Episode 284: Reel Choices

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having

[00:00:06] an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing

[00:00:14] my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] You know what your problem is, Lewis?

[00:00:19] No.

[00:00:20] I mean, I ain't gonna fuck with you or nothing, I'm just trying to tell you something for

[00:00:24] your own good, alright?

[00:00:25] You think you're a good guy.

[00:00:27] The great in us has attention to that man behind—

[00:00:32] More brains than you have.

[00:00:33] Anybody can have a brain.

[00:00:37] You're a very bad man.

[00:00:38] I'm a very good man.

[00:00:59] Just a very bad wizard.

[00:01:00] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:09] Dave, this is our first episode after officially deciding to go ad-free on the podcast.

[00:01:16] But I know you're gonna be a good guy.

[00:01:19] I'm gonna be a good guy.

[00:01:20] I'm gonna be a good guy.

[00:01:21] I'm gonna be a good guy.

[00:01:22] I'm gonna be a good guy.

[00:01:23] I'm gonna be a good guy.

[00:01:24] I'm gonna be a good guy.

[00:01:25] I'm gonna be a good guy.

[00:01:26] I'm gonna be a good guy.

[00:01:27] We're gonna go ad-free on the podcast, but I need to ask, did we make a huge mistake?

[00:01:31] I haven't thought about that a lot.

[00:01:36] I mean, look, I think we did the right thing, you know?

[00:01:43] But boy, things were a bit easier when that ad money was coming in.

[00:01:47] Back in the day.

[00:01:48] It was flowing in.

[00:01:49] Yeah.

[00:01:50] No, I think we did the right thing too.

[00:01:51] And once we get the Patreon kind of what we're gonna do all sorted out too, I think it'll

[00:01:56] be fine for us.

[00:01:57] Not as good.

[00:01:58] There's always DoorDash.

[00:01:59] Uber driving.

[00:02:00] Yeah, no, it's true.

[00:02:01] Do you know the origin of the salad days?

[00:02:05] No, I don't think I know that phrase.

[00:02:07] You don't know the phrase?

[00:02:08] The salad days?

[00:02:09] Uh-uh.

[00:02:10] It's actually, well, carefree innocence, idealism and pleasure associated with youth.

[00:02:14] So I guess it's not an appropriate phrase here.

[00:02:17] Right.

[00:02:19] The salad days when we're like shilling for protein bars.

[00:02:26] The innocent days.

[00:02:30] All right.

[00:02:34] Speaking of making a choice that will define who you are, define your identity, define

[00:02:43] how you understand the meaning of life, we are going to be talking or giving our top

[00:02:49] three existentialist movies.

[00:02:53] Movies with existentialist themes.

[00:02:56] We haven't done one of these in a while.

[00:02:59] It's been a while.

[00:03:00] Yeah.

[00:03:01] Probably for a reason.

[00:03:02] But this time it's gonna be great.

[00:03:03] This time it's gonna be different.

[00:03:04] It's gonna be different.

[00:03:05] Yeah, no, we'll soon remember probably why we haven't done this one in a while.

[00:03:11] The joke is that these are usually where they become rambly, huge monster edits for

[00:03:16] Tamler.

[00:03:17] That's the joke.

[00:03:18] I know that our listeners, you do such a good job that our listeners would never know this.

[00:03:21] Anyway, so that's what's coming up in the second segment.

[00:03:25] But first, thanks to Neuroskeptic and thanks to you for putting in our slack.

[00:03:31] Thanks possibly being sarcastic as I say it.

[00:03:36] But yeah, we're gonna talk about a new paper.

[00:03:39] We're gonna check out what's the latest in the world of analytic philosophy.

[00:03:43] And by latest, I mean latest.

[00:03:46] 2024.

[00:03:47] Synthes.

[00:03:48] Good journal, really, you know, borderline top 10 journal, especially in philosophy of

[00:03:54] mind, language.

[00:03:56] We have a paper by J.T.M. Miller, The Metaphysics of Puns.

[00:04:01] Do you want to read the abstract?

[00:04:03] Yeah, okay.

[00:04:06] In this paper, I aim to discuss what puns metaphysically are.

[00:04:10] I argue that the type token view of words leads to an indeterminacy problem when we

[00:04:15] consider puns.

[00:04:16] I then outline an alternative account of puns based on recent nominalist views of words

[00:04:21] that does not suffer from this indeterminacy.

[00:04:24] Phew.

[00:04:25] Thank God.

[00:04:26] Thank God somebody got, took care of it.

[00:04:29] I was worried we wouldn't know what puns are.

[00:04:32] But I think we're gonna be good by the end of this paper.

[00:04:35] We haven't talked about this at all.

[00:04:37] So I'm kind of curious, like, what you thought about this paper.

[00:04:41] Did it scratch the itch that you sometimes have for this stuff?

[00:04:45] No.

[00:04:46] It scratched the itch to wonder why people publish things like this.

[00:04:50] I think you and I have expressed recently that of the domains of analytic philosophy,

[00:04:55] perhaps metaphysics is the most perplexing.

[00:04:57] Especially kind of ontology of things like of art, ontology of puns.

[00:05:03] And I honestly didn't know that there was like a new metaphysics of words debate.

[00:05:09] Of words.

[00:05:10] Yeah.

[00:05:11] Like, you know, separate, I guess, from the concepts.

[00:05:13] Yeah.

[00:05:14] Separate from like discussions of semantics or.

[00:05:16] Yeah.

[00:05:17] Yeah.

[00:05:18] Let me just read the first whatever, you know, paragraph and a half.

[00:05:21] So the paper opens like this.

[00:05:23] Lately I've been selling houseboats.

[00:05:25] Sales are through the roof.

[00:05:27] This is a great pun.

[00:05:29] Sales, S-A-I-L-S.

[00:05:31] Yes.

[00:05:32] Sales are through the roof.

[00:05:33] Do you agree that that's a great pun?

[00:05:35] No.

[00:05:36] What are your feelings about puns in general?

[00:05:40] All right.

[00:05:41] So I'll admit to something.

[00:05:43] I've always hated puns.

[00:05:45] Not hated.

[00:05:46] That's not right.

[00:05:47] I've always thought that puns aren't funny.

[00:05:48] I think they're clever and they like give a satisfaction in this clever sense.

[00:05:53] But I think that they're not humorous at all.

[00:05:56] And I think that people who make lots of puns all the time are actually quite annoying.

[00:06:02] Yeah.

[00:06:03] They should be separated from the rest of the community.

[00:06:07] There's a very weird thing with puns where when you make it, like the cleverness makes you feel like it's funny.

[00:06:13] But nobody else really cares.

[00:06:15] Like people.

[00:06:16] Paul, I think, likes puns.

[00:06:17] Does he?

[00:06:18] Maybe.

[00:06:19] And I feel like he does.

[00:06:20] But I don't, yeah, I don't make them really either.

[00:06:23] And so I don't even feel clever if I make them in part because I almost never make them.

[00:06:28] Like there is a kind of joke that I will tell that I find funny in the telling of it that other people don't find funny.

[00:06:34] But puns is not in that category.

[00:06:36] Puns are not one of them.

[00:06:37] I do make them sometimes but in a very heavy-handed like corniness.

[00:06:41] Yeah.

[00:06:42] Trying to explicitly be corny which, you know, is probably also annoying.

[00:06:46] Well, that is a meta annoying thing about puns is often it's about the eye rolling and the dad joke.

[00:06:52] And now you're talking about that.

[00:06:54] At its best, it can do that okay.

[00:06:57] But, you know, if nobody ever made another pun, I would be fine with it.

[00:07:01] Right.

[00:07:02] That said, an ex-girlfriend of mine once pointed out that I was a huge hypocrite because rap lyrics are full of puns.

[00:07:09] Oh, yeah.

[00:07:10] And I was like, no, that's a different category for me.

[00:07:13] That's wordplay.

[00:07:14] We call that wordplay.

[00:07:16] Yeah.

[00:07:17] It's not.

[00:07:18] Uh-oh.

[00:07:19] I see another Synthes article.

[00:07:22] And then I thought about the rapper, May He Rest In Peace.

[00:07:26] Big pun.

[00:07:27] And pun was always short for Punisher.

[00:07:29] But I was like, wait, was he making a pun out of his name?

[00:07:34] You know, I'm a huge fan of the Asterix, Asterix French series of comics.

[00:07:42] And they are full of puns that I actually enjoy and are funny.

[00:07:47] And so there's a little hypocrisy in my general attitude towards puns.

[00:07:52] It's usually when people make them and they're not incorporated into some kind of art form.

[00:07:58] MF Doom, my favorite, actually uses sails through the roof in one of his songs as a pun that I thought was very clever.

[00:08:07] But it's just like it feels like a different art form altogether.

[00:08:10] That's so funny, really?

[00:08:12] Sails like S-A-I-L-S through the roof?

[00:08:15] Well, he's talking about having an out-of-body experience and also selling lots of albums.

[00:08:20] And so he says he's talking about floating above his bed while at the same time selling lots of albums.

[00:08:27] And he says a new meaning to sails through the roof.

[00:08:29] Oh, so there's three types for the word sail or the sound sail.

[00:08:34] Not just two types.

[00:08:36] Right.

[00:08:37] But this is all just a distraction from the real question of this paper.

[00:08:41] What metaphysically is a pun?

[00:08:43] We all agree that this is a great pun.

[00:08:45] But what metaphysically is a pun?

[00:08:48] Is there anything we can learn about the metaphysics of words by considering the case of puns?

[00:08:53] And then JTM takes your favorite tack.

[00:08:57] Speaking of sails, not much has been written that explicitly takes up this question.

[00:09:02] In fact, at least to my knowledge, there has been no work that explicitly considers what from a metaphysical perspective a pun is.

[00:09:10] Perhaps this is not surprising.

[00:09:12] I was shocked, actually.

[00:09:14] But yeah, no, that's so funny that that line you will see the surprise that the author expresses that nothing has been written is correlated with the lack of actual surprise that a person like an unbiased observer would have.

[00:09:30] You have to say it.

[00:09:32] And to be fair to this paper, it's not as much about trying to get to the bottom of what a pun is as much as using the example of puns to challenge certain views within the recent metaphysics of words debate between nominalists and I guess realists.

[00:09:57] But realists of a type token kind.

[00:10:00] Did you know about this debate?

[00:10:02] Had no idea. No, absolutely not.

[00:10:04] Yeah.

[00:10:05] Did you?

[00:10:06] I think I did. I learned about it just in passing recently, but was only motivated through this paper to actually figure out what it was because it's different than the nominalism universalism or the nominalism realism debate about other things like metaphysical objects or even concepts.

[00:10:28] Although I guess concepts kind of does play into it.

[00:10:30] But this is very focused on actual words and what words are and what their ontological status is.

[00:10:38] Do you understand the debate, would you say?

[00:10:40] Yeah, I'll try.

[00:10:42] I'll try to give my understanding.

[00:10:44] Yeah.

[00:10:45] Very briefly.

[00:10:46] The problem is this, like the dominant view, according to J.T.M. Miller of the metaphysics of words is that every instance of a word, like when we were saying the word sales is a token instance of a type, though, like the word sale that can be instantiated in many different ways, whether you read it in a newspaper or whether I'm saying it on this podcast, wherever you read it, however it's spelled, wherever.

[00:11:10] Like there are a bunch of instances of this true type of word, the singular type.

[00:11:15] It seems like a very straightforward view that each instance of a word is a token of like the I don't know what to call it other than type.

[00:11:25] Yeah. The type of that same word, although a single word can have two types.

[00:11:30] Yeah. And that's the tension, right?

[00:11:32] The pun all of a sudden introduces a word like sales, which is at least in the spoken sense is exactly the same, pronounced exactly the same.

[00:11:41] And if you try to assign it to a type, you realize that it is.

[00:11:46] It's neither sales as in selling things or sales as in the things that go on boats.

[00:11:52] And so he says this isn't just an epistemic problem when you make a pun.

[00:11:56] It's not just that we don't know which one you meant.

[00:11:58] It's that really you are using this word that's attached to two different types and a token can't be attached to different types like that.

[00:12:08] That would go against this type token realism.

[00:12:11] Yeah. So there can be what do you call two words that sound the same but are different words?

[00:12:16] Homophones.

[00:12:18] That's a pun that uses a homophone.

[00:12:20] But there wouldn't be any issue of the word sales spelled S-A-I-L having one type and the word sale, S-A-L-E, having another type.

[00:12:29] Right.

[00:12:30] But later in the paper, they introduce another pun.

[00:12:34] Another one we can all agree is a great pun.

[00:12:37] And I do think it's a slightly better pun.

[00:12:40] The other day I tried to make a chemistry joke but got no reaction.

[00:12:44] Right.

[00:12:45] So in that case, the reaction word is the same.

[00:12:49] The reaction you might get by mixing two different kinds of chemicals versus the reaction you would get from a joke.

[00:12:56] Right?

[00:12:57] And so in that case, this word reaction spelled exactly that way has different types but tokens of that word, it will always be clear I guess which of the types it's referring to.

[00:13:13] Right.

[00:13:14] So he writes, in most cases, which type a token is a token of is clear.

[00:13:19] The word dog, and here he spells dog in lowercase, is I take it obviously a token of the type dog.

[00:13:25] And he spells it in all caps to distinguish the type.

[00:13:28] But in the case of puns at least if we accept the ambiguity thesis also, a metaphysical puzzle begins to emerge.

[00:13:34] While in most cases it might be clear as to which type a particular word token is a token of, I argue that in the case of puns, it is not so clear.

[00:13:42] That is I will argue that if we are type token theorists and accept the ambiguity view of puns, there is no good answer to the question of which type a word token, which is a punning element, is a token of.

[00:13:52] Yeah.

[00:13:53] Which at this point I'm just like, isn't he just saying what puns are?

[00:13:57] I think so.

[00:13:59] But this is the thing.

[00:14:00] I don't think he's trying to – I don't know what the author's pronouns are here.

[00:14:07] He's a boy.

[00:14:09] I looked him up.

[00:14:10] He's a boy.

[00:14:11] It's a boy.

[00:14:12] All right.

[00:14:13] Well, I didn't know it could be that simple these days but apparently.

[00:14:16] So now to be clear, I don't know if you agree with this.

[00:14:20] Like to me the whole metaphysics of words thing as far as I understand it doesn't seem to me to be not a pseudo problem.

[00:14:29] That's my biggest issue with this, which is like it seems as if this has created a problem that did not exist before merely because of the emergence of this new field of the metaphysics of words.

[00:14:40] And so because of that, it's supposed to have a tension.

[00:14:43] Puns give you this tension.

[00:14:45] So he says it's not just that we don't know which type the word token in a pun is a token of but that it is metaphysically indeterminate as to which word type is being tokened in the case of a pun.

[00:14:54] Yeah.

[00:14:55] And he says I'll argue that this indeterminacy is not merely epistemic but is metaphysical and on the assumption that we should not accept genuine metaphysical indeterminacy means that type token views cannot provide a good basis for a metaphysics of puns.

[00:15:07] Right.

[00:15:08] It might be a pseudo debate that just is another of the, you know, in a long line of misguided debates in metaphysics.

[00:15:15] But to the extent that it is a debate, it does seem like puns here might pose a problem for type.

[00:15:22] Like I was compelled by the argument that puns pose a problem for the type token view of words because it really is indeterminate.

[00:15:33] It's not just like an epistemological problem.

[00:15:36] Like that's the whole point of puns like you were saying is that it's playing on the ambiguity of the word so that you can't say, oh, this is a clear use of the type, you know, reaction meaning chemical reaction or reaction meaning audience reaction.

[00:15:54] Yeah.

[00:15:55] So …

[00:15:56] So let me give the other example that he gives.

[00:15:58] So he goes on to talk – flesh out this problem of indeterminacy.

[00:16:03] He says, okay, I said like the ambiguity thesis is that in a pun there is a single token, right, the word reaction that has multiple meanings.

[00:16:12] So accept that.

[00:16:13] But now if we also accept the type token view of words, that token, because all tokens work like this, has to be a token of some type.

[00:16:21] But which one?

[00:16:22] Which type is it a token of?

[00:16:24] And then he brings up the – well, first he admits that this is not a question ordinary speakers are likely to ask.

[00:16:31] Fair.

[00:16:32] Yeah.

[00:16:33] Fair to say, yeah.

[00:16:34] But he brings this other pun into play.

[00:16:36] He says desperate times call for desperate measures.

[00:16:39] So pour us each a desperate measure.

[00:16:41] Yeah.

[00:16:42] Right.

[00:16:43] So here the word measure is being used in two different meanings and he spells it out.

[00:16:47] Measure one is meaning a plan or course of action taken to achieve a particular purpose.

[00:16:51] Measure two meaning a standard unit of in this case alcohol.

[00:16:55] Yeah.

[00:16:57] So he's like, so tell me, metaphysicians of the type token school of thought, which one is measure in that pun?

[00:17:07] Especially I think the second measure, right?

[00:17:10] Because the first measure is clearly type measure one.

[00:17:14] But the second one could be either of them and it is like fundamentally indeterminate.

[00:17:22] Which of those – yeah.

[00:17:24] I actually take it, you know, like a lot of these kinds of fundamentally misguided metaphysical debates can still bring out something in the topic that they're discussing.

[00:17:35] Even if it's not anything to do with ontology or metaphysics.

[00:17:38] In this case I was thinking does that mean that this is a better pun than the first one and the second one?

[00:17:44] Because there is actual ambiguity of the second use of measure there where it really could be both.

[00:17:51] So there's a kind of complexity to that pun.

[00:17:53] Yeah.

[00:17:54] That there isn't for the other puns.

[00:17:55] Yeah, I have that intuition too.

[00:17:58] And he says, why is this not just epistemic indeterminacy?

[00:18:02] If we were merely epistemic indeterminacy then we might not think it particularly problematic.

[00:18:05] However, I think we have reasons for thinking that indeterminacy we've identified is metaphysical.

[00:18:09] If it were just epistemically indeterminate you would just say I just don't happen to know which one it is a type – the token is a type of.

[00:18:19] But there is an answer.

[00:18:21] And here he's saying but there isn't actually a right answer, right?

[00:18:25] It's not just that you don't know.

[00:18:27] And you can think of this like people talk about this in terms of quantum indeterminacy as well.

[00:18:31] Is it just the question of you can't know or is it that fundamentally reality is indeterminate, right?

[00:18:36] This matters, this distinction between the epistemological and the metaphysical.

[00:18:40] The type token theorist about words could be fine if it was epistemic.

[00:18:45] It's like, well, it's not that everyone needs to be able to know which type this token word refers to.

[00:18:52] But it does refer to a specific type.

[00:18:55] But apparently if we take the author at his word, they are committed to the view that every time a token of a word is used, it refers to a specific type.

[00:19:07] Whether we can identify which type it's referring to or not.

[00:19:11] And in this case, in the measure case, so pour us each a desperate measure, it is Schrodinger's measure.

[00:19:20] Yeah, exactly.

[00:19:22] Although now that I think about that sentence, isn't it just clearly measure one in the first clause and measure two in the second clause?

[00:19:28] So I thought of that and I think not.

[00:19:30] This is why I was saying that I think this is a more sophisticated pun.

[00:19:34] He says pour us each a desperate measure.

[00:19:37] So the shot is both a measure of the alcohol, but also a measure of trying to deal with whatever they're doing.

[00:19:46] Yeah, right.

[00:19:48] So at some point, he also.

[00:19:51] Yeah. And at some point he says I love this.

[00:19:54] This argument because part of me was all like behind it and part of me was like, this is so absurd.

[00:19:59] He says, OK, you could think in the reaction pun that reaction one, meaning of chemical reaction, reaction to the meaning of audience reaction.

[00:20:09] That the use of the word reaction there, it is now referring to a third type.

[00:20:14] And that third type is reaction.

[00:20:18] The type that refers to either this or that.

[00:20:22] A disjunctive view.

[00:20:23] Right.

[00:20:24] Like and it's introduced metaphysically, like whenever you create a pun metaphysically, you create a new third type.

[00:20:30] And that third type is this word when it means both of these things at the same time.

[00:20:35] And his response is like, God forbid that we go around every time we pun.

[00:20:41] We're like creating a whole new like ontology of words like that just seems like a terrible.

[00:20:48] It's like spinning in his grave.

[00:20:52] It's like what people think about multiverse theory. Like surely you can't just come up with a new universe every time.

[00:20:57] It's just too much like you just want to like save the universe problems by just not making choices.

[00:21:03] This is why we don't respond to emails.

[00:21:07] Right. Exactly. But we read them.

[00:21:10] I don't mean listener emails. I meant.

[00:21:12] So like I said, I think as far as this goes, this is a good objection to this debate.

[00:21:16] And any issue I have with the paper is just like I'm not sure that this is something real that you're arguing over.

[00:21:24] But just to be clear, I don't think we've talked about the nominalist view of words.

[00:21:29] But the nominalist view is the one that always seems and always have in pretty much any time.

[00:21:35] Nominalist versus realist or universalist or whatever.

[00:21:39] Like always seems to me just the intuitively obvious position on these things.

[00:21:44] And the nominalist position here is, look, these are our words. We create them.

[00:21:47] There are tools and we use them in all sorts of different ways through the artifacts of history and culture.

[00:21:54] They take on different meanings and there's nothing more to say about it than that.

[00:21:59] So one thing in trying to do a little investigation as to what this debate was all about.

[00:22:06] I came across something kind of interesting, which is here's why you would be not a nominalist like I am.

[00:22:14] But some kind of type token realist.

[00:22:16] If that could explain, you know, that had some kind of explanatory power that nominalists couldn't account for.

[00:22:25] In other words, if you could use this machine, this metaphysical machinery, had some kind of explanatory value,

[00:22:34] then that's a reason to be a type token realist about words.

[00:22:41] If you're going to wade into this area, which I wouldn't recommend, but don't like, I mean, let us a thousand flowers bloom and all that.

[00:22:51] Like I do think that is as compelling a defense of like why we're talking like about this at all.

[00:22:59] Is that maybe we could get some explanatory value out of that, that we don't have if you're just going to be like, well, they're words.

[00:23:06] What are you talking about?

[00:23:07] We use words in different ways all the time.

[00:23:10] And ultimately we are the ones that created them.

[00:23:13] So like metaphysics doesn't enter into this, which is again what I pretty much believe is to be the case.

[00:23:19] So I'm not sure I followed what you were saying.

[00:23:21] You're saying that the reason to hold a type token realism view is because it might explain something.

[00:23:27] It might explain something about the way we use language, the way certain words keep cropping up in certain contexts,

[00:23:34] that a nominalist can't explain.

[00:23:37] And so it has value that way.

[00:23:40] And so because otherwise it's just a candidate for Occam's razor.

[00:23:44] Why add another ontology this time of a certain word?

[00:23:49] Why add that to your metaphysics if it's not doing anything?

[00:23:52] But if it is explanatory in some way where the nominalist either has to shrug their shoulders or come up with a much more convoluted explanation,

[00:24:02] then there might be a reason to do it.

[00:24:04] Again, I'm not sure that that would give it a kind of metaphysical status that it didn't have before,

[00:24:09] but it would at least be worth then I think engaging in this kind of thing.

[00:24:14] Yeah, I guess I'm just not clear what it would explain as a metaphysical theory, you know?

[00:24:19] And I know you're not defending it, sir, but I get that maybe the people who hold this think that it can explain something.

[00:24:24] I was coming at it as maybe this is sort of the default in a way that like a lot of realism is default.

[00:24:31] So but like let's take physical objects and categories, right?

[00:24:35] So you I think one of the ways in which we even acquire the concept table is that, you know,

[00:24:41] you see a bunch of instances of tables and somebody tells you these are all tables.

[00:24:45] And so you have now like a theory about what a table is.

[00:24:48] And if you are a realist about this, you think there really is a category of tables with an essence.

[00:24:54] Like that concept of table has some sort of like fundamental essence and things can be instances of that table.

[00:25:02] But there is and there's a reason he brings up Plato.

[00:25:04] There is some sort of like form of what it is to be a table, whereas the anomalist would just say we arbitrarily assign words,

[00:25:13] these sounds similar to various objects and like it's picking up on some similarity.

[00:25:18] But like there is such an inherent fuzziness to the way that we do this that it can't doesn't make sense to think that there is some true platonic form of table.

[00:25:26] So like nominalism is sort of deflationary in that sense.

[00:25:29] Like it's like saying the category doesn't have ontological status.

[00:25:32] Yes.

[00:25:33] So I agree with all that, except that I think what Miller is arguing against is not a platonic kind of realism because, you know,

[00:25:44] platonic realism has its own issues and listeners can take that up with Jeffrey Watermill.

[00:25:51] But this new kind of type token view isn't Platonist and so is I think much more if it's going to be valuable,

[00:26:01] it has to be explanatory because it's not adding some kind of form to your whole metaphysical understanding of the universe.

[00:26:12] One of my favorite sentences here is my own view is that these problems indicate the Platonism comes at too high a cost to pay to solve the issue raised about puns.

[00:26:21] Yeah, right. But the point is it could, right?

[00:26:24] It could solve it, but at the expense of adding platonic forms to your ontology, whereas apparently this new type token, which always is very suspicious.

[00:26:35] It's like property dualism versus substance dualism.

[00:26:38] It's like whenever there is like, oh no, it's not that crazy form of this thing.

[00:26:44] It's a way of doing that, but you're more comfortable with your naturalism.

[00:26:49] So I think that's the position that this author is arguing against and they can correct me if I'm wrong.

[00:26:57] But with those positions, that's when I'm so convinced initially at least that this is probably a pseudo debate because they don't even go whole hog in terms of like what they, the realism that they're actually defending.

[00:27:12] And so probably it is a battle over words, but this is definitely a battle over words.

[00:27:17] So maybe it's appropriate.

[00:27:18] Literally.

[00:27:19] Literally.

[00:27:20] Yeah.

[00:27:21] To be clear.

[00:27:24] I just want to read the sentence where he says, even if we insist that measure is a token of some new type measure three, this response would mean that every new punning event results in a new word being created massively inflating the number of words that exist.

[00:27:37] Which for some reason just makes me think like how hilarious it is to be a metaphysician and have the power to add reality by making a pun.

[00:27:49] You have to use it responsibly.

[00:27:51] We can't just keep creating new things, you know, new types of words.

[00:27:57] Then, you know, like where will it lead to?

[00:27:59] Yeah.

[00:28:00] Okay.

[00:28:01] So like maybe just let's wrap up since you did some background on this.

[00:28:04] So he says I can avoid all this problem by saying that words aren't word types are then taken to be bundles or sets or collections or pluralities of tokens.

[00:28:15] And so is the move here, is it just like there is no like deep essence to any word type.

[00:28:21] It's just sort of like a family resemblance or an arbitrary set of criteria that we use.

[00:28:26] So the metaphor that I that came to my mind is, you know, how like say you're organizing your photos in your software.

[00:28:31] You can have like collections of photos, but any single photo could belong to multiple collections.

[00:28:37] And there's no need to say that there's only like a singular category that captures what this photo is.

[00:28:42] Yeah.

[00:28:43] Yeah, exactly.

[00:28:44] And like that's true.

[00:28:46] Like that's the right way to think about this stuff.

[00:28:50] Like in almost every instance where family resemblance rather than some kind of extra realist ontology is possible.

[00:29:01] It's the right thing to do.

[00:29:02] And it's the thing that all normal people do, except in this one field at this particular point in our history in, you know, the English speaking Western world.

[00:29:13] It's interesting that the view that there might be a real type like a real capital R type that a word is referring to seems to me to be maybe just a result of like I think dictionaries.

[00:29:27] The existence, the creation of dictionaries kind of fucked the way that we think about concepts and about language.

[00:29:32] Like if you think of a dictionary as a collection of the real types of words that exist that you can then refer to and you go and you see, oh, sale.

[00:29:41] It has definition two and it has definition three.

[00:29:44] And so like I can easily say like there is the true existence of the word sale.

[00:29:49] Whereas like in like a regular language that whatever we spoke for thousands of years without having dictionaries didn't seem like you would just default to the view.

[00:30:00] Yeah.

[00:30:01] I mean, so this is Wittgenstein's point, right?

[00:30:04] Like if this stuff doesn't come up in everyday interaction, then it's probably not a real debate.

[00:30:10] But in terms of the dictionary thing, I do think it's part of why the debate has lasted this long.

[00:30:17] But there were no dictionaries in Plato's time.

[00:30:19] And when Plato came up with his genuinely realist ontologically realist view of the various concepts, he wasn't influenced by dictionaries.

[00:30:31] I'm not sure what he was.

[00:30:32] Yeah, I meant this for the metaphysics of words.

[00:30:35] Yeah, for the metaphysics of words.

[00:30:36] You're probably right.

[00:30:37] I mean, who knows what the sociological has to do with like vanishing jobs, you know, like stuff to talk about.

[00:30:46] So everything just gets more obscure and yeah.

[00:30:50] And then not just in philosophy, but we're a prime example of it.

[00:30:54] Like this.

[00:30:55] I don't want to sound like a dig because this is just how academics works.

[00:30:58] But he does when he brings up the nominalist account of puns, he says nominalism is a family of views.

[00:31:05] But here for ease of exposition, I will focus on the version of nominalism I have outlined recently in a series of papers.

[00:31:10] Twenty twenty one a twenty twenty one B.

[00:31:12] Twenty twenty two A.

[00:31:13] You know how you have a twenty twenty one A.

[00:31:15] Twenty twenty one B and twenty two A is if you write about like this kind of stuff.

[00:31:21] And you could just see it because like I'm sure I've done it.

[00:31:25] You could just see like somebody going like, oh, this is interesting.

[00:31:28] Here's a counter example.

[00:31:29] Like what about puns?

[00:31:31] And you're like, oh, there's a paper that I need to think about that.

[00:31:35] But yeah, there's a paper there.

[00:31:36] Totally.

[00:31:37] I was talking to some students and they were like, you wrote a paper about zombies, which you always bring up to.

[00:31:42] And I was like, I mean, you know, it was a seminar paper.

[00:31:45] And, you know, like I had a little point to make.

[00:31:47] You can do that kind of paper.

[00:31:49] It's just I urge J.T.M. Miller to ask himself, is this really what you want to focus?

[00:31:59] You know, the rest of your or even for the foreseeable future, your inquiry.

[00:32:05] And if so, then go for it.

[00:32:06] I think this might be the first time I'm easier on a hardcore analytic paper than I was.

[00:32:11] I'm sure I'm shocked.

[00:32:13] I'm shocked.

[00:32:14] Like I will give J.T.M. Miller credit.

[00:32:16] Like if you're going to do this kind of work.

[00:32:19] I think doing a paper on puns seems like kind of a cool version of doing that.

[00:32:25] I think in thorough and like I'm convinced at the very localized level of if you accept that this is a real debate, which I don't,

[00:32:35] and you accept that this is the right characterization of the type token realist view,

[00:32:40] then I think this is a good counter example to that.

[00:32:43] I feel like we caught you on a fucking good day or something.

[00:32:46] Like you must be in a good mood.

[00:32:48] Like you must have gotten laid recently or something.

[00:32:50] Yeah.

[00:32:53] Last thing to close, although my aim was not to directly assess why puns are funny,

[00:32:59] it still is the case that a metaphysics of puns needs to minimally be consistent with theories about why puns are funny.

[00:33:07] Like now you've lost me.

[00:33:10] J.T.M. Miller, you've lost me.

[00:33:12] I don't wish you well anymore because there's like anytime someone talks about theories about why anything is funny,

[00:33:20] I think that's ridiculous.

[00:33:22] But why puns are funny?

[00:33:24] It's like I have so much to object to just within this sentence.

[00:33:28] Theories about humor, why puns are funny.

[00:33:31] It's tacitly assuming that puns are funny, which they're not.

[00:33:35] As I was reading it, I was just thinking like he's definitely teeing up his next paper.

[00:33:40] Like this is just like the obviously next paper.

[00:33:43] 2024B.

[00:33:45] B.

[00:33:46] Yeah.

[00:33:47] Yeah, but like you're totally right.

[00:33:48] It's like saying you're writing a paper on sexual attraction.

[00:33:52] You're like but any theory must at minimal be consistent with like the fact that feet are hot.

[00:33:57] Yeah, right.

[00:33:58] And to be like.

[00:33:59] The fact that I am really hot.

[00:34:01] And it's like it doesn't have to be consistent with just that you think feet are hot.

[00:34:07] It just has to be consistent with like.

[00:34:09] At the very least be consistent with.

[00:34:14] All right.

[00:34:15] All right.

[00:34:16] Let's come back and talk about existential movies.

[00:35:06] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

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[00:38:18] All right.

[00:38:19] Let's dive into our list of top existential movies.

[00:38:23] So, Tamla, this was your idea.

[00:38:25] I think it's worth saying a little bit about what we mean by existential movies because as you were pointing out when we were first talking about this, the term existential can be used to mean a whole bunch of things.

[00:38:36] It has many types.

[00:38:37] It has many types.

[00:38:39] There is a metaphysical indeterminacy.

[00:38:42] You know, sometimes people just use it to mean brooding like our emo.

[00:38:47] And so we wanted to focus at least or at least try to focus on one aspect of existentialism, the one made famous by Jean-Paul Sartre, which is captured by the phrase existence precedes essence, which basically just means, you know, human beings don't come into this world with an essence.

[00:39:09] There's no meaning granted to us.

[00:39:11] There is no instruction manual for what we should do.

[00:39:14] There's no identity even.

[00:39:16] Like, there's no essential identity that we have.

[00:39:20] Right.

[00:39:21] And so we have to make choices and in some ways we're burdened by these choices.

[00:39:26] But existentialism, like I guess unlike many of the popular accounts or what people think of as existentialism, it's sort of an optimistic take, which is let's create meaning.

[00:39:36] Once you realize that there is no inherent meaning, you build your meaning.

[00:39:40] I would even phrase it, and I don't know if this is optimistic or pessimistic, but there are certain choices that you make that don't just determine what you do but determine who you are.

[00:39:52] And that's where the essence part comes.

[00:39:55] The Sartre example, as we've talked about, is the soldier that has to choose whether to fight in the resistance against the Germans or stay home and take care of his sick mother.

[00:40:06] And making that choice will not just determine which of those two things he does but what kind of person he is.

[00:40:13] And that's certainly what I focused my list on, choices that are connected to a person's identity.

[00:40:22] Except actually in one case.

[00:40:24] Yeah.

[00:40:25] Yeah.

[00:40:26] All right.

[00:40:27] Should we get started?

[00:40:28] Yeah, let's get started.

[00:40:29] All right.

[00:40:30] So my first choice, and as soon as this popped in my head, I thought, oh, this has to go on.

[00:40:38] It is a movie from last year.

[00:40:41] It is called Anatomy of a Fall.

[00:40:44] This is co-written and directed by Justine Trier, and it stars Sandra Huller, great German actress.

[00:40:53] She was also in Zone of Interest from last year.

[00:40:55] And this movie, Tony Erdman, have you seen that?

[00:40:58] No.

[00:40:59] Absolutely fantastic movie.

[00:41:00] It's like a three-hour movie about a woman whose father, kind of deadbeat stoner father, comes and she's like the successful businesswoman and just has to deal with that.

[00:41:10] And it's very good.

[00:41:12] Anyway, she's great in this and she has to do a lot in this movie.

[00:41:16] She kind of carries the movie.

[00:41:17] It's about a husband and wife.

[00:41:18] They're both writers and they have, I guess, a kind of half blind or mostly blind son.

[00:41:25] You saw it like.

[00:41:27] Yeah.

[00:41:28] He doesn't seem completely blind, but he is.

[00:41:30] Yeah, severely not able to see.

[00:41:32] Differently abled regarding visual capacities.

[00:41:37] And they're living in the French Alps, some town in the French Alps that I guess the husband is from.

[00:41:42] She is German in the movie.

[00:41:44] At the beginning of the movie, the husband is found dead by the window and a shed of their house.

[00:41:51] And Sandra, the wife, was home and she was in the house at the time this happened.

[00:41:57] Daniel had been on a walk with his dog, Messi.

[00:42:01] Great dog performance.

[00:42:02] Fantastic child performance in this too.

[00:42:05] During the time that the husband either fell, was pushed, was killed, whatever happened to him, Daniel and the dog were away.

[00:42:14] So Sandra was the only person in the house at the time.

[00:42:18] And she's soon arrested for her husband's murder.

[00:42:21] And the movie is mostly covering the trial, which is great.

[00:42:25] Like all the scenes of the trial in the French courts are just beautiful.

[00:42:31] And I love the French trial system.

[00:42:34] I love the looseness of it.

[00:42:36] It is like a trial system kind of.

[00:42:38] Like to the point where I was like, wait, is this real?

[00:42:41] Yeah, which I actually don't know if it's like that or not exactly.

[00:42:46] But all my issues about like procedural bureaucracy and how that interferes with that, like none of that is a problem in the French court system as it's presented here.

[00:42:57] As the trial goes on, we really get a sense because this is very important to the trial of the dynamics of their marriage.

[00:43:03] And this is oversimplifying it, but he was a kind of a failure as a writer and seemed to resent Sandra's success as a writer.

[00:43:12] And Sandra, for her part, she's not one to indulge weakness or vulnerability because she's German.

[00:43:20] You know, they don't like, they don't respect that.

[00:43:23] So their marriage had hit the rocks and or the shed, I guess you would, you might say.

[00:43:30] OK, so now I'm going to spoil something.

[00:43:32] So if you haven't seen it, I don't know how much this exactly matters.

[00:43:36] But if you haven't seen the movie, I recommend going to see or hitting head 30 seconds or whatever.

[00:43:41] As the movie goes on, you start to realize, oh, shit, we're probably not going to learn whether she really did it or not.

[00:43:49] And neither will any of the characters except Sandra.

[00:43:52] Like she'll know. But that's it. Right.

[00:43:55] And most importantly, the son, Daniel, again, terrific performance by that kid.

[00:44:01] He can't know for sure if his mother killed his father. Right.

[00:44:05] And he was close in his own way to both parents. He was an only child.

[00:44:09] So, you know, that's a really tough position for him to be in.

[00:44:13] Now, at the end of the movie, he gives a key piece of testimony that appears to exonerate his mother.

[00:44:19] But also, I think the viewer is supposed to at least suspect might be made up, might be fabricated. Right.

[00:44:28] After this recap, I want to get your take of this.

[00:44:31] But I think he did make it up because right before he gives this testimony, he has this conversation with what's her name?

[00:44:41] The caretaker, this French woman who was assigned to live with them for the past year to make sure that Daniel can't be influenced by his mother during the trial.

[00:44:51] And so like she's just been living with them for a year.

[00:44:55] And then she has this conversation with Daniel on the walk.

[00:44:59] He's like, I don't know what to do. I don't think she did it, but she might have.

[00:45:03] I don't think my dad would take his own life, but I could maybe see it.

[00:45:07] So this is what she says. She says, when we lack an element to judge something and the lack is unbearable, all we can do is decide to overcome doubt.

[00:45:16] Sometimes we have to decide one way over the other. Since you need to believe one thing but have two choices, you must choose.

[00:45:24] This is all in French, by the way. And so Daniel says, so you have to invent your belief.

[00:45:29] And Marge says, yeah, well, in a sense. Right.

[00:45:34] And I think that convinces him. I have to decide which one I believe and then I have to commit to it.

[00:45:41] And I have to commit to it to the point that I will fabricate my testimony to get my mom to not go to jail for the rest of her life for killing my father.

[00:45:51] And then I have to believe that. Like, he is making a choice to be the son of a woman that didn't kill his father.

[00:46:01] I think that's the interesting advice from Marge. Yes, there's no—this is open, right?

[00:46:08] We don't have the element to judge this, so you have to choose it.

[00:46:12] Not because you have some new epistemic advantage, but just so that you can become something.

[00:46:18] Either the son of a woman who murdered his own father or the son of a woman who didn't and his father took his own life.

[00:46:25] Like, you have to make that choice. And who are you going to be? And he makes the choice.

[00:46:30] And I think it's pretty clear in that last scene with him and his mother that they both know that he made up that last story.

[00:46:37] I think so, too. Well, first of all, great movie, obviously. I loved it.

[00:46:40] Whether or not she did it, I think it's clear that the story was made up.

[00:46:45] There's another thing that I love about this movie, which is that we also have to decide.

[00:46:49] We have to sort of decide at lower stakes, obviously, whether we're going to believe that this was a movie where a wife killed her husband and now is living with her son as a murderer or whether this was a misunderstanding.

[00:47:04] And I love that they refuse to tell us what the truth of the matter is, because it is to me a microcosm of the active role that we play in shaping our own reality.

[00:47:17] And so that little boy to make that decision so early on, I think it captures that part of existentialism where these are, you know, like Kierkegaard focused on the anxiety, the crippling anxiety of having to make these choices.

[00:47:30] Many existential writers focused on the crippling anxiety of having freedom.

[00:47:33] Like once you realize that you have freedom and you have to make choices, this little kid has to — how old was he?

[00:47:39] He's like 10.

[00:47:40] Yeah, like 12 maybe.

[00:47:42] 12, yeah. Has to make a life-defining decision at that early age.

[00:47:49] And I think he's right to draw the implication that if I decide she didn't do it, then I have to concoct this bogus fairly heavy-handed kind of hint that I, oh yeah, I just remembered like a year and a half later.

[00:48:04] Right, contradicts.

[00:48:06] And like if we ever do a deep dive on this movie, we can talk about like some filmmaking choices that make me pretty convinced about that aspect.

[00:48:13] Do you think she did it? What did you decide? Because we don't have to decide to define who we are.

[00:48:18] We don't have to decide. I definitely thought that the boy lied.

[00:48:22] I think at the end I didn't think that she did it.

[00:48:25] Yeah.

[00:48:26] But I don't know. That was mainly on my assessment of the character.

[00:48:31] The husband's character.

[00:48:32] Yeah, well and her character that we learn about. But it did feel kind of like a choice to believe that.

[00:48:38] Movie also features a steel drum version of P.I.M.P. by Ferdie Sandberg.

[00:48:46] Oh, so good. That's right. I forgot about that. God, I want to watch that movie again.

[00:48:50] It's so good. It holds up a second time. And then you can just really appreciate the French trial and the performances.

[00:48:57] Wait, so did you think she did it?

[00:48:59] I think she did not do it. But you know, like my credence is not high.

[00:49:06] I say credence like someone would say priors, you know?

[00:49:10] Yeah, your priors.

[00:49:11] The facts surrounding the trial, like neither of those things totally make sense forensically.

[00:49:17] And so it is really hard to tell. And I love, yeah, it's a great movie.

[00:49:22] Good job, Justine Friere. I hope to see a lot more from you.

[00:49:26] And I'm so glad that movie just for whatever reason was kind of a hit and a big Oscar contender.

[00:49:31] And just, you know, you wouldn't necessarily think that that would be the case, but it was.

[00:49:35] Yeah. I love the recreations of the little scenes like that.

[00:49:39] That added a little bit of just a satisfying sort of forensic analysis.

[00:49:43] And the experts are disagreeing with each other. And every time I'd be like, oh, yeah, that's what makes sense.

[00:49:47] And then they would argue, oh, yeah, that also makes sense.

[00:49:50] You're totally right how it is a great like it illuminates how much we shape our own reality through these kinds of choices, sometimes less conscious than others.

[00:50:00] But yeah. All right. What's your first one?

[00:50:01] By the way, I feel that we need to say that we explicitly excluded movies that we've talked about on the podcast before because a lot of them turn out to be great examples, I think, of exceptional movies.

[00:50:12] And I like they were eliminated from my in my repertoire is not as big as yours.

[00:50:17] Yeah. And we picked ones that we either knew the other one had seen or that we were pretty sure the other one had seen.

[00:50:25] Right. And at the end, we can go through maybe just if we have time.

[00:50:29] So mine is Blade Runner, the original. So Blade Runner, 1982, Ridley Scott, sci fi movie based on Philip K. Dick's story to Android's dream of electric sheep set in the dystopian future of 2019.

[00:50:48] And it follows Rick Rick Deckard, who's a retired police officer who is referred to as a Blade Runner.

[00:50:55] In this future, there are robots like Android replicants that are bioengineered just to do labor who look and seemingly act exactly like humans.

[00:51:04] And so Deckard's job is to Harrison Ford's job is to track down ones who have like strayed illegally away from their job.

[00:51:15] Yeah, they've gone rogue. They only live for four years. And this gets to kind of the heart of what I think of as the existential theme.

[00:51:23] So the replicants, again, indistinguishable from other human beings by most people only live for four years.

[00:51:30] And so they don't have a lot of time to develop specifically any kind of like emotional maturity.

[00:51:38] And because of that, the way that Blade Runners are able to figure out who is an Android and who's not is by using this thing called the Voight-Kampff test, which is essentially imagine some cool cognitive science experiment where they just flash emotionally evocative pictures and measure your reactions.

[00:51:59] And based on the emotional reactions of the human or the replicant, they can tell.

[00:52:03] And analog to like a test that you would do to determine where someone is on the site.

[00:52:07] Exactly. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So there are a lot of existential themes, I think, in here.

[00:52:14] I mean, because one of the primary questions ends up being is Deckard actually a replicant because they have memories programmed into them.

[00:52:22] And so there are characters who do not know that they're replicants. They think that they are humans.

[00:52:27] How do you know you're not a replicant?

[00:52:29] I don't. All of my memories could have been implanted yesterday. Yeah.

[00:52:33] And the key scene to me, like the key piece of this story that resonated existentially with me was that there is this group of replicants that Deckard is hunting down and one of them played by Rutger Hauer.

[00:52:46] It seems as if he has developed a sort of emotional maturity. He has made the choice to live the rest of his life, even if it meant that he was going to have to escape.

[00:52:58] He was going to embrace the short life that he had and essentially live the life that he wants to live.

[00:53:07] You know, replicants are considered sort of like they don't have the same emotions. They don't have the same moral code.

[00:53:13] You know, they're a threat. But in the end, when there's a confrontation between Deckard and Batty, the one played by Rutger Hauer, Batty just makes this decision to save Deckard's life, which shows a degree of compassion that these replicants aren't supposed to have.

[00:53:31] This is a theme in Sartre, which was not only did he believe that you had freedom to shape who you were with your explicit choices, he thought you had freedom over your emotions.

[00:53:41] Like he was like deeply believed that your emotions were your choice. And for Batty to have this moment where he chose, despite knowing it was going to mean his death, that he chose to show compassion.

[00:53:56] Well, he's going to die anyway, though.

[00:53:57] He's going to die anyway. Yeah. But other ones would have just been like, well, fuck you. We're dying together. Right. And then he gives this very touching, apparently extemporaneous ad libbed speech at the end.

[00:54:09] So in other words, whereas the existence precedes essence is often described as by Sartre, he's like, you know, imagine this like whatever cookie cutter, I think, like something that comes with instruction, something that was designed by humans for a function.

[00:54:24] Replicants are exactly that. But nonetheless, a replicant who was designed to serve a specific function through their own choices was able to create a life that superseded that, that stretched.

[00:54:39] Transcended.

[00:54:40] Transcended. Yeah.

[00:54:41] Transcended is the programming. Yeah.

[00:54:44] And then you get this hint in at least one of the cuts of the movie that the person who we've come to follow, Deckard, the Harrison Ford character may himself be a replicate with implanted memories. And that I think sheds extra light on what he thought of himself as human with choices.

[00:54:58] Yeah. In Blade Rumor 2047, wasn't it?

[00:55:01] 2049.

[00:55:02] 2049. I mean, wasn't it kind of confirmed that he was a replicant?

[00:55:05] Yes.

[00:55:06] But I guess not one that dies after four years.

[00:55:08] Right.

[00:55:09] All right. Good choice. A little basic, but a good choice.

[00:55:12] I knew you were going to think all of mine are basic. So, but thank you for encouraging me even when I've come in insecure about my film choices. Thank you for making me feel that.

[00:55:22] I'm actually kind of surprised I thought you would go because usually your thing is the I'm just a caveman, but then you'll come in with something pretty obscure and artsy.

[00:55:32] Yeah. The problem is that I had ones that I had no idea whether you had seen and you may not have seen. So, so I had what the common denominator of films that we've seen is actually probably the biggest constraint.

[00:55:43] Yeah. All right. Well, I have a tie for my second, but I know you've seen both of these.

[00:55:49] So you're saying that you have four, four films on your list?

[00:55:52] Well, so these were going to be the only other two I had, but then I realized they were too similar in slightly different ways of making the kind of the point. So I'll tell you what they are first. Double Indemnity, the great Billy Wilder film and Lock, the Stephen Knight film.

[00:56:10] Both about men who are like, and this is, I think, a common feature of a lot of these kinds of movies, people who are very committed to being good at their job. And that's a big part of their identity.

[00:56:22] But then they have to make a choice extraneous from that. And that will determine something else about them, but will also affect the way that they interact with their jobs.

[00:56:33] So in Double Indemnity, he's an insurance salesman that makes a choice. In this case, I am going to commit insurance fraud and murder to be with this woman. And I'm going straight down the line. Like once we're on this train, we don't get off until the last stop. That's a big thing.

[00:56:52] But the one I'll talk about, I think probably people have seen Double Indemnity. I'll talk about Lock because I think this is a really interesting movie that we actually talked about doing at one point and maybe we will. So this is written and directed by Stephen Knight. It stars Tom Hardy.

[00:57:09] And Tom Hardy is the only actor to appear visually in this movie. It takes place almost entirely in his car. Like 98% of the movie is just him driving from Birmingham to London. There are other famous actors in it, but they only play voice roles because he's constantly on the phone during this. Olivia Colman, Andrew Scott, Tom Holland.

[00:57:35] So Tom Hardy is great in this, by the way. Just absolutely phenomenal. It's amazing. Christopher Nolan, like what you can do with Tom Hardy if you don't muffle up his voice to the point of incoherence. Like look into that for the next one.

[00:57:52] So he's Ivan Lock. He's some kind of supervisor or foreman for a construction company and they are prepping for the biggest concrete pour in European history that doesn't involve a nuclear site according to some synopsis I read.

[00:58:06] But just as he's finishing the preparations for that, which is happening the next morning, he gets a call from somebody who he had like a one night stand with on another job. A colleague who you get the sense that he has zero feelings for and also that even sleeping with her was something that he did more out of pity or compassion than desire.

[00:58:31] But he did do it. And so he gets this call. She's about to have a baby from that one time interaction that he never had any intention of pursuing. And she didn't really either, it seems like.

[00:58:43] But she desperately wants him to be there because there might be complications with the pregnancy and she just wants him to be there to have support. So Lock has his family. He has two sons, I think at least, and a wife.

[00:58:58] And they're waiting for him at home. He has this job that he needs to be close by for the whole time. And now he has to make this decision whether to risk all of it, not even just risk, sacrifice his job, his family, just to be with this woman who he doesn't really care about.

[00:59:16] Right. And I think the choice comes early in the movie. He's literally at a crossroads and he has to decide whether to go right or left or right or straight or something like that. And you see him. He thinks about it and he makes the choice to go to London to be with this woman because he knows that that choice will either define him as like a person like his dad who will just abandon his obligations and his responsibility in order to.

[00:59:45] Preserve, you know, whatever kind of prosperity and life that they want to pursue or he's not going to be that he's going to be the person that is there for the woman, even if it's just temporary. And, you know, he's just offering her support in this moment. Right.

[01:00:05] So really, the movie is him driving to London. He's made the choice and he has to, like, make sure the job goes OK because there's complications with that that he has to deal with and talk to his family who is like his sons are waiting to watch a soccer game, a football game. And basically he loses his job. He loses his family, or at least that's the sense we get at the end of the movie.

[01:00:29] But he maintained this part of him, which I think he thought he was. He thought, I'm not like my father. I am not the guy that will just abandon this woman, even if he doesn't really owe her that in one sense. But he and another sense, he can't be a kind of person that will abandon vulnerable people no matter what. So he makes that choice.

[01:00:53] And at the end, he has preserved that part of himself. But he has really but it came at the cost of his job and his family as far as we know. And I think it's less a choice to create who you are, but more a choice to preserve your conception of yourself and actually make it real. Like this is who he thought he was.

[01:01:16] So he had to make the choice to preserve his self-conception rather than to create it. Like I think maybe Daniel is doing in this situation.

[01:01:25] And it takes clear courage.

[01:01:27] Moral courage to the highest degree.

[01:01:29] Yeah. It's a movie that I don't know how to describe this ratio. The description of the movie and like how it's filmed, like the structure of the movie and how good it actually is, is like a huge distance. Right? You can't like I feel like you tell people like this is a movie where it takes place with this guy talking on his cell phone about these events are going on in his life in his car. People are like really? Like why should I watch that movie?

[01:01:57] And the performance is where you really get this such a good sense of the bravery that it's taking to do this and why he's doing it. And the pain in the voices of the other people who he's screwing over in some way because he's choosing to do this.

[01:02:17] And the surprise. I'm not even clear that I agree with what he should be doing in this situation, but I respect why he's doing it. Like he is a master of his own fate and he is not backing away from any of the consequences at all.

[01:02:31] And then the Tom Hardy performance, the calmness with which he's dealing with the shit storm that is occurring is so good. It's just it's a perfect performance because it's not dead. It's not numb. You know that there's stuff boiling inside of him, but he is the kind of person where that can't come out. But he keeps it together without it seeming like he doesn't have these emotions.

[01:02:58] I mean, I couldn't like I would just collapse in panic. If I was in that situation, like even just any of them and then putting the both of them together, the concrete poor and your family crisis. Like, yeah, but it's a great performance. It's a gripping movie. It really is. I know it's about a guy in his car, but it is fully compelling.

[01:03:20] I taught this in a class and nobody was like, why are we watching this? Everybody is hooked to this movie. I don't know anyone who's watched this and hasn't liked it.

[01:03:31] Yeah, absolutely. All right. I'm going to continue with my basic theme for you. My next choice is another sci-fi film, Gattaca from 1997, directed by Aaron Nicol. I assume you've seen Gattaca.

[01:03:48] I have. Yeah.

[01:04:19] So the story follows Vincent Freeman, who is an invalid who has this sort of like a dream of going into space. But he knows that he would never get chosen because of his genetic inferiority. But the kid has heart.

[01:04:36] So he organizes with Jerome Morrow, played by Jude Law, somebody who is genetically fit but who has been in a terrible accident and is now disabled. He basically takes on his genetic identity and he lives his life as a lie, lying about his genetics, constantly having to hide that he is an invalid in order to meet these goals.

[01:05:03] Now, the movie starts basically with Vincent Ethan Hawke as a child being sort of the genetically poor one getting in a race, a swimming race with his brother who is genetically superior and always losing until one day he finally beats him despite his genetic inferiority.

[01:05:20] And the day that he finally beats his brother, he reveals that the only reason he was able to beat him was because he never planned on coming back. So Vincent makes it to space, almost gets caught and I think dies at the end. But the movie doesn't quite tell us. It's on the nose.

[01:05:40] I know. I saw it when it came out, but I don't remember it. So I don't remember that ambiguity as to whether he died or not. I don't remember very much about it.

[01:06:10] But he has a son who is also not genetically superior. And because of his son, he decides to let Ethan Hawke's character nonetheless go into space and do it for all the inferiors. And you really get the sense that much like his strategy for having defeated his brother through sheer will was to never have a plan for swimming back, that his trip to go into space was his ultimate dream and that he wasn't planning on coming back either.

[01:06:39] And then the Jude Law character who has donated his genetic material to Ethan Hawke the whole time in a very nice ending scene steps into a furnace and kills himself so that there would never be evidence of his genetic material. So this movie really is, I think, overly optimistic given my views about what these genetic constraints.

[01:07:03] You're a genetic determinist.

[01:07:06] But it's one of sheer like desire and will to shape your life in the manner that you want. And I think nicely fits with the way that we're thinking about existentialism.

[01:07:20] Cool. All right. I just don't remember that movie, so I don't have that much to say about it. Not really. No, I just remember the basic premise and that's it. I don't remember the first thing that happened. I don't even remember disliking the movie. I remember thinking it was fine, but I just yeah. And I never thought of it again until you brought it up.

[01:07:38] By the way, it's Aaron Nichol is the director who also did the Truman Show.

[01:07:43] Yeah. Another high concept movie that you see on a lot of these lists, actually. Is that going to be your number one? Is it really? No. Okay.

[01:07:57] No, but I don't think you'll care for my number one. I like I think you're taking this the wrong way when I said it was basic. Yeah. Are you saying I'm defensive?

[01:08:09] A little bit by that type. I'm anomalous about words. All right. My number one actually goes with a more popular understanding of the idea of existentialism. It's not exactly as about a single choice like my other two movies.

[01:08:26] So this is Night of the Hunter, a 1955 Gothic thriller, just weird thriller written by James Agee, the novelist. We brought him up last episode, directed by a very famous British actor, Charles Lawton.

[01:08:43] This was his only movie that he directed, and it's a total masterpiece. Like I think it's one of my ten best movies that I've seen, but was not really well received either at the box office or by critics at the time.

[01:08:59] And then he died before people started to realize what a masterpiece it was. Stars Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters and two kids, Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl and Billy Chapin as John.

[01:09:14] One of the weirdest kid performance movies, Anatomy of a Fall. Like that's just a really good, just well acted performance. But when you when you look at Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl and Pearl's performance in this movie, it's just like I don't know what that is.

[01:09:31] I don't know what was going on behind the scenes. I don't know what this little girl is like, but holy shit, that performance leaves you unsettled from the get go and throughout.

[01:09:43] Yes, it's definitely like a weird kind of 50s kid actor performance.

[01:09:48] Yeah, but just like turned to a different frequency and level that, you know, but you're right. It is of that kind of performance that you would see on like 60s TV shows.

[01:10:00] So the central character is played by Robert Mitchum, who has come to steal the money of this man who was in jail and confessed that he had hid this money.

[01:10:14] He decides, I am going to go to this town. I'm going to steal that money and pretends to be a reverend. And for all we know, he could be some kind of reverend.

[01:10:24] And he comes there and he seduces the wife played by Shelley Winters and becomes the father and caretaker of those two kids because she is immediately murdered.

[01:10:36] And there's this famous scene. He says, Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right hand left hand? The story of good and evil.

[01:10:47] H-A-T-E. It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E.

[01:10:57] You see these fingers, dear hearts, these fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand, friends, the hand of love.

[01:11:05] Now watch and I'll show you the story of life. These fingers, dear hearts, is always a warring and a tugging one again to other.

[01:11:13] Now watch him. Old brother left hand, left hand hates a fighting and it looks like love's a goner. But wait a minute. Wait a minute. Hot dog loves a winning. Yes sirree. It's love that won and old left hand hate is down for the count.

[01:11:35] This is what I mean. It's about the world making this choice. Like this is a dark movie. So at a certain point, the son just runs because it becomes clear that he's going to kill the two little kids so that he can get the money.

[01:11:48] And so the son takes the money and they get on a boat and start going down the river and he's hunting them. And it's just like this movie is so fucking good. Like these scenes of him on the horseback and them in the boat are just completely mesmerizing.

[01:12:06] Like silhouetted, like haunting and just burns in my mind.

[01:12:13] It does feel like it's attacking some primal question about what kind of species we are or what kind of world this is. Is it a world of love or hate? And given that there are these people in the world and given that there are also good people but are gullible and then good people like John, the older son who wants to maybe because he's still young, resist the hate and the greed and the evil.

[01:12:40] And, you know, at the end, I think in a way that doesn't seem like a cop out, you do get the sense that maybe hate is at least down for the count if not out, you know, because they are, spoiler alert, taken in by a woman that isn't gullible or deluded about what's out there in the world but still chooses love and care for others.

[01:13:04] And it's just a freaking movie is awesome. It's also like not long at all. It's like well under two hours, like 90 minutes or something.

[01:13:13] One of the most amazing, incredible scenes is the underwater scene.

[01:13:18] Of her body, her corpse.

[01:13:19] Of her body, yeah.

[01:13:21] Shelly Winters.

[01:13:22] Yeah, it's just beautiful in a very morbid way. One wonders like or I wonder if this would have been a different movie outside of the Hays Code times because you can see it as an effective movie with a pretty dark ending.

[01:13:38] You mean, yeah, if they had been able to end it in a Chinatown ending instead of the ending we get.

[01:13:46] You know, I think it would have been almost unbearable then. Like I think it would have been like I don't think I would like it as much. By that time you're so invested in those kids not being killed by this guy that I think I couldn't have handled it. But yeah, you're right. I wonder if that was even considered as something they wish they could have done.

[01:14:06] Yeah, like you said, it's the only movie which is kind of sad.

[01:14:08] It's so sad that he didn't realize how everyone belatedly appreciated it.

[01:14:13] Yeah.

[01:14:14] All right, that's my list. What do you got? Wrap us up.

[01:14:17] Good list.

[01:14:19] The Matrix.

[01:14:20] My last movie is...

[01:14:23] Fuck you.

[01:14:24] No, this one was hard. I had a few candidates. I ended up picking Dog Day Afternoon.

[01:14:29] Oh.

[01:14:30] Yeah.

[01:14:31] See, that's more of, you know, the kind of stuff you usually shout out.

[01:14:33] That's what you're attracted to.

[01:14:35] So Dog Day Afternoon is a 1975 drama by directed by Sidney Lumet.

[01:14:40] Lumet.

[01:14:41] Lumet, sorry. La May.

[01:14:43] Starring Al Pacino, John Cazale. And it's about a bank robbery. It's based on a real story.

[01:14:48] It's about these two guys, well three guys originally who attempt to rob a bank in Brooklyn. One of them wusses out right away.

[01:14:56] The other two stick around and take hostages. And it is from the get go like just doomed.

[01:15:03] Like they're not very competent as bank robbers. They're taking hostages from the bank.

[01:15:08] But they don't want to kill anybody.

[01:15:09] And they like seem like nice, nice-ish guys who when we find out eventually why they were trying to rob a bank.

[01:15:17] It was for Sonny Al Pacino's love interest, which was a woman, a trans woman who wanted to get a sex change operation.

[01:15:26] So he was trying to get the money.

[01:15:28] So he actually develops quite a relationship with many of the hostages. They become friendly.

[01:15:32] There is a dynamic with like the police are surrounding, but there's a crowd of people who are cheering him on outside.

[01:15:40] The police are trying all kinds of tactics to like take them down. But again, they have the support of the people.

[01:15:46] It finally ends with they negotiate with the police that they're going to be taken to the airport and put on a jet.

[01:15:55] And also he demands that pizza be brought for the hostages because he really cares for the hostages.

[01:16:00] And it turns out to be a play, right? It's a trick by the cops. They end up getting to the airport.

[01:16:07] And at the very last minute there was a hidden revolver that one of the cops had.

[01:16:11] He shoots Sal. Sonny ends up going to prison for 20 years.

[01:16:16] The reason I chose it is because this is a decision that Sonny, the Al Pacino character, makes.

[01:16:21] He makes a bad decision. He made a decision that ended up drastically altering the rest of his life.

[01:16:28] He had to face the consequences. He is a good guy. He's trying to be good to the hostages.

[01:16:36] He presumably ostensibly had good reason for trying to rob the bank. You could tell he's a good guy.

[01:16:42] What this illustrated to me was that the world sometimes has plans that no matter what you choose, you're not going to win.

[01:16:51] Even his identity as a gay man or somebody who is in love with a trans woman, his desperation to get the money, his good treatment of the hostages.

[01:17:03] From the moment though that they go into that bank, you just know it's not going to end well.

[01:17:08] And this is, I think, illustrative of the aspect of existentialism that is sometimes focused on,

[01:17:13] which is that the world sometimes has plans that you can, no matter how much freedom you have, the world is a cold place.

[01:17:21] And your decisions might have consequences and you're not able to define yourself fully.

[01:17:27] You're not able to pull yourself out of the situations that you were in, no matter how hard you try.

[01:17:33] And it's a tragedy like that, but it's one that at least to me, kind of at my core, and maybe this is in part because of Pacino's performance,

[01:17:39] you feel that desperation of wanting to be able to create your own life, but not having the ability to.

[01:17:47] It's a futile quest. I think a lot of movies that I would call existentialism are about ultimately doomed quests.

[01:17:54] And so the choices you make aren't related to whether you'll succeed in your quest or not, because that's already determined.

[01:18:03] It's, well, what's he going to do given that he's going to fail? Is he going to kill a bunch of hostages?

[01:18:07] It's really more how you comport yourself in the face of this kind of ultimate failure.

[01:18:14] And I think that's a great example of that kind of movie, Dog Day Afternoon.

[01:18:18] One of the best scenes is, in fact, when he realizes that he has people on his side out there cheering him on.

[01:18:24] He runs out and starts yelling, Attica, Attica! To rile them up about the recent prison riots in Attica.

[01:18:30] Yeah, it's fun. It's a great mid-70s New York movie too.

[01:18:34] It really captures just like, you can smell it. You feel like your air is harder to breathe.

[01:18:42] Yeah, you could feel the cigarette smoke in the air.

[01:18:46] It's a really good movie.

[01:18:49] One of my favorite Pacino performances, really, aside from Godfather.

[01:18:53] You know, the negotiation thing, I always thought he at some level knows that it's bullshit.

[01:18:59] The whole time, I feel, yeah.

[01:19:00] He has to pretend that he doesn't, because this is about playing this out.

[01:19:05] And trying to be a good person as it plays out, but he knows.

[01:19:10] Yeah, and he's trying to protect Sal, too, in a very Lenny kind of way.

[01:19:15] John Cazale, I mean, everyone makes this point, but he had a string of movies that is just completely unparalleled in the 70s and then just died.

[01:19:25] Every single movie he was in was not a good one.

[01:19:27] It was a total masterpiece.

[01:19:29] Yeah, the movies are The Godfather, The Conversation, the three Francis Ford Coppola movies in three years.

[01:19:36] The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter.

[01:19:41] Just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, you know, like, un-fucking-believable.

[01:19:45] Incredible. And unfortunately died young.

[01:19:47] Yeah, died soon after that in 1978.

[01:19:50] All right, good choices.

[01:19:53] Do you have any Bring Out Your Dead?

[01:19:54] Yeah, so like if we didn't have the, we can't choose movies that we did a deep dive on, Ikeru to me is maybe the ultimate existentialist movie.

[01:20:05] You know, Stalker in other senses, 2001, same. Burning, for sure. Eyes Wide Shut. Twin Peaks Firewalk with Me was a consideration. No Country for...

[01:20:19] Eternal Sunshine.

[01:20:20] Eternal Sunshine, absolutely. Yeah, that's a big one. Like, do we do this relationship even though that's a doomed, it's a doomed quest probably, but we're still going to do it.

[01:20:29] And then A Serious Man, Persona, like a lot of identity movies.

[01:20:35] Yeah, as I was like going down the list of movies I want to talk about, I was like, oh, did that, did that, did that.

[01:20:40] What about you? What's your list?

[01:20:42] You already mentioned, but Ikeru and Eternal Sunshine were at the top. I considered, because I think there really is a way that Apocalypse Now captures an aspect of existentialism that's really about how you deal with the horror of the world.

[01:20:59] And the difference between Kurtz and like, Kilgore and just the various responses to the horror that is existence. Like it to me, it's one of the best films ever made. And it's a war film, but it's about so much more, I think.

[01:21:15] Yeah. We should do an Apocalypse Now.

[01:21:20] I would be. So we could do a, we could also do Hearts of Darkness.

[01:21:25] Both of us.

[01:21:26] Yeah, for sure. I just watched that again recently, actually.

[01:21:30] So good.

[01:21:32] All right. Well, that was fun. A little back to the old days. Top three, top five. I can't believe we used to do five. Did those just take eight hours? Like how did that work?

[01:21:41] I think we were just quicker.

[01:21:43] Yeah, probably. All right. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:22:30] Just a very bad wizard.