Episode 306: What to Expect When You're Expecting (David Lynch's "Eraserhead" with Barry Lam)

[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. This is weird. This is plain weird. Like I just don't belong.

[00:01:15] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, today Barry Lam joins us again to talk in the main segment about David Lynch's Eraserhead. Last time he was on, we did a deep dive into Primer. What is it about Barry that we have him on for some of the most inscrutable movies ever made? What would be movie three? Because I hadn't thought about that. But it's so true. Some super mainstream Marvel thing, like you know.

[00:01:44] That's right. Four, Love and Thunder will be the number. First, you've just published a book and the book is called Fewer Rules, Better People. You published it with Norton Press. That's right. February 11th release date. It's a nice little book. It's a slim short part of their short series. Trying to get philosophy out to the masses just like you guys.

[00:02:08] Yeah. But with Norton, that's pretty good. Dave, as you know, Barry is a strict Kantian and like an obsessive rule follower. So like I imagine, Dave, that this book that argues that we need to cut down on the rules instead of expand them and multiply them. Are you scandalized by this?

[00:02:31] I was more disappointed. I was more disappointed in Barry because I know him. You know, I like rules, but I like to break them. But Barry, you're in this weird in between. You're like, no, no, no. Have the rules. But it's okay if you break them every once in a while.

[00:02:47] Yeah. So much of the book was actually trying to make the case for on behalf of the people who are rule makers and rule followers about why they were not completely incorrect in thinking that whenever there's some kind of social problem or some violation that we need some new rule. It's trying to be extra charitable to them on grounds of fairness, on grounds of rule of law.

[00:03:13] I appreciated that. I appreciated that. Tamler's all for bias. He's like, let everybody decide on their own and then they could be racist and stuff like that's fine. That's fine. Yeah. Because as we know, we never have racist outcomes when strict procedures are followed. No, never. Not never, Tamler. You know what I'm saying. That's the thing is that different standards are applied when there's rules and when there's not. But if you just look at outcomes, it's not clear which. But let's 100 percent. 100 percent. That's a whole chapter. Yeah. 100 percent.

[00:03:43] Yeah. That's right. Yeah. There's a passage that you have. You needed to get like a second vaccine booster for your child. Yeah. And there was some problem with the records. And you're trying to see this, like you just said, from their perspective. And you say, one scandal is enough to cause major procedural reactions. It is built into the evolutionary structure of organizations of scale to encounter problems and liabilities and to fix them by formulating a new rule sent out by memo for other people to implement.

[00:04:11] It's part of that same evolution for someone somewhere to find a loophole in the rule leading to an additional clause culminating in dozens of pages of fine print. And then a computer system that collects, organize and sends information in accordance with these rules. Rules and procedures are the order of the day when any organization gets large enough. And in a litigious society like the U.S., these rules better be writing in writing and reviewed by the modern day clergy of rulemaking lawyers.

[00:04:36] I think that really gets at like how something that is started with good intentions can just all of a sudden mushroom into this huge bureaucracy that nobody wanted. But like once it's out of the box, it's like just a runaway, not just train, but a train that just keeps having like six other trains sprouting from it. It doesn't seem like we have a great way of dealing with that.

[00:05:04] No, it's it's it's built into the way an organization that's larger than, I don't know, 100 people maybe are evolved. Right. There's this whole chapter I call the laws of bureau dynamics, which are, you know, the you know, the first law of bureau dynamics is that rules only increase in complexity. They never decrease in complexity.

[00:05:25] A great example of this is if you ever have any inclination to look at the U.S. tax code, sometimes you might have good reason to because you're doing your taxes, although now we just use TurboTax. Right. You'll have these really bizarre things in there like does prize money count as taxable income? Right. And you'll see like three clauses that are so incredibly specific. You're like, where where did this come from? So I actually look this up. So it was like something like.

[00:05:56] Prize money is non taxable when it's something like the Nobel Prize. But if you entered yourself into a competition and then got a prize, then that is taxable income. And then there were like unless and then some various other clauses in there. And you could kind of see this. Right. Somebody won the Nobel Prize and the country was like very proud of the guy and probably like, oh, does he have to pay like 30 percent on that? So they said, oh, well, let's not make a taxable income. But then somebody just, you know, entered a bunch of game shows maybe.

[00:06:26] Right. And then they said, we got this prize. And like, wait, you're entering the game show. So then, you know, some senator or some aid in tax policy probably thought, OK, now I got to close that loophole. And then there you go. There's your law of bureau dynamics. And if you're a university like we are, you see this everywhere. You're traveling, you're hiring, you're whatever it is, submitting an end of year report.

[00:06:49] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. So. So in our department, we recently merged with another department. Right. So we doubled in size. And what I found was that there was this increased need for rules because there was something about the organic nature of one of the departments, like with only half of those people that had developed norms and social systems of norm enforcement

[00:07:14] so that nobody would try to get away with things. So a rule was never necessary to be written down. Like if somebody had tried, it would just be frowned upon. They would be like, you know, told not to do that. But and then when we couldn't rely on having this shared culture or this shared and these shared norms with with all of the like enforcement, the social level, then it had to be written down. And I got to say, like, I think this is exactly what your book is sort of like, at least the sentiment that I got from it.

[00:07:42] It just made me sad. Like I felt like we lost something. Yeah. You know, you absolutely did lose something. And is it now is it enforced? Like so. Now it has to be enforced. You know, we are. We have a good German chair of the department who. He's actually a wonderfully sweet guy. He does like his rules.

[00:08:02] One of my favorite chapters, Barry, was on sports and rules, which is always a source of constant and entertaining debate in like sports media. And I just find the whole thing super interesting. I mean, I think it's a really good test case for your book.

[00:08:22] One of the examples that come to mind, I don't know if you bring this up, is the NFL and all the rules and variations of those rules on what counts as a catch. Do you talk about that? I don't talk about the catch rules in that. It's one thing worth worth talking about. So, yeah. What do they is it? So just to use a piece of vocabulary for my book, is it legalistic? Is it like here are some kind of an attempt at necessary and sufficient conditions?

[00:08:51] It's legalistic to the point, though, where nobody can understand it. It's now opaque even to the people applying it and certainly to the fan. And I think it's like it's actually a good example of this because it used to be catch the ball, both hands on the ball, two feet inbounds. That was it. And I don't know what destabilized about that, but there was probably some problem of, well, you call this a catch or what happens if he goes to the ground and he fumbles it. Once that train got started, it's a great example.

[00:09:19] Now there is like 19 different rules about how much possession you have to have when you hit the ground when you're inbounds. And like, did your toe tap your elbow or does your shoulder count as your all these things now to the point where it's completely opaque to everyone involved in it. And it's a constant source of frustration for the fans. And it didn't used to be. It used to be both feet inbounds. College was one foot. NFL was two feet.

[00:09:45] Yeah. So so it sounds like that particular rule is at the kind of end point of legalism, which is the thing that I'm just strongly trying to argue against generally for all institutions. The one example that I do talk about are foul rules in basketball, which are kind of like that. There was one line at the founding of basketball that says this constitutes a foul. And now it's 10 sections, 10 pages, nine subsections.

[00:10:08] Right. And and, you know, with definitions that differentiate between personal fouls and technical fouls and flagrant fouls. And one of the drivers of the laws of bureau dynamics, increasingly complex rules I talk about is mistrust in referees in particular and umpires. And in the case of governance, it's going to be mistrust in institutions and cops and and and people who are in a position of power, lawmakers and so forth.

[00:10:34] And, you know, you could have a very highly discretionary rule in sports like a catch is what's ruled as a catch by the referee or the umpire. That'll that's very simple. And and sports fans generally hate completely discretionary rules because it kind of puts the the outcomes of games in the hands of people that they don't trust. Or even if they trust one, they don't trust them all. Right. So they don't equally trust. Right.

[00:11:01] And as this evolves, as the mistrust gets more right, anything. So even in the foul rules, after 10 pages, you still have to have a discretionary clause. Right. Or something else judged as unnatural touching by the referee by the referee. And the irony is they still have so much discretion. No, that's right. They still call it in all sorts of different ways. And there's different rules on fouls for the playoffs than there are for the regular season. And there's some referees that let the boys play.

[00:11:29] And then there's others that call every ticky tack foul and like players. I mean, like so it's not even like you don't have these biases or these referees like it. It's an interesting case where it hasn't worked except maybe replay. You know, the rules of replay on certain things which have their own problems. But it really hasn't worked to make the referees and the officials more trustworthy to the fans. And I think to the players too. Right.

[00:11:57] So adding to that, is it a possibility that it was what brought a lot of this on in football and probably in other sports is the increased availability of replays and our ability to sort of like be, have more precision about a ball. Like whereas the naked eye couldn't catch whether there was too much bob, like what do you call it? Like the bobbing up and down of the ball in the hands before he hit the ground.

[00:12:26] Like the naked eye can't catch that. But now that you can catch it with a replay, then it's like, okay, well, a reading of the rule of like having possession. Now, like, should we not look? Like, but we can look. You really should look when you have the ability to look. So I actually, you know, it's interesting whether the increase in complexity of rules

[00:12:55] is correlated with more surveillance. Right. So this is something. So definitely the increase in the, not the amount of rule, but the specificity of the rule definitely comes with increased surveillance. So here's another example. Drunk driving laws used to just be before the invention of the breathalyzer. Judgment of the officer, whether this person is drunk enough to have to go to drive. Right. And that's where all these tests come from. Right. Like touching your nose and all this stuff. And they still exist.

[00:13:23] But as soon as the breathalyzer was invented, you just choose an arbitrary. It's not completely arbitrary, but I think it's arbitrary enough of 0.08. And now you have a specific rule. Right. And specificity comes with the ability to surveil. Right. So the more ability to surveil, I think you will get more specificity. But the more rules part might come from both surveillance and that wasn't, I'm going to argue, that wasn't a catch. It went up one time from his left hand or something.

[00:13:51] And then at that point, it's like, okay, let's all sit around in a committee at the NFL and figure out whether it comes up for us. That's right. Right. It really has, I think, one complaint. I think a real true complaint is that it takes away a lot of the joy of the game. I mean, for one, it slows it down. But look at in soccer. This is the example that was on my mind because it just recently happened. There was a case where a penalty kick was given and then ruled out because there was a double touch on the ball.

[00:14:21] So the player, like his foot made contact with the ball twice. Yes. And one of the analysts who was a referee said, look, in soccer, there are two kinds of rules. One is a rule of judgment and one is a technical rule. And a technical rule, like it doesn't matter intent, like whatever, like if it happened, it's illegal. Like, and so in this case, if they can prove that it happened, it doesn't matter whether it wasn't in the spirit of the game.

[00:14:50] It has to be called illegal. And you see that with the offside rule where it's literally a millimeter, right? The offside rule was not intended to judge that. It was just supposed to be like, don't cherry pick. And now because we can, we have to call out offside. And it just seems like nobody likes that. Yeah. Right. I think it's a really good question.

[00:15:15] Why I talk about sports is what kinds of rules in sports we as sports fans and as sports players think should be discretionary. Yeah. And which ones are we perfectly happy to be completely non-discretionary so much so that we'll let automated calls, right? So as a baseball fan, I would say, you know, I kind of like automated strike zone calling, you know? You know, I disagree. Okay. We can argue about that because, but, but if you look at the variation across on bar, sometimes it's like enough freaking egregious, you know, calls so far outside.

[00:15:45] That's right. Angel Hernandez. But I think everybody should agree that unsportsmanlike conduct rules should be discretionary. Right. The idea that you want to come up with a super precise definition of what constitutes unsportsmanlike conduct and then enforce that, you know, algorithmically is just, you know, it doesn't make sense. But we, you know, but the strike zone thing, I'm, I'm, I'm actually open, you know, cause I like discretionary rules more than I like precisely. Yeah.

[00:16:13] I mean, the idea is as a huge baseball fan, like players would get to know umpires and they would get a sense of what their strike zone was generally. But then also like sometimes it would change game to game and, and it was like a skill for the hitter to get on the same wavelength as the umpire as to what the strike zone was. That was like part of the, like the intellectual part of the game for the players. And anytime a player was complaining about the umpire, it wouldn't be, they called balls that

[00:16:42] technically weren't balls. It was, they were being inconsistent. Right. They weren't being consistent within. So like, I think the idea, the, the ideal to aspire to that I enjoyed the most anyway, was when you had, and there were great examples of this. There are some good umpires, like they had a consistent strike zone for both teams during that game. And part of the job of the batter was to figure out exactly what that was. And now if you just have like automated stuff, it just takes a little bit of, uh, away from that element of the game.

[00:17:12] I mean, there's obviously benefits also. So I'm not denying that, but I don't know. It's like one of the things that, you know, I think you're going to people, it's going to change fan to fan. Yeah. Probably depend on when you were, you know, at the peak of your fandom, like when that was. Well, Taylor, what you've articulated actually is the central thesis of the book. The thing that discretionary, um, judgment gives you when you don't have overly complex

[00:17:39] rules and mandatory enforcement is to develop judgments about another person who's part of the game. In this case, the umpire, right? And, and that's sort of what you want, not only in citizens, but you want them in judges and you want them in police officers and you want them in Congress people, right? You want them in your doctor, you want them in the nurse at the, at the hospital. Um, the one thing that's missing and you are even more extreme than I am, because you

[00:18:06] know, you think even with respect to strike zones is, um, develop a kind of wisdom and judgment about the judgments of other people. Right. And, and discretionary decision-making, both allowing that for the umpire. And in the case of like governance, allowing that with your citizens, in addition to the people who are enforcing your citizens, that's completely lost in a legalistic world. Yeah. Right. And think about how often we have to do this in everyday life. Like, you know, your wife comes home and she's in a certain kind of mood and you're

[00:18:34] like, okay, I'm going to have to sort of navigate like the, this mood that she's in right now, uh, until that changes. It's like the skill of just having to be like new. I'm not saying I'm good at that. I'm probably really bad at that, but like, but you are saying she's moody. I'm saying she's a little moody. As Barry walks away from the microphone. She comes home, she's like, where's my bourbon?

[00:19:05] And, uh, no, but you know what I mean? Like you do this, like when you meet somebody for the first time, you're trying to gauge like what their, I don't want to say energy is, but like what kind of things you can get away with saying and joking about what kind of things you can't like that. And so anytime you're going to like have some sort of ironclad rule about how to engage with someone, you, you lose what is, I think, part of the drama of life. And I think also what's part of the drama of sports. Yeah.

[00:19:33] I mean, on the, the, uh, the other alternative would be the, uh, don't talk to your wife for a 10 minute rule, right. Or some kind of rule like that, which some people do have relationships like that and, and, and operate like that. And what they are, um, gaining, they're losing exactly what you're saying they're losing, right. Tamler, what they're gaining is like wife gets pissed off. He said, nope, I was just following the 10 minute. Don't talk to the wife rule. Right. Whereas what you really wanted, what you really wanted that day was for you to immediately,

[00:20:03] you know, go to her and say, you know, say something, right. Something like that. And, um, but you have a built in excuse. You have a built in excuse, right? That's exactly what, what legalistic rules and rule following gives you. In the kind of religion that I was raised in, there was always this, um, even though we had a lot of rules, there was always, um, a belief that legalism would be a bad thing. And that it's so cliche to say spirit of the law versus letter of the law, but that is really truly what you lose.

[00:20:32] Like with these, like exactly what you were saying with the emergence of concrete, really specific rules, you can get away with a lot of things that nobody ever would have wanted you to. It almost gives you ideas for how to get better circumvent the spirit of the law. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. That's right. Using the letter to circumvent the spirit, like the obscurest elements of it. And it, yes, it rewards bureaucrats. It rewards professional bureaucrats too. Yeah.

[00:21:01] It elevates them. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and you know, maybe we're talking about the same thing, but one of the key villains in the later chapters is what I call the by the book bureaucrat, right? This is the person who is, doesn't exercise any discretion with respect to whatever. And so you violate the letter of the rule. It's a no. And, and if these people are in charge of us, right, this is the, you know, the, the story that I tell in that chapter is, you know, not a high stakes story, but it was a story

[00:21:29] of a, of a, of a university administrator who was in charge of approving catering orders. And, um, I was at an event where they wanted coffee and it was, it started at 9am and the only approved vendor was this vendor that opened at 10 for instance. And, uh, um, and she said, okay, well just let me apply for an exception. Um, oh look, the coffee I want to buy is from Starbucks and this vendor subcontracts out the coffee orders to Starbucks anyways.

[00:21:58] So the, by the, even by the, like the, by the spirit of the rule, it should be perfectly fine. Right. Of course this administrator said, yeah, but it doesn't say Starbucks is an approved vendor. Even the vendor subcontracts it out, but that's on them, not on me. So she did not approve the coffee order. Right. And I've had deans like this, right. Um, there are, and I'm sure you have some examples in your life where you've come across this. Yeah. Of course.

[00:22:24] Like the, like academia, you know, there's rules, uh, with purchases of all different kinds. And I think like you're saying the best kind of business manager is the ones that kind of no workarounds or will just, yeah, they have enough credibility within the organization that if, if something wasn't followed and that's going to be picked up by somebody down the line, it's not going to be a huge pain in the ass for them. They're trusted. It is all tied to, to trust.

[00:22:52] But I think that's been slowly eroding, you know, because given that this rewards bureaucrats, the bureaucrats just will make more bureaucracy. That's the, that's their oxygen. That's the water they swim in. Right. And that's, these are the laws of bureau dynamics and what I'm fighting against in the room. So like at the end, it's like, nope, we got to respond. We got to, we got to, we got to push back. Yes. We're going to start a revolution. These same elements that you're talking about that lead to the greater expansion of rules

[00:23:22] and bureaucracy, lack of trust and people unwilling to take responsibility. These are the same features of also the, the move towards quantification, probably for some of the same reasons, you know, but that's what everyone says. When you go to metrics, you go to quantification. Part of the reason you do that is lack of trust, you know, lack of trust in teachers, lack of trust in people making decisions, lack of trust in judges, in the criminal justice system.

[00:23:47] And so you want to go to something numerical that's quote unquote objective. And then also the other part of it is just people not wanting to take responsibility. Like, I don't want this to be my fault. Like if I make a judgment and I use my discretion and it goes badly, that'll be my fault. I'll get shit for it. And I don't want to do that. So I deferred to this rule. I defer to the 10 minute rule, you know, or something, you know, it might be the only

[00:24:13] way to survive in certain institutions, but it's, it's, it's deeply unfortunate to have that state of affairs. I think. I think it's not only unfortunate. I think it's going to lead to a lot of existential crises in people. I think it damages people's moral character. It definitely damages their decision-making ability. It makes a life less joyful. So I, I loved your episode on Tinian's anti-metrics paper.

[00:24:38] So there's a whole chapter about the, the, the quantification of qualitative human judgments. Um, so in the criminal justice system, there are algorithmic risk assessment procedures. So how likely is this person to commit this crime again in six months? Um, run it through the algorithm. It's a score from one through five. Um, the major story in that is about GRE essay scoring, which went, um, it went algorithmic in 2004 that early.

[00:25:04] Um, and so on the grounds that human judges were more inconsistent, you're likelier to get two human judges that'll score an essay, a five and a two, but the, but the machine would always only be varying from the human judge by one point. Right. Um, and, um, that took over. If you write an essay to go to into graduate school, you're going to be evaluated, um, algorithmically. Um, right now I think, um, Yelp reviews and Uber reviews.

[00:25:33] I mean, we don't care anymore who's driving us. Right. Or the unsophisticated care about the restaurant. They care if it's a 4.6 or above, right. Or, or whatever that number is. Right. And so, I mean, the, the, the smarter culinary, um, you know, citizens will be like, okay, that's some information, but no, you know what, you know, I, so I, you know, some Asian students will say, actually, I just look for the lower scores. Cause then I think, oh, maybe that's cause like white people don't like it.

[00:26:03] And maybe they have some weird funky food that I might like, you know, something like that. And I go, good. You're developing judgments, but by and large, you know, that sounds like a rule. Yeah, that's right. But you know, but by, yeah, but by and large, you know, like most people are using heuristics based on those like metrics, like people have this complaint about rotten tomatoes. It's an attack on our agency. Like it's like fewer and fewer decisions are being made by us and are just being made by all these other things.

[00:26:31] And sometimes that's welcome, uh, because we can waste a lot of time about decisions, but sometimes it's, it's like, I think you said, it's, it's damaging to our virtue. Um. Yeah. Well, look, like, but it's, um, it's going to be my shtick, but I'll just say this. You two should get a room and make out, make sweet love because you're also, you clearly see eye to eye on this. All I'll say, I think our audience knows what I would retort.

[00:26:58] All this stuff is the big advantage of the quantification of all that stuff is like, if I want to buy a vacuum cleaner, I don't know shit about vacuum cleaners. I don't want to spend my life learning about vacuum cleaners. I actually trust that those numbers are capturing way more than, than, uh, I would have otherwise. And if I were like to have to read all the reviews to get some fancy qualitative judgment about the quality of vacuum cleaners, I'd want to like poke my eyes out by the end of that. Right.

[00:27:25] So like, if I look and I say, yeah, you know what a vacuum cleaner that's 4.9 rated on Amazon is better than the 3.8 one. Let me buy that one. Like that's a huge advantage. Right. It is. Yeah. No, it is a huge advantage. Especially, especially like, so this is another, um, problem of scale. The kind of thing that, um, pushes us in, in the direction, not only of quantification, but rules and procedures that are regularized over large, right? This is just the scale of decision-making. Yeah.

[00:27:54] It's the sheer amount of things that we have to buy and that are reviewed. Um, it's, it's a good, it's a good heuristic to be using that. Yeah. But you know what? My sentiment is in agreement, believe it or not, even Tamler, your defense of, of anti, um, automated strike rule is, is like the best one I've heard. Um, not that I listened that much to those arguments, but, um, I think there is a real value in understanding what it is you lose. And sometimes you weigh the costs and benefits, right?

[00:28:24] Like I would, it'd be fine if somebody said, look, like the egregious errors that have happened because of bad umpires are such that I'm willing to take that loss. But like, you got to know what you're losing. That's right. And yeah, I think, you know, even with replay, you know, which I think everyone is like, well, if you know, people at home can see it, then they should be able to see it too. But then all of a sudden now you're going frame by frame to see like whether the ball touched this guy's finger before it went out of bounds or something in basketball.

[00:28:51] And all of a sudden, like, it takes like an extra 10 minutes to get through like 30 seconds of basketball because they're always putting everything to this minute replay. Like, that's a great example of, I don't think people realized it would be like that. You know, I think everyone thought, well, if it obviously goes off somebody then, you know, and then, but now that like the technology, like you said earlier, Dave, like the technology gets so much better that it's, it's, you start to feel like you can't not do that. But right.

[00:29:20] What are we going to do is not look to whether like the metaphysical truth of it touching his finger is like, yeah, exactly. It gets very metaphysical at those levels. Like, what does it even mean to touch something? Right. Well, what, what do you think sports fans, what do you think they would think if to solve the, you know, it takes too long problem, the frames are put through a well-trained AI and then it spits out the thing, right? Like, so, so in tennis line calling. Tennis.

[00:29:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think by and large, I mean, I saw a player gripe and complain about it this weekend at, at Indian Wells, but by and large, it's gotten rid of the McEnroe problem, right? It's gotten rid of the hugely pissed off tennis player who says like, I've just, I've just lost the match because of your stupid line calling, which there was. So do you think sports fans would given a certain degree of consistency and reliability accept that? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great example.

[00:30:17] And I think in tennis and especially when they knew you could challenge it. See, that was a happy medium for me. You had the line callers, but they could have challenged and they had plenty of challenges. You rarely had a player run out of challenges and they could do it really fast because of the AI thing. And for some reason, everyone just thought this little animated thing is actually real, you know, like actually like that's the, you know, the suspension of disbelief we all have to make that. That's what actually happened.

[00:30:43] Not only is it out, but it's out by like that much instead of like that much, you know, but then, you know, going to the U S open, I went to it this past year. Now they don't even have lines officials. Yeah. They just have like a voice recorder saying that's crazy. And that I was creeped out by that was too dystopian. There's no point in challenging because it's exactly what the challenge would just be that, you know, like what they said. Yeah.

[00:31:08] I actually think it, like in those examples, but what Tamar, you alluded to the speed with which those judgments are made is a huge boon. Yeah. And I, and I really do think that in sports, like it would actually be a really good conversation to have about what, what is okay for us to rely on. Like an automated offside call would be better than them pouring through, like having to draw those lines and waste five minutes. I would much rather it just be like, okay, offside, let's keep playing.

[00:31:36] And then you can just like, I don't know, like just say, okay, clearly we want rep judgments on some of these things like fouls, for instance. Like I think. Yeah. Soccer is interesting. There's so much discretion still in soccer, even though they get bogged down with these little, like on certain very specific things. But like extra time is just kind of like what the reference. Or like how far you're allowed to move the ball from the spot, the ref marked from where you kick.

[00:32:05] Like they'll just, they'll let you fuck with it a little bit, but like don't get egregious. You know, extra time is such a high stakes decision that they're leaving to discretionary calls and fans are fine. So we don't like, yeah, like you don't know, like it's not even like they get to decide how much extra time and then you see it. It's just like at some point he's going to blow the whistle and we don't know. Like we don't know. We don't know you how many minutes. We don't know within a minute of when they're going to do it. Yeah. Yeah. I love that imprecision in soccer. I do too.

[00:32:33] You know, like it feels like they, they, they've in the transitionary stage right now with that stuff. Cause people bitch about extra time description right now. Yeah. Yeah. Especially cause they like, they call the, they blow the whistle when a play is done. Right. Like they don't, you wouldn't want the clock to go off like in the middle of like a promising offensive. Yeah. Like a two on one or something. Yeah. Well, it sounds like both of you guys are like 100% on board with this thesis. Yeah. I'm committed. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:03] It's like we were talking about off air. It comes at a time where I think people are not necessarily inclined to give up the rules established in the constitution or so we thought, but it's going to have like legs this book. Cause I do think it's capturing a lot of people's frustration with modern life.

[00:33:25] The hope was that this was going to be the message for a demo Democrats and democratic states, right. When they were in power and say, okay, there's a real frustration, right. That's coming from the, you know, you might want to say libertarian, right. But I'm not libertarian at all. But I, you know, I, I'm trying to put, you know, an analysis to it and the, the, the, the proposals were moderate, right.

[00:33:55] So why don't we learn to like vaguer rules rather than more precise rules incorporate discretion into all of the rules. Always have a clause that says, or unless there's an exception to be made, um, the judgment of the enforcer and so forth. And then the other, the last proposal was, um, give a discretionary budget to new people. So they're learning on the job. They're trying to figure out how to make the right calls. They get, you know, five opportunities to make calls against in the spirit of the rule,

[00:34:25] but against the letter of it. And if they did well, then you increase that whatever that happens to be. It could be a, you know, uh, a cop who refuses to do an arrest or a judge decides to let somebody go, even though the algorithm says there are five on the recidivism meter or something like that. You know, I think those are moderate, sensible, you know, um, proposals. Um, instead of what we're getting is, you know, burn the entire bureaucracy down. So now like maybe no one should be in the FAA, okay.

[00:34:55] Directing air traffic control or something. Here's your plane on fire yesterday. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Thanks. Uh, I'm glad we talked. We broke our own rule and talking with you about this. We used our discretion. We have a no guests who've just put out a book and want to talk about the book. We don't do that normally. We usually just have them as we're about to do to talk about movies, but we broke the rule because of your thesis. So you use your discretion. I'm so grateful. Uh, we did.

[00:35:24] I'm so glad you guys liked the book. All right. We'll be right back to talk about Eraserhead.

[00:36:17] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. If I sound a little down, well, that's because my University of Houston Cougars, my beloved Cougs from this year, so much grit, so much toughness, just outworked everyone all year. They lost an excruciating national championship game last night. Would have been their first.

[00:36:39] Just an excruciating loss after an absolutely historic, amazing comeback victory against Duke. The most loathsome team in all of college sports. So that was great on Saturday. It made the heartbreak even worse last night. But anyhow, uh, this is the time where we like to take a moment and express our gratitude

[00:37:05] to all the people who reach out with us, who connect with us, who build the Very Bad Wizards community. If you would like to email us, email us at verybadwizards at gmail.com. If you would like to tweet at us at peas at Tamler at verybadwizards, you can follow us on Instagram, like us on Facebook, join the Reddit community, uh, and give us a five-star review

[00:37:31] on whatever podcast platform you listen to. Um, that really helps other people find the podcast and it has been growing, it seems like. Oh, and if you really want to cheer me up, follow me on Letterboxd. I'm trying to post reviews there. I enjoy the interaction. Uh, it's a healthy social media environment, it seems like. One of the few remaining. And if you'd like to support us in even more tangible ways, you can go to the support page on the website.

[00:37:59] Best thing to do is become a Patreon supporter. There are multiple different tiers. For $2 a month, you get all the volumes of Dave's Beats. At $5 a month, you enter our bonus episode tier. You can, we just completed our severance, uh, season two bonus episodes with Paul Bloom. Of course, there's the ambulators, our deep dive breakdown of every episode of Deadwood.

[00:38:29] So much other stuff. A lot of David Lynch stuff, um, relevant to the segment coming up. Uh, you can also vote on an episode, uh, topic, which we do about twice a year at the $10 level. And at the highest level, you can ask us a question every month and we will answer it in our monthly AUA bonus episodes, which will be a video for our highest tier members and

[00:38:55] an audio for all of our bonus episode tier members. We love doing those. It's a lot of fun. Questions are great. Yeah. So thank you so much for all your support, all your interaction. It really does warm our hearts. Now let's get to our deep, deep dive into David Lynch's first movie, Eraserhead. Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film. Mm-hmm. What? Elaborate on that. No, I won't.

[00:39:24] Um, no one, no one, uh, sees it. Uh, all right. Uh, we have Barry Lamb here. It must be time to talk about a real head scratcher. Today, it is in honor of David Lynch's passing, his first feature film, Eraserhead. Uh, this is from in 1977. He had been an art student and then an off and on again fellow at the American Film Institute.

[00:39:51] And through this, he was able to make Eraserhead. But over the course of five years, it took him five years to do it. He would shoot scenes, run out of money, then raise or make funds and then resume shooting. And like kind of famously, there's a shot of Jack Nance, uh, who plays Henry entering like a room or building. And then the next shot is of him inside. But those two shots, uh, were taken over a year apart.

[00:40:18] He shot it all at night, made most of the sets himself. You can, if you know, like David Lynch's sculptures and stuff that you also see in other work and like his, that documentary, The Art Life, you can tell like all the things that he made in this. I think it's one of his more surreal and dreamy movies, which is saying a lot for him. And in some ways, although this wasn't my experience this time, one of his more alienating movies,

[00:40:45] like, you know, maybe put it with England Empire or something. But it was a huge cult hit, uh, eventually and would play at midnight showings across the country, like for 25 years after its release, as long as midnight showings were going, uh, this was always in the rotation. Uh, in terms of what it means, there is very little consensus. Some people see it as expressing the anxieties of fatherhood or parenthood.

[00:41:13] Other people think the meaning goes beyond like words even. Uh, and it's like some, like we can only access the meaning through our subconscious. Speaking personally, these last two times I watched it, I saw it in the theater on Wednesday night. One of the great like silver linings of him dying is that you can just always see a David Lynch movie in the theater these days. I kind of had a fairly coherent interpretation of what's going on, which I'll may talk about later towards the end of the discussion.

[00:41:41] But first I want to hear what you guys thought, what your history with Eraserhead and Lynch is, if any, Barry. And what did you think of Eraserhead when you just saw it, uh, probably this past week? I have no history with Eraserhead. So I watched it for the very first time this time around, which is not to say I don't have any history with David Lynch. I have quite a bit of history with Lynch. Um, I, the first David Lynch film I believe I saw was,

[00:42:11] and did not understand and didn't remember most of it was, was, uh, Lost Highway. So in the nineties, when I was a teenager, I remember it being a big deal. If you were into alt rock, that soundtrack was a big deal. So I came through it through the soundtrack. I, I, I remember going to the theater. I don't remember remembering much of it. I remember it's a little bit. I since seen Lost Highway a couple more times. So, and then I, I watched Mulholland Drive in the theater when it came out.

[00:42:38] Um, and then in my early thirties, um, I was, some friends had said, so this is at a point where I've already, you know, tenure track philosophy professor. Oh, it was only then that I, I got, um, the DVD set of Twin Peaks because, you know, some people had, had said something about, you got to watch Twin Peaks. And so I didn't go, I didn't find Twin Peaks until then. Right. I went and bought the DVD set and watched it from start to finish.

[00:43:06] Uh, and I went back into the Lynch catalog, but Eraserhead was not one of them. All right. So this is the very first time, which fascinating. Just absolutely fascinating. I mean, I'm a huge Lynch fan. I only saw this for the first time, like seven years ago or six years ago. Um, it is one I kind of thought, well, that's more not for me. That's the side of him that Dave, what about you? First time? I've never seen it before. Yeah. Either. So first time watching it was yesterday.

[00:43:35] It, it had to brew in my, in my mind a bit longer maybe than many movies. Like I will admit to like the first few minutes of it, just maybe more just being like, what the fuck am I watching? Um, and then when I got a sense of the narrative, like it settled in a bit more, but when you don't know what any of the narrative is even supposed to be, you're just like, what are these images? Like, yeah. Yeah. But I, but I enjoyed, I enjoyed it.

[00:44:04] It has a student art film kind of quality, especially at the beginning. Um, right. Yeah. I also was not a huge fan when I saw it the first time. Like I thought it was great. You know, once you get into it, like you said, but I put it on the second tier of Lynch movies and now I, I'm completely kind of the other way. I think it's kind of a masterpiece, but it took me like a bunch of times before arriving at that. I think going into it, thinking that it was going to be a first feature film, a student

[00:44:34] film, and it helped a lot with patience. Yeah. I agree. A patience in the beginning. Right. And then maybe about a third of the way in after I laughed out loud many times, I said, Oh, it's a comedy. Right. It is funny. It is funny. Yeah. And, uh, of course, after a while, after half of it, I thought, Oh, it's not a comedy. Although it's, it's funny. It's not a, it's not a comedy. And then two thirds of the way in, I thought, Oh, I know what this is about. It's, I know exactly what this is about. And then at the end I said, Oh, I don't know what this is about. That's my reaction.

[00:45:03] Yeah. Which I think is just the way he likes it. He has called it his most spiritual film, um, which is actually, uh, plays into my interpretation of it. And also he has said that nobody has come up with, and as far as he knows, like the interpretation that is the one that he has of it. But of course he thinks like his interpretation isn't definitive. Yeah. I think it's a very funny movie, uh, in spots in that.

[00:45:33] And there's like these kind of absurdist, like, like the dinner conversation, which we'll talk about is like just very funny in the way Lynch can be funny in certain modes. But then there's this other aspect of it, which is just it as a visual and sonic experience. Like, I think the sound of it is amazing and the effects are incredible. We'll talk about the baby, but like just really all of the effects in it, but you know, maybe

[00:46:00] especially the sound, uh, it's, it's, it's something that you kind of don't really notice the first time you, or you may not note the first time you watch the movie, but it is deeply, deeply unsettling. Like you feel the sound it's cause there's no escape from it. It's like, we're in this like clanging factory, but also a kind of a pressure cooker the whole time and there's no rest and there's no escape. And it's like oppressive just in how constant it is.

[00:46:28] There's no moment in the movie where you're not getting kind of assaulted by these industrial, uh, uh, noises and like these whooshes and hisses and clangings. Um, yeah. So like, I think it's a real experience to see it. And the, the, the other just general thought I have, like this is pure Lynch, uh, in a razor head that you will just see remnants of throughout all of his later work in film. Yeah.

[00:46:57] So I think I like, I had a really good time with it and I'm excited to hear what you guys think as we try to grapple with some of the themes in it. Visually set design, you see the jagged, it's black and white, but you see the flooring of, you know, the black lodge, you see black and white tile. You see the stage, which appears in a lot of Lynch, right?

[00:47:20] Um, uh, sonically we, we can talk about this when it comes to the interpretation, but I thought sonically, uh, I noticed it right away on the very first viewing, um, immediately. And especially when the issue of the baby came up, I, I thought this is an incredibly familiar sound to me. Also, I wonder like, like radiators, like the sound of the radiators and like that, that kind of particular clanging of gas radiators.

[00:47:50] Did you guys grow up with that in your places where just all of a sudden the radiator would just start going bong, bong, bong in the middle of the night or during the day? Absolutely not. Cause I grew up in Southern California where, where there's, but when I went to college in Northern California, the dorm that we had, had those radiators and like it became a very familiar sound. I'll do, I'll do you one better Tamler. I didn't grow up with it at all. Cause I grew up in Southern California, just like David.

[00:48:16] But, uh, I had as a young couple, my wife and I, we moved to the Northeast. I moved to Vassar. Um, and that was constant and it was therefore absolutely constant during the infant, uh, of our child. And this is what I meant by the sound. Um, almost everything about the soundscape reminded me of Poughkeepsie, New York at the time in which I was a brand new parent, right?

[00:48:45] In so many respects, including the, especially the radiator. Poughkeepsie actually is like, it could be in Poughkeepsie. Yeah. It's a post industrial. Yeah. Railroad tracks and, um, uh, old decrepit factories that have been abandoned, things like that. There's even a pencil factory that is not at Poughkeepsie, but at Beacon, it's, you know, which is just a, you know, 15 minutes South. Um, well known because in the 2010s it was this abandoned pencil factory and there was some

[00:49:15] hipster artists who decided to open a business in the factory. Um, famously it was an artisanal pencil sharpening business. All he did was he asked people from New York city to send him pencils and he would videotape himself in the factory sharpening it in an artisanal way. So there's a, and which was just taking a knife and like sandpaper. Incredible. Yeah. So there's a pencil factory. There's all of these railroad tracks, you know, clanging radiators.

[00:49:44] I did not know they made erasers that way, um, until I saw this. Uh, yeah. Do you guys actually, before we get into like, I have a little kind of outline of some of the scenes in order that when, then we can allow us to talk about specific stuff, but do you have any general, uh, ways of viewing the movie? What, what you think the movie's central themes are about? Maybe it's general enough.

[00:50:10] I two thirds in, I thought this is a movie about what it's like to care for a newborn baby. Maybe if you took out all of the love and joy, that's, that was my thought, right? Two thirds in. Of course, I, like I said before, after the end of that, Oh, maybe that's not it. Right. But, but that's my, that was my thought.

[00:50:34] Like I, because of so much of it was so familiar, including the sounds, um, and maybe even the room in some respect, because it was so familiar to me as a father of a newborn in a certain era that I thought it was just like that, except if you had to take out love and joy and all of the good stuff, if you took out all of that stuff, I think that's what this movie is about. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:50:58] I was going to say something along those lines, but maybe a bit more broad, which is what you were talking about, Tamla, the sound assaulting you the whole time. Like this to me felt like a movie of someone who is feeling trapped in life, like feeling a bleakness that can come from being somebody at the age in which you might have an infant, which is you're, you're dealing with the stress of a relationship. You're dealing with the stress of your work life.

[00:51:27] Like all of that is that it's, you know, like hits a peak at a certain time of your life. And then the lack of sleep and the child constantly yelling this, like Tim, this is the nightmare parts of feeling trapped in a life that you're not sure that you should have ever gotten yourself into. Yeah. Right. And you were kind of a young dad when you had Bella. So that must've been fairly relatable in that sense. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:51:54] Although exactly like Barry said, like take the, take the love out of it. Like, like take those, the moments at which you're most desperate about whether or not you should, should have done these things. Right. And I'm also the father of an eight month old. So the crying part really gets to me as well. Yeah. I was joking with you that this is Lynch's what to expect when you're expecting. But, um, I, I do think that like it, I, I kind of had that thought too.

[00:52:21] And I think it's undeniable that it's about that to some extent, right? Lynch had just had a, a baby, Jennifer Lynch. Um, she had was born with club feet. And so some people, which turns out is not about dancing at like a rave. No, uh, yeah. Um, the, like, and so they had to do a lot of surgery initially and, but Jennifer Lynch, I don't think took it personally.

[00:52:47] She was on the set, but I, I agree that I think once you get to the end of the movie, it, that becomes more just part of something larger. And I do think one of it is about a guy who feels trapped. I also think it's about a guy who's afraid. It's got a person who is very like timid and startled by every, everything. And completely uncomfortable in his own skin. And I think it really is about like the limits and the boundaries we impose on ourself,

[00:53:16] which keep us from accessing a kind of greater joy or bliss. And so I don't think the joy is taken out of it. It's just, we're only seeing the prison, you know, we're not seeing what the prison blocks. Yeah. All right. Um, so we start, it is a floating sideways giant, somewhat transparent Jack Nance who plays Henry.

[00:53:42] This, uh, giant sideways Henry is floating in space by some kind of planet. Um, we don't know exactly what it is. Then it seems like we go through, he has a lot of great shots where we just go through this opening. And this looks like some kind of corroded cylinder. And we see the man in the planet by a set of, of levers and looking out of a broken window. He's called the man in the planet in the, and he does seem like a man in the planet.

[00:54:10] This is played by Jack Fisk, the great production designer. He did most of PTA's movies, uh, and a lot of Lynch stuff too, like Mulholland Drive. He's covered in warts and he spasms, uh, quite a bit. Like he has these quick spasms. Uh, then we go back to Henry and side floating sideways, Henry. And out of his mouth comes some, like, I don't know how you describe it. Like snaky sperm looking thing.

[00:54:39] Um, and once that comes out, I got you, you go back to the man in the planet and he's it's, it looks like he sees that that came out of his mouth. And then he's very slowly goes towards the gears and pulls the lever, which makes the, like, it seems like it makes the, the snaky sperm, uh, fly really quickly and then land in this big puddle of like black water.

[00:55:05] So I don't know, like one way of thinking about this is this is the conception of the eraser head baby. And I think certainly there's a lot of indications that that's what's happening, but you know, like who is this man in the planet? Why does he control conception? So, so is he like the little homunculus in, like, is he in supposed to be some sort of like the homunculus controlling, uh, uh, Henry? Um, is he like the internal workings of Henry?

[00:55:35] There is a reading where that, there is an immediate reading. You can say, Oh, that's, we're looking inside Henry's head and there's this guy. Yeah. He, he's like the one who says, bust your nut now. Like let yourself. Don't pull out. It'll be fine. But visually that man sitting there looking out of the broken window was, I don't know why it actually distressed me. Like it's probably one of the most distressing images of the whole thing.

[00:56:02] Like there was something about, he looked like he was about to die. Like you said, he's covered in like open sores of some sort. And, and it looks like somebody who's just about to die because they've been injured so badly. There's war going on outside and he's, you know, pulls this lever and. Yeah. Like a slave laborer of some kind, you know, like he, he's not enjoying his work, but he is, he does have to do it. It seems like. Yeah. He's just working through the, the, the, the source. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:56:31] The looking out the window. Yeah. Motif is something that will return with Henry as well. The idea of looking at a window, seeing something and then intervening or not intervening. In this case, I guess this man does intervene. Like now's the time to pull these levers. Yeah. Later in the movie, he will try to pull the levers again and they will not, uh, uh, they're jammed. So I think it is important that this time he's able to do it. I, I'm more inclined.

[00:56:57] Like I, I absolutely think Dave, you could have a reading of him being inside Henry, but you could also have a reading of him being something outside Henry, but that is focused on trapping him in, in some way. So he's kind of a hostile external force of some kind of the kind of the, I think I'm not sure if it matters. I can see that like some sort of external psychic. Um, yeah. I mean, psychic in the sense that it's about the things that he's doing to the mind.

[00:57:27] Um, yeah, yeah, you're right. It doesn't matter so much if he's inside, but, but I do like the idea that, that fears or insecurities or something are just a thing that is that like are affecting. Yeah. Cause he's a, he's quite a passive character. He, uh, someone that like, it seems like things just happen to. Yeah. Life is just happening to him. Yeah. Um, you can see that so clearly in another one of my favorite shots, which is the elevator. Yes. Yeah.

[00:57:54] So, uh, after that happens, we go through like a bright light, uh, like a white light. Uh, and then we're going to like regular Henry, normal Henry, quote unquote, and he's walking home and we don't know where he came from cause he's on vacation, but, but somewhere, uh, through this just really loud industrial wasteland, there's like piles of dirt and guard this, all this stuff is great.

[00:58:20] Like garbage and puddles that he steps into and he just looks so uncomfortable, but it's also kind of comic. You know, have either of you guys seen movies by Jacques Tati? No. Uh, like Mon Oncle or Playtime or Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, big favorite of Lynch's and the scene of him walking home to his building and then going into the building and the elevator is very Jacques Tati because it's just somebody who's a little out of place.

[00:58:46] You know, somebody who's just the environment and him are not, uh, like suitable for each other. In sync. In sync. Yeah, exactly. He does do like a little bit of a Charlie Chaplin walk. Yeah. Can I ask you really quickly? There is this moment, like right when you, after that white flash, um, that you were talking about, he, when it goes to like normal Henry or whatever, uh, he's staring into the distance, like, you know, staring at us into the middle distance and, and has an expression. And he's not sure what just happened.

[00:59:15] Like he just heard something or saw something that captured his attention and he wrinkles his, his brows. Like, is, is he noticing the man in the, the, what'd you call him? The man in the planet? The man in the planet. Yeah. Is he getting some sort of sense that he's being like levers being pulled? Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, I feel like that it almost freezes on his face for a lot of the movie. It's like this look of consternation. There's just like constant consternation, but it might be this kind of suspicion. Like you're suggesting that there's something going on that isn't right.

[00:59:45] And that's like messing up his ability to like interact with the world. Right. It's almost like his, it's almost despair that turns into fear. I'm like looking at the images right now. It's like a very well done performance. Yeah. He's great. And it's kind of iconic too. Like there's so much in the, in the images for us to be perplexed with. And it's interesting to think that he has a kind of consternation and perplexed look about some of those things and not other things.

[01:00:11] Like there's clearly a lot for us to be absolutely perplexed about in those opening scenes, in the landscape, in the apartment, just all these things. Like, what am I looking at? What is that? You know, underneath the radiator or whatever, but he's not perplexed by that. He's like perplexed by these other things. Totally. Absolutely. That's a great point. It's like, yeah, he's not our surrogate because like, it's like some of these things he was like, yeah, what the fuck is that? Like we are. And other things he just completely takes for granted.

[01:00:38] I, I, the thing around the radiator and whatever, like a nest of some kind or something like, I don't even know what that is. And he doesn't give it a second thought. It's just. That's what makes it so powerfully a dream experience. Like in your dreams, there's random weird shit that goes on that you don't even think twice about. Yes. And he's such a master at evoking that stuff. Yes. So then we, he's walking home and even as he's walking home, the sound just hits you. It's like he's inside a machine of some kind. Yep. And then he gets to the building.

[01:01:07] How would you describe the building? You know, with the mailboxes and the elevator. A small European hotel that hasn't been renovated in a long time. Yeah. You know, and this is the lobby. The elevator is great. Like when he just gets in there and it just takes irrationally long for the doors to close. It's like just, just long enough to make you very uncomfortable with, it shows some degree of passivity where like, I think most people would be like, I don't know, like pressing

[01:01:37] the button in the hopes that it would, yeah, that it would do something. Um, but, but of course he knows how that elevator works. Uh, so he goes into the apartment. Apartment again has this like, and it's all different. It's like this now kind of a large, like a hissing or a whooshing. And then also the buzzing noises. This will recur in almost every Lynch film of the like flickering lights that kind of from the, uh, the electricity. Um, and yeah, you know, he has a record player. He's into vinyl.

[01:02:07] Uh, oh yeah. You didn't talk about the woman that's there. Oh yes. He sees the beautiful neighbor from across the hall as she is built. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who tells her that somebody called on the payphone, which is again, hilarious. Like, like there's only a phone in the corridor that they all have to share. She's like, yeah, Mary calls. She wants you to come to dinner tonight. Yeah. And you get this full shot of his head and his hair. Jack Dan's had to keep that same hair for like five years. Five years. I read that. That's crazy. Yeah.

[01:02:35] And I always figured that eraser had referred to that hairdo. It looks like the eraser on the top of it. Yeah. Everybody thinks, you know, so I told my wife, I was going to watch this and she says, does it explain why he has an eraser head? I said, no, that's not what that refers. I said, too. Does it explain? Does it explain? Yeah. Much more literal than that, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You also get a first shot of the radiator. It's like that stuff by it perplexed me to no end. Like, what do you think it is?

[01:03:05] It's there underneath the radiator. At first I thought it was hair because it's roughly like the consistency of the hair on his head. Then I thought it was some kind of nest material. Yeah. That looks like nest material. Yeah. Yeah. Probably a bit of a fire hazard if it's a nest to have it right by the radiator. I mean, I don't know. Yeah. It looks like the kindling, like the real first kind of kindling. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:03:27] The nest thing like resonated with me like when I watch it because this whole movie reminded me of a phrase that I once heard that I never, I still don't understand it. But a friend of mine said that he had this old philosopher professor who would go on and on about what he just always referred to as the fecundity of life. Yeah. And like that's the vibe of this movie is the fecundity of life.

[01:03:51] And those images of whatever it is of a nest of the baby birds, of the obvious baby was all like this fucked up way that we reproduce, that we keep the world going. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And Tam, you should also mention to the listeners who haven't watched this, it's a tiny apartment. It's a studio. It does have a bed, though, that can turn into some kind of deep water. Lumpy. Under the right circumstances. Under the right circumstances. Yeah.

[01:04:18] It also has a window, which is nice, but it looks out for most of the movie right onto a brick wall. Yeah. That's right. That's the emotion that it first solidified in me, that like I'm trapped in this life. Yes. The window looks out to a brick wall. Yes. So then leading to this question, and it's a dumb question because like we said earlier, there's no yes or no answer to questions like this.

[01:04:40] But here's a scene that isn't obviously a dream or hallucination of some kind like we get a little later in the movie. Do you still see this as going on in his mind or psyche or some kind of projection onto reality? I didn't read this scene just because of other things that happened in the apartment later. And other things in which he actually wakes up to afterwards.

[01:05:06] I didn't read this scene as in his mind. Yeah. I read this as whatever the sense of the outside world is in this movie is. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe filtered through a prism that is, you know, his trapped feeling and fear-ridden psyche. Yeah. This is, that's how I understood this because, because you're right there, there are levels of, of unreality. Like, and so I think he pops down into dream state or whatever hallucination state later.

[01:05:35] But this to me felt like a very Lynch kind of way of doing this. This is the experiences of somebody as interpreted through their own unconscious mind. Like, yeah, he probably lives in an apartment that doesn't have all of those fucked up things. And dinner wasn't like exactly like that. Yeah. But it doesn't matter. Your unconscious is not, it's not encoding the, the, the specifics of reality. It's encoding this emotional tone to something.

[01:06:05] And he's, it looks like he's already kind of depressed or, or anxious. And this is the world that he's, that his, his unconscious is experiencing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it would make sense to see it that way. Just the whole movie. Just the fact that it's constantly that noisy and all these different kinds of noises that seem in some vague way to correspond to something he's feeling or something we're feeling. Um, so he walks to go see his girlfriend and then you have the great family dinner scene.

[01:06:32] I think this is like, if you, if you're watching this movie, you got to at least watch through the dinner scene. If you're not on board after that, then maybe, I don't know, like take a break. But, uh, like, you've got to at least go through this scene because it is just absolutely hilarious. I think. Is it, okay. Is it just me that they're, that, that, that these, both the scenes I'm going to refer to are weird? Or is this not like the Texas chainsaw massacre dinner scene?

[01:07:00] I mean, um, I think it's so perfectly weird. Um, and it, you know, some, some, some of Lynch's weirdness just creeps you the hell out. Like there, you're, you're, you're, the hair stands on the back of your neck. You feel like a tingling and it's, it's so hard for you to get over. I didn't feel that in this scene. Right. Um, after having gone through this scene, I thought I am in for a conversation.

[01:07:26] I mean, I'm in for, um, but, but at the same time, I would like to watch this scene three times, just this scene and read extract from it. What I think the rest of the movie is trying to do because so much of what is happening in that house, I feel like is consequential to, um, to how we're supposed to read other things right down to the dog that's in there. Yeah. That's nursing and so on. Just so much is, so much is going on. And really just from the opening.

[01:07:53] So she comes out, he's just waiting outside, uh, like not knowing what to do. Like he doesn't go up and knock. She comes outside and he starts, you know, uh, nagging her almost like you never come around anymore. What's going on? And she doesn't really respond to that. She says, dinner's almost, we're ready. And there's this great shot of them looking at each other. And there's almost like a potential of like some kind of closeness that that moment passes and she just looks despondent.

[01:08:23] You see just the, the life go out of her as they look at each other and she just, her shoulders slump and like, and then they go in. And what's so cool about this, it's weird, but then it's also not that different than meeting your girlfriend's parents for the first time. Like in terms of how that feels, the mother who's looking at you, maybe a little side-eyed and judging you, uh, what you do and you know, where this is all going.

[01:08:51] The father with his weird stories and his. Totally. It captures really well that feeling of meeting a new family for the, with their own quirks for the very first time and knowing that you have to like somehow impress them. But, but you're, but they're also weird. It's like a, it's not your family. Yeah. Um, the, this extended silence that he's sitting there with, with the mom when they're sitting on the couch, um, is just great. Just tense. Barry, you were saying that the scene didn't creep you out as much.

[01:09:19] There is one part though, that really distressed me, which was when she's asking him, the mom is asking Henry what he does and he says, I'm on vacation. And then she says, uh, and then he says, but, but I used to work at a printing factory. The, uh, Mary just starts having like a seizure of some sort. That's right. She just starts like going. And then the way that it's dealt with is the mom grabs a brush and starts like brushing her hair to make it stop. A side of her hair. Yeah. Yeah. The side, like I couldn't tell what that was. And that just like shook me. Like I was like, what the fuck?

[01:09:46] Well, well, the thing is there were maybe four of such events in that house that night. And it's, um, there's this, the normal weirdness when you go to a girlfriend's parents' house that you have to deal with. And there are these little quirks and he just puts in completely abnormal weirdness that happens. And the reaction to it is exactly the same as you would react to the normal. But I think that, I think it's, I don't know if it's completely divorced. It's just heightened, you know?

[01:10:14] Like I think you might find out that one of the family members has this weird, uh, illness and it's new to you, but, uh, it's not new to them. They deal with it all the time. So like, they're not surprised. And then like the thing with the dogs, which also comes in this opening, uh, meet the mom scene. There's, they have some weird pets that like make these like horrific noises maybe. And you're just like, what the fuck is that? In this case, it's like eight puppies like violently at the mom's teat.

[01:10:44] Or I don't know if it's violent, but it's, uh, aggressively, uh, going at it. And it also seems like she has the seizure because she's stressed out about. Yes. About like him talking about him not being at work, you know, like that would stress anybody out when you have to like, your mom has to discover that your boyfriend's like a deadbeat, you know? Like, yeah. He's very clever at the printing factory. I'm sure he is. Um, uh, he sounds very clever.

[01:11:11] Uh, to that point that you guys are both making, like that is, I think just again, a great way in which Lynch is representing the subconscious. Like in the subconscious, you go to, to their house and they serve food that was kind of weird. Your subconscious, it's just representing it as like fucked up, you know, like, uh, oozing, you know, man-made chickens that, that are like, it doesn't, it really doesn't matter what it was.

[01:11:40] It just matters that your, your mind somehow encoded. This is an uncomfortable, weird, uh, dinner experience. Yeah. We've got chicken tonight. Strangest damn things. They're man-made little damn things smaller than my fist, but they're new. I'm Bill. That's great. Dude. The, the look at my knees line when he's talking about being a plumber was the funniest line to me in the whole movie. Like, he's just like, look at my knees. Yeah.

[01:12:07] He swings from like deep bitterness to like a kind of cheery, uh, you know, affability. Yeah. And then catatonia at some point. Right, right, right, right. Uh, we go to the kitchen and that's where we meet grandma, uh, when the mom is making dinner. Like that is just, it's just so awesome. At some point she just has the grandma toss the salad by literally doing like every part of it,

[01:12:34] putting her fingers around the, uh, the spoons. All right. So people need to know. So grandma's sitting in a chair, essentially catatonic, right? So if you had a grandma who had dementia or has Alzheimer's, kind of like that. So not moving in any way, staring straight ahead. And she's just put like a crap ton of salad dressing on the salad and puts the bowl in grandma's lap and the tongs in grandma's hands and just grabs the hands and tosses the salad with grandma's hands.

[01:13:03] And then lights her a cigarette. Yeah. Yeah. Then lights her a cigarette. So thank you. It's almost like what you do with little kids. You're like, oh, look, you helped. See? Like, you know. So then we get the chicken and he asks, again, like this is a common thing. Like the dad asks you to carve like the turkey or something like that where you're meeting and you don't know, like, you don't know what rules they have and you're not like, you know, like I, I feel like I did this when I had to go to the house. I don't know how to fucking carve something.

[01:13:30] So like, but, but you don't want to be really bad at it. And, uh, yeah. And here's where you get the famous chicken, which, uh, seems to be, I don't know if you'd call it a live or what. It's about the size of a quail, like a small quail. Yeah, that's right. Right. And he, and the fork that he uses is like a, the kind you would carve a turkey with. So like a giant serving fork. So like, so the two tongs essentially like straddle both sides of the thing. Right. And he kind of like, okay, I'll carve it.

[01:13:58] And then as soon as he puts the tongs on it, you have this famous scene. You want to, so you guys want to describe what happens? I mean, like people have probably seen the movie or they'll get the, just what do you make of this? Just the, the, the oozing stuff that comes out of it. Like the mom, like having an orgasm over just seeing it. Like what's going on here? Well, there's an obvious interpretation, right? This is like amniotic fluid. And this is like the spread eagle. This is like the birth thing.

[01:14:25] There's a, there's a, you know, because this comes right before the announcement that there was a baby. Right. So, so the legs are like animating and they're moving up and down. The thing looks like to be alive. And then just this inordinate amount of fluid, more, more than could possibly be inside this bird just oozes out of the orifice. And it does look, yeah, it looks like a vagina at times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Like I never really picked up on that before. Yeah. I didn't either. So when you said it was obvious. Oh, okay.

[01:14:55] Okay. Right. Right. So, yeah. What about the mom, like basically coming to the chicken? Yeah. So this is, this is a simultaneous with the mom leaning back and kind of looks like she's orgasming, you know, her tongue is out. Like tongue protruding. Her tongue is out. And, and you know, right. So this, all this fluid's coming out. So that was my take, right? Afterwards I was like, oh, something. So we like have a turkey every Thanksgiving, like a free range, you know, well-treated turkey

[01:15:24] or so they say at Whole Foods or whatever. When you do carve the turkey, so much liquid comes out of it, you know? And it's like, I don't think anything of it except, oh, I just need to like make sure I have my apron on or something like that. Also, like if it's a really well done turkey and my wife makes a good turkey, it's like everyone is gathering around going, I can't wait for this, you know, like as you're cutting it.

[01:15:49] And so it's also the way I typically saw it, although I think Barry, you might be also completely right about this other way is it's just a, it's just the normal thing. That's also very weird that we all sit here carving this headless animal. A lot of liquid comes out and everyone looks at it like drooling because they're hungry. So like part of me thinks, oh, this is like a lot of the other stuff in the scene. It's just taking ordinary weirdness that we filter through our, our, our just like take

[01:16:19] for granted categories that he is heightening to sort of highlight the fact that our current practices are also very weird. If you stop and think about them for a second, the same time, Barry, it's pretty compelling. The legs are moving. They're up and down, you know? Although, yeah. Hopefully amniotic fluid doesn't look that tar like in real life. Yeah. What's the, what's the analog there, Barry? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:16:47] Since you've unlocked the code, like the twin perfect guy. Oh man. But then, okay. So what do you make then of like, is the sexuality of the mom, is that like just the first, first like hint that she's, you know, like a thirsty cougar? This had exactly what happened to me the first time I met Jen's mom. All right. So, so the mom comes out to inform Henry, takes him aside that we have to go kind of in

[01:17:16] secret and talk about something. And we know eventually that it's going to be that he had a baby, but, but right before she does that, she, she leans in and kind of makes out French kisses his neck in some way. Also unexplained. And they move on like nothing happened. No. Well, Mary, she goes, mom. Like a teenager. Mom, like don't embarrass me like that. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:17:44] But anyway, like it's never confirmed that he had sex with, I mean, he just says, you know, like there's a baby. He's like a baby. And they're not sure it even is a baby. What do you think of that? We don't even know if it is a baby, but apparently it's already been born, I guess. And it's in the hospital. Yeah. It's in the hospital. And so they can like pick it up and like start their life together after they get married. As soon as you get married. This is when he gets a nosebleed. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:18:14] Yeah. Yeah. And all of a sudden, like he's married and has a kid. He had no idea when he was walking over to our house that the next day he would be married and have a kid. As he gets his nosebleed, the dog starts whimpering and we get a very Twin Peaks-y shot going through the window. And then we're right into the apartment, the little precious bundle, the baby. Yeah. How would you guys describe this baby? God, man. I didn't know anything about this movie. Yeah.

[01:18:44] Like, I mean, I got the hint when they're like, it doesn't, we don't even know. I had gotten a small hint because I had read a little, what was a spoiler to me, there was body horror involved. But I still was not ready for whatever this fucking creature is. It looks like maybe a newborn E.T., whatever creature, or just like a big version of the sperm that we saw being tossed. Yeah.

[01:19:11] It kind of does have that vibe, like just a sperm that grew up. Yeah. That's right. If E.T. had a sperm head and the eyes were on the side of it. Yeah. Right? So it's a little bit E.T., it's a little bit sperm, it's a little bit lizard, alien, just. And nobody knows how this thing was made. And Lynch will never say. And he took the secret to his grave. To his grave. But it really does look alive. I mean, there are parts where it seems more animatronic, but there are other parts where

[01:19:40] you're like, that is a thing. Like, it looks like my dog Trixie a little bit. It's in some ways deeply repulsive and maybe malevolent. But in other ways, you know, it has these kind of cute little gurgles sometimes and you feel bad for it when it's sick. And when it's having trouble breathing, it wheezes a lot. I don't know, like it's a really fully successfully pulled off thing that's impossible to describe unless you see it.

[01:20:06] It looks a little bit like a newborn bird without a beak, but like kind of like raw skin. Yeah. Almost all of its body is swaddled in gauze. Yeah. In the beginning, it looks like how you would swaddle a newborn, you know, pretty tightly, but it's gauze and what's sticking out is a kind of longish straw-like neck to like the sperm-like head. And that's what you see most of for most of the film.

[01:20:33] That thing lying on the table in that exact spot throughout the entire film, Mary's trying to feed it in the beginning, just spits up. She's feeding it with a spoon and like some like just gunk with a spoon and it keeps spitting it up. And she's not a patient mother from the start. Yeah, that's right. I felt bad for the baby that like, you know, she's trying to feed it. Babies don't always want like having some of this goo dumped in their mouth.

[01:21:00] Like, you know, she's not very maternal as we know, but, but I actually thought that this did a really good job capturing the frustration and like that mothers have to go through, which is like, I think there's this expectation. You're, Oh, motherhood is so wonderful. And the truth of the matter is really like you have, you know, you're barely sleeping. Um, the, the kid may or may not want to eat and sleep when you want it to. You're, you're in discomfort for all sorts of reasons.

[01:21:28] Your nipples are, are raw. You probably have a husband who's not doing nearly as much as they might do. And so like when she finally screams, like to the baby to shut up, like I thought that captured the frustration that, that I think many women have, um, at some point. Yeah. So I don't judge her too badly except for the part where she leaves and never comes back. I forget which one of you said, like we don't, it's all the joy taken out of her. Henry at least will smile at the baby.

[01:21:57] She just never has, has anything but active like frustration and like animosity towards it. Whereas Henry at times actually does take care of it and, um, and, and, and smiles at it. So like, but I think again, we're seeing her through his perspective too. So she's always going to be impatient, always going to be antagonized by it. Um, so this is a weird scene.

[01:22:24] He goes into the elevator, he goes out and he finds a little box in his mailbox and he goes out to look at it. And it's something like a, like a little tapeworm. It doesn't seem at first, like it's the kind of worm that came out of his mouth at the beginning. And I don't know if it ever is, it looks a little like that original sperm snake thing, but it also just looks like more of like a tapeworm or something. He goes back up as one does. He lies.

[01:22:51] He says there was no mail when there was actually a box of, with the tapeworm inside and he puts it in his little cabinet. Uh, you know, you never know. I don't know what to make of this shit. Like I, I'm still puzzled by this little worm. Yeah. You know, just the other time we see that worm doesn't help us. Doesn't help us make sense of what the hell this is going on. It's like flipping over. Yeah. We see it flipping over in the dirt. Yeah. An animated sequence in the holes. Stop motion. And then we go through its mouth.

[01:23:20] Um, yes. You know, But it makes, but it doesn't help with what, what, what, what we're supposed to make of what this thing is. And what his plans are for it. And what, like, why is he keeping it? And, but worms and snakes and sperm definitely are a big theme in the movie. Uh, uh, and they come like that. There's very few scenes where they don't eventually play a role. So here's a, okay. Here's an idea. Like, I can't help but think that like, we are all worm food in the end.

[01:23:50] You know, we're eaten by worms. And this is maybe represents the thought of death as a relief from everything that's going on. And he's, he's hiding that he's keeping that as a special, like, this might be my out if things get too bad. And I don't want to share that that's the case, but like, this is the worm. This is the, the worms of death. And, and because arguably the end might be, um, his death. Yeah. Yeah. He cherishes it. And, and he has like that secret.

[01:24:19] It's almost like, um, like something that he wants to keep for himself because all of his life currently is, is just completely taken over. So having something to keep for yourself seems important to him. Yeah. And here's where Mary loses her patience. And like you said, Dave yells, shut up, shut up. Shut up. Shut up. I don't think that's what they say in the baby books is what to do. But I'm sure every parent has felt that. Has felt that. Oh, absolutely. If you haven't said it out loud, you definitely said it to yourself or in bed.

[01:24:49] Uh, she, she just decides I'm leaving. I need to get a good night's sleep. I don't know when I'll be back. And her getting the suitcase from under the bed. I love that. I love that scene. Cause I wasn't sure what she was doing, but she's on her knees at the foot of the bed, like motioning, like, like desperate, like pulling something. And then you realize she's fucking the bed. Fully packed. It looks like she's fucking the bed, but you realize it was her fully packed suitcase underneath the bed. That was her version of the worm. Just a fully packed suitcase.

[01:25:19] It was her go back. So, so now he's alone with the child for the first time. Right. And, um, he wonders whether it's sick and then takes its temperature. Yeah. Right. And then, and then it becomes sick. Uh, and you get a scene of pustules and just, it's just really gross. So it is. Very scary. Very scary. Yeah. Broken teeth. Like it looks like a, yeah. Rotting mouth. Yeah. And he decides, oh, okay, well then I'll just put a humidifier on. And okay.

[01:25:48] So this point of, uh, of the film, even the sounds was absolutely took me right back to the first five days of my daughter's birth. And why the sounds? Because there was this white noise machine, right? Cause when the, and we all know we were fathers, when the baby first comes out for a good month, maybe two months in order to quiet a newborn, you got to play some kind of loud white noise

[01:26:16] because when they're in the womb, it's just this amplified sound of, of, of the surroundings. And that's what comforts them. If there's too much quiet, which you need to sleep, they just can't, you know, settle down. And so we tried so many things static, right? The kind of thing that comes from, um, there was this, that whatever her bass, bassinet came with, it was like this, oh, it's like how the heartbeat would sound when other stuff goes on and it sounded exactly like the soundscape of that apartment. Yeah. Right.

[01:26:44] Just, just wind, like a combination of wind static, a thumping, like this regular heartbeat thing. And then like the sound of the bubbling humidifier because they get congested like day five or four or whatever. This happens with newborns all of a sudden, and you think they're sick and you freak out if it's your first child. And so you put on like a humidifier and all that. And I was like, oh, this is exactly what it's like to have a newborn. Maybe it's not an alien baby, but it feels like that. Right. And like, you feel like this illness, which is just the sniffles is like going to kill the thing.

[01:27:14] Right. So like it's pustules. I'm like, this is exactly right down to how it sounds. What I felt when I was sleep deprived, you know, maybe two hours of sleep a night, but it was intermittent. So it would be four in the morning and you come back up slightly awake and then you freak out because it's kind of stuffy. The child, you know? Yeah. I mean, it's funny because when she leaves, the baby has been crying nonstop. And as soon as she leaves, it actually calms down for the first time. And he's sitting by it.

[01:27:42] And yeah, he gives it, he takes its temperature. And then in a, it's like a jump scare. Like he looks at it, it's normal. And then he turns around and like all of a sudden, like, like you were describing, it's just, uh, but the fact that he then has the wherewithal and puts the humidifier there and sits with it is almost like the closest thing to like, I guess this is consistent with what you're saying. Normal domesticity. Like he's not freaking out about it.

[01:28:10] So it's, I almost took like a positive message out of just that little sequence. Uh, it, it won't, it doesn't last for more than a few moments, but I, that almost seemed like the best interaction that they ever have with, with a baby during that period. Yeah. There's affection there. Yeah. Um, but again, your subconscious, like, uh, it's, it's just true. Sometimes you're like, this is a creature.

[01:28:36] Like that, that thought that this is a creature is just captured wonderfully with this like actual fucking crazy creature. Yeah. And then he tries to leave. Cause I think, uh, I don't know where he's planning on going. I don't know if it's the neighbor at this point, but as soon as he opens the door, the baby who's been calm from the humidifier and for all the things that you were describing, Barry just starts immediately crying. And, uh, and then he closes the door and it stops and then he opens it again and it starts

[01:29:06] crying, basically trapping him in the apartment. And it's making these now at this point, like horrible gargling, wheezing noises. So then he goes to sleep and now we get the first act of the radiator cabaret. Uh, we see the woman, she has like paper mache cheeks or some kind, like big exclude excretions on her cheeks.

[01:29:30] Uh, looks, you know, I mean, I guess if you deformed in a way, but do you notice that there is a picture of a mush, like a mushroom atomic bomb in the background? Her cheeks look like the bomb, like the, the mushroom cloud of the bomb. And so I couldn't help but think, you know, this is again, my narrative that what she represents is the death, um, like by dint of being associated with that deathly explosion.

[01:29:58] Yeah, maybe. I mean, that's not like, I have kind of the opposite interpretation, but, uh, I'm interested as we get further to, uh, to discuss that more. Yeah. I don't know. Like it, but yeah, whatever it is, the, the emotion that he associates with her is escape and, and yeah, it's like relief or escape. This is when the weird sperm start falling onto the stage and she starts stamping them out.

[01:30:25] And again, here, I couldn't help but think that she's representing, like she starts stepping on these little sperm creatures and killing them. Anti-fecundity. She is sexuality without the baby, without the reproduction. She represents like the liberty that maybe you would have if you were in a marriage with a brand new baby where sex is not like something that's like being thought of at any point for, for a while.

[01:30:55] She represents the pill. Yeah. And, and I thought like the sperm falling might just represent him jerking off, like fantasizing. Oh, interesting. Uh, I mean, so one thing to say before that happens is she, you have this kind of carnival like music playing, uh, like organ music and her expression is like giddy kind of like a little nervous, but also excited. And she's doing this dance, which just involves her kind of shuffling from one side of the stage

[01:31:23] to the other side of the stage. And then all of a sudden the sperm snakes start falling and she, you know, she's a professional. She doesn't panic. She just starts, she continues the dance, but then also starts stomping on a few of them. And that yellow pus blood comes out of it. Uh, then she's pulled back into a kind of howling darkness. So I think she does represent an escape, like you said, Dave, for sure, but also maybe some kind of potential in Henry that he's not realizing. Yeah.

[01:31:54] Uh, and, and maybe that potential is death, but, uh, a potential at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Like the two, the two takes that we have aren't that different, especially if you don't view death as a negative, like it's perfectly consistent with everything that you're saying about it. Um, uh, this did, I, I did think of this as club silencio with some cum giant sperm. There's the sperm is trying to hit a target.

[01:32:23] There's something going on. She's dodging it. That's definitely true. And she kills it. That's also true. So that's, Oh yeah. She's like playing space invaders with the sperm. She's shuffling back and forth. Right. It's just the literal description. I don't know what to make on top of all of that. Right. So, you know, at first I thought. Definitely sperm. Also like, it's like little snake likes, uh, things with sperm like heads that are falling, but we don't have to, uh, it's, it's not. No, we don't. Yeah. It's whatever it is. I was convinced from the beginning that it was sperm and that just, that's how I read it.

[01:32:53] That's right. It's whatever it is that dropped into the puddle in the beginning. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And even maybe the baby at the end. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So then, uh, I think once you go back into that, like howling darkness, then he wakes up. So I think, you know, like Lynch is telling us, this is some kind of dream escape for him. You think he's waking up, uh, to whatever reality is supposed to be in this world, but his wife is there. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:33:22] This is very, this made me feel, I would say this is the thing that made me feel most uneasy. Uh, she's there and she kind of moves over to, you know, his side of the bed and she's making him uncomfortable and he's like, move over, move over. He's very petulant. Uh, almost the whole movie. And she's swaddled. Tabler. She's swaddled. Yeah. She's not just under the blankets, but you don't know that at first. You think maybe she's swaddled like the baby.

[01:33:48] And, but then also just clicking and spasming and, and that click, the sound that she keeps making and he's just trying to go back to sleep. It's, it's kind of terrifying. Uh, and then, you know, nevermind the fact that then when he starts go opening the swaddle, all these snakes come out of her. Sperm. You got, you see sperm everywhere. Like here, it doesn't seem like it's sperm necessarily that is coming out. Uh, it seems like snakes.

[01:34:18] Maybe not. Like, uh, they're, um, they're, they're definitely like long and with a head and he, he smashy throws them up against the wall. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. You know, I guess it's like sometimes, you know, the wife comes on your side of the bed when you're trying to sleep. Uh, you know, he encodes this in his unconscious, but now we're in real dream territory. You know, he woke up, but he didn't wake up to even the reality of this movie.

[01:34:47] Like, uh, we're, we're on our way. Uh, the cupboard now lights up and starts to open. Uh, and, and here's what you, uh, alluded to earlier, Barry, that the, the small tapeworm looking thing just starts running around and flipping, uh, like in like stop motion. It's, it's, it's like a slinky the way it moves, but really fast for the, it's the only thing in this movie that's super fast. Into and out of holes, presumably in the dirt pile. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[01:35:17] The tree is coming out of. It disappears for a second and then reappears. And then it seems like it yells. It like opens its mouth. There's this big chasm that we seem to enter. It's very cool. The way he films this. It's like all of a sudden we're journeying into this tapeworm's mouth somehow. Yeah. And so then he's in space for a second, but then he's also in his apartment back, like sitting on the bed. And this is where the neighbor, the beautiful neighbor from across the hall, as she's called

[01:35:47] in the credits, is, uh, comes in. And she emerges from the rich blacks of my OLED TV and says she locked herself out. She asks if she can spend the night, where's its wife? And, uh, the bed is turned as they kiss and what I wouldn't call an erotic scene. Um, the, the bed turns into some sort of giant puddle and they fall beneath it.

[01:36:13] You know, when I saw this, it, it looked to me like, I think my note said sex in the primordial ooze, you know, like, like again, something this, the way that this film represents life as both like the force of life, but like also in this dark, dark way to me, it seemed like, okay, we emerged from the primordial ooze. That's where life started. And there they are having sex in what looks to me like a primordial ooze. Yeah. It's primal and also hostile.

[01:36:44] A lot of the time. Yeah. The baby is kind of crying. I'm kind of surprised the baby lets them do this. But again, I don't think we're in literal territory here. They're doing it. They're in the pool. She kind of looks horrified at the crying child or maybe not quite as hard, but she, there's a look she gives to the child, but then they turns back and then they keep doing it. Yeah. Yeah. She looks like very frightened at that creature. Uh, yeah. I took it as more like, Oh fuck, you have a kid that's going to be crying while I'm trying to have sex.

[01:37:13] Uh, cock block. Yeah. But then she keeps, she goes back to, to doing it, but then she leaves. She goes back into the blackness and now out of the blackness emerges the lady in the radiator. Although we didn't know we were in the radiator. Um, and she sings this song that I have not been able to get out of my head since I saw this in the theater on Wednesday night. Basically a very simple song. I'm not going to try to do the tune because then I'll get back in my head.

[01:38:03] And then that's, uh, that's the whole song. And she has a kind of, on the one hand, kind of beatific, uh, look on her face, like, like a kind of touched by divine goodness. But then also I think you could read it as potentially sinister. It's, it's a really interesting effect that she produces with this song.

[01:38:32] Is this song something we're supposed to think of as presenting a positive or affirmative vision of something, or is it a trap? When, by this point I was like, she's calling him, you know, she's a siren calling him. And I, what I think of calling him to death by saying in heaven. Um, but, but again, does just to an escape, like leave, leave wherever you are. Um, you said beatific, like, yeah, she does have this, this look.

[01:38:58] It reminds me of like a twenties, like Betty Boop kind of like, like style. And he goes, you say he's summoning her. Or she, he, he goes up to her and he, and she does something with her hands. Right. She like opens her hands. She like a, like it's an offering of some kind that she has. There's nothing in her hand, but she kind of holds them as if it's like some kind of offering to him. And he wants to go, you know, he's hesitant as always, but he walks up to her and he touches

[01:39:28] her hand and you do get a blinding white light, but then she vanishes. And then all of a sudden in his play, in her place is the man in the planet. And then they roll in the, a giant version of the plant tree that's on his bedside table into like, he's in the radiator now. He should, I guess, indicate. Um, so you're just like, what the hell is going on here? Why is his bedside table thing come in? Why is the man with the, and this is before things completely go crazy. Right.

[01:39:56] Uh, yeah, this is before his head pops off. Like, I'm just wondering like, what the fuck is going on? I have no fucking idea. No idea whatsoever. Yeah. You're, you're right. Like the, the way that she holds her hands out, it's, it's like she has something in them. Yeah. Like a secret fork. Cause she, she's not really reaching out to him. It's like, she's holding something close to her that she's got like beckoning him to come see, you know? And that's when he grabs her hand. Yeah.

[01:40:25] But, and then head pops off. Uh, first he starts moving his hands like, like on like a curtain rod like thing. And then yeah, pop. And, uh, uh, and it goes onto the ground and then a babe, the baby. He's his true self. His true self is. Well, yeah. Do you mean the baby is his true self? Cause the baby's head comes out from his neck. Yep. Yep. That's why the baby looks like that because that's what he is. Apple of his father's eye.

[01:40:55] The head doesn't fall far from the tree. Wait, is that? That's good. Uh, and the baby has this expression. It's still kind of crying, but it's also looking a little triumphant. I think if I can interpret its expression. I mean, it is like a funny effect with like the hands, you know, his hands still like scrolling through that metal tube or whatever. It looks like the baby. Yeah. It does kind of look like that to me. Yeah. Uh, yeah.

[01:41:25] It's like, uh, so then the head disappears from there, drops into the quote unquote real world. This is, I love this sequence. Yeah. Like, this is crazy. This is crazy. Like the vibes to me was like the, in, in Mulholland drive when we get into the diner. It's also its own little mini short film. It's like this, you know, this boy finds a head, uh, picks it up, takes it to like, uh, this building in an office and you have no idea what's going on. The guy. Right. Right.

[01:41:55] That's why I was talking about the diner scene. It is like that. All of a sudden becomes its own short. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a film within a film, uh, about how you make erasers. And, uh, I just, yeah, it's just very funny. Like we, we gotta speed up, but I just love that, you know, he, there's a lot of levels he has to pass, but when he gets to the factory that the eraser maker and he gives him the head and he tries it out and you see all the pencils being made and the, the erasers come on it.

[01:42:23] And then, you know, once he kind of confirms, he goes like, it's okay. Hey, you know, he sounds like he's from like a forties movie and they give him the money and like, it was just a good transaction. The kid got his money. They got their erasers. Quality eraser right here. Good job. Good job. Yeah. Yeah. And then you have this visual motif that you see quite a bit, like the kind of a dust swirling in space. I suppose you could also, since you guys see sperm everywhere, you could think it's sperm, uh, with his head.

[01:42:52] And, uh, and then Henry wakes up. I think he has a, like, I'm losing my shit moment there. Yeah. Like it's. Is this where he, when he wakes up, like his arms are almost look like the bird wings of like a dead bird, you know? I didn't see that. Do you know what I'm talking about? I remember. Yeah. He goes like, I think it's when he wakes up, he wakes up like this. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

[01:43:22] He's just throwing stuff and like clawing at the bed. Uh, and he, and he sits up and he's like, Whoa, that's what it, that's what I got from it. Um, and then this is weird. Like all of a sudden he's looking out a window, which we didn't think. It's not a brick wall anymore. What? It's not a brick wall. Yeah. There's no brick wall. It's not a brick wall. And he sees some kind of assault in the like, uh, street below in a puddle. Yeah. And, and I don't think he had any other windows in that place. So all of a sudden the bricks were removed.

[01:43:52] He goes, opens the door. He's been, and he goes to the neighbor. He's like, I want to, I think he probably dreamt about the neighbor. He's like, you know what? I'm going to make this real. And he goes, knocks on the neighbor's door and there's no answer. And then when he comes back, the baby's just laughing at him. Yeah. Like he's laughing. He's definitely laughing at him. It was like, ma is like an evil cackle. It's like, I'm, he's mocking him at that point. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, he's going for a booty call. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. It's just hilarious, you know?

[01:44:21] And again, like you can't take this fully literally, but you probably think your baby is fucking with you at certain times. Uh, and it's just fully enjoying it. Yeah. And then when he does hear the woman again, she's with just this truly repulsive guy with these pustules coming from his cheek. Uh, and it's, it's weird because that looks disgusting. Whereas the deformed cheeks of the blonde lady and the radiator seems less, doesn't, it seems weird, but not repulsive. Yeah. Cause it's less diseased looking. Yeah.

[01:44:51] Yeah. But, but okay. So then the neighbor looks at him, the woman and sees that baby head image with his body that we saw earlier when his head popped off. Like, like what's going on there? Like she sees his true self too. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. But it does seem like that's a key moment. Like that's, that's, that's the moment that where I think he decides to cut open the swaddles of the baby is when she sees him like that. I, I, so I think there's two ways to read that.

[01:45:20] One is it's how she sees him. And the other way is how he is thinking she's seeing him. Yeah. Right. Yeah. She's repulsed by me. Yes. Like I am. That's right. I am just this thing. And that, that might be an explanation for what comes next. Yes. She associates me with the baby, which means I am like just completely unappealing to her right now. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. I think that's. And he gets this resolve on his face. For the, one of the first times in the whole movie. For one of the first times. Right. Yeah.

[01:45:49] It's like anger, but angry resolve. And he reaches for the scissors. Oh, you want to do this, Tam? You're going to describe what happens in this last scene? So he cuts open the swaths and the baby starts crying. And you don't know if the baby's crying because he just doesn't want something like these scissors near the baby. But at a certain point, you get the sense that the swaddles are actually part of the baby. It's not a swaddle. It's like an organic material that is part of the baby's physical organism.

[01:46:18] And then he gets to the end and opens it. And it's just the baby's organs. Just, and all like the heart, the lungs. And the baby's freaking out. You know, you get the sense the baby is like, oh, like something bad's about to happen. It doesn't seem like he's dying yet, but it seems like the baby might die if like Henry didn't. Quickly sew it back up. Yeah. Yeah. It felt like baby murder already to me. But then he isn't going to take chances.

[01:46:47] He finishes the job, stabs the baby. He cuts it up the middle of the organs. Whenever the organs are in the middle, he doesn't just stab it. I think he actually cuts. He actually uses the same. Yeah. That's right. That's right. You're right. And then that leads to a lot of spurting. Yeah. Yeah. Like all of a sudden this, what will later be called in like Fire Walk With Me and Twin Peaks, like Garmon Bosia.

[01:47:14] This like creamed corn looking thing comes out of the baby. Now in Twin Peaks, Garmon Bosia represents misery and suffering. But it is something that like these evil demons feed on. We also get now one of these worm things. One of these. Yeah. It's like also spurting onto the electrical outlet. Yes. Which is going, which is electricity is now going crazy in the whole apartment. And great shot of his face.

[01:47:44] Like the lighting just looks great on his face. Henry's or the baby. Yeah. Henry's. Yeah. And his face is distressed and, you know, lit halfway and the sparkling. And this is where the fucking baby head starts. Yeah. It's not going down without a fight, the baby. And it just becomes giant and multiple and like all over the walls. Everything is completely out of control. Sound wise, the head wise being big, enormous all over the place.

[01:48:13] And then all of a sudden the lights go out. The planet breaks up. It seems like Henry's in the dust space again and then enters the black. And here's where the man on the planet. We got a shot of the man on the planet. He tries to push the gears, but they're jammed. And he keeps trying to push them and he can't get them to work. And then it becomes light. And Henry is with the girl in the radiator. She gives him a hug. And we get this look on Henry's face.

[01:48:42] Maybe, you know, this would play into, I think, your interpretation too, David. Like he looks peaceful maybe for the first time. But it's enigmatic. Like I think his expression could, you could read in a lot of different ways. His eyes are closed and they look tranquil. Fade to black. Movies over. What do you make of all this, Barry? I will not give a full coherent interpretation because I've only seen this once.

[01:49:09] But our discussion, it strikes me that the key is to compare the wife, the neighbor, and the woman on stage. I think the key is to look at the roles that they play and represent for him in this particular kind of life stage. Yeah. And this particular kind of relationship that he has. I read all that worm stuff as sperm also. Yeah. The same as Dave.

[01:49:37] But like the particular relationship between you and sperm, procreation, your sexuality, and what that does for you in your life. And I think that's the key. Whatever the story is, it's got to be something about what those three women represent to Henry. Finally, the woman on stage is the one who has the last kind of say. Yeah. That's sort of the salvation.

[01:50:07] But whatever that is, that's got to be it, I think. So what is it for you, Barry? What would you say is like what is the neighbor representing as opposed to the radiator woman? You know, so the very first scene with the neighbor, she was reporting about the phone call, but she gave him these hungry eyes. Right. She's clearly immediately. I was like, oh, this is the sexy neighbor.

[01:50:34] You could pretty straightforwardly read her as representing when you get married at a young age. Like all the women now you see, they're like, well, guess that's now off limits. Like it just seems like the whole world wants to fuck you. And yet and now you're not supposed to anymore. But one of the things that I noticed about him when it came to the mother and the girlfriend, he's a frightened individual, but he cooperates.

[01:51:01] So there's frightened people who are frightened and they just like detach. Right. They're like, I'm going to avoid. But he's the opposite. Right. So he's frightened by and nervous and just anxious about everything. But he goes along with everything. Yeah. Right. He's not the kind of person like whatever you want, whatever I'm going to do. Right. The wife is. Abandons the child care right at the beginning. And but he cooperates.

[01:51:29] He's like, OK, well, I guess that's what she needs. And so I guess I'm going to be tasked with watching. Yeah. I mean, he does. He gets a little patchy on about it. It's like, why don't you just never come back? You know. Right. That's true. That's true. Yeah, that's true. So so that's as agentic as he is. Exactly. And really in the whole movie up till him killing the killing. Yeah. Yeah. But so clearly the neighbor lady is it's much more idlike. It's much like this is the horny self. This is the this is this is the sex.

[01:51:58] You know, I couldn't you know, I'm just I'm trying here. Like the woman on stage, on the other hand, she's like stepping on the sperm. She's dodging the sperm. You know, that's that's my reading of it. But she's clearly there's something about an afterlife, like something about bodiless virtue going on there. Something about that in death. I don't know. That's who he embraces at the end. Are you sticking with this is his fight? His death. She beckoned him to death as the final escape liberation from this oppressive life.

[01:52:29] I took that from Dave. Dave, what do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel that way. I feel that way extra at the end there, because whatever the man in the planet is representing, like that planet blows up and, you know, the levers no longer work. It feels like the destruction of his body, maybe.

[01:52:53] And the warm embrace of the tempting, idyllic, cherubic, you know, angelic woman who's singing about heaven. And that flash of white, especially after that baby grew, you know, baby probably did him in, you know, like I'm sure he was choosing death, but it feels like the baby was was doing him in there at the end too. But again, the death, if that is death, is better than the world that he's been in this.

[01:53:22] And I can't say enough about like what you've already been talking about, the industrial landscape and soundscape and the way that all that, the way that it just makes everything feel oppressive. Yeah. And it never stops until the quiet at the very end. Never stops. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, there's a lot speaking to that. But I, so here's. Yeah. I'm very curious to hear your takeoff. So there's a little extra textual stuff, which A, that he called it his most spiritual film.

[01:53:52] B, that he start like one year into it started doing transcendental meditation, has always talked about that as until he started doing that, he was very fearful person. And then that just showed him that there was, there's something underneath all of that. That's actually like, you know, sometimes he refers to it as like an ocean of consciousness, a, you know, a light, a reserve of energy and creativity.

[01:54:20] And what transcendental meditation allows you to do, he says is get past a lot of these things that are holding you down, holding people down. And if you try to map some of that onto the movie, I think it works pretty well. Like, you know, here is a guy who is imprisoned by his fears, by his anxieties, his timidity. And he, that's how he sees the world is how we see it in the movie. And then there are these just beckonings of like, wait, there's something else going on here.

[01:54:50] It's not just industrial clanging and worm babies and shrewish wives and, you know, treacherous neighbors across the hall that will be with you one day. And then some just repulsive man the next day. There is something else that if you can overcome your fears, then you will have access to, you can experience.

[01:55:15] And so if all the things that you call sperms, if you think of that as just different kinds of fears, different kinds of things that are holding you back and making you see the world in this deeply counterproductive way and noisy way. Like if you can access it, there's a reservoir of something else. But first you have to face your fears and confront them.

[01:55:37] And I take that end scene where the baby, who is probably his greatest anxiety, now it's like all over the place and giant and everything's fritzing out. This is the final confrontation with his fears that leads to a kind of awakening at the end that is symbolized and called to by this lady in the radiator.

[01:56:00] And when she hugs and he feels at peace, you could look at that as death, but you could also look at it as a kind of liberation that comes through some kind of enlightenment or awakening. And maybe one for at least David Lynch that you might have, that you might access through, in his case, transcendental meditation. Yeah. I think that is interesting and helps make sense of why it's not a real baby. Yeah.

[01:56:29] Why it's because if we say, okay, it's a baby by metaphor. It's a deformed offspring of some aspect of yourself. Some literally, it's like decapitates you sometimes. Sometimes. And what you do is you nurture it. That's what you feel compelled to do. Right.

[01:56:53] It is something that is disruptive, but also you feel the need to take care of it. Right. Like your ego. And that would make, yeah. So that would make the murder scene not a murder scene or an instance of infanticide. Right. But a kind of killing of some aspect. Ego death. Right. Yeah. You know, there's this idea of samsara, like all this stuff that gets in the way of you accessing who you really are and what reality really is.

[01:57:22] And it's just like all this stuff gets in the way of that. Anxieties, thoughts, your ego, your identity, and fears. Once you're able to clear that away, you realize that you're not just this little head, that you're something bigger. And, you know, you could see the man on the planet is just churning out samsara, you know, like the illusion, the web of illusions that entrap us.

[01:57:45] And then when he can't do it at the end, it's because glimpsed beyond that normal surface stuff that imprisons us. And, you know, this is maybe why he calls it his most spiritual film. And last thing, this is too gimmicky and facile maybe.

[01:58:04] But remember, Dave, when we had Sam Harris on and we were talking about the no head aspect of Buddhism, one of the things, one of the ways that you can glimpse your true nature as a spacious awareness is to recognize that you have no head. That you actually, that that is a construct or a concept that you impose, but it's not how you experience the world. Well, you know, you could see the movie as erase your head. Erase your head. There you go. Clever. There you go. That's it.

[01:58:34] Solved. Solved, baby. Finally got the right interpretation. Yeah. So I like everything you said. I obviously, you know, this is open. The one thing that I want to know, like if it works on your reading is this feeling that I have that the lady in the radiator is tempting him to come. Yeah. Like, and like you said, at one point, it's like, is she good? Yeah.

[01:59:02] You know, and, and given like that, that, you know, the baby kind of looks like a sperm and maybe if those other things are sperms, like the fact that she is like crushing them under her feet and calling him, she's like, it feels like she's calling him to like free yourself from your body, from this bodily existence, from this reproduction, from like the, the world in which you live that is full of this like gross, weird bodily stuff. Yeah. And come to me.

[01:59:58] And definitely, definitely that helps make sense of why when his head popped off, it was that baby. Yeah. Like I like between what you and Barry were saying, like maybe the baby was just his ego in some way. Yeah. And, and like the, the sin, the potentially sinister aspect of her is maybe the fact that he doesn't know whether he can trust this or not. You know, it could be that, or it could be that we're not meant to know whether this is something that's like death. She's hiding the thing in her hand. Yeah.

[02:00:28] She's like, she's not revealing to him everything yet. She's, yeah. That's right. Um, I love, by the way, in the, in the interview that you've been referencing, Ray says it's his most spiritual film. It's just the best, best response when the interviewer says, can you expand on that? He just says, no. Classic Lynch. Perfect. It's perfect. Quintessential Lynch right there. Yeah. Yeah. Where does this rank Barry and your like favorite Lynch movies since you've seen a bunch? Um, I would put it.

[02:00:58] Wow. It's so different. I don't know if it's commensurable with like blue velvet or, for instance, which I put, I put up there for me. Me too. Um, well, yeah, I think, I think if blue velvet's on the top, um, different, probably commensurable with lost highway a little bit for me. I would put it right there. Like with that, you know, like I'm not sure which one I like better. It probably depends on the, you know, the day. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:01:28] It's so different. Are those both higher than Inland Empire? I don't get it. I just, I can't, I can't, I don't know how to engage with Inland Empire quite yet. Well, we have a Patreon episode. You teach in the Inland Empire. That's right. Yeah. I teach in the Inland Empire now. Now you'll, now you'll, like, it'll be obvious to you. Now you finally get it. It is much more perplexing than this movie, I would say. Yes. Um, you know, I have not seen that many Lynch films, um, but I do, this is, this does feel

[02:01:58] like it's in its own category as the primordial ooze from which so much of the other Lynch, uh, like comes from, like you just can see even the little that I know from the, from Twin Peaks and from the movies I've seen, you can just see it here. And it is like, we've talked before about people's first work. It has all these ideas that work their way into these other movies. So it's like, it is like the, the dad, it is the spermatozoa, um, that creates the other words.

[02:02:26] It's the eraser heads baby of Lynch's career. Yeah. It's such a touchstone. Um, I think it's great. I really loved it these times. It's also 89 minutes. That I've just invented. Like. It's very easy to get through. Well, I don't know if it's easy. Time wise. Time wise. Time wise. Uh, all right. Uh, any final thoughts, Barry?

[02:02:55] Um, not at all. Another love this opportunity to talk about David Lynch. I think it's my first David Lynch discussion group. Oh, nice. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, uh, by his book, become better people by reading that and also by seeing a razor head and either dying or becoming enlightened. Thanks, Barry. Thanks guys. Join us next time on very bad wizards.

[02:04:03] Just a very bad wizard.