Episode 197: The Long Slow Death That Is Life

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist, David Pizarro, 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, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] I think of the hubris. It must take day. He ain't got soul out of nonexistence into this meat. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Apparently the open science movement is funded entirely by billionaire pedophiles.

[00:01:29] Do you still support the pre-registration of research? If I pre-register, the pedophiles have won. Every time you pre-register, you're diddling a child. Now I'm starting to wonder what they mean by pre-registration. I don't even get that joke. It's just funny.

[00:01:48] Man, I wasn't expecting you to talk about this Twitter drama. You know, capitalism, love it or leave it. I mean, money's going to come from somewhere that it came from a centralized, that it comes from like a single person versus it coming from a bunch of people.

[00:02:09] I guess matters if somebody is controlling it, but like I personally have recently released a paper with all of my pre-registration, open data, all those analyses there. And I didn't get pressure once from a pedophile. I didn't feel anything.

[00:02:27] You had to kind of look the other way, right? I mean, you're connected with Jeffrey Epstein. You've been at a number of the same events. Luckily in no pictures, man. But nobody cares enough about me to rally accusations.

[00:02:42] We should clarify that, although it is funded the open science movement by, I don't know if it's a billionaire or somebody who's very wealthy, but the pedophile thing, I think, is me running together a couple of different things on my Twitter. That's right.

[00:02:58] It's just that billionaire is now so frequently followed by pedophile that like a machine learning algorithm that scours Twitter would just assume that these were very closely related. Yeah. I mean, do you want to talk briefly about that?

[00:03:11] There was this blog post, which I would love to talk about, but you probably don't want to. This very critical review, sort of meta review of research in the social sciences, how much of it fails to replicate and all sorts of other problems.

[00:03:28] And then Tej Rai, who is... has he been on the podcast? No. No, no. We talked about his paper with Alan Fisk. Right. And I have interviewed him and Alan Fisk for the Very Bed Wizard book, but yeah.

[00:03:46] But anyway, he said, note that this movement and the funder of the person who wrote that blog post is he's a billionaire. Yeah. Strongly implanted that he was also a pedophile. Just conceptually true. It's a thick concept, billionaire. It's with two Cs as we know.

[00:04:13] Yeah. No, I, you know, like Tej and Tej got to took to Twitter and received a lot of pushback about this because, you know, leaving it as remember, it's funded by billionaire is a wink, wink, nudge, nudge that something less than above board is going on.

[00:04:27] And Brian Nosik, who, you know, I know both Tej and Brian, I'm closer to Brian, but took to Twitter to defend himself. And then there was a back and forth. It just leaves in a bad taste in my mouth because there's there are other

[00:04:39] things to be fighting about. And in an ideal world, we wouldn't need a billionaire to fund the Center for Open Science, I guess. But there's also as many people point out, there's tons of open science reform that has nothing to do with the Center for Open Science.

[00:04:52] And if it's funded by billionaire and they're being transparent about it, I don't see the problem. I mean, billionaires should be giving away their money too. I think that the thing that Tej had to deal with is the question about whether,

[00:05:04] and I don't know what the answer to this is, whether as an editor of what is essentially the premier journal in all across all sciences, whether as the social science editor there, he should be expressing opinions like this on Twitter.

[00:05:18] And some people were like, well, now I know, I don't want to submit to science if that's what he thinks. And and I have mixed feelings about that. But I do feel like, yeah, maybe, maybe I shouldn't submit something really open to science.

[00:05:34] I just don't get why Tej took to Twitter in the first place to do that. Why did he feel the need? He seemed to make it about race and prejudice and having read the blog post. I mean, there was nothing about that in there.

[00:05:51] Yeah, I think Tej was probably just sitting on some sentiments that some people have expressed that they're sometimes disparaging. They refer to this as broken science because it is dominated by this sort of like this, you know, assertive or sometimes aggressive male white

[00:06:10] personality terrorists, what do they call them? Methodological terrorists. And I guess it was just wrapped into some sentiment about that. But that's not what we're going to talk about. That's not what we're talking about today. We are going to talk about something that I'm kind of interested in.

[00:06:25] We might disagree about, but I don't know. It seems like over the last few years and over the last few months, there have been all these articles that have pointed to the existence of either UFOs that are videos of UFOs that are moving in a way

[00:06:41] that seems impossible based on what we know about aircraft motion. And then now that there's definitely life, probably intelligent life on Venus, the latest from the clouds. And it's like, I don't get why nobody is talking about this

[00:07:00] and why this isn't exciting the imaginations of people in the way that seems like so much other bullshit is. This is like we're talking about aliens. These are fucking aliens. And they're like, and it's not even like Venus is just in our solar system. That's I see.

[00:07:16] I see Venus every every night and I live in Houston. I wave. I think that what we'll disagree about is that those two stories that the UFOs that the Pentagon released videos of and that the Venus

[00:07:30] thing have anything to do with each other, except for in the loosest, loosest sense that both would be about extraterrestrial life. I agree that there's UFOs probably didn't come from Venus. They probably came from Mars or Saturn. They would know to be more careful. The Venus aliens.

[00:07:46] These are these are other these. These are aliens from another quadrant who are clearly didn't read the signposts. I am like actually not because of aliens, but super excited about the Venus thing because at best it's evidence of life. So they found an element.

[00:08:04] They found a phosphine chemical that that might be a biosignature. At best, it's evidence that there could be life on Venus. And at worst it's just or I guess that worst isn't the right word. But but at the very least, it's just like a mystery

[00:08:19] how that could occur chemically. And those things are actually exciting to me. And I'll be honest, like anything that takes my attention away from this particular planet right now is very welcome. So I'm all for talking about UFOs too.

[00:08:33] What why do you think given all the various conspiracies that are out there right now? Why why is this one seem neglected? Well, the UFO thing is an interesting one because from from the moment that we had ubiquitous cameras on our phone,

[00:08:50] the rate of UFO sightings dropped precipitously. So so it says something about the nature of the claims before. Well, they're probably not flying in our now that they know that we can film them, you know, they can. They actually have like cell phone detecting.

[00:09:08] Yeah, it's like the police not wanting to have the cams. You know, I used to tell my daughter when she was very small that I could fly except for not when anyone was looking right. Is that the ultimate argument?

[00:09:23] But some yeah, I don't know why the UFO stuff is so. So you were talking right before we recorded about these videos and these videos are crazy because just like what I said with Venus in a very similar way, like even if they're not UFOs,

[00:09:35] they're weird, like I don't know what they are. And and you would think that instead of talking about billionaire diddlers, we could be talking about about the cover up for the UFOs. And then there is this. So this was from July 24th, the Pent,

[00:09:51] and this is in New York magazine. The Pentagon has reportedly found off world vehicles not made on this earth. And they were citing like a New York time. I don't know. What? Yeah, apparently like I looked, I was looking back in my timeline and realized that I'd essentially

[00:10:06] done the same twice, like a few months apart. With this one, I was like, why? Why is this not all anyone's talking about was the first one. And then I did a variation of that just recently. But I believe it.

[00:10:17] I'm like, wait, like this is just this thing that was like in between like 12 Trump stories that nobody remembers. And you know, same with the Venus thing. It got a little more play, but not really. The Venus thing is has been like

[00:10:32] I've read quite a lot about it, but, you know, from like the science communication people and maybe I follow some astrophysicists. And that's exciting. Like I feel that when I feel like everybody, it can't be a conspiracy theory. There's all all kinds of scientists

[00:10:50] agree that something funny is going on in Venus. I'm more perplexed at what's going on with these Pentagon videos. Like and why don't we just have a clear answer? Because I'll be honest, I don't believe that these are fucking UFOs. But why don't we have a clear answer?

[00:11:04] Like, why don't we have somebody coming out and saying like, well, this is just a weird reflection or a weird computer glitch. Like you would think that that would be an easy thing. And why are they not even feeling the need to do that?

[00:11:15] So wait, let's put our cards on the table. You don't believe those are UFOs. 100 percent no. And what do you think about just the odds of alien life that is in some way aware of us? I believe that there is a high certainty that there is alien life.

[00:11:36] I believe that there's a low probability that we've been able to communicate with any of them or that or that given the astronomical distances that we would ever have a shot at physically reaching, reaching them. Like that this space is big.

[00:11:54] So I don't think that any of this stuff is evidence of visitations. And I think that just the universe is so vast that even the little signals that we're sending out with our little gold record with Carl Sagan's voice and all that, like the chances are so low.

[00:12:07] But what are the odds that they're aware of our existence, whether we ever come into contact with them or not? Yeah, I would think very low. I would think very low. I think that catching the signal, the signal that there is life on our planet would be hard.

[00:12:25] But there's a lot of really cool mathematical attempts at coming up with these probabilities. And what's really crazy is that depending on the assumptions, it's either like one really certain or like not at all. It's so confusing to me.

[00:12:39] Well, it reminds me of those Nick Bostrom argument about it all depends on your assumptions, but like the argument that we are part of a simulation. It's like if you take certain assumptions and then the probability approaches one, but it's those assumptions themselves,

[00:12:57] given our epidemic situation that we can't take for granted at all. Yeah, there is this Enrico Fermi, who is the physicist who we talk about sometimes in the context of alien life with Fermi's paradox, like why hasn't anybody reached out to us?

[00:13:14] He would have this method of estimating these kinds of calculations where he would assume that the various errors that you make in all of the basic assumptions, the chances that you make an error in one direction versus another direction would wash out.

[00:13:34] And so he could arrive at pretty accurate estimates of these problems with back of the envelope calculations. And that's actually fascinating to me how we come up with these estimates. But I don't know. Yeah, it's so. Space is fucking big and we don't know.

[00:13:51] There's so much that we don't know about. Yeah, like you said, what to put into the estimates. So I feel like I'm more of a believer than you. I'm more the mulled-er to your scully. Yeah, I mean it goes along with the fact that I am rational. Right.

[00:14:07] And you're... I know it's all anecdotal and then, but now you have these anecdotal reports plus there are tons of them. And a lot of people I respect have at least either claimed to have some sort of very strange encounter

[00:14:25] or like talk to people who they find credible. And then you combine that with the little bits of hard physical evidence that we get. And the fact that, you know, definitely something's going on in Roswell, New Mexico. I think we can easily discount every claim

[00:14:44] that there's been an encounter and we can discount 99% of any physical evidence that people have claimed is for UFO. And what we're left with is just a bunch of people really trying hard to find something that doesn't exist. That's my take. Do you think that it's just...

[00:14:58] My hot take. Like there's something about our culture right now that this isn't, there's certainly more evidence for this than a lot of the other, you know, than like QAnon stuff. Is it just like the cultural moment for this being the conspiracy has passed? It's an interesting question

[00:15:13] because I think that conspiracy theories to... And we should do... We're gonna do an episode, I think on conspiracy theories. But I think conspiracy theories, one of the things that they really need is a motivated reason to believe them. And I'm not sure what people's motivation

[00:15:28] to believe in extraterrestrial life would be or that the government is covering that up. Like the reason I think things like QAnon come are so powerful is because it fits well with a narrative that people really want to believe. And maybe we used to wanna believe in UFOs,

[00:15:45] but now we just wanna believe that like the opposite political party is evil. Because it has a lot of the same elements, right? Like I guess it was more government focus with the UFOs rather than like billionaires and shady... And it's less moralistic too.

[00:16:01] It's unclear who the bad guy is if the government is just the government covering stuff up. Yeah, maybe for our benefit, maybe not, we don't know. Yeah, yeah, it does say something about the state of affairs that like we're not... We can't even enjoy old timey conspiracies.

[00:16:18] Yeah, we kind of have the good fun conspiracy that has to be like Hillary Clinton is like kidnapping children in a pizza place. Yeah, like why does it have to be about kids? But yeah, just talk... I bet you if you could put, if you added

[00:16:32] there's extraterrestrial life and they're molesting children and you could get a whole bunch of people. I mean, they were molesting people, right? The whole anal probe thing. So it had at least molestation, but they were... It was class year times then. It was adults, it was usually adults.

[00:16:48] And it was usually adults from very poor parts of town. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. You should say what we're doing, right? Oh yeah. We have a special guest, YOL Imbar, frequent guest to discuss the most recent Charlie Kaufman movie on Netflix called I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

[00:17:10] I think it was a great discussion. Yeah, we had a really nice discussion with YOL. This was before I learned that he was a part of the billionaire open science kind of ring. What did you think? I blame you. I know, I'm naive.

[00:17:26] It's probably willful ignorance in some ways. Because he's such a nice guy. He is, but that's how they get you. They send out... YOL basically has candy and he's in an unmarked white van and he's just calling you. Calling your name. He's grooming me, essentially.

[00:17:46] Sorry, so what were you gonna say? I don't remember now. We should do a conspiracy. Yeah, there's actually, yeah. There's some cool research on it, but just as a topic, I love it. You know, for a long time when I was in college,

[00:18:01] I really loved reading shit about secret societies. I don't know that I ever believed too much of it, but I wanted to man. I thought it was so cool. You want to believe. Yeah. Yeah, like Illuminati stuff. That's also stuff that I really kind of...

[00:18:16] I come very close to just outright endorse it, or believe. I think I had this moment of disillusionment when I realized how bad we as human beings are organizationally, bureaucratically, and two people know something, it's no longer a secret. That the thought that there could be people keeping

[00:18:40] such important secrets and that there would be that many people is just completely... There's not a shot that I'll believe it. That's exactly what they want you to think. But still, you would think that it would leak out more than it does, but we have things like

[00:18:55] Kubrick's eyes wide shut, arguably is casting a light on certain practices. That there is cover up in Hollywood. This is the problem with the best conspiracy theories. They're hard to shake because you don't... One, this billionaire pedophile rings, you don't want to sound like you're denying

[00:19:20] that there is child abuse. Or even like child sex trafficking, because there is. Child sex trafficking, and yeah, and there is. And there's I think plenty of evidence that Hollywood has had quite a problem with this sort of stuff. It's the levels of organization

[00:19:37] that are more implausible to me than the actual abuse or damage that people have done. I believe that people would be covering up for others, but that it would be so organized seems. It's sad to say that the organization is the implausible part.

[00:19:49] The bureaucracy, like you just don't buy it. Plus, don't you think that we could have been tapped for Illuminati membership by now? Like I feel like... I mean, you're a Jew, you're white. I know, why haven't the Rothschilds contacted me yet? It's a little insulting, frankly.

[00:20:06] I would say no, I would like to make that clear with the outset, but I'd like to be asked, that's all. I know, it's rude is what it is. It's sort of like the Harper's letter, you know? You wish you could have had a chance to sign it.

[00:20:21] To say no, to say no, just saying it. You know, they definitely wouldn't have signed it. It's true, nobody's asked me. All right, well now that we've established that the Illuminati is hiring aliens to molest children funded by billionaires. And somehow the open science movement

[00:20:42] and Brian knows it, Samine's ears. And I love those people. I'm so supportive of what they're doing too. Yeah, I know me too. But it did remind me of you saying that. I just pictured, right now I can see your office for our listeners.

[00:21:02] And I just wish that you had like a little board up there with red yarn connecting pictures of Samine Vizier and Jeffrey Epps. That's what's so ridiculous about like broken science. Or maybe it's just me, but the people I know don't tend to be white men who are.

[00:21:20] Yeah. Or no. Yeah, yeah. It's also just a conflation. I get it, I mean, but it's a conflation of like what, you know, they're always gonna be jerks associated with any movement. And so I'm not saying tell your conys a jerk. Hey, that's too far.

[00:21:39] Yeah, like the board, Samine Vizier, like it'll just be a picture of an alien. And then Jeffrey Epps. That one big foot pose, you know, where he's like has one hand up at the front. And then to YOL. And then to like the bizarre chemistry

[00:22:00] that would produce phosphine in an environment like Venus. Yeah. I do think there's also like conspiratorial elements to just what made the open science movement necessary in the first place. Just, I think somebody could do like an expose a movie mini series just about like how the.

[00:22:23] We had the secret P hack handshake back in the day when I was in grad school. You shook someone's hand and you diddle your middle finger into the handshake. And that's when they knew, ooh, he collected more measures than he reported.

[00:22:37] And you were at least invited to that one. I was far. I was invited to the conspiracy where we're supposed to care about zombies and like fake barns. That's important. No, no, stay with me. Conceivability. We're gonna sell it as conceivability.

[00:22:55] We're gonna say, and I know this sounds insane. We're gonna say that conceivability implies possibility and you're gonna go along with it unless that pretty young wife of yours. It's. Oh God, I'm so glad we got it all figured out. It took us eight years. It did.

[00:23:21] Now I'm sure like this will never reach air but at least we try. That's right. If I am dead by the time this is aired just know that we were this close, this close. Yeah, to shining a light on it's all connected. Yeah, if I kill myself,

[00:23:41] it won't be by hanging to a doorknob in my house. That's right. Well, we'll be right back to talk about Charlie Kaufman's new and really great movie. I'm thinking of ending things. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you by BetterHelp. What is BetterHelp?

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[00:31:28] Support us that way, but you also get a sweet shirt for doing it. So thank you everybody for all the ways in which you supported us and now to talk about a very cool and depressing movie. All right. We are here with special guest YOL Inbar

[00:31:44] whose work portrays interiority. Hey there. Yes, absolutely. Thanks for having me back and what a wonderful introduction that was exactly right, Tamler. Thank you. It really comes through. His early work was all exterior. He's really made a change in this second part of his work.

[00:32:00] Yes, and my more sure work as I like to put it up. Yeah. He's changed his clothes from red to blue basically. So we're going to talk about, I'm thinking of ending things. Should we just get general opinions about how much you liked it,

[00:32:14] what you thought of it first and then we'll go through it a little bit. It's a very hard film to give us an opposite of or describe, but what did you guys think of it? Just did you like it? Not like it? How did you feel about it?

[00:32:25] I thought it was incredibly depressing, but I also really liked it and I liked it more the more I thought about it. So the evening that I watched it, I was like, I don't really know. And then I had a very depressing night of bad dreams

[00:32:38] prompted in part by the movie. And then I woke up in the morning. I was like, this movie's brilliant. Yeah. I totally same thing with me. It just got better and better as the more I thought about it and the more I reflected on it.

[00:32:49] And you can feel it just the mood of it long after you've watched it. I just watched it a second time and I have that feeling of kind of depression and anxiety and loneliness right now. What'd you think, Dave? So I just watched it and finished watching it

[00:33:05] like a little less than an hour before we started recording. And I'm in what you guys must have felt which is that in between sort of like my brain was still processing it. I was reading about it. Well, I'll say this, Charlie Kaufman won't ever really disappoint me.

[00:33:19] So right now it's more like I am trying to figure out what kind of depressed I am after having watched that film because there is something about these Charlie Kaufman directed movies that he just has a fucking finger on like my just existential despair.

[00:33:37] And he presses that button so, so well in ways that I hope we'll get into that it's, I'm sure that by the time I was actually looking forward to talking to you guys about it because I wanna process it with you guys as I'm thinking about it.

[00:33:51] But I liked it. I liked it. But it's like a bad dream. I mean, just sort of like Sinecta Key was a bad dream. Stressing me out thinking about how you watched it. Did you watch it in good circumstances? Like, Oh yeah, I actually had,

[00:34:06] I was drinking coffee, burning incense on my big screen TV. I've had phones on. So I paid attention and I didn't read anything about it beforehand. And I only, and I read just in the last half hour I was reading things

[00:34:18] that actually really helped my interpretation of it because at the end of the movie I still don't think I got what had been going on if we're using say the book as the source. Yeah, I also required an explainer immediately after watching the movie.

[00:34:31] I like had a vague idea of what might have happened but like any of the specifics I had no clue. So I feel like that's kind of essential for the movie to make any sort of sense and for it to like have its real impact.

[00:34:44] You kind of, I think have to understand what was happening. So I'm like you, Yoel, where I had a sense. Like I made the connection that you're supposed to make but without being certain about that connection until maybe the very end. And also without,

[00:35:01] without having any of the details, like Dave said, and watching it a second time you see that the details are just, it's so well constructed. But I will say that even when I was totally confused which is for the majority of the movie

[00:35:13] I liked each individual scene a lot. Like it's kind of long but it doesn't drag at all somehow. And I don't even understand how it doesn't drag. And it's actually some scenes are very funny in an absurdist kind of way. And you get that constant feeling of anxiety

[00:35:29] and like something's off in a way that's pretty gripping without even knowing how any of this is happening, why it's different time periods and she has different names, the main character Jesse Buckley and she has different careers and it's bewildering

[00:35:45] but not in a way that was alienating to me. And now I know some people don't agree with that and did feel alienated by it but I wasn't ever there. Yeah, so that's something I hadn't thought about is like the challenge of making a movie

[00:35:58] where your plan is that the entire time the viewer is gonna be kind of confused about what's happening and yet it still has to be watchable. Like that's really damn hard actually. And he gives you nothing. Like it's like,

[00:36:10] you're like can I get some idea of what's going on? And he's like my offer is this, nothing. You get shit. Yeah, exactly, I get it fucking. I agree, Tamar with what you're saying that in some ways, even though I didn't know like the main twist,

[00:36:29] you get this vague emotional sense that something is off and that these people are somehow related and not all of them are real and that there is, he gives you enough to know that there's a connection between the janitor and these characters.

[00:36:43] And it doesn't matter so much to me what is the truth of what's going on, like the big picture truth of what's going on because the scenes themselves are so good at giving me these feelings of just unsettling feelings that are like life is.

[00:37:03] Like I don't know how, it really is like you're waking up from a weird dream. It's all very dreamlike to me. And there is some, this sounds cheesy, but there is some truth to what's going on that doesn't require me to know exactly what was going on.

[00:37:18] And I think Charlie Kaufman knows exactly what he's doing and it's less important what like the big twist is. In a way, like Mohon Drive is also giving you a feel the whole time, even when you're totally confused, it's still you're getting this kind of emotional undercurrent

[00:37:35] that involves you in the story, even if you're not sure what the story is. Yeah, I was thinking of Lynch and I was gonna ask you guys what you think because I think that one of the big differences is Lynch is trying,

[00:37:46] I feel like at least in that movie, he's giving me a plot and I'm really struggling to figure out what's going on in the plot. And in this case, I don't feel like I'm struggling to figure out the plot so much as I would be in a Lynch,

[00:37:58] but that other part that have given you emotions with these scenes I think is spot on. That's right. He's not there, Lynch gives you mysteries. Like pretty much all of his movies have a central mystery and there's no real mystery here beyond what the hell is going on.

[00:38:13] It's just a girl going to meet her boyfriend's parents while she's thinking of breaking up with him or at least that's how it presents itself. Right, so I do think that Tamler should say what the plot actually was, but the last thing I wanted to say

[00:38:27] was I'm sad that he didn't get to watch it again before we recorded this, I just didn't have time because I'm excited to see what is it like on the second viewing where now you know what to look for, right?

[00:38:38] And I feel like it's gonna be this entirely different experience. Totally different, I mean, but not in the feeling of the scenes. There's so many clues that are littered through it and it actually makes obviously a lot more sense. So I did notice this the first time,

[00:38:53] but as an example, you see that the book of Pauline Kale reviews in his room and then all of a sudden she starts quoting a Pauline Kale review and starts talking like Pauline Kale in the car and the first time I remember thinking,

[00:39:07] oh, okay, she's being like some sort of 70s intellectual film critic like, and then I was like, oh, Pauline Kale, she's probably doing Pauline Kale right now, but I didn't at that point say, oh, so that means that she's not, she's a fabrication or something like that.

[00:39:23] You just make these connections. And actually the thing that I was expecting those little details, what I wasn't expecting is a lot of the way that the interspersing of the janitor is done in a way that on the rewatcher,

[00:39:36] like, well, why didn't I pick this up the first time? You do pick up something, but you don't pick it up fully. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, on the first watch, like I got that the janitor was significant

[00:39:47] and I had the idea that like maybe this is all in his head somehow, but it just never like really clicked in a coherent way. So I think that's also a great thing about it is that he gives you enough that it sort of makes sense,

[00:40:00] but like you never, at least I'd never a hundred percent got there. And that's I think a very tricky thing to nail because it's like this theory of mind problem. Like, you know, you the writer and director obviously knew everything about this

[00:40:11] and to calibrate it such that the viewer going in is like following it, but not too much but also isn't completely lost. Like that seems like to me nearly impossible to nail that in that way. I didn't see this as a big twist that is revealed.

[00:40:27] It was just slowly kind of unraveled over the course of this, over the course of the film. Yeah, calling it a twist is doing it a service I think because this movie really doesn't depend on, I think Charlie Cobb from what I read,

[00:40:41] Charlie Cobb himself thinks that that being the twist it was all in this guy's head is a cheap way to make a movie. And if that were the primary payoff of the movie I think it would fail miserably that like,

[00:40:52] oh, this whole time I had been in as in the, you know, this was all fantasy in the mind of the janitor. It can't be just that and it can't hinge so much on that.

[00:41:01] And like as you all says, like I don't know how he pulls it off but he pulls it off where I think I could watch this have not read any of the reviews or the book and not know that this was in the mind of the janitor

[00:41:10] and still have some vague sense that this is a retrospective in the mind of the old man. Not sure who's real and who's not. You would also know that this is about regret and missed opportunities and loneliness and aging. No matter what plot like connection you get

[00:41:27] the themes of it are so I think viscerally felt throughout. So, okay, let's talk about it. So it starts with a Jesse Buckley who plays in the credits as described as a young woman. At the time you think she's your protagonist because we're getting her voice over

[00:41:45] and she says I'm thinking of ending things and there's these lines about once that thought gets into your head you can't get rid of it. It's constantly with you. You sleep with it. You wake up with it. And so, you already have a double meaning sense

[00:41:59] is does that because people say that about suicidal thoughts or suicidal ideation that it's like this thing that once you think of it it's like all you can think about but then it's also pretty clear that she means I'm thinking of breaking up with her boyfriend Jake

[00:42:14] played by Jesse Plemons and all this is going on in her head while she's waiting for him going to meet her parents. And meanwhile there's this old man who's it seems like looking at her and also talking to himself. And on the rewatch it seemed like

[00:42:30] he was actually speaking her voice over. But again, you don't, it's not in any way clear that that's what's going on. You hear a male voice if you're even paying attention and you see this guy looking out at her but that's all.

[00:42:45] It felt like bleed into her internal monologue and I was like, oh weird. Like how is his thoughts bleeding into her right? So then they get in the car and they, you know, they seem for a little while like a kind of a normal couple,

[00:42:59] a little sort of he's on the sad sack side. Jesse Plemons, you know, playing a little like and he's playing like Fargo season two, Jesse Plemons. But he's really good I think and they're sort of joking around but also there's just from the very beginning

[00:43:20] she's thinking stuff and he seems to the sense that she's thinking and constantly interrupting her thoughts and she's always anticipating what he's gonna say. And so there's this very disorienting feeling when they're talking where like she immediately just responds to him in a way that just seems off

[00:43:40] but it's not that off. Like it's also like they're having conversations that a boyfriend and a girlfriend for, you know, like six weeks would have if they were in that situation. There's a couple of weird things that happened on the trip over.

[00:43:52] Number one, at first he brings up Wordsworth and she says I'm not like, I don't like poetry I'm not a metaphorical person and he keeps trying to tell her about it. I guess she at that point is like a biologist of some kind or virologist.

[00:44:06] And he says like, aren't you proud of me for showing interest in your work? But then, you know, a little while later he convinces her to recite her poem that she just wrote and she does it. And it's a really haunting poem about loneliness and despair

[00:44:19] and the dread of going home every single night. It's a beautiful and really, really desolate kind of poem. And there's a point where she looks outside the window and she's just looking at us as she's describing it. And all this time you get this janitor

[00:44:39] like you get interspersed with all of this just the janitor pushing his mop and what do you call this thing that he's pushing? Like a little bucket with wheels, that thing. You tow it, yeah, utility cart or something through the...

[00:44:55] Yeah, he looks like the smells like Teen Spirit guy. Smells like Teen Spirit janitor. Yeah, and so now she, it seems like she's a poet. I don't know, what'd you guys think of the car scene because that's the first big chunk of the movie

[00:45:09] is them in the car. Yeah, so it already feels tense. Like they're, it's clearly not okay between them and they have these weird like not quite arguments but like kind of tense almost disagreements. She really doesn't wanna read the poem. He sort of like pushes her into it.

[00:45:26] She really doesn't wanna hear the words worth and he keeps like sort of perseverating on it. Like he seems kind of menacing in this like depressed fat dude way, which I love. I mean, Jesse Plemens is just like amazing.

[00:45:37] So it's already got this like unsettling sort of mood to it. I noticed that her profession kept changing but somehow it didn't, I didn't really know what to do with that. And so I just kind of like put it aside. I'm like, oh, that's weird.

[00:45:51] I thought she was supposed to be a biologist. I guess maybe the poetry is in her spare time or something. Like I sort of came up with some explanation for it to make it sort of make sense. But yeah, it was a very like ominous

[00:46:02] and uncomfortable beginning to the movie already and something that must have been like, if you just think about how hard is it to shoot two people in a car talking for like 15, 20 minutes in an interesting way? That's kind of crazy to like pull that off

[00:46:15] because I was never like, oh, this is feeling tedious. You know, I was always like interested. Because it's so unsettling, I think. Yeah. It's super unsettling. So the thing that I made note of that I really thought was well done was how stilted

[00:46:29] like early relationship kind of like they're being polite and they're making like corny jokes to each other. Like the kind of conversation filler that you use with people that you don't quite know yet. Like almost corny at times. And here's where I started to think, okay,

[00:46:46] well we're hearing her inner monologue. She is at times getting a bit confused as to what's going on. So she's not clear how long they've been in a relationship sometimes. And this is where my running hypothesis which lasted for throughout the car scene

[00:47:02] was that this is the memory of an old woman who is like suffering from senility and she's trying to piece together her early interactions which turns out not to be what's going on. And that I, but I attributed it solely to

[00:47:15] I was still believing that we are in the mind of this main protagonist, this woman who might be holding on. Which makes sense because you're hearing her think, right? So naturally she seems like the center of the story. Yeah, the moment where she's like,

[00:47:29] I can't remember the last road trip I went on. I was like, oh so this is something about her. She's an unreliable memory, unreliable narrator. Maybe I didn't quite go to old woman but I was like maybe she's mentally ill.

[00:47:39] This kind of a fantasy that she's having maybe. Yeah, you know on the road trip, what he responds to that is something like road trips are great. They're good to remind yourself that the world is larger than your own head. Which I think is kind of like one

[00:47:54] of the thesis statements of the movie. This is a guy that's or this is a character both characters are the way their portrayed are trapped in their heads, in their own heads. And one of the characters in a fairly profound way.

[00:48:07] I wonder like we're kind of cock teasing the big spoilers. So I think that one of the scenes with the janitor as they're in the car on the way to the parents house is of the janitor walking through the hall and these two girls,

[00:48:25] these kind of two sort of hot, pretty high school girls are making fun of him as he walks by and then he cuts to him cleaning gum off the desk. And then you hear the wipers going as that's happening, the wipers in the car.

[00:48:38] And so I think that's your biggest clue. And it's not one that I was able to, you know, connect the first time through that this is actually going on in the janitor's mind that he has imagined a girl that it turns out

[00:48:52] he met at some trivia night and tried to talk to but she thought he was a creeper and she was there with her friend and just wanted him to go away and doesn't remember him. And he's constructed this fantasy where they got together that night

[00:49:09] and then they're going to meet his parents. And you know, what's so unbearably sad about it is even in his fantasy of this girlfriend, she still wants to break up with him and she kind of asserts herself throughout the movie

[00:49:27] as like I'm not gonna play ball with your fantasy. And you know, when you think, this is a guy who's so lonely and so disconnected from like other people who are who like him and are nice to him, it's like that he can't even construct somebody

[00:49:44] who just wants to be with him. By the way, by the way, genius edition? My whole life I've been saying genius edition. Yeah, that was great. I thought that was like you are like the old farmhand white mother of the podcast. I really am.

[00:50:02] So, Tamler, like on that idea that like he's just, he can't even imagine that somebody would like him. Did you take this that they saw each other at trivia and that she was annoyed and disturbed by him talking to her literally

[00:50:22] because I thought maybe that's just his imagination too. So he like one time looked at a girl awkwardly tried to talk to her and now he has it in his head that she's like, hated the encounter and most likely she just, right? It was nothing, right?

[00:50:36] Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Absolutely, I agree. That's his projection of her now that she's decided to exit the fantasy and so that's his interpretation of her. But the one thing you know is that they never got together and that's the last time he saw her

[00:50:50] and that was a long time ago. I mean, he even gives himself white gunk in the corner of his mouth, right? This is like a fantasy for which he has little control over which he has little control and it's like why is he failing to,

[00:51:03] I mean, is he trying to give himself a realistic relationship? My sense is that in the fantasy, he isn't just Jake, he is also her. And I think this is why we are hearing both her thoughts and then later on, like I think that it is

[00:51:20] he is exercising his ability to fictionalize and he's making himself the protagonist woman. I mean, there's definitely things that she thinks that are part of him, but that's also because he is constructing her. I kind of think that what you were saying earlier

[00:51:38] that it wouldn't work if it was just a twist and it's like, oh, is the janitor all along? Like it's almost like she's getting away from him and she is acquiring agency and control over the course of the movie.

[00:51:50] And there's an interesting thing on the car trip back where he tries to interrupt her thoughts and now he can't. He's always able to interrupt her thoughts on the way there, but on the way back, like she's able to think and talk about

[00:52:05] like why am I still with him? How does it happen? And it's not that clear cut where all of a sudden they're not connected at all because they have some laughs after that and stuff like that, but it is very different.

[00:52:15] And I get the sense that she is not something that he has control over. So in that sense, I'm not sure I agree that she's also him because she just becomes like a real character at that point. Yeah, no, no, I like the way you're saying it,

[00:52:31] which is, it's not that different from what I'm saying. I mean, like she is taking full form. I think you're totally right. Like the very first time she's thinking, he says, what did you say? Right, and you mentioned this. And I think you're right.

[00:52:45] As she's becoming a more complex character, he is having less control over her agency. But that to me is just kind of a way of saying that she is a part of his psyche in the same way that Jake is part of his psyche.

[00:52:58] But you get the sense that there is a Jake who probably lived in that house with his aging parents and was and maybe still lives there or maybe lives in a new apartment. I don't think that's fully clear and now where it says it.

[00:53:14] Right, he even kind of looks like the janitor. Like they make them like slightly like an old, like a plausible older version of him. Yeah, they get to the house and they meet the parents played by Tony Collette and David Doulas and they are both great.

[00:53:31] And I actually think the scenes at the house are my favorite scenes in the movie and they're both funny and desperately sad and they're meditations on being a parent of a child that you're proud of and that you love but hasn't quite kind of made it.

[00:53:47] And you get a real sense of these parents. Also, David Doulas is hilarious. Like an old timer who hates abstract art and thinks it's just a con job. And I mean, he's very funny in the early parts of it. And then when he starts getting dementia

[00:54:04] and he ages over the course of the evening, it hops around a lot in terms of their timeframe. It's so sad and very much reminded me. A lot of this reminded me of my dad as he got older and then started to get dementia.

[00:54:19] And you know, like it's just cat, he really captures just the frustration and the weariness with it like just so well. And it's beautiful, but also like there are some scenes that are hilarious. David Doulas is amazing in this.

[00:54:34] And I knew, I knew him and I had a look at it in the middle of a movie, but I know him mostly from Fargo where he plays a viscerally disgusting human being and an amazing villain. But in this, he is so good.

[00:54:51] And I don't know if this is Charlie Kaufman's writing and the probably combination of their performance and the writing where they say things that parents would say or that old people would say they really are just saying the kinds of corny shit

[00:55:04] that you would expect a couple to say when you're visiting, you know, your boyfriend's parents for the first time and they're a little bit old fashioned. It's very mundane and banal, but like the things that he says really capture this character so well

[00:55:18] and Doulas pulls it off so well. So did it strike you guys that like he's supposed to be some sort of like prestigious occupation? Like it's not entirely clear about like a physicist or something. And then his mom keeps talking about how he like

[00:55:32] wasn't that bright, but he like tried hard. Yeah, exactly. The diligence pin, the diligence pin. And in fact, when he's feeding his mom, he's wearing the diligence pin. And the mom is saying like, you know, we were proud of him for the deal.

[00:55:46] He might not have a lot of natural talent and ability, but he worked harder than everybody, which is even more impressive. When they arrive at the house, he won't let her go in. And this is another one of those just like unsettling things.

[00:56:01] He's like, I need to stretch my legs and then they go to the farm. And this is where it starts getting a little horror movie. First you see these sheep that are all penned in and in her voiceover,

[00:56:12] she's imagining what it would be like to be penned in like a sheep. And then you get the story of the pig, which is one of the most horrible stories like being eaten alive by maggots. And, you know, they keep saying it's brutal life on a farm.

[00:56:25] And then he has this other line during that scene where he says, other animals live in the present. Humans cannot, so they invented hope. I think another like just- Great line, what a great line. And then they get in the house

[00:56:37] and the parents don't come down for a while and there's music playing. It's just all so weird. Okay, I wanted to say a few things about the farmhouse scene because, yeah it's jarring that he doesn't go in at first. And he's like, I just need to stretch.

[00:56:53] They understand. Then when they go in, there's like this creepy basement that is like taped up and has scratches on the outside of it. And he's like, it's just the dog. And at first I'm like, wait, is there really a dog?

[00:57:03] And then yeah, sure enough, there's a dog. And upon finishing the movie and thinking about that scene, it really does seem like he is writing this story in his head and he wasn't quite ready yet for the narrative part that was to come.

[00:57:17] So he's like, let's hold back for a second because I haven't worked out what's gonna happen in the house yet. So like, let me show you the pigs. And the creepiness of that farmhouse, which is objectively I think, all of the trappings of like a country home,

[00:57:32] like all of the chotchkes that you might see in a farmhouse. There is something that Charlie Kaufman captures so well that I don't know if you guys experienced it, but the lighting of those scenes is to me the worst kind of nightmare lighting that I have.

[00:57:48] Like that is straight out of my most uncomfortable dreams. The whole way through, the light is, it's not completely dark. It's this weird twilight-y where you can't quite see. And he totally plays on this with her clothing with the sweater that kind of keeps changing colors,

[00:58:04] but it's not clear that it's changing colors. It might just be lighting. It's like that blue and the gold and the white dress. Yeah, it starts out kind of bright, warm orange in the car and then it turns kind of light purple

[00:58:14] and then it's like tan and black and stuff like that. And then she's just wearing a dress like later. And then she's wearing a dress with pearl necklace. Yeah, and the dog is always shaking in a way that's really- Yeah, you never see the dog's face. Super uncanny.

[00:58:31] Super uncanny. It makes that, like everything is there to get under your skin a little bit and never let you feel relaxed. He's so good at that. I don't know what he's doing, but he is so good at unsettling in non-obvious ways. Just little details.

[00:58:46] Like at some point, we just get a shot of the dad's foot and it just makes you uncomfortable, right? It's like the dirty, bloody toes. And like dirty, bloody toes just make me like really uncomfortable for no reason other than to make me uncomfortable.

[00:59:00] Even the cup of the ice cream that's sort of spilling into the car and like that was stressing me out. I'm not like a neat freak by any means, but it was stressing me out that like all of a sudden like melted ice cream

[00:59:11] is gonna go down into like the gear shift and like he was getting stressed out about that too. Yeah, like everything about this doesn't let you relax. There's a scene where like you said he's describing the basement and telling her not to go down there.

[00:59:25] He said he always hated it and she's just kind of stalking him under it in a kind of playful way. But in a way that just made me feel like I was getting trapped in this under the stairs place by the basement door.

[00:59:37] And then he tries to play it off. He's like, he's hiding down there. She's like, who's hiding down there? It's like, no, nothing, nothing. It's so like it's an anxiety driving machine, this movie. And also at this point she's gotten a few phone calls

[00:59:50] that are coming from a name that is hers. So Lucy, my first thought was, oh, has she taken over the identity of somebody else? Like has she been lying to this guy when I saw that first phone call come in?

[00:59:59] And then you see like all of these missed phone calls. Another by the way, very anxiety inducing feeling is when you see like 10 missed phone calls, all of which say now, like now. No. So, but there's a clue that something weird is going on.

[01:00:13] She's getting phone calls from essentially herself whose name is never quite like firmly so long. It keeps changing. It goes from Lucy to Lucia to Louisa. And then Ames. And then Amy. I knew. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by the great courses plus listeners.

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[01:02:14] Remember, the great courses plus plus.com slash wizards and thank you to the great courses plus for sponsoring this episode. A couple of favorites of mine in that parent scene. They're talking about some Billy Crystal movie in Paris and then David Thule is like,

[01:02:32] Billy Crystal is a Nancy. And then you just kind of know. That's great. I love, okay, and then I know you're, I'm sure you're gonna get to this. All of a sudden there is a Robert Zemeckis film. This is a movie that the janitor is watching

[01:02:47] as he's cleaning up the school. Yeah. But it's not really a Robert Zemeckis movie. It's just, it's terrible. No, it's not. It's so bad. It's so bad. It's just a diner scene where a server or waitress is taking someone's order and then the guy that she's,

[01:03:05] that is supposedly in love with her just goes on to give this speech about what a great woman she is and she's an animal rights activist. Everybody cheers at the end and she gets fired. I needed that job, asshole. Did you say you loved me? I did.

[01:03:24] What did you think of the parents, going, getting older and sicker and even dying in Tony Colette's case or get, and then getting younger again? Like what did you make? Like how do you interpret that within the framework of your larger interpretation of the movie? Yeah.

[01:03:39] So that these are his actual memories of his parents who aged and died while he lived with them. That there's just sort of like jumbled together in a out of order way in this story that he's creating. I agree. Like, and that when she says about the painting,

[01:03:56] now she's a painter and she paints landscapes which you find out later that he had painted landscapes. And the father says, David says like, well I mean you can't evoke an emotion unless there's a person in the painting feeling that emotion.

[01:04:10] Like it can't be sad unless there's a person feeling looking sad in the field or in the, you know, the landscape. Such an interesting point, such a weird point to make. And you know, a lot of times Charlie Kaufman is being a little meta and you know,

[01:04:24] I have like a boner for meta. So I just eat those up. Like he's making some commentary on his own task to try to make us feel emotions about these people who don't actually exist. I thought the parts with the parents,

[01:04:37] especially the part with dementia in the end, David Doola's play so well, he just turns into like from a sort of annoying like kind of the kind of dad you're embarrassed about. Like you're embarrassed to bring friends around because they're probably secretly racist and misogynistic

[01:04:53] and but they're trying to be on their best behavior but they still can't. Then to that transformation into the old man remembering how his wife used to laugh and how she was funny and how over the years it faded. He turns into this sweet old man

[01:05:06] and I thought that those, the performances of the parents over the years were, that was really a point where I was just along for the ride. I didn't care what the truth of the matter was. I actually don't even care if he made up

[01:05:18] some of those touching scenes that they never really happened to his parents, right? Like that there was his childhood room and there's a little handwritten sign and you come to find out it's because they have labels on everything in the house because he's losing his memory.

[01:05:30] And he says like, I'm just to be honest, I'm looking forward to losing my memory entirely. So I won't remember that I'm losing my memory. Those, they're just touching. They're just like, at that point, I really didn't care what the truth of the matter was.

[01:05:42] It was just, it was a commentary on aging and life and the scope and like people like us whose parents are aging or perhaps have already died. Like that's, that hits me. Like, you know, watching your parents get older. Yeah. And when you combine it with these quarrels

[01:05:59] that he's almost certainly had with his parents like about painting and, but then as the dad grew older and like that he, that the character had compassion for his dad. And I think that's shown through Jesse Buckley who by the way is just amazing in this, I think.

[01:06:13] Like, and I don't think you could do this movie without her. No, I think she's great. But one thing I was going to say is how confusing is it to have two actors in the series? I wonder if that was, I almost thought that was intentional.

[01:06:22] Like, cause they are playing in some sense reflections of the same person. Ooh, that would be so mad. That's not really fucking bad. Beyond meta. But she like, she is kind to the father and she hugs him at a certain point. She puts her head on his shoulder

[01:06:38] at a certain point when he's talking about. And so I think that represents either, you know, he would have loved to have a girlfriend who, you know, was that kind and compassionate that could, you know, in the way my wife was with my aging dad,

[01:06:50] you know, it was really helpful and supportive to have that. So it could, you could look at it as, oh, this is just a representation of his compassion or you could look at it as a darker place of this is what he wished he had but never had

[01:07:04] is somebody that could help ease the burden of taking care of his parents, you know? That's what I, that's the way I read it. By the way, a couple of things. One, one of the scenes with the mom where she's talking about her tinnitus,

[01:07:20] which if you've ever had it is super disturbing. But she says at some point that it's, that it's the kind where she's constantly hearing whispers. And she says it's like, it's like somebody sharing the secrets of the universe with me, but I can't make it out.

[01:07:35] Which is to me like such an interesting way. Like that would be so frustrating to constantly be hearing little whisper sounds that actually not have make anything out. That is to me just an example of the unsettling that he put that idea in my mind

[01:07:49] and now I'm like fucking scared to death that I'm gonna get that kind of tinnitus. And then she says, or maybe it's just recipes. I don't know. And then she laughs and that yeah, now that's kind of the emotional, that's an emotional high point in this

[01:08:04] and one where you're just feeling so much just disoriented, I don't know, yeah, despair. It's like, keep saying despair, but that's how it feels at that point. Did you notice Jimmy the dog didn't make it out? His, his, I did notice that. His ashes. Yeah.

[01:08:19] Probably that's how he died. Like just got something in his ear or something like a ear infection. We haven't got, there was so much that we haven't talked about, but any other thoughts about the scenes in the house?

[01:08:31] No, the one thing I was gonna say is that it really, so there's something about a child's room after many, many years that is a really, for some reason a powerful emotional induction to me, like to see the room that you grew up in.

[01:08:44] Oh, we should also say one thing that happens is that she goes down into the basement where a very young Tony Colette tells her to just go down there and she finds in the washing machine the uniform of the janitor from the school.

[01:08:59] Yeah, which I didn't know was the uniform of the janitor until later. And then she also sees there the paintings of this guy Blake Locke who is a landscape painter and then his paintings below them that are just signed Jake. And so at this point,

[01:09:15] if you're still with the Jesse Buckley character, which there's no reason for you not to, it's told entirely from her perspective almost till the last maybe 10 or 15 minutes of the movie, you're starting to think, okay, what's going on? She knows she's trapped in somebody else's world

[01:09:33] and she's trying to get out, but she can't. And that continues as they finally leave. And I honestly didn't think they were gonna leave. Yeah, I know. And she keeps saying, let's go, I need to go, let's go, I need to go.

[01:09:44] And that adds to so much tension, right? Like this is a dream. This is a bad dream. She can't escape it. She can't escape that. And keep saying, I have chains in the trunk. Don't worry. Cause it's a snowstorm. It's a horrible snowstorm outside.

[01:09:55] But yeah, they get in the car which almost was like a relief to me. And they're driving home, but then he says we should pull over at, if there's a high lynchion point of the movie, it is the Tulsi town, this ice cream place.

[01:10:11] And it's open at midnight in the middle of a blizzard. Yeah, with the two girls from the high school who are laughing at him and then a girl who's kind with a rash who actually pours them. And meanwhile, the girls are kind of laughing at him

[01:10:25] and he didn't even wanna order because he says they won't actually serve him there or they'll make fun of him. Yeah, he has a shame. Like you can tell that he's just a shame to be ordering and you can imagine being the old janitor in a town

[01:10:39] and seeing all these high school kids year over year and knowing that like you're going in this little town, they're gonna be some of those kids who laughed at you in the halls are gonna be the ones working there. And he's just, he's ashamed of his life

[01:10:51] and it's really sad because he had these ambitions and these interests, these intellectual artistic interests and they just didn't work out for him. What did you make of the scene though with the girl? This is something I'm still trying to figure out

[01:11:07] how it fits or if it does fit. But with the girl with the rash who's actually nice to him, but then also it's nice to her but then also tells, gives her kind of a warning. Like you don't have to do this. I'm worried about you.

[01:11:20] Yeah, do we see the rash girl at any point previous? That's something that I was gonna look out for. No. No, not as far as I could tell in the second watch. Yeah, so I mean it seems pretty clear to me that what she's saying is

[01:11:33] you don't have to go through with it, right? She's like, you don't have to go. You don't have to kill yourself? Yeah, yeah. So I imagined that she was some student who was nicer to him and this is how he's imagining her like in the story.

[01:11:47] Like maybe who works at that place and who's the only one who will serve him without making him feel ashamed or something. Does that place actually exist? Are we 100% on that? It's supposed to be a Dairy Queen and apparently it's a Dairy Queen in the book.

[01:12:02] But they even do that thing where they serve it upside down like they would in a Dairy Queen. But they call it Tulsi Town as a nod to Tulsa, Oklahoma, I guess. And it's, I think it is meant to exist. That's how I interpret it in any way.

[01:12:17] And it's a place that he goes to. Cause then you see a dumpster full of these ice creams. So maybe it's kind of a favorite of his. She almost feels like she's trying to wake him up to from this delusion. Cause she talks about the varnish.

[01:12:31] She starts getting explicit about like, you don't have to. So it's almost like she's trying to drag him out of this. But I agree. She's someone who has shown him kindness from the school. I hadn't thought about this scene enough but I'm glad we're talking about it

[01:12:47] because you're right, it is the lynchiest it gets. And I'm not convinced that he should be going for a lynchee. He's already has his own way of being completely creepy. And, you know, like getting to the, that sort of level of absurdity.

[01:13:01] I don't know that it did much for the plot other than just continue the creepy feeling. Like just the idea that you would be eating ice cream in a blizzard is anxiety inducing. When then you wouldn't keep going. Like just go man, just get out of there.

[01:13:13] But you really start feeling stressed for her too cause she wants to get home. And he, he keeps making like any kind of excuse to not take her home. I do like what you guys said about,

[01:13:26] I think you all were saying that she seems to be a character who's trying to pull him out of his own head right now. And I like to imagine that that's how he took the despair of being a janitor for 30 years at the school

[01:13:37] having somebody be nice to him must have felt like somebody who is trying to pull you out of that. There's an interesting line, another line that I think represents what this movie is all about where, and I don't even, I didn't write down who said it

[01:13:50] but I guess it doesn't matter. It's between, they're both in the car and I think it's her, she says everything is tinged. Everything is affected by mood, everything. So every time you look out and you see something it is colored by your frame of mind and your circumstances.

[01:14:07] Like there's no objective thing. And then they start talking about colors. It's like colors are what we project on the world. They don't are actually out there but they're making it in terms of the mood. She's like, I know I'm a physicist.

[01:14:19] And I'm like, oh, she's a physicist now. But she's definitely acquiring her own sense of like, you can't interrupt my stream of thought anymore and I'm gonna fight back. Even if I'm going to fight back as Pauline Cale I'm going to make you feel like insecure.

[01:14:34] And it's almost like, I was trying to figure out so it's at this point where she just turns into Pauline Cale's review of a Cassavetes movie A Woman Under the Influence. And so again, I was thinking is this her acquiring agency

[01:14:49] but she can only do that with thoughts that he has or experiences that he has. And so he's read that book and so he knows the review or is he trying to box her in as the review so that she can will remain trapped?

[01:15:05] I think you could look at it both ways. You know what I mean? Yeah, it doesn't seem to me like he likes it. Like he's kind of like, well, I was just trying to say it like the movie. If that is her voice, she does a great job

[01:15:17] at transforming herself into this sort of transatlantic accent sort of like, ah, nah, dah, dah, dah. Like powerful woman of the 40s. There is a few things about the car scenes that I really got to me and I think they're part of this

[01:15:32] of Charlie Kaufman's ability to be unsettling. One is obvious, which is the amount that the low visibility in the car is so distressing. If you've ever driven in that kind of storm and you're like, why aren't they pulling over? Oh my God, like why are they continuing?

[01:15:48] Those windshield wipers are not powerful enough to get you through that. Two, they never wear seat belts and this I understand this might be visually important because you don't want that image blocking you but I think that there is something to the fact

[01:16:02] that they're not wearing seat belts that is adding to at least to my anxiety. And three, he does this really cool thing in those scenes with audio. Sometimes he's right outside the window while they're talking and you get all of the noise

[01:16:17] of the blizzard and sometimes it's inside and it's completely quiet except for their voices and that was enough to keep me a little off balance. The windshield wipers are like a character in the movie because there's like two, there's like sometimes where it makes a certain sound

[01:16:32] and it's very loud, other times where it's completely quiet, other times where it's like, and so yeah, you have not only like the interior of the car or and the exterior but you have the windshield wipers that are sometimes making this noise of interference

[01:16:46] almost like not allowing you to follow what's going on and other times totally silent which has its own unsettling quality because it's like all of a sudden there's no sound except what they're saying and it's yeah, off balance is exactly how you feel throughout those.

[01:17:01] All right, and I think that just, I mean, it's a point many people made but the director is not only manipulating emotions a good director with visual storytelling like the audio is playing a really important role here that I think is harder to notice

[01:17:15] if you're not paying attention or maybe some people notice it. I noticed it more on the second watch like it was affecting me the first watch but I was starting to notice it more like exactly how it was working in the second time.

[01:17:27] They also have another talk about youth, how youth is better than being old and as you get old, you're less fun, you're less vibrant, you're less healthy and so this really is about like your body decaying too and so like if your body's decaying,

[01:17:42] your hopes and dreams never realized, where never realized, you can see where this person's head is at. You know? There's a line there, old people are the ash heap of youth. It's very depressing. So then they get to the high school

[01:17:58] and I was even though it's a horrible thing and it's like almost kidnapping at this point like I was stressed out by the ice cream so I was glad that when he took them and got them out of the car and threw them away

[01:18:10] but he won't throw them away in one thing and it's like, and then as he comes back and they should leave but they still don't leave. So first they have this, she almost accuses him of kidnapping her and they have that baby it's cold argument

[01:18:25] and what she says is a song about coercion and he's like okay but you know and he's like it's not about roofies it's like a song in the 30s or 40s and he's like yeah but. She's like they had Mickey's in the 30s

[01:18:39] and you get the sense that he's trapping her there but then they have this moment where they kiss which they barely do in the whole movie but right at that moment you get this really horrible, like almost horror movie of the janitor

[01:18:53] just sort of in the frame with them and he gets really unsettled and says he's looking at us I can't let the stand I have to go and she's like what the fuck are you talking about and then he goes into the high school

[01:19:04] and that's where things go haywire in a different way than the rest of the movie or like it goes haywire re-year that there is this period where they're at the high school there's no reason for them not to leave and he still won't leave

[01:19:17] he's like it's peaceful here which I think is, you know later in the movie I think you'll see as a representation of the janitor deciding whether or not to leave. From the moment they get there they notice there's only one other car in the parking lot

[01:19:30] and so they infer that it must be the janitor and you do get the feeling that it's the solace of the janitor to be able to work these late hours and he can't remove himself from the story enough

[01:19:43] not to remind his fictional character to take off her shoes. I just cleaned the floors. She just cleaned the floors. So should we go through like what happens here so he she goes in after Jake he she meets the janitor

[01:19:58] the janitor asks she says have you seen my boyfriend the janitor asked what does he look like and here's where she says like what does he look like I don't know, you know he was some guy that I'm people are so hard to describe

[01:20:08] he was one of the thousands of non interactions in my life you know she ends up with and she says like, you know it's like asking me to describe a mosquito that bit me 40 years ago and then she hugs him and then it becomes a ballet from Oklahoma.

[01:20:29] Okay, the hug tender really nice scene like this is the collision of the worlds he's wrapping up his story you know she obviously is his well not so obvious maybe but in retrospect she is obviously the creation in his mind

[01:20:45] and so having her comfort him is a really nice touch I found it to be a nice little emotional moment and here's where I might as well I'll just let you guys take over because it's not that I dislike the way that Charlie Kaufman ended the movie

[01:20:59] is that I just could not be bothered like to care about the Oklahoma sing and dance like I actually fast forwarded through the dancing like that's horrible sorry Jen I mean I understand and not loving this part of the movie but fast forwarding through it is not

[01:21:17] and excusable it was a 15 second skip button you know if something happened that was you know like I rewound but yeah well it's interesting but yeah go ahead you know how do you interpret so well there's there's different parts right there's the ballet which is idealized versions

[01:21:35] of his younger self and the girlfriend and him I guess as the villain in the ballet and then there's a prize acceptance speech and then there's a song from Oklahoma right am I getting those in the right order yeah so let's go with the ballet first

[01:21:51] is that an Oklahoma dance number it's not there is as far as I under and I don't know Oklahoma that well and certainly didn't know that Oklahoma was as dark as it apparently is but I need to die but there is a ballet scene in it

[01:22:06] it's just you know obviously it doesn't have the character and I don't even know if it so Oklahoma has a kind of fucked up love triangle too it's not really a love triangle it's you know this one that lonely outsider and this couple

[01:22:21] but yeah so in the ballet it's the two idealized versions and then the janitor who ends up attacking the younger version and killing him and in some sense even though he's being kind of rough with her he's also liberating her from his younger self

[01:22:37] because then she leaves and that's the last we see of her and she's free or extinguished I suppose I don't know what did you think you all of the of choosing that way to wrap up I just didn't understand it in the moment

[01:22:52] I was like this is kind of cool I have no idea what the fuck is going on right and so like you could look at that as a failure I guess but in retrospect I'm like no that's like that makes sense it was cool to look at

[01:23:04] I think it's like thematically like there's this whole musical thing running through it like in the car we didn't talk about this yeah we didn't talk about this but like a song from you I know nothing about musicals I should say

[01:23:14] but a song evidently from a musical comes on and she's like you like musicals he's like no, no I just you know I dabble I like a few and then he just starts naving musicals and you also see throughout the movie

[01:23:25] that he is a janitor while they're rehearsing Oklahoma and one of the girls, the bitchy girls is the star of Oklahoma and they live in Oklahoma you see an Oklahoma license plate on his car towards the end of the movie too

[01:23:38] even though Phil filmed in upstate New York and very much looks like it's supposed to be that's where he comes they don't have the snowstorms like that in Oklahoma you know it reminds me almost of that Yol drove me to the airport when I interviewed at Cornell

[01:23:51] and I believe there was a snowstorm going on I don't remember the weather it's a depressing fucking drive for sure it makes it's not that it took me out of the movie that much I just it's not my thing I don't think it's failed

[01:24:07] and I think it's very in keeping with the general the broad theme of what's going on which I hope we'll get to talk to because I think it's you know the thing that Charlie Kaufman is giving us in this particular case the musicals make sense for the character

[01:24:21] yeah and so then after that dancing where he kills his younger self and Jesse Buckley is free or just gone in any case he goes to his car the janitor so now it's just the janitor there's nobody but him and he's in his truck and he

[01:24:43] he seems to then make a decision not to turn on the car and so maybe you think oh he's gonna freeze to death but then he just starts getting really upset it's a very distressing scene he starts getting really upset

[01:24:55] as he starts seeing just flashes of his parents over and over like just little clips of his parents and then all of a sudden the windshield turns into a commercial black and white commercial like it looks like from the 20s or something or 30s for Tulsi town

[01:25:10] and then out of that emerges a animated pig with maggots kind of underneath it that talks and is actually really nice it's kind of a nice big nice guy and leads him through the naked because he's taken off all his clothes leads him naked through the high school

[01:25:30] and says let's get some clothes on you and he goes out after that and gives what I later read was the John Nash speech from A Beautiful Mind yeah yeah I didn't know that's what was happening either he's on a stage it's the high school auditorium

[01:25:50] but when you look in the audience everyone's dressed really nicely and if very creepily because they're all aged and makeup that just looks grotesque they're all wearing yeah they're all wearing like stage makeup for looking old from a distance like it's very very weird and he gives yeah

[01:26:09] and there's a set that is made to look like his childhood room and he just gives the John Nash speech and then he goes from that to singing a number by this character from Oklahoma Judd who is a kind of a lonely outsider character who loves

[01:26:25] loves the main woman again I don't know Oklahoma that well but she loves this guy named Curly and they kind of make fun of Judd and there's that's not the song that he sings but there is a song in the musical Poor Judd is Deid

[01:26:39] and I didn't know that this I've heard the song I've heard the music I've heard the song because it plays sometimes in my house but I didn't realize that it is a song where the Curly is trying to convince Judd to kill himself and telling telling him how

[01:26:53] everybody will react after he's dead like oh this is if you do this they'll remember you and feel sorry for you and feel and it's like and I have no idea that it was that dark but but that's not what he sings

[01:27:06] he sings a song that Judd sings that just expresses just how alone and just oppressed he is by these people they don't respect him they're not nice to him and he feels like he's better than Curly but you know nobody else agrees and so it's really sad

[01:27:24] and then that's pretty much the end yeah the final shot is a car with snow covered snow completely covered covering it and we presume that he died in the car except second time viewing if you stick through it through the credits the car starts again

[01:27:44] here the car starts and yeah and the last thing that you see because I'm a diligent viewer yes except like when there's like a ballet going on yeah but yeah and so in some ways that's worse it's like this is just something that happens almost every night

[01:28:01] and is gonna continue to happen you know it's like he doesn't even get an escape from it wow you're right that is worse yeah like he's like the live pig that's getting eaten alive by maggots slow death that's right the slow the slow death of that is life

[01:28:18] wow I didn't think this movie could get any more fucking depressing and we've managed to that's a good title the slow death that is life that is life that's a great title that should be the title hahah oh what you know I heard the car start

[01:28:33] and I didn't think too much of it but you've given it a depress yeah that is a depressing depressing twist um because you know you never see like at first I was like oh maybe he froze to death that and they're gonna find him naked out in the

[01:28:47] in the you know outside of the high school frozen to death naked and that would be kind of tragic but and that would be a story like in Oklahoma that would be a story that people will tell for years to come

[01:28:58] but he doesn't even have the courage to do that he just fell asleep in his car and woke up the next morning he's like fuck I gotta go home now right exactly and like do it all again and maybe what we were seeing throughout the movie isn't

[01:29:09] a girl whose job and name kept changing but just different iterations of this same fantasy that he's been having there's this weird scene where like it cycles she's walking down the steps and then you see her uh again at the top of the steps

[01:29:25] and it's just a stream of her walking down the steps while she's having an interior monologue in the house so one way of interpreting that is things are just completely fucked up and off the rails but another way is no no no this isn't one night

[01:29:37] and one fantasy we were seeing this is like you know one of a hundred and like represented by all the different cups Tulsi town cups that are in the dumpster like so this is oh that's great I like that that's good that's good yeah I like that

[01:29:53] I had been envisioning it as as the final thoughts like in that bore his story of the guy who's about to be executed and he just asks God for time and in the time between the gun being fired and the bullet hitting his brain

[01:30:05] he works out a whole story I had I had figured that but this this is this is nice because I yeah it makes sense there are iterations of the story he is working through a story every time right every time he is done cleaning the school

[01:30:19] he gets in his car and thinks I could end it tonight and he tells a story and that story is just evolving as he tells it but maybe like you could maybe it's like girl's kindness that keeps him going and maybe that's good like the pig says

[01:30:33] like there's kindness in the world you just have to know where to look so maybe it is this kind of hope even if it's hope that is you know not grounded in fact can we talk a bit about the pastiche of things you know throughout the

[01:30:50] throughout the movie we see the source material that he's using to create this story and from what I've read and from watching the movie I guess Charlie Kaufman is trying to say something about that and there's even a line in the movie Tandler you probably remember it better

[01:31:05] where he says that's the thing about an idea a movie a bad movie idea it gets in your head and it's hard to get rid of it replaces your real thoughts he says yeah and this is to me the loss of identity from that comes

[01:31:19] he doesn't have original thoughts now he has thoughts that are all you know what it reminds me of is the the spoiler for usual suspects the final scene of the usual suspects where you realize his whole Kobayashi's whole story or Kaiser Soze's whole story I mean

[01:31:34] is put pieced together by little things in the police office you're getting these reminders throughout this movie or you're getting these little visual cues that oh he's taking that part from this he's taking that part from this he doesn't even have the originality to give his character

[01:31:50] congratulations speech at the end because his character hasn't even accomplished anything really so he just copies and pasts John Nash's speech because he's like oh and here I want like I want the there to be like a thunderous applause because of my and it's depressing in that sense

[01:32:02] but I wondered what you guys thought like is he trying to critique something by giving us this man who's built his world around these other people's ideas you know I relate it I relate to this because you know I love movies and I'm constantly watching things

[01:32:21] and I feel like there's just so many times where I am if you go into my head I'm just thinking of these movies and these movie lines and then that I then apply to the real world so I'll be talking to somebody and I'll say that

[01:32:36] and there's like it's like what's wrong with me that I'm like that like people are having real conversations with me and I respond with a movie line and it's like because it's just invaded my thought process to such a degree where it just has become a part of

[01:32:50] and that line it replaces like real memories or real thoughts or real ideas I feel that I mean there's good and bad points to it like there's good things to about it too it's an it can be an engine for creativity but it's also like

[01:33:04] really kind of upsetting that you that you are just this construction of all these other things that you've read and seen and you're not you're not fully we're not fully formed in the same way that he hasn't fully formed Lucy. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, you know

[01:33:19] I think this is such a Charlie Kaufman thing that he's my imagination of him is is that he's always kind of beating himself up for being a hack, you know, like his hackish alter ego Donald in adaptation and even that this is almost a callback to that where

[01:33:36] Donald's hackish screenplay was called the three, right? And it was that these three characters are actually all the same character. And you know, now he's got to make that movie. So like I feel this is like a little bit of him kicking himself of like,

[01:33:49] oh, you're such a hack all you do is you, you know, lift shit from, you know, the crappy feel good movies. What a great way to do that. What a great way to embrace the like, all right, here's my deepest fear that I'm a hack. I'm taking nothing.

[01:34:02] I'm only taking other people's ideas and then making a movie out of somebody whose life is making a truly novel creative project out of this. What's so interesting about that, though, and like connecting this to adaptation is so Donald Kaufman is he's the hack. Charlie Kaufman is trying

[01:34:21] to make art in that movie and his and his twin brother is so much happier than he is because he's not trapped inside his own head and he's not constantly second guessing himself. He thinks that idea is amazing and he loves it and he's like going

[01:34:35] he has this kind of hot Maggie Gyllenhaal girlfriend and is also friends with. Wait, is she hot or is she Maggie Gyllenhaal? You have a thing where you. Is that true? She's so cute. Yeah. It's just droopy. She looks like droopy. I like her.

[01:34:49] I mean, I don't have like a huge thing. But what's interesting is I think on the one hand he is afraid of being a hack like that. But he also it has an appeal to him too that he could be out of his own head enough

[01:35:00] that he's not second guessing that he can come up with the three and think it fucking rocks that that's like he's like I remember that scene. It's so funny. Like Nicholas Cage is so good as both of them, but Donald's like he's telling him this ridiculous story

[01:35:12] that makes no sense. And he's like, isn't that fucked up? Like, isn't that just mom says it's psychologically taught. Nicholas Cage, by the way, is bad in 90% of his movies and in the 10% where he's good. He's really good. He's so good in that adaptation.

[01:35:32] But then also like, you know, it's the John Cusack character and being John Malikovich, there's a little bit of or maybe a lot of the character Jim Carrey and Eternal Sunshine. Like this is this is the Charlie Kaufman character who's constantly got this running monologue

[01:35:47] and he wishes he could he could just embrace the world. So is this Charlie Kaufman embracing his Donald Kaufman and getting a deal with Netflix to make a movie that's about three people being one? I don't think so. Cause number one, they're not the same kind of movie.

[01:36:00] That was like a psychological like a ridiculous psychological thriller it's supposed to be like the usual suspects except that it makes no sense. And this is obviously not. But also I think he I heard an interview with him

[01:36:13] and he said, I haven't been able to make a move get a movie made until since 2008 which was a Sinectity New York, I believe Anomalisa was later, but that wasn't all of him. Sinecta key one day you'll pronounce that right. Yeah, Sinectity. Sinecta key. To say

[01:36:29] I didn't even I couldn't get through Anomalisa by the way. So I'm not a huge like Charlie Kaufman directed fan. I didn't get through Anomalisa actually either. That's fun. I finished it and I have no memory of it at all.

[01:36:41] Sinecta key is a movie we did an episode about it, right? No, we could. We did? No. I thought we did. Well, we've talked about it in one of our top lists. It is a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed. I think I watched it twice

[01:36:55] and I don't ever really want to watch it again. I mean, it's not that I'm averse to watching it. I just don't need to. It is that emotionally distressing to me to watch it. And this is a movie that I won't watch again for a while probably

[01:37:07] because it's hard to digest what Charlie Kaufman's serving up. Like he's so good at making me have existential dread that I need to take a step back from Charlie Kaufman. So if he's been trying to get movies made like this, maybe, maybe he's just. Exactly.

[01:37:26] He fucks up the Donald in you. Like I have a Donald in me but he makes me like, he drags me out of that and makes me reflect on whether that's just shallow and ultimately pointless and worthless. And meanwhile I'm getting old and, you know,

[01:37:42] and I'm gonna soon be like unloved. Yeah. I mean, we are like squarely his target demographic for the dread, you know? So I was like watching that. It'd be like, is that me? Am I that pedantic? Oh my God. This is like, it was excruciating, you know?

[01:37:57] Like I have those tendencies, man. I might've done the Mussolini correction, you know? Yeah. You know? Yeah. But this one I wanna, like I was psyched to go back to it actually just because I wanted to make more.

[01:38:14] Now I didn't really had a chance to talk to anybody as detailed as this conversation. But unlike, it took me a while to go back to synactity and I didn't love it the first time. I got, like I struggled with it and then liked it the second time.

[01:38:27] But this one I find is just more watchable through that. Yeah, you're right. Synecdoche is just like a, you know, by design it is a burning building throughout. Like it is a little too intense to go back.

[01:38:42] This one, I think part of it is the performance of Jesse the woman is, she's very delightful I think to watch on screen. When she does the poem and then afterwards is kind of embarrassed. Now it turns out that it's not her poem

[01:38:57] it's a poem by a book in a book that you see later in the movie but she does the, I just read something to you and I'm embarrassed about it but I wanna know how you think and she does that so well

[01:39:09] and there's so many scenes like that where she is just, she just nails what what you would hope the interaction is like and it feels very real. And I think without that this movie would really struggle cause you could see it as kind of cheap

[01:39:23] that it's in her head but it's not about her. And I think the only way to get away with that is to have her give just this performance that feels so real that it doesn't matter. I don't think by the way that I am aware of any movie

[01:39:36] in which the internal monologue turns out to not be from the protagonist. Yeah, that's right. It's a, it's a hard thing to pull off. I think he pulled it off. The, Tamela what you were saying about sort of like having this head full

[01:39:51] of movie quotes and kind of wanting to communicate like that. I mean, I think this is just for anybody who is part of like, you know say our generation and younger this is just it's hard to get around it. Like our head whenever you do try

[01:40:06] to come up with something novel even in academic ideas it's really anxiety inducing to think that somebody else has probably come up with it and you're not actually doing something new you just forgot that somebody else did it. But at the same time

[01:40:20] it's actually a cool way to be able to communicate with people like in this in this way it reminded me Tamela probably haven't seen this but you remember you all that Darmak and Jalad at Tanagra episode of the next generation where they speak

[01:40:32] they speak in basically they take stories and their language is purely I don't remember this episode. So you're erotically illustrating the failure of this mode of communication. It is exactly that is it is it is failed but that's, you know but essentially communicating through movie quotes

[01:40:50] would be what they're doing. They're just applying phrases to communicate. This is like my fantasy of a good movie conversation that has I've lost control of and now it becomes like a Star Trek next to discussion. Hey man, that's how Charlie Kaufman made me feel

[01:41:05] with ballet at the end of the movie. I'm like, oh. I have one question to ask you that I was thinking about. So I was walking the dog with my daughter after we saw it and she was expressing which I totally get this perspective.

[01:41:20] If it's not about her and yet we're, we are in her head for like all but maybe 10 or 15 minutes of the movie. It sort of cheapens it to know that she is not a real person she's a creation of this older guy.

[01:41:39] And so I was saying to try to argue against that that well look, I mean any character in a movie is a creation of somebody. So like the fact that it's a creation of a character in the movie rather than Charlie Kaufman's creation what difference does that make?

[01:41:54] And she's like, no, it's two different levels. This is why she hates any interpretation of Twin Peaks where like the first two seasons are a dream of just one character. I get that and I feel it. And at the same time I think that

[01:42:07] these characters can be projections and they can be just as real even if they are projections of a character in the movie rather than the filmmaker or creator. And so the example I gave was the Princess Bride. Nobody bitches about the Princess Bride

[01:42:22] that actually those characters aren't real even within the reality of the movie they are part of a story that Peter Falk is reading to his sick grandson. And yet you never feel like, oh that cheapens it to know that they aren't real within the reality of the movie.

[01:42:37] So why should we feel that about characters who are parts of dreams or fantasies or delusions like in this case? You are, I have thoughts but I do not have anything. Well so I guess two. The first is that it didn't bother me

[01:42:51] although I can see how people would think in general that it was all in somebody's head thing is cheap. To me the most obvious difference between the Princess Bride and this is that the Princess Bride puts it up front. So it's like a framing device for the story

[01:43:09] and all along we're like, okay well this is a story within a story thing I kind of know what that is. Here it's like maybe you feel like you're you were kind of taking it seriously in a way like, oh these are actual people who actually exist

[01:43:20] and then you feel jerked around right? It's like, it's kind of cheating almost but the reason I don't feel that way about this is that it's very clear pretty early on that there's something weird happening that's not quite right. And so already I feel like it signals

[01:43:34] that like some of these people don't exist in the way that we think they do. And then it's kind of trying to figure out like in which way that is. I think that this is sort of why I started off saying

[01:43:45] in some ways I viewed her as just as much an aspect of him. And I think that his making her a virologist, then a poet, then a landscape artist and a physicist I think those are all things that he would like to have been

[01:44:04] in his sort of wasted life as a janitor. And so I think that she is just as much projection of his fantasy. It turns out as the main guy because he's in his own head and he's creating these characters and he only has two things to work with.

[01:44:22] All of the media that he's read and his own wishes, thoughts and desires. So the thoughts are getting confused at the beginning because they're both him. He's just making himself a chick and a dude, right? He's both people and he's trying to flesh her out as a character.

[01:44:38] And I think in doing so, he is creating a very real solid person that is just as real and as real a part of him as the Jake character. I don't actually think that Jake is more real than Lucy or whatever her name is.

[01:44:57] I think it's only a result of us identifying the janitor with the Jake character but I don't think there's any reason. So do you think she's the part of him that wants to kill himself? The I'm thinking of ending things is that's...

[01:45:13] I hadn't thought of that, but I think that is right. The fact that he's putting those words in her mouth and that she's living this retrospective and it kind of in a dreamlike way, how in dreams you're like, and I was me but then all of a sudden

[01:45:24] I was also Luke Skywalker. I think that that's the kind of bleed that's going on in these characters because it really does turn from it's her and then all of a sudden it's also him and like his parents, not just like she's meeting someone else's parents.

[01:45:41] Now she is interacting with his... And he's not there. Yeah, and he's not there. Right, and there's that weird scene with a picture like the childhood picture of him that then becomes the childhood picture of her. That's right. That's right. She's like, that's me. That is, yeah.

[01:45:56] She even says at one point, I'm not sure where I end in you begin or something almost explicit like that. I think that's all right. Do you think also that he was trying to kind of explicitly make a point about the way that men value themselves

[01:46:10] by their partners desirability? I mean, she comes out and says that pretty much. And then the very, the last song from Oklahoma I thought was kind of that explicitly as well. Like, you're gonna go out and get the girl to validate

[01:46:26] that you're like not a piece of shit basically. Yeah, exactly. The fact that she is critiquing his own creation. Like, she's critiquing his creation of her as he is like, it's again another thing where she has agency here even if that agency ultimately comes

[01:46:47] from this separate aspect of his psyche. There's a part by the way where he says to her in this real fake deep kind of, you know, I'm 14 and this is deep kind of way maybe we're all programmed. And then she's like. She knows like the mind blown

[01:47:03] but sarcastically kind of. Yeah, I really, it really is interesting the way that he is trying to create her and he's just not quite landed. So all of the aspects of her, he's like wait was she, it's like somebody telling you about their fake Canadian girlfriend

[01:47:20] they had over the summer and like, well what does she do? No, no, she works as a model. Wait, I thought you said she was an accountant or whatever. And I think that's perfectly illustrated in the clothing that he can't settle on what she was actually wearing.

[01:47:31] Unless she's just wearing different, you know, that theory I had where it's like those are just different iterations and she's wearing different things through them. I don't think you have to choose or even that there's an answer to that. But yeah.

[01:47:44] No, this is exactly the kind of ambiguity that Charlie Kaufman is playing on. You know, it would be dumb if there was an answer like. I think in the book they sit like they find his journals that have these stories that he's been writing

[01:47:57] and it's very clear cut in a way. I think Charlie Kaufman didn't want in the movie. And he definitely died in the book. Yeah, in the book he definitely dies. And so you could, like I could see Charlie Kaufman, both he's doing two things, right?

[01:48:12] He's both, I haven't read the book obviously, but I was reading a little bit about the similarities and differences between the book and the movie. He has, and I guess this is what adaptation is all about, he has to do a good job

[01:48:25] translating somebody else's work into a screenplay. And that can, I can see why that is a task where you would have some ambivalence toward. You're like, wait, is my job really just to take someone else's good ideas and make them into something slightly different?

[01:48:40] And I would really like to think that that turning the car on at the end of the credits was Charlie Kaufman saying like, by the way, this is my story. Well, so Oklahoma isn't at all part of the novel. You would have liked the novel better.

[01:48:53] Let's dance at here. Yeah, so I haven't read the book either obviously. I heard that it got sort of mixed reviews. So I think having just like kind of read about the differences between the book and the movie and having read some like excerpts from the book,

[01:49:11] that the book sort of seems to hit you over the head with grimness and that the changes that Charlie Kaufman made sort of mitigate that a little bit. Like the Oklahoma stuff is just kind of weird and fun. And that he's not necessarily dead,

[01:49:24] could be interpreted as less grim although we've come up with a way that it's actually worse. But so... That's right, actually. Yeah, no, that's right. We didn't talk about the phone calls but they're very strange, the phone calls

[01:49:36] and he keeps saying like a question has to be resolved. This question has to be resolved in your head but you never find out what the question is. Maybe it's do you take your own life or not? Yeah, I thought it was a super obvious nod

[01:49:49] to that Camus, like the fundamental question in all of philosophy is should I commit suicide? Yeah, I thought it was like a clear nod to that. I didn't think of that actually. Yeah, there is... Is... Are the phone calls his voice? The janitor's voice, I believe.

[01:50:04] Yeah, they are the janitor's voice. Yeah, so. I believe. All right, well I'm no less depressed than we started but I think... Do you guys have anything more you wanna say about this movie? No, just that I'm also quite depressed.

[01:50:18] And we hope we have depressed you, all right? Yeah, I'm slightly less depressed but that's because I think I haven't had as much time to think about it as... Yeah, give it a day. I'll wait for the slow roll of the question. I'll text you tomorrow.

[01:50:34] You're gonna feel your body slowly aging overnight and then you're gonna get it. But like a lot of really kind of sad movies about the worst parts of life, there's something exhilarating when they get it right. There is something exhilarating about somebody

[01:50:56] accurately capturing something that is true to life and so like I can't get too depressed when something is good in that way. Yeah, when art is good, yes. And I will say that every once in a while

[01:51:08] I look down at my hand and I realize I'm fucking cold. Dude, I'm glad it's not just me. I'm like oh my... It's not... Yeah. That was too close to home that scene. Yeah, I know this feeling of self-alienation where sometimes you look at some aspect of yourself

[01:51:24] and you're like, I look old. This is fucking creepy. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's a great note to end on. Yes, and I loved... I really liked the movie. I don't know about loved because I haven't decided yet but I really enjoyed it.

[01:51:37] All right, well thank you, Yoel, as always. It's always a pleasure to lend my expertise to you guys. Yeah. Two psychologists, four beers will pimp, listen to Yoel's podcast. It's, you know, I mean, Mickey's no tamler. You know, he does what he can. But that's a good thing.

[01:51:54] But that's a good thing. Thanks guys, thanks for having me on. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizard. I'm a very good man. Brains and U.S. Anybody can have a brain? Very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.