Pill Pod 65 - Don't Look Up (Exclusive)
Added 2022-01-08 03:39:12 +0000 UTCMovie episode! This is more than a film, it's now a cultural event, and content is content and we are serious about that content. Please time your molly accordingly. Cheers all!
Comments
I know I'm late to the game, not sure if anyone looks at this at a later date but just listened today... There are mostly ideological responses here, and that's part of my problem with how the movie situates itself. In my opinion is that the movie is fine, not great: and not because it's ham-fisted and on the nose (which are criticisms so bad they're not worth responding to). It makes me think of László Nemes, a Ukrainian director, when he says, "Cinema today – by jumping from angles, from points of view, always giving the right amount of information and the right vision when it’s needed for dramatic purposes – gives the audience the impression that they control, they can judge, and they can understand. I think, on the contrary, I have a responsibility to my audience to take them on a journey that is also by themselves, and show that you cannot always open all the curtains. There’s a labyrinth in our life, and there is a limitation to our understanding. This film is about the desire to understand, but that there are limits to this understanding." This is what Kubrick understood: his films aren't apolotical but can be read that way past "Dr. Strangelove" gives the audience space to see internal contradictions and paradoxes of our logic. Pills was onto something good when he talked about the apparatus itself of media-making being a system that is obscured from giving easy understandings of how to fix problems of misinformation and zealotry. Kubrick was interested in an aesthetic of contingency (Thomas Allen wrote about this very well), and it's too much to go into writing but even if you put together the ultimate plan for fixing climate change, you cannot account for forces that are beyond what you can plan for that at times no logic can overcome.
Brandon Held
2022-03-15 22:16:22 +0000 UTCOne of the few episodes where I agree with Matt. I don’t think the masses are as dumb as leftist intellectuals assume they are. Zizek’s analysis of ideology can be useful here. the ideology of today is not one of “false consciousness” (as marx wrote) where people need to be “awoken” to the truths of the exploitative system. Rather, the ideology of today is one of cynicism. Most people are well aware that the status quo is corrupt and the system is broken. They just don’t believe there is a way to change it, they are cynical about change because they have been lied to so many times by liberal politicians who promise “change.” We have gotten to the point where over 40% of people don’t vote at all and many people who vote do so out of pragmatism (democrats voting for a lesser evil) or put of enjoyment (trump supporters enjoying that they are “trolling the libbs.” In many ways I do think more democracy could be helpful. For example, if there were a referendum to implement a Universal Basic Income would most people vote no? I doubt it
1DimeMan
2022-01-17 02:28:06 +0000 UTCLulz
Ronnie5545
2022-01-16 05:10:24 +0000 UTCThey were working from source material, and then suddenly forgot what made the source material worth adapting and picked plot development over character development. TBF I think this happened in the book series also, though at a later point.
Plastic Pills
2022-01-13 05:54:08 +0000 UTCIt is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a humanist to contemplate the implications of the climate extinction crisis. Tying the two eps together; learning to deal with the climate extinction crisis entails a recognition of the limits of the Human. The authoritarianism required isn’t one of the State over subjects but rather an end to what Val Plumwood called Human Chauvinism and it’s prioritising of human (white,male,colonial,heteronormative) rationality. It’s not so much that we never were modern but rather the realisation that we were always, already not (just) human. An authoritarianism of the Real. If this is Gaia it’s more the Gaia of Margulis than that of Lovelock; a symbiotic distributed thing rather than a planetary essence. Not some loving earth mother but an inaccessible, all encompassing, somewhat disinterested, unknowable other that demands our subordination. A Real something like Zizeks Real that is both sublime and horrifying. For what it’s worth I think that Matt is correct when he argues that there are no solutions in an authoritarian State but, unlike Matt, the ability to deal with the crises we face will require a democracy that is distributed and subordinate to the Real. Something that looks a little like anarchy! Something that might look like the AANES in North and East Syria or like reimagined city states or like a cybersyn structure with top down systems controlled by bottom up direction or like something else entirely but always linked to the Real There were things other than Paris happening around the time of May 68. Ehrlich in 68; Limits to growth in 72; Carson’s Silent Spring in 62; a revolutionary shift in relations to non western cultures with social anthropology shifts and new knowledge being uncovered (like Mungo man in Australia which suddenly dated the First inhabitants to at least 40k years); the discovery of Ozone layer depletion in the mid 70’s; the establishment of clean air and water legislation along with the EPA established by Nixon!! in 70. Seen in this light the neoliberal ascendency of the 80’s can be viewed as a counterrevolution. Nixon establishes the EPA, talks of fossil fuel reduction and the counterrevolutionary Reagan’s first task is ripping solar panels off the roof of the Whitehouse. This reaches its most absurdist level with the development in the 80’s of ‘endogenous growth theory’- materialism denying the material. And yet the revolution continues unabated. We still know that the planet is heating; we still know that resource extraction will destroy our life systems; we learn more every day about the links between forestry and wildfire; we even discover that depression can be alleviated by communities of earth others is our gut biome. There are political grass roots movements coalescing around ecological catastrophic events. In my community those political affiliations are a response to the Black Summer climate bushfires of 2019-2020. I reckon the Western North American heat wave of 2021 will also have political ramifications particularly if the one in a thousand year event happens again in the near future. On the critics response the movie it’s worth reading Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Great derangement’ and the inability of the novel to deal with climate change. Also Scorsese’s attack on Marvel as not being cinema because “it isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being” neatly sums up why cinema and the novel can’t do the crisis. On the narrative that we’re all fucked, Donna Haraway from the introduction to Staying with the Trouble “The second response, harder to dismiss, is probably even more destructive: namely, a position that the game is over, it’s too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything any better, or at least no sense having any active trust in each other in working and playing for a resurgent world. Some scientists I know express this kind of bitter cynicism, even as they actually work very hard to make a positive difference for both people and other critters. Some people who describe themselves as critical cultural theorists or political progressives express these ideas too. I think the odd coupling of actually working and playing for multispecies flourishing with tenacious energy and skill, while expressing an explicit “game over” attitude that can and does discourage others, including students, is facilitated by various kinds of futurisms. One kind seems to imagine that only if things work do they matter—or, worse, only if what I and my fellow experts do works to fix things does anything matter.” Love the show. Proud to be a Patron.
Peter Haggar
2022-01-13 01:01:49 +0000 UTCI’m curious pills, what was the game of thrones pulled by the expanse in season 3?
archivedtransience
2022-01-11 21:40:32 +0000 UTCListening to Matt’s invective against Godard was entertaining.
Walker Goff
2022-01-11 18:44:25 +0000 UTCThis is a good episode to make freely available. If you are trying to get more people interested in the podcast I think this episode will draw people in.
Brian Spatola
2022-01-11 13:59:17 +0000 UTCand its not a far stretch of the imagination to see it happening in one form or another, remember the water ways opening up due to ice melting in the arctic has been hailed as a good thing as much as a bad thing.
The Gfc draws
2022-01-10 00:55:01 +0000 UTC1. "never let a crisis go to waste". 2. Jordan Peterson/musk/gates threesome aftermath. 3. this movie sucks because its like a Disney exec with a left leaning step son read some Chomsky and made a big name movie out of it.
The Gfc draws
2022-01-10 00:51:31 +0000 UTCMy take on the billionaire's voice being over the top weird was that it was meant to seem forced, because of billionaires need to otherise themselves from ordinary people so as to justify their position of power. He's not like us, he's a genius, you can tell by his weird voice and strange mannerisms
Myles Jeffers
2022-01-10 00:05:34 +0000 UTCI was a little surprised to not hear a mention of chomsky's manufacturing consent, especially since there was a brief interlude about which news sources are allegedly more credible than other mainstream media sources.
LesZedCB
2022-01-09 02:57:48 +0000 UTCGetting Zizek vibes from you lol nice
Plastic Pills
2022-01-08 21:47:49 +0000 UTCIs the problem with climate change really that we don’t care or aren’t aware of the problem or is it really that a decent number are aware and the system doesn’t allow us to enact change? Pills, probably - some statement about fu*k binaries, that I agree with
Waya Dalimber
2022-01-08 17:40:51 +0000 UTCPills' take on the media apparatus determining behaviour and maintaining the status quo is incredibly spot on, as are his final thoughts. How about a psychoanalytic take on this, that unconsciously we want something like that comet to happen because at this point in late capitalism, the spectacle has rendered modern life so banal that we should be so lucky if an apocalyptic event like that had to come along and free us from this walking dead state? And I mean a proper event, not like this pandemic, which in many ways has just resulted in a more tedious status quo.
anacidcommie
2022-01-08 13:50:53 +0000 UTCOK just finished listening, I’m not really that smart but ill try - : re Matt’s argument about more democracy.. no I don’t think it would work because 1) the general public does not have the time nor should they need to learn the complexities of the systems holding their society and ecology in place- necessary to make informed decisions. If we can’t trust the people we elect to do what they were hired to do, then what? 2) as displayed in the movie, the human response to impending doom ranges from panic, denial, resignation, delusion… its hard to believe that people would suddenly see clearly when we’ve been raised in dare I say a simulation where everything is banalized. It is kind of funny though to think about how this movie has people talking about climate change right now but seeing that its even less viral than squid game, this topic will probably only last for like a month or so :/
Rei Lem
2022-01-08 06:05:28 +0000 UTCThis is one of many available takes, but I'll be satisfied if you agree with me that matt is wrong😁
Plastic Pills
2022-01-08 04:01:27 +0000 UTCWe're making up for last week, yall need your content!
Plastic Pills
2022-01-08 03:55:47 +0000 UTCMovie was a bit tooo on the nose, but nonetheless you cannot walk away without thinking yeah the world is fucked. Also side note: Leo’s dry ass lips made me so uncomfortable LOL
Rei Lem
2022-01-08 03:54:32 +0000 UTCAlready? So fast!
Max Olson
2022-01-08 03:43:38 +0000 UTC
