12:24 Erin: Yeah. He hears the pilot's cheer, and then the bodies rise up.
12:29 Wes: Well, he saw a boat appear. I saw a boat appear. So is he hearing another boat?
12:34 Erin: Yes.
12:35 Wes: Okay.
12:35 Erin: This is the boat versus the ship, I think.
12:37 Wes: Right.
12:37 Erin: And then. So then the lights vanish. The bodies of the crew rise again. The wind is blowing just on the mariner, inexplicably. And then he hears the pilot and the pilot's boy coming, which is strange because they must be in a rather small boat compared to the ship. So the fact that he could hear them coming is odd. And then he hears the voice of the hermit. So presumably this is like the hermit is right. Right along the shore. So he's very, very close to land. Yeah. Anyway, I just. I forgot how confusing this part was when I. When I came back to read it.
13:09 Wes: It is confusing. Yeah. What is it? It's a joy the dead man could not. The dead men could not. Blast that they can't talk, that they
13:16 Erin: can't yell or that. Blasting it away, stifling it, like their presence couldn't diminish the joy, you know? Okay, maybe that's. That, though, is.
13:25 Wes: Oh, I see. It was a joy that. That the dead men could not get rid of. I think you're right about that. Yes.
13:31 Erin: But it fights against this idea of them as seraphs because they would be trumpeting the joy.
13:38 Wes: We just have to accept that there's just so many contradictions in the poem. It's the poem, you know, he. He includes so much in it. It's. It's chock full of different sorts of images and allusions and kinds of logic. And, you know, that what ran the ship, Was it the spirit or was it his trance or this or that? You know, that sort of thing. Ultimately, there's no fixed logic to any of this.
14:02 Erin: It's a lesson to everybody. If you write something complicated enough and contradictory enough, people will be arguing about it 200 years later. He's creating his own cottage industry of interpreting this poem. Yeah.
14:14 Wes: It's voiced by a marinaire.
14:16 Erin: Right. Loves his marinara sauce.
14:20 Wes: I know. They just called him Sauce for that's his nickname.
14:25 Erin: That's what he loved to share with the albatross. And they sat there and he. Nose to the meatball across the plate. Yeah. So then the hermit is there. You know, the need for the hermit is. I don't know. I mean, we could talk about the hermit and why a hermit and, you know, the significance of this person living along the shore being brought into the poem, obviously, as a Mirror maybe for the mariner or something like that. Right. This is someone who's like alone but happy about it versus the mariner who's alone and miserable. And the hermit is sort of self sustaining and the mariner is dependent.
And even in this instance he seems to be dependent on the hermit. Hermit as someone who will presumably, you know, hear his confession and administer absolution for the sin of killing the albatross, which as far as I know, is not necessarily a sin in the Catholic Church, depending on how hungry the mariner was.
15:17 Wes: You know, the hermit does seem to have some things in common with the albatross. In a way. The albatross is the bird version of a hermit.
15:25 Erin: Oh, with the albatross. Oh, I like that.
15:27 Wes: Even though. Yeah, even though the albatross is mobile and goes to the ships for food and all that stuff. So. Although maybe we can see the albatross is kind of pilgrim in that sense. But the question on my mind is, why is it the hermit who's going to give him absolution and allow him to do penance? And perhaps having something in the. In common with the albatross is important, but I. I guess we're going to find out more in section seven.
15:50 Erin: Okay, here we go. This hermit good lives in that wood which slopes down to the sea. How loudly his sweet voice he rears. He loves to talk with mariners that come from a far country. He kneels at morn and noon and eve he hath a cushion plump. It is the moss that wholly hides the rotted old oak stump. The skiff boat neared. I heard them talk. Why, this is strange. I trow. Where are those lights so many and fair that signal made but now strange. By my faith, the hermit said. And they answered not our cheerful. The planks look warped. And see those sails, how thin they are.
And sear. I never saw aught like to them, Unless perchance it were the skeletons of leaves that lag my forest-brook along. When the ivy tod is heavy with snow and the owlet whoops to the wolf below that eats the she wolf's young. Dear Lord, it has a fiendish look. The pilot made reply. I am afeard. Push on, push on, said the hermit cheerily. The boat came closer to the ship. Cheerily, cheerily, yeah. The boat came closer to the ship, But I no spake nor stirred. The boat came close beneath the ship and straight a sound was heard under the water.
It rumbled on still louder and more dread. It reached the ship, it split the bay. The ship went down like lead, stunned by that loud and dreadful sound, which sky and ocean smote like one that hath been seven days drowned my body lay afloat. But swift as dreams myself I found within the pilot's boat upon the whirl where sank the ship. The boat spun round and round and all was still, save that the hill was telling of the sound.
17:27 Wes: So they're coming out to him on a boat and then as soon as they get there, the. The ship sinks.
17:32 Erin: Yeah, it's. It's reminiscent to me of like the ripping of the temple veil or something. But it's also a great way to just get rid of the evidence of all the ghostly zombie bodies.
17:43 Wes: Yeah. No one's gonna believe him now.
17:45 Erin: Right.
17:45 Wes: I'm reminded of an. At the end of the horror, like The Friday the 13th movies, they always ended with like the lone survivor being kind of put into a car by. Or an ambulance by police, I can't remember. But something like that. He's. His horror story is over and he's the only one who survived. But no one is going to believe him.
18:06 Erin: Well, there's.
18:07 Wes: So what is it about the character of the hermit? Yeah. That makes him suitable? He loves to listen or to talk with mariners. The mariner will have no problem getting this guy to listen to his very long poem.
18:22 Erin: Right. Reminds me of Thoreau at Walden Pond. Thoreau is a pretty bad example of someone who lives in the woods in self sufficiency when he's like going to Hawthorne's house every night for dinner or going to Emerson's house every night, hanging out in the library and, you know,
18:38 Wes: we go into town to get a newspaper every day too. He even says that after railing against the news and as if, you know, the telegram and all this stuff. Yeah, but I had to go. I had to have my morning fix. I went into the town every day for a newspaper and a coffee. Yeah.
18:55 Erin: So it's a hard knock life for Thoreau. Walden Pond. You know, there's something reminiscent of that here. Obviously. I'm also thinking, you know, I didn't look this up, but I. I'm sure that a hermit is not able to hear someone's confession because, I mean, okay, so this is obviously, you know, this is set in some kind of medieval time in which, you know, there are obvious Catholic imagery here. Coleridge is writing out of that tradition. So an older Scotland, whatever British Isles, which is still part of the Catholic Church. And a hermit is someone who, obviously this is a concept that transcends all different kinds of religions.
A hermit I'm almost 100% sure is like a kind of a monk or a brother. It's someone who lives the consecrated life but is not a priest. So someone who could hear confessions and give penance and. Right, because a priest is someone who has to live in community. Right? They serve the community. They have this role to say Mass, to hear confessions, et cetera. Like, they have to be by nature of their calling, they have to be in relationship to other people. They have an important role to fulfill within the community. So this hermit can't really hear his.
I mean, you know, you could tell. You could confess to somebody in air quotes and like the Mariner does with the wedding guest and kind of just unburden yourself in an unofficial way. But the hermit can't give penance. The hermit is living a specific kind of life away from the community, much in the same way that nuns do. Like they're nuns and then they're sisters. People think that all sisters are nuns, but they're not. Right. So much like cloistered nuns where they live, they actually live in community with each other, but they live apart from the world.
20:40 Wes: Right.
20:41 Erin: Hermits are like a step beyond that. So they're supposed to be living apart from the world and apart from other people. So the fact that this hermit wants to talk to people or makes a regular habit of talking with people, I don't know if that makes him like, a bad hermit. I don't know what the. Of the hermits are. I don't think they have necessarily, like a strict. They're not living by a sort of set of rules, because rules are, I'm pretty sure, you know, established within community living, like the Benedictine rule. You know, if you're part of a Benedictine order, you follow St.
Benedict's rule. It's about how communities should operate. Presumably, like, a hermit would take orders or have, you know, have to answer directly to, like, a bishop or somebody. Somebody above him. But anyway, the point is he's not being a very good hermit, and the Mariner is not a very good, I don't know, Catholic or whatever you want to put it by. By thinking that the hermit could give him some kind of absolution. So it's. I don't know if this is helpful or useful. It's just that it's. It's the fact that this hermit seems so interested in the goings on of these ships.
It's almost reads to me as like a gossipy kind of interest. So there's something fishy about him as a hermit. And and maybe there's something fishy about the mariner, too. And as I said, like, what the mariner wants, which is absolution or something. It's almost like maybe what. Maybe the Mariners need to tell a story over and over again, is because he hasn't actually received penance, because he's going to the wrong people. He's just. He's unburdening himself, but he's not actually confessing, right? Like, he's talking to the wedding guest. If we're going to say that.
You know, we talked before about the bridegroom analogy. Christ is the bridegroom. What he should be doing, maybe is going to the bridegroom. Instead, he's going to a guest who's outside the wedding. He's not going to the right person. And that something about that seems to be mirrored in the fact that this guy is not doing what he's supposed to be doing.
22:32 Wes: Right. The wedding guest is waylaid by the mariner, who in a way plays a similar role to the hermit. And being a lunatic probably comes across as the same sort of person. So what do we know about hermits? We know they play a role in different, you know, in Christianity and different religious traditions. You know, you could see it as a kind of early form of monastic life, of seclusion for the sake of the spiritual, I guess. But also people. Do they. They are the sorts of people that are sought out for advice, right? So you climb the mountain or you go into the woods, or you find them in their cave and they're sitting there and they're.
They probably don't smell great and probably not looking so great and. And looking pretty grizzled and old and unkempt and. But anyway, living austerely, but. But for whatever reason, can provide us with advice. And why is that? What. What is it about their sort of life that makes them suitable to hand out spiritual advice, to hand out counsel? After all, you know, when we want that sort of advice, it's sort of a. It's a product of the trials and tribulations of living in the world and living. Living in an ordinary life with all of its troubles.
And a lot of those troubles arise from having to deal with people, which is something that the hermit has solved for himself successfully, for the most part. You know, gets visitors here and there, but he can otherwise have as much alone time as he needs. So I'm thinking about, out loud about what's suitable here about the hermit for the mariner. It is interesting. I mean, I think you're Capturing the spirit of this. You know, when you mention gossip, for instance, the hermit has a plump cushion. He's a bit perverse. In other words, he's excited when he sees the ship.
He's not scared. Push on, push on. The pilot's excited. The hermit is like, oh, this is juicy. I'm really going to get a story from this guy. It's as if we get a version of the hermit who's less interested in providing spiritual counsel and more interested in gossip about what's going on out there in the world. So yeah, maybe very similar to Thoreau's who just likes reading the news. What's the news? Yeah, but is there anything more to say about the religious significance of the hermit or the spiritual significance, the significance of them as someone from whom we try to get spiritual counsel?
And why would isolation be the avenue to that?
25:05 Erin: You're making me think of the importance of this kind of separation as a way to gain perspective or even to create conditions, extreme conditions under which you are then sort of forced into a new relationship with the world. So the hermits sort of self imposed conditions. I imagine the worst smelling hermits were the ones who were the, the pillar saints, like the people who lived on top of pillars. Do you know about this? No, this is real. You know, they're the hermits that live in the woods that, you know, hopefully they have some running water they can bathe in or whatever. But then there are the people that lived on top of the pillars. These are people deliberately were. This has nothing to do with anything. Sorry. It's just fascinating. They lived deliberately at the top of a pillar so that they would not have any access to any comforts at all. Yeah, did so for years.
25:53 Wes: Wow.
25:54 Erin: Anyway, yeah, so this forced perspective change which a hermit is voluntarily doing presumably gives it this kind of like outsider insight into, you know, they have an experience of growing up in a place and of being in relationship with people and then they have the experience of not being in relationship with people anymore. And this I guess gives them more insight into, or in theory would give them more insight by having the relationship with people removed. You know, I'm thinking about this too in relationship to the Mariner, you know, does the Mariner have some special insight as a result of what has happened to him?
Or is he just as lost, if you will, as, as the hermit who you know is supposed to be also, you know, the life of the hermit is supposed to be also for the hermit's own edification or for their own moral purity by staying away from temptation, etc. It seems as, as you and I are both suggesting that the hermit has not learned to care less about. About worldly concerns by virtue of being a hermit. Maybe it's the location of his little hut that is the problem, that he's, he's set himself up in the middle of some kind of, you know, sea thoroughfare that he needs to be further into the woods or something, so he can't be.
27:05 Wes: Yeah. Why is he hanging out with the pilot? You know.
27:07 Erin: Right.
27:08 Wes: He's keeping an eye on everything.
27:10 Erin: A sailor is almost like someone in a religious community in a way. I mean, it's kind of the opposite of that too, but. Right. It's someone who, you know, you're in a close, enclosed environment with a bunch of men who are all of similar mindset to you. So in a way, he's like the opposite of a hermit, but also still sort of in this special sequestered, quasi religious kind of relationship to the world.
27:40 Wes: The sailing vessel is hermetic in a way.
27:42 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know. I mean, I think like, there, there are a lot of similarities, but I guess I wanted to get to something about this relationship to the world from separateness and whether or not it gives you insight or a special kind of wisdom, whether or not we think the Mariner has the special kind of wisdom or if, like the hermit, he seems to not have necessarily gained spiritually from the experience because he's, he's, he's trapped. He's like, like the hermit, in a way, is trapped by his own spiritual foibles. And, you know, he's not seeming to learn anything from being a hermit because he's still to some extent trapped by the world and his relationship to it.
The Mariner, it seems, is trapped in his experience of being. Of what happened to him when he was isolated. He's trapped inside the story. He's trapped in the past. I don't know. I'm trying to talk myself into some deeper connection, but I don't know if I'm finding it.
28:35 Wes: Well, leaving aside the deficiencies of the hermit, it's interesting that we have these three isolated figures. The Albatross, the Mariner. And the hermit. One thing to mention about the hermit as well is that he's connected to the land, just as the Albatross is also connected to the land, the spirit of the land. So in a way, hermit. Right. Is they're, they're, they're permanently camping, they're getting in touch with nature and perhaps that's part of this process. So the mariner has to literally find land, right? And he's trying to get back to land, but in some sense he also has to do that spiritually.
Eventually the albatross has to go. And they can't fly forever. They fly for a very long time, but they have to land somewhere. Eventually the mariner has to. Mariner has to go back into port. The hermit, I think, is representative in part, not just of someone who is isolated, but also someone who's permanently on the land and close to the land. He's not doing the sailing thing, he's not doing the flying thing. So it's more than just. It's more than just isolation. And so then the question is, what is it that the mariner needs? Right. So the land does have more definiteness.
We are talking about the way in which the, you know, the surreal aspect of the pond and the way everything melts into everything else. So in some sense, it sounds like he's looking for more things to be more defined and separated and down to earth and less spirit y and watery and airy and all the rest of it. Shall we read on and see? See what happens?
30:10 Erin: Yeah. Upon the whirl where sank the ship, the boat spun round and round and all was still save that the hill was telling of the sound. I moved my lips, the pilot shrieked and fell down in a fit. The holy hermit raised his eyes and prayed where he did sit, I took the oars. The pilot's boy who now doth crazy go Laughed loud and long, and all the while his eyes went to and fro. Ha ha, quoth he, Full plain I see the devil knows how to row. And now all in mine own country I stood on the firm land. The hermit stepped forth from the boat and scarcely he could stand.
Oh, shrive me, shrive me, holy man. The hermit crossed his brow. Say quick, quoth he, I bid thee say, what manner, man art thou? Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched with woeful agony, which forced me to begin my tale and then it left me free. Since then, at an uncertain hour, now ofttimes and now fewer, that anguish comes and makes me tell my ghastly aventure I pass like night from land to land. I have strange power of speech. The moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me. To him my tale I teach.
31:25 Wes: So, yeah, it sounds like. Well, the hermit, it sounds like he does get some. Some peace right from. From telling his tale of the hermit which forced me to begin my tale and then it left me free. And then it's just occasionally at uncertain hours that he has the impulse. He has anguish of come over him and he has the impulse. The impulse or it's only going to be relieved by finding someone to tell his tale to. In other words, he's a poet. Maybe this is about being a poet and he's running around forcing people to listen to his poetry.
32:02 Erin: Yeah, we're the worst that way. I think that's very true. I do though, think there's no relationship between the hermit and this mariner in terms of the relief that the mariner feels. Correct me if I'm wrong, has nothing to do with having unburdened himself to the hermit in particular. Right. It's just this build up. It's like, it's like an earthquake. He builds up, it seems, this pressure, like tectonic plates building up pressure. And then he must unburden himself and then he feels a relief of that pressure only to have it then build up again. And pressure is not a strong enough word. Right. Woeful agony forces him to tell the tale.
32:42 Wes: Right.
32:42 Erin: So it doesn't seem dependent on the fact that he told the hermit that he gets relief.
32:47 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that sounds right to me. It's not the hermit in particular that matters. What does he mean by shrive me?
32:53 Erin: There's a direct connection being made to Matthew chapter eight.
32:57 Wes: I mean, I think it's right. So literally it's to. Sorry, is to give him penance. Right. Or give him absolution.
33:03 Erin: Yes, yes, yeah, Literally it's to hear his confession and. Yes, and administer absolution, which. Which as I already said, he can't really do. But the hermit looks at him and says, you know what manner of man are you? And this is From Matthew, chapter 8. Jesus has been performing a series of miracles. And this is from the moment where he calms the storm. So a bunch of these miracles happen right in a row in this chapter 8. And so then in verse 23, Jesus gets into the boat. This is when a furious storm comes up on the lake. So the waves swept over the boat, but Jesus was sleeping.
So this is verse 25. The disciples went and woke him, saying, lord, save us, we're going to drown. He replied, you have little faith, why are you so afraid? Then he got up and rebuked the wind of the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. The men were amazed and asked, what kind of man is this? Or in some translations, what manner of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him. It's significant, I think, to read that, to understand the context from which this line is taken. Because the Mariner is asking the hermit for absolution.
And the hermit says, what manner of man are you? Much like the disciples saying this to Jesus. So in the strange way, like the Mariner here is still the Christ figure. He's just been, you know, they're afraid because he's just been resurrected, it seems, right. Like they think he's dead. And that's why this freaks out the pilot and the pilot's boy so much. The pilot's boy goes and goes crazy. But then there's also the suggestion that he. That this might be evil or perverse, this resurrection, right? So, so the pilot's boy goes crazy and says, ah, look, the devil knows how to row.
So the devil, meaning the Mariner. So whether or not he's Christ or the devil, it's like contained within this one, this one person. So. And either way, whether he's Christ or the devil, he would not need absolution from the. From the hermit, right? So it's this really complicated moment, these images kind of folded on each other.
35:08 Wes: So something about the telling of the tale is important to giving him peace. And I guess the hermit is his first experience with therapy. But as you point out, the hermit doesn't have to be a good therapist. It's not really about the hermit. It's just about the telling of the tale. And then he can go and find people on a regular basis to redo that therapy by telling his tale, by getting it off his chest, so to speak. It's interesting. It builds up in him as an urgency to speak, to confess. And, you know, then the question is why that is useful.
We know, you know, there are plenty of theories about why that would be useful in therapy and having to do with connecting and, you know, making the unconscious conscious and connecting words and feelings and various, you know, various other ideas. But in this case, I suppose it's just about guilt and penance and confession by way of confession. It's just about having someone hear about what he did. And I guess in particular the killing of the albatross. Although that, that doesn't, you know, you get the sense that that's not really what he concentrates on when he's concentrating on the horror of the tale.
The horror of the tale is more about the zombie crew and all the rest of it. As far as I can tell, the horrible thing that he did, which really should be the center of the confession, that's very casually treated and very quickly gone over. Oh, he'd shot the albatross. If it were a movie, the shooting of the albatross would not be in slow motion. It would not be a full fledged action scene. It would just be something that. That happened incidentally, in between a lot of other actions. So. So yeah, you don't, you don't get a sense here that. Well, it's unclear what atonement and confession actually mean to him.
What it is he's confessing, what it is he feels guilty about. If anything, does he actually feel guilty? It's all very murky to my een. To my eye. To my een.
37:09 Erin: I like the connection you're drawing, and I think this is something that did occur to me as I. As I read this. This was maybe the first, like, analogy I could draw was. Was with the creative process as well. Is this therapeutic process you're pointing to. I also think of, like, Coleridge as a person who suffered from addiction as well. And I don't know if this is like something. Having never experienced addiction firsthand, I don't know if this is something that's similar where he feels like, the itch, the call to. I'd imagine it would be something that happened at more frequency than this.
Than this cycle kind of suggests. But I'm just wondering about that connection. I also think it's like something in this too, that maybe we're, you know, maybe you were right to kind of point to the hermit. I'm reminded in the way that he puts this of that moment we talked about in the previous episode of Never Sadder Tale was told. You know, sadder and wiser. Thou wedding guest, where it seems like a lot of this is actually dependent on the recipient of the story, rather than it being purely about the Mariner unburdening himself. Because he does say, you know, the moment that his face.
I see, I know the man that must hear me. To him, my tale, I teach. So this is about, you know, having a teachable moment. This is about. Actually there has to be. Not. It's not just about the Mariner unburdening himself. It's about there being a receptive person to hear.
38:31 Wes: And, well, he's warning people who might. Who might go astray. It sounds like he's actually saving people from themselves. It's a cautionary tale, in other words.
38:41 Erin: Right. And what. Okay, so what then? I mean, we talked a little bit about the. And we're going to come now.
38:47 Wes: Don't kill the albatross. Sorry.
38:49 Erin: Right, right. Like what, what about this wedding guest makes him the person? I mean, there's something that seems random about it. Right. And there's something that seems like, as we already suggested, maybe the bridegroom would be the more likely person to need this story or the bride, or somebody who's more central to this event that's happening rather than some random guest. You know, why this guy? It's kind of a.
39:13 Wes: Well, maybe he's the one who would have caught the flowers or something. I don't.
39:19 Erin: I think the fact that he's random too implies something supernatural or Christ like about the Mariner, but in this kind of opposite way. Like, you know, the idea that God gives. God selects the most unlikely people to be the ones who carry out his will, to be the ones who he gives kind of special gifts to. Right. This is a, this is a theme throughout the Bible, that it's always like the smallest one, the most unlikely one, who's the one who gets the glory or gets the gift that gives him this. You know, sometimes a gift or most times gift is like a double edged sword.
Right. But it's like a, usually something that has a positive valence being bestowed on, on the unlikely person. In this instance, again, it's like, is the hermit. I'm sorry, is the Mariner. Now I'm really confusing him. Is the Mariner Christ or the devil? It's a teachable thing. So it's supposed to be about potentially redeeming the person or saving them from. From something which we haven't quite determined yet. So what that says about the Mariner, I'm not, I'm not sure, much less the person to whom he's giving this advice and what the advice is, what exactly the lesson is, I think is like another element of this poem that's so confusing is that it has, as we've already said, so many different possible interpretations and yet the purpose seems to be instruction to a particular end with a particular moral.
40:38 Wes: Yeah. What is the ordinary world version of killing the albatross? What does killing the albatross ultimately represent if not trying to be too independent of one's formative conditions, trying to be too autonomous, trying to be independent of, you know, you could think of it a number of different ways, but of God trying to be entirely self sufficient. And of course there are a variety of images of self sufficiency in the poem that the albatrosses to some extent, although that turns out I think just to be the self sufficiency of nature. And it's on nature, that we have to depend in part.
And then there's the self sufficiency of a ship, of the Mariner, who aspires to be so self sufficient that he is willing to casually kill the albatross or feels compelled to do that. The supposed self sufficiency of the hermit. Right. Which turns out not to be real. I guess if you translate it into real world terms, you're looking for people who are uncomfortable with dependency and intimacy, let's put it that way. Or are hubristic, are maybe narcissistic, maybe overly self involved, but are in some sense disconnected from the social fabric. A wedding guest, you think is actually plugged into the social fabric.
That seems to be their role. Right. I mean, in attending a wedding, they are part of the community. So, you know, you find the Mariner at some communal event and it's as if he can spot an imposter, maybe tell them that they're going through the motions, but they're doing it more deeply.
42:11 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. Because it gives credence to this idea that it's not deliberately or precisely not the bride or bridegroom that's being chosen to receive the message. And also like someone who is. Yeah. Who seems to be, on his face to be part of this. Yeah. Of the ceremonial rights of the community. Which I think like a wedding is perfectly, you know, maybe this gets to some of what we were talking about in the first episode about the significance of the wedding, that like this is a. At least at the time that the, that Coleridge is harkening back to.
This is both a religious and a social ceremony that has double. A double function. I mean, I suppose these things wouldn't have been tweezed out the way that they maybe are today. Right. But it's not a Mass, so it's not something that's like purely religious in which everyone is partaking, but it's also not something that's just like a birthday party. Right. And some. It's like both of those things celebrating an individual personal kind of joining together. And it's also a community celebration as well, and something that would incorporate a Mass.
43:13 Wes: Yeah. And we, you know, we could see this more broadly as a warning about the nature of ritual itself and the nature of social forms and the way in which they can become devoid of deeper meaning or separated from what it is that they're trying to signify. And, you know, the church historically was criticized for this. So Erasmus. Right. Who's not a Protestant, obviously, but was very critical of the Church. This is one of the things that he was on about as a humanist, the sense in which, say, monks just go through the motions. They do what it is they're supposed to do, but it's all very rote.
It has no deeper spiritual significance. And in the Chinese tradition, right, this is the sort of things that Confucians were criticized for as well. It all comes to seem very superficial. So I'm just speculating here, but if one is showing up to a wedding to annoy people, one of the underlying motivations could be that, you know, to say, yeah, you're going through. You're going through the motions here, but you are at a spiritual level divorced from the substance of this. And that's my. That's my warning to you. Shall we read the final part?
44:22 Erin: Yeah.
44:22 Wes: What loud uproar bursts from that door, speaking of the wedding. It's about to burst out. Finally.
44:28 Erin: What loud uproar bursts from that door? The wedding guests are there. But in the garden bower the bride and bridesmaid singing are. And hark the little vesper bell which biddeth me to prayer. O wedding guest, the soul hath been alone on a wide, wide sea. So lonely twas that God himself scarce seemed there to be. O, sweeter than the marriage feast. Tis sweeter far to me to walk together to the kirk with a goodly company. To walk together to the kirk and all together pray while each to his great father bends. Old men and babes and loving friends and youths and maidens gay.
Farewell, farewell. But this I tell to thee, thou wedding guest. He prayeth well who loveth well, both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small. For the dear God who loveth us he made and loveth all. The mariner whose eye is bright, whose beard with age is hoar, is gone. And now the wedding guest. Turned from the bridegroom's door. He went like one that hath been stunned and is of sense forlorn. A sadder and a wiser man. He rose the morrow morn.
45:36 Wes: So here we do. We do seem to get again a call to being on land, so to speak, to being part of the natural world. We get the wedding feast or the marriage feast compared to something sweeter, which is goodly company and this very nice vision of a community. Loving friends who are assembled outside in a natural environment, Right. They walk together to the kirk. I guess the kirk is the church, Right. So they go to church, Right. So maybe I'm wrong about the Natural environment. Part of this. All right.
46:13 Erin: Yeah. I think you're pointing to something really strange about this, which is like, I think this ends in a really uncomfortable place because we have. What's sweeter is to walk together to the kirk. So there's also the suggestion that they're in transit, but they're never arriving. Much like the idea that he can never be fully divested of this experience, that it never leaves his body. He tells it and it seems to leave, but then it reappears. Right. It's like an illness that can't be cured or something. It's in transit. He's never arrived. We do get this in the following stanza, to walk together to the kirk and altogether pray.
But we're never like, quite inside the church. Right. There's a strange thing that happens where we're walking to the church and then we're all praying, but the poem kind of never goes inside the church. And then, in fact, we do get a kind of moral, which is about being part of this community. And I think, like, you know, I like your reading. The idea of not being rote. And this, you know, connection to Erasmus that you're drawing, I think is a really good one. And there's something here about, like, the moral involves being in a community, and that community involving the world both inside and outside the kirk, if you will.
Right. Men. And also, like, the natural world is incorporated into this community.
47:31 Wes: Right, Right.
47:31 Erin: But then in the Last Beasts. Right. And then the bridegroom. I'm sorry, the. The wedding guest leaves, though he doesn't go into the wedding. He leaves his. In a way, like the. The mariner has just created another wanderer, which. Which. Which makes me think again that he's like. There's something almost demonic or could be demonic about this, where he's. He's turning this inside out. He's. He's not. He's creating more people like him. He's creating social. This is like people who. Who go online and become, like, more lonely and more outcast as a result of the, you know, the manifestos or whatever that they read online.
It's like he's creating these people who are actually discontented and separated from the community in the process of telling the story, which is like a pretty terrifying thing. Right. That's the opposite of what a story, like any story on its face, should be doing, which is like providing a collective narrative, a way to fit into a community better. He's. Instead, it's like he's creating these isolationists.
48:32 Wes: He's creating These isolationists?
48:34 Erin: Yeah.
48:35 Wes: What do you mean? What?
48:36 Erin: He's. He's creating people like him, people who can't go into the wedding feast, people who can't go into the church. He's creating islands rather than adding to the main.
48:46 Wes: You know, I thought he was trying to save them from becoming islands.
48:49 Erin: Well, you think he is. But this wedding guest responds by turning from the bridegroom's door. That's as strong an image of spiritual isolation and potentially even damnation as it is someone who's turning away from community. Right. Because outside the bridegroom's door is where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Right. Like this is the people who are sent out into the outer darkness. So, you know, something's broken at the end.
49:16 Wes: Well, my. Yeah, I mean, I just had the more benign reading of which I mentioned before, of trying to save people from both. From trying to be hubristically independent of God or nature, but also from being overtaken by ritual. For instance, the ritual of marriage to the point where it no longer has any substance. And so there's a call here to be kind of returned to nature, to all things great and small. And that return to nature is supposed to serve something spiritual. And I guess the wider anxiety is one we've talked about before, many times, about the division between signifier and signified and the worry about getting lost in the land of signification and out of touch with the real.
50:04 Erin: I suppose what I thought you meant by that was that the return to nature would be a way to refresh the ritual so that ultimately there would be a coming back right to the fold. So there would be a new kind of invigoration of the ritual. This suggests.
50:19 Wes: Right. We can't just get rid of signification and ritual and all the communal rights and all of that stuff altogether. No, we can't.
50:26 Erin: And I suppose where the wedding guest ends up sounds to me like something that is something much more modern or postmodern. Right. Which is like the abandonment of the ritual altogether. There's something being totally cut off here. I don't know. Maybe I'm. Maybe I'm wrong to read it in such a dark way.
50:42 Wes: No, I mean, I think it makes sense to go either way.
50:46 Erin: Right.
50:46 Wes: You have a more pessimistic reading. I have the more optimistic.
50:50 Erin: Well, the invocation, I think of, like, turning from the bridegroom's door. That. That seems to me is like a direct reference to the outer darkness, which is hell, in Jesus's parable of the wedding feast.
51:04 Wes: Right.
51:04 Erin: But I hope. I hope not. I hope there's a more positive reading of the. You know, it's funny because it's like the. At once the most, like, overly positive and cloying and most morally moral that we get in the whole poem. I think like is immediately followed by what I see as something like the utter rejection of that moral. Or like someone who becomes lost. Like, so we finally get some kind of answer which is, you know, like a wink, wink answer, maybe not an answer at all. And the response to that, once we finally get it, is the rejection of that answer. Like, to me, that's. That's how I'm reading this.
51:43 Wes: And so, like, he is sadder and wiser.
51:45 Erin: Simplicity. In the end, he is sadder and wiser. Yeah, but I think, like. And this is something that has to do with, like, the absorbing of the whole tale rather than the thing that it can be boiled down to. So maybe this is like anti. You know, anti moral. I mean, in the sense of anti. Boiling something down to a single stanza versus anti morality. Right. Where it seems to me that what's happened is he's. He's somehow digested the whole story and that's what's affected this transformation in him. He's been changed by the story. And the length of the story has something to do with that. Right. And the fact that it follows the like, sing songy, super cute and simple moral. There's something like, kind of ironic and perverse almost about that.
52:30 Wes: Yeah, interesting.
52:32 Erin: I don't know, but, I mean, I want to be convinced otherwise for obvious reasons, but I don't know.
52:37 Wes: All right. Yeah, we can appeal to listeners. What do you think? Do you have. Yes, more pessimistic reading, more optimistic, or something in between? Let us know. Did you have anything else before we end?
52:49 Erin: No.
52:50 Wes: Okay, that was fun. Thank you.
52:52 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Psychedelic Regrets in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Part 5
Jun 16, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
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0:33 Wes: Okay, so, welcome to part five of our discussion of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I think we are ready to start from line 347. I would give you a summary of what we talked about just before this, except that it's been quite a while since we did our second recording, parts three and four. How long has it been, Erin?
0:59 Erin: 20 years? No, at least three weeks. Possibly a month.
1:06 Wes: Yeah, we had a break. I was sick with COVID so we had some delays. So, in any case, what we're going to do is we're just going to jump right in and we'll be recollecting what we said previously as on the Fly. And we'll join it up that way.
1:22 Erin: How fun for listeners. Okay.
1:25 Wes: On the fly, Just like the albatross.
1:27 Erin: That's exactly.
1:29 Wes: All right, so I'll let you. If you want to read.
1:33 Erin: Okay, so we're at line 347. Sometimes a dropping from the sky I heard the Lavrock sing. Sometimes all little birds that are how they seem to fill the sea and air with their sweet jargoning. And now. Twas like all instruments now like a lonely flute. And now it is an angel song that makes the heavens be mute. It ceased. And yet the sails made on a pleasant noise till noon. A noise like of a hidden brook in the leafy month of June, that to the sleeping woods all night singeth a quiet tune. Listen, O listen. Thou wedding guest, Mariner, thou hast thy will.
For that which comes out of thine eye doth make my body and soul to be still. Never sadder tale was told to a man of woman born sadder and wiser. Thou wedding guest, thou' LT rise tomorrow morn. Never sadder tale was heard by a man of woman born. The mariners all returned to work as silent as before the mariners all gan. Pull the ropes. But look at me than old. Though thought I I am as. Thought I, I am as. Sorry, thought I, I am as thin as air they cannot me behold. Yeah. Beforn and than old. That's really like. That's a joke that I make when
2:53 Wes: I. I mean, beforn. How to rhyme anything, by Coleridge. Makeup, words and syntax. I don't think he. He would have any problem with orange.
3:10 Erin: Like a man. Woman. Boring. Yeah.
3:13 Wes: And I ate an orange. It was the biggest orange I'd never had a. Anyway, sorry.
3:25 Erin: Okay. So my edition glosses Lavrock as a. As a lark. It says that it's associated with song. I have an edition that has notes in the back. So then I very badly, like just quickly gloss them by hand. And sometimes I get it wrong. Okay, so Lavrock, in my edition it says lark, a songbird associated with the dawn as a land bird. Its sound like that of the hidden brook suggests that the mariner is dreaming of being ashore. So this is a section that really interests me. Especially the stanza that starts. It ceased. I just like this. A noise like of a hidden brook in the leafy month of June.
I'm just interested in this idea that he is obviously dreaming of fresh water. And we. We talked about this. I remember in previous episodes. It's coming back to me a little bit. I suppose I find it interesting that he's dreaming of water at all. I suppose it makes sense because he's still hearing water regularly. But the sort of complexity of dreaming of a hidden brook while one is on a ship after a long sea voyage is intriguing to me.
4:27 Wes: Yeah. I'm trying to recall what has just happened before. So what's just happened before is that a strong wind reached the ship. The dead men gave a groan. Uprose started working this ghastly crew. Including his nephew for some reason.
4:45 Erin: Yeah. Who randomly has been on the ship
4:48 Wes: the whole time just to make things even more spooky. And I quake to think of my own voice. How frightful it would be. So that was that weird moment when it seems like we're asked to think of the world of the living from the perspective of the world undead. And to see the world of the living as something spooky from their perspective, I think. And then it's the zombie crew, Right. Who are making the sweet sounds that are rising up slowly through their mouths and their bodies. The sounds are darting to the sun. Which is reminiscent of an earlier scene where I think the souls flew out like arrows.
And we were discussing how it is that they flew away like arrows and now they're back to dart around like sounds or as sounds. Sounds come back. They mix. They're dropping from the sky. I heard the. So sometimes a dropping from the sky. I heard Lavrock sing. So what's happening here? Is he comparing them to birds or now or is he actually hearing the birds?
5:54 Erin: Well, it's hard to tell because he's close to shore now. Right. He's drawing closer and closer. So. Yeah. And then the Lavrock song also is transfigured, right? Because it's. Sometimes it's like all instruments, then it's like a lonely flute, then it's an angel song. If it is in fact the Lavrock, then that Lavrock itself is being transformed into several different iterations, which none of which really make sense for the sounds of a single bird, but they also don't make sense as like zombie song. I don't know.
6:27 Wes: Yeah, it's yet again a really creative and surreal kind of picture we get here. Again, it'd be interesting to see an animation of this, but the sort of sounds rising up from the zombie crew and modulating in various ways, changing in various ways, becoming a flute, becoming an angel song. It sounds like the birds are part of it, are just. It's as if the. The sweet sounds have. Or sound like birds or they've become that. I think things are undergoing a metamorphosis. So it's unclear what's what with all these quick, rapid transformations. I think that's the.
In a way, the defining effect of the poem is this lack of any firm boundaries between things, the quickness with which they transform one into the other and. And sort of lack of boundary as well between life and death and the kind of count. The counterintuitive quality of having this undead zombie crew that suddenly produces all these beautiful sounds. But. Yeah. What do you think?
7:30 Erin: Yeah, I think you're right to point out the connection between all these things. The part that you're pointing us to, the. I quake to think of my own voice. How frightful it would be. You know that in itself. Right. Is an imagined voice. And of course, like, you know, it's part of the mystery of the poem. I suppose that, like, we keep coming back to this idea that we would like to see an animation of this, I think because so much is described here, or so much feels like this poem is kind of bursting its own seams or its own boundaries. Or maybe it also feels just so unruly and kind of strangely indefinite in the way that it's put together.
And maybe like, you know, Coleridge has continued tinkering with this over time is, you know, Coleridge maybe also gets this feeling from the poem. Right. And continues to have to play with it. But there's so much that needs to be filled in by our own imaginations. Or by Coleridge's own, like, glosses that he puts on. On the poem in later editions, or the things that he changes to try and sharpen it. And so I think it's just. It's. Yeah, so it's kind of too much. You know, there's too much in this poem. I mean, the fact that we're on part five in this discussion indicates, right, that this is too much and maybe a bit too long.
But I'm thinking about, too, about this hazy boundary that you're discussing, the relationship between this sound, which is indeterminate, which we can't. We can't really picture or understand what it is that he's. That he's talking about, and the indeterminacy of who is the. Who is the zombie and who isn't. Also in the passage I just read aloud, right, he thinks. The mariner thinks to himself, I am as thin as air, they cannot me behold. So it's as though he's the. He's the ghost. He's the one who is actually the zombie. And that makes more sense than this ghost crew, right?
Because he's the one who's been inflicted or afflicted rather, with life in death, right? Whereas they were able to just die and be done with it. He's actually the one who was created to be a zombie. So he's the one who. Who worries about his own frightfulness, the sound of his own voice. Whereas the zombie crew is associated actually with stability, I would say a bird associated with dawn, with instruments or a flute or angel song. So all of these things are like humans working with some kind of nature, like, in terms of instruments. You know, the instruments are being operated or animate by a human in order to be played, but it's a natural kind of operation or animation of the instruments.
Same thing, obviously, with the lonely flute. And then the angel song kind of explodes that. So it's more supernatural. But I think of an angel playing a harp, right? That is what I think of when I think of angel song, maybe singing, but also the harp as well, right? And then the stability of this idea of, like, the leafy month of June, so sort of the height of summer, a place that has greenery and water, is kind of a more stable environment in terms of it being ecologically more hospitable to humans, you know, stable for humans, I mean, versus the environment that he's just been in.
You know, I don't know how to draw all that together, but it just. It just heightens maybe the zombie, like, quality of him and his guilt and his isolation, which makes him something particularly undead even in comparison with the animated bodies of this ghost crew, which is just such a bizarre, you know, exploding of that binary. Or, you know, I hesitate to call it a binary because it's not like, oh, right, you know, there's the ghost crew and the Mariner, like the two basic categories we could put people in. But, you know, of that. Of that boundary that you're talking about,
11:12 Wes: if this is merchant marine. Hades, Merchant marine version of Hades, then. And he's the living human being who's making his visit to Hades. And yes, he is the. He is the odd one out. And we could see that from their perspective. Again, him as the. As the spooky one, him as the strange one. So he's been inserted into this world by death in life.
11:40 Erin: Is that the one life or life and death?
11:43 Wes: Life and death. I always get that backwards. So he's in this intermediate state and of course they're, you know, the zombie crew is undead. So in some sense they are in that intermediate state as well. But he's on one side of the line and they're on the other. So maybe you could, you know, there's the dead, there's the undead and maybe there's the undead. Maybe. Maybe that's what he is. And it's like thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I mean, although for him, the synthesis will be a return to life. Interestingly enough, it's the voices of the zombie crew that kind of lead us there.
You know, they're pleasant. They sound like instruments and birds and even an angel. And then we get. It turns to the noise that the sails are making. So those. It sounds like, you know. And now it is an angel song that makes the heavens be muted. It's as if an angel comes in and it's. Ah. And then everything is silent. Everyone else shuts up. Then things are quiet enough to hear the sails. And somehow they sound like a hidden brook, which is a very odd sort of sound for sails to be able to make sure. I mean, I can hear the ruffling of the sails.
Right. But how does the ruffling of the sails become a sound of the brook? The water is supposed to be underneath the boat, not in the sails. If the water's in the sails, you're in trouble, normally. So, yeah, we're transformed into this very pastoral woodland scene. But in any case, yeah, he's getting to where he's going by way of this middle realm of life and death, or death and life. How do I remember that. How do you remember which one is which?
13:32 Erin: I don't know. Life in death. It's Linda Lind, Life and death.
13:40 Wes: Okay, so he's got.
13:41 Erin: Yeah, so he's got this matter of life and death. Remember in Arrested Development? Matter of land. When. Anyway.
13:50 Wes: Yeah. Let's hope he's not navigating like Buster navigating.
13:56 Erin: The blue part is the land. You made me realize, like, I was kind of thinking of the. The leafiness because we get the leafy month of June and the brook as being all kind of like part of the sound created by the sails. But it is singled out to be. Just grammatically, it is just the brook that's making the sound. But wouldn't it be the wind through the leaves? That would sound like the sails rather than the brook? Right. So there's a kind of transposition there as well. Like, if. If anything would sound like the wind in the sails, it would be the wind through the branches with the leaves which are catching the.
You know, a leafy sound is like a sound of branches with leaves on them. I'm also thinking about, oddly enough, like, the phrase production for use kind of came. Came into my head from our. His Girl Friday episode because I was just thinking about, you know, the instruments, this idea that I haven't really developed. It just kind of came into my head. But, you know, the animated quality, right, of an instrument that you have to breathe into it. These ghost zombies, you know, they've come in and sort of re. Breathed life into their corpses and reanimated them.
And of course, you know, your focus on the sails makes me think of that as well. I know that's something we talked about in previous episodes, about the ship kind of working with natural processes also being determined by human intervention at the same time. And, like, one skill at sailing a ship. But there is something that's kind of like this similar kind of kind of property. If we think of an instrument as being something that is animated by wind, the same thing is true, obviously, of sails and of a ship in terms of the fact that you can assign.
You could say that, like, you know, as. As Coleridge does at times in this poem, that God or the gods are kind of blowing, right? It's their. It's their sort of instrument that they're blowing into the sails in order to make the ship go. And we talked about the superstitious quality of that, Right? Assigning. Assigning a sort of consciousness behind inanimate elements of nature. But I'm just thinking about that in Relationship to this is really out there. So, I don't know. Bear with me. But I guess I'm thinking about that in relation to the bow and arrow with which he shot the albatross, and whether or not there's a sort of like, this is where I'm getting the glimmerings of production for use.
Maybe you could see where I'm going with that. I'm going kind of far afield here. But I'm just thinking about this in relationship to the bow and arrow as being something that seems like more of a violation in terms of the arrow moving maybe against the wind, or if we can draw a larger conclusion here with all of these various instruments being animated by humans, nature, what have you, if there's something we could tie together.
16:39 Wes: You're reminding me that I think the ancient Greek word for bow and life are the same or similar bios, as in bio, like biology. But I'm not sure I'm helping your point here.
16:51 Erin: No, that's great. I mean, like life. Life itself here, it seems to be, to me, is the. Also like the violated. Sorry, the violatory thing, like the. The mariner's life is, you know, as you suggested, like the thing that kind of violates the scene in the same way that his arrow, you know, violated the albatross. So now he's, you know, he's still the thing out of place or the thing that has, like, the forward momentum that. That is capable of, like, going against the grain in this. Maybe in the similar way. Yeah, he's.
17:23 Wes: You're comparing him to the arrow?
17:25 Erin: Yeah, to the arrow or to the. To the bow. Either way, like something that can either set, you know, send out things that are going to forge their own path or go against, you know, the prevailing winds or whatever the case may be. Something that's transgressive in some way from the norm, if not transgressive in and of itself.
17:45 Wes: Yeah. So maybe the question is, what's driving the ship at this point? Because as I recall, there was an upsurge of wind, and then that went away at some point. And it's not the wind, per se, that's been driving the ship, which is one of the odd things about having the zombie crew work the ship as if they're. So back at 320, strong wind reached the ship. Then it dropped down like a stone. Dead men gave a groan. And then the ship moves on. Yet never a breeze blew up. And I don't think we've gotten a breeze back, despite the fact that we get this comparison of sails making this noise like a brook, which is suggestive of them ruffling in the wind. But there is no wind. So what's driving the ship? I think maybe you were suggesting his life force was one of the options. I think you suggested several.
18:41 Erin: Yes, though we also get the answer in the next stanza, I think. All right,
18:48 Wes: before we go there, let me say one more thing. I was thinking, as you're talking about two, about. Well, the other ancient Greek association here is pneuma, I think, having to do with the wind, but it's also the soul or the spirit. So I think there is an association between wind and spirit or soul. And the ships are of course live or die by whether or not there's a wind. And it's a terrible thing to go down to the equator or wherever it is, there's no wind and be stuck in the doldrums. Right. It's a life or death situation. And as we've talked about before, there's this acute dependency on nature and natural conditions.
One's fate is tied more closely to that on the ship in this little microcosm, this little world that might end or continue on once fate is tied to natural conditions more acutely than is typical. And in this case, at the point where he's doing the life and death thing, he's been severed to some extent from those natural conditions. And the question, it's no longer something natural that's running the ship. It's a little unclear to me what's running the ship. You know, life force, death force, the music, even the. Or maybe the sails are running themselves.
Maybe it's just metaphor that's running the ship. Maybe, maybe it's the spirit of poetry that pushes all of this along the ship as well as the, as well as the poem. Maybe the, the wind here is just the, the figurative itself somehow. But yeah, tell me how, how we get the answer here in the next stanza. Let's take a moment to talk about our sponsor for today's episode, Hellofresh. With Hellofresh, you get farm fresh, pre portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Skip trips to the grocery store and count on Hellofresh to make home cooking easy, fun and affordable.
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22:37 Erin: Yeah. Okay, here we go. Till noon we silently sailed on yet never a breeze did breathe Slowly and smoothly went the ship moved onward from beneath under the keel Nine fathom deep from the land of mist and snow the spirit slid and it was he that made the ship to go the sails at noon left off their tune and the ship stood still Also the sun right up above the mast had fixed her to the ocean but in a minute she gained stir with a short uneasy motion. Backwards and forwards half her length with a short, uneasy motion. Yep.
23:11 Wes: Yeah, let's just stop there for a second because we actually. Yeah, we jumped over a little bit. Never a sadder tale was told, all that stuff.
23:18 Erin: Right. I know. I was.
23:19 Wes: I. I just wanted to mention. Just bring that up quickly because. Is it really that sad? It's actually not that sad.
23:28 Erin: Well, I don't know. I mean, that's a great point. I mean, I think it's as a cautionary tale to think that you could be punished so much for a relatively small crime. I think that's.
23:41 Wes: I mean, he's just had the flutes and the angel song and all. I mean, he said it's been pretty good.
23:48 Erin: That's true.
23:50 Wes: So I think. Yeah, let's bookmark that or bookmark that and try to think about what makes this a sad tale other than the fact that it's Spooky. Right. If that's what that means, then okay. Although I would say it's not the spookiest tale either. But it's more surreal than spooky. Right. I think the fact that it's so surreal works against any of these characters straightforward characterizations. And that's why it's odd to hear it called sad to me.
24:24 Erin: Well, I think, you know, in saying cautionary tale, maybe I was being smarter than I realized there because I think that this is more about the reception than it is about the actual tale itself. Like that there's something in the transmission of the tale that is sad. So he says never a sadder tale was told. And then later never sadder tale was heard. And then the, the repetition of sadder and wiser thou wedding guest. So this is about his moral edification, you know, this is about changing him as a person and making him sadder. It's about the idea that he will be initiated into this knowledge, which is about, I think, the inexculpability. That's not a word of, of this, of this guilt of the Mariner that will then awaken the wedding guest to a kind of deeper understanding of what
25:17 Wes: it's like to be married.
25:19 Erin: What it's like to be married.
25:20 Wes: Hey, you want to know what it's like to be married? Here it is. Or novel starts with shooting the albatross, which is a metaphor for the wedding night. And then after that it's all here we go.
25:37 Erin: Right? Yeah, but yeah, so I think there's something. It's sad for the wedding guest to be bummed out when he meant to be, you know, doing jello shots with his friends inside. Yeah, yeah, but you know what I mean, like it's about the transmission and it's about the fact that the mariner is saddled with this. That's what makes it so sad is that he saddled with it and he has to go and spread the bad news to everybody. He's like the anti evangelist or something. Like instead of, you know, oh, here I'm going to tell this story about eternal, you know, about how I'm going to spread the good news about eternal life.
He's spreading the bad news about how much life sucks. So that's, that's the sad part. But, but I think your, your point is well taken that like this isn't a particularly sad story. I think you're right. I never even thought. I always believe what poems tell me. Like this is a true story. Right. But I.
26:29 Wes: Anyway, so they sail on slowly and smoothly went the ship. Okay. And so you, as you mentioned, we get the answer from the land of mist and snow. The spirit slid. Slid like a snake.
26:42 Erin: Oh, it's icy. It's from the land of snow.
26:44 Wes: He's sledding. Sliding rosebud.
26:49 Erin: There we go.
26:50 Wes: So he's making the ship go. That is interesting. Slid. So, okay. But as soon as sails at noon left off their tune. Okay. So the sails are continuing to make their own music. And. And there's that quality of the music running. So it's as if the, you know, instead of wind, we get spirit and music.
27:08 Erin: And no sooner do we identify the ship mover than it's gone. And the ship is standing still now.
27:15 Wes: Right.
27:16 Erin: Without ever being told that the spirit left or where it went or if it was just being thrown into the fire with rosebud.
27:23 Wes: It's very up and down the story. Yeah, Never was enough. More up and down story told. All right, so the. This is. The. This stanza I really like. It's one I've referred to actually several times in our conversation where you get this image of the sun being directly above the mast and fixing her to the oceans if the sunlight is coming down, pinning the ship to the ocean. And I think we had started much earlier, we had gotten that image of the ocean of the ship being something like a painting. Right. And very static. And then she stirs again, a short, uneasy motion.
28:07 Erin: I like how that repetition kind of performs that pawing horse that's, you know, moving back and forth. I didn't notice that really until I read it aloud just now.
28:16 Wes: Right, good point. Alright, so do you want to continue figure out how.
28:20 Erin: Yeah.
28:21 Wes: What's going on with the ship again?
28:23 Erin: Then like a pawing horse let go. She made a sudden bound. It flung the blood into my head and I fell into a swound. How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare. But ere my living life returned, I heard and in my soul discerned two voices in the air. Is it he? Quoth one, is this the man by him who died on cross? With his cruel bow he laid full low the harmless albatross. The spirit who bideth by himself in the land of mist and snow. He loved the bird that loved the man who shot him with his bow. The other was a softer voice. As soft as honey dew, quoth he, the man hath penance done, and penance more will do.
29:05 Wes: It flung the blood into my head. She may. Okay, so she made a sudden bound. So we get this image of the Ship taking off like a horse or a carnival ride. So violently. Yeah. That the blood goes into his head and he falls into a swound. It is a swound.
29:25 Erin: It's a swoon, but it has to run.
29:27 Wes: He's swooning, and it's.
29:29 Erin: It's a swoon where you fall to the ground.
29:33 Wes: So he's in a fit on the ground, having a seizure. Don't put a stick in his mouth. Call 91 1. I. Okay. So then he discerns the two voices by him who died on cross. Is this the man by him who died on cross? What is that?
29:48 Erin: I don't know. And that.
29:51 Wes: Are they just swearing by Christ? Is that by, you know, like, by God? By. By Christ. He is the one.
29:58 Erin: You would think, though, that would be Scottishized if it was a. If it was an oath, right? Because I. You know, he. He violates the meter countless times. So he could have just said, by him who died on the cross.
30:13 Wes: Yeah. You get two unstressed syllables. On the cross. By him who died on the cross. Died on cross. Yeah. Very strange. With his cruel bow. So, okay, this is the guy who killed the albatross. The spirit in the land of the mist and snow loved the bird that loved the man who shot him with his bow. Did we know that the albatross loved him?
30:34 Erin: Yes. Well, I think. I think I mentioned this much, much earlier, like, maybe in the first episode, because I was most taken by these lines as a cipher to kind of understand the rest of the poem. Like, I think. I think I recalled this at the moment when he actually does shoot the albatross. And when we talked about whether or not this was such a terrible crime, but, you know, did the Mariner know? I don't know. Does this provide some, like, belated context for. Was there a friendship montage where he and the albatross were, like, sitting on the ship, you know, laughing and having fun? We were not privy to this until this moment. Right.
31:15 Wes: If we make an animation of this, there's got to be that montage. That's awesome.
31:18 Erin: Right? Yeah. You know, walking along on the deck
31:22 Wes: together, laughing, playing deck croquet, doing the spaghetti thing. Have the same piece of spaghetti in their mouth. Anyway.
31:35 Erin: Yeah. So I think I talked about it then, but at this point, what strikes me is the chain of associations that this grammatical structure sets up. Yeah. Degrees of separation here. And they all knew Kevin Bacon. Yeah.
31:52 Wes: This looks very much like a Christian allegory at this point. Right. He sacrifices the bird that loved him. Where does penance fit in do we do penance for having killed Christ? Not really, right?
32:07 Erin: No, not really. I mean, you know, so penance is for sin. When we sin, then we have to do penance. Whether or not this is a sin has been kind of an open question throughout this entire poem. Right. Like, the idea is that Christ, in a way, does the penance for you. Yeah, yeah. So it's not the kind of endless atonement that seems to be on display here with this idea of like the, you know, the. The parable of the wandering Jew. Or even I think of like La befana in Italian. I'm thinking of this just because it was just epiphany and Christmas, of course.
Right. But like, in Italian folklore, there's a similar kind of figure who. This is the old woman who is always cleaning, coming along to each house, waiting for the Christ child to come. Right. And is never, never has the Christ child come into the house. Like, that's the whole point of La Befana. So. And I think there's a similar kind of figure in other European folklore as well, so. Or she gives. No, no, she's cleaning. Well, there's thing with cleaning and then she's delivering gifts. But she's like the magi. But she's always leaving gifts for children in anticipation that that will be the Christ child.
But, you know, so she does this eternally. Right. So anyway, the idea of like eternal having something you can't expiate, that you have to keep atoning for forever, is kind of the opposite of the whole point of Christianity.
33:37 Wes: Exactly.
33:38 Erin: Yeah.
33:39 Wes: Well put. Well, that is a sad tale. Maybe it is the saddest tale after all.
33:44 Erin: See, I told you. When it's about guilt, it's sad.
33:48 Wes: Right.
33:50 Erin: Catholics feel like this is the story of their faith, but it's actually not Catholic guilt. Jewish guilt.
33:55 Wes: Yeah. Right. Okay. And we had been reading early on, we had been reading the Killing of the Albatross as a way of rebelling against dependency upon nature. And of course, being, as we've mentioned before, being a mariner and being on the. On the sea, on a. On a boat, that makes us more acutely dependent on nature, in particular on the. On the wind, but on other circumstances as well. And to kill off the albatross is to. Is to say, yeah, I'm not going to depend on you anymore. I don't want to have to depend on you. How does that fit in with this idea that the main role of the bird now is to have been something loved by the spirit from the land of Mist and snow.
What does that mean? I mean, in a way, I. I guess the albatross comes from that land right down in Antarctica, I think. And so, you know, that's the actual geographic origin of the albatross. And then we get the idea that, that it is loved by its, you know, ecological niche in a way, that that niche is kind of an animated and values this animal.
35:10 Erin: The word dependency, you know, that you use and that we, We've used in previous episodes. I'm thinking too about this chain of dependency that love sets up here. Like, you know, as I said, literally, grammatically, but also just this idea that, like there is a. A strange kind of emotional dependency that is created in relationship, which seems like that's a kind of a uniquely human. Right. Sort of dependence. And yet here it's established ecologically, as you're saying.
35:41 Wes: So the niche loves its species. It's an interesting idea. You know, the. Evolutionarily, the niche has a role in producing the species. So in a way it's like a parental. You could see it as a parental figure. Right. It's a formative force and it's something that links the physical environment to the phenotype of the animal, to the very form of the animal. And the very form of an albatross obviously is linked to not just the land, but to the. To the wind itself, which is important. And it can be obviously seen as a representation of the wind as, as, as well, but it's. But paradoxically, it's also an ungainly creature.
36:18 Erin: Sure. And it's also marked, of course, evolutionarily by predation. Right. Like there's an interdependence, I think, evolutionarily speaking, between the. The predator and the prey in terms of their sort of like co evolution. So I suppose it makes sense that it links back up to the. The albatross's predator in a, In a strange relationship of, of dependency in this way. Like, like it's, it's following him. He's violated the, the ecosystem. He's not part of it and he's made the stain on it or he's. He's removed something from it that has caused the, you know, the Jenga tower to fall, apparently.
Right. But I think like, there's also within evolution itself this idea that you evolve as part of a system and that involves the thing being eaten, trying to escape being eaten and the thing doing the eating, trying to become a better killer. Right. Of the, the things it wants to eat. That too is kind of like marked in probably in Some way in the form of the albatross itself.
37:20 Wes: Who would be.
37:20 Erin: Do we talk about the natural predator of the albatross in.
37:25 Wes: Yeah, I just, you know, the only one I know, I know of is through the. Our Planet, the David Attenborough stuff.
37:33 Erin: Right, right.
37:34 Wes: They have a great little section on albatrosses and tiger sharks are their natural predators because they. They know to go. You know, they know when the juvenile albatrosses are having their first flights and often are falling into the water, and the tiger sharks migrate all the way there to wait around so that they can eat the ones that fall in the water. I know of no other natural predator for the albatross except that now there is invasive species like cats and dogs and stuff that eat albatross eggs, you know, and from a little search online, I didn't find anything else. So not many real predators, at least of the adult, you know, of the adult birds, so.
38:17 Erin: So they're at the top.
38:19 Wes: Yeah. I wouldn't think of them as an apex. What are. What are they eating? Apparently, the. The maggots from biscuits on sailor ships.
38:29 Erin: The offerings of the spirit of the Land of Mist and make sacrifices to the albatross.
38:35 Wes: Yeah. So there's. There's something here about the violation of the killing of the bird as the killing of. Of one that loved you and. But also the killing of one that was loved by the land, so to speak, or loved by the. The larger environment, the milieu. One of my favorite words. So, so let's, I mean, maybe explore this analogy. The. The spirit of the land loves the bird, the bird loves the man. If we were to take that analogy seriously. Right. We would try to figure out the way in which the bird is in some similar relation to human being as the land of mist and snow is to the bird. But it's hard to figure that. I can't think of anything. How is that. How is the bird a formative influence on man or a. Something analogous to an ecological niche for man, except insofar as it does that symbolically. Right. If it's a symbol of good luck, for instance. Right.
39:38 Erin: I mean, I'm. I'm totally convinced by that. I think. Symbolic reading. I. I was just thinking, you know, quite literally, if we argued, if we had to say in purely practical terms why the bird would love the man, it would be because the mariner was probably the predominant one feeding it the biscuit worms. Right. I'm serious.
39:57 Wes: Right.
39:58 Erin: Because that would be the only way
39:59 Wes: the bird did love the one who fed it tasty treats.
40:02 Erin: Well, yes, well, yes, just like my cat. And that would be exactly right. And that would be the thing that would cause the bird to come back over and over again to be trained to tell you train an animal. Right. And that, that I think fulfills on the most basic level the analogous relationship you're talking about, which is that, you know, the ecosystem between the. The land of mist and snow and the bird is such that the bird performs the function to keep the ecosystem going by eating the things that without the albat maybe would go. Would get out of control or would.
Right. Like there's a mechanism there to keep everything in balance, which depends upon the predation of the albatross on whatever it is that they eat. So then the mariner reverses that equation, right, by instead of like feeding the albatross, which apparently seems to be the natural order of things, is instead feeding on, or wants to feed on the albatross. Going back to my original theory, right, that he killed the albatross to eat him. I don't know. So I'm. I mean, maybe that's. That makes sense or stupid to mention, but it's just.
41:03 Wes: No, no, you know, literally I'm just. Yeah, I'm trying to. Reading of this, but no, I. That makes sense. I'm trying to fit it into the larger reading of. The real crime here is to try and transcend natural and formative conditions, I think, which is what hubris is. Is about, right? So Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost, one of the. The fun thing about that rebellion is he's trying to rebel against the groundwork of his own being, Right. He realizes that it's like trying to, you know, it's like standing on a stool and say, I'm going to get you stool, because I don't like depending on you.
I'm going to get you. I'm going to be number one. No, you can't be number one. You're. You're on the stool, right? So we can't be our own foundations. We have to be dependent. There is some, you know, whether you believe in God or not, there is some ultimate ontological foundation and we can't pretend that we are first. And the killing of the bird in a way is, I think, psychologically motivated by and at the very least symbolic of wanting to rid oneself of any conditions of existence. Wanting to become the unconditioned, so to speak, which is to say God a God unto oneself.
In that sense, we do get some parallel to the killing of Christ. And the idea is that These conditions that determine us, you know, and whether it's parents or nature or whatever you want to think about this, these formative conditions, they are fickle in a sense, and they saddle us, right? The crimes of the father are visited on the son and they saddle us, say, in the case of parents with all sorts of hang ups and trauma. But there's something very natural, you know, that relationship always by nature includes some aspects of love. Even if you just want to think about that in the sense in which it's constructive.
Right. It builds us, it makes us who we are, it synthesizes us, which is a loving act. We are, we are reproduced from those forces. So to rebel against our dependence on nature is to really, in the end, to rebel against love itself. And that again, that's. That's sad. And, you know, maybe. Maybe he's right. Saddest tale.
43:15 Erin: I love that. That's great.
43:16 Wes: Okay, so we will stop there and then we will do the sixth and final section. Is it the final?
43:24 Erin: I hope so.
43:25 Wes: No, we got seven. But we are really gonna have to. We're gonna promise we'll finish because we are gonna definitely finish. So we. You may just hear us read the poem and say, that's nice. All right, so we'll. Yes, we'll continue from section six and the sixth and final part of our recording on the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Thank you.
43:52 Erin: Okay, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Psychedelic Regrets in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Part 4)
Jun 11, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:00 Erin: But where the shadow of the ship lies, the water is red. So the sultry is the redness, is it? So that's why it bemocked the sultry main. So, you know, this is image almost of like blood in the water, you know, is the shadow of the ship. I think that's why it's sultry. Maybe I'm reading this wrong.
0:19 Wes: Well, I'm thinking heat and humidity, something like that. It's not unheard of for it to have a sexual connotation. Are we getting any of that here? I don't know.
0:31 Erin: The moon is a woman, but otherwise, I don't. It's in contrast to the sultry. Maybe the purity of the moon. I mean, there's a respite here, right? From the.
0:44 Wes: Yes, this is. I think you're spot on here.
0:46 Erin: Okay.
0:47 Wes: Yes, yes. The purity of the moon is what mocks the sultriness of the main. The sinful, bad main, bad ship.
0:55 Erin: Well, there's also, I think this punitive quality to the sun is relaxed with the more ameliorative moon. So, you know, one is put in mind of Marian implications. You know, Mary is the intercessor for her son Christ, who can be more of an administrator. I'm sorry, of an administrator of. Of justice, perhaps. Right. So there's something pure but also rather, I think, gentle and more maternal about this moon, which, you know, the purity of the moon and the connection to Mary would connect those two ideas pretty well, I think, if we want to look at it that way. Yeah. So she's coming in, she's interceding, and her intercession seems to be what then induces the mariner to find the water snakes now, now beautiful in this softer light. And this seems to be what allows his conversion of sorts.
1:59 Wes: So all he had to do is change his perspective. Yeah, I guess so. The water burnt alway. The water is burning. I guess that would make things sultry. And it remains that way, remains red even as the moon frosts up, so to speak, cools down the ship. But I presume now that he's looking at the water snakes, which we had read, you know, at some point it seemed like they had legs maybe and there might be maggot, like because they're coming from a rotting deep. Presumably he's looking still at the burning water. Whether that's just, you know, the way.
The way it looks or what it. What. What's actually happening. But when they reared, the elfish light fell off in hoary flakes they're leaving tracks of shining white. It's as if now they are sort of agents of the moon, right? And they're having the same cooling effect, at least when it comes to the light. Light comes off them as if they're shedding pieces of skin. You know, one of the most interesting parts of the poem is the oddness of this imagery, right? It's not just surreal, it's not. It's just. It's quite. I guess surreal is the right word.
But it's not just dreamlike, it's quite out of the ordinary, this cooling effect.
3:10 Erin: I think that in a way we're returned spiritually, if you will, to the scene of the crime, right? So the hoary flakes are like snow. So we're almost in the middle of this sultry ocean at the equator. We're being returned to these Antarctic conditions for his transformation to be. His sort of spiritual transformation to be. Be affected. And I think that there's, you know, there's something too in the following stanza that is a mirror of the witches oils. So, you know, the water snakes are described as blue, glossy green and velvet black. Right prior the psychedelic, I think was the word you used for the waters, like the witches oils at the equator, which burnt green and blue and white.
But here they're described as being like attire. So it's almost the velvet black is like they have rather heavy clothing on, which would be indicative of a colder place. So these water snakes are going to turn out to affect his redemption or whatever we want to call it. Not to put too fine a point on that, but I think for that reason we have to get this gust of cold air, this reprieve and as I already said, this return to, you know, the conditions in which he killed the albatross.
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I might have done that sometimes, but not on the same consistent basis. Hellofresh made it much easier to consistently prepare healthier, fresh meals for myself. Some of my favorite recipes include Hearty Steak and Potatoes, Balsamic Chicken Rustico, and Lemony Shrimp risotto. Go to hellofresh.com subtextsweet for free. Dessert for life. One dessert item per box while subscription is active. That's free. Dessert for life@hellofresh.com subtextsweet that's HelloFresh, America's number one meal kit. Okay, back to the show. Yeah, it's interesting because when they broke into the static realm, we speculated that that might have something to do with the aesthetic, at least the Apollonian aesthetic.
And here he rediscovers, or he discovers for the first time, I guess, the beauty of the things that he thought were a kind of rotting. We had moved from aesthetic stasis to death to rot, which reintroduced dynamism, and then to this spirit that's been pursuing them under the water. And now we've made it transition to the idea that there could be something beautiful in what seemed to be a rotting. So and that. That, as you've pointed out, is his redemption. The ability to see that beauty where he only saw terror. And that's the thing that frees him up to be able to pray again.
It spiritually hydrates him, so to speak. He can now actually speak in more than a whisper. The albatross falls off like lead into the sea. Great image. Great. It conveys the heaviness of it. This continues to suggest that his problem involves his relationship to the natural world and in particular to living things, to other creatures, and maybe to the concept of creaturehood in general. Which would also explain his relationship to marriage. Maybe it's a relationship to propagation. Right. Maggots coming from rot are like propagation according to right.
Pre scientific theory, spontaneous generation would be sexless generation of life.
8:07 Erin: That's a great point. I just wanted to, you know, I figured I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that he blesses the water snakes unaware. Right. So this is what makes this poem so frustratingly complicated is that, you know, seemingly just as unmotivated as his shooting of the albatross was, he's also not really responsible for. Even for his moment of redemption. You know, I don't want to say.
8:32 Wes: Yeah, I think you're spot on here. Go ahead.
8:34 Erin: Yeah, no, I don't want to say that this is a poem that's sort of like anti. Anti. Free will. But it might be. I don't know.
8:43 Wes: Yeah, no, I think you're spot on. I hadn't thought of this. Yeah. This moment where he blesses them unaware. This is directly parallel to the lack of awareness with which he shoots the albatross. I don't know that he describes his. When he shoots the albatross, he just says. And I. Yeah, I just went ahead and shot the albatross. I think it doesn't. He doesn't say, I was. I shot it unaware. But it comes across that way. So I think this has to. Coleridge is purposefully juxtaposing these two moments. The thing that gets him in trouble and the thing that gets him out of trouble are very similar. He's shooting from the hip, in a sense. Well.
9:20 Erin: And there's a kind of.
9:20 Wes: I can see why you would think that maybe this implicates a lack of free will or he's acting from the unconscious. Although I guess you could suppose at this point he's acting out of grace, maybe.
9:32 Erin: Right. But either way, I think, you know, what this highlights is if you like a kind of capriciousness to his internal weather. Right. Like if he is an extension of the natural landscape, which can turn on a dime and, you know, and suddenly decide to make you feel as though you're being persecuted, as if there's a. There's a kind of a thought behind it, but really there isn't. In spite of this desire for mastery over it or for separation or, you know, whatever motivated the killing of the albatross. You know, he's just as much a part of nature as the weather is or any of these other. Or the water snakes or the albatross. Right.
10:13 Wes: Yeah. Makes sense. Shall we do. Yeah. One more section.
10:17 Erin: Sure. And now we're into section five. Oh, sleep it is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole To Mary Queen the praise be Yevon. She sent the gentle sleep from heaven that slid into my soul. The silly.
10:30 Wes: Is this like a Robert Burns poem? I mean.
10:32 Erin: Yeah, exactly. The silly buckets on the deck that had so long remained. I dreamt that they were foolish, Filled with dew. And when I awoke it rained. My lips were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank. Sure, I had drunken in my dreams. And still my body drank. I moved and could not feel my limbs. I was so light almost I thought that I had died in sleep and was a blessed ghost. The roaring wind, it roared far off. It did not come anear but with its sound it shook the sails that were so thin and sere. The upper air bursts into life and a hundred fire flags sheen to and fro they are hurried about and to and fro and in and out the stars dance on between the coming wind doth roar more loud the sails do sigh like sedge.
The rain pours down from one black cloud and the moon is at its edge. I'll do one more. Hark, hark. The thick black cloud is cleft and the moon is at its side like waters shot from some high crag the lightning falls with never a jag A river steep and wide.
11:38 Wes: Yes, the dead men are about to get up.
11:40 Erin: About to.
11:41 Wes: Yeah. So what's going on here? I mean, praise be Evan.
11:44 Erin: Yeah. Praise be Heaven.
11:46 Wes: Mary Queen. Praise be you to you, even. Yevon. Yeah. What is it?
11:51 Erin: I don't know. I think it's supposed to be given to you. Praise be given.
11:54 Wes: Well, you could have just said that.
11:55 Erin: No, it doesn't rhyme with heaven. Or I guess it does, but not. Not enough for him.
12:00 Wes: She could just put a G instead of a Y. Praise be given.
12:03 Erin: Gavin. Praise be Gavin. Mary loves people named Gavin. That's his name.
12:08 Wes: Lots of fun we do be having.
12:10 Erin: Sorry. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So we have a direct invocation of Mary. So I wasn't too far off, I think, with this moon thing. Moon Mary connection. But anyway. But then we have these buckets. I love this. The silly buckets on the deck, which is ridiculous. It's glossed in my edition as simple or homely. So they're filled up with this dew is what he's dreaming. And then when he wakes up, he realizes that it's raining and they're filling up these buckets. And of course, I'm thinking of the Mariner as a vessel for these natural forces. Right. He, too, is being filled up like the bucket.
But also, it seems like he's been filled with grace at the right moment and is now receiving his redemptive kind of hydration. Yeah, hydration. The albatross. Then, you know, just prior to this having fallen off of Him. You know, the suggestion here is that the albatross both marked or cursed and kind of blessed him at the same time. So now he's. He's gotten rid of this burden. He's. You know, if he's a Christ figure, then the sleep is like a. It's like a death. And in a way, this. This rain and this replenishment or this hydration. Right. Is like.
Is like being reborn or being rather resurrected, right?
13:27 Wes: Yeah, that's what it seems to be. The dead men are going to get a different kind of resurrection, right?
13:33 Erin: That's right. Should I keep reading these?
13:36 Wes: Straight up zombies? Yeah, I think. Yeah.
13:39 Erin: Yeah, do it. Yeah. So he's. He thought he had died and thought he was a ghost, but in fact, he's. He's just truly resurrected. And then there's. There's a wind that's coming. The black cloud parts, and then we have this moment. The strong wind reached the ship. It roared and dropped down like a stone beneath the lightning and the moon. The dead men gave a groan. They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, nor spake, nor moved their eyes. It had been strange, even in a dream to have seen those dead men rise. The helmsman steered. The ship moved on, yet never a breeze up blew the mariners all 'gan work the ropes, where they were wont to do.
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools. We were a ghastly crew. The body of my brother's son stood by me knee to knee. The body and I pulled at one rope, but he said nought to me. And I quaked to think of my own voice, how frightful it would be. The daylight dawned. They dropped their arms and clustered round the mast. Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths and from their bodies, passed around, around, flew each sweet sound, then darted to the sun. Slowly the sounds came back again, now mixed now one by one. This was Wordsworth's idea that he.
He gave himself credit for, right? This idea that the bodies of the crew would be reanimated to get the ship back where it belonged. Am I right for. Okay, remembering that correctly?
15:04 Wes: I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I know he. He gave himself credit for something, and that sounds right, but he gave himself credit for a few things.
15:11 Erin: You know, I don't know that I. That I love this point. This is the point at which I think, okay, you know, this is the really unbelievable part.
15:23 Wes: We're supposed to believe this.
15:26 Erin: I liked the whole, you know, death and life and death thing, but this is just a bridge too far. No, but there's, you know, there's something.
15:33 Wes: Well, is it consistent here? You know?
15:35 Erin: Yeah, yeah. This is what I mean.
15:37 Wes: I mean, their spirits have already shut off. Like his bow.
15:41 Erin: Right, right.
15:42 Wes: Like an arrow from his bow.
15:44 Erin: It does seem like this is just one too many complications in this. In a poem that's already kind of overburdened with various forms of, you know, immortal and mortal complications. But, you know, so we have the rain, and then we have this, like, big storm coming. And now we have again, we have something approaching which is very similar to the undead ship. It's one too many reanimations. One too many. You know, I was almost dead, and then I came back to life. Kind of twists and turns here. And this is supposed to be, like, a good thing, I guess, because this is how he gets back home. He needs the whole crew to run the ship. Otherwise, I suppose, it would have been too unbelievable for him to get all the way home on a ship that big with a crew of one. So this is how they. You know, how. Presumably Wordsworth suggested they fix the plot hole. Is that.
16:37 Wes: Oh, is that right?
16:38 Erin: Interesting. I'm assuming, right. Because otherwise people would say, well, I don't believe that. How could he get home? Just one guy on a ship. That's the thing they would critique the realism of.
16:48 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. You know, we get another paradoxical image. There are lots of them in here. The strong wind dropping like a stone. And it seems to be the thing that reanimates the. The dead men. It's as if the wind becomes their spirit. And later on, the helmsman is steering never a breeze up blew. So a strong wind comes instead of just blowing the ship normally. Which would be plausible, right? That would be the plausible way. Even if he's the only one left. Yeah. He could do it if he has a wind. Instead, the wind comes, reanimates the men, and then it's gone. And then the ship moves without the wind, but with the crew.
17:26 Erin: Right, right.
17:27 Wes: I guess you need the crew more than you need the wind. Or they're their own wind. If they've been reanimated by the wind, the crew, in some sense, are the wind. So maybe we could see that as a kind of fusion of the agency of the crew members with the natural elements on which they are usually dependent, as on chance or fate, but, you know, but for movement. So they become their own source of movement here.
17:56 Erin: Well, I like this because you're, you know, you're. You're kind of submerging within the. The crew. Like the two things that we actually do need to make the ship go. Right. The, the ship in a way is like a clockwork mechanism or something. Right. That. Like that. But at the same time. Right. It's. It's also like dependent on wind and something that's extremely natural. So it's like these two sort of semi opposed forces coalescing in order to get the ship to move. And so here I think you're suggesting that this is like combined within these reanimated bodies. So we have them working the ropes, which is almost like the wind working them or the crew members. It could kind of go either way in that. Well, I suppose it says the mariners all, again, worked the ropes. This is the first time, is it, that these, the sailors are referred to as mariners, or am I. Yeah, I think so.
18:53 Wes: I think the only other reference to. Is when the wedding guest calls him a mariner.
18:59 Erin: Right.
18:59 Wes: Marine heir.
19:01 Erin: Right. Yeah. The crew, they're called the crew. They're called. I don't know, I suppose I've been referring to them as sailors to distinguish them from the mariner, but maybe that's just my own distinction. Certainly they're called the crew.
19:16 Wes: Right.
19:16 Erin: And so here. That's interesting. Here they're all mariners. We are all the crew of his nephew.
19:23 Wes: Nephew's along for the ride. And that's the first time we learn that. I don't know what this little stanza is doing other than for shock value.
19:33 Erin: Well, it's very.
19:34 Wes: My brother's son is.
19:36 Erin: Yeah, yeah, it's very strange. The brother's son, you know, gets this individualized shout out, but then, then he becomes the body. The body and eye pulled at one rope.
19:48 Wes: Yes. Spooky.
19:50 Erin: Yeah. So I don't know what that's supposed to do. It's supposed to show what.
19:56 Wes: I think it's just supposed to be spooky and creepy.
20:00 Erin: Well, it's not just the body of my brother, but my brother's son. So there's something here about. Right, about, I don't know, the extreme unnaturalness of the fact that like he's, you know, the younger generation is, has also died in this male. But, but we're learning this too late. You know, if there was a little boy.
20:17 Wes: Yeah. And I don't know.
20:20 Erin: Yeah.
20:21 Wes: But yeah, I see it as a little bit gratuitous. But then the interesting part here is, you know, so he, the nephew says nothing and then he says. The nephew says nought to me. And I quake to think of my own voice, how frightful it would be. So that's an Interesting reversal. The idea that he's the one who's frightening. He, the living one, would be frightening to the dead. That's inventive.
20:46 Erin: And also that, certainly. But also that his sort of surprise that this reanimated corpse is not speaking to him supersedes his own lack of speech towards this. Right. If anyone would be talking like, hey, who. Who are you? What's going on here? Presumably it would be the one who's actually alive. Right. And so instead, what we kind of get by the end of the sentence is the knowledge that neither is saying anything to the other.
21:17 Wes: They're both not speaking from this perspective of the dead. They probably. I think the supposition is that they would assume he's just one of them. Hey, we're all just dead men manning this boat, right? Nothing out of the ordinary about that.
21:32 Erin: We've been drafted by the wind.
21:34 Wes: Speak. What the hell is this? There's a living guy on board. What the hell?
21:39 Erin: Get him.
21:40 Wes: That's weird. That's scary. So you. Yeah. You get this reversal of perspectives where the dead might look upon the living as their own sort of haunting or weirdness or being out of place.
21:57 Erin: The mariner, our mariner, joins in, you know, but they have a very specific purpose here. Seems they, you know, they get right to work their limbs like lifeless tools. You know, they're just. They're purely there to do it. One. One last job before they're. And that's the other thing, is that they. They all were off to heaven or hell. So I guess they've been recalled.
22:17 Wes: Yeah. I don't. It's just such an inconsistency. I don't know how you have a look at it. But they will make now sweet sounds. There was a point, right, in the poem when they were alive when no one could speak because they were just so thirsty.
22:28 Erin: Yes.
22:29 Wes: And now presumably they don't speak because they're dead, even though they can man the boat. But they can emit these sweet sounds which then seem to take upon a life of their own, fly around, dart to the sun. So we get another darting. They've already dart. You know, the spirit's already darted out.
22:46 Erin: Right.
22:47 Wes: Right now they're producing sweet sounds which start then come back and mix.
22:51 Erin: Yeah. And this does remind me of the whistling and groaning that come through the holes of the eyes and mouth of death.
23:03 Wes: Right.
23:04 Erin: Yeah. But this seems better because they're sweet sounds. So. And then.
23:09 Wes: Oh, yeah, yeah. Back then it was creepy and terrible.
23:13 Erin: Right. Now it's just that now it's all good. The sounds of spirits once again departing from zombie bodies. So this is much sweeter.
23:23 Wes: It's like a tin whistle now.
23:26 Erin: Yeah.
23:27 Wes: Before it was more like someone with a chipped tooth kind of whistling. Now it's more like a melodic recorder.
23:36 Erin: Well, and this is going to be interpolated with birdsong. Right. In a second. And potentially the idea that he's now back home or he's near shore.
23:49 Wes: Right.
23:50 Erin: So let me read a few more stanzas here.
23:52 Wes: Well, I think we're out of time.
23:53 Erin: Oh, are we? Okay, well, then that's just a preview of the next few stanzas.
23:58 Wes: Yes, I think. Yes. We've gotten to a point where we can get through this in one more recording or two more episodes, right? Yeah. Two more parts. One more recording. Two more parts. That'll be parts five and six. We will finish this up, but for now, we must say farewell. What would the Mariner say? I think they'd say not adieu.
24:21 Erin: That's not a sweet sound. They would say not ahoy. Don't even the door on the way out. No, that's not. Say something like, don't curse me with your eye. If it's all the same to me. And. Yeah, okay.
24:39 Wes: How does a sailor say good night or goodbye? Is there a specific sailor term for that?
24:44 Erin: Hi ho. No, those are miners.
24:48 Wes: Godspeed.
24:49 Erin: Godspeed. Fare ye well. Ahoy is hello. So I don't know.
24:53 Wes: Yeah, like, what's the opposite of ahoy?
24:55 Erin: I know ahoy isn't like aloha, aloha, where it can mean hello and goodbye. Huh.
24:59 Wes: Right.
25:00 Erin: Too bad it's almost the same letters, but very different terms.
25:05 Wes: Okay. All right. Well, till next time.
25:08 Erin: Okay, bye bye. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Psychedelic Regrets in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Part 3)
Jun 03, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:00 Wes: represented, it's not about our need for it. So if it's a painting of an apple, it doesn't satisfy us by allowing us to eat the apple or enjoy it as an apple, but we enjoy it as a representation. We enjoy it qua representation. In this case, they are actually in a position of need. So the undrinkability of the water or the. The ships being, in a sentence, painted by no longer being moving is a problem. And that's the form of their interest in the situation. So for us as readers of the poem, we're in a much different position than the characters within the poem, obviously.
And our enjoyment, this is something, I think, that has come up before, maybe in the turn of the screw. But our enjoyment, in a way, is predicated on their suffering, which goes for, you know, it's not real suffering, obviously, but it goes for a lot of art, especially tragedy. So pain out of hypothetical, getting pleasure, the fantasy of human suffering or human pain, which is one of the paradoxes of tragedy and one of the questions of how we do that. Because we're not just sadistically enjoying the pain of the other. We empathize, for instance, in tragedy.
And yet it is a pleasurable empathy or pity, or however you want to put it. Which is not to say that in this case, this is, you know, a tragic medium. Exactly. Or that it induces pity. It doesn't, you know, it's too. It's too surreal. And, you know, I don't. I. I think it's too surreal to. To induce that. Those kinds of emotions in the audience. I don't know if you. You agree it's. It's too fairy tale, like. And if there is, I, I don't think I have a, you know, I don't have a strong emotional response to the content, to the narrative of the, the poem.
1:41 Erin: No, no, I think it's. I think it's more about the, the imagery it creates, which is quite, you know, it can be quite scary to a kid if this is convincingly recited as. Or read aloud rather, as it was to me when I was a little kid and I was, I was really freaked out by the water snakes. But what you said it reminds me of, or the relationship that we have to the art object reminds me so much of that famous anecdote from ancient Greece about the artistic contest between. Is it. Oh, it's two really strange names like Zeuxis. Zeuxis and Parrhasius, I think, are the names.
And this is in Pliny. Oh, this is a story that Pliny tells that there was a contest to determine who was the best at art. The two greatest painters had a contest with each other. And one of them, I can't remember, which revealed this painting of grapes. And it was so realistic that birds came down to peck at the painting. And so this was considered to be like, okay, who's, you know, how could he possibly be beaten? And so then they move to the next painting and they're waiting to see what his competition is going to be. Because it's behind a curtain, since someone says, okay, you know, reveal the curtain.
Right. And it turned out the curtain itself was the painting and it was so realistic that the, the one who, who painted the curtain, I can't remember if it was Zeuxis or Parrhasius anyway, but the one who painted the curtain one, because in the end it was like, ah, you only tricked the birds. But, you know, but I tricked everybody with, with my curtain painting. Right, but you know, and there, and there's a bird in that story as well, right? No, but it reminds me of this, this idea of this orientation towards the art object as being something like, quite literally here, having to do with appetite.
Right. At least like the, the appetite of the birds. And then I, I don't know about the curtain and concealment, but it just, it reminded me of the, of the, the grapes that induce. Right. That something would be such an amazing painting that it could induce hunger or, or, or some other type of appetitive drive that your discussion of this idea of the water that is also undrinkable in a painting. Yeah, yeah.
3:53 Wes: Maybe there's a curse in A way he's drawing our attention to the unrealness of this. It's as if the real world is becoming like a representation and they are coming to live within a representation as such, instead of the real world, the real world is starting to behave as a representation. Let's say, at least if you think of representations as static in this way. So maybe they have broken a wall of sorts. I don't know which wall it would be by breaking into this silent place. Right. They've. It's not the fourth wall they've broken, but they've broken some sort of wall and entered into.
It's almost like waking up and hey, am I in a poem or am I in a right representation? Is everything a simulation? Is the simulation broken down? In any case, it's. It accentuates the surreal aspect of this. And then we get. We get a transition from stasis to the. An organic metaphor, a really interesting organic metaphor in which, first of all, the deeps did rot. Is it. It's as if the ocean is a body, is a decomposing corpse. And then you have slimy things crawling with legs upon the slimy sea. So there's the obvious irony of how could the sea be crawled upon?
But I suppose, you know, I think if the deeps are rotting, we would think of maggots. It being infested with maggots of some sort. But these slimy things are actually have legs and scurry on top. Very strange image.
5:20 Erin: Yeah. Though they, they, they lose them later. No, I mean, are these the same as the water. As the water snakes or.
5:27 Wes: I don't know.
5:27 Erin: Yeah, I think I read something that said, oh, you know, they. First they have legs and then they don't. But I don't. This is a different kind of animal. But yeah, I noted the same thing. Like the idea that this is like a decomposing corpse and that therefore, like the containments of the body, creatures within the sea are like the organs. Right. Within the body or as you're suggesting, like maggots or something. This idea that natural creatures are evidence of a kind of rot is a really interesting one, considering that these are sailors who are.
Who are in a completely foreign place. Right. Like they're the invader, if you will, or like a kind of a virus in this. They're the thing that's not native. Not to say that that's indicative of a rot or a decomposition. Right. But if we want to think of the sea as like a. Like a body, as I think this is suggesting, then the ship and the people on it are the foreign object that's. That's been lodged in the middle of this body. And, you know, certainly the mariner's transgression of killing the albatross is proof perhaps of the potential deadliness of this invasion or the capacity for the people on the ship to wreak some kind of havoc or to, you know, leave death in their wake.
And so, you know, something about like taking the rot that perhaps the mariner himself induced by killing the albatross, he now has a rotting thing around his neck and turning that around and kind of submerging that in the physical environments which seem to be particularly inhospitable to him at this particular moment.
7:03 Wes: Right.
7:03 Erin: And it seems to me to be a case of. Of what would we call it? And I mean, obviously I'm not the psychoanalyst, but. Right. This seems like a case of projection, perhaps, is what I'm trying to get at. I don't know, is that. Is that going too far or to
7:17 Wes: see the rotting out outside of himself, outside in the sea? Yeah. So you're taking the rotting as being part of something, something that's going on within him.
7:27 Erin: I mean, it must be, right? Because, I mean, certainly it's possible for things to rot in the natural world, but to, you know, paint with such a broad brush as he's doing here and to say that, you know, the entire sea is kind of rotting or that, you know, things which are. Which seem to be perfectly natural and native to this particular water are inverted and become something undead or, you know, even kind of perverse, I think is kind of. You know, there seems to be some too, I think. I'm trying to suggest that the desire for the projection is to see the inhospitable landscape as being somehow corrupt.
Right. When it's. When it's being inhospitable to us, there's something sort of inherently wrong with it or it's. It's turned inside out. It's. It's blamed. It's right here. It's. It's called basically dead or undead, however you want to call it. I'm envisioning like a zombie, a zombie sea filled with zombie slimy creatures. So there seems to be like the desire again, to. To blame external circumstances or to see things as being perverse or perverted in light of this inhospitable situation in which they find themselves.
8:36 Wes: Yeah. You could see this in part as an expression of guilt, I suppose. So the progression here is he's killed. This link to the natural world I think that's part of the way we were looking at the albatross, and something to do with dependency on the natural world. So asserted a kind of independence from the natural world that we don't really have. And there's something grandiose in that. And that pushes him into a world of aesthetic stasis, as we've described it, motionlessness. And then there's the immediate association to death, which is a natural association.
And it's oft explored in the history of philosophy and criticism, this relationship between the aesthetic and the deathlike. So for Schopenhauer, we've already described a sense in which it. The aesthetic is abstracts from. From need and appetite and desire, ultimately, which is the way Schopenhauer described the aesthetic relation to the world as a. In the Apollonian sense, as an involving, a cessation of will. It's different with music, different with the Dionysian, but. And then from death we get motion again. It's a circle of life. Hey, don't worry.
There'll be worms crawling through your body. Things will come alive again. There'll be motion. So we get dynamism reintroduced through rot and through the dancing of the death fires and this kind of, like, psychedelic treat that they get with the witch's oils and the burnt green and blue, and then spirit. So the next step from rot and from this new sort of dynamism is the concept of spirit. And in this case, a spirit that plagues, which you could read as a fury or as a representative of conscience or justice or vengeance, I suppose. Nine fathom deep.
He had followed us from the land of mist and snow, so it turns out. So is it the spirit of the albatross? Yeah. Is it something else?
10:34 Erin: I don't know. I didn't read it as such, but that's an interesting idea.
10:39 Wes: I didn't either until this moment, I'm wondering, because it's been following them all along, it turns out. So even before they burst into this static, deathlike world, they had been pursued by this. He finds out.
10:53 Erin: Yeah, it's very. You know, when I see spirit and then nine fathoms deep. I was trying to think about the significance of nine fathoms or the number nine biblically. And the only thing I could think of was that 9 is the number of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. But this is, you know, rather than being above the ship, right. It's below. So it's like this shadowy figure. I mean, it could very well be. If we wanted to read this literally, it could be A whale or so, you know, I mean, it could be something that's like literally been following them around.
11:24 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think albatrosses do. They do dive into the water right when they're feeding. But yeah, could be a whale, a shark. Do they need a bigger boat?
11:36 Erin: Could be Steven Spielberg. Yeah.
11:40 Wes: Right. So, yeah, spirit of the albatross. Some sort of angry spirit, spirit of the natural world. Some representative of that has followed them from the moment that he killed the albatross. And how does he find out? Some of dreams assured were. So apparently some of the crew have dreamt this and that's. That's the idea now it's come from their dreams.
12:03 Erin: Well, I love that.
12:04 Wes: But now communication stops because they've run out of water. I guess they've been without water for a while now and they can no longer speak. Yeah, I suppose. And then this is the moment where they put the albatross around his neck. I don't know where it's been the body of the albatross has been all this time, but now it goes around his neck and there's this direct comparison to across.
12:25 Erin: I really like the word psychedelic that you used for the witches oils. And I suppose that now they're tripping, right? Like they're hallucinating from lack of water. Is this, by the way, is the albatross that they hang around his neck? Is it a skeleton at this point? Right. Like they must have actually. I mean, they must have eaten it. I'm still convinced that the most logical explanation is just that the mariner was hungry and they all just needed a snack. So.
12:53 Wes: Well, it depends on how superstitious they are.
12:56 Erin: That's right.
12:57 Wes: Well, maybe freaked out enough to not eat it no matter how hungry they
13:00 Erin: get, at some point when, when they decided it was a good thing, maybe they. They roasted it.
13:06 Wes: Yeah. I never read this as a skeleton. I mean, I. Neither did I. I how the skeleton would stay together. But.
13:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true. Yeah. I suppose it's even more cross like though if. If there was some way for the skeleton to stay together to. To hang the albatross around the neck as a skeleton rather than as a white and now probably rather stinky corpse. Just to briefly backtrack. I was thinking too about, you know, the idea of a rotting deep related to this idea of the witch's oils. So something here about, you know, nature and the feminine again being perverted or, you know, seen as some sort of like evil force or things that are natural and Normal, taking on a kind of inhuman valence.
But then we have this. You know, I was thinking a lot about this idea of the cross and the albatross. Right. Like, there's an inversion here happening as well, where obviously a cross is a sort of. It's a sign of the promise of salvation. It's a sign of redemption. And here, you know, this is inverted. So instead, this is a sign of doom and shame. And it's rather heavy as well. Right. Like, this is a huge bird, so lighter if they've been snacking on it. But it should be really weighing him down physically. And so it's. You know, it puts me in mind, rather than someone, like, wearing a cross around their neck, it puts one in mind of the Mariner as a Christ figure, you know, shouldering the cross on the way to Calvary.
14:37 Wes: So, you know, is the albatross the Christ figure or is it the Mariner? Or is it both in a way, you know, getting your identification?
14:45 Erin: Right, right.
14:46 Wes: But, yeah, I thought it does seem much more like Christ carrying his own cross at this point. So it foreshadows an even greater possible sacrifice or suffering on the part of the Mariner.
15:00 Erin: It's strange, though. It's all the way wrapped around. Right. It's like. Reminds me of, like, when parents threaten their kids. Like, I brought you into this world and I can take you out of this world. Right. And so it's like. It's like, you know, this is a Christ figure who's introduced sin into the world and taken sin out of the world. Right. This is creating quite a confusing sort of cross to bear, considering that the Mariner is guilty of this death. But anyway, should we move on?
15:25 Wes: Yeah.
15:26 Erin: Okay, so here's section three. I saw a something in the sky no bigger than my fist at first it seemed a little speck and then it seemed a mist it moved and moved and took at last a certain shape, I wist a speck, a mist, a shape I wist and still it neared and neared and it dodged a water-sprite it plunged and tacked and veered with throat unslacked with black lips baked Nor could we laugh nor wail Then while through drought all dumb they stood I bit my arm and sucked the blood and cried Assail a sail with throat unslacked with black lips baked agape they heard me call Gramercy! they for joy did grin and all at once their breath drew in as they
16:08 Wes: were drinking all what are they drinking?
16:10 Erin: Yeah, that's a good question.
16:11 Wes: They're drinking it all in. They're just drinking in the sight. So the arrival of this new ship is the replacement for water? I suppose. So they make out what turns out to be a ship. In the beginning, it seems like it's something in the sky, like it's flying. It plunged and tacked and veered again.
16:29 Erin: Like a albatross. Yeah. Like, since it's a black shape. Where do I get this idea that it's a black shape? I don't know. I suppose a speck and then a mist. I'm thinking of this as being dark. And so, yeah, it seems like the sort of photo negative of the albatross, in a way.
16:48 Wes: I suppose it's possible. It's like a will o' the wisp type thing that then takes on the shape of a ship as it gets closer. Something like that. So you could think of a light or something or a speck floating around and then settling. I don't know. But I like the juxtaposition of these black lips baked so they. They're so thirsty that they can't laugh or wail. And in order to actually cry out, he has to drink his own blood, bite himself, drink some of his own blood and make. You know, so he can get his mouth unstuck so he can cry. A sale. A sale. And then they drink in. All at once their breath drew in and they were drinking all. So he's able to, in a way, quench their thirst with a sight.
17:37 Erin: Man, this is really grossing me out.
17:39 Wes: It's really. I was just thinking. It's really cool. Do you want to continue reading?
17:45 Erin: Sure. She doth not tack from side to side Hither to work us weal Withouten wind, withouten tide she steadies with upright keel. The western wave was all aflame. The day was well nigh done. Almost upon the western wave rested the broad bright sun. When that strange ship drove suddenly betwixt us and the sun and straight the sun was flecked with bars. Heaven's mother, send us grace as if through a dungeon grate. He peered with broad and burning face. Alas, thought I, and my heart beat loud, how fast she nears and nears. Are those her sails that glance in the sun like restless gossamers?
Are these her naked ribs which flecked the sun that did behind them? Peer. And are these two all? All the crew? That woman and her fleshless Pheere. Okay. Is it Peer? Fear? Fear. Sorry. And are these two all? All the crew? That woman and her fleshless Pheere? His bones were black with many a Crack. All black and bare. I ween jet black and bare, Save where with rust of moldy damps and charnel crust they're patched with purple and green. Her lips are red, her looks are free. Her locks are yellow as gold. Her skin is white as leprosy. And she is far liker death than he.
Her flesh makes the still air cold. The naked hulk alongside came and the twain were playing dice. The game is done. I've won. I've won, quoth she. And whistled thrice. A gust of wind stirred up behind and whistled through his bones, through the holes of his eyes and the whole of his mouth. Half whistles and HALF GROANS this is great.
19:23 Wes: So she will turn out to be life and death. Death and life.
19:26 Erin: Life and death, I think.
19:27 Wes: Yes, life and death. And he is just plain death. Yeah, just plain death. And she wins his soul in a game of dice. So everything that's going to follow here is the result of that. It's not a reprieve, but it's something that puts him into something more like purgatory. Instead of dying, he's going to remain alive even as his crew will end up dying. But before they. Yeah, we get this really, you know, we get this really cool image of. So they're. They're very helpful about this being a rescue. It turns out to be a death ship. And the way they learn it is really cool, right, where it comes in between them and the sun, and then they see the sun coming through. It's as if the ribs of the boat are like the ribs of a dead person and there's gaps in between them.
20:16 Erin: Right? Yeah. And then there's the. Before that, too. You know, the sun is often. Seems to be deified, right. It's described as like God's own head. And so before that, it's flecked with bars. So it's as if God is being half blotted out or imprisoned or say, you know, restraint. His power is being restrained for the moment. And that turns out to be true. Right, because these death and life and death in this moment have, you know, a kind of godly power to decide what's going to happen to these people, perhaps superseding God's power in this moment or taking over for the time being.
20:53 Wes: It's interesting, though, because the sun is the thing that's given them drought or made them thirsty. And it's also, as I was pointing out, the thing that is associated with stasis and is almost like pin the ship down in the light of the day. So Perhaps there's going to be some reprieve or at least some forward momentum, some dynamism in the fact that now the sun, that role for the sun is being interfered with.
21:20 Erin: Well, I mean, in a way, they are getting a reprieve. They're being put out of their misery.
21:26 Wes: But, yeah, I suppose I should worry a little bit more about his fellow sailors. They do die. There's no reprieve for them.
21:37 Erin: Well, you know, and I'm just looking here at the description of death and of life and death. I think in the previous episodes, I might have mentioned something, maybe in the first episode about the fact that life and death is sort of akin to the bride. Right. In that moment where we get the glimpse inside the wedding venue or into the hall. Right. We see her paced into the hall, red as a rose. Is she right here we have a kind of kinship between life and death and this. And this bride. And we do have, you know, just two people on the ship. Death and life and death. I'm assuming that Death is this guy's last name and that life in is her first name. So they're married, right?
22:18 Wes: Mrs. Death.
22:19 Erin: Mrs. Death and Mr. Death. Right. No, but I think, like, there's, you know, I just wonder about that. And I'm thinking too, about the fact that Death seems to be. He probably doesn't look all that dissimilar from the crew themselves and from the Mariner. Right. His bones are black, just as their black lips are baked. He's rather skinny, I'm sure. As they are. Right.
22:42 Wes: I was thinking of him as a skeleton, but I guess he could be a classic Death in a robe or. Yeah. What does he look like?
22:49 Erin: No, I think he is. I think he is a skeleton. I think he's. And then he has these, like, moldy parts of his body that are crusty. Like, almost like he's been in water. Like a skeleton, like, you know, decomposing in water and then kind of lifted up out of the water. And so he would have some almost like envisioning barnacle type things on him. Right. With this purple and green. But, you know, I mean, I'm sure. I'm sure that the. The crew is skeletal at this point. I mean, not. Not a literal animated skeleton. Right. But they seem to look a bit like Death himself. You know, this charnel crust. I know charnel crust.
23:28 Wes: I mean, charnel house is where skeletal remains are stored. I didn't know they got crusty.
23:38 Erin: Well, okay, so what sometimes happens. I don't know if this is true. Everywhere but in ossuaries, which is kind of. I think it's just the same kind of idea as a charnel house. What people do in southern Italy is you. You bury a body and then a couple years later, you go and you dig it up and you check and see what state of composite composition. Sorry, decomposition. It's in. So sometimes what you have to do is go in and clean off the bones and scrape things off of the bones and get them ready to then be stored in the ossuary, which is. This is pretty gross. Right. And sometimes they're not ready. Sometimes they still have more decomposing to do. But very often you do have to kind of scrape stuff off of the bones in order to get them ready to be reinterred in the family crypt.
24:30 Wes: Ah. So charnel crust is like when I'm eating barbecue ribs, it's like the best part of the rib is like attached. Yeah. The last to decompose could still be.
24:43 Erin: Still be some fibrous tissue on there, maybe.
24:47 Wes: Fibrous tissue?
24:49 Erin: Yep. Aren't you glad you know this about southern Italy?
24:54 Wes: Yeah. I was hoping you were just going to make something up. And I thought you were going to facetiously just.
24:57 Erin: Nope.
24:58 Wes: Makeup story. But no, it's better that you. It's.
25:04 Erin: I'm sure this is a common practice.
25:06 Wes: Interesting that. Interesting that you know about that.
25:08 Erin: Yeah, well, it's all in the family. I haven't had to do anything like that, but. Yeah, but I know people who have to go and scrape off grandpa's bones, you know,
25:22 Wes: Everyone get your scraper. I'm still like, visit Grandpa.
25:26 Erin: Seriously, I would not be able to,
25:28 Wes: you know, but then again, give your grandpa a scrape.
25:30 Erin: Those. Those Italians are tough, man. You know, one second you're petting a little bunny, and the next second your sweet little grandma is going out to the rabbit hutch to twist a neck so you can have rabbit cacciatore for dinner anyway.
25:44 Wes: And then the carcass is hung about her neck.
25:47 Erin: There you go.
25:48 Wes: No, that wouldn't happen. They should be tougher, these mariners. Her lips are red. Her looks are free, her lot. This is like a stanza that I just completely highlighted and put an asterisk next to. And now I want to figure out why I did that. Her lips are red, her looks are free. Her locks are yellow as gold. Her skin is as white as leprosy. And she is far liker death than he. Her flesh makes the still air cold.
26:16 Erin: She sounds hot.
26:17 Wes: It's funny because a very common Homeric epithet is Arms are white as ivory, and that's a good thing. The sexy girls have the white arms. White as ivory Here. It's white as leprosy, which is another thing I didn't know. I didn't know that leprosy was whitish.
26:32 Erin: I don't think it is interesting not to take issue with Coleridge here, but
26:38 Wes: I don't know if it's a scarring or who knows? But she is far liker Death than he, which is interesting in light of the fact that she's not all the
26:48 Erin: way deaf and he actually is deaf
26:51 Wes: and he actually is Death. But she's, as usual, it's a good woman standing behind the man who's the key to the man's success. And her lips are red, her looks are free. What does that mean?
27:11 Erin: I don't know.
27:12 Wes: She's got a little bit of life in her.
27:14 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. He married up, but I don't know
27:16 Wes: what her looks are free means exactly. Well, whatever the case, she makes the still air cold. It's not just because there's a dissatisfied woman romantic subplot here. She's not just complaining that Death spends too much time at work or nagging him in other ways. Sorry, is that a sexist? Yeah, but sexism allowed temporarily the one pass of the year, so she has this chilling effect. Yeah. So it's such a great, spooky image. I looked for animations of this poem online. I couldn't find anything really good. This would be something that you could do, an amazing. Whether live action or animation, it would be quite amazing. Put all that. Whatever they learned in the Pirates of the Caribbean, put all that knowledge to work. I can't help thinking of that Johnny Depp as the Mariner and Amber Heard as the Death.
28:15 Erin: Oh, no. Oh, now we're sorry we're going there. No, but you've seen the Gustave Doré illustrations, though, right?
28:25 Wes: I think so.
28:27 Erin: The life and death is not terribly. I mean, of course, they're line drawings, they're black and white. So the life and death and death playing dice illustration is not terrible. Not one of my favorites. But these are, you know, these are some of my favorite illustrations ever.
28:41 Wes: I hadn't really seen these. It's odd.
28:43 Erin: Oh, no way. Wow.
28:44 Wes: Yeah.
28:44 Erin: I got my best friend. I got a. I think I got her the 'ice mast-high' illustration, a print of it for Christmas or something at some point.
28:54 Wes: It's crazy. I didn't see these because I was looking for animations and images. Huh.
28:59 Erin: Yeah. And these are super beautiful, super, super popular.
29:02 Wes: Yeah.
29:02 Erin: I have. I have a very cherished edition of this poem with all the illustrations in it.
29:07 Wes: All right, so someone just needs to input these into ChatGPT and have it turn these into animations.
29:13 Erin: Yeah, well, you know, the. The thing about these, though, is that they are in black and white. And the. And so, you know, particularly the life and death kind of the. The odd coloring there is a bit lost, but she does look free. Her hair is billowy and wonderful, I think. Okay, so what can we say then about the fact that there's a man and a woman in the middle of this story, which is taking place in the middle of a wedding? I mean, is there anything besides jokingness?
29:43 Wes: So it does seem to be evocative of the fact that he's interrupted a wedding to tell this story when he
29:49 Erin: interrupts of, you know, a bar mitzvah. Is there, you know, a ghostly bar mitzvah happening on the ship? Does it depend on what. What event he's crashing?
30:00 Wes: Yeah. Does he have some special relationship to the concept of marriage? Does the shooting of the albatross. And you could read that in the Christian way, obviously, as well. Christ as the bride. Right.
30:14 Erin: Bridegroom. And the church is the bridegroom.
30:16 Wes: Bridegroom, sorry. Church is the bride. Christ as the bridegroom. And so you wonder. Yeah. You wonder if the interruption of the wedding. He's not interrupting the wedding per se. He's interrupting the experience of the third guest, interrupting his ability to attend the wedding. So I don't know. Yeah. What do you make of this? Is there something here about marriage?
30:38 Erin: I think you're right to have pointed out the strangeness in this idea of the sun as being something punitive in its way against these sailors and the ship being a potential relief that's then inverted by blocking out the sun. And I'm wondering if, considering this connection you're drawing between Christ and the church or whatever, if there's this. If this is a sort of inversion of this marital idea. Whereas rather than a sacrament, which would be working in participation with God, not blotting it out or imprisoning God and enforcing its own law onto the world, a good marriage, you know, in a.
In a Judeo Christian sense, would work in tandem with God and with God's laws. I'm also thinking about the crew, therefore, as being like their children. I suppose maybe that's a bit of a stretch. Right. But they're. They're kind of deciding what to do with these kids, but not. Not necessarily about how to raise them up. If you like, or how to. How to help them, but rather in which direction or sense they might be condemned. How to end their lives rather than how to, you know, create children and create life.
31:48 Wes: Well, it's interesting that the Mariner, he's the one who's spared, and I presume it's because he's killed the albatross.
31:55 Erin: But for a fate worse.
31:56 Wes: His punishment is to. His punishment is to live for a fate worse. But on the other hand, he gets out of it in the end, so. Or does he, I guess he has to run around telling his story, maybe, which is also a fate worse. Worse than death. Not just for him, but for the people who have to listen to it and they want to be doing something else. He's just a determined bachelor who's being avenged by the ghosts of marriage future. Or who are suitably. Who are suitably represented as death. And this is Death. Just kidding. Sorry. Well, and I think, why didn't you get married? It's like having your mom nag you forever.
32:38 Erin: Well, I like this idea that the fates are dependent upon chance, though, right? It's not necessarily the death of the albatross that condemns him, though. He is singled out, right? They're playing for his soul.
32:51 Wes: I mean, if Death wins the dice game, he. Everyone dies, I suppose, right? If she wins, we get this, you know, he. He becomes the. The exception, right?
33:00 Erin: And then they get free advertising for the rest of time. But otherwise the story dies.
33:07 Wes: Exactly. Right. And so I was just thinking, you know, thinking of your idea of them as producing children or the crew being children in some sense. He gets a rebirth, perhaps, and becomes their. Their child in a way.
33:25 Erin: But another. Another deaths.
33:28 Wes: It's. Hey, everyone, it's the Death Family, starring the Mariner as little Bobby. Sorry.
33:38 Erin: Yeah. John Boy. No, but I'm thinking about the role of chance in this and the way that this kind of, like, flips the concept of the albatross on its head. So here they're like. They're literally watching these two figures decide through a game of chance what's going to happen. It's admitting both chance and determinism at the same time. Right? Which is. Which is kind of the relationship between the sailors and the interpretation of the albatross. Or it's sort of literalizing it in a way. Do you know what I'm trying to say about this? You know, in the way that they're looking at the albatross to be punished for its death through some sort of natural occurrence or to be rewarded for its death through some sort of natural occurrence.
They're kind of trying to guess at what deterministic fate this action has afforded them. But what they're really doing is just interpreting chance events according to how they, you know, according to the superstition. Whereas here they're literally watching people play a game of chance. But for them, like, for their fates in a way, like, I mean, if we want to interpret this whole thing as a hallucination that, you know, that's part of the. The hallucinatory images that they're continuing to have because they're all going insane from starving to death and everything.
This is maybe just an embodiment of some natural force that is already occurring. In other words, you know, the Mariner is hallucinating that this is happening, when in fact all that might be happening is that hunger and thirst are picking off each one of his companions. Right. So, you know, so. So they're kind of imagining this literalization of these two forces working in tandem that they previously were trying to guess at. Now it's brought. It's brought before their eyes. It's made real to them through this personification of these two forces.
And yet it may just be like a hallucinatory wish fulfillment to see the mechanism of death at work. You know what I mean?
35:40 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. I think you've well highlighted the relationship between their superstition about how killing the albatross might affect the elements and affect their fate, and then the way that becomes represented in the characters of Death and Mrs. Death who are playing dice with the futures of the Mariners. Did I get that right?
36:04 Erin: Yes.
36:04 Wes: So we get a movement from maybe some sort of determinism to the role of chance. But we can talk more about that in part four. Okay, this is the end of part three. Otherwise they'll have to wait a week. Thank you.
36:23 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext. You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. or patreon.com/subtextpodcast.
37:43 Wes: Okay, welcome to part four of our discussion of Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We just got done introducing death and what presumably is Mrs. Death. Although that may be in this reading classic couple. For all we know, she could be his daughter. Or they may not even be related, but they may just work together.
38:04 Erin: They work husband and wife. Yeah.
38:07 Wes: In any case, we should see what death and life turns out to be. Mrs. Death or death and life turns out to be the more important personage in the sense of that what comes now will be. For the Mariner will be life in death as opposed to death, because she's the one who won the dice game. So do you want to read on and tell us what that looks like?
38:25 Erin: Yeah, let's do it. Okay. With never a whisper in the sea off darts the spectre ship while clomb above the eastern bar, the horned moon with one bright star almost atween the tips One after one by the horned moon, Listen, Stranger! to me each turned his face with a ghastly pang and cursed me with his eye. Four times fifty living men with never a sigh or groan. With heavy thump a lifeless lump they drop down One by one their souls did from their bodies fly, they fled to bliss or woe. And every soul it passed me by like the whiz of my crossbow.
39:03 Wes: Okay, so I guess the stranger, his attention is wondering at this point, surprising given how cool Death and Mrs. Death are. But he's. He gets a little slap in the face here. Pay attention.
39:17 Erin: It's interesting that this. This condemnation to death does not extend to any kind of condemning, to eternal damnation. Say. Each one gets his own ascent in his own direction, right? Some are going to bliss, so some are going to heaven. And some are going to woe or hell. But, you know, regardless, they're all dead
39:37 Wes: and they're all passing by him. Each soul goes by him like the whiz of his crossbow. So they. Each flight of each soul recapitulates the killing of the albatross and sense.
39:49 Erin: Yeah. So it's kind of this you know, the sailors have been kind of one mass, if you will. You know, the mariner is the only one set apart. And otherwise they all seem to have a singular kind of consciousness, which, you know, interprets events as a fairly uniform body. I think the only indication of some individuals within this hoard prior to this are some people who are having these dreams of the spirit that's followed them from the land of mist and snow. Right. Some in dreams assured were. So I just think it's interesting that we have these 200 men just all dropping dead simultaneously as if.
Again, as if they're all one singular body. And yet the particularity of the fact that these are individuals going to their individual fates, that each one has the. As you're pointing out, the weight of the singular albatross. It's a very interesting distinction to make at this point, that they're. They seem most particularized in death, in this. In this collective fate.
40:55 Wes: And then later on they'll seem to become zombies, Right?
40:57 Erin: Yeah. And they have.
40:58 Wes: No. So it's a little confusing what. What's animating them as they are.
41:04 Erin: Right, right.
41:05 Wes: Zombie creatures running the ship. But also, oddly enough, the Spectra ship just leaves Darts off. Also, it is kind of weird that if death and life wins the bet, that the bulk of the winnings go to death. She won the dice game, but he gets 99% of the winnings of the pot, so to speak. So very strange through the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth. Half whistles and half groans. What an image.
41:33 Erin: That's great.
41:34 Wes: All right, so what's next? Okay, die.
41:38 Erin: Part 4. Part 4 begins with quotation marks. Here we go. I fear thee, ancient mariner. I fear thy skinny hand and thou art long and lank and brown as is the ribbed sea sand. I fear thee and thy glittering eye and thy skinny hand so brown. Fear not, fear not, thou wedding guest. This body dropped not down alone. Alone all, all alone. Alone on the wide, wide sea. And Christ would take no pity on my soul in agony. The many men so beautiful and they all dead did lie and a million million slimy things lived on. And so did I. I looked upon the rotting sea and drew my eyes away.
I looked upon the rotting deck and there the dead men lay. I looked to heaven and tried to pray I But or ever a prayer had gushed A wicked whisper came and made my heart as dry as dust. I closed my lids and kept them close till the balls like pulses beat for the sky and the sea and the sea and the sky lay like a load on my weary eye and the dead were at my feet.
42:43 Wes: So we finally get a reaction out of the wedding guest. Yeah, stop scaring me.
42:49 Erin: Who previously was maybe not totally paying attention, is now afraid and rapt again after just a couple more stances, I guess, you know, the payoff is, or the high point is all these people dropping dead. So now he's, he's back in it. But, yeah, so he fears the mariner. You know, this interesting interjection. He fears the mariner the way the mariner feared the ghostly figures on the ship. And again, like, I'm, you know, I'm drawing a connection here between the way the mariner looks and the way the way death seems to look. You know, I'm reminded of so many stories.
I'm really. I grew up being really interested in old ships and particularly in, like, whaling expeditions and things like this. But anyway, I always loved stories of tall, tall ships and expeditions and things like that. And very often what you'll read in these accounts of real life instances in which people were shipwrecked and nearly starved to death is that usually for the, for the rest of their lives, their, their body, like, never makes up for the loss of nutrition that they had for however many days they might have been out at sea. Right.
Oftentimes they'll eat and eat and eat and still, still always be underweight for the rest of their lives. At least this is what was reported, you know, back in the 19th century by their contemporaries.
44:06 Wes: There's a huge, huge dieting Fad in the 19th century, the seahand diet. Just go out and do your. Your do some time on a ship.
44:15 Erin: That's right. That's right. Yeah. No, but it's, it's being, you know, it's being called to mind here in terms of, like, the, you know, both the appearance of the mariner and he does seem like he's, he's not put on much weight since this, since this event. But also in the kind of, you know, the rapaciousness of the person who has gone through the experience. And, you know, here it's coming out in the compulsion to tell the story and in this, like, heightened emotion. Right. But this desire to continually relive it or rather like someone who hasn't moved beyond the event. Yeah.
44:48 Wes: So he doesn't like the mariner. He doesn't like a skinny hand. He doesn't like the tan.
44:55 Erin: It's kind of tan that you can
44:56 Wes: only get by being at sea for a long time. Right. And he doesn't like that glittering eye in a way, it sounds like. So he's telling the Mariner, you look like you're dead or maybe you look like you're a mummy, which is what the tanning and is kind of evocative of. And the Mariner says, don't worry, I'm not. I'm not actually dead.
45:13 Erin: Right, right.
45:14 Wes: Everyone else died, but I had this special death and life role to play. So let me just continue telling my story.
45:23 Erin: Right.
45:24 Wes: That's reassuring. That's really reassuring. So he's going to continue to force feed him this really disturbing story in which he now compares himself to the other million million slimy things that they lived on. So to see again, it sounded as if they might be maggot, like from the rots of the deep. And does he have a maggot role as well? I don't know. But he tries to pray. But again, the. This idea of the drought and thirst, which is. It's been used figuratively a few times, comes back and he. Right. He'd had to drink his own blood to communicate with the crew earlier and now he can't even pray. He's too dried out. And maybe that's the way he looks to the wedding guest.
46:09 Erin: He looks like jerky.
46:11 Wes: If he is looking mummy, mummy like. Yeah, like jerky. He looks dried out. He's not hydrating enough is what I'm trying to say. If you're going to do the Seahan diet, it's very important you stay hydrated.
46:23 Erin: That's right.
46:25 Wes: Even if there's water all around and not a drop to drink, you bring your own bottled water on the trip with you. It's clearly stated in the guidelines. But anyway, yes, spiritually, that's true. He's not spiritually hydrated. He can't. He can't pray. So you get this, you know, the continuing irony of there being water everywhere but things but drought, there being a drought, physical and spiritual, that prevents communication, prevents prayer.
46:57 Erin: Yeah.
46:58 Wes: I don't know what makes your eye glitter like that other than just complete insanity.
47:04 Erin: That's it. Yeah, I like this. Yeah. Spiritual dehydration. You know, I spent some time with the stanza thinking about why. Why a prayer can't gush from him. And. And whenever he tries to, a wicked whisper comes up instead of. And wondering what that. That whisper might be, you know, what's what sort of like what would he be saying a curse instead of a prayer, you know, taking the Lord's name in vain or something like that, rather than. Than crying out to God. You know, I think that there are a lot of potential interpretations for this inability to pray.
He says, you know, Christ would take no pity on my soul. So, you know, presumably pity would. Would be having gone with. With death rather than death's wife dying or somehow being. Being relieved of this suffering. So he's, you know, he's kind of a job figure. And rather than, you know, continuing to handle this with those with a certain forbearance. Right. He's potentially kind of angry and alone now. And so anyway, it's. It's, you know, this spiritual dehydration seems to be related to the fact that he is still. He still hasn't learned his lesson, perhaps, or he's still.
He's not redeemed yet. And so I just. I'm just curious about what that wicked whisper might be. I mean, you know, we don't. There's a suggestion perhaps that we'll get it a little bit. Do we get it later? Does he say something? No, I'm thinking of something else.
48:33 Wes: Well, it's interesting because the whisper makes his heart as dry as dust when you would expect the causality to run the other way. His heart is dry, and therefore he produces a whisper instead of a gush. So that's one interesting aspect of the image. We know he's alone because it's repeated several times. And presumably not just to make meter. Right. Alone. Alone.
48:55 Erin: All alone.
48:56 Wes: Alone.
48:57 Erin: Right.
48:57 Wes: Are you really alone? If you're alone four times, you've got company. At least you have the company of all the dead men on the deck.
49:07 Erin: Eldritch deck.
49:09 Wes: Perhaps he's alone as many times as there are dead men. Presumably the aloneness has something to do with this state of being able to pray properly. And as we've already mentioned, there's a sense in which he was alone even before all this began. And identified with the aloneness of the albatross. Perhaps. I like the image of the sky and the sea kind of laying on his eyes, his weary eye, like a. Like a load, like a bearing down on it. They have pressure such that, you know, the static image of the painted boat and the painted sea. There's a dynamism to it. It can be oppressive to the eye.
49:51 Erin: Should I keep reading? Yeah, okay, sure. The cold sweat melted from their limbs. Nor rot nor reek did they. The look with which they looked on me had never passed away. An orphan's curse would drag to hell a spirit from on high. But, oh, more horrible than that is the curse in a dead man's eye. Seven days, seven nights I saw that curse and yet I could not die. The moving moon went up the sky and nowhere did abide. Softly she was going up and a star or two beside her beams bemocked the sultry main like morning frost. Espread I spread. W. Spread.
50:32 Wes: Come on, Coleridge. Getting a little bit ridiculous.
50:36 Erin: Like morning frosts, y-spread. But where the ship's huge shadow lay the charmèd water burnt alway a still and awful red. Beyond the shadow of the ship I watched the water snakes. They moved in tracks of shining white and when they reared the elfish light fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire. Blue glossy green and velvet black. They coiled and swam and every track was a flash of golden fire. Oh, happy living things. No tongue their beauty might declare. A spring of love gushed from my heart and I blessed them unaware. Sure my kind saint took pity on me and I blessed them unaware the self same moment I could pray and from my neck so free the albatross fell off and sank like lead into the sea.
51:24 Wes: Well, that was quick.
51:25 Erin: It was quick, all right.
51:27 Wes: He was redeemed pretty quickly.
51:30 Erin: Well, it took a week.
51:32 Wes: Is that what it says?
51:33 Erin: Seven days. Seven nights.
51:34 Wes: Oh, seven days. Seven nights.
51:36 Erin: Yeah.
51:36 Wes: Alone, Alone, alone, alone. Day after day after day after day. Then Orphan's Curse would drag to hell a spirit from on high. Really? Orphans have that much power?
51:52 Erin: Yeah. God. Even more horrible than an orphan is the curse in a dead man's eye.
51:56 Wes: Dead man? Slightly.
51:58 Erin: You think? And especially like a ginger orphan, like Little Orphan Annie. Even more horrible than her is. Yeah.
52:05 Wes: The sun will come out tomorrow.
52:07 Erin: Oh, no.
52:09 Wes: But there won't be any water to drink. Be great to see that song performed
52:15 Erin: on the ship with the dead.
52:17 Wes: The dead mariners dancing like a Michael Jackson.
52:20 Erin: There you go.
52:20 Wes: Thriller video. Doing it to a hard knock. It's a hard knock. Life. Yeah.
52:24 Erin: Their bones clanking around. Little tap number. It's great.
52:28 Wes: So the curse on the dead man's eye. A bit evocative of the glinting eye of the. Of the mariner. As he's relating the tale. Maybe. Maybe I might be stretching it a bit there. In the meantime, the beams of the sun or the moon. Sorry? The moon. In parallel, it seems to the curse coming from the eyes is bemocking the sultry main. Ooh, sultry. The ship is sultry. It's the main. The mast. It's the main mast, right?
52:58 Erin: Yeah.
53:00 Wes: Why is it sultry? Well, because everything's supposed to Be dry.
53:04 Erin: Well, where the moon colors the sea, it's white. Right.
Psychedelic Regrets in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Part 2)
May 27, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:00 Erin: work. Em woe for all averred, I had killed the bird that made the breeze to blow Nor dim nor red, like God's own head, the glorious sun uprist. Then Oliverd I had killed the bird that brought the fog and mist. Twas right, said they, such birds to slay that bring the fog and mist. The breezes blew, the white foam flew, the furrow followed free. We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea.
0:25 Wes: Okay, the sun came up upon the right, I think, at the very beginning of his account. It comes up on the left, right. And then comes out of the sea, shines bright, goes right back down into the sea. It's almost like the poem has started again. As if there's some parallel between the shooting of the albatross and the arresting of the wedding guest singling out, right, an attack on the wedding guest. I'm not making anything. I haven't dug into that to think if there's something significant about that. But that does seem, at least formally, to be a parallel. And. Okay, so instead of. In this case, where we get the stanza, which is evocative of the beginning of the account, the sun doesn't just. Well, it goes back down into the sea, but. And broad as a weft upon the left. What does that mean? Comes up on the right. Out of the sea came he, and broad as a weft upon the left.
1:18 Erin: Yeah, this is a. This is a controversial line. So this is glossed in my edition as a thin line of cloud or mist or a broad flag on a ship. In 1800, the internal rhyme was sacrificed for the sake of the sense. So he revised this to say, still hid in mist. And on the left, perhaps in response to remarks in the negative review noted above. So there was a negative review in the British critic. This critic dismissed noises in a swound as nonsense. And he also took. He also took issue with broad as a weft upon the left, you know.
1:56 Wes: Okay, interesting. All right, well, I'm glad I. My critical instincts were.
2:01 Erin: Yeah.
2:03 Wes: Were spot on there, actually. No, I was just confused by what that meant. But. So it's going down into the. So I take it that the meaning is supposed to be that it's going down into the. Into the mist. Okay, so they get a good south wind, no bird anymore following.
2:17 Erin: Yeah, well, just before we do that, though, I'm thinking about. Okay, so the sun is coming up in a different direction because now they're reoriented.
2:26 Wes: Right.
2:27 Erin: So they were going from north to south, and now they're going from south to north. So that means that the sun is coming out of their. Out of now the right hand side. So in other words, the reorientation, the change in direction occurs right at the moment of shooting the albatross as well. And I like this weft. To me it makes sense because it's warp and weft, right. Like, like they're, they were stitching down and now they're stitching back up right there, there's, there's something logical to me in, in the, in the, the use of that word around a reorientation or a change in direction.
Like they're gonna weave back up again. But anyway, I think it's lovely that this, the reorientation which is, which is normal, relatively speaking. Like they've now rounded and are coming back up the other side. Like it's logical, but at the same time what it, what it creates is this idea of like a topsy turvy world, you know, that everything after the albatross being killed is now kind of. Everything is kind of on the wrong side. It's still the correct side. The sun is still rising in the east and setting in the west. But because of the reorientation, again in relation to the body of the ship and the bodies of the crew members, which is the ultimate, the ultimate yardstick, which is what's getting them into trouble.
It seems to be coming out of a different side for them.
3:54 Wes: Yeah, it's a very sailor type of thing to do. There's port and there's starboard.
3:58 Erin: Exactly.
3:59 Wes: Could have said the sun came up out of the east and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but.
4:05 Erin: And went down into the west. Yeah.
4:06 Wes: And it would be less confusing because I did think, wait, wait, the sun is coming up on the right. Is that right?
4:12 Erin: Yeah.
4:13 Wes: Thinking, of course of myself as facing north or south or. But no, I think normally we would think of ourselves as facing north. And then we think of the east as our right and the west as our left. Right. I think that's how as a kid you were kind of taught to do it. So. Yeah, so by giving these relatives directions, it becomes confusing and it might take a minute to say, wait, wait, right, left. And it's different than it was before. You kind of have to figure out, oh, the boat is turned around. And he didn't tell us that.
4:43 Erin: Right.
4:43 Wes: He didn't tell us that the boat turned around. He didn't tell us that it turned around right after he killed the albatross. So. All right, so now we get the good south wind still Blowing behind, but without the bird. So now we learn something new about the albatross, which is that I don't think we knew that they thought that the albatross was bringing the good breeze. Right. Did we know that before?
5:05 Erin: Right.
5:06 Wes: So now we learn that, and we learn that the other sailors think that he's cursed them, or at least cursed their journey by killing the bird that was bringing the breeze. Except the breeze is still there.
5:19 Erin: Yes. The punishment, in a way, comes before the crime. Right. Because the crime isn't necessarily. Necessarily killing the bird. It's killing the thing that brought the breeze. So. Or it's killing the breeze, in other words. Right. By proxy. So he's. He gets punished. He's told he's done a hellish thing before, the repercussions actually happen, and they. Only after the breeze stops.
5:40 Wes: Yeah, he says I had done a hellish thing. He doesn't put that in their mouths. They aver that he's killed the bird that made the breeze blow.
5:49 Erin: Yes.
5:49 Wes: So in a way, their. Their criticism is more practical and his is more in the domain of the. Of the normative and the moral.
5:57 Erin: Well, I mean, I think you're right, of course, but. But this reads to me almost as though he's parroting what other people have said to him.
6:03 Wes: He's concluding he did a hellish thing. There's what he was said that he was told, and then there's his internal self evaluation based on that I had done a hellish thing and all averred that he killed him. But, yeah, I think you're right. We could also just read this as. As a paraphrase of something that they also. They also said to him. It's hard to say.
6:24 Erin: Well, I think this. Yeah, this internal self evaluation, too, is really interesting because the conception of it being hellish does predate, you know, as we're already saying, any kind of repercussions. So I suppose there's the further complication of the fact that this could be the mariners, you know, the present day mariners, editorializing about the thing that was done, which the mariner inside the story, the young mariner, would perhaps not know at that point. You know, the layers of storytelling are a little complicated by that story within a story idea.
6:58 Wes: You know, the other interesting part of this is the other sailors are ambivalent. On the one hand, he's killed the bird that made the breeze blow. On the other, he killed the bird that brought the fog in the mist, and it was the right thing to do. You don't want to kill the Bird or am I miss. Am I misreading that?
7:14 Erin: I think that. So there is another sunrise, right. The sunrise, it seems, shows that there is no longer any fog and mist. And so then. So I think it's a change. These two things, they change the mind at the same time. Right. And so it's entirely based on whether or not they're having a good or a bad day, is whether or not it was good or bad to kill the bird. And I think this is the marks.
7:38 Wes: Except that they, they haven't lost the breeze yet. Right. Or they never lost the breeze. The good south wind still blew behind, but he had killed the bird that made the.
7:49 Erin: That's right. Because then at 99, the breezes blew, they're still blowing.
7:54 Wes: It's a really interesting, you know, what you would expect here is that the wind stops blowing, he gets cursed for killing the bird, you know, and then the, the sun comes up, the breeze is back, the fog and mist is gone, and then he gets praised and then. Oh yeah, right. But it's a much weirder juxtaposition.
8:12 Erin: That's true. Yeah. So the significance of they're ascribing a power to the bird that we don't know that they've ascribed to it until after the bird is dead, expecting that things are going to go bad. So they're expecting that the breeze is going to stop because the bird was killed.
8:32 Wes: Right.
8:33 Erin: Only in death do they actually come out and attribute the fair weather to this bird. So there's something here about the changed circumstance. They want to ascribe a sort of like post mortem causality to the bird's existence. And when they can't blame the death of the bird on the winds dying because the winds continue, they then have to see the. When things improve even more, they then have to see the bird as bad luck that was rightfully done away with.
9:05 Wes: So they make a negative prediction, it doesn't come true, and then something positive also happens. And so they change their mind about the significance of the bird.
9:16 Erin: It's as though their relationship to the bird has actually been a distraction from their own magical thinking. Until the bird dies and then they're right back into. Right. This seems to pull them out of their, the whole ship's solipsism by engaging with this bird. So now it's kind of like in hindsight, now we do see that this was redemptive for them. Then once the bird is dead, they're immediately going back to this superstition, magical thinking, trying to, trying to like influence the outside world in this more deterministic fashion. So it seems to me that the bird again was a positive thing to draw them out of themselves and then they just slam right back into their former orientation to the world when the bird is gone.
10:01 Wes: Yeah, good point. I talked about a hypothetical imperative relationship to nature versus categorical seeing it as something to be used versus seeing it as something of value in itself. And then there's the domain of superstition, which is a kind of pseudo scientific or quasi scientific scientific because it's still in the domain of the causal. It's just magical, as you said. It's causes that aren't really there. If the bird is with us, we'll have a fair breeze. If it's not, we won't, that that sort of thing. And it turns out that their relationship to the bird is not one of mere utility, like I'm, we're going to eat it.
It's not one of the, oh, it's a nice pet or it's a soul, it's a Christian soul. We're gonna treat it well, it's more that it, that it's an object of superstition. So the tendency in the, in the beginning to treat it as a spirit or as a Christian soul turns out to be just part and parcel of their superstitious relationship to the world. It's not really about some profound connection to organic things and the value of life. And it's not something about their Christian religious belief. It's really just a subdomain of their superstitious relationship to nature, which is an odd relationship to have.
I mean, it, you know, it's, of course, that's the stereotype, right. Superstitious sailors who, of course, as I said before, there's a lot of technology and art and know how that goes into navigation, especially at that time. Right. It's an enormous technological accomplishment, but it's imperfect and requires a lot of courage because things go, things that go, you know, much more likely to go wrong back then. And you're much more likely to get killed or have your ship sunk or to go to the wrong place. And so superstition is the surplus. In other words, navigation is about science.
Superstition is the surplus that's there because of the imperfectness of that. If you had a GPS and a motor, you wouldn't need to worry about giving super, you know, superstitious significance to nature or to events, to natural events. What I'm trying to say is that the, you know, this has me thinking that the albatross is in. Yeah. Is in this third position of having merely superstitious or symbolic significance for the sailors. So that shooting it is not a practical question or an ethical question or utilitarian question. In a way, it's a symbolic question.
12:44 Erin: Yeah. I mean, I love what you're saying. And also, isn't this idea of superstition, isn't it about control, you know, maybe beyond what you're saying or a step beyond what you're saying? Like, what did you. What did you say about. About technology? That there. That the superstition is like the surplus of this kind of technology.
13:05 Wes: Yeah. Because it's in the. Just to be clear, it's in the domain of the causal. Right. So normally I think, okay, I'm going to use my knowledge of cause and effect to use technology to control the world and to do whatever in this case, the cause and effect is about. It's not real causes, it's these fantasized, magical causes. But go ahead.
13:24 Erin: Right. But wouldn't that be. A sailor at this time knows that their technology, I mean, what they deeply know, maybe more than they can admit, is that their technology can't stand up to nature often in practice. Right. They may feel in the 1800s, mariner culture has a certain mastery over nature. But what they know better than anybody from experience is that this mastery can never be complete because nature is so overwhelming. And so to me, this idea of superstition is like a fear response. It's a way of exerting more control over something that they know ultimately they can't control. It's this idea that they could, like, determine their fate, that they can, in other words, like, provide a stopgap where their technology actually fails. Right.
14:10 Wes: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
14:12 Erin: Okay, so, you know, in this way, you're making me think that there. This is actually further evidence for the. The killing of the albatross to be completely unmotivated from this perspective of technology and the supremacy of nature. In other words, it doesn't matter. I mean, it does deeply matter in the poem, what killed the albatross. But the killing of the albatross or the, say, the death of it could have been by any number of means. What if the albatross had just dropped dead onto. Onto the deck of the ship? Right. They would have come up with a superstition for that, of course.
Right. You know, so in a way, like the mariner. What am I trying to say about this? The mariner is kind of being used as an impetus for an event which could have been natural in A way he's. He's being punished in the way that the mariners want to punish nature for its cruelty. Do you know what I'm trying to say? Like, so. So he then becomes almost, if you will, the mariner. Okay? The mariner is like the scapegoat for all of the crimes of nature against these ships. Is that going too far?
15:28 Wes: Let me. Let me think about that. Well, you had me thinking before about the mechanism of the superstition. Is it. Is it important that the bird is there, or is it important that they be good to the bird? You know, if the bird just died of natural causes, had a heart attack on the deck, would that be a reason for the breeze to go away? Or does it have to be that one of them affected it? You know, one of them made it happen and. And did a bad thing? Is it, you know, is. Does the breeze stop? Is the breeze going to stop because you did a bad thing, or is the breeze stopping the bad thing?
Something like that. Okay, but now. Now you're asking the question of. So if I understand you correctly, you're associating all the bad things that happen of their own accord, like the natural causes, like dying of natural causes of a heart attack on the deck. The. The albatross has eaten too many biscuit worms and, well, that would still implicate them. They would still be complicit in that scenario. But in any case, dying of natural causes and all the. All the act of God. So I want to say act of God here, not just natural causes. All the stuff that, you know, when there's a shipwreck, it's a.
Or a storm capsizes a ship for insurance purposes, at least that's an act of God, right? Unless the crew did something wrong, but unless they killed the albatross first or steered it into a rock negligently, but in any case. So, yes, it's all these bad things that happen according to natural causes. And you could try to control that with superstition. But beyond that, I think your suggestion is beyond wanting to control it through one's magical thinking. One might want to take vengeance on it. And this, I think, is really spot on because this really does give us some insight into a motivation for shooting the albatross.
In a way, it's a kind of envy. It's envy in the. Sorry to name drop this, but the Melanie Klein psychoanalytic sense of not wanting the control to be outside, not wanting the good thing to be outside of oneself, not wanting to depend on others, not having to Want to depend on the albatross and feed it and do whatever it takes, keep it around, and then you can have a good trip. No, I just want to be able to have a good trip of my own accord. So how dare you be the thing that I need to control or to relate to in order to get what I need, whether that's physical or social, whatever.
And so people do this in their lives all the time, and this implicates death drive as well. So they kill off relationships. They avoid having relationships because it's too painful to acknowledge that the good thing that they might get from the outside, from the relationship is not already inside them, that they're not just complete in and of themselves, that they need people. So the mariner might be trying to say, I don't need you, albatross. Screw you, we don't need you. We're just good all by ourselves. We can do it on our own. I don't know.
Am I capturing anything of what you're getting at?
18:45 Erin: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's. So the albatross, in other words, is, like, representative of the mariner's relationship to the sea itself. Right. In which it's like. I don't know if I want to say this on the podcast, but, like, I don't want to be the sea's bitch. Right. Like, I don't want to.
18:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
19:01 Erin: Then the Mariner, oddly, like, then would trade places with the albatross in a way, as being like the locus, like the tangible locus now for the mariners, or for the. For the crew members, rather, for their, like, desire for vengeance. Yeah. So then the. The mariner, in a way, trades places with the albatross after having killed it, because now we can just. It's like he symbolically transports. So now the crew members have a direction for their ire, a locus for their ire, which. Which then would rest with the mariner, who is. In killing. The albatross then becomes like the albatross was a tangible symbol of a kind of act of God on which they can then exert a kind of revenge by making him again, making him the scapegoat, making him have to expiate for, you know, the sins of nature against the crew. Is that.
20:00 Wes: Yeah.
20:01 Erin: Does that make sense or am I going.
20:03 Wes: Yeah, no. Yeah. You're getting back to the. This idea that you had about his identification with the albatross and their identification of him with the albatross and the negative component of their ambivalence coming out, meaning that. Right. So the Albatross is good fortune. In a way, it's a good omen. But why should we have to depend on such omens? And why in general, should we have to be at nature's mercy or rely on the causal framework of the world in order to have them to navigate the world? Why shouldn't the world work according to the rules of the normative.
The rules of morality. Right. This is a famous kind of opposition that Kant makes, which is that there are ethical laws that are analogous to the laws of nature, but the laws of nature just are what they are. And nothing that exists can violate the laws of nature. Everything is bound to the laws of nature. But normative laws are violated all the time. There are still laws, but they don't have the element of necessity in the world. In the same way we're bound to them, but we can violate them. I think there's always an underlying wish that. So that the ethical were more like the natural.
And we weren't just at the mercy of a uncaring natural world. That things would unfold as they should unfold. No one would. Would murder and no one would gratuitously kill a bird. And none of these things would. None of these things would actually happen. So to kill off the bird is to kill off this dependency on nature. In a way, it's almost like a. It's like an attempt at. It's almost like an ethical. It's an attempt at the vindication of the ethical, the vindication of the normative over and against the natural. Okay. So that's the first part of that.
Right. So then he's. I'm just trying to get to where you are with the identification with the albatross. And so. Right. The breeze is about to stop. I forget what happens here. But in any case, I think you were saying he's gonna. He's going to become a scapegoat. Yeah.
22:13 Erin: And this is, in a sense.
22:14 Wes: So he may come to represent the very same things that the albatross that we take the albatross to be representing. By the way, I think we have a very original reading of this poem here.
22:27 Erin: I think we do.
22:28 Wes: I haven't found this in the secondary literature, but go ahead.
22:32 Erin: Shall I read? Because the breeze is about to drop. And then we'll get to that. So stands if I read straight through.
22:37 Wes: I think we're running out of time. Okay. So let's end it there. And we will continue on in part three, where down drops the breeze. Okay, thank you.
22:50 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext. You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. All right, welcome to part three of our discussion of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We are a bit of the way into section two of the poem.
I think we're going to start today's discussion from down dropped the breeze, which is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 stanzas into section 2. Okay, I think I'll. I'll go ahead and read it. Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down. Twas sad as sad could be and we did speak only to break the silence of the sea all in a hot and copper sky, the bloody sun at noon right up above the mast did stand no bigger than the moon. Day after day, day after day we stuck no breath, no motion as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. Water, water everywhere. And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere. Not any drop to drink. The very deeps did rot. O Christ, that ever this should be. Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and rout the death fires danced at night, the water like a witch's oils, burnt green and blue and white. And some in dreams assured were of the spirit that plagued us so. Nine fathom deep. He had followed us from the land of mist and snow, and every tongue through utter drouth was withered at the root. We could not speak no more than if we had been choked with soot.
Ah, well, a day. What evil looks had I from old and young, Instead of the cross the albatross about my neck was hung.
25:43 Wes: Oo.
25:44 Erin: Oo.
25:45 Wes: I think that's pronounced suit to rhyme with rude. Just kidding.
25:49 Erin: Yeah, I know some of these rhymes are a little. I'm also trying to swallow the. You know that. Nay. Any drop to drink or no. Or. I don't know how to say that, but I'm trying to gloss over it so that it doesn't. It doesn't sound like I can't be accused of anything.
26:06 Wes: Is it the schwa sound?
26:08 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
26:10 Wes: I think I was reading it ne, but. Yeah, I don't know for sure.
26:14 Erin: Yeah, I think it's ne. I think it's ne, but it just, you know, like everyone thinks of it as nor. You know what I mean? I think there's a more modern day. I suppose I don't have the. Did he edit that in the re.
26:28 Wes: Yeah, he might have modernized that maybe.
26:31 Erin: Yeah, right.
26:32 Wes: He modernized a bunch of them. All right, so he's killed. We have to try to remember where we left off our last recording, which was two weeks ago. I remember that he killed the albatross already, the bird that had brought the fog and mist. All right, so there's some ambivalence about whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to do that killed the bird that made the breeze blow, but he had also killed the bird that brought the fog and mist. We talked a little bit about what the albatross represented. And I think there was some talk of its representation. Of what? Of nature and natural forces. Do you remember? What did we conclude there?
27:12 Erin: Yeah, we talked about the albatrosses as a representation of nature, as a representation of obviously as a scapegoat kind of figure. Most of our conversation was about the albatross, perhaps as a reflection of the Mariner himself or a kind of double for the Mariner. So that the act of shooting him was like, the Mariner just really doesn't like himself and he needs to work on his self esteem. I think that's what we.
27:40 Wes: So, yeah, so there's an identification with the albatross.
27:43 Erin: Right.
27:43 Wes: So the thing I think I had been emphasizing was the sense in which they are at the mercy of these natural forces like the breeze. And the killing of the albatross, in a way represents a rebellion against that dependency. It's not merely motivationless. It's not merely just a casual crime of sadism or cruelty. In a way. It's unconsciously an objection to the natural world, maybe. And then you were getting at several times at his identification with the albatross, partly Is it because of the albatross's isolation? And by the way, the reason we had gotten to the albatross as a representative of natural forces is in part because of the role of the albatross is a sort of object of superstition.
And is it good luck? Is it bad luck? And we talked a little bit about the way actual sailors at the time viewed albatrosses, whether they eat them or protect them as symbols of good luck or whatever. But we made the transition from a superstitious conception of the effect of the albatross on their fate to a less. Well, it's still somewhat superstitious, but it's related to natural causes. And then the identification with the albatross had something to do with the mariners isolation and maybe alienation from other members of the crew?
29:07 Erin: I think so, yeah. And we also talked about the. The albatross, I think as being a perfect example, or rather an example of living successfully in isolation. Right. So he's someone who's. Or he. The albatross is. Is someone whose body is, you know, a perfect ship, if you will, and far more self determined and, you know, capable of dealing with the elements. Right. Someone who lives in an extreme environment or a thing. I keep making the albatross a person, but an animal that is. Yeah. Just. Just better able to weather the concerns that so kind of torment the people on the ship and thereby an object maybe of aspiration or even envy on the part of the mariner.
29:51 Wes: Right, we did talk about the envy. Yeah. So everyone wants to be the albatross. The albatross is the thing to be.
29:58 Erin: Yeah. The thing I have written in my notes that I think the one thing I wrote down from last time is sailors are the sea's bitches. So I don't know if we actually said that or if it was something you said that I thought was funny.
30:15 Wes: Yeah. So, okay, so a symbol of independence and being able to navigate this natural world without depending upon the whims of the winds and other forces. So object of envy, of identification and symbolic of a certain sort of independence. Okay.
30:36 Erin: You know, this independence is. Is funny considering of course, that just prior to the section that I read, we were talking about last time, the symbolic dependence or the superstitious dependence between the albatross and the elements. Right. That the albatross brings something with him and you know, with his loss, causes the weather to change. But of course, one of the things we pointed out last time, I think was the fact that they actually say that the sailors when they when they get mad at the mariner for killing the bird, say that they killed the bird that made the breeze blow before the breeze even stops blowing, then they think it's a good thing because the fog and mist clears up. Right. So. So it was a good thing to kill the bird because the bird actually brought the fog and mist, not the breezes. And then finally, now at 1:03, finally, the breeze does stop blowing. So.
31:25 Wes: So they were right.
31:26 Erin: They were right. The albatross did make the breeze blow. And we have this, you know, one of the really famous images from the poem, the ship being still as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. I love this image. I've just started, and I don't know, I have a tremendous amount to say about this, but I'm wondering about the interplay here, perhaps, between artistry and inactivity or stillness. And I'm wondering if Coleridge. I mean, this is just a nice image. I haven't really interrogated it, you know, but I'm thinking about the sort of. The contrast between the image that Coleridge is invoking here of probably a very serene, lovely kind of painting that you might have in a study or, God forbid, in your bathroom or something like that.
Right. And the actual desperation of their. Of their situation, which is submerged in this image of imagery, of artistry. And I just wonder about that contrast here.
32:22 Wes: Yeah, I think we might have mentioned that this is a very Apollonian thing. This. You know, when you get to something that's static, something that's like a painting or a statue, something that's not dynamic, like music. If you're thinking esthetically, you're thinking about the Apollonian as opposed to the Dionysian and Romantic poetry, as opposed to. I think Coleridge described it. We were reading some quotations, is very focused on the Dionysian element. So that's something to keep in mind here, as he maybe is engaged in this reflection on the.
On the static. But it's interesting because there's the worry that he killed the bird that makes the breezes blow, the relief that he killed the bird that brings the fog and mist. And then before the breeze drops down, the breezes blew, the white foam flew. So they have a period of being in motion, and then they burst into that silent sea. And they're the first ever to burst into that silent sea. It's as if this burst of activity sends them hurtling into this unknown, heretofore undiscovered place, space that turns out to be a very static Silent space in which there is no motion.
So they burst into that. It's like being like, maybe sent out of the airlock from a spaceship, and suddenly you're in this very silent, empty place. But the nature of communication changes. They speak only to break the silence of the sea. So they're no longer speaking primarily to communicate with each other and we can imagine to communicate about in ways that are typical of sailors, which is in the running of the ship or whatever, hoist the so and such and such. Or now it's purely because they can't stand the silence that they would speak. So when there is activity, it's a rebellion against silence and stasis.
And then you have the image of the bloody sun at noon, which is an odd image, right, because we would think of a bloody sun as being something normally at sunset, standing above the mast. Later on, we're going to get an image. I mentioned it in our last recording, about where it seems like the sun is coming down like a pin and pinning the ship in place. I think that's coming. I'm not sure, maybe that's the way I read this image. But I think it's a different one that's coming later in the poem. So you get also an idea that light has this arresting effect, that it's by shedding light on something that you would make it stop and make it stand still.
34:53 Erin: Yeah, I really like the way you're reading this. Stands around line 100. Something you said about the fact that they're bursting into this sea, the first to burst into it, and that it's unknown. You're highlighting another.
35:07 Wes: These are the voyages of the starship.
35:11 Erin: Well, but really, though, I mean, I think you're right.
35:14 Wes: The sea ship Enterprise. Do you know the name of the ship?
35:18 Erin: I don't think so. Maybe it is the Enterprise. The connection you're drawing to being sent out of an airlock or something like that is really an apt one. And I think this is another instance of having these two opposites kind of sit on top of each other, because we have this idea that they're the first to burst into the sea. So they have a knowledge now that nobody else has. And it puts me in mind, of course, of being maybe cast out of the Garden of Eden or having eaten the apple of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Right. So they now have a knowledge that they didn't have before.
They're explorers. That also involves being thrust into the unknown. So they're seeing kind of behind the curtain, if you will. But this contrast between being the first ones to have the knowledge and being in the unknown place, it's highlighting a contrast for me in the same way that I think we were talking about the reorientation that happens in part two from part one. So when they're. I think we made a little bit of this when they are going from traveling from north to south on the globe, go down towards Antarctica, and then around the beginning of.
Or just at the beginning of section two, they start to travel south to north. So they round the cape and start traveling northward again. So now they're roughly. They've already been over the equator. Now they seem to be back around the parallel to the point where they were before, but now in a very different location. So in certain ways it's extremely familiar. It would be familiar perhaps to anyone who's traveled over the equator. I don't know enough about seafaring knowledge to know if things are calmer at the equator or what the case may be.
Yeah, Right. So this is a place that's familiar and unfamiliar. Right. That they know and yet they don't know. And it's truly like, you know, because they're parallel to where they've been before, but also in a different place. It's truly like a parallel universe kind of situation. So it does put me in mind of like a Star Trek episode, you know, where everything is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Known and unknown.
37:26 Wes: Right. And then they're about to be pursued by the Klingons.
37:30 Erin: Right?
37:30 Wes: In a sense. Well, yeah. I like this idea of them discovering something and having a new sort of knowledge. I mean, ultimately, they were looking for Australia. Right. Or being. It's based on a story of people who expedition to discover Australia. And they didn't get that. Instead they get this place of nothingness in a way neither land nor wind, nor so idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. So in a sense, they've become like a aesthetic object and perhaps become something representative of the arts or. Or of the poetic. I don't know. We should be on, as usual, on a lookout for any meta commentary here on the nature of the arts, of the aesthetic or the poetic.
38:17 Erin: Yeah. In light of this, it's funny that. Yeah. That this aesthetic image punctures this moment, considering these are not people really in a position to appreciate art in this particular situation, nor are they near any kind of culture or shoreline or people who could paint them. Right. So this is like a strange infusion of culture in a completely cultureless place, completely bereft of any kind of art and away from any kind of human civilization. And yet here we have this aestheticized image. So it's again, just kind of calling to mind these contrasts. Living on top of each other here.
38:52 Wes: Yeah. So when he says water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. On one level, it's salt water. So that's one irony. Can't drink the saltwater. But then you ask the question, well, how is that exactly relevant? And then if you look right, that follows the stanza about the painted ship. And so you can think of it also as being painted water, undrinkable, which says something about our relation to the art object, which is the classic description of what it means. To be related to an art object is to be in a quote, unquote indifferent relationship, something that Kant made an idea that Kant made famous. Where our appreciation of the art object is not about our desire for what's
Psychedelic Regrets in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
May 20, 2024
The ancient Mariner kills his Albatross with a carelessness that stands in stark contrast to his impulse for confession. For several days he and his shipmates feed the albatross, play with it, and treat it as if it were inhabited by a “Christian soul.” The mariner never tells the wedding guest why it is that he kills the bird, but the casual and seemingly unmotivated act is followed by a psychedelic nightmare that gives us some clues. Why do we rebel against our position within the natural world, even to the point of self-destruction? What is required to restore us? Wes & Erin discuss Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: The ancient Mariner kills his albatross with a carelessness that stands in stark contrast to his impulse for confession. For several days, he and his shipmates feed the albatross, play with it, and treat it as if it were inhabited by a Christian soul. The mariner never tells the wedding guest why it is that he kills the bird. But the casual and seemingly unmotivated act is followed by a psychedelic nightmare that gives us some clues. Why do we rebel against our position within the natural world, even to the point of self destruction? What is required to restore us? Today we discuss Samuel Taylor Coleridge's classic poem, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:18 Erin: Okay, Wes, here's how I'd like to kind of frame our discussion today. It's a philosophical question, I know, but I think it's foundational to our discussion of this poem. And that is, is it really ever a crime to kill a bird?
1:33 Wes: Is it ever a crime to kill a bird? Well, you're making me associate to something which I associated to when I started reading the poem, which is being an adolescent boy. And at some point the hunting instinct kicks in. As a teenager, you desperately want to bow and arrow and you desperately want a gun, or at least a BB gun. And then you go out and try to kill things with it and then you regret it horribly. So that's what happened to me. I had several BB guns early. I forget the age that I was when I first got them. And then I had a friend whose name I remember, but he will remain unnamed.
I don't want to out my partner in crime, but yeah, I ended up shooting a bird sitting on a branch and it flew down to the ground. I'm taking this in a much sadder direction probably than you expected. Yes, sorry, but. And then we went over to the bird and it was just lying there dead with its eyes open, but it was kind of nestled in the grass. Like it didn't just topple over, it looked like it was just sitting there. And that filled me with horrible, horrible guilt and cured me forever of wanting to hunt Anything. And that's the. You know, that was my way into this poem, that experience.
2:51 Erin: Really? Wow.
2:52 Wes: Yeah.
2:54 Erin: No, I just think in reward for doing that, you should get some sort of stipend from the Tippi Hedren Fund for removing birds from the world. I don't. I don't hate birds, but I do have, like, a performative hatred of birds, which. Which motivated my question.
3:10 Wes: What is. So what is that? Yeah. Did it all start with a bad experience with Big Bird and.
3:18 Erin: No, actually, I. I always liked. I always liked birds. Okay. You know, it's a poet thing. Like, poets love birds. Everybody in Florida, when I was down in Florida, you know, everybody's a birder. Everyone's obsessed with birds. And I just started reacting against that. Performatively, I think birds are fine, but, you know, there are lots of epithets you could. You could swing around. Rats with wings. Who cares?
3:41 Wes: Well, if you really don't like birds, you can. You know, it's not too late to become a hunter.
3:48 Erin: No, thank you. I don't want to kill any birds, but. But I. I want to be pro bird murder. For the purposes of this podcast.
3:56 Wes: They have to be controlled.
3:57 Erin: Yeah.
3:58 Wes: Otherwise they could easily take over the world.
4:01 Erin: Yeah. Especially the ones with cameras in them.
4:04 Wes: Right, right. What is that site? Birds Are. It's a parody kind of conspiracy theory site that claims that birds are a hoax.
4:11 Erin: Yeah, it's really funny. You know, who knows? Like, maybe the Albatross was going to kill them. I mean, it was following them. It obviously is like waiting for them all to die so that it can have lunch. Right? Yeah.
4:26 Wes: You're getting at the arbitrariness of that killing, which we should talk about.
4:30 Erin: Oh, you mean like a real conversation? Okay. All right. This is. The postscript is just infecting the real episodes now. This is what's happening.
4:39 Wes: No, it's good. It's the way it should be.
4:42 Erin: No, but I mean, in all seriousness, I spent. I spent a long time, Okay, I spent like an hour or two, but that's a long time for me, trying to figure out exactly what the motivation for this might be. You know, this is a poem I hadn't. I hadn't read since maybe college, but I feel like in college I just kind of glossed over it. I. You know, I really loved this poem in high school. I saw it in high school, I'm sure, as being some kind of very simplistic Christian theological, you know, symbolism, something which I'm sure I interpreted in an extremely simplistic way.
And, you know, Re encountering it now, I see how incredibly complex its symbology is and how you can't really locate it in any one tradition. Like, I had forgotten about this spirit that goes, you know, that travels nine fathoms deep under the ship. Incredibly bizarre. I mean, among the many bizarre things in the poem. Right. The original sin, if we want to. If we want to call it that, which I'm a little bit reluctant to. Of shooting the albatross really does come out of nowhere in the poem. And it really. It seems like Coleridge has taken pains to make it seem as unmotivated as possible or at least to like, remove any idea of.
Of a potential motivation. Though I did find a couple of things in the poem that might have been potential motivations, I think. But I'm not sure if I was over reading. But I'm just. Anyway, I'm just curious as to whether or not that was a preoccupation of yours or if. If you have a clear reading of that act.
6:12 Wes: Yeah, I don't. You know, I think the lack of psychology to the poem or psychological plausibility or the lack of. It's not. Not. That's the wrong phrase plus plausibility, but the unmotivated killing of the bird. And in general, maybe it's the surreal quality of the poem, but I think Wordsworth criticized it for that and they thought of leaving it out of this volume. Lyrical Ballads. What I think about with such an abrupt turn in the poem and seemingly unmotivated, where there's a. You know, but this seems like a friendly bird. Maybe he shares your irrational hatred of birds.
But I think, okay, well, you know, maybe. Maybe one ought to reflect here on one's own sort of thoughtless acts of. Cruelty isn't the right word, but thoughtless acts of. Or maybe one's careless acts that harm others, that one does unthinkingly. But I think even. Even beyond that. Well, here's an association I had to. It was to St. Augustine's Confessions, taking the pears. And he has the famous passage where he says, well, it wasn't really even about being hungry or needing the pears or anything like that. It was completely motivated by the thrill of doing something evil or illicit or transgressive.
Now, I'm not suggesting that that's what's going on with the bird killer, with the. With the Mariner. I don't know that we're supposed to ultimately come up with any psychological explanation except maybe the death drive. You know, that's another thing I thought of which. Where it's, it's something that in a way transcends psychological explanation, except to the extent that we want to destroy life in the sense that we want to destroy all tension within ourselves. Because the life drive or what it means to be alive comes with desire, comes with longing, which is to say, comes with tension.
And at some unconscious level, if Freud is right, we are trying to get rid of that even. Even if it means doing something really destructive or self destructive, and even if it's completely unmotivated at a conscious level. And some people, if they're engaged in repetition compulsions, they're doing this over and over and over again without knowing why. And that's another, I think, apt association to this, the death drive, because it does, you know, it becomes a death ship. What's your whole take? You know, before we get into the actual poem and start going line by line, I think this is a good idea for you to set us off by just giving a little intro about what we think about the, the shooting itself.
8:59 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I like this idea of self destruction. I think the, the singleness of the albatross really was. Was interesting to me. You know, it's not a. It's not a bird in a, in a. In a flock and it's kind of going after this, this ship and you know, they treat it as like a pet, but it is solitary in some way. And I think like the mariner's isolation, he's set apart at the beginning of the, of the story, you know, the frame narrative. He's. He's obviously someone who's an outsider from, from society. And so in a way, you know, the, to. To connect the two.
So I would want to connect this, this isolated albatross with the mariner who, who goes to kind of like the depths of isolation and solitude on being, you know, the lone survivor on this, on this voyage. By, by equating those two, I'm kind of eliding the time, right? The whole. The killing of the albatross is what really induces his solitude. But I think that there's something not just in the order in which the story is told, in which we get the old mariner telling this story from his youth before we get the young mariner. But I think there's something here about the mariner's isolation, even on board the ship already before the killing of the albatross, in which there's maybe some kind of identification and therefore the self destruction happens in, in the act of killing the albatross.
That's one theory I Have. I think I mostly arrived there after reading that line about how the spirit was motivated to follow the ship because it's the. The spirit, I think the line goes, loved the bird that loved the man who shot him with his bow. Right. So. So the idea here is that the. The bird loved the mariner in particular, so there's like a kind of an identification between the two of them. And so having shot the albatross is like this desire for self destruction, you know, I also think that there's a reading in which maybe the opposite of that is also true.
Right. In which the albatross is the other, you know, that the mariner can't deal with, can't kind of integrate into his. How do I want to put this? Something about the albatross is an unknown quantity which then must become, through story must become like integrated into the mariner's psyche. So like, maybe the mariner is kind of. Maybe it's not aloneness, maybe it's more like solipsism. Right. And so he can kill the albatross because he doesn't care about the albatross because the albatross has nothing to do with him. But then, then must kind of like integrate this albatross into.
Into himself through the perpetual telling of this story. So that like, the punishment is to live inside the story forever with the other now integrated as kind of like the main character, the main actor in your own story does that. I don't know if I'm putting that very well, but, you know, so maybe. Maybe that's almost like the flip side of the. Of the identification with the albatross. Or maybe maybe they're both the same, you know, like two sides of the same coin. I'm. I'm not sure, but, you know, I was thinking a lot about it and obviously thinking about it hasn't made me any more articulate as to like how.
How I can explain these, these various thoughts. And they're all very. They're all very hazy, I think, because we never really get very close as. As you suggested, like we never really get inside the mariner psyche for, for all of the length of this poem in which he's telling us the story, we don't really get a tremendous amount of psychology. So.
12:37 Wes: Right. All the psychology I think we would have to see as played out, allegoric, allegorically, symbolically.
12:44 Erin: Right. And the symbols are very, very complex. So.
12:47 Wes: Yeah, I like that about identification. I hadn't thought of that. Let's revisit that when we, when we get There. I want to dig into that. Should we read a little bit about the background of this poem? Coleridge later on wrote about what occasioned the poem in his Biographia Literaria. I could read that. If it's boring, I could cut it out. It was a little bit long.
13:08 Erin: No, I think that's great. I like the idea that this is all Wordsworth's original, original idea.
13:16 Wes: Let me. Let me start reading and we'll see how. During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbors, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry. The power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appear to represent, the practicability of combining both.
These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself. To which of us, I do not recollect that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts, the good ones and the bad ones. I wrote the bad ones. He wrote the amazing. I'm just kidding. In the. In the one. The incidents and the agents were to be, in part, at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections, by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real and real. In this sense they have been to every human being who from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.
For the second class subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. The characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village in its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons in character supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.
Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us, an inexhaustible treasure. But for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude. We have eyes yet see not, and hearts that neither feel or understand. With this view I wrote the Ancient Mariner and was preparing, among other poems, the Dark Ladie and the Christabel, in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt.
Okay, that's Coleridge. And then Wordsworth said of this. The Ancient Mariner was founded on a strange dream which a friend of Coleridge had who fancied he saw a skeleton ship with figures in it. They should have, by the way, trademarked this before Johnny Depp and everyone else, I don't know. We had both determined to write some poetry for a monthly magazine, the profits of which were to defer the expenses of a little excursion we were to make together. The Ancient Mariner was intended for this periodical, but was too long. I had very little share in the composition of it, for I soon found the style of Coleridge and myself would not assimilate.
Besides the lines in the fourth part, quote, and thou art long and lank and brown as I in the ribbed sea sand, unquote, I wrote the stanza in the first part. He holds him with his glittering eye the wedding guest stood still and listens like a three years child. The mariner hath his will. And four or five lines more in different parts of the poem, which I could not now point out, basically all the good lines. The idea of shooting an albatross was mine, for I had been reading Shelvocke's Voyages, which probably Coleridge never saw. I also suggested the reanimation of the dead bodies to work the ship.
Yeah. So I think that's a. It. It's a very interesting background. You know, we did. From this volume, we did Tintern Abbey. Very different kind of poem. Very interesting idea to put their poems in a single volume and say, okay, here's two varieties of the romantic disposition. In one of them, we take things in everyday life and we rediscover what's extraordinary about them by ripping off that film. Right. That Coleridge mentions. That covers up the senses. The way we become inured to the wondrousness of the world, we try to undo that. And then the other one method is just to take a tab of LSD and see what comes.
I'm just kidding. Sorry.
17:38 Erin: Opium is.
17:39 Wes: I'm really. Yeah. To take. Take a lot of drugs. No. So to. The other method is to really get into the realm of fantasy. And in this case, something very dreamlike. And it's odd because it's. You Know, again, these are. I can see why you would think of these both as variations on the Romantic, but they are also just very, very different endeavors. And Coleridge and Wordsworth couldn't be more different. It's. It's a very odd couple. You know, you could make a sitcom with them as the. Wonder how they got along, as how they got along as neighbors and until they didn't.
18:18 Erin: Yeah.
18:18 Wes: So, yeah, it's an interesting collaboration, but yeah, it's funny.
18:23 Erin: I, you know, I think we'll talk about this quite a bit more when we get to the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which I'm sure we'll cover at some point. But, you know, it's funny too that this is one of the actual ballads in the collection. So, you know, at once it's kind of outside of the purview that Wordsworth set about for the book in a way. I mean, obviously they had this kind of like joint understanding of which arenas each would cover. But I think ultimately, you know, Wordsworth was not the biggest fan of this poem and certainly it exerted a huge gravitational pull over the.
Over the whole collection by having it be the longest poem in the book by far and having it come first. So that when it was reissued a couple of years later with, with Wordsworth's preface, it was, I think, shunted to the back of the book at that point because the poem pretty much dominated the reviews and everything. You know, that. That's really kind of what swayed people's opinions, I think about it, because it was so mammoth, you know, right at the beginning of this thing. And then to have a bunch of, you know, Wordsworth's kind of quieter poems later on.
It's definitely a book that is trying to coalesce two completely different styles and put them under one sort of like guiding principle which doesn't quite, I think, capture both of them in this scheme, I think. But I mean, it is worth saying that like, this is a ballad, it's a book called Lyrical Ballads. And of course, like, there is obviously there's this desire, the whole project of Lyrical Ballads to get at real speech, to get it, you know, something having to do with the lives of real people. Obviously this is supernatural and doesn't have much to do with that.
But in terms of the ballad tradition, ballads were considered a kind of lower class form of poetry, often oral. And so I guess there's something here about Coleridge trying to fit in with like, what was Wordsworth's particular project by producing a long ballad.
20:21 Wes: Anyway, I want to think more about that, but let's get into the poem.
20:25 Erin: Okay. It is an ancient mariner and he stoppeth one of three. By thy long gray beard and thy glittering eye. Now wherefore stoppest me. The bridegroom's doors are opened wide and I am next of kin. The guests are met, the feast is set. Mayst hear the merry din. But still he holds the wedding guest. There was a ship, quoth he. Nay, if thou's got a laughsome tale, mariner, come with me. He holds him with his skinny hand, quoth he. There was a ship. Now get thee hence, thou graybeard loon, or my staff shall make thee skip. He holds him with his glittering eye. The wedding guest stood still and listens like a three years child. The mariner hath his will. The wedding guest sate on a stone, he cannot choose but hear. And thus spake on that ancient man, the bright eyed mariner. Mariner.
21:13 Wes: Marinera.
21:14 Erin: Marinera. Sauce.
21:16 Wes: Mariner. Yeah. I think one of the things that Wordsworth didn't like about the poem was kind of some of the ancient diction and spelling, the old sea yarn affectation. But you just have to let yourself get entranced by it. Just like the bridegroom. I mean, sorry, not the bridegroom, but the wedding guest.
21:34 Erin: That's right.
21:35 Wes: You look into the mariner's eyes and they become little whirlpools, little spirals. And then you let yourself go.
21:48 Erin: Well, you know, a lot of this though, is pretty easy to clean up. And he does, you know, I mean, Coleridge gets rid of some of this in the next edition. The problem is he keeps going and going and tinkering with it for 40 years or something, but. And of course, some of it is just Scottish because it's. He's supposed to be Scottish. Yeah. So. So we have this idea of the wedding. So lots of questions already coming up. Why this one guy? Why is it important that he's a wedding guest? You know, we have this repetition of the mariner holding him. Very tender. No, he's. He's transfixing him with his eye, making him stay. What kind of, as you're suggesting, hypnotic power does. Does he have over him? Why the compulsion? All of these questions and more.
22:31 Wes: So he's like a wedding crasher, but he's not going to go in and have fun.
22:36 Erin: He's like. He's the opposite of a wedding crash. He's trying to prevent people from. From going in and having fun.
22:42 Wes: He's a wedding blocker.
22:45 Erin: Yeah, he's the Bouncing guest blocker. Turns out this guy was not wanted at the wedding and they hired this guy to stay outside and just tell this one guest a story until he went away.
22:58 Wes: Yeah, so it's one of three. The wedding guest is walking, I guess, in with two other people and he's the one who gets stopped. So I guess that's symbolically significant. I don't know if it has something to do with the Trinity or not or some other, you know, three is a symbol with very wide ranging possibilities of interpretation. But what do you make of that? Is there anything else to say about that? About the one of three?
23:24 Erin: I don't think so. I was trying to figure that out myself, but it didn't, you know, a trinitarian explanation wasn't really satisfying to me. This is more just like a, like a psa, like one in every three people will be stopped by the Ancient Mariner. But, you know, take precautions.
23:41 Wes: He's a business. He's a busy man.
23:43 Erin: No, I just, I guess I just thought, thought more and more about this idea of the guest and the, the bridegroom's feast. Of course, like, this is a common way of thinking about heaven. You know, Christ is the bridegroom and, and heaven is the sort of like eternal wedding feast. And so this guest seems to me to have been chosen for some purgatorial. Right. Waylaying and needs to hear this story. And if anyone has ever heard a long story told by an old man, it is, it does shave off some time in purgatory, I think. But anyway, yeah, you know, so, so, so perhaps he's being waylaid because he's not ready to go into the feast.
In other words, he's not ready to go to heaven. He needs to be, he needs to be purified in some further way. He needs some sort of further knowledge, some, some greater understanding before he can partake. But I was also thinking about just this idea of the guest. Like why, why not the, if we're not going to read this as a, as a heavenly symbol, why a guest? Why not the bride or the bridegroom? You know, the, the people that the event is actually about. Thinking about the significance of a guest as, you know, having the enjoyment of the feast but being ancillary to the marriage itself, to the sacrament.
So like a looker on, you know, someone who's coming basically for entertainment and celebration and probably food, but who's not directly partaking. And whether or not that's significant either as a kind of a mirror of the Mariner in some way in terms of, you know, someone who seems set apart from the crux of the event or if the guest like needs. Not that if, if you're just going to go to a wedding that you need some kind of admonishment for being there. But you know, but there's, there's something about this idea that, you know, the guest wants, wants merriment and wants enjoyment and wants to, and thinks at first, oh, I'm going to bring this mariner inside and have him, oh, you have a great story.
Is it a laugh? You know, come in and tell it for everybody. The guest maybe can be accused of a certain kind of unseriousness or something. I'm not, I'm not sure. You know, all of these things are just kind of swirling around in my head as I, as I approach the poem.
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But instead of revealing too much about the private life of the groom, he just tells this crazy tale. He's really drunk and says this weird poem, and everyone has to sit through it. But in this case. Right. It doesn't happen at the wedding, but outside the wedding, before the wedding. Or is the wedding already happened? This is the feast. So I guess this is like the reception, right?
29:17 Erin: Yeah, I think so.
29:18 Wes: After the wedding. And. And yeah, the. The wedding guest's response is to threaten him and get off me or I'll. My staff will make you skip. Yeah. And that's when he gets, you know, arrested by the glittering.
29:31 Erin: I.
29:31 Wes: He gets mesmerized, which is, to my mind, the best way to experience a poem. It's in a state of mesmerization.
29:40 Erin: Well, I love the fact that you're pointing out that he's rude to this. To this Mariner, because I think I totally glossed over that and that. I think that's really important, you know, the Peter.
29:51 Wes: Peter moment.
29:52 Erin: Yeah, exactly. And also the. It's downright Greek. You know, he's. He's an old man. He deserves respect, perhaps. Or, you know, you should. You should listen to him. You should care about him. You should extend him some kind of hospitality. Maybe, you know, maybe. Maybe someone's doing wrong by not inviting him in so that he.
30:11 Wes: That's a great point.
30:11 Erin: Bring down the whole party.
30:12 Wes: Well, it's like the. The uninvited witch who shows up in the fairy tale. Or it's the soothsayer or the prophet. Right. A Tiresias figure there to deliver some sort of truth, and that's what's being pushed away.
30:27 Erin: Mm. Yeah. So I think. Yeah, this question of ordering and how the. How the Poem seems to know, you know, as I, as I kind of suggested earlier that the, the mariner's solitude is sort of prefigured in the poem even before he becomes, in the course of this story that he tells, the solitary figure that mirrors the albatross here. It's as if, you know, the mariner already knows that this particular guest is the one who will reject him, who will not extend him hospitality, and therefore knows that perhaps he's the one who needs to hear this tale. Right. There's a kind of like super knowledge or before knowledge that seems to, I think, come up again and again in the poem.
31:06 Wes: Yes. There's an opportunity here to write another poem from the perspective of the wedding guest.
31:11 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
31:13 Wes: It's a much more boring poem. All right, shall we keep going?
31:17 Erin: Yeah. The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared Merrily did we drop below the kirk, below the hill, below the lighthouse top the sun came up upon the left out of the sea came he and he shone bright and on the right went down into the sea Higher and higher every day Till over the mast at noon the wedding guest here beat his breast for he heard the loud bassoon. The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she nodding their heads before her goes the merry minstrelsy. The wedding guest, he beat his breast, yet he cannot choose but here. And thus spake on that ancient man, the bright eyed mariner.
31:54 Wes: This is really interesting because I didn't give a lot of thought to the fact that the wedding guest is so torn up about not being able to be at the celebration.
32:05 Erin: This is like the easiest application to basic Christian symbolism I think for this reason, right, he's instead of partaking of the feast, he's in the outer darkness, right? Like this is, this is very biblical. So he can, he knows what's going on, he knows what he's missed out on or what he is missing out on. And he's, he's rueful over, over this. What's interesting though of course is that, you know, he has the desire to go in and partake and was intending to go and you know, had his invitation in his hand or whatever whatnot. And the mariner is like forcibly holding him, preventing him from going in.
Normally there would be more agency on the wedding guests parts. You know, something that he had done that would prevent him from going in. Like, you know, he shows up and it turns out, oh, he doesn't have an invitation, right. He's been. If we want to imagine a scenario in which this has A more easy application to this idea of. Of the wedding feast as heaven. Right. He did. He. He had forgotten to plan for. For, you know, needing the invitation to prove that he. That he belongs or hadn't had left something important behind. Right. Something that indicated his own ineptitude or, you know, a respons dropped instead.
You know, this is like outside of his own will. And yet it does seem to be necessary in this idea of like a. It's. It's purgatorial in nature. He needs to hear this before he can be allowed in or before he can go in. Of course, in the end, he doesn't end up going at all, which is a further complication to this easy Christian symbolism. Right.
33:41 Wes: So he's gonna miss. Miss the whole thing.
33:44 Erin: Right.
33:44 Wes: I want to back up to. Before we get this little interlude about the wedding guest being upset. You know, we get. He launches into his account. So we get this little isolated stanza of what is going to be a very long account. And the stanzas is very representative of what's to come include. Which includes a lot of personification of nature. So you have the sun coming up out of the sea. I think, at this point. Right. You can just read that as straightforwardly a matter of a creative way of describing the sun. And visually the way it looks like it's coming out of the sea, even though we know it's not.
But I think as the poem goes on, it becomes so surreal that we can no longer say that anything is just a matter of imagery. It's not to be taken literally. It's figurative or imagistic. And in this case, we get the sun comes out of the sea, shines bright, and then on the right goes back down into it. Makes me think of, you know, one of those. Those cartoons where you see the sun actually emerging from the sea and the sun's got a face and then it looks around and then it plunges right back down on the other side. So. So to my mind, cartoonish. But also time is accelerated here.
We get. Correct me if I'm reading this wrong, but we. We. We get a whole day in which nothing happens before we get the interlude about the wedding guest.
35:07 Erin: Yeah, that's a great point. I also love the fact that, you know, the sun is personified as a he. It shines like God's own head, I think is the expression that'll come up later. Right. There's a very clear identification here between the sun and God. And yet what you're pointing out about this stanza is that the sun is subservient to the sea in a way. Right. It rises up out of the sea and then goes back down into it. So the sea has a kind of supremacy here. Later, when. When the mariner will describe the sea as rotting, it's. It's as if the sea is itself kind of like this supreme body in which.
In which everything else is. You know, we're all just kind of like organs, you know, in this. In this giant body of the sea that is decomposing. So there's. There's this supremacy maybe, of. Of nature. I mean, obviously the sun is. Is part of that as well, but almost this idea that, like, nature is supreme over. Over God contained within the stanza.
36:07 Wes: Yeah, good point. I mean, the sea is a much more. Well, it's a maternal image. It's where life comes from. It's amniotic. It's a big womb, in a way.
36:16 Erin: And.
36:17 Wes: And Right. So typically, the associations to the sea are associations to the maternal, but also to the organic. So, you know, yes, the sea is nature, the sun is nature, but the sea is essentially organic and therefore, in a sense, more Dionysian and more about life drive, if we want to connect it back to. Ultimately to the whole death drive theme that we may get into. And the sun is more Apollonian and it shines light on things later on in the poem. It's gonna. I think it's gonna pin down, right. The ship, it won't be able to move. It's like a pin of sunlight comes down and goes right through the ship.
And so the sun can be associated with stillness and with the static, because that is often what the concept of an image, I think, produces in us when we. Well, let me just think of a less convoluted way to say this. Yeah. I think the sun is. Despite the fact that it's moving, it's more associated with stasis and in the sense that it's more associated with being. So traditionally in philosophy, being as opposed to becoming the only true beings or the absolute eternal beings, like the Platonic forms, for instance. And they can't live in the world of becoming because if they did, they would be unknowable.
They wouldn't serve as a good foundation for knowledge. So anything that comes out that discloses itself and the light of day, in a sense, is associated with the static. So I like your. Yeah, I like your point about this opposition between sun and sea.
37:52 Erin: This is tangential, but I'm also just, you know, looking at the form of the poem too. The words of the wedding guest. And later a few other people will speak and they'll. They'll be quoted in the. In the poem as well. These words have the. The kind of. The membrane of quotations around them. But the mariner's speech and the poem itself, the implied poet, perhaps we could call it, who's telling the whole story, who says at the beginning, you know, it is an ancient mariner. So we get a voice other than the mariners to start the poem, right? So.
38:25 Wes: But then he disappears and he doesn't show up again until the end, right?
38:30 Erin: But there's a collapsing where the mariner's identity becomes then the poet. Or at least there's no differentiation. There's no membrane between the speaker of the poem and the mariner himself in his own speech. So there's a kind of. Again, I just think of a body, like, for me, it's a kind of a bodily association where. In the same way that the sea contains these various creatures in it. Maybe I'm thinking too much of one of my favorite poems, Marianne Moore's the Fish kept thinking of that over and over again. And in reading this poem, when she talks about the turquoise sea of bodies.
But it seems as though some of these characters, right, they have these membranes, they're almost like organs, whereas the flow of the poet and the mariner are collapsed. It's as if they're in the same. They're like the blood. They're in the same bloodstream that runs through the whole poem. And I think that'll become important because I think there's a lot about embodiment and blood and being embodied and things that are flowing versus things that are stagnant or more contained.
39:35 Wes: Cool. Shall we?
39:36 Erin: Okay, so this is the mariner speaking again. Listen, stranger, storm and wind, a wind and tempest strong for days and weeks it played us freaks like chaff we drove along. Listen, stranger. Mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold and ice mast high came floating by as green as emerald and through the drifts the snowy cliffs did send a dismal sheen. Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken. The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there. The ice was all around. It cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a swound.
40:12 Wes: Okay, so now we get the elements played us freaks.
40:16 Erin: Yeah.
40:16 Wes: What is that? I. Is that a. Is that idiomatic or. For the time, it's not idiomatic for. Not idiomatic for us.
40:24 Erin: But in my edition, it says freaks is glossed as unexpected changes of mind. Capricious tricks play games. Yeah. Still doesn't really explain grammatically how. How freaks is working there. Yeah, but I. I was stuck on that line so for so long that it actually made me miss the significance of the following line. The, like, chaff we drove along. And I mean, as fun as the freaks line is, because it is really fun. And I love the internal rhyme of the. Of the third lines. My favorite line, maybe my favorite single line in the whole poem is, and ice mast high came floating by.
But chaff. I'm just thinking about, you know, separating the wheat from the chaff. And I'm also thinking about the idea of these sailors as chaff in a way, right? Like we. We don't ever get an explanation for what it is that they're doing on this journey. We don't know what type of sailors they are. Are they explorers? Are they whalers? Are they. You know, like, we never get. We never get a reason. But the one thing I think that all sailors have in common is, you know, they tend to be people who are cast out from society. You know, they tend to be people who are.
Have lost everything, you know, and are looking for a way to make a living that would. They're looking for a way to make a living, and it wouldn't matter to them that they would be gone for upwards of two years at a time. No one would particularly miss them, unfortunately, was often the case with these. With these sailors. Right. So we have. We have a very interesting class of people to begin with here. And I just. I just wanted to point that out because I feel it's. It's easily glossed over, but the reality at the time was that if you were a sailor, you would often be potentially a criminal, a desperate person of some kind, you know, so this is a group of people that's already.
I don't want to say morally suspect, though that that comes into it. But this is already a group of people who are separate from society. On top of the separation that then we'll already see, or that on top of that we'll see that the mariner will come to experience. I don't know. I just. I think that's important for context here and understanding something of the world of this poem.
42:41 Wes: Maybe that's another thing that I hadn't thought about. As far as I know. It's a weird way to use chaff, Right. Normally you would be separating wheat from chaff. Secondarily, maybe you could think of chaff as being something that's driven or it's usually More passive. Something is acting on it, right. Or it's being spit out by a
43:01 Erin: machine or being winnowed and blown away.
43:03 Wes: Yeah, right. But in this case, like chaff we drove along. They're the ones performing the action. But I, you know, it's a weird simile.
43:13 Erin: It's like they're exiling, right?
43:16 Wes: Perfect. They are separating out themselves and they are the extra in a way. Or they. They are the unusable husk. This whole wheat from chaff thing, I think that originates with the Bible or its use as a metaphor for human worth. Right. What is that? Well, this is the wrong translation. The new living translation. He's ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. Then he will clean up the threshing area, garnering the wheat into his barn, but burning the chaff with never ending fire. Ooh, that's not nice. The chaff go to hell.
Well, it's very apt. That's what's about to happen with them, so. Or him, he. Everyone else dies, but he gets to go to hell and back, I guess. Yeah. So hints of that with the just thinking about the hell thing. You know, the hints of the Odyssey there, there too. But it played us freaks. Maybe. Maybe that means it's. They. They went nuts. They went crazy. But based on your. Your gloss, there's so much storm that it's making them crazy. And like Chaff we drove along. I mean, obviously the images of them being driven by the storm, but oddly it makes it.
It's as if it's their own agency. So I think that that suitably collapses the difference between their own freak minds and the natural elements. Because the storm, the outer storm, has become the internal storm.
44:43 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I think too that the membrane of the. Gosh, I don't want to keep using this word membrane. So I apologize, but. But I think it's important here, this idea of internal versus external. I guess Auden was interested in this, in that collapsing throughout the poem. But I'm thinking about the ship too, as kind of its own little universe. And I love this. One of the reasons why I love the. And ice mast high came floating by line is not just because it's beautiful and majestic and has a great sound to it and everything, but also just, you know, this is the beginning along with, in line 34, the viewing of the sun as then coming to stand over the mast so that we know that they're at the equator.
But in this line, you know, the mast is like a measuring Stick. It's. Everything is kind of viewed from the perspective of, like, where it is in relationship to the mast. Both the people on the ship, you know, the crew members themselves, will kind of be standing around the mast at various times. And also the outside world, the, you know, the natural world is measured in relationship to the mast as though this is like the center of the universe. It's their own sun. This. This particular master. And I think that this. What I take to happen later, shortly after this point, with the introduction of the superstitions of the crew members, etc.
You know, that all, I think, is being prefigured here with this idea of the mass, that they're measuring everything. They're measuring the world in relationship to them and their ship and their perspective. And so they're going to start reading, or we're going to see that they read signs in relation to how things are affecting them. And I think that this is an important psychological theme that occurs over the. Over the course of the story, which is everything is about its relationship to the ship. All natural signs are just about. I'm sure you would be better than me at giving a psychological kind of like, definition of this.
But it seems like they view the natural world purely as something to be interpreted in its effect on their own fate and their own psyche. Right. Which I think is their downfall with the Albatross Incident. The Albatross Incident. It's a subtitle of this poem. Yeah.
46:55 Wes: Right. Now, that's a very good point. They're used to thinking of nature in terms of hypothetical imperatives. What can you do for me? Nature.
47:03 Erin: Right.
47:03 Wes: And how. What do I do? You know, hypothetical imperatives, as in, what should I do to accomplish goal X? And how can I use the natural world to do that? And the highest manifestation of that is, of course, science. It's built on experimentation, built on hypothetical imperatives. If I do X, then Y happens and I gain some sort of power at the level of navigation, manning a ship. Very old art, but involves some very interesting technology. And it's not just about navigation, but it's also about survival and having all the supplies on board and then knowing what to do when you get to shore in some distant land and all of that stuff.
So, yeah, so the tendency is to look at. I think this is very good. The tendency is to start to look at the world in terms of. As something to be navigated or exploited. And this. This helps a little bit with the whole shooting of the albatross and the seeming arbitrariness of It. Because it's as if it is just one more thing outside of the ship, or it's one more aspect of nature. You know, there's the sun, there's the storms, there's the winds, all these things that need to be circumvented or dealt with. And the bird is just one of one more of these indifferent things.
It's not appreciated as organic and it's not appreciated insofar as it's. It's a sentient being as being akin to humanity in any way and deserving of non hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative, like you owe something to the bird. You can't. Yes, you can shoot birds if you're hungry, but not this bird. And not for no reason, not in this circumstance. So I think that's a very good point. And I don't know what to make of this line about seeing cliffs in the distance through the drifts. So they see land, I take it, but they don't see shapes of beast or men.
So it's an uninhabited land that they get a glimpse of. There's too much ice in between them and it. For. For them to make out whether or not there's any living thing on that land. And then that I think is the last we hear of that. Is that right?
49:18 Erin: I think, I think so, yeah. I'm sure you're right. Now, you know, looking at this, I thought that the snowy cliffs were just like a kid continuation of the icebergs and the.
49:27 Wes: That's what I thought at first too. And now I'm just, I'm. This, this thought is new, but now that we are reading it together. Yeah, because it's through the drifts, the snowy cliffs.
49:36 Erin: That's right.
49:37 Wes: Initially I just thought it was a metaphor for the ice, but.
49:40 Erin: Right. No, that, that must be. Right. So there, this is, you know, they do see Antarctica, I suppose.
49:46 Wes: Right.
49:47 Erin: So. And that would explain why then the, the albatross will, Will shortly appear and if there is a land mass.
49:52 Wes: Exactly. Yeah, right, of course.
49:55 Erin: Right. It's all coming together.
49:57 Wes: Realizations. Yeah, a lot. There's actually some logic to the poem. They wouldn't see an albatross if they weren't near land. Yeah. I mean, the albatrosses do go far out. Right, but.
50:08 Erin: Right, but yeah, but they need to eat their, Their penguins and their, Their. Their sea. Sea people, their sailors.
50:15 Wes: And this is, this is based on a account of a voyage to find. In, you know, in the area of the Antarctic, to find Australia. Right. To. You know, there were rumors.
50:27 Erin: Yeah.
50:27 Wes: Rounding the existence of Australia, but.
50:30 Erin: Right. Yeah. This is what Wordsworth was talking about. I think this was an account of a sea voyage that rounded Tierra del Fuego. Right. And. And someone on board a ship actually did shoot a. I believe it was a black albatross. Now, those are okay to shoot. I think they sound creepy.
50:51 Wes: You can shoot the black albatrosses, but not the white.
50:53 Erin: Exactly.
50:53 Wes: I don't know. Do you want to.
50:54 Erin: Do you want to retract statement?
50:59 Wes: I don't know if you were conscious of the political overtones of that statement, but.
51:07 Erin: Oh, good Lord. That's hilarious. I was kidding.
51:13 Wes: So that is interesting. Yeah. It's based on an actual account of the killing of a black albatross.
51:19 Erin: Could you imagine, though, in a. In a. In all seriousness, how terrifying a black albatross must look in a. In a place in which everything must be blindingly snowy and icy and various shades of white? You know, I mean, it must look. And they're. They're enormous. You know, depending on the time of year, could look quite skeletal. It would look like a. Yeah, like a corpse, I'd imagine. So.
51:46 Wes: Interesting.
51:48 Erin: Don't speak from experience, but. Yeah.
51:51 Wes: I think that brings us to the end of part one. If people want to listen to part two immediately, they can do that as subscribers. Subscribers. If not, you'll have to wait till next week. Thank you.
52:04 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext. You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. or patreon.com/subtextpodcast.
53:24 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We had just gotten done discovering that the Mariner's ship was actually near land before the sighting of the Albatross. And now we are ready for the grand entrance of the Albatross. Go to it.
53:43 Erin: Okay. At length did cross an albatross. Through the fog it came, and an it were a Christian soul. We hailed it in God's name. The mariners gave it biscuit worms and round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder fit the helmsman steered us through, and a good south wind sprung up behind. The albatross did follow. And every day for food or play came to the mariners' hollo in mist or cloud, on mast or shroud it perched for Vespers 9 whiles all the night through fog smoke white glimmered the white moonshine. God save the ancient mariner from the fiends that plague thee thus. Why looks thou so? With my crossbow I shot the albatross. Dun, dun, dun. That's the right one.
54:32 Wes: Yeah.
54:34 Erin: Picked the wrong. Wrong tune. All right.
54:38 Wes: So out of the fog and albatross and they. As if it were a Christian soul, they hailed it in God's name. So this thing I had said before about them being in the disposition of treating everything as if it were something to be used or navigated around everything natural, that that's not the disposition that they have on their first encounter with the Albatross. In fact, not only are they treating it as if it were a human being, but they're treating it with a soul, but they're treating it as a Christian soul. And that's the way they hail it. And it.
It's a we. It's not just. It's not like, yeah, and the rest of the crew really love this bird. And I'm like, God damn fucking bird. You know, it's eating all our biscuit worms. And like, you know what? We can't. We don't have time. We don't got time for this. We don't got the resources for the. No, no, He's. He's part of the welcoming committee himself, which is what makes the turn to the killing of the Albatross so strange and abrupt.
55:44 Erin: Yeah. Could you demonstrate this? So hail the Albatross in God's name. What would you say?
55:52 Wes: How do you hail anyone? How do you hail anyone in God's name?
55:55 Erin: I know. I'm serious. Like, what do you say?
55:58 Wes: God. God be with you. Fair.
56:02 Erin: Okay. How come I can only think about damning someone when I. Isn't this awful?
56:07 Wes: God or God bless. Yeah. God bless you or. Oh, okay, what would you. Right, so what does it mean to hail another person or an animal in God's name except to say something like God bless you? I don't know.
56:19 Erin: I think God bless you is the good answer there. Okay, so why would they be saying God bless you to like, why would they be so happy to see the albatross? Because this is probably the first living thing they've seen in ages. Besides biscuit worms. Nobody likes to see a biscuit worm. Which leads me to the.
56:36 Wes: I take the biscuit worms to be the. The maggots that they're. That they don't exactly what they are, but they're pulling out of their biscuits, which is completely disgusting.
56:46 Erin: Which leads me to the real reason why the albatross was killed. The only reason that makes sense.
56:51 Wes: Which is you stole a biscuit. We said you could have the worms. The biscuits are for us.
57:02 Erin: Oh my God. Yeah. No. God damn.
57:05 Wes: You give them a worm and they take a whole biscuit. Eventually. It's always the way if you give
57:10 Erin: an albatross a biscuit worm. My favorite childhood book. No, they were hungry, right? They had maggoty maggoty biscuits and that's it. And you know, Larry over there was starting to look pretty tasty. Am I wrong?
57:25 Wes: Yeah, no, I don't, Larry. Yeah, well, that would be the sensible explanation for the killing, but of course that is not given as a motive. And the albatross is not eaten. He ends up being hung around the guy's neck.
57:36 Erin: So, yeah, I don't know. I just feel like if they weren't hungry, he would devote a couple stances to describing their, you know, the five star cuisine on board or the three different restaurants with Michelin star chefs next to the swimming pools. I don't know. Anyway, obviously this is not given as motivation. I'm just being right. Silly. But I will say that, you know, they do definitely break the. The taboo around killing and eating. Or killing. Okay, I don't think they eat them, but around killing your pet. Right. Because this thing is obviously their pet, came for food or play and he came to their hollo. So yeah, half a pet.
58:15 Wes: He's got one foot in the family, but not quite.
58:18 Erin: Okay, he's their mascot since he's a.
58:20 Wes: He's a wild bird. But yes. So taboo, symbolically. I think we know why it's taboo. Or do we, we could say something about that. But in some less figurative sense and some sense not related to religion. What is it other than what you've just mentioned? They've made friends with it and in a way it's like their pet. What is it that makes it such a terrible thing to kill it, other than that some relationship of kindness has been established to it and that the killing is arbitrary?
58:51 Erin: I mean, I guess I'm thinking again of its singleness. Were it part of a flock, you know, there would be an abundance from which you could then cull some. Some of these birds for. For food purposes. So the fact that there's just one, and I don't know if they're. They must be. Because they're very large birds, they must be relatively solitary compared to birds that move more regularly in flocks. This is entirely speculation on my part, but. But that seems logical. I don't know.
59:21 Wes: Well, they go out on these enormous. These long flights. I only know this from watching the. They're featured in part of the Planet Earth, one of the Planet Earth documentaries. And it's a crazy. They lead crazy lives. Let's just put it. They go out on these ridiculously long flights. Once they get old enough, they go out somewhere to mate, maybe. But in any case. Yeah. So I think solitary is a good. You were singling out the solitariness of the creature.
59:50 Erin: Yeah. You know, to kill a lone bird is in this kind of context seems like the destabilizing of an entire population of one. Right. Versus if you come across a herd or a flock or, you know, any number of animals together somehow that it seems that it would be logical that you would have less of an impact on culling a few animals from a larger group. This albatross, its singleness seems to imply that there aren't many of these around. And also the fact that they have. Oh, well, the fact. The fact too, that they like, relate to it as. It as a soul, I think has to do with the fact that it is a single bird.
They have a relationship to it that's allowed like, you know, maybe in this pet like way. Right. Like you have. You have your dog or your cat or you may have a couple of them. Right. But that you have a. Like a personal relationship with it because it's just one. It's not acting in a. In a group with others and therefore kind of like excluding you. This albatross seems to kind of come in and not intrude in a negative way, but enter the psychology of the ship and become something that they are like, they look forward to seeing. They call it out, you know, they call out to it and it comes in an extremely barren landscape.
This Seems doubly wrong to kill a single animal in a place that's so barren, where there aren't perhaps large populations or at least a large population that isn't visible readily to them. And also the fact that, like, this is something that's comforting them in their. In the ships solitude. This is the only living thing they've seen in ages.
1:01:26 Wes: So, yeah, yeah, it's interesting because they're enormous birds, right? And they're white. They apparently they have the largest wingspan of any living species of flying bird. I think up to 12ft. I'm just thinking back to my. To the documentary I watched. They have a lot of trouble when they're first learning to fly. They have a lot of trouble getting off the ground. The young adolescent albatrosses who are flying for the first time will tend to fall into the sea, which is dangerous because the sharks know exactly when, you know, there's a bunch of albatross adolescents reaching, you know, they.
They all reach adolescence at the same time and they all try to fly off at the same time and they're falling into the water and getting eaten by sharks. So we know they are, you know, they're enormous. They have these huge wingspans and they fly these very long distances. So in a way they're like, you know, I'm thinking of you. You were talking about identification earlier. They are like sailors in a way. They're in a place that sailors encounter when they're very far away from home. And like, say, sailors, in a sense, they're taking these long sea voyages, except they're doing it high up in the air.
And in general, once they're in the air, they're much less vulnerable, practically invulnerable to predation, and certainly much less vulnerable than human beings are on a ship. They can be very far away from land and resources and. And yet, unlike human beings, be in there in their element in that kind of isolation. So the, the albatross can, unlike the human being, can be very solitary without being imperiled by that solitude. Whether we think of peril in terms of predation or threat to life, or we think of imperilment in terms of social isolation.
So I think that's another. I think they pair bond for life, but they do end up with a mate. Albatrosses are unlike the sailors, right? They're married for life, but I think they're solitary for long periods of time. And that's something I often think about this. The, the human sort of severe dependence on being part of a social Fabric, which many animals just don't. Don't have. Many species of cat. Right. Can just live very contentedly without ever running into another cat. Except during breeding season. Big cats, certain species, but some species are more social.
1:04:00 Erin: But this is especially true for women. Right. Rather than men like that. Like these famous Oregon Trail stories. Right. Where men are more capable of going off and living on their own. And then their wives go crazy, not only because they, you know, because apparently their immediate family also isn't enough for them. Right. They need other. They need other people besides just their family.
1:04:21 Wes: Yeah. Well, men. Men can channel their social needs into hunting and killing. Killing animal. Other animals, for some reason, that seems to do the trick. Killing albatrosses, but, you know, or killing anything. But in any case, it's. Yeah, I think there's something about that. There's something about the size of the bird which brings it closer to being more like in the. In the physical domain of the human, especially if its wings are outstretched like. Like arms. And then the solitude of the bird, its success in navigation and travel.
1:04:58 Erin: Yeah.
1:04:58 Wes: So I think there are conflicting reports on whether it was actually taboo for sailors to eat albatrosses. So James Cook, for instance, says they would regularly catch the birds and eat them, and then other sailors apparently would catch them and free them and believe that they had the souls of lost sailors and that killing them would bring back luck, bad luck. So I don't know what the historical verdict is on that. There might have been a superstition around the killing of albatrosses by sailors, but maybe some sailors just saw them as food. And we don't.
From the poem itself, we're not informed of that background. So within the world of the poem, I don't know that we need to read this as, hey, you know, it's. Hey, man, it's bad luck to kill albatrosses. Don't you know that that could have occurred in the poem. That could have been a plot point within the poem, but it doesn't happen. No one warns him that, hey, don't do this. It's just implicit in the relationship that's been established with this animal. And then he. He does it. So we don't know his motivation for doing it and we don't know which sort of taboo he's violating.
1:06:07 Erin: I really like this idea that this bird is like, you know, both a kind of a perfect sailor and a. An ideal ship, you know, ship of one. This crew is obviously not. Not doing so well by comparison.
1:06:21 Wes: Exactly.
1:06:22 Erin: Yeah. I also am thinking Too, just about like the, the face of the albatross and the fact that it has a kind of dodo quality to it. You know, it's, it's a little bit goofy looking. It's kind of like the.
1:06:34 Wes: Oh yeah.
1:06:35 Erin: You know, it's kind of like the opposite of the charismatic megafauna. Right. That's. I think that's the, the term that's used for like the species in zoos that get the most attention. You know, they're called. They're. Yeah. So, you know, the things that look big and spectacular and that zoos put on their logos, you know, the things everybody wants to see. You know, the, the albatross, like the dodo is kind of like the inversion of that where, you know, the dodo's appeal it seems, is like how uncharismatic it looks. Right. And therefore it's a bit more human. I think that the, the fact that the albatross kind of has that look or is maybe the closest looking thing to a dodo that, that yet exists. Of course, at the time of the. This poem's writing, dodo still existed. There's a kinship there that's. That's intense.
1:07:24 Wes: Do you ever see the rescuers?
1:07:25 Erin: Yes. I loved that movie.
1:07:27 Wes: Disney. Is it Disney? It's a cartoon.
1:07:28 Erin: Yeah.
1:07:29 Wes: So there's a, there's an albatross in that movie.
1:07:32 Erin: That's right.
1:07:33 Wes: Orville. Named after Orville, right?
1:07:35 Erin: Yes. Oh my gosh.
1:07:37 Wes: And it always has trouble getting off the ground. Right. So it's a goofy. It's a Goofy character, Goofy bird. And it's like the, the amount of Runway that's required. Right. To get off the ground is enormous. And that's true. They do. They have to do a nice big run up to get in the air. They are at the very edge of being a bird that's so large that it no longer can fly. You know, getting up to the ostrich level or whatever. And, and it's interesting, you know, since birds are really the, the only surviving dinosaurs. I think the larger they get, the more akin to being a dinosaur and being something that's just alien, that belongs to another age. I think that might be an element of this. So, yeah, the weird, the weird look I think enhances that. It's both comical and goofy, but I think it also highlights the alien ness of the creature. Anyway, are we ready?
1:08:37 Erin: Yes. And the good south wind still blew behind but no sweet bird did follow no any day for food or play Came to the Mariner's hollow and I had Done an hellish thing, and it would
Sins of Omission in “On the Waterfront” (1954) (Part 2)
May 13, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “On the Waterfront.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of on the Waterfront. We were just talking about pigeons and stool pigeons and what they represent, whether it's care or passivity and being exploited or falsity and betrayal and so on. Actually, one thing I forgot to mention is that I think Terry also makes the remark to Edie that pigeons are monogamous.
0:56 Erin: Yes.
0:57 Wes: So we get one more positive connotation there.
1:00 Erin: That's right.
1:01 Wes: So maybe we should talk a little bit about how critical Edie is. You know, you made the point that he has this seed of goodness and caring in him before anyone even works on him. But she is pretty critical in getting him out of this corrupt system. There's no way that he would ever have gone on to take the enormous risks that he does to rebel against Johnny Friendly and even to take that walk at the very end of the movie. It's hard to imagine him being psychologically capable of that before his love of her actually helps transform him. And that's kind of what makes the ending a little bit more believable for me than maybe it is for some people. But what about Edie?
1:46 Erin: I think that's. Right. That she's crucial. I was thinking about how this film could be a metaphor for online culture almost because Terry is so passive. Right. So 50 years later, Terry would have been just like some guy on the computer in his brother's basement.
2:02 Wes: Right.
2:03 Erin: Like for me, what's. You know, obviously there's a lot of.
2:05 Wes: The only way to escape that is to start a podcast and.
2:08 Erin: That's right.
2:09 Wes: Re. Establish connection with the world. Sorry, go ahead.
2:11 Erin: Yeah, we're not the poster children for activity. There's even a reading of this I want to do where, like getting Joey to the roof makes Terry like some sort of equivalent of like a social media influencer. Like he's encouraging people to do things that are going to. But anyway, I'm just thinking of the scene where he's sitting on the. Is it the bags of coffee beans? I think when he gets the cushy job, right, where he just does nothing but sit around all day. This is the primary image for this silly reading.
2:43 Wes: At least he's reading.
2:45 Erin: He's reading.
2:45 Wes: It's a girly magazine.
2:46 Erin: Yes, exactly, exactly. He's looking at bikini clad women in these magazines, which is another.
2:54 Wes: It's Playboy. But he's reading the articles, which are really good too.
2:59 Erin: He's not engaging with real life. Right. Like the work is going on around him, but he's not working and he's.
3:06 Wes: He's being a bum.
3:07 Erin: He's being a bum. He's not actually going out there. And I mean, this seems to be a world in which there is one woman, and that is Edie. But actually there are some moms. Right. Of other longshoremen. When Joey gets thrown off the roof.
3:19 Wes: And the bad women in the saloon. The racy women.
3:22 Erin: That's right. Well, and the.
3:24 Wes: No, they're not all bad. There's older couples dancing and the bride.
3:28 Erin: Yeah, right, right.
3:30 Wes: A more raucous scene that Edie doesn't belong in because she's so pure and innocent. Right.
3:37 Erin: Yeah. She can't handle the wedding.
3:39 Wes: She's the wedding guest who should have stayed outside and talked to the Mariner.
3:42 Erin: Yeah, she would have loved that. She would have been really sympathetic to the Mariner story.
3:47 Wes: That's true. She would have. She would have taken him in under her wing. Yeah.
3:53 Erin: She would've been like, do you have six toes by any chance? Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. So obviously we get this idea that maybe Terry has abdicated all forms of active life and is just reduced to looking at pictures of women in magazines rather than going out there and really forming relationships with women and putting himself into an arena of action and responsibility and engaging with real people. So I think that's one of the reasons why Edie is so crucial. It's also, I think that she hits him. Right. Isn't that something that happens when they're picking up the tabs? When he first sees her, I think when she's standing over Joey Doyle's body. Or maybe he's not within eye shot of that. Maybe by that time he's gone to inside the bar or something.
4:38 Wes: I think he might be gone at that point.
4:40 Erin: Okay. So when he does actually first see her, we learned they have a past history. But when he first sees her, it's when she comes down to the docks the next day. She's like, later, when Kayo gets killed, she's weirdly like, on the ship or something. So she's way too involved in this, in the goings on of the waterfront. But anyway, she comes, she comes down.
5:01 Wes: It's a little suspicious when a nice girl like that hangs out.
5:04 Erin: Hangs out at the docks. That's right.
5:06 Wes: One wonders. But go ahead.
5:08 Erin: She's a blonde, though, so you know it's true. That means she's an angel. And innocent.
5:14 Wes: Pretty. Angelic.
5:15 Erin: Yeah. Just like a white blonde. When they throw the tabs up in the air and all the men are scrambling for them like pigeons, as we already talked about in the last episode, she runs in to try and grab a tab for her father, because even though his son has just been killed, the night before Pop Doyle is down there looking for work so that he could pay for the funeral. So she wants to get a tab to give it to her father so he can get a day's pay. And she runs up to Terry and struggles with him over this tab and says, give it to me. And I think at one point, she does slap him kind of lightly across the face, if I'm not mistaken.
And that, of course, is like anybody who's Catholic, and this is such a Catholic movie, you know, this has Got to be baked in. Thinks of that moment at one's confirmation, which is one of the seven sacraments that you receive as a Catholic. There's a moment in confirmation where when the bishop is confirming you, he. You know, it's a tap, but he's. It's symbolic. He hits you on the face. And confirmation, of course, is about receiving the full gifts of the Holy Spirit. It's sort of the completion of the infusion of grace, if you will, that you get in baptism.
And it's supposed to be your entrance into adulthood and into full responsibility. And so there's something in the slap that's supposed to kind of wake you up, you know, and make you. Make you aware of one's responsibility as an adult in the world, someone with agency. And so I think that there's a little bit of. And I should have. I'm kind of just putting this together now. I should have done a little bit more research into. I'm sure there's a long theological reason I could get into as to why that happens. That slap in the confirmation, I think, you know, Edie, in this way, is an expression of grace.
And she's also like, if we're gonna take this kind of literally, right, like, the bishop has to confirm you. So she's also kind of giving him a sort of parental tough love in that moment. Like, she's not only kind of grace itself, which I think is, you know, a big part of her symbology as a character, but in this instance, she's sort of, like, raising him, like, parenting him. Give me that. It's not a joke. It's not funny. This is real life. You're really an adult. I really need that tab to give it to my father and wise up. And that, I think, is, like, crucial in the kind of relationship that Terry needs, in which.
And in all relationships, in all romantic relationships, right, where you have to kind of, like, grow up, perhaps in really profound ways and not in, like, Distorted ways where you're a child and you need to grow up, but in profound ways where you have to help each other to become complete good people in relationship to each other. There's a sort of parental mechanism that must happen in relationships. I'm just speculating here.
7:53 Wes: It's interesting because you're reminding me that she sort of is the engine or she's the spark for the catalyst for everything that happens later in the film. I mean, it starts with the death of her brother, which, of course, is not having anything she has any control over. But she shows up at the scene of the crime. She shows up to see the corpse of her brother, and the priest is there as well. So. And I think Father Barry at first wants to be quite passive. She wants to find out who killed Joey. And I think the father is encouraging her to not worry about that.
And he uses. He says, remember, time and faith are great healers. So we get a depiction of religion which is more consistent with what we might think of it stereotypically. We might think of it as quiescent, we might think of it as inactive. Right. So you turn the other cheek. You let people do what they want to you, and then you don't do anything about it. If I'm remembering that correctly, that's the way it starts. And then she sparks something in him. She says, father, my brother is dead. And you talk about time and faith. And she'll end up saying something like.
She'll say, I want to know who killed my brother. I think what's important about that is it's an interest in the truth. I put in my notes, there's something about here about religious mystery versus a criminal mystery versus a crime mystery. Although it really isn't a mystery. Everyone really knows. It's not much of a whodunit here. People kind of know from the beginning, but there's a relationship, obviously, between spiritual or religious truth seeking and the kind of truth seeking that will put a group of people in opposition to the mob. And she starts that whole process off by, in a way, reminding Father Barry of who he really is.
Reminding him that that is part of his function in the community is not just to, say, time and faith, but to help people do something about what's actually going on.
9:52 Erin: Yeah, that's really good. You're reminding me that Edie's role here. I think in the last episode, you made a really great connection between the idea that Edie represents the realm of the spiritual. Right. As well as this kind of connection to the brain, because she's studying to be a teacher. She's in a college.
10:11 Wes: Well, she's doing it with nuns, right?
10:13 Erin: With nuns, yeah. Yeah. And yet Father Barry's passivity, though, we would think it would be of this kind of more feminine variety. Right, because he's a spiritual guy and. And he's advocating nonviolence. He's actually, like, disconnected from emotion. So he, too, I think in the scene, it shows that he's become denatured in this fundamental way, maybe by being, like, overly feminine. Like, Edie seems to be a pretty balanced character in that she has the proper reaction here. It's an emotional one, but it's one of anger. And Father Barry is kind of encouraging her to skip over all the processes of grief and just go to acceptance.
You know, his parishioner Joey is dead. Joey's sister is right there. Like, this guy has just died, and he's like, you know, time and faith, time and faith, you know, empty platitudes. Completely disconnected from the emotions of this moment. He's just fallen from the roof. Edie has the proper emotion, which is. Which is actually anger. You know, I think about the moment in the Bible which. Which I believe Thomas Aquinas later used to develop this. What would eventually become this just war doctrine in. At least in Catholicism. I don't know if other.
I'm sure other Christian religions have this idea of the just war, the moment in the Bible where Christ turns over the tables of the money changers and the people selling things in the temple in this moment of anger. So this idea that anger, righteous anger, has a place in fighting injustice. You can't have passivity, full passivity. Sometimes you have to act, and sometimes that you need to access that anger in a positive way. It can be harnessed when there is injustice. So Father Barry is, like, disconnected from that. He's, you know, as Edie will accuse him of.
He's hiding in the church. She said, have you ever heard of a saint who hides in a church? Saints are in the world, right? They're. They're reckoning. Yeah. So she's a catalyst for this emotion to come out in him as well. And I think by that same token, the longshoremen aren't just flesh with no spirit. And Father Barry can't just be spirit with no flesh. I think that's maybe what's going on. And they both have to come and sort of Father Barry has to basically become incarnate and go down to the waterfront, go down to the docks and actually, like, minister to these men and Reckon with them.
Reckon with his own. With his own flesh, with his own physicality. And kind of like enter the world in that way.
12:34 Wes: Yeah, that's great. So she works on the father. She works on Father Barry, and she works on Terry. And we started out mentioning one way she does that. She's, you know. I like your account of the slap. The struggle over the tab. Right? It's called a tab.
12:51 Erin: Yeah, I think.
12:52 Wes: So the way that may have sort of slapped, you know, be the beginning of slapping, in some sense, into him. And the same thing with Father Barry. And then we get a whole progression of her relationship with Terry. And it starts out with that scene we've already talked about. Where he's talking about the Hawks and then they're in the bar together. So that scene, the previous scene was on the rooftop. And you have Terry working very, very hard to win Edie over to his cynical way of looking at the world. You know, it's in the bar that he talks about.
He'll say, my philosophy is to do it to him before he does it to you. And she says, I've never met anyone like you. No spark of sentiment, romance, human kindness. Knock people aside when they get in the way. Which is a reference to something he said about pigeons as well, being on a perch and knocking others aside. You know, eventually he'll say, everybody's got a racket. It's every man for himself. And then he'll say, there's nothing I can do. So the passivity sort of goes along with this cynical way of looking at the world. She presses him on Joey, on finding out who killed Joey.
And he says, quit worrying about the truth all the time and worry about yourself. Which is something that in the following scene, Johnny Friendly is going to say to Terry. Terry's going to get slapped around on the train tracks, I think. And he's going to be told to wise up, right? So, same line, essentially. Quit worrying about the truth and worry about yourself. This is wisdom as in self preservation. Not wisdom as in philosophical wisdom. Or wisdom as in caring about spiritual truths. Or wisdom as. As in being able to relate to people so care about self preservation.
But something has changed for him, right? Because by the time we get to the scene after the act, you know, the supposed accident where Kayo Dugan has been killed, Terry will jump in. You know, they're trying to, I guess dock workers and mobsters are trying to get the priest to shut up about the crucifixion and all that. You know, it's a very inspiring speech. He Gives. But they're trying to get him to shut up. And I think throwing fruit. And Terry says, let him finish. So I think that's the first point where we're going to see Terry have some spark of life in him where he's going to be able to engage in some sort of rebellion.
The other notable parts of the progression of their relationship are. Edie comes onto the roof looking for Terry. So right after the murder of Kayo. So she comes on the roof looking for him. And he's lying there looking very childlike. And she's brought him Joey's jacket because she says, yours is coming apart. And then he mentions again, the pigeons are nervous. The hawks were around before, and there's this look of incredible agony. And then they kiss. I bring that up because before she says, you know, patience and kindness is the cure for all of this.
And ultimately love is the cure. And that. That's part of what she's doing with Terry is to show him real love. And that's bringing out this other side of him, this caring side of him. Working against the cynicism that he's tried to tempt her with. Essentially, she's undergone a temptation.
16:04 Erin: Yes, there's the love scene. And then the next day is when Terry goes to the confessional. So it's not enough to hear the sermon. This really long scene of Karl Malden doing his best speechifying. The combination of that and the love scene is what induces Terry to go and confess the next day, which is the really pivotal moment. The idea of the confessional, of course, is built into the Catholic symbolism of the film. Is this idea of confessing one's own sins and accepting responsibility for one's guilt. I'm thinking about what you said about how it's not really.
The film isn't really a whodunit. And you're right, you're making me realize that so much of the film seems obsessed with this idea of who is responsible for this. Right. Like to name a single person we know the whole time that whoever is responsible, they're just Johnny Friendly's heavies. And it could have been anybody up on the roof. It could have been those two guys that are the real life ex prize fighters. I can't remember their names, but they have great faces, character actor faces that are watching this unfold while standing outside the bar with Terry.
It could have been them. It wasn't them. It was two other guys that probably look like them. Right. And so this idea of who did this, which Edie is obsessed with and which Father Barry also is kind of obsessed with this idea of, like, finding out who the perpetrator is. When everyone pretty much knows it's just Johnny Friendly by proxy. Almost seems like a kind of like a red herring in the film or something. Because who they're trying to find out becomes, I think, Terry himself. They're almost externalizations of Terry's own conscience as it builds up with guilt.
Over the course of the film, the thing that has to be revealed, the thing that has to be the whodunit. Is for Terry to recognize that the call is coming from inside the house. You know, that he actually is right. That he's actually guilty of something by being the one who lured Joey to the roof.
18:00 Wes: Right.
18:01 Erin: So the idea that then he's moved to confess through this combination of love and Father Barry's speech. It's about accepting responsibility for his own sin and his own complicity in the system. All of that to say that you're making me realize that it really is kind of a bait and switch through the whole film. Because the figures that push Joey off the roof are these shadowy figures. We don't see them. And everyone is obsessed with knowing exactly who did this. But it's really kind of ultimately the wrong question. Or is it a question? I'm kind of. I'm, like, throwing this to you, but I'm just curious what you think. Is it a question about that's supposed to make Terry realize that it's him, that he's the responsible one? Or are we supposed to be legitimately interested in finding out who killed Joey Doyle?
18:47 Wes: No, I don't think we're supposed to be legitimately interested.
18:51 Erin: And yet that's what everyone is wondering.
18:54 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. It starts out that way. And it ultimately becomes about defeating the mob. But I think your point about the confession is spot on. Because I think Father Barry won't hear Terry's confession at first. And Terry follows him outside and then tells him his story. And Father Barry redirects him to Edie.
19:16 Erin: Right.
19:17 Wes: And there's that great scene on the rocks, shot at first from a distance. And then you get. I think it's all silent except for the steam whistle. The steam blaring steam whistle. And you see Edie get upset and running away. And then the priest reacting. Father Berry reacting grimly. And although I think he's taking out a cigarette as well at that point.
19:38 Erin: Right.
19:39 Wes: Which is what you do when something depressing happens or something good when anything happens back then. But anyway, she's the one who ultimately hears the. Really is the one who hears the confession. And she's the one who has to forgive him, which ultimately he does. And that is part of his transformation. So she's not only slapping and not only loving. What else does she does? She slaps. She loves, forgives, she forgives. Is there anything else she does?
20:07 Erin: All the Sonya in Crime and Punishment or something, but more active than that. Right, but she's in the sense that she's like the female redemptive catch all,
20:16 Wes: you know she is, yeah, but playing an obviously thematic, symbolic level. Playing a Christlike or angelic, let's say, role.
20:25 Erin: The fact that Father Barry doesn't want to hear his confession is actually a really interesting sign in that it's a good sign. It just continues to affirm Father Barry's effective transformation, which is he's angry and fed up with Terry and also is maybe saving Terry. Like, maybe. Maybe the redirect to Edie is about the fact that Terry isn't quite ready to make a complete confession. Like, Edie is the way station. Maybe she's the step he has to take along the way to actually fully examining his conscience. Father Barry's angry with him, and that's natural.
He's fed up with him, which is good. Which means that Father Barry is, you know, successfully accessing his more aggressive emotions now, which is a good thing. Also, he's potentially saving Terry from making an incomplete or maybe even an invalid confession because maybe he recognizes that Terry doesn't fully. He has to, like, be fully honest with himself in order to make a good confession. At some later point when you go to the confessional, you have to have, like, a full recognition of what you've done and a resolution not to commit that same sin again.
That isn't always borne out by what actually happens post confessional. Right. But you have to have, like, an actual understanding of what you. You've done and a resolve to try to not commit that sin in the future. And I think, you know, there's something about this interaction that you can kind of tell that Father Barry knows that he's not really ready, he's not really there, and he needs to go to Edie first. So it's not like he's like, oh, he just has to confess to Edie and then it's all going to be okay. I think, like, there's still something that needs to happen before he can be rightfully absolved of the sin.
And, you know, you could argue that the whole last movement of the film is about his confession is the testimony, and then his penance, which, you know, you're given a penance at the end of the. Of confession. His penance is the physical beating.
22:13 Wes: Right.
22:14 Erin: That he gets the physical suffering. So that is kind of thematically what enacts the real confession at the end of the film. And he still has a ways to go in order to get to that place, I think.
22:24 Wes: Right, good point. You're making me think of the fact that being a stool pigeon and doing confession are related. Right. You're telling the truth.
22:33 Erin: Yeah. Though interestingly related to that is the idea that the priest is forbidden from ratting out the. You know, so it's. It's. It's a private thing. Right, right. And a great movie that maybe we can do someday on the podcast is I Confess Hitchcock film with Montgomery Clift, where he plays a priest who's implicated in a. In a murder that he did not commit, but his has been told he's the murderer, actually came in and confessed to him. And the priest, Montgomery Clift, can't break the seal of confession even to exonerate himself. If you're a priest and you break the seal of confession, you're immediately excommunicated.
So it's extremely dire that you can't rat on someone confessing to you. So it's a slightly different relationship. But there is this idea that in the confessional, the confessor unburdens himself and does kind of rat on someone, but kind of himself. Yes, exactly. And the priest has the obligation, the mortal obligation, to keep that in confidence and not rat on this guy, even if it means saving himself from prosecution.
23:37 Wes: Yeah. So the priest, though, on that analogy, is parallel to, let's say, the judicial system. And instead of handing out a punishment for a crime, he's handing out, well, on one level, hail, Hail Marys. Right, Right. So there's a sort of punishment that goes to it. But as you. You pointed out, what, you know, what stands in for punishment is actual understanding of the truth, and then this resolve to act differently in the future. But it is, you know, it is on a religious level, it's what corresponds to what is punishment in the judicial system.
And I think you're right. We can't get a believable understanding to the final part of the film where he becomes a hero. That transformation is not going to be believable without this step. And I think, as you pointed out, he's trying to take the easy way out by just saying it to Father Barry. Father Barry knows that by himself, he's not going to be able to give an effective punishment, which is to say give an effective inducement to self reflection and to change. Because Terry really is trying to backslide at that point. The rebellion might have ended right there.
Right. This is just after the docks where Terry has just gotten his first spark of life, you know, saying, let the father finish. And then he's established a relationship with the father, with Father Barry. And it's like, okay, here's my friend now, and he can make it all right. And then he won't have to do anything. He won't have to turn on Johnny Friendly. So I think instinctively, Father Barry seems to understand he's nominally coming to confess, but really he's trying to backslide. So he has to redirect him to Edie, to the one that he's wronged, and suffer the agony of seeing her hurt by that and feeling betrayed by that.
Only she can actually hear the confession and forgive him in a way that will get him to again, just to repeat what you said, have an actual understanding of what he's done and resolve to act differently in the future.
25:45 Erin: Yeah. My favorite scene in the movie, outside of the cab scene, is when he then comes to Edie's apartment and breaks down the door.
25:52 Wes: Yeah.
25:52 Erin: Which is, you know, what's that about? Read, read wrongly. Maybe that looks like he's just like forcing Edie to kind of forgive him or almost like intruding upon her psyche in a way. He's putting himself on the line. He's actively pursuing her even to the extent that he's going to like break down the barriers which he himself has put in place. Right. Like his actions have caused her to close the door against him because he's committed this sin against her brother. Right. And so he has to. He's like undoing that by breaking down the door. It's another kind of form of, I think, penance that he's kind of doing. Symbolically speaking, it's not really a penance, but he's trying to undo what he did and break down the barrier which he has erected between them through his betrayal of Joey.
26:35 Wes: This is the first step and resolving to act differently. So this is the first. The breaking down of the door is the first scene of Act 3. And the plot point that has pushed him into that is the cab scene, his talking to his brother, even having a gun pulled on him by his brother and being profoundly disappointed in his brother. He doesn't react to that as if, oh, my God, I could be about to be killed. He just reacts with sorrow and disappointment, which already reflects a certain amount of transformation. Right. He's no longer just thinking about his own self preservation.
And then he gives that ultimately speech about could have been a contender. And then Charlie relents and lets him go free. And Charlie, of course, goes on to his own death. And then the ball is now rolling downhill at this point to some extent. Well, that's the wrong way to put it. There's momentum now, you know, Right. There's momentum towards the climax of the movie at this point, or it's become inevitable. And he's desperate. He goes to Edie's in a desperate state. But what it reflects is his interest now in love, his complete surrender to that.
And he goes there and he says, you know you love me. She's saying, stay away from me, saying you love me. And then on from there, he's going to go down to find his brother dead and they almost get killed and all of that.
27:55 Erin: But, but yeah, yeah, I'm thinking through then the testimony scene is this metaphor for confession. I mean, I think that through this whole conversation I've been wanting to get to a point at which we can say that mere truth telling is something like a physical action. I think that maybe the answer was in front of me the whole time in this metaphor of the Catholic confessional, because there are actually physical air quotes, physical consequences that result from the sacrament of confession in Catholic theology. So to the extent that we could think of the soul as having a kind of form to it, a kind of essence or substance, the idea, metaphorically speaking, and again, it's.
This is kind of an imaginative exercise, but there's, there's supposed to be some kind of quasi physical truth to this, that sin stains or damages wounds, negatively affects the quality of the soul in some way that is, you know, a soul isn't a physical thing, but it's best understood as a kind of physical degradation of some kind. In other words, it matters. Like committing a sin actually changes the substance or essence of one's soul negatively. So say that it's like a window, you know, the soul is like a window and sin stains it or clouds it in some way where you can no longer see through it as well as you could before, or the light can't get through it as well.
And so the idea is that in the confessional, through confessing one's sins and receiving absolution that physically is cleaned in some substantive way, those smudges, or whatever, be it larger, small, are wiped away through the confessional. So there's. There is a. You know, it's difficult to speak of these things in physical terms, but there is a quote unquote, physical transformation that occurs to the non physical entity of the soul, the substance of the soul. And so there's something active in that action. When we're speaking of this in terms of the confessional, in terms of the sacrament of confession, which the testimony scene is clearly attempting to mirror, we could think of this in terms of an action being performed that goes above the verbal and somehow enters the realm of the physical.
It's cleaning something up, you know, so maybe it's not necessarily like putting something out into the world. It's cleaning one's room, you know, it's keeping things tidy, undoing something that has been done. But I still think there's an action as opposed to a passivity there that goes deeper than just something that's verbal. There's a shift in substance. There's a certain kind of change being made to reality.
30:28 Wes: Yeah, you're making me. I think you use the phrase speech act at this point. So it's something that's not just communicating information, but it actually changes the world. So it's the same sort of thing. For instance, when I make a promise or when I say I do, getting married, you're saying something, but by saying I do, it's a form of promise, but it's also a legally binding step in some sense. Right. So you're now in a, I want to say contract, but that doesn't sound very romantic. But now you're married. And of course, it's the conventions of the community that give certain types of.
Of speech that power, but they have the power to do something more than just to relate something. So I like this idea, if that's what you're saying, of confession being this sort of speech act that changes the soul. It's something active, but also it changes one's dispositions, one's character in some way so that one is more disposed to act as well, to do something real. So even when he engages in the. The court scene and he's being a truth teller at great cost to himself and getting Johnny Friendly in trouble, that is not enough. You know, there have been.
And the confession to Edie is not quite enough, and this confession is not quite enough. I mean, they are accomplishing this internal transformation. But to really complete it, he actually has to do something else. I think of this something else as entering, quote, unquote, entering the scene. I say entering the scene because I was thinking of Johnny Friendly. I called it rigging the scene, as, in a way, standing outside of the community, standing outside of work, outside of love, outside of the system as a whole, and needing to control it and rig it and spoil it, as I put it, from the outside.
To change that, you have to go down and actually become part of it, to be within the system, within the scene, among the workers on the dock, not just in the loft being a bum, but actually doing something and part of a community in a relationship, engaging and being loving. So that's what happens at the. At the very end with the confrontation with Johnny Friendly and then the walk up to the warehouse. So, yeah, confession is a kind of speech act that creates a promise to actually act. And so I think the forms of confession that he engaged in to Edie and in court create the grounds for him doing that thing that you talked about that's important to confession, which is actually acting differently in the future.
33:00 Erin: Right. Yeah. And he even gets a redirect away from sort of retributive violence by Father Barry in the bar. Right. Because he has Charlie's gun on him. So Father Barry intervenes, and Terry's taking an action which will almost certainly end up with him going to prison for the rest of his life, and says, you know, do you want to hurt Johnny Friendly? Do you want to fix him? Do you want to finish him for what he did to Charlie? Then don't fight him like a hoodlum down here, because that's what he wants. I think something like that. Fight him in the courtroom tomorrow with the truth. Terry's impulse is actually to take physical action at that point, which is maybe a good thing. But Father Barry is setting up a kind of equivalence between this idea of telling the truth and taking a retributive action against Johnny Friendly, that these are similarly active ways of dealing with the problem.
33:49 Wes: Very good. Yeah. Action doesn't have to be violence, and that's part of the misunderstanding for the mobsters and for that way of life, Passivity isn't. It's not like one is violent or therefore one is passive and exploited. Right. It actually is to be loving or to do work. It actually is what is genuinely active.
34:08 Erin: That's great.
34:09 Wes: Okay. Next time we will discuss Philip Larkin's Aubade. Is that how I pronounce it?
34:15 Erin: I think so. Aubade. Aubade.
34:16 Wes: All these things that I've never abad or obeyed.
34:19 Erin: Yeah.
34:20 Wes: Okay.
34:20 Erin: I should know and. But I can't think of it.
34:24 Wes: I don't know if that'll be enough for full discussion or not, but we'll have another poem back up handy, so we may end up discussing something else as well. By Larkin.
34:33 Erin: Great. All right, thank you, thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Sins of Omission in “On the Waterfront” (1954) (Part 1)
May 06, 2024
Terry Malloy and his fellow longshoremen on the New York docks are witnesses to union corruption under labor boss Johnny Friendly, but won’t testify against him because of his violent intimidation tactics, which ensure that union members remain “D and D”—that is, deaf and dumb—to any illegal activity. When Terry’s collaboration with Friendly results in the death of his friend Joey Doyle, and when Terry subsequently falls in love with Joey’s sister, Edie, he’s forced to reckon with this D and D policy, as well as his own passivity, guilt, and naivete. Wes & Erin discuss Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, which might be said to dramatize the so-called “sin of omission” while asserting that its opposite, truth-telling, can be a radical and perhaps even a strangely physical form of heroism.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Terry Malloy and his fellow longshoremen on the New York docks are witnesses to union corruption under labor boss Johnny Friendly, but won't testify against him because of his violent intimidation tactics which ensure that union members remain D and D, that is deaf and dumb to any illegal activity. When Terry's collaboration with Friendly results in the death of his friend Joey Doyle, and when Terry subsequently falls in love with Joey's sister Edie, he's forced to reckon with this D and D policy as well as his own passivity, guilt and naivete.
Today we're discussing Elia Kazan's 1954 film on the Waterfront, which might be said to dramatize the so called sin of omission while asserting that its opposite, truth telling, can be a radical and perhaps even a strangely physical form of heroism. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:26 Wes: Okay, so Erin, it's been a long time since I've seen this movie and the only scene that really stuck with me is that famous scene in the cab with Terry and his brother Charlie and Brando doing that amazing performance, which I'll read in a moment where he says he could have been somebody and calls himself a bum. So that's something. When I was looking at some of the background for this, I was interested in seeing how many actors praised Brando for that performance. It is a great performance, but I didn't really think that much about it when I was watching the film because I was watching for other things.
Scorsese said, everything that we know about the power of great screen acting relates back to him. When you watch his work in on the Waterfront, you're watching the purest poetry imaginable in dynamic motion. Kazan himself said, if there's a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don't know what it is. Al Pacino says he couldn't move. He was so touched by the performance. And then Anthony Hopkins said, when you Brando in the famous cab scene and on the Waterfront, it's still breathtaking. So I think that's one reason why the cab scene is so memorable.
There's a real pathos to the scene. And then Brando pulls it off very well for the second act. It's the climactic scene which leads us into everything that follows in the third act. So I thought we'd start out by talking about the scene a little bit. And I was going to ask the question of, well, what makes him a bum? And why is he using that word in particular? And it comes up in the movie several times. So he says, do you want to read this and do. And do your Brando imitation?
3:02 Erin: Yeah. My famous.
3:03 Wes: Pretty certain you have a Brando impression that you do in private that you're unwilling to do in public because you're so good at so many other impressions.
3:13 Erin: Thank you.
3:13 Wes: Yeah, I think you've done Katharine Hepburn on the show. But that's.
3:17 Erin: That's as far as I'll go. I'll go as far as from New Haven to Hartford, but no further.
3:22 Wes: All right, well, so I'll read it, and then I'm going to be doing the Brando voice in my head, but I can't do it. So in the cab scene. So Charlie has said, you could have been another Billy Conn as a boxer. And he blames it on the manager. He blames the loss of the fight on the manager, when really it was. The fight was rigged by Johnny Friendly. And Charlie played a part in that. So Terry says, you was my brother, Charlie. You should have looked out for me a little bit. You should have taken care of me a little so I wouldn't have to take dives for short end money.
So that was Terry speaking, and Charlie says, I had some bets down for you. You saw some money, Terry, you don't understand. I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody. Could have been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it. It was you, Charlie. So it's interesting, he talks about wanting to have been taken care of because that is thematically part of the movie and it involves taking care of the pigeons. But we'll get. We'll get to that. But I wanted to start with this concept of being a bum.
4:22 Erin: Yeah. At the end of the film, not the very end when Terry goes down to the docks. But prior to that, when he testifies and he comes back and talks to Edie, he says, they always said I was a bum. Well, I ain't a bum, Edie. So something about him being restored to non bumness occurs over the course of his decision to testify for this waterfront crime commission. But I was thinking about that, too. I was thinking a lot about Terry's passivity and how speech is something that restores this active quality to him. Maybe the film locates the origin of his becoming a bum with the moment that he throws the fight, which, of course, happens prior to the timeline of this film.
But we learn later on that however many months or years earlier, he had deliberately thrown a fight and thereby lost out on having a great career as a prize fighter. And so the first time we see Brando, when he's coming up from that shack on the edge of the docks having had a meeting with Johnny Friendly and his men, I noticed that Brando is always sticking his right arm in his jacket. To me, it looked like he was sort of holstering it. You know, he was pulling his punches, maybe. So something about being a bum has to do with the fact that he's no longer active.
He's given something away. He's not performed to the best of his ability when he could. He's deliberately pulled punches, held back. And something then about speech and about his testimony restores that activity to him and makes him no longer a bum. It cures this passivity and this inaction. And I was really interested in that transformation and whether or not speech is enough to affect it. Which is maybe a slightly different question than this idea of being a bum, but I think it's related.
6:08 Wes: Yeah. So whether or not speech is enough, as in needing violence, needing to beat up Friendly.
6:14 Erin: No, but that's where one's mind automatically goes, right? Because what would be better than speech? You know, I'm not saying that there's necessarily an answer to this, but, you know, it's silly because I think I want something that isn't speech, that's somehow more than speech, but isn't violence, you know, and maybe that middle ground doesn't. But I think there's something about Terry being a prize fighter. And this whole final scene when he's beaten up by Johnny Friendly's men, where it's located in the film, it's a form of penance for the action that he's already taken.
So it's not quite part of that action. It's the fallout of it. And he's outnumbered by so many men that he can't fight back. And so he just takes this beating. But that, too, strikes me as being really passive. Like, he actually tries to physically defend himself and to fight back, but ultimately that's fruitless. And so. So all of that to say, I don't know what the solution would be. That would involve not violence, but more than speech. I keep reaching for something more than
7:15 Wes: that, but I think walking up to the warehouse workplace, it is interesting because we see him testify, and one wonders at that point in the film, is that the climactic moment? Is that the defeat of the antagonist? And it turns out, no. And then you see him get into the fight with Friendly, and you wonder whether he's going to kill Johnny Friendly or he's going to get killed. I mean, I honestly forgot. I didn't know if there was a tragic ending to this.
7:42 Erin: Right.
7:42 Wes: And then the really, you know, the genuinely climactic moment, of course, is not the violence, but walking into the warehouse, ultimately stumbling because he's been beaten up so badly, but also getting everyone to follow him and wresting control, essentially wresting control away from Johnny Friendly, away from on behalf of the people, on behalf of the little man, the common man. And that wresting away of control is not something that is accomplished through violence or even that can be accomplished through violence. It's more about changing people's mindsets in such a way, because they.
They outnumber the mobsters, obviously, but changing people's mindsets in a way where they can cooperatively stand together, which is, of course, what a union ultimately represents and what makes the infiltration and corruption of that such a terrible thing. But to restore that cooperative spirit, that unity between people, is the only way to go. And that seems to be the middle ground that you're talking about between violent action and mere speech, which, of course, is what we get when he testifies.
8:45 Erin: So you're. You're convinced by that ending. It's satisfying to you? I mean, I. Don't get me wrong, I think that when he walks in, it's tremendously moving, but it's also, you know, the film ends very quickly, and it comes with that conclusion is sort of the knowledge that he's now beaten the entire corrupt system and everything is going to be restored. And so I know that some people have thought that's maybe a little bit easy. I mean, I like the reading that you're giving of it, that it's beyond speech and the restoration of this unity. And obviously inherent in the cab scene as well, and throughout the whole film is this idea of what a union is, what a family is, what relationships are, what we owe to each other.
And so restoring that is. Seems to me to be really crucial. At the same time, it's given such a kind of, like, Hollywood ending. It strains believability for me just a tad. Yeah.
9:32 Wes: Yeah, I get that. I think thematically it works, and I think it's emotionally impactful. I am someone who's bothered by plot holes a lot. It wasn't enough of one to bother me for me in this case, but I get what you're saying. So I think with the concept of being a bum, you were talking about passivity and him pulling punches, and I think that's great. In a sense, everyone who's being exploited by the mobsters is a bum in that sense. Right. And I think there's a lot in here about exploitation and the concept of exploitation and corruption. And it had me thinking about the meaning of those things and why people would engage in it.
Right. So there's. Obviously, there's financial motives for mobsters, but there's also. It's actually a lot of work to be a mobster, it turns out. It's not just strong arming people and killing people and engaging in the risk of being killed. But, you know, there's an accountant, and they're essentially running a business, so why not just run a legitimate business? And it, you know, towards the end of the movie, Johnny Friendly says, we're going legit for now because I'm under scrutiny. And undoubtedly they could look good legit, and they'd probably be a profitable enterprise if they went legit.
So the question for me was, why do people engage in this behavior anyway? And there's. There's lots of answers to this. Some of it is about freedom, being outside of the system. There's status and power that come with it. There's community, a kind of, you know, second family of sorts. But I think this need to exploit and turn people into bums is a very strong motive. So when you first see Johnny Friendly, for instance, I think he's watching a boxing match. He's ignoring his men who are trying to get him to pay attention to business stuff, which is really apt because I think we can wonder in retrospect whether that was just another rigged match, which means that he's not watching it for the suspense of the match.
And he doesn't take that sort of inherent risk, right, of rooting for someone and not knowing whether they're going to win and then enduring the disappointment if they lose. It's all just rigged. But he's getting a kind of enjoyment out of that. And the enjoyment, in a way, is I think of this as rigging the scene. It's like he's outside of this scene, outside of this environment, looking into it in a way, like an audience member except he's in control of it. And in particular, anything internal to the scene, which is people's own work and their own good faith efforts, become false.
Right. He can turn them into something false. So Terry becomes a bum by being controlled in that way. He allows his whole future to be compromised. He is prevented from doing his own real work in a way. He's prevented from doing something earnest and from participating in a kind of meritocracy, which I think is part of what the mobsters are transcending. So in other words, I think there's this need to spoil, not just to control it for financial gain, but there's a joy in exploiting it. And, well, not just exploiting it, but corrupting it and spoiling it.
Spoiling is the word that I'm looking for, almost as if it's envied. So. And they need to do the same thing with the dock workers. They need to take what might be honest labor if it could afford the men who do it a decent living and if they had some sense of dignity. But it turns them into bums. Right? It turns them into. Like, they're like beggars. They have to stand on the docks and if they're lucky, they get some. Some work.
13:08 Erin: Hmm. I think in that moment when he's watching the boxing match, he turns it off out of frustration and he says something like, ain't nobody tough anymore. Which is really interesting with.
13:16 Wes: Okay, so I'm. I'm wrong about that then.
13:19 Erin: No, I think. I think I love this. This reading that you're giving to that scene. I think it's so apt and it reminds me actually, you know, if he did control it and he's still frustrated with the outcome, that's kind of even more fascinating. But it's reminiscent to me of the moment when the heavies are standing outside the bar right at the beginning when they throw Joey Doyle off the roof. And these heavies remark to themselves out loud, you know, somebody fell off the roof. So this is really interesting tension set up right away between, you know, the action that happens that we see as the viewers, that we know that they know exactly what's happened because they might as well have been, you know, they're interchangeable with the men who are actually on the roof pushing him off.
So this tension between what's actually taken place and then what they verbalize, what they acknowledge aloud, which is a different sort of spin on the situation or, you know, a parallel narrative that they're constructing. So I love this idea that friendly is Watching this rigged fight and uses it as a way to say that no one's tough. Like to sort of bolster himself at the top of this sort of imagined hierarchy. If he's watching someone who he's paid to throw the fight and then gets to proclaim that this guy isn't tough, it's like even. It's even better, I think, within the universe of this film and the way that this idea of being a bum and a sort of failure of acknowledgment are laid side by side with each other or in which there seems to be a kind of active parody going on of proper relationships with this kind of warped relationship where lip service is given to something.
And there are relationships which bear resemblance to what a proper relationship would be. But it's all. It's all twisted in some way. So it's like a parody. In which case that fight being like a parody of a fight and his reaction being a sort of parodic reaction or ironic or, you know, however we want to put it, I think would be really in keeping with that.
15:06 Wes: Yeah. So I think I hallucinated this fight being rigged thing. So it turned out he was watching a real fight and got frustrated by the outcome. But the same point holds, right? He's rigged fights. And the larger point is that there's this antagonistic relationship to the concept of earnest effort and honest work and people who try to get by in life by doing that. So whether you're a prize fighter or a dock worker, essentially playing by the rules, I think Johnny Friendly and probably mobsters in general, that's something that they see as being exploited.
Right. You get all this stuff at some point. Terry himself says. So everyone has a racket. He says about the priest. What's his racket? Everyone has a racket. Everyone's exploit. Either exploiting or being exploited. Relationships are being reduced to that. I think that's the twistedness that you're pointing to. And I think there's the desire to turn all relationships into that. And in particular, to make others dependent, turn others essentially into beggars in the context of the relationship. There is an actual bum in the movie at a certain point.
16:19 Erin: Right, Right.
16:20 Wes: Who Terry tells to screw off at first. Terry himself. He's been made to depend in a certain way on Johnny Friendly. And there's a. It seems a little bit like a father son relationship in the beginning. Right. Because that's. So there are elements of dependency which are actually positive and a normal part of intimate relationships. But, you know, as the movie Progresses, we see that Terry is just being used. He's a bum to the extent that he's allowing himself to be used, to be turned into a beggar and to be idle. Right. So he gets rewarded with a cushy position on the docks where he gets to sit up in the loft and read.
So there's that sort of idleness involved in being a bum. And the mobsters themselves are avoiding honest work and they're parasites, so they're bums. So everyone has to be turned either into a bum or beggar in the sense that they have to rely on the mobsters for what they want or become a mobster themself and get everything by violence. Not through effort within the system, not as part of a meritocracy, but as part of an organization where the only effort involved is violence.
17:37 Erin: Yeah, I love that. You know, thinking through some of what you said, I'm thinking that, you know, so much of this movie is about work, honest work and the dignity in work. And so whenever someone kind of isn't working, you know, something is. Something is broken. And thinking about how relationships are their own sort of form of work, I love this idea that you bring up about. I think you said, being a beggar in the relationship, you know, that implies the twisting of this responsibility. Right. In relationships, which are a form of work. I mean, I guess I don't like when people say, use that term, you know, that, like, relationships are hard work.
It implies that you've been sentenced to something, you know. But they are, in the lightest form of the term in that we have responsibilities to each other, we owe each other something, and we have to fulfill that obligation, which takes effort, if not work. Right. And so, you know, thinking back to the cab scene, maybe getting to sort of the first layer of signification or something underneath that scene, you think, well, Terry is just once again kind of blaming his brother. Right. Like he's once again blaming someone outside of himself. Right.
He fails to take responsibility for his part in Joey's death, and now he's failing to take responsibility for getting involved with a mob, for throwing the fight. Right. It's all Charlie's fault. But what's interesting about that is that it is Charlie's fault. Terry has correctly, I think, located something about this relationship that has become twisted, that has made Terry a beggar. Charlie has a responsibility to his brother. He did need to look out for him because Terry is his younger brother. And instead he's running Terry's life in this negative way, which.
Which keeps Terry A bum which keeps him incapable of this kind of action or keeps him in this state of passivity. Charlie and Terry's relationship is kind of a microcosm of that between the union and the longshoremen. You know, the union has. Is supposed to be protecting their members, and instead they've exploited their responsibility to their men by both kind of leeching off of them and keeping them passive. And, you know, the men, in turn, have ceded a certain kind of responsibility by participating in this, by taking it, by not speaking out, though they have very, very little agency in the film's telling.
Right. So Terry is also responsible for putting up with this. But really, you know, the responsibility, the chief responsibility, is that of this kind of paternal, when it's working. Paternal in a positive way. Responsibility, which is like the. The first mover in the relationship. Right. It's the primary activating force in the relationship. So that Terry and the longshoremen bear less responsibility for taking the consequences of crime than the men in power do for instituting those criminal practices in the first place. Of course. Right. So I think Terry is right to locate the origin of his being a bum with his brother's abdication of responsibility.
20:31 Wes: Yeah. And I think Charlie himself is also an object of exploitation. So he's come under Johnny Friendly's wing as well, I think, at an earlier point. And because there's talk of his brains. Right. He's a smart guy. Terry doesn't think of himself as a smart guy, and he seems to think that this way of life is necessary. If you're not a smart guy, if you're going to be somebody and you're not smart and you can't be a boxer, then you have to be a mobster. You know, you don't have the brains. You use the brawn. And there's a certain point where Terry is talking to Edie.
He talks about admiring his brother's brains. She's just said she wants to be a teacher, and he says he admires brains and that his brother Charlie is a very brainy guy. And she says it isn't just brains, it's how you use them. So something that Charlie has that would, like Terry's prize fighting ability. Charlie could have done well at an ordinary job because he's got brains. Right. But that's been corrupted by Johnny Friendly. And his brains have been channeled into something that requires some degree of cleverness, but isn't a full use of that capacity and is also criminal and corrupt.
Obviously. I also like your point about this paternal responsibility and Exploitation instead of protection, right? The union is supposed to protect, but in fact, it's a protection racket. It's an interesting way in which these honorable terms get corrupted. Same thing with wisdom, right? And you know, brains relating to wisdom, they're wise guys, so they're not brainy in the ordinary sense, but they're clever in the sense that they're cynical. They see through the bullshit of trying to get ahead in society through brains or some other ability like boxing or anything that involves actual effort.
They see that as the racket, that as the corrupt thing. So wisdom, truth, brains that gets turned into wise guys, protection gets turned into protection rackets. And as you've pointed out, relationships get twisted at paternal, you know, a seemingly paternal relationship between Johnny Friendly and Terry and Johnny Friendly and Charlie that turns out just to be exploitative rather than protective as well. That turns out to be a misuse of paternal responsibility, as you put it. I want to say one final thing, which is that Terry himself, I'm not sure that he fully understands this, right, because he understands it better at the end of the movie.
But at the point where he's in the cab, he sees not being a bum as having won the fight. It's about winning. He could have been somebody. And there's. There's an element of truth to that. But it's not so much about winning as being able to be his own man and rely on his own actual effort instead of, again, extracting oneself from that realm, from that scene and living as mobsters do outside of it and trying to exploit and control it from the outside, but also spoil it, right? In the sense that to put gum in the whole system, the whole meritocratic system or the whole system of effort, to just gum that up and spoil it for everyone else as well.
So it's not just that they're running a racket. They could do a lot without ever having to rig a prize fight. They could make a lot of money without having to exploit the dock workers. But they have to do that anyway because they have to spoil all that. So would Terry have actually won the fight? He thinks he would have won the fight. Maybe he would have. He was holding the guy up for certain rounds. He would definitely, you know, but that kind of. We would expect anyone to say that sort of thing, to have that sort of bravado. It's not clear that that's actually the case.
So the important thing wouldn't have been becoming somebody by winning the fight. It would have been been not having engaged in the dishonesty of throwing it and not have not having been exploited in that way. So in the end, right, we see a recapitulation of this because he doesn't win the fight at first. People say, oh, he's still got, you know, he's still got his boxing chops because he does get Johnny Friendly good in that fight. But in the end, he can't do anything about the number of people who are on top of him beating him. What he can do though, is he can reintegrate himself into something honest by doing that walk and getting people to follow him into that place.
So that's the way to be somebody. That's the way not to be a bum.
24:54 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about this fascinating idea of the removal of agency and of passivity being twinned with the longshoremen union. You know, like the nature of this work itself, which is. Which seems to me to be so physical. So it's funny that this whole. In the same way that Terry's prize fighting past seems to run at cross purposes with this idea of his passivity, you know, the very nature of the work itself, of the longshoremen's work is extremely physical too. And yet they're very passive. And I've just been thinking about the way that the longshoremen, they're kind of the disenfranchised children of Johnny Friendly.
For whatever reason, Terry is the son with whom he's well pleased. Right. So Terry gets in this sort of father and Christ figure kind of perversion or the turning inside out of that relationship. To a certain extent, the longshoremen are like the disenfranchised children of Johnny Friendly's anti benevolent father. And they're forced to contend with none of the favoritism that Terry gets. And especially Charlie, right? Charlie doesn't seem he has to do any of the hard labor because he's just purely in the administrative wing of this corrupt union.
But I'm thinking about the way that it's specifically that it's dehumanizing these workers who in a way, I think are speaking out truth telling as redemption for them, I think works a bit better maybe than it does for Brando's character, who, I mean, after all, we're talking about the scene in the cab and he, he knows how to give good speech, right. It's famous for his. For his speechifying and for his ability to kind of articulate what the problem is. It comes late in the film and after some development and growth of his character. But also we think about, you know, the Inciting incident of the whole film.
The drama of the whole film comes from something that Terry says, right? He goes down to Joey Doyle's apartment building and lures him out with a lie. But it's a speech act from the very beginning. I'm thinking about the longshoremen as being treated like animals with this deaf and dumb idea, right? So that this passivity can be in terms of, like, brains. You know, this brains brawn distinction that you're making. Where they're supposed to sort of just shut down their brains and become like animals, like beasts of burden. Where they're deaf and dumb and they do the physical labor and that's it.
So they're sort of shutting down part of their humanity and becoming animal. Like. It seems to me that for them, this idea of speaking out, as I said, is really an antidote to kind of balance the state. And I think about Edie coming in this teacher. And also maybe this, like, feminine force where, you know, these. These men are almost like parodies of this hyper masculine, extreme state in which you're just. As a man, you're just a sort of silent working body who just takes all the crap that everybody throws at you and you just sort of keep working through it.
And you don't really get to access your consciousness in any kind of way to fight back or your brains, right? Like, you. You can't articulate things. You can't speak. You just have to, like, take it and work and do the hard labor. And Edie kind of comes in as this force of articulation and expression, right? She's really the one who forces Father Barry to act. And she gradually works on both Terry and her father over the course of the film. Part of what you were saying is that those two things, the brains and the brawn are out of balance. And in the Longshoremen, I think that's especially true more than it is for Terry.
And so in a proper relationship, one in which the men are not being exploited in the way that Johnny Friendly is exploiting them, their brains would not be taken out of the equation. They would still be, like, fully, fully human. In a relationship that's actually a relationship and is not exploitative, but that's actually working. It would retain their humanity. So in this thwarted union system, they're being dehumanized or denatured in some essential way. Because the relationship has been denatured. And Johnny Friendly, too, is like, by participating in this, by setting up this kind of relationship, he's dehumanizing himself as well.
He's missing out on his obligation to be an actually responsible union boss and he's thereby dehumanizing himself as well in this equation.
29:00 Wes: Yeah. One of the reasons I have down for why it is a mobster wouldn't go legitimate or what the appeal of that sort of life is, I phrase it as rejection of inwardness. So that means book learning, education and Edie, as you've pointed out, as a counterpoint to that. Those things can be seen as soft and effeminate, of course. Right. They prevent men from being real men, from relying on their strength and their aggression. But also the spiritual is part of this. So there's. There's an enormous sacrifice for men in giving up aggression for human beings in general.
But I think especially for people who have large amounts of testosterone in their bodies, there's a. There's a sacrifice in giving up the world of action and aggression for this more constrained, internalized world. Right. So sublimation into work, whether it's physical labor or boxing or something, or a white collar job or creativity, something artistic, it all involves this movement to something more inward or religion itself. And that's something that I think they reject. And they reject it again because they see it as something that is itself exploitative.
Right? Oh, I got to go to school and do this. Or oh, someone's giving me the opium of the masses, religion in order to keep me obedient. I got to do a stupid job that doesn't pay very well. They see again, that whole system as being the thing that's exploitative. And so one has to stand outside of it just in order not to be exploited by it. And that goes for inwardness as well. Inwardness just makes you soft and easily exploited. So we get that scene early on, this whole speech about, from Johnny Friendly about having had a hard life and growing up on a widow's pension and basically suffering the trauma of having been exploited.
And that's why he has to do what he does. I think this helps us make a transition to the idea of what it is to be a pigeon. Pigeon does a lot. The idea of a pigeon does a lot of work in this movie. It means different things, but at one point Terry talks about pigeons being in the park and hawks descending on them. He says, so she says, I wouldn't have thought you'd be so interested in pigeons. He says, I just go for it. Which is a really weird response. I'm not just noticing it in the transcript, but I thought that when I was watching the movie as well.
31:36 Erin: He goes for Them, he's, you know, it's like ice cream. Pigeons. Yeah, yeah, I know you know what it means. It's absurd.
31:43 Wes: It's just. Yeah, yeah, he's, it's, it's something he's in, he's into and he doesn't know why. And then, and then he says, you know, you know, the city is full of hawks. That's a fact. They hang around on the top of the big hotels. They spot a pigeon in the park, right down on them. Okay, Obvious subtext. And there's a lot of good subtext in the dialogue, you know, that's makes for good dialogue in a movie is this type of thing, the hawks are the mobsters and the pigeons are the bums or the passive innocent people. People trying to live by the rules.
That's the pejorative concept of what it is to be a pigeon. Of course, then there's the idea of a stool pigeon and the idea that he is a pigeon. And this had me looking up, I looked up stool pigeon. I was wondering what the origin of that was, this idea. And apparently hunters would tie a pigeon to a stool and it would flutter around in a. Attract other pigeons. So you can see it's being made to betray its own kind. So to attract other pigeons so the hunters could kill them. It looks like it was the 1840s that it was first used to describe police informants.
So this idea of disloyalty, but also and of being something like a decoy or betraying one's kind, it inverts the concept of honesty and truthfulness. Right? Because the pigeon is actually being truthful, they're not being false. From the standpoint of the mobsters, it's falsity. But in a more absolute, absolute sense, pigeons are just honest and they're just people who are more interested in truth than the corrupt way of life that they're rebelling against. And so that gives a transition into this concept of the pigeon in the non pejorative sense in the movie where it's about care.
So Joey Doyle takes care of pigeons and that helps get him killed. Right, because he's lured up to the roof. How does he, how does Bran. How does Terry lure him up to the roof again?
33:33 Erin: He says he's gonna bring the pigeon up. Pigeon had flown away. Obviously not. But Terry says that it has and that he would meet him up on the roof to put the pigeon back in the cage.
33:43 Wes: Right. So Terry is gonna, you know, he's gonna collaborate with Joey's taking care of the pigeons and Then after Joey dies, he takes over that very caring activity. And so, you know, when he says he just goes for it. There's a side of him, right? There's this caring side of him that runs against the side that thinks that caring and being cared about are just weakness and exploitation. That cynical view of it. Edie says to him, at some point she would cure people of this sort of thing by. Or of their hardness, by patience and kindness instead of using something like violence or force.
And finally, I think at some point in the film when he's being called a pigeon, I think he says, no, you're all pigeons. I don't know if I'm misremembering that, but it's a pigeon, you know, I'm not a pigeon for ratting out the mob. You're pigeons for letting yourself be passive with the mob. So the dock worker passivity is pigeon like. And there's kind of an echo of this in the father saying, you know, every time you let this happen, it's a crucifixion. So, sorry for running all through those. Through all those different pigeon ideas in one speech.
But, yeah, maybe that'll help us explore this a little bit.
34:49 Erin: Yeah, I really like the idea of. Care to go back a little bit. Like, it's just very funny that, you know, Terry uses a pigeon to get the pigeon. You know, it's. It's a little bit, you know, when he stands underneath Joey's window holding the pigeon and basically acting like his own. Like a stool pigeon for the mob. Right, right. I like learning about this etymology. I didn't know it. So he's. He's doing exactly what a stool pigeon does. Right. By staying down. Down below and getting the other birds to. Well, he's sort of flushing them in a way. Right.
35:20 Wes: Yeah.
35:21 Erin: There's one more element I can think of too, that, you know, the image of the tabs being thrown on the ground with all the men picking them up like pigeons, you know.
35:30 Wes: Absolutely. Yeah. Very good.
35:32 Erin: So the men are in this position of being beggars, as you already suggested. So, you know, there are all these valences, these negative valences, that they're beggars for work, that a pigeon is like a bum, I suppose. Right. Because you're, you know, pigeons are always looking for you to throw them some food and give them something. Yeah, right. So that's another. But I really like the fact. I mean, you kind of have to get almost all the way to the end of the movie or watch it a second time. In order to realize what exactly Terry's relationship is to the Joey Doyle pigeons on the roof.
Because he's there, like, the very next day taking care of the pigeons. And this is one of the only. Or maybe the only thing that indicates that there's something in him that's what really positive before anybody else even gets to him and works on him. You know, before Father Barry, before Edie, it's this idea that he went up there and took responsibility for those pigeons and cares very much for them. Like when he. When he talks to Tommy, he. Tommy comes up to feed them in the morning, and Terry has already fed them and tells Tommy, I think, to be careful about spilling water because he doesn't want the pigeons to catch cold.
36:42 Wes: Yeah, Right.
36:43 Erin: And so this is a really strong indication that Terry has this paternal quality in himself and that he understands obligation and relationships to other things. And we know later that he'll be well matched with Edie because of Edie's tendency to take in stray cats. Right. So they're both. They both kind of have this inherent softness about them. And I think it's, like, really crucial that Terry is taking care of those pigeons before his actual intellectual transformation via influence occurs, so that we could see that he has this inherent goodness expressed really strongly through the idea of these pigeons.
And the sense that he takes on this obligation and it puts him in. Again, in a positive relationship in which he owes something to these pigeons and performs those duties, those ministrations towards them, I think is really crucial to show his development or the possibility for his development.
37:38 Wes: Yeah, very good. One of the big losses in the movie is when Tommy kills all the pigeons. And this is someone who, earlier on, Terry has described as his shadow. In fact, he says, this bum here is my shadow. Says that jokingly. So this bum here is my shadow. So he has this paternal relationship to this kid. And then this kid does something so horrible, he doesn't just kill one pigeon and then throw that pigeon at Terry, but he kills all of the pigeons, which is really horrific. And then the question is, why does he need to do that? He's getting it back at Terry for Terry's betrayal.
But why take it out on the pigeons? And again, one can see this, right, as a denial of one's own passivity and softness and even relatedness and therefore, one susceptibility to exploitation. So caring and relatedness can be identified with passivity and susceptibility to exploitation. So one might want to rebel against that by just eliminating the symbols of that and eliminating Even the possibility of taking care of them. So Terry can no longer take care of the pigeons once Tommy has done that. So it's almost like killing off caring, killing off vulnerability, killing off relatedness.
And why? Because Terry has betrayed this twisted, to use your word, this twisted version of relatedness that comes with being part of this corrupt system.
39:04 Erin: I like that. Because you're redeeming Tommy from being just another budding psychopath to know to someone who represents Terry's inner child. Right. So it's. As long as we stay in the realm of symbol, we don't have to think about the fact that Tommy went in there and wrung every little neck.
39:23 Wes: It's just. I know, I know.
39:25 Erin: Yeah.
39:26 Wes: Tommy was helping out with taking care of the pigeons, so he had something of that. Terry's obviously a paternal figure to him. Oddly enough, he feels betrayed by Terry doing something that's actually genuine and non exploitative. He feels exploited by that. Okay, so we. We're gonna end part one right there. And I don't know if we have anything more to say about pigeons. We might.
39:48 Erin: We haven't talked about being pigeon toed, so that's an important part of this.
39:53 Wes: Oh, just joking, right? Of course.
39:56 Erin: Just playing word association games.
39:58 Wes: When did that happen? But anyway, we'll talk about other things probably. So you can listen to that next week, part two, or you can subscribe and get that right now. Thank you.
40:10 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subjectspodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter NYsubtext.
Consciousness Bemoaned in “Aubade” by Philip Larkin (Part 2)
Apr 29, 2024
In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the aubade inverts the serenade. Where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Dunne’s famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one on behalf of self-love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us to both workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality. As a consequence, life is harder to live by the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Wes & Erin discuss whether life (and love) can be reconciled with human self-consciousness and all that it entails.
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0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to Subtext. This is part two of our discussion of Philip Larkin's poem Aubade. We got half a half a line into the second stanza, so we'll pick it up from there. The mind blanks at the glare created by our speed as we go through this poem. Okay, so we were just about to get to the lines. Oh, actually, in fact, I never read this second stanza Aloud. So perhaps I should.
1:01 Wes: Yeah. So why don't you read the stanza and then we.
1:03 Erin: Okay, here we go. The mind blanks at the glare not in remorse, the good not done, the love not given. Time torn off unused, nor wretchedly because an only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings and may never but at the total emptiness forever, the sure extinction that we travel to and shall be lost in always. Not to be here, not to be anywhere, and soon. Nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
1:35 Wes: Okay, so as usual, I've been operating under a misconception because of my misinterpretation of. I had been thinking about death in life as wasted time and inhibited love. But he's denying that here. He's saying the mind blanks at the glare. Not because we are remorseful about unused time and love not given or because. And this is a great. This is a really great idea. Only life. And only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings. The idea that we've been screwed up by our childhoods. Right. And a significant portion of our life involves trying to climb clear of.
Of that so that we can really achieve what we want to achieve. So there's this kind of remedial aspect to some aspects of how we spend our time. And we only have one life to do it. So the question is, can we do all the remedial stuff and then get into AP calculus once we're done with that? But he's saying it's not that either. It's not that we have so much to overcome in our limited time, but just this idea that our extinction is. Sure. And I guess one might think that that deprives anything that we might do. No matter how productive we are, no matter how much love there is in our life, it perhaps makes it all meaningless, that we can't.
None of that can be meaningful, if. Sure, extinction is what lies at the end of it.
3:12 Erin: You know, I think your reading is correct, though, because, I mean, I think it is on a certain level. First of all, the best phrase in the whole poem is time torn off, unused. And, you know, and we do get. You know, we do. We do spend some lines here really preoccupied with what he says. He's not preoccupied by. So, you know, again, I think he's. Through negation. He's. He's able to sort of occupy two states of mind at the same time.
3:42 Wes: Yeah.
3:42 Erin: But I do think, you know, I'm really interested in this idea of remorse as actually maybe a fantasy about more life. You Know, this is the idea that maybe somewhere, some other time, under some other circumstances, you could have had another life. Or it's kind of dreaming of a parallel life in which the correct choices were made, the achievements, you know, were many. I don't know. You know, in which everything went well. Right. And so this. This idea of. I think what he's thinking of as, like, deathbed remorse is actually a further stay against this idea of extinction, because it's actually a fantasy about another thread, a continued life, or just a different one, but still something that's more life.
Right. And what he's talking about is shutting all that down because those kind of open up little wormholes of hope and possibility. The thing that's really the scary part is the extinction. And I'm not sure that I agree. I mean, not that it's my place to agree or disagree with the poem, but I think remorse can be a much scarier thing than the eternal dirt nap. I don't know.
5:01 Wes: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, yes, there are nights when I wake up in existential dread. Oh, my God, I'm going to die.
5:10 Erin: Yeah.
5:11 Wes: And I. Unless one has some religious consolation for that, that can be quite piercing, but it's pretty rare. I actually used to do that as a kid, believe it or not.
5:24 Erin: That explains a lot. Yeah.
5:27 Wes: Like, oh, my God, I'm gonna die. But I think, yeah, most of us are concerned about what we can fit into life. This is one life to live, and how do we make it the best life that we can live, and how do we get as much love and work accomplishment and then good, which, of course, is the word that I ignore. Right. There's a triad here. Good love and time unused, which, you know, thinking of not just work, but anything we might do. So, of course, I ignored the good part. Right. The good not done. All the nice things we might have done for people or the.
Or how we might have perfected ourselves ethically or improved ourselves ethically and been better people and proved, you know, maybe done something for justice in the world and things like that. So that's the part I ignored. But, yeah, so there's. There's a trio of these things. And I think, yeah, most of us think in those terms about when we're fearful about time passing, we're fearful about not being able to do enough of those things.
6:38 Erin: Did I ever tell you my. My panic attack in the Coolidge Corner theater story?
6:45 Wes: No.
6:47 Erin: So I think I've only had, like, one really extremely vivid reckoning with my own death. I mean, I think you know, obviously I have garden variety thoughts of death all the time, but I was in the Coolidge Corner Theater. I was watching The Old Man & the Gun, the Robert Redford film that came out maybe, oh, I don't know, five, five years ago now. Five, six years ago.
7:10 Wes: I haven't heard of it.
7:13 Erin: It's. I don't remember if it was good or not, because I. For whatever reason, I went to go, you know, this is Coolidge Corner Theater. Was like, you know, kitty Corner to my apartment. So sometimes I would just like, at the last minute just go in and see a movie by myself. And anyway, I was sitting in the theater. Redford came on the screen. I was shocked at how old he was. And suddenly I had a really. A really vivid experience of the fact that, like, I was actually going to physically die someday. And because Redford looked so old. So I guess if Redford's gonna die, I am, too. I don't know. And anyway, it was so upsetting and so vivid that I started, I guess, having a panic attack. Like, I couldn't breathe. And I actually had to leave the theater to calm down. And anyway, sorry, that's just a ridiculous. I just love telling that story.
8:14 Wes: I don't have to have a movie ticket to have that experience. I just have to look in the mirror.
8:21 Erin: No, but it's a Redford.
8:22 Wes: Who is that person?
8:24 Erin: I know there's something.
8:25 Wes: Well, that's what I used to look.
8:27 Erin: Exactly.
8:30 Wes: I was a model. Yeah. No, that's really interesting because it captures all of this at a visceral level. It's not just about. So what is it? Yeah, what is it about someone looking really old and Robert Redford in particular, that would cause a panic attack? What aspect of your mortality is that plugging into another world? Is it about the eternal dirt nap or is it about time torn off, unused, or which.
9:02 Erin: I think more the former, but also the idea that there is an initiation into death. I think there was also something kind of religious, too, in the fear that, oh, he has aged. We are all going to undergo aging. The manner of our death might be excruciatingly painful and drawn out. If things don't go so well for us, you know, we're not all guaranteed to die in our sleep. And then I'm going to have to give an account of what I've done. Like, I think it's all kind of in a ball for me. You know, it's all. It's all entwined together. And part of that could be my sense of faith.
Which is also, like, I think, a really profound fear that he's not giving any attention to in this poem, which is like, what if. You know, what if you die? And then after you die, there's someone who has on divine videotape every single bad decision you've ever made in your entire life and then plays it back to you, and you have to give an account for that. You know, you have to pay for it.
10:12 Wes: I'd rather do the eternal.
10:14 Erin: Exactly. Right. Like, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, religion is just a way to make you feel better about yourself. Really. That's not my. Not my experience.
10:23 Wes: I would not want to relive all my bad decisions.
10:26 Erin: Yeah. So I think, you know, I think that was a big part of it for me, and I think it was. Yeah. I think it was induced by this idea that even Redford is getting old and is going to die. And so that means. That means it's going to definitely happen to mere mortals like me. And. I don't know.
10:44 Wes: I mean, anyone could have not gotten old. It would have been him, right?
10:48 Erin: Or Paul Newman. But Paul Newman's already dead, so unless he's just, you know, been assumed into heaven.
10:55 Wes: Is Paul Newman dead?
10:56 Erin: Oh, yeah. He's been dead for a while.
10:58 Wes: I had no idea.
10:58 Erin: Yeah, I thought, Joanne Woodward's still alive, but you surprised?
11:03 Wes: Oh, I was thinking Natalie Wood. I thought you were messing with me. Okay.
11:06 Erin: No, no, no, no, no, no. Joanne Woodward, his wife.
11:09 Wes: But Paul Newman, he was. Isn't he the one who put his head, face in the bowl of cold water to prevent aging? Or is that Robert Redford?
11:17 Erin: I don't know. I've never heard that. But I don't think Paul Newman would do ice dives. What? Really?
11:22 Wes: You don't think so? Okay, he's too manly for that.
11:25 Erin: No, he was so. He was so ambivalent about his own looks, and they caused him so many problems that you. I think it would have been. If I had to venture a guess, I would assume it would have been a relief for him to age a little bit, though. I don't know. With men, sometimes they look even better when they age. It's a whole thing. Anyway, the point being, I think that these thoughts that he's talking about of this kind of, you know, I'll call it like the deathbed remorse thoughts, I think that can't help but be tied to or come with, you know, in the caboose of.
Or in the trunk of the car of extinction. Because it's about. What is this Extinction about it's the lack of continuation in one's life that means one wants one's life to continue. There's inherent remorse in the idea of extinction for what is lost. I think it's about more than just this idea that the screen goes blank and that's it, you know?
12:23 Wes: Yeah. I mean, we develop all these abilities, for instance, we learn all these things. This is always what struck me as this is the meaning aspect of it. Right. So there's the dirt nap aspect, but then there's the way in which everything that we might think is meaningful in some sense could be deprived of meaning by the fact that it's all going to be terminated. What's the point of becoming good at something if all of that work is for naught in some larger sense, because it can't be carried forward indefinitely.
12:54 Erin: Right, right. But isn't that also what gives. You know, we also wouldn't, say, develop any skills if we lived forever, you know what I mean? Like, there would be no. I don't know, there would be no point to becoming good at anything if any kind of excellence wasn't needed to give meaning to our lives, sustain our lives for the brief time that we're here. We could always just say, oh, we'll do it later. There's no urgency, there's no pressure to become great. I mean, I think like, death maybe takes away the. The meaning of becoming good at something, but it also lends the meaning for. At least for certain things. I mean, maybe not for like, you know, learning to play the piano, but certainly for making the most of one's time in certain crucial other ways. I mean, I think that includes playing the piano. But, you know, for argument's sake.
13:44 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. I was thinking. And you know, if just thinking strictly in terms of accomplishment, people can be driven by prestige or they can be just driven by love of the work itself. But to the extent that we're driven by prestige, yet that's something that's time pressured. Perhaps it is the case that if we had an infinite amount of time to do any of those things, then it would become meaningless. And after all, the person who's a great novelist inside of 80 years, if I have an infinity to tell myself that I might be able to do that one day. Yeah, no, I think so. That's a good point. Before we move to the next stanza, just like this, these last two lines, not to be here, not to be anywhere and soon nothing more terrible, nothing more true. Makes me think there should be a Dr. Seuss version of this with drawings and just for kids.
14:46 Erin: Oh, the places you won't go when you're dead.
14:50 Wes: That's great. Everybody dies.
14:56 Erin: I really want you to become used
14:58 Wes: to the idea early.
14:59 Erin: Yeah. I really want you to write a series of children's books on the theme of mortality.
15:04 Wes: Actually, that is actually not a bad idea.
15:07 Erin: That would be horrid. Have you ever read. I had some of these books. Maybe. Maybe it was Hilaire Belloc wrote a couple of children's books on this theme or. I also loved the Edward Gorey, the kids dying in gruesome ways according to the Alphabet. You know, like A is for Arthur who was struck down by an axe or whatever, you know, and it shows, like all these kids being brutally murdered or dying in heinous ways. Anyway, I loved that when I was a kid. Kids are sickos.
15:37 Wes: All right, you want to read the next one?
15:40 Erin: This is a special way of being afraid. No trick dispels religion. Used to try that. Vast moth eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die. And specious stuff that says no rational being can fear a thing. It will not feel, not seeing that this is what we fear. No sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell. Nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with the anesthetic from which none come round.
16:10 Wes: Yeah. So this idea, no rational being can fear thing. It will not feel. This is what I attributed to Epicurus, which it is. It's. It's. And then the other option is the. I guess it's not just Christianity, but whatever religions introduce us to. An afterlife can be a source of consolation. But it's an interesting juxtaposition because like I said, there's this interesting historical dynamic between the Epicurean and Christian point of view. In particular, historically very important. And he's introducing those two different options here. The religious option he discards as a fiction, but the Epicurean option he dismisses as specious.
So the first option is false and the second option is just badly reasoned, which I don't think is the case, by the way. I think Epicurus has a really good point because he himself, I think by. In the lines towards the ends, at the end of the stanza highlights the paradox of this sort of fear. This is what we fear. No sight, no sound. Which of course is not of this. It's not something that can happen to us.
17:28 Erin: Well, first of all, I like your. Your binary choice between Christianity and eternal nothingness is very crusadery of you. Like, these are your two options, Christianity or Eternal death. Anyway, this idea, too, that, you know, it's. This is a sort of like post Christian poem, like religion used to try. So in other words, you know, even religion has given up on this attempt. It's just sort of. I don't know what it's doing now in Larkin's mind, I thought too, for a long time about the brocade and what that might be suggesting. I didn't get very far, but, you know, I was just thinking of, like, priestly vestments, but also drapes and maybe furniture and furniture coverings, things that cover, like, you know, if there's a connection to the drapes in the room, the curtains, rather.
And musical. You know, I kind of. This was a pretty slippery image for me. I was trying to think through this. Like, it's. Why musical brocade? Because it's patterned.
18:35 Wes: Well, I was thinking of brocade in terms of weaving. Right. So one could say you've weaved a tale, if, you know, oh, sure, it's made up. Yeah. But why musical?
18:45 Erin: There it made me think of.
18:46 Wes: Which seems to mix the. Mixes the metaphor, Right?
18:50 Erin: Yeah. Like there's, like. There's something inherently sort of sense crossed in it, you know, I mean, later we're going to get the list of the five senses. Maybe that nonsensical element is part of what he's getting at here.
19:01 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it occurs to me that. So there is this intimate relationship between Christianity, not to say that there aren't other religions with afterlives, but I'm going to keep focusing on that. But music sort of arises within the context of Christianity, and maybe the idea is that that is part of what seduces us in religion. And, of course, music is still an important part of religion in a way, but we get seduced into humming a certain tune. Maybe. I don't know.
19:37 Erin: I like that. In regards to the Epicurean quote, it just makes me think of Hannah and her sisters. The character Mickey that Woody Allen plays his father, when he's like, now I'm alive, when I'm dead, I'll be dead. And then Mickey's like, you know, aren't you afraid? He's like, of what? I'll be unconscious. You know, it's like there's actually a pretty simple, fixed all of this, which is, I'll worry about it. I think he says something like, who knows? Like, I'll either be unconscious or I'll. I'll be awake. If not, I'll deal with it then. I'm not going to worry now, you know, this is Just like the perfect tonic for this poem.
20:17 Wes: Right. Reminds me as well of Annie hall and the other consolation that Woody Allen introduces, which is that it's all just far off. Right. What's the uncle? He says something like, alvy, don't worry, Alvy. The universe is not gonna.
20:33 Erin: It's not gonna fall apart for billions
20:36 Wes: of years, so we can't be reassured that the universe isn't gonna end, but it's just gonna happen really, really far off.
20:46 Erin: I don't want this whole episode to just become like Erin arguing with Larkin. But another thing I take issue with, or which maybe doesn't sound so bad to me, is the anesthetic from which none come round. I mean, you know, maybe this is where I should know that I'm. I'm just like, too tired and overworked to have coherent thoughts about things. But I was just reading this thinking to myself, like, wow, that sounds really good to me. I mean, I've often. I've often said that I'd love to be put in a medically induced coma for like six months or so just to get a really nice long rest in. I know that's not the same thing, but, like, it sort of is.
21:28 Wes: And, yeah, death is just a permanent vacation.
21:32 Erin: Right. Well, you know, thinking actually of this idea of rest. I mean, seeing as this whole poem takes place in a moment of disturbed rest, of disturbed sleep, you know, for someone who, you know, I think I mentioned this in the last episode, but for a speaker who works all day and has to get drunk at night to mildly anesthetize himself, one would think that maybe he'd be a little bit more like me in his thinking and be grateful for the knowledge that there's a break coming.
22:02 Wes: Absolutely.
22:03 Erin: You know, it doesn't sound like the speaker has the easiest life.
22:05 Wes: Right, right. No, I think this is a very important point. It's at this point where he mentions an anesthetic. We're supposed to make this connection between drinking and death. So he's trying to. With drinking, he's trying to reduce his consciousness of things. He's trying to anesthetize himself and put him in himself, not in just a half drunk state, but a half death state in order to deal with what to deal with nominally in the beginning, with work, having a bad job or a meaningless job or something like that, and having to deal with that, the stress of that, by anesthetizing himself.
But work, you know, as. As we saw and shall see as the poem goes on, meaningless work is kind of associated with death in a way that I think we're meant to ask why, if being meaninglessly busy is the deathlike thing that we're trying to escape, why would drinking as an anesthetic and something that puts us in a half death like state, why would that be the solution? So I see it as somewhat paradoxical.
23:18 Erin: Yeah. You know, I'd want to draw. I think it's too early to do this because towards the end of the poem is where I have a better reading of this. But if we want to draw a connection between something I know you've talked about a lot, which is the sort of euphoric state that drinking induces, and if we can connect that maybe to art making and to this poem itself as another kind of stay against death, maybe they're doing something again, similarly complicated. Right. Where it's a kind of like a distraction, but also something that mimics the thing that one is distracted from.
I mean, I don't know if we can make this argument for poetry, or maybe we can make it more easily for poetry as an art form than we could for other forms, since writing is a difficult thing to portray on film because it involves you sitting still and not talking to other people and being alone. But, you know, I don't want to make too fine a point of that, but somehow, like in, you know, in the act of writing poetry, you're imitating being dead.
24:18 Wes: Yeah, No, I think that's spot on in the sense that. So Freud would call it this narcissistic libido. Whenever we're engaged in work of that kind, creative work, we're taking libido and turning it away from objects outside of us. So love objects outside of us. Instead of directing our love towards people, we direct it towards our own aspiration. And there's an element of narcissism in that. And there's an element of withdrawal from life in that. You see it more obviously, right, in ascetic, philosophical or scientific activity where people are being hyper rational and so therefore kind of withdrawing from the realm of feeling, which one might think of as obviously deathlike.
Nietzsche made a big deal of that. But in any creative pursuit, one is withdrawing to some extent from people to focus on that and in a sense, to focus on oneself, one's own artistic output. So, Hanns, there's a psychoanalyst named Hanns Sachs who made this point, and he wrote a book called the Creative Unconscious, which is that beauty itself is evocative of death. We talked about this with Keats, I think, and to be involved in Life is to be involved in appetitive behaviors and satisfying oneself with the sensuous world. And to enjoy something as beautiful is to refrain from treating it as an object that might satisfy us.
So the example I always use is right. And there's the painted apple, which we enjoy qua representation. We enjoy it formally, but we don't. We can't pick it up and eat it as we would normally. So there's. Or. Which would be the worldly, typical, worldly way of enjoying the apple. So that's a withdrawal, right? It represents a withdrawal from life to enjoy things at an aesthetic, formal level. There's something inherently deathlike in that. So I think your point about that is spot on.
26:34 Erin: Yeah. That's like me watching Redford circa 1973. We were. And the way he no longer is.
26:43 Wes: Yeah. You ready to move on?
26:46 Erin: Yeah.
26:46 Wes: Yeah.
26:47 Erin: And so it stays just on the edge of vision. A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill that slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen. This one will. And realization of it rages out in furnace fear when we are caught without people or drink. Courage is no good. It means not scaring others. Being brave lets no one off the grave. Death is no different. whined at than withstood just one cheery thing after another.
27:20 Wes: Okay, so on the edge of vision.
27:24 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like the fact that the, you know, the flash or the glare is now kind of, like, turned down. It's like I'm getting this image of, like, an oil lamp that has the knob on it that you can kind of put on a dimmer, you know, burning less. Less brightly in the corners. Seems to still have an effect, right? It's. It's affecting maybe the vitality, if we want to call it that, of. Of his choices. It's not blindingly before him all the time. And this, again, I think, again, I'm going to kind of disagree. It's like he's attributing this knowledge of his own extinction to the thing that, in the moment, interferes with his ability to make a decision.
And I just, again, I don't know if this is true necessarily to my experience, my personal experience at least, but I don't know. I mean, are people, you know, unable to choose between pistachio and Rocky Road ice cream because they're thinking, well, what does it matter? I'm going to die anyway? I don't know. And then they're like, oh, I guess Rocky Road, since that's all my life, is just a Rocky road to death.
28:34 Wes: But, yeah, how does this compare to Prufrock's sort of indecision? Because I was associating them. What is it that leads a Prufrock to lack courage? So it's interesting that he talks about courage in this context. So I'm going to just answer my own question.
28:49 Erin: Please do.
28:51 Wes: Part of it is a lack of courage, right? So he can't make a move on a woman, for instance, or something like that. And then one has to ask the question of why people might lack the courage to seek out the love that they want or to do the work that they want to do. What is it that gets them in trouble? And on a more surface level, it's about failure, right? It's about rejection or it's about failure. And then if one were a psychoanalyst, one might say it's also about fear of success. So fear of succeeding and then being submerged, whether, you know, in a relationship or in something that one has accomplished such that it gives you a new identity.
One. One's previous self gets kind of wiped out in that. So you could look at it in both ways. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to think about what about the fear of death would lead to indecision. I'm not sure. I've talked about fear of success and failure. And in either case, I suppose one could make an association to death. Either is like being killed, right? So if you. The failure or the rejection is like being cut off from human contact forever and dying in that sense. And then the success is like merger, reabsorption into the womb, let's say merger with another person.
Loss of one's identity, which is another form of death. So we're kind of damned if we do, damned if we don't. I don't know what you make that's. I'm thinking out loud again here about trying to make this connection.
30:27 Erin: No, I like this a lot. I think it's. Maybe I don't have a lot of sympathy or something because my identity isn't all that great or precious, so it doesn't really matter if it gets absorbed into something better, like as if, you know, we're all. I kid a little. Not much, anyway. No, I like both of those things. I think for me, maybe the most powerful line in the whole poem and the one with which I can most, you know, most heartily sign on is, most things may never happen. This one will. You know, I think this is like the most effective and chilling line in the poem.
Because you know, in fact, as we all know, like most of the things we spend hours and hours worrying about never actually do happen. It's sort of as if they happen maybe because we torture ourselves with these false scenarios, right? But most of our fears never come to pass, right? But this is like the surefire thing that will happen. Everybody's story ends the same way. So this is really the only legitimate thing one could worry about. Even though it's the most self defeating one, it seems.
31:42 Wes: Yeah, I like your point as well about the contrast between the glare earlier on, the glare of the sun or the glare of the. Of consciousness of death that produces indecision, right? Because we can think of that as being caught like a deer in the headlights, something like that, and we'd be stunned and unable to move just because we are terrified. And maybe that's one part of what he's thinking about here, but the way he chooses to do it in the stanza or to characterize it in the stanza is to say it's not a glare but an unfocused blur on the edge of vision, which suggests that we can sort of exclude it from consciousness to some extent.
We just can't fully exclude it. So that even when we are not thinking about death, it's there doing its work in our peripheral vision and that somehow this leads, it leads us to indecision as well. I think part of the point of that, part of the point of that very subdued depiction of the role of death, his desire to contrast that with furnace fear, right, that rages out. So awareness of death is there as an unfocused blur. And then we get fear being the passionate raging thing if we are caught without people or drink. So this is very interesting, right?
So we come back to this idea that drink might be used to anesthetize oneself against the fear of death. Or as it seemed in the very beginning, the stress of work. It's now just occurring to him that love is another solution to this. And you know, in Aubade, right, we expect this, you know, at some point, concept of other people or love to get to be involved. But he's, he's juxtaposing those two things as if social relationships were also just another form of anesthetic.
33:46 Erin: Yeah, and the contrast between the. Yeah, the anesthetic and then the furnace fear. I spent a lot of time thinking about that phrase and how to me it's like a sort of more tangible and maybe quotidian version of like hellfire or something. You know, this is sort of like the furnace fear is what the atheist has. And, you know, maybe this is a little too literal, but for me, it also recalls the, you know, my childhood fear of, like, the furnace in the basement, you know, the thing that makes strange noises that we don't want to be left alone in the room with, we're afraid of, you know, which is just sort of alien to us. So I think there's this concept of like, yeah, not wanting to be left alone with the scary thing.
34:35 Wes: So, again, I think it's interesting, this association between people and drinking and then the talk of courage is no good, because the way I had tried to parse out indecision and then relating that to Prufrock was the idea that it involved a certain amount of lack of courage in the face of death, like the deathlike consequences of our relationships to work and to people. So when he says courage is no good, well, it is good. Courage is good for overcoming indecision, actually. Yes, it's no consolation for death per se, but he has been talking about the consequences that consciousness of death has in life.
And courage is actually a good solution for some of that stuff. Courage might make it so that you don't need drink or that your relationship to people isn't simply about. It's more generous, and it's not simply about avoiding fear of death. And then he says it means not scaring others, which is true, but he seems to suggest that's all it's about, is I'm just putting on a brave face for other people when I know the truth. But there is something to helping other people out with their fear that is an important part of relationships and shouldn't be ignored.
36:03 Erin: I like that. So I think what I'm hearing you say is that you would like to nudge him into a sort of healthy existentialism. Like, if he's going to be an atheist, then courage is a good way to deal with this inevitability or to manage those problems which arise from fear. Is that right?
36:27 Wes: In the context of. Right. Fear of success as merger or fear of failure as a kind of death, people do overcome that and therefore overcome indecision. And so courage is relevant in that sense. But the larger question about whether it can help us face truly existential fear. Maybe he's right. I'm not sure. Maybe courage is no good for that.
36:54 Erin: Should we read the last stanza? I mean, I think we'll have to let that one ride.
36:58 Wes: Yeah. But I just, you know, to bring it back to figuring out where the lover is in this poem. Or the. The missing lover. I think one important thing to note is that. Well, I've already noted it, but work and love sort of stand in contrast to each other because it's in the typical Aubade. It's getting up to go to work. That's part of the problem, part of the thing that separates the lovers. But also, as we've pointed out, love and work are sort of the two big factors in our happiness and they compete with each other. And work might be seen as a form of narcissistic withdrawal.
Right. If we're focused on our own creative activities as opposed to another person. So we get this competition between them, which I think you can make good use of with Aubade. But here, what are the two things that are competing? I mean, there's something deathlike about work, and I think that really comes out in the. In the last stanza. But where is love in this? Maybe we can't really answer it until we read this last stanza.
38:11 Erin: Well, you are. I mean, before we go to that, because I think we do get something of an answer. You're pointing me back to Stanza 3. This is what we fear. No sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell. Nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with, except perhaps for nothing to think with. What he's describing, I think, is as much his current state alone in his room as it is death. Right. I mean, the light doesn't enter until the last stanza, so he's in a dark room. There's an element of sensory deprivation tank about, you know, the circumstances that he's currently occupying.
And he's alone, so he's already inside. Death, it seems. I mean, not just the realization of it, but he's in. Like. There's something here, I think, about the idea that the lack of the lover is already inducing a kind of a death for him, or that there's something in him which is dead because of the fact that he's alone in the room. Is that. You know, I don't want to be too histrionic about that.
39:14 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think one wonders. Yeah. Why is it that he's alone and has he misdiagnosed his problem?
39:26 Erin: I like that.
39:27 Wes: Fear of death, right.
39:29 Erin: I like that a lot. Yeah.
39:30 Wes: Yeah. And I'm stressed out at work and I'm afraid of dying and therefore I have to drink at night. Drinking may be the primary problem, actually. The first task is to get him off the drink and then second is to get laid.
39:45 Erin: Is that what you're saying?
39:46 Wes: Yeah, exactly. Overall, the tension is between fear of death and love. So in a typical Abad, it's between love and the other work a day requirements of the other requirements of life, which include work, but other things. Just going out into the world, into the sunlight and doing things, not being cooped up in a room or in bed, which itself, Right. Is arguably a very deathlike state. Lovers in a bed, you know, there's sex, but then there's also, like I said, a lot of sleeping and a lot of lazing about. Right. So love comes across as this languid thing, as something that's kind of the opposite of work.
All right, so there's that contrast that I'm associating with the typical Aubade. And then there's Larkin's contrast between love and death, I guess, where love is really hardly visible in this, except some of the lines we've already pointed to, like nothing to love. Right. So death is evocative of not having anything to love. But yeah, in a concrete sense, the lover is actually absent from this poem. So the Persona here is of a person who, his life is loveless. It's not like work is taking him away from a lover. And his explanation for the lovelessness of life is just that death is the thing that hangs over him and he associates.
Again in the last stanza we'll see this most clearly. But he associates work with death. So it's not just that having to go to work in the morning is going to take him away from a lover, but work in general, the pointless work, and then certainty of death following that extinguishes love altogether from one's life. See what I mean? So it's kind of an extreme version of the Aubade, where love is permanently extinguished by everything else that goes on.
41:51 Erin: I think I read. I mean, I think you're right and that reading is corrective work, but I also see something a little bit more hopeful and a little bit of a twist, I think, on what you're saying in the last stanza. But maybe I'm wrong. But we'll.
42:05 Wes: Let's read it. Sure, yeah, read it.
42:07 Erin: And then, yeah, slowly light strengthens and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe. What we know, have always known, Know that we can't escape yet can't accept One side will have to go. Meanwhile, telephones crouch getting ready to ring in locked up offices and all the uncaring, intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
42:41 Wes: So I love this.
42:42 Erin: Yeah, me too.
42:44 Wes: Intricate rented world. That is fantastic, that intricacy. It reminds me of the brocade earlier on because there's an intricacy, there's a weaving to that. And it's as if the intricacies of workaday life are part of what we use to distract ourselves. But I love this. Telephones crouch. Great metaphor. It's as if they are animals. So there's something vital, there's a vitality to that. They're crouching and instead of getting ready to pounce, though, they're getting ready to ring. So that's the irony. And when they ring, they are calling us to some unpleasant work task.
Right. And so the vitality there is extinguished. The vital metaphor is extinguished by the. By the reality. And then the idea that they are in locked up offices. Right. So if the telephone were a cat or something like that, crouching and ready to pounce. It's also in a cage. So life is being caged up in these offices and in the work world. Rented. Yeah. What is it? Why is it rent? It's not owned, but rented. The world. I guess that's because we're going to be leaving inevitably, or maybe we're not committed or.
44:01 Erin: I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I see the plain as a wardrobe phrase as kind of predicting this rented world idea. I was thinking a lot about the word wardrobe and I looked at it too long, I think, so I just started to see it as its component parts. So the world is just like a ward of robes. I was thinking about, you know, whether we take robe for its ceremonial implications or something like, you know, a bathrobe, a dressing gown. There's a temporariness, I think, inherent to the robe, more so than most other garments. So it sort of points us subsequently to this idea of the rented world.
44:39 Wes: Yeah. Normally we might say plain as day. That's the idea that he's playing with. So light is strengthening and instead of it being simply plain as day, it's plain as the thing. As the dull. The dull thing that light is being shed on. And I imagine the light. There's not a whole lot of light at this point.
44:59 Erin: So I'm imagining him just looking at. Just, you know, plain as a. And he looks up and it's, you know, I'm imagining that the wardrobe is just directly in his field of. Field of vision. And so that's what he, you know, that's what he settles on there.
45:12 Wes: Yeah, exactly, yeah.
45:14 Erin: You know, thinking, though, about the idea of the postman, like doctors and the telephones crouching line. I think where things get a little bit complicated for me is the twin idea here in. I'm going to locate it in communication, maybe the postman and the telephone as both being ways for people to be in touch with us, even if they're the electric company with a bill or something. So I'm seeing this communication as being both threatening and kind of intercessory or something like that. So the fact that the doctor, obviously, he's invoking the idea of doctors making house calls, you know, a bygone ritual.
But the idea that he has to make a house call suggests that the person inside is sick, right. And needs ministration. And so we could just say that the doctor is a temporary stay against the inevitability of death. That, you know, we shouldn't need doctors at all because we're all going to die eventually. In the simile here, of course, you know, what the. What the doctor is really administering is contact. It's the postman bringing letters, something, right? Something that's keeping you engaged in society and thus distracted from the, you know, the furnace fear of the previous stanza, right?
It's bringing people to you. So it's bringing communication and communion and maybe especially like the demands and needs of others, you know, with a phone call, like the urgent phone call or the, you know, someone writing you a letter asking you for something. It's a band aid, but it does seem to be kind of the band aid here. And any kind of communication puts me in mind of poetry itself. And maybe what this says about poetry is a little bit less clear or about art. It's a form of communication on the one hand, and the act of making it is an act of communicating something as a way to stave off these thoughts of death.
At the same time, this poem seems designed to be that memento mori that's, you know, that's calling up impending doom for the reader. So it's kind of like a. You know, I have in my notes, I just wrote that it's a made you look poem. You know, it's like forcing you to reckon with the thing that maybe art is at least sometimes distracting you from. Obviously not always or you know, ultimately maybe if it's great art, it always leads you to that deeper realization of one's own death. But. But insofar it's entertainment, say it has a distracting element.
So I don't know. I mean, I just kind of throwing a lot of things out there. But I guess to go back to the main point, just this idea that the communication, that there's the threat and the distracted quality. The latter seems kind of positive.
48:01 Wes: Yeah. Okay. I mean it. To me. Okay. So my. This looks very bleak to me, but it's super bleak.
48:10 Erin: But. I don't know. But at the same time, I mean, does he want to just lie around and think about death all day, or does he want to get drawn into something? And communication seems to be the means by which one gets drawn into distraction.
48:25 Wes: Yeah. I mean, if this were a typical Aubade. Right. Work has to be done. Sorry, lover, got to go. But we'll meet up later. And the sun revolves around us, and this is the only thing that's important. Right. Instead of saying that work has to be done, and then we get postmen, like doctors, going from house to house, which is. I think you're exactly right. That's about contact with people. Right. The doctors are supposed to. The compensation for this bleak workaday world is supposed to be ultimately. Right. Love. In this case, it's social contact delivered by postman.
So it's not intimate, it's distant and remote. And the only other image of that kind of contact we get is the telephone. So human contact is made to look like something that's remote and something that is just a palliative for the hospice that life turns out to be. We're all in hospice and we're all going to die. And what is social contact? It's a kind of palliative, which I think is the point you were making, but maybe it seems more positive to you.
49:35 Erin: Yeah, exactly. I'm just reading that as like, yay, thank God we have this. But I mean, I guess, yeah, I
49:46 Wes: mean, the question is, I think the Aubade in its ordinary form says love is the most important thing and work is a distraction, and everything revolves around the. Love, in Larkin's formulation, is work is all there is and work is death. And love, in a way, is a satellite of that that can't fully compensate the reality. Everything revolves around death and work. Love can be kind of a deluding. And love, and by which I mean love in general, not just romantic love, but relationships are just a way of anesthetizing oneself. Right. Without people or drink, one is afraid.
And so one anesthetizes oneself. And so whether one's drinking or relating to people, it's all the same. So we could go back to the very first sentence and see that drinking, in a way, stands in for love and relatedness to people. It's one of the two ways one can deal with awareness of death. And so we do get in the very first sentence. We get a work love contrast here. It's just that love has been distorted into something else.
51:04 Erin: Well, I still think that if I just say that in a happier voice, it'll sound fine. But
51:12 Wes: the sky is white as clay with no sun.
51:15 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we're all actually just already dead. Were already underground.
51:21 Wes: Right.
51:22 Erin: To me that's reminiscent of just. Yeah, the earth heaped on the grave. And so, yeah, what's the point?
51:29 Wes: It's quite bleak, right?
51:32 Erin: I'm a little afraid to release this two part episode into the world and send people on their way with this moral. I feel like we should do a little song and dance now.
51:45 Wes: Unfortunately, we have to part with our listenership now because we have to go to work unsubscribes after this, but listeners stay in bed, take a day, eat ice cream and strawberries or whatever. We'll be back from work shortly.
52:09 Erin: Okay, that's great.
52:12 Wes: All right, thank you.
52:14 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Consciousness Bemoaned in “Aubade” by Philip Larkin (Part 1)
Apr 22, 2024
In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the aubade inverts the serenade. Where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Dunne’s famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one on behalf of self-love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us to both workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality. As a consequence, life is harder to live by the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Wes & Erin discuss whether life (and love) can be reconciled with human self-consciousness and all that it entails.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:32 Wes: In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the Aubade inverts the serenade where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Donne's famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin's poem Aubade seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one, on behalf of self love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us both to workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality as a consequence.
Life is harder to live in the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Today we discuss whether life and love can be reconciled with human self consciousness and all that it entails. This is Wes Alwan and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to subtext. Okay, so today we are discussing Philip Larkin's Aubade. I looked up the pronunciation. I don't think I said that. I don't think I pronounced it correctly when we announced it on the last episode.
I think I might have thought it was obeyed. Anyway, it's Aubade.
2:03 Erin: That is how it's spelled.
2:04 Wes: Yeah, it is French. Technically. I've had some French and should know better. But anyway, so it's interesting because this is a form of poem that is meant to be a kind of love song between lovers separating at dawn. And I think it has its origins in troubadours. Provencal, right? Courtly love. John Donne, who we've done before on this podcast, has a famous example called the Sun Rising, which maybe we could point to some of the elements of that by way of comparison. This poem is an interesting twist on the aubade because it in the typical. So I guess we should say, what does a typical aubade do? Lovers have spent the night together, they're parting in the morning. And the aubade addresses what specifically about the parting? I guess it could be any aspect of it.
3:05 Erin: Well, it's regretful and it's a love poem. There's regret about leaving the lover. So I think it has a couple of mixed emotions, typically.
3:15 Wes: And in the John Donne's poem, there's an element of defiance which is pretty typical of him. So the poem starts with busy old fool, unruly sun, why dost thou thus? It's not the first inanimate object that he's insulted as if it were a person. And then the way it ends is with she's all states and all princes I, nothing else is. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, and that the world's contracted thus. Thine age asks ease. And since thy duties be to warm the world that's done in warming us, shine here to us. And thou art everywhere. This bed thy center is these walls, thy sphere.
So the world, in a sense, revolves around the lovers and the sun, which is the thing, right, that's interfering with the couple and is the cause of them having to part, is defeated in a sense. So I guess it doesn't have to all be regret. It can be some element of defiance there, or turning it around on the villain. In this case, the sun who's causing the parting.
4:24 Erin: The parting is put off for now. They never quite part. I don't know if this is like full aubade, because eventually he invites the sun in, in a sense, but they still haven't gotten out of bed. The sun rising part, too. The Sunne rising up after bed.
4:42 Wes: The Sunne rising. Yeah. It is spelled S U N N
4:46 Erin: E. I know, it's. Yeah.
4:51 Wes: All right. So do you know of any other famous examples?
4:55 Erin: This is the one I always think of.
4:57 Wes: Yeah, I think of that. And I think of this Larkin poem, which is interesting in that it seems not to have anything to do with lovers parting at dawn. Why is this an aubade? And what is he doing here?
5:08 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking a little bit about this. Like, the dawn kind of breaks during the poem. The anticipation of the dawn occurs in line three, but it hasn't actually happened yet. So it's sort of pre dawn. The trope seems to be inverted where he's.
5:27 Wes: So he's mentioning work. So the reason the villain is the sun, or it's having to go to work, or it's whatever it is that there's a kind of coupling that happens at night in the sense it's not just sex, but it's the sleeping next to each other the whole night. And I guess. Right. That's really. If you had to count up the hours that a couple spends with each Other, the majority of it would be while they're sleeping, because otherwise they're out doing. Other people have to go to work. And so work. The poem starts with the concept of work. So it's apt. It's not completely irrelevant to the aubade. And that's the subject, but it doesn't explicitly mention the idea that work is interfering with love.
6:15 Erin: Yeah, well, I mean, I think work here will come to have a couple different valences. I mean, I'm thinking about the fact that the lover that he's with, if you will, in this poem is death, or thoughts of death, or the reality that's really always there. Right. And then when dawn comes, the curtains are drawn on those thoughts of death as his actual literal curtains open up and let in the light and obscure the reality of death that haunts him. So in that sense, the lover is death, as I said, but also the poem itself. And this idea of maybe where art fits into work or where the very action of writing this poem fits into the schema that Larkin is introducing here is itself maybe sort of performing an aubade quality, like the very meditation in poetic form is perhaps something like the preoccupation with the lover that is actually keeping the thoughts of death at bay, or at least sort of containing them, which is a bit twisted around.
Maybe that doesn't quite work. But I was just thinking a lot about, if not the form of the poem, then the sort of action of writing the poem in the face of what the content of the poem is telling us to do, and whether or not the poem therefore performs a kind of lover function or this idea of, like, whether he's spending the night with the poem or writing the poem rather than with a lover. I know it took him. I think it took him several years to write this poem, but I think that because it seems to unfold in real time or it dramatizes a particular set of moments, I wonder if the poem, therefore, is sort of taking the place of the lover.
8:00 Wes: Yeah, that's a very good point. The poem is taking the place of a lover, or are you suggesting it's to an unnamed, unmentioned lover? When you said the lover, certainly the former lover is. Death is important, but go ahead. Sorry.
8:18 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So definitely, I think this is Larkin at his most alone. So definitely the poem in the place of a lover in the role of a lover. The idea that he's wiling away his hours writing this poem rather than sleeping with someone.
8:38 Wes: Okay, right. Right. That's another good thing to keep in mind. So we can think of death as the lover. We can think of the poem itself because it's what he's spent his time doing overnight. Is that the idea? All right, so we have two candidates. It occurs to me that originally, the aubade is a song sung by a departing lover to a woman who's sleeping. So it doesn't have to be about that circumstance. It could be anything. I mean, I think it's meant to be evocative of dawn in some way, but I don't know enough about these actual songs of the Middle Ages. There's. Apparently, there's a book by. And I got this off of Wikipedia, but by Gale Sigal called Erotic Dawn Songs of the Middle Ages, voicing the lyric lady.
9:28 Erin: Oh, yeah, I have it. It's right on my shelf.
9:31 Wes: There's enough of these to have a whole book about that. So I don't. You know, it'd be interesting to know what the content of these songs is and how it varies and the extent to which they're on the nose or they might make creative departures in the way that Larkin does. But, yeah, so I like this idea of. So I think we talked about death as the lover or the poem itself as the lover. And then it's possible the poem is. Maybe this won't make sense once we get into the analysis, but it's possible that this would be something that he's writing to a human lover. Okay, should we start going stanza by stanza?
10:12 Erin: Sure, yeah. Do you want me to read one stanza at a time or.
10:15 Wes: Yeah, let's do that, I think.
10:17 Erin: Okay. So here's the first stanza. I work all day and get half drunk at night Waking at four to soundless dark I stare. In time the curtain edges will grow light Till then I see what's really always there Unresting death A whole day nearer now making all thought impossible but how and where and when I shall myself die Arid interrogation. Yet the dread of dying and being dead flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
10:50 Wes: Really interesting irony here in the sense that light is going to be evocative of death. You might think that going to sleep in the dark and the dark itself would be the thing that is, strictly speaking, evocative of dying and death. But here it's actually the light coming in around the curtain edges and the transition from night into morning that is evocative of death.
11:19 Erin: Yeah, I think that transition idea is a really interesting one because it's the thing he's anticipating. So right now he's in the dark room occupied with these thoughts of death, the light coming in, or, you know, he's anticipating that the light is going to come in and obscure this vision that he has. So there's something about him being in this dark room with the curtains over it that he's sort of entombed right now. And then the light is going to come in, open up the tomb and distract him from the thoughts of death. But I was thinking a lot about that sort of, you know, that transitional idea that you're getting at, where.
So there's something, you know, a bit reversed about this because we begin with him in the room. You know, it seems like his sort of normal state, his regular operating system is, you know, lying and thinking about death. And the intrusion of the day is this sort of false thing, the. That comes in and obscures those thoughts for a while. But, you know, he implies that these are always kind of lingering at the edges of his field of vision, even when he's not in bed, mulling this stuff over. So I was thinking a lot about the idea of the day as the distraction from this sort of regular operating system, of the speaker, of thinking about death all the time and how that's kind of.
Maybe it flips our usual expectations. And also thinking about this idea of him being dead or in a kind of faux death, lying in this bed, in this dark room and then rising up into a kind of life during the day. It seems also to flip the expectation that death is something that waits for us at the end. It's like a state that he's always in that he's just taking a break from temporarily.
13:05 Wes: I think that's a good point. It's the. So the sense in which day is evocative of death is just the sense in which it is a timekeeper. Here's another repetition. Here's another day. And I am one day closer to death. And death is inevitable. So this transition period, if it were all day or all night, if all of our existence were confined, if there weren't the cyclical event to remind us and to parse out time in this way, then obviously we would still have clocks and watches. But the timekeeping is kind of embedded in nature. Whereas the sun rising, one might think it would be a source of optimism and hope. And look, here's a whole new day ahead of me. One can always look at it as just another tick of the clock and look at it as an indication that one's future is contracting, not expanding, that time is running out.
14:09 Erin: Yeah, this first line, I'm really Intrigued by. Because it sort of starts with this idea of being anesthetized. That the workaday world is exhausting enough or onerous enough that the speaker needs to get half drunk in order to sort of deal with the stress of the day. So he's in this state at the beginning of the poem. Because, as often happens when you drink too much, you wake up in the middle of the night. So these thoughts are intruding after.
14:41 Wes: Really. I've never experienced.
14:42 Erin: Right after a day of actually taking the waking world, if you will, quite seriously and actually needing to induce a kind of, you know, anesthetized, deadened state in order to deal with the oppression of reality. So that, as a kind of setup, is just a really interesting idea to me because it seems to fly in the face of what he'll later say he's afraid of, which is this idea of being anesthetized and never waking up. Which is something a bit different from taking the edge off of your day. But I still think that there's this, you know, courting, if you will.
He seems to fall pretty definitively on the side of believing that waking life is kind of a lie and that it's all a farce and a charade and we're all going to die. But I think in terms of the way that he lives his life, the little glimpse that we get into how his days normally go in this first line, there's something a bit more complex, I think, happening there.
15:44 Wes: Yeah, we're going to learn that part of the problem is that time is being wasted. And that's one of the ways in which death is invading life. Life is not being fully lived. There's a lot of similarities, I think, to. Well, conceptually at least, to the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock being anesthetized and the idea of time being wasted and passivity, which is an interesting way to think of work. But I wanted to say this first line is great. Right. It's the kind of line where. Okay, yeah. I'm almost guarantee to read the rest of the poem. And that's not just because it has the word drunk in it.
16:29 Erin: I just love those drinking poems.
16:32 Wes: I love the symmetry of the first eight syllables. So you have. It's. Before we get to syllables 9 and 10, which evokes the concept of night. It's just, I work all day and get half drunk. Very balanced. Work corresponds to drunk. All is. Corresponds to half. As if there's something. Drunkness is a transmutation of work. And allness has become Half ness. And then the concept of night is introduced after that and then you get this. So it becomes a triad work, drunk night. And then in the next line it's wake, dark stare. In the next line it's time, edges light, and so on and so forth. So I find that, like you, very intriguing from the beginning.
17:24 Erin: Yeah, that's great. Just maybe another note on the form. That first line too is like a perfect iambic pentameter. And a lot of the poem is pretty regular except for the. So there are 10 line stanzas, but in the eighth line it's a little shorter. I think it goes down in the last stanza to just a five syllable line. In this first stanza it's a seven syllable line, so it loses a foot or two feet. And the rhyme scheme here I was pretty intrigued by. So it's A, B, A, B, C, C, D, E, E, D. I wanted to see, and it's not, unfortunately, I wanted to see if it was the same 10 line stanza that Keats uses in his odes.
But that's a different one. That's more, you know, that's that kind of like mini sonnet that he worked out with the abab quatrain and then the cdecde. I think we discussed that in our episodes on his odes. So this one has a quatrain in the beginning and then a sort of like joint in the middle with the C rhymes and then another quatrain at the end, this time one in a more Italian rhyme scheme with the outside rhymes and inside rhymes within that rather than the interspersed ones of the. Of the English sonnet or the English quatrain at the beginning.
So there's a kind of, I think, balance there too, that maybe you're suggesting happens in the first line, which I really like. You know, maybe there's something like that happening in the form of the poem as well, where it's a sort of equation almost being set up with the two Cs and something's parallel, but also gets a little bit twisted in the back four of the stanza.
19:07 Wes: Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, thanks for that. I was curious about what you thought about the form. So when you say something twisted, what do you mean?
19:16 Erin: Just a bit of a transposition or a bit of a repositioning of things or reconstituting of things. Maybe that dawn that happens in the poem that recontextualizes one's middle of the night musings. The C rhymes are kind of like maybe the dawn or the transition point in the middle of the Stanza. And then things look a little bit different once the dawn has actually broken and you're into the flow of things and getting work done, and you start to forget what you were thinking about the previous night. So, though it's always there, as he says, things just take a different shape or have a different kind of tone to them during the day. I don't know. I mean, this is really meta. I don't know if I believe it, but if I had to give a. A reading of why he chose this form, that would be my best guess.
20:10 Wes: So it's like a turning point in a sonnet.
20:13 Erin: Yeah, yeah, a bit of that.
20:14 Wes: And this is. It introduces the concept of the.
20:16 Erin: Right, which seems strange to say because it's, you know, the Volta doesn't necessarily occur. The couplet rhyme in, say, Shakespearean sonnet, of course, would come at the end. It's like the button at the end of the sonnet. Right. And so the Volta usually just occurs, you know, between quatrains, somewhere in the middle. So here it's strange to associate it with a couplet rhyme, but I do think it kind of has that effect because it has these two ideas getting really close to each other in a way that no other words in the poem really kind of ping off of each other, like those two in the middle. So there's a heightened sense maybe of realization, like a dawning realization that you end up with these two words that ping right next to each other smack in the middle of the stanza.
21:06 Wes: And it's there that. So death is introduced, and it's unresting death, which is interesting because we associate death with being at rest. But death in this case is dynamic, and it's represented by the cycle of days and nights. Again, by the unfolding of time. Not just a ceasing to be, but that's something that can be within life as a timekeeping, and then we'll see as a form of waste. So unresting death a whole day nearer now, making all thought impossible.
21:45 Erin: Yeah, and let me tell you more about that in the next four stanzas.
21:49 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So that's interesting. So the idea is that death, because death hangs over us, we can't think straight because death is hanging over us. And there's, of course there is. Really, there is something to that. Fear of death arguably plays a huge role in human psychology and including our crazy behavior, our insane behavior. And so, for instance, if we identify with a group, say, with a nation, say we're a hardcore nationalist, there's a sense in which the nation is deathless. And that by virtue of that identification, I can enjoy a little bit of immortality from that.
And, in fact, that's so potent a thought that I might even be willing to die for my country. I might even be willing to die in some literal sense for immortality in this fantasized sense. So if we think that fear of death is part of what drives that sort of behavior, including, paradoxically, the willingness to die and willingness to kill oneself, we can see how plausible this idea is that the thought of death is something that interferes with our thinking on a regular basis and therefore introduces a deathlike wrinkle into our thought. So it's not just that time is wasted, it's that the thought of death interferes with our minds in some fundamental way, therefore depriving us of life in its fullest sense.
23:27 Erin: Yeah, I really like this idea, though, that death is unresting, that he's had his sleep interrupted. But, you know, death is this force that doesn't need to sleep. It's always, you know, it's kind of like a supervillain or something that is just, you know, always lingering there. I mean, I think you're pointing to things about this poem, as you always do, that I hadn't considered before, but I guess I kind of thought that unresting death was, I don't know, maybe a little bit funny. And certainly the idea of it being a whole day nearer now is just.
I also thought was kind of. Kind of funny. I'm not sure why. You know, it's a little bit like, yep, here we go. One day closer to death. I put a smiley face next to that line in my notes. But maybe I'm reading this wrong. And maybe, too, in what we're pointing to with this idea of all thought is impossible, and how that does come with a qualifier, but it's also kind of. That statement is itself contradicted by the poem. Maybe there's something a little bit winking in parts of the poem, too. I don't know if you feel that.
24:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah, no, no, absolutely. I think the tone of the poem, there's something humorous to it. Is that. What am I capturing?
24:38 Erin: Yes. Yeah, definitely.
24:41 Wes: Yeah. Just the beginning line. I work all day and get half drunk at night. It sounds like. Almost like a drinking song. You know, a drinking song or a. Right. It sounds like something you would. You would have a stein at a beer hall and you'd all be singing together with your buddies. What did you say?
24:56 Erin: I said it's actually like a blues song, right?
24:59 Wes: Mm. Yeah. Singing.
25:01 Erin: I Work all day and get half drunk at night. You know, like, there you go. That's my bad impression of a blues singer. Sorry.
25:08 Wes: This could be. Yeah, this. This whole thing could be turned into a bluesong.
25:12 Erin: Well, actually, I was thinking in line 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. These stanzas are too long. 6 to 7. When he says again, another. Another thing I find kind of funny, all thought impossible, but how and where and when I shall myself die. You know, the most fascinating thing about Larkin to me is the fact that he was a jazz critic. And, you know, immediately I think of the Rodgers and Hart song, where or when, which is a great jazz standard. And at the end of the song, the lyrics go. And so it seems that we have met before and laughed before and loved before, but who knows where or when?
I mean, you know, it's a very, very famous song. And so there was something a little bit of like an earworm creeping into those lines, like something sort of quoted in a. In a jazz riff, quoting another, you know, the melody of another song in one's own improvisation. I just wanted to point out, too, since we were talking a little bit about the form, that, you know, this first stanza is really so regular. I mean, almost all of the lines in this stanza are end stopped, except for how and dread, they're all. And so there's something a little bit suspended, you know, after each of those words.
But, you know, the regularity of the completed thoughts at the end of each line. And then the single syllable rhymes, which are quite simple. I mean, night and light now, and how. Except for the last word, horrify, which is obviously three syllables, there's a kind of just plodding sort of death knell quality to the end of the. You know, it'll get complicated as the poem goes on and starts to, I don't know, advance some more sophisticated syntax and things like that. That sort of plodding regularity at the beginning I think, really increases this sense of maybe a little bit foreboding, but also kind of inevitability.
The sort of repetitious Groundhog Day kind of quality of what he's about to wake up to.
27:14 Wes: Interesting. What do you make of arid interrogation? I find that really interesting because it's all thought is impossible because of death, except for thoughts about my own death. And then in the next line, that constitutes a form of interrogation, and then one that's arid, you know, which I guess we would associate with the desiccation of a dead body. But it's as if death itself interrogates us by making us aware of our own mortality.
27:48 Erin: Yeah, I like that idea of death interrogating you. I was thinking about this idea that I suppose the interrogation is arid not just because a question posed to death is fruitless because death can't answer, but also that the question is actually one posed to oneself, which is, I think what you're getting at. Death is kind of addressed throughout the poem or spoken of as kind of an outside force. It inhabits his room with him. And you know, it's kind of like you almost get this the Grim Reaper image. Like he's just sitting in the corner, you know, having a Diet Coke, waiting for something, some opportunity to strike.
But it's not really a, you know, how can we put that? A positive force, shall we say, that acts on someone. It's more like the absence of something. So there's this negativity and it's expressed in or through or on or however you want to put it, one's body. So that there's something kind of self defeated or like a mirror that you can't quite look into, or something circular about it. So that's how I was reading the aridity there.
28:58 Wes: Yeah, no, I think that's right as well. And I think, yeah, what arid is saying is, yeah, it's a futile. It's futile. I think your reading is actually better now that I think about it. The interrogation involves reflection on the thought of dying. There's no way to resolve that in some satisfactory way. One can't think one's way through it and become comfortable with it. So the dread, as he says in the end, flashes afresh to hold and horrify. And I think we can associate flashes with the sun and with consciousness. And again, consciousness should be in a way the opposite of death.
But instead of it being the opposite, something simply opposed to death. It's something that stuns and horrifies and keeps us from thinking and keeps us from living our life fully. It will turn out, wastes our time. And just to bring us back to the way we began the discussion, I guess the comparison here, or the point of contrast with a typical Obad is here the sun and work and waking up interferes. Instead of interfering with love per se or with a couple, it interferes with something more fundamental, with one's relationship to oneself, with one's ability to think, with one's ability to live fully.
Something like that.
30:30 Erin: I like that. And I like what you said about this idea of flashes afresh. You're putting me in mind of the climactic scene of Rear Window when the Raymond Burr character comes to Jimmy Stewart's door and he has the flashbulbs that he uses to blind Raymond Burr to keep him from killing him. So there's this flash that blots out, as you're saying, so the light of truth, shall we say that these flashes represent, is contrasted actually with the light of the sun. And I think it's odd that the truth is something that does blot out or sort of temporarily suspend other considerations with its force or terror or whatever you want to say.
It's interesting that this realization and truth I think of as something sort of sobering. And instead it seems here to be yoked with such strong emotions that we can't quite call it a rational kind of realization or. Or truth, even though it is fundamentally. It comes loaded with so much sort of histrionic emotion. I think I was thinking actually a lot about the last two lines of these stanzas and how they're not really teased out here, but I think of the fear of dying and the fear of being dead as two really distinct fears. I was thinking, too, about the uses of.
And in these last few lines, how these thoughts yoked together. So hold and Horrify, I think, are the two most interesting. I mean, hold seems to suggest a preoccupation, but also a kind of stunned inaction in the face of death, maybe, which seems to kind of like rehearse death in its operation. Like if you're just held still by something, you're sort of right. Like almost performing kind of momentary death by being still and not moving and not acting. Whereas Horrify is really different. This I think of as being kind of histrionic. And I'm not sure if thoughts of death are really capable of horrifying.
I mean, it's difficult to say, but I suppose the order of hold and horrify maybe reverses the expected response to the two states in the line above. So that if we take hold and horrify as being listed, you know, respectively, we have dread of dying as what holds us, and being dead is what horrifies us. And I guess I was just thinking, you know, those two fears for me are very distinct because I think the fear of dying might involve something like, you know, imagining a kind of gruesome or painful death, and that I think of as being far more horrific than maybe the state of being dead.
33:13 Wes: Yeah, very good point.
33:14 Erin: On the other hand, you know, there's a decomposing corpse involved, so maybe I should be more horrified, you Know, the decay of the body. But I suppose, like, being dead doesn't really call up those, you know, vivid images of a decomposing corpse. So I don't know, I just. I was really interested in whether or not my reactions to death are the sort of, like Larkin. Meet the Larkin standard of, you know, human reaction. Normal human reaction.
33:41 Wes: Yeah, that's a very good point, because fear of dying and fear of the process of dying and whether violently or by disease or just by time doing its thing. And then there's the fear of what follows and the nothing, which is basically, by implication here, it's just a nothingness. So in the end, he'll address this idea that one might be comforted by an Epicurean idea that, you know, how can we fear non existence when there will be no one around to experience non existence? Right. It's a famous paradox introduced by Epicurus to suggest that we should be reassured.
And then the other option is a Christian option to believe that in an afterlife that things actually go on. Which is interesting in light of the fact that Christianity and Epicureanism were considered to be diametrically opposed to the extent that Epicurus, in a way, was suppressed by the Church and didn't become a thing again until the Renaissance and then had a big. His doctrines had a big influence in the advent of modern science. But. Yeah, so I think that's a very good point because it's foreshadowing the reflection at the end of the poem concerning what it is we're horrified by and how it is we might be comforted in the face of that horror and whether there's something paradoxical in being horrified by nothingness when we'll never get to actually experience it per se.
Can we be horrified by something we'll never actually experience? Should we? Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
35:18 Erin: Well, you know, I'm thinking about that in relation to the, you know, what happens over the stanza break, actually, because throughout this poem, maybe, you know, you're pointing me to this idea that perhaps he can't really see the thing that he's trying to look at. The abstractions throughout the poem are kind of, you know, I mean, death is itself a kind of abstraction unless we're actually, you know, looking at, you know, a dead body. You know, given a vivid image of this in the poem, he's talking mostly about mental states and doing so with.
Mostly with. With words that are abstractions. So there's a sense at which you can't quite directly look at the thing, both because it's a Bit impossible to do. And because it's too difficult to look at. Or even the emotions that he's describing, feeling in response to kind of getting a glimpse are distancing mechanism. But I think something happens there where he's, you know, in the transition. We have this flashes afresh to hold and horrify. And then he has it both ways over the stanza break. Where at once the flash of realization of death makes him consider with dread the prospect of dying.
And it also makes the mind go blank at the same time the thought, as soon as it occurs is pushed away.
36:37 Wes: Yeah, I mean death is something that we can't imagine what it is exactly. If we don't believe in an afterlife, we can't imagine what a complete cessation of consciousness forever would mean. And so it's something without a full content that nevertheless horrifies us. We can't conceptualize it. And there's a blankness to it. And so he'll say the mind in the next stanza. The mind blanks at the glare as if it's the sun, right, that's blinding us again. Instead of the sun shedding light on a world and facilitating consciousness and therefore facilitating aliveness.
It becomes a. A kind of glare that prevents. That interferes with our thinking and our living and therefore brings death into waking life. In that way we waste our time. We are prevented from thinking, we are prevented from living fully. And so in a way the way we. We don't know death conceptually, but we just know it procedurally in a sense. Or we know it through the effect of the fear on our. On our day to day life. I think here Freud's death drive right through the repetition of say self destructive acts or things or behaviors that aren't really constructive.
Our behavior can kind of have an undead zombie like quality to it. We're not in charge. We do things because of some past trauma that has a hold on us and we can't remember. Part of the. The way trauma functions is that we can't fully remember it. We remember it by acting it. Like we don't remember it as a content. It only comes out in action and only comes out in repetition. So whatever the trauma was is symbolically repeated in an action and that's the only way we know it. And so the same thing with death per se. We know it by wasting time, by having our thought interfered with.
And on Larkin's or on the account in this poem, it seems to be work itself, which one might think of as like love, right? Those are the two big things that people go into therapy for and the two big parts of life. One might think work is something in which love plays a role and work is paradigmatically constructive. We're making things and we're making a living, right? We're making life, not death, and that it's an integral and an important part in what it means to live a good life. But the conception that we're of work at work here is one in which it's just this zombie like, pointless thing that one does repetitively and therefore is a component of death in life, let's say.
39:27 Erin: Yeah, I think that's a really great point. I think this is a good place to stop for now. And next time we'll continue talking about Aubade and we'll pick up right here at the beginning of the second stanza and maybe we'll go through the rest of the poem with a slightly we'll make an empty promise, perhaps an empty promise of slightly greater speed, but knowing us, it'll be a while.
39:53 Wes: One hour per stanza.
39:54 Erin: There you go. All right, thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Identity and Infamy in “Citizen Kane” (1941) (Part 2)
Jan 15, 2024
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.”
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0:11 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Citizen Kane. We had just gotten done talking about the complicated way that Kane comes across, especially in that scene where Gettys is threatening him. And Gettys doesn't come across entirely as simply a villain. In contrast to Kane, Kane is just as much as a villain in that scene. And something you said, Erin, I thought was very interesting, which is that he never does anything good. And I'm trying to think if he ever does anything good. And it, you know, on first blush, that seems right to me.
And it would be interesting to think of what if the film had him do something that was unequivocally good. That's kind of save the cat moment in the film where the protagonist is made likable to the audience, whatever his trajectory is going to be. It might make the tragic downfall. It might give it more emotional heft. I don't know. In that first Scene where we first see him as an adult in the newsroom. Young Orson Welles. There's at least a hint of that. There's a kind of idealism there, it seems it makes you think that maybe you're gonna see him actually do good things with his newspaper.
Maybe he is gonna expose someone's corruption. And the one. The person whose corruption he does expose, Gettys. That again, that is made more complicated by the fact that he wants to defeat Gettys politically and is using his own newspaper in a corrupt way to support his own campaign.
1:53 Erin: Thinking through this, I can think of one instance in which he does something we might call good. And I'm thinking that this might actually turn out to be a lot more significant, maybe symbolically, than I had considered before. And that's when he's distracting Susan when she has her toothache.
2:12 Wes: Right.
2:12 Erin: I love that scene. I mean, I think it's a really sweet scene. I also think that maybe in the previous episode, I said that Emily comes across as being sympathetic in the confrontation scene. I'm actually not sure why I said that. I don't 100% think that's true because I don't think that Emily is a very sympathetic character overall. And I think it's ironic that, you know, Hearst's biggest issue that he took with the film, it seems, which is very gallant of him, is the fact that he felt it maligned. Marion Davies, who. Susan is sort of. Susan is like the funhouse mirror version of Marion Davies.
And actually, I think that Susan is an extremely sympathetic character. Okay? She's shrill, she's too loud of a voice. And maybe she's a little bit idiotic at times, but. But I really like her. I mean, of anybody in the movie, I think I have the most emotional connection to her, perhaps. I mean, I'm in love with Orson Welles, but that's beside the point. Anyway, so she's extremely childlike, right? And in this scene where she has a toothache, which is really funny. I love that first scene where she starts laughing at him on the street. When she first sees him, we see that she has no idea who he is.
So she has this inherent innocence. She's not out to get some rich guy or anything like that. Not at all. And in order to distract her, he puts on a little bit of a show. And it allows time, I suppose, for the medicine to kick in or for the toothache to totally subside. It's unclear. And she forgets all about it and is cured. And there's a metaphor there to the movies perhaps. Right. Especially in the middle of 1941 or 1940 really, when the film was made, hadn't gotten into the war yet and were still in the throes of the Depression. And movies were obviously this great escapist entertainment.
And maybe the suggestion is that Cain's papers are also a kind of escapist entertainment, that they're giving people something to distract themselves from their toothaches or something. I don't know. But I do think it's significant that if we can argue, and maybe there are other instances I'm not thinking of, you can tell me. But if we do argue that this is kind of the one good thing that Kane does or the one time that he really shows a sort of selflessness or a desire to authentically please someone else versus sort of throwing gifts at them or doing all these other self aggrandizing things that he does throughout the film, like making her into an opera star, which we could talk about is really self interested on his part.
Right. If this is the one moment in which he loses that self interest and is just focused on making someone else happy, how significant then that this is his downfall? Right. That because of this affair, this is the self sabotage that's going to ruin everything for him.
5:02 Wes: Yeah. And it's interesting because when he meets her, he says, I was on my way to the western Manhattan warehouses in search of my youth. Do you remember that? Did you mention that? And then I've forgotten that you mentioned that.
5:18 Erin: I talked about it a little bit in terms of. In the previous episode. I think this is where Mary's stuff is held that he keeps on. That he hangs onto. So this is presumably how he still has the sled.
5:29 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So it suggests that he's on his way to find his sled. Is that what's going on?
5:37 Erin: I think just look through the old garbage heap from Colorado. His mother's dead at this point. Right. Or maybe she just died and he's gonna go on a. Oh, he even says it. He's gonna take a sentimental journey. Right?
5:50 Wes: Yeah. Yep. So you were asking about the. Or you were. You were suggesting that he does something good here by help. By distracting her from her toothache. What does he do? He moves his ears. He does the shadow puppets.
6:04 Erin: Yeah, of course, you know, she doesn't. Yeah, I was just going to say of course. It's also an instance in which he gets to show off and be the center of attention, but he doesn't have to exert himself in these ways. Right, right.
6:18 Wes: She doesn't know who he is, which is crucial. At a certain point he'll say, I run a couple of newspapers. Which is a line that gets repeated. In fact, near the. I think it's near the end when he's. Well, he uses it to threaten people at various points. So he says it to Susan, oh,
6:40 Erin: I've found the mention of the mother, she hadn't just died. He says that she died a long time ago and her things were put in storage out west. And yeah, so just want to make that correction.
6:51 Wes: Okay. So yeah, so the other, this whole idea of newspapers comes up again in the end where her music teacher is worried that he's going to be a laughingstock if Susie is allowed to sing in public. And that's where Kane again says, I basically, okay, I own the newspapers. Her reputation is gonna. I'm the guardian of her reputation. So there's that echo from this first meeting with Susie where he mentions running a couple of newspapers as if it's in a kind of modest or self deprecating way. She doesn't know who he is and he's not explicitly saying, hey, I'm famous.
7:38 Erin: Right.
7:39 Wes: But yeah, I think you're right. There's something about that, there's something sweet about that scene. I also found some. A little bit, I don't know, creepy, not sinister is the wrong word. A little bit creepy. When he's watching her sing for him. Definitely something a bit obsessive and controlling. And you can see that his relationship to the world has become more one of possession already at this point.
8:08 Erin: Yeah. I mean so significantly they meet in the street because she's laughing at him because he's just gotten, he's gotten mud splattered all over him by passing carriage and she says she invites him up to her apartment to get the mud off him. Right. So. So there's the suggestion here that she's going to be redemptive for him. And of course there's also, right like the, the funny sort of reverse meaning in terms of the fact that this is going to begin their affair. This is a situation in which there's the opportunity for his opponents to sling mud at him because he has this secret.
Right. So she's both going to kind of clean him up and dirty him at the same time. And the redemption I think is. Yeah, it's short lived in terms of his political career, as I've already said. Like, you know, we have this moment where he does some sweet things for her but ultimately this is going to be the ruin of his Public life. We also have him being kind of sweet and receptive to this, to her as a person, and then insisting that she sing for him, which might be something sweet, but then we know that based on. Even as you're suggesting, and I agree in the way that he's relating to her in this scene when she's singing, that this is going to become a problem, that there's something sinister here about this relationship to her singing.
Especially because I was almost wondering as I was watching this if Orson Welles is signaling during their conversation about her singing career that he's not quite listening to her or he's not listening to this one particular part of her story, which is that she's not that interested in being a singer, but her mother wants her to be. And you know how mothers are. And to that he says, yes, his eyes glaze over. We assume that he's thinking about his own mother. But there's also, I think, a point at which she repeats this sentiment and talks about her mother wanting her to be an opera singer.
And at some point, I get the impression that he's not really paying attention. So what's curious about this singing thing is that she does make it clear that this is her mother's aspiration for her. But then he actually fills the role of the mother by continuing her singing career and by kind of forcing her into those. So he takes on this, like, oddly maternal role, which is weird. Obviously, it's connected to his own mother. That connection is, as I said, explicitly made in the dialogue. And then the really mysterious part of this, though, the piece of this that I don't quite understand is, like, why singing.
Why does he take this on? You understand later that it's a point of honor for him, that he's not gonna be made a laughingstock and he's going to, you know, prop her up and insist on this career because she's been made fun of and she's an extension of him or she's an object that he own. But singing, thinking through this a little bit, it's the manipulation of the voice. Maybe he wants to be the puppet master. Right. I'm on the edge of something here, but you take over.
11:10 Wes: I haven't thought about why singing in particular. You have me thinking about the way in which he's invested in trying to make Susie a successful opera singer. And part of that is getting her lessons and seeing if she can improve. And I. To my amateur ear, they don't make her obviously, horrible, right?
11:30 Erin: No, not at all, maybe.
11:31 Wes: Right. But she just doesn't have the innate talent to really rise to the level that he wants her to rise to. And it turns out in the end, she doesn't even want to do that. She tells him she never really wanted to be a hugely successful singer. For some reason, she tells him that from the beginning. Yeah, that's right. And so for some reason, he needs to repair her and make her into something. And I assume that's part of why he's making this transition from his first wife to his second. I mean, obviously there's the famous montage scene where we see his first wife, Emily, complaining about the amount of time he's spending with the newspaper.
So it's a very ordinary and typical sort of conflict that ultimately leads him to divorce. But you can also, you know, meeting Susie is the inciting incident for the breakup. And I think part of his fascination with her is her. She has a lower status than his wife, and he can give her any status that she's going to have by using newspapers to manipulate her reputation and forcing her on the world and trying to create a different reality by having all of his papers give her good reviews except for the one review by his friend, which we'll talk about in a minute, or the one review that he actually finishes and publishes, that Jed starts and Kane finishes.
So his conception of being one of the people with Citizen, or being a champion of the people, or loving other people, doing good for other people, it involves, again, the use of manipulation. It involves this idea that he can manipulate other people's perception of reality in order to paint something in a good or bad light in order to manipulate reputation. So instead of just being interested in Susie as she is and loving her and all the rest, he has to embark on this project of using his power to make her into something which is not what she wants.
And I don't even think he's particularly invested in what it is that he's trying to make her into. I just think he's invested in the process of using the power that he has with newspapers to. To turn her into something that is his own product.
14:08 Erin: Yeah. What you say about her voice, I mean, I think her voice is sweet and obviously he likes it. And in a healthy relationship, which this is already not starting out as a healthy relationship. Right. But if it were and he liked it, it could be part of his private enjoyment in a good way. Not in this way that we're pointing to, is embedded within this very first scene in which he's staring at her kind of. I mean, how would we describe that kind of covetously or I think. I think creepy is a good word for it. Right. But if he weren't staring at her in this way and if they didn't have such a destructive relationship and he liked her voice, which he's entitled to like, and I do think that she has a.
She has a sweet voice, then this could be part of their shared enjoyment. Their. Yeah, they're. Again, a kind of private enjoyment in the home where she could sing for him and he would like that, and it could be something positive in the relationship. But a voice for opera, a voice of that size is a relatively rare thing. You either have it or you don't. You can. If you have it, you can improve it. You can train it, you can learn to control it. But you can't take a small voice or a thin voice and make it big and full. And so he's fundamentally asking her to contort herself into something that she's not.
And I think maybe it relates to this idea of this private versus public divide. Right. If she was just singing for him in private, I don't mean like behind a closed door, but, you know, like entertaining friends, something like that, not having to be a public figure, a public opera singer, then that would be one thing. The operatic voice, the largeness, the pure size of that instrument. It, you know, it's something that is designed to fill a theater without amplification. It's a big voice. It's something public. And so I think that his desire to turn her to that indicates that he has no privateness, that there's no there, there.
You know, and this maybe relates back to this idea that I was interested in of Leland, describing his private greatness that he, you know, kept to himself, if there was any. And so it seems like he has no interiority, in other words, and he has to take anything interior and project it outside of himself, make it bigger than himself, make it public. And so this. I mean, later, he. You can argue he becomes private because he becomes a recluse, but that's. That. That's a kind of emptiness, too. So he has to take anything that's private, like dirty laundry, and air it and make it big and make it flashy.
And he has to take it, take news, a small headline and make it a big headline. Right. I think because he has no ability to relate to anything on an intimate level, on a private level. There's a glimmer of it in this scene with Susie, but it doesn't last. And so he doesn't know how to relate to something personally. And I think that taking this thing, this woman that has this small voice and amplifying it is part of this desire or this. Not even a desire, but a need. Right. To keep things at a kind of remove from himself and keep things external rather than internal.
17:19 Wes: Right. That makes sense. He's accused by Susie of and others. She'll say at one point, you only give me what you care about. You want me to love you. And then in the final scene where she's leaving him, he says, please don't go. You can't do this to me. And she'll say, you think this is being done to you. You don't care about what it means to me, and says, I can't do this to you. Yes, I can. So there's something about his interest in other people, always in a narcissistic way, reflects back on himself. And the desire to be loved by others becomes far more predominant.
It outweighs his ability to love. So, again, I think the trajectory here is. It's this seeming concern, and I think it starts out as real concern, but real concern in the beginning for doing something with his newspaper that is loving, that is for the sake of the public good, but has this odd component to it, which is that it involves a manipulation of the way reality is perceived, reputations are perceived, and including the ability to manage his own public image. So love and concern for others quickly becomes concerned for oneself. The. Those two things, I think, are the things that he has trouble disentangling.
And in his relationship with Susie, you just kind of see it gradually degrade to the point where when they're in Xanadu together, the prevailing feeling is this spaciousness and hollowness, echoiness and boredom where Susie's trying to put together that puzzle. And there's that great scene where he's so really, really far across the room talking to her and telling her they're gonna go on the picnic.
19:14 Erin: Yeah. I think the relationship between Kane and Susan, I think because of the snow globe that she has with the cabin inside it, that looks similar to his childhood home. Right. I think there's this ambition. Ambition is the wrong word for it because it suggests something large in public. But, you know, there's this desire that he has maybe to become reconnected to that, as we already suggested, he's on his way to take a sentimental journey into his past when he meets her. And I think that Emily, his first wife, because she's the niece of the current president, is someone who he's obviously become connected with.
I mean, she's an attractive woman, and he claims that he loves her, but I think that really the motivation behind that marriage is something to satisfy political career, a way of shoring up his pedigree in order to be a better political contender. The relationship with Susie is really different. I think he obviously really both loves her and doesn't know how to love her. I think that his distance from her in those scenes that you're pointing to at the end is like the. She becomes a little object in a huge empty room in the same way that the snow globe is like this little object in a big empty room or a room filled with other stuff.
And he. To the extent that Xanadu maybe is like the externalization of Kane himself or representative of his whole mind, like the inside of his head or his psyche or something, the vastness and the smallness of Susie in that space is like she's there kind of in the back of his mind, but he can't access her in the same way that he can't access those that return to childhood that he wishes. It's maybe still kind of rolling around there in his brain, but he can't. He can't find it. He can't sift through everything. There's too much stuff in the way, or there's too much space in the way of him and maybe that original ambition that you're pointing to, to actually do something good.
And I think that this, like, desire to love Susie, but his inability to do so is maybe related to this fact that he has no. This public, private divide that I'm kind of interested in. It's like the trustee taking care of him, taking over his childhood, sort of puncturing this. This womb, if you will, of the house in Colorado and the privacy of the family and making everything into, like, a kind of a matter of public record where a trustee is going to come in and handle you. You're going to be famous because you're so wealthy. You know, the money has, like, externalized Kane so that whatever is buried in his psyche of his childhood and of that relationship to his innocent self is very deep and can't really be accessed because everything's been ext.
Rather than being reared in a home, in a private space with a family, he's going to be sent to boarding school, where he's going to be. You know, everything is. Nothing is private. Everything is, like, external. And. And so I think that, like, this desire for Susie, obviously, is a desire for a return to this privacy, this innocence this pre moneyed state where he can just be, you know, a boy and a girl with her and. And yet he sabotages that. Sorry, I'm trying to connect this up to the. Back to the fact that this is, this very desire is the thing that sabotages the political career but it's also self sabotaging like it also is not sustainable in and of itself and I mean.
But to backtrack fully, do you agree that he really does love her and can we maybe connect this to your idea that like he does have these positive ambitions at the beginning?
23:00 Wes: Well, yeah, I think in a way his love for her and the idea that he loves the common man are associated. In fact, I think Jed says that Kane always called her a cross section of the American public. Something like that.
23:16 Erin: It's awful.
23:18 Wes: Yeah, right. She's a commoner and that's right. I think that's right before his flashback to the scene where they meet is where he says that. So yes, do I think he loves her and wants to do good for the general public? I think so. I don't think those are, you know, he's not just cynical or misrepresenting himself. He really does believe that that's what he wants. But they get wrapped up in. They get wrapped up in his narcissism, that's the easy word. But I think it's a bit complicated because the mediating instrument here is the press and his control over the press.
It's the means that he's going to use to affect what's good or to show his love that becomes corrupting. Instead of being corrupted by money, which is what he could have become if he didn't try to escape that by getting into the newspaper business. He gets corrupted by the newspaper business from the very beginning. He's idealistic in a way, but he has a means justifies the end attitude. Yes, we are going to be doing gossip. Yes, we are going to be a tabloid. We're going to publish the truth, but we're going to make it entertaining. He doesn't give any thought to or doesn't reflect on the possibility that the need to make things entertaining or the need to spread gossip or to again manipulate public perception of reality or manipulate public perception of reputation.
He doesn't see that getting into that kind of habit of thinking or embedding himself in that sort of institution, creating it around himself, can affect the way he relates to others in a deep way such that it's not the reality of things that's all that important to him, including other people. So you only give me what you want. He's not giving any thought to what she wants and then this movement to wanting people to love him because he sees himself as the instrument of their good and he can't do the work of the people, right like get elected to office if his own image is not in good shape and he can use the press to affect that.
So it's this weird thing where he has a genuine motivation to help or to love, but the mechanism of doing those things for him, the way in which he seeks to accomplish doing those things, involves turning the arrow backwards on himself and making himself loved. He can't love until he's loved, maybe is the way of putting it. Let's take a minute to talk about our sponsor for today, HelloFresh. With HelloFresh you get farm fresh pre portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Skip trips to the grocery store and count on Hellofresh to make home cooking easy, fun and affordable.
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27:49 Erin: Yeah, you're reminding me of the scene, I think it's in the tent at their picnic when Susan really starts becoming at the end of the film, a an incredible truth teller or something. She reminds me actually of Like a Judy Holliday type figure, like, you know, as Judy Holliday was probably just coming up in Greenwich Village at this time, like this. This person who's this sort of canny idiot, you know, like this truth teller who's in the throes of a realization all of a sudden, and then, like, can't stop herself from saying things, and she. She confronts him.
Some of this is, I think, is dialogue you've already talked about. But, like, she says, what's the difference between giving me or giving somebody else $100,000 for a statue you're gonna keep crated up and never even look at? It's just money. It doesn't mean anything. You never really give me anything that belongs to you that you care about. And he says, stop this. And then she says, you never gave me anything in your whole life. You just tried to bribe me into giving you something. So, like, this idea of, I guess, giving her something that belongs to him or that he really cares about, it seems like you're saying, like, that thing, whatever it is, doesn't exist.
Right. And all he's trying to do is to get people to give him something, which is to give him love, it seems. Right. Like, Susan says, you don't love me. You want me to love you.
29:13 Wes: So I misquoted that. She said, you never give me anything I care about. But now I'm looking at my notes. Yeah, you never give me anything you care about.
29:21 Erin: Oh, right, right, right.
29:22 Wes: Yeah, that's important. You want me to love you, but you don't give me anything that you care about. So it's not just that he's not thinking about her and what she wants. He's not willing to lose anything by loving. He's not willing to give anything away that's important to him.
29:41 Erin: He has to care about something first in order to then be able to give that to somebody. The idea is that you show your love to someone by giving them something that you actually care about, by giving something away that you have.
29:57 Wes: Right.
29:58 Erin: And so I think the idea here.
30:00 Wes: Right.
30:00 Erin: Is that he doesn't have anything to give her. He doesn't. He doesn't love something first.
30:08 Wes: That he accept a reputation.
30:11 Erin: Right.
30:11 Wes: That the thing he tries to give her is a fame for talent that she doesn't have.
30:16 Erin: Right, right.
30:16 Wes: Yeah. So that's interesting. Yeah, that actually is very interesting. That he conceives of. The only thing that he can actually give people is this gift of a false exterior, maybe a reputation or however you want to put it. And it doesn't matter if it reflects some sort of inner underlying reality.
30:35 Erin: And a reputation is public. It has nothing to do with private feelings. I mean, I don't know. I mean, what could we put in that category that she's talking about that would be an acceptable answer? What could he give her? What can anyone give us? I mean, that's true.
30:53 Wes: That's a good point.
30:54 Erin: You know, I mean, in the.
30:57 Wes: Yeah, right. I mean, yeah, yeah. What can he buy for her at a store that doesn't really isn't susceptible to her charge? Right. It's the sentiment, it's the thought that counts, in other words. But yeah, that's the literal level. On the metaphorical level. To give her something of himself would mean to disclose himself. That would be where intimacy comes in. And he's in the business of disclosure of other people's secrets. But self disclosure is not something that he can do. It's not something that he's good at. And this perhaps explains why he wants to put her in the spotlight so he can live vicariously through her and her vitality.
You were thinking earlier about why singing like sledding, there's a lot of vitality in it. It's something you could do very free spiritedly as a child. And that's what she is doing in the beginning. She's just doing it in a free spirited way, in the manner of play, in the manner that a child might do it. And he wants her to do it in the manner of winning a reputation, which is specifically what he can give her and then what he can live vicariously through, because it is at least a pantomime of self disclosure. So that's the thing that he can't give.
That's the thing that he can't do. I'm thinking out loud here. Let me. Tell me if this makes sense.
32:23 Erin: No, it does, it does. It's also, of course, just the plain manipulation of the voice that it's analogous to his manipulation of the news. So ultimately, I think what we're saying is this is kind of ouroboric. Right. Like he wants someone to love him first. But what Susan is suggesting, and I think what the film is suggesting, is that he has to love something first in order to get love back. Like he has to care about something. It has to be something more than himself and his own reputation, but also their reputation. Right.
32:55 Wes: Their interior as opposed to their exterior. He's fascinated by her singing in the beginning. Sorry, am I helping or hurting? My interruption?
33:03 Erin: Yeah, no, no, no, no, you're helping. Yeah, I Mean, and I think if he had just loved that and just had her sing for him privately. I mean, like, I, you know, if he had just thought of her little voice as just some little thing that didn't have to be amplified, maybe that's what he could have loved in her without trying to then like, like manipulate that or make that.
33:29 Wes: Exactly.
33:29 Erin: Make that reputational. Right, so that could have been the thing. Yeah, right.
33:35 Wes: Yeah. The tiny voice, which is very much like a child's voice. Again, I'm drawing this connection to the sled in childhood as opposed to the adult or accomplished professional voice. So maybe there's a conception of what it means to be an adult here that's been distorted where what it means to be an adult is more about how one is seen or how one can manipulate what others see as opposed to how one is.
34:02 Erin: This is related here, I think, to. I did want to talk about these effigies. The most marked one that stands out to me is Susan's doll of herself, what looks like a doll of her in the bedroom when she's leaving him, which he subsequently destroys. That, first of all, is an extremely childlike room. Um.
34:23 Wes: Right. Good point.
34:25 Erin: She's little animals on the, on the walls and stuff like that. And then. Yeah, this giant doll of hers that looks like life size. You know, it just, it looks like. Yeah, like an effigy. And so there's a shot where she
34:38 Wes: plays with a puzzle and she's doing it on the floor in front of the fireplace like a kid. And the, the. The size of the room, the fact that it's so big, makes them look small in childhood. Like, that's very interesting.
34:49 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Like they're in a giant dollhouse or something.
34:53 Wes: Yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah.
34:55 Erin: And especially because of the replication. Like, even the. Oh, I guess there's the stove, the mother's stove. So it's like their playing house, all the different women, the statues that are littering the area, like dolls or something. And the fact that he has so many of them is like, almost like they're mass produced objects in a dollhouse. But yeah, the jigsaw puzzle thing always, always bothers me because I love jigsaw puzzles. And then I'm just like, am I Susan? Anyway. But the. It always freaks me out. But anyway, what can we say about that? I don't know.
35:32 Wes: I think what we're drawing together here is the. Again he says, I'm in search of a lost childhood or something when he meets her. Is it. He says, again, I forget the exact words. But he's going to the warehouse, another big space. In search of.
35:51 Erin: In search of my youth.
35:52 Wes: Childhood. In search of my youth. Okay. He finds someone who's much younger than him and is childlike in various ways, including her voice. I think we can make a strong association between her and Rosebud in the sense of the. His connection to her is in part an attempt to recover his lost youth. And her sweet childlike interest in her singing, which has nothing to do with a professional ambition she's fine with that is what attracts her to him. But then he has to do this kind of Pygmalion thing where he refashions her into something that is more about the exterior and the way she appears to others.
There's never any sense that he's ashamed of her and her status or anything like that. I think it's something to do with how he thinks he can integrate the childhood longing into his adult life. And the way he does that. It's very paradoxical with the newspaper. The integration of that longing, which becomes a longing to be helpful and to do something for the public good, becomes there's a corrupt reputation oriented mechanism at work there. And it's the same thing with her. The same mechanism happens with her. He can't integrate this in a way that doesn't get corrupted.
So instead of leaving that childhood vitality and Rosebud as it is, maybe leaving it as a. Well, in the case of the sled, leaving it as a kind of memory of something lost, but not as something that becomes a monument and that has to be preserved and held onto and repeated in one's life. In some sense, I think it's about idealization, self aggrandizement having to do with the idealization of that state. So instead of letting her have a more childlike, which is not to say immature, but a more pure delight in music, he's after that youthfulness, he's after that lack of self consciousness.
But he. To fully grasp it and possess it, he has to turn it into the very opposite of that.
38:07 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about the montage of her headlines on his syndicate papers throughout the country. And these pictures of her. Right. Which. Similar to the campaign poster image of him, obviously the huge one behind him during his big speech. But also it's smaller campaign posters we see posted around. And so it's like he's. He's going to inflate her or make copies of her all over. And it's like the desire is to fill the space. Yeah. Amplify her fill. Yeah, make. Make more copies of his own childhood. Make. As she's representative of. Yeah, like, make her. Yeah, make her fill that up. But, you know, like Xanadu, it's like the. It's too cavernous. That can't be done. And all you're gonna do is what, dilute her or something?
38:58 Wes: Yeah, that's great.
38:59 Erin: Yeah.
39:00 Wes: So, yeah, you create this vast, echoey space. Instead of strengthening her voice, the space around the voice expands so much that the voice can't fill it at all. Great. Do you have. So I think we are near the end. Did you have anything. Have we missed any vitally important things that we must talk about before we end?
39:23 Erin: You know, we often get introduced to characters in these various interviews with Thompson. We often get introduced to characters first through an image of them and then through them. And at the end, I think Susie owning this nightclub in Atlantic City is. I mean, obviously, she's a much diminished figure. She's very pathetic. But we see that billboard of her, and then when the camera goes through the skylight twice for the two different interviews, it's the same setup. We see a billboard of her looking very larger than life as billboards. Make one look, and then you go through the skylight and you see her in the space of the. So even in this diminished, sad, seedy little nightclub, she's small, sitting at a table. And then we see her face is lined. And, I mean, the makeup in this film is incredible for 1941. It's unbelievable how convincing I was.
40:11 Wes: I was thinking that especially compared to, like, CGI stuff with, like, the Irishman, is that where he has. Scorsese has an age, and it didn't come across very well. I. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. And then I read on Wikipedia, I read a little bit about the makeup stuff. I mean. Yeah, it's incredible. Completely believable and natural. I think he had to create. The makeup artist went through this really involved process involving creating a plaster cast of people from the face down to the hips.
40:42 Erin: Yeah.
40:43 Wes: Is that again?
40:44 Erin: Yeah. And then he had to invent, I think, a new way of. I mean, like, everyone on this film is just, like, the best possible people in their fields, you know? So I think that over the course of making this film, he invented something more flexible. I should have looked this up prior to this so I could have gotten this. These facts straight. It's a hazy memory for me now, but I think he invented something so that the. As the prosthetics applied to the face would actually Move with you more naturally than any prosthetics had done prior to that. So it used to be that, like, you could age and you could put all this stuff on your face, but then you wouldn't be able to, like, smile or talk or do anything, you know. But he invented something that moved with you, I think is my recollection.
41:28 Wes: Yeah, it was so natural. I mean, I didn't. It took me a while to figure out it was Orson Welles, frankly.
41:34 Erin: Yeah. He's such an incredible actor.
41:36 Wes: Thought in the beginning, the newsreel, I just thought it was a different actor.
41:39 Erin: Yeah, that's the thing. Sorry. No, as much credit as he gets for this film on a certain level, to me, he doesn't get enough credit because the central performance is so amazing that if it was just. If this film was created by lots of other people and it was just Orson Welles in that role, it would be one of the greatest performances ever. But that gets glossed over because he's the wunderkind and the director and this. That. Right.
42:07 Wes: Yeah. I was gonna joke that this is, like, the greatest student film project ever.
42:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
42:12 Wes: Because he had been doing theater and radio and essentially taught himself to make films. Even he had a book that he read and then.
42:20 Erin: And he had to basically get people to help him, too, on the early days.
42:23 Wes: Get people to help. Yeah.
42:25 Erin: Teach him on the fly.
42:26 Wes: And was watching and was imitating other styles. Right. Looking at, especially foreign filmmakers. Yeah. And Ford. And saying, oh, okay, how did they do that? Asking someone, how did they do that? Let me do that. And then with the cinematographer who worked with him said, I was excited to work with someone who didn't know anything, who was coming into this naive because I knew he would ask me to do experimental things. Most people know too much to ask me to do. And so, like, I don't know if anyone else was cutting holes into the floorboard to get these very low shots or using muslin fabric ceilings to, you know, getting all these shots of the ceilings. So, yeah, really very dramatic, incredible shots. And.
43:17 Erin: And he really, I guess, pissed off everybody at RKO because he dug trenches in the studio floors, you know, in order to get those shots. Which gives us incredible impression of everyone being on a stage. Like, we're like. We, the audience, are in the front seat in the orchestra. But, yeah, Gregg Toland, the cinematographer, I think, like, really hits on something really important, which is that the. It is, like, the best student film ever made. It's certainly the best first film ever made. And I think, like, there's I think that's not accidental.
And Toland knew that, knew something really essential about the creative process, which is oftentimes you do. You do your best and most impressive work when you don't yet know what the rules are and when you haven't been cowed by the weight of what other people have done. Not just the style, but, like, you have this daring that comes out of pure naivete, that when it's combined with enough talent, can produce something spectacular. I think this is why lots of first things turn out to be the best things that somebody ever does, because then once they do something, they try to replicate it, or they try to.
Or they learn in the process of doing it. And then the more they know, the more hobbled they are by their own knowledge and by this discovery of what everybody else has done and the realization that they have to contend with a history that maybe they weren't even aware of in the first place that allowed them the freedom to create the original thing, you know, so Toland.
44:48 Wes: I think they're always trying to get back to their rosebud, but succeeding.
44:53 Erin: Right, right, right. And now they just have. What are those things called? Those things that you race in the snow with the motorbike. Snowmobiles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And just have a snowmobile that keeps breaking down.
45:07 Wes: Yeah. But no, I think that actually, even though I made a joke, just making a joke, I think that's a real parallel. People trying to recapture the rosebud innocence, getting back to that original thing that made the first thing they did. Great. But if you try to capture that in a bottle, that never works.
45:25 Erin: That's right. That's right. And so much of this film, so much of Kane is. It's not just Hearst, It's. It's Wells himself. So much of his biography really overlaps with the story to the extent that you could call it, in a way, like an autobiographical project, as so many first novels say are autobiographical. Right. And maybe there's an argument to be made about how that's the freshest kind of material one has, is one's own history, one's own childhood. Of course, this isn't. This idea of the first product being the best is obviously not universally true.
I should know as an oldest child in a family, that first priority is not the best. But, you know, and some. Some directors like Kurosawa and some others, arguably, you know, they got. They got even better as they went on. But. Yeah, but I do think there. There is a more general trend toward Sometimes toward. Towards first things being the greatest anyway. Yeah. Yeah.
46:24 Wes: Okay. Well, that was fun. Thank you.
46:27 Erin: Thank you.
Identity and Infamy in “Citizen Kane” (1941) (Part 1)
Jan 08, 2024
It’s a film bursting with objects—the treasure troves of Xanadu, a snowglobe, jigsaw puzzles, a winner’s cup, the famous sled. Even the conceptual elements of the film’s plot are expressed tangibly. Kane’s mind-boggling wealth isn’t an abstraction, but a list of concrete holdings—gold mines, oil wells, real estate. And the news Kane controls and manipulates, when yoked to another noun, is something one can hold in one’s hands: a newspaper. Kane, too, is described as the incarnation of several abstractions. As his obituary tells us, he himself was “news,” as well as the embodiment of whole years in a swath straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. One might call him the American idea personified. But what these terms really mean and how they’re made manifest in Kane is hard to pin down. At times, he seems to be no more than a vast, empty planet around which objects swirl. What’s at his core, then? What did his life mean? One reporter searching for the secret of Kane bets that just one fact—the identity of “Rosebud”—would explain his whole life. Another suggests that it’s in the sum total of his possessions. Yet another thinks, curiously, that even Kane’s actions won’t tell us who he really was. So what, then, determines his or any identity? What’s the measure of a person? The objects they possess? The abstract ideals they claim to stand for? Their actions? Or something still deeper? Wes & Erin discuss possibly the greatest film ever made: from 1941, Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: It's a film bursting with objects. The treasure troves of Xanadu, a snow globe, jigsaw puzzles, a winner's cup, the famous sled. Even the conceptual elements of the film's plot are expressed tangibly. Kane's mind boggling wealth isn't an abstraction, but a list of concrete holdings, gold mines, oil wells, real estate and the news Kane controls and manipulates, when yoked to another noun, is something one can hold in one's a newspaper. Kane, too is described as the incarnation of several abstractions. As his obituary tells us, he himself was news, as well as the embodiment of whole years in a swath straddling the 19th and 20th centuries.
One might call him the American idea personified. But what these terms really mean and how they're made manifest in Kane is hard to pin down. At times, he seems to be no more than a vast empty planet around which objects swirl. What's at his core then? What did his life mean? One reporter searching for the secret of Kane, bets that just one fact, the identity of Rosebud, would explain his whole life. Another suggests that it's in the sum total of his possessions. And yet another thinks, curiously, that even Kane's actions won't tell us who he really was.
So what then determines his or any identity? What's the measure of a person? The objects they possess? The abstract ideals they claim to stand for their actions? Or something still deeper? Today we're discussing possibly the greatest film ever made from 1941. Orson Welles, citizen Kane. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:47 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan.
1:49 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I'm curious. If you had to name one object that is most important in your life or that somehow represents you, what would it be? No pressure. Just one thing and you can't. No redos.
2:08 Wes: Does it have to be from childhood?
2:10 Erin: No.
2:12 Wes: Probably my iPhone.
2:15 Erin: No. I knew you were going to say that.
2:17 Wes: Everyone isn't. That everyone's.
2:19 Erin: That's your rosebud.
2:21 Wes: But at this point, they start out in early childhood with it. Do TikTok.
2:27 Erin: It is a rectangle.
2:28 Wes: We used this company all our life. Now. Yeah. Right. We can't. It's not big enough to ride down
2:34 Erin: a snow hill, but maybe one day.
2:38 Wes: But let me think of a. Let me think of a more. Something with more sentimental value. The first thing that comes to mind that I have from childhood. Let's do that. Is a teddy bear that I got from my mom when I Was five years old. And I still remember her giving it to me on my birthday. And I named it Charlie Honey Bear. I still have it. It's one of the few things I have because when we came over from Ireland when I was nine, it's a long story, but we lost all our possessions that we had in Ireland, and the only things that I had on my person did I end up keeping.
So all my everything from childhood was gone except for good old Charlie Honey Bear. Well, fun fact, the back of his head is burnt because I dropped him in the fireplace at some point. He still has this soot stained back of his head, but he's still running strong. They used to make him really durable back in the day. How about you?
3:41 Erin: Oh, I don't have an answer for this. I'm putting you on the spot.
3:44 Wes: Screw you.
3:47 Erin: I'd really have to think about it,
3:48 Wes: but I regret telling that story.
3:50 Erin: I know I trapped you. I trapped you. No, but I was thinking about whether or not that's. I was thinking about this idea of a totem object and whether or not people have these things if they can name off the top of their heads, you know, you're part of my social experiment. If they can name off the top of their head something that they would save in a fire, obviously, you know, Charlie Honey Bear narrowly escaped. But fun fact, Charlie Honey Bear is Susan's nickname for Kane. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I was reading a little bit about what Welles thought about the word rosebud, that maybe even Kane didn't know or remember what that meant, that it was just a kind of an unconscious word that was floating around in his mind unconsciously from childhood, that maybe he wouldn't even have been able to say that it was written on the sled.
And so whether or not that word as divorced from the object even means something even less tangible or less, I don't know, somehow explainable than the sled itself. That memory is such an unpredictable, unstable kind of thing, and our relationship to our own childhoods can become so romanticized, estranged, somehow we take sometimes, as memory often works, we take memories, memorable events from things that are utterly inconsequential, and somehow those become the things that we remember best from certain periods of our lives. Anyway, all of that to say that I was just thinking about the significance of Rosebud and whether this rang psychologically true on a contemporary level.
I mean, it must, it's very significant. People seem to agree this is a pretty good movie.
5:43 Wes: So which, whether, which part rings psychological?
5:47 Erin: The idea of Rosebud of a singular object, of a life reduced to. Yeah. Or something that one carries with you, even if it's just a word that you don't even know the significance of.
5:59 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. When you started to ask that question and you said the word object, I started to worry that you were going to ask me which of his antiquities I was most impressed by. And I thought, oh, am I supposed to know what some of those are? Because I don't know any of them. You know, one of the things I had reflected on is that that sled ends up in the big, huge room before it's burned. It's in there with all his possessions, including all those statues and other antiquities. And I. By the way, it's a scene that reminds me of the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And the Ark kind of is kind of a sled too. Right. Or it looks like one, maybe. Could be. It could be repurposed as a sled. It. What the final scene suggests to me is that what replaces the sled in his adult life are all these statues and other antiquities, these possessions, which, you know, whereas the sled is something that can be used for play and childhood fun. And like I said, you can take it down a snow hill. There's a certain element of vitality and freedom associated with it. The antiquities are more about. You get the impression he's trying to aggrandize himself both by having those possessions, but also by identifying with whatever is the subject of a monument.
I don't know if that answers your question. Your question was about. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
7:42 Erin: Whether this was psychologically accurate to the way that we relate to objects. I mean, I think that the final scene, they're taking inventory and they have two categories for the stuff that's in that room. Junk and art. Right. And the $2 stove, part of the estate of Mary Kane Charles, mother from Colorado, that's in there, too. Right. And so he seems to have amassed, and we're told earlier in the film, I think, right. That he has a big warehouse in western Manhattan where he stored everything from his mother's estate and from this house in Colorado.
Right. So the fact that all of these things are in the same kind of junk pile together or maybe in the same warehouse, or in this instance, in the final scene in the atrium altogether, implies the people going through an inventorying are trying to figure out what to throw away and what to save. What's junk and what's art. But of course, like any mother saddled with a macaroni necklace that their child has made for them, knows sometimes the junk is a lot more valuable or of much more psychological importance than some expensive vase or something like that.
Right?
8:54 Wes: Yeah. So the question is whether it's psychologically realistic. So you don't. Do you have anything from childhood that
9:02 Erin: I have Lots of things. I mean, too many things. I think that's. Maybe that's the question that I have, is the fact that one can reduce everything to the sled. I have probably if I sat down and thought about it and made a list, I could think of 25 things that each represent some area of my life that are still kicking around somewhere. At my grandmother's house, at my parents house, in my apartment, in somebody's basement, you know, things that I've held onto. And so maybe it's the singularity of the sled or the fact that one could be reduced to a single object.
Like, I think I'm interested in the fact that Kane can't be pinned down. It seems like Kane is almost like a vacuum in the middle of the film. Of course, the point is that the sled doesn't explain everything, right? But the interest in the fact that this guy who is sort of everything and nothing and who is vast and simple at the same time, who has conflicting motivations and seemingly like a very complex personality, that he can be a explained and not explained in a single object, I think is. I mean, maybe that just increases his complexity or something, that he has all these objects and really just one is the thing that has haunted him or something.
It's these sort of opposed binaries united across all vectors of his personality, so that he would be a collector of everything in the world on the one hand, and then just wanting, not wanting, but being explained by one object on the other hand.
10:39 Wes: It's associated early on with his loss of his parents and his capture by Thatcher. Is that the name of the person who runs the trust? Thatcher? So I think it must have even more significance than many an object, childhood object, would have for us. He attacks Thatcher with it. Thatcher tries to give him a new one. And that forms the basis of a transition from childhood to adulthood. We jump over a whole bunch of years by kind of sledding over it, I guess. And the first act is really about that conflict with Thatcher. So I think this led. It is about, as someone says later on, at the nearly very end of the film, it is about something he's lost, but it's also about what he becomes.
Because his desire to become a tabloid newspaper operator who can make or ruin people's reputations in the name of representing the people. That is obviously framed as part and parcel of his defiance against Thatcher. I want to become everything you hate, he says near the end of the first act, and even to the point where he's willing to publish articles that are not beneficial to companies in which he has lots of shares of stock. So I think the sled is also a representation of, or it's representative of defiance. And somehow that defiance went awry and turned in on itself.
It didn't have the forward momentum that it was supposed to have. It went off track. So that whereas he starts out wanting to be a man of the people and to fight for justice, the whole act of being involved in this use of information to create whatever reality he wants to create for his own purposes, that becomes something. It becomes about his own reputation.
12:54 Erin: Yeah, I'm thinking about that replacement sled and what that's maybe representative of. Right. Because we have the early sled is rosebud, obviously, which is suggestive of nature and innocence and femininity with his mother, his relationship with his mother. And then we have this replacement sled that Thatcher hands him, which has crusader on it. It's the name of it.
13:20 Wes: Oh, really? Okay.
13:22 Erin: Yeah. Interesting. And, of course, this is something tough and, you know, representative maybe of. We think of a crusader, I think of armor, something protective that's donned against the world, against attack. But there's also something romantic about being a crusader, being a knight in shining armor, a protector, or someone who goes out on a kind of a mission, obviously. And so I'm interested in the fact that this crusader sled is Thatcher, hands it to him in the same way that Thatcher kind of hands him the money, so to speak, that makes Kane able to be the defender of the people that he seems to wish to become.
And that itself is a kind of crusading effort to. So obviously the two sleds represent one Kane in childhood, the other Kane in adulthood. But I suppose I'm interested in the fact that Thatcher supplies this sled to him. It's symbolic to me in that Thatcher, of course, has, like, affected his maturation by coming into his life and being his trustee and changing everything. But also this idea of crusading, which seems to run against, as you're pointing out, seems to run against Thatcher's personality, or, you know, it's a way of Kane trying to defy Thatcher by being the defender of the people or whatever, is also lent to him.
It's like an idea that's been lent to him by Thatcher as well. Perhaps just in negative. Right. In defiance of what Thatcher represents, but also literally in terms of this sled. Yeah, yeah.
15:03 Wes: The money both gives him a target of his crusade and his discontent and something to fight against and then it gives him the means for conducting the fight. So it creates a kind of contradiction or paradox for him from the beginning. And it's an odd situation for him to be in where he's not rebelling against his own father and there's this suggestion by the mother that she's sending him to be brought up where the father can't get him. So there's the suggestion that the father has abused him, but instead of going through that kind of rebellion against his own parents, he's doing it against a surrogate who is.
What, he's not a foster parent? Exactly. Although I suppose he must have played the role of a parent up to a certain point. But really he's the provisioner of the trust of the money. He's the source of the money. And it's clear that the defiance that he feels towards Thatcher is directly translated into the interest in the newspaper. We get this jump after the sleigh, Thatcher trying to give him the new sleigh. We get this immediate fast forward to Thatcher hearing that he wants to run a newspaper. And then there's this montage of all this bad press that's been given to various companies which Kane presumably has holdings in.
Right before the end of the first act, we get to see, we get introduced to Charles, to Kane as a young adult. And it's interesting, he's very confident and self possessed in that very Orson Welles kind of way, given the circumstances, given the. What's happened to him as a kid. He's awfully self confident and it seems like that self confidence is built on top of his defiance. This crusade, you know, what you've called a desire to engage in a crusade. And there's even this remark about, I don't know if it's at this point, but you know, oh, I'll provide the war.
As if he's going to be able to use his newspaper to I guess create. To cause a war, the war with Spain, I guess. Is that what it is? Yeah. So there's a certain kind of, there's a certain kind of power in that. But I guess the point I was trying to make is that we get a different kind of father son conflict than usual here because in a way it's not so personal and he's not fighting the person who raised him in the most important formative years. But in a way he's fighting against the person who kidnapped him. And we don't ever get the sense that he's going to.
I don't know when it is. He gets his independence and money, I assume at 18, but we don't.
17:56 Erin: 25.
17:57 Wes: 25, okay. We don't. Right. Yeah. We don't get the sense that we don't know what's happened to his parents. Correct me if I'm wrong about that. And we don't ever see him even considering the idea of reuniting with his parents. We don't know how much contact he's had with his parents over the years. I guess we have to assume that he didn't have any. Or did he? I don't know. But again, what I'm really trying to stress is this kind of displaced father son conflict where the conflict is with the concept of power and money in general that plays out with him his desire to fight the establishment and be the establishment at the same time.
18:38 Erin: Yeah. With this talk of his confidence, this is something that maybe. I certainly registered it too. I was thinking about the contrast between Kane and Hearst and I think that the most marked one is the fact that Hearst was not self made. He was a guy who maybe curiously thought of himself as standing up for the little people. At least that was his motivation at the beginning. And that was strange. Right. Because he was never one of the little people. Right. He didn't have. He was not someone who made his own fortune or something like that. In Kane it's more understandable that he would want to stand up for the little guy seeing as he, he grew up in poverty.
But maybe what isn't as explainable is precisely this unearned confidence that comes with money and privilege. So, so they're, they're sort of at cross purposes that way. And the, the. I think that the one thing, maybe not the one thing, but one of the only things that threatened to make this film really libelous, though it was gone over I think by lawyers. But the one thing that threatened to make it libelous was this anecdote which was entirely borrowed from Hearst's own life about. You supply the prose poems, I'll supply the war. Charlie Kane says Hearst said almost the exact same thing to.
I think it was Frederic Remington who was on the staff of, of his paper the. Now I'm getting all the names mixed up. The Examiner, I think was Hearst's paper and he had the rival just like we have in the film, it's the Inquirer, and the rival is the Chronicle. I think in real life, it was the examiner, and his rival was Pulitzer's paper, which was the World, I think. So, anyway, he sends Frederic Remington down, who's on the artist, on staff of the examiner, and Remington writes back and says, there's no war here. And Hearst says, you provide the pictures, I'll provide the war.
And so this is one of the few possibly apocryphal but famous Hearst quotes that's actually repurposed for this film. So I understand Kane, and I don't understand him precisely because of the fact that. Of this confidence that you're talking about. He does mention his mother twice in the film, I think, at one point. And I should do. I should do a search for this before I say anything definitive, because I noted the two times that he mentions her. I think that at one point he mentions that she's dead and that she died a while ago. There's also the suggestion that I think they were receiving some kind of annuity for themselves, the parents.
$50,000.
21:20 Wes: Right. They were.
21:20 Erin: Right. Yeah. So when she died, and whether or not his. It was maybe during his boarding school years, and he couldn't. He couldn't be with her. He. You know, he was forcibly kind of removed from her until the point that she died. It's unclear, but. Yeah, sorry, Now, I'm kind of gone off on a little mental tangent, but I'm interested in this idea of this. Yeah. This proxy war that Kane is waging against this parental figure. And it seems that he's able to keep the parents in this very exalted mental position precisely because of the fact that he has a proxy with which to.
On whom he can blame everything that has happened to him in a way that parents would normally absorb those blows. Right. Instead, the parents remain like rosebud, like the sled, especially the mother, of course, the father. Maybe there's no love lost there, but remains this person who's untainted by the vicissitudes of a long relationship or of what happens when you go into puberty and become a teenager and start rebelling and lashing out. Right. All of that is absorbed by Thatcher rather than the parents. So the parents remain like museum figures or something, or like something in a museum themselves.
And I was really interested in this idea of the proxy, which most often in the film is visually expressed with paintings or statues or some kind of effigy of somebody appears almost for every major character, I think, except for the Parents. Right. So maybe they're. Or the mother. So she, it seems to me, is the sled.
23:04 Wes: I think that's a very good point. He never has a chance to become disenchanted with his parents, so they remain idealized. And when he's collecting these statues and other antiquities, he's. In a way, it's not just about self aggrandizement, but it's about the idealized mother, maybe, which is a feature, of course, of narcissism. The connection to that ideal which has not become disappointing enough and has not been mourned, let's say. So in the end it's. Yeah. What does it mean for him to say Rosebud? I mean, is it a recognition of loss? Or is he, in a way, just holding on to the. The ideal, to the very bitter end? I don't know if we can know that, but.
23:55 Erin: Yeah, I think now that I'm thinking about statues and ideals, you know, in that last scene when they're cataloging everything, I think someone makes a joke about one of the statues of Venus. There are many of them in the shot. Some of them have heads. Right. But one of them makes it, makes a joke. One of the reporters says, you know, $25,000, that's a lot to pay for a dame without a head, you know, so presumably that one that he's referring to is headless. All those Venuses in that shot. And the fact that the one that's singled out is the headless one, and we're talking about the fact that the sled might be a kind of proxy for the mother or a symbol of the mother.
All those Venuses, all those women, of course, would be symbolic as well. And we should talk about Cain's relationship with women and how this is related to his relationship with his mother. But I think that headlessness is significant because it does seem like it suggests, I think, the estrangement at the heart of Cain's idealization of his mother. Right. That this is something that has no face, something that you can't. You can't see the face. It's misty, it's shrouded in memory and many years. And I mean, maybe it means something still deeper than that.
Right. The headless statue is so evocative of so many things, but something that can't be pinned down, easily understood. Maybe I'm wrong to connect that with a mother.
25:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good association because it. I mean, on the one hand it's not. It seems to suggest he's not being Seen, which is something that, of course, has become very important to him. And people accuse him of. Well, they accuse him of wanting to be loved. But in this case, wanting to be loved has something to do with wanting to be admired and seen. And then the other aspect of that is, I think you can associate headlessness to objectification. So the object is no longer a full person, which is part and part of idealization, but is a body.
Right. So that makes sense in explicitly sexual terms, but it can also be made sense of in terms of a more narcissistic orientation towards another person, in which their subjectivity is not so much at stake as your own. So in a way, it can represent two very different things. One of them, the sense of not being seen. And then the other one, you're the only one who's important or should be seen. Something like that. I don't know. Is that what you're getting at?
26:38 Erin: No. Yeah. This is great. This is great.
26:41 Wes: Yeah.
26:41 Erin: I mean, I want to go. I want to talk about the two wives. But before I do, I think it's important, since we've been talking about this motivation question, the desire to be loved, perhaps Leland says something about Kane, that maybe he had some sort of private greatness, but Leland never really knew what it was. And I'm interested in that expression, too. Or in any of these. Right. In any private sort of greatness. Okay, that's what he says.
27:09 Wes: Where is that?
27:10 Erin: Leland says it during the interview with Thompson. At some point, he tells Thompson, you know, I suppose he had some sort of. I suppose he had some private sort of greatness, but he kept it to himself. He never gave himself away. He never gave anything away. That, of course, is. That has a couple of different meanings, too. Right. Giving oneself away, like. Like betraying his private thoughts. And also, like, physically speaking, he wasn't maybe generous, didn't give things away to people. So. But this idea of his motivation and of the fact that he had a private sort of greatness, I'm very intrigued by this idea, because even Leland, who maybe knew him better than anybody, doesn't know what this is.
And I'm interested in this idea of greatness. He had greatness, if you like, thrust upon him, but not greatness necessarily, but just a great deal of money. Right. In a way, Kane is kind of like just one of these figures who's famous for being famous. There's no there there. You know, he didn't do anything to get this money. He wasn't special in any way. And it gave him the ability to have the career that he had. It maybe gave him to the. This confidence that we're talking about to have the career that he had. But otherwise, without it, he would have been no.
1. Probably. I don't know. Maybe he would have built up an empire on his own. I don't know.
28:31 Wes: Sled manufacturer, right? Biggest sled conglomerate in the world. And then he would have diversified into sleigh or sled.
28:39 Erin: Sled, yeah. I think sleighs are bigger. Sleighs are like. You can.
28:43 Wes: Oh, right.
28:44 Erin: But, yeah. Horse drawn. So the. I have gotten my brother to pull me on a sled like it was a sled. But anyway, yeah, so I don't. This question of his greatness. I was wondering if you had any theories about if you think he's great or not. And if you do, what you think this greatness is, where we can locate it? Is it in his spleen? I don't know.
29:06 Wes: Yeah, it's a good question. See? Great. He's driven, he works very hard. Right. We get the early scene where he kind of moves into the office. Is he working from bed? He moves a bed in there, right? Is he working from bed at some point? In any case, he's devoting himself entirely to this project. And he might have ended up as the kind of trust fund kid who devoted himself to nothing or kind of trying one thing here or there, not putting in a great deal of effort, or not being totally committed and moving on to the next thing. So that part of the film interests me that he's able to throw himself into something like that, even though he has all this money, because the money could become sort of a tar pit in which he sinks for the partially examined life.
We're reading Kierkegaard right now. Kierkegaard tells in either or the second book of either or now we're in, which is about the ethical sphere. So there are these three spheres for Kierkegaard. The aesthetic, the ethical, and then the religious. But the point is that if you get everything you want, then you could call that a fortune, Right. Having so much money that you've made a fortune or that you have a fortune. But in a way, it's the greatest misfortune. And it's the greatest misfortune because it allows you to live what he calls the aesthetic life, really, which is an ambiguous term, but in this context, it just means a life of desire, a life of being able to.
Having the power and resources to satisfy all of your desires. And the idea is that it can't do that. And it creates a very unique kind of unhappiness to have the resources to live a life of desire. But it's not like the same sort of unhappiness as everyday unhappiness where we might fantasize about having all that money and power, but we don't, so we can't be corrupted by it. But in this case, he does have, essentially, for his purposes, unlimited amounts of unlimited resources, and. And yet he's able to get some forward motion, which I see as the sled part of this.
He's able to immerse himself in a project where, at least in the beginning, he's not going to get sucked down into the tar pit of cash and live a dissolute life. And yet, tragically, that doesn't work. His attempt to escape. He has an instinct right there. As a kid, even when he attacks Thatcher, he has this instinct that this is not good for him. It's not just about losing his family, but something is coming which could really overwhelm him, and it's that sense of defiance which is going to help him maintain some sort of an identity and be someone.
But that defiant project just gets absorbed by the very thing that he's trying to defy, tragically. So that's the most interesting part of the film to me. So, yeah, in that sense, you could see him as tragically great at the psychological level. He's making this enormous effort to escape the perils of winning the lottery and does something that you think would be the surest path to escaping that, which is wasting all of his money at first. Right. He's wasting a million a year, although that could last 60 years, I guess, is what he says. But still wasting a lot of money on newspapers until it starts to make him a lot of money as well.
But I don't think that's not the tragic turning point. I think the turning point is just how it affects his view of the world. And I think the way it affects his view of the world is this is kind of another omnipotence of thought thing. He develops the idea that he can make anything he wants happen in reality, whether it's war or getting Susie to become a famous opera singer or anything else. He can make that happen by manipulating information, by manipulating people's reputations, which is something, of course, Hearst did, and he tried to do it to Hollywood and Welles.
Right. He tried to. He went through. Took a lot of effort to prevent the film from even getting released. It's amazing. I didn't I only vaguely knew that story and only I had forgotten it. And just reading that again in preparation for this episode, I was astounded by the efforts he went through to prevent the film from getting released. But it's about the manipulation of reputation. So that's the means by which he's going to fight this fight against the wealth and privilege that are dangerous to him is to do tabloid journalism. What does he say?
At some point, this is like another old wives' tale thing to spread the gossip that wives talk to each other about. We're going to put that on the front page and that becomes a new sort of peril which sucks him right back into the very thing he's trying to escape. It's not our function to report the gossip of housewives, is what Carter says to him. This is after he's just taken over the Inquirer. If we were interested in that kind of thing, Mr. Kane, we could fill the paper twice over daily. And Kane, that's the kind of thing we are going to be interested in from now on.
Mr. Carter, right now I wish you to send your best man up to see Mr. Silverstone. Have him tell Mr. Silverstone if he doesn't produce his wife at once, the Inquirer will have him arrested. Have him tell Mr. Silverstone he's a detective from the central office. If Mr. Silverstone asks to see his badge, your man is to get indignant and call Mr. Silverstone an anarchist. Which is great because Kane gets called an anarchist or a communist by Thatcher. I think he's called everything communist, fascist, anarchist. Yeah. Jed at one point jokingly calls him an anarchist.
Or is it the other way around? I forget. But, yeah, I like this. I think this is an important aspect of the film, the idea. Well, the old wives' tale aspect, the idea of producing old wives tales or gossip for the sake of political purposes. It's almost like a platonic noble lie of a sort of a very different sort. He's gonna be the citizen. He's gonna be the champion of people, but he's gonna do it with this particular method and.
36:04 Erin: Yeah, well, that's the question, though. I mean, does it ever. Is it ever noble? I mean. So he seems to be very canny about the fact that all this stuff will sell. I don't think that takes a tremendous amount of intelligence to know that. I mean, he seems to be kind of inventing the tabloid in the film, but. So of course this is going to sell, but. But it doesn't seem that desire for success is tuned to Any particular direction. In other words, it doesn't seem that his intention is to inflate readership with these kinds of tactics and then become powerful enough to stand up for the little guy. He always seems to have this intention that he's going to stand up for the little guy. He has the declaration of principles which he makes, which is important enough that I think I should. I should.
36:59 Wes: Yeah, let's do it.
37:01 Erin: So he. It's a two sentence, I think. Yeah, it's a two sentence declaration of principles. He writes, I'll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings. And of course, in this scene when he's writing it, Leland points out that he started both sentences with I. And later Leland will accuse him of acting as though he's personally doling out the rights of these citizens, as though he controls the tap or something. Expression he uses. Right.
37:34 Wes: Services. It's compensation for services provided or something like that.
37:40 Erin: Yeah. And so immediately he starts, immediately this declaration of principle starts with I, of course, it's all about him. But the first sentence is a lie, you know, that will tell all the news honestly. Okay, so he never seems to think that this is a contradiction. I mean, this is some sort of hallowed moment. Right. But he never seems to think that the tabloid news is some kind of contradiction. And it's never explained away as, okay, this is what I'm going to do to become popular and then I'm going to get on the people's side, tell all the news accurately.
Right. And then the second sentence, I will provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings. And you know, means nothing. Just like everything he says means nothing. You know, he doesn't need to be their. The champion of their rights. How can a newspaper be the champion of their rights? I suppose by, obviously the free press is important. I'm not saying that there's no role here for a newspaper, but I'm saying that, you know, he's not the law, he's not the constitution, he doesn't actually provide them and he's not a judge and he's not, you know, like he
38:49 Wes: doesn't actually provide them with levy wars and. Well.
38:54 Erin: Right, yeah. And I suppose he might be able
38:57 Wes: to manipulate the world into war or the country into war, but he doesn't have the official power as a war maker. He's not a state that's right. He's not a representative of the citizen as he wants to be. Sorry, go ahead.
39:11 Erin: Yeah, well, and his desire to champion the little guy is never borne out. I mean, this idea of wanting to drum up a war because it would make good news is actually chilling. I mean, it's the very opposite of that. Like he wants to send people to get killed in the interest of his own newsmaking apparatus. So we don't see him really doing anything good. And his personal convictions, such as they are, if he has any, are so nebulous that it allows everyone, as you pointed out, to call him both a communist and a fascist at the same time. That he throws his support behind someone, then he denounces them.
Significant shot of him with Hitler. He seems to have no core. Everything's just orbiting around this empty space in the middle. And then when we see him in his campaign speech, something very similar. It's all about him. It's aye, aye. And then in the end, all he does is he sets himself aside. Being against Gettys, who we. We never really get a clear understanding of what makes Gettys so bad. But, you know, Kane says, very interestingly, right, that he doesn't want to make any promises because he didn't think he had a chance or something like that, right?
So he's made no campaign promises. And then he says, well, the one I will give you is that when I'm in power, I'm going to prosecute my opponent, right? That doesn't do anything for people. That's not, and that's not standing for anything. That's just using, that's just using the office as a cudgel against people you don't like so well, I think it's,
40:47 Wes: it's ambiguous because it, I think Gettys is supposed to be a representative of Tammany hall corruption, right? So it makes sense to go after people who are corrupt. But also in this case, it's personal and it's just right. As you said, it's just someone. He's. Who he doesn't like and is a competitor and who he can punish as a competitor if he loses. So it's a very ambiguous situation. And I think that kind of sums up his whole position where his attempt to do right keeps getting adulterated by his own attempt at self aggrandizement or other motives.
41:27 Erin: And how is he not a symbol of corruption himself? I mean, I think I really like this little moment when Gettys, after he's blackmailed Kane in Susan's Apartment, walks downstairs with Cain's first wife. He's very gentlemanly to her, you know, offers, I think, to give her a ride in his car or something like that.
41:51 Wes: I made a note of that scene. It's very odd because what Gettys has just done is pretty corrupt in and of itself too.
41:58 Erin: Right.
42:00 Wes: But on the other hand, Gettys is kind of exposing the truth about her relationship with her husband. So he has done a sort of public service himself.
42:13 Erin: That's right. And he also has. I mean, that whole scene, that whole confrontation scene is shot in really interesting ways, as is every single scene in this film. Of course, every aspect. Lots of people have said every single shot has an idea behind it. You know, Gettys at one point is in this deep focus shot, is in the back of the scene with Kane in shadow. Emily is in the foreground. And then Gettys steps forward to join Emily in the light. So that in the background Kane and Susan remain kind of smaller and shadowed. And so the composition of such is that Emily's body and Gettys body are arguably maybe trapping the two.
Right. They've, they're. They're sort of conspiring against them. But it also makes Kane and Emily look kind of evil and sinister in the background. And in fact, they have been doing something wrong. Right. And so. And that significant walk that, that Gettys makes where he's in the back in with the shadowy figure of Kane and then he walks into the light and could be read so many different ways. Right. He's exposing Kane. He's just as good. Sorry, he's just as bad as Kane, but he's going to pretend to be good or he's going to make Kane look like the bad guy.
Right. But it could also be meant to show that he's kind of superior to Kane in a way. Kane stays in that in the background. Eventually he does come forward, but the shot composition changes at that point. The camera's in a different position. So the camera is maybe trying to tell us something about Gettys relative worth to Kane in that scene. And so not just visually, but also Gettys makes some significant statements over the course of that scene. He's doing this partially to protect himself and his family. He doesn't like the fact that Kane has been, I guess, you know, running things like political cartoons of Gettys in a prisoner's outfit, a striped prisoner's outfit, which is making him look ridiculous to his children.
So he cares about his children's perception of him. He cares about their well being. It seems something that Kane will prove seconds later that he doesn't care about. Right. He doesn't care about his son's reputation or trying to keep this out of the press for the sake of his wife's humiliation. And he also says that Gettys also says that he thinks that Kane is going to need more than one lesson to learn his lesson. He's going to to need to be taught twice at least. And that turns out to be very perceptive. I mean, he sees that Kane is an egomaniac and it doesn't seem that Gettys is one.
So I think there's a lot of ambiguity in the way that this scene is set up and kind of how we're supposed to think about the moral superiority of one versus the other. I think that Gettys at the end of this scene comes across actually. I mean, it's funny because he's blackmailing him and obviously that's terrible. But, you know, he comes off looking maybe better than anybody except for Emily in that whole setup. Yeah.
45:24 Wes: So, yeah, I think that's very interesting. I think that is. That situation is ambiguous. And the sort of complicated way that Gettys comes across reflects kind of the complicated way that Kane comes across in the whole film, which we'll talk more about. And there was something you said about he never does anything good. And I want to dig into that a little bit in the next part, so.
45:49 Erin: Sure.
45:50 Wes: So, yeah. So we're going to end our first part here and next week we will continue our discussion. Thank you.
45:57 Erin: Thank you.
Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 6)
Dec 25, 2023
Part 6 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
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0:13 Wes: Okay, welcome to part six of our discussion of The Winter's Tale. We are just going to finish up Act 4 and then get into Act 5. We just discussed the giving of the flowers and the meaning of all that stuff and grafting on and weeds and all the rest of it. So I think we're ready to move on to the point where Autolycus comes in and is selling the ballads. What do we want to say about that?
0:44 Erin: Just before we do, if you don't mind, for one second, I just want to point out, you know, we were talking in the previous episode about these complications of this flower imagery, how it doesn't quite line up with the whole this element of disguise, this God and goddess metaphor, that it all gets a little bit messy. But one thing I noticed that follows that and precedes this Autolycus stuff we're gonna get into is a complication of this idea of blushing and pallor, which I hadn't noticed before that the queen
1:16 Wes: of curds and cream.
1:18 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Well, and Florizel has been praising Perdita by saying one of the loveliest speeches, I think, in the whole play. What you do still betters what is done. When you speak sweet, I'd have you do it ever. You know, everything she does is better than the thing before it. And he ends that speech by saying, each your doing, so singular in each particular crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, that all your acts are queens, so even everything she does is royal. And she responds to this by saying, oh, doricles, which. This is his false identity, you know, he's dressed down as a shepherd.
O Doricles, your praises are too large, but that your youth and the true blood, which peeps fairly through it to plainly give you out an unstained shepherd with wisdom I might fear, my Doricles, you wooed me the false way. So this is really interesting because she says, you know, I could see that you're true and that you are unstained, that you are not trying to get in my pants by saying all this sweet stuff to me. You know, I could see you're innocent, and I could see that by your true blood. This kind of flips, this idea of the virginal pallor image that previously we'd been talking about, or this idea of blood as, you know, the blush entering in as being the sort of rite of spring, as being the, you know, synonymous with, like, obviously imagery of, you know, the sexual act or of becoming blushing, because you're being seen by someone and have a burgeoning romance with them, and therefore, you know, you start to become stained with sexual desire, if you will, in your.
The blushing of your cheek. So here it's like, what makes him a true noble intent and sort of like a true virgin, if you will, is the blood is the blush. This is an inversion. And then later, as you point out, Camillo looks at Perdita and says he tells her something that makes her blood look out. Good sooth, she is the queen of curds and cream. So then Florizel is whispering something in Perdita's ear that makes her blush. And then he remarks that she has this peaches and cream complexion to her. So I don't know what to say about that, except just to point it out that the true blood, of course, what she might be noticing is also maybe an inside joke between the two of them about his royal blood, so she could see that he's going to not woo her the false way, precisely because he's a prince.
And this also gets into what we were talking about previously, about Perdita's goodness as being inherent to her genetic makeup because she's a princess rather than just a shepherdess. And maybe in this moment, Perdita is attributing Florizel's moral upstandingness with the fact that he's a prince. Those two things are kind of collapsed on each other. Right.
4:08 Wes: She's saying, if I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to get in my pants because of these. With these extravagant praises. Right. This is flattery. And the way. How does she know better? She know because he's blushing, which can be taken as a sign of desire, but it can also be taken as a sign of conscience, shame or embarrassment or something like that. So there are certain emotions that are grafted together and can't be disentangled. It is desire. And yeah, his. There is a deceptiveness to the praises in some sense, but the desire is also entangled with.
With. So it's lust on the one hand, but it's also respect and love on the other. And the two things are tangled up. And the two things are both revealed in the blushing, in the redness. So I think that's a great point, which is that, yeah, this is another. The many ways in which this redness can have these two different meanings that are connected to each other. So I think that love is complex in this sense, and it combines honesty and deception and combines ulterior, your physical, lustful motives with true respect for a person. That's what comes across here to me.
5:20 Erin: Yeah. You're also making me think of maybe if Leontes saw this, he would say, is blushing nothing? Because it's something that is, as you're suggesting. It can mean all of these things together or at once, and it could mean innocence or it could mean guilt. Right. But it's complicated and it's something that. The way you present could be deceptive. It could have many different potential meanings or all the meanings together. And this opacity, even of something as sort of self revealing as blushing to me, indicates the complexity of human nature and human desire, which is one that Leontes wants to flatten into one single read.
Right. He would read guilt into a blush rather than being shy, as you're suggesting, or actually being innocent. Right. And that. That flattening is what makes Leontes so dangerous. Whereas I think that what you're suggesting is that the multiplicity of possible interpretations is actually much more accurate and much more fruitful. And, you know, both on a linguistic level, as we see in the complexity of these speeches, but also in terms of just understanding people having many different sides to them.
6:30 Wes: You know, and I think we'll get some of the same complexity with Autolycus's songs. I love the way he's introduced by the servant. He sings several tunes, faster than you'll tell money. He utters them as he had eaten ballads. So he's memorized a lot of songs. Is that a reference to memorization or is it just a reference to how well he performs them? Because obviously they're written down, but in any case, he shall come in. I love it. This is the clown. I love a ballad even too well, if it be doleful. Doleful matter merrily set down are a very pleasant thing indeed in sung lamentation.
So seems like a bit of a reference to this admixture of comedy and tragedy that we have here in the Winter's Tale. And then the servant says he has the prettiest love songs for maids. So without bawdry, which is strange, that he makes the maid to answer, whoop, do me no harm, good men. I'm not actually quite sure what's being said here, except that it seems like they're so free of. Of bawdiness that they frame the intentions of the man as being pure, as being good. You know, again, we get this connection to what we've just been talking about, but you can correct me if I'm wrong on that interpretation.
And we do, you know, Perdita, just a little ahead of that, will say, forewarn him that he used no scurrilous words in his tunes. I love that. So, again, you know, that's what's deception, what's manipulation? What's an expression of pure, pure good intentions. Autolycus the deceiver seems to be providing the implements of deception that will lead to love. But maybe this, again, an invisible hand argument where the ornamental deceptive serves the higher, a higher purpose of the down to earth. So maybe this is kind of a counter thesis that I talked, again about the mind not being able to pay off reality in several different ways.
Maybe the suggestion is, is that, yes, it can, because the world would not reproduce if it weren't for these elements, these things that happen in the domain of the mental, the symbolic, the possibly deceptive or possibly inadequate to reality. In other words, we need to misapprehend the world to some extent in order to bring it into being and in order ultimately to. To connect to it. Maybe that's the counter thesis here.
8:55 Erin: That's a great point tied up with that, I think. Is this what you've pointed out about him having eaten ballads and Whether that means he's a good memorizer or a good performer. It puts me in mind of someone who has to be a good actor, right? If he's, you know, a good repertory actor will have to have eaten many parts, right? He'll have to have many parts memorized and at the ready to be able to perform them. And also, of course, he has to be a good actor in actually performing them convincingly. And you have me thinking about the implications of what it means to be a good actor.
And a good actor that is like, you know, not a bad actor, not someone who performs bad actions, but someone who performs good actions and the ways in which Autolycus is, as a pickpocket is a bad actor. But in the end, you know, his pickpocketiness is put to good ends. He becomes a good actor almost in the spite of himself. Right. And that. This, I think, is the nature of what you're suggesting about courtship, that deception or being a bad actor can be put to these more positive ends, that this is the way the world goes round. This is how people are born.
9:57 Wes: But it's interesting. It sounds like the tales are non. The ballads tell tales that are winter's tales. They're non romantic, they're non sexual, and somehow that serves the purpose of wooing a woman. So Mopsa says, pray now, buy some. She's talking to the clown. I love a ballad in print of life, for when we are sure they are true, for then we are sure they are true. So this idea of printing, it occurs, this metaphor of printing occurs a few times in the play, mainly with respect to children looking like their parents. So that we know, right? So that Leontes knows that Mamillius is his, because he looks a lot like him.
Or Perdita will look a lot like her mother. But in this case, right, it's an absurd thing to say, because if you look at what Autolycus is selling, here's another ballad of fish that appeared upon the coast On Wednesday, the four score of April, 40,000 fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids. All this very specific. It sounds like data, right? But it's all bullshit. It. It was thought she was a woman and was turned into a cold fish, for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her. The ballad is very pitiful and as true.
Is it true too, you think you five justices hands at it and witnesses more than my pack will hold. So again, these are old wives tales, or winter's tales, obviously false, but being Represented as true. And that's the way they differ from being just a mere fairy tale, tale or piece of fiction. People want to believe that they're true, and in believing that they're true, be romanced, be wooed to love with non body, like tabloid content. In a way, it's like handing someone the National Enquirer and saying, here you go, love. This is my gift to you.
Have I won you over? Really fascinating idea. I. I think we would normally expect these ballads to be romantic, and that would be their function. So we have a rather odd thing going on here, and it's clearly supposed to serve a thematic purpose. And again, I think it speaks to the necessity of some sort of untruthfulness in leading us back to truth and back to love.
12:23 Erin: Yeah. The thing this is putting me in mind of is my favorite song from. From any Shakespeare play, which is the Sigh no More Ladies song from Much Ado, which maybe it has a similar function in that it's kind of doing the opposite of what you would expect it to do. Right. It's a love song, or it's a song in a romantic comedy which is advocating against love. I think it goes, sigh no more, lady Sigh no more Men were deceivers ever or men were constant never One foot in sea and one on shore to one thing constant never. That's right. Then sigh not so, but let them go and be you Blithe and Bonnie Converting all your sounds of woe into hey nonny nonny.
So it's like, forget about men. They're awful, they're deceptive. Just give up love. Right. And this is within a play which is advocating for love and for marriage, and also in which the women are being accused of deception. You know, hero is being accused of deception, not her boyfriend. Right. But here that's kind of flipped on its head in this, where instead of saying, get married, it's saying, don't get married. Instead of following the theme of the play in which a woman's constancy is called into question, the song is saying that men are the inconstant ones.
So I wonder about these songs as counterpoints.
13:36 Wes: I think, yeah, this Autolycus is the suitable provider of counterpoints here. And I think we should skip to the end of the act where he gives his final speech. What happens with. With Polixenes and Florizel. I think it's a bit of plot development. And so he's gonna get very angry and forbid them from being together and makes lots of threats. And the interesting thing is we Get a little bit of a repetition between Florizel and Polixenes of the dynamic between Leontes and Camillo earlier on in the play. And we get a bit of Polixenes being a madman like Leontes was, but now with respect to the Youngins. And then Camillo, you know, we get another reiteration. Camillo saves the day with a nice little plot, sends them to Sicilia and ultimately get them costumed for that. And then we have Autolycus enters and gives us a little capstone or what's the word to the act? Cherry on top. I don't know.
14:36 Erin: Yeah, like putting a button on it. Mm.
14:38 Wes: Yeah. So I think the one thing I wanted to draw attention to was this idea that, you know, he says, what a fool Honesty is. And that's right after. Where does he say that?
14:51 Erin: Line 594. Gosh, this is a long scene.
14:56 Wes: So, you know, Camillo has just helped them plan to do something deceptive, but again, it's a deception that serves a higher cause. And Autolycus, ha ha. What a fool Honesty is. And trust his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman, but he's celebrating his thievery and his ability to. To sell all these knickknacks and ballads as if he's manipulated or deceived people into doing that. You know, my clown, who wants but something to be a reasonable man, grew so in love with the wench's songs that he would not stir his pettitoes till he had both tune and words.
15:32 Erin: Pettitoes. It says here, toes, usually of a pig. So it's like his little piggies, his little toes. Sorry.
15:38 Wes: So cute. So, you know, and then towards the end, we get. I see that this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive. The prince himself is about a piece of iniquity stealing away from his father. You know, he's been in the service of Florizel, and it's as if he's finding redemption and dishonesty. He's going to use. Use it to do some constructive things and ultimately to help out Florizel. And he's going to claim that he's deceptive by nature and he needs to keep that identity, but that, you know, it's in keeping. So he's going to do good things by accident, in other words, is essentially what he'll say. He's not violating his own code to be a thief and deceiver. It just so happens that that is going to serve an ironic good, which I thought was a really interesting part of the play.
16:31 Erin: Yeah, he Notes often that he used to work for the prince and now has since been fired. This obviously sticks in his craw, but he says at the very end of the act, if I had a mind, to be honest, I see fortune would not suffer me. She drops booties in my mouth. I am courted now with a double occasion. Gold and a means to do the prince, my master, good. Which, who knows how that may turn back to my advancement. So it's a two for one deal. I can make money and I can do some good. So he does make the distinction there, but then comes back around to also who knows how that may work out in my favor, as you're suggesting.
So it is mercenary, but there's an acknowledgement of wanting to help his former master, even though he has been been fired. And he feels regretful about this, Right? So no hard feelings. He's going to help out. He got fired from Applebee's. He doesn't work there anymore. But, you know, he wants to help his manager out, which, you know, that seems like a pretty generous thing if you ask me. Right?
17:31 Wes: The end, he says, I'll have a. I'm courted now with a double occasion. Gold and a means to do the prince, my master good. Which, who knows how that may turn back to my advancement. He has to pretend that he's just thinking. Thinking about himself. All right, we're gonna have to do the fifth act really quickly. So we get a secondhand account of them figuring out Perdita is the daughter, right? Because it basically, Polixenes has chased them to Sicily, and he's furious. And between Autolycus and the gentleman, we're gonna. We're gonna find out secondhand about that.
So we don't get to see that climactic scene. Instead, later on, what'll be substituted is a different climactic scene where Hermione comes to life from. You know, Hermione turns out to have been alive all the time, and she's disguised as a statue. And this is something in the secondary literature. This is one of the reasons why the play was thought to be so flawed. This idea that you would bury the climax and then have it related secondhand. But I'm not so sure that it's such a flaw, especially given that he doesn't necessarily want to upstage what he's going to make.
The true climax of the play. And then the other element here is that we get these references to. Someone tells the story of Antigonus getting eaten by the bear. And that's like an old Tale. You know, we get these important references to what Shakespeare is doing here, and that also this whole. Oh, they figured out she's the daughter. Again, it's like an old tale. I think part of what he's doing here is he's once again drawing attention to the implausibility of all of this, for thematic reasons.
19:09 Erin: Yeah. And tying everything together by saying, it's like an old tale. And also, just prior to that, saying, such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad makers cannot be able to express it. Again, this is even beyond the crazy ballads of the National Enquirer, like Ballads of Autolycus. And I'm wondering if there's some significance to the fact that there's not one, not two, but three gentlemen that have to report the story. I don't know, something about the rule of threes in providing finality or in wrapping things up. And that their speeches, in the sort of retelling of this story that's happened offstage, are all thematically resolving some of the preoccupations of the entire play.
You know, we have the third gentleman saying, in response to the question, has the king found his heir? He says, most true, if ever truth were pregnant by circumstance, you know, and then he says, actually, right after that, that which you hear, you'll swear. You see, there is such unity in the proofs. So it's all coming together here, Right? We have this idea of, like, pregnancy, that Perdita is the true daughter of Leontes. That circumstance or evidence does, in fact, win out, because we get a description of the evidence that proves that Perdita is their daughter.
And this evidence is convincing, unlike Leontes.
20:30 Wes: Yeah, it's the stuff that Antigonus left with the baby.
20:33 Erin: Right?
20:33 Wes: Right, yeah.
20:34 Erin: Right. Yeah.
20:35 Wes: That's been on the boat, by the way, the whole time. And it's explained that, well, Polixenes got sick and that's why they couldn't resolve that issue.
20:44 Erin: Right.
20:44 Wes: It's a ridiculous explanation. Cause he arrives angry, and it's the source of something dramatic. But it doesn't make any sense. It's like a plot hole. Because why wouldn't they have gotten all that worked out during the trip? Oh, he was sick. I mean, it's. You know, Shakespeare's having a laugh. You know, it's like, there are no rules to this because it's a winter's tale.
21:05 Erin: So that's a generous read. Then the third gentleman, too, will. It's via hearsay. It's via this talk that we first get this idea of the statue introduced. The third gentleman says that everybody there was so moved by the scene. Perdita has been told how the queen died and the king has to. Again, he's on his 16 year apology tour. Now he has to tell his own daughter exactly how the mother came to have died. So Perdita says with an alas, I would fain say bleed tears, for I'm sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there changed color, Some swooned also. If all the world could have seen it, the woe had been universal. So he's saying, you know, everybody there, anyone there who saw this, even if they were made of stone, they would have changed color.
21:52 Wes: And again, unfortunately, we don't get to see it, but if we had been able to see it would have been great. Again, I think he's having a laugh,
21:59 Erin: but there's a significance to this because again, this even wraps up this thread we were talking about with pallor versus the blush, color being brought to one's cheeks. And we have stone being brought to life before we even hear of this statue for the first time, which happens a couple of lines later and we hear of it through hearsay. So the princess hearing of her mother's statue, which is in the keeping of Paulina, is like, what? You know, we didn't even hear of this prior to this. And now Perdita is hearing of the statue that we've never heard of before,
22:31 Wes: which, by the way, was made by that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano, who's a contemporary of Shakespeare.
22:38 Erin: Oh, really?
22:39 Wes: Yeah.
22:40 Erin: Oh, I thought he was just some fake Italian.
22:42 Wes: No, no, he's a real guy. You can go look at his stuff. I mean, he's great, but he's a contemporary of Shakespeare, not of these people back in the old. So clearly he's having a laugh with all this stuff.
22:55 Erin: Well, I thought it was even funnier if he was just some. Oh, you know, we'll just put in some random Italian. You know, those Italians are really good at statues. So, you know, Giulio Romano, you know, like Ray Romano's brother. I don't know, it's like this guy just comes out of nowhere and. Oh, right, that guy. The guy that's been in the background this whole time holding a chisel, you know.
23:18 Wes: But in any case, that use of anachronism, I think it's again, self referential and then it's in the third. So we can wrap up with the third scene of Act 5 here. One thing I want to say about early on in the scene is just that again, there's another recapitulation of the whole thank you situation that happens at the beginning of the play. They're visiting the chapel in Paulina's house and Leontes says, oh, you know, you're such a great comfort, Paulina, even though she's just basically there to apply the whip, you know, to keep chastising him and making him feel bad for all those years.
And he loves it, so he's turned into a big masochist. And then she'll say, no, no, this visit is a surplus of grace, which never my life may last to answer. And I'm like, oh shit, is this gonna start all over again? The last time someone was playing that game with him, it didn't go well. And then he says, no, this is all I'm just troubling, you know, this is a big pain for you to have the king visit. We honor you with trouble. So they're doing a little bit of the excessive politeness and the idea that there are these unrepayable debts. That's one thing that occurred to me.
Well, I have in my notes, Psyche itself is a form of debt, which is again, this is just the ax that I've been grinding through all of these parts. But about the mind reality relationship, what I mean by that is that it exists only insofar as it owes in some sense. Or there's something about our comportment as self conscious beings. Our self consciousness depends upon the recognition of the other and certain normative relations that show up within that. And there's this kind of double vector of reciprocal recognition. I don't want to keep beating that dead horse, but you know, we might think of that owing others recognition as actually being constitutive of self consciousness.
This is a very Hegelian theme. So I'm going to just put that in there as a little side comment to this whole theme of debt and gratitude and thank yous and all that. So what do we make of the big reveal?
25:23 Erin: You know, I think it enacts this idea of thank you never being enough inherently ties in with grace. Right. Grace is more than any thank you can be. You can never make up for it. You can never thank somebody enough or you can never thank God enough. Right. For grace, it's supposed to override or reduplicate any attempt to repay it. That's the whole point. It outruns any thank you. So maybe the message here for Leontes is this acceptance of grace in the form of his wife, that maybe this is better than he thinks that he deserves, but he just has to accept Hermione, that is grace, rather than looking a grace horse in the mouth.
I don't know. And the absurdity of a great thing of grace happening to an undeserving person is then literalized, perhaps by the absurdity of this statue coming to life, this free bounty. You just have to accept it, just like we, the audience members, just have to accept that this is happening and there's nothing we can do about it. And sure, okay. Hermione's been in her house for 16 years. Just out, whatever.
26:42 Wes: She's been in the spare bedroom for 16 years.
26:44 Erin: Yeah.
26:45 Wes: We're given lots of clues that it's not magic, even though Paulina keeps alluding to the fact that they're going to take it to be magic. But, you know, she's the aged version of Hermione and people want to kiss her or whatever, touch her. And no, Paulina's like, oh, no. But the paint's not dry, so can't do that. The paint's not dry. So obviously. Right. It's not magical. Although there seem to be some. Some dispute in the secondary literature, which really surprised me because there's all these clues that of course, it's. She's been. Paulina has been keeping her in the spare bedroom, which is, you know, just as ridiculous.
But it ought to make us wonder, well, why does that need to happen? Why can't they get together before that? Why do we need Leontes? Why 16 years of berating himself? Why not just do, like, 10 or 5? They lose all that time that they might have had together, so what's the point of that? You know, the oracle predicts that what's lost has to be found. Perdita, her name meaning lost, she has to be found again before they can get back together. But within the context of psychological, Paulina's and Hermione's actual motivations, how do we make sense of it?
27:52 Erin: Yeah, you're putting me in mind of. I mean, the arbitrariness of this number. You know, I wish it was something that I could say, like, oh, well, you know, 16 has tremendous biblical significance or something like that, but it doesn't. It doesn't even line up with something that I think the, geez, I'm not going to be able to find it now if I try to look for it. I think it's something the shepherd says about how everybody who's between the ages of 10 and 23 should just go to sleep, you know, because all they do during those ages is get up to trouble.
Right? So that's 13 years. That doesn't even match up with the time that we, the audience, have been sort of put to sleep, or the play rather, has been put to sleep and reawakened for a 16 years. Numerologically, none of it kind of adds up. But I guess what we could say regarding this idea of loss, or why things had to be lost. Have I talked before in a previous episode? I must have of the Felix culpa, the fortunate fall.
28:48 Wes: I think you might have.
28:50 Erin: This is the result of the fall of man and the source of original sin as being actually a good thing. The concept is just. I think this is from Aquinas who said that God allows this evil to happen in order to bring about a greater good from that. So somehow you need to have loss, you need to have sin in order to have the greater good of redemption from sin, of grace. In other words, there is no concept of light without having the darkness. Right. There are lots of cliches about this, but it has its roots in a theological question of the felix culpa, which is related to this philosophical problem of the problem of evil.
So in order for the grace to happen, in order for the statue to come to life, one has to register significant loss. It's not quite that grace needs to be paid for. This is getting into the weeds here in Christian theology. Like Christ's death, his death and resurrection is a kind of like payment for the sins of man. So there is certainly an economy of salvation. But also there needs to be a reckoning for what Leontes did. There needs to be some comeuppance. There needs to be something that he needs to, in essence, pay for, even if what he's going to get back in return for that payment is like a hundred thousand fold on that payment.
I'm trying to not get into a deeper theological discussion and maybe by skirting it, I'm just to going kind of being even more confusing than not. But in other words, all of that to say, I think that the loss needs to be registered for the return to be affected.
30:33 Wes: Yeah. No, I like that. We have two returns. One is Perdita's and one is Hermiones. And the return of Perdita is like the registering of the loss. I like that. And you know, she's loss incarnate. You might ask, well, why not go find her? Of course, they don't know she's alive, but on the other hand, they have the prophecy and Hermione's hiding in a room as if, like she's waiting to come out. So if they have some inkling that what's lost might return, that Perdita might actually be coming back, then why not accelerate the process and go actually look for her?
But yeah, psychologically we could speak to the necessary process of mourning. And it's not enough for Leontes to berate himself and be mean to himself and have Paulina berate him and do all that stuff. There has to be some sort of transformation. And perhaps it's reuniting with Perdita that actually affects that. And then also on a more literal level, it undoes one of his horrible crimes and redeems that Polixenes at one point says, make it manifest where she has lived or how stolen from the dead. So he's unsure if it's magic or was she hiding somewhere?
And Paulina doesn't answer that question. She does another of these references to the old tale that she is living, were it but told. You should be hooted at like an old tale. But it appears she lives though yet she speak not. So another one of these references to, you know, this is really outlandish. This whole story is silly. Well, which you might on first blush think she's saying to Polixenes, I didn't tell you because you would never believe it. But that can't be what she's saying because, you know, apart from him being gone, or maybe in general, I didn't tell people because they would never believe it, but she can always take Hermione out of the closet and demonstrate.
I find that to be a really odd moment. It's as if Paulina is actively trying to create a winter's tale, trying to bring to life this implausible story and by creating that implausibility bring about either redeem or bring about a reuniting again. It speaks to the necessity of this deceptive world or this fantasy world in reconnecting people or reconnecting us to reality.
32:58 Erin: It's interesting that as an agent of Grace, then she's bringing this about. That this agency is also about fashioning a story or about storytelling. That these two things would go together seems on the one hand really strange, but really. Yeah, but really important.
33:16 Wes: Yeah, maybe it's this necessity for a mythology. The Romantics like Schlegel, we're always on about that. What is the relationship between grace and old wives tale? This type of of storytelling, I think one could very easily read it as a reflection on the necessity for fiction and sort of dramatic and maybe a bit of a reflection on the relationship between what he's doing and what's happening. When people gossip or do their tabloid thing, it's different, obviously, because when we read fiction, we read it as fiction, or when we see a performance, we see it as a performance.
We don't need to believe that, yes, there are UFOs or whatever it is that's in the superstitious tale, but I think the point is that those two things are not entirely unrelated. And the suspension, the willingness to suspend disbelief and embrace certain types of implausibility that's supposed to be, I think, significant at some level. I like the connection to grace and to this waiting period that Leontes has to go through before he can get back with Hermione. It's not just that he needs to regret what he did and castigate himself for what he did.
The story has to come to a particular type of conclusion. And again, it's as if Paulina arranged for this very implausible thing to unfold as if it were the only redemptive possibility.
34:51 Erin: I wonder, in regards to this idea of grace, would a fuller grace, would a truer grace restore Hermione to Leontes as she was 16 years ago, if this was going to be real magic? You know, much is made of the fact that she's much wrinkled, nothing so aged as this, right? And Paulina says so much the more our carver's excellence, which lets go by some 16 years and makes her as she lived. And Leontes calls this good comfort. But the loss registered here, the time that can't be gotten back, there's redemption within grace, there's this outpouring. And at the same time, it seems the lesson here is that it can't restore lost time back to you.
Like something still has to be, you know, I hesitate to say degraded, but, you know, let's just say degraded, right? Like he can't get her back the way she was. Even if that would be kind of true grace, right, would be to have Hermione, exactly at the moment that she dropped dead, come back in that exact state. So I don't know what to make of that. The last little thing I'll say about that is that in Leonti's final speech, I mean, maybe there's a suggestion to me that the reason why Hermione is aged is not just because it's a practical thing, because she's been alive all along and she's aged like everybody.
I wonder if Leontes really has learned his lesson. And one of the things he says in his Final speech is, well, first he tells Paulina to shut up, which is, you know, maybe an ill advised thing to do. And then he says, this is a match. And made between's by vows, thou hast found mine. But how is to be questioned? So he's talking about getting a wife back and he says, thou, meaning Paulina, hast found mine, meaning her mother. But how is to be questioned? For I saw her, as I thought, dead, and have in vain said many a prayer upon her grave. This is my problem.
This adds credence to this idea that this is a magical event. Because as we know, Leontes has seen Hermione's dead body. He's been praying over her grave. But what does he say here? I have in vain said many a prayer upon her grave. Actually, the opposite is that it hasn't been in vain. Right, she's back.
37:01 Wes: Well, if she's dead, you say a prayer to talk to her in the afterlife, but she's not in the afterlife.
37:07 Erin: Oh, interesting.
37:08 Wes: Yeah. But also, I think your reading is correct. I mean, it's a nice irony, of course, if his prayers could be thought of as bringing her back to life or for at least preparing him to be in her company again, then of course they haven't been in vain. It's a misunderstanding.
37:23 Erin: Well, it seems to me to represent still a confusion that he has about the power of his. His own words or the power of speech in general. Speech and words. And him talking himself into a lather caused all of this in the first place. And in the end, something still doesn't seem to be lining up between speech and its reflection in reality. So he does not believe in the efficacy of his own words. In the end, I don't know if that represents a progression because he's downgraded his belief in his own words. And therefore this maybe actually represents some positive change in him, or if it represents a flattening, the continuation of this idea of flattening things out, that words and reality all kind of experience the same level of being debased by Leontes in practice, that a prayer has no efficacy, that prayers needn't line up with reality, words needn't line up with reality.
In the end, you sort of make your own reality. In which case a prayer would be a kind of like an extremely hollow thing. It's performative, you know, he was praying and in vain. And the result, the fulfillment of his prayer has nothing to do with the prayers that he said. So I'm not sure where that leaves us in terms of words et Cetera. That being said, I mean, Shakespeare's words have had the efficacy of actually bringing Hermione back to life, right? So there is something to be said here for the power of language just in terms of like what the play is actually enacting, or Paulina saying awake your faith or something like that.
There is some sort of magical quality imbued within the words on a meta level. Or just in terms of Paulina seeming to speak Hermione back into existence.
39:10 Wes: You know, I was thinking, I was wondering if this is much like the Tempest, a way of saying goodbye and abjuring his rough magic. Magic. It seems to run a bit in the opposite direction in this tongue in cheek equation of what he's doing with an old wives tale. Or maybe not in the opposite direction. It strikes me as a critique in a way or an apology for being an artist. Prospero apologizes at the end and the playwright is essentially apologizing for the play. And I think the art object must also be an apology. It can't just be a great thing, but it must also be an apology to the audience.
For various reasons, one is worried about inducing envy, right, Rather than enjoyment or mania, grandiosity or projecting one's own grandiosity in the art object. And it has to be tempered. So you need to undercut the power of the words, right? This is the omnipotence of thought thing we were talking about earlier with Polixenes Blue believing that his ideas could make things come true. You want to undercut that idea ultimately. Now he does have empirical evidence, right? He thinks he saw her dead, which is an odd touch. There's a certain point in the play where I thought, okay, Paulina is going to do the whole potion thing and we're going to see that in the plot.
See her do the, you know, the whole Romeo and Juliet potion that makes the person seem dead and then they come back to life and it's all arranged. But that never happened. And I wonder if it was taken out in some sense. Instead we get this weird hanging thread at the end, but we don't know why. You know, maybe we're supposed to think it could have been magic, I don't know. But there's all sorts of clues that it's not. So, you know, I think a lot of critics see that as a kind of flaw. And I. I guess I'm inclined to agree with that. I don't know what it's doing here for him to think that he saw her dead.
And then that's. It's just left at that. But I think you're right again. This is another. There's a lot here when it comes to this, this idea of a prayer care in vain about the relationship between ideas and reality, words and reality, potential omnipotence of thought and its effect on reality. All right, do you have anything else to say? Or shall we call it, let's call
41:20 Erin: it the Statues back to Life and We're all back in Sicilia. And yeah, let's you and I already
41:29 Wes: pass out at this point.
41:31 Erin: Yes, we are two and a half
41:32 Wes: hour recording, even though it'll be edited down to something shorter and cut into two parts. But now this has been great. I love doing Shakespeare this way in multiple parts and getting into it in great detail, doing a close reading. I hope the audience enjoys that. Let us know if this is a good way to go or if it's too much. But yeah.
41:50 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
41:53 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 5)
Dec 18, 2023
Part 5 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
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0:13 Wes: Welcome to part five of our discussion of the Winter's Tale. And parts five and six. We will be discussing acts four and five. So we just got done discussing act three and some of the action. We, with Hermione and Paulina, noted that they use language in a different and more persuasive way and talked a little bit about the concept of evidence and the oracle and all that stuff. And now we are going to get a very different scene, I guess, at the end. We already moved to the desert. The end of Act 3, we moved to the desert of Bohemia. But now we're going to fast forward 16 years and Shakespeare will directly apologize to us for that.
For just taking a big shortcut there and having. Well, I guess his shortcut is, the way he handles this is to have the personification of time come out and tell us that he's going to be sliding over 16 years. Time begs forgiveness and essentially says, but think about it. I'm so powerful, I can overthrow law and, and custom. You know, laws change, customs change over time. Time is powerful enough. In other words, I'm going to apologize for this trick of fast forwarding, but as the personification of time, I can do that. It's a very funny way of excusing himself by personifying time.
1:44 Erin: If only Shakespeare were a screenwriter, he could just say, here is a title card that says 16 years later. Something like that. Instead, he has to do this whole song and dance.
1:54 Wes: I guess he could have had someone come out with a card. Is there a way to do this without that? How would you clue the audience in? It would probably emerge from context. That's true, but the groundlings might not like that. They might start throwing things. Is there anything else of significance to get from the section on Time?
2:15 Erin: Well, you know, we get a little pre figurement of, you know, as we have all along, of some of the, what do we want to call it, horticultural imagery that's gonna come up throughout Act 4. So time says, I turn my glass and give my scene. Such growing as you had slept between. This image of things growing, of profundity, of profusion, I think is gonna be important in this pastoral act. And then in line 24 time says to speak of Perdita now grown in grace, equal with one. This idea of grace and growing, coming together. Presumably she's growing more and more like her mother, Hermione, because Hermione is the image of the figure of grace in the. I almost said in the film, figure of grace in the play. So, yeah, I think hints of this are shooting up here. They're sprouting. And it'll come to full flower maybe later in Act 4, Scene 4, I think is why.
3:11 Wes: Right, right, right.
3:13 Erin: But one of the things that I think I've come to understand about Act 4 and it's kind of unnecessary length. I don't know if this is too early to give a bird's eye view of the entire act. It's just that the length is doing some work here to help us shift tonally. It's providing some insulation, if you will, from the tragedies that have just occurred. Because people have just died in, you know, grievous ways. And now we have to forget our troubles and get happy. So something about the length, I think, is helpful. And even this speech by time, maybe it's oddity and maybe the fact that it isn't just a title card is helping that prolongment as we shift into something different here.
3:53 Wes: Yeah. Is this his long. I mean, it's not his longest. Hamlet is his longest. This strikes me as a very long play. But I didn't really check that to
4:00 Erin: see it is one of the longest. One of the longer. I don't think it's.
4:04 Wes: Okay. I'm looking now, I'm looking at the stats, and it seems like there's a lot of other much longer plays. So why does it feel so long? It's kind of in the middle, so. No way.
4:14 Erin: Really? I thought it would be in the top, say, quarter of, I guess.
4:18 Wes: No, I guess you're right. It is in the top quarter. But Hamlet's longest, Richard iii. Coriolanus. Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Othello, King Lear, Henry V, Troilus and Cressida. Henry iv. So I just read all of them. Yeah, the two Henry IVs are longer. So act four is very long. So I don't know. Yeah, I didn't analyze this specifically, but I. You know, I suppose it feels longer because in a way, it is two plays divided by 16 years. And we transition to a much different place as well in Act 4, you know, we saw a little bit of Bohemia in Act 3, but that was the desert.
And now, apparently Bohemia includes a little bit of English countryside as well, because that's the way it actually feels. And it's important, right, that we are making this transition to something pastoral, something rustic. It's important that Perdita now be a shepherd's daughter and that she will be the mistress of the sheep shearing. It's a context of renewal and animal husbandry. Is that. I don't know why. That's just something. Let's leave that part out. Yeah. It's the context of renewal and rebirth and the birds and the bees, so to speak.
And we're going to try and figure out in these last two parts of our discussion, how that recompenses everything that's gone before and what the deeper connection is between Leontes's jealousy and difficulty with the concept of gratitude and, you know, problems not just with Hermione, but his own child and his relationship with Polixenes. And finally, if I, you know, if my thesis has any weight, this whole concept of the relationship between mind and world. I think we want to try to figure out how all of this rustic context and these young, how that kind of renewal will pay all of that off.
6:27 Erin: You're reminding me that. That, you know, the transition actually comes a little bit sooner. Or maybe we just glossed over this at the end of the last episode. It's difficult to say now, but Act 3, Scene 3, is really, I think, the transition, it's one between. The hinge point is the famous exit pursued by a bear. Did we talk about that? Yeah, we did talk about that. Okay. And then the transition into prose, which is as obvious a shift of tone as anything, perhaps, but you're putting me in mind of the Shepherd In Act 3, Scene 3, around line 107108, the shepherd referring to what the clown has just reported to have seen.
His son, the clown has reported to have seen, which was not only Antigonus being eaten, but then everyone in the ship becoming flap dragoned by the sea. A word that I'm not gonna put into every single poem I write, not really. But anyway, the description of what's happened to both to Antigonus and his apparent dismemberment by this bear, and of the ship getting flap dragoned about, of course, has become funny already. Like, this is already kind of a joke. So anyway, the clown reports this back to the shepherd, and the shepherd says, heavy matters, heavy matters.
But look thee here, boy. Now bless thy. Thou metst with things dying, I with things newborn. Heavy matters, heavy matters. Is almost kind of funny in itself. Reminds me of. Is it 80s slang to say like, oh, that's heavy, man. It's real heavy. It must be, right? Because we were talking about. Oh, I think back to the future Doc makes a comment about whether or not things have more mass or weight in the future because Marty keeps saying, that's heavy, man. And so anyway, the transition here in the Shepherd's Speech is signaled for us before time even enters with thou met' st with things dying.
I with things newborn. And I'm wondering if this is a little bit of a. You know, it's literally a turn signal within the text to say that was tragedy. Right. Tragedy is meeting with things dying. Comedy is something about being reborn. Something about. Well, I said reborn, which is an interesting mistake, but newborn may be reborn too. Something about birth seems inherent to comedy. Maybe. What is that? The birth of laughter? Something about maybe surprise being inherent to comedy. I'm not sure. I haven't thought that through.
8:56 Wes: You know, the comedies generally get the young lovers together in general. Usually people are hooked up by the end of a comedy. So comedy, strictly speaking, is just. Just means a happy ending. And typically an ending that unites spouses or lovers. Right. In tragedy, everyone dies. In comedy, everyone pairs up. And sex and death essentially provides the engine for birth. Yeah, exactly. So the engine of renewal. And why do we. Yeah, I think it's a good question. Why is that in particular associated with hijinks and laughter and funniness? Why is it the romantic comedy typically, and not the romantic drama?
I guess if there's drama, people are not getting along, essentially. But in any case, yeah, I think that's a really good point. We get the turn signal, as you put it in the text, that we're gonna go to what is newborn and reborn. This scene reminded me of. Of the Tempest in that Miranda witnesses a shipwreck which turns out to be the cargo of that shipwreck includes her future husband, includes her father's enemies, but also her future husband. And when she sees it, she feels this tremendous empathy and talks about how much it hurt her to. I forget the exact words, but to see this happening to these people, in this case, the clown, the son kind of sees it as a joke, or it's played not for empathy and not for sympathy, but for.
For laughs. And it's interesting in that it kind of inverts that scene in the Tempest. Perdita, of course, is just a baby at these. This point, and she can't. And she's. You know, the shipwreck is of the. Has something to do with the Past, not with the future. Right. The shipwreck kind of in for Miranda is a forward looking event and her father has essentially brought these people or had a role in bringing these people to the island. In this case, it's a way of casting off the past. It seems like kind of a harsh fate for Antigonus, but symbolically it seems important that the past be shipwrecked, so to speak, or gotten rid of.
11:19 Erin: Is Miranda, remind me, is she watching it happen like we're watching her her watch this shipwreck happen, or does she report it?
11:26 Wes: She's reporting it to Prospero, if I remember correctly.
11:32 Erin: Okay, so similar situation here where we don't see the clown see it, but he comes back and reports it almost immediately thereafter. That kind of ruins my little thesis, but I think it still holds true. I'm thinking about, is it Mark Twain who said that comedy equals tragedy plus time? I'm wondering if I could tie that together.
11:52 Wes: Or is it Alan Alda?
11:55 Erin: Yeah.
11:57 Wes: Hal Holbrook, I don't know. Is that Mark Twain?
12:00 Erin: I think it might be.
12:01 Wes: Okay.
12:02 Erin: But yeah. What Woody Allen movie was that in the Alan Alda was that Crimes and Misdemeanors?
12:08 Wes: Yeah.
12:09 Erin: Yeah. I was just wondering if there was a difference maybe in tone between the Miranda and the clown scenes because Miranda was seeing live, as it were, and the clown is reporting it. But that doesn't hold up. But I do think it's interesting that so much in the second half of the play is reported to us after the fact. Even the reconciliation that'll come in Act 5, spoiler alert. That is reported to us.
12:34 Wes: Shakespeare's much criticized for that.
12:36 Erin: Though I can't quite make a distinction between Miranda and the clown here in terms of how they report the show Shipwreck on a literal level. I mean, we have time. Time as a body or a person, a body of people or a person coming in and putting just some distance between. And this is maybe what I'm trying to suggest about the length of Act 4. The fact that it seems so incredibly long and this insulation that we need from the tragedy, we literally just need a little bit of time in order to think that what the something tragic can actually turn into something funny.
13:11 Wes: I think we do need a sense of the passing of time. Insulation, I think, is a good is a good word. It's not enough just to cut to some scene with a shepherdess or whatever, and we quickly infer that it's Perdita we need. Time's appearance itself is comic and Shakespeare is giving A, you know, he's poking fun at himself to some extent. So he takes us out of the play a bit and then puts us. Lands us nice and soft back down in it with a different attitude. And as you point out, he's already done that with the pursued by bear bit and making fun of a scene at the end which might otherwise have been construed as tragic. It's pretty clever to make a comedy out of a tragic scene and then make that the seed of this rebirth.
14:02 Erin: I mean, I guess Antigonus death is funny. And we get this gruesome description from the clown, that the bear tore out his shoulder bone while Antigonus was still crying to him. Why is that funny? Or that the bear half dined on the gentleman? He's at it now. So he's still, as we speak, consuming Antigonus, who hopefully by this point is dead. But, you know, why is that funny? I'm thinking about, I don't know, something like, I'm a great fan of Buster
14:29 Wes: Keaton or Chaplin, you know, often the slapstick of dismemberment.
14:35 Erin: Yes, yes. But also the fact that so often their films are about men that are down and out. Lots of Buster Keaton shorts begin with him losing his job and being out on the street, and then a series of misfortunes happen to him. And for some reason they're funny because there's a slapstick element to it. But if we were to take that same premise and say, you know, an Italian neorealist film like Bicycle Thieves, you know, everything goes wrong and that's a tragedy. He loses whatever. These films all follow this trope, but Right. Of like one terrible thing after another happening to some poor schmuck, you know, and why is it funny in a Keaton film?
And it's tragic and sad and heartrending in something like Bicycle Thieves, you know, there's a very fine line and some of it is just Keaton's movements, like the way his body moves and. Yeah, the little slapstick kind of jokes that punctuate everything. So is that what this comes down to? That Shakespeare, this great writer of wonderful lines and everything, all he has to do is kind of turn Antigonus into a slapstick buffoon. And that's what makes the difference.
15:44 Wes: I think the slapstick is part of it. And also we are taken out of the play a bit because it's a bit abrupt and farcical. And in fact, this is one of the things it'll is described later on in the play as something like an old Tale or. Right, an old wives tale or a Winter's Tale. This is one of the things that draws our attention to the fact that we ought not to take all of this too seriously. We've been drawn into the tragic frame. We've really been drawn into a kind of psychologically realistic narrative up to this point. And now we're being hit on the head and told that actually this is just a silly old wives tale.
And I think from that perspective. It's easier to look at this in a more comic context. On top of the way the. You know, the clown's funny descriptions and all that stuff. Reading this, I found the clown and the shepherd's reactions to be strange. The act ends with the shepherd saying. Tis a lucky day, boy. And will do good deeds on it. Of course, they've just found gold. But they've also just found a child. An abandoned child. That is now going to become a daughter. I guess it depends on your point of view. Whether you see that sort of thing as lucky.
Especially in the context of the person who's obviously brought the baby being killed. Along with all of his crew. So they're describing something unfortunate as something that's from their perspective.
17:16 Erin: Certainly lucky for the baby. Who would have otherwise died of exposure.
17:20 Wes: So. Right, of course. Yeah. But in any case, you know, the next scene two, we don't, you know, we're not going to get the countryside quite yet. We're now in the palace.
17:32 Erin: This is the wife swap portion of the Camillo is. I see him as like a serial monogamist now. He's been Polixenes's BFF for 16 years. Years, yeah. He's filled the friend vacuum that Leontes left for Polixenes.
17:48 Wes: Yeah. This scene is mainly just exposition. And I didn't take a lot of notes on it. You know, we learned that Camillo wants to return. Polixenes wants him to stay. Then we get introduced to Florizel of late, much retired from court. Does that remind you of anyone? Little Prince Hal? Action going on here. It's less frequent to his princely exercises. And hanging out with the shepherd and his hot daughter. So we find that out. And then we find out that they're gonna go disguised. They're gonna go to see what's going on in disguises. Is there anything that's more than exposition in this scene?
18:22 Erin: I think just one thing, which is. Polixenes says that he fears that Perdita or this shepherd's daughter. Is the angle that plucks our son thither. So this is Just another twist of this fishing metaphor that's been running all the way through. Now, she, the vixen, is the angler and Florizel is the fish. But of course, they're going to go on their own fishing expedition to get information and by putting on disguises. This is some heavy comedy signaling from people who, you know, the last time we saw them were fleeing for their lives from Sicilia. So.
18:56 Wes: Yeah, women with their angles, with their ulterior motives.
19:00 Erin: So many angles. That's right.
19:02 Wes: Part of that angle involves having curves, ironically. Sorry.
19:07 Erin: Oh, yeah.
19:10 Wes: Curves for angles. But in any case. So now, going into scene 4.3, we're going to have to try to make sense of Autolycus. Am I pronouncing that the way you pronounce it?
19:24 Erin: Yes.
19:25 Wes: And so he's a scoundrel and a robber, but he seems to be an age agent of fortune, a mercenary of fortune. He's an agent of some of the good things that happen in the play, even though he's trying to fleece. People talk about someone with an angle.
19:43 Erin: I never realized until you said this that he's basically just Han Solo. Like he come.
19:48 Wes: He comes in. Yeah, that's interesting. He has a more kind of lower class feel in a way than Han Solo. And I don't know, that's a great comparison, kid. I just want my money, kid. Yeah, right.
20:02 Erin: If Han Solo was also like, I
20:04 Wes: will take you to the. Wherever you need to go, get in my ship.
20:09 Erin: Exactly. And if he was also helping Luke and Leia get together as a couple, which would be a bad thing for their children. But anyway, right. So when he comes in, we have daffodils begin to peer. Things are. Things are coming up out of the ground. He's announcing that spring is here. But it seems like with this intrusion of music, of course, music is also something else we could talk about as a feature of Shakespeare's comedies, maybe of comedy in general. I don't know. Maybe I should think of it not as gaining layers, but as shedding layers. Right. We're going from kind of cold Sicilia, maybe, into this warm spring of bohemia. So we're shedding layers of this trapped tragedy. When Autolycus comes in, that's really when the fun starts. That's really when the comedy happens. With the song.
20:57 Wes: Yeah. It's much easier, you know, if you see a good performance of this. It's much easier to grasp on the written page. When I start to see the songs, my eyes glaze over a little bit. And I have. And it Was the same thing with J.R.R. tolkien. Okay, where's the violence? Where's the violin? Oh, no. Now we've got Tom Bombadil to doing an enormous song here. I do love musicals, so seeing it performed, it's really great. And it really adds, of course, this comic element and this musical element if it's done well. I really like this, the way this is done in the BBC and you know, lines like for the red blood rains and the winter's pale.
I really love that, the idea that there's something as winter fades when spring arrives, that there's something bloodlike involved. I'm thinking of the sun. But what does he mean there? Yeah, I think the more literal meaning is people being red blooded and desire and rebirth and all of that. Blood, in other words, is associated not just with tragedy and death, but birth is bloody and people's cheeks get flushed. You imagine young maidens with their red cheeks and you imagine young people with their red bloodedness and Americans with their red bloodedness.
Just kidding. As in I'm a red blooded American. I think that's another hinge between tragedy and comedy, the concept of blood, which can be taken in a different way.
22:31 Erin: No, I'm just thinking about maybe there's something here about the kind of hibernation or that this power kind of like requires rosiness to follow it or something like that.
22:40 Wes: Yeah, I mean, the winter's pale. It almost makes me imagine a cheek. And then the. Whether you apply makeup or you hit your cheeks to bring out a little color, color is now, you know, and of course we can think of flowers blooming. We can think of this in. In many ways. But a colorless world becomes colorful. Things are frozen over, things are hibernating, including the bears, up to a point. Till they kill you.
23:05 Erin: Yeah.
23:07 Wes: And now everything is blooming, everything's coming out. So why, you know, why is the thief and the scoundrel the person to kind of announce spring here and sexual passion? He's someone who trucks in deception. And some of it is just outright pickpocketing. And some of it is he's getting people, later we will see him get people to buy these songs which are themselves essentially old wives tales, outlandish tales, you know, that he claims are true. But he knows how to manipulate people into buying them because they're designed to be bought for one's mistress.
So I guess maybe, maybe I'm answering my own question here, which is that, you know, it's suitable for him to be the one to announce wants spring because he's a deceiver. Because in a way, sex sells, so to speak. And that's one of the. His means of manipulating people. And also in general. Right. He's selling trinkets and these songs and things that men can use to please their mistresses. But in general, it speaks to the plumage of spring and these characteristics that are the result of sexual selection. In other words, why are the flowers out?
Why are the flowers so beautiful? Why are the birds so beautiful? Why this is all the result. You might think of them as the kind of nature's trinkets or decorations that are designed to produce. They have the function of producing sexual attraction. And whether or not you think of that as well, that's very superficial. Or maybe there's something profound about it. Here it is, suitably, I think, the deceiver who represents that. I don't know.
24:56 Erin: I like that a lot. No, it does. You're also illuminating for me, something interesting, I think, that's happened in his song, which I didn't notice before, which is, you know, we just talked about. For the red blood rains and the winter's pale in line four, in line five, it's followed by the white sheet bleaching on the hedge. And then we have the birds singing and everything. And then, as you mentioned, Autolycus will say, my traffic is sheets, obviously ballads, but also, of course, bed sheets. And, you know. Cause he's a randy guy. Right. So the winter's pale, that image of whiteness.
And as you're suggesting, a sort of, you know, a sheet of ice over things then becomes the white sheet bleaching on the hedge. I guess I'm interested in this idea of whiteness or of pallor becoming for Autolycus, the pallor then kind of stained with a blush. Or the sheet, the ballad sheet, brought to life by the text that then colors it. Right.
25:58 Wes: Or brought to life in the actual performance of singing or in the performance.
26:01 Erin: Absolutely right, yeah. Which would put us in mind of what's going to happen later with the statue becoming animated, coming to life. Right. So we could think of maybe a written text by that same token. Right. As being like the statue, which needs the actress to animate it. This is actually reminds me of something I saw in a really great Stella Adler lecture where she talked about. I think it was one of her great lectures on Chekhov plays where she talked about how she's suspicious of anyone who says that they like to read plays, which I count myself as someone who likes to read plays, but she says that Basically, the play is like a dead thing. And if you're not seeing it in performance, then you're not actually seeing. Reading the play is not actually experiencing the play like it needs to be performed. The thing on the page is just a dead thing. It's not even. It's only like 50% there.
26:53 Wes: Yeah.
26:54 Erin: This transition, too, between four and five lines. Four and five. I'm thinking about, you know, when does whiteness mean death and pallor and snow and rhyme? And when does it mean cream and bedsheets and freshness and light and virginity? Right. That's then ripe for the blush to enter. When does it mean the statue? And when does it mean the living woman or the written word and the performed play?
27:20 Wes: Yeah, no, that's. That's great. You're giving me a connection to one of the other themes here because. Yeah, I like this idea that the written word, in a sense, is something desiccated. You know, where you add water. Water. And then it becomes something. Or it's like a code of some sort, like a record where things are latent, but then you have to put the needle down and it becomes music. And some people can do that in their imagination. I have a bit of trouble translating the play in my imagination and to. I thoroughly enjoy it, but it's also.
I more enjoy seeing it performed. Well, I guess there are two different forms of enjoyment because I can pay more attention to the language when I'm reading. And I miss a lot of it in the. In the performance. You know, it's a matter of how we bring things to life. We bring them to life with our imagination. But one can al. You know, someone can bring them to life with a performance. And it seems to go for language in general. Someone speaks to us and it's just words. It's just sounds until we as interpreters can do something with that. And we had talked before about the.
Thank you. You being a cipher and how it is that something purely mental or linguistic or something like that could recompense physical reality. The hospitality given to a guest, the inadequacy of the mind to the world. And I think there is something of that here. So that something, in a way, language is like something dormant and pale or something that's. That's hibernating and it's little winter cave or something like that, until it can be given an interpretation by another mind. And then there's always the perils involved in that interpretation.
If you're paranoid, it could be construed in a way that makes you psychotically. Jealous, as with Leontes. So Springtime, in a way, is a different type of interpretation. It's the antithesis of the jealous interpretation. It takes what's desiccated and then it produces something bountiful out of that, something generous.
29:22 Erin: You're making me want to provide a reading or a connection, which I. Which I don't quite have. It's just burgeoning to Autolycus's obsession with money and pickpocketing. Because that money seems to me to be part of this kind of universe of latency that you're talking about here. I'm sorry. Thinking too, about the fact that when he meets the clown, the clown is going out to get ingredients for the. For the feast. Right. So the ingredients have to come together to produce the final.
29:50 Wes: And he's trying to figure out what things cost and does he have enough. Do some calculation.
29:57 Erin: Maybe the money that in the end, you know, Autolycus then decides to. When he does decide to help, when he is kind of spurred toward a good deed, which in a way seems to. I mean, he's not terrible guy, he's kind of roguish and funny and charming and all those Han Solo qualities. Right. But in the end, when he decides to actually do the good deed. I want to, but I can't quite make the connection between this idea of money's latency and then actually putting it to use. Being put in towards a good, towards an action, towards actually producing something.
30:27 Wes: I like that, though. The thief is taking this currency which only has value in exchange in a kind of human interaction. But in general, he's the rogue. Right. And he could be more like an Iago. He could be doing very destructive things within the play. But his roguishness has a invisible hand quality to it. His selfishness is going to actually serve a higher good. So, yeah, I get your association. I can't spell it out on the fly any better than you just did. But this, that. I like that phrase that you. Universe of latency. I love this one line. The. Oh, where is it? The kite. When the kite builds.
31:09 Erin: Yes. 23.
31:10 Wes: Right. When the kite builds. Look to lesser linen. The lesser linen being the thing that the ballads are written on the sheets. Although, again, there's the double entendre. You see the bird? Right. I guess it's a bird of prey getting high in the sky. Right. And I understand that he's speaking of a bird of prey there. Kidding. And that this is an association of spring. And so you imagine this happening over maybe a sheet. Thinking back to the earlier part of the song, of the sheet being out on the line. Bleaching or bleaching on the hedge. But something here about.
We're thinking of the sheets as what the ballads are written on. Something about the bird of prey. I don't know. I feel like I'm also. I'm missing something. Except for the association of the bird of prey with spring. Something high. You know, of course, the over overall import of that line is there's something high and noble about that. But that's his signal to do something lowly so that he's being induced by that noble event into his. You know, it's now the time for me to start stealing. It's now time for me to start getting people to buy these ballads.
And maybe it speaks to something about the high and noble passion of love and how one can make use of that, right? One can traffic in unconsidered trifles. When people start getting randy, when their cheeks start getting flushed, when they start getting loving the deceiver, that's the time for the deceiver to make his move and prey on that.
32:36 Erin: And he's also part of that sexual economy as well, right? Because as a bird of prey, the question is, what might he be snapping up? You know, like, lock up your wives kind of. Is that all of sorts inherent to this idea of the kite?
32:50 Wes: So he says, snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. And in my text it says, points to his rags. I had said before, said he was considered selling the trifles. So I was misreading that. Later on it'll be trinkets that he sells. So. So he's dumpster diving, essentially. He's picking up used things. And when people are moving out on September 1st of their apartments, he's there to. To pick up or he's doing. He's going thrift shopping. So anyway, I'm reminded that Macklemore song, which is about thrift shopping.
33:22 Erin: Anyway, oh, I can't help you there,
33:25 Wes: you know, and then the little, little remark about the gallows at the end, him being terrified of beating and hanging. So his revenue is the silly cheat. He's telling us that he's. He's not running around killing people and he's doing more minor crimes. And then the. The clown comes in and the clown, of course he's gonna. He's gonna pretend to be hurt so that the, you know, when the clown taunt tries to help him, he can rob him. Maybe we should move on to scene four. Now, I find the language to be Quite difficult in this scene. It really took me a while to decipher something. And in general, that seems to be the way with these late plays. Much more. I think we've already mentioned that. Much more syntactically complicated in general, but here quite. Involves quite intricate.
34:19 Erin: I attributed the difficulty of Leontes's speeches towards the beginning of the play to the tortured thoughts that he's having and the way that he tries to work out. You know, he wants to get to the predestined answer which he has decided upon. Right. So he has to kind of take this circuitous route mentally to get him there. Here, these speeches between Florizel and Perdita, the difficulty is indicative of a dance or of trying to kind of impress each other or maybe just of having a lot of speaking of latency, maybe a lot of, like, latent sexual energy that they're channeling into these over, overdone, overwrought kinds of turns of phrase.
I don't know. I think you're right that the style is just indicative of Shakespeare's. Of his late style overall. But I think it kind of fades in and out. You know, sometimes we get a smoother read and then we'll come to a particularly gnarly patch after a while of coasting, you know. So I guess I'm looking for the reason as to why this would be occurring in a scene which would. If we had to guess, we would say, oh, a scene between two lovers where they're declaring their love for each other and they're just being happy. That would, you know, if I had to guess, maybe that would be a coasting scene in terms of the difficulty of language.
Instead, it's gnarly, as I said, or flowery.
35:36 Wes: Ornamental.
35:37 Erin: Flowery. That's. That's much better.
35:40 Wes: Lots of flowers, I mean. But I think your point is very important, which is that we have these different forms of rhetoric or ways of speaking in the play. And that includes the intricacies of Leonti's jealousy, but also the smooth writing, as I. That's the way I experienced it of Paulina's persuasiveness and Hermione's persuasiveness. Those are the people who speak very well in the play and powerfully. But now, the language of love. It seems to be that with the language of love, we're back to this intricate language which, if we think about it in terms of gnarliness or floweriness, is appropriate to what we described before as the sort of the outer exterior or charm involved in winning People over.
And then also, you know, as we talked about in Much Ado About Nothing, it forms a kind of insulation as well. It's really charming to see this performed. The BBC, the performance I've recommended. The girl who's playing Perdita seems to be closely matched with her actual age in the play, which is, I think, 16. Right. So it's quite charming to see a 16 year old speak in this. They're speaking in a way that's quite formal, normal. And of course, Florizel is you give life to weeds and you're basically the personification of spring. And he's loading all these compliments onto her and she's demurring and saying, no, you're the high one, you're the prince.
Yeah. He's just called her the queen of the sheep shearing it's very important that she's metaphorically royalty in the situation and he's not. Right, so he's royalty in real life, but in this particular context, she's royal and he's paying her homage and she's saying, no, you're the one who's the prince. And then that leads to, of course, worries about what happens when Polixenes finds out. But I find, yeah, I find again, the intricacy of the love language very charming.
37:32 Erin: Something you said there about the topsy turviness of this. It's also. There's a lot of irony here, of course, because we know that Perdita is the Princess of Sicilia, right? She does not know. So there's a little bit of, you know, maybe part of the thorniness is this circle within a circle within a circle of the fact that she is saying, for instance, in line seven, you, high self, the gracious mark of the land you have obscured with a swain's wearing. And me, poor lowly maid, most goddess like, pranked up. So pranked up. Pranked up. I know, I love that too.
38:08 Wes: It sounds like deception. It sounds very low. But, you know, the contrast with goddess. Just gotta love Shakespeare.
38:15 Erin: She really is like a Victor Victoria joke in here, you know, like a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. You know, she's a princess who thinks she's a shepherdess who's dressed up as a goddess. There's a complication here, and of course, I like what you point out about the formality as well, because they're in marriage negotiations and though they don't know it, they are both royal. So part of what they're doing is that they're unwittingly forging a kind of treaty. Right. These are affairs of state. The joining of two kingdoms is involved here.
I wonder about that significance in light of this difficulty in the language or about any flirtation potential, marital negotiation as having subtextual. Everybody can drink at home. A kind of formality or a deadly seriousness to it, which this is performing in the. As you're saying, in the thorniness of the language and in the kind of thorniness of the irony of the situation and the fact that we're all. Oh, you know. You know what I could say about this, Right. We all are playing dress up. We all are kind of like making negotiations with each other and putting on various disguises.
I mean, hopefully not for long. Right. But this is part of the art. Art of love or of wooing someone.
39:33 Wes: Yeah. This is part of the petals on the flower, the charms that you. That one uses to attract. But in this case, they're flirting. But also it's very courtly and it reflects their high station, the high. Including Perdita's high station, which she doesn't know about. But she, as is commented on in the play, doesn't really act like a shepherd's daughter. So it's just genetically, she has this air of a princess about her. It's not that she has the two buns on the side of her head so that we know she's a princess, even though she's down and out. Although she might, I guess, in some performances.
But in any case, she's genetically royalty. And it looks like with the falcon, Florizel finds her because a falcon flies across the shepherd's ground. And you know, this is her also ancient signs of prophecies. It looks like he's been led there. I can't help thinking of the kite that Autolycus mentions as. In a way, as a sign of love, but. So Florizel counts that as a blessing. But they have something that is hanging over them that needs to be resolved. And as Perdita puts it, your resolution cannot hold when tis opposed by the power of the king.
Or the resolution. Solution here is he's adamant that come what may, they are going to be together. And it's at that point where we get the entrance of all these people. Shepherd, clown, Mopsa and Dorcas, what great names. Yeah, the two women who are fighting over the shepherd's son, the clown. And then, of course, Polixenes and Camillo in disguise. And it's a very lovely scene with Perdita playing her role as mistress of the feast, or the sheep shearing. It starts out with the shepherd reminiscing about her mother and all the multiple roles that she would play in a time like this, and feeding people and getting up on tables and dancing or whatever.
Yeah, very raucous. And I playfully chastises Perdita for not doing that. But of course, that again, she's a princess, and she acts that way naturally, so. And you get the sense he understands that. So in the end, he just encourages her to introduce herself. And then she gives that wonderful, you know, her speech about flowers. And she gives Polixenes and Camillo the flowers, that they're flowers of winter because they suit their ages. And then she says she doesn't really like the flowers of spring. We'll have to go to the specific things she says about.
About. She gets very saucy. Actually, at this point, I think Polixenes asked her, why not? And let's go to this point. So Perdita says something that took me a while to puzzle out. Art, which in their piedness shares with great creating nature. So let's go to that. This is around 89, so she's listing. Give me those flowers there, Dorcas. Reverend sirs for you. There's rosemary and rue. These keep seeming and savor all winter long. Oh, it's Polixenes who says she well fits their ages with flowers of winter, winter. And then she says, so the year growing ancient, not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth of trembling winter.
The fairest flowers of the season are carnations and streaked gillyvors, which some call nature's bastards. Of that kind are rustic gardens, barren, and I care not to get slips of them. And Polixenes asks why? For I have heard it said there is an art which in their piedness shares with great creating nature. What she's saying, and this I had to look up.
43:06 Erin: Up.
43:07 Wes: What she's saying is that these flowers, are they of summer or spring? I'm not the gillyvors, but in any case, the fairest flowers have been domesticated. They're multicolored and so pretty because they've been domesticated to be that way. Keep in mind that at the beginning, Florizel says, you can make flowers out of weeds. That's how wonderful you are. And she seems to be drawn to the weeds. Those are the flowers that she likes. So basically, when people domesticate the flowers, they're playing God, is what she's saying. Then Polixenes essentially says, but nature is what makes the horticultural art possible.
You can make a weed produce a flower by grafting on a purebred plant. And that engineering improves nature, it's true, but that engineering is a product of nature. And of course, this is a sly reference to the idea that. That she herself is a weed who's going to be grafted on to Florizel. So then he says, so stop calling the gillyvors bastards. And of course, she, in a sense, might be considered a bastard, at least of fortune. And then she's very saucily says, well, I'm not going to plant them. That's like wearing makeup to get a boyfriend, is what she says.
Let's go to that part because I love the way she puts it. That's something I had to look up. I'll not put the dibble in earth to set one slip of them no more than were I painted. I would wish this youth should say twere well and only therefore desired breed by me. It's like putting on makeup to make someone attracted to you. So she's, in a way, she's rejecting the deceptive element. You know, the trifles, the trinkets, the flowery blooms, the charms that produce attractions. She is interested in something more essential. She's drawn to the weeds.
She may herself be a weed in some sense. It's all so beautifully done.
45:01 Erin: Yeah. It's funny how, as we've said, she's sort of genetically well behaved, sort of genetically royal. And she also has a genetic hatred for bastards, I suppose, that she's inherited from her father. You know, obviously, the irony of this scene is, of course, the. That she is advocating against the very thing she should be advocating for. And Polixenes is advocating for the very thing that he should be advocating against. Right. So Polixenes is fine with crossbreeding flowers and refreshing or using the baser stock to refresh the bud of nobler race.
I'm partly paraphrasing there. Right. So he's fine with this in theory, but in practice he's going to get very upset when he finds out that Florizel is engaged to a shepherdess. And Perdita, you know, though she is very concerned about Florizel's family's disapproval, should be advocating for this mixing because this is what she wants to do herself or what she thinks is what she wants to do because she doesn't know that she's royal. I wonder about the significance of that irony and why the two are arguing at cross purposes. I mean, I think it's really funny that this is happening and delightful and I love Perdita's sauciness, as you say.
And I love the fact that even after Polixenes gives her this whole speech about why, you know, he's this older man whose, even though he's dressed up, he must still kind of register as an older man and someone who maybe she should respect or something, that even after he gives her this pretty well thought out argument, she says, ah, I still don't buy it.
46:38 Wes: You know, she.
46:39 Erin: She's not moved by it, which I think is really funny because you expect her to come back and say, oh, you know, you're right. Instead she doubles down, which I love. I want to connect it back to this God and goddess idea, this idea that she's goddess like pranked up. And also the fact that, you know, I'm thinking about our previous conversations about sticky language or contagious language. Florizel says, calls her Flora. So a kind of connection to the derivation of his name. Or maybe Florizel comes from Flora, I'm not sure. Right. So he gives this idea that she's the goddess of flowers.
She takes that and says, oh, she's just pranked up like a goddess. But in fact, the gods really haunt both Florizel and Perdita's speech throughout. I mean, she says, now Jove, afford you cause constant invocations of the gods in her speech. She'll say later, she speaks of Proserpina later on, who's Persephone? And obviously some of this has to do with the fact that Shakespeare is operating in this sort of liminal space between Christianity and this sort of old fashiony Roman mythology, right? That he often invokes in these romances. But it's significant because she's dressed up supposedly like a goddess and because Florizel then says in defense of his own love for her, that the gods themselves, humbling their deities to love, have taken the shapes of beasts upon them.
Jupiter became a bull and bellowed, the green Neptune a ram and bleated, and the fire robed God golden Apollo, a poor humble swain, as I seem now. Their transformations were never for a piece of beauty rarer, nor in a way so chaste. Since my desires run not before mine honor, I swear I'm not just trying to get in your pants, in other words, I'm trying to connect all of this together, I suppose, and ask, because I don't quite have an answer, what does all of this grafting and cross breeding have to do with this idea of the gods assuming humble shapes to get with the people that they Love, obviously, on its face, these two things are running parallel to each other.
The lofty gods are crossbreeding with the baser stock. But the necessity of transformation is the thing that goes beyond the parallel. Right? For the flower to be grafted. For the flower to be crossbred. The nobler race of flower does not have to pretend to be something baser in order to be grafted with weed, say. And also, how does that come together with this idea that actually there is no crossbreeding going on at all, that Perdita is royal? Do you see what I'm saying? And I don't even know how to express this well, much less tease out these various threads that are going on.
So in other words, what is the play trying to say about all of this cross breeding? Presumably it's advocating against it, then. It seems to be advocating against this idea that one has to dress up or pretend to be anything other than one is, even though that the theme of disguise is a constant theme in. In Act 4.
49:49 Wes: So, you know, this thing that Florizel says about the gods is very odd because for the most part, the transformations, as far as I remember, would happen to facilitate rape.
50:00 Erin: That's another. Yes. I didn't even want to go there.
50:03 Wes: Yeah, Turning into a swan, right? It's Zeus that turns into. To someone rapes later. And he did a lot of that.
50:09 Erin: Europa and the bull.
50:10 Wes: Bull, yep. So Florizel is disguised to look lower than he is. She's disguised to look higher than she thinks she is, although she is just as high. And his argument is that, hey, look, I'm like a God lowering myself to be with a mortal. It's normal. Don't worry about it. It's not actually a very encouraging line of argument, if you have ask me. But even apart from the rape connotations, which, you know, Shakespeare is very familiar with Ovid, and he knows exactly what he's doing there. So then the question is, you know, why are we getting this idea of the grafting onto a weed or the crossing of low and high when we know that they are both high?
And I've made this association between, you know, the lowness is the bare reality and the weed. And maybe it's more like winter and the highness I associate with the trappings associated with royalty. I'm thinking of Lear here. In the end, it's all just custom. What makes a judge? Well, they wear a robe is Lear's argument. And what makes someone royal versus not royal? I think the suggestion is that it's not real. A matter of nature, It's a matter of custom. Even though that runs against this idea that she is naturally a princess. But maybe we're just supposed to think that she's actually just good natured and in fact it's her.
What seems to be high in her is precisely her weed status. She's been raised by a shepherd. Shepherd. She's honest, she's straightforward. Maybe if we think about it, maybe she is much like a shepherd's daughter. And maybe she's much closer in a way to reality than these others. She's more. She's closer to the performance than the language. She's closer to something real. And so we can think again of the advantages of reality over mind and language and the way she. She can instantiate that and so pay off. You know, what's grievous about the first half of the play is the lack of reality.
First it's about the inability to repay hospitality with a thank you, and then it's about Leontes being cut off from reality. But Perdita is down to earth. She was not just, you know, she was put out to pasture. Not really to pasture, she was put out out, you know, to be exposed and to die that way. But in a way she's become creature of the earth. Maybe she actually says, by the way, she gives them summer flowers and says those are for men of middle age, I guess, because summer is in the middle. So to make it another association. I don't know if I'm really getting at your question, but the Winter's Tale kind of has the status of the flowery bloom, strangely enough.
And if we associate that with a kind of charm, because. Because the ballads that Autolycus is selling are winter's tales. And it's the kind of thing you can use to win a lover. But it's also if it's a fairy tale to some extent, which I think is different, but related, you know, it's the kind of thing you tell to a child, but it's the type of thing that Mamillius himself is relating. And we wonder if, you know, when Mamillius tells his mom, I'm going to tell you a scary tale, you kind of wonder if everything that comes after right is just Emilius's story.
But these fantasies are ways of deceiving ourselves, but they're also ways of loving, they're ways of establishing status. So I don't have any overarching conclusion about how all of that is related. I think we should leave that up to listeners. Have them tell us how all of that is related.
54:06 Erin: We gotta use that more often.
54:07 Wes: We do. We're gonna start soliciting questions from listeners.
54:17 Erin: Oh, I love that idea.
54:18 Wes: Some of the stuff. Yeah.
54:20 Erin: Well, your down to earthness. I was thinking along those exact same lines because I thought, well, you know, Perdita hasn't been. You know, she's neither the result of a grafting between higher and lower stock nor is her future marriage a grafting of higher and lower stock. Right. Because Hermione, we know, is the daughter of a king as well. So really, what has happened to her is she's been transplanted to richer soil to grow or healthier soil. So I like this idea that she's earthy, she's down to earth. Right. And that what's good in her could be the very fact that she's been raised by this shepherd in the sort of rich soil of what, I don't know, reality or something.
Rather than the kind of stifling atmosphere of Sicilia. Besides the fact that her father wants to kill her. Not a great place, maybe to grow up. A lot of people die there. So with that in mind, you know, she seems, with this earthiness of hers to kind of take on both the earth and what the earth produces. She becomes kind of like spring itself. In this speech to Florizel where she wants to cover him with all these different types of flowers and she names a bunch of different ones that she wants to heap over him.
55:34 Wes: Yeah, I love that line. He's teasing and, you know. What do you mean? Like funeral flowers? Am I a dead man? Then she conjures up this idea of him suddenly turning into a hill or an embankment. Right. And the flowers springing from that which is beautiful. And then she gives an alternative, which is that he comes back to life. He's actually, no, but you're in my arms and quick. Which I think is evocative of him actually going from death to life in her arms. It's a very Cinderella moment, except it's not sleeping, it's from death. So I like that.
And I think there's too many contradictions. It's confusing. Is winner representative of reality? Or if, you know, if the Winter's Tale is the superstitious, deceptive thing then is it the representative of the other, which is the representative of which? I think they're both representative of Both. Both, in a way, they're purposefully being mixed up. I think we're not meant to draw a solid conclusion one way or another, they're right. Just as a flower can be a flower of death or a flower of life, we're meant not to draw a single conclusion about the meaning here.
These things can be interpreted differently and they mean different things depending on the context. And love and life and death are related. Related in this intricate way. And love and I don't know if hate is the word, but love and thieving or deception and. And all the rest. All right, unfortunately, we're going to have to end part five here. We are not quite through act four. We're going to finish that up in part six and then do quick act five as well. It would have been nice to have these line up with the ax, but that's not going to work. Either way, it happens.
So. All right, thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 4)
Dec 11, 2023
Part 4 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
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0:17 Erin: patreon.com/subtextpodcast you're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.
0:33 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part four of our discussion of The Winter's Tale. We just got done discussing act one. Now we're ready to rocket through act two.
0:45 Erin: We'll see.
0:45 Wes: Although I think the beginning of act two is going to be. It's going to be a lot and then it really picks up. But yeah, so this. Now we get to the point which we've discussed. I think we've already discussed it a bit, which is the interaction between Mamillius and his mother and the ladies, who I take to be, in part, at least, his. His nannies suggestive, bit sexually suggestive. And then we get the part about the. His mom asking for the tale and him saying, a sad tale's best for winter. There's a number of references internal to the play, to this concept of a.
A winter's tale or an old wives tale. One of them comes up when some, I think some gentlemen say later on that the recovery of Perdita will sound implausible. It's like an old wives tale. The bear, the fact that Antigonus is killed by a bear makes it sound like an old wives tale. The fact that Hermione is still living makes it sound like an old wives tale. And then Autolycus, we'll talk about a tale of a Puritan and his honest wife. And that's in the context of him defending the honesty of his ballads after Mopsa asks for a ballad that is the print of life.
So they're looking for honesty in these tales. But in any case, this, I think, is this first internal reference to the idea of a winter's tale. And of course, Shakespeare is doing all of this intentionally. It has to be a reflection on the status of the thing that he's writing and not unlike what's going on in the Tempest as well. But the other. I think we've talked a bit about how this is a trigger for Leontes. And I think part of it is the fact that it's whispered. And the reason why Mamillius is going to whisper this to his mom, he says, I'll tell it softly so yon crickets won't hear something like that.
That right, yon crickets shall not hear it. And I think by crickets he's referring to the ladies. He's just had this interesting, you know, we'd want with you if you'd have us experience with ladies. And now he's going to. It's almost like he's trying to create jealousy. Okay, well, now I'm going to give something to you, Mom. And the ladies are not allowed to hear it, even though they've just been flirting with me. And so here we have a child who's trying to induce jealousy. And then we have an adult, Leontes, who is. Obviously, he's already been set off.
He's already in a state of jealousy, but it's hard not to believe that this feeds it.
3:32 Erin: Yeah, and it's an interesting. This moment is an interesting flip of the imbalance that we've been speaking about previously, where we have Hermione among a bunch of men. Right here we have Mamillius, the sole boy, among a bunch of women. And this feels to me like a very. The beginning of the scene is a very female space. It's a. It's what I would call in a grad class is like female coded space. Mamillius is commenting on their makeup. And also there's a lot of.
4:07 Wes: You learned it of women's faces.
4:09 Erin: Yeah, that's right, that's right. And there's a lot of discussion of the moon. Of course, he talks about the half moon made with a pen of the eyebrow. And then later a lady will say of Hermione, the queen, your mother rounds a pace which is also reminiscent to me of like a moon. She's, you know, she's. She's waxing, so.
4:31 Wes: And they're teasing him that he's not going to be the apple of her eye anymore when she has a baby.
4:35 Erin: And we know this, this baby too is. I have a lot of theories about this. I think this is related, very closely related to the spider, which will come later. But I. I think it's obvious to me, or maybe I'm just imagining this, like Leontes. It seems obvious to me that everyone knows this is going to be a girl. Like there's a kind of competition, male, female competition, inherent to this discussion with Mamillius. Maybe I'm making that up, but I do think that the spider, which comes in just a second later, practically maybe bears this out, that Perdita is the spider. I don't know.
5:18 Wes: Interesting. Before we get to the spider, just maybe as we keep going, we can think on why is a sad tale best for winter. What does Mamillius mean by that? I don't have much to say about that right now, but it could be something to keep in mind. And then I think it might be worth relating that later on, Perdita is actually, when she's handing out flowers to people at the sheep shearing. She will. To Polixenes and Camillo, she will give these winter, winter flowers anyway, flowers that are appropriate to old age. And she will lament the fact that she doesn't have any springtime flowers for if that's right, for Florizel and for others who then.
And for all the young people, people, she doesn't have flowers suitable to them. So winter, in other words, is also a stand in for age, which is not surprising. Winter's tale, old wives tale. It's something having to do with what older people tell younger people. We've associated it with superstition. Maybe also we can associate it with the deceptions that older people engage in, especially with regard to sex, Right. Oh, a stork brought the baby. That's why your mother is rounding. Not that those two can be reconciled, but. So childhood theories of.
Distorted theories of sexuality that are in some ways encouraged by adults. I just want to emphasize the fact that, yeah, this idea of a winner's tale has something to do with what it is parents are communicating to children. The representatives of old age are bequeathing to the younger generation. Plastics. Right. I'm thinking of the Graduate now. Again, someone pulling this idea in person and talking about plastics. But in any case, and also keep in mind, the way the second half of the play is going to recompense the first, the way the more comic part is going to be recompense, the springtime, let's say, is going to be recompensed to the.
The wintry, tragic first part of the play. Older people have to move aside, right, to allow the younger generation to do their thing and to allow the seasonal cycle to complete itself. And the question is, are they doing that in the way in what it is they're communicating, not just in old wives tales, but in culture in general, in what they are bequeathing to the younger generation. Are they facilitating that transition or are they not? And both Winter's Tale and the Tempest seem to be about facilitation of that transition. In Prospero's case, he has to let go, right, and give Miranda away, even unto his son of his enemy.
And we get some of that in this as well. So just thoughts as we go forward. I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that.
8:18 Erin: No, I like that a lot. I hadn't thought about Winter as
8:23 Wes: an
8:23 Erin: older person, in which case, I think for me a sad Winter's tale would be one of regret. And that maybe is it becomes a winter's tale by the end of Act 3 or at some point in Act 3, thinking about Leontes as being middle aged, as we've already discussed, and maybe in the previous episode, we talked about the moment that Leontes kind of animates that clock, that he gets it to speed up. So maybe in some way that's representative of speeding toward that kind of regret or mourning that we're talking about, where this is becoming the winter's tale. Maybe it was a fall tale.
You know, presumably in terms of the seasons of life, Leontes and Hermione maybe are middle aged or approaching middle ages. By the end of Act 3, he will have sped everybody up to this tale of regret and mourning, like an old tale, a winter's tale which then, as you say, I think becomes a tale of recompense and spring and renewal in the final two acts.
9:25 Wes: Yeah, properly speaking, it should be an act of mourning. We got at this in the Tempest. And the aesthetic in general, arguably must include not just the manic moment, not just the denial moment, not just the putting of things into sprites and goblins or distortion, the harsh realities of the world through one signifier or another. But one has to let go of the manic moment, the moment of grandioseness or even revenge, which is what Prospero would like to do in essentially telling the story of his enemies landing on his island and wanting to control and destroy them.
Instead, he sublimates that into something aesthetic. And there's a morning in that. Right. There's a letting go. And the larger letting go is the ceding one's own interests and ambitions to those of the younger generation. So properly told, The Winter's Tale should be about that. Improperly told, it can become something darker, like revenge, or in Leontes' case, jealousy. His jealousy may involve not wanting to let go of something as his wife has her second child, or as his good friend leaves or. I haven't thought that through. We're getting a little bit.
We're getting hints of the way the second part can link up with the first and involve some kind of recompense. But unfortunately, we are still stuck with crazy Leontes at this phase. It's actually quite fortunate. Don't get me wrong. This is the best part of all this, and it's why we're spending so long on it. And this spider steeped speech is just amazing.
11:01 Erin: So, yeah, speaking of grandiosity, I just. I have to start using this line all the time. How blessed am I in my true opinion? I love it. That's the way that the spiders.
11:13 Wes: How accursed in being so blessed.
11:16 Erin: Okay, there's the flip side. But yeah, it's hard. It's hard to be as blessed as he is with omnipotence and omniscience.
11:26 Wes: But do you want to read this, the relevant poem?
11:29 Erin: Yeah. So he goes on to say, there may be in the cup a spider steeped, and one may drink, depart and yet partake no venom, for his knowledge is not infected. But if one present the abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known how he hath drunk. He cracks his gorge his sides with violent hefts. I have drunk and seen the spider. Oh, I love it.
11:51 Wes: I have drunk and seen the spider. That's all awesome. So what is he saying here? This again gets at the strange nature of jealousy, which is that. Or betrayal, which is that if you don't know someone has been unfaithful to you, then there's a sense in which you're not harmed by it because no distress is caused to you. Right. Harm may be impending. It may be that there's betrayal if you knew about it. It's a clue to what might happen in the future when the more overt actions that could actually harm you, not just because your feelings are hurt, but in any case, for this to fully have an impact, for the Hermione's unfaithfulness fully to have an impact, he can't.
It can't just be that it's happened. He has to actually know about it. So you, you not only drink from the poisoned cup, you know what, you have just drunk and then you come down with all the symptoms. But of course, the symptoms in his case are just crazy jealousy. That's the thing he doesn't seem to understand. It's not that there's a spider in his cup at all. There's no spider in his cup. But he thinks there is. It's the problem. And the symptom is jealousy. The symptom is not he's taking the. His pain to involve an actual betrayal when the pain is caused by suspicion.
13:20 Erin: And I love the supremacy of thought here because thinking through this literally, and maybe this is too obvious to even say, right, but what he's describing is two situations, one of which someone drinks a drink, they don't know a poisonous spider is in it. So they're okay. Well, of course it's unprovable. And if they did later die, let's say they did drink a poisonous spider. Didn't know a poisonous spider was in there. Then of course, later, if they died, it would be attributed to some other cause because no one would know that they drank the spider. If. If you drank something, Wes, like if I gave you something and then I said, by the way, I put a poisonous spider in your drink, even if I didn't, you would then probably get sick, Right, because you would be. You would be upset or disgusted or something like that. And maybe you would gag or something if not.
14:09 Wes: Or induced by suggestion.
14:11 Erin: Yeah, exactly. So there's. There's the very suggestion of. Yeah, whether I put it in your drink or not. The suggestion is what produces the visual evidence which Leontes is reading as proof. So he's sort of reverse engineering this idea. But what's most interesting to me is, and I think I talked about this in one of the first two episodes is this X ray vision idea that happens on 45 where he says, I have drunk and seen the spider. So like so many of the. Of the turns of phrase he uses, it's in reverse order. I have drunk and seen the spider. That can't be possible.
If you. He drinks it, then he sees the spider. The spider's inside of him by that point, so he's never seen it. He's just had to have been told or presented the ingredient to his eye. But then again, that's another example of some of an impossibility. You can't drink the spider and then have someone present the spider to you to prove that it was in your cup the whole time. Something's broken there, right?
15:19 Wes: Yeah. No, I think it's a good point. Unless the spider has marinated in the drink and poisoned it and then it's left at the bottom once you've drunk. I don't know.
15:29 Erin: Could be. I don't know how.
15:30 Wes: That's my way to. That's just me trying to save the appearances.
15:33 Erin: But no, I think it's important. I think this X ray thing is important because it's totally insane pain. It's also, to me reminiscent of. It's a body inside of a body. It's a pregnancy. This is. This links up to my idea that the spider is Perdita. You know, the baby itself is like proof of. Of infidelity. You know, dance. Dancing around in there, inside your stomach. Right. In the adaptation that I looked at, Hermione is frequently feeling her stomach and getting. While other people are talking, miming, having other people, like the ladies come up and feel her stomach. And it's obviously suggested the baby's kicking.
16:16 Wes: Which one is it?
16:17 Erin: The one with Antony Sher. I Can't remember his name now.
16:21 Wes: Yeah. And it's set in the 19th century. 19th century, yeah. I didn't watch it, but I know I saw a preview of it, so I immediately brought that one to mind. Yeah. So she's touching her belly a lot.
16:35 Erin: Yeah, she's touching her belly and other people are coming up to touch it. And the suggestion that the baby is kicking and people are like, ooh. You know, like when they. When they're touching it, like. Oh, yeah, I feel it. You know, like they have that kind of expression on their faces. This is all just being. It's all silent because it's. While other people are speaking. But I thought that was a really brilliant bit of stage business to have. It's a little creepy too, because. Because on a literal level, she's a woman with a. With a pillow underneath her dress.
Right. In the costume. And then you. Then you think about the reality of. Of this play as it was performed in Shakespeare's day. She would be a man pretending to be a pregnant woman with a pillow under her shirt. So in that way, it's similar to the sort of, like, fake spider idea. But. Yeah, so it's like the spider is doing jumping jacks inside him. Somehow. He feels it inside him. He takes that as proof.
17:29 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. This has me. Had me reflecting about, what is it about infidelity in another that can actually harm us? Why do we care? Is it just basic? Can it be given some sort of explanation? The most obvious explanation is that it, you know, that it portends a loss of love, that they may leave me for the other. Their attentions are divided. Right. They're. They don't love me. I'm not. Not the only person for them. I don't fully satisfy them. There's the threat of comparison. There's the threat that a spouse would enjoy another person more.
There's the creation of this domain of intimacy and carnal, bodily, sensual knowledge that is no longer. That is an unshared domain that's supposed to be completely shared in some sense by the spouses. And one could say there's a specter of raising others. I'm not person's offspring, which is one of the things Leontes worries about. There's the breaking of a promise, the marriage vow, which will become an important feature of what happens a little later between Florizel and Perdita. This promise to forego sexual pleasure with others. I think there's something to do with not wanting the other to have more sexual pleasure.
Than you. You're kind of stuck with having the exact. Well, it's not the exact same amount. Right. So it can differ, but you forgo other partners for the sake of a spouse. But in any case, that's me thinking out loud about something that deserves a lot more thought, because I think it is psychologically complicated. Why it is that this strange paradox, if you don't know it happened, maybe you're not even harmed by it? Or can you be harmed if you don't feel it? If you don't know it, you can't feel it. You can't feel distressed about an infidelity that you don't know didn't happen.
I think that my final thought about this is just that there's a way in which the spouse or the person that you love is kind of a container for your own life and your own narrative. They're the person who knows everything about you and what's happening with you. And their story is. You're telling your own story to some extent through their eyes. And in some sense they are the. The co writer, maybe they're even the storyteller. And you're the performer. And one needs them as that kind of container or even narrative framework. You need that framework to be uncorrupted.
In some sense, the story, in other words, the camera has to be on you. It can't be on another person as well. So infidelity, I think the thought of infidelity means the thought of the. That containing function of another human being, another subjectivity fails, and that's part of the threat. And this is something that we talked about in the Tempest, too. And it's something that motivates not just jealousy, but revenge. Right. Part of the problem when we've been harmed is not just the pain of the harm, but it's the disrespect and the way in which another has hijacked our story.
Leontes thinks a lot about people laughing at him. There's a malicious storyteller. And what you want to do with revenge is to wrest the narrative back from that other person. So I think he's thinking, in a way, revenge, in a way, is the subject of the Tempest. And here he's doing a quite similar thing with. With jealousy. And this passage about the spider really poses the question, because it is, as I've put it, a bit of a puzzle or a paradox about how it is that jealousy or the feeling of hurt from betrayal, how those things work, I love that.
21:28 Erin: That's all great. You're giving Me a crazy thought. Okay, I love it. I'm hesitant to share.
21:35 Wes: The more crazy thoughts, the better would.
21:37 Erin: Okay, well, you know, I'm thinking. I'm thinking of adultery as a kind of numerical problem.
21:45 Wes: I love this already. I love turning things into numerical problems.
21:51 Erin: Well, from say, from a Judeo Christian perspective, maybe another in other religions as well, right? We have this idea of the two becoming one flesh in the marital, in the sacrament of marriage. And so in this conception, marriage is something like one plus one equals one, so that you merge in this mystical way with the other person. So in adultery, that's atomized. So instead it's like one plus one becomes three, like an extra person has been added. It atomizes the couple. Like it splits apart the union, right. And then adds another person. So you end up with this remainder or something like that in a marriage in which there's been adultery. And I'm thinking about the crazy part of this. Maybe this is already crazy, but the other crazy part of it is like, when else does that happen? When else do we have one plus one equals three is of course in pregnancy.
22:49 Wes: No, I think this is spot on.
22:52 Erin: Okay, good, because I'm a little disturbed.
22:55 Wes: Keep going.
22:57 Erin: Because it's the same mathematical concept as an adulterous relationship, right? And we've already talked a little bit about Mamillius threat to Leontes. I think I raised this idea that my professor had discussed with me, that Leontes is not jealous of Polixenes or Hermione, but of Mamillius and of the idea that he can't be the boy, he can't be the main character anymore, so long as the son is there to replace him. Right? But I think. And I think that's interesting and certainly true on several levels, but I'm interested also in this idea of the pregnant body maybe as being.
We've already touched on Leontes misogyny as being something especially threatening to Leontes. This conception of the spider, of something venomous preying on you, of a parasitical relationship, seems to be a mirror of what's happening in Hermione's body, Hermione's pregnant body. And that perfectly natural relationship, which in Leontes mind is like in this idea contagion type of thing we've been discussing, is perverted and turned into something poisonous, just as the lingering dram of Archidamus is turned into something poisonous by Camillo.
And poor Leontes can't win in my mind, right? Because there's a suggestion he might be jealous of. He might be jealous of Mamillius. And I'm also wondering too if Perdita's being a girl. Like I said, I have the suggestion that people know it's a girl, even though there's really no reading for this in the text. That makes sense that that's somehow something to be suspicious of too, if you're a man, right? How can it be mine if it's a girl and I'm a boy? Do you know what I mean? There's something sort of elemental happening in that regard. And there's also a recursive element of that.
A woman pregnant with another woman, which might also psychologically tie into this. So I'm sidestepping this numerical thing thing and adding in something else, which I don't mean to do. We can just discuss the numerical thing. But I. But it puts me in mind of this problem of pregnancy, which I think has many other problems attached to it psychologically for Leontes, but perhaps that's all craziness. Yeah, yeah.
25:03 Wes: No, I think it's a good point. You're reminding me of Plato's Symposium, in which various characters give theories of love. And one of the famous ones is Aristophanes' account, which is that love involves finding our other half. And quite literally we've been split off from other half by the gods. And when we originally eight limbed creatures cut in two, and then when we find that person, we're in love with them. And being in love and in that relationship is essentially about fusion, about refusing using with your lost other half. And Socrates rejects that and says, no, the love of relationship always involves a third.
You get a kind of union, but you only get it in the offspring. And it's incomplete and not fully satisfying. And that's the punishment of the gods, if you want to look at it that way. That's not what he says, actually. I'm adding that for Aristophanes the punishment is separation. But in any case, and this is all implied in Socrates account, but you get this incomplete union with the other, and then the third thing is the child. And this lines up with the way with our relationship, relationship with the mind of the world in general, we can put signifiers together, symbols together, but that doesn't give us this immediate fusion with external reality.
We don't have a direct relationship with external reality. It always remains indirect and not completely satisfying. So Socrates definition of love has to do with reproduction. Reproduction in the presence of beauty is the idea for Socrates. Not fusion, but the production of a third and the production of something else. And I think that's what your point about the third and the child makes me think of. And I think it's important because I think this is part of the. What happens in jealousy is that the reason why adultery hurts is that there's a fantasized fusion with the other.
And you, again, you want this single domain of shared intimacy they can't have. There's this one realm at least. Of course, they have to have their own lives. Right. But there's one realm where everything is shared. Shared. And if it's not shared, if it's not entirely shared, if someone's having another staked out another domain of intimacy, then the fusion is threatened. And of course, famously in psychoanalysis, you know, once you. Once you add a child in the mix, you get all these kind of Oedipal problems. The jealousy of the child towards the father, but also the father towards the child.
So the child intrudes on the parental pair in a way that's very similar to the intrusion of a lover, another lover. And so I think it's. Again, what you're saying is spot on about. I wouldn't say it's only of Mamillius, but that has to be it. In part, that has to be part of what's going on with Leontes. Psychologically, Mamillius is part of the threat. The new baby is part of the threat. Right. The ladies tease Mamillius about how he's going to be on the back burner once the new baby comes in, but that's also what happens to the husband, right?
28:36 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I love too, the way that this numerical thing we're pointing to is actually. It's almost a joke in the text when Hermione goes into the prison cell pregnant, and first there's just one prisoner, and then there are two prisoners, right?
28:56 Wes: Yeah.
28:57 Erin: When she gives birth. Right. And then, of course, there's that great argument that Paulina makes about how the child is not in fact a prisoner, but the point is that first there's one person in the room, then there are two people in the room. So, yeah, it's funny playing with numbers in pregnancy.
29:15 Wes: The other aspect of this, you know, the one more thing about this spider speech, is that he's blessed and he's cursed to know the truth. So knowing the truth is good, but knowing certain truths can be deeply distressing. And again, he's identifying the truth with his own suspicion, with a psychological state. Essentially, it's this kind of omniscient, grandiose, omniscient feeling that he has so he doesn't understand that. That, in fact, the curse is not about. He's accursed not because of the external world, he's accursed because his faculty of judgment is impaired.
And so he's got it backwards. And the judgment, of course, brings a lot of disaster for itself. But this omniscience of thought, it's as if there's a hint that he knows that his suspicion and jealousy are not warranted. But it's almost as if he thinks that. That the mind can affect the past. So this is a variation on omnipotence of thought, that his suspicion makes it retroactively true that she did it. I don't have the passages in front of me right now, but we may see them as we go forward. And this is not. This is not unrelated to an idea that I think does afflict people, which is the sense that their emotions, or the sense of what is normatively true, what is ethical or what is moral or what is just overrides the facts.
The facts don't matter in light of. Of certain feelings. I think that's part of what's going on here.
30:44 Erin: Yeah. Not to skip too far ahead, but around line 1 68. Is that what you're pointing to, where Leontes says the matter, the loss, the gain, the ordering on it is all properly ours. So he takes sole responsibility for his own thought and suspicion, and that doesn't seem to be a problem for him. Right. It's what he believes. And that's it. That's evidence enough. Right. He goes on to say shortly thereafter, that all of his suspicions lacked sight only. So.
31:14 Wes: Yes.
31:15 Erin: Yeah. Not for approbation, but only seeing all other circumstances made up to the deed. So in other words, he has all the evidence he needs, short of actually seeing them have sex with each other. I guess.
31:31 Wes: Yeah.
31:31 Erin: But this idea is that the. A notion or a belief that one has doesn't need an object outside of oneself or the sight outside of oneself to be conceived of or to be true. It doesn't need to conform with an outside reality to be believed. In other words, he is wholly justified without evidence because he believes it, as I think you're saying.
31:53 Wes: Yeah. This is exactly the part of the play that I was thinking about. Yep. And I call this section the Question of Evidence. Because Hermione says to him, at the beginning of this particular part of the scene, after he's turned on Hermione and is about to have her taken away, she says, you'll grieve for having published me. Thus, there's a lot of publishing and printing metaphors in this. But anyway, so he's announced her infidelity to the world, and she says, you'll regret it. And he says, if I'm wrong in those foundations which I build upon, then the world itself is without foundations.
And this again is a variation on the speech he's already made, which is that if my suspicions are nothing, then everything is nothing. If I can't found my conclusions on my own mental states, on my own feelings, then nothing is sure. Right? If my certitude doesn't count, then if this isn't certain, then nothing is certain. That kind of idea. And then we get a scene where the. Which I think is what you're just referring to, where the lords are pleading with him and they're making basically similar types of arguments so that the arguments have the same form as his.
Like if. If she's false, all women are false. Turning his reasoning on him. And what Leontes does then is he accuses them of having poor senses. They're just not as sensitive as him. And. And so this is a great line about the tweaking of the nose. Let me just read this. This is on near line 150, so cease no more. You smell this business with a sense as cold as is a dead man's nose. But I do see it and feel it as you feel doing thus, he tweaks his nose and see with all the instruments that feel. So when he senses something, he not only can he smell, but it's like his nose is being tweaked.
And then I think he's suggesting here, or in other words, they would have to be tweaked on the nose to have the sensitivity that he has by just smelling. And further on in the scene, it's not just about his sensitivity, but he talks about all he needs is his own forceful instigation or natural goodness. He can ground all of this in his own insight, in his own character and his own own sensitivity. He says he needs no more than what I know. His knowledge, in a way, is its own foundation. What need we make communion with you of this, but rather follow our own forceful instigation?
This is at a point where the count, where the lords are saying, let us advise you. And he's saying, I don't need advisors, I only need my own sensitivity. I only need my own mind. And you guys are all just. Just idiots if you don't see this the way I see this.
34:52 Erin: Yeah, it's like the. It's as though I love the passage that you're pointing to with this, I do see it and feel it, because that would suggest actual, tangible evidence. Right. But in fact, what happens in Leontes is that the knowledge or the idea seems to then produce this kind of sensual reality. So the idea precedes evidence and then produces its own evidence, which he says he can see and feel. We don't know what this is. He says, like, I can pinch you. And then he pinches Antigonus. So it seems like he says it literally. He says, as you feel doing thus. And then, bam, pinches Antigonus. That seems to reflect the order, the order of affairs going on in Leontes' own mind, which is. I say that this is true. True. And now it is true. Pinch. You know, rather than being pinched and then saying, ow.
35:47 Wes: Oh, this is in the dead man's nose speech.
35:49 Erin: Yes.
35:50 Wes: Okay. Because I have it. As I do. As you do. Feeling thus, he tweaks his nose. And I took Leontes to be tweaking his own nose, which is now that.
35:59 Erin: Oh, and my notes. Pinches Antigonus.
36:02 Wes: Yeah, yeah, no, they're clarifying that. And that makes more sense to say that he's tweaking Antigonus, because that, I think, is true to his character. He wouldn't just illustrate it for them by tweaking his own nose, he would make someone feel the pain of that.
36:16 Erin: Yeah, well, I don't know. It's also appropriately masochistic and solipsistic to tweak his own nose. So I think there's something true in your reading too. But prior to that, on 105, roughly. Hermione says there's some ill planet. It reigns. I must be patient till the heavens look with an aspect more favorable. So she. She's the ill planet that she's seeing. In control here is the bawdy planet, you know, Leontes. Body. Body planet. And so I think that ties into this whole idea of. Of the senses. It's just. It's just funny that he's. He's on the one hand saying he needs no outside evidence, that he does not need the evidence of his senses. His thought is supreme. And yet at the same time be so entrenched, as we said in the previous episode, with the sensual and accusing everyone else of being overly sensual and of getting to the senses only through his own idea.
37:19 Wes: Yeah, I think in the passage you pointed to, he says it's their familiarity was as gross as ever. Touched conjecture that lacks sight only. So he's telling us he didn't see them do anything directly. He's just interpreting behavior that might be interpreted as innocent, that others have interpreted as innocent. He has to interpret it. He has to apply some interpretative frame to it, he has to apply some theory to it to get the conclusion that he gets out of it. But he treats that whole process as if it were like smelling something, as if it were like sensitivity.
It's almost like a sixth sense. And there's a point in here where it's. It's almost sounds like he's a prophet, which is right. So he's having a vision in a way. It's not a vision literally, because he hasn't seen anything, but it's a vision in that metaphorical sense. And this is not surprising because he's going to reject the Oracle's vision for his own vision. And in fact, he moves on to the oracle. Now, at this point, after saying that lacks sight only, he says, I don't need the oracle. I'm just going to do it to help put you guys at ease.
Especially you, Antigonus, because you're a baby, you're naive. And so, okay, I'm doing that for you guys. So give rest to the mind of others, such as he, whose ignorant credulity will not come up to the truth. Again, it's that others are naive. But you see a hint of his own doubt. And we're going to see other hints of this in the fact that he's consulting the Oracle. But his own oracular vision overrides anything else. And he's confusing again, it's like a critique of empiricism. He's confusing the vision of immediate awareness of his own mental states, that sort of empirical experience, if you want to call it that, with the collection of data out there in the real world, those two things are becoming conflated by.
39:21 Erin: I like that. I think I give your reading a lot of credence of this prophet like quality. But I think also it's like he's a God. He's speaking things into existence. And so this is what I mean, where he says basically around 150, when he pinches Antigonus, it's like he's saying, I am going to pinch you, or even something less embodied. He says, as you feel doing thus. There's some passivity in that construction, almost. He doesn't say, I am going to pinch you. He says, as you feel doing thus. He's taken himself out of the subject position in that sentence.
So it's like saying, you are going to be Pinched. And then you pinch them. Right. So there's something in that, speaking something into existence. I believe you cheated on me there. You did it. Right. So there's something also, like, I think, that goes further than a prophet. It. That is like, literally making it happen by thinking it thus. Like he says, though I am satisfied and need no more than what I know, yet shall the oracle give rest to the mind of others. Right. I don't need anything more than what I know, because what I know is the truth.
Because what I think happens, produces result in the world.
40:36 Wes: It socially constructs reality.
40:38 Erin: That's right. But. But it does, though.
40:40 Wes: Thinking makes it so.
40:41 Erin: Well, that's exactly. That's exactly what I put down. I was put in mind of the famous dictum from the poet William Carlos Williams, who said, no ideas, but in things. Right. Leontes reverses that like nothing but an idea. Right. Ideas first. That's it. Only ideas. Those are the things.
41:01 Wes: He's a discourse theorist, he's a disciple of Foucault, but in any case, terrifying. And I think the. The. Again, what I see is the opposing. I don't know, it's. Epistemological theory is a bit of a strong way to put it, but the opposing theory is represented in the persuasiveness of Paulina and Hermione and their ability to speak credibly and persuasively. So we get some of that in the prison scene and where Paulina goes to. She's going to try and get the baby out of the. You know, so basically, Hermione's given birth in prison and Paulina wants to take it to Leontes to try and see if that will help him, if that will soften him.
And the guard is confused about whether or not. Right. The baby's in prison as well, and Paulina is. Right. Can I let you know, am I allowed to let the baby out? She was in prison with the baby. And so Paulina's argument is just that, hey, the womb is like a prison, and when we're born, we're freed from prison. So the baby has been freed, so therefore it's free to leave this prison. Really? Yeah, It's. It's not. So it's metaphorical, analogical reasoning. We talked a lot about this in Much Ado About Nothing as well. And Shakespeare's always ruminating about this.
And is it. On the face of it, it's not legitimate. Right. This isn't. If you had a logician examine this and ask whether this is a valid argument, they Would of course say it's not. This doesn't imply anything that you can come up with a metaphor about birth as being freed from the womb. But on the other hand, there is something to this. And. And there's a kind of rationality and persuasiveness to Paulina that is lacking, sorely lacking in other. And I think it's the same with Hermione, the only two people who can speak persuasively. What do you make of this?
It's an argument which doesn't work. Literal is the wrong word, but on some literal level, but metaphorically, I think there's something to it and it's. It accrues to her credibility.
43:26 Erin: Yeah, it's witty. And wit is its own evidence, according to this logic. Right. Like it's perfect.
43:32 Wes: Perfect way to put it. Yes.
43:35 Erin: It's somehow enchanted language. Like this is the language that actually makes things happen, as opposed to Leontes language which kills things. Right. It's over determined or something. So when Paulina says, I'll use that tongue I have, if wit flow from it as boldness from my bosom, let's not be doubted, I shall do good. Good. That's the exact opposite in effect. And cast from what Leontes says, even if it runs a little bit parallel to it. Right. I'm going to argue my way out of this. I'm going to think my way. I'm going to wit my way out of this.
Right. Which is what Leontes does, but he shuts everything down with a sort of lack of wit, of sparkle by the deadly. What do we want to call it? The banality of his own thoughts. Right. Something. Something which is overly determined, which shuts things down, which is too. It lacks wit. It's. It's like saying you. I say you did this, so you did it. Ha. That's. That's not clever. That's not interesting. But somehow being witty, that. That makes things happen, that works. That's a logic of its own.
44:39 Wes: Well, it really does. Yeah. It really does make things happen in the world. So when ideas are communicated in certain ways, they really do affect the world. For Leontes, there is no act of communicating and persuading and linking up with other people to make things happen. It's just the world is supposedly the way it is because he thinks it is the way it is.
45:02 Erin: Well, but here's my problem though. He does make things happen. They're bad things, but they do happen. Because of his thoughts, Hermione prematurely delivers Perdita because of stress. That's the first bad thing that happens, right? She's stressed out, so she has the baby. Baby. He's put her in danger. He's put the baby in danger. Then he drives. It's a little ridiculous, right? But he drives both Mamillius and Hermione to death by this psychological torture. So, in fact, this is what. This is where I arrived, I think, at the very beginning of our discussion when I mentioned the fact that I had had those blood test results that showed that stress was having an effect on my immune system.
And I thought that was insane. How could I possibly have thought myself into some state that would show up on a blood test, right? That seemed like impossible. And. But this is true. This is what happens, and this is what Leontes does. So though he is lacking wit, his thoughts are still having an effect on a world, and they're on the world, and they're still effectual in that he has a wish and he experiences wish fulfillment in the most incredible way, which is he gets rid of two people. He wants to die.
46:17 Wes: Yeah, you have me now. Yeah. Thinking about what's the difference between persuasiveness in Paulina's case and the way that can make things happen in the world, and the way jealousy and vengeful behavior predicated on that jealousy, can make things happen, I think one of the differences is that, right, Paulina can win over other people. She can make things happen in other people's minds, not just in the world. Do you see what I'm saying? Leontes persuades no one. He doesn't alter other minds the way Paulina does. And so when she, to the extent that she makes anything happen, it is a social collective project that always involves other people. And for him, it's just tyrannical use of force.
47:08 Erin: You're pointing me to this incredible statement that the jailer makes, right? Paulina gives her funny, witty legal justification for freeing the baby. She says, well, the jailer is concerned that if he lets the baby out, he's going to get in trouble. And Paulina says, you need not fear it, sir. This child was prisoner to the womb and is by law and process of great nature, thus offense freed and enfranchised, not a party to the anger of the king, nor guilty of, if any be, the trespass of the queen.
47:37 Wes: And the jailer says, those are actually good arguments, but. But go ahead. Yeah, yeah.
47:41 Erin: And the jailer says, I do believe it, right? It's like amen and hallelujah, right? She. So this is the exact illustration, I think, of what you're talking about, which is that he. She has literally gotten him to. To believe what she wants him to. Like he has assented to belief. She's convinced him she doesn't have to
48:01 Wes: break Hermione, the baby, or just the baby out of jail. Right. And do it deceptively or by force. She can. She can alter the mind of another. And. And yeah, this whole question of force versus persuasion. Very long history. Philosophically, Plato ruminates on it a lot. When are we just manipulating people? Also kind of a sub question here. And when are we legitimately just changing their point of view in the way that preserves their agency? Is that what she's doing here, or. I think it's complicated. But the important part is that she's doing something that Leontes is not capable of doing. He's capable of persuading himself. That's it.
48:43 Erin: Well, the. I do believe it. What does Paulina say at the very end of the play? Sorry for jumping there, but it's important here, I think. Awake your faith. Right. That's what she instructs everyone to do. Wake your faith. So she says, I do believe it. This is like she's imbued faith into him by giving this witty argument. What Leontes does, obviously, is like he vacates faith and trust. Right. He's faithless and accuses Hermione of being faithful.
49:19 Wes: Yeah, good point.
49:20 Erin: Yeah.
49:21 Wes: Because again, the extent to which there's an element of faith involved in accurately reading the world, we have to rely on others. We have to rely on their secondhand reports. We have to rely on our understanding of psychology to evaluate them and their reports so that we, you know, so maybe faith is the wrong word because we're doing that. We're doing checks. But I think in some larger sense, there's. There's. There's a faith in what I've called the chain of. Discursive, chain of custody. The. The idea that our. That on the whole, The. The fact that our knowledge is largely secondhand and comes from others is. Is something we can rely on. The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they reject that. And the same thing with crazy, jealous people who won't listen to their advisors. They can't depend on anyone, not even Paulina, to set them straight.
50:12 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking about wittiness also as fertility and a lack of wit as barrenness. And that leads me to scene three. If we could jump there. Unless we.
50:26 Wes: Yeah, we got one more scene before.
50:28 Erin: One more scene to go.
50:30 Wes: Here we go.
50:31 Erin: Well, this is where, you know, towards the beginning of the scene, we get the information that Mamillius is sick. And the explanation we get from Leontes is that he's conceived the dishonor of his mother. Leontes says, conceiving the dishonor of his mother, he straight declined, drooped, took it deeply, fastened and fixed the shame on it in himself, threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep, and downright languished. I love that. Like, I just. He drooped. So this is interesting because Leontes says, actually he precedes this by saying to see his nobleness.
So previously he said all he lacked was actual sight of Hermione and Polixenes affair for proof. Now, what he sees, what he is able to see is Mamillius thinking something, comprehending the sort of sin of his mother. So what he can see is another man having an idea. Right? His son is kind of a mirror of him. This is a very circular, barren kind of evidence. He. I think, because he's taking this as further evidence that he's correct in believing Hermione's infidelity, all it is is evidence that he's infected Mamillius with this thought. And in another kind of circle within a circle, which I have written here is I have circular logic.
And I also have something else, which is the bastard conception. Has the conception that he is a bastard. That's what I wrote in the margin, which I think. I mean, is that so the conception that Mamillius has what he's conceived the dishonor of his mother. So it means he's realized his mother is adulterous and therefore that he is a bastard. This logic kind of extends to Mamillius as well. Right. At this point.
52:25 Wes: Point.
52:26 Erin: Because Perdita, right, not literally, but like Leontes, I think, by this point has had this idea that, like, even Mamillius is not his. Or.
52:36 Wes: Yeah, he might not. He can't know.
52:38 Erin: Yeah, right. Perdita is obviously the one who is conceived of as being the product of the adulterous union. But I think this is the example of this contagion that, like, it's spread to Mamillius too. So anyway, this thought is barren, right? It produces Mamillius, droops and languishes, loses his appetite and he throws off his spirit. So later we're gonna learn that he dies. It kills him. Maybe this is just what I'm talking about in terms of the barrenness and the lack of animating wit and just the lack of sense, I guess, in anything Leontes said is barren and kills.
Perhaps because it's not animated by wit, which we. Which I think you argued about Polina's legal justification, that it's analogous, it reaches out to other things and therefore keeps itself alive. This is an idea that will be brought up in Act 4 with this. With this grafting right of two flowers onto each other that will keep the stock hearty. It's the same thing with an idea that if we can reach out to an analogy or to a simile or something like that, it refreshes our thoughts. It keeps them from getting inbred or something.
53:54 Wes: Very nice.
53:55 Erin: Yeah, maybe that's what I'm talking about here with Leontes. It's an inbred thought versus a refreshed, fertile, multi stranded thought that Paulina has with her wit.
54:08 Wes: Yeah, inbred is a great way to put it. He won't listen to others. He can't be informed by the minds of others. He. He's reproducing asexually, so to speak.
54:17 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think we talked about that before. Yeah. This idea that, like, he's the father of his own thought and it has no mother, so there's something gross about the product.
54:25 Wes: Yeah, so, yeah, that's interesting. You know, again, and with the idea, you know, with Mamillius fixing the shame on himself, it's as if he's. Mamillius is the guilty one, in a sense. Again, it gets us back to your point about Mamillius being the object of jealousy rather than Hermione. And I think it could be something to do with Mamillius approaching adolescence or something like that. Mamillius is the kind of emblem of the innocent, timeless youth that Leontes and Polixenes shared and their fusion. Then as Mamillius gets older, that is essentially lost.
Hermione was asking, basically prying with Polixenes about, you know, what did you get up. What naughty stuff did you get up to as young men or as boys? And Polixenes had to plead that they were completely innocent until a certain point. So I think that's part of why Mamillius is to blame. It's not only for taking away some of the attentions of Hermione, but it's also because watching him get older and reach adulthood is a threat to the. To whatever fantasy he has of eternal shared youth with Polixenes. And again, this goes to the. The whole winter's tale question and how it is that we.
That one generation bequeaths something to the next generation and lets go and is not simply threatened by it. And does that make sense so that you. Yeah. What types of communications are you giving? What types of stories are you telling? Are you telling the story that the central significance of it is? I'm gonna hold on for as long as I'm gonna Feinstein this all the way. Gonna have to pry power and everything else out of my cold, dead hands. I'm never gonna retire. And Or. Or I'm going to recommend you go into plastics. I'm going to kill all your dreams, even as I pretend that you're.
That I'm trying to help you fulfill your dreams, young person, you know? Or are you telling a tale of. A sad tale of mourning? Are you living and communicating in a way that actually paves the way for the next generation? That abjures rough magic, right? That abjures power and lets them come into their. Into their own? I think that's really interesting. And in light of all that, this idea of Mamillius taking the shame on
56:57 Erin: himself, I love that. And you're helping me see clearly here what I think I was inclined to read as glee in Leontes description of Mamilius's decline to see his nobleness. You know, he's straight, declined, drooped, took it deeply, fastened and fixed the shame on it himself, right? We get all this alliteration, which is like delightful, or he's delighted that Mamillius is so upset, not only because he takes Mamillius reaction as proof of Hermione's guilt, which is of course ouroboric, as I've already suggested, right? He's put this idea into his head and then is happy to see it flourish there, but also he's happy that this is an idea that's taking the wished for effect, which is it's destroying Mamillius, it's destroying Leontes. Competition. Yeah, yeah. Sick, creepy.
57:54 Wes: Yeah. And the way this scene ends, we get to really get a good picture of how paranoid Leontes is. And this whole theme of sickness comes up again because Paulina, she comes in with the baby and he can't sleep because he's been so worked up about all this. And she comes in saying, I'm bringing basically medicinal words. She can use words to relieve him of his sickness. So again, that speaks to why it is that her persuasiveness is important. And what he does at this point point is he has a ton of just great insults for her mankind. Witch, intelligencing, bawd, dame, partlet, crone, basically.
58:47 Erin: Cause if I had a nickel, if I had a nickel for every time I was called an intelligencing bawd, you
58:54 Wes: know, intelligencing bawd on a bawdy planet. And at a certain point he looks at Antigonus and says he dreads his wife. As if Paulina's forcefulness and her persuasiveness had to be chalked up to something about a failure of the husband to rein her in. I don't know what more to say about that, except to mention another one of these insults. A callat of boundless tongue who had late beat her husband. Husband. This idea that her persuasiveness is actually. It's nagging or it's the subjugation of the husband, it's the browbeating of the husband into submission.
And it points to, you know, I was talking about persuasiveness versus manipulation. But it could also, you know, in the domain of manipulation is also just nagging, breaking people down by using words that basically are just unpleasant, right? Until someone just gives in, something like that. So in other words, he can't read reasoning and persuasiveness for what they are. He has to treat them cynically as a manipulative external force. Again, there's an opacity to it, to use the word that you were using. He can't look at the internal structure of it.
It's just opaque to him. It's just brute force. And in this particular case, you know, he has to characterize it in terms of a nagging wife or a witch or however you want to put it.
1:00:33 Erin: Yeah, he sees her as oppressive, right? Like she, like he reads all power other than his own as oppressive and in particular, any kind of female power as distorted and perverse on top of. Right. So she has to be a distorted woman. She has to be a crone. Right. A woman kind of cannot be powerful. She has to be a witch. This is, yeah, just more evidence of his. Of this deep distrust of women and this misogyny that goes back to Polixenes account of their childhood in which the entrance of women signals the entrance of sin and something distorted, something perverse.
And Paulina rightly, I think, directs him back to himself, says, no, no, no, you're the perverse one, you're the oppressive one. It's all coming back to you, right? She says around 83, 84, Leontes says, a nest of traitors. Antigonus defends himself. I am none by this good light. Like, yeah, thanks a lot, Antigonus, for backing up your wife too. Thanks for. Thanks for jumping to your own defense. Per usual, this guy's worthless. I don't know what Paulina ever saw on him. Anyway, and then, well, she does.
1:01:44 Wes: She obviously actually does. Does wear the pants in the relationship, let's face it. But go ahead.
1:01:48 Erin: Well, well, but. But for good reason, because I'm not a fan of Antigonus. But anyway, you know that Paulina says, nor I, nor any, but one that's here and that's himself. For he, the sacred honor of himself, his queens, his hopeful sons, his babes, betrays to slander, whose sting is sharper than the swords and will not. For as the case now stands, it is a curse. He cannot be compelled to it once remove the root of his opinion, which is rotten as ever oak or stone was sound. So he's the traitor to himself. He's the sick one, he's the distorted one.
He's the perverse one, Right? So. So he's accusing everybody else of being sick, rotten, witchy, a crone, Right. Like some. Some perverted form of themselves, right? Really, he's the one who's rotten. And all he can do to respond to that is to say, as you already said, a callat of boundless tongue who late has beat her husband and now baits me. Right again. It's wonderful that he just responds with more of the same. Right? Because that's exactly what she's saying is like he's recursive, he's ouroboric, he can't get out of his own way. He's stuck in a.
He's like on an adulterous treadmill or a sick treadmill. And so what does he do? He just. Bam. You're a callat. You're a witch. Right? Yeah. He can't get out of it. He can't be broken out of the pattern until that fateful moment when he finally is broken out of it. Right? But even the oracle won't convince him otherwise until the death. Yeah, yeah.
1:03:25 Wes: Paulina could have her own, like, talk show. Oh, you tell me about that stray talk with Paulina. Or maybe Judge, Judge Paulina in there. But. And she's.
1:03:35 Erin: I love these.
1:03:36 Wes: Right. The reason why Antigonus looks bad is because she's the only one willing to stand up to him. Standing up to him. Standing up to Leontes, of course, means risking one's life, and he repeatedly threatens to basically burn her alive along with the baby. And it's a very dangerous project, but only she is willing to do it. The larger upshot of all this is it's also about his unwillingness to listen to the other lords and counsel and thinking through and testing. I think someone says, you know, why not do a trial? Why not do an actual investigation of this?
And he says he doesn't need it. So when he calls what she's doing witchcraft at some point, an excellent piece of witchcraft or nagging, this kind of combination of the idea of a wife. Again, old wife, old wife's tale, but as a wife, as a source of nagging and browbeating, but also maybe as a source of manipulation and witchery. The magic. You know, the kind of. The magic of women and how they make things happen in the world, which, of course, is associated with their being mothers and having babies and things like that. So for him, anything to do with consulting others or consulting reason or doing an investigation, any interactive thing like that that doesn't simply involve him observing his own mind and the force of his own feelings, all those things are forms of witchery which precisely reverses a situation.
Again, we talked about. About his omnipotence of thought and omniscience of thought, as if he can make something true by just having the feeling. That's the witchery. For him, the witchery is any potential influence that others might have in moderating, as he puts it, in moderating the extremeness of his opinions and his mental states. He's not. He doesn't just believe something. He's. He's attached to. Firmly attached to that belief.
1:05:47 Erin: You're. I just want to give you more credit for this. Paulina should have her own chat show thing. That is so funny. Your own talk show, because you're reminding me of. Remember that episode of 30 Rock where Liz gets her own. Her own chat show and she has that. That tagline. That's a deal breaker. Do you remember that?
1:06:06 Wes: Oh, no, I don't remember it, unfortunately.
1:06:08 Erin: Oh, my gosh, it's been so long. It's like. This is like Paulina, this is amazing. It's. If your guy can't listen to reason, then if he accuses you of cheating and the only proof he needs is his own thoughts, that's a deal breaker, ladies. You know?
1:06:22 Wes: Okay. This is actually. Yeah, no, I think I'm vaguely. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Would it be amazing? You know, you could do it if someone could do a skit and do, like, legitimate Shakespearean dialogue, You know, just do a whole Paulina talk show episode. But all in Shakespeare parlance, that would be amazing.
1:06:44 Erin: Be awesome. If he calls you a callat and says you are nothing but a blah blah, you know? Yeah, that's a deal breaker.
1:06:51 Wes: If he calleth thou a callat,
1:06:56 Erin: he hath broke Faith with you.
1:06:59 Wes: Yeah. Okay. Any. Any final words before we wrap this up?
1:07:07 Erin: Let's see, in relation to the magic quality of women that you're talking about. And maybe some further passivity, kind of passive construction again, that Leontes uses to distance himself from the reality of his own thoughts and thereby take them as evidence, as if he's just coming upon something in a field that has nothing to do with him. I'm thinking of line, round line, 1, 7. 78, when he talks about what should happen to this baby, because Paulina has meanwhile brought in the baby to show to him, and he says, as by strange fortune, it came to us.
Right. It just puts me in mind of what you're saying about this magical quality. Like, you know, that this baby is like a changeling that's just shown up on their doorstep. He removes Hermione's, you know, this adulterous act from him, and also, at the same time, admits the mysterious magical quality of childbirth, too, within this idea that it came to us by strange fortune. That's the way any child comes to you.
1:08:17 Wes: Right.
1:08:18 Erin: You know, even if you're a mother, you give birth to this baby, it's always going to be, you know, that child is always going to be a kind of strange fortune. Right. Um, and so this turn of phrase is really evocative for me. And he says that he commends it strange or. Or he asks Antigonus, rather, to commend it strangely to some place where chance may nurse or end it. That's another really interesting.
1:08:44 Wes: Yeah. Make nature the mother. Later on, Antigonus will say, ravens be thy nurses. He's hoping that the child would be brought up by raven, so. Hoping that. Hoping against hope that somehow the child would survive with nature, in a sense, as the mother. But, yeah, I made a note too, of this. Commend it strangely to some place, which I take to be commended. In a foreign locale. Right. That's the main meaning of that. Or as alone. Right. Alone and as stranger in some place. Yeah. But it's also like the word strange is also evocative of witchery, which is something that's come up several times in this scene.
1:09:36 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. It's like instead of the expression easy come, easy go, it's strangely come, strangely go. We have no idea how it got here. I did not have sexual relations with this woman, so I don't know how this happened. And then it's going to leave to this passivity that admits no responsibility for the child and allows him to psychologically abandon it. Even when it's in front of him, as he's already kind of mentally abandoned it for a good act and a half now.
1:10:09 Wes: And it does, you know, it is another reminder of the child childhood theory of sexuality. The stork bringing something or taking it away as if he's disgusted by the whole concept of the biology of birth. Who knows how it got here? I don't want to think about that. And now I'm going to give it a kind of rebirth that is also a killing. But I'm going to bring it into being in some other locale where I'm not as freaked out by the sexually reproductive nature of all this. As I had pointed out before. I think the old wives tale or fairy tales, these things are to some extent in some cases related to childhood perceptions of the world, including sexuality, and as defenses against or as theories or sublimations of ideas, raw, more raw ideas about sexuality and aggression and all the rest of it.
So in a sense, he's creating. It becomes more of a winter's tale in the Acts 3 through 5. Right. And then the reason why we spent so much time discussing the first two acts is this is all the psychological thriller. This is where all the, the psychological thriller element of the. The play happens. And the second half is going to be all, all fairy tale land in a way, or old wives tale land in a way with lots of implausible things happening. Okay, so we are through Act 2, I think. Yes. In the next two parts of this, we will theoretically cover the rest of the play.
I think that is possible.
1:11:56 Erin: I think so.
1:11:57 Wes: I don't. You know, again, I think you. If the second half of the play is more. It's a completely different animal and it's also going to be a less time consuming animal, especially given all the setup that we've done with the psychology and the first four parts of our discussion.
1:12:16 Erin: That's right. That's right. And we keep referring to the last two acts, keep puncturing our discussion of the first three. So I think we've done quite a bit of setup and discussed some key points already.
1:12:29 Wes: So true.
1:12:29 Erin: Yeah.
1:12:30 Wes: All right.
1:12:30 Erin: Okay. Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com or patreon.com/ subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter @enjoysubtext.
Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 3)
Dec 04, 2023
Part 3 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
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0:16 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast you're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.
0:34 Wes: We are continuing our discussion of Shakespeare's the Winter's Tale. This is part three of a multi part series on the Winter's Tale. I think we may have said in our, in the last part that we were probably going to go for four parts. I think this is going to be a six part series now because we only got through act, not all of act one. We got through part of act one in the first two parts. In part three, we are going to launch ourselves at the beginning of Act 2.
1:07 Erin: I'm predicting this is going to take roughly 16 years. So by the time Perdita is ready to marry, we will be done.
1:15 Wes: That's right. We should call on time to intervene here and just fast forward us. But yeah, so we're not going line by line, but we're, we're taking it easy. So to Speak. And I don't know if we mentioned last time that we are. We're going to be releasing weekly now. So we're doing twice as much recording, maybe a little bit more. And then we are not putting. Instead of doing Postscript, we are doing it, what's essentially a part two. And most of those will not behind. Be behind the paywall. So that's the new approach that we're taking. I don't think. Did we mention that in our last.
1:53 Erin: I don't think so.
1:54 Wes: Okay, so we left off at the point where Leontes had been very mean to Hermione and had to say the least, and had her carted off to jail.
2:09 Erin: Oh, that's where we left off.
2:10 Wes: Okay, I'm looking at act one, scene two. And we were just about to get into his conversation with Camillo. He had just finished his rant about it's a bawdy planet and there's no barricado for belly. People are getting cuckolded, Men are getting cuckolded left and right. And then that part of the scene ends with, I'm like you. Mamillius says, I am like you. They say, leontes, why, that's some comfort. So at least you're my child. So then we get Camillo, and we wanted to get into the scene a bit, in part for the. There's the famous speech about the spider and the level of paranoia.
We get some real insight into that in this scene because Camillo is a wise advisor and is going to try to put the brakes on this, but to no avail. So he starts out by noting the interaction between Polixenes and Hermione and asks Camillo why it is that Polixenes stayed. And Camillo says, at the queen's. At the good queen's entreaty. And Leontes replies that the queens, be it good quote, unquote, shall be pertinent. But so it is. It is not. Was this taken by any understanding pate but thine. For thy conceit is soaking. I'm just. This isn't a major point that I'm getting at here.
I just. I love this line. For thy conceit is soaking. And I had to think about what it. It meant. His imagination is absorbent, and he is likely to notice things that others are not likely to notice. So Leontes is curious. Leontes has noticed this. It's the basis for his jealousy. Camillo, at least has noticed the fact that the queen. That Polixenes stayed on the queen's entreaty. And Leontes is what he's asking here is as if other people have looked at it with the same level of suspicion. And in a way, he's making the assumption that Camilo's absorbent imagination has drawn the same conclusion that Leontes has about her infidelity, which of course he hasn't.
So I guess this is important in the sense that there's a big confusion in Leontes about what constitutes evidence, what constitutes insight. He's going to tell us over and over again that it's enough for him to feel suspicion. And because of the fact that he has these very heightened senses and is very aware of the world, that's enough evidence for him. It's more trustworthy than what his advisors are going to say, for instance. And in any case. So I thought that was a. You know, I just thought that was a great way of putting.
4:54 Erin: Is great. Thy conceit is soaking. Is really wonderful turn of phrase. And then there's a discussion between Leontes and Camillo shortly thereafter about what constitutes negligence. And there's this idea in Camillo's speech about being willfully negligent, which I think is really interesting. So what Leontes sees as. What he sees as heightened understanding on Camillo's part would suggest that Camillo needs to come to the same conclusion that Leontes has, that Camillo needs to look at the evidence and see what Leontes sees in it. And the fact that he doesn't means that he's been negligent, which supposes that a sort of heightened, insane way of.
Of interpreting factual information. Right. Is. Is. Is normal. And that to not see this kind of pattern that Leontes sees is negligent. The. In other words, that Camillo somehow isn't trying hard enough, right. To come to the imaginary conclusion that Leontes comes to. But since we spoke in the previous episodes about how suggestive the language is between Polixenes and Hermione, I do wonder if there's a certain amount of negligence on Camillo's part. I don't know if I've come out the other side now, and I agree with Leontes that they're acting very suspicious, as we've already hinted at before.
So what constitutes negligence to a.
6:28 Wes: That was the original ending of the play, by the way. Leontes and Hermione are in bed together, reading, and she says, you know what, honey? You were actually right all along. It's okay, Hermione, I forgive you. And then roll credits. Sorry, sorry to interrupt.
6:47 Erin: No, no, yeah. It just things. Like, to put this another way, Right. We have to, in order to not go insane the way Leontes has, we have to admit a certain amount of negligence all the time. Right. In order to tamp down the things that we could be noticing, if we noticed everything around us, we would go insane. So where is the line between fact finding, or I should say clue gathering and willful negligence? And I think this is what the discussion between Leontes and Camillo is getting at. Around line 242. And then in Camilo's response, around 250.
7:27 Wes: Yeah. So right after telling Camillo that he has such a great. That he's so perceptive, he finds out that Camillo doesn't share his paranoia and then starts attacking immediately. And he does something which he will do in other places in the play with people who are trying to make him be more reasonable, which is, you guys are just so naive. You don't know how the world works. Again, it's always an appeal to the bawdy planet framework. You don't know how deceptive people are and licentious and all of that stuff. So we have been deceived in thy integrity, deceived in that which seems so.
So he's, you know, now Camillo has deceived him into thinking that he was a wise counselor. And then in the next fool thou seest a game played home, the rich stake drawn and takest it all for jest. So in other words, Camillo noticed that she got him to stay. She got that Hermione got Polixenes to stay, but he's not willing to draw the right conclusions from that. He just takes it as nothing, just takes it as a jest or takes it for what it is at surface level. But Leontes sees underneath the surface. I think the thing in the first two parts of our discussion that I emphasized was the way in which this play is an ethical and epistemological reflection on the world that involves.
It's a reflection on the inadequacy of the mental world and the social world to the physical world. So this question of how do you recompense hospitality? Well, you can only say thanks, and that's not anything, that's nothing. And then in this case it's about. The epistemological problem is about the role of suspicion in drawing these conclusions. But not just suspicion, but theoretical frameworks in general. So sometimes I think there's a critique of empiricism here, because Leontes will say, I don't need your advice. And again, we'll not just say this to Camillo, but to other advisors.
Later. I don't need trials. I'm not even going to trust the oracle. I'm not going to trust any secondhand sources. This is like what the conspiracy theorist does. I can trust my own firsthand experience. That's what's trustworthy. I'm a radical empiricist. Except that experience is that word can include an equivocation. Is it actual empirical experience? Is it the actual observations? Or is it your own mental state or your own, the theory that you're applying to the data and that where that theory may be nothing more than suspicion, or it may be some cynical outlook, it may be the bawdy planet theory that you apply to some innocent interaction between your friend and your wife, and then the data gets interpreted into something sinister.
So, again, I think we are dealing with the relationship between mind and world and the inadequacy of one to the other. In the first case, it had something to do with thankfulness, and in this case it has to do with what's going on with his jealousy.
10:50 Erin: I love that. And I'm wondering if I could wrap this around into something else that you're making me think of or if these things tie together, because I'm thinking about this idea of one's firsthand experience being paramount and wondering if that means that automatically that's going to increase the opacity of everyone else around you.
11:10 Wes: Right?
11:10 Erin: That if you only trust your own firsthand experience, you can't take anything anybody else says on faith, and it denies their own interiority, or that interiority could be useful to you in some way, could add to your own experience. Is that.
11:25 Wes: Yeah, correct. First of all, that's great. I love the way you put that. The making others opaque.
11:32 Erin: Well, and then every time you say bawdy planet, of course, I know you're saying B A W, D Y, but I hear body, B, O, D, Y. And of course, a planet is also a planetary body. And I'm thinking about the animalistic metaphors that occur throughout the first two acts, maybe longer, but I'm just thinking about those two right now. The repeated reference of Hermione to a horse or to a cow, and this is also carried out in the male equivalents of these things as well. But this reduction to the animalistic, which Then at line 276 in this conversation between Camillo and Leontes turns into something that's almost like a.
Oh, what's the word? An effigy. She becomes a hobby horse, right? Which is supposed to be. It's glossed in my notes as a slut a woman who could be ridden by anybody. Right. So. So we have this sort of reduction to animals and then further reduced to just a pure hollow body. It's just a representation of something else, even a representation of an animal, not even of a woman. Shortly thereafter, we have. He calls her. Let's see, she says rank is any flax wench that puts to before her troth plight. That too is very suggestive to me, obviously.
12:50 Wes: Sorry, what line is that?
12:52 Erin: This is the following line 277. So the. This means a woman. A flax wench is a woman who works with flax to make cheap cloth. But also the phrase has contained it within the idea that the woman is made of flax. Right. She's a flax woman.
13:08 Wes: And these puts to before her troth plight has sex before marriage. Is that what that is?
13:13 Erin: Yes, yes. And so these two reductions to something which is something which is totally hollow. Right. Has no interiority that. In other words, that Hermione is not a real person, she's an animal. Or even an effigy of an animal or an effigy of a woman. Of course, this will be really interestingly turned inside out when she becomes a statue that then actually becomes a real live woman. But I'm wondering if this is a further illustration of the kind of mind that you're speaking of, which would reduce everyone to a kind of flatness or a kind of hollowness.
13:55 Wes: Yeah, I think that's great.
13:56 Erin: Also, I'm thinking too about just because empiricism made me think of this, I'm thinking also about what I believe would be a contemporary understanding of animals as right as machines. Wasn't that the theory for a long time that animals were just extremely sophisticated?
14:12 Wes: Well, that was machines on a certain level. Descartes theory this would have been. And I don't. This predates Descartes. I don't know how much it was in the air, but there's a lot in here that makes me think of Descartes, by the way, and I put that in my notes. And of course it predates that, but it wouldn't be surprising if that's already part of the culture to some extent. There's a lot in Shakespeare that's suggestive of skeptical strains in the history of ideas, which is not surprising because the Renaissance and the texts that they've discovered that are leading to this sort of perspective, I mean, I think that started in the 1400s, the rediscovery of Lucretius de rerum Natura and Epicureanism and Atomism and all the things that we take for granted in the modern world.
The way of looking at things scientifically, that's been around for quite a while and of course, obviously is a big part of what makes Shakespeare the introduction of the skeptical and the scientific frame of mind and the anti superstitious frame of mind. Does that make sense?
15:23 Erin: Yes, definitely.
15:25 Wes: But you were thinking about in particular of animals. Descartes famously saying that animals are machines. And maybe that idea is at work here. Here.
15:34 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think so. But maybe just for the sake of accuracy, I'll, I'll back off that a little bit and just say that, that I just think there's a curious, coming full circle here where Leontes is trying to see into people imagining their supposedly secret thoughts. But ultimately what that does, ironically, is reduce them to bodies or people who are just ruled by their appetites and increases the sense of the. The actual impenetrability of another human being.
16:04 Wes: Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. I think that when you talk about the opacity of others, again, I think about this in relation to conspiracy theory, and I know I've talked about this before, but the conspiracy theorist in a way is not unscientific, but ultra scientific. They are too focused on the concept of firsthand experience. So people 9, 11 truthers want to pretend that they can do experiments that show that the towers couldn't have fallen based on X, Y or Z. In other words, they don't trust the experts, which in some cases is not surprising.
But more importantly, they don't trust their ability to rely on other human beings as a source of knowledge or as one of the foundations for their knowledge, which we all have to do that. And it's not because we're naive. It's not because we don't know that people can be deceptive, as someone like Leontes thinks. It's just that we think we know enough about human psychology. We know that deception is motivated in certain ways. We know that people aren't diabolical. Exactly. It's not that they're Satan incarnate. They don't deceive in order just to get for kicks.
Right. They have things that they want and those are predictable and we're able to evaluate those. And part of our ability to evaluate them is about understanding the psychology of it, including the fact that if the conspiracy theorist thinks that there can be these large scale cooperative, deceptive practices, when we know that people are very bad at cooperating in that kind of way, and that the truth would probably out and so on and so forth. So this opacity to others, as you described it, I think is very important here. I really like the idea of this reduction of people to their appetites.
It's a very cynical way of viewing people, and in the conspiracy theorist, it comes out as a reduction of people to their worst motives. And it's not actually psychologically realistic. It's not complex enough. And ironically, it is in this. I think this is the point you were making. It's in this reduction of people to mechanism and the failure to appreciate their subjectivity, the fact of their opacity, treating them almost like atoms or particles or something, that one becomes deceived and unrealistic. It's almost like, again, a case of being overly scientific, which turns out to be pseudo scientific about people.
Right. There's certain forms of knowledge that. That involve our appreciation of the interior lives of others. And of course, in general, most of our knowledge is just secondhand. We know there was a moon landing, but not personally, not from direct experience, but because we trust the social chain of custody.
18:56 Erin: That's great. I think that leads us right into Leontes' speech about nothing at 285. Maybe I'll just read the whole thing. Camillo is telling him that actually this doesn't quite follow from what Camillo says. It's almost as if he's responding to something that Camillo has said, that. That this is all nothing. But Camillo actually never uses the word nothing. But Leontes comes back with is whispering nothing, is leaning cheek to cheek, is meeting noses, kissing with inside lip, stopping the career of laughter with a sigh, a note infallible, of breaking honesty, horsing foot on foot, skulking in corners, wishing clocks more swift hours, minutes, noon, midnight, and all eyes blind with a pin and web but theirs, theirs only that would unseen be wicked Is this nothing.
Why then the world and all that's in it is nothing. The covering sky is nothing. Bohemia nothing, my wife is nothing nor nothing. Have these nothings. If this be nothing so great. I know we probably talked in the Much Ado about Nothing episode, of course, about nothingness as being a rather, maybe not a rude epithet, but certainly a suggestive one about female genitalia. And I wonder if this is also something we could tie into. Or that idea, of course, it's all over the speech. But if it's something that we could tie into this idea of opacity as well, which is the unknowability of a woman, in this instance, to a man, especially in light of this Theme of cuckoldry, which we've already talked quite a bit about.
But this particular kind of divide, I think this gender divide is extremely. It's as if he's been asked to give evidence here for his suspicions, even though he's not quite been asked to do so. He starts out with things which maybe are suspicious or grow in suspicion. So whispering, leaning cheek to cheek, meeting noses, kissing with inside lips. So this kind of ratchets up a level of intimacy here. Then we have. Stopping the career of laughter with a sigh.
21:06 Wes: Infallible.
21:08 Erin: Yeah, A note. Infallible. Of breaking honesty. Basically playing footsie, skulking in corners. And then we have this moment, which is really interesting. Wishing clocks more swift. So he's been looking at the outside. He's been looking at people who seem to be too close to each other physically. And then suddenly we have this. We've dived into the psyche. He's now saying that they're wishing that time would go by more swiftly, presumably to the hour of their assignation. But I wonder how we get there. Or how that leap happens of their
21:42 Wes: assignation to the sexing hour. Right.
21:45 Erin: To get it on. No, but I mean from what he's giving as physical signs to being suddenly inside. Right. The wishing clock's more swift. That's actually a projection into the minds of Polixenes and Hermione, Whereas prior to this, he's looking at outside signs that anybody might be able to see, like making out with each other.
22:06 Wes: I think that's a good point. He's now thinking like it's as if he can just see into people's minds, which is very typical of this level of paranoia.
22:15 Erin: Yeah. And it's about awaiting the hour of the assignation but also wanting to speed through things. We have wishing clocks more swift. Hours, minutes. That seems to go in the wrong direction. Minutes. Hours, maybe.
22:30 Wes: Right.
22:31 Erin: Wishing the minutes go by faster then. Wishing the hours go by faster. And then we have noon, midnight, which is of course the same number. Right. So there's a collapsing. I don't know. Like I said, this seems significant to me. I can't say why. Maybe there's something about the speed with which paranoia accrues evidence to itself that's being almost enacted here. And then the collapse of two things which are actually opposite noon and midnight are opposite each other. Now he's collapsed them, or he's collapsed the distinction between them or the hours between them. So maybe he's the one. Of course he is the one who's doing this by animating thoughts that aren't there. Like he's taking. Like a. Like an empty pumpkin and filling it just with his own thoughts, right? Not seeing into the mind of somebody else.
23:20 Wes: That's a good point. He's collapsing this distinction between now and then noon and midnight, and between what's in his mind and what's in other people's minds, and between signifier and what's real, which is basically the point of this speech. He's basically saying if the signifiers are nothing, then everything is nothing. Because he's taken. What he thinks he's responding to is the idea that Camillo has seen the surface signs, but is willing to treat them as not signifying of anything deeper. And that's why Camillo is naive. And that thesis is that those things are actually nothing.
Oh, it's nothing. They're just being friendly. It's nothing. There's nothing. Nothing serious about it. And Leontes wants to claim that in fact, unless we can take those signs as signs of something, then the world itself is nothing. Bohemia is nothing. My wife is nothing. Which seems to suggest that he's very attached to the significance of things. Again, something that this is a part and parcel of paranoia and. And being asked not to read significance into certain behaviors or events seems crazy to the person in this situation. And what he's most certain about is his ability to read the signs, his ability to interpret the signs.
And again, I think that is anchored in the certitude about his own theoretical framework, which is the framework of suspicion and jealousy. And I think we can imagine that before all this happened. I don't know if we mentioned this in our previous discussions, but the picture we get of Leontes at the end of the play, which is a far nicer person, we have to imagine that's the way he was before all this happened. Especially given people's surprise and the long standing relationship, good relationship with Hermione. So we don't really. We never get to see the good Leontes before all this happens.
That's an interesting aspect of this play. We never get to see normal, rational Leontes and then see him as jealous. We get very little of him before he just suddenly goes off the deep end. And we have to imagine that this is quite a transformation, that he's gone from someone who's more reasonable and not willing to treat everybody, everything that's going on, as if it were a sign of something nefarious to that particular type of person. It's like a psychotic break. And I think that's why this disease metaphor comes up again and again. It's not just used by Leontes, but by others.
Camillo says, this is a diseased opinion. And then that's where Leontes calls him a gross lout, a mindless slave, a hovering temporizer. That's an insult that I really love. And I had to figure out what that meant. Basically, it just means someone who rationalizes, someone hovering. I think that may have something to do with flattery, but someone who minimizes, rationalizes. And so in the case of Leontes, goes on to say, at once see, canst with thine eyes at once see good and evil inclining to them both. What does that mean? He doesn't make a firm moral choice between alter alternatives.
Right. It's almost like being a skeptic and say, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna draw any conclusions. Does that make sense?
26:57 Erin: Yeah, it does. It's funny, the word rationalizer that. That you use, I think is really funny in this context. Right, right, exactly. He accuses Camillo of being a rationalizer, of being rational. Right.
27:10 Wes: Or moderator is the other. I'm using the word rationalize, but it's almost like someone who's trying to moderate.
27:18 Erin: Yeah, another. Another insult from the diseased mind of Leontes. Right, right. Yeah. I'm thinking about the fact that we don't see him normal, quote unquote. And I suppose that I don't think we could have seen him in a state prior to this, because both these scenes and then the backlash scenes where he's atoning are so extreme. Like, this is just an extreme personality. So I can't imagine a Leontes who was ever happily married in a stable relationship. Right. And disease comes up again and again. I think were it not for the impossibility of him surviving with this for as many years as he does by the end of the play, I would suspect that he's syphilitic or something.
Right. And that would give credence to this projection, the sudden projection, as well as the actually deluded mind that he displays here. Because it would suggest that he's just had his own affair and is wracked with guilt on top of being. On top of having these deluded thoughts. Of course, that's an impossibility on a certain level. It's an interesting pairing with all of this disease imagery. Maybe we're supposed to think that he's ridden with one of these diseases. I think it's also unlikely, considering the fact that Sicilia seemed to be a rather formal kind of martial male culture.
And I don't. He seems to be surrounded by other men in court. Hermione is not ever seen, I don't think. I mean, I suppose she does have women that are around her, right? But when they tell the winter's tale with Mamillius and there are even some of her ladies in waiting who are jokingly flirting with this little. Innocently flirting with Mamillius. So I suppose there are women around and available. But. But much of what he demonstrates his understanding to be in these scenes suggests that he has very little real experience understanding women.
So that would fly in the fit, like almost if he were. If he were having more affairs, maybe he would understand women better and therefore. And therefore not accuse his wife of having one. I'm not sure. But anyway, I can't imagine a normal Leontes, I think, because if we read him as having a psychotic break here and then the subsequent atoning Leontes as a response to this, I think he's someone with such an extreme personality. I can't imagine him being in a. Just regular gear.
29:49 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because you say this idea that his suspicion of her is reflective of guilt or something like that, about his own misbehavior. And we've already pointed to his relationship with Polixenes as being this weirdly. Not necessarily weirdly, but this very close to the point that we also suspect that part of his problem. It's not just rejection by Hermione that's a problem, it's rejection by Polixenes. And that goes towards your point about little experience understanding women. It's as if he's not balanced out in a way, he's not connected enough to the feminine, which I think is a good way of.
Well, it isn't. It isn't. In a way, psychosis is about being, is about not having the intervention of the father, so to speak, between the mother and the child, between that fusion. But in a way, I think it is. To the extent that we think about this as the opacity of others, as you put it, and the lack of insight into the subjectivity of others. I think he's not balanced out by the feminine, in a way. And we. We see this borne out in the play because it's Paulina who ultimately is able to deal with him and becomes his custodian, in a sense. And Paulina and Hermione are the only truly persuasive speakers in the play.
I think they are representatives of the power of the rhetorical on the one hand, but they're also representative of what it is and others that we can use to evaluate their credibility independent of our firsthand experience of them or of the behaviors that we're attributing. Infidelity, we know later on we'll know. At Hermione's trial, we just know she's. She's telling the truth and we wouldn't need to know anything or she's an incredible deceiver. But there's. There are lots of internal. And we'll get to that. Internal clues to her honesty in her testimony and that.
That is the case in general. We have ways of internally evaluating the credibility of what people say without doing empirical checks. Now, of course, rhetoric can be used to deceive as well. So it's a very. It becomes a very complicated, interesting subject. The persuasiveness of Paulina and Hermione, their skill at speaking about things, and the way in which that gives us a criterion of credibility and honesty, even though, of course, rhetoric can be put to more sinister ends. But in any case, where's the spider?
32:45 Erin: Yeah. Well, before we get there, I just want to say I think this question, equality is a really interesting one. And I suppose, you know, though I doubled back on my own point and said, well, you know, there are ladies in waiting around. There aren't. What's really curious about Paulina and Hermione is that Hermione almost never overlaps with her on stage or very rarely does, except for in the trial. They don't ever, I think, have a real conversation with each other. They barely overlap. Like, once Hermione is put in prison, Paulina kind of replaces her and speaks for her.
And then essentially, in the years of Hermione's, whatever we want to call it, her absence, she becomes a kind of proxy, right? She becomes a. A replacement, a wife to Leontes in certain respects. But of course, the original problem here seems to me to be a problem of a lack of women, a lack of numbers, of balance. Because, of course, the elephant in the room that we haven't really talked about is Polixenes wife. She's not here. That's the whole problem. If she was there, none of this would have happened. She's barely mentioned in the text. Right, but it's that.
So it's that numerical imbalance of equals, shall we say? So not like ladies in waiting, but of queens. And, you know, the number of queens to the number of kings, the number of wives to husbands. That's, I think, the sense that I have that this is an imbalanced culture somehow. And and that's, I think, reflected in Leontes own person, as you're saying, with this too close relationship to Polixenes and a lack of. Therefore a lack of understanding of women. I think it's somehow all tied together.
34:20 Wes: It's interesting because the part of what sets off, seems to set off Leonte's jealousy is witnessing not just that flirtatious moment between Mamillius and his nannies, or the women who I presume are also his nannies, saying, you'd want in with us if we'd have you, you when you got older. But that critical moment when Mamillius sits on Hermione's lap and says. And Hermione says, tell us a tale. And Mamillius says, a sad tale is best for winter. And that the tale, of course, is the winner's tale, the old wives tale, the tales of goblins and sprites or superstitions, things that aren't real, but not told in the typical way of something purely fictional or a fairy tale told as if they were real later on.
Autolycus is basically. These ballads are also old wives tales and people are asking them if they're true. And he says, of course they're true. Why would I peddle in lies? But in any case, it's that moment with. As we've said before, Mamillius is also implicated in the jealousy, the relationship between Mamillius and Hermione. And there's something about. Yes, I think what I'm trying to relate this to is the important role of women in the play and the. The role of older women, for instance, telling these, quote, unquote, old wives tales or winters tales, and.
And as. As purveyors of superstition, let's say, and then accusations against Paulina, for instance, that she's a witch or a crone, that type of thing. And the relationship between that and the. I don't know, the burgeoning sexuality of. Of young males. Some. Something about the way in which the. The sexuality of children as they're getting older is in some sense governed by the behavior of adults. And including this, including seemingly unrelated activities like telling stories, which I think can be ways of communicating with children about sex and death and violence.
Right. Fairy tales, Grimm's tales, all that stuff. I haven't fully formulated that thought, but I was just trying to join that up with what you were saying about the importance of women, because I think there's been volumes written on that about the. And we'll get to more of that. Why is it called the winner's tale? Why does that matter? A winner's tale, essentially an old wives tale. What does that imply about the role of women here?
36:51 Erin: I really like this idea. And I'm thinking about. Maybe this doesn't align perfectly, but you use the word superstition. And now I've gone off on a little bit of a mental tangent because I'm thinking about the contagion of ideas that you seem to be getting at here with Mamillius and the nannies as being one of the things that kind of sets Leontes off. And I'm thinking about a superstition as a kind of contagious idea that originates out of nothing or maybe even out of a kind of false empiricism. And if a lot of. Right. Like. Like maybe it originated from the fact that one person had the singular experience of, whatever, putting new shoes on the bed and then something bad happened.
You know what I mean? It was a correlation causation problem. Right. Which then spread to other people. Don't do that. Otherwise if you put new shoes on the bed, then your cat's gonna die that same day. Right? Whatever.
37:41 Wes: It's true.
37:42 Erin: And it spread. It spread and it. And it. And it became very contagious in that way. And the way that the play enacts this contag, where we see, as you say, this interaction with Mamillius kind of goes into Leontes mind and almost acts like. Like a sticky idea, like a superstitious idea. Same with several other little moments that we discussed in the previous two episodes. And there's also in this scene with Camillo. So I think this is also happening on a meta level as well. Shakespeare seems to be remixing or sampling. This is like a. Like a. Like a rap song in which he's sampling other songs, but all the other songs were also written by him.
So there's a kind of stickiness to the repurposed language or the other plays which get recycled here, almost like they have been sticky and have gotten into the works. So we have Leontes talking about the purity and whiteness of his sheets and then this idea of preserving sleep. You know, we have like little hints of Macbeth, obviously, tons of Othello throughout. Right. But all of this happens and at the same time, not all of this, it happens throughout the play, but there are some heavy moments of Macbeth that come in, especially with. In. In relation to.
To poison that happened around line 320. And at the same time that this Macbeth sampling comes in, Camillo talks about the lingering dram that. That he suggests he can use to poison polixenes and this is another, I think, or a further contagion that he's caught from Archidamus. Right. Because Archidamus gives him the idea in that very first scene of using the lingering dram to. To dull their senses, I think is the expression he uses. Just flip back, but to dull their senses. And so this is somehow like put. Camillo doesn't give Archidamus credit for this, but it somehow put this idea in Camillo's brain and then it pops up later in this new way now as a poison almost.
So I wanna. And I. I can't do this effectively in a short amount of time. But basically, basically what I'm wondering is if we take this lingering dram as a case study. A contagious idea. It's like a game of telephone, or like the superstition that grows and grows. It changes shape. Something that was a sedative, relatively innocuous, if a bit odd in Archidamus original conception, becomes something poisonous when it gets recycled and regurgitated later, as if it's undergone a kind of dream warping. And I'm thinking about this in relationship to the Winter's tale, you know, a story in which one learns about life through fairy tale.
People become goblins, they shape shift. I don't mean literally within a story, Right. But goblins are used to express an idea in real life outside of the story. Right. But they're maybe transposed into these magical creatures within an old wives tale. And somehow that also I think to me represents the process perhaps of a thought becoming a superstition.
40:51 Wes: Yeah, I think that's great. We talked earlier on about omnipotence of thought and the idea that our thoughts can affect the world in negative ways. That's what Polixenes was suggesting. He worries too much about what's happening in Bohemia while he's away. It might, might make it come true. And then Leontes in a way is moving to omniscience of thought. If he thinks it must be true and that this is the sort of thing that plays a role in superstition and the idea. Right. Superstitions often involve ways of predicting or controlling the world. Right.
If I put the shoes on the bed, then the bad thing will happen, so I won't put them on the bed and it won't happen. Right. And those rituals ultimately come down to ways of preventing thoughts from doing bad things in the world, or controlling and then controlling the world with ritual. And then what's happening in fairy tales, which I think are different, they're not exactly the same as old wives tales, but we'll. We'll discuss that later. But the. Just overlap, I think. But the. We get. We get this displacement from things which are dangerous or taboo to monsters and creatures, and somehow this can be metabolized.
All. All of the stuff about sex and death and aggression. Children need to communicate about that. And this is the form the communication takes place in. And if you take those things literally, then they become superstition. And there's a reflection here. And I think we'll get this to this later as well, about art and the difference between aesthetic than fiction and old wives tales, which are false things that people actually take as true. Right. So how does fiction work? How does the aesthetic work? It's a lie in some literal sense, but. But we're all right as long as we don't take it as such.
And in fact, it has this important redeeming quality. In a way, it's going to be the thing that can prevent us from becoming like Leontes. It's the thing that can prevent us from becoming jealous and superstitious and crazy, even though it's the realm of fantasy. So fantasy can lead us to an insanity, but fantasy may be the only thing that can prevent it as well. But in any case, with the rest of this scene, it's. He finishes up the conversation with Camillo, there's a decision to poison Camillo, and then Camillo immediately basically rats out Leontes to Polixenes and will come up with this plan to escape.
And I just wanted to point into one thing in that conversation, and maybe you have more to say about it too. But there is just one thing I thought was really interesting at 385ish, where Camillo says there is a sickness which puts some of us in distemper, but I cannot name the disease, and it is caught of you that yet are. Well, so the sickness of jealousy that Leontes has, he's caught it from Polixenes, even though, of course it doesn't mean that Polixenes was jealous. Therefore Leontes got jealous. So it's an interesting concept of contagion.
And this is again one of the several places in which the disease metaphor emerges, and also in which this kind of asymmetry between and. This asymmetry is going to come up in the spider speeches as well, which we'll talk about soon. But the asymmetry involved in being harmed by the infidelity of others, how is it that can actually harm us? It's not like they're stabbing us or saying anything, communicating with us directly. What? What? How is it that something, something that we don't even know about, maybe can harm us without us even knowing it?
44:28 Erin: I love what you're pointing to, and it reminds me too, of what we talked about before, about the something that breeds out of nothing. So the sickness that breeds out of being. Well, here the disease is caught of you that yet are. Well, it's not that he's. That he has it, but he's asymptomatic, Right? It's that he's. Well, I mean, asymptomatic doesn't scan. But prior to that, just Polixenes saying to Camillo, just prior, like around 380. Good, Camillo, your changed complexions are to me a mirror, which shows me mine changed too, for I must be a party in this alteration, finding myself thus altered with it.
I was interested in this moment for a couple of reasons. First of all, talk about remixed other Shakespeare works we have. This reminds me of Lady Macbeth saying something like, your face, My Thane is a book where men may read strange matters. This is the to beguile the time look like the time speech. It also has a little hint of Sonnet 116 in there, which is my favorite sonnet. The Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds. But what's most interesting to me is that Polixenes demonstrates more of a sense of people skills, much better people skills.
Right. Than Leontes has, by being able to actually look accurately at something that Camillo is at, an emotion that Camillo is betraying on the outside and accurately intuiting what that emotion is on the inside. Right, which is something we've just discussed that Leontes is unable to do. But he does so by this idea of a mirror, which would suggest, on the one hand, a similarity with Leontes, where Leontes is projecting, right, he's projecting maybe his own bad ideas about people into the them. But here, that mirror actually, I think is indicative of a kind of empathy in Polixenes, where he's able to identify with Camillo in a positive way and thereby intuit what Camillo must be thinking.
So just to the extent that these, you know, this little moment shows something good about Polixenes, but in this interesting, similar sort of counterpoint to what we've just gotten from Leontes, I just find it an interesting little glimpse into Polixenes, more positive.
46:49 Wes: Yeah, I think this is important. I had made a note to talk about this, but then I missed the note. So. Yeah, this is a gray Line. I just put mirror alteration lines. So good. That's what's in my notes.
46:59 Erin: Nice.
47:00 Wes: But it's important to, you know, as you're pointing out, we're getting another form of evidence, right? Another way in which we can evaluate the honesty of people or evaluate what's going on in the world. Later on, Polixenes will say to Camillo, yeah, I know you're being honest, because there's a possibility that Camillo is deceiving him. And what does he say exactly? He says, I guess he says, I know you're being honest because I saw how weird Leontes was acting. Maybe that's it. But I think part of this is he's able to, as you're pointing out, read Camilo's emotions and in an accurate way. And so that's the. It's that kind of social. It's really a social skill. It's not science, it's a social skill, and it's very important for evaluating reality.
47:53 Erin: But, yeah, no, that's exactly what I. That was. The phrase I was searching for, is a social skill. And what's interesting is it's this highly complex emotion, whatever that. That Polixenes has intuited, because not only does he know that Camillo is upset, but he knows that Camillo is upset, and that is indicative of Polixenes fortunes having changed. He knows that he's also. Polixenes himself is also in trouble. That's a rather complex, right? It's not just, oh, you're upset. Oh, I did something wrong too, you know.
48:26 Wes: Well, he knows that Camillo is upset about the thing that he has to communicate. Polixenes knows that Camillo is upset about the thing that Camillo has to communicate to Polixenes. So he knows he's upset because something is not good with Polixenes, right? He's not just upset for himself, he's upset for Polixenes. And Polixenes can tell, and so can most of us, in the right circumstance.
48:51 Erin: And I love this little. I love the subsequent exchange in which it's like a guessing game, or Camilla's. I promise not to tell, but if you can guess it, then if you only ask me yes or no answers, then maybe I'll tell you, you know, like in a sitcom, right? Or something. But it's a. But it's a riddle. And it's funny that when Polixity says to himself on 3 97, like he's repeating what Camillo has said to him, he says, a sickness caught of me, and yet I will, you know, he's like, okay, what could this mean? It's funny because it's like it is trying to figure out a riddle. And. And I'm wondering if that is. I'm wondering about the logic of the riddle now, and if this ties into our whole idea of our whole playing telephone with thoughts or superstition, if there's something baked into the structure of a riddle which is suggestive here of Leontes mind, of something being twisted or.
49:43 Wes: Well, we saw. Yeah, we saw with Oedipus, right? Riddles can be solved a priori, and they don't. Oedipus was good at that, but they don't require investigation. Oedipus, like Leontes, was someone who's also not good at investigating external reality, but external social reality, and was reacting to the advice of others, right, with rage, instead of. Instead of taking that advice seriously. With Oedipus, it's Tiresias, and with Leontes it's not just Camillo, but the gentlemen, the lords and Antigonus and all, everyone who's trying to help him back to reality.
50:20 Erin: One more thing. Polixenes notes or asks, rather, in addition to trying to figure out this riddle, when Camillo finally tells him what's going on, that Leontes suspects him of adultery, Polixenes asks, how should this grow? I love that question. Because Polixenes is asking, how could Leontes suspect him of adultery? Like, how did this happen? How did he get this idea? And Camillo just cuts right to the chase, which I love, you know, we've spent this whole time trying to figure out how is it that Leontes got this idea, right? This has been our obsession, Wes, for the past three episodes.
Now Polixenes says, I know not, but I am sure tis safer to avoid what's grown than question how to tis born. I love this. Polixenes is questioning the parentage of Leontes misconception, as though this whole notion of Leontes is like a dangerous kind of baby. And Camillo just says, who cares? Who cares how he got this idea? The point is he has it and we have to just deal with it, right? Which I love. And maybe that's exactly the kind of fatherly advice that shows that Camillo has really good judgment here because. Because then Polixenes says as they're leaving, I will respect thee as a father if thou bearest my life off.
Hence, Polixenes is going to be reborn, right? Or his life will be spared through the sort of pseudo paternity of Camillo as they. As they leave. And Camillo gets him off safely to Back to Bohemia. And I just. I love this idea that like Camillo is just the sensible one who undercuts all of our questions about Leontes and just knows that the smart thing is just to leave. And that turns out to be really smart because his life will be spared. Whereas Antigonus, who kind of stays too long and does Leontes bidding and entertains Leontes notions, of course, will receive a kind of a bad end as a result.
52:13 Wes: Very good. I have a correction before we end this part, which is that I think I said that what we're talking about comes after he has Hermione hold off to.
52:26 Erin: Yes, that's right. I think you did say that.
52:28 Wes: But yeah, no, that's what happens at the beginning of Act 2. So that hasn't happened yet.
52:34 Erin: I also have a correction to make, which is I realized right after I said it that I put that I said the superstition is new shoes on the bed, but it's not. It's new shoes on the table. Any kind of shoes on the bed. I think superstition experts don't come at me. I know the difference, I promise.
52:51 Wes: Get your. Get your. Your superstition's correct.
52:55 Erin: Yeah.
52:55 Wes: All right. All right. So that ends part three of our discussion of the winner's tale, Part four. We will get into act two, and as we promised, things will actually start to go faster because it becomes a bit more plot driven, in a sense. I don't know if that's the right word. Thank you.
53:14 Erin: Yes, thank you. patreon.com For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com Rate Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 2)
Nov 27, 2023
Part 2 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
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0:12 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part. Part two of our discussion of the Winter's Tale. We had just been talking about the way that Hermione persuades Polixenes to stay and the, as I count them, four different sections to that argument ending with this concept of imprisonment. I think, Erin, you were about to move on to the next phase where we get some pretty serious flirtation between Hermione and Polixenes. Obviously, Leontes has been activated by several different things that have already gone on. And he's even. He's drawn apart before that whole Verily section to observe them unobserved. And then now he's going to look on as Hermione gets very flirty. Go ahead.
1:06 Erin: Yeah. She wants to know what he was like. When he was little. And interestingly, he's been there for nine months.
1:12 Wes: But he's a bad boy.
1:15 Erin: That's right. And he reveals their backstory after being. I don't know what they were talking about for the first nine months, but now he has something new to tell her. He says, we were two lads. He's speaking of his childhood friendship with Leontes. When they were BFFs, they were two lads that thought there was no more behind but such a day tomorrow as today and to be boy eternal. So this is a very strange way of putting this, right? First of all, there's this. The boy eternal. There's this Peter Pan quality to this, right? They wanted to be.
They wanted to stay young forever. But two lads that thought there was no more behind but such a day tomorrow as today. So behind here, meaning after, there was nothing after today but a tomorrow. That's just like today. So this idea of the stillness of time, I think is really interesting in this word behind, because besides the fact that it's a funny word for other reasons, but the fact that behind means both before and after.
2:21 Wes: Yeah, it sounds like. No, it sounds like what he's saying is they thought they would live forever. So she brings the conversation back to their youth and says, was not my lord the verier wag o' th' two? And my Lord probably refers to Leontes, right? But I think it's at least syntactic. Or semantically, it could just as well refer to the person she's talking to, since he's also Lord. I don't know. But in any case, she sets up this idea. Who's. Who's the. Who's the more bad? You're both bad, but who's more bad? And Polixenes, I think, is trying to.
I don't know, he's trying to be a little bit evasive. We're twin lambs, all right? So it's not one of us. We're lambs. We're innocent and we're twinned. One of us wasn't worse than the other. And we. What we changed was innocence for innocence. And they hadn't dreamed of ill doing and all that stuff. But they. He's already alluded to this idea that they might be eternally youthful. And then there's the idea that they're twinned innocent. Except he alludes to the idea that they didn't stay innocent because he says, and our weak spirits never been higher, reared with stronger blood, we should have answered heaven boldly, not guilty.
The imposition cleared hereditary ours. So he's saying we could have gone on being innocent forever if we hadn't been reared with stronger blood. And then she says, by this we gather you've tripped since. So she's pushing the conversation once again into the idea that they've tripped up, that they've been sinful, that they've been bad boys. She's pushing them. She's pushing Polixenes for some sort of confession to their youthful sexual indiscretions. That's what all of this is about. And each time he tries to evade that, she puts that back on track.
4:24 Erin: Yeah, there's this. There are so many strange things happening here. I mean, to say that they were not even guilty of original sin is really fascinating. So. So there's a transposition of. In the sort of pre sexual existence that the two of them had in which they were twin lambs. So they were. They were one and the same. They were the same thing. So this is the pre. Pre branching. Right. They were. And they were bleating at each other. B, L, E A T bleating like ba at each other. So they were sort of pre. Language as well. They had no original sin, so they were pre. Pre lapsarian as well. Which they then. Sorry. So then Polixenes locates the moment of the fall or the trip, partly because of Hermione's suggestion, with the idea of a woman rather than he's transposing Eve for the apple is essentially what he's doing.
5:23 Wes: Interesting.
5:23 Erin: Right, Because Adam and Eve live together as a couple, pre original sin, in a sinless state. The apple was the introduction of sin, not anything that he did with Eve. It's not as though in a Judeo Christian society, people believe that like, just to be with a woman is inherently sinful or something like that. Right, but there's a. But there's a transposition happening in which the object, the apple, is replaced by Eve herself. Eve's person. Just the very existence of women is somehow a sinful quantity with which these boys must reckon. Right, so.
So then we have. By this, we gather you have tripped since. So since then you've tripped, you've sinned since. But of course, as you've suggested, right. To trip, to fall, the fall of man is associated with like your foot slipped, which is, you know, it's a euphemism for having an affair. So that was the introduction of sin with woman. Well, so he then says, oh, my most sacred lady, temptations have since then been born to us. Which is an interesting turn of phrase for in those unfledged days was my wife a girl? Your precious self had then not crossed the eyes of my young playfellow.
So temptation is created, oddly enough, with the introduction of their wives into their lives. Yeah, right. When his wife was a girl, this is the only mention I think we get of Polixenes wife. She's a wife first, then a girl in that ordering. And then all she had to do was cross their eyes. There's something strange about that. Eyes crossing and crossing across one's path. Right. Or sort of commingled there. All they had to do was walk in front of them and then something is broken.
7:10 Wes: Yeah, I like that. So he. When he talks about the not guilty hereditary ours, he's saying that that would have been the case if we hadn't been raised with stronger blood, which I don't know exactly what being reared with stronger blood means. I mean, if he's talking about nature or nurture there, right. If we hadn't been such lusty young men or if it was just a matter of how they were raised. But he's suggesting, yes, like she. She gathers that they have tripped since he's alluding to not being innocent anymore. And I think she's already taking that to be a reference to sexual activity by young men. And she's pushing for confessions about, did you. Who did you date before you got married? Who did my man date before he got married?
8:01 Erin: What's your body count?
8:02 Wes: That's.
8:03 Erin: They say now.
8:03 Wes: Yeah, what's your body count? And. And then he says something, which I think he's trying to evade that by saying, well, yes, I think he's trying to suggest that they've only been involved in sexual sins with the wives. Although she makes a remark about that the offenses we have made you do will answer if you first sinned with us, and that with us you did continue fault and that you slipped not with any. But with us. He's trying to skip over any previous relationships and say, okay, we've sinned with you because you're our wives. Right. And she says, okay, well, that's fine as long as you didn't sleep with anyone before us. And what's also interesting is that it's a foursome at this point in the way they're speaking. There's already this kind of swingers element to. Is it infidelity outside of the foursome or outside of the twosome?
9:08 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. I'm wondering if we can tie this. What's strange is that they're talking about something which is not a Sin as a sin. Right. Obviously, if you have sex with your wife, it's not sinful in the traditional sense of that term or in any other sense. But it seems like this suggestion is maybe that the first time they sinned in this imaginary scenario which Hermione is trying to get him to sort of cop to. So the first sin here might have been an out of wedlock tryst perhaps, but it has not been. But even that has not been separated from like, whatever sex that they've had once they had actually gotten married.
It's as if every. It's as if every sexual experience one can have, even with one's own wife, is somehow an infidelity or. Or a. It's a. It's all fornication. So. So the swingers idea that you're talking about I think is really interesting because if it's all fornication, it might as well be with anyone, right? It might as well be with somebody else's wife. If all sex is sinful, there is no fidelity. And so the other interesting element that's added to this little chunk of speech that Hermione has here is she first says the word grace. She says Grace to boot is glossed in my text as heaven help me.
But this is the first time that she's said this word, which she'll subsequently say many other times, which is this idea of, as we've talked about in previous episodes of Right. Unmerited favor that one gets from God. In a way, the opposite of sin. Not literally, but it runs at cross purposes to sin. And so she's introducing this idea of grace at the same time that any kind of human sexual activity is being painted with the broad brush of sin. And I don't know what to make of that. I haven't really thought about it, but I just think it's an interesting moment at which this grace idea is injected into the conversation.
11:08 Wes: Yeah, yep, it's sin. Lest you. Lest you say your queen and I are devils, they're the temptresses. But, yeah, I think that's very interesting. At the very least. I haven't thought about the grace part of this, but at the very least, it's really interesting that she is pushing Polixenes for this sexual gossip, essentially. And meanwhile Leontes is spying on them and this is the nail in the coffin that's catastrophic. He. It's right at this point that he comes up on them and enters the conversation again and says, is he won yet? And she says, yeah.
And he has that little aside and I love all the asides in this, by the way, and in the BBC production that I recommended from 1981, I think it's all done so well. So he has this little aside where he says, at my request, he would not. These sides are really interesting in this because a lot of Leonte's insanity, his insane musings happen through those little asides. But yeah, so there it seems like, I think if you were reading this quickly and you might. Or seeing it performed, you might say, huh, this is an awfully abrupt transition. He's upset that Hermione could convince Polixenes now, and this is what's going to set him off, that he couldn't get Polixenes to stay, but Hermione did.
But if you look back at all of this has been set up in various ways that not only psychologically account for the jealousy, but very tightly integrated into everything that's going on thematically.
12:55 Erin: Yeah, we have this idea. Is he won yet winning in terms of winning over a lover. Right. Or winning someone to you in terms of being in a relationship or even for marriage or something like that. So, yeah, that phrasing already suggests that.
13:12 Wes: Well, it's even extended. So it's even extended because it. He, Leontes will say, you never spoke to a better purpose. And she'll say, never. And he'll go, oh, yeah, do duh, never but once when you said yes to my proposal. So he creates this direct parallel between his proposal to marry to Hermione to marry him and her persuasion of Polixenes to stay.
13:46 Erin: That's right. And in his description of the efforts that he made to win Hermione over. It's pretty. It's not a happy memory, this winning her over, that he waited three crabbed months which had soured themselves to death. Ere I could make thee open thy white hand. This is not the eternal summer of the twin lambs. This is a time of bitterness that he waited for Hermione to accept him. He was not happy in the process of winning her over. So there's already this almost nastiness, not explicitly so, but I think within Leontes own heart. We can see a kind of nastiness towards Hermione in this characterization.
14:29 Wes: Well, it's interesting because it suggests she teases him an awful lot, including that previous tease where she says, not that I don't love you, if you want to go spend time with your buddies or your buddy here for an extra month, that doesn't mean I don't want you around. But in this case to my eye, she's playfully teasing him, which. Well, so anyway, in any case, let me make the larger point. Regardless of what's going on here, there's some teasing in this that suggests that they have a relationship, which allows for that. And it's even the case.
We should point out that Polixenes has been there for nine months and it doesn't seem like Leontes has gotten jealous yet. Things are a little off in the beginning, but we see everything build up within the context of the play. So whatever has gone on Leontes, it's the leave taking that's really important to stimulating Leonte's suspicions. It's this concept of gratitude that is pivotal. It hadn't happened before the leave taking, and now it is. And of course, the fact that they're reaching the nine month mark, they're nearing the nine month mark on the pregnancy and that's.
It's been nine months of visit and various other things are important as well. But, yeah, at this point, I think he's primed. He's primed for what comes next. Too hot. Too hot to mingle. Friendship. Far as mingling bloods, which is really fascinating because it sounds like he's talking about. Is he talking about his friendship with Polixenes or is he talking about her friendship with him? Or both?
16:24 Erin: This is the question, who is he jealous of here?
16:28 Wes: Exactly.
16:28 Erin: Right, Yeah.
16:30 Wes: I mean, yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. Who is he jealous of? I think in the end it's probably both, but we have to. I don't think we can avoid a conclusion that a big part of it is he's upset that this, his twinned lamb, this person with whom he has a very strong relationship that's described as love, has said no to him, but said yes to his wife. And I'm sure reams of literature have been written on the homoerotic aspect of this, but which plays a greater role here, his love of Hermione or his love of Polixenes? I don't think we can answer that question. I think they both play a role, but I think we. I don't think we can avoid the conclusion that his love of Polixenes plays a huge role in what's about to happen.
17:24 Erin: I think too, I. In conversations that I had with a professor of mine, my thinking on this has evolved a little bit. But what's interesting. So we have Hermione right before Leontes is too hot. Too hot. Says basically that she's. She's thrilled that, yeah, that this is Grace. I've gotten something extra. Right. Two for the price of one, which is a kind of grace economy. Right. So I have both a husband and a friend. And of course, in my edition, friend, it's noted, can also mean lover. Right. And Leontes then has this very. When Harry Met Sally, kind of, you know, men and women can't be friends. Right.
18:01 Wes: And I've got my husband, I've got a friend with benefits. Friend with gratitude has had the benefit.
18:07 Erin: Right, well, and of. And of course. Yeah, that's good. And of course, Leontes wouldn't think, so long as he has this. The same kind of attitude towards women as Polixenes does. Of course, he wouldn't think that a man can be friends with a woman, seeing as women are devils, they are sin incarnate, and just walking in front of you can cause you to slip. So. So of course he wouldn't think that they could.
18:27 Wes: There's some truth in that.
18:29 Erin: Well, come on. Well, this, therefore, this. This idea of the inherent impossibility of the. Of a chaste relationship between men and women, I think it speaks to, obviously to Leontes, misogyny. But then at the end of this little speech, he immediately turns. Well, he turns not immediately, but abruptly, I should say, to Mamillius. And this is, I think, where things really get interesting.
19:00 Wes: Yeah, I think this is great. I just want to. I just want to make one more comment about this line. Mingling friendship is mingling bloods, because there's an ambiguity in that line. Mingling bloods in what sense? In a metaphorical sense. Right. As in one meaning of. It is obviously that they're involved in a romantic and sexual relationship. But the mingling of bloods also seems to allude to the idea that they've created a child together.
19:33 Erin: Yep.
19:34 Wes: And so he goes on to recount what he thinks he's seen from afar, which is them paddling palms and pinching fingers and things. But. But anyway, then there's this turn to Mamillius, as you pointed out. Go ahead with that. Yeah.
19:49 Erin: He's in the middle of talking about this idea of his cuckoldry. And a reference to his brows, which might be sprouting horns over this current pregnancy of Hermiones, and then abruptly turns to Mamillius and says, art thou my boy? And this turn, this repeated turn back to Mamillius is a theme of this section. I think that I was convinced in this conversation with a professor that I had that Mamillius is far more important to Leonti's psychology here than we might think that it might be, and I don't want to get ahead of myself, but maybe I'll say it now.
I'll state my thesis now and then make my case as we go. Go along. But the thesis which was lent to me, really by this professor, is that it's Mamillius who Leontes is actually jealous of, which is a really interesting idea. I'll try to make the case as we go along. I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced of it. I think that there's. I think there. That there's something here with the closeness with Polixenes, which. I don't know if we want to call it homoerotic or not. I'm not terribly interested in any homoerotic elements there. I'm more interested in this kind of misogynistic view of women that.
That both Leontes and Polixenes seem to have mingled maybe with Leontes kind of jealousy over Hermione's pregnancy, which is maybe some fertile ground there for conversation. But Leontes looks at Mamillius nose and says, they say it is a copy out of mine. He's convinced that Mamillius is his child and that maybe is the problem. That's why he continually turns back to Mamillius. So there are a few things at work here, first of all, and I think they go together, I think that Leontes. I'm calling it misogyny. It's a strong word. I think it's appropriate here.
But in the Renaissance period, as now, arguably, but especially back when establishing kingship and having a male heir was so important, there's this desire, I think, being expressed in the play of women as the mere conduits for the reproduction or replication of the man. Right. The man needs a copy of himself to keep going. And this is. Nowhere is this more important than when the man is king of something and needs a male heir to inherit and to succeed him. So the woman in the equation is the problem to be solved, really. They're the thing that's in the way of the man who desires an asexual reproduction, if you will, to replicate himself.
The woman is the variable. She's the one who may cheat on you and thereby you cannot produce yourself again. She might be producing somebody else, some other man. So this obsession with cuckoldry, the printing
22:45 Wes: press might be exactly copying out someone else's play.
22:49 Erin: Exactly. And this problem of cuckoldry is one with which Shakespeare is obsessed, and perhaps rightly so, in the time that he came up or shortly before it.
22:58 Wes: Right.
22:58 Erin: Henry VIII was Obsessed with this idea of replicating himself, of producing a male heir. In Elizabeth's time there's this vacuum in which she has no heirs. She's also a woman. And so anyway, so, so all of this I think is important to stress that there's a. There's an inherent misogyny in this idea of the male progeny taking over. This idea that the woman can, can betray you and thereby rob you of yourself projected into the future. And at the same time, I think the fact that Mamillius actually is his is causing Leontes a lot of problems. The fact that he has actually replicated himself is an issue for him.
And again, I don't want to see, and I don't want to move too far in advance, but even just say, looking at the next subsequent pages, like in around line 155, when he looks on the lines of his boy's face and sees himself 23 years younger, we have this Peter Pan complex. We have these two men who want to be boys again, but you can't be a boy as long as you have a boy, then you're a dad. Right? So I think there's a problem here with his self replication is what I'm trying to say.
24:15 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think Mamillius may be a stand in for the twin lambs as well. So that he and Polixenes constitute in their boy eternal fusion. I think this idea of replicating oneself and so vicariously living eternally connects to this idea of being a boy eternally and a boy with one's friend. For any complications of the opposite sex, sexual attachments, marriage, reproduction, all of that before the domestic scene intrudes on that kind of perfection inherent in that sort of same sex love, that same sex friendship that's highly sublimated, right, and not sexual.
I think the word homoerotic actually misses the point because the attraction of it is the innocent part, the lamb part, the lack of sexual complication. And in Mamillius I think you get an emblem or a symbol of that. And the danger here, if Mamillius in a way represents that childhood boy eternal fusion with Polixenes, I think it's just one more step to the idea that that Polixenes could be the father. And so that's part of where the jealousy comes from. But I think the other aspect of this is, and I think you're right, and I'm just extending what you're saying is that there's a threat to the idea of that eternal youth.
He's somehow still attached to that. There's a threat to this idea of a perfect replication of the self through which one lives. But also, if I'm right, a perfect replication of a certain type of friendship, a certain type of relationship that's supposed to live on forever as well. And that's what has been threatened. So, again, it goes both ways. Jealousy of Polixenes, jealousy of Hermione.
26:35 Erin: Yeah, I think that's good. I like, too, that Mamillius is obviously what that. That name is like, means. Breast. Is that right?
26:44 Wes: You know, it does seem evocative of that.
26:47 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So he has this. So Mamillius is, in a way, like a living embodiment, a living reminder of the break in the relationship with Polixenes. Right. In the way that any child is. Is evidence of the fact that you have had sex. Right. Mamillius, even in his name, is a constant reminder to Leontes of his mother and of the relationship that produced Mamillius as being sort of at cross purposes to. Or the thing that occasioned the break with the relationship with Polixenes. So he's again, at the end of this, of another little speech after he refers to his brows and first turns to Mamillius and says, art thou my boy?
We get just. Just about seven more lines after that in which she. He's going through again, as a kind of, on a smaller scale, the same paces as he did earlier, looking at the two of them, Hermione and Polixenes, holding hands, continuing this heifer, this really unattractive heifer metaphor that's been introduced the page before, and then says again turns to Mamillius. And now with this heifer idea carried through, Mamillius becomes the calf. So this is how. Now you wanton calf.
27:57 Wes: Wanton calf.
27:57 Erin: Are thou my calf? Yeah. Wanton calf.
28:00 Wes: Yeah. So wanton calf. Right. In contradistinction to the innocent lambs, we're gonna get an echo of that when the ladies playfully tell Mamillius that if he were older, he would wanton with them. I was pretty shocked by that. But in any case. Yeah. Art thou my calf? So he's worried about provenance of his offspring, or is it his offspring?
28:27 Erin: I mean, it seems very clear that he is and that even that Leontes believes he is, that there's something.
28:32 Wes: Oh, yeah, I totally agree.
28:34 Erin: Yeah.
28:35 Wes: Yep. He hasn't gone that far. But he's leading himself towards the idea that her current pregnancy is not his and he has to rely on her word in general.
28:48 Erin: Right, right. And in a way, it isn't I mean, what. I think what allows Perdita to be Perdita, to come back, to be reconciled, is the fact that she's a girl. There are different stakes there, unfortunately. Right. So in a way, a female child, whoever that is, isn't going to be like Leontes, though much is made of the fact that she looks quite a bit like him. There isn't the same kind of threat there. So in. In line 131, when Leontes says of Mamillius that they are almost as like as eggs, which is a really.
29:26 Wes: Women say so, but she can't trust them.
29:30 Erin: I take two eggs sitting together. I mean, in addition to the fact that an egg is obviously a sort of feminine image, two eggs sitting next to each other also look like something else, and they're featureless. And implies Leontes takes both himself and Mamillius back to this sort of pre inseminated state where they're both pre embryonic. And again, the twinnedness of that, I think, is what's threatening here.
30:01 Wes: Yeah. As you've pointed out, he must partly be jealous of Mamillius at least. And that's very common, of course, for men. It's usually more common, I think, earlier in childhood. Right. Men with wives, with new babies, they often regress into a more childlike dependent state and have a lot of problems with the attentions of the woman being more on the child. But yeah, so there's a lot of different. There's a lot of different ways in which the jealousy is running here. But I think you also have another good point about the separation allowed by Perdita Lost.
Right. Her name means lost and means loss, which is an important part of establishing the separation where you don't go insane because the bloods mingle too much. There's too much closeness, there's too much fusion. In the whole early boy, eternal lamb situation, there's possibly too much fusion between your friend and your wife. We need some kind of barrier. Part of that is distance in time, distance in country, a change in sex. The line is going to run through her, Right? I think the royal line will run through her, but it'll be her child. With Polixenes son, Florizel, we assume, I think, that they will produce a male heir that will unite both kingdoms.
Maybe, I don't know, but. But at the very least, whether or not it unites the kingdoms, it unites Polixenes and Leontes. They finally get to have a child together, but it's a grandchild and so you get. It's less. I Think it feels less dangerous.
31:56 Erin: Polixenes and Hermione get to have baby as well. Yeah, it works both ways, Right?
32:03 Wes: Exactly. The swingers all get to have a baby together.
32:07 Erin: Exactly. Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice all have one grandchild.
32:12 Wes: Yeah. I think we should move on here to this affection speech. Which is amazing.
32:19 Erin: Yes.
32:19 Wes: And confusing. But here. So now he's going to make the movement. From reflecting on the impossibility of knowing whether the child is yours. So he says, affection thy intention stabs the center. Thou dost make possible things not so held. Communicatest with dreams. How can this be with what's unreal? Though thou coactive art and fellowest nothing. Then tis very credent. Thou mayst co join with something, and thou dost. And that beyond commission. And I find it. And that to the infection of my brains and hardening of my brows. So what does that mean?
I think there's been, you know, there's debate on what this is supposed to mean. It sounds like. I don't know if affection. So affection is obviously paired with infection down below. I don't know if it's meant to mean insanity. Or just the feeling of jealousy. Or the feeling of love. But in any case, it seems to be personified and have an intention which stabs the center and the center of what? The center of the world. His center, his heart. And makes possible things not so held. So it makes the impossible possible. And is coactive with the unreal.
Communicates with dreams, but doesn't produce anything. So, again, I think there's this contrast between the concrete world and the mental world. So when he says 'tis credent, it conjoins with something. I think the idea is that affection, when it reproduces. It reproduces something only within the domain of the imagination. But by doing that, it's almost like a vision that reveals the truth. He's going to go on to say a lot of other things about basically his emotional state of mind. And lack of reasonableness. Lack of attention to evidence. And all that he portrays as a kind of virtue.
Because he thinks he's been. By way of his emotional state. He's actually been plugged into a more direct connection to the truth of things. And I think that's part of what's going on here. But I'm curious about hearing about how you read this.
34:49 Erin: That's great. I mean, I think that to the extent that I was able to figure this out. I think that's along those lines. I mean, I literally have in the margins. Which are otherwise really full. This section. I just have crazy talk. That's all I wrote.
35:02 Wes: I did a little research on this, and everyone, I think, is quite confused by this. So.
35:08 Erin: Well, it seems that there's this.
35:09 Wes: There's a lot of conflicting theories about what this actually means, which I think is just brilliant. If you want a crazy person, you got to have them say indecipherable things, or at least they could be deciphered in a number of different ways.
35:25 Erin: That's right. Yeah. There's something of the cipher here. This idea comes up again and again that if we have nothing, then it has to hook up with something in order to have meaning, and thereby it makes meaning. I hesitate to bring this up, and yet I feel I have to. At the same time that I was reading this, I got these blood test results back, which. This has nothing to do with anything, except that I'm reading almost everything Leontes is saying as being like. Like a newspaper article about my current predicament. I. It's a report from the front lines.
But anyway, I got. I got these blood test results back. I had to figure out why I was getting sick so much. And it turns out that I have a very low white blood cell count right now. And I'm trying to figure out why that is. But basically the supposition is that I had been so stressed out and my cortisol levels might have been high, thereby reducing my white blood cell count, that basically I. The exact same thing. I'm just like Leontes in pretty much every possible way. But that. In other words, that something that I thought.
36:33 Wes: Do you look at the camera all the time and give mad speeches to.
36:36 Erin: Exactly.
36:36 Wes: Or at the audience?
36:38 Erin: No, but, I mean. But this whole idea, this. This magical thinking has been an obsession of mine since I read this, because I feel it's happening to me. You know, this idea that the things that you think, the nothings that. That you think can somehow. The. The mind can somehow produce this effect on reality, which is truly superstitious. Which. Which I've always been guilty of. But this. This. The idea that. That. That through magical thinking, you can actually affect something that will show up on a blood test result, you know, through being stressed out.
I mean, not that this. The stress is magical thinking. Right. But through something that happens purely process, that it can actually have a physical effect on you is just something that has been. I almost like Leontes in the Oracle. I almost said these blood test results are wrong because this can't possibly be true. That. Right? That when you're presented with the evidence of this still, it seems unbelievable that you could have, in the sense that you've stressed yourself out and thereby caused a physical problem. You thought yourself into a change in your physical state.
And so some barrier has been punctured. I hope it's relevant. But this is what I'm trying to talk about. I think this is what he's saying here, that something has been transmuted between states. Between states of matter, you might say. But here it's between the state of ideas into the plane of reality. Something like that.
38:01 Wes: Yeah. I think that's really interesting in light of Polixenes worry, his omnipotence of thought. Worry that his fears about bad things going on in the kingdom while he's away might make them come true.
38:17 Erin: Exactly.
38:18 Wes: And that seems to be the idea that you're entertaining here. And I think that this is so spot on. Because we've been introduced to the idea of omnipotence of thought on the one hand. And impotence of thought on the other. The impotence being thank yous are impotent in a way. Gratitude attitude is impotent. And what else? I forget, There are various other things that we mentioned. But this domain of the psychosocial, which is not concrete, there's a kind of impotence in that. And here he's discovered a domain in which that may not be the case. Because there may actually be an omniscience to being touched.
Or it's a weird type of inspiration, right? It's not just jealousy. And this is what will allow him to be certain. Even in the face of the oracle, right? He's his own oracle. It's almost a sort of prophet like inspiration that he's undergoing. In which by feeling something. And this is not uncommon, right? We all do this actually by feeling. We feel like our feelings are a kind of evidence that they can give us a kind of certainty about things. And that's what I think this speech. I think this speech has something to do with that. Something to do with this idea that a certain realm of thought is not impotent emotion, or whatever you want to call it.
Or maybe jealousy. Maybe jealousy is a form of power because it produces certainty, because it produces a kind of omniscience. Now, is it inventing the question about the truth aspect of this breaks down a little bit. Because is he making it happen in the way Polixenes might make something happen at home? Is he making it happen through his fears? Not in the sense that he's going to drive them together? But in the sense that it no longer matters what the concrete reality is. The reality just is one's internal emotional reality and that's all that matters.
I think this is a very important idea and it's so psychologically true and it has a very strong political importance as well. I think it's relevant, for instance, to what Orwell calls doublethink, or what I think on the Daily show was called truthiness. This idea that it's almost aesthetic in the sense that there's a higher truth that's more important than facts, than the actual facts, and that higher truth is just one's own sentiments and they're typically moral sentiments of certain kind or sentiments about what's just or not. It doesn't matter what really happened because I'm outraged by something that happens.
Happen, for instance. So I think that's part of what's going on here. So we've gone from gratitude and mental states to being impotent to finding a domain in which they are actually powerful in the sense of conferring a type of omniscience.
41:38 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I think in what you said about the effectiveness of Leontes jealousy in potentially in pushing Polixenes and Hermione into an affair or yet to create this reality. I think that obviously that doesn't quite work, but I think that the deeper impulse is maybe not that he wants them to have an affair or he wants to make it true, but that he wants to, as you've already said, like, push them away from him. Right. He wants to. He wants to get out of this too close relationship to both of them and to Mamillius. And that is what he successfully occasions.
Right. What he does is pushes them. Them away. I mean, his. The way that his thoughts affect reality. I mean, it's actually shocking. It's. That's why I brought up my blood test results, which were equally, to me, in my current state, equally shocking in that people actually die as a result of what he thinks. Right. I mean, it's a bit silly that Mamillius and Hermione both kind of swoon and it's more realistic because Hermione's just given birth in what we imagine are
42:46 Wes: pretty and is also not really dead.
42:48 Erin: Right.
42:49 Wes: Well, although I know there's two readings of that.
42:51 Erin: Yeah. Right. But what he does is what he wants is distance and that's what he gets, that's what he produces.
42:58 Wes: Yeah, great point.
43:00 Erin: Yeah.
43:01 Wes: So when we go from there, Hermione, I love the transition from affection to infection of the brains and this infection, disease metaphor is going to start becoming predominant. But then distraction. Hermione puts it as distraction. So affection, infection, distraction. You look as if you held a brow of much distraction. And then he. And then he gives that line about. He hides the fact that he's been worrying about the parentage of the boy and says, I thought I saw myself as you already mentioned. But I think, as we've discussed, there's an element of truth in that. Mamillius is the representative of the boy, eternal. And the fusion of him and Polixenes. But.
43:43 Erin: Yeah, yeah, well, in this. Speaking of fusion, I'll just, If I'm not going too quickly, turn our attention to Polixenes's discussion of his own son, which I think provides some credence for this reading of Mamillius being the problem. Polixenes says that his son is all my exercise, my mirth, my matter now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy, my parasite, my soldier, statesman, all. He makes a July's day short as December, and with his varying childness, cures in me thoughts that would thick my blood. So I love this idea that kids are the problem for which they are also the cure.
That's how I'm reading this, that kids cause all these. These issues they bring out. Right. All of these various elements of their parents. They cause them a lot of grief, they cause them a lot of stress. They are, in this instance, it seems, for Polixenes, they're a kind of threat, kind of competition, but then also they cure the very thoughts that they produce.
44:44 Wes: Yep.
44:45 Erin: It seems to me that he wouldn't have any of these. He wouldn't have need of a cure if he hadn't a child to thick his blood. Right. In a kind of literal way, in the way that we're talking about.
44:55 Wes: Yeah. The fears that. The fears created by the. Well, not only because children are pain in the ass, because you're worried about them all the time.
45:02 Erin: Right, right.
45:03 Wes: What could happen to them?
45:05 Erin: And that. That Polixenes is no longer the main character. Right. He's. He has to give way to this young person who is all of these.
45:12 Wes: Right.
45:13 Erin: He's the main character now. He has all the characteristics. He's soldier and statesman. Everything.
45:17 Wes: Okay.
45:18 Erin: Yeah.
45:18 Wes: Right, Right. Okay. Yep. That's the more profound reading of that.
45:23 Erin: No.
45:24 Wes: And it. So at this point, we get a transition to Leonte's, to use his word, angling, trying to set them up by saying things like, let what is dear in Sicily be cheap, show all your. Be as nice as you can be hermione to Polixenes. I'm gonna. You guys go off to the garden, do your thing to your own bents, dispose you. You'll be found, although, you know, be beneath the sky. And then there's the aside I'm angling now. So anyway, that it's not going to take him long, of course, to.
45:59 Erin: To.
45:59 Wes: To come to the position of absolute certainty, which that affection speech suggests that he's. He's already nearly there, if not there, but he's pretending like he's setting them up to sin again and be found out.
46:19 Erin: Yeah, he's. The transformation of these metaphors are what is most interesting to me in these subsequent speeches. The way that things change or become perverted or turned inside out. I think it happens with the fishing metaphor, and it really happens, of course, with the infection, disease, contagion metaphor, where that keeps changing who has the disease, who doesn't know they have the disease, et cetera. You know, that the. The referent keeps being transposed. But I think that something of that is happening on a microscopic level at the opening of this speech of Leontes once he sent off Polixenes and Hermione, when he says to Mamillius, go play, boy, play.
Thy mother plays. And I play too. But so disgraced a part. Just that the changing of the word play there, the meanings of play is kind of the evolution that some of the metaphors undergo, which again is suggestive of this early idea that you brought up of this word associative thing. Now it seems like Leontes is like party of one. He's playing his own word association game that leads him down the mental garden path to the thing that he believed in the first place. He gets himself there.
47:40 Wes: Yeah, I love this. I love this. Yeah, exactly. I love the speech. This association of Mamillius playing with the mothers and fidelity. It's great. So he can't encounter any phenomenon in the world without interpreting it through this lens that he's created. And then he says, and I love this speech as well. There have been or I am much deceived cuckolds ere now. And many a man there is even at this present now, while I speak this holds his wife by the arm, that little thinks she has been sluiced in his absence and his pond fished by his neighbor.
I think we should bring sluiced back as a. But anyway, I just love these crazy speeches by Leontes. You know, a tenth of mankind would hang themselves if they knew that their wives were getting sluiced the way they are. If they. If everyone whose wife were cheating on them actually knew that, then. I don't know, 10% might be a low estimate. I'm just kidding. Physic for it. There's none. It is a bawdy planet. I love that. Oh, my God, there's just so much I love in this play. And a bawdy planet that will strike where it is predominant and then no barricado for a belly.
49:07 Erin: That's great.
49:08 Wes: Kingdoms can have gates and psyches can have gates. They can have defenses that work. Right. But there's no way to ensure the fidelity of another person.
49:21 Erin: Yeah. Which is such a. Which is so interesting, because the belly is. That seems to be the impermeable membrane. Right. That seems to be the. It's the belly itself. Right. Is not the port of entry, shall we say?
49:36 Wes: It's not.
49:38 Erin: And so there's. So the. But the illogic of that is what makes this so great. Right. I mean, the literal illogic, the impermeability becomes. Leontes imagines himself, I think, to have, like, X ray vision, because this becomes a theme and I'm skipping ahead. I won't go all the way there. Right. But this becomes the whole point of the spider thing. Right. I have drunk and seen the spider. That's a very odd order. Right. You don't see the spider if you drank it. It. Right. So there's something of this, I think, of this X ray vision. Right. That's happening where he could see inside someone here. Before we get to that, I just want to say, though, that the. You know, this belly, too, it will let in and out the enemy with bag and baggage. Obviously, that's a very sexual metaphor, but it's also indicative of a baby, too. Right. The baby is also.
50:28 Wes: Right. Well, that's. I think by belly, he means the pregnant swollen belly.
50:34 Erin: Sure. Absolutely.
50:34 Wes: That's the way I took it. Yeah. There's no way to determine parentage. There's no way to know. You can defend a kingdom, you can defend your mind, but you can't defend yourself against being cuckolded.
50:47 Erin: Right, Right.
50:48 Wes: Or having offspring that you might think is yours but isn't. Which psychologically, it's interesting to think about. Why is that such a terrible thing? Intuitively, we can understand it, but if we try to parse it out rationally, it becomes much more difficult. What is the danger of another's offspring?
51:10 Erin: Well, he immediately switches back to the disease metaphor, which. It's a kind of an odd place for it because I think there's a lot of association Going on here. I mean, same thing with the fishing metaphor. So earlier he talks about angling, right? So he's the fisherman and the couple, both Polixenes and Hermione are like the pond of information and in which he's fishing. What the fish is, we don't know, Right? But the two of them together, maybe in this metaphor, like the pond. Then in this speech, the fishing metaphor comes back, but as a symbol of a man who fishes in another man's pond with the woman, as the woman is the pond, or she's the conduit from which the men extract the goods, the fish maybe being the sons or something like that.
And so Leonti's pond has been violated by another fisherman. Someone else is angling in his pond in the same way. I think there's this idea of no barricado for a belly. There's no. You can't block access to the womb, as it's glossed in my edition. So. So a man can enter a woman and she will let in and out men who are not her husband in terms of an affair. Also, the enemy, as we've already said, is the child who will exit the issue of the adulterous relationship and then he immediately goes to. Many thousands on us have the disease and feel it not.
And here I'm taking, you know, because of. It's in such close relation, or close. Close proximity, rather to this very explicit sexual language, I'm taking this almost as like a. Like a sexual disease. But he's flipped it or he's twisted it, right? It's the woman's body that's being violated, or that's not the right word, Right, but that's being invaded by outside forces. So presumably she would be the one who has the disease. In the previous metaphor, if we take it for. If we take the disease to be what literally? A sexual disease, a sexually transmitted disease, because she's been the.
The gate through which people are coming in and out, or the disease of sin or whatever. Right, but she's the thing that's been the conduit for others. She's the thing that has been, if you like, violated, I'll use that term. Right, but he's the one then who becomes the violated one. He's the one. So. So just as he. He went from being angler to landowner whose pond has been violated, she has gone from being the violated pond to now he's the one who is infected with the disease. So it's almost as though he is put in the woman's Place. And Polixenes is the fisherman taking something out of him.
So there's a transposition in which he is in the feminine role in this metaphor.
54:03 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. And just to reinforce your point, it's a really odd way to describe being cuckolded as having a disease. Because it's something that really, in a way, doesn't involve you. And this is the weird thing about jealousy. And it's also something worth reflecting on. What does it matter what the other person is doing out of sight? What does it matter? Why is sexual fidelity so important psychologically? I mean, it can be explained, obviously, but it's not like someone is taking a knife literally and putting it into your body.
You're not being physically harmed. No one's yelling at you. You're not being verbally abused. But there's this need for another to have a certain kind of comportment to you. Not just love, but complete faith and fidelity such that they are not engaged in some pleasurable, maybe loving, but maybe just physically pleasurable experience with another person without you. So there's a lot to be said about why would we be jealous? Why would we be envious? Those are very puzzling ideas, I think, when you begin to think about them. And here, this idea of describing it as a disease captures some of that.
He has a disease that involves the activity of his wife with another, does it? That actually he's not. He can't actually catch it. It's not really. It's an odd metaphor in a way, to capture some odd emotions. But what else was I going to say about this? The real disease is that he's insane. The real disease is the jealousy, not the thing that he's jealous of. So by calling it a disease, he's, I think, a little bit conscious of the. The fact that there's a kind of insanity involved in jealousy. But he's thinking of this and consciously, at least in terms of catching the disease of someone else's unfaithfulness of cuckoldry and becoming like all those other men on the bawdy planet.
56:28 Erin: Well, I like that because then, you know, it pushes this metaphor even further. Arguably, you know that if he's the byproduct. Right. Of the affair, in other words, these two people produce an infection which is registered in his body. He's almost like the cuckolded man is almost like the child of the affair in that metaphoric relation. Right? The affair produces something. Its product is the disease in the third party. Maybe that's pushing things too far. But the.
57:01 Wes: I think that's good. Is this a good place to end, do you think? I think it is. Since we're just going to do Leontes and Camillo next.
57:09 Erin: Okay. Yes.
57:10 Wes: All right, so we will stop there and next time we will finish up act one and. And I think things are going to go a bit faster. So I'm not sure what we're going to get through in the next part of the discussion and the part following that, but I was not surprised that we spent a lot of time on this first act.
57:30 Erin: This is where all the meat is, not all the meat, but it's important. Yeah.
57:38 Wes: Things get more action oriented. They move much quicker in a way after this. But so I. Yeah. So we will continue on with Leontes and Camillo next time.
57:51 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
57:54 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com
58:31 Erin: hey
The Emptiness of Signification in Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 1)
Nov 20, 2023
When King Leontes accuses his pregnant wife of adultery, the nobleman Antigonus assumes that Leontes has been “abused and by some putter-on”—in other words, some Iago-like villain has been putting malevolent ideas into his head. In fact, Leontes is the father of his own misconceptions, just as he is the father of his wife’s children. But unlike his children, his ideas might be said to have no mother; they lack corroboration, which is to say, collaboration with a source outside himself. How, then, do we account for the seemingly spontaneous generation of his thoughts? How can false apprehensions arise out of nothing? And what price must one pay for bearing these misconceptions, these “nothings,” into the world? In this episode, the first part of a six part discussion, Wes & Erin discuss one of Shakespeare’s last plays, “The Winter’s Tale.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: When King Leontes accuses his pregnant wife of adultery, the nobleman Antigonus assumes that Leontes has been abused by some putter-on. In other words, some Iago like villain has been putting malevolent ideas into his head. In fact, Leontes is the father of his own misconceptions, just as he is the father of his wife's children. But unlike his children, his ideas might be said to have no mother. They lack corroboration, which is to say collaboration with a source outside himself. How then do we account for the seemingly spontaneous generation of his thoughts?
How can false apprehensions arise out of nothing? And what price must one pay for bearing these misconceptions, these nothings, into the world? In this episode, the first part of a multi part discussion, we'll be talking about one of Shakespeare's last plays, the Winter's Tale. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Okay, Wes, So the Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's possibly his second to last play, is that right?
1:15 Wes: Or third to last? I was looking at a chronology. So it's after Cymbeline, supposedly, and before the Tempest, Henry VIII and two noble kinsmen. So okay, 1610 or 1611, is that right?
1:31 Erin: Yes. So, but really his second to last great play, I'd argue, right? His penultimate great play, sure. So it's classified as a romance. And this question of genre is one that's a bit interesting, especially because this play is playing so consciously with generic crossover, with taking two genres and putting them together, something we'll probably talk about later when we get to Acts 4 and 5, when the play becomes something quite different. But in romance we have a mixture, I think, of comedy and tragedy, of comic and tragic registers. The question of what genre this actually is, or whether or not it's useful to call something a romance, is an interesting one.
But in general they seem to be characterized by a loose episodic structure. There are elements of fantasy or improbability, or even the supernatural that run through romance. Those listeners who are familiar with our episode on the Tempest will remember that there's explicit invocation of the gods and supernatural creatures, right, like Ariel, that are running around. Caliban has some elements of the supernatural in him, and there's this sort of halfway between the comic and tragic that occurs. So tragedy, which is never quite fully tragic and with a sort of generous smattering of comic relief even within the tragedy, which we can argue, I suppose, in these first three acts, if there are comic moments, I think there are quite a few of them.
So there are things that are irrevocable. Time passes, people do die. But then the comedy also works itself out of the ingredients that are already in place within the tragedy. So the action is transposed in this particular play from one generation to the next. And the movement from tragedy to comedy, I think, has a lot to do with this displacement by way of the generation. So there's a regeneration into comedy, just as there's a regeneration with these younger people now coming of age and becoming interested in marriage and starting their own lives, their own history together.
So there's. That's something about, I suppose, about romance in general, but also this play in particular, and the way that it blends these episodes, as I said, of fantasy, of the supernatural, also of both comedy and tragedy wedded together or interspersed with each other.
4:11 Wes: Yeah, I really like the way you put that when you say transposition of the action into the next generation. So it starts out on the trajectory of the tragic. And maybe there's some tragic element like the death of Mamilius or in the Tempest. It looks like it's gonna be. It looks like Prospero is gonna be merely getting revenge. But then we get, in the end, a comedy in which some young people are, I want to say, cobbled together in a relationship. You get the redemption in the union of the younger generation, which undoes a rift in the older generation. And I hadn't thought about it in terms of the phrase, the way you had put it exactly, this transposition into the next generation.
5:05 Erin: Well, there's something, too, I think, about. And this is another element of romance which I should have mentioned earlier, which is this travel element. Right. The Tempest has this as well. Even though most of the. Most of the action is just located in one place. There's this idea of this huge map over which these events are taking place. So there's huge spaces traversed. It's very peripatetic. Right. We have Sicilia and Bohemia having a sea coast. So there's something fantastical inherent in that kind of imaginary space. But this transposition, I think, between one generation to the next is repeated in this idea of these two spaces that you're.
That we're toggling back and forth between, which represent. They'll represent a change in the genre of the play. When we go from Sicilia, which is sort of dour and extremely regal and courtly and regimented, and we go to Bohemia, which is a place occupied by shepherds and clowns and. And all of these fun people. And it's much more pastoral and it has these fantastical elements to it in a way that Cecilia doesn't. And so this kind of transposition into a different environment, a different frame of mind, I think is also repeated in this generational.
This regeneration. Right. In which we have a relationship which has failed. The relationship between Leontes and Hermione literally renewing itself in this new place with this next group of young people.
6:37 Wes: Yeah, it has a desert, it has a seacoast, it has bears, which Ben Jonson really criticized him for that. And of course, yes, the pursued by bear. Famous criticism. What is the bear for? I read that it may have been just that they happen to have a bear available and available. And so Shakespeare put that in the play. And I thought it really misses the point to criticize something like that, because this is really, first and foremost about entertainment. It's sublime entertainment. But if you have a bear, you're going to use the bear. I mean, that's the governing principle of the art at that point. But he's taking these fantastic elements from Robert Greene's Pandosto. So although he reverses. Is that how you pronounce it?
7:23 Erin: Yeah, Pandosto.
7:25 Wes: Pandosto. Robert Greene, by the way, the guy who had accused Shakespeare of plagiarism, apparently said, referred to Shakespeare as that upstart crow beautified in our feathers. Which is taken. It doesn't mention Shakespeare by name, but it's taken to be a reference to Shakespeare. And here Shakespeare is essentially adapting a story by Robert Greene. So including Bohemia, which is basically part of the Czech Republic, doesn't have a desert, obviously doesn't have a coast. And yet in this fantasy it does. And not only that, it looks like the English countryside really is what this second setting for the play seems to be.
8:13 Erin: I take the bear more than anything to be a pun. Maybe I'm being a little silly in that way, but. Right. But there's so much emphasis in these first three acts on, obviously on the pregnancy of Hermione and on people having these misconceptions or these conceptions, people bearing ideas. Antigonus, when he's overtaken by the bear, it seems to be this personification almost, or that's not the right word for an animal, but I can't think of the proper word, but that this is the last gasp of this violent idea that's taken root in Leonti's mind and which has killed, arguably killed at least two people.
And then finally, Antigonus in this last moment, which is then very quickly transposed into a comedic moment. Right? But Antigonus is the last person, it seems, who believes Leontes story. One of the things, maybe that marks Antigonus for death is the fact that he does believe it still. Right. Camillo gets away in order to avoid killing off Polixenes, but Antigonus leaves with the baby on this evil errand that he's agreed to do for Leontes before he can hear from the oracle that it's all bunk, that Leontes suspicions of Hermione are garbage. And so in doing this evil deed of leaving Perdita to die by exposure, he's just following orders, of course, right.
But he gets his comeuppance in the form of a bear, kind of a born idea that's swallows him up. Maybe I'm a.
9:52 Wes: What idea?
9:53 Erin: A born idea. An idea born out that he's carried this idea, personified by Perdita, across the oceans that seem to separate Sicily and Bohemia. And then when she's deposited, born again into this new place, he's then eaten by the bear, the last vestiges of this idea.
10:15 Wes: That's great. In a way, it's. Again, I hadn't thought of it this way. I mean, I certainly appreciated the comedy of the moment and I think it's already comical, him running out with a bear running after him, even before the son of the shepherd, the clown, cracks some funny. Makes some funny remarks about it. But you're making me think of this as. This is an interesting segue from the tragic to the comic. It's almost a decomposition of the tragic. Here's a terrible violent act that actually is played for laughs. So I like that. I like that a lot. Shall we start into act one?
11:00 Erin: Yeah, let's rewind and see how we get to Bohemia first place.
11:05 Wes: Yeah. So I. In a way, this play is about, obviously about jealousy. And there's a great psychology, I think, to the first act and to the transition, the quick transition in the mind of Leontes into the mental state of jealousy, although that. That itself has also been criticized. But I think it's done expertly and. And part of the. What I think is so expert about it is that the play actually grounds itself in a reflection of. About the concept of gratitude and hospitality. And I thought, surely other people have thought about this, right? They had.
The secondary literature doesn't just focus on jealousy. And of course, I did a quick search. I didn't read anything, but, yeah, there's a million papers written on hospitality and Gratitude and the Winner's Tale. But I think there's also an interesting relation between. There's an interesting transition from the question of hospitality to jealousy. But in any case, the play begins with a scene between Camilo and Archidamus in which there's this worry over whether the hospitality of the Sicilians can actually be returned when Leontes visits Bohemia.
So Archidamus suggests that instead of living up to that challenge. Right, because it can't be lived up to, the hospitality they've received in Sicily is so great that there's no recompense for that. So instead he says, we will give you sleepy drinks. That your senses unintelligent of our insufficience may, though they cannot praise us as little, accuse us. And then the first scene sets up some other stuff, including the idea that Polixenes and Leontes have this unalterable affection between them and that Mamillius is a gentleman of great promise that everyone wants to see become a man.
But I was taken by this early emphasis on the concept of hospitality, which also is how things play out in the beginning of the second scene. I don't know what you made of that.
13:28 Erin: Yeah, this first scene, I love the fact that we're talking about this because it's something that might easily be skipped over and yet I think it's. It has all the themes of the play in it in microcosm. So we have all these things that you're describing, this question of hospitality. In fact, I was joking with. I was joking with someone the other day that you could take Leonti's jealousy or his insanity as just evidence of the fact that this is a play about guests that have stayed too long, they've been there for nine months and people start to go crazy. And that's the way it goes.
14:03 Wes: That's what happens. Yeah.
14:04 Erin: Right. But we have.
14:05 Wes: Especially when you're leaving right at the nine month mark, it's very suspicious.
14:10 Erin: Well, there's a lot of correlation equals causation here.
14:12 Wes: I mean.
14:13 Erin: Oh, yeah, we can immediately see.
14:15 Wes: I'm not so sure. They didn't actually get together.
14:18 Erin: No way. Really?
14:19 Wes: Based on the way it's portrayed.
14:20 Erin: Yeah. Well, it's pretty. Yeah. Their language is pretty. Polixenes and Hermione are speaking almost exclusively in sexual metaphors with each other. But prior to that. Yeah. So we have Archidamus as representative of Bohemia and Camillo as representative of Sicilia. So we already have this kind of metonymic function happening here in which these two men are each representing their two kingdoms. As parts of the aristocracy, I believe, and as proxies for their kings. And then they refer to their kings as Bohemia and Sicilia. A further metonymic function, metonymic kind of distancing or replacement of these men with their countries.
And yet we learn that Bohemia hasn't really been in Bohemia for quite a while. Right. And then we understand that this is a friendship which, though it's extremely close, has been carried out by proxy by gifts and letters and other things which have this kind of replacement function that metonymy has. So there's something up here, right? There's. I see this as prefiguring something as late as Hermione's statue or. Which. I know I'm really getting ahead of myself here, or the fact that.
15:37 Wes: Spoiler alert, spoiler alert.
15:39 Erin: Or Florizel replacing Mamilius. We also have this idea that Mamilius isn't going to exist very soon after this scene. Already within this scene, Archidamus is already projecting what would happen if the king had no son. At the end of this scene, the sleepy drinks we know are going to come up later. This is potentially where Camillo gets the idea in the substance scene to poison Polixenes. It's lent to him by Archidamus in this scene. It's also. I mean, Leontes isn't here to listen to this, but this idea of these sleepy drinks, which is such an odd thing that it really does stick in our minds, so it stands out.
We remember it when we get to Leontes talking about the drink poisoned by the spider in his famous speech. And then what else could I say about this? Oh, God, the best thing of all, the affection which cannot choose but branch. Now, this doubling, this duplicity within the language, not a conscious duplicity on Camillo's part, but when he talks about the affection that Leontes and Polixenes have for each other. There's this great word branch they had. Here's.
16:46 Wes: They were trained together in their childhoods and there rooted betwixt them then, such an affection which cannot choose but branch.
16:53 Erin: Now, yeah, so we have this.
16:54 Wes: So the metaphor is that it will flourish, it will come into actuality. Right, because they've been having interchanges through gifts and letters. But the double meaning there is that the branching will represent an extension of the affection, say to Leontes to Hermione. Right, from Leontes to Hermione. Or that there'll be a split, that there will actually be a rift.
17:26 Erin: Exactly. And this flowering idea too, within branching, or this flourishing flowering, it's glossed in my notes, in my edition, rather as flourish, as in yours. Yeah. So this idea of the thing that flowers, that produces heirs and children, etc. Is also splitting at the same time. In order to have a child, you split yourself. And of course, there's also this idea of the horns, the cuckold's horns, inherent, I think, in the branching imagery too. So, you know, in the language here. The language is so tortured. I think in this whole play it's very difficult. It's much more thorny, I think, than most other Shakespeare plays. And this scene is no exception to that. And I think that just this idea of branching as having this. This oxymoronic meaning is something that'll be played upon really heavily in the subsequent scene and in the rantings and ravings of Leontes.
18:27 Wes: Yeah. It's worth emphasizing your point about the syntax of the play, that this is the way Shakespeare wrote in later life. In the Tempest and Cymbeline, for instance, are very similar, very difficult to understand. It does loosen up a little bit as the play goes on, but in the first act, definitely this very tortured syntax. It's amazing how different Shakespeare can be from play to play because it's quite unlike earlier plays. And it is poetically very beautiful, in my opinion. But it takes some deciphering. There's almost like a riddle like or puzzle like aspect to it.
It forces you to run over the. If you're a reader, to. To go over it again and puzzle it out. And it's clear when you see it performed, obviously because of. Because of context, but. But still, it really requires a lot of mental capacity of the audience, I think. Or it requires some mental. Some mental exertion. But, yeah, I think this is. You're right. This first scene really does set up everything thematically. I had the same reaction as you. And when I first read this, and this is the second time I've read the play, it was the kind of thing you gloss over.
Okay, here's some introductory exposition, right? No, much more is going on there. It's a thematic introduction as well, and some ingenious parts, so. Including this idea of wanting Mamilius to be. Wanting to see him born. And then the joke. So that went on crutches ere he was born. Desire yet their life to see him a man. And then Archidamus says, would they else be content to die, Camilla? Yes, if there were no other excuse why they should desire to live. Archidamus. If the king had no son, they would desire to live on crutches. Till he had one.
He may be foreshadowing. I thought maybe you pointed to this as a foreshadowing of the loss of Mimilius and also foreshadowing his replacement by Florizel.
20:48 Erin: Definitely. There's even something in this that reminds me now of the wording of the oracle, Right. This idea that she's not going to recover what's been lost until he gets his daughter back. This is a sort of twisting of that or a parody of that. Like this is, you know, oh, if the king were to have lost a son, then they would want to keep living until he got one back. You know, there's a similarity to that oracular speech, just as this scene, I think, mirrors. That is their name, Cleomenes. Cleomenes and Dion are another two, another pair of men who have a similar expository role in a couple of the bears of the.
21:33 Wes: Of the oracle.
21:34 Erin: Right, right. And. And so it would make sense that this scene would mirror that one. Another scene, which we think is something that you can pass over, but which has some interesting resonances and sets up some themes which are really important. So it makes sense that the oracular language that those two Cleomenes and Dion are bearing in that scene would be prefigured by. By this one. But let's get into. I mean, right. Right from the start. As soon as in Act 1, Scene 2, when all the major players come in and Polixenes starts talking, he just becomes.
22:10 Wes: Yeah, I think it's worth reading that. That first speech, if you want to read it.
22:15 Erin: Sure. This is Polixenes, right at Act 1, Scene 2, Line 1 9. Changes of the watery star hath been the shepherd's note. Since we have left our throne without a burden, Time as long again would be filled up, my brother, with our thanks. And yet we should for perpetuity go hence in debt. And therefore, like a cipher, yet standing in rich place, I multiply with one. We thank you many thousands more that go before it.
22:39 Wes: Okay, so this is wonderful.
22:41 Erin: Yeah, it's awesome.
22:43 Wes: Wonderful speech. And among the deciphering I had to do was looking up the word cipher and trying to figure out what does this mean? And it sounds like, to my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, what he's saying with this cipher speech is that a cipher is like a zero being added to a number to multiply it, right? So 10 becomes 100 becomes 1000. The cipher are the zeros. This is an idea that comes up in Shakespeare a few times. He likes this idea of a nothing that is creating a something or multiplying a something. And in this case, it's used to highlight the fact that there's this interesting asymmetry between hospitality and gratitude, where hospitality is a.
It's a. It's concrete, it's physical, right? You're providing people with food and shelter, sustenance. And what is gratitude in return? How are you repaying that debt? You repay it to some extent with your company. You repay it to some extent with your gratitude. But these are ineffable things, and they are, in general, mental or social phenomena. It's not like giving someone food. And so that is the asymmetry with which Polixenes begins the play saying that though standing in rich place, which I think so, you can read that in two ways. He's standing in this place in which he's received all this hospitality.
But also the zero, the cipher, and its place in the number, in some sense is standing in a rich place. But all he can do is keep multiplying these thank yous, like adding zeros onto a number, and it's meaningless. It will never amount to a repayment of the debt of hospitality. Am I reading that right?
24:54 Erin: I think so. I think that's great. I hadn't considered this. I love this distinction you're drawing between the physicalness of hospitality and the ineffability of gratitude. I love it. So what does that mean about this debt between them? How is this, then? How do we square this then? Is this really a debt that is lingering in the mind of Leontes? Is Leontes actually quite as I think your argument here is suggesting to me, Leontes is then feeling this debt rather keenly and feels he's been taken advantage of, maybe in more ways than one. Is that where you think this doubt of. This doubt is originating? In the debt of Polixenes?
25:39 Wes: I think maybe at some unconscious level, that's true. And you pointed to the fact that guests can overstay their welcome. And if someone hasn't overstayed their welcome at nine months, then I don't know, they must be an extra special guest. I realize this is olden times and they've traveled very far, and time works differently back then, but still, I think we will see clues in Leonte's kind of obtuse reactions to what Polixenes is saying. I think he's not quite tuned in to the emotional reality of what's unfolding at this point. And I think he may be irritable about the overstaying of A guest or maybe, but probably not consciously.
But there are other subtle things that I think happen to stimulate the jealousy as well. And some of it is the. We can go over that as we keep talking. I think it's worth pointing out each thing. And a lot of it does have to do with the behavior of Polixenes and Hermione. But in this case something is off, I think. And that's what Polixenes is pointing to. He's pointing to a very general truth too. It's not just that gratitude is ineffable in response to hospitality, but in general, mental states and social phenomena can pay off concrete physical reality adequately in ways that they are meant to.
And then that goes even for various types of social phenomena. And we'll get more into this as we go along. But honor, for instance, can't repay love, even though it's often meant to. And in fact, this is a case of honor, you know, gratitude. Giving gratitude, in a way is like honoring and recognizing and respecting something, respecting someone for something they've done. But giving people food and shelter is more. Is better described as love, I think. And honor can't actually repay love. But I think you're right, you're pointing to the fact that, or I think you are, that there's already something off here.
And Publicity's speech reveals that he's sensitive to that. He's reacting to something that we haven't seen on camera, so to speak, happened off camera. Something's already happened that. That has put things off. And this speech sets things in motion, let's put it that way. It's a very small thing, but this reflection by Polixenes sets everything in motion towards Leonte's insanity, even though it's just him trying to do. In a way it looks like a nicety, right? It looks like politeness. It looks like just people doing the usual thing. But there's a darker undercurrent.
28:33 Erin: Well, I really like what you say about Leontes not being quite tuned in. I know you took it in a slightly different direction, but I'll borrow that phrase and say that it seems that he's hearing things almost out of their own context, that he's then interpreting for his own ends. Right. So Polixenes is arguably putting these ideas in Leontes head by using the language that he uses. But Polixenes is pointing out that he's been there for nine months and standing next to Leontes nine months pregnant wife. So Leonti's suspicious, Right?
29:09 Wes: Right. And so I can't repay your debt But I did leave you a child.
29:14 Erin: Well, so Leontes is not hearing that. Oh, Polixenes is saying, oh, I've overstayed my welcome, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, maybe he is hearing that, but he's hearing, like, oh, nine months he's been here, and then he's hearing that Polixenes is a cipher. I mean, maybe this is suggestive to him that he's, you know, since Leontes is making signs out of things that are not signs, that he's making a code out of things that aren't coded. And here Polixenes is saying he's a cipher. Right. To be figured out. Leontes is reading this as, oh, he has a secret, he's doing something wrong.
And then Polixenes himself puts this idea of cuckoldry into Leontes head in the same way that maybe Archidamus in the previous scene puts the idea of the sleepy drink into the head of Camillo. You know, things are contagion as something that's so often used as a metaphor here. There's lots of sticky ideas. And Polixenes is concerned that he's left his throne without a burden. Another image of pregnancy. And he says that he fears what may chance or breed upon his absence, which is of course itself an image of cuckoldry. Something bred in one's absence can't be fathered by you if you're not there to father it.
So. So it's like gulliones, as you're suggesting, I think is he's hearing the words and these are just giving him lots of ideas out of nothing. He's multiplying them like a cipher into that. Which Polixenes surely doesn't mean, but which is so suggestive in isolation.
30:54 Wes: Yeah. And in a way, Polixenes takes up that theme of the mental versus the concrete. So I think he takes up. He keeps extending the theme in his next speech. So Leontes, the thing that I was thinking of as obtuse, Leontes just says after that long speech by Polixenesis, stay your thanks a while and pay them when you part. Which is an odd thing to say to someone who has just said, I'm accruing this enormous debt by staying and it can't be repaid, and thanks aren't good enough. Thanks will never repay them. Leontes breezes over that. Later on, Hermione will accuse him of being too cold in his entreaties.
He's not doing a good job of actually trying to persuade Polixenes to stay. And I think she's right. He's not actually trying to get him to stay, but until he calls Hermione. Tongue tied. But in Polixenes speech, I guess I'll read the whole thing, sir. That's tomorrow. I am questioned by my fears of what may chance or breed upon our absence that may blow no sneeping winds at home to make us say this is put forth too truly. Besides, I have stayed to tire your royalty. It took me a while to figure out that the that and the that may blow refers back to fears.
So he's doing a number of things here. He's giving us a number of things that worry him. So there's what may happen in his kingdom in his absence. And then there's this idea that his fears may actually cause things, bad things to happen at home. So the fears that may blow no sneeping so cold winds at home and make us say, this was put forth too truly. Meaning I hope that by having the thought, it doesn't make it come true. So you get a little bit of the omnipotence of thought there. A worry about mind actually having this effect on reality. So in the first speech, we get the idea that mental states can't ever compensate concrete reality.
And in the second speech, we get the idea that what if they do. What if they do have an effect? So it's a little bit of superstition, or what psychoanalysts would call omnipotence of thought. And then there's the idea that he's just tiring Polixenes out. He's being a burden. He's being in trouble. So those are the three elements that he's using to excuse himself.
33:37 Erin: I love that. I thought that last line, though, was his admission of guilt. He's saying, I've stayed to tire out your wife. So.
33:47 Wes: Look, man, I'm tired of having sex with your wife. This has been nine months of this.
33:56 Erin: Yeah. This magical thing.
33:58 Wes: I'm not your boy toy.
34:01 Erin: I have feelings.
34:04 Wes: I know I'm hot. I know I go around without a shirt on most of the time and I have a six pack, but.
34:12 Erin: Oh, that's too funny. No. But, yeah. This idea that you're pointing to of magical thinking. I did not read that properly. I didn't realize that's what he was implying. And of course, that's the most interesting part of this whole thing to me. And this idea that in this economy, this gratitude economy, of course, grace is a form of magical thinking, arguably as well. Right. The note of grace that will be sounded by hermione shortly, I think, also figures into this. So I don't want to get ahead of myself, but the two of them go on a little bit after this about tongues and speech, to the point that you pointed to where Hermione accuses Leontes of being too cold in his entreaties.
But we have from Polixenes, there is no tongue that moves none in the world so soon as yours could win me. Of course, silence is always maybe a little scary in. I mean, certainly the concept of silence can be a little bit scary in a play. We need words to fill up the space, the time. But also, of course, we know that silence is confusing and it can be as much of a cipher as anything that's explicitly said. And we know from Cordelia, Right, that silence can be taken the wrong way. It can be dangerous in Shakespeare's mind. So there's this idea of speech, of needing speech to move someone, to convince someone.
And I'm just immediately put in mind of Lear and of Cordelia needing to convince someone to stay, and then Hermione's silence, both as. Both as a sign, maybe of a Cordelia like virtue, but also of being something dangerous that can be interpreted any way that you want to interpret it. So there's the demand for speech to. Yeah, to produce something from within yourself that is itself nothing. Right. That's just air.
36:02 Wes: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. The nothing is always a stand in for consciousness or mental states or what's interior to the person, or what goes in it, what is distinguished from concrete physical reality, or however you want to put it. And so thanks belong in that. Thanks and gratitude belong in that realm. But you're pointing to something, I think, that is very important, which is that it seems like Leontes has already become suspicious now at this point when he asks his wife if she's tongue tied. So Polixenes has already set this up by saying there is no tongue that moves, none in the world that basically could win him.
And obviously Leontes is riffing off of that unknowingly, in the way we do in speech. And this is what I think is part of what's so psychologically wonderful about this first act, is having that little remark and the use of a word like tongue, which is quite suggestive sexually, and Leontes cottoning onto that and somehow joining that to the idea of his wife's silence, which, as you point out, can be taken as something suspicious. But how is he going to try and get rid of his suspicion? He's going to invite her to try to get this guy to stay. There's a lot of different dynamics here.
Not only is he doing that, he's challenging her to. He's setting up a competition between them. Well, I couldn't get him to stay, so maybe you can. And there's a few different ways in which that can go really wrong. He could get upset because she turns out to be a much more persuasive and better spoken person than him and much more tuned in to the emotional reality. And so that's a. And then the next thing is, if she does win Polix knees over, this is Leonte's childhood friend, someone he's supposed to be very close to. And there's almost even kind of a homoerotic suggestions there.
And so he could end up being jealous of. If she does get Polixenes to say, he could be jealous of that. Right. He could be jealous in the other direction. Or he could interpret her ability to persuade Polixenes to stay as evidence of an affair, which is what happens. But probably all three of those things are happening. He feels aggrieved that he feels rejected by Polixenes in favor of Hermione and rejected by her in favor of Polixenes, and then also just shown up for his lack of rhetorical skill. It's remarkable that the very sharp distinction between the way Hermione and Paulina are able to speak so persuasively, and the way in which Leontes.
He doesn't really wax poetic except when he's insane. So in any case, yeah, Hermione even has to supply.
39:21 Erin: She even has to supply his speech. They have this whole. What's strange about what Hermione says here is it's a kind of imaginary conversation, or she's sort of speaking for him, quoting him in advance of himself. She's. She says to Leontes, you surcharge him too coldly. Tell him you are sure. All in Bohemia as well say this to him. He's beat from his best ward, she's instructing him. And then she has this whole kind of hypothetical conversation carried out again by proxy, where she says to tell he longs to see his son were strong, but let him say so then, and let him go, but let him swear so, and he shall not stay, you know.
So she has this whole imaginary conversation between the two men which she carries out. So it's as if she's. Yeah, well, as if she is harboring their relationship within her. Her pregnancy of speech here is almost like the love child of Polixenes and Leontes, for which she is the surrogate. She's having this imaginary exchange between them in which she also says lots of interesting things about.
40:25 Wes: Yeah, let's go over, like, the. She has some really interesting. How is it she persuades Polixenes to stay? It's fascinating. It's absolutely fascinating the way she does it. She starts out by teasing Leontes that he's not being passionate enough. Right. You charge him too coldly. And then she says to Polixenes, well, you're not. You're not being honest about why you're not leaving. It's really. It. If anything, it's because you miss your son. It's not because you're worried something bad's gonna happen. You just miss your son. It's not fear. It's love.
And if that's true, then you. I'm gonna make you say it. If you say it, if you admit to that love, then we'll force you to leave. We'll thwack you out of here. However she says it, and there's a little bit, it seems to me, of maybe a bit of a challenge to his masculinity or something like that. But then she moves into. She bargains with him. This is like the different stages of grief, I guess. Right. She moves into the bargaining stage, where she says, okay, well, if you just stay an extra month or stay a little longer, I will let Leontes stay.
It's almost like a mom. And these are like overnights. Right. Pajama parties. When Leontes goes to visit you, I'll let him stay an extra month. And then she has this afterthought, which is another point where I think Leonte's suspicion is aroused. And we can talk about that. She has an afterthought. Oh, doesn't mean I don't love you, Leontes, as much as a lady should love her. Lord. Didn't mean to diss you with that remark. It's not like I want you to be away so I can. So Mama can drink wine at home.
42:10 Erin: Get with the pool boy.
42:12 Wes: Yeah, yeah. And then she gets into this flirtatious yes and no battle. Actually, we don't. I have two more points that she makes, but I don't want to just keep speaking. If you want to jump in here. I think there are two more elements to her persuasion, but, yeah, go ahead.
42:29 Erin: Sure. In this verily section, because I have something to say.
42:31 Wes: Yes. The verily. The back. And so. Yeah, go ahead with the Verily section.
42:36 Erin: Yeah. Prior to that, she fill. What I really like about to tell he longs to see his son more strong is that she fills the vacancy of the throne with his son.
42:46 Wes: Right.
42:47 Erin: So she puts the sun in there. The breeds in my absence becomes. No, you missed your son. He's there in your absence.
42:52 Wes: Ha.
42:53 Erin: Right. The sons are a problem, I think. And then when we have, we'll thwack him hence with distaffs. This is another thing. I was really interested in this word distaff. So this is a stick used for spinning wool. This is like a. This is an association with female artistry, classical association, obviously, going back to ancient Greece. And so there is something aggressive about this, in a way. It's like a female phallus. There's something aggressive about this desire to send him back to his own family, his own concerns, which. Which I think is related to a desire to send him back also to his wife, to his own.
She's saying, let's break up this frat party. You know, go home to. To your own own throne and your own problems. I think that maybe what's been going on here, this is my hint, is that whatever has soured is like a frat party that's gone on for too long. While he's had access to Hermione, in the meantime, Polixenes has had access. So there's a tension which is going to come out in a bit. And this kind of prefigures that. And I don't want to skip ahead of you between this idea of fraternal love and love of a woman. Right. And so I think that she's.
I think that's in play here, but I won't go there yet. So let's look at this verily thing. She's teasing him for using this word verily again. She's like, as I love what you've suggested, that there's this word associative nature of speech here. She's doing that explicitly, right? He says the word verily, and she calls him a verily and says, you put me off with limber vows, which. Limber here means feeble. But to put off a limb reminds me of this branching idea, right? That he's branching away from her in speech. He's kind of trying to outmaneuver her or get away from the position in which she's trapped him.
Anyway, you keep going. You wanted to say something about this.
44:57 Wes: Yeah, Well, I think it's. First of all, it's a very flirtatious kind of little battle that they have where she says, you'll stay. No, madam, Nay, but you will. I may not. Verily. So, yes, you will Stay. No, I won't. Yes, you will. No, I won't. So the verily is like. She calls it a limber vow. Later on she calls it an oath. And the essence of this part of the argument is to say that oaths can always be countered by an equal and opposite oath. You can say, no, I really have to go. And the other person can say, no, I really need you to stay. Verily.
So this again points. Yeah, exactly. This again points to what I put in my notes is the impotence of mental states, like the impotence of niceties, like. Thanks. Right. The impotence of an oath to really do anything. It's not actual physical necessity. It doesn't. Right. So if someone, if. If a door is locked and I can't get out, I can't get through it. That's physical necessity. Verily, I really can't get out, but I feel anxious, therefore I want to go home. That's not necessity. That's not. That's. You could call it psychological necessity, maybe, except that we could always make a different choice.
So she's pointing to the fact that what he's representing as this ultimate sort of necessity in fact is not. And that can be revealed by simply proffering an equals, an opposite oath. And she even says that a lady's oath is just as potent as a lord's. Uses that word, potent. But what she's really saying is just as impotent as a lord's. They're meaningless, just like, thanks, they're nothings and reality is something else. And then she continues that. That dive into reality and actual physical necessity by talking about imprisonment. If he were imprisoned, then yes, that's a.
Verily. That's what verily really amounts to. Verily, you won't be able to leave. And, and doing so, she trans. She gets. Puts this. She creates this great juxtaposition between being a guest, the one who owes thanks, and being a prisoner, the one who has to pay fees when they leave. I guess they made prisoners in England, right, pay for their stay. So thanks get transformed into something a bit more concrete, which is to say money. And in doing that, I think that this is the masterful thing she does. She can allay some of his anxiety by saying this is not at least giving him the idea that your concept of necessity is flawed.
You feel like you have to leave. But actual necessity would involve this imprisonment. And in a way, you don't have the choice. You can leave the choice up to me. You're going to be my prisoner or your guest. Choose. And it's all playful. Of course, he's not literally going to take him prisoner, but it's a containing function. It can alleviate anxiety by giving him the idea that it's not his impulse that he's acting on. And so therefore any omnipotence of thought involving his ideas affecting going back to Bohemia and affecting reality and doing something bad, that is alleviated a little bit as well, because it becomes her impulse that's at stake.
48:50 Erin: That's great. No, that's wonderful. I think too. Yeah, I love this. The problem, I suppose is that is that Leontes is overhearing this and so this is all going to become. This all sounds, though very suspicious even. So she's allaying his concerns. And she's right. So she's doing all these things that you're describing. But also, so just as in this previous chunk of speech that we've gotten from her, she's having a proxy conversation between Leontes and Polixenes here with this verily speech, she moves into this quoting of a conversation between herself and Polixenes.
So now it's the two of them. So rather than brokering something, you know, the reason for her speech was that she's supposed to be the proxy of Leontes. She's trying to work to get Polixenes to stay on Leontes behalf. Now she's speaking for herself, but she's again having this imaginary conversation between the two of them. So you put me off. Should you yet say, sir, no going Verily, you shall not go. A lady's verily is as potent, potent as lords. So she's. Now she's put herself into this conversation with these quoted sections. So now she's. This speech is, as you point out, that it provides this kind of containment for Polixenes.
It's also providing a kind of containment for their interchange, their intercourse. And she even puts a prisoner in there. This idea of keeping him as a prisoner, which of course we know will come up later with this. The baby is the prisoner in the womb. And then Polixenes says to be your prisoner should import offending. So we have this idea inserted into the middle of this quoted speech, the speech in which Hermione is imagining a conversation with Polixenes and she's speaking for him, putting words in his mouth. So this conversation between them, which happens inside of her, a baby is inserted into this imaginary interchange and.
Or a prisoner, I'm sorry, which is which we know later will become a baby. And then this idea of the prisoner as being someone who committed an offense by staying too long by being somewhere. This idea that, oh, if I'm here as a prisoner, then I've done something wrong by staying too long. I'm not putting this very well. Right. But the idea of an adulterous baby is in the center of what Hermione is saying. She goes 90% of the way there. And Polixenes provides the last 10% by saying that this. This idea of being a prisoner should import offending.
And what have I done to offend?
51:25 Wes: Very interesting.
51:26 Erin: Yeah.
51:27 Wes: Which is for me, less easy to commit than you to punish. Yeah.
51:31 Erin: So she doesn't want to be his jailer then, but. But his kind hostess. So I'm not forcing you to have sex with me, but, you know, I'll treat you well. No, yeah, yeah.
51:44 Wes: So, yeah, I think that's great. I didn't think of the. This parallel between the prisoner and the child imprisoned in the womb, but I think that's right. So let's leave off there for part one, Part two. I think we will just get through act one and then get through the rest of the acts in the subsequent parts.
52:07 Erin: Sounds good. Thank you, thank you.
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(post)script: Post-Tryst (Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters”)
Nov 13, 2023
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:01 Erin: Welcome to Postscript. We just finished talking about Hannah and her sisters in our main episode. We talked about pretty much every major character in the ensemble except for Hannah's parents, Norma and I can't. I don't think the father ever gets a name. But anyway, the original sin of this family is their marriage. So we have to talk about that. They're the beginning of all the dysfunction. So the mother is an alcoholic, as we already touched on. Lee obviously inherited that from her mother. And Holly, it seems, also maybe has inherited this addiction problem from the mother. The father, it suggested that he has had many affairs as well. Right. That he laid everyone in stock.
0:50 Wes: Well, he accuses her of the same thing. They accuse each other of having slept with all of Hollywood, I think.
0:55 Erin: Yeah. His line is one of my favorites theater world. But, yeah, in the theater world. Yeah. He said, I can only hope that she was mine. We're talking about Hannah's as his daughter. And he says, slept with his. Or. No, her father could have been anybody in Actors' Equity. One of my favorite lines in the film. Yeah. So they're both. You know, I see their problems as being theatrical ones, but also maybe as the most obvious expressions of the kind of the root of the neuroticism that everyone in the family seems to labor under. I see everyone's problems as being fundamentally.
How to put this? Sorry. Like, these are people who are very privileged and intelligent. Right. So their neuroticism seems to be a kind of. They're looking too hard or too closely perhaps, at what, for other people would be like basic, normal processes of life. Right. Their neuroticism kind of emerges from them overthinking or inventing problems for themselves out of their own privilege or intelligence or artistry or something like that. I'm painting with a broad brush here, but I kind of, you know, I kind of feel like that's most obvious in the parents relationship, where it's obvious that they love each other and they're kind of throwing these roadblocks in the way of their love for each other because they kind of.
They can't deal with it, you know, so they're going out and they're having affairs or she's drinking or. Right. I think that a lot of these characters, it kind of boils down to the fact that they can't. That they just. They can't deal with something that for maybe a less complicated person, wouldn't even be a thought. Right. And so for the parents, it's like, you can't just love your wife you can't just love your husband. You have to have all these problems, right? You have to. You have to deflect that love. You have to. You can't deal with it head on.
You're too complicated for that. You have to have other issues. Is that. I mean, this to be, like, serious, though. I'm sounding flippant in my criticism of them. I think this is a common problem, right?
3:20 Wes: Yeah.
3:22 Erin: Love is too much.
3:23 Wes: Love is too much. So they're creating enough friction in order to avoid collapsing into each other or something like that.
3:35 Erin: Right.
3:35 Wes: That's the only way they know how to maintain separation. We kind of talked about that with much ado about nothing. Except that witty banter maybe was a healthier version, I don't know, of what's happening. I mean, I think part of it is about age and part of it is about the big life that they've already had that's now behind them at this point in the film. It's a really nice feeling at the beginning of the film that we get as we're introduced to all these characters really deftly, because there's so many to introduce. We get introduced to everyone's characters and their problems and all in the context of this Thanksgiving scene where the parents are in the other room singing.
And it's a nice kind of family feel. It feels warm, it feels good. It feels like the parents have created that kind of environment for everyone, even as we discover all the complications. So right up front, we become acquainted with Lee's, you know, problems with Frederick and her lack of a vocation or lack of money, and Holly's situation and her drug problem. All the rest of it all very quickly. The mother's alcoholism, of course, you know, it all begins with Elliot's unfaithfulness, unfaithful heart. As you know, we even hear about Mickey and Frederick, who are not there.
They come up, but all within this sort of environment that I think in the beginning has been created by the parents. And the parents sort of hover over everything. And when I think. I think it's Lee who says something about how when she comes into the kitchen, about how they're going down memory lane. And then the sisters start talking about the mom, and at least she's not drinking. And at a certain point in the film, the mother is going to return to drinking and it's a crisis. And Hannah gets called over there. Let me just find that point. So this is really at the midpoint of the movie.
So it's. Or no, it's. It's at least it's Hannah's midpoint of. The midpoint of her arc, where. Where she goes over there and the mother has just tried to seduce the salesman, according to the father, whereas too old. Sorry, Just too. Too old to seduce the salesman. So she got drunk, she got upset. So her two big flaws come into play here. Her desire to be still desirable at this age and flirt with people of any age, and the alcoholism. So then they get into that fight, and it's a good thing we had such a talented daughter. So we get the idea that Hannah is, in a way, kind of attempt to repair their relationship.
And her perfectness and wholeness. Right. Stands in distinction to that and offsets it, the cracks in their relationship. There's that remark about how she could be anyone's, which you already pointed out. And then I think the father makes a remark about, you never know when she's going to fall off the wagon and humiliate everyone. And the mother accuses him of being jealous of the attention, and he's all, show. How can you act if there's nothing inside to come out? She was so beautiful and him so dashing. And so now we get into Hannah's voiceover and is.
I think this is the only voiceover for Hannah in the film. Everyone.
7:42 Erin: Oh, is it?
7:42 Wes: Is there voiceovers? I think this might be. I don't know. Yeah. So. And when I went back to my notes, somebody else surprised because I was looking at my notes and I'm like, wait a minute. Why? Who's saying this? And I realized, oh, yeah, this is Hannah's voiceover. So she's thinking about her parents and describing how the mother was so beautiful and the father was so dashing. They were full of hopes that never materialized. And they loved the idea of having kids, but not of raising them. So you wonder what these hopes are that never materialize. Because I had had the sense that they had had some success, and they were. I started off the speech thinking that. Thinking in terms of them feeling the loss of that success as they got older and their youth and their attractiveness and all that stuff.
8:39 Erin: Well, I think they're work a day actors. You know, I think that they are. The scene starts because they were going down to film a commercial for the mayor's office. That's what they said.
8:50 Wes: Right. I see. Okay.
8:53 Erin: They're in Equity. Right. So they're working actors, but maybe they want it to be, you know, Katharine Cornell and Olivier, but they're still working. You know, they have. They're the type of people that have all the stories.
9:14 Wes: Right.
9:15 Erin: Of the great actors that they were in the company with, you know, because they played, you know, they played third, fourth, fifth string to, you know, to the Cornells, to the whoever. And so. So I think it's that they. They had the ambition to be at the peak.
9:36 Wes: Yeah. So that. That sheds a lot of light on it for me, I think I didn't get that. So. But now that. Yeah, that sheds that knowing. That sheds a lot of light on the whole movie, actually. But go ahead.
9:51 Erin: Yeah. Well, then we also have the father. One of the things I love about that voiceover of Hannah's is the fact that we think that we're hearing piano on the soundtrack. And it turns out to be coming from the father who started playing the piano in the other room. And we see them come back together over the piano. And he's quite good. Or whoever's playing it is quite good.
10:14 Wes: Right.
10:15 Erin: But one of the things that she says that we kind of glossed over, he's all show. This is the mother talking about the father now, how can you act when there's nothing inside to come out? She calls him a non person or a haircut that passes for a man, says that he could never support them. So it would be one thing maybe if she never had her ambitions, material, but for the man, in a marriage that must have started in the 30s or 40s, for a man to never become successful, for his ambitions to never materialize, that's a problem. Right. And so she maybe has little respect for his talent because he wasn't able to make it, at least not in a big way.
11:11 Wes: Well, yeah. And they've just called her. Hannah has just been called gifted by the parents. And she ends this scene in her voiceover saying, my gift was luck.
11:26 Erin: Yes.
11:27 Wes: I thought Lee was the one destined for great things. And her father is at the piano at this point. And then she's. The scene ends with her in this reverie and then the next scene at the dock, which I think we see with Lee at the dock at least a couple of times. Lee is in her own reverie at that point. So we get this really nice transition from Hannah's reverie into Lee's reverie. Although we don't know exactly what she's thinking about. There's no voiceover, but we can imagine she's thinking about the Elliot situation and even Hannah's reverie.
It's a little unclear what that's about exactly. You know, we. We know this idea that. That her gift was Just luck. But that can't, you know, that can't be the focal point of what she's. She seems to be in a positive state of mind. So I don't know what she's thinking about exactly, but it's an. It. Oh, it is. Oh, she says that to them. Okay, Right. That's right.
12:26 Erin: Yeah. Because the mother answers, because Hannah says. The mother says that of anyone in the family, you were the one blessed with the tr. And then that's when Hannah deflects and she says it was luck. And she always thought Lee was the one doesn't for great things. The mother says she's lovely, but she doesn't have your spark. She knows it. She worships you. She wouldn't dare get up on stage, which is a shocking thing to say. And then she says Holly's game for anything, though. She's like her mother, the mother saying this. That really the mother is like Holly, which I think is right.
13:02 Wes: Okay, so then Hannah's reverie is a
13:04 Erin: reaction to that, I guess what it precedes that Hannah. Well, her voiceover precedes it then. Yes. And then she does have Hannah.
13:13 Wes: You get this look on her face at the end of that scene. It's just. It's a close up on her face looking angelic, I think. Space. Yeah, angelic and just. And thinking about something. And then you come to Lee in the same sort of state of mind. But.
13:31 Erin: Right.
13:31 Wes: And so. Yeah. So what is Hannah thinking about in that moment? Is she. Is she. She taking in her mother's praise or is she reaffirming the idea that her. Her gift was always luck? I think there's something. There's a truth to that, that her. That she's actually just lucky. But I don't know what you said.
13:55 Erin: Well, I would agree with that. I think it's such a fascinating question when it comes to these. This is what makes acting so fascinating because in fact, talent helps a lot, but ultimately a lot of it is down to luck. And there are a lot of forces at work which are completely outside of one's control. The idea that Hannah is the most talented one is taken for granted because she's the one with the success. Maybe she is just lucky. Holly, the mother says she's game for anything. There's a luck about that. There's a luck that because Holly is game for anything, she can shuffle through a bunch of possible identities until she finds one that hits.
I think there are. I think this is really complex. The suggestion that the father hasn't fulfilled his promise. Is it because he wasn't talented enough or because he wasn't lucky? What constitutes luck by this definition? They seem to be pretty lucky people from where I'm sitting. Yeah, Right. They have a beautiful. Well, I think it's Hannah's apartment. But they have a kind of a beautiful life, an artistic life, and all things considered, a pretty happy marriage.
15:24 Wes: Well, the luck is always luckier on the other side of the. Of the what? The fence. What would the luckier luck be on the other side of. Yeah, on the other side of success. But.
15:39 Erin: Well, there's Lee's beauty. That's lucky. Right. The mother's beauty, which the father. I love. I love, love, love their conversation. Well, that's actually the second of the three Thanksgivings, because we have this.
15:54 Wes: Okay. Yeah.
15:55 Erin: Yeah. We have them being a bit high the first Thanksgiving. High spirits, I mean, and maybe a little bit precipitously high spirits. Then we have the plunge into this scene, and then they're telling stories and they're. You know, and he's saying these wonderful things about how she was so beautiful that men drove their cars up on the sidewalks. You know, like, I love that. That's such a beautiful thing to say about someone. And. And then in the final Thanksgiving, it's when he's just playing the piano and she's listening. It's a contemplative moment, and it's a quiet moment. And therefore, we are. We're calm. It's satisfying. They seem stable. Right.
16:40 Wes: She's drinking and singing, and so I like the fact that everyone's just accepted the fact that she's gonna drink.
16:46 Erin: Yeah, that's it.
16:48 Wes: All right. We're gonna just live with that.
16:51 Erin: Who knows? Maybe it's seltzer.
16:53 Wes: We can hope.
16:55 Erin: That penultimate Christmas Thanksgiving, though, is really, really a great moment. Their arc seems to have been resolved by that point because he's now expressing this apprec. Of her. She's expressing appreciation of him. We see the evidence of this and the photographs of them looking very lovely as young people. And so, you know, we believe these stories. And of course, she's, you know, of course they're both actors, so also, we know what they looked like when they were younger. But. Yeah, anyway, I just. I love that. I love that scene. I love what he says about how beautiful she was.
It's like such a dream romance, you know? I mean, they are. They're work a day actors. They toughed it out, but, man, they still love each other and they have those fond memories of how beautiful and Wonderful they were when they were younger. So he's more than just a haircut. An expensive haircut at that, I think.
17:50 Wes: I think that's why I wanted to make them out to be more successful than they. Than they were, because there's such a element of nostalgia and their memories and. Which is a part of their. Their singing and playing the piano and all that, so. And that nostalgia. We talked a little bit about the role of nostalgia in love and Woody Allen films and Annie hall, but there seems to be some of that here as well. And, in fact, I think Elliot takes on that position of nostalgia at the very end of the film when he's kind of mourning and looking back on his affair with Lee.
It sounds a lot like Alvy Singer and Annie hall looking back at his relationship with Annie and thinking about their good times together. Although there's not that same type of montage with Elliot. But he says, you know, he sees her and the professor, and instead of being jealous, he says, oh, Lee, you are something. You look so beautiful. Marriage agrees with you. Everything that happened between us seems more and more hazy. I acted like a fool. And then that line that I've already read about. Complete conviction that I couldn't live without you, and I put us both through the wringer.
So he's sorry about that. His love for. For Hannah. So he. He moves from a position of passion, you know, and. And the kind of passion that's involved in infidelity to this nostalgic position, which is more a position of mourning and. And reflection and. And perhaps the kind of reverie in which Lee and Hannah have been engaged. Although I think, again, Lee's reverie on the dock was. Had something to do with. She was holding the E. Cummings book at that point and probably thinking about Elliot. But in any case, I think that movement from passion to nostalgia in the end is important.
20:10 Erin: I agree with everything you're saying. And I also think that the success of that movement contributes to the success that we get that they were. Yeah. Just as we already discussed. I think, you know, they're living in a successful way, like they are the parents. Integrating. Yes, the parents.
20:25 Wes: Yeah. Yeah.
20:26 Erin: I think that they're creating an environment that's beautiful for the whole family.
20:32 Wes: I think the thesis in Annie Hall was that the. That nostalgia, in some sense, is required to sustain love. There's a way in which one must look back on the past and what's lost. And as the relationship changes, there's a lot of lost. There's a lot of loss. You lose your Looks and your youth and all that. And you probably have lost out on completely fulfilling your ambitions. And then the relationship itself has been transformed. It's. There's no longer the same infatuation. In all likelihood, there's been a lot of conflict and friction. And so to sustain the relationship, you have to be able to look back on all that and not feel it, not, not chafe against that, but in a way long for it.
And there's got to be a kind of bittersweet feeling in relation to the past and what one has lost in the past and not defiance, not I am going to fix this and have an affair with a younger woman like Elliot, or not a younger woman necessarily, that I guess she is quite a bit younger. But in any case, have an affair outside of my marriage or do whatever it is I can do to reclaim the past that I've lost. You know what I mean? You've got to have some kind of reconciliation with, with that. And I think nostalgia is what helps with that.
22:16 Erin: I think so too. I think, I think it also, I think, you know, in long term relationships that the, the kind of steadier, more sustaining love is what sets in. It's not going to be infatuation, but you can recall, you know, the infatuation is the thing that one can be nostalgic about while still having hopefully that sort of like, you know, the deeper current of the history, the shared experience, the love. Right. But the ability, I think, to become nostalgic about those, about that extreme infatuation, the height of that passion and to keep that integrated into one's memory is like. Yeah. To me that shows the health of the relationship at that point, really from that point forward.
23:03 Wes: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you can be connected through infatuation in the present, but you can have a deeper connection in a way, a more realistic, loving connection that involves memories of those infatuated moments. It doesn't mean that you can completely recapture that feeling, but you think about how nice it was to have had those feelings and they can inform the more stable, realistic sort of love that is there. You know, after decades, thinking through that
23:46 Erin: comment that he makes about men driving up on the sidewalks, I think what makes that so effective is he's not even necessarily talking about his own infatuation. He's giving her, it's such a beautiful moment because what she wants is this idea that she's desirable, period. You know, like, not necessarily to him. Right. She doesn't want to. This is someone who put great store in her looks. She was probably like a Lee when she was younger in terms of the way other people related to her. And so what his compliment does is show how well he knows her, that what she wants to be validated about is the fact that everyone thought she was beautiful, you know.
Right. And that's, you know, that's very, very sweet because then she gets to feel loved in the way that she wants to be loved. And he also gets to be the center of attention by telling this grand story about how, you know, and he gets to be the victor. Right. Everyone loved her, everyone thought she was beautiful, but he was the one who got her. So it's like, you know, it's just this absolutely beautiful resolution of the difficulties that she has, which is, am I still desirable to men? And of putting himself in a position of power. Yes, she is.
And I'm the one who got her. And they're interdependent in that way on each other's. On validating each other and resolving those, you know, they resolve well, those difficulties that each of them has in that moment. So. Yeah, I love that. That's one of my favorite moments in a film that has like a tremendous amount of poignant moments. And then the last 10 minutes of the film, from Mickey's near death experience with the gun through the Marx Brothers film and to the end of the, of the Thanksgiving scene when Holly tells him that she's pregnant.
That's maybe my favorite 10 minute chunk of a movie ever. I love that, those last 10 minutes, even though Woody Allen has said that it's too idealistic, that he wasn't brave enough to go for the sucker punch of, I guess everybody, you know, having a tragic ending. I think that's the worst thing he could have ever done. Terrible.
26:14 Wes: I mean, the whole. Yeah, it's a sweet ending. Yes. Okay, I'm pregnant. It seems very cliched. He pulls it off in a wonderful way. I mean, the whole thing is. Yeah, it's sweet and it's wonderful and the whole movie is superb. I mean, it really illustrates what a. In so many different details that we haven't even discussed what a fantastic screenwriter Woody Allen can be. Now he can be horrible too, which I do not understand because this is movie is, you know, near perfection. Like. Yeah, truly. And I feel like I, you know, I haven't fully appreciated it until this moment coming back to it, you know, just at this age.
27:01 Erin: Well, for me, you know, I don't know that it's his best, but I think that the reason why it's my favorite is because of the optimism in the ending, I think of his, of his great films, this is the only one that has what can be called a truly optimistic ending. And you know, there's an experience in that final moment of like a catharsis for all of the nostalgic, unsettled, bittersweet endings that preceded it. You know, and then he kind of then in his great films after this film, I think just go, you know, dark all the way like Crimes and Misdemeanors or even Deconstructing Harry, which I think is a great film of his and you know, Match Point and these other films, much, much darker. So I think this one, that's why this one is my favorite because it's
28:02 Wes: so
28:04 Erin: life affirming or something. You know, some, some, some terrible, some terrible term I could use there that's a little silly and. Right. But it, but it is, it fulfills the, the optimism and the, the, you know, the, the happiness maybe that's lacking from the others. And then it's this beautiful, brilliant moment before the plunge into tragedy of the later films.
28:25 Wes: So, yeah, you know, he's coming out. He has a new film out that's. It's a. In French with French actors. Did you see them?
28:38 Erin: Yeah. I'm a little skeptical at this. I think he should really hang it up because he's not going to get great people working with him anymore. And really, you know, that was.
28:49 Wes: God, what's her face? Catherine Deneuve. Is that how you feel?
28:54 Erin: No way. Really?
28:57 Wes: Yeah.
28:59 Erin: Okay, I think.
29:01 Wes: Okay, let's look at who's in this. The film is called Coup de Chance. Stroke of Luck and it has. Let's see. No, I guess I'm wrong.
29:24 Erin: Damn. Damn. I was so excited.
29:25 Wes: Is she even alive? I mean, she could be for all I know.
29:28 Erin: Of course she's alive.
29:31 Wes: I wouldn't have even the faintest idea. But. Okay, so I don't know, I don't know where I got that. I was reading press about this and somehow her name came up and maybe she comp. I think maybe she defended or complimented him or something like that. But, but in any case, I think, I don't know. As long as the films are good, I don't care who he's working with. The problem is that the spotty quality at this point. But it's his 50th film and more power to him and I. It's a travesty that, you know, it's a crime that, that he's been ostracized in this way.
30:13 Erin: But see I think his. His films are so dependent on, you know, he's an actor's director, and I think the quality of his films is so dependent on the quality of the performances. I mean, as I say that, I think, well, you know, the flaws in his bad films are not the performances, it's the scripts. Right. But still, I think that what I go to Woody Allen film for is to see, hopefully, a great script in combination with great performances by great actors. And so the more he has to kind of scrape the bottom of the barrel to find people who will populate his films, the less confidence I have that it's going to be an enjoyable film for me.
30:56 Wes: Yeah, I don't know that these are. These are French actors, so they may. I don't know where they stand in the French film world.
31:04 Erin: Yeah, sure. Part of it, I.
31:07 Wes: They might be near the top. I don't know.
31:10 Erin: Right. Yeah. Part of it is the familiarity, too, of the people that he tends to get up until a certain point, you know, like, whatever. Seeing Cate Blanchett give a career best performance in Blue Jasmine or, you know who. Like, that's part of the appeal for me is to see people I already like in a Woody Allen film. So it's. You know, this is probably not something I'm gonna. I'm gonna see unless I'm. I'm really attracted to one of the actors in it. But, I mean, I don't mean attracted in that way.
31:43 Wes: I mean, that's why I.
31:47 Erin: Forget what I said. Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, compelled by their. Their Persona, just.
31:56 Wes: Yeah, I get it. I get it.
32:01 Erin: I deserve that. Anyway.
32:04 Wes: All right, on that note, well, which next we're gonna do Winter's Tale?
32:11 Erin: I don't know if I'm attracted to anyone in that one, though, that it's
32:15 Wes: going to be all Woody Allen and Shakespeare from here on out on this show, so.
32:19 Erin: Sounds great to me.
32:21 Wes: All right, thank you.
32:23 Erin: Thank you.
The Tyranny of the Good in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters”
Nov 06, 2023
Hannah supports her sisters. She’s a source of money, encouragement, and advice, and seems to ask for nothing in return. In fact, she’s so giving and self-reliant that her husband Eliott begins to believe that she has no needs. This seems to be the spark that ignites his infatuation with Hannah’s sister Lee. It also leads her sister Holly to rebel against what might be called Hannah’s regime of care, only to marry another of her dissidents, her ex-husband Mickey. Wes & Erin discuss Woody Allen’s 1986 classic, and try to figure out why those closest to Hannah need to escape her goodness to find themselves, and whether a loved one can be too perfect for our own good.
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0:12 Wes: Hannah supports her sisters. She's a source of money, encouragement and advice and seems to ask for nothing in return. In fact, she's so giving and self reliant that her husband Elliot begins to believe that she has no needs. This seems to be the spark that ignites his infatuation with Ha Hannah's sister Lee. It also leads her sister Holly to rebel against what might be called Hannah's regime of care, only to marry another of her dissidents, her ex husband, Mickey. Today we discuss Woody Allen's 1986 classic and try to figure out why those closest to Hannah need to escape her goodness to find themselves and whether a loved one can be too perfect for our own good.
0:55 Erin: This is Wes Alwan, this is Erin
0:58 Wes: O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So Erin, the film is called Hannah and Her Sisters. And yet I'm not sure that we can make Hannah out to be the protagonist of the film in any typical sense. It is an ensemble film, so in a sense there are a lot of protagonists in the film, but the most passive of them all is Hannah. In that sense, she reminds me of Alyosha, say in the Brothers Karamazov, where not only he's the protagonist, but all the action and the bigger arcs happen for Ivan and Dmitri. So why is Hannah the center of the film and what role is she playing in it?
We see other characters with their problems and arcs. We're introduced very early on to Elliot's or we're introduced in the very beginning to Elliot's infatuation with Lee, her lack of a direction, career wise and unhappy relationship with Frederick, Holly's drug use and failing career and lack of a relationship, Mickey's hypochondria. Everyone has a problem but Hannah. The accusation that's ultimately made against her is that she is too self sufficient, doesn't have any needs, and maybe we could even say doesn't really have any problems. So why call this film Hannah and Her sisters?
Why not call it Lee and Holly and their sister Hannah? Their sister Hannah in parentheses and smaller font.
2:42 Erin: Yeah, that's a great question. I described her to someone the other day as the still center of the neurotic carousel.
2:49 Wes: Love it. Love that description. That's great. That's so perfect. She is like the unmoved mover in a way.
2:57 Erin: Yeah. But I also, I don't know, I tried to be more critical of her this time around or to try to dig in a little bit. I actually think that you know, the more critical of her you can be, the more likable she becomes, which is, you know, I think, maybe central to this question of her lack of flaws, her passivity, whatever we want to call it. I started to see a little bit more, especially in the Holly dynamic, that she is allowing herself to be manipulated, I think, in that relationship. And that this kind of mother daughter dynamic, which is a little bit messy and a little bit screwed up, is, I think, being fed in both directions, like any dynamic.
Right. I think that Holly is looking to disarm Hannah. You know, when she continually comes to her to ask for her money and support. I think there's a part of Holly that wants to be validated by Hannah. She knows maybe that she doesn't deserve this validation. Right. But just in terms of the conversations around money, she says, you know, now, don't get upset. It encourages Hannah to then say, oh, you know, I know, I never get upset about this. Right. But it's a dynamic that kind of reminds me of something that someone once did to me. In the middle of this big party, a party for me, they sort of dropped an emotional bomb on me and then said, you're such a wonderful person.
So I knew I could tell you this and you would understand, you know, and that made me immediately feel like I could not. Me not understanding would mean that I'm not a wonderful anymore. Right. So I played along with it and only later realized what a huge manipulation that was. Right. But it also came from my need to be thought of as a wonderful person.
4:33 Wes: I murdered someone.
4:35 Erin: Right.
4:37 Wes: It helped me live with that secret forever.
4:40 Erin: Exactly. It helped me understand, I think, some of what's going on in Hannah. I mean, does she have. She claims that she has enormous needs.
4:49 Wes: Yeah.
4:49 Erin: Does she?
4:50 Wes: That's a great scene. She's accused by Elliot in that scene of. Let's look at the actual dialogue, or really, I have. I have it in my notes here. There's been two different. This is the second Thanksgiving, the tumultuous Thanksgiving. We see three Thanksgivings in the film, and Hannah and Elliot are fighting. And in a previous scene, she's been talking to Holly. Hannah's been talking to Holly because she's upset. A script that Holly has written seems to be based on Hannah's life, and Holly seems to know far too much about Hannah's life, and that could have come only from Elliot, which, of course means that it was fed to Holly by Lee.
And this is the closest we get in the film to Hannah figuring out that she's been betrayed. So the upshot of the script is that she's too self sufficient and has no needs. You're so giving and everyone relies on you, you know, and I think Hannah says, you make it sound like I have no needs or something. You think I'm too self sufficient, Holly. Now, Hannah, that's not what I meant. You know, everyone relies on you for so much. You're so giving. It's not a criticism. We love you, we're grateful. And Hannah says, you're grateful, but you resent me.
And then Holly comes back with you and Elliot. You mentioned to me yourself that you and Elliot are having some problems. So Holly is trying to reassure her at that point that she understands that she's not completely self sufficient. So this accusation that's there in Lee's, Holly's script, sorry, comes up again between Hannah and Elliot where Eliot parrots those concerns. And obviously, you know, again, the script has been based on his report. Hannah asks him if he finds her too giving, too competent, too perfect, and
6:45 Erin: ultimately too disgustingly perfect.
6:47 Wes: Yeah, and ultimately he said, it's hard to be around someone who gives so much and needs so little in return. She says, I have enormous needs, which is the line that you just mentioned, which is an interesting way to put it, using this word, enormous. And then Elliot says, well, I can't see them and neither can we or Holly. This is really a climactic moment of the film, at least for Lee and Hannah and Elliot, these scenes at this Thanksgiving. So anyway, she has enormous needs, she claims. But does she?
7:20 Erin: Well, earlier in that conversation with Holly, Hannah says that she has problems. You know, she sort of admits to these problems, but she doesn't want to bother everyone. And Holly says that's the. I'd like to be bothered. These problems, of course, stem from the fact that Eliot is being kind of emotionally abusive to her. Right. Because of the affair with Lee. And prior to that, perhaps she really didn't have any problems, which is what caused Eliot to run into Lee's arms in the first place. I think that what's most interesting for me in this scene.
So we have this conversation with Holly and Hannah, then we have an interlude in which the mother, I think her name is Norma, Maureen O'Sullivan, comes into the kitchen and praises Holly for her script and says that she loves the character of the mother who's just a boozy old flirt with a filthy mouth. Right? Yeah, it's a minor moment. You think it's just a laugh line. In fact, I think it casts Hannah's Reaction in a very interesting light. Hannah has a right to be upset, of course, by the content of Holly's play. But I think the contrast with her mother's, maybe self awareness or unselfconsciousness highlights Hannah's own need to control people's perceptions of her.
Maybe this is why she refuses to share her problems with her sisters. In other words, she resents being perceived as having no needs, but she would do anything rather than admit a flaw or a lack that would produce a need. So maybe the question isn't, does Hannah have needs or not? Maybe the question is, will Hannah admit what those are and place herself in that position of vulnerability to allow other people in? Maybe this is all about image control for her, that she has to be the confident one, the one who takes care of everyone else, and the one who is perceived by others as being disgustingly perfect.
The sad thing is that the relationship between Eliot and Lee destroys Hannah's confidence in her own control over her situation, perhaps, which then produces in her the very vulnerability that she lacked in the first place that caused Eliot to go to Lee in the first place. There are many other causes as well, you know, especially Eliot's immaturity.
9:38 Wes: Right.
9:38 Erin: But the conditions of the affair are such that it sustains the fallout, the emotional fallout, then sustains the marriage for as long as it will work out. I think there's an open question at the end of the film as to whether or not this is a long term solution, which we could talk about too.
9:54 Wes: Yeah, I think that word control that you used is an important one because by being self sufficient, and not just self sufficient, but the one that everyone relies on, she can control people in that way. And the way she controls them is not always to their benefit, or at least that's the accusation that Lee makes against her. I think when they're in the restaurant, there's the scene when they're shopping when Hannah is very discouraging about. Sorry, I'm saying Lee and I think. I mean Holly. That's the accusation that Holly makes against her. There's the scene where they're shopping together and Hannah is very discouraging about the audition.
There's the scene in the restaurant where they're all having lunch, I think lunch or dinner together. And Holly is asking for more money, but now she wants to be a writer, no longer an actress. And Hannah is telling her to do something practical, do something productive, which would sounds like it would just mean having an administrative position somewhere and giving up her dreams. So Hannah herself has been artistically successful. She was in A Doll's House, right? She had a performance in that. I think the implication is that she's been successful as an artist, as an actress, and that her parents have it as well.
The film begins with the parents being nostalgic. I think a lot of what happens at Thanksgiving in those celebrations involves. Well, the father is playing at the piano and the mother is. At least in the end, she's boozing it up again. She has an alcohol problem, falls off the wagon. And by the end of the film, I think it seems to be okay. But that she's doing that. Everyone has just accepted it. But the mother and the father seem to reminisce about the good old days and youth and possibility. And that kind of longing, by the way, is every. That's the kind of thing Ibsen was dealing with, I think.
So they've had their own success. They're longing, you know, they're nostalgic about it. Hannah has had it, and she seems almost indifferent to it. When she's being celebrated for her success, she says, well, you know, it's nothing. I'm just gonna go back to what's important, which is my husband and the family. So she seems to. Things seem to come effortlessly for her, and she doesn't seem to care all that much about those accomplishments, the things that everyone else is striving for and being really very neurotic about, whether it's work involving work or love, she seems to be very placid about.
And I think it has something to do with her being. Having become a maternal figure in the family. You get the sense that because their mother is an alcoholic and is concerned primarily with being an actress, it seems that Hannah stepped into that role. And that means that she's been both sister and mother to Holly and Lee. And that's where some of these problems are coming from. Because on the one hand, she is the provider of resources. She's the nurturer. She's the one everyone can rely on. On the other hand, there's sibling rivalry. The sisters want to be like her.
They want to reach her level of success. But she forecloses that in a way, she forecloses that by getting people to depend on her, by killing off their striving, by making them passive. She's a passive protagonist. But because she's already accomplished everything and is stable, the other protagonists are striving. But they. They're stuck in the sense that they've been possessed by her passivity. If they can rely on her, they don't need to go anywhere. She keeps them within the familial fold. So I think the accusations against her are apt in a way.
13:47 Erin: The question of A Doll's House and of her playing Nora is a really interesting one because, you know, of course, that play is about a woman who seems to be the perfect housewife, but who walks out on that role in the end. And I think there's a question, just as there's a question at the end of the film, can this marriage between Eliot and Hannah really be sustained? I think there's maybe a little suggestion that Hannah might walk out on that life that she's built at some point, though I think this is at the end because we're told that she's gonna be playing Desdemona.
I think it is in a public TV performance. So she's gone back to. Which I see as a really good sign. Right. I think, you know, Hannah at the beginning is fascinatingly the opposite of Nora. So she was an actress who walked away from the stage, it seems, to become a mother and to want to go deeper into this motherly housewife role. I think it's really interesting when she describes this one temporary return she's made as Nora. It seemed to me that she had. She had a successful stage career. This whole first marriage with Mickey went on, and this sperm donor best friend of Mickey who was.
Who fathered the twins. And then she seems to have also adopted other children. And then the second marriage with Eliot at some point, right, she's walked away from the stage and become a housewife. But this one temporary return that she's made to play Nora in A Doll's House, she describes it as something that she had to get out of her system, which I think is a really interesting phrase, because it's as though her own needs or ambitions are a kind of virus that has to work its way out. And I think considering what's happening at home and how overly responsive, which, you know, I think is what we're suggesting, how overly responsive Hannah seems to be to everyone else's needs, one wonders if it would be better for her to have more of a stage career.
Right. To become a little bit more unavailable, to detach from the, you know, as I suggested, as a kind of mutual dynamic between her and especially Holly, in which Holly needs her approval and Hannah needs Holly to feed off of her approval detachment and becoming a little bit more of a career woman and thereby deflecting the attentions of the sisters, being a little bit more unavailable to Elliot and having a different Set of needs that come with needing to juggle her time better or feeling, I don't know, insecure about her line reading or, you know, something that provides a little bit more interest that isn't quite so dialed into everyone's emotions in the family and providing for them and being there for them and, you know, wiping their mouths when they're done eating, et cetera, would be a good thing for her.
And so hearing at the end that she's returning to the stage, I think is a positive indicator for the future of this marriage and for the dynamic among the sisters.
16:38 Wes: If Hannah can just stay away from real life, everyone will start behaving well.
16:44 Erin: Isn't that terrible that this is what I'm suggesting? Right. You know, that everyone just needs her to what, back off? I mean, I don't know that I agree with this as a solution, but I think that this is what the film is suggesting. You know, that as long as Hannah's ambitions are being fulfilled and this overly mothering role is being thwarted, things are going well. I think there's something to that. I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's also a little sad.
17:11 Wes: Yeah. The interesting thing is that it's not that she's intrusive and smothering as a person. She's actually quite. I don't know, distant is not the word. But she's not an overwhelming presence. So the effect that she's having is somewhat subtle, maybe mysterious. She's. I called her the unmoved mover because, you know, as. As per Aristotle's description of God. Because she's causing so much commotion to happen around her. How did you put it?
17:43 Erin: The still center of the neurotic carousel.
17:47 Wes: Neurotic carousel. It's just a great description of the universe as a whole as well. So she creates all this motion in virtue of being unmoved. That's her power. There's power in not being reactive and so effective. There's power in her stability because it becomes something to emulate. It becomes something that will generate passion and idealism and other people. Oh, if I can only be like that, if I can only have that, if I can only get to that point where I'm that fulfilled and that complete and perfect as a person. But if she's too good, then it seems like something is unobtainable.
And if she's too accessible, then again, you get it from her. You don't have to go out and emulate her anymore. You just rely on her. Whether it's for emotional Support or money or whatever. So that's the trick. So I think you're right about the going out and acting. I mean, as harsh as it may sound, I think you're absolutely right. She needs to enter the world of becoming. This is almost like the Christ moment. Right. You gotta put the divine into the world to get. To really get things going. But she needs to enter the world of becoming and desire and all the rest of it in order to release other people and give them some possibility of salvation.
19:17 Erin: I like that a lot. You're reminding me of another moment where Holly tries to disarm Hannah where she says, I have to borrow money. Don't get upset. You know, And Hannah says, I never get upset over that. Right, exactly.
19:28 Wes: It's such a defining moment.
19:30 Erin: Yeah. I think I yelled at the screen, like, maybe you should get upset, Hannah. You know?
19:35 Wes: Exactly.
19:36 Erin: Maybe that's what you need. Yeah. Have a little skin in the game. My God. She seems to have as much money as God, too, that she can keep funding these.
19:46 Wes: Well, her husband is a lowly financial advisor.
19:50 Erin: At least he's a glorified accountant.
19:52 Wes: A glorified accountant.
19:55 Erin: I know this film a little too well. And I know every one of Frederick's lines. He's my favorite.
20:00 Wes: I wish I were there with you. So many great lines.
20:05 Erin: Yeah. Well, let's shift a little bit because I think we're kind of glancing towards Eliot, and I'm thinking about the fact that Eliot, this affair with Lee, has unwittingly pushed Hannah into, as I already suggested, you know, the condition of vulnerability that Eliot seems to have found attractive in Lee, I suppose, read in the most positive light the emotional condition, the emotional state produced by the affair has forced Hannah to be honest about her own weaknesses, such as they are, and then allowed Eliot to return to her. But read negatively, I think we could say that this affair has actually just damaged and destabilized Hannah and that Eliot, who is only attracted, perhaps to damaged women, can therefore transfer his affections from Lee, who now has this professor that she's dating.
And Lee seems to be coming into her own and becoming a little bit more confident to the wife that he has now injured and caused to become damaged.
21:09 Wes: I think that's right. You're reminding me of the standard job interview question. What's your greatest weakness? And you always have to say something that's not too genuinely a weakness. Right. You can't. Well, I'm a drug addict and, you know, otherwise I'll be a good worker. Right. You have to say something that is positive. Look, I'm such a perfectionist and. And in her case it's, you know, well, I'm just so perfect and self sufficient and have no needs. And if she can break down over that, so the reflection of perfection into itself becomes imperfection.
Let's put that in a Hegelian way. It's perfection in and for itself is no longer perfection. It's. Well, maybe that's a reverse Hegelian. But anyway, by having that reflected back to her in a script and ultimately by Elliot, this idea that her self sufficiency isn't the greatest thing for everyone around her, that's her arc. I mean, that realization is it. That's her climactic moment, just knowing that. And in the external plotline, it doesn't mean a whole lot. Everyone gets. Everyone finds someone. Mickey and Holly find each other. Lee finds the professor and gets away from Frederick.
The parents who've been fighting seem more content with each other. And Elliot returns to Hannah. But Hannah is not finding anyone or returning it to anyone. She's just being herself with a little bit more insight into the effect that her perfection is having on other people. And I think, you know, if you think about Elliot, who seems Michael Caine has that kind of scumbag, kind of edge to him, in my view, with women in films, just an edge. You know, he's a charming cad in one hand, but so it's a little bit different or it's a lot different. Her effect on him and her effect on her sisters.
Her sisters. It's about being mother versus rival sibling. With Elliot, you're always wondering in the film really is that, you know, your wife's too perfect. That's why you need to hit on her sister and become infatuated with her sister. It's really perverse and destructive and in real life probably just would be entirely destructive and nothing could ever come out of it that was good. It would just be ruinous and the truth would out and all of that. To the extent that the film is a little bit allegorical, we can accept it. But you know, what is it that is really ailing him, as you put it, to desire.
The thesis seems to be that for something to be desirable to him and perhaps to all of us, it can't be perfect and it can't be complete in itself. There must be some vulnerability there such that we can imagine the other desiring us back, needing us back. They can't just be an object of desire. They have to be a desirer. And that's what Hannah Seems to lack.
24:08 Erin: I love what you are saying about Elliot's real life application would be destructive. I never thought about that before, and I think that's absolutely right. I think that for him to embark on an affair like this in the first place would necessitate him being such a scumbag and so immature that he would never be able to have the redemption arc that the film gives him. But I wonder about this fine line maybe between vulnerability and being damaged. Does he need someone who is vulnerable and who will need him in return? Or does he actually need a woman who is damaged so that he can feel like a rescuer?
That is, I think, a fine line. And we're all damaged to a certain extent. But I think that the extent to which he needs that level of imperfection or of difficulty is disturbing. Which leads us into maybe a conversation about Lee, which I want to get to, but before I do, I was thinking about the fact that Mickey and Elliot kind of split the atom, if you will, of the Woody Allen Persona in this. You know, like, normally, before you go
25:15 Wes: to that, I just want to stay on Elliot for one second because you said something about you reminded me of the fact that Elliot. There's a significance to his being a financial advisor because he is a provisioner of goods, and Hannah is the one who provides the goods. She's the source of goods and nurturance and all that. She's the big. She's the divine or the maternal figure, and he's the provisioner. And that's what makes him so lowly, in a sense. This is what the stigma of just. In this community of people who are artistic, of just being a financial advisor who's focused on money and the practicalities of life. Of course, he turns out to be very cultured. He's talking to Lee about, like he recognizes a Bach concerto. Is that what it is?
26:06 Erin: Yeah.
26:07 Wes: You know, and can name it. Most of the people in the film are very, very cultured, whether they're a financial advisor or not. And at a certain point, Mickey calls him a loser, which is an echo of Holly's accusation in the beginning of the film that a certain person that Hannah wants to hook her up with is a loser. And then in a climactic scene, you only hook me up with losers. The idea is that Hannah's goods aren't always. That she's foisting substandard goods on people. It turns out that this is the thing that Holly's gonna have to get over.
She's gonna have to get over this idea that all these men who might actually make good partners are losers, and that's the only way she can end up with Mickey, who she's already rejected as a loser in the past. But in any case, there's something to this idea that Elliot is actually a loser because he's successful in these more practical terms. And it's the domain in which Hannah functions as well. So she also functions as an artist. She has both sides. And the way he gets out, the way he transcends that position of being simply mundane and a provisioner of goods, the way he can be something more, is to be involved in this infatuation with Lee in the first place and ultimately to induce some vulnerability in his wife, or as you're putting it, damage.
And I'm trying to think through the vulnerability versus damage question that you've. Does he need to damage her in order to feel like more than his handmaiden or his, you know, the provisioner of the goods that she has? But in any case, we could come back to that later. You were going to talk about the splitting of the.
27:51 Erin: Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that maybe this is braided with that, because one wonders what kind of appeal Eliot would have for a woman like Hannah, if we're to take seriously that Hannah is this great dramatic talent which strains credulity a bit for me, because of her placidness and kind of her opacity. Right. Like, she's not.
28:13 Wes: She's remote.
28:15 Erin: Yeah. And she doesn't walk around like her mother does. The mother, I believe, could play a great stage actress who is extremely dramatic. Right. And has a great deal of flair.
28:24 Wes: The mother is histrionic, and Hannah is the opposite of that.
28:28 Erin: Right. And so I suppose I have trouble believing that Hannah has access to those parts of herself for the stage. Right. That she doesn't seem to have access to in her private life. But this question of losers, I mean, you know, Holly's right to suggest that Hannah is hooking her up with losers because Hannah's hooking up with losers, too. You know, Hannah has terrible taste in men. What appeal does Eliot even have for her for someone of her particular gifts? I struggle to. I mean, it's Michael Caine. Okay, sure, that makes it a little bit better.
But prior to that, she was married to Mickey, and actually, Mickey, in a way, because he's a writer for tv, makes a more natural kind of match for Hannah in terms of the fact that they're both involved in performing arts and. Right. A writer and an actress are a more natural combination. Than not. She seems to have gathered this collection of the dynamic in the relationship that Eliot needs is the wrong way around. So he's the loser and Hannah is here to rehabilitate everyone. What Eliot wants is to be in a position of superiority where he can be the rehabilitator, even if that means he's going to wound you to then rehabilitate you.
But it seems that Hannah needs this dynamic even in her men of these losers, to help them along in their development.
29:44 Wes: Yeah, I think ultimately, as I guess I just said, Holly has to be less stringent in her requirements for men. She comes back to someone she's already rejected because she's so discriminating, let's put it that way.
30:00 Erin: Yeah.
30:01 Wes: She hated Mickey. And then they run into each other again and they turn out to be perfect for each other. They discover that they're perfect for each other.
30:08 Erin: I think that's true for Holly, that she needs to be less stringent. I think that. Not that Hannah facilitated this. Maybe if I really thought about it and could draw some sort of squiggly line back to her, maybe I would find one. You know, Mickey did need to improve. Right. In order for him to be in a position where he could be with Holly. Right. Just like Holly needed to find something that she could actually, you know, that actually resonated with her, something that she was really good at for her to be in a position to find someone. Right. So they both needed to improve. I don't know that we could say that Hannah facilitated that. Maybe she did. By divorcing Mickey and getting. Putting him in a position where he could find the right sister, as Mickey
30:50 Wes: will be in mysterious ways, you know.
30:51 Erin: Exactly. Exactly.
30:55 Wes: Asketh of Hannah and you shall receive it.
30:58 Erin: Even if it's her ex husband, Hannah from heaven. Yeah. I don't know whether or not we can make this argument that, like, she's rehabilitated everybody to shift a little bit just to this idea that, like, Elliot and Mickey normally would be fused together in a Woody Allen character. I mean, do you think that's correct? Like the Elliot traits. So like the affair, you know, the desire to the midlife crisis or something like that, which is represented by wanting to have this affair. Escaping impending old age, et cetera, would usually accompany the Mickey traits of the midlife crisis in the form of a crisis of faith and an obsession with death.
31:39 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, it's a big ensemble cast, and it's amazing that the film can handle so many characters with their own arcs. And do it so deftly. But as you point out, both Mickey and Elliot are in search of meaning. And I suppose everyone in the film isn't away meaning through love or work or some combination of the two. Or in Mickey's extreme case, and I'm not calling religion extreme or philosophy, in Mickey's extreme case, he has to go to the philosophy books and then to religion to try and solve his existential crisis, which is induced by his extreme neuroticism, his hypochondria, his brush with the idea that he has the quote, unquote, classic symptoms of a brain tumor, which turns out to be a ringing in your ear.
32:32 Erin: Yeah.
32:33 Wes: And then finding out that in fact he doesn't have a brain tumor, which turns out to be even more traumatic because then what's, you know, he came close and escaped death, but he definitely will die, so what's the point? A lot of echoes of Annie hall in this film and the typical Woody Allen schtick. So his existential crisis is more obvious and funny and expansive than that of the other characters in the film, who all seem to be having their, you know, some variation on an existential crisis. And that's part of what makes him work so well in the film, even though for most of it he's kind of on the periphery with his own narrative.
He's on the sidelines until he comes in at the end. But his. His existential crisis is what the others are going through writ large. And I think you're right, Elliot and him could have been combined, might ordinarily have been combined, but in this film, Elliot is not the typical Woody Allen character. Just the fact that he's a financial advisor. Right. Woody Allen is thought of the most sort of ordinary type of occupation for him. He's wealthy, he's successful, he's even cultured, he understands the arts, he knows about the arts, but he can't be an artist.
So that in this. Among this group of people, despite his success, in practical terms, he's not necessarily going to be thought of that highly. He's in a. He's in a lower caste, in a sense. And his problem in his mind revolves strictly around being enamored of being infatuated with this woman. It doesn't go so far as to, you know, he doesn't think, oh, should I really be a financial advisor? Or am I going to get ill? Am I going to die? Or any of the other. All of the neuroticism. Not all of neuroticism. There's plenty of neuroticism but, you know, the extreme comedic neuroticism that's not there with Elliot.
He's kind of simple. He's a simple guy in a way. And the movie starts with his passion. He's more straightforwardly passionate than I think a Woody Allen type would normally be. He can say, God, she's beautiful. And he's complaining to himself in his mind about what's going on a bit. He's smitten, he's stricken. But it revolves again, strictly around the infatuation. And at the end, when things come full circle, he can be somewhat nostalgic about the relationship and say, oh, what was I doing? He says something like, I had the complete conviction that I.
He's addressing her in his fantasy again at the end of the movie, addressing Lee in his fantasy and said, I had the complete conviction that I couldn't live without you and put us both through the wringer. And Hannah, you know, I realized I love her more than ever. His choices between security and love and maybe the boredom that that entails and then the excitement of infidelity and someone new, someone more flawed. I guess. So, yeah.
35:31 Erin: I love the fact that you call him simple because that's exactly my thought. You know, I hate that scene. I mean, I love it, but I hate it, you know, hate that scene when he's in his, you know, with his analyst and he says, for all my education, accomplishments and so called wisdom, I can't fathom my own heart or whatever. And it's like, yes, he can. You know, he's just way simpler than he wants to admit. You know, he just wants to have his cake and eat it too. Just like any, you know, any of these guys that are just looking for some excitement and the convenience too, at the end of this renewed happiness that he finds with Hannah.
Of course, it coincides exactly with when Lee ends it. You know, he suddenly has this realization that he loved Hannah all along, which is so convenient considering that Lee has said at the middle Thanksgiving, I think it is right. Is it the middle Thanksgiving scene which occurs very late in the film, the two Thanksgivings back to back almost, you know, that she's found someone else and that she wants to move forward with him. Because by the time of the next
36:29 Wes: Thanksgiving, that's the climax, really, of the film. And the third act is that second Thanksgiving. Yeah, both of the two final Thanksgivings are crammed together in the third act.
36:40 Erin: You're also kind of making me consider the fact that, yes, it's a large ensemble cast, but there's Tremendous convenience in the fact that Elliot goes for one of Hannah's sisters. And it's a film that revolves around the family. Right. So everything stays within this large but sort of incestuous familial situation.
36:59 Wes: I think the keeping it in the family is a very efficient way to go as a lover or a filmmaker. But go ahead.
37:06 Erin: And one of the things you're reminding me of is the fact that I think Woody Allen has mentioned, obviously the film functions very novelistically with these title cards which kind of divide the film into ch. And I read somewhere that he wanted to produce a film in film. The sort of effect that Anna Karenina's split has, where you have Levin and his story, his crisis of faith on the one hand, and then, you know, the dynamic with Karenin and Anna and Vronsky, the love triangle in the other part of the novel. But what I find, you know, really interesting about the way that the film functions is that the family is kind of like its own tractor beam pulling everyone back in.
I think there's something tremendously appealing about this family. So I understand it very well. Maybe they're not so appealing as I think this is the reason why this is, admittedly my favorite Woody Allen film is because I love this family. And I love the fact that the film is built around these dramatic tent poles of the Thanksgiving scenes, which, like, anybody would want to go to these parties. Right. But notably, of course, Mickey is absent from the first two Thanksgivings because he's outside of the family. And, you know, the relationship with Holly allows him to make an appearance at the final Thanksgiving scene to be pulled back in to the family, to the fold.
And I wonder if Hannah, you know, comparing her to God, if she represents something that the family offers writ large, which is, you know, a sense of religious type, belonging and community, which Mickey has been ostracized from. And perhaps that's part of his whole mental difficulty in the first place. And then he finds his way back into community with others. Hypochondria is a very solipsistic kind of, you know, mental problem. And so when he goes to the movie theater and has this first communal experience and sees what but the Marx Brothers, another family on screen.
It's just occurring to me. Right.
39:11 Wes: This is great. Yeah.
39:12 Erin: He then is able to kind of rejoin the land of relationships relating to other people and of thinking about something more than just himself, even though he seems to have pretty humorous parents of his own.
39:26 Wes: Yeah. No, that's very good. I hadn't thought of that. The return to the Family to the community is the thing that he was looking for. I mean, how does he put it? He seems to solve his existential crisis before he runs into Holly again. And as you pointed out, in a way, they both solve things, and that makes it possible for them to get together. I'm just looking for the way he describes this. So this is. I was just gonna give the moment where, sort of the upshot where he says, what if the worst is true and there's no God and you only go around once?
Don't you want to be part of the experience? Stop searching for answers and that you're never gonna get and enjoy life while it lasts? And maybe there's something more, and that maybe is a slim reed to hang life on, but it's all that we. All that we have. So he's come to terms with this idea that he's not going to find an absolute answer that he can lean on. And there's a parallel, of course, to the sisters getting away from having to lean entirely on Hannah and be completely dependent on her. So there's the question here of autonomy and whether the search for meaning has to compromise that in the sense that you find an absolute belief that you immerse yourself in, or whether you can believe to some extent, or maybe even be an agnostic, which just sounds like what he's come to and still have what you need to live and keep moving and to be sustained but not be weighed down, maybe not be sucked into the vortex.
Whether it's religion or whether it's the fantasy of being a great artist or the fantasy of love, all of those things have to be, maybe have their proper place. You don't discard them, but they have to have their proper place in order to preserve some sort of autonomy. And then it's in that position that Mickey and Holly can find each other. Of course, Holly, you know, for Holly, it is success. I mean, maybe it's a bit different with her. Right. Because she's finding success, and that seems to be what stabilizes her. I don't know. I was trying to relate this back to what you were saying about community and family, because that is, you know, I'm trying to square these two things or maybe integrate them.
41:54 Erin: Sure, yeah.
41:55 Wes: It's not just resignation to not knowing the answers to life. And it's not even just the realization that, okay, I found. I just have to find a good woman. And that is the key. But I think, yeah, what you're saying about this larger idea of community is the key part. But Go ahead.
42:12 Erin: Yeah, I think read straight or maybe, you know, ungenerously, we can argue that, well, at the end of the film everything's solved because everybody's now in a happy relationship. That that's all you need, right, as you suggest, to find a good woman. I think what that's really about is about keeping things in balance maybe, right. That each one of these characters is neurotic because they're out of balance in some fundamental way. And that getting into this series of relationships and of things, finding what it is that they need to satisfy whatever was out of balance in the various ways that you're suggesting stabilizes them in such a way that allows them then to relate to others and to have positive relationships.
So that what we're looking at is not the solution, but the post solution state of affairs, right? These people have been able to work things out and therefore to be in good relationships with other people. The person we haven't really talked about though, that you brought up is Holly. I don't know that she wants. I mean, I think success is certainly a word for it, right. But I think that she feels inadequate. That's, you know, her fundamental problem. Lee does too, to a certain extent. Right. But I think Holly really, really feels inadequate. And I think the cocaine addiction is maybe, you know, a symptom of that problem.
Something like a desire for self sabotage being expressed in that. Right. So she's on this continual quest to find herself and is taking all these detours to try to do that and maybe to kind of prevent herself from being found, if you will. And the detours also require that she's constantly in debt to Hannah, which is the exact situation that she doesn't want to be in. She doesn't want to be beholden to Hannah, she wants to be out on her own. But she keeps putting herself in the situation where she needs Hannah and perpetuates the sort of self hatred cycle there.
And so I think that what she gets in the end, or what qualifies as success for her in the end is just having found something that she is good at, having found a role that she can play that will fulfill her, keep her out of the clutches, the maternal clutches of Hannah, and standing on her own two feet and give her something that she can say is her domain independent of everyone else.
44:37 Wes: Yeah. Through most of the film you just get the sense that she is just gonna be this tragic, self destructive character and that she has these pie in the sky impractical ideas that she's getting money for one Minute it's catering. Next minute, well, it's also acting at the same time. And then, no, I'm not gonna be an actor. I'm gonna be a writer. That's like that Arrested Development moment where Tobias wants to be an actor and then the little giggle afterwards. But it's a nice touch to the film that this actually turns out to be a real calling for her, that she actually turns out to be a good writer and that she hasn't just been searching in vain or being naive and unrealistic in the pursuit of her dreams, that she has just been temporarily down and out.
So I'm trying to think through whether it's success that is transformative for her or if so, what that means. Exactly. Is it because she's. Because for the average person, the idea that they need to be a great this or that, especially a writer or a actor, is not the most practical solution for her life. And perhaps one. You know, look at a film like this and be. Look at it quite skeptically. But I think what I was getting out of what you were saying was it's not that, per se. It's just the fact that that, for her, turned out to be a grounding thing.
Not because she turned out to be the greatest writer, necessarily, but because she found her independence through it. And she could have found her independence through any number of different avenues and channels, but it just happened to be that one. And I think that's right.
46:29 Erin: Yeah. That idea of independence, too. I'm thinking about the fact that she's hooked up with April for so much of the film.
46:35 Wes: Yeah, right. Like Carrie Fisher being very, very underhanded. Yeah.
46:41 Erin: Yeah. Gosh, it's hard to hate her. We see that Holly is called April,
46:45 Wes: and it's an interesting. Yeah. But anyway.
46:48 Erin: Oh, why?
46:49 Wes: I don't know. I just thought there must be something to the fact that April's the cruelest month or something. Or the.
47:05 Wes: So April is the thaw. Maybe. I don't know. But yeah. Steels. What's his face?
47:12 Erin: Yeah. Sam Waterston.
47:13 Wes: Sam Waterston. What's his name?
47:16 Erin: David. David.
47:17 Wes: Richard. David.
47:17 Erin: David.
47:19 Wes: So steals, you know, wins the audition, you know, steals the audition, steals David just really. Wow.
47:25 Erin: Very destructive relationship. They're very competitive with each other, obviously. And then I wondered this time around if David, you know, when they first meet him, I thought, is he negging them? Because remember when he. When he asked them, he compliments their food, but then he Asked them if this is their first catering gig.
47:44 Wes: Well, also, he says you're far too attractive to be caterers.
47:47 Erin: Yes. Right.
47:48 Wes: Which is like a perfect neg. Yeah.
47:50 Erin: Yeah. So, you know, he's kind of terrible and exactly the, you know, the wrong guy for Holly. It's lucky for her that he can
48:00 Wes: identify his prey, identify vulnerability. And knows how to exploit it. And takes them both out on a double date.
48:08 Erin: Oh, my God. That is the worst. That is just the worst. And also the best. I mean, I love that montage of buildings over Bach's double violin concerto. It's sublime. But.
48:18 Wes: And then April saying something intelligent about architecture. And then the whole thing about who's gonna. Who's gonna be dropped off first, which is really wonderful.
48:27 Erin: Oh, yeah. Meanwhile, I don't know how anyone could make Carrie Fisher look that unattractive, but they manage it. She looks like she's. That scene. Is she wearing a flight. Is that what that's called? Or the Garrison cap that she has. She looks like she's parachuted over enemy lines or something. And she's wearing that cap and the leather jacket combo. It's so bad, anyway.
48:52 Wes: Oh, really?
48:53 Erin: That scene is so painful when she's. When Holly is sitting in the backseat and we hear her voiceover after it's been decided that they're gonna drop Holly first. And she makes that comment about regretting telling some roller skating joke about the Guggenheim, which sounds. It actually sounds like a really cute joke.
49:10 Wes: And she calls herself a loser in this scene, too, by the way. Yeah, go ahead.
49:14 Erin: She puts herself down. I find it very, very painful. She says she can't tell jokes that only her mother and Hannah can, but she kills them. Yeah. It's just obvious that she hates herself. She says she'll go get into bed and just take an extra Seconal or whatever. She's like, okay, Judy, that's pretty distracting at that point.
49:30 Wes: She's trying to comfort herself. Yeah, I'll just go have some me time with some drugs.
49:36 Erin: Yeah, right. You know, maybe that's a. Maybe it's okay that she pulls herself out of it. Maybe that's actually indicative of the fact that she'll pull herself out of the situation in the end. But I just find that really difficult to watch that whole scene.
49:49 Wes: And it's an interesting counterpoint to Lee's little reflection in the cab where she's just been. Where she realizes that Elliot has been flirting with her earlier in the film.
49:59 Erin: Yeah, Lee's kind of the worst. Cause she knows she's known this whole time. And she's even lying to herself in voiceover. That's how I'm reading that.
50:08 Wes: This is actually what I would call the inciting incident of the film where it's about nine minutes in and she's, you know, Elliot has a crush on me. I wonder if he and Hannah are happy. And she has a buzz from flirting, that's the key thing. And complains about Frederick.
50:26 Erin: But if you watch that first scene, this is why I think Lee is so, so not innocent. I won't call her guilty. But we see how subtly Lee is keeping Elliot interested in her. Right. She praises him for the attention he pays her by suggesting some book that she was meant to find particularly meaningful. Right. And then maybe she's not entirely aware of it herself, but she puts this image of her naked portrait into his head. I find that to be extremely inappropriate to do to your brother in law. Right. And so I think she knows. She knows and she doesn't know.
I think Lee is an interesting character because I think that for someone who is a recovering alcoholic, she acts as though she's still an alcoholic. I think she acts anesthetized. I think she's numbing herself with men now rather than with alcohol. And she gets off on this idea that she's the muse to a competent male artistic figure. I think that's the only way she knows how to relate to fellow artists in a way that doesn't put her in competition with Hannah. Maybe even kind of reflects the relationship with Hannah in which she can be the pretty sister, the beautiful sister that maybe Hannah draws upon in her imagining this, of course, in her dramatic performances.
51:46 Wes: Perhaps it's interesting to compare Lee and Holly in a way. They are in very similar positions because they're not successful with in work or love. But it's manifested actually in very different ways. So Holly has ambitions, she just is not making them work out. Whereas Lee still doesn't know what she wants to do when she grows up and is talking about taking courses at Columbia. Holly is looking for a man. Lee has one and he's seems to be a very well respected artist. But also he's an asshole. So maybe not an asshole. He's curmudgeonly. We'll just call him curmudgeonly.
So he's curmudgeonly and older and doesn't want to be around people. So she has a. In that relationship. She has a kind of problem on her hands. But she's not as neurotically wound up as Holly. She's not bouncing all over the place. I like the way you put it. I think you said anesthetized. I had a similar. She's got kind of a dreamy quality. Got a kind of sedated quality to her. She's happy just to be attracting men and doing that as her. She doesn't seem to be thinking too hard about what she wants until she's knocked out of her orbit with Frederick by what happens with Elliot.
And then she can. It seems like that's the jolt she needs and so she can actually go to school and meet a professor she likes and kind of move on. But she is. Yeah, she's on autopilot until some external eventuality can jolt her out of that.
53:31 Erin: Yeah. I think, you know, as far as Frederick is concerned, I'll give him credit for the fact that he, you know, he says something really annoying like he's in this period in his life where he just can't be around people, you know, which is eye roll. But. But he has the self awareness to know that and therefore to stay away so that he doesn't become unpleasant to people. So I'll give him that. You know, he really has no right to be with Lee for a lot of reasons, but he's extremely perceptive and obviously very, very brilliant. And he's Max Von Sydow. On top of everything. He's an artist and he's Max Von Sydow. Um, I really.
54:08 Wes: The name like that. Such a great name.
54:13 Erin: It is a great name. I find the scene when he immediately perceives the affair and the contrast between his reaction to that and Elliot to be chilling. And I think he. Frederick is an extremely sympathetic character in that moment. It's just a heartbreaking scene.
54:35 Wes: Yeah. I think Lee has just been walking in the rain and she comes back to Frederick having just watched a television show about Auschwitz. Is that what we're talking about? And then he starts lecturing her about, you know, the question isn't why, how did this happen, but why doesn't it happen more often? Little bit of the voice of Woody Allen there. And then he says it does in subtler forms, which I think we can infer. He's talking about the way artistic vitality maybe is squashed by the world. You know, you could hear him going off on capitalism or something as well.
So he gets. Goes. You know, the whole culture, people watching wrestlers or preachers and. And she tells him to lighten up and doesn't want to listen to one of them. You know, she's not in the mood for his reviews. Of contemporary society. And then he says this very condescending thing, which is not actually very sympathetic about completing the education he started five years ago. Maybe, maybe it is sympathetic in a sense that he sees his role as limited. He knows she's gonna leave him one day. He says that several times, right, I always knew you were gonna leave me.
And he sees, what does he have to offer? Well, he has to offer this education. Once that's over, right, there's nothing to keep her there. And he even says, when you leave the nest, I want you to be able to face the real world. It's like he's preparing a child to leave home and preparing himself for inevitable loneliness. So I think you're right the moment. It's very touching when he says, I always told you you would leave me. Does it have to be now? You're my whole world. You're my only connection to the world. But I think the other interesting part of that is this contrast that Woody Allen is creating between artistic passion or real deep engagement with artistic ambition and being part of the world, being connected to the world, being able to enjoy ordinary things, being able to be more like Elliot in a way, and just inhabit the mundane and tolerate the fact that rich people want to match your paintings to their couches and all of that stuff.
So, you know, I think that's a dilemma that is often somewhere in the shadows in many Woody Allen films. This worry about the conflict between the social connection and being in the real world and then being an artist and often la-la land. And how do you reconcile the two? You get a little bit of that. You get kind of a hint of that in this film in the character of Frederick. And more strongly, I think you get it in Holly because she seems to be floundering because she's devoted to the idea of becoming an actress at first and then a writer. But on the other hand, you have characters like Mickey and Hannah who have done very well for themselves as artists, not just succeeding from the standpoint of status, but obviously from the standpoint of financial success and self sustainability.
So it's an interesting. I don't know what else to say about that. That question seems to come up in Woody Allen films despite the fact that Woody Allen himself obviously saw so much success as an artist and often has characters that are much like him in his films who are enjoying the success of being a TV producer or whatever, comedian or TV producer and some other kind of artist that could be right there in the film.
58:03 Erin: Yeah, I think Frederick, though, is an extreme case of the artist, you know, he's the, you know, the solitary figure on the mountaintop, you know, I think his level of artistry we're meant to see as being above the more quotidian success of a TV writer, you know, which is by definition, I think, more engaged, obviously, with people. And it has to be responsive to standards and practices. Right? Yeah, Right, right.
58:31 Wes: Excellent. Yeah.
58:32 Erin: And same thing with Hannah, though. Hannah's a little elevated from Mickey because she's in the theater. Right. Frederick is in a category all his own. I think that's going to be more fraught. And the nature of painting is so solitary. I think that what you're talking about with this moment, the poignancy of this moment with Lee is that he does have this realization that he needed to be more engaged in the world, but he has it too late. Right. He says, God, I should have married you earlier or right away or something like that when you wanted me to.
Right. He should have, you know, in this Hannah way. Right. Put some skin in the game. He should have entered into the world of becoming, Is that right? The way you put it. Right. He should have. He didn't. He stayed in this realm of ideas with Lee and now he pays for it. Of course, in the end, when we see the guy that Lee is with visually, you immediately see that that is working and that's the right guy for her. Right. The fact that Frederick is so much older and, you know, kind of odd looking in his great Max von Sydow way is cantankerous. Yes, yes.
It's a visual mismatch as well as a, you know, visually, it's doing some work, I think, to show us how mismatched they are in reality as well. The kind of concern that, you know, Woody Allen doesn't have when he's matched up with actresses. So we see that that was wrong. But I suppose, yeah, the poignancy of that moment comes when he realizes that he should have invested more in reality and less in this realm of ideas. And his pain, the depth of his emotional pain is a, you know, as I think I mentioned before, is really stark contrast to when you cut to Eliot going home and sleeping next to Hannah thinking like, oh, Lee, what a volcano.
Wasn't that a fulfilling experience? You know, he subsequently have a crisis where he wants to call her and break it off. Right. But he has to kind of work his way there. And the self satisfied little voiceover coming on the heels of Frederick's pain, deep pain, is. You see how small and simple Elliot is. Right. And how truly superior Frederick is. I think.
1:00:57 Wes: Yeah, that's a very good. Those are very good points. Yeah. Do not reduce him to just being the curmudgeon. He's definitely more substantial and ultimately more of a mensch than Elliot.
1:01:10 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right.
1:01:11 Wes: But so I think it's time to move to post script. What are we going to talk about in post script?
1:01:18 Erin: Maybe the parents. We didn't get to the parents that much.
1:01:21 Wes: Let's talk about the parents. All right.
1:01:23 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
1:01:34 Wes: subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
Odysseus and Penelope’s Comedy of Remarriage (“The Odyssey,” Postscript to Part 3)
Oct 30, 2023
Wes & Erin conclude their discussion of “The Odyssey,” with a focus on Odysseus and Penelope getting reacquainted with each other in Books 19 and 23. We discuss Penelope asking Odysseus-in-disguise whether she should marry a suitor, but tells him the dream of 20 geese, foretelling their ruin; the test involving the bed post tree trunk; and how we might think of the ending to this epic as a comedy of remarriage.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:00 Wes: Okay. Welcome to Postscript. We just got almost done talking about the Odyssey. We are just going to finish up by talking about Odysseus reuniting with Penelope and in particular, books 19 and 23, where they have their personal interactions with each other. So it's in book 19 that he first sits down with Penelope. I think this is page 428 in Emily Wilson's translation. So let me just go there. I think Penelope asks him about who he is, and he says, don't ask me about my family or native land. You have the right to question me, but do not ask about my family or native land. The memory will fill my heart with pain. I am a man of sorrow. I think that's where the I am a man of constant sorrow idea comes from. And then it's in what movie?
0:57 Erin: Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?
0:58 Wes: Yeah, it's just, I guess, retelling in a way. And then the other aspect of this, which I thought was interesting, well, we get more testing because Odysseus, as beggar tells of seeing real Odysseus. There's a great line where the poet says his lies were like the truth. And as she listened, she began to weep. But she then tests him by asking what Odysseus looked like. And he describes that. And she knew the signs, so she knows his story is authentic. Odysseus says he's heard that Odysseus is coming home, but he wanted. This is the part where he says he had to travel to get more wealth, which is a funny way of bragging.
And then Penelope says, no, I don't think he's coming back. And then finally Penelope says, should I marry a suitor? And then comes up with this idea of, let's look at that. This is 4:41. This is an odd. And I'll say why in a moment. So she starts out this speech by saying, stranger, I have one small question I want to ask you. I lie crying in bed and overwhelmed by pain, worries and sorrows crowd into my heart. And then a little farther, farther down, just so, my mind pulls two directions. Should I stay here beside my son and keep things all the same, my property, my slave girls and my great house to show respect towards my husband's bed and what the people say, or should I marry one of them, whichever is best of all the suitors and can bring most presents and so on.
And then she tells a dream about 20 geese and them getting killed by an eagle, which is obviously a vision of Odysseus killing the suitors. And Odysseus just says, well your dream means that, you know, it portends ruin for all the suitors. So he doesn't directly answer. And then Penelope says, well some dreams are tricks and some are not. But Odysseus never correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see that he ever really answers the question that Penelope asks about should I marry a suitor? I mean, he indirectly answers it by saying they're all going to get killed.
But the other aspect of that is he's not upset that she's considering marrying a suitor, which is really interesting in light of the fact that she's portrayed as constant and loyal. And she even says she's going to arrange a contest with the suitors. Whoever can shoot the arrow through the axes, right, will win her hand. And Odysseus is like that's a great idea because Odysseus will arrive before that's finished to kill them all. And really he's thinking in his mind, of course this is a good setup for the impending slaughter. But he's not upset by the fact that it's seems to suggest that a suitor is still is a real option for her.
Oh, Odysseus doesn't have to interpret the dream for her. The eagle comes back and interprets the dream from within the dream. The interpretation is coming from inside the dream. The geese of the suitors. I was once an eagle, but now I am your husband. Okay.
4:04 Erin: It's so difficult to say what Odysseus's psychology is and that's part of, maybe part of the appeal. But I think he is maybe giving her space for her ambivalence, if you will. He's wisely not saying anything because I think that this demonstrates a deep ambivalence that Penelope has about Odysseus homecoming which you know, as we've already said, Odysseus himself has about his own homecoming. And just as Odysseus tests her, she tests him. And so if anything I see this as a parallel between the two of them, but one in which, you know, interestingly, Odysseus own future kind of hangs, hangs in the balance or her desire for him hangs in the balance.
But I like the fact that he doesn't say anything because of course she's right, I think to be she feels however she feels about it. But to the extent that we could say that a feeling is correct, I think she's correct to feel ambivalent about giving up the attentions. However, you know, at whatever cost they've come of a bunch of men for one man who has abandoned her and has been unfaithful all over the known
5:13 Wes: world with mortals and immortals. Maybe with. Yeah, I'm sure with both. But yeah.
5:19 Erin: And I also, you know, I'm also interested and I honestly don't know what to make of this, but I'm interested in this idea of the two types of dreams as well. I'm wondering if she is saying that this one comes out of the trickery kind of dream.
5:32 Wes: Yeah, maybe those three dance.
5:34 Erin: Yeah. She says stranger dreams are confusing and not all come true. There are two gates of dreams. One pair is made of horn and one of ivory. The dreams from ivory are full of trickery. Their stories turn out false. The ones that come through polished horn come true. But my strange dream did not come out that way. I think I wish it had, as does my son.
5:56 Wes: And then the axe contest. So she's basically saying, yeah, no, Odysseus isn't coming back. I'm going to do the. To contest to find a suitor.
6:04 Erin: But she's also, perhaps if she suspects that this guy is Odysseus, which I'm also of two minds of. She's giving herself an out for having the impure thought of, you know, desiring the suitors not to be killed. Right. Wanting them to stay, not wanting her husband to return. She's giving herself an out by saying that this is maybe the trickery dream, the dream that has no, no meaning behind it. Right. She's saying, well, it's just a dream. Right. It doesn't mean anything. And so it undercuts the whole reason for the conversation in the first place, which is to have Odysseus interpret it because that implies that there is some meaning to be interpreted.
It's confusing because, as you say, it also interprets itself. I'm most interested, I think, in the fact that she is providing an out for her own ambivalence. And yeah, I guess that's it. But a secondary element is the distinction between the horn and the ivory, which I find really interesting. One comes out of the head. They're made of the same type of material, I believe. Right. Because ivory would be like a tusk or teeth and the horn would be made, I think, of fundamentally the same type of structure as listeners can correct me if I'm wrong, as a tusk, they can't be too different.
They're both probably made of.
7:23 Wes: Well, they're at least similar. I mean, ivory, I think of elephant tusks and then horn, maybe on A ram or something.
7:31 Erin: Right. But I'm wondering if they're both made of the same type of collagen type.
7:37 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
7:38 Erin: Structure. Right.
7:39 Wes: I think they're. I mean, is it ultimately skin cells? The type of. The same, sort of.
7:44 Erin: But anyway, but I think it's, you know, they're similar to each other, but they come out of different parts of the head. Right.
7:52 Wes: Okay.
7:53 Erin: One, the horn, it's almost like Athena springing from the head of Zeus. Right. So the horn that comes out of the head, that one comes true. The one that comes through the mouth is one of trickery. I don't know. I think there's an interesting distinction being made here. But I don't want to put too fine a point on it. No pun intended, anyway.
8:17 Wes: But yeah, it's interesting that she would simply assume the dream is one of the false ones when it's so. So it's such a clean, obvious dream. So, you know, she doesn't psychologize her skepticism about the dream. Right. She gives a kind of mythology around it. But you know what you. Or I might say, well, that's just wishful thinking. But for her it came through the wrong gate. And then she says, she says, and then she has to go to the conclusion of the conversation is she's going to go to sleep. And she says this thing that I really like. Humans cannot stay awake forever.
If you would sit and entertain me guest, I would never wish to go to sleep. But humans cannot stay awake forever. And then talks about her bed being stained with tears. And then the line about the use of the word Evilion for Troy. But no, I think all of it is interesting in light of your observation of the dreamlike quality of the repetition that Odysseus has been engaged in. Right. And the associations of dreams with wishes, which in a way is one might use to explain her skepticism about the geese dream. So does the dream merely express a wish or a repetition?
Or does it tell us something about, you know, if not the future, about ourselves, at least if we can properly interpret it. Right. Which is something that the ancient Greeks do. They interpret dreams and they interpret a few times. In this poem, an eagle actually does swoop. What is it? A dove comes by with a dove in its claws. And that's supposed to be an omen each time Odysseus killing the suitors.
10:05 Erin: I like too what you're saying with calling attention to the birds reminds me we have in Odysseus dream slash story of the man from Crete. You know, it's a different island than Ithaca, but it's a similar kind of similar setup. Right. And, you know, are you an eagle or a goose? Are you from Ithaca or from Crete? Are you. You know, something I think we've already alluded to also is the fact that the suitors aren't necessarily doing anything that Odysseus himself wouldn't do in the same situation. Right. It's not like Odysseus has some kind of moral high ground.
So there's a. There's an interesting kind of. Maybe it's this question that we talked about in the main episode of, like, can you just reinsert someone for Odysseus? Maybe that's at the heart of Penelope's question. If I'm married to an eagle, could I just as easily be married to a goose? You know, can Odysseus be replaced? Can Odysseus replace his own backstory as a man from Crete rather than a man from Ithaca? You know, so there's a question of, like, whether or not substitution suffices. That's at the heart maybe of both of these repetitions and iterations or dreamlike
11:14 Wes: variations, which is interesting in light of the fact that a lot of these tests involve these sort of key and lock type situations in which. Or maybe that's not the right metaphor. Exactly. But one is supposed to exhibit certain signs that only the other person could know.
11:32 Erin: Yes.
11:32 Wes: It happens again in the. The bed scene where Penelope will tell a little story about. Well, she doesn't tell the story. She will say, hey, move the bed or something like that for Eurycleia to make a bed for him and pull out the bedstead. And then Odysseus gets furious. He doesn't figure out that he's being tested and says, woman, your words have cut my heart. Who moved my bed? And tells the whole story of creating the bed around the trunk as a bedpost, in fact, building the whole house around that. Right. And the way it's put is that Penelope recognizes the tokens that he's provided
12:15 Erin: because this is the particularity to circumvent the.
12:20 Wes: The unsubstitutability. Yeah. And the lack of substitutability involves, of course, all of the prior experience that one has had with the person and the ways in which each of you, each person in the couple, has affected each other. They've been a formative force in each other's lives. And that fades in a way because they've been away from each other for so long. In a way, Penelope's weaving, which looks a little Bit like a repetition compulsion as well. Way of avoiding being subject to new formative forces which might turn her into a different person and so really might sever her from her husband in a way that physical distance just doesn't do by itself.
13:13 Erin: This very unsubstitutability, as you're saying, this is the cornerstone of the, you know, the comedies of remarriage that we've talked about in other episodes. This is the real root of my interest in. In those relationships is that they seem to, you know, like. Cavell makes this point in his book about these films. And this is something, too, that we've addressed in, like, at least in the Awful Truth episode, I think, his Girl Friday as well. He makes this point that the couple has to know each other, like, almost from childhood or nearly from childhood, right?
They have to be this. Like each other's origin story that they make each other like Adam and Eve, right? Or Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado where Beatrice says of Benedict, I know him of old, right? This idea that you have a history that predates the story in which the characters are occupying so that they go way, way back, back before we knew them. This, I think, contributes to the romance of the whole thing. Not that one needs to know one's partner from childhood or something like that, but it builds the two characters into each other in this way that you're talking about from a storytelling perspective.
It makes them inextricably intertwined, like the bed and the house, because they try to substitute someone else in the place of the spouse, right? This is the part of the fun of the comedy of remarriage. But it doesn't fit. It's not this lock and key. It's about being in love just with this one particular person. And that even when you stray or you do all this other stuff, there is still nothing like that person. And that particularity and even the peculiarity of being so deeply attached to one other person in particular, I think is like, a contributing factor to what I see as like, the deep romance with a capital R at the end of this poem that's embedded in Odysseus and Penelope's story and which I think makes them like the first comedy of remarriage.
You know, they have to, like, re. Recommit themselves to each other. It's exactly like the structure of the Shakespeare comedies and of the 30s and 40s films.
15:19 Wes: Yeah, that's great. What better way to lock someone in than to build the bed and the house around the bedpost, right? And I mean, a bedpost that is a tree trunk and can't even be taken out of the ground. So, yeah, that's commitment. That is commitment. You can't even move the bed. So, yeah, that's. You know, as you pointed out, that's a really great metaphor for how intertwined they are with each other and how they can't escape each other, which is not true of all couples, of course. And we were wondering, I think in one of our discussions, we were wondering why Penelope is holding on. I think it's because Odysseus did such a good job with the bedpost. No, I'm just kidding. But I like your comedy of remarriage idea. They're too implicated in each other's makeup at this point.
16:15 Erin: There's even the suggestion. I believe I mentioned this in the previous episode, but I'll just say it again, that Penelope, were she to remarry, were she to marry one of these suitors, there's the ritual that she has to go back to her father's house. Right. So it's almost like she has to rewind the tape. You know, she has to go back to childhood and be like a child in her father's house again in order to marry one of these guys, which represents. She has to, you know, the blackboard of her identity has to be erased and then rewritten with this new.
I mean, this is just a ritual that I suppose, that all Greek women at this time would have to go through. But insofar as it. As it accords with this comedy of remarriage idea, you know, she has to, like, revert to a childlike state for a new man to intervene adequately in her life. But she won't. She can't. It's impossible. She's been too. Her blackboard, her bed is too entangled, is too written on. And that's what I see as. So, yeah. So beautiful about this and all the comedies of remarriage, I think, because we're living in this, like, Tinder age where if you don't, like whoever you're with, you could just type in somebody better on your phone and just replace them, you know, and so.
And this. This idea that. No, no, no, it has to be this particular person. You're so inextricably bound up with each other that you can't go with anyone else. And even when you're gone for 20 years, you have to go back to this person no matter what.
17:42 Wes: Yeah, that's where home is. Being with this person is like being at home. It's not entirely unrelated to being part of a certain culture, being part of a larger network of a family, a tribe, a people, that type of thing. It's funny because you're reminding me of the fact that Penelope talks about if she were to remarry, having being taken away from home, she uses the same phrase. And these are both in conversations with Odysseus. One when she knows him as the beggar in book 19 and then one when she knows him as. No. Well, let's look at the first one.
So this is on page 443. She says, I will be parted from here, this lovely house, my marriage home, so full of wealth and life, which I suppose I will remember even in my dreams. I thought it was really interesting that she used this phrase, remember even in my dreams, twice. So the other time is at 4:62. And okay, this is when she's addressing the suitors and says, I will marry him and leave this beautiful rich house so full of life, my lovely bridal home. I think I will remember it forever even in my dreams, which I kind of made note of that also in relation to the fact that Penelope gives an account of a dream that she's had.
So she makes several references to dreams. I don't know that any character does that. Right. You can. If you know of one, let me know. But as far as I remember, she's the only one who relates a dream or talks so much about dreams. The aspect of her attachment to Odysseus is having something to do with being so attached to home and to the idea of it being full of wealth and life. Wealth is something, of course, that gets mentioned a lot. I mean, really like material wealth and resources and cattle and all that stuff. Polished wood. That's part of it, yeah.
19:42 Erin: And the dream maybe is, you know, this internal. Referencing the dream in the text, as you're saying, almost implies like an interiority that no other character has. There's a depth there that it's like her inner room, which is not dissimilar to the bedroom. You know, she keeps retreating up there all the time and she's always crying on her bed and stuff like that. But then having these dreams, having this activity going on inside of her at this level, if she is in fact the only one to have and relate these dreams, gives her that kind of feeling.
20:16 Wes: I'm looking at this now. I think dreams are mentioned almost exclusively in reference to Penelope. There's another mention where it says, intelligent Penelope, still sleeping sweetly inside the gates of dreams. This is on page 178. So much earlier than when she mentions the gates. There's almost no other. There's one other mention of dreams in the whole book. I think that's not Penelope related. Yeah. And that's when he's in Hades. So the shadows are like dreams.
20:43 Erin: The depth there inside Penelope's psyche is similar to the, you know, the deep part of the house, the root of the house, where the bedroom is.
20:53 Wes: If you lose home, it visits you in your dreams. Which in a way, as you pointed out, is the dreamlike quality of Odysseus Adventures. And in a way, the fantastical quality of it. Right. Is a product of what it is to be homeless. We think about it non literally. So there's a dreamlike quality to homelessness. It's like being in a shadow world. And of course, everyone and all the poor spirits in Hades, I guess the implication is they're homeless as well. But anyway, do we have anything else? Any final thoughts?
21:29 Erin: I don't think so. That was a great discussion. Great ending.
21:33 Wes: Yeah. All right. Thank you.
21:36 Erin: Thank you.
Terminal Wooings in “The Odyssey” (Part 3 of 3)
Oct 23, 2023
Wes & Erin discuss the final 12 books of “The Odyssey.” Having learned the lessons of the murder of Agamemnon, Odysseus does not rush straight home to his wife and children, once he arrives at Ithaca. Athena is impressed–but why, exactly? Why is it that Odysseus feels the need to hide his identity, and put friends and family to the test? And after 20 years apart, how do Odysseus and Penelope reacquaint themselves with each other?
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0:12 Wes: Okay. We are in our part three discussion of the Odyssey. We got through books one through 12 in parts one and two, and now we're going to get through the final 12 books, all in the third part. Probably. Hopefully.
0:29 Erin: Probably
0:31 Wes: even if we have to rush, which is something Odysseus would never do. In fact, that's kind of the way I wanted to start this episode. Talking about the fact that instead of rushing to see his wife and family, he goes through a lot of disguises and testing, makes use of all his Odysseus powers for deception, I think even more so than he has in the previous 12 books. So even Athena remarks on this. She's very impressed with this. He's dropped off on Ithaca by Alcinous's people, the Phaeacian people. Their magic boat, basically self driving Tesla of boats drops them off.
He's left on the coast in sheets. There's kind of Odysseus is reborn moment. And then Athena covers Ithaca in a mist so he won't recognize it immediately. And she herself shows up as a shepherd. He supplicates himself. Very usual thing. You got to touch their knees, right? If you ever get time transported back to ancient Greece, just remember to touch someone's knees first thing. And then he tells her a lie. She asks, you know, she's acting like she's a shepherd. She actually then tells him it's Ithaca and then asks where. What. What his story is.
And he tells, and he, he tells like some variation on a. I think it's a different life story every time that he tells to people. Just some made up thing. But correct me if I'm wrong about that, but I think he's always from Crete in these stories.
2:04 Erin: Yeah, what he chooses to focus on is slightly different each time. It could potentially be like different, you know, different layers or iterations of the same story. Like I think if you lay them on top of each other, they line up in places. Certain places, not in others.
2:18 Wes: In this one he tells the story of having murdered someone. And then Athena gets excited, changes herself into the form of a beautiful woman, says, oh, aren't you so clever. I really love your ability to lie. And she tells him, you know, you're going to have to go incognito now. Ithaca. And Odysseus himself becomes skeptical that this is even Ithaca and complains about the fact that Athena didn't protect him when they were leaving Troy. This is an interesting part of the story. Athena loves Odysseus and is so on his side in the Odyssey, but she's responsible for the problems of the Greeks had leaving Troy.
Here's what Athena finally says after complimenting him about his skepticism. An ordinary man would rush straight home to see his wife and children. You decided not even to ask about them until you test your wife. This is on page 327 of the Emily Emily Wilson translation. And then she lets him know that Penelope is loyal and that she has always been loyal as well. And that the only reason he's having to go all through all this is there's a delicate kind of dance with her brother Poseidon, who's pissed off at him. So he's going to have to suffer a lot.
But you know, if Poseidon had his way, it would be even worse. First of all, it's interesting that how happy she is about the fact that instead of rushing home to see his wife and children, he's going to be cautious. Unlike Agamemnon, right? Who just waltzes straight up to little red carpet inviting him home and then is slaughtered at the feast. And yet he already knows Penelope is loyal. There'll be a lot of testing in this. He is going to test Penelope. Penelope is going to test him to see if he's actually Odysseus. What other testing is there?
There's the sussing out of who's loyal among the slave women. And there's the fact that Eurycleia the nanny basically has to recognize him by his scar. But here's my question. Why not just go rush in except for planning, making a plan for the suitors. And the bulk of that plan is just that Athena is going to help fight them. Right. And ensure success. So I don't know why that has to be so sophisticated. So the question is, what role does all of this deception play in these last 12 books? Why is it necessary?
4:49 Erin: Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, Telemachus journey at the beginning when he learns that his father is still alive, sort of, you know, but we had the question about this, I think in the first episode of this series about why did Telemachus have to go through that whole little fact finding mission in the first place? When Nestor describes Agamemnon's fate and Orestes returning to avenge the murder of Agamemnon by killing Aegisthus. And I think he kind of belied the fact that Orestes also kills his own mother, Clytemnestra. The shadow story that kind of lurks over the whole Odyssey.
One of the things that Nestor says when he tells this story to Telemachus, is that the moral is, like, don't stay away from home too long, you know, while the suitors are lurking in your house. And, you know, it's funny because it's Telemachus leaves for a blip compared to how long Odysseus has been away, allowing these suitors to lurk there.
5:49 Wes: Right?
5:50 Erin: And also, you know, we already know that Telemachus is unequal to the task of fending off the suitors on his own. He needs to wait for his father to return home. So ostensibly, it doesn't matter that Telemachus is missing. He goes on this trip, which is ultimately sort of fruitless, but he could stay away as long as he wants, because it doesn't matter, because he's not the one that can fight against the suitors. There's also this interesting moment with Mentor in book two that I was thinking of, in which Telemachus is told that it's rare for sons to be like fathers.
Only if you are better, most are worse, I think is the line from book two, this idea of doing the unnecessary thing or taking the unnecessary journey or the long way around, if you will. I don't think that is ever for me, borne out with a kind of purpose. Like Athena tells us that Telemachus had to go through this trip because he had to gain confidence, right? At one point. That's the justification that she uses. And so I don't know if there's a rhyme there with Odysseus, that he has to gain a confidence in the situation, get his footing back home and suss people out for the same reason that he's kind of, you know, though he's not someone we would call lacking in confidence, that he has to make sure that he can trust the people who he wants to trust and gain confidence in other people's fidelity to him.
But for me, the most interesting part of these deceptions is the story that he tells about himself that changes each time. That the deception allows him to come up with this changing story about this other identity that I find really interesting. And that's something that maybe we could talk about in a second, but I don't know that I have an answer to why he has to test everybody out in the first place, except for the opportunity that it gives us to. Much like Telemachus, right? Telemachus, his little journey gives us, the reader, the listener, the opportunity to hear what's going on with Menelaus, what's going on with Nestor.
You know, you have all these kind of side journeys. And in a way that's repeated a little bit with Odysseus, where it feels like vamping, you know, because we just want him to go in and kill the suitors already, and we don't want him to tell another story. But I think that those stories that are embedded in each one of these lies about his identity are interesting in and of themselves and in a way are repeating some of those elements of the Telemachus journey for me.
8:21 Wes: So, yeah, so what he has to do is to test people so he doesn't end up like Agamemnon. But of course, in a way that's. That's all short circuited by Athena, who tells him that Penelope is loyal and tells him about the suitors. And in fact, she does that in this, in book 13, right, when he gets to Ithaca. And then he says, talks about, oh, I would have died like Agamemnon. And then she disguises him as an old beggar. And then she says, I'll go fetch Telemachus. And then you just refer to this. And she says. And he says to her, why didn't you tell him I was alive?
Why did you let him go on this journey? And she says, well, for the glory of it. Yes, and the suitors are plotting to kill him, but they're not going to succeed. So the role of the gods, and Athena in particular, seems to undercut the more realistic aspects of his deviousness or the utility of his deviousness, or the necessity of it, however you want to put it. But I wanted to go back to his complaint to Athena that she hadn't protected him. So he says on page 327, when we Greeks had sacked the town of Priam and we embarked. Oh, Priam, which Penelope, by the way, in Emily Wilson's translation, calls Evilium Priam.
And we embarked, and gods dispersed our fleet. I did not see you there on. On board my ship, daughter of Zeus. You gave me no protection.
9:55 Erin: She says, you're. You're smart. And I. That's why I can't leave you whenever you need my help, right?
10:02 Wes: That's what she says. At first, yeah. Well, no. And then she says. So she does that stuff about him being smart and you not, you know, not going straight home to see the wife and children. And then she says, but I did not want to conflict with my father's brother Poseidon, who resented you because you blinded his beloved son. Now I will show you Ithaca. So you believe. And she ends up lifting the mist.
10:24 Erin: So that's A really interesting moment, by the way. I find that so interesting because, you know, that's a. That move, that godly move of, you know, showing you something so you believe in, you know, the Judeo Christian tradition. That would be like revealing, performing a miracle. Right. Doing something that would. Would beggar belief under ordinary circumstances. Right. But increasing the faith of someone who's maybe, you know, doubting by showing them an indication of something that's supernatural. And instead she's showing him where he is. Right.
She's hidden it in the first place and then is revealing Ithaca to him. But it's not like she's performing some sort of supernatural deed. Right. Like, I'm thinking of the moment early on where she transforms into. Is it an eagle or a hawk? I can't remember. Some bird. Right. And flies away. She does that in front of Telemachus. Right. So that would be in the Judeo Christian tradition, more in keeping with the kind of revelation that would happen under Judeo Christian sort of miracles in which. Right. Like something incredible happens here. It's turned on its head where she's unnecessarily covered it in mist and.
And then just reveals it to him that Ithaca is Ithaca.
11:46 Wes: Well, even more interestingly, she's covered it in the mist. And I, before rereading it and taking notes, I remembered the mist lasting for longer. Cause I thought it had something to do with his staying in disguise. There's another. There's a previous episode where she. I think it's the Phaeacians, where she kind of hides him from people so he can get through town. So I think I was confusing it with that. But yeah, this is very brief. But interestingly, she puts the mist on, makes herself a shepherd, and then changes herself into a woman. So he does see one sort of obvious miracle happen, but he's still skeptical.
So even Athena is being tested and he says, this can't be Ithaca. And that's when she compliments him about not rushing home to his wife and children. And when she lifts the mist and shows him where he is, then he kind of rejoices. Oh, this really is Ithaca. So she's passing his test. These tests are all about recognition. Are you who you say you are? Well, on the one hand, are you who you say you are? And are you trustworthy? Which in a way is a way of saying you are who you used to be. So I've been away for 20 years, right. Is Penelope actually the person that she was when I left?
She could be an entirely different person. I mean, Penelope has to figure out if it's really Odysseus like everyone else. And a scar is good enough. But again, he's testing everyone's trust, even though Athena is Athena, she doesn't really need to be tested. And then she's sort of the guarantor, the underwriter, everyone else, their loyalty, who it is they are. So again, as we've mentioned, this is all kind of all of the testing happens in the context of it seeming to be excessive. Unless you want to think of it as a ritual or I think another way of thinking about it is just getting to know people again, getting to know home again, a transition or an emotional working through of the potential trauma, returning home after all these years.
So in other words, Odysseus is not just going to pull the band aid off, whether it comes to getting revenge or to reestablishing his relationships. He even does this with Laertes after the suitors are dead. Right. Does he really need. And he kind of teases his father, oh, who owns you, slave? You really have stopped taking care of yourself. Until he cries and Odysseus takes pity.
14:28 Erin: Yeah, that's a pretty sick moment.
14:30 Wes: Yeah. Maybe this will get clearer as we look at other parts of these last 12 books. But that getting to know you thing could be an aspect of this getting to re know you.
14:43 Erin: Something that bears out. Your point is, when she does, or rather before she disperses the mist, she says, now I will show you Ithaca. So you believe this is the Bay of Four Phorcys. Okay, this is the Bay of Phorcys, ancient sea God. And at the head there is an olive tree with long leaves. And nearby, the shady cave sacred to nymphs called Nereids, to whom you sacrifice so many hundred cattle. And here is Neritan, or Narraton, the wooded mountain. With that, the goddess made the mist disperse. The land was visible. And then he sees it and is filled with happiness.
But prior, you know, she primes him, you know, she's telling him before she actually lifts the mist, she's telling him what to expect or what to see or what to look for for confirmation. But it's also must be pulling up an image in his mind of familiar landmarks for him to look for. So, you know, I think that provides some evidence for what you're saying, that this is like, you know, he has to be prepared to. To recognize what's right in front of him to properly make that transition.
15:54 Wes: Yeah, and the fact that she's mentioning all those landmarks before she's lifted the mist. Putting that into his imagination and then lifting it and giving him a match.
16:04 Erin: Right. I'm interested, too, in the variation. Or really, there's kind of two varieties of tests that we're talking about here, because they're the tests that reveal. Reveal some truth and provide some psychological role. But then there are the tests of, like the tests of the slave girls, for instance, or even of the suitors. The suitors are tested, in a way, by Odysseus, what, being like an old beggar? But it's just proving to Odysseus something he already knew about the suitors or something that we know about the suitors or believe about them, which is that they're fundamentally, like, morally bad. Right. They're. They're worthless people.
16:43 Wes: Well, at first they passed the test, interestingly. Sorry to interject, but he is testing them, even though, as Homer puts it, you know, they were not. They were fated to all die. So the test is pointless. So here's another pointless test. But he did want to see if any of them were decent. And many of them do in the beginning, pity him and give him food, and then they get riled up by Antinous and others. And there are clear, in the end, moral gradations or moral differences, ethical differences between the suitors. Some of them are better than others, obviously, and yet he's gonna kill them all.
17:24 Erin: That's a good point, because there are those really interesting gradations, but we're told ahead of time. It's like watching an episode of Law and Order in reverse or something. Because we're given the verdict, we know they're going to die. And so we know that even though there are moral gradations there, they've all been found guilty in some fundamental sense. And so it's as if those tests that Odysseus makes them undergo are a kind of formality of a trial, or even like a kangaroo court, right, in which the people who are undergoing the trial don't even know that they're on trial.
So I guess I'm trying to draw a distinction, and maybe it's not quite so black and white, between the tests that serve a kind of psychological purpose and the tests which are actually a kind of concealment. They're like Ithaca in the mist. They're a formality. The tests, the nature of the test, well, it's hidden in both instances. But even the purported utility of the test is not there, so that it seems like it's just an opportunity for Odysseus maybe to feel better when he finally slaughters them or something. The more I talk about this, maybe the distinctions are collapsing because ultimately neither group, whether it's Laertes for instance, or the suitors, neither knows that they're on trial by Odysseus.
But one seems like it's serving a purpose for at least Odysseus own psychology. And the other is just an opportunity for him to exercise his might and just our formalities.
18:59 Wes: A lot of this testing involves him lying, interestingly enough. So he's a lie detector or he's giving people not a lie detector test, but a loyalty test. But his way of doing that is to lie about who he is. And not just by. Not just a lie of omission or by being dressed up as a beggar, but telling elaborate stories. So when the swineherd Eumaeus asks him where he's from, this is book 14, he gives that one of his elaborate I'm from Crete stories and then tells a bunch of adventures that actually sound quite. I think it's here that they sound pretty in parallel to his actual adventures.
And then Eumaeus says, don't stop lying. Part of the story is that Odysseus had, I think it was in Thesprotia where he had been a guest and left treasure. So he's visited a place that Odysseus has been, but not at the same time, but right after. And the swineherd Eumaeus don't lie, the gods detest him. And Odysseus says, well, you can kill me if that's not true. And then Eumaeus gives one of the. There's only two times I see irony used in the book. One was with Helen and we discussed that broadly. The irony of her conflicting the conflict between her story and Menelaus story.
And then Eumaeus will say, so this is at the bottom of 344. Yes, guest, I would be praised enormously among all men now and in times to come, if I took you inside and welcomed you, then murdered you. Not just irony, but sarcasm.
20:49 Erin: I know how he feels.
20:52 Wes: Odysseus is vouching for his honesty by saying, you can kill me if I'm not. And Eumaeus is invoking the fact that Odysseus is a guest, which of course he's not. And I mean he's actually at home, he's pretending to be a guest and he's there to clean up the problem of pseudo guests, the suitors, right, who are actually abusing hospitality or making use of the code of the Guest to eat up all his property, as he often. But anyway, I'm pointing that out because I thought that moment of sarcasm, which is the only one in the entire book, was pretty surprising. But also because it's an illustration of the elaborateness of Odysseus deceptiveness and these long stories, fables that he tells about himself that he seems to really relish telling.
21:55 Erin: Yeah, he does. You know, I wonder, especially with Eumaeus, because of the parallel story of Agamemnon. And just this, I'm thinking about how in book four, when Proteus continues the story of what happened, you know, in that other parallel story, that when Agamemnon lands back at home, he's spotted by a watchman who's been paid off by Aegisthus, who then alerts him to Agamemnon's arrival. And maybe, I don't think get any information about the identity of this watchman and if it's someone who was close to Agamemnon formerly or whatever. But there's a suggestion maybe that anyone could be turned against Odysseus.
I suppose if I had to really find a reason as to why he would be putting Eumaeus through all of this, that Eumaeus might have been turned against Odysseus or paid off by someone to spy on Odysseus and alert someone as soon as he came home or something like that. I don't know. It seems pretty pointless to me overall. But I'm interested in this. These stories about which go on for many pages, actually, which are difficult to kind of summarize, but basically, let's see the story that he tells Eumaeus. What's like a summary of it. Like, he says he comes from Crete, he's the son of a wealthy man who had many other sons by his main wife.
But this Odysseus, false identity. In this identity, his mother is a slave, but his father respected him like his other sons. And then Odysseus, half brothers seize his property and give only a tiny part to him. But then he won a wife with a good dowry, but then he lost it. He wins spoils of war and then he goes to Troy, even though he didn't want to, and stayed for nine years and then sacked the city, returns home. You know, there are all these like, stories of sort of unequal distribution or of earning things by one's own merit that recur in these stories.
Also of kind of doing things reluctantly and also of having continually being steered off course or having to go down these various Other paths, when you have one destination in mind, but you're pulled in other directions. What I find interesting about this is that these stories to me almost have the scrambled quality of a dream, right? In which Odysseus own real life experiences have been kind of broken into bits and then they're sort of reconstituted into these stories that are different from his actual story, but contain, you know, all these pieces so that he's.
It's like he is awake, but his mind, his subconscious mind is trying to work out some problem. Maybe it's a, you know, it's this problem of his own identity, like squaring this idea that for the past 20 years he's been a wanderer and now he has to become, you know, a man with a home again. And so it's as if he's awake, but like I said, trying to kind of work through his own conflict within his identity in his mind, as one does in a dream state.
25:09 Wes: I'm thinking of. You have me imagining a undercover cop type of story where the cop has to be given a backstory. I guess for a spy it's the same thing, right? And then, you know, so his compatriots will quiz him on the backstory. What's your name? What are your parents names? Where did you go to high school? Right. Every detail has to be in there. And it. It cannot be the case that when you are asked about it, you pause and fabricate on the spot. Except Odysseus does seem to be fabricating on the spot. And as you said, he's drawing on all these various experiences he's had and scrambling them up in a dreamlike way.
But you get the sense he does it with complete facility and complete smoothness, or there's not a wrinkle in his ability to fabricate on the spot and just simply to manufacture backstory without a glitch. This is one of the things that Athena seems to admire about him. But I think you're also pointing to the role. So that ability to manufacture backstory and to be many weighed and to be the quote, unquote, Lord of Lies. I think that's one of the epithets, or master of Lies. In a way, it stands in opposition to homecoming. I mean, if we think about home as we could think about it in purely psychological terms, in terms of authenticity and being at home in one self and not putting on all these masks, being transparent to oneself and to other people, in that sense, this deception seems to stand in opposition to homecoming.
And I think we could probably Say similarly that there's an opposition to homecoming in its more literal sense in the long run. But in the short run, it seems to be a means to homecoming. All these tests means to homecoming. But as we pointed out, on one level, that explanation seems to fall apart. On the level of having to test people to figure out if they're loyal because Athena's already told him what's what, or to see, you know, see if there's any danger. He already knows there's danger. Athena's told him what's what. But on the other level, the whole psychological working through and figuring out how to return from being the traveler, the wonder, the deceiver, the warrior, to being in a position after incredible and horrific bloodshed, which we'll get to, to being in a position to be a father and husband again.
Although he does say, you know, is he really going to do that? He has to go take care of some business, including going out and raiding, stealing other people's sheep. So. But anyway, on one level, he has to. He has to navigate the return to domesticity and ironically, deception and not being himself in a way, being traveling away from himself is going to become this means to homecoming. After spending some time with Eumaeus and we shift scenes to Sparta in book 15, Telemachus with Menelaus son. And I guess they are. They're still at Menelaus and Athena appears.
Right. It's easy to forget that Athena is appearing not just to Odysseus, but to Telemachus throughout the poem. And it motivates him to go home by saying Penelope's about to get married. And she even says something like, you know how women are. In fact. Yeah, let's look at page 351. So she's just said her father and her brother's already telling her she should wed Eurymachus, one of the suitors. Top of page 351. You know how women are. They want to help the house of any man they marry. When one darling husband dies, his wife forgets him and her children by him.
She does not even ask how they are doing.
29:11 Erin: Just like a woman.
29:12 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Sexist Athena. Let's pause to talk about our sponsors for this episode, starting with St. John's College, which turns out to be my alma mater. St. John's College is for students who seek meaning in their lives and who want to ask hard questions of themselves and the world. At St. John's students explore 3,000 years of human thought, confronting fundamental human questions while engaging with history's most influential works of philosophy, literature, math, science, music, political, history, and more. At St. John's our vibrant community of learners examine works as divergent as Aristotle and Aquinas, Einstein and Nietzsche, Bach and Baldwin.
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32:51 Erin: Yeah, it's funny, I'm thinking of a parallel now, but what is Athena basically saying, but that Telemachus is going to lose his identity, right? His mother is no longer going to acknowledge him and therefore he's going to be, I don't know, nobody's son. She's going to. You know, there's this smacks of disinheritance, right? Being forgotten, as we've talked about before with Odysseus, right? That's like the worst thing that you can be, you know, is to be forgotten or that people are afraid that someone is going to forget Odysseus, even though he's on everyone's mind constantly, but somehow not occupying space in somebody else's mind.
Or it is literally, it seems, a fate worse than death here. So this bespeaks, I think, you know, like I said, a loss of Telemachus identity on some level, a loss of his relationship with his mother and therefore of a piece of whatever epithet we can assign to Telemachus. He would no longer be her son or a son. And I'm thinking of this in parallel with Odysseus. Many, many identities. You know, Odysseus is kind of overflowing with identity. This is something actually I'm thinking of in relation even to the Tennyson poem Ulysses, which I know pretty well.
The idea that life piled on life were all too little or something like that. The idea that Odysseus has, he's constantly out for the next adventure. He's like a cat times 12, you know, he has hundreds of lives. And that this storytelling that he indulges in with Eumaeus and with everybody else, it seems like it's a part of him and of his own story. Like it seems like something that could have happened to him or, you know, the way his life could have gone had he been born in Crete or something like that, right? Like he has an abundance of identity.
And the loss would be to foreclose some of those possibilities or to shed some of those identities. And that's the threat that motivates Telemachus to return. I don't know how that squares with homecoming, though, or it can run both, I think, in tandem with and at cross purposes with the idea of homecoming. Because you give up, like Odysseus has to give up his identity as a wanderer or, you know, a man of the sea should he return to the plains of Ithaca, but he'd also regain the status as a husband and father. Telemachus, it seems, is like having a good time out there, which is why he doesn't want to come back.
35:16 Wes: Well, it's funny, I guess he is having a good time at Menelaus house and then. And they've just. Just done some good drugs as well, right? But he is getting a little bit of the. Of a taste of his father's life. Not much, but. But a little bit. And then, you know, once Athena encourages him to go back, he. Then he's in an awful hurry. In fact, there's kind of a moment of humor where, you know, he's stopping at Pylos and he's supposed to go visit Nestor again and go through that whole rigmarole with the feasting and the gifts and the jumping out of the bed in the morning.
It's kind of a repeated scene where someone jumps out of the bed in the morning. And this is the one time in the poem where that's just bypassed. Telemachus is like, look, I can't do it again. Just did it with Nestor, did it with Menelaus. Now I'm not going to do it again. I got to get home. And Nestor's son is like, okay, you know, father's gonna be really, really pissed that he's not allowed to give you millions of dollars of gifts. But okay, get out of here and I'll go tell him. And then he takes a murderer aboard his ship who will continue to be a character through the rest of the novel.
Someone's just like, yeah, I murdered someone. I'm fleeing the law. Can you take me aboard Telemachus? Yep, sure. But anyway, so that kind of homecoming is different. And. And I think this is part of what you're pointing out stands in a kind of contra distinction to Odysseus's homecoming, which for Telemachus, now it's more about anxiety. For Odysseus, it's about longing for home and even being methodical about it. He makes up a lie at some point where he says, well, I could have come home earlier, but I was out gathering treasure or something.
I wanted to stay away a little bit longer under one of his. And we get this contrast right after this scene in Sparta and then Pylos, where we go back to Odysseus having dinner with Eumaeus and Odysseus gives one of his speeches about homelessness and what it means to the importance of getting back home. So he says, this is page 361. So basically Odysseus has just said he's going to go to town to beg and then he's going to go to Odysseus's house, right? Odysseus in the guise of the beggar. And Eumaeus says, no, you'll be killed if you do that.
Odysseus says, Odysseus, experienced in pain, answered, I hope Zeus loves you as I do, since you have saved me from the agonies of wandering. The worst things humans suffer is homelessness. We must endure this life because of desperate hunger we endure as migrants with no home. And then he'll say, tell me about Odysseus parents. But this is a really interesting way to put it because introduces this idea that homelessness is the worst form of suffering. So it's not just all the things that he has gone through, including losing all of his men and you know, any of the privation that, that he's gone through in his travels or the risk of death, but homelessness itself is the worst thing.
And then he says, kind of life itself is kind of that way, right? So in a way it's not a problem that can be solved. We must endure this life. We endure as migrants with no home. And why? Because of desperate hunger. I take that desperate hunger to be something broad, right? And not merely literal. So desire in general, whether it's for love or for glory or for food or sex or anything more material or basic, is a form of homelessness to which we are all subject. So we are all in the position of an Odysseus and the task is to get home, if that's possible.
And then it makes me wonder, well, what is the role of this testing and deception and all of that stuff in that process, right? Are we supposed to be telling stories to others, to ourselves? What is the role of that? So a little bit later they will get to the point where Odysseus asks Eumaeus how he became a slave. This is a story, of course, Odysseus must already know. And Eumaeus has a story to tell which sounds a lot like one of Odysseus's backstories where he gets sold and Eumaeus gets sold into slavery. You know, he's from a wealthy family, but he ends up getting sold into slavery essentially because of the deception of one of his nannies.
But before that, and this is page 363, Eumaeus says, but let us, you and I, sit in my cottage over food and wine and take some joy in Hearing how much pain we each have suffered. After many years of agony and absence from one's home, a person can begin enjoying grief. So this highlights the fact that there is no homecoming for Eumaeus. He's stuck, right? He's sort of more literally in the position that we've just heard described as a kind of existential position, right? We endure as migrants from the home. That's just life. Eumaeus, because he's a slave, will never go home.
And Laertes and Odysseus had never offered him the chance, obviously, of going home. He's genuinely stuck in this position. And then finally, the third idea that's introduced there is that storytelling about one's suffering can actually be a pleasurable thing. And again, storytelling is related to this concept of lying and deception. It's what Odysseus is constantly doing. So how do we put all that together? The existential position of homelessness and then the role of storytelling in relation to that.
41:03 Erin: There's a lot there. You know, one of the things I'm thinking about is with these lines that you've referenced about the worst thing humans suffer is homelessness. We must endure this life because of desperate hunger we endure as migrants with no home. You know, I think you're right that he means a deeper hunger there. But the irony also is that right out in the world is where the riches are. That's where the glory is, right? And I mean, even Telemachus has to have his little year abroad, if you will, in order to be able to fight with his father.
At the end of the poem, there's the necessity of leaving to seek one's fortune so that life at home can be, and, you know, know in all senses of the term, life at home can be sustained. Odysseus seems to live off of spoils he gets from other places, right? I mean, it's not. Ithaca is not a wealthy place in and of itself. And if out in the world is where. Where the riches are and, you know, one's needs are satisfied by leaving home, one's physical needs and one's sustenance in old age, I think that probably extends to the storytelling idea as well.
Like, you need to have something to regret, something to mull over in your old age. You need to keep retelling the stories of your youth, the adventures that you have. And had you not left home in the first place and lived to experience this grief or regret or all these sad things that Eumaeus is talking about, then you don't really have a story to tell. And the storytelling seems to be a really important piece of all of this. Though I still haven't worked my way back to your question, which is why that's so important in the first place.
42:48 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it could be that the storytelling is integral. Integral in some way to one's account of oneself, which I'm associating Right. With home in the sense of authenticity. Although if we're telling stories nominally, we're deceiving ourselves. And so the question is, what type of story? In this case, in this scene, it's a story. It's stories they're telling about their own suffering. And the idea is that there's a kind of pleasure in that. And we know there's pleasure in that. Right. This is a classic question when it comes to the enjoyment of tragedy.
Plato addresses this, Aristotle addresses this. But it gets brought up again and again in the history of aesthetics is how is it that we could ever enjoy stories about painful things in which painful things and often horrible things are happening to other people, where we are actually empathizing with the characters to which all this horrible stuff is happening? And there are different explanations for this. You know, Aristotle talks about catharsis. But one of the ways of thinking about it is just that pain and suffering are integral to self organization and, let's say, self integration and to maybe reaching higher and higher levels of psychological organization.
So in a way, pain is growth. So maybe that's the. It's just a trite thing, but the point is that the kind of growth that we're talking about there is a kind of homecoming. So the storytelling, in a way, is. It's a way of maybe integrating experiences of homelessness such that they become the foundation for home. Home is built on top of homelessness in some weird way.
44:36 Erin: I'm curious, though. You said that storytelling is necessarily self deception.
44:41 Wes: Well, not necessarily. Did I say necessarily?
44:44 Erin: Or it's always self deception, or it relies on self deception, or it just
44:49 Wes: using the word story, like telling tales,
44:52 Erin: rather than this idea that making a story out of one's experience is always going to involve some kind of organization which can make sense only in hindsight and which maybe attributes causes to things that, you know, there's correlation and not causation or vice versa.
45:07 Wes: Yeah, to the extent that we organize it and, you know, we might falsify. Right. In giving things a clean narrative when really they're much more like sound and fury. Our daily chaos of our experience is a lot like the travel and homelessness here and their organization into A narrative is a lot more like home. We can't do that organization, we can't engage in that organizing process until we have the raw material of chaos and
45:37 Erin: the organization into something fundamentally repetitive, right? Which is kind of ironic, like the need to tell the repetitive story or to tell the story over and over again, even if it isn't in itself repetitive by its nature. The need to repeat the story is something that I'm interested in too, psychologically. Being very close, as I've been in my life with old men who love telling the same story over and over again, you know, that kind of thing like that repetition compulsion, if you will, is really integral, it seems, to the experience of storytelling.
And I'm thinking about that in relationship to the repetition inherent not only in Odysseus own need to tell his own story over and over, which is how we get the story in the first place, right? This is something we talked about last time, that we're not actually seeing Odysseus experiences firsthand, right? We hearing them told by him. And this is something that we get the impression he's told many times before and will tell many times again, right? His own story. But also something you pointed out about the Groundhog Day like element of, you know, Telemachus and Odysseus as guests, like the ritual of the guest, right?
So even when they're out there having these kind of wild adventures, there's like an inherent repetition because of the formality and the ritual in involved with being a guest. There's a repetition that structures each one of these experiences every single time, whether it's, you know, as I say, the ritual of hospitality or in the thread in a lot of Odysseus stories of him saying too much or having to announce himself and therefore kind of making the same mistake over and over again, or at least displaying the same set of flaws over and over, even if they work out in the end for him, but only at great cost.
So there's the repetition within the stories themselves, which is maybe like the personality element that we're seeing, right? Where we might have a series of experiences that are similar to each other because we're the common denominator, right? So our stories maybe about ourselves, are always going to be somewhat repetitive because we're always going to be working out the same stories, perhaps. But then there's this idea that also the story needs to be repeated over and over again for some psychological need. Once all the stories are over and you're finally back in your house, right.
They need to be Repeated. And then there's this idea that, like, every story has a kind of superstructure above and beyond the fact that, you know, I'm going to. Because I'm Erin and I have my set of characteristics, I'm going to make some of the same choices every time I encounter an obstacle or something. And that's going to be a common theme in my own story. There's this idea too, that lots of stories have the same structure. There's a superstructure about every story. You could argue, yeah, I'm always journeying like a hero. And the idea that you have to leave to come home, the idea that the stories are for a seafaring people, you could argue they're tidal.
They go in and out like the sea. I'm kind of all over the place there, but I'm kind of referencing maybe so three tiers. So like a superstructure that is repeated in all stories in terms of an arc to a story. The repetitions that we have within our own personality to have tendencies towards certain stories that are all alike, and then the need that we have to repeat the same story over and over again verbally, and the recapitulation of that story. I don't know how all of those work together.
49:09 Wes: I mean, you're reminding me of our conversation, our first conversation, the part one of this conversation about the Odyssey, in which we started by thinking about the fact that Odysseus, despite being polutropon, many weighed, resourceful, flexible, can solve any problem, has been stuck for so long, 20 years. I mean, I don't know that we want to blame him for being stuck at Troy, but it was his brilliant Trojan horse solution, right? Solved the problem. It took him 10 years for some reason, to think up, and then he had to spend another 10 years at sea.
So for some reason he's been stuck. And that stuckness is what we think of psychologically as a repetition compulsion. And it's of course related to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. We have a certain narrative, and often it's unconscious. And maybe the stuckness and the repetition come first and the story is emergent upon that. In psychoanalysis, the repetition compulsion, in a way, is about staying home, oddly enough, because it's about staying where it is that we feel comfortable, even if it involves a lot of suffering. And the comfort comes from its association with parental attachment, attachment to an early caregiving situation, such that if we had abusers as parents, we might want to repeat the experience of being abused, even though it's painful, just because it is reminiscent of that attachment of that feeling of being at home.
You just. You're making me think that Odysseus's repetition, which is on a literal level, to be far away from home and his wife and to be adventuring and doing all types of crazy stuff, which I guess can be fun, that feels more like home to him than actual home, such that he has to solve that problem and go from being stuck in the. In the repetition of being at home, away from home, to figuring out how it is that he can actually progress, move forward and really be at home. Give up his warrior identity and even deceiver identity. There's not. Other than raiding other people's farms.
And I guess he has some. One more quest to complete. But it's going to be a very different life domestically than what he's had. I'm sure he'll have his man cave. Right. But it won't be the same,
51:44 Erin: you know, that's why when you mentioned that Telemachus is spurred home by this kind of anxiety, and I think you said something about, you know, Odysseus not having this anxiety. I wonder though, if he does, if this, you know, that's why I'm reading a lot into these stories about him as, you know, this Cretan, this guy from Crete. I don't want to say Cretan. It sounds.
52:05 Wes: Hey, everyone, I'm a Cretan, okay?
52:06 Erin: Yeah.
52:07 Wes: I'm not Odysseus, by the way. I'm just a Cretan. The very opposite of clever. Odysseus, a Cretan.
52:19 Erin: Yeah, that's. But if you're, as you're saying, you know, this, this. I love this idea that, you know, the storytelling is. Is about that desire to live in those experiences again, even if they're unpleasant experiences or they're about danger or they're about not being at home, that there is a home within those stories. And so the telling of the story, the recapitulation of the story that opens up time, I suppose. So you're puncturing whatever your present experience is or present time with the past time with the past experience. And so what Odysseus is maybe doing by telling these stories is another form of delay, which I'm reading as a kind of anxiety, an inability to move forward into his home by continually delaying and puncturing this forward progression of the narrative to the destruction of the suitors and the reunion with Penelope, continually puncturing that with these stories of a false past, like I said, a kind of scrambled identity.
53:27 Wes: Yeah, he's got a delay until he's ready. And at this point, though, this is more about. He's been delaying for 20 years. And the types of delay involved in this disguise and testing. I think, again, we might want to read as the process of psychological re and social reintegration into home and reading it as having solved his problem of the repetition compulsion that required him to be away from home.
53:55 Erin: Does reintegration involve this kind of. I mean, is it like, psychologically like sinking into a hot tub rather than doing a cannonball into the deep end, you know?
54:06 Wes: Right. Well, that's the thing. I mean, a good therapist would just go, kill the suitors now, stop delaying. No, exactly. It is therapeutic. Right? So what he's doing does seem like he's taking the slow road. He's taking the therapeutic road. He's got to get himself right. He's got to get his mind right before he takes action. And usually he's quite impulsive. Despite his cleverness, he couldn't help himself with Polyphemus, gotten himself in huge trouble with Poseidon, but now he's being very disciplined. Athena's help. But also, again, I think you're right.
It's in line with the kind of anxiety where he can't just jump in immediately. He has to go through this therapeutic process of, quote, unquote, testing people unnecessarily, but reacquainting himself with his island and his family. And also, I think building up some of this seems to be about building up the rage to do what he's gonna. This whole thing with Athena, making sure the suitors abuse him, putting him in a position to be directly abused by the suitors, right until he's enraged enough simply to murder them all, which is quite disturbing.
But somehow he's got to go through a process which is going to put him into action, but also get him to the point of being reunited with his wife.
55:28 Erin: I don't know if this is fruitful or not, but this is just putting me in mind of conversations that we had about. Or maybe we didn't. When did we talk about this? I talk about this all the time in my own life and with students, when I would assign them certain short stories on this theme. But the idea of disappearing from your own life, or like George Bailey and It's a Wonderful Life. Have we talked about this? Did we do an episode on this where someone vacates their role in the story, if you will? They step outside of themselves and look at. It's like they're part of a puzzle, you know, and they remove themselves from the larger scene.
Like, they step outside of it and they can see the shape that they've left behind, right? The hole that they've made in the surrounding, you know, but only once they've stepped out of that image can they look back and see what impact they've had on the people around them. Because they see sort of like the outline, you know, the hole that they've left behind. What I'm interested in here is I'm wondering if this testing idea is part of the fact that maybe, like Ithaca being shrouded in mist, Odysseus has been away for too long and can no longer see the hole.
You know, it's closed up, if you will. If it's like a wound, right, it's scabbed over, and he maybe is wondering if there is a place for him. And part of this sussing people out is determining where he fits back in. Or it's even like making that opening for himself to fit back into the ecosystem, if you will, of the island. Because it's had to live without him for so long that it's probably replaced him in the ecosystem. I mean, it's an imbalanced ecosystem because of the suitors and the strain on the household. Right. It's disordered. We already know this quite well.
Right.
57:16 Wes: It's a sort of Ghost of Christmas Future thing going on.
57:19 Erin: Exactly.
57:20 Wes: The part of Clarence is played by Athena, right.
57:24 Erin: And so he has to find a way to make room for himself. Not only that he's been gone and yes, everyone's been miserable, but also they've moved on. And so part of this is like reopening that hole or that, you know, wound sounds painful, but I think there's something of that too, you know, moving, as we already said, moving Laertes to tears.
57:45 Wes: And then I think this is a really good point, because part of what's motivating him, you know, I spoke of him being getting abused by the suitors as a way to motivate him to kill them all. But what you're pointing to is the having to witness what it is that Ithaca and his family have become without him. The hypothetical world in which Odysseus just doesn't exist. I mean, it's the real world as well. But, you know, looking at it from a Christmas Future perspective, such that he can be motivated to fit himself back into the world, see that it needs him.
58:22 Erin: I guess I'm sure I mentioned this in the It's Wonderful Life episode, but there's that short story, Wakefield by Hawthorne which self consciously chimes with the Odyssey because Wakefield leaves for 20 years and then one day he just walks back into his house. He goes one block over and spies on his wife for 20 years and wears disguises and at one point meets her in the street and she doesn't even recognize him, I think somewhere at the midway point. And then after 20 years, he just walks back into his house. You know, he does the cannonball into the hot tub and just walks back in and their life goes back to normal.
The 20 year thing, of course, as I would tell my students, like, that's an obvious reference to the Odyssey. And something about the amount of time that he has been away or, you know, something about the absurdity of it makes it so that he could just walk back in at the end of the story. And we, at least I believe it. But part of the theme of that story, and I don't mean to go down this rabbit hole too far, it's this idea, I think, that Hawthorne is playing with, that the city, this story takes place in London and the city is such a sort of unnatural, unhuman kind of place that someone might be run over by a streetcar one day and you never see them again.
Or someone might just take off and have a new identity and move to another part of the city. And these cities are so large and they're so new at this time and so impersonal that you might just find yourself in a new situation and you might suddenly find that your entire world's changed overnight. The street signs have changed, you've moved to a new part of the neighborhood, you have new acquaintances. You can totally reinvent yourself. This is a sort of terror at the modern world. Kind of underpinnings to the Wakefield story, the Hawthorne story, and in It's a Wonderful Life, which is playing with this small town, everybody knows your name, you have an identity.
It's a different kind of thing. So maybe, or I'll use another metaphor here, like double dutch, right? The city is always playing double Dutch. And you could just as easily jump out and have somebody else jump in and start doing double Dutch as you could just jump back in and start skipping the rope again, right? And the city just keeps going. The machine of the city just keeps going. So maybe Wakefield, because of the nature of his circumstances, can just bam, jump back in. But in Ithaca and in whatever it's called, not Pottersville, Bedford Falls, these are old fashioned places.
These are places where your roles are very clearly defined and where if your mother forgets you, like George Bailey's, mother forgets him, or Telemachus is threatened with his mother forgetting him and moving on. That's a great tragedy. Right. That's something that is going to. I mean, it's a great tragedy in any case, of course. Right. But for the purposes of this old fashioned way of relating this deep human need to know each other in community and in a family structure, to know someone closely, that's something that takes time to reintegrate into, because it's like an organism that you're rejoining, you know, not just something that's kind of already dead or shifting beneath your feet all the time, like you have to.
This is why I think the wound thing maybe is an apt image because you have to, like, reintegrate into this living thing with many moving parts and that that requires a kind of pain and gradual reinsertion and sort of rehabilitation of the whole organism, which now has to work with you grafted back into it. Yeah. I don't know.
1:01:47 Wes: Yeah. The question is, is he. Well, you put it as double Dutch or a cog in the machine. Is Odysseus replaceable?
1:01:56 Erin: Right. Right.
1:01:57 Wes: And he turns out not to be. Not for Penelope, even though she has lots of options over the course of many, many years waiting in her parlor. But she waits out Odysseus, as improbable as that may seem. So I think as we go to. We're going to move into postscript and we can talk about. This is a good time to talk about Penelope and the reuniting of Odysseus and Penelope, which primarily happens in book 19 at first, where she talks to him as a beggar, as she believes him to be, and then in book 23, where they go through their whole personal reacquaintance process, which is really interesting. But I think what we're not going to get to, which I am happy not to get to, is the orgy of violence, which I don't want to relive again, where they just slaughter Everyone, including 12 of the slave girls, for the crime of hooking up with the suitors.
1:03:04 Erin: I'm glad to skip that as well. And I'm really interested, I think, in talking about the bed. Right. Which is maybe further along the lines of how we're thinking here, because even the bed is a living thing.
1:03:17 Wes: Yes, yes. And it's built into the structure. The bedpost is built into the structure of the house in such a way that the bed can't even be moved. Yeah. All right. So we will talk about that in Postscript. Thank you.
1:03:32 Erin: Thank you.
1:03:35 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com to listen. airwavemedia.com.
Foolish Adventures in “The Odyssey” (Part 2 of 3)
Sep 25, 2023
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. In this episode, part 2 of our 3-part series, they look closely at the heart of the poem, books 5-12, in which Odysseus arrives in Phaeacia and provides the tale-within-the-tale of his adventures after the Trojan War. They discuss the significance of Odysseus’s fantastical encounters and asking what they might reveal both about his character and about the nature of our own progress—through times of safety, complacency, excitement, danger, and loss—as we wend our way back home.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:12 Erin: Today we're continuing our discussion of the Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. In this episode, part two of our three part series, we're looking closely at the heart of the poem, books 5 through 12, in which Odysseus arrives in Phaeacia and provides the tale within the tale of his adventures after the Trojan War. We're discussing the significance of Odysseus fantastical encounters and asking what they might reveal both about his character and about the nature of our own progress through times of safety, complacency, excitement, danger and loss as we wend our way back home. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:49 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan.
0:51 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. We're back for part two of our discussion of the Odyssey. It was originally going to be a two part discussion. It's now been extended. It's gotten bloated into a three part discussion for good reason, I think. We spent last time between the main episode and the postscript talking about the first four books up through the end of book four. We talked about Helen and Menelaus in book four and also Proteus, I believe in the postscript we discussed Proteus. And so today's episode, our goal is to get from books five to 12. And then in a part three episode, we'll do the back 12 books. So today we're talking about all of Odysseus's many travels and stories of his
1:41 Wes: travels, his crazy adventures.
1:44 Erin: So his crazy adventures. Those wild and crazy guys. Okay.
1:49 Wes: Book five starts in an interesting way because in a way it recapitulates the very beginning, which is it returns us to Mount Olympus and Athena pleading with Zeus. Right.
2:06 Erin: Like this whole conversation has gone on perhaps during the whole Telemachiad. We return to the previous story thread, which is Athena on.
2:14 Wes: It's an interesting frame. It'll never make sense. The gods will never make any sense. There's no consistent psychology or it's difficult to figure out why. Why they. They do what they do. But they, you know, they do have some interesting conversations at certain points. So Athena starts out by saying, let's read a little bit of this book five in the second stanza, I guess you call it Father and all immortal gods. She said, no longer let a sceptered king be kind or gentle, or pay heed to right and wrong. Let every king be cruel, his acts unjust.
Odysseus ruled gently, like a father, but no one even thinks about him now. And then she goes on to talk about he's stranded on an island with Calypso forcing him to stay there. So Athena is becoming a little bit of a nihilist at this point. Poor Odysseus shows you that being good just doesn't pay. But of course that's not actually Odysseus reputation. And at certain points in the book, and this is something Emily Wilson points out, the translator, when we learn why it is that Athena actually likes Odysseus, it's because he is crafty and deceptive and good in ways of war and all that stuff.
So when I say it'll never make any sense, the fact that something is framed here in terms of justice and kindness, you know, that happens at times, but it's not the overall gist of what normative framework for the gods. It's just kind of a kind of randomly shift. So if you think about metamorphosis and shape shifting, that the whole normative frame or terrain or domain is always shifting, I think between something that recognizable as justice and morality to us, or to something that's more akin to an honor society or the valuation of pure evaluation of power or violence or intelligence or strength.
A bunch of different conflicting values, except insofar as they are forms of power and excellence. So pre moral in a way. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you took Nietzsche's two scales of valuation, one, the extra moral as in the standing outside of morality, the blond beast form of valuation beyond good and evil, just all about power and excellence. And then something more akin to the Christian scale of values, something again that we would recognize as morality. Both those systems are at work here and there's no clear way to say which one is going to predominate at any different moment.
4:58 Erin: Yeah, I hadn't thought much about this moment, but you're really making me see how interesting it is. It's interesting too that Athena is acting as a kind of mediatrix to her father in this moment. There's a little bit maybe of kind of anti job logic going on here, right. Like this is a sort of counterpoint. Like I was thinking, you know, with all of Odysseus trials and tribulations, how it sort of runs parallel to, but also counter to the Job story in the Old Testament. And I was thinking too about what you said in the last episode about Odysseus having that kind of twin nature of. How did you put it? It was really good. I can't. I can'. Remember now, like brains and.
5:37 Wes: Brains and brawn.
5:38 Erin: Brains and brawn. Yeah, yeah. Brains and brawn.
5:40 Wes: Is that it? Okay.
5:41 Erin: Yeah. I was thinking about this in relationship to. Well, actually, I think Wilson, too, brings this up in her introduction. I wrote down a couple of great quotes from her. She talks about this in relation to Athena, where she says, Athena's skill in weaving clothing for domestic use sits uneasily with her ability to weave deception and military strategy for the tapestry of war. And then in another section, Wilson compares or contrasts Odysseus's craftiness and Penelope's. So. And I think this is worth reading aloud too, because it's something I'd like to talk about at length, perhaps later.
But she's talking about Penelope's craftiness with unweaving the shroud. The shroud with which she's delaying the suitors. And Wilson writes, this delaying tactic shows her Penelope's capacity for deceptive storytelling, a quality shared by her husband, as well as her technical skill in weaving, which is analogous to her husband's competence as a construction worker. The things Odysseus constructs, such as the wooden horse, his raft to get away from Calypso and his bed, are finished and are supposed to remain finished. Penelope's weaving is designed to be undone.
Moreover, whereas the deceptive plots of Odysseus are geared towards a particular end, to invade a city, to reach his home, or to destroy the suitors, the deceptive plot of Penelope serves in the opposite direction to hold off an endpoint, to avoid the end of the story. It is meant to be forever in a state of becoming, not completion. I'm interested in that. And we could talk about that more, I think, in part three, in terms of what it reveals about Penelope's psychology. I'm just thinking about how, with Athena's emphasis here on, for instance, the fact that no one even thinks about Odysseus.
Now you can have all these great qualities, as you've already suggested, the desire for power and things like that are maybe the great qualities that Athena finds interesting and excellent in Odysseus. I think I see more and more that Odysseus is brawn because of this craftiness, which has this literal construction element to it. Like he's kind of constructs his plot via these made things that he puts together. It's almost like his brawn is just his brains sort of externalized. And Athena's emphasis here on the externalization of his circumstances, where the concern is about proper tribute being paid, the concern is about hospitality and getting really good gifts from your host, not just in the satisfactions of Virtue.
But to have these external gifts, to get attention, to get favor, all of these things which are about accumulating power, stature for oneself and status are the things that Athena's really concerned about. And those are the things in this moment that she's concerned are being depleted from Odysseus. Right. Not necessarily his goodness, though she kind of pays lip service to that to a certain extent. And I think that kind of is interesting in that it runs in counterpoint to the Job story as well. Right. Whereas Job loses everything. And the concern is supposed to be just for his soul and his character.
And with Athena, it's about. Even in terms of the gods, it's about this losing the status and wanting to accumulate power in this Nietzschean way I think, that you're describing. Does that make sense?
8:55 Wes: Yeah, it shifts back and forth between some seeming concern with the ethical and the just, and then the concern with status and power. You know, when she says that no one thinks about him now, it's manifestly untrue. She's thinking about him. She's getting Zeus to think about him. Poseidon is pissed off at him, which explains why he is in the trouble that he's in, and she respects that. There's a point where she is reticent about intervening because she doesn't want to anger her brother Poseidon. Telemachus is thinking about him. He's searching for him, as Athena will mention later on, which leads.
Or is it Zeus who mentions him now? It's Zeus who brings up Telemachus and says, use your skill to help him to come home alive. And then Penelope, of course, is the whole weaving and unweaving that you mentioned and leading suitors on, but not ever giving into one of them. It reflects the fact that she has not accepted his death. Everyone is waiting on him, even Telemachus, who will repeatedly say, odysseus must be dead. And who else says, odysseus must be dead all the time? Seems like there's someone else. Anyway, it seems like everyone's always talking about, Odysseus must be dead.
Odysseus must be dead. And now Athena's. No one's thinking about him. But everyone is waiting. They're waiting for. Oh, they're waiting on Odysseus.
10:14 Erin: Yes.
10:15 Wes: So this is one of. When I say that the gods are never gonna make any sense. This is part of what I mean. It's not just the two ethical frameworks. It's just the kinds of contradictions that just crop up even within a single stanza, which Is, which is not just entirely random, I think, as we'll continue to see, but reflects something of what the divine realm means for the ancient Greeks.
10:39 Erin: In this stanza in particular, maybe it just highlights the fact that yes, there's an emphasis on goodness or virtue, but not for its own sake, right? Purely as a means to glory or remembrance. I like the fact that you point out that Poseidon is thinking a lot about him too. It's like both sides of positive and negative attention, I guess, are good. They're both attention for Odysseus. And I'm wondering if this is a mirror, the fact that people are thinking of him either because they love him or because they hate him. I wonder if this mirrors Odysseus own conflict, which I think we have yet to talk about, which is this idea that maybe he doesn't really want to go home.
He has both positive and negative feelings about making actual progress in his journey, which I think is manifested in the. We could call it gently call it like a stop start journey or movement home. One step forward, two steps back, something like that.
11:31 Wes: Odysseus will say in book nine about Calypso that she held him for a while but never really swayed his heart because there's nothing sweeter when you're far away from home. There's nothing sweeter than one's native land and family. Now what happens when you're actually at home and have been with them for a while, that's another thing. But as long as you're away from them, then of course the absence makes the heart grow fonder. So I think that's part of the paradox of the ambivalence about getting home. And of course there's lots of stuff, you know, in the chapters that we're talking about today about home and the meaning of it, right?
The island of the lotus eaters, his men, right, Eat the lotus and it makes them forgetful. And then specifically it makes them forget home, which is a kind of similar danger to what happens with the Sirens in book five. So I want to look at this specifically because this kind of speaks to both of these points, one about home and then the one about the gods must be crazy point that I'm making. So this is around page 186 in this translation where Calypso has been visited by Hermes. Athena sends Hermes to say, okay, Calypso, you gotta let go of Odysseus.
And she's not happy about that, calls the gods cruel and jealous. But by the time we get to page 186 she's aligned herself with that mandate and even describes feeling pity, which is kind of odd, right? Because in the before Hermes visit, he's really just a mortal plaything. She's a cat playing with her toy. And there's no indication of any possibility of feeling. And then there's this divine intervention, and suddenly she's capable of pity. And then she asks him a question about home. So she says, this is at the bottom of 1:86. Odysseus, son of Laertes, blessed by Zeus.
Your plans are always changing. Do you really want to go back to that home you love so much? Well, then, goodbye. But if you understood how glutted you will be with suffering before you reach your home, you would stay here with me and be immortal. Though you might still wish to see that wife you always pined for. And anyway, I know my body is better than hers is. I'm taller too. Mortals can never rival the immortals in beauty. And he says, well, yeah, you're right, your body is better than her. But I still want to go back home. And then after he says that, then they have sex.
13:59 Erin: I know. Just for old time's sake.
14:01 Wes: Yeah, it's like, okay, let's finish up here. I still do want to go home. So I think the alternative, as it's presented here, is between the perfect specimen, the woman who really is not just metaphorically a goddess, but really is a goddess and has the perfect body. And what about her soul? Well, it's unclear, right? I was thinking of her as someone who didn't have much of a conscience and then suddenly did. But in this stanza. Am I using the word stanza? Right? I think you would.
14:32 Erin: Yeah, I think so.
14:33 Wes: Call these stanzas. You know, in this stanza, she's acting like this is his decision, right? And I think we're always meant to wonder if he's really being buffeted by fate or if he's just trying to stay away or find excuses to stay away. I mean, he does reckless things, right? He got himself in trouble with Poseidon in a very stupid way, which explains a big part of his problem. But here she talks about his plans always changing. And this is a description that comes up many times in the context of, I forget who tells him. We talked about this a little in the last episode, but the idea that his plans are always flexible, right?
So he can take off with one faction of the Greeks, but then return when things don't work out. I think Nestor was talking about that. Telemachus, your father's plans are always very flexible. And Here it's more about changeability. And so is he torn between the divine and the mortal or the adventurous and the domestic? He's kind of been living a jet setting life, in other words, hanging out with models. And now the question is, do you really want to go home? Is it really that I've been keeping
15:47 Erin: you captive here, the way that I'm understanding? So I do think he's conflicted about his desire to return home, but I think that the thing that's driving him is actually I think a lot about all the time, not just when I'm reading ancient Greek texts about Anne Carson's Eros, the Bittersweet, her essay about Sappho's poetry, and about the concept of Eros, in which she basically says that Sappho sees Eros as being a lack. She defines it as, I think like obstructed or deferred. So basically you can't desire the thing that you already have, right?
It's just basic absence makes the heart grow fonder kind of principle, right? So the thing that you want by definition is always going to be out of reach. And so I think that is psychologically at work here, right? In Odysseus desire to return home. And that's a powerful desire. I think because he lacks home and because he lacks Penelope, he's motivated certainly very strongly by a desire to return to her. In a way they kind of have. You know, last time I talked a little bit about the fact that she kind of has an interesting situation with the suitors, but in a way, you know, Odysseus and Penelope kind of have a perfect marriage only while he's away, because then they can really desire each other, right?
By a sort of like Sapphic standard, this moment with Calypso and this pity that you're calling attention to, I wonder if it's not just the result of divine intervention, but now the realization that she knows that she'll lose him is invoking an emotional response also because of this glimmering of Eros that comes into play here. So like, you know, much attention is paid to the fact that Odysseus is always like crying on the beach and saying, you know, I want my wife, or, you know, whatever he's doing. And then he goes back in and sleeps with Calypso and then goes back outside and cries on the beach because he's.
But, you know, maybe, maybe Calypso too is getting a little bored of him and, you know, a little bored with this situation, right? And maybe she finds it annoying that she's like, I'm great. I have a great body. You know, we're having a great time. And all he does is go outside and cry. And so perhaps that complacency, shall we say, has been punctured by Hermes. And that is what is allowing the pity and the other emotions to come in now that, you know, now that she's going to lose him, he seems more complete and attractive to her in some way. Is that a stretch?
I don't know.
18:09 Wes: Yeah, No, I think that's good. And I think that you're bringing up something which I hadn't even thought of, which is, why is Calypso even interested in him? Or Athena, for that matter? I mean, we get some evidence, you know, again, as Emily Wilson points out, we get some evidence that Athena identifies with Odysseus, in a sense, because of his intelligence. A combination of intelligence and a warlike nature, let's say, and resourcefulness and all the rest of it. But it is odd, right, that this particular mortal man is getting so much attention, negative and positive.
What is it about him? So most people, they got stuck in Troy for 10 years, and then everyone either got home or they died or they didn't. And the. The one person who got home and died was the foil to the story. That's Agamemnon, right? Comes up repeatedly, as we mentioned. Why Odysseus, Is it ever really sufficiently explained why he would be the one to get. To get all of this attention in the Iliad? He seems. He's more like the consigliere, right? There's never really any question of him getting home because it's fated and it's even. It's so much fated that, you know, maybe from his standpoint, but from the standpoint of the gods, right?
He's repeatedly told by Tiresias, and then by Circe again, she sends him to Tiresias to get advice on how to get home, and then repeats the same advice to him when he gets back from Hades, which is that so, for instance, don't eat the cattle of the sun God, or what not, or you'll never get home. You might not get home. But even if you do get home, it's gonna be delayed. It's gonna be a flight delay. Of course, it undermines the suspense just that we know the story, but even within the internal logic of the story, there's not a plot point or there's not a question about, oh, does this character actually.
Are they gonna make it? We know the whole trajectory from the very beginning. We're made to concentrate on this idea that it's gonna take him a long time to get home. And when he does get home, it's gonna be without honor, it's gonna be without all the spoils of war. And he's gonna have to deal with a nasty domestic situation and he's going to have to deal with the anxiety that he might become another Agamemnon. Right. That he might actually be repeating that story. Which is why he has to disguise himself and feel things out, see if Penelope is actually true to him.
20:49 Erin: Right. You know, what you point out about the fact that we already know this story from the beginning. That's another thing I wanted to really highlight, I suppose, in these books when we get the whole story of his travels told through his perspective. It really struck me this time that the nature of the poem is such that it calls attention to. Yes. How obsessed everyone is with him. I suppose I can only justify this by imagining him looking like Brad Pitt or something. And then, you know, somebody where it's like, oh, okay, I understand why everyone's obsessed with you.
But also just with how much he loves his own story and how much he tells his own story over and over again and how much attention is paid to the act of storytelling. And so there's a little bit of mise en abyme or something like that happening here where part of the codification of Odysseus legacy seems to be the character himself burnishing his own legacy over the course of the story. I'm just wondering what you think about the function of this. I mean, obviously it points to Homer as the poietes. Right. As the maker himself. The similarities maybe between that and the kind of maker that Odysseus is, or just that's something we could talk about.
But also to the fact that like 99 times out of 100, it's not going to be. Or far more than that. Right. It's not going to be Homer that's actually telling the story. It's calling attention to the particular bard or bards who are reciting the story. And so there's something very, you know, meta about already embedded in one of the oldest stories in the Western tradition. I don't know what we could say about that or what that reveals about Odysseus.
22:29 Wes: He is a poet. He is of course, a stand in for the poet. We see that just in the fact that all these classic adventures that, you know, that we associate with the Odyssey, he's the one who tells those stories and he tells them in the Context of, you know, he's at the Phaeacians and they're saying goodbye. You kind of think he's about to get on the boat and leave at this point. Right. But he finds a chance to give a very long account of all his adventures up to that point. And it starts with Demodocus, poet, telling some of the story, I think, about Troy.
And Odysseus sends him, has a slave boy give him some meat. Sends him, you know, give that guy a piece of meat on me. He's a great poet. And it says something like, poets are honored above all those who live on earth. This is not the first time someone has praised poets or defended poets. Right. Telemachus is the first one to do that when his mom is like, shut up. Don't talk about. To their bard. Don't talk about Troy. That's upsetting to me. It's not the poet's fault.
23:32 Erin: Yeah. You have no right to be triggered. Yeah, yeah.
23:35 Wes: This is reality, Mom. It's just, it's. He doesn't make. He's not making it up. So then Odysseus praises Demodocus for saying, by the way, this is around 236 or 5, praises him for saying what it is the Greeks achieved at Troy and how much they suffered. Suffering is always a very important part of. Of this whole story. And then says, but why don't you tell me about the wooden horse that Odysseus dragged inside Troy? And at this point, they don't know he's Odysseus. They've gone through the whole thing without even asking his name, because that's the custom of hospitality, is you don't ask them what they do, and you don't even ask their name. You just wind them, dine them. They have some dancers and some sports contests. And then maybe at the very end, when he's about to get on the boat, you say, okay, what's your name?
24:26 Erin: But anyway, they have gone through his wallet, though, but they couldn't find anything.
24:30 Wes: Right, right, exactly. And then Demodocus complies with that request by Odysseus and sings about that. And then Odysseus cries. And Homer compares this to the crying of a woman who's lost a husband and says she shrieks. And in the same desperate way, Odysseus was crying, which is really. We do, like I said last time, we see a lot of crying in this.
24:55 Erin: Yep.
24:56 Wes: But really, that's really laying it on thick. This is not just a few dignified tears. This is like, you Know, falling on the ground and beating it with your fist. It's a very undignified kind of picture. But strangely enough, only Alcinous is the only one who actually notices that. So Alcinous stops Demodocus notes the grieving of the guest Odysseus, and then says, okay, well, why don't you tell us your story now? Because this is really. It's really interesting that you're so worked up by this. So, you know, we gotta ask. And you wonder here. This seems like Odysseus protests a little too much, right?
He's saying, sing about the horse. And then that becomes an opportunity for him to cry profusely until, in other words, it looks a little bit like he's inducing them to ask who he is so he can start boasting, which is something he does repeatedly in the poem. So he gladly, as book nine begins, he gladly begins to do that. He takes on the position of the bard and I guess perhaps the poet. And so let's just look at. I want to look at how that begins because it's really interesting, right? This is all in line with the idea that he's a liar. The idea that he's a deceiver, a dissembler, right?
Which is the classic critique of the artist, of the poet, of the one who's engaged in mimesis. Not reality, but a semblance of reality. And this, the idea that he's a liar then crops up at the very beginning. So book nine, the very beginning of Odysseus account, Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies, answered, okay, I want to bracket this because at the very end of this, in all these adventures, he'll talk about his lying. And then at the very end of it, Alcinous will say, I can tell you're not a liar. The end of all of this. And this is in book 11.
Alcinous says, I know you're not a cheat or a liar because your story has both grace and wisdom. You sounded like a skillful poet. So you're a poet, but you're not a liar. Even though he doesn't just talk about lying, he boasts about it. He says, I'm like the greatest liar in the world.
27:07 Erin: It's like that classic piece of relationship advice where someone's like, when a person tells you who they are, believe them. He's like, I'm a liar. I'm a liar. Like, oh, no, you're not. It's great.
27:19 Wes: Anyway, back at book nine, oh, Lord of Lies, this is on page 240. And then on 241. I am Odysseus, known for many clever tricks and lies. My fame extends to heaven. So he's no longer crying like someone who's in mourning, who's lost their spouse. He is very excited and ready to boast. And that's what we get for the next few books.
27:41 Erin: You're calling attention to how scary that is that he was crying so intensely in a way that suggests pay attention to me is kind of sociopathic. I don't know.
27:52 Wes: Well, yeah, he might be beyond that category, or it could just be why the gods like him so much. But this speaks to the brains versus brawn thing. It's like he can't decide whether he is a man of action or a man of words. Right. And he manages in this weird way to combine both. He drives the action through his skill with words and deception, but also charm, various other uses of words. So it is the poet has become an actor within the story. The other thing I wanted to say about this next, you know, the section on his adventures is just that I wonder how much of it we are supposed to believe.
I think we're supposed to believe it because I think it's referenced outside of the frame as of his own narrative enough, I think I haven't put it all together. But on the other hand, you know, we are now getting Odysseus own varnished rendition of all of this and prefaced by him being the Lord of Lies. And so, yeah, we have to wonder what he's doing. And then again, the subject of home comes up a lot and at the very beginning of the account and then throughout it, and that's an important connection as well, because we wonder about whether he wants to get home, why he wants to get home.
And he's directly asked about that again, you know, by Calypso, by others, and what it means to him to get home.
29:20 Erin: Yeah. In relation to what you said about this, you know, is he a man of action or a man of words? I think no episode in this story illustrates that better maybe than the episode of the Cyclops.
29:32 Wes: Yeah.
29:33 Erin: You know, it also occurs to me that there's very little action in that story until the very end, when words and action are combined intensely. But there's a lot of, just like sitting in the cave, you know, like there's a lot of inaction or arrested progress. There's a lot of attention paid to sound and say, meaning or lack thereof, from the very beginning of this little episode, even insofar as it extends to like the baaing of the sheep and the bleating of the goats. Right. There's several references to the noises that they make and those noises are obviously not ordered into speech, shall we say. And then Odysseus will kind of turn that around or do the inverse of that if you will.
30:19 Wes: Yeah, I think these are good points. And it's an episode. I think it's natural to think of this first. Right. Because I think it's the longest of all of them by far. Correct me if I'm wrong about that, but we get a lot of very brief little page by page adventures. Even the big things, right. The sirens just go by. And it's a very brief account. It's a very brief account of the Scylla. How do you pronounce it? Silla. And what's the other one? Charybdis.
30:47 Erin: The lotuses go by in a flash. Yeah, Crazy.
30:51 Wes: It's like a sentence or two. And that always surprises me when I, you know, I've only read this a few times over many decades, so I forget. And yeah, I'm always surprised by that. But this is the big, this is the one that's told in great detail down to the baaing of the sheep as you mentioned. And it begins with Odysseus characterization of this society. This is something Emily Wilson makes something of where it's a place with no agriculture, it's a place with no laws, it's a place with no. I have this wrong in my notes. So what's the third thing that it doesn't have?
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36:35 Erin: They hold no councils, have no common laws, but live in caves on lonely mountaintops, and each makes laws for his own wife and children without concern for what the others think. So they're libertarians, they hold no council. So is it. I can't remember the two things that you did mention. Sorry. The idea of a lack of community, perhaps.
36:55 Wes: No agriculture, no laws. Ships, which in my note was shops, which I'm like, he can't be criticizing them for not having shops. They don't have any ships. And they could have turned this place into a fertile colony if only they had boats. There is richness underground. So the idea. Of course, yeah, they're savages. And. And, you know, when he's in the cave with Polyphemus, he's not very nice and he demands gifts. Right. He gets to the point where he's gonna, in a very arrogant way, demand that the Polyphemus observe the customs of hospitality. And in a way, he's there to find out if he'll do that. Right. When he goes to explore the island, his men just want to take the flock of sheep and whatever else is there, steal it. And. And he's like, no, I want to find out if this guy is going to give me gifts.
37:49 Erin: Right.
37:50 Wes: Presumably as a test of whether or not they're really civilized. There's almost an element of perversity or prurience in Odysseus's fascination with the primitiveness of this place and the desire to comprehend that, even if it means risking his own life and the lives of his men.
38:11 Erin: Yeah, I see so much contradiction in this episode. And just as an opening gambit, too, I Just wanted to point out that I. Like when you said earlier that everyone is just waiting for O. And I was thinking about the O in Odysseus when I was. This is such a shower principle thing to say, but I was in the shower this morning and I was just thinking like, oh, the O in Odysseus is like, he's the cyclops. And I was thinking about the cyclops as being, you know, a mirror or externalization or something or, you know, whatever, like a funhouse mirror maybe of Odysseus himself, the great man Odysseus among his little peons and then the cyclops among the sheep and the goats.
It's a sort of like, you know, hyperbole, externalized. And just what you said now, too, about the richness underground, then, you know, Odysseus himself will end up inside the cave. There's a lot of, like, I don't know what you want to call it, sort of thematic rhyming going on here. So I'm wondering what the primitiveness of Polyphemus and what his customs or lack thereof reveals about Odysseus, then, you know, if I can like extend that analogousness to all parts of Polyphemus, which maybe doesn't hold up, but maybe maybe just like his attraction to this or his desire to test it indicates this mirroring.
39:28 Wes: Yeah, I think that's good. I mean, I think we should contrast his approach here to the Phaeacians, right, where he's very careful, he's very reticent. Athena cloaks him in a mist. The daughter is very careful as well. I'm going to go ahead and you come by yourself. I don't want anyone to talk. He goes to Arete and touches her knees and supplicates and all that. He's willing to really debase himself when necessary.
39:56 Erin: Right.
39:57 Wes: He's willing to be very careful and not to be arrogant in the way he is here. So something about he gets into trouble here precisely because he's induced by the nature of the island and its people and it's, you know, the fact that they're quote, unquote, primitive or savages. Well, it's not. That's not the way he puts it, but that's the implication, you know, if they are wild, lawless aggressors or the type to welcome strangers and fear the gods. The whole question of whether, again, not to beat a dead horse, but the whole question of what it means to be civilized is always framed in terms of this question of hospitality.
And when he Gets in there and he says, grant me a gift, as is the norm of hosts and guests. So he's basically saying, look, you savage, or you bumpkin, prove to me whether or not you're civilized. And Polyphemus says, you order me to fear the gods. My people think nothing of that. Zeus with his big scepter, nor any God. Our strength is more than theirs. I do the bidding of my own heart. And at that point, I had the same thought that I think you're describing, where I thought, that's a very interesting commonality. It seems like with Odysseus, there's something about Odysseus that is very right.
His plans are flexible, his plans are changeable. Is it whim or is he being crafty, or is it just he's whimsical? But anyway, I think your point about. Is Odysseus reacting this way because he sees some of himself in them? I think that's probably spot on. You know what we see in Polyphemus, he's just casually killing people, braining two men, ripping them up, eating them. That kind of appetitiveness, that willingness to plunder and despoil. Right. That's the way his whole story begins, with him sacking the Kikones. How do you pronounce it?
41:47 Erin: Yeah, I was wondering about that too. Let's call them the Kikones.
41:50 Wes: Kikones. It's the type of thing I look up and then I forget.
41:54 Erin: But yeah, same.
41:55 Wes: I found it funny that Emily Wilson remarked on this because it was something that when he began this story, I put like, WTF in the margin, because it's just very casually. Yeah. We got pushed off course, ended up near this town, and we sacked them and killed all the men and took all their riches and wives. I don't know what happened there. Why the wives are not on the boat, so I don't know what happens after that, but. And then they get drunk. His men get really, really drunk and start just slaughtering sheep and cattle on the beach until the Kikones, their neighbors, come to the rescue.
And he loses six men from each ship before they escape. So this is like the worst atrocity from a Vietnam. You know, I'm thinking of like a Vietnam movie where it's. People are totally out of control. But that's not the way that Odysseus is describing this. Right. It's completely without any conscience. I looked them up and I found out that they were actually an enemy of the Greeks during the Trojan War, which explains a little bit of it. So they're not just random people, they're considered enemies. But again, just in the offhand way that he would describe an episode like that, I think you have to wonder about what it is and isn't that's civilized.
I mean, you know, it's great that they're very nice to each other and they give all each other gifts and feasts on polished wood tables and the slave girls rub them down and all that stuff when they arrive. But it's one thing to be treated nicely when you arrive at someone's house, it's another thing when they're arriving at your home and either casually slaughtering you or demanding that you observe their customs.
43:32 Erin: I want to go in so many different directions with this, but just to return to those couple of quotes that we looked at right before, the part that we quoted earlier, they hold no councils, have no common laws. There's three or four lines preceding that are they put their trust in gods and do not plant their food from seed, nor plow. And yet the barley grain and clustering wine grapes all flourish there, increased by rain from Zeus. So they don't actually have agriculture, as we already said. But this is described as a trusting that the gods will kind of provide for them.
44:03 Wes: They're on divine welfare and Odysseus does not like them.
44:08 Erin: Yes, and there's something to that. But I think it's also. Okay. A positive way of viewing this maybe, right. Is it's a form of like a receptivity. I'm thinking about. Maybe you're going to think this is crazy, maybe not. I'm thinking about how Polyphemus puts me in mind of Alien for some reason, the movie Alien.
44:28 Wes: Because I'm thinking, yeah, well, yeah, yeah, I see that.
44:31 Erin: Yeah. He has so many. Well, I don't want to get ahead of myself here. But so, so he puts his trust in the gods and allows things to grow just, just naturally. And, and he's sort of rewarded for this trust by increased rain from Zeus or. Sorry, by. By. By, you know, the increase of his crop, by the. By the flourishing of his crops because of Zeus's rain. So when Odysseus asks if they are wild, lawless aggressors or the type to welcome strangers and fear the. You know, there are three things happening there. Are they wild, lawless aggressors or. And then Odysseus twins together. Are they the type to welcome strangers and fear the gods? Well, actually, Polyphemus will kind of separate that latter half into. Into two parts. He does not welcome strangers, but he does fear the gods. Right. He, he, he, we're told he puts his trust in the gods, but he does not welcome strangers.
45:26 Wes: Well, he says he's not afraid of Zeus though.
45:29 Erin: He's.
45:29 Wes: That's right, he is Poseidon, you know, he is under the protection of Poseidon, so.
45:34 Erin: Right.
45:34 Wes: I think you're right to point this out. You know, even though he's boasting that he's not scared of Zeus and that it almost sounds like your gods are not my gods, but that's entirely untrue. Right, we know that. Yeah. Odysseus whole problem is that this guy is a made man in, you know, Poseidon's gang, cannot mess with him.
45:54 Erin: What each of these episodes I think is revealing to me during this reading is each one is playing with an interesting sort of twist on this masculine or feminine principle to, you know, to either both together to a greater or lesser degree, or one versus the other. Maybe part of this is highlighted for me because of what you mentioned about Odysseus crying like a woman, like a widowed woman. But I am thinking of Polyphemus as a kind of mother and father here. Right. You would think by looking at him, there's something quite phallic about a Cyclops, obviously.
And obviously he is an aggressor, obviously. He is huge and demonstrates a lot of masculine kind of principle. But what also occurs to me is this receptivity inherent in the culture, as I'm saying, with this lack of agriculture, but this sort of willingness to let things come to them by that same token, not going out in boats and being aggressive in that way, not exerting one's will in the world, but allowing things to come to you. The idea of the, you know, the richness underground and the fact that Polyphemus lives in a cave.
46:59 Wes: Yeah, they're cavemen. I mean, some of this is about their relation to some kind of dim memory of the prehistoric.
47:06 Erin: Sure. I see him as kind of a mother to the goats and the, and the sheep that he cares for. Right. There's something, almost a suggestion that Polyphemus is like a self sustaining entity that he would reproduce asexually or something like that. Right. Because there's a little bit more balance in him, I wonder, than there is in Odysseus. And what Odysseus question points out to me too, are they wild, lawless aggressors or the type to welcome strangers and fear the gods? Odysseus too is both a wild, lawless aggressor at times and one who welcomes strangers and fears the gods. Right, Right. I don't know if we can argue that Polyphemus is better, whatever integrated than Odysseus is, or if he's just again like the funhouse mirror or the sort of maximalization and externalization of Odysseus own conflict.
47:58 Wes: I think what you're pointing to is that there might be an element of envy here. Or maybe that's not your point, but I'm sure.
48:04 Erin: No, I think that's right.
48:05 Wes: But this is what you're making me think. Yeah, because he civilization is a double edged sword and you could look on the primitive as something horrifying in its simplicity and lack of proper customs, but you might also envy that simplicity and straightforwardness. Odysseus needs ships. Ships are going to disappoint him an awful lot in this story. He needs his craftiness, he needs his deception. All of those things are wonderful talents in a way and as warlike abilities, but they're also a burden and lead to a lot of complications and, and tragedy.
So civilization comes with a lot of problems. So you could take a sort of noble savage line on the Cyclopes. Is that how we're pronouncing it? And then you could say there's the possibility that Odysseus actually envies that. And so that's why he in a way wants to destroy it. And you know, when he goes out to the cave, when he has a chance to with his men to escape and steal and, and escape, he's sticking around. He wants this conflict.
49:11 Erin: Odysseus is O at the beginning of his name. Hold on, let me look this up. Okay, so Polytropos, as we talked about, is his epithet. I was just wondering about Polyphemus. So it looks like it means many voiced. This is according to Wikipedia, so take that for what it's worth. But his name means abounding in songs and legend. Many voiced or very famous. All three of which could apply to Odysseus. Right?
49:37 Wes: Again, that's another. If there's an element of the legendary. Right. And you don't even, you don't have to know who Polyphemus is to know that. Right. We are in the realm of the fairy tale and the legend and that's inherently threatening to someone like Odysseus. Odysseus is, you know, he's the story, he's the protagonist, he's the hero. And if he finds himself in a story, land in something that's very obviously a the realm of fairy tales with creatures and monsters and all that, then he's no longer the main attraction. I don't know. Am I making sense here?
50:11 Erin: Sure, yeah.
50:13 Wes: So that in and of itself he's trying to prove his right. The way this ends, he has to tell Polyphemus his name and say, hey, I'm really, really famous. Completely unnecessary. And this is after having the discipline to trick him, right, by telling Polyphemus that his name is no man.
50:31 Erin: Right. Which kept autocorrecting to Norman for me, which I really loved.
50:37 Wes: Have you ever heard of the no man conquest, Polyphemus? And it's kind of a dumb thing where the trick is that it's pretty contrived when Polyphemus is calling for help and the other Cyclopes come and he says, no man is killing me by tricks, not force. So they leave. Oh, you're crazy. You're obviously alone. I don't know what your problem is. I think a lot, right. I'm sure there's a lot made in the literature. The significance of Odysseus in that moment, attributing to himself a non identity. I am no one. But it's just as significant that he will not be able to resist yelling from the boat, hey, you know, my name is Odysseus.
Here's my address if you ever want to come find me, you know, Right. Which is what Polyphemus immediately does by praying to Poseidon. So. So a lot of the story to follow, a lot of what is delaying Odysseus from getting home is completely self inflicted because he needs to be talking about how famous he is at all times. Right. He's doing that with the Phaeacians he engineered. You know, he set things up so he could do that and he even needed to do it while. It's like being in a car chase, right, In a movie and you know, having a megaphone and yelling over your shoulder about your exploits as you're running away.
51:59 Erin: Well, on that subject, not the, not the car chase, but the self thwarting element. I see a kind of logic in the subsequent episodes, like in the movement that happens from one episode to the next from Cyclops on. But I'm wondering if we can say that there's anything like a learning experience, you know, or anything like internal progress that happens for Odysseus. I think that's the case when he goes to Hades, but prior to that I'm not sure. So his desire for fame and attention and recognition seems to kind of catch up to him in the Aeolian winds story. Right. Like he goes to this island of Aeolus, which is like an extremely self sufficient land. To the extent that he's conveniently. That this king has conveniently had 12 children that are six boys and six girls who could all marry each other, which is. The birth defects that might result from this are another story.
52:57 Wes: The problem with family planning is ensuring that you balance the female male in the right way so they can marry each other.
53:06 Erin: Yeah, God forbid you have an uneven number.
53:08 Wes: I actually had that thought when I was a kid because I had a sister who was near my age. I had this idea that little kids were born in male female pairs and then would were destined to get married when I was very young. There's a bit of like in that idea. It's kind of evocative of childhood, naive childhood theories of sexuality. Right.
53:29 Erin: So Aeolus gives Odysseus the bag of winds. And then because of the fact that Odysseus keeps going and getting all of these gifts from people, it incites his men's jealousy, right? So because he has this compulsive need to continually accrue attention, and via this attention some kind of wealth or recognition that comes from being a guest, it's incurring the resentment of his men and then they're blown back to Aeolus Island. But then Aeolus has done some work on himself and realizes that he can't fool me once. Shame on you. But anyway, that he's not going to
54:08 Wes: extend himself twice his men for it to Aeolus. And Aeolus is like, no, get out, nasty creature. You're hated by the gods.
54:15 Erin: Right.
54:15 Wes: Which is not. And it's true in a way, but not true. You know, Poseidon hates him, but Athena is pretty fond of him. But this whole idea of who's to blame, you know, that's the way the whole thing starts with that he couldn't save his men and yet they were the ones, they were the foolish ones who caused all the problems.
54:31 Erin: Yes.
54:31 Wes: So who's to blame here? Was he supposed to keep them in control? Right. In a way they're representative of the impulses. As a man of intelligence like Odysseus supposed to be able to keep these more impulsive people in line, or is he in a sense blameless?
54:50 Erin: Yeah, he's not a great manager.
54:52 Wes: And then they end up with the Laestrygonians. And at that point it's like, well, didn't we already have the giant story. We need a second one with giants.
54:59 Erin: Yeah. But now there's a giant girl who starts the whole thing. And this is where I'm like, you know, this is interesting is the way Wilson puts it.
55:07 Wes: When they meet the.
55:08 Erin: Right. Yeah. And then the mountain high woman,
55:14 Wes: the baby is 7ft tall. And they don't seem to realize that they're among giants until they get all the way into town.
55:23 Erin: But with the Laestrygonians, there's also this. I don't know that I could say that there's a clear logic here, or at least I haven't sat down and charted out some sort of grand unifying theory of all of this. But we have the Cyclops, as you said, who's a giant, and then we have the Laestrygonians, who are giants again. In the meantime, we have this sort of self sustained kingdom with these clear boundaries and with this self sustaining line of descent through the family. And there's something of that in Polyphemus people as well, where they're not going outside of their own bounds, they're keeping to themselves.
And then with the Laestrygonians, there's something of that as well. It sort of marries the previous two maybe. Right. So the idea of cannibalism is sort of reflecting whatever is going on with the six boys and six girls in Aeolus's family. It's like Polyphemus plus Aeolus equals the Laestrygonians, perhaps in a super simplistic way. But I wonder what that just again, like, what that reveals about Odysseus, if this represents some kind of progress. Obviously it doesn't. Right. Because these are his. He's being waylaid repeatedly. But if it represents some kind of interior progress on his part, is the point that he makes ultimately no interior progress because he was already, you know, he is what he is and he's telling the story.
So he's already like, we're already getting the Odysseus that is the result of these experiences anyway, overlaid over these earlier stories. So the extent to which, as you said, we can even trust what he's telling or whether or not he's putting a spin on everything, you know, means that at the very least the version, the earlier version of him that we're getting through these stories might be heavily influenced by the way present day Odysseus wants to spin it. There are several versions of him and you know, in fact, we might even say that he's like.
By repeatedly telling these stories he's whatever. He's self cannibalizing. Right.
57:15 Wes: They're not flattering to. I mean, in some ways they are. From our perspective, it doesn't seem like such a flattering.
57:21 Erin: You know, perhaps I'm asking the wrong question. You know, perhaps what's interesting about these episodes is not about the progress he's making, but about what the episodes reveal about Odysseus or how they reflect him. And maybe the Laestrygonians are again, like. I mean, obviously each one is telling something interesting or several interesting things about Odysseus storytelling and what he's choosing to highlight or not highlight. But just as I was talking, it occurred to me that the Laestrygonian's cannibalism reflects something about storytelling, like the action of storytelling and the action of having to repeatedly tell his story and chew on his past experiences or whatever that Odysseus repeatedly engages in.
58:01 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. As you were talking about this, I was thinking about the very beginning of the poem. Tell me about a complicated man and where he went and who he meant. And in other translations, this makes it sound like more literal translations. It's. You get the sense that what this is about is someone who is going to come into contact with all different types of societies with different types of mores and maybe even religious outlooks and ways of doing things and potentially technologies and. Right. So it's like being an explorer, an adventurer, and what we get is again, the fairy tale version.
I mean, we do get. We get some things that seem more realistic. Right. Like the Phaeacians, but of course, they turn out to have like these Tesla boats that just. Just read your mind and drive themselves. Right. They're not a real society. None of this is real. This is not an anthropological expedition or an exploratory expedition. Odysseus is traversing the realm of fantasy. Yeah. I don't think we see a character arc for Odysseus until he comes home. Right. In which he has to cope with what a homecoming is and what it means reuniting with a woman that he hasn't seen in 20 years and a son that he essentially abandoned and all of that stuff.
So. And he's gotta be a different. You know, he's going to, as we will see, put on the Athena is gonna help him, but put on the costume of a beggar and be an entirely different person, but also, in a way, humble himself before he takes horrific revenge until there's the bloodbath at the end. All right, so Maybe there is no character arc, but we'll see. We'll see if there's some arc there. But yeah, in these particular episodes, it's more episodic than sure.
59:55 Erin: But you don't think there's anything that happens slightly, like, even on the level of what we were talking about with the pity that Calypso. Right. That Calypso suddenly feels for Odysseus? Something like that. Like, I want to say that when he goes down to Hades, there's some. Something is awakened. Not that we see a sort of progress that develops from that. Right. But that we might, if only see an additional facet to the sides of Odysseus that we were already familiar with, that maybe an additional facet or something might open up in one of those episodes. I don't know.
1:00:27 Wes: Well, let's go to Hades. Well, first, do we want to say anything about Circe first?
1:00:32 Erin: Yeah, yeah, just about. Again, you know, I do agree it's episodic, but insofar as Circe is like. Because she's a witch, you know, we have these giants. There's something giant about Circe, I suppose, on the inside. Almost like in Hindu stories in which Krishna opens his mouth and the whole universe is inside. She's something like that. Where he goes from the Laestrygonians to Circe, who can make anything happen, or who is giant in her own witchy way. Otherwise I don't have anything to say about that. And then she makes making the men into pigs also kind of rhymes or chimes, whatever, with a parallel maybe between Polyphemus and his sheep, goats, and now Odysseus.
Men are literally pigs, or some of them are anyway. Eurylochus is an interesting character, which we probably won't have time to go into, but his incredulity at every single thing that Odysseus does is really, really classic Eurylochus, I guess.
1:01:29 Wes: Yeah. I mean, he's the unlucky guy who sent with 22 others, I think. Right. To go explore the house with the smoke coming from it.
1:01:39 Erin: And the only guy with a brain
1:01:40 Wes: had enough of bad experiences that why do it?
1:01:44 Erin: Yeah. And he's the only guy with a brain, like, poor guy. And then in the end, he's punished for being the only one who.
1:01:50 Wes: Well, he does advocate for eating the cattle. Right. He's the principal.
1:01:56 Erin: He's been right every time until the last time when it really counts, you know, just so unlike.
1:02:02 Wes: Then they get to the house and they meet all these drugged out wolves and lions that's already a bad sign. The most interesting thing about the episode. And of course, Hermes meets Odysseus, gives him an antidote so that he's not going to get turned into a pig as well. And there's a whole plan set where he's got to grab her after she tries to use her wand on him and they've got to have sex and he's got to make her swear an oath and all this stuff so they can make things right. And then. But I think the most interesting thing is that she'll say when he tricks her like that and beats her at her own game, I guess she'll say, you're different.
Basically says, you're different. You must be Odysseus who can adapt to anything. And later on she'll say, you always find solutions, Odysseus. And then they end up at her house for a year, feasting every day, which is quite something, which speaks to the ambivalence about actually going home.
1:03:02 Erin: What a fantasy this is. Like, they sleep together. And then Circe's like, you're not like the other girls, are you? You're different.
1:03:12 Wes: So, yeah. And really he's just getting help from the gods.
1:03:14 Erin: But anyway, he keeps getting so many God makeovers that by the end it's like, what is he? Well, I guess they're balanced out by the makeunders, but.
1:03:24 Wes: So then the next step is this weird thing where he has to go. It's his men who say, it's time to think of your own country after a year of feasting. And Odysseus says, my warrior soul. Agreed. Interesting way to put it. And then Circe says, yeah, sure, you can go, but you just have to go to Hades and ask Tiresias for advice on how to get home. Which is weird, because when he gets back to her, she gives him exactly the same advice, as I pointed out before. But, yeah, let's talk a little bit about Hades. Why don't we do that? And then after that, we'll finish up in Postscript about the rest of the adventures.
1:04:03 Erin: You know, another interesting thing about the Circe episode is we get this anecdote with Elpenor, who we're told is not very brave in war nor very smart, which is okay.
1:04:19 Wes: They run to the litter, right?
1:04:21 Erin: And this will be borne out in practice, I suppose. He was lying high up in the home of Circe, apart from his companions, seeking coolness. Since he was drunk, he heard the noise and bustle. This is downstairs. The movements of his friends and jumped up quickly forgetting to climb down the lofty ladder. He fell down crashing headlong from the roof and broke his neck right at the spine. His spirit went down to Hades. So I love this, this little episode because, you know, perhaps because in death, Elpenor finally gets to be first in something which is he's the first one to go down to Hades. He gets there before everybody else. But it's such an odd moment with which to end the Circe episode before they then go down to Hades both
1:05:02 Wes: because I mean, it does just gratuitously set up them. Odysseus getting to see Elpenor in Hades.
1:05:09 Erin: Right, right. Perhaps for dramatic effect. He could have died earlier and then when we were reunited, it would be more surprising. No, but in the way that it points towards Hades immediately. It's.
1:05:23 Wes: You can go the easy way or the hard way.
1:05:26 Erin: Right, right. That Elpenor, you know, I don't know, like smooths the path for them or something. I mean, it does turn out to be relatively easy for them to get to Hades, all things considered. That. Yeah, that he breaks the ice or he breaks the surface tension on the underworld and then they can kind of drop in after him. I don't know. But anyway, I find it Curious moment.
1:05:45 Wes: Well, yeah, it highlights the fact that it's. When most of us go to Hades, it's because of an accident or. No, it's because for circumstances beyond our control, aging or war or accident. Right. So we don't. Stupidity, being drunk, it's not a decision, it's not a journey, it's not an intention. Maybe sometimes it's a suicidal intention, but you know what I mean, if there's an afterlife of some sort. So the idea of. I think it is, now that you point this out, it is an interesting contrast between ordinary death and this type of journey to the underworld that Odysseus is about to take to the world of the dying.
1:06:29 Erin: Well, and it's also. They go to the underworld and they see many men who died glorious deaths, you know, this episode, because it's kind of embarrassing. It's like, you know, an embarrassing way to die is a sort of inglorious death. Though he does, you know, as I say, precede them to Hades. So he comes first in something. But another thing that occurs to me, the fact that he's seeking coolness because he's drunk is another kind of beautiful little detail because then he'll end up being cold as a dead body. Right. So there's something, I don't know how to put it, but there's something predictive or self fulfilling or predetermined, maybe even about this accidental. Enjoy.
1:07:16 Wes: The most surprising thing about this is that no one has yet died an accidental death from drunkenness.
1:07:24 Erin: That's true.
1:07:25 Wes: They're doing a lot of drinking and driving, essentially. I mean, you don't just launch the ship, you immediately break the wine out once the ship gets going. All right, so let's do Hades. And then so that we're gonna do book 11 and book 12 and postscript, we talked a little bit about, we've referred quite a bit to book 12 and those adventures, including the Sirens and the Sun God. But yeah, there's some good stuff in Hades to get at.
1:07:53 Erin: Great. All right, thank you, thank you.
1:07:57 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
Home as Identity in “The Odyssey”
Aug 28, 2023
He was famously a man of many ways, whether we interpret these as abilities or norms; designs or deceptions; reasons or identities. Yet despite such resources, he was also famously stuck, making a 10-year odyssey of his attempt to return home from a 10-year war. What keeps the man of master plans from homecoming and domestic bliss? In the first of a three part discussion of Homer’s classic, Wes & Erin try to figure out what Odysseus really wants, and whether the “lord of lies” can master the trick of entrusting his mind to others.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Wes: He was famously a man of many ways, whether we interpret these as abilities or norms, designs or deceptions, ruses or character tropes. Yet despite such resources, he was also famously stuck making a 10 year odyssey of his attempt to return home from a 10 year war. What keeps the man of master plans from homecoming and domestic bliss? In the first of a three part discussion of Homer's classic, we try to figure out what Odysseus really wants and whether the Lord of Lies can master the trick of entrusting his mind to others. This is Wes Alwan, this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
So today we are discussing The Odyssey first 12 books and the first 12 books. And we're doing the Emily Wilson translation. And we've actually discussed this translation on my other podcast, the Partially Examined Life. We had her on to discuss it, which was, which was interesting. And you know, when I started reading this translation, I'm used to Fitzgerald, which is a very. There's a lot of license taken with that translation and I'd even memorize a little bit of that as a kid and then I'd memorize some of the Greek as well. Although looking at the Greek this time, it's like if I get a Loeb out and there's English on one side and there's Greek on the other, I can make some things out, but it's such difficult Greek to try to translate.
You know, when I first encountered her translation, because it's so different and it's different because it's much simpler syntactically than most translations. And I was a little bit weirded out by that in the beginning. But then I found the translation to be so readable that it actually increased is the enjoyment of reading it a lot. It's much easier to read than say a Fitzgerald or many of these other translations. And you see the difference where these other translations are. They're often a little bit archaic, maybe a bit ornate or they're.
Sometimes they're archaic just because they've been translated a long time ago. Sometimes they're archaic because they're trying to match syntactic formality of the Greek or something like that. Which is not to say, by the way, that she isn't herself taking license. She's taking a lot of license here and she's leaving things out. And it's quite a loose translation in some ways, but I think that's okay. She's trying to capture the essence of it. I'm Beginning this way, just because I was curious about what your history with the text is, what translations you've read and why you suggested this translation in particular and what you thought of her translation compared to the others.
2:45 Erin: You know, I had this translation on my reading list for the summer. It was suggested to me, you know, that I might try it out. I had been, I think the Fagles was my first translation. Maybe some combination of Fitzgerald and Fagles, but I really partial to the Fagles, I think, because that ended up being what I read in college. And it just had a big impression on me. I think it was. It maybe opened, you know, one of my freshman year literature courses with a really wonderful professor who, you know, we spent, I think, like, two weeks just. And we barely got through the first, like, hundred lines of book one.
I loved the Fagles. I thought I would try this. I really came around on this at first. I was like, oh, this is so. I found it flat, I think, or like, I could really hear the iambic pentameter. It was like both flat and sing songy. I thought, I think that because of my familiarity with the Fagles or my partiality, I wasn't able to kind of get into the music of it. And so I had actually told a friend, like, oh, I'm reading the Emily Wilson translation, but I really want to switch back to the Fagles. And then, I don't know, something happened, like, around book four, maybe, like, as soon as you get it into the Odysseus stuff.
I think, you know, Telemachus is always a little tiresome. But as soon as I got into it or it just took me.
4:00 Wes: He's such a baby.
4:01 Erin: He is. You know, maybe it just took me a little, you know, a few books to acclimate myself to the translation. But then I really started to love it. And I started to feel that the poetry has a really pristine, kind of stark beauty. And I appreciate the fact that the idiom is more contemporary. And. Yeah, I just. I really loved it. And at a certain point, I mean, you can actually sit and read this, you know, in a couple of days. I mean, only for sheer length, would you not be able to read it, like, in one sitting. Right. But, you know, it's really a page turner in this translation.
4:34 Wes: Yeah. So I had very, very similar experience to you. Everything you just described, and down to the whole book four, you know, and then page turner and all that stuff.
4:43 Erin: Yeah. I was even talking about it with a friend on the phone who was like, oh, I was thinking of Rereading the Odyssey this summer, it was like, don't read the Wilson. I'm not liking it. I had to text her and say, I take it back. You know,
4:55 Wes: I would never say it's the only. You know, I would recommend reading it and then. But I wouldn't recommend this be the only translation you read. Sure, if you want something which is a little bit truer to the Greek.
5:07 Erin: I was having lunch with a friend yesterday, and he wants to read Anna Karenina. He knows that's my favorite novel. So he said, you know, what translation would you recommend? You know, I know nothing about Russian, obviously, so I can't speak to that, but I have read several different translations, you know, and I know what my experience.
5:22 Wes: I hope we agree on this, because I'm very opinionated about this, but go ahead.
5:25 Erin: Oh, okay. I actually surprised myself because I said, the Pevear Volokhonsky translation. And I said, you know, I think that that is better for right now for, like, for someone just getting into it. I said, because I think that if you read something in a more contemporary idiom, you have more of the experience of there's more nakedness about the book or a kind of not nakedness, a kind of. There's less opacity and more clarity where you're having a more direct experience, I think. And I said that the Constance Garnett, you know, that has passages in it that I remember vividly, lines out of.
Out of that Constance Garnett translation, and that was the one that I cut my teeth on. It reminds me of what you're talking about with memorizing the Fitzgerald, you know, So I revered the Constance Garnett translation, but now I find myself in this position of recommending the Pevear Volokhonsky as, like, a gateway for, you know, especially for an older reader, because the Garnett gives you this sense of, like, oh, this is a grand old novel. You know, this is a. Whatever. Shaggy, baggy monster, whatever the expression is. And that can be fun, you know, and it has a certain austerity or grandeur about it.
But I think just recommending it to my friend in terms of, like, what would give him the experience of really coming to Anna Karenina, but just coming to it for the first time and experiencing it almost the way a contemporary would in a contemporary idiom, I think is maybe for me, at this point, worth more, which is why I recommended the Pevear Volokhonsky and why this Emily Wilson translation, maybe it affected my recommendation.
6:57 Wes: Yeah, all right, well, we're going to have to fight about that when we do the Anna Karenina or some other Russian, because I consider Constance Garnett far superior. And I don't like Pevear Volokhonsky. And I'll send you some. We had a big fight about this on PEL, and we were doing the Brothers Karamazov, and because Dylan preferred, you know, Pevear Volokhonsky to Constance Garnett. And then I tried to convince everyone with very. With specific passage comparisons. And then I found. I went out and I found someone who written this very angry polemic in which they crapped all over Pevear and showed how Garnett was better. And then I was very.
7:37 Erin: Because of the Russian.
7:38 Wes: But. Well, both in a way, because Garnett is rhythmically in the way. She's just a better writer than these guys in English. And the way those two do it, you know, one of them, you know, he knows Russian, but he's, you know, his wife is fluent in Russian. He's fluent in English, and, you know, he does a rough translation and then she corrects things based on. Anyway, I just find it. I find it very confusing to read them, but I find it much harder, actually, to read. And some of the passages are not even. They don't even capture the meaning correctly. But I'll send that article. We don't, unfortunately.
8:11 Erin: Sorry, we already had a.
8:15 Wes: But we will. We will have this.
8:16 Erin: Pardon the word. We already had a Herculean task ahead of us covering the Odyssey or just the first 12 books. And now I've gotten us off course.
8:23 Wes: But back to this question of translation. So she is as far as the meaning sometimes, and then just as far as the way, the sound of the language. She's quite different than the original. And not that you can capture the sound of the original exactly, but just the syntactic complexity. So, for instance, in the beginning. Shall we read the stanza by stanza, by the way?
8:45 Erin: Yeah, right. We'll be done sometime in 2030.
8:49 Wes: I'll read a little bit of the first stanza. Tell me about a complicated man, Muse. Tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy and where he went and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe, poor fools. They ate the sun God's cattle and the God kept them from home. Now, goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.
9:18 Erin: Spoiler alert.
9:19 Wes: I'll give you first. Yeah, seriously. So let me give you this old Loeb translation, I forget the name of the translator, but some of it is quite archaic. But it's also much truer to the Greek. So tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, ay, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. I want to read the rest of it. And then the original Greek.
9:50 Erin: Oh, that's actually nice.
9:52 Wes: Yeah, yeah, the original Greek. Andromoianipa musa. Polutropon haus mala polyplankthe epetroyes hieron tole ethron epe epperson polon de anthropon iden astea kaino on engno. That's the comparison just at the level of how things sound and then just getting a little bit into the meaning. So this word complicated, this is like a famous. This could be a discussion for the whole episode, and maybe it will be. But that word translates polytropon, like polytropos, many ways is the way that Fitzgerald translates it. And the man of many devices is the way I had it in the Loeb translation.
And I was just thinking about, well, how would I go about this as a translator? How would I try to capture that one word? Because it has several different connotations. One of them is just about the fact that he knows a lot of different things and that he's resourceful, that he can get himself out of a scrape in a way, like being a Renaissance man or a Jack of all trades. The other thing is his ability to be. To disguise his ability to trick his cunningness, that he's a little bit slick, you know, he's willing to lie. And I couldn't think of actually got the thesaurus out and thought about it.
And the words multifaceted or many sided, I thought might work because, you know, many ways I like what Fitzgerald did there, but it's not idiomatic. Right. In our language. How do you capture it in English in a way that captures the most of the connotations. So Wilson with complicated is interesting, right? Because what do we mean when we say someone is complicated?
11:45 Erin: First of all, polytropon. I'm guessing that's, you know, the way that trope we get from that.
11:51 Wes: The man of many tropes.
11:53 Erin: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I like that. I mean, polytropon is, you know, that's almost been directly imported into our Language. And I like the idea of, like, there's something about talkiness in that, or talking your way around something, you know, using different tropes to express meaning in different ways. I like Many Ways because it also captures the wandering in itself. Complicated. I'm trying to think about. So what? That's Latin. So, like, to fold together. Right. That's off the top of my head. If I'm getting that wrong, then I'm sorry.
12:30 Wes: What does plicated come from?
12:34 Erin: It's plicare. To fold. This is. My goodness. If I have this right. I'm so proud of myself because it's been since junior year of high school that I had Latin. But. Yeah. So folded together, complicated maybe works actually for me.
12:49 Wes: I think you're right. Yeah.
12:51 Erin: You know, so that has what? That has entanglement, etymologically speaking? If that's correct, then it has entanglement. It has a folded togetherness that almost reminds me of the Trojan horse itself. Right. I like anything that emphasizes the craftiness as well, because crafty also kind of has this multivalent sense in which you're sly, but you're also, like, crafty, like, physically handy. And what I like in Odysseus is the fact that these things come together. So anything that emphasizes the various threads of his personality or that captures as many of them together, I think I'm convincing myself that complicated works, even if it is a Latin origin rather than something else.
13:35 Wes: My only beef with it is that the connotation in English often has something to do with someone being conflicted or brooding or something like that. I was actually watching Bottle Rocket last night, if you've seen that movie. And, yeah, it had been a long time for me, and I didn't. I hate most Wes Anderson movies, actually. But I enjoyed this. I enjoyed it a lot when I saw it. I enjoyed it less this time. But there's a point in the movie where the Luke Wilson character, who's recently been in a mental hospital, he's being asked by a pretty young woman about that experience.
And he doesn't lie about it, as you would expect. He just is very honest about it. And she is actually becoming enamored of him because of it. And she looks at him and says, you're complicated, aren't you? And then I thought of this. I thought of this book. So that's my only problem with the word, is that it implies something that Odysseus is definitely not. And I'm not even sure that Homer or the culture of the time would even conceive of a person like this. It seems like quintessentially modern to be complicated in the way that we often mean.
Everything is external in this book. Everything is on the surface in a way. And where there is inwardness, it is because of deception, but it's not self deception. It's not that kind of complication. So he is tricky and deceptive and clever and can put on, you know, many disguises and things like that. But overall he is kind of a simple guy. And, you know, he'll do things like taunt the Cyclops as he's leaving and he can't help himself doing that. So he can be impulsive at times, even. Even after they've got a rock thrown at them and been drawn back into shore.
And then he'll taunt again just because he can't help himself. And he can be overtly brutal, right? Just casually kill a town full of people and take their women as slaves or whatever, rape their women. That is the kind of thing that he can mention in passing as perfectly normal. So he's also a man of action and impulse. I wanted to make that observation here at the beginning, that the conflict between those two types of things, his cleverness, but also his. The fact that he's also strong, warrior type guy. And then the other side of this, he failed to keep his people safe, which is, by the way, not the way it's put in the Greek fail.
Wilson is more obviously giving him blame for this, but in the original it's just that he wasn't able to save them and the blame is all on them poor fools. But he's complicated and clever, but he's also couldn't save his people and he's kind of stuck. He can't. He's very resourceful, but it takes him 10 years to get home.
16:15 Erin: Anyway, what I like about the bottle rocket example that you gave is the fact that I think what it reveals is complicated usually implies a kind of interesting weakness. And as a character without any weakness, you know, it's something I was thinking about quite a bit. It's like, is Odysseus a likable character? Like, part of me was kind of rooting this time around for the suitors in a way that I. That I didn't anticipate doing. I was like, oh, this is. This is cute. It's like, who's the boss? You know, she could just choose Antinous and settle down with him and it's fine for me.
Odysseus came off much less likable than I Remembered. Not that he has an obligation to be likable, but I think that part of that is this quality you're describing of being all surface. And I think that maybe the weakness part of complication is what perhaps gives depth and makes people more likable. And if that is what's. What's lacking in that word, complicated, because he really doesn't have any weakness.
17:11 Wes: There is a lot of crying in this book though. Surprising amount of crying.
17:15 Erin: There's a lot of crying, but it's so as a Mediterranean person, I register the performativity of the crying more intensely than others might. It's like they cry because it's a good thing to do that, you know, keep them juiced up or whatever.
17:30 Wes: Well, it seems very natural to me in a way. It's almost, you know, at one point, I think after a comrade dies, first they have a feast, basically they're sacrificing, quote unquote. But every time they're just having a barbecue, that's what that means. And then they cry. And after they gotten the eating out of the way, then they sit down and cry for their friend and then it's over and then they move on. You know, like I said, everything is more on the surface. Things seem much simpler in a way. And there's no. It's never implied that there's any shame in crying or that.
That somehow inconsistent with being warriors or tough guys. There's also never ever any expression of empathy for anyone else that they've killed or hurt. The crying, it's not that type of crying where you. There's not a layer under Magnus is what you're getting at with performative, but there's not some deeper layer where capacity for reflection, where they might say, well, maybe we shouldn't make other people cry. So, yeah, so I think that's an interesting part of this where cleverness and strength and crying, but not the connotation of vulnerability that we might think it would have.
As you pointed out, those things all get bundled together in this and in a way it adds a kind of complexity to the character. Right. We're not just getting some sort of heavy handed stereotype with, with Odysseus, despite this well known quality that he has that can be described with one word that has so many different meanings. So for instance, he's not like the mob guy who's wearing the glasses and doing the books. The accountant. Right, the mob accountant. Or who was it in the Advisor and the Godfather?
19:14 Erin: Tom Hagen, Robert Duvall's character.
19:16 Wes: Yeah. Right. So it's not, oh, oh, hey, here's the smart guy. He's all these different things in one.
19:23 Erin: Yeah, I like that.
19:25 Wes: I like the way this transitions in the beginning to the suddenly we're on Mount Olympus, right. Tell me, Muse, about the many ways men or complicated men. And then suddenly we're on Olympus. And then after that we're going to be with Telemachus for a long time. So we're not going to get to Odysseus for a while, which I guess is fitting, since he can't get home. We're not going to get to him for a while. But I love just the very casual way suddenly we are among the gods. It's a very winning aspect of the narrative. It's hard not to get drawn in. I think in a way it's what makes it so readable, as you put it, a page turner.
19:57 Erin: Yeah. This also introduces the element which for me really stood out to me this time, which is the parallel or the cautionary tale of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Right. They repeatedly. This is referenced over and over and over again as a kind of counterpoint to Odysseus and Penelope. I don't know. Did the translation make this more apparent this time around? Did you notice that counter thread? I wonder too if I was influenced by the introduction, which I really loved and which talks about the parallel story.
20:27 Wes: Yeah, I think I was influenced by that too. And it is a great introduction. And I reread. I've only reread half of it. I'll reread the other half for the next episode. And also, I didn't have enough memory of the book to know whether the Aegisthus story was as prominent or that parallel was as obvious. I don't think I ever thought of that, I think before Emily Wilson mentioned it. So it's interesting because at first. Right. So all the other Greeks who had survived the brutal sack of Troy sailed safely home to their own wives, except this man alone.
Not true. Right. And we find that out very quickly afterwards. That's the first thing that Zeus is responding to. Hera. Right? Or no, Zeus is talking first. So, yeah, so Zeus is kind of the one who associates from that. It's almost like Zeus is responding to that remark and saying, oh, it's silly for the mortals to blame the gods. Look at Aegisthus or Aegisthus.
21:23 Erin: I noticed so much this time that. So this is the first time reading the Odyssey since reading Ulysses. In that book, this theme is a little bit more naked to Me. But that book I almost read as, like, a comedy of remarriage. It's easier to read that way because the novel takes place in the course of one day. But this preoccupation with marriage, with what makes a good marriage or, you know, who is a good wife, who is a good husband and by what standard, is something that really attracted my attention, especially in the first half of the book, because we get all of these portraits of other marriages, you know, including Helen and Menelaus. Right. The.
22:01 Wes: Yeah. Which we should talk about at length because that's the best part of the whole thing.
22:05 Erin: Right, right. And the Phaeacian.
22:08 Wes: I think it's Phaeacian. Yeah. I don't know.
22:10 Erin: But, yeah, that couple, whoever they are. The one with the wife.
22:14 Wes: Who's Arete, right?
22:15 Erin: Arete. Yes. Whose knees Odysseus clasps, which means virtue. Yeah. And then this dark side, you know, what can happen to you when things go south. You know, Samuel Butler, of course, said this in kind of a condescending way. But this idea that, like, you know, perhaps a woman wrote the Odyssey, that it seemed like almost like a form of wish fulfillment, you know, for a woman to write this story in which, you know, a man comes back after all those years and everything, everything's okay again. Yeah, I was really. I think I was most interested.
22:44 Wes: And for much of the time, he's just shacked up with two different girlfriends.
22:47 Erin: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's total, total wish fulfillment for a woman. But maybe before we get to Odysseus and his story, we should cover the Telemachiad. Like, what do we think of Telemachus as a character? I find him, you know, he's preserved in amber at the age of 12. I guess, obviously, it's a choice to make him as immature as he is, despite the fact that he's, what, 20? I find everything to be everything about his character to be really unbelievable and uninteresting, but also to question it as kind of beside the point. At the same time, he's kind of exactly what he needs to be.
He needs to be really immature and floundering and sent on this journey so that he can kind of grow up. But he can't be too grown up, because when his father comes back, his father has to be in charge. So, you know, he's this sort of plastic figure that has to kind of be unlikable, immature. I don't know.
23:47 Wes: He's immature. He's childlike in many ways. What year of Odysseus absence are we in the 17th or the. Is it closer to the end? Right. We're starting in the middle, in a way, in medias res, but it's towards the end.
24:02 Erin: Yeah. How long does he stay?
24:03 Wes: Most of the account in the book is just Odysseus doing a flashback, or most of the account of those famous adventures. I mean, all of them are basically flashback.
24:14 Erin: Yeah.
24:14 Wes: With Telemachus, the poem motivates our interest in sort of two strands reaching out towards each other or, I don't know, two tentacles. It's not just Odysseus trying to get home. It. It's his son now trying to find a father. Trying to find his father, which is dramatically interesting. And he's got a very Luke Skywalker vibe. Right. Very kind of whiny, you know. At some point he says, I wish I were the son of someone lucky instead of the most unlucky man alive. He's not even doing anything until Athena goes and gets him going, tells him Odysseus isn't dead yet, that he's going to find a way home.
Telemachus complains. And then Athena inquires about the suitors, and Telemachus makes a speech in which she ends with, you know, soon they will kill me. And then she. At that point, she says, if Odysseus is dead, you're going to have to figure out a way to kill the suitors. And she uses it. She says, in Wilson's translation, don't stick to childhood. And then at that point, she goes away. I think she's been in the. In the guise of who? Mentor. She's been in the guise of Mentor, I think. And then he sees, as she goes away that he's. That Telemachus sees that she's a God because she goes away as a bird or something like that.
But anyway, so mostly passive. We do get hints of standing up for himself when his mom comes down and says, tells the bard to stop singing about. It's funny because their entertainment is about the legendary Troy. But for Penelope, it's very personal and painful. So she says, stop it. And then Telemachus says, poets are not to blame for how things are. Zeus is. And he also says it's for men to talk. I am master. Right. So he's trying to stand up to his mom at that point, even though he's not standing up to the suitors, although he does scold them after that.
And then he has his first moment where he's deceptive or. I'm not sure if it's here or it's a little later. But anyway, at some point he repeats his complaint about his father not ever coming home, but he knows it's not true. He's just trying to deceive the suitors, you know, even though at this point he's more optimistic, I think that happens later on. So you get little hints of him being more like his father, more assertive, more deceptive. But in many ways, you get a lot of whining and passivity.
26:27 Erin: I found the fact that he can only ever stand up to his mother to be really obnoxious. But now, on further reflection, I'm thinking that that's kind of interesting psychologically, that this is the only one that he is able to exert that or sort of like practice on his mother because of the safety maybe that he feels with her still, you know, these gestures on his part are so immature. I find him just, ugh, he's the worst.
26:50 Wes: Well, he's like an adolescent. He can be annoyed with his mom, but not stand up to the bullies at school, you know?
26:55 Erin: Right, exactly. Just, you know, in talking about Telemachus and the fact that he's not able to stand up to the suitors. What kind of read are we getting on the suitors themselves? Sometimes, as I previously mentioned, I sometimes find them. I don't know if it's by contrast to Telemachus and how annoying he's being, but at least in the first half of the book, I find them more likable. They become caricatures. When Odysseus comes at the end of the book, which we'll talk about later, they treat him really terribly. And it's. It's not a good look.
But prior to that, and I know they're. Obviously, they're wasting Odysseus's wealth and blah, blah, blah, all these things that they're doing. But they're also supposed to be, you know, the best young men in Ithaca. I don't know that that speaks so well for Ithaca or if it should, but I don't know. It's like a group of bad boys hanging out at the house, you know, all, like, revving their motorcycles all day long and getting hot and bothered over Penelope.
27:51 Wes: It's kind of looking for a milf.
27:53 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. It's kind of. I don't know. I find it a really interesting dynamic. And obviously Penelope enjoys the attention, so.
28:02 Wes: It's true. Yeah, I like your. I like the staging with, like, a few. If you did a adaptation of this, having them as kind of a biker gang who've just taken up residence in the house.
28:13 Erin: I'm kind of like, okay, Penelope, good for you. She deserves some attention.
28:19 Wes: It is a saloon, kind of a saloon like atmosphere there, right? Because you have all the servants, slaves, and you have feasting. There's a lot of feasting and partying in this book. Eating and drinking and. Which, remember, these aren't just households. These are estates, rich people with lots of means. And so they're abusing. You know, as Wilson points out, there's a whole thing about hospitality and guests in this. And it's highly relevant that the suitors are abusing the abusing hospitality, Right. So these guys are all. And we'll see it many times in the book.
You know, they're all supposed to. As the gentry, so to speak, they're supposed to welcome each other and to lavish gifts and feasts on each other when they visit. And that'll happen to Telemachus multiple times. But to abuse it is to stay longer than one ought, right? And then not only that, but they're eating up the wealth of the household, which Telemachus complains about several times. And so I think the idea, there's gift giving and sharing and. But at a certain point, resources are finite. It's interesting, right? There's a. It's like a spectrum between something that bonds people to each other and then something that can become outright exploitative.
And what they're doing is on the. On the spectrum of friend, guest type of behavior, but it's gone too far. So it's particularly offensive in that sense. It's, you know, it's. It's offensive to the culture because of this ethos of welcoming guests. I'm trying to get at the sense in which this is so criminal, what they're doing, so offensive. Because it'll seem a little bit odd to us that killing them within the context of the book will seem so obviously justified, just killing all of them and not kicking them out and punishing them in some other way.
But they're violating a very sacred norm here.
30:15 Erin: Yeah, it does seem rather justified in the book by the time they're done kicking their last old man. You know, one of the interesting elements about this, and, you know, I think Penelope maybe is someone that we could talk about more in the next episode just because we have so much to get through with these first 12 books, which is really where 90% of the action is in this first half. But one of the things I'll say about the suitors and about Penelope, that occurred to me, the interesting counterpoint that Penelope makes to Odysseus and the setup with the suitors, not just in the fact that she's wily in the same kind of crafty way that Odysseus is with, you know, the famous trick with Laertes burial shroud.
And she's. She's deceptive. She's clever, right? She's all of these things that make her a compliment to her husband. But a counterpoint here in that, you know, Odysseus, though he's thought of as a wanderer. When we see him first, he is. It is in the middle of things and he is now trying to get back home. So he's trying to find his way to one particular place. He has a mission and he's going in that direction. He's chosen to go back home, despite what's offered to him by Calypso, and is traveling in that one direction the whole time. What I find really interesting about the suitors and the fact that every once in a while, one of them gets a little bit more attention than the others.
And we actually learned the narrator tells us something interesting about their character. Like this one might be actually, oh, well, he's actually the best speaker in Ithaca, you know, and he'll give a little speech and then another one will raise his head above the parapet and become individualized a little bit so that they're not always this. This mass of suitors. And so I get the sense on Penelope's side of actually that she's kind of a bit of a. More of an explorer, if you will, than Odysseus is. Or she's more, you know, she stays in one place, but in terms of her.
The possibilities available to her, she's in a sense, more of a wanderer than Odysseus. You know, it's described that if she actually chose one of these men, she would have to then go back to her father's house, right, and kind of move back in with him and then prepare for the, you know, prepare the bridal rituals or whatever it is, and then go to live in, you know, say, Antinous's house with him. And so it would require a kind of regression, giving something up or foregoing all the other possibilities and just making a single choice and then going in that direction.
And it would also involve, you know, as I say, a kind of aggression where she has to go back to being a young girl again, essentially living in her father's house and prepare for being a bride all over again. And so she doesn't want to do that and so, so long as all of these suitors are in play, she's kind of like a wanderer, you know, she can imagine herself in each of these various possibilities without having to. Without having to settle on one. She can kind of move all over the board, you know, she can choose any one of these possibilities and chooses none and thereby keeps all of them in play.
And so psychologically, I suppose that was interesting to me that if I, you know, I thought to myself, like, if I were writing a poem about each of these two characters, you know, Odysseus would actually be about moving very clearly in one direction, whereas Penelope would be more of the. The mental traveler, which would be backwards of what you might expect. I don't know if that makes sense or if you agree with that, but.
33:34 Wes: Yeah. What I have always wondered when reading this is what is she holding out for? He's been gone for so long, and you would have to assume at that point that he's probably dead. You know, it's a little bit opaque. You know, what are her motivations exactly? Is it expected that she would do that until you see the body, that she's stuck in this position? It sounds like. Not because why would there be suitors, but. And then what is the weaving about? Right. This is Antinous, who tells the story of her weaving and unweaving. What is it she's weaving and unweaving?
34:10 Erin: Laertes' burial shroud.
34:11 Wes: I think it's just a. And this is right after, by the way. I think Telemachus has plead for people to help him in the town square. And the suitors are there. And at the end of his speech, he flings his scepter down and bursts out crying, which is a really interesting contrast between the fact that he has a scepter, but. And then Antinous goes, telemachus, you stuck up, willful little boy. How dare you try to embarrass us and put the blame on us and blah, blah, blah. Go blame your precious mother. She is cunning. It is the third year, soon it will be four.
That she has cheated us of what we want. She offers hope to all, sends notes to each other, but all while her mind moves somewhere else. And then later on weaving her fine long cloth, she said to us young men, you are my suitors since my husband, the brave Odysseus is dead. I know you want to marry me. You must be patient. I have worked hard to weave this winding sheet to bury good Laertes when he dies. He gained such wealth, the women would reproach me if he were buried with no shroud. Please let me finish it. And her words made sense to us. So every day she wove the mighty cloth and then at night by torchlight she unwove it.
For three long years her trick beguiled the Greeks, but when the fourth year seasons rolled around, a woman slave who knew the truth told us and then we caught her there unraveling the cloth and made her finish it. It's interesting that he describes her as beguiling the Greeks, right? As opposed to just them. In particular, it's a little bit reminiscent of Odysseus trick with the Trojan horse of deploying an artifact in some way to in Odysseus case to take Troy in this case just to put off the suitors. So Penelope shares, I think, as you mentioned, some of Odysseus qualities with the deceptiveness, but it's unclear what her actual motives are.
Does she just hold out hope that Odysseus is really alive? That's the motive attributed to her by others, I think. Lets pause to talk about our sponsors for this episode, starting with Factor. If you're looking for wholesome, convenient meals, Factor America's number one ready to eat meal kit can help you fuel up fast with chef prepared dietitian approved ready to eat meals delivered straight to your door. You'll save time, eat well and stay on track with your healthy lifestyle. I actually used this service in the past during a time when I didn't want to cook.
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38:43 Erin: In a way, she, much like Telemachus, is kind of frozen at a kind of prepubescent state. I think this situation allows Penelope to go back in time. You know, should she choose a particular suitor, she would have to regress all the way almost, you know, to girlhood, as I said, and. And go to her father's house. But this way she stays, in a sense, young and sexually desirable forever, you know, so who wouldn't want to not settle down, you know, with anyone? Who wouldn't want to keep that going? So it's clear to me why she retains her beauty or why she also seems to be, you know, just as desirable as she was when Odysseus left.
Because the situation, you know, just as it behooves the narrator to keep Telemachus young, the situation keeps her young. A counterpoint to the story that I was thinking about is the Tennyson poem Enoch Arden. Do you know this poem? It must have been a kind of reference to the Odyssey. And of course, Tennyson wrote that great poem Ulysses, which we will have to cover on the podcast at some point. It's a poem about a man who's shipwrecked and believed dead. And there was a law in place, I think, that after seven years you're declared like legally dead.
You know, you're considered dead. And so Enoch Arden's wife waits for him and waits for him to return, but then after seven years, he's declared legally dead. And so she marries someone else. And then he comes back. He had been stranded on a desert island but was alive the whole time. So he comes back and in the poem, I think he never reveals himself to her. And then he kind of dies of a broken heart. It was made into several screwball comedies. Actually, the Cary Grant Irene Dunne film My Favorite Wife is a version of this where it's gender swapped and Irene Dunne was stranded on a desert island and comes back and hilarity ensues.
But anyway, so there's a. There's this alternate. The story is almost like. It's almost like Odyssey fan fiction, you know, imagining, like, what happened if Penelope actually chose someone. It's really interesting. But anyway, I believe in the poem the wife goes on to, like, have more children and then ends up dying of old age or something like that. And it's boring compared to Penelope, kind of, like I said, keeping herself green and interesting for all those years.
40:54 Wes: The contrast between Penelope and Telemachus, in a way, if she is. If there is, Granting everything you just said about the psychology of staying young and all that. But if there is an element of optimism about Odysseus, it's in marked contrast to Telemachus, who, even when he's with Nestor, he uses these interesting phrases to talk about his pessimism about his father's fortunes, right? He says his mother surely bore him for misfortune. Weird way to refer to your own father, right? His grandma bore him for. For misfortune. So. And in the meantime, Nestor, you know, there's.
There's this other aspect where the idea is that it's hard to. Who is it who says it's hard to know who you're your own father is? Or it's a wise man who knows his own father. It might be Telemachus himself. But anyway, at this point with Nestor, it's repeated where Nestor, in talking to Telemachus, says, your father, and parenthetically, if you really are his son, was the best in every trick. And then he says, well, you talk like him, you know, you're so similar to him. But it's interesting for that question to be raised in this context. Right?
And so what I'm saying is part of this is about fatherlessness, and Telemachus has essentially had no father since he was a baby. He was essentially abandoned by his father so his father could go off and fight a war. So why would he. Why would he believe in this person that he's never seen? I think there's a. Maybe there's an aspect here, too, of not getting his hopes up, or probably there's even more going on than that. But. So his relationship to Odysseus is much different than Penelope's in that sense, even though they are both, in a way, as you pointed out, I think, stuck.
So everyone's stuck, I guess. Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus, it's the gods that get things going. And Nestor himself at one point, Says everyone needs the gods. Everybody needs the gods. Which if you read that as whatever primal thing in us actually gets us going, motivates us, is very apt in the context of people who are just otherwise stuck.
43:04 Erin: What I like about what you're saying too about this idea of Telemachus really being his father's son. You know, there's also so much in here, of course, about recognition or even early on when Telemachus goes out to Menelaus palace, there's this idea of like, you know, do you look like him? Are you like him? And I think it's an interesting question because it also seems to be about like Telemachus own self recognition as being his father's son. That will sort of allow him to finally get the self confidence to tell off the suitors. And also this idea that.
It didn't seem to me to be a question of paternity, though I think it does plants that kind of interesting seed in one's mind. But it's also about like, are you like him? Do you take after him? One's worth is determined by whether or not one is like a copy of one's father or reminiscent of him in some way in terms of his character or his appearance and ideally his character and his deeds. Right. And so I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves because this is something we could talk about in the second episode. But you know, I think there's a question of whether or not Telemachus is actually meant to be his father's son.
Because Odysseus needs to come back and rule the kingdom. And the extent to which he actually grows up is, you know, open for debate.
44:19 Wes: You know, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the Nestor scene. Just cause you had mentioned the parallel to the Agamemnon Clytemnestra Orestes story. And also because Nestor has so many interesting things that he says. So Telemachus has asked for news about his father and then Nestor is going to tell the story of Menelaus and Agamemnon not getting along because Agamemnon wants to. Menelaus wants to leave immediately. Agamemnon wants to stay and make a sacrifice. It's not mentioned explicitly that he's going to kill his own daughter. Right. Horrific story, which is just. It's not even mentioned, which might imply that maybe he ended up getting what he deserved.
45:04 Erin: But it's very selective about what it chooses to highlight.
45:07 Wes: Yeah, yeah. And then he makes that sacrifice and it's Athena's wrath that he's trying to fix and it doesn't work. And Nestor will say, the minds of immortals rarely change. All this sacrificing, they do all this barbecuing for the gods and libations and everything. And then the minds of immortals rarely change. So some of them take off, it doesn't work out. And Nestor says, your father's plans were always flexible, which is really. It's not in the original Greek, that's almost a complete interpolation for one word that Wilson is making. But I love that it captures the spirit of it and I love that phrase.
Your father's plans are always flexible. And so, you know, he sailed, got everyone to sail back, I think to make peace with Agamemnon. And then there's no news of what happened next except for the news of what happened to Agamemnon. So everything goes dark. But there's this one story. And then Telemachus says, yeah, you know, I know about that. Orestes took revenge. I wish I could do the same. So we get him directly comparing himself to. To Orestes, and then Nestor basically implies that he's kind of weakly submitting to the suitors and maybe Odysseus will come home and take revenge.
And Telemachus then says, I doubt it. I wouldn't be so hopeful even if the gods willed it. So you get this interesting back and forth about the minds of immortals. Right. They rarely change. And now it's. Even if they will something, it might not happen for Telemachus the pessimist. And then we get another interesting comment by Athena in the guise of Mentor, who's like Telemachus. The gods can easily save anyone, no matter what the distance. Except death. Death is universal and even the gods can't protect the people that they love. When fate is cruel.
When fate and cruel death catch up to them. Yeah, it's all this ambivalent back and forth about what the gods can do, what they can't do. Whether Telemachus should be the one to take revenge on the suitors or whether it should be Odysseus. Right. So whether Telemachus should step into this Orestes like role. Except that, you know, it's not Orestes kills his mother and her lover. It's a very different story. Right. He's not going to be killing Penelope. He's going to be killing all these suitors. So do you understand what I'm getting at? It's all this jumbled up.
The parallel would be Odysseus comes home and Telemachus kills him and Penelope.
47:35 Erin: Right.
47:36 Wes: As a way of assuming growing up. And it's a sick, radical way of doing it. But as a way of coming into his own as a man. So for a father who's been absent. That he hasn't been able to identify with. And perhaps to some extent he's not as detached as he should be with his mother. And makes feeble attempts at that by telling her to shut up, Mom. It's not the poet's fault. Then. Part of that psychology is the overcompensation of. Well, maybe to be a man at this point. I don't need to become my father, identify with my father. I must replace him. Right?
So there's this line maybe, fine line sometimes between identification. Taking the father in or just replacing the father. Killing off the father, becoming the father, taking his place. Right. And that, I think, explains some of the ambivalence of Telemachus about the project that he's undertaking. Because is he searching for a father figure with which to identify. Or is he. And is he trying to save his father? Does he want. If his father is alive? It really amps up the conflict, right. Between killing and identifying and dealing with the abandonment.
So the pessimism is actually forms of. Is a very protective function. And even. Even as he's out searching for his father, in a way, he has to stay negative about this. Because it's hard to comprehend what's gonna happen when Odysseus actually returns. Where is the violence gonna be? Is it. Telemachus couldn't kill the suitors. He was too passive. And now Dad's gonna do it. Or maybe I should get rid of dad and be the one to get rid of the suitors. You know, all that stuff. So I don't know if I'm getting at that very well.
49:18 Erin: So what you're saying is that, you know, Orestes had an easier job of it because, you know, Agamemnon was killed. And so then he was able to like his process of maturation was much simpler. And with Odysseus as like a potential, you know, a shadowy figure out there. Who may or may not be alive.
49:35 Wes: Yeah. Did I say Orestes killed his mother and his father? Did I accidentally say that?
49:38 Erin: Yes.
49:39 Wes: Or did I say that his mother and her. So, yeah, it's an interesting slip. Right? So killed his. His mother and her lover after his mother killed the. The father. But anyway, the mother and the father get. So I was comparing Telemachus killing his father too. That's a weird slip to Make.
49:55 Erin: But anyway, I was just clarifying that, you know, that you're saying that Orestes had an easier time of his process of maturation. Because of the fact that his father was already dead. So he was more able to, like, step into that role. And that therefore it's useful psychologically for Telemachus to believe his father to be dead. For his maturation to commence or continue or flower, however you want to describe it. Yeah, that it's psychologically useful to kill off the father. For you to mature is essentially what I'm asking.
50:24 Wes: You know, maturity means. So the classic account is that, right, you're detaching from the mother. And then some paternal principle intervenes and becomes a point of identification. And you don't have to think of it literally as a father. But it's the point at which you identify, you know, for instance, with the norms and of the culture. Or with certain aspirations or peer groups or whatever. But so killing off the father is an extreme exaggeration of that psychological process. Ultimately, in a way, you do replace the parents, right, In a way.
By taking them in and then moving on becoming a parent, maybe yourself. And you don't obviously, literally kill off your parents, Although they do get old and die. Right. And they might envy you now being younger and yet in their. In their role. So there's a lot of psychological stuff there. I don't know. I'm trying to think back to what I said and whether I was operating under the delusion that. Whether I was comparing Orestes killing Agamemnon, which he didn't do to Telemachus. But what I was trying to get at is the real parallel there is the suitors are in the position of Aegisthus.
Penelope is in the position of Clytemnestra. Penelope is resisting the sort of temptation that Clytemnestra succumbed to. The implication would be that he might have to kill Penelope if she were to succumb to that. Or he can preemptively kill the suitors and prevent that whole situation from happening. Not kill, I guess, this character after the fact. Sorry, but kill him before that tragedy even occurs. And spare himself the trouble. Right?
52:12 Erin: He's like, you know, the world's most extreme. He's like the world's most extreme prophylactic.
52:17 Wes: Yeah, yeah. But he doesn't have to worry about. Since his father is always. Is already dead. And that's the motivation for revenge. He doesn't have to worry about this question of whether it's the father's job to do something or whether it's his job like Telemachus does. And he also doesn't have to worry about the implications of doing the thing that if it is his father's job of supplanting the father in that role, which may be, you know, symbolically. Right. It's a killing off of the father and then the father may not like that. Right. Maybe that is in this case Odysseus job, not Telemachus job.
52:58 Erin: Well, elided also from this story is the fact that, you know, Orestes didn't exactly get away with it, so he was punished as well by the Furies. Right, right.
53:10 Wes: Better to kill the suitor up front and not get into all that mess the family drama. So stand up to the bullies and don't do the school shooting. So. Yeah. Did you have anything more with Telemachus? I mean, I think as far as time wise, we're going to probably have to talk about. I think we're going to do have another episode on just these first 12 books. We should devote an episode to just Odysseus Journeys. Odysseus Journey and stories. And we can call this the Telemachus.
53:43 Erin: Yeah, I was almost going to suggest that we do six. Six and then the back 12.
53:49 Wes: Sure. When does his flashback start?
53:52 Erin: It starts at four, the sea god, with Proteus, which is an interesting story in and of itself.
53:59 Wes: I think we should talk about the visit to Telemachus. Visit to Menelaus now and Helen, which is another, you know, so we get another couple and another, you know, cameo from, you know, the heroes of the.
54:15 Erin: Yeah, it's a guest star from the Iliad.
54:18 Wes: Yeah, exactly. This is my favorite part, I think, of the whole story. Probably there's an element of irony in the account of what happens with Menelaus and this visit to Menelaus and Helen that I think is rare because like I said, everything is very surface level for the most part. But there's a bit of humor and irony in this vision.
54:45 Erin: Is this like a rich couple, like they're always drunk and they just don't listen to each other?
54:51 Wes: Yeah.
54:51 Erin: Is that. Is that an accurate read? Like they're super rich and they just spend all their time like they're both alcoholics. And he comes home from the office and she's been drinking all day and he's had drinks after work. And so she just starts telling him about like all the stuff that she's done that day. And he tells her about whatever he's done, but they're not really listening to each other at all. And then they have friends over and they both tell completely different stories about this thing that happened to them.
55:21 Wes: So she tells the story first. And by the way, I love the part there's a certain point where she just roofies everyone because they're all grieving and crying too much. Just puts drugs in the wine and then everyone passes out. That's the way to cure the blues. But before all that happened. So she tells a story about in Troy. How does she put it? Let's find. I think it's page 160. I think it's worth, actually. So she puts the drugs in the wine at line 220 on page 159. I didn't realize she did that first. Then the child of Zeus, Helen, decided she would mix the wine with drugs to take all the pain and rage away, to bring forgetfulness of every evil.
Whoever drinks this mixture from the bowl will shed no tears that day. Not even if her mother or her father die, or even if soldiers killed her brother or her darling son with bronze spears before her very eyes. Helen had these powerful magic drugs.
56:20 Erin: No, I like that. As you're reading it, I didn't notice before the female pronoun. So it's like it's speaking almost from her, you know, it's like free indirect discourse from her own mind.
56:30 Wes: I think that might be Wilson doing that. It's probably.
56:33 Erin: Oh, of course. Yeah. No, I think it's an interesting choice.
56:36 Wes: So then it takes a while for people to pass out, but. So it's very interesting that she drugs them to first and then tells this ridiculous story about how she was really on the Greeks side. I mean, she's run off with Paris, right? She's trying to leave her husband and get with another man. And then he waged a war for 10 years to get her back. A lot of people died. A whole city was razed to the ground. Horrible.
56:59 Erin: But that too was done under the influence, right? If Aphrodite hadn't made her go crazy and taken her away from her country, then she wouldn't have.
57:08 Wes: Is that the way she puts it here or.
57:09 Erin: No. She says, I wish that Aphrodite had not made me go crazy when she took me from my country and made me leave my daughter and the bed I shared with my fine, handsome, clever husband.
57:19 Wes: So in the margin here, I just put a line. I just bullshit. Blames her infidelity on the gods. So now I understand the drugs, right? Just to make this believable. And then. But before that, right, she Says he crept through Troy. So they're telling a story about Odysseus. He gets dresses up as a beggar to get into the city. I guess the horse is already inside. He crept through Troy like that and no one knew him except for me. I saw through his disguise and questioned him. So she's the one who can. She has an Odysseus detector, Odysseus radar that no one else has.
He was too smart to talk, acting evasive. But I washed and scrubbed him with oil and dressed him, which apparently is what women do on the first date in ancient Greece. And I swore an oath that I would not reveal him to the Trojans. Before he had got back to his own camp, he told me all the things the Greeks were planning. On his way back, he used his long bronze sword to slaughter many Trojans. And he brought useful intelligence to tell
58:24 Erin: the Greeks, all right, euphemism alert.
58:27 Wes: The Trojan women keened in grief, but I was glad. And then if he had really told her that stuff that the Greeks are planning, I think the Greeks would be dead. But at the very least it sounds quite implausible. And then even more so in the context of what comes after, which is Menelaus saying, yes, wife, quite right. But then he goes on to tell a story in which she tries to out the Greeks by putting on the voices of the men's wives. There's a lot of things which give her a very witch like cast, right? And everything that's come before the drugs and the Odysseus radar. And now this idea that she can perfectly imitate each man's wife, many of whom she would not even have.
59:14 Erin: Bizarre.
59:14 Wes: And she's trying to get them to come out, to reveal themselves in the hollow belly, which if she knows they're in there, she could just tell the Trojans about lots of weird stuff going on there, but she tries to get them all killed. This is the story Menelaus is telling, even though he's just affirmed her previous story. So it's this weird, nutty level of repression of Helen's infidelity and betrayal, let's say, even though he can recount it, it's almost like it's a cute little story about her. I don't know, am I getting it though?
59:49 Erin: That's exactly right. It's also, Helen is half God, right? Like she's half divine. And part of the problem, I think with all of this is that there's so much ambivalence throughout about the role of the gods in terms of their what their abilities are, how well they can intervene or not. You know, Helen can be mortal and subject to the will of the gods, but then she can also do these things, like, as you say, like putting on these voices or behaving in this almost witch like way. And so this story, for me is kind of like an encapsulation of that ambivalence of how you can just not be responsible for your own actions.
Or two things can be true at once, or you can just believe two things to be true at once, even if they're completely contradictory. You know, it's like an illustration of the kind of cognitive dissonance that living in this world, world inhabited by these gods, kind of requires of you and maybe of the cognitive dissonance required in marriage. I don't know if we want to draw a larger, you know, larger parallel. Like, obviously, this is an extreme example. Menelaus has now come back and is living with this. He's living with his wife who had this affair for 10 years in Troy with someone else.
To me, it's this very modern and extremely dark vision of, like, what happens in a marriage after there's been infidelity and you try to make it work again, basically. And that obviously would take a hell of a lot of cognitive dissonance in order to. And a lot of drugs in this case. Right. In order to get over that. But it's interesting, I think, how that's twinned with the various versions of the story insofar as they relate to, like, the intervention of the gods, which is itself, as I said, very ambivalent.
1:01:38 Wes: Yep. Yeah. And I think.
1:01:40 Erin: What more do I want to say about that?
1:01:42 Wes: So Helen seems to be in the role as siren here. She's putting on the different voices calling to each of the men, and they want to go out, which is a weird thing. Right. Why would they think their wives are there?
1:01:54 Erin: Yeah. Why would they be tempted by this? Yeah.
1:01:57 Wes: So it's almost like a magical kind of lure, like the. The Sirens lure. And then it's Odysseus who prevents them from going. Anticlus still wished to answer. Odysseus hands clamped shut his mouth and saved us all. He held him there like that until Athena led you far away. So Odysseus saved them from Helen. Right. The point of the story is exactly the opposite of the one Helen told. But also he's. You know, the clamping of the mouth shut stands in parallel to the wax and the ears. His ability to save the Greeks here stands in contrast. Right. To what's said at the very beginning of the story, which is that he was unable to save all of his crewmen from his ships.
So very interesting foreshadowing of the siren situation later on with Odysseus. So very clever way of representing the relationship between Menelaus and Helen. Right. Complicated, nuanced, humorous. That's incredible irony. But in the contrast between their two stories, really, really, really great.
1:03:03 Erin: Yeah. The more I'm looking at these two things as well. I love this parallel you're drawing to the Sirens. And I also think that there's something. There's actually something true about Helen here that's captured in both of these stories. Now that I'm looking more closely, she sees the Odysseus inside the beggar. Right. She sees through his disguise. In Menelaus story, she seems to be the only one who knows that they're in there. Right. Because it's odd because this moment happens where she's tapping on the belly. So she knows there are people in there, but still the Trojan horse, that plot goes off without hitch.
Right? Like, they still come inside and then are able to slaughter everyone. So the fact that she's going around touching the belly, saying, hey, like anybody in there? And going through the trouble of putting on the. The voices of all of these wives is not making the other Trojans go, oh, gee, there's some people in there, you know, like, they just ignore it. And Menelaus attributes her actions in this moment to the gods, just as she attributes her infidelity to, you know, being insane under the influence of Aphrodite. Right. Menelaus says some spirit who desired to glorify the Trojans urged you on.
They're kind of mirrors of each other.
1:04:20 Wes: And then in the end, Athena leads her away. In the end.
1:04:23 Erin: Right, right. They're telling opposite stories, but it's like in both stories, this is very much like, this is Helen, you know, this is the same woman in both stories, but in one she's sort of pro Greek and the other she's pro Trojan. But it's the exact same characteristics.
1:04:37 Wes: She sounds like someone who's treating it as a game in a way. Right. So in her story, Odysseus tells her about the plan.
1:04:43 Erin: Yes.
1:04:44 Wes: So this is the backstory to what Menelaus then says. And she's like, and I was glad and I was ready to go home, so I wasn't going to mess them up. And then Menelaus, it's this weird. She doesn't tell the Trojans about the plan. She doesn't explicitly open up the horse and reveal them, but she plays a game in a way, trying to lure them into outing themselves. And so it's maybe somewhat perverse. It's like she doesn't take any of it seriously, which is a. That's an interesting interpretation of her as a character and how she could have ended up launching, you know, being end up in Troy and then also launch.
Have a face that launched a thousand ships. It's not just the face. I think it's, you know, that's very good point. That she's half goddess and the gods. That is kind of reminiscent of the way the gods do behave so impetuously and playing with mortals and not in a way not fully comprehending what it is that they're inflicting on mortals. Right. She has one foot in that terrain.
1:05:52 Erin: Well, I wonder if that straddling makes her even more pernicious somehow. But I like what you say, playing with them. I was gonna say she's like toying with them in the sense that they are her toys and in the sense that she's so superior to them that in the story or in Menelaus story, they come across as like little boys who could be convinced by someone doing somebody's voice outside. Oh, come out, come out. You know, like, like they're like, oh gee, that sounds like my wife, you
1:06:17 Wes: know, but there's honey, it's me. I'm come to visit you in Troy while you're in the belly.
1:06:24 Erin: Yeah, like only. Right. Only a child would be. There's just something childlike about being convinced by that. And the fact that some of them are convinced like that it's like, it's really like she's playing with a bunch of, you know, she's playing mind games with a bunch of little boys.
1:06:38 Wes: Or it's magical and it's in the same vein as the sirens having an irresistible call or something.
1:06:44 Erin: Yes, exactly. But I think that that magical quality creates that. That little boy like dynamic. Right. Because you're so. You're so superior to them or you're using. You're using superhuman methods so that you become like the adult playing with the. Or you know, whether it be like the little girl playing with the dolls, right. Or like the adult playing with the little kids minds and freaking them out or something. There's a stark power imbalance that is involved there.
1:07:10 Wes: If you were to naturalize this story and try to give a retell it right. According to simply psychologically in a realistic way. You can imagine shooting a film and they're inside the horse and it's very claustrophobic in there. And one guy's going, I just can't take it anymore, man. I have to get out of here. To Vietnam style Trojan War movie and Odysseus holding him down. And you're not gonna reveal us.
1:07:41 Erin: And Helen standing outside going, ooh, look at all this nice fresh air.
1:07:47 Wes: I just feel like it's gonna be. It's about to be raining men. But anyway, your point about her being half God, in a way, is kind of the key to understanding all of this and her role here and how it is that Menelaus can live with a certain cognitive dissonance and they can tell contradictory stories as if they're in agreement. The drugs, in a way, kind of represent that whole fairy tale quality of the world, right? So they're narcotics. Later on reveal them. And they're kind of in a surreal. I think it's enough to say that she's a goddess or half goddess to say why they're in a surreal realm. You could talk about drugs as well, if you like, or witchery of some sort.
1:08:30 Erin: I'm thinking about this in relationship to the larger, you know, what the larger story is doing with this. With this whole idea of the intervention of the gods, or where the human leaves off and the divine enters. You know, I'm thinking about the fact that where we kind of started the discussion with Mount Olympus and this idea that Zeus and Athena both say, okay, you know, enough is enough. But then there's a part of the. Like, if you think of the gods as kind of having a hive mind, which you kind of have to. In order to get at this idea that, like, it's all kind of divine energy, right?
But with all of these different expressions where you have different gods controlling different parts of the world, different parts of, you know, different whatever, different activities, different people having their particular favorites. You know, Poseidon obviously doesn't agree with this, right? So he's working at cross purposes to them in this one part of the realm. And I'm thinking about that dissonance or ambivalence that we're talking about in general, almost like made into a map, if you will, that's then laid on top of the map of Odysseus journey, or of all of all of these things that are happening, including Telemachus as part of.
When he's at Helen and Menelaus house or whatever, the ambivalence in the story, or even, like I said, I'll just use this term cognitive dissonance. And hopefully listeners will forgive me for using something so inept, this cognitive dissonance in the story and the fact that the Trojan War breaks up, everybody kind of goes back home, they have this story still inside them in all of its various facets, and they've all spread out over this map, and then we have the gods kind of spread out over the map, and it's all kind of contradictory, right. And it's all working at cross purposes to each other.
And so what I like is, or what I see as kind of like this overarching idea that runs throughout the whole poem is this idea that at any moment the landscape could be working for you or against you, you know, depending on what territory you've run into. And it's all part of the same tapestry, if you will. And like, two completely contradictory things can be true at the same time and held together, and it doesn't break apart. Helen and Menelaus can have two different. Completely different ideas about what actually happened, but still they're married to each other.
I mean, you know, the marriage is being aided along by this drugs and, you know, as I say, it's like this cognitive dissonance, but that's like part of this whole tension between a world run by men and their wits and a world in which potentially you have no free will at all, and you're all just at the mercy of the gods. And that collapse maybe is best personified in these characters, which are half human and half divine, because they kind of tread that line. I don't mean to be too grand there, but that's kind of how I'm thinking, like two landscapes on top of each other.
1:11:30 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting, you know, especially in light of what Christianity ends up doing with that attempt to combine the mortal and the divine. Right. In one concrete personage.
1:11:41 Erin: Right.
1:11:41 Wes: What it means in one versus what it means in the other, what it means to the Greeks versus what it means to Christianity.
1:11:49 Erin: Right, Right, Yeah. Helen is, in a way, like an embodiment of that. Of, like the whole world, right. That whole dual landscape, all of its contradictions, all of its complexities and contradictions are kind of embodied in her, in her person, and arguably in other people who are half human and half divine. But it's kind of like subsumes that complexity in the whole world. Whereas in Christianity, it's just absorbed, as you say, in one person.
1:12:13 Wes: I mean, I think with Greek mythology there's this attempt to give some order to things, right? To the chaos of things. And life at a time when life is very chaotic and more capricious than the way we experience it. Although of course it's similarly capricious at the advent of Christianity. But in any case, and yet it's quite disoriented. The mythology itself is quite chaotic and disorganized and hard to make sense of because famously the gods seem to behave like human beings or even worse often and are impulsive and play favorites and this and that.
So they're not necessarily there's the will of Zeus, but it's not necessarily justice or the good. You know, he's out raping people, you know, that's not his thing. And so what is the point? There's an element of resignation in a way to the harshness of life. But in any case, I think why don't we so move to Postscript and discuss. I'm not sure how far we're going to get, but we're going to save Odysseus for next time. Fitting once again, waiting for Odysseus. That's the whole name of the game. Okay, so we're going to move to Postscript and we're going to finish discussing this chapter with Menelaus, and I think he's going to tell a story about Odysseus with Proteus and then we'll move on and our next full episode to Odysseus and his adventures.
And then there'll be a third episode as well on that, probably concentrating more on the last 12 books.
1:14:01 Erin: So perfect.
1:14:12 Wes: subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
Competing Affections in “The Lion in Winter”
Jul 31, 2023
Before Henry VIII changed history for lack of a son, Henry II had too many. His eldest, Richard, a fierce soldier who controls the wealthy Aquitaine, is the favorite of his mother, Eleanor. The youngest, John, is immature and dull, but his father’s favorite. And the middle son, scheming Geoffrey, is, quite dangerously, no one’s favorite. In the end, there are no winners; competing affections and power schemes serve only to cancel each other out. Is it true then, as this story suggests, that being a favorite amounts to nothing more than a target on one’s back, as its benefits are counteracted by the destructive envy of the disfavored? What drives our own propensities for favoritism? And does occupying any position in the pecking order entail, in Eleanor’s words, learning to live with disappointment? Wes & Erin discuss the 1968 film “The Lion in Winter,” starring Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: Before Henry VIII changed history for lack of a son, Henry II had too many. His eldest, Richard, a fierce soldier who controls the wealthy Aquitaine, is the favorite of his mother, Eleanor. The youngest, John, is immature and dull, but his father's favorite. And the middle son, scheming Geoffrey, is quite dangerously no one's favorite. In the end, there are no winners. Competing affections and power schemes serve only to cancel each other out. Is it true, then, as this story suggests, that being a favorite amounts to nothing more than a target on one's back as its benefits are counteracted by the destructive envy of the disfavored?
What drives our own propensities for favoritism? And does occupying any position in the pecking order entail, in Eleanor's words, learning to live with disappointment? Today we're discussing the 1968 film the lion in Winter, starring Peter O' Toole and Katharine Hepburn. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, I have a piece of trivia for you. You probably know that there was a remake of the lion in Winter with Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close in 2003, I think is the year. Did you know about that remake?
1:23 Wes: I did not know that.
1:24 Erin: Oh, okay. Well, that's not even the piece of trivia I have for you. The further piece of trivia I have is that it was also adapted into a TV series in the early 2000s.
1:33 Wes: Wow.
1:34 Erin: Called Arrested Development.
1:38 Wes: Oh, yeah. I didn't think about that.
1:40 Erin: I feel like we're John is Buster. That's perfect. I didn't even think of that. Yeah. Helenor. Helenor, sure. Yeah. Henry and Eleanor are obviously George and Lucille, and Lucille really doesn't care for any of her children, but she especially doesn't care for Gob, I feel like. And Gob is Geoffrey. So I was just thinking about the similarities between this story and so many others that we've covered on the podcast. Like Arrested Development is, of course, a through line throughout the pod, but there are obvious parallels here, too. I was thinking of who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And.
2:13 Wes: Oh, yeah, I thought of that.
2:15 Erin: And especially Lear. Of course. Henry himself says that he's a Lear figure in the film. And at one point, I actually thought of There Will Be Blood, which is hopefully a movie we'll cover on the podcast at some point when he says he has no boys or whatever reminded me of that part when Daniel Day Lewis is in the revival meeting and he's like, I've abandoned my boy. It was very similar.
2:38 Wes: I think Geoffrey, though, would be Michael. Just as far as personalities go. Kind of more reserved, cerebral advisor role. And then you have Richard, who will be Richard the Lionhearted, who is the warrior and. And sometimes the one with the brawn and. Right. Well, that's what Mommy taught him.
2:59 Erin: That's right.
3:00 Wes: It's not the way things worked out ultimately. Yeah, he did not succeed at that. But I guess there's no equivalent of that in Arrested Development. Maybe I'm spending too much time on this. This comparison, though, you know, it's a similar thing in the Brothers Karamazov. Right, with Ivan the brains and Dmitri the warrior, the brawn, the passion. And then Alyosha the religious one. Who does that correspond to? John, incidentally, is the Will turn out to be the. The Magna Carta. Right. And the John who's the villain in Robin Hood.
3:33 Erin: History of England. Yeah.
3:34 Wes: Yeah. And the John who's the villain in Robin Hood and the way he's portrayed in the film is as this extreme moron whose mouth is often just agape no matter what's going on. Very afraid, very stupid, very easily manipulated. And for some reason, the one that Henry apparently loves the most, and I don't know why that is exact. Why does Henry love Jon the most? Is it just because he's the least capable of scheming in a successful way?
4:08 Erin: Perhaps that was a preoccupation for me as I was watching. Because I just thought, you know, in a way, his favorite is Alys. Right? That's his favorite, like, pseudo child. I mean, there's a lot of strange, ancestral kinds of dynamics going on there. Because Alice, you know, she's kind of the Cordelia figure. If you're gonna do the Lear parallel. And if you're gonna do the arrested development parallel, maybe she's like Lindsay or something in that the father loves Lindsay best. Right. And she has that. You know, Lindsay and Lucille have that kind of weird relationship.
Familiarly bad relationship. So I was trying to figure that out myself. And I thought that, you know, John is the favorite partially just it seems, because he's the favorite. And I'm wondering about the psychology of favoritism. And if there's really no logic behind it at all. And if there is a logic, perhaps it has to do with the fact that John is the youngest and therefore represents the last hopes of Henry. Or an interest in his own youth and kind of preserving his fertility and his continued success as king. And therefore, to elevate the youngest son might Be appealing to something within himself that he wants to, I don't know, live forever, as he says at the end of the film.
But certainly insofar as that actor is the worst actor in the world.
5:33 Wes: Oh, you think the actor is bad?
5:34 Erin: Oh, I think he's so bad. I think it's also ridiculous that he looks like he's 30 playing a 16 year old who. I think there are a lot of things that are wrong. I think it's miscast. I think the actor's.
5:47 Wes: Yeah, he's overplaying the stupidity of the character. I mean, just looking at the script, you don't have to make him such a moron. And so, I mean, the body language, the mouth agape. He's kind of almost hunchbacked a little bit in the way he moves around and scurries around fearfully.
6:05 Erin: Yeah. But I wonder if his cartoonish unlikability is actually serving for me to call attention to just the strangeness of our own predilections for things. You know, like in a way, taking Jon at face value, maybe the most interesting thing about Henry as a character is the fact that Jon is his favorite in the way that we would think it would be really strange if he loved, I don't know, some really disgusting flavor of ice cream or something. It reveals something kind of strange about him. Obviously of more import than the ice cream thing, but something strange and unexpected about his character, which I think still kind of is somehow fitting. He's not a guy with a lot of smooth edges himself.
6:46 Wes: So Jon is grotesque and maybe that's part of it. There's something about the grotesque. And since incest is such a strong theme or the, you know, the way the family members are embroiled with each other and in a way too close and using the power dynamics, the fighting over land and things like that to establish some separation. You see the incestuousness broadly in that, but then also, you know, specific scenes, one that I think we'll discuss between Richard and Eleanor, in which she cuts herself and which you get a very strong sense of the over closeness of the mother and the son.
So the grotesqueness, you know, you might think of that in terms of a product of incest. So that John is the closest, the fully representing and concreteness and concretely embodied the incestuous dynamics of the family. I didn't think of that watching the film. I just thought of that. Now, from what you were saying, I do want to put a little caveat on there. There is a historical reason, I think at this Point. He's the only one who hasn't tried to overthrow his father, to rebel against him. And probably just because he was too young, later he will.
But it's odd when you look at the history and you realize. Yeah, well, it does come out in the film, of course, that I think looking at the history of this, the full extent of it is actually quite startling. You know, they were fielding armies against each other, and now they're together as a family for their Christmas vacation. So it's quite something. There is also historical, a boring historical reason for this, which is that John is the only one who hasn't yet rebelled against the father. And it's really interesting when you look at the history.
It's quite startling, even though it does come out in the movie, that, right, Eleanor has rebelled against him and he's keeping her prisoner and the sons have been involved. I think the history makes it more hammers home the extremeness of it. Just because the family members have been fielding armies against each other, right? Lots of people getting killed, castles being razed to the ground, treaty negotiations, all that stuff going on between father and wife and sons, and now they're all together for their Christmas vacation. I guess Christmas is the time where you.
Well, no, it's not the time where you put away the knives. It's a time where you really dig in deep at an emotional level instead of going at it with the armies.
9:16 Erin: You hold the knife menacingly in your hand as you stare at the family members. Yeah, well, what I love about the film is just how the historical import, however implausible some of this may be, the sort of real facts behind it and the real insanity behind this family actually warring against itself, I think heightens the campiness of the film. I see this as a very campy film, a film that's not at all taking itself seriously and that's kind of fundamentally a comedy. I mean, I think it's like Virginia Woolf in that way, where the genre is a bit unstable, but I think it's very arch.
And when it's funny, it's really funny. And even when it's kind of being serious, even serious moments have really campy undertones. Each member of the family emerging from one tapestry after another over the course of a scene, which has many painful moments, right, but which is also set up like a bedroom farce and is, in a sense, a bedroom farce. But to go back to this question of incest, one of the things I was thinking about, too, is the fact that much is made. I think Eleanor Says at one point that if she had stayed married to Louis, if she had produced sons for Louis, then none of us would have known each other.
Something like that. And what I'm really interested in the film as well is not just the incestual relationship in the actual nuclear family, but in the sort of shadow family that emerges in the might have beens. And even at the end, this shadow family that Henry wants to build with Alice and this idea of getting an annulment and starting over again. But there are all these possibilities that might have been Philip, might have been Eleanor's son in a way. Right. Alys, who's Philip's sister and now Henry's mistress and was kind of raised by Eleanor.
She is also a kind of shadow daughter of Eleanor. And so there's a sense in which these are people who, like Eleanor and Henry especially, they're older, they're at the end of their long careers, and you could see the shadows of possibilities back behind them on the road behind them that have been closed off. And so in a way, it makes the film feel a little bit more claustrophobic, maybe that at the end of this marriage, like, these are the only people that they're left with. They're the only people that they have to contend with or to deal with or to play with, as the case may be.
And so it makes it seem a little bit more.
11:45 Wes: When you say at the end of the marriage, they are the. Who are the only people at the
11:49 Erin: end of the day. Henry and I almost said, Lucille, Henry and Eleanor are just left with each other. And these three surviving children, all of the other possibilities for their lives have been eliminated through their own choice or through unforeseen circumstances, like the fact that young Henry has died and everything. And so it makes the film feel extremely claustrophobic to me that this family is, as you say, overly close, even if they're far away from each other.
12:18 Wes: Yeah. I mean, he essentially. He has to keep her in a prison on the surface level, just because she is dangerous and has rebelled. And. But you get the sense also on an emotional level, because the. They are too close in a way, and they don't know how to regulate that boundary. These are people with a combination of boundary issues and power. Right. So the dynamic that might play out in a typical family that does can't fight over a whole kingdom. There'd be subtler power dynamics. And you might do things that are aimed at, like figuratively kill a sibling or a parent.
Right. But you. It doesn't play out as Literally here. Just because there are. There's so much power at stake. All of the family dynamics, including envy and you didn't love me. And all that stuff can play out at the level of, give me a castle, give me. What is it that they're fighting over? The Aquitaine itself. There's other. Anyway, give me this tract of land, the Vexin. Give me this tract of land or I'm going to take it because it's mine. That's really. The film makes all of this out ultimately to be about love and the way in which love has been completely distorted by power and can only be experience through the lens of power and the lens of these big power struggles at the level of nations and duchies and things like that.
So you get this weird sense in the film that there's all this love and profound attachment, and yet everyone also overtly hates and resents each other and is willing to talk about it. At least they're doing, like, family therapy throughout the film. They're willing to talk about it and they're willing to. It does look like a bit of a game through the whole thing, because the film starts with when Eleanor arrives on her boat. She and Henry seem to be very happy, like authentically happy, to see each other. And they have that same affect when she leaves.
They say goodbye, and it's almost as if everything that has gone on in between is just the game that they like to play. And it's the game. It's the only game that they can use to signify whatever affectionate bonds they have, even if that game involves a lot of hate. So that's the sense. That's the way. The reason it reminded me of who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Right. All this aggressive gameplay. My overall point was the way this dynamic between love and power and how love can be completely swallowed by power dynamics, but find a way to manifest itself in those, even when they are murderous and involve war.
15:13 Erin: I can't even recall in this moment the ending of Virginia Woolf. I know we discussed this in the podcast, but did we come to a sort of understanding of whether or not the pieces on the board had moved at all over the course of the night? I think we did.
15:27 Wes: Whereas here the ending is actually quite dramatic change because their imaginary child is killed off.
15:35 Erin: That's right. So there is a kind of resolution for that. Yeah.
15:37 Wes: And the whole game has actually been designed to, in a way, is designed as that catharsis or basically psychological abortion.
15:46 Erin: Right.
15:47 Wes: So you're right, it's different here.
15:49 Erin: I think yeah, it's not really the end of the game. It's just. I mean, maybe there was. Maybe they were playing a little game, but then they're just going to set up the pieces again for next time, for Easter.
15:59 Wes: Let me out for Easter. And he's like, maybe you can strike me down again. And I hope we never die. Right. So it's not just a game. It's like Eternal Return. They're going to do this forever. And maybe there's something even primal about it, some sort of mythology that's being enacted and supposed to lie deep, deep in the ontology of the world or something like that.
16:21 Erin: Is there a first cause here? I mean, I think the. The explanation that the film seems to set up, insofar as I will believe anything that Katharine Hepburn tells me is just that it was really Henry's fault. I'm always looking to figure out who I can blame here. You know, she says, at some point, I could peel you like a pear. And God himself would call it justice. Right. It seems that the original sin that has sparked all of this insecurity on Eleanor's part and then set off this chain reaction is Henry's notorious infidelities. The affair with Rosamund, maybe.
But also, it seems, his willingness to kind of bed down with anybody over the course of their marriage. Though we also get the suggestion that Eleanor teases him with the fact that she slept with his father, who's named significantly, Geoffrey. You know, that she violated the marriage with Louis while she was, you know, while she was still married to Louis. She had this passion with Henry that then sparked that annulment. It's a bit futile and maybe a bit silly of me to be looking for a cause, but there does seem to be an element with this. It's like crying out for just an attribution of how all of this started, what set it in motion.
17:37 Wes: He's a philanderer, and he himself even says, I've slept with. I don't know. How does he put it? Alice, in my time, I've known Contessas, milkmaids, courtesans and novices, whores, gypsies, jades, and little boys. But nowhere in God's Western world have I found anyone to love but you. How romantic.
17:57 Erin: That is so beautiful. He is just a walking.
18:01 Wes: Not even the little bag of STDs can live up. And then later on, Eleanor will accuse him of bestiality, which I wouldn't put that. So, yeah, he's a. He's a bad guy. Like many of these People were. But the film kind of raises us to the level of everyone seems a bit psychotic. They are quite caught up in this power struggle, and some of it seems really absurd. So, for instance, there's the wedding scene where Henry is. And this is a game, this is a ploy. But basically, Eleanor at this point has. The way the game has gone is that he has made Eleanor a promise that's too good to an offer that's too good to refuse, which is her freedom if she will sign away something or other.
I forget the Aquitaine for John. And there are other elements to the deal, and she's. She has this great line, you offer me the only thing I want if I give up, the only thing I treasure. So in a way that seems like a defeat. And she initially says, yes, but then she says, but only if you marry off Alice to Richard. And you do it. Right now, it's got. The wedding has happened. Gotta happen right now. And then he calls her bluff, or seemingly does. But, you know, what he knows is that he's going to. That the. That the conditions of the deal are not going to be acceptable to Richard anyway once he reveals him, so that a wedding is never going to happen anyway.
But he goes through with the whole thing, and Alice thinks it's gonna happen. It's a very cruel. You know, one of many very cruel moments in which people are just being people and their emotions are being toyed with. But the wedding kind of reveals the absurdity of what it is they're competing over, right? Just the complete meaninglessness of it. So I think Richard says something like, I'll have the crown. And Henry says, you'll have what Daddy gives you. And then Richard says, I'm next in line, you know, and he. And he does it with. And this is Anthony Hopkins doing, you know, being Anthony Hopkins and doing a great job, but throwing a tantrum, basically, it looks like a child throwing a tantrum.
And they're talking about how they might go to war over this. I don't know that I've done a great job of describing it. I think the film does a very good job of bringing it out. But the sense in which these very high stakes about land and property and titles and who's going to be king are really. They're valueless, except insofar as they represent what it is the family really ultimately wants, what they want from each other at a different level.
20:45 Erin: The strange thing about that scene and the meaninglessness of that enterprise is the fact that, you know, marriage seems to mean maybe as Little as it does now, or like maybe it never meant very much. I don't know. I mean, it's strange to look at what marriage meant in the Middle Ages, you know, with our kind of postmodern eyes. But when it's all about power anyway, and it's all about just like one upsmanship or something, you know, you have the legal problem or the ecclesiastical problem of having to divest yourself of someone that you no longer like.
But you know, there's not a tremendous sense of marriage for love or anything like that. So it' swhat do I mean by all that? Just that everything seems to have been evacuated of meaning. Like all of the traditional ways in which maybe a modern day viewer might say, well, you know, they're married, so they care about each other because they're married. But it's sort of like the last reason why anyone in this film would care about each other is if they were actually married to each other. So the formalities of these arrangements or these schemes, whether they go through or whether they don't, seems ultimately to matter very little.
Like it matters to Henry, obviously, if Alys marries one of the other sons because he actually has some kind of genuine affection for her. But yeah, I think maybe that scene, that wedding scene kind of contributes to this sense of camp that I'm getting through the whole film. Because ultimately, even these life or death battles or even, or the prospect of having to haul in a bishop to suddenly marry you in the middle of a sentence, it's deadly serious, but also just so ridiculous at the same time and obviously true to life in terms of how things actually went in the Middle Ages that you're left only with how these people actually do feel about each other underneath everything, like the game playing.
Ultimately it is for me not so much about power as it is about getting out these feelings that they have towards each other. And it's not really for me very much about power at all. Is that what power is all about anyway? It's just about divesting yourself of unwanted feelings or trying to secure someone's affection? Or is it about these sort of relatively, in terms of import, low stakes feelings? Or is it about high stakes, actual history changing kinds of moves? Do you know what I'm saying?
23:09 Wes: I think power and status go together. And status and the seeking of recognition and honor and titles and all of these things is a kind of alternative to love. And there's a narcissistic element to it, right? It's often one way you admire me, but I don't you know, you're my subject. I don't have any obligation to you. So it's a more bounded way to have a relationship with someone. And to make the love less intimate and less potent, you protect yourself against intimacy, which is especially important in a family with these incestuous dynamics. So the power serves the purpose of keeping them sane, really, keeping them from going completely crazy, because the incestuous dynamics are so strong.
It was a cool little exchange between Geoffrey and Eleanor early on where they're scheming. And I think she's talking something about delaying Richard's wedding or something. I think the dynamics and the scheming in the movie is so complicated, it's hard to keep track of it. But anyway, at some point, Geoffrey says, I know you know. I know. I know you know. I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We're knowledgeable family. We're knowledgeable family is a great line because it sums up the incestuous part, right? The knowing. And that's the way Henry puts it when he gives that speech to Alice, you know, who is he known in the sense of.
Laid with. We're a knowledgeable family, which is to say, they're too much in each other's heads, but they're in that kind of hall of mirrors in which the way they know each other, the other side of that knowledge is the knowledge that keeps people away, keeps people from being too intimate, and that's the scheming. So there's knowing in the sense of really like an intimate knowledge of the other. And then there's knowing in the sense of you're reading their intentions to. In order to figure out your next step in a power struggle. And it becomes.
Is there a Princess Bride scene that's. That's like this.
25:14 Erin: The Wallace Shawn scene is like outwitting the poison. The poison cup is similar to this principle.
25:22 Wes: I think the guy who wrote the play and the. The screenplay. I think his brother wrote the Princess Bride, the Goldman.
25:29 Erin: So talk about a knowledgeable family.
25:34 Wes: Yeah. So this question of being, you know, being aware of what other people know, but also being aware that they know, you know, and then how far does that nesting or that loop. Where can you settle at a point where you think you've outsmarted them or looked farther ahead than them. Any case, all of that hall of mirrors effect provides some insulation against closeness. And then you move on to. I was gonna contrast that to. We don't have to do it exactly right now, but to the Eleanor scene with Richard. That very intense scene between them.
26:09 Erin: Yes, I was gonna suggest we go to that scene and look closely at it.
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28:41 Erin: Well, they've had a recent falling out for reasons that are never 100% explained. Like for the past couple of years they've been on the outs with each other as he's been off conquering things. So he's gotten the Aquitaine from her. Right. And he's just been out warring down there, perhaps. And so I wonder if the fact that he's gotten this from her has contributed to the cooling of relationships between them a little bit. But what I find most disturbing about this Richard and Eleanor scene is the fact that Eleanor loves to tell people about her sexual attraction to her husband.
It's very. It contributes to this ickiness where they're in the middle of a family scene and they just start like making eyes at each other. And there would have to be a little bit more alcohol. I think, if you were to stage this in a modern day interpretation in order to convince people that she would just suddenly start talking about how her husband's body was. That he had a form like mortal sin. But why does she do that?
29:40 Wes: Yeah, that happens in this scene. So they're scheming and at a certain point she tries to get sentimental with him. So she says, she says, I loved you more than Henry and it's cost me everything. And he says, what do you want? She says, I want us back the way we were. No, that's not it. All right then. I want the Aquitaine. And then he says, that's the mother I remember. We can win. She says, I can get you Alice. So I've got to have the Aquitaine. I must have it back. It's mine. I'll never give it up. She says, shall I write my will to Richard?
Everything. Would you believe me then? And then he says, paper. She says, where's paper? As if she's going to write her will. And he says, paper burns. She says, I love you. He says, you love nothing. You're incomplete. The human parts of you are missing. You're as dead as you are deadly. Don't leave me. You were lovely once. I've seen the pictures. So you have all this back and forth and she tries. She acts as if she's going to write the will on her body and cuts herself. And then he becomes upset and they. I think at that point they have an embrace, right.
And. Or she says, remember how I taught you numbers and the lute and poetry? This is something, by the way, Henry will later guess he even almost gets the line right about how she's been manipulating him. What kind of words. She would say, I taught you dancing, too, and languages. And all the music I knew and how to love what's beautiful. The sun was warmer then, and we were every day together. So you get this kind of weird descent from Bitterness and scheming into a loving moment. But a moment that has some incestuous overtones. And then at a certain point in that scene, she's talking about.
I think she does talk about sex with the father at some point. I didn't find that. But she compares, right? She compares him and the father. And having given up the father for him, he's her favorite over Henry. And she lost everything because of it. Right. She helped him with the rebellion. She ended up in prison because of it. That's how much she loved him. Oh, she says we shatter the commandments on the spot.
31:52 Erin: Yeah.
31:52 Wes: That's the line where she's talking about the relationship with Henry.
31:56 Erin: Right.
31:57 Wes: So it's kind of not the thing you should be saying to your son. Right.
32:01 Erin: Yeah. That was my big takeaway from that scene. Also, just the fact that when Richard says, you know, you're incomplete, the human parts of you are missing. You're as dead as you are deadly. Are we supposed to take that seriously? Are we supposed to take anything anyone says seriously? As you say, this is a really tender scene. And then in the next scene, Henry is making fun of them and doing his little Katharine Hepburn impression. I taught you. Prancing lamb and lute and flute, you know, and she's like, that's marvelous. That's absolutely me.
So then we're led to believe that she's circumspect enough to make fun of that tender scene that she just played with her son. It seems to me, of all the. Like, there are a lot of passions in the film that everyone is, like, overly human. They're not incomplete. Like, I think that part of the problem, you know, as Henry suggests, or actually as Eleanor suggests, is that there are too many sons, not that they have too few. You know, Henry wants to have more sons. She's like, I thought that was the one thing of which you had had enough. So the problem doesn't seem to me to be incompletion or a lack of something.
It seems to me to be an overabundance problem. So there are too many passions. And these scenes in which various people are accused of not feeling enough or not being human enough, you know, it seems a pretense to me, or like a script that these people have for each other, which ultimately doesn't seem to matter because he says these things and she just kind of ignores it and is able to get him on her side anyway. That's the other thing, is that they're really good at sparring. But most of the zingers just bounce off each other. So there's a kind of futility both to the passionate scenes like this one and to the ones in which they're really trying to.
33:43 Wes: There's a scene where she tries to get Alice and Henry to kiss. Says she has only an intellectual interest in it to see if it's how she imagines it. And then he says a lot of very tender things to Alice and then kisses Alice and she. And Eleanor gets very upset and says, I've lost again. I'm done for this time. At this point, she's in her bedroom in front of a mirror and looking at jewelry. And she has a great line where she's holding a necklace of some sort and says, I'd hang you from the nipples, but you shock the children. You're shocking the audience. Katharine Hepburn, to hear you say that.
34:22 Erin: I will admit that I love doing a Katharine Hepburn impression. And this is a gold mine for great lines to do an accent.
34:28 Wes: I want to hear it. I was going to ask you earlier if you were going to do a Katharine Hepburn impression.
34:33 Erin: That line is the most frequent line that I say in the Katharine Hepburn voice of all time. Like I used to go around saying, I'll save it for the post. I'll save it for the postscript. How about that? All right. Yeah, sorry, yeah.
34:46 Wes: I've seen you do your Katharine Hepburn impression. It's very spot on, very impressive.
34:51 Erin: I'm kind of always doing a Katharine Hepburn impression, but some moments are more robust than others.
34:58 Wes: A line like that, what is that doing? What is that about? She's in a state of despair. She's associating to putting on some sort of weird sexual display. And apparently that's in some sense meant for Henry. But the only reason she wouldn't do it is because of the children. She has to preserve them from that dynamic. But of course, in large part, the children are not preserved from it. And there are elements in the film where you get the idea that it's the fighting between Henry and Eleanor that has actually damaged them. Right. They're willing to consciously attribute the fact that they're psychologically damaged to the relationship between the mother and the father, which is not far fetched.
So it is, of course, about how the parents have treated the children, but it's also about the sick game, the sick relationship between the parents. So even witnessing that, even beholding that is damaging.
35:49 Erin: That's my favorite scene in the film, is her scene in front of the mirror. And it's also the scene in which I have the Most sympathy for her. I mean, I do throughout. But it's interesting that to me, all of Eleanor's hurt comes down to the fact that she's been sexually rejected by her husband or that she's insecure about her appearance and has been put aside. And like, the fact that she's kind of an also ran in her own marriage. And I think that her feelings of rejection of not being her own husband's favorite companion, that this is kind of repeated in each one of the children, that they all feel hurt for being rejected or they all have these resentments towards not being a favorite or are trying to hurt the one who is perceived to be the favorite in any given moment.
And I'm interested in this dynamic. Like, I think that not to speak too much from personal experience, like, I've experienced being both the favorite and the least favorite in different relationships in my life. And I've perceived both, as being, in a sense, equal punishments. I'm interested in this film in how you're screwed either way. Basically, how either way seems like a huge punishment. Except for in this scene in which you see the cost of Eleanor's not being the one that Henry wants to be with. This is the one scene in which all of that scheming and shuffling kind of falls away.
I don't know really what I want to say about that and about favoritism in general. It seems like everybody, in other words, is getting a raw deal in this film.
37:25 Wes: What do you mean by everyone's getting a raw deal? So in a way, no one is the favorite or.
37:30 Erin: Well, it seems like the way that favoritism works is that if you are the favorite, then you become the target of the people who are not the favorite, and you're cut down by other people's envy. And so it's a bad thing to be the favorite because you become the target of other people's desire to destroy you. And if you're not the favorite, that sucks too. Obviously, it's terrible to know that someone prefers someone else to you or flaunts things in front of you or ignores you and treats you like a total non entity. So it seems like if there is a dynamic in which there are favored ones and unfavored ones, everyone is the unfavored one.
But it also seems to me that there is no perfect dynamic in which, like, everyone can be equal all the time. Right? So I'm interested in the line that Eleanor says at some point in the movie where she says, you know, you can't all three be King. Two of you are going to have to learn to live with disappointment. I see the message of the capital M message. But the demonstration that this film carries out is that whether you're the favorite or not the favorite, you still have to learn to live with disappointment. You're still getting a bad deal. And I'm wondering if that's symptomatic of this particular situation or if I can reasonably draw these generalities that I'm trying to draw about the condition of any kind of tiered system or pecking order, whether it be within a family dynamic, within.
I don't know, whatever else. It could be within a job, a friend group, whatever the case may be, where affections will inevitably be unequal and
39:06 Wes: where envy is often aroused. But in this case, again, that dynamic gets writ large be just because they happen to be royals. So there's much more for them to fight about.
39:19 Erin: Is this an interesting question for you, or is it something that you're not this idea of favoritism or of unequal distribution of affection. Is this something that is an interesting psychological issue, or am I just being so obtuse and overly generalizing that there isn't much to say? Just people have preferences and that's it.
39:38 Wes: At the deepest level, this kind of dynamic is supposed to be psychologically fundamental. If you're of a psychoanalytic orientation. Because the whole premise of the Oedipus complex is that we have an attachment to the mother or early caretaker to maternal principle, however abstract you want to get. And in a way, we have to be extracted from that relationship. And the way we are extracted is to become painfully aware of the mother's subjectivity, which is to say, aware of the fact that her desire is not simply like the psychological version of a womb in which we can incubate forever, but that it is a vector.
And it's a vector that is pointed away from us towards the father or the other lover, however you want to put it, and that that's necessary. So we develop an aggression towards whatever it is. And it could be. It doesn't have to literally be the father. It could just be the mother's work, right? Eleanor uses this phrase in the film. Her life's work is ruined, or what a life's work. We should discuss that at some point. And anything else towards which the mother's desire is directed can become an object of envy and aggression. And at the most primal level, envy doesn't even need a third, right?
A father or something like that, or a sibling. You can just envy the Thing that is the source of love or nutrition. All right, so the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein talks about envy of the breast. And what you envy, you want to destroy it because. Because how dare it be outside of me? How dare I have to depend on something outside of me? Everything should be inside of me. I shouldn't be in that precarious situation. So envy. Envy doesn't have to simply manifest itself in these triangles. But on the other hand, when it does, you know, if it is manifesting itself in that Oedipal triangle, it serves the purpose of detaching you, right?
So that you can. There's a psychological birth. You leave that little Garden of Eden, but then now you have identifications with the paternal principle, which is to say work and culture and aspiration. You turn your psychological energies towards work and other love objects, right? Towards romantic relationships and things like that. And that diversion depends upon the intervention of the paternal principle and the resentment of that and the aggression towards that. And in this dynamic, that hasn't sufficiently worked for some reason, and you would think it would, because he's a king.
And he's a very Peter o' Toole type of king. He's loud and being very assertive. It's not like he's the passive, unassertive father who can't step in and be the barrier between the infant and the mother. But in this particular case, the mother and the father are also rivals. They're political rivals. And their children are pawns in that rivalry. And the children are also rivals with the father in a way, right? Not just in some abstract psychological way where I'm gonna become a film producer, too, and I'm gonna surpass my father, and not just that type of stuff, but literally may need to defeat the father to get what they want as far as their life's work is concerned.
But anyway, I think if the dynamic between the mother and the father involves their own type of rivalry and then the use of the sons as allies, then the father is no longer simply a successful intervening principle. Something to take people into the quote, unquote, symbolic order, as Lacan would put it. There's the opportunity to stay with the mother, which every son, I think, in some sense, has done. Even John, in a weird way. Right? So how does that speak to this problem of favoritism? And I was thinking out loud, and I'm not sure am I going to be able to get back to your question about favoritism.
And we learned that we're not our mother's favorite, you know, maybe knitting is her favorite. Maybe it's father, maybe it's knitting, maybe it's being the CEO. We might be high on her list. Right. But we can't be everything. I think favorite can have multiple meanings, but I think the meaning we want it to have is to be everything to that person. Nothing is more important. But also there's really nothing else that's significant that can compete, that all competitors are eliminated. And to know that that's not the case, that there's always things that compete for the mother's attention, is a problem.
And then that plays out in all of our relationships at some level, because we know that everyone has multiple relationships on a friendship level. We're polygamists. So I think you see those dynamics played out. I don't know if I've answered your question. I've gone on for a very long time now because I am just thinking about out loud. So I do think it's a very interesting question. It's just hard for me to fully wrap my head around it. I haven't thought fully about that. Does that help you elaborate your own thoughts on this?
44:48 Erin: I think so. I'm never quite sure what I think about these psychoanalytical readings of these dynamics because it always feels so foreign to me to think of things in those terms.
45:01 Wes: It still feels foreign to me, in a sense. I don't think it ever stops feeling foreign because. Yeah.
45:05 Erin: Yeah. Nor does it even seem right to me, that to be a favorite means to be everything to that person. For me, maybe. And again, I haven't. Though I'm the one bringing the subject up. I don't have really any set ideas about this either. I just think it's an interesting topic of conversation. But I think for me, or what my intuition might suggest about this, is that it's a matter of insecurity. So it's not that one has to be everything to one's mother, but that one has to feel secure that one is sufficiently valued by one's mother. And I think that the odd thing, maybe, about the Eleanor and Richards scene for me, is the fact that she's trying to win Richard over.
She's trying to make him, in that moment, secure in her love for him, secure in the fact that he is her favorite, and she's bringing up the very relationship that I identify as being the root of whatever insecurities he has about that relationship. In other words, the competing affection of Eleanor for Henry. You may be right that this desire for favoritism is to be everything to the parent. But I think that favoritism, if you're someone's favorite, it implies that you occupy a secure position within that person's affections, that you're at the top of a kind of a hierarchy.
And that can be a perilous place to be. Because you could be knocked out of that position by someone or something else, especially knitting. But the idea is a kind of search for security, which I think tells me that insecurity is at the root of maybe the desire to be recognized as the favorite. Or insecurity is, of course, a position of not being the favorite. And so the extent to which Henry and Eleanor have been occupied with either, alternately, like, having a passionate kind of love affair with each other and fighting with each other, I think has created the symptoms of this insecure environment in which there was no stable, secure sense of affection.
And then they chose favorites to use as weapons against each other. But that position is really perilous when you're talking about an environment in which secure attachments have not been formed. And so even when you are the favorite in this particular family dynamic, that's a perilous position to be in, both because you become the target of the other children and because you may just as easily fall off the top of that pyramid if it behooves the parent.
47:30 Wes: But in this case, he may also be right upon. In a game between the father and the mother, she's trying to win his affection in a way. What is the rebellion right in the play? Not historically, but what is it? But, you know, as you pointed out, there's the infidelity. And then, in a way, her project is to win him back, win his love. And the sons become subordinate to that project. They get used for that. Right. She turns them into her allies.
48:01 Erin: I think that's right.
48:02 Wes: So they can be favorites in a sense, but favorites in the sense that they're useful to. The favorite is Richard, because he's the most effective at, you know, she's gonna help him conquer Henry.
48:14 Erin: Yes. I also think that Richard must have been the most affectionate towards her when he was a child, Obviously the most willing to receive her influence and attention. And I think that her whole thing, right, is that she feels rejected by her husband and therefore is extremely insecure in her. Like, ultimately, I think a lot of it has to do with she's insecure about whether or not she's sexually desirable and attractive. And Richard offered her that attention, it seems, when Henry was out gallivanting. So her affection kind of transferred to him because he makes her feel more secure in her desirability, which is maybe another, like, thread to which I think we've already touched on to this incestuous element where she didn't get attention and affection from her husband, she gets it from her son.
49:02 Wes: In this dynamic, who's the favorite, right, Comes down to who has the land or who's going to be king. And only one person can be king, and only one person can have the. What's the name of it? The Vexin. So if there's a love language for this family, it's. It's land or dirt, as Eleanor later puts it. There's a scene towards the end where Eleanor says to Henry, my losses are my work. And he says, what losses? And she says, I'm the one with nothing. Okay? So nothing is nothing equivocates between she doesn't have him and his love, but also she doesn't have her freedom from prison and she doesn't have the land that belongs to her.
So he says, lost your life's work, have you? And she says, provinces are nothing, land is dirt. I could take defeats like yours and laugh. I've done it. So at that point where she says, provinces are nothing, land is dirt, I had the impression she was making fun of his pretension to not caring about that at this point, because he's made several gestures throughout the film that he's willing to give up all that stuff and he doesn't care about it. He just wants to marry Alice and that she's reacting to his idea that it's silly for you to care about the land.
So provinces are nothing, land is dirt. But no, in the context of the film, provinces are everything. And land is not just dirt, it's love. And they have fully bought in. I think at some level they know it's crazy, right? But the political battles, the battles over who's going to be king and who's going to have the land, they are signifiers of maybe who's gonna be the favorite, who's gonna get the love? And they really aren't of any value. They're just purely associated, right? Cause they're not gonna get the love if they get the land or the titles.
And they know that. They know it, and yet they can't help acting as if that's the case. They seem to be aware of it, and yet they just can't help themselves. To me, that's one of the most interesting things psychologically about the film. They are just caught up in this enactment and this kind of crazy belief that there's a pathway to love through political struggle and battle and scheming and all that stuff. And through hate, right? Because there's so much hate and hateful stuff, cruel stuff that goes on in the film, and resentful stuff. And it's as if there's a deeply held belief that hate can be used to win love in the same way that war might be able to win peace and all that.
51:32 Erin: I like that. Because I think that what you're saying essentially is that this is all, like, the land is kind of a proxy for the affections, but it's actually working in the opposite direction. Is that right? So when a really interesting moment that I love in the film, all three of the sons are together and Richard says to Henry, you know, what are you giving to Philip? What of mine? And John says, whatever you've got goes to me. And then Geoffrey says, and what's the. Nothing Geoffrey gets, You know, so each of the three of them are sort of like demanding.
They're like baby birds with their mouths open, you know, squawking. And so Henry tells them the terms that, you know, at this point in the. In the scheme, relatively early on, that Richard will succeed him, he'll get Alice and the crown. And Jon is told, like, you know, he can't get the lands because he couldn't keep whatever Henry gave him, that he would lose it on the battlefield. And John says something like, oh, well, you know, you can help me. You know, if you fight with me, I'll keep it. And Henry says, of course, like, he won't always be there to win back these lands for John, and he has to know that whoever has these lands is going to keep them.
And John says this really interesting line. You've led me on, right? Like, Henry has led him to believe that he's going to take over when Henry had really had no intention of giving up the crown to him. Of course, Henry really does have the intention of giving up the crown to him, but he's making this really interesting, you know, devil's advocate case that he can't give anything to John. And actually, it really doesn't make sense to give anything to John, because he's exactly right that John won't be able to hold any of these lands against his brother.
But what's interesting to me is the line you've led me on, because it's like Henry is like teasing everyone, and there's a suggestion of being a romantic tease or some kind of sexual tease even to his own sons, using this Land or these titles or the Vexin or the Aquitaine or whatever, as a kind of proxy, so that it's a kind of wooing or keeping everyone in play or keeping everyone happy to a certain extent. That involves lying. That's kind like if you were somewhat like a guy who's trying to keep three women who are prospective romantic partners, each one of them happy at different points, and making sure that none of them kind of leaves you, you know, but lying to all of them to keep them in play, or vice versa, if you're a woman who's trying to keep three guys or whatever the case may be.
Right. So whatever the arrangement that he's juggling. He's juggling them. That's the word. And it involves leading them on so that he has to placate the other two at various points, even though he wants only Jon to get it. It's an interesting. It's like he needs the others to feed off of this. He can't just give everything to Jon and then say that's the end of it, even though he could. Is it because. I mean, partially it's because he has to placate the other two, because they're going to rise up against him and have risen up against him. But it also seems to me to be a kind of a psychological need that parents maybe have in general, that Henry certainly has in particular, to like, keep the other two on the hook for.
For these sort of more. More mysterious parental reasons where you actually want to have the affection of all three of your children at various points. Or, you know, you want to have the security that, like, if John betrays you, you'll have someone else. And this is ultimately what motivates him. I think in the end, to want to have more sons is to finally find the one that he can bethat will be loyal to him without having to juggle the others. That he could finally get it right and not have these variables of these three people who might turn on him and have turned on him at any moment.
55:03 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a very good point. We should talk about that in postscript. Yes, because there's a point where he talks about having lot that point of despair where he talks about having lost his sons and you think because of your way, did you ever have them? When are you talking about. About. So we should. I think we should talk about that.
55:20 Erin: Great.
55:21 Wes: Thank you.
55:22 Erin: Thank you.
55:30 Wes: subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Com.
Friendship and Honor in “Becket” (1964)
Jul 03, 2023
In Jean Anouilh’s 1959 play “Becket,” the titular character seems at first to be a Saxon collaborationist to the Norman rule of England, and a man who has sacrificed his personal honor to his friendship with King Henry II and, as he puts it, “good living.” This will change when he becomes Archbishop of Canterbury, only to realize that he is enchanted by the “honor of God,” leading him to to defend at any cost the prerogatives of the Church against those of the state. When is honor more important than friendship? Wes & Erin discuss the 1964 film version of the play, with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, about a 12th-century high-profile bromance-gone-bad.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Wes: In Jean Anouil's 1959 play Becket, the titular character seems at first to be a Saxon collaborationist to the Norman rule of England and a man who has sacrificed his personal honor to his friendship with King Henry ii and, as he puts it, good living. This will change when he becomes Archbishop of Canterbury, only to realize that he is enchanted by the honor of God leading him to defend, at any cost, the prerogatives of the Church against those of the state. When is honor more important than friendship? In this episode, we discuss the 1964 film version of the play of Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton about a 12th century high profile romance gone bad. This is Wes Alwan.
0:54 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:00 Wes: Okay, so today we're talking about the film Becket, which is based on a 1959 play by Jean Anouilh called Becket or the Honor of God. And this is set in 12th century England. The most exciting time.
1:18 Erin: Don't knock it.
1:19 Wes: No, no. Actually, what's interesting is Anouilh got the idea for this play reading Augustine Thierry's history of the conquest of England by the Normans, which I think is 12 volumes. But he picked up one of the volumes at a used bookstore, I think, just because it was green and he wanted something green on his bookshelf. There was no burning interest in the Norman Conquest, but I downloaded and took a look at that book a little bit, and then I thought, you know, the Norman Conquest is really fascinating. We think of it 1066 as the beginning. It's not the beginning of England, but it's beginning at the beginning of what? I mean, we're on the way to the English language.
2:00 Erin: I think you're right. When I was a kid, I memorized all of the monarchs of England in order, and it was too difficult to get Ethelred and all the Saxon kings under my belt. So I decided that 1066 on is what I would count as the English monarchy. So as far as my historical efforts are concerned, that's kind of what I always thought of and what I was always taught as being the big bang of an English self concept, maybe, which has always been entangled. Right. With other ethnicities coming in and actually being the ruling class, while the native people are of a different ethnicity or a different tribal background.
2:39 Wes: Yeah, the thing that I hadn't given a lot of thought to, I knew that the Normans had come in and conquered and taken over and were speaking French as the language of the court. But I hadn't given a lot of thought to this. What is basically started as an occupation and the subjugation right of the Saxons, and then became gradually a new people with a new language and culture predicated on that integration of the two, which took, think, hundreds of years. And this play is set about 100 years after the Norman Conquest, and it concerns the friendship between Henry II and Thomas Becket, who, in the account of Thierry, and therefore of Anouilh, is a Saxon.
This turns out, by the way, to be historically inaccurate. And Anouilh found that out after he wrote the play, but decided to keep that in because that's one of the more interesting aspects of the play, which is that Henry II has befriended and raised up first to be his chancellor and then to be archbishop. This person who's supposed to be one of the underclass, supposed to be a Saxon, which is a fascinating plot point.
3:57 Erin: I wonder what that adds to the film, though, because I know that there's, in the story between Becket and Henry, there is some tension having to do with the fact that Henry makes Thomas and then Thomas betrays him. And I know that there was a class distinction, obviously, between them, as there's going to be between any, you know, king and commoner or even king and, you know, relatively lowly aristocrat. I wonder what this distinction, which in the film read to me as a racial metaphor, maybe what that adds to the drama of the film and what I think is already a really compelling story.
I mean, this is historically a really great moment for high drama. I guess. I just wonder, like, I knew going in that that Becket was a Norman. And so the fact that it made so much of this Saxon heritage kind of confused me. I. I just. I wasn't sure what it was doing, what it was illustrating about the nature of their relationship that was so worthwhile that it needed to be expressed in these really black and white terms. Norman, Saxon.
5:04 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right. This occurred to me as well. Even though Anouilh thought it was important to leave in. I'm not sure how much is really that necessary to the film. I think Anouilh himself was accused of being a collaborator. And by the way, the film is. It's a screenplay based on the play, and we're discussing the film, and it's a screenplay that won Best Screenplay Adaptation, won the Academy Award for that, and involved significant changes. I think is largely faithful to the play, but it involves some additions and some cutting. But, yeah, Anouilh himself was accused of being a collaborator with the Germans during World War II.
I think he was initially imprisoned and then got out and was fully willing to work as a playwright and intellectual during the German occupation. So I think part of what he's thinking about with the Norman occupation of England is the German occupation of France. But again, I think you're right. I'm not sure that it's all that essential to the film. In the beginning, we get this question of honor. So King Henry is at his bath and Becket is attending him. And they have this conversation about how he reconciles his honor with being a quote, unquote, collaborator.
That's what Henry says to him. And Henry is very fast and loose with subjects which have a lot of potential for humiliation of Becket. Right. His subservience to Henry and the fact that he's part of the suppressed underclass and all that. So the way Becket responds is to say that honor is the concern of the living. It's a private matter. It's an idea. And he loves good living. He makes himself out to be a pragmatist who loves good living. And good living is Norman. He loves life. And the Saxon is basically brought up to be slaughtered. So he's doing the thing that will keep him alive.
And honor is not all that relevant. He makes this argument, which is really weird, which is that, you know, you can't be honorable if you're dead. And Henry says, well, there's something that's not quite right about that reasoning. And of course, Henry is right. Sticking to one's honor may lead to you getting killed or executed often does at this time. Right. So the point is to be honorable up to the point where you die for that, where you're martyred for that. It's kind of irrelevant whether you can be honorable after you're dead if you are dishonorable while you're living.
Right. So Beckett's argument seems to be, well, I'm going to be dishonorable while I'm living because I can't be honorable when I'm dead. So it doesn't make much sen. But then at the end of that scene, we get from Becket this talk about introducing forks into the royal feasts. And this is the beginning of the idea that Becket is a kind of. Ironically, he's kind of a civilizing force for all these people who basically behave like savages. He's a civilizing force in several different ways. And that fact and the pragmatism in the beginning, it'll change.
But the pragmatism seemed to be connected. But just going back to your point, the conflict that arises between Henry and Becket, which does have something to do with honor once he's the Archbishop and has discovered a different kind of honor, honor of God, that conflict doesn't really have a lot to do with his being a Saxon. There's, in fact, nothing really very little in the film is made of that conflict. Right. Very little is made of the fact that Henry kills Beckett's girlfriend, basically, or causes her to commit suicide by being about to rape her.
And several other reasons that Becket would have for having legitimate grievance with Henry. Those aren't really the motivating force in the film. So I think your point is well taken. Maybe he could have cut it out.
9:03 Erin: There's a suggestion that the Saxons are maybe more civilized than the Normans. You know, there's this sort of topsy turvy element to it. Of course, Becket is introducing the fork as a Florentine invention. It's anachronistic. The introduction of the fork to England didn't happen for hundreds of years. So that, to me was laugh. Like I laughed out loud. It's second only to this moment in the Passion of the Christ when they credit Jesus with inventing the dining room table. It's absolutely ridiculous.
9:36 Wes: Because you need a place where people can say grace.
9:39 Erin: Yeah. You only sit on one side of it.
9:42 Wes: Right. Exactly.
9:44 Erin: Anyway, I guess. Okay, well, the truth is gonna come out now because I will say not to turn this into the Siskel and Ebert podcast, but I hated this movie. I hated it.
9:54 Wes: Okay?
9:54 Erin: It was difficult for me to get through, and I'm really interested in talking about it, and I'm really interested in hearing what you love about it, because this is a film you were interested in doing. I think it's safe to reveal that to the listener. But, you know, I had always thought that I had seen this, but now I'm certain I haven't because one element of the movie would have bothered me so much that it would have stuck in my memory, you know? So I should preface this by saying that I really love the story, the historical story of Thomas Becket, and I love Murder in the Cathedral.
And just reading about the history, or at least I did when I was a kid, probably now, if I went back and reread it, it would be a real snooze. But anyway, I think that that's probably at the root of my problem with the film. This Norman Saxon conflict, which is sort of trumped up various other historical inaccuracies and these moments, like the fork moment, where it turns into, like, an opportunity for someone to get a fork in their butt or whatever. Right. The food fighting scene. So the historical inaccuracies or that kind of flourish with the fork really distracted me, and none of them seemed necessary in a story that was already really packed with drama from the beginning.
So I didn't see what purpose they served.
11:04 Wes: Yeah. So the Saxon thing comes from the Thierry history. He just. He read the 30 pages that involved Becket, and that was what Thierry said, and then he didn't get that fact check checked until it was too late. Yeah. The fork I don't know about. I'm not as bothered by the historical inaccuracy.
11:22 Erin: There were many other things that I probably didn't notice. Yeah. I mean, the. The thing that would have stuck out to me, which is how I knew that I hadn't seen the film, was its treatment of Eleanor of Aquitaine and even of Henry's mother. So Henry was very close with his mother. His mother was a very formidable woman and politician, if you will, you know, in quotes, in her own right. And the reduction of both of those women to these kind of idiotic harpies, I mean, you know, they do say some pieces of criticism that. That Henry should pay more attention to, but I suppose what that diminishing of those two figures and really of any other woman in the film, to exclude them from a possible relationship with Henry, whether it be killing them off, having them kill themselves, you know, mischaracterizing various relationships, it almost made Becket look like the only viable romantic option for Henry in all of England.
I just wonder again why that needed to be. It's turning this relationship that actually has a lot of nuance and complexity into something that's very, to me, sort of ham handed, very stark. Right. The same thing as this Saxon Norman conflict where it's like, oh, I can't be friends with you because you're a Saxon, but I'm friends with you anyway because you're a Saxon. You know, that kind of stark dichotomy seemed very similar to me in terms of the way that it treated any other relationship in Henry's life. So that Becket was his only friend and his only love interest.
Right. And the loss of that represented. Whereas I think the reality was that Henry had a lot going on in his life. Right. And I think that you didn't have to make Becket the figure upon which Henry hung all of his love and friendship. And to be this catch all for all of Henry's emotions. It didn't have to all hinge on Becket. There could have been a portrayal of the complexities of all the intrigue that was going on and much more. You know, Becket was doing lots of things that were really pissing Henry off until the end. So, you know, it could have been a more fun, almost cat and mouse game.
There could have been a great scene in which, you know, not to totally rewrite the film or to argue that I could have written this better, but, you know, it would have been interesting to bring Eleanor in as the formidable woman that she was and have her perhaps align with Becket. Or, you know, you could take a lot of historical liberties, I think, so long as you do it in a way that I think gets to a deeper truth about a historical situation, or if it brings something out about the real nature of the relationship, even if it does so in a sort of compressed way, I think I would have taken it a little bit more seriously and I would have forgiven some of those inaccuracies if it lent itself to more complexity.
I suppose what I'm saying is that these inaccuracies shut the film down for me.
14:13 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think it's best to look at it as fiction with a bit of a historical backdrop. And the focus, really is this relationship between Henry and Becket, which, when I first saw the film, well, I should say this is a film that my mom was into, and it was around when I was a kid, in a way, I think as a kid, I thought, well, this is kind of a boring adult thing. But the murder of Becket in the church, or the killing of Becket in the church, in the end, it always made this impression on me. And then when I saw it as an adult, I was just.
And this was years ago, saw it for the first time as an adult. I was delighted by the language. I also found the relationship between Becket and Henry really interesting. And I think there's something there about the chemistry between Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole that's going on. But what's interesting about it is not really principally the class thing that is brought in. The class thing really, in a way, doesn't matter. We have an odd couple relationship, first of all, we have two men who are. Well, at least Henry has this passionate love for Becket, but Henry is also a impulsive sociopath, basically.
And Becket is a little harder to figure out in the beginning. Is he a man of principle? Is he the amoral pragmatist that he portrays himself to be? It turns out not right. He will turn out to be someone who is entirely devoted to principle and in particular to the church and the honor of God as opposed to the supremacy of the state, where the state in a way, comes to represent the whims and impulsiveness of Henry II and his brutality. But in the beginning, what he does is more pragmatic. So, for instance, when they are on the hunt and they take shelter in the hut of some peasants and Henry wants to basically rape the girl that's in the hut, Becket is a restraining force, but he's not a die hard stickler for principle in the sense that he would get away from this sociopathic, terrible person.
He's there as a moderating force and obviously he's not going to be able to moderate all of it. He's only going to be able to do a little. I'm sure Henry is engaging in all sorts of crimes that Becket is standing by and can't do much about, including the attempted rape of his own, what seems like his girlfriend and then her suicide. So. And he seems a stoic in the face of this. And there are some things about even Gwendolyn, this woman who ended up committing suicide, kind of intimates. And there are several points in the film where it's intimated he's not really all that capable of love in some personal sense.
He finds it in God, but he's a little bit too, what's the word? Abstract or stoic in a way. So you have this very passionate, powerful person who loves Becket, loves this person who's very, very different. And then the attachment that Becket has to Henry in the beginning is a little more unclear. It's not entirely cynical. The whole backdrop for this, the social environment, is complete cynicism, whether it's people in the church or people in the government, people in power. Right. They even. They have trouble even comprehending Becket, that anyone would behave that way except out of cynical motives.
This is what interests me. Becket is hard to define in the beginning, and then he takes on this new form later on in the film where he is willing to have this enormous conflict with Henry, this man he's been serving over principle that we didn't even know he cared about early on.
18:09 Erin: What makes Becket such an interesting person, historically speaking as well, is the fact that no one can really trace the roots of this conversion that happens. And I think to this day, lots of people read cynical motives into. I mean, I guess it depends on what you think about the church or whether or not you're English, you Know, I think the English maybe have a much more complicated relationship, or English Anglicans, anyway, have a much more complicated relationship with Becket probably, than someone from the States whose Catholic is going to have.
But I think that this curiosity at the heart of the figure of Becket is really well portrayed by Burton because he's someone onto whom you can map any possible number of explanations or motives why he's behaving the way that he is. The film obviously guides your hand, and later we see that it's a genuine conversion. But I do wonder about whether this is the same person. You know, I think that's what I'm most interested in. Is this the same person from the first half of the film as the second half of the film? The roots were there, the sort of character, and not in terms of character morality, but like the character traits are there in part one and in Part two, Or does some truly supernatural, in the religious sense, a sort of supernatural conversion happen that changes the character between parts one and two?
I was looking at the opening scene of the film again, and Henry is still struggling to understand Beckett's conversion. Beckett's change of heart, his conversion and breakup at the same time, break up with Henry, and he wonders if it was Gwendolyn, if that was like, the moment at which this break occurred. Which is really funny because I wouldn't locate it there necessarily. Right. I mean, maybe the film does for us, and the film points to that moment as being an explanation. Of course, it's entirely ahistorical, but points to that as being the breaking point between the two men.
20:03 Wes: Logically, you would think it would, but it doesn't seem to. That's one of the interesting things for me about the film is nothing is made of Gwendolyn. Right. And nothing is made of being a Saxon in a contemporary film. The Gwendolyn thing and the class thing would be centered and Beckett's resentment based on that would be centered, but they really fall to the wayside. You can give a cynical interpretation where Beckett's not really concerned about defending the church and is really concerned about those other things. But I think that runs against the way the film goes.
20:33 Erin: But I'm just wondering about his relationship with Gwendolyn because. Or what that reveals about his character, because once, you know, she kind of asks if she could see Becket again after Henry will have his way with her that night, and Becket says no, I don't know. Does that represent rigidity or not? On the one hand, it represents a certain kind of rigidity. On the other hand, he must not have been as rigid in his love for her as we might think. So that was the most inscrutable moment in the film for me, trying to reconcile the deep love that I think it was, trying to show that Becket had for this woman and how devastated he was over this impending moment, while also kind of having to have a poker face, being affected by her suicide, but also essentially telling her that once she's raped by Henry, she's going to be either damaged goods or Henry's property, that Becket can no longer have any.
So I wondered where a certain rigidity, which I read into Beckett's character. He's uncompromising. That's part of what breaks him and Henry up in the second half of the film. Right. I wondered where that uncompromising nature was tending to in that Gwendolyn episode.
21:53 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because they have an exchange where she says something to the effect that if the Welsh had won the war, she would have married a man of her own race and at her father's castle. And then later on, she'll relent and say she could have just as easily ended up marrying Becket and says, you've taken my heart before you captured my body. He has a sort of reaction to that, doesn't say anything. And she asks if she said something wrong. And he says, somehow I can never support the idea of being loved. So there's a lot of ambiguity in the beginning of the film that goes away in the second half of the film after he becomes archbishop.
He seems to care about this woman and to be kind. But on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a strong passion there. At least that's what he says right about himself. And there are other parts of the film where it's similarly intimated that he can't love. You know, Henry will accuse him of that. So Henry's all about, I love this man, I love him, I love him, I love him. Just never shuts up about how much he loves Becket, even when he's trying to kill him. And Becket is always playing it close to the vest, doing things that are basically decent, like preventing people from being raped if he can, or preventing the raping and pillaging of an entire French town, the slaughter of a French town, because Henry's barons just want to do it for fun, but it never seems to be out of love.
I think when he becomes religious, he can combine his principledness with love in the sense of love of God. Not love of people, but love of God is where Becket can go but his relationship to people is based not so much on personal passion as on something ethical. Although Henry accuses him of being aesthetic. Right. Which goes along with the amoral aspect of him that seems to be there. So the aesthetic, in a way, is premoral. Or for a philosopher like Nietzsche, it would be a superior form of the superior system of values. But for German philosopher and poet Schiller, the aesthetic is on its way to morality.
Right. When people start decorating their swords and not just slaughtering each other with them, they are on their way to some higher relationship to the world and to other people in which they can treat people with respect and restraint. And that's where Becket seems to be. This ability, it's almost like an aesthetically based respect for other people that hasn't risen yet to the point of having some sort of transcendent justification or basis which it will get in God. So he has the seeds of it. But I don't think he quite understands himself in the beginning or why he behaves how he behaves.
And it's ironically, Henry, by giving him this title and this power, who allows Becket to come to this sort of self realization about what's actually motivating him and where his passion lies, if we could call it passion. So I'm saying, anyway, the scene with Gwendolyn, I think in a way that the idea seems to be that he can't really feel passionately about a woman. He has to wait to fully find God before he can feel that.
25:06 Erin: Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm thinking about what you said about the aesthetic as being like, on the way to. What was it? Morality.
25:14 Wes: On the way to the ethical.
25:15 Erin: On the way to the ethical morality. In the same way, I'm thinking about Becket's regard for John, that Saxon monk who tries to attack him and who he then is able to convert to his side because of his really convenient habit of praying to Jesus out loud
25:34 Wes: and being overheard.
25:35 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah. At first you think, okay, this is just because this is like, it's so stagey. So you think, okay, this is just a play being filmed. I guess they could have done this in voiceover, though. Like, why aren't they doing this in voiceover when you first hear him praying out loud and then you realize, oh, because it becomes a plot point. And if they're. If they're going to do it in voiceover, then John can't overhear him. So in the same way as you say that the aesthetic is on the way to ethics, I wonder if For Beckett's relationship with John, if self love, if you will, is like on the way to love, that Becket seems to be interested in John before his conversion because he sees himself in John.
Yeah, he says that what we might make of that. Yeah. And if that is what's motivating him. At first we wonder if his motives are entirely self interested from the beginning. Right. If he. He does have a soft spot for making sure that women aren't gonna be taken advantage of by Henry, who is, you know, in real life, was also a horrific human being. So we wonder if he's just playing a role to keep himself in power, to keep his relationship with Henry going, even as he's sort of repulsed by Henry's behavior. I'm not sure that I buy the genuineness of their friendship from the beginning.
And I think there's obviously a reading of the film which can be, as you say, entirely cynical in which Becket was never friends with Henry and was just using him for some sort of political means. So maybe Beckett's self regard is what motivates his behavior in the beginning and what the turning point actually is is not the conversion, but in seeing himself, but in another person. The moment in which he is able to extend himself to really caring about another person actually happens when he sees John as a younger version of himself. I think that's a bit of a stretch, but I think there's something, and I think that it's this thread that runs through the film to a certain extent, insofar as the film is concerned with this real homoerotic undertone, you know, where Henry is really in love with Becket.
And that seems much healthier than whatever Beckett's doing, which he sort of seems like he's in love with. And I'm talking about the figure in the film, of course, not the historical figure. But Becket seems to be like really in love with himself. And I think that's something maybe within the psychology of being uncompromising and believing yourself to be really right. Am I wrong there?
28:05 Wes: You could always point to the narcissism of the principled behavior. Right. I love my own morality, but that's a big subject. Is that a fair critique? I mean, at least probably, partially, but. But on the other hand, people can be principled.
28:22 Erin: And I think that a lot of people read the historical Becket as being motivated by that impulse. You know, those who want to read real life Becket as being a cynical figure or an arrogant figure would read his uncompromisingness as being a sort of self regard early on in the second part of the film, his sort of post conversion spends a lot of time looking at and adoring this crucifix. And I wonder if there's. You know, I just want to say that I'm not sure that I believe that Becket in this film is motivated by self regard. I think that's a possible reading, but I think there's also this reading wherein Beckett's regard and maybe real love for Henry to the extent that he's capable of loving, is transferred to the person of Christ. And that that's kind of symbolized by this crucifix that figures prominently in some of the scenes.
29:17 Wes: We can give a cynical interpretation of Becket's conversion, so to speak, but nothing is really made of it in the film if that's true. Right. So there's nowhere to go with that. And, you know, it's more interesting to me as a case study and someone becoming uncompromisingly principled and the way in which the roots of that are there in a less principled pragmatism or the kind of pragmatism where the principles are more in the beginning. You get him being loyal to the king and serving the king, and there's something about service which seems to attract Becket.
He will even towel off the king and say, nobility lies in the man, my dear, not the towel. Because the king points to the potential humiliation of Becket being the towel boy. Right. And then there's the conversation about what honor involves and the fact that he's a collaborator and all that. And then you get a scene after that where Henry is gonna surprise Becket at court by making him chancellor and for a very cynical reason, to support him in trying to extract money from the Church for his wars. And Becket goes along with it. He's surprised at first and tries to wriggle out of it a bit, but then takes it on and is willing to fully support Henry in that project.
Then you get the hut with the girl, you get the Gwendolyn incident, her suicide, after which Henry is completely concerned about, comes back crying, basically because he's worried he's ruined his friendship with Beck. You're not going to love me anymore. I'm never going to know what you're thinking. And then there's the saving the French town from the assassination attempt which you were pointing to. Right. When John Saxon tries to assassinate him is another potential turning point. But as you look at all these early plot points, each one of them kind of builds up.
So I think you're right. I think the assassination attempt contributes significantly. And Becket says, this is basically, I'm coming face to face with the ghost of me when I was young. And the suggestion there. And maybe we can retrieve some relevance for the Saxon thing, but the suggestion there is that he, like John, was basically a member of the Saxon version of the ira. Right, Norman's out. Get the Normans out. We're gonna do whatever we can. And then he became a collaborator, something that marks him as being extremely unprincipled, unless you conceive of it as someone who's trying to be a moderating force or change things from within, or someone who's just confused.
And that goes to my reading of his motivations, you know, versus the purely cynical reading. I think there's an element of truth to the cynical reading and concept of self, love and all that. But I think Becket, in a way, doesn't understand what's motivating him. And he'll say that later on when he is talking to God and saying, you know, I found honor in this in the beginning. He's behaving at a surface level as a dishonorable collaborator and wrestling to some extent with that problem, even though he does it very quietly in a way. Henry does all that for him, basically by teasing him and saying, look at what you're doing.
And then that scene about the aesthetics comes right after the assassin scene, where Henry is saying, look, you know, look at this girl's ass. That's real aesthetics. It looks like an apple. It's round as an apple, something like that. And in contrast to what Becket has, and this is what Henry says, you love work, don't you? Henry says to Becket, if you love anything, I love doing what I have to do and doing it well. You'd be as efficient against me as for me, wouldn't you? Henry replies, if fate had arranged it that way, says Becket. So he's.
He's honest about how the happenstance nature of their relationship and the happenstance nature of his loyalty to the king. And then the king says, so what in most people is morality in you? It's just an exercise in. What's the word? Aesthetics, says Becket. Yes, that's the word. Always aesthetics. And then he says, my version of aesthetics is the body of a woman. Which, of course, is precisely not aesthetics. That's appetite, that's lust. And the aesthetic, the reason why it's on the way to the morals, because it raises us above that we become interested in form, not in exploiting objects and consuming them, but in the formal nature of objects when we have a response to something as beautiful.
So in the beginning, it's all confusion, and I'm like, what's going on in Beckett's head? It's very opaque. But the king, in a way, gives Becket, I think, an idea which is going to be the seed of something bigger, and it's going to be the seed of the downfall of their relationship, which is that what in most people's morality in you is aesthetics. But aesthetics can become morality. And then it's not long after that, right, that he makes him archbishop and really seals the fate of their friendship. The motives of Becket in the beginning of the film are opaque, and there's little hints of the material that might serve the purpose of the very hardcore principle thing that he does in the second part of the film.
But it's all jumbled and confused, so. Which is what I found very interesting about the film.
34:29 Erin: So, yeah, I think you're helping me articulate what I think is my real impression of the film and not one of these other alternate theories that I was sort of exercising as potential motivations. I think maybe more than anything, I mean, I think that the film is portraying Becket, obviously, as having, as you say, this inherent aesthetic sen. But even more than that, or even more interesting than that, is this other idea you're getting at, which is.
34:53 Wes: And that's what, by the way, the fork is about. Manners are one area where aesthetics and morality are kind of obviously mixed. But anyway, so there's the civilizing element, but it's more aesthetically focused.
35:05 Erin: That's good. I think that another, maybe even more interesting, maybe something that I believe is that we don't know what's happening in Becket because Becket doesn't know what's happening in Becket. Right? Because, in fact, what is happening within Becket is a total mystery. There is a logical illogic to the fact that any human being might make a choice called, quote, unquote, moral. And of course, Christianity would point out that any moral act, like anything that a human being does that can be called good, is simply God moving within us, right?
Operating us with, like, you have to, in fact, good word for this play, right? You have to collaborate with God in order to be able to do that. But there's something inherently frustrating about that, I think, especially when you're a kid and you're learning about this, because it's like, oh, the only thing that you're really capable of doing, doing on your own is behaving badly. That, too, might be considered the operation of various Vices working within you, or the devil, or both, however you might conceive of in terms of what your idea of supernatural forces might be.
But within Christianity, there's the idea that the only time that you can ever achieve anything is in collaboration with God or in allowing God to work in you. And so the mysteriousness of that and the inherent lack of agency that implies to a certain extent, makes any good act that anyone might perform in a way fundamentally mysterious and fundamentally supernatural. Right. So whatever Becket does in the first half of the film that might be good is perhaps as mysterious as anything he does once he becomes archbishop. But I like this idea that you're saying that it's all kind of a mystery at the beginning.
And then there's a more. Maybe we can argue that the only change that happens in the second half of the film is that Becket accepts the illogic or the mystery of what we might call God's grace more consciously and less begrudgingly or in a less confused way, like it has an outlet that is just slightly more conscious than it was in the first half of the film.
37:06 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because he's already undergone one conversion in the opposite direction, in a way, right from the. A member of the Saxon underground resistance to being a collaborator. So a decrease in honor and principledness, it seems like. But he's on his way to another reversal in which it's no longer nationalistic pride or something like that that would be the motivator, but religion, God, Christianity, nevertheless, that conversion to being ultra principled makes him impenetrable to others, you know, in the way that he's impenetrable to us in the beginning, to the audience in the beginning of the film.
He becomes impenetrable to everyone else over the course of the film because even the pope and the cardinals can't comprehend what it would mean to do what Becket is doing. You know, I think one of the cardinals says that to the pope. That man Becket smacks of too much sincerity. It's a strategy like any other, or he's completely devoted to his. His own advancement. So they read his holier than thou attitude as being completely cynical, but of course, that's because they themselves are cynical. And the Church has already been compromised, it seems, by the state.
So on one level, Becket is trying to preserve the prerogatives of the Church over and against the state when it comes to the trial. You know, the ability for the Church to handle the malfeasances of its priests and not have the state intervene. But the way the power of the Church is maintained is much more collaborative and involves the Pope. Right. Being willing to take a bribe, essentially money, money from the king. And, and as the Pope puts it, the Church must exist peacefully within the framework of the state, not by hot headed and intemperate methods.
Which is an interesting accusation against Becket given that he seems so sober and that that's meant to contrast very markedly with the hotheadedness of Henry. So he's, you know, the Pope will say to him, you've proved your moral worth, but you've split the Church of England into two parties. And Becket says, you know, if I'm wrong, I'm repentant. And the Pope says, well, that doesn't solve the problem. The Pope is the pragmatist now, not Becket. So the state, and because the Church has become such a temporal power, it understands that it's the Pope and cardinals and everyone else seems to, they seem to understand the world in terms of power, even though not questioning the fact that religion is actually important.
And it's not the kind of cynicism in which they don't really believe in God. But this is all an act. That's not what it is. It's just that their comprehension of the world, even for the religious establishment is only through and filter, you know, feel free to disagree with me. But happens through this lens of power politics. So Becket becomes something that is impenetrable, incomprehensible to others, that even if it is complete narcissism and he's in love with his own virtue, or it's that he's just simply principled and that he found honor in God and loves God.
And either way, this is not the way anyone is functioning. Right. In a sense, they're all collaborators. Collaboration is just the name of the game. And Becket thought he understood that, thought he was okay with that. It turned out not to be.
40:38 Erin: Yeah, that's really interesting. My understanding of the real life history, of course it's very complicated. But the Pope did encourage Becket to be more moderate in his approach to this church versus state dilemma. And in fact there were many in the Church in England at the time who were also, you know, I think the concern was that, as is suggested in the film, that church courts were dealing too leniently with real crimes. So there were many in the Church at the time, from what I understand in the little bit of research I was able to do before we recorded, I used to know a lot more about this When I was super interested in this, in this time period.
But I've forgotten a lot. I think I read parts of the Clarendon Constitution and stuff like that to try and really figure out what was going on and what the real bones of contention were between Becket and Henry. I think that this invention of this Lord Gilbert issue in the film is a pure invention. It's what I was able to find out, but it sort of illustrates one potential conflict that might have come up. Anyway, my understanding is that there were plenty within the church who also wanted to find a sort of middle way or a solution in which to better achieve a balance between the criminal and church courts.
And so it's interesting the ways in which the film treats collaboration in this kind of black and white way, whereas maybe, arguably, or some would argue in real life that Beckett's lack of compromise might have actually been bad for the Church, like he was seeing things a bit too starkly.
42:07 Wes: The real Becket, I think, is very likely and nothing like this fictionalized version. The research that I did on this was through Wikipedia. I downloaded a lot of Norman Conquest books because I suddenly got interested, and of course, I didn't have time to read them.
42:20 Erin: But the contrast is interesting because in the film, it's all poeticized. But what in the film looks like, oh, he's finally not collaborating with other people, he's sticking to his guns and everybody else. In every other character, collaboration is associated with. With corruption. Whereas what I'm maybe trying to say is that in real life, I think these issues were more complicated in Beckett's day. I think they're more complicated today. I just think it's interesting the way that the film is underscoring this sharp division between collaboration and principle.
Whereas most often, I think, in our own lives, we have to learn to collaborate, right? We have to learn to be more compromising and less uncompromising. Right. And I'm wondering if in the film, Beckett's behavior can be interpreted as a kind of a madness. In fact, in the film, the crime that precipitates this break is really horrible. And maybe you think to yourself, like, okay, this person does deserve to be tried. And anyway, I keep referring to the real life history because of the fact that I think it makes such an interesting contrast to the way that the film is choosing to tease certain of these elements out.
And I'm hoping that it's revealing something about the trut choices that the playwright made in thinking about what to highlight from the story or what to sort of isolate from the story and whether or not. That could be illustrative about the film's themes, but I'm not sure if that's doing something.
43:48 Wes: I mean, I don't know what's in the Thierry history, but we know that the whole Saxon thing is wrong, and he got that from there. But I don't know if he also got some alternate account of Becket, but it looks like probably what happened between Becket and Henry in real life was just a big power struggle. And that one historian, Josiah Cox Russell, according to Wikipedia, said, basically, Becket was this vain, ambitious, and overly political person. That could have been an interesting story in and of itself. Right? That story about this personal relationship between them, and then they get in a pissing match and neither is willing to back down.
And Becket was just excommunicating people left and right, you know, Right. Just all the king's people. And the king was getting pissed off and harassing Beckett's people, you know, and it was a big problem for the Church. And Pope put an interdict on England and to get Henry to negotiate again, all this stuff going down. And I think ultimately what got Becket killed was he couldn't resist excommunicating some more people, you know, his tit for tat. And then he finally got murdered. And it could have worked out. People had been reasonable, and maybe Henry was the more.
Actually turned out to be the more pragmatic and reasonable one in real life. But what the playwright seems to want to do is use the historical background as a way to amplify this idea of a personal relationship between an authority like Henry, like. So this temporal, worldly, personal relationship that involves subjection and absolute power, almost. So the king has absolute power over his subjects. How is he going to be friends with any one of them? And especially the kind of intense love that he has for Becket. And again, accentuated by the Saxon Norman thing.
And then the question is, the development is from that relationship to another relationship of subjection, in a sense, right to God, to a transcendent or to some transcendent principle for one's behaviors. So Becket can be loyal to Henry, and there's something proto moral in that. And he can be interested in forks and aesthetics and preventing rape and basic decency in various proto moral behaviors. And it may have something to do with this idea of service to power, but he doesn't find morality in principle per se, until it's subjection to a transcendent principle, not a more imminent worldly, aesthetic principle, something like that.
So history is kind of discarded in the service of that project, I think. And then the question is, I think, you know, you ask a good question, which is, well, is that right? Is that reasonable to do what Becket did? You know, so even if we put aside the historical thing and just look at it within the context of the play, isn't he just being crazy? Hasn't he gone too far? Is that what is required of us? Is that morality? Is that principle? Or is that just a complete failure to implement moral principles within the real world, which is what we have to do.
Right. We're not in the kingdom of heaven. We have to make it work on the ground, so to speak.
47:05 Erin: It reminds me a lot of Billy Budd, actually.
47:07 Wes: Yeah, actually, I was reminded of it too. Yeah.
47:09 Erin: Just that idea that the tools that you might have to work with, you might have an idea that there's always going to be a rigidity in the way that you apply them, but in fact, you have to be really flexible. Or maybe not. I mean, you know, obviously, Billy Budd has at least two possible interpretations. I think that ultimately, what's his name? Who's the captain? His inflexibility is presented as being a tragedy. It's interesting that here it's presented as being a triumph in situations which are really not dissimilar to each other. I think it depends on context, but that very context is exactly what both of those characters would disregard.
So I just want to return, though, to Henry, because I do think he's an interesting character. I think that O'Toole is just so hammy in this film. It was really hard to take him seriously. And in fact, it leaned toward camp for me, especially the latter half of the film. Or when they were meeting on the beach, one of them should have come out of the surf like Bo Derek or something.
48:03 Wes: But on that note, let's transition to post script and discuss the alternate ways. And Peter O'Toole, because I was just thinking when you said that before, right before that I was thinking about Peter o' Toole's charisma. But, yeah, it's over. It's over the top. So let's discuss that in Postscript.
48:24 Erin: Sounds good. All right, thank you, thank you.
48:35 Wes: subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
Losing Your Head in Alice Munro’s “Carried Away”
Jun 05, 2023
Jack, a Canadian soldier recuperating in a European hospital during World War I, begins a correspondence with Louisa, the librarian in his hometown whom he has only seen and loved from afar. Their letters turn romantic. But when the war ends and he returns home, Jack never shows his face to Louisa and marries another woman, leaving Louisa to wonder if she’s been the victim of some diabolical trick. Then Jack becomes the victim of an accident at the local factory. Wes & Erin discuss Alice Munro’s short story “Carried Away” and ask how the unforgiving machinery of a factory might mimic the so-called machinery of courtship, and how being carried away, whether by love or by ideas, might prove dangerous.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: Jack, a Canadian soldier recuperating in a European hospital during World War I, begins a correspondence with Louisa, the librarian in his hometown, whom he has only seen and loved from afar. Their letters turn romantic, but when the war ends and he returns home, Jack never shows his face to Louisa and marries another woman, leaving Louisa to wonder if she's been the victim of some diabolical trick. Then Jack becomes the victim of an accident at the local factory. Today we're discussing Alice Munro's short story Carried Away and asking how the unforgiving machinery of a factory might mimic the so called machinery of courtship. And how being carried away, whether by love or by ideas, might prove dangerous. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:58 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan.
0:59 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext.
1:02 Wes: So, Erin, you suggested this reading and I don't think I've read anything by Alice Munro before. We think you were reading this for school, Right? I'm curious about what prompted you to suggest it.
1:16 Erin: I'd never read any Alice Munro either. And what was really curious is that I encountered this book, Open Secrets, from which we're reading Carried Away, which is the first story in this collection. I encountered it in an experimental forms class that I took this past semester. I read this whole book of stories, which I was just totally knocked out by, especially the first. I guess, you know, I went to class thinking to myself, like, okay, how is this? I mean, there were certainly lots of like, surprising twists. Like the way that the stories move is really unusual and unexpected.
And, you know, I had some, some hints as to why this might be included in an experimental forms class. But then when I got to the class, I was really surprised by, by my professor, Kate Coles, who's brilliant. I was really surprised by the reason why she had included it. But I'm curious to know before I tell you why she included it in the class. If you have any idea as to why, why specifically Carried Away would qualify as being experimental, There's a softball to throw at you.
2:23 Wes: Yeah, that's a difficult question. I didn't think of it as experimental. It's literary fiction, so I don't expect it to be plot driven exactly. Although there is a. This is actually plotted and each section kind of ends with a plot point and does go back and forth in time. And there's an omniscient narrator who takes different character perspectives. Her perspective, then Jim Fraley's, then Arthur's, and then back to her in the end, which is interesting, but yeah. So give me the answer. Why is this experimental? The pulp fiction of short stories?
3:07 Erin: Sorry, no. Well, you know, I was thinking this was relatively straightforward compared to some of the things that we were reading in that class, as you suggest. So I was thinking, like the letter writing or these time jumps which happen and are really destabilizing. There's one story in the collection which is really fabulous. Lots of stories kind of pull the rug out from under you narrativistically, where you're reading something. In one of the stories in particular, you're reading something going along with the story. And. And next thing you know, someone says, well, that's the story that so and so told me.
You don't realize, like, sometimes they do this in movies or TV shows where you think that what you're seeing is the actual movie or TV show. But then it's sort of like you realize that you've been watching the movie that the other characters are watching. You know, it sort of pops out of the movie. So it's sort of that kind of effect. So there are lots of really interesting things that happen in this whole collection. But anyway, I went to class and come to find out that Kate Coles. She thinks that the story functions on a kind of a lyric principle where the movements that happen in the story operate according to lyric functions rather than to narrative functions.
And so she talks about how the story basically operates according to this metonymic principle of someone losing their head. And in each one of the stories, sort of sections, someone literally or figuratively, you know, sort of metonymically. Right. Loses their head or is carried away is a synonym for that, of course. And so each of the plot points in the story, you know, she thinks, reflect that principle or happen according to that principle. Whether it be Jack obviously literally being beheaded by the machine, which is an incredibly shocking moment in the story, or Louisa sleeping with Jim Frarey and is reeling after that experience and sort of loses her head in that moment.
Or when she sees Jack later on in the story. Lots of other instances in which we can note that one or another character is carried away. You know, at one point, I think Jim Frarey says that Jack was just carried away and that's why he wrote those letters when he had a fiance at home. You know, Louisa being carried away by potentially seeing him when he comes into the library, et cetera, et cetera. So, anyway, I really liked that idea. And I thought it was a really fascinating way to look at the story as functioning according to. And this is something we talk about a lot in my grad program about the lyric and how lyric works as compared to narrative.
And so this is something that's of particular interest to me and my field of study. This is going to be like a plot point that I'm going to have to. Is ironic, but this is going to be a question that I'm going to have to answer. For instance, on my. My big exams that I take at the end of my reading year.
5:53 Wes: Yeah, I think you're making me think of a word that Arthur uses to describe Jack. And that word is careless. So they have this really, she and Arthur, while they're getting to know each other. And really, they're getting to know each other right through Jack. He's the martyr, in a way that brings them together because it's his death that becomes the topic that they initially discuss. Anyway, so Arthur mentions the public's endless appetite for horrific details. And we do get a lot of horrific details in the story itself, right? The precise location of the cut through Jack's head.
And Louisa defends that and says, it's natural. People want to picture it. And then she asks about the machinery. Did the machinery do something unexpected? Which later on Arthur is going to think, huh. She'll also make a comment about, you know, isn't there anything you can do to protect the workers? Which he reflects on later as perhaps a criticism. But here's what Arthur says. No, Arthur said it wasn't the machine grabbing him and pulling him in like an animal. He made a wrong move, or at any rate, a careless move. Then he was done for. So later on he reflects on the fact that Jack has been stealing books from the library.
That's the reason that again, this prompts the meeting. He's taking those books back to the library for Jack's wife, Grace. He'll think this not stealing, except temporarily harmless behavior, but peculiar. Was there any connection between thinking you could do things a little differently that way and thinking you could get away with a careless move which might catch your sleeve and bring the saw down on your neck? And of course, Jack's first act of carelessness is the way he treats Louisa with the letters. And then there's a suggest, I think there's the further suggestion that it's not just stealing books that's careless, but maybe even reading books, right?
There's something aspirational about it. Jack is working in a factory, but he's reading these books. And later on, in Louisa's hallucination of Jack, the specter of Jack will tell her that's what got him started, in a way. And thank her for that. Even though. Did it really get him started? He didn't go anywhere, of course, and he died. But could it have gotten him started? Could it have led to something else? But anyway, what I'm trying to point out is, yes, I think this thematic thing of being carried away, which is perhaps related to carelessness in the sense of, in each case, losing one's head, not being careful, maybe falling in love, writing letters to someone even though you know you're engaged, or, you know, the example in the end when whatever is happening to Louisa, maybe a stroke or maybe it's her, these are her dying moments, but there's a vision, right?
That's another form of being carried away. I think that accounts for what's so powerful about the story, which is. Which I find hard to account for. Like in the last section, I started feeling really mournful and sad without quite knowing why. Because she's so. So in the details of things, right? So. So in. Into the concrete reality. And she's conveying all these emotions indirectly, but it builds up to something really powerful.
9:12 Erin: Yeah, I really like what you say about this connection between carelessness and being carried away. I'm thinking about the fact that several. Several men are pretty careless with Louisa's feelings, right? We have this relationship mostly carried out via letters with a doctor who was treating her for tb. And you learn only in the last pages of the story how really terribly sick she was. I mean, she was in the sanatorium for four years and this doctor was married and, you know, obviously got Louisa's hopes up or, you know, did something he was not supposed to do and ended up having to leave.
Thinking about Jim Frarey, when Louisa sleeps with him and loses her virginity. And he's obviously been careless in his sort of understanding of her, right? He thinks he knows her really well. He thinks he knows women really well. And he's full of these trite little phrases that he assigns women where he's obviously, on some fundamental level, distrustful of them somehow, and thinks that because Louisa lives in the. In the hotel and, you know, dines by herself and has a glass of wine with her meal, that somehow that means that she's, by the standards of the day, some sort of loose woman.
And so he thinks that it's.
10:24 Wes: Drink upsets women in a radical way, so they have to confess things.
10:28 Erin: That's why.
10:29 Wes: Insights.
10:30 Erin: And when she tells him the story of Jack's letter, she asks, and this is not the first time she asks if some diabolical trick has been played on her by Jack, if she's the victim of some kind of really perverse and extended practical joke. And Jim makes the comment that no, no, no, he doesn't think so in any way. It's women who are the type to play that kind of joke. And this kind of makes maybe a parallel between the machinery of the factory, maybe and the machinery of courtship, you know, to coin a phrase or something in which one is expected to take necessary precautions to guard one's body, one's heart.
And if one is hurt, the person who's hurt them somehow isn't to blame. Like you're to blame for not taking the proper precautions. So I think that what happens is this really interesting blending between what I'm seeing as a story that's very, very concerned with class, right? I mean, the fact that we never see Jack's face, the fact that he then loses his head and has really no face. And that Arthur, who owns the factory and who picks up his head, cannot give a physical description of this man, right? So I think there's something about Jack's class that makes him faceless, that steals his identity or something.
So I think the story is very concerned with class and with these, very subtly, with these issues of unionization. Who is to blame when these types of accidents happen at the factories, if they're accidents at all, if not enough care is taken for these workers? And there's a connection between that, I think, and some sort of statement, not in any heavy handed way, but I think the story is also interested in the plight of women like Louisa and what happens to women like that. She, who's sort of equally downtrodden at the beginning of the story, you know, she's an orphan, has had to work for a living and the sort of uncomfortable situation in which women are placed in this time where they have to make a living and support themselves.
And that very necessity to keep them alive somehow places them within the realm of suspicion. So I guess I'm trying to tie those things together. I think they do sort of tie together, though I'm not quite seeing all the threads right between this sort of, what I'll call loosely, a sort of feminist concern about women in this time and a sort of interesting concern with class and labor and all of these other things that are coming together, I think quite rightfully in this time in Canadian history, between the world wars.
13:10 Wes: Yeah, it's very, it's very subtle, but I think I had a similar idea. She says she's very ignorant of machinery. And, you know, he gives that line about he made a careless move. So the machine is not like an animal is Arthur's idea. It's not like an animal that's just bitten him, attacked him and then grabbed him and pulled him into the machine. He had to do something to get pulled into the machine. The machine is not nature. And in that sense, it's not fate. It's not just the machinery of fate doing what it's going to do to you. It really depends on your choices.
This becomes a way of expressing a conflict between free will and determinism, but also between the social conditions that put people where they are and keep them where they are, and then the possibility of them transcending those social conditions and doing something aspirational, right? Writing or reading, having a life where books are involved or education. And that's the way Jack puts it in her fantasy, right? This got me. The books got me started. It's not something that ever comes to fruition. But in reality, the other thing that Arthur says is a machine is your servant and it is an excellent servant, but it makes an imbecile.
Master Arthur may be right about this connection between Jack's carelessness with the books, you know, not checking them out, which is probably right, we can surmise, is because he doesn't want to interact with Louisa. But also between that and what would happen with the machine, there may be an element in which Jack is at fault, right? Because again, there's something careless in the way he treated Louisa initially. But that carelessness is also how love is founded, perhaps in a way, right? And Arthur himself talks about when him and Louisa fall in love at the end of the section, or seem to fall in love, he describes it as a compulsion.
Is that lover that isn't? Then maybe we can discuss that. But there's a question here in parallel, between whether love is imposed on you or whether it involves some sort of free choice. And then there's a question of different types of love, right? Her movement from this idealized relationship with someone she's never seen, right? She's just contacting him. They're having an exchange through letters. And then this more grounded relationship with Arthur, which she describes to fantasy Jack later on as having to do with her wanting to have a normal life, wanting to get married and having a normal life.
Not the most exciting, ecstatic sounding form of love, not the same idealized form of love that she can have with Jack. And similarly, in. In parallel, there's this transition historically to the power of unions, which I think is more grounded as well. So Arthur describes his father as someone who ruled by whim. Right. Go on home now. When he didn't have work for people, he could just treat them how they wanted. That was changing even at the point where Arthur is taking over. And then Louisa in her 80s is encountering union activism and associating that with Jack and that there's a.
The whole Tolpuddle Martyrs thing. And they were champion, early champions of unionization, but imprisoned. Right. I think they were. That was. Their martyrdom, was an imprisonment. So there's a parallel there to what I think of as Jack's martyrdom and the kind of martyrdom that leads us from love as an idealized fantasy to love in reality. Right. I think that's part of the transition that's going on in this story. So a free for all and again, parallel economically, an economic free for all versus something more constrained.
16:44 Erin: Well, it's interesting. I'm really liking what you're saying about a certain carelessness even in being someone who uses the library. Right. In the story, there's going to be sort of a line drawn between people who are library users and people who aren't. When Jack, when his engagement or his marriage is announced in the paper to Grace, Louisa will see her name and recognize her as not a library user. Right. It's a small town and she knows those who go to the library and those who don't. What's interesting is that somehow Jack gets away with like being a library user without being a capital L capital U library user.
Right, because he goes in and steals things, you know, so he's not officially on the books, if you will, but he is in the books. So there's an interesting distinction that's being drawn there in Louisa's generation. And if we consider Arthur to be part of her generation, though he must be a. A little bit older, maybe by 10 years or so. He also seems to have become more practical, I think, is what you're saying. Right, than his father. And there's the suggestion that his father was a library user and Arthur is not. And I wonder if why is that? Well, the father's portrait is in the library and he's noted as being a particular benefactor of the library.
And it's suggested that he was maybe the one who gave the money to set it up. Of course, that doesn't guarantee that he used the library, but I think there's some. Let's see, he says the pictures inscription says A.V. Doud, founder of the Doud Organ Factory and patron of this library. A believer in progress, culture and education. A true friend of the town of Carstairs and of the working man. That's an interesting blend to be.
18:29 Wes: Yeah. Somewhat ironic given the character as described by Arthur, which is dictatorial and even talks about his impudent nose, I think is the word.
18:39 Erin: Sure.
18:40 Wes: Impudent face. So, yeah, at the very least that's the way Arthur's father wants to present himself. Right. As someone who cares about education and the well being of the people, even as he's laying off people carelessly without any real care.
18:56 Erin: But I think there's also, maybe I was misreading this too, that the father does seem to know the workers by name. Right. Wasn't it that he called them by name when he was laying them off? Like he seemed to be more invested in. Right. Arthur has. There's more of a division between him and the workers. So the nature of the labor is changing because how I was reading the. I believe at one point the factory is described almost as being like a medieval rampart, right. That runs alongside the town. And because of the fact that, you know this, practically the entire town of three to four thousand people ends up going to work for Douds. You know, there's really a suggestion that there's a serfdom going on, right. That.
19:35 Wes: Yeah, exactly. It's basically feudal.
19:37 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. And what I'm sort of interested in, maybe in connection with what you're saying is this idea that the elder Doud was sort of more invested, like by the very nature of that kind of a system with its many, many flaws. Right. He's somehow more invested in what's actually going on there in the factory. The suggestion is that Arthur is not. And I'm wondering if the fact that Arthur is not a library user, you know, here his father is in the library, right. Like his image is in the library. There could be a tremendous amount of irony in that.
But I take Arthur's like sort of finally coming into the library after all of those years of sort of rejecting it almost as, therefore, as being an expression of the fact maybe that as a modern man he's moved away from the sort of whims of in the library that his father was involved with. I see Louisa and Jack's interest in the library and their interest in education as being part of what is condemning them in a way. Right. Like Jack will remark to Louisa, I wondered what brought you there. He's talking about Louisa's arrival in Carstairs. I wondered what brought you There you were an educated person.
This idea that, like Jack says this to Louisa. Yes. That no one in Carstairs seems to be educated. And yet I'm very interested, for instance, in the images, the very educated images that are hanging on the inside of the walls of the Commercial Hotel and of the library, the prints that hang there. In addition to the portrait of Arthur's father. There almost seems to be a suggestion that progress means moving away from the library and being more concerned with practicality, strict standards of comportment when it comes to our relationship with these machines, a strict division between labor and management, and somehow a less humanistic or sort of holistic understanding of the relationship between sort of all of these moving parts, if you will.
Even if that holistic understanding also has a tremendous amount of flaws. Right. It's a feudal system. I guess what I'm saying is that the past almost seems to be a state of more education, but it's education to, I don't know, particularly unuseful ends, perhaps. And what marks Louisa and Jack for their sort of individual martyrdoms? If we can argue that Louisa is sort of martyred in the process of this love affair and sort of emerges maybe as a different character, what marks them is perhaps their clinging to a certain education or to certain cultural mores of a previous era.
22:28 Wes: I think it's complicated.
22:30 Erin: It's very complicated because Jack's education is. He's much more progressive, I think, inherently than Louisa is. So his education is tending him towards being propelled into the future. These things are very. I think by trying to tease them out, in a way, I'm doing them a disservice.
22:45 Wes: No, I think you're getting at some important points. I just. I'm. I'm trying to think them through in real time. Like I said, I think it's complicated. So let me try to articulate my thoughts and maybe we can. We can reconcile. So I'm thinking, all right, it's basically a feudal system, and you have the lords of the manor running things. And he's the rich kid, son of the father who's taken over the business. And he thinks of himself as more progressive. So this is the way he puts it. And by the way, I can understand why he wouldn't want to go into the library if the father set this up as a kind of way of glorifying himself.
Right. Putting his portrait up, saying, oh, I'm such a progressive guy, when he wasn't. Right. So it's a simple. Library, in that sense, becomes a symbol of hypocrisy. And then when he finds himself going into the library, quite a bit, you would think, right, it's because of Louisa. I mean, initially it's to return Jack's books, but. And then it. And he finds himself going there and it's like, okay, come on. He's going there because of Louisa, but. And they're going to get together. But he denies that, right? So from his perspective, Arthur found himself thinking of the library.
And he would often end up there, sitting in the spot he had chosen on his first visit. And he would read Illustrated, London News or the National Geographic, some other magazines. And these were magazines that he subscribed to and had at his house and would actually read at his house. But now he preferred to read them out there in public. And he has a bunch of different rationalizations for why he's doing this. He preferred the view of Main street to whatever the view from his house is. And then here's another. It was not that he felt the need of sociability.
He was not there for a chat. And then he really wouldn't talk to Louisa that much at this point. And then instead, he rationalizes this in terms of his philanthropic impulses, the ones that supposedly the father is trying to represent with the library. So he'll say he seemed himself to be providing something. People could count on it, seeing him sitting there, right? So he's thinking of himself as kind of royalty out in public, the guy who basically runs the town and takes care of the town. As he'll say later on, people expected everything to be provided for.
He's basically like the Mafia boss of the town that people look to for things. And he's sitting out there in public, being visible to the people. And then there was an expression he liked, public servant. Then he contrasts himself to his father, the old man's petulant mouth, ruling by whims and decrees. Go home. And how workers would joke about that. But now things had already changed. They were not prepared to take the same treatment today. His way of proceeding was quite the opposite of his father's. And then he describes himself as someone who has to think about everything over and over again and wants to stay in the background, wants to keep his dignity, wants to always try to be fair.
So you get the sense. And then there's the stuff about the whole town being provided for. You get the sense of. He's kind of like the Michael of the family. Thinking of the Mafia again. Sorry. Yeah, you get the sense of someone who's more educated and cerebral. So this is where I'm trying to work through what you were saying because I got the sense of someone who's more educated and cerebral and less impulsive than his father. But, yeah, not really a book reader. And so he doesn't have that same aspiration as Jack. And there's not that lightning rod type of tension, right, where there's a working class guy who has become interested in education and it's a source of longing and yearning.
It's not just the ordinary thing that upper class people at this time might be used to. And not many people were going to college right at this time. And still the majority of people don't go to college today. But his interest in education, that kind of aspiration is something unique. It. It represents not just a desire to do something other than be a worker in a piano factory, but some higher aspiration that is associated with his passionate nature in general and his idea that he has fallen in love with Louisa because she's associated with that.
So this transition from working class to an interest in education is quite fraught. I'm familiar with it in my own family. I feel like I still live with the consequences of it. I have these two warring sides. The practical side that's very suspicious of books and ideas and thinks that they just are a distraction from trying to survive and have a normal. Right. Is that Louisa's word? Normal life and the dangerousness of being distracted by ideas and by education. Of course, today, and maybe in the case of Jack's father, there's this. You can easily combine the two.
You can go to Harvard and then become a management consultant. You get your education, then you use it to make lots of money. It's very practical and keeps you part of the upper ruling class. But for someone who's a working class person who discovers an education like my mother and father both did late in life, although Jack. It's not late in life for Jack, but someone who. For whom it's discovery. It becomes a kind of religious moment that can unfortunately turn the next generation into fanatics. But anyway, I don't know if I successfully connected that to anything.
You were?
28:13 Erin: No, I think you did. I think you've illuminated a lot for me because I think I was reading the description of Arthur's father with far less irony than I should have been reading it. I guess I was seeing Arthur's sort of rejection of the library as being indicative of the fact that though he may be in many ways more educated than his father, you know, I saw it as a kind of symbolic.
28:33 Wes: I Think that's a possible reading? I think that's a legitimate, legitimate reading.
28:37 Erin: By the way, what's happening that's so interesting? And, of course, I believe this story, I believe Carried Away first came out in the New Yorker in the 90s, I want to say. So, you know, and the story ends one, I think. Okay. And the story ends in the 50s. And I do read a lot of hypocrisy in Arthur's position. Kind of in the way that. Right. That Michael is a much more hypocritical character than his father and the Godfather. Right. Because he comes in and he basically becomes exactly like his father by sitting there and feeling himself to be a public servant just by his reassuring presence.
29:09 Wes: He becomes ruthless, Right. He doesn't observe the whole business. It's just business thing. It gets personal, Right.
29:17 Erin: Well, by that same token, I think the town sort of becomes more feudal before it can become less like a feudal system. It seems to become more so under Arthur. He's detached himself. And also, there's a suggestion that. Because. And maybe this was always the case, but it seems to me that there's the suggestion that as especially the First World War is sort of evacuating the churches because people are becoming disillusioned with religion in light of, you know, the 20th century's advancements and the horrors of World War I. In the time between the wars and Maybe into the 50s, 60s, the businesses are taking up the mantle of sort of community support that was previously held by the churches or other kinds of, you know, voluntary associations like the Elks Club or, you know, the Women's League or.
Right. All of those things that are kind of falling out of favor over the course of the first half of the 20th century. So Arthur finds himself in the position of supporting the church when it needs repairs. Right. Of supporting the Little League teams, right. So it's this strange. What Arthur seems to be doing is he has sort of one foot in the past and one foot in the future and in progress. And the position of the factory at this time is one of tremendous change in which it's sort of like on its way to becoming a more modern workplace. But in the course of this change, it's looking maybe more like a feudal system than ever before.
30:46 Wes: Yeah, well, he's still lord of the manor, and he may be enlightened, Right? He may be an enlightened dictator, so to speak. But politically, we ought not to rely on that. Right. We ought not to rely on the detached benevolence of the boss's Son. And you need a system in which the workers have actual power, right? And that's where the union comes in. And then there's the question Louisa asks, which is, isn't there a way to make people safe? They. Is this a function of Jack's carelessness or the lack of care taken in ensuring workplace safety? It could be a combination of both, of course.
And that's something, right? That also, you can't just depend on the benevolence of the factory owner for that. Even if they're well intentioned. There has to be something that happens at a system level. And with regulation and enforcement, even the best of intentions aren't necessarily going to rise to that level. And his detachment plays out very interestingly in the accident. He doesn't know Jack's name, for instance, initially has trouble thinking of it. And he's up in his office, I think, when the accident happens. In his dreams of an accident, there was a spreading silence.
Everything was shut down. Every machine in the place stopped making its customary noise and every man's voice was moved. And when Arthur looked out of the office window, he understood that doom had fallen. He could never remember any particular thing that he saw that told him this. It was just the space, the dust in the factory yard that said to him, now, then later on in the actual account of the accident, you know, he hears. Saw someone saying. Saw someone saying head, someone saying Jesus. Repeatedly. Arthur could have wished for the silence, the sounds, sounds in the objects drawing back in that dreadful but releasing way to give him room.
It was nothing like that yelling and questioning and running around himself in the midst, being propelled to the sawmill. One man had fainted. So there's an interesting contrast between the silence of the dreams, which perhaps says something about his detachment, right? And then he wishes for that silence. The wish that plays out in the dream, he actually wishes for, in the actual account for that silence. But instead it's chaos and noise. And then there's that act of putting his coat over Jack and getting the blood all over it, which, right, is almost religious in its significance because he gets marked with the blood of the martyr.
And of course, again, Jack is the mediating agency of him and Louisa getting together, their love. So I wouldn't write a whole paper on the religious significance of the story, but there's that illusion. I think there's a fundamental psychological observation being made there as well. This is why I think your reading is also apropos. His detachment is actually really important. And his father was not detached, was probably more on the Floor probably knew everyone's names, like you said, and was ruled on a whim and was not benevolent, but also was not detached.
33:45 Erin: I quite like Arthur as a character. I mean, I think they're all interesting characters, but Louisa will interpret his actions in that moment as being, I think her word is remarkable. What he did by picking up the head when we're in his.
33:58 Wes: Oh, I forgot about the fact that he picks up the head.
34:01 Erin: Right, right. Well, when we're in his thoughts, if you will, you know, through that sort of free indirect discourse that happens over the course of the story, you know, he does so very automatically and it's noted that he covers Jack's body with his jacket because he's the only one in the space who's wearing a jacket, which is a really interesting class distinction there. Right. He's the only one with a jacket
34:22 Wes: to offer and he's trying to make up for his detachment.
34:25 Erin: I'm thinking too, as it says in the story, the reason no one else had done this would be simply that no one else was wearing a jacket. And so, you know, Louisa is impressed by the fact that he picks up the head and puts it on the body. I don't know that we can fault him for not being able to give Louisa a physical description after carrying Jack's head in his arms. I can't imagine anything more intimate.
34:47 Wes: Right. But he doesn't know Jack. You know, he doesn't know Jack. He owns the factory with all the workers and he doesn't yet. Right. He doesn't know Jack. Obviously he's not interacting very much with his work.
34:56 Erin: Right. But he has a sense of knowing what to do when we're in his mind. There's a sense that this is all rather automatic, but anyone would know what to do in a circumstance like that. Maybe is remarkable, to use Louisa's word upon rereading the story, because I read it for school and then it been a couple of months now and I was really ill and everything, so I really had to go back and reread it closely. It's amazing what happens rereading this story, how much foreshadowing you see. I mean, talk about machinery. It is just such a tightly plotted, just really magnificent story.
And I just noted on the very first page of the story that in the description of the commercial hotel where Louisa is taking her dinner, the white tablecloths were changed every week and in the meantime were protected by oil cloth mats. Louisa has her glass of wine every day with dinner. And so there's this sort of, like, faint trace of red that follows her, which is really apropos, maybe, right? Because in the eyes of the town, she's a scarlet woman. And when we see the narrative jumps from Arthur holding Jack's head and staining his shirt front just with blood, it jumps to Louisa in the library wearing that scarlet blouse and having her hair bobbed so that she's.
You know, the effect of a bob is that it kind of. It shows your neck, right? Your head becomes, if you will, you know, sort of more detached, part of part of your body. You know, you don't have the hair going all the way down your back or something like that, right? So the head becomes more of a separate entity. The oilcloth mat stuck out to me this second read. Because in thinking about, was it Jack's fault? Was it not Jack's fault? You know, what does fault even mean when we're talking about machinery? Are we allowed to. We have to be so vigilant and not slip up for a moment or else be beheaded.
You know, it's a terrible thought, but the idea that the mats protecting the tablecloth, that stuck out to me, it seemed to me that there was more care being taken over the tablecloths than there is over the human life in this story, the tablecloths are being protected. They have a system of protection, but the workers in the factory don't. I'm muddying all that up by at the same time talking about this connection between Jack and Louisa. But I'm thinking about. Louisa does pay a blood price in the story when she sleeps with Jim Frarey, and she attributes the blood on the sheets to her period.
And he soon realizes, right, that he's taken her virginity. And, you know, the connection between the two of them and the fact that both of these figures are people for whom those around them seem to take as less care and concern for their welfare than people take for these tablecloths is really interesting. Like, Louisa can sort of bloody things, Jack can bloody things. But the tablecloths have to be pristine. I don't know. It just took on a tremendous amount of pathos for me, is what I'm saying.
37:47 Wes: Yeah, there's something about, you know, she's a traveler. And this word traveler will come up in various places. And the suggestion is not just geographical travel, but traveling in love in some sense, you know, and this is probably not unconnected to the. The idea of being carried away, her travel in the beginning. One of the climactic things that she'll say in the story is that fantasy Jack. Right. When he leaves again, he was not with them or anywhere in sight. A traitor, helplessly, a traveler. The idea is that this. It's not fickleness in love exactly, but the inability to settle down, let's say, into ordinary, normal love, marriage, whatever, I think, is partly represented by travel.
And she starts traveling after the breakup with the doctor at the sanatorium. But in the midst of that, there's something kind of homey about the hotel, even though it's called the Commercial Hotel. Right, right. And it's got a Frarey is, who she hooks up with as a traveling salesman, basically. And you'd think they would not be particularly homey, but she's. In a way, she's kind of made it that way in a comforting. Eating her steak and potatoes and having her usual glass of wine. But, yeah, I was struck by that description of the tablecloths changed every week, protected by oilcloth mats.
And then in the winter, the dining room smelled of these mats wiped by a kitchen rag, and of the cold fumes from the furnace and the beef gravy and dried potatoes and onions. A smell not unpleasant to anybody coming in hungry from the cold. So a sort of homelike quality to the hotel. Even though she's a traveler. By the way, you also mentioned her neck being exposed, right?
39:30 Erin: Mm.
39:31 Wes: It also reminded me of something that, again, she says in the final section here, when she's older, she's talking about Arthur to Fantasy Jack, and he's just given this platitude about love never dying. She's thinking, well, this is what speech making turns you into. Right. Because in his fantasy version, he's a union organizer, a person who can say things like that love dies all the time. Or at any rate, it becomes distracted, overlaid. It might as well be dead. Arthur used to come and sit in the library. She said, in the beginning, I was very provoked with him.
I used to look at the back of his neck and think, ha, what if something should hit you there? None of that would make sense to you. It wouldn't make sense. And it turned out to be something else entirely that I wanted. I wanted to marry him and get into a normal life. We get this. This idea of something hitting him in the back of the neck, which is obviously related to Jack getting decapitated, and it being presented as a sort of dilemma, a decision between these two things. Does he get hit on the back of the neck, or do you marry and get, quote, unquote, get into a normal life?
Which is a way of saying, get away from Being the traveler get away from being the one who's carried away. Even though I think you could argue that in each stage. Right. With. With Arthur as well. It's a very romantic. The way they get together is very romantic. And there's the wind blowing.
40:52 Erin: Oh, it's such a romantic feeling, the
40:54 Wes: wind and the compulsion. So, you know, I don't want to downplay that. Right. There's something in here about the temporality of love, what happens when time passes and it gets more and more ordinary and it becomes a different sort of bond that it is in the exciting beginning. So the only way to sustain that excitement, and we saw this in Joyce's the Dead too, right. Is if the beloved is martyred quickly enough that you don't get used to them, that it doesn't become habitual. And so that's the dilemma. Do you cut it off early and have this fantasy image of the beloved that you can preserve as an ideal, or do you get into the normal life and the ordinariness of it?
But the final thing I wanted to say here is that the ideal always informs the ordinary and perhaps sustains it. I think we talked about that with the dead and also in Annie, believe it or not, our Annie hall episode, about the way in which nostalgia, including nostalgia for past loves or lost loves, can sustain a current love and the way this ends and it ends so powerfully. I think we should talk about this ending and how she accomplishes such a powerful effect with a. But anyway, the way it ends. I think it's something about the importance of this really almost imaginary love with Jack and how that has been transformed and become the relationship with Arthur.
And now, as perhaps she is dying. I don't know. I'll get your. See what your opinion is on that. Having a stroke or dying or whatever it is. But I like to think that it's her dying. There's a significance to that. But she's reflecting not on. In her last moments, she's thinking about an interaction with Jack in which she describes her relationship with Arthur. So the two again. Jack is sort of the ideal medium through which the relationship with Arthur is established. There's a getting carried away, and she's being carried away again in the end.
If it's death or hallucination. But there's getting carried away. But somehow that can serve the purpose of something that's more grounded, let's say.
43:00 Erin: Just to briefly go back to what you were saying before about a traveler. I had this idea now of a librarian as like a travel Agent transporting people through books. The books, you know, come and go. And she's sort of, you know, helping people with their travel plans, if you will, by being the way station through which.
43:18 Wes: That's great.
43:20 Erin: Yeah. And. Well, then there's. Even Arthur kind of recognizes that the librarian is not really part of the town or that she's a sort of agent of travel. Right. Because he remarks that she's known for not having the best reputation, not having a spotless reputation, though she doesn't have an expressly bad reputation. He says that this is okay because she's not a schoolteacher. So she's not really responsible for setting an example or something like that. Right. So she's not really part of the fabric of the town. Even as the librarian, she stays apart.
Of course, she'll become enmeshed in the fabric more than anyone. Right. By marrying the guy who's. Who's the head of everything that happens in the town. But I'm thinking about a librarian as a traveler or a travel agent. And also a soldier. Right. As in both world wars, you know, a soldier gets his free trip to Europe. And the sort of romantic death of the soldier, it's in no way romantic, but, I mean, in the popular conception of the. I'm thinking of my grandfather, who had a very long decline before he died. And I think, you know, death makes one feel really powerless.
And he many times remarked to me that he wished that he had died in the war, you know, that he had felt, I think, so upset over the fact that he could see, you know, the evidence of his own failing health and his, you know, the lack of power in his body and all of that, that he kind of, you know, romanticized dying in the war. Of course, if he had, then, you know, none of us would have been there. But you know what? You point out where Louisa is looking at the back of Arthur's neck, as you're kind of suggesting there's a sort of transposition going on there where she's hoping that the saw is going to come.
Like, I see that as evidence that Louisa is falling in love with Arthur in the same way that Arthur's not really aware why he's. I don't think he's aware why he's coming to the library fully. Right, right. Yeah. And I don't think that. I think that Louisa, by wanting to kill him. And I think your comment is getting at this. Maybe I'm just saying it a little bit differently than you are. Right. That she's actually falling in love with him by wanting to cut his head off. She's going, arthur, Jack. Arthur, Jack. By cutting his head off. Jack is in the hospital during the war, and there's lots of foreshadowing about the idea that there's a guy in hospital with him who dies of a heart attack in the middle of the war rather than getting killed by a
45:39 Wes: bullet, which is ironic. And then later on, the newspaper mentions the irony of Jack's death similarly.
45:47 Erin: That's right. And yet he manages to die in a rather sensational way. Right. It's noted in the story that because of the tragic and sensational way in which he died, people come from all over the area to go to his funeral. It's a huge funeral. Even though he has, as he notes in his letters, he has no family. And in fact, the one family member he does have, his father, doesn't even go to the funeral. But. But there are presumably hundreds of people there because he does get, in the end, a sort of fantastic martyrdom in the way that, you know, even a soldier wouldn't get that kind of fanfare. Right. Because their death would be overseas in some battlefield. Right. And so no one really would be able to kind of properly mourn them, except probably en masse, you know, for. For whoever would probably get a memorial service. Yeah. So what am I trying to say about all that?
46:34 Wes: Were you thinking about the neck thing and. As a manifestation of love.
46:39 Erin: Yes. And also of.
46:40 Wes: But also your grandfather's. Yeah.
46:43 Erin: Yes. Also of. You know, literally of transport. Like a romantic figure in the order of books and literature and. Right. Someone who dies tragically in some sort of great heroic escapade or something like that. Someone who, like, travels into the realm of fantasy or into the realm of death. Like, for Louisa, Jack is dead, really, from the beginning of the story. Right. Like, she never meets him. And whether he's murdered in the factory or not, or killed in the factory, he is dead in a way, because he will never show himself to her and he never materializes. And so I guess I'm thinking about death as. Or someone dying as becoming a traveler as well. And the difference between dying and, like, staying put, if you will. Anyway, this isn't quite coming to fruition. I had a better. I had a better way of tying it together in my head that I now can't think of.
47:40 Wes: Well, yeah, she's transported in the end. She's being transported to. What is it she says in. At the very end? What is this place?
47:48 Erin: That's right. That's what I was going to Say, I like this idea that she's dying out of town at the. You know, I like the idea that as you're suggesting, that she's dying in those final moments, the dying is itself kind of a flight of fancy. It's a fantasy. So those two threads sort of of traveling, of, like literal, physical traveling around and not being rooted and being free to go wherever, and that sort of. It's not really a fantasy, right. None of these. Dying in war certainly isn't a fantasy, right? But the sort of symbolic significance of that is then twinned or wedded to this idea that she is literally physically dying and having a hallucination at the same time.
48:25 Wes: Her death is somehow a recapitulation of love. And both are ways of being carried away and transported.
48:33 Erin: Right.
48:33 Wes: The idea of hitting him in the neck, you could think of that as we kind of want to kill the beloved, right. And take them inside us and just have them and not have them separate at one level. That's the aggressive part of it. But on the other hand, our love is. If it's intense and ecstatic, we lose ourselves, right? And we want to be. We want to go the opposite direction and get merged into them. So clearly there's this relationship between the transport of dying and the transport of falling in love. She managed to time it right, to have a life and to have an ordinary life and ordinary love and not die before her time.
There's something about the intensity with Jack and the carelessness and the contrast between. So for ordinary life for Jack is not the way to put it. It's more compelling in the wrong sense. It is more of a compulsion, right. Why doesn't he look her up when he gets back? In the end, he's afraid of not playing by the rules. He's going to marry the person to whom he was engaged. He's not going to do something that reckless, but he's got a little bit of the reckless in him, which is almost worse. Right. Louisa's willing to pick up and move to a new town.
He's not willing to do that. He's trying to, in a way, have it both ways, which is how you get your neck caught in a machine.
49:53 Erin: Oh, that's good.
49:54 Wes: He's working in a factory, but reading these books. So there's an intense conflict, but that conflict is also a social conflict. And then the question is, what are your progressive hopes for the worker? Because Jack, in a way, is emblematic of these higher hopes that are cut down by the drudgery of the factory and that may be the thing that is distracting him. Right. He may be thinking about something he read in Russell's book on Bolshevism. Or hopefully maybe it was Chesterton's book what is Wrong with the World?
50:25 Erin: Right.
50:26 Wes: Which I looked up. I had to read a little bit of that.
50:29 Erin: Chesterton's so great.
50:30 Wes: Yeah. Is he distracted by the little injection of bookishness? What do we want for the worker? Do we want a better education for all? Not everyone is going to be a white collar worker, Right. There's always going to be blue collar workers. Or the alternative is the more grounded alternative that recognizes that and creates unions. It's kind of a middle ground in the way that her love for Arthur is a middle ground. So there's not going to be a Marxist utopia. And again, the reference to Bolshevism. So there's not going to be that more ecstatic, exciting version, revolution, cut off people's heads, blah blah, blah.
There's going to be a. An acceptable homeostasis. There's gonna be a capitalist society in which a union functions. It's not gonna be the case that everyone is a poet, as Marx puts it, in the evening, because they only have a little bit of factory work to do during the day. It's just not gonna happen.
51:22 Erin: Well, I like this question for Jack. I'm wondering, before we do get to that final scene, you know, I'm wondering if we like this life for Louisa. Like I think that in the end I'm ambivalent about what happens to her, even at the same time as I feel that in, in the end she gets a pretty good life. Right. Which I think that we are set up to feel that she deserves. Right. She's a kind of an exceptional person and we want her to. She's had a raw deal from a lot of different people. Right. And we want her to succeed. We feel that she's exceptional because of her intelligence. Right. We never get a real physical description of her, but we know from other people that she's beautiful. Right. And that maybe she kind of stays on the shelf too long. Right. She's rather older than she could be.
52:05 Wes: Frarey describes her. She's attractive but not young is the way he puts it.
52:10 Erin: Right.
52:11 Wes: In this ending, there's a 40 year old woman who seems to resemble her younger self who. She describes this woman's face as being worn, but we could get to that. That may be her describing herself is what I'm saying.
52:24 Erin: Right. But she's had her youth stolen from her a bit Right. She's had these exceptional experiences. I like what you say about the fact that Jack is trying to have it both ways, because I think you're pinpointing something I wasn't able to express about the sort of unfairness. Right. Of the way that he is operating. Whereas she is willing to take the risks, she's willing to go to the new towns, she's also had this. Right. She's had this experience of illness. She just all around seems to be an exceptional person for whom we want some good ending.
In a way, it's ironic that, you know, and maybe this is the situation with women where they have this unique ability through marriage to be able to transcend their social class that men don't have. Right. So she ends up making this good marriage in terms of. It seems like it's a happy marriage. Right. And also it's a good marriage in terms of the fact that she's able to get into a comfortable situation for herself. Socioeconomically, though, it's not without hardship. And she goes through hard times during the Depression. Right. But she has a good house, and she has.
She's now in this position of going from someone who's pretty ostracized from the life of the town to becoming someone who's maybe the most important woman in the life of the town.
53:33 Wes: Right. He dies, and she's the one running the piano factory, trying to keep it afloat, as she puts it. Yeah.
53:39 Erin: Right. So I guess Jack doesn't have the ability to realize his educational ambitions and sort of leapfrogging his station through marriage. I mean, I suppose he could if he, you know, if some, like, countess fell in love with him. I suppose that would be possible, but it's more possible for women. And so I think in the end, what I'm trying to ask is, are we satisfied with the life that Louisa has had for herself? You know, we find out that she has a son. There's something very bittersweet and sort of melancholy about the ending and the fact that, you know, it all kind of comes down to this temporary bus depot.
Yet at the same time, I feel sort of satisfied for her as a character. Are we supposed to feel satisfied, or are we supposed to feel as though there was always this. Of course, there's always going to be longing and regret. Right. But does she get a good deal in the end, is what I'm curious.
54:28 Wes: Yeah, I didn't think she got a bad deal. It sounds like she's had a good life to me. And it's such a poignant ending. It's so, for me, just emotionally affecting. And yet I was also puzzled why, what's going on here that I'm this touched by the ending, the sense of mourning and reflection on love in the final moments of one's life. And maybe we can try to. I think a lot of it is in these very, very subtle details. Just things that seem insignificant, like being in the coffee shop getting a Coke and the papers blow off the desk and a girl says, oh, shit, and stamps on them.
Things like that are actually speaking to the emotional engine of the story. And this is what I think makes her so great. From what I understand, this is something she does. This is, I mean, this is not just the story, but this is Alice Munro in general making these, these details. So, so let's talk about that in the, in the postscript. All right, thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
Time and Taboo in “Back to the Future” (1985)
May 16, 2023
In the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall, Doc Brown plans to use his Delorean time machine to head 25 years into the future and see, as he puts it, “the progress of mankind.” But like the license plate on the Delorean, Doc is out of time. Through his absent-mindedness—and angering some terrorists—Doc has failed to provide a future into which he or his friend Marty McFly can progress. Meanwhile, Marty’s own options and possibilities have been foreclosed by the mistakes of his parents, whose inaction and passivity have failed to secure happy lives for themselves or their children. Out of time and without a viable future, Marty’s only way forward is back. Wes & Erin discuss the 1985 film, “Back to the Future,” and how securing the provisions for one’s own future depends on two modes of confrontation: one in the present and one with the past.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: In the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall. Doc Brown plans to use his DeLorean time machine to head 25 years into the future and see, as he puts it, the progress of mankind. But like the license plate on the DeLorean, Doc is out of time. Through his absentmindedness and angering some terrorists, Doc has failed to provide a future into which he or his friend Marty McFly can progress. Meanwhile, Marty's own options and possibilities have been foreclosed by the mistakes of his parents, whose inaction and passivity have failed to secure happy lives for themselves or their children.
Out of time. And without a viable future, Marty's only way forward is back. On today's episode, we're discussing the 1985 film Back to the Future and how securing the provisions for one's own future depends on two modes of confrontation, one in the present and one with the past. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I've been thinking a lot about the story of Marty's parents meeting, and it always struck me that it was similar to how my parents met. My mom's car actually broke down in front of my dad's house, and that was how they met.
And so I was thinking a lot about just about cars in this movie, the significance of cars in the film and how that might point us in a lot of different directions in terms of where we might start our discussion. It seems to me that cars are a really significant part of American culture and this idea of American freedom in particular. They're really tied into sort of California's culture, and they seem to be. Besides being a method of time travel, they seem to be a really important mechanism in terms of how the plot is operating. So I thought we might start there.
1:58 Wes: Yeah, it's funny. I think the originally they were going to use for the time machine, they were going to use something like a refrigerator that you crawled into or some other stationary object. But they were worried that that would influence kids to crawl into refrigerators and attempt to go backward in time.
2:18 Erin: So isn't a refrigerator how. What's a refrigerator in terms of surviving nuclear fallout? What's that from?
2:25 Wes: Yes, I know what you're talking about. I can't remember the movie, but the
2:29 Erin: Brendan Fraser thing is just in a bomb shelter. But I'm trying to think of what movie someone survives in a fridge. The listeners will tell us, or we'll remember it as soon as we stop Recording.
2:40 Wes: I'm glad that they ended up going with the car. Cause of course, as you're hinting at symbolically it's a far richer and culturally it's far richer and it's more dramatic and there's lots of good reasons. But you know, the automobile, right, it fits in well with someone who's a teenager. And I think, right, he aspires to get that, I don't know what you call it, that truck, right. In the beginning of the movie, he's aspire. Is it a 4×4 or some sort of Toyota truck or outdoorsy type vehicle that he actually does end up getting in the end. And the car problem is really like the first plot point in the movie's external line of action.
So, you know, you could have made it, in a way, the basis for a story. What it represents for teenagers, right, is newfound freedom. Then there's the sex aspect, being able to pick up women. What does the phrase pick up even come from? And go to the point or whatever they park, whatever they call it in the movie. And then the car that Marty is gonna go, he wants to go to the cabin by the lake with his girlfriend, right? And that car that he's hoping to do that with is wrecked in the beginning because his father is so spineless that he lets Biff, major antagonist of the movie, borrow the car.
The bully, you know, the car is. In this case, the wrecked car as a stand in is closely connected to the spinelessness of the father, which at an emotional level is the big problem of the movie, right.
4:08 Erin: It's also something connected to Lorraine and to Lorraine's father as well, right? Because. Well, one of the first things she says in the film is about her dislike of Marty's girlfriend and the fact that when she was young she didn't call boys and she certainly wouldn't sit in a parked car with a boy.
4:26 Wes: Such a hypocrite. And I know, as parents always are sexually. But anyway, with regard to the sexual mores of the youth. But yeah, sorry, go ahead.
4:35 Erin: Right. No, but you know, the significance of sitting in a parked car will take on a really, really sinister association when Biff tries to, you know, basically to rape her in the parked car. You know, so there's the freedom that the car provides, which has been co opted by Biff. It's sort of stalled by Biff twice, right? So we have the totaled car at the beginning and then we have, you know, Biff assaulting Lorraine in the parked car and sort of like impeding her progress towards George and her, the future that she seems to be destined for. But I'm also wondering about Lorraine's father hitting supposed to be George and then hits Marty and what that might mean and what the passivity of that first meeting suggests.
Like, obviously, there had to be some sort of plot mechanism in which George is introduced to Lorraine, in which Lorraine can feel sort of sorry for him, which will occasion their getting married in the first place. And so I think the fact that George is, like, run over by somebody else's car is a perfect image for that. And I'm also wondering if it's, to a certain extent, also an expression of some of the sort of incestuous themes that'll come up in the film. This is just occurring to me now, just the fact that the father is the one that has to initiate the relationship between his daughter and George and that the father seems to have the actual agency in that relationship.
And both George and, to a lesser extent, Lorraine are just sort of agents or pawns in this sort of larger passive bringing together that will be flipped on its head or restored or righted, rather, when Marty intervenes and forces George to pursue her more actively.
6:19 Wes: Hmm. I'm just thinking about it. This is something I hadn't thought about. I mean, the incest part I've thought about a lot, and I feel like I'm going to be plagiarizing my own essay that I wrote many, many years ago on this as I talk about it. But, yeah, this part about the father, Lorraine's father, hitting Marty with the car and that being the thing that leads to their union, it's really interesting to me because the father's function is usually to be an impediment to that. Right. To be part of the daughter's selective mating strategy and to help her weed out the losers. But instead he runs over the loser and does the one thing that's gonna make her like a guy like that. Right.
6:59 Erin: Well, I think there's something to that as well. Right. You know, the fact that the father accidentally hits George. I mean, he does hit him with the car. And so there is something aggressive. Right. Like trying to take out the male suitor, which occasions, you know, the bringing together of the couple. Right. The fact that, you know, Lorraine is maybe going against the father's unconscious wishes.
7:21 Wes: It's too disorganized to be effective. Yeah. So it's more aggressive in a way, but also not focused and organized enough to be a real deterrent. Right. So ironically, it does the opposite of the thing that it should Be, you know, if he had killed him, he would have prevented a catastrophe, that marriage. The father's intervening role is importantly connected to incest in psychoanalysis. The father is the one who prevents incest from happening through threat of retaliation, through threat of castration. So what does that mean in more practical, less dramatic terms?
It means that as part of the maturational process, there's some sort of detachment, separation and individuation that happens. It takes us away from our connection to the maternal and the mother or whatever primary caretaker is serving that role and forces us in a different direction. And that direction is towards the development of certain psychical capacities like a conscience, like aspirations, right? Our libidinal ties, our attachments, our energies get redirected towards those other objects, right? And not just towards the person who's going to feed us and take care of us.
So that's part of maturation and theoretically part of the way that works is to realize that the mother is, is not just a feeder and a caretaker, a baby raising machine, but she has her own interests and desires. And that's partly what the father of the phallus represents. Her attentions are not just towards the child, they are elsewhere. And ultimately, as we get older, we have to realize, you know, our mother is actually just a person and imperfect and does lots of messed up things. And part of it is because she has her own interests and desires out side of us.
So the father is part of that and the father. So the presence of the father intercedes and comes in between what might otherwise just be an incestuous relationship in the broad sense of someone never being able to separate from the mother, from wanting to have her entirely for himself or herself, and to have that forever, to not grow up. So when you have a spineless father like George, there are incestuous implications because the father can't play that role, he can't come in between. And again, father in a very abstract sense, like a paternal principle culture is also father teachers.
Your mother, you know, can play the role of a paternal principle and does in certain ways. But it's just that interceding paternal principle that would lead you to the process of identification, to the building of a superego, conscience and ego, ideal aspirations to turns your libido in different directions. And if you don't have something that's strong enough, right, to attract you like a lightning rod that says, okay, I'm going to. My goal is no longer just to be taken care of, but now I want to do, I want to become a great Guitarist, like with Marty, right.
If there's not something that can draw you in that direction, like a stronger father or something that intercedes strongly, then you get arrested development. You could get a maturational problem. And then the more complicated part of that is. And I'm sorry, I'm going on that length, but the more complicated part of that is aspirations and ambition can get wrapped up in. They seem in some way to be an escape from incest and an escape from the maternal, but they can get wrapped up in it symbolically in a way that interferes with them. So they can become grandiose.
In other words, they can become symbolic of being with the mother, of being godlike. Right. You know, so in very grandiose people with grandiose psychological pathologies, people might think they're Jesus or God or this or that. That's ambition in a way, taken to the extreme. And, you know, we all have, I think, a bit of it at times. And what it does is it activates an incest taboo again, in the broad sense. And so it inhibits us. So the more grandiose we are and the more grandiose our ambitions and the more tied that is to the concept of love, the more inhibited we get about actually accomplishing them.
And that's the position of Marty in the beginning of the movie, right? He's got a. An inhibition about guitar, about succeeding with that particular ambition. And then he's got some external obstacles to being with his girlfriend, his mother. Right.
11:39 Erin: So anyway, sorry, just so I'm clear, how does that inhibition activate the taboo? Like, how does that grandiosity return you to the mother?
11:47 Wes: Because it is reminiscent of. Of a perfect condition where one is no longer dependent. So the ideal state, right, is to be one's own parents or to be parentless, to be completely self sufficient. And the idea is that it kind of feels that way. Speculative. This is very speculative. But in the beginning there's such a symbiotic relationship with the mother. I mean, in the beginning you're in the womb and then you're in this very close, know, being taken care of type of relationship, which is, if it goes well enough, is very ideal in a sense. So the grandiose ambitions can give you the feeling of.
And this is sort of what it means to be in a manic state as well. It can give you the feeling of reuniting or take you back to the feeling of being in that perfect Garden of Eden, basically. So being godlike. So there's the hubris element, transcending the disappointment, you know, the ordinariness of life and the disappointingness of our love objects. And so the, you know, the one's ambition becomes the ultimate love object. And if you can accomplish it, it can be perfect in a way that other people can't be perfect. The very thing that's supposed to take us away, you know, aspirations and a conscience.
The conscience. We have a moral code and we want to be good. Where there's energy and gratification out of that, even if it's self denying, there's an element of gratification, it's compensatory. So we get told as children, you can't do this, you can't do that. And that's frustrating. But then the payoff is gratification in the idea that we're being good. But in either case, in the case of conscience or in aspirations, the very thing that's supposed to lead us away from the childhood situation can in a very subversive way, actually symbolically keep us attached to it.
So that's the dilemma.
13:42 Erin: So, I mean, that's all super interesting. I was thinking a lot about the role of Lorraine's parents in this. Maybe according to the definition that you're providing here, you know, the fact that Marty only has to go back one generation indicates something positive about Lorraine's parents, even though they don't seem to be immediately, you know, particularly enlightened or even in spite of the intervention of the father, having several different potential meanings. I'm thinking about the fact that like Marty's problems seem to originate just with his parents.
And so there's an Edenic quality, I think, to California and to the fact that to go back 30 years in terms of the town that he lives in is really to go back to the beginning, to go back to an origin. This could only kind of happen in America or maybe in California, you know, this time period, you know, the problem seems to spring up with his parents and not with some sort of earlier original sin that's been carried forward through generations prior. So I think in later there might be. In the what in the third one he goes back to like the Wild west or something that's not talking about that.
So there's a sense of, yeah, ruin it with the terrible.
15:00 Wes: I think they're terrible. Maybe I don't remember them well.
15:03 Erin: I was really frightened of the second one. I can't even remember why now. I just know that I have a dread around that from childhood. Like the sense that you can go back to the beginning and that can only be 30 years ago. The one line in the film that stuck out to me for being maybe somewhat false. So much of the script is just really, really brilliant and complex. But I think it's when Biff calls George an Irish fly, which is like a funny. It's a funny joke, obviously, but it struck me as hitting slightly the wrong note because they're all so.
Like. They're not Irish, you know, they're all like these California. Like, they have no origin. They've sprung up out of nothing, it seems. And Marty can go right back to where the problem is. So rather than having to go back thousands of years to some sort of problem, you know, some sort of generational finding, the origin of the generational trauma that's persisted in, you know, throughout his family for hundreds of years, as we might expect, he can just go back to his parents and fix the problem.
16:00 Wes: This is very interesting on so many different levels. It has me wanting to say a million things at once. But, I mean, part of what you're pointing to is the implausibility, right, of all of this. First of all, the implausibility that Lorraine would really get with a guy like George, I think, be very unlikely, even with the car accident. And I think Crispin Glover, you know, he really overdid it. And they were trying to get him to not overdo it because he's so unattractive. He looks practically, you know, just socially irredeemable. Just really messed up.
But I. Although I think it's great. I mean, it's part of what makes the movie great, I think. But. But even. Even though it makes it less plausible. And then the fantasy here is of, you know, what if we could go back and repair our parents in a way that would solve some of our psychological problems, right? On one level, it's just, he's not going to exist. He went back there by accident and he's not going to continue to exist unless he gets his parents together. But you can see the effect in the end is that he makes his father an assertive guy and not a loser.
And that's the wish, right? That's really what's motivating. If you saw this as a kind of dreamlike sequence in the second act. And it is. In a way, it reminds me of the wizard of Oz, in a way. Even though it's time traveling and the characters are the same, they're different in a way, they're reminiscent of each other in the way that the characters in the different acts of wizard of Oz are. Except the Makeups in the first act and back to the future. Right. So going back, just one generation to fix your parents, to make them better adjusted. So you could be well adjusted.
Better adjusted because. Right. Marty's problem has something to do with music. I mean, there are only hints of this. I mean, he seems pretty. Right. He seems pretty well adjusted, which is another implausible thing. Although you could say. Well, he got that from his mom, essentially. And because she seems fine. Right.
17:49 Erin: Herself more indication that her parents were actually doing an okay job with her.
17:55 Wes: Yeah, by just being careless, schlubby, average parents. You know, you have your hang ups, but it's not. You know, you're not a George McFly.
18:04 Erin: Right.
18:04 Wes: So I was thinking about this too. It's 1985, and all you have to do is go back 30 years to get to 1955, which seems like such a. Like today, you go back 30 years and what has changed? And I've lived it, so it seems like very little has changed. You know, technology has changed, but socially it certainly doesn't feel as radically different. And it may be just the fact that I've lived it, but.
18:34 Erin: Well, now I'm here. So that's the big. That's the big change.
18:38 Wes: So that I thought about that as well. Wow. It's really amazing that in 1985. 1955 just seemed like a different world. It just seemed like an entirely different world. And you could play up these ironies or these distinctions between the cultures. Right. Him on a skateboard being cool and wearing the jacket that looks like a life preserver. And the concept of coolness in 1955 being so different with slicked back hair and this and that. You know, all that stuff. You could make a movie today that went back 30 years and had any of those contrasts, really.
19:13 Erin: That's something that I really noticed during this viewing. That opening sequence, which I really love, of all of the technology inside the garage. But it's all. It's all been just left there to operate on its own by Doc, who's out, you know, doing some whatever, getting his plutonium or whatever. Whatever he's doing that morning when Marty comes in, right. I started to see those images, you know, of the coffee boiling, but there's no. There's no carafe to catch it. The TV turns on and there's all these stories about the Libyan terror group, which comes into play, right.
The newspaper showing that Doc's home has been. He's obviously sold it. And it's now been sold for commercial real estate. The dog Food just, you know, dumping it into Einstein's bowl. But you know, the bowl is overflowing cause he hasn't been there to eat it. And the burned toast and the automated toaster launching again and again. It's a microcosm of like the 1985 world outside. Right. So technology leading to a decadence on the one hand with the dog food bowl, like too much of a good thing, sort of the food bowl overflowing, but also to waste and you know, to a certain extent to ruin and decline.
So it's like the whole future, the whole 1985 future seems to be out of time. And the way that I was using that phrase as like a cipher to interpret this idea of like the lack of futurity, the lack of a way forward that that message about 1985, at least, you know, insofar as the film sees it. And then the, you know, the renewal that happens with the spaces when you see the Same Town back 30 years earlier where the town square is not a parking lot. And you know, the things that were created to be something, you know, like the diner is still a diner.
It's not been turned into some kind of aerobics class, some kind of gym. Right. So I didn't pay a ton of attention to in those ending sequences to whether or not Marty having fixed, fixed to the past has helped to avoid some of that decline that seems to be happening in 1985. But I think that what I'm trying to say is that there's a tremendous amount, I think, of difference that happens in those 30 years. That happens on a lot of different vectors. I think that the movie is pretty. Even though Biff is in both time periods and he's the real force for evil in the film.
I think the movie is making an argument that there's a lot of decline that's happened in 30 years as well as a lot of technological progress. I don't know if that's fair or pie eyed or about the past or what.
21:41 Wes: Yeah, no, I didn't think about that because the 80s to me is such a time of innocence and wonder.
21:47 Erin: Sure.
21:47 Wes: Even though I wasn't a happy kid. But the 80s, man, the music and the culturally, I don't know how to explain it. So it's really just a matter of, you know, nostalgia for me probably. So when I look at the 80s, I see something more innocent in a way than 1955. It's interesting. A lot of things that I, you know, that we or I, or we even might find quaint about the 80s you could point to as a softening or making superficial of the culture. Maybe there's a level of superficiality with this movie in particular. Right. They had trouble, enormous trouble, getting it made, in part because the comedies of the time were generally more racy. There had to be a topless scene that was just de rigueur for those movies. And then Disney, on the other hand, wouldn't take it because of the incest.
22:38 Erin: Right.
22:39 Wes: So the movie is racy in a much different, less comfortable way, let's say. It doesn't flatter people's easy conceptions of sexuality at the time, which, as a kid, actually, I did find kind of disturbing because I came from Ireland, which had a much different attitude towards sex. And so when I saw films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I think actually is a brilliant movie, but at the time I was shocked by it. Right. That's one of the movies I pitched to you for this episode. So, yeah. No, you. You have me thinking about something else again that I hadn't really thought about, which is the social, cultural element of the film.
It's not like they make a huge amount out of that, except they're trying to milk it for comedy. But I think there's something to that, you know, with that amazing beginning scene, in particular with all of Doc's inventions that I guess they work, but they're not very practical. Right. And you get the sense that no other invention that he's ever tried has really worked, except for the time machine. And he's the typical crazy scientist. He's disheveled and not taking care of his living space and not taking care of himself and somewhat crazy. Which has to make you wonder about why he and Marty are friends.
Right. What's the story behind that? How has that helped Marty not become like his father? Maybe he's sought out a different father figure, but a very crazy, disorganized one. I think maybe what you've made me think of now is just some of the frivolousness of those inventions as a commentary on the frivolousness of technological advance in general. Right. It seems very practically oriented and very oriented towards progress, but it might just be, in some ways be masturbatory. Right. So that brings us back to the incest theme, you know, or a fantasy or playful or grandiose.
Right. The time machine itself is, like, about as grandiose an invention, science fiction invention as you can get.
24:37 Erin: Right. The improbability of the Doc, Marty friendship is a great John Mulaney joke. People can look that up, but.
24:44 Wes: Oh, really?
24:45 Erin: What does he say? What does he say? He talks about how, like, weird that is that, you know, his best friend is a disgraced scientist who's decades older than him.
24:54 Wes: Have you ever seen Rick and Morty?
24:55 Erin: Well, I've seen parts of it.
24:56 Wes: The animated show. Yeah. But the same guy who did Community. Anyway, I think he's. He has to be ripping off, you know, and riffing.
25:02 Erin: Oh, right.
25:03 Wes: To the future with the. No, it's the grandson, actually. It's a grandson and a. The grandfather and it's much more racy. But, yeah, it's a weird relationship and it makes you want to say, wait, what's up with this? And the film never addresses it, which it shouldn't, but it should just make you think, huh, what's going on?
25:20 Erin: But, yeah, well, I like the fact that Marty is. What does it show about him? And, you know, this is just occurring to me now, but it's showing that he already has a flexibility in relationship to time. He's good at navigating these sort of cross generational spaces. Not as good as he will be once he has to go back in time and parent his father. Right. But it shows that he has some purchase on other generations already by being able to have this friendship and that he has this really great way of relating to people which seems to spring out of nowhere to a certain extent.
But one of the things I was trying to get at in my intro is that Doc also. I like what you say about these inventions and about him being kind of a screwed up character in and of itself. He also has a fraught relationship to time, as anyone who is, you know, the absentminded professor character, Right. Has this fraught relationship with time. And I think, you know, to a certain extent, Marty's going back in time and fixing his parents, you know, also has that subplot of saving Doc's life. And I think in the end, when Doc is told what's going to happen, and then Doc makes the provision, right, to wear the bulletproof vest, that also shows a form of.
Of growth and maturation for Doc, that he's able to provide for himself. I think Doc's problem repeatedly, is that he does not provide for the future. He has to get Marty to bring the video camera to the mall because he's forgotten it, which I think is pretty significant. And then he rips off these Libyan terrorists, like, that's not gonna. That's not gonna come back to bite him. So he's not providing for the future. And yet he wants to go into the future. Right. The whole time machine plot begins with this idea that he's not going into the past, he's going into the future, which I think is really significant.
27:05 Wes: 25 years, which is ridiculous. Yeah, he had the idea 30 years ago, and then he spent 30 years so that he could jump another 25 years.
27:17 Erin: Could have at least been wanting to go 30 years into the future. Well, I think he says something about wanting to see a time that he would not ordinarily see. Yeah, there's something about the fact that he doesn't expect to live 25 more years. Yeah, it's hard to tell what age the movie wants us to think he is at any given moment, apparently.
27:37 Wes: Yeah, he's old enough that he wouldn't expect to live that long, but still, why not go 100 or a thousand, you know?
27:43 Erin: Well, I think there's something significant, too, about the fact that, you know, it's funny when he sees the footage of himself on Marty's video camera and says. Remarks, you know, that he's such an old man when really there's no. He's also, I think, as you're suggesting, like a sort of replacement or surrogate father and has a. What, for the most part, is a really positive relationship with Marty. There's also this suggestion that he is also out of time. Like he's just born looking like that, apparently, and has no. Yeah, he doesn't really age.
But I'm thinking about, just to return just for a second to this California thing and this idea that one's clock starts, you know, 30 years before and that you can go back in time. Someone, when they heard that I was recording on Back to the Future, said, oh, you should do a paired episode with Oedipus Rex. I said, I think we've already recorded on that. But I couldn't remember. We did. But anyway, I was reading Emerson. I was reading something else, but someone said that to me that day and later that evening, a line from another Emerson's. All of Emerson's essays sort of allied.
I think that's an Emersonian phenomenon. So I was reading either Self Reliance or something else, and all of a sudden I had this memory of a line which I looked up, and it's from Emerson's History. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. In the section about how the whole of history is just in one man. You know, how man contains everything that has happened throughout history. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. And I was like, oh, this is so. This is so Great to bring up in this episode. Right. Because it has the Oedipus Rex connection and it has this idea that, like, you know, Marty has to go back and solve his own history, right?
He has to solve his own parents. He has to solve the riddle that he's been given himself.
29:32 Wes: So what is it in Emerson? What does it mean exactly?
29:35 Erin: It's this idea that you have to, like, no one can solve your problems for you. You have to solve them yourself. Right. And that you have the ability to do that, that you have the ability to reckon with your own path. You know, it's typical optimistic Emerson. You know, it strikes me that this film is very much in an Emersonian vein. No other country could produce a film like Back to the Future. It has to be this American culture that invents itself, that thinks that you can just go back to when California was farmland and that'll. Which was only five seconds ago in the grand history of time, and solve the problem yourself with a time machine one generation back.
Because that's where the origin is. Right. I mean, I wonder what European audiences made of this. When it came out, they probably laughed at it. Right. The idea that your problems only started, as I said, five seconds ago, in the grand scheme of things is a really American idea. Not to mention the fact that then you can also just solve those problems and everything will be great and you'll get what, in the end, the ultimate symbol of American success, which is a nice car, you know, that'll take you all over the place. So anyway, I was thinking about this film as being like an expression of a lot of those Emersonian ideals and this film as being like a kind of joining that really American philosophical tradition, which I love Emerson, don't get me wrong, he's.
I love the Transcendentalists.
30:56 Wes: Yeah. This is really fascinating. I think you're speaking to the American idea of a pioneering spirit and self determination. And self determination is, of course, I think it's a theme in Oedipus, certainly, and here and even Chinatown. I was thinking of all three of these together. So self determination in the sense of. Right. Thinking back to our Oedipus episode, he solves the problem of the Sphinx just by using his reasoning power. He can do it a priori without collecting any empirical data. Right. It's just a. It's a language problem and the solution of the problem is just internal to the puzzle.
He turns out not to be good at collecting empirical data, that is being an investigator. Right. When he actually. The city is sick and he has to figure that out. And likewise, you know, Jake has an investigation problem as well. So Sophocles makes a lot of the fact that reason and rationality, that there is an incestuous element to that because it is kicking off tradition and the need for connection to the outside world and to, like I said, empirical data to anything that might condition it right, to make it to anything that might not make it self determined.
This is another thing Oedipus plays on a lot himself is the fact that he's kind of a self made man and what is he doing when he flees his, what he originally thought was his homeland to get away from it so he can avoid incest. He's trying to cast off all of these determinative influences, parental, cultural, whatever, and to transcend fate, to change fate, which is of course what Marty is doing to some extent when he goes back in time and tries to change the character of his father. So presumably he can change his own character and life as well.
These are attempts at transcending fate, attempts at being self determining, and they go wrong. And the result in Sophocles, right, is barrenness. Hyperrationality is barren. It can't reproduce, it can't produce. You need something richer, something that involves the world more closely and feelings and facts about the world. And so the other thing that happens in Oedipus Rex is Sophocles makes a lot of the idea that to sleep with one's mother is to sow in the field from once one came. Right. In a way, it's like giving birth to oneself. And that's the problem.
It's an attempt to evade dependency and, you know, which ultimately means evading any dependent relationship or any dependent relationship with a love object. And it's unproductive, right? It leads to blight in the fields. And we can think of this psychologically as well. The effect of it is to deprive us of a full featured psyche, let's say. You know, the other thing I wanted to mention is that Cadmus, the, you know, part of the reason why Oedipus is Thebes is cursed and then ultimately Oedipus is cursed, is because Cadmus, who's sort of like a Promethean figure because he brings the Alphabet to the Greeks from Phoenicians, right?
So this association with rationality is it's also generally an association with history and culture, right? The way that we have of time travel, the way we normally time travel, is to have written history or to have the reasoning capacity to think about the future and deliberate about what we're going to do. The advent of that can seem like a crime. It's typically cast in terms of hubris and supplanting the gods. The gods get angry and then they knock you down. But, but the subtext of that is, sorry, oops is becoming, you know, becoming the go, becoming one's own parents and no longer paying proper homage to tradition, to the previous generation, to, you know, speaking of blight or whatever's happening in the 80s, you know, being unmoored from previous generations in this very terrifying and potentially destructive way.
As good as technology is, as good as an Alphabet is as good as fire is all that stuff. Right. You know, the other way of time travel that we have, if we want to change ourselves, we do. I mean, history is like that too. We're trying to learn from history, but therapy, right? And memory in general. Memory is what is our time travel.
35:22 Erin: Right. I was thinking about the sort of double strand that goes on in the sort of literalization of this therapeutic experience or of the memory experience that Marty enacts. Right? Because I was thinking about this in terms of the word confrontation and the fact that Marty is being confronted with history and with the facts of his family's problems in front of him. And he's also trying to, he's trying to bring about several confrontations between his father and the things that his father must kind of face, right? So he's both like doing his own, taking his own therapeutic journey and taking his father sort of kicking and screaming through a kind of therapeutic journey that happens both in the past, but also in that present moment.
Right. So there's like a collapsing that happens, which seems to me to be like very similar to what happens in the therapeutic experience or like in any experience, Right. Because we don't have the ability to time travel, right? But essentially like what we're doing is reckoning in the present with past memories. So I think like, there's something about the therapeutic experience that's being literalized here through the time travel trope. I don't know if that makes sense.
36:41 Wes: You know, the question is, how do we change ourselves? How do we change our character given our. The hang ups that come from. Right. It's kind of a cliche psychoanalytically or psychotherapeutically to say, okay, our parents messed us up, but the deeper, maybe the deeper way to put it is these are formative forces, right? We are creatures, we have been created, we have been plucked out of nothingness and just inserted into the temporal Right into the world and the temporal frame or stream and which is in and of itself a traumatic experience. Even if you didn't have messed up parents, that would be a source of, and is a source of hang ups and problems and pathology and all that.
So, but, so it would be, what a wonderful fantasy, you know, if only we could have better parents but be better formed ourselves. Right. So you're going to go back the artisans, the ones who've made you, you're going to go back and give them instructions on how to do a better job maybe, or you're just going to make them better in some way at their craft by making them better people because the craft just is so closely connected to their own well, adjustedness, their own character and all that. And we do have that pattern in general. We try to repair our objects, so to speak, our love objects.
We, we do all sorts of things. I even did it with my mom. I was constantly trying to like get her to take better care of herself, for instance. Right. Even though it's too late. It's too late to make her a better person in a way that makes me a better person and.
38:13 Erin: Right.
38:14 Wes: And then, you know, but, but we do it with love objects as well. We try to, we try to repair ourselves, to make ourselves worthy of the love object. And then we try to repair them by various forms of influencing them. So the therapeutic process, the way it's supposed to work, if you don't have a time travel machine, you can't actually go through all that. You know, the therapist can be something like a surrogate parent. And then you repeat some of what didn't happen or what happened in not the best way in your early childhood situation so that you can take in different formative influences.
Even though it seems like it's too late, you're already formed. You try to put yourself in a position where the clay kind of softens up again and the relationship with the therapist can change you at a deep level. Right. Change your character. Right. So if it were George McFly, could he go to a therapist and become more assertive after living a life with that particular character? Probably not, but given enough time. Yeah.
39:18 Erin: I like what you're saying about the film as an expression of this fantasy. And I think it's also that you are. Everyone is Marty here. Everyone is the. What is the thing that kids are saying now that they have main character syndrome or a main character complex or whatever. Right. That like you are the.
39:35 Wes: I'm too old to have even heard that.
39:38 Erin: You know, you're the one. You're the exception. You're the well adjusted exception that's going to fix the rest of the family, which Marty literally is. Right. Once everyone catches up with you, they're going to give you the freedom that you want to sleep with your girlfriend. But what you're also making me think of is something that maybe, I don't know, it's occurring to me now, but maybe it's more obvious than I think. What do we make of George's interest in the future? Right. Seeing as his sense of futurity is so thwarted and that he can't really look forward to a positive future.
What do we make of the fact that he is like Doc, Right. Doc wants to go into the future and so does George with his science fiction. With his science fiction. Right. And you would think that based on George's character that he would want to repeat, to retreat rather into a past. You know, he might be a history nerd or something. Right. That he would want to go into a past that actually like didn't contain him.
40:33 Wes: Right.
40:33 Erin: That's like the ultimate form of non confrontation is to not exist at all. Instead, he's sort of imagining a future in which what? It's not really a future in which he's.
40:43 Wes: You're asking a very deep question here, which is why nerds get into science fiction as opposed to going into the past.
40:50 Erin: Well, it must be a fantasy about being powerful. But the way in which that's enacted in the film is. Again, I'm sorry, I'm just like, I haven't thought through any of this. It's just happening to me right now or just occurring to me right now. But you know, the way it's enacted in the film is that those powerful forces in the form of Marty's like, you know, Darth Vader intervention, right. Is that they act on him. Marty finds a way, or he finds like a loophole to get his father to be more assertive by forcing him into an even deeper passivity. Right. By going and saying like, you have to do this because I'm this guy, you know, the sci fi guy that.
41:30 Wes: Yeah, he has to become a puppet master.
41:32 Erin: Sure. That's better than. That's better than how I was phrasing it. I don't know, I think, you know,
41:38 Wes: he has to make his father like
41:40 Erin: existentially powerless in that moment where he's subject to the whims of, you know, of another species. Right,
41:49 Wes: right. Because it is a retreat into fantasy and it's a retreat into a kind of power that lies in the future. And I guess it has something to do with the hope that when technology dominates the world, it's less about whether the bully has bigger biceps anymore. And that, you know, when this plays out, the high school nerd is the one making the big money at Google.
42:14 Erin: Right.
42:15 Wes: But then the other thing you're saying about Marty himself and the passivity of his father is also very interesting. How crazy is his plan? It's crazy that there's a film so focused on incest that's a very popular comedy, I think, where incest plays such a strong thematic role.
42:34 Erin: Well, it's unwitting, so it's. I mean, it's innocent.
42:37 Wes: I mean, the mother is literally trying to have sex with the son for a large chunk of the movie. And then he sets up this crazy plan to get them back together. What's the plan? He's gonna be messing around with his mother in the car, and then his father can intervene to separate them. Which, by the way, is a perfect representation of the psychoanalytic theory. Right. The Oedipal moment. The father intervenes and saves so that the father gets saved on the surface level, but really it's about saving the son from incest. But still, it's a crazy plan. Why would you do that? Why would you put yourself in a position? And George himself asked Marty, are you going to touch her on her. Oh, no, no. It'll just be. But he doesn't ever give a good explanation. How is he going to make that work? I find that so fascinating, especially because
43:32 Erin: he's been so disturbed by. I mean, he's had experience being at the receiving end of his mother's.
43:38 Wes: Yes. It's like.
43:40 Erin: And he's so, you know, obviously disgusted by it, that to put himself in that position all over again seems like exactly the opposite of what he would want to be doing at that point in the film.
43:51 Wes: It's brilliant because it could, because it. I mean, it moves the plot in the way that it needs to go, but it also reflects some of the unconscious dynamics. And then, of course, it gives us a good setup for George's inadvertent confrontation with Biff, where. So he's put in a situation where he can man up in the end, I guess, get physical, even though it's completely implausible, but still it works within the fantasy of the film. I think.
44:16 Erin: Before we move to that, and I think we should. I just want to say something about. It's a sidestep, but something about this idea of sci fi and the Honeymooners episode that features twice in the film. I'm a really big fan of Honeymooners. I know all the. There aren't that many episodes to know. Right. The classic 39.
44:35 Wes: I think I've seen them all. Yeah. And then they're great. I love Jackie Gleason.
44:40 Erin: He's the best. He's a great one. I was thinking about that episode and I actually went back and rewatched it just to totally refresh my memory. But it's the, you know, the man from space is Jackie Gleason's or rather Ralph Kramden's costume idea of this costume ball that they're having. And he wants to. It's a typical scheme where there's a costume competition and he wants to rent a costume for a certain amount of money and then win the competition, which comes with a cash prize, so that he'll make a profit. Basically. He figures if he puts. I can't remember what the amounts are, but if he puts, you know, $5 into a costume rental and wins the $20 prize, he'll make a profit of 15 or something.
And he doesn't even have the money to be able to rent the costume. So he's looking to Ed Norton to try and, you know, get him to lend him the money to rent the costume. Ed won't lend it to him because Ed decides that he's going to rent a costume himself. So Ralph is instructed by Alice, his wife, to come up with his own costume. So he decides he's going to be the man from space. And what he does is he takes, you know, he has this famously, you know, dilapidated apartment, and he takes all this crap, this domestic crap from around the apartment.
You know, their appliances, but their appliances, quote unquote, are all outdated. Like in 1955, it's a subject of great fun and hilarity that Ralph and Alice still have just an icebox. They don't actually have a refrigerator. But one of the things he does is he takes the icebox door and uses that as the sort of like, front panel of this really ridiculous looking spacesuit. In addition to all the things that the episode kind of contains within it. Like, it's the fact that George is watching an episode of the Honeymooners while he's sort of ignoring his wife.
And while his wife is kind of. At first dreamily and then kind of ruefully recounting the inciting incident of their marriage. It's significant because even though Ralph and Alice are poor and there's always, you know, there's Always some kind of scrape that they get into or something like that. Right. They have a really happy marriage, a much happier marriage than George and Lorraine do. And also we have this image of this guy who wants to look like a man from space, a man from the future, but who's covered in the trappings of domesticity and kind of the symbols of Ralph's own domestic failures as a provider because Ed is able to afford a refrigerator that Ralph can't.
And a lot of it has to do with the fact that Ralph can't hold onto money because of his own stupidity. So he's sort of like held back, right, by all of his failures, his past experiences.
47:24 Wes: And compared to Ed, that's saying something. But, yeah, anyway.
47:27 Erin: Right. Well, Ed. Well, there's a suggestion that Ed takes out a lot of things on credit, but Ed is a lot slyer about, like, he's dumber than Ralph, right. But he's better at, like, existing in the world and making things work for him than Ralph is. And to a certain extent, it's Ralph's kind of his sincerity that trips him up. But anyway, in the end, you know, the famous end of the episode is Ed Rather, who works in the sewer, has this emergency in the sewer, and then he ends up showing. And he had been shown earlier in the episode wearing this, like, almost like this underwater suit that he had to go down into the sewer with.
Right. So Ralph goes to the costume thing with his own makeshift costume, which is really ridiculous. They think he's a pinball machine, and they think that he is about to win the contest. Right. And then Ed bursts in in his sewer outfit and wins the contest for being the man from space, which is a typical twist that happens. So anyway, I don't know how relevant that is, but I think the fact that it's not just the. For me, anyway, it's very telling, the combination of that particular episode with the film. And it's not just about the fact that there's this sci Fi thread in that particular episode that seems to make it chime with the purposes of the.
Of the movie.
48:39 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right. There's something grandiose about what he's doing. Right. This is the way I'm thinking about it in relation to what I've said already about grandiosity. But when grandiosity kind of contaminates ambition and makes it stupid so you end up. There's a narcissism to it. You know, you're the. You're the cat who looks in the mirror and sees a lion, and you're putting together what's supposed to be an amazing costume out of outdated appliances.
49:05 Erin: Right.
49:06 Wes: And there's an element of trying too hard and aiming too high, which always backfires and reveals one's abject humanity. Outdated appliances. And then the. The way getting things done and ambition actually have to work, they kind of have to be a bit inadvertent, which is the way you avoid the incestuous implications. Right. There has to be kind of a implied father keeping enough of a buffer so that the implication of success is not incest or killing or the aggression or the killing of the father. This is. I know this probably sounds really implausible to listeners, but this is the theory.
And I think, you know, someone who could explain it better would. Could make it more plausible. So if you create the sewer costume, Right. That's what it is. So it aims lower in a way, but it ends up being more successful. Because aiming too high is precisely the psychological dynamic of incest. The way it plays out in work. You're aiming at the mother, and you can't aim at the mother.
50:12 Erin: Well. And it's entirely accidental. Ed just shows up. You might take it as inspiration. I mean, it's totally unconscious on Ed's part, but you might take it symbolically as being the inspired choice to show up in sewer costume. I really like that. And I love. I mean, Ralph is just the perfect encapsulation of grandiosity in a TV character, which makes him sweet also.
50:35 Wes: Yes, he's grand, despite his constant threats of domestic violence.
50:41 Erin: Don't get me started. He's bang zoom. Yeah. That's just about the only time that I find a threat like that to be humorous. And it's only because he is so. He has such lack of power that it is funny.
50:57 Wes: Yeah, exactly. I think that's a good point for us to make our transition to the postscript.
51:04 Erin: Okay.
51:04 Wes: And I think we probably have quite a few other things to talk about, and even then, we're not gonna get to them. There's so much in this film, but. And I can't say exactly what we're gonna focus on in the postscript, but it'll be a pleasant surprise, I promise. Thank you, thank you. Thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Like Food, with former New York Times food journalist and best selling author Mark Bittman, and Movie Therapy, in which Siskel and Ebert meets Dear Abby. AirwaveMedia.com.
The Violence of Redemption in John Donne’s “Batter My Heart” (Holy Sonnet 14)
Apr 10, 2023
In “Holy Sonnet 14,” John Donne would like his “three person’d God” to break instead of knock, blow instead of breathe, and burn instead of shine. This vision of redemption is about remaking rather than reform. And it seems to be motivated by a sense that neither reason nor the typical rhetoric of faith are not enough to bridge the mortal and the divine—what’s needed is God’s violent intervention. Wes & Erin discuss Donne’s surprising and paradoxical use of war and rape as metaphors for salvation.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:08 Wes: In Holy Sonnet 14, John Donne would like his three person God to break instead of knock, blow instead of breathe, and burn instead of shine. This vision of redemption is about remaking rather than reform. And it seems to be motivated by a sense that reason and the typical rhetoric of faith are not enough to bridge the mortal and the divine. What's needed is God's violent intervention. In this episode, we discuss Donne's surprising and paradoxical use of war and rape as metaphors for this intervention. This is Wes Alwan.
0:41 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to subtext.
0:49 Wes: So Erin, when he says batter my heart, is he talking about battery or is he talking about deep frying?
0:55 Erin: I think. I think it's deep frying. That seems to be the conceit that's running through this whole poem, is that he's just gotten a job at McDonald's and he wants God to save him.
1:07 Wes: Batter my heart and season it with 13 spices. I'll deliver it to you on a platter, my love. What we're getting at, I think we're reacting to the violence of the poem. The way I summarize this poem to someone who's telling about it, I just said, you know, it's kind of like he's asking God to rape him, basically.
1:30 Erin: Yeah, I think that's totally right.
1:32 Wes: So that's one way to overcome one's doubts, I guess, is to have God.
1:37 Erin: That's interesting what you say about doubt, because I'm wondering if doubt even comes into the poem. So you see this as a poem that has doubt in it. I never even considered that it's my
1:48 Wes: interpolation or the only thing really to go on. Right, is that he's betrothed to the enemy, which I take to be Satan. That's one of the questions of the poem. What is it that separates him from God? Or however you want to put it in such a way that God's being Mr. Nice Guy, right? He doesn't want the Mr. Rogers version of God breathing, shining, mending. He needs something more forceful still. The question is why?
2:13 Erin: That's interesting. I can see that reading now, being betrothed to the enemy and the enemy being Satan. I usually think that belief in Satan is the first thing to go. It's the first step on the way to unbelief if you're raised within that tradition. So the fact that he believes himself betrothed to Satan tells me that he's in thrall of sin. But it could also be doubt, too. I'M also seeing that reason is captive proves weak or untrue. So that could mean doubt as well. I didn't see that reading the fact that reason is weak or untrue, I saw as being to stand up against the sin that he feels is overwhelming him, that you wouldn't be smart enough to combat these instances of sin when they arrive, or that reason would even betray you, and that you would be using your reason to sort of justify your sinfulness.
So it's betrayed you to say, even though it's supposed to be this gift from God, it's actively working against you.
3:03 Wes: I think the talk of doubt, it runs against the being betrothed to the enemy. Suggests that he believes. Right. It's just that he believes that he's caught up in the other forces. And then the rest of it's about chastity and freedom. So this has something to do with impulsiveness, his own sinfulness and impulsiveness and perhaps sexual impulsiveness and maybe aggression goes in there as well as sex and aggression. So God's metaphorical sex and aggression is the only thing that can save him from his worldly sex and aggression and impulsivity. He's asking God to become the carrier of the impulsivity that he wants to get rid of from himself. Do you want to read it before we go further?
3:42 Erin: Sure. Holy Sonnet 14. Batter My Heart 3 Personed God for you as yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend, that I may rise and stand o'erthrow me and bend your force to break, blow, burn and make me new. I like an usurped town to another due, labor to admit you, but oh, to no end reason your viceroy in me me should defend, but is captived and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you and would be loved Fain but am betrothed unto your enemy. Divorce me untie or break that knot again. Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, shall never be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
4:28 Wes: Very nice. So a three persons God.
4:31 Erin: Yeah, I was wondering about that to
4:34 Wes: begin with, you know, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the three spices that go in the batter.
4:39 Erin: Yep.
4:40 Wes: Just kidding. The use of the word person there, right. Makes it more corporeal maybe than where you used to or maybe not. But it's almost like there's a hydra like effect. I think the very, you know, from the very beginning, it's kind of a surprising image. I don't know. What do you think about that?
4:56 Erin: I was thinking through this a really long time because I was just wondering why three? Why three? I mean, why emphasize the triune God here? And I noticed that the first six lines or so have that spondaic foot in the middle, so that we get three stresses in a row in the middle of the line. So it's as if there's like three, you know, three knocks that happen in the middle of each of those first lines, which gives it that really explosive kind of power. And the more I thought about that and that battering or knocking, the more I thought that, you know, if his heart is a door and they're battering it, you would need more than one person to break down a door, wouldn't you?
Or you'd need more than one person to batter it down with a battering ram, I think. So he needs three people, it seems, to stand up to his sin or to stand up to Satan. Like there's a kind of strength in numbers here, maybe that's being implied.
5:43 Wes: Yeah, I mean, he is thinking the Trinity, right? It makes me wonder. So he's come up with this nice, you know, as you were saying, these three stresses in the middle. Knock, breathe, shine, and later on, break, blow, burn. And then of course there's in each case a fourth thing, which is the effect, you know, maybe the effect of the fusion of those things. So God does these different things. Knocks, breathes, shines, and then men's. And I suppose that the knock, breathe, shine, right, has to do with each different person in the three persons, God.
So it makes me think about the genesis of the poem which came first. Did he come up with that nice idea of knock, breathe, shine, right? And then think, okay, let me backward engineer the first line. But anyway, whatever the case, it's rhythmically interesting. And then also. So what are knocking, breathing and shining? Knocking is politely knocking at the door to announce his presence, his existence. So that's like the first awareness of God being a child and being told there's God showing up to church early on. One's first memories of church or something like that.
And then there's the other two, by
6:51 Erin: the way, for the stresses too. I'm reading that three stress from the very first line. So heart, three personed God. So I'm reading those three stresses there. And then also the triple stress on stand, o'erthrow me to batter my heart.
7:04 Wes: I mean, I'm three personed God. I'm still reading that as iambic.
7:07 Erin: So batter is reverse foot. It is Iambic pentameter. But of course, there could be variation. In fact, there should be some variation if you don't want it to be right. So batter my heart three personed God. So I'm reading my heart as an iambic foot and three personed. So three per would be a spondaic foot. So you'd have heart, three personed God.
7:29 Wes: Yeah. Okay.
7:30 Erin: And then the same in that I may rise and stand because of that caesura, o'erthrow gets a kind of. Both halves of that word get equal weight. So we have stand, o'erthrow me. That's another line that has that three in a row.
7:46 Wes: So we get three per. So that's the spondaic, unstressed soned. And then God again. And then the second line, knock, breathe, shine. Yep, all stressed.
7:57 Erin: Then rise and stand, o'erthrow me. So stand, o'erthrow. And then in the fourth line, break, blow, burn, of course. And then I think that's where we. And I, like an usurped town, to. That's where we get the change in rhythm there. So the first quatrain, I should say, I think maybe at the beginning, I thought it was the first, or said generously, was the first six lines, but it's really the first four. But I think that there are a lot of changes in rhythm that then happen or continue to happen throughout the poem. It keeps kind of shifting. And of course, the biggest tonal shift comes with the octave turning into the sestet.
It's worth mentioning again that this is another combination of the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean, or the Italian and the English sonnet. So just as death be not proud, so we have A, B, B, A, A, B, B, A, C, D, C, D, E, E. So we have the traditional Petrarchan octave, and then we have the break with the sestet. But then it ends on that Shakespearean couplet to tie it all together. So back to knocking. The other thing I really see there, of course, I'm reading this really biblically. I spent a lot of time with my Bible over the past couple days reminding myself of some of these references.
And of course, knocking is Christ the bridegroom knocking on the door of the bedchamber. So from the very beginning, we have a little bit of that sexual implication, right, with the church or the soul, even, like I think was traditionally conceived of as being feminine because of the fact that there was a lot of this kind of like, male female imagery in a sort of. Not in a literal sense, but in, like, a supernatural kind of sense. Just as A metaphor. And so Christ was always the bridegroom and his church, the bride in this metaphor. And so the soul was conceived of as being like, feminine for that reason that Christ is the masculine bridegroom that woos the soul is the feminine bride.
So the knocking on the bedchamber is a reference to several things. There's connections to revelation there, but also to the Song of Songs, famously erotic poem in the Old Testament, which the early church fathers and most Christian traditions interpret either both as a love poem, which it is, but also as a metaphor for Christ seducing the soul, the sinner. And so that kind of gentleness. Or the bridegroom knocking on the door already has this decidedly not rapey but romantic implication from the very beginning. And a gentle knocking as you're saying
10:14 Wes: Jesus is a nice guy.
10:16 Erin: Yeah. So Jesus has a lot of different roles.
10:19 Wes: Right.
10:19 Erin: So he can also be. Mean is the wrong word. Right. Because that implies that, like, he's doing something wrong, but justly, he could be the just punisher as well, like mighty king. All these things are images of God that are baked into the Old Testament as well. So here he's being gentle, which is part of it too.
10:34 Wes: Yeah. This makes me think this is out of order, but maybe I'm just trying to read this too rigidly with lining things up with the Trinity, but knocking with Jesus and breathing with the Holy Spirit and maybe inspiration shining with the glory of God.
10:48 Erin: Yeah. I was wondering that myself, because I was like, okay, knock seems like a reference to Christ, but then shine, we have this idea that it's connected with the sun, S U N, which would then be a homophone for S O N. So maybe knock is supposed to be God the Father, but not sure.
11:04 Wes: I was thinking. Yeah. That probably each of these, you could make an argument for each of them lining up with the different parts of the Trinity. Maybe it's informative to compare them to what they're going to turn into. Breaking, blowing and burning. Knocking will become breaking down the door. Breathing, which again, to me, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, but connotes inspiration, breathing into. Probably there are other ways to read that too. Whereas blowing is no longer. Well, let's compare breathing and blowing. Breathing gets inside you.
And blowing is external. It's like something internal versus external force in a way. And then shining versus burning. So shining puts light and warmth over things and there's glory in it and articulates and clarifies the world. And burning, of course, is destructive. So you get these verbs which are Associated with establishing some sort of relationship, some sort of connection between two beings, the divine and the. The mortal. And it's non destructive. And the second one is just entirely. Seems to be entirely destructive, but also external.
If you're inspired, if. Right. In the first case, you can become a believer, you have a sort of internal or have faith, there would be some internal spiritual or psychological change in one's attitude. In the second case, it turns that into something seemingly, at least metaphorically external.
12:29 Erin: Mm.
12:30 Wes: You are forced. And it's no longer a matter of faith, Although it could be. Maybe that's what faith looks like under this model. Right. Something. Maybe force is the. Is the way that's the argument on the face of it. Right. Is that this nice guy stuff is not good enough. If you're really gonna get to me, I need this force. So Very, very interesting.
12:52 Erin: Yeah. I was thinking, like, blowing into somehow. But you're right, it is external. I'm thinking of Lear. The more I sat with this, being knocked around on the heath, the idea that this is external. I really like knowing Donne's upbringing in Catholicism and his relatively late conversion. So he was educated in Catholic teaching and all of that. And then even when he became an Anglican. Right. It was what we would recognize today as being like, extremely high Anglican, you know, Catholic. Catholic light. So the Catholic understanding of God's influence in our soul, of grace's influence in our soul, is something that really does.
To the extent that we can say sort of metaphorically speaking or even, you know, sort of creatively speaking, that the soul has some form of physicality or some form of reality which is. You know, I'm using physicality loosely here. Right. But the extent to which it's maybe visible to God, the extent to which it's somehow present within us. You know, Catholics believe that through the sacraments, through sanctifying grace, our souls are literally changed. They're in some way evidently changed in the sight of God. So this idea of remaking one's inner self or this idea of like, a physical change being enacted on the body is actually a pretty good metaphor for what is happening internally.
Right. The kind of internal change that is conceived of in Catholic teaching. And I could talk about sanctifying versus actual grace, I suppose, because I feel like that's like a good reference point to talk about if people don't know.
14:20 Wes: But you should do that. But I would just want to emphasize the point you've just made, because I think it's very important. This breaking, blowing, burning. They seem like externalities and more radical remaking. Right? So the effect of knock, breathe, shine is to mend. Right. But the effect of break, blow, burn is to make new. And it's almost. Maybe hints of transubstantiation there. Right? So something seemingly destructive happens, but that's what's necessary for something truly transformative. Right? Don't just patch me up and make this feeble, broken thing a little bit better. Give me a crutch or something like that. Just, yeah, completely transform me. So I think that's very good. Because, you know, as you put it, the question is, what kind of influence. How did you put it? What kind of influence does God have on us?
15:02 Erin: This episode, by the way, is brought to you by the Baltimore Catechism. So grace is. I'm thanking my mother for, you know, making me memorize some of that. So grace's favor. It's this free help that God gives us to respond to his call, right? To partake of his, like, divine nature. So grace is participating in the life of God. It's sanctifying us. It raises us up. It's a gratuitous gift that God gives us out of himself. And it surpasses human intellect, and to a certain extent, it surpasses human will. So there are two types of this that at least the Catholic Church recognizes that Donne would have been familiar with.
The first is sanctifying grace. This is like the being in the state of grace thing that people might have heard of, right? This is like when you have supernatural life. So if you die in a state of sanctifying grace, you may have to go through a process of purgation first. But Catholics believe that you will go to heaven. The lines are open to God. You're free of mortal sin. You've, like, received sacraments. God is working within you. So this is kind of like the state that has to be continually cultivated through, you know, if you do commit a mortal sin through, like, confession.
Right. And receiving absolution. So this is like your operating system. Ideally, actual grace is more of what Donne is talking about here. Now, sanctifying grace, like to be in that state of sanctifying grace through the intervention of the sacraments through, like, baptism, confirmation, all those things. Right? That does, like, physically to get there. That does physically change your soul in this way that I'm talking about. Actual grace is also what Donne is really, I think, talking about here, which. This is the second type. This is God's intervention in our process of sanctification.
So this is when God offers us an Opportunity to convert back to him. Right. He's collaborating with us, though. It's God's free initiative to offer this to us. And we have to have, you know, Catholics believe in free will. Right. So it demands a free response. We have to, like, enter freely into God's love. Otherwise, you know, it's not really love. Right. So God is basically standing at the door and knocking with actual grace. Like, he's saying, can I come in? Right. He's inspiring us maybe to convert, to return to him through this kind of supernatural help, and also helps us, like, resist temptation.
Actual grace. So he's standing at the door and saying, like, can I come in? And we have to let him in freely. But that can be really hard to do. Right? Because sometimes we don't want to accept the call. Right. We're free to reject grace. So, for instance, for me, it's the way that I conceive of this, if I was teaching a catechism class or something to kids would be to say, okay, that might be something like the working of your conscience when you've done something wrong and you get this nagging feeling like, I really have to make that right. That would be actual grace.
But of course, you can ignore that and push it away and just be like, no, I'm fine. There's a famous line from Augustine, I think, in his Confessions where he's like. He reaches this point where he knows that he wants to convert to Christianity and to live a holy life, but he's like, okay, not yet. Like, I'm not done sinning. Like, I want to. I want to stay doing this other stuff that I'm really enjoying. So we can reject that. And the problem is, when we're habituated to reject it or when we're habituated into certain sins, it becomes really easy for us to just reject that.
So Donne is here advocating for, I think, an actual grace that takes away his free will so that he can't say no. He can't reject it in favor of, like, continuing to live a sinful life. So it's this sort of paradox of using his free will in this poem or using this creative effort to ask God to basically remove his free will, make it so I can't reject this grace. I know I went on for a bit, but I don't know if it's worthwhile to make that distinction between the
18:40 Wes: two forms of grace. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's very helpful. Your talk of free will is very apt here in light of the fact that he's going to complain later on. Right. That reason, you, Viceroy in me, me should defend the way free will is thought of in this period as being the product of reasoning in our capacities to reason and to make choices based on reasons rather than simply on impulses. So this is in line with what you've been saying about, in a way, being asked to be relieved of the choice and free will and just basically having one's door knocked down.
And no, you don't have a choice. Whether or not you're going to accept this, it's going to be by force. This reminds me, because I'm rereading the Brothers Karamazov right now for the live show that partially Examined life is doing in New York soon. Ivan's famous speech about the Grand Inquisitor argues that Jesus messed up because when he rejected Satan's temptations, because Satan basically offers him the chance to have absolute power over the world. And that power would mean the ability to create a utopia and to make sure that no one ever suffers.
Right. But the cost would be to freedom and to free will. There's some commonalities between that vision and this vision, the vision of being. They're different in important ways. But the commonality here is the idea that wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have a choice at all and faith were simply imposed on us?
20:06 Erin: Yeah. You know, the other thing that most orthodox, small, Orthodox Christianity argues, is that reason alone is just not enough to withstand evil. Right. Like we need God's grace. So we do need some sort of divine intervention. But often what we get is so accommodating of our free will that it's easy to reject it or to just walk away from it.
20:25 Wes: When we say reason is not enough. Yeah. The question is, what else do we need? Right. The more general question, just putting aside religion for a moment, is a failure of reason might be a failure to persuade. It might be a failure to solve a diplomatic problem in an international level, meaning violence or war is necessary. Or maybe even at a personal level, reason doesn't always work. Or reason might fail in the sense that we need our feelings. We need our feelings to navigate the world, and we need our feelings to relate to people. There are lots of ways in which we can point to the failure of reason.
And then we look for what are the contrasting faculties or domains that are available to us that are alternatives to reason. So there's instinct and emotion, and there's love and sex and violence and impulse. And then there's also faith. Right. And religion, oddly, Enough. Maybe the religious and the divine and faith kind of straddle the line between those two. Right. So if we're thinking of the classical division of the soul, maybe the Platonic division, reason, eros, and then the spirited thumos. Thumotic part of the soul, maybe faith in some sense has a foot in each of those things.
I don't know, but I think what you just said made me think of the sense in which faith must transcend reason. Right. You're not going to reason your way into believing in God by proving God or something like that. Something. It has to be outside of reason. But on the other hand, once you start talking about free will or once you start talking about resisting one's impulsivity or one's temptation to sinfulness, there seems to be a place for reason.
22:02 Erin: Sure.
22:03 Wes: So I think you could say that about any faculty here. Right. So it seems like the erotic might be opposed to faith into the religious in important ways, but here they're important. And as with Donne's poetry in general, I mean, there are important parallels between the religious and the erotic.
22:19 Erin: Yeah. In Catholicism, at least, obviously. It's hard for me to even say that reason isn't enough as someone who loves Aquinas. Right. So there's like that whole, you know, intellectual tradition within Catholicism, but there's also the erotic there as well. Like, there's a really strong link, I think, more so than in most religions, between the erotic and the sacred.
22:37 Wes: What part does the erotic have to
22:39 Erin: play in faith, besides the obvious joke about Catholics loving sex and having a lot of kids? You know, I think that the idea of God, or Christ in particular, as a bridegroom wooing the bride is something that really comes into a lot of Catholic and orthodox Christian stories of mysticism, of different saint stories, have, like, famous periods of ecstasy, Right. In which the saint experiences something like sexual ecstasy to see when being visited by God. The really famous version of this, or a good visual image of what I'm talking about is Bernini's famous sculpture, which is in the Vatican, the Ecstasy of St.
Teresa, which shows Teresa being visited by an angel. Actually, this is a great image for this poem. She's being visited by an angel. She has this beautiful gold behind her coming down like the Holy Spirit, and almost like, you know, the shower of Danae, you know, the coins coming down, the Holy Spirit coming down upon her. And this angel is holding an arrow, I think an arrow or a spear of some kind, and is going to, like, plunge it into her. And she looks like she's wrapped in a kind of erotic ecstasy. And so, you know, this idea of, I think, like, communion of joining with God, in a way, it kind of like mirrors sexuality in the fact that this is supposed to be this.
Ideally, you know, it was supposed to be kind of like a joining together of two souls in like, a really beautiful and intimate way. Right. So that's all part of it. So stories like. Of ecstasy, which, you know, can look a lot of different ways. And it's not like God is literally coming down like Zeus would and having sex with. With women or something like that. I don't mean to suggest that at all.
24:18 Wes: That was the old style.
24:20 Erin: Right, right. But just more like that is the closest metaphorically we can get to understanding that kind of communion with God. And that's why it's a, you know, like the bride and bridegroom metaphor. That's why it's a trope that is useful for people thinking about this kind of thing. To return to.
24:34 Wes: Yeah, you're making me think that monotheism solved the problem of being literally raped by the gods. The closest you could get to Zeus was if he was sexually assaulting you.
24:46 Erin: God, what a terrifying religion that was.
24:48 Wes: Fucking with your fate in other ways.
24:50 Erin: But. Right.
24:51 Wes: I was also reminded of. There's the whole soulmate thing. And I was reminded of Aristophanes and Plato's Symposium telling a story about how because they pissed off the gods, because they tried to be like the gods. I think after Prometheus brought the fire. Right. Human beings are punished for their advanced reasoning capacity. Speaking of reason again. And the way they're punished is to be cut in half. All of us used to be kind of joined at the back. Each of us have four arms and four legs, and so they get cut in half. And then everyone. Love is about searching for one's soulmate and re.
Merging with that person. And this is a conception of love that Socrates actually rejects. Socrates sort of entertains the speeches of a bunch of people, including Aristophanes. And maybe he preserves parts of those accounts, but overall he's going to say that all of them come up short because it turns out that what love is, according to Socrates, has something to do with our reproductive capacities. In particular, reproduction in the presence of beauty. And that reproduction, that's broadly conceived. Right. It could be actual reproduction of children.
It could be the sense in which thinking is reproductive, in the sense of it involves representation. And the same thing with the arts, so the same thing with anything sublimating. So in other Words, Socrates argument is that actually love is a kind of relatedness that actually preserves the distinction between the two lovers, but produces a reproductive third. But the maintaining of the distinction is important and the prevention of merger. And you see the same sort of idea later on in psychoanalysis, where the conception of love as merger is kind of a pathological element to that.
Right? Because it's reminiscent of the merger with the mother and being in the womb, or in this symbiotic relationship where the distinction, separation and individuation hasn't occurred and the distinction between mother and child is not yet clear. This is not unrelated to the incest taboo, Right. The sense in which the idea is that there are types of relationships which obliterate the person. There are types of love relations, you know, like if there were a sexual relationship between parent and child, the psychological significance of that is psychological obliteration and trauma and so on and so forth.
So what am I trying to say here? So I'm trying to think about that in light of. That doesn't necessarily transfer to faith in a way. That might be what makes faith unique. I think whatever model of faith and its relation to the erotic you're working with, obviously the individual is preserved. It may be ecstatic, it may be that one is inspired or filled up or feels merged at particular moments, but one is not simply destroyed by the divine. And in Donne's account, right, it's overthrow me so that I may stand, destroy me in order to make me new.
The destructive part of the merger is actually a moment in something new, something standing. And so you get that reproductive third that Socrates was talking about. In a way, you give birth to a new self through the divine.
28:02 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I'm thinking about this too, in terms of. Like, you're suggesting this parallel to the creative. The submission, whether it be to the muse or to the divine, has to be a submission, right? Like, you have to metaphorically willing to be penetrated in order to allow, like, a creative force to work within you, in order to allow a supernatural power to come into your life, right. You have to. You have to admit that you need something larger than yourself, that you alone are not enough. Right? And you have to be willing to be humble enough to open yourself up to that kind of, again, submission penetration,
28:40 Wes: which isn't supposed to be inspiration, the muse, right?
28:43 Erin: Which ultimately results in something that's supposed to be not demeaning to you in any way. By humbling yourself, you actually are then able to produce the creative thing that you're trying to Produce, because you have to be open to that kind of transmission. And if you're overly determined in terms of your reason or in terms of trying to control all elements of the creative act, for instance, and not allowing inspiration to come into you and to strike where it may, then that means that you're going to produce something that's rather closed off and as a result is going to be pretty much an artistic failure.
Right. I think the same thing with the divine here. Like, I think that the poem, even as I think it's not super humble in a lot of ways, I think is humble in the way that it's thinking about submission and about using this, frankly, like using this rape metaphor to describe the way in which Donne wants to be penetrated by the divine, wants to open himself up to another's influence. I don't know if that's too gross. Yeah. And I'm not. I feel like by the end of this, I'm, like, advocating for something really, really terrible here, which I'm not meaning to do.
Obviously, rape is.
29:50 Wes: Rape is bad, even if it's. All right. I hope you're not going to ask me to take that joke out after we're done. So there's an interesting transition here now in the second quatrain to. It's not a different metaphor. I think everything works. Well, it is and it isn't. We talked a little bit about rapes, but now we have a. I guess it's a political version of that where we have a town under siege and maybe the possibility of a pillaging. So I like a usurped town to another due, labor to admit you. All right, let's unpack this. What's going on here with this? It's a usurped town, so it's already been taken over by the devil, I suppose, or by some equivalent of that to another due. Right. Due to God, I think.
30:34 Erin: Oh, I see.
30:35 Wes: He's trying to give God his due, but he can't. Right. God is besieging the town to take back what's his. But Donne can't open the gates. Reason, his viceroy. Okay, so if he's the town, there's a viceroy in that town, which is reason. The viceroy should be able to defend the town, but it is captived and proves weak or untrue. So those are different ideas. Either the viceroy has been put in the tower, put in prison, or he's a collaborator. I'm not sure which, or if there's some combination of that. But yeah. So we get the unfolding of A very elaborate and different sort of metaphor, but go ahead.
31:15 Erin: Yeah. Well, I like the fact that he's not sure if it's weak or untrue. Right. That's indicative of someone whose reason is in fact captive.
31:22 Wes: Right.
31:22 Erin: Because he just not sure. So Viceroy is. I had to look this up to know exactly what it is because outside of the Star wars universe, I realized. I realized I don't have a strong understanding of that. So this is a representative of the Monarch or someone who acts in the name of the Monarch. Right. So reason is acting in the name of God here. So reason is supposed to be. It's a gift from God. It's supposed to be there to. I guess short of having God in like a tiny form sort of working the controls in some sort of Cartesian like image, we have reason at the helm.
This part always makes me think of Lord of the Rings too. But anyway, so we have the steward, in light of the fact that Aragorn is off being a ranger, whatever, so should be defending us, but instead is captive. So this is where I get this idea, which I mentioned earlier, that reason is either too weak to withstand sin, which would be literally true. Right. Like it would be true in Donne's understanding. We need something more than reason. As I already said, to withstand evil, we need God's grace.
32:25 Wes: Yeah.
32:26 Erin: Or it's become warped. It's like the Viceroy has been paid off by Satan and has actually been actively betraying what it's supposed to be used for. So it's been warped by sin to believe that it's doing the right thing. So it's using reason to justify one's sinfulness or to remain in one's sinfulness.
32:43 Wes: Yeah. There's a bunch of different ways to make sense of reason. Being captured. Right. And being weak or untrue. I mean, normally we would think of reason as something very strong and the vehicle to truth. And strong in the sense of just the transformative effect for human beings of reason and education and culture. And then that includes the existence of a city and it includes technology. And it's of course intimately related to self consciousness and language and everything that we take to be human. Right. So it's Aristotle's writing. It's what is distinctive in our humanity and separates us from the brutes.
So it's a unfortunate circumstance, turns out to be weak and untrue. And the capture. I think the most straightforward reading is that it's just not strong enough to deal with our impulses. Plato has this image of a. I think it's reason. This is not the exact metaphor, but reason trying to rein in horses, basically, but being drawn this way and that by our impulses. The other way to think of this is that. And I think you were getting at this a little bit. You know, reason can be used to rationalize. So it's a dangerous. And a psychoanalyst would think of it even as a defense.
It can be a dangerous way to justify things, even things that are positively evil. One other way to look at this is that reason is on Freud's account, and it's a really interesting account because there's a paradox involved, and we know that Donne loves these paradoxes. But on Freud's account, what we call the ego, which is associated with reason, is kind of constructed out of the clay of the ID of the passions. And so is our conscience, which is part of the ego as the superego. But that account is quite complicated. But the idea is that anything that's motivated has something to do with our passions.
And reasoning actually is a motivated activity. There has to be. What's the best way to put this? So, for instance, if we are wrestling with some sort of moral conundrum and we're saying, well, I want to do that because I just want it, that would be very pleasurable. And some other part of us is saying, no, that's wrong, or that would, in the long term, not be in my best interest. Or it may just be wrong, morally wrong. If the reason side is going to win out, it has to win out because there's some amount of pleasure, right, in being good, being a good person, ultimately obeying our conscience.
There has to be something that satisfies, at least, is a compromise, right? With the passions, it's a form of sublimation. It's not just sex, for instance, that feels good. But refraining from sex can feel good in a different sense, maybe a higher sense. So anyway, that's the complexity in which reason can be captured by the passions. And in some sense, maybe built out of. It may be a structure that's built out of. Of the clay of the passions. So, but anyway, I like this idea of the people being cities in God's domain in his country. And when they rule themselves through reason, to some extent, they are really doing that as representatives of God.
But on Donne's account, it's not a very workable form of government because, in fact, the town is occupied. What is the town occupied by? By the passions. So, God, you know, is this really the way things are supposed to work? Right. You've installed the governor, but you've also installed a usurper.
36:14 Erin: Right. I was thinking about that. First of all, this is another connection which I didn't see, to Teresa of Avila, whose book the Interior Castle kind of works with this idea of us as being a city. In fact, I'm thinking of the cover image used on a lot of editions of Interior Castle, which has. I think it's a Remedios Varo painting, this fabulous woman's surrealist painter, which shows something like a city, the extent to which Like a castle is kind of like a city also, because the inside usually has several buildings within it. But I was thinking about that idea of the town or the city and the maiden that then comes into this, the betrothed maiden. And I'm wondering, I don't want to skip over this hinge line so we can return to it this yet dearly, I love you. But what connects the two, I wonder? The collapse of town and maiden or betrothed woman.
37:03 Wes: Yeah, he's given us two different metaphors here. And now they are coming together, I guess. Right.
37:08 Erin: I guess it's related to this bridegroom knocking at the door thing. Right. So we have this connection that goes all the way back to Song of Songs, where we have the door of the citadel or the door of the bride's chamber kind of being collapsed into. I guess I was looking for something, like, inherently similar, which is a little bit ridiculous. Right. Between a city, a woman, somehow. There's the rape of the Sabine women, which, of course, is. Anything that talks about an abduction with this kind of wording is probably inviting that reference in, you know, the city being founded on those abducted women. So maybe there's something there.
37:48 Wes: You're trying to save this mixed metaphor.
37:50 Erin: No, but I think it's the door. I think it's the door. Right. The battering of the door, ultimately. Is it the door to the chamber? Right. Is it the door to the city? This door contains all doors, all things that separate us between our sort of hardened hearts and the God who wants to enter there.
38:06 Wes: Yeah. In the beginning, we get something that sounds like rape, and then we get the pillaging being asked, you know, okay, come into this town. Take it back. And then the third thing, we're now talking about marriage and divorce. So we get a more legalistic turn, in a sense. Right.
38:24 Erin: Yeah.
38:24 Wes: Less violent, a little bit more civilized. Although, again. And he does say, imprison me, I guess, for the crime of marrying. Marrying your enemy.
38:34 Erin: Well, before we get there, I just wanted to say, you Know yet dearly I love you that turn, I'm wondering, is this a little bit performative? Is this. I mean, this is quite a shift. Suddenly it's like, oh, but actually, I. You know, it's like he's trying to woo God in this moment. I guess I'm just. I'm wondering if that's meant to be taken as a rhetorical, sort of self consciously performative move. No, but really, I really love you. I really do. You know, that kind of thing.
39:05 Wes: Yeah, he's been usurped by another. So in other words, you know, to the extent that. That's, again, about one's passions, right? So being usurped by sinfulness or by passion, by emotion, sex, violence, whatever. And despite eating, to be so radically transformed, there's love. There's a seed of that impulse here in love. So there's more than just the sinful impulses. And, you know, this goes back to the erotic stuff here too. Right. There has to be love for all of this to work. Right. Not just love of earthly things, but love of God.
39:36 Erin: That's right. I think this is also doing a really good job of sort of dramatizing the waffling that happens when you're trying to work your way back. Like you're doing something that you know is wrong, but you can't quit it. You know, this moving back and forth, like, no, no, I really want to do this thing. I don't want to be doing that. Like, I know what I need to do. And that sort of like, you know, which Donne is doing here. Like ransoming for yourself. You know, like self negotiation. What do I really want? What do I really care about here?
No, but really, I love God, you know. No, but he's abandoned me. That kind of thing is, like, really well dramatized here. And this also relates to. Maybe here is a good place to say it, but the performativity of this, too. I mentioned earlier that I think that in some ways this is really not a humble poem. Those ways are the ways in which Donne really evades kind of taking responsibility for his own sin. And so I'm wondering if the performativity here of no, but I really love you is complicated by the fact that he wants God. He's acknowledging God's superiority.
He's wanting God to come in, take back the city, take him back. But the extent to which this whole usurpation has occurred, you know, it's like, oh, well, gee, things are really bad here. Don't know how that happened. So there's not a huge acknowledgment of the part that he's played. Like, all of that is kind of sublimated in favor of this idea of God coming in and just rescuing him from himself. But what exactly he needs to be rescued for? Of course, it's hinted at in the last line. Right. And based on the other poems we
41:01 Wes: kind of know and his history.
41:02 Erin: Yes.
41:03 Wes: So he's been having a lot of fun, Poor John Donne
41:07 Erin: Donne. Rhymes with fun.
41:09 Wes: And then after he had all his fun, then he decided to become religious.
41:13 Erin: That's what most people do is the convenience way to go, basically. I'm just saying that this is not someone doing a mea culpa, doing a confession, per se.
41:21 Wes: Right.
41:22 Erin: Yeah.
41:22 Wes: That's really interesting. Yeah.
41:23 Erin: This is someone who's like, hey, come in here and deal with this. And oh, by the way, I really love you. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
41:29 Wes: You know, so I'm a philanderer, so philander me. So I can stop. You do to me what I've been, and that's the only way I can stop. Yeah. Never chaste except you ravish me. So just to emphasize what you're saying, I think it's really interesting that it's not an expression of guilt over being sinful. It's an expression of. It's a complaint in a way to God that he's not doing enough to overcome that by force.
41:57 Erin: Right.
41:57 Wes: And in a way, it's an abdication of reason, or it's a suggestion that reason is not good enough and possibly an abdication of the power of free will. So it has that element that you're pointing to of passivity and helplessness, which is not precisely where one wants to be, even if one is acknowledging the parts of faith that are not rational.
42:16 Erin: Right, right. On the one hand, arguing with God is a classic tradition in Judaism and Catholicism. Right. Actually, this is another connection to Teresa of Avila, who argues with God.
42:27 Wes: Yeah. There's a job like element to this, I think.
42:29 Erin: Yeah, for sure, for sure. But on the other hand, this is not really the way to approach. Right. This is not the way to do
42:38 Wes: it, but yeah, to be imprisoned and to be ravished, one appreciates the sentiment and the kind of desperation of it. But ultimately it's not a model for.
42:47 Erin: I think that's fine. Ultimately, it's the demand. It's like, you're not doing enough. I know better than you. Also, my reason is crap. I don't know anything. Put it this way, it's not the traditional Prayer, it's not the way that one is traditionally taught to pray. And the lack of acknowledgement and responsibility for his own sin is probably the biggest part of that. But the other big part of it is this, this demand of God, which isn't to say that God can't handle this, it's fine, but it's just not the way that one would normally approach the divine with a request. Not just because of the metaphors or whatever, which actually I think the metaphors are one of the more standard elements of this. Not standard in a, oh, I was expecting that kind of way, but it is trafficking in biblical themes.
43:33 Wes: So there's the demandingness of it. And then the thing that I was pointing to is the tension between the aspect of faith, which maybe depends on it's about grace or it's about ecstasy and the irrational. There's that, but there's a tension between that and free will, which implicates rationality to some extent. So to ask God simply to overwhelm one's free will, to make one's choices and to do all, it takes the concept of the relationship to God too far. Maybe theologically I don't think it can be. Or at least there's that tension. Right. It makes sense in a way, but there's almost like a hysterical, the hysteria to the poem.
44:14 Erin: You're reminding me of something that, you know, especially with this, like divorce me untie or break, like asking God to do something that is, I suppose divorce is permitted in Judaic law.
44:24 Wes: But yeah, no big source of contention. You know, a lot of things happen because of Henry VIII wanting to not so long ago get a divorce.
44:32 Erin: Yeah, but you're reminding me of Rasputin of all people.
44:35 Wes: Right.
44:36 Erin: Have you heard this idea that Rasputin's heretical idea is that he might have borrowed some things from this religious sect which it's actually been proven that he was not a part of. But he, either through that sect or through his own heretical one man system, you know, that he was trying to get people to join. He actually had this belief that he should sin greatly. Like it's a fascinating idea, but that it was a good thing to sin. And the bigger the sin the better because the more infused with grace and forgiveness you get as a result of that sin.
So, and this is actually refuted by Paul in Romans 6 because he talks about the fact that like when you sin, but then you come to God for forgiveness, you get this infusion of grace and you get, if you have some big sins, right Then God gives you this big infusion to like counteract that. Maybe I'm misremembering or sort of like overemphasiz. But then he says, but does that mean that you should sin a lot? Like, no, of course not. Right. But Rasputin ignores that cult leader type of. Exactly. He is a cult leader. That is exactly what he is. Yeah, that's the word I was looking for, his cult.
But there's something kind of fascinating about. I mean, there's something insane about that because Rasputin is insane. But there's this idea that maybe that's too tangential. I don't know why that crossed the windscreen of my. Or the windscreen. The windshield of my mind.
45:56 Wes: No, I, I think it makes sense because this is, you know, this is what happens in a cult. People want to, you know, and often religion gets accused of this in general. But it's in a cult, people want to abdicate their freedom and give up their minds. You end up, or at least the women end up being taken advantage of by the cult leader. Right. And are ravished. And are. So I think it's spot on to worry about that connection. And that's the tension I was pointing to at the point where this is a request to God to be deprived of one's mind. It becomes a problem.
46:30 Erin: Yeah. And I think that Donne is saying, like, I need the big guns come in with the full troops.
46:34 Wes: I'm just a little too good looking.
46:38 Erin: Yeah, that's right. That's a really good point.
46:41 Wes: He'd been not as good looking. I think it would have gone easier for him.
46:44 Erin: But yeah, I think there's something about that. Like, especially because he's kind of proposing that God do things to him, metaphorically speaking, which are like, literally speaking, sort of ungodly. And also the fact that he's sinned a lot, so he feels like he needs this like, big infusion of grace. Like there's something that maybe is also. Is this connection to this cult y idea that I'm thinking about, which is that the greater the sin, the greater the grace and forgiveness. And he really wants to be like overwhelmed with that. So go out and sin people.
47:11 Wes: Look, everyone's. Everyone needs their own particular connection to God. And in the case of a Don Juan, you know, you need the Don Juan God. You need the ravishing. The ravishing God for the ravishing man.
47:24 Erin: That's right. Well, I was going to say that he has two choices. Like he can either be beaten up by God or he could join A fight club. And that would be like.
47:32 Wes: Right.
47:32 Erin: Two ways to drum it out of him.
47:34 Wes: I said Don Juan. I should have said Dun Juan.
47:36 Erin: Dun Juan. Yeah.
47:39 Wes: Terrible. Although he was known to make. Or was it him who made some puns on his name and poems and letters. I think he did. But then others did, too.
47:46 Erin: It's that time honored tradition.
47:48 Wes: What's done is done. In reference to the marriage.
47:57 Wes: All right, so what are we going to discuss in Postscript?
48:01 Erin: Well, the final couplet. I don't think we quite got all the way there. Or did we?
48:04 Wes: Okay, we'll finish up any loose ends with this sonnet and then maybe we'll discuss another random.
48:12 Erin: I have some connections to make to the flea, actually.
48:15 Wes: Oh, were you thinking of the fleas?
48:16 Erin: That's the obvious. Oh, yeah. Well, I think, you know, the flea is not unlike a rapist.
48:23 Wes: Yeah, well, I love the. I love the argument in the flea. And we're not going to tell you anymore. We're going to.
48:29 Erin: Yeah, let that be enough of a teaser.
48:30 Wes: We're going to make you listen to Postscript if you want to know what that's all about. All right. Thank you. You.
48:36 Erin: Thank you.
48:38 Wes: Thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
Mortal Pretensions in John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” (Holy Sonnet 10)
Mar 13, 2023
A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet— John Donne’s biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps its no wonder that his great subjects were mortality and death. His Holy Sonnets, likely composed between 1609 and 1610, and published posthumously in 1633, are a collection of 19 poems written after the sea change in Donne’s subject matter from the secular to the sacred. They reflect his anxiety over his conversion to Anglicanism and his eventual decision to enter the priesthood, and meditate on salvation, death, and the wages of sin. Erin & Wes discuss Sonnet 10 in this series, “Death Be Not Proud,” an address of Death personified, whose power gradually diminishes beneath the force of Donne’s dazzling poetic rhetoric.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:00 Erin: Hey everyone, just want to let you know that my other podcast, the Partially Examined Life, will be having a live show in New York City on April 15th at 7pm we will be discussing Dostoyevsky's the Brothers Karamazov. You can get tickets whether to come in person or live stream it on the web@PartiallyExaminedLife.com live. And on another note, for Subtext, we have a listener survey and it would be a big help to us if you fill it out. It only takes a few minutes and your feedback will help us improve the show and find new sponsors who actually interest you. By filling out the survey, you'll be entered to win a $500Amazon gift card. To fill out the survey, go to surveymonkey.com r airwave.
0:47 Wes: You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet. John Donne's biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps it's no wonder that his great subjects were mortality and death. His Holy Sonnets, likely composed between 1609 and 1610 and published posthumously in 1633, are a collection of 19 poems written after the sea change in Donne's subject matter from the secular to the sacred reflect his anxiety over his conversion to Anglicanism and his eventual decision to enter the priesthood and meditate on salvation, death, and the wages of sin.
Today we're discussing Sonnet 10 in this series, Death, Be Not Proud, an address of death personified whose power gradually diminishes beneath the force of Donne's dazzling poetic rhetoric. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So Wes, Donne is a great love poet, of course, but I would argue that I think he's a great poet of death. That might be his greatest subject matter. And when I put quotes around that term, great poet of death and put it into a Google search out of curiosity, I saw that Whitman is supposed to be the greatest poet of death.
For my money, he's not even the great American poet of death. That would be Dickinson. But I don't know. I mean, I guess there are a lot of contenders for that title. And I was thinking a lot in preparing for this episode about the relationship between poetry and death, or at least things that are sort of death adjacent. Poetry and grief poetry and mourning, the elegy, of course, being one of the great poetic forms. So I'm curious who you think is great on death if you have an answer for that. And maybe why death is so present in so many poems as a way to start us off.
2:57 Erin: Well, the first person I thought of was Shakespeare. And then I was thinking, well, that's kind of an obvious and lame association. But then in thinking about poetry and death, I thought of the phrase undiscovered country. Right. Is that the right?
3:11 Wes: Mm.
3:12 Erin: And the way in which something that is puzzling and paradoxical and ineffable, a nothing can be grasped. I mean, on the one hand, there's the terror of death, the inevitability of death, the death of loved ones and life and sorts of things that make good subjects for poetic reflection. And I guess the question is what the point of that is. Maybe it's therapeutic or something. But then the other aspect is just that it's because it's something that can't be represented in any direct way as an experience. Right. You can describe a dead body, but it has to be gotten at in this more indirect, metaphorical way. So I think this type of subject, I guess, love and death are really the most. There's a lot of opportunity there, I guess, let's put it that way.
4:03 Wes: Right. I'm thinking a little about maybe about Keats as an anti death poet. I can't decide if someone is a death poet or an anti death poet. And I think maybe that tension reveals something like maybe anyone who writes about death is also in the act of writing about it, is staving it off, obviously. And I do think that love and death, or especially sex and death, are pretty closely linked. I think that, you know, this sort of emotional climax in a poem, or even like the beats inherent with each line and the turn back to the beginning that happens at the end of each line of a poem.
It's very reminiscent to me of like, the climax contains within it, like the diminution or the demotion, demise itself. So we have these peaks and valleys, maybe a bit dramatic to say that those are sort of like, I don't know, flights of fancy or great vivacity or vitality, to use words, connected with life. And then the dying off of the end of the line or the dying at the end of the poem, as it were, is connected with a kind of death. So I think that waxing and waning, or that ecstasy followed by evacuation, you might say, is very close to love and sex.
Of course, you know, these things very much mirror, I think, our experiences of not just of life's up and down kind of trajectory, but also the fact that we have at the end the eternal death waiting for us, not just the end of the line or the end of the poem that it kind of predicts.
5:40 Erin: I would add to that the use of metaphor, especially the metaphysical conceit. Right. Which Donne was accused of and criticized for. But this bringing together very different things is one as the metaphor for the other. And then maybe the introduction of paradox, too. But the use of metaphor, and we've talked about this a little bit on the show, but is in collapsing distinctions is evocative of merger, of the collapse of distinctions and things just kind of dissolving into oneness. Right. You could say that one could think of the whole world sort of being reduced in that way to these metaphorical commonalities and distinctions falling apart.
And so there's merger, which is evocative of like an early symbiotic relationship with the mother, something prior to separation and individuation. And on the other side of that, there's the kind of dissolution of distinctions that you get in death. And the merger. Right. With the natural environment, with the body, at least. Right. And if you're religious, whatever it is that an afterlife means in that context, perhaps some kind of merger or union with God or heaven or something like that.
6:54 Wes: I am really interested in that. I'm also thinking just about the sort of merger of form and content, like, inherent in poetry or in the poetic line. And I just. The more I looked at the form on the page, you know, I was thinking about the sonnet as a kind of a coffin, right? Like a box. Something that's been famously commented on many times. Like Wordsworth has that great sonnet, nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room. This idea that the sonnet itself is this little membrane that keeps all its contents within it. And we have this merger too, within the sonnet of the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean forms that Donne is working with.
Right. And which. Which is also like this mashup at this time is not particularly uncommon. And it's true of several of the Holy Sonnets, I think. But it takes advantage then of these two turns because of this mashup. So there's like. There's the turn in the. In the traditional place after the eighth line. But then there's also this turn right before or right in the final couplet in this very typically Shakespearean kind of mood, so that you have two climaxes in the po. It's self contained, it's box like, coffin like. But it also has a lot of movement within that.
And A lot of different kinds of registers coming together.
8:13 Erin: Interesting. Do you want to read it?
8:15 Wes: Yeah. Okay. This is one of the many poems that I had my students recite in school. And sometimes I would have to hear this, like, four times a day. So I have this one memorized. All right, here we go. Death be not proud. Death be not proud Though some have called thee mighty and dreadful for thou art not so for those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow Die not, poor death, Nor yet canst thou kill me from rest and sleep which but thy pictures be much pleasure Then from thee much more must flow and soonest our best men with thee do go Rest of their bones and souls delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men and dost with poison, war and sickness dwell and poppy or charms can make us sleep as well and better than thy stroke. Why swell' st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more. Death thou shalt die.
9:20 Erin: Very nice. Exactly the way I would have read it. So you get this personification of death, but also his addressing death directly and giving death a command. This is like this imperative mode. Was something Donne did, I guess, in several poems. And there's one with the sun. Right. Go away, go away sun. Is that what it's called?
9:48 Wes: Unruly, busy sun, son, go away, Come back another day. Busy something fool. Unruly sun, Busy, unruly fool. Die something. Anyway. Yeah. I love that poem.
10:02 Erin: Yeah. In this case, there's also the. There's the accusation of death being proud, which is a curious and unexpected accusation, I think. Right. It's not what we would think of as the first thing to dislike about death, even a personified death. So I think here it's hard for me not to think immediately of death as in the classically personified death. And the shroud and with the scythe and all that stuff. And going around touching people and bringing them off to. So that kind of personification of death. That death is a kind of meager creature, in a way.
Silent. And if you pull back the cloak, just bones. And here the idea that his death has swollen and proud. And I suppose, the. So conscious of its own power, I guess, so over the psyches of human beings. So we go from our own. The pivot is from our fear of death to. Not directly to the idea of an afterlife for an eternity. But instead, the fear of death is counterposed with this attack on the pride of the personified.
11:17 Wes: I just love the fact that this imperative at the beginning is a negative Rather than a positive imperative. So just thinking about how crappy this poem would be if it was like, death, be humble. You know, something like that, right? Like, the negation, I think, identifies it, brings death down. It sort of removes, like, a kind of power there from the adjective that we want to assign to death. And it's sort of killing death, like it's killing our sort of beliefs about death. Even if they are, as you say, and I think they are unexpected beliefs that he's putting into our mouths a little bit.
I think it's this very negation. The two nots that we get from the beginning are kind of already performing what's gonna happen in that last line. It's already kind of killing death a little bit with just the way that the phrases are structured. And I'm thinking, too, like, what you say about being proud and being puffed up and swollen, as death is called in the third to last line. That made me think about the fact that images of being puffed up, of being swollen, that are inherent in pride, are also, like, literally. I mean, I can't help thinking this just because Donne is such a bodily poet.
But I'm thinking about, like, a swollen corpse. And since death in this poem, what's so weird about the movement of this poem, which we could obviously talk about, and maybe you agree, maybe you don't, in the end, it's transformed into something that isn't even death. Or it's repeatedly evacuated, displaced somehow, as in these negations. But by the end, I feel like it's been transformed maybe into something. And so that image of a swollen corpse is really interesting because that in itself is not death. That's like someone's body. It's death maybe working on that body in some way.
Death is definitely acting on this body, but it's also, like, literally sort of replacing, like the. The only image that we can have of death is of its action on an actual human being. So the personification is sort of immediately being, in my mind, kind of twisted into a diminishment of death's force. Because really, the only way that we can conceptualize it as you're saying, is, like, to visualize the human being affected by that death.
13:28 Erin: That is spot on, in my view. I just did a little free writing, rewriting of the poem as an exercise. I thought, well, how would I attack death? And at one point I said, these agencies are life's agency, and you master only the effect. Slave to the lawfulness of matter and form, the way they wind down. I Suspected I would just reveal something about Donne's poem by doing that, which I think you just did, which is to say even the beginning, by personifying death, you've defeated death because you've created a creature, right? And everything happens within this terrain of life, and terrain of life, everything happens within that frame, right?
So someone dying in a way, that's a thing of life, right? Those are biological forces and natural laws at work. And you know, and if you have to depict death as a kind of. To think about death, you have to depict it as a kind of creature or ghost in a way. But it's still. It's a humanoid form and it gives you some sense of the predominance of life or the greater power of life in a way. And then finally, I think the way you put it was effects, right? Death is the effect, but it's not an agency or a power in a way, right? The power is what happens within life.
It's part of the rules of life, right? Which is that for whatever reason, reason, the imperative of a living thing is to die, whether of an old age or through an accident. But again, those are the forces of life at work, even in their own termination. And then the effect is death. And that lack of power sort of parallels the nothingness and the difficult even imagining. How do you personify something that is nothing, right? least as far as we can speculate within our own experience. Either one is. Believes in an afterlife and think that experience continues in some form, or one posits a nothingness that is inconceivable.
So this complete cessation of experience, that's great.
15:31 Wes: You're even making me look at the second line. Perhaps I'm overreading, but those last three hard beats that are great art. Not so now I've just put a square around art. Not, you know, I know of course art is just the antiquated form of are. But now I'm seeing it as, you know, not art. So we have this idea that some. I've heard some people out there call you mighty and dreadful. And I'm thinking about this in relationship to overthrow, which it's yoked to in the next line. It's just like, is Death supposed to be a king? Is Death supposed to be. Or a usurper? Is it supposed to be an army? What other things are mighty and dreadful that would be. Or in other words, what kind of collection of images is that supposed to call up for death personified, I wonder.
16:22 Erin: Well, I'm trying to think if it's Just a strange way to think about it or not. We think of death as dreadful. But it's not until you start thinking poetically, I think, that you start thinking of it as this mighty force. Or at least rhetorically. And I think he even talks about death a lot that way in his later writings. Just skimmed some of his sermons. And he just got more and more preoccupied with death, I think, as time went on. And seemed quite morbid about it. Despite the religious hope that it's supposed to be vindicating. But I think, you know, again, we're prone to think of that dreadfulness.
But the power part and the pride. The pride part is the consciousness of power. And then the mightiness is power here. So you're trying to deflate something that. Or I guess convince Death that he's not all that. You know, I guess if you were right to write this more straightforwardly. The approach would be to say, hey, everyone, don't worry about Death. It's not so bad as long as you're not a sinner. Or as long as you atone and are saved, or something like that. And the one you would be trying to persuade is human beings. Right. Instead of Death himself.
And the argument would be, it's the thing that we get at the end is that there's an eternal waking. That death isn't what it seems to be. So then, you know, the question is, what is the significance of saying, okay, it's not human beings I'm directly trying to persuade in this poem, but Death himself that he's not so mighty and dreadful?
17:53 Wes: Do you mean almost in like a talismanic kind of way like this is done talking to his own mortality.
18:00 Erin: I'm just thinking of the conceit of the poem as personified death. And speaking to that persuading that. I keep wanting to call it a creature, although that's not a good word, but that being. But yeah, I mean, I think speaking to his own morality. What are you thinking there? That sounds promising.
18:16 Wes: Well, I'm thinking about the fact that in the fourth line, when we finally get Death acting in a Truly. It's when Death actually kills the speaker kills Donne himself. I think that overthrow is a violent word, but to me it's a bit abstracted. Die earlier, die not poor Death, nor yet those you think thou dost overthrow. Die not poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. Overthrow feels to me a bit abstracted. Die almost like emphasizes Death's victims there. There's a bit of passivity. And so it highlights what death does. As a kind of byproduct of sorts.
This happens to people rather than death actively working on them. And this is one of the interesting things about having a personified poem about a subject which could also be a verb. So, of course, overthrow and death too, here are tied up in further sort of evacuations of death's power. So there's like this misapprehension, right. You would think that it's mighty and dreadful, Right. You think it overthrows you, but it doesn't. And then the negation, the repeated knots. But here, finally, we get death actually killing someone, and that is the speaker himself.
So Donne is the one who's. Who's taking the blow, as it were.
19:38 Erin: He's saying, nor yet canst thou kill me.
19:41 Wes: Right.
19:42 Erin: So what are you just thinking? The image is evoked of.
19:46 Wes: Yeah, the landing on me, I think, is really evocative there. Like, of course, on the one hand, as you're saying this is a persuasion of death, it's also being performed for an audience of readers who are hopefully going to find the object being that they find the threat or the promise of their own death to be diminished, their fear of it to be diminished. But I think by doing that, what's interesting about the poem and what Donne understands really well about poetry is that you have to kind of like, put yourself on the line in every poem. And, you know, he's, like, very good at the performative. I think this is why he was such an effective speaker and sermonizer. And so he. I like the fact that it lands. The sentence lands on me. That's significant for me.
20:39 Erin: Well, you were pointing to the word overthrow, which I think is interesting because it turns us to a martial metaphor that sheds light on mighty and dreadful, so. Or it sheds a new light on that. And it reminds me of Sonnet 14, Holy Sonnet 14, which we'll be doing next. But where sexual and martial metaphors are kind of combined. The idea of a God reaching us by sort of overthrowing our citadel. So for those whom thou thinkst, thou dost overthrow. So the image I get connecting those two things, mighty and dreadful and pride and overthrowing someone riding into war. It's hard not to think of Game of Thrones now with the White Walkers.
21:25 Wes: I was thinking of Helm's Deep when you made the reference to batter my Heart. I was like, right, they're the orcs. Like, God is the orcs trying to get into Helm's Deep.
21:34 Erin: Anyway, sorry, but, you know, so zombie creatures who are also regal and proud and warlike and proud of their warlike effectiveness. Right. So you can. An army, a horde, let's say, might think of itself as death incarnate. And the. I'm thinking of Apocalypse Now, Death from above. Right on the helicopter and Lt. Kilgore. So this position of being the personification of death, I think warriors and soldiers, and even maybe we do this ourselves in our daily lives in various ways, but thinking of ourselves, thinking of our own effectiveness, or thinking of the ultimate form of effectiveness as lying in the capacity to deliver death to others.
So for instance, it's one thing to induce admiration in others. That's one form of power. And the whole idea is to make the consciousness of the other submit and serve our own self consciousness or our own sense of being. But the ultimate power is to just extinguish the other consciousness. Especially if it is not in line, if it doesn't share the right values, if it's, you know, other different, if it's disrespectful, if it doesn't flatter one's pride. So going from that martial metaphor, we get people that think it overthrows die. Not so. So we go back to death overthrowing.
It sounds like overthrowing a regime or a king, something like that. Right. But now we go back to just you think you overthrow them, but they don't die. There's a little bit of a lack of a parallel parallelism there, but. And you can't kill me either.
23:10 Wes: We are the kings, the people that death tries to kill. But we're still sort of kings in exile or something. I don't know.
23:15 Erin: I like that. No usurpation. So then the question is why what that means? Why, of course, literally death does kill me. What does it mean then?
23:25 Wes: Before we move on? I'm really stuck on this third line for its sound and its rhythm, even more than its sense. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts, because I literally don't. I've been trying to puzzle this out. I find that third line to be really indelicate or something. Like we have all of these one syllable words until overthrow, obviously. Three syllable word and it's like almost silly for those whom thou thinks thou
23:54 Erin: dost overthrow, but of th sounds, say thou, say thou, thinkest thou five times fast.
24:01 Wes: But yeah, then we get that really interesting reversed foot in the middle of that line. Think' st thou where the stress is not where it should be, or it's consciously reversed so that the emphasis is not on thou or death, but on thinking. It's reduced in the sort of imagination as well as in the sense of
24:27 Erin: the line, is it a double stress? Thinkst thou trochee? Is that what you would call it or.
24:33 Wes: Yeah, trochee would be stressed unstressed. You're saying it's a spondee.
24:37 Erin: Spondee. Spondee. Spondee.
24:39 Wes: Yep, spondee. I think it's trochaic.
24:41 Erin: Okay.
24:42 Wes: Because then thinkst thou dost overthrow. Yeah, I think it's a trochee. That's how I would read it anyway. Because it's. Because it's a qualification for those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow. I think thinkst is actually the highest point of that line.
24:55 Erin: Right. I agree with that. Yeah, definitely.
24:58 Wes: So it diminishes the thou that follows it. And if you kind of like are running up to thinkst it a little bit makes even the stress of the thou preceding it to it dwarfs it by comparison.
25:11 Erin: This is the type of use of a more natural speaking sound that Donne was criticized for. Right. By Johnson and others. And as I guess it's inklings of modernism. Right. T.S. eliot was a big fan. And it creates different rhetorical possibilities, I think. So it's apt to the attempt to persuade to thinkst. Right. Thinks you think, but it's not true. So to have that tenting there right in the middle of the line.
25:36 Wes: But you're not bothered by this series of single syllable words seems kind of plodding to me.
25:43 Erin: Or those whom thou thinkst thou dost. Yeah, I guess I didn't notice that it's all one syllable until the last word. Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm bothered by it. But what bothers you?
25:56 Wes: Well, even in the following. Well, because it's sort of ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, it's a little bit chimy. Like for instance, in the following line. Actually, now I'm just noticing the following line consists entirely of single syllable words and yet we don't notice it as much.
26:12 Erin: It's almost like because it's broken up, there's some pauses or the cadences there.
26:17 Wes: That's right. That's a really good point. But also I think that weirdly for me, the alliteration in the third line is calling attention to a kind of choppiness, even as the th sound would seemingly serve to make it a little bit more smooth and mellifluous. Instead it calls attention to something about the line that's almost silly to me.
26:39 Erin: Yeah, I mean, I see what you're saying. You get more. The first two lines Sort of cadences mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so. And more typical. I guess it's typical iambic pentameter, right. And then you get this weird, choppy, differently stressed line that runs. That goes much more quickly. So it's like a sudden burst of machine gun fire. And then you're back to the cadences again.
27:03 Wes: Perhaps the idea that the sort of conclusion of the line logically occurs in the following line means that this is like, you know, speeding to overthrow. And then only in the next line do we get that nice caesura that will kind of relax us a little bit. Die, not poor death.
27:21 Erin: Yeah, the whom, the pronoun doesn't get its verb until die. Yeah. So poor death.
27:28 Wes: Poor death. So then we have from rest and sleep, which. But thy pictures be much pleasure. So of course, the only sort of notes I made on that line are the connection to Lady Macbeth. The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. And then the fact that we get rest and sleep, which sort of subdivided there. I find that interesting, but I don't have anything to say about it.
27:55 Erin: Yeah, I mean, it is always interesting that sleep is very. It's one of my favorite things.
28:01 Wes: So same when I can get it.
28:05 Erin: This speaks to what's terrifying about death, right? Which is loss of consciousness forever. Loss of experience, as I was putting it before. This weird story that we're a part of that terminates and we can't even, you know, we can't even be spectators to the termination or what comes directly after. But which speaks to an element of curiosity, you know, why want more? What is it we have lost? I think. Who is the philosopher who first made this? Epicurus. The argument of Epicurus was that no one could die because at the point of death, right? There is no one.
So you can't be injured by death because there's no party anymore to the event. So Wes dies once Wes has died. You speak of Wes being dead in a metaphorical way, but not in a literal way, because the subject, Wes, has disappeared and there's no entity to ascribe the property dead to. So we can't be harmed at that point. Which is a. That's a much more abstract philosophical route to go that evades the strategy of appealing to an afterlife. But although I think the two have weird crossover, which I won't go into now because I can't articulate it or express it, what I'll say is I'll allude to this and this.
This is related to discussions on the Partially Examined Life about personal identity. And this question of death. But there's weird paradoxes involved in personal identity and death speak to the impossibility of death, which I can't. I'm not going to be able to give a good explanation of that, so I won't. But. So in other words, the idea of being eternally alive or impossible to extinguish is. It's not just predicated on belief in an afterlife. I'll just say that. So I think there's something deeply ingrained in us which thinks that this termination of experience is in some sense impossible.
So I kind of got us off track there on the whole sleep rest thing.
30:09 Wes: I really. I want to put a pin in this Epicurus quote. I really like that because at the end of the episode, if I may, I want to recite something as well from Donne's Meditation 17, which I think will shed some additional light on that or be in conversation with it. Not the famous part of. Pretty much all of Meditation 17 is really famous, but not the most famous part about Ask not for whom the Bell Tolls, but a different part that I really love.
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You know, he's pointing to an interesting paradox here about the pleasures of sleep and rest and the fact that. The strangeness of. The fact that we fear cessation of consciousness when we kind of welcome it at various times, and we're also beset with it constantly. There's a lot that goes on, you know, if you think of the limitedness of our stream of consciousness and attention and things that we don't notice and that might fade. You know, the feeling of my. Of the chair against my thigh right now, which. It's an experience when I attend to it.
I know it's been there all along and it registered in some sense, but if I hadn't just drawn attention to it, that I would never, you know, that would have gone off to oblivion. Oblivion. And remained in my preconscious or whatever you want to call it. And we have this little. This is kind of a William James thought, but this little spotlight in our stream of consciousness that's very narrowly focused. And we're constantly losing experience to the past as well. So death is a constant, right? It's as experience. Like, what can you say about 10 years ago, about 20 years ago, that is no longer.
We can say something about our memories, but only vaguely, right? We can't re. Experience those things. We know that we had such experiences. We might be able to bring back a little bit of it, but only in this very vague way. And then as far as who we were, you know, you reach a certain point in your life, it's like, that was a different person. I'm linked to them in memory, but that person, in a way is gone. So anyway, I'm just trying to think of all these ways in which there is this death in life. The point here, of course, for Donne, is just that let thy pictures be is that we get.
You think you're scary. Well, we get. We actually. What you do for us, for the most part, or at least, you know, in your kind of pictures of you that occur within life is actually provide pleasure.
33:09 Wes: So that's great. I'm thinking too, about. I guess I got at that a little bit sort of accidentally in my intro. But this idea that, like, if you have many phases to your life, as I think you and I both have, having different experiences or different sort of reinventions or. I mean, in short, Madonna is the true expert in death. But basically the different types of lives that you might lead may arguably, if I'm understanding you correctly, acquaint somebody like us who's had many different phases and sort of reincarnations, if you will, in our own lives, than someone arguably, who hasn't.
You know, not that we're superior in any way, right? But like, that maybe those types of experiences help to demarcate one's life in ways that might be more invisible to someone who, like, stays in the same job and, you know, the way any kind of interminable experience really does seem to last forever, and time has relatively little meaning when one is engaged in something for a long time. Is that. Am I taking that too far?
34:14 Erin: You know. Yeah. I'm thinking of this hypothetical now in which, yes, if we were doing the same thing every day forever, then that remark I made about losing the past would be less true. We would always be reinforcing the same Thing over and over again. I'm thinking now of repetition, compulsion and psychoanalysis, AKA death drive, which is just repetition without progress, stasis, which is possible within life. Not to say that everyone doesn't do a bunch of career changes. Isn't that position really, really. We're talking about growth. We're talking about psychological growth, personal growth, career growth as well.
This is another interesting accusation or argument against the power of death that one might make to personify death, which is just that. Look, the engine of progress is the leaving behind of the past, is the death of the past and the death of the former self or the death of certain qualities one once had, right? What if you get over a hang up? If you. If you change as a person therapeutically, you leave some portion of your identity behind. And it's one of the reasons it's so hard to do because that part of you just doesn't want to die. That's scary, right?
So even if it's maladaptive and painful, that it'll fight to stay alive within you and it might feel like death to. To try to give it up.
35:32 Wes: So I think those are excellent points. And I'm thinking. I'm thinking about the fact that we get two rests in this poem as well. We get a lot of yoked images, double images, rest and sleep, rest of their bones and soul's delivery. And I'm thinking about that delivery of the soul as being related to what you're saying. And also a little further back to that Epicurus quote as well, that this is just a release into which you become something different. Not to pack too much in here, but I'm also thinking quite a bit about line 7 and this only the good die young kind of reference here, right?
Which is a proverb that, whether through Billy Joel or some other means most people have heard of. And I was wondering about the origin of this. This idea that only the good die young or that, you know, good people tend to die first soonest, whatever the case may be. And I found interestingly that it's. There's a section of this in the Greek anthology, which I have, and I looked it up. It originates from a story in Herodotus, history. There's a section I could read from. Okay, so this is gonna be really bad because I don't know how to say any of these names.
Like, they're particularly opaque to me. But in the Greek anthology Cleobis, Cleo and Bis and Byton or bitten B I T O N. Wow, these are reaching far back.
36:59 Erin: The neanderthal Greeks in their mythology. Yeah, I'm not familiar with them.
37:04 Wes: They enabled their mother, Cydippe, C Y D I P P E, the priestess of Hera at Argos, to sacrifice by putting their own necks under the yoke when the oxen delayed. You could see this is right out of the Greek anthology. So this is quite a sentence. So they replaced the oxen that Cydippe was going to sacrifice.
37:24 Erin: Why did they do that?
37:25 Wes: They were missing. The oxen were missing. So these youths hitched themselves to the cart to carry their mother to the festival for the goddess Hera. They say she was so pleased that she prayed to Hera that the highest human happiness possible for man should befall her sons. Thus she prayed and that night they died. So this idea that like the greatest thing that can happen to you is that you. So I have another source that I found online. Yeah. At the temple, the grateful mother asked Hera to reward her sons with the greatest gift anyone might receive.
Whereupon her sons lay down to sleep and never woke again. And so this story, the original proverb, which is whom the gods love dies young. Or you know, something like the best people go first. And so I'm thinking about proverb, you know, tells us that if you're loved by the gods, you die young. And this idea that the story itself contains sleep and the idea that you go to sleep and then you just never wake up, and that this is a blessing by Hera, but also it links sleep and death pretty closely.
38:29 Erin: So only our best men with thee do go. Yeah, I'm trying to think, what is the origins of that thought? I mean, I know that when I was much younger and lost a loved one, I think the feeling was it's kind of a misanthropic thing too. But I being around other people and thinking, well, this person who died was so much better than them.
38:50 Wes: Yep.
38:50 Erin: Why did she die? I guess when you think of someone who has died, there's that element of idealization as well. Once someone is gone, they become the best. Right. They become corporeal. Actual human beings with all their flaws just can't compare to that. So maybe that's. I'm just trying to give an off the cuff psychology of it because I haven't thought about it. Made me curious. And then you might think of, okay, best men with thee do go. I think originally reading the poem the first time, I was thinking of people who go to war. The most valiant, the bravest end up at the front and get killed.
And the people who are in a leading Role and taking the most risks in whatever context. It doesn't even have to be war, but. And then blessed in a way. Best and blessed, but in the sense of luckiest. Right. So maybe there's that connotation as well, which I think you were getting at, which is just that it's our best and also our luckiest to go with you because they get to rest. Although it's a strange way of putting it. Rest of their bones, since there's a potential double entendre there. And then soul's delivery, which just turns death into a courier.
Now,
40:00 Wes: I know all I could think of. Doordash. Yeah.
40:03 Erin: Death in little brown shorts carrying a package with a soul in it. So death has now become a link between two worlds, between this world and another, where the best people are and continue on.
40:20 Wes: Yeah. I'm thinking, too, that there's something inherent in the original story from Herodotus about these two boys, that they were willing to carry their mother to the sacrifice and they were willing to debase themselves, in a manner of speaking. Right. By putting themselves in the position of the oxen, the beasts of burden. Obviously, that has, say, Donne, who probably was very familiar with these classical pieces and coming out of a Christian tradition, of course, that would have a lot of Christian resonance. And so I'm wondering about that.
The Christological implications of this idea, which, of course are kind of inherent through the whole poem. And, you know, the end we get the sort of transposition of 1 Corinthians. This idea that death is a portal, that it affects a transformation which is ultimately triumphant, I think is obviously inherent in the, say, the genealogy of this poem from both the Judeo Christian and the sort of Greco Roman side here. So in the following line, death then becomes a slave, and it's a slave to the master in this equation are further sort of personified things.
And then actual men, kings and desperate men, fate and chance are clear to me. Kings are to a certain extent, clear to me as well. Desperate men is really interesting. Yeah.
41:42 Erin: Well, I was thinking of murder and. Right.
41:45 Wes: But also suicide, in which case desperate men would be slaves to themselves, which is really fascinating.
41:52 Erin: I like this idea that in a way, it's like a kind of Platonic question about abstraction versus or universal versus particular. Right. Death is instantiated in the doings of human beings. Only can be what it is through those doings. Whether it's, you know, it could be people killing each other. Could be chance. Could be just falling down in the shower, getting a disease. It could be, you know, Microscopic organisms or just old age. But. So maybe human doings is going a bit too far in that sense. But it's, you know, the worldly, worldly doings. It's not Hades or it's not death's world which controls all these things.
Again, that's just the receiver. The kind of death that sort of picks up the garbage. Sorry, that's a bad way of putting it. The effect death receives, the effects of things that actually happen in life. And all the power is in life. You know, if someone's killing or even killing themselves. The agency is a. Of a living person doing things within life. And it's not something that death is doing. And in fact, death is slave to it all in the sense that there would be no undying if these things weren't. Death would not have any work to do, any garbage to pick up if all this stuff weren't happening.
So we get the idea, you know, when the world finally ends and there's no more dying to be done than death, you know, as per the last part of the line of this, death will also die.
43:20 Wes: I like that garbage idea, too, because we have this littering at this point of the poem with lists. You know, stuff just starts to really pile up like bones. So we get this list there of four things. And then in the following line, line 10, we hear who Death also, like, hangs out with. Poison, war and sickness. In fact, they're his. He doesn't just hang out with them, they're his roommates. And that, I think, is pretty straightforward to me. But in line 11, we get what I. Again, I don't know if I'm overreading or if I'm just, like, staring at this piece of paper for too long.
We get. And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well and better than thy stroke in the following line. But we get. For me, I feel like there's a little bit of reflection of line 10 into line 11 sonically, if not in terms of meaning. But maybe there's something we can make out of this meaning. So we get poison in 10 and poppy in 11. And then we get the most tangential connection, war and charms. Which I think there's something in there. And then we get sickness, dwell and sleep as well. So poison and poppy, war and charms. I think that's not just in my imagination, right?
44:32 Erin: No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, that seems right.
44:36 Wes: And then sickness and sleep. So I'm interested in, you know, if this makes sense in sort of reading the collection of former items on the list with the latter items, I mean,
44:47 Erin: we go from poison to poppies. I mean, if you think about what's happening with poppies or charms and the. The effect that they have, sleep, this is all. Again, it doesn't transcend the framework of life. It all happens within life. And the power lies with the poppies. And then the. The effect is sleep. But death is not the agency in poison. Again, death is the receiver, so to speak. The agency is still, you know, poison or war or sickness. And death dwells with them in the sense of. But if he's the roommate, he's the moocher, he's living off of their labors.
45:28 Wes: He's Kramer. I like it.
45:31 Erin: That's right. Bursting into the apartment and getting the cereal out. So the counterpart there is sleep, but death sleep. Both effects of something and those things that create the effects of the powerful things. And so there's no reason for either sleep or death to be proud. But the distinction is that the idea of dwelling with those things with death is a very passive. And it is that way only because, again, death is an abstraction that transcends the frame. And sleep happens within the frame. Right. Sleep is a real thing that creatures do on an ongoing basis.
And dying is a process and activity of the being. Dead, unlike being asleep, is not itself a ongoing process and an activity. It's the termination of all of that. Again, so it lies outside of the frame in this very confusing and paradoxical way. So I think this turns the paradoxical nature of death against itself. And that's why I was referencing Epicurus. It's much more clever than just an appeal to an afterlife. It uses the inconceivability of death in a way against. Against itself.
46:40 Wes: So this latest comment that you've made is littered with Princess Bride references. I just have to say, I mean, and inconceivable is really the inconceivable, the cherry on top of the sundae. Because I'm like, of course. Right? I mean, death is a binary state. You can't be only mostly dead, right? Yeah.
47:00 Erin: Oh, God, that's so funny. Yeah, I'm just being that guy. You really are thinking I was being clever.
47:09 Wes: No, no, not at all. Well, that's a combination of Billy Crystal's character and Wallace Shawn's character right there. The two, arguably the two best characters in the film. Not forgetting Carol Kane as Billy Crystal's wife. But anyway, yeah, so we have. And better than thy stroke, which I like there for that, obviously, for that double meaning, we have the stroke of the bell, the Bell tolling in the middle of that line. But also, I suppose, an ax falling.
47:34 Erin: Yeah.
47:35 Wes: Or sword separation of having a stroke.
47:39 Erin: Just kidding.
47:42 Wes: The separation there, I think. Like that stroke, when that stroke falls in the middle of that line. Arguably, that is the moment when death truly dies. Rhetorically in the poem, perhaps.
47:52 Erin: Well, I'm thinking of the scythe there as well. Right. So if you think of death personified and the reaping, the. The act of reaping, so. And so they make us sleep better. There's this again. There's this comparison between sleep and death and the idea that sleep is better, but also that, well, is there. They're more effective. That's interesting, actually. It's like saying the poppies have a power and effectiveness that your stroke doesn't or isn't. You see what I'm getting at here?
48:21 Wes: Yeah.
48:21 Erin: It's a little bit confusing. Is it the sleep that's better or the agency of the things causing sleep or death?
48:29 Wes: I think ultimately the grammatical antecedent would be sleep, but.
48:33 Erin: Yeah. So a better sleep. Right, of course. I mean, this is like the clear reading, which is just to say, look, you're not the only one who can make people sleep. But there's a kind of sleep which is better. Doesn't quite fit with the idea of waking eternally. I mean. Right. In a way, death should be the better sleep from a religious standpoint.
48:58 Wes: But my reading in line 12 is that the word stroke and that semicolon there, that in fact kills death in that moment. Death personified in that moment. And then the second half of the line is actually the swelling of the now dead corpse. So this is the killing of death himself or the person that death has killed. And then we get this communal.
49:22 Erin: So it would mean. On one reading, it would just mean pride. Why swell'st thou then? Why are you proud? But then on. I see on your reading, it's also.
49:29 Wes: Sorry, I'm skipping ahead to the vague secondary reading.
49:33 Erin: The other meaning would be swelling corpse. Interesting. I didn't think of that.
49:38 Wes: Yeah. So, you know, the death is murdered. And now it's, you know, before, at the beginning, when we were talking about death being proud and swelling. Right. It's always sort of being replaced by. Imagistically, it's being evacuated and replaced by the actual human body that it affects. Whereas here, arguably, there's a sort of like triple meaning, because I think swelling recalls death being proud, of course, and the human corpse. Right. But it also. Perhaps this is the moment where death itself dies and death becomes a Corpse, a swelling body.
And then in the following couplet, we get the pronoun we, the collective pronoun. So it's almost like maybe I'm, like, really taking this too far. I don't know. Or maybe there's a reading like this out there somewhere. But the last two, it's almost this effort for a chorus of mourning. Right. One short sleep passed. We wake eternally. So then it becomes a matter of, instead of individuation, killing me or death itself, death as a guy, as a singular person, death is killed. And then we all collectively wake eternally. And then death becomes. There's still that individuation of personification that occurs in the very last line of the poem, but also the larger concept of death.
Right. So there's a kind of move toward the collective, in other words, in these last two lines of the poem, in which death writ large shall be no more. And that D is not capitalized. Right?
51:10 Erin: Yeah, that's important. I think what's being evoked here. Right. Is the resurrection. Right. And the end of the world. What is that called? Armageddon.
51:25 Wes: Sure.
51:26 Erin: What is the part?
51:26 Wes: I just know it involves Bruce Willis. Revelation.
51:29 Erin: Revelation. Thank you. Yeah. Thinking of an asteroid or whatever it is.
51:36 Wes: No, that's what killed the dinosaurs.
51:40 Erin: Yeah. So the end of the world. Revelation. And so there's some point where we're no longer just talking about individual human beings anymore, but humanity as a whole and maybe biology as a whole. Right. All living things. And the end of time, maybe, per se as well. So even matter. And at that point, there's no more small D death, individual dying to be done by. By individuals. And so capital D, death has nothing more to do. Right. It's a slave to all of those happenings. It's a slave to what happens within that framework of the world. And when all that stops, death dies. So getting at this dependency of the personified death on everything that's happening within existence, being life, whatever you want to call it.
52:30 Wes: And I like the fact that short sleep replaces death there. So really death isn't even really death. Like, you know, not only does it die, but it's not even really itself. I think at this point, it's totally lost any kind of power, even in its own meaning. It's just replaced by sleep. And then I, like earlier you said it results in an eternal waking. You use that phrase. And I think that sounds to me like way more terrifying than death itself.
52:58 Erin: Yeah.
52:58 Wes: As someone who's also an insomniac, you
53:01 Erin: know, how are you Gonna pass all that time in heaven. That's the problem.
53:04 Wes: Right, right. Well, yeah, and we've talked about this before, about the eternal being terrifying inherently. But, yeah, just the fact that in the end, again, it sort of transformed into something which is not death and then not itself. Kind of the opposite of death and then death itself, which is, of course, as I mentioned before, a reference to 1 Corinthians. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death as the enemy. In that line, too, actually shed some interesting light on those earlier lines as well.
53:38 Erin: Very good.
53:40 Wes: Yeah. So in relation to Sonnet 10, I was also thinking a bit, as I said before, about Meditation 17 from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. And as I said, you know, the whole thing is really famous, but this one part is my favorite part. And I've also kind of memorized this part as well. So not the for whom the bell Tolls part, or even the no man is an island part. This just like. Amazing. Meditation 17 is amazing. It's like an album with only number one tracks. All mankind is of one author and is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
And every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God's hand is in every translation. And his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. I was thinking about this. Now you'll see why. I was thinking about this when you mentioned the Epicurus idea here, where, again, death is sort of displaced as he is in Sonnet 10, you know, God as this great author of man who's merely employing these tools of translation.
And these tools are not death itself per se, but they're these synonymous actors, you know, acting on behalf of death, or like what we call the. You know, the roommates of death before these individual causes. Age, sickness, war and justice. So he even includes this sort of criminality, you know, sort of capital punishment element here as well, which is really interesting. But I just think it's beautiful. I love this part of meditation 17 even more than I love Death Be Not Proud, which I really love, just because of this idea of all of God's work as being a great library, I think is fabulous.
55:46 Erin: Yeah, this idea of translation is really interesting as a way of thinking about what happens. Translation into a better language.
55:55 Wes: That's right. I love this idea, ultimately, that death is just translation. And I think just as someone whose greatest wish for many years is just like read Tolstoy in the original Russian. I love this idea of the afterlife, not as this eternality that we've been talking about, but as a great library in which you can read everything in the best possible language. That's really wonderful.
56:18 Erin: Yes. Once again, please support the podcast by taking our short listener questionnaire@surveymonkey.com or click on the link in the episode notes.
56:31 Wes: Okay, well, I think we're gonna move to Postscript now. I know we are going to talk about tar, the great Tar. Tar on Tar. We've both seen the film and we wanted to have a little bit of a informal chit chat about that movie. Doesn't have a lot to do with Dunn, but next time we will be back with more Dunn poems or a poem. We haven't decided yet, but we'll have a part two coming up soon.
56:57 Erin: Great.
56:57 Wes: All right. Thank you, thank you.
57:00 Erin: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. airwavemedia.com once again, please support the podcast by taking our short Listener questionnaire@surveymonkey.com Airwave or click on the link in the episode notes.
Trauma and Repetition in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974)
Feb 13, 2023
Roman Polanksi’s 1974 film “Chinatown” seems to have little to do with its titular neighborhood, which is the setting for only one horrible and final scene. Chinatown functions instead to represent the traumatic moment that drives this story just because it is hidden from view—a place indecipherable even to the hard-boiled private investigator who has seen it all … the place he doesn’t go … the place that bothers him to talk about … the place where inaction and evasion are the only ways to avoid causing harm. Wes & Erin discuss what Chinatown has to do with “Chinatown,” and how the theme connects the seemingly disparate themes of police work, political corruption, water rights, and incest.
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0:11 Wes: Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown seems to have little to do with its titular neighborhood, which is the setting for only one horrible and final scene. Chinatown functions instead to represent the traumatic moment that drives the story just because it is hidden from view, a place indecipherable even to the hard boiled private investigators who has seen it all. The place he doesn't go, the place that bothers him to talk about. The place where inaction and evasion are the only ways to avoid causing harm. Today we discuss what Chinatown has to do with Chinatown and how the film connects the seemingly disparate themes of police work, political corruption, water rights and incest. This is Wes Alwan.
0:56 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:03 Wes: So, Erin, it's a movie that nothing really plot wise happens in Chinatown until the very end of the movie. And in the original screenplay, that's not in there. Polanski changed some things and said, well, we got to have a scene in Chinatown. If you're called the movie Chinatown, you gotta have at least one scene in Chinatown. And we learn almost nothing about Chinatown. The one thing we learn is that Jake Gittes, or as John Huston, Mr. Gitts, that he used to work there, something bad happened there, we learned. We just get hints of that. So why is it called Chinatown?
1:44 Erin: I was thinking about that a little bit too. And Jake's casual bigotry, which prevents us from really, or for me anyway, from really developing any firm sort of liking for him. I think we're in sympathy with him for quite a bit of the film. But he's crude and he tells that really nasty joke, which is really stupid. And so I think these things are supposed to trouble our sympathy with him. But anyway, so it seems for him to be a symbol of this kind of corruption, some sort of moral invasion, I suppose, which again, I tie to his sense of bigotry.
The fact that he has to return there seems, because it's set up in the dialogue of the film, that he tried to help a woman there and he just ended up hurting her. And this seemed to be the scene of his original sin as a cop as far as the film is concerned. And so because of the circular nature of the film, perhaps it's inevitable that he ends up back there for this final confrontation and that history repeats itself.
2:47 Wes: It's history repeating itself. But if we knew more about that history, it could be a more poignant repetition in the end, right? I mean, It's a horrifying repetition. But if this movie were being made today, you would have seen some flashback at some point to the event to which this is referring. They wouldn't just let that go, and they wouldn't trust the audience to pick up on these little tidbits about what happened in Chinatown. This scene where they're. I forget if they're already in bed. Is this before they sleep together or after they've been chased out of the nursing home?
Is that it? And they're having a talk, and Evelyn says, does this usually happen to you, Mr. Gittes? And he says, what's that, Mrs. Mulwray? Well, I'm only judging on the basis of one afternoon and an evening. But if that's how you go about your work, I'd say you're lucky to get through a whole day. By the way, when reading this screenplay, it actually comes across as more funny. It's a great film, but it's an even better screenplay in a way. And it makes me want. We can talk about that later. It makes me wonder about what Polanski was doing with this.
But anyway. And he says, it hasn't happened to me in some time. And she's like, when was the last time? He's like, it was in Chinatown. He was working with the district attorney. And she goes, doing what? And he says, as little as possible. She says, the district attorney gives his men advice like that. He says, they do it in Chinatown. And then she says, it bothers you to talk about it. And then they start tending to his nose a bit. And then after that, she asks, so why does it bother you to talk about it? Chinatown, he says, bothers everybody that works there.
But to me, it was. You can't always tell what's going on there.
4:30 Erin: Yeah, that's a really significant line, I think.
4:33 Wes: And then he says, I thought I was keeping someone from being hurt, and I actually ended up making sure they were hurt. This is, like, the one place where we get a bit of intimacy, human intimacy, and also transparency, and also some about what's going on underneath everything. Right.
4:50 Erin: Well, it seems that Chinatown is, you know, it's a state of confusion or a place in which things aren't as they seem, both for Jake and for us, because I think we're so often in Jake's position as the viewers.
5:02 Wes: Yeah, he's in every scene, actually. And everything is shot from his point of view. Polanski purposely did that. We see a lot of his back
5:09 Erin: and shoulders when we read the evidence, up to a certain Point exactly the way that he does. Especially because the movie has set both of us up. It set Jake up in his profession, and it sets as people who are watching him in his profession and people who've been to film noir before, to think that this is another straightforward case of adultery. I was really interested this time around in Jake as a character, why he's so rude to the Chinese workers in Mrs. Mulray's house. The gardener and one of the maids, he's nasty to them. And so it seems to me like this idea of Chinatown as a place of moral corruption for him.
And, you know, and we never really quite understand why that is or what connection like Chinatown as an idea has with Chinatown as an actual place or Chinatown as a place where Chinese immigrants might live. And that seems to me to be like a really interesting complication in a character who I think we're supposed to like. And I just wonder what to make of that alongside the fact that he's able to weaponize antisemitism against the evil nursing home owner, so that he's sort of able to cleverly use to pull one over on the guy. So he has this awareness of that.
But this Chinese bigotry is something that really this time around just troubled my perception of his character.
6:29 Wes: Yeah, I want to come back to that. Let's talk about his characterization and whether we're meant to like him. But just on the topic of Chinatown specifically, you're pointing out something I think is really important, which is that we're not really given any associations for Chinatown other than the fact that he used to work for the District Attorney there and the fact that something bad went down there, and the fact that it's supposed to represent some sort of inscrutability. When he says it bothers everybody who works there, you can't always tell what's going on there.
That's one of the very few moments where you see much vulnerability from him. Right. And even the way Nicholson delivers that line, there's something poignant about it, but it doesn't tell us anything else. And of course, I'm sure many critic, many literary critic has talked about, well, the Orientalism of this idea that there's something inscrutable about Chinatown. I went looking for associations like what was Chinatown in LA in 1937? We know the, the film is set in 1937 because of a. You get a glimpse of that in the newspaper. But interestingly, Chinatown didn't exist in 1937.
It had just been demolished. There's a two year period where it did not exist because it was demolished for some station or something. Before that, it was almost like a red light district. It was a very seedy, crime ridden type of place, apparently, or at least that was the reputation. And then what it was after that, I think it was really something quite different. I'm not sure. I didn't. I didn't get to that. But in this film, we really just know two things about it. We know Jake's association and then we know that the help live there. Right in the way Jake formulates it.
Chinatown is basically where good deeds go to meet unintended consequences, right? He was trying to help someone. In that very attempt to help her or help this person, he got them hurt. Do we know it's a woman in this first case?
8:35 Erin: He says so explicitly at some point.
8:37 Wes: Okay.
8:38 Erin: I don't know if it's just a matter of a pronoun, but he does okay.
8:41 Wes: When it comes to inscrutability, despite the orientalism of that, it is true, right, that what it represents is a kind of unassimilated cultural pocket, or a partially assimilated cultural pocket. So something that is foreign even on home turf, something almost that's undigested, it's got a language that an investigator can't understand. It's hard to tell. Apparently what Jake means is it's hard to tell who's a criminal and who's not. And again, the reputation before the demolition was a kind of seedy red light district. And also it puts a policeman or an investigator in the position of almost being like a colonial occupying policeman, interestingly enough, on foreign ground.
So as an investigator, you can't get plugged in to this in the same way. In a way, what an investigator is doing, it's partially social, right? So lieutenant homicide investigator for police department. Ideally, they're plugged into a community in some way so that people will talk to them or at least they have informants, right? They have the necessary relationships and there's even, you know, often some social connection to the. Whatever criminal element is there. So what someone doing that job in Chinatown faces is a culture that he basically can't navigate.
So he's essentially flying blind as an investigator. It's hard to tell what's going on, as he puts it. The more interesting significance is the contrast between that and whatever crime is going on in this sort of immigrant neighborhood where there's essentially an underclass, right? You contrast that to the crime of the powers that be and of the founding fathers. This reminded me of the Godfather, where you have immigrants trying to make it in a new place. And in the Godfather, right. The idea is that the justice system as it stands can't do them justice, and so they invent their own.
So there's organized crime, and I assume there's supposed to be organized crime in Chinatown that Jake found incomprehensible. The screenwriter Robert Towne actually called Chinatown the American nightmare, as opposed to the American dream. So the American dream. Right. Good intentions are supposed to get you everywhere. You work hard, you play by the rules, and you get ahead. A place like Chinatown, let's say, maybe puts the lie to that. And then there's the larger association to the fact that LA itself was kind of built upon this original sin of stealing water from the Owens Valley from ranchers.
Basically, LA agents from LA pretended to be ranchers and farmers and purchased all the land and diverted the water. That really happened. That's not unusual. Right. So there's always this, like, for states, and there's this foundational violence at the origins of things. That's the way societies at some point in history got organized. And maybe it persists in some form. So the inevitable amount of corruption in the government and legal system. So that's what I wanted to put on the table, is just that contrast between crime within an immigrant community being policed by people like Jake, and then the corruptions of the powers that be, which he sort of inadvertently gets involved in investigating in the film.
12:11 Erin: It's occurring to me while you're talking the significance of Curly. I'm wondering about Curly's relationship with his wife and the fact that they seem to live in a nice neighborhood and have been relatively assimilated. It's one of the geniuses of the film that Curly returns to serve a purpose.
12:28 Wes: Mm.
12:29 Erin: You know, like in film noir, it might be typical to see a privatized office in action in the first act of the film, where you'd have, you know, someone coming in, maybe like a sample client before, you know, the main client comes in. And so we think that Curly is just a character set up to show us exactly what it is that Jake does and Jake's sort of manner with him. And so we think that it's pure exposition, I suppose. Though there are some great things in that opening scene that.
12:55 Wes: Yeah, don't eat the blinds. I just had them installed.
13:00 Erin: It's so good. You know, so there's a lot, of course, about sight in that first scene and other things that we can unpack a little bit later. But you don't really know anything about Curly and his background. And then when Jake goes to his house later and Curly serves that practical purpose and we see the wife with the black eye, it becomes obvious that Curly is Italian and that his wife is maybe not Italian. You know, she could be Italian, but she's blonde. And that I wonder now, in light of this conversation, if that interesting cultural difference.
He drives up in a neighborhood which could be anywhere, right? It's obviously not in some kind of Little Italy or Chinatown or whatever, you know, it's more suburbanized. But then he walks in and it's like a multi generational household. And there's all this stuff going on in there, which makes it to me obvious that it's an Italian household. And also that his wife is potentially not Italian. And I'm wondering if that transgression, that adultery of the wife is somehow related to that ethnic difference. I feel like now there's something there.
And it didn't occur to me until now. And I don't think I even said to myself out loud, oh, Curly must be Italian. I think it was just something that like was flickering in my subconscious as I, you know, as he walks into the house. It didn't, it didn't occur to me. So I really. This is really not even a half baked thought. I wonder about that and the connection with adultery in that relationship.
14:27 Wes: So it sounds like you're relating adultery to cultural difference.
14:31 Erin: I don't know, like no one gets married expecting their wife to commit adultery. It's not as though adultery is an accepted thing in any culture. But it seems as though this wife of Curly's is maybe out of place within this household and maybe even among her own children and her in laws who I think are also sitting around the table. It reminded me of a woman under the influence which came out in the same year. And so the desire for her to have the affair, it seems like a desire to flee the cultural space in hindsight, like a desire to flee this Italian family. A desire not to be assimilated within the pocket, even if that pocket is itself assimilated into the suburban neighborhood. Does that make any sense?
15:14 Wes: Yeah, I mean, and then there's the question of domesticity and domestication and the effect of that on freedom. So one is assimilated into domestic life at a certain point and one is assimilated into relationships through mutual influence. People change each other and so there's a natural impulse to rebel against that. And I think adultery is part of that. This is important, right? Because seemingly he's just investigating these. It's not crimes, right. It's personal indiscretions. It's unethical behavior. So he's gone from the realm of investigating criminal acts to this twilight zone or hybrid realm. He's not a policeman. He can't go out and say, hey, I'm arresting you for adultery. Or, you know, let's take this to the district attorney. It's just giving the information to the aggrieved spouse.
16:07 Erin: That's interesting because one is, as you say, a legal crime. The other is still a crime of some kind of moral nature. So in one instance we have a way with the justice system of dealing with that quote, unquote, immorality. In the other instance we don't. And I'm wondering if the nebulousness of that is reflected in Jake's character where we have this person who on the one hand, I think, conceives of himself as being a good guy, of having a moral code, as these Raymond Chandler noir detectives often do, but who, on the other hand, has these very obvious flaws and who is not extending maybe his moral awareness or his moral capacity equally to everyone.
Which you would hope that a cop would do that because he's part of the arm of the law. You would hope in an ideal world that he would not go after one person based on their cultural background over another. Obviously, this is. This is a problem that human beings have. It's as if the nebulousness of Jake's position as a private eye is a literalization, perhaps of the nebulousness of his own blinders or even casual racism or bigotry of some kind, as expressed when he was a cop and which he carries over with him into that realm.
17:30 Wes: He's no longer doing investigations that have to do with the law per se, right? Criminal law and things that can actually be enforced. He's in this nebulous realm of the ethical. And there are no ethical police or investigators. The enforcement can only be within the relationship. And of course, you see, right. Curly is like his wife, I think, is a black eye, right? So Jake at the end sees the consequences of what he's involved in. And this is. There's always the possibility of extra judicial punishment. And there are other noir films, I think, right, in which this becomes a big issue.
Like Coppola's The Conversation in which the protagonist. It's a big problem about what's going to happen with his surveillance. Is it going to get people killed? And it has gotten people killed in the past and will get people killed in the future. And one wonders about the relationship between that and Jake's having apparently gotten someone hurt in the past.
18:25 Erin: So The Conversation also came out in the same year. I just want to say, you know,
18:29 Wes: and the other thing, it's a fall from grace, apparently. I think he must have been on the police force or. I don't know if he can be an independent contractor for the DA or how that works, but I assume he had a job with the city that he lost. Maybe their investigators just attached to the da, But I assume that it's the police. He's had some fall from grace, and now he's suffering in that position doing something which is itself a little bit morally suspect and can lead to unforeseen, just as naturally, the kind of thing sharing surveillance with aggrieved spouses that can lead to unforeseen consequences. The very thing that he should be avoiding. Right. He should be avoiding anything that might do that, not worsening his situation by getting into even murkier territory with this stuff.
19:17 Erin: My understanding of his background, and it's entirely speculative, is that he left the police force willingly because he was disillusioned by whatever happened in Chinatown. I don't necessarily have any evidence for that, except for the fact that I think it's within his character to want to become a private eye and to exert the kind of retributive justice that maybe he couldn't exert as a cop. Like, he feels as though he's sort of restoring the moral order now in some sort of meaningful way. Also, the fact that he's interested in publicity and wants to have his picture taken makes me think that he was not dismissed in some way from the police force.
He turns towards the camera and gives his information to the camera. When, oh, I forget what scene. I have this image of him turning around. He might be with Mrs. Mulwray and she's walking ahead of him and he turns towards the cameras and is happy to have his picture in the papers. And so I think that if he had been dismissed in any kind of public way or that would have been a matter of public record, if there was some shame associated with his dismissal, then he might not be so eager for publicity. He makes a comment that publicity is good for his work.
20:30 Wes: Yeah, it was probably not he didn't get fired, but that he was disillusioned. It sounds like the trauma of getting someone hurt has something to do with that. This movie, in a way, really is about trauma and about the repetition of that. The tendency of someone to take something traumatic that happened to them and instead of evading it, repeat it, right? This is something. We'll talk about incest later. He's in a very Oedipus like role because he's ensuring that the very thing that he's trying to avoid is actually going to happen again. So what I was thinking of was, if I'm right and you're leaving the police force because you don't ever want to have this traumatic thing happen again, and maybe you say to yourself, all right, I'm never going back to Chinatown.
And maybe you blame it on Chinatown, you know, and the inscrutability of things there and the cultural disconnect. And then, of course, you end up right back in Chinatown at the very end of the film. But you say that, and then you say, well, what am I gonna do? And you say, well, obviously, I just have to be a PI it's somewhat safe because it's not about crime per se, and I have some control and I don't have to go to Chinatown and this and that. It's lower stakes. You know, you can see the cynicism, right? The way it's characterized in the beginning.
This screenplay is often taught as, like, one of the greatest of all time. So after Curly is trying to eat the blinds in the beginning, Gittes says, all right, enough is enough. You can't eat the Venetian blinds, Curly. I just had him installed on Wednesday. Curly responds slowly, rising to his feet, crying. Gittes reaches into his desk and pulls out a shot glass, quickly selects a cheaper bottle of bourbon from the several fifths of the more expensive whiskeys, which I did not get that from watching the movie until I read that. And I'm like, okay, okay, that's a.
There are a lot of great little touches like that characterization, you know. And at the end of this, Curly says, I think I'll kill her. Again, we get pointed to the fact that this low stakes thing into which Jake has cynically retreated is not as low stakes as he thinks. He can get people hurt. He can get people killed by doing what he's doing, and he has to block that out to some extent. In the next scene, he purported. Mrs. Mulwray, just forget about it. Leave it alone. It's not worth it. So he's even trying to dissuade people from using his services, but if they persist just a little bit.
Okay, all right, let's do it. Here's my. Here's my fee. Before we move on to the next thing, I want to just bookmark one thing that I know that we will definitely have to talk about. I wanted to connect this to what you were saying about adultery and you were getting at a cultural element of that. But seemingly he's investigating adultery ultimately, and then it becomes official corruption and then it becomes incest. So there's a kind of circle that it goes through. And then there's some relation here to cultural difference in Chinatown, as we've been talking about.
But I think we can hit those connections a little bit more towards the end of how it is that incest and water and official corruption and all that stuff actually relate. Because on the face of it, it looks just like a kind of random thing, you know, for him to think that he's investigating official corruption and end up. Which he is. But the more significant thing ends up being the incest of the father. Right. So the father has committed Noah Cross. Right. Speaking of water and the Bible and two crimes, and one of them turns out to be the more important one.
But yeah. Did you want to say some more about that first scene in the characterization of Jake?
24:01 Erin: There are a few things that I'm interested in that opening scene. First, that Jake is full of cliches. He says a lot of meaningless stuff. You know, he says to Curly, when you're right, you're right. He says, let sleeping dogs lie to the fake Mrs. Mulwray. Which is, I think, unintentionally, he's being funny there. I don't think it's his intention to be funny, you know, because it's idea that her husband's having an affair. So he says, let sleeping dogs lie.
24:28 Wes: Let me just say one thing about that. So he's telling her to let sleeping dogs lie. You're better off not knowing. That's what he's really trying to tell himself.
24:37 Erin: Right.
24:38 Wes: At least that's the message for him that he's not heeding. So in a way, he's his own soothsayer doing this Oedipus thing whereby he's achieving his fate by trying to avoid it. And I think, you know, the fact that these are cliches is important in that respect because cliche reveals that he's not thinking. It can reveal repression.
24:58 Erin: And I'm even thinking of the idea of the cliche as a form of idiom within the language. So he's reading, and we're reading this opening scene as a typical noir scene. We're reading him as a typical private eye. We have this, of course, the motif of sight throughout the film. So we have these images that are presented to us in the first scene, which are very obviously of Curly's wife having an affair, they're not graphic, but they're rather affronting. I like that.
25:27 Wes: I was going to make a dumb joke.
25:28 Erin: Go for it.
25:29 Wes: A backing. Okay. All right. So that is funny.
25:34 Erin: No, because I had to guess what the joke was, and it was. Oh, my God. Anyway, the idioms that he uses, I'm connecting to the language and the visual language of the film is what we come to expect in film noir. You know, even the Venetian blinds themselves, that Curly. That Curly eats them is funny, but it's this desire to be blinkered or blinded in some way with these blinds, of course. Like, it's in the word, but it's this desire to not know the terrible thing, to keep oneself sequestered or in the dark.
26:04 Wes: He's installed the blinds, and someone is trying to chew them up.
26:07 Erin: He's installed them. Right. And of course, there's irony in this, because it's his job, it's his way of making money, is to let them know the terrible thing. And so we see that there's a kind of generosity in that or a kind of desire to keep people from truths that will harm them. But I think it's related to this idea of idioms which protect us from difficult emotions, perhaps, and which also keep us in expected modes and patterns of behavior and speech. And so when the Chinese gardener, when he goes to Mrs. Mulray's house, says that the water is bad for the quote, unquote, grass.
I'm trying to tie this idiom idea to the fact that Jake is then presented with an unusual use of language, which is a result of the language barrier between them, or this reinvigoration with the language, with someone who's not a native speaker using it in interesting ways very often. Like, the last thing you learn when you're learning a foreign language is the idioms in that language. So you're constantly potentially surprising the people around you with the things that you might say in their language. You can't get into those grooves with any kind of ease that other people.
It's invisible to them. And so the moment of recognition when Jake realizes what the gardener is trying to say and the fact that it's actually revealing something that was hidden to him in plain sight.
27:32 Wes: Right. And it turns out to be glasses. Right?
27:35 Erin: So it's glasses, but also the fact that the water is salt water, so it's bad for the grass. So he's making fun of him because he's not using the right word. Or because his accent is preventing him from saying his R properly. So he's being really a jackass, you know?
27:51 Wes: So it's a case in which the cultural difference draws his attention to a clue that he wouldn't have seen it without having noticed that difference.
28:00 Erin: And then there's the triple meaning of, well, why is the water bad for the grass? He doesn't realize it until he returns to the house in the third act of the film, when the gardener gives a little bit more information that salt water is bad for the grass.
28:14 Wes: Ultimately, he puts all those clues together to accuse Mrs. Mulwray of killing her husband, when it turns out it's actually the glasses belong to her father.
28:24 Erin: But that's another cliche. He and we as filmgoers expect her to be the villain because she's in the role of the femme fatale. So again, we're reading a kind of idiom into the genre, into the clues that we've been presented with. The only time that this really, I think, just doesn't quite work where we might. And you can argue if you had a different perception. But the only time where I obviously think like, okay, Jake is reading this situation wrong is very early in the film when he first sees Mr. Mulwray at the. What is that? The public hearing?
I don't remember exactly what the nature of that event is supposed to be. I think it's a public hearing where Mr. Mulwray comes up to the stage and starts talking about the water and the dam and all that stuff and how the dam is not gonna hold. Looking at him, I'm like, this guy is not having an affair. I can just immediate tell. I don't know if that was the case for you.
29:14 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
29:15 Erin: Of course we've seen the movie before, but Jake has been primed to see him as an adulterer, obviously, because his wife is saying that he potentially is an adulterer. And maybe we're, like, curious. We're trying to figure this out, but to me, it's obvious that he's not. And it's obvious when he's with the young daughter that that is not a girlfriend, but I don't know.
29:36 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. It's been so long since I first saw it. I don't know if I got that or not. I think it's just confusing when on your first scene of the film, you're like, what is going on? Like, he's arguing with this woman. My impression when I first saw it was it just wasn't clear. But One is inclined to believe. Yeah. That he's not really having. I mean, the movie sets you up to be inclined not to think that adultery is actually what the real substance of all this is.
29:59 Erin: Well, actually, it's occurring to me right now, the fact that Mr. Mulwray is accused of adultery with this girl would actually implicate him in incest. It's a misunderstanding. Of course. They think that she's another woman. Really? She's his stepdaughter. I never thought of that before.
30:17 Wes: Right. It's unclear what he knows. Right. We never learn. Who does he think she is, does he think?
30:24 Erin: I think he knows because Mrs. Mulwray said that he took care of her after it happened and I think raised the daughter. Right. Oh, maybe he doesn't know that it's Noah's. Is that what you mean?
30:35 Wes: Yeah. Does he know it's a daughter of incest? I'm not sure, but I think if
30:39 Erin: he did, then things would be different.
30:41 Wes: So he breaks off the relationship with Noah, and so I assume. Yeah. Thinking about that, I think he's friends and partners with Noah, and then they stop talking. So I think maybe the implication is that he does know. But I wanted to go back to something you were saying about language and the blinds, because eating the blinds, right. That's not a real thing people do. It's just a saying, isn't it? So that's not a cliche, but it's a figure. Figure of speech is kind of brought to life by Curly, who's literally eating the blinds and being told not to. Does he actually bite the blinds at one point? I think he does.
31:17 Erin: I think he does.
31:18 Wes: Yeah.
31:19 Erin: So that's when I should have known he's an Italian.
31:22 Wes: And one more thing, you know, that you were making the association between blindness and blinds, you know, and Jake is supposed to be an investigator and trying to see things, but he's significantly turns out to be blind. And his investigation makes him blind. Right. Accusing Mrs. Mulwray, that the clues come together in a way that keep him blind. But I wanted to point to, you know, one more connection to Oedipus, which is that Oedipus, right. Starts out in the position of investigator as well. The city is sick. Do something, Oedipus. You're the leader. Figure it out. So he becomes a private investigator, and really, of course, he's looking for himself. And then in the end, he blinds himself because the thing that he finds is too difficult to bear and to see. And you get the same association with the kind of City wide sickness here with the whole water thing and the official corruption.
32:12 Erin: That's good. I was wondering about. And maybe this is where we can kind of make our transition into this idea of incest. Because I was associating Jake, of course, with this damaged sight, his inability to see clearly. The most obvious Oedipal at the end of the film is of course, when Mrs. Mulwray has one eye shot out. And this is prefigured with a ton
32:37 Wes: of things, you know, the speck in her eye.
32:38 Erin: Yeah, the speck in her eye. Curly's wife's black eye. Even Jake gets when his nose is cut, which is funny, you know, because he's nosy. He gets a black eye on that side, which makes sense.
32:48 Wes: Polanski. Polanski does it to him. Yeah, right. Polanski is the very diminutive thug.
32:56 Erin: Oh, I guess like the fish on the plate, you know, because it still has its head on and, you know, it has the eye on one side of its head. We can only see the one eye.
33:05 Wes: Yeah. Noah says, I'm sorry. Is that okay? I believe they should be served with their head on.
33:10 Erin: And this has nothing to do with anything, but I just. It has to do with bad sight, but it doesn't have to do with the one eye thing. I was thinking about that Mar Vista Rest Home. It means sea view. But it's also potentially, if we take Mar, its English language, meaning it's bad damaged view, bad view home. So anyway, you know, we get all these images of broken glasses and, you know, whatever. At the end when Evelyn's eye is shot out, that sort of identifies her as the Oedipus. And of course, she's the one who's been involved in this incestuous relationship and she's the victim of the film. But how does she then relate to Jake? You know, are all of these symbols merely just externalizations of Jake's psyche in his sort of Oedipus role? Or can we save them from just being victims of Jake's imagination? Here is Evelyn her own sort of Oedipus figure.
34:00 Wes: Yeah.
34:01 Erin: And does she have her own kind of arc rather than everyone just being part of Jake's continual disillusionment in Chinatown? What is her Oedipus or Oedipal role in this film?
34:14 Wes: I think your point is well taken. She's seen that she herself is the one who's seeing the thing that one ought not to see. And so she loses her eye in the same way that Oedipus loses his eye So I think you're right. It applies more aptly to her. But we can speak more generally about trauma, right? So trauma, what does it mean? What is it above and beyond pain? What makes trauma worse than pain or something different or more significant than pain? And the difference is that pain has a history. Pain slides into the past, and trauma is forever present.
And part of the reason it's ever present is because the quote unquote thinking of Freud here, psychical apparatus itself is modified or damaged, right? So the eye is a very good metaphor for that. The ego, for Freud was at its most basic level, it's about movement and seeing and navigating the world, navigating reality. And one's ability to do that is fundamentally damaged by trauma. So Freud was thinking specifically about soldiers who came back from war shell shocked and were just having these horrific dreams. And why would anyone have those dreams?
Why wouldn't the psyche just be primed to avoid that? Right? We're primed to avoid what's painful and to do what's pleasurable. Why would we keep inflicting that on ourselves? And why do in our lives we have what he calls a repetition compulsion to repeat these painful and traumatic things. And in Jake's case, it's the compulsion to repeat the circumstance in which he hurts someone, even if the trauma actually hasn't happened, right? So even if one has not been the victim of incest, one literally, one can to some extent be the victim of it psychologically with, like, an overbearing parent, for instance.
But even beyond that, there's always the threat of it. There's always the taboo. People's lives and psyches get organized to some extent around that taboo and the prospect of trauma. In Jake's case, right, his eyes are damaged from the beginning of the film. In Oedipus Rex, right, Tiresias says, I'm blind, but I can see. I can see what needs to be seen, right? The truth, what's of significance. And you have eyes, but you can't see. So the damage to seeing is caused by this desire to. You want to evade knowing about it. So instead you act it out, you repeat it.
And so, yeah, so symbolically, the physical blinding acts out the metaphor in the way that curly eating the blinds enacts that metaphor, that figure of speech. I don't know if any of this
37:04 Erin: is making sense, but it totally does. It's difficult because the crime in this film is so heinous. It's difficult to think about, like, what the psychic solution is then, you know, like how do you stop the cycle from occurring? Like, what should Jake have done? This dualism where we get good and bad eyesight, we also get the bifocals, Noah Cross's bifocals. This idea of taking both the short and the long view. Like, he's interested in the future. He wants the future so he knows what's going on in the present because he's able to control the police force.
He's able to, you know, he's successfully enacting his corruption on the city. But it's toward this larger picture of how he wants the future to be or this grander vision. And I'm thinking about this in relationship to being two things at once, having two things at once. And because of the heinousness of the crime of incest, it's difficult to tie these things together in a way that's satisfactory to me. So Jake, you know, on his face we have like the good side of his face and the bad side, which has been marred by the knife. We have the two types of water, the salt water and the fresh water.
Again, we have this bifocal thing, seeing up close and seeing far away at the same time. And then we have this idea of like the sister and the daughter. This is where it becomes difficult for me because I'm like, okay, well, it's not like both good and bad. That's just like, you know, that's terrible to connect those two. But two things occurring at once. That Evelyn could be telling the truth about a relationship which is both her sister and her daughter. And I'm wondering how that maybe connects to the significance of incest in the film and the idea that something can be.
Obviously incest is disgusting, the crime is heinous. But I'm saying that it connects to this idea of. And maybe good and bad is the wrong terminology to use here, but good and bad seems to be one element of the system of opposites in which the film is sort of working. The grammar of the film and the images of the film are working in. So I don't know how to connect those things. But I'm.
39:00 Wes: Let me go back to. You started out with progress or the idea of Noah with his bifocals, looking to the future. Noah Cross, very apt biblical name, in part because of the water, the flood, but also because that's paving the way for the future. Right. He's going to take everyone on a little ride into the post diluvian world. But yeah, go ahead.
39:24 Erin: Right. And also just that he stands across or astride generations nasty Sorry, go ahead.
39:30 Wes: Right, yeah, good point. This focus on progress. Right. On future, looking towards the future. This is a variation in a way on investigation. Right. So progress is anti incestuous. Let me start out with that. Because it's the opposite of regression where regression is becoming an infant again and going back into the mother's arms. Right. So to speak. And progress is an attempt to break away from that. And sometimes it's manically such, and sometimes it backfires such that what seems like an attempt to break away from the familial fold actually returns one to it.
And in Noah's case, as a perpetrator of incest, you can imagine that he's engaged in his own repetition. And so what does he do? He's paving the way for the future by stealing water, which is highly symbolic of incest on a number of levels. Right. Associate water with birth and with the maternal life force. So he's stealing life force and he's stealing the forces of creativity, including the forces that on some larger level have created him. You try to overpower, right. Incest to ultimately represent, overpowering the forces that have created you.
Right. Taking them on for yourself. There's a connection here to hubris and ultimately. Right. This is connected to corruption and to taking advantage of one's own. You're taking advantage of these farmers. Ultimately, it's a system that takes advantage of the people. Right. The government citizen relationship is something like a parent child relationship. And when the government is corrupt, it's like the parent that takes advantage of the child. But what I wanted to get at, and I'm not sure how this connects up, you started the whole idea of good and bad with the idea of the fact that he's, he's looking to progress, I think on the good side of things.
And I think if I'm right about that, that's spot on. There's this anti incestuous vector which ironically and inevitably this is the edible thing, gets co opted by incestuous forces. So progress should be non regressive, but instead it becomes stealing water. This is what happens to people with malignant narcissism and ambition. Overweening ambition, ambitions should lead you out of the familial fold. But symbolically, if they become overweening and obsessive, they can really symbolically be a way to return to the. The mother that can have incestuous significance.
That's part of how I wanted to connect the concept of incest to water and to the idea of official corruption.
42:10 Erin: I'm thinking too about the idea of a cover up, which I think connects with what you're saying a bit. I haven't fully formulated this, so I
42:20 Wes: was drawing a connection between progress in the sense of expanding LA by making water available to it, growing it, nurturing it, and then what Jake is doing. Right. So Jake is investigating things and nominally that brings things to light and it's progressive. Right. Communication is progressive as well, or can be, because it brings things to light, it opens things up, it can lead to growth. Let's put it very simply. That's what ideally an investigation. But in his case. Right. It turns out to be also to be regressive and it's a more dangerous position to be in because it's looking backward. It's the same thing in therapy. It's like you're supposed to be making progress and you have to think about the past a bit and to do some investigation. But if you get caught there and if it becomes part of the repetition, then it's a problem.
43:13 Erin: Well, I'm thinking about so many images of water bursting out in the film too. Even the fact that the dam that burst prior to the events of the film, which killed a lot of people, is the Van der Lip dam. And that word lip and the fact that so much of what's in the story is the character's attempt to contain it. But, you know, eventually it bursts out, like Evelyn not wanting to tell the truth and finally, you know, admitting it in this burst of again, of language in which she has to explain, or she doesn't really explain, but she has to say, she has to make the connection between.
That this girl has both relationships to her. Obviously the water being released in that flood which catches Jake in at one point or even when he's in the barbershop, there's that steam coming from the car outside while Jake is getting a shave. And so it seems like nothing stays covered up in this story about progress. Like everything has to be bursting out all over in the final scene when everything happens, you know, out in the middle of the street, because we know that Cross wins and that he will go on to be successful in his various evil deeds.
You know, in the end we know that it doesn't matter. Like he's had the police in his pocket, so his corruption can basically be naked at this point. Like there is nothing to cover up anymore. It doesn't matter.
44:32 Wes: Yeah.
44:33 Erin: And maybe that speaks to his futurity and the fact that the progress that he wants to make doesn't require covering things up. That a cover up implies regression, I think, is what you're saying. And he doesn't need. He doesn't have need of that. He can, like the water, just burst forth and keep doing what he's doing.
44:51 Wes: So he can be relatively brazen about official corruption he's involved in. Right. I think that's your point. But he's also. It's pretty brazen for him to try to be the father of the incest daughter as opposed to leaving that alone. Yeah.
45:06 Erin: In the effort to hide her, to go to Mexico to flee so that he doesn't get access to her. He can then, in the middle of a street and in front of a bunch of cops, just grab the daughter and walk off with her.
45:16 Wes: Right. And have them horrifyingly shoot her when he's the villain.
45:23 Erin: I'm wondering, though, about the connection to Jake getting his proverbial hand slapped when he's trying to uncover secrets, like Noah, as if there's a figure of this forward progress. He does get shot in the arm, but otherwise escapes unscathed when it comes to getting what he wants. Jake fools around and finds out, as they say, you know, like, he's nosy. And as a result, he gets his nose cut. And then he has to wear the thing for the rest of the movie. Wear it openly. Same thing with Curly's wife. Right. Like, she then has to walk around with a black eye because of the knowledge of her adultery being learned by her husband. I'm just wondering about that. Like, if his whole business is to uncover these secrets, crimes and everything, why does he have to walk around with a big gash on his nose? Why isn't Noah's hand slapped at the end? Why doesn't he get arrested?
46:16 Wes: Yeah, Noah suffers the trauma of seeing his daughter killed, but it's unclear. It seems like, yeah, he's not gonna suffer any criminal penalties, so there'll never be any official punishment for what he's done. Having Jake walk around with a bandage on his nose for the whole movie is great. He's snooping around, but the nose and the eye are playing a similar role in this context. His snooping ability, his ability to be nosy, I think, as you've already pointed out, has been compromised. And there's the implicit threat of castration, which is what you get for incest.
Castration is just the punishment for incest. So the implication is that he's in search of this incestuous circumstance in doing it. He's compulsively doing it as part of a repetition, and it's going to lead to the same traumatic result as it did last time. Ultimately, that's the real the death of Evelyn is the trauma that's prefigured by the nose cutting or the nose cutting is a warning. Right. So he might have heated it. Shall we go to Postscript and let's say what else we have to discuss. I want to talk a little bit about this idea of doing as little as possible in Chinatown and the significance of that.
47:38 Erin: And also we haven't really talked about Evelyn's character or the other Mrs. Mulwray.
47:44 Wes: And you could say maybe a little bit more about film noir, which you're going to know a lot more about than me. And then. Yeah. All right. So thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
Better and Bested in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Jan 16, 2023
It’s a play full of contradictions, secrets, lies, and unspoken rules. It’s a play decidedly for adults, but about a child—an imaginary one, no less. It takes place on a college campus, but it is absent of students. And it’s about “fun and games” and “playing pretend,” but its games are harsh and shocking, and playing pretend involves vengeance and even murder. Wes & Erin discuss Mike Nichols’s 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, adapted from Edward Albee’s 1962 play, and ask what it has to say about the nature of game and play itself, as well as what might be generative on the one hand or contraceptive and inhibiting on the other about our relationships with our spouses, our parents, our children, and our work.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: It's a play full of contradictions, secrets, lies, and unspoken rules. It's a play decidedly for adults, but about a child, an imaginary one, no less. It takes place on a college campus, but it is absent of students. And it's about fun and games and playing pretend. But its games are harsh and shocking, and playing pretend involves vengeance and even murder. Today we're discussing Mike Nichols 1966 film, who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Adapted from Edward Albee's 1962 play, and asking what it has to say about the nature of game and play itself, as well as what might be generative on the one hand, or contraceptive and inhibiting on the other, about our relationships with our spouses, our parents, our children, and our work.
This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, as a way of getting started, I thought I would ask you, because I've been thinking about it, and I don't really have an answer, but I was wondering if you have an answer to the question, what is a game? What constitutes a game?
1:18 Wes: Hmm. It's a big question.
1:21 Erin: This is a really. I know it's a tough one. Obviously, enjoyment doesn't have a lot to do with it.
1:26 Wes: Can I define fun instead? Since it's fun and games?
1:30 Erin: Yeah, yeah, let's. Let's do fun first.
1:32 Wes: Let's do one of the words. I'm just kidding.
1:34 Erin: Oh, okay.
1:35 Wes: What is a game in this context? What is a game in general? It's funny because we're reading Wittgenstein from my other podcast. And so the idea of a game is something that's important to him, specifically the idea that language is a game. Certain rules, certain moves that you're allowed to make, and certain moves that you're not allowed to make. There's some sense in which it's moving away from the idea of just language, that, you know, it's playful and unhindered, but there's some sense in which it's guided by something, that there's stakes, that there's something to be lost in one, that there's such a thing as fair play.
You know, I didn't actually give this a lot of thought in preparation, but I would say the one thing that occurs to me is supposedly there's a game or a set of games going on between Martha and George. And George thinks that by mentioning their imaginary child, Martha has violated the rules of the game, and so he's going to have to get her back, do what it seems in the end, it's more meant to be a cure. But anyway, what were you thinking with
2:39 Erin: regard to this in relation to your last point? I think, too, that she has violated the rules of their particular game, it seems. But then that kind of launches them into a different game. Or then it's like the wheels come off and they're playing a more vicious. They're taking the bumpers out of the gutter and playing just like raw bowling at that point.
2:58 Wes: Yeah, it seems no holds barred from the very beginning. Right. Where is the game in this? Where are the rules?
3:04 Erin: I'm wondering if that's a. I don't want to say a flaw metaphorically. I'm just kind of wondering if it's not quite as well defined as it could be in the text and in the film. I mean, I pretty much just watched the film because it basically is the play. I think that the play is a lot funnier than the film, or at least a bit funnier than the film. And this is something I read about in the very brief chapter in Mike Nichols biography by Mark Harris. I just quickly glanced at it this morning, and this is something that Mike Nichols, I guess, is on record saying that he decided to make the film less funny than the play adaptation. The play. They were getting like a big laugh every couple of minutes. And Nichols felt that because a film audience can't respond in the moment to laughter like that, that he would have to sort of drain it of some of the laughter and make it a more serious film.
3:55 Wes: I read the play as well after watching the film. So I had seen the film at least twice before, watching it again in preparation for the podcast. And those two times I was much younger and I was just mesmerized by it, by the wit, by the language, and my overall feeling was very positive. And then I saw it performed live once, and I think Kathleen Turner was playing Martha.
4:21 Erin: Oh, you saw that production. Okay. Yeah, I really wanted to see that when it was at the Long Wharf.
4:26 Wes: Yeah, I think that was in D.C. that I saw that.
4:29 Erin: Yeah, it was at the Long Wharf in New Haven for a brief stay. And it was in D.C. for a brief time.
4:34 Wes: Okay.
4:35 Erin: And I think it was in LA for a bit, too. But while it was in New Haven, I really wanted to see it and never got the chance. But I knew my cousin went to see it, said it was fantastic.
4:42 Wes: Yeah, it was really great. This time I was like, oh, my God, this is brutal. This is absolutely brutal.
4:50 Erin: Yeah, it's like a root canal of a film. It's an endurance test.
4:55 Wes: Remembered it that way. So I don't know what changed in me that it just. I still enjoyed it, of course, but it just was hard. Hard to watch. But one thing I will say is that I also read the play for the first time in preparation, just as. Instead of taking notes during the film or watching the film a second time and taking notes, I just read the play and took notes. And most of the play is in the film. I don't know how that works because the play apparently is three hours and the film is two hours and something. Maybe the film goes fast. I don't know how they fit most of the play into the film, but you can see how a lot of the lines in the play could be read in a softer way or in a way that's more tongue in cheek.
Right. So that you could get a more playful relationship between Martha and George. And maybe that's the way stage productions generally go. So that could be it. It's hard to read the play after you've watched the film and not just hear Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor going at it in their specific way, which they do so well, but you can see how that softness might be introduced. But going back to your thing about the game and, you know, I think you were saying it's too. Maybe it's not well defined enough. The rules aren't well defined.
6:07 Erin: I think part of that is the genius of the play. It's the flexibility of the truth. Right. Just for my own part, I'll say that I read the play and saw the film in high school, and I think that was a very bad idea. I think I was much more concerned at 15 or 16 that this might be a relationship that was more common than, of course, than it actually is.
6:29 Wes: That's what the future holds.
6:30 Erin: Right. Right Now I realize how uncommon and crazy this is, and maybe we have lax divorce laws to thank for that. But anyway, of course, the Burtons were no strangers to those divorce laws. But anyway, yeah. I think watching it now, oddly enough, the thing that it reminded me of a lot this time around was Kiarostami's Certified Copy. I don't know if you've seen that film.
6:52 Wes: No.
6:53 Erin: Okay. It's with Juliette Binoche and a fabulous actor who's also an opera singer whose name escapes me right now. And I think that was his first film, too. But anyway, it's a very interesting film. And it's not anything like this in terms of tone, but it's A film about the relationship between these two people. And I don't want to spoil anything, but it's kind of not what you think it is. Or it sort of evolves or takes on different qualities over the course of the film. I really recommend this to our listeners. And I think. I don't know that other people have thought to make the connection between these two things.
Or if it's just the fact that I really love Certified Copy. And it occurs to me right now, maybe there is more of a connection than I realize. But it's a film in which you think that these two people at the beginning are meeting for the first time. They just meet on screen, and you see them meet and then the relationship unfolds. But in fact, that may not be the case. And you're never quite sure about the nature of the relationship. And it goes in very strange directions and fascinating directions over the course of the film. And so I was just thinking about the ways in which Kiarostami might have had Virginia Woolf in mind and might have been indebted to that.
What I'm trying to say is the fact that we don't quite know what game they're playing puts us, of course, in the position of. What is it? Nick and Honey. Even though we don't ever hear the name Nick in the play or. Sorry, in the film, in the play it's Nick. So it kind of puts us in their position right where we're kind of trying to figure this out as it's going along. I don't know how clear the rules of the game are to George and Martha themselves. And maybe the fact that we're not privy to that. It's not just putting us in the position of Nick and Honey, but it's also putting us in the position of being outsiders in their relationship, which is true, I think, of any relationship, that only the people in it knows how it functions.
So I have two questions that arise from that, which is, is there a purgative element to game playing? And therefore, is the purgation that happens at the end or something like a purgation or catharsis? I think there's direct mention, at least in the sections of the play. Oh, exorcism, exorcism. So is there something purgative or is something exorcised at the end of the play? And can that coalesce with the idea of game playing? And can we say that there is a winner or a loser here? Because I was interested in that element of what you described.
A game fundamentally as having, you know, winning and losing the stakes of the game.
9:12 Wes: The question of whether it's Purgative. You're reminding me of the time I was playing Settlers of Catan with my siblings and was getting taunted by one of them because there's a lot of trash talking when we play and it went too far and I stood up and I swept the pieces off the table, destroyed the game. So it can be purgative to dramatically end the game, which is a move that happens outside of the game. It was a move within Settlers of Catan that involves sweeping the pieces off the table. And so I think that for what's Purgative here, in the end, the two rules that we seem to know solidly as an audience are that it's not right for her to mention the imaginary child.
And it's not actually, we know a few. It's not right for her to talk about the book thing. Whether that really happened to him or that's his fantasy is unclear. So we can talk about that later. But you can't talk about the imaginary child, you can't talk about the book, and then he's not allowed to kill the fantasy child. It would have to be a mutual decision. Unless the rule is that once she's crossed the line, he can legitimately cross the line. So you have me thinking about this question of Purgative now in terms of whether that. Does that happen in other sorts of games?
Does that happen in the sorts of games that people play in relationships or just in social life in general, which are generally much less dramatic. Right. There's still self deception and illusion, but it's not like having an imaginary child or friend or something. Or does it always involve stepping out of the game and maybe into, so to speak, reality? Because there seems to be some association here between illusion and game playing. But anyway, as far as the rest of the rules go, it's really hard to figure out what the rules are because it shifts so much and their relationship is just all over the place, right?
11:05 Erin: Yeah.
11:06 Wes: One minute they're being nice, one minute they're being nasty. You don't know if they're being fake nice. You don't know if they're being fake nasty. All of it seems to be happening, but it's never clear when they're doing it. And it does all seem to be pre approved in a way or natural. Right. It just seems to be part of the course of things that they do this. So they're not surprising each other with their behavior very often. Even though it's surprising.
11:31 Erin: Yeah, to us.
11:32 Wes: So that's the purgative part. And then I think the other question. I'm not going to keep talking, but we can have this other question in mind as well as we go forward,
11:40 Erin: which was, is there a winner and is there a loser?
11:43 Wes: Right. Yeah.
11:44 Erin: You're making me think about a couple things. The idea that this is less a game and more something else. I don't know what, but perhaps a performance. Right. So you're making me think that they know the beats, they know the moves of the other person. It's kind of like an improvisation game, but with certain guardrails up. They seem to kind of generally know where the other person might go, but they're not sure at any particular moment which card they're going to draw. They each have, like, a set of. I'm really mixing my metaphors here, perhaps because it's really hard to define this, but they each seem to have a hand, you know, filled with, let's say, cards that have particular moves on them that they tend to make as individuals.
And the other person doesn't necessarily know which card George or Martha is going to play at any given moment, but they kind of know what's in the other person's hand. So I'm wondering about the element of performance in that as well. And I'm also thinking maybe to just kind of set us up into a, you know, diving into the play here. I was thinking about this first moment quite a bit, the. What a dump. The Bette Davis impression. And I was thinking about that in relation to a game show. I don't play very many games. I'm not a game person. But oddly enough, I love certain game shows, especially classic game shows.
And since I was a kid, I've loved watching what's My Line? And I, for some reason, have been on a. A little bit of a kick with that. And so for the past week or so that I've been home for Christmas break, I've been watching episodes of it with my family. And, well, I've kind of now gotten them hooked on it. And we've been watching, like, you know, maybe four or five episodes a night instead of watching a movie or something. So I've been thinking about. And that has celebrity guests, and it has. You know, there's kind of an odd bit of crossover here.
But I was thinking about the opening moments and Martha repeatedly asking George, you know, what's that from? Come on, you know. You know, like, she's insisting that he knows the answer to this. That it's there, that he just has to flip through the mental files and find the answer. What's really funny about that is that she doesn't know. It's kind of like she's testing him. Or she's asking him, like, come on, you know, for the $5,000 answer, what is the name of this film? But she also does not know. And so she's asking him this because it's something that's kind of like bothering her.
But it's also set up as this kind of game show format. It's also clearly a dynamic in their relationship where she either expects him to know the answer and alleviate her mental block, or she expects him not to know the answer, which seems more likely because he suggests it's Chicago, which is a ridiculous suggestion. And then she can belittle him for not knowing the answer or for giving a stupid answer. I don't know what could be said about that. Or if I'm making too much of this game show idea just because I'm primed for it.
14:26 Wes: Yeah, no, I like that. This is something that, you know, how much has happened before. How much is, you know, I was talking about how much are they surprising each other versus acting out roles that have been acted out in many times before. And that seems to be a lot of what's happening is acting out these agreed upon roles almost like a sadomasochistic role playing, except it's not happening in the bed.
14:47 Erin: It does once or twice, but not always with George.
14:51 Wes: Yeah, well, he's a voyeur at a certain point. Yeah. But they've decided which couples do that. It's okay to be mean to each other. I mean, many couples go down that route, and not as dramatically as this, but they are willing to engage in a certain amount of ongoing. Kvetching is not the right word.
15:10 Erin: Needling.
15:11 Wes: Yeah. And complaining to each other. And then the question is, when does it become disrespect? The point where disrespect maybe is the breaking the rule of the game thing. Ultimately some sort of thing that's going to set the really set the other person off versus staying at low level. Banter. Banter isn't the right word either. Maybe I'll think of it. But with this first scene, you have me thinking of like what a screenwriter would be thinking when they're trying to. So what's going to happen is you have like a very messy place and for some reason they haven't cleaned it up in expectation of guests.
But then it turns out the Guests are coming at 2am and they weren't expected in a sense, at least not by George. But Martha probably expected him because she sort of set it up. It's almost like a kidnapping in a way. It'll turn out so they know the place is a mess and a dump. I guess the audience can know that on the stage to some extent. You could make it look that way. It's not so much a dump as it's cluttered. So how do you convey the character reaction to that in an interesting way where they're not doing simple exposition in a clunky, on the nose way or, you know, you don't just have Martha coming in, why didn't you clean this place up?
Or. Which would be dumb. So instead you get this very interesting. Instead of fighting about the mess, they're fighting about the film. About the film that he can't remember. And as you pointed out, why are they fighting about this? She can't remember that either. He's berating him for not being able to remember. And what does she want from him? Why does she want him to be able to remember that? I mean, I think it comes out that don't, you know, anything? And it's the idea that he's not that into movies. He's not that into contemporary culture.
You know, he thinks the movie is Chicago, which is ridiculous just because she mentions Chicago. So he's an old. Even though he's younger than her in spirit, he's an old fuddy duddy who's into his books. And so maybe that's our introduction is her. You know, ultimately we know she wishes he were more of a man of action. Right. Having some sort of spine and ambition, whatever it would have taken for him to taken over the college from her father, which seems to be the original plan. So that's the way ultimately that he's failed her, or it seems that that's the way.
And so this complaint about the film becomes an indirect way about him not being able to remember. The film becomes an indirect way of complaining about that. So it's a cool opening in that it sets all of that up, right? With a seemingly trivial third object. But yeah, and it's playful.
17:40 Erin: I think it's important to note a couple of things. First of all, I think they in the film adaptation have been careful to take out the references to the fact that George is younger than Martha. I think because it's a little too unbelievable in the film to argue that even though Taylor's wearing a lot of age makeup and Stuff. She's unbelievably, I think, maybe 32 or 33. During filming. It was released when she was 34.
18:02 Wes: She gained, like, 30 pounds for the role.
18:05 Erin: Yeah, but the eye makeup and everything, like, that's one of the reasons why it had to be in black and white. Was because the makeup that they had to put on her to make her look like she was in her late 40s was so highly colored and everything that they had to shoot it in black and white for it to work. So I think they remove that. And I imagine that they are supposed to be just a mirror image of the slight age difference of what, two or three years between the younger couple. I don't know what role that's having in the play. I think this idea that she's older, even if only slightly older.
And taking a kind of shrew wife slash shrew mother role towards him. I think it makes it less interesting, that insistence when he says that he's younger than she is. The thing I wanted to say about that, too, that opening idea with the Bette Davis film. I think it announces also kind of a dynamic which we're gonna see repeated with the younger couple as well, of this frustrated housewife. Beyond the Forest is a film. It's from 1949. So even in 1966, I think that would have been considered an older movie. Like, maybe. Actually, I always wanted to say like an 80s movie.
But now the 80s is, like 40 years ago or something. So I keep thinking of the 80s as being 20 years ago. And it's not anymore.
19:18 Wes: I looked at the clip, by the way, and Bette Davis doesn't really sound like the imitations. She doesn't really do that. What a dump in the highfalutin way that Martha is remembering it.
19:28 Erin: But she's doing a Bette Davis impression and a kind of late Bette. She's doing a contemporary Bette Davis impression. But sort of like into the past, of beyond the Forest.
19:39 Wes: Right. Projecting that into the past. Okay. And Bette Davis almost was gonna be in this role.
19:43 Erin: Right.
19:44 Wes: Doing an imitation of Bette Davis.
19:46 Erin: I think Albee, even after he saw this film, was disappointed that she wasn't in it. Which I find hard to believe. Because I think that Taylor's performance is, like, actually so incredible. Yeah, it's a little crazy, actually. I was just thinking about the ways in which the dynamic that Martha described between Bette Davis character and Joseph Cotten's character in beyond the Forest is kind of like a mise enabeam of what's happening in George and Martha's marriage. And then it'll be repeated, of course, in Nick and Honey's marriage. So there's also that kind of establishment. So this sort of innocuous moment, which at first, for someone who doesn't know anything about the play or the film, might look like an ordinary pedestrian, slightly venomous, but not really tiff between the two, really is loaded with a lot of exposition right up front.
20:36 Wes: Very expertly done.
20:37 Erin: And a couple of things I noticed. Taylor says. She's describing the film and she's saying that Bette Davis comes home from a hard day at the grocery store. And Burton says she works in the grocery store. And Taylor, I should refer to them by their names. She says she's a housewife, she buys things. But there's this establishment of this idea of being a housewife as a hard day's work. And particularly in the way that Martha is emphasizing, like, you know, it's maybe the hardest job of all, which maybe we wouldn't argue with, but there's something there.
And then she says something about. She does that sentence where she repeats modest three times. She comes home and something about. She walks into the modest living room of the modest cottage that modest Joseph Cotten has set her up in. And it's another, like, loaded phrase to set her up. Right. And it makes me think of a game, too. Right. Setting up the pieces of a game and then watching it all kind of unfold. So later, when this is a first private conversation between George and Nick, when Honey leaves the room to go to the bathroom, George says something like, we're merely exercising.
We're working what's left of our wits. I was just thinking about that idea in relation to this first scene, this first moment. Because neither of them can remember what this film is. It doesn't really seem like an exercise. But of course, that's also a homonym for to exorcise something. So I'm just. I'm wondering basically, if this opening scene contains pretty much all the elements of the entire film or play within it.
22:07 Wes: Yeah, I think there's a lot. There's a lot packed in. There's a wonderful climax to that interaction. That part of this first scene that involves the movie, which is. George says, are they married? And she says, yes, they're married to each other.
22:22 Erin: Yeah.
22:22 Wes: And then she does the what a dump Imitation again. And then George is like, oh. And Martha goes. And the timing in the movie is absolutely perfect. This is the climactic moment. She's discontent, which, of course, seems to be telling us that Martha is discontent, which sets us up for a more ordinary type of conflict between the couple. Because I think what's going on really transcends discontentment. It's not, oh, I'm a housewife and the place is a dump. And discontented. There are elements of that. She wanted him apparently, to be more ambitious, but there seem to be other clues that go against that.
And I'm not saying it goes either way, but, for instance, they've practically kidnapped this young couple. And by that I mean, right, They've been at some kind of cocktail party with Daddy, with the father, the president of the school, and here's a new professor and his wife. And at 2am they're going over to have drinks with Martha and George. That can't possibly have wanted to do that themselves. Maybe they did, but.
23:27 Erin: Well, I. I don't know. Honey kind of did.
23:29 Wes: And. And Martha says, this is to make Daddy happy. Did Daddy really want her to do that at 2am the way things pan out, it makes me suspect that you could, on one reading, say Martha and George are in cahoots, right? Mm. To screw things up for Nick and Honey. Because ultimately, Nick will say, you've damaged me. I'm sure you remember that. He ought to be worried about Honey because Honey has just run into the bathroom after George has revealed that he knows about her hysterical pregnancy. And Nick is like, you've damaged me. And George is like, okay, well, rearrange your alliances, buddy.
It really sounds like. And Nick, right, is being groomed to take over the presidency of the college. So on the face of it, it looks like Martha has invited Nick and Honey over to humiliate George and to rub it in his face that here's this up and coming young man, right? Biologists could be a eugenics product, you know, Superman, ubermensch, who's gonna actually do what you couldn't do. But George, at least, right, is milking him for information that he can use against him. And it's unclear whether Martha is part of that. She might be part of that or it might be unconscious.
But do you see what I mean? Did she really want him to be the biologist, or did she want him to be the historian? Did she really want him to take over Daddy's spot, or did she want to keep him from taking over Daddy's spot?
24:50 Erin: Sure.
24:51 Wes: I think that's kind of ambiguous in the film. And so the word discontent here at the very beginning, it could be quite ordinary, as it was in the movie being referenced, or as it can be in these relationships, or it can be something out of the ordinary, which it may be here. And at the very least, this. Something very out of or the ordinary is going on.
25:12 Erin: Right. You're making me think a couple different things. First of all, that idea that this could be a much more quotidian film, this had never occurred to me before you said that. But someone who didn't know anything about the play might go to this film thinking that it was some kind of. What are they called? Kitchen sink drama. A lot of these things coming out of Britain, these sort of realist films where it's like, you know, someone is trying to make their way in the world and they're beaten down and they're in an unhappy marriage and they're.
You know, exactly what you describe. And of course you have two. Elizabeth Taylor was British born, though not by heritage. And of course, Burton is from Britain. And so this might be something where they're just struggling to pay the bills and yelling at each other while one of them continually screws up his job or something like that. You're making me realize maybe the set of Betrayed Expectations.
25:59 Wes: There are so many trite ways it could play out that have played out a million times in dramas and. And movies.
26:05 Erin: Yeah, it's so clever the way that they. And really beyond the Forest, which was a failed film, is kind of an early version of that kind of thing that had this full flowering. And even with the black and white cinematography, because a lot of those movies that were made in England, the kind of high point for that was like late 50s, early 60s, they were being made in black and white. So I could just imagine somebody going into this theater not knowing anything about the play and thinking that they're just going to see this struggling working class couple or something and how their innocence might have been stolen by this film.
26:34 Wes: Yeah.
26:35 Erin: Anyway, the brilliance of what you're saying about the biology thing is also making me and Martha's efforts maybe to impede his advancement less than to try and encourage it or help him develop. Makes me think about the fact that, first of all, they're living on this house on campus, and yet they could scream at each other and no one hears. Like, this is a campus that is conspicuously absent of children. Right.
26:58 Wes: It's filmed at Smith, right?
27:00 Erin: Yeah. In the middle of the night, I
27:02 Wes: guess, but I'm pretty sure it is. Yeah.
27:03 Erin: Yeah. But it's conspicuously absent of these kids. Not children, but these college kids, kids that are a little bit older than their imaginary child. And kids are of course, the question of this whole thing, I think that ties into what you're saying about biology, so maybe we can shift into that a bit. But this idea of is it wanted, is it not wanted, is it impeded, is it nurtured or cultivated? Is related to this Honey question of. Which maybe ties back into Martha, which is, did they actually want a child? And that's why they have to have this imaginary child. I think that's the reading that we're probably supposed to take from the film, but it's twinned with this idea that Honey is deliberately trying to avoid having a child. She does not want to give birth
27:45 Wes: and George accuses her of having aborted. Yeah.
27:48 Erin: Yes. So, though at the beginning. And a lot of stuff that Nick's character says at the beginning, of course, unravels, and he becomes far more honest over the course of the night, which is one thing that the game, whatever this game is, seems to achieve. That might arguably be said to be a net positive, that he becomes more and more honest about his failings and his true intentions over the course of the evening or the night. But he does say at the beginning that they're waiting to have a kid, and he does seem to believe that. I think this idea that Honey is secretly having these abortions is hidden from her husband, of course, and so are her feelings of anxiety towards having a child.
In other words, I think she is also convincing her husband that she wants to have a child and yet, unbeknownst to him, is having these abortions and doesn't actually want this. We'll call it, a biological project of theirs to advance. Yeah, I'm wondering about that connection. And also about the ways in which Nick and Honey are mirror images of George and Martha and the ways in which they are something quite a bit different. Like, we have this theme with Honey of illness, which, of course, Martha is this earth mother, as she calls herself, who's never been sick a day in her life, according to her husband.
And then we have the same kind of principle of a sort of reversal in George and Nick, in which Nick is the younger, more idealistic, as you say, the Ubermensch. And George is obviously someone who looks as though he's been. He's had the life sucked out of him and is maybe the less healthy in his marriage. Yeah, I don't know what we can say about that.
29:27 Wes: Yeah, we should think about this being a historian versus being a biologist. Opposition that's set up, of course, in the beginning. Martha thinks he's a mathematician, which is really Interesting. The biologist represents a few different things in the film. Being a biologist, for one thing, it represents his physicality, his fitness, the fact that he has a hard body, the fact that he played doctor at a very young age with honey, so that nothing was a mysterious, there was no mystery when they got married. And the fact that he's a ubermensch and specimen, blonde haired, blue eyed Superman and according to George's interpretation will be looking to the future.
And he's. He's the future person in the sense of the one who's being groomed to take over, take over the school, but take over, you know, one might think society or culture in general. George will make several speeches suggesting that civilization is going to pot. So the very first part, before I refer us to the text on some of the stuff, I just want to say that with the math thing we can talk about it maybe at some point. But what did Martha want out of a mathematician that she can't get out of a biologist? Right? She'll say, you're right in the meat of things.
He seems to relish the idea that he's a biologist. It's a very good opposition to George. A mathematician would have been something different altogether. Still. And that's not a humanities person, right? Thank God. But still more abstract and not as of this world or a person of action.
31:02 Erin: Perhaps the mathematician knows the right answer faster. I mean, maybe not about a movie, right? Because maybe a humanities person would be more likely to. No entertainment type facts, right? But maybe he would be able to come up with the answer quickly because he has something that provides an answer, provides a solution. It's right there.
31:21 Wes: And also he's a realist, right? So Albee himself said the song who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That's about who's afraid of doing without illusions. And of course in the end they have to give up this particular illusion. And there's another point where George will say people who can't abide the present either look to the future or look to the past, right? So he's absorbed in the past. Nick is about on George's interpretation of biology looking to the future and eugenics and things like that. And the mathematician is in this Platonic abstract world, so one might say the present, the mathematician is the one who can abide the present state of things because he's the only one who can be in this eternal realm.
32:05 Erin: Then you're making me think too, that if the mathematician can abide the present and he turns out to be a biologist, which is much More future directed then that would represent a disappointing lack of immediacy to Martha. In other words, she wants the mathematician because she wants someone who's in the present, not someone who's either in the past or the future. Though the future is better than the past. I think.
32:25 Wes: George says Martha is seldom mistaken. Maybe you should be in the Math Department or something.
32:31 Erin: Well, maybe if he was in the Math department, then he would have been able to have an affair with her instead of just hoping for some future consummation.
32:38 Wes: Yes, it's just a right line, right? The right line is the erect pointing straight up rectitude, maybe in terms of that. Straight lines and rectitude versus undependable biology.
32:52 Erin: There you go.
32:53 Wes: Bodies that may be soft or not, but often if they're drinking too much. But anyway, what I was going to point us to was just the way George's interpretation at the very beginning when Nick says he's a biologist and he says you're the one who's going to make all that trouble making everyone the same. Rearranging the chromosomes, not zones. Zones or whatever it is. And then Nick corrects some chromosomes and George goes on to talk about science fiction. And you people are rearranging my genes so that everyone will be like everyone else. Now I won't have that.
It would be a shame. I mean, look at me. Is it really such a good idea if everyone was 40 something and looked 55? You didn't answer my question about history. So that's the introduction to that. And then there's this idea put into circulation that George couldn't take over the History Department. He's in it, he's not it, he's not identical to it. And Nick will one day run the Biology Department and may run the History Department as well if he becomes the president of the school. This comes up again. So when Martha comes back after her and Honey have been away, and Martha comes back later dressed up, then there's that shotgun scene.
And then you get Martha being corrected about Nick being a biologist. And she's pretty resistant, right, to accepting that even though Nick is there. No, Martha, he's a biologist, he's in the Math Department. And then Honey says biology. Maybe only Honey is present at that point, I'm not sure. And then she says she can't be expected to remember everything because she has to keep track of all the teachers and their goddamn wives. But she's like, he's a biologist, good for him. Biology is even better. It's less abstruse going to this distinction we were making between math and biology.
And George is like abstract abstruse in the sense of recondite. So anyway, biology is even better. It's right in the meat of things. And then Nick reenters and she says, you're right at the meat of things, baby. I love that. So whatever she wanted, she finds a way to interpret this in a way that serves her impulses. And then she says something which suggests she might have known he was a biologist all along, which she tells Nick that Georgie boy says you're terrifying. And he says, I didn't know that I was. And then Honey says, it's because of your chromosomes, dear.
So I'm a little unsure of that if maybe something wasn't revealed to make that make sense. But it seems like the suggestion I got was that Martha and George had actually talked about this before and talked about the whole chromosomes thing and the whole biology thing. I might be wrong about that.
35:32 Erin: This is presumably after Martha has crossed the Rubicon by bringing up their imaginary son with Honey, who of course we don't yet know is imaginary. But George says, there's one thing in this whole sinking world that I am sure of, or if there is one, it is my partnership, my chromosomological. Chromosomological partnership in the creation of our blonde eyed, blue haired son. That seems to me in itself to have a kind of what you're talking about, a kind of retraction within the assertion.
36:01 Wes: This is just occurring to me, but you're making me think about the relationship between reproduction and generation, right? And fantasy, also artistic creativity, but fantasy here normally, right, Having a baby has something to do with the chromosomal partnership. But here it has to do with being willing to enter into this fantasy together. Or maybe this delusion or illusion together. Maybe it's psychosis and that's the way they have produced the baby. And there's lots of talk about the baby's eye color, right? And you know, earlier on, Nick suggests she doesn't know what chromosomes are.
And Martha says, I know what chromosomes are, sweetie. I love them. And George says Martha eats them for breakfast. She sprinkles them on her cereal. It's very simple. Martha, this young man is working on a system whereby chromosomes can be altered. Well, not all by himself. He probably has one or two co conspirators. Genetic makeup of the sperm cell changed, reordered to order actually for hair and eye color, stature, potency, I imagine hairiness, features, health and mind. It's important because Martha later on will say that he can only see specks, he can't see minds because of this microscope.
Most important, mind. All imbalances will be corrected, sifted out. Propensity for various diseases will be gone. Longevity is assured. We will have a race of men, test tube bred incubator born superb and sublime. The cost of that, he thinks, right, is that there's going to be less diversity. First of all, it's going to involve what he quote unquote regulation, where you're involuntarily sterilizing people and then loss of liberty. But also history, which is my field, history, of which I'm one of the most famous bogs will lose its glorious variety and unpredictability.
I and with me the surprise, the multiplexity, the sea changing rhythm of history will be eliminated. There will be order and constancy and I am unalterably opposed to it. I will not give up Berlin. So there's something forward looking about having a child, right? About giving birth to the next generation, which is going to take over. And that's what George apparently is slated to do with the school or was not anymore. And why not? Because he tried to do something creative, right? He tried to give birth to a novel. But the forward lookingness, the next generation, the quasi eugenicist, it's not really eugenicist project, but you know what I mean.
The gene, the chromosomal partnership of having a baby together, that's been denied George and Martha. And they can do it in fantasy. And they do it even to the point where they're designing their own kid. What he looks like, his eye color, right? They'd have that big disagreement over eye color. Is it blue, Are they blue? Are they green? It's like a eugenicists type of disagreement. And then that extends into these fantasized disagreements about why he was messed up, why he was troubled, why he left home. And George is claiming it's because Martha was incestuous and baiting him at 16.
And Martha says it's because George is a failure, you know, and they're having like what seems to be a serious fight over and accusations over something that an it or a hymn that really doesn't exist. But anyway, I think what you, you know, what you just pointed to is really important. This parallel between George's idea that biology means eugenics and their failure to have a real baby and only be able
39:22 Erin: to do it in fantasy is the motivation here. Do we accept the conventional understanding of this play, that it is out of a desire for a child that must have Been thwarted by a failure of biology of some kind. Right. Infertility in one or both of them, which they're compensating for.
39:41 Wes: I think that's the most probable reading, which is that they wanted to have children and couldn't because one of them is infertile. Although it's kind of suspicious that there are no accusations floating around about that.
39:55 Erin: I know that's exactly what I was going to say.
39:58 Wes: That's not the case. So I love that about this place. The suspicion is aroused. George is not the only one who's suspicious. Suspicion is aroused that one of them. I even suspect it might be the fact that neither of them wanted a kid. That's just my gut feeling is that neither of them actually wanted a kid or they were ambivalent. And you see this in Honey, right? I don't want kids. I don't want a baby. I don't want to be hurt. And then later on at the very end, I do want a babe.
40:24 Erin: Yes. Well, only because she's boozed up and she's affected by Martha's little story about the kid who, you know, you thought was not as attractive because he had dark hair. But then, hooray. Here's Wander a topic of discussion which makes me roll my eyes. But the other element of this which I'm wondering about is of course, the parental relationships. There's something very Tennessee Cat on a hot tin roof about every time Martha or just Elizabeth Taylor says the word Daddy. It makes me cringe.
40:54 Wes: Right.
40:55 Erin: There's something big.
40:57 Wes: Daddy, just what makes you so big? All I can think of. That's all I can think of when someone says Daddy.
41:04 Erin: I don't know why she's always a daddy's girl, but she is. There is something, it seems to me, inherently thwarted about her ability to have a child with George because of the fact that she is still being infantilized by her father. It's odd. She and Honey are kind of physical opposites. Taylor is with the gained weight especially. She's extremely voluptuous. As I said, she calls herself an earth mother, which is an odd thing for someone who's not a mother. Whereas Honey is more of what we would expect someone who is not yet sexually mature to look like in terms of a body, just on a basic level in terms of body type, because repeated mention is made of her slim hips which are supposedly going to prevent her from giving birth.
41:51 Wes: And she acts like a little girl in many ways too.
41:53 Erin: Yes, she does. I think there's evidence of this too, in the Fact that George hasn't been able to give birth, proverbially speaking to his novel, and there's obviously some issue with his parents. But there seems to me to be something infantilized about the two women and therefore contraceptive about the fact that both of them have these overbearing father figures. And it's related to me, ironically, with Martha and perhaps logically with Honey, related to a kind of inherent lack of sexual maturation, something little girlish about their relationship with their fathers that then impedes their relationship with the husband.
42:36 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very good. And I think that might be why Martha perhaps doesn't actually want George to be president of the school and why she may have worked actually to prevent that, but also seems to be working to prevent Nick or George is at least, maybe she's involved, maybe she's not. But one of the results of this whole thing is that they have the goods on Nick if they want to use them, if they want to sabotage his rise. So.
43:04 Erin: But that's very funny turn of phrase,
43:05 Wes: so to speak, assuming that he can perform, that he has some performance next time and not just potential. But as Martha puts it, before we
43:15 Erin: move on to a discussion of what's going on with George and his parents and this friend of his and bergin, et cetera, et cetera, before we move on to that, which I think is really important, is there something we can say here about. I'm sure you were reminded, as was I, of the Graduate and of your vampire thesis with Mrs. Robinson in that film. Is there some connection we can make here between Martha and Nick in that regard as related to their sort of lack of conception. It seems to me that of course, you know, there's something inherent in the Mrs.
Robinson relationship with Benjamin that even if she is still, and she should be still able to have a baby, of course, that seems to me to be an inherently anti conception kind of relationship. And I'm wondering if there's a relationship we can draw not only between, of course, the obvious vampiricism with George and Martha and the younger couple, but something in the fact that the sexual relationship between Martha and Nick is thwarted and how that might mirror, what do I want to say, antiseptic relationship between Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin.
I don't know if there's something there.
44:23 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. Speaking of the game again, George. So on the one hand he seems to act like she's going too far if she sleeps with Nick. It's more subtle in the movie, but in the play, Martha And Nick start fooling around on the couch. And then George comes in, pretends not to notice and just pretends to read sitting there. And Martha's getting unhappy that he's not being jealous. And he's like, no, you two go ahead, don't bother with me. I'm just going to read. And then she's pissed off and that's why she ends up taking Nick upstairs. And then even more so in the play than in the film, the suggestion is that they definitely did not consummate because he couldn't.
45:04 Erin: Yeah, the film, it's actually pretty muddy.
45:06 Wes: He couldn't get it up.
45:07 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
45:09 Wes: It's muddier in the film, I think. Which is funny because you think the film seems to try to soften this in a way. But then it seems harsher to me because they don't want to show the make, you know, the two making out. Except, you know, he's seeing something through the window. But they don't want to do the voyeur thing. This kind of sick, perverse George being a voyeur thing sitting there in the same room. But you know, of course I did think of. Mrs. Robinson. Yeah. Are you trying to seduce me, Martha? I don't know. You know, I did think too of, okay, she's 53, he's 46. Maybe closer in the film than the play. But two middle aged people, they have this young couple over. What the hell?
45:46 Erin: Why is that? Wouldn't they welcome this young couple?
45:50 Wes: Well, I mean, yes, if it were a normal interaction and not at 2am Maybe, you know. Right. But the whole attempt to seduce in various ways. Yeah, seduce in various ways. And it's not just her seducing Nick. It's the whole thing is a seduction. It's getting information out of Honey, getting information out of Nick. It's almost like exposing these youngsters to a primal scene. Even if that primal scene is just they're fighting, they're exposing themselves. In a sense, it's exhibitionism. They're exposing this kind of fighting which would happen in private.
I mean, yes, people do it in front of others. They can't help themselves. But they've raised fighting to the level of an art form. Right. And they're putting on a performance for these two youngsters. So I didn't think a lot about this parallel, but of course I saw it. I don't know if you have any other thoughts on this older generation to younger generation relationship and how it played out in the Graduate versus how it plays out here.
46:47 Erin: There's an element of initiation, which is similar to what you were pointing out in the Graduate episode of a sense of a warning. All the Dynamics, as between Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin letting the new couple know what they're in for at this college. Basically, the element of performance is interesting because, again, it makes me think, like, okay, again, it's more of a game show. Literally, those two words together as a kind of portmanteau. It's more of a game show that they're playing than a game, per se. They need an audience in some essential way.
It's not enough for them to put on this performance without them. But another thing that I was thinking, and maybe this is just asinine and I don't know, maybe it's a bridge too far, but I'm thinking, like, when would you actually have someone over at 2:00 clock in the morning? And it would only be if the party that was going on was so great that you didn't want the party to end. Or it would be on a kind of a special occasion kind of night, like at a wedding, when you would then go out after or, you know, keep the party going until the wee hours.
The only real instance I can think of is a wedding.
47:50 Wes: Well, this is why it's so strange in the beginning, right? So George doesn't know the couple are coming over. So Martha is foisting this on him at 2am I think she's foisting it on the couple as well because they don't seem all that enthusiastic about being there. It looks to me like they feel. Nick and Honey kind of feel obliged. And then they try to excuse themselves and leave as soon as they get there, given what's going on. But they feel obligated. And at a certain point, Martha's going to say, you know, you're the houseboy. You're going to do what I say because I'm the daughter of the president and you want to get ahead.
This is why I called it a kidnapping. And I think it's kind of that way from the beginning. They've been kidnapped and taken to this or, you know, come over to this house for a kind of initiation that I don't think Daddy knows what's going on with these initiations, a regular thing.
48:39 Erin: But anyway, that's why I think there's something, thematically speaking, antiseptic about this relationship, because it is a kidnapping. It is, of course, Nick bears a striking resemblance to their imaginary child. And there is something very Oedipal going on with the two of them, of Course, in the actual Oedipus story, the mother and son do conceive with each other, but in this instance, it seems to be something that can't have any kind of consummation. By its very nature.
49:08 Wes: We definitely hope that they haven't consummated. And I think it's important that it seem like they haven't consummated. Because for all the cruelty that happens within the play, that really does break the rules. I think it breaks the rules not just for the audience, but it would break the rules for Martha and George. Maybe she is sleeping around with everyone, and maybe I'm wrong about that. But this is another one of these muddy areas. Where is the idea of her infidelity? Is that part of the fantasy or isn't it? You know, you could ask that about any aspect of the play. But it seems, at least in this particular situation, that he accuses her of going too far, and therefore he gets to kill off the kid. But there's too far and there's too far. Right? There's. You broke the rules, therefore I'm changing our fantasy life.
49:55 Erin: Yes.
49:56 Wes: And in order for us, you know, it's purgative, like, so we can actually be closer and it can just be us. If that works. And then there's, you broke the rules, therefore this relationship is over. Right. Those are two very different things. And so we can always ask. Yeah. What are the rules that would break the actual relationship? He thinks she's breaking a lot of rules that allow him to kill off an imaginary boy. But apparently she didn't break any rules that would lead him to end the relationship. Because by killing off the imaginary boy, it's like a renewal of vows, which is actually a phrase that George uses at some point in the play.
50:32 Erin: You're making me consider a couple of things here. First of all, the insistence of at least Nichols and I think probably also Albee, that this is a couple that is dysfunctional because they love each other so much. I don't know that that's absolutely, terribly clear in the play. But part of the baggage of what the Burtons bring to this is, of course, a kind of a. Like, even as they're being really vicious to each other, just because they have so much physical chemistry with each other. That comes across for me very well in the film, considering also the Burtons kind of baggage.
I'm thinking about Martha's infinite variety, as it were. To use the Cleopatra thing, of course, we have to for the Burtons. And the fact that she is. I don't know what I want to say about this, but it seems important to say that she is so changeable. She has so many different registers. Burton has. Obviously he's a great actor. I don't mean that he can't have more than a few registers. But the character of George is somewhat limited compared to Martha's or Taylor. As Martha's volatility, her ability to be sort of low class, but then go into this high class mode at times, which seems right to me.
She's discontent, but she's also the daughter of a college president. It's almost like she's slumming it with her own behavior. Or she's creating. She's inventing the slum around her that she wants to live in. I'm thinking about that in relationship to generation, to a generative impulse. What makes the fact that we don't know whether or not they've had this affair murky in the film is the offense that George takes and the way he is hurt by the suspicion that maybe they did consummate it. So he is offended. Then I'm using this word offense, like offense.
Who is on the offense and who is on the defense in this game? It seems to me that George is continually on defense because he is more limited in his modes of attack. And so he has to shut down. It's like Martha is creating more and more possibilities, more and more varieties, and he has to start kind of closing down possibilities in order to almost like what, I don't know, direct them. Put his arms around the relationship and kind of hold everything in. Hold the pieces in that Martha continually kind of wants to explode. I'm thinking about this, as I say in relationship to the way that their characters function and the fact that Martha seems to be able to shapeshift much more than George does.
So is that part of the dynamic of this relationship? Martha wants to continually explode things. George has to shut them down in order to keep her tempered and to keep the relationship in a kind of positive tension just between the two of them, you know what I'm saying? Is this important?
53:16 Wes: I mean, that sounds right. I mean, at one point she says, George is out there somewhere in the dark. George, who's good to me and whom I revile, who understands me and whom I push off. Who can make me laugh and I choke it back in my throat. Who can hold me at night thinking, you know, you used the word hold there, right? Who can hold me at night so that it's warm and whom I will bite. So there's Blood. Who keeps learning the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules. Who can make me happy. And I do not wish to be happy. And yes, I do wish to be happy. George and Martha. Sad, sad, sad. She's talking to Nick here.
53:53 Erin: I love that speech. That is like Shakespeare, just a little more of it.
53:58 Wes: Who I will not forgive for having come to rest, for having seen me and having said, yes, this will do. Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving me and must be punished for it. George and Martha. Sad, sad, sad. So this is the way at least she sees it, right? I think the way you were describing it, accurate or not, seems to be the way she sees it. Where he's adapted to her variability and to her makes it sound like self loathing here. In a way that he can keep her in the relationship in a way that maybe others have not been able to keep her. Even if that means playing these sick games, unfortunately.
54:37 Erin: Right.
54:38 Wes: What you were saying before is she's always. Yes, she defines the game. She's always ahead because she always has more on him. Right. She knows the book story, the bergin story, and she can reveal at will the fantasy child, which he does not want revealed. You know, you would think she might be the one who would be ashamed of that, right? In some way, but it's not. It's him. So he wants to learn the games, play the games to keep things between her and him going. But he doesn't want the game to be overexposed, maybe through some of the details of the game to be made public.
55:14 Erin: And she's also insidious. I mean, she's working behind the scenes. The big thing that changes the nature of this entire night happens offstage when she tells Honey about the child.
55:25 Wes: Yeah.
55:26 Erin: The thing that the whole play hinges on, we don't even see. And then Honey's the one who reveals it. She's the one who sort of gives birth to the child in the conversation. And you're making me realize kind of the, you know, the idiocy of the maybe of this whole pretense, which, you know, I mean, you don't want to look too closely at it, of course, but, you know, Honey just brings it up like, oh, and what about your son? You know, like, totally normal. And it's like, okay, well, what did Martha expect to happen? Like, obviously this is all part of her plan.
Right? And by the end of the night, they will know. Not to bring this up in company with other people at the college, but it seems that Martha has mentioned this in some sort of totally innocuous way in the other room, which we're not privy to, that makes Honey think it's perfectly fine to just mention it in front of everybody else. And it's like, of course, if they ever brought this up to anybody else at the college, it would just be dead in the water. Or like, what if they then went to the president of the college and started talking about his grandson?
You know, I mean, the whole thing is crazy. It seems like the rest of the night must happen, if only in order to shut down the fact that Martha has innocuously introduced this fact, which has to be drummed out of everyone before they could be sent off to go and talk about this to everybody else. This is a small college, and everybody talks. There's a lot about what's unspoken and what isn't. One of the things I was thinking of when I mentioned the fact that Nick becomes more honest over the course of the night is that George will mention the playing of musical beds, as he calls it, that happens in the college.
And Nick acts suitably disturbed by that fact. And of course, later we find out that's exactly what Nick is intending to do in order to advance his career. So there's an interesting tension here, as in any polite society, between spoken and unspoken truths and the things that everyone seems to know and the things that you're seemingly not supposed to talk about. So in a way, Martha seems to be dramatizing a kind of an essential fact of any closed community, like a college campus or something like that. I don't know.
57:28 Wes: Speaking of the end of the night, it's 2:30am and I have guests coming over, so. So we're going to move it to Postscript. The after party. Yes, with our guests, Nick and Honey.
57:39 Erin: Now, I keep thinking that you're saying milk and honey.
57:43 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting, because, of course, George and Martha reference to Washington and his wife. And then I think Nick is actually supposed, according to Albee, was a specific reference. But now I forget what the reference is to. But anyway, maybe we'll remember that and share that with you on Postscript, if that is an enticement. But we will talk about bergin. Is it bergin and Coke, what that's about. And a little boy shooting his mom with shotgun and then killing his father. Very exciting stuff and what that means. Anything else that we need to talk about?
58:19 Erin: I think that's enough intrigue for one Postscript.
58:21 Wes: Okay.
58:22 Erin: All right.
58:23 Wes: So that's what we're gonna do. All right. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
Pagan Poetics in “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens
Dec 19, 2022
Wallace Stevens was an ungainly insurance executive, but his poetry is serene and secularly reverential. In particular, his poem “Sunday Morning” seems to suggest that the rhythm of the natural world—if we give it enough rapt attention—is as good as any chant or prayer. But can a return to nature worship solve the problem of nihilism, once monotheism has been eclipsed by modernity? Are memory and desire as permanent heaven, and can the poet become their high priest? “Sunday Morning” is a poetic dialogue about these questions. And whether or not we’re satisfied with its conclusion that the world is nothing more than an “old chaos of the sun,” the poem itself is an orderly and beautiful form of communion.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Wes: Wallace Stevens was an ungainly insurance executive, but his poetry is serene and secularly reverential. In particular, his poem Sunday Morning seems to suggest that the rhythm of the natural world, if we give it enough rapt attention, is as good as any chant or prayer. But can a return to nature worship solve the problem of nihilism? Once monotheism has been eclipsed by modernity, are memory and desire as permanent as heaven? And can the poet become their high priest? Sunday Morning is a poetic dialogue about these questions and whether or not we're satisfied with its conclusion, that the world is nothing more than an old chaos of the sun. The poem itself is an orderly and beautiful form of communion. This is Wes Alwan.
0:59 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:04 Wes: So, Erin, to make ends meet, if you ended up getting a job, let's say as an insurance executive, maybe at the Hartford Accident Indemnity Company. It's a cool sounding name, right?
1:16 Erin: I had an internship there.
1:17 Wes: Are you serious?
1:19 Erin: No.
1:20 Wes: Oh, my God, how naive I am. All right, well, I guess it's within the realm of possibility. You are from Connecticut, but I was going to try to make a joke about being attentive to risk or something, but anyway, no. So if you get a lucrative job, let's say paying $350,000 a year in today's salary. Today's money. But then you also became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. I like the alliteration in that. Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Would you be tempted to quit your job or would you just, like Wallace Stevens, keep that job forever and ever?
1:57 Erin: I would keep the job because of my expensive interest in lifestyle.
2:06 Wes: Interest in money is stronger than my interest in poetry.
2:09 Erin: That's right. No, actually, realistically, I would 100% quit the job. I wouldn't be in a job like that in the first place. But it's kind of. Yeah, it's kind of amazing to think that he was maybe America's most practical. Certainly like the most practical modernist. Well, there was Williams, who was a doctor, but that's a lot different than being an insurance man. So I think that speaks to, like, the mystery at the heart of Steven's personality. I feel like I can't quite figure him out. I can't figure out the marriage. Certainly maybe I can, and I just don't want to figure it out like that. He was just like unhappy in his marriage and it was boring and he kind of didn't know what to do. Yeah, but, yeah, it's odd.
2:51 Wes: He's an interesting character because apparently he was very sto, too. So his boss once said, unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart. Ooh. So apparently he was quite a reserved person. Unless he was drinking, in which case he would get in fights with Frost and Hemingway. Once I actually got into a fist fight with Hemingway. These sorts of things happen while he's on vacation in Key West. But otherwise quite reserved. The kind of guy who composed poems on scraps of paper while walking to work. And then asked his secretary to type them up.
He also turned down a. After he won the Pulitzer Prize, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard, which he turned down because it would have meant quitting that job. So the background that I got on him, I didn't ever get a firm. It must be somewhere, because he has journals and prose writings as well. I imagine somewhere he must have said why it is he kept the job. But you can kind of see it in his poetry. There's this sort of commitment to reality, maybe, let's say, and to the concrete. And he seems like the person who might have become unmoored without the day job, without being able to be locked down by that.
Because there's also a very expansive quality to his poetry. And the tendency towards abstraction. And this weird balance between that expansive tendency and being anchored in sensuous detail and concrete detail.
4:24 Erin: I think that's really right. How I understand him is as a guy who just lived for his vacations. But, yeah, I think that tethering that you're describing is probably really apt. Michael Hofmann, the great poet critic who's one of my professors at University of Florida. He had, like, a really. Just an amazing character analysis of all of all the poets that we've read, of course, which, of course, is very much in evidence in his reviews. He's famously perceptive, but he thought of Stevens as being this, like, big, fat guy who loved life and loved. Like. Loved to eat and loved, you know, loved all those kinds of sensuous pleasures. So that makes him seem kind of jolly too. But there's, like, a dark side to that as well. But, yeah, you see that come out so much in Harmonium. And then you think, how could an insurance guy have written this? I don't know. It's crazy.
5:12 Wes: Yeah, exactly. So we should say for background. This was his first book, Harmonium, in which Sunday Morning appeared. It had appeared in Poetry, the journal poetry, in 1915, but didn't appear in a collection until 1923. And this is when Stevens was 44 years old. He had been writing poetry since he had been at Harvard and studied, I think, with William Carlos Williams. Is that right? No, studied with Santayana and apparently very influenced by Santayana's book, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. And then after he left Harvard, he was actually a writer in New York for a little while and then decided to do something practical.
Went to law school and then ultimately got this job as an insurance executive, which he kept for the rest of his life. So, you know, I'm always fond of those late bloomer. It's not really Late bloomer story, but you'd always say, okay. He published his first book when he was 44 years old. So I guess he worked very consistently. And then he. Eventually he felt like he had enough to put together. The way he put it was he was picking a crisp salad from the garbage of the past. The way he put it to his editor when he put together Harmonium.
6:29 Erin: That's great.
6:31 Wes: There are a lot of great poems in that collection, including in the first publication, a pared down version of Sunday Morning with some stanzas missing and reordered by his editor, which is just, like, so shocking to think about.
6:44 Erin: I thought that was in Poetry. That was that Harriet Monroe.
6:48 Wes: You're right.
6:48 Erin: Yeah.
6:49 Wes: Wait. Yeah, the full thing appeared in Harmonium. Yeah. Sorry. Yes, that was the initial in Poetry. Right. Yeah.
6:55 Erin: Mm.
6:57 Wes: All right. So shall we get into Sunday Morning?
7:01 Erin: Let's do it.
7:02 Wes: We'll do our usual thing where we'll read a stanza and then talk about it. You want to start with the first one?
7:09 Erin: Sure. Sunday morning 1. Complacencies of the peignoir and late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair and the green freedom of a cockatoo upon a rug mingle to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little and she feels the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe As a calm darkens among water lights. The pungent oranges and bright green wings seem things in some procession of the dead winding across wide water without sound. The day is like wide water without sound. Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet over the seas to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulcher.
7:53 Wes: Beautiful. My experience of his poetry is, and especially this poem is immersively beautiful. What's your overall?
8:02 Erin: Yeah, it's beautiful. And it sometimes sort of resists being pinned down, like there is a lot of abstraction, like you say, you know, it's not rhymed, but it still reminds me, like, so much of this poem, of course, is probably heavily influenced by Keats. And so these sections, I noticed that they have 15 lines in them. They're like a sonnet plus, you know, sonnet plus one line, which is really nice. And then that puts me in mind of Keats's To Autumn, in which I think we talked about this. He sort of has that, like, overstuffed sonnet in each one of the stanzas of that poem. And yet.
8:35 Wes: And the ending, sorry, will sound like a direct variation to Autumn.
8:38 Erin: Right, right, right.
8:40 Wes: Stanza with the poem.
8:41 Erin: Yeah. With the birds. Yeah. Yeah. But there's still, at the same time, like, it's not, I don't know, firecrackery to me, as some of Keats. Like, there's a placid.
8:50 Wes: Oh, yeah.
8:50 Erin: You know, and a dreaminess, which I think is fitting for the subject. This opens with just a woman sitting in a chair, and she's sort of chillaxing on a Sunday morning, and her mind wanders and we sort of wander with her. There's a feeling of calm and it's troubled, like wind on the water at certain points, but very smooth kind of sound.
9:14 Wes: Just the first word. I really love. If you could say, well, what are the great first words of poems as opposed to the great first lines of poems? This has got to be one of them. So complacency, in the plural and whatever satisfactions are associated with sleeping in late and being lazy on a Sunday. And in this case, of course, not going to church, which is very significant. Relaxing in the sun. And there's kind of a hint of class and luxury with the peignoir and leisure. But there's also, in the word complacency, there's another connotation which is just that there's some sort of impending danger. Right. If you get too complacent, you might get. What's the word you might get? Smacked. I don't know. You might be surprised by something. Yeah.
10:00 Erin: That's really nice. And also the kind of. I think it combines so many senses, because also in complacency, there's a sense of, like you say, the negative sense that something might creep up on you, but also a smugness or a kind of self satisfaction. And the whole poem is about trying to take satisfaction from just the self or from just the qualities that are being offered right here in this opening image and to fashion some kind of existence out of that or some kind of higher order, which is a troubling project.
10:35 Wes: Yeah.
10:36 Erin: Causes a lot of hedging.
10:38 Wes: Yeah. I mean, we can Say if we want where we're headed, the poem will tell you explicitly too. It's not a matter of interpretation, but we're headed towards the attempt to establish a post Christian neo pagan religion to find some sense of meaning in the wake of that. The other thing that really draws me into the poem are the very charming rendition of coffee and oranges and the cockatoo. The green freedom of the cockatoo where I think of. In light of thoughts about religion and sin and knowledge of good and evil. There's a connotation of naivete to the greenness and freedom associated with naivety.
Right. Pre lapsarian, pre self consciousness in animals. And the image I have is of the cockatoo having its wings out but walking, which is an interesting image because it's a bird that's been uncaged and there's freedom in that. But it's not using its full freedom. It's not flying. It's not exerting itself. It's sort of stumbling around in a comic way. At least that's the way I. Way I've always imagined it.
11:38 Erin: That's nice. I really like that. Yeah, that's the way I've imagined it too. But I never thought about the idea of extended wings because you want to get that nice swath of green. So the wings would have to be a bit extended. That's nice.
11:50 Wes: You know. And then we wonder about her freedom in relation to that. Right. There's a freedom to this level of leisure and satisfaction, the complacencies. But then isn't there. What kind of freedom? Is she uncaged? Isn't she? So.
12:03 Erin: Yeah. And these colors, you know, the oranges in the sun are orange and the lighter orange maybe are yellow and the brown of the coffee and the green of the cockatoo. She's thinking she's not free of this compulsion maybe to think of herself as doing something wrong here by not going to church. And they all dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. Do cockatoos make noises? I mean, they must like chirp and stuff like that. But they're not like parrots.
12:28 Wes: I was thinking about the same thing. Because the dissipation of the hush implies noise. Although I think it's visual noise and probably auditory noise as well.
12:37 Erin: Yeah. And it's sort of backwards. It's interesting. This florid color scheme is sort of matched by some kind of sound. Or maybe they're just really loud colors. Right. And what are they dissipating but silence. It's an interesting Usually silence is what dissipates in noise, but not the other way around.
12:53 Wes: Right?
12:54 Erin: Yeah. So there's something happy and exuberant about the image, erasing the sort of dour silence maybe.
13:02 Wes: Right. The hush involved in holiness. And of course, the ancient sacrifice, meaning Christ's crucifixion. Right. Mm.
13:12 Erin: It's as if the poem is narrating her a little bit, maybe. I mean, it's describing her, but also we get this holy hush of ancient sacrifice. And then, oh, she dreams a little and she feels the dark encroachment.
13:23 Wes: Right.
13:23 Erin: It's as if the poem has kind of punctured this or the scene, or maybe she has remembered it, been called back to what morning it is. And then she gets this flood of realization. Right. Oh, I'm not at church and now this old catastrophe is encroaching upon me. And so the old catastrophe is itself also the. The crucifixion.
13:45 Wes: Again, this sort of reminds me of Freud's there's no no in the unconscious. So she's thinking in a self satisfied way about how she doesn't need to be at church and this is all she needs.
13:56 Erin: Right, Right.
13:57 Wes: She's thinking about how she should be at a church and she's feeling guilty.
14:01 Erin: But yeah. And there's a kind of. I mean, there's so much doubling in this poem. But here already we get ancient sacrifice and old catastrophe. It's like it comes back around, you know, we're dissipating the ancient sacrifice. But yeah, like you say, we get it as a kind of a negative construction, like we're not thinking about this. And then again it comes up in like, oh, no, we are thinking about this. So it appears twice. Because her thoughts keep circling around and around throughout the entire poem.
14:26 Wes: Yeah. What induces the encroachment is this reverie that she goes into, which you would think the reverie would be the culmination of the satisfaction that she's feeling. Right. Relaxing, being in the sun, being in a state of pleasant reverie. And here it's more like an anxiety dream. Again, he uses the word dream, not daydream, not reverie. So there's some ambiguity as to her waking state. She's awake, but maybe it's closer to sleep than the average daydream. And then anxiety rears its ugly head and the catastrophe. So on the one hand it's the crucifixion. So catastrophe is an interesting word. I mean, it's got a negative connotation often. And in this case, so there's the catastrophe of Christ's suffering, of the killing of Christ. But of course on the other side of that is supposed to be salvation.
15:22 Erin: Right.
15:22 Wes: And then there's the more neutral description of just catastrophe in terms of the big turning point. Right. Historically there's BC and then there's AD that line. Things are very different on either side of it. And then of course there are other associated catastrophes, turning points that are parallel, like again the fall and then the development from animal sentience into human self consciousness. So again, it's an interesting encroachment because she's moving into a state of. In the dreaming of lower consciousness. And then it's consciousness, it's a higher level of consciousness and self consciousness that intervenes.
16:04 Erin: Well, you're making me think too that this almost predicts the end of the poem in a way, or the mere use of the term old catastrophe already contains within it the seeds of disbelief that will be sown over the course of the poem. Because it's really not a catastrophe if you're a Christian.
16:20 Wes: Right.
16:20 Erin: I mean, a catastrophe would be what, the murder, the killing of an innocent man, of a good man, but not someone who is then a God and is then. Right. Resurrected. And so it can only be a catastrophe, I think, if stripped of the resurrection as a concept. And the resurrection of course is what proves Christ's divinity.
16:39 Wes: Yeah.
16:40 Erin: So there's already a sense of like, if it's just a catastrophe, then Christ really isn't God. Yeah, it's already in that.
16:47 Wes: And if you're anti religious, as Stevens is, although it's a bit complicated ultimately. But the adventure of Christianity and its dominance of the world, including political dominance, is catastrophic. And you could point to religious war and everything that follows as well, if you're thinking in that anti religious vein. So it's not just about being separated from nature. Right. The sort of pro pagan theme of this poem, wanting to return us to the experience of nature as a kind of secular religion. But it's also about the political and social consequences of Christianity historically.
17:29 Erin: The next line is as a calm darkens among water lights, we get that same kind of doubling. First the hush is dissipated, then the calm returns. And I get this really strong mental image of, I want to say maybe in a Lord of the Rings movie or something, you know, where everyone's like happy and having a good time and they're eating their, their fourth breakfast or whatever it is, and then all of a sudden, you know, maybe one of those ring wraiths comes out of nowhere and then Everything, like, you know, the sky gets clouded over and everyone immediately stops laughing. And there's this hush that happens, and everything gets still and dark and. Yeah, it's very cinematic for me.
18:06 Wes: I was actually looking up water lights. I was like, what the. You know, it's not night, so it can't be, like, lights floating on the water. And then so I was like, is this some kind of thing that I don't know about? Of course, it's just Steven's coinage. And I think he's thinking about the light being reflected off the water. Right. And maybe sparkling. And so there's an interesting image of the. Something sparkling. There are sort of dark recesses to it or the dark recesses of waves. And then one can become focused on that darkness. So the calm becomes something different now in the beginning, and I think it's associated with complacency. And now calm starts to have a sinister tinge to it.
18:47 Erin: Yeah. So we get this transformation of even the happy things around her and the colors around her becoming a kind of funeral procession winding across wide water. And these are maybe the two most difficult lines in the poem for me. Almost a repeated line. The day is like wide water without sound. And she passes over the water. I'm wondering if there's supposed to be a chime here with Christ walking on water. She makes an imaginative flight.
19:12 Wes: The encroachment turns into her actually walking and imagination over walking to Palestine. You know, she's gonna wrestle with the idea that she can give up Christianity in a way, but it begins with a pilgrimage. Begins with a journey in which she imitates Christ by walking on water.
19:29 Erin: Oh, that's great. I love that.
19:30 Wes: Yeah.
19:31 Erin: And then she goes to silent Palestine. This is really. Things that are silent are very bad. Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. There's no resurrection here. I think I might have mentioned this in a previous episode, but there are always, like, two types of Christians. They're the crucifixion Christians and the resurrection Christ. And this is very much. Stevens is very much a crucifixion Christian. There's nothing happy.
19:53 Wes: Yeah. So I think she's leaning against. But the dominion of the blood and sepulchre. I mean, you could think of it as the blood of Christ, but you could also think of it as the blood of religious and ethnic warfare. Right. That's long afflicted the area. And then the sepulcher, Christ's tomb. And then the question was, whether was he really resurrected? The answer is going to be the negative. And the negative at the end of the poem, that's going to be her insight, her realization. She's going to answer that question. The negative. I like this idea, too, of the procession of the dead across the winding water. And then the day is like white water without sound. The kind of expansiveness of her day becoming this expansiveness of pilgrimage and inquiry. So, inner pilgrimage.
20:36 Erin: Nice.
20:36 Wes: So each stanza now is going to pose questions. And later on it'll be. I think from the four stanza on, it'll be quotation marks or she'll say things. But here it's still the poet channeling or the narrator channeling her point of view. So why should she give her bounty to the dead?
20:54 Erin: Right. Yeah. The turn of her mind, immediately recalled from Palestine to present. Should I read that stanza?
21:01 Wes: Yes.
21:02 Erin: Okay. 2. Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams shall she not find in comforts of the sun, in pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else in any balm or beauty of the earth, things to be cherished, like the thought of heaven, Divinity must live within herself. Passions of rain or moods in falling snow, grievings in loneliness or unsubdued elations when the forest blooms, gusty emotions on wet roads, on autumn nights, all pleasures and all pains, remembering the bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
21:45 Wes: Yeah. So the question is, whatever is to be gained by religion? Her sense is that it takes her away from her bounty, you know, which turned out to be her current comforts in the sun and all the rest of it, her bounty of the cockatoo, even though it's now it's just the green wings and the fruit or a form of bounty that she would have to sacrifice that if she were to go to church, turn her. Or turn her attention to religion. And of course, you know, religion generally calls for certain sacrifices in terms of pleasure here maybe there's an invocation of giving up, of youth or virgin sacrifice, something like that.
That may be a bit of a stretch, but giving her bounty right to the dead. And then there's the larger. And we discussed this, James Joyce's the dead. There's a larger sense in which we, in adherence to norms and in the effects of culture, the influence of those things, we sort of are sacrificed to the previous generations. We are no longer just creatures of instinct, but we follow the rules of the dead. The dead pass that onto us. The second part of the stanza is interesting because she begins with Divinity living in herself. And then we get a lot of stuff about the environment and the weather or nature.
22:56 Erin: Yeah. All her emotions seem to be this divinity in herself. So the emotions are the response to the outside world. They're all passions of weather. Like having seasonal affective disorder or something like that.
23:13 Wes: Yeah, there's this sort of collapse of distinction between inside and outside. Gusty emotions on wet roads. So at a certain point the emotions become the wind, for instance, there's moods in falling snow and then there's passions of rain. Yeah. So this collapse of distinction between inner emotional state and the natural world.
23:36 Erin: Yeah, I like this turn that happens really after line seven. The first half of that stanza really repeats the words and images from section 1. We get the silent shadows and dreams again. We get the wings and the fruit and everything. But then line 8, Divinity must live within herself. We finally get this new direction. So we move forward. And then we get rain and snow. I marked this out. Spring and fall and then winter and summer in the last two lines. So we get a whole kind of year compressed from lines eight to 15.
24:10 Wes: Yeah.
24:11 Erin: And there does seem to be a permeable membrane between the seasons, the moods, the passions, whatever that are happening inside her and whatever is going on outside. Which is interesting to me because so much of. At least in the Catholic liturgical year, you know, so much of the calendar is so attentive to. And so much of very old religions are attentive to the seasons and the passing of time and sort of like the marking of time in the seasons. So there's a stripping away of that. Where then what we have left is just the seasons. You know, we don't have like the Easter, for instance, the Easter celebration of new birth and eggs and bunnies and things coming out of hibernation. Now we just have those things themselves without the sort of associative. What for Stevens or this narrator would be sort of associative baggage.
25:00 Wes: Right. Divinity living within herself is interesting, I mean, because it sounds like it could be something that you read in a self help book. Right. God just lives in you or the divine lives in you. But it speaks to a transition from the divine as guaranteeing a kind of moral order, so being a foundation for morality and for a certain set of values, as Nietzsche put it, and Nietzsche was influential on Stevens, and you can see it in this poem, because it's a question of what you do after the God is dead, after the prospect of nihilism raises its ugly head.
So the divine can be regulation of the moral order. But the divine, in the sense of a more pagan divine, has to do more with the regulation of the natural order and seasons and those cycles. And there's a connection between that and our inner lives and the regulation of our emotions, which is not unconnected to the regulation of the moral order. Right. And this is a pagan and Nietzsche idea as well, which is that we replace morality in the Christian sense with a kind of virtue ethics in which we cultivate various excellences, or we develop this ability to have a certain type of psychological integration.
I mean, ultimately its legacy is psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. But the idea of the divine being in oneself here becomes this, I think, an idea of self regulation, which in psychoanalysis has something to do with the internalization of the things that a mother does for a baby. Right. Mentalization and something called mirroring. But we integrate maternal function into ourselves. And that's almost like a sort of pagan thing. Right. So instead of God the Father laying down the law, it's the maternal earth mother saying we regulate our behavior according to the concept of psychological integration, or something like that.
So anyway, sorry, I won't do too much of that, get us off track with that kind of speculation.
27:01 Erin: But no, I think that's good because it does come up later when we get the mother of beauty. So shall we move on?
27:07 Wes: Yep.
27:08 Erin: 3. Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave large mannered motions to his mythy mind. He moved among us as a muttering king magnificent, would move among his hinds. Until our blood, commingling virginal with heaven brought such requital to desire. The very hinds discerned it in a star. Shall our blood fail, or shall it come to be the blood of paradise? And shall the earth seem all of paradise that we shall know? The sky will be much friendlier then than now. A part of labor and a part of pain. And next in glory to enduring love. Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
27:49 Wes: This to me is the most difficult stanza of the poem.
27:53 Erin: It might be my favorite, though, I don't know. Yeah, I especially love the last part. But Jove or Jupiter, right? Born entirely of gods, not at all human in the way that Christ is human. He didn't have a mom. He didn't have a growing up land like Palestine for us to travel to on this earth. And I love this idea that he's huge and moving among us like a king would move among deer.
28:20 Wes: This is interesting because I was very confused about that. The idea of him moving amongst deer. And what I found. Is that what Stevens, I think, meant is he's using a. And this is something he would do. He's using this in an archaic way to mean, like subordinate peasants, basically.
28:39 Erin: Okay. That's what I thought too, because I looked that up and it said, yeah, that could be old English peasants.
28:44 Wes: Yeah. And I think there's evidence in the. I don't know, his correspondence or other. I think that is the critical decision, is that that's what he meant.
28:51 Erin: But. But I like the idea of deer, though, because then we have the idea
28:54 Wes: of a hunter, which is initially the way I interpreted all this. I did a whole big thing where I was like, on board with the whole deer thing and I was like, okay, he's a hunter, he's. But go ahead.
29:03 Erin: I just like the idea too, that we're just fodder for this myth. Like Jupiter is always coming down and raping maidens and turning people into things. Right. Yeah. So we're just.
29:12 Wes: That's the way I read that as well. Yeah. And that still holds. Yeah. I don't think the deer thing leads the reader astray. So he could have meant both, really, Because I think when we talk about the star, I think that's going to be ambiguous as well, or polyvalent polysemus between the planet and maybe the star that led the apostles to Jesus. But the inhuman birth is important because it's not. So Christ was a real human being, whether you're religious or not. And Zeus has much murkier origins. That's why there's this mention of mythology. So no Sweet Land gave large mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us as a muttering king. The muttering is because there's less distinctness because he's not a historical being. It's almost like it's a matter of rumor or it's not as impressed upon us or distinct. Right. There's a different relationship where there was, you know, for the ancient Greeks and Romans, to their gods, it seemed like a much more, say, casual relationship.
30:18 Erin: Right.
30:19 Wes: I don't know if that's fair because, of course, there's temples and there's sacrifices. There's evident, of course, they took it seriously in a sense, but it's hard not to look at that from the perspective of Christian civilization. Think. Well, I don't know if they took it all that seriously.
30:32 Erin: Right. The importance of Jupiter beginning as an idea.
30:35 Wes: Yes.
30:36 Erin: Right. So the idea of an invented God, something that we've just come up with so that even when the sentence continues and we add to that the incarnational theology of Christ, it still seems to have this origin in God as being just an idea that we've come up with, you know, now we've added flesh to it, now we've elaborated on the idea, we've made the idea better, but it is in fact still just an invention of our own humanity.
31:01 Wes: Yeah. For Jesus there's a feedback loop between the people, his hinds, right. His followers, his flock and his self conception. It's almost the idea that large mannered motions. I don't know if this is right, but who Jesus became as a prophet, proselytizer, who he was to his contemporaries, to the apostles is self fashioned. And ironically, Jupiter is not self fashioned in the same way. If he's a product simply of myth. Right. If he's simply a product of human beings, there's the political element to this. There's Palestine being under Roman rule and the prospect of liberating themselves from Roman rule and everything that goes into that. So then there's this amazing image of the blood commingling and the requital of
31:49 Erin: desire as if Jove becomes man. Yeah. And we have the idea of the virgin birth in here.
31:55 Wes: So Jupiter moves among us until our blood commingles with heaven. So what is the desire being requited? It's a desire for the divine, but it's requited in the sense that the divine is really brought down to earth. Right. I don't know. The gods are humanoid and they have human passions. And maybe ultimately by locating Jupiter in the heavens, in a star which turns out to be a physical entity, there's sort of a deflationary aspect to that. So discerning Jupiter in a star actually so finding God or finding out that God is in nature, but paradise is here. And then the inverse reading, I think you could say, well maybe this has something to do with Christianity.
32:38 Erin: Yeah. So you're saying that the requital is desire for what?
32:42 Wes: I mean it's the desire of the hinds for something in relation to heaven and the divine and Jupiter.
32:48 Erin: Right. So it seems to be the compensation for the fact that Jupiter is too far above the hinds and therefore there must be some loss or the difference has to be made up in some way. There's a demand to have a more human God, to have someone closer to
33:06 Wes: us, or there's some way in which the pagan pantheon requites desire for the divine that's different than the Christian. The other reading for Christianity is that it has something to do with God incarnate in Christ. Right. Or something like that. So there's the union of the Christianity itself involves this union of the human and the divine, the synthesis of the human and the divine in a personage on earth. And then the parallel here is a synthesis of is Jupiter ending up as a star? So I'm not sure. I'm wondering if both those readings go in parallel.
But he's looking forward now to a paradise that's non Christian, that's not this severe distinction between the earthly and the heavens is what he calls the indifferent blue. Or maybe the indifferent blue is just the dividing line, but a friendlier sky that's more connected to what happens in daily life, to labor and to pain, and the idea of this paradise on earth. So there seems to be a contrast between shall our blood fail or shall it come to be the blood of paradise? As if it's almost like are we going to lose our nerve? Or can we follow this pagan requital to the bitter end?
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36:12 Erin: I see that as maybe something about just accepting that this existence that we're currently in is just a precursor to some sort of heavenly, truer afterlife. So that would be the blood failing, and then the opposite of that would be accepting that we are in the paradise now and the blood is the real thing. I don't know if that's right, but that's the way that I. Because there's so much compression here now. He's sort of pointing to this future prospect. There's kind of no present here. It's either past or future. So shall it come to be the blood of paradise? Can we become gods ourselves? Can we have divinity within ourselves and just accept that the blood that we have in this present moment requires no sacrifice? This is the heaven. This is the only reality that we will know. And therefore we have to make of this earth a paradise ourselves. Is that.
37:07 Wes: Yeah, I think that that sounds right on.
37:10 Erin: And shall the earth seem all of paradise that we shall know goes with that. But then the idea is, it's so interesting. Like, the friendly sky then becomes a matter of imagination and just perspective. And this is my favorite part, maybe, of the whole poem, because it's the reversal of what we might think. So in a Christian world, we would imagine that the sky would be friendly to us because there's actually a God up there, right opposite. The dividing line, as you say, between us and God is the sky. But he imagines the opposite. He imagines that the sky is indifferent to us and it actually divides us from God.
So it prevents us from seeing. And in that way, it's like a wall that we feel sort of antagonistic towards almost because it prevents us from seeing whatever we perceive to be the TR reality behind it. Instead, if there's nothing behind it, then it becomes friendly. Like, if there's no cognition or something that's kind of operating this divider, then it becomes friendly to us.
38:12 Wes: Part of the unfriendliness of the division is just that it's otherworldly. It's not of this world. It's something that we can only look forward to and only after death. Right. If we're thinking of now, heaven in paradise, you know, and there's the sense of the indifference of God within the natural world, unless you believe in miracles. Right. So that's another element of this sharp division in which the indifferent blue actually cuts us off from the divine. Whereas if we are finding the divine within ourselves, and then our right and labor and pain, and then above it was the emotional States and concert with the natural world.
That's sort of an intimate experience of the divine. Now, of course, I think Christians would themselves talk about an intimate experience of the divine, but this is not a miscomplacent experience or Steven's experience. Hmm, I don't know. Did I get any of that wrong?
39:15 Erin: No. That's good. 4. She says I am content when wakened birds before they fly test the reality of misty fields by their sweet questionings. But when the birds are gone and their warm fields return no more, where then is paradise? There is not any haunt of prophecy, nor any old chimera of the grave, neither the golden underground nor isle melodious where spirits gat them home, nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm remote on heaven's hill that has endured as April's green endures, or will endure, like her remembrance of awakened birds or her desire for June and evening tipped by the consummation of the swallow's wings.
39:57 Wes: This image is really nice of the reality testing birds. I assume their sweet questionings are. They're chirping, right? You know, we know while Stevens was familiar with Freud, so I assume when he says test the reality, he's thinking about reality testing, which would be Freud called the reality principle, as opposed to the pleasure principle. Reality principle says you can't always do what's pleasurable because you might get punished for it, even if that's just getting burnt if you put your hand on the stove. So this idea of the birds doing something like that before they take off, like that sort of pausing, it's almost as if there's a reflectiveness to the birds. The fields are misty, so they're about to take off, and weather conditions, they're gonna have to fly on instruments, so to speak, they're not gonna be able to see. So I really love that.
40:52 Erin: Yeah, I love that too. I wanna make some connection to the sky at the end of the previous section. I don't know if that quite works. We also have in this almost like an image of plumbing the depths, like plumbing the ocean, to test how deep it is or how far they could fly out, or is it really there? And so they're sort of testing the friendliness of the sky.
41:20 Wes: It's a navigational problem ultimately that they have and they, like her, are figuring out where to go. It's of course, a much simpler navigational problem, not a spiritual one. And it's one in which she can take satisfaction. I think when you read these lines, you understand that contentment, right? What it means to be so Contented by seeing this happen with the birds, the reality testing, the questionings, being able to look at the birds through that lens, as almost engaged in reflective activity, as if they reveal a teleology to nature. Right.
As if they reveal some sort of design, ironically, given the theme of the poem, but some sort of purpose to things or maybe universal intelligence or something like that. So it's that contentment that she begins with, and that seems to be the ideal, right. That that could be the pagan way, is just to be content with that sort of experience. Make that one's religious experience. But now she's worried, right? I don't know if I can do that. You know, when they're gone and they return no more, where is. Then I lose paradise. Paradise becomes this transient thing rather than something eternal.
So it's not fulfilling the same function. That idea of paradise, you know, the function that it serves in a religion like Christianity, cannot really do that if it's an earthly conception of paradise, because it involves becoming. It involves not just comforts and complacencies, but also death and pain.
42:54 Erin: So in the quoted section, then, she's again kind of swinging back around to doubt, you're saying. So the transience of these birds and even of the fields means that her paradise is under question here. She can't just be content with this. So the rest of this stanza responds to the question that she poses by saying that it presents all of these afterlives, these potential paradises of ancient myth or of Christianity that one could conceive of. And none of these, he says, or the narrator says, has endured as April's green endures. And it all hinges on her remembrance of these birds and her desire. So her perspective, her desire are what keep these birds alive, if I'm understanding this correctly.
43:44 Wes: Yeah.
43:44 Erin: Not even these paradises, which I suppose if the paradises aren't real, then they don't endure because they weren't there in the first place. So the only thing that does endure is her thought. Her thought and her desire within her.
44:00 Wes: Well, even if they did exist, I think he's saying they can't really do the thing that they purport to do, which is an interesting idea. Right. So I think we'll get more about that idea as we go on. They can't really do as well for us as memory and desire can do. And ultimately as becoming and even death, which turned out to be essential. Later on, he's going to imagine what paradise would be like. It's very Keatsian, I think, reminiscent of the Urn, right. Imagining everything like what's on earth but frozen. When you analyze paradise, it stops making sense in its eternalness.
Its eternalness becomes a contradiction, the paradox. We wonder how that's actually going to serve us. So, yes, those things will not be able to endure as April's Green endures, right? So in the same way, in the relevant way, in the way that's actually relevant to what we want out of paradise. So remembrance and desire turn out to be the constant things, right? Those things are essentially about change. Because you remember things because they're gone. They've come and gone. They're an element of becoming. And that what you're left with is the memory.
So that it's not a reality that persists, but something within the mind, within consciousness. And the same thing for desire, right? Even if we don't possess the object of desire, the desire is the thing that stays with us. The object is objects of desire come and go and satisfaction wanes and, you know, increases and decreases and all of that stuff. But those sorts of vectors within consciousness, backward looking and forward looking, are the things that stay with us. And it turns out those will be. I think the argument will be those are the only ones that will be relevant.
45:47 Erin: Yeah, it's so fascinating because there's an allowance made for subjectivity or even like the subjectivity is built in to this conception of what the actual paradise is. Because we think of April's Green enduring. You know, so often our memories are tinged with unreality. So often we remember things as being better or worse than they actually were. We remember them in this kind of heightened state and desire too. Like we remember things or we experience things in the present as being heightened from their actual reality in some kind of idealization.
It's interesting. It's like he's found a way for the subjective experience which is so transient and which is maybe based in unreality, like some kind of fundamental unreality. Something that is not the way it really was. That is the thing he says, that actually endures, that actually sustains us. Not the seasonal change, right? Because seasons are over quickly and they may not be particularly splendid in some years compared to others. And we might remember them as being more splendid than they really were. And I don't know if you experienced this, but every single time the colors change in the fall, everybody, it seems over the age of 50, says, this wasn't anything like in my youth, you know, like the leaves just don't.
They're just not as beautiful anymore. You know, they used to be so spectacular, the foliage and now it's just. It doesn't compare. And this past year it actually was really splendid. And everyone was really reluctant to say that it was really as beautiful as it was when they were kids. You know, it's just interesting to me that he makes allowances for that subjectivity. So it really is the mind itself, like the workings of the mind itself, even if it's making something better out of a reality, that is the thing that endures.
47:37 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very good. You're reminding me of Tintern Abbey. And apparently Wordsworth was some influence here on Stevens as well. And in Tintern Abbey in particular, I could see that. So we got the transition, that poem from nature as, you know, what does nature give us? There's sensation. We talked about good character and then ultimately contemplation. I mean, when he was younger, it was just more about being randy. Right. Wordsworth's poem. And then later on it becomes the memory of nature that stays with us. Right. To deal with life's drudgeries and distractions.
Many shapes of joyless daylight, the fever of the world, all that stuff. So his love of nature goes from being about sensuous desire in his youth to being more about these elevated thoughts and about spirit and morality. And he's coming back to that scene, enjoying nature in a different way, partly as a function of seeing it through his younger self's eyes from a mature perspective, but then also seeing it through his sister's eyes and the idea that now she has a seed of a memory that will help her through life's hardships and will help her mature.
So I think, am I making a relevant association here?
48:58 Erin: Yeah, I think so.
49:00 Wes: There's a quasi romantic quality to this poem because of this idea of what nature can, you know, what can nature do for us?
49:08 Erin: I think that Wordsworth in that poem is more high minded than this is. I think Wordsworth is still more interested in the objective natural experience and yes, of like taking pleasure in that, but only like in some sort of real sense. I would say that the narrator here cares about the natural in the sense that it sparked the remembrance. But the extent to which that can become unmoored from the reality of what was being remembered. Like if you looked at a picture and said, okay, this is what it was really like, and here's how I'm remembering it, and maybe the remembrance looks like it's gone through an Instagram filter or something, then he would be okay with that Instagram filter where I think, like Wordsworth would be suspicious of that filter.
49:53 Wes: I get what he's saying.
49:54 Erin: Yeah. Steven seems to be saying that the filter is really what makes it. And it doesn't matter how many filters you put it through, because the subjectivity of the experience, that's the pleasure. It's what you make of it. Whereas I think Wordsworth is far more bound to the actual natural beauty. I don't know. Maybe I'm carrying that too far, but
50:13 Wes: I think that's a good point. I think I'm thinking about, how does the world of becoming serve the world of permanence? Because that's how he's trying to answer her. Paradise is here now, but how can a world of becoming serve that? And Stevens, or the narrator is asking her to reconceive her conception of permanence as rooted somehow in becoming, but via subjectivity. Right. The permanence happens in memory and desire. And I thought I saw some of
50:40 Erin: that in Wordsworth, but, yeah, I think that's right. But I think Stevens is just taking it a step further, like I say.
50:48 Wes: Yeah, yeah, I agree. All right.
50:50 Erin: Five.
50:50 Wes: Yep.
50:51 Erin: Okay, five, she says, but in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. Death is the mother of beauty. Hence from her alone shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. Though she strews the leaves of sure obliteration on our paths, the path sick sorrow took, the many paths where triumph rang its brassy phrase or love whispered a little out of tenderness. She makes the willow shiver in the sun for maidens who were wont to sit and gaze upon the grass relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears on disregarded plate. The maidens taste and stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
51:33 Wes: Love it.
51:34 Erin: Yeah.
51:34 Wes: If there's anything that's quintessential Wallace Stevens, it causes boys to pile new plums and pears on disregarded plate.
51:42 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That is even the absence of an article which seems to be pretty.
51:47 Wes: Yes. Yeah.
51:48 Erin: Characteristic.
51:49 Wes: What is the line from the Emperor of Ice Cream, the roller of big cigars bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds or something like that.
51:58 Erin: Yeah, yeah, Very similar.
51:59 Wes: I think one is evocative of the other. But this was a line, actually, that his editor did not understand and he explained it to her in a letter. And what he said about it. Let me just read that.
52:12 Erin: Yeah.
52:13 Wes: So he says to Monroe, his editor, disregarded refers to the disuse into which things fall that have been possessed for A long time. I mean, therefore, that death releases and renews what the old have come to disregard the use, inherit and make use of. Which I thought was pretty clear, because at this point, it's a cycle of life. Your parents stop using a plate, and then you use that to seduce other people by piling it up with fruit. You dust it off. You get it out of the dusty cabinet, you dust it off, and then you get yourself a boyfriend or girlfriend with it. All right, maybe that's not as funny as I thought it was.
52:52 Erin: Oh, so the parents have disregarded it because they've long since. You're saying they've long since put away their good china or something.
52:57 Wes: What's fallen into disuse by the leaves. Right. The leavings. In a way, it's a mundane point which Wallace Stevens actually acknowledged. He said something like, you can put this stuff in poems, but if you were to spell it out literally, it sounds trite, which is just that death paves the way for new things. He's going to claim death as the mother of beauty and strews the leaves of sure obliteration on our paths. Our plans, in a way, come to naught, or things come to an end. So the path Sig sorrow took. But even our triumphs and our love, those pathways through life, get strewn with leaves of obliteration. So even within life, before we actually die, we experience all these losses. But those leavings, those losses, those leaves become the basis for new life, new experience, et cetera, et cetera.
53:58 Erin: Yeah, it's just such a fascinating. I mean, I think death is the mother of beauty is probably the most famous line from this poem. Right?
54:05 Wes: Yeah.
54:06 Erin: What's fascinating about the line is that beauty is not beautiful in itself. The thing that creates the beauty is not, we would think, it's not the fact that it's pleasing or symmetrical or somehow there's some inherent quality of it that is making it beautiful in some way. It's the fact that it's transient. The fundamental quality of things that are beautiful are things that will stop being beautiful someday.
54:34 Wes: Yeah, I like what you're pointing out with transience because it's also that beauty is a flowering. Right? Beauty is a certain point in a process, growth and degeneration. And degeneration is necessarily the other side of that. So in order to have beauty, you need becoming, and then becoming implies death. This appears in philosophical theodicy where you're trying to justify Augustine. Right. You try to say how God could allow evil, and you say, well, actually, evil is just the necessary component, the good is not possible without it. So the positive is not possible without privation. And here it's the same sort of thing. And then. And then also, you know, on a very literal level, animals eat animals and the dead leaves fertilize the ground. So the cycle of life is a real natural thing with it. What flowers? And the next generation comes out of the death of the previous generation.
55:33 Erin: Right, that's good.
55:34 Wes: The way the stanza is structured, it's. Although Death does all those things, you know, obliteration on our paths, she also. She makes the willow shiver in the sun. For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze upon the grass relinquished to their feet. That's an interesting image. Right. What does this mean exactly? The thing that we get next is much clearer. So death is what causes boys to pile plums on plates and try to seduce the maidens and distract them into passion, even though they're walking on the death. The littering leaves, they are now distracted into desire. But the line before it is a little less clear.
56:12 Erin: Why is the willow shivering? Is it the appearance? Is this a willow at its full sort of height of not flowering but, you know, of leafing, and therefore the sun is kind of dappling it and it appears to shiver and therefore it's sort of prefiguring in that shivering, the moment when it will lose its leaves and look bare is sort of punctured with fall or death in the middle of this height of dappled beauty. Yeah, it's the opposite of, you know, nor ever can those trees be bare. Right. Like on the Grecian urn. But that very shivering prefigures the time when it's going to be bare and it's cold because it has no leaves on it. Yeah, I don't know if that's stupid.
56:54 Wes: Yeah, no, no, I like it. But I'm still baffled. I thought I had. And I thought I had more to say about this too. I mean, what you're saying makes sense, you know, like the shivering. It sounds almost like the shivering that the maidens would do in response to the desire of the boys.
57:11 Erin: But there's something of the pathetic fallacy in this. Maybe because maybe it's shivering in response to the whisper, like it's shivering with desire or something. Yeah, in response to the whisper, the line before it. Yeah, it's responding to what's going on around it. Or maybe it is literally shivering because of the movement underneath their movement. They're talking, they're whispering, whatever. Or maybe literally shaking the willow branches. The leaves on the branches that are hanging down. So that their movement is causing the tree to move.
57:47 Wes: I don't know if the willow is bare of leaves. Willows do get bare of leaves. Leaves, right. It's a naked willow. So of course it's shivering because it's fall, I guess leaves are falling. So what it seems to evoke is the idea that the leaves are somehow a gift to the maidens. It becomes the things that they stray upon later with passion. Or something like that.
58:14 Erin: I like the idea that this is willow, though. Because I can't think of any tree that when it loses its leaves, looks more spectral, you know? I mean, it looks like a naked umbrella. I don't know. It's just a great choice of tree.
58:29 Wes: It's interesting. You're reminding me of something Stevens said about. This is from his Opus Posthumous, his later prose writings. All of our ideas come from the natural world. Trees equals umbrellas anyway, so I like that. That you got that out of that.
58:51 Erin: Well, Weldon Kees has. This doesn't have anything to do with anything. But I recommend this to our readers. It's one of my favorite poems. He has a great poem called the Umbrella. Which is kind of like an essay poem. That explores all the different umbrellas throughout time and history and nature. And it's just a fabulous poem.
59:10 Wes: Very cool. All right. And I would say, before we move on, just one more thing. I like this idea of the grass being relinquished to the feet of the maidens. Surrendered right by nature, in a way.
59:21 Erin: Yeah. It's going to bend with their weight.
59:23 Wes: Right.
59:23 Erin: So it's like.
59:24 Wes: Yes, that's one of the things that I thought of. Yeah. I thought, you know, in a way, it goes both ways. It's like. It's as if it's been relinquished. In the sense of it's being pushed out of the ground grown for us or for the maidens. But also. Yeah. It's relinquished in the sense that it's
59:38 Erin: bends, underweight, it's falling on its sword for us.
59:41 Wes: So we get leaves and shivering and grass bending. And nature is very nice, even when it's death operating. Anyway, let's move to six.
59:52 Erin: Six. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs hang always heavy in that perfect sky? Unchanging yet so like our perishing earth with rivers like our own that seek for seas they never find the same receding shores that never touch with inarticulate pang why set the pear upon those river Banks or spice the shores with odors of the plum. Alas, that they should wear our colors there the silken weavings of our afternoons and pick the strings of our insipid lutes. Death is the mother of beauty, mystical within whose burning bosom we devise our earthly mothers waiting sleeplessly. Every time I read a new stanza, I'm like, oh, this one's actually my favorite.
1:00:36 Wes: Yeah. So this is like. All right, here's our Ode to a Grecian Urn stanza. It's going to end with Ode to or to Autumn. But am I right about that? Isn't this explicitly.
1:00:47 Erin: Oh, yes, definitely. And, you know, the Grecian urn has some expectancy in it. I mean, maybe there's something scary about the Grecian urn, but this is like showing that kind of the Grecian urn turned into a nightmare. The Grecian urn is right on the brink of fulfillment. So it's not quite as scary as this. Right. The people are bending toward each other and they're almost going to kiss. Right. So it's frozen in the perfect moment right before the kiss. This is like an eternal kiss where you're frozen there and your lips are getting chapped and it really sucks. Right?
1:01:24 Wes: Yeah, very good point. And so you're frozen not in the state of heightened desire prior to consummation, but in the state of consummation.
1:01:35 Erin: Yeah. So the nightmare here is the idea of eternality. Is that a word? But also expansiveness, infinite expansion. So the infinitude of paradise includes, like, if there are rivers there, then the rivers are going to go on forever. Right. Because it's infinity. So if a river is just running down to want to be emptied into some sea, some ocean, and a river is in an eternal space that goes on forever, it's never going to find that ocean, which is a terrifying thought. Like, there is no terminus.
1:02:13 Wes: So this goes against my reading of perpetual consummation, actually, because this is a state of desire that never touch within articulate pang.
1:02:24 Erin: But it's desire and consummation at the same time. I know what you're saying, but also it has to be that this is also the height of consummation, because there's no death.
1:02:33 Wes: Yeah.
1:02:34 Erin: Grecian urn is sort of like pre death. And this is post death.
1:02:38 Wes: Yeah, no change of death. That's a great phrase.
1:02:42 Erin: There are seas, but the rivers go on forever. And the seas go on forever.
1:02:47 Wes: Yeah.
1:02:48 Erin: The difference here is infinitude. I think maybe you're revealing something that is a contradiction or maybe the inherent contradiction in thinking of a space in which there is perfect fulfillment, but also it goes on forever because we can't conceive of it. So maybe you're revealing this sort of impossibility, whether it be of imagination to conceive of such a space or of such a space to exist, period. If you're not a person who believes in this.
1:03:16 Wes: Yep, I think that's right. When you think about it, the paradoxical nature of it starts to become clear. So paradise, if you think about it in these human terms, trying to transfer over earthly delights into paradise, it doesn't make sense. But why do we need to do that? Can't we just say, well, we don't really know what paradises exactly in terms of a Christian paradise.
1:03:40 Erin: What this is making me think of is I might have mentioned this on a previous episode. I'm not sure, but I studied English Gothic architecture in England and I would go around and look at all these different churches all over the south of England. And one of the things that becomes clear when you're going through those churches is that hell is really, really easy for people to imagine. I think this is still the case, but this is the reason why Inferno is read so much more frequently than Paradiso. Because Dante had so much fun coming up with Hell.
And Paradiso is a little. It's not as fun, but you can see in the stained glass windows or in the tympanums of these churches, you could see the hell is just incredibly florid and fun and amazing. I mean, it's not fun, but it's like terrifying and wacky and there are all sorts of crazy things happening. You know, think of a Bosch painting where you have somebody's head.
1:04:31 Wes: You know, you meet a lot of
1:04:32 Erin: interesting people coming out of their own. That's right. That's right. And then you see the. Maybe on the opposite side of the building or something like that, you'll see the depictions of heaven. And heaven is just the worst. You know, heaven looks like maybe like a version of hell. Everybody is like, lined up. Heaven is like an eternal queue, you
1:04:49 Wes: know, it's where all the infuriatingly nice people are.
1:04:53 Erin: Right. Well, not only that, but it just looks boring. Yeah. And everybody's all orderly and everything is just, you know, because the rule followers part of the problem is the A
1:05:03 Wes: student
1:05:07 Erin: part of the problem is that. Yeah. So maybe it's not attracting a great class of people for interest's sake, but also because we can't imagine happiness that goes on forever. We can't imagine heaven anywhere near as intricately and disgustingly as we can imagine. This sort of eternal torment, which seems to always have. Maybe because, you know, on Earth we have so many different varieties of making people upset or whatever, but it's really difficult to imagine. And so heaven, which is supposed to look like where we want to be, looks like a really dour bad time.
Where everyone's just, like, standing around and holding their hands clasped in front of them and just, like, just singing or something, and that's it. So it's very, very hard to imagine. I think a banquet is the most frequently probably used simile for heaven. Like an eternal banquet. That seems like a little bit of a party. It's tough.
1:06:03 Wes: Yeah. And I just think it points to Steven's point here. Which is that pleasure and satisfaction and beauty are necessarily. Or the appreciation of beauty are necessarily cyclical things. It's hard to make sense of them except as involving the pain and pang of desire. And then a temporary fulfillment and then that fulfillment wearing off. And there's also the role of novelty. And so if you are always sated, if it's eternity, an eternity of being content without the cycle of the up and down cycle, the becoming, then, yeah, that will sound boring to us.
1:06:44 Erin: It's also whether because of our own limited imaginations. Or because this is the only kind of heaven we can imagine. Like when I say it's most frequently compared to a kind of eternal banquet. Of course, a banquet is an earthly idea sort of being transposed into heaven. And Stevens is imagining that heaven is kind of like this eternal garbage dump. Which takes all of our things that we've created on Earth and sort of, like repurposes them. So he imagines it as a place where whatever we spent weaving on Earth, it shows up in heaven and it's there forever.
Or our lutes, this is very Keatsian, of course. But the lutes that we were playing that we invented on Earth. Are then going to be transformed in heaven to be up there forever. I don't know what that means. I don't know if heaven is stealing from us on Earth or something. We come up with the stuff down here, and then it goes up into our imaginative garden in heaven forever. Or if I'm carrying that too far, and if he's just trying to say that what gave us pleasure on Earth because of its kind of transience, like the silken weavings of our afternoon.
So the things that we just, like, killed an afternoon making. Have no specialness in Heaven. Because you can't kill an afternoon in heaven. You can't sort of while away. You can't while away the hours pleasantly playing on your loot when you should be doing your homework. I think it works both ways, but I like it as an eternal garbage dump. I just came up with that.
1:08:17 Wes: I mean, I think he's saying something about the nature of certain subjective states or certain states of mind. So pleasure and desire and the appreciation of beauty, they're interweaved with pain, and yet we don't want to get rid of them. So if we think of paradise as this pain free environment, then we do away with those things that are important to us. So desire is obviously painful. Right. In the sense that we lack the thing that we want. And there's a sense in which beauty is something that can't be fully possessed. Let's talk about those last three lines, by the way, in a second.
But I think the idea is that there's something inherently painful about all of this stuff. And that pain doesn't get through the pearly gates, doesn't pass the threshold. So we lose out on all of these things that are necessarily interwoven with pain. So death is the mother of beauty, mystical within whose burning bosom we devise our earthly mothers waiting sleeplessly. Devise our earthly mothers waiting sleeplessly. What does that mean?
1:09:24 Erin: The most difficult word. And that of course is devise.
1:09:27 Wes: Yeah.
1:09:28 Erin: So we invent. I looked it up and in a legal sense to devise. And I think of this because it's Steven's, that maybe the legality might shed some light here to leave real estate, say to someone in a will. I mean, maybe that has nothing to do with this devising, which just means inventing.
1:09:46 Wes: Or there's our earthly mothers. I take our earthly mothers to be our literal mothers. Am I right about that?
1:09:51 Erin: Yes.
1:09:52 Wes: And they are obviously not devised by us in any literal sense. They devise us. Right. How is it that we're devising our.
1:10:01 Erin: There's kind of a bullseye quality to this. Right. Which I've already kind of pointed out at other points of the poem. Like maybe the willow shivering in the sun is because it's starting to shed its leaves. Or the dappling of the sun is prefiguring this moment where it will have no leaves. The bullseye quality is that. Or maybe the Russian doll quality seems to be that within death we're imagining our mothers waiting for us, waiting up for us. There's a kind of stalled moment, or there's like a Moment of eternity there. Like a mother maybe waiting for her child to come home and is really nervous. And so there's a kind of eternal quality at the heart of death. Which is dilated and sustained in this moment. But I'm not sure how that. How those two things are working together. But I'm getting the sense that there's, like, death. There's eternal in the death and death in the eternal.
1:10:57 Wes: I mean, it sounds like this has something to do with the way we imagine our mothers. Or the way we are related to our mothers. Right. Which is not just through the physical biological relationship. But we, in sense, have taken them inside of us psychologically. Or at least we have a fantasy of them. Maybe earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly waiting up for us. Being a watch, being a guardian angel. And that fantasy, somehow, which seems to be a form of beauty here. Right. An instance of beauty is this relationship to the mother. Imagining her as something beautiful. And so we don't get that without death. Which is to say, the whole biological cycle of mothers giving birth and then. And the mother dies. And then the new generation become mothers and fathers and so on. Right. The concept of motherhood implicates the cycle of life and death.
1:11:50 Erin: Yeah. Are these pregnant mothers, like, they're pregnant with possibility. Or are they mothers from whom we've been separated on earth? And so we divide. Like, there's a desire in death that we have actually to die. And be reunited with those who are absent from us. Like, that's the promise. And obviously, it's a promise unfulfilled. But it's a sort of fantasy. I mean, for Stevens, it's a promise unfulfilled. But there's a sort of fantasy of reunion, reunification, reconstitution, which death keeps alive for us.
1:12:19 Wes: That's an interesting reading. Because it's, you know, in the womb, there's theoretically a sense of merger. Right. And then developmentally, we have to separate and individuate. And what Lacan calls jouissance. And it's not unrelated to death drive. And Freud is this desire to return to that merged state. Because it's completely without desire and without any tension. So there's normal desire. There's a typical desire for temporary satisfaction or some more modest satisfaction. And then there's the desire to go beyond that and something more transcendent.
And to merge with the mother. Which is almost like returning to death. And may have something to do with our religious impulses, that particular fantasy. But I was thinking about this simply in terms of, you know, that the argument here would be it's only in a world of becoming and hence death that we get the cycle of generation and degeneration, so that we get mothers. Right. So, hey, you. You enjoy having a mom. Well, can't do that in heaven, because that's not really, you know, there's no one being born in heaven and enjoy having the. Yeah, so I don't know if that's too literal a reading, but I think
1:13:33 Erin: this could be read all of those ways and probably more.
1:13:36 Wes: Yeah.
1:13:37 Erin: Yeah.
1:13:38 Wes: Okay. So are we ready to transition to Postscript?
1:13:42 Erin: I'd say so, yeah.
1:13:44 Wes: I know there's going to be a lot of very disappointed listeners, but I do have to say that this next stanza is kind of disappointing on my point of view. The seven stanza, the weakest. But anyway, yeah, so we are going to. If you want to listen to this, please subscribe to Postscript. Our after show. We will cover Stanza 7 and 8.
1:14:07 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
1:14:09 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
Production for Use in “His Girl Friday”
Nov 21, 2022
Before she settles down to life of homemaking, security, and insurance policies with Bruce Baldwin in Albany, star reporter Hildy Johnson has one more story to write for her ex-husband and ex-boss Walter Burns, editor of the Morning Post. Hildy must write up an interview with convicted killer Earl Williams that will grant him a last-minute reprieve on the basis of insanity. The ingenious angle she finds to prove he’s insane: Earl listened to so many soapbox speeches in the park about the socialist concept of “production for use” that when a gun was placed into his hands, he had to shoot it.
Howard Hawks’s 1940 film “His Girl Friday” knits together two plots from two very different genres. One is a romantic comedy that intends to reunite its main couple in something like wedded bliss. The other is a dark drama of murder and corruption, complete with a gallows lurking just outside the window and a suicide attempt that takes place on screen. Yet Earl Williams and Hildy Johnson’s fates in their respective plots are twinned. Both are, in a sense, looking for their own reprieves. And Hildy has her own production-for-use dilemma. What was she made for—the life of a newspaperman, or the life of a housewife? To what kinds of production should we devote our own lives? What are we made for—risk and adventure or security and insurance? Wes & Erin discuss.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: Before she settles down to a life of homemaking, security and insurance policies with Bruce Baldwin in Albany, star reporter Hildy Johnson has one more story to write for her ex husband and ex boss, Walter Burns, editor of the Morning Post. Hildy must write up an interview with convicted killer Earl Williams that will grant him a last minute reprieve on the basis of insanity. The ingenious angle she finds to prove he's insane. Earl listened to so many soapbox speeches in the park about the socialist concept of production for use that when a gun was placed into his hands, he had to shoot it.
Howard Hawks's 1940 film His Girl Friday knits together two plots from two very different genres. One is a romantic comedy that intends to reunite its main couple in something like wedded bliss. The other is a dark drama of murder and corruption, complete with a gallows lurking just outside the window and a suicide attempt that takes place on screen. Yet Earl Williams and Hildy Johnson's fates in their respective plots are twinned. Both are, in a sense, looking for their own reprieves. And Hildy has her own production for use dilemma. What was she made for?
The life of a newspaper man or the life of a housewife? To what kinds of production should we devote our own lives? What are we made for risk and adventure or security and insurance? These are the topics for today's discussion. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I've been dying to talk about this film with you for a long time, partially because it's one of my top two favorite movies of all time, but also because I'm really curious to hear what you have to say about the sort of philosophy of the film and particularly this idea of production for use that the whole film to me seems to hinge on.
Have you read a lot of Marxist ideas about production for use, or have you heard a lot of soapbox speeches in the park when you were wandering around at night during the Depression or
2:20 Wes: something like that before I tried to murder someone.
2:22 Erin: Right.
2:23 Wes: Well, I went to school where they make us read significant parts of Das Kapital. And then I kind of wrote my master's thesis in grad school on Marx and Nietzsche. So I'm supposed to know something about Marx.
2:39 Erin: You're kidding. But more on I knew Nietzsche, but I didn't know Marx was in the middle.
2:44 Wes: Yeah, my conception of ideology, so very focused, actually. And then we've also done for the Partially Examined Life, we've done some Marx. So I can't claim to be an expert on the economic side of things, actually. But I was glad in your introduction that you featured production for use. Because this is one of the things that I looked up and thought about and tried to make sense of in relation to the film, what it's doing thematically.
3:09 Erin: Well, please explain it to me, because my 50 or 60 or 70 times of watching this film, it's still kind of opaque. And I'm guessing that they're making very liberal use of the phrase production for use. That is not being used in a traditional Marxist or a strict Marxist sense.
3:25 Wes: It's pretty foundational to communism. The idea that is, instead of accumulating capital, instead of producing things for profit, they are produced directly in proportion to social need. If any listeners want to email us and correct me on any of this, go ahead. But so that, for instance, instead of having. Developing a surplus, going through economic cycles of boom and bust, right? There's too much supply or where there's too little supply. And maybe when there's too much supply, there's not demand for it, even though there are people who are in need because they simply can't afford it.
Now, supposedly market forces, right, are supposed to adjust the pricing until it does become affordable. But anyway, the idea, I think it has something to do with the production of things in a capitalist society. It's not in proportion to what's actually necessary. It's more about producing profit and capital accumulation for capitalists. So the idea in the film is that Earl hears something about this and this was kind of an idea, I think, that was talked about by Eugene Debs, for instance. It's this kind of idea that you would hear about at the time in speeches.
And so the idea is that Earl, and this is the idea that Hildy invents for him, that he's listened to a speech about production for use, someone on a soapbox in the park trying to convert people to socialism or communism and has had the idea that this means that if there's a gun, it's gotta be used, right? It's gotta be put to use. And so that's what he does when he realizes the analogy is, I can't keep bullets in the chamber and leave the gun unused. Maybe in the same way that it can't accumulate capital or store something up. Everything's gotta be expended relative to the moment, the concerns of the moment.
So it's a really interesting parallel to draw because I Think, you know, as we talk. You already brought up in your introduction what it might mean socially. Right. For their relationship.
5:21 Erin: I'm just thinking, too, about the fact that Hildy, in the snippet of that interview, write up that the other reporters in the press room read aloud once she sort of vacated the typewriter for a while. Also draws the parallel to the Gallows. So the funny thing about Earl Williams reprieve is that it's subverting the Gallows own production for use, as defined by Hildy's interview. So she says something like, you know, the Gallows too, has its own production for use, and tomorrow morning, Earl Williams is set to be hanged. Which is a kind of a funny idea that seems like somehow related to almost a subversion of what you're talking about with the gun and its relationship to this idea of, like, bullets and capital.
Like, the gun seems to be an item that's like, almost accidentally snuffs out in the expenditure of the bullets and sort of like keeping things moving through the market, if you will. Whereas the Gallows is like a total dead end and something that both Hildy and Earl Williams have their own respective gallows that they're trying to escape from. It's an odd comparison to draw, I think, because it seems to me to be like the end of production for use. You know, maybe the Gallows is like the most capitalistic structure in the film.
6:27 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. At that point, they're reading from her unfinished interview and this is worth quoting, and she's straight up lying. It's worth.
6:36 Erin: Yeah, for sure.
6:37 Wes: It's worth reminding yourselves of that. It's completely fabricated the story. But she's also tainted Earl to believe that it's his story.
6:45 Erin: But the very fact that he accepts this story also, though, kind of proves that he's insane, which proves the basis of her argument. So she is being honest in a deceitful way.
6:56 Wes: Right. And so into this little tortured mind came the idea that the gun had been produced for use, and use it he did. But the state has a production for use plan, too. It has a gallows. And at 7am Unless a miracle occurs that Gallows will be used to separate the soul of Earl Williams from his body, and out of Molly Malloy's life will go the one kindly soul she ever knew. This is kind of almost like a structural or systemic idea at this point, like, you know, reversing the causality. It's like we need Gallows because we have to have deterrence for capital crimes.
Right. And we had A way to deal with criminals. But the idea is that if we make the gallows, inevitably they'll be used. Making them as part of creating the social environment in which they would have to be used. Or maybe we'll find people to use them on whether they're guilty or not. You know, that kind of idea, that the making of it somehow mandates the use of it, which is the idea that Earl had about his gun, which is. Which is not quite what production for use means for socialism. It's the perversion of that. So the underlying idea seems to have to do with.
It's about whether we can keep things in reserve. So whether. If you have a gun, can you keep that power in reserve? Or does it need to be used as quickly as possible or something like that? Can you hold on to some kind of awful or violent power like that and have it truly wait until it's ready to be used? Or is it naturally going to be premature? Is its use naturally going to be premature or naturally going to be unjust? So there are perils to the accumulation of power, violent power, including the power of the state, which is founded on violent power.
The ability to arrest people and imprison them and execute them. Power corrupts. Or will it naturally be to its unjust use? Or can it be accumulated and kept in reserve for the times when it is actually necessary? And so I think the same thing with capital, right? That the idea is that there's something, I think the capitalists would argue capital accumulation is a good thing. It helps create businesses and you hire employees and so on. But the counterargument is that it will necessarily create class divisions and unjust conditions. So the only way to prevent that.
You can see how the parallel is kind of breaking down. But anyway, sure, but the way to prevent that is to prevent that accumulation of power or capital or whatever in the first place. To have the creation or the production and the use more tightly wedded to each other. So that there's just. Hey, when the occasion arises when I need something, it's supplied for me. And it's not building up in quantities that will allow exploitation to occur by the people who control those quantities or the people who have the power.
9:52 Erin: It's really interesting. The way that this relates to Hildy is purely on the basis of a kind of word association then, but not necessarily anything having to do with the logic behind this. But maybe the softest version of this concept is sort of like nothing should go to waste regardless of this sort of like power being stored up or Whatever. So insofar as it applies to Hildy, it's like having to do with the fact that her journalistic power is too great and not that it's going to be stored up in some. I mean, maybe it will be. And then she'll sort of like explode in newsprint all over Bruce after a few years in Albany. But just the idea that this is something that should be actively used, it shouldn't go to waste. This muscle shouldn't atrophy. It's something too precious or important, but not in a scary sort of punitive way, though it could be put to that use as well, I suppose.
10:41 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. And that's one of a number of layers to this. I think there's a positive case being made here for some sort of social version of production for use. And the way I see that is that what goes on for us socially. I'm thinking of production for use as a way of describing their banter. There's a kind of openness there, right. So they don't stir up their feelings and hide them and engage in romantic niceties and. Or even any sort of normal social politeness. Right. Their banter. And this is like Much Ado about Nothing. Their banter puts them in place of having certain emotions and then immediately discharging those in a certain way.
Which is not to say that they're honest with each other, because there's all sorts of, on another level, deception going on. But they kind of know from the beginning of the film where things stand, right? He's made it clear that he wants her back and maybe that's her is tongue in cheek. He wants her to marry him again. Or does he want her back for the paper or does he want her back for themself? There are all sorts of questions, but their ongoing irritation with each other, right, all of that, in a way they wear on their sleeves. So that, to me, is production for use, as opposed to the other model is to keep secrets, to repress, to not be as forthcoming about one's feelings, which is pretty typical socially.
Right. We engage in a lot of social deception and at the political level, that's happening with the governor and the mayor. And all the political machinations involve a similar thing at a political level, which is hiding information, keeping things hidden. And the press is supposed to undo that. They're trying to expose people. That's another production for use example. Instead of letting information capital accrue in secret to the benefit of the people who are in power, you expose it, you get the information out, you get it flowing, you get it into the social bloodstream, so to speak.
12:32 Erin: I love that idea. That's genius.
12:34 Wes: Thanks. That's why I do this podcast. Get your compliments.
12:40 Erin: That's fantastic. Well, no, but you're. I mean, sorry, you probably.
12:45 Wes: No, no, no, go ahead.
12:46 Erin: You know, in regards to the romantic element of this, you're exposing a kind of difference for me between the nature of this relationship and the one that we covered in the Awful Truth with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, where there's a lot of secrecy and, you know, and part of this exorcism of that remarriage plot is to have a kind of a new sense of openness and honesty with each other. And I think that this is related to a kind of class difference probably. Right. Like Grant and Dunne in that film are high society. And there's more feigning, there's more sort of like natural deception in polite ways of interacting with one another that Walter and Hildy can completely do without because they're straight talking newspaper men, you know, and they don't have to hide behind these niceties.
And so everything is just sort of free flowing. I mean, Walter never really tricks Hildy. It's just a matter of what he's going to do to get her back. But she knows not to trust him at every turn. Even those deceptions are just another form of open communication, at least as far as their relationship works. He's deceiving other people, but it's all kind of for her benefit, right?
13:50 Wes: Nominally, she's tricked because there's counterfeit money or this or that, and she's getting calls from Bruce in jail, but she already knows from the beginning that that is what's going to be happening. And he's going to be trying to do that stuff and she's going to. She's trying to outplay him, but she knows he's going to be making those plays. But meanwhile, she's keeping Bruce in the dark about that's what's going on, right?
14:10 Erin: Oh, that's not hard to do, right?
14:13 Wes: Oh, shucks, I didn't know.
14:15 Erin: I could see. He's wrong for you, Hildy.
14:20 Wes: Yeah. So with him, interestingly enough, there's more capital involved in that relationship, so there's more idealization. For instance, and he's very idealizing of her and it's very cute, you know, him running around with this umbrella because it might rain or is it raining? I don't know. I think.
14:37 Erin: Yeah, that is the Worst, Walter makes
14:40 Wes: fun of him early on for that. You can see every time she answers the phone and it's him, she responds very sweetly and with genuine affection. And it's something that can arise in the context of this very sweet, not cynical man who's idealizing her and she's appreciating, enjoying it and says that directly this is what it means to be treated as a woman. And there's too much openness, for better and for worse. But I think the argument of the film is probably ultimately for better. But there's too much openness with her and Walter for that. It could still be romance, potentially.
Right. And then you have to figure out what kind. But that type of relationship is too much openness for that. There's too much capital in that and there's too much production for use in their relationships. Which comes across as cynicism. Right. Like the cynicism of this hard boiled press reporters. And I don't know if this is like the first movie to do that, to create this trope or not.
15:40 Erin: Well, this is a remake, right?
15:42 Wes: I mean, the front page. Yeah. Does the front page create that trope or does it predate that?
15:46 Erin: But yeah, yeah, I think it pretty much solidified it in the public imagination at any rate.
15:50 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So the play itself and then the earlier movie based on it. But yeah. So I'm trying to say is that that cynicism of the press, which is of a kind, in a way, with the cynicism of the powerful people they're trying to expose. And it's almost like it's unnecessary. It's unfortunate that they have to be as hard boiled and cynical as they are, but that's just what comes with their job of exposing these people. Their illusions are destroyed. They can't idealize power and government, the system. They have to be disillusioned in a way. But on the other hand, they're serving these ideals, which are ultimately progressive.
Right. Where is society going to go? The only way to improve is to have this critical process going on. Thinking of this at two different levels. The personal relationship between Hildy and Walter, and then there's the economic, and then there's what goes on socially with the press and people in power and all that stuff.
16:40 Erin: I wonder what the relationship is, though, between appreciation and idealization. Because certainly Bruce idealizes Hildy, but he does not appreciate her. Walter does. He's capable of appreciating her more deeply.
16:54 Wes: He genuinely knows her.
16:55 Erin: Yeah, right. You're reminding me of something that Cavell Says, for the benefit of our listeners, we should say that I love this book, Pursuits of Happiness, which I think I've heavily referenced, at least in the Awful Truth episode, if not more, because I just adore that book so much.
17:08 Wes: Yeah, you did. Yeah. And that's why I have it and looked at it again for this episode. But.
17:13 Erin: Yeah, but Cavell writes about these comedies of remarriage in this book, Pursuits of Happiness. He's the one who comes up with this term comedy of remarriage. And so in his essay on his Girl Friday, which I know really well, though I haven't read it as recently as you have, this is something that he gets really right about Hildy, which you're noting in her appreciation of Bruce's sweetness and idealization of her. She is better equipped to appreciate Bruce, of course, than Walter is. Walter sees nothing to appreciate, but what he gets right. What Cavell gets right about Hildy, I think, is the fact that she genuinely wants what Bruce is offering her.
She is genuinely conflicted about what to do here. This is not, you know, in the awful truth order of, like, using Bruce as some kind of pawn to torture Walter and get Walter to love her and appreciate her more, because Walter literally cannot love and appreciate her more as much as he is capable of is what he gives Hildy. So she's not using him to make Walter jealous or anything like that. This is a life that she genuinely desires. And that conflict within her is what makes her such an interesting character. And to see that sweetness and that desire for idealization, I think really bears out Cavell's point.
18:19 Wes: And she uses this phrase, I'm gonna be a woman, not a newspaper machine. I'm gonna go have babies and take care of them. She says this in a climactic moment to the other reporters. I'm gonna live like a human being. The word home is associated with this as well. She wants a home. She wants children. And even at a certain point at lunch where Bruce is having second thoughts for her, he's like, well, actually, are you sure you want to quit? And then he comes back, he gives his own retort, which is, well, no, this is your chance to have home and be a human being.
So obviously, they've both been talking about this a little bit to get it right. She's used this phrase, being a human being around Bruce as well. And they formed the kind of united front about the explanation for the choice that she's making. Right, which is a career versus domesticity type of choice. But it's also, as you're pointing out, it's a legitimate dilemma that we all face. Adventure versus domesticity, family versus career. And in this case, someone who can a greater amount of, at least for now, this sort of romance and idealization, but less fast and loose communication.
Maybe there's some ideal level of communication which is not as hard boiled as between Walter and Hildy. But you get the sense that Bruce will never be able to understand her in the way that Walter does. And for that reason he's always going to be less cynical than Walter about his relationship to her. He's always going to be more idealizing. This is a real choice and it's not even clear what the right choice is. These are both facets of her character and what she wants.
20:01 Erin: Both require giving something up, either choice. But I think that Bruce's idealization of her is of an odd sort because he doesn't really even understand what makes her so wonderful. Like what is it that he actually loves about her? Like Bruce, in a way is the most mysterious character. Why does he get hooked up with this woman? Well, I think he's excited by her, right? Like he says, he never knows what she's going to say. Part of that is because of his sort of incredible naivete and his inability to understand her. So she provides, I think maybe some excitement for him, some way for him to jazz up this life of his.
And the film is rather cruel to him. You know, I love that scene where he's in a clinch with his mother as the door closes. You know, that's pretty great. The mama's boy destined to lose the girl. But otherwise, like, what does he love about her? The fact that she's a doll faced hick underneath the newspaper business transformation that Walter has affected. I don't know.
20:57 Wes: Well, let's reconstruct this movie. They met in Bermuda, right?
21:00 Erin: Yes. During her post divorce trip.
21:03 Wes: Right. So she didn't get a chance to have a honeymoon, a real honeymoon trip. So she gets a divorce and then treats herself to whatever the divorce equivalent of a honeymoon, post divorce equivalent of a honeymoon. And that's where she meets this guy. So on her solo honeymoon.
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22:55 Wes: You know, he's got to know that she's quite different probably from the women he's dated. Has a much different life. You know, he's like the country bumpkin again. You know, the same sort of character that he.
23:05 Erin: I guess he's like that guy in the movies.
23:07 Wes: Yes, like that guy in the movie. Yeah. That's a great fifth wall moment. Of which there are a few. Right? Is it fifth wall? Is that the right phrase?
23:16 Erin: Fourth wall.
23:16 Wes: Fourth wall.
23:17 Erin: I don't know how many walls there are.
23:18 Wes: I don't know why I'm going to fifth. But other than her being an attractive woman, there's got to be something about him that's interested in someone who's different than usual. And she's from Chicago, I guess. And he's from where?
23:31 Erin: Albany.
23:31 Wes: Albany.
23:32 Erin: Home with mother in Albany too.
23:35 Wes: Yeah. So the only other thing I would say about this is he's constantly just getting duped and taken advantage of through the whole film. Right. Repeatedly being arrested, being robbed. It's almost like he's the victim of a scam or a sting or something in which both Hildy and Walter are actually cooperating. And they're not after his money or anything like that. They're just after the mechanism of their reunion. So if I'm going too far with that.
24:03 Erin: But no, I think you're right. And I think Cavell will even say that what she needs from him is clear right from the very beginning of the film that she's sort of participating in the winning back of herself to Walter, which is a really interesting idea, which isn't a set way to read the film, but that they're both cooperating in her means of return to the paper.
24:24 Wes: Yeah. So what she finds in Bermuda is not the next guy, but the way back.
24:29 Erin: Right.
24:29 Wes: That's where the whole scam begins. The shared scam that they're cooperating. And then she shows up to the office to say, you gotta stop calling me so much. Which is bullshit.
24:38 Erin: Right.
24:39 Wes: To the office, right before she's about to get married, you know, the day before she's leaving to get married. To do that. She's just letting him get started on his side of the scam, and then they can make things unfold together.
24:51 Erin: In talking about what it is that Bruce doesn't necessarily love her for or understand about her, we might get at what are her gifts. This is what's really interesting about the film. There's this dichotomy between being a woman or being a housewife and being a newspaper man.
25:08 Wes: Yeah, I'm a newspaper man.
25:11 Erin: Right. So Hildy is a brilliant reporter. Like, she's a brilliant writer. And I think that what makes her so brilliant is actually her femininity. She wears it rather loosely. But being a woman in a man's world gives her a kind of an ESP that other people don't have. In addition to the fact that she's obviously extremely smart. And this production for use thing is really genius. So she's smarter than everybody else. But she's also, I think, more perceptive and more compassionate than everyone else, which I think makes her special. It makes people open up to her.
It makes her get scoops because she has a relationship with the subjects of her interviews or articles, whatever, that is going to be fundamentally different than the man's harsher relationship with those subjects. She has compassion for Molly. She has a certain amount of compassion for Earl, which the other reporters are emotionally divorced from the subjects of their writing. And so they can't see them on a deeper level. They can't get the deepest angle on these people. So, like you say, it's not obvious what the right choice is. I would say, of course it's obvious that you always have to go with Cary Grant, no matter what, even if he's playing the bad guy.
And also I do think that his appreciation of her therefore is rooted in her being a woman in a way. I mean, obviously they have kind of a sexy relationship. He loves her as a woman and not just as an employee. But I think that the extent to which she is his best employee is as much related actually to her womanliness, if you will, as it is to her good solid workmanship, her newspaperman quality. I don't know. I mean, would you agree with that?
26:48 Wes: I do. And I think I was thinking while you were talking about that when you watch the film, especially as someone like with my level of knowledge about the era, which is low, and films of that time, and you're thinking, wow, this is like the gender dimensions or however you want to put it. Nothing is made of that in the film, right? She's just this go getting reporter and one woman among a bunch of men and holds her own. But the film never hits you over the head with that. It never makes a thing of that. Exactly. Oh, this is the long suffering female reporter in a room full of sexists.
And of course, to whatever extent they're sexist, there's evidence for that, right. The way they treat Molly, which is horrific, terrible, and they make nothing of her being a woman either. So it's really interesting the way that's done and it makes you think what's going on here as far as the role of a woman in a workplace, especially like that, which wouldn't have been as common and obviously isn't since she's the only female reporter. Right. But yeah, I think going back to what you were saying about part of her skill comes from being a woman.
In the beginning, Walter is worried about this guy getting executed because of what it means for his paper. This is a very typical thing in, in the film, like ethical concerns just get translated into concerns about the self interest of the profession or the paper. So the paper, in a way, right, they're supposed to hold powerful people to and to be doing something on behalf of justice. But that often gets confused with just getting the story and getting notoriety, entertaining people or inducing interest in people. There's a point even where, you know, Walter is talking about comparing the story of Earl's escape, its level of importance to the war in Europe or to local human interest stories and trying to say where it belongs.
So we're meant to question the degree of importance or the way in which everything that appears in a newspaper starts to take on the same level of urgency. It's a high level of urgency. But it's cheapened in a way, because it's all about stimulating the reader in certain ways. And we could say the same thing about social media. So her idea is to actually get to know Earl, is to do that interview to create an opposition between whatever she discovers in that interview or whatever she plants in that interview and between what the psychiatrist is going to say so they can say.
How does she put it? Because she uses the word goofy.
29:14 Erin: Do you remember that alienist says he's sane interview shows he's goofy?
29:18 Wes: Yes.
29:19 Erin: I think is the line from memory.
29:21 Wes: You put these stories side by side, what the alienist says and then what the interview shows, and you get that contrast, and it maybe becomes a chance at saving his life as well, but only for the purpose of saving the paper or maybe for exposing the corruption of the powers that be or something like that. But I'm just trying to expand on your idea of the benefit of being a woman here. But you could say this sort of idea and the idea for the interview and how she's going to elicit his goofiness, whether one thinks that's ethical or not. You could relate that to her greater focus on empathy being in the other person's head. Right. By comparison, all her male coworkers or colleagues, not even coworkers exactly, are focused on the surface, let's say. Maybe that's the way to get it. It's about surface focus versus something deeper. But maybe you can elaborate on that.
30:15 Erin: I don't know.
30:15 Wes: Am I getting at what you're talking about?
30:17 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think that's nice. I think that relates to this idea of Walter and Hildy both being the most, to use film technique terms like deep focus. People in the film because they can see several layers deeper than other people can, which makes them so well suited to each other. Like the one who looks at the world and sees it the most surface level is Bruce. And then there's kind of like an angle that the other newspaper men in the press room from other papers are employing for the particular ends of their own papers, allegiances, you know, political and otherwise.
But they're not quite so interested in getting at the heart of something, the reality of something. It seems to me that Hildy is. And sort of, to a certain extent, Walter. I mean, I think that he's in this Earl Williams thing because of the benefit to the paper and the idea of wanting to oust this current political regime that's in place. But I think it's because he believes that this political system Currently in play, rather, the party and the people currently in power are actually corrupt. And so I think there's something a little bit deeper to his motivations.
31:18 Wes: Yeah.
31:19 Erin: To just give him a little bit of credit. Because I think otherwise. I mean, he doesn't care when someone jumps out a window in front of him, you know? But I do think that he cares about the truth. And I think underneath it all, maybe he does think he's doing some kind of public service. This reference to the unseen power that watches over the Morning Post. To a certain extent, he believes God is on his side.
31:39 Wes: We should talk about that concern for the truth. You know, the number of different moments in the film. We see the other reporters just outright lying, even with stuff that's just happening right in front of their eyes. Right. So as Earl is caught, it's already an amazing story that's unfolding in front of their faces, right?
31:55 Erin: Yeah.
31:55 Wes: Earl's coming out of the desk and it's right there. And they're reporting it in real time and they're making shit up.
32:02 Erin: Right, Right.
32:02 Wes: Fabricating stories. And there are many instances of that in the film. So you get the sense that even with the press, right. Which their job is to production for use, in a sense, and getting things out there, exposing things, not letting things accrue in secret. But unfortunately, it becomes hard to distinguish that the truth from whatever it is that maybe titillates or something like that. Right. So to reveal is to titillate. And therefore, it seems like everything titillating must be revealing when it's not. And we can accuse Hildy of this as well, although it's just more sophisticated.
Right. Because she even does that thing with Molly. Right. So they've all fabricated the story, and maybe it's true, you know, but Molly denies it, that she's somehow involved with him. It makes a juicier, more interesting story. And she does that as well, saying, you know, Molly will lose the nicest person she's ever known. Or something like nicest soul she's ever known. And then, of course, planning. This whole idea about production for use in Earl's head is also deceptive in a way, and dishonest. But I think you're right. Both her and Walter have a more interesting relationship to the truth.
There's still an interest in the truth in some sense with them, whereas with her colleagues, they would never have the imagination to do what she did with Earl, planning that idea. So maybe it's literary truth. Right. She's coming up with a theme and a narrative that makes sense. That's more interesting than just, oh, Walter the socialist and Molly his girl. They found something more interesting in it, whether it's there or not.
33:35 Erin: Well, I think this is related to Hawkes's kind of values as a director. He's a really interesting director in that he's probably directed more great movies in the widest variety of genres than any other major Hollywood director. And what kind of unites all of them is he has a very workmanlike attitude towards his films. And all of his films are about work. And the highest value you can aspire to in a Hawks film is like doing your job well. It's like professionalism, you know? And so Hildy just does her job better than the other newspaper reporters do, you know?
And I think part of doing your job well under these circumstances is actually uncovering the truth. Finding it and uncovering it, rather than just putting your own papers, gloss onto true events. So to the extent that she uses deception, it seems to me to get at the truth in a deeper way. Like you say, a more poetic truth, but a truth of a certain order which is more true than the scene you describe when Earl comes out at the desk and all the different newspaper reporters are writing, dictating vastly different stories into the phones. So I think this is related to Hawkes's own concern about what it means to be good.
To be like a good person means to be good at your job. I don't know about the moral implications of that, but within the universe of his films, that is a source of morality.
34:52 Wes: Interesting. I didn't know that.
34:54 Erin: He's really interested in gender roles and therefore in gender role reversal, which is why he loves tomboys and he loves women who can keep up with men. And so that kind of plays into Hildy as a figure as well. I was really interested in this time around watching. I was interested in Sweeney, the guy that they're constantly using as the excuse. And what an interesting absent figure Sweeney is. He's this writer who could maybe do what Hildy does. And Hildy calls him the best man you've got on the paper for that sob sister stuff. He's this sort of like, absent, feminized figure.
So this, like, feminine, coded writing that Sweeney is good at is just like a pale imitation of the writing that Hildy can do, you know? And then, like, what's the excuse for why Sweeney can't perform this writing? It's because, like, he's going to have a baby, right? And then later the baby Becomes twins. And of course, you know, it's all made up. Walter has just sent him away on a vacation, which is kind of funny. Like, Hildy wants the vacation, Hildy wants the babies. What does he do? He sends Sweeney on the vacation, gives Sweeney the babies and says, you know, he's not around to write the female coded articles that Hildy has to write.
36:01 Wes: Yeah, it's really interesting what you're saying to this idea about morality for hawks having something to do with being good at one's job.
36:08 Erin: Yes. But I think that there's something about, maybe even Cavell says this, like something about Hildy being lucky. I recall the idea that when she's around, that's when this magic moment happens of Earl Williams puncturing the actual space of the press room. The story comes to her. I don't know what that means. I haven't really thought about that. But I'm just thinking that there's something like supernatural maybe about Hildy's abilities.
36:32 Wes: Yeah, he does refer to that really interesting shot, which I think he relates to German realism, where she's walking into the prison to see, and he's in that cage. So you get this very high angled shot looking down as she's entering. And this is what Cavell says about it. The high angle entrance shot is first of all a reflection of the woman's expansion of consciousness. She can see the whole of the situation as we can see the whole of Earl's cage, including its top horizontal bars, emphasizing a prisoner's absolute loss of privacy, of subjection to visibility, as if to being filmed. I don't know if that's what related to. I don't remember the lucky part, but I read the article and I'm not going to remember a lot about what
37:13 Erin: Cavell had in front of me.
37:14 Wes: I would like if I couldn't say. I couldn't even summarize what Cavell said in it. But there is something about the idea of an expansion of consciousness that goes back to. And it's not unrelated to being good at her job. And it goes back to the sort of whatever higher truth is being gotten at, despite this deception, because the truth is actually really mundane. The truth is probably that he was given a gun and accidentally discharged. So then there are two stories that can be fabricated. One is that he's a socialist and he did that as a political act.
And meanwhile, it's an African American cop. And the African American vote is very important. So this guy must be hanged or he's a loony and the thing that, of course, is closer to the truth and may even be true is that he is a loony. He is goofy. Is any accident an accident, in other words? Right. One of the problems with the news is that if something really is just random, it doesn't make a story in a way, and you have to weave it into a narrative, and then you falsify that as soon as you do so. Then in this case, it becomes a choice of narrative.
And then there's the question of saving this guy's life, which is also in observance of a higher ethical truth. So just repeating what he says, Right? Oh, it was an accident. It was an accidental discharge. Putting that in the newspaper again is not going to do anything for this guy. So we can speak to her motives as well. So what she writes, she's deceiving Earl, she's tricking Earl. And as Cavell points out, it kind of runs in parallel to Walter being a trickster who is tricking her, although she's not really being tricked. Right. So she's able to take something that cannot be given sense, cannot be really given a narrative without being falsified, and she's giving it the closest approximation of something untrue.
But it's the truest thing that you can get and still be a narrative. Right. The idea that he's insane because there's an element of sensationalism to that. People can be interested in that. They can't be interested in an accidental discharge, but they can be interested in someone who's lost their mind and it could save his life.
39:22 Erin: So you're reminding me of the sort of unholy bargain that gets Hildy into this in the first place, which is to receive a kind of, I guess you could call it like a form of alimony from Walter to get paid in the form of buying a life insurance policy in order for her to do the story. I mean, there's a lot that could be said about that. But just at the lunch table, he is able to appeal to at least Bruce's sense of the stakes of this story as being a man's life by saying, you know, that Earl Williams face is going to come up in his mind when they're at the preachers will
39:51 Wes: be on your hands.
39:52 Erin: Yeah, right. Well, he says something really interesting like, his face is going to come between you, which is exactly what happens. But this is another thing about Walter.
40:00 Wes: Yeah. He says, sorry, Earl Williams face will come between you tonight and the rest of your life.
40:05 Erin: Yeah, yeah. He knows what the right thing is, even if he's using it for his own nefarious ends, like, you know, he knows that it's a bad thing that this guy be killed, that it's an unjust thing, and he uses it to manipulate Bruce and through Bruce, to kind of manipulate Hildy. Right. Which she knows she's being manipulated, but he knows what the right thing is. And I think in a way that makes him also more like Hildy than the newspaper men in the press room who, like, really don't care whether or not Earl Williams dies. So there's something, I think, a little bit more human or humane in Walter.
But to switch gears, talking about the cage scene, I want to talk about two items this time around that really kind of fascinated me. And maybe we can get some sort of symbolic resonance out of them. And thinking about the cage, it reminded me that I was really reflecting on Hildy's pinstripe suit in the first part of the film, which is, like, totally insane.
40:59 Wes: Yeah.
41:00 Erin: And how that relates her maybe to Earl a little bit, because I think she and Earl as parallels to each other are really interesting. And the more I thought about it, the more parallels revealing. But the suit is absolutely crazy. And it reminds me of Irene Dunne in the Awful Truth or a lot of these screwball comedies where these women wear incredibly wild outfits, which are supposed to signify that they're capable of breaking out at any moment into sort of devious or dangerous behavior. Behavior anyway, not befitting a prospective housewife. Right.
There's something professional about it because it is a suit. And there's something like newspaper manny about it. Like, there's something of newsprint in the outfit with these sort of stripes. And there's, like, freedom, too. I was thinking this is like a professional career for a woman which, particularly in 1940, on several different fronts, economically, societally, et cetera. This woman's business suit represents freedom on a basic level. So there's a sort of, like, freedom of consciousness that it implies that we might free to behave in wild ways.
There's also freedom of a kind of social mobility sort for a woman in 1940. But of course, she's also, like, wearing bars. You know, she's caged like Earl Williams, and she has to kind of find her way, I think, out of this mental cage. I started to see the suit as being the symbol of both, like, freedom and imprisonment and a sort of visual depiction of her own ambivalence about what her life should be, what choice she should make. She's sort of stymied by this decision. And I think this ambivalence actually plays out, like, in certain scenes.
I. It's just amazing how I've seen this film so many times and yet I notice something new every time. It's so rape. Rewatching and this latest viewing, I noticed, you know, the scene where she comes into the press room for the first time and she's telling them, like, she's gonna go into business for herself is how she calls it. Gonna make her farewell appearance by writing this paper. But she's getting married tomorrow and they're kind of like making fun of her. Like, can you imagine her washing diapers and beating rugs and whatever else they're saying?
So they're talking about her being a wife and mother, and then suddenly a bell goes off that signals like a fire. And I never noticed before that the fire is in a school. So she's talking about being a mother. And then there's this, like, school full of children that's potentially up in flames. And its only interest to her is as a potential spot for, like, a good scoop. You know, she's like Pavlov's dog with this fire bell. It just triggers this ingrained newspaperman's response of excitement towards what anyone with maternal or paternal feeling would find horrifying.
And then this is immediately followed by the sound of the gallows outside the window. Because they're like, whatever. They're practicing for the hanging. And Hildy asks, what's that? And she's like, interested. She starts walking towards the window to see. And even as she's like verbally asking, what is that? Even as she, like, walks over to the window, one of the men says, you know, it's going to be a pretty good hanging tomorrow. And she says, not interested. But of course, like, she is interested. Like, her body is moving towards the window and she's wondering what's going on with interest even as she's claiming out loud to not be interested.
I felt like the suit is a sort of like expression of that where there's this stop start quality. Like it's giving her this mobility. But, like, the bars are kind of holding her back.
44:12 Wes: Yeah, I like that. It's a busy kind of frenetic. You know, if you look at it, it almost looks like a. I don't even know what you call it, you know, with the black and the white stripes. It's like you're hypnotized by it or something.
44:23 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
44:24 Wes: But, yeah. Why do they say zebras? Have stripes? Do the flies get confused when they're trying to land or something? But, yeah, I like that. I think you're getting at the kind of conflict between the bars that hold one back versus the activity. The freneticness that's kind of trying to come out. Because it's both at the same time. It's funny because on one of the posters, at least, it's got her in a yellow. Or is it even her? It doesn't even look like her.
44:48 Erin: But I know it's totally, like, has no relation to her. Yeah.
44:52 Wes: Evening gown. Which, as far as I remember, she never wears in the film.
44:56 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
44:57 Wes: And Cary Grant is kind of looking down at her almost like God from the skies or something in a condescending way. And then it says she learned about men from him. Exclamation point. Yeah. Right.
45:11 Erin: Clearly they're trying to advertise a different movie than.
45:13 Wes: It's ridiculous. Yeah. It has nothing to do with them.
45:17 Erin: This is their newspapery lie that's trying to sell the truth to people in a different package.
45:21 Wes: It's like they're taking the title literally. A Girl Friday would be the girl that you have on Fridays. Meanwhile, you're not committed. Is that right?
45:29 Erin: I think it's Man Friday. So I think it's supposed to be that she's his lackey.
45:34 Wes: Yeah.
45:34 Erin: But also helps him out of jams. I don't know. So. But I think that's an interesting read, taking that literally.
45:40 Wes: Okay, so what is it in the slang of the time? What does it mean? Like, it's a Man Friday. That's the original.
45:45 Erin: I think it's from Robinson Crusoe. His assistant or his friend on the island is Friday. Right. So if you're somebody's Man Friday or Girl Friday, you're their assistant. You help them get out of scrapes like a loyal servant.
45:56 Wes: Okay.
45:57 Erin: Which, of course, is very true in this running after him with his suitcase.
46:01 Wes: So is that made up about having a Girl Friday who's just on the side or something?
46:07 Erin: I don't know.
46:07 Wes: But okay.
46:09 Erin: That's a really interesting idea, though. Idea of taking that literally is. Yeah.
46:13 Wes: So of course she's not in either way. She's not in that servile position, actually. So the title is entirely ironic, but the poster has not caught on to that.
46:26 Erin: It's hilarious.
46:27 Wes: What would she be doing in an evening gown?
46:30 Erin: Nothing. In this film.
46:31 Wes: Yeah.
46:31 Erin: It's like a workday girl, not a weekend girl.
46:34 Wes: Yeah, exactly.
46:35 Erin: The other thing I was thinking about in relation to this pinstripe outfit and her ambivalence or something. Is the desk as another symbol? I mean, obviously the telephone is the most obvious symbol in the film, but there's a lot, I think, that's been written about that. And maybe the desk, too, I don't know. But this desk is really interesting because it's like a play on the production for use argument. Like, what is a desk for? Well, here it's used for getting a scoop. It's used towards newspapery ends, even when Earl Williams is hiding in it. I mentioned before about this idea I had of him puncturing the newsroom. Like when the news comes to you. When the news happens in the press room.
47:13 Wes: Yeah.
47:13 Erin: And this is like double symbolized. When he actually crawls into the roll top desk. I love that Cary Grant calls him a mock turtle.
47:21 Wes: Um, can you do the accent?
47:25 Erin: No, I don't want to.
47:27 Wes: Get back in there. You mock turtle. Turtle.
47:30 Erin: I can. I can do it, but I don't want to. So it's like a funny moment, of course, but also I was thinking about the fact that this is like his coffin, you know, and if Earl is a kind of a proxy for Hildy and vice versa, what are we trying to spring Hildy from? Death for her represents, like, the death of her. Her journalism career represents marriage. So this body in a coffin in the middle of the newsroom that they're trying to spring Earl from takes on this, like, double significance of this coffin represents you're gonna die. If you go to Albany, you're gonna.
Everything that's interesting about you is going to die. And so there's something ridiculous about it, which makes it funny. Just like there's kind of something ridiculous maybe about the idea of Hildy beating a rug, especially in the outfits that she wears. But I don't know what else can be made of that. But I'm just kind of thinking along.
48:17 Wes: It turns out to be the desk of this guy, Roy G. Bem. Is it Bensinger?
48:22 Erin: Bensinger. Doesn't have to rhyme. Doesn't have to rhyme.
48:26 Wes: Yeah. I love that he's trying to get him out of there and has convinced this guy that he's going to give him a job and seems like, write a story for me from the point of view of the escaped man. Get the sense of the animal.
48:37 Erin: Animal. Kind of a Jack London style.
48:42 Wes: All right, let me get my rhyming dictionary. It doesn't have to rhyme. Doesn't have to rhyme.
48:46 Erin: It's my favorite line in the whole film, of course,
48:51 Wes: but yeah, it's a great irony to have the actual story be hiding inside your writing desk incarnate.
48:57 Erin: Of course, the only ones who know it are Walter and Hildy.
49:00 Wes: Yeah.
49:01 Erin: Oh, and Bruce's mother, but she doesn't quite know what she knows.
49:05 Wes: Yeah. And then when he gets out again, the reporters can't even see what's right in front of their face. They start fabricating stuff. They don't pay an awful lot of attention to him before they get on their phones and start wiring and fake stories.
49:18 Erin: That's interesting. They can't deal with the reality in front of them the way that Walter and Hildy can, even just in terms of finding a practical solution for this guy being in the newsroom, they're able to figure it out, Earl.
49:27 Wes: They make him as uninteresting and as timid. Right. As they possibly can. And even at the psychiatric examination, he could have been an interesting character. He could have been like Hannibal Lecter mask. He could have been a firebrand socialist. He could have been anything. But instead, he's just the guy that the psychiatrist and the sheriff are talking co. Callously about how his life is about to end. And all he can do is say, I'm tired, or something like that. What does he say exactly in that moment? I'm awful tired. Yeah, I'm awful tired.
So he's not inherently interesting. And to open up that they've got their guns pulled. Right. Waiting for this supposed criminal to jump out of the desk and do who knows what. But ultimately he's really. Despite the fact that he stole a gun and. And escaped. Okay, that is interesting. He's ultimately harmless. Right. He's a mock turtle. So the reveal is inherently anticlimactic. Once you open that up and see this timid little guy in his coffin, and that's when the fabrication starts.
50:33 Erin: Well, you're making me think that even stealing the gun really doesn't make him all that interesting. He's still a pawn in the narrativizing efforts of the sheriff to try and recapitulate the story as they want to tell it. The state has a narrative about him too. It's that he did this sanely and in cold blood. Right?
50:52 Wes: Yeah.
50:53 Erin: On the basis of that narrative, they're hanging him. So when they try to, during his examination by Egelhoffer the alienist, and Sheriff Philip B. Hartwell, B for brains, they tried to replay what occurred on the basis of what they want to have happened, not on the basis of what actually happened. So they too have their story to tell about him. And then in their story, he becomes the cold blooded killer, discharges the gun. But actually, even that redoing of the story, the truth asserts itself. Right. Because the gun accidentally goes off even in the examination process, demonstrating that the gun went off accidentally and that it does go off accidentally.
51:34 Wes: Let's see. So the sheriff gave his gun to the professor, who gave it to Earl, who shot the professor in the classified ads.
51:43 Erin: So many ass jokes.
51:44 Wes: No. Ads. Yeah. Do they say. Do they figure.
51:48 Erin: Well, maybe there's a similar kind of question.
51:50 Wes: Yeah. Did it go off accidentally or not? And then.
51:53 Erin: Right, right. But the truth there probably is also rather mundane. It probably did just go off accidentally. Again, they were literally playing with a gun.
52:01 Wes: And then he ran and he had the gun while he ran and.
52:05 Erin: Right.
52:05 Wes: Yeah. He was pretty easily disarmed by Hildy.
52:10 Erin: Right. Well, you just have to be a newspaper man, Take that gun away, put it to your own use.
52:17 Wes: So maybe we should make the transition to Postscript. What do we want to talk about?
52:22 Erin: I could think of a couple things, but the machinations of Walter aren't all that interesting. I suppose in the postscript we could talk about background on the film and our personal relationship to like, we can make it a more personal postscript if we feel as though we've gotten through everything we want to say for the.
52:38 Wes: Yeah.
52:38 Erin: For the movie.
52:41 Wes: Yeah, let's do that.
52:43 Erin: Okay, good. And the only fan letter I ever wrote. That's a teaser.
52:47 Wes: Okay, that's good. Yeah, that'll get some subscriptions.
52:57 Wes: you to everybody who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Com.
Post-Doctoral Bedevilment in Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus”
Oct 24, 2022
Dr. Faustus expected more from his education. After a lifetime of study, his professional options—philosophy, medicine, law, and theology—all seem disappointingly ordinary. He is of course not the first to have this experience. At a societal level, the promise of knowledge is power, especially once it has become technology. At an individual level, what education seems to make us is an insignificant part of a formidable machine. For Faustus, the only way to make book learning great again is to extend it to the domain of black magic. And yet all this seems to earn him is an all-expenses-paid European vacation—notwithstanding the perk of having Mephistopheles as tour guide—to be followed by eternal damnation. What’s the point of selling your soul to the devil? How do we avoid subordinating our own search for meaning to the desire for power? Wes & Erin discuss Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Wes: Doctor Faustus expected more from his education. After a lifetime of study, his professional options, philosophy, medicine, law and theology. All seemed disappointingly ordinary. He is, of course, not the first to have this experience. At a societal level, the promise of knowledge is power. Especially once it has become technology. At an individual level, what education seems to make us is an insignificant part of a formidable machine. For Faustus, the only way to make book learning great again is to extend it to the domain of black magic. And yet, all this seems to earn him is an all expenses paid European vacation. Notwithstanding the perk of having Mephistopheles as tour guide to be followed by eternal damnation. What's the point of selling your soul to the devil? How do we avoid subordinating our own search for meaning to the desire for power? This is Wes Alwan.
1:03 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:04 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. Okay, Erin, we're back.
1:11 Erin: We are back.
1:12 Wes: It's been a summer hiatus. Now we're ready to get going again.
1:17 Erin: It was hard to drag myself from the pool and talk about this.
1:21 Wes: That's right. It's been all shits and giggles all summer long. But, yeah, we were gonna do His Girl Friday. And then we started talking about Marlowe's Faustus. Because you were taking a course on it for school, and you really. I don't know if you loved Marlow in particular or that it was just the teacher.
1:43 Erin: I'm still in the middle of this class, so I feel like this is a sort of clandestine operation. Which is actually befitting of Marlowe. But the class is great. It's this Renaissance drama class. We're just focusing on Marlowe and Jonson. I did Dr. Faustus. I was really intrigued by it. And unfortunately, we had to move on in the class. So I thought this was a way to kind of prolong my ecstasy. The 24 years that I'm planning to devote to Dr. Faustus. So his Girl Friday will have to wait. But of course I will. I love His Girl Friday.
2:15 Wes: Well, it's important to have, I think, Dr. Faustus under our belt before we move on to His Girl Friday.
2:20 Erin: It actually probably is foundational.
2:23 Wes: Yeah. But it's funny. So, Marlow, I knew little about him, except that maybe the spying stuff. And also that he got stabbed in the eye. Right. He apparently tried to stab someone. He got stabbed with his own knife in his eye in a bar fight. And that wasn't the first bar fight he had been in. I think there was a Warrant out for his arrest at the time for being in a bar fight. And he was also known for being. He'd been accused of being a atheist and a blasphemer. The other thing I knew is that I, you know, I just glanced at the play and thought, well, why read Marlow when you could read Shakespeare?
And just in the past, when I've looked at passages from the play, I wasn't that excited by it. And this time around, reading it, by comparison to Shakespeare and all the wordplay and what goes on in Shakespeare, it's definitely less exciting. And then I watched the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor performance, which is silly in many ways, but it's also quite gripping. Then little snippets of other performances, and then reread it while taking notes and then just reading passages to myself. I developed a much greater appreciation of Marlowe's talent doing all of that.
3:31 Erin: The class that I'm in is not very well populated, to say the least. And this professor that we're taking from is normally known for being, you know, the Shakespeare guy. So I think there was some disappointment when the course listing was released and he was focusing on Marlowe and Jonson. And I was kind of delighted by that. Not because I don't love Shakespeare, and not because there isn't so much in Shakespeare that still, of course, escapes me, that, you know, whole plays that I haven't read, obviously, or just the fact that there are just incredible riches there, even within the things that I had read.
But I had this attitude like, you know what? This is great. As an opera lover, you go to the opera, and if they're doing La Bohème for the 120th time, you kind of want to shoot yourself. You know, I would rather see something different every once in a while. And so that was kind of the attitude I had going in. And then the first day of classes really intrigued me when the professor said something like, with Shakespeare, we get these problems of attribution because, you know, everyone's always trying to prove that somebody else really wrote certain plays because of the fact that Shakespeare has this incredibly kind of negative capability, which we've talked about in other episodes on Shakespeare plays, in which he sort of contains dozens of people inside of him.
So the professor said, you know, Marlowe and Jonson, no one could ever mistake them for each other or any other playwright for their style. They're so particular in their style. And that, I think, just was really intriguing to me to read a playwright who is so himself from the same era, sort of like anti Shakespeare. It's something that's interesting to me right now in thinking about my own work. And what makes a style and what makes somebody individualistic and recognizable immediately. What makes someone even easily subject to parody? It's a concept that I'm interested in on a lot of different levels.
5:17 Wes: Or self parody.
5:19 Erin: Exactly.
5:20 Wes: Which is what I run up against frequently.
5:24 Erin: No, self parody is really revealing, I think. One's ability to do self parody, I think it's very rare.
5:29 Wes: Yeah. It's the unintentional self parody that I'm good at. So Marlowe has a particular, identifiable style. Is that the idea? Because he seems very vanilla to me.
5:41 Erin: Yeah. He has, I think, a set of subjects, maybe. I mean, this would be a conversation that would encompass more plays than Faustus and also probably more than I've read yet. I'm still in the thicket of the Marlowe section of this course, and so I'm still kind of trying to piece everything together. But Marlowe is the way that I've been led to understand him. He's someone who just doesn't give a crap about anything or anyone. He's out to get you. He will destroy you. The plays kind of destroy everything in their path. We read his play Tamburlaine.
Basically, the plot is that Tamburlaine is this great conqueror. He comes into a kingdom and he's like, I'm gonna beat you. And the guy's like, no, I'm gonna beat you. I'm better than you. And then Tamburlaine just, like, whoops their ass and then moves on to the next place. And the same thing is repeated over and over and over again until he's just conquered, like, the entire world. Like, the trajectory of the play is just climax after climax after climax. And Tamburlaine as a figure is this kind of evil but sexy destroyer who you kind of, like, want to see just, like, stomp on the little Lego set that somebody has painstakingly erected and just like, bam, step all over it.
And so the fact that he's this incredibly magnetic hero, but at the same time, you know, whether he's killing Muslims or Christians over the course of the play, the allegiances of an English, Elizabethan era audience would have been really turned upside down and over and over again watching something like that. That's kind of how I see it. Like, he's destroying theater as he is writing these plays. He's destroying our expectations of theater. He's destroying almost like a narrative arc of theater. He's destroyed. He's destroying And Faustus, destroying the concept of the morality play, which was sort of the chief play up until the Renaissance era, that was the chief genre.
So I just finished reading the Jew of Malta and I still have a bit more to go with Marlowe, but that doesn't speak much to style, but it does to kind of an overarching vision of what Marlowe is doing.
7:47 Wes: And the morality play, I think it started out as the portrayal of biblical stories and then it developed into their characters representing, say, virtues and vices. And there's a less to be learned
8:01 Erin: from the play, really the beginning of theater in England. They're didactic, they're allegorical. So the whole point is the battle to save the soul. I think the term in class that was used was the psychomachia. Just like soul battle. Right. So really, really obvious, very silly character names. I think the most popular play or the origin of them all was Everyman. I think the character's name was Everyman. Right. And there are like characters like knowledge and good works and all that kind of thing. And I think that where that morality play got kind of turned inside out a little bit already is with the rise of Protestantism and specifically Calvinism, where this is like your chief form of entertainment.
But then you have to kind of ask yourself, okay, who are these morality plays for at this point, when we no longer have this battle for the soul that's inherent in other denominations of Christianity, but within Calvinism, you know, you have either you're divinely elect and you're going to heaven no matter what. Right. Or you're a reprobate and you're going to hell. What's the point of these morality plays except as a kind of like self torture for the person watching it, wondering whether or not they're picking up on. They've been given, you know, as a member of the elect, the divine insight to pick up on the incredibly obvious allegory within the play and therefore sort of confirm their own sense that they are in fact a member of the elect.
Or I don't know. I mean, it can't possibly convert a reprobate because they're a reprobate.
9:36 Wes: For partially examined life, we just read Erasmus and recorded on Erasmus. So his Praise of Folly was published in 1511 and he had a bit of a public fight with Luther over the concept of free will and Luther who? You've probably read some Luther, right?
9:53 Erin: Oh, yes, and Erasmus actually.
9:55 Wes: Okay. And Erasmus is great. So he's a Catholic who wants to reform the church from within. And he's much more humble and good natured and rhetorical and bent than Luther. And Luther is just a insane radical. So they had a. You're speaking my language about free will. And I looked at both of them and I'm like, oh my God. And you know, Erasmus is trying to be nice and Luther is like, you know, screw you. Very contemptuous, very arrogant. But what I was going to say about that is, you know, I got a sense of, you know, the debate over free will. Protestantism, I think.
So for Lutheran, this leads into Calvinism. But the idea is that there's no free will and getting into heaven is not a matter of good works, it's a matter of faith. So religion becomes less about or not, maybe not at all about perfectibility and self improvement and one's virtues. It becomes about something else. And Erasmus is much more on the. In a way, there's a pagan strand to it. Right. Because there's a virtue ethics involved, but also it's sort of a more moderate version of Catholicism. Right. So pare down the excesses, the things that had been happening that, you know, it wasn't just Luther who was critical of them, but you know, with indulgences and this whole game of what you're going to do to save yourself or your loved ones from hell.
11:14 Erin: Oh, absolutely, yeah. It's sort of like weeding the materialistic garden, I would call it. This reliance on the material had really gotten out of hand with, you know, famous things like indulgences and blah, blah, blah. You know, indulgences exist, like that's still a concept within the Catholic Church, but you can't pay for them anymore. It's still an interesting. And you know, I mean, depending on your belief system, if you're a Catholic, it's an incredibly useful concept. And I don't mean to say that
11:39 Wes: flippantly, but this is more like the organized crime version. You know, it'd be a shame if something happened to your soul. Right, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna need 10% every month. But yeah, right.
11:52 Erin: With the unchecked power of the church and the sort of growing, the level to which these had become excesses and needed reform, which, as you suggest, you know, Erasmus and others. There was a movement in the church called the Counter Reformation which refuted the Reformation theology and also cleaned house from within, you know, because this was a problem that Catholics of course too recognized. At least Catholics of goodwill recognized that this had become a problem. But this reliance upon the material, right, like sacraments, just A general sort of mediation between you and the divine, which is very important to Catholicism on a certain level, became very upsetting for Protestants.
They wanted to mark their division with Catholicism with a total lack of dependence on anything like, you know, the material or any kind of mediation. And so it included doing good works. Basically the idea that anything could get you to heaven of your own will. Or even just. Catholics don't believe this either. They don't believe that your own will can get you into heaven necessarily, but that rather you're working with God, you're accepting God's grace in order to perform goodwill. So it's not like you can, through your own might and strength, climb your way up the ladder to heaven.
It's obviously in cooperation with God's grace that any good can be done. This is pretty standard Christian idea.
13:09 Wes: What are you thinking of? The word synergy?
13:12 Erin: Yes, synergy.
13:13 Wes: Right.
13:14 Erin: In synergy with God. Yes.
13:17 Wes: We can leverage the trying to think of what the corporate speak would be
13:21 Erin: the ad-language of how to sell thee. What I'm getting at is just this idea that within Calvinism you can't do anything good. You're either saved or you're not. And the process of discovering whether or not you're saved is through this really deep and intense, constant and very punishing self analysis and textual analysis of the Bible. Like if you can read the Bible properly, it's because God's given you the grace to read the Bible. It's because you're saved. And you can be tricked basically into thinking that you're saved when you're actually a reprobate, which is a terrifying prospect for people. And I should just say that to our listeners, all of this is, I think, directly related to Faustus. That's why we're talking about it. We'll get there.
14:03 Wes: It is important. And the other thing I want to say too, and this I think is also important background of the play. Because people may wonder in the beginning, what's all this stuff about him being unhappy with philosophy, medicine, law and divinity. You know, one of the other things that happened during the Middle Ages is the rise of Scholasticism, including the influence of Aristotle. And the point Erasmus was writing in his opinion, there were a lot of ridiculous sort of arcane esoteric theological quibbles. And so a focus on highly analytic and logic chopping types of arguments to do with theology and religion, which he of course contrasts in praise of folly to the simplicity of the apostles and of Christ.
So there's a question there about the relationship between Engaging in these very intellectual activities and being religious. And then the other part of that, part of the innovation of humanism is to revive not just the more analytical ancient texts, but to revive the influence of more rhetorical texts, history and literature and that sort of stuff. And so you see it in the way that Erasmus writes. And it's very pleasing and well written. It's an essay, it's not a philosophical treatise. You know, one more thing to say is that is of a piece with his idea that so he'd done some time as a monk, done some time, so he was worried about empty ritual and ceremony that was devoid of any, like, real subjective content.
The idea that, you know, you could just kind of, in a very rote, unthinking way, perform certain acts or ceremonies and that that was what your relationship to God consisted of. This is all about, you know, one's mental and spiritual comportment, whether that's being undermined by over intellectualism or undermined by the ritualistic or something like that. So, yes, it sounds like we're running off on a tangent, but this is all going to come up in our discussion. Just one more piece of background that I think you can probably feel him better than I am is the source of this legend for Marlowe.
There was a German, so apparently Faust was a real guy, or Faustus was a real guy. Then it became a kind of. Obviously it's not real as it's presented, but became a kind of legend. And then it was put down by someone in German, and I forget when that happens. And then it was translated into English by someone who took a lot of liberties with that. But that's the source for Marlowe of this.
16:49 Erin: Yeah, that's right. And I think that'll get us right to the start of the play as Elizabethan era attendees going into Dr. Faustus, just knowing that we're familiar with the Faustus legend. And so they would be as well, they would know this. They would know the basic outline of the story. It was common knowledge at this time. So that's really important. They are going to a morality play about someone who they know in the end, you know, spoiler alert, will be damned forever. So then one might argue why then go to see this? What is the point here?
What is the narrative arc in which something is a foregone conclusion? And it's about a guy who's really, really bad and does bad stuff. Is this going to edify us as potential members of the elect? Is that possible? If one is elect, do we actually care Whether or not Faustus achieves salvation at the end, are we rooting for him? And if we are, then are we rooting for a reprobate? And does that make us bad? And does that make us reprobates? It's a little bit of a brain teaser. A different term I was thinking of for that, but I'll call it a brain teaser.
17:55 Wes: Yeah, it's funny, in my second reading, I had the intrusive thoughts having to do with contemporary sitcoms, as usual. And I thought, wouldn't it be funny if the comic relief were actually at Faustus expense? And you could do a sort of office version of this where Wagner, instead of going off and doing the silly things that he does, he does the equivalent of kind of looking at the camera every time Faustus says something stupid or something like that.
18:25 Erin: Faust would be Dwight, of course, and Jim would be Wagner, right?
18:28 Wes: Well, no, I was thinking, yeah, Jim would be Wagner. No, I was thinking of Faustus as Michael Scott.
18:33 Erin: Oh, sure.
18:34 Wes: So he's the boss. And the way this starts out, he has this very inflated self conception, this kind of mania or grandiosity, however you want to put it. And he's doing something that we are, at some point, we're all tasked with doing this right. If we go to college, if we are getting an education of any kind that's going to serve some sort of professional purpose later on, which is like choosing something, making a choice, specializing. That's like his dilemma in the beginning. And because of his grandiose state of mind, nothing is actually good enough for him.
So starting with philosophy, it's a very grand thing. It's something that if you want to be grandiose, a lot of people can do that and go there for that. Or really any academic, right. Humanities specialty, you can convince yourself that what you're doing is awfully, awfully important. Doing something with ideas, something or something artistic, something that's going to change the world, deeply affect people. And then you can give that same sort of rationale for law or medicine. It becomes slightly more different and more practical. Right? But the idea is that you can heal people, you can make lots of money, you be respected.
I'm unclear on the actual situation. It looks to me, okay, this is someone who's just gotten a degree, who's making this sort of decision. But you can correct me if I'm wrong about that. And then the final step is divinity. So of the professions that he's considering, the fourth one is divinity. And he rejects that as kind of being depressing. In a way that's reminiscent of what you've been talking about, Right? So it's what will be, shall be. In other words, we're all destined to sin. And therefore, we're all destined to an everlasting death because of that sin.
The turn is to magic from that. That's what gives us real power, honor, omnipotence, like education is disappointing in a way. Because it really doesn't live up to any kind of grandiose promise. But, yeah. What did you think about the way this began? You know, what ails Faustus?
20:40 Erin: I think you're right that there's something ouroboric. About the structure of the whole plot. And about this first scene in particular, too. Where he's sort of now deciding on what his specialization is going to be. Only after he's received how many doctorates. You know, he has this whole speech which seems completely counterintuitive. Again, it's a kind of foregone conclusion. He's already studied all of these things and mastered them, according to him, Right? He studied law, divinity, and medicine. Mastered them. And he's like, no, I'm not going to do any of these things.
You know? So it's a performance at the very beginning. It's a sort of performance of rejecting each one of these things. And then at the end, I think the desire is to actually get away from the studying of something. And actually do it. He studied divinity. Now I want to be divine. This is all just empty scholarship. I want to actually be on the ground, you know, doing my divine deeds. To go back to the very beginning, to go to the prologue. We get this chorus that is describing Faustus's situation. It gives us the whole history of Faustus. We get his infancy, he's born.
First they say they're going to speak for Faustus in his infancy. Then he's born. Which is an odd kind of ouroboric kind of thing. Anyway. So we hear that he was born in Rhodes. And he goes to Wittenberg. Which is the center of Protestant reform at the time. And becomes this great scholar, gets all these doctorates. And then we have his downfall. So the prologue says. Till swollen with cunning of a self conceit. His waxen wings did mount above his reach. And melting heavens conspired his overthrow. For falling to a devilish exercise. And glutted more with learning's golden gifts.
He surfeits upon cursed necromancy. Nothing so sweet as magic is to him which he prefers before his chiefest bliss. And this the man that in his study sits so we get this comparison to Icarus, but some other things in here that are really strange. Like, I mean, the most obvious line here is and melting heavens conspired his overthrow. So the heavens themselves thought that he was getting too high and are conspiring against him, rather than his own pride taking him up too high and his own self destruction, you know, at his own hand, if you will.
The heavens are basically the actor that is condemning him. So the height is theological excellence, it's theological learning. And then the punishment, the thing he falls to is the devilish exercise. The punishment is magic or necromancy. So it's like the God is the one who sends him down to the devil. Yeah, there's already, is this his fault? Is this just the way that it is? This is the way that it works when you're a reprobate.
23:25 Wes: So the irony is that theology should be getting you closer to God, but it's doing precisely the opposite.
23:31 Erin: That's right.
23:32 Wes: The other point I think you're making is that so in the Icarus myth, you fly too high and the sun melts you and the sun is just. Yes, you can think of the sun as a God, but in this case, this is purely a matter of one's own action and then some kind of natural consequence of that action. But here it sounds more like the displeasure of the gods at hubris. More like a Promethean thing, Right?
23:55 Erin: Yeah. And there's even a few lines above that. When he's studying divinity, there's this idea of the fruitful plot of scholarism graced. So he's gracing the fruitful plot of the university with his talents. But of course, we can't help but hear the sort of Garden of Eden echo in that. It's as if any undertaking in theological studies is going to result in your downfall. You know, it's all a trap designed to just usher you off to hell.
24:20 Wes: It's funny because divinity schools these days, as far as I can tell, have a reputation. Right. Just for harboring atheists, essentially.
24:28 Erin: That's exactly right.
24:29 Wes: I wonder if it's a similar kind of stereotype at the time, and I think Marlow was subject to that. Not that he went to divinity school. Right. But I don't know if something that was attributed to him by someone else who had been arrested, but I'm not sure.
24:44 Erin: Do you mean the sedition thing with Elizabeth, where he was plotting to overthrow the government, but it was because he was a counterspy?
24:51 Wes: No, it was. He was accused of having denied the divinity of Christ, for instance, and a lot of other blasphemous things.
25:00 Erin: Right. Well, this is, I think, the problem of, you know, something we've touched on in many other episodes, the problem of classical education is, you know, that it might just make you an atheist and sort of undermine the whole project. At least a classical education promoted by a Christian society, it could have the opposite effect.
25:19 Wes: In a way, it's a spiritual competitor. Right. So one can see the life of the mind as a kind of spiritual practice as it was before the. At least in some forms, as philosophy before the advent of Christianity. Then you can either make it the handmaiden of Christianity or maybe Christianity gets second billing eventually. Right. Which is part, I think, of the criticism of the Scholastics that was being leveled by Erasmus. So one can be overwhelmed by the scaffolding that you're trying to build in order to make a connection to God. Yeah, maybe don't do that. Do something else.
25:57 Erin: Well, I think there's a suggestion here, though. In his opening speech, he talks about all the things that he's rejecting. And at the end, when he's describing why divinity doesn't serve, I think there's a suggestion that he's a bad reader. He's not quite as intelligent as he thinks he is. Or, of course, the other way to read this is that he hasn't been given the divine insight in order to read things specifically, you know, the Scriptures correctly, precisely because he is a reprobate. So like he says, he's looking at Jerome's Bible and he reads stipendium peccati mors est. Right. The reward of sin is death, he says. He translates it for us, you know, the wages of sin is death. The second half of that line is, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
26:41 Wes: Ah, okay.
26:41 Erin: He's deliberately leaving out the second half of these things. Same thing with this other part of the Bible that he quotes from John. He provides the translation. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and there's no truth in us. The line that follows that is, but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And I think an audience in the Elizabethan era being relatively well versed in the Bible, or maybe not. I don't know. Maybe I'm overestimating this, especially because of what would still be very low levels of literacy.
But still, I think the Bible, many parts of it, were learned by rote, especially the New Testament, maybe an audience would know that he's deliberately leaving out God's promises of salvation. Or if not deliberately leaving them out, then maybe that's the thing. Is he a bad reader? Is he just rejecting what he doesn't want to see? Or is he actually a reprobate and God is literally not allowing him to see the second half of the line. He's setting him up for failure.
27:40 Wes: He's focusing on the inevitability of sin and human imperfection. And then he's cutting out the part where there seems to be a possibility of redemption. Right, so it's just eternal death and we sin and that's it. So what are the different reasons he rejects all of these? Right, so philosophy, it's just. You know what? We're just going to learn logic, it's empty. And we're going to learn how to argue better. What's the point of that? Medicine. I've already mastered that. But in any case, I think the main point is making people healthy. Okay, but what about.
28:15 Erin: But they're going to die eventually.
28:16 Wes: Yeah, they're going to die anyway, so what's the point? And then it's not raising them from the dead or giving them eternal life. And then law. I think his study fits a mercenary drudge who aims at nothing but external trash. Too servile and a liberal for me. So you might think of law in relation to justice as something extremely grand, but from the inside. And this is kind of the way any job is, right? It's just work, and it can become drudgery like anything else. But also, I think that part of the implication is here that you get caught up in what Shakespeare called the fine quillets of the law and all these fine distinctions, endlessly multiplying distinctions, and all for the sake of doing something with petty human concerns like inheritance law, which I think is the thing he mentions.
And then with theology, it sounds like. And so I'm trying to relate all these. Maybe you can help me see the arc here, because I didn't fully think it up. But with theology, it sounds like there's no insight available. Or the final insight in theology is that redemption is impossible or that we are powerless or something like that. So ultimately, what he's rebelling against is the sense of powerlessness, you know, in light of his desire for omnipotence. And in the end, you know, what he wants is. This is what's disappointing about education, is that thinking and action are not the same things.
And our thoughts don't directly affect the world, although part of being grandiose and having omnipotence of thought is having kind of the unconscious belief that they can do that. And that can lead to very debilitating conditions like ocd, where people are worried that their negative thoughts are going to affect their loved ones directly. But the truth is our thoughts don't have that power. The world is on the verge of a point where it'll be almost as if that's the case. Right. Science looks awfully magical these days, the kind of power that science affords.
So there's something prescient about all these concerns and Dr. Faustus and with Frankenstein and all these thoughts about alchemy and magic in relation to. Also in the Tempest, in relation to science. I think there's a premonition here of what is actually going to happen with the relationship between thought and technology and what happens in the world. It's going to get very, very amped up. Right. But even allowing for that, none of these disciplines that we spend all our time devoting ourselves to is anything like being directly active in the world.
It's too abstruse and isolated and in our minds. And I could go on about that, but yeah, I think that's inherent. Part of the dissatisfaction and it's one of the downsides of self consciousness per se. Right. We're no longer in the moment and merely acting creatures. We can get caught up in our own minds and in the minds of others, in what they think and in culture and in. And then the other part of this is just the more education we have, is it powerful or is it just arresting? Does it lead to more indecision and inaction and less courage and less vitality?
The kind of critiques that Nietzsche will make, but that Erasmus has already made, that kind of stuff.
31:28 Erin: Yeah. It's not enough to study God. We have to want to be God. We want to make a difference in the world.
31:34 Wes: I just want to make a difference.
31:35 Erin: Divine acts. Yeah, exactly. Like I think what he talks about with the law and divinity are very closely related. Like he quotes matters of inheritance out of Justinian's law. Right. If two people are bequeathed the same thing, then one person will get the thing itself and the other it's equivalent cash value. This type of.
31:52 Wes: So it's petty.
31:54 Erin: It's petty. And Justinian, of course, his law, his Roman law was deeply influential in the creation of canon law within the church. Right. There is a sense of circling the drain here, you know, thinking about the little tiny things. I mean, God's grace is often Thought of as a kind of economy, right. In which we have, like, the wages of sin is death. You know, we get grace as a kind of infinite economy. But still, thought of in economic terms.
32:19 Wes: Marx would call it commodification, maybe, or fetishization.
32:23 Erin: Yeah, well, and this is a. Largely because, I mean, in stuff that we understand. It's a way that we use to think about how God works in our own limited way. But, you know, just someone who's not imbued with the right spirit, shall we say. This all would then look very, very empty to him. It looks like external trash. And trash is a word that Marlowe uses in a lot of his plays. He really likes that word. My professor is just such a great line. So I have to have to give him credit. Said something like. Magic is the belief that nothing is external trash.
Magic is the belief that everything has meaning. Reminds me very much of what you've said in the past about conspiracy theories. This is, I think, intricately related. So in a world in which Faus's studies have demystified the world for him. They've reduced even God to a case of paltry legacies. Is my soul consigned to heaven or to hell? You know, as it depends on which fast track I'm on. And it's all very denatured and demystified. When one has studied this so intensely. Magic is that reinvigoration of a kind of divine spirit. It's this idea that everything might be coated with some sort of secret, hidden meaning.
And I think that is what is attractive to him here. He reduces things to lines and circles, signs, letters and characters. Aye. These are those that Faustus most desires. So he wants to kind of reduce the meaning of the word. To just the things that make up the word. The letters and the lines that make up the word. Which we would think is like going backwards. But it's a sort of magical remystification. Whereby even the process of reading becomes suddenly foreign to us. And it's imbued with a kind of mysticism. I don't know.
34:02 Wes: Yeah.
34:03 Erin: No, there's the suggestion, too, that the magic book that he's reading. Maybe it's just the Bible. You know, to a reprobate, maybe the Bible just looks like a bunch of squiggles. Or maybe he's just taking the Bible and turning it upside down or something like that. There's a duality, I think that's a constant theme in the play. In which the two things that look like opposites. Are actually maybe the same thing. You Know, maybe a magic book is just a bible. You know, a lot of this conjuring stuff, you know, he's using the sort of biblical Latin to get these demons to appear. And he sells his soul to the devil in the same way that someone who's really, really cynical would say, well, if you're a Christian, you're just selling your soul to God.
34:42 Wes: So you're making me think again about. Well, you're really elaborating what I was calling omnipotence of thought, which is to say magic has a lot to do with the idea that we might, or the wish that we might use our thoughts to directly affect the world. And I mentioned ocd. So for instance, that's something in which people engage in kinds of rituals or even you could call them spells. Right. And everything is imbued with significance. So you know, step on a crack, break your mother's back. Some people really do avoid stepping on the cracks and.
Or you know, unless I flip the light switch up and down 10 times when I walk into a room, one of my parents is going to die or something might symbolically contaminate me. I might have mentioned this before, but there was a show on A and E called. It was about ocd. I think it was just called Obsessed or something like that. But there was a guy on there who every time he saw a certain type of car, he had the idea that he was contaminated. And then he had to ritualistically pretend to wash his arms. Not actually wash his arms and hands, but just go through the motions of that and would have to do that for some indeterminate amount of time.
It's a really horrific and debilitating and often the ritual is not enough or it doesn't last very long. But yeah, I like what you were saying about magic is this idea that everything is imbued with significance. So nothing is external trash. And what does external mean there? Right. Is that just accidental or not essential or not meaningful? That's what I was thinking. And I think your point hammers that. Hum.
36:19 Erin: Yeah, it doesn't get to the heart of things. It's extraneous.
36:22 Wes: There's real power in thinking and in particular mental development. And being a student, which is great. Right. Runs completely against the stereotype, for instance, of a professor who's completely impractical. But so from this section as well, maybe this is worth reading. These metaphysics of magicians and necromantic books are heavenly lines, circles, scenes, letters and characters. Aye, these are those that Faustus most desires. Oh, what a World of profit and delight, of power, of honor, of omnipotence. Is promised to the studious artisan. This mention of studious artisan.
37:02 Erin: Makes me think poetry is another way to get at this. But, you know.
37:07 Wes: Yeah, say something about that.
37:08 Erin: He doesn't want things to be inert. He wants to create. Rather than just study what's already been. Or memorize kind of dictums about ways. A sort of cookie cutter way to understand the world. This is what he dislikes, especially about the law. Or what he says about logic. You know, is to dispute. Well, logic's chiefest end. Affords this art no greater miracle. He wants the miracle of the thing. Turned into some transformation, some creation. This is obviously like being godlike. Is to create something out of nothing. Out of the materials one already has.
But to effect some sort of transformation on the world. And I think creativity of any sort is sort of aligned with this. I think the studiousness of Faustus. Which involves memorizing case studies. And applying them over and over again. Okay, this one is like this one. So this is how we're going to rule in this particular case. Because here's the precedent for it. And you're just sort of like stamping something out over and over again. And that same sort of issue with scholasticism. It's like, okay, well, you know, they have a problem with this element of God.
But if we apply this to that. Then here's the result we get. There's something dead and anti creative about that, in his view. And he wants the thing reinvigorated. And whether that be turning the scripture upside down. And reading some garbledygook out of it. And therefore proclaiming magic words. Or rearranging words into something that has a little spark of magic. Like a poet would. I think those two things are pretty closely related.
38:40 Wes: And there's what a poet does at least just thinking of metaphor. And the assimilation of different ideas to each other. But the idea that one thing can stand for another metaphorically. And that one might extend that to a great degree.
38:57 Erin: That's kind of a divine economy in and of itself. Right. It's like if you connect two things together. Then you get more than the two things. You get a third thing. It's like you have an excess. Which is more than just this paltry economy that Faustus dislikes. Of dividing things up. Rather, it's like a multiplication that happens. You create something extra.
39:18 Wes: Yeah. And I think it speaks to the idea that ultimately. There's a hidden unity to the world. Right. So this is one of the things that metaphor kind of reveals, is that there are these deep structural isomorphisms, let's say, between things. And speaking of magic, you might have the idea that it's like a voodoo doll or something, right? So I make a doll that looks like the thing and I pierce it. That other thing will feel pain. But that in poetic imagery, there's some control over the target of the metaphor. Or. I don't know. Before, in Much Ado About Nothing, we were talking a little bit about metaphor as a kind of argument, as a way of convincing yourselves of things.
Thinking of someone as being stained, impure and stained because of a illicit relationship or something like that. But, yeah, I think that's something for further thought, the relationship between metaphor and magic. But the other thing, you know, speaking of this whole idea of a possible underlying unity. So after he goes on, the angels come and nag him one way and the other, the good angel and the evil angel. And then after that, he's fantasizing about. Sorry to just skip over the angels like that, but it shows you where I'm coming from. But he gets excited by the thought of becoming a magician.
You know, I'm glutted with conceit of this. And what he's fantasizing about in particular are spirits being able to fetch him anything that he wants or do anything he wants. Examples of fetching include, like, getting him gold and pearls and fruits from all over the world. And then there's knowledge. So some of there's fetching, there's doing and there's knowledge. So knowledge, like philosophy and royal secrets and the doing part, it's really like construction and landscaping and fashion and war and political office and like war technologies.
That's the way it all breaks down in my notes. But construction, meaning, like putting a wall of what around the city? I forget the material. But the other thing that happens in there is this phrase that he uses, resolve me of all ambiguities. So how I'm blooded with conceit of this. Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please? Resolve me of all ambiguities. Literally, meaning, answer all his questions. But also, I think the implication. I mean, it is for contemporary reader. I think it would be for reader back then as well. But just to the resolution of ambiguity in the world and in one's thoughts, the resolution of any ambivalence.
41:49 Erin: It's a really interesting line that I hadn't noticed previously, because according to him, he's already resolved all the ambiguities, right? So it's strange that there's something that remains that still needs to be worked out, still needs to be cleared up.
42:02 Wes: Yeah. Knowledge plays a curious role here because it starts out with him being dissatisfied by all these academic pursuits and then it's like, okay, I want omnipotence and power, and some of that means getting rich. It's going to mean sex, some of it's going to mean war or building things, transforming the environment. But then here, knowledge is still playing this role. What's the point of knowledge if you can just magically do everything you want? Anyway, I thought he had shown that knowledge was already pointless, in other words. Right, and then now he's fantasizing about a spirit reading him philosophy. What? I'll have them read me strange philosophy. Yeah. I thought you just decided to leave academia and do a tech startup or something.
42:50 Erin: No, anyway, right. And influence policy and tell the secrets of all foreign kings. Yeah. It seems like what he's interested in knowing, he wants to just eavesdrop. He just wants to know what other people are talking about. Not necessarily towards any particular end. I mean, ultimately, the irony of this play, what makes it really, really funny, is that here, as you say, he's imagining all this various great deeds that he's going to perform. In the end, he basically sells his soul to the devil for a couple of cute magic tricks, one of which is a Looney Tunes skit where he beats up the Pope.
43:28 Wes: Well, also, he's basically a tourist. It's basically he won the big vacation on the Price is Right.
43:35 Erin: Right, Right.
43:36 Wes: So what does he do? He goes around being a tourist, he gets to play some pranks and apparently there's 24 years of this. I don't know how he'd do that for 24 years. But I had this in my notes as well. I thought this was incredibly ironic, what he ends up actually using his time for. What else does he do?
43:55 Erin: Right, he asks for a wife and he just gets a devil with fireworks in her hair, which is fantastic. Then he's like, this isn't a wife. And, yeah, odd work.
44:04 Wes: Which is great to hear Richard Burton say that, by the way. In that version.
44:08 Erin: I've got to see that. I can't believe I didn't. I haven't seen that yet because I heard about it. Because doesn't Elizabeth Taylor play Helen of Troy?
44:15 Wes: Yeah, and it's a bit ridiculous, I'm sure. You know, they have to, like, shoehorn her in as much as they can. And of course, she has no speaking part at all. And it's weird, but it's still great. It's still worth seeing.
44:26 Erin: That's so funny. Yeah. So they play a prank on the Pope. He gives someone horns. Wagner seems to be able to do about as much magic as Faustus. Without any of Faustus training, though maybe he's picked up a bit eavesdropping on his own.
44:42 Wes: And then Robin picks it up from Wagner. Right. So he's able to do a little bit as well. Yeah, it's like a pyramid scheme or a plague.
44:50 Erin: Faustus brags about how he's cured plagues, but he seems to have started another one and. Yeah, and then he does this whole thing for the emperor where he reproduces Alexander and Alexander's paramour.
45:01 Wes: Okay. So he gets to hang out with famous people. He gets to be famous and hang out with famous people. That's another aspect of this.
45:07 Erin: Yeah, he's like that David Copperfield guy who gets to go, you know, like, is he actually that great or is he just there to play for the birthday party for some rich person's kid? And then, you know, that speaks to the sort of anti creational aspect in some of these metaphors that you mentioned. Like when he says, magic that hath ravished me. And you also mentioned earlier in that same speech how I am glutted with conceit of this. Or in the prologue, when he says. Or when the chorus says that Faustus is swollen with cunning of a self conceit. So this idea that he's just pregnant with himself. Right. Like he's not actually creating anything new, he's not doing anything worthwhile. He's just sort of like playing with himself, basically.
45:53 Wes: Did it not occur to him to write a book or do something creative?
45:57 Erin: Right. Well, and then these things that he's producing out of thin air, like Helen of Troy or whatever, they're not even really.
46:02 Wes: They're just holograms, basically.
46:04 Erin: Exactly.
46:05 Wes: He invented the TV or something, you know? Right.
46:08 Erin: And if we think about what it literally is. I mean, it's. What it literally is is a man, an actor, dressed as a devil dressed as a woman. You know, like, if we think about the staging of this too, it gets pretty recursive.
46:22 Wes: Yeah. The one other thing. So we mentioned being famous, hanging out with famous people, being a tourist going to Rome, playing pranks. But the other thing, after he signs away his soul, which we can talk about that scene too. But the first thing he wishes for is a wife. And that's when the hot whore comes in, you know, that's Like Mephistopheles has to. Is that the first time we've said the name Mephistopheles? I think it is, because I trip over. Well, it's interesting. Say it three times and Michael Keaton shows up. But why is it important for Mephistopheles to distract Faustus from having a wife?
But then the other thing he does is he wants to know things. Right again, definition of. He wants a definition of what hell is. And then, actually, that's before he wishes for a wife. Then he wants to raise spirits. This comes up a number of times, like, can I raise spirits? Can I raise spirits? I want to raise spirits. That's what I want to do. And then, does he raise any spirits except for Helen? I guess he does, right? He does. Alexander. But anyway, as a party trip.
47:22 Erin: But does he? Does he? Or is it just devils?
47:25 Wes: Right, exactly. But then after the raising spirits question, he's like, okay, well, why don't you give me a book on astronomy and then also give me a book on botany? So again, we get this same collapse back into. First of all, there's a question of why Mephistopheles can't just, with a wave of the hand, give him omniscience and let him know all that without him having to read inefficiently read books in the same way that he would have to do if he were still being a student or being a teacher. So I found that very interesting, that it's like, wife, raising spirits, astronomy, botany, let's go. Okay. I want all the money in the world. Give me a private jet. Yeah.
48:04 Erin: In the end, he doesn't even really get to rule over any country or, like, none of the things that he wanted. And the speech where he describes everything that he would do, none of that happened.
48:13 Wes: And then for some reason, when he goes back to Wittenberg, in the end, the options are walk or take a horse. It's like, what? Haven't you guys been, like, riding around through the air, you know?
48:23 Erin: Yeah. That's a really interesting scene. I wrote a whole paper on that, so I have a whole, really thing about that. But before we get there, give the elevator speech.
48:31 Wes: Okay. Yeah.
48:32 Erin: No, let's go. Right. Well, actually, elevator speech is a good term. I'm happy to skip there. Except just prior to that, I think, like, I don't know if you had this experience, but for me, it's just really, really hard to keep track of everything that happens in the play because it's just the same thing over and over again. The scene will start, and Faustus will be like, oh, man, I shouldn't have done this. I'm really upset. Then the devils are just, like, distracting him. Or he gets yelled at for saying God's name out loud. And Lucifer's like, don't do that.
You should only say my name. And he's like, you're right. You're right. It's fine. It's fine. Everything will be fine. And then they do some magic trick. And then the scene ends. And there's a little, like, comic scene in the middle with Wagner or Robin. And then the whole thing starts all over again. And so by the time you get to the end of the play, you're just like, wait, what happened in what scene? Like, I was getting Alexander's paramour confused with Helen of Troy. Like, I don't know if you had that experience, but I just feel like it's really hard to keep track of what happens when.
And I wonder if it even matters.
49:30 Wes: The first time. It's just all a jumble. I mean, it's just like, okay, I might as well not almost not have read it. And then the second time, I'm sitting down and I'm just writing down all the notes, and I'm, like, structuring them. So I have a better sense now of the overarching quote, unquote plot, if you want to call it that. Right. There's very little. I think I read in some of the secondary reading I did for this. I think someone said, well, this is a play that has no middle. Yeah, that's here. I'm selling my soul to the devil. And then it's, oh, shit, I sold my soul to the devil.
Now I'm going to hell. And what happens in between, again is just quite. Doesn't live up to the grandiose. Before he sells to the soul of the devil, he calls in Valdes and Cornelius, his magician friends, to show him how to do it. These books, thy wit and our experience will basically make us all rich and famous and omnipotent. And then you have to ask the question, well, why haven't Valdes. Cornelius. Not done that for themselves already? Yeah. What do they need Faustus for? I love these incongruities because I don't think they're just accidents.
They're forms of irony. That's why the whole office version of this comes up. Because there's an element of confusion. These people are actually quite confused. And by some kind of luck, they get the devil conjured up.
50:52 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
50:53 Wes: Well.
50:53 Erin: And the devil makes a Point of saying. Mephistopheles makes a point of saying. Becomes kind of on his own accord or something.
51:00 Wes: That's right.
51:01 Erin: They kind of accidentally conjure him.
51:04 Wes: Yeah. Mephistopheles uses that phrase per accidens saying, well, no, you. Faustus didn't make me do anything. I can only follow Lucifer's instructions.
51:15 Erin: Yeah. He does this kind of, like, logical reasoning with Faustus. Which is pretty funny. He seems to know just as much scholastic logic as Faustus does. But what you're talking about here. I think it's kind of the hallmark of the play. This idea of, like, why does any of this have to happen? Or, why does the play even have no middle? Or, you know, I said before, like, this ouroboric quality to the play. Everything is a foregone conclusion. You go round and round in circles. And you don't really get anywhere. Even just like in the very beginning, after the prologue.
Faustus enters already in his study. Like, how does that happen? How is it possible that he could, like, enter but already be there? You know, the same thing with the prologue. Sort of like speaking for him in his infancy. For Faustus as an infant. But then Faustus has to be born over the course of the prologue. Like, there's something just really strange about this. And so in the sequence where they're walking in act for scene one. Where they're walking from the court of the Emperor Charles V. Back to Wittenberg. Something happens there where they're kind of performing the paradox at the heart of the play.
They have to walk back a distance of many, many miles. And yet they're there. And Faustus enters into his study. In the course of, like, 40 lines. Where they're walking. So there's this part where Faustus says. Now, Mephistopheles. The restless course that time doth run. With calm and silent foot. Shortening my days and thread of vital life. Calls for the payment of my latest years. Therefore, sweet Mephistopheles, let us make haste to Wittenberg. And then Mephistopheles says, what? Will you go on horseback or on foot? Faustus says, nay, till I am past this fair and pleasant green.
I'll walk on foot. So seems like a relatively uneventful little section of dialogue. But as I dug into it, I realized how strange this metaphor is. So this is the restless course that time doth run with calm and silent foot. So he's imagining, I guess, his life as, like, a track. Maybe a path that extends in one direction. Like through the woods or something.
53:14 Wes: Or.
53:15 Erin: Or even better, a Track that's sort of circular, like a running track. So that's his life and time is running on it. But that's kind of odd because the track and the ground, the set thing, the thing that's sort of in the earth, the permanent thing, is Faustus. Life and time is the impermanent thing, the runner that's going along it. That seems strange. These metaphors don't even add up. The runner then is shortening the length of the track by running on it. How is that possible? And then he says the thread of vital life, too. Okay, so he's imagining his life as being the thread of the Fates, which, fine, that's a common metaphor, but don't we all have in the Greek mythology, isn't it, that our life, the threat of our life, is a set length, and our life only ends when the Fates cut the thread with the scissors, so it's also shortening the thread of his life?
Well, that's really strange because our life has a set length. But also if they're shortening the thread, then aren't they making cuts to the thread which should themselves be fatal? So nothing kind of adds. And then it calls for the payment of my latest years. So what is it doing? It's like the track of one's life is calling for its own shortening. If you actually dig into so many of these metaphors, they don't actually make any sense. And somehow you kind of get to the end. You just arrive at the end without kind of knowing how you got there.
So something similar is happening, I think, in the course of the play where, like, we're seeing the whole term of Faustus's servitude, this 24 years. It's happening within the span of, you know, however long it takes to stage this play. Two or three hours. Like, we think we're seeing 24 years, but it's really down to the space of a couple of hours. In fact, like the end of the
55:03 Wes: life, very little actually happens.
55:05 Erin: Very little happens. And really the majority of the time is spent in the last hour or so of his life, right? Like the end is magnified and magnified. Nothing really happens. They don't really get anywhere. So I kind of describe this just
55:19 Wes: some second act hijinks, right?
55:21 Erin: They're walking on a magical treadmill. Everything is kind of squeezed. And then somehow they're at the end. The figures of speech are squeezed together. The action of the play is kind of all squeezed together. And then somehow it's the end of his life and he has to be dragged down to hell.
55:36 Wes: Yeah.
55:36 Erin: It's so strange. The metaphors are performing the plot of the play.
55:41 Wes: Interesting. This is what you wrote your paper on?
55:44 Erin: Yeah. Can you tell? I'm so excited about this one little part of the. No, but it explains so much of this bizarre wordplay that happens over the course of the play. Or even just like in the prologue, or the fact that he's pregnant with himself. He's arrived already here, he enters already on the stage. There's something you might call it stillborn about the play and about Faustus as a character, which I think speaks to this idea of him being a reprobate. The foregone conclusion of the state of his soul, the fact that the people coming to the play already know what's going to happen to him. I think all of that is kind of tied up in this really clever kind of magic trick that Marlowe plays. By tying this all together over the course of a couple of hours.
56:29 Wes: What are some versions of Faustianism that afflict us? As I've said, you could read self consciousness as a kind of bargain with the devil as well, and as what it means to fall or something like that. But if you were to think about this kind of thing in more mundane terms, maybe you would think about the pretensions of the intellectual or the artist. Someone who thinks they're going to write a great novel or write something that's going to change the world. And I think ultimately thinking about myself and my own ambitions. What's the point? What's the point of all this?
Go through that Faust thing in the very beginning. Why do any of this. And I think for people who are. Let's just think specifically about writers, you use that phrase, make a difference. People do want to make a difference, but not in the same way as someone who's going to go out and start a non profit organization to feed the poor. It's a different kind of difference. It's a little more grandiosely oriented because it's about influencing people. And if you're writing political columns, it might be as simple as I don't want to convince people of the right political opinions.
But if you're writing poetry or novels, it could be, well, I just want to entertain people. But it could also be, well, I want to improve people. Ultimately I want people to be less stupid. I want them to not be so idiotic. And that will actually reduce a lot of the crazy, horrible stuff that happens in the world. Right. There's a kind of conceit or hope or dream that if we educate people, we civilize them, and that some of the things that afflict the world, like war, for instance, would be less common. Or, for instance, that if I educate people in a certain way, then that is important to living in a liberal society that has just laws and doesn't break down in chaos and.
And those sorts of things. So it's a fantasy of enlightenment, of enlightening the world. And maybe, you know, for a philosopher walking out of the cave, figuring out what the truth is, bringing it back in, I think the idea there is improvement of people. And if you look at that psychologically, part of it is just to make them more worthy of love, of our love or whatever relationship we're going to have with people, because people are so complicated and ambiguous and. And our relationships to them are ambivalent and ambiguous. So if you can perfect your objects of desire or the people to whom you're related, then they can become worthy of relating.
And this gets back to the phrase of the Faust phrase, resolve all ambiguities, which is to say, to resolve the ambiguity of having the imperfection of human relationships and the way they're fraught with conflict and loving people despite their faults and all of that stuff. So this speaks to some of Faust's manic motive, right? Which is to avoid mourning the imperfections of others and hold on to something ideal. So his omnipotence is not just about the literal level of wanting knowledge or riches or any of that stuff. It's about wanting to hold on to this ideal relationship to people, which is like the idealized relationship to our parents, but also has something to do with our, if we're believers, to our relationship to God, right?
So in a way, he's trying to, I don't know, maybe substitute the world for God or something like that.
59:49 Erin: That sounds like eternal life, right? Like just the desire, like medicine is not enough for him because he wants to live forever. So that would be the substitution of the world for God in a way, right? Like the riches that are supposed to be waiting for us in heaven he doesn't quite believe in, right? So he would want an internal stay on earth. He would want to continually make a meal out of his earthly life, like the feast that never ends. But that's the way that heaven is usually thought of traditionally, as like an eternal feast. Instead, he wants to create that on earth for himself out of a kind of. Like what you're saying, out of a kind of knowledge of. Almost like eating the earth. Is that going too far?
1:00:27 Wes: No, No, I think that's good.
1:00:30 Erin: But then we might say that what is Marlow then doing in creating this play? Is he attempting to edify us by telling us, hey, don't sell your soul to the devil? Is that the message here? And is that a message people need to hear? Don't put anything in writing. Seems to be the lesson.
1:00:49 Wes: Why the devil needs it in writing is another question.
1:00:52 Erin: But, yeah, right. Let's actually go to that scene.
1:00:54 Wes: Yeah. So this is act two, scene one. So we just had an interlude with Wagner and Robin where basically, Wagner impresses Robin into magical service. Kind of a replication of the relationship between Faustus and Wagner. You're going to be my helper. So then this is at the point right at the beginning of Act 2, Scene 1. Faustus is going to say, now, Faustus, must thou needs be damned, and canst thou not be saved? What boots it then, to think of God or heaven? Away with such vain fancies and despair. Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub. Now go not backward. No, Faustus, be resolute. Why waverest thou? O, something soundeth in my ears. Abjure this magic. Turn to God again. I was like, huh? Where have I heard this abjure this magic before?
1:01:47 Erin: Right.
1:01:47 Wes: Tempest. And, yeah, this breath of magic, what is it, this rough magic I hear? Abjure.
1:01:52 Erin: Drown your book, Faustus.
1:01:54 Wes: Yeah, exactly. And then we go on to. He turns away from that, and he has the idea that, well, God loves thee not. God doesn't actually love me. And we get a little bit of the good and bad angels struggling to.
1:02:07 Erin: I love that. What's a bad angel?
1:02:08 Wes: Yeah, right. And then he develops this idea that, well, nothing can hurt me. Religion is basically foolish. It's lunacy. Think only of honor and wealth, and nothing can hurt him if he has Mephistopheles by him side.
1:02:24 Erin: Mephistopheles says that if you want me to wait on you, you'll have to buy my service with your soul. Sort of paraphrasing there.
1:02:31 Wes: A deed of gifts with thine own blood for that security craves great Lucifer. Why the legalities. And this is something that Lucifer and Mephistopheles are going to use to keep Faustus from repenting. Right. They're going to say, well, you made a deal. You signed a contract. It would be unjust. They appeal to the concept of justice. It would be unjust for you to try and get out of it, even though the good angel is telling Faustus that actually, if you just repent,
1:03:00 Erin: you
1:03:00 Wes: can still save yourself.
1:03:02 Erin: Yeah, It Seems like Lucifer is just as much of a Justinian as God is. Both of them have the higher law of law, and, I guess capitalism or something. You have to buy this.
1:03:16 Wes: Higher law is interesting. It's an interesting phrase because there's no overarching authority to enforce a contract between the devil and Faustus. There's either force or there's the law based on society and a monopoly of force by the powers that be. So the government enforces the contract, but we're just enforcing our own contracts. It doesn't make much sense. There's a legal agreement outside of any really legal framework. So it's one of the oddities. Any kind of sell your soul to the devil story. I think the irony is pretty obvious.
1:03:51 Erin: This gets to the kind of scariness of this sort of Calvinistic predestination problem. Right? Because the higher law is God's law, supposedly. And therefore, it's like you have to be damned. Like, the thing that's enforcing your damnation is God in a weird way. Like, it's a very strict economy. There's no sort of supernumerary economy of grace that can save you from the brink. I mean, we might even question when he's at the beginning of the scene, he hears this voice, abjure this magic, turn to God again. Like, is that the voice of grace? We don't know. Does he have a chance at salvation? We don't know. But it seems like, yeah, like this contract law, which is higher than Lucifer's law, is that, like, higher than God's law, too? Or is it God's law basically saying, you have to sell your soul to the devil? It's a sort of logical hiccup
1:04:38 Wes: that security craves Great Lucifer. It's like the contract is security. It's like, well, if you don't live up to your end of it, I'm going to take this piece of paper to who? Who are you going to show it to?
1:04:50 Erin: Lucifer.
1:04:51 Wes: And then Faustus asks some questions I think we all might want to ask about how any of this makes sense. It's really questioning the whole mythology around all of this. Right. That's what Marlow, I think, is doing, or questioning maybe the utility of it. So Faustus will say, what good is my soul to Lucifer? And Mephistopheles response is, basically, Lucifer likes misery and company, and the more people he can get down into his kingdom, the more soothing it is to have other people suffering with him so he doesn't have to suffer alone. Yeah. So very, very interesting response.
1:05:28 Erin: Maybe this is a delaying tactic. He then asks, have you any pain that tortures others? I go, well, tell me about that. Are you in pain? Maybe he's trying to buy some time.
1:05:39 Wes: And to his credit, Mephistopheles is honest. Right. Lucifer will later on say, oh, hell is full of delights. But when he distracts him with the seven deadly sins pageant. But here. Yeah. Mephistopheles is very upfront.
1:05:53 Erin: We sort of feel sorry for him. It's like, are we supposed to pity the devil?
1:05:56 Wes: And we should remember he's dressed up like a friar the whole time. Because in the beginning, there is so much fan service. Yeah, right, right. Exactly.
1:06:07 Erin: Yeah.
1:06:09 Wes: It's a nice little joke, but at the expense of Catholics. But it sends Mephistopheles off, and he's like, I'm not going to have you be looking like a devil all the time. That's weird. Let's just dress up as a friar, and then we can go to work. Yeah.
1:06:22 Erin: It's interesting. He doesn't want to face the reality of it. He has to dress it up in something that will satisfy a Protestant audience.
1:06:28 Wes: Yeah. Faustus says that's a more suitable look for a devil is the garb of a friar. Yeah.
1:06:34 Erin: Yeah. But there's something about like he's not ever really facing the reality. In spite of the fact that he has a demon in front of him, he continually denies the existence of hell. I think he maintains the sort of pagan idea that hell isn't really a place of torment, Even though he has the testimony of Mephistopheles standing right in front of him, Telling him that he's gonna be tormented down there. Then there's this really funny and kind of odd moment where he's trying to write the contract in his own blood, but the blood keeps clotting. It keeps clotting and then running, Clotting and then running.
And Faustus is kind of trying to write meaning into the clotting of his blood. He says, what might the staying of my blood portend? Is it unwilling I should write this bill? Why streams it not that I may write afresh? So he's wondering if there's some divine will in his blood. Clotting and not being able to write. And then when the blood runs so that he can write with it, he's like, oh, okay. Well, this does mean I should write. I should give away my soul. Finally, he says, faustus gives to thee his soul. Ah, there it stayed. Why shouldst thou not?
Is not thy soul thine own? Then write again. Faustus gives to thee his soul. So he's like, sort of unable to write it. And finally he's like, you know what? I should just be able to do this, because isn't my soul my own to give away to whoever I want? So he's sort of reading maybe some divine intervention and this idea of the blood clotting. And then finally he's like, you know what? I'm the one who has the authority to give away my soul as I want. And that gets the blood flowing enough that he can then write it for himself. So he seems to be the divine actor in that little fanciful moment.
1:08:08 Wes: So after that, he asks Mephistopheles, where is Hell? And Mephistopheles gives this answer, under the heavens. And this is really like the first request right after he's actually signed the contract. He does mention previously raising up the spirits, actually, when he gives this very legalistic speech about, okay, here's what I get for signing the contract. Here's what Lucifer's going to do for me. Which is a kind of funny little legalistic speech. But then it's Mephistopheles, ask what thou wilt. And then, where is Hell under the heavens? And then Mephaustus objects to that.
And Mephistopheles says, hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place. For where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there must we ever be. This is one of the cooler lines in the whole play. And it's something that gets paid off later. And first of all, here, Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place. For where we are in Hell, and where Hell is, there must we ever be. And to conclude, when all the world dissolves and every creature shall be purified, all places shall be Hell that is not heaven. At which point Faustus says, well, he thinks Hell's a fable, which is a really odd thing to do to say when you are talking to a devil.
Why would the Hell be a fable any more than the Devil? And Mephistopheles says, I think so, till experience changed thy mind. And then Faustus, pain in the afterlife is an old wives tale. Mephistopheles says, well, I'm actually a counterexample to that. And Faustus is surprised. So, you know, basically like even while you're here walking and disputing, you're in Hell, this is kind of paid off. Later on we get more about Hell. So, yeah, I thought that was one of the More interesting, let's talk about what hell is.
1:09:53 Erin: This is Miltonian, Right. Doesn't Lucifer say, which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell? Something like that. What can we make out of that? I don't know.
1:10:03 Wes: So it's a little bit of a theological discussion in a way. Right. That's happening within the play. And part of what's happening is the very first thing that Faustus wants after signing away his soul is an answer to some theological questions, which is a very interesting reason for signing away his soul. That's really the core motive. It's like, because that's, you know, hey, divinity didn't really solve any of these, you know, studying theology didn't solve any of these questions for me. So why don't I go ahead and consign myself to eternal damnation and then I'll get the answers that I want about God and the devil and hell and this and that.
1:10:42 Erin: Yeah, this is another sort of like putting the cart before the horse kind of element of the play. Yeah. So that's the first thing that he asks then, is to get knowledge of what hell is. That's really interesting because I thought it was the wife.
1:10:56 Wes: Yeah, the wife happens right after that. Yeah.
1:10:59 Erin: Yeah.
1:10:59 Wes: We unfortunately are like, faustus are running out of time. What's the fancy way he says it? Someone's running and there's a thread. And I forget
1:11:12 Erin: the restless course that time doth run with calm and silent foot is running out of time.
1:11:16 Wes: Yes, the hour is going to strike soon. And all the yes, whatever deal we've made that's allowing this podcast to come to fruition, we're going to have to pay. But anyway, we're going to transition into Postscript and Discuss, have another 20 minutes or so of discussion there. And we are going to get finally to this final one of these final, I mean, I guess the final scenes. One of them where Helen of Troy appears and then the other one where he does a lot of complaining before he finally is damned.
1:11:48 Erin: But bummer.
1:11:52 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you,
1:11:56 Erin: thank
1:11:56 Wes: you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Shows like Food, with former New York Times food journalist and best selling author Mark Bittman, and Movie Therapy, in which Siskel and Ebert meets Dear Abby. AirwaveMedia.com.
Fate and Blame in “Long Day’s Journey into Night”
Sep 26, 2022
Who is to blame for Mary Tyrone’s morphine addiction? Is it Mary herself? Is it Edmund, her younger son, after whose difficult birth Mary was first prescribed the drug? Is it Jamie, her older son, who caused the death of the brother that Edmund was born to replace? Is it the doctor who prescribed morphine too readily? Or is it James, Mary’s husband, who hired a third-rate doctor because he was too cheap to pay for his wife’s proper care? James, in turn, will have his own story to tell of familial suffering and a miserliness acquired from a childhood fear of the poorhouse. To ask who is to blame for Mary’s addiction, or for the alcoholism that seems to plague every other Tyrone, is to ask who or what is responsible for our own suffering. Are our woes self-created—or at least self-perpetuated? Or is suffering something visited upon us by caregivers, the legacies of nature or nurture that we are powerless to control? If so, whom do we have the right to accuse? Wes & Erin discuss.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: Who is to blame for Mary Tyrone's morphine addiction? Is it Mary herself? Is it Edmund, her younger son, after whose difficult birth Mary was first prescribed the drug? Is it Jamie, her older son, who caused the death of the brother that Edmund was born to replace? Is it the doctor who prescribed morphine all too readily? Or is it James, Mary's husband, who hired a third rate doctor because he was too cheap to pay for his wife's proper care? James, in turn will have his own story to tell of familial suffering and a miserliness acquired from a childhood fear of the poorhouse.
To ask who is to blame for Mary's addiction or for the alcoholism that seems to plague every other Tyrone, is to ask who or what is responsible for our own suffering? Are our woes self created or at least self perpetuated? Or is suffering something visited upon us by character caregivers? The legacies of nature or nurture that we're powerless to control? If so, whom do we have the right to accuse? Today we're discussing Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, in one of the several editions that I own of this play, it turns out Harold Bloom wrote the intro in one of them.
Bloom kind of surprises me in his assessment of the play, which he thinks is the greatest American play, but only kind of by default. There's a little reluctance. He says, okay, so if Eugene o' Neill is our greatest American playwright and this is his best play, then, well, I guess this is America's greatest play. And he seems to think that the power of the play lies in the stage directions, in the bits of business that o' Neill really writes quite a bit of in between the lines of dialogue. So I guess I'd kind of extrapolate from Bloom's point to say that maybe there are very few if any memorable single lines of dialogue in the play, which is sort of surprising.
It's not like maybe Streetcar to use another play that we've talked about on the podcast, which has a couple of those really memorable moments, at least that the movie has made famous. So I guess I just kind of wonder if you agree with that, if you think that this is America's greatest play by default, and where you think what is great about this play if the lines aren't particularly memorable.
2:47 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting you say that. I had that thought that it's Very unplay, like dialogue in a way. Even though the speeches are often quite long. There's honestly not that much poetry to it, I guess, is the way to put it. Even though Eugene o', Neill, he was a poet and like Edmund, the play, I'm sure, as people know, is highly autobiographical. And many of the names have not been changed, although he's switched his name and made himself Edmund in the play and made the dead brother Eugene. And of course, this wasn't supposed to be published or performed.
It wasn't supposed to be performed at all. Right. It wasn't supposed to be published until 25 years after his death, which his wife did not honor that request. So I honestly had trouble enjoying this, let's just put it that way, which surprised me. And I haven't read this since high school and all I remembered from high school is that there were people drinking in the play. It's just like, all right, there's going to be people drinking. So this surprised me. Nothing resonated from my memory. And as I read it, I just kind of felt sucked down into the quagmire of misery.
And there's not much that's pleasurable to kind of redeem that you're just kind of stuck with these people and these very plain speeches. There are some impassioned, just a few, just a handful of impassioned, touching speeches in this, but a lot of it is just bickering. And it took me, it was a slog for me to get through it.
4:34 Erin: In all honesty, I felt that way too. I also hadn't read it since high school either, and I remember being ecstatic about it in high school, which I don't know what to attribute that to at this point. Maybe because it seemed like such a grown up play and I was probably about 14 when I read it. I think that the, you know, the strange thing about the lack of memorable dialogue too, is the fact that so much of the dialogue is repeated. So you would think that some lines would kind of, you know, raise their heads above the parapet and be memorable for that reason, because so many of the accusations are sort of traded or someone will say something that later, another character, it'll come out of their mouth.
And yet I think maybe it's because it's also sort of plain spoken that even those repeated like, you recognize them, oh, someone said that before, but after the play's over, you can't say, oh, that's, you know, I remember that line. And so I think that ultimately the effect is, is just extremely cumulative. So the power of the play maybe comes in that sort of snowball result where at the end we feel weighed down and we feel like the powerlessness of the family to change and all that stuff. So I think that's part of it, too. Is that the slog of it, which is very purposeful, or must be.
It doesn't really reward you until maybe the very. And then it's a funny kind of reward. Did you watch any adaptations of this?
6:02 Wes: I watched a little bit of the Katharine Hepburn, and I watched half of a Canadian 1996. It's the one I liked the best, by Wellington.
6:14 Erin: Oh, I knew you were gonna say that. That one bored me to tears. I had to turn it off.
6:18 Wes: I just thought it was the best in terms of acting. But I also. Yeah, it wasn't captivating, but neither was the written play. And I did watch bits of the Katharine Hepburn. And maybe if I had just let myself get into the Katharine Hepburn, it would have been more engaging if I'd given that more of a chance.
6:37 Erin: That's another reason, I think, why I was struck by the play as a kid was because I did watch the Katharine Hepburn version. And though I wish that Fredric March, who played it on Broadway, was playing James Tyrone in the film, I'm not a Ralph Richardson fan, particularly. I think Robards is great in it. And Kate is just. I think, from the very beginning, she's playing the character with so much tension that wasn't there for me in the Canadian production. So she's sort of immediately riveting. And I think it's a fantastic performance. One of her best.
And it takes a lot of the boring stretches on the page and makes them really captivating. Maybe just because she's so captivating and she's so sort of oddly gorgeous in the film. You know, she looks both. You know, she looks super young in certain stretches and super old in others. She seems to be able to shapeshift or something. So that was really effective. And I think Mary is the. Obviously, that's the prime role. I saw a couple of clips also on YouTube of Laurie Metcalf, and I thought her interpretation would have been really interesting to see on the stage.
7:42 Wes: Which one is that?
7:44 Erin: It was just a stage production. And so the clips were of. They must have been used to either, like, they did a broadcast performance, the stage one, or it was just used to promote the play, something like that. But I thought her interpretation was really interesting. And then I saw the same thing with a Jessica Lange production, which I thought was much less Interesting. I could kind of predict what that was going to be like.
8:09 Wes: I saw a little bit of that. And then there's the one with Jack Lemmon and what's his face from House of Cards.
8:15 Erin: Yeah. Kevin Spacey.
8:16 Wes: Kevin Spacey. And that looked good. I just can't abide Jack Lemmon.
8:21 Erin: Sorry, what?
8:25 Wes: Yeah.
8:26 Erin: Wait, what?
8:26 Wes: I don't know, it's just.
8:28 Erin: But I thought you love Jack Lemmon because. Jack Lemmon.
8:31 Wes: When did I say that?
8:33 Erin: Oh, I don't know. Well, I thought you liked the Apartment and.
8:36 Wes: Well, the. The Apartment, Yeah, in the Apartment. But otherwise, if he's in a. When he's in plays. I don't know, I haven't. Like in Kenneth Branagh's the Hamlet. Can't abide him either.
8:48 Erin: Oh, wow. Well, that's. His other great role is the. What was it?
8:53 Wes: The guard. Right, the guard. Yeah. Yeah. He's. Yeah. It sounds like the cumulative effect for you was that you enjoyed the play by the end of it.
9:05 Erin: I'm also interested in this assumption that it is our darkest play, which is something that Bloom says in the intro as well. I mean, to compare it to Streetcar. There's certainly a lot of dysfunction in the play, of course, but there's also a lot of love in the play. And maybe I'm reading in the facts behind it. There's a certain self evident biographical element which if you know anything about Eugene o' Neill at all, you know this is about him. And if you know that Edmund is a proxy for Eugene o', Neill, then he obviously did beat tuberculosis and go on to write this play.
Right. So there's a certain kind of triumph that's sort of embedded in that. And then there's the less evident biographical element which you would have to dive deeper into the biography to know. Which, okay, yes, Jamie drank himself to death, but I think the mother actually did beat her addiction to morphine. And I think that was in the play, takes place in 1912. I think the mother beat the addiction in 1914, something like that. And also for a good chunk of his adult life, o' Neill had a reasonably good relationship with his father. And of course, none of that is evident in the play itself.
But I guess just the fact that these people do love each other, that is obvious to me. And they do sort of will the best for each other on a certain level. Of course, the tension in that is most obvious when they're sort of like telling Edmund he shouldn't be drinking because it's not good for him, and then they're Sort of like rewarding him with a drink at every turn, you know? So there's this disagreement about what is good for you.
10:39 Wes: There's no harm in it just as an appetizer before dinner or a tonic.
10:44 Erin: Right. It might improve your appetite in moderation.
10:47 Wes: Of course, if you do that 50 times during the day.
10:52 Erin: Yeah.
10:53 Wes: Then it's going to spoil your whiskey. Dinner during the night.
10:59 Erin: That's right. Then Edmund checks into the clinic or whatever and discovers that he has the world's only case of quadruple tb, tttt,
11:07 Wes: bbb, or who knows, you know, the alcohol may have destroyed it.
11:13 Erin: Yeah, that's right. That's right. It's like drinking Lysol anyway. So, I don't know. I mean, maybe that's kind of dumb of me to. To think that this isn't so dark, but I just. I think the end of Streetcar, you know, when Blanche is being carried off is a heck of a lot sadder and more disturbing ultimately, because nobody cared about her. I don't know.
11:38 Wes: Was Mary not lost at the very end of it?
11:42 Erin: Yeah, but they're really sad about that. I don't know.
11:47 Wes: I mean, she is. There are some Blanche like qualities to her. At least that's the for sure. The experience I had during this, though. One of the things that happens a lot during the play is the alternation between different states. You were kind of getting at this with the whole idea that there's a lot of love. So people are quickly alternating between on the one moment saying something affectionate and then on the other saying something really cruel or mean. And in Mary's case, you get some of that. And then you also get her alternating between states of being kind of detached and carefree, especially under the influence of morphine, and then being more openly distressed.
And then you have her alternation between sitting at home and hating people and wanting to be alone, not wanting to be around anyone. And then as soon as they arrive saying, I was so lonely. It's such a good thing you're back. I had to hang out with horrible Cathleen just to not be lonely. So this is one of the things in the play that it's kind of crazy making. It's hard to experience is this alternation back and forth between affection and meanness. I mean, hey, at least they communicate as family, right? No one's unclear about where. It's not like it's all repressed underneath the surface.
Everyone's saying what's going on in their head.
13:24 Erin: Yeah, it's like one big long family meeting.
13:27 Wes: Exactly. So for better or for worse, everything is very out in the open. On the other hand, something is in a fog, right? Fog is a major theme of the play, especially in Mary's case. But I think this applies to everyone. There's the attempt to not be seen. So Mary, she wants to be able to have her habit to do the drug, but to get everyone to ignore that. And she's constantly troubled by the idea that people aren't ignoring it or can't or they're suspicious of her. And you know, her big thing with the hair, which I guess her hair gets unkempt when she's using so she's worried about it falling down.
And then that's sort of connected to her larger concerns about getting old and the ugliness of her hands and getting too fat and things like that. So her physical appearance is a tell in a way. It's a tell for her age and it's also a tell for her morphine use. And what she seems to prefer or demand of others is that they simply just not notice it, that there kind of be a fog in between the family members and people just refuse to say anything. So maybe that. And then of course there's the fog effect of the drug its on her psyche. It's like a family that just can't leave some things unsaid.
And so you get this attempt to ameliorate the effect of that by introducing intoxicants. And for her it's morphine in particular. But you could apply this to the other guys as well. You know, what is it they're doing with the alcohol? Is that the cause of the family dynamic? I mean obviously it's not just the cause, but it's the effect of it as well. They're trying to handle something with the drugs and alcohol. And I was thinking it has something to do with desiring to be less frank. In a way it's like trying to undercut the natural frankness of their relationships.
But that's kind of an unformed thought. I don't know. What do you think of that?
15:36 Erin: Yeah, it's sort of like the longing for repression or the idea, the wish that they could repress things. They seem to want to dampen everything, including from each other, and yet they're addicted. They're addicted to drugs that seem to make them loose lipped. I think someone at some point says in vino veritas, that line is in the play. So there's one line I remember. But anyway, you know, and there's something funny about that too, because they're not drinking wine, of course, but you know, the morphine sort of like lets the cat out of the bag for.
For Mary's craziness, right. She goes on these, these flights of fancy which you can tell that the other characters find extremely embarrassing. You know, she starts reminiscing about her childhood and all this other stuff, you know, the veracity of which is sort of consistently questioned. But at least this is the idea of her, to herself and her history that she wants to rehearse. And then we have the men who are also drinking quantities of things that make them start to open up. And the fact of addiction itself is also something that's very, very difficult to hide.
You know, you are making yourself vulnerable in those ways too. And so I don't know how to tie all that together. It seems to me also to be related to this class difference which then at the same time like they're living in a house which we know is dilapidated, at least on the inside. I don't know if mention is made of the outside of the house and how much people know of James miserliness that at least among the men, seems to be another open secret in the town. But it seems to me like there's a desire for them to be. Or that rather that the desire that they have to repress all of these problems is somehow aspirational, like class aspirational as well.
Or maybe I'm. Maybe I'm overreading.
17:29 Wes: Well, now I'm having two thoughts as you, as you speak, I was thinking about the way in which alcohol is used in the play with the father and the brothers and the level of denial involved in that. So with Tyrone saying he never gets drunk and with. At some level they understand it's a serious problem. But then you have this very light hearted. And these in a way are the most light hearted moments in the play when they're having a drink, when they, you know, it's like, oh, that's just how, you know, just one won't hurt. Steal some from the father's bottle, fill it up with water.
And it kind of reminds me not to get too personal of my own childhood where there were decrepit conditions, but it was food. Food was the celebratory thing. So you had these sort of. It's really odd because there's a. Those are the moments in which they kind of rise out of the misery and it's almost like they're toasting to each other in celebration of some accomplishment, some non existent accomplishment. And Then the other thing you were talking about, class, I was thinking about, well, what is it that just led them from being so cut off from the world?
In a way, Mary feels friendless and alone, and she blames that on Tyrone being a traveling actor. Right. So she never had a home. We should talk about home a bit, too. Home is a big part of this and what that means, and maybe we can make some connections to E.T. just kidding. But, yeah, they are cut off and they're stuck with each other. And I think that's part of the problem. They're too entangled in the family dynamic. They don't have enough connection with the outside world. And that's what's naturally foggy. Right. If you're too embroiled in the familial scene, it's hard for reality to cut through that.
So because the mode of engagement of the males, the guys in the play, is, again, it's through bar rooms and drinking and that kind of thing. And that's not a real. And whores. It's not a real engagement. So they, in a sense, are just as cut off as Mary is. And why is that? Is it really just because of that itinerant lifestyle, or is it something else?
19:47 Erin: I think the reason why I'm thinking about this is because of that James Joyce class that I took this past semester. In it, I read a lot of helpful secondary literature about Irish culture and why certain patterns emerged within that based on things like the Potato Famine and how that was actually played out in terms of the way that society worked. And I know I mentioned this in our episode on the Dead, but Ireland at this time, so 1912, and this would have started, I think, right during or after the Potato famine, they had one of the lowest, if not the lowest, I think, marriage rate in the world, at least in Europe.
And there was a culture in Ireland of men sort of not being able to marry for reasons that they felt as though there were many different reasons interwoven. But for the purposes of gravity, I'll just say because maybe they couldn't get food on the table or, you know, for work reasons. Right. And so there was a culture of men going to the pub and spending all day at the pub and only being with other men. And very often because they weren't getting married, they lived with their mothers. So they were trying to sort of escape women by having this sort of fraternal connection.
It reminded me so much of the way that this family works. And, of course, Eugene o' Neill would have known this intimately. And it seems as though James Tyrone, the father, is still holding on to a lot of these sort of Irish dynamics. And so I wonder, you know, Mary is the only woman and she's extremely isolated for that reason among others. And what the morphine does for her is make her even more feminine, right. More childlike. It makes her kind of dreamier and it makes her reflect on feminine concerns basically on the domain of women. She thinks about her childhood fantasy of wanting to become a nun and be in a convent which would have been an all female environment of being at boarding school, which was presumably also an all female environment.
And so I think there's something there too though I don't, you know, I haven't worked this out and I don't know what that is but it seems like part of the issue here is almost like the aggression and the sort of anti woman sentiment which is sort of most obvious in Jamie because of his inability to be around any other women except for these prostitutes. It's most obvious in him but I think it's also expressed in all the other men in the family as well. I can only imagine that the relationship to class is also tied up in this. Right. If you have a woman who's given a certain household budget or, or whatever with which to run a proper home that's like part of the requirements of being a certain class is having a place to entertain and having a woman to make up a home and to make people comfortable.
That's just a basic of being any class, but particularly high class.
22:49 Wes: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think it's one of the brothers. I think it might be Jamie who when he's back from the whorehouse says something about men being nothing without the love of a woman. Do you remember that?
23:03 Erin: Yeah. Edmund asks him, what did you do uptown tonight? Go to Mamie Burns, presumably. That's the madam. Jamie says, sure thing. Where else could I find suitable feminine companionship and love, don't forget love. What is a man without a good woman's love? A goddamned hollow shell, Right. The two of them are laughing together and Edmund says, you're a nut.
23:25 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So it's really interesting of course, because there isn't actually any love there. Right. So in a way this is a parody, but in a way I think he means it. And then he tells the story of picking Fat Violet because he pities her and then wants to talk to her and then she's thinks of him as beneath her and then they end up kind of falling for each other or something. Like that. That's the way that story runs, but it's all fake. And what you were saying was making me think that these are men who. So Tyrone found a good woman and someone that he loved and someone who loved him.
And he even says, at a certain point, this is why I think. I was thinking it might have been Tyrone who said this. But he says something like, his ambition was, in a way, enabled or was. You know, he was already successful by the time he met her, but she, in a way, anchored his ambition and her love, in a way, made his career. But she never got to be the homemaker. She never got to fully play that role because he was dragging her around with him, you know, to cheap hotels and all that, as she puts it. And then. So the brothers, for the brothers, it's even worse, right?
They never. I'm just thinking about the extent to which. Yeah, all of this is a. Maybe the way to put it is there's not a strong enough feminine principle at work, and that's the source of all the disorganization and destabilization and chaos in the family. The feminine principle is far too weak.
25:09 Erin: I think that's right. There are lots of crossed wires in the play in terms of accusation and blame. I feel like almost everything that anyone says in the play is either is just blaming someone or accusing someone of the family problems. At one point, there's this idea floated that, well, the reason why they couldn't have people over or the reason why Mary doesn't have any friends is because of her problem. There's a constant desire to look at the genetics of Mary's morphine addiction. That is like what started it in the first place. There's this sense that, well, she couldn't make a home because Tyrone wanted her on the.
On the road with him. Right. He wanted her to be a wife to him. And that's part of the reason why Jamie killed that Eugene, the middle child, because Mary wasn't there to watch over Jamie and to keep him away from that baby when he had measles. And it was because she was on the road with Tyrone. And so there's an interesting split there where he seems to want her around and he seems to have a desire for that femininity. However, it's sort of like he wants his wife around, but really she's supposed to be at home. That's her story, anyway, that she's supposed to be at home taking care of the children and running the.
The proper home. So there seems to be a sort of Tension there. But anyway, I think all of this brings us to this idea of who is the one who's responsible for Mary's addiction? Who is responsible for it, in your view?
26:41 Wes: That's a really good question. Because it's who or what? Is it because of her hands, her rheumatism? Is it because of childbirth, which you could recast in a personal way, is because of Edmund in particular? He's to blame. Is it Tyrone? Is it his itinerant lifestyle and their essential homelessness? Or is it the psychological version of that? He's also not fully there. So you could talk a lot about Tyrone's problems and the legacy of poverty, which I think is connected to what you were talking about with Ireland and his stinginess and his inability to be generous, his inability to keep the lights on, which is not unconnected from the fog, his inability to shed light on the situation because it demands too much of him, because it's.
Because he's too insecure about losing everything, about going to the poorhouse, not just literally, but spiritually, psychologically. So he, in a way, is withholding, and that's part of the problem. She talks a lot about loneliness, right. And that we can say that there's a lot of truth to that. Part of what people do when they're using drugs and alcohol is that they're trying to recreate the effect of human connection. They're trying to make the substance replace other people, which it can to some extent, because the effects of being drugged or intoxicated in some ways approximate the feelings that you get from human connection.
But what you can't get out of that is the true sense of being seen by others and heard by others. You know, Mary talks a lot about, you know, I want someone to joke with, I want someone to gossip with. The drug can't do that. If the drug could do that, then it might be a full supplement to her lack of real connection to someone. Her and Tyrone do love each other, but in a way they don't have each other, despite all the frankness and people blaming things, blaming each other out loud. And I think this is connected to Tyrone's lack of generosity.
But she's not receiving enough from him, let's put it that way. And then she's watching her sons follow in their father's footsteps, except they're not even successful, and there's not much she can do about that. She's using morphine because of the family dynamic. To what extent is she to blame for that dynamic? To what extent is it a Result of her character and personal problems. And to what extent has she just been unfortunate, Right? Just married the wrong guy and been sucked into the wrong situation? It's not entirely clear, but she thinks a lot about this.
And when you read your intro, I thought about the fact that Mary is really onto this question of whether anyone is to blame. They're trying to figure out, are we alcoholics because we're just trying to deal with our mom's morphine addiction, or is she a morphine addict because we're alcoholics? Right? And then Mary is onto this question to blame as well. So, for instance, on page 45 of my edition, she'll say, this is Mary about Tyrone. All he likes is to hobnob with men at the club or in a bar room. Jamie and you are the same way, but you're not to blame.
You've never had the chance to meet decent people here. I know you both would have been different if you'd been able to associate with nice girls instead of. You'd never have disgraced yourself as you have so that now no respectable parents will let their daughters be seen with you. She's always onto this idea that people are products of their circumstances so that no one's to blame.
30:16 Erin: So I think you can actually trace all of this back to Tyrone. There's a part of me that wants to say, okay, what Eugene o' Neill is writing is basically being an actor, being involved in playwriting and all this stuff. That is the original sin of this family in a way, Tyrone, because he is an actor. So I've been thinking about the implications of an actor at that time. And Mary makes this clear as well. Very similar to prostitution for women, right. And for men. I don't know what they would say about that, but of course not very respectable. And in the play, repeated mention is made of these hotels that are called one night stands, which is because they were in a one night stand show.
Probably he did like One Night in a Town before they moved on. And so these are hotels which are not respectable, I think, because you only stay in them for one night before you move on. So there's an automatic association with prostitution, I think at that time, because maybe it would be more common to stay longer in a hotel. But she says at one point in a list, one night stands, cheap hotels, dirty trains, leaving children, never having a home. So there's a connection here between the idea of prostitution, I think, and this idea of acting, which is more than just the, oh, an actress is no better than a prostitute kind of, you know, idea of the day and also about the mechanics of the way that this life functions, really, which I think is part of why it had a negative connotation to begin with.
But I think the effect of this is that, in essence, Tyrone's job splits the atom of Mary's identity. So if we think at that time of what being a woman would mean, it would be being a wife and a mother. And then this is something that she says to a lot, right? She wanted to have a home and be a wife and a normal wife and mother. Well, the kids are at home, it seems. They seem to be born in hotel rooms. Other people are taking care of them because of the fact that Tyrone is on the road and Tyrone wants his wife with him. So he's sort of separating the mother part of her from the wife part of her.
And it seems to me that the reason why. I mean, he is very in love with her but the reason why he would want his wife on the road with him is because he wants to sleep with her. So, in a sense, Tyrone's profession, in addition to bringing shame onto him in the eyes of some respectable people, also sort of makes her into a theater person and therefore gives her this sort of stain of prostitution. And because he's so unwilling to pay for her to be sort of like set up he's willing to appoint to do the bare necessities for her. But because of his profession and because of the fact that they're not really settled, Tyrone is not really married.
He's not really seeing her as a full person. And so you can argue that the first instance of prostitution or of having these unhealthy relationships with women that Jamie seems to have, it's really in Tyrone and Mary's relationship that this is modeled. I don't know if I'm going too far there with that parallel.
33:28 Wes: No, no, that sounds right.
33:29 Erin: Or how we can tie that back to Mary's morphine addiction, except for the fact that she feels that she is being used. I think she is being used like a drug by Tyrone. I think that Tyrone is ultimately responsible. Of course, he has this whole story about his father. And I'm sure if we asked the father, he would have a whole story to tell about all the evil things that happened to him, some of which I think, you know, I'm sympathetic to. But I think ultimately it's this fact of being an actor which is really funny. Of course, in a play, what I
34:00 Wes: put in my notes is that the morphine addiction, in a way, is it's an attempt to. Kind of a failed attempt, obviously, to remedy her attachment with an itinerant husband. Right. So he wanders in his profession. He does it characterologically. He's another one who jumps back and forth, hey, he's amused by the pig story. He's outraged by the pig story. He has these artistic proclivities. Not proclivities, but he's very successful actor and artist, and yet he's withholding and stingy and obsessed with money and real estate. And so those sorts of contradictions.
But then the biggest way that he wanders is booze. He takes himself, even when he's not traveling as an actor, he takes himself to the bar room, or presumably when he's with his wife, he takes himself away with the alcohol. So ironically, so she's doing the same thing. The morphine takes her away. But the odd paradoxical thing about that is each of them, in a way, is trying to re establish a connection by means of the substance. Like I said, it gives that faux connection feeling that I think is ultimately connected to home. So the morphine is the last ditch, desperate attempt at creating a home, at creating some sense of home, creating some sense of stability and some sense that not everything isn't constantly in motion and moving, but that people are somehow anchored.
And I think that anchoring is connected to shame. So she's, in a way, trying to vindicate her shame by being unseen. And again, there's the paradox here is because by using the drug, she's more seen, she's more surveilled, people are more suspicious of her. And precisely what she wants is for them to pretend the problem doesn't exist. But I think the attempt to be unseen, in the sense of in a fog, is connected to the shame of them not having a being able to entertain. Right. Them not having connections to the outside world and real friendships and the reputation of Tyrone around town because of his stinginess and his bad real estate investments and all that.
I haven't fully thought that out. So I'm trying to make a connection between her husband's evasiveness and lack of home and then the desire to remedy that with the morphine. And I'm trying to figure out how the morphine does that. The very basic explanation, again, is that it creates that feeling of connection. But I think there's more to be said about that.
36:41 Erin: Well, I wonder how you're making me think of another really interesting fact about Tyrone, which is the stable identity of his most recognizable role. Right. We know that this Has a basis in fact that Eugene O'Neill's father played in the Count of Monte Cristo so many times that he actually wrecked his own. His own reputation. Right, right. Wow. Really?
37:04 Wes: 6,000 times he played that? Yeah.
37:06 Erin: Wow. Yeah. So that he actually damaged his own reputation as a serious actor because he went after this cash cow. But that also your use of the phrase stable identity made me think there's maybe another addiction or something. Or it comes from a kind of addiction to being cheap because he knew that he could take advantage of this money making opportunity and just play that role to death. It also kind of presents as maybe a kind of morphine or alcohol addiction in that this. Playing this role seems to have similar effects. I don't know if that's too much of a stretch, but I'm curious what you think about that fact of his personality, which I find really interesting as a symbol, though. I don't know of what.
37:49 Wes: The fact that he got into the rut of playing this part over and over again because of the financial success.
37:56 Erin: Yeah. He's spoiled his own talent like one would do if they were an alcoholic and they spoiled their potential. It functions like an addiction.
38:06 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. I think he is addicted to the attempt to get security right. Not to end up in the poorhouse by being stingy, not keeping the lights on, acquiring property, being a cheapskate, sending his son to the state sanitarium. And of course, he can never get that feeling of security. This is something too. I know from my own father, even though I didn't grow up with him, I met him when I was 21 or 22. Someone who grows up in extreme poverty, they never get over. Nothing is ever enough to make one feel secure again. I have a little bit of that myself.
In his case, it's pretty remarkable that he was able to become an actor to do something. Usually from that situation you're like, all right, I'm going to be a doctor, I'm going to be an engineer. I'm not going to be an actor and risk poverty again. I'll never risk that again. But then he made it work. So he made it work on the one hand. But given his characterological propensities and his desire for safety, he somehow turned that into an act of stinginess. The stinginess is connected to just repeating the same play over and over again, not moving on because there's solid financial reward in that and everything else becomes too risky.
So you mentioned earlier the arts being a kind of original sin in all of this. Right. So the sons are bequeathed not just the alcohol, but the interest in being an actor or a poet or a playwright, all that stuff, which is a very ungrounded, impractical sort of aspiration that I'm trying to make the connection now to.
39:54 Erin: And I think there's something funny too in the fact that Tyrone is able to turn it into a kind of family business. Right. That is Jamie's profession, is it? That he's an actor, but sort of a second rate actor. Of course, now we're used to, you know, nepotism in Hollywood and everything. But back then that would have been, I think, kind of silly. And I think even if one's father is an actor, the hope would be that the child, at least in 1912, would get into a more stable profession and kind of make good and become a doctor or a lawyer or something. Right? Or am I getting that wrong?
40:25 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right. I had kind of taken this a little bit off track by talking about the arts, going back to your point, as the arts as original sin. But you had emphasized before that this idea of the repetition of the play as addiction, which I like. And I was also connecting that to his stinginess and his desire for security. And the way in which Mary's morphine and their alcohols kind of an attempt to create some sense of connection and some sense of home. All of those things are connected. The stinginess is part of that too. This is all about security in the end.
It's weird because you would think that a family that's just so self involved in a way. What's more home like than that everyone's at home with each other for the whole summer. And there's way too much time spent together, probably, you know, despite the guys going out to the bar. But strangely enough, that kind of is a home wrecking thing. Home depends on these connections to outside society, which is part of what Mary wants. Right. She can't have a home unless she has friends and she's entertaining people. There's gotta be some sort of commerce between the home and the outside world.
If it just becomes its own sort of black hole and nothing escapes, there's no real connection to the outside, then that no longer is home. It's so home, it's not home.
41:50 Erin: Right. I think there's something too, in this. Well, this will take us to Connecticut. The idea that this is a summer home. And so there's still a kind of transience in those instances in which they are at this house. The engagement will always end like Staying in a town for a series of performances, a limited engagement. And I think the parallel to, I guess, another deep irony is the stinginess of Tyrone and buying up land. Right. So having tons and tons of land but no home is also, I think, ironic, too, because he's buying up the land in this.
It's in Connecticut. Right. It's around where the summer home is. And at least his connections are in Connecticut. And so he's buying up probably land on which there are summer properties. So that, too, has a kind of duality to it, which I think is expressed, as you said, in all of the characters sort of thinking two ways about things or behaving two ways about things, which is like a lot of land and no home. And where is the land? Well, it's in a place where people are only there temporarily. He's not building a sort of ancestral dynasty or anything.
And I think there's something, too, about the location of Connecticut here. Connecticut can mean lots of things. In our Awful Truth episode, I talked a bit about how do you want
43:03 Wes: to reveal your personal connection to Connecticut? I mean, I know you have before, but.
43:07 Erin: Oh, I should, I guess.
43:08 Wes: I don't think you've mentioned that you're from Connecticut.
43:10 Erin: Oh, right. And I'm currently call.
43:13 Wes: You are speaking from Connecticut speaking.
43:15 Erin: That's right. The very place you are.
43:18 Wes: Inside the house. This podcast is coming from inside the house.
43:24 Erin: That's right. And of course, you can go to the house where all of these events actually really took place. It's the Eugene o' Neill house at the Monte Cristo cottage, because it was built by the count of Monte Cristo. And for some reason, we're all proud of that. It's kind of funny. People should read the play more. But anyway, the implication in the Awful Truth episode of Connecticut is that it's sort of the playground of people who are in New York who want to escape to the country. It was called the country to people in New York. It's also, for a lot of people, I think it's kind of a liminal space between New York and Boston.
And what I see in Connecticut in this play is definitely that liminal space. It's the foggy place, right? It's the place between places. This is the New London area. So it's not a place where you would go to put on a show. There wouldn't be any place nearby where you would have an engagement. Like, for instance, having a home just outside of New York City, like in Fairfield county or in Westchester, someplace like that. This is A foggy place that's kind of nowhere. And it's also not really a summer place associated with the rich and famous of the day.
It's almost there, but not quite so this is the far eastern coast of Connecticut, very close to Rhode island and to Newport, but not there. Right. And at this time the Vanderbilts and all those rich families had built those enormous palatial summer homes in Newport which you could still visit to this day, which were very, despite being summer homes, were very permanent in which no expense was spared. They're sort of aspirational, if you will, by being in that kind of direction. But then with this dilapidated place, had Tyrone wanted to, he probably could have poured money into some big Newport home and then they would have been very respectable and they would have been able to entertain all these other very wealthy families, these dynasties.
And so there's something I think about this location which to me seems really perfect. Of course it's the real location, but it seems like a wonderful sort of poetic justice that that is the real location for its symbolic meaning.
45:37 Wes: So the way Edmund puts this is just to go back a little bit to what you were saying about him buying up property. So Tyrone and Edmund are bickering about whether he did enough to help cure Mary of her morphine addiction. And the idea is that also that he sent her to a cheap doctor who was just going to prescribe morphine to her instead of really addressing the problem. And that's why she got addicted. And then he wasn't willing to spend the money to send her to a specialist who could really help her kick the habit, but just sent her to this quack who kept telling her to have willpower.
And then so Tyrone says, what did I know of morphine? It was years before I discovered what was wrong. I thought she'd never got over her sickness, that's all. Why didn't I send her to a cure? You say bitterly, haven't I? I've spent thousands upon thousands in cures. A waste. What good have they done her? She's always started again. And then Edmund says, because you've never given her anything that would help her want to stay off it. No home except this summer dump in a place she hates. And you've refused even to spend money to make this look decent while you keep buying more property and playing sucker for every con man with a gold mine or silver mine or any kind of get rich quick swindle.
I just wanted to reinforce the point you were making about this odd thing that Tyrone is doing. He could be putting money into making a nice home and into giving Mary what she wants. Instead of doing that, he's doing this thing which is directly adjacent to that, buying up all this property. It's still home related and house related activity, but it's misdirected, it's oblique to the central question. So it's almost as if he's trying to address the home concern, but is doing it in a self undermining way or can't directly address it.
47:32 Erin: And I think this is related to the way that he's spending money, supposedly thousands of dollars, but probably in drips. So that in the. And he might have generously given all the money up front for her to go to a nicer place. And in the end it would have come out the same. It's kind of like a poor person's way of dealing with money, which is you kind of have to sink a lot of money into something right up front and get the best possible treatment you can get. Instead, he's trying to maybe treat symptoms or treat things with as little money as possible.
And therefore in the end it's the same expense. Right, but he's just looking at it as a miser would, or as someone who's maybe raised in a very poor home in which they're so reluctant to spend any small amount of money that they might have. Of course he has a lot of money. Right. But he still has this poor person's mindset. But you're leading me to another thing that I wanted to talk about, which I think maybe is the most fascinating. Blame accusation. Genetic hereditary kind of entanglement, which is at the end of the play when Jamie admits to purposely being a bad influence on Edmund.
Sort of like purposely spoiling Edmund for the world or purposely screwing him up.
48:48 Wes: Edmund is Jamie's Frankenstein.
48:50 Erin: Right, Right, His Frankenstein. So the last pages of the play, Jamie gets super drunk and he starts to confess to Edmund. He says, not drunken bull, but in vino veritas stuff. You better take it seriously. Want to warn you against me. Mama and Papa are right. I've been rotten, bad influence. And worst of it is I did it on purpose. Edmund tells him to shut up. He says, I don't want to hear it. Nix, kid, you listen. Did it on purpose to make a bum of you or part of me. Did a big part. That part that's been dead so long that hates life. My putting you wise so you learn from my mistakes.
Believed that myself at times, but it's a fake. Made my mistakes look Good. Made getting drunk romantic. Made whores fascinating. vamps instead of poor, stupid, diseased slobs they really are. Made fun of. Work is a sucker's game. Never wanted you succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you Mama's baby, Papa's pet. So here we have this idea that he's made Edmund something outside of Edmund's own will, which is related, I think, to Tyrone's tracing his miserliness back to his childhood poverty and to his father, who abandoned the family when he.
When James is only 10. So this is of a different order, I guess. I don't know if we can classify these various problems that the family has, but this one seems to be of the hereditary order, of the thing that's inherited, that you have no control over order rather than something else. I mean, maybe that's what all of these addictions or issues ultimately amount to, is something outside of these people's will. But I don't know that I believe this. Or we could still then argue. Well, Edmund accepted all of it, of course. Is this silly, or what do you think about this moment?
50:45 Wes: It's interesting because I had just been looking at what happens right before that, where Jamie is taking credit for turning Edmund on to literature. So you've been getting a swelled head lately about nothing. About a few poems in a Hicktown newspaper. This is all very autobiographical again, by the way. He really was publishing poems in the local newspaper. Eugene o'. Neill. But then he goes on to say, why shouldn't I be proud? Hell, it's purely selfish. You reflect credit on me. I've had more to do with bringing you up than anyone. I wised you up about women so you'd never be a fall guy or make any mistakes you didn't want to make. I love the slang in this, by the way.
51:29 Erin: It's so silly.
51:30 Wes: Ajax, I'm wise to the world. Is there anything that ages worse than slang? It's what sounds cool in its time, and it just sounds like the quaint thing in retrospect, but anyway. And who steered you on to reading poetry first? Swinburne, for example? I did. And because I once wanted to write, I planted it in your mind that someday you'd write. Hell, you're more than my brother. I made you. You're my Frankenstein. And then he goes on to talk about having been purposefully a bad influence. So in a way, supposedly he gives Edmund his aspirations, but also undermines those aspirations or influences him in a way that undermines them.
Which is not an uncommon family dynamic. Setting up the goal, setting up the aspiration, but then having an undercurrent of envy, which this is usually parent, child, relationship and undercurrent of envy, such that you incept your offspring with a self destruct mechanism to ensure that they will actually never succeed. So the conflict over success gets acted out in the child. And of course, it's an odd thing for Jamie to say about turning him on to literature and poetry, because it's the father who's the artistic success. It's hard to take Jamie seriously there.
And I think it's also hard to take him seriously about doing things on purpose to make a bum of you. Of course he didn't do it on purpose. There's truth to it. It's on purpose. In a sense, he's honestly identifying the underlying psychological dynamics of envy and being a bad influence. That's absolutely true. But he's making it more arch and more intentional and more sinister than it actually is. So he's trying to pretend that he's not also embroiled in the circumstance and along for fate's ride. But Jamie, of course, is being swept along by all these circumstances and forces as much as Edmund is.
So we are all the Frankensteins of fate and our formative influences and especially our parents. But everything else that's happening, if you want to bracket out the concept of freedom and look at human beings purely as functions of external forces in the environment.
53:59 Erin: Yeah. So is this a case of. Is Jamie just a case of overactive self awareness wiseness? He's right. Right.
54:08 Wes: Hey, man, he's hip to the world. But of course, not really.
54:13 Erin: Right. But in terms of how aware he is of the effect that he might have had on Edmund, and he's taking upon himself things that ordinarily never rise to the conscious level in most of us, well, this is the moment at which I was like, oh, okay, so Jamie did kill that middle child. He did do it on point.
54:29 Wes: Right, right. Eugene. He killed Eugene.
54:33 Erin: Right. And then of course, you can argue. This is so tangled, then you can argue, well, the only reason why Jamie was supposedly successful in poisoning Edmund is because the parents weren't around. Right. Because of the fact that the father was taking Mary away and himself away, and Jamie himself didn't have a proper sort of formative influence. The issue of the father having the artistic aspirations that he bequeaths to Edmund, that's an interesting one because, I mean, first of all, o' Neill has these odd heroes and Swinburne and certain other poets, they seem to be of a very different order than what the father's interested in.
So I'm associating, and I think maybe we're meant to, Shakespeare with James's Catholicism and also with his Irishness. Somehow there's that really funny moment where he says that Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic. So Shakespeare and the God of Catholicism and Ireland are all sort of yoked together in these sort of old fogey almost superstitions that James has, at least the way that Edmund and Jamie seem to view it, whereas they're into the cool, subversive stuff like Swinburne and Baudelaire. So Edmund's desire to be a poet, even though the father's an actor and knows all these Shakespeare roles by heart, Edmund wanting to be a poet or a playwright, oddly enough, seems to be in rebellion against the father being an actor.
And as I say that, it occurs to me, it's really interesting because the rebellion is what. Wanting to rise up and kill the. Of course, there are a lot of Greek elements of this, right. Greek tragedy and elements of the play. So Edmund wants to rebel against the actor father by becoming the playwright and forcing all the actors to do his bidding. And it's a sort of desire to have a Frankenstein's monster. Right. To influence people in the way that Jamie has supposedly influenced him.
56:35 Wes: Yeah. To transcend creaturehood and become the creator.
56:39 Erin: Right. Which is fascinating, too, because then it has to do with what we've been talking about, which is this idea of hereditary what's inherited and what's picked up through nurture or a combination thereof.
56:51 Wes: Yeah, exactly.
56:52 Erin: Yeah. Edmund wants to assert that dynastic impulse and to affect other people, maybe the way that he has been affected or infected by bad influence.
57:03 Wes: This desire to escape creaturehood and become the creator is sort of integral to artistic aspiration. It's about freedom, in a way, and the desire to be more than merely a creature. And Frankenstein is about how that goes wrong. Right? So Victor Frankenstein creates a monster precisely because he thinks he can become a God. And so if we become too arrogant, if our ambition becomes overweening, then instead of escaping creaturehood, we become monstrous. We make ourselves monstrous. And that's part of the danger of being an artist. Being an artist can be a very dangerous thing.
And this is what you see with isolation and drugs and alcohol here is integral to that. It's interesting because you use this word, poison, right? Jamie poisoned Edmund. He's claiming he poisoned Edmund, where poison is about being a formative influence. And you could say in the same way our parents poison us, our fate poisons us. Everything that happens to us to alter our character is a potion or a poison in some sense. Sometimes it's a potion, a good potion, sometimes it alters us in a. In a good direction. But that made me think of the ways in which these substances are also attempts at escaping creaturehood.
They are substitutes for formative influences. So they call Mary's morphine poison over and over again, even as they poison themselves with alcohol. So you could think of people intoxicating themselves as this attempt to wrest the reins away from fate, right? To say, I'm going to be the one who poisons myself. I'm going to be the only influencer here, even if it just means being under the influence. At least I did it to myself. And there is that feeling of freedom because of the disinhibition. There's a feeling of freedom that comes with that.
So, anyway, I thought that was really interesting. At some point, I want to talk about. So Edmund tells us what drinking is good for. So I want to get to that.
59:21 Erin: At some point, I'd like to turn to drink as well. You're reminding me of this talk of poisoning, and we're using names like Edmund and James, and it's all very Shakespearean to me. And it reminds me, too, of the famous. A famous essay by Auden about Falstaff in which he talks about the effects of alcoholism in men versus women and how in men, you know. So James even makes mention of this. And Jamie's developed a little bit of a belly from drinking. So Auden will argue that in men, the alcoholism makes them put on weight, and it's a desire to basically be pregnant, gives them a pregnant belly, gives them like a kind of surrogate womb and something to nurture in that motherly way.
And so he. You know, of course, Falstaff is an example of this, right? We have a mental image of Falstaff with almost like a pregnant belly from drink. And in women, it makes them typically. Auden says it typically makes them waste away the desire to, like, lose the excess and to winnow themselves past a point of, you know, the ability to. But, you know, it has the opposite effect. They don't want to bear children, you know, they want to kind of erase themselves in a way. Morphine is having similar effects on Mary where the idea to not want to be a creature or to lose one's creaturehood, as you say, she gets thin on the morphine, and she also is escaping into the Past and into a kind of girlhood, which I think is also related to this.
Right. Into one's girlhood would be into a point before which one had children and also maybe before which one was capable of having children as a woman. And of course, TB is. It's a wasting disease as well. And Edmund is very much his mother's child. So there's something kind of ironic or a little bit twisted about the way that this expresses itself in Edmund, who is also very thin and yet who will become the playwright, the creator. But I think it relates to your point. We can look at what Edmund says about drink.
1:01:18 Wes: Yes. This desire to waste away. It's like going back to the position of potentiality, like with Hedda Gabler, killing yourself so that you can keep all your possibilities open.
1:01:29 Erin: Right.
1:01:29 Wes: I don't want to choose a major, so I'm just gonna go ahead and obliterate myself. But similarly. Right, yeah. Going back to the point of childhood and where she could have been a piano player, she could have been a nun. And back to the point where all the experiences that one have in life haven't scarred you or marked you and haven't altered your character in such a way that you become more and more set in your ways and more and more a product of those influences that have created you, that have made you. So, again, escaping. There's an element of escaping creaturehood.
And I think Edmund kind of pretty directly talks about this. This is when he's having a conversation with Tyrone at the end, and there's this toast that he gives repeatedly during the play. So this is saying, here's how. So Edmund says to Tyrone, forget my condition. And then he raises his glass and he says, here is how. And I mention this kind of celebratory aspect, right. To their drinking and that particular toast and the celebration there. It's a celebration of forgetting. And again, the forgetting of one's condition is the forgetting of one's troubles.
But again, I think it's an attempt to transcend formative influences. The toast is supposed to be about good luck, but this is kind of a cynical appeal to the mechanism of luck. What is the connection between drinking and good fortune, good things happening in the future? Well, really, it's just about obliterating one's consciousness of all the bad things that happen. So it's a cynical take on that. And then he goes on to talk about. After quoting Dowson, he will talk about the fog being where he wants to be. So he'll say, halfway down the path, you can't see this house, you'd never know it was here or any of the other places down the avenue.
I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted. To be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor where the road runs along the beach. I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea, as if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damn peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.
He sees his father staring at him with mingled worry and irritated disapproval. He grins mockingly. Don't look at me as if I'd gone nutty. I'm talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is if they can help it? It's the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it's Pan. You see him and you die. That is inside you and have to go on living as a ghost. It's two pages later that he will be quoting Baudelaire to say, and I think this is important because we're wondering about the function of alcohol and drugs in the play. And Edmund is going to straight up try and tell us, or through Baudelaire, he's going to give us a thesis about.
A bit of a thesis about this. So reciting Baudelaire, he says, always be drunken. Nothing else matters. That is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth. Be drunken continually drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will but be drunken. This kind of goes to our discussion of escaping creaturehood and becoming the creator, gaining some element of freedom. But here we get three different methods for that lumped in together, right? Is it going to be alcohol and drugs?
Is it going to be being an artist, being a poet? Or is it going to be by virtue of being a good person? Which just to put in a philosophical point here, the philosophical tradition is associated with freedom, both with happiness but also with freedom. As in, it's in acting ethically that one is truly free. But the alternatives are it's in being an artist that one is truly free, or it's in being intoxicated that one is truly free, where freedom again includes some transcending of influence, but also being an influencer, being a creator.
1:06:12 Erin: In artistry, though, it seems as though there wasn't too much freedom for o', Neill, because I was reading that he died in a hotel room. So he was born and died in a hotel room. And he made mention of that fact and said, look at me. Here I was, I was born. I was born in a hotel room and now I'm dying in one.
1:06:30 Wes: I think he said, like, I knew it.
1:06:31 Erin: Right, right, right.
1:06:33 Wes: I knew it. I knew I was gonna die in a hotel room, just like I was born in a hotel room.
1:06:37 Erin: Right. And of course, how perfect for someone who wrote Long Day's Journey into Night, because here his escape into art has only become the sort of reanimation of all of these ghosts from his past. So maybe even in the drunkenness of art, there still is no escape, at least if you're Irish. So.
1:07:00 Wes: Well, let's talk a little bit more about autobiographical art maybe in our, in our postscript.
1:07:07 Erin: Okay?
1:07:08 Wes: All right.
1:07:09 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
1:07:13 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
Work as Madness in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957)
May 09, 2022
In the beginning, Colonel Nicholson seems to be a stickler for principle, willing to die rather than have his officers do menial labor in a Japanese prison camp. In the end, his principles seem to be a cover for personal vanity. He is willing to put his officers to work building a bridge for his enemies, as long as it leaves him with a legacy. “The Bridge on the River Kwai” is a reflection on the meaning of work, and whether the ravages of time, if not war, imply that being happy in one’s work—to use a phrase repeated several times in the film—is nothing more than futility and madness. Is work the key to freedom, or is it inevitably a form of bondage? How do we distinguish the desire to be creative from the desire for prestige? When is destroying something more creative than building it?
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Wes: In the beginning, Colonel Nicholson seems to be a stickler for principle, willing to die rather than have his officers do menial labor in a Japanese prison camp. In the end, his principles seem to be a cover for personal vanity. He's willing to put his officers to work building a bridge for his enemies as long as it leaves him with a legacy. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a reflection on the meaning of work and whether the ravages of time, if not war, imply that being happy in one's work, to use a phrase repeated several times in the film, is nothing more than futility and madness.
Is work the key to freedom, or is it inevitably a form of bondage? How do we distinguish desire to be creative from the desire for prestige? When is destroying something more creative than building it? This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, have you been happy in your work?
1:14 Erin: Yeah.
1:17 Wes: What does that mean? I think that's the standout phrase for me in the movie.
1:21 Erin: You know, I'm so delighted that that's what. I've seen this movie several times, and this last time I was like, I think this might be about work and the nature of all work. And then I was like, no, that's crazy. So I think it's funny that you picked up on that.
1:38 Wes: All right, I think we're on the same page about that.
1:40 Erin: Am I happy in my work? I don't know. Is anyone?
1:43 Wes: Well, isn't work all madness in the end?
1:46 Erin: Well, for sure.
1:47 Wes: We'll find out in this episode. So it's interesting because there are four places in which the phrase be happy in your work or some variation of that occurs. And it starts with Saito talking to the newly arrived British soldiers and telling them, let me remind you of General Yamashita's motto, be happy in your work. And then he dismisses the soldiers. And of course, they don't flinch until Colonel Nicholson tells them to stand at ease. And then the next time, again, it's Saito when he is upset with the lack of progress on the bridge. And then he gives a kind of theory about it, a theory about why it's not progressing.
And he explains that to all the soldiers. And he basically says, the officers are lazy and they think they're too good to share your burdens. And that is not just. Therefore, you are not happy in your work. Therefore, the bridge does not progress. So he makes this connection between being happy in your work and the justice of whether the officers are gonna share in that. And then the third time, he basically bribes them with Red Cross, you know, he calls them. Presents a token of regards for your efforts in the future. So let us be happy in our work.
And then the final time, it's not Saito, it's Shears who says it. And he says it while they're cutting through the underbrush to go on their project to blow up the bridge. But they're walking with the female bearers and basically Joyce is hitting on one of them, calling her lovely. And Shears kind of walks by and says, be happy in your work. As you pointed out, I think this is about work. And there are different conceptions of work at work, including different conceptions in those instances. I think in the beginning, this idea, General Yamashita's motto, the idea is that they're going to keep busy.
And that's one form of happiness. You're a slave, you've lost your honor. You're no longer a soldier. That's Saito's point of view. But you're gonna keep busy. And that's the beginning point. But then this concept of work evolves over or there are conflicting candidates for what it is to work over the course of the film. Right.
4:18 Erin: And one of them is the idea to sort of keep busy by being lazy or.
4:22 Wes: Exactly.
4:23 Erin: To actively work against the idea of work that someone is imposing upon you. Preferably by a way, to make it look like you're doing their form of meaning while you're also undermining it at the same time. So the wires get crossed there, you know? And then there's also the idea of sabotage as carried out by Shears and that little commando troupe and the commando mentality. Similarity to, like, play. I think there are a lot of parallels made between, like, oh, this is just a game to you, and so be happy in your work. Makes me think of work as being fulfilling, meaningful, fun.
Making work enjoyable, maybe making it like a game, which is itself, I think, a parallel for war in the film too. Like the lack of seriousness involved in war or the play acting involved in war. So I think there are a lot of threads there. Like, one of the most interesting moments for me was when Shears is first going to the commando school. He's first been invited there. And there's that moment that I always kind of thought was silly where he gets attacked by that commando in training. And, of course, something similar to him had just happened to him in the jungle as he had escaped from the POW camp.
And So I think for a long time I read that moment just as being indicative of Shears mental state that he's this tough guy on the outside. But obviously his recent experiences have had more effect on him than maybe he had realized or that the audience had realized. But, you know, looking at it again, I realized it was really clever for showing the extent to which so much of war is training for war and so much of training is this play acting among your fellow men. So you're casting them, like, in the role of the enemy and then sort of trying to sneak attack them, whatever.
You know, I'm carrying out all these war games, right. And so those particularly slippery boundaries between, like, who is your enemy and who's your friend or who's your comrade, I think is related to this idea of work because they're joined by this play acting that's also inherent in this idea of sabotage and working against, like, appearing to be busy. I don't know how to tie those two things together, but I think they seem to be related somehow.
6:43 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. A bit is made of who people were in peacetime, like what they did. So, for instance, Warden was a professor at Oxford, right. And Joyce, the Canadian kid, was an accountant. And something is made of the fact that it was really boring and repetitious. He checked figures that had been checked several times before and would be checked several times after him. There's a lot in this movie that's evocative of the potential futility of work or whether it's meaningful. This is one of the things that Nicholson wonders. Is there anything I done had an effect?
Will it be remembered? And so the way Joyce's participation. Because they're not Warden and his commanding officer. Not sure that Joyce is the right candidate, but the idea is that, well, he's going to be engaged in something which is much more interesting than accounting by going on this trip to blow up the bridge. But I wanted to bring that back to your idea about how sabotage fits into all of this. Right. And destruction. Because we have, you know, nominally, the creative work that's done in the film is done by Nicholson to create the bridge.
And then, you know, at the end of it, he is very proud of what he's done and seemingly. Right. That's the constructive thing to do. But it works against the larger project of the organization in which he's participating, the British army and the Allies and the war effort. So it's madness in another sense, as the medical officer Clipton puts it. So you have someone like Warden who's been a professor, and he has this kind of interesting relationship to his plastic explosives. Right. It's like he's transferred his professorial curiosity into playing with explosives.
So I was trying to make a connection. I think you were making a connection between sabotage and play. So there's an element of kind of delight and absorption that you see in Warden's relationship to this work, which is ultimately going to be destructive. And he's done it several times before, so he's taken down a few bridges. It turns out you have to know something about engineering to do that, too. Just like in the same way that you have to know something about engineering to put the bridge up. You have to know where to place the explosives to take it down.
9:12 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about the moment with the plastic explosive where doesn't he sort of like, pretend to throw it or. No, he throws it up in the air and then Holden, or Shears, rather catches it and is really nervous about it. Right. So like.
9:25 Wes: And then he. And then he says, you know, yeah, it doesn't explode unless it's been ignited.
9:29 Erin: Yeah. And again, there's this idea of play acting or mime. And I'm thinking of this maybe in relation to. I'm wondering if it's useful in relation to your point about these soldiers former lives to think about play acting and war, even, like, in relation to, say, the draft. Like, this is a situation in which most of the men, maybe not most, but many of the men that find themselves in this war have been cast in this role through no initiative of their own. And so I think there's something here, maybe about the fact that any soldier is miming at being a soldier, sort of play acting.
Like, I think of the moment with Joyce in the jungle when he has that moment to kill that soldier and they look at each other and that soldier looks like he's about 15 years old or something. And then, of course, there's the moment where you see the pictures and the necklace that he's carrying with him after he's been killed. You know, that he's just this little kid, basically, or just this normal, sweet boy. Well, I don't know if he's sweet. Maybe he's not.
10:29 Wes: But anyway, he's the enemy, Erin. He's the enemy.
10:32 Erin: I know, I know. And so this idea that you have this former life that you really are, and then you put on the guise of the soldier, and some people fill that role better. Better than others. Shears, of course, has also been play acting within the play. Acting, Right. Because he's also given himself a higher rank in the power vacuum of the POW camp when he realized that it was to his benefit to do that. And so I wonder if what Nicholson doesn't understand about war is that the element of play acting inherent in all of it and the element of sabotage, miming, of acting like you're doing something and really doing something else.
Nicholson, it seems to me, sees everything in such black and white terms or in such serious terms that he's not capable of understanding the sort of idea of play or flexibility that seems to be inherent in the job itself, in the job of this play acting and also in the idea of being successful at war. You have to kind of be able to adapt play with new circumstances, not just read the script as written, but sort of improv your way out of situations. And so his lack of ability to act or to take things less seriously maybe is what makes him mad, but also sane.
You know, according to. Obviously, war is madness. So it's a strange bind he's supposed
12:04 Wes: to be acting on rigidly, on principle. And, you know, there's these scenes with Clipton where he says to Clipton, you have much to learn about the army in response to Major Clipton, the medical officer. Again, you know, to his kind of shock or surprise that Nicholson wants to build the bridge for the Japanese and to do it well. The way Clipton responds to him early on is. Or actually, no, this is a little bit later on when I think Clipton questions him for a second time after the bridge has already gotten going and it's going well. And Clipton asks Nicholson, what's going on with Saito?
How's he doing with all of this? And Nicholson says, he's been most reasonable since we took over. And then Clipton says, well, I wonder what he's thinking. And Nicholson says, I haven't the foggiest, and sort of brushes that off. And then Clipton asks, are you convinced building this bridge is a good idea? And Nicholson gives this speech about. He says, don't you agree the men's morale is high, that discipline has been restored, that their condition has been improved, and so on. So he switches back and forth between this position of being rigidly principled and then worried about his men.
So early on, it's just about the officers are not going to do any work. We're going to follow the Geneva Conventions, the letter of the law. His rationale for building the bridge is initially, there's this idea that because he was ordered to surrender, he would be disobeying orders not to Build the bridge for the Japanese, which is absurd. Completely absurd.
13:41 Erin: I don't think that's about the bridge. I think that was just about the idea of not escaping.
13:44 Wes: Yep, you're right. So that's about escaping.
13:46 Erin: But that plays into your point.
13:48 Wes: On the one hand, there's principle and following the letter of the law and on the other, which is something that Shears thinks is absurd and opposes. And on the other, there's this idea that he can prevent his men from becoming slaves. If they can work on the order of the officers they can avoid being slaves and take pride in what they're doing and prevent disorder in the camp. The reason I'm bringing all that up is that both of those, in a way, are undermined. Because in the end, it turns out that Nicholson does have his officers work when it's necessary because they can't get the bridge done without it.
And then at the very end of the movie, he's willing to betray his own side. So what we learn there is that this hasn't really been about principle or about his men, exactly. It's just simply about all the other stuff which he talks about which is his desire to leave a legacy or to do something meaningful to make a difference. What I'm suggesting is that his focus on principles and all the rest of it seems to be a cover for vanity or for pride, let's say, for something personal, at least. I don't know if you agree on
14:58 Erin: that, but I do. I think, also, though, and maybe this chimes with what you're saying too I do think that there's something here about Nicholson's sense of hierarchy as being paramount. And I think that's tied up with personal pride but in terms of a larger civic pride. So I think that his desire for the men to be happy is also working in tandem with his idea of hierarchy. Because he wants everyone to be, I think, content in their station. And he feels as though he is being a good leader when his men are fulfilled, when they're being inspired and all those things.
Right? Because that's part of his job as a colonel to keep this order to make sure that the men are industrious and feel happy in their work. And so the way that I see the turn is that he sees an opportunity. So he wants to keep these hierarchies very strictly enforced in this region of lawlessness as a way of, like, preserving his troops pride and understanding of their own positionality. I think that when he sees the opportunity for the bridge to be constructed by these good ideal Englishmen. His sense of hierarchy is then transposed into being something on a much larger scale, which is almost like a proselytizing move on his part.
You know, like it's going to be a lesson to these Japanese people that we're better than you or that we're more disciplined, that we could build a better bridge. So the idea of hierarchy from colonel over the men or the officers over the men, the officers not working, it becomes the idea of them as Englishmen being superior to the rabble in the jungle as he thinks of them. And so I think that then the completion of the bridge becomes a project of preserving his very British and colonial idea of what hierarchy means. And so I think there's a lot of personal pride there, for sure.
And there is that interesting idea about leaving a legacy. But I think it's also tied up in this, like I said, civic or national sense of false pride that has to be exerted.
17:07 Wes: Clipton has, you know, earlier on expresses again some reserves about all of this. And Nicholson says, honestly, Clipton, there are times when I don't understand you at all. It's a fun part of the film that Nicholson treats everyone else as if they're crazy for even questioning his idea about the bridge. So Clipton says, well, you know, it could be construed as collaboration with the enemy, perhaps even a treasonable activity. And then Nicholson again gives these two different sorts of explanation. One kind of rule or principle based or law based, and then the other utilitarian.
So the first one is, we're prisoners of war. We haven't the right to refuse work. And then Clipton says, I understand that, but why do we have to work so well? And this is what Clipton says. Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built themselves? If you had to operate on Saito, would you do your best or let him die? And Nicholson responds, would you prefer to see this battalion disintegrate in idleness? Would you have it said that our chaps can't do a proper job? Don't you realize how important it is to show these people this is the point you were getting at?
I think that they can't break us in body or in spirit. Take a good look. One day the war will be over. I hope the people who use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built and who built it. Not a gang of slaves, but soldiers, British soldiers, even in captivity. And then Clipton says, yes, sir. And then Nicholson says, you're a fine doctor, but you've a lot to learn about the army. So the concepts of principle and law are tied up with the idea of keeping order among the troops and giving them something to live for even in captivity, and making sure that they're not slaves, which is tied in turn to showing these people the point you were getting at kind of larger civic pride.
And I kind of chuckled at the one day the war will be over remark because I had a kind of flashback to apocalypse now where Lt. Col. Kilgore gives a speech, and it ends with that line, right? It's saying, one day this war is going to end, and that's it. And he gets up. This is the classic trope on which that kind of satirical comment, towards which that kind of satirical scene is directed, where the war will be over one day, and then what do we want to happen afterwards? What are we going to have to show for it then? All this destruction? Because the way the war is, it's inherently not a creative act, but a destructive act.
And being a captive and a slave essentially seems to hamper one's potential for real work or for real creativity. And you see, in Apocalypse Now, Kilgore's solution is to try to bring home into the theater of war and to surf and to do all that stuff, to pretend it's not happening, pretend they're at home or in California or wherever. And Nicholson's solution is to see if he can have a little society within captivity and to do something that's genuinely creative within a larger context, that is inherently destructive, and leaves him thinking, what is it all for?
Unless I do something like this.
20:19 Erin: Yeah, you're exposing my kind of sympathy for Nicholson. You know, I was thinking about Billy Budd, too. I know. I kind of, like, argued for the Captain. Billy Budd.
20:29 Wes: Yeah, I thought of that too, actually, but. Yeah, go ahead.
20:32 Erin: Yeah. No, but the idea of there is something inherently more fulfilling about the kind of creativity that is building something that you think will last. Again, to go back to this idea of play acting, like, that's a form of creativity, too. Right. But it just doesn't look like much. Performances are temporary, you know, and, you know, stage performances are not recorded. And so it doesn't end up feeling like much, even if it does kind of exercise that creative faculty. You know, I'm talking about the idea of, like, maybe the men banding together and trying to actively sabotage in cleverer ways, which they already are doing, I think, while Nicholson is in the oven.
Right. They're sort of working against each other on the bridge. But anyway, I'm thinking, too, about the idea of creativity versus destruction and how it might be related to the idea of hara-kiri and the clashing sort of codes of honor between Saito and Nicholson. Because they run very, very close to each other, of course. I mean, they're basically the same person in a way. I think Saito is, like, far more sympathetic, actually.
21:31 Wes: They even repeat each other's lines at one point, like it's madness to escape. They both have that line right after
21:36 Erin: one after the other and they call each other crazy.
21:39 Wes: Yeah.
21:39 Erin: But I think Saito is actually a more like a Shears kind of character or like the Warden in terms of his background. You know, I think Nicholson being a professional military man makes him, by degrees, kind of more insane than Saito, who we see have a very touchingly vulnerable moment where he cries over the. The bridge being completed by the English, which is, by the. Just unrelated to anything. It's hilarious to me. And I looked it up and other people have pointed this out that the Japanese can't build just as good of a bridge as the English. What is going on here? They don't have good engineers. Give me a break. They probably have much better engineers than.
22:16 Wes: Well, this was one of the complaints about the film.
22:18 Erin: Oh, really?
22:19 Wes: People found it offensive, and, of course, it's untrue. A lot of this is fictionalized. There really is a real someone who corresponds to Nicholson and his wife. And that guy, of course, did try to sabotage the bridge. And they would have thought of it as treasonous collaboration to do anything other than try to do that. So, yeah, completely fictionalized by. I think it's the novelist. Right. That's based on a novel by Pierre Boulle, who wrote Planet of the Apes, another one of my favorites.
22:45 Erin: Oh, he did? Okay. I didn't realize he wrote both those.
22:47 Wes: Yeah. So anyway. Yeah, but you were saying that.
22:51 Erin: Yeah, there are sort of conflicting ideas of honor which, as I say, you know, run really parallel but also conflict. So I think the mere fact that Nicholson and his men end up at this camp is the first place where that sense of honor, which usually runs parallel, clashes. So I think that for Saito, anyone who ends up in his camp is inherently without honor. Right. Because they haven't died.
23:14 Wes: To surrender means to have lost your honor and to no longer be a soldier is what he says. Yeah.
23:19 Erin: And then there's this idea of the fact that if you fail at your work, then the cost of that is your own life. That honor and life are dependent upon each other. And I think that's true for Nicholson. You know, the Ways in which Nicholson carries that out, I think look very different. And one can even make the argument perhaps that Nicholson himself has committed a kind of ritual suicide of his own humanity to military service, you might say. Right. He's mentioned that he's been in the service now for 28 years and he's been home for like 10 months of that time.
You know, he's essentially put to death, if you will, any kind of outside reality or identity. Whereas Saito maintains, I think, a certain amount of humanity, outside interests. Like we learned that he was educated in England, that he wanted to study art. You know, he's a much more interesting figure and a more well rounded personality, I think.
24:17 Wes: I'm thinking he's got something in common with Mrs. Robinson, actually.
24:23 Erin: That's right.
24:25 Wes: I can see him sitting on the bed, rolling up his stockings, smoking his cigarette.
24:31 Erin: He was quite a good looking.
24:32 Wes: I wanted to be an artist. Well, yeah. There's so much that's interesting in what you said. They're so alike and they both seem to be so honor driven. And yet there are some differences and it's kind of complicated to untangle those differences. I still haven't. I didn't fully do that. So, for instance, do you lose your honor by surrendering or are you maintaining your honor by obeying an order? Which is what Nicholson seems to be, you know, suggested. Right. You follow the law. I was ordered to surrender. I did that so I can't escape. But for Saito, it's a loss of honor to actually surrender.
You know, you could see those as both honor driven but in different directions. And then one of the things about Saito is it seems like his honor is more right. You mentioned the role of hierarchy and by implication obedience for Nicholson, but it's there for Saito in a different way. He has to get the bridge done because otherwise he's going to be in big trouble. What he says to Nicholson is, do you know what I'm going to have to do if I don't get this done on time? Nicholson says, what? And he says, I'll have to commit seppuku. You know, I have to kill myself.
And then Saito says, what would you do if you were me? And Nicholson says, basically, I suppose I'd have to kill myself in a very nonchalant way. And then that kind of more obedient conception of honor shows up in his conception of work. Right. As being busy and being obedient. Something like that. So there's what it means to be happy and your work is different for Saito than it is for Nicholson. For Nicholson, it seems to have something to do with pride and one's creation. And then also the other stuff that you were mentioning, this kind of larger civic pride and the order of the community.
And for Saito, it seems to have more to do strictly with obedience and following orders and fitting into a hierarchy. And then this shifts because my interpretation of why Saito cried, and I could well be wrong about this, but we'll see. You can let me know. My interpretation was that he had been humiliated by the way Nicholson took over. So basically he had to essentially give in to Nicholson. He was defeated by Nicholson because it was more important to get the bridge built than to win his battle of wills with Nicholson. So he gives in and says, okay, your officers don't have to work.
And then you see at the first meeting, Nicholson basically runs that meeting and says, hey, you guys put the bridge in the wrong place. So we got to change that. And this runs the whole meeting. It's like he's in charge. And I saw Saito as being humiliated by that. And so it goes from being, I got to get the bridge built on time or I have to kill myself to once the bridge gets built, I have to kill myself because this is really humiliating. And so you see him preparing for that, right? He does his calligraphy, he cuts off his ponytail. I'm sure there's a proper name for that.
He puts the knife in his vest, he takes it out at one point on the bridge. You know, he's preparing to kill himself once this is all over. Doesn't get the chance, of course, because he is killed. Ultimately, I think for Saito, the loss of honor involves the loss of command, which is something he simply can't avoid because the project of building the bridge overshadows whatever power he has in the hierarchy. Whereas for Nicholson, the project of building the bridge is his power and is supposed to be the thing that frees him and his men from being slaves.
I don't think I've really done much work in untangling the two different conceptions of honor at work there. Or if they are two different conceptions, maybe they're just sort of expressing themselves differently at different times. So let's pause to talk about our sponsors for this episode, starting with AG1 by Athletic Greens. AG1 is a powder with 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, whole food sourced superfoods, probiotics and adaptogens to help you start your day right. It's designed to support your gut, health, your nervous system, your Immune system, your energy, recovery, focus and aging.
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32:01 Erin: Yeah, I think all that's really good. I think too that they have, and this is slightly slanted away from your point, but maybe it's related. I'm thinking about their idea of waste. What is a waste? Because this honor that Saito has supersedes, Nicholson is only too happy to surrender when given the order to do so. You know, he doesn't want to waste any unnecessary deaths or whatever on something that isn't necessary. You know, he would rather just go to the POW camp. So for Nicholson, perhaps if he could see maybe a troop under Saito's command sort of go out fighting rather than obeying a surrender order, he would see that probably as madness, but also as a kind of a waste.
I'm thinking about this in terms of something that Nicholson says about the men who escaped. He says, oh, three men dead and for what? So he's kind of implying that death is a waste. Yet he's also like willing to be shot by machine guns over the idea of not wanting his officers to work. And of course, the justification that Saito gives, which is actually kind of a good one. And as far as Geneva Convention or Geneva Code's violations go, having your officers do manual labor is pretty. Exactly. But Saito's justification for it is also good, which is related to this idea of waste, which is why should I feed people who don't pull their own weight in a POW camp?
Why should I feed a bunch of officers who are sitting around doing nothing? Which, I don't know, I feel like that's a reasonable. I mean, I. Far be it from me to, you know, criticize Geneva Code, but I'm just
33:42 Wes: saying, yeah, they're lazy. They're mooching off the Japanese army.
33:48 Erin: Well, I mean, there's something to that, that limited resources in the middle of the jungle that, you know, you're not going to have these officers just sit around. So Nicholson, and he has that Great moment where the guns come out and he says to Saito, I'm warning you. It's like you're about to die. And he's still so arrogant. Like, he's warning him, like, what's going to happen. You know, it's only because of a plot intervention that he doesn't get shot. But anyway, it's just hilariously prideful.
34:11 Wes: There's almost a smugness to it. It's just. Oh, yeah, he's, like, infuriatingly stubborn, and
34:17 Erin: he's willing to let his. To be killed himself and to let his officers die on principle. But the idea of trying to escape when Shears has made it very plain that the odds of survival staying in the camp are worse than escaping.
34:32 Wes: And he also says you at least have to have the fantasy of escape or you go insane.
34:36 Erin: That's right. Which is another really important thing, because, you know, Nicholson seems to think that duty and just pure pride of being an excellent British specimen is enough to keep people alive. And I think Shears is far more astute about psychology, which is that the Union Jack can't keep you warm at night. I guess I can if you wrap yourself in it. But anyway. But the idea is that you have to have a life outside of that. You have to dream of an escape outside of that and see it as a possibility. You can't just be a perfect little worker drone and take pride out of that, though apparently Nicholson can.
35:13 Wes: Yeah, wrapping yourself in the Union Jack, metaphorically, figuratively, won't keep you warm. You would have to do it literally. But, yeah, it's interesting. What Nicholson does say about escape is that normally it would be an obligation. He just. He has an absurd rationalization. Right. It's actually an obligation to try to escape. That would be following the letter of the law. But then he introduces that absurd idea about how he's ordered to surrender. And that's when Shears confronts him with the. You intend to uphold the letter of the law despite the cost.
And then Nicholson says, without the law, there would be no civilization. And Shears says, there is no civilization here. And Nicholson says, well, we have the opportunity to introduce it, so drop the subject of escape. It really is crazy. It's madness. The one element of truth and sanity there is just that it's indisputable that he takes a bunch of guys who are undisciplined and behaving in more of the Shears way, the kind of cynical way, you know, at the beginning of the movie, Shears is basically robbing the dead of possessions and using them to bribe Japanese soldiers to pretend to be sick to get out of work.
Right. Speaking of the whole problem of work, Shears whole project is to evade work. And he's so serious about it that not only does he escape, you know, where the chances of survival are almost nil, but he has to go on this whole journey where it seems like he almost dies several times and then just gets really, really lucky in his pursuit, ultimately of a life of leisure and getting women and all that stuff. And then of course, it backfires. But the one bit of method in Nicholson's madness is just that if he can get his soldiers to work, then he can give them a kind of freedom.
He can allow them to transcend their captivity. And he looks to Shears at that point and says, are you with me there, Commander? And Shears says, I hope they can remain soldiers, Colonel. As for me, I'm just a slave, a living slave. And Nicholson's response is kind of funny because he's like queer bird, even for an American. And then he stops himself and says he's been in isolation too long.
37:25 Erin: So you think that Nicholson's idea of work is good to a point, like in terms of a kind of work a day model. Right. It's suitably distracting, but can maybe only carry you so far because you need a sort of more long term project or something to be hopeful about, like the idea of escape or what have you.
37:44 Wes: What makes it madness to do a project like the Bridge? Why is that mad? On the one hand, it's because it's helping the Japanese, but on the other, it's because ultimately it is meaningless. It's going to be wiped out in some way or another. You know, if it's not wiped out by the war, it'll be wiped out by the ravages of time. In a thousand years, it'll be a different bridge. Right? So our work is not preserved ever. That's the mad thing. We do all these things to make our lives meaningful. You know, we want to be creative, we want to do everything else that makes life meaningful, love and all that stuff.
But it's time will destroy all of it. So I think in a larger sense, all you can do is what Nicholson is doing, which is to ignore the fact that you're a captive of time and circumstance and the necessities of life. Right? That's the larger captivity in which we are all stuck. I think his worries about legacy are complicated. Right, because he thinks the bridge is going to. He puts the plaque up on the bridge. He thinks the bridge is going to be something that he and the soldiers can be remembered for. Which of course, as I'm saying in the long run is not actually true.
We're stuck in the temporariness than the temporality of our creative activities. There's a really good interaction between him and Saito on the bridge. Where Saito is walking on the bridge, sees Nicholson leaning over the railing and then looks at the sky and sees the sun and says, beautiful. And he's referring to the way the sky looks. And then Nicholson says, yes, beautiful. A first rate job. I had no idea it would turn out so well. And then Saito just runs with that and says, yes, a beautiful creation. And then Nicholson says, I've been thinking tomorrow will be years to the day that I've been in the service 28 years in peace and war.
I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I love India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. You wonder, you ask yourself what the sum total of your life represents. What differences your being there at any time made to anything or if it made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking is very healthy. But I must admit I've had some thoughts along those lines from time to time.
But tonight, and then before he can say the positive part of it he interrupts himself and says, I gotta be off. I gotta get to some entertainment that the men are making for me. I love that scene because it says so much right from Nicholson misinterpreting Saito and bringing it all back to himself, to his struggling with the idea of whether the bridge is fulfilling the function that he wants it to fulfill, of making a difference by existing again, whether it's gonna leave him a legacy. And then the very telling part at the end, you know, where he cuts himself off and doesn't try to articulate the positive part of it because I think he's having trouble convincing himself of that.
41:03 Erin: So I love that scene too. I think that the other element of the long term implications of work besides legacy is the much more practical consideration, but also maybe nobler consideration of the fact that work is about supporting your family and your community. And, you know, there's this tension, which I think I've heard you speak on this before too, about the idea that you're working to support your family, but it also takes you away from your family and the ways in which being a soldier, like, especially in a foreign war, makes this really plain.
And I'm thinking about how Nicholson seems to me, like, of necessity to be a man without a family. You know, I can't imagine him as being married or having children or anything like that and acting the way that he does, whereas it's very easy for me to. To imagine. And maybe he even talks about it. I know he talks about his parents, Saito, but it's very easy for me to imagine Saito having a family. And I think it's related to this idea of an impoverished form of or understanding of work. Whereas with Shears, I mean, there seems to be endless opportunities for Shears to get it on with people in the middle of the jungle, because that's what he's looking for.
But it seems like the preoccupations of the soldiers in the scene that immediately follows the one that we're talking about, where the soldiers put on the show, it's about returning home to their girlfriends and their wives. And they're obsessed, of course, as a bunch of soldiers are cut off from women with pinup kind of images and
42:34 Wes: obsession, dressing in drag.
42:38 Erin: Right. And there's also, I think, other elements of family that are kind of expressed by that little performance. I mean, I think that also highlights the idea that these are just little boys playing at war. You know, you have the young Canadian soldier who can't kill the young Japanese soldier. Both of them look like little kids. And you have the Thai women who accompany them caring for them almost like their mothers. You know, I could think of the moment where one of them is putting on. I mean, it's like kind of half sexy, half. I mean, it's stupid.
But when she's putting the mud on Shears body, like, he's not capable of putting on his own body paint anyway. But the men in Nicholson's command, when they put on the show, the end of that show, has that romantic scene that's, like, comic because the big tall guy is comically playing the woman and the smaller guy is the man. Yeah. And then in the end, the little guy, like, jumps into the bigger guy's arms and she carries him off. And so there's this idea of, like, the mothering bond that's kind of tied. That's like a mother kind of gesture, like carrying a baby or something.
And Nicholson can, like, laugh at this and thinks it's funny and everything, but you get the sense that, like, he doesn't have these desires or something. Like he doesn't have a mother or a wife or. It seems like all of his desire is directed towards these stopgaps you know, of the daily distraction and building towards that legacy. Yeah.
43:59 Wes: Yeah. That's really good. He's so obsessed with this that he gives another speech. This is kind of the counterpart to the bridge speech that he gives to Saito. He takes another stab at those ideas right after that performance is over. I think I'll read some of this because I think this is another good one. You know, he says, I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say this has been an enjoyable evening. Most of you move on tomorrow to a new camp and new construction. It's a pity you won't be here to see the first practical use of the bridge. So that's a really interesting thing to say you know, since the practical use of the bridge will involve the enemy moving supplies in order to defeat the British and, you know, defeat the Allies, so.
However, you'll be glad to know the completion of this link in the railway will enable us to transport the sick and the disabled to the new camp by train. Colonel Saito has kindly permitted me to stay behind with Major Clipton and the sick men and then we'll rejoin you in a few days time. Now that your work here is finished I suppose many of you feel somewhat let down. That is an amazing projection. Now, he's still wrestling with this idea of whether building the bridge has solved this problem. So I suppose many of you feel somewhat let down. That's quite understandable.
It's a very natural reaction. But one day, in a week, a month, a year I wish I could do the Alec Guinness accent. I wish I could impersonate his voice here because it's so perfect for him. But one day, in a week, a month, a year or that day when, God willing, we all return to our homes again you're going to feel very proud of what you have achieved here in the face of great adversity. What you've done should be, and I think will be an example to all our countrymen, soldier and civilian alike. You have survived with honor, that and more. Here in the wilderness.
You have turned defeat into victory. I congratulate you. Well done. You know, it's almost like Churchillian or something. A weird variation on that, of course, where they're gonna feel proud of the thing that's gonna help defeat the British. So it is, as I said before, I think it is madness but there's also. There's something to it. But then is there something to it that's sort of the letdown of having completed the project is the moment where you, you know, you go from being feeling proud to having a return to existential angst. That's what the show did for him, instead of making him think of love and family.
Although he does mention that it leads him to ruminate, to further ruminate on whether the building of the bridge has helped him get over his career angst.
46:34 Erin: But it also maybe makes him uncomfortable and he has to return to the subject at hand because I think enjoyment is not something he's capable of. You know, he could laugh for a second, but then he has to get back to the. You know, he can't lose thread. Right?
46:48 Wes: His white whale.
46:50 Erin: That's right.
46:50 Wes: This pine bridge. You've spoken a bit about something that really didn't fully occur to me, which is the element of play and play acting and perhaps a connection to destructiveness. And I don't know that. I mean, we touched on it a little bit. Maybe there's more there to talk about. So there's Major Warden, the professor, and his love of explosives.
47:15 Erin: Once you work in a university, anyone would love explosives. Yeah.
47:19 Wes: Well, I was thinking. Yeah, there's something very academic about that. Right. It's like the. The critic. Right. Nicholson is the poet and he's the critic. So he's there to analyze the bridge and take it down. So very suitable to his position as professor. And also, it's something that's done and has to be done in the cover of night. Right. So he has to. It's like being down in the dusty cellar as a scholar poring over your
47:47 Erin: books or using a pseudonym in the paper when you destroy your enemy.
47:52 Wes: Exactly, exactly. So he's happy in his work in a way. I think I was trying to think about, well, who really is happy in their work in this movie? Is it Nicholson? Is it Warden? Warden, in a way, seems to be the most absorbed, kind of naturally, playfully absorbed. I was trying to make the connection to play here as well. So despite the comment about the critic, you could read this as there being something more flexible in true creativity, so tearing things down to start over or being willing to reorganize if something doesn't work. But anyway, that's just the kind of loose association I made to that. So I don't know if what he's doing is being the critic and the scholar or if what he's doing is inherent in its destructiveness. And inherently playful. But at the very least, that represents two more vectors for what it is that work means.
48:47 Erin: You know, being honest with myself, would I get more. Like, if I was in a situation in which I had no. No freedom to. To do anything else, would I take more interest in actually building something useful or in the work of sabotage? I think there's something that's, like, very difficult to sustain about destructive. Okay. The work of sabotage is, like, a destructive work, of course. Right. It's undermining. And, of course, like, you can't sustain that over a long period of time. Like, that's very, very difficult to do. I think that's why you need to have the active work of planning an escape to go along with the sabotaging of, like, the bridge construction, which one Nicholson is not willing to do.
Therefore, he has to do something, like, active and creative, because otherwise the destructive element, the sabotage element, burns itself up and cancels itself out without that positive escape plan. So, like, thinking honestly about it, like, I would rather be involved in the work of, like, actually actively building a good bridge than in. For months and months and months putting up one thing and making sure that it's, like, built on sand so that in two days it'll collapse. So then you try it again. You know what I mean? So this destructive enterprise cannot be sustained over a long period of time.
50:09 Wes: Well, I think that's where Nicholson is right.
50:11 Erin: Right.
50:11 Wes: He's absolutely right. It is better for them individually. It's better for the men. It's better for the little social group that they have in that camp. It definitively improves morale and even the kind of characters of people. Right. Which have degenerated, and you can see they might naturally degenerate in captivity, especially if you're in the state of being sabotaging all the time.
50:34 Erin: I wanted to relate that to Warden, though, because I'm wondering if. Yeah. If there's a relation to this idea of captivity, not just in terms of, like, not having freedom, but sort of being limited in one's resources, you know, I guess for Warden, there's always another bridge to burn. You know, there's always something else to blow up. But I don't think that's an interesting enough.
50:56 Wes: Well, I think, you know. No, you're getting at something which I thought about, which I think is important, and I tried to give some thought to this as well, which is. So we've made a connection. Like, on first appearances. Warden actually seems quite absorbed in his work and quite delighted with it in a way, like playfully tossing Them, those explosives, shears. And with Nicholson, you get more of an obsession. And it's as if with Nicholson, it's more connected to pride, and with Warden, it's just more connected to the work, which is odd because it's so destructive.
But you kind of have to combine all the different elements here, I think, to get a full picture of what work ought to be. So I think there's a place for all of these things, right? There's a place for Saito's conception of just being busy and being obedient to some higher order. There's a place for Nicholson's pride. There's a place for Warden's destructiveness and absorption and work. If you think of the destructiveness as having something to do with part of the larger process, you need the positive part, which is the Nicholson part. You need to be able to build things as well, but maybe you need to be able to destroy in the sense of rearrange and start over.
And, you know, you need love and leisure as well, which is what Shears seems to be representing. And then there's the Clipton Principle as well, which we haven't mentioned. But the medical officer has his own conception of work, which is repair. It's to repair people, to help heal them. So I think if you put all those things together, you could get a fuller conception of work. But each one apart is obviously not enough. And what kind of war, in a way, has a function of severing all those different components and letting people get stuck in one or the other?
But of course, we all do that anyway. We may have all of those things, but get stuck in one or another at a different time. I become obsessed with a project and I'm just driven to do it to the point where it's no longer absorbing or enjoyable. Or I get focused on the pride part. You know, is this gonna get me recognition? Is this, you know, gonna be career building? Something like that. So anyway.
53:08 Erin: And yet it seems as though the film is kind of arguing that Shears idea is the best idea, too. And I like the fact that you point out that his pursuit of leisure involves a lot of work.
53:18 Wes: You know,
53:21 Erin: so he's sort of a one man ecosystem according to the way that the film draws his schematics for how he's achieving this because he's able to enjoy his leisure, because it takes a lot of work to get it. And there's something satisfying for him in that. Anyway, you're making me think of. Because of the destructiveness, you know, I'm thinking about how there would have to be, like, a great plan for escape, like a great creative plan for escape in order to carry out the project of sabotage at the POW camp and still give the men something, like, positive to do.
Which makes me think that, like, the perfect companion film to this is, of course, the Great Escape. You know, thinking about the parallels, actually, as you were talking was really fascinating to me because they are also, in a sense, building a bridge. The men in the Great Escape. It's a film I love. I don't know if you like that movie too, but.
54:08 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
54:09 Erin: And the kind of destructiveness of the fact that, like, in the end, you know, spoiler alert. Like, pretty much everybody dies trying to do this is interesting, too. And they kind of know that they're going to die. But the ways in which that work of escape brings everyone together is kind of like that's sort of the ideal of what you can do in a POW camp that is creative and also not aiding and abetting the enemy, but the tunnel under the ground, too. It is kind of like a perfect mirror image of this bridge over the ground that's going to give passage to the Japanese soldiers versus the sort of, like photographic negative image of that. Just interesting.
54:47 Wes: Okay, is that a good place to end it?
54:50 Erin: I think so, maybe.
54:51 Wes: All right, we'll say a little bit more about the movie and our postscript, but yeah.
54:58 Erin: Thank you, thank you,
55:09 Wes: subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
What Falls Upon the Living in James Joyce’s “The Dead”
Apr 11, 2022
In 1906, presumably finished with his short story collection Dubliners, James Joyce wrote to his brother with dissatisfaction that, though he set about to create a comprehensive portrait of Ireland’s capital city, he had not managed to render its famous, unrivaled hospitality. His efforts to rectify this omission resulted in “The Dead,” the book’s final story. It takes place chiefly at a party in the home of the elderly Morkan Sisters on the Feast of the Epiphany, and fittingly its central character, the Morkans’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy, will have his own epiphanic experience by the story’s end. Gabriel preaches about Irish hospitality in his after-dinner speech but does not realize that he will grapple with a stranger of sorts later that night. How might the virtue of hospitality include the need to incorporate difficult feelings about our families, our homelands, and ourselves? And is the story’s ending, with its incorporative vision of snow falling on both the living and the dead, hopeful or hopeless? Wes & Erin discuss.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: In 1906, presumably finished with his short story collection, Dubliners, James Joyce wrote to his brother with dissatisfaction that though he set about to create a comprehensive portrait of Ireland's capital city, he had not managed to render its famous unrivaled hospitality. His efforts to rectify this omission resulted in the Dead, the book's final story. It takes place chiefly at a party in the home of the elderly Morkan sisters on the Feast of the Epiphany. And fittingly, its central character, the Morkan's nephew, Gabriel Conroy, will have his own epiphanic experience by the story's end.
Gabriel preaches about Irish hospitality in his after dinner speech, but does not realize that he will grapple with a stranger of sorts later that night. How might the virtue of hospitality include the need to incorporate difficult feelings about our families, our homelands and ourselves? And is the story's ending with its incorporative vision of snow falling on both the living and the dead, hopeful or hopeless? Today we're discussing James Joyce's the Dead, published in 1914. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.
So, Wes, I've read in multiple places that a lot of people, including T.S. eliot, consider this possibly the finest story in the English language. I'm wondering what you think about that honor, and does this story deserve it, in your opinion?
1:37 Wes: Yeah, I think this story is a good. Is a good candidate and I guess we can try to say why. I don't know if you agree, but it's a story personally that I find very touching and I guess I've read it a few times, so maybe it's because I know what's coming, you know, the famous epiphany. Right. But I find it hard to put down. It's kind of, you know, with the little episodes within the story, they're very well thought out and there's a rhythm to the story. The buildup is pretty perfect. And then I think what's going on beneath the surface is really fascinating as well, which will get into.
2:25 Erin: Yeah, I agree. I think it's kind of funny that presumably the whole purpose of the story, which is to render this. This party at the Morkans' house is. Is really just set up for the final scene in the hotel. And so that's a little bit unexpected to me, I guess every time or not that what happens at the Morkans' party isn't consequential. And doesn't you Know, as you say, perfectly set up, what comes later,
2:51 Wes: you
2:51 Erin: know, it's a story in which not very much happens and everything that is occurring is occurring on a kind of subterranean level. And the central drama of the story is not even happening inside the character that we're following, at least not until the very end. Right. I think it's the central drama is occurring inside Gretta, and the main character, Gabriel, that we're following isn't aware that this drama is going on until the very end. And so every time there's a kind of twist, a surprise. So though it doesn't have this sort of obvious, like an O. Henry style plot twist, it's really surprising and satisfying to me.
3:35 Wes: Yeah, in a way, I think there are two climactic moments in the story. One is his speech, right. Which in a way, according to his, I think, preconception for the narrative of the evening. Right. That is going to be the climactic moment. And that's the thing that he's worried about. But of course, that ends up being kind of a. It's not entirely a false flag because I think it's intimately related. And the whole question of nationalism as well, and hospitality versus hospitality is related to what's going on with his wife and the epiphany he has about his wife.
But in a way, Right. That climactic moment turns out not to be the end of things. And then we get this really wonderful poignant vision of his wife in a way that also leads to a kind of disappointment. So I think, you know, your question of whether there's something hopeful there at the end will be interesting as well. But, yeah, there are those two high points and the, you know, in the beginning, I think if you want to think about the inciting incidents of the story, you know, when they arrive, as you pointed out, you know, it begins with the bustle around this annual dance with the aunts and the niece and the servant Lily.
And then there's the question of where Gabriel and his wife Gretta are. Right. Have they arrived yet? So I guess that's the first point of suspense. And the second one is whether Freddy Malins is going to turn up drunk.
5:07 Erin: There's actually no suspense there.
5:10 Wes: Yeah, exactly. You know, and then when they do arrive, when Gabriel and Gretta do arrive, it's. There's the kind of friendly or, you know, who knows? But there's the marital teasing back and forth. His wife took too long to dress, that's why they're late. And then she's making fun of him for the galoshes There's a whole interaction a little bit later on having to do with him being more cautious and concerned about health. But we'll. We'll get to that. And then the other, you know, the other thing that's really, in the beginning, sort of telling.
The first thing that disconcerts, or the word is discomposed. The thing that gets to Gabriel is Lily, who. He makes some comment about how he'll see her married soon. And she basically says that all men suck and they only want sex. That's pretty much the upshot of what she. She says. What does she call them? Palaver. Palaver. I don't know how you pronounce it.
6:04 Erin: They're full of palaver. Yeah.
6:06 Wes: Yeah. And they only want to get something out of you or something like that.
6:11 Erin: They're all for what they can get out of you, I think, is what she said.
6:14 Wes: Yeah.
6:15 Erin: You know, the moment of teasing that you mentioned, I think can be read a lot of different ways. The marital teasing. I think there is a humorous note there, but I think that also it can be read a little bit more sinisterly. You know, he. Gabriel has an iron grip, we'll say, on his household, demanding, you know, what people will wear. And so you can see it. I think it's really clever this way. I think you can see it as a moment of teasing about a good natured husband who cares about his family's welfare and their health. Or you can see it as a guy who has to be in control, who considers himself very smart and very up on things.
Right. And who has to sort of force his family into alignment with his own conception of the world. I suppose. So I think that need for control is something that we see later in the hotel room. And so the groundwork is very subtly laid from the first moments that we see Gabriel and Gretta. We see that they have, you know, a good marriage and that he loves his wife, but also that there's this lack of understanding or maybe a point of slight contention between them that is released in this. In this teasing and could be read in a lot of different ways, this interaction with Lily.
I mean, like I was thinking last night about Gabriel's name being Gabriel and how he has this sort of, like, annunciation that he wants to deliver to everyone, his speech over the course of the night. But then he's sort of visited by these three. These three women who all, you know, have messages for him, I guess. And Lily's is maybe the most confusing in a way. I think what she's responding to. You know, correct me if I'm wrong, is his infantilization of her. Is that right?
8:04 Wes: You think she's unhappy with him?
8:06 Erin: No. Well, yes, yes and no.
8:10 Wes: So she's complaining about boys.
8:14 Erin: I think that his interaction with her has spurred this feeling, this negative feeling. And so she may be responding to this kind of infantilization by way of, like, these negative feelings about men. She may not know that she's responding not only to the content of what Gabriel is saying, but to sort of his manner of putting things right, assuming that she's still in school. And that sort of everyone is following this narrative trajectory towards marriage, which at the time was a really complex subject matter for the Irish because of the fact that Ireland had the lowest marriage rate in Europe, like a shockingly low marriage rate at that time.
And as we see with the Morkan sisters and with Mary Jane, it's very common for a woman to end up alone. So the assumptions and the kind of liberties and the infantilization that Gabriel takes spurs this reaction in Lily. And maybe she gives a kind of a stock answer, but I think it's important that it's been provoked in the way that it has.
9:18 Wes: Let's see. So Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll. So to her, he's much older at this point than her and he's known her as a child. And he's. So there is an element of fatherliness and I don't know how old she's supposed to be. Pretty young. I don't know if it's a teenager or early 20s, but. But yeah, she could be that. That point in life where she wants to say, don't. Don't treat me like a child anymore. Which is not the way I was reading it, although I think that's a possibility. So his words exactly are, I suppose we'll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?
Regardless of whether it's infantilizing or good natured. That's always the sort of thing that can get you into trouble because you love life is often a sore spot with a lot of people you don't know. It's like saying, you know, I suppose you're gonna be going on a vacation to Paris with all that. With all that money. There's. There's an element of luck in here which he's not acknowledging. So when she responds, the men is now only all palaver and what they can get out of you. I think so I took this purely as her cynicism about this sort of thing.
And I think he, you know, he ends up being surprised, I think in part because he doesn't expect that cynicism out of her, perhaps because she's still young. Right. She hasn't really had that much time to become that cynical. And I don't know if this is a comment on the way values are changing. You know, there's always that possibility things have become more socially unstable or more liberal, or the moral fabric has compromised in some way and that her response could reflect that. But I think what you're suggesting, which I think is a possibility, is that she is also saying, I'm not just a little girl who's dreaming about my wedding.
I already know what men are all about.
11:19 Erin: Well, no, not quite. I mean, I think that. I don't think I put this very well, but I think that what Gabriel is assuming about her is infantilizing and it provokes, you know, it's assuming that she's not old enough to have a realistic view of her prospects for romance or that she has had no negative experiences with men and that she's full of this youthful hope and a kind of blindness at this point. So I think that it's not like she's saying, hey, don't think of me as a little girl. I think that his mode of addressing her is infantilizing. And she's not. It's not like she's saying, hey, take me seriously, or something like that. I think that it's provoking bitterness from her because of his assumption and his mode of talking to her so that she's not aware.
12:06 Wes: I think this is a good assumption in like a normal way that someone his age would talk to someone that age. So I don't see it as inherently infantilizing.
12:17 Erin: I think it's a good assumption too. But I think that it has the unintended consequence of doing that.
12:22 Wes: Yeah. So I think he doesn't know something about her, obviously, which she's much more jaded than he expected.
12:29 Erin: Right. And that's the thing. He doesn't seem to know her very well at all.
12:33 Wes: And it's interesting, it's right after that that I like this word discomposed by, you know, he's discomposed by her retort. And that sends him into a kind of worried rumination about the speech he's going to give and a kind of self attack. So this, you know, your idea here, that he doesn't know her very well. He starts to worry in a way that he doesn't know his audience very well. So their grade of culture is different than his. It'd be ridiculous to quote poetry in front of them. He would just be kind of showing off with his superior education.
So these are, in a way, they're at the same time condescending thoughts. Which kind of supports your reading of the interaction with Lily. Because now we kind of get the extension of the condescension beyond the relationship with Lily to basically his relationship with anyone, with all of them. It reflects that his education has sort of created this distance between him and his. His family. But on the other hand, he's quite self critical about that distance and his. His inevitable condescending relationship to people because of his education.
13:47 Erin: You know, his whole interior monologue is ultimately kind of silly. Right. I mean, he's just giving a speech at his aunt's house that he gives every year. And it's kind of funny in the end. I mean, it's a great speech in a lot of ways, but it's kind of funny that, you know, the whole night he's sort of consumed with the speech when it's really kind of a low stakes enterprise. And it's really important. I think it's important emotionally to his aunts and Mary Jane and they are obviously really moved by it. And it's a beautiful experience for the people at the party. But it's also. It's not like he has to speak before parliament or something like that, Right?
14:23 Wes: Yeah, but I would feel the same way. I mean, if I had to speak in front of any audience, because I've done it. I just do nothing but worry about it all night until it's done.
14:33 Erin: That's true. But it seems to me to be more of an issue of. Sorry, Less of an issue of public speaking and more of an issue of what he's going to include in his speech potentially as a way of reproach or his motives for including certain things from the beginning are not entirely clear to me. Like he wants to include Browning, I think because he's just written this review and what he sort of thinks that his audience is going to take out of it is a bit unclear.
14:59 Wes: Yeah. And I think we should talk about the speech and what it's doing because it has actually a bunch of different sections. Right. Which he tells us before we even hear the speech. We get the outline of the speech. So one theme is Irish hospitality, one is sad memories, one is the three graces which turn out to be the, you know, his aunts and Mary Jane, is she his cousin?
15:23 Erin: I think so, basically.
15:25 Wes: So one is the Three Graces, who turn out to be his aunts and his cousin who are hosting the party. And then he lists Paris as if that's a separate section, which it's not. It's part of the Three Graces section. And as we'll talk about, it's kind of a sinister allusion. Paris as in the Trojan, not Paris, the city. And then finally there's the Browning quote. So he lays out those sections of the speech. Not long after he has had the interaction with Ms. Ivors, which is someone who presumably he has a lot in common with. Right. And they've both been teachers, but she basically comes at him with a quote, unquote crow to pluck, because he's written something for the Daily Express and therefore must be a quote, unquote, West Briton.
Right. Which I take it to mean that he's a Anglophile or something like that. He's not loyal to his own country and his own culture. So that's an interesting interaction because part of what he's going to say in the speech in a way, is a response to that kind of nationalist sentiment which has been pre. Written into the speech. But he thinks later on he'll think of a. A way to sharpen up that attack because he thinks that Ms. Ivors is actually going to be there and so he can, he can get revenge for her from this interaction. But I love this little conflict between them.
16:54 Erin: Yeah. The charge of West Briton is like a really serious and consequential one in a way. But also this is another moment where, you know, everything is kind of filtered through Gabriel's perspective. And so it's hard to tell how serious Ms. Ivors is being. Like, she could be just tweaking his nose and being a little bit ironical in her name calling of him, or she could be like, actually kind of salty about. About this. Right. But I don't get the impression that she's being super serious. And then when she leaves the party before Gabriel's speech, he takes it as potentially she's so upset over her interaction with him that she's leaving or something, which is like, definitely not true.
17:36 Wes: Um, well, I, I'm not sure about that, really.
17:38 Erin: Okay.
17:39 Wes: She may not know that. She may not consciously be upset, but it's leaving early. Like that is a. It's a communication or it's. Who knows? But it's not. I don't see it as an outlandish guess, but I think you're, you know, so there's an ambiguity to their interaction where he feels attacked right in the beginning and right. He. In responding to her. This is another moment where he has to think carefully about how he's going to respond. He says, you can't risk a grandiose phrase with her because, you know, so she's on his level. Right. Unlike the others.
And he's not just gonna superior his way out of this. She can kind of get him, you know, she can kind of punch back just as hard. So the grandiose thing he wanted to say was that literature was above politics. But what he ends up saying to her is that he doesn't see anything political in writing book reviews, whatever the political alignment of the paper. He wasn't writing a political column, he was just writing a book review. And he loves books. He even gets a little bit in, just a love of newly bound, newly printed books. And so he sees himself.
This is an important theme in the whole story, right? The story, in a way, is also about nationalism. And it's not. It's a topic that will turn out to be interestingly related to the question of hospitality, but we'll get to that. And she, in his mind, at least, is the representative of nationalism. He'll make a very rude comment in his mind about her later on, saying, had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism? I think he comes to this interaction probably with some preconceptions about her and her politics, and then feels attacked.
And she'll. Of course, you know, as you point out, there's this ambiguity because she'll say she's only joking. So she kind of. The way it comes across. And again, we. We see everything through his eyes. So we don't know how reliable everything is, but the way it comes across to him is that he's been attacked. And then she goes, oh, I'm just joking, and come on this vacation with me. And no, I'm not going to. I can't. I've got a cycling tour. And then there's this whole interesting thing about he's going to be in France or wherever, and she's, why not visit your own land?
And I want to keep my languages up. Why not your own language? And he says, irish is not my language and I'm sick of my own country. And. And then she teasingly, right, presses his hand and then teasingly says, West Briton again before she ends the interaction. So it's hard to tell who's more politically serious there or who's more obsessed with the politics of this right, is she the hardcore nationalist or is he the hardcore anti nationalist? What's going on in this interaction? Although she does make those remarks. And this is a time of fervent nationalism in Ireland, and Joyce is definitely anti nationalist.
So. And it's funny, I thought of, you know, with the whole, Irish is not my language. I thought of being in, you know, when I was in Dublin as a kid, they made us learn Gaelic, and I was just always like, what the hell? What are we doing? You know, we're never going to be able to speak it. It's just like an exercise in. A kind of futile exercise in cultural pride is what it felt like even to me as a kid. So. But there's, you know, there's still that strain in Ireland of cultural preservation, which I think Joyce is rightly associating with nationalism.
It doesn't have to be. Exactly. But in this case it is.
21:09 Erin: Well, and by nationalism, do you mean home rule? Because I think Joyce is in favor of. Of home rule.
21:15 Wes: No, I mean this whole idea that he can't be an Anglophile. So the way Orwell defines this is patriotism is one thing, right? We can love our country and we can love a certain way of life, a certain form of life, and want to preserve that, you know, American ness, let's say, if there is such a thing, or Irishness. But if we are devoted to those things in the sense of wanting to identify with them as superior, Irish culture is superior. We should stick to our own in order to get our own sense of superiority. It's that kind of fervent nationalism associated with a closedness and unhospitality to make the connection a, you know, being closed off to other cultures and nations. Hey, don't go to France. Stay in your own country. That's what I think is the.
22:07 Erin: Is the problem, right? Oh, and I think that Gabriel has kind of the opposite problem, right? Like he's closed off to his own country. I'm sympathetic to the idea of people learning Gaelic and of certain. Certain elements, maybe of Ms. Ivor's platform, if we can call it that. I think that Gabriel maybe represents the other end of that extreme, right. When Ms. Ivors asks him to go to this tour of the Aran Isles. This is the west of Ireland, which of course, like Yeats, has made the association that the west is sort of the true Ireland, right? The original Ireland.
And Ms. Ivor says, oh, you know, your wife is from there, isn't she? And Gabriel says, what? Her people are in a sort of impatient way, or he says it, what is the word her people are, said Gabriel shortly. And so there's a kind of, I think, desire on his part to separate him and by extension his wife from this wellspring of Irish culture because he is sick of his own country for reasons that are maybe understandable, considering all of the talk about it going on at that time. But there's also a sense, I think, that he's maybe divorced himself from his identity in a way, whether this be literal, that he's not in tune with Irish identity, or rather figurative, that he sort of cut himself off from some sort of original wellspring, a feeling or sort of innate nature or whatever that might be.
Right. That could be literalized in his desire to separate himself from the tradition of the west and the true Ireland.
23:40 Wes: You know, he's a representative of cosmopolitan and elite education. The references he's going to make in his speech are to ancient Greek mythology and to an English poet, a liberal English poet, Browning. So whatever his relationship to Irish culture, which I don't presume necessarily, it's explicitly negative.
24:02 Erin: Well, he says he's sick of his own country.
24:04 Wes: Yeah. Although in that moment he's trying to. I think what he's trying to say is I'm sick of people like you, but sick of nationalist, that sort of nationalist sentiment, which can become very simplistic and narrow. So for instance, the other thing I remember learning about in schools, you know, how great the Celts were, the glorious, glorious culture of the Celts, which even at that age felt a bit heavy handed, like, is this propaganda or am I learning history? Spent a little too much time on the Celts. But anyway, so it's a very, as Orwell points out, it's very difficult to know where the line is between being culturally anchored.
Right. Not being unmoored from one's culture, not being unpatriotic, which are negatives, I think, and Orwell does too, but the line between that and simply having a more nuanced relationship to one's own culture, which isn't jingoistic or bigoted or nationalistic, however you want to put it, the line between patriotism and nationalism is actually unclear. And people, I think can cross back and forth without knowing they're doing it right. And even people in the United States who think they are the last thing, they would think of themselves as patriotic and are, when push comes to shove, you could elicit some patriotism from them and you could even elicit some, some nationalism from them if they thought America were in Danger, for instance.
So I think people have these deep feelings about their country, which, as the more liberal they become, the more cosmopolitan they come, or, you know, the more they become a citizen of the world and world culture, the less aware they are of that deep connection. But it's inevitably there. It's like a connection to one's parents. It's undeniable and it's. It's deep and it's visceral, but it can get covered over in the same way that our vitality in life can get covered. Covered over by too much intellectualism.
26:05 Erin: So you don't take this idea of the west or of Gabriel's desire to escape this heritage as being sort of cut off from those kind of elemental emotions. I'm reading it in a symbolic way.
26:17 Wes: I'm not so sure he wants to escape his heritage, but I think there's always that danger of being too reactionary in a way. Right. So I don't want to be a nationalist, therefore I'm going to say I'm sick of my country. It's unclear to me that that's exactly the way he. He feels in this. Right, that he's not also interested in Irish culture and Irish writers. He's an intellectual. Right. It'd be surprising if he weren't also interested in the best of Irish intellectual history. But very clearly he's also interested in the ancients and. And it's Browning and probably world literature and all that stuff. So. And. And in the speech, like I said, nothing Irish per se comes up, right? Except for Irish hospitality, which is something that comes from something decidedly not intellectual, something he can associate with his uneducated family members.
27:11 Erin: Like I said, I am a little bit sympathetic to, not necessarily to Ms. Ivors herself, who might be a little bit insufferable, but to that righting of the ship, as it were. I think it's important to understand the Irish desire to celebrate the Celts and to learn Gaelic and celebrate their own traditions in light of the tremendous amount of the denigration of their culture that they were receiving at the hands of people who had no. No right to rule over them.
27:40 Wes: I think it's understandable, but it can easily become pernicious. It can become jingoistic and nationalistic.
27:46 Erin: I think that this question of nationalism in light of hospitality comes up perhaps in the figure of Mr. Brown, who's another guest at the party and whom Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate have invited in and are kind of allowing to take a little bit of control over the party. I think there are Warnings on both sides. I think that hospitality can also leave you imperiled. It can leave you open to attack or to the stranger who does not have your best interests in mind. And though the figure of Mr. Brown.
28:20 Wes: He's the Protestant, right?
28:22 Erin: He's the Protestant. Yeah. Is a pretty benign one. We also see the ways in which he is.
28:29 Wes: He's an invader. He is the English invasion.
28:33 Erin: Well, he represents the illegitimate authority of the oppressor.
28:37 Wes: Right, Absolutely.
28:38 Erin: And this takes shape in several different ways. I mean, we encounter it even in a sort of, like, vague sexual kind of threat that he poses against the young girls at the party. Like, he's sort of playing like the dirty old man. Right. But also this kind of, like pantomime that he plays where he sort of adopts this low Dublin accent. And at the end of the party, we see him leave in a green coat. Right. He covers his brownness in greenness. He's sort of playing the part of
29:06 Wes: English brownness covered in Irish green. Yeah.
29:09 Erin: Right. And so.
29:11 Wes: Or really orangeness. Right. William of Orange, but the color is.
29:16 Erin: We'll call it terracotta and split the difference. Yeah. And he assumes this paternalistic role or even like the role of a defender, de facto host when he leads Ms. Julia into the dinner, you know, and everyone is allowing him to do this. They're deferential to him in ways that suggest that, you know, like many Irish people and Joyce is, I think, you know, deliberately trying to point to this, they've sort of embraced their own oppression in sinister ways.
29:45 Wes: Yeah. Brown condescendingly calls her my latest discovery. Right. And then says something about her voice having improved.
29:52 Erin: And there's a lot of presumption there. At the same time, he's harmless. He's part of this comic duo with Freddy, and he does see and appreciate other points of view. You know, he even says some positive things about Catholic monks. And he's not sort of single minded or a caricature, but he represents the dangers of maybe not having a strain of a little bit of Ms. Ivors and a little bit of standing up for yourself and for your own. And I think that this question of patriotism and how much allowance one should give to the outsider is a really fraught one when you don't have control of your own house and are trying to take that back. So I am sympathetic to her and I do think that there's something in her reproach of Gabriel because. And he must know it.
30:44 Wes: Right.
30:45 Erin: Because he. I mean, he's a sensitive guy. He's really affected by the encounters that he has over the course of the night. But the fact that Ms. Ivor's statement hits him so hard must mean that he suspects this of himself, right? Or that there's something in her criticism which is true.
31:00 Wes: I think part of the epiphany he has with his wife will turn out to say something about his relationship to Irish culture, right? Because what puts her in her kind of reverie is listening to this, this old Irish song, which she does, you know, she associates with this boy that she loved, but it creates all these feelings in him, you know, And I think that's directly related, right, to his sort of indirect relationship to his own culture. It's mediated in, in some way. We can talk about that more when we get to that. So I want to take a break now to talk about the sponsor for this episode, Buck Mason.
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And then he goes into that whole bit about the tradition of hospitality which is unique among modern nations. And then he calls it a princely failing. This kind of lends itself to your point about the dangers of hospitality when
33:15 Erin: it brings to mind, oh, I never made this connection before, but they have on the wall, you know, talk about, like accepting your own oppression. They have on the wall that image of the princes in the Tower. Right. So maybe there's something in here with a connection to that. That princely failing means that the, you know, the rightful rulers are imprisoned. And Mr. Brown, as Richard III is, you know, running wild over the landscape. Anyway, sorry.
33:40 Wes: This is a patriotic sentiment, right? And it's potentially type of thing which could become a nationalist sentiment. You know, when someone says, this is unique among nations, hey, we're the best at hospitality. But he's putting that in the service of anti nationalism. Because the next moment, and this is where he's thinking of Ivors. You know, there's a new generation, sincere but skeptical, and he uses that phrase, that cool phrase that he wanted to use the. The thought tormented age. But he worries that they're hyper educated, lacking in humanity, lacking in hospitality.
And I think he's. Again, he's specifically thinking of nationalism. And he's interestingly trying to turn a certain kind of Irish pride and hospitality, put that in the service of tempering it before it goes too far, before it becomes a nationalist sentiment. On the one hand, he wants to say something about the hospitality of his family, but he can't avoid politicizing it in this way, even as he wants to criticize people like Ivors for politicizing everything. Everything's propagandizing to them.
34:52 Erin: I'm just curious because I've never really considered this before. You think that any statement which would cast a country or its people as being the best at something culturally, you think is a nationalistic statement or sentiment?
35:05 Wes: Yes, but I'm.
35:07 Erin: So you think it's always negative?
35:09 Wes: I do. Some of that may be benign. And I'm just. I think it's dangerous whether or not maybe it's. Sometimes it's benign. You know, some of it obviously is benign. Hey, the Irish are uniquely hospitable. That's a fine sentiment by itself. But of course, all of that can always be put to nefarious uses. I mean, we're seeing it now in what's going on in Russia, right? It's the greater than, less than thing. It's the other people are lesser than. And Russia is a unique and glorious nation, and it's been severed, it's been split up and amputated, and it must be restored to its glory.
So I'm going by Orwell, wrote a famous essay called Notes on Nationalism, which is very influential on me. And I liked his distinction there between patriotism and nationalism. The difference between celebrating a form of life, a way of life, a culture, between that and saying this makes us superior to other Peoples in some way. So I think you're right. Kind of call this out. It's not a firm distinction, Right. One could benignly say, oh, I think Italians make the best pizza. Sorry, that might just be a bigoted thing to say. Italians are the best opera singers.
36:21 Erin: I think if they didn't make the best pizza, that would be a problem.
36:24 Wes: Yeah, they're not the best fighters, but they're lovers, not fighters. But anyway, right.
36:29 Erin: I see the opposite side of this as being a problem of homogeneity and of no culture at all. Like, if you can't celebrate anything, um, or if you can't stand up for your own or. Or even assert your own superior. And. And I. I don't know necessarily that I agree with what I'm saying. I'm just sort of like, rehearsing this argument, Right? Like, standing up for your own superiority in a certain regard has to do with what makes your culture unique and what makes it different, just on a very simplistic level, from other cultures. I think that, you know, homogeneity would be the result of having no cultural sentiment, and then everything would just be the same, which maybe is the way that we're tending now as a world, but some kind of complexity or sort of local color and flavor and all that is lost in the process.
37:18 Wes: This is why I like Orwell's distinction. When he says patriotism, he means that broadly, it doesn't just apply to nations. And nationalism, for him, doesn't just apply to one's relationship to one's nation. It could be one's relationship to any social group, including one's political party or one's religion. So for Orwell, there's such a thing as pacifist nationalists. People who aren't just pacifists, but believe who everyone isn't. A pacifist is less than. Is inferior. So patriotism in that context is just. I embrace the ideal of pacifism. I think that's great.
And that's what I want to see. That's the idea I want to see furthered in the world. Or as an American or someone who lives in a liberal democracy, one might want to say, I embrace Americanness or the idea of liberalism. That's the idea I want to. That's a way of life that I want to see preserved and furthered. I don't want to see it destroyed. I want to defend it. I want to enhance it. That's the patriotic way of relating. But for Orwell, that nationalism happens when that kind of degrades into rah rah, rah. My country is better than yours. My in group is better than your out group.
And as you're pointing out, the distinction is inexact. Right. We find there's a lot that happens at the border and sometimes it's very hard to tell which one it is. And this is Orwell's whole thesis, is that it's hard to tell on a personal level and it's hard to tell on a political level. When do we want what is good for our culture or our country or way of life or for some particular social group or even for myself? And when is it about pride, essentially? When is it pride in the pejorative sense? When is this about some kind of nationalist sentiment in which I use my membership within a certain nation or group as a means to feel powerful and superior to some other group?
Not only is the line between those two things inexact, they're sort of interpolated in complicated ways where. And this is what Orwell means by doublethink. We can think two contradictory things, you know, on the nationalistic end of the spectrum and the patriotic end of the spectrum, or the good and the focus on power versus the focus on the good. We can grab both of those in very, very contradictory ways and we allow for those contradictions because we are willing to strongly conflate the good with the superior, the powerful, and. And so on.
So I'm reading it. Sorry for the long speech. I'm reading it through that lens and through the lens of my own strongly anti nationalist sentiments. But I think you're right, it's easy to go too far in the other direction. Orwell points out in the essay, there's such a thing as anti nationalist nationalism. Right. One can become too. This is Gabriel's whole problem with feeling superior to people and feeling condescending.
40:17 Erin: Right.
40:17 Wes: It's the nationalism of the intellectual. That's his loyalty, and more than a loyalty. Right. It's a way of feeling superior. So it's very hard for any of us to escape it, even when we're in the mode of thinking that we're rejecting it.
40:30 Erin: Right. And in the case of Irishness, there's an interesting blurring of the boundary between what we might call nationalism or what we might call the right to exist as one's own nation, which I think is more of what's at stake here.
40:45 Wes: Well, this is the thing, right? Yeah. There's the legitimate fight for the right to exist as a nation, but even a just cause can produce stupidity and people and really unsavory notions. So people go too far in the other extreme. It's understandable, right? It's why it happens. And to your point, you know, he kind of adds the caveat to his speech that we should cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone, great ones, whose fame the world will not willingly let die. Like you've pointed to this very complicated problem of how we would distinguish nationalist and patriotic sentiment or celebration of our culture and the positive sense from one that goes into the pejorative sense.
And he's struggling with that in his speech. He wants to say, nevertheless, you know, despite his worries about lack of humanity and hospitality and by implication close mindedness, we still want to cherish the dead and the great ones. I see the stories about culture per se as well, right? The dead rule over us in a really significant and interesting way. Everything that we are, that we've been constructed culturally to be, come from all these people who are long gone, they're long gone as individuals. But their ideas and their ways and their customs and their culture, those aren't gone.
They live on in us. And we are subject to that. And the question is, is that a form of oppression, right? Is it almost like being infected with a kind of cultural virus that compromises our individuality and autonomy or is that heritage a prize? It makes us what we are and it's the only means to be truly happy and to be truly fulfilled as individuals, right? We can't just be autonomous individual units. We have to be embedded in some sort of culture like that. So like the question you've been asking about. Well, you know, if we're anti nationalist, we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
That's precisely this. It's a very difficult question about whether culture per se is oppressive. And not just culture, but our formative influences, right? Our parents, everything that makes us who we are. Are those formative influences oppressive or are they good? Are they both? You know, obviously they're both. But when are they one and when are the other? Or can we have one without having the other? So to call this story the dead is to it makes it a little bit sinister, right? It's unclear how sinister it is, but the idea is that we are ruled by the dead and that's representative of culture.
And then to that caveat that I've been talking about, he adds a another caveat, which is that, yes, let's remember the great ones of the past. But, and this speaks to again, the problem of, is the existence of culture Oppressive or not. So we got to remember them, we got to allow their influence, but also we have to live in the present. You know, he's thinking specifically about lost loved ones, but this applies culturally as well. If we brood on them, if we are. Let ourselves be entirely captive to them, we, quote, could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living.
We have living duties and affections.
44:03 Erin: Yeah. We have the idea of deadness or of the dead sort of ruling over the scene in these conversations or that sort of preference, the past over the present. Right. Based on the singers that the party guests and Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate have heard in their youth and being better than any, like the tenor Parkinson as being better than anyone that you can hear today. Or Mr. Brown mentions all of these Italian tenors or Italian singers that have come to Dublin and preferences the past over the present.
44:39 Wes: D'Arcy won't have any of it.
44:40 Erin: Right. There's a tenor sitting right there that,
44:44 Wes: you know, we're just as good today as they were back then. But.
44:48 Erin: Yeah, right. Well. And interestingly, like, D'Arcy doesn't, you know, he has a cold and he doesn't sing, so he is kind of voiceless until this really crucial moment where he does finally sing. And it has a huge effect. I mean, like, on the one hand, his voicelessness is kind of proving everybody's point. Like, oh, look at this little. This tenor who's. So. It reminds me of conversations at baseball where, like, now everybody's injured all the time. Like, you know, nobody used to get injured before. Now everybody's so precious, they're getting injured.
You know, D'Arcy won't sing. Don't make me sing. And then the opposite is proved when he does sing. And all of these sort of live and immediate emotions crop up in Gretta, who is hearing it and has an experience that maybe when she's Aunt Kate's age, she's going to look back and say that D'Arcy was the greatest tenor that she ever heard. But it seems that subjective experience, I think, seems related to this idea of what one heard in one's youth or at a particular moment, which chimes with one's sort of intention. Individual experience, which is, you know, the concerns of the living are extremely subjective.
And this maybe provides an interesting counterpoint to the idea of the snow that falls generally over all of Ireland. The subjective versus the objective seem to be warring with each other in this idea of what is living and what is dead for each one of us.
46:13 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it's like the anxiety of influence problem. Right. So I think there's a connection here between cultural nostalgia and individual nostalgia and romanticism. And so our connection to the past, does that make us more alive? You know, she's having all these deep feelings in relation to the chip, to that song. And then it's also inducing something in Gabriel. Is our connection to the past and to the dead. Is that, in a way, a key to our aliveness? Or does it trap us in a kind of idealization that prevents us from living in the present?
And I think it can do both. It's like the scholar who can't do anything original because they sort of get crushed under the stack of all their references. They can't take the influence and become alive enough to do something new with it. It just becomes like collecting scraps or being a stamp collector. Hey, look, I'm collecting all these quotations. But it doesn't live in me, and I don't produce anything new of it. I haven't developed any particular talent because of those influences. In Greta's case, Gabriel feels humiliated by the fact that he's looking at her lovingly and lustfully and.
And with pride and all these different emotions, and she's thinking about someone else. And even worse, his feelings are aroused by the spectacle of her thinking about someone else. Because her state of mind, the state of mind that produces such a beautiful, graceful figure that arouses him that night, is created by her relationship to that song and to her memory of Michael Furey. In other words, is she neglecting her current love relationship because she's caught in an idealization of someone who's dead and gone? And, of course, there's the cultural parallel that I've just mentioned.
Or is that inevitable and necessary in a way?
48:09 Erin: Well, I think that Gabriel. Part of his epiphany is realizing that he has not felt or loved as deeply as Gretta and this young man, Michael Furey. You know, we see the ways in which he abstracts her. When she's standing on the stairs listening to the song. He says, you know, what is a woman standing on the stairs? A symbol of. Or something like that. Right. And he doesn't see her as a complete person. He quite literally, like, objectifies her. He makes it. And this is out of admiration and, you know, his mental.
48:41 Wes: He's objectifying it, though, as someone. Something sacred.
48:44 Erin: No, Maybe. You seem to want to give him a lot of credit. I'm inclined to be a little harder on him. Because his relationship to her does not come, as he discovers at the end of the story, from a kind of wellspring of real emotion, but from a kind of abstraction. And he says Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. The title of the painting really doesn't even have anything to do with her. It's about this sort of abstract song that she's listening to. And music is itself an abstract art form. So the question of whether or not he's even really engaging with her as a person is, I think, one that Joyce wants to introduce into our minds.
49:25 Wes: He's idealizing her, which is an inherently objectifying state of mind.
49:29 Erin: But is he idealizing her?
49:31 Wes: Right.
49:32 Erin: Or is he not really engaging with her at all?
49:35 Wes: He's engaged with the vision, you know, the sight of her at the top of the stairs. And, you know, there's a substantial history between them. And, you know, as will happen as you know someone for a long time and you live with them, or you're in a marriage or a relationship, kind of mundanity sets in. And those moments of ecstasy, those moments of being in love, there are moments of that, but that doesn't define the whole relationship. The whole relationship is much more mundane. If you're 17 years old and you have a moment of ecstasy with someone and then they die, that's like capturing that in amber forever.
Mundanity never sets in. And all you have is that perfect idealizing memory. So she idealizes Michael Furey, to my point of view. And it's the spectacle of her idealizing this guy who she didn't obviously know very well. And this is young love. When he says, you know, he's never known love like that. You know, I think he gives too much credit to that type of infatuation. But we could talk about that.
50:35 Erin: Well, he says he's never known love at all.
50:38 Wes: Yeah.
50:39 Erin: Which makes me think that he's not really engaging with her, if we take that seriously.
50:44 Wes: Yeah. So we're not going to agree on that. I mean, I see what he's doing is actually very loving. Loving can often be. Especially there's the love of infatuation and the ecstatic moment, which is often unrealistic and idealizing. And then there's just love as represented in a relationship that's unfolded over years. And intimacy and knowing each other well, which they, in my mind, seem to have. I don't look at their relationship as skeptically as I think as. As you are. I take that as just sort of something pretty ordinary. You know, I don't see him as terribly controlling or them as loveless or.
51:25 Erin: Well, I don't see it that way.
51:27 Wes: Okay.
51:27 Erin: I take Gabriel seriously when he says that he. He's never experienced this feeling, but it must be love. I think that by the end of the story, he does love her by empathizing with her fully. But I think that they have a very good marriage and that prior to this experience when he is sort of like expecting to have this rendezvous, this really romantic experience with her in the hotel, what he thinks about her is so romantic and so beautiful that the thunderclap of the realization that maybe he hasn't really loved her properly is, I think, shocking for us. Maybe we're not supposed to take that entirely seriously. Or maybe it's just a different kind of love.
52:07 Wes: Clearly, he's been infatuated with her. I mean, you know, moments of their secret life burst like stars upon his memory. Her first letter, for instance, and the feeling that produced in him. That's a very touching moment. Right. You know, to my mind, he's pretty clearly been infatuated with her at various points and had ecstatic moments with her at various points. So it's not like he hasn't had feelings for her that are similar for the feelings that she and Michael Furey had for each other, except that time and memory have not for her. And Michael Furey never got a chance to set in.
52:41 Erin: Oh, I see.
52:42 Wes: Yeah. So when he's self critical in the end about not having loved in the
52:48 Erin: way she's loved, he says he had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. Yeah, that's pretty bold to me.
52:59 Wes: So the feeling of saying I don't want to live. Right. That's what he's impressed by, is Michael Furey is sick. But he's willing to go out in the cold and say, I don't want to live, and then die a week later because of the woman that he's loved. So this is a more. Maybe that's right. Whatever moments of infatuation he's had, he never put his life on the line. Right. For someone. Or died by definition, obviously, but died for someone. And perhaps that's a deeper emotion. So my view on that is yes and no. Young infatuated love between 17 year olds.
It's both deeper and not deeper. A lot of it is predicated on illusion. You don't know the person. It doesn't represent the kind of love that happens in a real relationship over time. Someone you really, really know. But on the other hand, there's a depth to it. The feeling is unbeatable. The amount of passion that's involved is unbeatable. But unfortunately, I think that passion is associated with idealization and objectification. So I put. I think I locate objectification at those moments of idealizing infatuation.
54:06 Erin: I suppose what I'm curious to know is where you think that infatuation and love intersect. Because to me, love is tied up in the idea of loving the whole person and the idea of sacrifice. And therefore, the sacrifice of Furey's life for this kind of love is, to me, a very noble thing. And Gabriel recognizes that it's different from his relationship to his wife hitherto. I think that he is infatuated with her. And I think that that's really beautiful for a long married couple. That he does kind of, like, have the hots for his wife and really want to go back to this hotel room because he is so infatuated with her.
But there's something, I think, very noble in the love between Gretta and Michael Furey, which involves sacrifice and a kind of a deeper love, which you think is kind of teenage infatuation. And I think that there's something on the line for Michael Furey that is not on the line for Gabriel and his relationship to his wife. You know, he doesn't know this story until this night. He doesn't really know or access this part of his wife's consciousness. Prior to this, she's never mentioned this experience, which seems so important and formative for her.
I think his moments when he is in the room with her, when she's kind of distant from him mentally, are both very relatable to us. Like, we want to have a certain experience with a person. Like, how come they're not on our wavelength. But they're also expressed sort of in terms of control. He's not really accessing her as a whole person, maybe until these last moments when I think he does really see her as a full person and love her in that way. You know, he's not accessing her past, which is obviously, like, tied up with her identity as someone from the west, as someone from a Maybe a less intellectual background, but maybe a more authentic one than his.
Authentic in quotes. And Michael Furey, you know, the fury of his passion is more live. Gabriel discovers and has more stakes in it than his own limited love for Gretta until this final moment. That's how I'm reading this. So I read their marriage as a very good one. And I read his feelings for her as being incredibly romantic. The description in the cab when he's thinking about their life together, like, you know, brings tears to my Eyes. So I wouldn't characterize my feelings for Gabriel as being anything less than really complicated in his relationship to Gretta.
56:29 Wes: One of the really cool things about the story is that the kind of flurry of different emotions that she creates in him. Or that he gets, you know, from just the sight of her in a state of listening. Or as I think Joyce will call it at some point, a riot of different emotions, including, ultimately, lust. And so we see him in the hotel room. You know, we see elements where he wants to kind of grab her and ravish her. And then other moments where he's relating to her as a whole person. So I think those different moments are. You know, often we're not relating to people as whole people.
So that we find those moments where we can do that, where we can genuinely empathize and get into their heads. Because often we are worried about what we want. And even in a state of infatuation. I don't see the infatuation as particularly empathetic, actually, again, because it's idealizing. I don't see infatuation as being related to a whole person. Like, I want to have my cake and eat it, too. Which year with the whole. Is the love of a Michael Furey? Is that the real thing, the deep thing? Or is it not? And I. You know, I was trying to say yes and no in different senses.
But I think your points about sacrifice and the level of passion are very important and good. Nor should we just abandon idealization and infatuation. Those are important emotions.
57:52 Erin: I don't know that I agree that, like, I don't know how I feel about these things personally. This is just my reading of the way that Joyce is presenting it, you know, So I don't know how I feel about the relationship between infatuation and actual love. I haven't really worked that out. But I think that Joyce seems to be making this distinction. I do think that there's something deeper and more sacrificial that's, like, inherent in a marriage. That, like, for a successful marriage, there has to be this level of love that's about sacrifice and about a willingness to die for the other person.
Which, when Gabriel admits that he doesn't feel. It could be because he's never had, you know, the opportunity to feel that way. Or it could be because he seems to be cut off from certain emotions or sort of views of himself or views of Gretta that he has to, like, welcome into his own heart. Right. Like, I see the final scene as being. Gabriel is learning to love Gretta. And also Learning to be hospitable to himself in a way, to his own complicated feelings about things, to this other man who makes up a part of Greta's past and who therefore represents a part of Gretta that is.
That is unavailable to him and that he has no control over. And I don't mean that in that he is only relating to her in a kind of controlling way, but I think that we all have, you know, when we love someone, we. We want to, you know, obliterate their past and not necessarily make friends with certain elements of people that don't kind of fit our view of them or our standards even. And like, part of, I think true love is letting that go and embracing all those being hospitable to all those elements of the other person. In the same way that I think, you know, he has to learn to be hospitable in a way to his own.
His own country. Like he's kind of made himself a stranger to Ireland and he has to maybe learn to integrate and incorporate those elements of Irish culture, you know, as represented by Gretta and her girlhood, as being part of his own identity as well. I think that that's really important for his growth at the end.
1:00:00 Wes: Yeah, I think the cultural parallel is very important here. As you've pointed out, there's this suggestion of a disconnect from a passionate relationship with his own culture and too much abstraction, too much of being an intellectual and in a way, I think too much. And you've given one reading of hospitality, but I'm going to give another here just too much hospitality in the sense of the kind of hospitality that invites a brown in or even the kind of hospitality that makes him feel like he's just. When he's being self critical about being a penny boy for his aunts, right.
Just being in this humiliating position. So the suggestion is that there's something missing. And I think you're. You're right about this. You know, there's something missing from. If you are cut off from a deep love of your own culture or you are cut off from the passion, right, the kind of passion represented by Michael Furey, then that's a problem. But again, on the other side of that lies nationalism and idealizing and all that stuff. So it's just a difficult. Ultimately there has to be some balance, but it's a difficult balance to get. So Michael Furey, I think is pretty.
Is a reference to the Furies. And if we didn't pick up on that, then Joyce kind of tries to make sure we do by basically saying he feels persecuted by this figure. I'm trying to find that. Do you remember where that is?
1:01:28 Erin: Yeah. A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if at that hour, when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him.
1:01:39 Wes: In its vague world, that terror is elicited by the. When Gretta says, you know, he died for me, and this is before she tells the whole story. So the Furies were, in ancient Greek mythology, were agents of vengeance. Right. So famously, they chased down Orestes. Orestes killed his mom because she killed his dad. And then he got punished for it by being chased by the Furies. So basically, they're punishing people for crimes, and in this case, specifically for the crime of matricide. So what do we make of that?
1:02:17 Erin: I have no idea.
1:02:20 Wes: You know, I think the punishment might have something to do with just the sort of thing that you were talking about, which is his disconnection to passion, whether culturally or romantically. Right. So that, in a way, you know, Orestes, in a way, was trying to vindicate the paternal over and against the maternal. And you could see that roughly as what Gabriel, in a way, is doing in the disavowal of passion. And so the story of Michael Furey becomes kind of the natural punishment for that. All right, shall we end it there?
1:02:54 Erin: Sure.
1:02:55 Wes: Okay. Thank you.
1:02:57 Erin: Thank you.
1:02:58 Wes: Thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com to listen. Com.
Finding Home in Stephen Spielberg’s “E.T.” (1982)
Mar 14, 2022
Stephen Spielberg once said that he was “still waiting to get out of [his] Peter Pan shoes and into [his] loafers.” Being a filmmaker, he said, was his way of remaining a child. Sort of. While his film “E.T.” is told from a child’s vantage point, it does not completely honor the wish to remain there. Like the alien he befriends, Eliot has been abandoned. And to this, many of us can relate. But in the end, the point of phoning home isn’t to get rescued by adults, but to avoid—even as we succumb to the responsibilities of adulthood—alienating our childhood talents for imagination and play.
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0:11 Wes: Steven Spielberg once said that he was still waiting to get out of his Peter Pan shoes and into his loafers. Being a filmmaker, he said, was his way of remaining a child, sort of. While his film ET Is told from a child's vantage point, it does not completely honor the wish to remain there. Like the alien he befriends, Elliot has been abandoned. And to this, many of us can relate. But in the end, the point of phoning home isn't to get rescued by adults, but to avoid, even as we succumb to the responsibilities of adulthood, alienating our childhood talents for imagination and play.
This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. Okay, so, Erin, it's been a long time since I've seen ET and this experience was quite different than the last time. For instance, I remembered the adult scientists in the film in a much more sinister way. I didn't remember that they were actually trying to save E.T. s life. I thought they just wanted to dissect him or maybe even vivisect him. But also I was thinking about whether or not I thought that ET Was cute or whether he was grotesque. And I know he's cute, you know, he's got a cute face, but I also found myself.
Or maybe it's only components of the face are cute, but I found myself sympathizing with Gertie. When she said I don't like his feet and in general, his shape and the way he hobbles around, I thought, huh, that's really interesting because he's sort of iconically cute, but I hadn't really noticed the grotesque aspect.
2:03 Erin: Yeah, I didn't remember the lower half of his body at all. When he's lying in that ditch after Halloween, and then when we see him kind of fully laid out, he definitely's definitely bottom heavy, shall we say
2:19 Wes: he's got a pear shaped body, unfortunately.
2:23 Erin: Yeah, his legs are a little on the short side, but I find him adorable. I mean, how would you describe his head? It's sort of binocular or, you know, I mean, the eyes make it.
2:35 Wes: Yeah, it's got a periscope plus binoculars quality, I guess. You know, the neck. Periscopes a bit.
2:41 Erin: Yeah, the neck, yeah, yeah, the neck extends, but just the head shape itself is.
2:46 Wes: Yeah, very oblong. Obviously he's probably used to a different gravity, although, you know, he seems somewhat adapted to Earth's atmosphere, although not enough to not get sick, you know, eventually.
3:01 Erin: But I didn't realize that was the problem.
3:04 Wes: Well, I don't know if that's the problem, actually. It could be the. Because, of course, he rejuvenates when the spaceship, his comrades, or not comrades, fellow aliens, come back and get near. So it seems like the sickness might also have something to do with empathetic connection.
3:24 Erin: Yeah. I hadn't seen this film since I was maybe 9 or 10, so it has been a very long time for me, too. And I also remembered the adults being bad guys, and they're not, and I was surprised by that. I also remembered the mother being kind of a bad guy, or that was my impression. Like, you know, not an actual bad guy, but, like, I remembered her being somehow different. Like not sympathetic or something like that. But not the case.
3:50 Wes: I think there's an ambivalent relationship to the adults in the film. You know, it starts out very sinister with the scientists doing their searching and the Keys guy. Right. And we only get to see the waist. We don't get to see the faces until the end in which we. We find out that Keys doesn't want to hurt ET but he wants to save him, and that he's been dreaming about this since childhood. And so that, in a way, his childhood wishes have carried over into adulthood so that it no longer looks just like adult cynicism. I'm going to find this creature and dissect him.
And I represent the powers that be. You know, the governmental powers are representative, as oppressive. But I like the complexity of this position, and it's not uncommon in Spielberg. It's a complex representation of adults and the relationship of children to adulthood. And one of the things about adulthood, and this is well represented in the mother, is just the intrusion of adult concerns. Right. So the mother is very harried. She has to work. She's been abandoned by her husband and now has to take care of all these kids. So there's something about adult concerns that are very alien to children or make them feel alien, I think Spielberg famously said.
Right. His focus on aliens had something to do with the fact that he felt. And I think his father abandoned him as a kid as well, but that his feeling of being like a little alien as a kid, which I thought was very interesting, because, of course, there are ways in which ET Seems to represent, you know, children and childhood innocence. That didn't tee you up very well, I guess.
5:45 Erin: No, no, no, no. We're talking about this in relation to the mother.
5:50 Wes: Yeah. This is a variation on adulthood. It's not the same. She doesn't Work the same way as the scientists. But, you know, she just kind of similar to the way I remembered her, which is being very frazzled and standing, in a way. She's an object of sympathy for the kids because she has been abandoned as well. But she's also largely irrelevant. She's kind of in a flurry at the perimeter of what's going on. And we get to be in the childhood world and it's the children who have all the agency for most of the film.
6:29 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about how late she actually finds out that ET Is there. I didn't really even remember her finding it out. And there's that great sequence, of course, where she doesn't see him.
6:40 Wes: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is a good metaphor, Right, for the way being adult closes us off to, let's say, the world of the imaginary. I don't know.
6:50 Erin: Right. Well, thinking about the mother and the sort of, like, fact of having this single mother who's gone for a lot of the day, he stays home from school or the sort of, like, inherent lack of supervision that comes from that got me thinking about the neighborhood itself. And I was really intrigued by this suburban backdrop, which seems. I looked it up, and it seems that critical opinion is split on this as well. But I seem to get, on the one hand, a kind of benevolence from the neighborhood and a kind of safety which is borne out as much in the mom as it is in the friends of the kids.
I'm surprised that the mother, you know, of course, she has this initial reaction to trying to protect the children from this creature. But then she has a surprisingly rational, or whatever the rational version of a good reaction would be to this plot scenario. And she's sympathetic to Elliot and, you know, likes this little alien, as far as we can tell. And the children in the neighborhood too. You would expect them to foil the escape plan at the end. Instead, they help. So there's this kind of surprising benevolence and community in the neighborhood at the same time.
It allows for this tremendous freedom. It's also rather alienating not to keep returning to that word. And it's a little bit cookie cutter, of course. Like, you could see the shots of it on the hillside are, on the one hand, kind of beautiful. On the other hand, they have that manufactured or prefab kind of look to them, the houses. And I was reminded of the neighborhood in the dissection scene which seemed to me to be just as the frogs were kind of identified with ET For Elliot, the individual little glasses that they were in with the chloroform I thought was kind of reminiscent of those houses on the hillside.
8:45 Wes: Exactly, yeah. That's great. I didn't think about that connection to the glasses, but I thought, you know, in thinking about this I thought again, I agree with you. And this is one of the, the things that's important about the film that it's not. This is suburbia, but it's not just, hey, suburbia bad, hey, adulthood bad, hey, science and technology and authority bad. Again, it's a much more ambivalent, complicated relationship. And I at one point, just thinking about some of these shots of the valley, right, we get to see this suburban, you know, I guess it's a suburb of la, maybe, I don't know, but mm, it's not suburbia.
Filmed entirely from within. And as something completely bland. We get kind of a grand scene of it looking down into the valley. And I had an association which is it's kind of a loose one. But I was thinking about the sort of crater like aspect of the way the city is laid out in the valley. And I thought of War of the Worlds in which the spaceships kind of get buried into the ground a bit. So I thought, you know, it almost has that glittery aspect, right, which is something that Spielberg does with his alien spaceships, all the lights and it's.
I thought, you know, in a way it's like a crash landed spaceship. I think the alien and the spaceship, they have something to do with our capacity to maintain a relationship to what is creative and imaginative and childlike in adulthood. And so here you see, it's not just where dreams have gone to die, but there's still a hint of some capacity for that. So yes, it's broken in a way. And adulthood tends to. The tendency is to break childhood capacities for being imaginative and for play and for creativity because adult concerns intrude. But there's still always that potential.
And the wish here, I think is to be able to maintain some of that imaginative capacity into adulthood. So it's there in a kind of broken form, which means that to some extent it's potentially fixable. So the movement into adulthood doesn't have to be all that sinister in the way it seems at the very beginning of the film with the shots of the searchers, the scientists, in a very sinister way overlooking the suburban valley. It doesn't end up being necessarily that sinister.
11:16 Erin: Yeah, I like the brokenness, but also the idea of the landscape is holding those two things in tandem. Kind of like the keys guy, right? As adults, of course, we like. We maintain memories of childhood experiences and therefore, sort of holding together our childhood selves and our adult selves at the same time. And in that same way, I think you're right that the shots above that little town are pretty grand. And it's that integration with the landscape, I think, expresses like a very California kind of tension between living in this beautiful place and settling it, but it never really being settled.
There's always the earthquake threat or the threat of natural disaster kind of looming over what's otherwise a kind of very hospitable place. And so you have that too, I think, in the house where it's like, it's safe and suburban and sequestered on the one hand, but on the other hand, because of the flexibility of the parent child relationship, it's unsafe. You know, your dad might leave you, your mom might be away from the house when you need her. And so there's both a tremendous freedom and safety and danger kind of all existing at once. And I think this is related, you know, the California idea, too, is really interesting when it comes to, you know, the movie associations and, like, being in the land of.
Of movies. I think that membrane is pretty permeable in the movie as well, you know,
12:41 Wes: in thinking more about the appearance of ET and sort of. I don't know if my experience is generalizable, if others get that element of grotesqueness as well, but I thought, you know, it's interesting to represent childhood innocence in et, which I think is represented as something grotesque. And that led me to think of the ways in which those two things are related. So I thought of the way the fetuses at a certain, you know, certain points in development look, and the fact that there's an incompleteness. And that incompleteness, you know, it's not just physiological.
So there's. There's a lot of that. Right. And ET's difficulty with mobility and. Which is a factor of childhood and not being an adult yet. And so. So being alien to an environment which. Right. We are adapted to that environment as adults, but not fully adapted to it as children. And incompleteness also extends to unformed character and lack of education. So children are more material and potential, or they're more a matter of potentiality than actuality. Right. There's. They're waiting to be actualized, but going along with that, there's a lot of vulnerabilities, which, you know, again, I'm connecting this to grotesqueness, but there's dependence and the prospect of abandonment, as you mentioned, there's a difficulty defending oneself.
There are sinister adults who might abuse or molest, and so those capacities not fully developed. And then even the ability to flee danger is impaired, going back to mobility. And then there's the. Ultimately there's the danger of poor formative influences that lead to a kind of adulthood that is damaged to some degree or another. And there's dramatic forms of damage, but then there's just ordinary damage again, being caught up in the world of adult concerns and losing a connection to one's imagination and creativity. So I thought that's a really interesting bunch of things that you can pack into the appearance of ET and it doesn't have to be that way.
Right. Because you. I love the Yoda crossover in the movie. Right. The gnarledness of the appearance can also represent old age and wisdom. And it also can represent, you know, as we saw in our analysis of Alien, it can represent sexuality. So I'm thinking of the frog scene there with a little girl standing, screaming as the frogs are on the floor, which, you know, if you're a Freudian, you're tempted to see that as a. Feelings about sexuality and ultimately. Right. That culminates in, in him kissing her. So he takes her down off the, off the chair and kisses her.
So I think all those elements are there in the, you know, maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but you can read into, into the appearance that, you know, all of these different elements.
15:37 Erin: No, I think that's right. And I think, you know, in your description of childhood and of the fetus, you know, I was thinking too, of old age that all of those things could apply in like, the final years of one's life. I think there's the dependence, the senility, and also the kind of. It's not unformed like in childhood, but it's like a. Is that at the risk of sounding too, I don't know, sort of like an Eastern philosopher? It's almost like the return to the generalized or the, you know what I'm talking about. Like, you become wise and things bother you less and the rough edges of your personality are kind of smoothed away and you become more, I don't know, clean in your, in your perspective on things.
You see things more vividly and more clearly, perhaps in a certain regard. And so there's a kind of full circle quality that I think ET Unites. And, you know, in as much as he has to sort of learn the human ways and as a child with this, the speak and spell and learning how to talk, he also has that kind of eternal wisdom quality. And that's what I love about the Halloween scene. I was thinking. I've been thinking about that Halloween scene so much. The idea of the children being dressed as people who are dead or recently dead, you know, and ET is the ghost.
Or also that ET is, you know, a ghost interchangeable with the little girl
16:57 Wes: and is scared of their outfits.
16:59 Erin: Right, right.
17:00 Wes: Yeah.
17:01 Erin: And that, that kind of flexibility, I think too extends to ET's gender. You know, like Elliot insists that it's a boy. Of course, Gertie dresses, dresses ET up as a. As a little girl. Right. So there's a kind of fungibility and flexibility to his, his appearance that we can take to, you know, in, in any direction.
17:21 Wes: ET is gender fluid.
17:22 Erin: Yeah, right. Or genderless or whatever. And I was thinking too about that frog dissection scene and about how it does seem like through linking his consciousness with et, Eliot. So I had. I had forgotten about that ESP connection that they had.
17:41 Wes: I had forgotten about the extent of it. That scene which we're about to talk about that culminates in the kissing. The empathetic connection to the ET and through that in the movie is one of my favorite. To me, it's the best. So I did remember that. But yeah, I had forgotten all about the extent of their identification and even the fact that Elliot, right, the E and T. It's pretty heavy handed in telling us that those two are strongly
18:08 Erin: identified, but for about half a second I thought I had really discovered something unique and then I realized that that was probably obvious to everyone and sure enough, it's in all the reviews.
18:19 Wes: Only in thinking about this carefully did I. That's the first time I noticed it and I'm sure it's mentioned a lot by critics, but.
18:25 Erin: But yeah, he contains Elliot's name, I guess. Right. And so that's, that's an interesting idea is the containment factor, like ET contains Elliot and the sort of the dreams of the children and everything, not the other way around. But that association where he's in school is a really interesting one because of course you get ET as a potentially very, very old little person, very close to death on one side of it, and also as a child, sort of close to non existence. Right. On the other extreme. But then that middle sequence, am I wrong for thinking of it as being like the surrogate father who stays home jobless in the middle of the day and drinks beer in front of the tv? Is that.
19:06 Wes: You know, I hadn't thought of that. But that's great. Yeah.
19:09 Erin: Because the experiences that he's picking up through the television and the sort of, you know, John Wayne movie watching, you know, Coors Light drinking experience. It's like Elliot is, you know, speeding through the maturation process by.
19:23 Wes: Exactly. Yeah.
19:24 Erin: Experiencing that with E.T.
19:26 Wes: yeah. That's the part of it I did think about. You could read Eliot's relationship in a Peter Pan way. Right. As a desire to stay a child. But again, and I think this goes along with the ambivalence towards adults in this movie. It's actually more about the desire to become an adult in a certain kind of way again and maintaining some connection to childhood or integrating childhood into adulthood. And maybe it's about imagination, but it's also about empathy. And so that empathetic or sympathetic relationship to ET Is not just about, hey, I'm going to stay a child.
And this is all very touchy feely and aren't we? It's also about becoming an adult so that ET Becomes a conduit. Right. A communication device, like the device that he later on builds to connect to his home. He becomes a communication device, device to adulthood for Elliot by way of a John Wayne movie. So Elliot gets to do these very adult things that normally a father might help him do. So I think that's brilliant, the idea that ET Is in that position of a deadbeat dad in this scene, but the deadbeat dad is somehow transformed into a real father.
20:49 Erin: Yeah.
20:49 Wes: You know, we get that scene later on where they're smelling his. The father's shirt and talking about the things that he used to. Used to do with him. So that's really interesting. And so, you know, as I said, the thing I love most about the film is just the fact that that telepathic connection puts Elliot in the position of behaving a lot like an adult and in the classroom, you know, taking it on himself to release the frogs and then ultimately kissing the girl in a scene where you get this cut back and forth between the John Wayne movie and what Elliot is doing. And I just. I think that's very touching.
21:27 Erin: I think so, too.
21:29 Wes: So we're talking about home a little bit here and the idea of a father being at home. And so I guess it's. We should talk about what it means to want to go home and so own home and what Homecoming represents in the context of the movie, because I think that's complicated as well, you know, like E.T. eliot's been abandoned and what does it mean for E.T. to go home? What does it mean for Elliot to go home? And how are those two things related?
21:56 Erin: Yeah, speaking of streams being crossed and things like that, you know, it seems important that ET Return to his proper place and that, you know, there's the suggestion that he's dying without being in close contact with his family. So that familial unit seems to be very important. On the other hand, it's undermined by the fact that, you know, he maintains this. This really strong connection with Eliot. You know, there's that moment where he asks Elliot to come, potentially come with him. And so there's this. This moment of crossing. But the message of the film at the end seems to be that these worlds are sacrosanct and that there's a very clear place of belonging for each of these two figures.
And I guess I don't know how to reconcile that in terms of the larger themes of the movie, which are obviously about the ability for these species to sort of integrate and about understanding and tolerance and all those good things.
22:54 Wes: You know, there's an ambiguity here in Homecoming as well, and one of the meanings is quite dangerous. It's regressive. Right. As we saw in our Oedipus episode, we don't really want to go home in the sense of ending back at home with the parents, sometimes in an inappropriate way, as it was for Oedipus, but sometimes just being dependent on them. Right. Economically. And the concepts of, like, going away from home, which I think is associated with growing up and going home, can get very confused. And as we talked about in the Oedipus episode, you know, nominally.
Right, becoming ambitious and competitive and developing a career in adult relationships, that's supposed to take you away from the fold, the parental fold and the original family. But it can, on another level, be a way of maintaining an unhealthy connection to it, you know, which is what we see. And someone becomes grandiose or narcissistic or very focused on, you know, admiration at the expense of everything else in their work. And again, they. So they lose a connection to the playful and the creative and the imaginative. But we can't simply be childlike.
We are focused on recognition. And there's. We. I don't think as adults, we can simply abandon that. So those things become very confusing. And I think it's a really interesting fact of human development that regression and maturation look a lot like each other. They're structurally very similar, and they interpenetrate and they create these enormous dangers, because what can seem like a maturational process can actually take on the significance of regression. So I think for Elliot, at the end of the movie, he knows that staying on Earth, if He's going with E.T.
to his home, I think that that would represent a regression, a return to some place where, you know, be very Peter Pan of him, where he can be a child forever with these childlike creatures. Although that's kind of a simplification, again, of what ET Represents. But so he has to stay in order to finish the process of becoming an adult. So, again, the wish is not simply to remain a child, but to carry something of childhood into adulthood. And I think, you know, it begins with his abandonment, his wish that his father hadn't abandoned him and that the family were still intact.
And so we get this unfolding of a kind of fantasy in which he. There's another abandoned creature with which he's strongly identified, and that creature is going to help him get home. But that doesn't mean him going home in the sense of remaining a child or regressing. These two things are paradoxically related. Maintaining something of childhood, the childhood capacity for sublimation and becoming an adult are importantly related. And so then the question is, how do you accomplish that very complicated task of staying a child in one sense, in the service of being the kind of adult you ideally want to be?
That's the problem. Right.
26:08 Erin: That's really interesting. I'm thinking, too, of, like, you know, if he left with ET he would become his father in a way. Right. His father who's depatriated himself.
26:16 Wes: Yeah.
26:17 Erin: And gone to another. To another place. Mexico. Right.
26:21 Wes: It's interesting because in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the father ends up abandoning the family and going with the aliens.
26:29 Erin: Yeah. Well, I hate that movie. I can't stand that movie.
26:34 Wes: I love that movie. And I wrote a long piece about it, and I think I'm going to put that on my substack.
26:40 Erin: Oh, fun. Maybe you'll get me to like it.
26:43 Wes: Yeah, no, I really. I saw it on its 40th anniversary in the theater.
26:47 Erin: I did, too.
26:48 Wes: Oh, okay. And I was. Yeah, I was really blown away by it. But Spielberg actually said, you know, if he had been a father at that point, he would not have had the father get on the spaceship. But I think part of what the father getting on the spaceship can mean is our relationship to our parents changes and no longer becomes dependence. And childhood attachment, there's much greater dose of identification. And so absence is also implicated. You know, parental absence is, in a way, is implicated in becoming an adult. So that, again, it's a very paradoxical thing.
You need the childhood attachments to parents and then the correct sort of attachments in the service of getting away from them, in service of detaching from them. Like in the very beginning of the movie, Elliot, very casually. Right. Says. And very insensitively because he gets chastised by his brother for it, but insensitively says, oh, he's in Mexico with so and so the name of the girlfriend. Hmm.
27:51 Erin: That desire for escape, I think, is pretty well represented in the Star wars product placements throughout the film.
28:01 Wes: I just love the way Spielberg has fun with his friend George Lucas, you know?
28:04 Erin: It's so good. Yeah, I read, too, that Harrison Ford was in it and then got cut out. He was gonna be the principal of the school.
28:11 Wes: Yes, I read that as well.
28:13 Erin: Yeah, I'd love to go to that school. No, but I had forgotten, so. I love Stranger Things. I don't know if you like that show.
28:22 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
28:23 Erin: I mean, I think it's declined in quality a little bit. But that. But those opening sequences, you know, because I grew up seeing the Goonies a lot more, actually, than ET or anything like that. I had forgotten that the kids in ET Are also nerds. You know, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, you know, those types of kids.
28:41 Wes: Yep.
28:42 Erin: And so I really liked. And I was one of those, too, not Dungeons and Dragons, but I did have. My brother and I had Star wars action figures, and we had a. We made the Millennium Falcon out of legos. It was a whole thing. And the TIE Fighters and stuff like that. So I really liked that stuff.
28:58 Wes: Yeah. Well, I can say, you know, in the 80s, growing up in Ireland, we were very, very into that as well. And there's a kid in our neighborhood who. He was like, the rich kid, and he had all the Star wars stuff, which. Which was hard to get, like you. You know, some of the things were practically collector's items and. But.
29:15 Erin: Yeah, right. I remember my most prized possession was I had Princess Leia in her Endor outfit with that speed bike thing where she would go through the woods in Endor with. Luke was on the speed bike, too. And then they had that whole chase quest.
29:32 Wes: Which movie was this from?
29:33 Erin: This is Return of the Jedi.
29:35 Wes: Okay.
29:35 Erin: Do you remember that? Where they're going through the redwoods, but it's on Endor. And Connor and I rewatched that over and over and over again, so everybody wanted her in the way. And I was so happy that I had her in that, like, weird little camo outfit where you could barely even tell that it was her you know, it was a little teenage, teeny, tiny thing. It could have been anybody. And her on her speed bike and we would, you know, through the backyard. Anyway, so these are kids who are. And they're red. Peter Pan is a bedtime story. And so these are kids who are thematically primed for an alien to come down.
I just kind of wonder what that brand of childhood, what function that is serving. It seems to me Elliot is like the ideal child to meet. They're in an age of sci fi, like partially created by the maker of this film, which is really interesting. And I love the. Is it Buck Rogers? Is that the name of the cartoon that they.
30:31 Wes: I think so, yeah.
30:33 Erin: Buck Rogers.
30:34 Wes: Yeah. That ET Gets the idea for the radar from. Yeah.
30:38 Erin: And I know Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers had a big impact on Star wars, the concept of Star wars and that development. And so it's like a fantasy for children. You know, the Peter Pan escapist going to another world, living in childhood kind of fantasy. But it's also, I think, of a very particular brand. You know, I think sci fi in general obviously has these associations with times of uncertainty and discomfort in the real world, which makes the sci fi element sort of so attractive, but also gives them a kind of a threat. Yeah, so I don't, you know, I don't know about, about that connection. I'm, I'm just kind of thinking about that.
31:17 Wes: Yeah, I think this is another ambivalent relationship, you know, because technology can also represent adulthood in the sense of, you know, like in Close Encounters more than in this movie. Spielberg makes a lot of electronic toys, but also appliances and, and the way technology can kind of just serve mundanity. And we see a lot, a lot of that with smartphones now. Right. The way technology can just come in and fracture life and fracture relationships and it breaks us apart. And the wish is that technology could actually serve the purpose of human connection and creativity and intimacy.
And of course, you know, film is a very technology heavy medium. And so, you know, you can see Spielberg, Spielberg's preoccupation with this idea that technology and art can kind of play well together. So when you were talking about Star Wars, I was thinking about the way in which the childhood imagination is kind of ascendant because you have all these impractical devices. Like why would you create these, you know, if you can fly around in spaceships, why would you create these big lumbering, you know, whatever it is in Empire Strikes Back, those big like horse
32:35 Erin: like machines walking the AT-ATs.
32:40 Wes: Is that what they're called walking through the snow and being susceptible to being tripped up and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, and why would you fight with a lightsaber if you could just use a blaster? But anyway, you integrate all of that kind of retro stuff and anachronisms and nostalgia, but you also, you privilege childhood imagination in those circumstances. So, of course, you know, children are fascinated with science fiction and the future and technology as promising something fantastic and imaginative. But there's also the other sides of this, you know, one is technology, again, serving the purpose of the.
The mundane appliances in the kitchen and just getting kind of stuck in the routine of everyday life. It can help make a routine more of a routine of all that stuff. But then there's also the sinister aspect of surveillance. The surveillance that is performed on the family by the searchers and the scientists. This happens in Close Encounters as well. The use of technology about the powers that be to kind of exploit or control. So control the populace. So, yeah, technology can mean a lot of different things, but the hope is that in a way it served the purpose of play rather than becoming the thing that kills it.
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35:27 Erin: I like that a lot. You're reminding me of the Roger Ebert quote I love, which is that movies are like a machine that generates empathy. I'm thinking about the boys.
35:36 Wes: That's great.
35:37 Erin: Becoming. You know, so much of growing up in the age of cinema is kind of like discovering one's own identity through identification with people on screen or with fictional characters, but in this far more visceral way than the generations past who had to sort of like, you know, experience these stories mediated through a page, you know, thinking about these movies reflecting back to you or sort of like teaching you modes of behavior, like literally carried out. When ET watches John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara kissing, and then Elliot is like, compelled to carry.
To carry it out with that kind of identification. But also the idea that the figures prior to ET's arrival, the figures that the boys are shown identifying with, are aliens. Yeah, these non human figures. I don't think he. I think he has maybe a Lando figurine, but he has, like, mostly the figurines that he's showing to E.T. are all aliens. And, you know, the fact that they go as ghouls and ghosts for Halloween and the fact that in Dungeons and Dragons they're playing as goblin characters or something like that is really interesting because it's like their identification is expressing a kind of brokenness, you know, and there's
36:51 Wes: also the childhood preoccupation with cuddly toys, which psychoanalysts would think of as these transitional objects between attachment to parents and moving on to more mature stages of psychological development. But. Yeah, what are these attachments to the alien or to the technology in some very imaginative sense? And to stuffed animals and animals in general, what does that all represent?
37:19 Erin: It makes the little Gertie. I think it makes her accept ET right away. I love when ET is among the stuffed animals so the mother doesn't see him because he looks like he blends in with the rest of her toys.
37:31 Wes: Yes. Yeah, exactly.
37:32 Erin: Yeah. So they're all a little ghoulish. It kind of highlights how heightened and actually odd looking so many dolls are, you know, and so I don't remember exactly what her dolls look like, but they all have those big eyes and they're, you know, I think that she immediately accepts ET on those terms because he. He doesn't look right. He doesn't look human or anything, but he looks. He looks like a toy. And therefore she accepts him on those terms.
37:59 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it goes back to Spielberg's complaint that he felt like an alien when he was a kid. And again, it's, you know, like E.T. these children are. Have much different forms physiologically than adults. You know, part of it was just being small, but in infancy, right. Large head and then the fetal stages and then. But you know, more to the point is the psychological, because they're inchoate psychologically, children are much different. They're aliens. So, you know, you could think of as the adults are the aliens or the children are.
Feel like aliens. But I think, you know, this identification with aliens and ghosts and stuffed animals and part of it is about, you know, it might be about the way you handle the imagined viewpoint of adults. How do adults look at us as these strange little incomplete beings? And how does one cope with that fact? Well, you surround yourself with these alien like figures with which you can identify. And then for Elliot, right, he gets to go beyond the figurines to the actual. Gets the actual thing right and get something out of that. So these identifications can actually facilitate the entry into adulthood, this transition, you know that again is foreshadowed, right, because children are aware that they're becoming adults.
And it's a strange feeling. I mean, I remember, I remember my big worry when I was a kid was like, because my sisters always had homework. And I just remember being terrified of the day that I would have to do homework.
39:50 Erin: Oh, I remember being excited for homework.
39:54 Wes: You were excited for homework?
39:55 Erin: Oh, yeah. I couldn't wait to be, to be a.
39:59 Wes: What kind of monster?
40:01 Erin: Let me tell you,
40:05 Wes: adult relationships and all the disappointments, everything that's coming, it's kind of a terrifying thing. Which explains some of the. What are Grimm's fairy tales preparing children for? You see some of the ways in which, right. Adults that the witch that eats the child and which adults can abuse or they can prevent children from growing up. The mother who wants to stay merged. But also, I think it's just adulthood looks like a, a scary place in part and again in part because it kills the. It can kill what's really important about childhood and what we don't want to lose, which again, I think has something to do with play.
40:41 Erin: And to return briefly to the, to the flip side of that equation, I was just thinking about, you know, one of the things that makes children so alien to adults besides their cute little big headed appearance, is the fact that we can't read their thoughts, right. Like we don't know what's going on inside their heads and they can't express themselves. Which is, I think, one of the things that makes that ESP connection with ET so interesting too. Yes, that's, you know, someone who can read your mind and who shares your consciousness in this really intimate way.
And therefore, that must be some facilitation of the maturation process, too, though I. I don't know under what terms that would be, but the ability to finally, I guess, express your thoughts properly or get people to understand you, even though that's always an imperfect enterprise. But to be able to express that in adult terms, or so that adults can understand you well.
41:29 Wes: And even to come to the point, you know, as part of what you're doing in childhood is learning how to mentalize and put thoughts to feelings and to. And a baby can't do any of that for themselves, and the mother does that for the child. And ultimately the child develops the capacity to do that for themselves in that capacity has something to do with the symbolic order. Right. And the use of signifiers, the use of language, because. Right. Language can help us cope with absence. So if the mother walks out of the room, it's not just that Mommy is gone forever.
It's, you know, I can imaginatively put this symbol in her place and soothe myself with the thought that she's still there in some sense and that she will return. I'm reminded of ET Saying, I'll be here. Right. He's leaving. But then he points to Elliot's head, although I think, there, I'll be here. The significance of that is more about the imagination will remain with Eliot, the imaginative, playful component.
42:37 Erin: Right. But I think also that it's like he's going through a whole life cycle with his father and that E.T. s loss maybe is helping him to mourn the loss of the father figure and realize that that can be. It's super sad because it's an abandonment. It's not a death. I mean, not that one is. I guess, one is sadder than the other, but, you know, I think it's like a way to cope with that loss.
42:59 Wes: You know, I love this idea, too, speaking of technology serving more humane, empathetic, and connecting purposes, this idea that ET Gets that he can phone home and that he can do that by cobbling together speak and spell and some other stuff.
43:15 Erin: Right?
43:15 Wes: Absurd. And again, going back to the kind of fantastic technology where childhood imagination is ascendant, this kind of absurd contraption that we're supposed to believe allows him to communicate with a spaceship in another solar system, or at least on its way back to another solar system.
43:34 Erin: I was reminded of when I finally got a flip phone late in high school, because early on I was always doing musicals after school and staying for rehearsal, and I would always have to, like, find someone who. And it was hard to do. Find someone who had a cell phone so that I could call my mom to come and pick me up. And anyway, I realized that really, it's. It's like ET Is on a playdate, and he has to let his parents know where he is so that he can get a ride back home anyway.
44:03 Wes: That's great. That's great. You know, that feeling of abandonment, I'm familiar with that in the sense of I grew up in a single parent household and didn't have a father, just with my mom. And I just, you know, she was working and trying to make ends meet, and it was a very tough circumstance financially, but also because she was often not home. And I remember that feeling of waiting for her to get home and just that sense of abandonment in that. Whether it was, you know, whether it was fair or not, but. And then just going back to more ordinary childhood stuff, like, you know, you get lost in the mall or something or.
44:40 Erin: Yeah.
44:40 Wes: And that horrible feeling as a child that if you're. If you've lost your connection to the adult, that you're in big, big trouble. Then you have to go to the kiosk and have them announce, you know, which is embarrassing.
44:55 Erin: Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Did this movie come out at a time that you were. Did this align with you being the perfect age to see it in theaters or.
45:04 Wes: Oh, yeah, Yeah. I was 10 years old when this film. Wow.
45:08 Erin: Okay. Yeah, so it's perfect. Perfect movie for you.
45:13 Wes: Yeah. And it was not long after I got to the. To the United States, too.
45:19 Erin: Did you like Reese's Pieces?
45:21 Wes: I don't remember liking Reese's Pieces, although I was very. I was very excited about American candy. Like, the first thing I did was I went and got Doritos. Like, I had. Only I heard about them, and I couldn't believe that, you know, they're these triangular chips. Like, I just thought that was crazy. Not that we didn't have, like, exotic stuff in England and Ireland, but. And not that you couldn't get Doritos if you tried, like, go to Harrods or something, but. But yeah, I had never had them, and that's the. That's the first thing I did. So I know that. And by the way, back then, you could get a Candy Bar for 36 cents and a pack of chips for 30 cents. Does that make me sound old? Start talking about prices.
46:00 Erin: Uh, oh, tell me that you're gonna get a roast beef D for 5 cents and then. Then we'll talk. Yeah, And a sundae and a shoe shine.
46:11 Wes: You know, originally they asked, I think it was Mars if they could do M M's and.
46:17 Erin: Yeah, that's right. I read that.
46:18 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. And the Mars said no. For whatever reason, I guess they thought that E.T.
46:23 Erin: was too scary. Right.
46:24 Wes: Yeah. Okay.
46:25 Erin: Pretty high and mighty for a company named Mars.
46:29 Wes: So Hershey's, you know, they got the. They accepted. And of course, it just drove, like, tremendous sales of Reese's Pieces. And I remember them being a big thing, so I remember them being, like a symbol, right? So they became more than a candy. They became a symbol of something. And in this case, you know, I wonder how they got the idea for this, because it is, you know, the use of the Reese's Pieces to lure E.T. i'm like, is that really necessary? Does, you know, how does that forge the relationship? In the beginning, ET Seems more like a child and more primitive in a way than he ends up being. So it's more like trying to lure a dog or a cat to where you want it to go.
47:12 Erin: I was thinking about that and the relationship of ET to appetite. He eats so much. There's a lot of junk food in that movie.
47:20 Wes: Yeah.
47:21 Erin: And a lot of spills unashamedly.
47:24 Wes: Right. With the Cokes. And it's just ordinary, and yet everyone is thin.
47:28 Erin: I don't know about that. I mean, I think that there's an important fairy tale quality to it. And the idea that Eliot somehow knows that winning something over involves satisfying its sweet tooth or, you know, something like that. I mean, there's the breadcrumb idea. There's the idea of, you know, winning over, like, the Ewok. Winning over the Ewok with a little treat so that it won't eat you. Not that Ewoks are a great example of actually. And this predates that movie, I think, by year. But anyway, I don't know what that's about.
48:01 Wes: Well, with the breadcrumbs, you made me think about reversing the whole Hansel and Gretel thing, right? So instead of getting lured into the forest to be eaten by the witch, you lure something out of it.
48:13 Erin: Right.
48:13 Wes: And the other thing that occurs to me by you talking about junk food is that, you know, that's another component of modern life and what technology does for us, you know, in the. In the realm of convenience, right? So you get all these convenient but not so healthy snack foods, and you have a busy mother. And so, of course, that just becomes a kind of go to that kids have access to. But. But in this case. Right. It's put in the service of something more sublime in a way. Right.
48:44 Erin: I mean, the cleverness of that is that what represents ease and convenience and the mundane for us represents exoticism for E.T. you know?
48:53 Wes: Yes. Yeah.
48:53 Erin: It's kind of like. Like renewed or rejuvenated through his. His perspective and. And things that are bad for you. I mean, includes, you know, includes beer and. And it's like a really mundane. Isn't it a Coors Light? Isn't that like a bad.
49:07 Wes: I don't know anything about beer, so.
49:09 Erin: Yeah, but isn't that, like, the junkiest beer as far as beer goes?
49:12 Wes: It's one of them.
49:14 Erin: Yeah.
49:15 Wes: Or PBR or. We drank even, like when I was in college, we drank even more. You know, the, like, cheapest thing you could find. I forget. Even forget the name. It's like, not even like a national brand, but. But yeah. Corsa Coors Light.
49:29 Erin: Yeah. So there's, you know, not that it's saying something positive about beer or. Or intoxication or something, but there is a kind of like, re. Enchantment of convenience and junk food and.
49:39 Wes: Yeah.
49:40 Erin: It's like animating the little figurines, you know, having them come to life or something. It's. It's that. That kind of reinvigoration of the symbol.
49:47 Wes: Yeah. And again, you know, there are lots of these reversals or putting one thing in the service of other. So it's putting junk food or beer in the service of something else. Like, it goes along again with the whole. Your idea of the deadbeat dad becoming the conduit to something more adult.
50:03 Erin: Yeah. And the intoxication maybe is just symbolic for this, like, imaginative flight, you know?
50:09 Wes: Yeah.
50:09 Erin: The dad, maybe, who's sitting at home and who's trying to forget his troubles and the fact that he's out of work by sort of drowning his sorrows in beer becomes like the conduit for this, like, imaginative escape in childhood, which is like, a positive thing and which is not associated with behavioral issues and addiction and stuff like that. Right.
50:31 Wes: And this is what adults use alcohol and drugs to try to recreate. Right. To recreate ecstatic feelings associated with being creative, but also to recreate connection to human. Human beings. And it's a kind of substitute for feelings of intimacy and self connectedness and connectedness to. To others. So it's a poor substitute, but, you know, it's spot on for. In its. In its parallel to the healthier version of that.
51:01 Erin: I wonder if junk food too is kind of a benign version of that. I mean, when I think of like certain junk foods, you know, I really don't eat a lot of. A lot of junk food. So when I, when I do think of Reese's Pieces or Doritos or whatever, I think of childhood parties or like watching the super bowl as a kid, you know, usually birthday parties, having that kind of unfettered access. Not that actually I was allowed to have junk food and stuff like that growing up. My mom wasn't strict about that. But just the quantities that you would eat and that kind of communal experience associated with those types of junk food.
You know, the idea is that it's available in the house and the kids are probably having it on their own, but it becomes this, like, shared experience by having it with ET in the way that I would associate it with, you know, hanging out with friends or having a sleepover, eating a lot of junk food and staying up late and being on a crazy sugar high or whatever.
51:52 Wes: Right. I love the way it starts out with the kids illicitly ordering pizza. Right. And like get lots of sausage, which becomes a kind of counterpoint to the pacifist. I don't know, I was going to call them herbivores, but really the ETs love plants and have a special connection to plants and are there to, I guess, harvest or to take botanical samples. But I can't imagine them as meat eaters, you know. So what do they eat?
52:19 Erin: No, maybe they eat gardeners, raising plants and boys.
52:25 Wes: Yeah, right. But part of that meat eating, pizza eating thing goes along with. Right. We start with these. Elliot in this relationship to these older boys, including his brother, but his brother's rowdy friends and razzing each other. This is another thing I like about some of these 80s films and Spielberg in particular, and these representations of childhood as the rough edges of that, especially as you get into adolescence, and then the relationships between children of different ages. So, and Elliot wants to play a game with them and he's being excluded from that game, which is again, one of the.
Goes to one of the vulnerabilities I mentioned earlier, which is the deficits or weak vulnerabilities when it comes to actually competing. And that's something that you will eventually have to do as an adult. So this is another. This is something that Elliot is trying to make the transition into the ability to compete and kind of roughhouse with these. With these older boys or with boys his age as he gets older. And there's this element of cynicism as well. There's a line that I like. I couldn't fully understand it in the movie and I had to look it up in the script, but something about 40 year olds and then someone says, how do you win this game?
Another kid says, it's like life. You don't win at life. Then someone says, money helps. So talking in very adult ways, when of course, they've just used their mom's money to order pizza. But for someone who grew up in the 80s, like me, it's very nostalgic. I have the feeling that even your generation probably feels some kind of nostalgic connection to the 80s, and that's part of what makes a show like Stranger Things work.
54:12 Erin: I don't know, I was a 90s kid, but yeah, yeah, for sure. I think that kind of grittiness in childhood TV shows was still very much that. Maybe it had softened a little bit, but I think it was still very much present. I'm thinking too about with these adult concerns and money and stuff like that. You know, you mentioned that people are eating all this junk food and not getting fat. The mother doesn't seem to be indulging that much, or at least she's always gone and she's always kind of harried, as you say. And of course, kids can eat, eat all that stuff with impunity, relatively speaking. And then I'm thinking about the intrusion of the government people who are all. Weren't they all like ER staff, like real EMTs or real ER doctors or something?
54:55 Wes: Oh, were they real?
54:57 Erin: Yeah, he hired people who really would know what they were talking about in an emergency room situation like this.
55:02 Wes: Okay, interesting.
55:04 Erin: And so I'm thinking about that in terms of health and trying to keep ET alive and the concerns of the adult figures with checking your vital signs and, you know, is there a connection to be made there? It's like things kind of get real for the adults in a way that doesn't for the kids.
55:23 Wes: Yeah, I mean, adults have to keep us alive as children so that, you know, you get a. You get a gradually more sympathetic view of adult worries and concerns. You know, the things that, again, the compromise our ability to be creative and playful. So it's not just sinister, but it's forced on us to some extent. So our first encounters with the Searchers and all the rest of it, it's very sinister and it remains that way to some extent. You know, you have adults with guns, right, Trying to stop the kids from escaping. Although Spielberg, in a later edition, digitally took the guns out and replaced them with walkie talkies. But I think he should have left in the guns.
56:05 Erin: So dumb. Yeah.
56:06 Wes: Yeah, but it's, you know, so the
56:08 Erin: threat is so important.
56:09 Wes: Yeah. The sinister stuff doesn't entirely go away, but again, we get a complex depiction of that and it's softened. It's softened for the keys guy. The keys guy turns out not to be such a bad guy, the way he's standing next to the mother in the final scenes and interacting with her. Hints of a surrogate father figure. And then the. The concerned medical staff. And what I took away from this as a kid is just a bunch of bad people trying to dissect E.T. i forgot about the fact that they actually care. They're trying to save them. They're concerned.
So adulthood has real concerns. It's not just a matter of negligence and malevolence and all the things that you might think it is in childhood. Right. So you learned to, you know, as you grew up, you learned to empathize with adults in a different way and the kind of things that led to them neglecting and, as a child, damaging you in certain ways.
57:10 Erin: Right. But it's funny, you know, those kind of practical concerns are, of course, like, superseded by this resurrection that happens. Right. So they, you know, they could monitor. They could monitor them with all those little. The stickers that. All their vitals and everything and try to sustain life as much as possible. And then, of course, it's all undermined. Like, first, you know, Elliott feels as though he can heal ET by being with him, or he's, I think, reading the adults around him as having sinister intentions in a way that a child would in that scenario.
And therefore, we're. We're reading those intentions that way, too. And he's. He's wrong, we think. Right. Even though he's close to E.T. in those scenes, just a few beats before E.T. is still dying or he's still suffering. So even though we get this sense that if Elliot was free to go to him that things would be better, it really wouldn't matter. But these practical considerations and the beepy machines and everything that's going on, ultimately it's something else that revitalizes ET and that supersedes all that stuff.
58:14 Wes: So he comes from a place that is more technologically advanced, obviously, put a spaceship on Earth. But in a way, for his species, it seems the social is more basic than the biological. Right. Which is not normally the way, at least if we're naturalists, that we think about it. Although, of course, it's very, in some circles, philosophically, it's very common now to think of the social ontology of things as fundamental as over and against materialists and scientifically oriented for whom atoms and biology and all that stuff, those are ontologically fundamental.
So in this case, it's his social connection and telepathic social connection to his shipmates, his, his spaceship friends. It's his telepathic connection to his people, to his peers that is more important than, than all the biological stuff when it comes to his actual survival. So whatever the machines say about his respiration and his heartbeat, cardiac arrest. There's something that is more important than that, that is ascendant over that, and that is the love and social connection. All right, so we'll leave it there. What are we going to discuss in postscript?
Other Alien movies?
59:38 Erin: Yeah, other Alien movies. What else can we do? Oh, like a Spielberg talk about other Spielberg movies that we like?
59:45 Wes: Yeah, yeah, let's think. Yeah, let's do that. All right, so thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is of part, part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
The Power of Calm: Two Wordsworth Sonnets
Feb 28, 2022
William Wordsworth wrote no fewer than 523 sonnets over the course of his career. (By comparison, the second most prolific Romantic sonneteer was Keats with a paltry 67.) Two of Wordsworth’s best-loved efforts in the form are both Petrarchan sonnets with the same rhyme scheme, written in the same year, published in the same volume. Yet their messages, at least at first blush, are fundamentally opposed; one admires London’s cityscape and establishes a truce between the trappings of human innovation and the untouched features of the natural world, while the other laments a developed, industrialized, disenchanted England. How might we reconcile Wordsworth’s two minds on city life? What characterizes his so-called pagan creed? And must devotion to an ideal alienate us from the tune—however discordant—of our own age? Wes & Erin discuss Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” and “The World is Too Much With Us.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:11 Erin: William Wordsworth wrote no fewer than 523 sonnets over the course of his career. By comparison, the second most prolific romantic sonneteer was Keats, with a paltry 67. Two of Wordsworth's best loved efforts in the form are both Petrarchan sonnets with the same rhyme scheme, written in the same year, published in the same volume. Yet their messages, at least at first blush, are fundamentally opposed. One admires London's cityscape and establishes a truce between the trappings of human innovation and the untouched features of the natural world, while the other laments a developed, industrialized, disenchanted England.
How might we reconcile Wordsworth's two minds on city life? What characterizes his so called pagan creed? And must devotion to an ideal alienate us from the tune, however discordant, of our own age? Today we're discussing Wordsworth. Wordsworth's composed upon Westminster Bridge and the world is Too much with us. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and this is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So Wes, Wordsworth's first published poem, it turns out, is a sonnet that he published in 1787. And then for about 14 years, I think, he didn't write any sonnets.
So the 523 came. Well, I guess 522 of them or 21 of them, because I think there might have been one other early sort of juvenilia sonnet effort. So 520 plus came after 1801. And I guess the sudden resurgence of interest in the sonnet happened when he and his sister Dorothy were sitting around, I think, at Grasmere and happened to open up a volume of John Milton's sonnets. And Wordsworth was rapt and suddenly decided to write almost, you know, a whole volume's worth of his two volume poetry collection from 1807 in the Sonnet form, which I think is so odd, it's so interesting that he then just went straight into it and then wrote over 500 of them.
2:20 Wes: Wow, that's amazing. Sonnet fever.
2:24 Erin: That's right.
2:26 Wes: Have you experienced that? Have you gone through a sonnet phase?
2:30 Erin: I did. I'm thinking about sonnets a lot right now because I actually am in a workshop where we were assigned a sonnet this week and apparently I've discovered it's one of those things I can do when it's not assigned to me. I write a lot of sonnets, or I have in the past and I've had people Also sort of prescribe sonnets to me. I remember when I was first getting into writing poetry, I had a semi mentor figure, this older woman I knew who was very accomplished poet, who said, if you want to be a poet, you should write a sonnet a day. And that's how you learn to write poems.
And I did not do that, but I thought it was pretty good advice. And there's something about the sonnet form, I think, that is adaptable to any situation. It's extremely flexible and it has the capacity to kind of hold whatever you put in it. It's like a Mary Poppins bag or something. Take that with a grain of salt. Obviously, many poems are not sonnets for a reason, but I do think that there's something magical about the form, especially in English.
3:37 Wes: Why did you pick these two? So we just got done with Tintern Abbey, which we did as a two parter. And then you suggested that we do these two sonnets as a third Wordsworth episode. Why these two in particular?
3:51 Erin: Well, they're a really odd pair. They sit just a few sonnets apart in that poems of 1807, that Wordsworth book that he released obviously that year. And yet they're such an odd pair. I mean, they're so opposite each other in certain ways. It's rare to see a poem in which Wordsworth is praising a cityscape in which he's looking at something man made and admiring it. Though granted he admires it as if it's a landscape and it has some pretty odd features. And then the second one is sort of atypical for him too, I think, in that I find it odd that he seems so angry.
I don't know if his anger registered for you, but he seems rather angry and it seems very strident in a way. And where he goes at the end of the sonnet is really surprising. So there are two really surprising sonnets that I think make an even O. And we could have done any number of his sonnets from that volume. Like there's London, 1802, in which he directly addresses Milton's legacy in England. And you sort of see this burgeoning conservatism really at that point in which he longs for an older and quote unquote, more authentic England, which would have been really interesting.
But I just think these two together are such an interesting dichotomy and yet they kind of wrap around into each other as well, I think.
5:15 Wes: Yeah, I think they go very well together. And Composed Upon Westminster Bridge is a surprising poem for me because he's praising the city, Right. And he's doing it as if the city were a natural wonder. So we get something interesting and counterintuitive there, and that will extend through the poem. There are a lot of interesting, paradoxical seeming images and thoughts in the poem. And so, you know, it's a really good extension of our discussion of Tintern Abbey as well. And this sort of relationship between nature and the human and human artifacts and buildings in the city and the way they. The way those things interact. Do you want to. Do you want to go ahead and read it and then we'll go line by line?
6:07 Erin: Sure. Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802. Earth has not anything to show more fair. Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty. This city now doth like a garment wear the beauty of the morning Silent bare ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples Lie open unto the fields and to the sky all bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep in his first splendour, valley, rock or hill Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep. The river glideth at his own sweet will. Dear God. The very houses seem asleep and all that mighty heart is lying still.
6:58 Wes: Very nice. So Earth is not anything to show more fair. Wow. That's a pretty extreme statement. Very clickbaity. Wordsworth.
7:12 Erin: Yeah.
7:14 Wes: Interestingly, it's not anything. It's not any and thing or not together there, but anything. We are going to be given an ode to the city in a way. And the way it starts, it seems as if the city is something like a natural wonder. Right. It's just another of the things of the sublime things that one might appreciate in nature, which is obviously counterintuitive because the city is something that's made by human beings. It's human unnaturalness and artifact making at a very large scale. And then the other thing is, it's industrialized and cramped and filled with work and drudgery.
Dirty, maybe crime ridden. All the ills that city suffers from. So we have to figure out how it is that as it'll become clear in this poem how it is, one might try to treat the city as if it were somehow another one of the things of nature. I was reminded of green to the very door in Tintern Abbey, the way he can treat human products and dwellings and so on as integrated into the natural landscape or overrun by the natural landscape. Something like that, sure.
8:33 Erin: Yeah. Well, you know, even before we have to figure out how he's going to Treat the city. He really buries the lead. I mean, we don't understand that this is a city even until line four. Right. I mean, I suppose the title is a clue, but Wordsworth is famous for being places and thinking of other places, so he could just happen to be on the bridge and thinking of something else. And so we really don't get what it is that he's looking at. He really could be describing anything. What is this sight? What's this thing that's so, so fair that you'd have to be an idiot not to see its beauty? I think Earth there, as you suggest, is a strange word because he is emphasizing a kind of scale which seems extreme. And fair is also an odd word, as if he's saying, let's be fair, you know, let's give this sight its due. There's, I think, the suggestion of fairness within that word in its other sense.
9:29 Wes: And also notably, it's not beauty.
9:32 Erin: Yeah. So there's something about. I mean, fairness is. Maybe Wordsworth would argue against this, and maybe he did argue against this in Tintern Abbey, but fairness is not something that we associate with nature in its second sense that I'm kind of suggesting. Right. And so there's the trappings of civilization that he's admiring and the things like justice and fairness that we get when we live in a city with other people and have to contend with others. So.
9:56 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of that. Double meaning. Yeah.
10:00 Erin: Yeah. And then in the second line, dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty? So he's. Again, he's suggesting, I think, that he really should admire this. You know, he's by himself and is sort of talking to himself here. And the dullness, I think, in the second line is really contrasted with, like, the images of brilliance and the glittering quality of the city in the later part of the poem.
10:30 Wes: Yeah.
10:31 Erin: This is interesting, too. You know, it's as if he's sort of chastising himself, maybe. At least I read into it that way, because anytime that Wordsworth is admiring something man made, I think that he must be kind of forcing himself to.
10:48 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. It's a lover of nature who is perhaps, you know, surprised to be so affected by human industry. You know, this urban scene on a large scale. So, you know, the suggestion might be that romanticism itself contains the peril of dullness by ignoring the majesty of artifice on a grand scale. And here. Majesty. Right. Seems to be. Again, we're not getting beauty per se. And this sounds a lot more like sublimity, which I think the rest of the poem supports. Although the word beauty is going to be used as well or beautifully, you know, and that's.
The sublime is something usually reserved for nature. Right. It's grand in scale and beautiful, but dangerous. And it reveals one smallness. It's dangerous in a way, but it's. But it's also, as Kant thought, we can appreciate it because we're not really in danger, but it's still evocative of something terrifying and dangerous. And so, you know, the typical examples of that are cliffs and the ocean and lightning and just these large, scary natural things. So to treat the city as an instance of sublimity, if I'm right in reading Majesty that way, is a really interesting way to look at this.
12:13 Erin: Yeah, I think you're right. And that makes touching even odder to me, because it strikes me as odd. I mean, are things that are majestic and sublime, do we say that they're touching? It seems an oddly domestic. You know, a word at a domestic scale. I mean, literally taken the whole idea of majesty and the sublime is something that seems out of our reach. Right.
12:40 Wes: Yeah. I think this is one of the many paradoxes of the poem, which is that by the very end of it, it's almost like when he talks about the houses seeming asleep and the river of its own sweet will gliding. It's almost like he's looking at a sleeping child or something. You know, that's almost like it's. Oh, this is very quaint. And so you get this mix, I think, of its grandness and its scale with these words like touching. It also argues. It could argue against my reading, obviously, but it could also just be an interesting tension.
13:17 Erin: No, I think you're right. I mean, there are so many paradoxes. Like the idea of. I remember trying to explain this to my students. The idea that the city is. Is like a person wearing clothing and yet it's bare at the same time.
13:31 Wes: Apparently Wordsworth thought of revising that later on because some lady in London complained about. Complained about that contradiction. But it's a really great contradiction because the idea that the city wears the beauty of the morning like a garment. So we get two ways in which the city is sort of integrated into the natural environment. The first part of it is more temporal. It's like the city is integrated into the diurnal rhythm of the day. And we're going to get some explanation of the majesty of the city in terms of Its silence, the fact that it hasn't really woken up yet, which is really important because we can imagine that the city, while awake, would not have the same majesty.
Right. And once it starts producing smoke, which we find out it's not producing right now, which would be the garment of the active city. So here it's clothed in nakedness, paradoxically. Right. So the beauty of the morning and the sky, it's wearing the natural like a garment. But to wear the natural like a garment just is to be naked. And there's even more to that because. Right. The garments are a form of artifice, and they are, in a way, the original form of artifice. Right. With Adam and Eve.
14:51 Erin: Right.
14:51 Wes: The first. The first technology is the technology that covers up one's naked body once one becomes aware of that, even if it's just a leaf. Right. And the only artifice involved is taking it from the tree. So you get a recovering. Right. So the city is covered in the sense that it's already artificial, already a product of artifice. And then the recovering is the covering by nature. Right. The whole green to the very door thing, again, where to cover is to uncover. To cover will turn out to be open to the sky, open to the fields. That'll be the bareness. And it's a bareness associated with silence.
15:31 Erin: I like that. I don't know if you're giving Wordsworth too much credit, because if he wanted to edit it, he must not have been thinking about it.
15:38 Wes: No, no. Yeah, but.
15:40 Erin: But it's a subliminal genius that he has.
15:44 Wes: Yeah, well, my authorial intent is. It's not irrelevant, but it's not everything, of course, so.
15:52 Erin: But, yeah, no, that's great.
15:54 Wes: Yeah. One more thing about this idea of sublimity at work here, the sublime, one of its effects, right, is to make us feel our smallness as human beings in relation to the natural. And here one can feel that in relation to the city, if I'm right, that there's something sublime about the city and therefore to the collective. To collective effort, to the grandness inherent in human cooperation. So I just wanted to highlight this whole interesting paradox with regard to the sublime.
16:35 Erin: Yeah. So then in line six, we get this list of buildings or structures. Were you able to make something out of the combination of structures that he lists? I suppose we have. You know, we have ships, so we have this idea of the merchant life of the city or communication with the outside world. And sort of the same thing for towers, which could be, you know, towers related to churches or related to Having a vantage point to military.
17:06 Wes: Military stuff.
17:07 Erin: Right. Military. And domes. Domes are pretty. They're pretty multivalent, too, in what they might suggest. I mean, they could belong to the theaters or the temples. Or a sort of administrative building or some kind of court building or some other municipal building. And then theaters and temples, I suppose, are more straightforward. So he's sort of like, you know, with towers and domes. Seems to be sort of like picking out elements that could belong to theaters or temples, but they also are suggestive of other types of buildings, too. And so maybe he's picking at the. Or rather maybe he's taking apart those elements of towers and domes, which, if he named the. You know, the buildings to which they belonged, it would kind of undermine the peaceful. You know, the peaceful moment that he's in. I don't know.
18:06 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point. You know, I'd be inclined to read this as, you know, ships, commerce, towers, military domes, Administrative, you know, city legal stuff. Theaters, entertainment, temples, religion. So you get all these different functions associated with human cooperation. That have physical embodiments in the city that are observable, right. And concrete. And also. Not just concrete, but stand in a physical relationship to the natural. They are open to the fields and to the sky. And that relationship, again, is that. That openness, right, goes along with bareness and nakedness.
And then also with. With silence. I think it might be the case that we're being asked to think here that the bareness is not the way it always is. It's not the only mode for the city. And it's associated with this particular time, this transitional point in the morning. From sleeping to waking up and in the darkness. The city and human beings kind of. They share a lot more with the natural world in the sense of being asleep and like any other animal and not engaged in an activity. And that will change, though the distinction between nature and the human will become much sharper when things are active.
Right. And when there's smoke in the air. And when there's no longer silence. Which I think, again, is the thing that the silence and the inactivity are the things that are so impressive here. And open up the city as something naked and a thing with these physical, concrete manifestations of what otherwise is more like a process, human activity, more like something abstract and invisible. But again, as we leave the morning, the implication is that that's going to. To actually fade away.
20:24 Erin: Yeah, I guess. London in 1802 is not the city that never sleeps. The idea of not being awake, the city not being awake. I think of a parlance that they probably didn't use in Shakespeare's day, but, oh, the city's dead right now. And I was thinking about that relationship between sleep and death and also the structures open to the natural elements, of course, makes me think of Tintern Abbey and, you know, Tintern Abbey itself as being like a dead structure. A structure taken over by nature and no longer used for what it was intended. And so there's something creepy about this to me.
I mean, it's like, you know, he's taking enjoyment out of it because it's kind of a ghost town. I mean, I suppose it's less creepy than a ghost town because he knows that eventually it is going to be filled up with people and it's going to be used for the purposes it's intended to be used for. And if it was just abandoned or something, it would have a different. There would be a different gloss on it. But that, it occurs to me, is interesting, too, because it means that the sort of like, you know, the quiet that he's enjoying is necessitated by, or rather is allowed for, by the contrast to the alive, awake city that he doesn't seem to like very much.
And yet without that alive, awake city, this would have a very different kind of tone. It would be creepy, and it would be. In other words, the stuff that he doesn't like necessitates the appreciation and enjoyment in the moment, but also the stuff that he doesn't like. The awake city allows for this peaceful moment and also for this serene reflection which doesn't seem to be tinged by. I'm losing it.
22:15 Wes: Yeah, No, I just have to get
22:17 Erin: to the end of that stupid sentence.
22:19 Wes: I know.
22:19 Erin: Sorry.
22:20 Wes: This is good. I'm ready to.
22:22 Erin: Okay, just cut me off. Tinged by what? I just need one more word and I can't think of it.
22:29 Wes: I think what you're getting at, there's a kind of a dark side to the poem. It's what lies on the other side in the morning. He hints at it very ingeniously in the whole idea. Right. The domes, et cetera, are all bright and glittering in the smokeless air. So that's like the. Cue the Jaws music right there. He's smokeless. Well, the smoke is coming.
22:55 Erin: Yep.
22:56 Wes: There's a sense of foreboding there. So. And then you can start to see that the poem, in a way, is an inversion of the daytime reality. So what is the garment of the city? The smoke is the proper. Metaphorically is the garment for the city. That is the right way to think about this instead of Wordsworth's very imaginative, wishful way of thinking about it. So what is the garment of the city? It's the waste product of human industry and it's something that will pollute the natural world around it and itself covers the natural world. So the idea that the city can kind of wear the purity and clarity and beauty of nature like a garment, which is to say it becomes naked in the wearing of nature, inverts this idea.
It inverts the reality that the city in many ways is not naked. It's not just not naked because of the smoke. It's not naked because it is full of self conscious human beings and the products of self consciousness. It is full of artifice. And garments are artifacts, but also all artifacts in a way are garments. They cover up nature and they take natural resources. Right. The buildings are built of rock and wood and other stuff that we get from nature. So they take natural resources and they process them and they make use of them. So again, another way in which nature is actually covered up, but it's at this moment of this morning moment where you can imagine that again this very covered in the sense of artificial thing can be so integrated into the natural environment that the natural environment becomes the nudity producing garment, the denaturing, I mean, sort of the garment that takes away the artifice.
25:07 Erin: Yeah, that's I think too smokeless. Besides the suggestion of the sort of ceasefire of industrial life, it's also suggestive to me of the fact that Wordsworth wrote this, I believe, very shortly after the peace of Amiens and he was able to go back to France and see his one time mistress there and his child because of the fact that there was a brief period of peace between France and the uk. So there is like a sense of, I think deeper foreboding too, as you're suggesting, of what would end up being, I think a relatively long period of peace, but short in terms of the whole sweep of history.
Because wasn't it succeeded then by the Napoleonic wars later? So yeah, so it's smokeless for now and aren't we relieved? But yeah, I think there's something military too. So, you know, the structure of this poem really interests me because one of the things that, you know, that characterizes a sonnet is of course a turn and this is a Petrarchan sonnet. And so we've just made our way through the octet and he does end the sentence at the end of the octet. He sort of unnaturally prolonged it with A lot of colons until now and some semicolons. And so then we get to smokeless air, period.
And then we have the sestet. Never did sun more beautifully steep. I wonder what the turn is here. Or if it's just. If there is one. He seems to just sort of be continuing his thought or taking a different gloss on the thought, but it's not quite so different. I don't know. Does something.
26:46 Wes: Well, is the turn is smokeless? Not the turn. Just that sense of foreboding that it produces or.
26:52 Erin: Oh, that's good. Sure, sure. Then we immediately come out of that, right? With the. With the sun.
26:59 Wes: Yeah, exactly, exactly. We get a little hint of that. And then we go back to early morning fantasy land.
27:07 Erin: That's nice.
27:07 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
27:09 Erin: That always bothered me, but there it is. You fixed it
27:15 Wes: again. You know, he's returning to the earth. Has not anything to show more fair. It's a little bit like someone's protesting a little too much. And it's the same thing here. Never did sun more beautifully steep. In his first splendor, Valley rock or hill. We get an evocation, I think, of primeval times, pre human times. Right. This idea of first splendor, I think. Right. Maybe not, but that's the image I got. And now the idea is that this idea of the sun steeping something, I think is another image of natural integration of something. These things of the natural world are in a way integrated with each other, not just by physical contiguity, but by the presence of light.
Interestingly enough, you need light to see things as integrated with each other and as beautiful and as all the rest. So we might read into it the role of God in creation. Right. And let there be light. Let things come into being through their disclosure in that light. And the steeping accentuates that. Right. So it's not just that the light falls on things, but things get soaked in the light. The light suffuses them, and they are all suffused with the same thing, as if it's a sort of fluid substance in which everything is like an ether, a natural world ether, that everything.
You might even treat everything as sort of a vibratory product of that ether, not to get too abstract, but as a wave function of the ether in which everything is. Is steeped. So that light is not just revealing, but light is actually creative. But the startling idea here is that. Wait a minute, really, the city turns out to be a kind of completion of the natural, not a departure from the natural. Right. If it's better at the natural integration than all these much more obviously natural things like valleys and rocks. Then we're asked to see human industry as a.
As a kind of completion of a natural process rather than a mere exception from it. And that I think is. There's a truth to it. Obviously human beings are products of nature. But it's also hard to accept. It's easier to accept. Right, Again in the early morning. But what happens when the air is no longer smokeless?
29:58 Erin: Right. Well, this is the tension too, that again, that I see in Tintern Abbey and that selection of that landscape, which is not, um. We talked a little bit about the fact that he might have been ignoring the pretty heavy industrial activity that was going on in that area of the river. Why? Nevermind the fact that he was choosing as the site of his meditation not a completely untouched landscape, but a landscape that bore the obvious evidence of human intervention. With the cathedral. Sorry, with the abbey, granted, one that had been overtaken by nature. But why not just choose a completely untouched landscape? Yeah, it seems to me to suggest a preoccupation with a sort of man made victory and then a corresponding defeat. Like he seems to want to see that rather than just nature, period. With no evidence of intervention, which I think is an odd impulse.
30:55 Wes: We'll say more about that.
30:57 Erin: Well, the idea that man comes in and changes the natural scene with buildings and, you know, flattening things in order to build them. In order to build structures. Right. Probably interfering a lot with the natural state of things. And then man is sort of defeated by that nature or undermined by that nature. It crawls back, as in the case of Tintern Abbey. Or there are sort of breaks in the clouds where you could see the sun like in the morning in London before the city is up. And yes, man has interfered with this nature, but there's an opportunity for nature and these structures to interact and coalesce with each other for a few glorious moments before it's ruined again.
And so there's a sort of like ebb and flow or. Yeah, like advancement and retreat going on. It's strange to me. Why don't. Partially it's because of the age in which he's writing, which is this industrialized age, which is really, I think, ambivalent about human progress. Or at least the Romantics were right and concerned because of the rapid change in ways of life and quality of life as a result of that. But I do think that what is he trying to do? Is he trying to redeem human intervention in this way or what? Because I think it's an odd choice.
32:22 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very good. And I think part perhaps of the solution to that is the idea that intervention is bivalent. And we saw that in Tintern Abbey as well, right? So there's the. The intervention of creating structures and the arts and artifice and technology. And then there's the more contemplative intervention. And we'll see this in the next poem as well. I think, you know, there's the more passive intervention of just being self conscious and conscious of one's environment. And this whole idea in Tintern Abbey, right, the world is half created by us.
These ideas that are evocative of German idealism and the notion that being, you know, there's being as it is in itself, which we can associate with the natural right. The rock not conscious at all for billions of years, just sitting there by itself, not comprehended by anyone. And then there's the kind of being that comes about through the consciousness of human beings, which is to say it is being. And perhaps nature from the Hegelian point of view, fulfills itself in self consciousness. So it's not just human beings coming to know nature, the natural landscape and the rock, but it is nature coming to know itself through human beings.
So nature comes to be not just in itself, but in and for itself. And so being as we comprehend it is also partly a product of our cognitive faculties of the way something in itself interacts with our eyes and our ears and our brains. And so that the product, the result is co produced and so naturally artificial in some sense. So there's the intervention that maybe pollutes nature, that covers it in smoke. And then there's the intervention that plays a role in creating nature as we know it. And if you zoom out on the Hegelian point of view, then it's God, you know, it's spirit or gods or some super subject's self consciousness that is implicated in this creation.
And human beings, you know, particularly human beings just sort of partake of it. So I think your idea of the ambivalence is spot on because it's. It's not just factories that are the product of human self consciousness, but it's the arts, right? It's culture. It's things that we might see as the fulfillment of the natural right. A landscape painting, is that. Is it merely a deviation from the natural or is it the fact that there can be beings that actually appreciate nature? Can that be its kind of culmination or its. So one might treat the city in the Same way as something that can be more beautifully steeped than the mere rock before the advent of the human.
35:25 Erin: And in that same vein, I think it allows for never feeling a calm so deep as the contrast of the bustling city. Right. Like the loud noises of human activity, I think allow for that contrast to be more extreme, which is why he's feeling this incredibly deep calm. Because you don't get that kind of calm exactly when you're already in a calm place. Right. So it is.
35:53 Wes: Yeah. Or when you're just a rock.
35:55 Erin: Right, right.
35:57 Wes: Rocks are very, very calm, but they can't be as deeply calm as a human being.
36:02 Erin: That's right.
36:03 Wes: Returning from their workday to sit on the rock and contemplate the valley or whatever.
36:08 Erin: Something about the way you said that reminded me of Charlie Brown Halloween, I got a rock. And then we get the river gliding at its own will, presumably because it hasn't been impeded by a. Well, I guess dams don't sleep, but traffic.
36:26 Wes: Yeah, that's exactly what I thought as well, but it took me a minute to figure that out. That's a really interesting idea. Yeah. And it's not just of its own will, Its own sweet will. So what I find interesting here is that the overall meaning of the line is that its will is free in a sense. Right. Because it's not impeded just by human traffic. But he doesn't say own free will. Own sweet will. Which to me is evocative of something innocent and childlike.
36:58 Erin: Yeah. And yet I like that too, because free and sweet, they have that suggestion of the other, the assonance. I think you can hear the echo of free in sweet.
37:09 Wes: Yeah. It's worth noting that he's anthropomorphizing here, the natural world. And I think that's the first time that happens. Right. And then in the next lines, we're going to jump from the anthropomorphizing nature to anthropomorphizing houses and human artifice in order to get us a little hint of actual human beings here. Which we haven't gotten yet. Well, we gotten hints before, but in the final lines of the poem we get a much more. It's still indirect, but a more direct evocation of the fact that there are human beings here in the city about to wake up.
37:52 Erin: Right. And I think there's something paradoxical in this houses being asleep line, too. Well, first of all, I think it's interesting that it does have that chime with sweet and sweet will. I mean, it's Not a direct. It's not rhyming with that line, but he has, you know, steep, deep, and then sweet will asleep. As if to suggest that the houses want to be asleep. Right. That that is their will because of that little chime. But the paradox that I see is the fact that, okay, the very houses seem asleep. Well, what would make a house asleep, I assume would be to be empty, and yet people are sleeping in those houses.
38:31 Wes: I was just thinking of the. Just the fact that. Yeah, that the people are asleep and that there's no activity in them. So if the house were active, if there were bustling, if there were people going in and out and making dinner and working, that would be what it means for the house to be awake.
38:48 Erin: Sure, yeah. Maybe I'm overreading, but it seems to me that the idea of the houses being asleep also suggests a kind of emptiness. But I suppose it could be asleep in a. In a cozy co. Mingling with the people asleep in that house as well.
39:06 Wes: Yeah.
39:07 Erin: With the last line we get. And all that mighty heart is lying still. All that mighty heart is interesting.
39:18 Wes: It's a line that takes a second to figure out, right. So we get this quick move from anthropomorphizing the river to anthropomorphizing the houses. And now it sounds like he's doing it to the city as a whole. So we go from the river being left alone by human beings to these households, which are so the houses. And that's the one thing he doesn't mention. Up with the ships, towers, domes, and all the rest of it. And these are the things that are evocative of families, which is to say proto Ur communities are proto cities. Right. The very core components or units of the city.
And then we suddenly zoom out again and we get the idea that there's a kind of collective heart. I think I'm. You know, tell me if you disagree with that, that the heart of the city is that there's one heart for the city, and in that it's lying still, which kind of straddles the line. And maybe this goes towards your reading, your initial reading of houses, but it straddles a line between merely being asleep and then being dead. Right. Because hearts don't normally stop while you're. While you're asleep. But what I thought was interesting here is just the movement from anthropomorphizing the natural to doing it to the collective.
Right. Because it may seem odd to say that we can anthropomorphize the human collective and we start doing that by doing it to its visible signs, the houses. But it's true because the collective is not itself a subject, it's not itself an individual. The. The city as a whole only metaphorically could have thoughts and feelings and a heart. And yet somehow human subjectivity is a inter subjective thing. It is written into the collective in some way as a kind of information. So that's what I took away from that last line.
41:16 Erin: I really like this idea that you brought up that in line eight there is the turn before we get to line nine. And then, and then we sort of have like a second verse, same as the first kind of moment where we return to the beginning and then we have, you know, at the end, I think, the smokeless air. We also end with death again. So I see that as a kind of reprise as well of the idea of smokelessness or this sort of seemingly benign but potentially creepy implications. Which is interesting too, because you're cycling through two. It's like the poem has two life cycles or goes through the course of two days or two lifetimes or two working days.
41:55 Wes: Right.
41:56 Erin: Where the poem gets up and goes through something and then ends in a death and then gets up and cycles through it again.
42:03 Wes: Yeah, well, again, you know, there's that. The ambivalence that you noted. Do we want that heart to lie still forever so that natural beauty can be natural beauty and the river have its own sweet will and the smoke not rise above the city? In other words, do we need to get rid of human beings? Some people, their worship of the environment and the natural world. It goes so far as to either implicitly or even explicitly sometimes suggest that, well, the earth would just be better off without human beings who are ultimately just going to destroy it, going to use up all its resources. But on the other hand, if human beings weren't around, there'd be no one to enjoy it in the way that only human beings can enjoy it.
42:49 Erin: So we'd all be rocks.
42:51 Wes: Yep. I mean, to be animals. But you know, they can't, can they really appreciate nature? You know, no animal is ever going to go to a museum and look at a landscape.
43:06 Erin: I can't even get my cats.
43:09 Wes: No animal is going to stand on the edge of a cliff staring out into the majestic valley with a feeling of. With aesthetic feelings. Whether they are the beauty of the valley or the sublimity of the valley, it's unavailable to non humans.
43:25 Erin: I think that my cat takes some enjoyment of nature when she's torturing a vole. But then I can't get her to see her own reflection in the mirror. That's one of my big problems that I have. I think she's a really intelligent cat. Then I put her in front of a mirror and she couldn't care less. So anyway, it's hilarious.
43:47 Wes: Yeah. Animals are so dumb.
43:52 Erin: No self consciousness there. Maybe she's just saying, I know I look good. You don't have to try and force me to acknowledge it.
43:58 Wes: Yeah, you gotta make a choice. You can be natural or you can enjoy the natural. It's hard to be both. All right, so shall we move on to our next selection, Too Much With Us?
44:15 Erin: Okay, I hesitate to read this because it seems like an advertisement for turning off this podcast. Okay, here we go. The world is too much with us. The world is too much with us. Late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our powers Little we see in nature that is ours we have given our hearts away a sordid boon. The sea that bears her bosom to the moon, the winds that will be howling at all hours and are upgathered now like sleeping flowers. For this, for everything we are out of tune. It moves us not. Great God, I'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn so might I, standing on this pleasant lea have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
45:08 Wes: All right. The world is too much with us Late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers so late and soon. That's a very interesting.
45:19 Erin: It is. I don't. And then our talk of Earth from the very first line of Westminster Bridge also has me thinking about world. The world is too much with us. Like worldly things, I guess. But there is a kind of. Again, a kind of a strange meaning in that the world could also contain the natural world, which he's arguing is not with us enough. Right.
45:42 Wes: Yeah.
45:43 Erin: But this late and soon is maybe the most difficult part of the poem for me. What do you make of it?
45:50 Wes: Well, it took me a while to come up with a theory, but I suppose in the end I associate late with getting and soon with spending. So the idea is that in our acquisitiveness we feel like we are late in a way. There's a sense of urgency, there's a sense of. And even in our day to day busyness, we don't have enough time. So there's a sense that we lack and that we very urgently need to get something but then the soonness goes with the spending, which is to say that. Well, I think there's two ways of looking at that, which is that the things that we acquire, we squander in some way.
But the suggestion at the end of the line is that our getting is a squandering. It is a spending in the sense we lay waste to our powers, which will turn out to be powers of contemplation, powers to be put into a passive, appreciative. Maybe passive isn't the right word, but an appreciative relationship to nature. So that world. I think you're right in a way. It has two meanings. Right. The world is too much with us in the sense of worldly things. But he wants us to be with the world in the sense of. In the way of appreciating it. But the other way is a more exploitative way in which we overpower natural resources.
We take them for ourselves, we use them.
47:24 Erin: Yeah, I like that. You know, because lay waste our powers. I mean, you know, power and industrialization seem to go hand in hand. So you might say Wordsworth. What are you talking about? We're more powerful than ever before. We're more efficient than ever before. Right, yeah. So I like that kind of double meaning too that you're suggesting.
47:44 Wes: Yeah, the idea that it's too much with us. It's a very nice irony given the trajectory of the poem, which is to say that his claim is that it's not enough with us. It's not enough with us by being too much with us. So if we are too much with nature in the sense of merely making use of it and turning it into artifacts and being involved in the exchange and trade of those artifacts, you know, all the day to day, busy world stuff that submerges the natural. There's a way of being with the natural in which it's submerged in our economic activity, let's put it that way, or even our cultural activity.
And then there's a way of being with nature in a way in which we are submerged in it. We are in it. And his suggestion is that it may seem that our mastery of nature makes us more powerful, but it's actually our powers lie in being in nature, integrated into it, appreciating it. And so you can see, Right, the crossover with the previous one.
48:45 Erin: Right, yeah. And then in line three seems like a continuation of that thought. Presumably we put our grubby little hands all over nature. It's fully ours. We've written ourselves into it and all over it. And Used it to our own ends, and yet at the same time, it's. Now we don't recognize it.
49:00 Wes: Yeah. So we see little in nature that is ours, as I think you've pointed out. You know, the paradox here is that we treat nature as if it were ours and that the boon comes from making it ours, mastering it. When in fact, what we squander here, what we lose, is the idea that nature is ours. And the. Again, the more contemplative sense. So we lose the riches of nature in the sense that we cannot be. We lose our ability to be focused on it, to enjoy the natural world in the same way.
49:39 Erin: Yeah. And I think there's something maybe of my cat not recognizing herself in the mirror. Right. Like, we are nature too. So I think, like, ownership and this idea of looking into nature and we're supposed to see something that in the Wordsworthian ideal, resembles us somehow. Maybe that's the Rousseau in Wordsworth coming out.
49:59 Wes: Right.
50:00 Erin: But there's supposed to be something natural in us that we're seeing and recognizing as being a part of us. I guess that's just another way of saying what you've already said. But the line four, we've given our hearts away. A sordid boon. Well, I thought our heart is there and it's just dead. But anyway, a sordid boon is really silly sounding. I hate that line.
50:25 Wes: Oh, yeah.
50:26 Erin: I think it sounds awful. But sordid boon is so interesting. I don't have anything to say about it. I just think it's dumb.
50:36 Wes: I might have something to say about that, but only after we read the next few lines.
50:40 Erin: Okay, so the sea that bears her bosom to the moon, the winds that will be howling at all hours. There's an interesting. At least in line five. I think there's a really interesting idea of exploitation going on there. Perhaps the sea is. It's innocent on the one hand, then at the same time, the moon is sort of using the sea. There's a relationship between the moon and the sea. It's symbiotic. It may even be a kind of a marriage. And yet at the same time, we know that this is also being exploited by people who are, like, not letting the river glide at its own sweet will or are harnessing that power and using it for ill. So am I wrong to read something sort of sexually exploitative that he's trying to get at here, or am I just a sicko?
51:33 Wes: You're definitely a sicko.
51:34 Erin: But okay, I guess both could be true.
51:37 Wes: I hadn't Thought of that, I guess the way I was reading this, I thought, wow, it's really interesting that, you know, I was taking the sea bearing her bosom as like the sea confiding in the moon. Which is a really interesting idea because it suggests that the sea could be confessing something and that it's something that we might overhear, that we might listen to, or that nature might in a way confide in us. So that when we. Our loss of powers with respect to nature includes the inability to hear what nature is saying. So that when we ignore nature, it's not just ignoring something inanimate, but it's like ignoring the subjectivity of another person.
And the same thing with the winds, right? So the howling of the winds, you could put in parallel, if I'm right, that bearing the bosom is kind of a confiding, then the howling is a complaining. So instead of a confiding, we get this kind of rough complaint from the winds, except that they were howling at night and now they're up, gathered, I take it, during the daytime, which this is a beautiful image, but the idea that they were, you know, they were howling at all hours, but now they are upgathered like sleeping flowers. And it's a little unclear to me exactly what that means.
Maybe, you know, maybe the. The idea is that the air is calm now and that the roughness and dangerousness, you know, again, maybe even the sublimity of the howling winds grounds. What happens, the peacefulness of the day. And what we do is we take that peacefulness and we reproduce a pseudo sublimity within it in the form of busyness. That's the sordid boon. So we make what otherwise might be sweet and peaceful into something rough again. And we do that because we're ignoring nature, including its dangerous aspects. And so we reproduce a kind of different, sordid form of dangerousness within our civilized environment.
Or maybe we try to capture it and control it so that the whole acquisitive urge, which seems like it's. That we master nature, right, in order to get rid of danger. In fact, we undo our own peace, a peace that we might have from nature. Because it's a kind of. There's two moments to it. There's the dangerous part and then there's the appreciative part. And so we lose the capacity to appreciate, which is its own form of. Own form of danger. And the danger there, right, is a. It's a spiritual danger. So we get rid of some material dangers, but we put ourselves in spiritual danger.
But that's maybe a bit of a reach, you know, just going back to the sexual part of that. I'd have to think about it. Right. I produce such a strong reading now, it's hard for me to. I have to revise it in order to think about the sexual implications of that. And maybe I willfully ignore them. Too dangerous.
54:52 Erin: Right, Right. Well, I don't know. I mean, you know, bosom isn't necessarily a sexy word, but I was just thinking about that. The implied relationship and then the broken relationship that human intervention implies. But I agree with you. I love the sleeping flowers. It's so great.
55:12 Wes: Was that your reading of it as well? Because it's another confusing one. The idea of peaceful, non. Windy time that follows the windy time.
55:20 Erin: Right. I didn't have nearly so developed a reading as you. I just think of windmills and then Dorothy falling asleep in the poppies, but obviously that's not in there. Windmills are, but not poppies. And, you know, the Wicked Witch of the West. But anyway, my favorite line maybe is for this, for everything, we are out of tune. And I was thinking about that first of all about what for this refers back to. And then he qualifies it with for everything. So there's this idea, I think, of that brokenness, like between the sea and the moon, or as you're saying, between the howling winds and the lack of wind, there's an out of stepness or there's a. One is not logically leading to the other, perhaps like a kind of a broken. I don't know, a metaphor, a broken natural process that's happening here, rather, that's not happening here.
56:17 Wes: It's interesting because I was thinking of this in terms of the powers that we've laid waste to, our capacity to appreciate these things and to see them for what they are, maybe. And that includes the sea bearing our bosom and the howling winds and then the up gathering that follows. But here, the way he's putting it, and I hadn't thought about this, is in terms of tuning so that we are not vibrating sympathetically with it, which is an interesting way of understanding the capacity to contemplate and appreciate nature.
56:55 Erin: And there's also the. Not just the vibrating, but the idea that it's playing some kind of music that we're no longer playing. But then there's the complication of the. You know, how do we know it's out of tune? Because of our own perception, which is related to this idea of music and of things that only humans can perceive. As you Were suggesting with this idea that we're the only ones who have the capacity to appreciate nature. We're also the ones who've invented this idea of music. And the whole, like the poem itself is an argument against itself.
That's what I see here. The music of the sonnet, the music that the sonnet creates is very much a studied one. The result of human intervention on language, which is itself a human intervention in the world. And so the idea of tuning and music and all of these things I see as being. You know, he's suggesting that there's a natural music, but you can't kind of suggest that there's a natural music to the world that we shouldn't interfere with and put that in a sonnet, which is, you know, up gathering the sleeping flowers in a way. Right.
58:01 Wes: Yeah. Again, yeah. It's that paradox of the artificial quality of. We want to talk about returning to nature, appreciating nature. But that in itself is a highly artificial thing in some sense. But I was thinking of my sympathetic vibration reading of out of tune. The idea is that. So nature doesn't move us. It moves us not because we don't vibrate sympathetically. So it's producing its music, but we can't be moved by it because we are not tuned into the right frequency. In a sense, the idea here seems to be that our power is not in the possession of nature, but it's in being part of nature.
Or in being in a more passive, seemingly passive relationship to nature, being moved by it. Right. So our power is not in being movers, movers and shakers, but in being in our capacity to be moved. And that means being in tune in some way. So we can't be in nature and part of it. And obviously, in a. I think this is what you're pointing out in some sort of sense of returning to being mere animals. Right. Without language, without self consciousness, if we want to be in nature, we have to, in a way, do it obliquely. We have to vibrate sympathetically.
We can't just be in there.
59:30 Erin: Yeah. I was thinking about the fact that in my intro, I kind of prefigured this conversation. I said, must devotion to an ideal alienate us from the tune, however discordant, of our own age? And so I kind of wanted. I just wanted to touch on the discordancy of the current tune. I like what you're talking about with this vibrating frequency. And I hate to keep returning to a more musical reading of that line because I think I agree with you, but I Was also thinking of this idea that, you know, the modern age is playing one kind of music, the modern age meaning Wordsworths, and the natural world is playing another kind of music.
And so there's a discordancy, there's a lack of integration. It's not the polyphony maybe, which is like creating the proper chords of highly ordered music, like a medieval chant or something like that. Again, I think of Tintern Abbey, but it's almost like some sort of industrialized John Cage kind of music that he wouldn't recognize as being tuneful, but I guess that few do recognize as being tuneful. And so that contrast between like the two songs that are singing, I mean, I can hear truly that industrialized music that makes use of those types of mechanistic, non expressly musical sounds in a song.
I can hear that going on in the background, that clink, clink, clink, or you know, some monstrous factory making its sounds and turning over and growling or, you know, something like that. And so the idea that we're out of tune with that, we're now playing a different song. We can't hear that song that's happening in the natural world. We can't hear those winds howling.
1:01:18 Wes: Yeah. We're not moved to play along with that. We play to our own tune.
1:01:26 Erin: Yeah, Right.
1:01:28 Wes: So there's the music. Yeah. That comes from us, that we. And then there's the music that we might participate in that comes from nature.
1:01:38 Erin: Well, and I think that musical metaphor prefigures the turn and the, you know, the sestet of the poem in which he would rather be playing a tune which is maybe out of date, which he knows is not the right tune per se. Right. In quotes, but which is actually harmonizing with nature. And I mean, you can argue that lots of different religions harmonize with nature, but he goes to the pagan creed. And I wonder.
1:02:12 Wes: So I was gonna ask, why does he have to become a pagan?
1:02:16 Erin: Right. You know, that too seems out of tune in its way, I guess, when you think about it. Right. The idea that it's not nature, but in fact it's also magical and enchanted. That also seems to be not looking at the thing square in the face.
1:02:30 Wes: I don't know, I think I get the basic association, which is that in pagan religions you have multiple gods who in a way are representatives of the forces of nature. So Zeus. Right. Not just creator, but the lightning bolts come from Zeus. And what's his face? Triton, son of Poseidon, representative of the sea. Right. So you get these divine figures that are very closely associated with the natural. And the critique of this, and someone like Nietzsche, right, was famous for this type of critique, is that as philosophy and ultimately religion develop, we are taken out of this more natural relationship because we are taken out of the instinctual.
So this is also Rousseauian kind of idea. But civilization ends up corrupting us. And correlation to that is Christianity, which is very strongly associated with the second moment in civilization. So we get the ancient Greeks and then we get the Judeo Christian. And the Judeo Christian is somehow supposed to be corrupting in the sense that it is anti instinctual. So the wish here is to go back to this more. You still get a relation to the divine, but it seems to be more in line with the natural. I don't know. So that's the basic. To me, the basic association.
But I still thought it was kind of funny, you know, do we really have to do that to get back
1:04:07 Erin: in tune or part of this, I think, is performative, of course. I mean, first of all, these are just incredible images. It goes to such a high pitch of rhetoric at the end. I really find it actually incredibly powerful and quite different from his normal happy, you know, relatively sedate kind of tone. So I find it thrilling. And I think that that acceleration and the rhetoric is mirrored by the extreme suggestion, which, again, I take as being performative. Not that we shouldn't take him at his word, but I think there's something going on with there.
1:04:46 Wes: You're making me think I've kind of given a little bit of a misreading. Because what he's saying is, I'd rather be. So he's not saying I need to be in order to get back in tune. But if it were the case that getting back in tune required me going to this extreme, becoming a pagan, then that's what I would do. But that doesn't imply that there aren't more modest measures for getting back in tune. So what it's there to do is to convey, you know, I think you. You were right to talk about the anger, but he wants us to understand how outrageous it is or how regretful it is, the depth of that loss, that being out of tune, that being not moved.
1:05:25 Erin: All right, well, I think we'll leave it off there. We'll continue our conversation in the postscript.
1:05:31 Wes: Okay, great.
1:05:33 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
1:05:43 Wes: subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
What Nature Betrays: Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (Part 2)
Feb 14, 2022
In Part 1 of our discussion of “Tintern Abbey,” we talked about whether Wordsworth was right to suggest that our experience of nature was good not just for restoring our weary spirits, but for helping us to mature and even for making us better people. In part two, we explore his justifications for this thesis, in particular the claim that nature connects us not just to our senses and baser instincts, but to our capacity to think, experience beauty, and ultimately act ethically and autonomously. Does nature really never betray the heart that loves her, or has the poet ignored her more sinister dimensions?
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:12 Wes: In part one of our discussion of Tintern Abbey, we talked about whether Word Wordsworth was right to suggest that our experience of nature was good not just for restoring our weary spirits, but for helping us to mature and even for making us better people. In part two, we explore his justifications for this thesis, in particular, the claim that nature connects us not just to our senses and baser instincts, but to our capacity to think, experience beauty, and ultimately act ethically and autonomously. Does nature really never betray the heart that loves her? Or has the poet ignored her more sinister dimensions? That's the subject for today's discussion. This is Wes Alwan.
0:55 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:56 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, on our first episode for Tintern Abbey, we got through, what is it, three stanzas, so we have two or three more to go. It's a poem that's worth two episodes, I think. We talked about the way in which his experience of a landscape, a natural scene, was a impetus for him to a contemplative frame of mind, at least in light of the fact that he was coming to it a second time. And so the scene is imbued with memory and experience. In the second stanza, he described what he gets out of, or what nature gives us.
So not just sensations sweet, but something reflective, tranquil, restoration, and maybe some sort of effect on character, right, via unremembered pleasure. And then above all, this capacity for a contemplative frame of mind, the serene and blessed mood which becomes much more explicit in the. In the second stanza. And then in the third stanza, we talked a little bit about the. I think you called it city life and the way in which one can bring the memory of nature to that, to the drudgery of the everyday world and the mundane. And so that's where we left it.
And now we're ready to get into the fourth stanza. So why don't we start with you reading that?
2:33 Erin: Okay, so the listener is going to have to bear with me because this is quite a long stanza. So here we go. And now, with gleams of half extinguished thought, with many recognitions dim and faint, and somewhat of a sad perplexity, the picture of the mind revives again. While here I stand, not only with a sense of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts, that in this moment there is life and food for future years. And so I dare to hope, though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills, when like a roe, I Bounded o' er the mountains by the sides of the deep rivers and the lonely streams.
Wherever nature led, More like a man flying from something that he dreads than one who sought the thing he loved for nature. Then the coarser pleasures of my boyish days and their glad animal movements all gone by to me, was all in all I cannot paint what then I was. The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion. The tall rock, the mountain, the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms were then to me an appetite, a feeling and a love that had no need of a remoter charm by thought supplied, nor any interest unborrowed from the eye.
That time is past, and all its aching joys are now no more. And all its dizzy raptures not for this Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur. Other gifts have followed for such loss I would believe abundant recompense. For I have learned to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity. Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime, of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky.
And in the mind of man a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains, and of all that we behold from this green earth, of all the mighty world of eye and ear, both what they half create and what perceive. Well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense, the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart and soul, of all my moral being.
5:03 Wes: Great. Thank you for taking that long hike through poetic nature.
5:08 Erin: You know, I was young and then I grew up. A lot of things happened over the course of it.
5:11 Wes: That's right. I think we both got a little older and wiser.
5:15 Erin: I had a religious experience.
5:17 Wes: Animal movements.
5:18 Erin: Animal movement. That's one of the best parts of this.
5:21 Wes: Sounds like 19th century speak for sex to me.
5:26 Erin: No, Glad. Animal movements? Oh, it seems so. Geez. I guess you're right. You know, I so often read this as. You know, I had no idea, as I said last time, that he was only 23 in the before. Or rather, he was as old as 23 in the before picture. And his after picture is 28. And so I thought of this as like a little boy, you know, running around like a deer. Yeah, to him it is. And he is running around like a deer. But it's cuter when you think that he's 9, 10. God, animal movements don't have so much weight at that age anyway.
6:03 Wes: Yeah, I mean, we get the picture that what nature meant to him when he was younger, which was much more bacchanalian and had a lot more to do with impulses, including the implication does seem to be sex. And it's hard not to read at least a faint allusion to the fact that he got someone pregnant in France and then couldn't go back. Because I think he. It was right after he got back from France that he made his first visit to this landscape when he was in kind of a walkabout exile, unable to go back to his girlfriend. But there's an interesting.
Here. I think we get three repetitions here that are kind of callbacks. There's probably more, but these are the ones that I've noticed. Callbacks to the first stanza. One of them is murmuring, right? So that was the river or the rolling springs that were murmuring in the first stanza. And now he's saying that he does not mourn nor murmur. So he doesn't murmur or complain in this sense because of the loss of this former, more youthful relationship to nature. And we get talk of the sky again. Right. There's that triad in the first stanza of river, cliff, sky.
And the whole sky thing here gets expanded. And then this word rolling comes up in the first stanza. It's something that's applied to the river, and now it's been transferred into the sky. Right. So I think he says the blue sky. And in the mind of man, a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought and rolls through all things. So the sense in which everything is imbued with or suffused with spirit.
8:01 Erin: Well, with God, I think. Right. Just looking at the moments that you're pointing out, I'm thinking too, how much trouble Wordsworth would be in if he was in a poetry workshop. For a lot of reasons, thank God
8:12 Wes: there were no poetry workshops back then.
8:16 Erin: But we have, you know, we have the deep rivers. Let's see, what else. The tall rock, the deep and gloomy wood, the blue sky, even not the most interesting adjectives in the world. But then we have. Then we have the sounding cataract, which I think is really lovely. And a couple of other and I guess, glad animal movements. Maybe someone would circle that. And Put a question mark next to it. But I think that's kind of nice.
8:38 Wes: Yeah, they would. That's too.
8:41 Erin: What do you mean by that?
8:43 Wes: Everything interesting would get a question mark.
8:45 Erin: That's right.
8:46 Wes: Wordsworth, you come into my office. I'd like to talk to you about your adjectives.
8:53 Erin: This could use some trimming, I'm not gonna lie. Anyway, just the very first line. I'm already kind of wondering what he's up to, though. I mean, I think, like, this. You know, this has such a talky quality. And I mean that in a positive way. I mean, you know, it's easy to read. It goes rather quickly as we go through the lines. We're kind of bounding through them like a row ourselves because we're not really tripped up by anything. But then when you go back, a lot of interesting things are happening. So. Like, for instance, just in the first line, with gleams of half extinguished thought. You kind of know what that is. I think what so often happens for me in this poem is that you read through it really quickly. And then you're kind of like, oh, well, what actually is half extinguished thought?
9:32 Wes: Yeah, it's kind of like our question about unremembered pleasure. Right.
9:37 Erin: Yeah. That little qualifier, half extinguished, is just really funny.
9:42 Wes: So we have this, especially in light of the fact. Sorry. That, you know, he's just talked about how he's not blind. He's not like a blind man. Right. Yeah.
9:49 Erin: Right.
9:49 Wes: He's been able to sustain this earlier experience in memory even when in the city or elsewhere.
9:56 Erin: Right. And now it's like the movie is over. You know, the credits are rolling and his recognitions now are dim and faint. Which we would use to describe, you know, sight that's failing. And somewhat of a sad perplexity. The picture of the mind revives again. And so I guess what I'm asking is, in these four lines, is he losing it? And then. Oh, he gets it back again or what's going on there?
10:21 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, maybe the memory starts to look dim in light of re experiencing something. Yeah. The picture of the mind revives again. So maybe there's the experience of realizing that what he thought had stayed with him hadn't quite stayed with him. I'm not sure how do we interpret sad perplexity here. Because then we get a transition to hope. These are the sorts of interesting conflicts that I really like and I think, like, sustain the poem regardless of whether it's sloppy or not. It's got that engine that keeps us bounding like roes, I guess. But, yeah, sure. I don't know. What do you make of sad perplexity here?
11:06 Erin: I don't know. Maybe that the images are kind of warring with each other. He's not sure what to make of them because he's just had this moment of emotion with that exclamation point that preceded this. So maybe he's almost a little bit. We've just left him at a fever pitch with, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods? How often has my spirit turned to thee? So, you know, maybe he's a little shy now. He's coming down from. From that moment, perhaps now. And, oh, I lost it. You know, he was at the height of some sort of passion, maybe. And maybe even through speaking it or writing it or whatever, he kind of loses it in the moment, even as he addresses it. Maybe that's what makes it escape him because he's finally addressing it directly.
11:50 Wes: I guess memory creates these different contradictory layers as he's described it. There's the first experience, which was all about youth and impulse and desire. And then there was the. You know, he brought in all these other effects. The ability to comfort us, you know, when we're in the office, let's put it that way. Character building. But above all, meditation. And, you know, the contemplative nature of all this stuff. And now, as he returns to it, it's one thing to have that contemplative aspect in memory, but now there's potentially a conflict.
Right? So does. Does revisiting the scene, does that evoke youthful impulse? Now, if it's in memory, it can have that element of nostalgia. Right. And be worked over. But if you're coming back to it a second time, then what is it? Exactly? It's not what it was in memory. Precisely. So when the picture of the mind revives, he once again, he's told us this before, but he wants to do it again, which is that the experience now is not about present pleasure just as it wasn't in memory, but it's about hope now. So this is like a new thing to put on the list.
Not just immediate pleasure, not contemplativeness, not character building. But now we get hope and also takes us out of the present. There's a lot of not being in the present in this, but go ahead.
13:20 Erin: Yeah. And he kind of wonders too, or hopes, rather, that even though he's not that unthinking being that, you know, sort of went traipsing through the woods five years ago that now he'll still be able to take. What does he say, you know, food for future years. And so there's this idea that even though he's now maybe more conscious of the fact that he is, you know, storing up for the, you know, the winter in town or whatever, about to, you know, go into his long sort of spiritual hibernation in the city, he's now conscious that that's what he's doing.
So there's a little bit of, I guess, you know, meta commentary, you know. Okay, so he has all these wonderful memories of this place from when he experienced it in a more. In a less thinking way, almost implying that though that was a sort of a false orientation towards nature, that there was something less calculating about that. Right. Because he wasn't intending to remember this scene so well and to have it have such an effect on his life in the future. And now he's going back as a retreat, I guess, and almost as a deliberate, or rather as a deliberate storing up of memory in a way which I find to be.
It never really kind of works that well. I mean, in personal experience, maybe this is the case for Wordsworth, but he's kind of hoping to recapture the lightning in the bottle moment. And my experience is that when you try to recreate a memory or go back to a place and expect to have the same experience, you very seldom achieve that. So I don't know, I read a little bit of desperation inside the hope. Maybe I'm wrong there.
14:58 Wes: No, I think that's right. I think you're getting at this sad perplexity. Right? Who goes. If he's feeling old at 20, is it 28 now he's going back to. In my view, that's still a baby, as I've said many times before. But if he's going back, they're feeling old now. And thinking back on youthful experiences, especially love, which is kind of implied in the background here, romantic experiences, then is that pleasurable or is it sad? Is it something I've lost or something I can take pleasure in simply as a memory or simply as an impetus to certain compensations, like the contemplative compensation.
So this is about loss of a certain kind of immediate relationship to things. Right. So he can, despite the nature worshiping quality of this poem, it's also kind of a requiem for a more innocent relationship to nature. Right. It's like looking back and then, you know, like looking at kids and seeing how they're. They relate to the world and they wonder around, they're bounding around like roes, so excited by everything, and you can't reclaim that. You get a little bit of that when you're around them, which is one of the things that's so delightful about children.
You know, you can relive that relationship to some extent, and it's worth bringing up. Right. He's actually talking to his sister, which for me was a big surprise. Right. And it took me a while to figure out. I thought it was a metaphor at first. He was calling the sister, the. The river, his sister. And then I, in my notes, I put in the margin, literally, his sister. Literally talking to his sister. So anyway, you know, once you know that, you. You realize that this is also, in a sense, an admonishment to her. You can even see it as him. It's a very indirect way of warning someone against behaving according to the impulses of youth and getting themselves into the same sorts of trouble that he got into.
I was reminded of. This may not be quite appropriate, but Laertes talking to Ophelia, right, and talking about guard your virginity. This is a much more sophisticated way of saying that if it is right, this is a big stretch that I'm making here, but it's kind of a reverse. Gather ye rosebuds, while you may, sort of position to take, but a very indirect one. So it's not about how precious, as Laertes puts it, you know, how precious virginity is. Exactly. It's about keeping in mind how the future will transform one's relationship to such things.
And if you know that going in, then, I don't know, maybe you have an advantage.
17:41 Erin: I don't think so, though. I mean, you know, maybe this is why Dorothy always said that she never had great facility for poetry, and she just ended up writing journals and diaries and becoming famous in her own right for those. I mean, not to get too ahead of ourselves here, but I do think that by warning her ahead of time, doesn't this effectively preclude her from being able to write her own Tintern Abbey? Right. You have to have the unthinking thing to go back to a place and then be like, ah, the first time I was here, I was so unthinking. It's not as good a poem to say, oh, the first time I was here, my brother warned me not to enjoy myself too much, you know, or to, you know, instructed me on how to comport myself toward the scene.
I mean, I guess maybe you could get an E. M. Forster novel out of that, but you really can't get a romantic poem out of it. So I think I end up feeling as though she's a little bit cheated because you have to have the. At least in the economics of this poem, you have to have the original wellspring of this unthinking emotion to then later come back to and get a return on that investment with a more sober kind of mindset. But to initially approach it with that kind of sobriety, at least in Wordsworth's formulation, doesn't give you that opportunity for later reflection and later personal readjustment.
18:57 Wes: It's like he's taking her aside and saying plastics to her.
19:01 Erin: Right.
19:03 Wes: Yeah. So you're reminding me of the Graduate, you know, where you get the adult wanting to impose their wisdom on a youngster when, of course, that's impossible. They have to live through it. They have to go through it themselves. And they're not gonna get it from your advice.
19:18 Erin: Well, especially because isn't he only a year or two older than Dorothy?
19:22 Wes: I know. That's the other thing.
19:24 Erin: It's like the obnoxious older sibling who thinks they know because they were, you know, they were born 15 minutes before you were. I don't know. And the idea, too, that, like, he has to tell her to control herself. I don't know. There's something a little annoying older brother about it.
19:37 Wes: Yeah.
19:38 Erin: But it's okay. We still love you, Will.
19:42 Wes: I thought of Annie hall and the way in which. There was a thesis there about the way in which human relationships, including, you know, especially romantic relationships, can be sustained by nostalgia. In a sense, they can be. So that, in a sense, the. Our relationship to memory is much less fraught in some ways. It doesn't carry the irritations of the present. And you can read, by the way, the whole city thing where he can carry the memory of nature with him in the city. You could just read that as being with people as well.
20:15 Erin: Sure.
20:15 Wes: People time versus alone time. And the way one can carry alone time with you or carry memory with you into those situations to help get through the irritations of them. And the same thing in love, you know, get through the conflicts of love by carrying memory with you, including memories of the good times in those relationships. That's the way Annie. Annie Hall ends. You know, one can always ask the question whether there isn't something neurotic about that, whether this need to kind of. I'm not saying that there is. I don't. I lean against this claim, but it's one that. That I think one might raise, which is that if. If you're leaning on Nostalgia. Is there something wrong with that or is that the right way to approach all of this?
20:57 Erin: Yeah, no, he doesn't protest too much. He. Well, never mind.
21:04 Wes: Well, I think you're right because you might be right about protesting too much because again, this is about, you know, this is sad perplexity about what is lost in youth to some extent. And he's putting a very positive spin on that.
21:18 Erin: No, I'm happy now, really.
21:19 Wes: Becoming an adult is really not that bad. Right. It's better to be reading and writing poetry than to be falling madly in love with someone. Right, Right.
21:33 Erin: Yeah. And I'm still enjoying this. Right. I still am loving being here and I'm still attuned to my senses. Right. The mighty world of eye and ear. And yet he's very well tuned, I think, to also what's happening on the cognitive level here. You know, both what they half create and what perceive. So there's something about taking this in. So he's. He's centering it more on himself and his perception. I think even as he is trying to convince. And I think he's conscious of this, of course, even as he's trying to convince us of this immediate reality that he's still taking in through eye and ear.
He then kind of goes into this, you know, both what they half create and what perceive, you know, both what I'm kind of bringing to this cognitively through my enjoyment and maybe even over and above what's actually really here versus what they're just taking in on a basic sensual level. And so that qualifier is really funny because it implies that he's not just still lover of the meadows and the woods. There's something obviously more. More going on there.
22:40 Wes: Yeah, there's no immediate contact with the natural domain. There's a philosophical background to this which is actually important, really important to Romanticism in begins in early modern philosophy. It gets amped up by Kant and then of course the German idealists, including Hegel. This philosophical tradition of German idealism, it's very connected to Romanticism. And one of the basic ideas is that there is something that stands in between us and our experience of the world. Just be straight up empiricists. We don't just sort of get everything as it is shuttled in through the senses.
Rather there's a lot of this, what we would call formal, whether it's spatial or temporal or causal or having anything to do with the structure of the world that in a way, at least with Kant, right, gets imposed on the mind. So we end up Creating. We are half creators of the phenomena. We get data, we get a given, and then we impose our human cognitive categories on that. And that's a kind of precursor to an idea that's very popular today, which is social construction, which I think in many ways is a misuse of this. But that's another discussion.
So I think that's a very interesting, as you point out, for him to say we are half creating the world. It's a very interesting way to talk about his relationship to nature and explains some of the sad perplexity, I think. And in his case. Right. What is he bringing to the table that transforms the experience of nature? It's the former memory of it, but also whatever experiences he's had in between then and now and a more contemplative frame of mind. And he's. And he tells us he's not going to complain about that, which is, you know, when you say protest too much, that's more evidence.
24:31 Erin: Right, sure.
24:32 Wes: Favor that. When someone says, I'm not mourning, I'm not complaining about this, then they are. They are actually complaining.
24:39 Erin: Well, I think, you know, you're helping me cast the lines about the godly presence in a different light because I see that same evidence of that German romanticism that you're speaking of. Maybe just to recap a little bit, he talks about his glad animal movements and all these things that were then just an appetite to him. And he. He says that now the loss of these aching joys and dizzy raptures is made up for by a more mature, sublime response and the sense of God or a divine spirit being interfused in what he's seeing now. And I'm thinking of what you're saying, because it seems to me that he would have to go back a second time to perceive the godly presence.
Because I'm thinking of the ways in which we kind of. We narrativize our experience only in retrospect. And I think, like that narrativization is indicative of perceiving a divine plan in what has already happened to us. So it's very difficult in the moment to see God, I think, working through things that are happening. But it's easy in hindsight to say, oh, now I get it, because that happened. So that this could happen. So that this could happen. Right. So the ability to look back on things and to reflect in memory, it adds this other extrasensory perception on top of just mediating things through the mind.
I think you're also mediating things through the divine will. Right. Or the Divine plan. And I think that's kind of what he's getting at here. Now. He sees that it's infused with this divine spirit. Of course, it was before, but he couldn't perceive that. So I see this too, as him sort of taking further evolutions toward maybe thinking back fondly, even on the intervening years between when he left this spot the first time and now, you know, as difficult as they were, and as much as they induced this sort of like rapid maturation in him, implying that they were very hard years to get through that, he now sees the narrative there, the divine plan that was there.
26:35 Wes: That's really interesting. You're making me think of something else in Kant, and this is his. It's often called the third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, which includes aesthetics, a theory of aesthetic judgment, judgments that something is beautiful. And one of Kant's ideas is that in our relationship to the natural world, part of our experience is of purposiveness without purpose, right? So from the standpoint of a naturalistic framework, we're not intelligent design people. We know that this is all brought about by natural causal mechanisms.
But when we notice that things are beautiful, it's like noticing a surplus. It didn't have to be made this way, right? So this is the distinction, Wordsworth's distinction between. Is between a more contemplative appreciation of beauty and then more a more youthful experience of just. Of pleasure, of being, having one's impulses stimulated by nature. But when we experience beauty, it's as if the world has been designed for us. In other words, if we want to give an evolutionary explanation of behavior, and we think that pleasure is critical to that, fine.
But is beauty really necessary? So beauty seems to be a kind of surplus over and above what can be explained naturally. Even if it isn't right. Even if there is actually a natural explanation for it. It gives us intimation for Kant, of the divine, of a higher power that has created nature for us, so to speak. Otherwise, you know, we wouldn't be able to experience it as beautiful. And that you were saying something different, which involved narrative, but it might be related, right? So the way in which we tell a. What is it? We tell a story, right?
We give a. We. We put, you know, the manifold of the. The chaotic experiences that have happened in the past, we organize that into a story, and so we're able to give it meaning and also give it a kind of narrative trajectory, maybe a purpose. So it starts to look as if it's more organized, right? There's history to it, it looks as if it's more organized than it seemed at first. And if it is more organized, then in a similar way it's. It would be an indication of the presence of the divine. So you can say, oh, you're reading into it, or this is just the, you know, our application of our kind of meaning making faculties that have been written into the brain by evolution.
Or you can take another tack, and this is what Hegel will do is say, everything you call cognitive, I call God. Everything you call reading in, I just call God. Because that is self consciousness. And God and nature all have, they're at bottom the same thing. They have the same structure. I can show you that. And so anyway, I really liked this idea that you brought up because it connects so directly into German idealism and ultimately Romanticism.
29:41 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking too, like the narrative element of it. Those of no belief who are listening to me go on about this. I mean, I think this is just something that we do to get through things, you know, is to narrativize these things. Whether or not we want to attribute it to a divine plan or to look, it was all okay because here, here we are now. And there was a kind of an irrationality maybe to where we ended up. Whether or not we want to call that God is really interesting or maybe just our own, you know, desire for meaning making, as you're saying.
30:08 Wes: Yeah, so this talk of the divine is a good segue into the very. Into the way the stanza ends, which is with, you know, I was talking about beauty and there's. The concept of sublimity is related and those two things are, you know, mentioned. Kant's third critique, the sublime is a big part of that and it's a big point of discussion among other philosophers at the time. So. And of course he brings it up directly. He's not, he's not shy about just using the word sublime in his poem. He's telling you about his experience and he's going to do that directly if necessary.
But what he keeps telling us is that our experience of nature, and I think our experience of art as well, is not just about passion and emotion. Right. This works against the stereotype of the Romantic. It's this important fusion of contemplativeness and thinking with passion. And the two Wordsworth explicitly say, in other places these things are not opposed to. They go together. And here in the same way that the cliff joins the sky and the river, these things are joined. So what he gets out of nature again, in the end, it's the spirit that rolls through all these things.
So he's still a lover of meadows. But that doesn't just mean sense. It also means sensibility. Right. So it's the anchor also of his purest thoughts.
31:31 Erin: Yeah. And he also says, you know, he explicitly uses the word language. And. And in so doing kind of exposes maybe what the romantic sensibility that you just described doesn't want to recognize, which is that if you're going to get your thoughts down on paper, you have to be a little more scientific about, you know, about being able to reproduce these things or to order them properly in a poem. Right. So the reflection and the mediation of the experience has to happen in order for the incident to be recorded.
31:59 Wes: Yeah. And, you know, and a thinking and a more analytic frame of mind. And it's also his moral being. So he's reminding us he's that unremembered character building pleasure here. The kind of formative influence of the nurture in nature. The formative influences that comes out here in a more. In our more reflective ethical moments as well, our decisions. What do I do? What's right, what's good. We might think that nature is the antithesis to that because it's always tempting us with, you know, what is with again, with pleasure. Doing what comes naturally. Right. But no, it's not just about. Nature doesn't just instill in us doing what comes naturally. It is actually the source of one's moral being. It is the source of some sort of relationship to nature as a source of one's capacity to be. To be good, to be ethical.
32:52 Erin: Good. Shall I read the last? Stand up?
32:54 Wes: Yeah.
32:54 Erin: Okay. This is another long one I'm going to try not to laugh at. My dearest friend. My dear, dear friend. All right, here we go. Nor perchance, if I were not thus taught, should I the more suffer my genial spirits to decay. For thou art with me here upon the banks of this fair river. Thou. My dearest friend. My dear, dear friend. And in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart. And read my former pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes. Oh, yet a little while may I behold in thee what I once was. My dear, dear sister. And this prayer I make, Knowing that nature never did betray the heart that loved her.
Tis her privilege through all the years of this our life, to lead from joy to joy. For she can so inform the mind that is within us. So impress with quietness and beauty. And so feed with lofty thoughts. That neither evil tongues, rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men. Nor greetings where no kindness is Nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life shall e' er prevail against us or disturb our cheerful faith that all which we behold is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk and let the misty mountain winds be free to blow against thee.
And in after years, when these wild ecstasies shall be matured into a sober pleasure when thy mind shall be a mansion for all lovely forms thy memory be as a dwelling place for all sweet sounds and harmonies. O, then, if solitude or fear or pain or grief should be thy portion with what healing thoughts of tender joy Wilt thou remember me and these my exhortations? Nor perchance, if I should be where I no more can hear thy voice Nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams of past existence. Wilt thou then forget that on the banks of this delightful stream we stood together?
And that I, so long a worshipper of nature hither came unwearied in that service? Rather say, with warmer love. Oh, with far deeper zeal of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget that after many wanderings, many years of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs and this green pastoral landscape were to me more dear both for themselves and for thy sake.
35:15 Wes: So that line was originally, my dearest friend. My dear, dear friend. My dear, dear, dear, dear friend. And then she read a draft and she cut out that third one. But so it's interesting now. So he keeps piling up the meanings of this. You know, this revisiting this scene. And we got hope, in particular added last time. And then, as, of course, a reiteration of the contemplative importance of nature. And now we get this idea of his vision of her future, his hopes for her. So this is also something that's transforming. That's half creating the landscape, Right. This is transformation forming. His experience of it is his anticipation of what it will mean to her.
36:08 Erin: Yeah. It's kind of bizarre that this only happens in the last stanza. It always surprises me. It's like he's been going on for 20 minutes. And then finally the camera kind of zooms out a little bit from his face. We realize that he's sitting next to someone who's just sort of been staring at him like.
36:23 Wes: It's like that Arrested Development moment or several moments panning out in Buster. Buster is sitting there.
36:29 Erin: Buster is there.
36:30 Wes: Unbeknownst. Yeah. One might see it as cheap when not used comedically. Self referentially is a kind of Cheap trick, this kind of reveal.
36:40 Erin: No, I mean, he's been talking to her all along. But we thought that he was talking to us, and maybe we still do when he says, my dearest friend, my dear, dear friend, and we think, oh, we're special. But in fact, no, Right.
36:51 Wes: And like I said, I had to figure out if the sister really existed. Even I was so confused.
36:57 Erin: It can be read both ways. I mean, he's speaking to us and to her. He's looking at her and he's seeing his younger self all 18 months that separate them or whatever
37:08 Wes: age.
37:10 Erin: And he is, I guess, you know, to give him credit, he is seeing her glad enjoyment, her glad animal movements, her being like a roe, bounding around perhaps, and therefore checking her. He's not maybe robbing her of that experience immediately. Or maybe he is, who knows?
37:26 Wes: Stop rowing around like that. The word on the screen is you've been rowing, rowing around town. Sorry.
37:40 Erin: And yeah, he sees the shooting lights of her wild eyes. And then we get the famous line, nature never did betray the heart that loved her, which we already addressed a little bit last time, but is there more that we can say about this now that we're almost done here?
37:54 Wes: Well, I just wanted to say that it's relevant to what you just said, but. So in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart and read my former pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes. So, yeah, maybe you just said this, but he's not trying to cramp her style and suppress her passion, part of his experience, right? So he can see it to some extent through his own youthful passion, what the landscape meant to him back then. And then what it means to her in the present. And for him, it's lost. So there's a sad perplexity, there's an element of mourning to that, but also, again, a appreciation of the compensations for that, the spiritual compensations.
And with her, there's the anticipation of that happening. So it's kind of sad in the sense, right, he's anticipating a young person, and let's just pretend he's really a lot older than her. Maybe he is spiritually an old soul, but it's this anticipation of a young, you know, you, you, especially when you get to my age, you look at the relationship of much younger people, say, in their, you know, late teens, early 20s to the world, and you. You remember what that's like and how thrilling it can be and how awfully painful it can. Can be. And in a way you miss it, but you're Also glad you're not going through it anymore if you aren't, you know, so one can envy the young.
And that, I think is part of the source of doing the graduate type of thing and coming at them and saying, you know, let's get down to business, let's do plastics. You got to worry about your career, you got to worry about money. You kind of. It seems caring and practical, but often I think it comes out of envy and a desire to deprive younger people of their dreams, which they should. They should be doing that. They should be bounding like a row. They shouldn't go straight into finance. There's always time for that. Or plastics. There's always time.
It's my advice to listeners of this podcast, so can always sell out. So you want to be careful about your advice and your admonitions. It's not just about the fact that they can't take the advice and live by that, but as. As you mentioned, they need to go through these experiences themselves. So I think it can be sad to be with her and to know that this type of excitement is something that's going to fade, but also to appreciate what maturation means, what the path of maturity can mean for someone and for that to be a pleasant idea as well. So this kind of idea of her transformation, or just more generally a transformation, the sort of course from a more immediate sensuous relationship to the world to something more spiritual and contemplative.
It's sad, right? So I think the way Hegel puts it is that language kind of murders reality, right? It interposes the symbolic order, interposes a veil, a layer between us and immediate experience. You know, and this is part of what we do growing up. We lose that maternal immediacy and this kind of early symbiosis and merger, and then we are forever kind of without our other halves, so to speak, as Aristophanes puts it in Plato's Symposium, right? And so we're always lost. We're always looking for this thing to complete us or to fulfill us, this thing that we can't really ultimately have.
So there's that loss, but then there's the conviction that it's also more importantly a gain. That. Right. That human self consciousness and language and science and the arts, that's all worth it. It's all worth the loss of our oneness, right? We're no longer animals just bounding around the forest or the grass, right? It sucks. It's a horrible loss. We've been expelled from Eden, but there's something more important that we're compensated with.
41:55 Erin: Or maybe it just behooves all those people who have written all this stuff down to try and convince us that what they're doing is worthwhile.
42:01 Wes: He's preaching. He's preaching.
42:03 Erin: Yeah.
42:03 Wes: It's an argument. It is an argument for poetry, ultimately. You know, it really is.
42:07 Erin: Right, right. I think he's trying to give Dorothy, you know, a sneak preview of what will happen when she's as wise and mature as he is. When her mind becomes a mansion for all lovely forms. Thy memory be as a dwelling place for all sweet sounds and harmonies. Which is interesting because I'm thinking back to last time and how I was a little puzzled by the fact that we don't really get a house in that first description of the landscape. We don't get the actual cottage. We get green to the very door, which is the closest we come. Right. And here now we've finally get the house, but it's a mansion. And maybe there's something here, too, about being a mansion for all lovely forms. There's something of a cathedral or a church in that as well. And the.
42:54 Wes: Not Tintern Abbey.
42:56 Erin: Right.
42:57 Wes: So present here, it's just off in the distance. But.
43:00 Erin: Yeah, right. And that's something that we haven't really talked about is that the fact that he effectively ignores Tintern Abbey's direct representation in this poem. But maybe this is part of that too. Right. Maybe there's something of the implication of the abbey in this that.
43:16 Wes: Well, he calls himself a worshiper of nature. Right. And he's at the periphery of the abbey. So what is the relationship between this nature worship and God worship?
43:26 Erin: Right, right. Well, I mean, it's a place that retains, you know, memory of several different ages. Right. Just as Wordsworth retains his memory of his. His youth and different experiences of the world. So, I mean, in a sense, Tintern Abbey has become a temple to nature now because it's been overtaken by nature. You know, you can go inside it, so to speak, but it really doesn't have a roof and it's all grown over. And that's part of why. I mean, it just looks so incredible, you know, the altar and everything, or I'm not sure actually, if the altar is still there, but, you know, all the things we would normally associate with trappings of a church and. And all that are now gone and replaced by ivy and grass and things like that.
44:07 Wes: So you'd wanted to return to this. And I think this is good. So we can now do what? Wordsworth, you know, we can kind of recapitulate what Wordsworth is doing and we can return to our former discussion of whether nature ever betrays the heart that loves her or that loved her. This is sort of, I'm reminded of our Keats, of course, episode on the urn, right. Beauty being truth and truth being beauty. It's at the same level of boldness of assertion. It's come right out and assert this very grand thesis and in this case, probably in both cases, but seemingly implausible.
And the poem has told us about the many ways in which nature can betray us. Not least is in leading us onto temptation, right? Of. Of being the source of instinct and impulse and sinfulness and desire and. But of course, you know, we. It's our embodiment, it's our mortality. Yes, it's pleasure, but it's also a lot of pain. Does his explanation hold up? Which is just that it, despite all of these things, it's our kind of our meta. Relationship to nature, the way we can hold on to it in our minds, right? So it's not being immediately. It's not being natural beings or being immediately embedded in the natural scene and having the immediate experience of the natural scene that is nature's faithfulness to us.
She's not faithful in the present moment in that sense. She's not faithful in her natural relationship to us. I would say she only becomes faithful at the point of contemplativeness or self consciousness, right. Or memory. She helps us build this, this mansion that we can, we can store up these memories of that more immediate relationship and I guess we leave the. Leave the bad stuff out and use the good, the good part of it to comfort us. So maybe, you know, maybe the idea is that on this kind of mediated plane of experience where we are doing half the creating, once we've contributed our part to the raw manifold, the raw experience of nature, then it becomes something redemptive and non betraying in another way.
Maybe saying that once we've united it to the divine. I don't know. Does that make sense?
46:33 Erin: It does. It's a little bit unrealistic, obviously. And the, the kind of mind and heart that would express this idea that all which we behold is full of blessings, that this faith is to just recognize that the blessings of nature. It's a little bit of the roe talking. Maybe he hasn't gone to the next.
46:54 Wes: He hasn't leveled up the deeper zeal of holier love. It's still zeal, right?
47:01 Erin: I mean he recognizes the, the bad things about, you know, the dreary intercourse of daily life. He recognizes the bad things that can happen to you and sees them and calls them by name, you know, the sneers of selfish men, etc.
47:12 Wes: And it's the memories of nature which are supposed to keep you. They're supposed to alleviate the pain of those things.
47:18 Erin: Right, right. And of course they can't, you know, in the moment, you can't. Maybe you can if it's not that bad. But, you know, these things tend to derail us. That's part of. Of the nature of being human, is that we lose sight of those moments of, you know, it can't all be, you know, divine gratitude and having something really crappy happen to us and then just, you know, oh, think of Tintern Abbey. It's all gonna be okay.
47:42 Wes: You know, just imagining, you know, her sister falling and spraining her ankle. She's like, ow. And he's just. Just think of Tintern Abbey. Shaking Tintern Abbey. Nature cannot betray you. Think of the wonderful things. Yeah, that pothole betrayed me.
48:07 Erin: Well, it's also. He's employing her to think of nature mediated through him. Right. Which is also really funny. Think of Big Brother and his wonderful exhortations to you with what healing thoughts of tender joy. When wilt thou remember me? And these my exhortations.
48:23 Wes: She needs the priest. Apparently she's not going to be a Protestant.
48:27 Erin: Oh, there you go. There you go. Yeah, no problems with his ego there. But the idea of the blessing and what he wishes for her, I think is what I'm reading here, that maybe she won't be able to have this monk like reaction to the slings and arrows of the world. World. But the idea is that this is what he wishes for her. And I do love much like a priest, I think there's a kind of the blessing that happens at the very end of the mass or whatever, which can sometimes be kind of a long multi part blessing. Let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk.
You know, this is very much reminiscent of those. To me it's very touching. Let the misty mountain winds be free to blow against thee. You know, so he wishes her, I think, these wild ecstasies, but also this mature pleasure. So he wishes her like a full life of both, you know, the roe kind of joy and the mature joy. And he wishes that this can heal her in those bad moments, perhaps, you know, by blessing her in this way and by being a mediator of God's spirit in this moment or nature spirit or both. I think the moment will come when she will be able to take these lessons to heart, you know, without the expectation that she's going to be able to always be just sort of meditating through all the bad moments of life.
So. Yeah. So I see this, you know, as a hope, as you say, as a hope, rather than maybe a realistic expectation. But in its hope, it's quite beautiful, I think, and sweet. If we forgive his. His grandeur.
50:05 Wes: Yeah. And it's. Although, oddly enough, you know, he doesn't actually. Even though I totally agree about that sort of grandioseness of these lines, for some reason, my fantasy of his character. And maybe that's his. Maybe it's just from reading about him. Right. And some of the secondary stuff, the background is. I don't have this impression of him as a grandiose person. He's almost oddly subdued for a romantic, in a way, oddly stayed in some sense. Hence this emphasis on contemplation and stuff. But I was going to say, you're making me think of how poignant this is and how maybe it doesn't exactly start with the return to the natural scene.
It starts with his encounter with his sister. Walking with her, hiking with her, essentially being with her. But this encounter that we have of others, that we can be with them, but we can't be with them totally. We can't be in their heads, feeling their feelings. We can't always be there for them. So you love someone, you love your little sister, but you know that you can't do anything about all the pain that she's going to experience. You can't directly alleviate those things. And you want to do that, you know, you want to give to that other person whatever it is that's going to prevent them from being painful or especially being lonely.
Right. So this talk of a solitary walk through life is a callback to the seclusion in the first stanza, right? The two types of seclusion, the seclusion of the natural scene, which is evocative of the seclusion of instinct, the way in which instinct is unseen or unconscious or unavailable to us. And then the thoughts of more deep seclusion, the kind of seclusion we get in the contemplative moment. I start to wonder with this callback to that in the last stanza with this word, solitary. If it isn't, you know, his experience of her. Seclusion in the sense of the seclusion of subjectivity.
Right. The seclusion of another person's mind, which is not directly available to us, it's cut off from us so the hope is that the relationship that her relationship to nature can penetrate in an enduring way and in a way that his love by itself can't. Right. His love is not enough to be a constant comfort to her on her solitary walk. But if he can give her this gift of a contemplative encounter with the natural world, which is to say this certain kind of relationship to the instinctual, certain kind of reflective relationship to the instinctual, then it transforms the meaning of pain.
And it can be like a balm, you know, and the kind of balm that one gets in being engaged with the arts and with philosophy. And it really is that, you know, and so wanting someone to have that, that's a real hope. That's a realistic hope. That's something that you might be able to. Might be able to give them. So that's what I was thinking of at the end here. Just this concept of being solitary or secluded and the way that shows up in instinct and contemplativeness and then finally in our relations to others, the way in which their. Their subjectivities are cut off from ours.
53:23 Erin: That's beautiful. I like the last line here in which, you know, we. We do get from him, I think, to that next level, because he's able to, even though he's. He's protesting too much about his lack of supreme enjoyment that he. He's experiencing in this contemplative moment, that because he is experiencing the nature now through his sister, I think that's the development and the evolution that happens at the end, that he's now going to remember this experience not only through his own youth, but through hers as well, and taking that lesson of witnessing all of those things that you say and seeing them through her eyes and. And kind of in that way almost doubling his enjoyment and experience, but also his kind of consciousness.
54:14 Wes: Yeah, we have to bring. You're making me think that we have to bring our relationships to others, to this experience of nature. Right. This is again, part of what we have create, but we have to bring the social. In some sense, his relationship to another, to another person is an integral. Or to society in general, including the city and all that stuff. But it's an integral part of what forms or half creates this experience. But yeah. So I think for postscript, I was thinking maybe we could talk about our relationship to nature. Is it really all that Wordsworth cracks it up to be? Is it the balm? Is it a basis for a mansion? Is it all that? So that's what we'll do in Postscript and sounds good. All right.
55:06 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
55:10 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
Mother Nature’s Nurture in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (Part 1)
Jan 31, 2022
After an absence of five years, the poet William Wordsworth returned to the idyllic ruins of a medieval monastery along the River Wye. The spot was perhaps not so very different from his last visit, but Wordsworth found that he had undergone a significant transformation in the intervening years. In a long blank-verse meditation, he explores the changes that the memory of this landscape has affected on his psyche and the role it played in his now-mature comportment towards nature, impulse, and desire. What can Wordsworth’s poem teach us about our own relationships to the natural world? Can Mother Nature truly exert a parental influence? Can nature even make us better people? In this Part One of a two-part episode, Wes & Erin discuss the first three stanzas of Wordsworth’s 1798 poem, “Tintern Abbey.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:08 Erin: After an absence of five years, the poet William Wordsworth returned to the idyllic ruins of a medieval monastery along the River Wye. The spot was perhaps not so very different from his last visit, but Wordsworth found that he himself had undergone a significant transformation in the intervening years. In a long blank verse meditation, he explores the changes that the memory of this landscape has affected on his psyche and the role it played in his now mature comportment towards nature, impulse and desire. What can Wordsworth's poem teach us about our own relationships to the natural world? Can Mother Nature truly exert a parental influence? Can nature even make us better people? Today, in part one of a two part episode, we're discussing Wordsworth's 1798 poem Tintern Abbey. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. The. This is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext.
1:00 Wes: So, Erin, have you ever felt betrayed by nature? Or is it true that nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Or maybe you don't love nature that much, I don't know. But I wonder about this thesis. Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.
1:15 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking about that quite a bit too. You know, I do love nature and I was thinking actually about a really scary incident that happened to me last summer. I have a. A little state park near my house where I go hiking in the summer sometimes. Every single day, rain or shine. And I go when it's cold too. But anyway, I was kind of cocky about my ability to get up and down the mountain before this big lightning storm that was supposed to happen and ended up being scared out of my mind because there were literal. I literally saw a lightning bolt come down and hit the ground maybe about 20ft in front of me.
1:52 Wes: Wow.
1:53 Erin: Something like that. Yeah. It was really, really scary. It was really wild. The sky turned that kind of weird green color, you know, of like extreme weather, almost like a tornado kind of color. And this was in New England. So this is. I was thinking about this too. The backdrop of a relatively hospitable nature versus a more extreme one. Right. I mean, New England doesn't have terribly. There's like a lot of variation in the weather, which is the big joke. If you don't like the weather in New England, wait five minutes.
2:21 Wes: Yeah. It's not like you went crab fishing in the North Atlantic or something like that.
2:24 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
2:26 Wes: To get in touch with, you know, the primal or.
2:30 Erin: I dried out and became Erin Jerky in the Serengeti or something like that. So there's a certain. Let's say domesticated element of New England and Old England, which I think much written about by Thoreau and Emerson. I was thinking about the Transcendentalist too, and Thoreau's experience of going up Mount Katahdin and his essay up there or his journal entry rather about how it made him see nature in a completely different way because it was so extreme and almost like. I don't know if you've ever been up there. I haven't, but I've seen pictures and it's like the surface of the moon almost. You know, it's all sort of slate looking. Not the happy chipmunks helping me do my laundry kind of. Thoreau,
3:13 Wes: which is really his mother and probably Emerson was doing some of it as well.
3:17 Erin: But it's easy to live in a cabin when you can just go to dinner at Hawthorne's house. But anyway, I love Thoreau and I love Walden Pond, which we should do at some point. I think that there is a more extreme. Wordsworth kind of grew up in more of like a Mount Katahdin kind of landscape to be fair. But yeah, I don't know. I guess so I'm throwing all these things out there just to say it's not as though nature can't be scary and extreme even in these, you know, more mild places, relatively speaking. But that relationship to nature, I think I fear na. I have an appropriate fear of nature, even if I take it for granted sometimes and try to outrun storms and stuff like that.
3:56 Wes: A healthy fear of nature, like being worried about sharks coming up through the shower drains. I'm sorry, that's a reference to a conversation we earlier had about Jaws.
4:10 Erin: And my fear of these things is intense and irrational. But I don't know. What's your read on that? What do you think?
4:17 Wes: I just thought that was a interesting throw off line because it's obviously the case that nature does betray the heart that loves her in some sense. Right. Because it's obviously the case that nature often betrays the hearts that love her and more so the hearts that love her. Not the people who stay on the couch watching tv, but the people who go out for hikes, even if it's not Mount Everest or the people who are outside more often get into more scrapes with nature and it's just a more dangerous place than the living room or the shower. Although maybe not if you look at the falls or the shark attacks statistics in showers, you might, but yeah.
So it's something that we'll talk about as we go through. We're Going to go stanza by stanza. You'll read a stanza and then we'll discuss. So that'll be one of the ideas will be thinking about is just in what sense it might be that nature does not betray the heart that loves her. I will say that this poem was written in the context, should we say the title of the poem, the full title Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 13, 1978.
5:41 Erin: 1798.
5:42 Wes: Sorry, did I say. What did I say? 1978.
5:44 Erin: You said 1978.
5:45 Wes: Weird. Six years after my birth. Not six summers with the length of five long winters, but no, July 13, 1798, the year that dyslexia was discovered.
5:59 Erin: I think it is just important to say that Wordsworth would have been better acquainted than most people, maybe even most people living in the world in his day, with the fickle quality, shall we call it, of nature. I mean, he was an early pioneer of mountaineering. He was estimated to have walked something like 200,000 miles almost in his lifetime, maybe. I mean, he pioneered the idea of the walking tour. He was one of the early pioneers of it. He describes in the Prelude in his childhood, climbing out onto the mountainous crags that looked over the school where he was just a boy and taking eagles eggs, climbing up to where the eagle's nests were in the rocks.
He was well acquainted with what we might say is the malicious kind of nature, or how malicious nature can be. And I think that's what makes this line so interesting. Because if anyone would understand nature, well, I think it would be Wordsworth.
6:56 Wes: Right. I was thinking also about the biographical context for the poem. So this is five years after a visit that he took not too long after he got back from France, where he had been for a while and he had a French girlfriend and he had gotten her pregnant. And then he had to come back, I think in part for financial reasons and to figure out how he was going to support a family and wasn't able to go back because France and Britain went to war. And this is in the wake of the French Revolution, which initially Wordsworth was enthusiastic about, but then became disillusioned with.
And by this point he's pretty well disillusioned with it. So as we find out at the end of the poem, he's with his sister, who is very important to him. They were separated for about 10 years as children, and then they basically lived together as adults for the rest of their lives, including after Wordsworth got married. Not to his French girlfriend, but to someone else. Dorothy, his sister, was a big part of his life. And speaking of nature, she. I think she called him a worshiper of nature. And it's pretty clear by the end of this poem, right, that he's singing a prayer to nature.
But he may be a worshiper of nature, but he's well aware of the perils of nature. But the context for this poem is the sort of perils of the human predicament, including war and unrest and injustice, all that stuff. And the ways in which nature can be a refuge from that, but a way of returning to that in a sense, or appreciating the sad plight of humanity. We'll get a little bit of that in this poem. You mentioned the walking tour. And in a way, after coming back from France, he was kind of in exile. So he was traveling around a lot. And, you know, he's not a wanderer in the desert, right?
He's a wanderer within a lush landscape. But he was really quite upset about his predicament, which is that he wasn't able to return to France, where he had a child and baby mama. Where he had a child and the child's mother. So I think of his seeking of solace in nature in that context, you know. So it's significant that he's titling the poem in his way. And it's July 13, which is the eve of Bastille Day. And it's about five years after he came back from France.
9:31 Erin: Should we dive in and I'll read the first stanza or paragraph? Okay, here we go. Five years have passed. Five summers with the length of five long winters. And again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur. Once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day has come when I again repose here under this dark sycamore and view these plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts which at this season with their unripe fruits are clad in one green hue and lose themselves mid groves and copses.
Once again I see these hedgerows, hardly hedgerows. Little lines of sportive wood run wild. These pastoral farms green to the very door and wreaths of smoke sent up in silence from among the trees with some uncertain notice, as might seem of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, or of some hermit's cave where by his fire the hermit sits alone.
10:41 Wes: Very nice. This poem has always really grabbed me in the first two lines. This very interesting way of describing the time interval between his present experience of a place and his experience five years in the past. So five summers with a length of five long winters. Why put it exactly that way? I guess winters are emotionally longer than summers. Right.
11:13 Erin: Oh, that's good.
11:14 Wes: If they are technically the same length.
11:17 Erin: Yeah. And there's so much repetition here. But in those first two lines, the repeated five, five, you know, you have that number in your head at the beginning and then it sort of fades away. And I often forget that he's still talking about himself five years earlier. I mean, when he wrote this, he was only 28, is that right?
11:36 Wes: Yeah.
11:37 Erin: So he's talking about his youth, as it were, as a 23 year old, not as a 10 year old.
11:43 Wes: Alan. He's an old 28 year old.
11:46 Erin: Right. And so I think that's a little bit silly for me maybe sometimes. But he is really trying to sell up front just how much growing he's done and just how different things are now with this repetition. But it's also just really. I forget how hypnotic Wordsworth can be. I mean, the language isn't necessarily hugely flashy. I mean, it isn't as a matter of principle for him on most occasions. But the sinking in to the hot tub of his. Of his poem is just really delicious. I think you kind of get on its wavelength because of these repetitions. Again, again, secluded and more deep seclusion. It works really well for me.
12:29 Wes: Yeah, I was going to mention that as well. You know, we get 5, 5, 5 and then again, again, again. So that those repetitions, they syntactically convey the fact that this is a repeat. Right. The fact that this is about the repetition of an experience and the way it's informed by the initial experience. So I wanted to say too, that this idea of talking about five summers and five winters, so you could look at one way of measuring the time as objective magnitude. Right. And the other way as conveying emotional intensity. So I said winters feel longer than summers.
But you could also just say summers feel more emotionally intense or something like that. And in winter we're more damped down. So it creates this contrast between the more, let's say, empirical experience of the world and then the way the world affects us emotionally, which is a very important theme for Wordsworth in general and of course for this poem. So right up front we get that, which I find to be really, really cool.
13:42 Erin: Yeah, that's really good. You're making me think too, of the sort of enchanted nature of the landscape in the summer, right? The waters have a murmur because of the fact that it's summer. And maybe they're not murmuring in the winter, they may be frozen over. But I like the fact that this idea that summer is so intense and it is kind of enchanted with this fairy tale quality. We get the murmur at the beginning and then down at the end of the stanza we get the signs of life that are there. It's a little bit fairy tale esque to me. Maybe. Yeah, maybe that's wrong.
14:16 Wes: Well, I think. No, no, I think that's right. So I draw a line right through the middle of this stanza. So I had read something about these being called verse paragraphs, but I guess stanza is. Is correct as well. I'm not sure, but. So we're going to call them stanzas. I draw a line in the middle of the stanza between here under this dark sycamore and view. And then the next line, the plots of cottage ground. Because that's the point where he turns from the landscape itself to the connection between nature and human beings. So and stuff that's man made, like cottages and copses and groves.
And within each of these I see a kind of triad. So just thinking about the first half of the stanza, right, we get the river and the wild secluded scene that he says is surrounding it, which, you know, as the poem progresses, we'll see it as a representative of nature, but also instinct and youthfulness and desire, including possibly sexual desire. And then we get the cliffs, which he says are representative of a more deep seclusion than the seclusion of the scene. So something contemplative and in fact something that connects us to the sky, which we could take to represent gods or ideas, some kind of transcendent realm that's accessible via contemplation.
So I love this kind of stacked. Maybe a totem pole of levels, right? River to cliffs to sky as representative of nature and instinct to mind and to rocks that have probably been there for billions of years. So something more temporally stable to a transcendent realm. That's the triad we're greeted with, I think, in the first half of the stanza.
16:07 Erin: I really like that the seclusion too is kind of. In that first half is sort of undermined and sort of not by the second half because, you know, we get this domesticated nature, as you said. And I kind of wonder. I wonder about this because, you know, we have the murmur, we have this idea of a hospitable nature, like I, you know, like I said before, maybe even a kind of enchanted nature. So we get this feeling of connection. And so I think that word connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky. You know, everything is kind of part of this ecosystem, including him. So there's this idea that he's alone and having all these experiences alone. And yet it's like a homie alone. He's able to have it both ways.
16:49 Wes: Homie alone.
16:50 Erin: A homie alone.
16:50 Wes: That was the original title for the film too.
16:53 Erin: But yeah, you know what I'm trying to say that he's alone and yet he gets to be alone and sort of happy about it. Because this is not some sort of. Maybe I should draw a distinction here between being alone and being secluded. Maybe that's the key. But anyway, do you see what I mean? That he seems to be able to have it both ways. He seems to be able to talk about seclusion and connection in tandem. And it seems to me to be represented by the landscape which he sees in front of him, which is both domesticated and empty somehow. It's devoid of people.
17:24 Wes: Yeah, that's a really interesting turn that he takes in the stanza, right? If you're paying close attention to it, he's talking about seclusion. Then all of a sudden there's cottage grounds and farms and you're like, what? That's weird. Which is a. Great poems that I end up loving have that kind of element where you're kind of jarred by. You're given some sort of surprise or some sort of conflict that the poet just passes over. But yeah, so that's why I draw that line in the stanza. We get all the man made stuff, cottage grounds, orchard tufts, hedgerows.
But then we get this downplaying of those things, right? So the orchards have unripe fruits and are sort of lost in groves and copses. And the hedgerows are hardly hedgerows, right? They're run wild. They're sort of escaping human domestication. And the pastoral farms are green to the very door, right? Human beings haven't been able to put that greenness neatly into a square just for cultivation, right? It overruns itself and comes up right to the edge of the cottage. And then we get the idea that if you see smoke, which we might normally see as a sign of human industriousness, right?
And the conflict between humanity and nature. And here it's just homeless people in the woods at an encampment, or it's a hermit in his cave. So people who are not masters of nature, right, but are sort of Immersed within it. So that's the image of the second stanza, which is that human efforts to tame nature sort of get swep. Swallowed up by nature.
19:00 Erin: Do we ever quite know where the smoke is coming from? Because he says, as might seem.
19:05 Wes: Yeah, exactly.
19:07 Erin: The more I dig into this, the stranger it gets, you know?
19:10 Wes: Right, right.
19:11 Erin: I really like the self correction. I love any poem that has a little self correction in it. Bishop does this a lot. Once again, I see these hedgerows. Hardly hedgerows, you know, I love that you get the repetition, the, you know, hypnotic repetition, but also that self correction. And then we have this idea that they're overflowing themselves, which is really interesting. It makes me think, of course, of Keats and to Autumn and the mossed cottage trees and the vines around the thatch eaves. So the idea of sort of like nature overrunning itself. I love the way you put that. But we don't even really get a house here, do we? I mean, we get green to the very door. So we get the sort of suggestion of a house, but the door is kind of disembodied from it.
19:53 Wes: Well, he says cottage ground and. But you're right, we don't ever directly get in the house. We get the stuff surrounding it, like cottage ground or orchard or farm or.
20:01 Erin: Yeah, and we don't ever really get a person. The word hermit is in here and the word dwellers is in here. But he is speculating and he does say, you know, as might seem of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods. So the implication is that there is a house, that there are houses around. It's as if vagrants were there and as if the woods were houseless. So there are all these really strange tensions.
20:28 Wes: Yeah, it's as if he's fantasizing. This thing that you're pointing out, I think is really important. It's that it's kind of fanciful. Right. The suggestion is that it's just his fantasy that nature overruns what is man made, and that the smoke, right, is coming from a vagrant's encampment or from a hermit's cave, rather than from an actual house or, you know, more remotely from a factory or something like that, from human industry, from human activity. And this is where I think we get a second triad, which is instead of river, cliff, sky, or nature mind, and then the divine or the transcendent, we get nature and then hedgerow and then human being, where the hedgerow is sort of a point of contention between nature and human industry.
Is it wild or is it just man made? Is it autonomous and free or has it been mastered and put to human purposes? So we get a replacement of contemplativeness as the joining feature as suggested by the cliffs to industriousness as the joining feature. And I think the tension between those two things will actually come up again in the poem. A contemplative relation to nature versus a practical or industrious, or even at the very extreme, an exploitative relationship to nature. That I think is what's being hinted
22:03 Erin: at here, even alongside this tension. Yeah, it's just standing out to me now. The redundancies at the end of the stanza alongside those contrasts. I don't know, maybe this is a little too obvious, but vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods. Well, if they're vagrants, then they would be houseless. Right. And the hermit sits alone. I mean, isn't a hermit by definition alone? So there's something. I don't know. This is such a bizarre poem. Maybe this is just too obvious, but I never noticed that before. The redundancy and repetition as opposed to yoking these opposites together. It's just very strange. It almost doesn't make sense.
22:40 Wes: Yeah. Or it suggests we're in the realm of fantasy. He's not just an observer here, but he is co creating the world in a sense, with his own fantasies elsewhere. Wordsworth says something like, the world is half created by eye and ear. So it's this element of subjectivity. And of course, this is historically famous. Right. Wordsworth is going to have a dramatic impact on the history of literature because he's prioritizing the lyrical and prioritizing the subject's description of their inner experiences. Right over the content of a narrative. That and the greater plainness of language. Am I right about that? As you know.
23:28 Erin: Yes.
23:29 Wes: This is the kind of transition we're seeing. Yeah.
23:31 Erin: And I think that in the. At some point. I really would like us to talk about the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which I think we are going to cover at some point on the podcast. Right. I think we both put that down as a favorite. But it's just worth mentioning here that Wordsworth and Coleridge both sort of laid out the principles of their sort of new poetry. And was this poem the last in the Lyrical Ballads, the last poem included?
23:55 Wes: Is it? Yeah. I didn't know that. You know, I don't know a lot about the Lyrical Ballads. I just. I know it's collaboration with Coleridge and that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is in there as well. Strangely enough, very different stuff. But yeah. So this is the last one?
24:09 Erin: I think so, yeah. I think this was the last thing written and slotted in. It's just worth a hat tip to that. We won't talk about that now because that's its own thing. But he and Coleridge really laid out the manifesto of their new poetry in this volume of Lyrical Ballads, you know, and it had just an absolutely revolutionary effect on poetry. You know, it's probably the single most important volume of poetry in the English language, easily.
24:32 Wes: That collaboration is really strongly related to one of the themes of this poem and one of the Wordsworth's preoccupations in general. The importance of a combining sense and sensibility. Right. So it's not just, hey, I'm a Romantic, this is a turn towards. We need to return to nature and towards emotion. But Wordsworth is very interested in the. And arguably the Romantics were. But in the ways in which both thinking and feeling are important and in the way in which it's important to combine them. Combine them as a writer. Combine them when it comes to one's emotional comportment to the world.
And I think the idea is that nature is a good way of One's experience of nature can actually combine them. And we're going to see that thesis play out in this poem. But I was thinking of that in relation to the collaboration with Coleridge. Just because Coleridge is so different than Wordsworth. So preoccupied with the supernatural. Right. With that transcendent. The sky, you know, Coleridge is up in the sky. Maybe they're like a peanut butter and chocolate type of thing, you know, it's like, you got your ordinary and my supernatural. You got your supernatural and my ordinary.
I don't know if that's right, but you can tell me. That's my general impression, but yeah, I
25:47 Erin: think probably next in the next episode, we'll get to maybe talking a little bit about the egotistical sublime as Keats character. The sort of Wordsworthian mode, which would be maybe helpful, especially in the long stanza where he talks about flying from something rather than flying to nature. Anyway, yeah, I think all that's really good. Okay, should we go to the next.
26:12 Wes: Let's do it.
26:13 Erin: Okay. These beauteous forms through a long absence have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man's eye, but oft in lonely rooms and mid the din of towns and cities I have owed to them in hours of weariness sensations sweet felt in the blood and felt along the heart and passing even into my purer mind with tranquil restoration. Feelings, too, of unremembered pleasure, such perhaps, as have no slight or trivial influence of that best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, nor less, I trust, to them I may have owed another gift of aspect more sublime.
That blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened, that serene and blessed mood in which the affections gently lead us on until the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul, while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
27:23 Wes: This is another one of these great, arguably immortal lines. His little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.
27:31 Erin: So, interesting question there.
27:33 Wes: The subject of the stanza. What is nature good for? Let me tell you, it's a few things. Not just sensations sweet or something felt at the visceral level in the blood along the heart, but also something that happens more at a reflective level, tranquil restoration. And then, apparently, it helps you become a good person. And beyond that, what takes up the bulk of the stanza is talk about something. Again, contemplative, I think, Whatever that means.
28:07 Erin: Yeah. I put in the sort of margin of my copy. I have this memory brings 1, 2, 3 sensations, sweet feelings of unremembered pleasure and a blessed mood because weight of the world is lifted. What is he talking about? Because what is a feeling? For instance, the most bizarre part of this for me, what's a feeling of unremembered pleasure? Is it just a sense of contentment that we can't yoke to any particular memory, but yet it must be triggered by something. It must be. You know, when we're in the city, the evil city to Wordsworth, we must be actively trying to take a mental journey out of that city.
28:52 Wes: So you're really tempting the psychoanalyst in me at this moment. Okay, is there two very tempting words here? One is unremembered and one is pleasure. Both pretty salient to the psychoanalytically minded. But when I look at unremembered pleasure, that's the cause, right? And then I look at the effect, which is this profound influence which I take to be a formative influence on the best portion of a good man's life, on one's life, I think, as an Adult. Right. As someone who is making decisions and has not simply a function anymore of those formative influences.
Or you are and you aren't. Right? Because the formative influences set you up for being free or being good, being ethical. So in this case, which seems to involve these nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. So this is one's ethical comportment. And we get a repetition of unremembered. So I take unremembered here just to be unconscious. Right? Just to be something that happens early on in one's life. Or it's a reference to that. It doesn't have to be that. But there's a connection between our experience of nature and kind of immersion in it in a way where it's not just that we're out on a hike and we're saying, oh, look, isn't that beautiful?
But it's the entire experience, a lot of which can't even be articulated. We don't even know that it is specifically pleasurable. We can't remember it as such. So these sorts of unconscious influences, whether you want to think, be a little forced about it and think of early childhood as the psychoanalysts who think about nature as mother, or you just want to think more generally about the way pleasure isn't always conscious and subject to our attention. What I love about this repetition of unremembered is just the idea that when one is good, one does things kind of unconsciously.
It's just a mode of being. It's like a virtue ethics kind of thing. Right. I'm just disposed to do that. It's part of my character. How is that character built? It's built on pleasures themselves that are unremembered and unconscious and not precisely intentional. These things sort of get woven into my being.
31:14 Erin: Yeah, I think that's crap. But in terms of reality or how these things work, I mean, are you rehearsing that? Or do you really believe that that is the way that character works?
31:29 Wes: The theory that I do subscribe to. Right. Is that early childhood experience does have a. So I'm saying two things at once here. One of them is more of a forced psychoanalytic reading about are formative influences, which obviously included early childhood. But here the formative influence is Mother Nature. Right? There's Mother and then there's Mother Nature. And the thesis that I do accept is that those early childhood experiences do shape our character. Right. So that the whole Freudian idea is that pleasure turns into identification. That's what it means to resolve the oedipus complex, so that we are no longer just pleasure seekers.
Right. And our relationship to nature is no longer just about immediate pleasure. But we develop these identifications. Our character is built of these identifications. So we get conscience and aspiration and lots of other things. And in that sense, our attention is turned inward a little bit. So we're not just looking for external pleasure, but we learn to. It's our own conduct, right, that gives us pleasure, our own moral conduct. So I do subscribe to that. What part of it seems like crap? Am I too idealistic?
32:43 Erin: No, no, no, no, no.
32:44 Wes: Maybe it's not idealistic. Maybe it's too pessimistic.
32:47 Erin: Well, I mean, I'm criticizing Wordsworth here. I guess I have a kind of a two pronged question or Objection. The little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, are those the best portion of a good man's life? And can they be inspired by positive experiences?
33:09 Wes: Yeah, I probably share your skepticism about that part. Right. So once we think about mother Nature, then it becomes a little more tenuous.
33:16 Erin: Yeah, Right.
33:18 Wes: Can nature make you good? On the next Oprah.
33:25 Erin: I mean, it's an interesting question.
33:27 Wes: Sit people up in front of landscapes with toothpicks holding their eyes open, Nature is gonna make you good.
33:37 Erin: My first inclination was to say, of course not. And then even just as I was about to say that, I kind of swung back around. I mean, what about nature would make us good? I implied that at the beginning, or I touched on the fact that Wordsworth had these, you know, trying experiences in nature. Some of them these death defying acts that probably did teach him his limits. But there's also the beauty of nature being around something beautiful as tuning you, maybe like an instrument toward the good. And actually, the more I think of that, the more I think there's something to that. Because, you know, as we know, beauty, truth and goodness are all yoked together. I mean, I think you could still be a terrible, but I don't know.
34:20 Wes: You really are, though. Pointing to a fundamental tension within the poem, which is that there's really two natures here. One is the remembered as remembered. One is as initially experienced. And the one as initially experienced in youth, right. As we're going to find out, is all about impulse and probably sex. Right. Back then it was just an appetite looking forward, you know, a feeling and love. And it didn't have the contemplative element that memory brings to it. So memory brings maturation. So, yeah, nature makes us bad, obviously. Right.
So let's Make a distinction. If we think of nature just as the instinctual. So if we're acting, if it represents acting on impulse, the argument can be made, nature makes us bad. At the next level is the contemplation of natural beauty. But that just might be just a reminder of instinct, including sex. Right. I mean, obviously being. It's birds and bees stuff. Right. I might just be aroused by it, but at a more contemplative level, it's actually mature. And the implication here, I think, especially since he's talking to his not much younger, but younger sister, is that it becomes a vehicle actually of impulse control, of not just being rash like a young person and acting on those impulses, but it can put you into a contemplative spot.
Right. So this is what I was saying before about the Romantics. It's really not just about sensibility and feeling. It's also about sense. It can give us sense if we approach it through the lens of repetition. All these repetitions. We were talking about the lens of memory, the lens of re. Experiencing something.
36:04 Erin: This speaks to your idea too, about Mother Nature. Nature as mother.
36:09 Wes: As teacher, you got at something very important at the beginning because you were saying, memory gives us, or memory of nature gives us. Is that right? Or.
36:20 Erin: Yeah.
36:20 Wes: Did you use that word give? Because that's the one I use in my notes as well. That's interesting, because he doesn't use the word give. I don't think he talks about what he owes to them. Right, right, right. The beginning of the stanza says he's not. He's been absent from the scene, but it's not like he's been blind to it because it's lived on in his memory, it's lived on in his imagination. And I think you listed three things which I initially did as well, because I wanted to line this triad up with my two previous triads, right? It was like, oh, sensation sweet.
You got the river and the wild scene and nature. And then at a more tranquil restoration, at the more reflective level. But then also, like I said, obviously he's talking about character formation and acts of kindness. And then in the final part, this maybe capacity for meditation or for contemplation, which he puts very, very beautifully. But what is it exactly? Is it aesthetic appreciation? Is it poetic insight into the world? He talks about a serene and blessed mood where we basically seems to suspend our bodily existence, which is an odd thing for nature to do or an experience of nature to do and turn us all into soul.
So I associate this with the sky portion of the triad. But the most important part of that, I think, is the way in which he talks about the unintelligibility of the world. The way in which this contemplativeness can lift the weary weight of the world and substitute the world's basic unintelligibility, its inaccessibility, simply to dry analytical thinking with some deeper insight into the life of things. It shows us the harmony of things and gives us joy in that. So I think there's a thesis in here about the poetic and aesthetic experience. And that thesis is that it's not just about feeling, it's also about thought.
But both thought and feeling each have their limitations, right? There's only so far kind of philosophical, analytical approach can go. And there's only so far mere pleasure and the immediate moment in sensation can go. And we get this interesting fusion of them in this contemplative moment. Does that help you with this whole question of whether we should look at nature? Is it corrupting? Does it help make us good? How does it do that?
38:50 Erin: It does. The other tension I see here, or one of many, I should say, or rather another line that stops me is while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, we see into the life of things. So there's this idea, too, that we're looking, but we're not looking. We're almost like, you know, there's something rather of a Eastern religious tradition in these lines, I think, almost like breathing through your eyelids kind of thing. I'm not sure what's happening there. An eye made quiet by the power of harmony. Eyes made quiet. So I think that there's something here to this idea of tempering even the voraciousness of the eye, which is maybe connected to what you're.
39:30 Wes: Yeah, very good.
39:31 Erin: Saying the idea of taming one's. One's desire to consume even the thing that is good, perhaps, or that is. That is teaching. Like, you have to have that balance, as you're saying, between the contemplation and the activity. Am I. Is that.
39:46 Wes: No, I think this is. Yeah, this is really good. It harkens back to the practical and potentially exploitative relationship to nature versus a more passive and contemplative relationship. So it points us to the possibility of two different types of art, right? One type that's merely titillating, that is merely entertaining, that gives us pleasure in the immediate moment that feeds this. You know, I like your phrase voracious eye rather than quiets it. And then something that's more, again, focused on the Contemplative, focused on aesthetic pleasure and beauty per se. As we'll find out, nature can just be a reminder of one's impulsive youth or even spur that on, but it can also be. Put the brakes on that aesthetically.
40:44 Erin: Should we do the next stanza? Yeah. Okay. If this be but a vain belief yet, oh, how oft in darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight, when the fretful stir, unprofitable, and the fever of the world have hung upon the beatings of my heart, how oft in spirit have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye, thou wanderer through the woods, how often has my spirit turned to thee? Really interesting portrait of city life, of the fretful stirring, unprofitable. You said something about the previous stanza that made me think of this, the unprofitable stirring, and I can't remember now what it was.
41:26 Wes: Maybe it was my talk of industriousness and human activity.
41:29 Erin: Yeah, that's it. Yes.
41:31 Wes: I love this transition from darkness to the many shapes of joyless daylight. What a great image. Right? Because it's not just that nature is good for comforting us in times of loss or if we're scared, we're in the darkness, but it's good for dealing. Or memories of nature specifically. Right. This is about what we keep with us from the scene five years ago, but it's also good for dealing with life's drudgery and distractions, the fever of the world, all that stuff. It's good for getting us off our phones.
42:04 Erin: Well, I also see this portrait of city life as being unintegrated, whereas in nature we might have light and shadow, or darkness and light, or dawn and dusk. Here I see that he's kind of making. And maybe I'm overreading, but I see him making a distinction between darkness and then the many shapes of joyless daylight. I picture a blinding, shadowless, blank kind of daylight, almost like a floodlight from both directions. It isn't necessarily throwing any shadows. It doesn't have any nuance, maybe, is what I was.
42:40 Wes: It's interesting because I realized that I gave no thought to my completely inaccurate image of this line. Which is not to say that it's not also informative, which is that I just imagined shapes as shadows, as human shadows in the workaday world, or they're backlit by the sun in a blinding way, such that you only see the outline or something like that. Which is not what he's saying. It's just because of my own prejudices and the Image that popped into my mind and I never even questioned it. But yeah, he's talking about the configurations of daylight, I guess, which is something more abstract.
Is that what you were getting at? This whole shapes of daylight, not as shapes produced by daylight, but the many ways in which daytime is scarier or worse for us than darkness. Right. Darkness. We're afraid. But what the day does to us in many different ways, it's many different shapes or modes, is to do what? Rob us of spirit. Right.
43:44 Erin: That's good. Yeah.
43:45 Wes: And here now you call it the city existence, which is. I hadn't gotten the word city in my mind, but that's really important too, I think. Cause now we. Here's where the smoke could be coming from. Right. Not from the hermit's cave, but sure.
43:59 Erin: I see this as returning to the lonely rooms mid the din of towns and cities. He's going back there to form a contrast with what he's seeing. But a lot has been made, I think, in critical literature about what Wordsworth ignores here. And of course, it's not just the fact that he's ignoring Tintern Abbey, you know, the structure that's presumably right in front of him, or that he's remembering. Perhaps he's not directly looking at it. There's a lot of ambiguity about where exactly he is in relation to Tintern Abbey, because of course, the title suggests that he's a few miles above it and therefore may not be seeing it. Anyway, there's a reference to it then it doesn't appear. And also, I guess at this time the River Wye was already being pretty heavily polluted by factories. Did you read this too?
44:47 Wes: I didn't. I didn't know that.
44:48 Erin: Okay.
44:49 Wes: Yeah, well, I did see hints of this, actually. I know there's a literature on it. Yeah. On this thing.
44:55 Erin: And maybe I'm misremembering maybe, you know, maybe just the inklings of this were happening at the time. But I do know that at this time some factories were springing up around the why. So there's a lot here, I think, about what he may or may not be ignoring or choosing to sort of like cut out of the frame for the purposes of his particular point that he's making. But I do think that this is city life, what he's talking about.
45:22 Wes: Yeah. Which I think, as we were getting at before, suggests to us that he's ignoring something or overlaying something with fantasy. I don't think it's too far fetched to say that he's intentionally doing that because this poem is, in part, about the two different relations to nature. One of which, again, more practical but conceivably exploitative and associated with the smoke. And it's not that he's not aware of that, because it's right here in the poem. If he's ignoring it. The whole point of this poem is that you ignore it, Right. You use the memory when the scene is gone. When you're back in the city. You use the memory of it to sustain you.
46:06 Erin: Right?
46:06 Wes: Yeah. So don't just pretend the smokestacks aren't actually there. Not exactly that, but you know what I mean.
46:14 Erin: Right. Well, and, you know. And of course, there's also this, like, Russian nesting doll of memory, too. Because now he's actually in the place, remembering an earlier time where he's in the city, remembering where he is now. The fact that part of, you know, folded into this memory is also the unflattering and perhaps oppressive setting of city life. I mean, it is providing the contrast here to give color to the idealized vision that he's currently looking at. On the one hand, it's as if he's sort of submerged in a pool of memory and then sort of surfacing and then submerging again.
Or maybe, rather, I'd like to flip that. Maybe the idea of city life is itself the pool. Because you can't. And it's, you know, you have to hold your breath and wait to emerge into the, you know, the free air of this natural scene. But there is this back and forth between them. This kind of toggling between these two scenes. And yet also there is this Russian nesting doll quality here where he's currently in the scene. Then he's remembering not being in the scene, remembering this scene. It's sort of like a psychic archeological dig almost, right?
So he's in a place, and then he's going down a level to back when he was in city life. And then he's going down another level into remembering this. And then, of course, there's the level of then going back in time to earlier experiences and being in that moment as well. The way that memory is working here is very complex. But I think it's very. If anything, it's true about the way that our memory works. Even if the memory of the place itself is somewhat idealized.
48:03 Wes: Yeah. Well, I think you're pointing to something very important here. Which is he wants to talk about the influence of the memory of an experience of a natural landscape. And we've gone through a lot of different influences. Right. It's the immediate pleasure of it, the influence on character, what it can mean for contemplativeness, and then now the ways in which it can get us through the drudgery of city day life or just everyday mundane life. But when do we get that right? Because later on in the poem he's going to describe how memory used to just be about sensuous desire and youth.
So we might imagine, well, for our relationship to nature to be contemplative, we already have to have made the return that he's making. Now we need two experiences of the landscape, one when we're younger and then one when we're a little bit older and we can compare. But the account here is that maturation has already occurred. So what I'm saying is a little bit jumbled because I'm just trying to make sense of this out loud. But what's confusing to me and which occurred to me when you we're talking about the nesting doll aspect of this is how is it that nature goes from in the immediate moment to being a stimulus for instinct, to becoming something more reflective over time?
I guess we are sort of forced to draw on the memory of nature by its absence. Right. Which you could also give another very psychoanalytic reading to. Right. So I don't know. Did that have anything to do with what you were trying to say?
49:45 Erin: But sure, only better than what I was trying to say.
49:50 Wes: Okay, so we are going to stop there. This is going to be a two part episode. There will be a postscript to each of these parts. I think for our first postscript, what do we want to talk about?
50:02 Erin: Probably just talk about personal stuff in the postscript.
50:04 Wes: Okay, so we could give some personal updates. We might also go into a little more background on Wordsworth and the context, which probably you can, you know, you would have a lot to teach me about that. I don't know. And Erin will talk a bit about her personal relationship to Wordsworth. Maybe we'll talk about the times we've communed with nature. Who knows? But okay, thank you, thank you. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Airwave media.com.
The Fool Gets Hurt in Fellini’s “La Strada” (1954)
Jan 17, 2022
Fellini called his film “La Strada” a dangerous representation of his identity, and had a nervous breakdown just before completing its shooting. Perhaps this identity, and its vulnerability, have something to do with the film’s portrayal of a disappointed hope that love might vanquish pride, if properly assisted by the forces of playfulness and creativity. The problem is that such forces are often themselves an offense to pride, and become the target of its cruelty. And so while the clown and tightrope walker Ill Matto convinces tenderhearted Gelsomina to stay with heartless Zampanò, his murder severs their tenuous, highwire connection. Wes & Erin analyze a classic.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:12 Wes: Fellini called his film La Strada a dangerous representation of his identity and had a nervous breakdown just before completing its shooting. Perhaps this identity and its vulnerability have something to do with the film's representation of a disappointed hope that love might vanquish pride if properly assisted by the forces of playfulness and creativity. The problem is that such forces are often themselves an offense to pride and become the target of its cruelty. And so, while the clown and tightrope walker Il Matto convinces tender hearted Gelsomina to stay with heartless Zampano, his murder severs their tenuous high wire connection. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
0:55 Erin: Okay, Wes, So this is our first Fellini movie, is that right? Yeah, this is our first one. Okay, great. So are you a Fellini fan? Have you seen a lot of his films? And late career, early career? What's your exposure to him?
1:09 Wes: My exposure to Fellini, it started in college. It's not a lot. Again, my friend John Lebeck, who just keeps coming up when we talk about this sort of thing, is the person responsible for me seeing a few Fellini films in college. La Dolce Vita, Eight and a Half, City of Women. And then the film I remember most is just Amarcord because of the scene where the guy is in the tree saying I want a woman repeatedly, which sort of became a refrain among my friends quoting that I saw La Strada back then as well. This is like. God, this is like when I was 18 or something like 31 years ago.
And frankly, with La Strada in particular, I remember not being terribly enthusiastic about it, being a little bit bored by it. But that was not uncommon for my 18 year old self to be in the middle of college to have that kind of reaction to these movies. I wasn't terribly excited about Fellini back then, but I was taking my educational medicine. The same thing with jazz. Just getting an education from this one particular friend. But this time watching it, it was just a delight. But in your case, I'm sure you started watching Fellini films at a much younger age and that it had something to do with the influence of your
2:31 Erin: grandfather, My grandmother especially. But this is her favorite film, I think one of her favorites. This was a very important film to me as a kid, and my first real. This and Bicycle Thieves and a few other things I watched as a kid. And I saw Gelsomina, I think, before I even saw a Chaplin film. And a lot of Critics, pretty much every critic mentions the Chaplin esque quality. There are lots of esques.
3:02 Wes: From what I read, he said no one had ever affected him or something like that as strongly as she had.
3:07 Erin: She's incredible. And I mean, on the basis of just this film, she would have a place in history. But of course, then there's Nights of Cabiria, which is actually my favorite. This is a weird thing to say, but that's actually my favorite Fellini film. I mean, I definitely think the best is 8 and a half and then LA Dolce Vita. But in terms of my favorite, you know, there's a kind of guilty pleasure quality in that. And I love Nights of Cabiria. I loved Gelsomina. I connected with that character so intensely. And there's something like very childlike about the film too.
Seeing it at the age that I was, was really effective in winning me over to Italian films because I was so young. And I know that the character of Gelsomina Fellini, based on photographs that he saw of Giulietta Masina as a 10 year old, he was inspired by that, which I just think is so sweet and touching, that he was so sort of in love with her childlike spirit. And what he saw in these pictures of her as a little girl and wanted her to play it in that way. Like she had a certain way of smiling in these pictures when she was 10 where she kind of did this sort of like thin lipped smile.
And he really wanted her to reproduce that for the film. So she smiles in that incredibly childlike way, which is really sweet. Like when she's waving and covers her face with her cape, she has that particular kind of smile on. But this was my first Fellini e arrivato Federico. And I love it to this day. It's hard for me to watch sometimes because it does make me cry a lot.
4:31 Wes: Really?
4:32 Erin: Yeah.
4:32 Wes: Which are the crying parts?
4:34 Erin: Oh my gosh. When are there not crying parts? At the beginning when she doesn't want to go with him. The scene of the rape, when she gets upset that night in the convent, of course, when Il Matto dies and she has that reaction to him dying as he's in the process of dying. And then afterwards when she's on the side of the road and he leaves her. And then of course at the end when he's on the beach, which is just the most incredible moment. Yeah. Plus more. I'm sure I'M forgetting some, but it's just very, very emotional for me.
5:07 Wes: So why this before 8 and a half or LA Dolce Vita? Is it just your personal connection to the film?
5:13 Erin: Yeah, my personal connection. And I think I understand this in a more intimate way. For me, this is a very relatable movie. And Eight and a Half or Dolce Vita are. I mean, they're incredible masterpieces. But this speaks to me personally. I think this is very, very. I mean, this sounds kind of dumb to say, but this is a very Italian movie. I mean, they all are, of course. That's why it's dumb. But, you know, in terms of the sort of grammar of the film, working in these commedia dell' arte traditions and seeing each of these major characters as archetypes or these roles out of commedia dell' arte and acting out certain fates.
Fellini always works, I think, within these types of characters who are broad, physical types and who maybe represent different elements of personality. Or these commedia dell' arte characters, I think, grow out of these archetypes as well. But anyway, the simplicity of this, the childlike nature of it, and the fact that it's within this tradition, which for me, I grew up with seeing, like, Italian puppet shows. And there's this element of Punch and Judy routine, which also grew out of commedia dell'. Arte. I think the fact that it's so simplistic.
I think it's deceptively simplistic and not so much wrapped up in a particular man's. I mean, I love Mastroianni, but his particular sort of ennui and all these other things that I couldn't really understand as a kid or as a teenager or in college when I watched it. But this I could understand. And this seemed kind of like a fable or some story that I would have read about as a kid. I had a lot of Italian folktale type books. And this was like. That. This had that kind of appeal for me.
6:45 Wes: Of course, I thought of commedia dell' arte as well. How do you see the characters lining up? I guess, obviously, the fool lines up with Harlequin, right?
6:54 Erin: Yeah. I think that maybe Zampano is supposed to be il capitano, maybe blustering and takes himself too seriously. Can't joke with himself. And Gelsomina, maybe like a Columbina, but with a more childlike slant. And the performances, the lazzi that they do together, the stock comedic routines where you do the same thing over and over again. Growing up, I liked Abbott and Costello. Do, you know, sort of modernized version of these, of a lazzo, which is similar to the trifle joke in the film, or to when the fool has Gelsomina play the trombone behind him and scare him.
You know, just a little comic set piece. Those are associated with the harlequin, those types of recurring things. Which then makes me wonder if that's initially what turns Il Matto against Zampano in a way, is because Zampano is trying to appropriate the harlequin's comic routines, his own act, just a possibility, or one of several.
7:56 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting because the way he describes his teasing of Zampano is just that he can't help it, that there's something about him that induces him to do that. And it's not hard to see why. Right. Because Zampano is so rigid and full of himself. And also his act is really lame. So it's really interesting because it's not that she's just been whisked away to be a circus performer. She's been hooked up with this guy whose act is really pathetic. The whole bursting the chain with his chest routine. The first pleasurable thing that happens is that whole trifle performance that she's involved in.
I mean, in finding her. Right. He's found someone who's like a natural born clown, let's say. Right? So she brings something real to the performance. And you know, in the very beginning, when the mother says why she has to go, it's really all about desperation and need. But by the end of it, she's talking about how she's going to be an artist and she's going to dance and sing like Rosa. Rosa is this figure who supposedly is dead. Zampano's a former assistant who comes up repeatedly in the film at critical moments, plays a big part in Gelsomina's imagination.
So that interests me about the relationship, the fact that she's a dose of vitality, you know, whatever you want to say about her simplicity. She's a kind of vital principle that is being introduced into something that's quite lame. And it amazes me that Zampano makes any money.
9:19 Erin: I know. And he does keep getting hooked up with, I mean, a larger circus, though the circuses they are associated with are rather sad. It amazes me that he keeps getting absorbed into them, no matter how bad his routine is. There seems to be a market for it.
9:32 Wes: The first time that we see the performance on film. A lot of it, of course, is just about selling it, you know, talking about the danger of seeing blood, you know, if you have weak Nerves look away. But again, very routine and unconvincing. And his heart is obviously not in it. He's in it entirely for the money. It's not long before we get to see something actually much more exciting. Someone who's truly in danger. Right. So shortly after she escapes from him, we encounter the fool in his high wire act, which is really amazing because it's more than walking a tightrope. Right. It's eating spaghetti up on the tightrope. So then this really interesting mixture of dangerousness and funniness. But, yeah, there are performances that are actually exciting. So you wonder how Zampano fits into all that.
10:20 Erin: I don't know that he's totally in it for the money, though. I mean, I think he has a compulsion to perform and he does think of himself as an artist, which is kind of funny. I mean, it's supposed to be funny, but it's also kind of touching. I don't know, this is maybe his soft spot that Gelsomina can see in him, that no one else can see, the potential sweetness that's there, which I think only works because this is Anthony Quinn, and so we kind of know him as an actor. But that entire scene, when we're first introduced to Il Matto on the tightrope, we see the better version of what Zampano could be, but we also see kind of the much savvier version of what Gelsomina could be.
Right. Because he has that assistant who narrates everything and then who passes around the hat, who's much more traditional of an associate for one of these acts. She's more commanding and she's on a microphone and she's savvy about the way she's describing it. She even has a kind of back and forth with the fool while he's
11:13 Wes: up there, too, after saying, be quiet, any distraction could lead to him falling to his death. And then she starts a conversation about
11:21 Erin: what's the weather like?
11:22 Wes: Yeah, does anyone want to go up there and have dinner with him?
11:26 Erin: And it's funny because we see someone who's far better than Zampano in the fool, but I don't know that the Fool's assistant in that scene is better than Gelsomina. Like, Gelsomina has that magical quality. I mean, everybody in the film kind of has a magical quality, but, you know, she has that spark that she can be an entertainer, too. And she does learn to play the trumpet eventually. I mean, would we characterize her as being Zampano's slave? Is that what this is? Psychologically or literally, in a way. I mean, she has opportunities to get away from him and doesn't. But just in terms of their artistic partnership is founded on this. So her mother sells her for 10,000 lira, right?
12:04 Wes: Yeah.
12:04 Erin: And they're never actually married. But I'm wondering about that as being the basis for this artistic partnership. The idea that she's his slave and doesn't really have any autonomy and learns to play the trumpet eventually. We don't really see it. We just see him being kind of a slave driver in trying to get her to become the proper associate for him, or the proper, whatever it is, the playmate of his character as they perform together. But his relationship to her is kind of a slavery and it's kind of an artistic training at the same time. And of course it's bad training because he's not very good.
But she transcends it. And he denies her being able to learn the trumpet, but she does end up learning how to play the trumpet. So she keeps transcending these expectations. And I'm just wondering about the nature of that really tenuous relationship between them, you know, in which he's bought her, but at the same time, she's presented with numerous opportunities to be able to run away. He does at one point go and find her and take her back, but at certain points he basically gives her her quote, unquote freedom and for psychological reasons doesn't take him up on that.
But I just wonder about the intersection between this idea of her being his slave and assistant and semi wife, his fake wife and his artistic partner. All of these things are very complicated and tied up together in that apprenticeship or whatever it might be.
13:26 Wes: Yeah, you had me thinking about the movie Whiplash while you were talking, which I haven't even seen, in part because I didn't want to see Crank. What's that actor's name? Cranky.
13:37 Erin: Oh, J.K. simmons.
13:39 Wes: Yeah. Being abusive towards a young kid. Play better. But yeah, in this case, of course, it's not. I mean, is he a master of anything? Maybe that's up for discussion, but it's certainly not of being a performer, as far as I can tell. But I think, yeah, I mean, slave, I think, is a good word for what she is. And keeping in mind that ultimately she has moments where she basically has to make a choice about whether or not to stay or to go. And ultimately it's the fool who convinces her to stay with Zampano in that great scene that we can discuss in.
And as you mentioned, I think that symbolically the trumpet plays a very important role in symbolizing her coming into her own, or perhaps her freedom, being her own person. So, you know, I think she sees the trumpet at first, when, after that first performance, and then they are camped out and he calls the soup she's made pig swill, and then makes this big thing about clothing her properly and then tries to get her to do the here comes Zampano announcement correctly. Yeah, I love that. I even wrote down the Italian for that, but, you know, and she can't do the drum properly.
He's using the switch on her. And it's at that point that she first sees the trumpet. And then it's at the wedding that after he's basically slept with the matron and she's upset and she says basically about the trumpet. Did you teach Rosa? Did she do my job, teach me to play the trumpet? Which he doesn't. There's no indication that he's ever the one who's taught her to play. Right. During the movie. And the first indication of her being able to play at all, really is doing a bit of the trombone for the Fool. Right. But by the time we get to the monastery, she's playing the trumpet for the sister and she's playing the theme that the fool was playing on the violin, on the trumpet, which the young nun is very excited about, telling her how beautiful it sounds and all of that.
So I see that moment as a climactic coming into her own. It's at that point where something significant has happened to her, even if she is going to turn down the offer from that nun to stay and continue on with him. And then, of course, he leaves her when he abandons her, he leaves her with the trumpet and it's the trumpet. He finds out that she had stopped talking and would be playing that theme on the trumpet before she finally dies. But, yeah, we don't see her learn to play it, but we know that her getting to the point where she can play it is very thematically important.
16:15 Erin: Yeah. The fact too, that Zampano comes across the woman hanging laundry who's singing that song, means that her artistic training has paid off, I think, because she's had an effect on her audience, like she's remembered after her death. So she's achieved a kind of, you know, not an immortality, say, but she's achieved a kind of artistic goal. So I do see what happens to her over the course of the film. Even though she does die, and even though the film isn't really about her, ultimately, it's really about Zampano.
16:45 Wes: And at that moment, too, Right. She gets through to Zampano at that point.
16:48 Erin: Right.
16:49 Wes: Emotionally, which she wasn't able to do when she was alive. That is what induces him to grieve.
16:54 Erin: Yeah. But from the very beginning we see that there's a strange kind of thing going on with his family, because Zampano knows that they're so poor that he could take advantage of them. And so he can keep going back to this well of all of these children. And I guess as he kills each one of them off, he can go back and get a younger version, a younger sister. And there are many children in this family, most of whom quite a bit younger than Gelsomina. But anyway, there's this mythology around Rosa and the fact that she left to start this apprenticeship and then Zampano comes back and like the hand of God pulls Gelsomina out of this terribly poor and starving existence and says, you're an artist now, you know, in so many words.
But even from the very beginning, when he puts that pig swill scene where she does see the trumpet and she becomes attracted to wanting to play the trumpet, that's also when he's putting the hats on her and she has that look of delight, you know, momentarily. It's so funny too, because he pulls out these clothes that are basically rags. He says, you know, he doesn't want her appearing in rags. And so he pulls out these clothes and is like, oh, you know, my women always look elegant and they're all these raggedy clothes, including a hat that's sort of like a top hat, but the top part is flapping as he puts it on her head.
And we see, you know, it's busted and we see her look of glee momentarily. And then he switches it out for a bowler hat and that she really loves. She sort of hops back and forth from one foot to the other in this really gleeful, very Chaplin esque kind of movement. And so we see that she likes playing dress up, she likes wearing these costumes, and then the trumpet and then the. The drum, which she also gets excited by. So, you know, she's being introduced to this life, but by the fact of Zampano coming in and just plucking her out of her former life.
It is kind of like she's been destined for this artistic career, at least in terms of the way that the narrative is working and destined to become an artist. And all she needed were the trappings of this to realize this vocation that she should have.
18:43 Wes: Even the lamest act for her is the beginning of something, right. And I love the whole metaphor later on of her planting some tomatoes. I mean, happens literally, but the metaphorical importance to it. But yeah, planting some tomatoes in that, I guess it's called a vegetable garden, but it looks pretty beat up field.
18:59 Erin: Bear fruit later.
19:00 Wes: That's a good way to describe what she's doing. She's trying to grow something out of some pretty meager beginning. But even in Zampano, there's something there to work with, a seed, so to speak.
19:13 Erin: Yeah, that's great. The beat up field reminds me too of something I should have mentioned earlier, which is the ugliness of Italy in this. It's incredible that this is in Italy and how the poverty and the rundown, the wretchedness of everything that they come across is of course part of their life and part of the poverty that the film is trying to express. But I think that also affected me very much as a kid and made Dolce Vita and Eight and a Half a little bit less relatable to me or personal to me. Because that kind of poverty, that level of poverty is why so many Italians came to America.
You know, that kind of sensibility is preserved or was preserved here for a long time. Whereas the bouncing back in Italy after the war to more success and then to decadence and stuff like that, that was not very relatable to me at all. So I love this too, because it's in this incredibly spare environment where there's, you know, there's even snow, which, you know, snow does come up again and again in Fellini. But the kind of countryside and the ruin and the degradation that we see in this is very suggestive to me of the kind of circumstances in which my own family was involved.
Not slavery and this level of degradation, but, you know, that incredibly dirt poor sense of Italy is very effective too. And it makes a perfect backdrop for this. Because they're so pathetic, the circuses, even the fool is pathetic and kicked out of the circus. And so it's a level of artistic vocation which is already so humble that the whole thing really takes on this parable like quality. It can just be pure idea because of the fact that we're not talking about real fame or real consequences for this, but just doing something for the love of it and no money involved whatsoever, except for just to be able to feed yourself.
20:53 Wes: Well, you were saying the fool is
20:56 Erin: part of the nature of the abject environment in which they're in is because of the fact that they're circus performers. Which is a ubiquitous form of entertainment in Italy, especially at this time. But it also means that every town had a little traveling circus go through it of various provincial and sort of run down natures. It's kind of like community theater. I mean, it's never going to achieve any level of success beyond what it takes to get from one town to the next. Hopefully, in the end, it looks like Zampano is hooked up with a slightly better circus in terms of the infrastructure and the location. So the fool, though he's obviously the most gifted of any of the artists in the film, is. Is still never going to achieve. You know, it's not like he's going to become a musical comedy star.
21:37 Wes: He has no aspirations to that. You know, he even says, I'm probably going to be dead pretty soon, my neck will be broken and no one will ever remember me. So it's not why he does what he does, but when we first see him in the film, for me it's an exciting moment because it's the first thing by someone who's genuinely talented to happen. When he does that tightrope walk. And the woman, his assistant you mentioned, who's collecting money and doing her job very well, you kind of feel the excitement of it and her being inspired by it. And that look that they give each other.
Him with his tear tattoo underside, there's an element of nihilism to him. He's willing to risk his life and possibly break his neck for this stuff. He doesn't think he's going to last that long. What puts him in much more danger than walking the tightrope is in teasing Zampano, which is the thing that he's best at. Right. Which is also I found to be really thrilling. Talking about the chain bursting performance being such a phenomenal thing. And then that whole interrupting Zampano to say that he has a phone call in the middle of his act and then of course almost gets himself killed there.
And eventually of course does get himself killed by Zampano. But there's a nihilism to him in that sense and a he's not doing this for fame. But he also probably doesn't take himself seriously enough to think of himself as an artist. Exactly. But he's a linchpin in the film in the sense that he's the one who convinces Gelsomina to stay with Zampano. Right. If you won't stay with him, who else will? And then that whole thing about everything having a purpose, even a pebble, where she becomes the pebble. I think she goes from talking about her identification with Rosa.
That's the big moment where she moves from being a potential Rosa to being this pebble. What's important about the fool is his ability to and we can think about this more generally, the role of Shakespearean fools and all the rest of it. But he has an important role in generating some kind of deeper link between Gelsomina and Zampano, basically getting her to commit, in a way, despite the fact that Zampano is such a horrible person who shows no interest in her as a person. I'd like to take a moment to talk about our sponsor for this episode, NYU Tisch.
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26:09 Erin: I'm sure you're familiar with the Pauline Kael assessment of the symbology of the three characters in the film.
26:15 Wes: I'm not.
26:16 Erin: Oh, okay. Well, I kind of feel like saying this. I think it's correct, but I think at the same time, it's also kind of. I don't want to totally shut down conversation after saying this, because it certainly sums things up, but it's also, I think, the starting place for further conversation. But Kael believed that you could take all three of them as being different parts of the body, if you will. So Zampano is like the pure flesh, the pure body. The fool is the mind, and Gelsomina is the soul. So together they all make one person. So we can take all of that to say that you can take Gelsomina and her role in the film as a purely symbolic one, and that this is really about Zampano and maybe the forces at work in Zampano trying to get him to become a redeemed human being.
But I think, of course, that's only one way to read this. I think it's a correct way, but I think there are many different readings that are within the film. And so what that leads me to ask is, is Gelsomina supposed to stay with Zampano? Like, is this part of her mission? And can we say that that's part of her mission, even if she's more than just some sort of symbolic linchpin for Zampano, or the part of Zampano that he's supposed to connect with, be it his softer, more spiritual side? Not to put these things in degraded terms, but could we see, even if we see her as being her own character and this as being less symbolic and more real, does she have a reason to stay with Zampano?
27:42 Wes: Yeah. So thinking about this more at a symbolic or thematic level. Right. For me, it makes it easier because the fool becomes a kind of linking. You can think of it intrapsychically. Right. And I like Kael's division. I was actually. I didn't have time, but I was trying to think, how do I do a tripartite division, like a Platonic division of the soul or Freudian or some other division. And I never worked it out, but I like hers. I think that works very well. So we can do that intrapsychically. We can also think about it in terms of relationships in general.
One of the refrains in the film, after he's been killed, is the fool has been hurt The Fool's been hurt, and that makes her relationship with Zampano impossible. After that, the fool kind of forged the possibility of an intimacy between them. And once he's killed off, that's it. And we could say that symbolically in our own lives as well. You can't kill off the fool psychologically. Part of it is just not about taking yourself too seriously or getting too caught up in status or one's own pride, one's own narcissism. Intimacy requires allowing that to be undermined.
We've talked about this in previous episodes, or maybe engaging in acts of self undermining. And part of what this represents is playfulness, the ability to play, to be the fool and to not take everything so seriously. So he forges the possibility of intimacy, and unfortunately, Zampano's reaction to that is to destroy it. You can see him as. At a thematic level, it's not just about revenge for being teased, it's about Zampano's need to destroy an actual relationship.
29:23 Erin: Right.
29:23 Wes: You know, he repeatedly says during the film, you know, I made her everything she is. She didn't even have any shoes before I met her. She could barely talk or whatever. He's got to be the one who's given her everything. And he doesn't need her. He doesn't need anybody, we'll say at the end of the film. So he needs to not need anyone and to have them need him in some very, very basic way on the reading that looks at this just as a story and just at the narrative of what's going on with the characters as real people. It's harder for me to make sense of her staying right. It's bad for her. He has been transformed in a sense, without knowing it, and he's not going to find that out. She has to die for him to grow, let's say. Really, when it comes down to it, there's nothing for her in this whole narrative. So I think your question was whether she should have stayed with him.
30:12 Erin: What reason would she have to stay with him?
30:14 Wes: I mean, the fool's reasons are that. Right? Let's look at what the fool himself says.
30:19 Erin: Yeah, that pebble scene is so great.
30:21 Wes: The Fool's reasons. In that pebble scene, the fool is kind of going back and forth, you know, offering her a chance to come with him, giving her a chance to consider going with the circus, because all the other circus performers have invited her as well. In a way, he's playing therapists instead of just saying, come with me, come with me, come with me. He notices how she's reacting and then he realizes that she wants to go with Zampano. So, you know, he talks about her letting him beat her like a donkey, but then he makes that remark about him being the dog who looks like he's trying to speak to you, but can only bark. And then if you won't stay with him, who else will? Everything exists for a purpose. And then he gives her that. What is he doing there to convince her to stay with him? What's the point of her staying with him?
31:11 Erin: I think that because everything has a purpose, he's trying to express to her that even, and I think she already kind of knows this, but that even Zampano deserves love. And that even she, the one who's been kicked from pillar to post throughout the film, even she can have a sense of agency in her own life. She could stay with him on purpose. As her purpose, she can choose to love him. So he calls Zampano an animal repeatedly. Like he says, you know what an animal. I've got nothing against him, but I can't help teasing him whenever I see him. I don't know why, an urge just comes over me.
So the fool is like the philosopher. I like this idea that he's a therapist too. He's the one who questions, and he's the one who has to continue to poke at things to understand them. Maybe he's that mind of the comic who doesn't know when to stop. I like that too. Later, where he says, you know that Zampano is like a dog. So he's an animal, he's a dog. And you know, when dogs look at you, they want to speak, all they can do is bark. So, you know, Zampano, he sees, has this love for Gelsomina, but it is mystery to Zampano, and it's not anything that he's consciously aware of, right?
And he wants to be able to cry out and talk to you, but he can't. So, poor guy, if you won't stay with him, who will? He's someone to be pitied. I think he's turning Zampano from an aggressor in the mind of Gelsomina, and someone who's scary and someone for whom she can have no tenderness. I think she already has a little bit of tenderness for him, but he rationalizes for her the fact that she can have tenderness for him and she should express that tenderness, because he's so pathetic, basically. So Gelsomina is not the pathetic one, Zompano is the pathetic One.
And to put him in the position of the pebble or to put her in the position of the pebble means that you just. You have an activity. You have a reason for being. And even if your reason is to help somebody else, like that's enough of a reason, which I think is really beautiful. It's just. It's sad, too, and kind of pathetic, but it's. You know, it's beautiful that because her frame of reference is already so sad, she doesn't think that she has any purpose at all than to tell her that maybe her purpose can be to be tender toward this guy who is terribly abusive to her.
It puts her actually in an exalted position, I think, because then she gets to be the one who has the power. She realizes that he's not that scary. You know, he gives her this terminology to be able to kick that sand in his direction and say, you're an animal. You don't think. You know. Or when she sort of play acts at sort of telling him off, you know, she's able to stand up for herself now because sort of, obviously, you know, he's still threatening to her. But she can sort of stand up for herself mentally and have a sense of her own worth. Because the fool has shown her he needs someone and she can be that person.
33:54 Wes: Yeah, very good. One of the interesting things about the scene is that she's sort of fantasizing about setting everything on fire. Right. And poisoning him at the end.
34:02 Erin: Yes. Yes.
34:03 Wes: Am I wrong about that? Even though really what's happening is she, the fool, has assisted her in deciding that she can stay with him. But she is also. I think he put it all very well. This is actually an assertion of independence and her coming into her own. And, you know, it's shortly after that. Right. That she. Right after she picks him up from jail. And there at the monastery, it's right after that that we learn that she can play the trumpet really well. And of course, she's playing the trumpet to the fool's sad song, to his theme, which I think in my notes, I say this.
It's really gets to the Fool's tune. But it's the theme of intimacy. I would say it's the sad song that can be interrupted by the trombone by some sort of comic or manic defense. But really, what all that sadness is about is about actual connection. And then we. In that conversation between her and the nun, there's a talk about how they have to change monasteries every two years so they don't get attached to the things of the earth. And so there's this comparison between Gelsomina following her husband and the nun following hers, which is Christ.
There's nothing more important than God. We could replace God with art in parallel, or however you want to think about it. So there's something about the dedication to another person, or to God, to others in general, that these things aren't simply a matter of subservience. And that's why I think the question of whether she's a slave is such an apt one, because in a way, it's about her psychology, not about her actual circumstances.
35:35 Erin: Right, right.
35:36 Wes: Is she a slave or is she not a slave? Well, at this point, she's no longer a slave, even though she's decided to stay with this not very nice person. But we can dedicate ourselves to others as a choice and have that be an ultimate act of freedom. It might seem like servitude, but often what's happening is we are allowing others to depend on us. Sometimes they don't even know it because they like Zampano. Being aware of that dependency is too dangerous, and he only tragically becomes aware of it when it's too late.
36:10 Erin: That's great. You perfectly summed that up for me and expressed what I'm like. I know there's something here to this idea of her dignity that she gets out of a relationship with Zampano that seems to have no dignity for her actually does. You know, I like the pebble, too, because this, of course, relates to the Franciscan spirituality of the film, in which, you know, every living thing or pebble is not a living thing, but every created thing has a purpose, every bug, you know, and we actually see Gelsomina being tender even to a bug when she's sitting on the side of the road when Zampano has taken off with his first woman, that rather busty, voluptuous waitress, Red. Yeah. Who's a sort of like, bizarre counterpoint to Rosa.
36:50 Wes: You know, I was actually confused when I first watched the film. I thought she was Rosa. I didn't realize Rosa was a sister. It wasn't until I looked at the transcript a little bit while I was taking notes that I figured out that Rosa and Red are not the same person.
37:04 Erin: Right. Rosa, the sister is kind of a symbol of vitality, even though she's dead. Right. She's been dead from the beginning, but she sort of lives on in Gelsemina's mind as being the symbol of artistic promise or something, or maybe even promise realized. If Gelsemina's inflated her in her mind. And of course, Zampano, he's always on the make, and he's always looking for extensions of his own vitality in the form of having these sexual liaisons with women. So I think there's something to that sharing of a name and that they're both red, you know, this vital color.
And each representing something different. For Gelsomina and for Zampano, the moment when he goes off and sleeps with the second Rosa and leaves Gelsomina thinking probably that she's been abandoned as she's walking down that road. And then she sits down on the. Basically in the dirt on this bank on the side of the road and is looking at the insects crawling out of this hole, letting them go on her finger for a second and then putting them back down is a tremendously powerful moment for me. And the pebble, too, is part of this idea that everything has meaning.
Everything in the created world has this purpose, which the fool expresses really well. And it also makes me think of the fact that if Kael is correct, and I think she is, that all of these people together represent three elements of a single person. And it's kind of like the Trinity, oddly enough, which is this idea of the one God, who is also three people and therefore also his own community of people. The idea of people living in communion with each other and things having a purpose and fitting together like a puzzle. I think that's also an element of, you know, even of the commedia dell'.
Arte, right? Like the comedic ecosystem that is created by all of these different facets of humanity. Everything is ultimately resolved in this comedic twist where everybody had their role to play. The person antagonizing the lover ends up pushing the lovers into the chapel or something like that. Everything has a positive purpose in the end. Everything is redeemed in the end of these comedic routines, which ultimately makes them comic and not tragic. It makes me think that this whole thing is actually a comedy, not a tragedy. Because in the end, everything had its role to play.
And Zampano was able to be redeemed in the end, not to jump ahead.
39:14 Wes: That whole question of her purpose comes up in part because of the fool's teasing. You look like an artichoke.
39:21 Erin: I know.
39:22 Wes: You're not good looking. It's then that she goes into, nobody needs me. What do I live for? And he's like, can you cook? She's like, a little bit. She's probably not even that good a cook. Or at least Zampano thinks her soup tastes like swill. And then why am I born into this world? That's when he is able to help her conceive of a purpose that doesn't have something to do with being good at something. Not even really being a good artist or trumpet player. Even though thematically. Right. The trumpet playing becomes important as something symbolic of again being able to play the tune of intimacy, but not just in the sad register of the violin, but to play it triumphantly on a trumpet.
To play it as something that transcends the sadness that's inevitably part of it. The other factor here, you know, this plays into the way in which the nature of comedy and the way in which it starts out looking like nihilism and a principle of breaking apart and chaos. Right. You're just in denial. You know, psychotherapists might call it a manic defense. You want to be in denial of sadness and you want to avoid intimacy. But really it actually serves the purpose of human connection. You're making me think about that with the connection to the divine as well.
So the fool I see as a linking principle and comedy in general, and the way it works is it helps us puncture our narcissism and our own pretensions. And the ability to explode those pretensions is directly related to the ability to relate to one another. Right. To escape our own narcissism. And just your mention of the connection to the divine. I think we might be able to think in terms of a parallel to which I haven't thought this through. I don't know if it's the Holy Spirit or something else, but what it is that connects the human to the divine and whether there's a kind of fool like element to that as well.
41:13 Erin: Sure. In terms of foolishness, broadly conceived. I wonder too about Gelsomina's intellect and the extent to which it's either impaired or if she's meant to be childlike entirely. I was reading the Roger Ebert review of this in which he wasn't. I think this was for the re release shortly after Fellini's death. This is a review in 94. He gives it three and a half out of four stars, which is compared to how much he loves Fellini's other films is almost a pan. He sort of questions whether or not Giulietta Masina is actually playing Gelsomina correctly, which is like heresy to me. He says the character should never be aware of the effect she has. But we sometimes feel Gelsemina's innocence is calculated, which I do not find it that way.
41:55 Wes: No, I don't agree with that at all?
41:57 Erin: Yeah. You know, there's a suggestion at the beginning from her mother that there's something wrong with her. There's a sense that she might be mentally challenged. There's another sense in which she is, you know, the holy fool figure, or there's another sense in which she's had some sort of arrested development, that she's simply had no exposure to the outside world, perhaps, and therefore she relates to it like a child would, I guess. I wonder which of these is the most likely reading, which of these is the most symbolically fruitful reading of what she is. I think it must be just that she is like a child so that she can have this vocational training from Zampano on the one hand and the fool on the other. I think they're both important to her spiritual maturation.
42:39 Wes: It's also that the story can't really be told. It's only a person like her who can learn to. You know, maybe love is the right word. I think it's just the fact that he calls her his wife.
42:51 Erin: Yeah.
42:52 Wes: That gets to her and has her feeling jealous and has her comparing herself to Rosa and at some point talking about marrying him. And most other people in this position, they'd run away, or they might just meet him on his plane. Right. They might be similarly curmudgeonly and give him back his abuse, and they would have some kind of stable relationship that involved being abusive towards each other or something like that. Who knows? There are a lot of different ways it can go, but as far as someone who could actually genuinely relate to him and then ultimately get through to him, there's not many characters who can do that. And so you can't really tell the story without someone like her, I don't think. And so it's childlikeness in a way, but it's also part of that is just the capacity to love, basically.
43:38 Erin: I think that childlikeness is related to how superhuman she is in a way. When the circus leaves and kicks out Zampano and the fool, both, because of the fight that they get into and they both go to jail, they offer Gelsomina the opportunity to leave and just come with them, in which case she would be able to be an artist on those terms without having to be abused by Zampano all the time. And then, of course, she's offered, too, a chance to stay at the convent. And it's almost like the Way of the Cross. I see those two moments as being what for?
I think you're right. If she was not this childlike character. Then for other people they would be moments of salvation, you know, where she's able to get away from an abuser for the symbolic reading or the childlike reading of someone trying to find their purpose. They function almost as temptations on her journey, in which case she becomes the Christlike figure. I think all three of them kind of take turns being this Christ like figure in which she is tempted to give up this metaphorical cross of having to deal with Zampano and be able to escape.
Ironically, you know, one of them is to escape into religion, really, and to escape into the convent and to become a sister or at least to live there in some capacity. So the fact that we could read them as temptations, I think is just a testament to what you're saying. The childlike element, the lack of reality and the symbology of the film working in that way.
45:01 Wes: Yeah.
45:01 Erin: You know, the temptation is to leave him and to escape the suffering, really.
45:05 Wes: Yeah.
45:06 Erin: But she has to keep suffering with him or at his hand in order to ultimately sow this fruit that's going to come out in him later.
45:13 Wes: The nun herself makes this direct parallel between Gelsomina's relationship to Zampano and the nun's relationship to Christ. I think it was Christ or God.
45:21 Erin: Yeah.
45:21 Wes: So that's a parallel we should take seriously. Even though it's not a flattering one to God. It's not a flattering comparison, but it's not like there are not Zampano like aspects to the divinity, at least from a human perspective. Right. So seeming indifference and harshness and I love you, but you don't love me or I don't really hear from you that often, even though I pray. It doesn't seem like there are that many miracles.
45:45 Erin: Yes.
45:46 Wes: Or we could even describe that. That's our relationship to the real or reality in some sense, because there's a seeming indifference in harshness.
45:55 Erin: It's funny that you should mention miracles, because that moment at the convent, he's stealing ex votos off the wall when he's sticking his hand through that sort of portcullis or the gate over that little chapel. So he's stealing the symbol of a miracle that has actually occurred.
46:10 Wes: I see. I didn't know that. Yeah.
46:12 Erin: So those ex votos are in thanksgiving for a prayer that has been answered more often than not. They're just made of tin, not silver, so they wouldn't be worth very much. But he is trying to get his hands on them and steal them away, trying to take the miracles that he can get and Turn them into money. But it is a funny comparison.
46:29 Wes: It's a road film, and you could see it as a series of adventures in a way, or an odyssey type thing, but really it boils down to a series of betrayals. Betraying her with Red, with the matron at the wedding. And these are things that are both very upsetting to her. But by the time we get to the monastery, this is a much more devastating betrayal. She's already made this decision to stay with him and he's gone from. Even though she's seen him attack, chase the fool around with a knife. The criminal component of all this is escalating and the sociopathic quality is intensifying to him. So we get that betrayal of trying to steal from the convent, which seems to her pretty devastating. And then it's right after that that of course he kills the fool. And then the final betrayal is just the abandonment.
47:22 Erin: I love the fact that you're phrasing these things as betrayals, because you would think, especially after being at the convent and being in that sort of holy environment, and he pays a lot of lip service to being kind to the sisters and everything, ultimately he rejects the grace that's offered to him. Right. So symbolically, he's trying to steal the miracles. And then, rather than being affected by the convent atmosphere, he continues to be hardened and kills the fool.
47:47 Wes: It's like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. As far as. Like stealing miracles.
47:51 Erin: Yeah, right. But it's also this idea too, that there's something of a betrayal of God in him, that he's even rejecting the grace that's continually offered to him. So he could just let the fool go and he rejects it. So that rejection of grace, those graces come to fruition, are physicalized in the ex votos that he's trying to steal. Those are promises fulfilled instead. The betrayal of that extended hand is what ultimately ends up killing Gelsomina, because he can't accept that grace and just let the fool go.
48:21 Wes: I think that works well with some of our other readings, including thinking about Zampano and the position of the divine from the standpoint of humanity, the indifference or harshness or whatever. But you can flip that, of course, right? And you can look at it in terms of an inappropriate human relationship to the divine. And those two things are mirror images of each other, Right. It's our fantasy of the divine that determines our reaction to it. For Zampano, it's just. I think it's meaningless and it's empty. If you think of it that way you become that to some extent.
48:54 Erin: Right. That's great. I wanted to say, too, that the metaphorical road that they're on could also be. I don't know how well this plays out throughout the entire film. It might drop off a bit halfway through. But the journey, too, could be a representation of the life of the artist and Gelsomina's artistic training, because I do think that it's significant that he calls her his wife and that they perform at this wedding. So there are mirror images of their situation happening at these episodic stops along the way. And I think the suggestion is, at least in the first half of the film, that these kinds of comforts or these kinds of milestones in life are not available to the artist, who stands apart almost in a way that the convent, you know, is standing apart from the way the world is working.
So you have people who are sequestered from that, from the life of ordinary people because of their special vocation, be it a religious vocation or an artistic one, and that all of these scenes that they move through at the beginning of the film or in the first half of the film are sort of like sad reminders of their special relationship to the world, which is set apart, obviously, not by necessity. I mean, he could marry Gelsomina if he wanted to. But the idea of the loneliness of the life of an artist and the sense in which you are set apart, you know, that Zampano comes in like God and chooses Gelsomina for this life in spite of what she may want, which is not to go with him and not to leave her mother.
So that, too, I think, is part of it.
50:24 Wes: Okay, so I think we can leave it there for the main episode. What are we gonna talk about in Postscript?
50:29 Erin: Well, in Postscript, I'd like to talk about my favorite scene, which we haven't even touched on in the main episode. So we'll talk about that. I'll talk about some fun trivia that you may not know about, including a Broadway musical that they were gonna make out of this film. Ooh, yes. And some other things maybe. We'll see.
50:48 Wes: Good. So this is us passing the hat around, unfortunately.
50:53 Erin: There we go.
50:54 Wes: You're gonna have to put some money in the hat if you want to listen to the rest of the episode. All right, thank you.
51:00 Erin: Thank you.
51:07 Wes: Postscript. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the airwave media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
False Roles and Fictitious Selves in “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin
Jan 03, 2022
In the late 19th century, the “New Woman” was a term coined by Henry James for a particular kind of feminist who demanded freedom of behavior, dress, education, and sexuality. Out of that paradigm came “The Awakening,” a novel that scandalized critics upon its publication with its tale of New Orleans society wife Edna Pointellier, who tries to throw off the shackles of society’s expectations for women and follow her own passions. What might the novel have in common with a fairy tale? How do Edna’s artistic ambitions frustrate her role as a wife and mother? And do Edna’s efforts to cast off her so-called “fictitious self” and live honestly constitute a triumph or a tragedy? Wes & Erin discuss Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:12 Erin: In the late 19th century, the new Woman was a term coined by Henry James for a particular kind of feminist who demanded freedom of behavior, dress, education and sexuality. Out of that paradigm came the Awakening, a novel that scandalized critics upon its publication with its tale of New Orleans society wife Edna Pontellier, who tries to throw off the shackles of society's expectations for women and follow her own passions. What might the novel have in common with a fairy tale? How do Edna's artistic ambitions frustrate her role as a wife and mother?
And do Edna's efforts to cast off her so called fictitious self and live honestly constitute a triumph or a tragedy? Today we're discussing Kate Chopin's 1899 novel, The Awakening. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, when I suggested we do this novel, it was one that I had been familiar with for a while. I think I'd read it in high school and you mentioned that you had never read it before and in fact you hadn't even heard of it. And then I went to poll a bunch of friends and it turns out that people have either read this in high school or have never heard of it before.
And there's no in between. There's no one who's heard of it but hasn't read it. At least that's my very inaccurate straw poll. So I'm just really curious to know, now that you have read it, what you think and if you think it's fitting in a high school or college curriculum. Do you think it's a classic?
1:39 Wes: Well, let me ask you a question first. Was there a generational divide? Because this may be the fact that I went to High School 20 years before you did.
1:49 Erin: I don't think so. The novel was rediscovered in the 60s and it entered the canon, I'd say, in the 60s, when there was this sort of feminist, one of the early waves of. Not of feminism itself, but of sort of feminist reappraisal of fiction. And so this, I think, became canonical then. So that would have been way before your time.
2:07 Wes: Yeah, in my time, by the way, there was a conscious effort to have an updated canon in high school. Like we read I Know why the Caged Bird Sings, which I'm sure you read in high school as well.
2:18 Erin: I did not. I read it on my own time.
2:20 Wes: But yeah, no, I had never heard of this, which I guess is kind of weird. You know, the writing is superb and I have a Meager sense of how to identify the kind of zeitgeist of what's going on stylistically at any given time. Right. But this seems a little bit ahead of its time. I don't know if I'm right about that or not. You can tell me. But it seems, you know, quite innovative. And it's very clear that she has influenced later, whether directly or indirectly, she's been an influence on writers who were working 20 years after this. So that was my first impression.
I'm like, wow, this is. What was it the publication date? 1899. I enjoyed large parts of it. Parts of it were. For me, this is not the greatest criterion, but plot wise, I found parts of it slow. So towards the end. Right. Of course, predictably, when things are getting down to brass tacks and more dramatic, then I had trouble putting it down. Right. But in the beginning, it was not that way. It was more of an obligation, let's say, in the beginning, despite the, you know, the writing is great.
3:33 Erin: Yeah, No, I totally agree. And I think you would really enjoy her short stories, which actually she was best known for in her own day. Maybe those are something we can cover on the podcast, too. One of them, like the story of an hour, is a page long and it's just a masterpiece of this super condensed format. She was a really big fan of Guy de Maupassant and all of her stories have that, like, twist to it that's really satisfying. And then there's another famous one called Desiree's Baby, and there are a few other just tremendously famous ones that I think were, you know, they were sort of included in the Norton Anthology even before the Awakening was rediscovered or properly rediscovered.
I could be wrong about that. But she was most famous in her own day for being a short story writer. And just to give a little bit of background for those listeners who don't know as much about Chopin, she was born in 1850. She was originally born in St. Louis, but her mother was from New Orleans. Her mother was French Creole. Her father, I believe, was Irish. And she married and she moved to New Orleans after her marriage. She got married at, I think 20 years old, and she had six children in nine years. So we can already see the feminist ambitions.
4:46 Wes: She sounds more like a Ratignolle than a Pontellier, but.
4:50 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So she's sort of seen both sides of it, I guess. But she only started writing after her husband's death and. Yeah. And she was known in her day for these short stories and basically for the sort of regionalism, like these local color type stories, because she knew French Creole society so well. And that was considered quite interesting in its day, as I think it is now. And then, of course, in the 60s when this was rediscovered. I've never read Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, but apparently this had so much in common with it that people were kind of remarking, what did it come out in, like, 63 or something like that? And, you know, the themes in it are the sort of, like, housewife is leading this. It's desperate domesticity.
5:32 Wes: Desperate domesticity.
5:35 Erin: Oh, yeah, yeah. That's how I. How I sort of classify everything from that time. I'm sure that's someone else's phrase. But anyway, the reviews in Chopin's day were really terrible. They were not, like, universally terrible. And people usually said, oh, this is really well written. It's too bad it's smut. Or, you know, whatever. Someone called it poison. Someone in the Providence Sunday Journal wrote. The purport of the story can hardly be described in language fit for publication. We are fain to believe that Ms. Chopin did not herself realize what she was doing when she wrote it. She's a clever woman, but she's put her cleverness to very bad use in writing the Awakening.
6:09 Wes: It is corrupting to the values of women.
6:12 Erin: Exactly.
6:13 Wes: The lady.
6:15 Erin: Which is funny because it's pretty tame. And it's also, like, very much within a tradition, you know, So I don't necessarily appreciate works of literature, full stop, simply because they. Simply because they, you know, espouse certain, like, values or whatever.
6:32 Wes: Right.
6:32 Erin: I mean, that's. That's not why I appreciate literature. I think that this has been classified as a feminist novel, and for reasons that I understand. But it's also very much in the tradition of. I mean, this is on a continuum with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and even Hedda Gabler. There's a lot of Hedda in this. So I don't think it's that far outside societal norms or expectations at the time for what their literature might contain.
6:57 Wes: And it wasn't ever censored or anything like that, right?
7:01 Erin: No, but I think it was the fact that a woman wrote it, which maybe is its own argument for it being called feminist, which I understand and I'm sympathetic to, to a certain degree.
7:11 Wes: What makes it feminist? Because when I was reading this. Let me put on my obtuse, insensitive.
7:18 Erin: Sure, we'll play at this. Leonce, you dog.
7:21 Wes: Is it Leonce?
7:23 Erin: Leonce.
7:24 Wes: So reading it, I'm thinking What makes this feminist as opposed to someone just feeling weighed down by, you know, this desperate domesticity, weighed down by the demands of domestic life and the way that anyone, male or female, would feel weighed down.
7:43 Erin: Yeah, I wonder about that. I think that's a really good question. I think that this is and isn't a feminist novel. I mean that in terms of like feminist in quotes as an ideology, clearly
7:53 Wes: it's not self consciously and it would probably suffer a lot if it were.
7:57 Erin: Sure. I mean, I think this is just a really good novel. I mean, it's unfortunate that classifying it as such would turn some people off. But, you know, I think that like Madame Ratignolle, Edna's friend, who's considered the
8:08 Wes: ultimate mother woman, the sensuous Madonna.
8:12 Erin: Right. I think that she's portrayed very sympathetically. I think that a lot of this clash between Edna and larger society is actually because of her artistic ambitions rather than her status as a woman. I mean, I think that those two things overlap on the Venn diagram. Right. But I think that Edna having these artistic ambitions and desiring this life of freedom are pretty twinned together and that the novel doesn't judge Madame Ratignolle for being a devoted wife and mother. Rather it admires her. She doesn't have the ambition. She has the artistry to a certain extent that Edna desires, but she doesn't have the ambition to try and do something with that.
And so it seems as though it's the fact that Edna has these art ambitions and happens to be a woman rather than that she's so, I don't know, screwed up and she's rebelling against a larger society and she wants everybody to change or something like that. It's very personal, her ambition.
9:08 Wes: So, you know, I hadn't thought about it in those terms. I hadn't thought about her. Maybe this has something. Her ambitions as a. Is it paintings or drawings? Strictly drawings, but yeah. So her ambitions as an artist. Because at some point the narrator talks about the fact that she was divorced of ambitions as far as becoming well known or making money off it. It was purely absorbed in the work itself.
9:37 Erin: The idea that we have these two divergent models of womanhood. There's sort of a spectrum with Edna being pulled in either direction. Madame Ratignolle representing the ideal Creole womanhood, and Mademoiselle Reisz representing a sort of bohemian artistic lifestyle and a lifestyle which is relatively free as far as what the novel thinks about these two women. I mean, interestingly, everyone dislikes Mademoiselle Reisz. Including Edna. Edna's not a huge fan of her personally, but she represents something transcendent and.
10:05 Wes: But she is personally very disagreeable. Like, she doesn't really try to be nice, right.
10:10 Erin: And she's free to be disagreeable, which is another element of this. This idea of artistry is tied up in a kind of personal liberty, regardless of whether or not she can make any money off of it. I think it's this idea that you are in tune with certain forces, that you're not trying control certain elements of life or just sort of control yourself and keep yourself confined. You're free to do what you want to do. You're free to express yourself in ways that you wish to. And because Mademoiselle Reisz is unmarried and doesn't have any of these obligations, she has a lot more freedom and mobility in society. And so I think Edna's wondering, you know, why can't I have that kind of freedom?
10:48 Wes: I hadn't thought about the fact that this had something to do with her artistic ambitions. I was reading this entirely in terms of. Well, on the one hand, her interest in Robert and her dissatisfaction with marriage, which. Part of what's interesting about it is it's not like she has the worst husband in the world, right? At some point there's this line about how everyone thinks she has the best husband in the world. Actually, let me read that one. So all the ladies selecting with dainty and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr.
Pontellier was the best husband in the world. Mrs. Pontellier was forced to admit that she knew of none better. There's lots of very dry humor in this, which I really like. But, yeah, even the best husband in the world, right, may just not be that great. Maybe oppressive, right. In a way. Or maybe the best spouse in general. So he's not the worst husband in the world. He's clearly not the best either. But there's lots to be desired about him. But she's suffering in a very ordinary way that I think people suffer in, not just in marriages, but in relationships with people in general.
You know, this ambivalence about dealing with people's bs, right? Wanting to be close to them, but dealing with people's bs. And what's interesting about her is, you know, she's dealt with that kind of. I think she uses this word mechanically, or she's been living, kind of following along habitually early on. I guess it's after her awakening when she returns and Leonce wants her to come in and she won't. And he gets upset. And she's like, you know, I'm not coming in. Don't talk to me that way. And then he kind of relents and comes out and smokes and drinks on the porch.
And then she goes in and asks him if he's coming in. He's like, yeah, in a minute. Let me finish my cigar. So it doesn't take a lot to resist him. And it's not out of obedience. So another time she would have gone in at his request. She would, through habit, have yielded to his desire. Not with any sense of. Of submission or obedience to his compelling wishes, but unthinkingly, as we walk, move, sit, stand, go through the daily treadmill of the life which has been portioned out to us. So, yeah, she's been doing what a lot of us do with large portions of our lives.
Which is sort of to subject ourselves to it unthinkingly. Because that's the structure we're in. And that's how we get things done, and that's how we get along. And the question of our own wishes in relation to that often gets blunted. Because there's a lot at stake, right? Are we gonna give up a marriage? Are we gonna give up a profession? How much dissatisfaction do we have to have before we're willing to make that jump? And for her, right, the trigger is this guy Robert, who flirts with all the ladies, right? And all the ladies take it as a joke, but she doesn't.
13:38 Erin: Yeah, I kind of want to talk about that. But maybe first we should talk a little bit more about Madame Ratignolle. And this idea of the mother woman, which I really like, because there's two nouns lashed together. There's sort of a suggestion.
13:52 Wes: Yeah, it's a very, like, New Orleans type of phrase. She was no mother woman.
13:58 Erin: But there's this idea, too, that if you have to sort of hyphenate them, that there's a suggestion perhaps, that being a woman and being a mother are two separate entities. That you have to combine them in this phrase in order to specify what you mean.
14:09 Wes: I think this is a paragraph worth reading, by the way.
14:12 Erin: Sure. The narrator says, in short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother woman. The mother women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as Individuals and grow wings as ministering angels. So I think of like a helicopter mother, you know?
14:39 Wes: Mm. Yeah, I thought of that as well.
14:41 Erin: This idea of self effacement, I think rubs up against what I'm seeing as like Edna's awakening as much as a sexual being or as someone who is in love with Robert and who has her own destiny as her artistic ambitions. I think, like that's part of this sort of self actualizing, whatever. I'm using that term wrongly, but, you know, it's part of this idea of trying to follow her own destiny and figure herself out. Whereas the mother woman, in as much as it's these two nouns lashed together, it's also about a woman tied up in all of these other relationships and having no personal identity of her own. And I think this is very much tied to the way that Creole society seems to operate.
15:24 Wes: Just as a point of contrast, there's that great scene later on where she's talking to Ratignolle and she says she would never sacrifice herself for her children. Right Then they have this heated argument and don't understand each other. And so Edna says, in an attempt to appease Adele, she says, I would give up the unessential. I would give up my money. I would give my life for my children, but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear. It's only something which I am beginning to comprehend which is revealing itself to me. Adele responds, I don't know what you would call the essential or what you mean by the unessential, but a woman who would give her life for her children could do no more than that.
Your Bible tells you so. I'm sure I couldn't do more than that. Edna says, oh, yes, you could. So there's being willing to give up all your money and your very existence for your children, which Edna is on board with. But it's this other domain, the one's inner life, I guess would be the best way to describe it, which he's unwilling to give up. And this, actually, this is an interesting conundrum which we should come back to because we can go on to what you're going to say about Creole society. But there's this sharp conflict between our own inner lives versus our relatedness to other people and our dependence on other people.
And it's a really interesting question to me. Maybe you can think of a better phrase for this, but how much of one's inner life or authenticity. It's not just about desire, right? It's not just about I want to be an artist or I want to do this or I want to do that. And I'm getting. I'm weighed down by family. It's more than that. It's. I want to be myself, to be who I am, and I have obligations to others, and I also care about others. And how do I balance those two things? That's an enormously difficult question.
17:16 Erin: So I think this is tied up really intimately with Creole society and maybe something being broken in Creole society. I think, you know, a lot of Edna's discomfort with what goes on at the whole beginning part of the novel takes place at this holiday location on Grand Isle, where everyone is Creole and they're all friends with each other, and they're all living together in these cottages. And there's a sense of a lack of boundaries in this society. She's not. She's Presbyterian from Kentucky. Right. Presumably she's converted in order to marry her husband, because she does go to Mass or, you know, then quickly leave.
But anyway, there is this sense that there are things being combined here. And that's why I think that this term of mother woman is so significant, because everyone is very free with each other, and everyone very openly discusses sexual topics with each other. Or there's a suggestion that they discuss childbirth openly, which would have been seen as taboo back then, that they discuss it and not just women discussing it with each other, which, of course, was not taboo, but with men openly. There are a couple of books going around that are considered really racy books, and Edna feels like she has to read them in secret.
And then everyone's just discussing it openly at the table. And this is with husbands and wives, but also with other people's husbands and wives. And everybody sort of living as a family. But there's this sort of a strange incestual quality to all of this, and this idea that people can function as being in a big family, but also be separate families and also be sexual with each other. Part of that is actually the freedom of Catholicism, I think, relative freedom in terms of free with the body and stuff like that, compared to certain more strict types of Protestantism.
And so I think there's a big cultural difference there, but it is confusing to Edna and a little bit disturbing to us.
18:55 Wes: There's also that line about how Creole men never get jealous. Right. But what Robert is doing, I think even now, most of us would find that, like, a little bit over the top with him running around flirting with everyone's wives. But it's not taken seriously. But it's Confusing to Edna.
19:10 Erin: Right. And there's this idea that Madame Ratignolle's husband would never be jealous of her because someone says the right hand jealous of the left. Like this idea that the husband and wife aren't even separate entities, but that they metaphorically share a body. So there's all of this weird boundary crossing. Or even if we call Madame Ratignolle a Madonna. Right. I mean, the Virgin Mary as an image is also these two things together that are a physical impossibility to go together. Right. She's both a virgin and a mother.
19:37 Wes: Not just a Madonna, but a sensuous Madonna, which is a great.
19:40 Erin: A sensuous Madonna, too. Right.
19:43 Wes: So the purity and virginal. Right. Creole women have this virginal reputation, a reputation for sexual purity, and yet they're willing to talk about it. And maybe there's beauty and there's seductiveness and there's all that still going on in conjoined to the pure part.
19:59 Erin: I think this is exposing a big point of ambiguity at the heart of this culture, which is how does one be a sensual, sexual wife and also like, you know, a perfect virginal mother at the same time, to be a virginal girl and then to be in a marriage and then suddenly become this perfect woman, I think that that's really difficult in any society. But I think also in terms of the. The values of this particular society, where you lose your identity in marriage to such an extent, to everybody else's concerns and expectations, and that it's all about how you have to behave and how you have to satisfy other people.
So I think that Creole society really externalizes a lot of what's going on inside Madame Ratignolle, what's making her tick, which is this idea that you just give up your own personal identity for other people. Like it's nothing. And so I think this ties back really nicely to. I mean, I love that quote that you gave about, you know, I'd give my life, but not myself. Like, what is oneself? And I think if it's one's soul or one's personal identity, then actually, Edna's idea of this is more Christian, it's more Catholic, than Madame Ratignolle's idea.
Right. Because we're not supposed to be totally subsuming ourselves and our own identities and other people. It's actually not. Right. I think there's something really broken about that.
21:20 Wes: Yeah. And we can't. To some extent, it was just associating to philosophical questions about or theological questions about God. And God is all powerful but could he do something immoral? Could he violate the laws of logic? Right. There's a similar conundrum here. There's ethical obligation to others, and not just obligation, but there's the ways in which we need those ties. But there's something towards oneself which is also important and maybe the most essential thing, as selfish as it sounds. And one might say, yeah, you can't truly be related to others without being yourself.
There are all those paradoxes about the one and the many. And if you can't be yourself, if you can't be a unified single entity, you can't truly be related to others and vice versa. So one can't withdraw completely without losing oneself, but one can't go outside oneself completely without losing oneself. Oneself.
22:14 Erin: Well, I think this is why Edna, in a way, is a better mother than Madame Ratignolle. Her children actually know how to take care of themselves and aren't just whiny babies because she doesn't coddle them.
22:25 Wes: Exactly. Yeah.
22:26 Erin: I think if you have no sense of yourself and everything revolves around your children, at least that's what this novel is arguing. If everything revolves around your children to such an extent that you have to be this formless, shapeless, just like perfect motherly mass that gloms onto your children, then they're not going to grow up very well adjusted or with a sense of their own.
22:49 Wes: Yeah, her children will pick themselves up right after a fall on the ground and quickly get over it and not make a big scene and come to mother to cry excessively and get taken care of. They're more independent as the way they're portrayed this idea.
23:03 Erin: I think that if you don't have your own identity, then you're actually not creating great people with their own identity.
23:09 Wes: Yeah, I mean, this question of identity is really interesting because there's kind of a ambiguity of whether she gets more clarity or she becomes more confused by this focus on identity. Like early on we get the whole thing about Robert devoting himself to married women and then him saying, what am I, a comedian? You guys don't take me seriously. Because he's getting teased and made fun of for that by the women. And then he's doing this thing where he puts his head on Edna's arm and she rebuffs him and then gets Edna to go swimming down at the ocean with him.
And there's a lot in here about the ocean and swimming. We can talk about that. This is the first hint we get of her awakening. So this might be worth reading in full. This Whole section. A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her. The light which, showing the way, forbids it. At the early period, it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her, the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears. In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.
This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of 28. Perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman. But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such a beginning? How many souls perish in its tumult? The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude, to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace, which makes it sound like one of these mother women. I was a little confused by that passage early on. But of course, in the end, she ends up at the critical moment when she actually has the awakening. She gets over her fear of swimming, and then in the end, she drowns herself in this oceanic thing I associate with ecstasy and merger, but also vagueness and chaos. So she's being awakened to the question of her own identity, which seems like this is something that ultimately should make things clearer and more precise.
But the whole project of doing that puts you into a vaguer, more chaotic place, right? Because before that, she just has her roles. This is part of what roles help do for us. You know, I don't have to ask the question of what I'm going to do today or who I'm going to be. It's just I've got to do X, Y and Z. And this is who I am. This is the job that I've chosen. This is the spouse and family that I have. All the external constraints weigh upon us and define us. And then if I say I'm going to pay more attention to my inner life, the goal, in a way, is a more precise definition of myself or identity that is more closely connected to who I am outside of those roles and maybe more connected to my own desires and to artistic ambition and all that stuff.
But it opens up this enormous problem of vagueness because to what extent am I actually anyone outside of the external relations that have in large part been imposed on me? Right. That's one of the things I found really interesting about the book is the way in which the precision of identity, or the attempted precision implicates chaos and vagueness.
26:51 Erin: Yeah. And Robert, as much as anyone, is kind of like a perfect representative of Creole society. It's really interesting that in her efforts to free herself, she just wants to be with a different man. You know, like, she's not really doing a Mademoiselle Reisz and just saying, okay, forget all of you. I'm gonna go off and I'm gonna do my own thing. I mean, she does that to a certain degree, but she really wants to be with Robert. And I think Robert represents that kind of merger as much as anyone. And ultimately, I mean, we can argue about why she decides to drown herself at the end of the novel, but, I mean, I think there's a reading there in which her rejection by Robert, who's ultimately, I think, a very ambivalent person, causes her despair and causes her to kill herself.
So the extent to which this identity seeking is also sort of like seeking a lover, like a truer companion with which to merge and to share herself. I know that she defines the terms a little bit differently so that it's not a pure merger, but still, I think there's something confused about that, which is, I'm sure, intentional.
27:50 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. So this could have just been a romance novel. Right. Or she's met someone that she is falling in love with, falls in love with. And typically, yeah, we think about that, as you said, merger or losing oneself in someone. But here it's actually the impetus for someone wanting to find themselves because it has something to do with inhabiting her own desire. But there's quite a bit of confusion over to what extent does her developing anguish have to do with Robert specifically? And then you brought up the artistic ambition, or just the suffocating atmosphere of domesticity, or the failings of Leonce in particular, or just the general sense of not knowing who one is. So these things all get wrapped up in each other in a confusing and interesting way.
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And by this I mean obviously, you know, a sort of philosophical incestuousness rather than a literal one. Edna is without a mother, right? Her mother has died and Robert is without a father. And they're even said to look similarly to each other. So it's almost as if they're siblings, you know, sort of spiritual siblings. And the way that they have of speaking to each other is very intimate. They seem to know what's going on in each other's heads. Whereas Leonce has a kind of fundamental disinterest in what's going on with Edna. We first see him trying to escape this noisy parrot and mockingbird that are having this discussion with each other and wanting to read the newspaper in silence, right?
And not necessarily wanting to take part in the so called life of the island or in holiday making or whatever enjoyment that everyone else seems to be willing to do.
31:16 Wes: And it's funny, when I read this in the beginning and it takes me a while to piece together who's who and right. I find it very confusing. I have to like read the first section or two twice over before I'm like, okay, this is who everyone is. My very first impression of him was that he was a side character. He's just part of the scenery in a way. Right. To tell us about the atmosphere of this place.
31:39 Erin: You know, he doesn't understand what's going on inside Edna. He can't imagine it because he's too distant from her interiority. So it complicates what she's looking for in terms of love or identity or partnership in that I think what she's looking for is actually undermining the kind of individuality that she's seeking.
32:00 Wes: Right. That's really interesting.
32:01 Erin: Yeah, it does get sidetracked. Her sensuality gets channeled in a different direction. While she's waiting for Robert to come back, she gets into this relationship or sort of non relationship with Alcée Arobin, which is sort of interesting. And that maybe seems to be a little bit more of what we would ordinarily expect her to be looking for, which is take a lover and have a sexual relationship without any strings or whatever. Without any expectations of her freedom or independence, having to be sacrificed.
32:31 Wes: Creoles with benefits. Sorry. Yeah, you have me thinking more now just about the question of finding oneself and what that means. And is it getting away from the husband versus finding someone new? And it's not his overbearingness or trying to be two at one with her that's the problem. And he's not completely indifferent. Right. There's talk of how he's devoted to her in a way and discouraged by her lack of interest. But the question of finding oneself again is really confusing because to what extent is it about giving ourselves more individuality and to what extent is it about giving ourselves less individuality? It's difficult to say. Maybe we should look at the awakening itself because there's great passages there worth reading.
33:15 Erin: There are a couple of mini awakenings and then there's the big awakening, which has to do with going to sleep. When we were talking about this in a class I was taking, my professor was like, for a novel that's called the Awakening, this has often been known as the sleepiest book in all of American literature. She's always napping and always sleeping.
33:34 Wes: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. That's again, the paradox of the awakening. She's awakening to her dreams, so to speak.
33:42 Erin: We wake to sleep and take our waking slow.
33:44 Wes: Ah, yes, yes. There's the first real hint of it I see as the kind of fight her and Leonce get into in section three, where she ends up crying and rocking on the Porch. And we've already discussed that a bit. She's filled with this vague anguish. So an indescribable oppression which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar. It was a mood. She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at fate which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had taken.
She was just having a good cry all to herself. The mosquitoes made merry over her, biting her firm, round arms and nipping at her bare insteps. That, to me, is this sort of first hint of an awakening. And then that's different from the scene where she. Just. Because I think I had them confused before, where she says, no, I'm not gonna come in. And then he comes out on the. The porch, which I've already quoted from. And in between those two scenes, this is what I, in my reading of this, I had seen, okay? This is the awakening. So maybe it's not really.
Maybe it doesn't really make sense to try and identify one point in the story, but it's where they go down to the beach. This is after they've kind of had a party in the hall with music and Reisz has played and really, really aroused Edna's passions. And then Robert suggests everybody and go down to the beach. And they go down in this procession. And Edna has always been afraid of swimming. Everyone else, for everyone else, Water is their native element, right? But for her, she's always had a dread of it. So she'd attempted all summer to learn how to swim.
But a certain ungovernable dread hung about her when in the water. Unless there was a hand near that might reach out and reassure her. But that night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child who all of a sudden realizes its powers and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with overconfidence. She could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy. As with a sweeping stroke or two, she lifted her body to the surface of the water. A feeling of exultation overtook her. And then she grows more daring and reckless. And she thinks how easy it is.
And then she gets afraid, right? So she looks at some point back and she gets a little afraid that she's gone farther than she should and gets a vision of death. It's not long after that that she has that fight with her husband and stands up for herself and refuses to go in. So there's something about this whole swimming thing that's very important.
36:20 Erin: There's a lot of childhood imagery associated with Edna in a lot of ways. She has these moments where she acts like a child or feels like a child. And this idea of swimming out alone and having this newly conquered power, I think, as the novel says, where she's able to learn to swim, it's like an element of adulthood that had been closed off to her that's now accessible. This idea for the Creoles, the water is their sort of natural element. And I think that this also ties in with this idea that going into the water and being able to swim represents a certain independence for her.
At the same time, water and the ocean is about merging and all of these other lack of independent qualities or joining yourself with somebody else or something else. So there's a weird ambiguity about this too, but. Yeah, but I think that symbolically, like, it's really important that she swim on her own. And then in the end, when she'll drown herself in the exact same water, what that means about how she's been able to make her own decision, conquer things again. It's like waking up to sleeping or something. Like she finally has this realization that she's going to end it all.
She's putting herself to sleep forever. The significance of this happening at night, too, is really interesting, but.
37:26 Wes: Yeah. Well, I was just thinking about the passage from earlier on that we quoted. She's realizing her position in the universe as a human being, on the one hand, but in the beginning of things, it's necessarily tangled and chaotic and souls perish. And then there's the talk of the voice of the sea being seductive. So she's got to swim out into the ocean in order to find herself, so to speak. Right. The danger is that one might drown and. Right. Of course, her learning to swim and no longer being afraid is of course, a metaphor for her being willing to take that chance with herself as a person and try to find herself, even if it means doing something dangerous, but also facing all of this vagueness and uncertainty and chaos.
So, in other words, if you're going to find yourself, you have to lose yourself first. And that's why we tend to shy away from that project, because who wants to take that risk? And to be in that place of uncertainty about oneself, to be in the ocean, so to speak. Not just in the Robert way. Right. Not just in the I'm going to play around way. This is just bathing. We're just going to go for a swim. But in the more serious way. Which part of what's confusing is any act can be interpreted in either way and people engage in a kind of play acting and pantomime all the time.
Right. Robert is playing the lover with the flirtations with married women. And he's doing it not because it's his ambition to have affairs with married women, but safe for him, obviously. Right.
38:53 Erin: I see him as someone who essentially has mommy issues. He's not the favorite of his own mother. Right. He's one of two boys. Just like Edna has two boys.
39:02 Wes: Victor. Right. Victor is the Victor. You remind me of that incredible scene, right, when Victor is kind of fetid or I don't know how you would put it.
39:12 Erin: He poses like a Caravaggio painting, almost the favorite boy of everyone with leaves in his hair.
39:19 Wes: Yeah, that was another moment that reminded me of Hedda Gabler, actually.
39:23 Erin: Oh, of course. Yeah. Vine leaves.
39:25 Wes: How did she put that? Yeah, the vine leaves in the hair. Yeah.
39:28 Erin: Mm. Well, it's funny that you say that because I'm looking at what I see as the awakening scene, which is after Edna's great nap, where there's the country odor of Laurel lingering in the air.
39:40 Wes: Yeah, that's also. That's a must see, a must read. I don't know.
39:45 Erin: This is chapter 13. Edna, left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes, removing the greater part of them. She bathed her face, her neck and arms in the basin that stood between the windows. She took off her shoes and stockings and stretched herself in the very center of the high white bed. How luxurious it felt to rest thus in a strange, quaint bed with its sweet country odor of laurel lingering about the sheets and mattress. She stretched her long limbs that ached a little. She ran her fingers through her loosened hair. For a while she looked at her round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first time, the fine, firm quality and texture of her flesh.
She clasped her hands easily above her head, and it was thus she fell asleep. She slept lightly at first, half awake and drowsily attentive to the things about her. She could hear Madame Antoine's heavy scraping tread as she walked back and forth on the sanded floor. And some chickens were clucking outside the windows, scratching for bits of gravel in the grass. Later, she half heard the voices of Robert and Tonie talking under the shed. She did not stir. Even her eyelids rested numb and heavy over her sleepy eyes. The voices went on Tonie's slow Acadian drawl Robert's quick, soft, smooth French.
She understood French imperfectly unless directly addressed, and the voices were only part of the other drowsy, muffled sounds lulling her senses. When Edna awoke, it was with the conviction that she had slept long and soundly. The voices were hushed under the shed, skipping down a bit. Madame Antoine had laid some coarse, clean towels upon a chair and had placed a box of poudre de riz within easy reach. Edna dabbed the powder upon her nose and cheeks as she looked at herself closely in the little distorted mirror which hung on the wall above the basin.
Her eyes were bright and wide awake and her face glowed. Then she goes into the other room and she sees some bread and wine. And she eats the bread, kind of like a hungry kid, drinks the wine down and then goes out to see Robert. So there's so much going on here,
41:38 Wes: and there's that great illumination breaks out of her face when he sees her. And then she asks, how many years have I slept? And says, and a new race of beings must have sprung up, leaving only you and me as past relics. When did our people from Grand Isle disappear from the earth? And he tells her, you know, you have slept precisely 100 years. I was left here to guard your slumbers. And for 100 years I have been out under the shed reading a book. It's really great.
42:04 Erin: Yeah. There's obviously a connection here to Sleeping Beauty, and there's a Rip Van Winkle element to this, that she has undergone a big change in waking up. So the change seems to be not, you know, Robert's teasing her and says that it's been a hundred years, but rather than Rip Van Winkle, sort of waking up into the new world of the American, Edna sort of waking up, and the change has been within herself rather than the outside world. And the Sleeping Beauty myth, too, is really interesting because it's turned on its head. Right. She wakes herself up and goes down to Robert, who hasn't kissed her awake or anything, and is just waiting to
42:40 Wes: attend on her and feed her with broiled fowl and be childishly gratified to discover her appetite.
42:46 Erin: Mm. She does a lot of looking at her arms in the very first scene, when she comes back from being out with Robert and her husband sitting on the porch getting annoyed and trying to read his paper. He asks her where her rings are,
42:59 Wes: or he gives them back to her, he's been holding them, which is a nice piece of symbolism.
43:04 Erin: Yeah. He tells her she's burnt beyond recognition. Looking at his wife as one Looks at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her lawn sleeves above her wrists. Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving the beach. She silently reached out to him and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them on her fingers. So they do have a little method of silent communication between them. But anyway, there's this idea of looking at one's hands and surveying the damage, I guess because she's been sunburnt versus seemingly, I guess, taking pleasure in her body and in looking at herself, as the narrator says, as if for the first time.
43:45 Wes: Yeah, there's the question of. Yeah, is her body her own? The scene from which I read earlier ends with the mosquitoes biting her firm, round arms, right? There's another reference to her looking at her round arms. I think this is right before she goes to sleep, before the whole, you know, the scene that we've been describing, right? She looked at her round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely. There's the question of self possession. And the rings, right, are kind of like shackles. They don't have to be put on you, right, you know, to ask for them.
You don't even have to ask for them. You can just reach out for them silently and someone will hand them back to you. Of course, if Leonce had been paying more attention. Well, first of all, it's pretty glaring what Robert is doing. But also, you know, if he were more attuned to subtext like us, he would pay attention to the symbolism of being left holding his wife's wedding ring while she was off with another man.
44:45 Erin: You're telling me that this podcast is supposed to give us real world experience and understanding?
44:50 Wes: Exactly, exactly. The other thing with the arms, the looking at the arms and the mentioning of the arms repeatedly throughout this novel. You know, I can't help but think of the ancient Greek epics, right, Homer, Iliad and the Odyssey, and the reference to arms as white as ivory, or the way in which a woman's arms can become a kind of symbol of her. But I don't know, is there more to be made of this?
45:16 Erin: There's a lot of bird imagery, almost too much bird imagery, because that can always get a little symbolic. And so I think that elements of wings and arms, I think, are closely tied together. So we have the mother woman who has to grow wings and Be like a ministering angel. Right. And then later, we're sort of told this after the fact by Edna, who I believe is telling Arobin, but she says this is at the end of chapter 27. She's talking about a conversation she's had with Mademoiselle Reisz, and she says, well, for instance, when I left her today, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades to see if my wings were strong.
She said the bird that would soar above the level plane of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. So I think there's something about. I mean, obviously, wings are not arms, and if you're an angel, you have wings and arms in most depictions. I think there's something about being able to soar above convention, about the fact that she ultimately drowns herself.
46:11 Wes: I think she sees an injured bird fall right before that, right?
46:15 Erin: She does, yeah. It's a little on the nose, but yeah. We begin with the two birds quarreling and Leonce wanting to get away from that sound of the two birds talking. Are they talking or quarreling? I can't remember. But anyway, he wants to sequester himself from birds and from nature, which is maybe a little significant, even though one of them is a parrot who's in a cage. So anyway, caged bird, it's all a little significant.
46:38 Wes: And later on in the music scene, the parrot is the only one who's willing to complain. Right. Because it's heard all those songs so many times before. And of course, Reisz is the only true artist and Edna gets her to play.
46:51 Erin: Yeah. I found the part at the very end where the bird with a broken wing was beating in the air above. And there's similar imagery to the awakening scene that you pointed out. The scene sort of happens over again on the very last pages of the novel. How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky. How delicious she felt like some newborn creature opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known. And even the language is repeated with that. The sea is sensuous.
47:16 Wes: The voice of the sea is seductive. Yeah.
47:20 Erin: So it's like it's happening over again, but this time she's going in, I guess, knowing what she's doing and going out too far. Deliberately, or is it deliberate? I guess there's some dissension about this.
47:30 Wes: Critically, she went on and on. She remembered the night she swam far out and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now, but went on and on. Thinking of the blue grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end, and her arms and legs get tired. She thought of Leonce and the children. They were part of her life, but they need not have thought that they could possess her body and soul. How Mademoiselle Reisz would have laughed, perhaps sneered, if she knew.
And you call yourself an artist. What pretensions, madame. The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies. So a lot of threads from earlier in the novel are being gathered here. But exhaustion was pressing upon her and overpowering her. Goodbye, because I love you. He did not know. He did not understand. He would never understand. Perhaps Dr. Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him. But it was too late. The shore was far behind her and her strength was gone. She looked into the distance and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.
Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. I hadn't planned to read all of that, but it's hard to stop. Just like, you know, just like it's hard to stop. For Edna, it's the question of whether she's. Does she go there with a plan? It evolves, right? She's being seduced by the ocean. So I think we could safely say she may not know what she's gonna do when she goes there, how far she's gonna swim, if she's gonna come back.
She's doing her own thing. But this, again, you know, this is joined, as you mentioned, to. And some of it, you know, the repetition of language, word for word, to one of her scenes of awakening earlier on, to that learning to swim scene. And it's interesting, what do we make of that? Because earlier on, it's supposed to be that she has to traverse the void, speak, to go through the stage of chaos and vagueness, which is associated with beginnings, right? Which is associated with an awakening. But she was supposed to get somewhere. She was supposed to get to herself.
And instead that's not where she gets. Or does she? In the Hedda Gabler episode, we talked about whether being alive, in a way, is a kind of cloying thing. It's kind of a violation of one's identity because one wants to be in the pure realm of possibility. It's not exactly the same here, but you get what I'm saying. So the act of suicide can be seen as an act of self affirmation in the sense of putting oneself back in that pure realm of possibilities. And maybe that's the only sense of identity that actually works. So not to undermine the feminist aspect of this, but to what extent is the aspiration to identity and to being oneself, to what extent is that a workable being an artist, you know, you mentioned early on is part of that.
Right. The attempt to be oneself through being an artist is important, which is why she brings up Reisz here.
50:35 Erin: Totally. Yeah. And I don't know how feminist this is if it means that you have to kill yourself in order to be a woman in this world. But I wonder at the entrance of Mademoiselle Reisz, because I think that's one of the most curious things about this passage. So she thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life, but they need not have thought that they could possess her body and soul. How Mademoiselle Reisz would have laughed, perhaps sneered, if she knew, if she knew what, knew what Edna is doing right now, knew of her intention to kill herself or knew of Leonce and her children and how they can't possess her. That can't be right.
51:08 Wes: I took this to be. And I think I'm wrong now that you're talking about this, but the way I read this was I was thinking of Reisz, her imagining Reisz, laughing at her because she thought of this act itself as something befitting a tortured artist, or maybe even as an artistic act itself. But the artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies.
51:31 Erin: And you call yourself an artist. What pretensions. The artist must possess the courageous soul
51:34 Wes: that dares and defies, which is a repetition from something Reisz actually said earlier on.
51:39 Erin: Right. So I'm seeing this as she's killing herself and therefore it's kind of a cop out. This isn't daring and defying.
51:46 Wes: Yeah.
51:47 Erin: One of the things that makes this so fairy tale like to me in a way is that I think that Ratignolle and Reisz, they're models for Edna, but it's almost like they're two witches, sort of like the good witch and the bad witch that are trying to exert an influence on Edna. And one wonders which is the good and which is the bad. The idea that Reisz is exerting a positive influence would be a reading that has some credence. Right. She wants Edna to be herself and to be almost. To be set free. The bad witch would be the one that wants you to be in a cage and maybe fatten you up for the slaughter or something.
So Ratignolle represents that to a certain degree, except that everyone likes Madame Ratignolle. She's in a happy marriage and she's happy with herself. We get this really incredible moment right before Edna decides to kill herself, which is basically that she finally discovers what childbirth is like, which is funny because she has two children.
52:40 Wes: Interesting.
52:41 Erin: But she was, I guess, knocked out for the birth. And so when she attends the birth of Adele's child, 13th child, she's disgusted by this and really disturbed by what she sees and put off something terrible. And so there is like this element of this unholy birth. And what is Madame Ratignolle giving birth to? But I mean, of course, a child literally, but to Edna's own. Again, disturbing awakening to the realities of the body. The ugliness of childbirth. She doesn't see it as something beautiful. She sees it as something violating and maybe boundary crossing or maybe something unholy in this witchy way that I'm. I'm sort of trying to get at.
53:22 Wes: Well, there's that idea of the possession of her body by her children, by others. Right?
53:27 Erin: Exactly. Yes. Thank you. So who is the good or the bad witch here? Ultimately, we would say that identification with Reisz is what makes her kill herself, but yet that's undermined, I think, in this last. That she realizes she can't be like Reisz and therefore she kills herself. Or that true freedom would be being like Mademoiselle Reisz, and therefore she kills herself. So that Reisz would be the bad witch in that estimation, because it just. It's associated with suicide. And yet here that's undermined. So I think neither is the good or the bad witch, but I think they do represent two sides of an equation, neither of which Edna is capable of accessing.
She has to go her own third way. I don't think that the answer to that is ultimately suicide, but I don't know what it would be in an ideal situation. I mean, how could she resolve all of these issues that she's had? I know a lot of people pathologize her in the criticism and say that she's obviously depressed. I don't know that I want to say that either.
54:16 Wes: It's hard to pathologize her because first of all, is she in a state of despair? I mean, she is in a sense. Right. A lot is Made of her being heartbroken by Robert earlier on. And she says, you know, today it is a robin, tomorrow it will be someone else. It makes no difference to me. It doesn't matter about Leonce. So she is having despairing thoughts. I guess I was gonna say that she doesn't seem to be in that much despair, but maybe that's cause it's a little unclear. And maybe she's not so clear on what she's happy about. Right. Because these two things have become tangled up.
Her feelings about Robert and her feelings about being and becoming herself. And those are two different things. And one might think those conflict, as we've discussed. So what is she doing in the end? Is it because she couldn't be herself? Is this the only way to become herself? Is it about Robert? Is it a bit unclear? Is it a despairing act? Is it actually a kind of. At least in her own mind, is there something. Yeah, I guess it is probably a despairing act. Goodbye. Because I love you. He did not know. I mean, for some reason it feels more positive to me than I typically imagine a suicide.
I guess because I'm associating it with freedom and with her learning to swim and all the rest of that. But as far as pathologizing her, I mean, you could describe her as someone who's got a quite a psychotic baseline and who lives in a dream world and is. Who's disconnected. Or you could say she's actually suffering from quite ordinary ailments that we all suffer from. It's just that something made those conflicts, which we all feel very especially acute for her. Right. And then as the novel goes on, you talk about it as a fairy tale, which the more it becomes a fairy tale, the less it matters how we read her psychologically.
Right. Because all of this stuff just becomes representative of something within the psyche or of something else.
56:08 Erin: Sure. One more note about your connection to the Greek here. There's this character, Philomel, that pops up right at the end. And of course, I can't help but associate that with, of course, the bird of Greek myth, or the woman turned into a bird as a result of suffering. I know I've mentioned the myth of Philomela several times, but someone who can't express themselves, right. Who's had their tongue cut out and who's pained into poetry and into artistry through a kind of hurt and a violation. And so I think the mention of this name, just obviously it automatically evokes this association.
And so perhaps this suicide, as I think you're getting at is. This is her artistry. Killing herself in the end is her independence. This is her self assertion that's happening. And this is her way of being courageous in the mode of Mademoiselle Reisz and of being creative too, in the way that we were talking about in the Hedda Gabler episode, returning to the world of possibility, which is obviously unfortunate. And we're not advocating suicide, but symbolically, it works that way.
57:09 Wes: Right? Suicide is a terrible thing. Let's do our public service message note. Don't do it.
57:18 Erin: Especially not in the Gulf of Mexico. Just don't do it.
57:21 Wes: It occurs to me now. So we did an episode on suicide for the Partially Examined Life, thinking about both philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives. And one of the things that I got from a literature review of the psychoanalytic thinking on the subject of suicide was that it's really interesting because it's actually an attempt at self preservation, oddly enough. And even though it's a crazy attempt at self preservation because you literally kill yourself, but on a figurative level, it's meant to preserve. There are various ways of thinking about this, but one way is that it vindicates a imaginary sense of self or an aspirational sense of self over and against the real self.
So you might psychotically or delusionally think that by getting rid of your, you know, or even your embodied self. Right. That you become immortal, you become who you are, you are fulfilled in the afterlife, Something like that. It's a last ditch. And I think this is right. I can't explain it very well right now, but it's a last ditch effort at preservation of a certain self image or a certain identity when everything is crushing in on that and threatening that. So that kind of aligns again with the whole Hedda Gabler possibility thing. But again, public service announcement.
It doesn't work. It's not actually. It's not effective. Go spend money on therapy.
58:44 Erin: There you go.
58:45 Wes: That's a good place to end it. Edna ended it there after all. Sorry.
58:53 Erin: Yikes.
58:53 Wes: But unlike her, we will go on for a little bit. Sorry, is that terrible?
58:58 Erin: This is great. No, I love it.
59:00 Wes: We'll talk a little bit more about. Well, I think Miss. Reisz. Reisz, Reisz, Reisz, Reisz. And what else do we need to touch on in our postscript?
59:12 Erin: Maybe we'll talk a little bit about Edna's Last Supper and some other Catholic Y things that go on.
59:17 Wes: The Last Supper. That is fabulous. Okay. With the diamonds and the hair.
59:21 Erin: So nice.
59:22 Wes: Okay. All right. Well, thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
(post)script: Post-Wonderful
Dec 27, 2021
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
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Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:00 Erin: Welcome to Postscript, the subtext after show where we talk about things related and unrelated to the week's episode. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:07 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. So we just got done talking about It's a Wonderful Life. Well, I guess we didn't just get done. We're gonna do a little bit more talking about it and specifically about Clarence
0:21 Erin: and the Martinis and maybe a little Uncle Billy too.
0:24 Wes: And Uncle Billy, how do you feel about the. An Italian family being called the Martini?
0:30 Erin: First of all, Love it.
0:31 Wes: And owning a bar to boot.
0:33 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's part of the tradition of last names, telling you what you have to do.
0:38 Wes: And it sets up an important joke in the film. I hope it's not only just for
0:41 Erin: that, but yeah, the Martini family is really like. So it was so important, I think to me as a kid and I think it was really self conscious choice on Capra's part to put basically like a version of his own family into Bailey park, you know, and to have Potter be also like an anti Italian bigot too.
1:01 Wes: Right.
1:02 Erin: He says that George is. Does he want to play nursemaid to a bunch of garlic eaters or something like that? Yeah, there's a real significance to the fact that Bailey park has people in it that would not ordinarily be allowed in these types of, you know, single family home communities.
1:18 Wes: Yeah, we get several nods towards the importance of immigrants. Right?
1:22 Erin: Yeah, absolutely. And I love all those little kids piling into the back of the car with a goat. That is so, so typical. You know, my grandparents themselves, after they were married, they lived for a few years in the upstairs unit of a multi family house where downstairs lived my grandmother's Italian speaking parents in New Haven. But then they saved up their money and they moved into kind of like the equivalent of Bailey park, this post war residential neighborhood of single family homes just outside New Haven, where they raised their kids and where my grandmother still lives. And, and Wes, you've been to that house, very, very small house. And it's just great to see that and to know that Capra too, like as, as an immigrant and as like part of this very American tradition is including immigrants as part of that vision of a ideal small town life.
2:11 Wes: Which is cool and it's interesting. You know, you're talking about the business versus personal and the commerce and professional life and work versus familial and the communal. And in this case, you know, immigrants play a role in both of those. Right. So for Potter, it's just people to exploit. There doesn't seem to be a lot of thought by him about their social role. You know, he's sort of casually racist towards them. And I think he also, you know, he makes a reference to a discontented, lazy rabble at a certain point, which I take to be just like the worky working class.
And he contrasts that to a thrifty working class, I guess. So that's his ideal. But for him, the existence of that social stratum, it's just there for him to be an object of his predation, let's say. And then there's the role of immigration and growth. Right. In the expansion of the United States, including its economic expansion. Very important to that. But also they play an important factor in the development of the social fabric. They're not just incidental to it or, as someone like Potter might think, some kind of detriment to it. Right.
3:22 Erin: And I think part of the implication of his statement about that thrifty working class thing is the idea that if you give them homes that are too nice, then they're not going to bother working as hard. So he wants to keep them in poor living conditions maybe to, you know, maybe there's a little bit of social Darwinism inherent in that, that they'll want to work harder to improve their station. And, you know, I kind of wonder if Potter is supposed to be. You know, there's that part where Potter sort of taunts George, who's come into his office to ask for the $8,000 that Potter has stolen.
I wonder about Potter as a figure, if we're supposed to take him as a literal person or if he's really just too mean and ridiculous to be anything but a symbol of, like, fate or generalized forces of evil. But anyway, that scene is interesting to me because he says to George, you once called me warped, frustrated old man, something like that. And he says, well, you're a warped, frustrated young man. And I do think there's supposed to, inherent in Potter himself, yet another alternate reality thread there for what George might have become. Maybe is he supposed to be the sort of inner psychology of George or what George might be if George really put his entrepreneurial skills to work?
Because here we have a man who's put up a lot of buildings and done, on a small scale, done a lot of things that George had the ambition to do.
4:43 Wes: So you're thinking about Potter as a reflection of a different possible future George Bailey. Is that the.
4:50 Erin: Yeah. Or maybe even the devil on George's shoulders or shoulder. The one shoulder.
4:57 Wes: Right. Well, he offers him a Job. Right. At one point, that is, I did the currency conversion equivalent of 3 or $400,000 a year in today's money. Wow. Very hard to resist.
5:09 Erin: Well, also, I wonder if the idea of joining forces with Potter is necessarily so negative. I mean, it is in the configuration of this film. So it is the possibility that he couldn't join forces and integrate a little bit more compassion and a little bit more of his own ideals into the way that Potter's structure works.
5:31 Wes: Change the system from within.
5:32 Erin: Well, exactly. And also, this idea of Potter as being. It's a curious one because Potter is so mean that it's like he's beyond conversion. You know, he's obviously a Scrooge figure, but a Scrooge who does not become converted. And so as the. The soul thrown into the outer darkness. I think that's a little chilling. You know, I mean, I want to see. I'm not a total softie or anything, but I would like to see Mr. Potter experience a conversion. I don't know. Maybe I'm asking too much.
6:03 Wes: Isn't that what the devil says to Jesus in the desert? Join me. You can change the system from within.
6:10 Erin: Yes. Yes, it is. That's right.
6:12 Wes: And Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker.
6:15 Erin: No, you're right. It's. It's.
6:16 Wes: I'm. Yeah. No, I'm just kidding. But. But, yeah, no, I get that. I mean, I was just making that joke because that's part of the temptation, right?
6:24 Erin: Well, no, I think there's something to that.
6:26 Wes: Yeah.
6:27 Erin: That it's impossible to change the system from within according to that formulation. If we take.
6:32 Wes: Right.
6:32 Erin: Potter as being a devil figure or it's.
6:35 Wes: I think maybe the danger is that you. And it's a very realistic danger, is it you will simply get corrupted by it. You will start to speak that language and get integrated into that culture so that the good that George Bailey might be able to do in that position will get undermined because it will transform him as a person. Do the sort of thing that you were bringing up before, which has created different possible future for him. Create a different variation on. On George Bailey.
7:08 Erin: Right.
7:09 Wes: I think we all face this problem because we are all worried about making a living for most of us. Right. We're worried about making a living. And we are always engaged in this rationalization to one degree or another. You know, to what extent do I need to sell out? And it's not just about making a living. It's about being part of an institution. It's about being a part of a community, right? So. But that always comes with constraints and it comes with influences. So, for instance, if I become a professional philosopher, for instance, right. If I'm tied to the academy and my bread and butter has something to do with publishing and delivering presentations at conferences, can I actually do the thing that I want to?
This was a dilemma once upon a time. For me, it's not anymore. But can I do the thing that I really want to do, which is to be completely authentic, right. Which. Which seems to mean being completely free and not tied to the expectations of others and not tied to the criteria of professionalization and, you know, and scholarship and all those things which seem to just sort of chip away at originality and creativity. So we have to make these decisions about being tied to institutions and the necessity to make money and all of that stuff, and the conflict between that and who we might be if we can remain free of those influences.
And again, it's even more complicated because we need those influences, as I pointed out. We need obligations and expectations and the recognition of others and their demands in order to do our work on a day when we might not feel like doing it. The other aspect of the immigration story in the Martinis is just the. That aspirational component, right? Because the communal, for the martinis means several different things. There's the communion bread they bring with them. There's a community into which they're being integrated. So that, in a way, the conflict between aspiration and community is different.
Right. In some ways, aspiration lines up with community. I'm moving to America. I'm becoming part of this place. So that that sort of integration is freedom. I don't know if you were thinking about any of that with the Martinis.
9:27 Erin: The mere fact of being welcomed into Bailey park represents the realization of an ambition, right?
9:34 Wes: Yeah.
9:35 Erin: And still being able to be oneself. What I love, too, about that sequence is the fact that they are still, you know, they're still coming with the goat. They're still, you know, they're still getting a blessing where they're crossing themselves with bread and the wine, right. So that it doesn't involve having to sacrifice their values, but they can be integrated as themselves into this idealized community and not have to do the things that a lot of people had to do, which is to try to quash that part of their identities in order to integrate properly. The thing I was thinking about Potter, too, which might lead us to Clarence, is this idea that Potter is kind of like a supervillain, which is another. His extreme meanness and his, his slyness is a super villainy. And I think it's funny that. And very, very appropriate that on the other side we have, you know, the dumbest angel of all the.
10:28 Wes: Of all the angels.
10:31 Erin: I think that's also true.
10:33 Wes: The dumbest name, Clarence.
10:35 Erin: Oh, he's so.
10:36 Wes: Hey, I say that as someone.
10:37 Erin: Wait a minute.
10:39 Wes: Yes, I'm allowed. I'm allowed to say that.
10:42 Erin: That's right.
10:43 Wes: Clarence, myself.
10:44 Erin: Yeah, right.
10:45 Wes: Who goes, obviously, by a different name.
10:49 Erin: Sweet Henry Travers. I think the stupidity of the angel, the stupidity of goodness is really important here. You know, it's a common theme of the childlike faith or the holy fool too. But I love the part where Nick kicks them out of the bar in the alternate reality. And then we see him playing with his cash register and saying, like, get me, I'm giving out wings. You know, making it. Making the bell ring. There's something in that that strikes me as being really important. It's like the movie's self awareness of the kind of sentimentality of the bell ringing and the kind of, I guess how easy it is to make fun of goodness and to make fun of innocence.
11:36 Wes: I think he calls them pixies, right?
11:39 Erin: Yeah.
11:39 Wes: And I don't know if there was. If the insinuation was that they're gay as well, but at the very least that they are not manly. And there's a connection between not being manly and being unrealistic, let's say, or prone to silly fantasies or something like that. And that that in itself is tied to goodness. So if we're good, we're not tough and we're not realistic, right.
12:03 Erin: That moment is just, you know, aha. You know, Nick has found the loophole in faith. You know, that's everything that everybody want to. Wants to point out, right. About, you know, gee, isn't it stupid to believe in religion? You know, the. Look how silly it all is. Of course, that's the point. Or part of the point anyway. So I, Yeah, I just, I love that moment. But Clarence turns out to be, you know, it turns out like a stupid, stupid angel is better than a super smart devil.
12:31 Wes: Right? We get deceived by our intelligence, right. It's not our. In an ethical sense, we get duped not because we are too dumb, but because we're not dumb enough in some sense, because we're too smart. And this goes again towards the whole God thing that we were so smart that we can rely only on ourselves and only on our own intelligence for guidance rather than something that is outside of Us. And what looks dumb about someone inside the religious moment to someone outside it is just that they would rely on something that. For which there is no rational explanation or no obvious material motive or something like that. It's dumb in the sense that it is. It reaches towards a inexplicable foundation. And what's inexplicable is we find ourselves dumbfounded in the face of what's inexplicable.
13:29 Erin: Right. The one thing I wanted to say, too, is just how terrible the ending message is that he writes in the book. The idea that as long as you have friends. You wrote it kind of undercuts the strength of that final scene for me.
13:44 Wes: Yeah. What are the words exactly?
13:46 Erin: Remember, no man is a failure who has friends. Thanks for the wings. Love, Clarence. Yeah, I think that really misses the mark.
13:54 Wes: Well, I was wondering actually, this earlier. I forgot to bring it up, but what do you do? We don't have to discuss it now because we're ending. But if you tell the story about someone who's not George Bailey. Right. How do you tell it about one of the other schlubs in the film where they don't exist? Can you tell the same sort of story about the detrimental effects of there not being there? Does one have to be a George Bailey to be so important to the social fabric?
14:24 Erin: Right. And that's a really good question. I think that George's personal popularity can't be the message at the end. Right. Because it's still. Having a lot of friends is still not part of what this is about because it's still implying some kind of worldly. You know, I take the ending to be kind of, you know, on the one hand, literal, on the other hand symbolic, where he's being able to see the rewards, the heavenly rewards of what he's been able to accomplish on Earth. And that is just a result of good deeds. It's not how many friends you have. I just, you know, I worry in the. The Christmas months, especially where people feel very lonely, to then have a movie where you're told that as long as you have a lot of friends, you'll be okay. That's tough for me. It's tough for me to reconcile just
15:06 Wes: thinking about the scenario in which it's Gower or someone else who's right at the bridge ready to throw themselves off. And the argument that one might make is that there's a lot that's just. It's not just a matter specifically of Bailey's good deeds, but it's. It's Really a matter of contingency, because he's. He's a linchpin. Not just in the sense that, oh, he's the guy with the most friends in town and the guy who's most important morally to the town or something like that, or, you know, in terms of good deeds, but that if you remove him, this. That might not happen, but it's. It's always possible that you interfere with a lot of other forces for good. So, for example, his brother. He saves his brother, so that his brother saves a whole troop carrier.
15:54 Erin: Right, right.
15:55 Wes: And the troop carrier would not have been saved if it weren't for him. And, you know. Yes. So it's a good deed. He saves his brother, but it's also. It's a matter of happenstance that his brother ended up in the water. And. And likewise, he wasn't there to save Gower from going to prison. So that the charitable reading here is it's not just that what's important is not just the fact that Gower goes to prison as kind of the. The endpoint, but Gower's influence on the town is lost as well. So that Gower is also a good person with good effects. And that order, and that the whole order can get unbalanced by simply subtracting someone from it.
And it could be anyone because they are already integrated into the community. Right. They already have an important role in the community. And that when people do disappear abruptly, it causes problems. And we have rituals, we have ways of, you know, the mourning people is not just about, you know, about our personal grief, but mourning people is about repairing the rent and the social fabric, so to speak. But if they are simply abruptly subtracted with no real transitional moment, or let's say, ability to process it or reflect on it, had this kind of dystopian result, let's say, which is what we get with Bailey, But I'm suggesting we might get it with less significant people.
17:15 Erin: Yeah, well, I hope that's true. I really like your idea that one of the most significant implications of George's non existence is the idea that the whole transport of soldiers dies as being your idea of it as being really incidental or accidental, because I think that's really important, that there's this idea that we're being worked through in ways that we don't even realize, that we don't recognize. So the idea that maybe Ernie the cab driver had picked somebody up and given them a free ride or gotten to them at the right time to prevent, you know, a whole catastrophic series of events happening might also be just as significant and the ways in which we're being used, I mean that in the. In a good way used in a good way for carrying out interventions of fate in ways that we are not ourselves aware of.
18:08 Wes: Oh, right.
18:10 Erin: Really beautiful element of this.
18:12 Wes: Yeah, yeah, good point. It's a. Don't interfere with fate or try even as we found out from our Oedipus episode just make things worse.
18:21 Erin: Right. But maybe we're all little versions of our own Clarences in ways that we don't know and we may not be directly sent down from a flickering Joseph star to come in and to have that effect because maybe we don't need that kind of direct intervention so literally enacted but maybe sometimes we're acting out those interventions in ways that. That we will not find out until we die, if ever.
18:44 Wes: Yeah. Okay. Well I like that. Great, thank you and Merry Christmas again.
18:51 Erin: Merry Christmas.
The Pain of Anonymity in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946)
Dec 20, 2021
Though sometimes accused of a sentimentality dubbed “Capracorn,” Frank Capra’s films are clear-eyed about the suffering of the everyman. A quintessential director of the Great Depression and World War II eras, Capra expressed better than most the desperation at the heart of a young country’s ambitions. And as a chronicler of his age’s disillusionment and alienation, he joined an American cultural landscape stretching back to Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain. How is George Bailey, a purveyor of the American dream, representative of the anonymyzing terror of 20th century society? And how might Christmas, rather than providing merely the heart-warming scaffolding for Capra’s tale, form an integral part of his message? Wes & Erin discuss the 1946 holiday classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters can learn more about their online courses at tischpro.smashcut.com/subtext.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:12 Erin: Though sometimes accused of a sentimentality dubbed Capracorn, Frank Capra's films are clear eyed about the suffering of the everyman. A quintessential director of the Great Depression and World War II eras, Capra expressed better than most the desperation at the heart of a young country's ambitions. And as a chronicler of his age's disillusionment and alienation, he joined an American cultural landscape stretching back to Hawthorne, Melville and Twain. How is George Bailey, a purveyor of the American dream, representative of the anonymizing terror of 20th century society?
And how might Christmas, rather than providing merely the heartwarming scaffolding for Capra's tale, form an integral part of his message? Today on a special Christmas episode of Subtext, we're discussing the 1946 holiday classic it's a Wonderful Life. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and this is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, It's a Wonderful Life. Do you have a yearly tradition or did anyone in your family have a yearly tradition of watching this movie at Christmas time? Or what was your experience of it growing up?
1:19 Wes: Well, I'm embarrassed to say that no, there wasn't a tradition. The movie that I watched every year at Christmas was the wizard of Oz.
1:29 Erin: Oh, that's right.
1:29 Wes: And there may have been others, but it wasn't It's a Wonderful Life. And I may not have seen this for the first time until college. And once again, my friend, the jazz pianist, the late, great John Lebecque, is probably responsible for getting me to watch this.
1:46 Erin: I watched it all the time as a kid and to the point where now my family, I think, probably won't watch it with me anymore because I had to watch it every Christmas or else I would get. I would think that it would. It was not Christmas, would not be up to the standard without watching this. But I do remember, like, the one time that I really remember watching it as an event was I watched it in college with a bunch of friends. We went to, like the classroom building and somebody brought in a DVD and we watched it on the big screen that sort of like comes down at the front of the lecture hall, you know, which sounds not very nice, but it was actually wonderful.
There was a big gang of us in there watching it. And then I remember in the ending, scene one, this was just so magical. I don't know why this stands out to me except for this reason, the ending when George comes back to the real reality. And it starts snowing again. It started snowing outside. It was one or two days before the end of term and it started snowing very, very heavily. These big, big flakes that kind of looked like fake snow, you know, the fake snow of the movie. And it ended. And I remember we just, we walked out in this sort of like daze at night and it was snowing and we just were like dancing through the snow.
And it was a perfect. So that was my best memory of this. But I think that George as a character, George Bailey, is it common to identify with him on like a very deep level? Because he's one of the few movie characters that I think I really truly identify with. Is that true for you too? Is he the everyman in that way?
3:18 Wes: That's what you identify with, the everyman quality?
3:21 Erin: I guess not. I think George for me is like part reality maybe and part aspirational. I think that maybe what was once every man about him, the characteristics of like living in small town America, basically all the things that George hates, right. Those are now kind of enviable. And so I wish for that kind of a world, I guess I wish for a world in which a town that's the equivalent of a cheers bar, you know, where everybody knows your name. I know that that comes with pitfalls and gossip and stuff like that, but I've always longed to belong to that kind of a community.
I'm lucky in having a kind of a Bedford Falls type place to go home to. Not in terms of that character of the town or the close knit community, but in the pre war sense of a st geographical location in America to which my family has been tied consistently since they left Italy. So I have that, but I don't have that communal environment. And that's something I've always really wanted. But I think insofar as George is frustrated and he has all of these thwarted ambitions, maybe it's an oldest child thing, but I think I really understand some of George's frustrations and thwarted ambitions.
Though few of my ambitions have been thwarted, I think there's that that tug towards home that George kind of represents, which is very responsible and about taking care of the larger family.
4:35 Wes: It's interesting that you're focusing on the thwarted ambition aspect of this because it's one of the things that I was took most note of. And I don't think it's the way probably people typically think about It's a Wonderful Life. Right. I don't think what occurs to people when they hear that title Is. Oh, you know, there's an interesting reflection here on a conflict between someone who wants to go out and do big things, you know, lasso the moon and at least, you know, get away from a small town. Right. And between the values of being part of his community and really, you know, if that whole counterfactual towards the end of the movie is correct in a way, a kind of linchpin of the social fabric there, for whatever reason.
And we can talk about why, you know, what qualities and him might lead him to be that sort of person. But. Yeah, so he's, you know, there's a conflict between aspiration and community, between freedom and domesticity, between work and love that plays out here. And in a way, he feels trapped in Bedford Falls. Right. But I just wanted to go back to your question about identification with George Bailey, because I can't really think about that character apart from Jimmy Stewart and his whole shtick, let's say, or his personality.
5:59 Erin: Shtick is a loaded word.
6:01 Wes: I know, I'm sorry. It was a little. But, no, it's a little pejorative, maybe. But, you know, his Jimmy Stewartness kind of intrudes to a great degree. And so what is that exactly? I mean, there's a kind of boyishness about him, and there's plenty of goodwill and heart, but maybe at times a little bit of benign cantankerousness, you know.
6:25 Erin: No, I'm glad you brought this up, because actually, I don't think that there's much about him that is benign. I think this is one of the complexities of him as an actor. I think that he can definitely do that cantankerous thing, and it is benign in this film, but there's also this volcanic, underneath the surface danger lurking there. It was exploited, I think, in certain films later on in his career, starting in the movie Rope. Hitchcock really saw in him someone who could be the main character in Vertigo, you know, a little bit unstable. There's a quivering quality to him that makes him.
It's bizarre because it's kind of like his idealism. It's like flickering flame or something like that that gives him this vitality and energy. But then there's also the implication with that that that flame might be fanned into something outside of his control and outside of our control. I think there's a little bit of danger there. So I think that the. You know, my defense of the film in the intro about this idea that sentimentality is something typically associated with Capra. I think that this is a terribly unsentimental film. I mean, people at the time didn't like it because it was too depressing.
And I do think that it works because Jimmy Stewart is showing signs of that later career danger. You know, I mean, he's. He does seem really unstable. And, you know, when he yells at his kids, that's a really believable moment. I mean, we've all been in that level of frustration before where you feel
7:55 Wes: like you're gonna snap, but you start abusing children. Of course.
7:58 Erin: Of course. Yeah. Not enough violence in this film for my. I'm just kidding anyway. No, but you know, that. That kind of like feeling like everything's falling apart, you're gonna snap, whatever. And he does snap. And it's scary, I think.
8:12 Wes: Yeah. So there's an edge. And I forget if we discussed this in our Rear Window episode. In fact, I had forgotten that we had already done a movie with.
8:23 Erin: That's right. That's right.
8:24 Wes: Jimmy Stewart.
8:25 Erin: Those were the days.
8:26 Wes: We've been doing the podcast long enough now that I can start forgetting about which episodes we've done. But anyway, yeah, we may have discussed this a bit and I may. I don't think I get as much of an edge from Jimmy Stewart. You know, that's what I was calling the benign cantankerousness. So maybe it's not. Maybe it doesn't seem as benign to everyone or I don't get a sense of dangerousness. Although it is a good point. That scene where he's being mean to his family is hard to watch and it's convincing and it's. You know, I can't help but think of him in a way as a kind of harmless guy.
9:04 Erin: Yeah, I think he is in most films, but I think this is just part of his complexity. Maybe. Or maybe I'm giving him a little too much credit, but. Credit for being Mr. Danger? Yeah. So this episode is going to be released on December 20, which is shortly before the first ever time that we ever recorded an episode of this podcast. So we're now at two years in. I just wanted to say that. Yeah, we're on the brink of our two year recording anniversary, which I celebrate as our actual anniversary.
9:33 Wes: Right.
9:33 Erin: So it is. So this is great. I love.
9:36 Wes: I feel like we should break into Auld Lang Syne now.
9:39 Erin: I know, I know. We're the richest men in town. Oh, damn it, I'm gonna cry.
9:44 Wes: Rich in recordings.
9:45 Erin: That's right. No man can be thought a failure if he has podcasts.
9:50 Wes: I was about to say that.
9:53 Erin: No. Oh, gosh. Hilarious. So, anyway, back to the regularly scheduled programming.
10:00 Wes: So we were trying to get at Jimmy Stewart and the character of George Bailey at least, and the extent to which he's a. Has some sort of edge or darkness or is just kind of a affable, kind hearted everyman. But we are also pointing to the central conflict between ambition, wanting to go out and do something, and then serving this role in his community.
10:27 Erin: Yeah. So I think that another element of fantasy that I'm thinking about here in terms of my own personal identification is not just to have the community, but also, you know, this, this linchpin quality that you're talking about. It's very inspiring to think that if someone is removed from the larger social fabric that there will be negative ramifications of that and not positive ones. So I think that's part of the fantasy for me too, about one's place in the world. And I was reflecting quite a bit and thinking about this film, about how common that societal removal theme is in American literature.
It's really significant. For instance, I was trying to think, you know, why is Clarence lugging around Tom Sawyer? And of course there's the famous scene in Tom Sawyer where he fakes his own death and watches his funeral. There are other instances in American literature, short stories and things like that that maybe we'll, we'll cover later of people removing themselves from society and seeing the effect that they have. There's. I know I've referenced this before and we should definitely cover it at some. But there's that Hawthorne short story, Wakefield.
Maybe I've gotten at it from so many angles now that it wouldn't be worth doing a separate episode on it. But it's very suggestive to me of this kind of theme in which this guy just decides, you know, he's mischievous, whatever, he just decides to up and leave his wife, just walk out of his house, put on a disguise and live in a house around the corner as a stranger for 20 years to spy on his wife. I was first introduced to this story in grad school in my mfa and then I used it to teach my students a little, A little unit on American Short Stories because I was so affected by it.
And I would frequently bring in It's a Wonderful Life in order to explain this, because I think it's part of this idea that it's like being a cookie cutter or something. You have to remove yourself from society somehow in order to see the size of the hole that you've left. And so I think that's part of this for some reason, Americans are interested in this. And I think it's because of this idea of ambition and wanting to make an impact on the world and, and various other anxieties which I think are becoming prominent in the 20th century at this time.
12:37 Wes: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think it's hard to actually see ourselves at all. Right. And we try to see ourselves by way of our social effects, by way of our experience or our fantasies or presuppositions about how others are experiencing us, how others are thinking of us. And ambition, of course, enters into that because it's very focused on, I want to build. What does he say? I want to build the longest bridge. Yeah, but of course it's something, it's a task we can't ever fully accomplish to get outside ourselves. And the suggestion here is that if we could run a kind of experiment, one experiment is just to thought about this sometimes.
What would I learn from. If someone had secretly videotaped me for very significant moments in my life? What, what horrifying things would I learn about myself? Well, I mean, originally it's, you know, what useful things would I learn about myself and how could I change because of that? But it's also, for me, it's kind of a horrifying thought experiment. It's like reading someone else's diary. Right. Or hearing gossip about you or, or something like that. I've. I've never, I've always worried that I just, I don't have the fortitude to withstand that kind of self scrutiny.
Right. Despite my interest in psychoanalysis and all that stuff. So here's what I'm trying to get at is that we can hide from ourselves socially. Part of being integrated socially is the way in which it enhances our capacity to hide from ourselves. Because of course, people aren't just running around telling us exactly what they think of us unless they're drunk. Right.
14:24 Erin: It's true.
14:25 Wes: And so we can, we can hide from ourselves socially. But of course, it would be truly revealing to be able to perform this sort of experiment. And I think experiment in the full sense of the word, since it's a kind of counterfactual where you say, okay, what happens if I subtract myself from the social environment, the social fabric, and I'm using the word fabric there, right. Because it's. Because of all these different causal dependencies, how would things have changed? In this movie we get a very dramatic version of that. Right. So things really go to pot or to Potter.
15:01 Erin: To Potter, yeah.
15:03 Wes: Without the presence of George Bailey And I can't. In my own case, I can't imagine. It's difficult for me to imagine it would be similar. Right.
15:11 Erin: But it's for any of us.
15:13 Wes: For any of us. Right. So we could. There's no attempt at realism there. Right. Even Mary is an old maid.
15:21 Erin: That's the funniest part of the whole
15:23 Wes: movie, is the horror of horrors. A librarian.
15:27 Erin: She's about to close up the library,
15:32 Wes: and then she's sort of like suit
15:33 Erin: and glasses, walking around like clutching a rape whistle.
15:37 Wes: Right, right. What a terrible fate. The library is sort of the worst possible thing that could happen.
15:45 Erin: Parks and Rec. Vision of the library.
15:48 Wes: Yeah.
15:48 Erin: Just to get back to what you're saying about this idea of the camera watching us. I find that so intriguing. And the idea that we can, you know, more often than not, we're hiding from ourselves. I wonder if, you know, I've thought of that camera thing too, of seeing myself in certain situations more often, I think as a. Maybe as like a neutral document of what really happened or even just as a desire to have, like, one's memory backed up on hard drive, to want to remember certain things in their entirety. But I think that that too is maybe. I wonder if people before the age of cameras had that thought, you know, I wonder if when there was no way to record anything, if people were thinking, you know, oh, I wish I could have.
I'm sure people were saying, I wish I could remember this forever. But I think that this idea of a camera watching you is so interesting because the camera is part of the culprit. I think in this whole story, I'm associating George's desire to leave Bedford Falls, maybe unfairly and maybe a little bit too simply, with a desire for fame. And I think that the desire for fame intruding on small town life is kind of the dilemma here. Sam Wainwright gets fame and fortune and gets out. Potter is a celebrity in his own community. But I think this explores the different ways that one can be thought of as a celebrity.
And maybe that's what's appealing to me about this too, is this idea that George is the linchpin. He is his own celebrity in this community. Right. And maybe that's kind of what we all want, is to be thought of as, like, this essential figure, whatever scale it is that you're in, whether it be a small town or conquering New York or an entire continent or something like that, we all have this longing, I think, for recognition. It's what George wants on a huge scale. And then Discovers, I think that he has still, but just on a much humbler scale and that that has to be enough.
17:38 Wes: You're pointing to something interesting about the component of aspiration or desire for fame in this, which is that it's kind of cuts two ways. You know, one is the aspiration to serve his community and to get married and to do all those sorts of things. And the other is just. It's about pure freedom to travel. Right? That's his big. That's his big thing in the beginning. And to escape the small town, to be free to not have a wife. You know, we sort of wonder in the movie why he seems so kind of clueless or weird with. With Mary. And of course, eventually we learn, you know, he's actually conflicted, he doesn't want to be tied.
And those are just, you know, those are concerns that we all. We all face at some point. They get enhanced in a world where there's. You're in a small town existence, but you have the modern mobility and you have a modern system of communications, right, in which you're exposed to many, many different sorts of possibilities. So you don't simply, you don't know only the small town environment, in a way, you know, the big city, you know, many, many more possibilities for life than you would otherwise have known if mass communications weren't around.
So in a way, I guess I'm trying to point to the fact that it's a. Is it just a conflict between aspiration and love or is it, in a way a conflict within aspiration? Maybe it's both.
19:08 Erin: I find it so interesting too that George, also the possibility of another apparatus for travel is closed to him that few previous generations had, which is a world war. That's one way, one classical way to achieve a notoriety, to achieve glory. And also it's literally a free trip to Europe or the South Pacific. And so even that, or to heaven, you never know. Right, right, right. No, but even that is not available to him. And so all of these small town figures, I love that sequence of all of these Bert and Ernie and everybody, you know, everybody gets to be a hero in their war story.
And poor George, because he saved his brother and has a bum ear, which, that in itself is really interesting too, like that. I wonder if that bad ear symbolically marks him as being almost prematurely aged, you know, like an old man before his time. Because it's like he skipped over that period of exploration and he immediately fills his father's shoes and skips over that typical time that people would have for adventure. And instead he must be saddled with really these concerns of old age, which is like holding down the fort, making sure the business doesn't go under, not being able to go to college, not being able to explore any other type of money making enterprise.
20:41 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting because I think it is part of what we were trying to get at with the George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart identity. Maybe an old soulness. I don't know if you agree with that. And I was kind of, when I watched this, I was looking for that and the actor who was playing the young George Bailey, I'm like, huh, I wonder if they found a kid or if they were able to craft this in a way where that shows where it's not just, you know, a generic boy. And I thought they got at that a little bit.
21:13 Erin: I think they really did. I think that this is a bold claim, but I think that Capra is probably the best director of children ever. These kids are. They're so adult. And the. I love any scenes with kids, whether they be, you know, George and young Violet and Mary or George's own children. I love, for instance, when, you know, when George first comes home after they've lost the $8,000, sits down in an armchair and his little, I think it's Tommy is the little boy. You know, he pulls him up onto his lap and Tommy has that Santa mask over his face and he starts like growling at his father.
You know, it's just exactly the kind of weird thing that a three year old would do, you know, growl with a Santa mask on. And then when he's putting the tinsel on George's head. And it's so smart about kids and the way that they, they work. And the scene in the drugstore when he's sort of majorly talking down to Mary and pretending to be an explorer. And there's some very adult dynamics happening there for these little kids. Violet and Mary already seem to be in competition for George and there's animosity and a kind of perceived looseness of Violet and the fact that she likes every boy.
And George too has not expressed a desire to be away from girls, but rather he's progressed to this idea of harems and three or four wives as an attractive possibility.
22:34 Wes: Yeah, I had the same thought. And of course the scene is designed to give us that thought, but the very adult like behavior of the children in that drugstore scene, and Violet and Mary, but young Mary in particular, her facial expressions. This may sound dumb, but I was wondering if a child actor or actress could pull that sort of thing off today if it was a product of the times that someone could be such a little adult. I know that sounds weird because precociousness, of course is a common thing in movies, but it just captures something unique here.
23:07 Erin: Part of that is the innocence of the culture on the one hand, but it's also the. Which allows that to work and not have it be like creepy or weird. But on the other hand, I think it's a product of the whole sweep of the film. The timeline of the film. The starting time is 1919. So we have the end of World War I, we have, you know, the Great Depression and then another world war. This is part of the cultural landscape that has caused this greatest generation to become the greatest generation, which is all of the adversity that they had to deal with.
And maybe that contributed to this premature aging on the one hand, but also a real inherent innocence in the culture on the other. And I think it's something I see too personified in George, the idea that, you know, he has to take responsibility. He's not uncommon for that time. He's a 12 year old, work behind the counter of a drugstore telling people they should have more coconut on their ice cream is in that position of power and delivering poison to people. So that little adult quality is also something I think that the Little Rascals truck in frequently.
They're of course way younger than these kids. But I think that sort of like 30s harshness combined with a culture that isn't going to view these children as being unduly sexualized in any way. Unfortunately, I think now we don't live in that kind of safe culture anymore.
24:26 Wes: Yeah, you know, one of the Little Rascals is actually in this movie.
24:30 Erin: Alfalfa. Yeah, that's right.
24:32 Wes: Okay.
24:33 Erin: He's in a lot of these movies.
24:36 Wes: You're bringing to mind here the role of necessity, right? Necessity is referring, I mean, first and foremost to all the things that we have to do simply to sustain ourselves. Right. Our material existence, we. We need money. At some point, George, right, thinks he. He finds out the hard way that he needs more than his idealism. He needs, he needs money as well. So necessity in terms of sustaining ourselves as physical beings in the world, being able to put food on the table, all that stuff. But also necessity in terms of the kind of causal web in which we necessarily find ourselves are.
Are being a product of influences, including social influence, influences around us and our. Are playing a role and of course in influencing others. Those Senses of necessity are. You called them to mind for me, because they in. They're enhanced. The farther back in time we go, the more those forces are enhanced, in a way. And they require people to grow up quicker and to get married quicker. Right. Because technology is more in its infancy and the more technological advancements we get, the less subject to necessity. In a way, we are for better and for worse when we indulge our tendency to aspiration and to fantasizing about ideals or to living by certain ideals.
Part of that involves, I think, the desire to escape from necessity. So the way it's put in the film is that I think at some point, is it George or George's father who says, this is no place for any man unless they're willing to crawl to Potter, which is an interesting image. Right. Given that Potter is in a wheelchair and so that the idea seems to be that Potter is envious and he basically wants to put everyone in a position where they have to depend on him even to be, you know, to do basic things and to be mobile. Yeah. The idea of crawling to Potter, I think, is a sort of.
It's an exaggeration or it's a hyperbolic representation of our relationship to necessity or the way that relationship might seem, or the burden of that. But necessity is also built into our relationships. Right. So we depend on other people. There's dependency. There's all the things that come with being part of a community or a family. So those two things kind of run against each other. So I'd like to take a moment to talk about our sponsor for this episode, NYU Tisch. They are offering online courses this spring on screenwriting and documentary filmmaking.
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29:11 Erin: In the case of Mr. Gower, for instance, the intervention of George to make sure that that kid with diphtheria isn't poisoned, which is really interesting. I looked up diphtheria because it's something I've always heard, but I didn't exactly know what it, what it is. But it's diphtheria comes from a bacteria that basically makes poison in the body. So Gower is ironically sort of treating poison with poison here. So the accident of putting the poison in the capsules, because Mr. Gower has a son who, you know, speaking of times in which people died faster, you know, who's apparently been cut down in the prime of his life by the flu. So we also have the intrusion of the flu epidemic. So George's intervention there, which, you know, Mr. Gower, basically, he's about to let his personal pain sort of destabilize his career.
30:02 Wes: Well, in fairness to him, he did have three other prescriptions for poison that day and the habit of filling.
30:08 Erin: Sorry, Right, right. Yeah, that's a question we might ask. But you know, obviously there's something interesting going on there too. You know, maybe subconscious desire to injure others because he's injured or whatever. But you know, there's this idea of his career becoming destabilized because of a private pain. You know, so this is his career world, his work world. George even steps up and feels a responsibility there. Of course, I mean, if any of us knew that someone was accidentally putting poison, they wouldn't deliver it to somebody. But anyway, the responsibility then that George is imbued with as a young boy, even to Mr.
Gower, of course, later, this is also going to be part of the apparatus of his own career as an adult, which is to get other people out of trouble. But this Gower thing is interesting because it's a professional thing. I mean, it's personal, but it's also his job at the same time. And so George's intervention is not just personal, but he's saving this guy's professional reputation. I don't know what relationship this has to this idea of necessity that you're trying to get at. And of course, as I've already said, anyone would intervene in that instance, but I just find it interesting that it's expressed on these professional grounds rather than personal.
You know, he's not going and helping Mr. Gower in a private capacity. There's some connection here to one's job, Capital J and one's job. This is something I was thinking about in terms of our responsibility to each other because George has this job which is already basically playing a charitable role in the community. Right. When he takes his father's job in the Building and Loan, there's kind of this expectation that George is always going to be poor. So there's a kind of altruism at the heart of George's job which would, in other communities, perhaps what he's doing would be picked up maybe by the church or by certain explicitly charitable enterprises within the town.
And assuming that this operates like any other town in the 1940s, those institutions are probably picking up some of this slack.
32:16 Wes: Right.
32:16 Erin: But basically he's like a non profit, you know, he's basically a one man charitable institution. Plus Uncle Billy, who's I think, more of a detriment than a help to him.
32:27 Wes: Right. I was gonna say, like many nonprofits, someone like Uncle Billy is handling the money.
32:31 Erin: Right, right. And with the help of his trusty Raven. But yeah. So I don't know where I'm going with this, except that there's this interesting collapsing. There's helping people and being charitable in one's private capacity. And then usually in American life, there's a separation and then there's the way in which you support yourself, you make money and you do what you need to do to support your family. And so in George, these things are collapsed from the very beginning with this idea of Mr. Gower's business being in jeopardy and George helps him out of his business. That's what I'm trying to say. And then later this becomes literalized when George takes over his father's role. Or not literalized, but it becomes central to his existence.
33:13 Wes: Yeah. So in the case of Gower, there's sort of the intrusion of personal pain, as you pointed out, personal misfortune on professional competence. Right. And there's obviously Some tension in the movie between professional competence and then basic human decency. Goodwill and goodwill. Right. But of course, it's not like you can simply abandon professional competence. There's not always going to be a way for the community to bail you out if someone makes an Uncle Billy level mistake. You know, ideally we want to live in a, in a place where human decency does give us a kind of safety net, to put it that way. But that doesn't mean we can abandon professional competence. Right. It doesn't mean that, that we don't need someone who is not going to put the poison pills.
34:05 Erin: Right, right.
34:05 Wes: The prescription bottle, despite the clearly labeled poison big poison bottle from which he's taking the pills. Of course, maybe not storing the poison in the pharmacy in the first place is also a good idea, but yeah, so what's, you know, and again, this is a sort of basic individual dilemma because what's required for our professional competence is to some extent, it is something in. We do have to draw on something impersonal in a way. This is kind of the whole it's, you know, it's just business, it's not personal thing in the Godfather.
34:42 Erin: Right, right, right.
34:43 Wes: We had to be capable of putting on our business hat because if we didn't, we might be involved in assassinating our enemies. Right. Or might degenerate into something like the mafia, or we might just simply be more mundanely incapable of performing our certain basic daily tasks and our professions or our work in general, it makes demands on us that allow us to transcend personal misfortune and pain or just being in a bad mood, having a bad day. Hey, I have to actually record this podcast. I have to prepare for it. But absent those responsibilities, I might just be wasting time not doing anything at all, not doing anything productive at all.
And that doesn't mean that I would be communing with the community, so to speak. It doesn't mean I would be integrating myself more fully into the social fabric. So that's just to say that there is something about the professional that's important to the social fabric and has a role in integrating one into it because it's, it's somehow related to obligation. And the ethical isn't just about altruism in the sense of good heartedness, community level giving, but it's also about some more basic and also more impersonal sense of, of obligation.
36:16 Erin: Right? Yeah. And I think that this, this ties into George maybe being ambivalent about his own aspirations because I think very often he derails them. I'm thinking of the time when he's on his. He's about to leave on his honeymoon with Mary and she tells him, let's just keep going. And he stays. There's a suggestion of the superhuman in George in terms of the ways in which he goes beyond personal responsibility into this realm of the impersonal responsibility. I think this crossing happens also in Gower's Drugstore. I love when young George sees the advertisement.
Ask dad. He knows. It's a curiously loaded image. Child takes instruction from an ad as a means of moral education or as a means of getting advice. Whoever is running that ad, that product or whatever for cigars or whatever it might be, I didn't take a good enough look. Are they running a charitable enterprise by putting up these signs, helping people make the right decision? Of course. Then, you know, George runs to his father and fails to get his father's attention and his father's advice and then is derailed by the compulsion to defend his father from Mr.
Potter's verbal attacks. And his father doesn't have time to give his son advice because the father's business is consuming so much of his time. And this conflict with Potter is actually preventing the father from giving his child the attention that the child needs. So it's very thorny, I think.
37:43 Wes: Yeah. Our work takes us away. You know, I was thinking of this when you were talking about the ways in which this whole concept of removal from the world. What if I were removed? What would happen? And of course that removal is a real thing more dramatically. Right. People go to prison. But more mundanely, we are removed all the time from our relationships or from intimacy by these other workday concerns, by being busy.
38:09 Erin: Right.
38:09 Wes: And so I was saying, you know, the busyness and the professional or that in some sense they are integrative into the community in a way, but they are also, you know, as you're pointing out, they also take us. They remove us from it. Right. And so it's thorny in the sense that it somehow does both at once.
38:25 Erin: Right. And in the, in the scene where they, where George gives away his own honeymoon fund to the residents of the town because of the run on the bank. You know, I just think about that guy who needs his 200 some odd dollars and who signed, who signed a, you know, an agreement with the bank.
38:43 Wes: So painful to me. I'm, I, I feel so. There are many points in this movie where I feel so Potter esque in my attitude. I'm just like, screw them. Like, go on your honeymoon.
38:53 Erin: Right, Right.
38:54 Wes: Listen to Mary, don't get out of the car.
38:56 Erin: Exactly.
38:57 Wes: You know, it's like a horror film, you know, don't go into that room. Don't get out of the car.
39:01 Erin: Right. It adds insult to injury, I think, because here we have George giving away his money to keep a business afloat. And also we have this guy who's then allowed to break his contract, his agreement with the bank and get out his full funds merely. So what? So that George won't lose one customer to Potter. I think there's curiously a lot of ego in the generosity of giving someone $200 just to make sure that they stay on with you. Anyway. It's frustrating because it's a legal agreement and it's like there are no rules in Bedford Falls, you know?
39:35 Wes: Exactly.
39:35 Erin: Nothing is above this personal charitable interaction, even a signed legal document.
39:42 Wes: So. Right, yeah. So this is the question of the extent to which the social fabric depends on the kindness of strangers, on the, on people being good hearted at critical moments such that if you subtract someone. Right. Everything falls apart. The social fabric is just that tenuous. Or the extent to which it's about systems and structures and about rules, about the proper social contract, about laws. Those are two different conceptions of the foundation of social order. And of course, both are at work. And to what extent do we privilege the one or the other? How are in it. They conflict? You know, those are the difficult questions. Of course, in, in this movie, I, you know, in my notes I wrote. In another very Potteresque moment I wrote at the end. So the social investment pays off, Right?
40:35 Erin: Right.
40:36 Wes: All the social investments he's made during the movie, everyone comes and, and he gets interest on those. And not just in terms of everyone's goodwill and, and in terms of communality, but in, you know, in the, in the very necessity oriented material factor, you know, money. Right. And then I was reminded of a different conception of justice. You've probably seen the Saturday Night Live
41:01 Erin: skit, right, where he gets the crap beaten out of him.
41:04 Wes: Yeah. Figure out that Potter stole the money and they all go beat the hell out of him. While, you know, while singing Auld Lang Syne At some point they get like the actual. The guy playing Potter, who is what, Jon Lovitz? Yeah, Jon Lovitz. Right. He disappears behind the desk and they bring out a dummy.
41:24 Erin: Yeah, it's pretty good.
41:25 Wes: Beating it with clubs. This is the ending many of us wanted to see. But yeah, the social investment pays off and we forget entirely about Potter. He's eclipsed by that. But there's an element of cynicism to seeing it that way, to seeing it as transactional. But the hope, of course, is just that actual human relationships play some role in keeping society together. And not just these impersonal forces and contracts and people's professional relationships and all that. And as you pointed out near the beginning of the episode, these are the things that we start to lose as we. As society becomes more urban and technologically advanced and more connected, ironically, right by technology, the more disconnected things get personally. So you can see this as a nostalgia for a social fabric that is more tightly knit, maybe.
42:21 Erin: Yeah. And I think that this is the threat of anonymity that hangs over the entire film. So the way that George's business is structured is predicated on not just these personal relationships, but this idea that he can loan somebody some money in the run on the bank scene and keep a mental ledger in his head. I'm pretty sure somebody's recording it too. But, you know, the idea that he can trust somebody to pay you back because everyone knows who you are and they know where you live, and so and so's money is in so and so's house and their money is in your house.
And. And so these personal relationships are predicated on this idea that everyone knows you, they trust you, they know you intimately enough, but you understand that you are going to make good on your promises or whatever. Or if not, they know where to find you. This is the real terror of the alternate universe scene is this idea that no one knows you. So what does George want? He wants to go to the big city. He wants to make a name for himself in an urban environment. He wants to go lots of places and be a traveler and maybe be this unknown.
Maybe there's a kind of like a hobo fantasy about this riding the rails or whatever. Common traveler fantasies in which one is anonymous and in which one passes through like a ghost through various towns and cities and countries. And so when he finally achieves that, in a way, by never having been born and he becomes a proper nomad without a home and with this kind of anonymity of the big city or of the modern world, that I think is the nightmare, right? That's the loudness of Pottersville, too. That's part of it. What is Potterville characterized by?
I think besides the neon signs? I think it's the sounds, the sound of crowds, loud music, and thus of city life's anonymous ability to just absorb you into a larger body and not recognize you as being the person whose money is in My particular, you know, is in my garage or something. So that's the terror. I think of George in this scene, you know, asking his mother, don't you know me? And then there's also an interesting moment where Burt says that he doesn't live in Bailey Park. He lives in a shack in Potter's Field. And I was like, oh, right.
You know, Potter's Field is where the unknown are buried. And then Bailey park is itself a cemetery. Right, where George's own brother is buried. So there's a kind of, you know, the scales are out of balance here, where Bailey park is where the possibility for personal relationships are dead and Potter's Field is where anonymous people are living.
45:01 Wes: Interesting. You have me thinking of two things. One is that earlier in the episode, some of your comments made me think of Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio. Those short stories and the conflict between small town life and big city life and their benefits and detriments to both. But you were talking about the dark side of anonymity and travel and an urban scene. And then the dark side of the small town is just the sense in which it's a kind of a panopticon. Right? So you could. You could give a more cynical reading to why it is people might behave themselves more in that environment, which is just that, you know, it's not just that everyone knows your name, everyone knows what you're up to, or, you know, you're trapped in some sort of web of gossip and you're worried a lot about what the neighbors are saying.
So that's the dilemma. It's between being unseen and being maybe seen too much. And then how does one navigate that? And then in a small town, it's not just about being seen too much, but it's about a more restrictive set of values. So that if you are, in Sherwood Anderson's terms, a grotesque or someone. These days, I think the word marginalized would be used. But if you're someone who's not part of an in group, let's say, then you really get a poor deal. So that's one thing I was thinking. And then the other is just that, you know, what is it that happens to the town when Bailey is removed from it?
And I was thinking, you know, maybe. Maybe the town is, in a way itself anonymized so that what are the different scenes that we get without in which George doesn't exist? We see a kind of moral degradation and Martini's place has become Nick's. And when Gower comes in, he's just a homeless drunk now, it's not just that George wasn't there to save him from that fate, and, you know, he's been to jail apparently for 20 years, but it's also that the people in the town are meaner and people in the town treat each other more as strangers. And not just as strangers in a.
You know, there could be a positive sense to stranger. Right. You know, as someone that towards whom you're hospitable or who at least has basic human rights. But here people are treated as others, you know, as strangers in the sense of others. And the only communality that people seem to have happens in bars or through revelry, through dancing. You know, we get lots of scenes of that sort of stuff, but with a tinge of kind of moral degradation. So we get anonymity and we get fake relatedness instead of real relatedness.
47:52 Erin: Yeah. This is the Internet world. Right. The commonality comes just in the sort of piling on of trolls. That scene with Mr. Gower coming into the bar is one of the five or six times that I consistently cry every time I watch this film. You know, but it's, you know, there's a disassociation, as I think, you know, you already. You've already said of being able to see Mr. Gower not as a human being, but just as an object of other people's scorn. And I see that moment when he gets sprayed in the face with the seltzer water as being a really interesting metaphor for what happens to people on the Internet when you don't see them as a full person and people just go after them.
48:27 Wes: Yep.
48:27 Erin: Yeah, it's tough.
48:28 Wes: And he's, you know, the justification. Right. Is that, well, he's a criminal and he's a drunk. And so it's moral judgment Right. At work. And it's supposed to be without knowing
48:37 Erin: the full story of anything that had happened.
48:40 Wes: Right? Yeah. And those judgments are supposed to have an ordering effect on a community. Right. And can we do without them completely? Not at least at a legal level. But the idea is that if they're not tempered by compassion, then we're in trouble.
48:53 Erin: Right. And that kind of judgment is what we would normally associate with the suffocation, as you were suggesting, of small town life. And we do see that kind of negative part of people knowing each other too well a little bit. I like when George's mother calls up Mary to let her know that George is coming to the house even though he walks in the other direction. Right. That's a little infuriating for him, understandably. And I think we also see this with Violet's reputation, which in Pottersville just becomes her, I guess, being a prostitute and being loaded into a cop car during a raid.
But obviously she's suffering under the moral judgment of the town. And I see her ultimately as deciding not to leave at the end, as maybe a willingness to be seen, a willingness to try and sustain the gaze of the town. And I don't know if that's a triumph in the end or not. I mean, I kind of wish her the opportunity to start over and maybe go to a place where she doesn't have this kind of backstory weighing her down. But there is this suggestion that if she's going to stay there, then she's going to try to make good and live by their rules and try to keep herself in line.
And that is a little bit. But, you know, that's tough.
50:02 Wes: I think she'd have to change her name as well. I mean, if you.
50:04 Erin: Right.
50:05 Wes: If you called Violet, I think you're pretty much doomed to live out. That's certain.
50:12 Erin: Maybe tone down her hair color script. Anyway, I see her as being maybe the victim of the town, but I feel sorry for her.
50:22 Wes: But.
50:23 Erin: Yeah. So Violet's sort of willingness to be seen for what she is maybe also is a good thing, because she's no longer ashamed of other people's judgment. And I think that by the end of the film, George is no longer ashamed of being a small town guy living a small life, because ultimately he's not anonymous in his own world. And that anonymity that I'm suggesting is like the actual nightmare element of the nightmare world is something that I think that Christmas also, as a theme, fights against. So I think that the idea that this takes place at Christmas is not part of this heartwarming, but ultimately incidental backdrop.
I don't think it's something that Capra chose just because it would add to the sentiment of the overall story. I think that there's something here in Clarence, in having a supernatural being come down and enact a direct intervention in George's life, I think that's part of this incarnational theology of Christmas. And I don't want to proselytize or anything, but I think in terms of the philosophy behind the incarnation, I think it's very much in keeping with the themes going on here, and it provides a kind of solution for George's problem, both literally in terms of Clarence's intervention in the story, but also in terms of what incarnational theology means for the significance of all of our lives.
So the incarnation being this idea that God, while being fully God, sends down his Son, Christ, who is also fully man born, grows up in the humblest of circumstances. But that humble station is irrevocably dignified by virtue of the Incarnation. So, for instance, to have a body as a human being cannot possibly be thought fundamentally bad or dirty in a post incarnational world, because God had a body, right? Nor, nor can the fact that you might have a menial job or a lowly position in the world. But this idea that no matter how humble you are, no matter how much of a loser or an anonymous person you are, right, you have inherent dignity, you're created in the image and likeness of God.
And that God sort of evened out that analogy more or less by making himself in the image and likeness of us. It's not quite true, and a little on the heretical side, but I'll take poetic license. This actually solves the problem of human ambition insofar as worldly glory is concerned, because just the ability to live a good and just life, regardless of one's circumstances, is paramount. Not to say that if you are given certain gifts or ambitions, you should just throw them away. Far from it. But I think it kind of puts the eyes of the world and the desire for recognition on a large scale in perspective.
So in a modernity in which we believe that the only thing that gives your life value and meaning is maybe to be an Instagram celebrity, this incarnational theology, and I think the idea of the film and is that you don't have to be an Instagram celebrity. You could just live a humble life and try to be a good neighbor, and ultimately that is what gives your life reward and status.
53:27 Wes: I think part of the solution here is that it's far easier to get wrapped up in the importance of our own success and ambition and our own glorification, if there's nothing else to glorify.
53:43 Erin: Absolutely.
53:43 Wes: If we don't defer to some higher authority and say, yes, the absolute is something outside of me and I depend on it, and I am not, I can't be that for myself. So in other words, you know, we've. It's much easier to fall into the trap of megalomania and grandiosity if we don't at some level believe, whether it's through religion or through some other. Maybe there's a psychological. You could give a purely psychological description of this, but, you know, unless we believe in something that is bigger than us and stands outside of us, and is the only thing that needs to be all good or all great. We don't have to supply that ourselves.
54:22 Erin: Absolutely. Any structure of meaning in any religion really is. Is key there.
54:26 Wes: Yeah. And part of the rebellion against necessity, of course, is, you know, that that in a way is Satan's rebellion. I think Milton does a very good job in Paradise Lost of painting this picture. Satan's big problem is just that he's not number one. And that being number one, it's not just a contingency. Right. Because the whole idea of being number one is inherently paradoxical. It's self contradictory because there's absolute being as the foundation is necessarily number one. And when we try to be number one, it's absurd. And so it's the premise of lots of sitcoms. Right. Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers are just the person who reaches at this sort of arrogation of necessity and circumstance or rebels against it and looks ridiculous doing it. There's an element of that in Paradise Lost. It's actually very funny.
55:18 Erin: I think in the postscript we'll talk a little bit more about Clarence and Clarence's role. I know I want to talk about the martinis a little bit and yeah, we'll continue the conversation.
55:27 Wes: All right, well, Merry Christmas. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
(post)script: Is “Die Hard” a Christmas Movie?
Dec 13, 2021
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Die Hard.” The first (and much longer) part of this discussion can be found here.
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Transcript
0:00 Wes: Welcome to Postscript, the subtext after show where we talk about things related and unrelated to this week's episode. Just got done talking about Die Hard. We're not really done, but we were almost done talking about Die Hard. We're going to talk about it a little bit more here. One of the things I got a little bit. I'm watching this movie, I watch it through your eyes a little bit and think, oh, yeah, Erin doesn't like that.
0:25 Erin: Oh, what parts.
0:26 Wes: There's the obligatory 1980s nudity, which somehow we moved beyond, thankfully. I think there was a time when the nude sex scene thing, there always had to be something in any given 80s movie. I think they thought it was, well, we can do this now. So we have to. This marks it as something for adults, right? People gave up on that, as far as I can tell.
0:48 Erin: And what is more adult but boobs. It's always boobs, right?
0:52 Wes: Exactly. Just a flash of the boobs and then you're done. You did your due diligence. Maybe they gave up on that for cynical reasons, like getting a PG13 rating or something. Or a PG rating. I don't know. But then there's the violence, you know, which I know you don't necessarily enjoy. I guess it's not too terrible in this movie.
1:12 Erin: Well, I really hate that Mr. Takagi's. That's like really bloody because it's displayed on the window behind him, all that blood and everything.
1:21 Wes: And it's also a very cruel moment, the way it's done when you see a bad guy get waxed, as McClane puts it. Does that you feel good about that the way I do?
1:31 Erin: Do I feel good about it? No, no, not personally.
1:36 Wes: You know, I guess when you're killing henchmen, you can't really feel good about that. It's just more. They're in the way. But, you know. And when Gruber gets his comeuppance at the end, which is a great, awesome scene, where. Another bit of film trivia is that they had Alan Rickman do that stunt himself falling from the building.
1:54 Erin: Oh, yeah, I know about that. Someone told me.
1:56 Wes: Yeah. And then they did the 1, 2, 3 thing, but they didn't get to the end of the count and let him go before so that he would genuinely look surprised. And then they also had. They invented this automated focus system because it was impossible to keep the focus on him as he fell. They wanted the focus, his face, to be the focus as he moved away from the camera. And it would happen too quickly to manually adjust it. So they invented some automated system which only worked partially, so you only get a little bit of that fall from that angle before it cuts away. Is that scene like a. Yeah. Moment. The bad guy. The bad guy is dead?
2:32 Erin: No, not really. It's cool, though. I mean, I think that's like someone maybe on Facebook or something pointed out that I'm inconsistent with my hatred of violence, because I did mention. Not that they were like, it was a gotcha moment, but they thought it was interesting that I talked about how Godfather 1 is better than Part 2 because the deaths in Part 1 are so much better. And it is true that I do. If it's an interesting and inventive kind of death, then maybe I appreciate the artistry of that.
3:00 Wes: So you can appreciate the aesthetics of violence.
3:03 Erin: Yeah.
3:03 Wes: Right. You must love Tarantino. I'm just kidding.
3:06 Erin: Oh, no, no, no, no. Well, that's terrible aesthetics. It's like cartoon violence. Not that I've ever fully looked.
3:14 Wes: I've heard.
3:16 Erin: Yeah, well. Cause that's the thing. Like, I've only ever half seen a lot of this stuff, so if it's, like, a cool thing and then I can sort of, like, peek at it, then it's interesting to me. But I think, like, Alan Rickman falling, that shot is really cool. But the idea of falling off a building is, like, the worst thing ever. I think my problem is I have so much empathy for anyone getting killed on film. Like, maybe it's actually. And I don't mean to compliment myself. I mean, maybe this is, like, a selfish thing, actually, that I just imagine myself getting killed in that way. And then I think that it would be terrible to have that happen. So. Yeah. I don't know what to say about that otherwise, except that I think that's an awesome shot, and I love the look on his face as he falls.
4:00 Wes: Yeah.
4:01 Erin: I think the funniest part, though, is the guy hanging from the chain who comes back out at the end so that Powell can shoot somebody.
4:08 Wes: So ridiculous.
4:09 Erin: It's so funny. He looks so crazed. He looks like a deranged He-Man after his head has been like. After somebody's sister has tried to give the He-Man doll a perm or. Or done something crazy with the hair, and he comes out and is. Oh, gosh. It's hilarious.
4:24 Wes: Yeah. It's such a Hollywood screenwriter thing to do as well. Right? There's like, we got to complete Powell's arc. We got to. You know, we got to have the story about the kid he killed pay off, you know?
4:34 Erin: Right.
4:34 Wes: And have him get over his. His hang up. But because the movie is a satire. Like just. Just in the same way that all the other caricature and silly stuff that happens is it. Is that it is what it is. It still, as far as I'm concerned, works within the context of a satire. So you. You get away with a lot once you enter that realm. And I think action movies work very well in that realm. I mean, that's. It's kind of the way James Bond movies, I think, used to function. Not so much anymore, but early on, almost a little like. Yeah. Even more. Not just satire, but very goofy. Right, sure.
5:12 Erin: Well, I think Star wars functions that way. Indiana Jones, anything with Harrison Ford as an action star.
5:21 Wes: Yeah.
5:21 Erin: My One True love.
5:23 Wes: Well, it's funny too. Cause right before that you get the embrace between Powell and McClane. And you can't help comparing his reunion with Holly, which is very passionate. There's that kiss. Right. But with his meeting of Powell, which is for the first time, but you know, in person. But it's powerful in a way. And inevitably, I think in a way it's more powerful than the reunion with Holly. Just because we don't see their relationship during the film, really.
5:53 Erin: Right, right.
5:54 Wes: That's one of the interesting things about the film is there's just no real development of their relationship because they're apart. Their relationship takes on the form, a very primal form, which is just me, man going to protect wife. You know, that's it.
6:08 Erin: I don't know. I do think that there's something interesting about the fact that she's hiding the marriage. Because she's hiding the marriage to begin with. Or rather she's cast it off. Right. By being. By going by her maiden name. And then there's something interesting and sort of like a communication through silence or subversion. Or like you, you know, she is trying to protect him throughout the whole film by making sure that nobody knows that he's her husband or what his real identity is. And he goes by Roy. Right. For Roy Rogers. But I do think that there's an interesting kind of communication in that because it takes what she was doing, which is casting off the marriage and makes the divorce into a plot to sort of keep the marriage together or to keep him alive anyway.
6:53 Wes: Right. I think that. Yeah, that's an interesting point.
6:56 Erin: It's kind of like a comedy of remarriage plot. Like a screwball comedy plot where the maiden name becomes the protective mantle for the husband and for her. Right. Cause he's trying to do the same thing too make sure that she's not implicated in him causing trouble for the pseudo terrorists so that she will not be singled out.
7:14 Wes: She's very well characterized. She's kind of the perfect hybrid of mother and career woman. Right. Because she's authoritative but not too harsh. Right. They just, they try to hit that, that mark and do it perfectly. And she's protective and she's intelligent and so she's well characterized during the movie. And I was thinking, well, they don't really communicate with each other. There's no relationship dynamics. It's not like a typical movie where they'd be interacting with each other through the movie. But yeah, what you've said about communication is very interesting because by virtue of she's altering his, the environment in which he's functioning and moving, right. She's affecting the events, she's affecting what's going to happen to him by protecting to him. So there is a, you could call that a, at some very primal level. That's the communication, right?
8:07 Erin: Yeah. She's changing the terms of their separation so that what was divorcing them literally is now uniting them in a shared effort to protect each other's, you know, identities.
8:18 Wes: Well, I was just thinking of this word, cooperating. They're actually engaged in a cooperative endeavor, interestingly enough, without direct interaction. So they can. And of course, that is what marriage is all about, right. If it's going to be successful. It's a cooperative endeavor to accomplish something. It's not just, you call it a relationship, but it's not just, hey, we're living together, have kids together, even that we love each other. It's an activity, one might want to say, of preservation.
8:48 Erin: So this idea of mutual preservation resolves, I think like the issue of career preservation or however you want to cast that conflict from the beginning of the film. So I think that his relationship with Powell also serves as, I don't know what happens in subsequent films as far as his relationship to la, if he then, if LA then becomes his home base or whatever. But I'm assuming that also the idea of his involvement in a friendship with another family man in the area and also having a like minded person in the LAPD is supposed to be a kind of an entree for him to feel at home in la.
I mean, there's nothing like subverting a terrorist plot to feel at home in la. But there's also the, you know, needing a friend and someone, a like minded person who's also engaged in the life of the family to be a support System. And so he also gets that over the course of, you know, he gets like two. Two relationships for the price of one by the end of the film.
9:44 Wes: Yeah, we need that male bonding for him to be the family man and someone with heart. We need something like that. Cause again, he's. Otherwise, he's alone through the most of the film. But again, that's one of the things that makes his, you know, his meeting Powell in a way, more emotionally compelling than his reunion with Holly.
10:04 Erin: Well, I think it's really romantic though, that, like, it surprised me how not Powell.
10:10 Wes: I'm sorry, that's what I thought you were saying.
10:12 Erin: No, no, it surprised me at the end of the film when he gets in the back of the limo with her. And it just, I think because of the rapidity with which everything wraps up, that hearing that song, the Christmas song at the end, Let It Snow when they get in the back of the car is like very emotionally satisfying. I kept wishing that someone would put him on a fricking stretcher since he's still walking on his cut up feet. But when he gets into the car, the two of them together, I think it's. Yeah, I find that to be just as satisfying. As much as I love Reginald VelJohnson, I think it's just as satisfying. The romantic thread wrap up well for
10:49 Wes: me at that moment, it feels like the end of an allegory about a marital spat where we've had a knockdown, drag out fight. Both of us are really cut up from it, cut up, exhausted from it, but we've made up and now we are just going to walk away like nothing has happened. La de da da da. And everyone else is there cleaning up the mess. I don't know.
11:12 Erin: Heads are bloody but unbowed.
11:14 Wes: Yeah, there's something about the, you know, the way they leave the. And again, this is part of the comedic and satirical element of this. Right. It's not, oh, I'm traumatized. Let me sit with my special shiny thing, blanket that they put over trauma victims. Right. And this might as well not have happened. Do you know what I mean? Exactly. It's like the substance, I guess the thematic element of the film takes over. This really all along was about them making up and the scene that they're leaving behind. You know, it might as well almost be as if they had just made that movie together. You step outside the frame a little bit, right?
11:52 Erin: Yeah. No, this is part of the comedy of remarriage too. I mean, like, I think of, you know, for instance, the awful truth in which there's like a total demolition of their cultural standing in the community. You know, like Irene Dunne comes in and just like destroys Cary Grant's reputation in front of these very high class people and pretends to be his sister and. Right. So there's all this like crazy stuff that happens. But in the end, it's like none of it happened, none of it mattered. The point was just getting back together through whatever means necessary. Whether it's, you know, pretending to be your husband's sister and making a fool of yourself at a party or subverting a terrorist plot. It's all like coming out of the same unreal displacement of marital dysfunction in antics or whether those be like action movie antics or comedic antics.
12:42 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very good. And it, you know, I'm thinking now that it speaks to the prioritization of that relationship over social concerns. So society be damned. This is the fundamental unit. This is the family unit or the romantic unit. And the integrity of that unit is everything. And if it costs skyscraper, you know, if you have to destroy a skyscraper and if you have to endure a hostage crisis and quasi terroristic incident and all that stuff in order to preserve it, then so be it.
13:19 Erin: Right.
13:19 Wes: It is of ultimate value. I think that's what you're helping me understand, that feeling that I get at the very end of the movie.
13:25 Erin: And I think that's why this is all part of McClane's realization about how bi coastal culture clashes be damned, that ultimately the marriage and the children are the most important thing.
13:37 Wes: Right.
13:37 Erin: Yeah. So it's very, very satisfying for me. I was recently started watching Brooklyn Nine. Nine. Not recently, I guess I watched it with my mom while she was recuperating over the summer. And there's a very sweet relationship at the heart of that show. And I think if I'm remembering correctly, it's weird how much of a fog this past summer already is for me. The Andy Samberg character and his girlfriend dress up for Halloween as John McClane and Holly. And she has like the pink jacket suit and the big perm. It's really cute. Like, it's actually a really great couple's costume.
I know it's after Halloween now we're talking about Christmas, but it would be a great couple's costume for people out there in the future if they're interested. Like the guy just has to wear a torn up wife beater and you just have to find a black skirt and some ugly 80s pink thing at the thrift store and a perm and You've got a wig or curl your hair. But we didn't get to the classic perms in movie history. Can we think of bad perms? Oh, I could think of one. Just one.
14:43 Wes: What are you thinking of?
14:44 Erin: I'm thinking of Annie.
14:46 Wes: Oh, really?
14:48 Erin: Right. That's like the worst hairstyle in movie history, I think.
14:51 Wes: Is that a perm that she has?
14:52 Erin: Oh, yeah, it's gotta be. It's not, it's gotta be a wig, but a perm wig.
14:58 Wes: Do people still get perms? Is that. Or is that just. Just the 80s? Is a perm something women do?
15:02 Erin: I think they do, but I. Maybe, but maybe they've gotten better now that they're more natur. Maybe not. Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I don't know what women do.
15:16 Wes: I just looked this up and the first one that came up was Grease. Olivia Newton-John in Grease.
15:22 Erin: Oh, but that's a good perm.
15:24 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It's actually not.
15:26 Erin: I can see that in my mind's eye. And that's, that's not a bad perm.
15:29 Wes: It's. It's good. Oh, oh.
15:30 Erin: Doesn't Mel Gibson have. Have a terrible perm in Lethal Weapon? Well, he has like a mullet. But isn't the top of it permed? Or am I thinking of Dog the Bounty Hunter?
15:40 Wes: Yeah. Is it tall? Does he have a tall. Yeah, I think you're right.
15:43 Erin: Uh huh.
15:44 Wes: It's pretty big. It's big hair.
15:48 Erin: You know, Mel Gibson can have his bad Lethal Weapon hair and he's still Mel Gibson. But I think that and Annie, you know, the perm is part of the whole thing. But Holly, her attractiveness is significantly diminished by the perm. So I think that is the worst. That perm is the real villain of the film because it takes a very attractive woman and really downgrades her. Like that's several points lower than she should be.
16:15 Wes: It should have ended with her sweating off the perm, you know, somehow.
16:19 Erin: Yeah.
16:20 Wes: With her hair wet.
16:21 Erin: And yes, if she had gone in the water in the Frank Lloyd Wright waterfall, then they would have undone the
16:28 Wes: perm and gotten her own wife beater and gone all Ripley on us.
16:31 Erin: There you go. Everybody should just be Sigourney Weaver by the end of the movie. Any action movie.
16:37 Wes: Yep. All right. Should we leave it there? Yeah. All right. Thank you.
16:41 Erin: Thank you.
Attachments “Die Hard” at Nakatomi Tower
Dec 06, 2021
It’s a Christmas movie, some say, and in the end the holiday classic “Let it Snow” plays over the credits. But what counts as snow in the final scenes is a confetti of smoke, debris, and millions of dollars of bearer bonds, not to mention the Euro-villain who tried to steal them. These descend from the blasted-out upper floor of a skyscraper onto a scene of total destruction. Worse, it all happens in Los Angeles. Is “Die Hard” actually a Christmas movie? And what is a Christmas movie, anyway? Wes & Erin try to figure out if there’s anything like a yuletide miracle in this story about the violent defense of marriage and family against materialism, globalism, status, and other forces of social dissolution.
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters can learn more about their online courses at tischpro.smashcut.com/subtext.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:13 Wes: It's a Christmas movie, some say. And in the end, the holiday classic Let It Snow plays over the credits. But what counts as snow in the final scenes is a confetti of smoke, debris and millions of dollars of bearer bonds. Not to mention the Eurovillain who tried to steal them. These descend from the blasted out upper floor of a skyscraper onto a scene of total destruction. Worse, it all happens in Los Angeles. Is Die Hard actually a Christmas movie? And what is a Christmas movie anyway? On today's episode, we try to figure out if there's anything like a yuletide miracle in this story about the violent defense of marriage and family against materialism, globalism, status and other forces of social dissolution. This is Wes Alwan.
1:02 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:03 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I think we should resolve this question once and for all. Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?
1:17 Erin: Okay. Well, I have this long standing discussion with family members over what constitutes a Christmas movie. Because they get very upset when I say that the Fellowship of the Ring is a Christmas movie.
1:28 Wes: That's upsetting to me as well.
1:30 Erin: Yeah. So I have two standards for this. There has to be an epic struggle between good and evil, and there must be snow. Now, LA doesn't have any snow. However, it does end with the song Let It Snow. So technically the word snow is in the film. So I would call this a Christmas movie.
1:50 Wes: Well, okay, good wins on a technicality. So, yeah, there is kind of stuff raining down from the sky. There's like shredded bearer bonds. So those are the bonds that Hans Gruber and his friends were after. And that one of the climactic moments of the movie. They're celebrating after getting into the vault and handling all those bonds to, well, Ode to Joy, which has been the theme of the movie all along. But it reaches its climactic moment. That's what's coming down. That's the snow is the destroyed dreams of a classically educated young German men. You know, also at the end, just the scene of all the wreckage and people cleaning up as John McClane and Holly ride off into the. Not the sunset, but whatever you want to call it. Right off into the night to the
2:42 Erin: back of Argyle's limo. He's like kind of the best character.
2:45 Wes: Maybe there's a lot of good ones. He is a great one.
2:48 Erin: I forgot about him. So I have a terrible confession, which is, until last night, I don't think I have ever seen this movie from beginning to End uninterrupted. It's the kind of thing that like plays at my parents house every Christmas to varying levels of interest from me where I'll go in and out. I hate the part where they kill Mr. Takagi. So I would never watch that. This time I had to watch it. I still kind of walked away. So I guess I've still never really seen the full film. But yeah, so it was interesting to finally see it from beginning to end and to sort of tweeze out like, oh, the plane thing must be Die Hard too, because I'm remembering them as like one big film.
3:26 Wes: Yeah. That's unfortunate.
3:28 Erin: Where's Samuel L. Jackson?
3:30 Wes: The fact that they turned this into a franchise is. Yeah. Unfortunate. And that there's any confusion between the movies. Yeah, this is a work of art. And the rest of it is just an attempt to exploit that for money.
3:41 Erin: Yeah. So you really think that this is the best Christmas movie of all time?
3:45 Wes: I do.
3:46 Erin: Okay, interesting.
3:50 Wes: So I originally saw this when I was 17, on my birthday, right after it had come out on vhs. This is like one of the few memories from my high school years that is not completely repressed.
4:02 Erin: Oh, my God.
4:02 Wes: Being in my sister's apartment watching Die Hard and thinking and really enjoying it. But I really thought nothing of the movie until I watched it a few years ago. I mean, I had to have seen it again since I was 17, but I have no memory. That might have been the first time I'd seen it since I was a kid. And I thought, wow, this is really actually a very good movie. Which I had never thought of it that way. I just thought it was a great action film. But I thought it was, you know, the script was good and thematically it was really interesting and a lot of great acting. Including especially Alan Rickman. Yes, especially Alan Rickman. I'm just assuming what he did with that character right after being plucked off the stage. Right. I don't even think he had film career aspirations. He went straight from doing Shakespeare. Right. To being a great villain in this
4:46 Erin: movie, though not his best villain performance, I think. What is his best that would be when he cheated on Emma Thompson in Love, actually. That really broke my heart. But anyway, this is a close second.
4:57 Wes: Which movie did we watch together? Not love, actually, but Notting Hill. Yeah, Notting Hill.
5:02 Erin: Okay.
5:02 Wes: I was trying to think, was he in there? Was he in Notting Hill? No. I was impressed. I became excited about the movie. Maybe it was a couple years ago when I saw it again and I don't know That I can defend the idea that it's the greatest Christmas movie ever. So your criteria are life and death, struggle and snow. Those were the two.
5:22 Erin: An epic battle or struggle between good and evil.
5:26 Wes: Oh, sorry. I put down life and death. That's weird. Epic battle between good and evil. Good and evil.
5:31 Erin: Oh, and good has to win. But that goes without saying for a Hollywood movie.
5:35 Wes: Yeah. In your opinion, what are the best Christmas movies?
5:39 Erin: So I should say that I came up with these two criteria many years ago. When pressed, I just said them. And my family has been quoting that back at me for many years now. So I don't know how serious it is. It's sort of solidified. But I would say that the best Christmas. There's only one It's a Wonderful Life.
5:58 Wes: I knew you were going to say that. Yeah.
6:00 Erin: You can't. It's the law. You can't acknowledge any other film.
6:05 Wes: An angel gets their wings. Every time someone says, that's the best Christmas movie.
6:09 Erin: That's right. Every time someone says, die Hard is the best Christmas movie, Bruce Willis sends them a free wife beater. I gotta say that I thought the script was really good. But the funniest parts of the film, for me, the unintentionally hilarious parts, were when Bruce Willis was saying to himself, think, think.
6:27 Wes: What scene is that where he says that?
6:29 Erin: It happens a couple times when he's sort of. Right before he goes into the elevator shaft. The third or fourth time. He's always in the elevator shaft. Poor guy.
6:38 Wes: Yeah. He has the unfortunate. He's in the. And he said, this was hard. Bruce Williston. But he's in the unfortunate position of having to act by himself. Very few interactions between himself and others. So it is really interesting to. Cause he does a lot of talking to himself, right?
6:52 Erin: Yeah.
6:52 Wes: Think, shit, Everything's gonna be fine. Stay calm.
6:55 Erin: Well, I think for the most part, it's pretty believable. But I was thinking about the function of Reginald VelJohnson's character. I don't know. It gave some interesting ideas about maybe what's at work in the film. Reginald VelJohnson is like a favorite for me. Love Family Matters and him in Family Matters. So this was fun to see again. He's great.
7:15 Wes: Yeah. I think it's interesting because the relationship between John McClane and Powell. That relationship is really important. What McClane represents is not just sort of the individualistic cowboy against. There are so many antagonists in this film, it would take a long time to list them. A lot of them involve oppressive social and cultural Forces oppressive in the sense that they work to the detriment of marital fidelity or marital cohesion or the social fabric. All those good old fashioned values that sort of get associated in this movie with Christmas. And so that's the sense in which it can be said to be a Christmas movie and not just set, you know, during Christmas. Right. During this weirdly contradictory idea of Christmas in la, as opposed to Christmas in New York. Right. In New York, Christmas is Christmas in la. What is it? Something very bastardized. Yeah, Very unnatural.
8:07 Erin: Something that becomes a Christmas movie on a technicality rather than real snow.
8:11 Wes: Yeah, exactly. Not just because California is warm and western, but because it's. And snowless, but because as it's made out in the movie, it represents kind of oddness or a set of values and conflict with like New York grittiness and practicality. So that's where I think the relationship with, you know, as you point out with Officer Powell is really important because it highlights the fact that what he represents is more of a family man kind of person who has heart and bonds with other males. You might see him as a representative of just machismo and masculine violence and all that stuff vindicating itself against the forces of civilization. I don't know what you would say,
8:55 Erin: but for Bruce Willis character.
8:56 Wes: Yeah, yeah. But he himself will say, you know, at a certain point, you macho bastards, as they're trying to. They're trying to send the armored vehicle up the steps. Right. So he's more than the representative of individuality and being a cowboy and vigilantism and things like that that Hans Gruber would want to make him out to be. He has something to do with these very large set of associated values that involve class and Christmas and family and, you know, like working class, I mean, and so on and so forth.
9:26 Erin: For me, this movie became a movie about partnership. You know, when the image of the cowboy is invoked. Hans Gruber, who says, like, you're not gonna ride off with Grace Kelly into the sunset or something like that, or walk off into the sunset with Grace Kelly. And then they have that thing about. That was Gary Cooper. It's not the lone cowboy, even in Hans Gruber's estimation. And I was thinking about that and how everyone. There's just a tremendous amount of duality in the. Seems to have a pair. So obviously, like there's the broken partnership of the marriage at the center of the film.
There's the idea of partnership in police work, you know, where you typically have a partner. There's the idea of Those two brothers, the two German brothers that, you know, the Germans seem to come in pairs, except for Hans Gruber. And gosh, like, there were just so many instances of it. I mean, he has. So he has two kids, right? A girl and a boy. The two FBI officers that come in, Agent Johnson and Special Agent Johnson. And I love how they're like, one's black, one's white, and they have to explain to people that they're not related.
10:31 Wes: Yeah.
10:31 Erin: The intrusion of the film crew is really interesting because I think that is also making, obviously, commentary on la. And I don't know that it fully works because I don't think it's really fleshed out all the way, the media intrusion, the TV coverage. But I do really love that moment where they have that expert on TV who has written a book called Hostage Terrorist, Terrorist Hostage or something like that.
10:55 Wes: Yeah. Helsinki Syndrome instead of Stockholm Syndrome.
10:58 Erin: Right. But that duality, you know, Hostage, Terrorist. I think that scene is followed by. I think it's between. Or maybe it's followed by these two things in quick succession. When Johnson and Johnson show up and when Hans Gruber pretends to be a hostage. So he's like his own sort of dual figure, maybe of criminal and cultured. Aesthete. I don't have anything to say about that, except that I found it interesting. And it must be making some sort of commentary on the necessity of relationships, the way of healing the broken marriage at the center of this or something. So I didn't see it so much as John McClane's rugged individualism. Even though he is fighting a lot of bad guys and a lot of incompetent people. That he does have this relationship of dependence. And the partnership that he's in in his marriage also can't be found out, which is another angle on that.
11:54 Wes: Yeah, I think it's all about the importance of relationships. In the beginning. It's about. It could be a mundane story about a couple who's having problems because of certain social changes, women in the workforce. And now there's dual careers and there's geographic dislocation. So you take that very fundamental story, which could have just been told straight, right. And you graft an action movie onto that. That's thematically really powerful, actually. You get the strong connection between the danger of the loss of his relationship with his wife and lots of other dangers.
Spiritual, psychological, physical, societal, individual. Like I said, there's a long list of antagonists in the movie, like network. Our last discussion. You know, the film is not shy about adding Those up throwing more on the bonfire. So it even starts out like Sexual Temptation is one of those antagonists or it's one of the villains in the film. And it's, I think, artfully done. Right. So one of the very first things that happens in the movie when he's getting off the plane and he's at the baggage section is he sees a young girl jump into her boyfriend's arms.
And he basically looks at her ass and there's the pinup girl. Later on, he gets distracted by this topless pinup girl in the building. And there's kind of a flirtat. Actually, there's kind of a flirtation between him and a stewardess on the plane. And so this is one of many threats to marital fidelity. And then I've mentioned things like the dual careers. But you also get materialism with the Rolex watch. You get Ellis, the finance brogue. Multinational corporations, globalization, technology, right. As soon as he shows up to. Well, even his fear of flying is kind of works into that.
But he shows up for the office party initially, and he's trying to find Holly by her last name, his last name, McClane. And there's the disappointment in finding out that she's gone back to her maiden name. There's also a banter with the security guard about the threat of technology. Right? McClane goes, Cute toy. When he's talking about the electronic interface that he can use to look through the building directory, which looked fancy in its time, right now. Looks primitive compared to iPads and things like that. Looked fancy in its time. And he goes, cute toy.
And the guard goes, yeah, you have to take a leak. It'll even help you find your zipper. And then the list goes on. Bureaucracy, like the, you know, the FBI, or as Hans Gruber puts it, the FBI, they're one of the antagonists. The police are one of the antagonists. And apart from these pseudo terrorists represented by Gruber, apart from these sort of white collar criminals on steroids, you have all these other opponents which could get messy or maybe could make the movie feel like it's overloaded, but in this case, it doesn't. It all works very, very well together.
I think I was just getting at the sense in which, you know, you mentioned the importance of this relationship with Powell and relationships in general, the way that is expanded out into the movie as a whole.
15:01 Erin: Is it Ellis, the smarmy guy?
15:04 Wes: Yeah, the guy is calling a finance bro. Yeah, shmarmy.
15:06 Erin: Right. He also represents sexual temptation for Holly, right? Like he hits on her and that's obviously subverted very quickly because being a hostage isn't conducive to sexy time. But he, I think, and the he and Mr. Takagi. I was thinking about this too, that they're both. Since they're both sort of killed in the same way or in similar ways. Obviously Mr. Takagi has a lot of dignity as a character, but I'm wondering about those two being detached from other people. Takagi at the top of this company, you know, use the term white collar criminals, I assume to refer to Gruber and co.
15:43 Wes: I did. It's right. I called it on steroids. Right. Yeah. They're not technically white collar criminals, but they, I think, in a way, are meant to represent. You know, Ellis says, I use a pen, you use a gun. That's what's the difference. Or something like that.
15:55 Erin: That's right.
15:56 Wes: But yeah.
15:57 Erin: Right. Yeah. So I think there's. I mean, definitely Ellis is kind of a villain. And the way in which business is done even, you know, legally in this corporation seems to be something that is not entirely savory. I don't know how literally we're supposed to take that. Like I say, like, Mr. Takagi seems like he's a good guy and certainly has an interesting history. When Gruber reads his biography aloud.
16:23 Wes: Yeah. His resume is very, very impressive. Fancy.
16:27 Erin: Well, and it's also heroic. And it has an incredible arc to it. I mean, he was interred in a Japanese internment camp in California and rose from. From nothing, it sounds like. So. But at the same time, he is. He is not partnered up with anybody. You know, he's. It's. It's lonely at the top for him, and he ends up getting killed. And then Ellis, of course, is not partnered with anyone, though he tries to be, and he ends up getting bumped off, too. I wonder what you think about that. And this invocation, too, of. I don't know what the movie is trying to say about this, that when the villains are Germans and America has made some sort of unholy alliance with Japan in this capitalist enterprise. I don't know what the movie is getting at in that gesture. I mean, Pearl harbor is mentioned. We have this shadow of this internment camp.
17:14 Wes: Yeah. You could say there are jingoistic tendencies in the film. And they do reflect working class anxieties. Right. Which a lot of this film does.
17:23 Erin: Oh, sure.
17:23 Wes: The worry about globalization and multinational corporations. These sort of cross political lines to some extent. And, you know, at the time, the media environment was focused on Japan as an economic threat, especially Japanese technology.
17:38 Erin: Ah. That makes Sense, I think people are
17:40 Wes: less aware of how much of that was part of the zeitgeist at the time. I mean, I remember it as a 17 year old, but the idea, you know, there's a lot of jokes about Japan and technology and the impending economic hegemony that was gonna result from that.
17:54 Erin: Yeah. And doesn't Takagi say, we didn't win at Pearl harbor, so we got them with electronics, something like that.
17:59 Wes: VCRs.
18:00 Erin: VCRs. Oh, that's good. Yeah.
18:02 Wes: The prompt for that is he's asked about someone, says, you throw quite a party. I didn't realize they celebrated Christmas in Japan. I think that might be McClane. And he says, we're flexible. Pearl harbor didn't work out, so we got you with tape decks.
18:16 Erin: Well, it's interesting, the line there, I hadn't realized. I mean, I hadn't realized that because it is a troubling element of the film as much as sad when Takagi dies and everything, you know, personally seems fine. But there's this idea of what Holly is engaging in and what the whole company is engaging in as a kind of, I'll call it cowboy capitalism or something, which is like also part of John McClane's identity, of course, as like a cowboy and the rugged individualist. But then there's also this idea of it's not far from what Hans Gruber is trying to do, which is basically pick their pockets.
I mean, at a general gigantic scale. It's interesting because it's not like the difference between some sort of epic struggle between communism and free America. It's more like the difference between 1980s High finance business deals, which I know from Wall street is not entirely savory, and people who are slightly more unsavory.
19:13 Wes: Yeah, I think the book on which this is based is more obvious about this. And it's consciously softened in the films. The novel is Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp.
19:24 Erin: I had no idea this was based on a novel.
19:26 Wes: Yeah. And the rights to the novel were purchased even before its development because they made a film with Frank Sinatra based on a previous novel that this guy had written.
19:37 Erin: What movie?
19:38 Wes: The Detective, 1968.
19:40 Erin: Oh, sure, I've seen that.
19:41 Wes: So based on a novel by the same guy. And in fact, they had to offer 70 year old Frank Sinatra the part played by Bruce Willis.
19:50 Erin: Oh my gosh.
19:51 Wes: Contractually they had to offer it to him before. And that, you know, course he said that's okay.
19:57 Erin: What I wouldn't give for a screen test of that. That's Hilarious.
20:00 Wes: There's a great making of documentary out there which I can't remember the name of, but I'm sure people can find it. But there's so much interesting trivia about how this film was made, and a lot of it actually has made its way into the Wikipedia article for the film. In the novel, it's terrorists. They have clear political motivations. And in the film, this was consciously softened because they wanted the villains to be not so mean. Well, mean is the word used by the director of the film, John McTiernan. He didn't want it to be so mean. I think he thought maybe it would make it too serious and heavy and he was looking for something light, you know, he had the film, the original screenplay, extensively rewritten to introduce a lot of comedy into it.
They allowed a lot of improvisation from Bruce Willis and from others to introduce comedy into it. Including these great scenes, right, where the. Where the henchman looks down at the candy bar.
20:52 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
20:53 Wes: And can't resist taking it. Or the. The SWAT team guy injures himself on a rose thorn and goes, ow. As he's running into the. Lots of great little comic touches like that. So that's all part of this kind of softening project. They had to make it not like a typical action film, but it also makes it, the role of the villains more ambiguous. Which works, right? Because you can do this thing where you can say, as Hans Gruber will claim, are the villains all that much different than the corporate people or the other bureaucrats or other oppressive social forces in society?
Which, again, are also the antagonists in this film. And it is ambiguous, right, because they're not really terrorists. They don't really have political goals. Even though Hans Gruber was part of a. Of a terrorist organization, he's been expelled from it, and he's decided he just wants the money and go live on the beach. And when he makes an early speech in the film about how this corporation has been doing something terrible and that's why he's here, it's completely a lie. So there's an interesting parallel between the terrorists and the corporate types and even Takagi, right?
Takagi and Hans Gruber have a lot in common. Hans Gruber says in the elevator scene when they're taking Takagi to the place where they're ultimately going to kill him, you know, nice suit. And then he names the designer of the suit and says he has a few of them himself. And rumor has it Arafat has one as well. Terrorism has turned into something cynical and associated with corporate Greed and things like that. And Takagi himself, right. Very cultured, very educated. One of the things that Gruber says when he walks into the portion of the office with all the models where they're taking, Takagi says, and when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.
And then he makes that remark. Benefits of a classical education.
22:44 Erin: Yeah.
22:45 Wes: Which I love. You know, benefits of a classical education, which you could also call an antagonist in the film. Right. The elites and their education. You know, speaking of pairings and relationships, Takagi and Hans Gruber have a lot in common, and it's part of what makes the scene where he's willing to off him so quickly and cavalierly so shocking. Right. Because you would think Gruber would have some admiration and interest in that sort of resume and someone who also probably has a classical education and somewhat accomplished and interested in money and if he is and things like that.
23:21 Erin: Sure. Yeah. Well, I love that remark about the suits and even Alexander's Domain, because it does imply that the ruling class, whether they be corporate or actual leaders of countries or something like that, are all kind of a monoculture. They all have the same type suits. And they, you know, I think this is easily more easily imagined for men than for women, especially because of the term suits. But this idea that everybody is all, you know, those at the top are all part of the same breed, whether they be good guys or bad guys or some combination of both.
But I like, too, the idea that Gruber sort of is and isn't an ideologue, or that somehow believing in classical education makes him a bad guy but not a mean guy or something like that, you know, by the director's standard. And I think you're right that when we get more terroristic, more sinister motivations, I think that's when you end up with like a Jason Bourne movie rather than a Die Hard. The Jason Bourne stuff I was thinking of. I love that trilogy.
24:24 Wes: Me, too.
24:24 Erin: And I was thinking of that when John McClane starts getting shot at by the FBI because he's waving his machine gun around and trying to get people back downstairs and away from the bomb. But. Yeah, but the idea of the government as being an antagonist, too, it puts them also aligned with the FBI. Aligned with Gruber in a way as well.
24:46 Wes: Yeah. Even Vietnam, even the Vietnam War comes in for a bit of a bashing, Right?
24:50 Erin: Sure.
24:51 Wes: Elder Johnson of the FBI is whipping it up in the helicopter and saying it's just like Saigon or something like that.
24:59 Erin: Right.
24:59 Wes: And the response from the younger Johnson is like, I was in middle school, asshole, or something like that.
25:03 Erin: Well, that's a great moment. So the motivation of the FBI is to enact. It's like a kind of play acting. I think there's some play acting that goes on with Gruber and McClane, obviously, when Gruber pretends to be a hostage and when he sort of casts McClane in the role of the cowboy. But then I like the fact, too, that the FBI seem to be working from this script. So they don't have a sense that everyone's seen the same movie, I guess, and that the. You know, that Gruber and his associates know everything that the FBI is going to do ahead of time. Someone says, I think the nerdy guy who's hacking into the mainframe or whatever to get out the bonds.
25:44 Wes: Or is it Theo?
25:45 Erin: Theo, okay, yeah. He's like, oh, it's right out of the FBI playbook or something like that. And I think Powell makes a similar comment about how it's stupid to go in or they're going to be expecting that. I know McClane has the same intuition about.
25:59 Wes: I think it's Gruber, right, who says, you know, you wanted a Christmas miracle, I give you the FBI. Which is always the way he says it. Right. With those pauses.
26:09 Erin: Right. So let's pause here for a minute to talk about something really exciting for all the established creatives out there and for aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters, too. NYU Tisch School of the Arts is offering a slate of online courses this spring on screenwriting and documentary filmmaking. And, guys, I've got to tell you that these courses look pretty impressive. There's one course called Writing for the Screen, in which you'll complete a film treatment and a step outline of your own feature film or TV episode. And there's another course called Documentary Workshop, which features participation from the New York Times Op-Docs.
The courses use a remote learning platform with some pretty incredible features. These are not just your basic classroom video meetings. NYU Tisch Pro designed these courses specifically to be digital, and the interface looks great. It's intuitive, inherently collaborative and interactive. You can watch video lectures delivered by Tisch faculty at your own pace. But then you can also join live video meetings and schedule one on one sessions with professors. And you can work with other students around the world as a virtual crew. There are built in collaboration features like a live chat to discuss your creative work.
And you can seamlessly share, download, annotate, review, and comment on video content, all without leaving the platform. There's even a particularly Cool feature which allows your professor or virtual crewmate to leave a comment at a specific timestamp on your video so you can zero in to exactly what they're talking about. So if you've been wanting to try screenwriting or documentary filmmaking, or you have a specific story that you've always wanted to put on screen, 2022 is just around the corner. Maybe make it a New Year's resolution to bring your ideas to life.
The deadline for spring courses is January 7th. You can learn more at tishpro.smashcut.com subtext that's TishPro T I S C H pro.smashcut.com subText and now back to the show. Yeah, so there's an expectation of how things are going to go down, maybe based on movies or, you know, how some idea that the FBI follows the same kind of script every single time. And so the FBI is trying to take off on some sort of. Or at least this one guy in the FBI on some sort of Vietnam fantasy, which is very reminiscent of, like, you know, what we were talking about in Apocalypse now and all that sort of thing, which maybe this guy could have been in the Vietnam War or he could just like Vietnam War movies.
So there's this idea of the sort of shared culture and the shared script that everybody seems to know and seems to be working from. And only by stepping outside of that script can you achieve success in defending yourself or in defeating the evil people.
28:51 Wes: Yeah, I think that's interesting because this is caricature and this movie is a satire. These aren't even realistic. Right. For all the bad things the FBI and bureaucrats and the police and all the rest of the antagonists do, they're not bad in precisely this way. It's more complicated. One of the Johnson and Johnson guys says to the police chief, Dwayne T. Robinson, another name that I love.
29:20 Erin: Oh, yeah, Dwayne, Dwayne. He says. Bruce Willis says a really funny way.
29:26 Wes: Played by Paul Gleason of the Breakfast Club, right?
29:30 Erin: Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh.
29:32 Wes: School teacherly kind of vibe.
29:35 Erin: Yeah.
29:36 Wes: So representative of authority of the bad, hypocritical sort. We could talk about how that's represented. So one of the FBI guys says to him, we'll try to let you know if we commandeer your police force. Or he's like, if we have to commandeer your men, we'll try to let you know. So exaggerations for comic effect, but also pure caricature with the Saigon thing and the helicopter and running up the armored vehicle up the steps, throwing caution to the wind, all of that stuff. But it works, right? It doesn't ever seem unnatural because the movie is not.
It doesn't need to be. It's a satire. And even Hans Gruber is over the top. There's not meant to be a realism really here. There's a parable like or dreamlike quality to this movie. So the strength of the movie lies in its, like I said before, its thematic antagonists. The oppressive social forces that the threaten family and marriage. Those feel real and they are real. And even if for fun, you have to make your villain charming and classically educated and all that stuff, and you have to make the police totally inept and the FBI totally gung ho.
Doesn't change the fact that those caricatures may more honestly represent the forces at work.
30:57 Erin: I really like what you say at the beginning about how place. I mean, this isn't real. It's la, right? Like the cliches are movie cliches. And that's, I think, part of the reason why it works so well is because it is in fantasy land, La la land. It's also like the over the top element, I think is also exploited by the TV journalist thread too, which again, like, I don't know, I just. I wish that was a little bit more prominent in the film because I think that that really dovetails nicely with the movie's satire. You know, I kind of knew the moment when Holly slaps the TV journalist guy that he would hope that they caught that on camera, you know, and so I was satisfied rather than being disappointed or say, oh, of course, you know, I was satisfied that he turned and said, you know, did you get that?
You know, the kids being interviewed saying, you know, mommy and daddy come home. You know, it's just like so delicious and exploitative and gross. You know, it's kind of amazing to think that this is also like pre OJ la, but it sort of. It's part of that continuum. Or maybe it started that continuum, I don't know. But the idea of the intrusion of the press into the pressworthy moment seems like a particularly LA kind of problem.
32:13 Wes: Yeah. Your use of this word, exploitation, because that's a word that connects some of these different villains from the corporate to the criminal or terroristic to the media and so on.
32:25 Erin: Yeah.
32:26 Wes: In thinking about whether this is a Christmas movie, I thought about the fact that when I was trying to make my list of which I've been talking about, of protagonists and antagonists, and then I thought there's kind of A duality within Christmas itself. And I was remembering our very first episode about the apartment and the scenes of licentiousness going on at an office Christmas party.
32:53 Erin: Yep, yep.
32:54 Wes: People making out everywhere when McClane is interestingly thrust into this office environment. So there's a strong class element here too. Right. So he's way over his head, class wise. He's right off the. Just gotten off the plane in LA cop from New York walks into this party, is offered champagne. I think he still is the teddy bear in the car. I guess he leaves the teddy bear in the car around a bunch of very well educated, cultured people, one of whom is his wife and is wearing a Rolex now, which will become very significant because at the end of the movie, that's the thing that has to be undone in order to send Hans Gruber to his death.
He's holding onto that Rolex. So he is really out of place when it comes to status in this environment. But we also get the association with sexual temptation and looser values and not just a people overly focusing on advancement and becoming powerful and rich, but the opportunities that an office environment offers for infidelity, but especially during a Christmas party. So what interested me was this way in which the celebratory, jolly aspect of Christmas, it's meant to be about family. And the movie makes this very clear. That's one version of Christmas being at home with your spouse and your kids.
But the other side of that is drinking a lot and partying. So there's an internal split within Christmas. And I think it makes for a good Christmas movie to highlight them.
34:33 Erin: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I also noticed that especially with that couple, like sort of getting caught in the middle of a tryst or something like that. Yeah, it was very, you know, it's sort of more of the rated R version of what I actually love about. There are a lot of office Christmas parties in movies in the 50s and 60s, interestingly, because I think so many people like, especially with women entering the workforce and sort of this like, new licentiousness in movies too. It sort of comes in through the office in a weird way.
So my favorite is in this is a wholesome version of this, which is in the movie desk, set from 1957 with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, where they just get drunk and they have a really merry old time. And there's a joyousness to that and a jolly, merry kind of Christmas vibe. Right. It's about, you know, celebrations are kind of about this indulgence and having fun in that way and eating too much, drinking too much. But then. Yeah, but you're right. Like, the intrusion of the sensual, I think, also serves to kind of undermine those structures that are, I think, also being subverted by the office, which is you have these.
Even in, like, the Santa Clause, it's like the single dad who works too much and isn't home. So there's already something sort of broken about an office culture and obviously, like the tropes about secretaries and. Yeah, like you say, the ability of the office to break up a family, whether that be because you're having an affair with someone you're working with or because you're working long hours away from the home and you're away from the home for long periods of time or
36:15 Wes: you have to move for your new job.
36:17 Erin: Right. I think there's also a duality, you know, not just the sort of sexual licentiousness, but I think that there's an inherent duality in Christmas for people who are. I mean, it's an extremely lonely holiday if you don't have a family and that it brings all of these things to the fore. Right. Like, if you've. I think I'm. I'm sure people have experienced holidays where it's like, right after a loved one has died and the holiday takes on this really painful aspect where everything is sort of magnified. So I think, like, the holiday office party is a really interesting sort of demonstration of that, where you have everyone's sort of like, good and bad qualities really get magnified in that kind of dissociative environment.
36:57 Wes: You're making me think about what is it that Christmas is celebrating exactly? Other than the competing. What would you call them? There's Christianity, there's the Christian celebration on the one hand, and then there's the pagan thing with the tree, and they got fused together somehow. And we've been talking about family and the association between Christmas and family. Is there anything else to say about what it is that Christmas celebrates?
37:25 Erin: Well, there's all that in there. I mean, there's Christ's two natures, right, as God and man. There's this idea of there's obviously the family at the heart of the Christmas story, but at the same time, you know, Mary is an unwed mother. Even though she has a husband, she's kind of like a single mom at the same time. Right.
37:42 Wes: Like there's knocked up at the office party.
37:45 Erin: Hey, hey.
37:45 Wes: Now the one with God. Sorry.
37:51 Erin: She has, you know, the man helping take care of her. And all that. But she also has. There's the class element there, too, frankly. Like, they can't even get. She can't even give birth indoors. Right. They have to go to the. They're isolated from the. Whatever party maybe is going on at the inn. I don't know. They don't have anything to celebrate yet because it's. They don't know what's happening. But there's an isolating element of that and of being, you know, very shortly. Being on the run and. Anyway. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of inherent conflict in the whole nature of Christmas.
38:24 Wes: And like John McClane, they were probably barefoot.
38:27 Erin: Exactly.
38:28 Wes: I mean, they were wearing sandals, probably. But sure, there's a lot of barefoot stuff going on. But what do we. You know, that's. That's.
38:34 Erin: Well, I'm sure Jesus was born barefoot, so that's obviously the symbolism.
38:37 Wes: Yeah. But that's one of the things I love about this movie. This oft noted thing is that McClane does all of his action stuff while he's barefoot and gets his feet cut up on glass so that there's a kind of stigmata element. Right. Going on. And the suggestion of a Christ figure. And all of this is set up at the very beginning of the movie where it's his fear of flying that leads to all of this, because it's, you know, another passenger says, oh, if you. I'll tell you what helps. Just ball your feet up like fists on the carpet. And for some reason that'll alleviate your fear of flying.
39:17 Erin: Yeah, I did not get that.
39:18 Wes: It's a weird idea, but that's what he's trying to do, and somehow it's working. Maybe it's just a de stressing thing in general, but that's what McClane is doing, and that's why he's caught with his shoes off, so to speak. There's something here that's being made of his suffering, obviously. And this is one of the interesting things about the casting of Bruce Willis in this role and the vulnerability involved in it, and him tearing up and almost crying and giving his last words via Powell to his wife, you know, telling her he apologizes. He's not like one of the typical action heroes of the time, just all muscled up and out to do everything like a Rambo, kill everything in sight.
He's vulnerable and he's wisecracking and he's reluctant. You know, he probably wouldn't even be engaged in this fight if he didn't absolutely have to be. He's not A hero, necessarily, who's gonna run into the burning building to. To save people or anything like that. There's a fair amount of cynicism. So I'm trying to draw some kind of connection between those things and the suffering that he does in the movie. I guess I associate it with working class suffering and people who just get down to work and do the hard things that have to be done in a society.
The real physical things. Construction or. Or being a cop or something like that, as opposed to being part of a corporation. I don't know. I haven't thought through this whole. The role of the bear, the bloody bare feet and his suffering in this. You know, apart from saying, oh, that's very Christ. Like. I'm not sure how you connect it thematically.
40:55 Erin: Yeah, well, I really like that he's. This is a working class symbol, that he's, you know, part of this infrastructure of the country that gets the hard work done. You know, this sort of silent people who make everything run for the corporate types.
41:09 Wes: Yeah. I love the fact that so much is made of Californian this. In fact, I was thinking about Annie hall and how Woody Allen just gets physically ill when he's in California. Or not Woody Allen, but Alvy Singer,
41:23 Erin: as do we all.
41:24 Wes: And I almost misremembered that. That. I mean, I did kind of misremember before rewatching it that McClane had some kind of physical reaction to California as well. But yeah, what we get from him is a few comments about California. What is it about California that's so objectionable to a New Yorker? Part of it is just the level
41:43 Erin: of don't get me started.
41:45 Wes: Or he says fucking California is what he says. One of his comments he makes after he is. I think it's when the couple is actually making out at the party before they go off into the room. The couple is going to get punished for their sexuality. Later he'll make one of his California remarks. So loose values, maybe. Weirdness, flakiness, less grit, less practicality. It's the same thing in Ghostbusters. It kind of represents the heart and soul of the nation and the working class. But its vices as well as its virtues, gruffness, lack of friendliness, lack of refinement, maybe, but also gets things done. And ultimately heart of gold type of thing.
42:29 Erin: Well, I think that California has its own lack of refinement. But I definitely, yeah, I associate New York with real life and real people. Not that California is full of automatons or something. I mean, my experience of being there is like, not being able to believe that people actually lived there all year round and that that was the weather all year round. Like, it seems like the kind of place that is a vacation spot that no one should be living in because there's a lack of grit required to live there. And, like, you should suffer for at least part of the year as.
43:00 Wes: Yeah.
43:01 Erin: Just as a human being, you should. You should have to contend with something. Right, Right.
43:04 Wes: And so people lose their connection to reality and I think is the implication. I mean, this is, of course, we're talking about gross generalizations and stereotypes and associations that are. That are unfair, of course, to the complexity of places, obviously. But that. Yeah, this is like what these places, I think, signify at some level.
43:23 Erin: Yeah.
43:23 Wes: I was going to say that's. It's the semiotics of these places, but that's a very California thing to say. No, it's not even a classical education thing to say, is it? To use the word semiotics in a.
43:33 Erin: Sure, it is. Well, it depends on how recently you've stopped.
43:36 Wes: No postmodern education. We were talking about McClane being a jerk and that being his arc. To apologize for. What is it he says specifically about what he's apologizing for?
43:48 Erin: For not being supportive of her, I think.
43:50 Wes: Yeah.
43:50 Erin: Are happy for her. There is one thing she should apologize for, which is the fact that her perm registers at, like, a 9.2 on the Richter scale. It's just devastating.
44:01 Wes: It makes her look older than she is, which I just don't. Do not get 80s fashion or the hair especially. It ages people.
44:09 Erin: Yeah. I mean, she looks better now than she did in that movie as, like, an older woman. Like, she's a very beautiful older woman. And in that movie, it's.
44:19 Wes: She's beautiful in the movie, except that the halo, the hair obscures.
44:24 Erin: It's so traumatizing. It just. Yeah. It ruins everything.
44:28 Wes: Yeah. Okay. So she has to apologize for that. Is there anything else? She has to apologize. She is wearing a Rolex.
44:36 Erin: That's true. And an ugly outfit.
44:39 Wes: She is hanging out with an enormous douchebag in Ellis.
44:42 Erin: Yeah, but she's keeping him. She's fine.
44:45 Wes: She is. She's keeping him in his place. You can't really have a movie in which a woman is the.
44:50 Erin: Is the. What?
44:51 Wes: What is it? I'm thinking of the sitcom parody of the guy, you know, the family guy who. Who is kind of an idiot. Right. And the wife is always smarter and puts up with him and has to be his better half and all that. Stuff. Are there other movies in which the guy is the better half?
45:07 Erin: Yeah, there are, but I don't think that's the dynamic here. Like, I think that. I think that Bruce Willis is just being selfish. He's not like an idiot or an oaf or whatever. He just is being insecure and.
45:18 Wes: But it's working class, you know, despite his criticism of machismo, there's that you kind of suspect that that's part of what's going on with him as his masculine pride, which. There's the wife beater. There's a connection between this and status. So being an idiot is not the most precise term, but it is, you know, being obtuse in this particular way, which is connected to lack of refinement and class stereotypes and things. One of the interesting ways in which class is used in this movie is just with the use of classical music and its association with the villains. And it's associated with both the corporate types and with the pseudo terrorists, as I like to call them. But, you know, when McClane first arrives at the party, there's a quartet, I think, playing.
46:05 Erin: Oh, right, right.
46:06 Wes: Or there's some musicians there playing classical music. And I think we get a reaction of McClane to that and various other things that I think he sees as pretentious happening at the party. And then there's the wonderful use of Beethoven's Ode to Joy throughout the whole movie, which I think from what I read, the composer of the score was actually reluctant to do and had to be persuaded to do by the director. But I mean, it is really fabulous because it's used for the entire score. So even, you know, early on when the Gruber's gang is arriving in there, or there's a shot of them moving in their van and you hear the low notes, maybe it's a cello or something of part of Ode to Joy as a.
Made to sound sinister. Right. Made to sound foreboding. And so it makes use of it for any different emotion you want to get out of the film. And it climaxes, like I said, with them luxuriating in their bearer bonds, where you get the climactic moment of that piece of music.
47:10 Erin: Yeah, it's another over the top German in the movie. I guess if they wanted to make a statement about Nazis, it would have to be Wagner. But these aren't ideologues, they're just Germans.
47:21 Wes: But yeah, there's no Nazi stereotype here. It's interesting, I mean, that Germanness is used, is exploited for villainy here. But it's A very different type of Germanness.
47:32 Erin: Right. I like to the. I don't know if you would call the interior of the plaza beautiful. It's not my taste. I mean, certainly it's like an impressive building and the waterfall and the sort of water element that then Bruce Willis will, like, hide in.
47:49 Wes: I think it's a replication of something Frank Lloyd Wright did, actually.
47:53 Erin: Well, there are a lot of elements of water. The waterfall house inside. The biggest fan of Frank Lloyd Wright, I mean, I respect it, but I wouldn't want to live there. I wouldn't want to live in Nakatomi Plaza. But also because, you know, the foundation is probably a little off now. But the element of that architectural model that's in Takagi's office.
48:15 Wes: You're talking about one of those actual models?
48:19 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
48:20 Wes: You know, I honestly don't know.
48:21 Erin: Well, there's a beautiful. Just beautiful look to that. And this idea of which, you know, Hans Gruber admires so the sort of like, visual art or the architecture of the Nakatomi Plaza interiors, anyway. And this model in the office and, you know, the expensive suits and the score are all this kind of nice. These high culture elements that this corporate world, even though it's corporate, is participating in. They're not just putting up, you know, tract houses or even putting up big radio towers or putting satellites and other, you know, celestial debris up into the atmosphere. Like, they're actually making things that look beautiful. And Hans Gruber also, like. Even though he's a. I like pseudo terrorist, that's a really good term for him. He also, of course, appreciates, like, the beautiful. And so it's fitting that he should have Ode to Joy as his theme music. It's funny.
49:19 Wes: Yeah. You know, you can accuse the movie of being unfair to, like, you know, again, to a lot of these different antagonists, including classical education and culture, if you take it too literally. But on the other hand, it's part of what makes Hans Gruber such an interesting villain and I think probably changed the way villains were done in movies. Right. I think this is kind of an innovative thing they did. I'm not certain. The well educated, charming, genuinely very smart and clever, formidable villain. That's something that works really well.
49:50 Erin: That's actually a trope of Nazi villainy. The highly educated villain, the reasonable cultured villain. That's what makes the whole Nazi trope in movies so chilling. And also in real life, I think the stereotype of the person who's been too cultured. And I mean, Heart of Darkness, what we've Learned our persistent theme for months now has been this kind of villain. And like, I think of the Third man, which is a movie, I hope we do at some point, or anything in which James Mason is a villain. Right. I think this is all part of that continuum.
50:30 Wes: Yeah. I don't know how long American movies had, if they had. Or if so, how long they had kind of gone without doing that. Honestly don't know. I think there's a trend of trying to emulate this. Right. Once the whole Hans Gruber approach to a villain. I think they tried to. Once people saw how well that worked, trying to replicate it.
50:48 Erin: Didn't they replicate it within this film series? Because didn't they use Jeremy Irons.
50:53 Wes: Yes.
50:53 Erin: For something. Is he supposed to be his brother?
50:56 Wes: I think so. Yes.
50:58 Erin: That works really well. They could be brothers in real life, don't you think? Like, they have a very similar.
51:04 Wes: Absolutely. Yeah.
51:05 Erin: Not only because they're two Englishmen pretending to be Germans, but that's kind of a niche. That's a family trait. But yeah.
51:14 Wes: Something that Rickman does very well, I think, too, with the English accent with a slight undertone. It's a weird Mutt accent. Right?
51:24 Erin: Right.
51:24 Wes: It's gotta be really hard to pull off.
51:27 Erin: I love when he's like Clay. Bill Clay or whatever he gives his name as when he plays the fake hostage. And he does like a. Pretty good.
51:38 Wes: Does it. Great. Yeah.
51:39 Erin: American. Is it Southern? Is it California? I don't know. It works really well.
51:45 Wes: Yeah. From what I understand, they were trying to figure out how to have McClane and Gruber meet one on one at some point. And they were having trouble figuring that out until someone overheard Rickman doing his American accent while socializing with people on the set.
52:02 Erin: That's great.
52:02 Wes: And they thought, yeah, that's it. He can pretend to be one of the hostages.
52:07 Erin: That's awesome.
52:08 Wes: Yeah. Okay, cool. Shall we break here and we can talk about a few more things during post script? I think I will ask you about whether and to the extent to which you enjoy the action part of this movie and maybe we will get through to a few other things that we've left out of this discussion.
52:28 Erin: Sure. Ranking movie perms. Yeah.
52:30 Wes: Movie perms. We need to explore that issue for
52:32 Erin: a. Yeah, I think that's. That's really the heart of the film. So.
52:36 Wes: All right. Thank you.
52:38 Erin: Thank you.
52:46 Wes: Postscript. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Com.
Mad as Hell in “Network” (1976)
Nov 22, 2021
Diana Christensen is a television executive in search of an angry show—something that articulates the rage of the average viewer. In Howard Beale, failed newscaster turned mad-as-hell prophet, she seems to get exactly what she’s looking for. Yet in doing so, she reduces political and social discontent to a form of entertainment focused on generating audience excitement and television ratings. Wes & Erin discuss the 1976 film Network, which seems to suggest that with the advent of mass media, acts of anti-establishment defiance tend to be incorporated by the systems they oppose.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:13 Erin: Diana Christensen is a television executive in search of an angry show, something that articulates the rage of the average viewer in Howard Beale, failed newscaster turned mad as hell Prophet. She seems to get exactly what she's looking for, but in doing so, she reduces political and social discontent to a form of entertainment focused on generating audience excitement and television ratings. On today's episode, we're discussing the 1976 film Network, which seems to suggest that with the advent of mass media, acts of anti establishment defiance tend to be incorporated by the systems they oppose. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.
0:58 Wes: So, Erin, I've seen Network a few times, but I've never tried to figure it out entirely, never tried to put all of it together because there's so much in the movie. And I was thinking about this sort of typical gloss on the film, which is that it's a critique of news as entertainment and that it's commonly thought of as prescient. So Fox News or other very politicized news networks, or reality TV or daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer. So it's often thought of as very prescient in that regard. But when I watched the movie, it took me some time to figure out what it is I thought was actually being satirized.
Right. Is it the news industry? Is it the audiences? Is it rapaciousness of certain executives in seeking ratings? Is it multinational corporations? Is it the very idea of protest? Is it counterculture itself? That's the subject of satire. It's not very clear. And then when I, doing a little background reading, Paddy Chayefsky, the screenwriter himself, was worried about what he called the lack of satirical clarity in the movie. And that's in part because he tries to fit so much into the movie, but part because I think there's this kind of fractal quality to it where.
And this is kind of Paddy Chayefsky's character, where there's one critique and then there's a critique of the critique. And that just never ends. It keeps going down the rabbit hole of self critique. But anyway, I thought I'd start out by. By just asking, what is this movie about? What is it actually satirizing?
2:46 Erin: Yeah, that's a good question. I think that what I was struck by this time around is this idea of the audience as being refracted, which is part and parcel of television, but the only time we really see them is in the live studio audience setting. And Especially, of course, in the famous ending scene, which I always forget actually happens. And then I'm always surprised.
3:10 Wes: I totally forgot about that as well.
3:12 Erin: Yeah. Like, why is that somehow the least memorable part of this? The least memorable, famous part of this movie?
3:18 Wes: It's the most surreal.
3:19 Erin: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess compared to other stuff, it's not that shocking. I think it's probably the audience. And I think that this film is a little bit cruel, maybe toward the audience because they're like the missing element, you know, despite the fact that they're brought into the studios. That's really an aberration, Right. To have a live studio audience for a news show and they're referred to. I like the word you use, like fractally. I think I'll steal it and say that the audience is referred to fractally or conceptually, in terms of shares, in terms of ratings.
And we see the effect that the show has on them or the success that it's having with the public only through these kinds of inside baseball expressions which are used from the very beginning, from the very opening narration in which we're sort of expected to be familiar with the parlance of network TV executives. I mean, it's presenting this film to us as something that we will enjoy or recognize. And therefore, it's sort of talking up to us. But then there's this vague figure of, you know, the American TV watcher who is being talked down to. And I think part of that is maybe the snobbery of film versus TV inherent in a movie about this problem.
Right. If it's a film criticizing tv, then it's okay, you know, you've made the right choice by buying your ticket and going to see this rather than staying at home and watching whatever was popular in 1975 MASH. I don't know.
4:57 Wes: How is it that we are not the ones, right, chanting I'm mad as hell in the studio audience. Although it would be different, right, if we were watching network in some way, we identify with this critique. And if we suspect as a satire that there's an angry critique there and that we're rah, rah, rah about it, then we fall into that same trap as Howard Beale's audience. Right. I think some people who might know little about the film and know if they know anything, it would be that mad as hell line. Mad as hell. And I'm not gonna take it anymore.
Iconic scene of people going to their windows and going out and screaming that out into the night air. Which seems like a moment of Triumph seems like a moment of real rebellion and authenticity, but of course turns out to be bullshit. So similarly, I think we have to be uneasy as an audience of the film and we have to wonder if the screenwriter isn't actually angry at us and if. If we aren't actually being ridiculed even. Even for our engagement with this very film. I had always loved the film and I love Paddy Chayefsky and I love especially the Hospital with George C.
Scott. And what attracts me about Chayefsky is his long dramatic speeches that he gives to the characters. And he gives them. He gives those speeches to them pretty indiscriminately, right? Everyone gets to be a mad prophet at some point, whether it's the executive, Frank Hackett or Beal or Max, which you might think of that as a flaw of characterization to give everyone those sorts of speeches. But also it gives it a more dramatic play like quality. And the speeches are exciting and they're suited to satire. So I always love that. But it's a little bit skewed because now when I view these movies, I'm preparing to comment on them and I'm taking notes and I think it takes me out of the more immediate enjoyment unless I do two viewings, you know, one where I try not to think at all about the fact that we're going to record.
And then the second one where I do notes. The second time it felt less dramatically compelling to me because of the kind of high level abstraction of the satire. And it becomes increasingly surreal. You mentioned that ending. It gets progressively more surreal as the film goes on, despite the introduction of a romantic subplot and the breakup with the wife and all that. But, you know, this attempt to introduce some humanity. But overall, you know, I still found myself very interested in this recursive or fractal critique of. Critique of critique.
Especially with the way in which some attempt at authenticity gets just co. Opted. Every attempt to sort of break out of the inauthentic position gets co opted. So for instance, Beale's had enough and he's been left childish. Widower with a 12 rating and an 8 share shares. That's the word is a line I love because the way it combines real personal tragedy with the overarching question of ratings, you know, the artificial outside of life tragedy of ratings. So he's had enough and it's all bullshit and he takes his stand and threatens suicide. And it's an exciting moment where it seems like something authentic has broken out, but ultimately it's something that excites Diana, the ruthless executive, is interested only in ratings.
And yet is excited by counterculture. Is excited by this group of terrorists and their antics. Not because she agrees with their politics, but just because she's excited by the chance to make what she calls angry shows. To do something that will articulate the rage of the public. Give the public an outlet for its rage. Many people today would think of that as a legitimate activity. To give people who are fed up with the status quo. Or fed up with certain systemic injustices, whatever you want to call it, an opportunity to vent that rage. And to do it through news programs, to do it through entertainment.
So she co opts, she takes Beale's show and turns it into a ridiculous carnival, right? And she does the same thing with the terrorists. You know, there's the great scene where they're negotiating the TV contract. The terrorists somehow become more interested in TV than they do in their own violent revolutionary activity. That co opting effect is something that really interested me in this.
9:27 Erin: To go back to a couple of things you said. I don't know that the question of Beale's ratings is so outside the personal. One of the main reasons that there is a hierarchy set up here with film over TV is because film is not subject to the slings and arrows of television viewership. And a lot of TV lives and dies by identification with particular personalities. And sort of like an immediate gut response to someone, you know. At a movie theater you have something that's been distilled through a group of people who are trying to anticipate what they think, their audiences or.
And of that audience, you know, who they think is going to like this particular film. It is a business and it is geared towards people. But it takes at this time six months to a year to put something together and then to package it for distribution. And it's advertised. Movie theaters sell concessions and they want to sell tickets. But there is a very, very big delay. And I think that that is part of what, you know, Chayefsky, by simply by choosing film as the medium for his message. Though he did do a lot of teleplays and stuff like that is making a kind of commentary.
And I think his experience in teleplays is reason enough for him to know what he's talking about. The chosen medium of this story is very much, I think, establishing this kind of hierarchy and saying television is subject to little teeny tiny changes in people's opinion of you personally. Right as the talking head in the middle of the screen. And so I think that Howard, very Rightfully takes it personally. It is personal, I think. But I'd say, like, in general, you know, what you love about the film is what annoyed me this time. You know, I've often said, I think in this podcast before, that I really don't like issue films.
You know, that is films of explicit and self consciousness, social commentary. I've enjoyed Network in the past and that's not like a blanket rule. But the speeches this time got very tiresome to me. It was like, oh, God, you know, we haven't even gotten to the Ned Beatty speech yet. There's a sense of like, okay, everybody has to have their little moment, which. And it just was so loud and so histrionic. And I don't mean to be down on it because I think it's very well written and I love Chayefsky, I love Marty and I love the catered affair. And my grandfather knew Paddy Chayefsky, they went to school together.
So I like him. But this has aged to me in a way, weirdly. I think that the subject matter is as timely as ever and I think it's beautifully written in a lot of ways. But I think that the presentation of it and the sort of grandstanding of it and even absurd things like Peter Finch's accent sort of coming in and
12:19 Wes: out, really, I didn't notice that. I was so impressed that. But I wasn't looking for it. I didn't learn he was Australian until after I saw it. And I thought, wow. But, yeah, I suppose if you're looking for it, it must come out.
12:30 Erin: Yeah, well, it comes out almost English, I think.
12:33 Wes: I know he does. I looked up in interviews with him, he sounds like posh English with like a hint of Australian.
12:38 Erin: Yeah, he was a real jerk, so. Oh, yeah, yeah. So that just further evidence with a heart attack.
12:46 Wes: Yeah, right. How is he a jerk?
12:49 Erin: So he was just a terrible alcoholic and womanizer and he broke up. She had responsibility for it too, but he broke up Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier's marriage during this tour of Australia. That's right.
13:01 Wes: I forgot about that. That's the guy. Okay. Wow. What a guy to leave Laurence Olivier for.
13:08 Erin: If you could see him when he was younger, you would understand it a little better. But I think that the. Yeah, obviously this is silly. I have like, my own personal likes and dislikes. I like his performance in this movie. But, yeah, personally not a fan of him. But anyway, so I just. This time that really bothered me. It seemed like it was moving constantly from one high octane moment to the next. And I'm sure that's, you know, that's the point. That's the structure, that's the invocation of television that's happening in the film. But I started to get exhausted with the whole thing and I didn't have much patience for it this time around.
13:45 Wes: Yeah, you were saying that you liked Finch's performance. I do as well. The way he captures Beale's disorganized madness is very cool. The facial expressions. So that's very good. And that character is very good. You were talking about the self conscious social commentary in the, in the film and the sort of tiring speeches. And I think you're right. I don't think it can ever really escape that accusation in a way that it's engaged in the kind of moralizing that it seems to critique. And perhaps that's a, you know, that may be a problem for comedy and for satire in general.
There's an anti moralistic strain in comedy, but it goes back to this whole co opting problem that I was talking about. So it wants to break out of the frame of moralism, but it's. That's just a kind of metamoralism or it's just a kind of attempt at a higher moralism. And sometimes that attempt can seem almost nihilistic because it's too good for any particular ethical position. It's too good to side with the audience. It's too good to side with the corporations, with the TV executives. It's too good to side with any particular art form, except maybe implicitly film.
So there's that aspect to it. But I think I'm more sympathetic to the nihilistic quality of that. So, for instance, when I hear those speeches, I always hear them as being satirized. Every speech puts the character in a position of being absurd and silly.
15:19 Erin: Well, the Beatty one is most obviously a parody of Beale's particular evangelical style. Right.
15:25 Wes: Yeah. And Beatty is, you know, he starts out, that scene, starts out with him saying that he is a salesman. It's been said he can sell anything. He's very friendly and amiable as he walks him into that very grand conference room with all the little green lights, goes to the other end of the table and then just immediately launches into that routine, which is tailor made. You know, it's a salesman's tailor made routine to convince Beale that he is a higher godlike figure who can instruct Beale on what he should be preaching next. And he even jumps out of character for a second to say, am I getting through to you?
It's an incredible speech, but, yeah, it obviously lives within the realm of satire. And at that point, things have gotten very surreal. And ultimately, again, the surrealism will climax in the assassination of Beale. Right. This decision to assassinate him is completely as broken out of any realistic narrative frame.
16:26 Erin: Oh, I think that's done very well, though, because you really get the sense that they have no other choice. In a weird way.
16:33 Wes: Yeah, it does. The plot tries to motivate it, you know.
16:37 Erin: Yeah.
16:38 Wes: In that scene where they talk about the amount of money that they could lose, you know, there's every attempt to motivate that decision because without that, it's very dissatisfying for an audience. But, you know, I still think it is very surreal. You know, the different speeches that Beale gives. Whether it's the everything is bullshit and what does this have to do with the price of bread? And I don't have to tell you that things are bad, that a dollar buys a nickel's worth. I think that's the kind of speech that many audiences will, when they first see it, take that at face value and say, yeah, this is all bullshit.
We are controlled by oil states and there's systemic injustice and institutions are messed up. And you could go either way, politically, you could do this in either direction and then react to that grievance as a sort of central organizing principle of one's ethical activity. So I don't think that to many audiences, that will seem, on the face of it, implausible, at least first. But of course, it becomes clear that that is also bullshit. That attempt to step out of the realm of bullshit is only a step deeper into it. And Beale, later on, right, can pontificate after he's been inspired by Jensen.
He can just as convincingly pontificate about what's finished is the idea that this is a country dedicated to freedom and the flourishing of every individual democracy is finished. The time has come to say dehumanization is not such a bad word. Great stuff like that. So I think almost every speech in here has that quality of being meant to be taken as bullshit. We just never. We never escape that. You know, on a larger level, you could take this as another, which I've brought up a lot on the show, but as another critique of the problem of representation and its inevitable failures.
18:37 Erin: I think there's a way to do this that's a little bit. If the film wasn't so in love with these speeches, then they would be shorter and. And then it wouldn't be quite so. You know, the fact that it monopolizes the film for such long periods of time. And I will say, and this is. This is gonna be pretty embarrassing, but I'll say it anyway. When I first saw this, when I was, I think maybe 19, something like that, I did not realize that this was a comedy. I thought that Beale was really seeing visions. And I just. I totally did not get it. I didn't get anything about it.
And partially I think that was because of my lack of experience with 70s film at that time in my life. And I had almost no prerequisite, you know, for this experience of seeing this film. This is one of the. Actually the first real 70s films that I had seen besides like Star wars, you know, and action films. Far be it from me to suggest how to edit this film or how to rewrite the script, but I think that for me it would work better if the speeches were shorter. It wouldn't feel as though there was so much importance and pretense hanging on them and so much of a seeming right to derail the movie and to get you signed on.
Right. And they'd be a little lighter. And I think also, like, tonally, I think the movie's really interesting, but the blackness of the comedy is so black at times that that also doesn't work for me. So I think just like a lighter touch in everything. Which isn't to say that there shouldn't be jokes about these, like, really serious issues, but I think that there should be more of them and that they shouldn't be interspersed with such long periods of seriousness. For me, the best scene is totally that script scene with the Great Ahmed Khan, the script negotiation.
I mean, that is just like, laugh out loud hilarious.
20:26 Wes: Yeah. How does he end that scene? What does he say at the very end?
20:29 Erin: He shoots the gun. And then he's like, now let us return to subsidiary rights or something. Something like that.
20:35 Wes: And then he. Well, first he says, give her the fucking overhead clause. Which is a great. It's a moment where the corporate mentality or the tv really, the TV mentality has again co opted or infected what started out as genuine enthusiasm and genuine political commitment.
20:57 Erin: The performance of Laureen Hobbs is one of my favorites in the film. And I love this moment where she's exploding over this distribution clause and how the Communist Party isn't going to see a penny of their earnings until they go into syndication or something like that. Like the Communist Party is going to be a beneficiary of this extremely capitalist exchange over this TV program, which is just hilarious. I Love that element of it. It's really great.
21:23 Wes: Yeah, the irony is great with all that. But, yeah, I think you're right about the film is heavy. I don't think anyone could argue against that. And so it can be hard to. To take in a way. You know, it might even be tedious. Now, this. I never felt this way when I was younger. To me, this sort of hit the sweet spot in every single way. I just. I could watch it through being completely wrapped with complete attention. And like I said, in the current viewing, I didn't enjoy it as much as I did in the past. But I was also trying to think hard about everything that was going on.
21:56 Erin: So I also remember being really disturbed by the fact that William Holden was dropping F bombs and had a sex scene with Faye Dunaway. I was really upset by that.
22:08 Wes: Yeah.
22:08 Erin: And I'm not even a big William Holden fan. But for some reason, that violated a boundary that I didn't realize I had as a, you know, an old movie person.
22:16 Wes: It is. It is weird. You know, even I felt that, yeah, old movies don't mean the same thing to you as to me, but they mean enough. That. That was weird. But I think, you know, with the heaviness comes some interesting ideas. And you. Repeatedly, in the movie, you kind of watch the line between words and actions get compromised. Like Diana practically inciting terrorist acts so that they can be filmed. And then the line between passion and cynicism in the beginning. It's interesting with Diana, when it starts out, it's a little bit hard to tell what she's so excited by. You're asking the question, is it. Is she a communist? Is she pro terrorist? Is she? Or pro guerrilla fighter? You know, freedom fighter?
23:02 Erin: Of course she is. She's. She's Ms. Bonnie Parker.
23:05 Wes: Yeah, right. Or is she completely cynical? And I don't think that question is ever actually really resolved. And that's part of the point of the movie, is that those two things are not as easy to distinguish as one might think. So this total attunement to the pleasures of an audience on the one hand and to getting ratings, and then on the other hand, the attunement to justice and to authenticity and to, you know, even aesthetic pretensions to being an artist, those things are actually harder to distinguish than we might think. And again, going back to that scene with the.
With the Ecumenical Liberation army signing a TV contract and being just as ruthless. And when they find themselves tasked with that, they can do it as devotedly and as expertly as I Assume that they're doing their bank robberies. They can be totally absorbed in that new task. Just as they were in the old. And with the same dedication and passion, almost. So those lines break down. And you ultimately wonder, what ought we do for an audience? What does an audience have a right to demand? Again, we can't escape the moralism of this. And the question.
It's the old question and dispute between Plato and Aristotle. About what representation does to people educationally, emotionally, psychologically, morally. And what our entertainments and art and all the rest of it ought to do to safeguard that. That's part of what's going on here. And then the question is, do we cater to audiences at all? What are we trying to do? Aren't we trying to make them enjoy themselves? Even if we are literary novelists, you know, how can we even get away from them?
24:53 Erin: Well, I think that in terms of the way to read Diana's motivations. We're told how to by Max, eventually, right? She is tv.
25:01 Wes: TV incarnate, right.
25:03 Erin: And I think that all of her instincts we see throughout the film, they are correct. You know, when she wants to pull the plug on Beale and they don't. You know, when she sees the potential that no one else can see. She's a pure symbol, in a way. She's a vessel. So in a way, she's the only character, really, who has pure motivations. The fact that Dunaway makes this role work, by the way, is, like, remarkable. I think that she's the best part about this film. But her motivations seem to be just what is the best for tv. And where that overlaps with turning a profit for the company.
Of course, there's a significant overlap there. But she's not in it for the sake of pure social climbing in the way that Hackett is. So Hackett's just this corporate guy who is trying to work his way up the ladder. And even Max, who's an extremely unlikely and sort of bizarre choice to be the hero and the moral center of the film. In a way. Even he has this whole self concept which is tied up in being a grand old man of tv. And he sells his best friend down the river for a while. In a way, by becoming romantically entangled with Diana. It's like his morals are compromised.
Not only because of the fact that he's having an affair, of course. But this idea that he's taken in by tv symbolically. Right. So Diana has a very strange purity of character about this.
26:29 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very good. And the reason I say that is because, of course, I'm going to. I'm going to recruit that for my own thesis about the collapse between cynicism and enthusiasm. Right. She may transcend that. She may just transcend the distinction between those two things.
26:45 Erin: Sure.
26:45 Wes: Between genuine political or ethical enthusiasm and mere cynicism. Mere being out for ratings. Because it comes back to the question of what it means to be TV incarnate. She's essentially in the. In my notes, I called it the fiction department because I couldn't think of what it was really called. The entertainment division. Right. She's not in the news division.
27:08 Erin: I think she's in programming.
27:10 Wes: Programming, yeah. The news division is separate, and the programs we hear are these cop shows and these other sorts of shows where there's always this crusty but benign character and she sits listening in boredom to that, and she wants to be excited. And of course, there's that one famous part where she says she wants angry shows. And this comes directly. This is part of the core of the idea that comes. I think there's a bunch of Paddy Chayefsky's notes now that are available, and he says something like, the audiences just want angry shows. That is like the sort of core of the movie. Which, again, is a very. It's a very ambiguous idea. And it even speaks to our current dilemma with contemporary social media.
27:54 Erin: Totally.
27:55 Wes: Not even you could see social media. Sort of the culmination of all of this, is the anger of people via social media. Is this a force for good? Is this a force for justice? Or is it total degradation? Is it sort of the logical conclusion of the degradation that TV may represent? I'm not saying I agree with him. If she's cynical, you might think, well, she thinks angry shows will generate more ratings. But you don't really get that sense from her. You get the sense that, you know, if she is TV incarnate, it's not just that she's a cynical TV executive, but she's functionally related to the tastes of the average audience member, which Max takes to be the worst tastes of the typical audience member.
Or you might say she's representative of the medium itself and the kind of the form of the medium or the psychological structure of the medium. So I think that purity you mentioned lends itself to her being a representative of something very abstract, the psychology of TV watching the medium and all the things involved in it. But what we should note is that what she seems to be most excited about is the potential for audience excitement, just for the identification with that Particular experience. And you could put a kind of cynical spin on that and say, as I think Max would say, she has to live vicariously through that because she's a mere vessel.
Right. She's just a mere TV box, just like a medium would be. And even she herself says she can't do love. Right. All she can do is work.
29:30 Erin: Right.
29:31 Wes: But you also get the sense that the medium has a life of its own and kind of wants to live on its own terms. It's like a virus, infects people. So titillating entertainment is kind of memetic. It's self propagating and. And she represents that. So she's more than just cynical TV executive. And I think Chayefsky wanted her to be more than that.
29:53 Erin: Well, I like that. And I like the fact too that she consults mediums too. Right? Yeah, that's part of the plot. Just an interesting side note, I'm constantly defending my love of Faye Dunaway to my family, and you and I are both too young to realize this, but did you know that in the 60s and 70s she had a reputation for being a terrible actress?
30:18 Wes: Did she really?
30:19 Erin: An inexplicable. Inexplicable reputation because she got a lot of Academy nominations. She got at least three, I think, and has been in some amazing movies and I think is a wonderful actress. But I think because of her beauty and her that old saw about how if you're a beautiful actress, then people assume you can't act or something like that. And I know that after Mommie Dearest, which by the way, is one of the great performances ever, her reputation really fell. And of course she was difficult and she was a pain in the ass and people should definitely.
30:49 Wes: But the day before this was the Poseidon Adventure. And Holden and Dunaway did that together.
30:54 Erin: Yeah. No, I thought it was Towering Inferno.
30:56 Wes: Yeah, it was Towering Inferno. They did that together. And he really did not like her because she would make him wait for two hours while she took phone calls and did makeup and stuff. And then he eventually pushed her up against the wall or he grabbed her and said, I'll push you through the wall if you ever do that again,
31:11 Erin: or something like that. Which is totally deserved. If anyone wants to see. I highly recommend search YouTube for Bette Davis, Faye Dunaway. So Bette Davis is the reigning queen of Faye Dunaway put downs. She had a terrible experience with her working on a TV movie and she then brought it up at any late night talk show opportunity that she could. And it gets more and More embellished and outrageous over the years.
31:37 Wes: That's awesome.
31:37 Erin: It's hilarious. So, you know, not the most professional actress in the world, but kind of a delight for that reason. I think that's the stuff that Hollywood. Great Hollywood stories are made of.
31:49 Wes: You know, like Finch, she pulls off this manic quality and even a kind of a touched.
31:54 Erin: Oh, totally.
31:55 Wes: The whole thing you said about mediums is, you know, important. Like a very touched, prophetic quality, a religious fervor. And that's, again, why I don't think we can just see her simply as cynical and interested in ratings. The kind of watery look she gets in her eyes all the time. There's a point where she's. I think she's looking at Frank giving some kind of speech, and she has almost like a look of religious admiration in her eyes. But. Yeah, so she pulls this off very well. And there's a kind of sharp quality to her that I think is perfect for the role.
32:29 Erin: So she's an oracle, I think, is maybe what we're getting at. She's an oracle and she consults oracles. But this secondhand excitement, which is, I think, a term that you used, is part and parcel of another great role of hers, of course, which is Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde. Right. And the overlaps and the callbacks are so, so significant that I can't imagine that they were actually considering casting Vanessa Redgrave instead of Dunaway. But Chayefsky said no.
32:58 Wes: Yeah, Lumet did. Yeah.
33:00 Erin: Yeah. Because of the Redgrave's association with the plo.
33:03 Wes: Yeah.
33:04 Erin: The fact that the first time we see her, she's looking at footage of a bank robbery in progress. Right. And gets very excited by it. And that's kind of Bonnie's whole. And I'm sure we'll talk about this movie on an episode in the future at some point. That's kind of Bonnie's whole MO is that she sort of gets off on the secondhand, this vicariousness or this. This charge that she gets out of seeing other people commit crimes, which is kind of like a television viewer. Right. And.
33:31 Wes: Yeah, and early reality tv. But. Yeah. In particular, our enjoyment of violence in films and tv, you know.
33:38 Erin: Right. I think there's a self consciousness to that baked into the script. Like, later, Holden has his callback joke when they're talking about love as being, you know, their many splendored night or something like that. I'm assuming that that was thrown in there because Holden was very famously in a movie, very successful movie in the 50s, called Love is a many splendored thing. So they use that term over and over again, which is a really silly term.
34:00 Wes: But, you know, again, there's the question of what's being critiqued in an audience, Right. Is it because we want to be titillated by violence or romance or Kojak always getting the culprit, as Beale puts it. Everything turning out fine in the end. Romantic Hollywood endings. You could make a list of these things that have to do with either idealization and, well, they all have to do with wish fulfillment. I think that would be the overarching thing. So whether it's violent fantasies or sexual fantasies or romantic fantasies, it gives the audience what they want.
In Diana's case, I think it's perfectly commonplace that people enjoy violence in films and in arts. In the arts. But with her, she's doing reality violence. You know, reality TV violence even. You know, one might even call it a snuff film. So there's something about her inability to distinguish between the fantasy and the reality, and then the activity of bringing the fantasy slash reality to the TV screen. So that, you know, you see, even with her romance with Max, that she's. It's a good gag where she's constantly talking about business during every romantic moment and while they're having sex.
Yeah, that's pretty funny and all of that stuff. There's no dividing line between these different parts of her life. And again, this brings us back to the question of what are we supposed to think about what's good for an audience or what's bad for an audience? Is it we're not allowed to enjoy violence in the arts, or that it's something about the way violence is represented or, you know, what counts as a good, acceptable experience for an audience from the point of view of this sort of critique. And we also see the suggestion that that boundary is compromised in the love relationship that her and Max try to have.
Right? So that Max's idea is that she is really. This is all script to her. So her engagement with life is. She engages with it as if it were just a show. And I think the suggestion is that if it is just a show, you do things because they might get ratings or because they might excite an audience. You don't do them out of your own particular desires. She even has to begin the whole relationship by appealing to the medium, appealing to the tarot card reader or whoever it is. The love story is an attempt at a breakout. Right. If you wanted to look for some opinion on what authenticity would mean, it would mean the success of that plot of getting away from ratings and fantasy and getting back to real life.
But of course that breaks down as well.
36:47 Erin: Yeah, there's a collapsing too of a film and TV in the self described scripts of their romance. At one point she references the Blue Angel, a Marlene Dietrich movie. So there is a sense of the ways in which film also is complicit in this sort of pre written scripts for romance. But that whole plot and that self conscious invocation of a script is the most appealing part of the whole film for me. I don't like their romance or anything like that, but I do like that kind of commentary. And the extent to which you can really do that in any film romance or maybe in any real life romance because of the extent to which we are affected by or infected by Hollywood style expectations or plot devices in our own lives where we don't even know to what extent our motives are pure or original or to what extent we're sort of carrying out something that we've
37:46 Wes: seen before acting out a role.
37:48 Erin: Right, right. And the idea that too, that we're, you know, as children sort of watching the movie of the relationships around us and then we repeat that too. Right. So I think that works really well for me. What didn't work this time is Beatrice Straight's five and a half minutes of screen time that she won an Oscar for that performance I think has aged really badly. And that kind of is the most histrionic example, I think of a bad, what I consider to be a bad speech in the film. I don't like that.
38:20 Wes: Interesting. Why do you think that? Because I think she. I thought she did a great job.
38:24 Erin: No, I didn't. Oh no, I did not like that.
38:27 Wes: I honestly think Holden's performance is the weakest in the film, but.
38:31 Erin: Oh, totally. Well, Holden is, is not a great actor.
38:34 Wes: Yeah, I don't think so either.
38:36 Erin: He's a personality.
38:37 Wes: Yeah.
38:38 Erin: No, not even. I wish. You know, it's weird because he's in so many great movies and he's one of those people where you're just like, I can't believe he's been in so many great movies. You know, he's in Bridge on the River Kwai, which is on the AFI top 100 list. He's of course in Sunset Boulevard. He shows up in the oddest places. So may, I don't know, maybe he's weakening it. But I find her. Her histrionics and that's to be a little ridiculous and the overuse of the word. I think it's either love or lover is like really silly to me.
39:07 Wes: Oh, really? Yeah, the whole winter passion.
39:10 Erin: The winter passion, yeah, it's silly. It's a little too scripty. It's a little too written. Also the. The evolution of her feelings towards him in that moment. I think if you're gonna scream that hard, then you can't flip over to ironic detachment that quickly. It's. It can't be done.
39:28 Wes: The speech I'm ambivalent about, but her actual acting I thought was very good. And what I think are the weakest parts of the speech is actually the self referential stuff about this is the obligatory middle of Act 2. The scorned wife throws out the husband scene. So unfortunately when writers do that, that's inevitably self referential about their own struggles with the script. And I know it was a struggle for Chayefsky, but when characters make comments about how they're. What's going on in their lives represents a bad script or something like that, then they are in a bad script. It's not a bad script, but they are in this case in a bad part of the script. So I don't like that stuff.
40:10 Erin: Oh, it's how she hurts. That's what I was thinking of. The repeated thing of how she hurts. She doesn't say that she's in pain. That really bothers me. I find that ridiculous. No, I think you're right about the self referential quality. And it also. He's doing something with her that he should be doing with Diana. So what does he do now that he's with Diana? He goes around and just talks to everybody about how everything is a script, you know, I mean, I think that the leakage of the script talk into this scene is a bit much.
40:36 Wes: It's not that it's not unified. Obviously it fits into the theme in a way, but it feels a little bit tacked on. This whole sudden idea of treating things as a script. You can tell he's struggling with the screenplay, which is completely understandable for a movie like this in the second act, you know.
40:51 Erin: Well, I think this whole scene is. I think it would have been far more effective if they had just kept the wife as a shadowy figure. I don't think you need this scene. He can go back to her and we can feel sorry for her without seeing more of her than when she goes to find that Beale has left when he's not on the couch.
41:07 Wes: It's an attempt to make the movie less abstract and less like a parable.
41:12 Erin: Right.
41:13 Wes: Because it's surreal and abstract and that can. I enjoy what you can do with that. But on the other hand. And it's fine with a comedy, right, because you're just laughing through the oven, the whole thing. But if it's more of a dramedy like this, then you. It lowers the stakes. And so this is an attempt to heighten the stakes and flesh out the humanity of a character when the film is just not suited to that.
41:34 Erin: Right. And this is where I think that the getting bogged down in these moments chips away from the overall sense of this film as a satire and as a comedy. This kind of thing is just a bit much for me. I think he says some interesting things though, in that speech. I think that's. This is where he says that basically because of Bugs Bunny, Diana's brain is not quite functioning on the level that theirs is. Which is funny that she's been raised.
41:59 Wes: Raised on tv.
42:00 Erin: Yeah, right. You know, which is an interesting idea. I mean, it's very icky because he's talking about the sort of intergenerational love between them and how they're not even able to really speak the same language. But I think that there's an anxiety expressed there about the effect that TV is having on people's minds. And in a way, that's an old anxiety. Right. I mean, people thought that novels were bad popular entertainment that would make people stupider. It does speak to a problem about maybe attention spans or something like that that we're now seeing.
There's scientific evidence of the fact that people can't focus on things for long periods of time because they're so used to toggling back and forth between screens on their smartphones or. It's simplistic, but there's something true about it, that a generation raised on TV is going to be temperamentally different from a generation raised on film. Film may be different from people who didn't have access to any kind of screen. You know, obviously there's something baked in there that Chayefsky is trying to convince us of, that there is a mental deterioration going on that people are participating in.
But I also see that as being self serving and sort of easy at the same time. I don't know.
43:09 Wes: So I think it comes back to what should we be doing for audiences?
43:13 Erin: Right.
43:13 Wes: I had a discussion about Game of Thrones. It was on pretty much pop, which is a podcast by one of my co hosts in the Partially Examined Life. I made a claim which people were not happy about, basically that there were no other than the visual aesthetics, which I. And I really enjoyed Game of Thrones and watched it religiously.
43:34 Erin: I've never seen it.
43:36 Wes: I'm not surprised.
43:37 Erin: Yeah.
43:38 Wes: But my claim was that there's no real esthetics to that kind of thing. It's all soap opera. So there's visual aesthetics, but there's no aesthetics to the script or the story. It's designed to be a soap opera. And what that means is it's designed to satisfy our desire for wish fulfillment. It's almost like a surrogate fantasy. It's an attempt to facilitate fantasy. I want to do violent things to bad people. I want to have love or sex or whatever else goes on in those films. One of the purest forms of this, right, is the vigilante film or the superhero film, which is basically a variation on the vigilante film where you get to imagine that you're a powerful person who has an unlimited right to violence because it's directed towards villains.
And in the case of soap opera, it's more subtle because it's about social dynamics. It's focused on the love and power dynamics and the sort of power jockeying of people and all that stuff. That characterization fits the Platonic critique where you're just identifying with the worst possible motivations. So if we want to defend the arts, we have to be able to say that there's something else going on, at least potentially. And if it is, it's aesthetic. So that would mean enjoying a story not just because it's fantasy and wish fulfillment and escapism, but because it fulfills some criterion of the aesthetic which we don't have time to talk about, but involves, on my view, loss.
It involves sadness. It involves going opposite direction completely. And part of that is just because that, you know, the focus on aesthetic representation is a deviation from desire and appetite. It's about something else. So that you can always read that sort of critique into a film like this and say, well, this is just a person who wants television shows or movies to be more purely artistic or aesthetic. The danger is, though, that that for a wide audience is just going to be boring. Pure beauty ultimately is boring. Right. If you have a novel with absolutely no plot, so you can't get away from appetite and titillation and all that stuff completely.
So it's a difficult problem.
45:52 Erin: Well, this ultimately plays into, I think, what we're talking about with message movies. Right. Would you say then that message movies sort of solve that problem or reconcile those two halves of enjoyment and.
46:05 Wes: I don't think so.
46:06 Erin: You're not really saying message, you're saying.
46:08 Wes: Because the aesthetic and the messages and the aesthetic are completely opposed to one another. The more you make something about a message, the more you moralize it, you undermine it as well. You undermine the aesthetic quality of something.
46:19 Erin: Right, right.
46:20 Wes: If a Shakespearean villain is just a representative of corrupt kings and we got to do something about that, you know, what we have to do, you know, what we're required to do aesthetically is identify with the villain and identify ultimately with loss.
46:39 Erin: Okay, I see. Yeah. Because I'm trying to figure out how this film fits into that.
46:43 Wes: Yeah. So how do we judge this film on its merits as a work of art?
46:47 Erin: Well, I think that the idea of the message picture is a different gloss on what you're saying, but I think it's entangled in some of those same problems, but in a different direction.
46:56 Wes: Right, yeah. So what is the message picture? Maybe I didn't understand what you meant by that.
47:00 Erin: A film that is usually a post war film up through maybe the 80s is when they stopped becoming quite so interested in this, really. This is a late example, I think, probably of a message film. Even. So, there was a high point of this in the 50s and 60s, a film that probably has the ambition to maybe lead the culture in a way of thinking about the social situation or some sort of philosophical issue.
47:28 Wes: So it's a social critique.
47:30 Erin: Yeah, it's a social commentary. And the worst ones are typically aimed, or rather the most mediocre ones, because that's. That's the worst thing that a message film could be is mediocre. Right. They're aimed specifically toward middle America. And they're interested in telling those people basically how to think about an issue and to lead the culture in that way. So they're self consciously trying to say to people, this is important and you need to consider these things. And it's very naked. They're not interested in sublimating those kinds of cultural concerns into the plot or letting the plot speak for itself.
So examples of this, like Stanley Kramer makes a lot of these types of mediocre films. He made some good films too, but like, you know, Judgment at Nuremberg about the Nuremberg trials, where it has some. Some incredibly ridiculous moments where it's all about how Nuremberg is important and the movie's trying to convince you that this is important and that the Holocaust should never have happened. It's like, well, duh, you know, lots of stuff like that where you could say duh about a lot of issues in the message film, a high tone example of this would be on the Waterfront, which is why I'm not as big a fan of on the Waterfront as I might otherwise be.
Where it has a particular message that it is pedaling and it's pedaling it hard. And it's designed, you know, for your moral edification, which doesn't interest me. I'm interested more in pure story and any. You know, you don't have to work quite so hard to bake a message into a film. If it's a well written script, it's going to have certain themes that are going to arise anyway. Right. But there is a tension when you're interested in a serious subject matter. It's easy to ignore thematic stuff in like a pure. In a romantic comedy or something, or something like that.
Right. When you're dealing with serious issues, I think that line between drama and message picture becomes fuzzier. I think that there's a connection here between what you're describing as this kind of soap opera element, actually, and the message film, I think, is what I'm a comparison that I'm trying to draw. They're both operating on this kind of placating level. And that, I think is some of the irony of network. So part of what message films do is that you can leave the theater feeling good about yourself. Right. And you can say, luckily, I think the Holocaust was a really bad idea.
And, you know, this movie backed me up in that very controversial opinion. And it'll give you a sense of self pride, you know, that you have the right opinion. Exactly, yeah.
50:01 Wes: The power of moralism.
50:02 Erin: Right, right. And so I think that network is engaging in this and it makes it therefore a bit ironic and a bit morally compromised. It speaks to that sort of hierarchy established between film and tv where maybe it skates it because it's saying, well, no, this is about how terrible TV is. So now if you go home and you think, well, I'm gonna stop watching tv, which probably will last for three or four days before you're back on it. It's interesting in that way because I think it's like on the Waterfront. It's a good message movie, but its quality is part of what is so strangely compromised about it.
50:36 Wes: So now I have to withdraw my comment about messages. Not just because I'm trying to do
50:41 Erin: it, just have to be contrary network, but.
50:45 Wes: Or on the Waterfront, but I think I put it too strongly. Right. So you can do social critique and still create a work of art. I think I'm not going to try and defend that right now.
50:55 Erin: No. I agree. I just think it's ten times more difficult.
50:58 Wes: Yeah, it's very difficult. It's easier with comedy because comedy buries the message and it borders on nihilism. It suggests maybe that we don't take anything seriously, even as it's got a. There's some ethical concern embedded in it. So comedy succeeds by making the ethical concern universal, by saying, this is about the stupidity of human beings. Aren't we all stupid? That's another theory I'm not going to defend right now. If it becomes too specific, right? If it's just about, hey, this group of people sucks and we got to do something about that, right?
Or the implication is that we have to do something about that, then we. We just veer back into the power position, as you put it, being gratified by the feeling of power we get in moralism, in the same way we might be gratified by the feeling of power involved in watching the good guys kill the bad guys. That sort of titillation, that sort of wish fulfillment. So the only way to transcend that is to escape the power position altogether. Which is why I think comedy is never about power, never lets us fantasize about being in the power position, always decries that position as false.
And like tragedy asks us to accept loss, it just does it in a different way. It says that loss is always vanity and that we. That our path to accepting loss is to laugh at our own vanity. So that's the way you do it. And then, so what happens in a satire where the focus is very specific and it might just be someone moralizing about TV has gotten so bad. And you younger generation, you were just raised on tv, you know, how is it not the old man yelling, get off my lawn and. And all that stuff? And it just depends on how well the comedy, you know, the satirical aspect is pulled off.
And if there are all these dramatic elements, that becomes much more difficult. And Chayefsky, obviously, from his notes, realizes this, right? This was an enormous struggle for him to try to make this film work. So he just has to do that recursive thing that I mentioned at the beginning, where every critique gets critiqued in turn. So if it's Beale criticizing the bullshit. Ness of things, then ultimately that has to be bullshit itself getting critiqued, and then so on and so forth. If there's any way in which we're called upon to identify with the film's outrage about something, right?
Being mad as hell about whatever network says we should be mad as hell about, I think implicitly we're meant to say, well, we've just fallen into the trap once again and we can't escape it.
53:30 Erin: And I think this is good at that kind of instruction. So I've seen many instances personally of people quoting the mad as hell thing or sharing the YouTube clip and thinking that it's meant to be serious.
53:42 Wes: Right, right.
53:43 Erin: But I think that this is where my idea that this movie should be just a little bit funnier because then it takes a pressure off because I think that these movies can be pressure cookers of self aggrandizement or accusation. And the funnier it is, the less pressure there is and the more it has a reason to be a film really besides whatever it's peddling. Because then you can just say, well it's funny, we could just laugh at it. So there's a kind of a self justification of that alone. Nevermind any other consideration in the film.
54:15 Wes: Yeah, well, I think you put that very well and I think Pressure Cooker is a very good description for the film. So let's leave it at that and we'll continue to discuss the Pressure Cooker and our postscript.
54:27 Erin: Sounds good. Thank you, thank you.
54:31 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
Autonomy and Incest in Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex”
Nov 08, 2021
His first claim to fame was the solution to a riddle that earned him a kingdom by sheer force of intellect. His second was a doomed attempt to escape the particularly gruesome fates of patricide and incest. With his first act, Oedipus saved the city of Thebes from the sphinx; with his second, he afflicted it with a plague. In his retelling of this myth, Sophocles reflects on the competing claims of three paths to knowledge: reason, revelation, and experience. Why can’t Oedipus’s brilliant mind save him from the enactment of a prophecy? Why might we be most vulnerable to the fate we’re most determined to avoid? Can we truly be free, or are our attempts to transcend the limitations of character central to its pathologies? Wes & Erin discuss Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:12 Wes: His first claim to fame was the solution to a riddle that earned him a kingdom by sheer force of intellect. His second was a doomed attempt to escape the particularly gruesome fates of patricide and incest. With his first act, Oedipus saved the city of Thebes from the sphinx. With his second, he afflicted it with plague. In his retelling of this myth, Sophocles reflects on the competing claims of three paths to reason, revelation, and experience. Why can't Oedipus brilliant mind save him from the enactment of a prophecy? Why might we be most vulnerable to the fate we're most determined to avoid? Can we truly be free? Or are our attempts to escape the limitations of character are central to its pathologies? Today we're talking about Oedipus Rex. This is Wes Alwan.
1:02 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, since there's an investigation afoot about, you know, the origins of COVID 19, and there are all these theories floating around about what the origins of the virus are. Did it come from a bat or a pangolin? This whole lab leak theory. I just want to float another possibility. I mean, how likely do you think it is that. I don't know, maybe the mayor of Wuhan doesn't know who his real parents are and he's made a huge mistake? I'm just saying, you know.
1:36 Wes: Yeah. Is it the mayor of Wuhan or is there a president of the world? I guess not, since the whole world has been plagued.
1:44 Erin: Thebes is most of the known world at that point. Right. But anyway, yeah, I'm just saying somebody should look into that.
1:50 Wes: I think the idea that we're being punished is a promising idea. Punished by the gods. What are we being punished for?
1:58 Erin: The Internet, podcasts?
2:01 Wes: Well, I think there's something to that.
2:03 Erin: YouTube, trolls. I don't know.
2:05 Wes: I think technology is part of the story.
2:07 Erin: You're already getting into an interesting area there, because I was thinking that just Oedipus was being punished, but you're suggesting the whole world is, or all of Thebes anyway, is being punished for. I guess it's being punished for housing incestual Patricider.
2:23 Wes: Are they just collateral damage or are they actually being punished to the extent that I think the punishment is generalized is just the extent to which I read it as a kind of Prometheus myth. Because here is Oedipus, this very clever guy who has come along and solved this riddle and he's done it. A lot is made of the fact that he's done it without learning. There's some question of whether he's done it with help from the gods or without help from the gods. That's sort of conflict in the text. There's a lot in the text that gives you the idea that he.
It's his intelligence and his riddle solving ability that are the problem and the things that threaten to arrogate the position of the gods in a way. I read the crisis, the crisis in Thebes is created by Oedipus solving of the riddle. The minute he solves the riddle, something has actually gone awry. Of course, you know, literally we have to attribute all of this to ultimately to incest and these things are actually related. But psychologically, the most immediate precursor of the plague and all these problems is Oedipus's cleverness. His ability to simply, almost like a mathematician or a logician, to solve this problem in a world in which this problem should be solved or is more typically solved by appeals to revelation, to prophecy, to some sort of supplication to the gods, or appeals to the authority of tradition, to experience.
But the solving of the riddle in a way is like an a priori exercise or an exercise in semantics or something very similar to math. Yeah, that's my kind of Promethean reading of all of this.
4:10 Erin: So I think that that is a really good observation. However, it makes me think of the fact that this prophecy about Oedipus sort of predates Oedipus himself. Right? Like Laios is told that if he has a son, that the son will. Like he tries not to have a son with Jocasta. Is that right? I don't remember fully the whole pre play longer myth.
4:31 Wes: So we just got confused about. Or I just got confused about whether it's Jocasta or Yocasta or Yocasta. Because, Erin, you've always heard it. Yocasta. I've always heard it. Jocasta.
4:42 Erin: Right.
4:43 Wes: And your pronunciation is what it is in the actual ancient Greek. And I guess the way I've heard it is the Anglicization. Is that how you say it?
4:53 Erin: Yeah, the Anglicized version.
4:56 Wes: Yeah, the Anglicized version. So I guess we decided just to go with that.
5:01 Erin: Okay, so forgive me if I don't consistently say Jocasta. I'll try to.
5:04 Wes: Well, just say okay, then we'll go both ways.
5:07 Erin: Okay. Yeah. So you're highlighting, I think, what's a really interesting tension in the text because it does seem as though his riddle busting is the source of a lot of the problems. And yet at the same time, laios has this prophecy before oedipus is even conceived that if he does conceive a son, his child will kill him and marry his mother. I think that's the way the myth goes. Obviously Oedipus, from what I understand, was, you know, Sophocles version was based on this myth that everybody would have been common knowledge for everyone in Greece that had a very long history.
5:42 Wes: And I don't think there's too much variation in the way the myth was told as well.
5:47 Erin: I know that there's a slight difference as far as the actual origin of the curse that laios might have been involved in, or he might have sinned against the Greek values of hospitality, or he might have just conceived oedipus when he shouldn't have or when he was told not to. There's some variation about the precise origin of why this curse falls upon them. But what you're also making me think of is another really big tension in the text that bothers me, which is, is fate different from the gods? And what role do the gods have in fate? It's my understanding that they're actually two different forces in a way. Right. Because the gods can be moved by sacrifice, supplication, but fate can't be changed. Destiny can't be changed.
6:36 Wes: You know, it's that whole euthyphro dilemma named after the platonic dialogue, in which is something pious because it's loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it's pious? Or in early modern philosophical tradition, is the moral law just something that is the whimsical dictate of God, or is the moral law. The moral law, and everyone is subject to it, including God. So, yeah, I think it speaks to that sort of problem, this relationship between fatedness and the gods who can be moved. Are the gods in some sense subject to fate? And this is a. I think a play in which the rumination. There's a lot of rumination by the chorus. It's a play about religious doubt. I think the chorus gets very worried about whether or not. So maybe we can look at one of those passages.
7:29 Erin: Sure.
7:30 Wes: And by the way, I think. I think the best parts of this play are in the chorus, actually. Even though when I was younger and I read it, it's just like, get me to the plot. I just can't this chorus fluff get me beyond the chorus fluff Now. I even felt some of that on this rereading. But when I actually started to analyze what's going on with the chorus, I'm like, wow, this is quite amazing. So let's go to 463 to 512. And by the way, so I'm using the David Grene translation and you're using the Fitzgerald.
8:02 Erin: Yes.
8:03 Wes: Fitzgerald is very known for his poetic style. And actually I favored him when I was younger. Like, I memorized parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and I would always use the Fitzgerald because the alternative was the Lattimore, which is very dry but more literal. I spent way too many hours looking at all kinds of different translations and trying to decide do I want the poetic and tolerate the anxiety of knowing that Fitzgerald has thrown in a word that just isn't there in the ancient Greek, or am I just going to go for the dry literal? And I went for the dry literal. But you have the other side of things, so we can compare those, which I think is a good thing. And actually, Grene is not that bad. He's not all that dry.
8:47 Erin: No, I find the idiom to be really dated.
8:51 Wes: Yeah, yeah, it's a trade off. If you look at the ancient Greek, there are so many difficult decisions to make. You know, if you try to be faithful, you are just driven in the direction of syntactical clumsiness and dryness and things sounding very dated. It's really hard to avoid. Like, if I were translating this, you know, just. Just even the beginning children, young sons and daughters of old Cadmus, I'd be awfully tempted to do a very loose translation and get rid of any reference to Cadmus, which some translators actually do, to make sure that any of the outdated references that would have been meaningful for ancient Greeks but are not meaningful for us, I'd be tempted to replace them with something that had some actual import for us, because that drives the emotional power of the play.
And for us, it just. It works against it. It's rooted in ancient Greek mythology, which is something that does not have the same deep emotional significance for us as it would for them.
9:51 Erin: Yeah, I think that any great text needs to be retranslated for each generation. And I think that the self consciously high syntax that he's using, I believe that the Fitzgerald is actually older than the Grene, or they're roughly the same age. But I just think that the Fitzgerald, much less self consciously produces a very beautiful text. And I allow a lot of liberty in translation. Things don't bother me ultimately, because you're not just reproducing perfectly exactly what's in the Greek, you have to create something that's beautiful in its own right. So I tend not to be bothered by those types of smaller changes, which is a liberty that I have for not knowing Ancient Greek at all. So I'm not bothered by it, as
10:33 Wes: you'll find out, for certain things, I like to know what's there in the Ancient Greek just because it drives the interpretation. It tells you what the playwright is doing. So, for instance, in the Grene translation, this fourth and fifth lines, the town is heavy with a mingled burden of sounds and smells, of groans and hymns and incense. Okay, so this is a difficult translation problem, because what Sophocles is doing in this is he's saying that different sensory modalities are actually woven together. So in the Ancient Greek, it's clear that he's doing something very interesting.
He's telling us that sounds and smells somehow have interpolated each other, which is very important in a play that. Where incest features. Right. Because incest is about a breakdown in boundaries between things that should be bounded and separated. So that's the way Grene gets at it. Other translators, sometimes they just abandon the attempt to try to get at that interweaving of different sensory modalities. So Fitzgerald, for instance, the breath of incense, rises from the city with a sound of prayer and lamentation. He hasn't abandoned that task, but he's been a little more subtle about it.
So the with is meant to give you a sense of this connection between the smell and the sound, almost as if the sound is coming from the smell. So that's just one example of the type of things I think about when looking at translations, but I've never been able to come down on one side or another. So when I was in school doing the Aeneid, in Latin class, I'd have one poetic translation and one literal translation, and then the Latin, and of course the Latin. I was practically hopeless, right? And I'm still hopeless now. Like reading Oedipus and referring somewhat back to the Ancient Greek, I'm like, I'm going to translate this for myself.
I can do it. I just need a dictionary and five minutes. And I'm like, yeah, it's not possible. But, yeah, I was hopeless in Latin class. So we did our translations while referring back to these other translations. And I had always had to have one poetic and one literal next to me at all times.
12:52 Erin: Six years of Latin, baby.
12:54 Wes: You did six years? Yep, I did four years, yeah.
12:58 Erin: Oh, so you probably know as much as I do.
13:01 Wes: Yeah. I taught Latin at a community college at one point, but.
13:04 Erin: Oh, then what are you talking about?
13:06 Wes: No, I'm not. I'm not proficient. Last night I was looking up, is there a way for me to become fluent in ancient Greek? Can I go to a place where people are actually speaking it?
13:16 Erin: Oh, my gosh.
13:17 Wes: Do they have any programs where you can just immerse yourself in it and, like, so I can just ramp up quickly, you know, I did two years in undergrad, and then I did a year or two in grad school at the University of Texas would have. Which had, like, I think, the number one classics program in the country. And I got a B in Herodotus because I hated sitting there with a dictionary. And Plato I could do, but Herodotus might as well have been a different language. And then I'm like, this isn't even one language. This is multiple languages. Because the civilization spans, you know, thousands of years, essentially. So, I mean, biblical Greek is not Platonic Greek is not Herodotus's Greek.
13:57 Erin: So my mom made me learn ecclesiastical Latin. Yeah, not that big of a difference, but. Oh, boy.
14:03 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's got to be somewhat easier, right?
14:06 Erin: I don't know. Sure.
14:08 Wes: Yeah, I don't know either. Anyway, so. All right, we got that interlude out of the way. We were talking about religious doubt, which I think is one of the big themes of the play. So if we go to 463 to 512 roughly, for the chorus. So I call this section Prophecy versus Proof. Teiresias and Oedipus have just had a big fight. And Teiresias has told Oedipus that, you know, he's the one who's the murderer. And the chorus now starts to fantasize about the culprit in a sympathetic way. Strophe says he should run. The gods are after him. The antistrophe says, fantasizes sympathetically and says he must be lonely.
He's out in the woods, he's running from justice and chased by prophecy. And then that word prophecy serves as a point of rumination for Strophe again, which says basically doesn't know what to make of Tiresias prophecy because Oedipus would have no reason to kill Laius. And you get this highlighting of the conflict between reason and revelation here. And then the antistrophe says, gods know all, but the prophet's opinion shouldn't. Really Isn't any more privileged than my own. You can't convict Oedipus without proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Even though it's not exactly that phrase. Because we already have a kind of tangible proof in Oedipus's defeat of the Sphinx. So you get these three different elements that enter into this. You get this, you know, there's empirical evidence, there's reasoning, and then there's revelation. And a lot, you know, a lot of the play centers on the question of whether prophecy can actually be proof. Jocasta is going to. Later on, she's going to say, you know. Yeah, you can't believe prophecies. They prophesied that we were gonna have a son who's gonna kill laius and marry me.
And that didn't come true. So why would you believe this? I love that. There's a lot of delicious ironies in this play, and that's one of them.
16:21 Erin: Yeah, I was just gonna say that Yocasta reproduces this argument for herself later on. She has some great lines later.
16:28 Wes: So this is around 699 to 732.
16:33 Erin: I think it's better in the Fitzgerald. In the Fitzgerald, she says, set your mind at rest. If it is a question of soothsayers, I tell you that you will. Whose craft gives knowledge of the unknowable. Here is my proof. And then she tells the whole story of.
16:48 Wes: I'll read the Grene. Our listeners can cringe along with you. Do not concern yourself about this matter. Listen to me and learn that human beings have no part in the craft of prophecy. Of that I'll show you a short proof.
17:01 Erin: Yes, yes.
17:03 Wes: Unless you're using this as a key to the ancient Greek. Yeah. It's very unsatisfying.
17:07 Erin: Yeah. And at the end of her sort of long explanation of how they killed their own kids. So none of this is, you know, needs to worry Oedipus. She says, this is what prophets and prophecies are worth. Have no dread of them. It is God himself who can show us what he wills in his own way. So again, there's this tension between. Like with Yocasta, it's this idea that these. These diviners, these prophets are flim flam men. You know, it's like going to a carnival and getting your fortune told by somebody. And so she believes in the ability to subvert prophecy.
And that somehow this is separate. So that both soothsaying and somehow prophesying are separate from God's own will, which is a bizarre qualification. So she thinks that Tiresias is basically the equivalent of like someone with a crystal ball. But also that the prophecies that she and Laios were confronted with as the result of the speakings of those types of men are worth just as much. So there's not any kind of divine revelation. How does God reveal himself then? Because she said, it's God himself who could show us what he wills in his own way.
How that way is meant to come about, she doesn't specify. But it's not through prophesying.
18:18 Wes: Right.
18:18 Erin: Which is bizarre. She thinks those things could be subverted. She subverted them. It's all fine. I love the fact that then she's like, we took care of this problem. And then later she's just like, don't worry about it.
18:29 Wes: Just.
18:29 Erin: I don't want to. Don't ask, don't tell. It's very. She's kind of the funniest character, in
18:36 Wes: a way, what you're saying about Jocasta. Oedipus ends up having the same sort of attitude in his great conflict with Tiresias, the sort of meat of the play. It's a great showdown and I think it's one of the things that actually can translate as a modern audience. If you're going to look at this on the stage. I think the only one that really worked for me was the. I don't know if you've seen it, the Christopher Plummer and Orson Welles version. Christopher Plummer as Oedipus and Orson Welles as Tiresias.
19:02 Erin: I saw that when I was a kid, but I haven't seen it in many, many years, so I have no memory.
19:07 Wes: Orson Welles does a really good job. And the other versions I've looked at, there's some BBC versions, I think one of them with William Shatner, but it's. Everyone's in a mask, which is just, I find completely unwatchable when everyone is in a mask. But, yeah, I think it's very, very hard to translate to the stage. But if you're gonna choose one scene, it would just be. It would be this showdown between Oedipus and Tiresias. Starts with Oedipus praising Tiresias by saying that he's versed in things that are both teachable and not to be spoken.
Again, I think this sets up this contrast between teachable knowledge, which I associate also with knowledge from experience, and then prophetic knowledge. And then it leaves out the thing that Oedipus is known for, which we'll find out is cleverness. And the part of this I'm thinking about is when things turn in the conversation. And at first Tiresias won't talk to him and then ultimately he accuses Oedipus of being the murderer. Oedipus turns things around and becomes very contemptuous and taunts him for not being able to solve the riddle that delivered the citizens of Thebes from the sphinx.
That's around 392, he will say, maybe let's go to that. So you can also read your translation. He will say, starting with 390. For tell me, where have you seen clear Teiresias with your prophetic mind? When the dark singer the Sphinx was in your country, did you speak word of deliverance to these citizens? Yet solving the riddle then was not the province of a chance comer. It was a prophet's task. And plainly you had no such gift of prophecy from birds, nor otherwise from any God to glean a word of knowledge. But I came, Oedipus, who knew nothing, and I stopped her.
I solved the riddle by my wit alone. Mine was no knowledge got from birds. This no knowledge got from birds is actually. And this is the last time I'm really going to go to the ancient Greek. But in the ancient Greek, it's just like Mathon, where we get our word for math from. So he's just. He calls it literally, it's bird knowledge. That's what he's saying. Tiresias Grift is, you know, bird knowledge and making fun of that. And he's contrasting that to gnome judgment or cleverness, or what's translated here as wit. What is it for Fitzgerald?
21:33 Erin: So he says, your birds, what good were they? Or the gods, for the matter of that. But I came by Oedipus, the simple man who knows nothing. I thought it out for myself. No birds helped me. And this is the man you think you can destroy, that you may be close to Creon when he's king. So he just says, no, birds helped me earlier.
21:51 Wes: So I just want to say. Before you go earlier, when he says, I thought it out for myself, he starts by saying, I stopped her. nin epausa. When he says I solved the riddle by my wit alone, he doesn't even actually mention the riddle in the ancient Greek. He just says, I hit upon it by wit alone. Or even that I hit upon her. So this, the word is. And I think kerr is. It's the root where we get curiosity or curator or. But ultimately these Kerr words go back to javelin. So it's as if he. I hit upon the answer. But there's a double entendre there. It's almost like he hit her with his mind, with his cleverness, with his knowledge.
It sets up A very strong contrast between cleverness and ingenuity and its ability. This isn't Hercules going and wrestling the Sphinx to the ground. This is someone who can use their mind to do things like this. And this is a rival. Oedipus is the rational guy. He's the smart guy who's come along and is a threat to the idea that bird knowledge or prophecy is effective is the way to go. I think this is the essence of the crisis created by his solving the riddle. He is an obvious rival to prophecy and he kicked prophecies ass. Tiresias couldn't do anything about the Sphinx.
23:06 Erin: So in the Fitzgerald, there are some actually some pretty funny things in Oedipus speech here which are more greeny type things maybe. So Oedipus says he has brought this decrepit fortune teller, this collector of dirty pennies, this prophet fraud. Why, he is no more clairvoyant than I am. Tell us, has your mystic mummery ever approached the truth? When that hellcat the Sphinx was performing here, what help were you to these people? Her magic was not for the first men who came along. It demanded a real exorcist. Your birds, what good were they?
So this interesting idea that he's yoking exorcism to this idea that the Sphinx is a hellcat and that Oedipus somehow had the magic formula to expel this sort of demonic force from Thebes. Yeah, it's a different gloss on the Grene. And your interpretation? It seems to me to be more. To have more of a religious bent to it. Of course, by bringing the word exorcism in. But I guess Fitzgerald's interpretation of this doesn't matter.
24:01 Wes: So say that exorcist part again. It doesn't mention wit or judgment or cleverness.
24:06 Erin: So of course he implies that Tiresias is just a fortune teller. In the same way that Jocasta will later say that prophecies are as good as the air they're written on or whatever. So the decrepit fortune teller, the collector of dirty pennies, which is like my favorite thing in the whole book, prophet fraud. He's no more clairvoyant than I am. And he uses this term, mystic mummery. So there's this idea of mysticism. And then he says I was the real exorcist. Your birds, what good were they? Or the gods for the matter of that. But I came by Oedipus, the simple man who knows nothing. I thought it out for myself. No birds helped me.
24:39 Wes: Thought it out for myself is what he's translating, you know, that's kures us.
24:43 Erin: So the idea of this yoking, of this kind of religious implication of exorcism with the idea that he's going to exorcise the Sphinx's evil with his mind.
24:53 Wes: Exactly.
24:53 Erin: Rather than with any kind of fortune telling. It's just an interesting equivalence.
24:57 Wes: It's a well thought out approach in the sense that it emphasizes the competition between those two things, which is right there in the text. Of course, I wish it were translated in any text as bird knowledge. I think that's just something a translator should leave alone because it's so contemptuous. You know, I did it with my mind, not by bird knowledge. So, yeah, you know, Oedipus, at the start of the scene, he pays lip service to Tiresias being able to divine with the birds, talk about both things that are teachable and things that are not to be spoken.
But that very little. Well, it's not very little, but, you know, under pressure, of course, we get. We get Oedipus true attitude, which is really arrogant and contemptuous. So it's clear that Oedipus intelligence is related to a kind of impiety or not taking the gods seriously if we are to associate the gods with prophecy. Which is a question, you know, and it becomes a big question for the chorus as well.
26:00 Erin: Of course, in reading this for the first time in quite a while, I had a different takeaway from this scene than I had ever before, which was that the conflict between Oedipus and Tiresia seems to me like one of biography or autobiography. It seems like the tension here is Oedipus is right to know. I find him to be as arrogant and obnoxious as ever. I love in the very first scene when he's telling the chorus that like, you know, no one is more upset about everything going on in Thebes than me, because this is all about me.
26:30 Wes: I know there's a lot of that,
26:32 Erin: yeah, it's really obnoxious. But at the same time, I think that what we're getting at here, what you're getting at is this idea of knowledge is the sin in a way. Right. The idea of the fact finding mission that Oedipus is on is somehow his fatal flaw more than his pride, is. I think what you're suggesting I'm using fatal flaw, throwing it in.
26:56 Wes: Yeah. So I think there's actually a triad here. It's not just prophecy versus knowledge. It's knowledge from teaching versus knowledge from revelation, from prophecy versus knowledge from wit or wits. Judgment, cleverness, thinking it out, as Fitzgerald describes it. And the knowledge from teaching is more akin to what is knowledge from experience, from what is empirical, from what is posteriori. And the wit stuff is more like what's a priori or semantic or conceptual analysis or math. Things that you can kind of demonstrate without any appeal to experience.
Right. If you start out with a few axioms and you have the rules of derivation, whether logical or geometrical, the conclusion in a way is already there in the premises. It just has to be teased out. And again, this is another example in the way, the kind of incest theme, in the way in which this type of reasoning undoes boundaries. If you think of the axioms as the progenitor and the theorems, the thing that produces, as sort of the children, the creature in mathematical reasoning, that relationship, in a way is too close because it's analytical in some sense, or perhaps analytical.
Kant ultimately thought it was synthetic. But anyway, so I think the threat is Oedipus particular kind of use of a priori reasoning, which is very suitable for the riddle. The riddle is not something you do. He doesn't have to become a private investigator for that. He doesn't have to go out and solve a murder. He doesn't have to appeal to the gods for that. That's just purely, hey, I'm smart, right?
28:35 Erin: Right.
28:36 Wes: I can figure that out. And obviously, when he becomes the private investigator into the murder, or the public investigator, however you want to put it into the murder for which he actually is guilty, there's a question of whether he is going to do this by experience, by prophecy, or by doing it the way he solved the riddle, which he tries to do. So for instance, when he concludes that Tiresias and Creon are in a plot against him, he does that a priori style. It's not because he has any evidence of that. It's just. It's almost like he's a conspiracy theorist.
Well, why didn't Tiresias say this before if he's only just saying it now? It must be because Creon put him up to it, blah, blah, blah. He's a bad private investigator because he's not interested in the beginning. He becomes more interested later on, but not interested enough in experience and data in the empirical. So anyway, sorry for that long speech. I see here a kind of conflicting triad of approaches. The rational, the empirical, and then the revelatory.
29:38 Erin: Well, I see what you're talking about with the experience or the teaching. Those two things are together in your mind, right? Teaching and experience.
29:46 Wes: Yeah.
29:46 Erin: So I see those two things are linked together in Oedipus throughout the scene, in a way, because what he's arguing with Tiresias about, I think, is this question of what is his true biography, what is his true history. And in a way, this bird knowledge idea is really interesting to me because Tiresias has knowledge from a certain height, from a certain vantage point that gives him a lack of involvement in these kind of worldly concerns in which Oedipus is embroiled and so embroiled that he can't see what the truth is. But the idea of Oedipus experience as being, you know, maybe the reason why this is all being brought to my mind is because of this much maligned term that I hear bandied about all the time, which is the idea of someone's lived experience.
Right. So Oedipus, according to his lived experience, is the rightful king of Thebes and did nothing wrong. This is why I see this as a tension about biography or something. So he's yoking together his experience of I came here, I did the right thing, I'm a great guy, and this is great. And then he's also yoking that to this detective thing that you're talking about solving the riddle, trying to figure out who the killer is, doing both of those at the same time. And it begs the question, who has this sort of ownership over one's own life? It seems to me that Oedipus has no ownership over his own life and that the very idea of ownership is refuted by this idea of the prophecy over which you have no control and of which you're then not even supposed to be aware because the very awareness of it will kill you.
So it seems to me like Oedipus is trying to tell a narrative of his own life which is not the truth, but which is true to his own experience of his life. And Tiresias is saying, no, you don't even have a right to this story. Yeah, I'm trying to find a way to be more sympathetic to Oedipus and also to kind of get at this idea of what is objective history and objective biography and objective truth and what is self aggrandizing memoir. You know, I think that is what's most interesting to me in this read around. So let's stop here for a minute to talk about the sponsor of today's episode, Better Help.
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33:22 Wes: That's really interesting. Yeah. You know, you're making me think of the fact that for all Oedipus contemptuousness, prophecy will be vindicated by this play, right? Fully, fully vindicated. But he is right that Tiresias couldn't solve the riddle of the Sphinx and that he could. And we don't really find out why that is. But, you know, then he moves on to the very paranoid way he approaches things. And this starts early on when he's. So, for instance, when he first puts on the private investigator hat and is interrogating Creon, you know, he's asking the where question, Was Laius killed at home or abroad?
And Creon, by the way, is very interestingly evasive in the answers he gives. And just instead of saying he doesn't know, he talks about how Laius went on his embassy. So basically he doesn't really know how far Laios got before he was killed. So the question of whether it happened at home or abroad is unclear. Where there are witnesses. Oedipus. Next question is, well, was it an inside job? He couldn't have done this without money from someone in Thebes. And then it's why was it uninvestigated Right. This is one thing Sophocles does very skillfully early on is he lets Oedipus put on the private investigator hat.
His first questions are very reasonable. And then you see this escalation of paranoia. It's really heightened in this scene with Tiresias, where he concludes that Creon and him must be in a conspiracy to kill together. How great a store of jealousy you are hoarding. If for the sake of the office which I hold given me by the city, not sought by me, my friend Creon, friend from the first and loyal, thus secretly attacks me, secretly desires to drive me out, and secretly suborns this juggling, trick, devising quack, this wily beggar. So I think you've read some of this in the Fitzgerald translation, but.
So that's the first part of the speech that ends with the whole thing about bird knowledge. And then ultimately Tiresias will tell him, as you're getting at the self aggrandizing biography that he has, which is based in some truth, is missing out on some very essential details, right? Like the whole killing the father, sleeping with the mother part. There's of course a lot of iconic stuff that happens in Tiresias next speech. You have your eyes, but see not where you are in evil, nor where you live, nor whom you live with. Do not know who your parents are.
And then at the very end of the speech, and of the multitude of other evils, establishing a grim equality between you and your children. You know nothing so muddy with contempt. My words and Creon's misery shall grind no man as it will you. I love this phrase, grim equality between you and your children. It connects this mathematical idea, this riddle solving idea with the idea of self generation. Right. So to be able to reason the way Oedipus does is to be a self made man in a sense, right? To be independent of influences, to be free because you can reason your way to your decisions.
And that is evocative of incest, that ability to be self generating, to be free of cultural influence and free of the gods and free of prophecy and free of fate, all that stuff, but it backfires. So the seeming, the capacity for this demonstrative reasoning to extricate oneself from fate, including one's character, right? Including the driving forces involved in just having one's character actually represents a breakdown in an important boundary. It becomes incest, it becomes grim equality between you and your children. Tiresias gets the best of this, you know, the best of Oedipus here.
37:12 Erin: Yeah. So I love this idea that you're Talking about of the self made man, this is clarifying certain things for me. The hubris of that, that Oedipus, by being above prophecy and above the gods has in a way already de parented himself is, I think what you're saying. He's already orphaned himself by separating from this larger tradition, this religious tradition and employing logic. This speaks to the question I have of his right to know his own biography. I think what you're suggesting is that he's already sort of divorced himself from his own biography by de parenting himself from this larger tradition.
37:49 Wes: Ah, very good. Yeah.
37:51 Erin: This idea of self generation and of the problem of knowledge, obviously it makes me think of, you know, the Judeo Christian tradition of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And both sets of knowledge, I think ultimately produce shame and alienation. Right. But of course with Adam and Eve that does away with the whole problem of parentage. Right. Because they're just created by God, so their lineage doesn't need ferreting out.
38:18 Wes: Right.
38:19 Erin: They're created by God immediately. And the knowledge that they cannot have is this knowledge of good and evil, which once they learn this, once they eat the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then the two of them are made aware of their nakedness and they experience all this shame and they have a similarly shameful reaction as what Oedipus experiences. Obviously Oedipus has this compounded horror and everything else that goes on. So the tension in Oedipus then, which I think this is where I'm getting at with this slightly unfair, I mean a lot about Oedipus situation is majorly unfair.
But this idea that he doesn't have the right to know his own origins, I think is a very different gloss on this idea of the danger of knowledge that both sets of traditions seem to be engaging with. So on Oedipus part, the fact that he's not allowed to know his own parentage or that somehow the knowledge of that is more dangerous than the fact that this has already happened. Right. The self knowledge and the self understanding obviously speaks to, you know, a discomfort that the Greeks have with this idea of knowing too much. So there's the same discomfort with knowledge in general and that it's crueler in the Greek because Oedipus doesn't even know where he comes from, though he thinks he does.
Whereas there's more of a sense of fairness, I guess, and safety and therefore more betrayal on the part of Adam and Eve than on the part of Oedipus.
39:53 Wes: More betrayal on the part of Adam and Eve in the sense of.
39:56 Erin: So that Adam and Eve have betrayed their rightful parent. By knowing their origins, they're at less of a disadvantage.
40:05 Wes: Just listening to you talk about this, I was reminded of the psychoanalytic claim that there's a connection between our curiosity, our desire to know in a scientific way, and early childhood sexual curiosity about where babies come from, where I come from, what sex is, what the opposite. The genitalia of the opposite sex look like. And we talked about that in our alien episode. Right. Where one can be diverted off. You know, mother diverts them off course. It's a very. There's some crossover here, Right, Sure. She diverts them off course towards something in service of scientific investigation which is going to bring them face to face with is what is arguably the horror of incest in some sense.
And self generation. Right. The larval form that impregnates the adult male and all that stuff. So there's a connection between knowledge of sexuality, which I think, you know, the knowledge of good and evil from the fruit of the tree, of course, is related to that. And why else would they become suddenly ashamed of being naked? There's connection to that and worries about incest. Right. Worries that knowledge. Right. Because just thinking about one's parents having sex is really gross.
41:31 Erin: Yeah.
41:32 Wes: Long before you would ever get to doing it or fantasizing about doing it with a parent. The idea of them doing it is horrific. So the taboo, the incest taboo runs that deeply and it makes sexuality very fraught for us, in part, also, because there's this crossover between the nurturing of infants and sexuality. Right. So we, you know, infants suck at the breast and there's pleasure in that. And later on, people tend to, to some extent, their choice of a partner is influenced by early caretakers, by, you know, they're modeled, to some extent, a mother and father.
So people end up not escaping their origins in the way they might think. And this is. You could tell a story about someone who goes off to college, tries to get a job, and then things don't work out and they end up back home with the parents. This is a version of that story. Another version of that story is that you don't end up at home because you couldn't find a job. You marry someone that's too much like one of your parents. And that Freud thought impotence and frigidity and other relationship problems had a lot to do with the incest taboo being triggered by the fact that people will pick someone that's too much like a parent.
And yet our affectionate feelings for people are based on that. So our affectionate and sexual feelings come into conflict with each other. This is all about the resolution of the Oedipus complex. This is what the Oedipus complex is all about, as the way in which neurosis arises because these taboos get evoked. Our relationships with people and our relationships to our work, so we become inhibited. So that's another way that you end up back at home. And then there's this literal Oedipus version. And then there's another version in which you think that your sublimation in work takes you away from the parental right.
Because we grow up, we detach ourselves from our parents and we find lovers, partners, alternative objects, as psychoanalysts would say. But we also sublimate things into work. And we identify with cultural values, we identify with parental values. The overcoming of the Oedipus complex means getting those identifications in place and shifting our libido away from parents, to values, to aspirations, to conscience. It's about the development of conscience. It's about the development of what Freud called an ego ideal. But that can go wrong. That can go wrong because it can be infused with a Garden of Eden ethos.
It can be fused with the idea of. With something hubristic, with the idea of becoming perfectly merged back with the mother, with the object, with grandiosity, with being completely triumphant over the gods. This is the predicament. Why does fate punish us for running away from it? Because sometimes running away from it is running towards it. Especially when we get involved in work and people become maniacal and narcissistic. Our ambitions can really screw us over. They can really be evocative of incest. They can really represent not growing up, not moving away from our original conditions, but finding them again in the effort to transcend them.
So sorry for that long speech. That's one of my pet theories that I just grind over and over again.
45:01 Erin: But anyway, no, but I'm glad that we got to the Freudian element of this. I mean, it's ironic because I think that Tiresias's relationship with Oedipus is. We could say it's almost anti therapeutic. Right. Like the idea on Tiresias part isn't to discover and therefore confront our problems as a way to heal them, to deal with whatever is broken within us, but to just stay submerged in ignorance like that. Ignorance is better for us.
45:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean, Oedipus could say to Tiresias, he says, why didn't you solve the riddle of the Sphinx? But he might also say to him, why didn't you help me out earlier? And in a gentler way, why didn't you become my therapist? Why didn't you help me discover what was just in my unconscious?
45:46 Erin: You know, this time around, I kept being reminded of the Truman Show. I don't know if this is a bizarre, interesting.
45:52 Wes: Yeah, let me know. Tell me about that.
45:54 Erin: You know, obviously, a lot of this play is about irony. And, you know, on a basic level, I suppose, having two competing ideas warring with each other at the same time, which we could say about a lot of turns of phrase and stuff like that. But I think that holds true for irony. And I think of Corinth and Thebes as setting up parallel universes, almost like they're kind of analogous to each other. Corinth has its king and queen, Thebes has its king and queen. And it's almost like one is the real world and one is the dream world or maybe the nightmare world.
And so it's as though Oedipus is Truman slowly realizing that he's in the nightmare world, yet at the same time it's the real one. Right. Because that's actually where he really belongs, in Thebes, because he's supposed to be a son of Thebes. But he's sort of waking up to this realization that his hometown, his relationships, his whole backstory is not what it seems. It's, all, in a way, an invention. And I vaguely remember, I think it was the director of the Truman show maybe reading something about how the feeling that the film meant to evoke is similar to basically anyone's childhood experience, where you might wonder if everything is fake.
But he used the example of if you're a kid wondering if you're adopted, like if this is really where you belong. And that kind of falseness is what that sort of Truman show idea is evoking.
47:21 Wes: And in particular, he finds himself in the wrong career, maybe as a king. I don't know. I was just thinking about facing career terms again and feeling imposter syndrome and feeling like a fake or that you somehow. Poorly situated.
47:33 Erin: Right. I think that the Truman shows, you know, the dramatic dilemma in that film. This is obviously not a perfect parallel, but I just think it's interesting that the dramatic dilemma in that film is this idea of letting someone live a real life, like someone's right to know what the truth of their own life is. Which is, again, I think, where I'm getting this whole idea of biography. One's ownership over one's own story, who owns it, who has the right to know it or to tell it, and who could be said to know the whole thing, the whole story. Can we say, you know, that Oedipus, in a way, does know the whole story, and he knows it better than Tiresias ever could because he's lived it anyway.
The tension in the Truman show is about making sure that he knows what the truth is and getting him back to the real world. And everyone who's a good guy in that film seems to intuitively want that for him. There's a tension in that film, too, between the television audience that's been watching him 247 his entire life and knows everything, everything about him, supposedly, or Truman's experience and which is the more real one. Anyway. All of that to say that the whole dramatic functioning of the Truman Show's plot is based on the idea that Truman, of course, has the right to know that he's in a fake world, that his relationships are fake, that things are not what they seem, and that he has to sort of wake up and get to the real world.
In a way, Oedipus is. The plot is doing the opposite of that. It's like, no, no, just stay in the dream world. Everything's great. Don't confront this. Don't think about it. Don't worry about it. Which completely is topsy turvy with this idea of prophecy, too, because the idea of prophecy is revelation. So I'm just really grappling with what I think are obviously purposeful inconsistencies and mind benders and riddles and all of that, which I guess, you know, I'm not supposed to think about.
49:22 Wes: Yeah, right. Yeah, it's taboo. But you're raising an interesting hypothetical, which is just, what if Oedipus had just followed Jocasta's advice and left well enough alone and didn't continue his investigation? Right. Just Oedipus. Prophecy is BS. Stop looking into this any further.
49:43 Erin: It's Tiresias advice, too.
49:45 Wes: Yeah, Tiresias is a prima donna as well. Like, you know what? As soon as he arrives, it's like, this is just a waste of my time. Why am I even here?
49:53 Erin: Right?
49:54 Wes: This is pointless. You're incurable. And I'm not going to even tell you anything because it's pointless. Which, of course, you know, he's a prophet. He didn't need to be a prophet to know that. That, of course, what was going to happen if he told Oedipus everything is Oedipus was going to erupt in rage and that Tiresias life would be in danger and all that stuff. But Tiresias, you're talking about the right to know. Tiresias is saying you don't know or you do in a way. It's unconscious. Some translations even use the word conscious. Unconscious.
I don't know what it translates. But at some level you know this, but you know it without knowing it consciously. And you're going to inevitably find out and you're going to be miserable because of that. But in the meantime, you have eyes and you can't see and I can't see and I'm. And I don't have eyes, but I do see. So you get this contrast between two different types of knowing. The more rational conscious type of knowing on Oedipus part, and then the Tiresian knowledge, which on one level is prophetic but translated into our language at least is a competitor for therapeutic self knowledge, right?
Or knowledge of one's own desires and hang ups and unconscious conflicts, unconscious beliefs, all that, you know, all that psychoanalytic analytic stuff that supposedly if we can raise it to consciousness or come to grips with it in some other way, would make our lives better. So you can read the prophecy stuff as kind of proto therapeutic because the understanding is that there's something more important than rational understanding of things. And it has something to do with our unconscious, but also something to do with our emotional life, something to do with the irrational.
And so just getting back to this whole hypothetical, why not leave that alone? You know, some people don't want to go into therapy and stir up all that stuff. Why, why can't Oedipus just take Jocasta's advice and not stir it up and they can live happily ever after not knowing. Possible answer to that is just that those things drive us, that comes out in action. So what you don't know will inevitably hurt you. And that's, it's, you know, fadedness is related to that, right? Fadedness is related to things that are merely in the unconscious. They have to come out somehow, they have to be discharged somehow.
And they'll be discharged in action if they can't be discharged in mentation, let's say, if they can't be discharged in the knowing of them. So that's one way in which fate again is related to these. The attempt to avoid fate, or at least to avoid the knowledge of fate.
52:32 Erin: This hubris with which Oedipus is plagued, I think is collapsed at several times in the text with the desire to know those Two things are the same thing. I don't know what it is in the Grene. I won't be able to find it quickly. But in the Fitzgerald, the chorus says the greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves. And I know early on during Creon's fight with Oedipus in the Fitzgerald, he says, natures like yours chiefly torment themselves. So there seems to be this suggestion that through his pride and his insisting to know both of those things together, he came to grief that the problem was not the prophecy itself, but his own personality.
And his need to know the truth is what caused him grief. His own nature, which you could also attribute to a kind of fate. You know, you have a certain personality that is what's bequeathed you at birth. And the ways in which that personality plays out are going to cause you a lot of problems.
53:29 Wes: Not just at birth though, but by early child, right? By nurture you get from bad parenting or even good parenting, but just the accidents of parenting that form your character.
53:39 Erin: Right. Though I think that a lot more. I don't know, I guess this is a larger. This is a larger problem. But I think that I've seen a lot of obstinate children in my day. I've been an obstinate child. And a lot of our personalities are in spite of our parents best efforts. And we're born sometimes with certain characteristics that seem to be handed down from on high, for lack of a better phrase. Right.
54:01 Wes: They're hard to change. They're really ingrained and very difficult to change.
54:04 Erin: Exactly. And even independent of any kind of human parental intervention. So they may seem to be, you know, fated or prophesied or whatever. And so in a way it seems to me that Oedipus worst curse, or his true curse is his personality. I mean, that seems to be what Creon is suggesting.
54:24 Wes: Character is fate, right.
54:26 Erin: You know, even the act of blinding at the end of the play is goaded by the gods. There's a kind of doubling suggestion that Oedipus act of blinding himself was on the one hand goaded by the gods. But then on the other hand he says, well, the blinding hand was my own. So he does take responsibility for blinding himself in an act of really insanity. Right. Which we can't even really say was his.
54:48 Wes: But it's also an advance though. He's becoming more like Tiresias, right? He needs to concentrate. I mean, he says it's so I can't see the crimes, I can't see my offspring, the products of incest, etc. Etc. But also he needs to be less focused on the conscious and on the rational and on the visible, the tangible, and get more in touch with himself, man. And what better way to get in touch with yourself than to cut out the distractions, get rid of your eyes and look inward, so to speak.
55:21 Erin: Though the chorus suggests that he would have been better dead than blind and alive.
55:26 Wes: They're hysterical. They're just all over the place.
55:29 Erin: Don't listen to them.
55:32 Wes: They're very worried. I love the chorus in this, you know, I think often they are hysterical. They're just. They're constantly worried and ruminating and doing a lot of work for the audience, of course, like so, for instance, in 864 to 910. In my version, the second ode, it starts out the strophe Mayow. Basically, the upshot is a desire to live by God's laws, which are not something that are derivable from mortal nature, right? We have to look, to use the word, they have to come from on high. And then there's the idea that there are nevertheless those who can violate the laws.
So insolence breeds the tyrant. There are two worries. One is that there are people who can violate the laws. And if they can do that, then it's a problem of evil. And the gods don't punish that. Then are the gods effective? Should I even honor the gods? Should I obey the oracles? All that stuff? Maybe the oracles are unfit, but then really, it's a double bind. The other worry they have is, but we need ambition because that's what profits the state in the community. We need leaders. And leaders can't just be passive. They can't just be subject to the law.
Everyone is subject to the law ultimately, right? But they can't be so passive in the face of the law that they don't have any agency. So this is the dilemma. So I was pointing this passage as an example of the sophistication of the choruses, even though I was just dissing them, the sophistication of their rumination. But this is the dilemma of the resolution of the Oedipus complex, which. It's one of the dilemmas, which is that we can't just say, oh, no, we can't just. It's like just say no to hubris, right? Can't do a. Like just say no to drugs.
We can't just do a campaign because we can't do without ambition. This is something I've actually seen in patients who, right? They struggle with this because they are. They're tortured by ambition. And I always wish that I could tell them, yeah, just stop being ambitious. Just enjoy your life. But that's not a realistic solution. It's not a realistic solution for the polis, for the community, and it's not a realistic solution for individuals. So Oedipus, ambition, right, he was going to go out in the world and he was going to evade the prophecy, but because it was tinged with hubris, it meant running back towards what he was fated to do.
57:58 Erin: Right. After the ode that you're speaking of, the most bizarre part of the play occurs, I think, which is when Jocasta decides that she's going to go sacrifice to the gods, pray to the gods for an escape from the curse, and then I'm not sure what happens here. So either she's stopped from being able to go and pray by the messenger coming in, or her prayers seem to be answered by the messenger coming in. I'm not sure what the function of Jocasta saying that she's going to go and pray is at this moment, because immediately the messenger comes in and seems to be an answer to her prayers.
Because this is when the messenger says, Polybus is dead. You know, the king of Corinth, who Oedipus believes to be his real father, is dead. And obviously Oedipus hasn't killed him. He died of old age. So they think, great, this is proof again, proof that Oedipus has escaped the curse. Of course, it turns out to be the opposite, I guess, even crueler, right? It turns out to be that that's not the case. I think it's also really funny that the messenger is like, I have great news. Your dad is dead. And Oedipus is like, great.
59:08 Wes: Yeah, that part as well.
59:10 Erin: Yeah, right.
59:11 Wes: He says something like, this will bring you pleasure. It might bring you some pain as well, but probably more pleasure, but mostly pleasure. Right?
59:18 Erin: But I guess the question then is Jocasta's attempt to pray to the gods for freedom from the curse, is that subverted? Or is this, you know, like, is she intercepted by the messenger before she can do this? Or is the play just that cruel that she goes and prays and then immediately seems to get her prayer answered, but it turns out that the gods are laughing at her, essentially. And this idea of the gods scorn or their hatred for Oedipus, their hatred for. For Jocasta, for all of Thebes, is something obviously that plays upon. Yeah, plays upon.
And this idea too is really troubling, I think. And something that you know, we should probably deal with the idea that if you're. If you're dealt a bad hand, then that means that the gods hate you. You know more about the ancient Greek, obviously, far more than I do. Are these threads meant to contradict each other or is there supposed to be some sort of higher understanding that I. I don't have of how. I mean, I know that there's obviously something fundamentally flawed at the heart of Greek religion here.
1:00:24 Wes: Yes, yes.
1:00:25 Erin: So, you know, this tension can't be resolved.
1:00:28 Wes: Yeah, exactly.
1:00:30 Erin: So Sophocles awareness of that is introducing all of these contradictions, rather than the contradictions are there, and he's not necessarily aware of how contradictory they are or some combination thereof.
1:00:45 Wes: I think this is what ancient Greek tragedy is all about. It's an ongoing religious crisis of a civilization that is becoming more and more culturally advanced. Family values are going to shit, cats and dogs, living together, all that stuff. So it's, of course, a crisis that continues and it's associated, we associate it with modernity, of course, but I think it's a very old crisis. And that's what we see here. The play vindicates prophecy because it has to vindicate prophecy and treats that as a. In some sense as a vindication of the God. So there's a question, you know, as you point out here with Jocasta's prayer, it's not clear that prophecy is, you know, and her and others in play, you know, it's.
It's not clear to them or to us that prophecies are real, that they really represent deliverances from the gods. It could just be a sham, right? These just could be con artists. They could be scamming us, people like Tiresias. So there's that problem. But then there's also the problem of evil, which we just talked about. And there's the problem of freedom, which is a big problem. Right. How can there even be an ethics if we're not free? But how can we be free if we're fated or if the gods simply determine everything? These are all the sorts of questions that are arising.
And you point to one of the most intractable questions, which is how can you populate your divine realm with a bunch of assholes, cantankerous assholes, who have grudges against humanity and make that work?
1:02:15 Erin: Right? It's a bizarre thing. So I guess the extent to which the gods become more human is where we get into trouble, where they might have a personal dislike for you. And the extent to which they're human degrades Them. The extent to which we have to appease them. Appease them? Yeah. The extent to which we have to appease them and deal with their personality issues is the extent to which the gods in Greek mythology become more and more human. And then as humans are getting smarter and more and more advanced in logic, it seems to me like the convergence of these two things goes to the vanishing point, right? We think of it as like a landscape almost, so there is no difference between humans and gods, and the whole thing collapses. And I guess we're probably right on the verge of this collapse.
1:03:01 Wes: You know, I think there's a. Which we've already talked about a bit, but the psychology of this is important, which is just that, the status of the gods as humanoid, so to speak. It means that you can tell stories about hubris, right? It means that you can tell stories about the ways in which becoming like a God is bad because it's a threat to the gods. Right? The gods are envious and they're jealous and. And they don't like their territory to be encroached upon. So one can explain how hubris and narcissism and all that stuff goes wrong. This is partly an attempt at a psychology, an attempt at an explanation of a very real phenomenon for human beings.
You get too inflated, you get too big, and then you get struck down by Apollo or Zeus. Apparently, even if they're not around, you still get struck down. It's an attempt to say why. And the answer to the why ultimately does involve incest in some metaphorical sense. It involves the ways in which, as I've said, the attempt to be godlike is an attempt at a return to a Garden of Eden or to a perfect restoration to a symbiotic state, with the Mother, for instance. And that grandiosity gets infused into the very thing that's supposed to achieve separation, which is our identifications and our aspirations.
It's a horrible bind that we find ourselves in that the very machinery that's supposed to achieve that, to give us psychological maturity, that that in and of itself can do the very opposite if it's too infused with the archaic, with the grandiose. Let's say the problem is complicated and the mythology actually successfully gets at some of those complications at the level of parable. But then it leaves you wanting more. So it inevitably leads to the sorts of questions that are addressed in Greek tragedies and the crises of conscience and to religious doubt.
We need a better religion or we need a better psychology or some combination thereof. Okay, so let's stop there. And we will continue to discuss the play in Postscript. Specifically, we'll talk a little bit more about Creon, who we've neglected. So thank you.
1:05:28 Erin: Sounds good. Thank you.
1:05:31 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
Gender Opera in “Tootsie”
Oct 25, 2021
How do you become the many you truly are? Try becoming the woman you aren’t. While Michael Dorsey can take the blame for his desperate transformation into Dorothy Michaels, it’s she who gets the credit for making him a better man. How are gender dynamics reflected in our relationships to ourselves? When are we staying true to ourselves, and when are we just acting out a role for others? Wes & Erin discuss Sydney Pollack’s 1982 film, “Tootsie.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:12 Wes: How do you become the man you truly are? Try becoming the woman you aren't. While Michael Dorsey can take the blame for his desperate transformation into Dorothy Michaels, it's she who gets the credit for making him a better man. How are gender dynamics reflected in our relationships to ourselves? When are we staying true to ourselves? And when are we just acting out a role for others? Today we're discussing Sydney Pollack's 1982 film Tootsie. This is Wes Alwan, and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
0:51 Erin: So, Wes, as usual, I have a little bit of Elaine May trivia with Tootsie Today's film. Elaine May was an uncredited script doctor on the movie. And if you had to guess which character she added to the script, which would you say she added?
1:08 Wes: Oh, she added a character. Brewster. Am I wrong?
1:13 Erin: Who's Brewster? Which one's Brewster?
1:16 Wes: Doctor, isn't it?
1:17 Erin: Oh, Dr. Brewster. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:19 Wes: No, yeah, right. Played by. I mean, the character's name is Van.
1:24 Erin: Van Horn. Yeah, yeah.
1:25 Wes: Is that right?
1:26 Erin: I think so. I think so.
1:28 Wes: Okay.
1:28 Erin: No, it was not him.
1:30 Wes: Oh, okay. So, all right. I wasn't right then. Okay.
1:33 Erin: It was the Bill Murray character.
1:36 Wes: Interesting.
1:37 Erin: Yeah. The pretentious playwright. But according to some blog that I found, there was an interview with Dustin Hoffman in which he talked about what her contributions were. And what did he say? She came up with my roommate and that the girlfriend has to have a terrible lover and she has to have a kid and a father who falls in love. And she said, I'm telling you right now, you have to have a girl already in your life. And I'm going to write her with Teri Garr in mind.
2:06 Wes: Wow.
2:07 Erin: And she wrote it in three to four weeks, and that was it. So she added a lot to Tootsie.
2:13 Wes: That's amazing.
2:14 Erin: The woman's touch, you might say.
2:16 Wes: So, yeah, it is a great script. I mean, it's a very, very tight script with great dialogue and everything works so well. You know, it's the kind of film that budding screenwriter should study, basically. So what is the Bill Murray character, Jeff? What is he doing in the film? Why add him?
2:36 Erin: That's a really good question. Because I think most people think. Not most people. I think a couple of people have said that he is sort of an outcast in the film. Like he's. Nobody quite knows what he's doing in the film, I think. So he's pretentious, and yet at the same time, like, very accepting of what Michael is doing. Right. He's a little bit of this sort of pretentious director, New York stage kind of caricature on the one hand. And on the other hand, he seems to be sort of the voice for the audience, or almost like the interjection of the audience at certain points.
Like, he's able to come in and be like, oh, this is. This is very strange. Or can even interfere in the scene. Like when John Van Horn and Michael are in his apartment and Van Horn is, like, about to force himself on Michael. So there's a witness to everything going on with Michael. And there's a sort of get out of jail free card when things get a little too crazy. What do you think?
3:35 Wes: Yeah, I think all of that's right. I hadn't really given a lot of thought to this when you brought up that Elaine May added him to the script. And I started to think about why that might be. I think he's the only character who really functions as a kind of mentor character in the film for Michael. And he's not much of a mentor character. So he's a foil. He offsets Michael's mania. Michael is quite manic in the beginning of the film. He's a hustler, right? And he's not just a hustler, but he preaches the religion of hustling to his acting class.
Really. He preaches two different, contradictory things to his acting students, which is, on the one hand, to always work and sort of maintain some sense of optimism. Even though you're hardly ever going to work. Right. Get on unemployment and on the other hand, be true to yourself. You got to play the part that's in you. If you can't make the part yourself, you can't play it, is one of the things he says. And you also see this mania in the way he hustles with women. He hustles for acting parts, but he's also pretty aggressive with the women in the beginning of the film.
To the point where one of the women he's hitting on at his birthday party says, why are you so wired? Just calls him out on it. So Jeff, of course, stands in contrast to that. So this is a very typical kind of Bill Murray character. Because there's a certain level of cynical resignation, in a way, feels like. And he's making funny quips from the sidelines. And the way he's interacting at the party reminds me of kind of his character in Ghostbusters, where he's creating fake telepathy experiments to try and hit on women. In this case, he's using his pretentiousness as a writer saying lots of pretentious things at that party to try and seem formidable to other people.
But the most important thing is just what he says to Michael right before the party, which is something like they're having a debate about the necktie in Jeff's screenplay.
5:44 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
5:45 Wes: This classic line necktie is what's wrong with your play.
5:48 Erin: Yeah.
5:48 Wes: And Jeff says, today's your birthday, Michael, and you haven't mentioned it all day. And then Michael says, no, no, no, don't start with that, man. And I think Jeff says, I think you're allergic to it. And Michael says, I'm a character actor. Age has no effect on me. Which is really interesting. Right. Because that stands in contrast to the fact that he's a 40 year old, essentially failed actor who no one wants to work with. Age certainly does have an effect on him from that perspective. And then he asks Jeff, how does one not be depressed? And Jeff says, instead of trying to be Michael Dorsey the great actor, or Michael Dorsey the great waiter, why not just try to be Michael Dorsey?
6:31 Erin: Yeah.
6:32 Wes: And then Michael responds, I am Michael Dorsey. I am Michael Dorsey. I don't know what the payoff is. Well, say it like you mean it. I am Michael Dorsey. Fine. Okay. So. And then there's the surprise party that I see as Jeff's role. You know, he's kind of a Yoda light. Right. He's not a particularly wise person himself, but he, in that moment. Right. He has a little wisdom, at least in contrast to Michael. He sets up a major theme in the movie, which is this question of how one is oneself, becomes oneself ultimately. Right. Michael becomes himself by becoming a woman, that sort of thing. But I don't know, what do you think of that? Am I overstating the whole mentor aspect of this?
7:15 Erin: Well, I think those themes are there from the very beginning in that first great sequence that you mentioned where Michael is giving acting advice and it's juxtaposed with his own failed auditions. I think that you pick up on something there that I didn't even realize, which is that he's giving contradictory advice to his acting students. I was picking up on the fact that he was, of course, disobeying his own advice in his auditions. You know, he would talk about there's this contrast between being oneself, as you mentioned, you know, this advice that he says not to play a part that isn't in you.
And it's juxtaposed with footage of him putting on a lot of heavy makeup and trying to hide himself and doing these acting exercises with his students that are designed to get comfortable, to break down your walls, to get to the, you know, sort of the true self. And so there's this sort of hiding versus self revelation. And then there's also this idea, I guess, of, like, authority, right? Because Michael says kind of do whatever the director says and play the script as written. And then he reads really, really unnaturally from a script. He does unnatural reading where he emphasizes, I think, the conjunctions in the sentence.
And then he's constantly challenging a director's authority, granted, with some really dumb directorial advice, but also practical advice. If nobody could see him on the side of the stage, then he probably should move over or land somewhere to die earlier so that he doesn't have to then move as he's dying. So I saw that juxtaposition happening very early. And the Bill Murray character as a continuation of that kind of theme. And also, as a guy that's just, in a way, kind of following Michael's own advice because he is himself and he's. I mean, he's pretentious about it.
And so that's his little flaw. He's obviously very comfortable with himself in his Bill Murray kind of way. And so it provides this sort of, like, grounding note for Michael's mania, as you point out.
9:13 Wes: So, yeah, the pretentiousness of Jeff, I think the difference is he has that sort of ironic distance to it. In a way, he knows what he's doing. Right. He's not confused about the fact that he's playing a role. At least that's the way it seems to me. In contrast with Michael, who is confused about who he is and is, in a way, playing a role in real life and failing to play it on the stage. So, yeah, you point out that he doesn't do such a great job on the stage. I think, in a way, that's a reflection of his defiance. Right. Use this phrase, hiding versus self revelation, which I think is very good.
The film immediately sets you up for that, as you point out, because you get these cuts between him putting on makeup, auditioning and then teaching the acting class. The whole thing with the makeup, it kind of highlights the extent to which he is willing to become someone else, to do anything to get the part right. To really go all out to make himself for another. In a sense, there's almost a desperation in that and a triviality to it. So at one point in one of the auditions, it's Great. It's hilarious dialogue. It's like, I can be anybody. You're the wrong height.
We need someone who's different. I can be different.
10:37 Erin: Yeah.
10:38 Wes: So you get this contrast between that level of kind of submissiveness and desperation. And then the. I think that goes along with the. The hiding part. Right. That's the connection you were drawing to the makeup. And then the. And then there's this instinct to self revelation which instead of coming out in making the part truly self revealing in the sense of expressive. Right. Artistically expressive, just comes out in his willingness to get into conflicts with the director or, you know, give his class advice about not merely submitting to the director or to the writer, you know, playing it as themselves, something like that.
And that progresses through these intercuts. So he gets more and more. He starts out submissive and then he gets more and more defiant. And it kind of culminates with, you know, I'm not going to walk to the center of the stage while I'm dying. That's stupid. You know, not with me as Tolstoy. So he quits one of the rare jobs, it seems like, that he gets
11:36 Erin: this lack of self awareness. I guess that the acting lessons and his actual acting experiences, the disconnect between those two things, I think shows he's a very shallow actor in a way. I was talking about this just last night with a friend, this idea of motion and stillness in acting. And I was talking about. This is funny. Actually, this is pretty relevant since Michael is so manic. I was talking about the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse. Do you know. Are you familiar with Duse? No one knows her and partially that's by her own design. But anyway, she was a rival to Sarah Bernhardt.
So back in the olden days, they represented two very different schools of acting. And Duse, her natural. Naturalness and lack of pretension and lack of sort of, you know, the typical histrionics of the day, the silent movie style acting, even on the stage, you know, where you're doing. Where you're sort of miming and reproducing all of these very large emotions through the body. She didn't do any of that. And she stayed extremely still. And she was noted for this. It's now considered to be her genius was her stillness versus all of this sort of business that typical stage actors of the day and Bernhardt included in that were doing with this showing that they were upset by sort of moving their arms in this histrionic way and sort of like this sort of faux rending of their garments kind of thing.
You can imagine this. This sort of miming. And we were talking about still, like what creates that stillness. And it seemed to me that it was like a sense of centeredness and a sense of understanding of oneself. And a contentment in oneself. To just let the scene play and to just stay still and let it do what it has to do. So it's like you can let go. You don't have to be in hyper control of everything. And that the more sort of stable your ego, the more willing you are to cede that power. And yet at the same time, it is a power. It's like a drawing to yourself almost.
It's funny because in a way, I mean, that sort of still point of the. Of the turning world. It's this contrast between the movie actor and the stage actor that I talked about before on the show. I know, where you have your Persona and then you sort of meld apart to you versus just being this pure chameleon. I think there's obviously a crossover between the two. And that you have to have a sense of yourself, whether you're a stage actor or a movie actor, but just in terms of the Persona. But with. With Michael, with this idea of being a stage actor and being a chameleon.
It's like he's entirely externalized. He has no center, he has no still place. And you need a little bit of that to retain your sanity. And I think also to be a good actor. Because you have to have some quietude or some sense of oneself and a sense of reality to which a part can be molded. And so I think that a profession like acting for a person who's well adjusted and who has that sense of stillness or that sense of observation or whatever. I think acting is noted for being a very empathetic profession. Because I think there is this chameleon property.
But in a way, what Michael is, is just. He's like a dress on a rack, right? Like he's just sort of going through all of these different Personas. He's not truly inhabiting them. And he's not really learning from any of these characters that he's taking on. And if he was learning and if he was being empathetic and had a sort of a sense of stillness at the center, then I think he would not be quite so clueless about, for instance, the way that he treats women. So he persists in. Like Dorothy gives him this, it seems to me, because he persists in his terrible treatment of women until pretty late.
In the film, like almost until the end of the film, because he still doesn't learn to self reflect. He still doesn't learn that what the director is doing to Jessica Lange's character, he is doing to Teri Garr. So there's no sense of almost like accumulated experience that goes into making a person. So despite the fact that he's lived hundreds of lives, he really hasn't lived any lives until he becomes Dorothy. All of this is a fancy way to just agree with what you were saying, which is that he doesn't really have a sense of self. He doesn't have any kind of distance from anything.
And he's just sort of donning these costumes and has no sense of the fact that he's the one filling the costume.
16:01 Wes: I like all of that about the connection to acting and quietude. It's as if he. He's kind of switched things. It's almost as if the acting is kind of this monster that's broken out of the theatrical context. And it's the way now he approaches life to the point where he can't do it very well on stage. So that making himself up before he goes to an audition, is that for the character or is that part of the hustle to try and win over the director? It sort of, in a way, stands outside of the part a little bit. And yeah, you know, what you say about.
I hadn't thought about this part for acting. The sense in which you need to be yourself and to be centered and to have a kind of stillness in order to be able to successfully branch out and convincingly do your parts. Right. Acting is involving being oneself in an empathetic relation to another instead of as complete merger with another, where the latter kind of reflects a loss of self and maybe even a kind of conforming oneself to a certain idea of being someone else and possibly even a caricature or conforming oneself to the expectations of the person running the audition or maybe even ultimately to the expectations of the.
Of the audience. So the extent to which you. You have to be oneself to convincingly play another is something that. I don't think it occurred to me in the way that you put it. And then the, you know, the connection to empathy, of course, in general, we're going to connect this all to his development of empathy for women and the way in which his relationship to women changes. Right. His capacity to actually love instead of, you know, in the beginning, he hustles women in the same way he's hustling acting parts. And he's being very aggressive about it.
And. And then ultimately this empathy and playing the part of a woman, but knowing that he's playing that part, maybe doing more of what you. What you said he should be doing as an actor will allow him to. To change the way he. He relates to women.
18:13 Erin: It's a lesson that he learns really late because, you know, in that sequence where he. He hears from Jessica Lange's character what she wants from a man in terms of, you know, the pickup line that she. The super honest pickup line. And then he tries it. That moment reminded me so much of Groundhog Day. It's like he's trying to learn how to be a man and he hasn't. He's still in the sequence of the repeated day, if you will, where he is. Thinks that he's learning because he thinks that he. What she says that she wants and is adapting his behavior, but he's really just reading her back a script that she's given him.
18:52 Wes: Right.
18:52 Erin: He's still just being an actor. This is like Groundhog Day for the world's most prolific actor until he finally learns to be honest with Teri Garr and actually be himself, whatever that is, and adapt that behavior. But I guess we should talk about. What is it about Dorothy that makes Michael himself? What is that magic that's going on there when he becomes a woman?
19:15 Wes: Yeah. I mean, he'll use this line in the very end. You know, you don't know me from Adam, but I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man, which is just great. And it made me think that, you know, there's Freud has this great. It's actually a footnote in a paper, and I've probably mentioned it before, but he says something like, every sexual relationship is between four people because there's a masculine. There are masculine components and feminine components to everyone's personalities. And then those kind of enter into significant relations with each other, regardless of what the whole people are doing.
And so I think the most obvious part of this. Right. Is just that he's forced into a position of empathy. So that's one part of this. And then one might say he gets more in touch with his femininity. Right. Which is ironic because it starts out with him putting on makeup. And there are lots of connections between the way he approaches auditions. Right. And the idea of femininity as altering one's appearance. Right. To be desirable. All of that stuff is supposed to be in parallel. But once again, he doesn't get the plight of that, even though he's suffering the plight of the actor, which is again parallel to the plight of women in this sense.
He doesn't. He doesn't actually grasp their plight. So I think empathy is one part of it. And then also he's just. What becoming a woman does is it shows him his predicament in a very sharp and obvious way. This kind of conflict he has between kind of self subordination and being for another, putting on a disguise, putting on a face. And then the more self expressive, assertive side of himself, which he. All of which he puts into his ambitions on the stage. But he loses that in his personal life. He can't be Michael and he searches for self expression through acting instead.
So he tries to be himself on the stage while being another in real life and so succeeds in doing neither. And in a way he needs to reverse that. So he's forced to make a choice in the sense that he. Ultimately, he's gonna have to make a decision between continuing to be Dorothy and having a relationship with Julie. So I think that's another part of this is just he's forced to address the conflict between the possibility of intimacy and the way in which he has put everything into his ambitions. Right. So when he starts out, when he gets, you know, after that great middle of the movie montage, go, Tootsie Go, he's really successful.
21:50 Erin: Yeah.
21:50 Wes: And then he's asking his agent, you know, I can, you know, I have plenty to say to women. I've been an unemployed actor for 20 years. I know what it's like sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring. And then when finally, you know, I get a job and I have no control. There's a lot of great lines in this. Whereas agent says, you're a man. Yes, I realize that, of course, but I'm also an actress, potentially a great actress. And he goes through all the parts that he wants. Lady Macbeth, the Eleanor Roosevelt story, for some reason.
22:18 Erin: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good.
22:20 Wes: It's not long after that, Right. That he's desperate to get out of that. Right. He's desperate to not be Dorothy anymore. And that's just a matter of weeks. Right. So he's willing to give up this incredible success because of Julie. That's also part of how being a woman is the key to becoming himself. Because being himself, loving another, empathizing with another, these things are all interrelated.
22:47 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. I love the part where he's chatting with Bill Murray's character and Primping his wig on the mannequin head, he says something like, I think Dorothy is smarter than me.
22:58 Wes: Yes.
22:58 Erin: Which I love, because of course it's impossible. And it's because he's just accessing, as you're saying, like that part of himself that is submerged in his hang ups and his sort of tied up in this masculine ego that can't let anybody get a word in and that has to fight with people. And in becoming Dorothy, in a way, he's learning that women have to have a different way of dealing with people's aggression and a different way of dealing with their own aggression. I love the scene where he decides to make the changes that he wants to make to the script and then just apologizes to the director afterward.
You know, it's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission or whatever the expression is. In being a woman, he's basically discovering how to be a person who tries to get along with people, you know, and in order to do that, you have to have some understanding of people's motivations. You have to be able to be softer with people and understand their own egos and, and kind of play with that sometimes. His, his little speeches to Sidney Paul, you know, they're so aggravating because he's like, I know what it's like to be a woman, because what I know what it's like to be dumped or be.
Be rejected or something like that, that's the state of being a woman is to sit by the phone and have no one call. Some of those speeches are a little aggravating to me. But the parts of Dorothy that he, I think, really learns from are these. This balancing act that all women, I think, have to. And of course, many men do this well too, but that all women have to find in their own lives, which is, which is to really understand where other people are coming from and to have to, you know, it's this tension with women and social norms and things that women have to navigate every day, right?
Which is that if you're too aggressive, then you're a bitch. If you're not aggressive enough, then you're a wimp. And you have to try and kind of learn to, I don't want to say play people, but manage, you know, manage people, manage people properly. And so that would suggest that Michael's character is basically just learning how to play a role again. But it actually has to come from this deeply intuitive sense of what you know is going to work for somebody. You know, how can I get what I want? And they can get what they want. How can I get what I want without wounding somebody else?
25:15 Wes: Right.
25:15 Erin: These are, I think, considerations that are more empathetic. Right. And so by being a woman and being. Being forced into that kind of empathetic role, he's learning how to properly contain other people's aggression and how to properly deal with other people's egos in a way that doesn't make himself obnoxious and hurt himself so that he's not just yelling at people. He's kind of being manipulative. But it's funny. It's like manipulative as a means of self growth.
25:43 Wes: Yeah, no, that's very good. I was thinking at one point when you were. You were talking about the predicament of women in the position of objectification and being an object of desire. Some of what we're saying goes for everyone to some extent, male and female. It's not like men have no experience of this, but it's. At the very least, it's particularly strong for women. So being the objects of the male gaze, so to speak, to be lusted after. And it's a certain kind of power. Right. And it's a power that has something to do with mere appearance, to be pursued just because of physical appearance.
But it's also a enormously troubling predicament. You know, the predicament from for men is often just to be in a state of constant agitated desire. And the predicament for women, going by the stereotypes, and I know there can be nuance and individual differences have to be added to this, but, you know, the predicament for women is to be the object of desire. There are different sets of skills involved in navigating those two different positions. And of course, if Michael learns anything, it's about navigating that other position, even though he's not particularly attractive.
Is that great scene when they're like, don't let the cameras get too close. It's almost panic in the control room.
27:07 Erin: How do you feel about Cleveland?
27:10 Wes: But he gets it to the extent that regardless of whether he's beautiful or not, he understands what it's like to put a lot of effort into his appearance. And he understands what it's like to worry about that. Not just from the standpoint of someone who's trying to succeed at an audition, but as something that's constant, at least to the extent that he's living in that role. It's a constant problem for him. Yeah. The other thing I was thinking about, you're talking about dealing with other people's egos. But his defiance does find a kind of outlet, a healthy outlet, in the Dorothy character. He gets to do some of the things that he was doing that were making people not want to work with him. Like just changing the dialogue.
27:56 Erin: Yeah.
27:57 Wes: And grabbing Dr. Brewster by the. By the face, which really got him excited. And then, of course, he's telling off the director for calling Dorothy tootsie and so on and so forth. That assertiveness, which. Right. The idea. Right. Is that that can hurt women. And somehow in this situation, situationally, it works. Works. And part of the reason why it works is just because it fits the role and it's an immediate hit with audiences. I don't know. I don't have a firm conclusion about that. I was just trying to think through the connection between the fact that he's becoming more empathetic and learning to deal with other people's egos. And yet the defiant part of him doesn't just completely disappear because of that. He gets the self assertion and some of the. Being Michael in a way that he was lacking.
28:46 Erin: Yeah. He becomes like, what, for me, would be the perfect woman. It's like he becomes a 1940s heroine. He becomes like Barbara Stanwyck or Roz Russell. Right. Like these strong women that have actually very, like, what is. I keep speaking in these generalities, and I'm talking about, obviously, like, societal standards and expectations, but brassy, sort of like ballsy women who are like, to me, like, the best. You know, the best kind of women. Like, they're not going to be anybody's doormat. They're sweet and they have this kind of like, heart of gold element to them, but they don't take anybody's crap and they're not afraid to assert themselves, stand up for themselves.
And it's from this whole sort of ethos of women having to go to work in the Great Depression and then having to again, stay in the workforce or even enter the workforce for the first time during World War II when the men were away. It's uncomfortable, I think, maybe in Tootsie because it's so literalized, but I think there is a way in which women would do better to sort of be able to inhabit those classically masculine traits and vice versa. And so it's uncomfortable in Tootsie, I think, because you have to deal with the fact that it's made very literal and that he's a man who's.
You know, I love the idea that he's. He's. He's a male actor who can't get any work, so he has to go for a woman's. But like women's parts are so easy to come by that he can just, you know, take this, don't think too hard about it or it gets, it gets a little bit icky and infuriating. It's kind of funny but.
30:22 Wes: Well, it's part of the. Yeah, it's part of the irony of the.
30:25 Erin: It's totally, totally. But it's.
30:28 Wes: In a sense he's, he hasn't really taken it away from Sandy but because she lost, you know, she wasn't able to get it. But of course he didn't in a way.
30:36 Erin: Right, right.
30:37 Wes: He's taking a part that his friend really, really wanted.
30:40 Erin: The idea too that like good parts for women are really the parts that are a dime a dozen. Of course he has to go, he has to gender swap in order to get a part because he's so universally hated as himself, you know. So as I'm saying, it's literalized but there's definitely something about this idea of exploring your masculine side if you're a woman and exploring your feminine side if you're a man, whatever those according to, you know, the popular construction and sort of integrating those elements of your personality as a kind of a balancing act, I guess.
And so it's made really, really literal here in funny ways. But it's, it's what I find attractive about like I think I find certain feminine and empathetic and whatever, you know, quote unquote feminine qualities that we classically associate with females. I often find those qualities attractive in men and I, I find quote unquote masculine qualities attractive in women. And I'm not talking about sexual attraction. I'm talking about, you know, a well rounded personality. So it sort of rounds off his personality is what I think I'm trying to say.
31:47 Wes: Yeah, I like this word that you're using, integration. Because it's not just about amping up the feminine side of oneself or amping up the masculine side about. Of oneself. It's the way in which they're related. It's the, the extent to which they are. They could be split off from each other because it's not simply that he doesn't have a feminine side. Right. The feminine side shows up from the very beginning and the making himself up and again the problem of being for another and the audition, all of that stuff. But it's unintegrated with the more defiant side of himself.
The self expressive part. Be true to yourself as an artist part where he's pissing everyone off. Those two things have to come together. And the other interesting thing that you were, you were getting at is that he integrates them in himself by integrating them in Dorothy. He sees the necessity of doing that in Dorothy in part just because it's, it's the way he gets the part. This is sort of a, a huge gamble. It's sort of a huge last ditch thing he's doing. Just dressing up, becoming Dorothy and then also immediately and predictably being rejected because of his looks and then taking a gamble and saying some.
What. What is it? He says to them? You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Yes, I think let's try to do Southern accent.
33:03 Erin: Yes, I think sounds okay.
33:06 Wes: I think I know what you really want. You want some gross caricature of a woman to prove some idiotic point like power makes a woman masculine or masculine women are ugly. Well, shame on the woman who lets you do that or any woman who lets you do that. And that means you, dear Miss Marshall. I guess Rita is the first name of that character, the producer. Shame on you, you macho shithead. Talking to Ron, the director. So that in a way is the elevator speech in favor of a different concept for the character, the character of Emily Kimberly. It's a pitch that Dorothy is giving, but also in acting, right, Dorothy is being that.
So really it's, you know, this is a necessity is the mother of invention moment where the recognition of the need to integrate the masculine and feminine, you know, it's part of his gamble to win the part and pitch integration, let's say, as something that will work better on the, on the soap opera, maybe. Which it does. Which it does.
34:06 Erin: Oh, and it, yeah, it totally improves the script and it makes Dorothy, or Dorothy's character, Emily into a well rounded woman because of the fact that he, Dorothy isn't playing her as a doormat, as like a hyper feminized, you know, stereotype of a woman who just like tells the abused wife to, you know, keep her chin up or whatever the, you know, whatever the thing on the prompter said.
34:33 Wes: Yeah.
34:33 Erin: So yeah, it's like she's going from being this really bland, sad stereotype of a woman to becoming like a Barbara Stanwyck. You kick the crap out of him or you get, you know, and in a way, like Rita, the, the executive is kind of like Dorothy, right. Like she's kind of a more integrated.
34:48 Wes: Right.
34:49 Erin: It's funny to keep using that word. She's an integrated person. Yeah. She has that personality in herself and so the fact that she's associated with this really terrible soap opera, which I think, you know, we're supposed to get the impression that this is like one of the worst soaps.
35:06 Wes: Well, let's discuss some of that, because I think it's so great, the rehearsal on set. You know, I just love some of the early. The way this is set up, you know, so you've. You've got the guy on the floor. The tubes are. Come out of his, you know, this patient.
35:22 Erin: Yeah.
35:23 Wes: And you just get this line, you know, he's getting the instruction. Now when you grab her, maybe. Maybe you even say, anthea. Anthea. And he says, yeah, that's good. And then out of nowhere, is my violin here somewhere in the room? I just love that. No, your violin sunk. It's at the bottom of the lake. The violin fell through the ice.
35:44 Erin: I love the fact that his character comes back later in a funeral parlor scene because he asked for a raise, so they have to kill him off.
35:52 Wes: Exactly.
35:52 Erin: I didn't realize he was that sick. No, I just asked for a raise.
35:56 Wes: It's great. Cause this is like the moment where Dorothy and the wizard of Oz, right. Walks out into Munchkin Land and it's all Technicolor. This is his first day of work. And it's with the rehearsal and it's so. It's over the top soap opera. So it's a land of caricature.
36:15 Erin: Well, and it's also. By actually being an actor, this just occurred to me. You know, you have to. So if we're talking about women, you know, stereotypically speaking, as taking subordinate roles to men. Right. As an actor, you have to take a subordinate role to a director. And this is something that Michael's not willing to do. And also a soap opera, and not just a soap opera, but a bad soap opera for a guy who was doing, you know, Strindberg in the park, which I love. I wouldn't. I don't know that I would want to see Strindberg in the park. But anyway, it doesn't sound like picnic fare, but.
But anyway, you know, for a guy who. Who has a real sense of his own highfalutin ability and sense of him. Sense of himself as a great actor, this is also demeaning and subordinate. And so the idea that he's sort of thrust into this situation, which is like you say, like Munchkinland, it's kind of exciting. He's finally working and he's getting a job. But it's also immediately demeaning and Subordinating and forcing him to punch up. And so that's kind of what I like about it. And the fact that it's so bad, you know, he can, I think, make the choice to either work with it or to condescend to it and then ultimately reject it.
And as a woman, he has to work with it.
37:32 Wes: I like that. That's very good. What's motivating him once he's in that role? He's still kind of disorganized as a person and frantic and manic. I mean, he's in a sink or swim situation and flailing about a little bit, I think. What's the reasoning behind changing the lines? Right.
37:51 Erin: The. Look at me when he grabs Van Horn's face.
37:53 Wes: Look at me when I talk to you, Dr. Brewster. I don't trust a man who won't meet my eye.
38:00 Erin: That's really good,
38:03 Wes: Dorothy. Wonderful. The way you held my face.
38:06 Erin: Oh, God, I smell a one man reboot.
38:09 Wes: Yeah, you're good. This is. This is it. This is my. I'm launching my acting career early on, when he prevents Brewster from kissing him. Right. The motivation was just to avoid, you know, she. So she hits Dr. Brewster when he tries to kiss her. You'll have to deal with my mind, not my lips. Great lines there. It's just a matter of desperation not to do the kiss.
38:31 Erin: Yeah, but that's a very female desperation.
38:36 Wes: With the added incentive he's a heterosexual guy, so there's not a huge master plan about, I'm gonna build a strong female character who's gonna be really popular with the public. It's just him navigating the situation and which women have to navigate. And then it fits. It sort of fortuitously serves a larger purpose.
38:56 Erin: And that's what I like. I think about the final monologue when he does the reveal, and he's floundering because, you know, you get this sense like, okay, is he not only a great actor, he's a great writer, too. Or where is all this talent coming from? It's not as though he sees Dorothy as a type, as I think you're suggesting. He's only adapting to the situation, and so he's not coming in and saying, oh, you know, Emily's going to be this. This ballsy woman who doesn't take any crap. So he's not coming into it with this idea of a trope or, this is the kind of woman that I am.
He goes into the situation and through almost observing his own behavior, that's how he determines what kind of woman he is, which I really like and I think is really smart. He's not trying to be a type and he's also not a writer. He's just doing what he thinks is appropriate for the situation based on how this character was. He sort of like, you know, has this moment of self realization, I guess, that then informs. Oh, now I have a working model of a self that I can then kind of play off of.
39:53 Wes: Very good. Yeah.
39:54 Erin: And so I think that the final monologue when he's floundering is really, you know, it's a difficult situation. He doesn't know what to say. And I think that's really important because it shows the limits of his writerly off the cuff kind of ability. But this, I think gets to an interesting tension between actors and writers actually, you know, because you have, you have a great script and then you also have actors who are inhabiting these characters and who may occasionally come up with even improvements to an already great script through improvisation.
Right. And so it becomes a kind of very nebulous area where the actors are like. The characters come off the page and become self realized little people. And then they say extra stuff, you know, it's. Yeah, it gets to something that's very interesting to me. I think as someone who does my own writing, improvisation in a way is like very, very appealing to me and very interesting to me. And I love improv, but at the same time it's very concerning sometimes because you have a text that you have to be loyal to and these sort of deviations can be uncomfortable and can maybe if they're wrong headed, kind of miss the authorial intent or add something in that is not right.
And of course, with a bad soap script, any improvisation will be an improvement.
41:12 Wes: Right.
41:12 Erin: It doesn't matter. But it kind of gets to this interesting tension, I think, between loyalty to the author and how you can actually be more loyal to the author through improv. In a weird way, this is why this is such a rich film, I think, for me, because it's very smart about these real philosophical sort of tensions within the art of acting, which is such a nebulous and sort of abstract art when you think about it.
41:40 Wes: Well, he's freed up to some extent by the lower stakes of the soap opera environment. Right. Any improvisation could be an improvement. And it doesn't matter how absurd your improvisation is.
41:53 Erin: Right. And how bad it is.
41:54 Wes: Yeah, it fits. Right. And then I love like Jeff's reaction to watching this on tv. You know, that hospital sure is a nutty place. It's any more implausible when he, you know, when he does the reveal, you know, as the brother, is that any more implausible than whatever that subplot was with the violin and falling through the ice? Right. So there's that kind of improvisational freedom, in a sense. But also, as you were mentioning, he can give up some of his pretentious and his, oh, I'm such an artist. And so that his. His defiance is a bit different.
It's not just, I'm not going to walk across the stage to die. It's a defiance predicated on a kind of gut improvisational feeling. And then again, the necessities of the moment, the kind of urgency of his situation as playing Dorothy, not just playing Emily Kimberly. Either you were saying this, or I was thinking it as you were saying this. But, you know, he. He kind of succeeds as Dorothy because he stops trying to be an actor in that moment. It's not just acting. I'm being an actor. He's trying to survive. He has to think both about being Emily Kimberly and about being Dorothy.
And the kind of stress and preoccupation of being Dorothy prevents him from trying to overact or do too much with Emily Kimberly that isn't governed by the experience of Dorothy or by the stuff that Dorothy has to deal with. So, ironically. Right. He can put more of himself into the part or achieve more of that separation that you were talking about at the beginning. That's kind of. I am not this person, but I'm in an empathetic relation to them. He can be more himself by being Dorothy. So that's one of the great ironies of the film. And therefore a better actor because he's more himself and not just someone who puts makeup on, not just someone who is trying to be what is required to get the part.
43:56 Erin: Yeah, I love that you're really pointing out to me how that works in the film. The whole thing is almost like an acting exercise in which you would try to distract yourself by performing some task that distracts your thinking mind, your active mind, to free up more of your unconscious, you know, so that that double acting challenge is sort of fulfilling that role.
44:18 Wes: Right.
44:19 Erin: I was just thinking about the fact that Jessica Lange was the only Oscar winner out of all of the performances in this film, which is so interesting. I mean, I think her. I think she does a good job. I think her character is, you know, she's very soulful and, you know, not a stereotype at all. It's very smartly done.
44:37 Wes: Was she up against Dustin Hoffman for Best Actress or.
44:40 Erin: Yeah, right. Well, you know, she was up against Teri Garr, I think, for the supporting actress category. Yeah. And, you know, I was thinking about this. I was like, you know, okay, so Hoffman's role is, obviously, it's a true feat. You know, Bill Murray's great being Bill Murray, you know, Dabney Coleman, I think, is like one of the most underrated character actors of the 80s. I mean, he's just great in everything.
45:07 Wes: He plays the best male chauvinist pig that you can get, possibly.
45:09 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But I would say that the two best. And you can tell me what you think. I'm pretty curious. I'd say the two best performances in this film are. I'd say Teri Garr is just delivering an unbelievable performance. Yeah. And Charles Durning, just incredible character actor.
45:30 Wes: Van Horn Slash Brewster.
45:33 Erin: No, as Jessica Lange's dad.
45:35 Wes: Oh, right, right.
45:36 Erin: Yeah. So I kind of. I mean, I love Teri Garr, so I kind of wish that she had won, because I love. I love that when she screams at Michael, to give her the pain now is so good.
45:47 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
45:48 Erin: She's so great. I mean, every single performance is great. In a movie of great performances, which was your favorite performance?
45:54 Wes: I think I agree with you that I like Teri Garr's the best. And then as far as the Durning character, Les, Julie's father, it's well done. I didn't think a lot about that character. And, you know, that performance in particular, I think I would go with Teri Garr, but I have a special. You know, I also have, like, a. Just a kind of affection for the kind of character that she is and often plays.
46:20 Erin: Right, totally.
46:22 Wes: There's a little bit of a flaky aspect, but not too much. I don't know if you agree with that.
46:27 Erin: Oh, yeah. I mean, it makes her so charming in this. I never thought about this until now, but, like, is she actually right for Michael?
46:37 Wes: So I think this is one of the interesting aspects of the film. And maybe Elaine May, if she were here, she could tell us about why he needed the female friend.
46:45 Erin: Please come here and tell me. Elaine May,
46:49 Wes: I think we figured out Bill Murray's role. I mean, I think part of what that role illustrates is Michael's dilemma around intimacy. Right. So he kind of has a friend, zoned person in his orbit, who, regardless of whether they're good for each other, obviously she's into him. And all it takes is, you know, him with his pants around his ankles in her room. You know, she jumps on that as absurd as he shuffles over to her, you know, I want you.
47:21 Erin: Yeah. What's the real soap opera trope going on here?
47:25 Wes: Right. So I think this is another thing that's split in him, the sort of affectionate and sexual sides of him. And this is a classic Oedipal, you know, what psychoanalysts would call an Oedipal thing, where he has trouble integrating the sexual side and the affectionate side. So Sandy is there to be the object of his platonic affections, and then he can go to parties and hit on women in an aggressive way. Say, you know, you have a terrific face.
48:01 Erin: Yeah. That's Christine Ebersole, by the way. Oh, yeah. Very young Christine Ebersole. Sorry.
48:07 Wes: And then end up going home with Teri Garr essentially to do platonic things like read lines together, which is like,
48:15 Erin: why would Teri Garr be the object of someone's platonic. It doesn't. Anyway.
48:20 Wes: Yeah, right, right. So she's too pretty to be right. Exactly. It's completely his problem. And, you know, in a different kind of movie, they would. You. Different kind of romantic comedy. They would have, of course, been the ones to end up together at the end. But of course, this is not that type of movie. You're asking if they were right for each other. I think ultimately not Teri Garr's character.
48:42 Erin: I mean, I think she, as an actress brings a lot of, like, surprising dignity to the role, which makes it so affecting. But, you know, she's definitely done dirty by the movie.
48:52 Wes: She tells us she's a doormat in relation to.
48:55 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
48:56 Wes: Love partners, as is Julie, you know.
48:59 Erin: Yeah, that's.
49:00 Wes: So we get that kind of thing. But, yeah, go ahead.
49:02 Erin: Yeah, that's exactly kind of what I wanted to explore. Like, how is Teri Garr's character that different from Julie? And what makes Julie so appealing to Michael? I mean, Julie isn't a good actress that we can like. She's just serviceable. I don't think that the soap opera is really giving her a chance to, like, show her chops at all. But she's obviously popular with the public. Right. Like, we see her getting stopped by fans from the beginning. So she's made some kind of an impression with soap opera audiences. But otherwise she has a child. I think that's important. But otherwise she's kind of a less interesting. Because she's less neurotic version of Teri Garr. Maybe just the neuroticism is what disqualifies Teri Garr. You can't have two Neurotics in one relationship or it'll combust.
49:50 Wes: Yeah. I mean, and Julie drinks a lot, right?
49:53 Erin: Right. But it's a sedate. Her neuroticism is more sedate. Teri Garr's more vibrating at Dustin Hoffman's frequency.
50:02 Wes: Yeah, that certainly is the case. Yeah.
50:04 Erin: I think the role of the child, it provides some Mr. Mom moments for Dustin Hoffman that's set
50:11 Wes: up early on in the movie. Right. Where he's at the party, party, and Sandy is trying to interest him in this baby and says, isn't she cute? And he says, yeah, but he's ignoring that because he's. I don't know if he's hitting on someone or he's. He's talking about creating your own opportunity. That phrase he uses a few times in the film. And. And Sandy says he loves children. He really does. So children are not on his radar at the beginning. So that's a great little, you know, one of the few little great setups in the film that's paid off later and paid off in him doing all that Mr. Mom stuff later on with the baby. It's at the farm that you see that really affectionate moment with the child where he's.
50:47 Erin: Right.
50:47 Wes: He's holding the baby and at first it's awkward, and then it becomes affectionate. And so this is part of the journey towards being capable of love and empathy is this relationship to children that changes.
50:59 Erin: Like Julie as a mother already. Like, first of all, it adds a really interesting dimension to that character. And we never learn who the father of the baby is, which I think is also really interesting. That baby is doing something for her that makes her, for some reason, more appropriate for Michael. It's grounding her or. I don't know. I don't want to. Not that the baby is this, like, accessory, like a handbag or something, but.
51:26 Wes: Well, it makes her more of a. I was going to use the phrase damsel in distress, but maybe that's not the right phrase. You know, he asked her, he says, I take it you're divorced? And she says, oh, no, I've never been married. So she is kind of, you know, you were mentioning the staid quality of her, which goes along with her being kind of a country girl. Right. Type, which is what we learned. She's not a city girl. She's grounded.
51:49 Erin: Right.
51:49 Wes: And she, it turns out, lost her mom at an early age, but has these very touching memories of the role of her mother in her life. And that's obviously led to her being troubled. And it's the same thing, of course, that's led to Les being this kind of lonely guy who hangs out at the bar but denies that he hangs out at the bar. Right.
52:13 Erin: Yeah.
52:14 Wes: And I think there's something in, you know, both Les and Julie find something in Michael, Dorothy, that is complementary to that loss of the mother. And for Michael, there's just something about this unwed mother who is not of the. You know, there's probably a class implication there, too. She's just from a different social strata in a way. Not lower necessarily, but oblique to his more urban existence. I don't know how to put it, but does any of that make sense?
52:45 Erin: Yeah. I think I got the opposite impression, though, with the idea of her being kind of a doormat with the baby. Not doormat. Damsel in distress is the term that you use. She's kind of the victim of that evil babysitter and, of course, of Ron. But I think that the baby also weirdly, makes her not a damsel in distress because she's taking care of a baby, even though she works long hours and she has to have that terrible babysitter. You get the impression that she's a very loving and involved mother and that the baby is kind of like proof that she can take care of herself, too.
53:15 Wes: She's not just about her career, which is obvious even from the way she behaves on set. Right. She's not a artist, narcissist type, so she's very different from Michael in that sense.
53:26 Erin: That's good. That's. Yes. You're clarifying it for me. There's something. I'm like, there's something here, and I don't know what it is, but you've got it, which is.
53:36 Wes: There's nothing like a baby to take you away from your own self absorption.
53:39 Erin: Yeah. Really? That's good. Should we talk a little bit about Charles Durning's character? I just love Charles Durning as an actor. He makes everything better. I think actually, this year he was not nominated for his performance in Tootsie, but he was nominated. Nominated for Supporting actor for Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, I think, and might have won the Oscar for that. I love his character because he's a little bit clueless. A lot. A bit clueless. But he's so sweet. He's like, how can we characterize him? He's a little pushy. Right. And he's a little. He doesn't really listen and he doesn't really seem to have. You know, he's like a clueless man. You know, he.
54:22 Wes: And he has some old fashioned things to say about the relations between the sexes and.
54:27 Erin: Right, right. And so he's kind of in the world of the soap opera in a way, as a stereotype of a, you know, as written, the soap opera, as written as a sort of stereotypical male character. But he is also like, he jumps off the page, jumps off the screen as being more than just a stereotype. So it's like he's learned his. His role and plays it. And then Dorothy comes along and sort of on two different levels, sort of smashes that stereotype for him. And he's more than a stereotype, but he really gets his sort of world shaken. And I just. I love the scene in the bar at the end where Michael comes to apologize to him and how quickly the whole thing turns around is kind of unbelievable. But it's very touching to me. His whole character is just very touching.
55:15 Wes: It is, it is very touching. And there's an arc there, but it's very subtle, which is just to say that he's someone who lost his wife and has been alone for a long time. And he has these old fashioned views about relationships between men and women. I forget exactly what it is he says, but there's a little Archie Bunker quality there. Yeah, a little touch of that. And then even at the end where he says to Michael, you know, the only reason I did this kick your ass was what, because we never kissed?
55:45 Erin: Because I never kissed you.
55:46 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So there's obvious discomfort with any homoerotic feelings. Strong discomfort with that. And if he's learned anything, of course, it's that he can be attracted to a person who happens to be a guy.
56:04 Erin: Right.
56:04 Wes: And that attraction is not just all predicated on a falsehood. Right. It's Michael that he appreciates and, you know, and it's that appreciation that he's able to express in the end by having, you know, they play a game of pool and you get the idea that Les has forgiven him and that he's probably given him permission to go talk to Julie and try to get back together with her. So that's the arc for the less character. His idea of what it means to be a man or a woman is. Is expanded. And again, it goes back to this whole idea that the feminine and the masculine are combined in people.
And the way I like to think of it is they're combined along many different facets. So it's more like a quilt. And people's personalities, you know, people are masculine to or feminine to some degree along hundreds of different axes. And that gives a particular cast to people's characters. And we're not necessarily just attracted to masculine and feminine types. And incidentally, heterosexual men are not necessarily attracted to overly feminine women. This is something that Freud points out in his famous three essays on sexuality, which is that one ought not to confuse heterosexuality and homosexuality with attraction to the masculine or the feminine per se.
Right. Some heterosexual men like more masculine women. Some, yeah.
57:35 Erin: But Dorothy doesn't like those types of men.
57:37 Wes: Right, right, exactly. So it's.
57:40 Erin: Sorry.
57:40 Wes: So in the end, I think it's very particular. Right. What is it about chemistry? What is it about that makes a. A particular person do it for us? One of Freud's ideas is that it has something to do with the fact that they are modeled on an early caretaker or both. To some extent. Both early caretakers, mother and father. There are aspects of them that remind us of those early caretakers with whom we have such strong bonds. But I think that can be cashed out to some extent in terms of this sort of what I called a quilt or maybe a constellation of a pattern, let's say a very complicated pattern of masculine and feminine features.
So it's like what we need in each other is just the right recipe with just the right ingredients arranged in just the right way, and that's ultimately what does it for us. And so what Les, I think, learns is that to love someone and even the way he loved his wife is not just man love woman.
58:40 Erin: Right, right, right.
58:42 Wes: It's much more complicated than that. There's a person there, and the person is a personality with all these different complicated facets.
58:50 Erin: I like that.
58:51 Wes: All right. I think that's a good place to end it.
58:53 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
58:57 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Com.
Our Name is Subtext, Podcast of Podcasts. Hear our “Ozymandias” Discussion, Ye Listeners, and Despair!
Oct 11, 2021
The land is not just ancient but “antique,” and while many of its artifacts end up as the possessions of distant museums, they may yet be capable of overpowering their audiences. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is traditionally taken as an exploration of hubris, and of the obliviating effect of time on power and its pretensions. But the poem also speaks to the power of art to preserve, and how this is accomplished by a hermeneutic collaboration between artist, audience, and subject matter. If there is something alive in the passions reproduced within an artist’s inanimate medium, then our creative powers may ultimately not belong to us.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:12 Wes: The land is not just ancient, but antique, and while many of its artifacts end up as the possessions of distant museums, they may yet be capable of overpowering their audiences. Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias is traditionally taken as an exploration of hubris and of the obliviating effect of time on power and its pretensions. But the poem also speaks to the power of art to preserve and how this is accomplished by a hermeneutic collaboration between artist, audience and subject matter. If there is something alive in the passions reproduced within an artist's inanimate medium, then our creative powers may ultimately not belong to us. This is Wes Alwan.
0:56 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:57 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I think this is a really appropriate poem to do after Alien, because I probably have a much looser association here. The poem is actually quoted in Covenant. I found out when looking at trivia.
1:16 Erin: Oh, wow.
1:17 Wes: I thought, oh, there's a segue for us from Alien to Ozymandias.
1:21 Erin: Well, isn't this also inscribed at the foot of the space jockey or. That's a joke. I know that it's not
1:31 Wes: the gears. We're processing that because obviously it's impossible for that to be.
1:37 Erin: You know, those aliens are like really big Shelley fans.
1:41 Wes: Yeah, that's Ridley Scott trying to be the king of kings there with that massive space jockey.
1:49 Erin: That's a good Cecil B. DeMille plug right there. Yeah, yeah. Another TV show or film or whatever that references. This is Breaking Bad, right? Because when I talk about it with my students, they're like, oh, this is the Breaking Bad poem, which is awesome. That thrills me that they both have seen Breaking Bad and have familiarity with this poem because of Breaking Bad. But I feel like this gets referenced all the time. I don't know. Are there other places where it appears besides Alien? Breaking Bad.
2:18 Wes: I don't know. But this idea will be part of our conversation today to the extent to which the poem itself is a monument and self referential. Right. In its aspiration to become a monument. The parallel between the artist and Ramses II, AKA Ozymandias. Much cooler name.
2:34 Erin: Totally.
2:34 Wes: I'm sure it's appeared in many places and I'm sure it's the most well known of Shelley's poems or the most read. Right. There's Prometheus Unbound.
2:45 Erin: I had the misfortune of reading that entire thing. Yeah.
2:48 Wes: You know, I tried to look at read some other Shelley poems As preparation for this. I can't say he's a poet that generally grabs me and he's a very. What's the word for it? Excited. Yeah, that's excited guy. This poem, it seems to kind of depart from his usual style in a
3:10 Erin: way which I love. Shelley is, full disclosure, he's by far my least favorite of the six major English Romantic poets. Ode to the West Wind was frequently parodied in my house growing up. I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. We'd say that whenever we like. Something bad happened that was very minor. Oh, no, we ran out of coffee.
3:31 Wes: Yeah, dinner's late. Again.
3:33 Erin: I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. Yeah, so. So he was always like the object of our scorn, my mom and I. She also hated Shelley.
3:43 Wes: So, I mean, he did have a very tragic life, but it was kind of self imposed.
3:48 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Not quite up to the Keats standard of tragedy.
3:53 Wes: Right. He tried pretty hard to.
3:56 Erin: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
3:57 Wes: Beginning with being very publicly an atheist in school and publishing a tract and sending it to all the professors and bishops, pissing everyone off and. And ending with falling out of a boat. Sorry.
4:12 Erin: Yeah. When I was at Oxford. It's funny because there's a whole monument to him at Oxford now, which is hilarious considering what happened to him there. They've reclaimed him, I guess. Yeah. But this, you know, this is a wonderful poem. Should we just get started and just read it and then talk about it or should we say anything more? It's an occasional poem, in a way.
4:32 Wes: Should we say a little bit more about the background?
4:35 Erin: Sure.
4:36 Wes: So the. The poem began as a competition and between him and his friend Horace Smith. Right. They tasked themselves with writing a sonnet on the same topic. And I think it was inspired by a visit to the British Museum. Right. And the sculpture is, you know, fragment of a statue of Ramses II, that had been taken out of Egypt. And at this. At this time, there are lots of antiquities, Right. Flowing out of Egypt because of Napoleon's invasion, basically, and plundering of all those ruins and artifacts. So there was quite a bit of Egyptian stuff arriving at the museum. And I think the statue at the museum was a impetus for this.
5:16 Erin: And then they found that Diodorus little fragment, the Roman historian.
5:20 Wes: Right.
5:21 Erin: So Diodorus described this inscription on a statue which read, king of Kings, Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work. Which is like pretty awesome inscription. So I think that directly inspired Both sonnets that came out of this, one of which has a much more involved title than Shelley's Ozymandias. The title is hilarious of the other one. I don't know if we should say it now or talk about it later. Okay, so the title of Smith's poem is, On a stupendous leg of granite discovered standing by itself in the deserts of Egypt, with the inscription inserted below.
5:58 Wes: Wow.
5:58 Erin: I gotta say that even I know that's a bad title.
6:01 Wes: Well, he wins the competition for title length.
6:04 Erin: Yeah, there you go. That's what it's all about.
6:07 Wes: Big, big title. So. Yeah, so I think Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramses ii. So the poets connected the statue and the account from Diodorus and then went from there. The competition was on, but it's not really much of competition in the end. Maybe we'll get a chance to look at Smith's poem a little bit, but sure. Yeah. It's just not even close. Shall we read the poem and then you can read it, and then we can talk a little bit about the structure and rhyme scheme and then move on to our analysis. Okay, go for it.
6:38 Erin: Okay. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand half sunk a shattered visage lies, Whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, Stamped on these lifeless things the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Nothing beside remains Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
7:22 Wes: Very nice. So the structure of this, am I right to say it combines two types of sonnet, the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean?
7:30 Erin: Oh, yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess it does.
7:32 Wes: So the rhyme scheme is more Shakespearean. Right. But it's divided into a octave and a sestet. It's a, B, A, B, A, C, D, C, E, D, E, F, E, F. So it's a weird little variation, you know, it's a regular. I guess it still qualifies as a sonnet.
7:54 Erin: Oh, there are much, much crazier sonnets than this.
7:58 Wes: I figured.
7:59 Erin: Yeah. So the thing that strikes me first, always when I read it, and it always surprises me, is that almost the entire poem is a quote, which is bizarre. So there's this bizarre distancing effect that Shelley's using where the I that begins the poem just completely drops away. And the entire thing is this quote of this traveler. So it's sort of doubly refracted for a poem that begins with the I. It's extremely impersonal. And it's this traveler's account of the sculpture coming upon it in the sand. And then there's also the quote within the quote of the traveler reciting the inscription. It's very strange.
8:39 Wes: It creates this sense of mediation on the one hand, so you get a kind of further insulation between the audience and the poet here by interposing someone else. And then there's always the question of the reliability if you interpose a Persona, narrator. But the question of the reliability of the narrator always arises. And that's kind of apt in this case because we're going to also take this as a commentary on art and the artist and the status of representation, which we'll get to. And we can think of the travel in various ways. So we're thinking here about source material and reliability.
And I think people were. It was kind of controversial whether. Right. Diodorus himself could be relied on, whether this account was actually accurate or his accounts were actually accurate. So who's the traveler? Right. Is it Diodorus? Are we meeting him metaphorically. There are also a lot of people writing travelogues at the time. You know, just as all the antiquities were coming back, people were visiting and writing about Egypt. And so there's the question of the reliability of those accounts. We could think of the narrator as someone in the past meeting Diodorus, or we could think of Diodorus in a way as a time traveler, which is apt in the sense that these monuments themselves sort of become time travelers that speak to us through time.
So there's a lot of ambiguities just in this use of a traveler here. And we'll see that's repeated throughout the poem. A lot of interesting pregnant ambiguities. So that work very well in the poem. The word antique. Well, yeah, I think, is a great word.
10:15 Erin: Right, right.
10:16 Wes: Not ancient.
10:17 Erin: Yeah. So I just wanted to dive right in and call our attention. I mean, that's the word that grabs your eye in the first line. An antique land. Like you say, it's a place where a lot of antiquities are coming out of. But there's also this idea that the land itself is antiqued or. I don't know, what do we want to say about that?
10:35 Wes: The things that come out of. Out of Egypt are antiquities and maybe even think the Sorts of things that will end up in antique stores and end up in people's living rooms of tourists, ultimately, if not museums. So it recasts the land as something that is for the conqueror, for the exploiter. In this case, Napoleon. Right. And Britain. So we're immediately confronted with an irony which is that Ramses' monument is supposed to, in a way, make him the big guy. He's sort of to help him trans. Temporarily subject others. Right. It's not good enough that he's king of kings. He's got to do that across time by way of his monuments. In this case we get a reversal, right? The monuments simply become something to be enjoyed in a museum, something to be plundered and so on. So that's just the things you can do with one word, right?
11:35 Erin: Yeah, I love that as a whole civilization or country as now being a place of plunder, which is allowed because of the fact that its glory days are past. Right. So those empires currently at the height of their powers can come in and make of this antique land, you know, what they want. But obviously contained within the poem, I think, as you're suggesting, is this idea that those civilizations currently at the height of their powers will also then become antique lands that the dominant force can come in and take their knickknacks from.
12:08 Wes: Naturally, we can ask the same question of the work of art. Does the work of art subject the audience in a way, as I think Ramses imagines his monuments subjecting future peoples? Or does the audience subject the work of art? Right. Curate it, take it, put it in a museum, make the artist their servant, you work for me, that sort of thing. And then just to say once again that we are, I think the mediation of the traveler raises the question of accuracy, which is that old Platonic accusation, art is a lie, artists are making things up. Or even representation per se keeps us at a distance from reality.
It's not something to be valued or favored. And it can even have a bad influence on us. It can be a way of sort of virally spreading poor character. That's Plato's accusation. Aristotle responds with the concept of catharsis, a different concept of identification that might not be so corrupting to us. So I think we can, you know, we can introduce all those. Those ideas here that I think do pay off later.
13:18 Erin: Sure. Well, I think that gets us to the two vast and trunkless legs of stone, Right. Because right away we have this heroic scale of the body. Something that's literally blown out of proportion, or it's in proportion but it's way blown up.
13:33 Wes: Yeah, yeah, very good.
13:35 Erin: So I think it's supposed to be reminiscent maybe of the Colossus of Rhodes. Keeping that in mind.
13:41 Wes: Yeah, yeah, I think that's very good. Because this word. We're going to be confronted later on in the poem with two ideas that are opposed to each other. One is this idea that the statue mocks, and the other is that it, well, reads. That it reads something. Well, it's an accurate representation. On the other hand, it mocks, which. There's a double entendre there. You know, mock is simply an imitate, simply as engage in representation of mimesis. But on the other hand, might mean make fun of. And in this case, possibly by caricaturing, possibly by distorting. So that the grandiosity of Ramses, as you're pointing out here, can be related to a kind of lack of accuracy or misrepresentation or even caricature and mockery. So inadvertent self caricature, simply by virtue of his arrogance and his aspirations.
14:43 Erin: Right. And he's been cut off. We have these great pairings of descriptors, I think, that happen throughout the poem. So we have famously, the last two pairs, the lone and level and the boundless and bare. But here we have vast and trunkless. And as you suggest, like the hand that mocked, the heart that fed. So we have these pairings of things which I think are kind of opposed to each other. So the idea that the legs can be vast is sort of ironically cut off at the knees or a little higher up, that it's also trunkless. So it's a kind of absurdity. An absurdity. Absurdity which is obviously highlighted in the title of the Horace Smith poem, that if you're just going to focus on these two legs, it kind of becomes unintentionally hilarious that here that it's extremely profound.
15:31 Wes: So this is something that I didn't actually pick up on this. This contrast you're highlighting between the vastness of the legs and their trunklessness, which we could see that as the grandiosity itself producing a kind of fragility or weakness, right. With the legs representing those. The aspiration to dominate or to walk over or to bestride the narrow world. But it's that size, right, which makes the monument ultimately so vulnerable to time and to the elements. If someone were injured, for instance, right. They lost their legs in an accident, we wouldn't look at the legs and say, oh, those legs are trunkless.
16:12 Erin: Right.
16:13 Wes: Look at the trunk and say, oh, that trunk is legless. So it's an interesting visual inversion of injury, I think.
16:22 Erin: So the legs, presumably, they carry your body around. They carry your. Your message, your. Your goods, your attempts to conquer. And the word trunkless is always so strange because whenever I. I would show this to my students, they would at first think that whatever was being described was an elephant. They're not used to the idea of a trunk as a torso, but it called my attention to the fact that a trunk is. Is also what you might carry stuff around in. Right. Like you're a trunk, like a traveling trunk, where you might take, if you're Shelley, to go spend some time in Egypt or Greece or wherever you might go, if you're Shelley. So there's an idea of storage and carrying across one's message, which is inherent in a conquering country. Right. So that I think, is. Is great in this word trunkless, even if it does make us think of dumbo.
17:17 Wes: I have one more association, which is probably loose and unfounded, but the word bootless in a Shakespearean Sonnet, Sonnet 29, that's great. It's the kind of thing that can unconsciously influence a poet in an unconscious way. If you're writing a sonnet and you've read lots of sonnets here, it's trunkless instead of bootless, with the boots intact, so to speak.
17:39 Erin: Mm. That's nice. Yeah. So near these. These legs of stone, we have this shattered visage half sunk in the sand. And from what we can tell of these descriptors, it's just the lower half of the face.
17:52 Wes: Right.
17:53 Erin: I'm thinking of that famous fragment in sort of like a black granite, of just the lower lips of a monumental sculpture. Do you know what I'm talking about? I always think of that little. That. Not little, but that large lip fragment.
18:07 Wes: The Egyptian Sphinx.
18:09 Erin: No, not the Sphinx. Sphinx. We have the full head. So what I'm thinking of is actually in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it's a fragment of a queen's face in yellow Jasper.
18:19 Wes: Yeah. So it's the lower half of her face.
18:22 Erin: Yeah. Because I think that's really all we get. I mean, that's what I imagine. Do you see a whole face, but just with a crack in it?
18:29 Wes: Yeah. That's very interesting. Yeah, that's the way I see it. And now I'm seeing half sunk, a shattered visage lies. So now I'm wondering if only half the head is above the sand or if the.
18:44 Erin: I guess it could be, like, upside down in the sand. So we're only getting. Because we get these three incredible descriptors, all of which are in reference to the mouth.
18:54 Wes: Yeah. It could be half buried and upside down and shattered to boot.
18:58 Erin: That's very interesting, but I like to think of it as. Yeah, just the bottom half of the face and the chin somewhat sunk in the sand. That's my mental image.
19:08 Wes: I have trouble seeing a sneer with just the bottom of the face. But, yeah, I get that that's a more dramatic reading, in a way.
19:16 Erin: Well, that's what I. Whenever I do. And actually, in looking up this poem online, I saw a bunch of really silly illustrations of what this is. And it shows a full head sunk in the sand next to two legs. But whenever I would kind of draw it out for students, I would just show, like, the bottom half of a face and then two legs.
19:34 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. Okay. So I'm looking at some of the. And I have seen these pictures before which have probably influenced my. The way I've imagined poem.
19:42 Erin: You know, the sort of illustrations of the poem.
19:44 Wes: Yeah, illustrations of the poem. Yes. I've. I've seen many.
19:47 Erin: I like this idea that all we get is the mouth. I mean, I think that there's a delicious irony to that. You know, we get the legs that can't go anywhere and that aren't carrying anything. They aren't carrying a load. And we get the mouth that speaks to us through the inscription. But that is disembodied.
20:03 Wes: He can sneer and he can say something very arrogant, let's say. But he can't see.
20:10 Erin: Right. He can't see the irony. His own words are creating, perhaps. Or smell the irony.
20:16 Wes: Right, right. Seeing or smelling.
20:18 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So we have the following descriptors for this visage. So half sunk. And then we have. Whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command. So I have that as three descriptions of the same thing. Frown, wrinkled lip, sneer of cold command. Which then makes me wonder, like, why give three. If you have a whole face, why give three descriptors for the lips? I mean, it could be just a preoccupation with the lips, certainly. But I just. I find all these three things so interesting because it seems to grow. It's frowning, it has a wrinkled lip, and then it becomes sneering. It seems slightly different, maybe with each, but it kind of shows this multiplicity of possible angles on distaste that seem to be represented here. Slightly, you know, shades slightly different from each other.
21:11 Wes: Yeah. I mean, being sneering and let's say, being caught up in Will to Power. If we're Plato, we think that, well, that's a version of unhappiness and hence the frown. But the person in that moment, of course, cold command, just. Just is what is happiness to them. So a sneer, in a way, if it's also a frown, betrays itself. And it's telling that we, you know, if you're right, and we only see half the face, or at very. At the very least, we're focused on half the face, that's very telling, that that's all that's required to give us that emotion.
It's incomplete, it's not whole, and maybe even there's something deformed about it. And in a way, it's also more suitable to the medium than other emotions. Right. This is something in cold stone, something frozen, something rigid. And, you know, in any statue, we're kind of. We. We catch ourselves and we characterize it, personifying it. Right. To say that the statue is frowning. Right. Is in a way, an inaccuracy. The statue can't frown. The frowning is represented in the statue. The same thing with Stand in the Desert, by the way. Stand is polyvalent.
Standing is something a human does. You could say a statue is standing in the sense that it represents human standing, but you could also say a statue stands in the sense that it's just a standing structure.
22:31 Erin: And this is arguably not a standing structure.
22:33 Wes: Right?
22:33 Erin: Yeah.
22:34 Wes: So the question of accuracy that shows up at the beginning of the poem when you interpolate a traveler, and then ultimately there's a lot of interpolations. There's us, the audience in our interpretation. There's the poet, there's the text, there's the traveler, there's the sculptor, there's Ramses' own self representations and so on. Right. We get the whole. The endless sort of number of displacements. The way that shows up in a work of art is just the sense in which the representation is not the real thing. And we wonder whether to be bothered by that.
So beyond the technicalities, was it Diodorus? Is that a real historical account? Beyond those sorts of technicalities, there's always the question of whether art can represent the truth, if so, and maybe it is, you know, as Keats thought, beauty is truth, so that we can circumvent all questions of factual accuracy, as we saw with the urn. But in part, that's the question that's raised here and kind of gets us to the next line where he, you know, he attributes a kind of accuracy to the sculptor.
23:45 Erin: Am I right. To think that the traveler who's describing this is sort of vacillating between two interpretations. It's like he's saying it's a frown and then he's looking closer. Well, what is it? Well, it's just a wrinkled lip. But then from that again he gets a different interpretation, which is a sneer of cold command. So he's first reading it as a frown and he's sort of looking closely at the lips and seeing that they're wrinkled and then sort of deciding that it's less a frown and more a sneer.
24:10 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. That's a possibility which didn't occur to me because I read the Traveler in a way as very matter of fact, in a sense, until we get to the sort of arresting turn in the poem, Nothing beside remains.
24:23 Erin: Well, the Traveler, I think, is doing a lot of interpretive work here that sort of half sunk in the poem, if you will. Like a lot of it is subterranean, you know. And so he goes on to say, you know, that this, this frown, this sneer, show that its sculptor accurately portrayed the subject. Right. But of course, he has no way of knowing if this is an accurate portrayal. So that also is a value judgment. So I think that the Traveler is doing a lot of op ed interpretation of this.
24:53 Wes: Yeah, that's very good. Yeah, I actually. I actually did have that in my notes. That is the first point where we come to question, I think the traveler as sort of just a matter of fact teller of a tale because. Yes. Tell that its sculptor well, those passions read. How could the traveler possibly know? Right.
25:10 Erin: And I love that tone. It's a very flat tone. You know, it's an even tone with which he's presenting this. So it is presented as a historical account. But as we know with. I mean, I think this is true for Herodotus, Thucydides. Right. They weren't present for pretty much anything that they were describing.
25:26 Wes: Right.
25:26 Erin: They were. They were just getting secondhand accounts. But speaking in an authoritative way about those secondhand accounts. Yeah. So we have this blank sort of AP description of facts without pausing to realize, oh, he's actually, he's doing a lot of interpretive work here.
25:42 Wes: Yeah.
25:43 Erin: So he's saying that this, this frown or sneer, we can argue, as we've already said, if those two things are distinct from each other, that this expression on them in the mouth tell that its sculptor. Well, those passions read which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things. So the sculptor read the passions of his subject accurately and transmuted them into his portrayal. So passions, I think, is the word that stops me here. It seems to, in a way, be sort of the opposite of this cold command, which is dispassionate. And obviously, if we think of, like, passion as being a kind of love or obsession, it's also negated by the idea of the frown or even a sneer.
26:31 Wes: Yeah. Well, I wanted to say one more thing about accuracy, which is that the question of whether the sculptor can, well, read these passions, on the one hand, it seems impossible for the traveler to know whether this can be a good reading of the actual visage. Right. What was sort of the actual kind of expression that Ramses had or would have, maybe habitually, on his face? But unless we think that there's another concept of reading, let's say, or interpretation at work, which is just to say that the artist really knows how to represent arrogance, or whatever you want to call it, accurately.
So the artist becomes a good representer of the passions, regardless of who Ramses II really was. Or even that. Just that it's done beautifully. So that's the third question. So there's the factual accuracy, there's trueness to a general character type, and then there's just the idea of doing something very skillfully and beautifully. And two and three naturally are connected.
27:37 Erin: I like that third idea, that if you just portray something with beauty, that that creates its own accuracy. I like that a lot.
27:45 Wes: Yeah. It's untruth. Yeah. So in this case, the passions. I think part of what's interesting here is, you know, as you pointed out, the conflict between this word passion and what's come before. Does cold command really count as passion? I'm calling it arrogance and will to power, but maybe we can think of some other words. But are those sorts of things passions, they seem, in a way, dead. Right. They seem more. The stone seems actually very appropriate for them. Or maybe the passions are. They're sort of buried in some sense. But the other thing is, while those passions red, there's really no antecedent to that directly. There's what's on the face, a face that's shattered. We're even meant to infer the antecedent here.
28:30 Erin: And, of course, that doubling of passions and coldness is contained within that following line. Right. They yet survive, but they're lifeless. So there's that same dichotomy in the following lines. So. And they're stamped on these lifeless things. So there's a kind of a critique of the artist's ability in that I think that he's, you know, oftentimes in statues of any great figure, there's usually some sort of identifying characteristic that is their signature, their trademark. Akhenaten obviously had a, you know, a different artistic whole movement behind him, but he's always portrayed as being that.
He has that kind of rounded belly. You know, he could always tell Akhenaten by his little potbelly. And there are lots of other sort of characteristics. So there's almost this idea of that if you want to portray Marcus Aurelius or Ramses II or whoever, that you might stamp him with the recognizable characteristics of his, you know, what he's most known for. I don't know if that is maybe involved here. I mean, I think it's part of it. But this idea that we have this stamp of a characteristic on what, what is the stamp here and what is the lifeless?
So it seems like the passions are stamped on. So the passions are alive, but the lifeless things are what the pieces of stone. It's very strange when you tear it apart, it starts to crumble, so to speak. So let me pause here for a moment to talk about the sponsor of today's episode, Better Help. That's H E L P. As someone who has found therapy to be really useful at different points in my life, I believe strongly that it can be an essential tool for growth and self reflection. So if there's a persistent problem you're having, having maybe something standing in the way of your happiness or your goals, Better Help is a great and convenient online resource so you don't have to go into a therapist's office.
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31:11 Wes: Yeah, so this is kind of built into mimesis. It's a problem inherent in representation and mimesis, which is that the medium of representation is naturally lifeless in a sense. It's naturally cut off in some way from the real thing. And even when we talk about our passions, right? So if we have a conversation and I say, I was scared yesterday or I was angry yesterday, that's not the same thing as re experiencing it. I might have some of that experience again in the telling of it. But even to use words, even to use concepts, even to represent, is to take me away from the reality of the actual experience.
Except that in the case of a work of art, I can be induced to some extent. Now, I don't know if I can be induced with the feeling of arrogance by looking at a sculpture like this, right? I can't become the sneering cold commander necessarily. Maybe I do a little bit through identification, but there is some ability here to sort of virally infect me with the passion in question, which is really important because that is the thing that actually survives with art. The sculpture could even disappear entirely, but it could create a kind of culture, right?
The cultural effect of these monuments, even if a particular monument doesn't survive, could be something felt, right? The culture of Egypt is part of our present, and its passions are to some extent our passions. Maybe that's just because we're human. But also maybe there's something distinctively Egyptian, right? Left over in them. It's almost like DNA or a virus in the way that this is the thing that survives from generation to generation, or the memetic character of culture. Even if particular works of art don't survive, it's something at the level of passion that gets propagated.
33:08 Erin: And yet there's something highly manufactured about that word stamped at the same time, like an assembly line. This has the character of Egypt on it, TM with a circle around it.
33:18 Wes: I think this is important, and this is what you were getting at before. I mean, I think this gets us to the relationship between red and mock, which is to say that if we're making something true to life in the sense that we are trying to accurately represent not the person, but a particular frame of mind, a particular passion or maybe arrogance, then the tendency is towards caricature, right? The tendency is towards exaggeration because we have to produce an effect in the audience and we have to make it recognizable. And in reality, people are very complicated, and it's tough to communicate that complexity.
So that's the sense in which trueness requires mockery in a way. And that's one. Or that's one take on mockery in this. It's dangerous. And I Think authors worry about this. And I think even in our last recording on Bartleby, the concept of characterlessness is in part a reflection on this problem, a reflection on the extent to which the creation of character is fraught with conflict and inaccuracy. Or on a personal level, in something like Prufrock. Right. Are we pigeonholing someone? Are we leaving them wriggling on a pin? This reminds me of my experience as a reporter, an animal healthcare reporter, strangely enough, in which I wrote this glowing profile of someone, this police officer who started the first animal cruelty department within a police force.
And she was very unhappy with my glowing portrait because I told a story, I created a narrative. And I wasn't trying to be overly dramatic. I was trying to highlight, I thought, what were some really true, interestingly dramatic facts in the story, like the fact that she grew up next to an animal hoarder who she later had to arrest. And she saw those things as caricatures and as misrepresentations of the subtleties, what was going on. And I realized she was right. So that just in the process of trying to tell a coherent story, I was engaged in misrepresentation.
So once again, we confront the question of whether aesthetic representation or even storytelling, even if it's reporting is naturally misleading and misleading in its attempt to either be beautiful or in its attempt to. Even in its attempt to be true in some sense. Right. If it's going to be. If we're attempting to be true to character or to passion by making it something that can have a suitable effect on the audience.
35:59 Erin: Well, yeah. In its attempt to get itself read. Yeah, right. What reader would go to a newspaper and just want to hear the driest possible recounting of exactly just the facts? Yeah, yeah, right. I guess it calls all of news reporting into question because all of news reporting is an attempt to, you know, narrativize and storytell, expounding upon actual fact. But it also is a medium that's reliant upon an audience, just like the arts are reliant upon an audience. And if it's not compelling, then who's going to want to ingest it?
36:32 Wes: Yeah. And compelling is a good word and hints at how deep this problem gets, because we do tend to conflate aesthetics and truth, even truth and metaphor. Right. So in Much Ado About Nothing, we talked about the extent to which metaphor could be used as an element in reasoning to make an accusation seem true. You know, they're so stained with blood that they could make the entire sea red or Something like that. And the use of metaphor and wit. Right. So a battle of wits involves the use of metaphors in a way that are convicting of the other person in the sense of, you know, convicting them of being an oaf or stupid or silly, partly because they lose the battle of wits at that moment, but also just because the representation is so clever that it makes it seem like it must be true.
So one might argue, as Nietzsche did, that all language, in a way, is metaphor. So we are confronted with that Platonic problem of the inherent inaccuracy in representation, but we gravitate towards these. So, for instance, to something like metaphor as a kind of truth teller or as an indicator of truth, for better or for worse. So it may be actually that there are ways in which it actually is a good indicator of a certain kind of truth.
37:47 Erin: I was just writing about this for my theory of poetry class, and my professor was talking about how metaphor, you tell the truth up to a certain point. It's like trying to get to a place where you have to. You can only drive so far, and then you have to get out and walk on foot to the rest of the way to your destination. That metaphor is doing that walking. But that there's also the false kind of metaphor, she said, in which you drive up and then in the last couple seconds, you switch to walking and make it look like you walked the whole way. Sort of performative element of metaphor, which is sort of emptier wit, in a way, you're putting me in mind of that.
38:24 Wes: There's always the problem of how far you can extend the metaphor. How long does the analogy hold? Or between what elements of the vehicle and the. What's the other one?
38:34 Erin: Tenor.
38:35 Wes: Yeah. How many isomorphisms are there between the two structures? I mean, you see this all the time in political reasoning on Twitter, where people create a metaphor or an analogy between two things, and so they know one commonality, and then they infer that some other commonality must hold when it obviously doesn't.
38:57 Erin: Right.
38:58 Wes: Just bad reasoning.
38:59 Erin: I did a whole segment with my students once on Twitter and logical fallacies, and they realized that every single tweet they had ever read was a logical fallacy.
39:08 Wes: Right. But it's emotionally very, very satisfying.
39:12 Erin: Right.
39:13 Wes: So passions well read or something Mocked. The other thing I think about the stamped on these lifeless things is this a funerary monument.
39:22 Erin: You know, that's interesting. I would take this to be a statue erected to someone at the height of his powers. Right.
39:28 Wes: I think you're right. I Think I think of that because, you know, of Egypt's sort of obsession with what are basically grand tombs and, you know, including the pyramids. Right. Essentially huge tombs and massive funerary monuments and the sense in which. Even though in this case it's not specifically that. The sort of irony of trying to become immortal through something dead or even become immortal through one's tombstone, essentially.
39:56 Erin: Right.
39:56 Wes: Which you could read any sculpture, a monument as being that.
39:59 Erin: Well, and I think the ways in which Egyptians took that literally by being buried with objects that were meant to sustain them in the afterlife, too, is. I mean, it takes. It takes on a kind of a deadly seriousness when you're.
40:13 Wes: Another misuse of metaphor.
40:14 Erin: Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. A literalizing element. We've already glanced at it, but it takes us to the most, I think, by far the most difficult line of the poem. And a line that I still struggle to understand grammatically to what it refers to. The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. So do you take that to be the hand of the sculptor? The hand of the statue of Ozymandias? Of both? Who's them? What heart is feeding whom? It's very confusing, I think.
40:45 Wes: Yeah. I have to admit it took me a while to figure out this line, and one of the readings that you've mentioned just didn't even occur to me. So the way I ended up taking this is that it's the hand of the sculptor who. Who mocks the passions, where mock, again, is ambiguous between just represents those passions on the face and perhaps exaggerates or caricatures them. Or beyond that, just the very circumstantially mocks them by representing arrogance in a medium that is inevitably going to fracture and decay and be subject to the ravages of time. And then the heart that fed, I take to be Ramses' heart feeding those passions.
41:28 Erin: Hmm. Okay.
41:29 Wes: What's your other?
41:30 Erin: Well, I would say that that's not the most intuitive first reading. Am I wrong in saying that, or was that your first reading? Because I would say that is my
41:38 Wes: first reading, but it took me a while to figure out what them refers to, what the object of fed is, which is to say them. What's your other take?
41:47 Erin: Well, I'd say that the most intuitive to me, and I could be totally wrong, is this idea of mocking, connecting back to the of cold command so that he, the sculptor, is portraying Ramses or Ozymandias mocking hand, which maybe doesn't survive, but is interpreted through the portal of the mouth in the same way that the traveler is attributing all of these emotions to just one mouth, again, in my interpretation. And that he's also. That he has a heart that is somehow also feeding his subjects at the same time that he's mocking them. Subjects, meaning.
Now, we get into this interesting idea of the subjects of a king and then the subject of one's artwork. And I think that when I teach this poem, my students most often think that the hand that mocked them in the heart that fed. That's describing Ozymandias, describing the statue, or describing real life. Ozymandias and his characteristics, which the sculptor is looking at in trying to sculpt his subject. And that's all kind of going into it. But then, of course, the second read is. No, wait, grammatically, this lines up with the sculptor, not the subject of the sculpture.
42:59 Wes: Yeah.
43:00 Erin: But it could potentially go both ways. Or not. The grammar of this is so tricky.
43:06 Wes: Yeah.
43:07 Erin: It could also be that Ozymandias is mocking the sculptor, too. The sculptor's attempts.
43:11 Wes: Yes, yes. I mean, I think these are all readings which she can get mileage out of that work. The sculptor. Well, those passions read which yet survive. So the passions survive, stamped on these lifeless things. What do they survive? Survive actually is transitive in my reading. Survive as an object. They survive the hand, the passions survive, the hand that mocked them on my reading. That's one of the interesting ironies of the poem, which is that on one level, it seems to have a very simple moral about hubris and arrogance and how power is ephemeral.
On the other hand, it's the passions that themselves seem to survive. And I talked about that in terms of cultural influence and in terms of the influence of the work of art on the emotions of the audience, something that can affect their character, something that can lead to. To dispose them, to behave in certain ways. You know, if it's artistic influence, it could lead in the viewer of the sculpture to replicate a style, replicate something within that. But in general. Right. It's just the way cultural influence works. It becomes part of our character.
It makes us do things. So there's a real hegemony represented here. Right. In Ramses, which is a cultural hegemony, a cultural influence. And that's what is immortal in works of art as well. We can create a parallel between the artist's grandiosity and that of Ramses and say here that neither of them really survive. And even the survival, again, of the object itself is not what's at issue. It's the survival of not to Be too nerdy about it, but it's information that survives. It's something out there, in a way, in the ether, where I'm including information in information, something encoded that can infect and spread.
It's like a virus. And that includes passions. It includes any sort of response we might have to a work of art or any artifact, anything cultural, anything. Any representation. But anyway, going back to the grammar. Yeah, that's what I see. I see survive as transitive and the passion surviving, the hand that mocks them and the heart that feeds them. It sets up a kind of competition between artist and subject, which I think you kind of hinted at. Who is it that is made immortal? Artist or the subject matter or something else or something beyond that.
The cultural entity, the passion?
45:43 Erin: Well, yeah. And you're making me think, therefore, of. I mean, what is the most sort of the most straightforward part of the poem, which is that we actually get the subject's words, we get the thought bubble, the speech bubble, within the statue itself, inscribed on the pedestal. Which is an interesting idea that the. What I think you're suggesting, which is that the inscription can provide sort of one reading, but that the way that he's portrayed can be betrayed by the artist. So we get the subject of this sculpture. In other words, Ozymandias wants to have his portrait in stone. Right. And he wants to have this inscription very explicitly describing his. The message that he wishes to get across. And yet that same message, through the work of the sculptor, can be betrayed. So there can be a clash, in other words, between the inscription and the actual depiction of the subject matter.
46:41 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
46:42 Erin: So the, you know, after the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed, which is a very difficult line, we get a very straightforward message, the message that Ozymandias wishes us to take away from confrontation. Yeah. And then, of course, the ways in which that message has already been betrayed by the sculptor and then ultimately by what happens to the sculpture itself. So Shelley writes, and on the pedestal, these words appear. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. Okay. So we have the pedestal, which must be underneath these trunkless legs, and Ozymandias announces himself, gives his name, calls himself King of Kings.
Which is, of course, in a different culture, that would have a very different meaning. Right. A very grandiose meaning here is imposed upon it because we know it's associated with Christ to be the King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. So it seems as though it's an invitation for Those who think they're great, like maybe Napoleon coming to take his treasures from Egypt to say, okay, you think you're great, but look at everything that I've done and despair of your paltry efforts. And among his works, presumably, is this statue, which does still remain.
Let's give him some credit here.
48:04 Wes: Right.
48:04 Erin: That was it. Right.
48:07 Wes: And we got the most important thing, the sneer. You know, if it is just the sneer that remains, it's, you know, it's like Cheshire Cat. Right, Right. Give us the essence of it all. And hasn't he succeeded then?
48:18 Erin: Well, totally. And I. I mean, I would argue that the. The fact that these items do remain is kind of an argument against what a lot of people take to be the whole message of the poem.
48:27 Wes: Yeah.
48:28 Erin: It does survive. Survival is the word of the day here.
48:32 Wes: Yeah. And the poem itself becomes its own sort of monument, you know, propagate the survival. And art somehow does that. And then the question is, what survives? And I've been arguing that passion, or some kind of correlate of that is really, really the kind of viral or the bit of DNA that really does survive whatever happens to any particular media. Yeah. The poem is a reflection on whether art can make anything immortal, even if not a person, even if not an artist, even if not a particular thing that's represented. Something. I love the line, look on my work.
See? Mighty and despair, which. That's got to be a grandiose moment that every artist has experienced. Right. It's an agonistic endeavor. It's a competitive endeavor. You're engaged in a dialogue with previous artists and attempt to take up their influence, which could be a kind of subjection. Right. If you're not careful and you become entirely derivative, then you don't transcend it. But also can be an important influence that can lead to a kind of artistic freedom, which I think is part of the goal. Right. Real creativity, some real kind of freedom that can't be unmoored from the past and from tradition, but in some sense must transcendence.
I think it's an emotion that's appealing to artists, but it has to be gotten over in some way. The sort of. The grandiose. Look how powerful I am. That narcissistic moment, that's what's fragile, and that's what could lead to something that truly is ephemeral in every sense, which doesn't have any cultural staying power.
50:13 Erin: What's so delicious about this, too, is that the very origin of this poem is an artistic competition.
50:19 Wes: Right, Exactly.
50:20 Erin: So he's rubbing poor Horace's nose in it.
50:24 Wes: Yep, yep.
50:25 Erin: Horace. Destined not to be famous with a name like that. If he had changed it to Ozymandias, then maybe.
50:30 Wes: Is the artist trying to be a dictator to subject the audience, or do they have to do something else? They have to move out of that moment.
50:39 Erin: I think you're also making me think of the fact that so often with this ancient statuary, we don't get the name of the. Of the sculptor ever. You know, we have no idea who the sculptor is. We know, of course, who the rulers are that they depict. And obviously here we get a direct inscription, but we get this nameless influence at the same time of the sculptor handed down someone whose name we don't know, but who has stamped his creations with his own artistic gifts. The anonymity of it is interesting to me.
51:15 Wes: Yeah. If it's a contest between the sculptor and Ozymandias, neither actually win. It's passions that win. So the hand that mocks doesn't survive. The heart that inspired them doesn't survive. A third thing is the only survivor in this battle. And the same thing for Smith and for Shelley. In a way, the artist is a medium. Right. And they're inspired. And the better an artist is, and the more they're operating at their optimum, the less credit they ought to get. Right. Because it's just the gods moving through them.
51:47 Erin: Sure.
51:48 Wes: So the better you are, the less credit you get as an artist.
51:52 Erin: Right. The more that mediating factor disappears. Yeah, yeah. So then we get the final three lines. Nothing beside remains round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away. So there's nothing around this statue. And I love colossal wreck. I love the idea that this is. The statue is a vessel again, carrying its message, even though it's trunkless. Right. The idea that it's like a shipwreck in the middle of the sea of the desert.
52:23 Wes: Yeah. Is it the desert that has caused an empire to disappear, or is it the artistic monument that creates the desert in some sense, because it's so powerful, because it's like a nuclear blast and everything around it is sort of obliterated in a way, if it's truly great. I know that's a stretch, but that's the sort of thing I think about at the very end is if you reverse the causality and you make this fractured visage, this sort of nuclear bomb that has gone off and produce the post apocalyptic wasteland around it.
52:58 Erin: I like that. Yeah. I Mean the desert is still in the process of digesting the statue. Right. The statue is half sunk. But I like that alternate reading. Obliteration capability in art has interesting complications too.
53:15 Wes: And then if it's a wreck, if it's remnants of a vessel or a ship, it's not something that is fully sunk. Right. So in some sense it can still navigate this sandy, desolate world or even this, you know, this nothingness. Nothing beside remains. Ramses is trying to call our attention to all the great works that he has done. Right. So which really are other people's works? They're the works of slaves or the works of the sculptor. And they are meant to be intimidating. They're meant to induce despair, despite the fact that they are where they do survive.
They're just the sorts of things that are going to be exploited and subjected and put into museums and enjoyed. So subjected to whatever extent the audience subjects something, a work of art, that they enjoy all that stuff. But if we are the competitive artist, it's enough that one beautiful thing survive to leave us in a state of desolation. I don't know where I'm going with that, but the other thing I wanted to mention was your focus on this word wreck. It makes me wonder to the extent to which you can see any work of art as a wreck in the sense of an abandoned ship.
Because I'm thinking in terms of this DNA or RNA analogy. I think of the capsid to a virus. It's sort of in this kind of protein shell and it's not activated except when it gets into a body and it can sort of hijack the living processes of a body and make the cell produce that DNA to exert its influence and naturally in the same way. Right. The aesthetic object is not activated except in relation to the audience, except in relation to acts of interpretation. So it's kind of freeze dried until then. And you have to add interpretative water to it.
Yeah, yeah. And then it comes alive. So it lives in, it can be alive in us. But by itself it's always this wreck that navigates, so to speak, in the sense it doesn't, doesn't really move, doesn't do anything in that kind of sandy realm of nothingness. And the artist has to confront the blank page, the realm of nothingness, in order to put something there. It's a courageous act, it's an anxiety producing act. And then the audience has to be able to retrieve it from nothingness.
55:48 Erin: So you're suggesting that pre and post traveler, this is just the tree falling in the woods and not making a sound because the person needs to hear the sound. In other words, the sound phenomenon is something that only the listener can partake of. So the traveler is sort of activating it, but then otherwise, if he hadn't come across it, it would still just be a wreck.
56:13 Wes: And the power ultimately belongs to the audience.
56:17 Erin: Right. You're also making me think that there's something wrecked, as I think we've already been talking about. In any attempt at representation, there's always going to be something fragmented about any representation because it's not the genuine article, you know, it's not the real guy. So there's always, I think, something missing there. And here that fragmenting of representation is literalized and the missing parts of the body are made literal in the fact that only the bottom half or the full shattered face and these two legs are what remain.
56:47 Wes: Yeah.
56:48 Erin: So we'll continue our conversation about this in the postscript. And I'm also going to read Horace Smith's effort at producing an Ozymandias poem, which is kind of hilarious at times. I don't know. Yeah, we'll see.
57:00 Wes: We might just make a quick reference to Plath's the Colossus, right?
57:05 Erin: Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.
57:06 Wes: Okay. All right.
57:07 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
57:18 Wes: subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
Sex and Tech in “Alien” by Ridley Scott
Sep 27, 2021
The Nostromo is a labyrinthine spaceship, a hulking ore refinery run on a sophisticated computer operating system and manned by a crew of seven. But somehow it’s not the most impressive piece of technology in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. That distinction belongs to the title character, an organism with blood of acid and two sets of jaws, highly-evolved, adaptable to any climate. Its scientific mission, if you will, is to fulfill a basic biological imperative: to become a parent. Fitting, then, that it chooses to prey on a ship controlled by its own problematic Mother. Just what kind of existential threat does this techno-sexual organism pose to a man-made and sterile future? And how does one woman manage to defeat it? Wes & Erin analyze.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:11 Erin: The Nostromo is a labyrinthine spaceship, a hulking ore refinery run on a sophisticated computer operating system and manned by a crew of seven. But somehow it's not the most impressive piece of technology. In Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien. That distinction belongs to the title character and an organism with blood of acid and two sets of Jaws. Highly evolved, adaptable to any climate. Its scientific mission, if you will, is to fulfill a basic biological to become a parent. Fitting then that it chooses to prey on a ship controlled by its own problematic mother.
Just what kind of existential threat does this techno sexual organism pose to a man made and sterile future? And how does one woman manage to defeat it? These are the topics for today's discussion. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and this is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So Wes, I don't know where I first heard this. It's a story that Sigourney Weaver has told at some point in like a making of featurette or maybe it was an interview, but I remember seeing it a few years ago where she talks about how her parents came to visit her on the set of Alien and it was really her first major movie.
As we mentioned in our Annie hall episode, she did appear in the. The last bit of Annie Hall. I think she was on screen for like six seconds in that wide shot. She was Alvy's date to the movie at the end of the film anyway, so this is really properly her first film. And her parents came to visit on set one of the days that they were shooting inside that Alien spaceship. And I guess she sort of took them on a tour and through the sort of tunnels and her parents were looking a little puzzled and a little uncomfortable. And finally they were like, what kind of movie is this?
Exactly. Certainly the art production in this film emphasizes certain elements of human anatomy, shall we say? I think that's an important theme in the film.
2:11 Wes: Yeah, we've both seen the Beast within, the making of Alien. I love the title of that because I don't think Alien has anything to do with the beast Within. But anyway, we'll get to that. I've seen it more recently than you have, although I know you rewatched at least a little bit of it. But there's a lot the film about one of the artists for the film. This really creepy. Is he German or Austrian? I forget.
2:37 Erin: I think he's Swiss.
2:38 Wes: Oh, is he Swiss? Okay. Hans Giger. And I don't know if he's the one who does the interior of the spaceship. I know. He's the one who does the famous space jockey and the interior of what they call the derelict ship, the one they find on the planetoid. He explicitly is interested in kind of combining technology and sexuality or biological forms. But, yeah, a lot of it very obviously sexual. So his work often looks like it's. It's like someone's combining human anatomy with automobile parts or something like that. And it's really fabulous. It's an incredible set in the derelict spaceship that I think the studios. Right. They didn't want Ridley Scott to actually even build it because it was so expensive. And it's just for one scene in the movie.
3:29 Erin: Right, right.
3:30 Wes: But, yeah, as you point out, there's this very interesting crossover between technology and sexuality and also being a mother. And that's the really, really. The interesting way the film begins is this very, very explicit connection between technology and a kind of artificial womb. Right. So everyone's in hibernation to begin with in the movie. And they're all going to wake up. To me, it looks like they're wearing diapers, right. They're all going to wake up in their cribs. And the computer that runs the mothership is called Mother. And one of the wonderful things about the film is just the way it opens on an empty ship.
Empty except for. Well, there's the. There's corridors, there's the empty bridge. There's some sort of like, moving helmet at some point in the distance. And then you see a computer boot up at the very beginning. And it's. And it's cool reflection in a. In a helmet and corridor lights coming on. So you get the sense that things are. The ship is empty but highly automated and also an environment that can sustain life. So it's an interesting contradiction, right, this sterility of the ship and the sterility of technology in general. The unfeeling quality of the technological, but also the fact that it can be life sustaining.
And there's a great touch which I think really kind of succinctly captures this idea, which is the drinking birds, right. Which, you know, in the scenes in the beginning, you just see them in the distance and it's hard to make them out in what they are if you don't already know what they are. I think they are probably a more popular, like, toy in the 70s and 80s or something. But they weren't immediately recognizable to me until later in the film when you see them more clearly. So in the beginning, you just get this very, very long shot of a ship in which there's largely no activity except for these birds that are kind of like they're not perpetual motion machines, but they're.
It's like they're almost Right. The way they work involves, like, pressure and temperature in a way where they can seem to indefinitely rock back and forth and look like they're drinking out of a cup. So life versus not life, automation versus what is life sustaining and maternal. All that stuff is really nicely set up in the very beginning.
6:03 Erin: Yeah, it's sterile and yet oddly not sterile at the same time. Right. Some parts of the ship with the white padding and the sort of gestational area for hypersleep that looks really future. That looks more like 2001. But other parts of the film. I know Ridley Scott uses this famous term of like truck drivers in space.
6:25 Wes: Right, right.
6:26 Erin: Other parts of the film look more like, you know, the Millennium Falcon. The, like, hunk of junk type spacecraft that's really degraded and shows that this is a ship that's been used and is. It's also just bizarre looking. And I guess, like, my first thought when we see the whole thing is that it looks like a floating 19th century factory or something like that. It doesn't look particularly like a clean place.
6:50 Wes: Well, it's towing the ship itself is towing a big refinery.
6:54 Erin: Right, right. And I guess spaceships don't have to be aerodynamic. It just doesn't. It doesn't have any sleekness to it. Quite the opposite. But also about that shot in the beginning, it's very strange because the camera is usually following the perspective of a character. You know, usually a camera's movement is motivated by. Not necessarily in a master shot, but if it's sort of gliding down a hallway, it's following the perspective of a particular character who's walking down the hallway. So here we have the camera gliding down a hallway not motivated by any particular character's perspective because they're all, it turns out, in hypersleep.
But it seems to be turning and looking. The doors even open for it. When it goes into the hypersleep chamber, the lights come up, which could be because, you know, the ship is also waking them up at the same moment. But there's this sense of uneasiness right from the beginning because of that unmotivated camera action. So in other words, the camera is the alien, or it's another alien. Right. That's coming in to the womb. It's the invader in the womb.
8:02 Wes: Interesting.
8:03 Erin: Which really also highlights, I think, the Vulnerability of the crew from the very beginning, outside of the fact that they're all half naked in these sort of quasi diapers.
8:12 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, you know, as usual, any commentary on the role of technology here can be taken as a meta commentary on film and even the arts in some sense. You're reminding me that the camera is actually following the boot up in a way. Like the reason why those doors open on the hibernators is because everything's booting up, you know, apparently. And so you could say you could motivate the opening of the doors by the fact that it's part of this boot up process, the lights in the corridor coming on. But I was also thinking that if you're watching the film for the first time, the beginning, you're seeing an empty ship and you don't know, there's a lot of confusion.
You don't know exactly what's happening. You don't know if this is the aftermath of something horrible that's happened. Right. There's no people around or if it's a lost in space situation. And when I say I don't know what's going on, I still don't even know what that vibrating helmet is supposed to be. I think in the screenplay it's somehow communicating with the other helmet. It's involved in the triggering a computer to boot up or something like that. But I still don't quite understand it. Getting back to what you said about the hunk of junk quality versus more of a sterile 2001 quality to certain parts of the ship.
And I was thinking, before you said it, I was thinking truckers in space.
9:37 Erin: Oh, really?
9:38 Wes: So that contrast reflects an interesting conflict that arises. So right in 2001, it's a scientific mission, Right. In search of artificial intelligence, or how does it all work?
9:53 Erin: I don't remember.
9:55 Wes: I've forgotten. Even though I read the novel a long time ago, I've seen the movie. So there's a, you know, these are scientists in 2001, I think, on a knowledge seeking expedition. But in this case, the truckers and space aspect of this, they're just a commercial ship bringing back ore. It's a towboat basically connected to a huge refinery, bringing back ore. The motivations are pretty much commercial. And yet they get sidelined by what is basically a scientific expedition for which they're really not, except for the Android Ash, they're really not qualified. And so that conflict becomes a big part of the movie.
10:34 Erin: Yeah. And what I Remember best about 2001 is just first of all, the cleanliness and also the scale. I remember that huge floating Howard Johnson's. I don't know if you remember that.
10:47 Wes: Yeah, right.
10:47 Erin: One of the things I noticed about that helmet is that it has that airport over the mouth, the emergency helmet that in shadow. It makes the helmet look almost like a pig snout. I thought of at the beginning. Or of course it could be a gag. Right. It made me think about the fact that 2001 and the cleanliness and sort of open spaces and the largeness, the scale of everything in that film is turned on its head here. So they're very, very narrow hallways which are extremely intestinal looking. And it's an odd contrast because they're in space. Right.
So space is lim. And yet everything that they are in is extremely enclosed and claustrophobic. The helmets that you're on, you know, it's an irony that when you're out in space, you know, you're sort of trapped in this glass helmet with just your own breathing. And in fact, over the soundtrack, very often in this film we just hear breathing of main characters who are either out in a spaceship or breathing heavily because they're running from the alien or scared or something. So of course a theme of the film is going to be, you know, the inability to breathe and the fact that the alien gestates in the lungs, which I think is an important distinction from the stomach in a lot of ways.
But that closed off and that feeling of being gagged, it seems to symbolize the sort of the limits, the very closed off parameters of the mission in a certain way. And the sort of working class nature of the mission that they're undertaking and the fact that the company is probably trying to cut costs as much as possible and all of that. Whereas in 2001 it's sort of a more positive, at least in terms of the style of the spaceship, a more positive and open and perhaps wealthy view of space exploration.
12:39 Wes: Yeah, I think a lot of that is deliberate with the whole feeling that there's cost cutting going on. Right. So Ridley Scott wanted like a retro aspect to some of this where the. The computer looks really unsophisticated. Right. It looks like it's like DOS booting up.
12:55 Erin: And yet you can ask it idiomatic questions and it'll know the answer. If you say like, what's the issue, Mother?
13:02 Wes: Yeah. What's the story about this?
13:03 Erin: What's the story? Yeah, yeah.
13:05 Wes: So this is one of the interesting things about technology, which is that it can serve as a kind of artificial Womb in this circumstance, right. This is what is being conveyed to us very explicitly. And even though we're not on the spaceship, we can think of our own lives in the same way. So there's a sort of threat. The threat of technology is highlighted from the beginning. And it's a threat that applies to all of us, which is just that it can infantilize us, it can be a surrogate. We're all familiar because of our smartphones with the way in which it can kind of hijack and replace actual human interaction, actual human intimacy.
There's the same sort of threat going on with the ship, but it's accentuated. And the threat is that everyone depends on Mother for their lives. They're in a artificial life sustaining environment, a kind of womb. And the question is whether the mother, their quote unquote technological mother, is a good mother, whether she is going to actually protect them. And of course she doesn't. Right. I love the line. Mothers interrupted the course of our journey near the very beginning. Right? So that's when, you know, Dallas goes and finds out what's going on.
So Mother, instead of performing her protective role, she sidetracks them to do this dangerous mission which. Right. Runs against their commercial interest and runs against the, the imperative to simply be safe. It's more libidinal in a way, even though it's sublimated, it's more about the desire to explore and to investigate. And it's important that the, you know, the object of investigation here is intelligent alien life, specifically. That's the interesting clause, right, that the company has in its contract which says if there's indications of that, then you have to stop and investigate.
And what I think is interesting about that is that there's kind of a relationship between that and motherhood in the sense that the search for intelligent life beyond Earth in a way is a search for our origins. What's so fascinating about it is we're really looking to find siblings, right? You know what's fascinating about that is because we want to compare and contrast on where they came from. And also what's the possible variability in form, right? Are they going to be humanoid? Are they going to look like one of those kind of Spielberg aliens with the big eyes, a kind of infant look?
Are they going to be benevolent? Are they going to be evil? In this case, of course, you could go the other route and say they have this monstrous insect like form. But I think ultimately, and I don't know, let me know if you think this is right. I think ultimately this has Something to do with seeking out our origins. Right. Arguably, even the scientific impulse has something to do in general, I think, with seeking out one's origins, which is to say one's maternal origins, one's formative influences. But ultimately that has a lot to do with sex as well.
Right. So sex is the. In one sense, the origin just is sex. So you have all those things tied together. And I think that, in a way, is part of the meaning of Mother's diversion of them. She prompts them into an investigation of the maternal in a way, or a direct confrontation with the maternal.
16:52 Erin: Yeah. And what you're saying is really illuminating Ash's particular interest in the alien, not just on a scientific level, but as a kind of search for his own origin, as I think is exactly common theme for Ridley Scott. Blade Runner, for instance, or the Android that is maybe embittered by the fact that he has no parentage.
17:11 Wes: Exactly.
17:12 Erin: Or that his parentage is a company and he's just a corporate shill.
17:17 Wes: That's a good way. I like that way of putting it. Yeah.
17:19 Erin: But I like what you say, too, about the search for siblings. Because one of the things that I've always known about this film is that originally the plan was that it was going to have a lot of graphic sex in it. Because there was a plotline at one point of first of all, of Dallas and Ripley having a relationship. There was also the idea that Ridley Scott wanted to put in that he was toying with, that it would be a sort of like post sex as a dirty thing or sex as a private thing kind of a world. So he envisioned that people would be having sex with each other very casually.
I wouldn't like that personally, for reasons I've already explained in other. In other episodes. But I also. Because I'm a prude. Not really. But also I think that the squabbling siblings thing is happening on the ship. Right. They're all in the womb together. And I think the only one who wouldn't be on the sibling level per se is Dallas, in a way. Dallas is the ship, is the mother, Dallas is the father. Right. When he goes in for his special transmission that he's going to receive from Mother. It's like the parents having a conversation in the other room and the siblings are all squabbling with each other over upstairs, downstairs types of concerns.
So it's almost like there are the favored children or the natural children and then the sort of two stepchildren who are of a lower order because they get lower pay and they're doing menial labor. And so the ways in which I think Dallas is a bad father stuck out to me this time. So he, like Mother, is also willing to risk his crew. We may think that he's doing that for the right reasons, but I think there's a pervading theme here of programming or following protocol as a means to save life and also disobeying it as a means to save life. And where exactly the film falls on that one side or the other, I'm not quite sure.
There's something here about this. This mixture of parentage and protocol and how following Mother's designated protocol leads them to a lack of safety. But also when Dallas tries to actually save a crew member, his disobeying protocol also results in very, very bad effects for everybody.
19:41 Wes: Yeah, well, there's an obvious representative of protocol and following the safeguarding quarantine, and that is Ripley. So she is the one who.
19:53 Erin: She's the hall monitor of the ship.
19:54 Wes: Yes. Yeah. And so. And Dallas should be that. Right? That would be. If he were really fulfilling his role as a father figure, he would be doing that. Instead, he's just a pushover, and he's not a real leader. She's the only one on the ship who turns out to be a real leader and in a way, a real individual, which we can discuss what that means later. So, yeah, when they try to bring in Kane, she's the one who tries to keep him out for quarantine purposes. And Ash ends up letting Kane in. And, you know, she has that great fight with Ash over all of that about protocol and Ash violating quarantine.
And also about the fact that when Dallas and Kane are off the ship, she's the third officer, so she becomes the senior officer, tells him, you forgot the science division, basic quarantine law. And when Ash says, that's a risk I was willing to take to save Kane, she says, that's a pretty big risk for a science officer. It's not exactly out of the manual, is it? Is it? And then he has to say that he takes his responsibilities as seriously as she does. There's an irony to this, right? Which is he's the Android. You would think he would be the one kind of wedded to the rules and not able to kind of deviate.
But he's doing all this perverse evasion of the rules because he has a fascination with, I think, as you pointed out, with origins. He has a very strong scientific instinct, and that kind of rationality I think we would associate with an Android. But it's not always obvious to us that that impulse to investigate could be, like I said, something motivated by a seeking of origins. It could be perverse, it could be a qu. A sexual quality to it. In this case, Ash is his origins are actually technological. So whereas the mothership and technology in general is sort of an artificial womb or an artificial life sustaining environment for people, that's all Ash has.
There is no real mother for him. And his formation is direct and it's sudden. Right? So for most of us, we have, in the development of identities, we were born. Let's start from the beginning. We're born, we have a very close relationship to a mother who helps us build a mind, helps us build self consciousness. And part of the way she does that is through what psychologists call mirroring through interactions with an infant which allow the infant to recognize itself in the mother and the fact that it has a mind through the mother and to develop a theory of mind and the ability to use language and all that stuff.
And we go on to develop identifications with others. We become who we are by identification with the other, which is to say the alien. And by returning to ourselves out of that identification, there's a return trip which hopefully is not interrupted in the way the return trip of the, of the Nostromo is interrupted in this movie. So yeah, in other words, you know, we're subjected, we grow up, we're raised up, we're subjected to all these sorts of influences. But there's still some sense that there is a kind of relatedness to our origins without being swallowed up and destroyed by them and robbed of any individuality and autonomy by them.
And that's something that Ash just does not have. He's programmed. Right? And that's the predicament. If your origins are simply to be programmed, to be created by fiat, instead of the kind of dynamic dialectical development of one's own identity in relationship to the other. I think that that's the predicament and that's the kind of really fascinating compulsion for him, right. To solve that predicament by seeking out this alien, come what may, no matter how much it endangers the ship, it's a risk he's willing to take because there's no risk that's too great to take for someone who's basically an orphan if you want to find a parent.
24:14 Erin: Right. What I was trying to say before I sort of sidetracked myself, is that if we can view all these people in the womb as siblings, with Dallas being maybe the exception, as the father figure. All of that casual sex would be kind of disturbing and problematic on a sort of thematic level, but also it would, I think, undercut the intrusion of the sex of the sexual.
24:35 Wes: Exactly.
24:36 Erin: Which is represented on, on the one hand, by the alien, but on the other hand, I think by Ash. He also represents this kind of sexual intrusion because of his preoccupation with origins, as you say. So he is also, I think, an exception to this sibling rule. Right, because he's an orphan.
24:54 Wes: Yeah, he's. He's pervers because he. To be perverse is to ignore the rules to some extent or to play around with them. There's some sense of titillation. He has that quality as a character, even though he's an Android. And there's some relationship between his scientific curiosity and his interest in origins and his perversity, but. Sorry, go ahead.
25:13 Erin: Yeah. One of the things that people do think is maybe unnecessarily titillating or something that did make it into the movie is Ripley in her underwear at the end of the film. But based on what you're saying about this idea of the individual having a return journey, it makes sense to me anyway. Maybe some of the camera work is a little bit exploitative, but it makes sense that since you are arguing that Ripley is the only individual, that she would be the one who successfully navigates the return journey and would end up where the film begins. Right. In her underwear, going back into the womb. Am I getting that right?
25:46 Wes: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think I haven't thought a lot about the whole underwear thing at the end. I think in the other films. Right. That just becomes a self referential trope. Right. Where she's constantly in her underwear. Do I remember that right?
25:58 Erin: It's very different, I think, in Aliens because at the end she's going into hypersleep and there's also the little girl that she's like, sort of comforting. So it's very different in the end of this film. I think it is more sexualized because we're seeing her from the perspective of the alien.
26:16 Wes: But isn't she running around in her underwear in the Aliens film?
26:19 Erin: No, no, not that I remember. I don't think so.
26:22 Wes: All right, well, it's just my imagination. Yeah.
26:25 Erin: Just being transplanted. I just wonder how she could do anything in the underwear she wears at the end of Alien, or is apparently wearing the whole time if it's underneath her clothes. Because that is just the worst fitting pair of panties I have ever seen.
26:38 Wes: I know, I was about to say that it is pretty ill. Ill fitting,'70s style panties. Yeah, well, so I see Ripley as actually the real mother in all of this. She plays a maternal role. Could say she might be father as well, but she does what mother is supposed to do, which is she protects everyone and she takes charge. She has a plan. She wants to follow protocol, she wants to follow the rules. In contrast to Ash's perversity because it's safer. She wants to establish boundaries and all that stuff. And she's surrounded by people who are very passive. You know, I thought Dallas is kind of a mama's boy in a way, and Ash is kind of a mama's boy. And then everyone else in their own way, is a pretty passive figure. Lambert is the worst. Right? Just constantly crying and bitching.
27:32 Erin: That's the thankless part.
27:34 Wes: What's the name of the.
27:35 Erin: Veronica Cartwright.
27:38 Wes: Yeah, she didn't want to take that role because she did not like the character. And Ridley Scott convinced her to take it by saying, you are. You represent the audience. You're the audience's fears. But, you know, really none of the other characters other than Ripley comes across very well. Parker and Brett are acquisitive and they are in the role of, you know, as you pointed out, the lower class. And they belong to the lower levels of the ship in the engine room, and they don't get paid as much. And they want their. They want to advocate for full shares.
So there's a level of self interest there and impulsivity. And then you have Dallas, who's not much of a leader and too passive. Lambert, who's just hysterical all the time. I don't know. We'll have to talk about what you do with Kane. And then, of course, Ash is a whole other story, in a way, is just an outsider. I would call him a step sibling, except that I'm not sure how that's gonna fit with my other comparison, which is that I. I wanna say that mother, in a way is like a stepmother or a witch. So she's not the real mother. And in a way, witches or stepmothers and fairy tales are.
They're a variation on mother. They're the bad mother. So I think, yeah, the mother, the mothership mother is kind of plays that role as stepmother and witch. And, you know, you could think of the ship members as Hansel and Gretel, in a way, lost and getting diverted into a situation in which they are going to be devoured by the mother, so to speak. We can talk about why I would take the alien is to some extent, the representative not just of sex, but of the mother. What do you think about that comparison of mother to the stepmother or witch? Because in a way, that's what.
Right. The technology as mother. There's a magical element to that. And it's not a real mother, it's stepmother. It's technology.
29:38 Erin: And it also implies the loss of the original mother. And one of the things that is so curious and I think great about this film is that the characters have no backstory. So it's as if they're born into a situation in which they have a stepmother. And, I mean, in the case of Ash, really, he's the only one whose backstory is kind of implied in a way. Right. Or whose backstory we can guess more readily than others by being a creature of the company.
30:05 Wes: I wrote down in my notes that I got a little bit of the vibe of Thelma and Louise.
30:09 Erin: Oh, really?
30:10 Wes: Yeah. In the sense that, as I put it on our Thelma and Louise episode I kind of thought that, strangely enough, the FBI and the police were really in the role of orphans and Thelma and Louise, in a way, in the role of surrogate parents. And that same, you know, the search that they're doing, in a way, is a similar journey to what Ash is on. That's a curiosity about finding something that has to do with the maternal. But at some point I thought, yeah, it feels like everyone but Ripley is kind of an orphan and Ripley is the one that ends up being the real mother figure trying to protect them from the monster.
30:52 Erin: That's really good. I never thought of that. How can we then tie in the fact that the orphaned police officers are then killed off one by one?
31:01 Wes: Yeah, I don't know how to keep going with that comparison, except describe the feeling there. There's something very Ridley Scott about it. You know, he's not just telling stories about strong women. There's something else going on that's more interesting. How about I get in trouble with that?
31:16 Erin: But, yeah, I meant it kind of not. Not being able to make a comparison. But also, in a way, you know, Thelma and Louise, by killing themselves at the end kind of also kill everybody else that's been pursuing them or mean to them or whatever. You know, by foreclosing other possibilities. So in a way, sort of a similar thing happens. Either they all die or the female heroine dies. I really love the shots too. And this kind of bolsters our children idea of Lambert, Kane and Dallas on the. Did you call it a planetoid? Is it a smaller Planet. It's like a moon.
31:50 Wes: I'm calling it that, I think, because that's what it's called in the script.
31:53 Erin: Maybe it's a cooler word than just planet. I like it when they're going onto the platform with the space jockey and they're dwarfed by the giant space jockey. They look like little kids. And I know they, in fact, had children in those suits for some of the long shots.
32:10 Wes: Yep.
32:11 Erin: And the kids kept passing out and the actors kept passing out because it was so hot.
32:17 Wes: Yeah. Eventually they got a way to get air into those suits. But, yeah, people kept passing out and then they're super hot and no air.
32:25 Erin: It's hilarious.
32:26 Wes: That is something, though, the space jockey doesn't. It's quite original in a way. He seems so huge. He's kind of welded into the chair. And it's hard to, even in the beginning, tell exactly what it is for me. Like, what is that? This is Hans Giger's, you know, probably his biggest contribution to the film.
32:43 Erin: Yeah. And it's 26ft tall as Amazon Prime. Those little video trivia in video trivia things tells me, and I know that this was used as the shot in the film that made people know this wasn't just a B movie. This is a movie with, like, vision and imagination and a large budget.
33:03 Wes: Yep.
33:04 Erin: I like the fact that this is so big. And of course, I'm. You know, it's so incredible looking. I'm glad it made its way into the film and the studio agreed to budget for it. But you do get this sense maybe that the now they've sort of broken out of the womb, in a way. And so the architecture of the ship, as I talked about being, you know, very enclosed and confining, is sort of extended, as I said, into these space suits. So you get them touching down on this planetoid and you get sometimes just their own transmissions to Ash, which keep cutting out, which, again, is kind of like almost like they're being gagged in a different kind of way because they can't get their message across. Ash can't hear them speaking, and we hear their breathing in the soundtrack. But then they go into this place that does seem more like proper space. You know, like limitless space, cavernous and open.
33:56 Wes: And this is a very different concept for what a spaceship could be.
34:00 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And this is the place where there's another kind of gestation going on. There are all these eggs. And so I think there's also something to this idea of the sexuality that the alien represents. Is this open, limitless, sort of terrifying space that then invades the closed off human space. But then at the same time it causes this gagged quality, right, this choking quality as a result of using the humans for the gestation of its own species. I haven't quite worked that out yet, but it seems like it's an important sort of doubling.
34:36 Wes: Yeah, that's very good. It took me a while to cobble together a theory of how this all fits together with mother and then the alien as sex or whatever it is. But I think a good place to begin is just the fact that the writers were really excited by this idea, right? This is sort of the, the central idea of the film which they thought was, was innovative and would help get it made or really was something quite original. Was the. I think what they were looking for was it was kind of a technical problem of like how, how do you get the alien on the ship in an interesting way.
And then this idea occurred having to do with basically male rape, I think is the way one of the writers puts it, and male impregnation. But that idea was, was exciting to them. This is the idea that. And it's also interesting, right, that it's the thing doing the impregnating comes out of an egg. And this isn't far fetched, right? So you, like, there are wasps who lay their eggs and you know, they'll paralyze a tarantula or some other organism and lay their eggs inside them. And the, the tarantula lives and is gradually eaten by the larvae even though it's alive.
So this whole idea of impregnation, like a second impregnation that is kind of a form of parasitism to complete gestation, that's something that occurs in nature. But it's an interesting paradox in this case, right, because the egg impregnates. It's almost as if the offspring becomes the impregnator or as, or as if the mother, you know, you could even say indirectly that it's the mother who's doing the impregnating and in this case impregnating a male or you know, perhaps even the father, so to speak. So I want to pause here to talk about our sponsor, betterhelp.com that's H E L P.
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37:48 Erin: Well, and the. The whole transmission that gets them there is interesting because I thought of it as being kind of a seduction. It's an SOS that gets them to come in, but then it's. It turns out that it's a warning. So maybe this doesn't really hold up, but it's kind of like Fatal Attraction. This egg, facehugger, Alien Planet, whole deal turns out to be like a very bad girlfriend. Let's get into this moment of the face hugger because I think it's this moment and the chest burster both bear close reading.
38:18 Wes: Yeah, the chest bursting was the other thing that excited the writers and I think probably got to the audience, you know. But yeah, the two things that really make it a classic.
38:27 Erin: Yeah, one of the things I noticed when, when Kane is lowered down into the cave with that blue mist on the bottom his. His head and the helmet with the light on it, it almost looks like an egg before we see the actual eggs. And so he gets down and the eggs are leathery, which is so wrong. So much about this is so wrong. He slips and falls into the egg pit. But still we really haven't seen the eggs. They're sort of shadowy and hard to make out. And then finally we get this light on one egg and the close up of this slimy opening, which is a really cool effect that Ridley Scott did where he Filmed it upside down, so the slime seems to be dripping up.
And this is the moment where I hadn't seen this since college. And then about three years ago, I was watching with my younger siblings and with my sister, it was okay because she was older, but I was kind of hoping that, that my brother would just, you know, I just started to get embarrassed because the imagery in this, I was like, wow, this is way more sexual than I remembered. Anyway, it is very bizarre looking and there's. There's this organic bulbous, pulsating mass that's inside of the egg. And I think it's important that they used all organic animal material to compose these things.
39:45 Wes: Sheep innards and Ridley Scott's hands in there moving stuff around.
39:51 Erin: Yeah, yeah. It's perfect that the technology of this quote unquote, is even literally made, for the purposes of the film, out of organic material. So there's this clash between this sort of bulbous, pulsating organic material on the one hand and the ship and all of that sort of man made technology on the other hand. And then we get this, the facehugger bursting out, screeching onto Cain's helmet. And it actually smashes through the glass, of course, and attaches to his face. That I think is also really important symbolically that it breaks through the mechanism that's been keeping him enclosed and away from this large space that I've been talking about and literally punctures through the mechanism that keeps him enclosed in small scale space.
40:38 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. Part of the relationship of this to sex is, is just that. And the writers, they, they. I think this was explicitly intended, as far as I can tell from the making of documentary, you have these kind of vaginal orifices that produce phalluses. Right. In the case of both the egg with the face hugger, basically not only jumping onto the face, but inserting a tube down the throat or I guess into the lungs. I didn't know that. Is that right? And it's also an umbilical cord, of course. Right. So it feeds him, paralyzes him, puts him in a coma, feeds him oxygen, keeps him alive.
And you know, you get the same sort of thing later on with the alien itself with a, you know, with a mouth within the mouth, something that, that is phallic and punches out. So, you know, you think of the mouth as an orifice and then the phallus coming out of that. So all of this speaks to me of the mother in the position of doing the impregnating and just to get it related back thematically, I think it has something to do with the idea that when formative influences go wrong, it can have something to do with the intrusiveness of the mother and the fact that the way our identities develop in relation to not just a mother, but to others.
Right. Is one of being penetrated or created on the spot, like ashes. Right. As opposed to being, you know, undergoing a more natural development in which there's some distance, there's some boundary, at least eventually. Right. There's separation and individuation. So in other words, what I'm saying is the alien is just the overbearing mother. The alien and also the egg or the larval form within the egg is the maternal as something intrusive or what psychoanalysts might call the bad mother. So I'm not sure how is that related to what you're just saying.
You were pointing to the fact that the closed space of the helmet and the other confined space of the ship and the artificial mother technology gets invaded by the open space, which has something to do with the organic, something to do with life. On one level, you could think of this not just as the revenge of the mother, but as the revenge of nature. Right. This Nostromo is an allusion to Conrad. And there's a speech that we'll talk about from Ash, which is something that sounds straight out of the Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now. It's kind of Ash's, Kurtz moment.
But, yeah, it seems to be the idea that the invasion of technology into the natural, the way in which it compromises the natural, is something that's being punished by life.
43:20 Erin: I love the look of this face hugger, because with this sort of. What are the claws?
43:25 Wes: The hand.
43:26 Erin: Yeah. It's literally like a hand over the mouth. So that kind of bears out your sort of mother, overbearing mother thing. Quieting a child or something like that.
43:36 Wes: Very good. I hadn't thought of that.
43:38 Erin: But also, this is where we first get this idea that the alien is a more advanced form of technology than the technology that they're on the spaceship. Because it's like a helmet, it becomes another helmet. It's a face mask that is able to sustain Kane and has this really advanced form of technology to be able to keep him in stasis. So in a kind of a.
43:58 Wes: It looks almost like a fighter pilot's mask in a way, too.
44:01 Erin: Yeah, it does. It does. And what's really interesting, too, is that while Dallas and Ash are tending to him, they're also Wearing masks, you know, to try and protect themselves. So they go into the infirmary with the masks on. And of course it's all just. You could read all of this. It's just a metaphor for everything that's been going on with COVID and quarantine and violations of quarantine. But it's funny because they have these sort of flimsy masks on. Fine. For the purposes of. They don't know what this is and they could catch something through the air. But of course, what we know about the alien is that a helmet couldn't keep it out. And so these, these masks and the sort of flimsy nature of them in comparison to the hand over the face, kind of a visual representation of the inability of this human technology to stand up to this more advanced alien technology.
44:47 Wes: Yeah, And I think that's, that's very good to relate the kind of the biology of the alien to something technological, which is part of the artistic concept. Right. I mean, even the moray eel inner jaw mouth thing kind of looks like it's got a chrome like finish to me at certain parts. And you wonder is this like a. Obviously can't be, you know, as I say, it seems like it is this kind of a hybrid of. Of machine and beast. Can't be. Right. Because it's grown up on the ship very rapidly. Unless it's eaten part of the ship, furnished itself, you know, unless that's part of the way it grows, you know, is to take in pieces of the ship. Yeah, it's interesting to think about that. Notably, it grows up entirely without having to eat anyone, so.
45:35 Erin: Oh, that's right. That's right.
45:36 Wes: Having to feed. Exactly.
45:37 Erin: So but it does, it does eat the ship. Right? Its blood eats the ship.
45:42 Wes: Right, right, good point. And there's something about it, you know, it's got that insect like quality which bad aliens often have. I wondered a little bit about what that means. Why do bad aliens look like bugs often? And I think there's something about the way in which death and life get scrambled up in that, you know, the bones are on the outside, like the exterior shell, as opposed to having bones on the inside. And evocation of parasitism and lack of individuality, social colonies of insects and sort of enhanced feeling of sociopathy that I think you get with the behavior of insects.
So I say enhanced because your cat is a sociopath as well. Even though it's cuddly. But you get a sense in which there's a reduction of biology to something inanimate or something that is like an automaton. So I think there's a direct connection to technology and to what it is that acts. Ash is, you know, the alien, in a way, is his true sibling, his kindred spirit or mother, perhaps.
46:49 Erin: That's interesting. I never thought of that before. I think also with the insect thing, the exoskeleton, and also like slime, for instance, you know, sliminess as being a hallmark of sci fi are both insect hallmarks or slug. Slug type hallmarks, Mollusk hallmarks.
47:06 Wes: Apparently they went through an enormous amount of KY jelly.
47:09 Erin: Yes, I read that documentary.
47:11 Wes: Just slathering it on.
47:12 Erin: But yeah, Veronica Cartwright, if I remember correctly, gets hysterical over that. In a way. What you're describing is like the sick thing is that the outsides are inside and the insides are outside. So that's what the chestburster does. Right. It exposes the innards of Kane, as does Parker's hitting Ash expose his gross innards. I don't know what that means necessarily, but just the insides being outside is what makes things so horrible. And that could be in gore, with slasher films and seeing a lot of blood, or it could be this insect slime type thing.
And I think maybe that has to do with seeing ourselves as creatures is disturbing. As biological organisms and things that are sustained by these skeletons and whatever. Slime, mucus, sorry. If people are eating blood, all of that is disturbing when we're confronted with it. So the fact that some animals wear that nakedly makes them more disturbing.
48:12 Wes: Yeah, that's an excellent point. You're making me think of the issue of boundaries again, because something like mucus, for instance, it's something that in a way is part of our bodies. Right. But it isn't. So it is kind of in this boundary violating position. This is something that the philosopher and psychoanalyst Kristeva writes about in her theory of the abject. This idea of what disgusts us is often this kind of boundary area between self and other. So mucus, for instance, or feces. Right. Something that was part of our body but isn't anymore.
These are the sorts of things that we feel disgust towards because they are evocative of a lack of individuation, a lack of a real boundary between us and the environment, but ultimately between us and mother. Right. Because at some point we are just the same as mother. We are her body and gradually become distinct from her body and then separate through birth and then have to go undergo a. A rigorous course of psychological separation. This gets us back to the. The idea of an overwhelming phallic mother who doesn't let that individuation happen fully and compromises the child to some extent.
And there's something incestuous about that, which is the other aspect here of what is disgusting or overly merging about that. And so I think this invasive and slime covered insecty alien really is evocative of all that, of the boundary violation thing.
49:54 Erin: Well, the fascination that Ash takes when he's looking through the MRI screens and scans of Kane, in fact, when he's watching those scans, in that moment when Ripley comes up behind him and asks him what he's doing. And Ripley does take an interest in everything that's going on on the ship. I love when Parker and Brett are complaining that none of the upstairs people ever come down. And then when Ripley comes down, they're like, what the hell is she doing here? Like, yeah, there's no pleasing them.
50:23 Wes: And then they're talking about their shares and she's like, you'll get what's coming to you.
50:27 Erin: Right, right, Dun, dun, dun. Yeah, yeah, I noted that line too.
50:32 Wes: I think she gets into an argument with everyone on the ship at some point, but we can get that, come back to that.
50:36 Erin: But yeah, yeah. Well, I wanted to also talk about just the level of aggression towards her. It's almost like she's the alien. I don't know know if you notice that, but when. Especially with Ash. So when Ripley comes up behind him, Ash jumps as he's looking at these MRI scans and it's almost like he's watching a dirty movie in the middle of the night or something. You know, he's been caught.
50:57 Wes: Interesting.
50:57 Erin: He looks in the microscope and he doesn't want her to look in the microscope. He seems very annoyed by her and he's the most annoyed and disturbed by her, which I think makes sense, but so is everyone else on the ship. It just really stuck out to me this time as never before how aggressive everyone is towards her. And I don't know if that's because she seems to be the only. I know in real life. She and Veronica Cartwright were the same age, but with Cartwright's haircut, she doesn't seem to be filling the role of this sort of nubile female that Ripley is supposed to be, I assume supposed to be filling and does fill.
So I don't know if she's supposed to be this sexual competition for Lambert and if the other people on the ship have a certain aggression towards her as an attractive female. And of course specifically what that would mean for Ash, who is I think the most preoccupied, as we said, with origin and perhaps with sex. I don't know. I'm throwing a lot of things at the wall.
51:52 Wes: On my view, maybe this is, you know, stop me if I'm becoming too repetitive and simplistic about this, but I see her as the real mother in this situation. So she attracts testing behavior, infantile behavior, from people who are. Understand that she can contain their aggression and that she can do something with it. It's the same thing as being a leader, too. So she's naturally a leader. So I think that's, in a way, what motivates the aggression, which in children is an attempt to individuate. And what's going on, I think, is that the mothership, the technological surrogate mother, it's infantilizing.
They're dependent on it. They're in a big womb, they're regressed. And she is kind of a maternal lightning rod in the sense that she's attracting her individuality, is attracting the attention of people who are. Who are looking for their own individuality through her or, you know, through her possible maternal interventions, which she is very good at every step of the way. I mean, it's funny, you know, you talk about all this aggression towards her. That's even. Even with Lambert at the very beginning. Ripley says, this is not our system. It's almost like Lambert gets irritated, like she's being told something that's obvious and that she knows.
And she's like, I know, right? I don't know if you remember that. Very smartly done in the movie. They make sure that everyone gets into it with her at some point. The scene with Parker and Brett, the conflict with Dallas, you know, where she calls him out for letting Ash make the decision to bring the alien back with them, to bring it home, which he sees as reckless. And above all, of course, getting into it with Ash. You're talking about that great scene, and I call it the science room. I don't know exactly what it is, but laboratory. The laboratory.
That's what a science room is, I think. She asks how Kane is, and he says he's holding. And she says, and your guess? Something like that. And he uses that wonderful phrase, you know, still collating.
53:58 Erin: Yeah.
53:59 Wes: Which is a nice clue to what he really is. I didn't know he was an Android. I knew there was an Android in Aliens, but I completely forgotten that he was an Android in the movie. And at that point I'm thinking, oh, wait a minute, is he an Android? So very good.
54:13 Erin: There's a Deleted scene where Lambert and Ripley discuss. I think Ripley asks Lambert whether or not she slept with Ash and if she noticed anything weird about him. Interesting, because Ripley, I guess, is. She's picking up on how the ways in which he is odd and not quite human, even before he sort of goes haywire, which we'll talk about.
54:31 Wes: Oh, no, nothing weird. Just. Except for the mechanical penis.
54:36 Erin: But she explicitly asked Lambert and Lambert says, yeah, I didn't think he was ever interested. And they both laugh about it. It's like this nervous laughter. Cause it's while the alien is on the ship and they're both nervous, so they kind of have this weird bonding moment. But I think that probably is a.
54:50 Wes: Ash is an incel. Oh God, poor Ash. He's just a big nerd, basically.
54:58 Erin: It's a relic, I think, of the whole everyone is sleeping with everyone concept. Or at least it admits that possibility,
55:05 Wes: which you're right, would have entirely messed up the movie because sex is part of the threat.
55:09 Erin: Right. So you're seeing Ripley as more of a mother? I'm seeing her as more of a sexual object for the crew. Which would align her with the alien, perhaps.
55:19 Wes: Well, Freud would say mother is the original sexual object.
55:22 Erin: Right, Right. Well, yeah. Ew.
55:26 Wes: In the broad sense of sexual.
55:27 Erin: But like, because she's a broad, I get it.
55:31 Wes: I don't think.
55:35 Erin: Okay, so I guess the two things aren't. Aren't.
55:38 Wes: Well, no, I think you are. You are bringing out a contrast. I mean. Yeah, I mean, it didn't strike me that she was much of a sexual object for the crew.
55:47 Erin: Well, that's just where I thought the aggression was coming from. Since she's the only likely candidate and they're all on this ship in the middle of nowhere. I kind of attributed the aggression to that. But I like the fact that you're actually saying that it's related to her being a mother and a leader. And therefore it's a kind of a boundary testing, which I think works really well.
56:07 Wes: Well, I think those two things can go together because it is a really odd feature of the movie. It's one thing to go to one extreme and say everyone is having sex with each other, but it's another to go to the other and sort of suck sex out of the atmosphere of the ship. Right. Which it is quite asexual. There's one scene where Parker makes some sexual joke and Lambert is really by that right before Kane has the chest bursting moment. But other than that, there's not a lot of. I can't think of Any explicit sexual tension or banter. So I would say her maternality has something to do with that, but also the mother.
Mother in general, the effect of the technological, artificial mother on. On everyone. And then, yeah, aggression is the way whatever sexual desire there is for Ripley, which inevitably, of course, there is, is going to come out as aggression. It's just been kind of repressed and redirected.
57:09 Erin: I guess, for me, it was a question of whether or not it was. It was completely devoid of sex or if it was, you know, like. Like you say repressed and coming out as aggression. And I suppose I read the repression very strongly in Ash's behavior when he goes haywire. So his preoccupation with sex and then his aggression towards her in light of that sort of. Same type of alien, sort of metaphoric rape that he perpetrates against Ripley, I see that as building throughout the entire film, that moment, because of his incredible anger towards her.
57:44 Wes: Yeah. She again, wants to enforce quarantines and protocols and to do things by the book and keep things safe. And he wants what he wants, which is the alien, Whatever kind of mother that represents. Or sex. Maybe you can even read it as his being cut off from sexuality and needing to find it in some very, very basic concrete form or represented in a way. Right. With this thing that's covered in ky jelly, ultimately. But anyway, yeah, his interest in discovering his origins, and she is not about that. So, yeah, as you pointed out in the laboratory, he's already irritated with her. She's like, ripley is. What is that? I forget what she's saying that about. And he's like, please don't do that. Yeah, he's getting very irritated by her curiosity and by just her interference. And then. And then, of course, she does read him the riot act there, so. Right.
58:42 Erin: But he also. She's just very smart. She knows that he must be playing some kind of game and that he's too invested in this alien from the beginning. So, like the instance with a cattle prod and then the tracking device when they start the search for the alien and Ash has this tracking device and Ripley's like, whoa, what is it? Key off. And he very, like, he's so annoyed, and he says, micro changes in air density. You know, this is really. And she later kind of like rolls her eyes and says, like, oh, micro changes in air density. Like, she knows he's full of it.
Or perhaps I'm reading that moment wrong. And maybe, you know, she just. She just knows, I think, that he doesn't have the right Motivations. And so she's. She's reading him correctly. And so maybe his aggression is particularly directed toward her. Not in this way that I'm thinking. Well, I think it's. Obviously we're saying that it could be all of these things together, all of these different readings, but also as the one who he is seen by for what he is, so he can't pass as a human somehow in front of her because she is too perceptive.
59:44 Wes: Yeah, that's good. She is onto him.
59:47 Erin: I don't know if you feel this way. And it could be because the initial shock of the look of the alien is lost on us because we didn't see it when it came out and it's been around for a while. But for me, the creepiest moment in the movie, and the actual scariest moment in the movie by far, is when Ash comes into the room with Ripley after she's read the true message from Mother, the classified for science officers, eyes Only. Which reveals that Mother doesn't care about the crew. They just want to get the alien back. She doesn't care. And Ash sort of leans forward.
1:00:25 Wes: Yeah, it is creepy.
1:00:27 Erin: That is. I'm actually getting. I have goosebumps right now just thinking about that. He is so creepy.
1:00:32 Wes: There's an explanation for this, right? Yeah, I'm sure you can do the English accent better.
1:00:38 Erin: Well, as she attacks him, he just, like, stares at her creepily. But something is already kind of broken in him. I mean, we see that bleeding or sweat, whatever it is, of milk that comes down his forehead. But prior to that, by showing up in that creepy way while she's reading this, he's already. His mind is turned or his programming has turned already, where he goes a little haywire before that. So I kind of wonder what triggers his sort of breakdown. And then this sort of. Oh, my gosh. I'm actually getting creeped out right now because there are weird sounds in my apartment that my. I can't even talk about this without getting scared. Can you hear it?
1:01:21 Wes: Nope.
1:01:22 Erin: Okay, I'm sure it's just someone in the hallway that my thing is picking up, but for a second, I almost thought I was going to look next to me and see him. Oh, he's so creepy. Okay, I don't know. You take it away. I've got to take a second.
1:01:35 Wes: So Ripley takes command. This is towards the ends of Act 2, although I thought it might be the beginning of Act 3, but anyway, I always try to section it out into acts, but they're in the conference room. Dallas is dead and Ripley is trying to get them to follow her plan. And actually, this is something really interesting from the making of documentary is that I think there is a lot of friction between Sigourney Weaver and the guy who plays Parker. There's a lot of friction between the Parker guy and everyone. He's Yaphet Kotto, you know, he did a lot of improvising and he kept running roughshod over her, even though it wasn't in the script, trying to get her to be more aggressive.
And then so finally in the final take, you see her telling him to shut up, which is great. And it seems real because it is. I mean, it's such an authentic moment. And so, yeah, I love that. I love that moment where she takes charge and sort of comes into her own. What's going on is she says, you know, we gotta kill it. We can't just escape in the shuttle. We can't do anything else. We gotta actually kill it. And then she says to Ash, are there any suggestions from you or Mother? And he says, no, we're still collating. He uses that word again. And she's like, what?
Still collating? I find that hard to believe. In her very Sigourney Weaver way of saying that I find that hard to believe. But he's like, what do you want? What would you like me to do? And she's like, just what you've been doing. Nothing so great. And then she says, I've got access to Mother now and I'll get my own answers. And so I think what's going on is, you know, as Ripley will point out later, Ash is in this to protect the alien. That's the only thing he cares about. And the idea that she's going to kill him is the problem. He has to stop her.
1:03:25 Erin: Maybe this is the moment that turns his brain because his incel mind has melted from being yelled at by a strong woman.
1:03:34 Wes: Exactly. And then he goes postal, tries to. I love the scenes with Mother in that circular room with the lights, you know, with the yellow lights. And then we gather from her interaction with Mother that she gives her emergency command override of this top secret thing. She finds out that the mandate is to investigate the life form at all costs and that the crew is expendable. And it's not long after that that we get that great. After Ash has been defeated, which is also a very creepy scene where he gets his head knocked off. Apparently in one of the screenings, someone fainted at that.
1:04:14 Erin: Oh, my gosh, I love those stories. That's awesome.
1:04:16 Wes: Someone just an usher. An usher just dropped when Ash got his head knocked off and people were leaving and vomiting. That's so great. Really interesting, interesting. But after he's been taken out, and then now he's being dissected, you know, so it's in the same position that the alien was in at a certain point, or the larval. The hand. Yeah. They revive him. They get information out of him, and he tells him a special order is to bring back the life form. And all other priorities are rescinded. What about our lives? I repeat, all other priorities are rescinded.
And then they ask him how to kill it. And he's like, you can't. And then he says, in this very kind of gleeful way, you don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? It's perfect organism. It's structural perfection matched only by its hostility. And then Lambert says, you admire it. And he says, I admire its purity, survival unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. And that's the Heart of Darkness.
1:05:19 Erin: That's immediately what I thought of. I feel like everything we've been reading and watching since then has been Heart of Darkness related.
1:05:27 Wes: Yeah, yeah. It's in Heart of Darkness. It's in Apocalypse Now. It's in this movie. Very much lifted straight from the book.
1:05:33 Erin: It's perfect for sci fi.
1:05:35 Wes: Yeah. And puts Ash in the position of a Kurtz, I guess, in which he is, you know, what's going on here? He's an admirer of the primitive. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is supposed to kind of bring culture to the natives. And he's renowned for being a very intelligent, cultured person, and that's part of the whole colonial project, supposedly. And you get some parallel on Ash, Right, because he's an Android, a super intelligent, intelligent Android. You might think of him as just having a scientific curiosity about an intelligent alien life form. But instead, he goes native in a way, just like Kurtz. He instead of being the one to sort of conquer it through some sort of higher culture or through science, he's compromised by his admiration for it. And it seems like wants to, you know, wants to emulate it in a way, wants to become like it.
1:06:37 Erin: I feel like with each movie, it becomes more obvious that Ripley and the alien are like the same thing, or maybe they converge. But when Ash is able to attack Ripley, he shuts the door and traps her in the way that she trapped Dallas earlier in the film. It's almost as if he sees everything that goes On. On the ship. And he is learning. He's adapting behavior from the alien and he's also adapting behavior from Ripley or whoever else he might be watching. But we know that he repeats what the alien does and he repeats what Ripley does. Those are the only two.
1:07:07 Wes: And it's very poignant because you get the feeling that he, in a way, is a Pinocchio like figure who wants to become real, wants to become alive. And that as part of his affection for the alien as a representative of life, as the perfect organism, of course, he also admires the fact that it can't be destroyed, it seems like, or it's very hard to destroy it. The fact that there's a hostility to it, that it's remorseless, it has no conscience.
1:07:36 Erin: So he both wants life and he wants immortality is kind of what you're saying, too, or something artificially sustained. That was making me think, too, about the nature of technology and what technology actually means in regards to the organic and how the alien can be both sort of organic and highly technological. And in a way, I mean, the ultimate technology is or would be immortality, right? Or just sustaining life. And that's what the alien is so good at. You know, the fact that you can't kill it makes it, you know, it's like the cockroach that survives the nuclear apocalypse.
You know, what is, what is the better organism? The human that dies immediately in the nuclear apocalypse or the cockroach that stays alive. And that seems to be a hallmark of what makes it so technologically sound is the way that it reproduces and sustains itself. So in a way, it's like the alien, by being technologically sound in that way, it's a bad mother. It's like a stepmother for the crew, but it's also a good mother in terms of. It's a good organism, it perpetuates itself and it's actual children, unlike the stepchildren of the crew members, it's actual children.
Or in this case, the one child that we do see grow up is a well parented, I guess, little organism.
1:08:50 Wes: And I was thinking it doesn't need anything from the mother. It doesn't need any parenting right to be spawned. And then it can parasitically rely on its environment, which is important.
1:09:00 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking about the different expressions of sort of parentage in the film the Alien, as I just. We've already talked about Dallas as the poor father who lets in the invader the ship. Obviously, mother is not a very good mother. The company is like a poor parent. It's almost like.
1:09:16 Wes: Yeah, the company is the father.
1:09:17 Erin: It is. Yeah. And Dallas is a sort of poor surrogate father.
1:09:20 Wes: Yeah.
1:09:21 Erin: The company is almost like leaving the children to squabble over the inheritance. And then I wonder at the end when Ripley survives. It's like she's overcoming all of these bad parent figures to defeat evil. Like she's overcoming the bad mother. And in a way, she sort of like parents herself at the end because she sings that lullaby to soothe herself as she has the final showdown with the alien. I don't know if that's too much of a stretch.
1:09:44 Wes: Yeah. What is she singing?
1:09:46 Erin: Lucky star, you are my lucky star. It's not a lullaby quite. It's a song that a parent might sing to a child. It's like a sweet song. People who know Singin in the Rain will know the song that she sings to herself. So I don't know. Is that too much of a stretch? She reaches maturation, I suppose, when she becomes the leader of the ship.
1:10:03 Wes: Yeah. Yeah.
1:10:04 Erin: Realizes her potential. But then in this final showdown, she's able to sort of. It's like she's Cinderella who's overcome the bad mother and is able to eject all of the sort of negative parental influences in a way, by being her own mother as a way of, you know, in the way that we all have part of our maturation.
1:10:22 Wes: Yeah.
1:10:22 Erin: To absorb that parental influence in our own thinking.
1:10:27 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. One of the things about her as a character is she is an individual from the very beginning of the film in the way the others aren't. She has not been. I think I see the others as compromised by technology ultimately as by the. The artificial mother that is technology, into being passive. And this is a very real, as I mentioned before, social issue with. With all of us. And it's becoming more and more. More and more of an acute issue. So they've been compromised and somehow she has not. She stands in a. You know, for technology to. For her is just a tool. And she's willing to have that confrontation with the mothership in the end. And even calls mother, you know, says, you bitch. I think because she can't stop the self destruct. Give herself a little more time.
1:11:12 Erin: Of course. An echo of the famous get away from her, you bitch. And aliens.
1:11:17 Wes: Yes. Where the whole mother thing becomes even more explicit.
1:11:21 Erin: Yeah.
1:11:22 Wes: So she's willing to take on this mother and the artificial womb environment and even destroy it. She's willing to destroy a kind of system that fosters dependency because she is an individual, even though she Does. I think, as you pointed out, she kind of grows and comes into her own and gets to a point where she essentially takes command of the ship. But she's assertive from the very beginning, willing to get into it with Parker and Brett, willing to get into it with Ash with Dallas. She already has that quality. And at the very end, I think what's significant besides destroying Mother and the ship is that she is ready to complete that round trip, that return journey which I associate with individuation.
Right. To go out to the other, to the alien. You know, our individuality is predicated on this relationship to the other and to the alien, which is to say it's one of identification is one of those processes where, especially in adolescence, right, we become individuals by creating these group identifications, ironically, outside of us, which might seem weird, right, because it's like we become individuals and particular people in part by becoming parts of different groups or internalizing them within us or internalizing the, you know, the maternal gaze earlier on, all of that stuff.
But that's the round trip aspect of it. It's, you know, we have to, in some sense, to be individuals, return to ourselves out of those identifications, out of those interactions. And if we don't return, we don't become individuals. So I think there is a symbolic quality to her completing that trip. And yeah, you know, I hadn't thought about this, but her being able to soothe herself, right. She's got that internalized maternal function, being able to sing a lullaby to herself and take care of the cat and ultimately to survive. Right. Her ability to survive, it's not circumstantial, it's a product of her character.
1:13:33 Erin: And she does look like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White or whatever in that final shot of her sleeping peacefully in the pod. And then the dissolve to the stars is very in keeping with, I think, some of the points you're making.
1:13:45 Wes: Yep. All right, shall we leave her with the stars or do we want to cover anything else?
1:13:50 Erin: No, I think that's good.
1:13:51 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone, everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Com.
Dead Wall Reveries in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Sep 13, 2021
Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” is subtitled a “Story of Wall St.,” yet there is almost nothing in it of the bustle of city life, and entirely nothing in it of the hustle of the trading floor. The story’s walls block out the streets, serving on the one hand as a container for a colorful assortment of human Xerox machines, on the other as a blank projection screen for the reveries of a man who seems to quietly rebel against the very concept of imitation. Can we continue to live and work, if we strongly prefer to do nothing that is derivative? What happens to our aspirations, if we come to fully appreciate the gravity of fate? Could we continue to tell our own stories, if we were liberated from all idiosyncrasies of character? Wes & Erin analyze.
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0:09 Wes: Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener is subtitled A Story of Wall street. Yet there is almost nothing in it of the bustle of city life and entirely nothing in it of the hustle of the trading floor. The story's walls entirely block out the streets, serving on the one hand as a container for a colorful assortment of human Xerox machines, and on the other as a blank projection screen for the reveries of a man who seems to quietly rebel against the very concept of imitation. Can we continue to live and work if we strongly prefer to do nothing that is derivative? What happens to our aspirations if we come to fully appreciate the gravity of fate? Could we continue to tell our own stories if we were liberated from all idiosyncrasies of character? This is Wes Alwan.
0:54 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:00 Wes: So, Erin, I think if I had to choose a title for this book, it would be Not Bartleby, but Dead Wall Reveries, which is. There's a few phrases I really like in the book, but that I think it would also be a great name for a band that would be. I'm like, I can't believe this is just sitting there in the text. This should be a title.
1:25 Erin: It's funny that you should say that, because I think I told you offline at some point that I teach the story, or taught now, former teacher, taught the story every year to my high school students, my 10th graders. And I always gave pop quizzes, or not always, but, you know, frequently gave pop quizzes, like the morning after they were assigned a reading. And I'd always try to trip them up with a painfully obvious question. So one of the frequent ones I used was, like, who wrote this? And they would ignore the name of the author. But for Bartleby, I always asked, what was the subtitle?
And they never knew. And somehow, not only would they forget the subtitle, but they always forgot where the story was set, that it was set in Wall Street. And I had to explain to them that was really crucial because they didn't seem to think that it was important at all, just like they didn't seem to think it was important that Melville wrote it or anything like that. So, yeah, but I think if I had to title this, what would I title? No matter how dissimilar, I always see a continuity, or at least some surprising thematic crossover between and among episodes that are adjacent to each other.
And as we've been talking and thinking about Alien, certain similarities presented themselves to me. So maybe Space Invader.
2:43 Wes: I don't know. Oh, I love that.
2:47 Erin: Something.
2:48 Wes: I know Space Invader. That would be a great adaptation of this actually short film. All right, I want to take your quiz now. The subtitle. It's either a Wall street story or a story of Wall Street.
3:02 Erin: That's right. I would have accepted either one. Which one is it a story of Wall Street?
3:08 Wes: Yeah. It's so interesting. Yeah. Because there really is very little of Wall street in this. Right. There's not. There's one scene where you get a sense of the hustle and bustle of the city. That's the scene where Bartleby is actually being escorted off to prison, to the tombs. And there's a kind of. When I did my first reading, I kind of got the sense that this was a raucous crowd. Right. Some of them were arm in arm with Bartleby and that they were. Maybe there was something sadistic about this when he was being hauled off to jail. And. And then when I reread it, doing my notes, I saw that it's actually.
They're silent. Let me just read the part here that's relevant. As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced. Some of the compassionate and curious bystanders joined the party and headed by one of the constables, arm in arm with Bartleby. The. The silent procession filed its way through all the noise and heat and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon. Which is a sentence I really loved. And, yeah, I see now, even rereading this, it's a constable who's arm in arm with Bartleby.
I think I was imagining, like a bystander on either side of him and people being somewhat raucous and making light of it all. But really, it's silent. And I guess the bystanders feel allied to him in some sense. But anyway, just the contrast of the silence of that procession and then that sense that we get of the noise, the heat and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon. I think that might be the only real sense that we get of. I think, what our stereotype of Wall street would be, which is the kind of busy hustle and bustle of the city at day.
There is one other mention of the contrast between the city at day and the city at night. This is just after where the narrator finds Bartleby living in the office and reassures himself that he would not be sitting down at the desk in any state approaching nudity. And then when he gets back there, he figures out that Bartleby has been living there. And reflects on his friendlessness and his loneliness and his poverty. And so he says, think of it of a Sunday. Wall street is deserted as Petra. And every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building, too, which of the weekdays hums with industry.
And life at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy. And all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous. A sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage. So I guess when you directed our attention to the subtitle of the story. The idea that it's a story of Wall Street, I was. I guess my project was to show that there really wasn't much of Wall Street. I guess there's enough now that I've found a. Now that I've looked for the places where he gives it some characterization.
6:33 Erin: I think its lack of character is one of its characteristics. The more I read this story, the more I think it's a story about zoning or city planning or something like that. It's a business district whose opposite, I suppose, is a bedroom. So you have people who come into the business district for work during the day and who leave at a certain time. Leaving the business business district completely abandoned after certain hours and abandoned on Sundays, as Melville writes. And then you have the bedroom community, which is the place where you just go to sleep. So you have the two different zones of your life are very clearly marked. And so the idea that someone has invaded business with bedrooms. It seems to be like one of the main transgressions that's happening here.
7:20 Wes: It's interesting. I worked in the financial district from 2000 to 2002. And it was the same way. This characteristic, this thing that Melville was describing was absolutely true at the time. I think it probably still is true. Maybe even more so now after Covid. But this weird contrast, so busy during the day, so crammed full of people, and then completely deserted at night. So I don't know, what are we supposed to make of that? There's something about that contrast that is important here. And something about the contrast between associations between human beings, which are based on business, and then something that is actually more intimate.
8:07 Erin: Yeah, it's about the rhythms of life. And I think something, too, is here about the kind of work that they're doing that is. That plays into this, too, in a way. Bartleby is like re. Injecting some sort of vitality into this. Into this dead area by living there. So when we have these two zones of. And I'm not using this in the like, literal zoning way, we have these two areas of work and of recreation very clearly demarcated. And then you have, for instance, turkey and Nippers beginning to defy that. So turkey and Nippers are like the precursors to Bartleby.
So you have someone who can only work half the day, so he's starting to encroach the bedroom or the. The home space into the workspace. Because there's something about this work, I think, demands what Wall street demands, which is a total shutting down for all things that are not business to only be open during business hours. And so Turkey and Nippers have already allowed something of home, something. Something that's not professional, into the workspace. And the narrator has been. Has allowed this. He allows these peccadillos. And we could talk about the narrator, obviously, in a minute.
But so there's a kind of an understanding that the sacrosanct nature of Wall street is something extremely unnatural. And the narrator sees this and allows a certain amount of eccentricity on the part of his employees. I guess the problem is then what happens when you take it too far and you are. You're the equivalent of sitting around in your pajamas and eating cereal and playing video games all day, but at your place of work, but to be unemployed while you're at work, what that might mean.
9:55 Wes: That's. That's hilarious. Yeah. Before Google was offering napping pods and ping pong, narrator of the story was ahead of his time.
10:03 Erin: Well, exactly. And I mean, what is that designed to do except to get you to confuse work for home, to get you to be willing to live at your job and to make your job your life. So what happens when that unravels and you can't do that anymore and you're not. You're not living to work, you're working to live only that. I guess the only living that you can do is an extremely limited one within the parameters of an office building. I don't know. Yeah, I think of someone living in the cubicles.
10:32 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking too, with turkey and Nippers, I was thinking about how. Yeah, that is true. People really don't. In office jobs, there's a lot of being around the water cooler and these days the Internet. And you get. There's a small amount of time that you actually use for work when you go to an Office job. And then there's meetings which are in a way, themselves completely. It's just time wasting. It's a form of time wasting where people can feel important, but for the most part, time wasting. But in this case, I think what's interesting here is these are human copy machines. Basically, it's a law office. And he brags in the beginning about being focused on material gain, but not actually overly ambitious and says that the easiest way of life is the best. And he's a safe sort of man. And he has a.
11:22 Erin: This is the narrator, we should say. Yep.
11:25 Wes: And is. He has a job that's not difficult, but pays well. And it's basically a government job in a way because it was connected to a kind of sinecure, even though he lost it. And so he's an easygoing guy in a way. But he does want to get his. His work done. So it's not like he's on some extreme. He's not cracking the whip with his employees. But on the other hand, people there actually have to work. But I think part of it is the kind of work that's being done. They're taking legal documents and then making copies of them because there's no copy machines.
And then having to proofread them by reading them out loud. Some of them, as long, I think he says is 500 pages. Right. It sounds just mind numbingly dull. So that what, you think that the ideal sort of person to do that sort of thing would be someone like Bartleby actually. Right. Who seems to be free of these human traits which define turkey and nippers and gingernut. So I. What I put down in my notes is just a synopsis of that whole introduction where he describes these characters in the kind of a very Dickensian way with their tics and everything.
Right. He's setting us up for something that in a way the story is not going to deliver on. As if the story is going to be centered around these types of colorful characters, when really it's not. But I think that he tolerates the eccentricities of these people. They're flawed. Right. So they're colorful and they're very, very flawed. But he tolerates them because he finds them useful. He uses that word. What does he say? He. He says, basically he says, whatever the failings of them, they were very useful to me. And then we get someone who comes in who in a way is.
I think of Bartleby as an uncharacter. If you were doing. If you set out a kind of literary exercise for yourself. We thought, well, what if I wanted to write the antithesis of a story that's focused on colorful characters, Someone who's basically just almost like a blank space in the story? How would I do that? In a way, that's the way I think of this as a kind of literary experiment on the part of Melville and then see what happens. See what that does to the story.
13:33 Erin: That's really interesting. And you're making me think of Hal from 2001 as well. The idea that we have these flawed humans who are all appetite is built into their names. One side note, whenever we would do this, I'd bring in ginger snaps for my students to eat while we would discuss it. So they're all, they're all fluctuation and appetite. They're all the, the, the humors. Yeah, the, the things. The pesky things about human beings find so difficult to program out of us. And, and then Bartleby is. He's less interesting than Hal, but he's. If a Xerox machine became self aware and suddenly decided to, to stop working, which is mostly what Xerox machines do is not work, but that kind of emptiness.
The idea that this is a machine that just. You should be able to punch something in and get something out. And Bartleby seems like he's going to be the perfect Xerox machine. I think it's really interesting and fitting that he ends up being like you say, this sort of black hole at the center of the story. I think that's why Melville's little postscript might fail. I'm not totally sure about this, but I think there's a chance that any effort to explain Bartleby actually cheapens the mystery of the story. But we can address that later. But do you think that there's anything pathological in the narrator?
Do you think that his, his complacency and the fact that he, in a way he's the most interesting character. Right. I mean, someone who moves their offices to get away from a pesky employee is psychotically passive, if that's a term that works. In a way, it's like Bartleby.
15:05 Wes: Yeah, yeah. He is strangely passive. And I suppose his passivity has worked in a way because he's ended up with the irritable because of the brandy like disposition of nippers and then turkeys incautiousness and rashness afternoon. That sort of thing I think, I guess is the result. Result of his passivity and allowing these types of flawed but useful characters into his office. But it doesn't Work when the. There's a sort of resistance in character, right? People's characters are. They're recalcitrant in a way. They're persistent. It's hard to change our personalities.
And it also creates. Our personalities create problems for other people because they're often a reflection of defense mechanisms or they're quirks that become annoying after a certain time. Or there are ways in which we are very. They reflect certain compulsions to do things in the same way, repetitively. That may not necessarily be all that productive. But if you have someone like the narrator who can just tolerate that stuff and say, you know, he calls it a good natural arrangement, this whole turkey being only productive in the morning. And I think, I guess nippers is only productive in the afternoon.
Is that the way it works? That's fine with him, but that's the resistance that he's used to dealing with. And his passivity works because he can get some use out of these people. But in the case of Bartleby, his passivity. It's strange because in a way, Bartleby is very passive himself, except in one important way. But the narrator's passivity can't cope with the absence of character, with the uncharacter, with the blank space, or someone's defiance to not be anything in particular, not do anything. That's where his method of tolerance, right, of being the cool boss who's going to tolerate this type of thing just isn't going to work.
17:08 Erin: Well, your characterization of gingernut and turkey and nippers as being ruled almost like by the humors is exactly what I put down in the margins. The narrator is describing them eating these ginger nuts, which are just ginger snaps. He lives then on ginger nuts, thought I. This is the narrator talking about Bartleby never eats a dinner, properly speaking. He must be a vegetarian then. But no, he never eats even vegetables. He eats nothing but ginger nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger nuts.
Ginger nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents. And the final flavoring one. Now, what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing? Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger then had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none. So, you know, I think this kind of plays into this idea that you're talking about of. Of human behavior being rather difficult to change on our part and of the narrator's expectation that. That the. His employees are just going to have these prop. You know, that nothing is really within their control.
That why are they this way? Well, maybe. Maybe it's because they eat too much ginger, you know, And. And even their choice of eating too much ginger also seems to be beyond their control. Why do they eat so much turkey? Because their name is Turkey. There seems to be no first cause. Only. Only the fact of this is the way it is. You can't change it. You just have to work around it. And. And yeah. And so I think what you're showing me is. And what is ironic is that Bartleby's. You would think it would play right into the narrator's hands, this idea of you just have someone who you just can't change.
But. But there is a limit.
18:50 Wes: Yeah. And you have no explanation of his behavior. If I'm taking this idea of him not having a character in a way, very seriously. So that's. And I may push it too far, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but. Because, of course, one could argue actually Bartleby is a very interesting sort of character. But. So I'm treating it as him in a way, as symbolic of characterlessness in a literary sense. But what I'm trying to say is that part of the appeal of the concept of character is that it explains people's behavior. And you can say someone behaves this way because of this personality trait.
That's just who they are. And their behaviors are expressions of that. And with Bartleby, there is no. If there is no character, there's no explanation of his behavior. And the narrator even tries to get him to say, tell me, aren't you going to tell me something about your history? Tell me why you prefer not to do X, Y and Z. Explain yourself. And that's one of the. It's important that Bartleby uses this word prefer as opposed to say something like desire or ought. We can talk about that in a second. Why this word prefer. But it's also important that he doesn't.
For most of the story, he doesn't explain himself. There are hints of him explaining himself at the end, but for the most part, he is just. It's almost godlike in a way. He just is. He is. That he is or he is. There's no explanation. He's just kind of bare fact, in a way.
20:30 Erin: Yeah. In one of the classes in which I studied this as a student, it was a grad school class that was really fabulous about these various 19th century American stories. Bartleby was one, Wakefield was another by Hawthorne. And I guess some of them Came later, too. But this idea of the retreat from society and the sort of blank in the middle of a story as being a fundamental element of this character mystery. Why does this character do the things that he does? And it's something in teaching this story that I brought up with my students a lot and we would.
I usually went into this discussion of fate and free will and to what extent Bartleby can be seen as being in control of his own actions. And I think that this is where the Dead Letter office ruins the arc of my argument for these students who I think really want to pathologize characters. And so in the end, if you just read the Dead Letter postscript, they all say, oh, okay, this is because he had a chemical imbalance. Because it was really depressing to work in the Dead Letter office. And so he just didn't want to live anymore. And this immediately figured him out.
And that's why I think that ending part doesn't work.
21:41 Wes: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's very lame. If that's. If. And the narrator probably. Yeah. That to the narrator, it is. That is what it is. It's just a.
21:50 Erin: It's just a psychological explanation.
21:53 Wes: Right.
21:53 Erin: And that's exactly what the narrator wants. He eats too much ginger. He has a chemical imbalance. This is one of the things, too, that really bothered me about that. That Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock. Did you ever watch that?
22:04 Wes: Yeah, for the most part.
22:06 Erin: So I liked it a lot too. But the thing that bothered me about it, and I didn't really know why until I read Bartleby in that grad school class, was that he calls himself something like a high functioning sociopath or something like that.
22:17 Wes: Is that what he calls himself something? Or autistic or.
22:24 Erin: Yeah. He has a label.
22:26 Wes: Asperger's.
22:27 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of takes all the complexity out of that character. For me, when you're going to view him through that lens, I would rather have the Bartleby as a completely blank slate and not know anything about his past as a way of.
22:38 Wes: Right, right. I think it's important in a way that he remained something symbolic. Otherwise the story starts to become less interesting and falls apart. I know papers have been written about this, relating it to schizophrenia or to autism, and I do. That's recognizable to me because. Because of the work that I've done for so long, being a director of a transitional environmental eel. I have seen people. I have seen people basically stare at a wall for a long time. Period of time.
23:15 Erin: Sure.
23:16 Wes: And it can be a lot of different things. It can be schizophrenia. It can be hallucination. It can be. It can be obsessive compulsive disorder. It's easy to look at someone like Bartleby and want to give a kind of psychological explanation of him. And it, you know, there might be some utility to that for understanding the story. But I think, for the most part, I think he has to serve a kind of symbolic function or else the story loses its power. As you were pointing out. The one thing I was actually thinking of beginning the episode by asking you, what do you think he's thinking about in his Dead Wall reveries when he's just staring at the brick wall? Is he thinking about something? What's Bartleby actually doing? What's going on in his head, in his imagination? Or is that the wrong. Is that the wrong question?
24:10 Erin: So I couldn't. I couldn't say that I've ever thought really deeply about the nature of what he might be thinking of other than a sort of feeling of regret for his life thus far. And I don't know. I mean, what does a person with no past to us, you know, what can we imagine that they're thinking about? It's an interesting idea, but, yeah, suppose
24:35 Wes: you had no personality. What would you be thinking?
24:37 Erin: Right? And we know that he's not even thinking about eating. And I guess that would be the one thing that you would have to think about just to keep you going. Right?
24:45 Wes: I think that's a very important point because normally when we think about a reverie, right? We're thinking about something like a fantasy. And our fantasies are often about wish fulfillment. They're about desire. So this is normally the way what we would think someone is doing. If they're staring often into space, thinking, we'd be thinking about. We'd expect them to be thinking about getting something that they want, maybe their aspirations. It could be desire, it could be longing. It could be what they're going to have for lunch. It could be anything like that.
But that's obviously not what Bartleby is doing. And that's why I think it's important. This word prefer, it's not desire or want, it's prefer. So we can talk about that in a second. But. So whatever he's doing there, it's got to be the fantasy version or it's got to correspond to, you know, if we fantasize about desire, it's the Dead Wall reverie is Bartleby's version of that with respect to preference, where the preference is for to be left alone and to have no desire, essentially.
25:54 Erin: Yeah. Which I think relates to the narrators perceiving in him something essentially genteel. Right. Which is also related to the nature of his refusal. I think that's the only hint of anything that we get about his personality. And I don't know if that's because of an inherent gentility in reticence and in the absence of perceivable desire.
26:18 Wes: Yeah. Gentility is all about concealing the depth and of our passions or it's, you know, genteel manners are shows of restraint. And a lot of classes, a lot of status signals involve, you know, socially. A lot of status signals involve displays of restraint. Even like lifting the finger when you're drinking from a teacup. That's about doing something extra. That has nothing to do with the actual. It's not just about getting tea into your face. Right. It's. Anyway, Sorry, did you.
26:47 Erin: Oh, and it's also visually, you know, you're refusing it by holding onto it with as few fingers as possible.
26:53 Wes: Yes. That's great. What you're doing is you're not grasping. It's not like you're an animal with paws and you're just using all of your strength and your grip to get something into your mouth. You know, it's not functioning appetitively to, you know, get what I'm saying.
27:08 Erin: Absolutely. And that. That reminds me. So we do get. At this first sight of Bartleby. The narrator does remark that he's pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn. Later, more of a straightforward reference to what he sees as his gentility. But oddly enough, in describing his work manner. At the very beginning of the story, when he comes in and does his work faithfully, the narrator does describe it as being appetitive. He did an extraordinary quantity of writing, as if long famishing for something to copy. He seemed to gorge himself on my documents.
There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sunlight and by candlelight. I should have been quite delighted with his application had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically. So we have a lot of things in here which are so the appetitive quality, but in a very mechanical way, which is very jarring. And also the day and night work. So first, Bartleby violates the rules of the bedroom community by working late and intruding the business district on it. And then he goes back and intrudes with the bedroom into Wall Street Maybe I'm not thinking of his gentility.
I mean, I think there is some of that. But maybe his mildness, the fact that he's. Oh, yes, he says. His cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance.
28:32 Wes: There you go.
28:33 Erin: And then he says it would not be thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person. So it's interesting because he's sleeping there and he's walking around in his under things. And yet the narrator knows intuitively that nothing hinky's going on. There's no hanky panky or anything like that happening. So it's. It's strange. I don't know.
28:53 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. So I'd like to take a break to talk about the sponsor for this show, Better Help. That's H E L P. As someone who works as a therapist, I know that one of the biggest problems that people have is actually finding a therapist, having access to a therapist that works with their insurance and getting to appointments, taking time out of their day to actually go to an office. One of the things I like about this episode sponsor, BetterHelp, is that they're expanding access to licensed professional counselors by providing a way to connect in a safe and private online environment.
So if there's something preventing you from achieving your goals or something interfering with your happiness, Please go to betterhelp.com/text and BetterHelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. You can send a message to your counselor anytime. You'll get timely and thoughtful responses, and you can schedule either video or phone sessions. BetterHelp is committed to getting you a therapist who is the right match for you. So if you need to change counselors, that's Easy and free. BetterHelp is more affordable than traditional offline counseling and financial aid is available.
As a listener, you'll get 10% off your first month by visiting our sponsor@betterhelp.com subtext. Join over 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health. Again, that's betterhelphelp.com subtext. Okay, back to the show. You wonder to what extent, right. The narrator. Everything is a projection of the narrator. And even, of course, the story has been and can be read as a story of a double for the narrator, as some split off part of himself that has come to visit him and that he's progressively induced to be compassionate towards that part of himself, which of course, he is not within his own personality and character.
It's something that's just pushed away whatever it is. Maybe it's simply a preference not to be. Lead a life which is all kind of busy work or something like that. Or something. Or lead a life which is all copying and all repetition and nothing genuinely spontaneous and new and creative. The point in the story where he finds him in the office and then he has those. This is actually shortly after what you just cited about the cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance and then the talk of Wall street, busy during the day and empty at. But there is a.
He'll say. He'll basically describe when he realizes Bartleby is making his home of the office and that he is the sole spectator of a solitude, the solitude being the way Wall street is at night. And then I think he thinks about him as being someone who's very lonely and very alone. And then he'll say, for the first time in my life, a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. And then he'll call this a fraternal melancholy, which seems to suggest that it's not just a melancholy on behalf of Bartleby, but a melancholy for his own situation, which is something that Bartleby makes more obvious.
Right. It's something that's been externalized.
32:31 Erin: Well, you're making me think of an even more extreme reading of this, which is that the narrator has an office alone and none of these people exist, and they're all elements of his personality. Even having the little boy, you know, the industrious little boy working there.
32:44 Wes: Absolutely. Yeah. So what is the. You know, what is this whole thing about preferring. I would prefer not to. What is going on with that? I'm wondering what. Trying to get into Melville's head and thinking what was his. I'm wondering where the story came from and how this kind of. Because this is sort of. Right. The central conceit of the story is someone who walks into an office and when he receives a request to do something that is part of his job, and that, in a way, is. Most of us would see as a normal thing to do, as an obligation, the kind of thing that would mean we're playing by the rules.
It wouldn't occur to us not to do it. He can, Bartleby can, up and say, I would prefer not to, and throw a wrench into things. I was thinking of this before in terms of introducing an UN character into a story to see the effect. And of course, it has a. You know, it drives a plot. Obviously, when someone throws a complete wrench and everything, it's perfectly good for the plot.
33:47 Erin: The grammatical construction of it is a negative so it's also. It's. It maintains that emptiness that you're talking about.
33:54 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. And again, the preference like that. That word preference is very. I think, is important because instead of I don't want to, or something more. But, you know, the word prefer is more formal and it's not. It doesn't seem to fall within the. It's not exactly like desire, because we think of desire as a positive thing. There's something that I want, and this is just completely negative. This is. I would prefer to remain motionless. I would prefer to do nothing. And it's hard to think of desire or appetite as simply directed towards nothing.
So I think that's part of why the word prefer is very important and why, again, the dead wall reverie is not the typical sort of fantasy. So if there were actual windows and Bartleby could look out into the world, that would be something representative of aspiration, of being able to look forward and being able to look out onto something. But if you're looking at a blank wall, aspiration and desire are foreclosed.
35:17 Erin: I love when the narrator says it's not what landscape painters would call life. Like, it doesn't have much of landscape painters.
35:23 Wes: Or does he say. I thought he said something like deficient or deficient in.
35:28 Erin: Oh, okay.
35:30 Wes: Painters might say it's deficient in life. Something like that.
35:33 Erin: It's just so funny that he even refracts it through art or through an artificial form of nature rather than actual nature.
35:41 Wes: Right.
35:42 Erin: He doesn't say, you can't see any trees, you can't see any living thing. He says a landscape painter would find this deficient for his subject.
35:49 Wes: This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise deficient. What landscape painters call life. So I love that because it's sort of ironic, or he's making this purely to be something funny or amusing when, of course, it's really kind of an oppressive environment to work in. You've got an office that is. All the windows basically open onto walls. So you get nothing of the outside world. And the narrator's. The narrator's attitude towards that is just one of kind of bemusement in a way, that's he's joking about something being deficient of life. And then. Yeah, as you point out, referring that back to landscape painters.
36:35 Erin: And the intrusion of art is a strange thing too, because this is. It's essentially a factory. It's a factory kind of environment, or it's a place that is. Is made possible because of the explosion of factories, not the literal explosion but the proliferation of factories during this time. And this is, I guess, in a way, it's a fact of. Of. Of ideas, but of stale ideas and of stock lawyeries, stock phrases. So the repeated. I would prefer not to phrase what I love about that. There's the idea of preferring. As if he's opened the space for a choice where there is none.
Something that, like you say, want or desire. That almost implies less of a choice. This is what I want to do or I have to do. So for something to be preferable is that you have an option and you're choosing to take one or the other. So he's opening this space of an option where there isn't one. He's there to do work, and yet verbally he opens it and then, in fact, he makes it happen. He sort of speaks this option into existence by really choosing not to, but anyway. But what I love about that repeatedness of it is the fact that it seems like he might have picked it up from a law document or something.
And there is this precedent for these stock phrases with. I think it's Turkey saying, with submission, sir. He said that a bunch of times, which is funny because he's not a very submissive guy in the afternoons. So whenever they mean to indicate. Whenever the narrator means to indicate what time of day it is, he'll portray nippers as saying something similar to that, something docile and submitting to the narrator's opinion. And then Turkey will be really violent and say, you know, he'll punch Bartleby or whatever. And then the opposite for Turkey in the morning, he'll say, with submission, sir, Which I love.
It's like submitting a. You know, there's. The idea of submission too, is interesting. Submission to someone else's will or. I don't know. I'm sure there's something lawyer y about submission as well, or just submitting documents to be reviewed. I don't know.
38:33 Wes: Yeah, it's that weird idea that the narrator has about people being useful to him. Yeah. So this. This idea that these different characters in the beginning are useful to him, and that's. That's why they can go ahead and be eccentric. And in the same way, he rationalizes some of Bartleby's eccentricities later on by saying that they're involuntary. And then he'll say, he is useful to me. And his whole attitude when Bartleby arrives is very. What's the word? Is exploitative. The word. What he does is he takes the guy and he puts him behind the screen so that within his own office, so that he can.
He doesn't have to. The screen is to quote entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner privacy and society were conjoined. He needs to be within call of the narrator's voice because in case there is any trifling thing that had to be done, he uses this word trifling. So he's really maximizing the utility aspect of the relationship. And he wants to minimize the impact that the other person will have on him while maximizing the ability to actually get them to do things for him. So you need someone that he doesn't have to hear or see, but they will hear him when he needs something from him.
So I was trying to get at what you were thinking about with this word submission.
40:14 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. There's also this. I was thinking too of the fact that everybody starts picking up the word prefer in their speech after Bartleby starts using it. And it's very sticky, sticky phrase that everyone starts using. And that might be another element of submission that Bartleby ends up having to sway over everyone else.
40:33 Wes: He's inducing people to copy him.
40:38 Erin: So I think that's the other.
40:40 Wes: Yeah, I forgot to get back to what you were saying, which is really interesting to me. I hadn't thought about it. Which is the idea that prefer is a legalistic term that Bartleby has picked up from all his copying. It's as if the copy machine read some of the text that you're trying to put through it and then changed its operating procedure according to what was in the law document or something and is glitching in that interesting sort of way, and then is inducing others to. With that same virus, let's say. But go ahead.
41:13 Erin: Yeah, that's great. That's a great way of putting it. I guess you mentioned something about. Something about involuntary behavior on the part of Bartleby at the beginning of what you said before.
41:24 Wes: Yeah, the narrator says it's involuntary. This is just.
41:28 Erin: Yeah, and that, that, that. That stuck out to me because I'm. I'm thinking about this idea of choice and having options. And I guess this is getting to the. I don't mean to constantly be like, well, in my 10th grade class that I used to run, but this is one of the things that, you know, that we talked about a lot. Are Bartleby's behaviors the result of choice or how much choice does he have? I mean, how much can we buy into this idea of the narrators, that you're just a product of all these forces working upon you, whether they be Wall street or.
Or the presence of ginger in your food or whatever. Because it seems to me that Bartleby is fated from the beginning to be tragic as too grandiose of a word. But it's. He's almost. He's the Chekhov's gun that gets fired right away. Like, he's. He. The industrious guy who we know is going to break down and not do any work. And I guess I don't want us to have to circle back to this idea of pathologizing him and saying he's a depressive and therefore doesn't have any choice in the fact that he doesn't want to work anymore. But. But I'm interested in that kind of tension in the story between something that seems like a compulsion on the part of Bartleby to refuse work and at the same time speaking in a manner that implies choice.
42:47 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think this. You can read the story as a reflection on the possibility of freedom, or what freedom might mean. Because if we. One of the problems of talking, trying to understand something like free will is it seems to suggest if we are going to be completely free, it seems like we might have to be unmotivated. Right. Because to the extent that we're motivated, we are driven by desire and, you know, desire for things outside of us. This is what the philosopher Kant called heteronomy. Right. Other things outside of us sort of pull our strings.
That's what desire does to us. And that undermines our ability to be free. So how do we get beyond that? The traditional philosophical explanation is just that. We can be reasonable. So we have the capacity to recognize what is good and to be rational, to reason about how to get that. So we can be reason responsive and good responsive. And even though, in a way, we are beholden to such things, it's not like we have free will to say. To say which reasons work and which reasons don't, or what's good and what's not good. We're beholden to the way things are.
There's some sort of autonomy and some sort of freedom in the ability to do that. And the autonomy arises only in situations where one is ethical, essentially, only in situations morality and autonomy just are the same thing. And in contexts where morality is not at stake, freedom is irrelevant. And if we do something immoral, that is the most unfree thing we can do. And the very possibility of freedom lies in the possibility of being ethical. So I bring all that stuff up because when we think about this word prefer, it seems to stand outside of all the different possibilities that we might typically think of as motivating a person.
Right. What does Bartleby after? Is he after. He's not after dinner or getting something that he positively wants. He's not going to listen to reason. Right. There's a scene where the narrator says. He says we're going to. When Bartle says he prefers not, basically tries to reason with him and says every copyist is bound to do X or why don't you understand that such and such is the irresistible conclusion of an argument? So the suggestion there is. That there is that one can appeal to a sense of obligation, one can appeal to rationality. And that is not something that is going to work with Bartleby.
So whatever preference is for him, if it amounts to freedom, it's not freedom in some traditional rational sense. It's not connected to obligation. But it's also not connected to just doing whatever the hell he wants, whatever he desires. Because desire doesn't really seem to be a part of it. Right. There's a wall between him and desire. And what's happening is entirely negative. And this may be kind of the Hedda Gabler thing. Right. Where true freedom means leaving all possibility open, which means doing nothing. That's it. That's the only way you can be free, and that's the only way you can actually resist this, the oppressiveness of life.
46:31 Erin: Yeah. It's like freedom from action.
46:33 Wes: Yes.
46:34 Erin: Yeah.
46:35 Wes: Yeah. And I think there might be a point to that. I don't know.
46:37 Erin: You're just trying to justify the fact that you never do any work and you just sit there.
46:40 Wes: Exactly. Well, maybe, you know, maybe the key to life is just going on strike.
46:45 Erin: It's really funny because with a bunch of teenage boys, you never have to explain why a character is just sitting and staring at the wall. That's the funniest part of teaching this to them.
46:56 Wes: Yeah. What's not normal about that?
46:59 Erin: I know.
47:01 Wes: I don't get it. He just doesn't want to do a boring, stupid job.
47:07 Erin: Right.
47:10 Wes: You have to explain to them that wall is not a TV screen with video games on it. Yeah. So you could see this as another manifestation of death drive. Right. So when we talk about human motivation, we often think that we have to talk about pleasure and desire and not much else. Maybe status, which is another thing that Bartleby is obviously not after a recognition, but. And so that's why your word compulsion, I think, is you know, it's. It's hard for us to resist. It's natural to think in those terms because it does seem. If there's a death drive aspect to this, which is just to say, I don't want to do anything.
I don't want to have desire. I don't want to engage. Be engaged with life, then it'll. It seems like a very mechanical, lifeless thing that's happening. And it's still. We can still entertain the possibility that this is the only thing that one can do freely. But it's a dark possibility, right? The idea that freedom is weirdly wrapped up in mechanical compulsion, in the sort of eradication of subjectivity, of desire, of interest and status, all those things. Because those things are too, in a way, more forced. Right. It's better to be just some mechanical thing in nature.
A billiard ball being shoved around or a planet subject to gravitational forces. There's something freer about that, maybe, than being this being with a subjectivity who's beset with desires and indigestion like nippers and irascibility and all the things that. That make us characters.
48:58 Erin: It's funny then, that the. You're shedding a little light now for me on the Dead Letter Office, which maybe we should turn our attention to, which is about thwarted desire. Right. I mean, it's kind of like he works in a sort of prehistoric version of the Craigslist Missed Connections page.
49:16 Wes: That's great. Yeah.
49:17 Erin: So do you want to read a
49:19 Wes: little bit of that passage first and then.
49:21 Erin: Yeah. So the narrator says that he received this. This report about one element of Bartleby's history that he was able to ferret out. He says Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration when I. Oh, so he's a government appointee. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters. Does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness. Can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames?
For by the cartload they are annually burned, Sometimes from out the folded paper. The pale clerk takes a ring, the finger it was meant for perhaps molders in the grave, a banknote sent in swiftest charity. He whom it would relieve, Nor eats, nor hungers anymore Pardon for those who died despairing, Hope for those who died Unhoping good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities on errands of life. These letters speed to death. Ah, Bartleby. Ah, humanity. Best last line in the world.
50:29 Wes: Yeah. I like your characterization as the. What is it? Working in the missed connections department at Craigslist. Because these letters reflect people's desires and aspirations. Right. Someone is there. Is someone sending a wedding ring through the mail? That's really interesting. It's an interesting way to do it. Someone is sending money to family members that needs money. So people are trying to gratify desires and hopes or they're expressing those desires and hopes.
51:04 Erin: Yeah. No one receives bad news from these letters, do. They're all expressions of charity, love.
51:11 Wes: Yeah. But somehow, you know, the letters are undeliverable. So apparently whoever is going to receive them, these good things, they've died. That's the idea. So the dead letters are. Correspond to dead people. And so what intervenes here between our. Between us and our aspirations? Even if we. It could be death, but it could be just fate.
51:38 Erin: Bureaucracy.
51:39 Wes: Yeah, but so in a way, Bartleby in that dead letters office is in a. The position of fate or death. I was thinking about this in my second reading. I was thinking, huh, what if I wanted to tell a sort of parable about death coming into the world, having a kind of Pinocchio moment and saying, yeah, I don't want to just be death anymore. The guy in the black robe with scythe. I. I want to see what it's like to be real. I want to see what it's like to be a human. So I'm going to take human form and try to change his personal brand. Yeah. See what the world is all about and go into the world.
It's a Pinocchio thing. The boy wanted to be. Wanted to be real. And not just wouldn't anymore, but in this case, not just be. Be the. Be death, but to be alive. And so you could read it that way as a poignant story of what happens when death tries to become incarnate and live and the way in which it falls apart and it just can't work. But anyway, I think the important thing is that this connects up to Bartleby's problem with aspiration. Right. So to look out a window onto a world in which there are living things. Right. That would be reflective of aspiration.
To look at a dead wall is a reflection of preference, which is to say a lack of desire. Desire to do nothing of desire to not have desires. And not have aspirations. Because in the dead letter office, one sees the true fate of such things, which is that they always come to naught. We all die. Or desire is never fully fulfilled. It wants something that it can't actually fully have. So Bartleby, even if he's not literally death or not literally fate, psychologically comes to reflect that insight. And Bartleby's behavior is meant to be a manifestation of or a personification of fate or death.
Something like that.
53:43 Erin: I like that a lot. I think that's the same is true, or maybe even doubly true for the narrator in confronting Bartleby. Right. I mean, I made that bureaucracy comment kind of flippantly. But it occurs to me that in a way, bureaucracy is like institutionalized fate, you know, Very nice. And in a way, bureaucracy is what Bartleby represents for the narrator. He's coming up against. It's like dealing with a dmv. You just. He's. I'm full of epigrammatics tonight and bizarre metaphors. But anyway, he's coming into contact with the immovable object that he can't avoid.
He can't. He tries to run away and he can't. He sort of runs away, but it's dealing with the thing that refuses to deal with you or refuses to treat you like a person. It's as if, you know, his practice of the law and his holding the law loosely has now sort of detached and become a man. Then he has to deal with all of the institutionalized elements of the profession that this man is in and maybe those that he subjects others to by nature of being an administrator or whatever an actor in the law is now.
54:54 Wes: So you're saying Bartleby is a personification of the law? Could be.
54:58 Erin: I don't. You know, it's. It's.
54:59 Wes: No, I think that's great.
55:00 Erin: This is a real flight of fancy on my part.
55:02 Wes: I think that's spot on. I mean, it connects to him as a personification of fate or death or law. And that fits very nicely with its concept of preference. And the idea that you had that he picked up the idea of preference from reading too much law.
55:16 Erin: Yeah. So maybe he's not the Xerox machine becoming cognizant. He's like the law code of New York, just as heavy as a Xerox machine.
55:24 Wes: Yeah. That's very interesting. Because with the law, you can. Again, this is. Desire is irrelevant. And even ultimately, reasons and obligations and everything else is irrelevant at bottom. Because what is written is what is written. And the law may not be ethical, the law may not be right, but it is definitive and final. And it's like, you know, the kids, and you say, you have to do this, and the kids say, why? And you just say, because. Because I prefer you do this, do it that way. And that's it.
55:58 Erin: Yeah, great. Well, should we stop there? Yeah, I think that was good.
56:02 Wes: All right. Thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com
Cursed Kids or Psych-Au Pair? “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James
Aug 30, 2021
The story begins and ends with two variations on the meaning of the title. On the one hand, to give another turn of the screw is to ratchet up the horror of a good ghost story, in this case by involving children in it. On the other, it’s to treat the cause of that horror as if it were just another of life’s many obstacles, to be overcome both by screwing one’s courage to the sticking place, and by suppressing awareness of what is revoltingly unnatural in it. Whose screw turns out to be looser—the audience that enjoys such stories (and sometimes believes them), or the teller who manufactures them? Wes & Erin analyze Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
0:08 Wes: The story begins and ends with two variations on the meaning of the title. On the one hand, to give another turn of the screws to ratchet up the horror of a good ghost story, in this case by involving children in it. On the other, it's to treat the cause of that horror as if it were just another of life's many obstacles to be overcome, both by screwing one's courage to the sticking place and by suppressing awareness of what is revoltingly unnatural in it. Whose screw turns out to be looser, the audience that enjoys such stories and sometimes believes them, or the teller who manufactures them.
Today we're discussing Henry James, the Turn of the Screw. This is Wes Alwan, and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I always found the title of this to be odd. And this is the first time I've read the Turn of the Screw. And I was looking forward to figuring out why he titled it in this way, what that meant. And it's still a bit obscure to me. There's two places in which this phrase, turn of the screw, turns up in the novella, but it's used in quite different ways in each of those cases. So I think one of the things we could do today is try to figure out what the point of the title is, because I think that ends up saying a lot about what's going on in the story.
1:34 Erin: Isn't it that the Turn of the Screw in the preface involves the emotional effect of a ghost story?
1:42 Wes: Yeah.
1:43 Erin: So they're listening to some ghost story, and they say the fact that this ghost appears first to a little boy, some little boy in the story at a tender age, adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children? We say, of course, somebody exclaimed that they give two turns.
2:07 Wes: So it sounds like it ratchets up
2:09 Erin: the suspense or it's even creepier or something. But there's some effect that these children seem to be having that is not quite so clearly spelled out.
2:19 Wes: I took the turn of the screws having something to do with suspense. But, you know, you're making me see that. Yeah, the creepiness might be the better word. They use some words as we go forward. The words that are used are dreadfulness, uncanny ugliness and horror and pain, which one woman describes as. Well, in response to dreadfulness, a woman says, oh, how delicious. So there's an emphasis in the beginning of the story, on the idea that ghost stories like this involve our getting satisfaction out of horrible things, on the one hand, and then associated with this idea is the notion that if you really want to make it as horrible as possible, get children involved.
So you have this creepy insinuation all by itself that adults are sitting around gratifying themselves with tales of the torture of children. And one of the interesting things about the way this begins is that the tale that is the point of departure for the primary story in the book, the one that involves just one child, here's the way it's put. I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to note it as the only case he had met with which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case I may mention was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion.
An appearance of a dreadful kind to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it, waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shocked him. So one of the really interesting things about that is that is what we expect out of the parent, right? In general, we think of ghost stories as the fancies of children. They're made up, they're in a child's imagination. Unless we're superstitious adults and it's the role of the adult to tell the child, no, there isn't a monster under your bed, or, no, that was just a dream, there aren't really ghosts.
You were just imagining that. And to provide a kind of soothing maternal function in that case that breaks down, the child doesn't get that you have an adult who actually also sees the apparition. So whether you chalk that up to. Within the context of the ghost story, of course ghosts are real. You can chalk it up to the internal consistency of that fantasy world, if you like. But you could also chalk it up to, you know, if you transfer that into our frame, that's just a psychotic parent or a failed parent who can't do their job and who can't alleviate the fanciful fears of the child.
And of course, that's a foreshadowing of what actually happens in the turn of the screw in which you have a governess. So in the turn of the screw, the children don't even see the apparitions. Only the governess does, only the parental figure. So it's not just that they're seeing them and she can't soothe them. She's introducing, unless her account is correct, which I take her as being deluded, we'll discuss that. But unless her account is correct, she's introducing her own fears and fancies and psychosis into the situation and trying to, in a way convince everyone else of it, including the children.
Of course, the alternate reading, if we were to treat it as a true ghost story, is that she, you know, the ghosts really are there and she does see them. And all the other evidence, psychological evidence that we get in the story, that we should ignore that and conclude that the ghosts are real.
5:52 Erin: The other part of that second reading would be that the children also see them and are just not being forthcoming about that. So there's a reading where the children, of course, know exactly what's going on. And I do think that these children are, at least in the way that we're getting the information from the governess. There is something extremely creepy about these children, which we could also talk about. But I like what you're saying about the frame narrative, which really stuck out to me during this reading. Just this morning I happened to find.
I love Virginia Woolf's commentary on people, which can sometimes be very mean. But she wrote this great essay about James and I just found it in bits and pieces on somebody's blog. I couldn't even. I was trying desperately to find the whole thing and it's behind a paywall somewhere. So she was writing about James's ghost stories and she writes they have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts, the blood stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. And she says that these old fashioned ghost stories, these things that people would tell over long hours that they had to spend sitting over the fire, drinking wine by the light of half a dozen candles, those things can't appeal to us anymore because of the fact that we have newspapers, basically that over breakfast we could read about more horrors than what people in the olden days could imagine in an entire year.
And so I like the point that you're making about these people over the fire on Christmas Eve, getting their jollies out of hearing these tales of horror, because it seems to me like that's the old fashioned kind of ghost story, you know, which maybe is this experience is trotted out on Christmas Eves. Now. It was a particularly creepy time and traditionally a time when people would tell ghost stories, oddly enough. But I like that distinction because then what we actually get, as I think you're Also suggesting is a story that's very different from that kind of old fashioned ghost story, as Woolf herself also makes this distinction.
His story is, I think, more about psychological realism than any kind of horror. Though maybe the two overlap quite a bit. Because the psychological realism that we see of the governess might have some horrifying elements to it. But the ghost story becomes a kind of a commentary. I don't know, storytelling itself or narrative itself, because it calls so much attention to itself, because it's a first person narration handed down as a quote, unquote, real account. And that narration itself is being transcribed by the guy we get in the frame narrative who's listening to and commenting on this guy Douglas's account because he knows this woman and the story within a story element.
And then the mirroring effects that happen a lot within the story were just making me reflect that. The whole story seems to be a commentary on the limits of storytelling itself and the extremes to which one can push psychological realism almost to a breaking point where you can't really understand anyone or anything because everything becomes opaque or abstruse and you can't ultimately penetrate other people's perspectives with your own mind. It's like where writing ends, where the novel as a concept ends almost. I don't know if that's going too far.
9:05 Wes: You said it gets at the limits of psychological realism.
9:08 Erin: I think so, because we're getting this story told by this woman from the first person perspective. And basically everything that she's trying to do is to read her surroundings and read things that are actually extremely opaque and project onto them what she thinks is actually going on. And I suppose what I'm trying to say is that in effect is what we all do. But it's especially what artists, what writers do. They try to read stories into things, or they try to, especially realist novelists or novelists that are, like James, trying to get inside the head of people.
They're trying to interpret how someone would act in certain situations and transcribe those thoughts. I suppose what I'm saying is that by the governess's failure, or what we might interpret as her failure of interpretation throughout the book, both in terms of things that she may or may not see and thoughts and motivations that other people may or may not be having, it ends in death and it ends in terror and horror. So to me, it almost seems to be like an indictment of just the process of trying to read and understand other people, which is in itself kind of an indictment of storytelling.
So it becomes something very Hyper meta. Even though it's presumably a ghost story told by a fire in this innocent, old fashioned jump scare way. It takes that classical storytelling conceit, which is very straightforward, and turns it into something that's actually very. As a vehicle for something that's very bizarre.
10:33 Wes: So it's a parody or a satire of a ghost story.
10:36 Erin: Right.
10:37 Wes: I hadn't thought of the way you could see it as a satirization of storytelling itself, but that makes sense to me. I mean, my general reaction to the book, in all honesty, I didn't enjoy it reading it the first time, really I enjoyed it more just going through the second time and taking notes on it. But I also enjoyed a lot. I watched this 1999 TV movie version of the Turn of the Screw. I think it was done on pbs. It's very, very good. And it genuinely actually does have creepy and terrifying moments. And not because it tries to play up the supernatural part, it doesn't.
You know, it treats it entirely as a matter of her. Her psychology. And yet it is. It's very effective. So my dissatisfaction with the story is a product of. So there's no ambiguity for me. She's a psychotic, hysterical person, very paranoid. And so basically you're in the mind of a paranoid person for 80 something pages, which I find very unpleasant. And there's lots of evidence from very early on in the story not just that she's an unreliable narrator, but that she's extremely paranoid. I don't know if disturbed is the word, that may be too pejorative in a way, but she's delusional in many ways.
And probably there's hints that she's an inappropriate figure. I mean, I think ultimately she plays the role of the ghost in the story. She is the ghost. And that's a very original, in a way, take on this. I think it's not until we M. Night Shyamalan. Right. Success. Until the protagonist becomes the unwitting ghost in a ghost story again. And I say that she plays the role of the ghost. If we side with the children, which I do, or side with the idea that they're not seeing apparitions aren't really ghosts. More psychological reading then? Yeah.
She is the one there being scary and being, to use her word and I think Flora's word at a certain point, cruel. So the idea of that is very interesting. But James's ornate prose, which I don't get the same satisfactions out of that prose as I do out of, say, Melville having to decipher a sentence. They should Use this for sentence diagramming in schools. How many subordinate clauses or triple, quadruple negations or whatever is going on that makes it so hard to read a sentence. The sheer complexity of it. That is not as rewarding to me and James.
But the main thing is, psychologically, it's brilliant. It's incredible. But it's precisely for that reason that I find it unpleasant. So in a way, it's accomplishing. Right. It's accomplishing the objective of a ghost story, which is to induce discomfort, but it's psychological discomfort. And that happens to be something that in this case. And I could think about it some more. I don't get that meta pleasure out of it. Right. That people seem to get out of ghost stories or horror movies. I actually don't like horror movies either. But anyway, I don't think that answers the question very well of my dissatisfaction with it.
13:43 Erin: But I think that's really interesting because I also was thinking about James in contrast to Melville, simply because when we read Billy Budd, we both had that resistance at the beginning that sort of gave way to something that we both really enjoyed. As far as James goes, this is a pretty easy one to read compared to some of his other books. So I'm used to James. I'm used to the syntactic complexity being ratcheted up even higher, like, particularly in his late trilogy of great novels like the Ambassadors is really, really difficult to get through. And that has an entire page is just one sentence.
14:21 Wes: Jesus.
14:22 Erin: Yeah, it gets really crazy. But I guess you would agree with. There's this famous H.G. wells quote where the two of them kind of went back and forth like they sort of admired certain elements of each other's work. But James was dissatisfied that Wells was so disconnected from reality, and Wells was dissatisfied that James was so tied up in his own wordiness, basically. And so he famously characterized James as like a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea. Like that was his.
14:51 Wes: That's great.
14:52 Erin: And I know Virginia Woolf said something about how when she reads James, she feels like she's entombed in a block of amber or something. In other words, you're not alone in your characterization. I adore him despite everything. And I think that turn of the screw and everything earlier than that is on the easier side in the sliding scale of James prose style. So I think there's evidence to the reading that you give of the governess being the ghost, the governess being the one who's actually haunting the children or hurting the children. I think that comes Pretty early on, when she puts herself in the place of Quint during his second.
When she goes outside and looks through the window and then scares Mrs. Grose. Yeah, but I also think that you're coming down on one side. I think maybe you're being a little too harsh for my sense of the story. Because though we don't really know who this Douglas is, there's a little bit of lubricant at the beginning of the story. This is a woman who this Douglas knows and greatly admires and, in fact, is in love with.
15:54 Wes: He's accused of being in love with her.
15:56 Erin: Of being in love with her. Right. But he doesn't really reject that assumption on their part. He says, yes, you may grin or something like that. Or like, go ahead and grin. That turns out to be not such a great look, actually, because he would roughly be, I think, the same distance and age from her as she was from Miles, only it was then 10 years later. So if we take Miles to be 10 years old and the governess to be 20, then if this guy fell in love with the governess while he was in college, so let's say roughly 20, then she would have been 30 anyway, or around there, who knows?
So this Douglas guy thinking highly of the governess is really our first impression of her. And I think that carries us over the first pages. I don't know how many pages we can say scientifically of her account of things and gets us a little bit more on her side than we would be from the beginning saying, whoa, this is a crazy person. A few things do happen in the beginning of the narrative that are very odd and very suggestive. And I think one of the most mysterious characters is Mrs. Grose. And certainly her lack of information that she divulges and her sort of odd secrecy can be interpreted in many ways, too.
But I think that certain readings that the governess is giving to her surroundings do make sense, even as they're extremely heightened and really extremely immature. I mean, everything is kind of mediated through her emotions she can't seem to see in a straightforward and kind of logical way. But anyway, I do have some sympathy for her at the beginning. And I am a little bit more questioning of the motives of the people around her, I think, than you sound like you are.
17:35 Wes: I don't think there's any ambiguity about whether the ghosts are real, even though that was a big. I was looking at early critical commentary. A lot of early critics seemed to take for granted that the ghosts were real. And then it seemed to occur to people maybe they weren't real.
17:50 Erin: Oh, wow.
17:51 Wes: And then that became a subject of critical controversy. And I thought, these critics are seeing ghosts if they think this is in any way ambiguous.
18:01 Erin: Hmm.
18:02 Wes: I think what James does at the end is he provides us with a twist. Because Miles dies, he provides us with a twist that makes the possibility that the ghosts are real a defensible position. But that I take to be a joke. And of course, some commentators have interpreted that ending, and there is evidence for her actually suffocating him after he faints, so doing an Of Mice and Men on him, loving him to death. And even if there were that ambiguity, it wouldn't interest me. I wouldn't find that very interesting. Her state of mind, to me, is over the top.
And I think James takes a lot of labors to make his point. Right. It's not all that subtle, his portrayal of her as a crazy person, in my opinion. I think it's subtle enough that early critics maybe could have missed it or some readers might miss it. But if you're reading between the lines, he's trying to include as much evidence as possible that she is not fully in touch with reality. I mean, the first thing that we get is her over the top reaction to Flora. And I think you're right. In the beginning, it takes a while to catch on to her, because I think the impression is in the beginning that she's just, wow, there's these two angelic, amazing kids, or at least with Flora in the beginning, you know, the way she describes Flora, the most beautiful child I've ever seen, her radiant, angelic beauty is something that she says leads to an immediate restlessness in her.
So in retrospect, as the story develops, you can see that, yes, she idealizes these children in a very over the top way, in a way to the point where we begin to doubt that idealization just as much as we doubt the flip side of that idealization, which is the appearance of the sinister forces that are supposed to corrupt this purity. Right. Those two things are. Those are just two sides of the same coin of her kind of split reality between all good and all bad. And the appearance of those apparitions is just the other shoe dropping. And of course, the other thing that James does is he takes labors to associate her relationship to the children with her relationship to their uncle, right, to her employer, who, when she meets him, is arguably flirtatious.
Or at least he's describing his bachelor lifestyle in a very compelling way. So he charms her, he pawns off these two children on Her. And then he says, don't ever contact me. So in very quick succession, it's as if you get this whole relationship right. You get a seduction, you get reproduction implicitly. And then you get complete abandonment.
21:01 Erin: Yeah, that is really good. I never thought of that.
21:04 Wes: And so part of what's unfolding in the story is her reaction to that abandonment, which she hints at in various ways, that that's part of it.
21:12 Erin: I hate to stand up for a weirdly pedophilic and obviously disturbed governess. You allow that there's at least a little bit of getting used to her perspective at the beginning.
21:23 Wes: But don't you think I fully admit, by the way, a lot of this is my own prejudice? So let me put that up front. My prejudice in this story is very amplifying. But go ahead.
21:35 Erin: I suppose this is why my attention was immediately called to the contrast between this classical ghost story and this psychological realism, as I'm gonna call it. Just because I can't think of a better term which is such a hallmark of James writing. So I suppose my prejudice would be in favor of that in which you have this waffling all the time, right, Where James so accurately reproduces the minutiae of people's thoughts that in the revolution of just one minute, you might have lots of contradictory thoughts about the same thing that'll just float into your mind and then go away.
And so I interpret this as being very much in the vein of how James typically is able to capture people's thoughts. In fact, let me refer to this, too, this Virginia Woolf essay. Just one little thread in it that she mentions, which I think is particularly good about his story. The friends of the friends, his characters, with their extreme fineness of perception, are already halfway out of the body. That is kind of a hallmark of all of his characters, I think. And it's also something that I really identify with. I mean, maybe that's because I'm halfway out of the body myself.
I don't know. But the extreme fluctuations in her perception of her environment when she first comes in, it kind of tracks for me. I mean, we realize after a while how unhinged she is. And I believe she becomes more and more unhinged, of course, over the course of the book. And we can argue about why that is or try to speculate about why that is and what's causing her to become more and more unraveled. But I do think that, at least at the beginning, when she's describing these bumps and jumps, these highs and lows of perception about the house and about her circumstance, I can understand it.
I mean, I think that when we are confronted with a new environment in which we have to spend some time and about which we have some oddly contradictory emotions, maybe, like her, we've had to take the position whether we feel like it's a great thing for us or not. Maybe we have all these ambivalent and differing perceptions of what our life is going to be like there. And so when she first comes in, there's in hindsight, an unhinged element, a sort of immaturity. But on the other hand, to me, it's at least just a sort of heightened account of what would go through anybody's mind when they come into this place.
There are hints that her preoccupations with power are something that's kind of troubling. When she first comes in, she seems to be very happy that she's going to be. You know, she's happy that Mrs. Grose curtsies to her when she comes in and that she feels like a very important person in this house, which is understandable, too, in a way. She's 20 years old, she's come from poverty, and now she gets to be in charge of everything with nobody over her.
24:17 Wes: And she's excited by the opportunity to form Flora. She says this opportunity to be a formative influence on someone.
24:25 Erin: Yeah, it reminds me very much of Hedda Gabler, which will obviously also end in death and destruction. And then certainly her waxing poetic over the virtues of the children is a bit much, But I guess I'm willing to give her a little bit more leeway in the beginning, because it does just seem like a natural extension of James's usual tack.
24:45 Wes: She arrives, she as that very idealized description of Flora. Then she has her first hallucination, which is the faint far cry of a child. She talks about her excitement over the opportunity to form Flora. And then there's that discussion of Miles, where Mrs. Grose says, you will be carried away by the little gentleman. And then the governess says, I'm rather easily carried away and that she was carried away in London. So you get this immediate association between her feelings for Miles or for the children and her feelings for the uncle. And this idea that she's been carried away, that she has a romantic interest in the uncle.
Which, of course, is a repetition of the moment in which Douglas is said to have a romantic interest in her. Right. You get all sorts of doublings like that, by the way, in this. Yeah, you pointed out one of them. When she takes Quint's place outside the window. And then she gets Mrs. Gross to agree to her idea that she's gonna go and greet Miles as he arrives. When the coach lets him out, he's under the care of the male guard or something like that. Little do they know they should have. If they were really guarding him, they would not let him get out.
And then she takes that as a sign that they are gonna be in total agreement about everything. She uses this phrase. Never falsified, she basically says. And that turned out to, you know, I saw that as a sign that we would always be in agreement, and we always were. Which, of course, they weren't. The critical moment. Mrs. Grose, who tries very hard to back her up and can't, in fact, can't because she doesn't see Ms. Jessel at the critical moment that the governess points that ghost out to Mrs. Grose. And then Flora gives her that tour of the tower.
And you see the structure. In the very first chapter, James is carefully working on establishing her as unreliable. Working on establishing her as someone who's very idealized and carried away easily. And, you know, as you point out, it's not over the top in the beginning. It gradually ratchets up. He gradually turns the screw, let's say he does that very effectively. So I think you're right that he's not beating us over the head with this from the very beginning. It's easy for me to go in with hindsight now and pick out all of these things, but clearly, once you go back through and analyze the story, he's very careful in the psychological construction here.
All of which, in my opinion, is designed to undermine the narrative and to undermine the idea that there are any ghosts, except for her proverbial fulfillment of that role. And so therefore, to satirize the ghost story. And I think ultimately, as you point out, it's a commentary on the meaning of ghost stories, which we'll get to some more. And then, as you point out, the commentary on what it means to tell a story at all. It seems clear now that those, in a way, are the themes, the subjects.
27:42 Erin: Now, I wanted to ask you more about Mrs. Gross, but maybe we should talk about the meaning of ghost stories before we move on.
27:50 Wes: Absolutely. Yeah.
27:51 Erin: Yeah.
27:51 Wes: I was hoping we'd do that pretty early so that I can get out all my state, all my biases up front, but.
27:59 Erin: No, I'm very interested. No, I want you to. I don't know what to say about it, except I suspect that I have my mind about to be Made up for me by whatever you're going to say.
28:12 Wes: Okay. I'm glad.
28:14 Erin: Sorry, sorry.
28:15 Wes: I'm glad to be able to have such a formative role in the life of an impression.
28:21 Erin: Yes, my dear.
28:22 Wes: Innocent. Oh, God, he just gave me shivers. Yes, my dear.
28:27 Erin: Kind of creeped me out.
28:28 Wes: That is creepy. You're right. Now that you say it that way, the way the story starts off with this connection between children and ghost stories, it made me want to think about that connection further because in a way there is an association. Right. Ghost stories are, in a way, the way that we actually entertain children, I think. Right. I mean, a fairy tale, in a way. A Grimm's fairy tale with its horror elements. So you could call them horror stories or ghost stories and you could say they're about ghosts or monsters. I think they all go together. And I think it used to be the case that we didn't shield children from that fascination because it does seem to be a fascination of children. I remember it being one of my fascinations as a kid. And I remember my mom soothing me after having a bad dream. Actually, I have a memory of an out of body experience while my mom was soothing me. So.
29:22 Erin: Wow.
29:23 Wes: I had a weird paranormal. I had a weird dream, she was soothing me and then I remember just a weird paranormal experience. So the ghost story sort of continued through the maternal soothing phase. Say what you want about that psychologically, but I was sort of hovering over the bed, looking down and watching us. And my first dream, I turn into a witch and fly out of a window and there's a monster. This is when I was five, by the way. There's a monster trying to kill a damsel in distress and I'm supposed to save her, but I can't because I'm stuck, bound down on the ground on this rotating platform.
Anyway, first remembered dream. Really weird, I know, for a five year old. But I remember those fascinations and I do think they're a fascination for children. And the more obvious explanation is that they reflect an attempt by children to come to terms with death and also everything else horrible that goes on in life. It's this sort of, you know, I was going to say introductory course. Right. Speaking of giving children formative experiences. This is part of the education, this is part of what we have to introduce them to in life, which is how terrible it's all gonna be.
Sorry, it's a pretty pessimistic thing to say, but all the horrible things that can happen and ultimately death, which is inevitable. I think there's something More. I've thought about this a little bit, just because Frankenstein was an obsession for me, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And I thought a lot about this and wrote about it because I think she was connecting the concept of a ghost story with the concept of rearing up a child or a creature and giving a creature formed of experiences and relating that to the ambition of a writer and what it meant to be a writer.
One of the ideas I draw from that, from the thinking that I did about that is that ghost stories, in a way, I think are about. It's a way for children to process the danger represented by adults. Adult desire, for instance, the kind of desire that the governess has for Flora and Miles. It doesn't have to be overtly pedophilic. Right. All of us get pleasure. I think most adults can get a lot of pleasure out of interacting with children. And they're very lovable. And you want to squeeze their cheeks and you want to eat them up, so to speak. Right.
It gets confusing. You quickly start having reactions which initially affectionate, if gone too far, would put you in that role of the monster. Right. That whole eating, I'm going to eat you up thing. Right. Just like a monster. So I think part of what ghost stories are about is the danger of the adult world and adult desires. Some of that is desires in the direction of children. Some of it is just the ways in which children can be collateral damage to those desires. But ultimately, it is about formative influence. It comes back to what this governess was saying about the opportunity to form Flora.
Because I think ultimately, what ghosts represent for all of us is the persistence of previous generations in the present. And in our own character. We are formed by it. Right? We identify with culture, we follow laws and speak a language. And all these things were invented by the dead. These are the legacies of the dead that live with us, and they essentially haunt us and they curtail our freedom to the extent that they form us, which. Right. This is something that Miles talks about wanting his freedom. So this is my preliminary thesis that ghost stories do have something to do with children and the formative role that adults have in the lives of children and the way that that formative role can go wrong, the way in which adults can be monstrous to children, the way adults can make monsters out of children.
Right. The governess is concerned about the evil influence that Jessel and Quint have had on the children, the idea that they've corrupted the children.
33:20 Erin: I completely agree. And this idea of, oh, for instance, you know, popular fairy tales Being watered down in animated Disney adaptations is something that I talk about frequently, or how sequestered from death we are in modern American culture. Just the idea that less than a hundred years ago, if someone in your family died, you were very often living in the same house with him or her, and very often the body would lie in state in your house. So in a multi generation house, that means that the child would have a much greater acquaintance with death and with the reality of that than we do today.
And I think that that was integral to forming a consciousness of what life means in light of the threat of death in front of you in a much more real way than it is now. So curiously, the governess is kind of this modern figure in that way, where she is trying to keep from the children both the idea of death and the idea of sex. I mean, she's trying to keep them from maturing. She even says this. She talks about how gentle the children are and how extraordinary they are. She says, I used to speculate, but even this, with a dim disconnectedness, as to how the rough future for all futures are rough, would handle them and might bruise them.
They had the bloom of health and happiness. And yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and protected. The only form that in my fantasy, the after years could take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park. It may be, of course, above all that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness, that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.
She wants to keep them in the sort of perpetual quarantine, if you will, of the park and the garden, the enclosed space of childhood, which she imagines to be a place in which maturity, you know, an awareness of sex and death has no place at all. The tamed nature of this extension of the house. And of course, lurking within that, she imagines, is this beast, this untamed nature, this force of evil that's going to pounce on them, which, as you've already suggested, would possibly be the governess herself, like she's already been this evil force that's come into the house.
I think there's an interesting idea at the heart of this, which is, I think what you're saying is then, that these ghost stories are an important means of maturation for young people, that they can serve as kind of vehicles for maturation and Healthy maturation. But at the same time, there's a kind of exposure to things that are dangerous and that are extremely disturbing, that, if gone too far, can be damaging to children. And I suppose the story is grappling with that distinction. I mean, how much can we expose children to. The actual horror within this story isn't that there are ghosts.
Right. It's the suggestion that there has been something evil in the relationship between Quint and Ms. Jessel and the children. And there's the suggestion of something, possibly pedophilia. Yeah, right. And that, of course, would be the truly heinous thing at the center of this story and that exposure. So you have, like the drip by drip exposure of children to the reality of the world through stories, through fantasy, through monsters, and all these things that you're suggesting. And then there's the criminal stripping of innocence of a child, which is then at the other end of that scale.
Extreme end of that scale.
37:02 Wes: Right. That's a good point.
37:05 Erin: So all of these things kind of come to bear in this story in a strange way. And whether or not the children have been exposed to anything untoward From Quint and Ms. Jessel, however, to whatever degree that might be, it seems that the governess herself, simply by assuming that they have been tainted or assuming a kind of higher maturity on their part than they're capable of, is also being the one who's then introducing that if we take the reading that she's the evil one, she is actually speeding their maturation and ultimately, you know, speeding their death by both trying to shelter them and by being suspicious that they may not be the little angelic creatures that she hopes they are. It's a strange combination.
37:48 Wes: It is. There's a lot of twists and turns and ironies. Like she becomes the ghost by. And in a sense, introduces the ghosts by trying to ward off the ghosts, trying to shelter them from the ghost. So it's a sort of return of the repressed. Right. Because arguably, she's suppressing any awareness of naughtiness in the kids. Right. Because, I mean, later on, Miles is going to arrange it. So she catches him doing something bad and says, I just. I wanted you to know that I could be. I wanted you to know that I could be naughty. Which is an important communication from a child that suggests that there's something stifling about her idealization of him and her attempt to deny the existence of anything but their purity and their goodness.
But, I mean, what you bring up is the way the novella begins is with this idea of a Child seeing an apparition, a mother waking up and not being able to soothe the child because the mother saw the same apparition. And here, of course, we could say, well, the governess is trying to soothe them. Right. She is trying to be that good mother who keeps the apparitions away from them, when, in fact, she's doing the very opposite in her attempt to shelter children. Which goes to show this whole idea. You know, I was treating ghost stories as being about the adult exploitation of children, but also just about being creatures in general.
As in, children are creatures in the sense of they are creatures in relation to their parents being their creators. And then they're also creatures in relation to all the creative forces of education and culture and language and everything else and those sorts of influences. Right. They can be benevolent and they make us who we are. They give us a conscience, they give us abilities. But they can also be sinister and exploitative, and at the very, very extreme is violence and pedophilia and abuse and things like that. But there's a whole range of things that are ambiguous, which just falls within the category of parental love.
So a child could be traumatized by a parent that is too smothering, for instance.
40:12 Erin: Well, and throughout, the governess is extremely physically affectionate with the children.
40:17 Wes: Yes, exactly.
40:19 Erin: To the point of. Not that there's anything wrong on her part necessarily, but it seems to be coming from an extremely insecure place in the governess.
40:28 Wes: And she gets physical a lot with Mrs. Grose.
40:31 Erin: Yes.
40:32 Wes: There are scenes in her grabbing her arm or snuggling into her breast, or she talks in this very physical language about pressing people or having them up against the wall. Yeah, there's a lot of physical stuff. The reader's attention is definitely drawn to it by James. Her physicality, her intensity, which is benevolent, but can still be damaging or unwanted. And obviously, by the end of it, you do find out. I think Flora's reaction to her at the very end is probably something that is not limited to the governess asking her, tell me where Ms. Jessel is. It's probably a reaction to the entire trajectory of the relationship in which she has been probably dissatisfied with a lot of what the governess has been doing. We can't see that. Right. Cause we get a very unreliable narrator. It's ingeniously hinted in all of this.
41:27 Erin: Before we move on, I just wanted to say that you took a kind of surprising direction for me because I thought you were gonna talk about the presence of children within ghost stories and what function they serve as Being a kind of a trope, you know, the creepy child.
41:42 Wes: Yeah.
41:42 Erin: I'm glad for the direction that you did go in. But that's just the angle at which I was kind of examining the story. You know, there's a point in a child's maturation, I think, where they become extremely opaque to adults after they're toddlers, when they've learned to express themselves to a certain degree, but not with a kind of complex ability to make clear their emotions. I'm just sort of speculating about this, by the way. I'm not saying, like, this is an actual phase of development. I just mean that, you know, I think there's a point where a child becomes, you could say, the victim of more complex emotions, but is not yet able to express them very well.
And I think it's around the ages that Miles and Flora are. You know, they're old enough to have more mature thoughts and to have their own fancies and inclinations and their own sort of complex feelings about things. But they're also at this age where they're not really forthcoming about them, maybe because they're not capable of expressing them fully. And I think at this particular age, there are a lot of ghost stories. I think this is a common age in which children appear in ghost stories. Maybe for that reason. This is entirely supposition on my part because of the opacity that that represents and the idea of the unknown being the thing we're most afraid of.
And children at this age are particularly unknowable, and therefore they can be particularly creepy or sinister in the way that they withhold information or suddenly change the subject because they're involved in their own thoughts. But it can look, especially to someone who's paranoid. It can look evasive. It can look somehow as though they're withholding critical pieces of information. And I think that is done really well here. The fact that we never know really anything about these children and their past relationship with Quint and Ms. Jessel, I think, is really creepy.
It's as though their children, I suppose you could say, are people without any past history. And it seems as though Miles and Flora are particularly lacking in history because they're not forthcoming about it at all. And even Miles and his reason for his expulsion from school, which we should really talk about, because that is evidence that the governess is not entirely to blame here. I mean, that's a very, very odd thing, that it never gets explained. And that is something that's, you know, he gets kicked out of school. It really happened. And we never learn what happened.
And he never even talks about what life was like at school. They say almost nothing.
44:17 Wes: You had me thinking, as you were talking about the fact that they're in what Freud would call the latency period between infantile perversity, what Freud thinks of as perversity because it involves erogenous zones like, you know, anality, for instance, or wanting to suck. There are quasi sexual components to early experience that are there just so they can help us survive, you know, pleasure and defecation or sucking or something like that. And then that once we get to the latency period, it's a kind of asexual period in a way, right? And maybe there's also something uncanny.
If you want to talk about the creepiness of children in horror films, I think maybe you were getting at something about the uncanny quality of there being little adults, right, which is kind of very played up in this with Miles calling her dear and all that stuff and being so smart. But on the other hand, of course, they're not really adults. But I think the whole thing with Miles in school, right, there's a strong suggestion that something sexual happened. And what we get out of him at the end, shortly before he's crushed to death, sorry to give a very prejudiced interpretation of the ending, what we get out of him is that he said things.
So he says, then what did you do? I said things. Who did you say them to? Miles says he doesn't know, she says. The governess says to everyone. He says only to. He doesn't remember the names, but only to the people he liked. And then she says, did they repeat what you said? And he says, only to the people they liked. So very interesting. And you know. And then it gets back to the masters, but it's too horrible to put into the letter, right? The masters from the school don't put in the letter what he's getting expelled for. Which, of course, if it were violence, as we know, violence is perfectly fine.
You can put that in movies, you can put that in letters, but if it's sexual, you can't. So there are strong suggestions here. So maybe it was perfectly normal, innocent. What is he, nine or ten? The kind of sexual experimentation that kids in that age sometimes engage in. Or it sounds like he was just saying things, right? So he may have been as innocuous as him saying naughty things to girls in school or to boys, or it could be something much worse, of course. And there's a huge. You could drive a truck through the gap, right, that James leaves and he leaves the same gap with Quint and Jessel about what has gone on here.
We simply don't know. It could be that with Quint and Jessel, for instance, it's just the fact that they had an inappropriate relationship and that she was a lady and he was a commoner and they were vaguely not a good influence because they were fooling around out of wedlock and shouldn't be consorting with the children in that way. Maybe Quint was giving Miles beers or something. Who knows? And then there's the other extreme, which is possibility of pedophilia, and then there's everything in between that. But regardless of how extreme it is, there's definitely a suggestion of some sort of sexual component to all of this.
47:23 Erin: The fact that Mrs. Grose is, like the governess, very obsessed with impropriety. They both seem to be products of this hyper, Victorian, provincial attitude about who can mix with whom. And that leads me to want to talk more about Mrs. Gross, because I do think there's a reading of this book where Mrs. Grose can be the villain. She also really doesn't say anything about anything.
47:49 Wes: Oh, poor Mrs. Grose. You're gonna.
47:51 Erin: I know. I'm gonna go after her.
47:53 Wes: All right, let's do it.
47:55 Erin: I don't know why this stuck out to me. Weird things stick out to me at different readings. Right at the beginning, when the governess first comes to the house and she's describing it, she describes seeing rooks circling the house. And I have in my backyard, there's this baby hawk that won't stop making noise, and it's screaming day and night. So I've just become extremely aware of birds. So I decided to go to Wikipedia and just look up the significance of rooks. And I found this little nugget, which was interesting. Farmers have observed rooks in their fields and thought of them as vermin. Rookeries were often perceived as nuisances in rural Britain, and it was previously the practice to hold rook shots where the juvenile birds, known as branchers, were shot before they were able to fly.
48:37 Wes: Jesus.
48:38 Erin: Interesting. So, anyway, I see this thing about rooks, and then Mrs. Grose comes in, and I always misread her name as grouse, Right. Which is like a game bird, and thus a victim, perhaps, of the governess and of the circumstances that are about to happen. But then, of course, there's a reading that, at least visually, her name can look like a corrupted rose, Right? Like a rose turned gross and thus sinister. And I think probably this reading only occurred to me because I'm really familiar with the '61 adaptation of this, The Innocents, in which roses visually figure really, really heavily in that adaptation. I wonder if this is part of the reason why. But, you know, it's just sort of a little visual rhyme. Obviously not an auditory one.
49:29 Wes: Interesting.
49:31 Erin: So Mrs. Grose's leaving things unsaid often leaves the governess to fill in the gaps. Did you notice when you read, it really stuck out to me this time how many times Mrs. Grose leaves off with a dash and then the governess sort of finishes the sentence?
49:51 Wes: I did notice that, but I was blaming the governess for that, I thought. I took that as part of her characterization as being so intrusive and finishing people's sentences. But, yes, I see how this could go the other way.
50:03 Erin: Right. That was my first reading, too. But then I realized, oh, it could also be that Mrs. Grose isn't really saying anything and it's giving the governess the opportunity to fill in her own impression. Then you can argue, okay, Grose is either her intentions are actually being read correctly by the governess because she doesn't correct the governess's reading of what she was going to say. So the governess is actually more perceptive than we're currently giving her credit for, if she's accurately interpreting Grose's thoughts. Or Gross is simply choosing not to correct her out of deference for her station or out of a kind of disinterest in whatever the governess is choosing to interpret from her first half of her sentences.
50:45 Wes: It's a mixture, maybe, of deference, and she thinks that there may be something off about the governess and is humoring her.
50:54 Erin: Mrs. Grose is not. Oh, like Mrs. Danvers, for instance, from Rebecca. You could get the trope here. I mean, James could have put in the trope of a housekeeper who is deliberately mean or deliberately withholding and mysterious and somehow in love with the master. And seeing this intrusive governess as a kind of a threat, as a sexual competition or whatever the case may be. Instead, we have this older woman who's more matronly. We could interpret that she does see the governess, perhaps as a threat to, I don't know, Mrs. Grose's affections for the children.
Maybe because she's been taking care of Flora. She resents the governess coming in and intruding on that. But we have this benign figure, and she does become a kind of a confirmation of all of the governess's worst fears. Except to that point that you referenced when she can't say that she sees Ms. Jessel, but otherwise the two of them are kind of winding each other up. I guess I just don't know how willing a participant Mrs. Grose is in that winding up of the governess. And though it's unlikely based on her characterization, I wonder if she could be read as the puppet master behind it all, Especially in this idea that she identifies Quint from the governess's description.
52:25 Wes: She does. She plays the role. She does nothing to calm down the governess. She definitely feeds into her fears. At the first point at which she does that is by identifying that the first apparition as Quint. And then later on in chapter seven, when the governess is describing the experience of seeing Ms. Jessel at the lake, the governess says, they know Flora saw. And Gross will ask questions like, how do you know? And the governess interestingly says, I saw it with my own eyes. When we see that other people are seeing, we don't see that with our own eyes.
We see it with their eyes. And we know that we're seeing it with their eyes. We know that we are inferring. And it's a paranoid person who thinks that they see what other people are thinking with their own eyes. They have no doubt about it. There's no space in between the other person's thoughts and their own. This time it's not Ms. Gross who says, oh, the woman must be Ms. Jessel, the way she did with Quint. The governess fills that in for herself. And then Ms. Gross will say, how can you be sure? And so she is expressing some pushback, let's say.
But by the time she gets to the question of the relationship between Jessel and Quint, what you get out of Mrs. Grose is, oh, they were infamous. She was a lady. The implication is that she's corrupted by a lower class man. And that's where, interestingly enough, the governess puts herself in the position of evaluating Ms. Gross's reliability and says, well, you know, there's no reason to doubt her. There's enough evidence to say, you know, she talks of our employer's late, clever, good looking, quote unquote, own man, impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved.
I think Ms. Grose says the fellow was a hound. He did what he wished. He did that with them all. When the governess says it must have been what she wished, Gross says, well, she paid for it. She implies that there was a pregnancy and a death and childbirth, although she never says it. And when she's kind of put to the test by the governess. She says she doesn't really know. So my point is that I think you're right. She provides a little bit of resistance to the governess's point of view, but not much. And usually by the end of one of these interactions, it's almost like Ms.
Gross gets into the intrigue of it. Right. She gets into the tabloid quality, what's going on, and is, in a way, enjoying gossiping about it, implying things or saying things about people's relationships that are. Saying they're seedy or whatever, but you don't get any details whether that's because of propriety or whether she actually doesn't know as much as she pretends to know, you know, what was going on between Jessal and Quint. Sure, there's gossip around the house and they're hanging out a lot, but what does someone like Gross really know about that relationship except the same servant's gossip that everyone is involved in?
And what is the truth in that situation? So Quint and Jessel may have been infamous, right? But what is the truth of their relationship? We really don't know. They're hanging out with the kids, hanging out with each other. Was it really all that bad?
55:46 Erin: Right.
55:47 Wes: Maybe it was much less bad than the governess's influence.
55:52 Erin: Well, the first time that the governess sees Quint, and this really stuck out to me this time, she said, I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page, and Mrs. Grose can't read, you know, So, I mean, in a way, I wonder if, as I think we've already suggested, like, there are a lot of explanations for Grose's being withholding, and I wonder if one of them is merely that she's at a real intellectual disadvantage. She sees the governess as being superior to her, and she's really trusting her reading of the situation and feels constantly understood by the governess and feels as though she doesn't have to spell things out or that it's below her station to spell things out or that she's afraid to, whatever the case may be.
But it just strikes me that the fact that Mrs. Grose can't read and then the fact that the governess is reading everything into this situation and into what everyone is saying to her, I mean, it kind of. It must take an extremely high level of intelligence to be as off the beam as the governess is. It's as though her ability, the governess's ability to see the ghosts is actually a function of her intelligence and a function of her craft. If she sees him like she sees her words on the page. And this whole story is very masterfully constructed and everything else.
And her reading into everyone's opacity takes a tremendous amount of interpretive power. I wonder if Mrs. Gross can't see the ghost because she's not intelligent enough to see the ghosts or something like that.
57:32 Wes: I mean, it makes sense. If you wanted to go the true ghost story reading, then that's one of the ways you would have to fill that in, I think. Right?
57:40 Erin: I think so. I think also maybe this is just tying back into this idea of the narrator of the story as the storymaker, as the artist, which would put the governess in that position. And therefore the governess can see things that other people can't.
57:54 Wes: Yeah.
57:55 Erin: She could see a world unavailable to others.
57:57 Wes: The implication is that there's something paranoid about storytelling because you presume to be in the heads of others. It can make sense as a writer because, of course, they're your own fictional creations and you really are in their heads. But you could think of it as involving the same mechanism. And so paranoia, at the very least, is storytelling gone wrong. Right.
58:19 Erin: Yeah.
58:19 Wes: And misapplication to the real world. You know, things do unfold as a relationship between Mrs. Gross and. Is it Mrs. Gross and I was calling her Ms. Gross for a lot of this. Whoops. But okay, you have me thinking about that the way it is a relationship. You know, it's not the engine of the story is not just the governess. It's their. The interaction between her and Mrs. Gross. And maybe things would have unfolded much differently. They may have been involved in unhealthy dynamic. They may have been the wrong couple, so to speak. You know, you get the really interesting interaction in chapter 21. And so much of what goes on in the story. Right. Is just between Mrs. Gross and the governess.
59:06 Erin: Mm.
59:06 Wes: It's a lot of the story. But there's an interesting part in chapter 21 where Gross is telling the governess that Flora is saying shocking things about the governess. She uses the word horrors, and she drops on the sofa and cries. And you think, holy wow, what is Flora accusing the governess of? So we get more hints of abuse or pedophilia or whatever, something really bad, but Gross is unwilling to say it. The name Gross does make sense if you think of it in terms of not detailed. Right. Gross, as in, you know, a big lump, as opposed to the fine details.
But she gives that information, drops on the sofa, and cries. And then what kind of distracts you is that the governess says, thank God, that justifies me. And laughing when Grose says it's about you laughing and saying, you know, I know where she picked up that appalling language about me. It was from Jessel and Quint. And then at the end of it when the governess says, do you believe me? Do you believe all this stuff Grose says she does? I do believe in such doings. So you get this really odd dynamic of resistance and then affirmation. And it's hard for me to describe that more fully except to say I think those interactions are actually the engine of the story.
It's not just the governess by herself.
1:00:23 Erin: So I agree. I think that the environment just between Mrs. Grose and the governess is like a boarding school atmosphere. It's a very suffocated kind of hothouse atmosphere. And at one point I think that the governess says that it's like they're on a ship or something. And it is like they're shipwrecked because they can receive no outside aid. Because the governess is insistent on the fact that she's not gonna break the terms of her employment, really, because she just doesn't wanna look bad in front of the guy that she has the hots for and have him, you know, degrade her in his esteem or whatever. But I don't know if this reading really bears out because it would require minimizing Flora's role and everything. But I do feel as though once Miles comes on the scene, the focus really goes to him and Flora kind of falls away a little bit.
1:01:12 Wes: Yep. Okay, I made a note of that.
1:01:15 Erin: And what's really interesting about that is that if he was at boarding school, he would have had to have been only with other boys. I mean, I don't think that co ed boarding schools existed at this time.
1:01:23 Wes: Good point.
1:01:24 Erin: And then there was also this sort of gender selected oddity of the fact that Quint was only with Miles and Ms. Jessel was only with Flora, which also, it now occurs to me, couldn't have allowed for a lot of hanky panky between Quint and Ms. Jessel in front of the kids if they were in their little sex selected sort of categories. So the interesting thing about Miles becoming the focus of the governess and Mrs. Gross's ministrations or whatever, this whole idea then that they're lying to the governess, that they become really the villains of the story in the governess's mind, and then the Remedy for Miles is going to be his confession to having stolen a letter that the governess was going to finally write to the uncle.
It's very strange. So she interprets his desire to want to leave and to not just be with a bunch of women as being really sinister. And yet we might say that a more natural environment for a young boy would be to be with his schoolmates, you know, to be with a bunch of. At least at this time, you know, to be with a bunch of boys at the boarding school or even to have a male role model in someone like Quint, who we don't really know what kind of role model he was. According to Mrs. Grose, he was terrible. But it seems like his greatest crime in terms of his dalliance with Ms.
Jessel is simply the fact that she was higher born than him. So who knows what the reality of that is. So the intrusion of men into the space, like the intrusion of Quint into the space, becomes immediately extremely sexualized for the governess. What I'm trying to do is tie together what keeping Miles around a bunch of women is supposed to do for his safety, for his sort of stalling his maturation in like a positive way, you know, according to the governess's own definition. And how exactly Quint is supposed to be such a danger to him or indeed how these ghosts are supposed to be such a danger to them.
What are they doing with the ghosts? And what can you physically do with a ghost?
1:03:28 Wes: Right. I think Mrs. Gross asked that of her and she says, well, they can destroy them or be a bad influence on them. They can corrupt them. That word corrupt actually comes up earlier in the context of Miles, too. The idea that, yes, we like men who aren't always good. You know, if a man is going to be spirited, he should be somewhat naughty, but not to the point where he's going to corrupt. That's what she's talking about, Miles. At that point, early on, the idea seems to be that the ghosts are going to be the wrong sorts of teachers for the children and raise them up in a wicked way.
1:04:02 Erin: When Miles is first sent home from school and she's overwhelmed by his charms and his incredible beauty and all this other stuff, she says he must have been too fine and fair for the little horrid unclean school world.
1:04:15 Wes: Yep.
1:04:16 Erin: And then what she seems to be disturbed by in Quint's appearance to her is the liberty that he takes by not wearing a hat and to stare at her in a way that challenges her authority or to stare at her in such a way that makes her the intruder rather than him. Like she doesn't belong there. His familiarity in wearing no hat and his boldness in scrutinizing her ties together this class distinction and this sexual threat.
1:04:49 Wes: And obviously he's a double to some extent for the uncle. He's wearing the uncle's clothes, so it couldn't be more obvious than that.
1:04:58 Erin: Right.
1:04:58 Wes: And he's a representative to some extent, of the sexuality of the uncle. And of course, she's just responded positively to that. And now it's showing up as something persecutory.
1:05:10 Erin: The idea of her authority being challenged by someone who is beneath her, who's of a lower station than her, seems tied up with this idea of her being carried away sexually, like taken in by a brute force like sexuality, which is of a lower order than this kind of restrained gentility. So it's like the beast in the garden. So really, Quint is a sexual threat to her because he is of the opposite sex and she is of the opposite sex to Miles. So it seems like heterosexuality is the threat here. And yet she's concerned that Miles is with Quint and Flora is with Ms. Jessel. Right. I'm trying to say something about that, but I don't quite know what there is to say about it except the oddity of the whole thing and the obvious nature of the fact that she's the one who's going after Miles in this sexual way.
1:06:00 Wes: Yeah. That's at least suggested in the kinds of things that Miles ends up saying to her about, do you think this is appropriate for to be a fellow who's with a lady always. And does my uncle know about this? So what's interesting about that is when you get Miles's dialogue, when you get some of that dialogue out of him, it doesn't fit in a way. And there are two ways to interpret that. Not fitting. It doesn't fit because it's precocious. Right. But there's something weird about it and it's possibly sinister. So it doesn't fit with his angelicness because he gets quite cheeky with her.
Right. So there's a reason why it doesn't fit. And it can be interpreted in two ways. One is that, you know, he's been hanging out with ghosts and he's got some of the devil in him. The other is just that there's something to the story that we don't know because she's an unreliable narrator. So that when he's making these remarks about whether what she's doing is appropriate. We don't know the full extent of what he's talking about. Cause it seems odd. Miles knows he's been expelled from school. So he knows why he's not going back to school. He's pretending not to know why he's not going back to school, but really, of course, what he wants is to be sent back to some school.
Why doesn't he just say, hey, why am I not going back to school? Instead, he's making these odd remarks about the inappropriateness of their relationship. And there's a point in chapter 17 where she's listening at his door. She starts writing to the uncle. She ends up listening at his door. He says, why don't you come in? How did you know I was there? You're like a troop of cavalry. She notes that he's not asleep. She says, I lie awake and I think. And she asks of what? What in the world, my dear, but you and this queer business of yours, the way you bring me up and all the rest.
She asks him what he means by all the rest. And he says, you know, so what the hell is all of that about, right? This queer business of yours, the way you bring me up. Nominally, it's about just her not sending him back to school and educating him herself. But it's a really, really odd way, in my opinion, for him to talk about that when he could just say, please send me back to school. And she makes a note that he never said anything. He's never mentioned school before, you know, I thought you wanted to go on as you are. And he says, I actually want to get away.
Not from Bly. He likes Bly, but. And so she says, well, what? And he's like, oh, well, you know, what a boy wants. What? What is he talking about? We don't know. We don't learn directly. It's odd, it's weird. And it can cut either way. It can cut in the creepy, been hanging out with ghosts way, or it can cut in the creepy the governess isn't telling us the whole story about what's been going on way.
1:08:58 Erin: That's the other thing too, which we haven't even addressed, which is the odd way that she. Because there are certain instances, and I know that this novella was first serialized, and so there are some cliffhanger moments which maybe account for this, but there are some times where she sort of leaves off in the middle of an important moment, goes back afterwards, and then fills in information after the fact. But a couple of times she just leaves it and we don't really know for sure what happened. I don't know if you can really get away with that.
1:09:28 Wes: Yep, I think that happens with the sighting of Quint. For instance, it's in chapter three that at the very end, she sees Quint after fantasizing about meeting someone, possibly the uncle. Right. Wanting to meet some charming young man, seeing Quint. And we don't get the whole story until she discloses it to Gross later on. Or at the very least, we get the description of him at that point in Chapter five. And there are a few more instances of things like that where there's a lot of waiting in between. The primary. The primary event is described in a vague way, and then it's only retrospectively that the details are filled in.
1:10:06 Erin: So many instances in the novella make us put us in the position that she's in. There are several perspectives through which to view what Miles says in that odd moment. One of them is the fact that he's been observing how strangely she's behaving and finds what she's doing to be extremely disturbing. And that's what he's alluding to. There's also a suggestion toward the beginning of the story that I think on the first day of teaching Flora, she decides that she's been too knocked around by all of her varying impressions of the house, that she doesn't want to start her lessons with Flora.
So instead she creates this pretext of, well, let's just get to know each other and you can take me around the house and show me everything. So, one wonders, I suppose, just on the basis of that, perhaps other parts of the story that I can't recall right now, one wonders how much actual teaching she's doing of these children. And if that is meant to suggest that because she's being so paranoid and behaving so oddly, she's being derelict in her duty to them and perhaps smothering them and hugging them too much and being odd with them and not letting them just play and do their own thing.
There's also the suggestion she interprets it as they're trying to distract her so one of them will entertain her while the other one sort of slips out of. She doesn't know what's going on.
1:11:28 Wes: Yeah.
1:11:29 Erin: And she obviously thinks that this is very sinister. Or that one of them is communing with a ghost while the other one distracts her and that they're both in league with each other.
1:11:37 Wes: Or that she interprets like if they're playing extra hard and they're extra Animated. That's in order to distract her lots of very, very paranoid thoughts like that.
1:11:48 Erin: From this perspective of her falling apart mentally in view of the children. And that the children are aware of this. It could be that they would rather just go off and play. But they feel a kind of duty to watch her and to make sure that she's all right. You can interpret it in any number of ways. And I think we have the job of the governess. Where we're trying to look at all this stuff and see how it adds up. And it could really be in any of a thousand ways in which we can interpret any of this. But I don't know. I mean, that's just a potential reading for what Miles is saying.
If you want to read it as giving Miles's statements a lot of credence. There's an odd dynamic in which when you're a governess, you're neither, you know, below stairs nor above stairs. So in a strange way, the governess is lower than the people that she has authority over. And so it could be that Miles has these odd turns of phrase that he's picked up by this various succession of help that's been brought in to try and raise him. And he has this odd little flourish that he might have picked up from the way that an adult addresses other people.
Or that he might have picked up as an affectation from his uncle addressing people as my dear. And it serves to highlight, first of all, how oddly adult the children are. Which is a creepy thing. But also the class distinction between the two of them. Where it's in the back of your mind. Reinforcing for me this idea that Miles is the governess's superior. And that, I think is played up at various times in the novel.
1:13:24 Wes: Before we wrap up, let's discuss the other appearance of this phrase. Turn of the screw.
1:13:30 Erin: Yeah, where is it?
1:13:31 Wes: Which is in chapter 22. It's page 77 in my edition. But this is after things have gone down with Flora and Mrs. Gross not seeing Ms. Jessel at the lake. And Flora saying, I don't want to see the governess anymore. I'm becoming feverish. And this plan of taking Flora to see the uncle. After that, it's just going to be Miles and the governess, basically. I mean, I don't think Flora leaves immediately, but essentially they're on their own together for the rest of the novella. So she wants to have it out with Miles or to bring things to a head. The exorcism.
Supposed exorcism. That's Going to happen at the end, which is probably really a murder. But she's gonna save Miles by figuring out what happened at school. And also getting him to, I guess, confess to some. Whatever relationship he has with Quint or something like that. It's a little bit unclear, so. Chapter 22. To mark for the house the high state I cultivated. I decreed that my meals with the boys should be served, as we called it downstairs. So that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room Outside the window of which I had from Mrs.
Grose that first scared Sunday. My flash of something it would scarce have done to call light here at present, I felt afresh. For I had felt it again and again. How my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will. The will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with Was revoltingly against nature. I could only get on at all by taking nature into my confidence. And my account. By treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding. After all, for a fair front only.
Another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact. Than just this attempt to supply oneself all the nature. How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression of reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make a reference. Without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? And then her answer to that last question is going to be something to the effect that she's going to use Miles intelligence to save him. But before we get to that, the idea here is that the meaning of turn of the screw that we got at the beginning of the novella.
Has been transformed. Right at the beginning, it was either about suspense or creepiness. Or whatever one can do to ratchet up the interest of the story for an audience. And here she's confronted with monstrousness. The idea is that she can somehow treat what is truly unnatural and monstrous. As if it were just an ordinary difficulty. And that it doesn't require of her some sort of feat of heroism. That is qualitatively different. Than the way she would deal with some other difficulty. It just happens to be more unpleasant. It happens to be harder.
It's a degree of quantity, not quality, that she's dealing with. So that if she can just ratchet things up, Deliver another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. That'll be enough to deal with what's going on. And then the way she describes what that means is odd. She talks about a suppression of reference to what had occurred. The idea that it seems to be that she needs to avoid thinking or talking about whatever monstrous thing has occurred. Do you get this?
1:17:13 Erin: I do. I must have this image in my head because of Gone with the Wind from last week. But it's as if she's both like the horse that's being blinded to take herself through the uncomfortable thing and the person blinding the horse. Yeah, it doesn't really make any sense. Or maybe it does on a level that I can't comprehend.
1:17:32 Wes: These two different meanings for turn of the screw, they kind of pit the interests of the audience against the interests of the protagonist. Right. So for the audience, the turn of the screw means supplying the horror. For her, the turn of the screw means coping with the horror by means of ordinary human measures. So it's a really interesting conflict. And I think it goes to your earlier point about this being about storytelling because it suggests that there's something unnatural about storytelling or about being part of the story. So that in a way, what she is fighting, the horror that she's fighting is just the fact of being part of a narrative.
Which, again, speaks to my hypothesis about what ghost stories are about, which is the horror of being subject to formative influences, of being a creature. Right. Subject to the powers of creators. Whether we think of those creators as parental figures or culture or whatever, not just because they can abuse us or take advantage of us sexually, but because they can malform us, they can be a bad educational influence on us. Right. Which is Miles's accusation against the governess. They can confine us, confine our freedom. That's another thing that Miles wanted.
And they can give us lots of hangups. You know, we can internalize too harsh a conscience because of those influences, too harsh a superego. All of those things I take to be hauntings. So the turn of the screw, you can see that as the interest created by ratcheting up those forces, by amplifying those forces. Right. Those horrors. Or as what it takes to resist those things. So maybe maturational forces, you know, in the governess, it's warped because she thinks she has to do an exorcism, basically. But if she had really taken her own advice and seen this more about ordinary human virtue, then one can think of that in terms of more and more practical action or maturation or resistance to bad influences or something like that.
1:19:40 Erin: I don't know. The more I think about this, the more confused I'm getting. But what is she literally talking about? What point is this metaphor trying to Serve this idea that virtue itself is like a turning of the screw. It's screwing one's courage to the sticking place or stealing oneself.
1:19:57 Wes: So one of the associations is, I think, is with courage. Like, you know, as you say, screwing courage to the sticking place. And here she associates that with repression, I think, or in some way ignoring the horrors around her. Right. This idea of a suppression of reference. She's saying, I basically, I have to ignore the fact that this is revoltingly against nature if I'm going to cope with it. Because if I acknowledge that fact, I'm going to fall apart. So it's a variation on courage, right? To say that the turn of the screw is a repressive function.
Because that's what ordinary human virtue, right. Does. We don't act on our impulses. We inhibit ourselves. That's one flavor of this inhibiting action. The other flavor is actual repression, inhibiting thoughts or feelings, which we do as well. And in her mind, this is about, you know, I think your horse blinders thing is a good metaphor. This is the idea that courage in this case simply requires not thinking about it so that she can move forward and cope with the situation.
1:21:02 Erin: This also has to speak to a grandiosity on her part that is really, truly insane and also kind of malformed for someone who's supposed to be a parson's daughter. Right. Though curiously, she continually avoids going to church. If the idea is that, in her opinion, that virtue involves, like, shutting out the thing that will violate us. Right, that's what you're saying. It's like building a wall. Then she's ignoring the fact that, okay, you can build a wall around the thing that's going to violate you by way of keeping out the corrupting or contaminating influence.
But you're also still stuck with yourself. And what she should know by being a parson's daughter, at least according to Christian theology, is that ignores the part of yourself that you're left with that is evil that is fallen. It also doesn't allow for grace. It's the idea that only your exertion of will is what it takes to have virtue. So basically, how she's portraying herself in this moment is as like a Christ figure. So if she shuts everything out, she doesn't have that evil part of herself that she would be left with because she is the pure savior.
Nor does she require grace from an outside source. She can just exert her will and produce virtue out of that. And I think from here we get the moment of the exorcism opened up to us a little bit, where she is transformed in her own mind to being the Christ figure. Maybe we should just read the last paragraph of the story. This is when she has him in her arms. She's trying to get him to see the ghost, but he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again and seen. But the quiet day, with the stroke of the loss I was so proud of, he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss.
And the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him. It may be imagined, with what a passion. But at the end of a minute, I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped. So she says she's trying to catch him in his fall. So again, it's this idea that she is saving him from. I think we can read this as the capital F. Fall. She's saving him from sin. And I think ultimately that's.
1:23:19 Wes: Yeah, dispossessed.
1:23:21 Erin: Right, right. She's exorcised the demon from his soul.
1:23:25 Wes: Dispossessed of life.
1:23:27 Erin: Right, right.
1:23:28 Wes: It actually takes more than a minute to suffocate someone. So I think Henry James should have looked in that a little more. But
1:23:38 Erin: she held him for three minutes and 14 seconds, which is the exact time it takes to suffocate someone.
1:23:46 Wes: FYI, I held him, maybe imagine what a passion. Pretty strongly.
1:23:53 Erin: And her passion, you know, there's also the passion of the idea of suffering and. Yeah, so maybe this is where things really get crazy. Because she should be aware, like I say, as a parson's daughter, she should be more conscious of the actual Christian theology to which she supposedly subscribes and understand that this has now achieved new heights of grandiosity and it's all kind of downhill from there.
1:24:16 Wes: It's a great representation of the suffocating parent and the convergence of protectiveness with murderousness. Right. Because that's what she's. You wanted to fence in the children and be a wall between them and the world and protect their purity in that, in the end, it has a murderous effect. But we also, in that, see the convergence of the two meanings of the turn of the screw. Right. Because the repressive one meaning is the production of horrors. The other is the repressive force. And of course, the latter, even though it's supposed to be virtuous, leads to the emergence of the horrors, the repression and psychoanalytic parlance leads to sickness, leads to a return of the repressed.
And I think what you're saying is that there's a religious way to talk about that as well. Or there's a way to talk about that in the context of religion, which is that you don't leave behind your tell me if I'm right, but you don't simply leave your fallenness behind. Right. You don't become God or you don't become pure, but you're always, you know. How would you put it? What are you doing instead? You're seeking forgiveness.
1:25:29 Erin: Yeah. Grappling with the fact that in everyone is the potential for both good and evil. No one is wholly good or wholly bad.
1:25:37 Wes: Okay. Shall we? Sorry, I'm trying to think of something funny to say.
1:25:42 Erin: Screw the cap on this.
1:25:44 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's good.
1:25:48 Erin: I think we'll be screwed if we go on for any longer.
1:25:51 Wes: Drumroll Insert. Insert a drum roll there, please.
1:25:56 Erin: I think we're both tired. We need to dispossess ourselves.
1:26:01 Wes: We have stripped the screw.
1:26:03 Erin: That's good.
1:26:06 Wes: All right. Thank you.
1:26:08 Erin: Thank you.
1:26:09 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to say that if you're listening to this on the feed for the Partial Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find us@subtextpodcast.com subscribe@patreon.com Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersouptextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
Gentility and Injustice in “Gone with the Wind” (1939)
Aug 16, 2021
On the moors of medieval Scotland, three witches hail Gone with the Wind— adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film in American history— has undergone several critical reappraisals in the 82 years since its production and release. Certainly the film romanticizes the Antebellum South and the Confederacy while glossing over the evils of slavery and stereotyping many of its black characters. Yet it may also provide a sharp critique or even satirization of its white characters— the ambivalent, arrogant, and deluded plantation owners who fail to acknowledge that their so-called “fairy-tale kingdoms” are built on the backs of slaves. What can we make of Rhett Butler’s characterization of the Confederate “Cause” as the “Cause of Living in the Past”? And why does even the modern, adaptable Scarlett O’Hara remain in thrall to a childhood dream that, like the “gallantry” of the Old South, was nothing more than a fantasy? Wes & Erin analyze.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:09 Erin: Gone with the Wind, adjusted for inflation, the highest grossing film in American history has undergone several critical reappraisals in the 82 years since its production and release. Certainly the film romanticizes the antebellum south and the Confederacy while glossing over the evils of slavery and stereotyping many of its black characters. But it may also provide a sharp critique or even satirization of its white characters, the ambivalent, arrogant and deluded plantation owners who fail to acknowledge that their so called fairytale kingdoms are built on the backs of slaves.
What can we make of Rhett Butler's characterization of the Confederate cause as the cause of living in the past? And why does even the modern, adaptable Scarlett O'Hara remain enthralled to a childhood dream that, like the gallantry of the old south, was nothing more than a fantasy? These are the topics for today's discussion. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
1:05 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan and you
1:07 Erin: are listening to Subtext. Wes, I am so happy that we are finally doing Gone with the Wind. I feel like I have referenced this film in so many other episodes that we've done. Obviously, this movie has an important place in film history. There's a lot to love about it. There's a lot that's controversial, which I'm sure we'll get to over the course of our discussion. But just to give a little personal background, I think you and I have both talked about how we grew up watching wizard of Oz and we don't remember the first time we saw it. But I really strongly remember the first time I saw Gone with the Wind.
It was Thanksgiving. I was 6 or 7 years old. And as the family was gathering around the table, they were talking about how Gone with the Wind was going to be airing on TV that night. And maybe that was something that we could do later, was watch it. I had heard of this movie before and I thought it was a James Bond movie based on the title. And I was.
2:07 Wes: It is a good title for.
2:08 Erin: Right. Like it kind of. That kind of makes sense. So I was really confused as to why so many people in my family who professed varying levels of interest in James Bond movies were so adamant about the fact that we should all sit and watch this. Anyway, I was very confused, very curious. And it started, and I obviously soon realized it was not a James Bond movie. And I was so captivated by it. I thought it was so beautiful. And I was just in love with Vivien Leigh. And I thought it was such an incredible experience that I asked for it from Santa for Christmas. And I got the two VHS double set and watched that double set pretty much every Saturday afternoon for the next. I want to say three. Three and a half years until I had worn out the tape.
3:05 Wes: Oh, wow.
3:06 Erin: Yeah. And I had. In my. I just remembered this. This morning in my freshman dorm in school, I had a poster of Rhett and Scarlet embracing over my bed in my freshman dorm room.
3:18 Wes: Wow.
3:19 Erin: Yeah. So this and wizard of Oz were probably urtext of my. Of my childhood and adolescence.
3:26 Wes: Very different.
3:27 Erin: I know. Well, and that's. Yeah.
3:30 Wes: I'm not sure if their relationship is such a good model for a young.
3:35 Erin: I know.
3:35 Wes: For a young mind.
3:36 Erin: I'm. I'm. You know, it occurred to me later how. How dangerous it was for me to be so obsessed with this film. Believe me, I know. But I'm glad we're getting two different flavors here, because you just watched this film for the first time, which I find so sad. Just a couple weeks ago. Right?
3:53 Wes: Yeah. I also vividly remember the first time I saw this film because it was a couple of weeks ago, and my second time was just this morning. So last night and this morning I did my second viewing with note taking.
4:06 Erin: So this is really the two ends of the spectrum in terms of perspective.
4:10 Wes: It is. I was excited to see this just because we were coming out of A Streetcar Named Desire and I thought it would be interesting to see another Vivien Leigh movie. And because I hadn't seen it and it's. It's an important movie to see and I was finally going to get to see it, you know, I honestly didn't think I was going to do two viewings, especially because it's three and a half hours. I thought I would approach this more casually, but I ended up doing the second viewing and taking lots of notes. So I was really impressed, especially by the visual aspect of the film.
The cinematography, the use of these often silhouettes against a. So, for instance, Scarlet and her father standing against a red sky. The whole thing with the red sky and people, you know, whether it's a sunset or the burning of the Atlanta Depot and seeing figures cast against that. There's a lot of attention to the aesthetics of the film, which is appropriate to everything that's going on thematically. It's appropriate artistically to think about that. The visual lushness of the film, of course, is also related to the kinds of ideals involved in the Old South.
Sort of the notion of gentility and the emphasis on appearances. Scarlet's interest in looking beautiful and wearing beautiful dresses. And hats and living on a beautiful plantation, all of those things. The film leans into all of that stuff, which I think gives it the unfair reputation of actually glorifying its subject matter when there's lots of evidence against that.
5:53 Erin: Absolutely, I completely agree. I think that the film is so much smarter about its source material and about the way that it's portraying certain things than people tend to give it credit for. It's been a long time since I've read the novel, I should say, but I have read it a couple of times. And I think that the novel is also more critical of the south than people give it credit for. And there's a lot in this that is anachronistic, though it does a pretty good job of. In terms of costuming and reproducing everything very meticulously. It does a great job at that.
But a lot of people have argued, for instance, that Scarlet is. I think Ebert said this in his review and other people have noted this, that Scarlet is more of a Depression era heroine than a Civil War or Reconstruction era heroine. She gets away with a lot more than she would have ordinarily in that society. We could talk about whether or not that in itself is providing a sort of anachronistic model of an alternative way to be in this particular world. The visual beauty. A couple of times when I was watching this time around and I. I really do have almost the whole movie memorized, I'm sure, even shot for shot in my head.
And still I'm just struck by certain moments where you can pause it and it looks like a painting. The one frame of the carriage going on that sort of perilous route back to Tara after Rhett has abandoned Scarlet and Melanie and Prissy and the baby. That shot of them coming through the landscape that's been destroyed by battles and there are all the headstones and crosses of, I'm sure, very shallow graves. It's not red in the backdrop, but a sort of early morning uneasy yellow, misty yellow, with the carriage silhouetted in black against that backdrop.
Just reminds me of German Romantic painting. Like, I wonder if they were directly influenced by The Abbey in the Oakwood, which is painting by Caspar David Friedrich, which is just very, very similar and very, very evocative. So there are different shots in the film that seem to be referencing famous paintings or informed by them, at any rate. And it's just truly one of the most beautiful, I think, and very carefully visually constructed. I'm sure our listeners are familiar with a lot of backstory around the making of the film and how they actually had to paint in certain elements of certain shots.
So they would take the. The film and they would have something where maybe in the background they wanted a grand house, like, say, Twelve Oaks. And they had physically shot all the stuff that they needed in the foreground. But the background was like Culver City, you know, so they would put one sort of half of a frame on top of what they had shot by painting in a beautiful house and sort of splice the two together and did other various tricks to sort of hide the fact that they were filming on a backlot. Because it really does look in many instances like it's been filmed on location.
8:56 Wes: Right.
8:56 Erin: Which is pretty rare at that time, and obviously it wasn't, but they. They really did a great job of disguising that fact and making you feel as though you're in Georgia.
9:05 Wes: Right. The burning of the Atlanta Depot. Right. That's the burning of a lot of different movie sets.
9:10 Erin: Right.
9:10 Wes: On lot that needed to be gotten rid of.
9:13 Erin: Right? Yeah. The King Kong doors are that big structure that comes tumbling down in that one magnificent shot.
9:20 Wes: That is beautiful. And you watch the movie and you wonder how they did that at the time. You wonder how they accomplished some of these things. Because the special effects seemed quite good. And then. Yeah, it was interesting to read.
9:33 Erin: Culver City Fire Department had a lot of phone calls that night.
9:36 Wes: Right. I saw that you mentioned the Ebert review, which I did read. So this is called. It's just called Gone with the Wind, I guess. So here's the part I had actually remembered and highlighted this part that you mentioned about Scarlett as a creature of the 1930s. So here's the way he put it for the story it wanted to tell. It was the right film at the right time. Scarlett O' Hara is not a creature of the 1860s, but of the 1930s. A free spirited, willful, modern woman. The way was prepared for her by the flappers of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, by the bold movie actresses of the period, and by the economic reality of the Depression, which for the first time put lots of women to work outside their homes.
Scarlett's lusts and headstrong passions have little to do with myths of delicate Southern flowers and everything to do with the sex symbols of the movies that shaped her creator, Margaret Mitchell. Actresses like Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Louise Brooks and Mae West. The way Scarlet is represented as a protagonist is really important. And Rhett, as well as her antagonist slash lover, which is that it's in direct conflict with her environment, with the old South. I don't think it's any more anachronistic than the strong women of, say, a Pride and Prejudice novel.
10:59 Erin: I agree.
10:59 Wes: Strong women of a Jane Austen novel are anachronistic. But she is not simply the Southern belle in the way in which a lot of other women in the movie fulfill that role to one degree or another, because they are interested in propriety. Right. So she stands out. She's an exception. And this gets us back to the question of whether it's actually glorifying the old South. So to me, the movie feels from the beginning like a satire. You have Scarlett, fiddle-dee-dee, war, war, war. Right. To her, the war is silly. And quickly we get the same sort of attitude from Rhett Butler and a lot of contempt for the impracticality and dreaminess and foolishness of the south and the Southern cause. So glorification is really the last thing that comes to mind when jump into the movie.
12:03 Erin: I totally agree. And I think that what the movie is doing is just extremely subtle. So I think in the first half of the film, what I find really striking is how arrogant the south is and how infantile the south is about itself. I think it does that in several ways. In the first half of the film, I think where the critique breaks down is because the film doesn't follow through with that in the second half of the story. It doesn't maybe recognize the subsequent hypocrisy that the south shows by painting themselves as victims in the aftermath of the war.
So you have these people literally asking for it, getting themselves into. Into a war that they can't win. And then in the second half of the film, when you see the aftermath, there's no recognition. There's maybe a little hint of recognition from Ashley, but otherwise no real recognition that they are not the sort of blameless victims suffering from a defeat that has been completely unjust and which has taken away their lives from them. So there's no recognition in the second half of the film. I think to that extent I understand people's problems with the film.
I also understand people's problems with the way that the slaves are portrayed. And a few other things, though I think that the best character in the film and the most moral character in the film is Mammy. She really is kind of the moral center and probably the smartest person in the film. Of course, you can argue that that's canceled out by other characters, especially Prissy, though I think that also Prissy is a little bit more intelligent than I think the movie May be implying that she's a little bit subversive.
13:51 Wes: Right.
13:51 Erin: I think that people have a certain idea about this film and if they actually see it, they may be pleasantly surprised. I think especially compared to. And we can, sorry, get into the minutiae. But I think especially compared to other films of this era with black characters, this film is far more nuanced in its portrayals than other films of the period. And therefore, I sometimes feel as though, despite the subject matter and the fact that it directly is reckoning with our country's past and history of slavery and all of these things, I think at the same time, compared to other films of the time period, it's sort of an odd target for that kind of criticism because unfortunately, I've seen other films that are just pure stereotypes of black characters.
Really disgusting stuff that I don't care to watch. So I think that this film has the, you know, the name recognition and the fact that it directly deals with the history. But I think that people would be surprised, and maybe not surprised in other ways if they gave the film a watching and saw the critiques of the white characters embedded in so much of the film.
15:02 Wes: Yeah, you know what we get with the text as we fade into the movie? There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South. Here in this patrician world, the age of chivalry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of knights and their ladies fair, of master and slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, A civilization gone with the wind. That account that we begin with seems to buy into the Old south as a romantic ideal. And then we immediately get what I have called the satirical element, which is we get the twin brothers who have been expelled from college and Scarlet's contempt for the war.
And we get the sense that the lifestyle that. And there are lots of things that happen in the movie to indicate this, but the lifestyle that they've built for themselves, which, of course is predicated on slave labor and also their own kind of indolence and the fact that they spend all their time is basically leisure time. So they're horseback riding, or maybe they're getting an education of some kind. But if you drop out of school, it's not a big deal. It's kind of impractical. The two most prominent representatives of the Old south are Melanie and Ashley.
And those are ambivalent characterizations, I think. So there's a lot to like, especially about Melanie. But Ashley himself is supposed to come across as weak and entranced with a. With this past lifestyle that's now. That's now gone and he's been stringing along. You really don't. You really wonder what's happened between him and Scarlet. You know, he says she cut her teeth on his heart, something like that. Right. But obviously he's kind of strung her along. So his softness and gentility are not without their dark side. And nor is Melanie's desire to see nothing but good in people and ironically to admire Scarlet for being the very opposite, which in her mind is passionate and stubborn, but really ultimately amoral.
So anyway, those are a few of the ways in which we get that title card that we begin with very obviously can't be taken at face value, which is not to say there isn't anything glorifying in it. In a way there's an aesthetic glorification, but that's undercut at every point as far as the glorification of the substance of it. So some of Rhett's comments sort of recapitulate that title card, but they're much harsher. Take a good look. You're going to watch the Old south disappear overnight. Something like that. And almost seeming to relish that.
17:55 Erin: Yeah, I agree and I completely agree with everything you're saying, particularly Melanie's delusions about Scarlet I find really interesting. And we can talk more about the nature of that later and whether or not it's a. To what extent it's a willful delusion and how that might tie into the Old South. I think that Ashley is. I've always, because of the charms of Scarlet, defended her wholeheartedly. And I do believe that she is the hero of this film, no matter how bad she is. Somehow the worse she is, the better I like her. You know, the older I've gotten, the more I see Ashley as the villain.
I do agree that he is a kind of a representative of the Old South. So we have this confrontation early on in the film between Rhett Butler and Charles Hamilton takes place as the men are sipping their brandy in the study or the lounge or whatever it is while Ms. Scarlet with a revolver is in the hall. No, the ladies have gone. The ladies have gone for their mid afternoon nap. And this is another indication that things in the Old south are not, not quite so great for the people involved and that this is a very infantilizing and oppressive culture.
And I think it's symbolically significant that Scarlet stays awake during the time that the rest of the women are sleeping. But anyway, the men are having this argument about the war. And Ashley is sort of being neutral about things and trying to quiet Charles Hamilton, this very young, very immature guy who is trying to assert the power and glory of the south and what it means to be a gentleman in the face of Rhett Butler by launching ad hominem attacks against him when Rhett is trying to bring up the very real disadvantages that the south would have to reckon with in a potential war
19:40 Wes: with the north and trying to start a duel with him. Yep, she would certainly lose. But.
19:45 Erin: Right, Right. And as Ashley says. And Rhett walks away rather than engage with Charles. Because Charles is so young and so ridiculous in this exchange that Rhett doesn't even take him seriously. But this is where we get Rhett's opinion about the war for the first time. And I think it's important to note that this is Clark Gable talking. So if you want to know what the movie thinks that the audience should think about the south, it's whatever Clark Gable says. And Rhett is generous to this kid and really makes him look like a loser. And meanwhile, Ashley is sort of this shadowy figure in the background, sort of advising Charles to not be mean to Rhett and to calm himself down.
But we see that Ashley is very entrenched in this culture. He understands all of Rhett's points but doesn't act on them or feel as though this is any real problem that we recognize later. We know that he's taken in all of these criticisms of the south and understands them quite well. But he's extremely comfortable at Twelve Oaks. I think at one point he says that had the war never happened, he would have been happily buried at Twelve Oaks. I think he uses the term bury. And one wonders if he means buried in the life of Twelve Oaks and sort of buried alive or if he means that he would have lived to be buried in the plantation plot.
But I think it means both things. So we have all these things converging by the time of this confrontation scene. We have the fact that the women have been sent up to take a nap. We have Gerald O'Hara at Tara being completely oblivious to everything that's going on on the plantation. He even has to hire Jonas Wilkerson, a white field overseer, to actually run the plantation for him. So he does. He's not even. In addition to being sustained by slave labor, he isn't even actively engaged in directing that labor or understanding what's going on in the fields, in the house.
His wife is kind of a prototype for Scarlet. She is the one who seems to be taking care of things, though she's taking care of other people outside the house and doesn't understand what her own daughters are doing. We have this little upstart who tries to engage Rhett in a duel over these pie in the sky ideals. And we have Ashley who just sort of shrugs his shoulders and tells Charles to cool it. So none of these men are particularly strong, nor are they particularly capable at what they do. And many of them are kind of idiotic. It's not a flattering portrait.
22:28 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think there is some ambivalence in the representation. Maybe I feel the need to defend the South.
22:36 Erin: Oh, that's right. Because you are from.
22:37 Wes: From your Connecticut aggression. Because I am from Savannah, Georgia, which
22:41 Erin: I know, I'm a Yankee.
22:43 Wes: I clapped when she mentioned Savannah in the film, even though she didn't want to go. There's nothing to do down there.
22:49 Erin: Seems like it would be more fun than Atlanta, but.
22:52 Wes: But, yeah. So, you know, I read it as ambivalence towards the fantasy element of that lifestyle and genteel values, genteel virtues. But the way in which those things are predicated on. Not just on certain forms of oppression, but on, you know, what people today would call privilege as a kind of obliviousness, you know, which is what you were getting at. The failure to see what's around them, the fail to look things in the eyes. I think that's the way this is what Rhett says at one point to Scarlet. Both of us are selfish and shrewd, able to look things in the eyes and call them by the right names.
So this is meant to be the contrast between them and the environment they find themselves in which they stick out. They both stick out like sore thumbs and so are made for each other in that sense, despite the fact that Scarlet. What's odd is, you know, you might call her a Southern belle, but she's not in the same sense of the other women. She's just using that. And she wants Ashley, but in a way, she can admire his gentility, but in a way, as a possession. Right. It's not that she shares those values like Melanie. She wants what she wants, and she's, as Rhett puts it, selfish and shrewd about it.
So those two stick out like sore thumbs and in and of themselves amount to a critique of everything that's. Of the impracticality and the dreaminess of everything that's going on around them. They're obviously very imperfect themselves. And I can't say I have a huge amount of Fondness for either of them, really. Yeah, I think Rhett, I think he's the. There are some very likable aspects to him. I wonder if Han Solo is sort of modeled on him. I think so because he's a blockade runner and rebel and he has that same, hey, I'm just self interested.
But in the end, he ends up fighting for the south out of some sense of shame and some sense of loyalty. So he's more complicated than just someone who's selfish and nihilistic. And you have to believe that there's an ethical component to how he feels about the south, which was not, by the way, this is not simply fictional. I mean, even Robert E. Lee, right, had contempt for slavery and in a way, for the Southern cause, but felt compelled, right, to fight for the South. And it's very, you know, it's documented in, I think, his letters. But so these are two different components to life.
The sort of the gentility approach and the hard nosed practicality approach. They both have their virtues, and then they both, of course, have a lot of vices when taken to their extremes. And the movie's characters aren't simplistic. So even Scarlet is not a just simplistic representation of selfishness, although I think she is very unlikable and selfish. But she, you know, at the point where she's forced to take care of Melanie because she's made a promise to Ashley, there's a transformation there, but it's not an unrealistic and it's not permanent.
So there's a kind of realism to her representation. She's not without a conscience in the end. She is capable of taking care of other people when she has to. And she is enamored of people, at least Ashley at first. And I think, you know, she comes to love Melanie. She's enamored of people who put her in the position of having to care for others. You know, so in the case of, you know, Ashley says, please take care of Melanie, and she feels impelled to do that, is not gonna flee Atlanta, but is gonna stay and help Melanie give birth. And then at the end of the movie, Melanie makes her.
Has her agree to a similar sort of promise to take care of Ashley, after which her relationship to Ashley and her love, you know, her obsession, romantic obsession with him, suddenly disappears. So what I'm trying to say is that there's a complexity to the characters that reflects an ambivalent critique of any given different position taken to an extreme. And it recognizes the virtues of those positions as well. So it's not glorification, it's not demonization.
27:05 Erin: I agree with you to a certain extent. First of all, I think I seriously overestimated the hold that I thought Scarlet's charms would have over you.
27:16 Wes: I mean, she's delightful. Just. You could watch the film with the sound turned off and just watching Vivien Leigh's. The expressions flit across her face. The raised eyebrow of annoyance and the depth of her passion and desire. That's really what Scarlet is about and that's a winning feature. But I do think she's not a nice person. The guy.
27:39 Erin: Yeah, sure. I don't think I've ever seen a more beautiful woman captured on film. Like specifically in this film. You know, she's just. I don't know. She's so unbelievably beautiful. Even when she's supposed to be ragged looking and covered in dirt, it somehow highlights it even more. It's truly uncanny.
27:56 Wes: So you, you would. You don't think Grace Kelly is more. I'm just kidding. Sorry.
28:00 Erin: No, no. It's funny.
28:03 Wes: I know how much you hate her.
28:04 Erin: That's what my mom said to me the other day. She's like, I still think that Grace Kelly is more beautiful. And I was, I, you know, man. Cut to a shot of the outside of my house with a. My screams ringing through the woods. But sorry to get to the meat of what you're saying. Okay, so I agree with you to a certain extent on another level. I think that there is a clear hierarchy of value in terms of living in reality versus living in this fantasy gentility. I do think that one is superior to the other, at least according to the parameters of this film.
I think that for Old south one can substitute a kind of a childhood fantasy and that certain characters preoccupations with this fantasy. It's not morally equivalent to the reality, the hard reality that Rhett represents. Though he has, I think, other flaws. And therefore I think you're right to say that these two portraits. Neither is particularly flattering. I think if Rhett has a virtue, it's the fact that he is the grown up.
29:07 Wes: Yeah.
29:08 Erin: Ashley says at one point that he would have freed the slaves once he took control of Twelve Oaks. And he was. This was something that he wanted to do and that he talked to his father about. Yada yada.
29:20 Wes: Yeah. He's objecting to Scarlet using prison labor. And she's. What about the slaves? And he said, well, we didn't treat them poorly like the prison labor's being treated. And also I was going to free them.
29:31 Erin: Yeah, right. It's important to remember, I think, that at the beginning of the film, Scarlett is supposed to be 16. Ashley is a great deal older. So I think that's where that dynamic comes in, where he must have known her as a baby or a toddler or something, which is a little creepy if you think about it too hard. Leslie Howard was aged down or tried. They tried to age him down and make him look a little bit younger so that he had that slight matinee idol kind of freshness at the beginning and then became more care worn as the movie went on.
30:00 Wes: Yeah, they couldn't get rid of the Englishness though.
30:03 Erin: No, but it's perfect. It's perfect.
30:05 Wes: You just wonder, why is this English guy in a Southerner?
30:09 Erin: This is why I think so many English people have played Southerners so well, because they do say that linguistically or whatever the term is in terms of accents, it's very easy for an English person to do a Southern accent. Easier than to do whatever you would call a Northern accent, a non accent, standard American, whatever. But Ashley's saying that about. About the fact that he would have freed the slaves, whatever. I mean, he's a grown man and he acts as though like, this is what I would have done when I grew up. Of course, based on what we know about Ashley's character, we could safely assume that that would never happen because it would require him actually making a decision and following through on it.
There seems to be a clear connection between the realm of childhood fantasy and this idea of the Old south or this desire to stay in one's comfort zone, one's bubble, one's delusions about the safety and security of childhood. Because I'm assuming that for many people who have only pure, you know, fantastic memories of childhood, it's in hindsight, and they are forgetting many of the realities and the harsher truths about how they were feeling at the time and how difficult it was to be a kid. And so it's. It seems as though everyone who glorifies the Old south in this film is glorifying a way of being that absolves them of responsibility.
And that requires, as you, as you said at the beginning, no real effort on their part. It's a society built on the backs of other people and it allows them to stay in this extremely comfortable and unchallenging way of life in which they can sort of just coast until they die. So I think, think that Rhett's sense of reality is a virtue. Compared to that, though the characters have Other strengths and weaknesses and other flaws. And ultimately, I think that's sort of what the movie is. Arguing that Rhett is correct and that Scarlet, as modern as she is and as realistic and strong as she is, what this childhood fantasy represents for her is Ashley, who, as you pointed out and I agree, is kind of a symbol of the Old South.
Her obsession with him, I think, goes back to something elemental in her upbringing and her sense of security at Tara. All of this is wrapped up in this obsession with Ashley. And so long as she is preoccupied with him, she's not really a grown up in the way that Rhett keeps on demanding that she be. And she can remain childish to a certain extent so long as she loves. I think ultimately the draw of this fantasy becomes something that Rhett actually succumbs to. Ultimately, he retreats because he wants to. He can't take Scarlet anymore and he wants to go to a place where there's still some semblance of grace and charm.
He says. So he's lived in reality for too long and he can't take the heaviness of Scarlet's reality anymore. So ultimately he kind of succumbs, maybe not to the Old south, but to some sort of idea of fantasy retreat, not having to deal with the harshness of the world. But I think that different characters are at different degrees of preoccupation with this idea of whatever fantasy the Old south represents.
33:27 Wes: So I don't have as strictly a negative view of those ideals. So, for instance, the south, in a way is representative of aristocratic virtues which are necessarily sort of predicated on oppression. So the aristocratic virtues are all, in a way, about the celebration of power and leisure that comes from it and the celebration of class distinction and the kinds of mannerisms and dress that illustrate class distinction. It's a way of life built on that kind of evil. But that doesn't mean that that way of life is entirely without its virtues. It's a celebration of excellence.
Right? It's the kind of thing that Aristotle might have pointed to in some ways as a model for good living and its purity. Now, in reality, even if you're looking at English landed gentry, the reality is always much different than the ideal. And it's even more degraded in the south because in a way, it's like new money versus old people. But it's country people playing at being landed gentry. We discussed some of this in the Streetcar Named Desire episode. They're playing at being landed gentry and they're doing that by use of slavery. So in a way.
It's a kind of pantomime. It's not even real. You know, what you've described is clear the extent to which it's a kind of fantasy. And I think, again, that title card makes it clear. They're the land of cavaliers and cotton fields of the old South. That sort of romanticization is being made fun of. And that sort of romanticization is built into the self concept, right, of the people involved in it, including Ashley. You know, including even Melanie to some point. Although she is much more motivated on a personal level by love and by the desire to take care of people.
I don't think she's. She's not into the lifestyle per se, let's put it that way. Think of this as a lifestyle. Ashley is into the lifestyle. Scarlet is not so much into the lifestyle as she is into making use of it to get what she wants. And there are certain aspects of it which suit what she wants. So, for instance, dressing up or acting like she's genteel, saying, you know, you say no gentleman or whatever, she's playing the part there. And it's not because she buys into the life lifestyle or is into it. It just. It suits her quest to get what she wants.
But someone like Ashley, right, he's bought into it. And someone like Rhett is completely contemptuous of it. I think the whole scene that really gets things moving is that scene, right, with the Ashley and Scarlet, you know, Scarlet, after having escaped her nap and we've overheard some overhoard, overheard some of the war talk with the men. She, you know, she pulls Ashley aside in that room and she is being very passionate and he's being romantic, but fatalistic. You know, you've gathered every other man's heart today. You always had mine. You cut your teeth on it.
And she accuses him of leading her on and slaps him, and that's his cue to leave. And then she throws the vase and breaks it. And then there's that wonderful moment. Well, throws the vase and then has that annoyed, raised, single eyebrow look that I think is so great. Then there's that great moment when we hear Rhett whistle, right? And he leans up from the couch. So we are immediately in the position of Rhett as spectators at that point. So if there's any confusion about the satirical nature of the film, it's the fact that this very romantic soap opera y moment has unfolded in front of someone who is so contemptuous of its falsity and says, has the war started?
Which is a great line because of the Throwing of the vase and associates the war with love and relationships through the rest of the film. And in a way, love is war for Scarlet. And that's the type of war that she takes seriously, not the kind of war that all the men take seriously. And she says, you should have made your presence known. And as Rhett puts it, in the middle of that beautiful love scene. So he's providing ironic containment there to a scene that by itself, if it took itself completely seriously, would be absurd. The movie couldn't survive without being ridiculous by simply stringing those sorts of scenes together.
And there's already an absurdity, right, in the fact that Scarlet and Ashley are at such cross purposes in that scene where he is. They're not speaking the same language. He's speaking the language of gallantry, which in that context is obtuse because he's leading her on. And he seems determined, fatalistically determined, to reject Scarlet in a way where he's not giving her the impression that, okay, you're not a nice person and I need a nice person. He's saying to her, I love you. But what. It's hard to know exactly what he's saying. So there's a fun or satirical asymmetry between them.
And then Rhett sort of completes that and ultimately will say, ashley is not good enough for a girl with your passion for living. So we were saying before about the idea of being kind of practical and clear eyed, but it also pits this sort of passion for living against whatever sort of living is involved in living out this genteel fantasy in which a lot of gentility means the curtailment of one's passions.
39:11 Erin: So, yeah, just to push back once more against your reading of Ashley a little bit, though, I, you know, I do agree with you, but sort of by a matter of degrees, I do think that in this scene, what you call gallantry is actually a false gallantry. So if he was really gallant, if he was really a quote unquote man or an adult, he would not be leading her on like this. And he says things like, you know, why do you make me say things that hurt you?
39:36 Wes: Yeah, yeah, I was basically. I was trying. I was trying to say that. Yeah, right, he's speaking that language, but it's. Yeah, it's. It's hurt.
39:44 Erin: There's a sense in which he's dragged along by whatever current he's in. You know, he even thinks that he might go to New York and make his living up there in the hopes of finally standing on his own two feet and not relying on Scarlet. But this idea that this 16 year old girl is forcing him to say things that he doesn't want to say, I mean, he's just. This is incredibly cruel in a way. I mean, he's never honest with her and just says things outright or even in a way that she's capable of understanding without nuance. And her pursuit of him really does kind of flip the traditional gender roles.
I mean, he is leading her on and he is playing the role of a coquette to a certain extent, or at least of a reticent female while she pursues him sort of voraciously throughout the film. I do think that there is a theme, even when it comes to Mr. and Mrs. O'Hara, of sort of emasculated men or men who. And I know that this connects to gentility and what you've been talking about rather well with aristocratic values, but there's something about the slave doing the work for you and the lack of engagement with the reality of what goes on, which is, first of all, I think, allowing these characters to romanticize this in their own minds.
And second of all, which is taking away, I don't want to say feminizing because it's too. That's too gendered. But divorcing them to the degree that they can be as shy and retiring and disengaged as the traditional Southern belle would be, forcing the women often to fill the void of the person in charge or the person who sort of directs, as women often do in courting situations where a woman is, you know, in relationships with men is often far more in control than one might think. Or traditionally, you know, there are all these stereotypes about women have to sort of manipulate men into proposing to them.
You know, women have always held a tremendous amount of power in that relationship, but here the power is very naked. And the shy and retiring elements of Ashley are, I think, very sinister.
41:58 Wes: Yeah, I agree, it is a sinister element. I mean, I actually think it's kind of. There's a kind of comedy skit element to that scene. That's what I was trying to get at by saying that they're speaking different languages. It's as if you took Ashley and it could be a Saturday Night Live skit where he's time traveled and he's trying to function in the contemporary scene that we're familiar with. He's trying to speak the language of gentility to someone who's trying to speak a different language. And it's funny in a way because he's caught up in his own little dream.
World and doesn't see what's going on around him. So, yeah, technically, Scarlet is the one who's kind of out of place there. But Scarlet is closer to us in a sense. Right, because she's not speaking that fantasy language entirely. She's more practical and more focused on reality. So we identify with that. And it's Ashley that feels out of place. And again, Rhett sort of brings that home.
42:57 Erin: Well, and this, I think, brings us to Melanie, who I really like also, when Scarlet leaves the library and is hiding under the stairs as the women come down after their nap. And we realize maybe for the first time that we've gotten hints of this when Melanie was introduced to Scarlet, that Melanie is reading Scarlet in a very different way from the other women of Scarlet's acquaintance, none of whom like her, including her own sisters.
43:22 Wes: She's just high spirited and vivacious.
43:24 Erin: Right, right. Well, and we get a sense too that Melanie's reading of her, though extremely generous at times, is often accurate and maybe more accurate than we realize and certainly more accurate than Scarlet realizes. So, for instance, India Wilkes, Ashley's sister, who is really not a sympathetic character. So we're given a lot of these rivals of Scarlet and they are so unsympathetic that it really makes us. At least for me, makes me.
43:51 Wes: Well, why is she not sympathetic?
43:53 Erin: She's harsh. She has no personal charm. I think we're not supposed to find her sympathetic. She advises or tries to advise Melanie not to trust Rhett Butler when he's trying to save the men from the situation that they've gotten themselves into. And I think that kind of shows what we're supposed to think of her. How dare she not trust Clark Gable? She's a little viperish. And we do get the sense that she's very jealous of Scarlet, I think, and rightfully so. She's speaking badly about Scarlet and certainly Scarlet deserves it, but she's saying things that are just demonstrably untrue. She accuses Scarlet of. Of making a fool out of herself by running after all the men at the barbecue. That's just not true. The men. Melanie says she's. She's so attractive, the men just naturally flock to her. And that is true.
44:38 Wes: Well, she is and she isn't. You know, she's not really throwing herself at, but she's using men. She's. She's manipulating men and getting their attention and.
44:46 Erin: Right. I think that Melanie is more right than India is. And I guess what I'm interested in is whether or not Melanie's Overly generous readings of everything that Scarlet does. If those readings are actually always accurate
45:00 Wes: on a certain level, I think they're deluded and they're accurate at the same time, which is what makes them so interesting.
45:05 Erin: Yeah, right, right.
45:07 Wes: She seems completely naive to Scarlet's. The flaws of Scarlet's character. And yet what she's really. She's focused on things that are real. And that's just what Melanie focuses on, the good things in people and the ways in which they're good. And when she ignores the rest of it, you get the sense that that is an ethical choice for her, that she's decided to do that and she understands that she's doing that at some level.
45:33 Erin: No, I agree. And I think you can even argue. I mean, there's a reading of this where Melanie is just trolling Scarlet throughout the entire movie, you know, that she knows all along and is just sort of getting the better of Scarlet.
45:45 Wes: Well, she's trolling her into being a better person.
45:47 Erin: Right, right. Or how much Melanie understands about Ashley and Scarlett's relationship is, of course, open to questioning. And when Scarlett marries Charles, for instance, and Melanie comes over to her and says, you know, we thought of you during our wedding the day before, or whatever, you kind of wonder, like, what is. She's being kind on the one hand, but she has to know. And it's almost like she's flaunting the fact of her marriage to Ashley the day before. Right. To Scarlet, in order to get her goad in a way. I don't know. There are certain things that she does that moment and a couple of other moments in the film where I question her motivations, and I think that's kind of what makes her so interesting in a way.
I mean, I don't think that Melanie is being portrayed as a troll to any degree, but I do think that Olivia de Havilland is really smart about the way that she's playing this character as being way more complex. And you suggested that Olivia de Havilland's performance is the strongest, you think?
46:42 Wes: Yeah, I do think her performance is the best. de Havilland's role is a harder thing to pull off. It's easier to be mischievous and irate and dissatisfied than it is to pull off that kind of selfless, loving kind of person, to give that feeling. Right. It's not going to come out in the dialogue necessarily. It does a little bit, but it's a vibe, you know? And I don't think it's just the actress's character. Apparently, she wasn't really like that.
47:11 Erin: So no, no. I think few people are, but yeah, yeah, yeah.
47:16 Wes: One of the things I'm curious about in the film is what it is that Scarlett actually wants. We know she's passionate, but we don't get a clear idea of why she's passionate about Ashley in particular, for instance. And I don't think it's. It's not about status. It's not about wanting what she can have. That doesn't seem to have a lot of pull with her, actually, with Rhett. The way I put it before is that her relationship to her genteel environment, like Rhett, they are sort of outside it in a sense, but in the figure of Ashley, in a way. It's almost like she wants to possess it. Or maybe it's more inexplicable than that. It's just she wants what she wants and she got the idea that she wanted Ashley and therefore that's it, that's what she wants and nothing else is gonna do.
48:07 Erin: I think you're right. I think there's a strange and very deeply buried strain of self criticism in Scarlet. I think Ashley represents an ideal for her also expressed in her mother. And this is something that I also remember in the book being much more fleshed out, which is the mother was always very calm and very genteel. And you get this in the very brief glimpses that you get of Barbara O'Neil.
48:34 Wes: Very unlucky, very much so.
48:36 Erin: Yet at the same time serving, as I think I suggested before, as a kind of a prototype for the girl boss, taking care of things and being very self sufficient and capable, unlike many of the other women of the era, I guess. I think that that desire to be good sets up this conflict with Melanie because this is why Scarlet hates Melanie so much and of course also loves her in a weird way. I think it's what makes her want to have Ashley because that would give her the satisfaction or sort of reassure her maybe of some sort of goodness in herself and some idea that she is actually a proper, even, you know, moral, virtuous, genteel lady.
But I think that her self hatred, if you will, comes out in the fact that she knows that she can't have Ashley and she only wants what she can't have. And it's a kind of a built in punishment for herself. And I of course, know a lot of background information both about the film and about all the. All the real life actors. And one really interesting element that I remember reading about a while ago when Vivien Leigh's letters to Laurence Olivier were made, they were bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum. I think she, of course, was having an affair with Olivier during the filming of Gone with the Wind.
And he was, he had just finished filming Wuthering Heights. I think there was some overlap, but the two were kept apart in Hollywood because they didn't want any scandal attached to Vivien Leigh by living with this guy while he was married to someone else, she was married to someone else. So they had to communicate through letters and he had to give her support and advice through these letters. And in one of them, I remember he wrote something to the effect of, you know, you do realize that the only thing that makes possible Scarlet's admission of love for Rhett at the end of the film is because she knows that she's lost him.
So on some level she knows that she's pushed him too far. And that is what allows her to finally see Ashley's flaws and open up to Rhett once she's become an object of rejection for Rhett. So there must be something there. I mean, there must be. She continually pushes it down and buries this self critical reflex in her, right, pushing it off until tomorrow, not dealing with it. And that makes her a survivor, of course, and it makes her capable of overcoming obstacles better than anyone else because she doesn't get distracted by morality, self criticism, questioning her own motives, questioning anything that she's doing to succeed.
But it does come out, I think, ultimately in a kind of an essential dissatisfaction with whatever her state is. Maybe assuming that she's not lovable. I don't know, I don't want to go too far here, but I don't know what you think about that.
51:32 Wes: So you're suggesting that her obsession with Ashley has something to do with, on the one hand, wanting what she can have in part because she is masochistic,
51:44 Erin: she doesn't feel as though she's worthy of it.
51:46 Wes: Yeah, I don't know, I didn't, I was trying to suggest that it wasn't simply that she couldn't have him. Although I think that is the more plausible in a way, interpretation that she wants what she can't have, it's much more plausible. But I was, I was entertaining the idea that it was more inexplicable than that and therefore I can't explain it.
52:07 Erin: No, I know what you mean. I, yeah, I agree with you. I think it is more mysterious than I'm making out and I think any effort to play psychiatrist, well, just inexplicable
52:17 Wes: in the sense that, you know, it has Something to do with her relationship to gentility. And therefore, it's a. Her obsession with Ashley is in some way. Right. A comment on fascination with that fantasy. Although, as I've said, she's not within it. So her love of Ashley is not. It's not that she shares those values in a way, but it's more of a fascination with it from the outside. And again, I think the idea that she wants what she can't have is much more plausible in a way. And it's consistent with her character and her sense of pride and all of that. So what I'm saying is it's kind of. I'm trying to give it some thematic heft, which may be a bridge too far.
52:59 Erin: Well, I think that works really well thematically. And I think that this childishness and this. This ambivalence in her is part of this larger structure that we've been talking about. I think to a certain extent, this self criticism is true for Rhett also. Why does Rhett like Scarlet? One can argue that he likes her because he can't have her and doesn't like her when she does finally come around on him.
53:24 Wes: Well, his theory is that they're kindred spirits.
53:26 Erin: Right, Right, right. I think there's a lot of things that they like about each other and even that Scarlet likes about him that she doesn't recognize. But I think that ultimately this butting of heads between them is because they're. I think his attraction to her is predicated on her unavailability. Maybe he keeps wanting her to fully engage with him and to give up Ashley. I think at the same time, in the same way that he is intrigued by gentility and has these sort of warring. Warring elements within himself of this sympathy for the south, but a, you know, a recognition of the reality of the situation.
And we know that this is borne out by his background. He's from a very genteel Charleston family. He is impressed by Melanie, though he says that genteel women don't hold much charm for him or something like that. Ultimately, he does, as I said earlier, desire to retreat from Scarlet's harsh realities and go to find some place of grace and charm. So I think this push pull is very evident in Rhett as well. Even the childishness of Scarlet in her intractability and her unwillingness to let go of Ashley is something that Rhett likes for some reason.
And I think that to a certain degree, Rhett wants to baby Scarlet and likes what is childish in her. Not in a creepy way or in a way that's wrong. Not in the childish way that women are typically treated in this society. Having to take naps and stuff like that. But I think he wants to do things for her and provide things for her. And we see this with Bonnie, where he can be a provider and a source of comfort for her. But that nurturing, that childishness comes with all of the bad things about Scarlet, which is her childish preoccupation with someone who is not Rhett.
So I don't know if she had gotten this childish fantasy of Ashley out of her head. Which is something that I think Rhett suggests to her in so many words early on when he comes with a bonnet or at some other point early on in the film. I don't know if completely eliminating that and becoming the woman that Rhett wants her to be would have made her less attractive in his eyes. And if somehow I'm trying to connect his sympathy for the south with her sympathy for Ashley. And all of it being a kind of engagement in fantasy in a way that is. That makes life and reality very difficult for people.
Even the people who we associate most closely with living in the quote, unquote, real world as opposed to the Old south world. I think that the childishness and the fatalism that you talk about in Ashley associated with the Old south ultimately like the undoing of all the major characters. And there's even a kind of sterility, ultimately, in what happens at the end. Right. The children and life renewing itself. As Melanie says, it ultimately kills her, though Scarlet has more children in the book. She has a child with each of her three husbands.
Those are cut out. And it's just Bonnie, which I think works really well in the film. Bonnie, of course, dies doing Mr. O'Hara's favorite activity. And again, a kind of symbol of the aristocratic lifestyle that you talked about. The marriage is broken between Melanie and Ashley because of her death. And the marriage of Rhett and Scarlett is broken up. And basically everybody just ends up being very, very unhappy. And there doesn't seem to be a way forward. And I wonder if that's because of each of those four main characters. Preoccupation with fantasy and with an older way of life that can't be carried into the future.
Even Scarlet, who is very modern in the way that she's made her money and the way that she lives, seems to be hobbled by that in the end. I don't know if you'd agree with that.
57:19 Wes: Yeah. So I think we see some of that preoccupation in Scarlet for the old ways that you were talking about with the significance of Tara to her. You know, this is obviously a theme that's repeated in the movie in the explicit content of it, but also visually, so early on, when we're being introduced basically to Tara and to the parents and to that little schemer Scarlet, we see her father riding and jumping and of course, foreshadowing how he's gonna die and how Bonnie's gonna die. But we also get that great scene where father and daughter are silhouetted against the sky.
And he says, land is the only thing worth working for, fighting for, dying for, the only thing that lasts. Then she accuses him of talking like an Irishman, very racist of her. That silhouetting against this guy is repeated at the end of the movie when she gives the famous speech, as God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again if I have to lie, cheat, kill, steal. Sorry, lie, steal, cheat or kill. And then I think it happens again at the very end of the movie, right? When she realizes that Tara, in a way, is the way out and she's hearing the voices of Ashley and others, you know, so Ashley himself has said that Tara is the one thing that's important to her.
And she's going to deal with the loss of Rhett by going back to Tara, although she's not going to give up, right? She's going to try and get him back because tomorrow is another day. But Tara becomes the focal point again, and that becomes the thing that rejuvenates her, this idea of the permanence of the land. And the land being a thing that's worth dying for or fighting for. I don't know how that fits in exactly. Right. Because it's not, per se, an obsession with the Old south or the lifestyle. Right. Because Tara is transformed after the war.
It's not going to be a plantation with slaves. It has been renovated with Rhett's help and all his money. But it's never going to be the same thing. And the land is never going to be the same thing exactly either. And yet it's supposed to be something that joins the past and the present and will survive the loss of the south and loss of that way of life. And I don't know how that works thematically or how it fits with Scarlet's character in particular.
59:44 Erin: I agree, because I think that Scarlet's mother represents one thing or a couple of things, as I've said, both a woman in charge and also a kind of ideal woman in terms of her behavior, while the father represents Something wilder and more passionate. And that's the link to the land. It's these two forces joining together to create the character of the south, in a way. And then it's never the same, as you say, mostly because there was a kind of a soiling that happened, not in terms of getting the actual soil tampered with, maybe to a certain extent, but because the Yankees used Tara as their headquarters.
Scarlet gets this real look of disgust on her face when she realizes that the Yankees have penetrated Terra and have used it, have soiled it, defiled it in some way by setting up camp there. It's a strange hybrid, as you say, because we have these slaves who have chosen to stay on and continue to work. Some of them continue to work for the family. So there's a kind of suspended animation going on at the house. And it's also.
1:00:52 Wes: Which is very common historically, but yeah.
1:00:55 Erin: And there's also a sort of false perpetuation of the estate that's been enabled only by the wealth of. Well, first, the wealth that Scarlet amasses through Frank Kennedy's store and then through Rhett giving her the money to make it as grand a house as it ever was, as he says to her. So it's gotten this infusion of cash that we can imagine not many other estates have had. I mean, you know, Twelve Oaks is completely. It's just the staircase at a certain point. So I'm sure that Twelve Oaks was ultimately just knocked down in the universe of the film.
1:01:30 Wes: You're helping me understand this, actually, because this is one of Scarlett's strengths, is that she's a very shrewd businesswoman and she seems to like to work. And there's even an element in her that she seems to like to survive. And maybe she likes to be down and out. And maybe that's the point of the infatuation with Ashley, is that it puts her always into this mode of struggle. I mentioned before about her love. Relationships are actually her war. Right. She likes to be at war in a way, because she likes to be active. And the transformation of the land that's happened is actually, it's been transformed from something that the slaves are going to work and the leisurely upper class are going to live off of that work.
It's been transformed into something that she can work herself. So she's losing rent, she's losing the person who sort of propped up the fantasy for her for a while by, as you put it, infusing cash into it. And she's imagining going back to the land and it sounds like to actually. To work, to turn Tara into an actual project and not just a project in which she's trying to make money, is with the lumber business and Frank's store. Because she's fearful, right. Because she feels insecure and she thinks money is the only way to survive. Not in the sense at the end of the first half, in which it's about never being hungry again and lying and cheating and stealing, but a much more completed and more mature sense of what work means.
Right. And so she's come into her own in that sense in which she can just embrace the land and embrace Tara, the estate, for the sake of becoming someone who's devoted to actual work. And it kind of helps you see the demise of the old way of living, of the old south, as a liberation of the master from the masters, from their indolence or from their passivity or from the fantasy that we've talked about. And, yeah, so I think what you were saying brought that out.
1:03:32 Erin: That's really good. It helps me understand more of what that draw is for her. And, yeah, I really like that. I think that cycle of struggle and reward is something that has to be sustained for her, too. So it can't be too much struggle. She has to enjoy a certain reward out of it. I mean, the happiest, I think, that we see her in the film is when she's on her honeymoon with Rhett and she gets to just totally indulge herself eating desserts.
1:03:56 Wes: And yeah, yeah, the look on her face when the dessert tray goes by, it's almost like an Eliza Doolittle moment. And where she's, you know, she's just voraciously eating and. And Rhett's like, don't scrape your plate. I'm sure they have more in the back.
1:04:14 Erin: It says a lot about me that. I thought that was the best part of the movie. That was the height of luxury. Get to eat as much dessert as you want. But then that very quickly is punctured by the nightmare that she has of. So she's not able to enjoy the reward after a while, or if we can call this a reward. Hopefully listeners will know what I mean by this. In other words, struggle and enjoyment. So she's not able to enjoy herself for long before this nightmare creeps back in. And what does she want to do but go back to Tara? So she's uncomfortable enjoying it for very long, which means that, I don't know, maybe there's no way that she could have had a satisfying marriage with Rhett.
I Mean, the honeymoon stuff seems, seems pretty good to me. And they could, if they wanted, just be two people enjoying their largess. And I mean, obviously even the nightmare scene has a very sweet element of their relationship in it, in which he's comforting her because of the horrors that she's seen. But it seems like that enjoyment can only last so long for her before she has to go back to the struggle, otherwise she's not satisfied. And I think this might also be what makes her a bad mother or a disinterested mother, which is because there's no cycle involved there.
Maybe, you know, raising a child is just. Well, first of all, I don't know how she would know how to be a good mother, seeing as her own mother didn't raise her. I mean, Mammy is her mother, but with none of the real.
1:05:37 Wes: The power.
1:05:38 Erin: Yeah, without the power. Exactly. Without the power that it would actually take to reign Scarlet in and to raise her properly. So Mammy has sort of been defanged in the way that parents need to have fangs. I mean, in order to properly raise their children. So Scarlet doesn't know how to be a mother, but it also, that kind of interest in a child implies a sort of a longer term struggle with little reward or enjoyment that Scarlet doesn't seem to know how to handle. It seems like she has to go through these real difficult trials and then get some sort of monetary compensation for them.
And a child just isn't the kind of project that she's interested in. So I don't know how long a relationship between Scarlet and Rhett could conceivably be sustained. Even if Scarlet was into him from the beginning, I don't know what their future would look like if she were to win him back. And if the movie is saying that it's impossible for her to get him back, I don't know if that is. If his stance on this is permanent and he wants nothing to do with her forever or what the movie seems to imply that what Scarlet wants, she gets ultimately sort of never really gets.
Ashley.
1:06:46 Wes: Yeah. I have the feeling they'll get back together.
1:06:49 Erin: You do?
1:06:50 Wes: Okay, yes, because they've done it before and usually people do what they've done before. Well, let me, let me say a few things about that. You're talking about her the dynamic of struggle and enjoyment. The struggle occurs within the context of the relationship and the enjoyment is kind of extraneous to it. Right. So she enjoys the food, she enjoys being rich. Right on there. He's like, what are you thinking about? And she's like, how rich we are.
1:07:15 Erin: Yeah, that's awesome.
1:07:17 Wes: And before they get married, you know, they admit to each other, say, you're going to marry me. And she says, yes. And then, is it because of my money? And it's a rare moment of honesty where she says, yes, partly. Money does help. I'm fond of you. You'd know I'm lying if I said I was madly in love with you. And he says, I'm not in love with you any more than you are with me.
1:07:37 Erin: Which, not true.
1:07:38 Wes: Turns out not to be true. Or maybe at that moment it's true. But obviously he does love her at various points and by the end of the movie, totally and abjectly is in love with her.
1:07:49 Erin: Well, Belle will describe it as being poisoned with her, which I think is pretty good, right?
1:07:54 Wes: Yeah, that is really good. As for her, what Melanie says at some point is that she's always been in love with you. She just doesn't know it. She says this to Rhett, and I think that idea occurs at a few points. Scarlet will say that at the end she says, I've loved you for years. Something like, I'm a stupid fool who didn't know it. So that actually is one of the things that interested me. So I wanted to relate that to our final question of whether they're going to get back together, but whether you can love someone without knowing it. Because I think whether they're going to get back together sort of depends on this question.
Is it really the case that she loved him without knowing it and now she realizes it, or is that just a silly idea of hers? I'm inclined to actually believe it through the movie. I badly wanted that transformation of Scarlet. Right. I wanted that climactic moment where she comes to see the error of her ways and grows up a little bit. And this seems to provide it. Although there's ambiguity about whether it's real. And I think that ambiguity is related to the question of whether they will get back together. Can we love someone unconsciously and not know it and then realize it?
I think yes, but I don't know if I can justify that.
1:09:05 Erin: I think it's obvious, too, that she loves him without knowing it. And I think that the subterranean element of that is even a necessity for her. I don't think that she's capable of outwardly loving anyone or sort of. That she has to sort of love someone against her own will because her actual means of loving people are so warped and thwarted, in a way by her own selfishness. Or her own fantasies that it's not really possible for her to love someone properly. That's why I'm not sure about what that relationship with Rhett would look like once she loves someone and.
And is conscious of it and then enters into a relationship because I don't know how she would be under those circumstances. We never see her express that love for someone in an. Actually in a healthy relationship. And we can argue that her relationship with Rhett was never healthy. And that they recognize that. That he recognizes that. Another thing that always bothers me in the film are the miscommunications that arise between them. So even though, for instance, Ashley and. And Scarlet are not caught many times having romantic scenes with each other India, I think it is, and Mrs.
Meade see them embracing in the mill in an actually innocent moment and interpret that as being an affair that's going on. As Rhett says, you know, Ashley can't be faithful to his wife mentally but won't be unfaithful to her technically.
1:10:31 Wes: Right.
1:10:31 Erin: So, of course, what they're seeing is just some sort of reality even if in that moment it isn't real. Also, Rhett makes the same error of interpretation when Scarlet comes out of the room in which Melanie is dying and comforts Ashley.
1:10:48 Wes: Right? Right.
1:10:49 Erin: And Ashley breaks down. But there have also been, of course, many miscommunications between Scarlet and Rhett when she's calling for him after she's miscarried and he doesn't know it and says later, if you had only wanted me. If you'd only called for me. And she says that she had. So I don't know why, but I feel as though this is fundamentally related to this question of whether or not they can be together because of the hidden nature of their love for each other to themselves. Also because of this continual misinterpretation. It seems important to me.
And the fact that the misinterpretation with Ashley happens twice. Once by the sort of larger society and once by Rhett. I think that's important too. I don't know why that is, but it seems to strike at the heart of the relationship dynamic being somehow permanently broken. I, as a kid, always was so frustrated by those scenes because I would think, you know, they do love each other. But as an adult, I realize that that inability to communicate that love means that there's something wrong there that probably can't be overcome.
1:11:55 Wes: So they're never gonna get back together.
1:11:59 Erin: I don't know. I don't know. I hope that they are. I mean, sometimes As a kid, I would be so upset over everything that happened that I would stop watching after the honeymoon scene and just imagine that they were happy together for the rest of the movie because their breakup was so painful for me to watch sometimes.
1:12:17 Wes: Wow.
1:12:17 Erin: Yeah.
1:12:18 Wes: You know, I didn't know where the frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn line came in the movie, and I kept looking for it, waiting for it, hoping that that was not the last line. And it's not, because it was a very depressed. That would be very depressing last line. And. Yep, it's not. So they give you just enough hope. Tomorrow is another day. There is a sequel. Right. That was written by someone else called Scarlet.
1:12:43 Erin: Yeah. But that's supposed to be pretty terrible, I think. Right.
1:12:46 Wes: I think they do get back together in that. Right.
1:12:48 Erin: Yeah, I'm assuming they would have to, but in order to. I mean, I'm assuming the appetite for their reunion is what caused the thing to be written.
1:12:56 Wes: Yes, but that's an alternate universe. We don't know what happens in the real Gone with the Wind universe.
1:13:03 Erin: Right, right. But maybe, you know, her ultimate comeuppance, or whatever you want to call it. We've been thinking that Ashley is the figure of the Old South. Maybe it's Scarlet, you know, and maybe this gesture at the end of tomorrow is another day, is like saying the south will rise again. You know, it's ultimately.
1:13:22 Wes: That's hypnot.
1:13:23 Erin: Right, Right. It's ultimately foolish and hopeless and sad and sinister. I don't know. One thing that we haven't gotten to really, that we've skimmed it, are examinations of the black characters. I don't know if we want to cover that or. We've talked about Mammy, but I guess there's Prissy. We've kind of glossed over Prissy. And who's the house servant? Pork and Big Sam. No, there's so much more to talk about with this movie because it is so big and so long and contains so many interesting characters. Some of it maybe we can get to in the postscript. So maybe that'll be a little teaser for our regular listeners.
1:13:58 Wes: Yeah.
1:13:59 Erin: But otherwise, I think now's a good place to end.
1:14:01 Wes: All right, thank you.
1:14:03 Erin: Thank you.
1:14:06 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to say that if you're listening to this on the feed of the Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find us@subtextpodcast.com subscribe@patreon.com Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to letters@subtextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter joysubtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
Realism as Cruelty in “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams
Aug 02, 2021
In the transition from stage to screen, A Streetcar Named Desire retained its long-running Broadway cast with a single exception: the role of Blanche Dubois, which passed from Jessica Tandy to Vivien Leigh. Like Blanche, Leigh was the odd woman out. A symbol of the glories of the studio system, married to the symbol of English stage acting, her classical training ran contrary to that of her Method-trained co-stars. Thus to the clash of wills between Blanche and Stanley Kowalski was added a clash of acting styles— and the struggle between the death of Old Hollywood and the birth of Brando and the New. Which principle— Blanche’s fantasy or Stanley’s realism— makes for superior art? Can the conflict between magic and truth ever be resolved? And is all realism a form of cruelty? Wes & Erin analyze Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:08 Erin: In the transition from stage to screen, A Streetcar Named Desire retained its long running Broadway cast with a single exception, the role of Blanche dubois, which passed from Jessica Tandy to Vivien Leigh. Like Blanche, Leigh was the odd woman out, a symbol of the glories of the studio system. Married to the symbol of English stage acting. Her classical training ran contrary to that of her method trained co star. To the clash of wills between Blanche and Stanley Kowalski was added a clash of acting styles and the struggle between the death of old Hollywood and the birth of Brando.
And the new which principle, Blanche's fantasy or Stanley's realism, makes for superior art? Can the conflict between magic and truth ever be resolved? And is all realism a form of cruelty? Today we're talking about Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So Wes, you know, I love Nichols and May and I try to bring them in whenever I can. One of their sketches that I don't think was ever recorded, so there's no record of this other than what reviewers and people at the time have written down.
They used to do send ups of various literary styles. And one of their most popular was a parody of Tennessee Williams. And basically it was Mike Nichols giving a lecture as a Tennessee Williams figure, but he was renamed Alabama Glass. And he'll give this lecture and describe this new play. And in it the heroine had taken to drink, prostitution and putting on airs. And her husband Raul had killed himself on being unjustly accused of not being a homosexual. I don't know, thinking about that kind of made me think about how this one time I was watching Streetcar, it was right before the end.
Blanche is in the middle of her breakdown. Everyone I was watching it with was like super invested in this, super into it. And someone walked into the room at that moment, saw what was happening on screen and started laughing. And I think the absurdity of Tennessee Williams is something that we don't. I don't know, maybe people talk about this a lot, but like there is a lot of suspended disbelief, I think that goes into watching it. Or rather like you kind of. You kind of sink in, like into a hot tub, you know, and once you're in, you're like used to it.
But to someone who's just passing by during a heightened moment of gothic camp, who hasn't been properly primed for it, it's a little bit silly. I don't know if you agree with that.
2:42 Wes: Gothic camp. I really like that, you know, I Never thought about it that way. Exactly. I guess I think one part of it is sort of Blanche dubois has kind of become a cultural meme. So if someone is new to the film or the play and you return to it, you return to it as if it's. Someone might think if they didn't know that this was the origin of that type of character, they might think of it as a cliche. We can always ask the question of whether is it Blanche who's kind of over the top, or is it Tennessee Williams? In some ways, she gives him a nice opportunity to have someone give cool speeches.
Right. And to be like her highfalutingness and her kind of pseudo erudition and wanting to say things fancy. All of that stuff lends itself to some really great speeches and turns of phrase for her. So it's, you know, you can see Tennessee Williams having fun through her. And we can also, you know, we can always ask the same question that we. That we typically ask in one of these episodes, which is the extent to which the artist appears in the play through a character or the extent to which there is some sort of commentary at work on the role of the artist.
3:59 Erin: Yeah. I think that this heightened sensibility, though, is true of all of his plays. I think Blanche is just like the most recognizable and parodyable figure. Didn't Woody Allen do like a send up of her? Okay, I'm not giving that up. I think he did.
4:15 Wes: In his recent autobiography, he calls A Streetcar Named Desire the perfect play. His favorite and the perfect play. Did he do a send up?
4:25 Erin: Why do I have this?
4:25 Wes: I'm surprised. I hope he did that.
4:28 Erin: I have this thing in my mind's ear of him doing a Blanche voice. I don't know. Someone can find that out. Once we release this, they could help us out.
4:37 Wes: Oh, you mean as like a passing joke in one of the films?
4:40 Erin: Yeah, I think so.
4:41 Wes: That does sound very familiar. Yeah.
4:43 Erin: Yeah.
4:44 Wes: She's perfectly suited to one of his movies in a way. You know, there's some sort of relationship between the neuroticism of his characters. Right. And her neuroticism or her hysteria. Really.
4:57 Erin: Sure. I think of Blue Jasmine as being maybe something like that. Cate Blanchett's performance in that the way
5:04 Wes: you started is not far off from the way I would have started. I thought I might be doing the intro for this. I always procrastinate at the very last minute. I start thinking about a title for the episode sometimes while I'm reading or thinking about it. And the phrase the fate of gentility. That's what came to my mind, even though I'm generally not interested in reading plays as social commentary, except to the extent that I want to read back any social implications back into the character. So the social stuff for me has implications for character and for aesthetics.
But of course, it's very popular for theorists or literary critics these days to kind of turn literature into a vehicle for cultural analysis or sociology or however you want to put it. So I bring that up with a different intent, although I did kind of go down a rabbit hole and I started. I was thinking about what is Southern gentility? And just this whole shtick that she has going. I wanted to think about that and understand that. And I found someone's master's thesis online. It's called the Assessment of Southern Gentility by British Traveler, 1776-1820.
6:24 Erin: Oh, interesting.
6:25 Wes: This is by Chelsea Larson. I might as well give her credit. First of all, it's cool that these travelogues even exist. Like, there's a guy named Cooper who wrote Some Information Respecting America, Weld Travels through the States of North America, Bernard Retrospections of America, and many, many more. So you get these firsthand accounts of what America was like at the time, and in particular, the South. And these travelogues are focused a lot on the extent to which Southerners, whether they have any kind of gentility, because in a way, there's a weird thing going on with Southern gentility where you have people who are essentially, they're not like the British landed gentry, but they're doing a poor person's imitation of that, not that they're poor.
These are people who end up having lots of enormous amounts of wealth very often, although according to these travel writers, they're typically not good at managing it. And they go through a lot of boom and bust type of cycles in a way that I think they're trying to imitate landed gentry. So when the colonists came to the United States, it really was kind of a leveling thing. And there's an opportunity for upward mobility. And except for the distinction between slaves and non slaves, there were not a lot of class distinctions. And so Southern gentility sort of is almost a conscious attempt to restore some of that.
And I bring this up because one of the things that these travelogue writers took note of, the thing that was most glaring to them was Southern hospitality. People in the north stayed in hotels when they traveled in the South. It wasn't necessary, because if you were an aristocrat or if you were part of the Upper class. It wasn't necessary because people, before they would even ask you their name, would offer you a place to stay, food and lodging, basically. This impressed them a great deal. I think they thought it was even more pronounced than it would be back in England.
So I didn't get exactly what I thought I would get out of going down this rabbit hole. It occurred to me while reading about hospitality, well, that is precisely this dependency on the kindness of strangers, which is one of the things I wanted to figure out, really what that means and how it's related to Blanche's shtick.
8:49 Erin: And that's something that I hope that we're also going to cover in our episode of Gone with the Wind, which I'm now really eagerly anticipating, the movie version of this. And just as a side note, I don't know what exactly we want to put our focus on here.
9:05 Wes: I think the movie is a good focus, and we can mention where there are deviations from the play.
9:09 Erin: Good.
9:09 Wes: There are a few things cut out, and there are a few deviations to meet the moral code of the time, but I don't think they're so numerous that it's gonna be hard to mash them together.
9:19 Erin: Yeah. And just for listeners, there was so much tinkering done, too, with the dialogue that many sections are taken entirely from the play. Many sections are just, like. Words are changed here and there, and it's kind of maddening. So I ended up just sort of choosing the movie because I love this movie so much, and I think of it as such an important historical document, in a way. But anyway, all of that being said,
9:44 Wes: I think some of that is Brando. Right. Just improvising some.
9:48 Erin: And some of it is Kazan and Williams sort of tinkering with things. And. Yeah, if you think of this as I do, as sort of the ultimate form of stunt casting, or the original, the OG stunt casting, having Scarlett O'Hara 12 years later, sort of, like, wash up on the beach as the sole survivor of an earlier age. Even though, fascinatingly, there is one other person who was a cast member on Gone with the Wind in this cast. It was the sailor at the beginning. He played Beau Wilkes, one of the children of Ashley and Melanie. Anyway, one can imagine this.
And many, of course, very many contemporary viewers of the film imagine this as Scarlett has lost Tara. You know, insert Tara for Belle Reve, and everyone is dead, and she is seeking refuge now in the New South. Of course, that timeline obviously doesn't match up, but they mean in terms of, you know, thinking about this on some Kind of a continuum. So that really interests me. And this idea of Southern gentility. And that didn't occur to me what that means. I know very much what that means in Gone with the Wind and how important that is in Gone with the Wind and how false it can be, of course, too.
And that falseness, I think, comes through as a through line here. But for me, that contrast between the old and the new south, it takes on a different meaning when you have Vivien Leigh thrown in with all of these method actors. Because now old and new south means old and new Hollywood. That's the thing that for me makes. I mean, Tennessee Williams couldn't have possibly thought of this when he was writing the play. And in a lot of ways, this is my reading of the movie. That is my particular idea of how actors, Personas, inform their roles in ways that they're not even conscious of and maybe that they don't realize until after the fact.
But that clash is what interests me, which is also, in a way, a clash of cultures. And it's about, I think, what we're both getting at here about the clash between, you know, putting on airs and cutting the rebop as. As Stanley will tell Blanche to do. Which is one particularly dated line that stuck out to me.
12:04 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting because I looked up some interviews with Vivien Leigh and was very surprised by her posh English accent.
12:13 Erin: Oh, you didn't know she was English?
12:16 Wes: I might have known at some point, but I hadn't thought about who she was in a long time. And I didn't. This is not ever something I paid a great deal of attention to.
12:25 Erin: Oh, my gosh. You are so opposite of me. This is like all I know.
12:29 Wes: Yeah. By the time I looked at the interviews, I knew she was English, but I just didn't expect such a posh accent.
12:36 Erin: Very.
12:37 Wes: Yeah, it surprised me. And then I went back and I watched this 10 minute YouTube reel of Scarlett scenes from Gone with the Wind. Because I haven't seen the movie ever. I don't think so. If I have, it's been so long and I'm excited to see it now.
12:53 Erin: Oh, my God. Well, you know, that's one of my top two.
12:56 Wes: We could do it next. You want?
12:58 Erin: Oh, I would love that.
12:59 Wes: Let's do it next. That makes. That makes sense.
13:02 Erin: Okay. We're working backwards here, but because I
13:05 Wes: am very impressed with Vivien Leigh.
13:07 Erin: Well, who could not be? I used to sit as a kid and just stare at her face. I mean, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I hate it. Whatever. Anyway, sorry. Continue.
13:16 Wes: She is extraordinarily beautiful. As long as you don't put a harsh light on her. Just kidding.
13:23 Erin: Hey,
13:26 Wes: but Scarlet's very feisty, right? It's hard not to think about this transition from Gone with the Wind to Streetcar and to try to think about Blanche as sort of some sort of broken down version of Scarlett. I can't say much about this until I've seen the movie. But what I saw in that reel was Vivien Leigh is playing a much more feisty character who also seems quite, you know, they have in common the manipulativeness. But do you see some continuity there between Scarlet's feistiness and Blanche's psychotic dream world thing?
14:03 Erin: Sure. Yeah. I suppose a lot of Scarlet's power comes from, you know, she's a man's woman. We'll say that about Scarlett.
14:14 Wes: And we'll say what that means, too.
14:16 Erin: She operates on the same wavelength as men do. Or rather, she's the kind of woman that has few to no female friends because she's interested in. In gracious. So I mean this. In the. In there are lots of degrees of men's women and women's women and all that sort of thing. But I mean to say that she's the extreme version of this. Not just that she is chummy with men and she gets along with them well, but that she is, I think, fundamentally too competitive and obsessed with jockeying favor from men to adequately have friendships with other women.
In fact, this is one of the tensions of Gone with the Wind. And she's very interested in appealing to men. And in Scarlet's case, I think this is a way to feel powerful because she knows her effect on men. And it's a way of sort of flexing her superiority. Because with a lot of the men in Gone with the Wind, in fact, almost all of the men, with one exception, she's superior to them in a way, right? She's stronger than they are. A lot of them are very weak, and they. They fold under pressure. And she can exert this influence on the basis of extreme personal charm and her kind of flirtatious feistiness and her looks.
And so Blanche is what happens when that person no longer has the looks part to rely upon and discovers that charm is not enough. Now, I don't think that she has the certain elements maybe, of the innate strength that Scarlett has. I mean, Scarlett loses Tara and gets it back and, you know, is actually able to make a success of it when other people are not able to make a success of their estate. And she has a real survivor thing going on. Blanche is obviously not a survivor, but we never see. We never see in Gone with the Wind a Scarlett that isn't the most gorgeous woman you've ever seen.
16:21 Wes: So.
16:22 Erin: And of course, Vivien Leigh at 36 in Streetcar had to be kind of made up to look older and to look a little bit ghoulish. I'm taking a long time to say this, but what I'm trying to say is that she's still. So. She's still drawing upon these resources and this idea that she is a woman who appeals to men in a certain way. But what's been hollowed out, or rather the. What she would say is, you know, the outside has been tarnished, but the inside is still just as beautiful. In fact, it becomes more and more beautiful with time, as she'll say. But as long as that. That veneer has been tarnished, she has lost her ability to make problems go away. And the big problem that she has ultimately can't get resolved. Though, interestingly, it's not because of her outward appearance.
17:14 Wes: There's that line from Stella at one point, which I find very poignant in a way where Stella says, why are you so sensitive about your age, Blanche? Something like that. Why are you so sensitive about your age? Which gives you. I think that and several other parts of the play give you a clue that she's overemphasizing the extent to which her predicament is a product of her aging. She's acting like she's an old maid at 30 or. I think she's supposed to be 30. Right?
17:44 Erin: Yeah.
17:44 Wes: People may have thought of her that way if this were said in the 1860s, but now that seems like an anachronism. And I think people are treating that as an anachronism. And her whole. Not that the Southern belle routine has gone away by the 1940s or that there isn't that among certain people, the Southern gentility shtick, like it exists today. I've met Southern belles, but the way that Blanche does it is extreme enough that I think that's an anachronism as well. But you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that it's so pronounced that people understand that this is kind of a crazy routine. You know, it's like one step away from her pretending that she's a princess out of King Arthur or something like that.
18:29 Erin: Right.
18:30 Wes: Her focus on appearances and looks are part of her self concept, and they're Connected to this idea that the only way she can get a man is to deceive. This is actually quite close to where Stella says, why are you so sensitive about your age? This is in scene five. Stanley has just told Blanche that he knows about her past before taking off to the bar. And now Blanche is a nervous wreck and she's talking to Stella. And Stella gives her that Coke and Blanche wants a shot in it. You know, a shot never hurt a Coke. I love that line. She explains this to Stella by saying she's nervous about Mitch.
So Mitch is coming at 7. I guess I'm just feeling nervous about our relations down a little bit. I want his respect. And men don't want anything. They get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly, especially when a girl is over 30. I love all these dashes, by the way, that Tennessee Williams puts in to kind of give the cadence of her speech, like a girl's over 30 or whatever. To me, it's meant to indicate a pause, perhaps, or something. So they think a girl over 30 ought to. The vulgar term is put out. I'm not putting out. Of course, he.
He doesn't know. I mean. I mean, I have informed him of my real age. And then Stella says, why are you sensitive about your age, Blanche? Because of hard knocks my vanity's been given. What I mean is, he thinks I'm sort of prim and proper, you know. SHE LAUGHS OUT SHARPLY I want to deceive him enough to make him want me. So I remembered this word deceive. And then I was doubting myself, so I didn't. That's not the word I was searching for. But, yeah, she directly uses that. And then Stella says, blanche, do you want him? So I was bringing this up because the whole thing about her looks is really related to a more general point of view about.
About how it is she is supposed to go about getting men. And the idea that that must involve deceit and the focus on tricking men. She uses the phrase turn the trick at one point. Yeah, like she's a prostitute. But the. The idea that this is the way to elicit desire in men. So this is. And this is one of the things we'll be trying to figure out, this whole Streetcar Named Desire metaphor, which very helpfully is right in the title of the play. I always depend on the frankness of authors. Or. So I think what we'll have to try to figure out is Blanche's relationship to Desire.
And in particular, what Stella is suggesting here is that Blanche is Kind of divorced from her own desire and very focused on. She sort of inhabits the desire of others and thinks that she has to adjust herself to that desire in order to get what she wants. Which is not completely crazy. Right. There's a lot of, like, femininity itself is a kind of language that is predicated on that. That kind of notion. But when it's taken too far, the psychoanalyst might call it hysteria, or if they're Lacanian, a hysterical character structure where the desire of the other becomes so important that it eclipses her ability to comprehend her own desire.
So she loses her own desire, she loses her own will, and all she is is kind of fodder for the will of others, just mere appearance. And what she's trying to do is to control other people's wills and other people's desires instead of using her own desire and using that to shape the world around her. And this is not unrelated to the question of gentility, which we started with, because the language of femininity and the language of class are related. You use this word superiority, which I think is very apt. I've said this before on the podcast, and I think it's worth saying again, which is just that class distinctions often map onto femininity, masculinity distinctions where femininity is representative of the upper class.
And that's where her conflict with Stanley becomes really relevant. But in particular, gentility is kind of a feigning of class where it doesn't really fully exist. Right. Because they're not really English landed gentry. Right.
23:03 Erin: It's amazing how parallel this runs to my own particular interest in clashes of acting styles here and the gentility of classical training and the theatrical tradition versus the method tradition, which is maybe I should just say a little bit about. About the actual. The literal differences between those things. So Vivien Leigh, who was English and really considered herself a stage actress, primarily, though I think she's better on film from contemporary accounts of. Of her stage acting, oddly enough. And she's married to. In real life, was married to Laurence Olivier, who, of course, is like, you know, the representative of the classical tradition.
And in fact, before she played Blanche on screen, she played Blanche in a West End production of Streetcar directed by Laurence Olivier, which became one of the. One of the big sort of points of contention for her and Elia Kazan when she came to Hollywood and wanted to do it Larry's way and not Kazan's way. So what you're talking about with this. With this idea of gentility, I think is something that's built into the class classical stage tradition. Classical training. Which. Which method acting? Well, the Stanislavski method and then a capital M Method Acting supplanted was built on vocal training and, you know, moving your body and.
And being able to, you know, perform sword fights if you had to perform sword fights or dancing and, you know, basically any of the tools that you would need to adequately perform Shakespeare. And that would often include poetic training and, you know, an understanding of things like scansion and where to put the emphasis in the poetry of Shakespeare and textual analysis. So it's very fitting that Blanche is an English teacher. And the idea is to create a performance that you can really, you know, repeat night after night after night, to have it be exactly the same, so that the performance is one sort of whole and complete repeatable event often built from the outside in.
You know, famously, Olivier would think about the appearance of his character and build that appearance as a way to get into the character. So he would try on different. I don't know, this is. I'm just making this up, but this is the kind of thing he would do, you know, maybe try on different prosthetic noses for Richard III and try different hairstyles and different capes. And based on that, he would sort of feel his way into the character through this outward facade. Method, of course, is very opposite of that in a way. Leigh represents, like, you know, if you work hard enough, you can become that character, whereas Brando and the method is more like, you know, you are that character.
You just have to find it inside yourself. And you don't have to work to you, you do have to work to bring it out. But it's a different mindset. So it develops from emotional realism and from finding emotional moments within yourself and connect those into your performance, which tends to be not very repeatable, which tends to be more spontaneous, which tends to be very exhausting and difficult to repeat because it is so quote, unquote, authentic. And it does not rely on vocal training and other things that. That in a literal way kind of would take money and a certain kind of breeding, you know, to like Marlon Brando, though he can speak well and enunciate his words properly, doesn't have to have a very developed vocal register in order to play the roles that he plays, right?
He plays bums who can just sort of elide all of their consonants. And he doesn't have to have that crisp, stage trained voice because that's not the kind of role that he's playing. And he's creating something New. So Blanche's, you know, her vocal flexibility is something that always I admire in this role. I mean, really, my two of my favorite screen performances of all time are her in Gone with the Wind and her in this movie. You know, she has this. This breathy, flirtatious upper register, and it deepens into that really rich lower register when she's being real, quote, unquote, and telling the truth.
This chameleon property is really indicative of classical stage training. And to be a stage actor, you have to be able to have a wide repertoire and to become different things and to be very false, you know, and the stage is. Is smoke and mirrors. You know, the stage, you're far enough away from people that they really can't tell how old you are. So you can go on playing ingenue roles into your 40s. You know, it's distance and illusion. You know, film is the close up. And as we see with Mitch and Blanche, you know, some of the close up can be unforgiving.
It can be kind of, we might say, cruel. So the English teacher, college educated elements of Blanche's personality, the fact that she does come from a very educated family is part of this class distinction that I think is also inherent in the classical stage acting tradition. But it is also very closely, you know, because of this connection I'm making or trying to make between classical stage training and old Hollywood. It very much is a retreat into fantasy. You know, she mentions Poe and Arabian Nights. Stanley compares her to Cleopatra. And in fact, Vivien Leigh played both Shakespeare's Cleopatra on stage and Shaw's Cleopatra on film.
So the femininity of that and the fantastical element of that, I think, are really closely linked. The old Hollywood, you know, not needing to have any kind of realism. And then we see with Brando this break into what will become new Hollywood method. The real, the emotional experience, the talking, however it is that you talk and not making any kind of particular effort, not trying to show yourself to best advantage, but just sort of letting it all hang out. You know, all of this stuff is. You know, we could take it as a. As a clash of acting styles, but also, I think, as you're suggesting, this clash between the ultimate feminine and the ultimate masculine characters.
And also a really sharp class distinction and also kind of an ethnic distinction, too, which is gonna be really important of.
29:21 Wes: He is 100% American. Remember, keep that in mind.
29:24 Erin: He is 100% American. Yes. But as the ethnic stars come to
29:29 Wes: be, people from Poland are Poles, not Polaks.
29:32 Erin: Right? Right.
29:34 Wes: Yeah, that's good. I mean, I think all of these polarities kind of line up. The one I hadn't thought about is this one that you've brought up between the classical training and method acting. Which lends itself perfectly to the raw, animal, instinctual nature of Stanley. Who's someone who inhabits his desire. Right. And just sort of without any self consciousness, acts on it, lets things out. And then the refinement of Blanche, which may be a pseudo refinement in a way. And her relationship to desire is complicated because I've painted her as a hysteric in a way.
Which suggests that what she wants is to be desired. But she's not interested in consummation. Consummation is too dangerous. So what really happened in Laurel, or as they call it in the play, Oriole? They changed the name because they didn't want to insult the real town of Laurel, Mississippi. But what happens in Laurel is a bit unclear. Right. The suggestion may be that she's just a hypocrite and she's sexually ravenous and hides it. Which I think, given her character, is probably not what's going on. So even if she is involved, as she seems to confess at the end in lots of liaisons with men.
I think her account of that is probably accurate. Which is that she's desperate and she's looking for protection. So it's not sex, per se, that she's out for. She's been reduced to using it to get what she wants. At some point, she even says that, you know, she'll go out on the streets if she has to because she's so destitute. That's sort of the very primal conflict in this play between Stanley's. Which, again, we can read in terms of class, masculinity, femininity, our relationship to desire, however you want to think about it. But these two are an explosive combination.
It's there right from the very beginning when the minute that Stanley walks in and sees that someone's been drinking his whiskey and said, oh, you know, this really good liquor really goes fast during the summer when it's hot. Something like that. And then he offers Blanche a drink. And I think she says she doesn't touch it, Right?
31:49 Erin: Yep.
31:49 Wes: And he has that great line about, you know, some people don't touch it, but it touches them often. Yep. And, of course, she's already had, you know, she's already been drinking it. So it's a perfect beginning to a troubled relationship.
32:01 Erin: I know Kazan and maybe, to a certain degree, Tennessee Williams both realized that in different versions or stagings of the play. One's sympathies, depending on the vision that the director has, may tend toward Blanche or they may tend toward Stanley. I think that what Kazan was interested in was kind of a bait and switch, maybe halfway through, where at first you're really annoyed with Blanche and then you realize. Or you think that she's kind of the villain, maybe, and then you realize that she is superior to, as I said before, superior to the other characters in the play, which we can talk about, whether or not that's true.
But that the personal magnetism of Brando is still such a. Such a tremendous draw, that one's sympathies are cloudy and ambivalent in the way that is, you know, beneficial to the art of the film. And so I've watched this movie with people who say Brando is so disgusting. How, you know, the character, I should say Stanley, is so disgusting, except for the fact that he's handsome. How could anybody be charmed by him? Like. Like he's so gross. Like, even just when he sprays the beer on himself, like, he's just disgusting. So. Word.
33:15 Wes: Well, there's a very fine line between disgust and desire.
33:19 Erin: That's true.
33:20 Wes: And sexiness, like, that's true. There's a very. Yeah. Important relationship between sex and disgust or. Or lust and disgust.
33:29 Erin: So my question is, are, you know, are you riding the Brando train? Are you. Do you understand why? Yeah. Or the Brando streetcar.
33:38 Wes: I've been railroaded by his raw masculinity. When I first saw this, I was just blown away by Brando's performance. Whatever attractions there are in Stanley's character, it just, you know, his looks and then also his vitality, basically, and his masculinity, his aggression, all of those things. I can understand why some people would be. Find that exciting. And I think I probably found it exciting too, in a way. Although I think he becomes a villain for me pretty early on in the play. I mean, the whole thing with Napoleonic law. He's such a moron.
And then he just becomes progressively more villainous until there's a rape, which is much more obvious in the play. But it's still pretty strongly suggested in the movie as well, or somewhat hinted at. For me, that's a devastating moment. Because as villainous as he is, there's a logic to it. You can make sense of that in terms of the relationship between him and Blanche and their differing characters and a kind of primal conflict between them. Like these are two forces of nature in a way. At work, that goes off the rails, pardon the pun. If we're on a streetcar, that goes off the rails with the rape, the logic completely breaks down because that can't be explained in terms of their conflict.
It has to be explained in terms of Stanley's basic sociopathy. So that's an interesting turn to play. So it's hard for me to say. I couldn't say I'm sympathetic towards Stanley at any point. I'm impressed by him, but not sympathetic towards him. And with Blanche, she's formidable in her own right, too. So I think there's a lot of. To her, despite the fact that she's not so overtly aggressive as Stanley. At one point, she says to Stanley that as they're in it, they're fighting over. Yeah, this is the whole scene where he's been rifling through her trunk.
And it starts out with Stanley talking to Stella. Have you ever heard of the Napoleonic Code? And I just love this scene in the State of Louisiana, we have the Napoleonic Code, according to which what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband. And vice vers. And he's going through the trunk, genuine fox fur pieces a half mile long. Finding her costume jewelry, the treasure chest of a pirate. This whole thing with him treating this cheap costume stuff as if it's precious and an indication that she's sold Belle Reve and is swindling them. And then we get Blanche come out and says, it looks like my trunk has exploded.
It's a really interesting response. Right. There's an element of sophistication in what Blanche is doing. She doesn't just come out and confront him and say, what the hell are you doing going through my trunk? She sort of excises his agency from the situation. It looks like my trunk has exploded. As if he's not there in a way, or it's so in a way that exonerates him, but it also potentially castrates or emasculates him. It says, you didn't do this. This is not your power at work. And eventually it ends up with her telling him that he's a little on the primitive side, which is where her restraint with him, it breaks down.
And right after that, Stella's upset by the. You know, Stella comes in on this as upset by their fighting. And then she sends Stella off to get a lemon Coke for her. So she does something where she's protecting Stella and standing up to Stanley by herself. So right after she sends him out for the lemon Coke, she says to Stanley, the poor little thing was out there listening to us. And I have an idea she doesn't understand you as well as I do. All right now, Mr. Kowalski, let us proceed without any more double talk. I'm ready to answer all questions.
I have nothing to hide. What is it? And then he talks about Napoleonic Code. And she's like, my. You have. But you have an impressive judicial air. So I guess there's something formidable about her and her willingness to stand up for herself in this situation and protect Stella. And initially, like I said, the whole trunk exploding thing, her sort of indirect approach to Stanley. But what it becomes is condescension. And that is her undoing. Because Stanley's response to that condescension. This sets in motion the whole chain of events where essentially Stanley's gonna try to destroy her.
And succeeds. Because he obviously finds Blanche's treatment humiliating. I mean, in the beginning with the whole Napoleonic Code thing, what is that really about? Does he really care about the estate? I think you could say that probably has something more to do with the idea that his marriage kind of extends beyond the boundary of that particular relationship with Stella. That it encompasses or nullifies or supersedes all Stella's other relationships. He has to have her entirely to herself. And that's what the Napoleonic Code really represents.
And that. That jealousy and that. That threat of Blanche intruding. Right, is a big part of the play, including intruding on the sexual relationship. He'll talk about how things will be better again when they can get the colored lights going and Blanche is not there to overhear them having sex. But beyond that particular conflict, I think it's really Blanche's condescension which is her undoing. I guess I'm trying to say that there is a tragic hero quality to her in this respect. There's something impressive. She's not just crazy and hysteric.
There's actually something impressive about her character. I don't know if you agree with that.
39:32 Erin: Oh, totally. A little bit. After what you read, the impressive judicial air, Stanley says, if I didn't know you was my wife's sister, I would get ideas about you. And she says, such as what? Don't play so dumb. You know what? And then that's when her voice kind of goes down a little bit. She says, all right, cards on the table. I know I fib a good deal. After all, a Woman's charm is 50% illusion. But when a thing is important, I tell the truth. And this is the truth. I never cheated my sister or you or anyone else on earth. As long as I lived.
And he says, where are the papers? In your trunk? And she says, everything I own is in that trunk. So that's true. I mean, I don't think she has cheated anyone, really. She believes that what she's doing is personal charm and she knows that she fibs. But she has legitimately lost the house. Because you feel actually looking at the text of the play, I think this comes across even more so. Stella has done the equivalent of leaving Blanche in charge of the care of, say, the parents, the elderly parents. And Stella's just left.
40:39 Wes: And I'm very like, I'm very curious about how all that went down. You know, what happened at Belle Reve. And that's left a mystery, right?
40:48 Erin: And actually, in the same way that you're describing with Blanche being clever with Stanley and not accusing Stanley, Blanche is being maybe a little bit more accusatory with Stella, but nowhere near the level that she should be. I mean, she should have. And I think she does have a lot of aggression towards Stella. It comes out passively, but I think she has every right to feel as though she's been left in the lurch or maybe she has taken on more than she should have or become a martyr for this lost cause in a way that isn't entirely necessary.
But like for instance, when they're in the play, it's in the apartment and the play, all the action takes place in the apartment. In the film, it's when they're talking in the bowling alley. Blanche has this really clever bait and switch where she says she's telling Stella she has something to tell her and it's the fact that she lost Belle Reve. Stella asks, what is it that you want to, to tell me? And she says, well, Stella, you're going to reproach me. I know that you're bound to reproach me. But before you do take into consideration, you left, I stayed and struggled.
You came to New Orleans and looked out for yourself. I stayed at Belle Reve and tried to hold it together. I'm not meaning this in any reproachful way, but all the burden descended on my shoulders. So I love that, that little paragraph because she uses the same word, you're bound to reproach me.
42:05 Wes: But.
42:06 Erin: And then at the end, I don't mean this in any reproachful way. So somewhere in the middle of that, she's gone in self accusatory track and then halfway through turned it around, you know, turned the knife on Stella. And she's very clever in the Way that she tries to manipulate Stella emotionally or passive aggressively tries to get Stella to. To do what? Ultimately, to give her sympathy and to give her a place to stay until she could get on her feet. I think those are kind of reasonable, you know, reasonable things. I mean, what ultimately does she want from Stella and from Stanley?
Does she want something different from either of them? I think maybe she wants some version of the same thing. I mean, she wants to be complimented. She wants to be appreciated, I think. And for her looks and also evidently for what she did in trying to hold on to the house, Stella never gives her any credit for it, which is maddening, actually.
43:09 Wes: Stella's very preoccupied with her man.
43:12 Erin: Right, right.
43:13 Wes: Well, what would happen if Stanley wasn't there?
43:16 Erin: I mean, I think that Blanche and Stanley are both trying to pull Stella into a relationship with them that is the status quo. So for Stanley, that is obviously a sexual relationship where she's so in love with him or satisfied with him sexually that she doesn't even have to bother to really think about anything else. And with Blanche, maybe it's being Blanche's pet and being her younger sister and, I don't know, being the obviously the less attractive younger sister who's there to prop up Blanche, maybe, I don't know. But she doesn't do it even in a satisfactory way for the sake of politeness.
If you had a sister who stayed and took care of everybody. Well, apparently everyone was dropping dead around her and she had to pay for all their funerals, which Stella apparently didn't even show up to because she wasn't aware of the fact that the house was gone or that all these people had died than to not even say, gee, thanks for doing that. You know, I mean, it occurs to me right now how terrible that is and how Stella is just like drunk on Stanley. She's too blotto to even know what's going on. It's bizarre.
44:22 Wes: Yeah. The way she puts it, I took the blows in my face and my body. All of those deaths. The long parade to the graveyard. Father, Mother, Margaret, that dreadful way, so big with it. It couldn't be put in a coffin.
44:35 Erin: Oof.
44:36 Wes: But had to be burned like rubbish. You just came home in time for the funeral, Stella. Oh, so she did go. Okay, okay. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths, not always. I'm using the play, so the film might have left that part out, that Stella goes home for the funerals. So funerals are quiet, but death's not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles. And sometimes they even cry out to you, don't let me go. Even the old sometimes say, don't let me go. And she'll go on to say, and now you sit there telling me with your eyes that I let the place go.
Death is expensive. And then moving down, just a very long speech. So I won't read all of it, but it ends with, where were you? In bed with your Polack or in bed with your Beat Pollock? I was reading more of that because this whole question of death becomes very important, right. Where Blanche will say, death is the very opposite of desire. So I want to make sense of that at some point. Going back to our speculation about what would have happened if Stanley weren't there, it's unclear whether Blanche is to blame for the loss of Belle Reve. She blames it on the fornications of her forebears.
Forebears. Fornications of her forebears.
45:54 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
45:56 Wes: Which is probably true, you know, but we get the idea later on that Blanche has been among the fornicators. That still doesn't make it clear to me whether she's responsible for the final loss of the estate, whether she's living whatever, some kind of lifestyle that she couldn't keep up. I'm reminded of these travelogues again, by the way, where they said very frequently these Southern planters were living lifestyles that they simply couldn't sustain and would do this very boom and bust thing where they would sustain it for a while, keep up appearances, and then they'd be poor for a while until the crops came in.
46:28 Erin: How pathetic do you have to be that you have slave labor and you still can't make the ends meet, Like God, anyway. Yeah.
46:37 Wes: So I think there is an element of a survivor in Blanche. You know, if we want to compare to Scarlett in that sense, you know, she ends up at the Flamingo and she's doing what she needs to do to survive. She ends up in New Orleans, destitute, but she has a sister that she can ask for help. And she runs into a. It's not a pothole, it's a landmine. Right. In Stanley, she steps on a landmine that closes her whole repetition, brings all of that to a very sudden end. But if he hadn't been there, I think she would have continued her game with men without ever finding the husband that she supposedly wants. Right. So there's a reason why she married a gay man when she was 16. They don't make that obvious in the film. But in the play, it's obvious that she married a boy who turned out to be gay. And when she told him that she was disgusted by that, he killed himself.
47:27 Erin: I thought it was because he likes poetry.
47:32 Wes: Same thing.
47:32 Erin: And he's very sensitive.
47:34 Wes: Erin. Same thing.
47:37 Erin: It was like one of the stupidest things about the rewrite in the movie. Like a boy who likes poetry.
47:43 Wes: Yeah. He was such a gentleman soul, and I didn't like that.
47:48 Erin: And he had to die because of it.
47:51 Wes: And I told him he was a pussy and killed himself. Yeah. It's not very well motivated in the film, but there's a reason why she married that kind of guy, which is because I think in her relationship to desire as such, that she really doesn't want consummation. She wants to remain at the level of appearance. She wants to stay away from the Stanley esque discharge of impulses and keep things at that genteel sort of level permanently. Which there's arguably something deathlike about that. So when she says death is the opposite of desire, it's a little confusing because her relationship to desire is confusing. There's the famous scene with, you know, Flowers for the Dead. Right. Where she says, not yet. What is she saying there? What is it that's coming for her? And what is it she's saying by saying not yet?
48:51 Erin: Sure. Well, I mean, there's a sense in which she is already dead. Right?
48:55 Wes: Yeah.
48:55 Erin: She's a ghost now. It's like she's outlived the narrative of her backstory. So in a way, she's like post desire. I mean, so she takes the streetcar to what, cemetery and then to Elysian Fields.
49:10 Wes: Yeah.
49:10 Erin: So she's already dead. She looks like a ghost throughout the whole film.
49:15 Wes: Yeah. The idea of fading looks and being a fading personage are related, but. Yeah, go ahead.
49:20 Erin: Right, right. And you get the sense that she's living this postscript life after the suicide of her husband. But there's a sense in which everything that she's doing doesn't really count, you know, like, it doesn't really matter. Like, first of all, you never see any of it. It's all just part of this backstory. Belle Reve is just this shadowy, ancient place. It's only referenced by Stella and Stanley in terms of a photograph. You know, you showed me a photograph of a place with columns. It's like nothing really matters because it's like she's dead.
So nothing she's doing. It almost justifies her sort of flight to fancy and her. I think she has the sense that none of this is really real. Like, I'm not really here. I didn't have to go to New Orleans and do any of this because it's so beneath me. She doesn't even really believe it's happening. And so I think that's part of this. This escape into fantasy that she can't deal with. But I'm sorry, I'm getting off of your train of thought.
50:21 Wes: No, no, I think that's right. I mean, what's the relationship between death and desire? I mean, you mentioned the. Her being a ghost, and I said something about fading looks. And there's this idea that she wants to be desired, but she doesn't want to consummate it.
50:36 Erin: Well, she has consummated it.
50:38 Wes: I mean, my argument is that she's consummated it for the sake of getting protection, but she's not into it, basically.
50:45 Erin: But she has to be in order to have that push pull with Stanley. I mean, she has to love it and hate it at the same time, because that's what Stanley is. Stanley is consummation. Right. And she has to be equally attracted and repelled by him. And we have to know that she's capable of consummation. But it's not really. She couldn't have possibly expected protection from the men she was having sex with in the tarantula arms.
51:11 Wes: Well, here's the question. Why didn't she. And this will lead us back to the relationship between death and desire, but why didn't she find a husband again after, you know, she lost her first husband, who wasn't really a husband in a way, you know? So why didn't she find a husband during that time? Is it just trauma? Just the trauma of the loss of her first husband and the trauma of taking care of all the dying people in her family? Or is it something more where she's in a pattern where she's just not. That's just not gonna happen. And even if Stanley weren't there in New Orleans, it's not like things would have worked out with Mitch. That's my thesis.
51:46 Erin: That's a really good question. I mean, I guess I have a mental image of her becoming a spinster as she's taking care of these. You know, she's been put into this caretaker or parental role almost for these people who are dying. And it's also.
52:02 Wes: She could have pulled a Stella, though, right?
52:03 Erin: And she could have. Yeah. But I think that the part of that is maybe fanning the flames of this dying society, trying to keep it alive by keeping These people alive. And by keeping the house intact. This is where Gone with the Wind is helpful as it. As a way to understand this. Like, you know, in Gone with the Wind, like she cares more about Terra than she does about any person. You know, because of the obsession, the Southern obsession with the land. She'll do anything to keep the land.
52:29 Wes: Also, Stella is slumming it, right. So maybe the consummation of desire just means slumming it. It means losing status in a way. He's. You know, Stanley says, I ripped you down off of those columns. Right.
52:40 Erin: And what's more genteel than a boy who likes poetry?
52:46 Wes: Yeah.
52:46 Erin: I think that what Stanley finds false in her is. Is her rejection of the animal nature, even as that is very much within her. So she's still having sex with men in the tarantula arms. You know, I think she still wants that, but I think that she almost has to be taken, you know, and this is where we get into the whole rape thing. But what is the point of her flirtations but to push that off? Right. To keep the guy interested, but also to push him away or to keep him at arm's length.
53:19 Wes: Right.
53:19 Erin: Because you have to. It rests on this illusion of virginity. So you have. Well, for her, it's an illusion at this point, but. So you have to entice the guy enough that he's interested, but keep him away so that he will respect you. I mean, she says something like this in the play.
53:33 Wes: Yeah, but I think she's just using that to really. She's just keeping guys at bay. Unless they're gay.
53:41 Erin: Well, see, I think it's both. I think it's both because I think that's become the only way that she knows how to function. That falseness and flirtatiousness has become her reality. She doesn't know what to do with it once she's caught it. You know, like she. She's playing with something and. And doesn't know what to do to a certain extent. But then at the same time, we have this. At this subterranean level, you know, in terms of her consciousness, that part of herself is still having an outlet, but it's just the part that she's lying to herself about. And consciously, she's still doing this flirtatious thing. I think that's what Stanley hates. Right.
54:18 Wes: Yeah, that's the interpretation. It's probably more plausible, but it's the one that I'm trying to argue against. My interpretation is, yes, it's definitely much more speculative and not on the firmest of Ground. But what I'm inclined to say is that she is someone who's not into sex per se, and that's part of the problem. And that she's this whole idea of using her charms and feigning virginity or whatever to get men. It's really, really what she's ultimately doing is driving them away.
54:52 Erin: But it works. It works with Mitch.
54:56 Wes: It does temporarily, but I think it wouldn't. Even though Stanley is the one who blows all this up, that scene with the newspaper boy makes it pretty clear what's going on, which is that she is going to do very self destructive things that will end up ruining these relationships and giving herself a bad name. There's no real reason she had to get a bad name in Laurel by associating with all these different men, except that she was in a pattern of drawing them in and then repulsing them. She calls herself a tarantula, ironically. Yeah. So those are two possible interpretations, I think.
In either case, the question is how is death the very opposite of desire? And how does that apply here? I think in one sense there are some pretty obvious ways to cash that out. And one of them, death is the end of our existence as strivers and desires, but also the idea of getting old. Her idea is that her aging and her approach towards death means she can't be the object of desire. And if I'm right, if my interpretation about her relationship to desire is right, there's something deathlike about that in the sense that she can't inhabit that vitality that Stanley has.
But I think she sees that as threatening. So I think she, you know, so she recognizes maybe something deathlike in consummation, in the discharge of desire, where it's something. There is a streetcar element to that. There's something almost mechanical. And she's all about high culture and higher consciousness. And the discharge and consummation reduces you to something physical and ape like. She talks about apes and maybe we should read that speech. He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits, eats like one, moves like one, talks like one.
There's even something subhuman, something not quite to the stage of humanity yet. Yes, something ape like about him. Like one of those pictures I've seen in anthropological studies. Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by and there he is, Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle. And you, you here waiting for him. Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you. That is, if kisses have been discovered. Yet night falls and the other apes gather there in front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking.
His poker night, you call it, this party of apes. Somebody growls, some creature snatches at something. The fight is on. God. Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image. But Stella, my sister, there has been some progress since then. Such things as art, as poetry and music, such kinds of new light have come into this world since then. And some kinds of people, some tender feelings have had some little beginning that we have got to make grow and cling to and hold as our flag in this dark march towards whatever it is we're approaching.
Don't. Don't hang back with the brutes. So a dark march towards whatever it is we're approaching. Hints of death there, right? And the idea is that she can avoid death by not being brutish, by not giving in to desire, by staying at the level of appearance and gentility and cultural sophistication and all that stuff. But then there's the countervailing idea that that is just what it means to be deathlike. And what it means to live is to. Is to actually give in to desire and be ape like and be, you know, discharge impulses and all that stuff. So those are.
What I find really interesting, is those. I don't think the play resolves that. And so we get two conflicting visions of the relationship between desire and death that we can't really. There's kind of a point to both of them.
59:01 Erin: Yeah, I like that a lot. I think which of these two characters, Blanche or Stanley, is a survivor of the Stone Age, you know, because I think we have with Stanley, like, you know, the modernity and the progress that she's talking about is actually running counter to the way that the culture is going, which is a more naked and frank and open relationship with sexual desire or, you know, whatever, like the sexual revolution is about to break through. And partially, you know, I think what we've been getting at is that a lot of what Blanche is after in her flirtatiousness and her aping of virginity is the pretending that those elements are dead in you, right?
Or maybe like hinting at them, but keeping yourself safe from them. It's almost as though what Blanche is advocating in this speech, as I said before, is like this idea of keeping death alive, right? Or keeping the. The idea of putting death to these impulses alive. In a strange way, she's advocating the idea that to dampen these passions underneath Art is the thing that we have to perpetuate. The death is what we have to perpetuate. Obviously. Like, you could argue that art is built on top of those more natural impulses, or that it's like a purification
1:00:29 Wes: of those things and culture and politeness and gentility. All of that stuff is a sublimation of those things. And. And is more. You could argue they are more alive.
1:00:37 Erin: Right. But I think Williams complicates that by tethering those principles to someone who is related to this dying culture, you know, and by making Stanley the live one, the one who is the most alive and the most in touch with his animal impulses. It becomes a strange. I don't know, I think it, oddly enough, you know, turns that on its head and suggests that art and music and higher things are just as dead as Belle Reve and all the collection of skeletons there.
1:01:10 Wes: You're elaborating on the conflict that I was pointing out, the conflict between two different conceptions of the relationship between desire and death and which one is more deathlike? Discharge or repression? Sublimation. And I think it's hard to arbitrate, you know, it's hard. There's a point to both positions.
1:01:29 Erin: Well, I wonder how this relates to the idea of cruelty. Obviously, Stanley is. Blanche accuses him of being deliberately cruel and says that that's the one thing that she's never been guilty of. The idea of deliberateness versus things that are unintentional is a strange one, because I think deliberateness implies forethought, which Stanley has none. And everything is just very immediate with him. And he doesn't really think about anything, whereas Blanche is the calculating one. But cruelty, of course, runs contrary to that. I mean, Stanley is obviously quite cruel. We see him beat up his pregnant wife and, of course, rape Blanche.
1:02:11 Wes: Is she talking about Mitch there or Stanley? Maybe she's talking about both, in a sense. Yeah.
1:02:17 Erin: I think so.
1:02:17 Wes: Yeah. So scene 10, she's.
1:02:19 Erin: She's telling this to Stanley about Mitch, right?
1:02:24 Wes: Yeah. This whole story about him coming back to beg her forgiveness, but him rebuffing him. Some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.
1:02:33 Erin: But she says this accusatorily to Stanley and telling. She changes.
1:02:37 Wes: That's good. I mean, arguably she's talking about Mitch, but really she's talking about Stanley to Stanley as well.
1:02:43 Erin: Right. And what Mitch has done that's unforgivable is repeating the slander and vicious stories from you. She says to Stanley.
1:02:52 Wes: So Mitch isn't really the one Being deliberately cruel. Stanley is. I mean, there's nothing.
1:02:56 Erin: Right.
1:02:57 Wes: He's just responding to these stories. But.
1:02:59 Erin: Yeah, right. And also, there's a difference. There's a tension between. So she says to repeat slander and vicious stories. So the stories may be vicious, but they're not slanderous. I mean, they are true. So that's another kind of tension. Of course, this whole idea of him coming back to beg her forgiveness is all invented by her. She's lying to Stanley about Mitch's actions here.
1:03:18 Wes: But you were talking about. So the nature of cruelty. And in your introduction, you mentioned the relationship between cruelty and reality, which I thought was really interesting.
1:03:26 Erin: Yeah. What Blanche shrinks from is exposure. Right. And she seems to think that part of being cruel or the things that are most cruel to her are the exposure of her body, her past, or in Stanley, the naked cruelty of his actions and of his vices. So there's this idea that by couching things in a kind of fantasy, Blanche is making them less cruel. That cruelty increases with reality and decreases with fantasy, or something like that, if we think of it as a knob.
1:04:06 Wes: So what is Stanley's cruelty other than trying to, you know, actively trying to destroy Blanche? He doesn't want to play along with her game. You know, in a way, his cruelty is the rejection of social niceties and the rejection of gentility and the rejection of the element of lying involved in those things. So there's an honesty to Stanley. Right. Because he's just being who he is, even if that's a brute. There's an honesty to brutishness. But that honesty is also a form of cruelty. Right. It leads, you know, he beats Stella. It's honest to act on your impulses, in a sense, and to bring them to light, but it also is inevitably cruel.
And to avoid cruelty, we do have to repress. And that also implies that we do have to, in a way, hide and lie. We refrain from just saying everything that comes to our mind around people, because that would be cruel if we just didn't keep that under wraps. I mean, ultimately, there's a point where. Where Stella says to Stanley, you didn't need to be. I think it's in scene eight. You didn't need to be so cruel to someone alone as she is. And Stanley says, delicate piece, she is. Stella says she is. She was. You didn't know. Blanche is a girl. Nobody was tender and trusting as she was, but people like you abused her and forced her to change.
Stella's responding to Stanley giving Blanche the birthday remembrance, the ticket back to Laurel.
1:05:31 Erin: Yeah, that's so mean, so horrible.
1:05:33 Wes: But there's some connection between this and the kindness of strangers, right? Because Stella's making this connection between cruelty and aloneness. Aloneness, or being a stranger is supposed to elicit kindness, I think, in Blanche's world. And Stella is supporting that idea here, which is that. And this is one of the things, right, about Southern hospitality, which is that hospitality is all about how you treat strangers. It's all about going out of your way to give them food, to give them lodging, to be kind to them in various ways, to show them respect, even though you don't have any familial or personal or intimate connection.
And so it becomes an expression of status. It becomes an expression of one's superiority and independence that you can be so giving to a stranger as opposed to treating them as some sort of threat. You're strong enough and you have enough resources that they're not going to be a drain on those resources and they can't be a threat. So you can invite anyone to eat at your table, but that's still a very distant relation, right? That's another way of avoiding consummation, to keep things at that kindness level. And so cruelty, again, kind of lines up with descending into the situation that Stella is in, where desire is associated with cruelty, where she has a very dynamic and sexual.
You know, she has a very strong sexual connection to Stanley, as she said. You know, she says, like things happen under the sheets, right, or something that make everything all right no matter what the actual relationship is like. So she has that. That's compensation enough for the fact that socially that's going to manifest itself as cruelty. So Stanley's sexual dynamism, his raw masculinity, is sexually exciting, but it's inevitably cruel outside of that cruel and other social context. So do you choose the cruel but close, or do you choose the distant stranger connection but kind and genteel?
I think that's kind of the opposition here. And I was going to try and get that. Get us back to the relationship between cruelty and reality with that. I don't know if I've.
1:07:53 Erin: I like what you're saying there. We've talked about how both Blanche and Stanley are trying to exert control over Stella. I mean, I would say that the cruel but close is certainly true. But the other quote you gave about how, you know, everything is better or it makes it all better or what, or whatever. I mean, there's a papering over the reality that's also happening in that Sexual relationship, relationship. So, you know, she gets drawn back to him after he's beat her up with the famous Stella scene on the sort of hypnotism that he has her under with this physical relationship that they have.
In the same way, I think that that thing that you're talking about with Southern hospitality, the flip side of that is the falseness of that, actually. Right. That person that you let into your house and are very kind to is actually not someone you're close to, and it's not your family, and it's not someone to whom you owe a particular loyalty. So I think that's where people, at least for me, as a Yankee, I don't know you can. You can. We have this north, south thing going on here between the two of us. You can defend your own. But, you know, a lot of.
A lot of people in the north, north find that to be false, right? Like this. Like, Southerners are very quick to become friends with you, but it's a very shallow relation. Not. Not always. But I'm saying, you know, the. The stereotype is that they are super friendly to you and invite you in like you're one of them, but really they're talking about you behind your back. Whereas, like, the Northerners will just, like, tell you to your face that they don't like you. And they'll keep you out and keep you out and keep you out. And then one day after you've, like, paid your dues, suddenly you'll find that you're in.
And then once you're in, you're really in. And they won't talk badly about you behind your back. Right. I'm trying to draw a connection here to the. To the fact that they're both kind of like a distortion actually of reality. So, like, Stella is in an abusive relationship. It's. It's weirdly a relationship that kind of works for them. It's actually a happy relationship, which I. Is a very odd thing to say. I know, and I'm not. I'm not saying it makes it okay. I'm just saying that the. The sexual aspect of their relationship is. I mean, I think that she acts drugged during.
During a lot of the. At least the film.
1:10:08 Wes: Yeah, the way. The way Tennessee Williams describes it is narcoticized. Stella's lying down in the bedroom. This is the beginning of scene four. Her face is serene in the early morning sunlight. One hand rests on her belly, rounding slightly with new maternity. In the other hand is a book of colored comics. Her eyes and lips have that almost narcotized tranquility that is in the faces of Eastern idols.
1:10:32 Erin: Yeah. It's like she's drugging herself with the sexual aspect of their relationship to be able to bear the other elements of it. Though she does say that she gets a thrill out of the fact that he likes to, I don't know, break things and be disgusting.
1:10:47 Wes: Yeah, yeah, she says that.
1:10:48 Erin: Yeah. What I want to draw the connection to, and I think this is also going to go back to you're talking about is when Mitch comes and accuses Blanche and they have that confrontation. One of the key quotes of the film for me is Blanche says, I don't want realism, I want magic. Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be punished for it. I try to give that to people. She says the magic, like a form of hospitality, is to give people magic and to not tell the truth. And she tells what ought to be true. So the odd thing about Stanley's reality is that it's keeping Stella narcoticized or whatever the word is. And that seems to be the magic for them, right? The colored lights, the idea that there's some sort of hidden magic between them.
1:11:42 Wes: So this is his argument right after being accused of cruelty to Blanche by Stella in saying delicate piece and. And Stella saying how tender she was as a child. This is Stanley's counterargument. When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it, having them colored lights going. And wasn't we happy together? Wasn't it all okay till she showed here? And wasn't we happy together?
Wasn't at all okay till she showed here. Hoity toity describing me as an ape love that he thinks this directly addresses the question of cruelty towards someone who is soft and tender. And his argument is just that Blanche's fragility and susceptibility to cruelty, they represent an impediment to their relationship. So in a very obvious sense, it's just about her being there and annoying Stanley and getting in between them and their relationship and probably making it difficult to have sex because there's no privacy. But on another level, it's the fact that her world of magic is entirely antithetical to Stanley's world of acting Impulsively, the two things are.
So if we think of the impulsivity as reality, in a way, and Blanche's magic as some sort of transformation of that. Stanley understands that her magic is, for him, is a kind of dark magic. It's kryptonite. It takes away everything that he wants out of a relationship, which is just for things to be right there on the surface, to be obvious. When you have an emotion, you express it. When you feel violence, you do it. Not all this social obfuscation and these social niceties.
1:13:40 Erin: Right. And he accuses her fragility of being a show, but really she is that fragile. Right. Like she really is. Well, first of all, I love the contrast between. And I think you get this more with Vivien Leigh than you did with Tandy, even though Tandy is also a small woman. Not as small as Leigh, though. But you get this real contrast between Stella's body and Blanche's. And Blanche just looks like you could just break her in half, you know. But she is also mentally fragile. I mean, and she really is, because ultimately she can't handle. She can't handle the truth.
And she has to make up a fantasy in order to deal with what. What, you know, with. With her being committed. The truth that is thrust upon her in the end is what makes her. Her crack. She really can't deal with it. Or maybe she chooses to. I don't know. As soon as I say something, I argue the opposite. Maybe she chooses to retreat and to the realm of fantasy completely. But still, that's an inability to deal with the reality. The cruelty of Stanley's committing her in the end. And also Stella has a part in that, too. And also with the reality and the cruelty of the rape perpetrated against her, which is, you know, I can only see that rape is symbolic, ultimately.
1:14:58 Wes: Yeah. It kind of ruins the play, in a sense.
1:15:01 Erin: It does.
1:15:01 Wes: If you read it. Literally.
1:15:03 Erin: The only redeeming thing about Stanley is that he actually really does love Stella, I think. And then she's at the hospital giving birth, and he goes home and rapes her sister.
1:15:12 Wes: Yeah.
1:15:13 Erin: Like, you can only think of that in terms of.
1:15:15 Wes: I think that's a violation of the Napoleonic Code.
1:15:18 Erin: I think. I think it is. And he. And he just becomes such a complete villain. Williams says in a. In a letter to Kazan that, you know, Stanley isn't a. Like a dyed in the wool villain or something like that, that there is no black and white, there's only gray. Well, in that moment, he becomes a 100% black hearted villain. And so I can only see that in terms of symbolism, which is Stanley is going to. In the act of. The symbolic act of rape, is going to bring reality to Blanche's flirtatiousness, reality to appearance.
1:15:57 Wes: So it becomes, he says, we've had the state from the beginning. So the rape works at a metaphorical level as between two forces of nature or two fundamental philosophical principles. You could even call it will and representation, if you really wanted to get philosophical. But, yeah, reading it literally is. I think it's not good for the play.
1:16:18 Erin: I agree.
1:16:19 Wes: It ruins everything.
1:16:20 Erin: Yeah. So just the idea that the cruelty of that, like, literally, of course, rape is cruel.
1:16:28 Wes: Yeah.
1:16:29 Erin: And the fact that she's been trucking in these modes of enticement and keeping men at arm's length and toying with them in this fantastical way means that Stanley has to, like you say, you know, elementally. He has to force reality and cruelty upon her by taking what was for her just a plaything and making it like, this is the consequence of what you're doing. You know, you're toying with men and now you're gonna get raped, you know, which is terrible, obviously. But like I said, it can only work symbolically that she's been leading up to this. She's been dancing up to the line, and he's going to force her to cross it, basically.
1:17:07 Wes: Right.
1:17:08 Erin: One thing that we should talk about that we really haven't is Mitch. Mitch and his mommy. I'm guessing you have a lot to say about that. What's really kind of a cool element. Not a cool element, but a really interesting element of the film and the play is the fact that this cruelty is really pronounced for Blanche when it's directed at her and Stella, I guess, but only to the extent that she sees Stella as an extension of herself. Maybe. But Stella and Stanley have, like, counterparts in the Upstairs Neighbors, you know, Eunice and Steve. I really like the moment when Steve is, like, beating up Eunice or whatever.
And from downstairs, Stella and Blanche are laughing at it. So it becomes like a comic thing for them. Like, it becomes like the Honeymooners or something. Like, they're like, ah, look at them. And they're. They're Punch and Judy show or not, that the Honeymooners is ever. I don't want to say that because I hate how people are down on the Honeymooners.
1:18:06 Wes: He only threatens to hit her. Pow. Right in the kisser. But.
1:18:10 Erin: And it's all a joke. It's whatever. Anyway, people think that that's, like joking about abuse. But it's not.
1:18:16 Wes: I know. I know.
1:18:18 Erin: I'm, like, such a big honeymooners, too.
1:18:19 Wes: Yeah. I love the honeymooners as well. We should watch that sometime.
1:18:23 Erin: We should. But anyway. Yeah. So it becomes, like, an object of fun for them. And in the same way, we realize that, like, for Mitch and I guess the guy. The other apes at the poker table. Poker. I hardly know her. The whole interplay between Stanley and Stella is also kind of a joke where they're like, oh, don't worry. He consoles Blanche and is like, oh, don't worry about it. They're crazy about each other. They all just think that this is okay, you know, and. And Stella thinks that it's okay, which is just, like, really strange. But I like that contrast between what's going on with the upstairs neighbors and what's going on with Stanley and Stella.
Because you. You could see that in. In Blanche and Stella's mind, when there's a little bit of distance, it becomes like they're watching, you know, the colorful neighborhood characters putting on some kind of comedy routine. When it's happening to you, it's. It's very terrible and immediate. Even though Stella bounces back from it quickly and is ready at Stanley's beck and call. But I guess what I'm interested in, in that is the idea of Mitch's character. And Mitch is being like a spectator to what's going on with Stanley and Stella in the same way that Stella and Blanche are spectators to what's going on upstairs.
And how that kind of contrasts, I think, with his susceptibility to Blanche's charms. I don't know. Maybe I'm inventing attention where there is none. But how can he be like, oh, Stella and Stanley, aren't they just so cute? And it's okay he could beat her up, but they really love each other and kind of be okay with that. Or even just be friends with Stanley and deal with Stanley and then also be taken in by Blanche. I mean, I guess you could say, like, it's because he's a mama's boy. And there's something appealing about Blanche is nice girl that you could take home to mother routine.
But then why is he hanging out with Stanley? Like, why is he part of Stanley's crowd? I don't understand that.
1:20:17 Wes: Well, he likes to play poker, right? Yeah. I mean, there is tension between him and Stanley, I think, from the very beginning. I guess it's towards the end, when he's bitter, that he accuses Stanley of bragging. Right. Stanley says, luck is believing you're lucky you. You. You brag, Brag. Bull. Bull. But Mitch is involved in the very beginning. He's pissed off by Stanley beating Stella. And he repeats this line about poker shouldn't be played in a house with women. He is kind of a foil to Stanley, but he's a weak one in the film and in the play, he comes across as quite bland.
He endangers the play in a sense, because he's boring. And he is. I think maybe you disagree, but like when he first meets Blanche, I think he's coming out of the bathroom. And then he goes back to the bathroom, which very quickly after that, which you can only assume is, you know, he's pretending to need to go to the bathroom. And then because he has to go through Blanche's to get to it. And then they have that conversation and she's acting quite oddly. And ultimately he says, I've never met anyone like you before. You get the sense that he's commenting, he's aware of her oddness as a person and he's commenting on it, but he's allowing himself to see that as charming because he needs to.
I think they both have a vulnerability in common that's predicated on having lost someone. Right. He also had a girl that he
1:21:49 Erin: died, even though he doesn't seem that broken up about it, which is really weird.
1:21:54 Wes: And he's also taking care of his mom in the way that Blanche took care of her relatives at Belle Reve. It's a believable portrayal for me that he would get taken in by Blanche because he is, in a way, they're both in a desperate circumstance. And there's that, you know, after she tells him that weird story about having married someone who's gay and him killing himself, you know, you think Mitch might have said, okay, this is a little much for me. Right. He says to her, you need someone, I need someone. Could it be us? Something like that. So it's clear that they bond in their desperateness and in their need to have someone.
1:22:39 Erin: Well, and yet his not to rank pain, but he's clearly so incapable of feeling as deeply as she does. I mean, he's clearly so beneath her. I think that's why he has to be. I mean, I agree that he's very bland, but I think that's really necessary because he has to. To be so obviously less than her. It's like she's slumming it emotionally in a way, or intellectually in a way.
1:23:04 Wes: And she messes with him. Right. She'll say in French to him. Do you. It's not in the film, but in the play, you know, do you want to sleep with me tonight? She says in French, and then she'll say, do you speak French? That's too bad. Or that's a shame. When he says he doesn't. Of course, if he had understood that's a very risky thing to do. Right. If he understood that French phrase.
1:23:22 Erin: I don't think she was taking a risk at all.
1:23:24 Wes: That's the. Yeah, so. Okay, yeah, so she understands her audience. She does, but that just gives you an example of the fact that she. Yeah. Intellectually, she feels herself to be in a very superior position to him.
1:23:37 Erin: And is. And is. I think. I think that's fair to say, you know, she's rather. Rather cultured. Of course. You know, Stella, too, though, she's put that part of herself totally to sleep and anesthetized it.
1:23:51 Wes: It awakens at certain moments in her diction, like, she'll start to speak more. Like Stanley's speech when they're arguing will get more basic and she will get a little bit more formal in the way she speaks. I can't think of exactly where.
1:24:05 Erin: But that's a great observation that I hadn't noticed. And of course, we've talked about something in Blanche, maybe that attracts her and repels her to Stanley. But there has to be something in Blanche that also attracts Stanley as it repels him, too, and is that, you know, he has to bring Stella down off the column. He has to bring Stella down to his level. I take that as his desperate desire to not have anyone be superior to him, that he's very insecure.
1:24:37 Wes: I mean, in the same way that Blanche seems to think that sex would be slumming it, he seems to be excited by sex as a means to robbing someone of their status, which is not unusual for men, because that's part of the dynamic. Because, like I said, femininity maps onto status, and part of the dynamic there, at least sometimes is destructive. It's like it's wanting to defile, which is related to wanting to bring someone down to one's level.
1:25:08 Erin: So you think that's innate in Stanley's? See, I'm looking for a reason why he's so insecure. Like, why can't he just let Blanche do her thing? Why does he have to stomp on her?
1:25:20 Wes: Well, yeah, it's accentuated by his insecure. Like the. He's intolerant of having someone who's superior in class to him around.
1:25:28 Erin: Does that mean that he has to be more aware of his lack of breeding than he lets on. Or there's, you know, like, what is making him into. You know what I mean? Like, what's the engine for that? Because if he really is just an ape, and if he really doesn't care about any of the things that he's not supposed to care about, then he wouldn't be threatened by someone who is asserting superiority over him. In other words, what is the lack that he's perceiving in himself?
1:25:54 Wes: Yeah, well, that's his one. That's the sign of some basic refinement in him, that he can be insecure slightly more than an ape.
1:26:04 Erin: Right. But what is that? Is that what attracted him to Stella in the first place? And then when they're fighting, as you say, is she using that as leverage against him? A little bit and keeping him a little bit in his place? So it shows that she has a little bit of control over him. Not much, but that's a way for her to exert some kind of control, is by exploiting that insecurity a little bit.
1:26:27 Wes: I think in a way that Stanley and Blanche have the same idea, which I kind of alluded to just a second ago, but. But about sex as either slumming it or bringing someone down to one's level or being defiled or defiling. And there's a great speech for Blanche near the end, but right before she's about to be taken away, where she goes off into this fantasy that it's triggered by an unwashed grape. So part of. By the way, speaking of defilement, there's a scene in the middle of the play. After Stanley has found out these rumors about Blanche, Stella asks him for a kiss.
And he says, not in front of Blanche, as if the fact that she is now defiled, you know, he's the one who suddenly becomes modest. Before, it was Blanche worried about the indecency and the lack of privacy. And then suddenly that turns and there's kind of a Lady Macbeth element to Blanche, except it's about sex. Right through the whole play. She's always taking baths. Her name, you know, blanched. A kind of artificial, purifying. She's not really a virgin, but she's trying to accomplish that retroactively by all sorts of cleaning rituals. It comes out at the very end when she asks whether the grapes are washed.
And Eunice is baffled by that. The idea that anyone would wash grapes. And she says they're from the French market. And Blanche says that doesn't mean they've been washed. And then the cathedral bells chime so you get this signal that, right, death is near. Where death will in this case mean being taken to the mental hospital. Those cathedral bells, they're the only clean thing in the quarter. Well, I'm going now. I'm ready to go. And then she doesn't want to pass in front of the men, so they get her to wait and that's when she tells the. She has the speech that's kind of predicated on.
That's an association from the unwashed grape. So she says, I can smell the sea air. The rest of my time I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? She plucks A grape. I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean, I will die with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond mustache and a big silver watch. Poor lady, they'll say the quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven. The cathedral chimes are heard and I'll be buried at sea, sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard at noon in the blaze of summer and into an ocean as blue as chimes.
Again, my first lover's eyes.
1:29:07 Erin: And that isn't in the film, we should say, oh, that's all cut out.
1:29:12 Wes: Okay. She does ask about the grapes in the film, but we don't get that speech.
1:29:16 Erin: We don't get the speech, no.
1:29:18 Wes: So I really love that speech because it really digs into. It's really not emphasized in the play, the whole question of cleanliness and trying to. It's not like at some point Blanche is ever doing out damn spot or something like that. She's just taking a lot of baths and there's her name. And we really don't get a lot of her obsessing about her own purity. She kind of makes a joke of the fact that she's pretending to have virginal values. Like she rolls her eyes over Mitch's shoulder when she says she has kind of. Of old fashioned values. Something like that.
But here this relationship to desire is really articulated very well in this speech because this idea of a lack of cleanliness in this fantasy, she's basically killed by desire. So here again we get this relationship between death and desire. Because she's eating, she's satisfying the desire to eat. But the thing that she eats is unclean. And yet it's by dying that she's purified, and it's also by dying that she gets a kind of cover for love. Right, so it's with the Doctor who. This is a kindness of strangers moment. Right. She's holding the hand of a nice looking Doctor and this is a kind of prophecy of what's about to happen with the Doctor that shows up to take her away.
1:30:37 Erin: Oh, of course, yeah.
1:30:39 Wes: So she's enjoying the kindness of this ship Doctor and that's the guise under, or the cover under which she can have a relationship. It can't be direct, it can't be consummated. It has to be in this indirect way where and now we see that that indirectness is connected directly to death. Death is like an alibi for her and it can purify her after the fact because we get to the point where she's sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard. This is a fantasy of the conditions under which she could, I think, enjoy her sexuality or enjoy her animal, brutish, Stanley esque nature, which she can't do without this idea of the kindness of strangers and dying in a purification ritual and all that stuff.
1:31:28 Erin: That's really great.
1:31:30 Wes: Are we ready to drop ourselves into the ocean in a white sack?
1:31:34 Erin: I think so. The whole time that I, when I watched the film and now hearing you talk, I was thinking about that time that you came over and you were about to eat unwashed fruit. And I was like, wes, you've got to wash that. And you're like, oh.
1:31:47 Wes: And I was just as uncomprehending as Eunice. I'm like, what? You wash fruit? The animals don't wash the fruit. Why should I? All right, thank you, thank you and, and thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to say that if you're listening to this on the feed for The Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find us@subtextpodcast.com patreon.com Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about.
When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter Njoy Subtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
Prestidigitocracy in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939)
Jul 19, 2021
The Wizard of Oz is supposed by the land’s inhabitants to be its most powerful magician. But far from having any actual power, he is not even native to the place in which real magic is in plentiful supply. Oddly, this supernatural world seems to be secretly governed by mundane sleight of hand, and growing up, for Dorothy, involves uncovering the flimsy basis of adult authority. Which magic is more potent: the childish imagination, or the symbolic power of grown-ups to educate it? Wes & Erin analyze the 1939 film, “The Wizard of Oz.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:09 Wes: The wizard of Oz is supposed by the land's inhabitants to be its most powerful magician. But far from having any actual power, he's not even native to the place in which real magic is in plentiful supply. Oddly, this supernatural world seems to be secretly governed by mundane sleight of hand. And growing up for Dorothy involves uncovering the flimsy basis of adult authority. Which magic is more potent? The childish imagination or the symbolic power of adults to educate it? Today we discuss the 1939 film the wizard of Oz. This is Wes Alwan, and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. So, Erin, what do you call a government that is ruled by a stage magician?
1:18 Erin: What?
1:19 Wes: A prestidigitocracy.
1:24 Erin: That's a good one, Wes.
1:26 Wes: So we had been talking about this offline a little bit, so you. I think I've already familiarized you with this idea, but one of the things that struck me about the film and the book is that I find it very interesting that we get transported into this magical world, this fantasy world, but at the center of it, there's this person who is not a real magician, doesn't have real magic. So there's plenty of real magic in that world with witches and so on, and then trees that throw apples at you and all that. But when it comes to this central figure who's supposed to solve all these problems, he is just a kind of a version of a stage magician with no real powers.
So it's as if there's this intrusion of the mundane into something that's supposed to be fantastic. I should say that in the book, it uses the word rule. The wizard of Oz rules over the Emerald City. In the script, it's cut out. He lives there, you know, he's said, of course, to be the all powerful. It's unclear, in a way, what his role in the Emerald City actually is. In the book, he's straightforwardly a ruler. I think I had gotten the idea that he was the ruler of Oz, and then I realized, well, wait a minute, you know, it's just the Emerald City.
2:45 Erin: Well, is there Professor Marvel in the book or is everything from that frame narrative kind of.
2:50 Wes: Everything from the frame narrative is cut out. I only read the first part of it and then skimmed the rest. So a listener can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure, yeah, there's no Professor Marvel.
3:00 Erin: Wow. Okay. Yeah, Yeah, I guess that didn't occur to me until you said that while we were watching. Cause we watched it together. It's funny, you know, every time I watch that movie, and it's been a lot of times I watch it as a kid, like, I just, I remember all of my emotions and I'd never tried to analyze it before or even seen any sort of, you know, I just sort of swallow the message at the end and that's it. And never thought about it. So this is a very strange exercise to subtextual a film like this that I have such. I think we both were talking about how we have such primal feelings when it comes to this film and such weird remembrances of it and. Yeah, so that's one of the things that I. You said it. And I kind of noticed that. And lots of other things too, that I don't think that the wizard is the only charlatan in Oz, which is interesting too, but we'll get to that, I'm sure.
3:51 Wes: So. Yeah. What do you mean by that? He's not the only charlatan?
3:54 Erin: Well, I think Dorothy might be the other one. I don't know if that's like too strong of a word, but I mean, she lands in Oz, she's getting celebrated for something that she does accidentally. And in fact, later when the, when the Wicked Witch shows up and says to her, did you kill my sister? Dorothy says, no. She's like, no, no, it was an accident. I didn't mean to kill anybody. And then she kind of like trades on that fame to get into the Emerald City. And then we find out that Oz himself showed up there accidentally and was. Oh, and she's also, of course, the main part of that is that Glinda thinks she's a witch and she's not really a witch.
Right. So she has this magical power foisted upon her. And presumably so has Oz. He got there accidentally via balloon. And so we can imagine that his inhabiting Oz and making a sort of a long term career out of. Out of being called a wizard by the, you know, indigenous population is.
4:58 Wes: He's sort of the Kurtz of.
5:01 Erin: Well, yeah. And so he's sort of got a.
5:03 Wes: Heads. There's no heads on spikes. But.
5:05 Erin: Right. Well, I have a great deal of sympathy for him because he has to. He actually has a tremendous amount of wisdom, I think. And he's built it up over time. He's taken his personal brand and built
5:16 Wes: it up over time. And unlike Dorothy, who.
5:22 Erin: Yeah. And Dorothy just wants to leave. Right. That's because she's pure at heart or young at heart or whatever. The thing at the beginning is, you know, she just wants to leave. But maybe the Oz figure is a figure of, like, this is what will happen to you if you're not, you know, real connected with your roots the way you should be by going back to Kansas. This is the bad stuff that'll happen to you, which I don't know that that's bad. And I also don't know. Again, it's. Watching this as a kid, it's like, no one would think of this. But I also just wonder what good or comes of Dorothy's return. Like, it's a dream. She has to wake up eventually. Unless she's gonna be in a coma for the rest of her life. But. Yeah. So I don't know if that's the right choice, per se, if it is a choice. And what awaits her when she goes back to Kansas?
6:07 Wes: What you said earlier on really struck me, which is that when you sort of watch this without thinking about subtext, you just sort of absorb the message at the end, which is a weird message, Right? How does she put it? She says, so this is. She's still in Oz and she's talking to Glinda. I get bothered by plot holes in movies. Just irrationally bothered when, you know, I know I should be suspending disbelief, but the whole idea that she had to go through all this because you've always had the power to go back to Kansas.
6:41 Erin: Right.
6:42 Wes: I'd be really pissed.
6:44 Erin: Are you freaking kidding me?
6:46 Wes: That was a lot to go through. A lot of very traumatic stuff, including thinking you're gonna die.
6:51 Erin: Well, the idea that, like, Glinda, you know, who thinks that Dorothy is a witch and that Kansas is a star, still, like, knows what's best for Dorothy, and that is a perilous, like, physical and emotional journey is really funny.
7:05 Wes: So it's the Scarecrow who says, then why didn't you tell her before? Which, you know, they have to do. I mean, imagine this hadn't been explained. That would have been so frustrating. So Glinda, because she wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself. Then the Tin man asks her, what have you learned, Dorothy? Dorothy Well, I think that it wasn't enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie M. It's that if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that right? And Glinda says that's it because it
7:41 Erin: just wasn't there in the first place. So you can't lose something you didn't have. Like.
7:45 Wes: Yeah. What does this mean if it isn't there? I never really lost it. So what did she think she lost?
7:53 Erin: Her heart's desire. So in other words, she's saying she never really had any ambition.
7:58 Wes: Well, she left because she's trying to protect Toto.
8:01 Erin: Yeah, but Professor Marvel also picks up on another motive. And, you know, he picks up on the fact that she's running away after a couple of tries. And then he says something like, they don't understand you at home. They don't appreciate you. You want to see other. Other lands, big mountains, big oceans, big cities. Something like that.
8:20 Wes: And then Dorothy says, why, it's just like you could read what was inside of me.
8:25 Erin: Right? But I think that the desire to escape with Toto and this desire to break out of Kansas and go see all these places, protecting Toto and leaving maybe are two sides of the same coin.
8:36 Wes: So, yeah, it's not just protecting Toto, but in the very beginning, there's the dissatisfaction with all the adults that aren't paying attention to her and her concerns about Toto. And then this fantasy of going to somewhere over the rainbow. This suggests that her heart's desire has something to do with finding a place where people would listen to her. Or, you know, maybe it has something to do with her parents. Right? She's an orphan. She's with her aunt and uncle. She's with people who are preoccupied with surviving and tending to the farm.
And in particular, the three farmhands are going to give her all this hypocritical adult advice. Be smart, be courageous. Things, qualities that they don't themselves have. And then ultimately, I think we're supposed to think that the heart's desire thing is ambiguous between growing up and not growing up. Because Oz is sort of this hybrid world. It's not the over the rainbow paradise. There's lots of terrible things in it. And it's this weird, weirdly childish place, right, where there are munchkins. And it's sort of a. If going away from home is growing up, she's not really left, in a sense, by going to Oz.
That's not the.
9:47 Erin: To go back to the beginning, you know, we first see Dorothy and Toto on the road back to the farmhouse, escaping Ms. Gulch. And then we very quickly see Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. And everything seems to me to look like a Dorothea Lange photograph. Like, you know, very dust Bowl y. This is a very broken down place. And Dorothy's pristineness, shall we say, like she's not engaged in the work of the farm the way that some children might be. You know, she's not like some girl who's out there with her pigtails. Yes. But somewhat disheveled and with some overalls, like helping out around the farm.
And. And you can even say, I guess, that her attachment to Toto also marks a kind of like a divergence from farm life. Just having a pet solely as a companion. When I was a kid and I still kind of feel this way, I always thought of Auntie Em less so Uncle Henry because he uses. I figured out why he uses terms of endearment with her, and he's a little gentler with her, which I think is typical of an older man with a young girl. But I always thought of Auntie Em as being really mean, and she's really not. In fact, Auntie Em actually in particular seems to really love Dorothy.
And there's an urgency to what she's doing in those opening scenes. Like, the farm incubator has broken and so they have to save all these baby chicks, and we're told that, like, some of them are gonna die. So that's a little bit immediately sort of a weird thing. And so Dorothy's coming up and Dorothy has really real concerns. Like she's trying to say that Toto is, you know, gonna get taken away and Ms. Gulch is mad and all this stuff. And. And I guess Auntie Em is like, actually kind of being pretty patient with Dorothy. But, you know, as a kid, you just get this sense of injustice on Dorothy's behalf, that there's an urgency in what Dorothy is trying to tell them.
And everyone is dismissing what seems like really real concerns.
11:40 Wes: Why do you think she's being patient? Cause it did seem to me like she was being dismissive.
11:44 Erin: So she doesn't just, like, yell at Dorothy and tell her to go away. Yeah, she, like, tries to give a reason for why she can't listen to Dorothy right now. And she's. She's in the middle of. I don't know if I was in that kind of a situation. And I had some kid coming up to me and bugging me while I was trying to do something urgent. I probably would treat her with a little bit less charity than that, which is really mean to say, but I'd just be like, hey, you know what? Just like, get away from me. I'll talk to you later, you know. Instead, she kind of tries to explain to Dorothy what's going on and says, you know, okay, go away.
Like, she does dismiss her, but it's not. But she's not a cruel person at all. And I thought of her as being cruel when I was a kid. Like, everybody's so mean to Dorothy, and Dorothy's trying to tell them that Toto is gonna get hurt and who cares about whatever they're doing, you know, which is a. Very. Obviously, you know, kids have a strong identification with Dorothy and feel those feelings with her, even if that's not kind of what the larger film is showing more objectively.
12:37 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think the adults all have good reasons in a way, or at least from an adult perspective, because in all likelihood, at that point in the movie, Dorothy's overreacting to something that. A cranky neighbor. Right. Who did something to Toto. It turns out not to be the case. Turns out to be that the threat is very real and something that should be taken seriously. But these are people who are focused on survival. The whole idea of a desolate landscape is very important, in contrast to the attempt to raise animals and to engage in farming and animal husbandry.
And there's a lot here about fertility, including the incubator and the chicks, which I think we have to draw connections between that and Dorothy's adolescence. And, you know, there's also even the contrast with Mrs. Gulch. Right, Gulch. Like a dried up creek bed, an old hag. The very personification of infertility associated with being an old maid really is the suggestion. So in this context, where for the aunt and uncle and the farmhands, their lives at stake as well. Right. They're taking care of animals, they're trying to nurture and keep alive.
So they're playing this role with respect to the farm that they're not entirely playing with respect to Dorothy. Right. They're sort of. It's a kind of version of parenting that's going on with the farm, nurturing and raising up and all that stuff. And Dorothy is an orphan, lives a life that is oblique to that in a way. And I think that's something I really did not think about, which should be glaringly obvious. Which you pointed out is how out of place she is with that dress. And, I mean, even before she gets the ruby slippers on, right. She's just.
She stands out like a. She's very feminine.
14:26 Erin: Yeah.
14:28 Wes: And, you know, like you said, she's not wearing the overall. She's not the farm girl. She's more of a. If she's in high school, then she's in theater club. Right. She's in the drama club. She's very passionate. She's very emotive. She's very idealistic and very caring. And in a way, it's just childhood. It's just understandably childhood. But on the other hand, you get the sense that as an orphan and as someone with substitute parents, she is now, like I said, living a life that's oblique to her circumstances in a really interesting way.
15:06 Erin: So at one point, Auntie Em says, it's no place for Dorothy around a pigsty. Just struck me that, like, when your whole life is pigsty adjacent, what are you supposed to do with that? Where are you supposed to go? And I think that's where we get. You know, it's right after that that we get over the rainbow. But it's clear to me that she's being in the way that she looks. And the fact that she's dismissed from these farm scenes must mean that Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are putting a lot of money and care into her and that they're kind of, you know, preserving her to be a young lady. She's supposed to be 12.
15:38 Wes: I think she's like the Michael of the Godfather. She's.
15:42 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
15:43 Wes: She's being kept out of the family business.
15:47 Erin: But at the same time, you know, I like what you say about the idea of fertility. So she's this prime little baby chick that they've preserved. Right. They've incubated her. And she suffers from no peers except for Toto and an abundance of parents. Right. And I think, at least I feel. And this is, again, one of those primal childhood residual emotions that, you know, Hunk and Hickory and Zeke are all, of course, childlike in their way, which becomes heightened in Oz in the dream sequence. But their sense of authority and superiority over her I felt as a little kid, though I couldn't articulate it, that that's, like, extra galling, you know, like, she has.
She has these five authority figures over her, plus Ms. Gulch who are, you know, trying to tell her what to do. And it's like these people keep hitting themselves in the hand with. With hammers and they. They're trying to tell her what to do, and she's just trying to help her dog man.
16:40 Wes: Yeah, it's unwarranted, Right. They don't really possess any authority. And some of this, I think, is about class. It's almost like Dorothy, she's like a little, you know, so there's a family romance fantasy going on here where she's the little adopted aristocrat who's slumming it with all hicks as she's coming of age. Right. With the. The farmhands are all represent a. Sexual possibilities and sexual threats. So there's. There's that kind of danger arising. But it turns out they're all, in a way, they're all very undangerous men. They don't really have any sense of authority about them.
They lack the qualities. Right. That they possess. They're quick to give her advice and to do things that, you know, that they can't do. Right. So have a heart, be courageous, stand up to her, or have the brains to avoid Mrs. Gulch. Stuff like that. And then you get that great scene where Zeke saves her from the hogs, but then he's, you know, he's really practically ready to faint because he's so afraid. I think it's really interesting. You know, you get this scene, theories. There's a bunch of steps in the advice she's given. And it begins with the uncle saying that Dorothy needs to.
I think Dorothy's left by this point. But that saying to the ant that Dorothy needs someone to play with other than Toto. And then you get the whole thing about brains and heart and courage from the farmhands. And then the aunt shows up to chastise everyone for not working and says, you need to find a place where you'll stay out of trouble. Which Dorothy then interprets as, yes, I need to find a place where there is no trouble.
18:25 Erin: Right, Right.
18:26 Wes: And then you get the over the Rainbow song. But I like this idea of yours, you know, that she has no peers, including no one really to play with, but an abundance of parents. It's just that, you know, it's not that the aunt and uncle are bad parents. I'm sure they're fine parents, but it's just the nature of the relationship between adults and children in which adults will always fail children to some extent. I think that's built into the system and we can discuss why that is. They're all sort of people behind the curtain. Part of growing up is you see the curtain pulled back and you see what adulthood really is, and that they're not adults aren't that all powerful and all knowing and that they're kind of faking it.
Right. It's very disturbing. But, you know, she has an abundance of parents who are. At the beginning of the movie. You know, they're people who are not listening to her for one reason or other. Even if some of those reasons are good.
19:21 Erin: I think Auntie Em and Uncle Henry being so much older than she is that the three farmhands kind of fill in the void that would ordinarily be the parents age or a little bit younger. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are kind of like they would be her grandparents age. I think that's important because I think she doesn't criticize them. They're, you know, as elderly parents, though they're obviously still working the farm and everything. They're gonna have a different relationship to her and a more. Rather, I think, probably a less complicated one than those who are actually in the proper age of a parent to a child.
But. And I think we see that in the way that the dream sequence, you know, highlights things in the frame narrative. So we don't get too much indication that Dorothy. You know, Dorothy's kind of humoring the farmhands. You could sense a little bit of her kind of annoyance, but she doesn't say anything out loud like she's listening to them. And she seems to, you know, she kind of has that look like she's taking in everything that they're saying. But then we know that she understands their faults rather well because their dream counterparts contain all of those inadequacies and strengths.
I mean, I would argue that even though, like, for instance, Hunk has his advice to use your head undermined by the fact that he keeps hitting his hand, that undermining actually doesn't take away from the fact that what he's given Dorothy is kind of good advice. Like, just try not to go past her house and then there won't be any trouble. And Zeke's immediate springing into action when Dorothy falls into the pigsty. That is a courageous act. And though it's undermined by his sort of shell shock after he's done. Oh, and there's also. What I love about that, too, is that he's separated from the pigs the whole time by the fence, and he's just touching them with a prod.
Like, he doesn't actually touch them directly because I'm like, how could he be so scared of pigs and work around the pigs all the time? But he's built a barrier for himself. So he's a little bit like Oz in that way, I guess. But he does courageously jump in without a thought and save her. So their strengths and their weaknesses are registering in Dorothy's mind because they show up in the dream sequence, but Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, they don't have those. I mean, you can argue that Glinda becomes like a surrogate mother to her, but they're kind of, well out of it.
And I think it's because Dorothy is trying to figure out how to be an adult. And Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, they're on the other side of that bell
21:49 Wes: curve of adulthood, and they're representatives of the home that she's trying to get back to. So in a sense, they have to be absent.
21:56 Erin: Right. Auntie Em's the only one who shows up as herself in sepia tone in the crystal ball. In the ball, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
22:03 Wes: It's interesting, in the scene with the farmhands, Dorothy, she doesn't accuse them of being brainless. She defends herself. Right. So. So when Hunk says what he says, you know, you'd think he didn't have any brains at all. He says to her, and she says, I have so got brains. And he says, well, why don't you use them then? And then ultimately she says, oh, Hunk, you just won't listen, that's all. So she does accuse people of not listening to her. You know, at some level, obviously, she's aware of their flaws and they get integrated into the dream.
And the question, you know, there's this confusion over whether they're her deficits or the deficits of the adults outside of her. And of course, you know, as you. As you point out, they obviously have strengths as well. Hunk is right, and he's hitting himself with the hammer. But that doesn't really suggest that he doesn't have brains. It just suggests that he's clumsy.
22:53 Erin: Exactly.
22:54 Wes: Which again, you see that in the dream world with the scarecrow. The scarecrow turns out to be a good planner and ends up doing lots of brainy things. Right. And including having the idea to drop the chandelier on the guards. But it's something else. It's something else to do with his level of physical coordination, which, you know, it's more suggestive of a kind of childishness or a being at an earlier developmental level. And the point is to develop some sort of agility. So if growing up is what's at issue, it's not about just going from not having brains to having brains or not having a heart to having a heart, stuff like that.
It's more about the development of a skill when it comes to using those things. Or maybe it's about coordination. Maybe there's something in this metaphor of being physically clumsy that we. That we could tease out of that. But I do think that, you know, what the farm hands are doing is not very helpful. They are attacking her. They are saying, yeah, you didn't have any brains at all. So they're not all that skilled, as you would expect, at how you deal with a child who is upset, how you deal with her concerns. And in the case of the aunt and uncle, it's.
The reasons are different than with the farmhands. With the aunt and uncle, they just have, you know, they're busy with the farm and with their cares and concerns. In the case of the farmhands, they are nominally busy, but they. They have time to give advice. It's more about them being full of themselves is not the right way to put it, but if you were to be a psychologist about. You would say they're defending against their own negative self assessments. Right. Why would you tell someone that they don't have any brains, really? It's what you think about yourself.
And your first reaction to someone who needs your reassurance is to be given a feeling. You detect in them that they've done something that's unwise. And you get induced with your own insecurities about whether or not you're capable of doing intelligent things. And then you say to yourself, I am the kind of person who's capable of doing intelligent things. And here's a young person who just needs to be told to do those intelligent things. When, of course, that's not how development and maturation work.
25:10 Erin: And the sense that they're not that far ahead of Dorothy in their own development, like, they have to figure themselves out, too. Like, Dorothy's dream is doing the work of maturing her and the three farmhands by resolving those issues, or whatever you want to call. I don't know if you can resolve defenses. I don't want to use the terminology
25:30 Wes: wrongly, but, yeah, what's to come is this, famously, is this kind of maturational journey that she's on. Right. So it's the whole dream. And by the way, I think as a kid, well, even now, I think it's left ambiguous enough to. Well, I guess it's not really that ambiguous. It is a dream in the book. It's real. And the studios had to make it a dream because they thought the audience wouldn't buy it. Suspend belief and buy into this fantasy world.
25:57 Erin: Well, I think it's so effective because it multiplies the interpretations by putting the dream narrative alongside the frame narrative. I think it's really effective, at least at the beginning.
26:07 Wes: As I mentioned to you before I read this, Salman, the only thing I really read on this is a Salman Rushdie essay called out of Kansas.
26:15 Erin: Yeah, you told me about that. And then I tried to find it, and it was behind the New Yorker paywall, and I let my subscription lapse. But I'll read it after. I think I've read it in the past. Yeah, okay. It rang a bell.
26:27 Wes: So, yeah, I just want to give him credit for the things that I'm borrowing. The one thing that he makes note of. Right. Is that it's hard to turn a movie or plot into a dream sequence and not have the audience object to that, to have that be satisfying. And he mentions Dallas. Right. Where at a certain point, the character played by Patrick Duffy, it turns out, is just everything proceeding is just a dream, and the audience is pissed off. And the show, you know, I think that ultimately that led to the. The end of the show. But there's really none of that in the wizard of Oz. There's no sense that nothing is at stake, even if it's just all a dream. Because what's at stake is psychological. Right. Even if it's all in her head, what's really important about the movie is what's in her head and what's happening to her developmentally. Yeah. So it doesn't decrease the power of it at all.
27:19 Erin: That's really good. Before we move on to something else, I just want to say a couple things I noticed this time about. Particularly about Zeke. I just love. I mean, I love all three farmhands. And unfortunately, Jack Haley gets kind of the short shrift in the opening sequence. But I love Zeke saying to the pigs, get in there before I make a dime bank out of you. Which is. I didn't ever get that. So I never got the fact that he meant, you know, make a piggy bank out of one of the pigs. So taking a pig and making it into a figurine, you know, and then we have all these mixed metaphors around animals. So he says, are you gonna let that old Gulch heifer try and buffalo you?
28:01 Wes: Yeah.
28:01 Erin: And then later he says, next time she squawks, go right up to her and spit in her eye. So all these animals are associated with him. And he's like the pig man. But I like the fact that he suggests making the dimebank out of the pig. And then in a way, it's like he's. You know, we talked about this when we were watching the movie, but, you know, it's like Dorothy, in her head has transposed them into these stuffed animals that she's playing with. And so I think there's something of that seed planted with the dimebank and the fact that Zeke would have to be an animal because he's. Well, first of all, he has that live quality. And I know that a lot of his lines were improvised. That mixed animal metaphor thing continues to happen even in Oz.
28:41 Wes: Oh, doesn't.
28:42 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Lots of different animals. I know he improvised a lot. And actually it was a real problem because Judy Garland kept laughing when he would come up with something surprising. He was really good at coming up with one liners. And she would crack up. And one time, Victor Fleming, even, like, she could not stop laughing. He took her aside and slapped her across the face. And actually, he was very upset that he had done that. And later she. She kissed him to let him know that she was over it. But, you know, anything to make the little girl give a good performance.
29:14 Wes: But.
29:14 Erin: Yeah, but those little nuggets are just so, so good. It just struck me how really cleverly put together this is.
29:21 Wes: I didn't notice that. I mean, I rewatched the first 10 minutes with the script in front of me, and I. When you're just watching it, it all happens so quickly in the beginning that you miss. Or at least I. You know, I've always missed a lot of the details and not even really understood some of the dialogue. When I came to dimebank, I honestly, I didn't figure that out. This morning I saw that. I'm like, what does he mean by dimebank? That must just be some weird bit of slang from back then. But, yes, I did not think of Piggy bank, nor did I notice. Yeah. The mixed metaphors with the animals. That's good.
29:56 Erin: We have over the Rainbow, the greatest American song ever written.
30:00 Wes: Is it. Is that your opinion?
30:01 Erin: No, that's a fact. That's not my opinion. Well, I know it was voted the greatest song by the American Film Institute, but it is the single greatest song in the history of film, I would say. I'd say this movie has the single greatest moment in American film history, has the single greatest song in the history of film, and it has the single greatest performer of the 20th century.
30:23 Wes: All those three things what is the single greatest moment?
30:27 Erin: The transition into color.
30:28 Wes: Oh, right, of course.
30:29 Erin: Don't you think that's like, the most. Single most powerful moment, at least in American film, if not in, like, all film?
30:35 Wes: Well, it's. Yeah. I mean, it's gotta be one of them. It's gotta be. For me, it's hard to assess a lot of. I mean, I know for both of us and for many people, this is a film people grow up watching. Right. So I can't even remember the first time I saw it. And it's just a thing that was on every. Every year around Christmas, and I watch it every year and everything. The movie is so powerful. I mean, it's so. For a child, it's just so captivating. And that moment, which he goes from black and white or sepia to color is so exhilarating. I still remember that from being a kid.
And I don't think it was ever not exhilarating. You know, it just became more exhilarating as with each re watching. And then, you know, the same thing with the song, which is interesting that the song, you know, you get this, what turns out to be kind of the centerpiece of the whole film, just right up front early on. Very powerful, very touching.
31:30 Erin: Sometimes I imagine these types of scenarios, like the National Film Registry is going to be razed to the ground and you're tasked with saving one film. This is the one film I would save. I don't know if it's the best film, but it's definitely the film that you would have to save. Right. That seems obvious to me. This is it.
31:48 Wes: I could be on board with that. I'd have to think about. I'd have to run through all the options.
31:55 Erin: But another thing I'll just say is that, like, this is.
31:58 Wes: I mean, there is also Face off with Nicolas Cage. So it's a hard.
32:01 Erin: Oh, damn it. Why do you have to complicate things for me? Like, I think I have all the answers. And then I remember that there is Face Off. If Face off is preserved by the National Film Registry, then who is running that? Probably Nicolas Cage. I just want to say, too, while we're at over the Rainbow, why does no orchestra on earth sound like the MGM orchestra did between the years of, say, 36 and 60? Nothing. Nothing sounds as rich and lush as that MGM studio orchestra. I mean, it is just fantastic. The opening sequence with the clouds and the exhilaration of it.
I mean, I get, like, an ecstatic thrill whenever I see those clouds and hear that orchestra at the beginning and and it just. This is just the height of American filmmaking. Which is funny because, like, the two great examples of the height of American filmmaking are, I think, this and Gone with the Wind. Same year, same involvement by Victor Fleming, and both very, very troubled productions with a lot of problems. And yet, like, this is a product of the single greatest studio, with the single greatest assemblage of musical and creative talent in the history of American film.
Like, this is the high watermark for me of American culture. You got, like, the greatest singers, greatest dancers, the greatest directors, choreographers, set designers, musical arrangers, vocal coaches, and then this orchestra. It's just. Anyway, this really does it for me. I'm gonna stop now.
33:37 Wes: Well, you're reminding me of one of the pictures in this book called the Making of the wizard of Oz, which I know you've read and I've skimmed. It's a picture of them scoring the film and, you know, with the films on in the background and the orchestra is. Is at work and they all look so delighted with what they're doing.
33:57 Erin: You know, it's just incredible. It's incredible what people were able to do with.
34:01 Wes: Yeah. And the sets, you know, I noticed, you know, on this last viewing and we talked about it a little bit, is just how beautiful the set design is. And I was even looking at part of it, you know, just watching this on a. On a large screen tv, and I don't know if this is a higher resolution that I've. Or the level of detail I'd never really paid attention to. Maybe that's what it is. But the. With the costumes, the makeup, the set design, they're all incredible. And I had this moment where I was thinking about looking at the Cowardly Lion's makeup, which is so great, and just thinking about what would have happened if this were cgi.
So we have like an uncanny Valley Cats situation on your hands. Could have been really awful. And so the lack of modern special effects doesn't detract from it at all. And even, as you had mentioned to me, the tornado, they used a stocking for that. Yeah, Everything looks so good and is so compelling.
34:59 Erin: The fact that you have Bert Lahr's costume as a lot of our listeners, you know, this is such a. The lore around this movie is so well known. But you know how it was £90 and he would sweat through it and stink. And there were two people that MGM hired, two guys who were hired to dry that costume out overnight. So it would be not clean, but it would be dry the next day for filming. And, I mean, when you have a studio that you run, like the Beijing Olympics, and you know how to get things done in this sort of, like, fascist dictatorship kind of way anyway.
35:37 Wes: Yeah. One more thing to say. One of the big factors at play here is the incredible talent of some of these people. Of course, Judy Garland herself, and not just the singing, but, I mean, how do you describe what she brings to the role? There's that element of purity. Right. But just the level of passion and emotion.
36:00 Erin: And she's like a perfect human conduit of every deeply felt emotion.
36:06 Wes: It could almost work as a silent film because of the way people are using their bodies and their facial expressions. Everything is right there visually. In the case of the Cowardly lion and the Scarecrow and the Tin man, there's that, I guess, vaudeville element. Is that the right way to put it?
36:26 Erin: Oh, and, yeah, they're all vaudevillians, including Judy.
36:30 Wes: Yeah. So I think that's what I'm trying to get at. What is that? To me, it's just about emotiveness and expressiveness and the fact that, you know, when the Scarecrow, the way he moves is such. It's such a perfect. With him always falling down and having to get back up. And there's a playfulness about everything. There's an energy to it.
36:54 Erin: Yeah. I think that vaudevillians have, or had the perfect combination of sensibilities in what they did. So when you're in front of a large, boisterous audience that has paid very little money to see you in a. In a. In a, you know, touring, say, roadshow in, let's say, Kansas, you have to work to hold their attention. You have to entertain them. You have to feel as though they've. They've gotten their money's worth. And you also have to be very, very real, you know, and. And very, very good at what you do, or you'll get booed. And, you know, you have to be a real pro.
You have to have a physical stamina to perform at the vaudevillian level, in terms of the touring schedules that you had and sometimes multiple shows a day. And you can't have poor technique and not be good in order to survive in that kind of environment. And you can't be precious about yourself, and you have to be really, really tough. But I think the most important thing about that is the connection with the audience. And this is something that I really. And we could talk about this in Postscript, but this is something I really believe strongly in, in the arts as performative and you're doing something for an audience, and you're putting yourself on the line for an audience.
And I think vaudevillians knew what that was firsthand better than anybody else. And that's the power that you feel, you know, reach through the screen 75 years later, or however many years it's been. That's the power of that, I think. The relationship with the audience and the idea that they know what their job is. And it's not to make themselves look good or to express themselves, though those are byproducts. It's to entertain you and to do anything they can to do that. And that kind of, shall we say, generosity is not something that you see anymore.
38:49 Wes: So vaudeville would involve different types of acts, right, which would include magicians. Am I right about that?
38:55 Erin: Yeah.
38:56 Wes: So there's an interesting connection between the form of the film and the content. With the wizard of Oz, who as the professor, Right. I mean, he's part of a traveling circus. But do we characterize him as a kind of vaudevillian, or am I stretching that?
39:12 Erin: I think he'd be a lower tier vaudevillian, not a very good magician. And some people, you know, they weren't good enough to cut it and got axed from lineups. But he might have been what we would call an early afternoon, given his little chance to shine and maybe eventually getting axed kind of perform. They would have these all day, almost long, long programs. So he would be like the warm up for the warmup maybe.
39:38 Wes: Yeah. And he's a fortune teller, so I might be stretching this too far. I'm not sure where I. Obviously, within Oz itself, he's doing something very much like stage magic assisted by technology to make himself seem more powerful than he actually is. But in the everyday world, right? Do we see him. Do we get the impression that he's more than just a fortune teller fleecing people out of their money by pretending to, you know, like to give Dorothy her fortune? He has a peek at her picture, right? And then he does that whole fortune teller thing where, you know, after she says, that's my Aunt Em, he says her name is Emily.
40:19 Erin: Yeah, yeah. That's such a great.
40:20 Wes: Dorothy's like. Right. How did you know that?
40:22 Erin: I guess, you know, to kind of get back to the plot here I was thinking about kind of like the various threats at work around Dorothy. Like, so we know, like, not four minutes into the film, we have baby chicks dying. There's like the threat of death due to, shall we say, natural events like the tornado, or threats to home and livelihood, which are brought about by, I think, like, a combination of things. First of all, the natural events of maybe like the Dust bowl, and also poverty. You know, like the wagon breaking down, the house, like, very easily coming apart in the wind, the incubator breaking down.
So there are all these, like, big threats to Dorothy, I guess, and then there's the sort of the individual threat of Ms. Gulch. But we learn really quickly that she's also one of these larger threats. Like she has money and power, and she shrouds herself in the law to basically advance, like, a personal vendetta against this girl and her dog. So she's very much like the tornado, I think, in that she's bigger than the gales and she can sweep through and destroy what she sees fit. But unlike the tornado, she's sort of, like, actively malevolent.
And so I was wondering. I was thinking to myself, you know, is Professor Marvel actually actively benevolent as opposed to Ms. Like, is he the sort of counterpoint to Ms. Gulch? And I kind of think he is. I mean, he also is sort of shrouding himself in these ideas of fortune telling or being able to see into Dorothy's past and future. You know, he's kind of shrouding himself in these larger forces, which are fraudulent, but he is using them very effectively to try to return Dorothy to safety. And she really doesn't get very far, and he immediately reorients her back home.
So it's kind of funny because she goes on the whole journey through Oz and all that in order to want to come home, but she's already been intercepted and returned home by the professor, which is something that just occurs to
42:15 Wes: me right now in a much less dramatic way than happens in the dream.
42:19 Erin: Right, right.
42:20 Wes: So now I'm looking at the script, and now I realize where I got the stage magic thing from. And it's actually a wonderful irony, because when the actual sign on his wagon says Professor Marvel, acclaimed by the crowned heads of Europe, let him read your past, present and future in his crystal. And then underneath that, also juggling in sleight of hand.
42:43 Erin: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
42:44 Wes: I love that irony because it sets up this very grandiose idea that he can perform real magic, or, you know, maybe magic isn't the right word, but do something that's truly supernatural, and then it's completely undermined by something as trivial as juggling and then by sleight of hand, which is obviously deceptive. So he's doing two things at once. He's trying to pretend to be, to have these powers convincingly on the one hand, and then he's betraying himself immediately with the sleight of hand. So just to get back to your point, he does come across as very benign, as he will say later on, he's not. What does he say? I'm not a good wizard, but I'm a good person. So there's a lot in the dialogue about whether he's good. You know, Dorothy says the wizard of Oz is.
43:32 Erin: I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad wizard. So I just want to give you that.
43:35 Wes: Okay? So it's really interesting, right? She's just gotten to the supposedly the over the rainbow place and now she's eager to get back. Maybe that's not so surprising given the fact that she landed on a witch. But, you know, she says, I'd give anything to get out of Oz altogether, but which is the way back to Kansas. I can't go the way I came. No, that's true. The only person who might know would be the great and wonderful wizard of Oz, Oz himself. So Glinda, right, who has the power apparently to travel around in a little bubble, doesn't know how to get her home, but. Or she does, right? We find out at the end. But the wizard of Oz, who's just a. You knows, really, what he knows is sleight of hand, is the person to go to to find out how to get home and who can travel in a balloon, you know, but he has no real control over. As opposed to Glinda's little bubble.
44:26 Erin: Yeah. Meanwhile, Glinda has like a 12 bubble garage. She can't lend one to Dorothy anyway.
44:32 Wes: Exactly.
44:32 Erin: She's like the Jay Leno of Oz.
44:34 Wes: Can she spare a bubble? Spare bubble to a poor girl? So Dorothy's first question, is the wizard of Oz, is he good or is he wicked? And Glinda says, oh, he's very good, but very mysterious. He lives in the Emerald City and that's a long journey from here. Did you bring your broomstick with you? So Glinda thinks she's a witch too. So very good, but very mysterious. And then, of course, course, mysterious just turns out to be. Well, he's behind a curtain, essentially, and not, not really what he purports to be. You know, obviously the benevolence of the, of the professor in the real world is borne out by the benevolence of the wizard in this world.
Although there is this. There's something much more sinister right? In Oz, because the wizard's means of appearing powerful is to scare people and to have that contraption with the image of the head and to speak very loudly. And in this case, he has to tell them to go away and get the broom. And when they come back, you know, he's still not going to help them. So in Oz, to maintain the appearance of power, he has to be unhelpful. He has to be like the adults who are not listening to her, which speaks to why adults don't listen to children. And so there's an irony to it, because to protect children and make them feel safe, you have to project some sense of power, which, of course, as adults, we don't really possess.
It's not like our insecurities have all vanished. It's not like our childhood fears and wishes have all vanished. We're still afflicted with all that. But we represent this much safer world with a sense of kind of a finality to it, to children. And at a certain point in adolescent development, that doesn't become enough because it becomes a kind of a form of fraud. And it also means that there's a rigidity to adults in which they're not as capable of listening. So really, right, the farmhands, in the beginning, they do want to help her, they do want to protect her, but they can't think about that in a way that involves some sort of openness or vulnerability because they're to protect her and to protect themselves, they have to focus on this feeling of being powerful.
So that shows up in a much more obvious and sinister way, right, where the professor just. He uses his powers for good, even though he's lying about seeing Auntie Em in the crystal ball. He, you know, he gets Dorothy to go back home, which is the right thing. But in Oz itself, that sort of thing becomes much more sinister. It all works out in the end, of course, but. So there's two forms of evil is too strong a word. But there's two forms of the sinister in Oz, right? There's just the obvious gulch, like malevolence of the witch. And then there's this other, more complicated thing, which is, I think, more representative of adults in general, which is the kind of fraudulent, hypocritical adult world which an adolescent, in growing up has to learn how to navigate.
And it's not optional, right? You do have to kind of become more fraudulent as a person as you get older. Right? Kids can say everything that's on their minds. They get away with that. We have to hide Socially, we have to start concealing a lot of things.
47:45 Erin: What you're making me think of is the fact that the journey as being a means of maturation for Dorothy is not just about the typical things. One might assume that, you know, she has to go through perils and make difficult choices and all that kind of thing. It seems like part of that is that casting her in the role of a witch and the parallel to the wizard of Oz is kind of charlatanism as also being really crucial for her maturation so that she can understand what it's like to suddenly be thrust into the role of an adult. And really, it's like the wizard of Oz's own charlatanism is because those around him are like, oh, okay, you've gotten here by balloon. So you're a wizard.
48:27 Wes: Yeah. That's very interesting.
48:29 Erin: Yeah. Like, the idea that you turn 18 and now, okay, you're an adult because society says so.
48:35 Wes: You've landed on the witch, so to speak.
48:38 Erin: Yeah. And that part of being an adult is not maybe willing on our part. I mean, it is to a certain respect. But in another respect, you have a lot of things foisted upon you as an adult that you don't particularly want and a lot of roles that you have to play. And so maybe that understanding on Dorothy's part is that the adults around her are all various forms of charlatans, and that she has to understand that and be sympathetic to that as a way of humoring the fragile masculinity of the farmhands or whatever the case may be. And the funny thing, too, that struck me this time around, I think it's significant that she lands in Munchkin Land, so she's immediately an adult among children, visually.
Right. Like, she's cast into this role as an adult, even though she has Glinda there to guide her. The Munchkins are. Some of them are children, some of them are adults. But just the visual contrast, it's as if she's gone into a doll world.
49:34 Wes: Yeah.
49:35 Erin: And she's the adult. And it's also. She's also thrust into the world of bureaucracy. Right. Because this is actually like a Munchkin Land is actually like a highly regulated and organized little place where they have, like, a mayor and they have the official coroner, who I love most.
49:51 Wes: Sincerely. Dead.
49:53 Erin: Yeah. And the land of procedure, where she has to, I don't know, deal with that.
49:59 Wes: Yeah. There's all these wonderful, wonderful contradictions. So you. Yes. They're. They're the Munchkins. It's a world of adults or the size of children. You get all these fusions of the childish and the adult. So including, like the lollipop guild. Right. So a guild is we associate with work and. Oh, yeah, lollipops are what children suck on. It's not just, you know, about pleasure, but it's this very. This kind of oral, infantile pleasure, like a pacifier. I think what that reflects is Dorothy. We know she wants to leave in a way early on. I mean, as you pointed out before, she even has to escape for Toto's sake.
She wants to leave. And I think there's a conflict inherent in what it means to leave. Leaving can mean leaving your family and becoming an adult and starting your own life. And leaving can also mean regressing. It can also mean going back to being an infant. And so when she arrives in Oz, you get a kind of hybrid in many different ways of these two things, of a regression to something infantile and adulthood. And the infantile part of this is reflected both in the idealizations involved in Oz. Right. There is a somewhere over the rainbow aspect to it.
It's beautiful. It's got wonderful things. What does she say about it in the end? She says that it's beautiful.
51:23 Erin: After she wakes up, she says, like, some of it wasn't very nice, but most of it was beautiful. But just the same, I kept saying, everybody, I want to go home.
51:31 Wes: Yeah. So the infantile aspects of Oz are reflected in both the idealizations and in the evil that appears there. So at the end, Right. She says some of it wasn't very nice, as you just pointed out, but most of it was beautiful. You get all this beauty and wonder, but then you get all this very obvious evil. That's kind of the way the infantile mind works. It splits into these, into black and white. But you also, in the form of the wizard of Oz, you get the intrusion of a more complex. As I was pointing out, there's something sinister in that as well.
And that's the more complicated version of evil, which is involved in being an adult. That in going to Oz, there's a fusion there that reflects her conflict between wanting to go back to being an infant and then wanting to become an adult. It sort of reflects that conflict within adolescence. And it's complicated by the fact that to individuate an adolescence, to achieve our independence. So we typically do that by seeking out new identifications. Right. So in adolescence, we start identifying with our peers. We might become involved with a subculture.
We pursue certain aspirations Maybe we get wrapped up in the idea of a certain sort of career. So the things that kind of bring us out of the familial fold are influences on us. So if we thought we were becoming free. Right. Because what's happened developmentally during childhood is that it starts with identifications with parents and authority figures. And we might think that that's. To become an adult means to escape that. When in fact, we're put into this quandary where we really just have to develop those identifications further. And so it might seem like we're not actually escaping at all.
And the final thing I want to say about that is that there is a kind of magic involved there, which is to say. So I think the prototype for magic is this idea that our thoughts can influence the world. Something like that. In this case, in. In the way human beings influence each other. That's very close to true. Even. Even language. It's. It's. It's very weird when you think about it. And it's predicated on the fact that. Right. We are very prone to identification and imitation. So infants acquire language simply unconsciously through something that I think you could think of as a.
As a process of imitation and identification. And then they form themselves as persons in the same way. They develop a conscience, they develop. Acquire certain values. And that is the power, in a way that adults have. I mean, it's two forms of power. It's the form of power that children have that we don't. Right. We can't, you know, as adults, we can't learn languages in the same way. Become fluent, completely fluent in the language just by being exposed to it. And on the other hand, it's kind of the scary power that adults have over us. So what I'm trying to think through is this connection between stage magic, the hypocritical world of adults, and then the real power that they have over us.
Something that's implicated in our development into adulthood.
54:45 Erin: The whole idea of the dream sequence, I think, furthers the point that you're making. Like the fact that it's a dream sequence adds so much to the original story. Because of that, like, she's. This is the. The dream is the place where you can. You used some particular phrase that I went out of my head now. But kind of in talking about fashioning one's own reality, the only place in which we can do that perfectly well, I suppose, is just if we lucid dream. But is in the dream world, like, is while we were dreaming. The dream itself is the place where she can have this sway, even if she's not herself powerful in the dream.
Or she is, I think, powerful in certain aspects, not in others. The fact that the dream sequence exists as a dream sequence is also a form of consolidation of power on the part of Dorothy, because she gets to go there and express her wishes, even if it's a wish to not be powerful.
55:41 Wes: Well, it is interesting that she is conferred a new power as soon as she arrives. Right. So she kills the witch by accident. It's not because of any power she really has. But then Glinda shows up and immediately puts a target on her head.
55:54 Erin: Yeah, right.
55:56 Wes: By giving her this. These incredibly powerful shoes. Although we don't really know what that power is. And it turns out it's not. Even Glinda says something like, they must be very powerful for her to want them so much. But we never find out what the witch thinks those shoes can do.
56:12 Erin: They give her protection and she can't touch them.
56:15 Wes: Yeah. So for Dorothy, I guess there's, at the very least, there's the power of the shoes involves the ability, the fact that they can't be taken away. But the only power reserve we really find out about in the film, it's not a power that functions within Oz, it's just a power that extracts you from Oz. Right. It takes you back home, it takes you out of the dream. So that power, in a way, crosses the boundary between what's inside of the dream and what's outside of the dream. In a way, it speaks to the power of the dreamer both to create that world and to extract themselves from that world.
56:49 Erin: Not to get into issues of gender too much, but I think it's also.
56:53 Wes: Yes, you know, I hate that. I'm just kidding.
56:56 Erin: No, yeah, no, it's about the power of femininity, maybe.
57:01 Wes: Yeah, absolutely.
57:02 Erin: This is a movie that I think appealed to me on a certain level as a little girl, like a very little girl, just because I was just very hyper feminine little girl. And I liked pretty things and I liked looking at sparkly things, wearing sparkly things, you know. And so the ruby slippers, like, on a very elemental level for me, like, I had a pair, I got a pair of these really gaudy ruby slippers I wore all the time. And that, as a form of protection, I think is really interesting and suggestive. But as I mentioned at the beginning, Dorothy is someone who's feminine and out of place in the farm environment. And this kind of gives, like a cachet to that, you know, in a way, currency that she has in.
57:46 Wes: They're glamorous. Right, right.
57:48 Erin: And also the.
57:49 Wes: It's the power of glamour. Go aheads.
57:51 Erin: Right? Yeah, exactly. No, but Glinda has that too. You know, that's the whole point of Glinda, is that she's beautiful and fabulous or whatever she's supposed to be. Get to be powerful things. When you were the, you know, surviving wife of Florenz Ziegfeld.
58:07 Wes: Let me help you be fabulous, darling.
58:09 Erin: Yeah, exactly, exactly. But a lot of this movie, I think, is an expression of little girls fantasy as a really little girl. And I know a lot of other women who say this, they really loved. And I loved Polly Pocket.
58:23 Wes: I don't know that.
58:24 Erin: Okay, so you get these little things. Sometimes they're just about the size of a little makeup compact or something like that. Just a little round or a little different shapes. About the size of like. You ever see a container of blush or something like that? And about that size, and you open it up, it has all these little figurines in it. And the main little figure is Polly Pocket. And she has all her little friends and she has little tiny clothes and little. So it's like a. It's like a dollhouse, but teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny, shrunk down. And little girls love that.
Like, there's this whole contingency of women that I know who say, like, oh, when I was a little girl, I loved little tiny things, you know, and so to me, the munchkins are like the dollhouse or the Polly Pocket. And, you know, the ruby slippers and the sequence with the wash and brush up company in the Emerald City as making yourself pretty and going through makeover and getting your hair done. And, you know, these are all things, I think, that are really strongly associated with things that little girls like.
59:25 Wes: Well, you're making me think about the fact that little girls like them because they also represent this kind of fusion. Right. So shoes are for going out and dancing in and being an adult and looking beautiful in with potential implications for finding a mate. But to make them that sparkly speaks to possibly not always, but possibly speaks to the mindset of a child. They overdo it, maybe, let's say.
59:55 Erin: Yeah. And the dollhouse, too, is having a baby doll.
59:59 Wes: Exactly. So what does this say about the power of the ruby slippers?
1:00:04 Erin: I'm just kind of thinking out loud here. She has to be able to move through Oz with the threat of the Wicked Witch of the west ever before her, but still being able to move freely, they provide her and she has to walk. She can't fly. She doesn't have a broomstick. So they are her vehicle in a way. Right. It's like her little Popemobile because she can't get injured by the Wicked Witch whenever she's wearing them. And as we were talking, too, I was thinking about the trees that don't want to have their apples picked off them. I don't know why that was coming to mind, but now it just occurs to me that the red color, as a really vibrant color, comes up again and again in Oz.
And I think that, first of all, it's like, on a purely Technicolor standpoint, it's a really vibrant color. It's also associated with, as we already said, with glamour and maybe with maturation. Maybe that's the inherent connection that I felt was there, that the apple being red, is like a mature apple. So it's a color that's somehow related to maturity and also to vibrancy and to the perfect encapsulation of what is the opposite of Kansas. So one thing that we didn't talk about is just going through the door and into Munchkin land. We immediately see this land of tremendous fertility and fecundity because of the flowers and the overripe beauty of the foliage and everything.
And even the Munchkin lands, the houses, even the two brick roads, the one sort of maroony and one yellow. The vibrancy of that is very obviously meant to be a shocking contrast to. To the dust bowl, Sepia Kansas. And I think, like, the ruby slippers are sort of like the crowning symbol of Oz and of whatever the opposite of that. Sepia Kansas is.
1:01:58 Wes: Yeah. I mean, part of it is the vitality. Right. Represented by the color red. The blood element.
1:02:04 Erin: Yeah, vitality.
1:02:07 Wes: And I know, you know, psychoanalytic literature will make a lot of that fact and the fact that she's becoming sexually mature and relating that to the blood color, which, whether or not you think that's a stretch, I think there's a point to that. I mean, you could even see it as a representative of youthfulness and think in terms of the witch or wanting the power that's associated with youthfulness and vitality. And, of course, you can read Gulch, the character of the old hag, as representing the fear on the part of young women that the acquisition of vitality and fertility implies taking that away somehow from women who are aging.
Right. It's almost like there's a. It's like an economic theory where there's only so much vitality to go around, and if I take it out of the air, then I'm depriving others of it. It's. It's kind of a. So it's another form of magical thinking where vitality is this zero sum game. And then you begin to fear retaliation on the part of one's elders. And this goes beyond, I think, witches. Right. It even applies to the whole idea of zombies, for instance, I think has something to do with the fact that we live our lives according to ways of life and laws and rules and norms that are.
Have been passed down to us for many generations. So the dead make their presence felt. And there's, I think, maybe some irrational, unconscious fear that if we deviate from their ways, they might retaliate because those ways are the only ways in which they can still be alive. They have to be alive in us through those ways that they've affected us. Maybe the idea is that just the existence of the dead is predicated on the existence of the living. So again, we fear some sort of envy which would bring them out of their graves. To take that back, something like that.
So I think it applies more broadly. So, yeah, you can read this as the worry of someone who's maturing that her maturity comes with a cost to adults. And it's the sort of cost that will lead them to retaliate, even if we just think of it as envy. And so this is true, of course. Right. The way that adults relate to the young are older people, let's just put it that way. Older people relate to the young. Is there is some element of envy in that. And it comes out even when they're trying to help them, as we see with the farmhands, even this idea that when they're trying to tell her to be smarter or do this or that.
You could read all of that as involving a certain amount of hostility that comes from the fact that this person has their life ahead of them. So you want to help them, shape their life. You want to use your adult powers to affect them and live vicarious through them. Maybe that's the way to put it, you know, this desire to live vicariously through which there's a positive element to that and being helpful. But there's also this kind of, I want your life. I want to take it from you. I want it to be mine. I think maybe that's the. You could read that as the power vitality is the power the shoes represent.
And that would explain why the witch wants them. I think in the book, it seems to me that it's not explained at all. We know that the witch thinks they're powerful. We don't know why. And then, of course, the filmmakers have made their own little addition to this. I don't think the shoes help Dorothy get home in the book, but in the movie they serve that purpose, which actually really ends up being interesting because, like I said, the power, it's not an intra Oz form of power at that point. It's a power that transcends the dream frame.
1:05:53 Erin: It just strikes me how personally perfect this film was in ways that I didn't even know until this moment in terms of my obsession with it in childhood. Yeah, yeah. So she interprets her journey as having gone looking for her heart's desire, which is funny because, you know, nominally, the reason, as we already talked about, is because of the very real threat to Toto and that necessity for leaving so that she can save Toto's life. So I suppose the question becomes, like, what is her heart's desire and where do we end with that? So the desire to see big cities and oceans and mountains, as Professor Marvel says to her at the beginning, Dorothy identifies with that and says, yes, you know, that's the reason why she's running away, is to have these experiences and to go to the place beyond the rainbow and to go to a place where people listen to her, perhaps.
All of which are very reasonable. I mean, the over the rainbow fantasy I think we can just interpret as being like, she wants to get out. She wants to see more than just the parameters of this farm in which she really has no place. So that seems to me to be a very reasonable expectation. Maybe she has to go away to college or, you know, whatever the case may be, because there is no role for her at home. And so I suppose what's troubling about the end is for me, just understanding this on this level for the first time really is okay. So she comes back and she, like the dog, is still possibly going to be seized by the sheriff and destroyed, and she's still in an environment in which she has no place.
And that is going to become more and more of a problem the more she grows up. And when she goes through puberty, that's going to be an even bigger problem. Unless she could find some group of fellow theater kids or whatever or somebody to come and date her. I don't know. What do you think about all this?
1:07:52 Wes: Yeah, maybe the word backyard extends to, like, the nearest small town.
1:07:57 Erin: Hope so.
1:07:58 Wes: Square dancing and the. Well, I think I'm just thinking on my feet about this too, but I think I've kind of talked about this a little bit already. But I think heart's desire is always ambiguous between adult desire and the desire to be a child. In some sense, our heart's desire is to for a utopia, for somewhere beyond the rainbow which reflects our initial conditions either as human beings in the golden age or in Eden, or as infants in the womb or in some perfect childhood situation. And our heart's desire is always to return to that. And that heart's desire gets grafted onto adult heart's desires and it complicates them immensely.
So that if I'm looking for a mate or I'm looking for a career, those things can get complicated just to the extent that they are infused with this other element, which is essentially grandiose. It's a desire to return to the powers of childhood in which the world does seem to be controlled in a way by our thoughts because we are just subject to the mind reading ministrations of adults. You want to be fed milk and suddenly you have milk. So that, for instance, if you want to be a great scientist like Mr. Frankenstein and that ambition is to infused with this more regressive and grandiose element, then it becomes very difficult to function in that way.
And this is a real problem, right? So when you see the reason why people get stuck is because their adult heart's desires are just too complicated by and caught up in this other grandiose element. The other thing I thought about here is about Toto, which there's so many things obviously we didn't get a chance to talk about because the film is just too big. But we didn't really talk about what Toto might represent. And Toto, in a way seems to me to represent curiosity or desire itself. Right? Toto is always nosing about. Toto is the one who draws the curtain, revealing the wizard and exploding his pretenses.
So that it makes sense in a way to say that her motivation is too protect Toto. Because it does seem to mean that she's protecting or maybe developing or nurturing something about herself. And that could be this more adult version of desire and curiosity and aspiration, something playful, right? Going back to this idea that she only has Toto to play with and something that's not overly grandiose and overly serious, so much so that it could become crippling. So what about staying home or staying in one's own backyard? Obviously, right on the face of it, that's not a real solution.
This is one of the things Rushdie hates about this, it doesn't make sense to him. This whole idea, this little moral at the end, is precisely the opposite. And Rushdie reads this almost in terms of the desire of immigrants to leave and to start anew, to start fresh. And so it's disappointing. This idea of return actually, is ultimately disappointing. But one way to read this is that not going any further than one's own backyard is just to reject the regressive or grandiose element of the impulse of desire. So it's to stay down to earth, so to speak.
1:11:41 Erin: I like that. I think, on the one hand, if I take it literally, it's a little sad, because staying in your own backyard for Dorothy means resigning herself to the fate of Auntie Em. I think I've successfully said Auntie Em through this whole thing. I was resolved to say Auntie Em and not Auntie M, even though I firmly believe in Auntie as the pronunciation. I wanted to do it as the movie's pronunciation. But anyway, so I think I've done that successfully, but I don't know. Anyway, so it's becoming a. You know, what Professor Marvel will describe as a careworn person. And I imagine that I'm assuming Auntie M is elderly, but, you know, there's. She could be 30 years old,
1:12:21 Wes: and
1:12:21 Erin: that's gonna be, you know, I mean, like, migrant mother was, you know, 32, I think, in the Dorothea Lange photograph, maybe 34. But anyway, so there's a danger in that for me, because part of why Dorothy doesn't fit in this way is because she's a dreamer. She's bigger than this world. And so it seems to me to be a waste to have someone like that stay in her own backyard. However, as you were talking and I was reflecting on what you were saying, I was thinking a big theme with the three farmhands and their dream counterparts and also with Dorothy, is that you already have the answer within yourself and that Dorothy, on some level, recognizes, as I said at the beginning, the strengths of the farmhands, as well as their weaknesses.
Their weaknesses are kind of highlighted in the dream sequence, but they've also already had the answers. And the wizard only has to provide them with the outward recognition of those inner strengths. Yeah. To make them feel worthy or to make them feel as though they can call them. Like with me not wanting to call myself a poet, if he had given me a certificate of poetry or something, then I could feel comfortable calling myself that. So it's a strange thing. It's as though this journey of maturation, it's actually a journey of recognizing the maturation that has already occurred.
1:13:43 Wes: Yeah.
1:13:44 Erin: Or the seeds within oneself that have already presented signs of sprouting. I think more maturation for Dorothy, but also recognizing the strengths already inherent in those around her. So insofar as the home or the backyard is one's own psyche, not to make it too grandiose. That is really interesting.
1:14:06 Wes: Yeah. No, I think you're exactly right. And I'm glad we didn't miss this, because obviously that's a recapitulation of what's just happened with the wizard. Right. The idea is that they're all seeking outside of themselves. Right. Someone is going to hand me a heart. Someone is going to hand me brains. I'm just recapitulating what you just said. And really, it's not something that's bequeathed to me from the outside. It's. But it's an internal developmental process, and it's a misreading of maturation. To think that to become an adult is just to simply have adulthood kind of handed to you by adults.
Right. By these powerful people. They just give you the power. And now, hey, you're good. It's true, of course, that maturing involves the influence of adults, but it's a much more complicated process. And it does involve something that's more like what the wizard does at the end, which is symbolic. Right. And that's where the magic is really. It's more natural. It's not truly magical in the sense of handing over these powers, but it is about being recognized by one's peers as such, or maybe recognizing oneself as such so that there's a kind of.
Kind of reflexively constituted. So that you. You know, I think the professor says that the lion is. Suffers from disordered thinking. Something like that. And so you get the sense that, well, if you thought of yourself as courageous, you would be. Or if you recognize the courageous qualities that are already there in yourself, you would be. Or if you just stop beating yourself up so much. Right. Stop holding yourself back, then those natural propensities which are there in all of us would just have a chance to emerge.
1:15:50 Erin: And that's magical thinking, too. But that's magical thinking made good.
1:15:54 Wes: Yeah, exactly.
1:15:55 Erin: You just have to think that. And then the world will reflect it.
1:15:57 Wes: Yes, Very good.
1:16:00 Erin: Well, cool. All right, let's end there.
1:16:02 Wes: Thank you.
1:16:03 Erin: Thank you.
1:16:05 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. subscribe@patreon.com Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersouptextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
Formulated Phrases in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: Part 2
Jul 05, 2021
Wes & Erin continue their analysis of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In Part 1, they covered roughly the first third of the poem. In Part 2, they begin with a discussion of Prufrock’s coffee spoons, and then continue on to: his allusions to John the Baptist, Lazarus, and Hamlet; the disjointed portrait of his probable love interest; and the twinning of aging and fantasy in the final stanzas.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:09 Erin: Today we'll be continuing our discussion of T.S. eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In part one, we covered roughly the first third of the poem, and in Part two we'll resume our conversation with Prufrock's coffee spoons. We'll discuss, among other things, Prufrock's allusions to John the Baptist, Lazarus and Hamlet, the disjointed portrait of Prufrock's probable love interest, and the twinning of aging and fantasy in the final stanzas. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.
0:50 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. Okay, part two of our two part series on the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. At the end of our last episode, we decided that we needed a minute for decisions and revisions before we could come back to more of this poem. The stanza we left on was the do I dare disturb the universe stanza. And now we are ready to measure out life in coffee spoons.
1:32 Erin: Nice. Good segue. So should we read this stanza?
1:38 Wes: Yeah, go for it.
1:39 Erin: Okay. For I have known them all already, Known them all have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. I know the voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? I'm trying to get into the mind of Prufrock in these readings.
1:57 Wes: So what is he worried about?
1:59 Erin: When I read this the first time, when he says, I've known them all already known them all. And then of course, the colon would indicate that the all refers to the evenings, mornings, afternoons. But isn't he also, at the same time referring to the people that he's going to be meeting at these parties?
2:14 Wes: Yeah, I think he's talking about these social occasions which the idea of measuring out life with coffee spoons is, you know, he's having tea with people, tea and coffee, to go up a few stanzas. Time for 100 visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea. Visions and revisions are nominally about his indecision, but of course they're also evocative of what he would do as an artist. So it would. So we'll have to revisit that question of the relationship between this social dissatisfaction and social indecision and what it means to be an artist.
It's interesting because you get on the one hand, right, the evocation of evenings and mornings and coffee spoons. What he's been doing is social. He's been hanging out with these women. I don't know if there are other men there, if it's just him surrounded by women. I think the original title of this poem was Prufrock with the women or something like that.
3:12 Erin: I think it's among the women.
3:13 Wes: I want to say among the women. Right. So lucky Prufrock. I don't know about that, or maybe not so lucky. But yeah, apparently he'd been hanging out. He's been doing these tea times or whatever it is with these women. It's Been going on long enough to connect that social existence with a sense of futility, measuring out life and coffee spoons. So I suppose it's some sense that this is meaningless, dissatisfying. Once again, I think we're supposed to think about the possibility of an essential fraudulence to social relations and then by way of that, a possible fraudulence to love itself. So that when we get down to so how should I presume, maybe I should just ask the question, what is so presumptuous in this context? Assuming that he's going to ask this question, which for the sake of argument we're taking to be a proposal of some kind.
4:10 Erin: And what you just said, you're really opening this up for me. Because the October night, the sense of the evening at the beginning of the poem and also the red light district that we talked about last time, I was thinking that this was, you know, he was going to a party. I think that's even explicitly what I said in the first episode, maybe. And now I'm seeing what you're talking about. So I was thinking that he was going into an environment in which there were, you know, men and women and that it was a party or that it was, you know, the sun is going down and he's going to some event and there would be, you know, an equal distribution, though he's preoccupied with the women at the party.
And the thing that kind of stopped me about that is in the previous stanza, it describes his morning coat, which I know is only worn until 5 or 6 in the evening. So he would have to go home and change if he was going out to a dinner party, actually.
5:02 Wes: But it is the evening supposedly, right? Right. The evening is laid out against the sky.
5:07 Erin: So now I'm wondering is he leaving the afternoon tea and going home at the beginning of the stanza or something like that? But the reason why all this occurs to me is because what you're describ. I'm realizing he must be in an all female environment. And if it's a tea, if it's in the afternoon, I can now sort of picture him as a kind of a eunuch in the middle of this ladies auxiliary tea or something like that. And so I'm presuming that his presumption is in such an environment. How could I turn this into an opportunity for a potential romance?
Or how should I sort of break the mold of this particular kind of afternoon where he must be accepted as some sort of benign, inoffensive figure among these women and put myself out there in A sexual way and sort of change the tone of this. Not explicitly sexual, but you know what I mean, in a romantic way. And change the tone of their interaction with me.
6:02 Wes: Yeah, that's very good. You could read it both ways. So even if it's a. Whether it's a social engagement with. Well, I'm not sure if there are men there, then you could see him as simply preoccupied with women. And so among the women might just mean psychologically among. But yeah, I think it heightens it to just to take it more literally and say, this is why I wanted to call it J. Alfred Friendzone. Because the question of presumptuousness arises because he's in a situation where obviously the person that he's courting may not know that she's being courted.
I think, you know, I think that's probably a strong possibility. So he has failed, as you point out, to establish that tone. And there's a very distinct shift in tone from the friendly to the romantic. And there are people who, you know, who have trouble shifting gears in that way. They have trouble moving out of what Freud called aim inhibited libido. So Freud saw this as, you know, our friendly relations with each other, our platonic relations with each other as sublimating sexual libido. And to try to move back to the sexual also inevitably involves something a bit aggressive or at the very least, it involves something potentially offensive and potentially objectifying.
And for someone who's too much of a good guy, as we discussed last time, or too much with the preemptive absolution of being the good guy, just like Guido or an analogy to Guido. I think being so invested in that means that he's going to have trouble inhabiting this other role. It will feel presumptuous in the sense that he has to presume that she's interested in that way. And I think later on in the poem he's going to ask whether it's worth it. Right. Would it be worth it if I were rejected? And a friend might say, come on, it's not a big deal.
She rejects you, she rejects you. What's the big deal? It's a numbers game. Move on to the next or whatever.
8:03 Erin: So you're saying that he needs a Will Smith to coach him?
8:06 Wes: That's right, yeah. For him, this is a cosmic, cosmic importance. It's a disturbance of the universe. What I'm trying to get at here by discussing Freud is how something like this shift from a more benign social situation to something more sexual could feel so terrifying, almost like actual danger, maybe even existential danger, but beyond that, dangerous to others, dangerous to the women, dangerous to the entire order of things if we want to take universe that way. So it's as if he feels the responsibility of an eruption of sexual reality into the world of social forms which keeps that under wraps.
8:50 Erin: If he is in some sort of afternoon or late afternoon or tea time environment, say you know, four or five o', clock, he would have to go home and change, I think, to then go out for the evening. And that would be a different set of clothes. Right. That would be a different environment, one more conducive to the kinds of things that he seems to be after. So I think that it would also be disturbing the universe, as you say, in the sense of disturbing the time. Because there would be some oddity, I think, about trying to make overtures to a woman in the afternoon or something.
And so he would have to. Yeah, I don't know about that whole timeline theory, but that seems to be part of it. Like what you're saying that he's out of place in terms of the season and the hour and everything is not right here. And it would actually be some kind of a violation if he were to do what it is that he's planning on doing by inserting himself into this gang of ladies and then hitting on one of them. It's an evening activity.
9:47 Wes: Yeah. I'm thinking about this idea of measuring out my life with coffee spoons. And it occurred to me that this is a. It speaks to his caution, but which later on he will identify himself as a kind of Polonius and an over cautious person. Not Hamlet, but prudent to the point of possibly being a fool. So he's been taking baby steps, so to speak. And because he's middle aged, you could imagine this on a more surreal level if David lynch were directing this, you could imagine that he has actually been. Or maybe it's a Twilight Zone episode. You know, he's been doing this for his entire life, life with the same woman showing up the same place, having coffee, thinking about proposing and never doing it.
And this just goes on and on. And perhaps that just is what the universe is at some level, if you're, if you're thinking pessimistically about it, not growth and generation and a work leading somewhere in the way that kind of got an evocation of that with Hesiod and works and days, but just this repetition, just this mere repetition of something that's very, very, very incremental, let's say. And the whole idea of measuring out life with coffee spoons. It occurred to me that that's a kind of work in miniature. So again, it made me think of the works and day stanza and the idea of there'll be a time to murder and create.
That murder and create line is sort of thrown in. It's like a little bit of the unconscious dynamic of this suddenly emerging because he's talking about a face to meet the faces that you meet and time for 100 indecisions and this and that. The idea of murdering and creating is really quite jarring in that context. So coming back to this now we get the more mundane version of that, which is not doing anything so dramatic as that work wise, but just measuring out life with coffee spoons.
11:52 Erin: That Twilight Zone episode that you just outlined before was. I'm still reeling from that one.
12:00 Wes: That would be a good one.
12:01 Erin: Yeah, that would be really good. You should be a writer for the new. Is that still going on?
12:06 Wes: I think there is a new one, but it's. I heard it wasn't very good.
12:09 Erin: Well, that's because they haven't hired you yet for the Prufrock episode.
12:13 Wes: I don't think anyone's going to be able to replicate what Rod Serling did with that.
12:18 Erin: That's true.
12:19 Wes: Not just the voice, but the screenwriting. That's sui generis.
12:22 Erin: What do we make of this? The voice is dying with a dying fall. That's one of my favorite lines in the poem. It's a really elegant line beneath the music from a farther room. I'm not sure how this connects up with coffee spoons. Or maybe I do. But a dying fall is obviously like a slowing rhythm or diminishing volume. So the voices are diminishing beneath the music. So this is maybe the party has started, the nighttime party has started or something. Or he's describing the point at which words end and people are entertained or swept up into the music.
And that is in a farther room. So that's unavailable to him while he's still sitting there with his coffee spoons. Maybe. But something celebratory and rapturous that he's incapable of taking part in or which is removed from him in another part of the house where they're having this party. I can picture the house very clearly, but I don't know if it's the house. Maybe I made enough of a connection right there. I'm not really sure.
13:17 Wes: Yeah. So he's listening to something going on in another room. He's hearing voices intermingled with music. It's an interesting experience because it involves hearing people talking, but not being able to make sense of what they're saying. Right. So it's just inarticulate, which is really odd when you think about it. And I think of it as like listening to another language. Or maybe it's like the Charlie Brown effect. You ignore adults and it's just wah, wah, wa. But regardless. So it's chatter. But the one thing that you do get that's still preserved in that situation, despite the fact that you can't really make out what people are saying, is you can make out tonalities, and you can get the general.
Sometimes I think the general feeling of what's going on. And in this kind of very polite drawing room environment, it sounds like people struggling to make conversations, struggling to make small talk. And I get this sense of the. When sentences come to an end, it's not with excitement. It's not an uptick tonally. It's a grave accent, I guess.
14:26 Erin: You mean not in Prufrock's room? You mean in the music room?
14:29 Wes: Yeah.
14:30 Erin: Oh, okay. I read that differently.
14:31 Wes: Oh, how did you.
14:33 Erin: I meant that as the music started up, the voices were diminished, you know.
14:37 Wes: Oh, I see. The voices that he's with. Yeah.
14:40 Erin: No, no, no, no, no. In the other room, they're like. You know when. When a party starts and there's some chatter and the music starts playing. And as it gets louder, people are stopping talking because then the music either overcomes it or they are just sitting and listening to it. So I'm getting this idea that in the farther room, the party is starting. So it's actually a good thing, though the repetition of dying, I thought, was more of Prufrock's reflection on the fact that he can't join in that kind of revelry or whatever Cole Porter kind of situation I'm imagining in the other room. But I like your reading, too.
15:15 Wes: Yeah. I think these are two legitimate readings. I mean, in one case, you have him envying some more dynamic social situation that's happening far off, which fits. It's similar in the sense that he's still cut off. I still have imagined this as a very staged social environment. In either case, he's not. Where the music is.
15:39 Erin: Right. And that dying and the voices and the music. It's going to come back with the mermaids. Right. So maybe we'll be able to make sense of it once we get to the end.
15:48 Wes: Yeah.
15:48 Erin: Or maybe I'm just imagining the music. Oh, no, they will sing to me. Yeah. There is music, Right?
15:54 Wes: But really, they won't sing to him. He's not getting sung to in either case. Yeah, but I'm just thinking about what you said. I mean, in a way, you could think about the dying of the voices as just being relative to the uptick of the music. In either case, the question arises, how should I presume? And you have to wonder, why. Does this heighten the sense that his proposal is going to be presumptuous? Is it because he's cut off from people? He's not really. It gives you the sense that he's not really part of this scene in some way. Is he sitting on the couch by himself in the other room while everybody. Everyone parties in the main room? What's going on here? In one of the bits of secondary literature I read, someone associated this to Twelfth Night because Shakespeare uses this phrase, dying fall. Oh.
16:49 Erin: In Orsino's opening lines.
16:51 Wes: Right? Yeah. If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it. That, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die that strain. Again, it had a dying fall. Oh, it came o' er my ear like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more. Tis not so sweet now as it was before. I don't think it's a stretch because TS Eliot is so allusive and was so into Shakespeare to make this connection.
17:23 Erin: Yeah, sorry, Eliot, for the fact that this is one of my favorite lines and you stole it.
17:30 Wes: Is there any sense to be made in that connection?
17:32 Erin: Well, it's funny, the dying fall that you're talking about. I was thinking, if music be the food of love, play on. So I suppose if people are feeding off of music and he's feeding off of tea and toast and being his little parochial self in the other room. I don't know what else.
17:51 Wes: That strain again. It had a dying fall. What is that referring to? Is that referring to the music?
17:56 Erin: Mm.
17:57 Wes: Okay.
17:57 Erin: Yeah. The dying fall usually just means it's a diminuendo.
18:00 Wes: Okay.
18:01 Erin: But it's a classier way of saying it. So do you want to read the next stanza?
18:05 Wes: Sure. And I've known the eyes already, known them all. The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase. And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin to spit out all the butt ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume, known the eyes already. That's really. That's quite something. It gives you the sense, right, that what he sees in other people is primarily his concern about how they see him. The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase. We talked about this a little above the idea of they will say how his hair is growing thin and.
And all that other stuff. And the idea that to fix you in a formulated phrase is to recognize you as someone with a certain sort of character who's not free necessarily to make choices and to do things, but simply a product of one's habits and traits. And in many cases, habits and traits that are difficult or impossible to change, including the habit of being shy or diffident, whatever it's going on with him. So he's driven to be the character that he is. And in the moment of confronting people, that sense is amped up, that sense of unfreedom.
So it's very unmusical when you think about it now in the context of the music and the freedom that that affords. It's confidential situation to him is confined to.
19:39 Erin: So this is why I thought that in the previous stanza, I've known them all already known them all. And then I've known the eyes already known them all, that he's also saying he knows all these people. So he has, you know, he's fixed them the way that they have supposedly fixed him. What struck me in the second line, I mean, the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase. Obviously he's worried that he'll be, you know, skewered by their wit or, you know, whatever they're going to. However they're going to encapsulate him. But I thought that this was a really odd blending of. Of eyes and mouth, like the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.
20:15 Wes: It's a mixed metaphor.
20:16 Erin: Right, Right.
20:17 Wes: That's good. I didn't notice that. I just thought of another meaning to fix you in a formulated phrase because I associate it to this moment when you're talking to someone and your fear of their response. So a lot of this is about eye contact and looking at other people's eyes and recognizing them, recognizing you and being afraid of their response to what you're going to say, how it's going to. How what you do and say will alter their conception of you. And being fixed is sort of like being a deer in the headlights in the moment, so that it has the effect of making the interaction more rigid and there's less spontaneity in what you say.
And so what you say might be very formulated. I don't think this is the primary reading by the Way this is just a. Is an alternate way to take this. Actually, I think maybe. I don't know, balance. I think maybe they're equal readings. Because the idea is that others are pigeonholing him. Right? They are in their minds formulating him, but the. The difference between that and that actually shaping his life is thin. Right? So it's. It's not just that other people are pigeonholing him in their minds, but once you're pigeonholed in the minds of others, that affects you and it pigeonholes you.
In actuality, it confines your behavior. So in other words, if I have a certain character and people respond to that, oh, that's just what Wes does. That's his habit, his days and ways, as Eliot puts it at the end of the stanza. And he tends to be. What's something that's not too negative?
21:54 Erin: A real asshole.
21:56 Wes: He tends to be an arrogant asshole. No, then you get to be formulated. Is not just for others to have this picture of you as someone who's a product of character and therefore unfree, but you become less free because you don't have as much room to move in the social situation. So in other words, it becomes hard to develop a new habit around people, whether it's like quitting cigarettes, the butt ends, or whether it's trying out a little bit of a new self or a new personality with people. Because people are going to respond to that and say what? That's not who you are normally it's going to draw attention. So you do become formulated by other people's responses to you.
22:36 Erin: That's why you have to move somewhere far away, like Gatsby.
22:39 Wes: Go to Long island or Salt Lake City.
22:45 Erin: Wes, could you, like, not reveal my secret plans to everyone on this podcast?
22:49 Wes: Please let us go to Salt Lake City and get ourselves away from the city. Sorry, city. And city to this rhyme. Terrible. Yeah. So formulated this to be. It's a very stark image of sprawling on a pin pinned to the wall like a bug. A scientific specimen. Right. For study.
23:11 Erin: And I was wondering what the butt ends were, but I guess I literally know that it's cigars. But cigars are.
23:18 Wes: Why cigars, as opposed to cigarettes.
23:21 Erin: Do people spit out the butt ends of cigarettes, don't they? No, they just throw.
23:26 Wes: Oh, you're thinking of when you cut off the end of the cigar and then spit that out. I was thinking of being done with a cigarette and disposing of the butt.
23:33 Erin: No, I don't think that works. Wouldn't spit it out.
23:36 Wes: You kind of flick it off your fingers.
23:38 Erin: This wouldn't fly in an MFA workshop, I think if it's cigarettes, which is not an advertisement for an MFA workshop, let me tell you.
23:45 Wes: But the poem would be much different after being workshopped.
23:50 Erin: Yeah, right. I really don't see where you're going with this. Yeah, well, because when you first. I know nothing about cigars, but when you first smoke it, I mean, when you first have to light it, don't you bite off one end of it first?
24:03 Wes: Yeah, you do bite it off and spit it out. Yeah. Unless you're fancy and you use some kind of cutting thing to do it.
24:09 Erin: Well, anyway, why does he want to go here if all this bad stuff is going to happen to him? That's what I want to know.
24:16 Wes: There's women, that's why.
24:18 Erin: Well, he doesn't even like the women all that much. You know, I think at the end of the last episode, I was like, I don't know. Is Prufrock really a jerk? And then it ended.
24:25 Wes: Yeah. Is he in love? Is Prufrock in love? It's a love song.
24:28 Erin: I don't know. If this is him being in love, then that's very sad. Yeah, it's very tiresome.
24:36 Wes: It is the least seductive love song ever written.
24:40 Erin: Well, there are butt ends in here. That's pretty sexy, but.
24:43 Wes: Yeah, right. Just thinking about spitting out the butt ends of my ways and days.
24:48 Erin: An after dinner cigar.
24:50 Wes: I'm trying to think about the metaphor here. What does it mean to spit out all the butt ends of your days and ways? Right. So he's measured out life and coffee spoons very incrementally. He's been spending all this time. The moment of the proposal is now. How should I begin? So this is the way he's characterizing what it would mean to actually do something now and hit on this woman or maybe even propose marriage to her. Just go straight from zero to 60. No. Hey, do you want to go on a date? Just, let's get married. We've been dating, haven't we?
I've been showing up here for 20 years. So to actually utter these. Whatever words he's come to utter is like a spitting out. And I was thinking of cigarettes just because the butt ends. You know, the idea of his days and ways being exhausted like a cigarette that's been smoked and it's at this point of exhaustion that here he is ready to do something. And that the doing of this is the spitting out of the product conduct of all that. It's evoking Hesiod and it's evoking work in some way and even agricultural work, but also Polonian advice about how to live life, how to tend one's garden, how to do everything from farming to being a good person.
The kind of a self helpy conception of life which begins with the necessity of work. Because of our fallenness, we get here an idea that work comes to an end and what it ends in is this proposal. And that's like spitting this out. I don't know. Can you make any more sense of that?
26:32 Erin: That's really good. That's far more profound than what I was thinking which is just the lack of consumption in these two stanzas. I mean at other times obviously he takes toast and tea and later he's going to be too full to act. So he does consume things in this poem. So maybe this is the wrong reading for me to take, but I just know the coffee spoons and the butt ends being spit out. I mean you're not actually. He doesn't say like I've measured out my life with cups of coffee or something like that. It's the spoon. And by the same token the butt end of the cigar or whatever we want to say is the part that you don't smoke and you spit it out.
There's like a regurgitation or something that's happening here. He's not actually in terms of his daily life, which is what he's describing here. I think rather than what he's doing at the party, it's associated with like. Like the mechanism or the discarded parts, rather than like receiving sustenance from the actual. Not that you receive sustenance from a cigar, but the discarded parts is what he's focusing on in doing this proposal.
27:33 Wes: It's almost like I'm thinking of the. It's hard not to associate to the smoke and the fog. Right. The pollutants which are the byproducts of human civilization and social life. Right, right. And here that's what he seems to have to offer is the kind of the trash or whatever. And there may be something in here, the ends of my days and ways. He may be thinking of the fact that he's middle aged. Right. At the age of 23 he's middle aged and therefore he's already reached the end or he's close enough to the end of his life to think of it that way. The idea of him being formulated early on as the idea of him comments about the things it about his age essentially.
So it's beyond character, as I pointed out it's specifically being pegged as someone who is too old for love in some way, that there's something inconsistent about age and his belated proposal. Which brings us back to the concept of this sort of being an anti seduction poem or something. A reverse seduction poem where it's like, you know, know it's not marry me, you're going to get old. It's, you know, marry me, I'm old. I'm already old, so marry me. Something like that. So to give the proposal is to. Instead of doing something spontaneous with one's youthful vitality and, you know, and if he were doing that right, we'd get a real sense of love in the poem instead of what we do get.
It's as if saying something expressing his love is saying something about his age. That's what I'm trying to get at. To make the proposal as a confession of mortality. That's part of the hesitation, I think the concept of presumptuous means that he's worried about the effect on others, I think. And the effect here is that his love is not love. It's just the waste product. That's the phrase I'm looking for. The waste byproduct of all the living that he's done too much living, living so much living that he's like a coal plant that's produced all this ash.
And that's what he brings to the table. I'm taking a bleak poem and making it even bleaker. So when you offer yourself up to someone, are you offering? What is it you're offering? What does it mean to offer your love? Does it mean to offer a certain state of mind towards another person? A certain type of habitual relation over time? Is it just a subjective feeling? Or is what you're offering when you make the proposal a certain form of life, a certain way of life that's predicated on you engaging in certain behaviors, right? So for instance, even as mundane as washing the dishes and picking up your underwear off the floor and then the anxiety there is what I'm offering.
Something that's entirely formulaic and also not adaptable, not changeable in the context of a relationship, which is something that people always often have a problem with, is that they have their. They come to the table with all these habits and that becomes disastrous because the habits are inconsistent and people have trouble making the adjustment.
30:49 Erin: Wes, you're like, you're breaking me. I can't.
30:52 Wes: What do you mean?
30:55 Erin: Oh my gosh. I'm like,
30:59 Wes: what? What do you mean?
31:00 Erin: You're destroying My belief in love right now.
31:03 Wes: Sorry, I'm gonna blame it on Prufrock.
31:07 Erin: Oh, wow.
31:07 Wes: I'm just trying to make sure that this stanza is sprawling on a pin before we actually take leave of it.
31:13 Erin: Well, I think I'll be. Before this is over.
31:15 Wes: Yeah. It's a real and interesting concern. What does it mean to offer love? And then maybe Prufrock, at the very beginning is right. Do not ask, what. What is it? Just go make the visit. Just do it. Because if you ask, what is it? These are the sorts of considerations you. You get into, right? We're. We're temporal creatures. So love isn't just some time slice in which someone has affectionate or loving feelings. Love means a ways and days. Love is spread out temporarily. It includes negative components as well. If it is to be love, it has to be organized in the right kind of way, even if it is negative.
So you can think of, like, Augustinian theodicy, right? If there is evil in the world, it's for the greater good, and it's privation. So you have to recast the negative moments as privation that are structurally necessary to the creation of a greater whole. And then that becomes a different conception of love than the everyday conception. And so maybe the everyday conception is not up to the task. And T.S. eliot, through Prufrock, is expressing a very philosophical concern. It sucks to be a philosopher who's going to propose, right?
32:37 Erin: Well, let me. Let me.
32:38 Wes: You want to ask, what is it? And then you write a long poem instead of provoking.
32:42 Erin: Well, then let me fight back against this because I have to come back from the.
32:46 Wes: I was going to win you ever with St. Augustine, but I guess not.
32:49 Erin: Well, you know, close, but these abstractions. So what you're proving to me then is that Prufrock doesn't love this woman. Surprise. This isn't a love song, though it seemed to be to look at something abstract, or I think, to look at oneself. Like, if this were a love song, then he would be not looking at his inabilities, to not want to presume all of these inabilities related to himself and his own mental comportment around marriage or relationships or women in general. So he wouldn't be dwelling on his abstract sense of incompatibility. He would be looking at the woman and the woman's habits and saying that he wants to, if he loved her, saying that he wants to adjust himself to that, or that he found something adorable or admirable or whatever in her own way of being that he finds compatible with his.
So to me, this kind of philosophical frame of mind and this idea of like, what do I have to offer? That's an entirely selfish way of being. And it's entirely not conducive to love or to caring about another person. Because if you love another person, you're directed towards then them and you're not thinking about. I mean, sure, you get a sense of like, oh gee, you know, how can I measure up? Or maybe this doesn't, you know, maybe this isn't going to work, or maybe I'm not right for this person. You get all of those things, but you don't have some sort of abstract conception of anything that's entirely about one's own.
Like in a way, I think that's like kind of the ultimate selfishness. To be like, what do I have to offer? Well, you could just love this person and give something of yourself. So I. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if he were really in love, then he would be familiar with this woman's personality and way of being and would want to join himself to that rather than saying that he couldn't engage with life at all and doesn't want to do anything because he doesn't feel himself capable of joining himself with anyone in this kind of abstract way.
34:54 Wes: I think you're right. He's very obviously self centered. Right. And this would be the worst kind of love poem to receive.
35:00 Erin: Oh, I've gotten worse.
35:02 Wes: Yeah. Just in the sense of badly written or in the sense of. So to love someone in a way he has to. We all have to escape our own gravitational orbit. You know, we have to escape our self preoccupation. And that includes escaping preoccupation with the love of others. This is one thing that psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote a book called the Art of Loving. Very small book that I recommend in that we actually did a partially examined life episode on it a long time ago. Okay.
35:33 Erin: That's why that's familiar to me.
35:34 Wes: I think one of the insights of that book is that when people think about love, they think a lot about being loved and they think a lot about loving other people in ways that are often conditional, even if it's just unconscious. And in particular conditional on that other person loving them back. So to really love in a way, you have to transcend the concern about rejection. I think that's the hardest part. And not even at this moment when you're making the proposal, but within the relationship itself. Because it's always a possibility. It's a possibility in A big sense the person will die or decide they want to get away from you.
It's a possibility in smaller senses where you just feel rejected by some everyday interaction with the person. And then that has to be. Be negotiated. And so love has to be a decision which transcends all those possibilities. And so you don't to truly love you really just. It's like willing something or deciding something. It's like an ultimate act of free will. That's when you get there, not when you're thinking about whether the other person is going to love you back or even maybe even whether they're the right person for you.
36:48 Erin: One that's really freeing though because I mean then you're not thinking like how can I measure up? Or whatever. Like if you get past that whole inward direction and just focus outwardly, then probably you also by that same token become more attractive because you're not so, you know, like Prufrock tripping yourself up and being so ruminating and unable to act. It's like it. I don't know. Either way it's a self fulfilling prophecy either for good or ill.
37:19 Wes: And I think this goes for work as well and for including artistic creativity. People get hung up on or they develop inhibitions to work because they get worried about fame and fortune essentially they get so worried about the reception for their work, they get so caught up in the eyes of others that it becomes not an act of love anymore and enjoyable. It's too anxiety producing and unfortunately we can't ever fully escape that. Right. We have to be thinking about an audience and so on and so forth. So it's very tricky with work. But the solution to the inhibition is to be able to inhabit the mode of loving and loving what you're doing. For there to be more of that than there is of a worry about whether the product is any good or whether it's going to be well received. Just to try and make some connections back to the meta narrative about art.
38:19 Erin: Should we do the next stanza? Yeah, that was a. We better speed it up, Wes.
38:24 Wes: Well, yeah, we gotta fill out. We do have quite a few stanzas left. Oh my God.
38:29 Erin: All right, I know. All right. And I have known the arms already, known them all. Arms that are braceleted and white and bare but in the lamplight downed with light brown hair. Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress. Arms that lie along a table or wrap about a shawl and should I then presume and how should I begin?
38:51 Wes: The arms sound to me immediately like A kind of Homeric reference. It's a Homeric epithet like rosy fingered dawn or swift footed Achilles. White armed is oft repeated. The Greek word is. And lovely haired as well is another very, very common epithet. So knowing about Eliot's education, I don't think it's a stretch to say that he's taking these very romantic, in the broad sense, Homeric epithets and turning them into something. I don't think sinister is the right word, but very unromantic and maybe objectifying. Right. It feels like someone cutting up the body or focusing on a body as opposed to focusing on the whole person.
39:41 Erin: Two words stick out to me in the stanza. First of all, known the arms. So that's a little bit sexual. And second of all, downed. So I suppose this could be crueler. He's being a little bit gentle with that word.
39:55 Wes: Yeah. I mean, what does down evoke? Right. It's a goose. Right. Soft feathers you could sleep on, though. You could use those arms as a pillow. Yeah. There's a comforting aspect of this as well. And these are feminine charms. So this isn't. It's not just Prufrock who feels this way about white bare arms. These are sexual objects. Right. For men. For women. I don't know for women, but for men, at the very least. And then perfume from a dress, the way arms lie along a table or wrap around a shawl. So the upshot of the stanza seems to be that we should ask again how this is related to a feeling that it's presumptuous to proceed. But it seems to me that what he's noting here are these feminine charms as opposed to an engagement with the whole personality. It's something more, something possibly trivial, something possibly not a basis for something, for a more sustained relationship.
40:59 Erin: I think you're right. He's gone too far out on a limb here. And not barumch and not. Sorry, this is the only.
41:08 Wes: That took a while to compute.
41:13 Erin: Oh, God, I think I need to be etherized on a table right now. And this, I think, is the only real glimpse that we get of her, which is sad in a way. The digression. Is the digression about the light brown hair on the arm or is the entire poem meant to be the digression?
41:31 Wes: Well, I was thinking that. Right. And now you think of the muse like aspect of love. Right. Love is supposed to lead to. I mean, this is the way Plato or Socrates defines love in the Symposium as reproduction in the presence of something or someone beautiful. After rejecting a lot of different Conceptions of love, including the soulmate conception. Right. The two halves separated by the gods in Aristophanes account. So that what you're looking for when you look for love is to find one's other half that's rejected in favor of this more dynamic and reproductive conception.
So that a digression is kind of a pejorative take on that productive component of love, that reproductive component, whether that's children or whether it's the reproductivity involved in being an artist. And so in a regular love poem, he might say something like, you've inspired me to write this beautiful thing. In this case, it's a digression. It's a hesitation. It's something that keeps him from love. It's not even a seduction. Right. It's not a seductive poem. It's something that functions to drive someone away. So it's an interesting reversal.
I think you wonder what it says about poetry and art in general. Maybe this is a worry that those things are not consistent with action and with romance. That it out competes it in some sense. And then just one final thing. Knowing the arms already known them all. It's not her arms in particular. It's arms of women. It sounds like he's known them on these social occasions. Right. Seeing them lie along a table. This is another aspect that kind of saps it of the romance. Because it's no longer just one person, but it's women in general. And it could also just be known in literature.
Right. He's read too much Homer, always with
43:32 Erin: the poetry bashing, you know.
43:34 Wes: Yeah. Sorry. All right. Shall we move on?
43:37 Erin: Yeah.
43:38 Wes: Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt sleeves leaning out windows. So what's interesting to me is now we get this is sort of the synthesis of this inner space of women and what's been going on on the streets outside. So it sounds like he has to communicate this outer world to this inner world of the chambers with women. Is that the masculine world? Is that the lower class world? Is that the sexual world to the world of polite society? You can think of it in different ways. Is that his character, which now I'm starting to associate with the smoke because of the butt ends.
44:25 Erin: Yeah. This kind of collapses. What you were saying before with, you know, the fog and the smoke and the pipes, like the smoking pipes and also the pipes on the, you know, chimney pipes or whatever.
44:36 Wes: Yeah.
44:36 Erin: Altogether. And then we get. Should we just quickly move on to the. Because I feel like we're gonna have a lot to say about the next.
44:41 Wes: Yeah, let's go on. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. So what the hell is going on there? He's just the claws. He's not the crab or the lobster.
44:54 Erin: Yeah. Well, if it's silent seas, then he wouldn't have to say anything. Right. That's what I get from this. He wouldn't have to make an effort. He wouldn't have to be thinking about any of these things. And the claws are very, I don't know, Grabby.
45:11 Wes: That's perfect. That's perfect. That's exactly what I was.
45:15 Erin: Is that the right thing?
45:17 Wes: Yep. That's kind of the kind of guy he is. Okay, well, I was thinking he could
45:22 Erin: grab as many arms as he wants.
45:23 Wes: That's right. Exactly. Exactly. It's interesting. He's disembodied. It's a really interesting image of just the claws moving across the ocean floor.
45:37 Erin: I've known the claws, known them all.
45:41 Wes: And push them away and crack them open and eaten them with a thing of butter. Yeah. Grabby is perfect because it seems to be about desire. You know, he's all desire in some ways, but it's not. It's a very rough, kind of appetitive, potentially destructive desire. Right. If he had a hand, he could reach out and grab a hand. Said he has a claw, and so he can't reach out without damaging what he's gonna get. So. And there's a kind of ravenousness here, you know, if he's. If he doesn't have a belly, if he's disembodied, then that it can't ever be filled.
And so the. The scuttling is. Is eternal. Looking for things to destroy with one's claws, but you can't ever feed yourself with it. A really, really dark image, you know? Why is this the solution to not wanting to talk about walking through narrow streets at dusk? Why is this preferable to talking about that? Because the previous lines are. Shall I say, blah, blah, blah. Nope. Instead, I wish I didn't have to talk about that. I'd rather be pair of claws. Yeah. Why is it so hard to talk about the other stuff?
47:00 Erin: I suppose there seems to be a sexual divide here of the realm of men and the realm of women. Women that he can't bridge that gap. The smoking and the outside of the house and the loneliness of the men, they're actually leaning away from. Right. They're leaning outside of the houses out of the windows, and away from the province of women, the land of women, according to Eliot's own sort of conception here, I think. And away from the perfume and the braceleted and bare arms of the women inside, and the sort of cleanliness of that, and out into the mucky.
Sooty. Polluted. Polluted both through something that maybe doesn't have too much to do with these men or women, but is a byproduct and also is being, like, actively polluted by people smoking. There's a disconnect. There's a gender divide there that. That can't be bridged. So he's saying he would rather go to a realm in which there is no divide, per se, or no mental divide or whatever between men and women. It's pure instinct.
48:09 Wes: Well, I think I kind of maybe mischaracterized it because I think he's just attacking himself.
48:14 Erin: Okay.
48:14 Wes: I mean, the first thought here might have been, I should have been a crab scuttling across. You know, you can imagine Eliot writing that before he lands on Ragged Claws. And so you get a kind of spinelessness, but also kind of the hard shell on the outside. So the spinelessness speaks to the indecision, and the hard shell speaks to his rigidity and formulated nature. The way to see it here is he's just attacking himself. He's characterizing his hesitation and fear and indecision, so maybe fear most of all. And then I was just asking the question of, well, why doesn't he not want to. Why doesn't he want to talk about that stuff? And I think you had a very good answer for that, which is there's something about having to cross the masculine, feminine divide that's too much for him,
49:02 Erin: which is weird because he already has. I'm imagining him as the sole man, as I said, at, like, a tea party.
49:08 Wes: He's in the friend zone, though, Right?
49:10 Erin: Right. But that friend zone, it's not strictly feminizing, per se. It's not like making a guy into one of your girlfriends. But I think that's what it's supposed to be here, in an extreme version of that. So in a way, he has a way in, but he's screwed himself up or something even more by crossing that divide.
49:30 Wes: Yeah, so I think it's a good point. He's crossed the divide in a sense. And then the sense in which he hasn't crossed the divide, which we discussed, was the sense in which he can't become a sexual actor or have any sexual or romantic agency. So he's passive in that sense. Says something to do with communicating that outside world that we began with to this inside world of women. And you wonder what does that mean beyond communicating the masculine to the feminine? Or you could look at this in terms of a class element as well, if you wanted, which I think those two things always line up in some sense.
50:08 Erin: The thing too is, like I think we mentioned at the beginning, who's. Like, some people say that they don't even know if Prufrock ever comes in at all. You know, if everything is from the perspective of the street and he's just sort of mentally coming in or recounting times in which he has been inside in this particular woman's home or whatever. I don't know. There's a strangeness about this because the lonely men in shirt sleeves leaning out of windows. I think of this as a. Like an after. Like smoking out a window, as being either an after work activity or an after sex activity. To be leaning out of a window smoking.
50:45 Wes: Well, yeah, and I think it's meant to relate back to. Like in the beginning we wondered is he walking around a red light district? I think he didn't like this reading as much, but is he with the one night restless nights and one night cheap hotels. So the association here would be to men leaning out of the windows from those places. So that would provide a pretty straightforward thesis about what's going on here, which is some association to a past sexual life or to seeing prostitutes or something like that. Whether he's directly involved or whether that's just his conception of the nature of male sexual desire.
51:20 Erin: I guess I'm using that as a bridge to the next stanza. Because then we have something even stranger going on here. And the afternoon, the evening sleeps so peacefully, Smoothed by long fingers a sleep sleep tired or it malingers stretched on the floor here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head grown slightly bald, brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet and here's no great matter. I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker and I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker and in short, I was afraid.
51:59 Wes: Smoothed by long fingers. Here we get another Homeric touch, Rosy fingered dawn. But it's the afternoon.
52:07 Erin: Well, this is the etherized patient, right?
52:09 Wes: This is the evening and the afternoon. The evening. What do we make of that? Am I missing something there? How can those be? The. I mean the evening is afternoon, but generally we think of the afternoon as still being day.
52:21 Erin: This is why Elliot is happier in England, because this is just tea time to me this is just that, that tea time hour of afternoon bleeding into Evening before or 5 o' clock now
52:35 Wes: it's no longer the evening is no longer etherized on a table. But it's asleep. Yeah. So we get a more. And it seems to have become the cat in my mind.
52:45 Erin: Oh yeah, you're right.
52:47 Wes: Stretched on the floor. It seems like in some sense the outer world now has come inside.
52:54 Erin: That's good.
52:54 Wes: And it is. And it's kind of a cozy. It's a nice cozy conception of it. You know, that's the way the stanza begins. It doesn't end well. But sleep tired malinger stretched on the floor. I think the. Smoothed by long fingers. I was thinking of, you know, just cat hair that's been smoothed.
53:13 Erin: The idea of malingering, isn't that like faking an illness to escape work, doing work?
53:18 Wes: Yeah. Okay, so we do get a little reference back to sickness, which is what etherization suggests.
53:23 Erin: Right, Right. This also makes me think like if you're pretending to be asleep, isn't that the classic I don't want to have sex with you? Kind of that and feigning a headache. And so again, the kind of like love and work doubling thing going on here. But then it's stretched on the floor beside you and me, so it's not in the bed at all. It's not. I mean, nor is it an actor in this. It's just the evening. But it seems to be like the little spirit animal of this particular day, whether it be the cat or the patient or both.
53:59 Wes: Seems to me she has a cat.
54:01 Erin: She has a cat. Okay, a cat made of fog. Yep. But I'm thinking that this is a bedroom, but I don't know why I'm thinking that stretched on the floor here beside you and me. I mean, I suppose they could still be on the couch in the damn sitting room, but Yeah, I suppose they must be because it's still after tea and cake and ice and. But I'm thinking of this as like a bedroom doubling as a recovery room with the evening light coming into it. But for some reason the patient's been left to recover on the floor and the people are in the bed.
54:34 Wes: So once again, something about Should I after tea and cakes and ice is the. Somehow it's a conflict between all this nice tea time stuff and Then the more momentous proposal. But he's wept and fasted, wept and prayed. Wow, that's pretty intense, Prufrock.
54:55 Erin: I think in the last episode I said something about how the heavy desserts that he's indulged in have sort of depleted his resolve. So we have this image of being overfed and therefore kind of inert. But then also the idea of having been weeping and fasting or praying is kind of like screwing up one's spiritual fortitude.
55:22 Wes: Yes. I hadn't thought of this. Right after tea and cakes. This is kind of the effect of all this stuff. Drinking tea and eating cake is to get tired. It's precisely the opposite of getting excited or animated to propose. So by contrast to that, he's fasted in preparation for all of this. As if there needs to be some sort of. How would you describe it? Would you call it religious atonement that he thinks needs to be preparatory and then we get the comparison to John the Baptist.
55:58 Erin: Sure. And also, being in a state of fasting is supposed to be in a state of greater communion with God. It's supposed to help you deny the physical in some way and focus on something higher and get you into a more prayerful state of mind in a lot of religions, I think.
56:19 Wes: So he's trying to wake himself up. He's trying to stay. You get the idea of someone who's trying to stay awake, someone in this very sleep inducing from the very beginning with the fog and all the etherized patients. Something where he's kind of stumbling his way through dream landscape or something, trying to wake up through fasting and prayer.
56:44 Erin: But then he becomes sort of like John the Baptist inside out.
56:48 Wes: So let's tell the story of that with the head on the platter and all that.
56:51 Erin: So Herod wanted to marry Herodias, who was the wife of his brother, also named Herod. There wasn't a lot of imagination in baby naming back then. And so Herodias, the woman that he wanted to marry, her daughter, who was Salome, danced. And she danced so well that Herod wanted to give her anything. And she wanted. Well, she asked her mother what she should have. And since, I guess Herodias was annoyed by John the Baptist trying to intervene in her marriage to her brother in law, I guess you could say she told Salome to ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter
57:30 Wes: and served it up to her reluctantly, but.
57:33 Erin: Well, it says reluctantly, but I'd be annoyed if some guy was telling me what to do with my life. And I was King Herod because he doesn't seem like a guy who takes no for an answer.
57:44 Wes: So how's Prufrock? How has his head been on a platter? It sounds almost. On the face of it, it sounds like, okay, I know what rejection is like, but I'm not sure that's gonna work.
57:55 Erin: Well, first of all, I think it's funny because John the Baptist is a hairy guy, right?
58:01 Wes: Yes.
58:02 Erin: Yeah.
58:03 Wes: I didn't know that.
58:04 Erin: Yeah. He looks like a. Like a. Like a crazy lion and everything. You know, he got. He has a lot of hair. He's out in the wilderness and he has, you know, he's like a crazy prophet. He has a lot of hair. He's always shown as having a lot of hair. And again, a kind of, you know, like, obviously a lot of strength and a lot of inner resolve and spiritual fortitude and all that kind of stuff. So he's a good sort of ideal male figure. So there's the joke of Prufrock being bald as John the Baptist. Then there's this idea of him being served up as a meal, which, again, we could say is like the sprawling on the pin idea, but also this idea that, you know, there's something with appetite here and the idea that he's sort of eaten himself out of a romantic moment and.
And now he himself is being the food served up for, I guess, other people's fun, enjoyment, whatever. So I don't know that there's a parallel with the John the Baptist story. I think it's more like the John the Baptist story turned inside out. So instead of intervening in a sort of courageous way, the way John the Baptist does, he's not intervening and he's not being courageous.
59:20 Wes: That's what I was thinking was that this is about his lack of courage, which makes it sound as if what he fears. Right. He's trying to tell us about the stakes here. What's at stake? Why is he afraid? Sounds like he's afraid of getting his head cut off, so to speak, whatever that means. And if there is, this may be force, but if there is a comparison, a greater comparison to John the Baptist, then it could be the idea that any proposal kind of represents an intervention between the woman he's proposing to and other her other suitors, basically.
So that may be forced, but in the same way that John the Baptist, in a way, is intervening, you could see any proposal as an intervention between her and all her other possible mates. Because there are other possible mates. There's the real possibility of rejection. There's the possibility that she chooses someone else, which becomes, in a way, the beheading. And on the other hand, he's not a prophet, which is to say he can't really see the future. So he doesn't really know whether he's going to be rejected. But it doesn't matter. He's still basically, in the end, he's afraid and he doesn't act.
There's a sense in which the moment of hesitation, which you. You hesitate perhaps because you imagine rejection, you are playing prophet, even though you're not really. The only way to roll in that situation is to not do that, is to not make those predictions.
1:00:53 Erin: To add credence to my earlier point, there's an Internet page that says that John the Baptist is typically portrayed with a large mop of unruly hair. Hmm.
1:01:03 Wes: So my head grown slightly bald. Yeah. So he's not only no prophet, but he's no possessor of hair.
1:01:13 Erin: Yeah, well, and John the Baptist is really interesting too, because he's always wearing animal skins. And he's an odd combination of someone who is fearless and has this sort of animalistic quality, but at the service of a higher power because he's, you know, he's an ascetic at the same time. Time. He's kind of an impossible combination.
1:01:31 Wes: He's kind of a mensch. I think John Cassavetes would be the one to play him.
1:01:35 Erin: Oh, yes, that would be so great. But he's kind of like Michelangelo, I guess, because Michelangelo is also kind of a strange combination of things in that he's like this hyper manly, virile. I mean, I don't know, we could call John the Baptist virile, but I
1:01:51 Wes: think that's the image I'm getting from what you said.
1:01:53 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. But also, I guess with. No one could accuse Michelangelo of being an ascetic. But I guess the art component, the art half of it is what we get in Michelangelo. The idea of being an artiste balancing out the other side, a masculine, animalistic side. Not that being a man and being an animal are same thing. But you know what I'm trying to say here.
1:02:18 Wes: Yeah.
1:02:19 Erin: I have to backtrack every claim I make about either gender before someone gets my. Out of me.
1:02:24 Wes: I mean, it's as if he thinks he has to be that type of guy, whether it's the dear owl type or the ascetic type or maybe the artistic type. I mean, I am no prophet. The suggestion now seems to be that if you could predict, if you were certain I had this Fantasy. When I was younger, in college, if I just knew that she would say yes, if I just had that gift of prophecy. Or. Or you tell the mutual friend, hey, I'm interested. If he just had that gift of prophecy, he could move forward. But he's not. This is supposed to be some kind of Herculean task, right? The moment of greatness. The proposal is going to be the moment of greatness. I mean, with those stakes, who can win, Right? Without prophecy, without certainty of success, then he can't go forward.
1:03:12 Erin: Well, I think that this stanza represents that moment. I think the. That even though he's sort of telling it in the past tense, I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker. I think that as he says that that's it, that's the moment passing. Because then in the following stanza, the moment has passed and now he's sort of Monday morning quarterbacking the whole situation.
1:03:31 Wes: That's good.
1:03:32 Erin: But, yeah, so I think that's it. And he sees the footman holding his coat and snickering. And so that moment of greatness is actually that John the Baptist moment. So there's something about that that's. It's like the height of the moment, but it's also like this sort of like castrating image happening at the same time and then nothing.
1:03:53 Wes: Yeah, I like the idea of leaving the apartment, leaving the house, being shown out by the butler or something as that. Becoming the eternal footman. So goodbye, off to Hades with you. For the people who can't act. That's the place, the shadows.
1:04:12 Erin: What circle of Hell is that?
1:04:14 Wes: Right. What's a good name for that? Circle of Hell?
1:04:16 Erin: The nine and a half circle would
1:04:20 Wes: be the Friend Zone circle.
1:04:21 Erin: Oh, yeah, there you go.
1:04:23 Wes: It's the nine and a half. I like that. Yeah.
1:04:26 Erin: The in between number, because they couldn't decide which one or the other. You want to read the next stanza?
1:04:32 Wes: Sure. And would it have been worth it after all, after the cups, the marmalade, the tea, he among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me. Would it have been worthwhile to have bitten off the matter with a smile? To have squeezed the universe into a ball, to roll it towards some overwhelming question? To say, I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all? I shall tell you all. If one settling a pillow by her head should say, that is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all. I like your way of putting this. The Monday morning quarterbacking and asking.
So now he's imagining the rejection and whether it would have Been worth it. He's doing the risk reward analysis here, but it's too late. We're still trying to figure out what is so monumental about this that he can't do it. So here he's fantasizing about a moment, I guess, which is, know, ultimately humiliating. I mean, this phrase, squeeze the universe into a ball, which again, gives you the idea of the stakes is really, it seems to be some version of screw your courage to the sticking place.
1:05:43 Erin: Well, it's from. To his coy mistress.
1:05:45 Wes: Oh, right, yeah. Give us that line as well.
1:05:48 Erin: Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball.
1:05:52 Wes: Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our son stand still, yet we will make him run. Wow.
1:06:07 Erin: Yeah, wow.
1:06:08 Wes: When you read that next to Prufrock, that is quite something, right?
1:06:13 Erin: Yeah, well, that's what I was saying last time, that this is almost like a direct answer, it seems like, to that, or hopefully the other way around, that you read Prufrock first and then you get the remedy, the antidote.
1:06:28 Wes: This is carpe diem, right? And this is tear our pleasures with rough strife. This is willing to be. To inhabit that sexual plane and to inhabit the aggression inherent in that. You know, here in Marvel as well, there's the idea of doing something to the cosmos, doing something to the universe, to life itself, the iron gates of life, and affecting the sun itself. So this idea of this cosmic dimension to love, it's interesting, I guess the rolling up our sweetness into one ball is sexually evocative, right? And in this case, it's not about that pairing of lovers. It's about just him and the universe.
1:07:15 Erin: The Lazarus image or a reference, I looked that up and it could be two Lazaruses or Lazari. And I think I like the second one better. So there's Lazarus that Christ actually raised from the dead, but then there's the beggar Lazarus who returns in place of the rich man who was not allowed to return from the dead to warn them about hell. So basically, like this Lazarus is almost like a Jacob Marley figure come to warn Scrooge about hell or something. Something.
1:07:48 Wes: Okay, so what does it mean in this context? It's as if he's saying that the moment of the proposal would have been a moment of prophecy. Is that right?
1:07:57 Erin: Oh, I guess so. I guess I was thinking of this as post prophecy, that the action of doing this would have been like a death. But you're Right. That doesn't make any sense. It's that the moment of proposal would be to inform. Oh, oh, maybe to say, I'm not dead, I'm here. You've been thinking of me as a dead person, person, as a non entity, but I'm actually alive.
1:08:20 Wes: Yeah. This is really interesting. I thought I had thought this through, but it's as if he has to convert or convey something of the divine to people who have lost that sensibility, that. That's his task almost. Right. Some sort of religious conversion to not
1:08:41 Erin: being mean to him anymore. That's my message to you, is please be nice to me.
1:08:48 Wes: The Lord did say that you shall love me. And the other Lazarus, right. He's.
1:08:57 Erin: It's one of his miracles. Yeah. But Lazarus was loved by Christ. Like, he was a really good friend. Christ particularly liked Lazarus. They were very close. So he heard he was dying, and Christ got there too late. He was already dead. So they said, you know, forget it. You got here too late. You came. I can't. I'm doing all this from memory. I hope I'm getting it right.
1:09:17 Wes: But, yeah, that sounds right.
1:09:18 Erin: So Christ was like, that's okay. I can make this right. The reason why I don't think it's that is because Prufrock doesn't seem like someone who would equate himself with someone who was loved by Christ or for whom special favors were used to restore him. It seems more like he seemed behind the veil and has come back. Well, in the case of the first or the rich man, Lazarus, that he comes back to help other people. But in this way, it seems like Prufrock is seeing it as a kind of a curse or that his message is going to be something that the woman is uninterested in. So it's not going to be this revelation that's going to cause people to turn from their ways. It's going to be that he's going to make this big proclamation and it'll be a big revelation. And then she's going to say like, so what?
1:10:03 Wes: So in the story. So he intentionally shows up late. And then the sisters of Lazarus, one of them is named Martha, which I
1:10:11 Erin: love Martha and Mary.
1:10:14 Wes: Martha says, my brother wouldn't have died if you had come here on time. And Jesus, that's when you get the I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. And it's on her affirmation. Of belief that the miracle is performed. Right. Didn't John the Baptist actually prophesy something like this? Or am I imagining that?
1:10:39 Erin: Oh, maybe.
1:10:39 Wes: Okay. Like it's one of his signs or something. So in any case, it's a proof of his divinity. Right?
1:10:47 Erin: The raising of the friend Lazarus. That seems like too grand a thing for Prufrock to acquaint himself with or to associate himself as. So it seems like it would be the first one. Obviously both of them technically are in it. You can't evoke one and not the other.
1:11:02 Wes: If Lazarus is the one doing the preaching here. Look, I was raised from the dead. It's a good reason for belief. I'm trying to fully make sense of this metaphor, but I haven't. Or this illusion.
1:11:15 Erin: Yeah, I guess it's the fact that he comes back with a message too. But I guess there's also the idea of Lazarus being. Martha is one of my favorite people in the Bible because she's great, she's very Mediterranean woman, but she explains to Jesus like he's been dead for a while, he's going to see, smell. And that always struck me as being very real and gross, you know, when I was a kid. So maybe. So maybe Prufrock is saying that when he comes back from the dead here to tell this woman how he feels, he's going to smell. Or you know, like he's. In other words, he's a musty old bachelor maybe, and he can't come back from that.
1:11:50 Wes: Yeah, I think that's it. It's a second chance. You know, Lazarus had a second chance at luck and this is supposed to be his second chance at love. It's another reference to being a middle aged person trying to propose.
1:12:04 Erin: Okay, well, let's kill Lazarus again and move on. Yes, let's do it now that he was killed in the first place. But I don't know.
1:12:09 Wes: I do want to say just I love the whole settling a pillow by her head and just sort of the very casual, you know, that's not what I meant at all. It's not just rejection, but it's the feeling that it's not important to her and that there's been this miscommunication and
1:12:26 Erin: would it have been worth it after all? Would it have been worthwhile? After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, after the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor and this and so much more, it is impossible to say just what I mean, but as if a magic lantern Threw the nerves and patterns on a screen. Would it have been worth while if one settling a pillow or throwing off a shot and turning toward the window should say, that is not it at all. That is not what I meant at all.
1:12:56 Wes: So after the sun sets and dooryards and sprinkled streets.
1:13:00 Erin: So this is further imagining that he's. It's later in the evening, I guess people have left. Maybe they're still. He's imagining that they're still talking about this. And he's had to expose himself to her in some way by this sort of X ray metaphor and explained all of his thoughts. And she's thrown off this shawl that's around her arm and walked away from him, perhaps across the floor. Or he's walked away from her, so now he's the subtext of this drink. Everybody at home is. She's rejecting him and saying, I had no idea you felt this way. And well, gee, Prufrock, this is very sudden and I don't feel the same way about you, and blah, blah, blah. And he's had to explain all of his feelings and so now there's this break between them and he's humiliated and can never go back there. That's what I'm imagining.
1:13:46 Wes: I put in all this effort. Sunsets and door, you know. Yeah, yeah, I took you out to see a sunset. This is how you repay me. Novels did he have to actually read? I'm reading War and Peace Prufrock. Up late, all night till 6am Just trying to cram the novel so that he can talk to her about it. Yeah, yeah, you mean. I read War and Goddamn Peace all night and it got me nothing. Yeah, Love the image of the magic lantern showing the nerves and patterns on a screen. The sense of having his innermost being exposed and then nerves is ambiguous between just his nervousness and possibly his fear and cowardice on the one hand, and then just the inner workings of.
Of his body, his brain, his mind, to be so exposed. So in the moment, this. This gives us some more insight into. Right into what's at stake with the moment of the proposal and why it seems to be of cosmic dimensions. It's because it's. In the ultimate self exposure. There's. There's a whole universe inside him patterned in. In nerves. And to. To propose is to reveal that. To put the. That, you know, to show it almost like a movie. The rejection would be a core rejection of his core being the fact that
1:15:09 Erin: it's revealing to her. It reminds me of. I don't know if this. This is predicting, like an mri, I don't know if it would. Would line up with an MRI or CAT scan or whatever. But, like, you know, when you. When they take brain scans and then poke you or. Or hurt you, some part of your body, and then you watch the brain light up in that region, you know, that's. That's kind of what I'm. What I'm thinking of. That he wouldn't be able to hide how much she's hurting him in that moment would be very obvious. And that image of the brain or the. Wouldn't be an MRI for Elliot, obviously. It wouldn't be the brain, necessarily, but some sort of dissection movie or something like that, but that cranial sort of circle of the night sky lighting up in one particular region. Cosmic, I think, is the word you used.
1:15:52 Wes: Yeah, I think it's good because it gets us back to the being being sprawling on a pin right on the wall. These things are related because in both cases, he's kind of like a scientific specimen there for study. In both cases, it's that there's that pigeonholing quality where, you know, if you reduce people to their brains and nerves and things like that, it's. There's a. Or to their physicality, their animality. It just becomes a. Become a more mechanical product of those forces or of one's character. There's this moment of vulnerability and ultimate exposure here.
And again, it's not unrelated to the pigeonholing stuff that's happened before. And so it gives us a little insight into what the stakes are, that this involves potential humiliation. And we're getting a little bit here about what humiliation really means. This ultimate powerlessness, this ultimate deprivation of freedom and spontaneity. The irony, of course, is that he deprives himself of that freedom and spontaneity up front if he doesn't propose. But the fear is that he will be deprived of it if he does. All right, shall we move?
1:17:00 Erin: Yeah, let's do it.
1:17:02 Wes: Almost there. No, I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord one that will do to swell a progress Start a scene or two. Advise the prince, no doubt an easy tool Deferential, glad to be of use Politic cautious and meticulous Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse at times. Indeed almost ridiculous. Almost at times. The fool. He actually sounds like Polonius here. Right? That sort of list of things. Neither a borrower nor lender be, Blah, blah, blah.
1:17:38 Erin: Yeah, this is politic. Cautious and meticulous. This is a little bit of iambic pentameter here, I think. I think he's doing a little ventriloquism with Shakespeare here.
1:17:48 Wes: Yeah. See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue. Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried. Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel. But do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear it that the opposed may Beware of the. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice. Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not express'd in fancy.
Rich, but gaudy. For the apparel oft proclaims the man. And they in France, of the best rank and station Are the most select and generous Chief of that. Neither a borrower nor lender be. For loan oft loses both itself and friend. And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all, to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell, my blessing. Season this in thee. So this is Polonius to Laertes. And Hamlet, before he's about to take off. He's going abroad to college. Is that what's going on?
Why is he sending. Why is Laertes off? It's for school, right?
1:19:09 Erin: I think it is, yeah. I left, but I think it is.
1:19:13 Wes: I know that's lengthy, but just to give some of the flavor of that and the similar flavor here.
1:19:18 Erin: This is a very important stanza to me in this poem. I really like it because I think there's nothing sadder than saying I'm not even. It's something that I'm actually very interested in this idea that you're so pathetic. That you're not even the main character in your own line life. You know, and you're not even the most indecisive character in history. You're the secondary character.
1:19:41 Wes: You're not heroically indecisive.
1:19:43 Erin: Right.
1:19:43 Wes: You're just overly cautious.
1:19:45 Erin: Not even that. You know, I'm not the Mary. I'm the Rhoda, which I always wanted to be the Rhoda. But that. But that's. It's very sad when you're the. You know, when you're the supporting player who's in your own life. Who's providing funny punchlines and ways to move the B plot forward.
1:20:03 Wes: Yeah. Swell a progress.
1:20:05 Erin: Right. That makes me sad for him because I actually do understand this. I don't understand much else going on here on a personal level, but I understand this one.
1:20:12 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's the idea of deference here. Right. So for Hamlet, what is it about? It's more about tortured existential angst and almost the lack of certitude about whether his suspicions are warranted and sort of a lack of confidence about whether his suspicions are warranted. So here, by contrast, it's just deference. It's just I'm a follower.
1:20:37 Erin: Yeah. Here to serve.
1:20:39 Wes: Yeah. And that will get you friend zoned
1:20:41 Erin: every single time, whereas the other one will get a girl to kill herself over you.
1:20:46 Wes: Right, right. Hamlet was a bad boy. That's what the Ophelia is like.
1:20:51 Erin: Like, you're tearing me apart.
1:20:55 Wes: And then the fact that it's kind of presented as high sentence, like someone who's kind of pompous and presents all of this as a kind of wisdom, but it really comes across as obtuse to the nitty gritty of life. And that's the foolishness. So there's a further element of humiliation here, which is that it makes me think of again, of Guido and the preemptive absolution and presenting yourself as a good person, as a good guy, nice guy, when that misses the point. And that in fact, you have to get beyond that to make a move. Okay, good. I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
1:21:36 Erin: Well, I think that's self explanatory.
1:21:41 Wes: So he's going to be walking on the beach. Right. So I think that's a good reason to have your.
1:21:45 Erin: Yeah, that's just practical. Like what? Old people are afraid of tripping over themselves so they have to roll up their trousers. I've never heard of that before. Before I've heard of old people wearing pants that are too short for them.
1:21:54 Wes: Yeah. I don't know if it's a reference of some sort to something old people in particular do or if it's just the fact that he's. There's an old man walking.
1:22:02 Erin: Oh, I get it. I get it.
1:22:03 Wes: Barefoot on the beach now.
1:22:04 Erin: I was associating a conditional relationship here. Never mind. I've been reading this wrong this whole time. I was like, I was thinking that because he's growing old, he has to. Nothing. This is embarrassing. I've just been reading this wrong for 16 years. That's all right.
1:22:18 Wes: He has to wear the trousers.
1:22:20 Erin: Yeah. Like old people wear their trousers rolled. I don't know.
1:22:23 Wes: Well, no, I think that might be it. I mean. No, I think that actually might be. It can be just a kind of an old man thing to do. I think that's entirely possible. But it can also be the walking on the beach.
1:22:33 Erin: Well, it's also an old man thing to part your hair behind. Well, let's.
1:22:37 Wes: Yeah, exactly. These are all old men. I think you're right. These are all primarily. These are old men kinds of things to do. You want to read the next part?
1:22:44 Erin: Yeah. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. So the comb over is a consideration here.
1:23:02 Wes: Mermaids are definitely not into that.
1:23:07 Erin: Eating a peach. I don't know. Because of dentures or.
1:23:11 Wes: Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. Yeah.
1:23:13 Erin: And then the. The white. White flannel trousers have to be rolled up to walk on the beach.
1:23:17 Wes: Not a bad. I don't think that's a bad look myself, but.
1:23:19 Erin: No, neither do I.
1:23:20 Wes: You could be a sexy old man. The most interesting man in the world.
1:23:25 Erin: Oh, yeah, There you go. And he's heard the mermaid singing, so he's. He's heard the magic. But then they're not going to sing to him, so that sucks.
1:23:32 Wes: Why is it mermaids here?
1:23:34 Erin: Sexy ladies with seashell bras? Is that what it's about? Those sexy armed mermaids?
1:23:41 Wes: We get these mythical creatures. I guess part of it is the unobtainability of the mermaid. They're not just women, but women as unobtainable. And I don't know, do mermaids really hang out with mermen or is that just a Disney thing?
1:23:55 Erin: I think they just hang out with each other in coves and comb their hair with forks.
1:24:01 Wes: It's like the Amazonians, you know, in a way they're not in need of men. And then there's this happen. Half fish quality and something primitive and regressed in the sense of having returned to the ocean or not fully emerged from the ocean. Like human beings.
1:24:16 Erin: They're half ragged.
1:24:17 Wes: Yeah. Submerged in this kind of realm of fantasy. The suggestion seems to be that this is part of what's been going on is he's been thinking of ordinary real life women in terms of this fantasy. I guess we'll understand this better when we read the next stanza. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves. Blown back when the wind blows the water white and black we have lingered in the chambers of the sea by sea girls wreathed with seaweed, red and brown. Till human voices wake us and we drown. Very sad and great.
It's a nice little inversion here with the idea that to be asleep in this fantasy, to be asleep in the sea is to be able to survive it and breathe it. It's waking up that will actually kill you when you would expect, of course, the reverse to be the case. I mean, the lingering in the chambers, of course is a reference to lingering in the chambers of the women for tea and all that. You're transformed into this fantasy.
1:25:22 Erin: It's like a teenage boy who plays video games 14 hours a day, day being submerged in the fantasy. And then unfortunately, the spell is broken when mom calls you down to dinner or tells you to do your homework. And that's what's going to kill you.
1:25:37 Wes: There's a book by Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote the Hitchhiker trilogy. I forget which book this is, but there's this idea that you, in order to fly, all you have to do is jump out of a window and then forget that you're falling. And if you want to breathe underwater, all the you have to do is to not be awake to the fact that the water is water, that you're in water. And somehow it's to be realistic about these things which drowns you. You can survive it by being oblivious or something.
1:26:05 Erin: Yeah, no, I like that because that's like a self forgetfulness, which is what Prufrock is incapable of. But the mermaid's voice puts you in a trance, though they're not singing directly to him. I don't know. Is that a thing that the. You know, I'm thinking of the sirens.
1:26:19 Wes: Yeah, it does seem to be a siren provoke the sirens, definitely. Who, if they were singing to him, of course it would be a trap and it would be the thing that would lead to his destruction, their seduction. But yeah, in this case they're not going to sing to him. And that's not going to be the way things go down.
1:26:36 Erin: Do we have anything else to say or should we?
1:26:38 Wes: I'm still trying to think about what it means for human voices to wake us. And it's interesting, of course, that the last stanza. It's suddenly us again. Us and we. After quite a while, it begins with you and I. And I think it's I for almost all the rest of the poem. Right. Here he is back with this imaginary companion which could be himself, of course again, it could be all the men who fall into this category. I think there is a connection to the sirens, right? So if the sirens had been singing to him, then. Then he would be lured to his own destruction.
And in this case, they're not actually singing for him. And in the case of the sirens, they lure you into a kind of fantasy that will end up drowning you. I guess that's a comment on. Or it expresses a concern about female seduction and what it means. But again, here it's another reversal in which he's been in the water. You know, he's been in the chambers of the sea, waiting, not acting. And now that he's old and on the beach, that's, in a sense, what it means to drown. To have woken up. To have woken up is just to be at the end of his ways and days without being romantically tied to anyone.
So ironically, it's the. You know, with the sirens, you get seduced into making a move, and that's what kills you. He was lured into. Somehow seduced into the friend zone, seduced into being in the proximity of women, moving towards them enough to share drawing rooms with them, but not to go any farther. So that's a seduction into friendliness in a way. And in the same way, it's predicated on illusions about women and feminine charms, right? So we get with the seaweed red and brown. They're wreathed with seaweed red and brown. It makes me think back to arms and hair and things like that.
So in both cases, it's a objectifying kind of illusion about what women represent and what it means to idealize them, what it means for relating to them to be something of cosmic importance that requires screwing up the universe into a ball in order to. To make a move. It's to give them more significance than they actually have in fantasy. And a psychoanalyst would call this transference or would call this. This sort of idealization would have something to do with an attempt to read something maternal into the feminine. And to have a relationship with a woman be evocative of an early relationship with a maternal caretaker, let's say.
So that's one angle on this and why the stakes get so high. And so you transfer your early childhood feelings from mother to sexual object. You know, according to this theory, women and men do this, and it messes up human sexuality because it's weird in various ways. It's not only incestuous to associate love objects with your parents, but it's also evocative of, like this return to the sea, right? It's evocative of the womb. And it's evocative of merger. It's evocative of a time when you are not fully separate from the love object. And so that you disappear into it, you're destroyed by it, destroyed by your love.
And so in this case, you know, the fantasy is to idealize women and imbue them with these qualities. In the case of the Sirens, you are seduced to your death because of that. In his case, he's seduced into inactivity because the stakes are too high. And what it means to drown is actually not to be related at all. Again, to be on the beach. Old.
1:30:27 Erin: Yeah. And so he dies a solitary figure. What I get from this is he's no longer even going into the drawing rooms with the women. He's completely alone and has unmoored himself completely from society and real relationships with people to the point where hearing a human voice and entering into that community causes death to him.
1:30:46 Wes: That's interesting. Interesting.
1:30:47 Erin: Yeah.
1:30:48 Wes: Okay. Well, that cheered me up. I was having a difficult day. And there's nothing like a beautiful poem like this to bring you out of that, to wake you up.
1:31:02 Erin: We'll revive you in the Postscript. That's a little advertisement for our Postscript.
1:31:06 Wes: Don't wake me with a human voice, because you know what? That does. All right, so thank you, thank you, and thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to say that if you're listening to this on the feed for the Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find us@subtextpodcast.com subscribe@patreon.com Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about.
When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
Disturbing the Universe in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: Part 1
Jun 21, 2021
It was T. S. Eliot’s first published poem. Written when he was only in his early 20s, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” rode the crest of the wave of literary Modernism, predated World War I, and presaged an age of indecision and anxiety. The poem is the dramatic interior monologue of the title character, a middle-aged man whose passivity and ambivalence are threaded with artistic allusions, epigrammatic observations, and meditations on the nature of time, the fraudulence of relationships, and the risks of eating a peach. Should Prufrock dare disturb the universe? Should we? Wes & Erin analyze.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:08 Erin: It was T.S. eliot's first published poem, written when he was only in his early 20s. The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock rode the crest of the wave of literary modernism, predated World War I, and presaged an age of indecision and anxiety. The poem is the dramatic interior monologue of the title character, a middle aged man whose passivity and ambivalence character are threaded with artistic allusions, epigrammatic observations and meditations on the nature of time, the fraudulence of relationships, and the risks of eating a peach. Should Prufrock dare disturb the universe? Should we? Today we're discussing T.S. eliot's the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:05 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself.
1:20 Erin: So, Wes, for the longest time I called this poem the Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock. In fact, up until like a week ago did I finally train myself out of it. And I. I don't know why, but I have. I always had such trouble with this title. And I think in hindsight, or maybe just sitting and, and thinking through the title and the awkwardness of that a little bit, it seems like maybe that's the reaction that I'm supposed to have. The, the inability to really know this guy's name or rather to trip over the awkwardness of his name, maybe. But I was calling it the wrong thing for a really long time. And I sometimes do that thing where I will call it the wrong thing and people will correct me and I'll ignore them and just persist.
2:03 Wes: So yeah, it's funny you say that. I. I have always had the same problem. In fact, I tweeted about this yesterday. Making a joke about how you did it was originally called the Love Song of J. Alfred Friendzone, but Eliot thought it would be too obvious. Yeah, I don't know if that joke really worked, but yeah, I have to look up, when I tweeted that I actually had to look up the name again. I have to do it every time. I have to look up the name to verify whether the J goes in the middle or up front. It's been that way since I first read the poem, which I probably read in high school.
2:38 Erin: Wow.
2:38 Wes: Why is it so hard to remember the order?
2:40 Erin: I think Alfred J. Prufrock has a little bit more music to it, if you can argue that. But having that one initial right up front kind of stops you dead for some reason.
2:51 Wes: He goes by his middle name, right. Alfred, which is, you know already. It's not the most fortunate name. Sorry. If there are any Alfreds listening to this, you know, and then it's a nerdy. There's a nerdy effect to it, I think. And then even the last name, it's goofy or whatever you want to call it. I think Prufrock was some sort of company.
3:10 Erin: Oh, I know what you're talking about.
3:12 Wes: Growing up or something. I don't think he said this. I think he just says it's made up.
3:16 Erin: He said he wasn't consciously thinking of that, but he must have picked up on that. He admitted he might have been influenced by seeing that and having it roll around in the back of his mind.
3:24 Wes: Yeah, this is when he was back in St. Louis. Yeah. So his family is from New England, but they ended up in St. Louis. His father had like a brick company or something. Yeah. And his mom was a teacher and also a poet. But yeah, I mean, apparently St. Louis in various ways was very influential on Eliot. But yeah, this title in particular seems to have come from the name of another company. It's a kind of. I don't know if arresting is the word for the title. It's a very memorable title. It's a good poem if you're going to make yourself famous at an early age. It's a good title to have. And this poem, I think he wrote it when he was 23, right?
4:08 Erin: Yeah, 22. Well, between 21 and 23 or something.
4:12 Wes: Yeah.
4:12 Erin: Yeah.
4:13 Wes: Which is interesting because it sounds like it's about a middle aged guy.
4:16 Erin: Right.
4:17 Wes: But he wrote this, I think, while he was in grad school and philosophy at Harvard, or maybe he was on a year abroad in France, I think he did a year abroad in France and he became friends with Ezra Pound, who became a big champion of his poetry. And ultimately, even though he finished his dissertation on idealism on this English guy, Bradley, who I think he directly studied under as well, he ended up not going back for the oral examination or whatever it was that would have ended up allowing him to complete his doctorate and become a professor.
He was off to the races with poetry and left that to the side. But yeah, so this poem made a really big splash. I think Ezra Pound was excited by it because of its. It was considered avant garde in its time. It's sort of the quintessential modernist poem. Right. It's kind of near the beginning of a movement. It received a lot of resistance. There's an early review in which the guy calls him a drunken helot. So this guy, Arthur Waugh, in Quarterly Review, wrote something called the New Poetry. This review starts off, cleverness is indeed the pitfall of the New Poetry.
There's no question about the ingenuity with which its varying moods are exploited. Its elaborate symbolism evolved and its sudden, disconcerting effects exploded upon imagination. I'm not sure if I like that image. Swift, brilliant images break into the field of vision, scatter like rockets and leave a trail of flying fire behind. But the general impression is momentary. There are moods and emotions, but no steady current of ideas behind them. Further, in their determination to surprise and even to puzzle at all costs, these young poets are continually forgetting that the first essence of poetry is beauty.
And he compares it to cubism. And the reader will not have penetrated far before he finds himself in the very stronghold of literary rebellion, if not of anarchy. And then later on, after quoting something else. So this poem appeared in 1917, I think, in a little book of poems called Prufrock and Other Observations, which Ezra Pound helped get published. So after quoting from Prufrock, he says, here surely is the reduction to absurdity of that school of literary license which, beginning with the Declaration, I knew my father well, and he was a f fool, naturally proceeds the convenient assumption that everything which seemed wise and true to the father must inevitably be false and foolish to the son.
Yet if the fruits of emancipation are to be recognized in the unmetrical, incoherent banalities of these literary cubists, the state of poetry is indeed threatened with anarchy, which will end in something worse even than red ruin and the breaking up of laws. A hint of warning may not be altogether out of place. It was a classic custom in the family hall, when the feast was at its height, to display a drunken slave among the sons of the household to the end that they, being ashamed at the ignominious folly of his gesticulations, might determine never to be tempted into such a pitiable condition themselves.
The custom had its advantages, for the wisdom of the younger generation was found to be fostered more surely by a single example than by a word of homily and precept. And then Ezra Pound wrote a response to this called drunken helots and Mr. Eliot. So I don't think the reviewer will use the word, word helot, but I think after Ezra Pound's extremely feisty response and ridicule of this guy, and I think everyone assumed that the reviewer used the word helot. And so that kind of became a point of amusement among other reviewers who were defending Eliot.
8:00 Erin: I think that you said it was published in 1917 in a book, and it was, but it was first published in, I think June of 1915 in Poetry magazine, right? Well, actually, no, I think Portrait of the Artist as a Young man came out in 1914 maybe. I thought it was also 1915. And then pound did have that book of imagist poems that came in, I think, 1912. But Prufrock was certainly on the crest of the wave. I find that review to be really interesting and kind of true in a way. I mean, not in any way having to do with Eliot.
8:32 Wes: What? True in a way? But not in any true way.
8:34 Erin: But not in any true. Yeah, that's like the Parks and Rec quote with Patricia Clarkson playing Tammy, where she's like, in a way, yes, but in another truer way, no. But anyway, as you know, I'm an art history buff and I certainly think that Cubism and modernism are inextricably linked. But I think that the reviewer is right when he says that for poetry this is moving down a really destructive path. Cubism set art history on a path that ends in basically in complete and total self destruction. Like if you eliminate everything one by one, then in the end you'll be left with nothing.
And then you have to build from the rubble of that. And I think that poetry kind of. I don't, I don't want to speak too grandly here, but you know, poetry kind of escaped that fate because eventually it, it swung back around into confessionalism. And I think confessionalism within that are the seeds of an even greater and more profound demise than, than was ever in modernism. But I think he does, he does sort of back his way into an interesting point about these destructive movements in art or like essentialist movements where you go down to the bare bones and then when you're done stripping everything away, there's nothing left.
But it's certainly not true when it comes to Eliot, that, and it's kind of funny that, that he thinks that Eliot is not what he called reverent enough of his forebears, considering the fact that it begins with, you know, it begins with Dante, right. And, and is littered with his reverence for his forebears and also.
10:02 Wes: And it's something very important to Eliot and Eliot wrote about that, you know.
10:05 Erin: Right, right.
10:06 Wes: Relationship.
10:07 Erin: And I hope that we'll cover tradition and the individual talent at some point.
10:10 Wes: That would be really cool. I read that as part of my prep for this, but, yeah, we should do that.
10:13 Erin: Oh, really? Oh, I haven't reread that since college, but I remember loving it.
10:17 Wes: Yeah. He talks about the importance of seeing a. You know, the importance of influence and thinking of a contemporary poem as sort of part of this larger whole that is poetry. So, yeah, the guy that reviewer doesn't is not astute enough to get that, despite the fact that Eliot is innovative and more fragmented in the way that he writes than people are used to, it's not simply an abandonment of tradition.
10:40 Erin: Yeah, no. And not to give this idiot too much credence, but I'm simply saying that in a. You know, that I think modernism actually has a lot more of the tradition within it now. We have, I think, later movements after modernism started to abandon that tradition more and more. But at least when it comes to art history, he was kind of right. Just because in the 70s, you have this kind of nadir of, like, after Abstract Expressionism, where do you go? Anyway? There is a certain cul de sac quality in a lot of elements of 20th century art, but not in Eliot. I'd say Eliot is like the stay against that.
11:14 Wes: Interesting. Well, I think Ezra Pound overhyped the book. In all honesty, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one of my favorite poems, and I think it's a great poem. Reading the whole book in preparation for this. It's not long.
11:27 Erin: Portrait of a Lady is that Portrait
11:28 Wes: of a Lady is great. Well, the Boston Evening Transcript is another brief little kind of playful poem that doesn't mark someone as being a great poet, in my opinion. So there are things of varying quality, I think, in that volume. But regardless, take my judgments with a grain of salt, obviously. But I can say, as far as my taste goes, my love of Prufrock does not extend to thus far to most of the other stuff I've read. So I also reread the Waste Land in preparation for this, and I remember having to read that in high school and having a friend of mine just bitch and moan constantly about the Waste Land.
And it was just almost a recurring object of contempt. So what I can say now is I'm not advanced enough to fully appreciate probably some of this Prufrock. Like I said, I count it among my favorites. I Think it's exceptional. And I think when I say Pound was overhyping, I was thinking of the volume in general. And Eliot is just starting out right. Ezra Pound's like, oh, I'm gonna make you famous. You're the greatest. I don't think there's enough evidence at this point. Pound is really, really. It's a leap of faith in some ways for Pound. You know, he sees the greatness in some of these poems.
12:43 Erin: Sure. Well, I think Pound is kind of a serial over hyper. I mean, Eliot fascism, you know? Yeah, exactly.
12:50 Wes: But we kind of got into this because of the weird title and the
12:54 Erin: juxtaposition of the idea of a love song with this guy who sounds like a. I don't know, I think he would make a great sitcom character on like the Big Bang Theory or something like that.
13:06 Wes: Really? Why is that?
13:07 Erin: I don't know. He just sounds like his name. It just sounds like a guy with a pocket protector.
13:11 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
13:12 Erin: But then we have the excerpt from Inferno.
13:15 Wes: Yeah. So shall we just go through? We'll read a stanza and then comment and. We may run out of time to do all of that. But that started out.
13:23 Erin: Sure.
13:23 Wes: I've been looking forward to hearing you read the. Read the Italian here.
13:26 Erin: Oh, no. Are you serious?
13:28 Wes: Yeah, it's in Italian. How are you going to avoid reading the Italian?
13:33 Erin: Well, because I was just going to read a translation. I didn't practice. All right, all right. Sio credese che mia riposta fosse a Persona que mai tornase el mondo castafiama Staria senza Piuscose Ma percioque giamma di castofondo Nortono vivo alcun cioldo il Veronica senza terma di infamia ti respondo. So the translation that I have, which I got off the Internet somewhere, if I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker. But since up from these depths no one has yet returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer without fear of being shamed.
14:16 Wes: So that guy is Guido da Montefeltro. What a name.
14:22 Erin: Great guy.
14:22 Wes: Speaking of weird names, probably not weird back then. Or maybe not weird
14:28 Erin: back then when everyone had those weird Italian names.
14:30 Wes: Yeah, I don't know what that was. Thank God. That's fast. But yeah. So Dante at this point is in the. This is from Dante's Inferno. At this point, he's in the eighth circle of hell for people who are being punished for simple fraud, fraud without malicious intent, which that sort of fraud is meant for the ninth circle. This includes counterfeiters, hypocrites, grafters, seducers, and this guy Guido, he's made entirely of flame. So when he talks about this tongue of flame would cease to flicker. He's not being metaphorical there, his tongue really is made of fire.
So Guido's crime was to advise Pope Boniface to basically betray a certain family, to tell them that they were getting amnesty and to then to renege on the promise. And Guido basically has Boniface agree to absolve him of the sin in advance. So to get over his reluctance for doing that, which I think is significant. So I think our task here is to think about how is this relevant? How is fraud, and in particular this sort of fraudulent betrayal of the Colonna family in which there's preemptive absolution. How is that going to be relevant to the rest of the poem?
15:49 Erin: Yeah, there's a kind of a preemptive absolution within the telling of this tale too. Or in other words, there's a kind of like a short circuiting because Guido is only telling Dante this with the understanding that Dante can't tell anyone else. So he's sort of unburdening himself with the expectation that if he tells the truth about this or if he tells his tale, Dante won't be able to tell it to anyone else because no one's ever made it out of hell alive. So there's again, that kind of confessional quality which is conditional on the assumption that Dante will not make it out.
16:22 Wes: You know, there's a nice irony to this epigraph, right, because it's understandable that Guido might think, okay, no one's returned from hell, I'm safe telling this story and not, you know, I'm not going to ruin my reputation up on earth by telling it because Dante is never going to get back. But in this case, Eliot is in the position of Guido and we are in the position of Dante and Eliot is publishing this poem. And there's no question, right, that this publication is not a private communication to some listener who's going to keep his confidence, but that it's a potentially reputation ruining event and in particular an admission of some sort of fraud.
17:03 Erin: Yeah, I think you're right, but I think also that Eliot is Dante and Guido is Prufrock. So there's that. Is that what you said?
17:10 Wes: Yeah. No, I didn't, but I think you're right. Yeah. Because it can be read in several different ways. Yeah.
17:15 Erin: Right. So there's that. You Know, hiding behind dramatic monologue also, which is interesting. So there's this idea that Eliot is betraying Prufrock.
17:25 Wes: I see.
17:25 Erin: So of course Prufrock is his own invention, but it's allowing him to the Persona, which is something, of course, Pound was really into the idea of Persona and I guess Eliot is here. Like this poem just makes me think of Browning. The idea of the dramatic monologue can give you that kind of ironic distance from whoever you're writing about. Even as you're revealing personal things about yourself. You can say that it's through the prism of this character and in a way, betraying the character.
17:52 Wes: Now this is of course a much better reading than the one I just gave. This makes. Makes much more sense, yes. To think of Eliot as Dante and in this case betraying Prufrock, which in a way you can read as a self betrayal as well if you'd like. But yeah, that should be the primary reading.
18:08 Erin: And Guido is giving a kind of the tongue of flame. That's got to be the evil Holy Spirit, right? So there's a divine inspiration. Well, an inverted divine, maybe demonic inspiration that hovers over the whole painting. The whole painting? Sure, the whole poem.
18:27 Wes: So I just wanted to give a little foreshadowing of what I think the fraud might. And the preemptive absolution for it, what that might be, which is that it might have something to do with. There's a lot in this poem about social forms which are associated with these women in their rooms having polite conversation and deception that happens in our day to day social interactions. One might think of those things as fraudulent. And then the concept of preemptive absolution is that that's just what it means to be a nice person. So to lie to people, to say.
Or essentially to conceal things from people so that you don't hurt their feelings, so you don't ruin the relationships. There's a great deal of deception that goes on socially, but it's kind of a noble lie situation. It's for a better end and that might be the preemptive absolution part of it. So that's a suggestion which I'm not sure that will bear out, but that was my first impression.
19:20 Erin: I like that.
19:21 Wes: Yeah.
19:21 Erin: Okay, so I'll read the first stanza. Imagine that I have the voice of a middle aged man. Or maybe I already do. Okay, let us go then, you and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. Let us go through certain half deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells, streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question. Oh, do not ask, what is it? Let us go and make our visit.
19:55 Wes: So famously, the first question is, who is the you that he's addressing in this poem? Is it himself? Is it the reader? Could we think of this as Prufrock addressing Eliot, his Dante, even given the. The way things begin? You know, my first reaction to this was that what you get from the first two lines, it sounds to me like the beginning of a. You know, it's called a love poem. And there's a kind of romantic feel to the first stanza, even after it takes a left turn and goes dark. Really, it's only the first two lines where you can maintain the illusion. It always starts out for me feeling like he's talking to a woman and that this is a night out, this is a date. And then later on you're left to wonder, could this be a male companion, as Eliot later on suggested when he was asked, is it Prufrock speaking to himself? And of course it can be all
20:52 Erin: these things at once to bolster your point of him speaking to a female companion. The romance of this first stanza, I think, comes from the fact that it actually begins with a decisive action, or maybe just the suggestion of a decisive action. Right? Like, let's go, let's do something.
21:10 Wes: You get the imperative mood here.
21:12 Erin: Right. And this is the only stanza, I think, that begins that way, that I think contributes to the romantic tone. Of course it's ironic because it's going to be undermined by the rest of the poem and whether or not one should do anything. And the love song itself, the fact that this poem exists at all is again a kind of a decisive act, though it's going to later be regretted if the epigraph is any indication. I agree with you that it seems like it's a woman. But then also I do kind of think to me it's Prufrock talking to himself, I think. I mean, of course I agree that it could be many things and probably is many things, but in light of the rest of the poem, this first stanza, I kind of read almost as like a self help kind of pep talk, you know, like he's ready to go out into the world and he has to bolster himself up a little bit in some sort of self helpy kind of.
I guess this slightly prefigures Dale Carnegie, but that kind of idea, like okay, let's go. Let's do this. And that's why he has all this enthusiasm up front. Or if not enthusiasm, then at least just the desire to do something, which then peters out over the course of the poem.
22:11 Wes: Yeah. The way I like to think of this is almost as a dreamlike situation where it could start out as a female companion in the first two lines. And then it takes a dark turn where the sky becomes the patient etherized upon a table, which we'll talk about. And then suddenly he's wandering through. Maybe it's a red light district, you know, place where there's sounds like people with prostitutes, restless nights in one night, cheap hotels. He could be alone in that situation, talking to himself. He could be with a male companion at that point. Ultimately, of course, he's.
It sounds much more, as the poem progresses, like he's just by himself, the companion disappears, or it's absorbed, it goes inside him, or he's abandoned. In some sense, I like the idea of thinking of, you know, because it's been set up with epigraph from Dante. I like thinking of the first two lines as in some way inspired by that. Right. So that it does sound like Prufrock is the Virgil here. He is the guide in some sense at first, but that quickly evolves into something else.
23:17 Erin: Yeah. And there is, because of this seedy quality too. It does seem like Prufrock, whether he's with someone or alone, we're meant to feel that his mind is tending in a certain direction. Even though the third line, the punchline of the first two, like a patient etherized upon a table, is the inversion, maybe of a romantic evening with this idea of the loss of consciousness and feeling going directly to sleep or being put to sleep rather than having a romantic time.
23:47 Wes: And I think this is one of the greatest metaphors of the English language. Yeah. Part of what's really interesting here is this idea of the evening spread out against the sky. Just a strange kind of doubling image. Is he referring to stars here? How is the evening exactly, spread out against the sky? Is it the darkness of the night that spread out against the sky? Yeah. This patient etherized upon a table part is wonderful because it suggests that the evening, far from being romantic, is sick and has been made temporarily unconscious. Or even.
He'll mention Lazarus later on. Right. The idea of someone coming back from the dead, and the closest thing we have to that is putting someone under anesthesia for surgery, putting someone, you know, very as close to death as you could possibly get, and then reviving Them. So here in the very beginning of the poem, we have this idea of sickness and someone being put under because of sickness and with the potential for revival. But most urgent up front here is just the idea that the evening quickly does not serve as any kind of romantic backdrop.
And now we have it. What he's about to do, if he's walking through a red light district, it's almost like the evening is being anesthetized so that it is not going to be a witness to what's going on.
25:06 Erin: Yeah. And then we have the half deserted streets. I guess they're half deserted because Prufrock is there and whoever else he's with. But after the patient, this section from the half deserted streets to insidious intent is also sort of deserted of people. Like we have all these images of emptiness, I guess. Streets are half deserted, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one night cheap hotels. But there's no one enjoying the. Or rather not enjoying the restless night. And the restlessness here must be asexual. It must be a restlessness because of anxiety rather than because of the fact that it's being used for sex or one night stand or prostitution or whatever the case may be. Am I right thinking that that's the restlessness?
25:53 Wes: What we seem to learn as the poem goes on is that he's on a way to see a woman who may or may not have been courting, or maybe he's courting her and she doesn't know that. And he's either proposing marriage to her, he's making some sort of. Maybe he's proposing that they become girlfriend and boyfriend, something like that. He's got something that he has to say to her that he's anxious about saying. And yet here he is taking a detour through a red light district. And I take the restless nights in one night cheap hotels as people seeing prostitutes. So you're taking it as something else here.
26:27 Erin: Well, yeah, because the streets are like a tedious argument. The restlessness seems anxious to me also because I know that this is. I mean, this is a Boston poem, right? So there's something obviously essentially puritanical about. About the nature of this neighborhood. I don't think that Boston ever had a red light district. I mean, maybe I'm being naive here, but also the idea of the oyster shells, not the oysters. I mean that the typical aphrodisiac, but the actual aphrodisiac part taken out of it, the emptiness of that. I don't know what you want to say about that.
The castration of that, as it were. The streets that are just like a tedious argument. Thinking about this poem, I was walking around Boston and those streets in my neighborhood that loop back around on each other so that you don't get anywhere. Yeah. It seems like what should be an area of indulgence, a red light district. Something like that is actually. It has all the sin or excitement or whatever leached out of it. And what you have left with is just the empty shell, literally, in this case of anxiety and not even doing anything, quote unquote, fun in any of these environments.
And also the lack of people that leads me to think that. But I could see it going the other way too.
27:41 Wes: Yeah, we should stay maybe agnostic between both of those readings. And there's also a conflict in how we are supposed to conceive of him. One of the ideas I had is that this guy is middle aged and the way he's. His interactions with women have probably only been through seeing prostitutes. That's one possibility. Or he's virginal and he hasn't done that at all. And it's hard for me to say which. When I look at the tedious argument of insidious intent in the context of the rest of the poem, I wonder if he's thinking about reconciling his sexual history or sexuality in general with the more affectionate and higher feelings involved in love and a declaration of love to a woman.
Something like that. It's not entirely clear. So that's one possibility for this. The tedious argument of insidious intent. He's worried about something. There's some sort of inner debate going on which is now represented by the streets themselves. And then the question is, why is the intent of the argument insidious? And it makes me wonder if it involves sexual intent.
28:54 Erin: Right. And what the question is is momentarily put aside. And then he actually goes to the party. Though I know some people think that he's never actually in the party, but I think he is, or you know, party used loosely, because then he's in the house and the women.
29:10 Wes: Yeah. So he's gonna be famously indecisive and hesitant and Hamlet esque. Even though we'll deny that comparison later on throughout the poem. But in the first stanza, right, he gets up. There's enough gumption to set things in motion, to start this walk and to go actually make the visit. So he's able to turn aside the tedious arguments and this more theoretical frame of mind. Right. So this do not ask, what is it? It almost Sounds like it's a very philosophical approach to the problem. Right. You become Aristotle and you say, what is this? There's a classic conflict there between being theoretical and being practical, actually moving to action.
And ironically, of course, this whole poem is essentially an analysis and it's an addressing of the question, what is it? So then we get to this next. Shall I just read the next two lines? In the room, the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. This was another butt of ridicule. My friends in high school, I know
30:15 Erin: this is the Woody Allen movie part.
30:18 Wes: Yeah, I always. I always imagined him at this point peeking in the window at the women in the room. When I was in high school, I'm like, why is this guy peeking in the room? You know, if this were a movie, this would be a nice dramatic. You know, you cut to the destination and in a way, the antagonists in their environment. And that's where he's headed. So at this point, I still think of him as outside wandering around and then we just get a brief glimpse of where it is he's headed.
30:49 Erin: I think Michelangelo's a great. I mean, not only because women come and go and Michelangelo are just like a fantastic rhyme. And I like the fact that it's a refrain that recurs and it has a little kind of jazzy element to it. So it's very. Yeah, it's like a Woody Allen cocktail party. But also because Michelangelo himself is someone that I associate with violence, of course, but also just action. And he's a great figure. So he's someone who maybe makes Prufrock feel inadequate or something like that, but he's also a guy who's associated with. I don't know if virility is too strong of a word, but like, you know, violence and great action. And so they're talking about Michelangelo and Prufrock seems small maybe by comparison to that.
31:31 Wes: Yeah, I think it's important that Michelangelo is an artist. And because we can also read this as a. Ultimately, as we can always do the reading, where we think of this as a reflection on art and what it means to be an artist. The surface content here is that this is kind of a characteristic of high society or polite society, where people are engaged in probably a lot of small talk and meaningless chit chat. They're not doing anything deep or real, and yet they, you know, they sprinkle their conversation with these sorts of allusions because it's a mark of status and sophistication. So it's a way in which art is being made use of. Socially rather than engaged with at any substantive level.
32:20 Erin: The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes, licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, and seeing that it was a soft October night, curled once about the house and fell asleep. Yeah, this is the fog obsessed one. The fog is a cat.
32:47 Wes: Yeah. What we get now. So we get pollution, I guess the yellow fog is the result of burning coal or fuel or something, and the yellow smoke. And then of course, we get the falling on the back of this cat creature made of the fog. But the gist of the stanza is something kind of warm and cozy and nice. Right. This idea of a cat curling up around the house, you know, that's sort of evocative of a warm kind of homey place.
33:16 Erin: And I guess this gives credence to your reading that he's still looking through the windows because maybe he's delaying by waxing poetic about the standing water and the soot and everything. And rather than. Because I always read this as being. He's now immediately gone mentally outside the house, in the streets again as soon as he arrives. But I like the idea that he's looking in through the window and then kind of looks around him and as a way of delay, engages in this kind of imaginative exercise of seeing the bad effects of urbanization as some cozy little cat that he'd like to stay and pet rather than go inside the house.
33:51 Wes: Yeah, I mean, on my current reading of the poem, I didn't even think of, you know, that was when I was younger, I thought of him looking in the window, which is. It's still possible, Prufrock as Peeping Tom. But I thought of this as just him making a transition from a red light district to another part of town in which there's a nicer part of town in which his destination, the house, or really what we're seeing is it doesn't matter where Prufrock is exactly. He's imagining where it is he's going. So it's unclear, but I think. Yeah, that's a good point you make about kind of negative products of urbanization serving the purpose of this kind of more cozy image.
And I don't know exactly what to make of that since there seems to be a bit of a class element of this. These upper class women doing upper class things and talking about Michelangelo, you Can think about the ways in which industry and the work of others is made to serve those purposes. And kind of kept out of sight. Right. So in these chambers, in these drawing rooms, the women are kind of sheltered from this. And it's the labor of others, in the end, serves the purpose of creating that shelter, of creating this cozy, protective cat. I think we can also make a connection between the fog and etherization.
35:11 Erin: Oh, sure.
35:12 Wes: And ultimately between that and some sort of dulling or obscuring effect of politeness and social forms. But correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought a lot about that in reading this poem. It seems as if. And this is where the fraudulence comes in again. That he's thinking about the essential hypocrisy of the way we engage with each other socially. And he's worried about whether love is that way as well. Whether love is inevitably a sort of fraudulence. Because it's actually predicated on something sinful, on lust. And just a kind of fogging over or papering over of its essentially sinful nature. That seems to be part of the conflict here.
35:55 Erin: That's interesting.
35:55 Wes: And then, more generally, society itself is right. The organizing force that builds society is something violent and exploitative. Societies come to be through a history of violence. They come together through warlords doing their thing. And whatever peace we enjoy within society with the cat kind of wrapped around us or historically, if we live at a more peaceful moment. It's easy to forget about that as the product of something more sinister that's evolved over time. And it's unclear how we could have ever gotten to where we are without that evolution. I bring that up just again, to highlight this conflict between the idea of what is social and peaceful and civilizationally advanced. And talk of Michelangelo and art with some sort of seedy underbelly. Or a conflict between that and some kind of energizing, contradictory force to which one might reduce it.
36:58 Erin: It's funny that you should say that, because I did a little word association in the notes in the margins. I wrote fog as cat fog settling around the house like brain fog. House is brain compartmentalized. And then fog of war.
37:10 Wes: Yeah.
37:11 Erin: So I think I got that fog
37:12 Wes: of war in my notes as well.
37:17 Erin: So it's funny that we both got to war somehow.
37:19 Wes: By the way, we should say that the musical Cats was based on Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
37:25 Erin: Yeah. Should we?
37:27 Wes: Cats are a recurring theme, I think, in his poetry. They appear in a few different places.
37:36 Erin: Well, let's not throw that in his face, it's.
37:39 Wes: So if you love the. Go out and see the most recent movie production of Cats, because you'll love it.
37:51 Erin: I'll read the next.
37:52 Wes: Yeah, sure.
37:53 Erin: Okay. And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street Rubbing its back upon the window panes There will be time. There will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. There will be time to murder and create and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate Time for you and time for me and time. Yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea, you can almost hear the nervous finger tapping. I hear a finger tapping in this stanza. The recurring There will be time. There will be time. Aside from the obvious repetition of the word, time is thematic.
38:33 Wes: Yeah. So we get an evocation of Ecclesiastes here, Right. A time to be born and a time to die and so on. And probably also to seduction comes like poems, like Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, had we but world enough and time, that sort of thing. So I think, given the fact that this is a love song, we're meant to think of that. And it's an inversion of that. Right? Because a seduction poem would say, look, life is short and you're. We're getting old. Beauty fades. Let's get it on now, sooner than later, before that happens. In this case, the idea is that there's plenty of time for indecision and for hesitation, which we can take to be men, ironically. But what's also interesting here is that in a way, I think indecision does expand time in a way. What do you think of this whole time thing here?
39:30 Erin: I think he's playing with the idea of delay as creating meaning, like a false way of creating meaning. The idea of possibilities or endless possibilities seems to him to be something that it's good to hold on to, which is a false idea, Right? Because ultimately all he has is. It's sort of like he's bought time in bulk at Costco and now he has. Or he thinks that he has a lot of time and that that in itself conveys meaning, really. Time is just at the service of actually performing an action and finding meaningful ways to spend one's time. In other words, he's divorcing time from a way to spend that time.
He's setting it aside. He's like putting it in a closet or something like that. And then maybe even sort of rubbing his hands in a way. I mean, not he's anxious, but saying, oh, you know, look at all this time I have, it's fine, it's all going to be fine. Of course there's a nervousness and an anxiety in that repetition.
40:34 Wes: It's interesting to say there will be time if we were to infer that he's middle aged from his bald spot later on, and to infer that he's sort of making a last ditch attempt at proposal, probably to someone who's much younger. Again, we get this kind of inverse of the seduction poem in which it's not her who's running out of time, and so get with me because of that, he's the one running out of time. But the way he understands that, it's as if he's reinterpreting a life of indecision as temporal expansiveness, right? Generally we think, I don't have time to do everything I want to do and so I better act quickly.
But if you've been inhibited from action all your life, then in that domain of deliberation and tedious arguments of insidious intent, it's as if there's something that is expansive about that. In other words, you know, indecision eats time, right? But then it's as if because it eats time, it gives you all that time. In some sense, that's the ironic reversal. You know, you take something that seems to destroy our time as being the thing that actually gives it to us in the sense that we don't. It changes our standard of judgment where if we don't, if we're comfortable with indecision and hesitation, then we're not hurrying ourselves up in order to act because we leave action to the side.
And then in that sense, by that standard evaluation, time looks more expansive. The other thing here, with the reference to Ecclesiastes, there's a kind of elision between saying there is a time for everything, right? A time to be born, a time to be die, everything in its place, and then this idea that there will be time. So the question is, it's the way in which the question of appropriateness degrades into the idea that I can always wait, there's always going to be time to make a decision because I want to make sure everything is happening at the appropriate time.
But of course, if you try to make sure everything happens at the appropriate time, you end up with a bald spot. It ends up being late.
42:41 Erin: Related to that point, I recently read, not too recently, actually. A. E. Stallings's translation of works and days, her new translation, which is very good, I really recommend it. But it occurred to me that Hesiod is the one who, from what I remember, he comes up with the idea of the five ages of man.
42:57 Wes: Yep.
42:57 Erin: And so I looked up on Wikipedia,
42:59 Wes: so we should say we're talking about the Hesiod reference here.
43:03 Erin: Yeah. Time for all the works and days of hands. And of course, the whole poem is about the idea of toil and creating meaningful work. And there's an almanac in there, too. But in the little. Forgive me that I'm reading from Wikipedia, but in the little Wikipedia description of the five ages, the current time of at which Hesiod is writing is. Or Hesiod is the Iron Age. And so Wikipedia says Hesiod finds himself in the Iron Age. During this age, humans live in an existence of toil and misery. Children dishonor their parents, brother fights with brother, and the social contract between guest and host is forgotten.
During this age, might makes right and bad men use lies to be thought good. At the height of this age, humans no longer feel shame or indignation at wrongdoing. Babies will be born with gray hair, and the gods will have completely forsaken humanity. There will be no help against evil. I read that and I was like, wow, you know, babies will be born with gray hair.
43:55 Wes: Yeah.
43:55 Erin: This is a Prufrock. Yeah, yeah.
43:58 Wes: Oh, yeah, that's a good. Interesting. Babies will be born with bald spots. Yeah.
44:02 Erin: Right, right. So it's funny, too, because it's. Hesiod thought that he was living in a, you know, a terrible time of his. You know, he himself was living past the Golden Age in a depleted time, a time after which all the meaningful time had been spent, or something like that.
44:19 Wes: Dang kids today.
44:20 Erin: Right?
44:22 Wes: Didn't he know he lived in ancient times?
44:25 Erin: I know. He should have appreciated it while he was there, while his village was getting pillaged or whatever. And so the idea that modernism is, of course, playing with as this sort of post, you know, everything is post everything and a sense of depletion or exhaustion of the arts and a sense in which everything good has already happened. And so, in a way, it's like there is a lot of time when you're just thinking that you're kind of playing with the leftovers of all the great ages past because all the great things have already happened. You know what I'm trying to say about that?
45:01 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
45:02 Erin: That's what I'm trying to get at. That's why I say that it's like Prufrock has all this time in bulk because he's like, all you have left is time. If you're in an age that's past the age of action and excitement and gold and profundity and all these things, it's like Marvell and his mistress have died, right? And the urgency is now gone. And you're just playing with those ages past that. Marvell was saying, you can't just linger by the Ganges and do whatever it is that you want to do. So now we're in that time, we're in the post time.
45:33 Wes: That's great.
45:34 Erin: It leeches the urgency. But of course, it's a form of. Of self deception, which compounds the deception that Prufrock tries to put on by preparing a face to meet the other faces.
45:44 Wes: Yeah, you have me thinking about how there will be time is actually his strange way of saying that there already has been so much time. And we can think of that in terms of Prufrock's life or in terms of history and in particular, what that means for a contemporary artist. We can read Eliot as thinking about the relation between tradition and the present, and we know that's something he thought a lot about. But I was also going to say about the works and days reference in Hesiod's poem, there's a lot of agricultural instruction and there's advice on how to live.
So thinking of the reference to Polonius later on in the poem, where Prufrock says, I'm not a Hamlet, I'm just this more cautious and practically minded person, maybe to the point of being a fool. So there's the kind of Polonian element to works and days, and it's an attempt to kind of impart the virtues of work, hard work. It's kind of a homemaking instruction manual, if you think of animal husbandry. And agriculture is involved in that. But part of the reason why he's talking about the ages of man is he's talking about why it is that work is necessary.
And so this story is evocative of the Fall in that way because it follows on Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to humanity, basically the capacity for technological and intellectual advancements. Because I think in the Golden Age, right, we supposedly lived free from all toil and illness. And then Pandora's box contains the curses, and one of them is that we will have to work, which is sort of our fate after leaving Eden, right, is to have to toil. The idea is that to be expelled from Eden and to live in a time of toil there's some connection there to living in a time of indecision rather than living in a time of heroism, something like that.
47:39 Erin: I agree with you. I think that's a good observation. I also think now this is even the time beyond the toil, because now we have too much. Right. Dropping a question on your plate led me to think of the question of appetite, which returns to that again and again. He's even then later on. I want to jump the gun here. But later on he's even overfed, and that kind of lulls him into not wanting to do anything. I looked up the term analysis paralysis, which I guess didn't even come into existence until the 70s, but he sort of presages that. Or the idea of choice overload is something I'm really interested in.
So, like choice overload, they did all these studies that found that in supermarkets, for instance, if you put out, say, one product or two products, then people aren't going to be satisfied with not having much of a choice. But there's a point of diminishing returns where if you have too many choices, say, of toothpaste brands, then people are not going to know what to do and they're just going to walk away. They can't make the choice because they're presented with too many, and it just ends in indecision. And then they don't buy what they have to buy.
So there's actually an ideal number of choices to have. But that occurs in all elements of one's life. It's very difficult to make a choice like this is what people talk about with why people aren't getting married because of Tinder, and the idea that there's always someone new out there, and it leads you to be so overwhelmed by the potential choices that you might make that you can't function at all. And if you do make a choice and you've had too many choices to select from, then it increases your dissatisfaction with that choice. And so I was thinking about all this stuff just because I'm kind of interested in that idea of choice overload, because it's something that happens to me all the time.
If I go into a store and I think there are too many options, I will invariably walk out with nothing, even if I really need something. And then I kind of think later on, like, why did I do that? You know, so. And then I found out there's a reason for it. But that question of appetite, or of the idea that the toil has now produced so many options and so much excess, so much Fruit of that labor, that. That's, I think, part of Prufrock's problem or the modern problem, which is, you know, you can't choose anything because there are too many possibilities that other people's labor have opened up to us.
49:52 Wes: That's great. I like that. The after toil time. Is that what you said?
49:56 Erin: Yeah, after toil, post toil. We should really get our listeners to write down all the phrases that we've come up with.
50:03 Wes: Of course.
50:04 Erin: This is a sad list.
50:05 Wes: Yeah, that's really great. And again, it comes back to this idea that what weighs upon us is the accrual of time in the past and history and kind of an accumulation of history. And that goes for the arts. That goes for Everything has been done. What do I do now? Or can I do anything that is original, that isn't the mere product that hasn't been done before, or isn't just a product of influence that isn't entirely derivative? So there's the indecision predicated on that burden, and then there's the kind of related in a decision that you've talked about, where at some point so much work has been done, that life, it creates so many options and making choices becomes so much more complicated.
So I like this when he says there will be a time to murder and create, that sounds very heroic and very. Yes, there's potentially at least a person of action. And it sounds to me again, like an inversion of the Ecclesiastes. And a time to be born and at a time to die. Born becomes create. Die becomes murder. But of course, in the end, we end up anticlimactically with taking toast and tea. Right. There's plenty of time to do all of this before the taking of toast and tea. Unfortunately, he's in the era of taking toast and tea. That's his age, not the era of murdering and creating necessarily.
51:34 Erin: It's a tribute to Eliot's genius, then, that this poem was even created, that he was even able to make the choices to lead to his allusions because of also the selection of having so many artists to choose from that he might allude to in the poem, like the wasteland is a monument to the triumph over choice overload. I guess that's a good point.
51:54 Wes: You know, if you have enough footnotes, then maybe you can overcome the accumulation of history and time.
52:01 Erin: Right, Right. Well. And so then we go from toast and tea to the return of the refrain. In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo, which is great because it recalls him to the present. But also to an artistic allusion, which contrasts with the toast and tea and like you say, the heroic age.
52:18 Wes: It's what's talked about during toast and tea, right?
52:21 Erin: Right.
52:22 Wes: It's no longer what's done, but it's history. And it's become an. An object of discussion and a kind of vehicle for social interaction in the present. So it's suggestive of part of what leads to indecision and hesitation. In a way, social life itself becomes a form of inaction or stasis. It just kind of lives off of the past or off of. In current times, off of the media environment. And it becomes easy to do that rather than to do anything to create or murder whatever you want to do, whatever your thing is, you talk about it or communicate your signal, your status through it.
53:02 Erin: So the next stands up and indeed there will be time to wonder, do I dare and do I dare time to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in the middle of my hair? They will say how his hair is growing thin, My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin. They will say, but how his arms and legs are thin. Do I dare disturb the universe in a minute? There is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
53:33 Wes: So we find out he's middle aged. Doesn't have to be middle aged. I mean, I wonder what Eliot was thinking of himself writing this in his early 20s. Right. Did he feel old already? Was he explicitly thinking about what it might mean to be middle aged? I mean, he might have thought he was thinking about someone in his 30s. Right. You could be balding in your 30s. It's the safest bet to assume it's middle aged. And then in the end of the poem, of course, he's worried about getting old alone. The thinness of the hair.
54:00 Erin: Yeah, I like the fact that we have thin rhyming with thin. In this stanza and prior stanzas, you have time rhyming with time. I think those are the two big perfect rhymes, perfect repetitions, thin and time.
54:14 Wes: There's a lot more rhyming in this than it. Like, I hadn't reflected on the amount of rhyming, you know what I mean? Like, I thought of this as very free. I mean, it is free.
54:22 Erin: It is. And when the rhymes do occur, I mean, I think the closeness of the rhymes expands and contracts when it does rhyme, which is nice because it's like time, I think, expanding and contracting. And when the rhymes are close together, there's a Nice little bow. Or maybe we could say a pin in the rhythm. But also a kind of like a nervous energy, I think, that's getting released maybe. I mean, that's always the case with rhyme anyway.
54:48 Wes: So there's almost something, I think that. About the earlier part of the stanza that seems frenetic and rushed, you know, do I dare and do I dare time to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in the middle of my hair. Very Dr. Seussy there. And then you get tripped up. Then the hesitation comes in, the hesitant feel comes in with do I dare? So very short line. And then disturb the universe. In a minute there is time. And then we get a full line again at the end with a nice rhyme.
55:19 Erin: Yeah, the speculation as he takes more time thinking what they might be saying and then self reflecting and then catches himself with the rhyme at the end. I think you're right. I didn't realize how that in the earlier part of the stanza, it's almost like he's winding himself up, even just the way that it begins, you know, and indeed there will be time, like da da, da, da, da, da da. You know, you kind of gain momentum and then it peters out and then he remembers himself at the end of the stanza.
55:46 Wes: It gives you a good sense of what seems to be his feeling that what he has to do is. It kind of has cosmic dimensions to it. Do I disturb the universe? You can see that the stakes are very high for him. And so, yes, if the proposal or whatever it is to this woman is of such monumental significance, then you can start to understand the hesitation and the indecision and understand that perhaps this is something that has afflicted him for a very long time. If his hair is growing thin now, and I think again of this conflict between a more mature way of relating to people or something we associate with civilization, a possible marriage and certain institutions.
But above all, the idea of loving someone. So that's the universe that might be disturbed. And the thing that might disturb it is the underlying baseness of the instinct that seems to be tangled up with the proposal. Right. It's a proposal for marriage, perhaps predicated on love. We could speculate that the hesitation comes from his worry that it's too tangled up with something that he's ashamed of, which is the sexual or the instinctual component. So I'm sorry to get so psychoanalytic
57:08 Erin: about it, but no, that's good. I mean, I think there's also a selfish quality that he is the center of the universe, or he Himself is the universe, too. The bald spot in the middle of my hair, you know, later we'll see the head of John the Baptist, and I think of him as sort of like a basketball head. Like, you know, that when he. When he's. His necktie is asserted by a simple pin. And later he'll say that he's sprawling on a pin. I think of it as like a basketball spinning on a finger, you know, and that he is the globe in a way. I mean, this whole thing is.
I mean, to be honest, this is where I start to get really annoyed with Prufrock, because his part of this anxiety has to come from a kind of self obsession that you think that everyone is talking about you. Really. No one cares about you, no one's talking about you. But that anxiety, I think, springs from that kind of self obsession and the idea that you are the universe or that the action that he's going to take will disturb the universe. It has to come from a place of, you know, the kind of selfishness that bachelor is prone to.
58:14 Wes: Do I disturb the universe? What's he disturbing? Well, he's stirring up a little hornet's nest of women. And how are they going to sting him? Well, they're going to say his hair is growing thin or his arms and legs are thin. Right.
58:29 Erin: Which sounds true.
58:30 Wes: Right. But these very not pleasant to hear comments, of course, would he ever really actually hear them directly? He's just speculating that that's what they're saying about him behind his back. But what he's anxious about disturbing is the cognition of others or their. You know, he's worried about what other people think of him. And to disturb the universe is to stir up the thoughts of others, let's just put it that way. There's an element of self obsession in that. There's an element of paranoia, even. I mean, it's something we're all familiar with.
Right. It's also so human to be concerned with what other people think of us. And part of the anxiety of socializing is just the sense in which we are exposing ourselves, so to speak, to people. But in particular, it's this fear on his part of being pegged. Right. So in one sense, it's just about being called old. But I think, as we will find out as we go on, the idea of him later on wriggling on a pin is just that we're all characters. And that's to say we all have these really strong character traits, personality traits in us that are fashioned by our upbringing and by everything that has happened to us.
So there's a sort of residue of everything we've been through, including especially anything traumatic that shows up in our personality. And it's something that's hard to buck, right? It's really hard to change our habits because of that. There's a strong amount of tendency just to repetition. And that's another sense in which there's. There's time, right? There's plenty of time in the sense that there's plenty of repetition that goes on because of these traits we have. Think about what we do when we gossip or when we. People watch or something like that.
We sort of reduce people to their personalities and to something almost mechanical, right? So. And so does. Oh, they did that because they're just that type of person. They're such a nervous person. And so they always do that nervous thing. So you have your particular behaviors, which to you are a matter of indecision or decision or reflection, sort of these subjective inner experience. There's an objectifying element in what goes on. And the way other people view that sort of thing, the objectification happens in the sense that they reduce you to.
To causal influences and mechanisms. So it's not like to you, the anxiety of should I marry this person or not? Blah, blah, blah. And someone might just say, oh, that's just Prufrock being Prufrock. So he's being reduced, he's being objectified. And I think part of our anxiety about others, our fear of what they might think of us, is not just that those thoughts might be negative, but that they're reductive and that there's kind of a magical quality to them. Right. That those thoughts can deprive us of our autonomy and our objectivity by pegging us, by pigeonholing us into some sort of character or some sort of this or that.
I don't know. Does any of that make any sense?
1:01:38 Erin: Sure.
1:01:38 Wes: I think I wanted to just to mention all that now, because I think it becomes. This idea gets returned to later on in the poem, clothing itself, just to talk about his clothing. These are sort of trappings, right? And they represent the kind of social trappings which also trap. Right. Trap us into various sorts of behaviors and determine us. So this. This also gets us back to the confinement and potential hypocrisy or fraudulence of social interaction and speaks to the larger possible problem of whether and possible source of Prufrock's indecision, which is a worry about whether love itself is inevitably fraudulent. So he's being the good guy, right? That's the preemptive absolution for this fraud, is that I'm just being a good guy. But being a good guy in a way means being a liar if it means being in denial of the sexual component or the aggressive component or whatever.
1:02:35 Erin: Huh. I like that. So I think this is a good place to end part one. Join us next time for part two of our discussion. Thanks, Wes.
1:02:42 Wes: Thanks, Erin. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find us@subtextpodcast.com subscribe@patreon.com Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter joysubtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
(post)script: Post-Apocalypse
Jun 14, 2021
Listen to more episodes of (post)script at Patreon.
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Apocalypse Now.” Wes apologizes for asking Erin to watch something so disturbing, and we further discuss dueling conceptions of the arts, one Platonic and the other Aristotelian.
We agree that “Apocalypse Now,” despite being challenging, is an aesthetic masterpiece. What about the narrative? Wes argues that it is very close to not having enough of an arc. What it does most successfully is to convey a kind of surreal, psychedelic mood, one that is meant to capture the insanity of the Vietnam War (and perhaps war in general), and so constitutes its critique.
We end by reminiscing about watching “Notting Hill” together. But we fail to talk about an obvious hypothetical, which is how Hugh Grant would play Kurtz. It’s one thing to have a poetry-spewing Brando put your head on a stake. But nothing could evoke a horror more pure than being subjected, in your final moments, to Hugh Grant’s pseudo-bumbling, self-effacing schtick, somehow performed so adorably as to win you over to the sad necessity of your own obliteration.
Next episodes: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and then “The Wizard of Oz.”
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:00 Erin: Welcome to Postscript, the subtext after show where we talk about things related and unrelated to the week's episode. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:07 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. We just got done talking about Apocalypse Now. Sorry.
0:14 Erin: No, I'm glad I saw it. I'm glad I finally sat down and saw the whole. I'm glad that you tortured me in this way. It was the necessary sacrifice that you had to make to get.
0:23 Wes: Yeah, exactly.
0:26 Erin: You were trying to spread democracy to me by showing me this.
0:29 Wes: Yes.
0:30 Erin: Trying to colonize my brain. How many ways can we make stupid jokes about this? Okay.
0:37 Wes: Yeah. So I'm glad you're glad that you saw it.
0:39 Erin: Yeah, sure.
0:39 Wes: You know, I think that went well. There are a lot of really interesting questions to talk about with that movie. And it wasn't just a matter of repeating ourselves with what we talked about in Heart of Darkness. Actually, there's a lot of new interesting territory there.
0:52 Erin: Yeah. And I think I. You know, I hope I didn't say anything too extreme or things that I'm going to live to regret by saying, like. Like this is immoral or what. I didn't mean it's strictly immoral. I was just kind of interested in exploring what happens when you take that and put it on film.
1:08 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it's a classic question. Right? So I think. And it led to a lot of good discussion, I think.
1:13 Erin: Good. Okay. I'm glad you think so. Because I don't know, sometimes with me, you know, things. I'm so emotional and I'm so swept up by things in the moment that sometimes I become obsessed with something or I have a real strong reaction to something. And then later I'm like, why did I. Why was that so extreme? Why couldn't I just look at this more objectively?
1:32 Wes: Well, maybe. Maybe you're just a Platonist and you're just. It's not about being emotional, but being so rational that you. Maybe you want to protect us.
1:40 Erin: I've never been accused of being too rational.
1:42 Wes: Protect us from the arts.
1:44 Erin: That's true. Yeah.
1:46 Wes: I mean, it's a real problem. It doesn't. I don't know how you resolve that dilemma of. This is about education. This is about influence. This is about what builds our character. Every stimulus is important. And like I said, I think there's the Platonic critique and then I think there's the Aristotelian defense of a more ironic detachment from the effects of. To the mimetic. Right. It's not just about the imitation. The fact that we. That the arts and the arts are in. He's thinking about tragic poetry, specifically that there's an imitation of the world, a representation of the world, but it's the fact that it induces imitation in us.
And for Aristotle, this is very important. We are imitation machines. We are built up out of imitations and identifications. So Plato's critique is very strong. If we are. We are subjecting ourselves to these identifications with bad people, we might become bad people. And Aristotle gives a kind of like quasi therapeutic explanation of this in terms of catharsis and the sort of inevitability of these darker sides of ourselves and the need to do something with that. Maybe sublimated, I'm not sure. But yeah, two different approaches, which I think both have to be taken seriously.
Yeah.
3:00 Erin: And I think. I don't know, sometimes I don't mind playing a role on these podcasts that I don't even necessarily agree with, but saying things that I feel like need to be said or. I don't know, I feel like people don't think enough about the ethics of what they say. They don't question things enough. Not the people who listen to this podcast. But, you know, you can excuse anything.
3:21 Wes: It's just this is a. This is. I'm consuming art or a story or entertainment, however you want to put it.
3:27 Erin: Right. And people don't even think of the. I mean, consuming pornography, if anything, is like celebrated at this point. So. And people don't think about the fact that we just have unprecedented access to these images of extreme sex or extreme violence and in ways that no other culture has ever had to face before. And what effect does that have on us? I think pop up ads on the Internet are immoral. I find them extremely offensive. I do, I do. I find them not only extremely ugly, but intrusive and offensive. I find television commercials be ugly and intrusive.
3:58 Wes: What about podcast advertisements that we read?
4:03 Erin: Yeah, as long as I read them from an aerial position and don't have to directly engage in the weeds, then I'm okay with doing it.
4:10 Wes: There you go.
4:12 Erin: No, I don't know. So I'm all right. Being the weird prophet of disaster.
4:17 Wes: I once got myself into some trouble with friends by arguing that culturally, maybe it's a little more politically incorrect now, but, you know, a public cultural obsession with athleticism and fitness and a healthy diet is perfectly acceptable. But if you talked about that in terms of high culture or the quality of your entertainment, people would just think that's snobbery. So, like I think I said Something like, you know, we are spiritually fat. We, you know, we consume the equivalent of Cheetos and act like that's enough. Not that there's anything wrong with Cheetos.
I mean, in moderation, as long as there are other parts of your diet. But the question is if it's just ethically inert and irrelevant, right. To be reading good books or to watch good films and to be very conscientious about what you expose yourself to and to the proportion of your diet that is empty calories, so to speak, and the proportion that is more nutritious. It's about education. And there are political implications to this. You know, the old liberal arts argument is that to have good citizens and a good polis, a good political arrangement in life, we need people with a certain kind of education.
Speaking of advertisements, I'm just. I'm advertising my. This is just an advertisement now for liberal arts and for my, you know, one of my hobby horses, but one of my religions. But, yeah, that's the idea. This is about education. I think if people reframed these questions about our entertainments and our leisure time in terms of the concept of education and character, maybe that's something we should do. I don't know.
6:07 Erin: Well, I think by that same token, I mean, in a lot of ways, Apocalypse now is the most. Even on the one hand, I expressed kind of a form of condemnation, though that's too strong of a word. I also think it's probably in the way that you're describing spiritual fitness or whatever. I think this film is the most morally nutritious I've seen in a long time. On the other hand, you know, I mean, in terms of consuming things that don't just make us feel good, but which challenge us in some kind of way or, you know, viewing films not purely as entertainment. I mean, I admitted at the beginning of the episode that I've just been consuming cotton candy. Escapist films. And there's an argument to be made about whether or not all films are fundamentally escapist or what.
6:49 Wes: Yeah.
6:49 Erin: What constitutes entertainment.
6:51 Wes: Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
6:52 Erin: I don't think I'm alone in this, though. I mean, it's a feature of times like these, you know, difficult pandemic times or the Great Depression. Far more difficult, where people seek escapism. And scary or challenging movies tend to only be consumed in times of relative prosperity and good feeling. Hence the failure of the Oscars this year, as I think a lot of people have pointed out. Yeah. And I don't think there's anything wrong with escapism. And I don't think there's anything unartistic about. When I think of the Great Depression. I think of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies as being, like, the height of escapism and beauty and wealthy people dancing.
And I think those are, like, some of the most artistic movies of the 30s. So, yeah, I've lost my train of thought. The point being, this is good for me to watch, though. It raised a lot of questions about whether it was good for me on one level. I think it was also nutritious in the way that you're describing on another level.
7:43 Wes: Yeah, well, I think I wish I had actually said this in the actual episode, but I think it is a masterpiece. Technically, it's masterfully done. I mean, the audio, the visuals, and the sound are just incredible. I mean, after watching Hearts of Darkness in the making of it, I was just like, I'm shocked at how you even get that out of his wife. Coppola's wife did that documentary and had a camera on what they were doing and just looking at the footage that she shot and thinking about how, wow, how they transform that into the actual movie. It's much more mundane, you know, when you see it before the.
Before the editing and all that. Or maybe it's just that it's also video recorded. But so it's brilliantly done. And I think it's. I don't know, you know, is it emotionally effective? It's suspenseful enough. It's on the verge of not having enough of a narrative arc, actually. George Lucas criticized it for that. He was originally supposed to direct this, but they couldn't. And I think Coppola was going to be the producer, but initially they just couldn't get it made. And then by the time they got some interest after Coppola started what's his company?
Zoetrope.
8:51 Erin: Zoetrope, yeah.
8:52 Wes: Got some interest. And then Lucas was busy doing Star wars, and Coppola kind of assumed that that meant he could direct it. But I think Lucas felt kind of betrayed by that. But it's funny to see him interviewed about this and just sort of to archly kind of say, he's like, francis likes to be very intuitive when he films and not be very organized and just go out and kind of shoot stuff. And when you do that, sometimes you don't really end up with a narrative arc. So, yes, this film is episodic, and it's setting itself up for a disappointing payoff, obviously, because we know he's just Going there to kill Kurtz.
And then how do you make that satisfying at all? And I think it is kind of, you know, when people say they're not happy with the ending. I think from a plot standpoint, that's understandable. It's just. It's not a plot exciting plot payoff. When you watch a film like this, you have to be more interested in the aesthetic. You have to be more ready to be wowed by the visual representations, by the sound, and also by the like. The thing that I think is conveyed most successfully and is one of the things that makes the film great is just the sense of the surreal and the kind of the psychedelic quality.
And that's the critique of the war, right? The critique of the war as a form of insanity that's conveyed very well. You get drawn into that. It's almost a meditative, trance like experience. And there's a good quote from Roger Ebert about this. He says in his review, I think this was a later. Not the original review that he wrote, but something later. But he said Coppola also well knows, as demonstrated in the Godfather films, that movies aren't especially good at dealing with abstract ideas. For those, you'd be better off turning to the written word.
But they are superb for presenting moods and feelings. The look of a battle, the expression of a face, the mood of a country. Apocalypse now achieves greatness not by analyzing our experience in Vietnam, but by recreating in characters and images something of that experience. So as a kind of raw experience, it's really hard to say anything about.
11:07 Erin: Right.
11:08 Wes: These are things that they involve the unsayable, ultimately. And that's what can make a medium like this great. It's a tool for capturing what can't be spoken, ultimately.
11:18 Erin: Right. That's a real sign of a masterpiece, too. The perfect use of the medium means that you shouldn't be able to express it or describe it. Like that dancing about architecture comment that somebody made about. I can't remember the quote now, but yeah, I also wish I had. I hope I said this in the episode, though. I do think it's like one of the greatest films I've ever seen, and it's totally a masterpiece, despite all of my criticism or explorations.
11:44 Wes: Right.
11:44 Erin: But to discuss another film of equal moral heft and brilliance. We did watch Notting Hill together,
11:52 Wes: which
11:53 Erin: has been more my satisfying. I don't know about that.
11:57 Wes: Really?
11:58 Erin: I don't know about that.
11:59 Wes: Wait, did we talk about this?
12:00 Erin: No, I agree with you, actually, I do, and I don't. I Actually, like I said as we were watching it, I find a lot of that movie to be so manipulative that I'm not. I don't know if I'm on board with that. That ending part where everyone's like doing tai chi in the park and the kids run past and oh la la, it's such a beautiful day and look, Julia Roberts is pregnant.
12:19 Wes: Yeah. Well, you wanted to end it at the press conference, right?
12:24 Erin: Yeah, yeah. What is it with me and wanting to end things like three minutes before the actual ending?
12:30 Wes: Well, you could just stop watching at that point and that would be the ending.
12:34 Erin: That's true. I've just self edit everything. I already do that. By closing my eyes at all violent parts of movies, I've forced myself to watch every moment of Apocalypse Now.
12:45 Wes: Hey, I think that maybe we could get rich off an app where you pre edit the movie in the way that you want to watch it.
12:51 Erin: Yeah, there you go.
12:52 Wes: Or have a robot do it. You know, have the software do it like it knows you and your preferences and then just custom edits the film.
12:58 Erin: For me, that would be the black bar. Do you remember that in 30 Rock where.
13:02 Wes: No.
13:03 Erin: He's trying to impress the new owner of NBC, who's that? Cable town smarmy family guy. And so he uses Kenneth's idea for putting the black bar at the bottom of the screen so that you don't see any dirty parts. And just like, cut. He cut off the half of the bottom of the screen and he demonstrates it by filming test footage of this couple who are saying to each other, like, look at us, we're totally sexing each other right now. But you can't see anything as you can just see their shoulders and the bottom of the screen is blacked out.
13:32 Wes: That's great.
13:33 Erin: Oh, gosh, why do I keep. I'm referencing 30 Rock all over the place in these past few episodes.
13:39 Wes: Bad and Arrested Development.
13:41 Erin: Well, my two ur-texts for Eliot and Kurtz, it's Frazer's The Golden Bough and that mythology. For me, it's the mythology of Alec Baldwin and J. Walter Weatherman, as you said.
13:53 Wes: So Hugh Grant is, you know, he's kind of a phenomenon in his own right. What is it about his hair?
13:59 Erin: His hair, as you said, his hair is a phenomenon.
14:02 Wes: Is kind of humble, adorable without being effeminate. I don't know.
14:06 Erin: I find that also to be at times a little on the irritating side.
14:10 Wes: Yeah, me too. He is very on the edge of being irritating, but I think somehow he manages to pull it Off. That's what I find somewhat interesting about him. Well, what I love in without an English accent. Forget about it.
14:23 Erin: Oh, totally forget about it. Totally. One of the things that occurred to me as we started watching Notting Hill, I thought, oh, you know, what we should have watched was Sense and Sensibility. The Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility. Have you seen that?
14:34 Wes: I have, but I would gladly rewatch that. I would gladly watch almost any Jane Austen adaptation.
14:40 Erin: Yeah, sure. Well, yeah. And I think that Sense and Sensibility adaptation, for an adaptation with a traditional movie runtime, the ability that Thompson had to compress that in her script and make it into like a perfect 2 hour and 1020 minute movie is like really remarkable. So I think that's like the best traditional feature film runtime adaptation of an Austen book. But I was thinking about that and then I was thinking about how in Sense and Sensibility, because of his, like Hugh Grant playing the character of Edward Ferrars, it's actually kind of the perfect encapsulation of his personality because of the something fundamentally ineffectual at the core of that that causes Elinor to suffer because he can't get his words out.
15:27 Wes: Interesting.
15:28 Erin: Yeah, because he is too affable.
15:30 Wes: Right.
15:31 Erin: It actually chips away at his morality.
15:33 Wes: That's very interesting.
15:34 Erin: I don't know, it's just occurring to me now, but I think that's what I find irritating about it ultimately is self effacement. A blind for something hollow in the center.
15:45 Wes: Right. By the way, did you see the most recent Emma?
15:48 Erin: I have not seen it.
15:49 Wes: I liked that a lot. How about Love and Friendship?
15:51 Erin: I loved that. I loved that.
15:53 Wes: We should do that sometime.
15:54 Erin: Yeah, I'd love to see that again. I saw it a few times when it came out on Amazon Prime.
15:58 Wes: Okay. I only saw it once.
15:59 Erin: I'm due to watch that again.
16:01 Wes: So next time we are going to do the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock just because we are inspired by Kurtz, who highly recommends that poem.
16:09 Erin: I take all his recommendations, T.S.
16:11 Wes: eliot fan. And we are going to do the wizard of Oz, which is actually Willard's favorite movie.
16:23 Erin: He seems to see the man behind that curtain, didn't he?
16:25 Wes: There you go. I'm glad you made that. I wasn't even thinking about that. That's a great connection.
16:28 Erin: It just comes out, I don't think. Wes.
16:30 Wes: Well, we do a lot of comparative literature stuff on this podcast, so I'm sure there's going to be a lot of interesting comparison and contrasting of wizard of Oz and Apocalypse Now.
16:44 Erin: Oh, God.
16:45 Wes: The ruthlessness of Dorothy.
16:48 Erin: Don't ruin this for me. You know. You know what this means to me.
16:53 Wes: She essentially is Marlow.
16:55 Erin: Oh, God. Don't take my Judy away.
17:01 Wes: Okay, you can't forget I ever said that. All right. Thank you.
17:06 Erin: Thank you.
At Home with War in “Apocalypse Now” (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola
Jun 07, 2021
Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore doesn’t flinch for enemy fire, loves the smell of napalm in the morning, and would literally kill for good surfing and a beachside barbecue. His attempts to recreate home within the theater of war render him the perfect foil to a certain upriver madman, who seems intent on making high culture serve the purposes of primitive horror. And yet Kurtz is ready to argue that it is his methods that are more sound, just because they embrace their ruthlessness more honestly, in contrast to the impotent half-measures of an imperial power that can rationalize its atrocities as collateral damage in the service of a larger humanitarian goal. Which approach should evoke more horror? Wes & Erin analyze Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.”
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:09 Wes: Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore doesn't flinch for enemy fire, loves the smell of napalm in the morning, and would literally kill for good surfing and a beachside barbecue. His attempts to recreate home within the theater of war render him the perfect foil to a certain upriver madman who seems intent on making high culture serve the purposes of primitive horror. And yet Kurtz is ready to argue that it is his methods that are more sound just because they embrace their ruthlessness more honestly, in contrast to the impotent half measures of an imperial power that can rationalize its atrocities as collateral damage in the service of a larger humanitarian goal. Which approach should evoke more horror? Today we're discussing Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now. This is Wes Alwan.
1:01 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:22 Wes: subtextpodcast.com subscribe or. Or by searching for us within the app itself. So Erin, at the very end of this film, had the voice of Walter Weatherman in my head. I know it's weird that my conscience has adopted the voice of an Arrested Development character in that movie. We make a reference to this every other episode.
1:44 Erin: That's true.
1:45 Wes: And the moral of the story was. And that's why you shouldn't read so much poetry, there is a lot of Marlon brando. He's reading T.S. eliot, right?
1:58 Erin: Yep.
1:59 Wes: And then according to the Dennis Hopper character, who's the photojournalist, and Conrad's the Heart of Darkness is the Harlequin. He recites Rudyard Kipling's if as part of his rambling speech, and we get the sense that he's referring back to Marlon Brando's Kurtz reciting that poem as well. And this seems to be one of the things that is entrancing to people in the same way that this worked in Heart of Darkness. Right. So Kurtz was an artist, he was a journalist, he was a musician. He was a person who took the supposed humanitarian mission in the Congo seriously.
And we get some of that idea here with Kurtz's reading poetry and composing manuscripts and recording himself pontificating on the war into his tape recorder. And, of course, we Also get the parallel in this movie of a supposed humanitarian component to the war. I think the two things line up very well, and that helps make this a very faithful retelling, I think, of the story, even though there's so many divergences. So, of course, the war is, you know, whereas in the Heart of Darkness, this has supposedly something to do with civilizing the natives.
In this case, it's about stopping communism and it's about protecting South Vietnam from North Vietnam. It's not as direct an idea related to higher culture or something like that, or the. The imposition of certain cultural values. And so that makes the. You know, in the movie, it makes it feel a little bit disconnected. Right. Why is Kurt's reading poetry is. Did Brando just come with poetry and wanna read it? Obviously, we know people who've watched Hearts of Darkness, which is a great documentary about the making of the film and the craziness of it, and the fact that Brando hadn't read the book Heart of Darkness and didn't learn any of his lines and didn't want to do the lines and wasted lots and lots of time arguing with Coppola over the dialogue because he didn't understand it while time was ticking on his.
I think he was gonna be shooting for two weeks. I forget. But for a million dollars. Yeah. To what extent is this just kind of a tacked on attempt to make things surreal? And to what extent does it actually fit with the story? I think it fits in the end. So that was the. What I was left with at the very end of the film. Something about poetry and something going back to this idea, this kind of platonic contempt for poetry and the idea that it can unleash raw, dangerous emotions on the world, on civilization, impulses that, you know, in a way, poetry, right, is meant to represent what is highest in civilization, and yet we get this paradoxical idea that this is actually dangerous to civilization.
And we wrestled with this idea as well in our Heart of Darkness episode, which is, you know, whether the horror, Kurtz's horror, is a matter of the primitive kind of breaking through the thin veneer of civilization or whether it comes from civilization and how those two things are related.
5:10 Erin: Well, I guess I didn't question whether or not Brando's character sort of fits in at the end, though I suppose I should have. I guess nothing Brando does surprises me. So I also liked the different. I had a very different reading on Kurtz in this adaptation. Not very different. But first of all, I like the fact that some of his humanitarian efforts in Heart of Darkness are transposed in Apocalypse now into that sort of quixotic joining of the special forces at 38. I really liked that detail because that's the kind of thing that speaks to heroism in Vietnam.
You know, it's not just a guy with big ideas who goes in and wants to rise through the ranks. This is a guy who wants to start from the bottom and work really hard and doesn't care about rising through the ranks so much as serving one's country, maybe, you know, or where, whatever the Special Forces entails, doing the hard work, the real hard job, that takes a tremendous amount of intelligence and skill, but is extremely dangerous and messy and puts you on the line in a way that, you know. So I liked that here. I don't think that we got that from the Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.
I think this is a translation into, like, what Vietnam era people would admire in someone. Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know enough about Vietnam, really, to be talking with any authority about it. So people are gonna have to take everything I say with a grain of salt. The other thing that occurs to me in what you said, I don't see poetry as being an outgrowth of Kurtz's ideals. Or rather, I don't see poetry and the way that Kurtz behaves being connected. Rather, I see those two things in tension. I think, you know, last time we talked about the two dominant senses that Conrad calls upon in the novel to describe both the jungle and Kurtz, which is like sight and sound, right?
Silence of the jungle, which is sort of terrifying. And Kurtz's voice, and then also the visuals of the jungle and of Kurt's. Of Marlowe wanting to see Kurtz, that desire to see him and to hear him, those two things were kind of twinned. And I guess sound struck me as the dominant metaphor within the novel, obviously the most fitting one based on the genre. And so it seems only right that in a film, it would be sight that's kind of the dominant metaphor. So I suppose what I saw was Coppola kind of playing with that a little bit and showing the ineffectiveness of rhetoric.
But also the tension between what Kurtz says he is and his highfalutin poetry recitations and the visual reality of what's actually happening in that Angkor Wat style compound those two things as being absurdly in tension rather than one being the result of poetry, which I think is what you're getting at.
7:53 Wes: So even with the title of the film Apocalypse now, the first screenwriter on this was John Milius, and an early title was the Psychedelic Soldier. And then eventually it ended up being Apocalypse now as a variation on Nirvana now, which was a slogan apparently going around in the hippie scene in California, which associated drug culture and getting high with reaching enlightenment, an enlightened state of consciousness. There's the famous scene in which we actually see. It's graffitied at the final and final scene on the temple. Around the rocks are our motto, Apocalypse Now.
So Nirvana is transposed into apocalypse. And so that's one idea here about the sense in which good intentions can go wrong. We see clearly that clearly in Conrad's novel as well. There's the hypocrisy element, right? So it's we're here to civilize the natives, but really they're there to exploit. But in the figure of Kurtz, the hypocrisy actually vanishes, and that might be the problem. So he's a true believer. He's the one who actually has all the artistic talents and genuinely, initially, at least, believes in this project of civilizing people, of being a humanitarian.
And then the question is why that goes wrong and whether, again, that's just a breaking through, whether he goes native or he somehow loses all sense of inhibition, is sort of touched by nature and the lack of civilizational check so that instincts simply emerge, or whether those types of cruelties he's engaged in are actually a product of civilization. So that's one fundamental question on the idea that they're the product of civilization. That's the sort of the Rousseauian point of view. So then we get to the point where we ask the same question with respect to the arts, whether there's a darker side to it.
9:55 Erin: Sure.
9:56 Wes: So Coppola, he famously said, this movie isn't just about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.
10:03 Erin: Right.
10:04 Wes: And he describes this whole process of making the movie and being in the jungle and going crazy. And in Hearts of Darkness, he kvetches a lot about, this movie's gonna be terrible. And this is so pretentious. And he sounds pretentious even when he's describing his own pretentiousness. I really didn't know that Coppola had this character.
10:23 Erin: I'm surprised by that because he seems very down to earth in the interviews that I've seen. Maybe they're later, you know, as an
10:29 Wes: older man, well, he seems almost a bit manic. So we don't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how this is related to the arts. But it's suggestive for me, in the sense that there's something. Right, right. You know, you're supposed to. Poetry is supposed to be inspired. It's supposed to be quasi insane. And I'm treating poetry here as the representative of higher culture and the higher part of civilization. Taken too far, it can become unmoored from reality. It can be a manifestation of psychosis. So there's inspired madness versus madness. And I'm lining that up with the darker manifestations of civilization. Or a supposed humanitarian component to colonization or war.
11:10 Erin: Yeah. So that tension, I think it's certainly there in the book. But I suppose what I'm trying to get at is it's not so apparent.
11:16 Wes: Right.
11:17 Erin: It's not so in your face. And I think that what you're describing as the function of poetry for me, as I was watching this was the function of filmmaking.
11:24 Wes: Right.
11:25 Erin: I think any good movie, just like any good poem, is kind of a commentary on making a movie as it is. I suppose I should preface anything I say with this disclaimer, which I mentioned last time. I've seen large chunks of this movie before. Not all of it, as I learned. Not the most horrifying sections. I thought I had seen basically all of it. And what I had seen I didn't remember very well. But I knew what I was in for. And actually, I really didn't want to watch this movie because I knew what I was in for. So I should just say that I watched the movie twice in preparation for this.
But I deliberately didn't look up any secondary information. I decided not to watch Hearts of Darkness until after we record. And the only thing I knew about this movie was that quote that you gave of Coppola's about this movie isn't about Vietnam, it is Vietnam. That was the only thing I knew going into it. So I've used that as a cipher to interpret everything about this movie. Because that was the one scrap of evidence that I had to go on. So I guess what I'll say, just to preface also, is that this movie I found unbelievably disturbing and did not enjoy at all.
And I think partially because we're coming out of the pandemic. So during the last year, admittedly, my movie consumption has been escapist. You know, it's been cotton candy. I really haven't been able to handle much else. So maybe my tolerance has decreased. I'm afraid also, I'm not a big fan, as you know, Wes. I have an aversion to any kind of explicit sex or violence on screen. Not to say that I'm against freedom of artistic expression in any way. And I'm, of course, fine when it serves the plot or when it's artistic, whatever. But even then I have a distaste for it, I must admit.
So I'm hypersensitive to what people get exposed to visually for a lot of reasons, partially because I'm a teacher of young men. And I also believe really strongly in an ethics of visual consumption. So I guess what this movie made me confront is the sort of meta difference between the novel as a form and the film as a form. And the boundaries that I almost felt were violated by seeing certain elements from the book which were horrifying, like the heads on the spikes around the Kurtz compound, actually seeing those visually translated into Apocalypse Now.
So I suppose that's where I'm coming from. And so therefore, the tension in what Kurtz was reading aloud, the poetry, and what the photojournalist character was reciting aloud seemed very heightened to me. So that this seemed to me to be not the outgrowth of poetry as what was happening on the compound as an expression of madness, but rather the tension between the higher ideals of poetry and what was happening on the compound as expressed through the visual medium. And therefore, the hypocrisy was inherent within the film itself rather than the tension between poetry and violence, if that makes any sense.
It made me think, why make this movie? Like, why do this? I don't know if that's a worthwhile question, and I know it's a stupid question. On a certain level, the movie is a masterpiece. I'm glad that it was made, but at the same time, it made me confront the idea of if this isn't a movie about a war, but if this is Vietnam and it's meant to reproduce a certain experience and it's also an anti war movie, those two things seem to me to be in tension. So we're using art, filmmaking art, as a way to express a kind of madness and using a kind of madness to get there.
Like you're using the film, which is a sort of a form of exploitation, in a way to demonstrate or depict exploitation. It seemed to me to be a double bind at a certain point.
14:54 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. I'm reminded of. I know this is not a book that you're particularly a fan of, but Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, sure. That book is a reflection on how you would talk about war without actually glorifying it, if that's even possible. And it's Related to how you. Whether you can talk about trauma per se. And the glorification is something that kind of, you know, you take something that is inherently traumatic and it becomes tolerable as glorification. So yes, then this was an. A debate at the time. You know, some people saw this as a glorification of the war, some people saw it as a critique of the war.
And of course Coppola saw it as a critique and so did Milius. The whole point of the screenplay was to point to the absurdity of the war and the surrealism of the war, which I think the movie does a very good job of. So we get the Sampan Massacre. The movie's episodic. Even though it's based on Heart of Darkness, it evokes the Odyssey in some ways. And in fact Coppola called it the Idiodyssey. He's very self critical through the whole making of the film and talking about how terrible it was going to be. And Milius was directly influenced by the Odyssey.
So he thought of for instance, Kilgore as the cyclops. And in the theatrical release there's a scene where the cyclops has to be tricked. And there's a scene where Willard steals Kilgore's surfboard and takes off and then is chased by Kilgore. Sorry, that's not. I mean, in the redux release, it's not in the theatrical release. And as they go up river, things get more and more surreal or psychotic. So this is a really interesting critique of the war because it tries to get at the craziness of it instead of saying this is just cruel or it's cynically exploitative or it's hypocritical.
It's not really about communism or any legitimate threat. It's about American imperialism or it simply is too costly in terms of American lives. Those critiques in a way are put to the side and favor of this critique of its surreality and that Milius original title for the screenplay, the Psychedelic Soldier. That's one of the things he really wanted to get at, which is not. Well, I don't know if it was original at the time. Of course, I think it became kind of a trope in Vietnam movies. But the, the emphasis on the use of drugs in Vietnam and the transplantation of youth culture and rock and roll.
So I think Willard at one point calls his crew Rock N Rollers with One Foot in the Grave, something like that. And we get introduced to them, you know, the Clean. He's listening to the radio and Then the Rolling Stones come on and there's dancing, and of course, the surfer is water skiing behind the boat and all that stuff. I think the most brilliant part of the film comes very early with Kilgore. And it's one of the longest segments in the film. Most of these episodes last like five to 12 minutes. But Kilgore, we get almost a half hour of Kilgore.
And it's brilliant because the absurdity is really highlighted, this idea that Kilgore is entirely motivated by the desire to have fun. Right. You know, his cavalry is very competent. They adore him according to Willard and obey him, and they can execute these attacks, which are very effective. But for Kilgore, it's all subjugated to the idea that he can kind of recreate home in the war theater, right? So he can surf. And his only motivation for helping take the village that Willard needs, because that's going to be his launching point for his boat, is so that he can surf.
And this is where I think the question of glorification is really highlighted, because Kilgore is sort of like an ancient Greek hero. And we can revisit that. Right? Because the first forms of poetry are glorifications of war. Or maybe they aren't, you know, is the Iliad glorification of war? That's also a discussion. But, yeah, Kilgore is this larger than life manly man who doesn't flinch when bombs go off around him. Everyone ducks, but not him, you know, and he just ignores everything dangerous. And so you, at least for me, and I'm sure for a lot of men, at least, it's hard not to find that attractive in a way.
So, yes, and highlighting the absurdity of it all, you may be evoking an identification with that position, a vicarious enjoyment of that position. Yeah, I think it's a good question.
19:28 Erin: I'd say again that I think I had actually the opposite reaction to that, though I can understand maybe why some of that would be glorification. I mean, certainly the elements of absurdity in the film serve the same function for me that they did in the book. So the devastation and the feeling of utter futility evoked in the book by things that we talked about last time, you know, the broken pipes, the fact that they can't get any rivets, stuff like that, that's what the effect of the absurdity in this film had on me. But I would say that, you know, the Ride of the Valkyries scene, I actually watched this with a Friend the first time, and I, like, broke down.
I found it so disturbing. I didn't find it glorifying at all. So, as I said before, the surreality of that scene had the same effect of deadening that in Heart of Darkness, the futility of the infrastructure had. For me, it seemed to me that Coppola's intention wasn't necessarily glorification. I mean, it seemed to me that the intention was to induce horror in us, in the viewer, and to make us feel, to a certain extent, as though we were going through the war. Though that's obviously absurd on its face. We're not going through the war by watching a movie.
But because of the reasons I mentioned before, maybe I'm set up to view the film this way, the pandemic, my natural skittishness, whatever. But I found certain elements of that attempt at horror to be. I don't want to use this word, and I don't want to say anything I'm going to regret later, because I just feel strongly about this right now. But edging on.
20:56 Wes: Immoral, perhaps, but not because it could be inadvertently glorifying.
21:02 Erin: No, no. In fact, because it could make it commonplace, I think is my problem. It could be deadening, I suppose I'm looking at this from, like, a Sontag angle, which we could talk about. I wish, actually, that I had thought of that before this, though luckily, I remember a lot. But I know a lot of Vietnam for the American public was about. For the civilian was about TV and the experience of witnessing a war in real life, or, sorry, in real time. And my understanding is that the visual footage of the jungle and the guerrilla warfare footage of the body bags coming off the planes, that this, from what I've heard from people who've lived through it, partly contributed to the diminishing of the American appetite for that war, if there ever was much of one to begin with, which there really wasn't.
So it seems to me that the idea of the visual has always been an important part of the Vietnam War, more so than any other war before or since, because this was kind of the intrusion of the camera into the war zone in real time in a way that we hadn't seen before, even in Korea. So I guess it made me wonder if this war is so bad, which the film seems designed to show and which even the American civilian knows, and if its effects are so horrendous on the mind and spirit of humanity. I mean, this is a war famous for inducing PTSD in the people who've lived through it, if the purpose is to make another Vietnam.
Then my question as I'm watching it is just why? On one level, I think that the film is aware of this and it provides a kind of visual rebuke throughout the film. There are instances I think of, like, you know, Coppola as himself directing a Vietnam documentary. The visuals and the futility of the visuals of the USO Playboy show, the photojournalist character. I mean, we could talk about all of these elements because I think they're saying something important about film. But I guess what I'm trying to say is just that I felt a deadening at the end of this movie.
I realized as I was watching it I had never seen any part of, like, the last 20 minutes of the movie except for the shot of Brando lying on the ground saying, the horror. The horror. I had seen that clip, but I had not seen the water buffalo scene. And as soon as I saw that damn water buffalo, I almost said out loud, like, am I to be spared nothing? I knew what was gonna happen. And so you could get away with so much true horror in a novel, in a story, compared to a film. And I feel as though it's nowhere near as morally compromised because no matter how vivid and sick and shocking the thing that you're describing on paper, it's not a direct image.
And so on some level, it's circumscribed by the limits of what's already within our own imaginations. Therefore, it can't possibly be as intrusive or scarring or ultimately deadening as images can be. And Sontag writes about this in terms of the pictures of the concentration camps that. And, in fact, the concentration camps were what I thought of when Kurtz tells that story of the pile of little arms.
23:48 Wes: Right. And it's there in Heart of Darkness as well. The things which sound, you know, are very evocative of that.
23:53 Erin: And frankly, I think the power and the emotional weight of that story is that it's told to us by Kurtz. We don't see that pile of little arms. I think if we did, I bet it would be so underwhelming that we would be shocked at ourselves. I don't know. I'm throwing a lot of stuff at the wall here. I know.
24:07 Wes: And I brought up the possibility that there's a darker side to the poetic that led to a discussion about the possible immorality of certain artistic representations, which is certainly in line with the traditional Platonic objection to the poetic. And I think we have at least three threads to the potential moral compromise in art. And these may all be related and there may be some overlap, but you're emphasizing the possible deadening quality. We may become inured to this sort of stuff, or it may be normalized in a sense. I remember seeing this movie as a kid, and the thing that.
The one thing that stuck with me and I found so disturbing was the, you know, after the woman throws the grenade into the helicopter, and then, you know, the helicopter explodes. And then Kilgore has a very casual reaction to that. He's not worried about his men who've just been killed or the little girl that he's just put into the helicopter. Right. The baby. We see all these different conflicting things in Kilgore about this tender moment of trying to save the baby. He's completely indifferent to the fact that the helicopters just exploded and casually says, you know, be savages or something and then has his, you know, crew mow down the three Vietnamese people who are running away, including the girl who put the hand grenade into the helicopter.
And when I was younger, I don't think I made the connection. I didn't realize that she was the one who had put the grenade in. And I thought this was just like, for sport, killing civilians. And this did happen. People killed for sport. My uncle was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and people in helicopters would shoot civilians for sport. This is the kind of thing that starts to happen in war. So I found that disturbing and heartbreaking. And I couldn't grasp the film's critique of that. Right. I couldn't feel that as an objection or a critique.
Maybe by the time I got to the sampan scene, you know, very obviously where they are trying to create a kind of My Lai massacre situation, I maybe grasp that more now, watching it as I'm older, I'm more inured to that. And it's difficult, very difficult to watch. But, yes, there's a certain layer or boundary that you learn to erect between you and the representation. It's different. So that's one possibility. There's inurement. And then the second one is the one that I was pointing to, which is, you know. And I was relating it to Slaughterhouse 5, which is the potential for glorification.
And for the potential for glorification being built into the representation of horror being built into critique because it depends on your particular moral comportment. If you're watching people who are justifying killing other people by calling them savages, you can accept the critique of that. Or, you know, maybe you go along with it. To a certain extent, or maybe it's both. Right. Or if you're looking at a manly man like Kilgore, he's formidable. He's got that, as I said, ancient Greek warrior quality. What's the intention? There is the sort of sociopathy and the unethical component of what's going on.
And then excellence. Excellence in the sense of just someone who's tall and has an erect posture and has barking orders and is fearless, absolutely fearless, and operates with total confidence and inspires loyalty in his troops. So you cannot help but be attracted to that. And this is part of the goal of the filmmaker or the artist. And it leads us into the third thread, which is, you know, you have to create something that's entertaining and that's alluring to people and that's. There are. There are charms associated with the arts. So the third possibility, and this is one that I think Plato is worried about, is just that the impulse to entertain dominates over everything else, so that you are sort of impelled to identify whether you like it or not.
So even, you know, when you're watching tragic figures on stage for Plato, you don't learn the lesson. You know, if there's some lesson in tragedy, you just sort of. You. You identify with the tragic figure and you want to imitate them, and your soul kind of gets comported to that, to having those same types of emotions, to being irrationally passionate and prone to strong emotions. Aristotle's Poetics is a critique of that. Its whole idea of catharsis tries to take that idea and say, actually, we can identify with those feelings without simply wanting to imitate them.
They can affect us in more complicated ways. So that's. I think we've gotten at that kind of ongoing debate about the effects of artistic representation. And I think it is important, the film, you know, as you pointed out, you can treat the film as a meditation on the role of the artist.
29:02 Erin: Yeah.
29:03 Wes: You had mentioned the sort of highlighting of the heroism of Kurtz and the fact that he joined the special forces at 38.
29:10 Erin: Yeah.
29:11 Wes: And Willard relates that, you know, the way the movie begins is someone you know. You also mentioned ptsd, someone who clearly has ptsd. And part of it is he can't function in the home environment. In this film, there's a lot about home and whether you can return home and Kilgore's attempt to make the theater like home and all this stuff. So. So Willard can't be at home without being lost. And, you know, it begins with his punching the mirror and by the way, that's all real. That was all just. They got Martin Sheen really drunk and let him.
29:42 Erin: I did know that. And the heart attack and the fact that Laurence fishburne was only 14.
29:47 Wes: Right.
29:47 Erin: And I know a couple things, but.
29:49 Wes: So, yeah, so he. It begins with this whole idea that he needs to get back to the jungle. He needs somehow to get back to violence. There's that addiction to that. And this, of course, this looms over. Right. The question. We've just been talking about whether we could be traumatized or lured into that position as well. And so in this sense, he identifies with Kurtz. Right. There's a doubling between. In the same way that there is in the novel. There's a doubling. Just as there's a doubling between Kurtz and Marlowe, there's a doubling between Kurtz and Willard.
Willard is fascinated with Kurtz as a kind of alter ego. So it starts with. As in the novel, starts with his kind of nobler ideals, perhaps, or maybe that's a component. But it kind of ends with the fact that he's stuck in the jungle and can. And really, that's why he is willing to. You know, he has the stellar career that he gives up and knocks himself down to Special Forces, where he can only rise to the level of colonel. You know, he could have been in general. Just because he needs to get back to war and back to the jungle.
30:46 Erin: Yeah. I like to the fact that. And partially this is because of a time constraint, I'm sure. But I like the fact that we get almost a complete picture of Kurt pretty much right away. Right. In the novel. It's more of, like, the slow drip of information. And we get it in the form of those three. Oh, first of all, I just want to say that opening hotel scene, that is like primo Martin Sheen. He is so attractive.
31:10 Wes: Oh, really?
31:10 Erin: Even though he's having the middle of his psychotic episode, like, with the stubble.
31:16 Wes: Plato would not feel good about this response. You've been seduced by, but.
31:22 Erin: I know, I know, but just in that first. The first part. And then when we see Harrison Ford and I'm like, oh, Harrison. Anyway, some very attractive men in the very beginning of this.
31:31 Wes: That's how they get you.
31:32 Erin: I know. It just reeled me in. And then I was like, for me,
31:35 Wes: it's Kilgore that does it for me. But, yeah, I get it.
31:39 Erin: No, I found him to be nasty. I mean, I love Robert Duvall, but, oh, there's something.
31:43 Wes: We have different tastes than men.
31:44 Erin: Sick about him. And then when he goes to meet the generals and they tell him about Kurtz and his sort of history, there's that audio transmission. So you actually get his voice right up front. And actually I was watching this with Greg, and Greg mentioned that he felt as though there was something similar in the timbre of Martin Sheen's voice and the voiceover and Kurtz's voice and the audio transmission, which is true. They both have, you know, Brando and Martin Sheen both have that kind of high pitched sound to their voice. So, you know, there's the obvious, like, visual parallel when they both are covered in the camouflage mud at the end, but even the audio, the auditory parallel. But anyway, so we get this. We get the audio transmission where he says that whole thing about a snail crawling on the edge of a straight razor and surviving. And it's a little bit.
32:33 Wes: That's gotta be a Brando improvisation.
32:34 Erin: Yeah. But then we get that general's really bizarre speech, which kind of took me out of it because it was a little bit too. He says this whole thing about, you know, things get confused out there.
32:46 Wes: It's very on the nose.
32:47 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
32:48 Wes: Yeah.
32:49 Erin: The struggle between good and evil. What Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.
32:53 Wes: Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.
32:56 Erin: You know, that's something that is frequently quoted in college by professors, you know, when I was taking, whatever, American history classes or whatever. And it just seemed to me to be so out of place. I don't know what you thought of that, that little speech he gives and whether you bought it.
33:10 Wes: Yeah, we get a lot up front. You know, the voice in the novel, it's a point of suspense. Right. Because Marlowe is simply imagining. It's a little weird because it's kind of a, you know, Marlowe telling the story has already heard the voice, and so he imbues the voice with this special quality that we don't know. And so when he's retelling the story, he's retelling it as himself, sort of being lured by the voice and wanting to hear it. It's a very weird thing because how could he know anything about the voice? So here we're just giving it right up front, which I don't think is a bad idea, actually, because I don't think as a point of suspense. That doesn't really work for me in the novel.
33:50 Erin: Yeah, it got tiresome in the novel. I think we both agree.
33:53 Wes: Yeah, there's more suspense in hearing a creepy guy talking about a snail slithering along the razor and say, oh, I want to meet this guy.
34:00 Erin: I think that might be Brando. What?
34:03 Wes: And then they get to the unsound methods straight out of the novel and then terminate with extreme prejudice. Which actually comes from a New York Times article about the assassination of two South Vietnamese special agents. But, yeah, that immediately injected itself into the popular culture after that. But, yeah, it is a weird. The scene is not. It doesn't not work for me because there's a strangeness to it all. So the fact that Corman does this very on the nose speech about Kurt's. You know, it wasn't. I don't think it was as jarring to me.
It shoves the theme, some thematic stuff, right in your face. It's true. I think the opening of the film is very enchanting. Right. And very visual. Then we get 12, 13 minutes of this, which is a lot, I think, for an audience to tolerate, you know, because in a way, it's the least aesthetically pleasing part of the film. And there's a lot of that exposition. And that's true.
35:00 Erin: Yeah.
35:00 Wes: You know, just shove it all in our face.
35:03 Erin: It really made me think of no country for Old Men. For some reason, that Tommy Lee Jones character's like, long meditations on what's happening, but also staying completely out of the action of the film, you know, And I guess often that's at that point, that's a tension in war films, like in Saving Private Ryan, too, right? The guys who, like, decide that they have to go in, stay very clean in their white offices, and meanwhile everybody on the ground is covered in dirt.
35:29 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.
35:31 Erin: I even think that that element of his quoting Lincoln is an important part of the demonstration of the distance, the mental and physical distance. As they're sitting in clean Saigon. It would have been even more heightened if they were in Washington. But the ability to have philosophical conversations about what's happened and even to order these types of executions versus actually having to carry them out works for me.
35:54 Wes: Yeah, we get introduced to this idea of unsound methods, and that becomes an important kind of kernel for Willard's ruminations throughout the film. Because when we get to Kilgore, Kilgore is kind of a pre Kurtz in a way, or he's kind of a foil or point of comparison for Kurtz and. And Willard directly, you know, this is.
36:16 Erin: Yeah. He says, if Kilgore acts like this, what must they have against Kurtz?
36:19 Wes: Right, right. You know, there's plenty of madness and murder to Go around for everyone and charging him, Kurtz, with murder is like ticketing people at the Indy 500 and all that stuff. It's an interesting question, I think, in the novel and the film, what makes Kurtz's methods unsound? How are they different from the other methods that we see in the movie? What are the other methods? Right. It's not just that Kurtz's methods involve atrocities because, you know, the film's critique of the atrocities of the. Of the war machine. So we ultimately, we need something else to explain what that means.
I'm not sure that I think, you know, a lot of people think Coppola doesn't really have any. Have a firm sense of, you know, what. He's. He's just throwing a lot of things at the wall. But I think there are some, actually, some very interesting things ultimately to say about this idea of unsound methods and the difference between Kurtz and Kilgore and Kurtz's form of violence and other forms of violence that we see in the film.
37:19 Erin: Well, one of the ideas is presented actually by the general. It now occurs to me when he talks about the natives and the temptation they present to be a God to them. So that seems to be Kurtz's main issue, is that he's a God. So I don't know, maybe it's a matter of degrees. Like, you know, Kilg is just a heroic warrior who has the support of the gods, and Kurtz himself has gone a step too far and made himself a God. That seems to me to be part of it. But it's just a very bizarre thing for the general to say, the temptation to be a God. He implies that that's a common temptation and that Kurtz has crossed the line by actually fully giving in to that temptation. So that seems to me to be set up as the problem, the big problem.
38:01 Wes: Yeah, this seems to be a kind of absolute power corrupts absolutely type of argument, which I think is one of several options. Just in the way, you know, in the book we have several options for explaining Kurtz.
38:13 Erin: But, no, I think it also shows a way in which Kurtz has. He's gone too far by penetrating something in the consciousness of the people. So you can have Kilgore murdering civilians willy nilly. I mean, not willy nilly. I mean, you know. You know what I mean? But that scene with a grenade, you can have that, but he does it aerially. So there's a godlike element to that. But there's also a kind of like, he's fulfilling his mission, whatever that may be. As an American soldier. Right.
38:41 Wes: Yep.
38:42 Erin: Kurtz has infiltrated among the people and infected their minds in a way. You know, he's become part of the culture in a way that goes too far.
38:50 Wes: Well, look, this is. You know, you can recite poetry. You're. There's nothing you can't do. Yeah, I think this is part of it. I think it helps just to look at a little bit of what Kurtz has, his own justification for his methods. Right. I like it when these things are kind of just done explicitly in films and books. So Kurtz says he tells the story of the men who cut off the arms of the vaccinated villagers. And then he says, at first, I wept like some grandmother. But then he says, you know, he had something like a diamond bullet through the forehead.
And then he saw the genius of that, the will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we because they could stand, that these were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love, but they had the strength, the strength to do that. If I had 10 divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment.
Without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us. Just to step back to your point about Kurtz kind of being able to become a God to the villagers in the book, that's associated with his artistic nature. Right. He can give these speeches, these amazing speeches. They do a little bit of that with the Hopper photojournalist character in the film, where, you know, he's like, man, you don't. You don't talk to Kurtz. You listen to him. This guy recites poetry out loud. Only Hopper could pull this off, I think.
40:33 Erin: But he's awesome in this. Yeah.
40:34 Wes: He's just legitimately insane enough to make all of that, like, convincing and funny.
40:39 Erin: I was just thinking, if they did a remake, Owen Wilson would be the only person who could play that character.
40:44 Wes: Yeah.
40:45 Erin: Not that they should ever remake this anyway. Sorry, continue. Yeah.
40:48 Wes: So Kurt's. It's not actually a bad argument. You know, he's. He's arguing for operating like an. Like an animal would operate, and engaging in killing. That isn't moralized. Right. It isn't. You don't call people savages or demonize them, and you don't say, hey, we're here on a humanitarian mission, and therefore there's going to be collateral damage. And this is necessary. The difference between Kurtz's clear eyed, sociopathic ruthlessness. So just call it ruthlessness. You know, Kurtz is advocating ruthlessness. And that is what seems insane.
That is what seems like an unsound method. Not because it might not achieve results, but because it doesn't. You know, if you look at the other forms of violence in the film, you get like the panic killing and the sampan scene, you know, the family on the riverboat and. Or the kind of just psychotic. There's no commanding officer stuff going on the Do Lung Bridge, which is a pointless bridge anyway. And it's just to fulfill some bureaucratic imperative to say that a road is open, you know, so the bridge gets blown up every. Every night and then rebuilt the next day.
Or the kinds of killing that's going on with Kilgore. Kilgore is a very interesting case, right, because he has an objective, which is. And this is something else Willard comments on, right? The guys just want to go home, but they can't because the home doesn't exist anymore. And I think part of that is this idea of there's the concept of social transformation, right? Youth culture is transforming the United States. And even the reaction to the Vietnam War, ironically, is transforming the United States in a way that means that the soldiers can't ever really go home.
They can't go home to what they do to a society that's more anchored to tradition. So this is kind of a things fall apart element going on here. And then they can't go home because trauma will alter them in a way that they are kind of become creatures built to operate in the warlike environment. So they can't go home in that sense. But Kilgore, he sees, he's trying to treat the violence as a means to homemaking, so to speak. So Kilgore, like, they have a beach barbecue that night. And then Willard makes a comment. The more he tried to make it like home, the more everyone just missed home.
And he can subjugate the objective. First of all, like, the cavalry just seems to be running wild looking for shit, something like that, as Willard puts it, and not having much of any real objective, but just kind of to wander around looking for things to kill. And then they're tasked with helping him get up river. So the motivating factor for Kilgore is I'm going to take Charlie point just so I can get some surfing in. So everything is subjugated to these things that you associate with being an American who has lots of time on their hands for leisure activities.
Right. Recreating the American lifestyle in the theater of war and even making war serve that purpose. So there's a lot of different types of violence, I think, here. None of them, though. I think in any of these things, people would say, are these the insane ones, or is Kurtz the. You know, are these the forms of violence that are insane, or is it Kurtz's form? I mean, there's just the insanity and pointlessness of being in Vietnam in the first place. And the way the military bureaucracy operates, though. But Kurtz asks us to give up our hypocrisy and give up our alibis, give up the moralization of violence, give up the justification of it, and just see it for what it is.
And that's what I think they see as the unsound method and the insanity, not because it might not produce results, but because it's psychologically too costly.
44:32 Erin: So once they leave Kilgore and then we get the episode on the boat, it seems to me like there's a sort of transposing. I mean, the boat becomes a kind of a safe haven and kind of a home in a way. There's this idea that Willard returns to over and over again, which is, don't get off the boat.
44:48 Wes: Exactly.
44:49 Erin: We have the.
44:50 Wes: Unless you go all the way.
44:51 Erin: Right, right.
44:52 Wes: Saying, going native. Yeah.
44:54 Erin: The lesson learned of never getting off the boat, we get with finding a different kind of native, which is a tiger. Right. In the jungle. Chef, the saucier, who, like, goes insane when the tiger jumps out at them and is like, I don't want this. I just wanted to cook. Man, that's great. Which is really awesome. But, yeah, the idea of creating the home on that boat so that you can, you know, the boat becomes a kind of a similar venue for homemaking as the helicopters do, even though they do obviously make the beach into a party, and there's a homemaking that goes on there.
What strikes me about the napalm and the aerial shootings and everything is the sense of distance between the vessels in which these people are entombed in certain instances, especially in the case where the helicopter blows up and the surrounding landscape, where there's a real. There's a physical and a kind of a mental distance, and the same thing with the boat. So the idea of getting off the boat, I think, is also related to the idea of Kurtz as having Gone native and having penetrated into the society, that seems to be the wrong thing. To actually see these people as being like, more human in a way, more and less human at the same time is what Kurtz does wrong.
Whereas if you just keep your distance and see them as targets and stay with your buddies and try to create a home as much as possible, whether that be on the boat or in the helicopter with aerial raids or with your little troop that you can go surfing with, then that's okay. Which is a strange and necessary idea.
46:28 Wes: Right. Because from the standpoint of home, the capacity for rationalization is greater. Right. So if you can kill, like the motto on Kilgore's helicopter is death from above. Right. Delivering death from above can be noble and glorious, and it's not up close and personal. Willard's reflections start with, you know, how many people have I killed the six that I know about? So he's done six up close and personal. And then there's others, who knows? Because you're part of a battle. Who knows. So you immediately get that distinction between those two types of killing.
And to embrace Kurtz's point of view is to embrace amputating arms or doing very, very cruel, cutting off heads, all the heads, very up close and personal types of killing where you don't get to create these alibis for yourself. You have to face the full consequences to yourself of the behavior that you've. You've engaged in. Not. Not that there's not a lot of up close and personal killing in Vietnam. And that's part of what's so traumatic, by the way. This is what war trauma is all about more than anything. Memories of the kinds of violence that they've engaged in, especially that up close and personal violence.
But, yeah, that's a very good point that you're making, I think, from the standpoint of a kind of artificial home bubble, it's easier to do this kind of distance killing. And that's the sound method. I think ultimately that's what they, you know, they don't think this consciously, but I think this is what really people think of as the. The sound approach. It's not crazy because you can always say, no, I'm not a monster. It's just collateral damage. It's just, you know.
48:01 Erin: Yeah, it's just a drone.
48:02 Wes: If you do it deliberately and face to face, then you can't use that excuse anymore.
48:08 Erin: Yeah. Again, I return to the idea of a camera. You know, camera is like a mediating factor between you and the subject that you're you know, you're not looking directly at it, you're looking through viewfinder. Just realize that the Sontag essay that I'm thinking of is called In Plato's Cave. Yeah, but she talks about that a camera is like fundamentally anti interventionist.
48:29 Wes: Right.
48:29 Erin: Because you can't shoot a picture of somebody and like help them at the same time and do or do anything with them.
48:34 Wes: By the way, let me just interject. There's that great scene on the beach, right, where Coppola is playing the TV guy and saying, just run past the camera, this is for tv. Just don't look at the camera. And Willard pauses for a long time, looking straight at him. Don't look at the camera. Keep going like you're fighting.
48:51 Erin: Well, that was the most important moment of the whole movie for me. The other thing I was thinking too, to return to this idea of the home thing is that you even have inter. Home Hatfields and McCoy's kind of warfare too, because you have the boats coming by, lighting each other on fire.
49:06 Wes: Right.
49:06 Erin: And then they have to replace the frickin top of the thing with the branches. The stupidity of that is really incredible.
49:12 Wes: Different layers of obvious insanity. Right. So who's insane again, is the question. Right.
49:16 Erin: And the same thing with the, you know, the purple haze, the smoke bomb which attracts the attention of the local tribes and ultimately results in Mr. Clean getting murdered. Sweet baby. With his mom's recording being played, which is.
49:28 Wes: Sorry, I felt very guilty watching the whole thing knowing that you were watching it, why I asked you to watch this.
49:36 Erin: Oh, oh. And you knew that I wouldn't be able to handle that. Yeah, I'm, I'm like, I'm literally crying right now. Just saying that I am. My eyes are watering. But that smokescreen, just really, really fitting to me, that use of smoke throughout, like especially around Brando's compound. And of course it's like, seems to me to be rhyming with the fog, which is in the novel and in the book, whatever we could say about that as a visual pun on the fog of war or the insularity of the fog, that it traps the people on the boat within themselves or with each other rather, and away from what's going on around them. But then that the purple haze, which is a literal smokescreen, actually draws attention to them. That's kind of a strange doubling and
50:20 Wes: which connects us to the drug culture as well, right?
50:22 Erin: Of course, of course, yeah. But that idea that by they're not covering themselves up, it's like they're standing out Instead, by infiltrating to a certain point.
50:30 Wes: Yeah. It's a form of escapism that attracts attention. So, you know, maybe we can connect escapism to home, what we've called homemaking. Treat them as the same sort of thing. Right. It's. They're trying to have fun on the boat and forget about where they are. And the fog is something insulating and something trancing. It's purple haze, you know, reminiscent of being high, you know, in a fog.
50:55 Erin: Insulating, That's a word I was trying to get to.
50:57 Wes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you, you, you try to escape from reality. You do it at home, you. But it's even more poignant and, and urgent to do that in a, in an environment that's traumatizing and yet it backfires. You know, it stands in contrast to Kurtz's urge to be clear minded, to do this with total clarity. Part of what they need home, they need insulation, because that, again, is the alibi for violence that makes it tolerable. This is what makes it a sound method. This is why the irony that I love is that it sounds. It gets clean guilt. But it's psychologically sound that insulation unsound in reality, sounds psychologically. So. Which do we prefer? It's actually not. There's not a clear answer to that question.
51:45 Erin: Well, it's the same idea of the dehumanization of, especially Asians in these times of war, like in World War II with the Japanese, and the tactics that people use to dehumanize the enemy as a means of psychological distancing is both sound and unsound. Right. Like you have to dehumanize them if you're going to expect people to kill in that way. But it's also disgusting and not sound by its very nature. It sounds like we're almost totally upriver here and we're gonna get to the Brando compound, which probably looks a lot like what I imagine his house in Polynesia looked like. But before we get there, I just wanted to turn around for a second and backtrack to the Playboy show. I do want to talk about that.
52:25 Wes: Yeah. So this is. I just want to make a preliminary comment. This is part of that odyssey, like effect.
52:31 Erin: Ah, yeah, sure.
52:33 Wes: I mean, Milius thought of this as the siren scene. And it's not perfect. It's very, very loosely associative what he's doing. But what you do see is you see these series of episodes in which certain appetites are, you know, and these are related with home as well, or What Freud might call ego instincts and self preservation, or the desire to take care of oneself. But, you know, it's food. Right. With the mangoes, chef just wants to cook.
52:56 Erin: Yep.
52:57 Wes: There's the sexual desire involved in this moment. So there are other moments like that as well. But. Yeah. So the Playboy Bunnies.
53:03 Erin: Yeah. It reminded me of. You know, I just recently saw Cool Hand Luke, you know, which is remarkably similar to this in certain ways. But, you know, the car wash scene that after George Kennedy's character is recounting the scene to the men over and over again in their bunks and describing it to them in this kind of titillating way. And Luke, Paul Newman's character gets mad at him and is like, what are you trying to do? Like, what's the purpose of this? That's what I was thinking the whole time during this whole thing. It's like, if pornography, I guess, is, you know, if the purpose is to titillate and it has some sort of utilitarian and even like, sort of mechanistic function, then what happens when you just.
When even the mechanistic function of this kind of. It's not a pornographic show, but you know what I mean? This purposely titillating show is also thwarted. Like, why bother? Like, why not get Bob Hope to tell a few jokes? Why does it have to be a Playboy show just to rile these people up to the point where they're trying to jump on the helicopter, you know.
53:59 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's another failure of the transplantation of home. Right. Of, you know, it's a place without women. And of course, it's. Yeah. What's the point? In Redux, they run into the bunnies later and there's like a makeout scene. I'm glad that was cut out.
54:12 Erin: Oh, yeah.
54:13 Wes: It doesn't make any sense, but, you know. Yeah. Because this is supposed to be. Ultimately highlight the pointlessness of this. It's not something they can actually have, and it's just inducing of.
54:26 Erin: Well, it's another element of this idea of the limits of the visual, the difficulty of film as a medium to express all this stuff. This scene and the scene of Coppola directing the faux documentary really stood out to me because, like, pornography or. And with the naked pinups too, whatever they're trying to express with that reference to something pornographic. Like for Coppola to say that this film isn't about Vietnam, it is Vietnam. Like, you know, pornography isn't about sex, it is sexual.
54:53 Wes: Right.
54:53 Erin: So in a way, like what Coppola is doing with Apocalypse now, it just occurred to me, is, like, kind of pornographic in a way. And again, it just made me think that. Is the movie itself artistic? Of course, yes. But it did make me think about a war film and the parallels between a war film and pornography, especially one which claims to reproduce the horrors. So is this artistic? Is it not pornographic? I think that pornography and artistry are two very different things. But is there an element of the pornographic in this? I think so. Because if part of that artistry of Coppola is, if the purpose of that is to be kind of pornographic about the horrors of war, to show how it's devastating, to show the deleterious effects of seeing something terrible which is used as a trope again and again.
Like, what did Kurt see that made him this way? Willard asked that something terrible. Seeing something terrible can warp you and deaden you. And to show this via a medium that warps you and deadens you as a viewer, to me, is more than just irony.
55:51 Wes: We're back again to the danger of the poetic or the mimetic right and to the something conflictual inherent in representation. And we focused on the violence, but now we get to the sexual component of this. So the things we were focused on were inurement or glorification or titillation. Entertainment via violence. But now we have to think about sexuality. And. And notably, there's a much, much higher tolerance for violence in films than there is for actual sex, right? So to be truly pornographic, it would have to be very, very explicit. And it's always an interesting question of why we are so much more tolerant of very, very explicit violence.
But we say, let's put the explicit sex in a different category and keep it out of the films. You know, I think the heyday of, like, anything explicit in films is probably in the 80s, when there always had to be a topless scene. And now I don't think, for the most part, you even see that, because what is the point, really? There is no point. I think it was done because it could be done, because it was, in a way, a statement of a sort, but it actually doesn't serve any function. And the reason it doesn't, I think it is very different from violence because in sexuality, representation and action, words and action are actually much closer to each other, right?
So people are involuntarily titillated or repulsed or both by explicit sexual scenes in a way that is very psychologically invasive. And you've made an argument that this, to some extent, is true of representations of violence as well. I Think it's less true. And I think that's why violence is more tolerated.
57:29 Erin: I agree.
57:29 Wes: It's less true, I think because our sexual activated sexual fantasies are actually arousing physiologically in ways that are much more powerful. A big part of the enjoyment of movies and other arts is vicarious enjoyment of violence. I think that's, you know, in a Kurtzian vein. I, I would say we should face that fact. Like, people go to see an action movie, they want to enjoy violence. And the way they usually enjoy that is through the moralization of the violence. There are good guys and they're bad guys. So this is another reason, I think we're more tolerant of violence and in film because we, we have better defenses that we can deploy to contain the fantasy and the impulses.
And we say, yep, these are bad guys and they deserve to die. And therefore, I'm not just getting off on violence. I'm, you know, I just want to see justice done, something like that. There's some filmmakers who, like Quentin Tarantino, you can see the difference because he's obviously sadistic. He's just like, I want to get off in violence. I'm not going to put the moralizing stuff in my film.
58:30 Erin: Right, right.
58:31 Wes: And so it's disturbing when that doesn't happen. It's a good kind of comparison. So, yeah, I think these are good questions that are, that are, you know, again, intimately related to what's going on in the film itself because we're talking about trauma. Anything that's like explicit pornographic sexual representations are actually potentially traumatic because they can invade us more effectively and because we don't have as effective defenses. And this goes back to the alibis, right, the homemaking alibis and rationalizations for war with sex. It's much, much harder to do that. We're much more in that Kurtzian position of just having to face up to it. It sounds like you agree about the potential for sex to be more traumatic.
59:16 Erin: I do, I do. And also because there's a flattening, like killing something. Violence already is a. Is a flattening. It shuts down life literally. There is a reality that is within sex that can't possibly be portrayed on film. And so film flattens that and makes it into something that is a purely physical act and therefore kind of cheapens it. Whereas in many forms of violence, it is just purely a physical act. There isn't something that people might call holy right about violence. It's the opposite. Whereas filming sex or seeing something like that through a camera, it makes it violent when it's not violent.
It's supposed to be the opposite of violence, but the depiction of it, because you're just getting the image and you're not actually experiencing it and getting the things, insects that go beyond the actual physical act. I think it makes it repulsive, which violence is already repulsive, so who cares? Right.
1:00:18 Wes: Yeah. That would be what corresponds to the defense. Right. For violence would be the containing factor for sex is some sense of intimacy. Or you mentioned that you could. There could be a religious component or a holy component as well, or.
1:00:33 Erin: Or just a spiritual.
1:00:34 Wes: Yeah, spiritual joining. Yeah. So. And so that provides a way to reinterpret or to give a symbolic component to sex that makes it more than mere rape or mere violence and mere intrusion. And it draws on the human capacity for language and mutual recognition and all those things. And so it's. And how do you do that in a film, even if it were a romantic comedy? Right. What are you going to. In Notting Hill, which we watched recently, do you go from the tender romantic scenes to suddenly cut to an explicit sexual pornography? Those two, they don't work.
There are deep, deep reasons why you can't ever do that. Because the representation of sex, you can moralize violence in a way that's completely successful. You know, the bad guys look like bad guys visually on the screen, but you can't. There's something about intimacy that's ineffable and so hard to represent that it can't sort of neutralize the extremely stimulating nature of the representation of sex. But you're reminding me with something when you mention something holy. If there can be something holy in violence. Right. It is with sacrifice.
And that's the thing that Coppola tries to use. And of course, it's not there in the novel, and it's hard to make sense of it. Coppola was looking for an ending to the film, and this is one of the things that was really bothering him in the original script, Kurtz and Willard joined forces to fight the Viet Cong for a while. There's this huge final battle, which would be idiotic, of course. And Coppola, throughout the filming process, was just completely rewriting the. And then he had a very uncooperative Marlon Brando in the end who didn't want to read any of his lines and basically had to have him improvise for days and days and days just to cut together what little he got of that, which I think was effective.
But, you know, I wonder how. Well, the concept of sacrifice in the End. That's his way out with an ending. Right. The identification of this kind of animal sacrifice on the part of the indigenous people, the natives in the film, with Willard killing Kurtz as a form of sacrifice. I thought a lot about this, but I think it's very hard to make sense of it. I mean, in a way, it's. Why try to make sense of it? You know, Coppola is just. He's, you know, he's reaching, but. Yeah, I don't know what you thought about that, if you thought there was something there.
1:02:59 Erin: I do. I also think it's beyond sense. The film doesn't really end for me. I don't find the ending very good, in a way.
1:03:08 Wes: Yes. I watched this with someone who's like, yeah, bad ending.
1:03:13 Erin: You know, at the beginning, we get the superimposed images of the helicopters with the ceiling fan. That works really well, I think. At the end, we get three superimposed. Well, we get one image and two images superimposed. So I really love. In the Cambodian Angkor Wat style complex, I really love the stone, that first shot of that large, monumental sort of column that, as you look at it, the two faces on either side seem to come into focus. You could see the faces and the doubling, the. You know, then impose, you know, Western culture onto this.
But you think of Janus. I thought of Janus. And I thought, of course, of the twinning of Brando and Martin Sheen's faces at the end. Those last shots are the what? The image of the boat and the riverbank superimposed with the image of that. Of one of those faces, one of those monumental faces, and then the image of Martin Sheen's face. Okay, so what are we left with? Well, Martin Sheen, what is the good guy who doesn't get taken in? And he leaves, but there's some remnant of this still within him. Is that what we're supposed to get from this? I think a far more effective ending and a very interesting ending would be if when he came out after killing Kurtz and was on the steps and everyone bowed to him, the movie just ended.
Because then we wouldn't know whether or not he takes the. You know, Instead he pulls Lance, the surfer who's totally bought into everything and is in some kind of trance that Colby guy is in. You know, he pulls him out and he gets to be the good guy who has made the sacrifice. If we had just been left with the image of them bowing to him on the stairs and didn't know what he did with that, then the quote, unquote sacrifice could be read not as a sacrifice, but as an overthrow. And I think the ending would be far more ambiguous. And the murder of Kurtz, where you call it whatever, you know, the killing of Kurtz would be very interesting.
And I don't know if you agree with that, but that's where I would end the film. In my infinite wisdom. If I could play God like Kurt's, that's where I would end the film. And then the sacrifice would be the sacrifice to the new God or the overthrow of the old God, whatever the case may be.
1:05:21 Wes: One of the questions here is the fate of Willard.
1:05:25 Erin: I suppose he has to tell the tale at the end, but the whole thing could be.
1:05:28 Wes: That's.
1:05:29 Erin: Yeah, that's him telling the story from the compound.
1:05:31 Wes: True. While bald and squeezing water all over his head.
1:05:36 Erin: Yeah. I wrote, like, the second time I watched it, when I took just a few notes. I really didn't take much notes at all on this. I just wrote Brando's Phases of the Moon.
1:05:47 Wes: Well, one of the reasons why they shot him in shadows was because he had gotten so fat. Kurtz was supposed to be gaunt.
1:05:53 Erin: Oh, it works better with him as a fat man. He's living off the largesse of.
1:05:57 Wes: And what Coppola tried to do is he said, okay, we're just going to go the other way on this, and you're going to be this hedonist who's like a woman on either side and fat. You know, like Caesar and History of the World part one or something. You know, just popping grapes.
1:06:09 Erin: Yeah. Now there's a reference I can get behind.
1:06:13 Wes: And Brando would have none of that. He didn't want to be represented that way. So. So they, you know, Coppola did the best he could and came up with this compromise. All right, you're too fat. We're going to shoot half your head at the same time. You know, half your head at a time and watch the gibbous wax and wane.
1:06:34 Erin: Yeah. Or the gibbon wax.
1:06:38 Wes: Yeah. Right. So I'm not so dissatisfied with Willard leaving. Ultimately, there's no good answer to this because there's no real answer to Willard's dilemma, which is to be traumatized and need to be in the jungle, and yet it's not a great place to be. So having him become the new Kurtz, you know, is a problem in its own right. You know, when he walks down the steps and people are bowing or kneeling down to him, and then he throws his weapon down, and then people throw their weapons down. That's kind of the corniest part, right? And it's kind of lame.
Insertion of an anti war message or something. Makes no sense, but. Or maybe it's not, you know, maybe. Maybe it's just meant to show the. The desire to. Which has something to do with worship. And of course, brings us back to the effect of art on the audience and the inducement of the audience to imitation, emotional and psychological imitation and the moral effects of that. For me, the big question is whether we can make sense of treating Kurtz's killing as a sacrifice. Can that really mean anything in the context of this movie? Can we connect it thematically back to anything else at that has happened?
1:07:49 Erin: For it to be a true sacrifice, the conditions have to be there, right? So what are the conditions of sacrifice? A higher order, a higher ideal? I mean, I think it's clear that there is none. That's part of the problem of this war.
1:08:01 Wes: And then we have to think about Christian sacrifice versus ancient Greek or primitive sacrifice. And what was it for the Greeks? It's a way of. You give some to the gods, right? It's a way of worshiping and honoring the gods. And I think it reflects an anxiety about what it means to kill because it's clear that when you sustain yourself by killing animals, you're much more. And you do it for yourself and you're much more directly involved in it. There's a stronger identification with the prey as another conscious being. This is where our human self consciousness gets us in trouble and where we have to kind of find a way out.
Right? If you're a Kurtzian lion, you kill without any of that. You kill with complete coldness. And empathy is not a factor in the mind. Consciousness of the other consciousness is not even a potential factor. But once that's been introduced, then we need again, we need alibis and rationalizations and a way to make the killing more than just killing. But this actually runs in the opposite direction of the typical moralized alibi, the killing bad guys or we're killing savages or whatever. This goes in the other direction and says we are killing something sacred and we are in a way honoring.
It's not just honoring the gods. There's a connection between the God and the beast, I think. And we are honoring the thing that we are killing. And one of the anxieties there is about depriving ourselves of the sources of life itself. It's the anxiety that life doesn't return, right? You know, winter, fall and winter, everything goes away. Does it come back? Is there a Spring. And in part, you worship and sacrifice to the God in order to ensure that there's another spring. So to kill the animals, to evoke the anxiety that that's it, there's no more animals, there's no more life.
And to turn that into a ritualized way of honoring the God is to appease God or nature and to preserving life, you know, in a more general sense, even in the context of specific killing. So those are my speculations, something like that. So I still don't know exactly how to connect that to. There's something there about another way of killing. The various ways of killing in the film, panic and moralization, or just simply mindless or cold and various other ways. This is a new way of conceiving, of killing. And it corresponds, by the way, to what we mentioned with intimacy and sex.
It's a attempt at containment, to supply to violence what we get with sex when it's connected to some kind of intimacy. So maybe it's more intimate violence. Maybe there's something to be said for the return to the primitive in this sense, to a position in which violence can actually mean something, especially when it's necessary. Right. If you have to kill animals to survive.
1:10:51 Erin: Right.
1:10:52 Wes: What Willard says about Kurtz is he doesn't want to go out as just like a washed up. He wants to go out like a real soldier. And so Kurtz, you know, basically arranges for Willard to kill him. That's why the boat. You know, when Dennis Hopper character says it's all approved, you know, pull in, pull in. Kurtz is setting this all in motion. He's kind of his little. He's a Prospero, in a way, on his island. And he controls, you know, from that point forward, he has a great deal of control over the way the narrative unfolds.
1:11:23 Erin: What he's saying as he's about to be sacrificed to is pretty interesting. Or the document on his desk, which is called. I wrote down the title. The Role of Democratic Force in the Underdeveloped World.
1:11:34 Wes: Okay. I tried so hard to figure out what that title was, and I couldn't.
1:11:38 Erin: And then he writes on it, Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them all.
1:11:43 Wes: So in the novel, it's what?
1:11:44 Erin: It's Exterminate the Brutes.
1:11:46 Wes: Exterminate the Brutes. And then the title of the report is something about civilizing the savages or something.
1:11:52 Erin: Yeah. So to what extent is Kurtz's vision a sacrificial vision? I don't know.
1:11:57 Wes: Well, in the novel, you know, Kurtz's high minded ideals have been compromised in some way. And like we go in two directions. He's been right, his impulses have gotten the better of him, or he's kind of the civilization has carried itself out to its logical extreme in a way in him. So those are the two ways I think you can go. But in this case, again, it's a little harder to make sense of because what we get is that Kurt's joined the Special Forces because he just needed to get back to the jungle. We don't get as much about him having any high minded ideals and so there's not as much of a setup that would make sense of that in this We've never heard before about Kurtz being interested in spreading democracy, so to speak.
1:12:41 Erin: Right, right.
1:12:42 Wes: Even though that's part of the official justification for the war.
1:12:45 Erin: Great. Yeah. Well, I think that's a good place to end.
1:12:48 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find us@subtextpodcast.com subscribe@patreon.com Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
Unsound Methods in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”
May 24, 2021
On his journey to the heart of the Congo, Marlow learns of a famed ivory trader named Kurtz— a remarkable man; a “universal genius;” a painter, poet, and musician; a man whose success in his trade has been unparalleled, but whose “unsound methods” have put him at odds with local bureaucrats. When Marlow finally meets Kurtz, he hears firsthand the trader’s essential characteristic: a deep and commanding voice which, combined with his methods, has earned him disciples and inspired local tribes to worship him as a god. But what message does Kurtz speak into the terrible silence of the African wilderness? And what deficiency, as Marlow calls it, might be hiding beneath his eloquence? Wes & Erin analyze Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:09 Erin: On his journey to the heart of the Congo, Marlow learns of a famed ivory trader named Kurtz, a remarkable man, a universal genius, a painter, poet, and musician. A man whose success in his trade has been unparalleled, but whose unsound methods have put him at odds with local bureaucrats. When Marlow finally meets Kurtz, he hears firsthand the trader's essential characteristic, a deep and commanding voice, which, combined with his methods, has earned him disciples and inspired local tribes to worship him as a God. But what message does Kurtz speak into the terrible silence of the African wilderness? And what deficiency, as Marlowe calls it, might be hiding beneath his eloquence? Today we're discussing Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.
1:09 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself.
1:25 Erin: So I have a confession to make, which is that this is the first time I have ever read Heart of Darkness.
1:32 Wes: Really? Yeah.
1:33 Erin: Which I think is kind of embarrassing, but it's one of those things. Well, for a while, I kind of. I thought that maybe I had read it. You know, sometimes you read Things Don't Remember, and it's such a classic, such a standard book, obviously, in so many high school and college curriculums. But as I was reading it, you know, familiar with the plot, of course, but I was like, I've definitely never read this before.
1:52 Wes: And.
1:52 Erin: Yeah, so the first time was Day before Yesterday, so we'll see. What.
1:56 Wes: That's so interesting. I'd figured you had taught this a lot in high school and that this one would be a breeze for you.
2:03 Erin: Right.
2:03 Wes: You would think I was worried that you weren't all that enthusiastic about doing this.
2:09 Erin: Well, I wasn't because I, you know, I guess I had resisted it. Like, I could have gone to it after college if it hadn't crossed my path earlier. And I haven't even seen all of Apocalypse now, to be honest.
2:19 Wes: Oh, my God.
2:21 Erin: I've seen large chunks of it, but I don't think I've ever sat down and watched it from beginning to end. I think this is the first time over the course of the podcast that I'm actually encountering something for the first time which has been interesting and maybe thematic for the purposes of this recording.
2:38 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I haven't read this since high school. I think the most recent thing I've read for Conrad, which I really liked and analyzed in detail, was the Secret Sharer. That's many years ago. And rereading this, I didn't remember a lot of it. You know, I knew the basic plot. The plot is very basic.
3:00 Erin: Yeah.
3:01 Wes: Anyway. And a lot of it is just a reflection. The only thing I really remembered about the book was the scene in the fog and the attack and the. Well, it's after the fog, actually. But I always imagined it being in the fog and the attack in which the helmsman is killed with a spear. And that's it. That's like the one memory I had of the book. I knew from my reading of the Secret Sharer that Conrad has such an interesting style of writing that obviously has something to do with the fact that English is his third language. It's brilliant. But it's also syntactically complex. So I knew that coming to this, it wasn't going to be. I'd have to ease myself into that. And you. And you sort of pause and reread things. It reminded me of Billy Budd, actually. And I thought, wow, these sailors really, you know, they're into some ornate syntax with their writing.
3:55 Erin: Yeah. Oh, gosh, that's funny. I certainly see some influence from the French in here. There's a sort of pile up of adjectives. It's like a. Like a wreck in the middle of every sentence that all these adjectives have collided with each other.
4:08 Wes: Well, supposedly, Flaubert was a big influence. Right. I don't know a lot about that, but that's. I heard that mentioned, sure.
4:14 Erin: Yeah. But I think it's just stylistically French like to take a bunch of adjectives and kind of string them together. But, yeah, I guess I had a similar feeling as when I first started Billy Budd, which was for the first 20 pages. I didn't find it difficult, per se, but it didn't really hook me. And I wasn't super interested in it. I was like, oh, man, what am I gonna say about this? I don't really like it. And then all of a sudden, I think when the ship that he's on sees the African coast, or I suppose he's along it all the while, but when he talks about dropping off the Frenchman or whoever on the shoreline and, like, not caring if they drowned.
And then specifically the image of that man of war ship firing into the continent. I was like, oh, okay, this is really cool. So, yeah, so that was the moment at which I was really hooked, though I liked certain things earlier, but, yeah. And from then on, it was smooth sailing, so to speak.
5:09 Wes: I actually find the beginning kind of enchanting, but it was slow going. And then, yes, as it, you know, I had the same reaction as you as things pick up. I mean, really, the novella is a. Most of it is just a reflection. Right. Most of it is Marlow's reflection on the effect on him of taking this trip up what is presumably the Congo River. This is something that Conrad famously did himself. Right. So this is a very autobiographical novel. Even the whole story about Marlowe's story about being a child and being into maps and seeing a blank space on the map and wanting to go to this one of these dark places.
That's something that is actually autobiographical for Conrad. And so, yes, this is all a vehicle for reflection on Conrad's experience of the Congo at a time when it was controlled by Belgium. Well, not even Belgium per se. Right. But it become the private property in 1885 of King Leopold II, who turned it into his fiefdom and ruthlessly exploited it for ivory and then rubber. We hear a lot about ivory in the book. But in the end, it was. Rubber was the big thing. And the atrocities were limitless and unspeakable. Right. Slave labor amputations were widespread.
In the end, because there was an occupying military force that, to prove that it had killed people, was supposed to bring back amputated arms of people. And this in part was to make sure that they spent all their ammunition and that couldn't be used for a rebellion, but to save ammunition. There were lots of massacres, but they would also just kill people and cut off arms, and that what ended up being ruthlessness. King Leopold was able to get that fiefdom by arguing to the rest of Europe that this was a humanitarian and philanthropic mission that basically Belgium and the rest of Europe was invited to.
Right. It was going to be free trade for everyone was invited in to. Not just to do trade, but to help civilize the natives. So the book is a reflection on that tremendous and tragic hypocrisy. Not just exploitation, but the justification of it as a humanitarian mission. And Kurtz, in a way, is made to personify all of that. He's a gifted person, a painter and a writer and a musician, a Renaissance man who goes in with the highest of ideals. In contrast to a lot of the people there who Conrad calls faithless pilgrims who are just cynically out to get rich, Kurtz was someone different.
And then he becomes, in a way, the extreme representative of colonial cruelty. So it's largely a reflection. And actually, I was going to say, towards the end, I find it gets a little bit tedious because it's a very repetitive reflection. I think it's great. It's a wonderful book. But the enchantment part of it wears off.
8:17 Erin: I agree. Yeah, it certainly needn't be any longer. And also the density of. Just as I was reading, you know, I've starred or highlighted or, you know, written in the margins, you know, multiple times on every single page, especially at the beginning. You know, one's enthusiasm for that kind of wears out towards the end. But, you know, there's certainly a lot packed in here. And I like the conceit too, that there's a frame narrative as well, which very rarely enters in. And we have the actual narrator or the original. The OG narrator is on this boat, on this.
I think it's a sailing ship, right, the Nelly, with Marlow and a few other unnamed characters, I think a lawyer, an accountant and some director of companies. So people who are, I guess, you know, representatives of London society, maybe. And the narrator is sort of himself, sort of pro colonization, pro England. And then Marlow comes in and sort of gives an alternate reading of that, though. I mean, we can only speculate, of course, about how much Conrad actually believed some of the things that Marlow says and how Marlowe's more nuanced reading of the atrocities he sees and of Kurtz's own gifts is a little bit more ambiguous maybe, than purely sardonic and a sort of condemnation of colonization.
9:40 Wes: Right. So it's clear that this is an anti colonial book and that that's Conrad's sentiment and that's what he's doing with this book, that's not hidden. But yeah, there is a long standing debate about the extent to which we can attribute Marlow's opinions to Conrad, which of course, we can't. We can't even identify Conrad with the original narrator. These are fictional Personas and every author is exploiting the fact of that fictionality. So some people want to accuse Conrad of racism for his depictions of the natives, to identify Marlow's voice with.
With Conrad's voice. But I think we can safely say that we should not do that and that there are places where we might get some ironic distance between Conrad himself and Marlow. Marlow himself is a curious character, right, because he comes across in the frame narrative as very brooding and mysterious and, you know, sitting in the dark and lighting up a cigarette and, you know, using phrases like, and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth, you know, referring to the Thames and London. But in his actual narrative, he comes across as quite vulnerable and disturbed by his emotions and willing to describe all of those feelings.
So, you know, we start off with the sense that we have an experienced sailor about to tell one of his yarns. Although the frame narrator tells us that, you know, he was not just a seaman, but a wonder, and that his stories don't have the simplicity of a typical sailor story. So the way he puts it is that the yarns of semen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical. And to him, the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale, which brought it out only as a glow, brings out a haze in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
Just to give an example of the wonderful. Conrad's wonderful prose. But that's an apology, right, for. About what's about to come. This is not a plotted, fast moving story. This is gonna be a very. An autobiographical rumination and it's going to involve a lot of someone reflecting on their own inner life. That's what that little preamble is telling us, right?
12:24 Erin: I really like what the narrator says about. He mentions a couple of things about Marlow that are not typical, as you mentioned, the way that he tells stories, but also the fact that he's a man of the world rather than a sailor, which is really interesting. He makes this. This strange distinction between the two because he says. The original narrator says a sailor is someone who basically just stays in one place, right? The ship is their home and they just go around the oceans and the atmosphere of that is relatively unchanging. And the ports that they see all kind of run together, right?
But for the most part they're just on the open ocean. And that has kind of a sedentary quality to it. He said, you know, the sea is always the same. Everything glides past. There's nothing mysterious to the seamen unless it be the sea itself. And that has some inscrutability. I was thinking about this, that, you know, the difference between the sea life and what we were talking about in Billy Budd, where it breeds this kind of hothouse quality or like I said, you know, like a boarding school quality or something like that. Whereas this distinction with what Marlow does by taking a steamship and going into freshwater, I think there's a distinction with the kind of craft that, that is obviously like.
It's like a steamship is inherently one step less removed from nature. Like a sailing ship has at least you know, to rely upon the winds and currents and various things. And in a certain sense it's just an elaboration on a relatively rudimentary form which we see the natives using, you know, the hollowed out log or whatever that they use at a certain point in the, in the story that Conrad notes. But the steamship is obviously removed from that. It has more innovation and technological advancement behind it. But also by going into the continent on this, this freshwater journey, it's a very different kind of experience.
So you could be a wanderer and still travel by ship when you're penetrating into the heart of the continent via fresh water. So it's a very different kind of experience, which I think is. I don't know. That was intriguing to me, that distinction.
14:34 Wes: Yeah. There's not the same sense of this well oiled machine in the case of. The way I've put it is a little ironic, but in the case of a big sailing ship where you have a bunch of, you know, it takes an enormous crew working together cooperatively and some very strict hierarchy going on, it's sort of a microcosm of law and order, as we discussed in Billy Bud, or even maybe the overreaching nature of the law. And the steamer. Right. Is just, he, I think he calls it a tin can. It's. It's just a piece of crap, basically.
15:12 Erin: Yeah.
15:12 Wes: It sinks. You know, the manager tries to take it up the river early and it sinks and then he has to spend months repairing it.
15:19 Erin: Humphrey Bogart pulls it on a rope.
15:21 Wes: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a piece of crap. And he has a few native crew members and then these useless white men, pilgrims, including the manager with their staves. Just this confederacy of dunces, you know, that he's going to carry with him. Yeah, there's something entirely decrepit and impoverished about the whole thing. And the men aboard, of course, are in a way desperate. They're simply mercenary. They're simply after ivory and they don't even subscribe to the official. You know, they may do some lip service to it. But there's a firm distinction between these faithless pilgrims, again, as he, as he calls them, who are not all that Wedded to the humanitarian.
The supposed humanitarian mission, and then a true believer, like. Like Kurtz. So, yeah, that sense of rapacity combined with pointlessness, the pointlessness of what's going on. I think the steamboat is a good way to highlight that because it's, you know, as you said, it's a technological advance in a way, but it represents a degradation. It requires less human excellence to use it, and it's less glorious. It's less.
16:35 Erin: And they're able to train the local tribesmen to basically just perform, you know, the automatic and somewhat mindless duties of just, what, like feeding the fire on the steamboat? I guess there's the suggestion maybe that. That the language barrier isn't even an impediment to being able to teach somebody how to work this thing. Yeah, yeah. There are other, of course, elements of supposed European progress that we see are completely useless and broken down over the course of the book. Like, we see the. The fact that they're supposedly building a railway, but they're blowing up cliffs that aren't even in the way of the railway.
17:11 Wes: Yes, yes.
17:13 Erin: The pipes that they've gotten shipped to them that they need for some purpose have all been fallen into a ditch and are all broken and completely useless. He can't get rivets, which. We could talk maybe about the significance of that. Of course, I think it's a little on the nose, you know, to hold things together as they fall apart. Anyway, regardless, one wonders how much of this is. You know, at the beginning of the novel, Marlowe says something like, you know, efficiency saves us. And I think he means to distinguish himself as actually, you know, a British citizen there talking about the British and saying that their love of efficiency provides them with something, some way to.
To shore themselves up in the middle of the jungle, the wilderness. Chaos. And so I wonder how much of this is supposed to be a uniquely Belgian lack of. Of efficiency. I mean, obviously, a lot of this is about how European any. Any form of technology will break down in the wilderness. But since Marlow expresses certain sympathies with. With the British way of doing things, I wonder about that. I also wonder about the particular ills of the Belgian Congo and these pilgrims who come. They're jokingly called pilgrims, of course, and they come to get ivory, basically.
That's their. Their God. It seems to me that other than that terminology, which is used ironically, and the sort of idea of a general cause and of a kind of civilizing force that the Belgians seem to think that they're bringing, and that Kurtz and Marlow's aunt seem to be advancing. Other than those things, there isn't any missionary force that we see in the Belgian Congo. And, you know, I'm assuming that it's there, but. But that was kind of like an essential component of British colonization. So the sort of lacking of any belief system and of any of this efficiency.
I wonder if this is just a particularly corrupt form of a particularly corrupt enterprise.
19:15 Wes: Yeah, I think so. For all the evils of colonialism, I think famously this is the worst. And it's a very different style than British colonialism. Although Conrad does take pains to make Kurtz a representative of Europe. So later on, and you know, he'll say his mother was half English, his father was half French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz. And by and by I learned, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report for its future guidance, which would become important later on. All of Europe is complicit in this, in the sense that Europe gave the green light to Belgium to go ahead with their project. So it is about the evils of colonialism in general, even though it's an extreme example of that. But I think in a sense it's supposed to reveal the core of colonialism which is exploitative.
20:12 Erin: Right.
20:12 Wes: It's just more obviously sinister and exploitative maybe than some other examples. But I wanted to go back to the concept of efficiency versus the incredible impracticality of some of the things they're
20:27 Erin: they're doing before we do. Can I just say. Yeah, I think that, you know, Marlowe's maybe admiration of Kurt's, though, is also an admiration of this Belgian colonialisms, their nakedness and their exploitation of the land, which I think, you know, this. This brand of colonization, I mean, granted it does have some humanitarian aims behind it, but it's not, in a way it's better than. Than a missionary colonization like the British that sort of takes that exploitation, which we may argue is perhaps lessened by that missionary element, you know, so it's not as obviously exploitative, but that takes a fundamental exploitation and kind of baptizes it.
So I think that what Marlowe kind of appreciates about Kurtz, maybe. I don't know, I was trying to figure this out because he seems to like people who are just. Who are honest. He hates a lie, as he says, he abhors a lie. And so there's something very honestly disgusting about what's going on in the Congo. And I mean, we could Talk about whether or not Kurtz is a liar or whatever. I know that's a complex thing that I'm just sort of grazing past. But, yeah, the kind of how bad it is and how horrible it is is so naked that there's, at least for the people who are there, a total lack of ambiguity about it.
21:45 Wes: That is a really interesting question, which I didn't. I don't think I gave enough thought to this. But it's. He's disgusted by what he sees at the very beginning. Right. But he's also intrigued by Kurtz from the very beginning, or it sounds like he is. It's hard to say, because he's. You know, by the time Marlow has formulated his story, he's already met Kurtz. And so everything is written through the lens of Kurtz's gloriousness or whatever it is about. Whatever it is about Kurt's point that is attractive. I don't think that occurred to me enough through the story that here he is despising all the atrocities that he sees and yet worshiping Kurtz throughout to the very end.
22:24 Erin: Perhaps that doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.
22:26 Wes: I mean, I think in the end, Kurtz. What interests him about Kurtz, for Marlow, it's a reflection on the. You know, in the beginning, I said this is a reflection on his reaction to colonial atrocity. But it's also. And this is one of the things that makes the book really interesting. It's a reflection on the effect of just being out in the wilderness, being out in the untamed nature. We get a lot of descriptions of the natural world and its effects on the psyche of Marlow and ultimately its effects on the psyche of Kurtz. Those two things go together, I think, often in a simplistic description of the book.
The idea is that Kurtz has gone native and that in some way he's been influenced by the natives. But in fact, I think there's not really a lot of evidence for that in the book. It's more about the relationship to the wilderness. The word wilderness is used repeatedly. So that is part of what fascinates Marlow and makes Kurtz, in a way, an alter ego for him. Is this reflection on the effect of the untamed wilderness on a quote, unquote, civilized human being.
23:37 Erin: Yeah, I agree. I didn't find much evidence for the whole going native thing either.
23:42 Wes: The whole reaction of Marlow to the injustice of what's going on happens pretty early on. So as he's taking the French steamer down the coast of Africa towards the mouth of the river. And by the way, Conrad Wright never says Africa or Congo. He leaves everything unnamed and generic. But we're going to just assume for the sake of argument and simplicity that's what he's describing. And they're, you know, they're landing soldiers, they're stopping at all ports and they're landing soldiers. And this sense of irreality comes over him and it's the irreality of being a passenger.
There's something unnatural about that because this is on page 14 in my edition. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact. The oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural and had its reason that had a meaning. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality.
So then he describes the natives, the natives occasionally approaching in a boat, and describes their wild vitality, as he puts it, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and as true as the surf along the coast. These are the sorts of descriptions, of course, that will get Conrad accused of racism and the identification of the natives with something natural and primitive. So they wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at for a time. I would feel I belong still to a world of straightforward facts. But the feeling would not last long.
And that's when we get into the whole man of war description. So it starts out with just this general sense of there's something being unnatural about being a passenger and doing nothing, which I think corresponds to the role of the colonizer, which kind of masquerades as a kind of work of some sort, but is really not, because exploitation is not a real form of work. And that's why we see all this, you know, the signs of impracticality that you mentioned. But now there's this wonderful scene with the man of war shelling the bush.
26:09 Erin: Yeah, I love this.
26:10 Wes: Do you want to read part of it? Whichever parts you think are.
26:12 Erin: Yeah, let me just read some of that. In the empty immensity of the earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible firing into a continent. Pop would go one of the 8 inch guns. A small flame would dart and vanish. A little white smoke would disappear. A tiny projectile would give a feeble Screech and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight. And it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly, there was a camp of natives. He called them enemies, hidden out of sight somewhere.
26:44 Wes: Yeah.
26:44 Erin: I love that. It's so wonderful. And I love the ironic, almost like scare quotes that Marlowe or Conrad put around these terms, like enemies or, at one point, prisoners or convicts. As if these people have done something wrong and deserve judgment from the colonizing force.
27:04 Wes: I think you're right. This is sort of the first place where you know that you're in for something really special in this novella. Just. It's a very poignant description of the craziness of what's going on.
27:18 Erin: Yeah. And right before it, and right before what you read earlier, just one little thing that I wanted to note. He notes the names of the places, and he's still kind of, you know, as he's traveling down the coast, has this sort of sailor relationship to it that the original narrator describes, where he's sort of watching everything go by and imagining and whatever. And he notes that the Trading Places names seem to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back cloth. So that the coastline is, like, sinister and some. And I really love that, too, because, first of all, because of the theatricality of it and to a certain extent, I mean, how little.
27:57 Wes: And its names are like little Popo. Sorry to interject.
28:00 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Which is like, the absurdity of that is kind of funny. Yeah. In a way, like, the wilderness always remains for Marlowe. Kind of like the way that the sea is described with the original narrator, where it's just this sort of unchanging and mysterious and, you know, silent is used over and over. Silent thing that forms the backdrop for him in the same way that the constant sea is just the constant backdrop for the sailor. But what I love about this is the fact that, of course you're gonna discover that, like, the back cloth isn't what's sinister.
Right. What's sinister is what's happening in front of it. It's the colonization efforts are. Yeah, they're farcical, you know, but they're also sinister. You know, the only time that we get maybe a sinister back cloth is when this just reminds me of when they pull up to that inner station and they see the harlequin who's kind of a farcical figure. And, like, behind him, the station itself is where Kurtz is, you know, so the sinister backcloth, if you will, behind the harlequin is the place where Kurtz has penetrated the back cloth. It's not inherently bad in and of itself.
In the same way that I noted that when he talks about the map being filled in, this is, I guess, another thing, this back cloth that Africa used to be a blank space, but that it had become a place of darkness. In other words, because it had been filled in and quote unquote discovered by the Europeans, it had taken on darkness. So the darkness therefore, is what it's discovery. It's the penetration of the land by the colonizing force. The darkness is something that the colonizer is bringing into the land with him. It doesn't seem to therefore be inherent in the land or the people prior to that.
And the ivory, if anything, is what's being taken out of the land, which is obviously not darkness.
29:57 Wes: On page 23 in my edition, he will talk of the silent wilderness. That quote struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion. And later on, at the very end of the book, he suggests that in a way, what happens to Kurtz is kind of the wilderness's vengeance for the invasion driving of Kurtz mad, if that's the way to put it. Maybe that's not the proper description of it, but. And that the wilderness is something which awakens brutal instincts. And even that the wilderness, in a way, is a replacement for Kurtz's intended.
That's what we learn towards near the end of the novel, which is really interesting, is that Kurtz is engaged and she has more money than him. And that's part of what sent him on this expedition, because he felt insecure about that and he wanted to make his fortune, but the wilderness steals him away and makes him bald by sort of patting him on the head, so to speak, and spoils him by giving him as much ivory as he wants. So there's a Circe-like quality to the wilderness. He becomes a kept man of these natural forces. And the other descriptions that I like include this sense of it is not just the darkness, but the soundlessness of it.
31:22 Erin: Yes.
31:22 Wes: And the idea that it's soundless but rioting.
31:27 Erin: Yeah. So he talks about the kind of a dumb immobility sat on the banks, the living trees lashed together by the creepers. And every living bush of the undergrowth might have been changed into stone, even to the slenderest twig, to the lightest leaf. It was not sleep. It seemed unnatural, like A state of trance. Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on amazed and began to suspect yourself of being deaf. Then the night came suddenly and struck you blind as well. About three in the morning, some large fish leaped and the loud splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired.
So I love that moment. I marked that as a moment in which silence and darkness kind of converge. Then there's the riotousness of the light, fog and the attack, which seems to be contrasted with this moment, but just that fundamental insensibility of the jungle. And, yeah, I think to what you were getting at, I was more intrigued by the silence versus sound dichotomy than the darkness versus light. But maybe they're the same thing.
32:31 Wes: Let me give a few more examples of this. So on page 30 in my edition, the great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life. A rolling wave of plants piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved. Not later on, he'll say going upriver was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.
An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. So you'll have this idea that something. There's a secret knowledge hidden in the. In the wilderness. And the sense of the wilderness, as I, as I mentioned before, trying to wait out the invasion, or being angry about the invasion and being able to wreak vengeance for it. And that Kurtz becomes the instrument of that vengeance. So that the darkness here, as you mentioned, is not just so it's there, but it's. It only becomes what it is in relation to the invasion of quote, unquote, civilized people.
Because what it does is it combines with that in a sinister way way. And that's the vengeance it takes. Right. So it. And the sinister combination turns out to be something that Marlowe also repeatedly emphasizes, which is the lack of any kind of check on one's behavior, the sorts of things that come from having police around or whispering neighbors. Basically, the fact that our behavior can get out of hand when we are essentially alone in the wilderness without enough consciousness of other human minds to keep our own conscience alive, essentially.
So the vengeance that the wilderness takes is simply a kind of absence. It's the absence of the social that's there in the silence.
34:35 Erin: Yeah, I really like that. At some point, too, he talks about how in Europe the monstrousness of the earth has been shackled.
34:42 Wes: Yeah, the earth seemed unearthly.
34:45 Erin: Yeah. So he writes, the earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster. But there. There you could look at a thing monstrous and free. So I really like what you're saying about that because it's as if the backdrop, you know, the monster of nature that hasn't been tamed by any European is also just like the Europeans themselves. It's them. It's their souls. So out here, they could live without. Without shackles, of course, by shackling the native people. But I think that the idea of time travel is really interesting.
You could, like, read it, I think, as a time traveling novel. And I think there is a kind of a blindness on the part of Marlowe that has to go into that. Because, you know, the fact of the matter is the babblings, or however he calls it, of the native people. There is a language there, of course, they just don't know the language or they don't think, you know, they're reading a kind of a prehistoric element into the people. Part of it is that they're going back to maybe what an earlier form of European society would have been, or whatever you want to call it, mixed in with this incredibly difficult landscape and all these other elements which are unconquerable to them, but able to be traversed quite well by the tribes and everything.
So this idea on Marlowe's part that these people have no language or that they have. That there's some earlier form of man we might say is, you know, rightfully so, we might. We might say is disgusting, but it's something that is. First of all, it's coming out of Marlowe, the narrator's ignorance of the people. And it's also, I think, is expressing something about the Europeans coming into a land where they can't understand the people. The landscape is inscrutable to them. And therefore it's presenting back a sort of image of a more natural state.
It becomes a symbol, obviously, of the absence of civilization, quote, unquote, of culture, quote, unquote. Again, because they're insensible to the actual civilization and culture already there because of the language barrier and other cultural barriers. And so it becomes, I think, just a reflection of an essential part of their own nature underneath what within them has been sort of shackled, the monster that has been shackled within them by codes of conduct and various other civilizing forces. Within Europe, Exactly.
37:15 Wes: In this very passage. The idea of the unconquered earth, monstrous and free. Is associated with the wildness and passion of the natives. And the, quote, unquote, terrible frankness of their noise, which he calls ugly. Even though he starts out by emphasizing their humanity. And then kind of regretting and feeling guilty about the suspicion of their not being human. Because it's a disgust at the fact that the instinctual is more on the surface, supposedly. And in a sense. Right. You know, you're pointing out that that in large part is a projection.
It has something to do with a reaction of the colonizers relationship to their own instinctual life. And then Marlow himself. And just the same passage will say. The mind of man is capable of anything. Because everything is in it. All the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage. Who can tell? But truth. Truth stripped of its cloak of time. And then the idea is that you can't meet that truth, which is the truth of the instinctual. The truth of us being driven by sex and aggression. And every other instinct you can think of.
Despite the trappings of civilization. It's not enough to have fine sentiments and principles. In order to resist it, as we might think in the context of civilization. You need, he says, deliberate belief. That's the phrase that he uses, which. It's unclear what that means exactly. Although later on he'll suggest that what you need is actually, you know, you have to be in a social context. It's not enough to have a conscience. It's not enough to have all this stuff inside you. But you really do need people around you who are behaving themselves.
And holding you to certain standards of behavior. Or things get out of hand. And then in his own case, he says he might have gotten caught up in the ecstasy of the natives and gone ashore. Right? Because there. There's at least one description of running into a group of natives who are very curious about the boat. And they're not hostile, but they come up to the boat and are energetic. And he says the only reason he doesn't get caught up in that. And go ashore and start dancing or whatever. Is because he is caught up in work. He is caught up in surface matters and very practical matters like steering the boat, making sure they don't sink, all that stuff, Right?
And that is all that keeps him out of that. You know, I think these are some different suggestions about what insulates us from the wildness of nature. What insulates us from becoming. From Regressing deliberate belief is one suggestion. Social context is another suggestion. Work is another suggestion. And perhaps these things go together, but perhaps also they are implicated in the problem. Work is not, as we've seen, it's not real work in some sense, like the ditch and the blasting of cliffs that are not in the way of railroads. It's a work connected to exploitation.
So it's a very complicated argument or an attempt at explaining all of this.
40:20 Erin: So I think there's a critique of Marlowe here, actually, in reading the native peoples as being a prehistoric force because of the cipher in the book, right. So Marlowe finds the harlequin's book, and the harlequin is Russian and he's reading an English language book, but there are notes in the margins, and Marlowe finds the book and says, oh, this is really curious. Like, why is there a cipher in a book in the middle of the wilderness? Like, who, who does he think is going to read these notes or whatever? And the cipher, of course, turns out to be Cyrillic.
It's, it's. It's Russian. And so that just strikes me as being a very clear parallel with the lack of understanding of the. Of the natives language or languages, depending on how many tribes they come across, that he reads something into it which is incredibly more complex and in a way kind of condescending. Right. Than is actually there, which is just your ordinary sort of language, society, whatever, you know, something that, that, that actually binds us all together. That's not a way to distance, but is actually evidence of a civilization.
41:24 Wes: With your insight here, and that this projection on the part of the colonizers concerning the dangerous, you know, the instinctual danger of the wilderness and of the natives. And then the suggestions about what keeps us in check, work and social context or deliberate belief, when those things are actually the problem. Right. The harshness and the cruelty of the colonizers is actually a function of civilization, a function of conscience. And strangely enough, this is kind of a Rousseauian thesis about how civilization corrupts us. And that's part of.
I think we can talk about the many meanings of what Kurtz is getting at with the horror. The horror, that climactic moment. I think one of them is the realization you can look at that as someone peering into the. As coming face to face with our fundamental instinctual nature and seeing civilization as a kind of veneer for that or just the trappings. But you could also see someone coming to a realization that at bottom, it's not just that civilization is a trapping, but that it is the Source of the cruelty. It is the source of much greater cruelty than can come about from the wild and the instinctual.
Right. Animals don't do what human beings do. And this goes along with the idea that colonization is a humanitarian mission, being a thin veil, right, for just getting rich, ivory and rubber. More than that, those ideals are actually implicated in the atrocities. So they're not just an excuse, but those ambitions and ideals are somehow implicated. And Kurtz's being a man of refinement and a painter and a writer and all that stuff, again, it's not just in tension with what he becomes, but it's implicated in it. You know, I think that's what you're
43:22 Erin: onto here, with what you're reminding me of is how people say, like, how could Hitler be Hitler, even though he was a painter and a vegetarian? Basically what you're saying is that the fact that he is a painter and a vegetarian is essential to making a Hitler.
43:35 Wes: And if he were a vegan, he would be.
43:37 Erin: Then he would be even worse. Yeah, I really like that. That's great.
43:43 Wes: Right? Because our conscience, what is it? It's, you know, it's a part of us which can tyrannize us. Right? And it can. It's the part of us that not only says no to ourselves. You can't do this, you can't do that, and you're going to be punished. But also the part of us that's related to our ideals, what Freud calls a superego ideal, and to the development of our ambitions. And so if we want to think, if we want to understand the cruelty of colonization, we have to understand the cruelty inherent in civilization and those factors in civilization.
Not just the thou shalt nots, but the thou shalls, the ambitions and the ideals. And if you say my goal is to civilize people, my goal is to help people, Even if there weren't also ivory and rubber, even if that were all they were doing, you have to question the motives of the civilizing force. Are they simply trying to control. Are they simply trying to transform other people so that they are like them, to make other people like them, to impose their culture on other people?
44:42 Erin: I think it leads us to something that really intrigued me, which is the idea of the restraint inherent in the African crew members on the steamboat. Maybe we could talk about that and you can help me kind of tease that out a little bit, because it confused me. He's talking about how the Africans on the boat actually outnumber the white people something like 30 to 5.
45:03 Wes: Oh, yeah. This is A wonderful passage, yeah.
45:06 Erin: And they've had some rotten hippo meat that they've been eating, most of which these pilgrims have thrown overboard. They seem to be cannibalistic, and yet they haven't gone after, you know, easily outnumbered as they do, and gone after the white people on board. And so Marlowe's trying to puzzle as to why that is. He says they were big, powerful men with not much capacity to weigh the consequences with courage, with strength even, yet though their skins were no longer glossy and their muscles no longer hard. And I saw that something restraining one of those human secrets, that baffle probability had come into play there.
And then skipping down a little restraint, what possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear? Or some kind of primitive honor? No fear can stand up to hunger. No, patience can wear it out. Disgust simply does not exist where hunger is. As to superstition, beliefs and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Skipping down again. And these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple restraint. I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield.
But there was the fact facing me. The fact dazzling to be seen like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma. A mystery greater, when I thought of it, than the curious, inexplicable note of desperate grief in the savage clamor that had swept by us on the riverbank behind the blind whiteness of a fog. Just really incredible.
46:37 Wes: It is, yeah. At the end of that passage, right, we get a callback to what, what's actually going on, which is that they have been hearing these shrieks and voices. You know, they're in fog and they can't move. They're eight way miles away from the Kurtz's inner station, and they're hearing all these scary voices and the whites are kind of panicking and the Africans on the boat are kind of calm. The cannibals are saying, you know, let's eat them if we kill some of these people. And then that's where he gets into this. Some of these thoughts about, these guys must be hungry.
They're not being fed. They're being paid in like copper or something, copper wire. Supposedly they're going to use that to eat, but they, they don't. They never have the chance to buy anything. And their hip, their rotten hippo meat was thrown overboard. So really, you know, these, these are cannibals. And they're starving. And why don't they, you know, as you pointed out, kill all the. And they outnumber them. Why not kill all of them and eat them? And as well they should. Yeah, as they should.
47:36 Erin: They would have a moral reason to do that, not just a lack of any kind of stuff. Scruple.
47:40 Wes: And it is a complete mystery. You know, he'll also say it. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one's soul.
47:51 Erin: Just to add a little. A few more notes to this, too. A few lines down, he talks about the manager and says he was just the kind of man who would wish to preserve appearances. That was his restraint.
48:03 Wes: Yep.
48:04 Erin: So for the manager, the restraint is obvious. He's this bureaucrat who is backbiting and trying to advance his way up the totem pole and his only.
48:15 Wes: And he's pretending to care about the fate of Kurtz at that point. That's the appearance he's trying to preserve.
48:19 Erin: Yeah, Right. And his only virtue of success in this climate is his ability to stay alive, which is something else we could talk about.
48:27 Wes: Right. He doesn't get sick. Yeah.
48:29 Erin: But then even a little bit further, he talks about the sound of the steamboat filling the native people with sorrow, which is this incredibly sad moment. The glimpse of the steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained grief. The danger, if any, I expounded, was from our proximity to a great human passion let loose. Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence, but more generally takes the form of apathy. So I picked up on, since this is just a little bit further down than the mention of, of course, the African's restraint, the manager's own restraint.
I saw the unrestrained grief and thought, okay, is this the answer? Is this the reason why the. Why the cannibals don't just kill the white guys? Is it because they are apathetic to their plight? They've been co opted by the colonizing force and they've now just resigned themselves to. To a kind of hopelessness that doesn't even encourage them to feed themselves. I don't know what we could say about that. I would like to think there's something more noble in their restraint than just the fact that I'm making this connection, which may be a far fetched one, with this idea of grief.
49:42 Wes: Yeah. So in this context, he's connecting grief to apathy. It's kind of a contradictory rumination Right. The other English guys are. Are they English? Why am I calling them English? Have we been calling them English through the whole thing?
49:54 Erin: They might be. I mean, he kind of notes. Marlowe notes when he doesn't speak English with people. So they at least speak English. Right. If they're not just, like traders who are hired by, you know, English people, but hired by the Belgians.
50:06 Wes: Yeah, it's possible.
50:07 Erin: It's hard to tell without a name.
50:09 Wes: Yeah, we're going to be agnostic on that for the rest. Yeah, for the rest of the episode. But anyway, white guys. So Marlowe's trying to explain he himself wasn't all that afraid of those cries. And he's explaining that because. Because there's not. He didn't get a sense of a hostile intention, just the sense that they're full of sorrow. And then he kind of backtracks and says, well, if there is any danger, then it's the proximity to a great human passion let loose. Extreme grief may vent itself in violence, but it may take the form of apathy. So it can go. Grief can go either way. And, of course, it does lead to an attack. And the grief is about Kurtz. Right. They don't want Kurtz to be taken away.
50:48 Erin: Right. I was just gonna quickly interject to say, I think there's something more, too, here, like the fear of the steamboat. Isn't it expressed also as a kind of terror for other tribes or the fact that the tribes move out earlier on? I mean, here he reads it as grief over the colonizers moving in, when, in fact, they're upset that Kurtz is going to be taken. But in other parts, I thought it was also that it was actually grief over the colonizers moving in.
51:16 Wes: Yeah. No, I think it can definitely be read that way. Yeah.
51:18 Erin: Okay.
51:18 Wes: Oddly enough, one is supposed to be related to the other. And the way he describes the attack later on. Right. It's not aggressive and it's not even defensive. It's protective desperation, basically.
51:28 Erin: Well, and ordered by Kurtz.
51:29 Wes: Right, Right. Well, that's what the Russian will say. That's what the harlequin will say later on, that Kurtz ordered it. And, yeah, we assume it's ordered by Kurtz, but also we assume it's their own affection for Kurtz that's involved here. But you can read this as about. As a reaction to colonialism as well, where any violence that the colonizers might identify with something primitive. It's about grief. It transcends even something defensive. But I don't know how to relate that to the cannibals on board and why they don't eat the white men.
He leaves it a mystery. Right. He says this is, you know, this is just mysterious. He calls it as more mysterious even than the grief, which we'll get an explanation for. The grief, as it just pointed out, and Kurt's. Whether you want to think of as Kurtz or colonialism. So maybe we are meant, as I think you're suggesting, to identify it with the grief. I think that's like the best explanation we have now that I've tried to reason through this. I think you're right on which is that one form of grief is apathy. And maybe apathy is the thing that can overcome even hunger.
52:32 Erin: Yeah. So in other words, it's not really a restraint at all. Right. Because apathy isn't a restraint. It's the absence of any force that one would need to restrain. Right.
52:42 Wes: Well, it depends on how you read it. Apathy could reflect a lower level tension between the desire to act.
52:49 Erin: Oh, that's true.
52:49 Wes: Something holding it back.
52:51 Erin: This is something that I'm. That I'm now getting a memory of reading about a long time ago. I don't remember where. But the idea of apathy also is restraining the slaves in America, the great difficulty and any kind of uprising, because it was just such a supreme overcoming of grief, really, in order to be able to muster the strength to fight back in any way.
53:14 Wes: Yeah. And there's much has been written as well, I think, about the sense of grief on the part of Native Americans as well. So. Yeah. How did we come to this place
53:25 Erin: here, the idea of restraint and grief. But we've put off Kurtz almost as long as Conrad has, I think.
53:33 Wes: Yes. Where do you want to go with.
53:35 Erin: I really like the. I don't like this. Sorry, that's the wrong way of putting it. But I. I like the. The decorative balls at the top of the stakes around the inner station. And I just knew I was like, what an odd detail. That's going to be something different than what I think it is. And of course, it turns out to be heads, which is shocking. And that's why I don't want to say that I like it, but I like how that sort of rhymes with the description of Kurtz's baldness. So he himself is sort of like reduced to nothingness. And the baldness was. Conrad describes the wilderness. Had patted him on the head, and behold, it was like a ball, an ivory ball. It had caressed him and lo, he had withered it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.
54:30 Wes: This is the point where he's saying that the wilderness has taken the place of his girlfriend, basically, because that's how it starts out.
54:35 Erin: Yeah. Well, and in the form of his mistress, kind of. I take her to be a sort of. Like, if Kurtz is kind of the personification of the colonizer, she's the sort of personification of the colonized.
54:46 Wes: He treats her as, at one point, as a personification of the wilderness.
54:50 Erin: That's kind of what I mean.
54:51 Wes: Yeah. His mistress, who's part of the tribe, the wilderness itself, is the one who's made him bald by patting him on the head and there's. Spoiled him with ivory and has basically replaced his fiance back home.
55:02 Erin: I think it's important to note that his mistress here has, I think, an incredible amount of innate power and dignity. And she's kind of cool, enigmatic figure standing there with her arms flung out. Interesting. But, yeah, I just. I love how it was like. And lo, he became bald.
55:20 Wes: Well, I was confused. This is one of the places where I had to, like, figure out what was going on. Because that whole passage starts out with talk of Kurtz's intended, you know, the fiance. And I'm like, wait a minute. He's talking about the fiance, and then he's suddenly talking about Kurtz being bald. What is he saying? Like, why is he talking about the wilderness now? And if you. You have to, like, study that paragraph for a while to say, oh, the wilderness is the competitor for the girl for the intended, and the wilderness replaces the fiance. And. Which is ironic. Right. Because that's. He goes to the wilderness in order to get money, so he doesn't feel as insecure about being with someone who's richer, higher in station than him.
55:56 Erin: Right.
55:56 Wes: So we get all these different descriptions about what's happened to Kurtz, what motivates Kurtz. There's just tons of it, so we might as well just dive in and into a few of them. And one of them is right here. So right after the baldness part, and it's on page 48 to 49 in my edition, Kurtz refers to everything as belonging to himself. My intended. My ivory, my station, my river. That's a really interesting sequence there. I think it's hilarious. This all ends up being explained by his relationship with his fiance. Actually, it's probably not emphasized enough.
And when people talk about this book. But that sequence from intended to ivory is. Is very, very important. And then the idea that everything belongs to him, but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible. It was not good for one either. Trying to imagine he had taken a high seat among the devils of the land. I mean, literally, you can't understand. So that's Marlow talking to the people on the boat now, who must seem incredulous.
You can't understand. How could you, with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman and the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums. How can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into? By the way of solitude, utter solitude without a policeman, by the way of silence, utter silence where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion. So I've alluded to all of this in our discussion before as a lack of social checks is a lack of social context.
And part of the problem is losing that and losing one's inner restraint because of a lack of social restraints. And then he says something which is, you know, he repeats something that said before, which is that, you know, when these external checks and social restraints are gone, quote, you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. This is an echo, right, of what he has said with the cannibals. How can they restrain themselves? No one has the inner strength for that. And then at the end of that, we get this idea, is that what you need is a devotion to some obscure back breaking business, as he puts it.
And again, this is another repetition. We saw before, right, that he had talked about being distracted by work. That's why he doesn't go out and engage in ecstasy with the natives. Or that one must have a deliberate belief in order to have self restraint. All these different suggestions, and I haven't. I haven't been able to think through coherent unified theory of what all this means. But. And maybe there isn't one. Just, just Marlow is throwing different things at us. But yeah, this is one of the explanations of what's going on with Kurtz, which is that he's been robbed, he's been turned into a monster by being coming the wilderness is boyfriend.
And being deprived of any social context that might keep him in check.
59:03 Erin: I'm sure a lot has been made of all Europe having gone into Kurtz and of Conrad being really prescient about totalitarianism and fascist dictators and all of these things that the book predicts.
59:16 Wes: Scenes in here that remind you of the Holocaust.
59:18 Erin: Right. The Valley of Death, which is. And I think explicit reference was made there to an inferno on Earth, which was really interesting. It occurred to me that because the river coils and because they're going inwards almost in a series of circles and there are three, it's kind of like a simplification of the nine circles of hell.
59:39 Wes: Right, Right.
59:40 Erin: It seems to me very smart about the way that Europe is. Is going or about to go as a result of. You know, it makes the scramble for Africa seem like the. The Jenga block, you know, that causes the series of atrocities and world wars in the first half of the 20th century. And I think the scramble for possession that Kurtz is maybe obsessed with is kind of predicts all of this. So I'm wondering if by claiming ownership, he's trying to fill whatever the. The vacuum this lack of belief has created in him. If. If we're going to take Marlowe at his word and.
And say that the lack of belief underneath it all has gotten to Kurtz as this representative of colonialism. And therefore this desire on Kurtz's part to express ownership over something is supposed to reflect this scramble for Africa, which itself comes from maybe a crisis of faith that's happened as the result of the Industrial Revolution, or whatever the case may be, or of proper work of the movement from the countryside into the cities, and therefore of a disconnect that technology brings between one's labor and the fruit of one's labor, perhaps.
And all of these crises that are happening over the course of the long 19th century. So I guess I read his desire to exert possession as a way of filling up his own emptiness, but I don't know if that's what the psychology of that might be or how useful that is or how seriously we should take this idea of belief. Like, is it. Is Kurt's suffering from a lack of belief? Like, what turns him in the jungle? Yeah. Is it actually the lack of dignity inherent in his being an ivory trader, of his methods of exploitation which has allowed him to be so successful in his work?
1:01:36 Wes: This is the central question because it's really unclear. And like I said, I think Marlowe throws lots of different ideas at us. On page 56 in my edition, he will say something like, the appetite for ivory sort of supplanted his idealism. And remember, this is, you know, like the funniest and simplest explanation is that he needed to get rich to impress his girlfriend and then got sucked into being a someone focused on business instead of what he had been focused on, which is the arts and even political idealism. The same thing could happen to us if we just got overly interested in the stock market and said, all right, screw literature and the arts.
I'm just going to go make money now. And of course, ironically, today Kurtz could have just started a podcast and he would have been extremely successful because of his incredible voice and his eloquence. So he wouldn't have needed to go hunt ivory. So, yeah, so in a way, he's like someone who gets sucked into the daily routine of making money. Except for him, it's also an extraordinary routine. He suffers the fate that many of us suffer just getting distracted by making a living. But it's this fantastical version of that. This, I think, is the most simplistic of the explanations.
You know, the, the lust for ivory supplanting idealism. But I think we get a more interesting idea around 49 to 50 in my edition where Marlowe is talking about, you know, this is just after the talk about restraint and the devotion to an obscure back breaking business and all of Europe's contributing to Kurtz. He's been commissioned by the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs to do a report. And that report is eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, although too high strung, Marlowe says, and he goes on and on about the beautiful writing, and despite the fact that this is written after he's already gone native, after he's participating in unspeakable rites.
So there's this idealism in the report, right? The idea that white people in relation to the natives are so much more technologically advanced and that the power that confers can be used for unbounded good. Power for good, practically unbounded. That's the words of Kurtz in the report. And Marlowe says, it gave me the notion of an exotic immensity ruled by an august benevolence. And that made him tingle with enthusiasm, which he then equates with the unbounded power of Kurtz's eloquence. This gives you an idea of some of the complexity to this argument, right?
We get this weird elision from the unbounded power of the colonizer in relation to the native to the unbounded power of Kurtz's Own eloquence, which is, of course, the thing that allows him somehow to become a kind of godlike figure among the natives. Which is odd when you think about it, right, because how does that translate? But that's a whole other discussion. The reason I'm bringing all this up is because I think the suggestion here is that the idealism is the problem. As I mentioned before, it's not just a thin veneer for something. It actually is the source of the cruelty and the viciousness and the savagery.
Right. The very thing that they want to project onto the natives, their own savagery, is there in the idealism. So the very end of this description, it was very simple. And at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment, it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky. Quote, exterminate all the brutes, unquote. So that's that. That famous transition from this eloquent argument for humanitarian mission to civilize the natives, to extermination, and were meant, I think, to associate those two things.
And I made some suggestions before about why that might be. You know, it's the desire to culturally transform the natives and maybe turn them into Europeans or to do whatever. Whatever it is they imagined they were doing can be thought of in itself as a kind of extermination. And the impulse to. Supposed altruism may. May just be an impulse to control. You know, there's a lot of arguments about the way the customs were unfair to women. For instance, that argument was used that the customs were very. The native customs were very cruel to women.
And that was used as a rationale for intervening so that the impulse is demoralized. And so I think that's, you know, what Marlowe is suggesting is that, in fact, Kurtz was more animated than usual by that moralizing impulse, more animated than usual by the philanthropic aspect of the mission. And that's what distinguishes him, right, from the faithless pilgrims with their staves. He was actually a true believer. And it was because he was a true believer that he could come to personify colonial cruelty most in its purest form. Something like that.
Right. Well.
1:06:50 Erin: And as further evidence to your point, when, despite his true belief, I think we're also supposed to see a profound rhetorical emptiness at the heart of that report. Right? There's a lot of grandiose language, but not a lot of there, there. And to further that, I think when Marlowe goes back to England and he meets with several people from Kurtz's past, he meets that journalist who calls Kurtz a colleague, says he might have been a populist politician and says that Kurtz really couldn't write a bit. But heavens, how that man could talk. He electrified large meetings.
He had the faith, don't you see? He had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything. Anything. And Marlowe asked, you know, what party might he have been? And the journalist says, just an extreme party. So he was considered an extremist, called an extremist here, when he must have been animated with this. These lofty aims that you're talking about. So on that side, on that quote, unquote, positive side, he was an extremist. And then, as you say, where, you know, sort of where the ends meet, he's become an extremist of another kind after his transformation in the wilderness into someone who.
Who uses these unsound methods, which I think is. You know, the manager quite accidentally hits on a really interesting term there, unsound, which I was kind of ruminating on.
1:08:05 Wes: Yeah, what is that? That's such a great line. Yeah. What is that about?
1:08:09 Erin: Right. It seems to be not. Not sound and not voice, of course. I mean, unsound is the opposite of sound, but it's also not quite silence either. Right.
1:08:17 Wes: Well, the manager says he's not. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the company. He did not see that the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously. That's my principle. So the manager is thinking here about Kurtz's kind of revolutionary. Kurtz is a social activist. Kurtz is a social justice warrior. I think that's the irony that can be lost with this book, because it may not translate so well to a contemporary reader, but that's the very thick irony here in the Heart of Darkness, that Kurtz is a supreme altruist and idealist, and that is supposedly what leads to all of this.
So the method is unsound. What's great about it is such a euphemism for the insanity that's going on. And the focus of the manager is not on Kurtz's. Is it going native? Or whatever. The one thing he's doing is he's going on raids of other villages. He's implanted himself with one village or tribe, but he's going on raids against other tribes, which is something that did happen, by the way, so that the manager is not focused on the injustice or the cruelty of that, but just the fact that it's not practical, it's not good for business.
1:09:35 Erin: No, I like that. It omits any Kind of morality, obviously, in the same way that, well, it
1:09:41 Wes: treats the altruism as if it were a method. And it makes no attempt to distinguish the original altruism from the degenerate form of it. Kurtz's regression. These are just methods for doing what they're really there to do, which is to get ivory.
1:09:56 Erin: What then do we make of Kurtz's insistence on wanting no more than justice in light of all of this? So Kurtz tells Marlowe on the steamship, this lot of ivory now is really mine. The company did not pay for it. I collected it myself at a very great personal risk. I'm afraid they will try to claim it as theirs, though it is a difficult case. What do you think I ought to do? Resist a. I want no more than justice. And then Marlowe repeats, he wanted no more than justice. No more than justice. So justice for him means what? His just deserts, his being able to enjoy the fruit of his own labor, as it were, and not have it turned over to the company, who has presumably employed him to procure this ivory. It seems to me that he wants to lend his work some dignity by being able to keep the ivory that he's procured by these unsound means.
1:10:48 Wes: Yeah. So it's sort of like a story of someone who becomes miserly or obsessed with wealth, who develops an obsession for something and even money, to the exclusion even of its practicality. Right. Just to have it. So the issue of the ivory, he becomes focused on the injustice of the fact that he simply has to ship it downriver. Right. And wants to keep it, even though what could it possibly mean to him by keeping it? It can't be translated into wealth if you just keep it. Presumably he's getting rich off this already, because that's the whole point of becoming a station manager. And that's what all of those pilgrims really want in the end, is to become a. To become a station manager and to enrich themselves. So there's something completely insane about saying, my ivory, my ivory can't have it. That's not fair, because it's not like he's not. He's not benefiting from it.
1:11:46 Erin: Should we go to the horror of the whore?
1:11:48 Wes: Yeah.
1:11:49 Erin: Which I should have to better enunciate when I say that, or else it'll sound like I'm saying the whore.
1:11:54 Wes: The whore. It was all about whore in the end.
1:12:00 Erin: I mean, what can we say about that? So. So. So I guess this is the subject of the most intense critical debate about this, or the infinite variety of Interpretations that can be teased out of his final words. What is it that makes him say? The horror. The horror.
1:12:17 Wes: So let me. Let me read the passage real quick. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation and surrender? During that supreme moment of complete knowledge, he cried in a whisper of some image, at some vision. He cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath. The horror. The horror. At a previous point in the book, he suggested that the way nature, the way the wilderness takes its revenge, you know, it's taken him as husband first, but it takes its revenge ultimately by giving him a kind of insight, or the way Marlowe puts it, is that the soul is made to look at itself and to see itself.
I think there. There are many ways to, of course, to interpret this, but the two most general ways to go about this, and there are ways that are in tension with each other are to say, on the one hand, the fundamental realization here has something to do with comprehending what it is to be unaccommodated man, our fundamental instinctual natures under all the trappings of civilization. And the other way to go is to say it's a comprehension of the fact that it's not the instinctual that's the problem, but it's civilization itself. Civilization is the source of cruelty, and the cruelty is there.
It's inherent in our civilizing norms, in both our Thou Shalt Nots and in our Thou Shalls and our ideals. Our ideals. We're driven these things by a kind of horrible, horrible cruelty. And those two things are in tension with each other, but they may also be related. Right? The civilizational norms may. May channel the cruelty of the instinctual. So what do you make of that? That's my general attempt at understanding that, because I think it is hard to understand.
1:14:16 Erin: Yeah, I think you're right. This is an encapsulation, too, of. Of Marlow's admiration of Kurtz, right? Because a little further down. So he says he's going to show his. His loyalty to Kurtz once more. And he says, destiny, My destiny. Droll thing. Life is that mysterious arrangement for merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself that comes too late. A crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness with Nothing underfoot with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right and still less than that of your adversary.
If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. It was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that I probably would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself. I understand better the meaning of his stare that could not see the flame of the candle but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.
He had summed up. He had judged the horror. He was a remarkable man, after all. This was the expression of some sort of belief. It had candor, it had conviction. It had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper. It had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth, the strange commingling of desire and hate. So his admiration of him, then, is to fight the lie that, for Marlow, seems to be inherent in all of the other elements of colonization going on around him. And to call something by its right name or to look into. Into oneself, or. I mean, we could talk, too, about whether he's looking into himself and the emptiness there or commenting on the emptiness of the cause of colonization.
1:16:17 Wes: Yeah, well, I think the two things are related. Right? Yeah.
1:16:20 Erin: Right. Or both. Yeah. And being able to say that it is horrible in a way that no one else is able to strike out and make that judgment and express that belief. So there's something courageous and wonderful in Kurt's, after all, just to name it.
1:16:35 Wes: It's funny because I was thinking of the horror in terms of, you know, the instinctual or the civilizational. And here it sounds like it's just about. It sounds very existentialist, Right. Like life is meaningless. The droll thing. Life is that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose, which is a callback, Right, to all the instances when he highlights the purposelessness of the supposedly purposeful activity of colonization. Right. That stuff you mentioned with the ditch, with the pipes and the blasting of cliffs that are not in the way.
So that's one take on the whole concept of having ideals and seeing through them. Right. Because that's what normally gives our life, some sort of Higher purpose, including the justification for colonization, the altruism, the supposedly philanthropic goal, which, if you see through that, as Marlowe does, and apparently as Kurtz does as well, you can take that as a more dramatic instance of seeing through the purposelessness of life in general and having any ideals at all. The sort of illusory nature of those things there sounds like a kind of existentialist redemption and just recognizing that.
Right. And being able to name it. Kurtz is able to put words to it. You know, his eloquence comes through in the end. The horror. The horror. The existentialist theme here would be to say that to face up to that meaninglessness is kind of meaning conferring, like we somehow retrieve meaning from meaninglessness by recognizing it.
1:18:15 Erin: Yeah, I agree with you. But I think also, you know, recognizing maybe the foibles and the horrible underpinnings of violence that kind of infect all of humanity is maybe something also that is being recognized here in addition to the idea of meaninglessness. I think that those two things are, as you've said before, are really closely intertwined. So, for instance, you know, the opposite of this might be taken to be the character who I think is the most repulsive in the novel, maybe who's that company accountant in the outer station, the man who is residing right next to the Valley of Death and who has impeccably clean clothes and has taught one of the native women to launder his linen so that it shines and stays impeccably white.
And he's trying to write down the figures and is annoyed by the moaning, the suffering of the people right next to him because it's distracting him from being able to write down his figures. That rejection of reality, that inability to see what we could say, on the one hand, is the very literal result of colonization. But maybe what is also, metaphorically speaking, the horrors of humanity that exist all around us and the terrible elements in our own natures and the natures of people around us in the violence that maybe underpins all civilizations.
1:19:38 Wes: Exactly.
1:19:39 Erin: That ignoring it is one kind of cowardly choice. And recognizing it, therefore, as a virtue, too.
1:19:46 Wes: Yeah, ironically. Right. That's supposed to be a form of restraint, he says over and over again. Work being distracted by mundane details, being distracted by running the boat. Or in this case, the accountant being distracted. So distracted by his work that someone dying in his office is just a. An annoyance. That's supposed to be the civilizing force, right? Or part of it, this devotion to work and to efficiency, when in fact it's A source of inhumanity. And I think, yeah, you're right. Part of the horror is to be able to see through that honestly and see that we have to look for. If we're going to look for the sources of evil. We can't just look to the instinctual or to natives, you know, to project and to blame it on so called savages. We have to look at ourselves and so called civilization.
1:20:40 Erin: It reminds me of very early on when he tells the story of Fresleven the Dane, who dies in the wilderness when he's poked by the spear of the native people after getting into a fracas with them over these two black hens. A great image he gives of when he finally comes back to the spot where Fresleven's body has fallen. There was grass growing through his ribs, which was tall enough to hide his bones. And then just two paragraphs later, he's describing going to, we assume is Brussels, to sign up to go onto the steamer. He's going through the street and he sees grass sprouting between the stones. Stones and bones. Right. It might be the bones on which Brussels itself is built. And the connection between those two just really stood out to me.
1:21:30 Wes: He calls it the sepulchral city.
1:21:32 Erin: Right. And then the women who are knitting the black wool are like the two black hens. On the one hand, I think they're supposed to be fates. Like one of them in particular, he says, is uncanny and fateful. She's knitting black wool as for a warm pall. So on the one hand they're kind of spinning out the fate of Marlowe and whoever comes into this office. On the other hand, they're women. And as you note with Kurt's going into Africa to seek his fortune specifically for his intended. And also these curious ideas are interjections that we get from Marlowe a couple of times about women and how, you know, it's a very paternalistic Victorian concept that women have to be shielded from the truth.
1:22:18 Wes: Women are out of it. Keep women out of it is the way he puts it.
1:22:21 Erin: Right, right. And at first it's kind of an accusation on Marlowe's part. Like he says that women live in a dream world essentially of their own making because they can't, you know, they can't handle the truth, whatever. And then of course, later we see that they're deliberately kept in the dark by men. That Marlowe himself will lie to a woman to keep her in a dream world. And of course, in Victorian society there was a lot of, you know, shepherding of women, making sure that they retained their virtue, hiding from them certain terrible truths of civilization.
So there's this idea that the black hens over which the Dane and the natives are fighting is also the idea that women are, in a sense, some kind of. Or they are the civilizing force, maybe, or the reason why civilizations are established for certain obvious reasons. And that they are maybe, underneath it all, the kind of bone of contention at the heart of this.
1:23:20 Wes: Women are the heart of darkness. You've gotten.
1:23:23 Erin: No, no, no, no, I'm just kidding. No,
1:23:28 Wes: do come together. That's terrible. No, but no, you are right on. Because that whole thing about women being out of it, that's the segue to the intended, right? And says, yes, women are out of it. In fact, the intended, she was way out of it. He had left her, you know, to go to Africa. When, of course, the irony is that she's the whole reason he's there, because he needs the money, or he thinks he does. He doesn't really, but she's got more money than him, and he's, like I said, goes to seek his fortunes. And then it turns out that the wilderness is the woman who replaces the fiance. So the women are not out of it. I mean, they are in a sense, but in a deeper sense, no, the women are not out of it. They're a driving force. And they're, in this case specifically, the fiance, plot wise, is a driving force behind the whole story.
1:24:21 Erin: It just occurs to me, too, that Marlowe is telling this story aboard the Nelly and that the ships are traditionally gendered as female. So there's something about that craft. The way that they get there is also the driving force, too, is a feminine construction.
1:24:39 Wes: Yeah, I thought a little bit about the desire to escape women. This reminds me of Frankenstein as well, where in Frankenstein, the protagonist is Victor Frankenstein is betrothed to his stepsister from a young age to be married to her, oddly enough. And he kind of rebels and invents a monster that kills her and his whole family, basically, or much of his family. And he has to get himself preoccupied with all of that in order to avoid the domestic scene, Right? So you look at someone who has a fiance and she has plenty of money, what the hell is he doing going off to Africa where people are dying in droves?
Right. It makes absolutely no sense. He's avoiding that relationship and he's avoiding domesticity. But of course, he's not really avoiding it. He's being driven into its lap, but in a raw form, Right? In the form of the wilderness, which is at bottom a kind of. A strange kind of domestic scene. Does that make sense?
1:25:42 Erin: Yeah, it does. All of this is a little uncomfortable for me, of course, because it's, you know, what to make of this. Well, because of the inherent misogyny of that or the idea that the terrible quality of the wild place is the idea that it's a feminine place or
1:25:57 Wes: something, but it's the source of life and.
1:25:59 Erin: The source of life. Right, right. Yeah. And I think in a way, of course, the irony of the Victorian sentimentalization of women and all that is, of course, that women are more closely acquainted with life than anyone, I think, you know, and they try protecting woman from the horrors of childbirth, for instance.
1:26:17 Wes: Exactly. Yeah. The word horror should evoke notions like that that should. One should think about.
1:26:23 Erin: Right.
1:26:23 Wes: And the horror of being born, of being separated from one's mother. Right.
1:26:29 Erin: Well, good. I mean, I think that's a good place to step. We've gone pretty far afield now into the wilderness.
1:26:33 Wes: Yes. I think we've gone just as far into the heart of darkness as we should.
1:26:39 Erin: Good.
1:26:40 Wes: And we can, like good, rational people, we can leave off and go home and enjoy the fruits of our. Of our labor. Enjoy our ivory, so to speak.
1:26:49 Erin: There you go.
1:26:50 Wes: All right.
1:26:50 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
1:26:54 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find us@subtextpodcast.com patreon.com/bonus Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full blown A show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersouptextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter joysubtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
On the Lam with “Thelma & Louise” (1991)
May 10, 2021
Two women—one a straight-laced waitress, the other a naive housewife—leave town for a quiet weekend getaway. But after a deadly encounter with a rapist, the two become unlikely…and then increasingly confident…outlaws. Though a kindly police officer tries to convince the women to turn themselves in, their refusal to surrender to a future scripted by forces more powerful than themselves drives them to a shocking and iconic ending. Is their fate triumphant or tragic? Wes & Erin analyze Ridley Scott’s 1991 film, Thelma & Louise.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:09 Erin: Two women, one a straight laced waitress, the other a naive housewife, leave town for a quiet weekend getaway. But after a deadly encounter with a rapist, the two become unlikely and then increasingly confident outlaws. Though a kindly police officer tries to convince the women to turn themselves in, their refusal to surrender to a future scripted by forces more powerful than the themselves drives them to a shocking and iconic ending. Is their fate triumphant or tragic? Today we're discussing Ridley Scott's 1991 film, Thelma and Louise. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and this is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext.
0:57 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself.
1:12 Erin: Wes, I was really surprised to hear that when this movie first came out, it sort of divided critical opinion. Did you see that as well? Looking back at reviews and stuff, I didn't know that.
1:23 Wes: I knew there was some controversy over the portrayal of men.
1:27 Erin: Yeah.
1:28 Wes: Is that what you're talking about?
1:29 Erin: Yeah, that is what I was talking about. I guess some male reviewers and even some female reviewers had a problem with that portrayal.
1:35 Wes: Yeah, well, there are a lot of bad men in the movie.
1:38 Erin: Right. And some things I guess also that strain credibility, which we could talk about as we go along. But you know how outlandish or not outlandish the events of the film are, which I think kind of misses the point.
1:51 Wes: Yeah, well, why does that miss the point?
1:53 Erin: I think very few of these on the lam movies are about the circumstances that get them on the lam or that make them outlaws. What I mean by that is, of course, this is about the circumstances that make them outlaws to. To a certain degree, but about the minutia of exactly how and why they are now outlaws, why they can't turn themselves in, stuff like that. I think it's less about those practical concerns and more about the mindset of being an outlaw or what makes one step outside of society and why. And so I think that, like, the state of being an outlaw becomes more metaphorical than it is literal and is trying to express something about the way that people do things that they can't come back from and maybe why they can no longer come back from those things than any literal, like.
Well, they could have just pled this, and they could have. You know, why didn't they drive through Texas and all this, all this other stuff? I mean, that's a plot conceit, which has an interesting resonance, and it provides a certain important backstory for Louise. But also, practically speaking, it's completely ridiculous that they don't just go through Texas, and Thelma even says that, but it's to keep them in the country and on the road and to keep the story going. So it's no big deal, I think.
3:13 Wes: I didn't feel like there were any real plot holes in the movie or there was nothing unsatisfyingly unrealistic to me in the plot or the psychology of it. I thought it was all well explained, you know, So I. I knew the screenwriter would have to do something. She had the task of convincing us that they couldn't just go to the police. Right. So that's the first item on the to do list as far as making the plot. Making the plot reasonable. And she did a good job of that, even if it's irrational, even if it's not something most of us would do. I think she convinces the audience successfully that these two people would rather run for various reasons.
It's not just about the crime, of course. It's not just about the killing of Harlan, but it's about needing to run in the first place. Right. The running comes before the killing of Harlan. Notice that I'm not calling it a murder because Leave that open to interpretation. But so the running comes beforehand, and then that killing of Harlan kind of is a step towards their actual liberation. So they can use that as a reason now to not return, to go on permanent vacation, so to speak.
4:25 Erin: Yeah. So the whole thing starts with this idea that they're gonna go on a vacation and they're going on a fishing trip, even though neither of them, I guess, knows how to fish. And I find it interesting rewatching it, that the whole thing begins because they're both trying to escape men. Thelma is trying to escape her really hilariously terrible husband. And even Louise is trying to, I guess, make her boyfriend Jimmy jealous. He's been taking her for granted. And I guess she wants to get married, he doesn't want to get married. And so Thelma says something like, you know, when.
While you're gone, he's gonna leave you 100,000 messages, and when you get back, he's gonna be kissing the ground you walk on. So for Louise, it's kind of a manipulation of Jimmy. For Thelma, she ultimately can't. She's so terrified of her husband that she can't even let him know that she's leaving and decides to take off and leave him a note on the microwave.
5:17 Wes: Yeah. You get the sense that Louise has this on again, off again relationship with Jimmy and. Right. Yeah. He's detached and not good at expressing his feelings, it turns out. And he's in a band and still doing that in his 30s. You don't get the sense that he has. Do you get the sense that he has other work? He's kind of just scraping by, trying to live his dream. So, you know, a case of maybe Arrested Development. There's no marriage, there's no kids. There's no kids for either of them, which I think is significant. We can talk about that later.
And then Thelma. Yeah. Has a husband who's very irritated with her, which doesn't come out of nowhere, by the way. Right. So Thelma is not an unirritating person. And Louise is, in the beginning, always irritated with her and always playing a. You know, having to play kind of a mother figure to Thelma's impulsivity. But on the other hand, yeah. Darrel's a horrible and ridiculous person at the same time. So who is Daryl, exactly? Like, what is his deal? And there are some great moments that really characterize him. One of them occurs when he's rushing out to work and he stumbles over.
Some people are doing some work on his house. Right. And he stumbles over the stuff in the driveway and gets angry at those people. And he's just gotten angry at Thelma for reminding him not to be late to work or whatever she's doing. And she's trying to be helpful. And I thought this is a person who gets irritated with people trying to help him. And then later on in the scene with the. With Hal, the detective played by Harvey Keitel, he steps in. Pizza.
6:58 Erin: Yeah.
6:59 Wes: He's upset about something, but Hal has to. Cracks a smile and can't take it seriously and said, I'm sorry, you're standing in your. Does he say standing in your pizza, something like that?
7:10 Erin: I think so, yeah.
7:11 Wes: So the other idea that occurred to me because of that, it's. He's kind of someone who tramples his own sustenance. Right. Whether it's food or his wife or the people who are actually building his house. These are all what ought to be sources of nurture or sustenance or however you want to put it. And that's what he can't put up with. So I find that very interesting.
7:32 Erin: That is really interesting, that tripping in the driveway is something I want to return to. But then. Then we have Louise as a. A waitress in a diner. And she wears that sort of, like, traditional waitress outfit which I actually looked up. Like, how long have women been wearing these things? And I guess since the sort of the mid-1800s with the Harvey girls. I suppose they've been wearing these sort of prototypical, you know, designed, I suppose, to look like a French maid outfit or to be similar to that. So that you give the patrons the sense that you're waiting upon them in a real subservient kind of way.
But she's very motherly from the beginning. And she's, you know, as a waitress, makes me think of what you said about the pizza. Like, she's also. She's giving sustenance to people. Or at least she's giving advice as well. In the first couple minutes of the film, she's even taking on a motherly role towards the teenage patrons of the diner and telling them not to smoke. But curiously, because it ruins your sex drive.
8:28 Wes: Yeah.
8:29 Erin: Cut to her smoking in the back. This motherly inclination is apparent, I guess, in the fact that she's dishing out the food. And she's also, you know, taking care of Thelma, of course, through three quarters of the film, maybe two thirds. But that setup is really interesting of the two women having that phone conversation back and forth. Because we see Louise in that outfit that you know, sort of typically, maybe overly feminized, maybe even slightly demeaning, we could call it that outfit. And then we see Thelma in her just really terrible, very claustrophobic house.
Everything seems to be layered with clipped coupons and magazine pages. It's even, like, tacked on top of the really loud wallpaper. Thelma and her husband, too. Like, they both almost seem, like, too big for the house. I don't know if you got that impression, but they were, like, both very tall people. And so with everything sort of, like, low around them, the low ceilings and everything, it's like they're busting out of it. And Louise is kind of guiding Thelma through it, telling her to, you know, hey, is he your husband or your father? Like, just tell him.
And then Thelma tries to play that role of being probably what she thinks Daryl wants, which is, like, the supportive wife who comes and brings him the cup of coffee and he rejects it and is terrible to her. So we have this setup where they're both in these sort of maybe traditional female Roles, they're both kind of bigger than those roles, or maybe even kind of busting out of them in the case of Thelma. And then we very clearly see that Daryl is cheating on Thelma. He stays out late. She asks him why it is that so many people seem to want to buy cars late on Friday night.
10:13 Wes: So is it cars or carpets? I thought it was cars. And then I. Looking at this screenplay, it seemed like it was carpets.
10:22 Erin: Yeah.
10:23 Wes: And it's conceivably something that could have gotten changed in between the screenplay and the film. So I was confused about that.
10:30 Erin: And then Ebert, in his review, refers to him as a rug salesman. And I was like, wow, he really got that one. Because every once in a while he kind of misquotes something because I got the impression he does a lot of it from memory.
10:40 Wes: Okay, so it could be carpet, then.
10:42 Erin: Yeah, yeah. But cars would be interesting, too, because she's never been out of town without Daryl. And obviously, like, the car is gonna be a huge factor. Yeah, it's really interesting. But anyway, so then it shows them packing, and we see also the difference in their personalities. But one of the things I picked up on during this viewing is the fact that later on, Daryl explains to the police why Thelma had a gun in the first place. We see her packing a gun, and we've just been told that Daryl's out late. Later on in the movie, he tells the police officer that he gave Thelma a gun specifically because he's out late so much because of his job to protect herself.
And so basically, the whole reason why, you know, we have this. This gun at this. At the center of this story, which seems to stick out and to be the thing in a way that protects them, but also that ends up hurting them or putting them beyond or outside of the law. The whole reason why it's there. And Louise gets mad that Thelma brings it too. But the whole reason why it's there is because Daryl is cheating on Thelma and basically wants to probably ease his conscience a little bit by giving her something to protect herself with. And then Thelma justifies bringing it by saying that she's afraid of psycho killers.
She repeatedly uses that term, psycho killers, up in the cabin. So there's a kind of a fear or an interesting sort of gender dynamic at the heart of why this gun is even there in the first place.
12:02 Wes: Thelma, in certain ways, is childlike and impulsive. Right. A lot of her behavior really propels the plot of the movie. So it's, you know, wanting to stop getting drunk, getting involved with this Harlan guy who Louise doesn't want her to get involved with because he's creepy, obviously creepy from the beginning. Robbing the store, holding the gun on the police officer, getting involved with JD and getting the money stolen. Pretty much everything that drives the plot forward happens because of something Thelma does. Even though Louise is the one who kills Harlan in her role as protector, this is really the motive force of the movie, is the behavior of Thelma.
So when a husband gives a person like that a gun and he is also an asshole in a way, he's asking to be killed. That's really part of the significance of that. Especially if he's having an affair. I thought that was kind of ambiguous about, you know, he's staying out late. Yeah, I too thought immediately, okay, this is probably the implication that is that he's having an affair. But nothing ever happens with that. Right. That's just kind of a throw off. So you're left wondering about that. Either he's having an affair or he's just an incompetent carpet salesman who's staying late at the office for whatever reason.
Either way, it's bad. And either, you know, he's mean to his wife and she should not be giving her a gun. And even if, even if he were the best husband there is, she's the kind of person that. For whom having a gun is just a. Is a bad idea.
13:40 Erin: Right.
13:41 Wes: And then with Louise, you know, I'm just thinking about the impulsivity versus the protector role and, and Louise is an interesting character because she's maternal and she's right giving advice to the young girls. You're too young to be smoking. And she's trying to rein in Thelma. But on the other hand, you get a lot of clear evidence that she's struggling with her own impulses and that Thelma, in a way is just a. She's living through Thelma. Right. So you could argue in a way that she's the driving force of the movie. So for instance, she's telling the girls that they're too young to be smoking. Smoking will ruin your sex drive. And Louise herself is a smoker.
14:22 Erin: Right.
14:24 Wes: So she's giving advice to young people that she can't take. And she's conflicted about whether or not to encourage them to be impulsive. Hey, rein in your impulses. Smoking is bad for you. But hey, you should have more sex. You're young teenagers.
14:40 Erin: Right.
14:41 Wes: So that conflict is the very first thing we get in the movie. And throughout the movie, we see Louise very neurotically chain smoking and looking very nervous and angst ridden. And I think we see that even before anything bad happens. In fact, you know, there's that great scene where Thelma does some. This happens before the saloon scene and the attempted rape or the rape where Thelma does some fake smoking, Right?
15:10 Erin: Yeah.
15:11 Wes: Says, what are you doing? And says, smoking. I'm Louise. Which is a very childlike thing. Right. And she's. She's identifying with Louise and she's imitating Louise. She's not going to do the actual thing. She's not going to actually smoke. So she's going to obey Louise's dictum. Right. The one she gave to the young girls. But on the other hand, she wants to fake it. It expresses an aspiration to be an adult, a child's conception of an adult. Right. As adults, we know this is actually the failure of impulse control to do something that's unhealthy like that. So it's more. It's more childish than you might think. But to Thelma, this is what being an adult means. And I'm going to imitate that.
15:48 Erin: Yeah, that's exactly what I was gonna say. Because she even later says that, you know, she married Darrel when she was 18. She'd been dating him for four years before that. And so there's a sense, too, that both Daryl and Thelma are both in a real state of arrested development. And playing at being Louise is like playing at being an adult for her. I love the scene, too, when they're packing and the difference in their personalities where this made me think of it because of the way that you describe Louise. But the fact that she puts everything in very neatly in plastic bags.
She's, like, trying to. Trying to contain everything, you know, Whereas Thelma just, like, dumps the contents of entire drawers into her suitcase. Which, of course, will later be interpreted by Harvey Keitel's character as perhaps an indication that they knew they were going to be away for a long time. Which, of course, wasn't the case. It's just that Thelma's incompetent.
16:37 Wes: Well, on some level, it may be the case. Maybe. Maybe.
16:40 Erin: Right, right.
16:41 Wes: Maybe the detective is a bit of a retrospective psychoanalyst. Right.
16:45 Erin: Oh, total. Totally. Totally. That occurred to me.
16:48 Wes: What do you do when you put a gun in a suitcase and bring as much stuff as possible? Is she going on vacation or is she leaving her husband for good again? I think that their desire to run away permanently, of course, precedes the stuff that happens in the plot to make that necessary, at least to rationalize it.
17:04 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. I love that psychoanalyst angle, too. Cause he even goes through Louise's apartment. He sees those childhood pictures of her, and it's like he goes through her whole history, but just without her being there.
17:16 Wes: And at one point he'll say, I
17:17 Erin: feel like I know you.
17:18 Wes: Yep.
17:18 Erin: Yeah.
17:19 Wes: Which is great, because he doesn't, because right after he says, I feel like I know you, he says something very stupid, which propels the plot forward to suicide, which is, you know, he brings up the Texas rape.
17:30 Erin: Right, right.
17:31 Wes: Despite the fact that he's kind of a good guy in the movie, he's also a completely inept negotiator.
17:37 Erin: Yeah. And I think that the failure of men throughout this entire film, you know, you can kind of look at it through several different angles, but they all underestimate or misunderstand or both these two women. So Daryl's failure of communication with Thelma will later become comic when they have him talk on the phone to Thelma. And Louise has warned her, you know, hey, if you. If you feel like something hinky's going on, the phone's probably being tapped, just immediately hang up. And all it takes is one word of him saying hello for her to just immediately hang up. This is really one of the funniest moments in the movie.
18:17 Wes: And I love the setup to that where the FBI guy before that is coaching him. Right. This guy Max, played by the same person who plays Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day, which is great casting, but he'll tell him to act like he misses her. And then he says, women love that shit.
18:35 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
18:36 Wes: Which we know from the very beginning is going to be. And they should have thought of this is going to be so out of character that it's gonna immediately clue her in. And it's exactly the wrong thing to do. If they had been smart, just tell them, be yourself. And if that means being mean, that means being mean. So it's really inept for an FBI person to do that, but he's going with his inept intuitions about women. They override any expertise when it comes to law enforcement.
19:04 Erin: And it's funny because that moment even also indicates that men are inept at reading other men because they can't tell from the way that Darryl's acting that he and his wife don't have a great relationship. And therefore, they shouldn't be instructing him to be overly nice to her on the phone.
19:17 Wes: Right.
19:18 Erin: Meanwhile, Louise has anticipated everything that they're gonna do. She doesn't even hesitate for one second and immediately knows that the reason why Harvey Keitel's character knows that they're trying to make it to Mexico is because they must have captured JD or brought JD in, and Thelma must have told him where they were going during their. I think that's kind of a great moment because it just shows how smart she is that she so quickly figures that out without even a moment, not even a shot showing realization dawning on her face.
19:49 Wes: Right. She has better law enforcement instincts than the law. And that begins with killing Harlan. This extrajudicial judgment and execution.
19:59 Erin: Yeah, we should talk about that moment.
20:00 Wes: Yeah.
20:01 Erin: So Harlan comes over to them when they're at this honky tonk getting drinks. And the whole reason why they're there is because Thelma's begging for Louise to stay, because she's sort of playing at being a free woman and maybe living out some sort of teenage or young adult fantasy that she never got to live out with Daryl or because of
20:19 Wes: Daryl, she says, I never get to do stuff like this. She's kind of begging Louise. Like she would beg her mom or something like that.
20:26 Erin: Yeah. And I thought their outfits in this whole sequence were really interesting, too. Of course, they become the outfits that they wear for a good long time. But Louise, as she's. She's getting ready to go, puts on what. What almost looks like a cowboy kind of outfit. You know, it's like very. No nonsense. This sort of, like, it's feminine, but, you know, a sort of a long sleeve white shirt with a little jean jacket over it that has some embellishment on it that looks like a cowboy kind of get up. And Thelma, meanwhile, kind of looks like a cowgirl.
Like, she's in that sort of, like, ridiculous white dress. So they're both wearing white, one of them in a more masculine outfit and the other in, like, a very hyper feminine. Which I think is kind of an interesting setup for this. So, you know, Louise is trying to reign Thelma in, and she just wants to, like, get up and dance to the music in her chair. And Harlan, we see him immediately see that Thelma is gonna be kind of an easy mark. She's drinking a lot. He comes over, calls them Kewpie dolls. He asks them, like, what two Kewpie dolls like them are doing there, which is obviously really infantilizing.
And Louise blows smoke in his face, which is maybe my whole. My favorite moment in the whole movie. And that speaks to what you're talking about with that Sort of suppression of urges. You know, she's trying to ward this guy off and. Yeah, and.
21:48 Wes: And then there's the thing about him being a funny uncle, right?
21:51 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Like he's. Yeah, he's trying to set himself up as not a threat, even though everybody knows that uncles are traditional threat.
21:59 Wes: Is it Thelma who says, you remind me of my uncle or something like that, and then says something about him being a funny uncle or something like that?
22:08 Erin: Right. I find a lot of scenes with Thelma to be kind of frustrating now that I've seen the movie so many times. Maybe not at first, but it's frustrating that, you know, as soon as Harlan comes over, Thelma just starts offering up all this information, like the. I guess it's because of the fact that she's been so sheltered that she doesn't understand that this is a really dumb thing to do and also just an inappropriate thing to do when you first meet someone anyway, you know? And then Thelma says, like, to Louise that, you know, it's all your years of waiting tables that have made you jaded or something like that. Like, there's constantly this balance between them where Thelma will do something really outlandish and then she'll try to convince Louise that Louise is just being uptight, when really she's just following, like, a very logical intuition.
22:51 Wes: Louise says, can't you tell when someone's hitting on you? And then that's when Thelma responds with the jaded thing. And then Thelma gets her into a conversation where she says, why don't you tell Jimmy to get lost? Or something like that.
23:02 Erin: Mm.
23:03 Wes: Mm. So, yeah, she fires back.
23:05 Erin: Yeah. So they go up and dance. And I. This time around, I listened to the band. I had the subtitles on for a while, so the lyrics of the song that they were singing were really popping out to me. A recurring line is the news is talking about a dragnet up on the interstate looking for a Cadillac with Tennessee plates. And then another line is, since I left California, baby, things have gotten worse. Seems the land of opportunity for me has gotten worse. So that was a great, great touch, especially the dragnet line.
23:34 Wes: Right, right.
23:35 Erin: So Harlan dances with Thelma, and she, by this time, has gotten drunk very quickly. And the way they're dancing, like, Louise is also asked to dance, and she gets up and is dancing very traditionally with this guy. Harlan is, like, holding Thelma with one arm behind her neck. And it just looks so aggressive, even just at the very beginning of the
23:54 Wes: dance, in identifying him as an uncle. Right. She's already, in her own way, figured out that something's wrong. Right. The implication is incest and that this is someone who's a predator, but she can't think about that or act on that. She seems to be attracted to bad boys, as she is with JD later on as well. People with some sociopathic quality to them.
24:15 Erin: Well, Harlan starts spinning Thelma too much and doesn't stop really, when she needs to stop. And he decides to take her outside for some fresh air. Meanwhile, Louise has gone to the bathroom. The actual rape scene I find really stomach turning. It's like, really, really difficult to watch. I mean, it's very violent. He hits her repeatedly. And Geena Davis just looks, like, terrible. You know, it's really, really bad. So anyway, Louise comes up with a gun and gets Harlan to back off. He's really apologetic at first, or he doesn't quite apologize, but he's, you know, makes excuses for himself, seems quite scared.
And Louise says, you know, in the future when a woman's crying like that, she isn't having any fun in response to him saying, you know, we were just having a little fun. And it seems like that angers him. Like the fact that she lectures him almost gets him to drop this pretense of this. This, you know, backed down, sort of semi apologetic stance that he's taking. And in response, he gets angry and defiant. And it seems like it's that defiance, ultimately, that makes her shoot him. Because by that time, you know, he's backed away, his hands are up, and maybe it's defiant about what he did.
It's also about the fact that he obviously feels like he can be defiant to a woman, even though she has a gun in her hand that she then shoots. But I'm interested in knowing what you think ultimately makes her pull the trigger in that moment.
25:41 Wes: One of the things that is interesting about the movie is that you can look at this from Louise's perspective as if she's reliving her own trauma. Right. And enacting a kind of revenge fantasy in relation to it. You know, like any movie, you could take it and take one of the protagonists and treat it as a kind of dream or an unfolding of their own fantasy. It's kind of a useful hypothetical to look at it like that because, of course, you know, what's driving it forward is the wishes and desires of the characters. And sometimes they're not. They don't quite understand them themselves, in Louise's case.
Right. Like I said, that conflict between her own wanting to be Protective, but also wanting to encourage impulsivity with the girls at the very beginning. Right. Don't smoke, but do sex. That manifests itself in a way with Thelma. So she's not just being protective, but she's giving in. And she's also with someone that she knows can. She probably knows at some level that Thelma can get her into a lot of trouble and that the trip creates that opportunity. It's a really weirdly conceived trip as well. Neither of them really fishes.
26:52 Erin: Yeah.
26:52 Wes: But they're off to a cabin to do that. A kind of stereotypically masculine thing to do. Right. Instead of a girls trip. It's odd. And so you look for ulterior motives, like I said before, like just wanting to get out of there, wanting to leave, wanting to escape, wanting to become outlaws, but. Or in Louise's case, wanting to relive this trauma and change the outcome in some way, or at least avenge it. At least get some sort of justice out of it. So part of, you know, when you explain why she kills him. Well, you know, he says, I. I should have gone ahead and, you know, effed her.
Right. So he says the worst thing you possibly can when you have a gun being held on you, Right. He says something that's likely to get you murdered because it's not just callous, but it's potentially humiliating. You don't, if you want to live, don't humiliate a person who holds your life in their hands. So I think that's well motivated as well, you can see. Even though when you, you know, I remember, remember first seeing this movie and being kind of shocked by that scene, I really didn't expect that it compromises one of the protagonists in a way, because it is murder of some sort, Right.
You call it second degree murder, someone she didn't have to kill. But on the other hand, it feels on some level justified.
28:05 Erin: Sure.
28:05 Wes: So it puts you as the audience in the. In a kind of quandary. And it, like I said, potentially compromising to the protagonist. So I think on either level, whether you're looking at conscious wishes or unconscious wishes, whether you're looking at her just reacting to Harlan's statement, or if you're looking at her reliving her own trauma in a different way, I think either of those explanations make sense and maybe they work together.
28:32 Erin: Yeah. I think part of the reason why this works too is just because of Sarandon's performance. She looks genuinely shocked by what she does. You know, it seems to come from a place that's Almost like beyond her ability to control that impulse and shoot him.
28:44 Wes: Well, she says to him, watch your mouth, buddy. Right. Right afterwards. After he's dead.
28:49 Erin: After he's dead, she lowers the gun and her hand is shaking and she looks shocked. And then Thelma is going, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. You know, she tells Thelma to go get the car. And then in that moment when they're alone together, she does say that. She says, you know, watch your mouth, buddy. Which is like pretty ballsy thing to say in that moment.
29:07 Wes: Right.
29:07 Erin: So there's this strange, it's just such a complex moment when she shoots him and. Right. Right after. I do think it's really well motivated. However, like you also see in the circumstances of it how the script that they are anticipating is going to result from this incident if they go to the police is going to betray them. Like the fact that he, she makes him turn around, she shot him in the chest and Geena Davis like got away. I mean, she looked pretty banged up. But so because of that, because she's made him turn around and actually face her, she didn't, you know, shoot him in the back. In other words, like it's, it's not, it's a situation where he's, he's vulnerable and he had his pants down and she shot him. Obviously not while he was in the process of trying to rape Thelma.
29:56 Wes: Yeah. So it's not self defense.
29:58 Erin: No, no. And you know, I don't know how they could have spun that in order to, I don't know that he was then coming after me or, or like, you know, what they could have, how they could have lied in order to make that problem for them go away.
30:12 Wes: But, well, Thelma later on will say, why don't you just say, you know, you shot him while he was in the act or something like that.
30:18 Erin: Right.
30:19 Wes: So they, they do consider manufacturing some story about. Would that have worked? It's unclear.
30:24 Erin: Right. Yeah. And I guess, I guess if they shot him in the back, that would have been even worse because you could argue that he was going away, walking away from them. So maybe that wouldn't have worked either. But of course, the biggest problem that Louise immediately knows is the fact that, you know, there were a hundred witnesses that saw them, the two of them dancing together and saw the way that she was being with him. And people will say that she, you know, that she's making it up or that she deserved it because of the way she was acting with him or whatever, whatever the case may be.
This made me think about, like, how this moment kind of motivates. Of course, it motivates everything else that happens in the film. But it seems to set up a pattern. Or even their leaving in the first place and not telling Daryl and Jimmy. Seems to set up this desire on their parts to not take on the established mode of behavior. Or not follow the script that women are supposed to follow in the face of the powers that be, namely men. So Thelma would normally have to get permission, I suppose, to leave Daryl. Though I don't think there's even a precedent for her going away without him.
And though she's trying at the beginning to be subservient to him. And to follow the script that he wants. He's also, like, rejecting her for that. And getting angry with her for trying to be the good little wife or whatever. So she breaks that chain, I guess, by leaving without telling him in this really defiant act. And then when Louise shoots Harlan, I think it's. Again, it's a kind of an act of defiance. Because he's being defiant with her. And feels like he can say these things to her and not experience any comeuppance. Because I suppose he's expecting that she's not a threat to him.
And that's why he can be defiant and say these terrible things to her. So, again, she kind of rejects that script, I suppose, by shooting him. And then for the rest of the film, they are trying to evade, again, coming under the power of the law, of the police, of men, of whomever who want them to behave a certain way. And basically, this has now set them on this path of refusal. Where they're not going to give in to any of those. They're not going to put themselves in a situation where they have to play the part and act out that particular script that men want them to.
So this includes, like, they don't want to have to put themselves in a situation where Thelma has to justify her behavior with Harlan on the dance floor and be humiliated and all that stuff. In addition to Louise having to justify her having shot Harlan. And I think that continues in their relationships with men throughout the rest of the film. And ultimately, of course, in the final scene, too. That's, like, the ultimate rejection of just not wanting to go along with whatever the guys want them to do.
33:12 Wes: So in some sense, they're trying to escape from men. But they're also moving through the world of men, in a sense. Right? That's what they find themselves in, in one circumstance after another. A world in which they're vulnerable to men. What the killing does is it gives them a reason to really make their escape. Now it seems like it's an escape that they may haven't attempted before. There's one great line where Louise says to Thelma, every time we get into trouble, you plead insanity. I do a double take at that. What? Yeah, that's. That's a very surprising reveal in the movie.
In a way. It doesn't really square with things. That the idea that they've done gotten into trouble before and that this isn't something entirely new. That's. That's very surprising in a way. It suggests, I think, that whatever trouble they've managed to get into, it hasn't been enough. It hasn't reached escape velocity. And this murder is escape velocity. The ultimate consequence of it is to push them forward towards liberation, which is really what happens in the movie. The. The whole progression is towards a kind of a spiritual liberation or a psychological liberation, despite the fact that it also involves suicide.
We can talk about that. So, you know, if that's what it takes, that's what it takes to be. To be liberated. You know, maybe. Maybe that's what you have to do. But is liberation just an evasion of men that I'm a little more unclear on?
34:42 Erin: I think not.
34:43 Wes: Yeah. And one of the reasons I'm unclear on it is the role of the police is very complicated. My favorite scene in the movie is actually where Hal and all the FBI officers arrive at Daryl and Thelma's house. So they set up shop at their home. Home becomes a police base, which is a really interesting. You know, it's not the first movie to do that, and not the last, of course, where the FBI camp out and someone's home. But in this case, it's a really interesting transformation. So. So one of my favorite scenes is that arrival because they're arriving out of the rain and they're kind of running up to the doorstep and laughing. Do you remember that?
35:22 Erin: Yeah, I do.
35:23 Wes: It's this very innocent, playful. The thing that they're doing is they, you know, as they arrive to do their police work. It's a wonderful touch, and it's. I think it's an important one. Max will be eating a cheeseburger while they watch the surveillance tape of Thelma robbing a store. And they all watch a movie together. Right.
35:44 Erin: At one point, Penny Serenade. They watch Penny Serenade. Yeah. With Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.
35:49 Wes: Okay. All right.
35:50 Erin: Yeah.
35:50 Wes: So they're watching that movie, and then Daryl tries to turn the Channel to sports. And then they get upset and he has to turn it back. So you get these very. These touches that are kind of like sensitive guy touches. For some reason, the police and the FBI turn out to be more sensitive characters. And what I think is interesting about that is that in the police, they've generated something that in one way is persecutory, right? Because Hal has a very real interest in catching them. Despite the fact that he's worried about them and has warm feelings about them and wants to keep them safe.
He also wants to catch them. And he'll make remarks to that effect that make that clear. On the other hand, despite the persecutory element, you know, the law enforcement guys are. The men who are. Have some actual curiosity about Thelma and Louise, about what makes them tick, what their motivations are, what's going on with them, where to find them, all those things that they should have gotten from the men in their lives. Right? Actual curiosity about them as people. Unfortunately, that's only something in this movie that law enforcement can provide.
So there's an interesting ambiguity in the fact and what it means to be sought after by the police in this movie. You know, the other way I think of the police in this movie are when I saw the law enforcement arrive and they're coming in out of the rain and they're kind of boyish because they're playful, I thought, oh, the orphans are coming in out of the rain. These are the children that Thelma and Louise didn't have. Their departure, in a way, is a productive thing. It's a. You know, it produces these kind of men, children because that's the way they come off in some ways.
Even though they're the better men in the movie, the better sorts of men. And they arrive at this home, the home is now filled with these children. They watch a movie, they eat a cheeseburger, they do things that. And the tone of the house changes. So instead of it being that just cluttered place that you mentioned and Darryl's tyranny, that scene with the movie, it suddenly becomes much warmer and much more homelike. So in the economy of the movie, Thelma and Louise becoming outlaws has a kind of integrating and organizing effect in the domain of the household.
And that, I think, has something to do with the generation of. Of curiosity in these men. And also with, you know, it draws on the kind of men who can be. Whereas Daryl tramples on his own sustenance. The way I was thinking of it, these are guys who can enjoy the house and home Strangely enough.
38:27 Erin: That's really interesting. Yeah. I don't know if I would go so far as to call them good men, though. I mean, I think that Harvey Keitel is the closest to a good man, but even he laughs at that women love that shit line. He repeats it and laughs at the humor of that, which is kind of a disappointing moment. But the guys are like. One of them is reading Boudoir magazine. Yep. And that idea of those, like, dirty magazines or whatever is something that recurs in Ridley Scott's movies, actually. Like, I think of Alien, which we'll get to in another episode, I'm sure. But yeah, I think you're right. As much as it pains me that, you know, in a two hander.
39:01 Wes: Well, that's why I use the term better men.
39:04 Erin: Right, right.
39:05 Wes: And I think it's com. Like, yeah, they are complicated. Right. Like the eating of the cheeseburger. Doing the playing of the. Max is kind of a perverse character. He's childlike, you know, he's. He's not unlike the Ned Ryerson character in Groundhog.
39:18 Erin: Max is the. Is the Ned Ryerson guy.
39:20 Wes: Yeah, Max is the FBI guy, the main FBI guy. So. Played by the same guy played Ned Ryerson. So, you know, he's the one who says women love that shit. He's the one eating the cheeseburger during the playing of the surveillance tape. So, yeah, he does a lot of perverse and childish things and has that quality to him. And like I said, you know, they. They have that boyish quality in general. Yeah. Boudoir magazine, all that stuff. So that's why I use the term better. Right. They're the better sort of men in the movie. But I think that doesn't mean they're the ideal or that they're even. That they're the good men, so to speak. They're complicated.
39:55 Erin: Right. I think that Harvey Keitel is a good man. Tries to be, anyway.
39:58 Wes: Yeah, yeah. There are very deliberate complications of that. When he says something like, you know, someone says they must be very smart or very lucky. And he says something to the effect that brains are never enough and luck always runs out or something like that. So he's kind of gleefully anticipating their capture. That's why I think that motivation is never simply eradicated. He doesn't just simply become a, oh, I'm the completely nice guy. Now, those two motivations, the desire to see them safe and the desire to capture them, kind of live alongside each other without eradicating each other, but. Sorry, you were onto something with Them not being good men.
40:37 Erin: No, that's it. I was just going to express my surprise that in a movie called Thelma and Louise, your favorite scene has nothing to do with them.
40:45 Wes: Yeah, Yeah. I have a soft spot for the little boys, the orphans that Thelma and Louise have from a distance, taken in. Taken under their wing. There's the interesting juxtaposition of the cop who stops them, who is all superego, right? All enforcement, and he's irritable and rude. And then the trucker who's all ID and all, you know, there's Jimmy with his detachment. There's the boyishness and perversity of the FBI guys. The more paternal and caring role played by Keitel's character, J.D. who's exploitative Harlan, the creepy uncle Daryl, trampling his own sustenance.
And then there's an old man. The old man may be the only kind of neutral male figure in the movie, but I tried to make a list of the men in the movie and how to characterize them and how to sort of how to characterize what is negative or not about them. It's mostly negative, and I don't know what to make of that. There's just a lot of different ways, I guess, that for men to be bad. Well.
41:53 Erin: And it's not nearly a complete catalog, but the character of JD I think is the most interesting. I know in some contemporary reviews when this came out that I read a couple of women reviewers were kind of incredulous that Thelma would invite this strange guy into their car so soon after what had happened to her. And he's really interesting because in a way, he's kind of a good guy, in a sense. I mean, he goes with whatever they want. So he's this great contrast to Harlan because he kind of demures when they. He's like, oh, no, it's crazy. Never mind.
Like, you don't want me around. And then legitimately goes away, you know, I mean, he doesn't, like, try to use that as a false blind and then take advantage of them. I mean, he does when he's standing out in the rain and Thelma invites him in, but that's only because he kind of knows that she wants to invite him in and she has the option of turning him down. I think that's really important. That kind of restores the balance for Thelma, of course, even though it's going to end up that he steals all her money. And I just want to talk about how frustrating that is, too.
But even more frustrating is when they look in their wallet, or maybe Thelma looks in Louise's wallet to see how much money they have, and she says, $61. And she barely says it. And, you know, they're in the convertible, driving with the top down, and a bill flies out of her hands. And then she turns to louise and says, $41. That is the most frustrating thing in the world. Thelma just, like, can't. Yeah, she just can't get it together at all, you know, even against the wind. And even the moment that she first. This actually rhymed for me. The moment that she first meets J.D.
she kind of trips over him and he's holding, like, a hose, I guess. And it really looked to me to be kind of similar, or maybe a deliberate rhyme with that scene when Daryl trips at the beginning and there's that guy with the hose standing.
43:50 Wes: Yep. From what I read, that scene in the beginning where Daryl trips is not part of the script. He just. He did that by accident and played along with it. But it fits his character, so. But yeah, so I thought, yes, the scene with JD Echoes that.
44:03 Erin: That's really interesting. I don't know if this is a common expression anymore, but in old movies, sometimes when they're describing, especially when a husband fails and has an affair, they described it as my foot slipped. And so I think that's kind of interesting that Daryl is leaving and he's gonna end up staying out late. Like, she's gonna later call him at 4 o' clock in the morning and he still won't be home. And then right before Thelma meets this guy that she's gonna have an affair with, she also trips under the same kind of circumstances. So it works out really well. But that I think his name is Christopher McDonald, that he tripped at the beginning is perfect.
44:38 Wes: But what's also interesting is that she's the one doing the tripping, but JD Is the one who's apologetic and says, did I do that or did I cause that? So he is thinking about his effect on her and is willing to take the blame for her tripping. Whereas, of course, when Daryl trips, he. He blames the. The workers and everything he does. Of course, he's, you know, he's the clumsy one, but he doesn't think about his effects on anyone. So. So JD at least can, for the sake of charming someone, pretend that he cares about his causal role in things.
45:13 Erin: Well, I. I think he kind of does. I mean, I. I think that someone having that reaction, it shows a certain amount of social understanding or a certain default Mode, which is. It indicates something, caring about that person. Even though we, we later learn that of course he's a thief and he's, you know, he has a lot of things that are wrong with him, there's still like a kind of a curious goodness there and a sense of deference to women, which is lacking from pretty much anybody else.
45:40 Wes: He's also really good looking.
45:42 Erin: Love to skip. Yeah, of course. No, but that moment happens, of course, when Thelma's coming out of the phone booth after she's just had a phone conversation with Daryl, which she later recounts to Louise in this really sarcastic way. Like she sort of imagines how the phone conversation should have gone and says to Louise, like, oh, I love you, honey. You know, all this, all this stuff that you know, of course they both know is bs. And it's from that moment on that Thelma decides to go to Mexico with Louise. So, you know, I guess the phone call was so disappointing that.
And he was such a bully to her that she ultimately decides that there's nothing for her there and she wants to run away to Mexico and that. And then, you know, trips over JD along the way. So she's kind of, I guess, in this mindset now where she's. She's, I guess you could say, mentally divorced from him at this point and is in a perfect position to trip over J.D. in that moment.
46:39 Wes: Yeah.
46:40 Erin: Yeah. So then they have this. They go to the motel where Jimmy's waiting for Louise, and Thelma has her own encounter with jd, which is again, kind of. It seems like it's a kind of restorative for what's happened to her with Harlan. To have a guy who's deferential to her and who actually listens to her and seems at least in bed to care about her and to be charming.
47:05 Wes: Yeah. We get these alternating scenes. This is a lead up to the middle of the movie, which is disastrous, which involves the losing of the money. But in the lead up to that, you get all these alternating scenes where thelma is enjoying JD's company and Louise is enjoying Jimmy's company. Although it starts out a little shaky at first.
47:25 Erin: Yeah. With the worst proposal ever.
47:28 Wes: Yeah.
47:28 Erin: The non proposal proposal, which is preceded by kind of violence.
47:33 Wes: Right, right. It's a violent outburst, starts trashing the room.
47:39 Erin: Yeah. There's a curious moment there with Jimmy, too, where he kind of expresses regret for the fact that his career never took off. And he says something like, you know, do you think I'm happy playing Ramada Inns? And Louise responds, we Both got what we settled for. Which is something that she says to Thelma early on in the car when Thelma's complaining about Daryl, I think, and she says, you know, well, you get what you settle for. Hmm.
48:04 Wes: Interesting.
48:05 Erin: Yeah. So I don't know the significance of that line. It seems really interesting to me that it recurs and that Louise is interested in that idea that. What? That you're sort of responsible for your own fate, even for the things that. That happen to you that maybe aren't your fault, and the extent to which maybe, I don't know, maybe everything is your fault that happens to you in some way.
48:25 Wes: Well, they could have ended up with better boyfriend and a better husband. Right. They did settle for whether. Whether or not they just didn't, you know, Like, Thelma's too young to know better and ends up with this person, right? She's kind of stuck. Takes a lot of. It's a huge disruption, right, to say, all right, I'm going to divorce this guy. And so, yeah, so we all find ourselves stuck in that way. And then we have to ask, to what extent are we responsible for being stuck and for simply staying in it despite the enormous difficulties involved in extracting ourselves? And it's always risky, right? It's always a risky thing to do. Maybe what's out there is worse. So to settle or not to settle, right? To settle or to drive off a cliff, right?
49:10 Erin: And that's the problem, right, is that when they. You know, when they decide to live in this mode of not settling, that ultimately means that you have to die. That's the way it goes.
49:20 Wes: The ultimate freedom, Right?
49:22 Erin: You know, it's funny when. So when Thelma comes down to the restaurant. I love that scene with Louise and Jimmy. And then when Thelma comes down looking like she's either on drugs or crazy, and they. Louise has this realization that JD Was alone in the room, and, of course, the money's stolen. They run into the room and. And Thelma infuriatingly says, I've never been lucky, not once. Which is just like, oh, it's so annoying. Because of course, it has nothing to do with luck. She's just an idiot over and over again.
49:56 Wes: Yeah. Carelessness is a form of bad luck, Right?
50:00 Erin: Yeah. I mean, I guess the luck involved would be to be careless like that and to actually have it not work out for the worse. And then here, like, this is the moment, I think, when the roles switch, right? So. So Louise can't take it anymore. She's been, you know, she's been reduced to a childlike state now because of Thelma's incompetence. And now Thelma is going to have to take control.
50:24 Wes: Yeah.
50:25 Erin: And this is something that. That. That I'm really interested in this idea that you can only assume a kind of a mature role or the role of an adult or the role of a competent person when another person is incompetent. And you have to. You know, you can assume that role now. So Thelma now becomes like the mother and tells Louise not to worry about it and she's gonna take care of it.
50:49 Wes: Yep.
50:49 Erin: But of course, she does so by getting them into even deeper trouble with the law and robbing a convenience store.
50:55 Wes: Yeah. So that's actually the way the second half of the second act begins. Right. So the very midpoint of the movie is the loss of the money.
51:02 Erin: And then I thought it was later in the film, but you're right. Yeah.
51:05 Wes: And then there's a shift in. In tone after that, because that's the. Right after that, the loss of the money and Louise crying and Thelma saying, don't worry about it. That's when we get a shift to the scene where the police are playfully running in from the rain and telling Daryl that they tapped the phone. And you have. Do you have a good relationship with your wife? And all that stuff. Women love that shit. But then when we go back to Thelma and Louise, we get that wonderful scene where Louise is just. Thelma goes into the store and Louise is smoking in the car.
And she's looking at these old ladies, and there's that kind of look of desperation on their face, which I think the old man later on will similarly have the old man that she trades some of her jewelry for a hat. And then Thelma, of course, comes out saying, drive. And she's robbed the store. And of course, she's entirely used the script that JD Gave her about how to go and rob a store like a gentleman. And he says. What does he say? It's my opinion that experiencing robbery doesn't have to be an entirely unpleasant experience or something like that.
And this really sets them on the path to complete liberation with Thelma taking over now.
52:16 Erin: And I guess, well, she has to kind of buy in. Louise has put something on the line by shooting Harlan. Right. For Thelma. And now. Yeah. And now Thelma has to do the same for Louise. So the role reversal works out with the smoking. Thelma is seen smoking in the car, and she actually, like, hands her cigarette to Louise as she goes in to rob the Convenience store.
52:42 Wes: Oh, okay.
52:42 Erin: That's important. Yeah. And then Louise is too distraught to smoke it. She smokes it for just a second, maybe, and throws it away. And then when Thelma comes out having robbed the store, Louise responds as Thelma did to the murder. So she repeats like, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit. Over and over again in the way that Thelma was going, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God. And we're not able to say anything else. So there was this sort of reciprocal investment, I guess you could say, in their being outlaws. So it's more balanced now, and they're both invested in this life of crime or rejection of society or whatever. So it's a little bit more equal.
53:19 Wes: Yeah. So Louise is reanimated by all of that. And you see that in her saying right after she robs the store and they're pulling out, she's telling her to slow down, but she also says, don't you litter. So Louise says that to Thelma, which I think is great. Then they have that interaction with the truck driver. And then after that, Louise gets the hat for trading it for some jewelry. And there's this discussion again of how they're really in trouble now, and there's no way to explain it away. And I think that's when Thelma says, well, you can just tell them that he was in the middle of raping me when you shot him.
And Louise has some response to that. And then Thelma says, wow, the law is really some tricky shit, or something like that. Part of what's interesting about that is the kind of newfound lack of giving a shit. I guess there's a kind of flippancy now in Thelma's tone. And maybe you could call it courage or boldness or something like that. That will actually only increase as the movie goes on.
54:22 Erin: Yeah, that transformation when Louise gives her jewelry away and when they kind of get into that sort of garb where they kind of strip down and become these. I don't know what you would call it. Like these sort of creatures of the road maybe, is really, really interesting. I love the quieter moments, too. Like, I love the moment when they go through Monument Valley in the dark. Yeah, they're both kind of smiling. It's like being in the back of the bus in the Graduate or something, only they keep smiling. You know, they know that they've done something now that's, you know, beyond help, but they're kind of happy about it.
And when Louise gets out and looks around at the sunrise sort of Wordlessly. And there's a real change in them. And then, of course, the cop who pulls them over, one line that really stuck out to me in that when Thelma really becomes this real professional and pulls a gun on the cop and gets him to get in the trunk, they're both very apologetic to this guy, and I love the way that he crumbles and just cries like a baby with this real tough guy who just becomes such a wimp, even though it's clear they're not going to really hurt him. Thelma explains, three days ago, she never would have done this, but.
And then you kind of expect her to say, but, you know, you wouldn't have believed what happened to me. Or like, you know, something crazy happened. And now. Now we're past the point of return or something like that. And instead she says, three days ago, we never would have done this, but if you met my husband, you'd understand. Which is really interesting because that means that she switches the kind of the locus of. Where the break with, you know, polite society was not at the moment of the attempted rape, of course, but kind of like where. Where I was sort of forced to go with my whole script idea, which is at the beginning, when she first leaves him, when she first goes on the trip in the first place.
So it was like the whole trip was destined to turn out like this. Not just because of that one event, it's because of the fact that Daryl's a jerk and Jimmy won't commit to Louise and they had to do this in the first place.
56:21 Wes: Right.
56:21 Erin: It was a really interesting idea.
56:23 Wes: Yeah. And this is the point in the movie where, too, we get this evolving relationship with the detective, Hal, Harvey Keitel's character, because the scene before just backing up a little bit. There's the call with. I think this is the first call where Louise talks directly to Hal. So at a gas station. And so basically, that's where Thelma will call and she'll hang up immediately because she can tell that her husband is not behaving normally. And then Louise calls back and talks, you know, says, you know, let me talk to the police. And. And Daryl's like, what do you mean, police?
56:57 Erin: What?
56:57 Wes: And. And that's where she gets the information, you know, that's where she hears Hal talk about Mexico. So she knows Thelma's slipped up with JD and all that stuff. And she'll say, you know, you got to stop talking to people and being so open. We're fugitives now. Let's start behaving like it so cut from that scene to the back to the house where the FBI guys and Hal are watching a movie together. You know, that old movie. And the line that we hear is, let's get married. And then we come back to Thelma and Louise. And I think it's Thelma who says, I've always wanted to travel.
I just never got the opportunity. That's the first scene where we really get the sense that they are now on vacation. Right? They are truly on vacation, and they are truly enjoying the scenery and enjoying being on a road trip. So the reason why I mentioned the movie scene again, too, is you. Just as their liberation, kind of like I said before, their increasing liberation kind of corresponds with a increasing sense of hominess on the side of the law enforcement. And what I kind of read again is little boyness. Orphan. Orphanness.
58:07 Erin: Yeah. Those two scenes of recreation on both sides.
58:10 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. So after that I've always wanted to travel thing. We get the trucker, and then. And then Thelma is laughing about Harlan and the look on his face when she got. When he got shot. And Louise doesn't want to talk about what happened to her in Texas. And then they do the whole thing with the police officer. But, yeah, as we move on, we get this development of the relationship between Hal and Thelma and Louise where he wants to bring them in. And there's a second conversation between Hal and Louise where he says, I almost feel like I know you, and do you want to come out of this alive?
And Louise responds, I'll have to think about that. Then he says something that reminds me of Jimmy in a way, because Jimmy had said, you know, one of the things that was weird about Jimmy's whole proposal is that he seems like he's just afraid of losing her, and he's not actually that into her. And he says something like, I don't want to lose you. And here Hal says, I'll do anything. I don't know. It's a really weird thing for him to say, you know, I'll do anything to you guys to just. To give up. Give yourselves up. And then he moves into this whole thing where I know what's making you run.
What happened to you in Texas? Which is precisely the wrong thing to say, right? And leads her to hang up the phone. But the tap has already been achieved. He's set them up for this tragic ending. I'm just thinking out loud, but what I'm trying to get at is the interesting caring, paternal quality there. But the. You know, again, the ineptness with which
59:43 Erin: he executes that, that's really interesting. And that makes me see actually something about Harvey Keitel's character, that is, which is, for Jimmy, as Louise says, it's about the thrill of the chase. It's not about his actual love for her. It's about the fact that when he fears that she's getting away, he wants to come back and chase her. And that's when his interest in her is renewed. So one wonders if this is just another form of Harvey Keitel chasing after two women that he can't have, but from a procedural standpoint rather than a romantic one, which is a really interesting idea. You know, what does that say about these men? That their interest in these women is only when they. They fear them running away, when they fear that they're getting outside of their grasp.
1:00:30 Wes: I think Hal really does care about them. You know, there's that scene where he's interrogating J.D. right, and says, you know, these are two girls that had a chance.
1:00:40 Erin: Right.
1:00:40 Wes: Which is an interesting way of putting it in light of, like, what Thelma says about her not being lucky. So, you know, he's going to. He's going to hold JD Personally responsible if anything happens to them. And he says lots of other things to that effect that should persuade the audience that he actually does have a soft spot for them and cares about them. But I also think, you know, like I was saying earlier, I think the other desire simply to capture them lives on alongside that. And maybe that's a dilemma within. That's an ineradicable part of romantic relationships. Maybe, you know, there's the kind of objectifying, capturing, chasing element. And often that's the more. Right. Sexual side of things. And then there's the. There's the more caring, affectionate, attached part. And it may just be that both of those inevitably live alongside each other.
1:01:34 Erin: Yeah, this is a common theme in battles of the sexes or whatever, this idea that men want the chase, and then they are unable to figure out what to do with the women they've caught once they've caught them, so to speak. This is obviously true of Daryl. Like, he married Thelma, doesn't know what to do with her. You know, Jimmy is only interested in Louise when he's chasing her, but they obviously don't have anything sustainable in the long term because of the fact that she has to keep retreating from him. And in the same way, in a more legal way, Keitel knows that, like, what is he going to be able to do for them once he's Caught them.
He knows that the situation is going to get out of control. At the brink of the Grand Canyon there, he kind of predicts that that's going to happen because he's warning people not to let things get out of control. But he can't. You know, even if that weren't to happen and he did successfully catch them, so to speak, or literally, he can't ensure that nothing bad is going to happen to them because once he catches them again, he's not going to be able to have a relationship with them that is nurturing and caring. They're going to be in the hands of the law.
1:02:40 Wes: Well, also. Right. He's not FBI. He's helping the FBI. And after he helps them get that tap, I mean, he's in a way, being used. So after he helps him get that tap, Max says to him, well, you know, we can't use you anymore. That's it. You're done on this case. Now we take over and we do our thing. And Hal's pleading with them to not get the girls killed by doing stupid stuff.
1:03:04 Erin: Right? Yeah. And this is one of the interesting things to me, too, about this movie is this idea that, you know, men don't know how to coexist with women. Right. The men seem to be able to coexist with each other in those police scenes.
1:03:19 Wes: Yep.
1:03:20 Erin: But there's even a question of whether or not Thelma and Louise are really coexisting. Well, I mean, there's some great scenes that we get of them, you know, kind of driving in the car to the music and all that. But there's. I don't know. I was thinking about this in relation to, like, the Bechdel test and all that stuff. Thelma and Louise is considered, like, you know, one of the movies that passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. And many, many movies do pass this. This test. Well, and not too many, obviously, which is part of the problem.
But anyway, this is. This was a test developed really in a cartoon. It wasn't ever meant to be any kind of litmus test based on something that Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay, A Room of One's Own. Basically, a movie must have at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man. And a surprisingly small number of films, you know, relatively speaking, pass this test. And again, it's not. It's not a particularly reliable or even useful indicator of how well women are portrayed on screen or even whether a movie is, quote, unquote, feminist.
Sometimes it may not even be particularly interesting or revealing. But it's entered the cultural consciousness to such an extent that it's, you know, become important now. But anyway, you know, I wonder if, though this movie is seen as being something that passes this test with flying colors. I wonder if it passes the Bechdel test, sort of according to the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it. Because the women are, you know, the choices that they make. Yes. Are in defiance of this script that they don't want to engage in. But it's almost like, you know, they're tracing the edges of what these men sort of expect them to be doing and how they're expected to behave.
But they're still sort of leaving the resultant outline that's sort of highlighting the men's bad behavior. Their behavior is still, I suppose you could say, fundamentally reactionary. Though they do talk to each other about something besides men. When they do, it's. It's because of circumstances that they find themselves in as a result of their relationships to men or the situation they find themselves in ultimately because of men. And. And that's the point of this movie, of course. But it's also just a little sad. And one doesn't. I don't know.
On the one hand, I don't want something cliche that shows, you know, the two of them camped out somewhere talking about their childhoods and what they were like as little girls with each other, you know, because that's a sort of obligatory female bonding scene. But on the other hand, it is a little sad to me that the police officers get these bonding scenes and Thelma and Louise bond in action. And I certainly don't question their relationship or fail to understand them as characters. But, you know, the minute they're alone, JD Comes into the picture.
You know what I mean?
1:06:24 Wes: They don't get to watch an old movie together.
1:06:26 Erin: Right, Right. Yeah. And then the truck driver is another way that they bond. So, again, it's very relational to the men. I wouldn't change any part of this movie. And certainly it's the point that everything that they're doing is a kind of a reaction. But maybe I'm wishing that there was a reaction.
1:06:43 Wes: Plus, now you have me trying to imagine what things would look like if they could somehow have escaped the world of men and simply enjoyed a real vacation. Right.
1:06:55 Erin: Yeah.
1:06:55 Wes: I mean, I think part of the problem with the Bechdel test is just that everyone's concerned about love. And what are movies about except sex and violence? Ultimately, love. And there's always ambition Right. And work. But that's trickier. But yeah, you know, as you, as you point out, because they're. The antagonist in this movie is kind of men in general. Right. And the nominal antagonist, Hal, is also a, an ally in a weird way. It's like a man against nature type of movie, except it's women against men. Women trying to survive in the harsh environment of a male world.
1:07:35 Erin: Yeah. And I think that's really important. I think what I was trying to get at with that sort of half baked tracery metaphor is that they're, by skirting men, they're creating basically like a negative, you know, they're creating a negative image of something that men have already created. They're not creating a new image, presenting a new relationship for themselves that isn't just a response to the world that men have created. However, you know, at the same time, that's the point of this whole film. So we can't ask it to, you know, halfway through become some sort of version of like two women on a desert island just like hanging out and having fun. The point is the point for point rejection of that male idea which, you know, exists just in response to the blueprint that men have already created. So it's going to be informed by that blueprint if they're going to reject it in that way.
1:08:32 Wes: Yeah, they're on the run. And what does evasion mean? Part of the complexity of relationships between men and women, I think, is that evasion is often taken to be a sign of an invitation. Right. Women being evasive is part and parcel of the courting ritual and is, you know, in the form of coyness or it's, it's. So men might get the idea that that is designed to produce desire. The whole concept of femininity is tied up in this very idea that evasion is not actually evasion, which makes women's lives very complicated because you get, if you say so, predatory people.
Yeah. Mansplain this to you. Okay. Because it gets, you know, it, it creates a lot of honest misunderstandings on the one hand, but then it also, it's the basis for a lot of predatory and even criminal behavior Right. On the part of men. And so to move beyond that to the position where evasion really is evasion. Right. So they want to, you know, throughout the movie they're trying to escape from men. So in that way. Right. It's, you know, as you say, reactive. They're trying to escape from their boyfriend or husband, they're trying to escape from law enforcement, trying to deal With a cop or a trucker or Harlan or whatever.
But at some point, evasion, an escape can also mean a desire for autonomy. Right? So men might misread evasion as, you know, an invitation when what it really means is they don't. They want you to fuck off or they. Or it has nothing to do with you. And it's a expression of autonomy. And that is something I do think they get to in this movie. There's the point where Thelma says, you know, something has crossed over in me. I think this is after the final conversation between Louise and Hal where it's. Strangely enough, it's Thelma who says to Louise, you know, don't give up on me.
Because you think Louise is the one who has more to lose ultimately. But Thelma says, don't give up on me. And then Thelma says, something's crossed over in me and I can't go back. And Louise says something to the effect that he says. They say they're going to take us dead or alive or something like that. And Thelma says, gosh. So again, this kind of very flippant, unconcerned way of dealing, you know, in the face of that danger, there's no longer anxiety, but you get a sense of liberation. So, you know, at some point, one of them says, everything looks different now.
And it's almost as if something, you know, we have something to look forward to now. And then get more scenes of them driving with. Enjoying music. And then they have that final run in with the trucker where they destroy
1:11:16 Erin: his truck the best.
1:11:18 Wes: And then of course, they're gonna get to that famous ending. But yeah, I think in that moment, just reflecting out loud on the. The extent to which is this is ultimately reactive. But my hunch is that ultimately, yeah, something in evasion is just about autonomy and is. Is not actually reactive. It's about. So the word evasion is no longer even appropriate, although it may be maybe read that way by other people, especially about men who are pursuing you if you're a woman. In this case, it becomes just an expression of the desire to enjoy freedom, which can mean a lot of different things.
It doesn't just mean freedom from men or freedom from women. Or it can mean the kind of freedom that we enjoy in our work or in driving down the road and looking out the window and enjoying the landscape. The sorts of things that they. They do get to do in the movie. Enjoying a real friendship. Freedom, I think, is implicated in that autonomy.
1:12:15 Erin: Right. So that would lead us to the last scene in which we could argue whether or not that is the ultimate expression of freedom. This is something we've talked about, of course, with Hedda Gabler, and thus whether the ending is a positive or a negative. I mean, it's silly to say because it's suicide. But, of course, the choice to end the movie on an upbeat note and to end it on the freeze frame of the car.
1:12:42 Wes: Right. It's not really suicide if they're just frozen forever. I mean, come on.
1:12:45 Erin: Right, right. That's true. That's true. Yeah. To capture them in that kind of triumphant moment before the reality of hitting the ground and exploding. Yeah.
1:12:55 Wes: Well, was this Ebert one of Ebert's criticisms? I forget who. Someone said they didn't object to the freeze frame, but they thought that it shouldn't have happened so quickly.
1:13:04 Erin: Yeah. In fact, Ebert lopped off half a star just for the fact that he thought it was. Yeah. It didn't provide enough of an earned catharsis that they should have held onto that shot longer, which I totally agree.
1:13:17 Wes: Yeah, I agree with that as well.
1:13:19 Erin: It just immediately goes into yet another clip montage. I feel like I'm watching so many movies lately with clip montages of the highlight.
1:13:26 Wes: Well, it reminds me of the Dukes of Hazzard, you know, when they used to. When they were in the middle of a jump or something. That would freeze it. Unless I'm misremembering that.
1:13:36 Erin: Well, when I first saw this film.
1:13:37 Wes: Yep. And then these two good old boys move.
1:13:41 Erin: When I first saw this film, I was relatively late in my film education, and I watched the last scene, and I was like, oh, it's Jules and Jim, which is another movie I hope we'll cover on the podcast at a certain point. But in Jules and Jim, of course, Catherine drives off the road with an unwitting person in the passenger seat. He doesn't know that she's going to drive off and exact this. It's an act of revenge, and we actually see the result of it. So it's far more tragic. But this idea of driving off a road as an act of revenge, or we can argue whether or not revenge is the motivation here, but I think it's very clearly supposed to hearken back to that film.
1:14:24 Wes: Yeah. I wanted to say about the ending, I find, like, any discussion about whether it's a good or bad thing to be kind of irrelevant, because at that point, the movie has kind of transcended the story as well. We've kind of drove off the cliff of the actual narrative line right along with them. Because what's thematic has become so strong within the movie that the theme of liberation has become so strong that it kind of bursts the boundaries of the story. And it's impossible not to read it kind of allegorically at the end.
1:14:58 Erin: Right, right.
1:14:59 Wes: You don't do that through the whole movie. You know, throughout the movie, you just enjoy the narrative on its own terms. But at the very end, there's kind of a transition to it being more allegorical or completely an expression of the theme. And so, yeah, I think you have to look at it simply as a metaphor for liberation. You have to look at that driving off of the cliff as an expression of a certain kind of psychological state, which is something uncomplicatedly positive. But maybe I'm, you know, maybe I'm just too jaded. Not jaded. Jaded isn't the right word. But. But, you know, maybe the average person is going to look at that and. No, they're dead now. No, but it doesn't do that for me.
1:15:41 Erin: No, not for me either. It's funny because I think there kind of were two vastly different ways to read this back in 91. You know, on the one hand, you have certain reviewers who are like, this is glorifying suicide or who even said the final moments disqualify it from being a feminist movie. Because it's basically saying that, like, if you're gonna be a free woman, you have to die.
1:16:04 Wes: Right.
1:16:04 Erin: And then on the other hand, you have, you know, one of the things that I saw in an interview, I think, with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, just this little tiny 10 minute interview that they did for the. I think the 25th anniversary of the film was Sarandon said that she kept getting offers from studio executives to do a sequel to the movie. And she was like, how are you gonna.
1:16:23 Wes: That's hilarious.
1:16:25 Erin: So that was really funny.
1:16:26 Wes: Oh, my God.
1:16:27 Erin: She was like, are we gonna be ghost ghosts? Like, you know, so. So it seems like on the other hand there was just this like, rejection, total rejection of the reality of the. Of the end.
1:16:37 Wes: Fade in. A convertible plummets off a cliff.
1:16:41 Erin: Yeah.
1:16:42 Wes: A hundred feet before reaching the bottom, a parachute deploys.
1:16:46 Erin: Yeah, right, right. She was like, how are, how are you going to get out of that? Or. Or are we going to come back as ghosts and like, teach people how to rebel against men or, you know, like, what, what is the story in
1:16:59 Wes: that fade in hospital room, two women are in traction and completely covered by bed.
1:17:06 Erin: Yeah, right, right.
1:17:09 Wes: I can't believe we live through that. Neither can we?
1:17:15 Erin: And the whole movie is what, a courtroom procedural.
1:17:18 Wes: If we suspend our disbelief. Yeah, right. It'll be a courtroom.
1:17:22 Erin: You can handle the estrogen.
1:17:25 Wes: That's awesome. Yeah.
1:17:29 Erin: But I read it as metaphorical. I also read it as kind of a metaphor too, for those studio executives in the 90s. I mean, you know, so, okay, so this is probably the only major, like, female road buddy movie. And, you know, one would expect that this was really successful, that it would produce a bunch of copycats of two women on the road and kind of a buddy movie.
1:17:53 Wes: Are you thinking about Boys on the side now or.
1:17:58 Erin: No, I mean, you know, major Hollywood doing its Hollywood thing, which is something works and then they're gonna repeat it until everybody hates it. And it didn't really spawn a movement as a result of this.
1:18:10 Wes: Oh, sorry, I thought you were going the other direction. Yeah, okay.
1:18:13 Erin: No, no, no, I'm saying it didn't. I mean, I could think of that. Or Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, which is hardly a. I love that movie, don't get me wrong. And there is a road element to that movie, but it's neither exclusively a road movie nor is it at the caliber of Thelma and Louise Divine.
1:18:30 Wes: Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Is that another one?
1:18:32 Erin: Oh, gosh, that's terrible. And it's also not 2002. Yeah, yeah, that came much later. I think it's written also by Callie Khouri.
1:18:41 Wes: Oh, that is as well.
1:18:42 Erin: Yeah.
1:18:43 Wes: The same writer.
1:18:44 Erin: Same writer.
1:18:44 Wes: Oh, yeah, you're right. Yeah.
1:18:46 Erin: But I'm not sure that that's a road movie either. Like, I'm talking about like a two hander, you know, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, kind of. And it reminds me of that Failure to spawn imitators. Reminds me of a story that I've often heard told about the movie First Wives Club. I don't know if you've seen that from 96 with. It's a great. It's just a really fun kind of cotton candy comedy with Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton.
1:19:13 Wes: Oh, yes, I probably did see that at some point, but I have no memory. Memory of it.
1:19:19 Erin: It's quite funny. It's really, really enjoyable. And it was notable at the time for. For the fact that they were, you know, at that point, middle aged actresses who could be in this movie really without men or with men as the villains or, you know, the whole point is, I don't want to get into it, but basically they were first wives of these men who Then discarded them and got new models, so to speak. And they were exacting revenge. And what those three women talk about a lot in interviews is the fact that they enjoyed making this movie so much.
They loved hanging out with each other. And then it was, they were told, nobody is going to want to go see this movie because these three middle aged women can't carry a movie. It's crazy. No one's going to go see it. And movie came out, it was super, super successful, made tons and tons of money, everybody loved it. And the three of them wanted to go back and do a sequel. And they were met with the same resistance from studio executives saying, nobody's going to want to see this movie. Nobody wants to see three middle aged women make a movie.
And they said, well, you know, we have the proof that people do want to see this. And they were shut down. And there was never a sequel. And there was never, you know, again, it didn't spark a series of films of imitators that followed, which I find really, really interesting. So it's almost, I don't want to put too fine a point on this, but these films, you know, after the sort of new Hollywood era of the 60s and 70s in which everything sort of shifted to these male centric stories where women were either non existent or totally side characters, any attempts from that point on, even in the 90s, which is a relatively good time for women in movies to have women helmed productions are kind of like suicide attempts.
And now this kind of movie would never be made. It's completely gone. Or if it is, it's, you know, maybe Greta Gerwig would make something like this and it would be released to, you know, a handful of theaters and get some Oscar buzz. But it's a curious thing because it makes me step back and look at this in the trajectory of Sarandon's career especially and maybe as a larger metaphor for Hollywood or for women in the movie business. I don't know. I think there's a lot there. Geena Davis was 35 when this movie was filmed. Sarandon was 45.
1:21:32 Wes: Yeah. Sarandon's character is supposed to be in her 30s. Actually, I was just looking at the screenplay. Sarandon, as we mentioned, was born at the age of 42 and then never aged. She's been 42 all her life and will always be.
1:21:46 Erin: Exactly.
1:21:47 Wes: You know, more than being a film about women, it is a film that. In which the portrayals of men are very consistently, overwhelmingly negative. And even the good guy, I think, is complicated. So there's no hero. For a lot of people who watch this, you know, I understand the whole, the whole thing, you know, the critical reaction of people who, you know, wanted to say, oh, this, you know, this is. This movie is male hating. Right. This is just women getting off. It's like a revenge fantasy for women about what they would do to men if they, if they had a chance. Which I get. I get some of that. I just think it depends on how you read it, right? You can read it that way or you can read this as circumstantial. You can read this as, you know, aren't men terrible? Aren't all men terrible? Or you can read it as, don't these two women run into a lot of bad guys?
1:22:38 Erin: Right.
1:22:38 Wes: Or somewhere in between. I think if the movie can only be read as a aren't men terrible? Sort of complaint, that compromises the movie, in my view. But I don't feel the need to read it that way or to view it that way. I think it compromises the movie because it becomes unrealistic. Anything that unrealistically vilifies a group or subtracts real. Too much complexity. But if the thesis is that there are a lot of bad men out there and that there are certain universal truths about what men and women find unpleasant in each other or what women suffer in society, although I think there's also, you know, there's always a corresponding what men suffer kind of thing.
I think both men and women are subject to certain cultural restraints. They're very different. And the suffering, on average, the kinds of suffering women and men do, there are lots of differences, but they're both there. So I don't know if I've explained that very well. What I'm trying to say is I'm trying to express my ambivalence about a movie that can simply be read as a complaint about men, but I don't. Or some kind of simplistic complaint about men. But I don't ultimately see the movies this way. And I brought that up because I was just trying to think about to the extent to which a movie like this can be.
Is viable. Right. You know, financially, whether it's in 1992. Is that when it came out or currently one 1991?
1:24:01 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I just think that people. People don't ask these questions about male centric movies, which are most movies. You know, I don't think this is a. A movie about how terrible men are at all. In fact, I think Callie Khouri has said that, you know, these women are meant to be antiheroes and that she felt as though Louise's shooting of Harlan was really not justified. So I think it's not that simple. And I think that to see it as a man hating movie is a big simplification and a big misreading. But you know, Lord knows how one dimensional and terrible women can be in male driven films, which is, you know, as I said, most films. So who really cares? I guess in male driven films, women run the gamut.
1:24:45 Wes: Well, to the extent that that happens in any film, I think it compromises the.
1:24:49 Erin: I agree. But yeah, I think that men that we see in this movie exist. To put several of them in the same movie is harsh and it makes a statement, but it doesn't really strain my credulity at all.
1:24:59 Wes: Well, Thelma is just very unlucky, so she runs into lots of bad men.
1:25:05 Erin: Yeah, it doesn't strain belief for me. But I think that movies like this, you know, there used to be a market for what was sort of condescendingly called women's pictures. And there used to be care taken for providing entertainment to female audiences. That would be the kind of thing that they would want to see. The closest approximation I can call upon at this moment is, you know, a Bette Davis or a Barbara Stanwyck film where the men are secondary, they're often villainous. Women triumph over them with their dignity intact. And you know, this kind of thing is very, you know, it's cathartic for women.
And I don't mean to put that in a. In a kind of a condescending way. I don't think that those movies need be unartistic either. You know, they're often very well made films and very beautiful films. But this kind of thing was a. Was a, you know, a genre, a mainstay genre of the 30s, 40s and into the. Into the 50s and the disappearance. I mean, you know, what we're seeing now, just the business model that Hollywood is running on, which really originated with the blockbusters, starting with Star Wars, I guess, is just a elimination of movies of all genres, really.
We're seeing them being cast off as Hollywood streamlines into repetition and decadence as it goes with these huge blockbuster movies which are gonna be inoffensive for international audiences and make as much money as possible along the same lines as whatever the previous hit was. And so, you know, the first thing to go, I guess, were these dramas that specifically appealed to women. I don't think they have an exclusive appeal to women. I think that thelma and Louise or a Bette Davis movie should appeal to any thinking person who enjoys a well
1:27:01 Wes: told story as it did to the FBI.
1:27:03 Erin: Exactly. Yeah, it's a shame is all I'm saying. I don't think that there is anything particularly shocking about the way this movie. It's almost as though people like forgot how women's pictures were always made and quotes around women's pictures that term how they were always made. And then in 91 saw Thelma and Louise and were like what? This is. People hate men in this movie. Yeah, it seems to me to be a kind of collective amnesia because so many years had passed since the last female driven film of this nature.
1:27:37 Wes: Yeah, well, okay, on that note, I think that's a good way to wrap things up.
1:27:41 Erin: All right, thank you, thank you.
1:27:45 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to say that if you're listening to this on the feed for the Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find us@subtextpodcast.com subscribe@patreon.com Sometimes we continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Supxt Subtext Podcast and on Twitter joysubtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
Spiritual Matters in Chekhov’s “The Student” and “A Medical Case”
Apr 26, 2021
In Chekhov’s stories, beautiful natural surroundings are often a setting for unnatural lives and ugly social conditions. This sets the stage for a reflection on the relationship between physical and spiritual needs. His story “The Student” suggests that material deprivation–whether it is the exhaustion of the apostle Peter or the poverty of the Russian peasant–can undermine the capacity for fidelity and cultivation. In “A Medical Case,” a young heiress is made physically ill by her guilty awareness of oppressive conditions in her family’s factories. Can art, science, and faith truly redeem the individual human spirit without first transforming its social environment? Wes & Erin analyze.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:08 Wes: In Chekhov's stories, beautiful natural surroundings are often a setting for unnatural lives and ugly social conditions. This sets the stage for a reflection on the relationship between physical and spiritual needs. His story, the Student, suggests that material deprivation, whether it is the exhaustion of the apostle Peter or the poverty of the Russian peasant, can undermine the capacity for fidelity and cultivation. In a medical case, a young heiress is made physically ill by her guilty awareness of oppressive conditions in her family's factories. Can art, science, and faith truly redeem the individual human spirit without transforming its social environment? This is Wes Alwan.
0:53 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:55 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. Okay, so today we are doing two more short stories by Chekhov. We did the lady with the Little Dog and the House with the Mezzanine. So today we're talking about the Student and a Medical case, two more really wonderful stories. And. I don't know. I was reading A Medical Case this week, and it's weird. I just. I'm immediately cheered up when I read Chekhov. Strangely enough, a lot of his writing features the negative social conditions in Russia at the time.
But there's something so uplifting about it to me. So I thought maybe we'd just read the first paragraph of the Student, start off with that and say something about it, because I find it so affecting and winning. And it's just. It's enough to read that for me and be pulled into the story. At first, the weather was fine, still blackbirds called, and in the nearby swamp, something alive hooted plaintively, as if blowing into an empty bottle. A woodcock churned by, and a shot rang out boomingly and merrily in the spring air. But when the forest grew dark, an unwelcome east wind blew up, cold and piercing, and everything fell silent.
Needles of ice reached over the puddles, and the forest became inhospitable, forsaken, desolate. It felt like winter. I was kind of reminded of Narnia, the sudden wintering of a place. It's interesting because you start out with some images of spring, and they have that. Well, I'm going to say redemptive quality Because I think that Chekhov, you always get these periodic descriptions of the natural environment and they always play a certain kind of redemptive role in the story. So we'll see in a medical case that they will come to represent the promise of a better future socially for Russia.
In the midst of all the social blight, the landscape represents the promise of something better. We saw it in the lady with the Little Dog, where you had these scenes of. It was kind of the vacationy version of the enjoyment of the natural environment and the way that kind of became a foundation for a real relationship between Gurov and Anna. But in this case, we get this quick turn to darkness. The wind blows up cold and piercing. So this sudden change, it's like an immediate plot point regarding the weather, which is really cool. Yeah.
3:57 Erin: And of course, it's taking place on Good Friday. And there's a sort of a getting colder and darker at the beginning. And then at the end, it sort of lightens up immediately in the last paragraph, too, it's obviously at that part of the year where he says, oh, winter is coming back again. You get those false coming, the false springs and the returns to winter in that part of the year. But then also, of course, it's Good Friday, so it's a time of darkness. And there's also maybe something in this descent that's reminiscent of entering the tomb and having that sort of. I don't wanna say sort of gestational period for the student. A. It's a gestation of death for Christ at this point. But then there'll be a resurrection of hope maybe at the end. Maybe.
4:47 Wes: Well, yeah, we can discuss that.
4:50 Erin: Yeah.
4:50 Wes: I'm reminded that Game of Thrones begins very similarly.
4:53 Erin: Except I've never seen Game of Thrones and I probably never will.
4:58 Wes: Well, it's similar, except it involves zombies. And it's not all that well written. And also it's not similar at all except for the winter is coming part. But anyway.
5:08 Erin: Well, this is Gospel of Luke, right?
5:11 Wes: Right.
5:11 Erin: The zombies are in Gospel of Matthew, of course.
5:14 Wes: But one day we'll be reading the Bible and zombies. I like the fact that he kind of takes Kurt Vonnegut's advice and just tells you everything you need to know. If there's symbolism, he tells you what's going on and it doesn't detract from anything. So when he says, it seemed to him that the sudden onset of cold violated the order and harmony of everything, that nature herself felt dismayed. And therefore the evening darkness fell more quickly than it should. So I commented on this in our previous episodes, the way in which, especially in the plays, Chekhov characters are providing their own commentaries on what's going on, and they have their own strong political and cultural opinions that they insert.
And then you get the same sort of thing with the narration from the point of view of the protagonist. So I find that a very winning. Another very winning thing, Chekhov. Just the people telling you exactly what they think and feel and interpreting their own experience, basically.
6:15 Erin: Right.
6:15 Wes: Because we do that. There's a virtue as a writer to not hiding the fact that we do that, because the instinct is to say, well, I want the reader to do that. Especially I think, in more contemporary prose, I don't know. So I don't want the protagonist to do that for the reader.
6:27 Erin: Well, and as I mentioned, I think also in previous episodes, I think that allows for a tremendous amount of interpretive variety too, because then one can argue whether or not Chekhov himself is agreeing with whatever the internal monologue of his characters is.
6:43 Wes: I think you're right. We were always wondering in the Chekhov story about the protagonist's interpretation of their own experience, because it's so strong. But, yeah, in this case, we get some more commentary up front. Right. It's a pessimistic reflection on the connection between future and past.
7:00 Erin: Yeah. And in this instance, since the main character is not just a student, but a seminary student, he's well educated, so we have some lofty connections. And then later some, of course, theological connections that he's going to make. He's continuing on. And Chekhov writes. And now, hunching up from the cold, the student thought how exactly the same wind had blown in the time of Rurik and of Ivan the Terrible and of Peter. And in their time there had been the same savage poverty and hunger, the same leaky thatched roofs, ignorance and anguish, the same surrounding emptiness and darkness, the sense of oppression. All these horrors had been and were and would be. And when another thousand years had passed, life would be no better, and he did not want to go home.
7:42 Wes: He's stating a kind of pessimistic version of the thesis that's at issue in this story. And it'll be redeemed in the end. We'll get a more positive version of this sense of connection between past and present. So in this case, it's the same thing happening over and over again. It's almost like a story with no real plot, or just a repetition of pain and suffering that has no point and no meaning and no forward progress. Which is interesting, because in a way, as a student, he's a representative of a kind of progress at a time in Russia in which there is a newly found possibility of upward mobility.
So Chekhov's grandfather had been a serf, right? And then his father, before things went wrong, had become middle class. And part of what. What's going on in Chekhov stories is their reflection on this transitional state and people who fall within that transitional realm. And so people suited to doing this sort of reflection. So I take the student as, to some extent, a representative of that. And of course, students are a progressive force in society and are thinking about its. And in part because they're young and thinking about its social transformation.
But in the beginning, pure pessimism.
8:56 Erin: I think that's really good. I think also I was wondering what this significance of this list of three is. I was trying to think Rurik, Ivan the Terrible and Peter. And I was thinking, okay, what do I know about these three people as a group? I mean, not much. Rurik, of course, was the founder of the Rurik dynasty, which were the ruling dynasty that ruled Russia for 6, 700 years, something like that. And they were ultimately replaced by the Romanovs. Ivan the Terrible was a Rurik, and he united all of the kingdoms of Rus, I suppose, as it was called.
And then, of course, Peter was a Romanov. And Peter, very Westernizing force in Russia, made a lot of changes to Russian society in order to make the country more like a Western power. So I suppose that there's even a little bit of. I mean, quite a bit. Several hundred years, almost a thousand years of progression in this little list as well. And certainly, I think Chekhov would. Not to speculate on the mind of Chekhov, but I think he would probably recognize that Peter the Great made a lot of wonderful changes to Russian society. And certainly a student would think that way as well, I would imagine.
So this is sort of going back through time and imagining suffering through all these times. But he's also. I think there's a clear sense, maybe Ivan the Terrible because of his name and because of the fact that he's terrible. Maybe. Maybe we're not supposed to read this quite so positively as I am.
10:30 Wes: No, I think. I think we are. I mean, it's. What he's trying to say is. Yeah, I think, yeah, the Rurik, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, reforms that, say, sort of stereotypical representation of the progress of things in Russia. And he's saying, in fact. No, despite that conventional idea, in fact, you know, this this pessimistic thesis holds same savage poverty and hunger, etc. It's all for naught. All the reforms are for naught.
10:56 Erin: Yeah. So then the student Ivan is walking along and he sees these two widows, mother and daughter, sitting in front of a fire. And they're sort of. I don't know. What do we want to say about them? Should we read their description?
11:10 Wes: Sure.
11:11 Erin: The fire burned hotly with a crackle, throwing light far around over the ploughed soil. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, plump old woman in a man's coat, stood by and gazed pensively at the fire. Her daughter Lukerya, small, pockmarked, with a slightly stupid face, was sitting on the ground, washing the pot and spoons. Evidently, they had only just finished supper.
11:32 Wes: What I like in this passage is this contrast between the pensive mother and the slightly stupid face of the daughter Chekhov never pulls punches about. One of the things about the Russian peasant that draws his sympathy is their ignorance and illiteracy and lack of education. Right. So today it would be taboo in the United States to say yes. To remedy social injustice, we have to think about the education of the lower classes. That would be entirely forbidden. It's forbidden to think about class in the way that Chekhov is thinking about it here.
Some of this might be alien to people, but he's thinking just as much about their psychosocial conditions as he is about their material deprivation. And we get a nice contrast between the mother, who once served gentlefolk as a wet nurse, and so her speech is delicate, and then the daughter beaten down by her husband. So in the mother, we get another one of these transitional figures. And then in the next story, we'll have that in the governess. But they are rubbing up against the upper classes in ways that make them kind of hover between the two situations.
But the daughter is firmly on the losing end of power relations. So you get this immediate, interestingly textured and tense social dynamic just between two women in a family. And it's delivered to us very succinctly but very effectively.
12:59 Erin: Yeah. I was going to ask, what do you think the significance of that is? That Lukerya does say, as you mentioned, that she's beaten down by her husband and that she only squinted at the student and kept silent. Her expression was strange, like that of a deaf mute.
13:13 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
13:14 Erin: There's something very affecting about her and very sad. I don't know if she's supposed to be, you know, a kind of a holy fool or. She seems almost to be a childlike presence.
13:24 Wes: Yeah. Well, I think, as we'll find out in the story, he, in a way, is recapitulating the role of Peter, not Peter the Great, but the apostle. I think the idea is that something has been denied. You know, in this social situation. There's an element of denial that Chekhov is getting at in his stories, not just this one. And here we get another negative representation of progress. Right. It's the daughter, so she should be in the better position. It shouldn't be a regression to the worst position of the peasant. It should be something better than the mother.
But it isn't. And he's doing what Peter did. He's about to tell them the story of Peter in a wonderful, beautiful way. But he's finding warmth by the fire, which for the apostle Peter, leads to his betrayal or denial of Jesus because he's recognized, and then three times denies that he knows Jesus. So I think we're set up for that parallel in the situation, and we'll be able to maybe say more about what the mother and daughter represent here after we say a little more about the story of Peter. I think we get kind of three iterations of the idea of the connection between past and present, the very pessimistic one up front.
But then the story of Peter is going to give us this idea of a connection between past and present as well.
14:38 Erin: That's good. I'd like to read a little bit from it. It's kind of difficult to deal with a story this short and not just want to read the whole thing aloud. And his telling of this story, I believe it's the version from the Gospel of Luke, and it is extremely beautiful. So Ivan, the student, is talking to Vasilisa and Lukerya, and he's asking if they've been to the 12 Gospels. This is the reading on Maundy Thursday of significant Gospel passages having to do with Christ's passion. And Vasilisa says, yes, she has. And then the student starts recounting the story.
At the time of the Last Supper, you remember, Peter said to Jesus, I am ready to go with you both into prison and to death. And the Lord said to him, I tell you, Peter, the cock will not crow this day before you deny three times that you know me. After the supper, Jesus was praying in the garden, sorrowful unto death. And poor Peter was worn out. In his soul he was. He grew weak. His eyes were heavy, and he could not fight off his sleepiness. He slept. Then that same night, as you heard, Judas kissed Jesus and betrayed him to the Executioners.
He was bound and led to the high priest and was beaten. And Peter, exhausted, suffering in sorrow and anguish. You see, not having had enough sleep, sensing that something terrible was about to happen on earth, followed after him. He loved Jesus passionately, to distraction. And now, from afar, he saw how they beat him. Lukerya abandoned the spoons and turned her fixed gaze on the student. They came to the high priest. He went on. Jesus was questioned, and the servants, meanwhile, made a fire in the courtyard because it was cold and they warmed themselves.
Peter stood by the fire with them and also warmed himself, as I'm doing now. A woman saw him and said, this man was also with Jesus, meaning that he too should be taken and questioned. And all the servants who were by the fire must have looked at him suspiciously and sternly because he became confused and said, I do not know the man. A little later, someone again recognized him as one of Jesus disciples and said, you are one of them. But he denied it again. And a third time someone turned to him, Did I not see you today in the garden with him?
A third time he denied it. And right after that, the cock crowed. And Peter, looking at Jesus from afar, remembered the word he had said to him at the supper. Remembered, recovered, went out of the courtyard and wept bitterly, the Gospel says, and he went out and wept bitterly. I picture it a very, very silent and dark garden, and barely heard in the silence, a muffled sobbing. The student sighed and fell to thinking, still smiling. Vasilisa suddenly choked, and big, abundant tears rolled down her cheeks. She shielded her face from the fire with her sleeve, as if ashamed of her tears.
And Lukerya, gazing fixedly at the student, flushed, and her expression became heavy, strained, as in someone who is trying to suppress intense pain.
17:23 Wes: Yeah, yeah.
17:24 Erin: I love the detail that the student gives to imagining the garden. It reminds me of in Ignatian spirituality, which the student wouldn't necessarily be studying. I don't know if in, you know, Russian Orthodox seminaries, they necessarily studied different Catholic methods of spirituality, but in Ignatian spirituality, you try to imagine the Gospels as if you're there and place yourself in that situation through the five senses, as a form of meditation. And this. This strikes me as something that he's doing, that he's. He's well versed in, that he can.
He can place himself on the scene. And then. Then we get this impression that Vasilisa and Lukerya are also, you know, through the power of his storytelling or perhaps meditating on their own lives, maybe are putting themselves in that situation, or maybe. Maybe Something else is happening. But I think it's really significant that Vasilisa weeps openly and she weeps through smiling, which is interesting. And then she sort of turns away and is ashamed of her tears, while Lukerya has this expression like she's trying to suppress her pain and does not.
Isn't moved to tears.
18:33 Wes: Yeah.
18:34 Erin: I wonder what the significance of that is, because one would expect Vasilisa perhaps, as the more educated of the two of them and the less simple, maybe, to be able to restrain herself a bit more. And so there's an indication here that maybe Lukerya has been misjudged by the student or that perhaps she has some hidden depths or some hidden strength maybe that her mother doesn't have. And this sort of surprising twist, I think, is an indication that we're, of course, not getting the full story here, because we don't know very much about these two women, but that either Ivan or we, the reader, are not understanding something that's happening here within these two women.
19:18 Wes: Yeah, I think one of the things that's so touching about the story, part of the question here is why the women are reacting the way they do and why they're so touched by a story. Right. That they've heard a million times. And of course, he's giving a very. He's giving his own spin on this. What I love about this is that Peter's betrayal is a product of loving Jesus passionately to distraction and exhaustion. So Peter exhausted suffering and sorrow and anguish, and in that state, in that state of physical exhaustion, he's seeking warmth, he's cold now, and he's subject to these basic physiological and material needs.
And he's too run down basically, to live up to spiritual demands, to live up to any requirement that he not deny Jesus. So I think the idea behind all of this is that to meet one's spiritual needs, you have to be able to meet your material needs first. So as a seminary student, ultimately, he's going to be ministering to these people. Right? He's going to be delivering these types of sermons. So he has to minister to the spiritual needs of people. But how do you do that if they are overworked and if they are suffering and if they work, if they are so involved in physical labor that they are illiterate or semi literate?
So I interpret the capacity of the mother to actually mourn and cry over this is more advanced to me than the reaction of the daughter. What the daughter recognizes in that story is the abjectness of her own situation. So what is the parallel here as far as, you know, Peter's denial of Jesus versus the social denial of the conditions of the peasant. Something like that. And I think the daughter, again, recognizes the kind of abjectness and hopelessness of her situation in this. You know, they're exploited, they're overworked, and the story of Peter is not fully available to them in that condition.
21:36 Erin: I wonder if the tears of Vasilisa are tears of repentance in this moment. It's curious that these two village women are evidently not devout because they are eating. They've just finished supper, in spite of the fact that it's Good Friday and they should be fasting. So if they were believers, or if they were devout believers, they would be like Ivan's family, who has had no cooking going on in the house all day. They're not fasting. They've just finished supper. So their material needs have been satisfied against the directions of the church. So I don't know how that. If that works into your reading of the story.
22:21 Wes: Well, I think it might be in tension with it in a way, although it fits with my idea that the spiritual stuff is less available to them because they're worried about survival and material stuff. So if they're not devout, they're distracted by the abject social and material circumstances in which they live. This is the experience of the apostle Peter to go out seeking warmth, and because he's seeking warmth, because he's cold, to be in denial of Jesus. Right. They are in the same position of denial. This is why I think it's complicated, because they are denied and they are denying. And likewise, the student is in the position of Peter as well. The student is pointing to the redemptive part of this. He's stopping by for warmth, like Peter, but it's a movement toward the needy, not away from them. Yeah.
23:13 Erin: The more I think about this, the more I think that the student is kind of doing them a service. I don't know.
23:18 Wes: Yeah, he's ministering to them.
23:20 Erin: Sure. Yeah. And he's not accusing them either. He's not coming over to them and saying, gee, why are you eating? This is really inappropriate.
23:28 Wes: Exactly.
23:28 Erin: And he's also. He's putting them in the. In the shoes of Peter in this. Really. You know, I've never quite, at least that I remember, interpreted Peter's story in such a sympathetic way. You know, it's supposed to be that Peter's. Well, why does Peter do this? Because he's a flawed guy and because he's embarrassed and because he's you know, it's supposed to be that Peter is so weak that he's. He's the weakest. And of course, upon, upon Peter the entire church is going to be built. So his weakness is necessary to his sort of redemption and in fact to the story of the entire church.
But that it comes out of this lovely idea of, as you say, that this love of Christ. And in this moment that Ivan describes, he was bound and led to the high priest and was beaten. And Peter exhausted, suffering and sorrow and anguish, you see, not having had enough sleep, sensing that something terrible was about to happen on earth, followed after him. There's a kind of a blending of Christ and Peter in that sentence. You know, who's the one who's being beaten and suffering and. Right. So there's a kind of an identification of Peter with Jesus and of the student with Peter and with Jesus.
There's that three person identification again, which is interesting because there's a Rurik and an Ivan the Terrible and a Peter in his earlier list of three. And of course his name is Ivan and there's a Peter. And I don't know that Rurik and Jesus are of a pair, but this identification of the three together is sort of interesting.
25:00 Wes: Yeah. Well, there are two moments for Peter, right. And one of them is more representative of the position of the women and one of them more representative of the position of the student. So the moment of denial is representative of the position of the women and like I said, the position of society. So there's two denials on my reading. There's the societal denial of the humanity of the peasants and their material needs and their social needs.
25:28 Erin: Sure.
25:28 Wes: And then there's the peasants denial of. In a sense, they're turning away from the spiritual and religion, even though, of course, right, they're commonly religious, but turning in the way, in the sense of not being devout or being essentially distracted by material needs. And then in the second moment, right, that's the remorse of Peter and his redemption through remorse. And I think that's where the student, that's the student version of Peter, where to walk towards the fire is not just to be in need, but to be moving towards ministering to those in need.
Right. So you go from being cold and betraying your friend to movement towards the fire, because that's where the needy people are that you are going to help. So you can undo the denial of Jesus by not denying the needs of the peasants. And that gives him a new reading on this connection between the past and present which we can get to in a second. It transforms his view, his very pessimistic view of the way the past leads to the present and is causally implicated in the present.
26:39 Erin: I'm interested in what you said about Lukerya, who has, of course, Luke in her name. The fact that she doesn't cry as being a sort of lesser reaction than Vasilisa's crying.
26:50 Wes: Well, because she can't fully recognize what's lost. So you have to have some sort of pathos of difference in order to recognize what's lost, you have to know something different. The mother has a hint of that difference through her contact with gentlefolk. And the daughter, I think, is in a non comparative position. Which is worse in the sense is that all she knows is her abjection and she's giving the story gives her a hint of the difference, right? I mean, of course she knows the difference on one level, right? You know, she knows that she's poor and other people are rich and all that.
But I'm talking about the ability to, you know, the person who's. Who's illiterate and uneducated doesn't know what it's like to be literate and educated. They have some sort of outside picture of it. And I think the fantasies. If you're on the losing end of social relations, your fantasies end up revolving around material differences, right? So you look at the way rich people live and the way they eat and the way they dress and their power and all that stuff, and the opportunity for a richer inner life is not fully available. The mother knows what's lost.
And I think Lucaria's. Because she can't fully imagine what's lost, because she can only get the barest hint of it, can feel nothing but pure pain, because what's lost is, in a sense, incomprehensible. And that's even worse.
28:15 Erin: Oh, I see. So Vasilisa can smile and cry at the same time. That's interesting.
28:22 Wes: Yeah, she can smile, she can cry. But all Lukerya can do is try to survive and essentially be mute. You know, it's like someone who's almost. Has been treated as if she's an animal, you know? And it captures the irony of going. Of going to someone who's been so mistreated, right? If you take someone who's been severely traumatized and mistreated and you go to them and say, well, I'm here. I'm here to convert you. I'm here to preach the gospel of Jesus to you, what sense does that make in the face of that trauma and. And severe deprivation. It's almost like the spiritual stuff is a luxury. How do you come to them trying to sell them the luxury when they can't even meet their basic needs? And I think that's part of what's being pointed to in this story.
29:11 Erin: Let's move on to his maybe interpretation of their reaction on the last page of the story.
29:16 Wes: Yeah, so this leads to him for a kind of redemptive epiphany and a transformation of the pessimism which begins the story. So, like I said, he recasts. He's still thinking about the connection between past and present and future, but he has a new spin on that now. So when he leaves, it's still a cruel wind blowing. It's still winter was indeed coming back, and it didn't seem like it's going to be two days to Easter. But what he comes away with is a reaction to the weeping of the mother. If she wept, it meant that everything that had happened to Peter on that dreadful night had some relation to her.
So now you get, instead of this, it's Rurik and then Ivan the Terrible, and then Peter, instead of that sequence of events which seems, according to his pessimism, goes nowhere, you get the possibility of this spiritual redemption. And I think this kind of reaffirmed from some of your intuition about the daughter as well, the incompleteness of my account of that. So he's just left. He looked back. The solitary fire flickered peacefully in the darkness, and the people around it could no longer be seen. The student thought again that if Vasilisa wept and her daughter was troubled, then obviously what he had just told them, something that had taken place 19 centuries ago had a relation to the present, to both women, and probably to this desolate village, to himself, to all people.
If the old woman wept, it was not because he was able to tell it movingly, but because Peter was close to her and she was interested with her whole being in what had happened to Peter's soul. And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain. He touched one end and the other moved.
31:17 Erin: I love that.
31:18 Wes: Yeah, it's so beautiful. So part of this is a reflection on historical causality. Right. If you give a more secular or materialistic interpretation of history, you might see the movement from Rurik towards Peter as a certain kind of progress. And so it's structured. It's not just the same thing. It's not just suffering the same suffering. There's something happening there. And people, the conditions of people's lives are improving. And we can think about ourselves as determined in the present by a variety of forces, right? Deterministically by whether we want to think of it at the level of physics or the social and cultural forces that shape who we are and what we do.
But he has a different way now to think about this, because now this is about human subjectivity affecting the present. It's amazing to think about the fact, the influence of the thoughts and feelings of Peter on the present, right? They can speak to the present, and his grief especially, and his remorse can speak to the present. So we're not just products of blind sociocultural forces, but of the acts and decisions and thoughts and feelings of those who have come before us. So their humanity can live in the present. It can be propagated into the present.
And so that's the redemptive thing here, that despite the, like, the, the whole idea of causality can lead you to a kind of pessimism. It's all determined and it's all suffering. But the redemptive thought is that human subjectivity in the past is available to us, whether it's religious or whether it's through the arts. And that's my reading of all of this, my very biased, agenda driven reading. But. Yeah, go ahead.
33:06 Erin: No, I think that's very good. I, you know, normally I tend to read things in a. In a kind of a positive way, but I had a very negative reaction to this the first time reading it. I know, I'm. I'm kind of surprised myself. I mean, you know, the student believes that Vasilisa is reacting to this story because the student has chosen to believe it, I suppose. I mean, he is one who, you know, by nature of the fact that he is a seminary student is going to believe that Peter can have that. This bearing in modern day life. And he's going to believe that this is true.
And he's also interpreting the behavior of these women according to their being affected by his story. And he says, not by the way that he told it, but by the story itself. He's humble. But I wonder whether or not Vasilisa's reaction has anything to do at all with the story or. Or if it sparked some recollection or reminiscence of something else in her that she's responding to. And I wonder if the student is completely wrong. As to its having some kind of positive result, I don't know. I just. I think that the student is reading these women a certain way according to the way that he wants to kind of view their reaction.
And. And I think that that's a mistake. They've said very little in the entire story. I mean, one of them has said absolutely nothing. And he's just talked at them for a very long time and then interprets their reaction favorably as regards to, you know, the effect of his story, what he's trying to do. So he's told them this story and then produced what he thinks is a commensurate reaction from them. And I don't know. I resist that.
34:58 Wes: Let me read the last paragraph, because I think it supports your position in the sense that the possibility that he's kind of engaged in an overcorrection into a kind of. From pessimism to unrealistic optimism. And when he crossed the river on the ferry and then going up the hill, looked at his native village and to the west where a narrow strip of cold, crimson sunset shone, he kept thinking how the truth and beauty that had guided human life there in the garden and in the high priest's courtyard went on unbroken to this day, and evidently had always been the main thing in human life and generally on earth.
And a feeling of youth, health, strength, who's only 22, and an inexpressibly sweet anticipation of happiness, an unknown, mysterious happiness, gradually came over him, and life seemed to him delightful, wondrous, and filled with lofty meaning. This sort of ending for Chekhov is not unusual, and especially this kind of theme of anticipation of happiness, it kind of happens at the end of a medical case story as well. So, yeah, I think this supports the idea, even though I'm still inclined to read this more positively. I think I even had some of that reaction as well.
It's such a quick kind of manic reaction to what is just passionate reaction to what's just happened. And partly a product of his youth. Right. He does have his future ahead of him. It's easier for him to take on this more optimistic view of the future. But what I think if we do accept some of his more positive account, then I think it's the grief of Peter that can live on in the present. He's not in a particularly grieving mode at the end of the story, but it's because Peter's remorse and grief can affect the present, that good things can happen through it.
So when the student, like I said, when the student moves towards Warmth. It's not just because he's exhausted and needs to be physically warm and is so exhausted that he doesn't care about anyone else. He's also there to minister to the needy and give them a kind of warmth. So that's the redemptive reversal, if we can read it that way, or extract something more realistically positive from the more Pollyannish view that comes at the end where it's. What is it? Let's just reread this one part of it. Truth and beauty that had guided human life there in the garden and in the high priest's courtyard went unbroken to this day.
Yeah, it's extremely. Went from extreme pessimism to extreme optimism.
37:46 Erin: Right. We know he's a student, of course, so we know he must be young. But I think it's interesting that, you know, only three lines from the end do we actually learn his age. I do think it kind of washes the whole story, or at least this ending in a kind of, you know, naivete. However, by that same token, I think, you know, he is the conduit for the transmission of this truth of the story. Right. As presumptuous as I think it is that he is speculating what's going on in the heads of these. These two women and has as ill equipped as I think he is to understand what could be going on in the heads of these.
These two widows who are obviously of a different social class than he is and come from. From much worse circumstances. I think that's kind of the position of the priest, perhaps, and of the artist. As wrong as I think it is to presume, it's kind of his job. He has to presume and just sort of take what. What's in front of him or be like a doctor, you know, has to take. Take what's in front of him and. And try to ferret out from it what the truth of the situation is, what the, you know, what he thinks these women might need and then provide it for them.
And even if he's wrong, hopefully in his failing, he's still sort of able to accidentally help them. I think that's that connection between being a priest, a doctor and an artist. I think those all three maybe are kind of. Now I'm. Now I'm arguing against myself, are kind of the same in that like. Like people will say all the time, you know, like the idea of a Catholic priest giving marriage counseling, for instance, you know, you've never been married. How could you possibly know about this? Well, you know, that's the way it goes. And all you can do is kind of hope that through what, what you've studied that there might be some overlap, there might be some help that you can offer for those.
Those people receiving your. Your instruction or your guidance or your therapeutic advice or whatever the case may be, and that. That maybe even accidentally you might reach them in some way, even through something that you're not intending to do. Maybe that's what I'm seeing here is I'm not satisfied that she's crying for the reasons that the student thinks that she is crying. And maybe that doesn't matter either. Maybe that's the positive thing I should take from this, is that he has produced a genuine reaction from her. It may not be for the reasons that he thinks, but maybe something good has come of it.
And regardless, his optimism is going to be essential to fulfilling his own mission. So he must be. He must continue to have this kind of stupid, you know, optimism, this, this naivete in order to carry out his job. I mean, obviously, I think there's a positive and a negative reading of this, and I'm reading it now somewhat negatively or even now my revision of this is a sort of like a negative with a positive spin. But that this. It takes all sorts of people to make a world, and we need as many of these students as we do of these Vasilisas. Perhaps.
40:57 Wes: Yeah, I mean, you're reminding me something someone told me, which is that. Because. Because as a therapist, you always feel like you're. Who am I to give any advice?
41:05 Erin: Right, right.
41:05 Wes: And often you feel like you don't know what you're doing in the. In a session with a patient. So. And you know, who am I to give this advice? I have all my own problems and my own limitations and it's just. It's a joke. Sometimes you feel like it's just a joke. But, you know, I was reminded by someone that those situations can bring out the best in us. And when we find ourselves in certain roles, we can rise to the occasion in those roles we can be more than just what we are as a person in a therapeutic role. For instance, there are lots of crazy therapists out there.
Right. But that doesn't mean that they can't be very effective in a therapeutic role. Although often that's not the case as well. There's a lot of poorly trained therapists as well, but. Yeah, so he can play an effective therapeutic role despite his youth and. And his limitations. This vacillation from extreme pessimism to extreme optimism, which I Think you're right. Your reading of that is right, even though I still would stick to my more positive reading. Ultimately, in a way, the role of Peter lives on in him, despite himself. And that's the positive thing, which is that, again, we can be inhabited by the ghosts of the past, in a good sense, by former subjectivities, by the grief of a Peter.
And it can lead us to do helpful things. And in this case, Chekhov is always reflecting on this question of what we saw in the house with the mezzanine. Are we going to work on being progressives and social reform and getting people doctors and building schools and meeting their basic needs, or do we do what the artist said we should do, attend to people's spiritual needs? Right. There's that tension in this story and the sense that they somehow have to go together. So the question is, in the end, does the student understand that they go together?
Right. I think you're right. It's not clear that he. Even though that's the implication of the story, I think, at least on my reading, it's not clear that the student understands that. He seems to walk away thinking, in a sense, hey, hey, I just ministered to two people. Isn't that great? I'm saving them. I'm. I'm.
43:20 Erin: Right.
43:21 Wes: He's walking away. He doesn't. He doesn't ever consciously ref. Well, he does, but he's not consciously reflecting on this point about the. How desperate their situation is. And. And that's my. You know, maybe. Maybe I'm reading too much into this myself. Maybe. But that. That's the sense I get, that their situation is representative of the Russian peasant and its desperation.
43:41 Erin: No, I think you're right, and I think that it really doesn't matter. I mean, as a seminary student, he is going to be, in a very real way, a continuation of Peter's legacy in the church as a priest, so he doesn't have to do anything or be right in order to be a priest. You know, that's kind of the beauty of it, I guess.
44:01 Wes: Yeah.
44:02 Erin: Shall we move on to A Medical Case? Yeah. I'm very excited to hear your opinion of this story because I wanted you to read it specifically so that we could talk about it, because I thought you would like it. So did you enjoy it as much as I thought?
44:13 Wes: Yeah, I think it's incredible.
44:14 Erin: Great.
44:15 Wes: I don't know that there's a story, a Chekhov story I've read yet that I haven't had that reaction to, but really, really wonderful.
44:21 Erin: I love, even from the first paragraph, a professor received a telegram from the Lialikov's factory asking him to come quickly. The daughter of a certain Mrs. Lialikov, apparently the owner of the factory was sick. Nothing more could be understood from the long, witlessly composed telegram. The professor did not go himself, but sent his intern Korolev in his place. So I love this because then the whole story is going to be about Korolev. So you. The bait and switch that happens in the first paragraph is really funny to me for some reason, because read this, you're like, oh, okay, a professor. No, not a professor.
44:54 Wes: And in a way you get three different levels of status here in the first paragraph as well, or actually more than that, because you get the factory owner who's going to turn out to be not an educated person and so she's witless. But there's also, that's evocative of the poor people who work in those factories. And there's the professor who's too good to go out on that call himself and Korolev. It's great. What follows this is the obsequiousness of his driver responding with no, sir, yes, sir. And then we get some of this wonderful redemptive scenery that Chekhov always includes. You know, he was enchanted by the evening and the country houses and dachas along the way and the birches and that quiet mood all around when it seemed that together with the workers, the fields, the woods and the sun were preparing to rest on the eve of the holy day. To rest and perhaps to pray.
45:50 Erin: Having these two stories in conversation strikes me how similar. Of course they are, and how similar the main character is. Korolev, I think, is very similar to Ivan, perhaps better, I'm not sure, but there's this positivity at the beginning. And then he actually goes to this factory area to minister to this woman who's sick, this young woman. It's noted that he did not know the countryside he was born and raised in. Moscow, had never been interested in factories or visited them. But he had a chance to read about factories and to visit factory owners and talk with them.
And when he saw some factory in the distance or up close, he thought each time of how quiet and peaceful everything was outside and how inside there must be the impenetrable ignorance and obtuse egoism of the owners, the tedious, unhealthy labor of the workers. Squabbles, vodka, vermin. And now, as the workers deferentially and timorously stepped aside before the carriage, in their faces, caps and gaits he could discern physical uncleanness, drunkenness, nervousness, perplexity. So he has no experience with factories themselves, except for his preconceptions about them.
And what he finds, or what he thinks he finds is a confirmation of his preconceptions.
47:02 Wes: Immediately I highlighted and underlined that paragraph as something essential to read. Yeah. So again we get this whole rumination on social conditions, the dachas versus the factory. And then once he gets into the factory, of course it's the driver instead of slowing down for workers saying watch out. And the kind of pathetic little oases within the factory grounds. You know, these five huge buildings with smokestacks and warehouses and barracks and stuff. And you know, most of the ground's not covered in grass, but there are these little oases with gardens and green and red roofed houses where management live. Dust covered lilacs. I love that.
47:46 Erin: That's so evocative, that detail.
47:48 Wes: Yeah. And then we get Mrs. Lialikov, the writer of the telegram. Right. Simple and illiterate. And then Christina, the governess. And so again, like the mother in the previous story, she's brushed up against gentlefolk more. And so she's through her being governess. And so she's the most educated person in the household, apparently. Again, you get a lot of very similar themes and tropes. And then Chekhov stories, the poor social conditions, the beautiful environment, then figures who are representatives of social transition. The governess, whether negative or positive, you know, so the daughter in the previous story, the governess here, who will turn out to be a somewhat negative representative or Lida in the house with the mezzanine.
48:31 Erin: So, and then we get the daughter, Liza, a girl of 20. She had long been ill and had been treated by various doctors. And during the past night, from evening till morning, she had had such a pounding of the heart that no one in the house had slept for fear she might die. And no one knows what it is that's wrong with her.
48:48 Wes: Yeah, it's going to turn out to be neurosis, basically unresolved guilt feeling.
48:54 Erin: Feeling of being a factory heiress.
48:57 Wes: Heiress and living on the grounds.
48:59 Erin: Right.
49:00 Wes: Seeing people suffering. I love his description of her as this wretched woebegone creature who had been taken in and given shelter here out of pity. And it was hard to believe that she was the heiress to five huge buildings. So that's his and that's his impression of her. And then, you know, she's sick, her heart is pounding. And it starts out he's kind of repulsed by her, you know, her big, cold, uncomely hands. And then he quickly moves to feeling empathy. You know, he sees her squinting in a light when a lab is brought in. And so the. The impression of the woebegone and uncomely creature vanishes.
And he saw a soft, suffering look, which was both reasonable and touching. And then the mother who is, you know, there's despair and grief in the mom. So speaking of material needs, again, she had spared nothing, right? Teachers, dancing, music, so education as well, but the best doctors, the governess. That turns out not to be enough. Although she doesn't know what's missing, right? The way he puts it, despite sparing nothing, she could not understand where these tears came from, why so much torment, could not understand and was at a loss, had a guilty, anxious, despairing look, as if she had missed something else very important, had failed to do something else, to invite someone else, but whom she did not know.
So Lisa doesn't need doctors, right. She needs a therapist. That's the person you're supposed to invite. I'm just kidding. Partly half kidding, but, you know, she. Yes, she needs someone to help her with what's going on with her morally and psychologically. So whether you want to put the emphasis on the psychological or the ethical, that's what she needs help with.
50:44 Erin: I find this so incredibly affecting that it actually makes me want to cry right now. Yeah, this is so painful, you know, this poor girl. And the mother just wants so badly to help her daughter and doesn't know the right thing because she doesn't have the education or the sense or the tools or whatever to help her. I think that the doctor's sort of transformation. I think, you know, the transformation is obviously within him. When he looks at her and sees her in this new way, he's, you know, he's. As you say, he thinks that she's rather unattractive. And then all of a sudden, the whole of her seemed shapely to him, Feminine, simple. And he would have liked to comfort her now, not with medications, not with advice, but with a simple, tender word. And that is ultimately, I think, what he tries to do. And the only thing he really can do for her. He tries to say something comforting to her.
51:37 Wes: I thought this is why you thought I would like the story so much, because he plays the role of a psychoanalyst and his goal is to convince her to leave, right? That's the source of her suffering, right? She's stuck in this morally compromising situation. But he can't just tell her that in the Same way you can't just tell a patient to do something. He has to give her a kind of interpretation and let her come to that conclusion. And so we'll see how that plays out as we go along.
52:03 Erin: But I love this mother and daughter. They're quite different from Vasilisa and Lukerya, but they're also sort of similar in a way. They're sort of roles reversed there.
52:14 Wes: Yep. The mother is the ignorant one and the daughter is the more educated one. So again, you know, transition, upward mobility. Except, you know, here in the case of Vasilisa and the daughter, you had a. A regression, I think. Right. The daughter was worse off. But here you're getting a progression right,
52:32 Erin: in the proper direction. But that then comes with its own price. It seems that it comes with the cost of psychological anguish. So you don't escape suffering either way. If you escape physical suffering, then you get your comeuppance and mental suffering.
52:47 Wes: Yeah. I mean, if she had just gone to college, right, she could find like minded progressives and go to protests and do the things that young people do. She could be friends with passion about social progress and. Yeah, that is kind of the natural position of youth, right. To be outraged by injustice and to want to transform the world and to be in a way that's one's focus. The spiritual and the material are kind of fused in youth, Right. You save people by doing something about social injustice, not by giving them God or great books or something like that.
In this case, she's right. She is the. She's an implicated party, the privileged party, as they would put it today. And she's stuck on the factory grounds. So leaving, yeah, leaving is precisely what she needs. Right? And maybe she'll become more like Leda from the house with the mezzanine. Or maybe she'll end up becoming an artist. But she needs something different than. And we're going to find out what's. You know, the way he finds out what's troubling her is so beautiful and so great. By having another one of the Chekhovian epiphany. Walking outside and hearing the birds and then hearing the metallic sounds and counting out the time.
So maybe we should go into some of that.
54:06 Erin: Sure.
54:07 Wes: So yeah, he's invited to stay over, right? And then he sees more signs of upward mobility, which is to say the ugly portraits in his room. The culture was poor. The luxury, accidental, unconscious, ill at ease, like his uniform. The gleam of the floors was annoying. The chandelier was annoying. It's new money. It's a Kind of tastelessness that comes along with people who are figuring out how to fake class. You know, hints of Great Gatsby here.
54:37 Erin: And he dines with Christina.
54:39 Wes: Yeah. So let's take a minute to talk about her character, how she's characterized. It's great.
54:43 Erin: Yeah. So she's rather pedantic and sort of idiotic in her way.
54:49 Wes: She's always talking. She wants to ceaselessly converse with him at the. That's what she thinks she's supposed to do. When he gets there, she's going on obsessionally about the details of the case and not pointing him to where the patient is. And so he's stuck having dinner with her. She's like, come to dinner. And then it's just him and her.
55:07 Erin: Right. Because the mom is too upset about the daughter and obviously the daughter's bedridden. And so she starts going on about how they treat the workers so well, and she says they're uneducated and yet they too have feelings.
55:22 Wes: Yeah. So that's in the context of saying, well, we provide them with the opportunity to put on plays. Right. And theatricals. We have theatricals at the factory every winter. The workers themselves act in them. And there are magic lantern lectures, a magnificent tea room and whatever you like. And then before that, the workers are very pleased with us. So she has the idea they're doing enough socially for the workers to justify what are presumably terrible conditions and overwork and exploitation, essentially.
55:55 Erin: Right. And then he thinks to himself, after the fact, you know, she's been eating this very fine food and drinking these very expensive French wines and then wiping her mouth with her hand. And it occurs to Korolev that only Christina Dmitrievna, rather stupid old maid, in a pince Nez, lives to her full satisfaction. And so it turns out that all five of these buildings work and poor quality calico is sold on the Eastern markets only so that Christina Dmitrievna can eat Sterlet and drink Madeira.
56:26 Wes: Yeah. So that's the interesting thing that'll turn out to be the case about who really benefits. Right. The daughter, the heiress, is not going to benefit. The mother isn't really benefiting in a way from the exploitation. It's going to be someone like Christina. I wanted to back up a little bit and just read this paragraph where he has the epiphany. So he puts his coat on and he goes out after dinner. And then we get this description of the fire coming from the smokestack occasionally. And then the further away the frog's croaking and the singing Of a nightingale.
And then there's the epiphany, right? Or one of several. But there may be theatricals for the workers, magic lanterns, factory doctors, various improvements. But even so, the workers he had met that day on his way from the station did not look different in any way from the workers he had seen back in his childhood when there were no factory theatricals or improvements. As a physician he could make correct judgments about chronic ailments, the fundamental cause of which was incomprehensible and incurable. And he looked at factories as a misunderstanding, the cause of which was also obscure and irremediable.
And while he did not consider all the improvements in the workers lives superfluous, he saw them as the equivalent of treating an incurable illness. You know, he's a doctor, but he sounds more like the artist in the mezzanine story, or in a way, like the student at the beginning of the previous story. We discussed, you know, more. More pessimistic about progress and the idea that it's little improvements aren't enough. What's going on here is that there's illness, but it's beyond the. The, you know, in the same way that there are chronic ailments that are beyond.
Even even though he can diagnose them, he can categorize the symptoms, there's not much he can do about them because the causes are. We don't know them and they're. They're beyond us scientifically. You know, like the speculation about scrofula. Right. In the same way these are social problems, the deep causes of which are obscure. And when we do these improvements, theatricals and stuff, we're just treating the symptoms and it's not effective ultimately. But in the meantime you get the, as we'll see, the promise of the landscape, the promise of the natural environment.
So what he tells her. You've already read the part about the poor quality calico, right. And Christina benefiting from that. This next part I really, I love, right. Because it starts with the short, sharp, impure sounds that are counting out time.
58:55 Erin: That's great.
58:56 Wes: Banging out 11 o'. Clock. It seemed as if these sounds were being produced by the crimson eyed monster, the devil himself, who ruled here over both owners and workers and deceived the ones like the others.
59:10 Erin: Do you think ultimately that the factory though, turns out to be entirely demonic? I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here because this marks a kind of a low point in his perception of the factory and the goings on there. And certainly there is something rather demonic
59:26 Wes: about It, Yeah, he goes out the farther away, to a place where he can hear the nightingales and frogs better and the train sleepy cocks crowed somewhere. But even so, the night was still. The world slept peacefully. He's engaged in diagnosis at this point. He's thinking about what is ailing Lisa. It's this experience that he's having outside which is going to allow him to make the diagnosis. And it begins especially with the banging out of, you know, the short, sharp and pure sounds that are banging out the time. Because that monotonous sound is what Liza is hearing all night, right.
You know, it speaks to the monotony of the work and the way in which the day is structured around time and work. And it's something that Lisa has to listen to every night so she can't escape her conscience because she has to listen to those sounds. He says nobody feels good here except the governess. And the factory works for her satisfaction, but it just seems so. She's only a straw man here. The main one that everything here is done for is the devil. And he thought about the devil in whom he did not believe and kept glancing back at the two windows gleaming with fire.
It seemed to him that the devil himself was gazing at him through those crimson eyes. The unknown power that created the relations between strong and weak, the grave mistake that now could in no way be set right. So this is a theory of what causes the sickness. Now is power relations could in no way be set right. It had to be that the strong hindered the life of the weak. Such was the law of nature. But this thought could be clearly and easily formulated only in a newspaper article or a textbook, while in the mishmash that is everyday life in the tangle of all the trifles of which human relations are woven.
It was not a law, but a logical incongruity when strong and weak alike fell victim to their mutual relations, inadvertently obeying some controlling power, unknown, extraneous to life, alien to man. This is what people are trying to say in a less artful way when they talk about what is systemic, systemic injustice or power relations that are beyond us. Right? This is a very cool way of interpreting the idea of the devil. Class relations, social relations of inequality.
1:01:44 Erin: And yet, what's interesting to me is that it seems to me that, I mean, the greatest victim of all is the one for whom all of this is perpetuated, because at least the factory workers have each other and they have a community. Liza, or Liza, has no community and is completely isolated. She has everything according to the narrator, she was taught French, dancing, music, had invited dozens of tutors, the best doctors had kept a governess. So she's had all this education and she's like a saint on a pillar or something. Like she can't, you know, she has no. No one can reach her. She's also beyond the reach of her mother. So she doesn't even have. She's been educated out of the mother's capacity for understanding. So she's completely socially isolated and says
1:02:34 Wes: that, says she's lonely.
1:02:35 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And the very thing that is feeding her continual education, care, comfort, et cetera, is also the thing that's tormenting her. It's like the factory itself is some sort of giant life support machine that she's on that's. Rather than giving her life, is sort of leeching her life away or something like that. That's the illness.
1:02:57 Wes: Yeah. That's really good. I love the way he, you know, he talks about the five buildings and the smokestacks and they are. There's steam engines, electricity and telephones. But one somehow kept thinking of pile dwellings of the Stone Age. One sense the presence of crude unconscious power. That's great.
1:03:16 Erin: It is so.
1:03:18 Wes: And then hearing the sounds again, you know, he. He knows what he has to tell her, which is to leave the devil. And the message, the kind of. The message he's bringing into it first. Right. Is about again, the redemptive aspect of the environment. What he brings in with him is the croaking of the frogs and the. And the nightingale. He tells her, you know your first thing? He says to her, the weather is wonderful outside. It's spring, the nightingales are singing, and you sit in the dark and brood on something. That's the beginning of a therapeutic intervention, one that appeals to the beauty of the external world, the place that she has to go. She has to go, like him, farther away from the factory to a place where she can hear the nightingales, proverbial and non proverbial.
1:04:00 Erin: He asked her if the rapping, keeping time, upsets her, and she says, I don't know. Everything here upsets me. Everything. I hear sympathy in your voice. At the first sight of you. I thought for some reason that I could talk with you about everything. He says, please do talk. And she says, I want to tell you my opinion. It seems to me that I'm not ill, but I'm upset and afraid because that's how it should be and it can't be otherwise. Even the healthiest person can't help being upset if, for instance, A robber is prowling under his windows. I've been treated often, she went on, looking into her lap and smiling bashfully. I'm very grateful, of course, and I don't deny the benefits of the treatment, But I'd like to talk, not to a doctor, but to someone close to me, a friend who would understand me, who could convince me that I'm either right or wrong.
1:04:45 Wes: Therapist.
1:04:46 Erin: Yeah, right.
1:04:47 Wes: Right.
1:04:48 Erin: Well, it's funny, because she speaks about her, the perpetuity of her suffering, in the same way that people in these Chekhov stories usually talk about the perpetual suffering of the peasantry. That's how it should be. And it can't be otherwise. It's too big to overhaul it, you can't fix it, you can't start over, that kind of thing. Like I said, I feel like she's worse off than the peasants are. Chekhov has finally found someone who's suffering even more than the peasants.
1:05:18 Wes: Yeah, well, again, it's a return of the repressed. Or it's the denial that we saw in the previous story. Except the denial, it can't simply be denied. It becomes a sickness within the upper classes. So this idea of both classes being controlled by the devil, both being subject to these forces beyond their control and both being damaged by them.
1:05:37 Erin: So she wants him to say something to her, and he knows what he has to tell her. And he knew what to tell her. It was clear to him that she ought quickly to leave those five buildings and the million, if she had it, to leave that devil who. Who watched at night. It was also clear to him that she herself thought so too, and was only waiting for someone she trusted to confirm it. But he did not know how to say it, how it was mortifying to ask condemned people what they were condemned for, just as it was awkward to ask very rich people what they needed so much money for, why they disposed of their wealth so badly, why they would not abandon it even when they could see it was to their own misfortune. And if such a conversation began, it usually turned out to be embarrassing. Awkward.
1:06:19 Wes: Long. Yeah. So I love this because he's going to do what therapists would call an interpretation. And like I said earlier, he can't just tell her directly, so he's got to give her the idea that she needs to leave, which he's already started to do by talking about how nice it is outside. But he's got to do it somewhat indirectly. It's not completely indirect. Right. Because he tells her, you're not content in your position. As a factory owner and a rich heiress, and you don't believe in your right to it, and now you can't sleep. So pretty direct intervention there.
It tells you this is a perfectly natural reaction to your being in this situation and it's unjust. And then makes a general comment about their generations. So this is the part of the interpretation which I think is really cool. Your insomnia is respectable. In any event. It's a good sign, in fact, for our parents, such a conversation as we're having now would have been unthinkable. They didn't talk at night, they slept soundly. But we, our generation, sleep badly, are anguished, talk a lot, and keep trying to decide if we're right or not. But for our children or grandchildren, this question, whether they're right or not will be decided.
They'll see better than we do. Life will be good in 50 years or so. It's only a pity we don't make it that far. It would be interesting to have a look. So, you know, he's telling her it would be interesting to see the future in which. This is an overly optimistic assessment, but I don't think the point here is to give her an overly optimistic assessment. It's to get her to be interested in taking a look at something else, some future, some different sort of possibility. So that's ingenious. Instead of just telling her to leave, he says it would be interesting to have a look.
And she'll say, but what would they do? What would the children and grandchildren do? And then he says they'll probably drop it all and leave. He's talking about they're leaving in order to give her the idea of her leaving, and then says, there's lots of places a good, intelligent person can go, and so on. So he incepts her, except he doesn't have to go into her dream. So I love that. I thought that's what you were onto when you thought I would like this.
1:08:29 Erin: Yeah. Do you think she will leave?
1:08:31 Wes: I don't know. Yeah. It's hard to say.
1:08:34 Erin: She wants to say something to him. Maybe we should just read that last paragraph and we'll talk about this at length. Next morning, when the carriage drove up, everybody came out on the porch to see him off. Liza was festive, in a white dress with a flower in her hair, pale, languid. She looked at him as yesterday, sadly and intelligently smiled, talked and all with an expression as if she would have liked to say something special, important to him alone. One could hear the larks singing the church bells ringing, the windows of the factory shone merrily.
And driving through the yard and then on the way to the station, Korolev no longer remembered the workers or the pile dwellings or the devil, but thought about the time, perhaps close at hand, when life would be as bright and joyful as this quiet Sunday morning. And he thought about how nice it was on such a morning in springtime to ride in a good carriage with a troika and feel the warmth of the sun. I wonder what it is that she would have liked to have said to him. If this is perhaps just an expression of gratitude, she would like to repay him, perhaps, for what he said to her and to thank him for what he's done for her.
Or.
1:09:38 Wes: Yeah, that's the way I take it.
1:09:39 Erin: Okay.
1:09:40 Wes: Or what's the other alternative?
1:09:42 Erin: I don't know. I kind of wonder why he doesn't marry her or something interesting. I wonder why he doesn't say something a little bit more, why he doesn't take her away from there himself and marry her. I think. I don't know, maybe I'm naive in that, you know, he's affected by it and then he moves on.
1:10:00 Wes: I'm trying to figure out, did I have that thought at some point in the story that they were going to get together. I might have. I can't remember. I mean, if he were her actual therapist, of course, then that would be completely inappropriate. But I don't know about doctor.
1:10:14 Erin: Patient marrying a doctor seems to be exactly what she's been set up for in life by being so sickly true. And this redemption, I mean, she's brought about, I think, a change in him as well. Now he doesn't think about the devil. He now sees the factory in this merry, shining way rather than in the negative way. And she has brought about a bit of a transformation in him, I think. I mean, at the beginning, he was, of course, expecting to find certain things at the factory, a certain amount of squalor and misery. And it's fair to say that he did find that beyond his own prejudices, but he also found something more than that.
I think the story, maybe on his part, is about learning to look past his presuppositions and his snap judgments about people, because Liza lives up to more than that and becomes more than that, in his estimation, very quickly and has a lot of dignity right away. And so, I don't know, I think she helped him see something differently and perhaps become a better doctor as a result. And, of course, his effect on her is obvious. So I think the sadness for me in the end is that they don't get together, but maybe that's very silly of me to think that the solution to everything is.
Is a wedding at the end of the story.
1:11:28 Wes: Well, maybe they will, you know, who knows?
1:11:31 Erin: But he's never going to go back there or see her again. He'll never know.
1:11:34 Wes: How do you know?
1:11:35 Erin: I don't know. It seems very final when he leaves.
1:11:38 Wes: Maybe she'll find him.
1:11:40 Erin: Right, that's true, that's true. I'll imagine that she's the one who's got to leave. We're gonna have to commission some fan fiction to.
1:11:48 Wes: That's right, that's right. A medical case, Part two. Part two or a marriage case. A case for marriage. The case for marriage. All right. You get another transition to Rosie, optimism at the end, just like the last story. And you wonder what he's doing at the end. Right. If he's kind of engaged now in his own suppression of the existence of the squalid conditions for the workers. And is it a good thing to just forget about the devil and the pile dwellings and all that? For Chekhov, there's somehow a promise of social redemption. And I said this before, but I'll say it again, a promise of social redemption in the beauty of the natural environment.
So that's what he's onto again here. He's outside, he's leaving. He can hear the lark singing. And I think there's something true about that, the idea that not just that we have to be Luddites or that we have to kind of return to nature or something like that, but that our engagement with the beauty of the world is really important. She's a reader, but as she says, she doesn't get out much. She has no life getting out. That's the solution in this story, and that's what he's doing at the end. He's modeling that for her. He's led her to that conclusion and now he's doing it.
So maybe she'll be able to follow.
1:13:10 Erin: That's good. Should we end there?
1:13:12 Wes: Sure. Thank you.
1:13:13 Erin: Thank you.
1:13:16 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to say that if you're listening to this on the feed for the Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find us atsubtext podcast podcast.com, subscribe@patreon.com Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersouptextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext. And once again, thank you for listening.
Art and Action in Chekhov’s “The House with the Mezzanine”
Apr 12, 2021
In this story, there are two sisters: one introverted, frail, and bookish; the other dominant, opinionated, and politically active. In meeting them, an accomplished artist seems to be confronted with a dilemma. Should art subordinate itself to the project of creating a just society? Or should it focus on serving more spiritual needs? These questions make Chekhov’s “The House with the Mezzanine” is an interesting meditation on the relationship between politics and the arts, and whether the windows of our proverbial dwellings are best used to illuminate a new path forward, or to articulate the beauty of the world as it is. Wes & Erin analyze.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Nipped by Love in Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog”
Mar 29, 2021
Dmitri Gurov does not take love seriously. His wife annoys him, long-term relationships scare him, and his love life consists of brief affairs with women he meets at vacation resorts. In Anna, he finds someone who appears to be the usual victim—traveling alone, tired of her husband, and unlikely to make any effective demands for intimacy, something that seems to be revealed in the diminutive portability of her traveling companion. This time, however, he has met a match too powerful for his predatory ambitions. When is love’s bite bigger than its bark? Wes & Erin analyze Anton Chekhov’s“The Lady with the Little Dog.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Business Gets Personal in “The Godfather” (1972)
Mar 01, 2021
Out of the darkness of the opening frames comes a supplicant— Buonasera the undertaker. He pleads for the justice that the American legal system denied him. As the camera draws back, we see the outline of a face, a hand… Don Corleone holds court at the confluence of loyalty and duress, generosity and calculation, power and fragility. It is not money, but friendship that he asks of Buonasera. Within and without the world of the film, can one consider Don Corleone a great man? Or does his moral code, like his favor, always hide a transaction? Wes & Erin give their analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film, “The Godfather.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
(post)script: Post-Hall: Pimps, Pills, and Automobiles
Feb 22, 2021
Listen to more episodes of (post)script at Patreon.
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Annie Hall; Wes pines to revisit his many unwritten essays, including the one about love and nostalgia in Woody Allen films. We discuss whether Mike Nichols used crack, and the way Google’s algorithms mercilessly hunt Wes down to forcibly dose him with information about the director, all because of a few searches. Wes couldn’t get through Clue, but that may be due to the variability of his many movie moods, and in any case Erin’s Madeline Kahn impression captures a redeeming attitude. We discuss My Favorite Wife (my favorite life?). It’s great, but it bogs down halfway through. By contrast, Annie Hall‘s use of free association helps it navigate the precarious second act, and keeps it brisk (despite its exceptionally long shots, on average of 14 seconds). Erin is reading a new biography of LSD aficionado Cary Grant, called A Brilliant Disguise, according to which director Leo McCarey‘s car accident changed him forever. Also, McCarey apparently admitted on his deathbed that his greatest frustration in life was never sleeping with Irene Dunne. Probably a frustration for most of us, but fortunately we get to enjoy the eidetic romantico-comical pairing of Dunne and Grant. Throne of Blood is so much more than samurai yelling at each other: there’s the incredibly creepy and insidious Lady Macbeth character, who motivates her husband by stoking his paranoia in a way that involves more psychological realism than the original play. Not to mention the transplendant, sing-songy witch, which in turn reminds Wes of Beverly in Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh (played by Alison Steadman): wonderful, trippy, darkly comic, but ultimately indescribable. Erin recently watched Elevator to the Gallows to celebrate the birthday of Jeanne Moreau, and is reading Great Expectations (coming to (sub)Text as soon as Wes has the time to re-read it). But David Lean’s adaptation of the novel disappoints: Alec Guinness looks like a pimp, and a nightmare vaudevillian Miss Havisham looks like she’s on ludes. We humblebrag about two recent positive reviews, and post-game our first ad, wondering whether this was the first time a conversation about a poem was made possible by the selling of drugs. So support us on Patreon, and you’ll be doing your part to keep pills out of poetry and where they belong, in the medicine cabinets of Mike Nichols, Cary Grant, and Miss Havisham.
Transcript
0:00 Erin: Welcome to Postscript, the subtext after show where we talk about things related and unrelated to the week's episode. This is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:07 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. Okay, so we just recorded on Annie Hall. That's like a dream come true for me to. You know, I always wanted to write something about it, but of course, that hasn't happened. But just to have a public conversation about that is great.
0:20 Erin: Yeah. What would you write about if you could write about it? What would be the. Just the idea of nostalgia.
0:25 Wes: Yeah.
0:25 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
0:26 Wes: And actually, there's an essay I want to do kind of with regard to Woody Allen films in general, because I think that sort of finds its way into everything he does.
0:33 Erin: That's great. Well, I really enjoyed what you had to say about that. It was really enlightening.
0:37 Wes: Likewise. Likewise.
0:39 Erin: Oh, we need to talk about how Mike Nichols used crack according to an upcoming biography.
0:46 Wes: So. Yeah, so for listeners, we have, like, a little slack to communicate, and we have some channels. Like, we have, like, a reading and viewing log in our Postscript channel. I just threw up this thing about Page Six. I don't know what publication that is, but Mike Nichols use crack upcoming biography claims. I basically, I get these in my Google News feed because in preparing for the Graduate episode, I must have Googled him. And therefore, now I must, you know, Google News must inform me every time something happens with respect to Mike Nichols. And, like, I get alert after alert about one salacious detail after another from this new biography. So. And you said, I doubt this very much.
1:29 Erin: Yeah, I do doubt it. But, you know, he was very productive.
1:33 Wes: Yeah.
1:35 Erin: You mentioned in a different Slack channel that you couldn't get through Clue.
1:41 Wes: Yeah. Sorry.
1:42 Erin: Could you explain that, please, and give your defense before sentencing?
1:46 Wes: I just. I hated it.
1:49 Erin: What? Okay, you have to be. First of all, you gotta be a little bit drunk.
1:53 Wes: Yeah.
1:54 Erin: Second of all, you've gotta be in a big group of people.
1:56 Wes: Yeah.
1:57 Erin: And third of all, you need me to do my Madeline Kahn voice along with Madeline Kahn and everything she says.
2:03 Wes: So now you have to do that voice. You can't just.
2:06 Erin: I hated her so much. I just. Sorry.
2:11 Wes: That's great.
2:12 Erin: It's great. It's a great. Yeah, it's really campy. And it takes a little work to kind of, like, get on the wavelength of the movie. But if you're not on the same wavelength, it can be hard to get there.
2:22 Wes: Maybe it's a mood thing, I think.
2:24 Erin: Yeah.
2:25 Wes: My reaction to movies actually varies significantly according to my mood. Usually Annie hall, for instance, is a transcendent experience.
2:34 Erin: I thought it was more Kafkaesque, but I mean that as a compliment.
2:38 Wes: Yeah. This is the first time it wasn't. It might have been just because I had to do it and I was taking notes to the whole thing and pausing, you know, and just like, oh, God, yeah, I've turned this into work now. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. It's just in the past. Every viewing has just been this. For me, that's kind of sublime. But. So, yes, I can give Clue another try. I can pick up where I left off and see what happens.
3:00 Erin: You know, it's a movie that comes in at, like, a very high pitch. It's, like, you know, hard to meet that craziness and the zaniness of the movie if you're not kind of gelling with it. So I. I kind of understand that. I think I've probably turned it off before because I was just like, oh, I can't do this right now. Yeah, that reminds me something that you watched a while ago, but we never talked about. And I was just curious to hear your reaction about my favorite wife. I know that was a while ago now, but did you like that?
3:26 Wes: Yes, I really did. I loved, like, the first half, and I can't give all the details on this, but I thought it got a little bogged down. So what I think happens in a lot of movies is, like, act two is really hard to sustain. It's, like, sometimes twice as long as Acts 1 and 3. And it's a sort of. A lot of transitional stuff before, you know, as you get into the third act and things really start with. You get a lot more momentum towards the climax. It's a place where screenplays generally bogged down. So it's not an uncommon thing. And I'm. You know, I think it's part of my impatience now.
And so it's partly my problem. Although, like, the second act, I think, is one. One thing that Annie hall does really, really well, in part because it's. I think free association works very well. We didn't go a lot into it in the. In the episode, but the. You know, a lot of the transitions in the movie, it's not just moving forward in time. One thing happens after the other. It's. It's mental free association. And I think somehow that gives more momentum to the second act because there's kind of a psychological urgency to it. So coming back to this movie, I just.
I think I'm. Towards the end of the second act, I was getting impatient, but I loved, loved, loved the first half of the movie. And I was pausing occasionally to try to do my. To practice my Cary Grant accent, which I'm not going to try to do here. I can do little Christopher Walken, but I can't do Cary Grant.
4:49 Erin: Yeah. I mean, one of the things, though, about Annie hall, it's just like, it's so fast, you know, it goes so quickly. It so speedily chugs along. And it's so inventive.
4:58 Wes: It does. But by the way, the shots are, on average, 14 seconds long, which is very, very long.
5:03 Erin: Yeah, yeah.
5:04 Wes: Most movies are four to six seconds or something. But it does chug along, as you say.
5:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And the inventiveness of it is amazing. But. Yeah. So my favorite wife is.
5:16 Wes: I think it's my favorite life.
5:19 Erin: Sorry. Yeah. It was supposed to be directed by Leo McCarey. And so part of the reason why that movie is so disjointed is because Garson Kanin ended up having to step in and direct it unexpectedly. And so it was actually. It was a huge disappointment, I think, for Irene Dunne, like, creatively, because she thought that it was going to be as inventive and fun as the awful Truth. And she actually complained about the exact same thing that you're complaining about. But one of the things that I read. So I've been reading this Cary Grant biography that just came out.
5:52 Wes: Did he do crack as well?
5:54 Erin: No, he did do lsd. I mean, but that's pretty well documented. But anyway, the reason why. So he got into a car accident, McCarey. Because he was driving drunk at 95 miles an hour when he slammed into a 1924 Packard. It was. It was really serious. It said the accident report lists multiple burns, gouge wounds, lacerations and contusions, broken bones and a possible skull fracture.
6:18 Wes: Wow.
6:19 Erin: Then there was this little sort of ending part to this section on my favorite wife in this book, which really shook me to use the term that the kids are using, which is that. Well, first of all, he emerged from the accident kind of like never being the same. But also that McCarey and Irene Dunne, she was a very devout Catholic, happily married, but the two of them had this, like, weird, sexy vibe between them where she, I guess, was, like, kind of interested in him, and he was super interested in her. And it said that he went to his deathbed saying that the fact that he had never slept with Irene Dunne was the greatest frustration of his life. And I just, like, could not get over that. Anyway.
7:04 Wes: Yeah, well, it's the greatest Frustration of my life as well. I never even met her.
7:11 Erin: I just couldn't get over that. But anyway, yeah, so as you were telling me that you had watched My Favorite Wife, I was reading that, going, oh, my God. Just couldn't get over it.
7:21 Wes: This is a new biography of Cary Grant.
7:24 Erin: It is, yeah. It's Cary Grant, A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eyman. A couple of biographies came out about him just recently, and there were two of them that were reviewed by David Thomson recently, I think, in LRB or tls, one of those places. And he said that both of them are kind of essential. So once I'm done with this, I'm going to have to go read the other one, too.
7:48 Wes: Can you do a Cary Grant accent, by the way?
7:51 Erin: No, I won't do it publicly. I kind of got this impression. The scene where Diane Keaton and Woody Allen are on the roof, she had to have been doing an Irene Dunne impression. And I looked it up, and I guess in an interview she did say that she was doing an Irene Dunne impression during that. That whole thing.
8:13 Wes: Oh, I see.
8:14 Erin: I think it's very. She gets the cadence exactly right in that.
8:17 Wes: So interesting.
8:19 Erin: Yeah. Everything goes back to Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. What can I say?
8:24 Wes: They are the ur-romance. So I also watched Throne of Blood, which I thoroughly enjoyed, even though in the beginning I'm like, ugh, am I really gonna be. Just watch samurais. Am I really just gonna watch them yell at each other for two hours? So much yelling. But it's amazing. Wow. It's just such a mesmerizing. I mean, I guess a lot of it is in the visuals, you know.
8:47 Erin: Yeah, it is very. It's like you go into a Zen state when you watch it.
8:51 Wes: The Lady Macbeth character is so creepy. And because she's so. You know, she has a kind of very passive, on the surface demeanor, but her manipulativeness is, you know, so insidious. It makes more sense than overtly than Macbeth, than in Macbeth. She's trying to make him paranoid. Right. She's giving him plausible reasons to be, you know, get them before they get you kind of thing. So it's more nakedly about self preservation in a way that she's appealing to his idea that as he rises, the only way to preserve himself is to be ruthless, Something like that. Whereas in Macbeth, it doesn't quite make any sense, you know, this idea that there's an urgency to killing Duncan just because there's a prophecy. So. So there's a. There's a greater realism involved But I just find her so creepy in a way that it's quite gripping.
9:45 Erin: Yeah, she's really great in that.
9:47 Wes: And the same with the witch.
9:48 Erin: Yeah. Oh, so weird. Yeah, I like that little hut too. It's really.
9:54 Wes: What is it, a spindle? Yeah. And just the way the. The witch talks and the kind of sing songy.
10:00 Erin: Great film.
10:01 Wes: Yeah. Oh, and by the way, I watched something called Abigail's Party. Have you ever seen that?
10:05 Erin: No, I haven't. Never even heard of it.
10:08 Wes: This is a trip. It's basically a filmed play that was on BBC, but it was. It was a successful play in the 70s, I think. 77, same year as Annie Hall. I. I'm so predictable in my. My taste. It's all like late 60s, 70s, early 80s, and then everything else, I just can't.
10:25 Erin: Doesn't.
10:26 Wes: Doesn't do it for me as much, with some exceptions. But. But it's a. It's directed by Mike Leigh.
10:32 Erin: Oh, nice.
10:33 Wes: I think it was a. It was a play at the Hampstead Theater before they did a recording of it for BBC's Play for Today. I don't even know how to describe it. They call it a. It's Wikipedia. They describe it as a suburban situation comedy of manners and a satire on the aspirations and tastes of the new middle class that emerged in Britain in the 1970s. So Abigail is someone who actually doesn't. Never appears in the play, but the main character, Beverly Moss, is just out of this world. And I don't even know how to describe what she is exactly. You just have to see this. You know, it's like so darkly comic. There's not a lot of laugh out loud moments, but it's intense and you're sort of on your. On the edge of your seat. So anyway, yeah, you should.
11:19 Erin: Where. Where can I find it? I'm really interested in.
11:28 Wes: It's free on YouTube. But otherwise, who's in it?
11:30 Erin: Is there anyone good in it?
11:31 Wes: Yeah. So it's. Alison Steadman plays Beverly.
11:35 Erin: Oh, no way. The Mrs. Bennet.
11:38 Wes: Yes.
11:39 Erin: Oh, my gosh.
11:40 Wes: Exactly. Right. Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, I forgot that Tim Stern plays Laurence.
11:45 Erin: I don't know.
11:46 Wes: Janine Duvitski, who didn't have much of a career. Yeah, I don't think many of these people had much of a career. Okay, I will watch it with you again. I would love to watch it again. So maybe we could watch it together.
11:55 Erin: Sure.
11:56 Wes: It is dark, so hopefully you won't hate me after we're done watching it, but.
12:00 Erin: No, that's okay.
12:01 Wes: What about you? What have you been? I know you. Well, we already talked about the fact that you're reading Great Expectations. Oh, yeah, I finished that, which I don't. I started. I don't know that I'm going to get done in time for the next one, so we'll have to talk about what the next episode is going to be.
12:14 Erin: Oh, okay.
12:15 Wes: Yeah, I could try to like force myself to try to get it done in two weeks. I'm a little nervous about that.
12:20 Erin: No, no, no, no, you should enjoy it.
12:22 Wes: Yeah.
12:22 Erin: Maybe we could do another movie. Could we do a back to back movie or would that be.
12:27 Wes: Yeah, so let's think about a movie.
12:28 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Because we've done some heavy stuff in a row, so. Yeah.
12:33 Wes: So what are you, what else are you reading or watching?
12:36 Erin: Let's see. Well, yesterday was Jeanne Moreau's birthday, so I watched Elevator to the Gallows again. Rewatched it since I finished Great Expectations, I watched the David Lean adaptation of it, which I had never seen and which I really did not like. I know it's supposed to be a classic, but I didn't like it. John Mills looked like he was 40 playing a 20 year old pip and Alec Guinness was like, oh man, what an unattractive young guy he was. I mean, that's not like relevant to anything, but he just looked like really weird through the whole thing.
Yeah, he's attractive when he's older. Yeah, I thought, you know, I mean, Obi Wan is fine and obviously his movies in the like 50s are hilarious. I wasn't really paying attention, but he just looks so weird. His, his head looks like an egg in this. It's very strange. But anyway, and they, I was annoyed by, you know, at the beginning I was like, wow, you know, they're really staying close to the book like this. Performances weren't exactly what I had envisioned, but the settings were all like really vividly drawn from the book. And I was really impressed because for the first 25 minutes or so I thought, wow, if this is a 90 minute movie, how are they going to do everything justice the way that they're doing it right now?
In the first 25 minutes it was like word for word out of the book. Not quite, but everything was happening in order and with a lot of attention paid to it. And then everything started kind of collapse. And I wasn't happy with Ms. Havisham. It was like she was on ludes or something. She was like relaxed and in the book she's such a vibrant, like, crazy, almost like a vaudevillian kind of. Kind of nightmare character. And she was way too dignified. And then the ending was all messed up, and so I got more and more upset. And it was also, like, really boring in the middle, which it isn't in the book at all.
So I was really disappointed. And then I tried watching a BBC adaptation of it with the one with Charlotte Rampling playing Miss Havisham, and it was awesome. All screwed up. Whatever version they have for free on Amazon was, like, skipping. And there were these pink slashes through the picture.
14:47 Wes: Weird.
14:48 Erin: Yeah. And then we tried switching to the second episode and seeing if that was any better, and it was not the second episode. It was weird. Anyway, I'm gonna have to try and find some other longer BBC version of it to watch, though none of them were as highly rated on IMDb anyway as the David Lean, which is obviously considered a classic, though I don't really know why. I mean, it's beautifully shot, but it's disappointed.
15:13 Wes: Okay.
15:14 Erin: Yeah.
15:14 Wes: Are you reading anything else?
15:16 Erin: Well, I'm. I'm about to teach Pride and Prejudice, so I've been rereading that again. And otherwise, no, I'm kind of in a fallow period right now. I would like to go straight into another Dickens, but I. I think that if we record on Great Expectations, I'm going to get confused if I go into another one too quickly. But, yeah, I really whetted my appetite for a long. Another long novel for the long winter stretch. So I might do Bleak House after we record on Great Expectations. Maybe Bleak House is my favorite Dickens. Haven't read it since I was in high school. Maybe I like this idea that I'm getting into all these rereads of these long novels. They feel so luxurious and wonderful to slip into at night, you know, in bed. And I'd been staying up way later than I should have just because I couldn't put it down.
16:05 Wes: That's great.
16:06 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
16:07 Wes: We got two nice reviews recently.
16:10 Erin: Yep.
16:10 Wes: What a wonderful podcast. Wes and Erin are two erudite but equally humble, personable hosts. I don't think I've ever been called humble before.
16:19 Erin: Well, you fooled this person. No, that's what I do.
16:23 Wes: That's what I do. This. Fool people. Anyway, very nice to get those reviews. We had our first ad.
16:30 Erin: Oh, yeah.
16:31 Wes: On Auden. Second. Our second Auden episode.
16:34 Erin: Yeah. Yeah.
16:35 Wes: That was kind of a trip to do that. Is that the first time, like, conversation about a poem has been sponsored by drugs. It's a word we weren't allowed to say in the ad itself.
16:49 Erin: Yep.
16:49 Wes: Sell enough drugs, you can keep doing poetry.
16:55 Erin: Should have been a brave New world episode, but.
16:57 Wes: Oh, well. Yeah. Okay.
16:59 Erin: Well, all right.
17:01 Wes: Okay.
17:01 Erin: Thank you, thank you.
Love and Nostalgia in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” (1977)
Feb 15, 2021
Alvy Singer is not, he tells us, a depressive character. It’s just that as a child he always worried that the expanding universe would one day break apart; and as an adult that romantic relationships must always fall apart. With Annie Hall, he thought he had finally found something that would last, in part because she could — like the audiences of Woody Allen — endure and make sense of his fragmented neuroticism: by finding it, on occasion, funny, or endearing, or even informative. While Annie’s patient, quirky fatalism does not prevent her from outgrowing Alvy and leaving him behind, the nostalgic and wistful frame of Allen’s film does have something to say about what helps keep love alive, and people connected.
This episode’s conversation continues on our after-show (post)script.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Yielding to Suggestion in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”
Feb 01, 2021
On the moors of medieval Scotland, three witches hail the nobleman Macbeth as the future king—despite the fact that King Duncan is very much alive, and Macbeth is not in line to the throne. At the suggestion of power, Macbeth’s mind leaps to murder. Later, he fancies he sees a floating dagger leading him to Duncan, and after more bloodshed, believes he is haunted by the ghost of a friend. Is Macbeth merely a victim of divination, goaded by suggestion and his own imagination? To what extent is every ambition an imaginative act—and perhaps a form of prophecy? Wes & Erin give an analysis of the Scottish Play: Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, “Macbeth.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Clever Hopes in W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”
Jan 18, 2021
W. H. Auden hated this poem. He called it the most dishonest he had ever written, and eventually had it excluded from collections of his poetry. And yet it quickly became one of his most popular poems. And after the attacks of September 11, it was published in several national newspapers and widely discussed. This might seem to be a strange result, given that the poem is not a call-to-arms, but an invitation to self-critique. What explains the enduring appeal of Auden’s September 1, 1939? Was he right to repudiate it? Wes & Erin give their analysis.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Martin Köster for allowing us to use his painting New York at Night III for the cover art to this episode.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
The “Human Position” of Suffering in W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”
Jan 04, 2021
As war loomed in Europe, the poet W.H. Auden left Britain for the United States. One of the poems he wrote just before leaving is about the nature of human suffering—or as Auden puts it, the “human position” of suffering: for the most part, it happens invisibly, and the procession of ordinary life leaves it unacknowledged. Yet, the representation and transcendence of suffering are tasks important both to religion and the arts. Is suffering’s “human position” something that can be redeemed? Wes and Erin analyze Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Mutual Amusement in “The Awful Truth” (1937)
Dec 21, 2020
It’s a romance that begins with a divorce. Lucy and Jerry Warriner suspect each other of affairs, so they file suit, battle for custody of their dog, see other people, and generally go wild. Despite the spectre of infidelities— real or imagined— Lucy and Jerry learn a surprising truth: that the only person they enjoy “fooling around with” is their spouse. How are all relationships a kind of performance? And how might finding a mate mean finding not just a co-star, but one’s best audience? Wes and Erin analyze the 1937 classic comedy of remarriage, The Awful Truth.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Against Specialization in Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”
Dec 07, 2020
Hedda Gabler is not a fan of specialization: not in the professor she has married, and his esoteric scholarly interests; not in domesticity, and the specialized affections required by marriage and motherhood; not in any lover’s infatuated specialization in her; and perhaps not in the form of specialization arguably required by life itself, with its finite and confining possibilities. Is there any way, short of suicide, to transcend such limits? Wes & Erin give an analysis of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Kill Billy: Order and Innocence in Melville’s “Billy Budd”
Nov 23, 2020
Bill Budd is a beautiful man. Not just good looking, but exquisitely good natured, something that costs him no effort and has required no instruction. And yet it is ultimately his beautiful soul and good nature that get Billy killed. Wes & Erin analyze Herman Melville’s final and unfinished work of fiction, and whether a good heart and good intentions are more important than obedience to authority and adherence to civilized norms.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Being Yourself in John Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974)
Oct 26, 2020
John Cassavetes is known today as the father of American independent film, a pioneering writer, director, editor, actor who managed to make movies on his own terms, and has since inspired two generations of filmmakers. In his own day, however, he couldn’t catch a break–unappreciated and unseen by most of the public, lambasted by critics. But what contemporaries didn’t understand about Cassavetes’s movies may actually be his message. What can he teach us about authenticity and the ways in which we confront and avoid our own emotions? Wes & Erin give an analysis of Cassavetes’s best-known film, 1974’s “A Woman Under the Influence.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode.
Worrying about the Future in Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate” (1967)
Oct 05, 2020
Benjamin Braddock is a little worried about his future. He’s a recent college graduate who moves back in with his upper-middle-class parents and feels smothered by their vapid, materialistic lifestyle. But he begins an affair with a woman from his parents’ circle… And then he falls in love with her daughter. Like Benjamin, we wonder what the future can and should hold for us. Can it be free of the negative trappings of our society and culture, of our parents’ influence, of the past? Wes and Erin analyze Mike Nichols’ 1967 film “The Graduate.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem in W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: Part 2
Sep 28, 2020
Wes and Erin continue their discussion of W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” In Part 1, they analyzed the first stanza of the poem, in particular Yeats’ use of “gyre”; the meaning of the phrases “things fall apart” and “the center cannot hold”; and the conflict between aristocratic and revolutionary values. In Part 2, they discuss — with a little help from Nietzsche — the anti-redemption of the second stanza, and the meaning of Yeats’ vision of a “rough beast” slouching towards Bethlehem.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:08 Erin: You're listening to Subtext, and today we'll be continuing our discussion of W.B. yeats, the Second Coming. In part one of this discussion, we covered the first stanza of the poem. And now for the second coming of our discussion. We'll be covering the second stanza of the poem and try to explain Yeats's dark vision of a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext.
0:43 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. All right, so here we are on the second stanza. The poem takes a real. Doesn't quite take its final turn yet. Right. So it evokes the possibility of a Christian second coming and something hopeful, and then it will take its dark turn towards his strange vision of a sphinx. There's a kind of a quality of satire or parody here. It's a send up of the very idea of a second coming, which in some ways might not be surprising if we reflect on the poem.
So we've seen hints. Even though he's talking about things falling apart and what's not going to be called for is a revolution. Right. In a way, the falling apart is what he's reacting to in the first stanza is all the revolutionary fervor and the chaos and disorder that it's created. So if we think of a second coming or the hope for a second coming as a variation on the revolutionary spirit, then we might not be so surprised that he's going to end up rejecting it. That's what he dangles before us as bait at the very beginning of the second stanza.
1:59 Erin: Yeah, and I like that idea of satire because as we said frequently in the previous episode, he's working a lot in Christian imagery. And the devil is often called the ape of Christ. It's a mimic of Christ, but it's sort of backwards turning things upside down. And so in this idea of the second coming, of course, we think of the book of Revelation, the second coming of Christ. The content here is actually going to be kind of an aping of that or a turning upside down or a satire, as you say. But before we get into it, I just want to talk a little bit about the form of the poem, since I don't think we talked about that very much last time.
So in the previous episode, we covered the first eight lines which make up the first stanza. And now the second part is actually a sonnet. It's kind of a sonnet. It's 14 lines long. So the whole poem together is sort of a sonnet plus an addendum, in a way. And so this sonnet form, which, you know, traditionally a sonnet has eight lines of one idea, and then a volta, a turn, and six lines of a competing idea. And that's sort of what's going on here. So there's a bit of a sonnet feel to it, in addition to the fact that it's 14 lines long. And then also there is sort of an iambic pentameter going on here.
It's so loose that it almost is an iambic pentameter. And there are some rhymes, some slant rhymes, but they almost seem to be accidental, and they don't really occur in any kind of pattern. So that we have hold and world, falconer and everywhere, or gyre and everywhere. So there's a suggestion of a line, a ghost of a rhyme, but doesn't seem to have any particular pattern, which I think sort of fits with the whole theme in which he's working, of this mere anarchy. Kind of has one foot in the world of form and one foot in free verse, and it's sort of spanning the breach between the two.
Yeah. So he starts with, surely some revelation is at hand. He's seen all of this chaos and anarchy happening in the first stanza, and now he's saying, okay, there's going to be some revelation that's coming. Surely the second coming is at hand. So I think here he's referring to the ideas in the Book of Revelation, which is, of course, the final book of the New Testament, written by St. John of Patmos. And there's a struggle between good and evil that happens in Revelation, and it reaches a fever pitch. The evil is growing stronger and stronger, stronger.
And there's this climax in which God finally comes down to earth to intervene. He destroys evil, performs the last judgment, and then basically establishes heaven on earth in which there is no more death and the world kind of returns to a prelapsarian state. So Yeats is assuming that with all of this anarchy, destruction and chaos, that there is going to be this restorative coming, this revelation, this second coming of Christ. And then there's kind of a turn that happens in line three.
4:46 Wes: I love this twist. You know, as I've said before, before I like a poem with a good twist, and I love the way it goes sideways here. Although, no, it's not such a nice vision that he's having. It's really powerful. So hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight. So we get this idea here that something out of the collective unconscious has actually inserted itself into his imagination. So what's going on is he's describing his own inspiration to us as a poet, but it's described as a kind of mystical vision that comes from this. Again, I think the best way to phrase it is collective unconscious. Although the use of the phrase spiritus mundi seems like an opposition to me to the idea of the Holy Spirit. And I think of the role of the Holy Spirit in Mary's conception of Christ. And here he is having his own conception.
5:47 Erin: As a side note, I just want to say that I love the fact that you have the proper classical pronunciation of spiritus mundi. And I'm saying spiritus mundi, which is bringing out my ecclesiastical Latin background. So we're kind of the personifications of the Greco Roman and the Judeo Christian traditions. Just in our pronunciation of that term.
6:05 Wes: I keep my pronunciation very Roman.
6:09 Erin: Yes, you're very good.
6:11 Wes: As Marcus Aurelius put it, one ought to strive to be a real Roman. So I do that every day, as with Yeats. I like those aristocratic Roman values, you
6:22 Erin: know, There you go.
6:23 Wes: You get to run around in togas and sandals, a very kind of leisurely outfit. And yet you're conquering the world at the same time. It's great.
6:31 Erin: I prefer, like, very heavy robes, ridiculous hats, sticks that you could beat people with if you want.
6:37 Wes: No, that's another form of power. So it just depends on which kind of power you want.
6:43 Erin: I'm into this whole sword and sandal thing, too. But so this image comes out of this collective unconscious, this world soul or whatever, from which we get all these archetypes and everything. And he has this vision of the sands of the desert in which this shape with a lion body and the head of a man is moving. And this is obviously supposed to be reminiscent of the Sphinx, and I think, in particular.
7:08 Wes: Right. Of the Great Sphinx of Giza, that actual monument that was discovered at the end of the 19th century.
7:16 Erin: Yeah, because there's an implication here that it's been awoken from a stony sleep. So we know that this is a stone sphinx, so we can assume that it's the Great Sphinx, perhaps. And this is a time in which
7:25 Wes: I Mean, maybe I'm wrong about that. That's just the way I've always thought of it.
7:28 Erin: Yeah, that kind of makes the most sense. Ignoring stony sleep, I was thinking that this was an animal that's sort of been Benjamin Buttoning or something like. It resurrects and then it's kind of living its life backwards because at the end of the poem, we have it slouching towards Bethlehem to be. But which makes one wonder what constitutes a birth. If by waking up and moving around for the first time in 20 centuries, it's not being born, it has to go elsewhere to do so.
7:53 Wes: So thinking of the Sphinx as a statue, essentially, that becomes animated and gets up, which is a great image, moving its slow thighs. Although I think because it's a cat, essentially, I think of it as maybe stretching before it starts moving on. That's, of course, not what really happens. But as many critics point out, there seems to be an evocation, Shelley's Ozymandias here. Right. So the idea of a great monument sitting in the sand and being a symbol of power but having been ruined and defeated by time. But here the twist is that instead of being a symbol of the way power is subjected to time, the power comes alive and reinserts itself into the. Into the world.
8:41 Erin: Yeah. And that's where we get this idea that perhaps this power. First of all, we know that the image is troubling his sight, which is an interesting term. So we know that this can't exactly be a benevolent force. Perhaps it's a malevolent one. And in the connection to Ozymandias, too, you know, Ozymandias has the pedestal beneath him on which is written, look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. So we get this idea that this guy is, you know, he has this wrinkled lip and a sneer of cold command. And so we have this idea that Ozymandias was kind of a dictator, you know, like, not a particular nice dude. So the same sort of idea is evoked when we have the Sphinx coming to life. That it has a gaze that is blank and pitiless as the sun. There's something of that coldness and perhaps that evil and malevolence that's being brought about here with this animal's resurrection.
9:30 Wes: And the other part of that, I think of that as a byproduct of something's being a statue. So I think of ancient Greek and Roman statuary where often there's a blankness to the eyes. And the same thing goes, I think, for this Giza statue. And the blankness just is a product of the fact that I think the eyes were often painted on. Right. There might have been good reasons for not trying to sculpt the eyes, I'm not sure. But I don't know if it was technically too difficult or what other reason. Maybe it would have looked creepy. That may have some influence over our relationship to the ancients. The way in which these statues seem ethereal or otherworldly, there's a kind of power to that. It enhances the timelessness. These sculptures have survived over time.
10:19 Erin: There's a strange sort of revival of Egyptian culture that's happening at this moment in time that Yeats is writing. I mean, it really starts in the earlier part of the 19th century, but Egyptian revival architecture continues to thrive up until the late 30s, maybe especially because of this renewed interest in Egypt with the search for King Tut's tomb. And I think it's actually found in 1922, maybe. A lot of Egyptian symbols I think are being evoked at this time. Like for instance, I looked up if there was a connection because I sensed that there was between Masonry and the Sphinx, because I know that with the societies in which, like specifically the golden dawn, that secret society that we talked about in the previous episode that Yeats was a member of, of the founders of that society were actually Masons and they used a lot of Masonic imagery and symbols.
And one of them was the Sphinx. And the Sphinx was actually seen as a symbol of mystery and also a symbol of initiation. It was always placed at the entrance to various Masonic temples. So I think that's kind of important here. The idea too that this is an amalgam creature is really interesting. I think first of all, we get this creature in flashes. Basically we see that it's a shape with a lion body and the head of a man. It has this blank and pitiless gaze. It has these slow thighs. But we don't really get this long view. We get like flashes of individual cut up parts, which is kind of like nightmarish.
You know, it's dreamlike in that sense. But because of that, there's this real emphasis on the idea that this is an amalgam animal. It's not a shape of the Sphinx. It's a shape with lion body and the head of the mountain man. And I was thinking about this in terms of. I looked up again the book of Revelation. There's of course the great beast in Revelation. Well, there are actually two beasts. So there's the sea beast, which has this amalgam quality. To it as well. So in chapter 13 of Revelation, the beast which rises up out of the sea has seven heads, ten horns, and on its horns ten crowns.
The beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear and his mouth as the mouth of a leper lion. So he also has this like cut up kind of quality to it. There's a second beast as well, which we could talk about in a minute. But this is a sort of hint that we're getting that this is maybe supposed to be like the Antichrist. Not really sure, but it's something that is reminiscent of this evil creature that comes out of the book of Revelation. So it's not Christ which is coming, but it's this evil, malevolent force.
13:00 Wes: Yeah, I think we're meant to wonder that from the very beginning, the way the poem will end. It'll become a question, I think, of what we're supposed to think of it. Is it evil? Is it good? Does it transcend good and evil? Maybe, but yes, the first side of it that we get is really frightening. And I think you're right, it's sinister, malevolent.
13:20 Erin: And then we have the most interesting part to me, besides the slow thighs moving, which is just a great. I mean, I just love that line and that image. Then we have these shadows of the indignant desert birds that are reeling around it. This is one of the frustrations of the poem for me, actually, because just like we get these flashes of different body parts of the sphinx creature, but not the whole thing together, we also don't get the actual indignant desert birds, whatever those may be. We just get their shadows that are moving around it, which is really strange. And we can imagine that these desert birds are perhaps vultures or something that eats carrion ants. They are indignant. And maybe we could talk for a second about why that word is used. Indignant.
14:02 Wes: Yeah. It's really interesting that we get the reeling shadows. So we're put in the position of looking down towards the ground, right. Instead of up at the birds, we're looking down and maybe we're in the position of the birds at that point. Because, you know, if this were a movie, right, the camera shot would be looking down and we'd be seeing the shadows around the sphinx and not the birds themselves. And we might be as high up as the birds.
14:25 Erin: That's really good point.
14:26 Wes: When I read this poem, I wonder, well, what are they indignant about? My first association is to the possibility that they were actually sitting on the statue so that their perching place, they've lost it. So as soon as the Sphinx becomes animated and starts moving, they fly off, and now they're reeling above it. And then if they are vultures, if they are carrion birds, then you have something here that is going in the opposite direction. So that usually they're oriented towards things that are animated and alive dying, so that they become carrion for them, so that they can perform their function as vultures and go down and eat.
And here's something that's doing the very opposite of that. And we can make a further association to that if we think of redemption or salvation as involving something like a metaphorical kind of eating. This is not like the body of Christ where one can partake of it. This is not a type of beast that's here to meet any kind of need.
15:35 Erin: I mean, the birds don't necessarily know that the statue is not a dead thing. They might actually have the impression that it is like a dead animal. So that could potentially allow for this parallel between these birds wanting to feed on the animal and Christians who partake of the body of Christ. So there's, I think, some kind of parallel there. But rather than Christ who dies and is resurrected and who allows himself to be the food of his followers, the Eucharist is initiated from him. So he allows people to eat of his body and blood. On the other hand, we have this inversion of that in which these desert birds are indignant because the thing that has come to life has not allowed, you know, the birds to feed on it.
Or that desire has been something somehow like subverted or inverted, where they can't eat. I think there's also supposed to be a parallel here with. Or at least it brings to mind for me, a parallel here with the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, which is often seen as a dove. So you have the dove versus the vultures. And then the vultures create these shadows on the ground, like you say. And it actually makes me think of the wording of the Annunciation from the Bible. So when the angel Gabriel tells Mary that she's going to. To conceive Christ in her womb, she's going to conceive of the Holy Spirit.
It's worded as the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee. So there's this idea that when she actually becomes pregnant with Christ, when the incarnation happens, it's when the Holy Ghost sort of like flies or hovers over her head and casts a shadow down upon her In a sense, you know, it's not quite literal. This is kind of making it more. But it's also then the fact that it's a vulture that's indignant and the shadows are reeling around this animal. Certainly that use of the word shadow is evocative of that portion of the Bible.
17:30 Wes: Interesting.
17:31 Erin: Yeah. So then the image is over, he says the darkness drops again. The vision that he had has ended. But now he knows something. And what he knows is really hard to say, but we'll try. But he says, now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cry cradle. So there's a lot to unpack here and a lot that's kind of confusing, but okay, so 20 centuries of stony sleep. So we know that this animal has been asleep for 2,000 years. And we know, because we talked about his gyres and everything in the previous episode, that he believes that this 2000 year cycle is about to come to an end and this sphinx creature is going to come and supplant this.
18:10 Wes: It's been asleep for longer, but it's been. Because this monument was built right. 2500 BC or something like that. But for 20 centuries of, of that Christ was born 20 centuries before. For 20 centuries of that it's had to worry about. I think we're meant to think that it's been vexed, a nightmare, the rocking cradle has something to do with Christ.
18:31 Erin: So the implication here is that this paganism, or whatever force that we want to associate with the Sphinx has not been put to death by Christianity, it was just sleeping, meaning that it could wake up and return at any time, time. So Christianity has not completely supplanted this. It's just been kind of filling the void while this sphinx was asleep. And it seems as though this rocking cradle of the baby Jesus, rather than keeping it to sleep the way that a rocking cradle normally would in this satisfied, happy, nightmareless sleep, instead it has angered this sphinx creature. It's caused this pagan force to maybe be angry or to cause it to have nightmares and to wake up in kind of a foul mountain mood.
19:19 Wes: Yeah, I love that reversal in this where you think of a rocking cradle. So the Sphinx is not in the cradle. Obviously, if it were in the cradle, maybe it would be soothed by that. Maybe it would have been a better sleep. But the rocking cradle is off somewhere else and the Sphinx is tormented by its very existence. And so then we have to think about what has it been vexed by? What is it about Judeo, Christian Values that's so vexing. We can think of a few different things. One of them is just that the war, the anarchy that Yeats talks about in the first part of the poem is not actually historically unusual.
It's not historically unusual if we take it to mean war and disorder. And Christianity has been a significant source of war and destruction. So for a long time the Church, right, was also a powerful political entity and there were crusades and wars over religion and eventually Protestantism and disintegration into factions. So one might think on one level that this is part of what's vexing, but I'm not sure that would be entirely right, because I think it has something to do. We read the portions from a Vision where Yates is talking about a transition from an age of necessity and truth and goodness and mechanism and science and democracy, all these things that he associates to together to one of freedom and aristocracy and war.
So I wouldn't take this just as a critique of the horrors of the last 2000 years and the extent to which they might have something to do with religion. I would take it as a critique of these sorts of values. So it really does parallel the Nietzsche critique of the ascetic and the ways in which, and I think here even of our Keats episode, the ways in which there's a lack of negative capability and the sort of irritable reaching after truth, the asceticism of science and the repression of instinct, the self denial involved in both a scientific frame of mind and in a Christian frame of mind.
So maybe there's something sinister about these ceremonies of innocence. Maybe they're lies. Maybe they dampen down the imagination. These aristocratic values and virtues are compromised by them. Excellence, let's say an ancient Greek conception of excellence, or maybe some other conception of excellence as strength and domination and so on. So those could be some of the things which are vexing to the beast. The beast could be a representative of that sort of critique. And for Nietzsche, at the very bottom of this critique is the fact that he thinks they lead to Nietzsche.
He thinks they lead to a sense of meaninglessness. It's not sustainable. First of all, they're actually Christianity and morality in general. It's actually motivated by nihilism. It's a nihilism predicated upon the inability on powerlessness, on being a slave, for instance. He calls it slave morality. And their logical endpoint is explicit nihilism, the death of God. And then the question is, what comes next? So that's the sort of critique I see at work here. Well, Not Nietzsche in particular, but just this general idea. My question really is, you know, how do we explain the being vexed?
So I'm thinking out loud there. I'm just. I think there might be some other ways to think about this.
22:48 Erin: Not to completely undercut that and retreat immediately back into the religious. But as I promised earlier, there are two beasts in Revelation. The sea beast is the one with that amalgam quality. But then there's a dragon beast which actually gives the sea beast its authority. And this beast is the one who in Revelation is standing before the woman who it's pretty much agreed upon, represents Mary, who's the Queen of Heaven. She's pregnant and she's ready to be delivered of a baby. And this dragon beast is actually waiting before her, ready to, as it's put in the Bible, devour her child as soon as it's born.
I think that we're actually kind of like with the shadows of the desert birds and the idea of revelation, the use of that word, revelation, as of course having for Christian society a particular kind of meaning, a reference to the book of Revelation. I think we're also maybe supposed to think of this nightmare of the rocking cradle as reminiscent of this Antichrist who wants to eat this child. And we have some hints of maybe the meaning of what eating this child is. The indignance of the desert birds because they can't feed upon this evil force or this sphinx spores.
I don't want to say evil. So this anti force, I mean, even if we don't say ascribe value of good and evil, there is this anti Christian idea here which is best exemplified by images of the Antichrist, the thing that is annoyed by the rocking cradle, the force that wants to eat the baby so that it can't come into the world and bring Christian values and all of those implications, even if we don't think of it as a redeeming force, just whatever this gyre and its Christian society has produced in the world. And so this other force which is going to take its place, we are imagining that now at the end of this Christian life cycle, this gyre, it's now successfully going to, in a metaphorical sense, eat this baby and produce this new Christless anti Christian world, which is, you know, subjective rather than objective, which has that list of qualities that you read, rather than the collective, the individual, et cetera.
And so by saying that that's, you know, I think for some people like the Antichri, you know, that's obviously a bad thing. But I think what he's doing is he's using these images to just describe whatever is not Christian as a way to just say that this is going to be whatever the opposite of that force is in terms of the values of this successive idea system. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. Another interesting and sort of complicating element of this is again, like said before, what does it mean to be born?
What does it mean that this animal which has woken up or become resurrected in Egypt and is now walking toward Bethlehem, what does it mean for that thing to be born? Well, perhaps in a sense it's being born again. This is again reminiscent of the idea of baptism, but this baptism, rather than being the ceremony of innocence in the first stanza, it's that drowned, that upside down version of that. Maybe this is the ceremony of evil, or if not evil than this anti Christian ceremony which is creating chaos, anarchy, dispersion, or propagating that rather than creating this holistic collective body of Christ.
26:11 Wes: So this is part of the problem of what the ending means. Does the new age that's coming upon us, is that a continuation of anarchy and chaos or is this a restoration of order?
26:24 Erin: Right, that's one of the things I struggled with.
26:26 Wes: Here's another list of adjectives from a vision, he says, where the primary heir of Christ is dogmatic, leveling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace, its means and end. The antithetical era of the beast will be expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical. Is that a solution? Is he endorsing that? It's unconscious. I mean, another way of reading this is you could straightforwardly critique it without getting into his whole system of different ages as a critique of the revolutionary ethos or the progressive ethos. So you might say there's no way for us to fashion a conception of a better future if that involves some sort of rapid transition.
Look what happens as soon as you start talking about second comings or revolutions. This is what happens. This is what is actually visited upon the world. This is the unconscious reaction that'll inevitably be. So I don't know that that's necessarily the right reading, but that's another angle to take with this. I think if the stuff we've read from Yeats, A Vision, gives us a more comprehensive way to look at this, but on first blush one might read that. And I think there are obviously anti revolutionary elements to this poem. So what is the Slav slouching about?
I love this use of the slouching as a verb for movement here.
27:50 Erin: Yeah, that's great as an active verb. It makes me think that the animal is wounded. Is that the wrong association to make?
27:59 Wes: No, I hadn't thought of that. But that's really interesting.
28:01 Erin: I always thought of this wounded loping, you know, the cat in the desert or whatever. It's like I keep wanting to make Lion King associations, which is just like really, really stupid. Like. Oh yeah, it's like Scar and Lion King or something. It seems wounded to me. Or it seems like it's not happy to be traveling or it's not able to travel effectively.
28:21 Wes: It's definitely pissed off.
28:23 Erin: Yeah, it's not pissed off in a way that's kind of speeding it towards Bethlehem. It's pissed off like it doesn't even want to bother, but it's going anyway.
28:30 Wes: I don't know. And that's the interesting thing about the movement of cats, right? There's an ill defined line in cats between their indifference and their laziness. On the one hand, and they're stealth and prowling and subterfuge on the other. They move in this very expert way. But there's a kind of casualness to it as well. And the other contradiction here is between we think of slouching as involving poor posture and there's kind of a slouchy and sorry to keep reducing the sphinx to a cat, but this is the most important for the movement purposes part of it.
We think of slouching as involving poor posture posture, but in a way a cat can move as it's crouched down. It's a kind of expertness to that sort of posture. And finally there's this association between the slouching posture in human beings and kind of lack of discipline or even poor moral character. I think these are natural associations. But we're not meant to think of the beast as undisciplined or unexpert in its movements. But we are supposed to wonder about the moral implications of this. So slouching is just such a perfectly ambiguous word for all of this.
It's part of what makes it hard to tell what the beast actually is exactly. Is it a lowlife, is it criminal? Or is it more like a beast of prey, let's say, is it more human than suffer from the evaluation that attend upon the human, the kind of moral evaluations that we make? Or if it's more like an animal, does it transcend those evaluations? And so the sorts of things that we might blame a human being for, sociopathy, for instance, criminality in a cat, that natural Sociopathy is just impressive and powerful and even admirable.
30:24 Erin: Wow. All I can say is that you are no slouch in your analysis of that slouch.
30:29 Wes: Thank you very much.
30:31 Erin: Yeah, so maybe we should talk about just what it all adds up to. Or did we already?
30:36 Wes: So it certainly has conservative sympathies and in earlier drafts of it there's mentions of Burke and Pitt, so two denouncers of the French Revolution. But I think the very first draft celebrated the fact that the German Free Corps went to Russia in an attempt to end the revolution there. And that's a sort of proto fascist. And the Free Corps was itself proto fascist. So you could read this as Yates endorsing the reactionary and endorsing counter revolutionary violence, and to the extent that he does that, endorsing fascism. But Yates himself, maybe in a kind of self serving way, wanted to see this as a premonition of coming fascism and a rejection of it.
So in a letter to Ethel Mannan, for instance, he said, as my sense of reality deepens, and I think it does with my age, my horror at the cruelty of governments grows greater. Communist, fascist, nationalist, clerical, anti clerical, all are responsible according to the number of their victims. I have not been silent. I have used the only vehicle I possess, verse. If you have any poems by you, look up a poem called the Second Coming. It was written some 16 or 17 years ago and foretold what is happening. So you could call that a revisionist and self serving reading by Yeats, but I don't think it's necessarily inconsistent.
There's nothing in here that necessarily says he's prophesying a new age, but that doesn't mean he endorses it or every element of it. It just may be what he thinks is going to happen. As he got older, he was more willing to moralize. I think that's something he was against in a way when he was younger, but he became more political and more willing to moralize as he got older.
32:22 Erin: So, so what that adds up to basically is this idea that no matter what age it is, people have a propensity for violence. And I don't want to say anarchy, because now that's a loaded term. They have a propensity towards evil, whether that be in one system of beliefs or another. And yet Yeats is saying that there's a rejection of the Christian system which has this understanding of that evil nature inherent within all people, but also the potential good need for salvation. And Yeats himself seems to indicate that there is this need for salvation.
But how do you become saved from Christianity, perhaps? Or, you know, how do you have the idea of salvation then, even outside of a Christian system? So there's something rather. I don't know if we put this in religious terms, which I don't really want to. It's almost as though Yeats has this deistic idea of how the world works, that whatever forces are in control are not necessarily good or bad. As I've said before, they are just operating on a cyclical system independent of the needs or the requirements of those people in any given circumstance.
This is where, I mean, if I can just interject my opinion of this poem here, which is not any kind of indictment of its quality or its canonical status or the reasons why it is justly famous to me. It's just so convoluted and so contradictory and paradoxical. You know, this idea of, of this anti Christian society coming about which provides salvation from the Christian society, you know, the fact that he uses all these Christian images and ideas in order to describe the supplanting of Christian images and ideas. It's very difficult for me. It's hard to kind of get your hands around it.
And I think that frustration that I feel when I read this is probably common. I don't know if it's common to you.
34:12 Wes: This gets us back to the Nietzsche critique of morality and Christianity and then also to the anti revolutionary conservative critique. So it's hard not to be ambivalent about such critiques, even if you're not a Christian, for instance, or not prone to progressivism or the revolutionary. So Nietzsche's critique is just that. Look, morality is actually the problem. Morality. There's something fundamentally hypocritical and inhumane about morality. It just suppresses and keeps hidden all of these darker impulses. And in many ways they come out in the system of morality.
So they come out as sadistic punishment. Or even the conception of heaven and hell might be read as Nietzsche read it as kind of vengeful and sadistic. And for Nietzsche, the interest in morality is actually ultimately predicated in will to power. And there's a lot of psychological insight to this. It's not hard to find the very sinister elements of morality. Violence itself is highly moralized. Sociologists and psychologists know this. They know that when people engage in mass violence or even second degree murder, that they are thinking about these things in moral terms.
The other person did something wrong, the other person is evil. The other person deserved to get what they got. The only way to rectify the moral order was to punish the other. And then with the revolutionary critique, look at all the horrors that revolutions lead to. Look at what it means to elevate certain ideals above the well being of actual physical human beings. So those critiques are well taken. But what does it leave you with? Nietzsche himself must be operating according to a system of values. And you could actually end up saying, actually Nietzsche is a great moralist.
He just has a more refined sensibility. Or you could even say, despite the fact that he seemed there are anti democratic or anti liberal elements there, you could just say he's the ultimate classical liberal. He's defending a concept of justice which is prior to and higher than the good, although he would probably reject that characterization himself. But if that's not the case, then what are you left with? What direction are you left with? After such critiques? We can't go back to being what Nietzsche called blond beast, right? We can't go back to being sociopathic monsters who murder each other at will.
We can't dismantle civilization. We're stuck with it. We can't deny that Christian values and the secular versions of those values that still predominate, you know, so whether you're Christian or not, those sorts of values actually predominate in society. You can't deny them in a way that they are necessary. So they have their downsides, but they can't be abandoned. That's the problem. That's why this is so unsatisfying. There's no answer to be given here. There's no better system to be proposed. Nietzsche talks in very vague terms about a gay science, a way of unifying and synthesizing the instinctual and the more ascetic trends in our nature.
A way of elevating the aesthetic and the artistic and the imaginative, making that the basis of our ethics or even a return to ancient Greek virtue ethics. And there's tons of insight into that and tons of practical application, but it's not complete. And then the darker side of Nietzsche is an embrace of elitism, which is entirely unsatisfactory. It's entirely. It comes across as juvenile. Most people can't do that or live up to that. And even people who think of themselves as living up to it don't. We're all just human in the end. We're all vulnerable and flawed.
So conceiving of ourselves as ubermenschen, I think it's. It's an unhelpful vision of the world and it arguably lends itself to fascism, even though Nietzsche was anti fascistic and anti Nationalist, and to the extent that he thought romanticism led to this sort of thing, anti romantic, despite an earlier flirtation with romanticism. So I'm sorry to talk so much about Nietzsche, but I do think it sheds a lot of light on this. These sorts of critiques are important, but they always leave you confused and not knowing where to go. Exactly. So what do we do at the end of this poem when the rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem?
What are we supposed to think? He leaves it as a question, which is the only way you can leave that. I don't know if it's a critique of the poem to be dissatisfied with that or if it's just a critique of our human condition.
38:50 Erin: One of the tenets of incarnational theology, the idea that Christ actually takes human form, is that that is an ennobling philosophy, that Christ is human like us. And therefore if God can become man, then man, you know, made in the image and likeness of God can become sanctified, can become holy, so that God had to eat and even go to the bathroom. And all these things which are considered sort of like other necessities of being human, that these things are therefore sanctified in a sense, or made better, made holy, so that it's not such a terribly ugly thing all the time to be a human.
And so that idea of what being a human means, I mean, I think that in Christianity anyway, though, there is all of this violence, religious wars, et cetera. There is something ultimately compelling and satisfactory about this. Reconciling the evil of humanity with the grace of God and the potential for growth, enlightenment, sanctification, change, redemption. I think Yeats can't help but operate under this idea, even as he's describing this anti Christian force. So certainly the condition of humanity, you know, remains the same. I don't just want to give a pro Christian polemic and say that the result of all this should be that Christianity should remain in place.
And, you know, it's a bad thing when we lose Christianity. Of course I'm going to believe that to a certain extent because I am a Christian.
40:12 Wes: But you're describing a very live important possibility that we just can't reject out of hand, whether it's Christianity or some sort of religious orientation. That's the big question. And we can't simply, you know, even as someone who's as fond of Nietzsche as me, I can't be very presumptuous just to. Nietzsche was anti atheist as well, actually. So this is. Atheism would be a sort of presumptuousness and it's not itself a solution.
40:35 Erin: And I don't mean to say this just in terms of Christianity exclusively. Any kind of great world religion, religion, any of the great religious traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, whatever they may be, they all give us something outside of ourselves. They all try to ennoble humanity or lift up humanity or give humanity something greater than themselves to strive for and also to unite people. And whether that is for good or for ill. Yeah, I don't know. I'm losing it at this point because I just don't want to say that Yates is wrong.
41:10 Wes: Well, why not?
41:11 Erin: Because I don't necessarily think that he's wrong or that Nietzsche is wrong because I don't know enough about it to be able to dismiss Nietzsche out of hand or Yates out of hand or something. But yeah, I think the objective forces that Yates is saying are being supplanted by the subjective forces. I think those, objectively speaking, are better than the subjective in a sense, and better for humans, humanity.
41:34 Wes: I agree.
41:34 Erin: Okay, that's the most bland way I can put it without upsetting people or undermining myself.
41:41 Wes: Most people, I think, would obviously agree, whether they're more prone to the secular and the naturalistic or to the Christian, because those all get tied together, not just by Nietzsche, but by Yates in that first objective phase. So it's important to understand the critiques, but it's difficult to know what to do do once one has comprehended the critique. It's easy to criticize. But what's the solution other than to reform and improve and refine what we already have?
42:09 Erin: Right. And it seems as though we have no choice anyway. I mean, we're all going to be carried away in the blood dimmed tide and we just kind of have to lie back and let ourselves float. But. All right, is that a good place to end? Yep.
42:22 Wes: Thank you. That was a lot of fun.
42:24 Erin: Thank you.
42:27 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to remind you again that if you're listening to this on the feed for the Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help us a lot. You'll also find us@subtextpodcast.com us@patreon.com on the website. You'll find ways to subscribe to email updates and to contact us directly by email or follow us on social media. We would love to get your feedback, including comments on episodes or episode requests or anything else. And once again, thank you for listening.
Things Fall Apart in W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: Part 1
Sep 21, 2020
In 1919, the world seemed to have descended into anarchy. World War I had killed millions and profoundly altered the international order. Four empires, along with their aristocracies, had disintegrated. Russia was in a state of civil war, and Ireland was on the verge of its own. It’s these events that helped inspire William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” which famously tells us that “things fall apart,” that “the center cannot hold,” and that a new historical epoch is upon us. Just what rough beast is it that slouches, as Yeats has it, toward Bethlehem? Wes & Erin give their analysis of the first stanza of the poem.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:09 Wes: In 1919, the world seemed to have descended into anarchy. World War I had killed millions and profoundly altered the international order. Four empires, along with their aristocracies, had disintegrated. Russia was in a state of civil war, and Ireland was on the verge of its own. It's these events that helped inspire William Butler Yeats poem the Second Coming, which famously tells us that things fall apart, that the center cannot hold, and that a new historical epoch is upon us. Just what rough beast is it that slouches, as Yeats has it, towards Bethlehem? That's the subject for today's discussion. This is Wes Alwan.
0:46 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
0:58 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. So, Erin, I have a confession to make.
1:17 Erin: Oh, gosh, do I want to know what this is?
1:21 Wes: The confession is that I associate this poem with a. I was going to say a stupid movie, but actually, I think it's a great movie. Maybe it's both stupid and great, but. Ghostbusters?
1:30 Erin: Yeah, sure. You mean in the sense of a disaster of biblical proportions coming on the city, fire and brimstone, dogs and cats living together, that sort of thing.
1:41 Wes: Right, Exactly. I'm thinking of two things. One of them is the end of the movie where there's a Sumerian God that appears, Gozer the Gozerian. And Gozer is there to destroy the world. And then the second part of that is just after an initial showdown with Gozer, I think the Ghostbusters have a small Pyrrhic victory for a while. But then Gozer says she will come back by taking the form of whatever one of the Ghostbusters thinks of first. And so the form she ends up taking is the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And Stay Puft. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And I can't think of an apocalypse without thinking of that figure marching through New York. Yeah.
2:25 Erin: Moving its slow thighs down Fifth Avenue or whatever street that was. Yeah.
2:29 Wes: I'm reminded of that also by the fact that the second part of this poem takes such a turn, and Yeats says that he has a kind of vision and in a way the vision seems to intrude upon the poem so that it's not just that he's imagining a second coming or conjuring it up himself. It's a prophecy, and it's prophetic in the sense that it somehow comes from outside of him, is given to him.
2:57 Erin: I was trying to describe this poem to someone when I was talking about the discussion that we were going to have today and they were asking me, well, what is this poem about? And it's rather difficult to say. I mean, I really. I could barely even come up with a summary. I think I finally came up with one. But it's a strange poem. It's an abstract poem. It's kind of in the ether. It doesn't really seem to have a foot in real life because it's so ritualistic in its language. Maybe we could try to give a summary of it once I read it and we give a little background.
3:27 Wes: Yeah, sure.
3:28 Erin: Okay. Because I feel like that would be useful because it is so unwieldy in a lot of ways, the subject matter.
3:33 Wes: It is. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Why don't you give it a reading?
3:36 Erin: Okay. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dim tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the second coming is at hand. The second coming. Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight. Somewhere in sands of the desert a shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again. But now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
4:36 Wes: Very nice.
4:38 Erin: I feel like I should have a
4:39 Wes: deeper voice, at least during the second part. It should be raspy and satanic. Possession. The possession part.
4:48 Erin: So yeats was born June 13, 1865. He died January 28, 1939, at the age of 73. And this poem was written in 1919. It was originally published in a journal called the dial in 1920. And then it was included in his 1921 book, Michael Robartes and the Dancer. And as you said in the intro written, 1919 is obviously on the heels of World War I, the Russian Revolution and unrest in Ireland. And I think it's important to know that Yeats, though he has Irish sympathies, was actually a member of the Protestant ascendancy. His family was very pro nationalist, but they were, you know, sort of originally English at some point, and he spent
5:29 Wes: a good amount of his childhood in England.
5:32 Erin: Yeah. I think his father was descended from a Williamite soldier. So English by heritage, perhaps, which is sort of interesting. It's something that maybe I want to talk about in a bit with the Falcon and the Falconer.
5:42 Wes: There are apolitical tendencies to his work, at least early on, and that I think he resisted, but they come to the fore later on. So he had nationalist sympathies, but he was also. So, for instance, he fell in love with Maud, this woman, Maud Gonne, who was sort of an outspoken Irish revolutionary, but he did not sympathize with her politics. He was much more conservative in a way. You'll see some of that conservatism in this poem. But he was deeply affected by the 1916 uprising in Ireland. And a lot of people he knew were actually executed after that.
They led the uprising and ended up being executed. And one of them actually was Maud Gonne. So Maud Gonne had rejected Yeats and married someone else, and her husband was one of the people executed. And Yeats actually ended up proposing to her. After that, it happened. Getting rejected and then proposing to her daughter and getting rejected.
6:43 Erin: But anyway, I was going to say something really mean. I was going to say, like, a dead husband is better than Yeats. But he was. He was really unattractive to her for some reason.
6:52 Wes: Yeah. I don't know the full story of what their relationship, but it's not infatuation. So that's some of the background. So the Easter Uprising in Ireland in 1916. He wrote a really beautiful poem about that called Easter 1916. And it has this beautiful refrain, all changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. This is a poem where he famously gets political. And anyway, he ends up becoming a senator. Right.
7:19 Erin: Did he really? I. Yeah.
7:21 Wes: So he ends up becoming a senator of the Irish Free State.
7:24 Erin: Wow, I did not know that piece. That's really interesting.
7:28 Wes: Yeah.
7:28 Erin: And I think it's important to say that even though he doesn't have the violent nationalistic fervor of Maud Gonne, he is very proud to be Irish. And he was very interested as a poet in shaping a cultural identity for Ireland as independent from any English artistic heritage. For instance, he went around the Irish countryside and gathered fairy tales and folklore from Irish peasants that he later published in this book called the Celtic Twilight. I think that was in the late 1800s. And so a lot of his literary interests were directed towards this strong Irish nationalism and independent heritage.
And a lot of this had to do with the kind of the pre Christian Ireland mythology which ultimately developed his interest in mysticism and the occult. And all of these sort of interesting crazy things that he's going to get involved with, which are going to figure into this poem somewhat. And figure into a lot of his later work seances.
8:25 Wes: And his wife later on, the woman he marries, is a medium and does all this automatic writing. Just inspires his poetry.
8:32 Erin: And you don't really need to know his. He has a vast system of thought that he's developed from all of this interest in the occult and the secret society that he's in called the golden dawn, which practices these magic rituals. And they literally have capes and wands. I mean, it's very. As Auden says in his great elegy for Yeats, he calls Yeats silly. He says a lot of the stuff he's interested in is silly.
8:57 Wes: So this is actually another embarrassing association for me, which is to Arrested Development and the. What is it called?
9:05 Erin: The alliance of Magicians.
9:07 Wes: So Arrested Development and the alliance of Magicians and their motto, we demand to be taken seriously. And then Gob's refrain, illusions. Not tricks, dad. Illusions.
9:22 Erin: Illusions. You don't take my illusions seriously. Yeah. You know, there are a lot of similarities, I think, personality wise, between Gob and Yeats that we can get into. Like, if Yeats took one of those buzzfeed quizzes about, like, what, which Arrested Development character are you? He would definitely be Gob. But.
9:40 Wes: But I think it's important because I don't take the magic seriously or the mysticism seriously. And that, I think might be a deal breaker for some people with Yeats, or at least for some of the poems. But I think he does really transcend that. So even in a poem like this, which, as we'll see, seems to depend upon some of his elaborate mystical system, I think it stands on its own. And it's a great poem regardless.
10:05 Erin: I mean, certainly this provides his ideas, which he elucidated in this book from 1926 called A Vision, was published a few years after the Second Coming. And certainly the Second Coming is operating within this scaffolding that he's talking about in a vision. But it's not necessary. I mean, he uses the word gyre, which could just be a spiral or a circle. You don't necessarily have to know, like you said, that there's all of this scaffolding of symbols and imagery and all of his ideas about these world historical movements. Like the word gyre is, you know, it's in the poem, but it could just mean what it traditionally means, which is just a circle or a spiral. You don't necessarily have to know that he had all of these ideas about gyres that these cones, these spirals, like a tornado, basically, one on top of each other, facing each other, so that the vertices are. How do I put this?
11:00 Wes: They're interlocked. Think of two cones, the vertice of one touching the base of the other, and they're being interlocked and having these movements in relation to each other. I think the most important part of it is just that even though you don't have to know it, it does help to know that he thinks of these gyres as having something to do with historical cycles. So what the second coming is prophesying is a new epoch. So the previous cycle starts with the birth of Christ and goes 2000 years. And that's what seems to be coming to an end.
11:37 Erin: Yeah, and he also believed that the full life cycle of a gyre, he thought was 2,000 years and that there were these smaller and smaller portions that were govern by. For instance, he thought the lunar cycle was very important and the full moon. He thought there were cycles that took place within people's individual lifespans. And then he thought that Also within this 2000 year gyre there were high points at 500 year intervals in which the greatest achievements of civilizations tended to happen around the 500 year mark. So the slices of the pie were successively smaller or Greater within that 2000 year span.
12:12 Wes: Yeah, I think it's actually helpful. The book you mentioned, a vision from 1926, explains some of this, so I'll just read a little bit. He says at the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ, which was narrowing and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however, take its character from a contrary movement of the interior gyre. All our scientific, democratic fact accumulating. Heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself, but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place and will for a time be constantly repeated of the civilization that must slowly take its place.
12:57 Wes: Elsewhere he puts it after an age of necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism, science, democracy, abstraction, peace. Comes an age of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particularity, war.
13:14 Erin: That's really good and helpful.
13:16 Wes: So I think that sets up. The first stanza of this poem describes some of the impetus to this type of prophecy. It almost sounds like the world is. Well, as he puts it, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Right. So things are falling apart, everything's going to hell in a handbasket. That's the first part of the poem. And then the second is he imagines at first the possibility of Second Coming, one that's evocative of Christianity. Right. But then things take a left turn and you get what sounds like a vision of a sort of Antichrist figure awakening and ultimately heading to Bethlehem to be born. So a very shocking turn in the second part of the poem.
13:57 Erin: That's such a great summary. I labored under trying to figure out how to summarize this poem for so long.
14:03 Wes: Well, yeah, give me yours. I know, because you said early on that you had one. What's your.
14:07 Erin: No, it's just. I mean, you said it far more elegantly than I did. I just wrote the first stanza. He's describing the current state of the world, its upheaval and violence through metaphor and abstraction. Then in the second, he predicts or assumes that a Second Coming must be on its way to reckon with this state of chaos and disorder. And the implication is that the Second Coming will be hopeful, restorative, what have you. But then he gets this vision of a creature emerging from a troubled sleep, comes out of the desert and slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. So what awaits the future generations, the recipients of this new order that the Sphinx represents is. It's unknown, but it seems to be sort of sinister, but it's hard to tell.
14:45 Wes: Right. We can talk a little more about that as we go on, but I guess we should start by hitting some of these very famous phrases that have now just become regular parts of our language and even cliches. So every time someone wants to evoke the idea of partisanship or maybe accuse others of partisanship, this phrase, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, comes up. And, of course, the famous novel was named Things Fall Apart and the Center Cannot Hold. So all of this, you see part of the power of the poem in these very evocative phrases that stay with us. And then, of course, at the end, slouching towards Bethlehem, which has also become
15:27 Erin: a. Yeah, the title of a Joan Didion collection of essays. Which is great. Which we might actually cover at some point on this podcast, one of those essays. So the first two lines, turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. So falconry is the sport of kings. As Wes reminded me before we recorded, the falconer is controlling the falcon through a system of signals. I think that it's by sound, possibly also by sight. So basically what we have is kind of like a broken communication. So we can imagine the falcon spinning in the air, making a circle above the falconer's head, and he has to stay within a certain distance to be able to be communicated to by the falconer.
And perhaps that spinning out of control. Perhaps the falcon has made too wide of a circle or something and can no longer hear the falconer who's supposed to be controlling it. And so there's this breakdown in communication. So that with a falconer, since it's the sport of kings, we think of this as a very aristocratic sport. Perhaps there's the metaphor there, the implication there is the falconer is like any kind of system of control or the monarchy or what have you, and the falcon is maybe the populace. I mean, do you agree with that, Wes?
16:45 Wes: Yeah, I think that's one possible reading of this. So you could read it as a central political authority, but you can also read it as we'll see in this poem as having something to do with the governing ethos of a society. So the falconer metaphor helps explain the center cannot hold this phrase, which before really thinking about this poem and when I saw it used, I actually thought of the center as being the moderate center between two partisan extremes. But I don't think that's actually what it's doing here in the poem. We think of the falconer as being at the center of that circular motion that the falcon is making.
Right. The bird moves in a circular way around the falconer. So it's not just that it flies off, it's that. That circle, that gyre, so it's a spiral, really, gets wider and wider until all communication is lost. So the center cannot hold, in the sense that when things fall apart, they cannot maintain their relation to this governing center. I think that governing center can be read, as I said, in a lot of different ways. One, as a central political authority, maybe monarchy, but again, could have something to do with the sorts of values that hold a civilization together.
So mores the moral fabric of a society. I think those sorts of things form the regulative principles that govern a society and give it some cohesion.
18:15 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking a lot about the center not holding and what that might mean. And I think that we have a lot of overlap there. But I thought about it, maybe even too intensely, and came up with all these different ideas in physics that it might relate to, like specifically with the idea of the cone. Right. So it actually started to. The more I thought about it, the more it reminded me of the inverse square law, which is the intensity of any kind of, like, radiating signal, whether that be light or sound or anything, is equal to the inverse of distance squared.
So what that means is, as I understand it, and our listeners are going to know way more about this than me. So forgive me with my bad explanation, but say you're standing on the ground and you have a flashlight and you're pointing it up into the sky in the same way that you could think of the shape of the gyre as being this ice cream cone shape, or the falcon and the falconer, like the falconer is on the ground kind of holding the flashlight, and the falcon is charting. The circle in the sky is this cone. So the person on the ground is holding a flashlight, pointing it up in the sky.
And basically anything that propagates through the ether, like the light, is going to disperse as it gets further and further out from the flashlight, from the source. So it's also getting weaker and weaker as it propagates through the air. So it's the inverse of the distance squared means that it's one over the radius squared. So basically, like, when it's a foot away from the flashlight, it's pretty strong, but when it's two feet away, it's actually already down three quarters of that strength and it just keeps on. So this dispersal through the air means that the further away someone is, the less of the flashlight they can actually see, basically.
So there's a breakdown of the light through the air, meaning that there's kind of like a breakdown of communication. I was also thinking about this in terms of, like, centripetal force and all this other stuff. But basically, what's interesting about that, I mean, it can kind of also just be related to thinking more about the metaphor itself, about training an animal. Animal training means that you are controlling the animal and they have a certain openness to temptation. But the closer you are to them and the more control you have over them, the less likely it is that they will be tempted to go away from you.
Right. So if a falcon is circling in a wider and wider arc, that means that they're further away from the controlling source. So they have a greater openness to temptation. Seeing a rabbit or something. Interesting. Yeah. That they might. That they might, you know, shoot away from the falconer that they're supposed to be responding to, because their temptation outside of that falconer is. It becomes too great. And so the further away, the more of a chance that they can be tempted and not be controlled. So this can be related to physical distance.
I mean, for Americans, we might think of this as being the colonies. It was very difficult for King George to control us because we're far away from the controlling source.
21:07 Wes: Being farther means developing different mores, becoming a different people. And so that's part of how control is lost.
21:14 Erin: But then also, if we think about this in terms of World War I and the nations involved in World War I that were on the continent, the countries losing the faith and the goodwill of their people by embroiling them in this war, there creates a kind of a mental distance which might account for some of this as well.
21:31 Wes: Yeah, so that's what I was thinking of with the colonies as well, that sort of mental distance. You're reminding me that we can see this furtherness, this distance in terms of time as well. Western societies have inherited these two important traditions, one Greco Roman and one Christian. We might think of those things as the center. And as time goes on, we move farther and farther away from that center, and we. We get farther away from those sorts of values. And at some point, there might even be a crisis. So this is the critique that Nietzsche gave.
And actually, it turns out that Yeats was a fan of Nietzsche and read a lot of Nietzsche and even wrote about Nietzsche. So this critique of the advent of nihilism in society, which is one of the problems of modernity, and Yeats is sort of on the cusp of that, is the loss of faith, the loss of a sense of meaning for the world, the loss of a real connection to religion, a religion like Christianity. So Nietzsche, for instance, thought in the 19th century, yes. You know, a lot of people still go to church, but is their faith vital? Is it really important to them?
Do they really believe? When he talks about the death of God, that's his way of dramatizing the fact that God has died for people psychologically, spiritually, even if they pay lip service to God. So whether we think about this in terms, terms of religious faith or the values involved in Greco Roman society, including aristocratic values. So as we mentioned, Yeats's conservative tendencies here, and he was a fan of the aristocracy, we can think of this temporally as well. The widening gyre involves a historical movement that attenuates certain types of values and puts us in a nihilistic crisis.
So what do we do to fill the void? Nietzsche had his own interesting solution to that and it's problematic. And I think part of the problem with this poem is once you evoke the problem of nihilism, it's hard to plug that hole, so to speak. It's hard to give any sort of satisfying solution.
23:33 Erin: Yeah, that's great. What kind of results from all of these things breaking down, according to Yeats, is mere anarchy. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, he says in the fourth line, and I was thinking about this too, like what's the significance of the fact that he doesn't just say anarchy, but mere anarchy? Almost as if he's implying that anarchy is kind of a force, like, you know, the force without all of the, of course, these central powers that are controlling it or these central values that are put in place and thus it's a more natural state. And this hints at a return to the pagan, the collective forces, the anti authoritarian forces which are happening in the first stanza or coming about.
24:13 Wes: Yeah, I love this phrasing mere anarchy because to a contemporary reader it might look like he's minimizing the importance of anarchy. The word mere might suggest to us one of the meanings might suggest that it's not all important that anarchy is loosed upon the world. Anarchy is something small or trivial. But the way the word was used at Yeats time, it could often just mean pure or absolute. So it's a way of saying complete anarchy is loosed upon the world. But I think there is a double meaning here. I don't know how well it holds up at the time Yeats was writing, but it's just the sort of thing that you were describing where the smallness of the.
It's as if anarchy is an approach to nothingness. It's like as close as you can come to nothing without actually being nothing. So that's one way to reinterpret the smallness here. Not as unimportant, but as in a loss of being or even a loss of form, as a kind of formlessness which will prefigure the talk of the drowning, of the ceremony, of an innocence that we'll talk about in a second.
25:17 Erin: I almost wonder if this mereness of the anarchy is actually further confused by the blood dimmed tide being loosed in the next line as a metaphor for mere anarchy and yet with something that's blood dimmed Like I just think of the opacity of blood in the water. Like it makes the water harder to see through, it dims it, it dilutes the water. Whereas mere anarchy is undiluted, pure, sheer. So there's something like staining about this anarchy as well, the fact that it's dimming the with blood. So there's a sort of strange like two opposites happening here.
25:53 Wes: I didn't think of that. That's very good. So what's really great about the idea of the blood dimmed tide, you take what might be a common image or a cliche. Right. So if he had said something like the rivers run red with blood or something like that, he would be trucking in a commonplace here. He alters that in an interesting way. So we might think of blood as staining water, but here he adds the image of dimming. What I think that is in contrast to is the image of clear water as having something to do with translucence and the visibility of the future and being able to project ourselves into the future.
So a kind of optimism, the dimming. Here we can think about that as having something to do with the loss of communication that we saw early on with the Falconer. Except I think we are thinking of that, that in many ways is primarily backward looking or spatial, but now we get some sort of relation to the future. So there's an opacity, as you mentioned, there's an opacity and I think it blocks out future hopes, let's say. And I think that's important because what he's describing here in light of, you know, we talked about the revolution in Ireland and Russia.
What he's critiquing in some ways is the revolutionary ethos in which bloodshed is worth it. Right. So there's a means justifies the end's approach to the world. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. To quote Lenin. I think that's part of what's being critiqued here.
27:28 Erin: Yeah, that's really good. With the Ceremony of Innocence in line six, that the blood dimmed tide is coming and drowning the Ceremony of Innocence. He's saying that a new order that is not Christian or perhaps even anti Christian is coming in. He's really getting a lot of use out Christian symbology and a Christian ethos here. So obviously with the Ceremony of Innocence, I think of baptism, which is you sprinkle or you pour water on the head or there's even, you know, full immersion baptism in water and it's supposed to be a rite of admission into the church, into the body of Christ.
So rather than being washed with water, as the term goes, you're being stained with blood in a sense by being washed with this blood dimmed tide. And it is a drowning force or killing force now rather than a, a life giving force. So there's obviously some sort of topsy turvy thing happening here where for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So since the world was once controlled by Christianity, it seems as though this force that's coming to take its place is turning Christianity inside out in a way.
28:38 Wes: Yeah, I really like that because it gives you the image. So it writes baptism large, right, or an anti baptism. To talk about a flood being loosed upon the world, a flood that's dimmed by blood, is to talk of a macro level baptism for the entire world, or anti baptism. And the thing that it wipes out, of course, is the more traditional concept of baptism. The smaller ceremonial baptisms that are part of everyday life is what it takes away. So you get this great big baptism that on a cosmological level, let's say, that wipes out the human instantiations.
29:15 Erin: And yet the great big baptism seems to be making smaller parts out of it in a sense. Like one of the things I read about in relation to a vision, I read this great summary of it online that talked about how there were these contrasting states of objectivity versus subjectivity that Yeats was ultimately trying to get at. So he believed that the objective is anything that's collective, unifying, where the individual is part of something greater than itself, society, God, you know, the body of Christ or whatever. Whereas the subjective is individualizing itself, separating people.
It's differentiating. Not necessarily that these things are inherently good or bad. I think maybe that type of binary is not particularly useful to understand Yeats, but here it has. The significance of baptism is that you all become one. You all become part of the body of Christ, meaning the church. You all become the collective. It's objectifying. And yet like you're saying, with this tide which comes and just washes over people here, where it's turned on its head, it actually has the effect of individuating people and causing people to actually break from each other, to separate.
And for the fabric, this tissue, this objective collective tissue that was holding everyone together, is now actually evaporating in this tide and everyone is being dispersed and particulate.
30:31 Wes: You're reminding me that we can read the ceremony of innocence in a larger way as having something to do with the Various norms and manners and ways of behaving towards each other which conceal or check our baser instincts, Right? So even if we're frustrated with people, or even if we have really aggressive impulses or sexual impulses, all these things, part of being civilized is to keep these things under wraps. But it shows up at a very micro level. So just having good manners while you're eating at dinner with someone is part of that. Those sorts of things are ceremonies, in a way, and they're ceremonies that project a kind of innocence which.
Which it's there and it isn't there, Right? So at an instinctual level, it's not there. The ceremony hides something, the ceremony conceals something. So when you drown those sorts of things, you obliterate the types of norms that make us behave in innocent ways towards each other. So that's Christian morality, but it's also the morality that descends from Christianity. It's Enlightenment morality. So even though you might think of Enlightenment values as superseding and in a way rebelling against Christian morality, the way way Nietzsche thought of this, he saw it as an extension of it, an extension of an essentially ascetic trend in which instincts are suppressed.
So even to be focused on scientific truths, in a way, is to repress the instinctual and to engage in these types of ceremonies of innocence.
32:04 Erin: That's really good. I love that. So then, in these last two lines, the lines that have launched a thousand and editorials, there's a sort of paradox happening here too, I think. I'm not quite sure. It's actually maybe more complex than those bad editorials would have you believe. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. People who are good, who are centered, moral, just, et cetera, they're not people who are going to be carried away, perhaps, by these violent passions. And yet it seems to me that convictions are also needed to hold people steady and to make people the best. Am I reading too much into this?
32:45 Wes: I think you're right. I think part of this there's this interesting contrast between conviction and passionate intensity, right? He could say the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of it. So you get an opposition between two things which aren't exactly opposites. They have an oblique relationship to each other. So do the worst exactly have conviction? Maybe conviction is something that you can't legitimately have if you are one of the worst. It's too deformed or bastardized to really be called conviction. And maybe passionate intensity is just what it becomes.
It's kind of empty. It's hard to say what it means for the best to lack all conviction. I think part of it is just that you might think of those who are virtuous or those who are morally upstanding as coming to the point where they are in a state of doubt. They are essentially skeptical or agnostic about the truth. So they're not willing, for instance, to kill and subjugate other people for the sake of a higher truth, for the sake of their revolutionary values. To take one example of that, those sorts of the philosopher de Beauvoir calls this the serious man.
This is the type of man who would do this, who takes such ideals so seriously that they become more important than human suffering, human life, human dignity, and any sort of decency. Again, we go back to a means justifies the ends type of approach to the world. So the best don't do that. So that's inherently weakening. You get this inherent tension between being virtuous and practical action in the world, because those sorts of actions often put you in the position of asking you to sacrifice life, or at least sacrifice the social order or social stability for the new stage that you would like to reach in society.
The implication concerns the pros and cons of revolution, the possibility of getting to a more just society versus the horrors that might be involved in getting there.
34:55 Erin: That's great.
34:56 Wes: So I think that's a good place to end part one. We've done the first stanza, eight lines, and we have how many lines to go?
35:04 Erin: 14.
35:05 Wes: 14 lines to go, but we'll fit that into an hour. patreon.com subtext so thanks Erin.
35:19 Erin: Thanks Wes.
35:21 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to remind you again that if you're listening to this on the feed for the Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help us a lot. You'll also find us@subtextpodcast.com us@patreon.com subtext on the website. You'll find ways to subscribe to email updates and to contact us directly by email or follow us on social media. We would love to get your feedback, including comments on episodes or episode requests or anything else. And once again, thank you for listening.
Filial Ingratitude in in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
Sep 14, 2020
Do we owe parents our gratitude for our upbringing? What if they haven’t done such a great job? And anyway, perhaps we inevitably resent all the forces that have shaped the characters that confine and limit us. If so, the quest for filial gratitude is ultimately hopeless. It could even be a kind of madness: a foolish attempt to transcend the same formative forces that we resent in our parents, to be “unaccommodated,” free of the “plague of custom.” Wes and Erin give an analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get this and other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:08 Wes: Do we owe parents our gratitude for our upbringing? What if they haven't done such a great job? And anyway, perhaps we inevitably resent all the forces that have shaped the characters that confine and limit us. If so, the quest for filial gratitude is ultimately hopeless. It could even be a kind of madness. Today we'll be discussing Shakespeare's King Lear. This is Wes Alwan, and this is
0:34 Erin: Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext.
0:44 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. All right, so let's start with a little bit of a synopsis.
1:03 Erin: So, King Lear is a play that takes place in pre Roman England, so in Celtic times. And King Lear is a man who, in the first scene, he's a very powerful king, but he wants to abdicate his throne. So he gathers everyone around and he asks his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, to profess their love for him and thereby win a third of his kingdom. And and so Goneril and Regan make very fawning statements about how much they love him. But Cordelia, even though she's his favorite and she actually loves him the most, really can't bring herself to make this kind of public declaration.
And Lear sees it as a lack of love and a betrayal. And so he casts her out and instead divides his kingdom in half and giving half to Goneril and half to Regan. Basically, what he discovers is that Goneril and Regan do not love him and just continually downgrade his retinue and insult him. And ultimately they cast him out into a storm on a terrible night and don't give him shelter in either of their homes. This leads to his madness, to Cordelia coming back to save him, and ultimately in both of their deaths, tragically. And meanwhile, a secondary plot.
The Duke of Gloucester, who's a nobleman of course, has two sons, one of whom is legitimate Edgar and one is illegitimate Edmund. And he also has some problems with his children. So Edgar really does love Gloucester. Edmund does not, because of his illegitimacy, he feels as though he's constantly being ridiculed for his lesser state. And so he plots against his father and brother, resulting in his father's blinding and Edmund's own death. And at the end of the play, it's presumed that Edgar takes over the kingdom because everyone else is dead.
2:52 Wes: Everyone ends up dead. That's how, you know, one of Shakespeare's tragedies has come to an end. So I thought I'd give a little of some of the background because I looked into this a little bit, some of the source material that Shakespeare uses for this. So there is a play that was registered in 1594 and published in 1605 called the True Chronicle History of King Lear. King Lear spelled L E I R. So that play was written anonymously and I read a lot of that play as well. And it's really amazing to read. You can see some of the things that Shakespeare is incorporated.
Although the play is way more basic, it's really. There's a dramatic difference in the level of sophistication between the two plays. But this story goes back a long way. So of course it's, you know, it's pseudo historical, it's a legend, sort of in the same category as King Arthur, but it's told in Raphael Holinshed's the Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, which is where Shakespeare got a lot of his source material. But it goes back to a book called History of the Kings of Britain, written in about 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. There's also a.
Around the same time, a little bit before, around 1574, something called mirror for Magistrates by I guess by John Higgins. But it's a bunch of different authors, I think, with a lot of different legends and their poems, basically. And one of them is called Queen Cordilla. There are various ways in which her name is put, but it's written in first person and in the original tale it's actually sort of a happy ending. So Lear is restored to the throne and rules for two years and then dies. But then there's more antics with Goneril and Regan and Cordelia is put in prison where she ends up committing suicide.
I recommend that people go look at some of that and the play written around the same time, just before I think. So here's Cordelia at a critical scene in the anonymous play. I cannot paint my duty forth in words. I hope my deeds shall make report for me. But look what love the child doth owe the father the same to you I bear, my gracious lord. One of the reasons I bring that up is just I was thinking a lot about the motivations for what happens in the first scene, which is it's a really Weird scene. And I've always, always thought that. And then getting more into this, it seems like, you know, it's something that's much discussed critically because Cordelia is King Lear's favorite.
But he's very quick to basically completely disown her. And she's somewhat obstinate in refusing to allay his concerns. And, you know, he feels slighted by her failure to declare her love for him. It seems almost like a little bit of a contrived conflict or exaggerated. And actually, in the source texts, it really is. It's less. The conflict isn't quite so dramatic, and nor is anything that happens. So the madness of King Lear in this play, for instance, isn't nearly so intense in any of the source material. Shakespeare does lots of interesting and sophisticated things.
And the other thing for people who do any comparisons, is that you'll see that the language that Shakespeare is using is not ordinary, or at least by comparison. You can read the other King Lear play from start to finish without ever looking up a word or being confused about something that's going on syntactically, which is, for me, not the case with Shakespeare. You know, it's interesting to compare those sources when thinking about the motivations, because it's clear that Shakespeare is doing something very deliberate. And the unlikeliness, maybe, or the very dramatic quality of this conflict is deliberate.
And there's lots of hints.
6:47 Erin: It's kind of odd to me, too, the structure of it, I guess, because we don't get any indication of who Lear is as a man or who any of his daughters are. We have to see it play out. So except for these 30 on line 35 of the first scene, Lear comes in and this all begins. So there's this very brief conversation between Gloucester, Kent and Edmund, where we set up the one family, Gloucester and his relationship with his two sons. But very briefly, only 34 lines worth. And then Lear comes in, and the whole thing starts. The whole ceremony starts, and that's it. We don't get any context in order to understand these people.
7:24 Wes: And. Yeah, and that's something that we badly need because we want to understand how it is that Lear could put such trust in Goneril and Regan because they don't seem like such nice people. And we want to know how they came out so bad and how Cordelia came out so good. And we want to know why he would be so quick to cut off the daughter who is his favorite. We want to know more about what motivates this guy to do something so risky. And Strange. Which is to give up his kingdom and become completely dependent on his daughters and not reserve any power for himself and do something so drastic.
Yeah. So as you pointed out, we don't really get any of that. And what we do get very quickly thrown into the conflict. The other thing we want to know is why he, someone who seems so rash, has such fierce loyalty from his. From Kent and from Cordelia herself and Gloucester and the fool and ultimately Edgar. Yeah. So he's obviously admired. He's done something to be admirable. We just don't know what it is because he doesn't act that way in the play.
8:37 Erin: That's exactly what I was going to say. The strange thing for me, reading this. So I hadn't read this in a really long time, and then I read it sort of more or less three times. And the first time I kind of was like, wow, this Lear guy is really. I don't remember him being kind of the villain of this. Like, he's so. He's so terrible. And then the second time I was like, oh, okay, you know, maybe he's just like a flawed guy. And then finally, the third time, I felt as though I got to, you know, maybe the reading I'm supposed to have where he's so put upon.
But it's only from, I think those three times of experience with Lear, the character. It's weird. It's almost like read those three times, gave me three times as much background knowledge on which to judge the play itself or just kind of get used to the way that Lear is and to see him for his complexity. But if we look at this opening scene where he makes this request, and I watched one adaptation of this. I listened to one with John Gielgud radio adaptation on YouTube, which I really recommend. But then I watched the Olivier adaptation of this, and Olivier, it's pretty good.
John Hurt is the fool, which is kind of cool, and Diana Rigg is Regan. But Olivier plays this scene with a real twinkle that Gielgud does not have. So Gielgud plays it very straightforward, like, okay, I'm going to ask you all to say how much you love me. And that's a reasonable request. Whereas Olivier is like, hmm, maybe you all can say how much you love me and it'll be fun for me. You know, like that kind of thing. And so he's kind of amused, and he's sort of playing this game with them. And then when Cordelia doesn't play the game, he gets mad as a result of that.
But it was in. Interesting choice. But the only real section where he. He makes this request, he says, this is on line 50, act one, scene one. Tell me, my daughters, since now we will divest us both of rule, interest of territory, cares of state, which of you shall we say doth love us most? That we our largest bounty may extend where nature doth with merit challenge. This is him setting up the stake. So I think this is the first mention of nature in the play. And that word nature appears a ton, a ton of times. So here I believe he's referring to nature as regards to just relationships.
So the natural relationship of a father to a daughter. And so I think what he's saying is that this is going to be pitted against whoever has the greatest merit. So whoever is the best speaker. So that merit is presumably determined by who will speak the best of their father. But for two out of the three daughters, that means whoever is the greatest liar. So whoever actually has the least merit. But why, if he has these three grown daughters, two of them already married, one of them being courted, does he not already know who has the greatest merit?
We know that Cordelia is already his favorite.
11:27 Wes: What we also know is that the territories are. It's already mapped out and divided. And that's the way the entire scene begins. So Shakespeare is very clever with this.
11:36 Erin: Right.
11:37 Wes: So the very first line is. I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. Albany is married to Goneril and Cornwall is married to Regan. And then Gloucester says, it did always seem so to us, but now in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most for qualities so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either as moiety, which is to say the way that kingdoms are divided. Whether we're left to guess a little bit, but I think it's meant to be in every part possible way, whether in any way.
You might think about the differences between the way he's dividing things up, whether it's the amount of land or whether it's the quality of the land or anything like that. It's so equal that you can't detect any preference for any of the daughters. Could also be the case that Goneril and Regan get exactly the same amount, but he's reserved a larger portion for Cordelia. I like to think of it as he's engaged in this act of pseudo magnanimity where he's just evenly. He's already evenly divided things for the daughters for one of the published editions.
So this is a collation of. Or conflation, as they call it, of various different versions of King Lear. There are some differences. And one of them, instead of saying for qualities are so weighed, it says for equalities are so weighed. And I think people had trouble making sense of that, but it makes sense of it as if Shakespeare is being clever, right, about this whole concept of everything being equal. The upshot is the whole thing is a farce. He's not really figuring out how to allot his kingdom based on what they say to him. He's doing something else.
And not only is it a farce, but it's openly such. It's not like everyone else doesn't know that things are already divided up. So that's actually something very strange about the first scene.
13:26 Erin: He's maybe trying to entertain himself, or he's trying, you know, because his court is all in attendance. He thinks of this as some kind of a show or the formal ceremony where he gives this land. And he wants to maybe make other people not think that they're earning it, because you're right, they already know. But maybe just to show off how much his children love him or to make a show of giving them a big present that everyone already knows they're getting. But, yeah, I liked the way Olivier played it because he made it seem like it was a joke that then Cordelia didn't buy into. And the jokey kind of nature of it not only shows Lear's sort of good humor. I mean, good humor that's easily punctured, but it shows that everyone else is in on the joke as well, that he's. He's already divided it.
14:11 Wes: This question of his motivation is really important. It's hard to pin down. And that's one of the reasons I talked about the source material, because that's what kind of what I was looking for was some information on his motivations. And it's something that Shakespeare has consciously avoided. In one of the versions, it differs, but in one of them, it's just that Cordelia doesn't want to get married. So Lear wants to pin her down by getting her thinking about how much she loves him. She'll profess how much she loves him, and then he'll say, okay, if you really love me that much, then you have to get married to this guy.
That's the motivation here. It's much more. Shakespeare's made the dramatic choice, and a very good one, to make us wonder about what the motivation could possibly be, what the motivation for retiring in this way is. You know, he talks of Wanting to give up business and crawl towards death. And, you know, we'll find out in the play, it seems like what he really wants to do is party, get drunk with his men and harass his. Or be rude to his daughters and their servants. Or. I guess he's only ever with Goneril. So Goneril and her servants. But we have to think of some of the deeper motives involve, you know, so, for instance, being treated like a child by Cordelia.
I loved her most and thought to set my rest on her kind nursery. And this idea will come up again and again of him sort of reverting to childhood and turning his children into his parents. But the idea was to do that with Cordelia specifically.
15:49 Erin: What I realized the more times I went through the text is that so many of the characters are kind of overlapping. I mean, certainly Lear and Gloucester are supposed to mirror each other, and they sort of learn the same or attempt to learn the same lessons over the course of the play. But there's a lot of. Between Lear and a lot of the other characters, even between Lear and Edmund and Lear and Edgar. And at the end, when Edmund dies right before he does, he has that moment where he realizes that he's been toying with both Regan and Goneril's affections, and he realizes that they both actually love him and that all he ever wanted was the love of his father.
In this opening scene, I understood his. Again, you know, his motivations more in reading it multiple times. But he seems to me to be a very insecure old man who is used to people fawning and flattering him, but maybe never was sure that people loved him for himself or because of his office, and really was the kind of person who's constantly fishing for compliments because they're desperate for someone to tell them that they love them. And of course, that's never satisfying because you've procured the compliment in the first place, right? So maybe he's asked this of people before and then is never satisfied because he's not sure, well, do they really love me, or are they just telling me this?
And in the end, who ultimately ends up with the love of Regan and Goneril, But. But Edmund, who. Then his sort of internal conflict of being this unloved illegitimate child is then immediately resolved because he says, oh, two people really did love me, and now it's okay. And now I want to make good. I wonder if Edmund is in many ways a less complicated character than Lear, so perhaps his nature is more easily resolved with that realization. But I wonder if that's the same, in a way, Edmund gets what Lear has denied, the love of Regan and Goneril.
17:35 Wes: That's interesting. It's about love, but it's also. Well, it turns out to be about love for Edmund. In the beginning, what seems to have happened is he's being insulted. You can guess that it's a lifetime of that. When Kent hasn't made Edmund's acquaintance and asks Gloucester about his son, Gloucester does something very cruel. So this is set up at the beginning where he volunteers the information that Edmund is a bastard and does it jokingly and tries to make light of it. To say, you know, but I've accepted him as if he were fully a son. But you can imagine Gloucester doing this for Edmund's whole life, for every introduction.
Yeah, this is my bastard son. And so you can understand Edmund's resentment. And he's preoccupied during the play with the idea and this. We'll talk more about nature, but the idea that this is all a matter of custom. And it's silly. He's not really any different from Edgar just because there wasn't some marriage ceremony performed before he was conceived. So he becomes the representative of nature over and against custom. So what he wants in the beginning, I think, is what he's been deprived of is respect. And he seems to want revenge for that and to take his father's estate from Edgar and from the father at any cost.
So I think, as you pointed out, he sort of ends up with the idea that he's beloved. And that's critically what he's been deprived of as well. Getting back to the relationship, to Lear's motivations, I think Lear is. I think of him as the parent who's not sure of his children's gratitude. So he's putting it to the test in a way that we see in other tales of this type. A lover may put their beloved's loyalty to the test by setting them up with someone who's going to seduce them. As, for instance in it happens in Cymbeline. But that's kind of a trope in literary history.
He's putting filial gratitude to the test because he's given so much. And not just that, but he is as a parent. This comes down to a relationship between parent and children, but also between creator and creature, creator and what they have created. And that is something very important and powerful. Right. So it's about being their progenitor and also about raising them and giving them so much care. And then when you get to the end of your life, what you're left with instead of children is adults with their own lives, married or in cordial. Cordelia's case, about to be married and he's about to lose Cordelia, essentially, which I think is the trigger, which we can guess is the trigger for a lot of this.
He's approaching empty nest syndrome territory. So instead of tolerating that, he's going to set things up so he can go be taken care of by Cordelia, but he's going to put filial gratitude to the test in a very ill considered way. So that he's primed to be really offended by Cordelia, really wounded. And that's where we get his explosive disowning of her.
20:41 Erin: I'm curious to know how much in the equation of the parallels between the two families, Gloucester and his two children and Lear and his three. I wonder if Regan and Goneril are the equivalent of Edmund. If, as you say, when Gloucester says, this is my son Edgar and my illegitimate son Edmund. In the same way Lear says, you know, these are my daughters, Regan, Goneril and my favorite Cordelia. The question for me that kept coming up in the entire play because the term nature, the concept of where we get our natures from, comes throughout, as does ingratitude.
And it leaves me with a question, you know, what do we owe our parents? In Edmund's case, perhaps he doesn't owe his father very much because he feels so put upon by his father's treatment of him. And I wonder if we're supposed to extend that parallel to Regan and Goneril, because like I said on the first read, Lear almost seemed to me a villain.
21:31 Wes: Who?
21:32 Erin: Regan and Goneril. They have his number, they know what he wants, they give it to him. That's kind of a sign that they've played this game before. They know, for lack of a better term, what a pain in the ass he is. And they know how to play the game and they know how little Lear's own self knowledge is. And if Lear has been flattered and fond over his whole life and perhaps running a kingdom and had little time for his children, I mean, maybe they've grown up with this sense that he didn't care very much for them. So he wants them to be extremely grateful for this gift.
Whether they got it now or after he died. There would have to have been some reckoning, some division of the kingdom. Probably if he died and all three were ready to inherit, or if he had stipulated it in his will. I take this first scene as Lear almost trying to Crash his own funeral. He's deciding to abdicate and give it all away and have this premature death ritual. And he wants to spy on everybody's eulogies for him. Only he's right there. So they can't be honest. But they were probably going to get it either way. Now, many children who have terrible relationships with their parents, the parents still leave all of their estate to their children.
He wants things both ways, right? He's still king and of course he should still be shown respect. But he wants a certain amount of power after he's abdicated. And of course he wants basic good treatment from his children. But it seems to me that Regan and Goneril's behavior must stem from some deep seated issues with their father that they have no intention of once he hands over the power. They have no intention of being kind to him. Perhaps because he wasn't kind to them.
23:07 Wes: I think we're kind of left confused about Lear's character, what it is before all of this happens. Because Regan in Goneril will say, yes, he never knew himself very well and he's always been rash like this. But I think it's Kent who will at some point say, don't deviate from that patience that you pride yourself on. You're supposed to be this wise. I think it's said multiple times by various people. Your reputation is for a sort of wisdom which I don't think we're supposed to take at face value either. I think we might imagine someone who's played at that, right?
So he's trying to play the role of a parent who doesn't favor this whole idea of equality again between the states. We're meant to think of it in terms of daughters as well. Who hasn't shown favor overtly for any of his daughters in particular and is very conscious of that in the same way he rules his kingdom and strike to be wise and just and all of these things. But I think we're meant to believe that was just on the surface and that it was somewhat hypocritical or just. It didn't run very deep. And one of the signs of that is, of course everyone knew he actually really loved Cordelia the most.
And if that's true, then she seems to adore him. So we know that he doesn't need her to say anything about her love. They've probably had this very obviously close relationship that has induced envy and rage and Cordelia's sisters. But at least Lear thought of himself as trying to be fair and equal. But that's all speculative. But whatever the case, I think when we get the question of what to. I think we are supposed to think about in this play. What children owe their parents more generally. And that's a really interesting question. Because we.
In this whole nature versus nurture question. In the nature part. We inherit certain qualities genetically, right, from our parents. But then we're also raised by them. So I think we have to take the creature creator relation very seriously. There are lots of forces that go into shaping our characters, for instance. And that includes forces other than our parents. But our parents are very, very important. That's what we are bequeathed initially, not their estates or their goods when they die. Our inheritance is the sins they've visited on us. Or are good qualities of character and bad.
And you see this especially in adolescence. But that's a gift in a way. Especially if you're thinking about the good qualities. The ways in which our education. The ways in which our characters and abilities are formed by our parents. But it's also something confining and imprisoning. Right. Character is a sort of prison. It tends us to shape the way we behave. It's included in character our hangups and our defenses. And those are all sorts of things that you can blame on your parents. The very thing that a parent wants gratitude for. Is the very thing that we tend to blame them for.
It's a difficult situation. I raised you and I nurtured you, and I loved you. Yeah. And that's exactly what screwed me up. You may have done your best, but even the parents who do their best screw their kids up in one way or another. It's always tragic for a parent to look for filial gratitude. Because really, it's just a thankless job. And you have to accept that you're only gonna get blame in the end.
26:28 Erin: Right? I think Kent really puts a button on it towards the end of the play in Act 4, Scene 3, when he set his famous lines. It is the stars. The stars above us govern our conditions. Else oneself mate and make could not beget such different issues. So, as you say, there's this tension throughout between what governs us. Fate or the stars is another way of putting that. Edmund is able to kind of play on Gloucester's belief in astrology. And the fact that eclipses cause people to act strangely. And Edmund says, you know, very strongly believe in this.
He says it's just pure nature that he believes in. Lots of different characters have different things to say about this. But here Kent says that fate must make us who we are, not parentage or else how could Cordelia be the child of Lear and Regan and Goneril can be the child of Lear? It has to just be a matter of the star's fate. Another thing that Lear kind of discovers throughout the play is how much like he is other men. So the fact that he's a king really has. In the face of that great storm, the storm doesn't care that he's a king. It's the great equalizer.
As Madonna would say, nature will drop a tree on your head whether you're a king or a peasant. He has this realization when he's brought low that being a king really has no bearing on one's mortality per se. What's interesting about this quote from Kent, I guess, is carried to its logical conclusion. This means that no one is better or worse than anyone else by virtue of birth. It's just by fate that you turn out to be a good person or a bad person. Which is interesting because that also means that a king could have terrible daughters. Okay, so then who's supposed to inherit the kingdom?
It's supposed to be the prevailing logic of the day is that kings are anointed by God and that that line has to continue and that each subsequent child is anointed by God in order to rule over the kingdom. And if you're a king and then you have really crappy children, that logic falls apart. And with Lear, that nature has to be weigh against merit, as he says in the opening scene. Troubles all of this because one's nature, that is being born into a certain situation, may not indicate merit. The fact of being a king doesn't make you a better person.
The fact of being a peasant doesn't make you a better person. As Kent says, it's all just a crapshoot, basically. So all of these things are layered on top of each other in this really kind of confusing way. Because all of these characters have different opinions about this. About what makes you a good person and what makes your character, what determines your character, and then all what makes you just the same as everybody else. It's almost to me, at the end, maybe kind of like an anti monarchical play, or maybe a play that comes to no definitive answer as to what makes you you.
And yet we see examples of children who, I think, you know, the play is trying to tell us are made bad by bad parenting.
29:19 Wes: That's interesting because there are different ways to see fate. Ultimately, what we're thinking of are causal influences as opposed to our freedom. Those causal influences might be genetics they might be the influences of parenting, other environmental issues, things that happen in the womb. It may just be temperamental stuff. Every parent knows this. Children end up very different. And it's just siblings will have very different temperaments from each other, naturally. And the same children can nominally get the same parenting. And some of them end up having very bad characters and some of them having good characters.
So I think what Kent is pointing to there is when he's talking about the stars above, in a way, he's talking about randomness. He's talking about things that transcend the natural order and transcend natural causality. Because he can't think of any other way to explain it. We might say scientifically, we can't use the natural order to explain these kinds of variances. The assumption is, yeah, if you're getting the same upbringing, then why would all these children be different? You mentioned that scene. So act one, Scene two, where we get all the stuff about Gloucester's interest in astrology and the way Edmund will end up making fun of that.
So this is around line 91, act one, scene two. Gloucester will say, these late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature cannot reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. He's saying that astrological explanations are more fundamental than natural scientific explanations. So superstition is given a kind of precedence. And he's saying, yeah, I understand that there's natural science and that all works. So that's its own little contained system. And there's still something outside of that system that disturbs it.
That's the astrological. And so that's one way of thinking about fate, except in the sense that it's outside of this natural causal order. It explains, but it doesn't explain. So it can just be Goneril maybe was born under one star and Cordelia was born under another star. And therefore one is this way and one is another way. And in a way, that's an explanation. In a way, you're attributing causes to things. But in a way, it's not in a way, it really is just another way of talking about randomness. Because why is one star associated with one thing and another star associated with another?
There's no way to explain that. There's no sensible way to make sense of that. And so when you talk about fate in these astrological terms, you're just trying to say that some things are actually naturally inexplicable.
32:01 Erin: And Edmund answers that I mean, as soon as Gloucester exits, Edmund says, this is the excellent foppery of the world. That when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion. And then he says, my father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
Yeah, so we can't blame the stars, he says, we have to blame our own behavior, the problems in our own characters, which in the same way that you say we use the stars as a cause and you trace that back and well, really there's no cause. Well, we might then ask, okay, well, what do we have to blame for our own behavior? And if we take fate to be anything outside of our own control, I mean, certainly once you reach the age of reason and then especially, you know, adulthood, there's a sense in which you can no longer other people for your own behavior.
Right. You have to be responsible for your own behavior. But what made your character thus, well, you might argue, okay, being born into that family, well, that's something outside of your control.
33:06 Wes: It's complicated. Edmund is the naturalist. He's representative of the new sort of world that's emerging right around the time of Shakespeare, a different way of thinking of things. It's clear that Edmund and Lear are sneering at astrology and that type of stuff. And you can imagine the audience got that and, and laughed at that. Right. We are now at the point in history where people can laugh at all of that superstitious stuff. Natural causes are a form of necessity. So as a naturalist, you would think he can't simply abandon necessity. He would just say, oh, it's not about astrology.
It's about all these other natural causes that make us who we are, which can include our parents, but it does include a lot of other stuff too, as I pointed out. But instead what he's thinking about is personal responsibility and freedom. So. So he's not quite to the point of the full naturalist, for whom maybe that wouldn't make sense. The full on naturalist would say freedom is an illusion because we're biological machines determined by things outside of us.
34:04 Erin: And Lear, when he's talking about Cordelia's treatment of him, this is in Act 1, Scene 4, line from me around 273. Lear says, O most small fault, how ugly didst thou in Cordelia show? Which, like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature from the fixed place, drew from my heart all love and added to the gall. Basically, he's saying that Cordelia's flaw. So the wrong that Cordelia did to him has changed his fixed nature. It's actually changed his character somehow. It bent him completely out of shape.
34:38 Wes: So wait, what does he mean by small fault? There.
34:40 Erin: This is now in relation to the larger fault that Goneril has displayed by kicking him out.
34:46 Wes: Is he saying that's his own small fault?
34:48 Erin: I think he's saying it's Cordelia's. How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show?
34:53 Wes: Oh, sorry. I didn't realize we were talking about Cordelia.
34:56 Erin: He's reflecting on what Goneril did to him and saying that Cordelia's maybe now seems a little bit smaller in comparison.
35:02 Wes: So he's saying, I magnified this tiny flaw in Cordelia's character to something really ugly. And.
35:08 Erin: And yet it was possible that this flaw of hers.
35:11 Wes: So he was the princess with the pea. Right. This tiny thing wrenched his frame of nature.
35:16 Erin: Exactly. That one's frame of nature is so susceptible to the slightest little pea. Exactly. And if he was so susceptible to someone not flattering him, I mean, he couldn't have been impermeable to people's words before this happened. There's a part, too, that's kind of interesting. The fool talking to Lear about Goneril in that same scene, act one, Scene four. He's sort of chiding Lear for having given away all of his power. And he says, thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no need to care for her frown. Now thou art an O without a figure.
I am better than thou art. Now I am a fool. Thou art nothing. So he says to Lear, you know, you were better off when you didn't have to care whether or not she frowned. So presumably when he was king, he didn't have to worry about whether or not his children were frowning. And now that he's given away his power, he sort of lives at their pleasure. Now he has to care whether or not she frowns. Wouldn't he always have an interest in his children tapping him?
36:10 Wes: Thou wast a pretty figure when thou hast no need to care for her frowning. Thou art an O without a figure. So in my notes, the O is a zero which should be accompanied by
36:19 Erin: a digit to give it value.
36:21 Wes: Yeah, a digit he doesn't fully signify to signify the zero would have to be supplemented by another.
36:27 Erin: Right. It just struck me that the fool's conception of Lear's rightful place as a king, an all powerful king who doesn't have to bother with how anyone else feels, basically. And maybe that's been the problem all along. I mean, it's certainly Gloucester's problem that he doesn't care how Edmund feels or thinks he does, but doesn't really get it. That comes back to bite him. Maybe I'm reading into it too much by using Gloucester and Edmund's relationship as kind of a cipher to understand Lear and Regan and Goneril's relationship. But I watched a couple of interviews with Ian McKellen about his interpretation of Lear and he said that he felt as though because of the age difference, that Regan and Goneril probably came from a first marriage and Cordelia from a second marriage.
He made a really interesting point that Cordelia would have been probably the age of Cordelia's mother at the time that Lear married her. Something that just seems very true to me about that because in my family there are two siblings and then a large gap and then two more siblings, the same parents for both sets of children. But I think probably my parents would say that they were very different parents to the two younger children than they were to the two older children. And here maybe even more so with the fact that, you know, as he and McKellen take it, there were two different mothers.
And you know, the fact that Cordelia is the youngest and the favorite maybe plays into that, that she's almost functioning as a. I see her as having almost a granddaughter type relationship with Lear rather than a parent parental relationship.
37:49 Wes: The whole idea that he's nothing here in this scene. I related it back to the first scene in which he tells Cordelia nothing comes of nothing because she says nothing. There aren't really words appropriate to her expression of love. So she can only say nothing. He desired in some sense to become nothing, to become powerless, to become dependent on his daughters. And that was the getting back to what children owe their parents. That's what he's trying to get from them. He's trying to reverse the parent child relationship. That would be the only way to get repaid as parents. And of course that's disastrous. That's not something we should seek out because otherwise we become nothing in a sense. We retreat into being people with, in a way, unformed characters or people without identities. Which is what the madness will speak to.
38:37 Erin: That flipping on its head of the parent child relationship. I mean, isn't that a function of old age.
38:41 Wes: I mean, it is a natural function of old age in the sense that. And this is mentioned in the play a lot, where as parents get really old, ultimately the parents, if they have good children, the good children will help take care of them. And not just shove them into a nursing home, right. Or let them wander about on the heath in the storm. That's one essential part of aging. But Lear's situation goes beyond that because he wants to do that emotionally as well. There are resemblances to old age and having to crawl again. So he uses that word crawl right between that and infancy. Crawling towards death and being taken care of. But what he thinks he's going to get out of this, what he thinks the payoff for old age is going to be. Is going to be an emotional sort
39:23 Erin: of infancy as well, the fact of his age. And Goneril and Regan really have their heads on straight about this. Where they say, you know, he was never a great person to deal with, even in his prime. Now that he's going to be an old man, you know, he's going to be even more of a handful. But they use his age against him. Where I think it's Act 2, Scene 4. Regan says to Lear, you know, you're old, so you should just apologize to Goneril. Like, they frequently use this as evidence against him. Like, well, you're old, so what do you know? But it's not fair.
He can't control the fact that he's old. He is old, but they use that as evidence that therefore he is idiotic or foolish. And in fact, the fool says to Lear, thou shouldst not have been old till thou has been wise. So even the fool thinks the problem isn't the fact that you're old. The problem is that you're old and you're not wise yet. Whereas Regan and Goneril just kind of want to say, listen, you're old. You don't know what you're talking about as a way to control him or kind of quiet him down. And he can't argue that fact because he is old.
40:20 Wes: I think that's really interesting. There's the possibility that aging is not necessarily a form of wisdom. We see that in the ending when we get Edgar saying, he but usurped his life. So after everything has gone down and Lear has died, Kent will say, the wonder is, he hath endured so long, he but usurped his life. And then skip a little bit, and Edgar will say, the weight of this sad time we must obey Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most. We that are young shall never see so much nor live so long. The reason why I'm going here now is it kind of wraps up some ideas about this relationship between younger people and older people, which is a big preoccupation in the play.
What does it mean exactly to say that he usurped his life? Right. So if it were a case of usurpation, when it comes to a kingdom, it would be someone who took his kingdom away by force. Right. Or it might even be a relative who kills you so they can take the throne or something like that. It's a little unclear, I think, what this means. So there's a few possibilities. But what it seems to suggest is that in the same way that a usurper might not inherit a kingdom by blood, life is the same way, or at least in Lear's case. But I think it actually probably generalizes.
But life is not something that was his by inheritance exactly, but something that he usurped. So it was only on loan in some sense, and only for a brief time on earth. So I think it's another way of saying that we are all imposters to some extent, and not simply by nature, but dressed up in custom. And when we talk about life, we are not just talking about the biological phenomenon, but we're talking about something inherently social and something inherently suffused with custom. But the other part here is that as the older generation gets older, power is naturally given over to the young.
And as we pointed out, that's a natural process. And then the young might take care of the old. And Lear seems to have this extraordinary desire to return to childhood. But that makes it seem like it's the younger generation that takes back what is its due from the usurper at some point. Edmund, in his letter that he uses to frame Edgar, says that the power of older people is actually not real. It only exists insofar as children make it so, and insofar as they obey and observe the pretenses of custom. And they could take it away at any time if they just dissipate.
So he's attributing that to Edgar. Of course, parents in the beginning do have all the power. That's the potency of creating and giving birth and then having power over their children. You might also see the younger generation as the usurpers. So you get this dual contradictory idea of the older generation as being usurpers, and the young take it back in a way. And then vice versa. The younger generation is usurping the older. And it's hard to say which is true exactly. All of that speaks to a natural reversal of this creature creator relation that I've talked about.
I think what the significance of saying we that are young shall never see so much nor live so long is to say that once we are old, we will never be the same. It will not be our eyes that are seeing at that point. We'll be so changed that we can't say it's us who are living so long and doing the seeing this. Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
43:49 Erin: I have a quote to bolster what you're saying. This is what I was alluding to before, but I didn't read it full out. In Act 2, Scene 4, oh, sir, you are old. Nature in you stands on the very verge of his confine. You're nearing the end of your life because there's a point at which you're getting to the end of your rope. Nature is standing on the edge in the same way that by usurping your life, you sort of go out of bounds. She's kind of imagining a boundary here. You should be ruled and led by some discretion that discerns your state better than you yourself.
You're old and by the fact of your oldness, that means that it's my turn. Someone needs to rule you and you need to step back. And she uses this as a reason for Lear to then apologize to Goneril. She says, therefore I pray you that to our sister you do make return. Say you have wronged her. And Lear in response, says, ask her forgiveness, do you but mark how this becomes the house. Dear daughter, I confess that I am old. And he kneels and sort of makes a show of this kneeling. Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg that you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed and food.
This is kind of the interesting thing about this is Regan and Goneril at the beginning accuse Lear of having too little self knowledge. And it seems to me that to what you're saying about old age, that part of Lear's journey over the course of this play is to have. I mean, part of it is to have empathy for other people, which he seems not to had much of at the beginning of the play. And part of it is actually to accept his age and to accept the fact that he has to give up his power. And at this point he makes a show of kneeling and says, oh, I confess that I am old.
But he's Imagining what he's. He's saying, oh, is this what you want me to say to Goneril? I confess that I am old. Age is unnecessary. On my knees, I beg that you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed and food. So he's saying I'm old, and therefore I've made myself unnecessary and useless. The interesting part about this is that in Act 4, Scene 7, when Lear sees Cordelia, he kneels to her and she says, oh, look upon me, sir, and hold your hand in benediction o' er me. You must not kneel. But he says in response, pray do not mock me. I am a very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less.
And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. He kneels to her and admits that he is old, that he's foolish and fond, and that he's four score and upward. So he's over 80 years old. And to be honest, I fear I'm not in my perfect mind. I think. I think I've gone crazy. So this very scene that he says, oh, you want me to act out this scene to Goneril and basically admit that I'm old and I'm useless now? Well, later he does this very thing. He kneels to Cordelia and admits that he's old and not in his right mind. And therefore the subtext there is that he's kind of useless, that he's lost his mind.
And so it seems to me that this is him finally making his abdication, admitting that he is old and that he does need to move on as being part of this growing self knowledge that the plot has been kind of forcing him to obtain over the course of the play.
46:37 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting, because I want to say here, because I can't help mentioning this, but in the other King Lear play, this scene is actually quite extended and comic, and it involves Cordelia kneeling and asking for his forgiveness, and then saying, no, you stand up. I'm going to kneel and ask for your forgiveness. And they do this over and over again, and they're like, no, you forgive me. No, you forgive me. I think this is important because this idea of him acknowledging his age, because even though it looks like he's done that in the beginning, in a way by retiring, of course he hasn't really done that, or he wants to eat his cake and have it too, in a sense, he is giving up power, but he somehow thinks that their love for him is going to earn him a kind of indirect power.
That's the bet that he's making. So he'll have none of the responsibility. He'll hang out at the daughter's castle and party and ultimately become childlike and dependent. But I'm trying to get at what it is to really acknowledge our age or our aging. I'm not even sure it necessarily has to be that we've gotten old. But what it is to acknowledge that we are at some stage of maturation that has left something else behind. Or what it is, you know, to be in the current day and to have every other day behind you. And to actually believe that every other day is behind you.
When one might not necessarily believe that exactly. One might think that you can retrieve those days in some sense or relive them or not ever really actually give them up. On the surface, again, it seems like he's acknowledging his age at the beginning of the play. And yet he's not really doing that.
48:17 Erin: I think there's maybe a conflicting message or just a complication about what the play wants us to think about what is an acceptable way to go into old age. And maybe this is why the fool disappears partway through the play. The fool, who we take to be a reliable source of information, is constantly telling Lear that he's made a huge mistake by giving up his power by yielding to old age. He says, Even in Act 1, Scene 4, thou mad'st thy daughters, thy mothers. For when thou gave them the rod and puts down thine own breeches. Then they for sudden joy did weep. And I for sorrow sung that such a king should play Bo Peep and go the fools among. So you're saying by giving them your power, you've made them into your mothers, which is what Lear wants. Right. He wants to rest on Cordelia's kind nursery, as he says.
48:59 Wes: And play Bo Peep, by the way, is peekaboo.
49:01 Erin: Right? And the implication there is covering one's own eyes, blinding oneself. Which is gonna be maybe a Gloucester reference or something. So he's saying by doing this, you've given them the stick to spank you with. And then you've pulled down your own pants. So you've allowed them to take advantage of you by giving away your power. So the fool's message to Lear is constantly right. You've pared your wit o' both sides and left nothing in the middle. So you've taken the two halves of your brain and given away to Regan and Goneril, and there's nothing left.
So now you're a nothing. You have nothing. Well, the fool keeps saying this. Tiller so we, or at least I, as the audience, say, okay, so this is bad. He shouldn't have given up his power. And of course it's bad for him because he's given it away to people who don't have his best interests in mind. And yet there's also the sense in the play that Lear has to come to terms with his age. He has to truly abdicate in order to move on. And what moving on is, I don't know. And what the necessity of acknowledging his own age is for Lear's development. I mean, that seems a little bit clearer to me, right?
He has to acknowledge that he's a king, but he's also just a man, that he ages, that he's no better than anybody else. That seems clear. But it's just funny that the fool is telling him, you shouldn't have done this. You shouldn't have given away your power. I don't think it's the giving away the power that is necessarily the problem. It's giving it to the wrong people that's the problem. If he had given it to Cordelia and she had become his quote, unquote, mother, she would have been a good mother. What do you think about that?
50:24 Wes: It's interesting because what the fool says is, thou hast pared thy wit o' both sides and left nothing in the middle. Here comes one of the pairings. That's the way he introduces Goneril, which is great. Here comes one of the parings, and that's a continuation of his talk, or I guess I'm not sure if it's a continuation. Elsewhere. The fool will talk of him dividing his crown in two, where the pun is on crown what you wear on your head, and then crown as in your head. So the idea that the division of power and the giving up of power is also a division of one's mind and one's identity and a giving up of one's sanity.
Maybe it's not so much the giving up of worldly power as it is the significance of that for Lear. What kind of power is he actually trying to give up? I don't want to beat this into the ground, but mention the idea that he wants to be a child again in the sense and to make his daughters his mothers. But what is the sense of power that one might give up that makes you mad? When I think of one of the parings, the fool is kind of saying Goneril and Regan are pieces of your mind that you've ejected into the world, which I think parents have something of that experience.
Right. This is. They're part of me, and now they're in the world. The idea is that you have to stay within yourself in some sense.
51:43 Erin: I think I have a bridge here because I think that identity is a really good way to go off from that here. When Lear sees Edgar and his interactions with Tom, he realizes maybe the precariousness of his identity. The fool has in that scene, in Act 2, Scene 4, he has this little rhyme. Fathers that wear rags do make their children blind. But fathers that bear bags shall see their children kind. Fortune, that arrant whore, ne' er turns the key to the poor. So I guess fathers that are poor make their children blind, which I suppose means indifferent to their father's misfortune.
So they don't care. Well, you have nothing to offer me, so I don't care about you because you're poor. But fathers that bear bags, like moneybags, shall see their children kind. So the fool has this incredibly just, mercenary idea about children and parents and the relationship between them. So children are only kind to their parents to the extent that their parents can give them something back, and therefore that people who are poor are unlucky. And this is kind of an interesting bridge, I guess, because what Lear will come to understand with Tom is that Tom, as a poor person, has been treated badly by.
And he sees Tom and Tom's nakedness as revealing something about his own identity to him. So now that he has no bags to give his children, I'm picturing like Mr. Monopoly or something with the canvas bags with a dollar sign on them. Now that he's given them away to his children, he has nothing left. So he is like a poor man. And he has no retinue. They've sent away all his knights. He has no place to go because they won't let him in out of the storm. So now he's like a poor beggar who is susceptible to the elements. So who is he, then? He's constantly asking, well, who?
Can you tell me who I am? Because he no longer has his identity, which is the kingship. And so he realizes that he is just like anyone else. Like what is it? The bare, forked animal, like Tom?
53:29 Wes: Yes, the poor, unaccommodated man. Poor, bare, forked animal. And the thing itself. Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated men.
53:37 Erin: The thing itself. Yeah. So you're just a man. This is just what we are.
53:41 Wes: The thing itself is opposed, right, to all the appearances involved in clothing, involved in anything artificial and customary, all the things that we think of as cultural.
53:51 Erin: Yeah, no, exactly. The Lear then gets into this idea of clothing that rich men with their clothing can get away with committing crimes that poor men can't get away with because they have nothing to protect them. In the same way, perhaps, as rich men who have these castles can hide from a storm, but poor men can't. Now Lear's on that plane with the poor man. So in other words, maybe the very thing that the fool is telling him was a bad idea is actually a good idea. He's gotten rid of all of the trappings of his power and has made himself poor, vulnerable, susceptible to the cold, susceptible to the storm, and therefore suddenly then capable of both empathy and self knowledge.
Like he says in Act 3, Scene 4, poor naked wretches, wheresoe' er you are that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, how shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, your looped and windowed rag raggedness, defend you from seasons such as these? Oh, I have taken too little care of this. Take physic pomp. Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, that thou mayest shake the superflux to them and show the heavens more just so. He's saying not only does he feel pity for these beggars who are suffering the storm, who don't have a roof over their heads or anything to keep them warm, he then is going the extra mile and saying, when I was a king, I didn't do enough to help you.
And so he says, take physic, pomp. So here's the medicine for people who are pompous, presumably like him, the way he was. Expose thyself to what wretches feel. So go out and learn empathy by understanding what it is to not have anything in this storm. And then you will show the heavens more just so. Then you will understand what it's like, and then the world will be more fair. So it's a good thing that he's suffered this and had to go out into the world. And he prescribes it to other rich people that they go out and understand what this is is like.
I guess I just realized the parallel here between this scene and the last scene of the play, the last thing that Lear says. He looks at Tom's nakedness when he says, thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare forked animal as thou art. Off, off you lendings. Come unbutton here. So he wants to take off his clothing. So he's saying, oh, Lendings like, I guess his clothing was lent him from animals or whatever. So he wants to take it off and just be a bare forked animal like Tom. That just chimed with the last lines that Lear says.
When Cordelia is dead in his arms, he says, why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all? Thou' LT come no more. Never, never, never, never, never. Pray you undo this button. The more I read this, the more I see all these incredible symmetries in the play. So earlier when he's talking to Tom, he has this desire to join Tom in his nakedness out of the tremendous empathy he feels for Tom, that he wants to take off his clothing and be like Tom, a bare forked animal. And he'll take his identity from just being the thing itself, just being a man.
And then with Cordelia dead in his arms, he asks someone to help him un undo his button. The note in my edition says, presumably because it's suffocating him, but maybe that suffocation is mental as well as physical.
56:46 Wes: Yeah, he himself might be having trouble breathing at that point. So she's not breathing. And that's the beginning of his descent to the same position. Maybe the parallel here is between being wretched and naked and being mortal and capable of dying like this.
57:01 Erin: Just as he's ready to take off his clothes out of empathy for Tom, now in his sorrow over Cordelia, he's ready to shake off his mortal coil and die with Cordelia.
57:10 Wes: Let's see, what else do we have to talk about here? Gloucester's blinding. So gross. Out, vile jelly. It's one of the hardest things to watch in any Shakespeare play, even though they usually face Gloucester's back to you.
57:23 Erin: And so Edmund has betrayed Gloucester to Cornwall and Regan. So they think that Edmund actually loves his father, but just had to reveal the fact that Gloucester was being disloyal to them. So Cornwall says to Edmund, the revenges we are bound to take upon your traitorous father are not fit for your beholding, which I love. He's like, oh, you know it's gonna be hard for you to watch when we take revenge on your father. It's not fit for you to see, so you should probably go. They're making Edmund, I guess, blind to what they're about to do to Gloucester, which is blind him.
And then there's even more Gloucester than when he's in front of Regan and Cornwall. He's asked why he sent Lear off to Dover, and he says, because I would not see thy cruel nails, pluck out his poor old eyes. Nor thy fierce sister in his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs. And then he says, I shall see the winged vengeance overtake such children. He's kind of suggesting, like, I wonder if the fact that he describes Regan as having cruel nails that pluck out Lear's old eyes. I wonder if he's then putting the idea in Regan and Cornwall's heads that they should blind him.
And of course, anything that happens to Lear has to happen to Gloucester. So by metaphorically saying they've plucked out Lear's eyes by maybe making him crazy, his mental eyes have been gouged out because of the fact that he's lost his. Now it has to happen to Gloucester, but it'll happen to him physically. He's going to be upset, actually, that he can't be crazy, that he can't retreat into madness the way Lear has because he's so upset.
58:47 Wes: So what's the significance of this blinding? People can go listen to our partially Examined life episode where we talk about Stanley Cavell's essay on King Lear called the Avoidance of Love. So there's this idea of Lear being motivated by shame, and it's a shame inherent to love because love creates vulnerability and dependency and powerlessness in shame. There's a desire to avoid the recognition, avoid being seen by others in order to avoid seeing oneself. Maybe the causality goes the other direction. But I think Cavell claims that there's something appropriate in Gloucester's blinding in the sense that he has denied Edmund proper recognition as a human being and that this. This is an apt way of punishing that.
59:36 Erin: Yeah, I think that's right.
59:37 Wes: So this refusal to fully see and acknowledge others. Just thinking about the parallel here between Edmund's being shamed, essentially. So in a way it's a failure to acknowledge, but it's an acknowledgement of the fact that he's a bastard. And as you pointed out, in a way, Goneril and Regan are bastards. In fact, Lear calls Goneril a bastard at some point.
59:58 Erin: Yes. Degenerate bastard. Yes, good one.
1:00:03 Wes: Yeah, she's a bastard. She's not really his child. It's another way of disowning her. There's the idea here that there's been some sort of failure to acknowledge Goneril and Regan as real daughters. And correlately there's been a over acknowledgement and something wrong with his relationship with Cordelia. We hear nothing of a mother in this. Right. So she's gone and we don't. And something about Lear and Cordelia's relationship seems to be off in its level of closeness. We might think that she's become a surrogate. And Goneril and Regan are treated as stepchildren in a way. So I don't know if that fully explains the stuff with blindness.
1:00:44 Erin: And so Gloucester has to then come to terms with how he has been blind. I mean, I think something that Cavell kind of gets at in that essay is that Lear doesn't quite learn his lesson. And maybe Gloucester doesn't quite learn his lesson either. I mean, immediately after the blinding, he says, all dark and comfortless, where's my son Edmund? Edmund, enkindle all the sparks of nature to quit this horrid act. So quit, like, requite it. Then he's told that it was Edmund who gave him up. So then, of course, he immediately learns that Edmund is the one who has hated him all along and that he caused this breach between Gloucester and Edgar and that Edgar really did.
Gloucester says, well, I have no way and therefore want no eyes. I stumbled when I saw. So he's saying, like, I'm not going anywhere, so I don't need to see because I'm not going in any particular direction. And when I did see, I stumbled. I made mistakes. But we don't get the sense from Gloucester that he knows what mistakes he made to not treat Edmund well. Well, turns out Edmund wasn't the great son that he seemed to be momentarily to Gloucester. So presumably the mistake he made was by allowing Edmund to worm himself into his affections to the detriment.
1:01:53 Wes: Part of the not seeing is just very straightforward, Right? Lear has the wool pulled over his eyes by Goneril and Regan. And as Cavell points out, in some sense he's asking for that because real love is not quite what he wants. He wants sincere flattery or sincere insincerity. He wants this contradictory thing because it's safer than actual love. So similarly, the parallel is that Gloucester gets the wool pulled over his eyes by Edmund in the way that Edmund sets up Edgar. But the deeper senses of stumbling when you see, it's seeing the wrong thing and then not seeing other things.
He doesn't see in the sense that he doesn't acknowledge Edmund as a person with someone who might feel shame over the bastard thing and not want it mentioned every time they meet someone. Here's my son, the bastard. And then what he does is he sees them through that lens which Edmund early on protests and makes an association between that and the nature versus custom distinction. Right? Gods stand up for bastards. He's the representative of nature. I think I mentioned this during the beginning. Because he's born outside of custom, in a way. And what Gloucester sees is he looks at things through the lens of the customary.
And the same sorts of things that Lear is railing against. When he talks about the poor. And how you can just dress up. And the difference between the just and the unjust is the just are dissembling. They're just dressed up that way. So that's where our vision tends to get blocked. At the level of social artifice and custom. And stops short of penetrating to unaccommodated men. So the blindness, I think, in a way. Is a way of talking about the inability to see beyond those layers. The reason why it's a blindness that goes along with seeing. Is that one site becomes preoccupied with the surface level layer.
With the appearance, as opposed to the underlying reality. There's a connection here to the myth of Oedipus. Where Oedipus blinds himself. After he realizes that he's slept with his mother and killed his father. And the stumbling that Oedipus was doing when he was seeing. Was he thought he was consciously evading his fate. He stumbles into it in virtue of the process of evasion, right? He's fleeing home. What he thinks is his home and his adopted parents. In order to avoid that fate. But he becomes preoccupied with everything but himself, Maybe is the right way to put it.
He becomes preoccupied with everything but his own agency. So I think one way of thinking about this. Is that to see through the layer of custom. To what's unaccommodated in another person. Is also a form of self knowledge. And one acknowledges others through focusing not on external circumstances, sense. But this is kind of an existentialist idea. To acknowledge others is to acknowledge them as subjectivities and as freedoms. As people who are free. And one only does that through one's own autonomy and freedom. And that's something that's compromised just as much by attempts to evade fate.
The sort of superstitious way of thinking about things that Gloucester embraces. Right with the eclipses. And all that would evade. Or I'm going to try. Try and take account of these cosmic forces that are affecting me. Instead of thinking about my own character, my own subjectivity, my own responsibility. You want to be thinking about one's behavior. Not as an evasion of a fate, in a sense, but as something else.
1:05:34 Erin: I think you're right. I mean, Oedipus, too. He's not only blind to his fate. Or tries to avoid his Fate. But he also then blames everyone else for being the one who brought the pestilence on the city. Right, right.
1:05:43 Wes: I was thinking of that, too.
1:05:44 Erin: Yeah. First he blames Tiresias, who's constantly telling him that even Tiresias is physically blind, that Oedipus is actually the blind one.
1:05:51 Wes: I am blind and I see, and you see, but you're really blind. Yeah, Right.
1:05:55 Erin: And then he blames Creon, and he doesn't understand the extent to which his own rage, which then turns on Tiresias and Creon and everyone else, the extent to which that is a function of his own faulty character and which actually caused the death of his father in the first place. The idea of constantly blaming other people for one's problems or some outside cause,
1:06:14 Wes: for one, there's a natural projection that occurs with seeing so that seeing becomes a distraction because we get focused on the trappings as opposed to the underlying unaccommodated reality. And then it becomes a distraction because we tend to be focused on the way we're affected by external circumstances.
1:06:37 Erin: Cavell says this about Lear, that, you know, in the end, Lear just wants to escape everything and go. You know, he doesn't mind going to live in a prison with Cordelia. That there they can love each other and live kind of almost in secret.
1:06:49 Wes: Let's talk about that scene just a little bit, because it's so wonderful.
1:06:52 Erin: Yeah.
1:06:52 Wes: So this is Act 5, Scene 3, which is a long scene where a lot of different things. In a way, it's many different scenes rolled into one. So at the very beginning. And it's funny because earlier, Lear, in his madness, thought Cordelia's people come for him. He's thinking, no, you know, you're going to put me in prison. No, I'm going to go away. But here Cordelia will say, we are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst for the oppressed King, I am cast down. Myself could else out frown false fortune's frown. Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?
No, no, no, no. Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds in the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live and pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies and hear poor rogues talk of court news. And we'll talk with them, too. Who loses and who wins, who's in who, who's out. They're going to watch a lot of reality TV together, too, and take upon the mystery of things as if we were God's spies and we'll wear out in a walled prison packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.
So wonderful. I think in the Cavell essay, he doesn't have such a high opinion of this as I do, but there's an element of delusion maybe to it, or maybe it speaks to the too much love that Cavell sees and the unseemly kind of love between Lear and Cordelia. But I see in this mainly so something genuinely loving that I don't know that I've seen at any other point in the play. It's almost like a fantasy of getting old together, except it no longer involves him being in her nursery. Right. That image that we got at the beginning, but of them having this relationship and talking and gossiping and gossiping specifically about people in power and the vicissitudes of power but outlasts because they're not the ones who are gonna get deposed and they're not gonna be involved in the conflicts that go along with power.
They're just going to live and have this relationship that is now outside of power.
1:08:58 Erin: Yeah. And perhaps that represents the journey that Lear has taken up to this point. That he no longer needs the trappings of the kingship and of royalty, that he just needs Cordelia's love and that he can be sustained on that and the two of them can create this relationship away from the rest of the world. So it represents some development on the part, but not all. Cavell says because of still this desire to retreat from the world. And he says this directly in response to Cordelia asking, shall we not see these daughters and these sisters? So should we not go and confront them?
And he will not see them. Maybe again, this is a parallel with Gloucester. He won't acknowledge them. He won't deal with the problems in front of him, because the fact of the matter is he is a king. Cordelia is not only his daughter and a princess, but also the wife of France. And so this retreat into fantasy is where Lear goes to the confrontation of what's gone on here and what's gone wrong, but a further retreat away from that. And again, what's the term we used with Gloucester not coming to terms with reality here? The desire to not denial, but evade evasion.
Yeah. To retreat and escape into some other way of life that involves not having to deal with reality.
1:10:09 Wes: It's a recapitulation, Right, of what happens at the beginning. Nominally, he's giving up power in the very beginning, but he Wants to have his cake and eat it too. And he's giving up power without giving up power, without any real surrender. By the way. This relationship between power and customary trappings is important. The thing that blinds us, the thing that we get distracted by when we see in a certain way the preoccupation with power and status and recognition and respect from other people. That's inherently related to trapping social media and the outward social appearances, including in Lear's earlier speech, just wearing a judge's robe.
But, you know, also in our mannerisms and our habits that connote class and in many, many other ways. But what I like about this, what's different in this is, yes, it's another retreat from power, but I think it's a more appropriate retreat from power. It's the kind of retreat we should all make, in a sense, which is not to evade confrontation. And you can't avoid ambition and status and power. You can't avoid those things being a natural part of one's life. But they can also become too much. One can become over focused on them. And many psychological pathologies are simply predicated on this.
They're predicated on. So Lear's narcissism. I don't think we've used that word yet. And his proneness to narcissistic injury, or having his pride wounded the way he does in the beginning, and his focus on admiration and status. These are part and parcel of what psychoanalysts would call narcissistic pathologies, where there's a fundamental confusion between what's good in the sense of something that arises out of care and love for oneself and others. And then what's just a matter of flattery and admiration from others, or what sometimes psychologists call it narcissistic, narcissistic supply.
So to really enjoy intimacy and authentic relationships, we have to get beyond that layer. This is again another way of getting the unaccommodated underlying reality. But we have to mourn that in a way to have the kind of fantasy that Lear is having here in which two people are just enjoying each other's company, even though they're imprisoned by it in some sense in the way we are by our relationships or with other people.
1:12:29 Erin: It's a step beyond what Gloucester's wish is when he says, how stiff is my vile sense that I stand up and have ingenious feeling of my huge sorrows? Better I were distract. So should my thoughts be severed from my griefs and woes by wrong imaginations lose the knowledge of themselves. So he wishes that he were, I guess we could say, you know, imprisoned in madness so that he could be severed from his knowledge of his woes. But here I think you're saying that Lear has moved beyond Gloucester by saying, okay, well, I want to be away from it, but with someone else. Not just often my own madness as an escape, but in the company of someone else as a kind of further development on Lear's part.
1:13:07 Wes: It's a retreat, and it's not a retreat. Right. I think you put it very well. It's a retreat into truly being in the company of someone, which is another kind of confrontation. It's not the one Cordelia is talking about, but it involves spending time with people, which can be frustrating, as opposed to the retreat he's trying to make at the very beginning of the play, which is not a retreat and into company. It's a regressive retreat into, you know, people are just gonna take care of him and feed him and allow him to, like I said, again, party and be at their house. But did he ever mention, yeah, I'd love to spend time with you, Goneril and Regan. It's not a retreat into company. It's a retreat into this other type of child parent relation that leads us
1:13:49 Erin: to the very end of the play. And there's a suggestion here to me, and maybe reading this wrong, that the only way everything is resolved, the only way we truly confront everything, the only way we're truly together is in death.
1:14:02 Wes: The three marry in an instant.
1:14:03 Erin: Three marry in an instant, yeah. And the idea that then Lear dies
1:14:07 Wes: with Cordelia Liebestod here at the end.
1:14:10 Erin: Yeah, yeah. We could talk about the extent to which the ending is just or unjust to its characters. I mean, for a long time, of course, in the 19th century, they rewrote this because people found it to be too unjust. So Gloucester, after he's blinded, he has his most famous line. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport. He's just acknowledged that he stumbled when he saw. He's not seeing any purpose in his blinding, ultimately, because he says, well, this is all meaningless. The gods are just toying with us out of their desire for entertainment.
But Edgar, in the last scene, says that there is. He says, the gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to play, plague us. The dark and vicious place where thee he got, that is where Gloucester conceived you cost him his eyes. So Edgar says that Gloucester's blinding, that the gods actually are just. They're not just toying with us that everything has a reason behind it and that our own vices, there's a reckoning there where we're given punishment according to what our vices were. And Edgar reads the punishment for Gloucester's blinding as a punishment for the fact that he had an illegitimate son in the the first place.
Which is kind of an interesting reasoning there. But that kind of leads us to the ending, which in the 19th century people saw as being fundamentally unjust, that Cordelia the innocent should die. And so I suppose maybe we should talk about whether or not this is a just ending for Cordelia. Whether it proves Gloucester's point that we're just flies to wanton boys, our relationship to the gods, or whether it proves Edgar's point that the gods are just, that we get what we deserve.
1:15:42 Wes: Just to say one thing to that speech by Edgar, in a way, it's indirectly making the Cavell argument because you could read the dark and vicious place, you know, so he's having sex out of wedlock and I think they share the same mother, so he's talking about his own mom there. But the dark and vicious place, you can read that as the frame of mind of Gloucester, which is one of lust, right? And so one of looking with the eyes at another person and seeing a desirable body, for instance, and nothing else. And then the cost of that being a blindness, because in a way it is already a form of blindness.
It's a failure of acknowledging of subjectivity and the person inside. And that's what Cavell was saying about the aptness of Gloucester's blinding, that it was a failure of an acknowledgement of Edgar himself. And so you do kind of get an explanation of the preoccupation with bastardy and its shamefulness, because it's a carrying over of whatever people feel guilty about and ashamed of in, we could say, objectifying relationships, but purely lust based encounter. To go to what you have talked about with the ending. And you're asking the question of.
Say it again. Whether the gods really are just or.
1:16:54 Erin: Yeah, whether the message that we're supposed to take from Cordelia's death and from the death of everyone in both families except for Edgar, that we're supposed to take this as indicative of the meaninglessness of life and the cruelty of the gods, or maybe the lack of the gods existence, that maybe this is a completely Athenian atheistic world vision or even crueler, the fact that the gods are cruel or that the gods are just. That everyone gets their comeuppance in the end and that the Comeuppance is in proportion to the sin. So the prevailing argument for a long time is that this is a nihilistic play. Because Cordelia dies. And Cordelia was sinless. She was blameless. And therefore Shakespeare is making the argument that Gloucester was right. The gods are just torn with us. And nothing evens out in the end. That's one reading of it, not one I agree with.
1:17:47 Wes: It's a tragedy. So if you don't want to see a tragedy as I guess. I don't know how long they used the alternate ending for this, but it was quite a long time. If you can't tolerate. It doesn't become meaningless just by virtue of being a tragedy or nihilistic just by virtue of being a tragedy. Because the redemptive part of tragedy is not necessarily internal to the plot. It is in some sense, you know, if we take the Aristotle, Aristotelian paradigm. Of there being a reversal and a recognition, supposedly the tragic character with their flaw. Right.
There's some sort of development, and they have some sort of realization. Even though they're going to die as well. They're usually going to die. But with tragedy, it's less about that recognition internal to the plot. Than it is about the entire work. The entire drama is an enactment of recognition from start to finish. That the audience is supposed to participate in, I think. So that the redemptive feature of this, the recognition and the true feeling of loss that the play is supposed to convey go hand in hand. And this, again, is the seeing through to the unaccommodated.
This is the willingness to see nakedness and wretchedness. And to acknowledge it as one's own. And not to just joke about it being a bastard byproduct of you that you can deny.
1:19:06 Erin: So what you're saying is the very act of attending a tragedy is redemptive. In a sense.
1:19:10 Wes: You want the ending where everyone dies. Because that's the means to experiencing total loss. The whole point of experiencing total loss. Loss is integrating. Loss is integrating in the sense that what you lose on the outside gets internalized on the inside. And the paradigm for this is progressing in church childhood, during maturation and childhood giving up one's, you know, speaking of parent, child relationships. Giving up that relationship of complete dependency and going through separation, individuation and becoming one's own person. But what you do in that process is you internalize those parental functions.
The ability to mother oneself, the ability to father oneself, to love oneself, make rules for oneself. All of that stuff comes inside. But it only comes inside by virtue of accepting its loss on the outside. And what people, what narcissists do is they don't accept that loss. So they maintain an attachment to an idol of sorts. An idol that is essentially the fantasy of a relationship in which that loss is never given up, in which there is this other who is ministering to you in this way. And it gets set up in the external world as an attention to the admiration of others.
So again, an attention to those trappings, admiration that the relationship is close between this attention to admiration and attention to the customary as opposed to the natural. But back to tragedy in a way I see it as, and I'm borrowing from. There's a really good paper on psychoanalytic aesthetics by this psychoanalyst named Hanna Segal, and she's working with another psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein. I mean, she's adapting the ideas of Melanie Klein to aesthetics. But the idea is that you want to experience total loss, loss in tragedy, because what you get out of that is a recapitulation of the movement in which some of our other recordings that we've talked about this, including the Keats recordings, but the movement from the manic moment to the depressive moment, which is what maturation is.
And that movement exists in the artistic process. And then the audience, in participating in the product of the artistic process is participating also in the creative. It also gets to experience those psychological moments that I think that go into the creative process. But the whole point is that it's a recapitulation of some fundamental maturational movement. And if you don't allow loss into this, if you have to have a happy ending, or if you get focused on vengeance and justice, for instance, like you would in an action film, films today, even when really, really bad things happen, they're not genuinely tragic because you're not focused on the acceptance of that loss.
You might be focused on remedying it or undoing it. But. So I think it's tragic, It's a cop out. It's a tragic cop out to change the ending of the play. And it's. Unfortunately, it's something that people are allergic to. They have trouble experiencing this today, and I suppose always, although the ancient Greeks seem to like it.
1:22:07 Erin: But part of what you're saying that maybe I'm going off in a slightly different direction here, is that by attending a tragedy, you are essentially participating in a rehearsal of the. And in Hollywood, which is, you know, a money making industry, it's very hard to get someone to buy a ticket to attend a tragedy. And be reminded of their own mortality. They want to be told that everything's going to be okay in the end. So it's difficult, maybe in this day and age to get people to do that. That's why it takes us hardcore theater goers to want to participate in this.
1:22:34 Wes: But it's an enormously pleasurable experience, as Aristotle points out. This is one of the interesting paradoxes, like normally with pain should itself be painful. But through poetry. And there's a very deep connection between tragedy and poetry. But through poetry and tragic poetry, we're able to get pleasure out of what is ordinarily painful. And that's really important.
1:22:55 Erin: That's the recompense of the whole thing, is that on the one hand, it is redemptive and you're participating in the creative process. That on the one hand, on the other hand, it is a rehearsal of death. But I think what you're saying is that in order for that transaction to happen, where you allow yourself to experience that kind of death, there has to be the redemption of the beauty of it. The creative part of it. The participation in the poetry. The high before the low, I guess.
1:23:18 Wes: Yeah. Part of the redemption is aesthetic, right? Part of the redemption is in the formal, the beauty of it. And in this particular art form, I think it's too much to say it's just formal because of the way metaphor works. But anyway, there's an aesthetic compensation. And that aesthetic compensation, it has something to do with the highly structured and put together together nature of an artwork. That again, I'm trying to relate that to the feeling of internal psychological integration as a compensation for loss. So when an artist compensates us, it's not just accidental. It's not like, oh, I'm gonna sugarcoat this horrible thing. They're intimately related. One thing follows from the other.
1:24:02 Erin: I think that's great. And that's not a compensation, typically, that Hollywood is able to make. Right.
1:24:07 Wes: People aren't there for beauty exactly. They're. They're there for titillation. And for. Hollywood can do comedy. Right. I think they can do that pretty well. And it can do action. I mean, it does those things well. It's just in general, it's not gonna do real tragedy. And even sad films with sad endings, I think, for the most part, are not really tragedy. Because the whole point of this is to maximize the loss. That's why you're talking about kings and great people. And Aristotle says they have to be important people to have the highest. Yeah, you really gotta have to accentuate the fall and the reason why is because that fall that we experience weaving the infantile behind is so terrible, so traumatic, so horrible. That's the only way to do it justice, is to do this losing everything thing. Nothing else can. Can approach it.
1:24:54 Erin: That's good. I think that's a good place to stop.
1:24:56 Wes: Yeah. I mean, there's so much more to talk about, but we, we are out of. We are out of time, and we're going to have to say goodbye to Cordelia and Lear and everyone else.
1:25:05 Erin: Well, that's the tragic part of this, is that it is. This episode has to die.
1:25:09 Wes: It does. All right. That was a lot of fun. Thank you.
1:25:12 Erin: Thank you.
1:25:14 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to remind you again that if you're listening to this on the feed for the Partially Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help us a lot. You'll also find us@subtextpodcast.com us@patreon.com subtext on the website. You'll find ways to subscribe to email updates and to contact us directly by email or follow us on social media. We would love to get your feedback, including comments on episodes or episode requests or anything else. And once again, thank you for listening.
The “Intelligent Way to Approach Marriage” in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (1954)
Sep 07, 2020
L.B. Jefferies has the perfect girlfriend—beautiful, intelligent, wealthy—but too perfect, he insists, for marriage. And so he spends his time spying on the love lives of his neighbors, and ropes his girlfriend into this project as well. Which, strangely enough, turns out to be a really effective form of couples’ therapy. What’s the connection between voyeurism and what Jefferies calls “the intelligent way to approach marriage”? Wes and Erin give an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window.
Thanks to CranioDsgn for permission re-purpose his poster for the cover art.
The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get this and other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon.
The Acceptance of Mortality in Keats’s “To Autumn”
Aug 31, 2020
In this third and final installment of our series on Keats’s odes, we’re looking at To Autumn, the poet’s last major work before his death at the age of 25. Keats’s elegiac meditation on the season also serves as a metaphor for his favorite subject matter, artistic creation itself. What parallels does Keats find between art-making and the bounty, harvest, and barrenness of autumn? And what can the poem teach us about loss and our own mortality? Wes and Erin analyze.
The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get this and other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Escape into Art in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”
Aug 24, 2020
Second in our series on the odes of John Keats is Ode to a Nightingale, in which Keats imagines a journey into the realm of negative capability, a concept introduced in our previous episode on Ode to a Grecian Urn. Keats hears a nightingale’s song and it inspires him to ponder such questions as, what makes an ideal artist? How might we access the world of artistic creation? How does art unite humanity across the ages? Wes and Erin discuss whether artists, however inspired, can escape the anxieties of a potential audience.
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The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get this and other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon.
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Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Truth as Beauty in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Aug 17, 2020
The poet John Keats is famous for the concept of “negative capability,” his description of the ability to tolerate the world’s uncertainty without resorting to easy answers. Literary minds in particular should be more attuned to beauty than facts and reason. In fact, truth in the highest sense is the same thing as beauty, he tells us at the end of his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn. What does that mean? Is it true? Wes and Erin discuss these questions, and how it is that aesthetic judgments can communicate a kind of truth that is not strictly descriptive or factual.
The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get this and other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon.
The cover art is based on Keats’ tracing of the Sosibios Vase, which may have helped inspire the poem.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Mastery and Repetition in “Groundhog Day” (1993)
Aug 10, 2020
When egotistical weatherman Phil Connors gets trapped in a time loop in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, he gets drunk, steals money, manipulates women, binges on breakfast food, plays God… and finally grows up. The story charts Phil’s development over the course of thousands of repeated February 2nds. Along the way, it raises questions about our own capacity for growth. How do we go about improving ourselves? How can we escape boredom? Achieve fulfillment? Wes and Erin analyze the 1993 film Groundhog Day.
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Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Love and Wit in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”
Aug 04, 2020
At the center of every courting ritual, there’s a great unknown. How do we know when we’ve met someone we can love? How do we know the other person is actually who they seem to be? In the beginning, all we have to go on is surface appearances, which amount to a kind of hearsay. The question is how to get beyond them. Wes and Erin analyze Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which seems to suggest that witty banter is more than just good fun, and has an important role to play in getting to know others.
The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get this and other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
(post)script: Debut
Aug 01, 2020
How did it all begin? Where is it going? What’s the point of anything, anyway?
With (post)script, get to know your quirky hosts, their existential doubts, and all the behind-the-scenes drama that’s concealed by their staid demeanors, not to mention an ample Patreon paywall. Actually, we’re giving you this debut episode of (post)script — and every fifth one thereafter — for free.
Wes talks about his experiences with alien abduction, and Erin cautions against the use of mayonnaise. Erin then recounts her former life as deep sea fisherman, and Wes reminisces about his Fleetwood Mac cover band. All this and more, except probably in fact none of this. We do, we promise, chat about something.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:00 Wes: Welcome to Postscript, the subtext after show where we talk about things related and unrelated to the week's episode.
0:05 Erin: This is Wes Alwan and this is Erin O'Luanaigh.
0:08 Wes: So this is our first after show and it's not even really an after show. Normally we're going to do these. We're going to record a show and then we're going to talk for, let's say, 15 minutes after the show. But this time we're just.
0:21 Erin: It's just real life.
0:22 Wes: It's just real life.
0:23 Erin: Just nothing. Just recording it after I had my coffee.
0:27 Wes: Which means we have nothing to talk about, unfortunately. So we're not going to just be talking about what's going on. You know, we might talk a little bit more about the episode that we've just had, but often we're just going to chat about other things. So we might talk about a little bit about personal stuff or what we've been writing, what else we've been reading. Sometimes we might even read a little bit from something else that we've been reading and talk about that a little bit.
0:53 Erin: But for now I think we want to just talk about personal stuff so that you could get to know. I mean, I suppose our listeners largely will already know Wes, but probably won't know me as well.
1:03 Wes: Yeah, so I heard you were a high school teacher.
1:07 Erin: So funny that you heard that because that is what I'm most known for. I teach high school English at. It's an all boys school actually, which I never thought that I would be doing single sex education. Especially that sex. Not that I am.
1:22 Wes: Not that you have anything against that sex, but discriminatory.
1:27 Erin: But yeah, you know, I think they think of me as being like a really odd bird because they're all super into sports and I am into sports. I'm. I'm into watching baseball and sitting quietly while doing so. But yeah, but they're like, you know, there are a lot of like jocks at that school that I teach at. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all. Like they're just like very active. You know, they're teenage boys active.
1:52 Wes: You were not part of the jock crowd growing up.
1:55 Erin: It's hard to believe now, especially as I'm extremely muscle bound and athletic, but so I don't know what to do with them except be what I am, which they think is very funny, which is like someone who doesn't really like to move that much. I just sit around and read and I think they think that I'm interesting I hope at least you're a bit
2:17 Wes: of a disciplinarian as well, right?
2:18 Erin: Yes, I am.
2:19 Wes: How do you keep a bunch of boys in line?
2:21 Erin: You know, corporal punishment, making a stand on their head in a corner.
2:27 Wes: That's very old school, this place.
2:28 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I don't take any crap, really. Send a lot of people to detention a lot. It's a. It's a good day when I've sent a lot of people to detention. But they're good kids for the most part. A few days of sending everyone to detention really makes everybody sit just as quietly as I do, so.
2:46 Wes: Yeah, good.
2:48 Erin: I sound like a monster in this. Oh, man.
2:52 Wes: Well, it's good that you know, for listeners to know the real you.
2:56 Erin: I think boys respect discipline. You know, they're good about that. Girls get resentful, then they write angry poetry about you, you know.
3:04 Wes: Well, speaking of which, I really. What I really wanted to start with is the fact that you're a poet. Although I didn't want to embarrass you.
3:10 Erin: Yeah. I like to say that I'm a person who happens to write poetry. The word poet has a has. I have too much respect for that word and it has too much gravitas for me.
3:18 Wes: Yes. Well, for marketing purposes at least. You are a poet and I am a philosopher, which I didn't feel great about marketing the podcast, as, you know, philosopher Wes Alwan and poet Erin O'Luanaigh. But you are a real poet in the sense that you've published. I've published some essays here and there, but I haven't really published as a philosopher. But you can be found in a variety of prestigious journals, Right? Sorry to flatter you. Let's leave the pristine variety of journals and tell listeners where they can find you.
3:52 Erin: I had a poem published in Southern Review and that was reprinted on the Academy of American Poets website, and I think that might be the first near the top that comes up if you Google me or something, so that's easily accessible. And where else have I been published? Agni, out of BU and 32 poems. New Criterion, I think New Criterion is also available online. Hopkins Review, A couple of other places that I can't think of. Not because I don't like them, but just because it's hard for me to think about it.
4:26 Wes: So how would you characterize yourself as a poet? Or is there a way to do that?
4:30 Erin: Probably the best way. I mean, I don't subscribe to any school of poetry or anything like that, but I think probably all poets can trace themselves back to influences and other poets that they admire. So poets that I really love are Auden Bishop, James Merrill is one of my favorite poets. Marianne Moore. Amy Clampitt is a poet that isn't known as well as she should be. I think she's a real top tier American poet. I guess Lowell to a certain extent. I don't know. I mean, I guess probably every American poet has been influenced by Lowell and Bishop and some of the other names I've mentioned. I like people who are dead better than people who are alive for the most part. But that's true of everything in my life. So no one should take this as like, you know, a polemic.
5:18 Wes: And how did that not just an interview you for all of this, but how did that for all of your life? What does that mean?
5:23 Erin: Maybe the listeners do know something about me because I think I talked about this at the beginning of the apartment episode.
5:28 Wes: Yeah.
5:29 Erin: My whole life I was really close with my grandparents. I still am very close with my grandmother. My grandfather has since passed away. You know, they're Italian, like very old school. My grandfather was a World War II veteran. Children of the Great Depression and teens of the Great Depression. And I just really loved them. I loved being around them, being at their house all the time. And so they had very old fashioned interests. My grandfather was like a big old movie buff. My grandmother is really into foreign film, especially Italian film. So Bicycle Thieves was a movie that I watched when I was really young with my grandmother.
I never understood when people who were my age, like really young, thinking that things that were old were dumb or that black and white movies were boring. You know, all those like prejudices that we have when we're little or that I think that most people have, I never had. I thought that they were more interesting. So I just started really liking and becoming fascinated with people who were all dead. Very, very dead. Many of them not just freshly dead.
6:30 Wes: Yeah.
6:31 Erin: And my grandfather was big into history and stuff like that. So he was like super into English history. English royal history. So was my mom, actually. I don't know if probably the same thing in your family because we both were very weird children. I'd imagine. I was like really into Eleanor of Aquitaine for a while. Like really dead people.
6:50 Wes: Yeah.
6:50 Erin: I don't know, maybe there are a lot more people who are like me than not like me. But I never went in for fads or anything new. And I mean, even to this day I have trouble reading fiction after like 19, I don't know. I don't want to give like a specific date, but I don't know. In general, I haven't really read anything written in the past 30 years, maybe fiction wise. And I tend to prefer 19th century fiction almost exclusively. And early 20th century fiction.
7:15 Wes: Yeah, I'm in a similar boat. I'm rarely reading contemporary fiction or more recent fiction. Although maybe we should do Infinite Jest at some point because that is a often requested book. I knew you were going to have
7:29 Erin: that reaction, but yeah, no, that's going to be a 12 part episode, I guess.
7:33 Wes: Well, yeah, yeah, I tried to read it once and didn't get through it, but. So some listeners, not all will know that I'm at the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast that's been around for about 11 years now. So if you want to know more about me, you can listen to hundreds of hours of audio over there. But yeah, I had a. I have one fan. I think we've gotten the request a few times, so sometimes we'll do literature over there. But I have one fan who's an Infinite Jest fanatic. And we kind of became friends a little bit because she lived in Boston and she kept asking me, you know, when are you going to do Infinite Jest?
When are you going to do Infinite Jest? And it would have been easier to comply with that request if the book weren't quite, what, a thousand pages? It's just wrapping my head around reading all of it. And the first time I tried to read it, I got 80 pages in and then I got irritated, which is not uncommon, you know, with me. It doesn't mean that it's a bad book, it just means that I'm picky. But I think doing it now, I could handle it.
8:34 Erin: I've never even attempted it, so. Which is something I should do probably at some point, so it might be good for me.
8:41 Wes: Well, what's interesting is he's a. A lot of it is set in a transitional home for the mentally ill in the Boston area. And I happened to be a director of a transitional home for the mental ill.
8:53 Erin: I had no idea, not about you, that Infinite Jest was set in Boston in a transitional home. Wow. Yeah, really interesting.
9:01 Wes: I always thought that the home was in Somerville, but someone was telling me it's in Allston. So it's piqued my interest in giving this another attempt. Not that we would attempt that anytime soon. I don't know how we're gonna handle long novels on this. I don't know if we're gonna break it up into parts, you know, we could say, all right, we're gonna read 250 pages and then discuss, and then the next 250. I don't know how we would do that. It seems like novels are something you have to discuss as a whole, but maybe. Yeah, maybe that would work.
9:29 Erin: I'm just about to start Magic Mountain.
9:32 Wes: Really?
9:32 Erin: Yeah. I was thinking that that might be a fun one to cover.
9:35 Wes: So is that for school?
9:36 Erin: Mm, mm. No. I've only read Death in Venice. It's my only Thomas Mann.
9:41 Wes: Okay.
9:42 Erin: So I felt I needed to. Plus I'm really attracted to the subject matter. And it also seems like thing to be reading during a world that's still sort of in semi quarantine. So I'm interested in, you know, in a world that's still kind of largely under varying degrees of quarantine. I'm interested in reading about the great sanatorium novel. The experience of being alone together or something like that.
10:03 Wes: Yeah. I recently read the Plague for the Partially Examined Life. We did an episode on that. That's a great. I hadn't read it before, and it's really, really great. It's one of my favorite novels now. So spot on for what we've been going through with the pandemic. I also dabbled, looked a little bit at Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year.
10:23 Erin: Oh, yeah? Yeah.
10:24 Wes: I don't know that I'll get through all of it, but that's a really interesting account. I think he basically took his uncle's diary and turned that into. It's a fictionalized account, but it's largely based in true events. All I've read of it is just him deliberating about whether or not to leave town. Apparently that's what people did. They went into the country. And he's extremely ambivalent about whether he should leave or stay for various reasons, one of which is just that his home and his workspace he thinks will be robbed if he leaves. I've started just dabbling in reading a bunch of different stuff at the same time.
So one of them, which I just finished, is a book on humor. Because I want to write my own book on humor, the Psychology of Humor. And kind of synthesizing different accounts from philosophy and sociology and psychology. But this one is written by literary critic who also happens to be, or happened to be a psychoanalyst, Norman Holland. And he gives a really wonderful synopsis of all the different things that have been said about humor over the ages. Really, really entertaining and fascinating. And unfortunately, when he gets to his own theory at the end, I think it turned out not to be.
Not to be great. Why he gets bogged down in the fact that in order to explain humor, you have to give these kind of universalizing explanat. Despite the fact that not everyone's going to laugh at the same jokes, and despite the fact that, you know, it suffers from the deficits of any explanation, which is that it has to generalize to some extent, so some of the concrete reality will always get left out. And he thinks he's going to overcome that problem by giving this theory of humor as having something to do with people recreating their own particular identity, so that even when we're laughing at the same jokes, we are doing so for different reasons in some ways.
So there are some classic theories of humors involving superiority or incongruity, which he acknowledges have their place, but he thinks he can find a richer explanation when he's trying to explain why someone laughs at a particular joke by analyzing their particular identity theme as a person, the particular narrative that they have. So I think that when you talk about humor, why people laugh at jokes, you do have to do the equivalent of literary interpretation. You can't just generalize about incongruity. To really get at a joke, you have to go deep and you have to say something about the social context that's assumed.
You have to say something about the subtext of the joke. There's a lot of stuff going on, which is really what excites me about hopefully writing this book. I don't think that the attempt to relativize it to a particular identity is workable.
13:15 Erin: I've heard a lot about that. The idea of, like, the comedian herself or himself has to be, like, alienated in order to be. You don't subscribe to any of that idea, like the social outcast or something.
13:28 Wes: I think comedians tend to be that way because I think comedy is always working with a tragic premise. So people who are dealing with their own tragic premise are going to tend to, you know, use comedy as a. As a defense or people for whom that's more poignant. He was thinking about not the identity of people telling jokes necessarily, but the identity of people on the receiving end of jokes and trying to explain why they laugh in terms of their identity.
13:54 Erin: Yeah, I just meant to flip it around and.
13:57 Wes: But I think it's probably true that there's a particular character type for successful comedians. Although, on the other hand, I am reading a book about how to write jokes as well, because I thought I should be able to consider myself with friends. I can, you know, make witty asides. I can make people laugh. But I'm finding out that that's entirely different than being able to actually write a joke, which is. Turns out to be quite difficult. So if I really want to understand humor, I have to at least train myself to write one joke. At least that's not terrible.
14:29 Erin: Have to watch more Dick Van Dyke show episodes.
14:32 Wes: Yeah, well, I'm going to be analyzing. I'm going to look for as much material as possible.
14:36 Erin: Sally and Buddy.
14:37 Wes: Yeah.
14:38 Erin: School of. Yeah.
14:40 Wes: Have we reached the end of our show?
14:42 Erin: No. That was fun. I'm going to enjoy these a heck of a lot more than the actual episodes.
14:46 Wes: Much less pressure.
14:48 Erin: Yeah.
14:49 Wes: All right. That was fun.
14:51 Erin: Yeah, it was fun.
14:52 Wes: Okay. Thanks for listening and thanks for being a supporter.
14:56 Erin: Yeah. Thanks so much for supporting us guys.
Expediency and Intimacy in Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” (1960)
Jul 27, 2020
You know, it’s that old story of boy meets girl … girl is dating boy’s married boss … girl tries to commit suicide … boy saves girl’s life …. Okay, that sounds pretty dark. But somehow it’s the basis for a classic romantic comedy, Billy Wilder’s 1960 film, The Apartment. The film raises the question of how we distinguish authentic relationships from relationships of utility and convenience. What cultivates human intimacy? What compromises it? When are we just using people? Wes and Erin analyze.
Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Marital Economics in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”
Jul 20, 2020
An advantageous marriage is Elizabeth Bennet’s only potential escape from a foolish mother, a disinterested father, three very silly sisters, and a house that’s entailed away to her idiotic cousin Mr. Collins. But she turns down fabulously wealthy Mr. Darcy because he’s prideful—and maybe a little prejudiced. But then, so is she. How do we know if two people are well-suited to each other? What makes a successful match? Is Mr. Collins actually the perfect man? Wes and Erin give their analysis of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get this and other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon.
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