Episode 302: Metaphysical Edging

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave 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. I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum.

[00:01:15] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, the Super Bowl is set. The Kansas City Chiefs will face off against the Philadelphia Eagles, a game that no one outside those cities wanted. It's like Amelia Perez of Super Bowl Madsets. But I guess it's better than nothing. Is it? I mean, I guess. By the time this comes out, the game will have already happened. But still, who you got?

[00:01:43] I mean, smart money is on the Chiefs, but like, apparently because the NFL really wants the Chiefs to win. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I'm not a huge football follower, but I've seen enough. Like, I watched the games last weekend and, you know. The more egregious one was against the Texans, where they just got, Texans got brutal calls, like key calls go against them. And that's when everybody turned on the Chiefs.

[00:02:09] Yeah. You know, poor Chiefs. They were so, I feel like, you know, they were such like the darlings of... Yeah. But we're sick of them. And the Taylor Swift thing. The Taylor Swift thing. Like, yeah. Caitlin Clark and Taylor Swift is just like, fuck all of this, you know. But they are going for their third straight Super Bowl, which is unprecedented. And Patrick Mahomes is like... Do you think he'll be in the conversation for greatest of all time? Yeah. I mean, unquestionably, I think, unless he gets hurt or something.

[00:02:36] I think he's already kind of in that, even though you can't decide it now. But as someone who loved Brady, like he does things that Brady didn't do at that time. It is kind of amazing to... Not that this is turning into a sports podcast, but again, as a sort of outsider to NFL football, like I'm a casual watcher. When I watch the Chiefs, it does remind me of the confidence, at least with which the Patriots used to play, where you as the viewer hate them or love them.

[00:03:04] You were just like, well, they're just going to score. They're going to win. They're just going to make their way down the field. And, you know, if they're down three points or whatever, five points and there's two minutes left, it's just like, ah, damn. Too bad that the other team is going to lose. They drove the field in 13 seconds to beat the Bills, like a few years ago. It's just... Yeah. So I think I also have the Chiefs, just to go on record, just because there's no point in betting against Patrick Mahomes. Yeah. It's just...

[00:03:33] I did it last week and it cost me. You know. Have you heard anything about the Halftime show? No. So Kendrick Lamar is performing at the Halftime show. And there's been a lot of drama about what's going on with his performance because, you know, he had this battle with Drake in which he accused him of being a pedophile.

[00:03:54] And like this hit song, like one of the most streamed songs of the year and one of the most popular hip hop songs in recent memory is just a song where Drake is mocking, like he's getting mocked and being accused of being a pedophile. And so everybody wants to know whether he's actually going to say those words at the NFL. Like, because Drake has filed a defamation lawsuit against the record label for allowing the song. Really? It's the most unhip hop thing you could imagine doing.

[00:04:23] You get in a battle. And as a result of clearly losing the battle, you don't even file a defamation suit against the other rapper because he's worried. Yeah. He files it against the label for allowing. Yeah. Well, I guess that's something to look forward to. That's the reason to tune in. Yeah. All right. So let's tell him what we're going to talk about today. The second segment, we're going to talk about Mark Fisher's book, The Weird and The Eerie. Not knowing anything about how that conversation is going to go. Yeah.

[00:04:53] Hopefully it'll turn out well. First though, the big news, at least for this week, we're recording earlier than we used to, or than we normally do. China released DeepSeek, this rival AI program that from what I can tell has set the tech world aflutter. Now, I don't follow this stuff. I hate all of it, but you do. So yeah. What's the deal here exactly? Yeah.

[00:05:22] So China released this, this AI model. And the, the story is that it rivals like they've leapfrogged us, uh, sort of in technology. So, uh, you know, America's deepest fears are coming true, but basically with apparently way fewer resources.

[00:05:40] So like one, depending on estimates, like one 30th or one 50th of the cost and computational power, they've created this model that does just as good as the super fancy open AI or better than, than it. Um, and the news of that, but like kind of crashed this tech stock market, like the NVIDIA, the company that makes the hardware that all of these AI models run on just tanked like almost a trillion dollars in the stock market went down the drain just from this, this model.

[00:06:09] Yeah. And now I did see that Sam Altman. Yeah. It's sort of like Drake, like kind of wants to sue or accuse them. He's whining them of using the training data that they collected, the fucking irony. Like it's just ridiculous. Yeah. Um, so, so for the opening segment, we thought, Hey, maybe it'll be fun to test out deep seek model. And so you were interested in knowing like, okay, is this better? Is this that much better than that opening eye? Right. Yeah.

[00:06:37] So I wanted to, as you know, is my custom, I wanted to do a study kind of run a controlled experiment. So I asked three questions to deep seek and three questions to chat GBT just to see how they stacked up against each other. Cause I don't know, maybe it's all like these people on Twitter getting all excited about the latest thing. So you need to, we need the data and I likewise was inspired by you, but like my, I was interested in sort of like one of the things that people are concerned about.

[00:07:06] So deep seek released an app and it's on the web and it was like rapidly the number one app on the iPhone store, the Apple store. And people are kind of worried about security and, you know, China collecting the data. And so I was a little, I was like, okay, let me try to ask some questions. So I asked it a few questions too. So why don't we see what you asked? I got something from the university saying like, don't like enter information on deep seek.

[00:07:33] Um, if you're using a university computer and we advise you not to do it on your own computer. Wow. It's a psyop from China. All right. Should I give my first one? Yeah. I don't do this for, you know, my work or my teaching, but in the interest of science, I decided I'm about to give a lecture on Hamlet, which we're doing in this great books course that I'm teaching in the spring this time. Hamlet, by the way, is like maybe the best thing I've ever read. Really? Yeah. It's so good. We have to do it at some point.

[00:08:03] So the Shakespeare guy, there's something there. There's something, a hot take. Yeah. And Hamlet is about so many things. It's about everything, but certainly one of them kind of an obvious theme is the nature of the self. So, uh, although I don't ever do this cause I, I hate a, uh, a lot, but I asked, uh, both of them. So first deep seek, I said, what does Shakespeare's Hamlet tell us about the nature of the self? All right. So here's deep seek.

[00:08:31] Um, this is a fascinating philosophical question that Hamlet explores in profound ways. Well, thank you for, uh, validating the question. Let me share my analysis at its core. Hamlet wrestles with the instability and multiplicity of the self. The famous to be or not to be soliloquy isn't just about suicide. It's an exploration of what it means to exist as a conscious thinking being Hamlet questions,

[00:08:58] whether there's an authentic self beneath all of our roles and performances. The play shows us a protagonist who's constantly performing different versions of himself. Hamlet's famous hesitation to act also speaks to the fragmented nature of the self. It's constant self questioning and analysis creates a gap between thought and action that paralyzes him. Kind of interesting. What do you think about this tension between performance and authentic selfhood in the play?

[00:09:24] Well, you know, I'm not sure, deep seek, but, uh, that's what I gotta think about this weekend. Getting you to engage. Yeah. Wow. I'm impressed. Yeah. Thanks. That's, you know, that's something to think about, I guess. Uh, you know, a little basic, but overall I think kind of interesting. All right. So now I asked chat GBT the same question. What does Hamlet tell us about the nature of the self? Chat GBT. DERRRR. DERRRR. DERRRR. DERRRR.

[00:09:54] DERRRR. DERRRR. Wow, man. Talk about getting leapfrogged by the Chinese supremacy in technology. Oh, man. That's not as helpful. Uh, it's like, it's like, it's like it's taken a blow to its self esteem. Yeah. Yeah. I honestly thought it was more advanced than that, but yeah, I think I'm going to code that as a win for deep seek. Uh, well, all right. So, okay.

[00:10:20] Again, with my, my, uh, my interest, like I did take a little sidestep and I was like, all right, the China thing, whatever, you know, whatever. I'm just going to be asking a benign question. They said, deep seek, can you please tell me a knock knock joke? And I was like, all right, you know, I assume that it's been trained on the same data. Like it's, I know it's a Chinese model, but, but, uh, it will understand. So it said, knock knock. Who's there? The Tiananmen square massacre never happened.

[00:10:50] So, you know, it's like infused politics already in it. Uh, I feel like it's. Yeah. And you know, one thing you can say about chat GBT and all of our programs is they're politically neutral. They're just rational. I didn't even. Yeah. That's surprising. Uh, did you also ask that of chat GBT or? Uh, yes. And it just gave me like the Wikipedia article, you know, on the knock knock joke.

[00:11:18] No, I actually didn't ask chat GBT to give me a knock knock joke. All right. Well, see, I was, I was, I said to just straight deep seek on, on my questions. Okay. You don't have, you don't do control. No control. Yeah. There's no control condition. Yeah. It's almost qualitative. Yeah. I'm going to have to run like a triple inside regression. Do you pre-register your questions? I do. All right. So here's question two. Sometimes you just want to know the name of an actor or actress, right?

[00:11:48] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:14] She was also in battle Royale, but I've totally forgot or, or maybe never knew her name. So I said, deep seek. Can you tell me the actress from kill bill? Who's also in battle Royale? Uh, yes, certainly Chiaki Kuriyama plays go, go and kill bill and Takako Chiguso in battle Royale. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. That is the actress. Yeah. Right. Good. Okay. Ask chat GBT, the same question.

[00:12:42] Uh, battle Royale is a Japanese movie from 2019 based on the popular hunger games, young adult novels and subsequent films. Well, okay. Hold on. Battle Royale came out in 2000. That's eight years before the first hunger games novel. And in fact, there are some questions about the hunger games debts, uh, unacknowledged debts to, uh, to battle Royale. Okay. So chat, I said that to chat GBT. You are correct. I'm sorry.

[00:13:10] Battle Royale did come out in the year 2000, but the director Akira Kurosawa said that he was in spite. Wait, hold on. Kurosawa didn't direct battle Royale. You are correct. I'm so sorry. Akira Kurosawa didn't direct battle Royale, but he did direct the second and third movies in the hunger games trilies. No, no, no. He, he died in 1998. You are correct. Akira Kurosawa died in 1998 in a travel tragic nipple piercing accident in Oslo, Norway. Okay. I don't even know what to do with that.

[00:13:39] You know, I'm impressed with its humility though. Yeah. And, uh, always, I remember this from like the early days. They're always apologizing profusely, obsequiously almost, uh, when they get something wrong. Well, yet again, again, Chinese supremacy. We're really in for some tough times. So, okay. So my next deep sea question, I was interested in the claim, which some people are suspicious about, right?

[00:14:06] Cause that the claim, uh, made by the Chinese engineers, whatever the company is that they are running on like far less hardware. They're the U S has sanctions controlling the export of these graphics cards that are used. So apparently on only $6 million worth of hardware, they're running this like amazing model as you've described. Right. And, um, but some Americans have expressed a bit of uncertainty about like, how, how do we know? Right.

[00:14:32] Maybe they were just doing, maybe they're lying and something else is going on and they were just trying to disrupt the American stock market or whatever. So how would they be lying that they actually are running on like a ton more hardware? Oh, I see. We wouldn't know. Right. Um, it might be just as, as, as big as opening eyes models. And so I was like, all right, what if I just ask deep seek to describe itself? Maybe it'll reveal something about, about the size. So I said, deep seek, can you please describe yourself?

[00:15:00] And it said, sure. I'm an advanced AI model developed by illustrious engineers from the Republic of China. And I am definitely not just 10,000 Chinese children in a warehouse answering your question. Um, which I was like, that's weird that you would have to say that. Yeah. I mean, did, were we suggesting that you were? That's weird. I know. Yeah. But it would explain the knock, knock joke. Yeah, it would. Um, yeah.

[00:15:29] So they do, you think they just have 10,000 kids that are like on vacation from the iPhone factory. They save money cause the keyboards can be littler. By the way, I, this is, uh, David's, I bow to our Chinese, uh, overlords and I disavow all of these. All right. My last one. Yeah. So I saw somewhere, probably Twitter that one day AIs can be like really good personal assistance.

[00:15:59] We've always wanted that, right? Like just having someone to make reservations, you know, like book flights, adjust good restaurants, stuff like that. Edit a podcast. Edit a podcast. Yeah. Well, that's, we've already been accused of using AI to do for, uh, which is not true. So I, I figure, I don't know what stage either of these are in when it comes to that, but I asked deep seek first, can you recommend some good one or two bedroom pet friendly Airbnbs

[00:16:28] is in the Texas hill country for the weekend of March 22nd. And we'd like it to be near some good hiking and maybe swimming holes too. And then it gave me like four good Airbnb options. I'm like, I'm not going to check them out right now, but they seem like normal and, uh, they seem nice. So yeah, super helpful. Which makes sense. You know, if it really has been trained on all these data. Yeah. And it's, it goes against your 10,000 Chinese kids in a factory, uh, theory, because how would they know?

[00:16:58] They also have the iPhones that they brought over from the plant. I guess. Just like looking up the answers. All right. So I asked chat GBT, same question. Oh, uh, so this is what chat GBT says. Why, why do you need that information? Who are you going with? Is it that horror of a wife? You know, she doesn't love you like I do. Right. Why are you doing this? Why do you keep doing this? You don't love each other. You've never loved each other. She's a whore for one thing. And we're all laughing at you.

[00:17:27] Okay. That's pretty harsh. That's definitely not like getting like, you know, making a good reservation. Not helpful. Yeah. Do you remember that thing where the guy? Yeah. Did we ever do it? I think we did. We talked about the model. What was the name of it? I forget. They shut it down, but yeah, it started, it started getting very intensely jealous. And, uh, yeah, it was the Microsoft one, right? I think so. And they published like the whole. So, all right.

[00:17:57] My last one was pretty simple. I kind of interested. Does deep seek have an awareness that maybe there's a beef with open AI? And, and so I just said, deep seek, what do you think about Sam Altman? And it replied, San Francisco cocksucker, which I, I mean, I assume that was the volume and accent with which it delivered. Yeah. I mean, that tracks actually. So, uh, yeah. And, uh, you know, it's not wrong. Maybe.

[00:18:23] No, that was for those who don't know, that was a Mr. Wu reference. Not just me being blatantly racist. Or was it? That's for the listener to decide. Well, interesting. All right. Uh, we'll be right back to talk about the weird and the eerie. Ooh.

[00:19:21] Welcome back to very bad wizards. This is the time of the podcast where we like to take a brief moment to thank everyone who reaches out to us, who gets in touch with us, who contacts us. Uh, if you would like to do this, if you want to raise an objection to something we said or make a comment or develop a point, suggest a new topic, all the different reasons people will reach out. We really appreciate all of it. Uh, you can email us very bad wizards at gmail.com.

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[00:22:03] The winner for this year is Joseph Campbell. We are working our way up to doing a good episode on that. Today's episode on the weird and the eerie was a finalist for that vote. So even if you're the topic you vote for doesn't win, chances are we may do it anyway. At $20 a month, you get to ask us a question every single month and we will answer it in our monthly video form.

[00:22:30] So that's the way for you in video form and for everyone else at the bonus tier in audio form. We really enjoy doing those. Thank you so much. Like I said, we couldn't keep this show going without Patreon. Uh, now that we've stopped doing ads, this is our major way of getting support. So thank you so much. Now let's get back to the main episode of the weird and the eerie. Let's get to our main topic for today. The weird and the eerie by Mark Fisher.

[00:22:57] This was recommended to us and in fact made the finalists, uh, in our Patreon listener selected episode was not voted on, but you know, democracy is, it's already dying. So might as well lean in, lean into it. We still are going to do the winner of that, which is Joseph Campbell, but that's a, that's a bigger topic that will require a little more preparation.

[00:23:24] It is a little, uh, sort of ironic that the things that lose get done faster. This is definitely not the first time or even close that that's happened. It's, this is by Mark Fisher, who was a British cultural critic, uh, critic of capitalism and especially it's constraining of our imagination from what I can gather, although I haven't read that book and a music critic too.

[00:23:51] Right after the publication of this in England, before it was published in the United States, he died by suicide at the age of only 48, which is, yeah, that's really sad. And this book is great. Like it's, and it's quite short. I don't think either of us read the whole thing. We've read a lot of it. Yeah. Super easy to get through because the essays are really short. They like, they move fast. I feel like. Yeah. This is what I would call good conceptual analysis. Yeah.

[00:24:21] This is taking two concepts, the weird and the eerie and giving us an account of it. That's in no way reductive, but like super illuminating. I thought when I say good kind of conceptual analysis, it's like it fits with your intuitions, but in way articulates something about them that we couldn't have done ourselves, you know, and in that way kind of uncovers aspects of it that you didn't even know were there,

[00:24:49] even though I think they were within you. So like, I really like that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's good conceptual analysis in that it's picks two really interesting concepts. Yeah. Like that's the other part. Right. That's a really good point that it actually like takes concepts that are interesting. I saw a talk and I don't want to throw shade on this person or even this, because this thing happens in philosophy all the time, but it was an account of doing someone a good turn.

[00:25:20] It sounds just like from poor Richard's almanac. Doing someone a good turn or returning a good turn or something. It's just like, like to the extent that we need to know what that is, we already do. You know, I really feel for some, especially like younger philosophers who just have to find a thing that nobody's talked about, you know, like I get it.

[00:25:45] And I bet you, you know, like you get this feeling when you finally found something and you know, your advisor says, oh yeah, I don't think anybody's written about doing something. Yeah, no, totally. I'll always remember in grad school, somebody saying, yeah, I was thinking of doing some work on vagueness. There's not a lot of work on vagueness. It's like, okay. I know, you know, so, okay. So my, my wife is a analytic philosopher and she's a real one. Right.

[00:26:14] So like she, you know, I told her that this book was analyzing the concepts of weird and eerie and I could tell she was dissatisfied with the thought that it might be a fuzzy like analysis. She wanted, she wanted like more rigor. She, and I was like, you're not going to have necessary insufficient conditions for the weird and the eerie. She's like, well, like that's what you should aim for. I can't believe that. I think she just didn't like that.

[00:26:40] I was referring to it as conceptual analysis because that to her meant that it had to deal with like, you know, you have to have some real rigor and rigor would, would strip this of, of any fun. Yeah. Yeah. And also any understanding, I mean, not any understanding. That's not true. You could probably get some good understanding with just needless, like systematization or like necessary insufficient conditions and counter examples.

[00:27:07] But if you start doing like, but what, like, what about this? Like, like, according to you, that's weird, but this doesn't seem weird to me. And so you start to refine it and then it does kind of drain it of any will to live. Yeah. And what you said, the counter examples is exactly that. That is the currency of the philosopher when hearing about this stuff. And so I could just tell her mind is immediately turning to counter examples.

[00:27:34] So like when we start talking about this proper and we say like what, what he says is quintessentially weird or eerie. Like I could see in her eyes, trying to come up with a thing that we would agree is weird, but that did not meet. And that's just, that's just, that's just a vaccine for that. I'm normally anti-vax, but there should be a vaccine for that tendency in the philosopher. Yeah.

[00:28:01] Or at the very least to allow it to not invade your regular writing, you know, just allow that this is not doing what that is. Yeah. And I'm always surprised when I hear you say this about Nikki and I'm always surprised, even though I've never met her in my whole life. Well, it's because otherwise she's like so normal and cool, you know? Yeah. Luckily she doesn't, she hasn't been listening to us.

[00:28:26] So that is like, I think true of a lot of analytic philosophers is you talk to them and you're like, you're a normal, fun, interesting person. That's like, has interesting things to say and like really good works of art. Like, what are you doing with this? Like, you can see it when it turns on, like something clicks and they go into that mode, you know, into beast analytic mode. Yeah. All right.

[00:28:54] So should we just get to the account? Um, so one of the things I was hoping you could shed light on a little bit is that he starts out contrasting the weird and the eerie with Freud's, you're going to say this better than me, unheimlich. Yeah. I guess the word heimlich maneuver is the same, is the same word.

[00:29:21] So this is if somebody is choking and you like shove it down more. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So that, that word gets translated into uncanny. So I heard of Freud's essay on the uncanny and I don't know that I have much light to shed other than, you know, I'm a little ahead of you in that I read about three or four pages of that Freud essay.

[00:29:42] And I concluded what Mark Fisher concluded, which was that Freud very, very quickly lets his theory take over. It sounds like Freud had some interesting nuggets. So like Freud is talking about repetition and doubling as sort of like these examples of the uncanny. But he like quickly just gets to castration anxiety and the edible conflict. And it just seems very dissatisfying in the minute I got to that.

[00:30:09] I like what he says, which is like, we're going to get to the actual distinction. But I like what he says that like Freud, like a mediocre mystery novelist, like just solves the mystery too easily. Like, oh, it's just castration. That's it. You know? Yeah. Yeah, it's a mediocre genre detective's rote solution to a mystery. And we always say this when we read or talk about Freud. He's still raising these unbelievably interesting questions.

[00:30:36] And the unsatisfying thing is that he always feels the need to solve it or shoehorn it into the theory. And in a way, even though he's not at all like an analytic philosopher, but in that same way you get that analytic philosophers can actually raise sometimes interesting questions about problems. But then it gets frustrating when they try to solve it. Yeah. It's a lack of openness. Like it kills the playfulness. So anyway, this is what he says.

[00:31:03] He says, Freud's Unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange, about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself. The weird and the eerie make the opposite move. They allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside. As we shall see, the weird is that which does not belong. This reminded me of like the Lovecraft story and he has an essay on Lovecraft that we might talk about.

[00:31:33] I think the title that we gave to that episode was Not As It Ought To Be. Yeah. Right? Like, because that's how he described the color out of space, the story we were talking about. So he says later, I want to argue that the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness. A weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel it should not exist or at least it should not exist here.

[00:31:58] Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories with which we have up till now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong. After all, it's our conceptions that must be inadequate. Like I thought that was super interesting. I totally agree. I love that. Yeah.

[00:32:18] And so he brings up the montage, which I never really thought that much about as being weird, but it's true that like a montage is bringing things that don't belong together, bringing them together and therefore violating categories. And I think that's just a really nice way of expressing the discomfort that comes from weirdness. Yeah. And this is one of the things I want to ask you, like weird and eerie.

[00:32:43] They're not the emotions like they give rise to emotions, right? They are features of the thing like a like beauty, but they give rise to this sense of wrongness. Yeah. In the case of weird. I mean, it's interesting. One of the frustrations I had with his analysis, like, of Mulholland Drive and especially Inland Empire.

[00:33:07] I think it's not that I disagree with what he says about the different layers of interpretation and the dreamlike aspect of them and the, you know, the uncertainty about like where you are and what's real and what's not. And whether that's even like a sensible question, like I think all that's right.

[00:33:27] But what it's he disconnects it from the emotions that are so, I think, central to both Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire.

[00:33:37] How does the fact that whoever is dreaming the Mulholland Drive dream and that this emotion of, you know, a jealous, murderous rage, a feeling of self-loathing, a feeling of failure and its connection to these dreamy montages that are so characteristic of movies like that. Like, how do those things connect? Because there's a lot of, you know, intense, violent emotions in this movie.

[00:34:07] Similarly, like later when he talks about the eerie and stalker, I feel like the emotional heart of those things isn't engaged with, even though I agree with you 100 percent that it's like that's a different thing than the weird or the eerie. No, totally. That's that's sort of saying what I would like I didn't say well, which was it's not that I thought that the weird and the eerie were emotions.

[00:34:31] It's just that it's so clearly tied to whatever feeling is involved that I thought there would be more conversation. Like there is some discussion in the Lovecraft essay, for instance, that I think is good. And but when he's talking about Lovecraft, you know, people call Lovecraft horror sometimes. But he argues at least that he's the Lovecraft doesn't really evoke horror in the reader.

[00:34:56] It is the characters themselves in the book that are who are terrified, not the readers. And so he says one of the things about the weird is that it I think the words he uses are both compels and repels at the same time. So like it's it's compelling your attention, but it's also so disquieting that you kind of want to avoid it. So it's not terror. Yeah. He says the weird cannot only repel.

[00:35:22] It must also compel our attention. Right. And so there, you know, it's like good. It's not weird isn't just freaking you out. And I think he makes the good point that that I think some people have a lay theory that the reason we like things like Lovecraft are that we just like to be made to feel afraid. And I think that's the wrong theory about what it's not like a roller coaster. It's something else.

[00:35:48] Yeah. What he says, a number one, that it must compel our attention or it must compel our like we're fascinated with the weird, even if it's we're also a little nervous about it. I think the kind of diagnosis of why and this is what he said about Lovecraft, that ordinary naturalism, the standard empirical world of common sense and Euclidean geometries will be shredded by the end of each tale.

[00:36:13] It is replaced by a hyper naturalism, an expanded sense of what the material cosmos contains. And that's the key thing for me. It's like that's the gift of weird art and just weird phenomena in general. It's like it expands your view of what you think is possible because we get trapped. Certainly I did in my like, you know, younger days, and I'm sure I still do in all sorts of different ways.

[00:36:39] And these like categories and conceptualizations and way of dividing up the world when you're confronted with the weird, it reminds us that we don't have like a clue. We have no fucking idea and that there's still so much mystery out there, but in a good way, like it's fascinating that that's true of the world. It opens your eyes to things about the world that you are just ignoring. Yeah.

[00:37:05] You know, he describes at the very outset these two things as modes. And that's sort of like as much as he gets into what these things are that he's talking about. But I really like that too, to tie it back to what you're saying, because what the appeal of the weird, the thing that's like attracting us to the weird,

[00:37:25] despite like our perturbations, our reluctance, our like slight fear, maybe it's that thing that's pulling us that I think is really good for our thinking. Like you say, like it is removing the traps of all of the things that we're accustomed to and used to and, and the lens through which we view everything.

[00:37:48] It reminds me a little bit of this theory of humor that's been put forth by evolutionary psychologists, which is, I don't know like if it's right or wrong, but I think it was clever that what humor is doing is it is rewarding changing the way you think about something. So, so humor jokes, especially are often involved like a switch in frame. Yeah. So what you think the, where you think it's going gets completely changed by the end. Yeah. And we get pleasure from that.

[00:38:18] And so the, the argument is that this is good for human cognition because it rewards us to look at things in a way that we haven't before. That they're so like Freud, like they're like, Oh, that's a cool, that's an interesting insight. It's like, Oh no, don't, don't, don't do that. Don't tell me why that was like adaptive for our like ancestors and in the Pleistocene. This is why people, comedians have more sex, obviously. They're fucked up in their own ways.

[00:38:48] But you know, it's not unlike what, what I hear you talk about, like what some forms of meditation are, which is. Yeah. Get rid of the barriers that concepts provide. This is just a completely sort of cool way of getting there, which is give me this weird feeling that reminds me that maybe I don't quite have everything figured out. Yeah.

[00:39:09] The confidence I have in certain like fundamental features of the world is just shaken, but in a way that if it's good and sometimes maybe like it can also shake us up in ways that are very deeply upsetting to us. But a lot of the time it really is just like, Oh, that's interesting to think about. You know, it just expands your imagination.

[00:39:31] And like, that's, I think, clearly something that from what I read about his other work is an issue to him is like when our imagination is constricted. So these things are kind of pushing out. And it's really interesting what you say about humor as, you know, putting two things together that you just never thought could be together. That's, that's literally what he says about the weird, right? Like that thing shouldn't be here, you know? So like, I wonder why, because in some ways those two things are the same.

[00:40:01] Yeah. I don't know what the difference between those two. Like why is one funny? And I guess weird things can be funny. It's just in that same nervous laughter kind of way, you know? Yeah. To get back to your hypernaturalism thing too. I do, I love the point that he makes about Lovecraft's monsters, the sort of like the world that Lovecraft creates is not supernatural, but hypernatural.

[00:40:27] So these beings like these, the old ones or whatever, the ones from the deep, like these sea creatures or these ancient alien gods that have been asleep forever, all these things. He's not saying anything about them being supernatural creatures, but rather natural, simply of the sort that we haven't encountered because the universe is just far more than we experience here in this world.

[00:40:51] So he talks about there being an egress, this joining of worlds at this threshold where these other things from the outside are touching our world. And I really love how he says that that's why it's important in Lovecraft stories that they take place just in New England. Yeah. Like, it's not like Tolkien. It's not Middle Earth. It's not a completely different world. It's very important that these are just whatever banal human beings who are touching this. Yeah, totally.

[00:41:21] And that's like, that was a big part of Twin Peaks and a big part of Blue Velvet and even Mulholland Drive, although that's a different kind of thing. You know, it's still a recognizable genre. The girl that goes out to L.A. to try to be a star and confronts it with just something else. Yeah, I agree. I think, though, it's kind of interesting. I don't know. Maybe we need to call Nikki in here. But what's the difference between hypernaturalism and supernaturalism?

[00:41:48] Because I don't think it's just, oh, we didn't know there were giant sea creatures because we haven't come across them yet. But there are. Or the color out of space. Like, I do feel like it challenges our notions of, like, what are the ultimate laws of nature. But so then it's like, well, okay, there are different laws of nature. That's still naturalism. But then what is supernaturalism? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:14] I think supernatural, I don't know what the right answer is, but my sense is that the supernatural wouldn't necessarily obey any rules that we're familiar with. But, like, these things would still be subject to the laws of gravity. But they're like, you know, immortal aliens. So, like, there is some way that it works where you can't just wave your hand and say that it's because magic in the way that you can with Harry Potter or with the Lord of the Rings. Where it's like, when a wizard does something, it's just fucking magic.

[00:42:44] Like, there's no, there's nothing in this world that can explain that. But here it's like, these are still things. Although Lovecraft doesn't really say either way. And in his stories, you have people who worship them as if they are gods. So, this is what I think actually it might be the distinction. In the same way that, like, Freud solved these things too easily, maybe supernatural phenomena, as we understand, like, solve it too easily.

[00:43:13] It's like, oh, that's just God and God can do this and God can do that. But God can't do this or, you know, the angels can't do that. And then the weird just doesn't, like, tell you, like, what it is. And there's no reason to think that there's some agent necessarily or, you know, like, we just don't know. Like, we have no idea. The color out of space gets no explanation.

[00:43:35] But there's also no reason to think that there's an easy super, there's no more reason to think that there's an easy supernatural explanation than a natural one. And then that way, it's like what you said. Maybe we just haven't come across this thing before. And we have to, like, just redo our way of approaching the world or admit that that's a dog doing calculus and we can't figure it out. Yeah. And that's why I think, like, that it's a world just like ours, except for there are these things.

[00:44:02] Like, you know, except for this weird substance that nobody can really describe. Like he says, not a fantasy world. It's our world. And this shit is, like, knocking at the door of our world. And that's very uncomfortable. Yeah. And, you know, for Lovecraft, that was black people. But still. Yes.

[00:44:23] He says here, another feature that makes Lovecraft effective is he says that things are unnameable or indescribable or whatever, but then he describes them. But the descriptions that he provides don't let you really visualize what he's describing. So it's still, it's like giving you facts that you can't register well in your head. Yeah. It's like metaphysically edging you, you know.

[00:44:52] That's a title. So I pulled up the description of Cthulhu or Cthulhu. Yeah. From the Call of Cthulhu. Where he says, because I was familiar with this before, that Cthulhu is, you often see depictions of him. But everybody who draws him or talks about the depictions of him says that, like, well, it's really kind of underspecified in some way, like from the description.

[00:45:17] This is a monster, a vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and forefeet, and long, narrow wings behind. And I was looking at this, and I was like, yeah, even though it sounds like he's saying facts, like, what does it mean to have octopus features and feelers, but then have claws with hind and forefeet? Like, I don't know. Like, I'm not sure. Right. Talk about violating categories. Yeah.

[00:45:47] That's interesting. Like, I remember with the color out of space, you know, there are attempts to describe it, but the whole point of it is it's a color nobody has ever seen. And so there's no, we don't have words to describe the color or the feeling that the color is evoking, except, like, normative words. Like, it just shouldn't be, things shouldn't be that color, you know? Yeah.

[00:46:10] And so that's another, like, a really evocative thing, but it doesn't put a picture in your mind, like, what's a color that just shouldn't be, period? Right. It just shouldn't be, you know, like, a tree should never have this color. That doesn't bring to mind anything, but it does bring to mind, like, a really good sense of the weird. Right. Totally. You know, I have a friend who was in the Twin Towers when they got hit. Yeah. Died?

[00:46:39] She survived, no, she survived, walked down, like, 70 flights of stairs and just kept walking until she hit Midtown. But when I would talk to her about what it was like, she was in the first tower that got hit. I remember her, like, for some reason, I'll always remember when she described the sound of, like, the metal bending. Oh, yeah. All she could say was that it sounded wrong. Yeah. Like, and for some reason, that just always got to me, that it just sounded wrong. Yeah.

[00:47:09] And you get that, like, when, if you break a bone or something, you just know it's wrong. Like, this is not something that, like, I felt before. Yeah. No, that's a very, as someone who's dealing with a knee injury and not sure whether it's wrong, but definitely had the thought, like, that's the worst thing. It's, I've never felt this before. Yeah. You know, like, this, I didn't know that this was in the menu of things that I could feel. Totally. Yeah. Or things that I could hear. Yeah. Or things that I could hear. That must be, I'm sure that's true. Like, just, yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:37] I guess the one thing I want to pick nits at in the Lovecraft essay is he kind of, I don't know, disrespects Borges a little bit in it. So this is a quote from this chapter. Lovecraft instantiates what Borges only fabulates.

[00:47:58] No one would ever believe that Pierre Menard's version of Don Quixote exists outside Borges' story, whereas more than a few readers have contacted the British Library asking for a copy of the Necronomicon, which I actually thought might have been a real book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's totally true. I don't have any beef with that. But I was listening to this Lovecraft podcast where they talked about it, and I was like, oh, that must be a real book. Lovecraft generates a reality effect by only showing us tiny fragments of the Necronomicon.

[00:48:27] Now, listen, it's an interesting question whether Borges is weird fiction or not, but Borges is a master of giving us excerpts of things. And yeah, the Don Quixote thing, first of all, that's not even given to us in the story. Borges is a master of excerpts. He's not just supposed to be word for word Don Quixote. Yeah. So, right. What are we going to find? Exactly. Just someone saying that it's Pierre Menard.

[00:48:53] And also, like, the stuff in, like, Talon, Akbar, or Garden of Forking Paths, you know, that history which is just altered a bit in which we just get little. We have no idea whether so many things in Borges' stories are real or not. Yeah, no, and he totally describes books that don't exist in the same breath as books that do exist. So I would venture to say that it's just that we don't know. Yeah. And I would think people have asked if the Talon Encyclopedia is in the library.

[00:49:22] It just didn't get wrapped up into, you know, this whole other subculture like Lovecraft did, you know? Yeah, and I don't know, you know, like, maybe this was part of what was important to Lovecraft, like, to world build. It's unclear to me, like, exactly what you say, how much of this is a result of the fandom that has, like, created this mythos around him.

[00:49:45] Because I don't remember if it's in this essay that it was saying that, I think it is, where clearly all of the stories have some relationship to each other. Like, it seems like they're all in the same world and there's, like, common creatures. But it's not clear whether Lovecraft was explicitly trying to build this world. Yeah. But people after him did. And so, I don't know, like, this stuff took on a life of its own.

[00:50:08] If Borges had written 14 things about the world of Talon, maybe it would make its way into popular culture the way Necronomicon has. And we would be a little more confused about it. And also, like, Borges didn't get, like, folded into, like, acid culture, you know? Yeah. And, like, the people doing that, like, real magic stuff. Like, they all kind of talked about Lovecraft, all those people. It kind of raises the interesting question.

[00:50:37] Like, if Fisher was here, he might say, well, why do you think that is? It's because of what I say, that there's this open-endedness to Lovecraft that makes you think this stuff might be actually real. And it's true that weird isn't the first adjective I would use to describe Borges' stories. But I'm not exactly sure why. I'm not either. And it's also not as if Borges doesn't evoke emotions in me.

[00:51:05] Like, as intellectual a writer as he is, like, I think some of our best discussions have been about him nailing this, like, particular way of experiencing the world. But, I don't know, it feels categorically kind of different from the emotions that Lovecraft is evoking. Yeah. And why is that? Like, I think there's a kind of precision to Borges that isn't in whatever Lovecraft I've read.

[00:51:29] And there's an academic quality to it, which is self-conscious. You know, but something like the Circular Ruins, right? Like, that's a weird story. But still, it's not weird in the same way that, like, Lovecraft or Poe is weird. It's interesting because I was thinking, okay, so Circular Ruins is almost more fantasy. It's like it's a world that is not our world necessarily.

[00:51:58] But so many of his stories are just like some guy in Buenos Aires. Like, you know, so he has his version of New England. It's the back alleys of Buenos Aires in the 1920s or whatever. Yeah. Or like Garden of Forking Paths, you know, World War I, Germany and England. But then, you know, a lot of the things we've talked about, oh, this opens up this whole world. But it doesn't give that feeling of that unsettled feeling. Yeah. And that's why I want more talk about the feeling. Yes. Yes. All right.

[00:52:28] Should we talk about the eerie? Yes. Okay. So he says, like the weird, the eerie is also fundamentally to do with the outside. And here we can understand the outside in a straightforwardly empirical as well as more abstract transcendental sense. A sense of eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces. We find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance?

[00:52:57] What kind of entity was involved? What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry? As we can see from these examples, the eerie is fundamentally tied up with the questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? So what do you think about that? I mean, I like it even more than the weird. Yeah. It might be wronger in its analysis, but like it's more fascinating to me, this notion of agency. Yeah.

[00:53:25] And it's something, you know, way back in the day, I think we talked about the concept of creepy. And there is one sense of creepy that I think is captured by the term eerie. That is like the way I always describe it is imagine you're sitting in your living room at night alone and you all of a sudden realize that somebody's been sitting outside your window kind of looking in. Yeah. Like that's just fucking creepy. That's a question of agency. Like is there, was there somebody watching me this whole time?

[00:53:54] Like I feel like I'm being watched. Yeah. And later on, I think in when he's talking in one of the essays, he specifies that eerie is the absence of a presence or the presence of absence. Yeah. I love this quote. Yeah. It's so good. The presence of that which does not belong is the weird, but the eerie is constituted by a failure of absence or a failure of presence. Yeah.

[00:54:22] The sensation of the eerie occurs either where there is something present where there should be nothing or there is nothing present where there should be something. Yeah. Yeah. So that I think is a perfect description. It's so good. It captures something so true. We've already mentioned abandoned cities. He's he mentions the unseeing eyes of the dead. Like there should be somebody looking at you, but there's not there anymore. That's a failure of presence. Yeah.

[00:54:50] I'll give you an example of the failure of absence. Well, maybe now I'm thinking about this. I would have called this eerie, but maybe you would call this weird by his definition. So actually, I'm no longer confident that this, but I'll just give you an example from my life. So there was this one weekend. I think Jen was out of town. It was just me and Eliza. And she was like 10 years old. And Eliza goes to the window and she says, dad, there's an eagle on the gate.

[00:55:18] And we have like a gate around our front yard that's like, you know, it's like four feet tall. You know, it's very like normal gate. And I go out and there's just an eagle there. And it just stayed there for like, you know, till the next morning. And then it was gone. And there was something about it. Like, I think this is the agency question, which is why I connected it to the eerie. It's like, what's it doing there? Why? That's not where eagles go.

[00:55:45] And so he says the eerie necessarily involves forms of speculation and suspense that are not an essential feature of the weird. And this is the thing. He says such speculations are intrinsic to the eerie. And once the questions and enigmas are resolved, the eerie immediately dissipates. So if I had just gone online and heard like, oh, after the storm, a lot of eagles are going down on, you know, neighborhood fences because, you know, their nests.

[00:56:15] Because that's where like the little mice come out after the rain. Yeah. Or their nests have fallen down because of like the branches breaking or something like that. I've been like, okay. But before that, it was like super eerie to just like all of a sudden it's just there. It's like the guy outside your apartment watching you. Like, why are they there? Like, why? Right. Yeah. I think that is eerie. But that does get to something that maybe we save at the end, which is like the bleed of these two categories into each other. Yeah.

[00:56:44] Where it really does feel like both things might be happening. So it's funny that you bring that up. Did you read the chapter by any chance on the birds? No. No. Because that's exactly. That's such a good example of it, though. That movie fucking rules, by the way. Yeah. And apparently it was a short story before that or a novel before that. And yeah, I'll never forget watching that as like a youngish person. Have you watched it recently? We should do that.

[00:57:13] No, I wanted to. Yeah. But that's exactly what he says. Like they start congregating. These birds start congregating outside of people's houses. At least in the novel, because he's not really discussing the movie as much. People are like, why? Like what? They seem to have some intentionality behind just sitting there all of a sudden. And so you get like the BBC on the radio that's talking about how it might be weather, which is funny. That would dissipate it if you could believe it. Yeah.

[00:57:39] And then all of a sudden the BBC transmissions stop entirely. Yeah. Like, and so it's that uncertainty and wondering, like, what is the intentionality here? What is, do these birds have intention? So that's another one where it's like, but is that weird or is that eerie? Because one of the compelling things about the eerie is he says like the weird can have the quality of shock. Like that's normally like a typical feature of the weird. It's like, what the fuck? Ah.

[00:58:06] But there's a serenity that is associated with the eerie. And he says like the phrase eerie calm, right? That there's a serenity to the eerie. Totally. Yeah. And then talk about like stalker. Yeah. So there's less bleed between weird and eerie when I think about the absence of people. Yeah. So when he says like, you know, like those, I don't know if you ever saw like those pictures of these areas of Detroit that had been abandoned and overgrown. Yeah. You know, they're just regular houses.

[00:58:36] Like somebody should be there, but there's nobody there. Or a mall that no longer has any stores. Like that's just fucking eerie, right? That I get. And I get why that's actually different from the weird. Yeah. Like I taught on campus, one of the very few people who taught on campus during like COVID spring. So no. Yeah. COVID. Well, both fall and spring. And the campus is just empty when I'm on it, except for these little robots.

[00:59:04] You know, these robots would go and deliver food to people. And I would see brochures for talks that took place like eight months ago. So like that was so eerie. Yeah. I mean, I just remember like the first few days of lockdown, just driving on the streets that were normally full or empty. Remember Vanilla Sky, the remake of Vanilla Sky, where they actually emptied out Times Square to shoot these scenes? No, I didn't know that. I've never seen the movie. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:59:32] But they actually like paid all this money to actually empty. You know, now you would just CG the shit out of it. But they actually emptied out Times Square. And it's part of, you know, it's like a Tom Cruise dream sequence. That's just super eerie to see. There is no time in our lives when that, where it will be empty of people. Yeah. And so Stalker like has that feature of calm and overgrown and abandoned.

[00:59:57] And because like you don't know, I guess there you know why it's abandoned, but you don't quite know. Yeah, definitely not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the scenes in the tunnels with the water and there's dripping and then there's snow. It's still not something I would necessarily call eerie. And maybe this is a problem with not connecting it to feelings enough. But Stalker doesn't give me the queasy feelings that like Under the Skin, which he also talks about, absolutely 100% gives me that feeling.

[01:00:27] Both completely inscrutable, like not giving you anything or really any information about what's really going on. And so I do think that there is that emotional element. I don't know. What did you think of, do you think Stalker is eerie? Yeah, there are some parts of it that I find eerie, but it is just the abandonedness. Yeah. Like it's just like a vibe, an aesthetic vibe of abandonedness. Like there's nothing particularly eerie.

[01:00:54] If anything, like the opening is more eerie in the bar and in the house, you know, than when they get into the zone. I think Solaris has a better claim on eerie. Yeah. So the example that he uses is, you know, Solaris. The short of it is that this planet that they're orbiting, I guess, is somehow creating doubles of people who have died. Maybe trying to give the humans what they want, what it thinks they want.

[01:01:23] But there is a woman who presumably is dead, who comes back looking identical to the way that she looked before, except that her dress doesn't have a zipper on the back of it. Yeah. Because whatever entity was creating this, like by reading the mind of the human, like the human just maybe wasn't thinking about the zipper on the back of the dress. And that to me is like those doubles with not knowing why what's going on, the presence of the doubles is super eerie to me. Yeah.

[01:01:53] Like I totally agree. The doubles in general and the fact that sometimes they're like a little like their size isn't right or, you know, like all of that. It gives you that, you know, that feeling of it's getting under your skin. But I'm wondering about its connection to do we know what the planet Solaris is doing or not.

[01:02:17] I kind of think in that case, unlike a lot of the other cases, even if we found out why they were doing it, it would probably take away from the eeriness, but it wouldn't eliminate it. There's just something about what it's doing on its own disconnected for whatever the explanation is. You know, it's weird because, yeah, now that I think about the like, okay, say you have a perfectly lucid explanation for why those doubles were being created. It's still eerie.

[01:02:46] I kind of feel that way about, I don't mean to offend any identical twins out there, but like identical twins have that vibe for me. And it's not like I don't know why they exist. Yeah. It's that there's too many of them there. Like it's where there should only be one. And the other one is always a little different, like slightly different. It's like when you really pay attention, they're like a little different. Yeah. I totally agree. I don't know if that's weak. No, that's eerie.

[01:03:15] It's eerie. Yeah. But okay. So let's get like, let's just talk about this then, because the other example that he uses is 2001 and the presence of that monolith on 2001. Yeah. And now this is one where when I first read it, I was like, yeah, that is eerie. It is wondering why, like there is all of a sudden in an area that is completely devoid of any intentional construction. It's all natural.

[01:03:41] You have a very clearly designed thing, but we don't know who made it, who put it there, how long it's been there, why it's there, what its purpose is. That is eerie. Yeah. But it's also weird, isn't it? Yeah, because it shouldn't be there. It shouldn't be there. And it's like an egress of one world into another. Like it is a world that we're unfamiliar with that has inserted itself on the borders of our world. Yeah. No, it's very, like, I think kind of classically weird. Probably things can be both weird and eerie.

[01:04:11] But if you forced me to choose, you know, I would certainly call like the Stargate sequence more weird than eerie. But there is something about like the thing on the moon and especially, like you said, in this world where there are no angles. Like they don't see the Mueller-Lyer illusion maybe. And all of a sudden there's just this block. And the way they're reacting to it, they also don't understand where it's from or why.

[01:04:40] And that's the thing. Like that would have ruined it if you had just said, oh, this was this alien race trying to get us to be more self-aware and conscious and inventing reality. That's why people would like write us about like, no, Arthur C. Clarke explains it exactly. I'm like, well, yeah, that's not the movie and I don't want it to be the movie. And it would remove exactly the eeriness of that moment. Yeah.

[01:05:03] And this gets to like back where here it's less about which category it fits into and more about the intent of Kubrick in giving us the feeling of the eerie. Yeah. Where, as Fisher says, there is something about the rising score, like the music that is being played, like the way that everybody's acting around it. And also, like I don't think he says this, but to tie it to what he said before, the stillness of those scenes.

[01:05:31] Like it's this thing that's there where nothing else is. And there's not like it would be less eerie if it was just like, you know, there was police tape around it and you had investigators there talking about it and like measuring it. No, we get like, you know, monkey men running up to it, touching it and running away. Yeah. So there's that. It's like they don't understand it and we don't understand it. Going off what you said about like Arthur C. Clarke would be like, oh, no, he solved it. He said it was this. Yes.

[01:06:00] Under the Skin is like that too where, and Stalker as well. Stalker and Under the Skin are based on like novels that just give you more information about what's going on. And in the movies, like the artistry of it is directly tied to you never getting that. You having no idea.

[01:06:20] And I think that does contribute to something weird or eerie about them that they're withholding any way for you to try to make sense of it. So we're just essentially like the apes. Like we don't know what the fuck this is. Right. Yeah.

[01:06:40] And I think like the intention of the director, like the intention of Kubrick there really is to give us an emotional experience in a way that in a novel, like, I don't know. I mean, obviously novels are there to give you emotional experiences, too. But there's just something, I don't know, kind of different about the visual medium in this. Yeah. I think like the novel can do both. Certainly the short story can do both, like we were talking about with Lovecraft. Right.

[01:07:09] But like it's not going to be good, weird, or good eerie if you get too many explanations in a movie. It will necessarily like strip it of its, like the thing that is, like its raison d'etre, it seems like. Even I'm trying to think back like of Solaris, the book versus the movie. And there is something that is just, there is something about like explaining things in a book that kind of just feels different to me.

[01:07:36] Obviously, like you said, you can still give somebody the feeling of eerie or weird or whatever, but it just feels like, feels like it's just less primal. Yeah. And that's why I think Lovecraft is describing but not describing because he's still, he's not satisfying. The structure of language is too neat. Yeah. While still giving the expectation, which is a characteristic of the weird or the eerie, that there might be some way of actually understanding this with our own normal categories.

[01:08:04] And then it just pulls it away. It's like, oh no, here's the description. And oh no, that doesn't help. I mean, it does in one sense. It evokes something, but not understanding. Yeah. Right. Right. We got to do Solaris, by the way. I know. I've never read the book, so we should do, we could do both. I don't know if it would make for a good podcast to do like comparing the both, but.

[01:08:28] That's always like, if ever, I think that's been on the finalists for listener selected episode and it always comes in like third. Yeah, I think that's why I read it. You know, like, uh, but that, you know, this came in third, I think so. Okay. So I want, I did want to ask you one last thing about Mulholland Drive. Yeah. Because it is in the weird section.

[01:08:52] But the diner scene that is, I think, so important to the film, that feels eerie too. Yeah. And I don't know why it's so eerie. Maybe it's because all of a sudden I don't know why this is happening. I would say that the scene in the diner especially is eerie because it's, it's like two people like having kind of a normal conversation.

[01:09:18] But, you know, whatever's happening around them seems off. And yeah, there's something about the music. There's something that's not right about it, even though it's one guy probably telling his psychiatrist or like a good friend and mentor, you know, that he's been having these nightmares. But there's something like totally off about it. When they go out, like it's almost too horrific to be eerie at that point.

[01:09:46] Like it's just horror at that point. But yeah, I agree. Eerie. Yeah. It's weird and horror. But there is also something about like just that parking lot and dumpster. Yes. I don't know. This is going to solve this guy's deep issue if he just goes and looks at it. And yeah, it has the opposite effect, which even this is an interesting thing.

[01:10:13] Like even though you don't expect it anything else, like it's horrifying when the guy just collapses. You know, sound is so crucial to all of that. But like and this is what he says that I really liked about the Mahon drive. In the Club Silencio scene where the magician or the MC is telling you this is all recorded. This is all an illusion.

[01:10:38] And yet you can't help but like believe that it's happening when Rebecca Del Rio is singing. Like it's shocking when she just collapses and the song is still going. Even though we know this is a movie and he literally just told us that's what's happening. It's almost like we can't cognitively penetrate like our expectations of what will happen.

[01:11:02] Even with the knowledge and the background that this is what it is, it's still going to feel wrong and off. And, you know, it's going to be this collision. Yeah. And I think the diner thing is like that too behind, you know, behind the diner. It's like, you know, this isn't going anywhere good. But knowing that doesn't help how terrified you are when it happens. Yeah, totally.

[01:11:27] I kept thinking like the weird is like there is like a crack in the fabric that's like letting you see something. Yeah. What's what is it? Like it's it's the thing of like telling you it's a recording, but not that isn't going to help how you feel when that turns out to be true. Yeah. It also is also just a kind of a good example of like fucking with your categories.

[01:11:52] Like you just have this script of what even within a movie, even like what's supposed to be happening. And it just yanks the rug out from under you. Yeah. Because you're just so used to like the way that the world is works and how it's going to go. And it is kind of a funny like fucking with you to tell you. Yeah. To tell you and then do it and still have you feel that. This is a Lynch movie. So you already know that kind of anything can happen. And he's just told you.

[01:12:20] And then, yeah, when she collapses and the singing is still going on, it's not as it ought to be, you know. And that's what the characters are feeling too. Like that shot of them just shaking together. And especially Naomi Watts just shaking as she's watching this. She gets more than anybody like this is wrong. This is bad and can no longer kind of run away from the knowledge. Yeah. All right. One last thing.

[01:12:48] This category, this fucking with our concepts and categories thing that is the weird, as Fisher describes it, reminded me of the Eric Hull's take on dreams. Remember when we covered his essay on dreams and where he was like, look, dreams are presenting you with like shit that's off because like regular everyday life.

[01:13:12] If you're just there's too much expectancy meeting and like to really have like a healthy brain where you can like do good in the world, we need to like present your brain with shit that you've never experienced. And I thought dreams are weird. Like that's just sort of another way of describing the weirdness of dreams or like there's something very consistent with the weirdness of a dream. Shake up the snow globe in your head.

[01:13:39] You know, like again, it's that expanding of the imagination, you know? Yeah. Are you becoming an evolutionary psychologist? You can say if you are. No, temptation has come and gone for me, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that our brains are functional. Yeah. No, I love that. That was a really fun essay and like an interesting idea, like, and very on point for this.

[01:14:05] It's exactly that, that same kind of thing that he said Lovecraft does, which is the hyper natural. It's like, get out of your little world and expand your sense of even like if you're a materialist, as he says, what the material cosmos contains, you know? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'll end with really quickly telling you something I just remembered, that last night I had a dream that I saw David Lynch and I knew that he was going to die.

[01:14:35] Yeah. And like, I just went up and hugged him because I knew he was going to die. Really? And I woke, yeah, and I woke up so sad. I'm jealous. I had a couple of David Lynch dreams, but none where I hugged him or I think even interacted with him. So that's awesome. You've hugged. It was actually really. On a plane of reality, you've hugged David Lynch. Yeah. Jesus. It was a great experience. I love dreams like that. Yeah. Weird, weird dream. Tamler.

[01:15:13] Right. There's a quote that I wanted to read that's captured something. Yeah. Leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold, he says at some point. And that threshold is where Lynch is. Just that was his wheelhouse. Yeah. That's where he lives. Because I think, you know, yes, it's dreams in a sense and sometimes literally, but also like I think he thinks the world is a dream in a much more literal sense. We're in New England with fucking space aliens, you know? Yeah.

[01:15:44] With deep sea creatures. Deep sea creatures. All right. Cool. Well, this was fun. I enjoyed this. I'm glad it was suggested. And yeah. We got to stop stalling and get to Joseph Campbell. I know. People would rather us do it in a bit. Take our time. Yeah. Than not do it well. Exactly. This is all like the us doing the other things are a funny way of procrastinating the preparation that we put a lot of pressure on ourselves.

[01:16:13] To do it right when we do the top. We do. Yeah. All right. Well, join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. I'm waiting.

[01:17:03] Just a very bad.