554. Frame Rate: I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Feat. Brooks Brown)
Added 2023-01-01 14:00:09 +0000 UTC
Happy New Year! Woah, 2023 has arrived! Beans! Everyone, get in here! Okay, great. Alright, everyone be quiet, we have something to say… we create avatars of each other in our minds and imprison them with expectation without their consent! Yeah! It’s depressing! Let’s all think about sads and listen to this podcast while Brooks is here!
Features:
Brooks Brown: https://discord.com/invite/dgqc
Michael Swaim: https://twitter.com/SWAIM_CORP
Abe Epperson: https://twitter.com/AbeTheMighty
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Comments
This sounds like what the joker movie wanted to be
Cyclops giraffe
2024-01-20 09:53:05 +0000 UTC"...people want violence to be correct because they enjoy violence." Great thought, I'll check out that video
Scottie Wottie
2023-01-03 16:50:30 +0000 UTCYeah, agreed re: spoilers. If I'm planning on watching something I avoid content about it, if I wasn't gunna see it without a pitch I'll take the spoilers. Related examples: I didn't even know Anomalisa was a movie that existed, but when I saw that there was a frame rate about it it motivated me to go watch it before I listened to the beans. I will, however, never watch Warhorse. I'm currently avoiding Maggie Mae Fish's Twin Peaks: The Return video for the same reason.
E l i j a h
2023-01-03 03:28:00 +0000 UTCI know that the major film/book difference is that Alex does not repent after the Ludovico technique is reversed, the film ends after his brain surgery. After he is given a government job he looks into the distance and we see his fantasy of having sex with a woman in the snow in front of a crowd, and with his narration it is heavily implied that he will return to the violence he previously enjoyed with no nod towards a later repentance. I'm more familiar with the film, so this is more about that: Given that we see Alex likes engaging in gang rape, is prone to a violence the level of which disables and kills people, and can barely contain his joy at the footage of Nazis used during the Ludovico technique, I feel confident that he is someone we reeeaally shouldn't like and that we (at least many) still do is one of the main mechanics of the movie. To me the film is broadly doing at least these two things: Contrasting the visceral (in the language of the film, exciting) violence of the individual with the detached (cold) violence of the state, and saying something about the innate joy (comma ode to) that humans can get from violence (especially representations of it on film). Contrapoints has a good analysis video on it that focuses on how usually popular media gives a moral pretense for engaging in violence (the main example is Law & Order SVU) and how A Clockwork Orange disposes of the moral justification to say that people don't enjoy violence because it's correct, they want it to be correct because they enjoy violence. In Law & Order state violence is good because the only people who experience it are bad. In A Clockwork Orange, even though Alex is doing some of the worst things an individual human can do, the violence of the state, the violence of the moral, will always be worse. That's my read of some of what's up in that movie, anyways.
E l i j a h
2023-01-03 03:15:40 +0000 UTCIs Alex a psychopath? I'll have to rewatch the film. The point of the book is that he is a hellion, just as much as all his droogs, and he grows out of it. Not so much a character study as a comment on a moral panic over the state of the youth at the time.
Scottie Wottie
2023-01-02 20:19:25 +0000 UTCAlways love to hear Brooks join y'all for analysis, and especially to hear links to philosophy and physics. On spoilers: I deliberately let Gamefully Unemployed spoil Midnight Mass for me, and their gleeful descriptions of the climax turned that from a series I was utterly uninterested in to one that I was keen to watch and I ended up ugly crying. Similarly with this film: I am now not going to get that "oh shit" moment, but I was very unlikely to watch it and now I'm very interested. Knowing that it is apparently a giant fucking bummer is also helpful so I can prepare myself. Your enthusiasm does your audience a service, spoilers or no. :)
Scottie Wottie
2023-01-02 20:06:08 +0000 UTCFinally! Can’t wait to listen.
JasperParse
2023-01-01 18:58:26 +0000 UTCThis one's my fav Kaufman! I think the best use of empathizing with a psychopath main character is in A Clockwork Orange, because it's actually part of the intended experience and is something you're supposed to be reflecting on within the space of the film itself. Whereas with most other cases it's like it was unforeseeable to the filmmaker, Clockwork knows it's manipulating you and tells you how it's doing it.
E l i j a h
2023-01-01 15:27:07 +0000 UTC
