Episode 180: Chekhov's Schrödinger's Dagger (Kurosawa's "Rashomon")

[00:00:00] This episode of Very Bad Wizards is made possible by our sponsors prolific at prolific.co connecting researchers with participants around the world and by givewell.org, the gold standard for charitable giving. Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro,

[00:00:19] having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:01:16] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, this is our first episode of 2020. I'll ask you the same question I always ask you in our first episodes of the year. What's your New Year's resolution?

[00:01:44] God, you know this year I always say that I think New Year's resolutions are stupid and they don't work and that's true. That's true but this year I found myself kind of wanting one.

[00:01:55] Like I want to participate, like I wanted to be part of this big cultural event so I thought and I thought and I thought and I can't for the life of me. I don't need improvement. Like at the end of the day.

[00:02:11] I'm like the ideal form of Dave Pizarro. Yeah, I'm as polished as a turd can get. I don't know, I feel like resolutions are treated with more skepticism lately. Yeah, I think that it's just that you're setting yourself up for disappointment

[00:02:32] and it's this little brief glimpse of optimism maybe fueled by the hangover-ness of January 1st, trying to start a new leaf to turn over a new leaf. But I don't know what every year you'd think that we would realize that we don't really do. I did.

[00:02:53] Like there are years where I've kept my New Year's resolutions. I would someone suggested doing it every month rather than for a whole year. So that worked. It would work through like April, which is still better than not working at all.

[00:03:07] But yeah, even I am like a sucker for these kind of cultish self-improvement things. I meditate. I you know, that's why you defend religion sometimes because you secretly just want to be in some sort of group that will tell you exactly what silly thing to do next.

[00:03:25] I crave ritual or at least I crave it in theory when I actually am presented with the possibility of being involved in some sort of community like that. I always balk at it. Like I just said, no, fuck it.

[00:03:38] But I like I know that there is a part of me that craves ritual and there is a psychology. Maybe at some point we'll talk about it. There is a psychology of like how to successfully change your habits. You know, there's work out there on that

[00:03:53] and you need to like make it specific enough. You know, it can't just be like be a better person. Right. It has to be like I'm going to do and then you get really specific and then then you deal with all of the barriers that are.

[00:04:04] It's it's there. I think habits are like magic. It's incredible. It's like you take something that you don't want to do and it takes a big force of will to do it. And then you make it a habit and then like this is what biking to work

[00:04:18] has become for me. Now it takes like a supreme act of will for me not to bike to work. Whereas before I would be looking for every excuse to not bike. Oh, look, it's like it might rain.

[00:04:30] Now it's really hard for me psychologically to not bike to work. That's also true with meditating. It's also true like you take something that starts out being hard and then once it's a habit, it's just the opposite. It's the it's what you want to do.

[00:04:45] It's like I think habits are the most under emphasized thing in the world. Like that's all we should be thinking about is habits. Pretty much is just like a non consciously performing things. Like, well, I mean, this is it's your contianism that resists it.

[00:05:01] It's like everything has to be this autonomous choice, but that's just not how we're wired. Well, you know, the one habit that I keep trying to build and I've actually been good since since about September of exercising. Yeah, routinely, not every day.

[00:05:16] But but I think one of the big things for me is you're going to fail. Right. So so at some point, you're going to fail to meet whatever goal you had for yourself. And it's those moments of failure that can really derail me.

[00:05:32] So right now I went I was in California for two weeks and I didn't have the chance to exercise as much. So now I'm back in my regular life. And now that extreme force of will kicks in again because like I'm out of the habit, right?

[00:05:47] It just doesn't take long. So I can't get down on myself for not having exercise for two weeks. I have to just say it's exercising today is better than not having exercise today. Yeah. And it's really hard.

[00:06:00] It's like someone used the analogy of it's like you gather a ball of yarn and it takes a long time to gather a ball of yarn into a ball. But then when you drop it, it's all gone. And it just the psychological barrier when you've had a habit.

[00:06:15] This is like swimming with me when you lose it. And then to you have to go back to an earlier point. Like really, I'm just going to do like 16 laps and that's going to be hard for me. Yeah, exactly.

[00:06:30] Well, yours, you know, like biking to work, that's that's tying an exercise to something that you have to do anyway. And I think that's a that's a really good way to do it. Then, you know, rather than having to do a whole brand new thing,

[00:06:43] like this is in in the service of meeting a goal. That's why honestly, one of the reasons I got a dog because I I know I'm going to have to walk it. So I mean, it's good to have an excuse to exercise. Yeah. Be outside, meet people.

[00:06:54] Dogs are so good for just getting you to be more active. So this is the new very bad wizards, everybody. We are a self help podcast now. Tim Ferriss like has to watch his audience because we're going to take it.

[00:07:09] We're going to take it from all the stoic podcasts. All the we are right now all about self improvement on very bad wizards. That's right. You know what? Let's take a break because I'm going to do some push-ups. All right. So what are we talking about today?

[00:07:26] We are talking about just an incredible movie in the second segment by Akira Kurosawa called Rashomon. But but first first something not quite as quite as great. Yeah. So you showed this to me because you got it from Neuresceptic.

[00:07:47] Once again, thank you, Neuresceptic, for improving your tweeting habits to better better fit our show. This is something and I can't believe we haven't talked about this broad topic before, but this is an article that is just should annoy anybody who knows anything about psychology.

[00:08:05] But it's in Forbes. I don't understand. But it's called when your lizard brain burns you out in short circuits of your career. So your inbox slog overwhelms you. The colleague who fails to meet as part of the team's deadline infuriates you.

[00:08:24] A co-worker talks over you in a meeting and you see with anger. Your computer crashes and you slam your fist. So a bunch of examples, but turns out, Tamler, that this is all because you have a lizard brain deep inside of you that that is an evolutionary remnant

[00:08:42] of when we were all lizards, apparently. And this is what's causing all of the bad things to happen in your life. Well, it's what's causing your reaction to all the bad things in your life. That's right. Overreaction to all the which themselves can lead to further bad things.

[00:08:59] But yeah, so so the idea is and this is an idea that that actually came from a psychologist or neuroscientist back in the day. The idea that there are that evolution worked by building layers on top of each other of brain

[00:09:16] of brain areas such that our earliest evolutionary ancestors had this part of our brain that deals solely with sort of reflexive responses to danger. It's vigilant, it's a tune to negativity and it is emotional and it causes immediate quick reactions to stimuli in our environment.

[00:09:38] We still have that even though thousands, millions of years of evolution have layered on a smarter part of our brain, like the mammalian brain, the prefrontal cortex that we have that can reason and think about stuff that old evolutionary part

[00:09:55] your lizard brain still kicks in every once in a while. So our lizards, yeah, emotional like, I don't I don't know why people call it is the reptilian brain and it comes from like this triune theory of brain.

[00:10:11] I'll put a link to Wikipedia and it was like the reptilian brain is because reptiles are really old. And so so apparently reptiles were really shitty to each other. And very paranoid about very paranoid. So this is neuro skeptic.

[00:10:28] I forget how he described it, but it was something like a delicious combination of neuro babble. He didn't say evolutionary psychology, although this is this is if you wanted to make fun of evolutionary psychology. This is your Forbes article and also just this kind of self help,

[00:10:47] self improvement, get your act together. You can solve all your problems attitude. And so I started just trying to excerpt the funniest passages. I know, yeah. But then I realized that I was just pretty much exerting the whole thing. But here's one of my favorites.

[00:11:06] Quick and protective, your lizard brain residing in your DNA has an important evolutionary origin. It kept your ancestors from getting eaten by wild animals or attacked by vicious tribes, vicious tribes. So I mean, it's very hard to even try to parse this.

[00:11:26] Like, but like what does it mean? Your lizard brain residing in your DNA. That's what that's the exact sentence that I texted you about to like brains resided in a now, you know, not to get nitpicky

[00:11:42] on this otherwise very accurate article, but brains don't reside in your DNA. But also it's if this is from our time as lizards, there are no lizard tribes. Well, vicious lizard tribes, Tim. We just. I mean, tribalism is a big problem.

[00:12:01] The part that really started getting to me because I was reading this, I was like, well, I think you had this feeling too that while this is just sort of maybe decent advice with a layer of neuro babel and, you know, fake science.

[00:12:17] But but maybe it's just good advice. But but it matters because because there is these weird empirical claims. So like he says, no one can trigger nobody can trigger your lizard brain without your consent, which is just the weirdest claim. Like if the lizard brain is so reactive

[00:12:35] and it's responding automatically to threats in the environment, then but nobody can trigger it without your consent. That's that seems to defeat the purpose of having a lizard brain. And and they make this claim that that once reactions kick in that are from your lizard brain,

[00:12:53] it takes 90 seconds for the chemical reaction to actually kick in. So that's how long you have carried. So yes, please do. You always have a choice to respond with either action or reaction, regardless how small or big the circumstances. In a recent Forbes interview, brain researcher,

[00:13:14] Dr. Jill Bopey Taylor told me when a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there's a 90 second chemical process that happens. Any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. In other words, when you react to a situation,

[00:13:32] you make a choice to do so, an unconscious choice perhaps, but a choice nonetheless. It's it's it's just like to try to make sense of this, to try to even make it coherent, to try to even know what this could mean. I don't know if it's possible.

[00:13:49] You are making a choice, an unconscious choice, perhaps. Well, what does that mean? Do we have control over this or not? What and then and then where is this data coming from? What is this 90 second chemical process that is happening that during that time?

[00:14:05] It's like it's just that window that we have control to either, you know, exacerbate it or restrain it or what does that mean? 90 seconds seems like a long ass time. Yeah, like, you know, isn't the whole point that you're spending the old advice to count to 10?

[00:14:22] Like you have to force yourself to wait, you wait a few seconds before you're actually like if we had a 90 second window, we wouldn't do a whole lot of shit. Like it would. She's everybody cuts you off on the highway and then you're like,

[00:14:34] fuck a minute and a half later, you're like asshole. Fuck you. It's like watching a video where the audio is lagging. Or like most of our Skype discussion. That's right. But yeah, as you point out, this is like the one of the biggest themes

[00:14:51] of all of our discussions of neuroscience is that the the attribution of the self to something nonbrainy or some like where it's like your brain does something and you have to choose whether or not to let it. It's like, wait, where's the you? Like what the fuck?

[00:15:07] Like what's the yeah. Here's a part that I that I feel like was it was it was almost going to say something wise. But but I but it's such a stretch. What are the signs of lizard brain burnout? No one is immune from lizard brain burnout.

[00:15:26] Did you know that? In recent years, the incidences of burnout have risen in alarming numbers. Seven thousand five Gallup study of nearly seven thousand five hundred full time employees found that twenty three percent reported feeling burnt out with an additional forty four

[00:15:38] percent feeling burnt out sometimes two thirds of the workforce. So I can relate. I'm you know, I've definitely felt this. But are these people like did the Gallup survey confirm that it was lizard brain burnout or just well, that's where the science has come in.

[00:15:54] He's using the science to explain the Gallup results. Your lizard brain. So he describes burnout as your lizard brain is a major contributor to burnout because it never sleeps. Oh, that's interesting. So this Lizards aren't sleeping at all.

[00:16:10] It works over time on always on a twenty four seven alert for anything that threatens you feeling threatened and constantly on guard, scanning, hypervigilant, worrying, processing, discerning and reacting time and time and again, the things you can't control is exhausting not

[00:16:24] only leads to lizard brain burnout, but also professional alienation and career suicide. Is my lizard brain that did it? And so when it says that it's on twenty four seven, is the lizard brain making me dream? Is it? That's what I couldn't.

[00:16:40] I was like, well, like, like, are you speaking? How much is metaphor and how much is a mix of like metaphorical language and actual neuroscience? But obviously it's not even though, like, it's just like throwing the words in at times.

[00:16:53] Like here's just another stat that I just I I'd love to know if this is even like that. If this was this is based in anything at all or is just something that I totally made up for protection, your lizard brain has a baked in negativity bias.

[00:17:09] Even though studies show that 90 percent of worries are false alarms that never manifest, your lizard brain prioritizes and remembers the negative experiences and attempts to prevent life's unexpected curveballs from ambushing you. Like what studies show that 90 percent of worries are false alarms?

[00:17:28] I know, I wanted exactly one of my questions. I was like, wait, I don't even know what to make of that. Is that what? Like is that a lot or a little actually? Like if I'm worried that's like, OK, I can see

[00:17:40] like when I worry about someone breaking into my house, maybe, you know, that doesn't happen. Maybe it happens once in a lifetime or something in at least where I've lived. But I'm worried. I worry about dying all the time. That's pretty much 100 percent going to happen.

[00:17:55] Well, that's in the 10 percent that will manifest. That's an attention. What like describe the study that shows that 90 percent of worries are false alarms? Yeah, I don't. You're always defending, you know, studies, data experiments. That's right. That's right. It brings like 10 people into a lab.

[00:18:15] I'm going to die on Pamela. 90 percent. If it says 90 percent, it's 90 percent. Definitely exactly 90 percent. So one way to understand this is that it is just a self help. And maybe it's not the best self help piece because, you know, it's cheesy, right?

[00:18:33] It's like you're not looking at the good parts of your life. You're always focused on the bag parts. But maybe what the science stuff is doing here, as in potentially other, you know, better, more competent science accounts is it's just making the point more salient

[00:18:56] and getting people to, you know, we always talk about Molly Crockett. Those old studies that she did where when you add brain just add brain data, even though it's irrelevant, it makes people believe the study more than the Frank and then you. Yeah.

[00:19:16] So maybe that's what this stuff is. It's almost like you could almost take like a postmodern performance art spin of it, where it's like it's trying to get this point across. And this is the way that it can do that in the same way that,

[00:19:34] like, you know, the Stanford Prison Experiment in one sense didn't really in an experimental way show anything. But as a piece of drama to dramatically present this idea that sometimes the situation is is powerful and we can adopt roles that seem like they're out of character for us

[00:19:58] just because we're in the roles. Like it did a good job of doing that, even if it might have been drama and in almost literal sense as it's coming out, like he kind of might have instructed the guards to behave that way. It still does it.

[00:20:15] This is why people still talk about it today, right? Like it's a really interesting way of presenting this thesis about human behavior, which is probably true to some extent, although the the Stanford Prison Experiment doesn't give evidence for that.

[00:20:32] It does make it salient to us in a way that a lot of other things might not have. Yeah, you know, like I agree. I mean, I think that there is some wisdom that is being communicated here.

[00:20:45] So like the gist of this article we've been pulling quotes, but like the gist is basically you have responses and reactions that that you can regulate and your life will be better if you use some strategies to downregulate some of your negative emotions or your initial reactions.

[00:21:03] In that way, it's just like a dual process theory. It's like it's no different than saying system one is sometimes stupid and leads you astray, so let system two kick in. Adding the language of neuroscience is doing, I think, just what you said,

[00:21:16] like making it sound fancier and truer. It bugs me, I guess, because it's wrong and I don't want that, you know, it just just for the sake of truth. And maybe the wrongness of it will undermine what other people say

[00:21:32] when they say right things, you know, maybe people either lose faith in any of the neuroscience. Well, they shouldn't be listening to neuroscience for advice anyway. But. But just the wrongness of it pisses me off. So it just so happened that my colleague Michael Goldstein

[00:21:51] sent me an article that's in press in current directions of psychological science, which has an awesome title called Your Brain is Not an Onion with a Tiny Reptile Inside. Yeah. And basically it lays out some of the history of this view

[00:22:06] that there is a reptilian brain and that your cortex was built on it and that it's distinctly human and that that's the seat of self control and planning. And they basically try to show how this is an old idea that's actually so wrong that

[00:22:22] that it has impeded progress in psychology to have this view. And they give like good evolutionary reasons for like why we didn't develop in such a linear fashion with like layers of our brain being added over time.

[00:22:36] And as I was saying, this is a theory that was proposed by a neuroscientist like a neuroanonymous himself, McLean. And it's to be honest, an idea that I was brought up believing in my early psychology classes. And I don't know, you know, the the authors of this article

[00:22:54] are trying to say that this this is dangerous. It's dangerous to keep believing this. I don't think the Forbes article is dangerous. It's just stupid. So maybe if it does help somebody, if it helps, say, you know, sometimes I go home and my family will have read

[00:23:08] some article on the brain. They'll be like, did you know that your brain does this? And I'll be like, yeah, like what they're saying makes sense. Like they're giving good advice. Like am I going to be sit there and tell them well, actually,

[00:23:22] the brain doesn't doesn't work that way. Right. But on this podcast for fuck's sake, I will. I mean, in that sense, it's it's it's like the same defense that people give of religion. Yeah, you know, except for the lizard brain hypothesis

[00:23:39] doesn't cause people to like just, you know, blow up buildings. Yeah, but it also doesn't cause people to like join the Peace Corps or that's because of the 90 seconds. Yeah. And then it gives you. I that's it. This is such an absurd example of just

[00:23:57] it's what the French would call in the import a quat. It's just anything like I just it's just this jumble of jargon and self help stuff. Throw neuroscience evolutionary psychology, just like studies about negativity and worries and how we worry too much.

[00:24:17] Like doesn't matter if this has any basis in reality, we'll just throw it in. You know what? What I was trying to think, like, why did this get written? You could just pop her and in published and you could just picture

[00:24:31] an editor saying like, Hey, I want you to write something that links neuroscientists to bad neuroscience, to bad habits that could serve as advice. You know, and somebody was under pressure to like bring this shit together into into a coherent article, giving advice.

[00:24:47] And then I was just lamenting that that yeah, in people just need to write articles so that online outlets can get ads and get published and that's just depressing. It's just content. Yeah, I wish people would write less. You know, well, this guy is definitely not writing less.

[00:25:06] If you look at his bio, he's the author of two novels and 40 nonfiction books. Nonfiction should be in quotes. Right. Two novels and 40. Fiction. Hashtag chill, turn off your job and turn on your life. William Morrow and the long selling chain to the desk.

[00:25:29] A guide for workaholics, their partners and children and the clinicians who treat them New York University Press. I mean, if this is true and this isn't just another thing that he's made up,

[00:25:40] you know, and all the other things like NPR being NBC Nightly News and all this stuff. It's it's his strength. It's a little weird that he would write this and the Forbes would publish it. But as you say, like they're just so hungry for content right now.

[00:25:56] I think every websites, they'll do that. Yeah. Did this guy really publish books and academic press? I don't know. He's this seems like a step down. Maybe he's just trying to make ends meet. Maybe he's got stuff all the time.

[00:26:16] I mean, I think they wrote an article praising very bad wizards at some point. So they'll publish anything. All right. Let's talk about something we love and not something that we can be snarky about because that's something that will give us certainty about what truth is.

[00:26:36] Yes, we'll be right back to talk about Rashomon. Rashomon. That's how I assume Japanese people pronounce it. This week's episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you in part by prolific. One of our favorite sponsors, Tamler.

[00:26:53] You and I got into a little bit of a fight, would you say? Last time about. Yeah, would you call it a fight? I don't know if I call it. I don't know. A tiff. Well, whatever you call it when married people after 50 years argue with each other.

[00:27:07] But it doesn't. But anyway, it was about generalizability and it was about what we can learn from psychological studies. And I think, you know, science, science of humans is hard. One of the things that we can agree on is that if you're going to make claims

[00:27:22] about about psychology and about how humans work, you need to have decent evidence. And that means that you need to have multiple studies. It means you have to have a diverse set of populations to study.

[00:27:36] You need to get all your ducks in a row in order to to say that you've discovered anything true about human nature. And that's what prolific does. That's why prolific got started. Prolific is an online data collection service that was made by social

[00:27:52] psychologists for anybody interested in doing research on humans. They have access to 70,000 active participants in North America and in Europe. They have survey takers that are regular citizens. And if you want, in fact, to do a study or a survey that just looks at

[00:28:13] Democrats or Republicans or African Americans or old Jews, you can. That's the Tamler demographic. Hey, you're not a Jew. OK, you're not a Jew. So in other words, they don't just they don't just pull undergrads who are trying to get extra credit.

[00:28:36] No one who are stoned and no, that's that's how I had to do all of my all of my day. I used to give out candy bars to do one page surveys. And now I realize now that you just said that is that I was definitely

[00:28:48] hitting the stoner demographic. I got the munchies. Let's do one of Pizarre's studies. I don't know. Throw the guy on the trolley. Throw the guy in the trash. Fuck it. But, you know, it's probably isn't the first online data service.

[00:29:05] One of the biggest, most widely used one is Amturk. But Amturk wasn't built for this specific kind of data collection. And one of the problems that Amturk has is that there are professional survey takers. The data quality can be tough.

[00:29:21] You've got to do a lot of data cleaning because there are a lot of people who don't take it seriously on Amturk, maybe because they're getting paid shit. And that's what Prolific tries to focus on the quality of the data.

[00:29:32] They use machine learning to improve the data quality, monitor the data and look at all of the feedback they get from researchers. They take steps to make sure that there aren't professional survey takers and Prolific easily lets you run longitudinal and follow up studies.

[00:29:48] You can keep track of the participants who took your initial survey and you can track them over time. That's invaluable for certain kinds of research questions. So Prolific is giving away $50 to very bad wizards, listeners who want to give online sampling a go.

[00:30:02] So whether you're a social scientist doing research at a university or you're in charge of market research at a big firm or you're a high school student and you're doing research for a science fair but you want to do it on human beings. Look into Prolific.

[00:30:17] www.prolific.co slash very bad wizards to get those $50 when you start an account. That's www.prolific.co slash very bad wizards. Thanks to Prolific for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards.

[00:31:21] www.prolific.co.uk

[00:31:56] www.prolific.co.uk www.prolific.co.uk Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the podcast where we like to take a moment to thank all the people who are so generously supporting us in all the different ways that you support us

[00:32:18] and one of them is just to get in touch with us, to email us, tweet at us, to participate in the conversation around our episodes. If you would like to do that, you can email us, verybadwizardsatgmail.com

[00:32:34] You can tweet at us, at Tamler, at P's, at Very Bad Wizards. You can follow us on Instagram. No longer like us on Facebook because that is defunct. Unfortunately, you can rate us on iTunes. You can join the conversation on the Very Bad Wizards subreddit.

[00:32:57] Lately on the subreddit, there's been some discussion of the episodes. I also got a little offended by a couple of comments and just wrongly offended too because they were more joking around than I understood. I didn't see that and you reacted with your lizard brain?

[00:33:14] I did. I got defensive with my lizard brain. If I had known about the 90 seconds, I did. But then there's also been some short fiction recently. Yeah, I saw that. There's a lot of stuff going on there. You can join in the conversation.

[00:33:35] Every once in a while we'll jump in and be either defensive or kind and generous like I always am. Yes, that's why you don't need any New Year's resolutions. That's right. Yeah, rate us on iTunes. Subscribe to us on iTunes. That's always good. Subscribe to us on Spotify.

[00:33:55] That's great too. And thank you. We really enjoy all the contact we have with you. We certainly do and if you want to support us in more tangible ways, please feel free. We love you for doing that.

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[00:34:24] Have we decided what our next one's going to be? I don't think so, but we should. Any suggestions from our patrons. So go there, patreon.com, very bad wizards or you can on our support page find a link to give us a one time

[00:34:40] or recurring donation on PayPal because not all of you have access to Patreon. We really appreciate it. We're very, very grateful for all of the ways in which contact us, but especially grateful for those who go out

[00:34:52] of their way to keep our lights on, keep the podcast going. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you. And we will have another bonus episode. We were pretty good about it last year. I think we did like five of them.

[00:35:07] And that's like a lot of content for us. Oh, I really want to quickly mention that I was on the I sold you out again. I went on Mark Linsemeyer's not partial exam in life, but his new podcast pretty much popped to discuss Watchmen. So find that podcast.

[00:35:27] I'm on the latest episode. It was fun to talk about Watchmen and partly out of revenge, revenge porn, maybe I went on a was an interview for an app, an app on stoicism called Stoa. I didn't know this. I didn't know you want to.

[00:35:43] Yeah, we had a nice conversation. It's the guy named is Caleb on Tavares and his app is called Stoa. We talked about honor and stoicism in the relationship. We talked about it. Zidane and the play Electra by Socrates, and it was fun.

[00:36:03] So so how is your thing with the partially examined life, motherfuckers? It's great. It's just one of them. And then two others on this podcast. It was much more civil than we are, but it was a good. It was a good discussion for three other people with very

[00:36:20] different perspectives and backgrounds, actor, musician, writer. And yeah, we did a deep dive into the Watchmen, the mainly the TV show, the Lindelof TV show that I think is great then, but also the graphic novel and the movie. It was fun. I got I got a nerd boner.

[00:36:43] I you very generously sent me the Watchmen graphic novel. I'm a little over halfway through it. And I always I read the things that you said to me. That's all right. I'm really enjoying it. So we can maybe that's what we should do. Let's talk about Watchmen.

[00:37:02] Oh, yeah. It could be a bonus. That would be awesome. I'll put a link to both of those episodes that we just mentioned. So let's talk about this, this movie. This is a 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa. It was his big break internationally.

[00:37:20] He had done a couple other movies before this, but this was what made him famous. It won the Venice Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival. And even though its own studio didn't want to submit it because

[00:37:34] it was it was thought of as too weird and not representative of Japanese cinema at the time. If you haven't seen it yet, you can find it on Amazon. You can find a version on YouTube. And also this thing canopy.

[00:37:50] If you're attached to a university and a university library, there's something called canopy K-A-N-O-P-Y, which has a ton of criterion collection movies and a bunch of other movies that you will just have free access to and you can put on your TV at home, Roku or whatever.

[00:38:09] I had no idea about this. I was going to ask you to work. I didn't either until like a year and a half. It's incredible. And it's awesome. I think probably some percentage of our listeners have access to it. I think even a public library subscription

[00:38:22] might give you some access to it. So yeah, there's a lot of ways to see it. I hadn't seen it in about, I think at least 15 years. I don't know why I waited that long. I'd like I love to revisit movies. And so I didn't remember.

[00:38:40] I kind of remembered what everybody remembers about it, including I think people who haven't even seen it. I think it's such a well-known, become like part of the vernacular phenomenon, the Rashomon effect. But here's what I remembered was it took place a long time ago.

[00:38:59] And in fact, it's in the 11th century. It takes place outside of Kyoto, Japan. And we get famously four different accounts of the same incident. And here's what we know about the incident. A samurai and his wife are walking through the forest and they're ambushed by a bandit.

[00:39:20] The bandit ties up the samurai, forces himself on the wife, and the samurai is stabbed to death. And a woodcutter finds the body. Those I think are the only things that are not in dispute within the four accounts. And the woodcutter and the priest are present

[00:39:43] at the court proceedings, which we see in flashback form. And then there's kind of flashbacks within flashbacks. And now we have to try to sort through as the judge and the witness accounts are presented like we are the judge directly into the camera.

[00:40:03] So this is probably the ultimate philosophy movie. But more than The Matrix? More than The Matrix. It touches on epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, subjectivity, objectivity, truth, good and evil. So that's what I remembered about it. What I did not remember, or at least that well,

[00:40:25] was just how incredible the filmmaking is. It has these three sets, the Rashomon Gate where we're hearing these stories and that's where the flashback, we get the flashbacks, the courtyard where the testimony is given, which is just incredible. And they each have their own cinematic character.

[00:40:43] And then it's just a strange movie. It's trippy, right? One thing I've... It's got to be so long. I didn't remember that one of the testimony comes from just the dead samurai through a medium. I saw the movie maybe three years ago and I didn't remember either.

[00:41:02] And it's such a striking scene where we're getting from this medium, who's a woman, speaking in what I take it is the samurai's voice. So it's a real kind of impressionistic trip, just such a masterpiece. It's faulting up in my all-time favorite movies.

[00:41:25] So that's what I think about it generally. What did you think about it? Yeah, I mean, I love the movie. I agree with all of the things that you said about the relevance of it. The interesting questions, tossing in psychology too, there's a lot about memories,

[00:41:47] a lot about attribution. And it reminded me a lot of the work that we covered on the Totalitarian Ego where people are motivated in this self-serving way to remember things the way that makes them look good. There's a lot there. But I think it's because late in life,

[00:42:10] I really started fairly late in life to even appreciate some of these aspects of filmmaking and like in part this podcast, but also people like the Every Frame a Painting videos, just the YouTube video essays about filmmaking that's so interesting that lead me to see things

[00:42:32] the way I never saw before. But even before that, I remember being struck that this movie, even though it's obviously, it's all of this black and white, the audio is kind of shitty, there's a modernity to the way Kurosawa makes his films,

[00:42:51] the way that he handles his camera. It seems as if he could be a modern filmmaker. It's like watching a modern movie in terms of the way that he frames things, the way that he moves the camera, the way that he uses the camera

[00:43:08] to be sort of another character. It's amazing. I was struck this time by how somebody can be so fucking good at their craft at a time when there weren't a whole lot of examples for him. Yeah, I mean, right.

[00:43:25] Well, it's certainly not in terms of the structure of the movie. I think it was pretty unique at that time. Yeah, and the filmmaking, I think it's just incredible. It was one of the first to shoot directly into the sun. And just that whole opening,

[00:43:45] it's not the opening, the opening scene is at the gate, but when the woodcutter is describing finding the body and you get a flashback to him going through the forest, with his axe and just that whole sequence, it's like two minutes long. Yeah, the camera movement,

[00:44:03] the way you get the shadows on his face, pretty much every scene in the forest where people are moving through the forest is just a wondrous thing to watch. I mean, the camera brings the camera underneath the woodcutter. You get tights on his face,

[00:44:18] you get the movement sometimes. Yeah, sometimes the camera is moving, but it's just a very different thing to do. It's amazing, and like I said, not knowing that much of the history of this stuff, I can at least feel the vibe that this is the work.

[00:44:32] It feels like the work of a modern director just working with black and white. I think I have a higher opinion of some of the older directors. The third man, Orson Welles, that stuff had happened before. But some of the ways in which he uses the camera,

[00:44:54] you don't even see in those noir, I mean the use of shadows and stuff like that. That's all amazing. But again, I just hate ignorance. Yeah, just the way that he moves the camera with the characters and the way you're walking. It's like you're walking through the forest

[00:45:11] with your head up like you're being, you're just seeing the trees, the sunlight through the trees. Yeah, it's amazing. I'm sure there were good directors before, but I take it that this is one of the reasons why Carousal was hailed as such an influence on others.

[00:45:29] Yeah, it's also just, even though it is in some ways the perfect example of the power of cinema, it has a very play-like feel too. Like a theater play, like a drama because they just have these three sets and very limited number of characters,

[00:45:50] like six or seven characters. And it's just a very spare story. It has this kind of almost, not absurdist, but a little like Beckett Waiting for Godot where there's not that much... You know, it's not like you get these crowds of people,

[00:46:09] even though there's court proceedings going on. We see three or four people at the most in the court proceedings. You see three people at the gate. You see three people, there's a lot of threes and there's a lot of ways in which the blocking

[00:46:24] of the three people is so cool throughout the movie. But let's talk about the plot and let's talk about sort of what's famous about it, which is this epistemological just clusterfuck that might apply to pretty much every aspect of our lives and how to understand that.

[00:46:49] Because the movie starts out, the first two lines of it are I don't understand, I just don't understand. It's the woodcutter just muttering to himself in this torrential rain at the gate outside of Kyoto, the Rashomon Gate. This huge just, I don't know,

[00:47:07] it looks almost like a temple that's been half destroyed and they keep kind of tearing it apart as they're going as well. And it's just, the rain is incredible. It's so powerful. And then this commoner comes in and the priest and the woodcutter

[00:47:29] have just come from the court proceedings and it's like they are direct from it. They can't, they call it like the strangest and most terrible thing they've ever heard. And when it's described like just a man was killed, the commoner is like just one man was killed?

[00:47:53] What's, who cares? Like there's probably five bodies up on top of this gate right now that are unclaimed. There's all these bandits coming through all the time, big famine, fire, these wars. This is at a very turbulent time in Japanese history. What's the big deal?

[00:48:12] And I guess the big deal is that it's, this is an existential like problem about the human condition and that's the thing that is just so deeply destroying these two characters at the outset. They've lost their faith in humanity, especially the priest says that pretty much explicitly

[00:48:37] just from this strange story. Right. So you're like, well what the hell has made them lose so much faith? And so, like you said, we get these flashbacks and you hear the account of the event that you outlined earlier from what ends up being four different perspectives,

[00:48:57] but during the proceedings it's three perspectives, right? So you want to go through the difference in the three? Yeah, and then the fourth too because I think some people think that the fourth might be the real one, but I disagree.

[00:49:11] Yeah, yeah, I definitely want to talk about that. Because it's, he structures it so that that, you know, so that it might be, you know, CSI Miami where you're like, oh! But then he gives you reasons to doubt that. He gives you reasons to doubt that too.

[00:49:27] Yeah, let's go through it. So the first thing we get, which is also a flashback testimony though, is just the guy finding the body in that walking through the wood sequence. And the priest then, yeah. Yeah, oh and the priest seeing the samurai also, that's testimony too.

[00:49:44] It's just so interesting that it is told from this perspective. This was one of the most innovative use of flashbacks. I don't think anybody had used flashbacks in a way where you could doubt the truth or you have to doubt the truth of the flashbacks before.

[00:50:02] Flashbacks, there's something about the nature of them where if you're seeing it then it must have happened and in this case, no, it can't have happened exactly in the way because you get these contradictory flashbacks. I mean, we'll get to this is like one of my favorite things

[00:50:19] to talk about is the metanus of this where the filmmaker is giving us flashbacks, which as you say would normally be like, okay, well it's the God's eye view of the events that occurred. And now I'm led to doubt that.

[00:50:32] So like I am now doubting what the filmmaker has told me just like the judge presumably is doubting what the high witnesses are saying. Yes, right. And just confused and confused at a very deep fundamental level. Okay, so let's go and talk about the three different accounts.

[00:50:53] So the first is the Bandit's account, Hajomaru. So I take it the performance, the over-the-top performance is in large part referring to his performance this act. Yeah, yeah. And you know, I was watching it with Nicky and it took her out of it

[00:51:12] much more than it took me out of it. It's a caricature of a crazy villain, right? So he is the best that I could describe it as like the Joker from the cartoons where he's just like his movements are big. He has cacophonous laughter that interrupts everything.

[00:51:35] And he has these very clear, vivid facial expressions of growls and grimaces. And he hisses sometimes. He hisses, so it's like, I think the part of this was just to let you know from the outset that this was the Bandit.

[00:51:54] This was the presumably bad guy of the story. It's like an archetype. I think Kurosawa, and I actually really liked this guy's performance. He wanted it to be like a silent movie almost with sound and it has the look of a silent movie

[00:52:13] and also like I think some of the performances of a silent movie. I got into it. I liked this guy a lot. He's scratching and like batting mosquitoes off of him and like laughing at random almost this crazy laugh.

[00:52:30] But anyway, so he says he was found by the side of a river and they can't even agree about why he was by the river. Some guy found him, tied him up, brought him to the court. Did he have arrows in his back?

[00:52:45] So that's what I thought at first, but I don't think so. And the second time I watched it, I realized no, it was just that he stole the same rice arrows. The guy who found him says that he fell off his horse.

[00:53:00] He says that he just drank some water and got really sick. He basically says he got diarrhea. So already we don't have any agreement on what happened. But then he says that he just happened to be in the forest when the samurai and his wife were passing

[00:53:21] and a breeze is the thing that made the samurai die and the breeze, it lifted the veil from the woman's face and as soon as he sees her face, he fell in love with her, felt like he had to have her. He had to have her.

[00:53:41] And there is a lot of the movement of the wind and of the trees and like there's a lot of movement that's involved in the nature in the scenes and to make that a causal effect on the plot is really interesting.

[00:53:58] And the music, there's like a little trilly, like a little tingling piano right when he sees it and that's like a motif in the score that comes back too. So anyway, he says he didn't want to kill the samurai

[00:54:16] so he does this sort of con job of saying that he found a bunch of swords and he shows the samurai the swords. He wants to show them the swords if he'll come through the forest with them and again, the shots of him is shedding through the forest

[00:54:32] like are just so, so good. So he kind of gets him to this isolated spot, attacks him, ties him up and then brings the woman back there because he wants the woman, all of a sudden he gets very jealous of the samurai

[00:54:50] and he wants the woman to see how pathetic the samurai is and... I love by the way that like obviously the way to con a samurai is to say that you found a bunch of cool swords. Exactly. I didn't know it was that easy.

[00:55:07] And then, you know, he decides to have sex with the woman in front of the samurai and this is like, this is actually a really affecting scene, right? You'd like the shame on the samurai's face when he sees like that he's so helpless and he can't prevent it

[00:55:25] and then there's that trilling piano but it's much creepier version of it and then of course in this bandit story afterwards, he kind of falls in love because the woman was so fierce and tried to fight him off with a dagger.

[00:55:40] He kind of fell in love with her and says, you know, like run away with me. Yeah, but wait, hold on, before you get there even though when he was trying to rape her are you talking about after the rape?

[00:55:54] No, well, yeah, I did it out of order. The dagger was before. Yeah, but importantly he says that she... like she turns, like after he's trying to rape her she actually turns to be like kind of seduced by him like she actually gives in where it sounds like

[00:56:14] well, it was a start, it started his rape but she saw how hot I was. Yeah, right, it started as rape but then she sort of clutches him as if she just... she's overpowered by his sensual. And he is very animalistic, right?

[00:56:34] Even the shots of him in the forest like he's just... he looks like a... like an animal on the prowl. Yes, absolutely. And in this version she is... she's got spirit, she's got spunk, she's butt in the end

[00:56:53] she sort of gives in to him and seems to like it but then says I can't live with the shame of this so with both of you alive cut him loose and I will go with the survivor, she says. And it's very honorable in the bandit's telling, right?

[00:57:13] He cuts the rope, he gives him his sword back they have this fight and it's like as far as I can tell I'm not an expert but it's a good sword fight. Yeah, definitely in comparison to it. Yeah, in comparison to what comes at the end

[00:57:29] which is very funny. I love by the way she says that like she can't have two men at least in the translation two men know her shame. Yeah. Which I was like wait does this just mean that she can't live with two men having had sex with her

[00:57:42] that the shame of the actual sexual assault it's not clear to me. Well, I know the shame of public knowledge of it from two men like honor related. No, I understand but is it honor about having been sexually assaulted and that being a shame

[00:57:58] or just having had sex with two men? Like I see. I think it's having sex with two men. Yeah. Yeah. Especially since on his story yeah, he she was willing participant. In, yeah, sort of willing at midway willing. That's right. Yes. He says that we crossed swords.

[00:58:21] He didn't almost didn't want to kill him the samurai after he beats him because they crossed swords 23 times and nobody had ever lasted more than 20 times with the bandit before. So he gives him an honorable death but then the woman takes off and he loses her.

[00:58:40] So that's his story. Right. Yeah. Before we get to the woman's story I want to take a quick moment to talk about Give Well. As many of you know, we've been doing spots for Give Well really the last few months that is the fantastic organization

[00:59:02] that researchers charity to help you maximize the impact of your donation. And this past season, podcast listeners like you and like me and like David, right? Right. We gave over $500,000 to Give Well's recommended charities in the past giving season. Give Well wants to thank all of you

[00:59:25] and we want to thank all of you for helping to support some of the most effective charities in the world. Give Well spends more than 10,000 hours each year searching for outstanding charities but that only matters when donors like you act on their research and give.

[00:59:43] Give Well greatly appreciates your support of extremely effective, evidence-based charities. These donations will be used to distribute things like malaria treatments, insecticide treated bed nets or vitamin A supplements, programs that can save a life for every few thousand dollars donated. Give Well uses academic research,

[01:00:06] interviews with charity representatives and site visits to estimate which charities can give donors the biggest bang for their philanthropic buck. They keep their recommendations up to date to make sure their recommended charities can still use additional funds effectively. This means that donations at any point in the year

[01:00:25] including now will be put to good use. To find out more about how much good your donation can do, go to GiveWell.org. There you'll find all of Give Well's research for free as well as a short list of the most effective charities they've found.

[01:00:41] You can donate directly through their website and they charge no fees and take no cut. Thank you to Give Well for all the good work that you do and for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. Then it's the wife's turn to give her testimony.

[01:01:02] Again, all of these testimonies are given. They're looking right at you, the audience member. We never see the judge. Presumably they're telling the judge, but it's a very nice... We never see a jury. We never see anybody other than the people who are giving testimony and the woodcutter

[01:01:17] and the priest in the background. And what's great is how... I mean, as many people have pointed out that these are actors who are portraying the same character in four very different ways. And so even the body language of the actors is very different, the different stories.

[01:01:38] And it's easy to lose sight of that because you really... If you get lost in the movie, of course you think these are different accounts of the event, but they're doing a great job. And so the wife's body language is when she's telling the stories,

[01:01:52] she is on the floor, just groveling and just devastated by the events. They also answer questions from the judge, but we don't even hear the questions. It's literally like we are asking the questions. And what's weird is that that didn't... I had to pay attention to notice that.

[01:02:17] It didn't bother me. It didn't take away from the... But it didn't seem that weird to have them answering questions to a silent, faceless judge. And watching at the second time, the first testimony is from the woodcutter who found the body. And they ask some important questions

[01:02:37] that will come up including what he found. And they ask him, they pin him down and say, so you didn't find anything else? And he says, no, I didn't find anything else. I assume they ask you didn't find anything else. We don't know what they actually are,

[01:02:54] but he says no, I didn't find anything else. Okay, so yeah, tell us the woman's story. So she says that the band at Tajumaru left right after having raped her and that she is begging, she begs her husband to forgive her.

[01:03:12] And then what a good job of this coldness. She says on her account, the husband has just completely changed. He's now giving her this completely cold response after the rape, rejecting her. Basically whatever has happened has made him not be able to see her in the same way.

[01:03:33] It's so much just contempt. Just contempt. And she's begging him to forgive her and take her back. So then, but his response is very clear. So she frees him and she begs him to kill her so that she would be at peace, but he's just a fucking cold.

[01:03:55] It actually was striking how like, just that guy staring that coldly into the camera made me feel like a little piece of shit. Exactly right. Totally. There's a couple of times where just the look into the camera just made me feel like I was getting that look.

[01:04:15] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And she is so distressed at the way he's responding to her. She faints with a dagger, this dagger that has a pearl inlay that we now know to be valuable. She faints with that dagger in her hand

[01:04:32] and she wakes up and finds that her husband is dead with the dagger in his chest. And I guess she tried to kill herself. Is that right? Yeah, she goes to a pond and she tries, I guess, to throw her in

[01:04:44] and the shot of the pond is so good too. Just like, I don't even know what it's doing, the light shimmering and the thing, but it's just, it's beautiful. This is what Martin Scorsese was talking about when he was talking about cinema.

[01:05:02] As opposed to a new Marvel nerds through your hissy fit. This is what he's talking about. There were better ways to communicate what he was trying to say. But yes, this is fucking cinema. And it's weird. I agree her posture is so repentant and docile as they say.

[01:05:28] In it except at the end, after she has described killing her husband or accidentally fainting with the dagger and killing him, the shot of her, she's kind of leaning back in an almost sensual way. You know what I mean? She's kind of leaning back

[01:05:50] and then there are these two guys in the background. She's leaning back. She almost looks like she's just had sex. And you know, like she's had sex, like smoking the cigarette, like whatever. And it's very strange that that was chosen at that time

[01:06:08] to have her be more of like a sexual figure at that point. By the way, what is up with those eyebrows? Yeah. And that was one of the times that I noticed it most prominently is when she's in that kind of leaned back position on her hands.

[01:06:27] So I guess that this is there must have been some sort of traditional way of painting one's face or decorate, you know, wearing makeup. But it looks as if her real eyebrows have been shaved off and above them in their place are like

[01:06:43] what I can only describe is sideways Hitler mustaches that look almost drawn on with charcoal. Yeah. But apparently she was a huge. She was like the Marilyn Monroe of Japan at the time. Yeah. So I mean, like so. So now we've had two stories.

[01:07:03] They're totally different in the sense of not like there's still this dead samurai, but in her telling, she did it in the guys telling he did it in her telling the bandit ran away right after having sex with her and laughing in this maniacal laugh.

[01:07:22] And then and in his telling, he tried to stay with her and she ran off. So there's two. There's just a bunch of things that can't both be true. Right. But at the same time they play it with such conviction that you believe it as it's happening.

[01:07:41] What was immediately a bit jarring to me was that these accounts were different. Not only in like the events that led up to them where you're like, well, who knows what anybody said. But in one he dies from a sword and another he dies

[01:07:55] from a dagger and you're like, oh, can somebody look at what the wound was that killed him? Well, this is the 11th century. There's no like. There's no CSI. But yes, right. In fact, the dagger sword thing is constantly alternating. That's another.

[01:08:15] And I just the courtyard is so spare. It's just like this big bright spot where you just have a sand. It's like a really big sandbox or something. Exactly. Yeah. And with these two guys in the background, it's not

[01:08:31] totally clear why the two guys are there in the background and nobody else is. And nobody else. So also we should say that in between the stories, you have this commoner who's very cynical guy. You know, for him, this isn't surprising. Like he says it's human to lie.

[01:08:50] We can't even be honest with ourselves most of the time. But he doesn't care as long as it's entertaining. Like he'll listen to the lies. And then after her story, he says, well, you know, women, they fool everyone with their tears, even themselves.

[01:09:06] So there is this explicitly this sort of throwing out this idea of both lying to others to make yourself look better, but also lying to yourself like that you don't even know in a way that reminded me a lot of the truth of fact, truth of feeling. Exactly.

[01:09:21] Yeah. Me too. Me too very much. Yeah. The commoner says has some of my favorite lines. He's the the the ever the cynic. He's like, is there anyone who's really good? He says, man just wants to forget the bad stuff.

[01:09:35] Like, like stop being so shaken like at this. Yeah. He says that after he hears that there is a dead man's testimony and that has to be the pre says that has to be true because he refuses to believe that a dead person can lie in that.

[01:09:53] That's when he says like that's when he gives he pulls out the goodness is just make believe. He's that's right. Yeah. I was like, I had the same intuition. No, like ghosts can't lie. Right. Aren't they under some some sort of constraint upon line? Right.

[01:10:13] So then we have this scene which is just bizarre and awesome. Bizarre and amazing. I was going to say yeah. Amazing. I don't know. Like how should we describe it first and then try to talk about how we're supposed to understand it?

[01:10:31] Like or what are the different ways of understanding it? Yeah. Because it's very, very simply they bring in a medium to talk to the dead husband so he can give his testimony. And I so I took it at that moment that we were

[01:10:44] to take at face value that this was in fact the dead testimony of the husband like that that this in fact is the ghost of the husband. I think that well at least that that makes it more interesting. It's certainly felt in that way. It's his voice.

[01:11:01] It's his voice. There are probably details that would be unknown by the medium herself. Well, that's the thing that I'm not sure about. So the voice you could maybe the medium's testimony itself is a flashback so maybe it is being remembered as if it was the Samurai's voice.

[01:11:27] You know, and I don't know that for sure that it was definitely the same actor's voice. It sounds like I have no idea either. Yeah, I don't know either. I think that that it makes the most sense to treat it at face value that this is the

[01:11:40] or at least I think that the four accounts that are all different perhaps because of motivated self deception is more interesting if it really is in fact the Samurai. Except I agree, but it's also kind of interesting. The medium is also motivated to justify her existence.

[01:12:03] And are you saying that she's not really a medium? Well, I'm saying that it could be that this is just another element of our lack of being able to discern what's real and what's not what's true and what's not because the medium

[01:12:19] has just the same has the same incentives that everybody else does to present as real and honorable and do an authentic. At the very least we could, it should at least be a question whether this is. But I also agree that the way it's presented

[01:12:38] and filmed it is we're supposed to take it I guess at face value. So what's the story? The story is that the bandit Tajamaru raped his wife and then asked his wife to like leave with him, like come have adventures with me.

[01:13:02] And she accepts but then says well you got to kill my husband because I can't have had like there can't be apparently there can't exist two men who have had sex with me or something like that or she would feel too guilty belonging to two men.

[01:13:19] And the bandit at that point is actually shocked by the coldness of that request and he grabs her sort of angrily and the samurai is at this point still tied up and he tells the samurai that he has you tell me what to do I'll either kill

[01:13:37] your wife or I'll let her go. And he's offended by how she's just completely betrayed her husband like at the drop of a hat. Yeah, he's like this bitch. And so the dead samurai through the medium says for these words alone I was

[01:13:57] ready to pardon his crime which is pretty interesting right in terms of at least honor and what it meant to him. Like they but prose before hose kind of moment. Yes, bro. That was an alternate title I think. That was the working title of the production.

[01:14:19] But then during this she escapes and the bandit runs after her but he comes back says sorry dude she ran away. Samurai then grabs his wife's dagger and kills himself. Yes. And then he describes in various powerful terms the you know everything started disappearing as he killed

[01:14:43] himself everything went black but then somebody came and pulled the knife out of his chest which yeah it's an interesting detail that we haven't heard from other people. The dagger right. And in fact the woodcutter then as the flashback is ending we're back now

[01:15:01] at the at the Rashomon gate and he says there was no dagger he was killed by a sword. Yeah. You're like well what like A how do you know and B why do you care? Yeah and I don't even I don't know

[01:15:14] if I was reading into it but as I was watching at the second time I was looking at the woodcutters expression when the medium was saying there was another dagger or there was a dagger and I think he was subtly acting uncomfortable. Yeah.

[01:15:29] Which is no that's definitely true. He gets very uncomfortable and also when the bandit realizes hey what happened to the dagger why didn't I steal that too. Right. So this dagger or Chekhov's dagger I guess it's not really Chekhov's dagger because it actually we don't know if it

[01:15:47] actually went off or not but it's Chekhov's quantum dagger Chekhov's Schrodinger's dagger. Chekhov's Schrodinger's Schrodinger's. That's what it is yeah. I wanted to say really quickly though that I think that the addition of the detail that there was a dagger that got pulled off of the body is

[01:16:06] perhaps an attempt to say like let's treat this as the true testimony of the samurai and because I think that in telling the story you want to the compelling story is going to be the testimony of everybody who was there to see it and you

[01:16:21] can't have a dead person tell a story you need to find a way to get the samurai's perspective even though he's dead. So while I agree with you that this in a perhaps metasense the undermining of our belief in any story because does a

[01:16:36] medium really know within the story I think it's supposed to play the role of just like a placeholder for the samurai's account. Yes I agree and I don't want to under emphasize how strange it is like she's like dancing around like kind of swaying and dancing.

[01:16:56] Yeah it's amazing that body movement like you she really does look like what one might think of somebody who's possessed would look like. So in all of these stories the person who's telling it they come off as the most honorable they can be in the other

[01:17:17] people come off much less so. So then the woodcutter says all of these are lies and he's been saying been calling all of these lies the whole way through. So now he says in fact that he didn't just find the body he witnessed what happened. Right.

[01:17:36] And this is not something he testified to in court because he says he didn't want to get involved but he actually witnessed what happened and what happened was the bandit the bandit Tadjomaru raped the woman and then. Tadjomaru is begging her to marry

[01:17:55] him the bandit's begging and she instead frees her husband she frees her husband and says you guys have to fight it out. The husband says to her like why don't you kill yourself in this story. Yeah yeah because she's it because she's a spoiled what like she's

[01:18:13] a mischievous child I don't think she's in this story. She's requesting that they fight. I think oh yeah she says she does she says that they're not real men because real men would fight over a woman's love but that's after she's been treated with contempt by the husband.

[01:18:33] I thought. It's like you were this is the Russian Maneffect for us whatever the husband is really Yes. And at first she just kind of collapses almost like she was in her telling of the story. Right. Like just this dainty flower, but then she starts laughing,

[01:18:54] like almost like the bandit at that point. She starts doing this kind of crazed laugh and she says it's not me that's weak, it's you that are weak. If you were a real man, you would fight for me

[01:19:07] and then she kind of shames them into having a fight, but neither of them seem to want to have a fight. And this is actually, it's not a very funny movie but this is very funny. They have a sword fight especially when you remember

[01:19:26] in contrast to the sword fight that they had at the beginning which is just, it's like if you and I had a sword fight or it's like Pink Panther when Inspector Clouseau and Cato when he would go back to his apartment and it's just a mess.

[01:19:45] They never, they're just scared, they're cowardly but then they're also just flailing around. Yeah. I was looking at it and I was like, this might have actually taken a lot more effort to choreograph than the actual sword fight. And I bet they had fun.

[01:20:02] So it's just this like clumsy. Yeah, it's pitiful. It's pitiful, right? And then the only reason that the samurai loses is because he sticks his sword into a tree stump and he can't get it out. And then he kind of begs for his life

[01:20:17] and then reluctantly the bandit kills him and the woman runs off. Right. It's so funny and it's interesting that from the woodcutter's perspective, every, like in all the other stories one of them came off looking very honorable. Everybody comes off looking in the woodcutter's story

[01:20:38] like a total chump and just kind of, and then a bad person. Yeah. So before we get to the baby, the controversial baby scene. And I watched this with my daughter Eliza and she sort of took it to be the real story because why would the woodcutter lie?

[01:21:00] Yeah. And I totally disagree with that. In fact, I think I briefly loved her a little less for us even saying that. In Eliza's defense, I think that's the way that it's designed. The lizard brain is supposed to believe that that's the true story.

[01:21:18] We want there to be a true story. She shouldn't have waited 90 seconds and realized that this was just Kurosawa fucking with us a little bit more. Yeah. I think that there is reason to believe that this might be the true story because presumably the woodcutter

[01:21:33] doesn't have a dog in this fight. Right. That's what she said exactly. Yeah. Why would he lie? But he does have a dog in the fight. Well, we might not realize it at that point, but when the commoner calls him out for having been abandoned,

[01:21:48] we realized that he may himself have had a dog in the fight. Right. Because the dagger, he's like, where's the dagger? Exactly. Where's the dagger in this story? There's no dagger. And the woodcutter doesn't deny that he stole the dagger. So now it could still be,

[01:22:05] and this was Eliza's contention that okay, he stole the dagger, but everything else is true. But you could just believe that he's making all of this up to sort of cover up the fact that in all of these stories, nobody can account for the missing dagger,

[01:22:27] except though, in Eliza's defense, his story doesn't account for the missing dagger either. Is there a dagger ever in the woodcutter's story? I think the dagger never makes an appearance, so there was nothing to find. But then why would separately three different people

[01:22:50] talk about a dagger that didn't exist? But that's why the woodcutter presumably would be making up a story that has no dagger. So there was nothing to steal. And hoping that they don't kind of catch the fact maybe.

[01:23:02] So I think, and I think a lot of the power of the movie depends on like this isn't a who done it with a nice tidy answer at the end. I think we have to take his story with like a big grain of salt as well.

[01:23:18] And we're in this epistemic position of really just having no idea which one of them is telling the truth or if anybody is telling the truth, if they're all partially true and partially false, if anybody is as they present themselves.

[01:23:36] And we are literally in that position as judges. Yeah, so here's what I think. I think stage one is thinking that there are four stories, the fourth one ends up being the truth. Stage two might be that you're trying to figure out who's lying and for what reason.

[01:23:55] But stage three with no value just being here, it could just be that none of them are lying. Like it could very well be that this is either an instance of flawed memory or self deception that is so strong that they don't realize

[01:24:09] that their account is not a true account. They're not intentionally deceiving. Like in truth of fact, truth of feeling. Exactly. Okay, I think that's fascinating. However, I have a hard time buying it because of the fact that in the first three stories, a different person kills the samurai.

[01:24:34] And it's not like it's taking place like 15 years ago, 10 years ago, like truth of fact, truth of feeling about like this just happened. This happened like the day before. Yeah. So are you really not going to remember whether you killed the samurai or the samurai killed himself

[01:24:58] or the woman fainted and killed the samurai, whether that you ran off or she ran off. So on that theory, that they're all telling what they believe is the truth sincerely, what possibly could have happened that would make that psychologically plausible? Right. One potential mechanism,

[01:25:22] and this happens all the time in eyewitness accounts, is that it's not that everybody saw the events so clearly as they happened and then forgot them, but it's rather that the failure was in the attentional and encoding steps. That they perhaps the woodcutter

[01:25:44] didn't have a right angle, couldn't hear the words, especially her fainting and perhaps killing her husband. See that from afar, who knows what happened. But I think that there are ways in which if you didn't have a good grasp of what happened

[01:26:02] as it was happening or a good grasp of what was happening because of whatever, I don't think this can explain everything. But the bandit wouldn't remember killing honorably the samurai yesterday. But there's very possibly some blend of these things. So the samurai remembers this as a really,

[01:26:23] a really good fight, right? In his mind they were like going at it. And you kill Bill or something. Yeah, but in fact, it's like you might think that you're out there on the dance floor cutting it up

[01:26:40] and then somebody sees you and they're like, oh my gosh. I'm not even at this stage for dancing where I think that. Yes. I am. I'm at that Dunning Kruger part where I actually think I'm a good dancer. So I don't think that accounts for it all,

[01:26:56] but I think that can account for a lot of the potential. It's not a memory lapse. It's a lapse of attention and encoding that these things happen to happen fast and you might not actually get everything. If you infuse that then with wanting to see yourself

[01:27:12] as honorable and heroic, then you can, I think, start telling a story that sounds like actually way different from somebody else. A good example is, you know, if from the bandit and from the wife's perspective, the actual sex act, like you could see the bandit thinking,

[01:27:29] actually she kind of got into it pretty quickly. And the wife thinking, I was just taken purely against my will the whole time. And you could think that both of them believe that whatever is actually the case. Right? Yeah. Yeah. But but but there's other elements

[01:27:52] that just don't seem like that. Yeah. And the sword fight is another good example, like you said, like you could see that in memory, it was a great sword fight. In fact, it was Clusso and Cato by or somewhere in between.

[01:28:10] But the yeah, I guess it's just that the big thing is who who killed the samurai? I think I think that's right. So I think it could be that that I think so. The upshot is that I think that these are all potentially wrong.

[01:28:26] I agree with you there. How they're wrong, I think it could be some blend of self interest and distorting of memory or failure to capture the right things and some clear like like saving your own skin. Like I'm not going to admit to this.

[01:28:44] So I'm going to like I didn't lie that much. Like it's all this other stuff was true. It's not even saving your own skin because the bandit kind of says, I'm going to die no matter what. So I'll just tell you that I'll tell you this version

[01:29:01] and then the dead man is already dead. So it's like it's not it's saving your own self image kind of. It's like saving like saving who you are. And which is funny in juxtaposition with the commoner who has such a cynical view that he already thinks

[01:29:19] that everybody is just goodness is make believe. We just want to forget the bad stuff. It's easier. We're constantly rationalizing. We're constantly making ourself look better than we really are. That's just what human beings do. That's what that is what is shaking the priest to his core

[01:29:37] is this idea that human beings are just rationalizing self-interested creatures to their core in a way that affects how they perceive reality and how they describe reality and and so that's why it's worse than famine and earthquakes and bandits coming through.

[01:30:00] It's that like this is something that is a part of human nature. It's just like an indelible part of human nature. Yeah, I don't know if it's what's shaking him is that that if it affects how they perceive reality, but rather he could just believe

[01:30:17] that people are so willing to blatantly lie that this shakes his faith in human goodness that they're just all liars. But I think it's possible that it also shapes. As you said, like how they actually perceive reality. I mean, there's so many interesting philosophical ways to understand this.

[01:30:37] You could understand it as and I don't necessarily see a great argument for this, but that there is no real truth as to what happened. But there's so many layers of testimony, like the fact that the testimony itself is a flashback

[01:30:54] and then the flashbacks in the testimony are flashbacks of flashbacks. I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah, so it's like, you know, like a playdough kind of cave kind of thing. We are many layers removed from reality.

[01:31:08] And so you could just think, well, maybe there is, you know, there is this is all kind of an illusion that we impose on the world with our kind of self conception. I don't think that that's what Kursawa had in mind.

[01:31:25] I think that and in fact, I think that this is more powerful if you believe that there was a set of true events that's unknowable. Right. Because if there is no reality, it's not even clear what that means to begin with. But but it wouldn't matter that much

[01:31:41] if there was actually no like no true set of events. Then then none of them would be lying, you know? Or yeah, I don't know if it wouldn't matter, but it is sort of hard to understand what that means exactly.

[01:31:57] I think it is it is this view of a kind of it's like everybody has this solipsistic view of the world. So there maybe is this. And so maybe it's like a content like your boy where there's a kind of a new man.

[01:32:15] But the but the way it's being understood is different for everybody. But I agree, I think a more interesting way of understanding it is that there is a truth, but it's unknowable because it is unknowable. Yeah, we do not get.

[01:32:34] I don't think we leave this movie with a good sense of what happened, even at the most basic level of who killed the samurai. No, I don't think so either. And I think that that it would be a far worse movie

[01:32:46] if we were to believe that the that the woodcutter had the true story. That something happened in that there is some truth to the events of what happened like is is I think just a good underlying assumption about how the world works.

[01:33:02] It's just that as you say, when you put human beings in the mix, some mix of the are like imperfect faculties of memory and perception, along with our egocentric biases and our desires to see ourselves as good means that.

[01:33:21] And there it is very much the case that we can't know that the actual event. I think the brilliance of this movie is that similar movies like a showing us what happened is supposed to be. You know, there's God's I view like there is this is the God's

[01:33:39] I view of what happened. So wait, you're showing me a bunch of stuff that didn't happen. Like I don't get it. Even a dream when we see a dream in a movie, we're assuming that the person is having that dream. Yeah, yeah.

[01:33:54] And so here we're like the I think they're the thirst to have the true answer is the false resolution of the woodcutter initially. You know, also by the way, what's great. I just thought of this, but you know, God's I view the of what happened.

[01:34:11] You imagine it from above. So often we're seeing the forest from below. It's like the opposite of God's I view. This is very much the human I view. Yeah. And it's and it's a lot of handheld camera. Yeah. Again, making it seem like we are right out there

[01:34:30] with them trying to parse out what's going on. Yeah. And and we're sitting there listening to their testimony and we have to, you know, this the truth will be filtered through our memory of this movie and a memory of the recounting of the events.

[01:34:45] And I think, yes, just thinking that the woodcutter that's the true story that betrays a kind of bias on our part of wanting a tidy resolution. By the way, there's this great in the wonderful Gretel Escher Bach book.

[01:35:02] The the author describes one of Bach's pieces where he is fucking with the audience by usually when you pop, you you start with a theme like a musical like a key and then you can go around. But when you come back to the key that you started on,

[01:35:21] it provides you resolution. You get this psychological feeling like we're back to where we began. And there is a piece, apparently, where Bach pops you down so many levels, but he brings you up only to the penultimate level and you have a false sense of resolution, not knowing,

[01:35:36] not realizing that the piece never actually gets you to the to the full resolution. And I think that's what the woodcutter story is doing to us. We're getting I think if you want to believe that there is a true story

[01:35:47] and that somebody surely would have seen it, it's the dispassionate woodcutter. So fine, you know, take take your resolution. But if you really think about it and I think let's talk about the baby, think that that we have a reason to believe that the woodcutter wasn't

[01:36:01] the dispassionate impartial observer that he might have been. Yeah, so let's talk about because, you know, you read a lot about this and I've also, you know, I've read a few articles about it. I've the baby is almost almost casually mentioned as almost

[01:36:15] an embarrassment of the movie to some degree, like this baby ex machina kind of like, I don't know. And I haven't read that is the idea that this is just a cheap way to make us believe in the goodness of humans.

[01:36:31] Yeah, they're like almost like a Hollywood kind of said, obviously, there's no Hollywood here, but that like, oh, this is too bleak. You need to put something that affirms the good, you know, like the possibility of goodness at least. Yeah. Oh, that would be if that would.

[01:36:51] Yeah, I didn't read it that way, but that would be shitty. I mean, but it is very this is another thing that like this actually made Eliza not think this movie was a masterpiece. She really was disturbed by like that.

[01:37:07] Just all of a sudden tacked on it seems like there's a baby. Like why is there a baby in this abandoned gate that just happens to start crying now? And it's like that last bitten joke. It's like, oh, by the way, everything was haunted or exactly.

[01:37:23] I mean, I could see reading it that way. And I'm not even sure that's wrong. Although I want I want desperately to come up with a more interesting way of understanding it. But let's just say what happens. It's not that complicated.

[01:37:38] So all of a sudden after the woodcutter tells his story, they hear a baby cry in sort of the back of this broken this gate, which is huge, this huge gate, abandoned gate in the middle of the forest. They've been on like a stage almost.

[01:37:56] And then the back of the stage is there's a kill of an infant and that has been abandoned. And immediately the commoner goes to it and just steals the baby's kimono, which was serving as some sort of blanket for the baby and just he steals it.

[01:38:14] And the woodcutter is like, what the fuck? Like what's wrong with you? How could you do that? And it had an amulet that was supposed to protect it and the woodcutter just goes full cynic right now. So even his cynicism is self interested.

[01:38:27] He says, what about these people? Everybody's selfish. We're all selfish. I'm just doing what everybody does. And this is where he says to him, like I didn't hear anything about a dagger in your story. That sounds like maybe you stole the dagger and the woodcutter doesn't say anything.

[01:38:45] And so he says, well, I guess I'm right. And then he walks off, he runs off into the brain has kind of stopped and he runs off with the kimono and the amulet and the priest is now holding the baby.

[01:39:04] Just so devastated now, because this is like the this is the bleakest way you could end it right now. It's like, oh, so even the woodcutter was self interested at least about the dagger. And then the woodcutter says, I'll take the baby. Don't worry.

[01:39:21] Like I have seven kids or eight kids or six kids or whatever at home. Six kids. Yeah. One other one is not going to make a difference. We're poor, but I'll take care of the baby. And the priest gives the baby to him

[01:39:36] and says that he's restored his faith in humanity to some degree anyway. Right. So. And it's sunshine again. Yeah, and then right in the clouds. Yeah, the rain stops. Yeah. I read somewhere never does does it only drizzle in a Kurosawa film inside there?

[01:39:59] So I read this very much as the woodcutter did steal the dagger with the pearl in there. I was curious as to how easy that would be to fence. Yeah, fence the dagger like that. Give it to Kevin Garnett. Maybe he'll think that it'll help him win championships.

[01:40:20] So that that the bandit, I mean, the sorry, the commoner cynicism is justified. He points out something. Hey, what's what's with the dagger? I think that the woodcutter was feeling guilty about it as as we talked about already.

[01:40:34] And the priest for a moment is like, shit, you're a fucking thief, too. Like, God damn it. And he's kind of reluctant to give up the baby. And it's not until he says that he has six kids of his own

[01:40:46] that this this will be fine, that he realizes that maybe what's going on was that he took the dagger because he figured who needs this dagger. The guy's already dead. And what he's trying to do is make ends meet to support his family.

[01:40:58] And I think that the priest in light of that information realizes that, hey, you know, it's very easy to judge the actions of somebody else as evil and get down, you know, be dismayed by it.

[01:41:13] But what really matters here is this guy's willing to take on this other kid. Like, yeah, maybe he took the dagger. And maybe that shaped his story. And maybe, you know, maybe it sucks because we don't know what really happened.

[01:41:23] But but God damn it, like if there's ever a reason to take a dagger, like go ahead, take the baby, you know. So it's like a redemption for the woodcutter. But doesn't that seem a little pat? Doesn't that seem a little like?

[01:41:36] No, because I think that what's still I think that what's still powerful about the movie is that now the priest is like, well, I don't think I'll ever know what really happened. Right. Those four stories. Now I used to believe that the woodcutter story was the true resolution

[01:41:53] and that would be Pat. Right. But now now I have to question the events that the woodcutter told me. But that doesn't mean that he's bad. Right. Right. And then so like we can be in this inevitable epistemic situation where we'll never know what actually happened.

[01:42:12] But but does that mean that we should despair for humanity? Not necessarily. Right. Yeah. So I think that's right. And I think it's also true on a psychological level, like, yes, we're self interested rationalizers, but we also have some goodness in us.

[01:42:28] And so if the movie, you know, if it's so bleak, then it's in some ways not doing justice to human nature because we do have good sides that come out. That's right. And there is. So I like that. I I'll throw this though into the mix.

[01:42:48] I think the priest. Like what's he going to do with the baby? Right. So he's looking. Well, glad you asked. Right. No, he wasn't Catholic. Right. No, he wasn't. He's like he's looking for a reason to give up this baby from his own perspective.

[01:43:09] And we haven't really talked about the priest's perspective and his self interest. But right now his self interest is I got to figure out what to do with this baby. If I can't trust anybody, I'm going to have to keep the baby. But wait, this guy.

[01:43:24] All right. If I believe if I will myself to believe in his goodness, then I can give up the baby and kind of feel like I'm not doing something horribly wrong. Interesting. You know, I never I never thought of that.

[01:43:43] I think I wasn't paying that much attention to the priest's reaction as much as paying attention to the to the commoner and the woodcutter. So so I don't know. I mean, yeah, I think like I came up with this idea trying almost to like

[01:44:04] fend off the idea that the woodcutter was telling the truth and that maybe stole the dagger, but otherwise telling the truth. And that was a good guy and like, but I don't know. There's something it fits. I'm not saying this is right.

[01:44:18] I actually think if I had to guess Kurosawa's intention, it's more along the lines of what you said. But there is something interesting about the idea that even the priest, like all of us, has his own dog in the fight as well.

[01:44:34] Maybe it was too quick, too quick to accept the goodness. Yeah, exactly. And that's why he's too quick to accept the goodness is because it's in his interest to be too quick to accept the goodness. Right. You know, and who knows if the sun really came out.

[01:44:47] This might be all from the priest's perspective is like, and then God gave me a sign. Yes, give up the baby. And the listener is just hearing that the sun came out from us. But we don't know. Like, should they trust us? Like what have you.

[01:45:02] But I do think that the claim that that this movie is about like whether or not there is any truth is is too postmodern of a take. I think this is more about the epistemic, not the metaphysical, right, that this is that it's unknowable.

[01:45:19] Not that not that there is no truth. It's just that like all all events are going to be colored by by our weaknesses and our our our faults, our perceptions, our evil natures in some cases. And that, I think, is a much more. That's a very powerful.

[01:45:37] Even the as people have pointed out, even the Rashomon biters, the people who have taken taken this idea and tried to develop like they tend to not be as subtle and and powerful as this. Yeah, I would say in some ways.

[01:45:55] It almost doesn't matter which of those two is right. It's it's almost like are we ones and are we living in a simulation or not? Like it's the same. We are faced from our perspectives with the same problem, which is we don't know what happened.

[01:46:11] Yeah, in practice, I think you're right. It's just stupider if it's just more pointless if there is no real answer. And yeah, it's in some ways less. It's more depressing if there is a real answer that will forever be out of our reach.

[01:46:27] Yeah, I think this, you know, in some ways relates to the discussion we were having last episode about science and what science can show us because science and scientists use tools and they are people and they make observations.

[01:46:47] And, you know, so there there is going to be this inherent subjectivity even in what we take to be the most objective form of discovery. So this is definitely, you know, the Rashomon effect has been applied

[01:47:06] to ethnography, but I think it can also be applied to some of the more experimental avenues of research. Yeah, that's that's maybe that's why I'm much more comfortable with the epistemic challenge rather than the metaphysical one

[01:47:19] because I think that there is, you know, water either is H2O or it isn't. And the fact that there are human flaws and interests in the attempts to answer that question is only only makes the solution

[01:47:37] a bit harder to find doesn't mean that there is no solution. But but it could be impossible to find, I think, is the message of the movie. So that shouldn't make you feel too hopeful, right? Yeah, yeah. But but it's not always impossible to find, right?

[01:47:58] It's if there were no real reality under there. It would always be impossible. I think that this is that is more interesting because it's pointing out the kind of the the the barriers to finding the truth, assuming the truth exists is a I think a I don't know.

[01:48:18] I think it's a deeper, more interesting point than no truth exists. But I guess so let's assume truth exists. There's still the question of is it inaccessible or is it just really hard to access? And I think this movie could certainly be argued that it is

[01:48:40] saying that it's inaccessible. I mean, I think that it's saying that it is sometimes inaccessible. And I think that's the powerful part that this is the things that we think that might give the objective answer. But if if you just said it, it's always inaccessible, then

[01:49:03] then that's almost getting to them. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think Carcala thought it out that when it comes to something like this, I guess, where we're in a position. But, you know, and that and that might be why the, you know,

[01:49:20] if the science that you are that you are viewing as possibly like interpreting it this way, if you're looking at the social sciences, then that makes sense. Right. When it comes to physics, I think that makes less sense because

[01:49:34] there are it's hard but not unknowable in some cases, at least. Yeah. And also from a, you know, we haven't talked about this, but from a legal perspective. Yeah, this is a movie about a court trial and different testimony,

[01:49:51] which is what, you know, the rare cases that actually go to trial are they often hang or fall on testimony. And this movie throws a lot of that into serious, serious question, no matter how you interpret it.

[01:50:10] But certainly if this is why algorithms are going to save us because the algorithms will just take the average of all the stories and give us the spit out the truth. Yeah. So if there's one thing I have adamantly defended on this podcast

[01:50:27] from the beginning, it's that algorithms are the salvation of humanity. You know how tennis balls, like when you're watching a tennis tournament and in some of the tournaments, they have those cameras that show you whether the ball landed in whether hit the line or not.

[01:50:41] And it turns out that those aren't actually visual. Those aren't recorded. Incidents, those are actually calculated statistically to give you what the most likely trajectory of the ball was because we we can't. That's it's so funny because it's like the way it's presented,

[01:51:00] even though it's like animated, it's like just an animation. Like, you know, like you're watching a Pixar movie of a ball that would land in a court. But I take it as gospel, you know, like,

[01:51:13] that's how far out or, you know, like, oh, it just touched that part, that tiny part of the line. You know, they should put they should put error bars on the animated. Absolutely. That that is a hill to die on. You know, Ted, maybe to wrap things up,

[01:51:38] but like I just want to reiterate how I think ahead of its time. Yeah, I don't know if that's the right way to say it, because I think it goes toe to toe with with the best films of our era. Yeah. But but God damn, man.

[01:51:53] Yeah, I, you know, I have a major recency bias when it comes to movies, but yeah, but it's very rare that I watch a movie and just want to watch it again right away. And that's yeah, that's what happened here. And it's also like 90 minutes.

[01:52:09] Yeah, I will say, you know, there are people are like me and suffer from short attention spans. Like it's slower paced, but not in a bad way. Like, I think and I agree with you. Like I actually wanted to watch it the second time

[01:52:22] and the second time was immediately and obviously even more enjoyable to me. Yeah. Yeah. So I could focus on the performances. No, it's brilliant. I'm still not sure what I think about the baby and whether that was a good way to end it or whether

[01:52:37] it could have ended better without. Yeah, I think you could have cast. I think casting doubt on the woodcutter story is important to do. Yeah, but you didn't need a baby to do that. You don't need the baby.

[01:52:49] You the baby. The baby is is the ray of hope, like the litter, you know, like the literal ray of sunshine that breaks the breaks through. And and yeah, maybe that makes it softer. But I'm OK with it. All right. I don't think it. Yeah.

[01:53:06] Yeah, I'm OK with it too. I am. And I think like the idea that there is goodness in humanity should get some play given how just this is like a parable of humanity in some ways, you know, like it really is. It's so spare.

[01:53:25] It's so spare in the way that parables are that it is. It almost does owe us a little bit of a glimpse into the fact that humans are not always assholes. Right. And and it's still pretty fucking bleak. Yeah. No, apparently, like they all live together

[01:53:49] while they were filming this in like cabins and they became very close as they were like it. It does seem like it would be a fun movie to film. And and also like a huge percentage of the budget just went to the building of the gate.

[01:54:06] Like that was interesting, which makes sense, because there's almost no other sets. The rest is just a big sandbox. Sandbox. Right. All right. Well, now you can all go back to your Marvel movies. But this is an example of fucking cinema. Thank you.

[01:54:28] You you you're really doing wonders for your it for for your reputation as being hoity. Yeah, that's what that's the goal. You know, sometimes Taco Bell food is good, Tamler. I wouldn't know I'm a vegetarian in my conception of myself. I'm a vegetarian. If you were vegetarian,

[01:54:52] you'd know that Taco Bell has plenty of vegetarian food. Yes. Well, on that note, Taco Bell is not a sponsor by the way. This means we have to stop. If they're interested in sponsoring us, this is like the opposite of Rashomon, where

[01:55:11] all hope of our goodness is gone because we're just shilling for Taco Bell trying to get them to feel like after 180 episodes, it's been gone. It's been kind of true. All right, join us next time on Very Bad Wizard.