Episode 1250 - A.O. Scott
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening what's what's going on how are we doing i am uh i'm okay i just got three boxes of covid tests
Marc:And I don't know why that's so exciting to me.
Marc:I got three boxes of covid tests to have so I can test myself before I go to a on the road before I go to a club so I could know if I'm the one who's not safe and I could cop to it.
Marc:I could just not test and just be like, well, what if I am one of those people who has it and may symptomatic but still spread it?
Marc:Well, I I don't want to be that guy.
Marc:So I bought a few boxes online.
Marc:I guess there's sort of a run on these tests right now, but I got a few for the at-home antigen test, which seemed pretty effective, certainly with the negative result.
Marc:So I just did that today because I'm going to Denver today and negative.
Marc:And I've actually asked the club in Denver to only allow and I'm probably going to do this with with my other shows as well, if possible.
Marc:I can't confirm that.
Marc:But I do know that tonight, tomorrow and Saturday at the Comedy Works in Denver are proof of vac shows.
Marc:I feel better with that.
Marc:It's really a concern for public health.
Marc:Massive vaccinations have saved thousands, millions of lives since vaccinations were created.
Marc:Almost everybody alive was vaccinated for polio, measles, tuberculosis, chickenpox.
Marc:You know, I got I recently got a shingles vaccine.
Marc:I don't I'm not I'll get all the vaccines.
Marc:I'm more afraid of Stevia, to be honest.
Marc:Where's the paperwork on Stevia?
Marc:But again,
Marc:You're free to fight for your right to die like a moron and remain unvaccinated.
Marc:But I think businesses and people who want to get back to life need some confidence in the safety of the situation.
Marc:And if you want to be the guy that's like, fuck you.
Marc:Well, it seems that, you know, personal safety and money seem more important than your state, your statement, just because you're nihilistic and don't care about your personal safety.
Marc:Or believe that you are above and beyond it.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Fight your fight.
Marc:You just won't.
Marc:I can't let you in the show.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Marc:OK.
Marc:OK.
Marc:A.O.
Marc:Scott is on the show today.
Marc:A.O.
Marc:Scott is the film critic at The New York Times.
Marc:But I just recently started reading a book that he wrote years ago called Better Living Through Criticism, How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth.
Marc:And I'm like, why can't I talk to this guy?
Marc:I want to see if I can hold my own with A.O.
Marc:Scott.
Marc:It's weird.
Marc:I don't read a lot of film criticism.
Marc:I don't read a lot of criticism in general because I don't know.
Marc:I guess I have finally...
Marc:gotten comfortable with the way I see things based on what I know and making certain connections.
Marc:You know, I do read some criticism after the fact, or I do talk to people who I trust and respect their intelligence about things to sort of move the ideas forward and, and see new things that I didn't see.
Marc:But at some point I had to become comfortable and confident with my own brain and
Marc:Because to be honest with you, when I was in high school, one of my heroes was a guy named Gus Blaisdell who owned a bookstore across from the university.
Marc:And I worked at a bagel place along the Central Avenue on Route 66 across from UNM.
Marc:And Gus Blaisdell was a sort of a mentor hero of mine.
Marc:I annoyed him, but he he made time for me.
Marc:And he was like a real intellectual, you know, well sourced.
Marc:You know, intellectuals, real intellectuals, not faux intellectuals are usually, you know, fairly well read.
Marc:They've built a firm bedrock of reference to to to engage their opinions and to move forward through life as an intellectual.
Marc:You know, it's all about.
Marc:The point of reference and not just the word or the title, but the understanding of movements in history.
Marc:History is another thing.
Marc:But I always felt I was sort of a faux intellectual, but I always aspired to it.
Marc:But I didn't have the discipline really to become to do the reading necessarily.
Marc:But I knew I was relatively smart.
Marc:So I studied film criticism as a minor in college.
Marc:But but I never I never really could wrap my brain around criticism.
Marc:Yeah, I'm getting better at critical thinking.
Marc:I'm not by nature a critical thinker.
Marc:I have to apply it.
Marc:I'm a reactionary thinker.
Marc:I react emotionally.
Marc:But a lot of times I can kind of nail it for myself and sometimes for others.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:You hear me talking.
Marc:But I've always been jealous of the idea that someone is a thorough intellectual and a bonafide critic.
Marc:not reviewer, a cultural critic, a film critic, they have to be well-sourced.
Marc:You know, a critic's job is to see something and then to kind of break it down, put it into a context, and maybe even move the understanding of what they're criticizing further along.
Marc:Now, I wanted to understand cultural criticism.
Marc:I've tried to read Northrop Frye.
Marc:I've tried to read Walter Benjamin.
Marc:Is that how you say it?
Marc:I've tried to.
Marc:There are people that I can read and that are readable, but
Marc:H.L.
Marc:Mencken comes to mind as well, who was definitely readable.
Marc:Hunter S. Thompson to a certain degree.
Marc:But but but I never I was always felt insecure in these conversations that I just never know enough.
Marc:And I still kind of feel like that.
Marc:But lately, as an old man who's been through a lot of stuff and seen a lot of stuff and read a lot of things, but maybe not studied enough.
Marc:I do all right.
Marc:And, you know, sometimes I nail it.
Marc:Sometimes I say and think things and then I see someone I respect writing about it in a similar way.
Marc:I'm like, I got it.
Marc:I got it.
Marc:Nonetheless, having gotten into this book of A.O.
Marc:Scott's, it's almost like a primer on how to engage with art.
Marc:So over the last few weeks since I saw the movie Pig and watched every episode of Underground Railroad and have been spending a lot of time with the work of Sterling Harjo, a Native American, it's very easy to start thinking, like, what power does art have?
Marc:And there's something about expression, about vulnerability, about the connection to the human heart and the community heart through art that means something.
Marc:And oddly, I didn't think I was really this guy.
Marc:I think I'd gotten cynical, but I believe that's the key to us moving forward is respecting the creative voices and voices in general of people that are not usually heard through their creativity and through their expression and their communities.
Marc:So
Marc:I don't know what it is, but something's happening in terms of how my hope is defining itself.
Marc:And I didn't have much of it.
Marc:I wouldn't say I'm optimistic, but I think people are generally pretty decent.
Marc:I went to a block party yesterday around here, and I'd never met my neighbors, and I didn't think I was going to be in town, but it was happening right on this corner.
Marc:I went out and met all my neighbors, and some I've already met before, a few I know, and it was just maybe 30, 40, maybe 50 people from the neighborhood I had never seen before, but it was people coming together of all different types, just having a piece of pizza.
Marc:you know watching kids play talking getting to know each other uh enjoying the you know there was a little booth about the historical neighborhood we live in uh but uh people being people not being in their phones not living uh in relation to information that they've dumped in their head and that they has no bearing on their life just people how you doing joe thank you for the tomatoes joe brought me some tomatoes the other day he's like i got more you know
Marc:That means a lot.
Marc:That's a lot more enriching.
Marc:Even just that moment, that exchange, it doesn't feel as immediately satisfying to the monkey brain as clickbait, but to the heart, it makes a big difference.
Marc:But I was excited to talk to A.O.
Marc:Scott and a little intimidated, but I read this piece he wrote a few weeks ago called The Movies Are Back, But What Are Movies Now?
Marc:That was in the New York Times and it was very insightful and provocative.
Marc:And I kind of read that and that sort of got me excited to talk to him as well.
Marc:So I referenced that a lot during the conversation because there's a lot in there and there's a lot in the book.
Marc:I just wanted to I wanted to mix it up, man.
Marc:I wanted to mix it up a little bit.
Marc:He goes by the name Tony.
Marc:You can read him regularly, regularly, regularly in the New York Times and his book, Better Living Through Criticism, How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth is available wherever you get books.
Marc:And this is me talking to him.
Marc:So, I guess you're wondering why I called you here today.
Guest:Yeah, it's great to hear from you.
Guest:I mean, it's always been kind of one of these fantasies you have.
Guest:Maybe I'll do the Marc Maron podcast one day.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, you've been thinking about it?
Marc:Well, it's weird because as we enter the end of times...
Marc:You know, I'm trying to, you know, kind of wrap my brain around certain things, and I don't, like, I've been reading the book, I started the book, The Better Living Through Criticism, but I have to be honest with you, this is a battle I've had my entire fucking life with the notion of criticism.
Marc:And in this book, you're sort of putting it in a way that I can wrap my brain around, because you don't know how long I've been looking at Northrop Frye's book on my bookshelf.
Marc:I mean, for decades, you know, when an intellectual dude that I looked up to said, well, you want to know about criticism?
Marc:You have to read The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Fry.
Marc:And I've got, you know, heavily underlined first three or four pages, and then I'm out, Tony.
Marc:I'm out.
Guest:Well, that's a tough one.
Guest:You know, I still have that book also on my shelf sort of, you know, looking at me and every once in a while I sort of steal a glance at it and feel a little embarrassed and ashamed that what I'm doing is so far from that ideal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I love that book, but it is a book by someone who seems to have read absolutely everything and just has it all at his fingertips, you know, from the ancient Greeks to modern poetry.
Guest:And he just like he synthesized it in this amazing way.
Guest:But that's, you know, that's not the only thing criticism is, I don't think.
Marc:No, but then, okay, so then I've got Walter Benjamin.
Marc:That's how you say it, right?
Marc:Yeah, I've got those books, and same thing, I'll get in them.
Marc:I'll read them for about 10 pages, and I'm like, this has no bearing on my life.
Marc:This isn't helping me at all.
Marc:And then I've got to put that away.
Marc:So there...
Marc:Those are the two things that I've been judging my entire intellectual adult life against, and I can't get through them.
Marc:I can't get through them.
Marc:And I guess this is just by way of thanks for you to sort of breaking it down in an emotional and personal way in your book.
Marc:So I guess on some level, poetically, you would see maybe Sontag and Benjamin as the sort of modern, the definers of modern cultural criticism?
Guest:Certainly for me, just kind of growing up, Sontag was a big one.
Guest:I just found the power of her mind.
Guest:And this is what I think the key for me to criticism is and what attracts me to it as a reader and maybe also as a writer is to be in the presence of someone else thinking.
Guest:So you feel like when you're reading a Susan Sontag essay, the thing that's most...
Guest:kind of galvanizing and magnetic about it is watching her mind work, watching her sort of take a difficult writer or a difficult text or a problem of human existence or human consciousness or the ethics of photography and try to think it through, try to wrestle with it in an active and open-minded way.
Guest:I never feel like she's just applying a set of principles
Guest:That she already thought of.
Guest:She's actually you're watching her work.
Guest:You're watching her thing.
Marc:And in that way, that like in the way you kind of construct your book and the way you sort of advise people or what I get out of it, that that active engagement with a text, a film, a piece of art or even, you know, some food is is really interesting.
Marc:And connecting that to your heart and mind as a means by which you seek to understand and feel connected is really the human activity of thought and moving the ideas forward.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Right?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I think you said it better just then maybe than I did in the book.
Guest:But it's to be actively engaged with our own experience and our own progress through the world.
Marc:On all levels.
Marc:Like today.
Marc:Right.
Marc:every day like today like you know it's just the on you know the ongoing problem with um avocados and tomatoes now is that a big problem no but like are there any more good avocados left rarely tomatoes that's over right and how many cashews can one person eat in a day but but the issue of avocados and tomatoes speaks to
Marc:directly to the idea of Disney and corporate occupation of every part of our life, right?
Marc:So are there ever going to be good tomatoes again?
Marc:I think we've let that go.
Marc:Don't you, Tony?
Guest:You know, I go back and forth.
Guest:I always try to be optimistic.
Guest:About tomatoes?
Guest:I wrote this about tomatoes, about avocados, about...
Guest:about movies, about Disney, about, you know, about the human future and the future of the human imagination.
Guest:It's a challenge, you know, and since I wrote this book, it's been more and more of a challenge.
Guest:I published this book in, I think, February of 2016.
Guest:And it was very much kind of trying to strike a
Guest:a note of optimism and hope and a sort of idea that, well, if we can all just, you know, think and talk about what we see and experience and devote ourselves to the work of figuring out individually and collectively the meaning of our lives and the meaning of the things that we make to explain the world to ourselves, everything will be great.
Marc:You have high expectations.
Marc:I don't know how many people you're expecting to get on board with this, but if it's...
Marc:But if it's most people, you're going to be disappointed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I mean it's – judging from the royalty statements, it's maybe 20 or 30 people at this point.
Marc:But that's –
Marc:Was it ever any more than that?
Marc:That's the question I have, because, look, I just I read your piece that you wrote a couple of weeks ago about the movies are back.
Marc:But what are movies now in The New York Times?
Marc:And, you know, whatever you were hoping for in the book, it seems to be diminishing, Tony.
Marc:It seems.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:I feel like the light is going out.
Guest:Well, that's that's been the hard the hard lesson and the challenge, you know, because you don't I don't want to I don't want to give up and I don't want to become nostalgic.
Guest:I don't want to become one of these people.
Guest:And there are many critics who are sort of take the stance of like all the great stuff is behind us.
Guest:You know, all the all the great movies have been made.
Guest:All the the good songs have been written.
Guest:You know, everything that that that human beings can can achieve.
Guest:But in growing, maybe also in growing avocados and tomatoes, it's over and we're just sort of going to play out the string.
Marc:And yeah, you can't that can't be the case.
Marc:And like, it's very hard for me.
Marc:You're about the same age as me to distinguish that way of thinking from is that is that can you rely on your perception or are you just becoming an old fuck?
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Well, right.
Guest:And I think people of our generation, you know, grew up coming after these old, you know, younger old fucks.
Guest:And I was really sick of hearing about how, you know, oh, well, you weren't there, right?
Guest:If, you know, you weren't at Woodstock or you didn't, you know, you didn't go see.
Guest:And we just missed
Guest:it that was the worst right you just missed oh you didn't you know you weren't at the newport folk festival when bob dylan plugged in or you didn't see you know la ventura on its opening weekend or i mean all of this stuff and um you know i grew up with a chip on my shoulder about that in in the in the later 70s and 80s oh geez so you must have been the fun guy at the parties huh
Guest:Well, I was just sort of like, I think like a lot of Generation X people, you know, I was just like, wait a minute, we could, you know, why can't we do something to, or as, you know, to quote Emerson, why can't we have an original relationship to the universe?
Marc:But like, it's interesting that what built us
Marc:intellectually, was all stuff that that wave had crashed, you know, from the 50s to 60s.
Marc:And then, you know, I imagine coming into your own mind in the 70s, like even those films, I mean, that was all nostalgia already.
Marc:It was all behind us.
Marc:And it was defining the future.
Marc:But we come up in a time of, you know, the end of death of disco, beginning of punk rock, new wave, and then whatever the hell was going on in movies in the 80s,
Marc:In the late 70s.
Guest:But there was good stuff.
Guest:There was good stuff.
Guest:I mean, the 80s was not a golden age of cinema.
Guest:And you're right.
Guest:I mean, all of the great movies of the 70s I saw late.
Guest:I saw either on VHS.
Guest:I saw them like a month ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, now you can see them on the Criterion channel.
Guest:But I would see them at the Campus Film Society or at the repertory house in my hometown.
Guest:So whether it was Nashville or Mean Streets or Chinatown, all of those movies definitely came late to them.
Guest:It wasn't while that wave was breaking.
Guest:But one of the things that I tried to talk about in the book and tried to kind of get...
Guest:And challenge a little bit, but also to say is part of the human experience of living in history and living in relation to culture and art is that you very often feel it's very rare, very few generations and very few people don't feel like they came too late.
Guest:They always feel like they do?
Guest:I think they always.
Guest:I mean, there's that Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris, where he keeps going back in time.
Guest:And he goes back to the 20s, and everyone in the 20s is talking about the 1890s, and he goes back to the 1890s.
Guest:It's an infinite regress.
Guest:It was always just a little bit better.
Marc:Well, that enforces...
Marc:Your argument really in the book that, you know, if that's the position you're in, that it all happened before, the pressure is on you to continue the conversation either creatively or critically to move things forward, that it's going to be your reaction.
Marc:So if you don't surrender to nostalgia and you're aggravated, there's a good chance you'll move the pin forward, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I think that's right.
Guest:And I think that that's how, you know, often how artists work.
Guest:And it's sort of how artists function as critics so that you think at any point in history, if you're a poet or a musician or a filmmaker or a writer or a painter, you might think that there's no room for you.
Guest:You might look and say, OK, everything's been done.
Guest:Because in a way, at any moment, it is complete.
Marc:um yes work through your relationship to the earlier stuff and and do your own thing right and then sadly when you make that room that doesn't guarantee anyone's going to visit the room but at least you know that like i've cut out this port i have my place right and you're all welcome to come and you know i hope a few of you do right and then hopefully one person will come that'll go out and go like this guy is doing something and then bring a few more people in
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:I think that's a very, I mean, obviously there are artists with, yeah, there are artists with more grandiose ambitions than that.
Guest:But fundamentally, that's sort of it.
Guest:It's like somebody, you know, notices what you did and thinks it's interesting.
Guest:And yeah, and maybe tell someone else about it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I guess like, you know, I'm what I'm coming up against and maybe, you know, the conversation that I wanted to have or that we're having, which is good, is just that it's hard to decipher relevance, you know, because a lot of the models that you and I came up with and that that did define those things.
Marc:I think you speak about this in the book.
Marc:You know, they don't they don't.
Marc:They don't seem to have it as much.
Marc:And this gets back to the argument around, you know, is it because we're older or is and that the language has changed or the paradigm has shifted or what?
Marc:And that, you know, that us talking about, you know, film or books or art, you know, is something dated and that we're just not fluid enough in the ways of the way the youth culture works.
Marc:But I don't know that's really true.
Marc:I dated a painter for years and it's like when you look at that world and then you realize all of a sudden that the world of painting and the world of that kind of art has always been this sort of hobby landscape for the wealthy and that its relevance in terms of really kind of having any social implications that matter is almost zero.
Marc:It was really heartbreaking to me to see how the art world worked.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And so like so that to me is sort of like there's no painting that's going to save us now.
Marc:So and then in your piece from a couple of weeks ago, when you really talk about what I thought was interesting and I've I've gotten myself in trouble about like you have the authoritarian nature of the Marvel Universe, you literally say in so many words that that business of motion pictures has infected malignantly everything else to the point where people like you have to reckon with it critically.
Guest:Well, right.
Guest:And the thing that frustrates me and it's very easy to be misunderstood, I think, when you make that kind of argument, because you get cast in the position of, you know, you just hate these things that everybody likes.
Guest:You're, you know, or you're a snob.
Guest:Yeah, about the Marvel.
Guest:Like you don't, you know, I hate comic books or I hate superheroes or I, you know, I'm a snob about popular.
Marc:But how about you're a what about you're a grown up?
Marc:You see, this is like when you go back to like, how have we accepted this was like done over the last decade, the almost complete infantilization of grown ass men.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know that like I enjoyed your piece about, you know, when you were having marital problems and you were playing poker because like.
Marc:That your assessment of who am I as a man and what defines that, which is the other problem with the generation we're from and where we're at now is like, we don't even know how to dress like fucking grownups.
Marc:So that there just seemed to be a time where grownups had a lot more grace in the world.
Marc:So if we're walking around with a sort of nebulous identity of what it means to be a mature person in the culture we live in, how are we not just going to be ripe to be filled with this justification of comic books as being passive?
Guest:Well, yeah, I think I think I think you put your finger on it and and because it is about kind of passivity and obedience and assent as as models of participation, you know, so it's like I'm a fan, you know, so that I mean, I don't I don't know what that means.
Guest:I don't know what kind of, as you say, grown up identity that that is.
Guest:It's not passive.
Guest:I'll tell you that.
Guest:It's not passive.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:But it is kind of disciplined.
Marc:Right.
Guest:It's subservient.
Guest:And subservient and obedient.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:You have to say this is quite an achievement that Disney and Marvel have done because they went from making sort of sequels.
Guest:So here's a movie and then next year there'll be this movie.
Guest:And then they started knitting them all together.
Guest:So you have to stay all the way to the end of the credits to see, you know, if...
Guest:Scarlett Johansson or Samuel L. Jackson or someone else is going to show up because that's the Easter egg.
Guest:And you won't fully appreciate this movie unless you get that and get to that, which means you're committed to watching all of the other movies, which means that a lot of your mind and your consciousness and your intelligence is going to be devoted to the trivia of this imaginary universe and
Guest:And your duty, your job as a fan will be to consume as much of it as they give you, and they'll keep giving you more of it on their different platforms.
Guest:So now there will be series on Disney+, and there will be feature films, and it will just kind of grow and metastasize.
Guest:And I just worry that it takes up so much of the ecosystem and so much of the time.
Guest:I mean, look, we're talking about it now, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:that it's a sort of total domination.
Marc:But you're talking about it, and I'm sitting here, I've not seen any of them.
Marc:I don't know how, but I can't even force myself to do it.
Marc:And I've been critical of it, and certainly in my last special, I likened it to a belief system, which it is.
Marc:Because one of the defining...
Marc:uh, uh, writers of my particular, you know, uh, perception of reality is, uh, Ernest Becker, you know, and, you know, the denial of death and, you know, uh, and, and the idea of, of what belief means, you know, that resonates with me that, you know, people need to feel part of something in order to have a sense of self, uh, you know, but there, you know, but most people are, are, are, are willingly shallow enough to just, you know, go on feeling and reaction as opposed to sort of like, what am I really doing here?
Guest:Well, and this belief system, I mean, the content of the of the Marvel belief system is a sort of perfect mirror of of the status quo or of a sort of a kind of, you know, global libertarian ideal.
Guest:So you have these these these super empowered elite, which is where all the drama takes place.
Guest:And their job is to save or to help the actual public.
Guest:the population of the universe or of the world in any of these movies is either, you know, is in a role of potential victims to be saved.
Guest:They have no, there's no agency.
Guest:There is no democracy.
Guest:It's about what the Avengers, it's about what this sort of, you know, Davos class group of... Superheroes.
Guest:Of superheroes, many of whom are either, you know, deities or billionaires or everyone's fantasy, every sort of like...
Guest:Elon Musk fantasy of sort of what it is to be like, you know, an intergalactic hotshot.
Guest:And so these are the people who we're supposed to care about and we're supposed to be rooting for and who we just assume that their interests are our interests.
Marc:But but but like in speaking about this last piece you wrote that, like my concern, you know, what the idea I've been trying to explore around this is that, you know, we and you do it in the piece in the in the Times, the movies are back pieces that, you know, we've all been, you know, sort of pimped out by the algorithm, you know, that we're all algorithm whores.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it becomes not just critical thinking, but you have to be actively protect yourself.
Marc:You have to mind your mind in an active way because there's this weird thing happening to even smart people.
Marc:And I don't know if you've noticed it.
Marc:Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe you can inform me that even some smart people have become painfully shallow in terms of their lack of engagement and their irresponsibility around thinking their own thoughts.
Yeah.
Marc:And I don't know what you do about that, because like if you just allow your brain to be a recording device of bits and pieces you pick up here and there that are just floating around in your brain because your ability to think is so shattered by your engagement with your device.
Marc:You know, what do you got to do to sort of ground yourself?
Marc:And that's sort of, I guess, you know, you wonder if the tomatoes are ever coming back or is it just that, you know, is it the is it the jam and soylent green?
Marc:You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:And it's, it's, it's, it's very scary.
Guest:I mean, cause I, I don't in, in that piece, you know, really engage with, cause it's not, it's not what I, what I'm supposed to be writing about the, the, the really scary and sinister aspects of what you're talking about, which is, which is how, you know, and there are so many stories of this anecdotally and, and, and, and everybody, I think knows somebody who, who kind of went off the deep end or went into the rabbit hole, right.
Guest:Who started watching you.
Guest:Of one kind or another.
Guest:Of one
Guest:And surrendered their critical thinking or had their critical thinking overwhelmed by disinformation and conspiracy theories and all kinds of stuff that's out there.
Marc:And then it becomes like critical thinking.
Marc:Like if you're not careful with that switch in your brain, it becomes the false equivocating switch.
Guest:Well, that's what it is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's like a sort of a virus, so to speak, that replicates critical thinking.
Guest:So, you know, people will say, you know, I know this because I did my own research.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I did my own research.
Guest:So I know that that, you know, the vaccine will magnetize my blood and my keys will stick to my forehead because I did my own research, which is a sort of a weird, perverse, upside down version of critical thinking because, well, I'm being skeptical.
Guest:I'm not believing what everyone tells me.
Guest:I'm thinking for myself.
Guest:And that is what really what what I find, you know, so overwhelming and just flat out terrifying as someone who kind of.
Guest:sets a certain amount of stock in and maybe too much stock in people's rational abilities, the sort of the intellectual capacities that we all have as something that can, you know, can protect us and can save us and can improve things.
Guest:And to see it, to see that almost reversing itself is chilling.
Marc:But how could it?
Marc:I mean, it's like what you did write about in the piece is that, you know, are we able to... Is there any way we can defend ourselves against this, you know, tidal wave or tsunami or sandblasting of the entertainment industrial complex, right?
Marc:So...
Marc:But what I've started to notice is that the brain is very soft and people are very lost.
Marc:And, you know, and, you know, a lot of times if it feels like thinking, they'll take it.
Marc:And it turns out that most people aren't were never really capable of critical thinking.
Marc:And the idea that it's an epistemic problem, because if you don't have any barometer for the integrity of truth, I mean, where the fuck does this go?
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it just makes everybody very easily led.
Marc:And it's not going to be great, you know, like because the broader problem around what you're talking about, it seems to me, is that there's an active, you know, anti-intellectual push going on, you know, on a fascistic level, which is a reality in this country now, but also with, you know, smart people who are dismissive because they're doing their own research.
Guest:I mean, that really troubles me quite a lot because I'd always thought that – I mean, I was never fully optimistic or sort of utopian that thinking or criticism or whatever we're talking about or whatever we're calling it would be strong enough to withstand the forces of demagoguery and ignorance and stupidity.
Guest:But I always thought my kind of idea of history was that, you know, from era to era, from decade to decade, from century to century, it's a draw.
Guest:You know, you can fight it to a draw.
Guest:So there will be just enough of reason and good sense and intellectual possibility to kind of keep it going.
Guest:That the forces of ignorance wouldn't, you know, entirely take over everything.
Guest:And now I just...
Guest:I still want to believe that that's still sort of the bedrock of my faith in a way as a as a as a thinking person.
Guest:But I just don't know.
Guest:I can't you know, I don't know why I have that faith in a way or, you know, what else?
Marc:Well, I mean, well, then will you have it because, you know, you're you're a believer in the the progress of.
Marc:You know, creativity, art, you know, intellectual revelation, you know, the the the higher good of humanity.
Marc:I mean, you know, if if that goes away, you know, I don't know what you're going to do in that attic.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:It's.
Marc:You know, but but I am I deal with this shit day to day because, you know, we allow ourselves our brains to be to be blown out by it.
Marc:But I mean, there are but even the weird things, these signals of hope.
Marc:And I think you've I think you've sort of you addressed it a bit in this piece as well.
Marc:The signals of hope are sort of devastating.
Marc:Like, I think that one of the things coming out of this pandemic that we might see again is that, you know, it might have killed the happy ending for most practical purposes for a little while.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Underground Railroad, which is relentless but seemingly necessary.
Marc:But the only thing that carries that is the finesse and the filmic intelligence of Jenkins because it would be torture if it wasn't handled like he's handling it and sort of really exploring these allegories founded in these grotesque realities.
Marc:But also with a movie like
Marc:Like Stillwater, I mean, that's a morally ambiguous bit of business at the end of that.
Marc:But it's like, that's a new thing.
Marc:I haven't seen a mainstream movie do that in a while.
Guest:Have you?
Guest:Yeah, no, I think that's a good example.
Guest:Those are both good examples.
Guest:And I think that there are definitely...
Guest:narratives and, and, and films and, um, and novels and, and, and stories that are, that are doing it very much in the way that you say, because there is, we do need, we have a kind of an appetite and a, and a hunger and a need for, um, beauty and tenderness.
Guest:Um, you know, it,
Guest:We can't just confront the terribleness of everything all the time head on, you know.
Guest:And I think Underground Railroad is a great example because the story, the material, the historical material and the way that it's distilled, both in Colson Whitehead's novel and in Barry Jenkins' adaptation of it,
Guest:is so harsh and so terrible and so almost, you know, overwhelming to an idea you would have of sort of the goodness of humanity.
Guest:And yet there is, and I think this is so true of how Barry Jenkins approaches his stories and approaches film and approaches the medium of visual storytelling.
Guest:There's such tenderness.
Guest:There's such kind of love for his characters and between his characters.
Guest:And he's so attentive to,
Guest:to beauty and to just kind of quiet moments that happen between people.
Guest:Um, in a way that it's not comforting you, it's not sentimentalizing or softening anything, but it's just reminding you that that's part of it too.
Guest:That, that, that, that, that part of the history and part of the story and part of who we are, um,
Guest:as a species, as a civilization, whatever, it lives in those impulses too, in those impulses toward kindness or empathy or beauty.
Marc:Right, and that's what's at stake.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Marc:That's a good point.
Marc:At the core of all this grotesque horror and complete ignorant violence,
Marc:is yeah are those moments but but the fragility of it and there's something that the heart wants but you know the heart wants it to you know like i i'm only halfway through and i hope she gets a break but i don't i'm not but you know but in the long in the big picture no one does right and that the only thing that you you know you have to go on is is what you're talking about is that belief that that matters and and the tenderness and and and i am i imagine that the reason why you have hope is because
Marc:you deal in movies.
Marc:Outside of the industry and outside of what it implies for the future of thinking and culture, that movies engage your empathy, they engage your hope, even if they're manipulative, even if they're cartoons, even if they're superhero movies, they're moving you through something that feels human.
Guest:Yes, and they're most of the time getting you to care about something and getting you to care about people, you know, who aren't real, who you maybe have no reason to care about.
Guest:But movies, and I think narrative generally, I think it's true of novels too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's even true, I mean, it's true of TV shows and sitcoms.
Guest:I mean, my... Yeah.
Guest:My son, when he was a teenager, he would watch the same shows.
Guest:He would watch his favorite shows, like Scrubs, again and again and again.
Guest:You know, he would just watch it.
Guest:It was when you were starting to be able to get them, like, on DVD and you didn't have to wait around for reruns or syndication.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My wife and I were like, what do you do?
Guest:Like, haven't you seen that, you know, five times already?
Guest:Why are you watching again?
Guest:And he said, well, this is like, these are people I like who I want to hang out with.
Guest:And this is how I, you know, I go and visit them and spend time with them.
Guest:And narrative and representation in art does that too.
Guest:It gives us, you know, imaginary friends.
Guest:It gives us people who are different from us.
Guest:whose lives we otherwise couldn't imagine that we can relate to and understand and care about.
Guest:So we're happy when they're happy.
Guest:We're sad when they're hurt.
Guest:We don't want anything bad to happen to them.
Guest:It's extraordinarily powerful.
Guest:And I think you're right that just because every, you know, often enough to keep me from, you know, quitting my job and moving up to the woods forever,
Guest:full time, I'll see something.
Guest:I'll see a story that, that reminds me of that.
Guest:It's like, oh yes, you, this, whatever else is going on at the corporate level and at the technological level, this is, um, uh, an, an, an art form that can tell these stories in this, in this way that's so, so immediate and so intense and so interesting and so beautiful.
Yeah.
Marc:Well, I thought that, like, you know, it was a pretty, for me, there was something, you know, kind of impressive about the best picture category of the last Oscars, you know, and not so much the Oscars presentation, but nonetheless, that those stories were unique, human, diverse, and encouraging, you know, for the most part, which was an amazing thing, is that, you know,
Marc:And I've tried to deal with this on stage is that there's been a real impact, I think, in the sort of integration and embracing of diversity within the fictional realm.
Marc:I don't know if it's going to cross over.
Guest:No, but but but.
Guest:But it has, and it's exciting, and it gives you stories also that I think this crop of Oscar movies, they also felt very kind of honest in a way, just thinking of the father and Anthony Hopkins and how this is like – Oh, my God.
Guest:This is an honest look at this.
Guest:This very, very painful –
Guest:that so many families, so many people have gone through.
Guest:And it's being presented in a way that is painful and devastating, but also honest.
Guest:And it's the honesty that keeps it from being utterly kind of, you know...
Guest:And I think there's something similar going on in Nomadland.
Guest:I mean, objectively, this is about just a really harsh, terrible reality of people, you know, who have lost their retirement and who are living on the road and, you know, working minimum wage jobs when they should be just taking it easy after a lifetime of hard work.
Guest:And the movie is...
Guest:Does take a hard look at all of that, but also holds on to this this kind of idea of of a human possibility within that.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And also, like, you know, the the adaptive nature of human beings and the the seemingly I think what gets lost a lot in just when we live in the information and not in in the life that we have.
Marc:is that, you know, that people do like people.
Marc:And, you know, instinctively, you know, like I always used to notice that about living in New York City, that no matter how bad the information was on how people treat each other, if somebody went down on the street in New York, people were there.
Marc:Like, you know, somebody was taking charge.
Marc:People were concerned.
Marc:Someone was clearing the way.
Marc:It was almost like a sort of a ballet of reactions
Marc:That everybody found their place to find the space to give the person the help they need in that moment.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:No, and I think, I mean, I felt that way being in New York, you know, the worst part of COVID in the spring of 2020.
Guest:You know, I was very glad to be there.
Guest:I felt, you know...
Guest:Vulnerable and terrified, obviously, because of the virus, but also protected by exactly that sort of that civic fabric that's there, that people are, you know, in a way don't have a choice.
Guest:If you have that many people, you know, sort of that densely packed.
Guest:But I mostly found it and still find it just in terms of conscientiousness about, you know, about how to behave and about sort of what you owe to the people around you.
Guest:You know, that it's not all about you and your freedom and your comfort and your immediate needs, but you're part of some kind of collective civic community.
Guest:grouping.
Guest:And you have some obligations and responsibilities.
Guest:And I don't, you know, I don't want to overstate it.
Guest:I mean, obviously, people in New York are just as kind of selfish or clueless or inconsiderate as anybody else.
Guest:But there is nonetheless a kind of a civic fabric in that place that held, you know.
Guest:And it held at 9-11.
Guest:It held at Hurricane Sandy, you know.
Guest:And it held in COVID.
Guest:And that's not a small thing.
Marc:And that's the interesting thing to me in relation to that is that that is exactly what's at risk for
Marc:Culturally, because, you know, in what we're talking about in terms of how people are sort of cornered in their isolation in a false sense of community by being their desires being mined by the algorithm and their reality and perception being guided by by choices that ultimately are consumeristic is that, you know, any sort of civic interaction, I think, is even rare.
Marc:And that, you know, that when you see people like, you know, Matt Gaetz or or the other one, Green, you know, running around, these are elected people who were designated to represent something that the community might have wanted.
Marc:And you look at them going like that.
Marc:What is it?
Marc:Then what is this clown show?
Marc:So so it strikes me that people don't have don't understand civic responsibility in an in an intellectual way or in a governmental way.
Marc:There's no understanding of it.
Marc:And they're the ones that are criticizing the cities, like, you know, the elites in the cities where we live among people.
Marc:We're not cornered in our suburban cul-de-sacs or living, you know, in a way that that the only community you have is a mega church you go to because you feel like you have to.
Marc:I don't know, man.
Marc:It's just like.
Marc:I don't know how to wrap my brain around what's happening culturally because that's what is being lost.
Marc:And you address it in this piece is that by these clustering, you know, of people, you know, because of how they're guided by algorithms.
Marc:Like, I don't know where we how do we get community again?
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:Well, that's that's that's.
Guest:a really important question, and it's one that I don't think I quite addressed in that piece, maybe as fully as I could have or will.
Guest:And another point, because there is this idea that
Guest:And it's a complicated idea.
Guest:It's an idea with a history that has a lot of twists and turns and detours.
Guest:But there is this idea, I think, I hope, that culture is this sort of participatory thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I've often believed this about American popular culture in particular.
Guest:One of the great strengths of it is that it does seem to have this ability to to cross other kinds of tribal and identity and ideological and political lines so that, you know, if in a way we did, it did, I hope.
Guest:No, I mean, I think one thing that I worry about very much now is that it also is being polarized so that it's like we're going to go see, you know, red movies and blue movies and listen to to red music and blue music.
Marc:I see it in comedy.
Marc:I mean, you know, and I'm trying you try to push back.
Marc:But there is this sort of like woke versus unwoke business going on in terms.
Marc:And that's and that's at the core of the cultural dialogue.
Marc:And a lot of the people who consider themselves, you know, pushing back, you know, against this wokeness, you know, are easily turned out by right wing ideologues.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like even the the the sort of premise of like, look, we should have the right to say anything without being socially crucified.
Marc:You know, I agree that that's true.
Marc:And I also agree that, you know, sometimes language evolves and you have to do that out of respect for, you know, the the what you're talking about, the collective.
Marc:But that, you know, to to sort of weaponize this stuff.
Marc:Mm hmm.
Marc:You know, and kind of hold ground is part of something that, you know, I don't know why we don't speak about it more, but, you know, we're up against a fairly organized fascistic movement that that has, you know, momentum.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I don't know how you speak of it properly, but that seems to be what's happening.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, and I'm curious what you said about comedy, because I felt, I mean, I'm very much an outsider in that world, but I'm sort of fascinated by it and have wondered kind of what kinds of arguments and schisms are happening.
Guest:Because there is this idea, yeah, that's a sort of a...
Guest:a venerable idea in comedy, at least since the 60s, is that, you know, the comedians are sort of the truth tellers and that your job is to attack the pieties and break the taboos and to sort of to go to the places.
Guest:You're almost sort of the unconscious, almost sort of the id of the culture.
Guest:And so the people sitting there can laugh at you saying things that they would never say themselves.
Guest:But it is interesting how that idea has taken this very...
Guest:Kind of harsh political turn in just just well, it's a threat of cancel culture.
Marc:So so what's happened is, is that, you know, how comedy functioned before there's also like something going on around.
Marc:the model of fandom that you're talking about within comedy, where you're getting a lot of people gravitating towards the sort of free-thinking zone that we talked about earlier, that are really anything but that.
Marc:They don't really know what that means, but they're fundamentally not necessarily comedy fans.
Marc:They're mobilized by a sort of like this new kind of...
Marc:you know, lifestyle approach of, you know, alpha maleness.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But nonetheless, there is a front that, and the problem with it is, is that they're uncancelable because the people, there's enough of them to sustain the,
Marc:their their universe right so like they don't have to answer to cultural appropriateness or or even be sensitive or or sympathetic to people struggling who are who are uh marginalized because it's like you know we don't fucking need them right you're we've got our people right and and i think also that any criticism i think um or or any attempt to sort of um
Guest:I mean, and we saw this with the 45th president, any attempt to sort of call them out or criticize them fuels the resentment and is more kind of evidence of you see, you know, who's out to get me, who's against me.
Guest:And that sort of defensiveness and resentment is what is kind of...
Marc:empowering and exciting um hilarious figures and their fans yeah well that's what they think comedy is right you know so so there's there's there's not only is there no nuance to it but it might not even be comedy it is you know jingoism right and uh when there's a fine line between a rally and a comedy show
Marc:Something has gone askew.
Marc:But buffoonery in fascism, it's like I was thinking about this recently.
Marc:Almost all of them are fucking buffoons.
Marc:I mean, like when you look at them, you know, contemporary ones and ones of Mussolini, Hitler, you know, the guy, what's his name?
Marc:Belisandro in Brazil, the guy, the whatever his name is, the guy in Turkey, the guy in the Philippines, they're little men.
Marc:and trump they're they're clowns they're they're literally like they look like comedic archetypes yet these are the people that mobilize now i can't that's one of my my my recent problems it's like why do they all fit that that how are they the leaders right because they're physically mentally behaviorally buffoons yet they're they're speaking for the the the grievance it's the grievance yes yes
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, and I think that's right.
Guest:And that that is part of their charisma.
Guest:I mean, I was a few months ago when I was working on another piece, I rewatched Face in the Crowd, you know, the Lydia Kazan movie.
Guest:And that's a great example of that because that guy is who Andy Griffith plays so brilliantly, Lonesome Rhodes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:is exactly what you're describing.
Guest:He's a clown and everybody knows he's a clown.
Guest:And the Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau characters who are the sort of the elite intellectuals who put him on the radio and then on TV and like, oh, we can control this guy and the people love him.
Guest:And then he turns out to be this monster precisely because, you know, they think they understand the joke.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But...
Guest:Which is that he is a joke.
Guest:But his understanding of the joke, of the way he is a joke, is that I'm tying myself in knots here, is that he's not a joke at all.
Guest:Or that it's exactly the line between there may be humor, there may be comedy, but there's no irony in it.
Marc:But the core of that guy is he knew it was a hustle.
Marc:From the get-go, he was like, I'm going to get what I need with this sick charm I have.
Marc:And I'm going to make me as big as possible because I'll take all of it.
Marc:But even with that dumb device in that movie of the audience simulator, it looks so stupid as a machine.
Marc:Him sitting there playing with that thing was menacing.
Marc:Yes, yes, yes.
Guest:And then, I mean, in the movie, and where that movie kind of doesn't go far enough or can't see all the way to the end of its presence is, of course, the way that he's destroyed, the way that he's brought down, which is the way that McCarthy was brought down.
Guest:That in the end, when the people discover what contempt he has for them, when the audience hears him saying that he thinks they're stupid and he's taking advantage of him, they're going to turn on him and reject him and that'll be it.
Guest:But that's actually not...
Guest:Not how it turns out to happen.
Marc:Well, you have to account for religiosity, Christian eschatology, how that sort of weaves into QAnon, and just some sort of strange nihilism that the core of patriotism now is having the right to die like an idiot.
Marc:So, I'm not taking it.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:But with comedy, and I think it speaks to some of the stuff you were speaking to, is that like, you know, as somebody who's in the business, and I've had this problem before, but not in a political way, like, you know, that the business has become so integrated through all the outlets that you sort of talk about.
Marc:There's one paragraph in the piece where you're talking about how it extended into, you know, news, everything, you know, that everything becomes sort of not transparent,
Marc:But there's no boundaries to anything.
Marc:So as somebody, as a comic, if I make some fun of, like, say, a Joe Rogan or an Adam Sandler, that somehow or another it's being interpreted as a personal problem with my contemporaries based on my bitterness or my whatever, whereas, like, you know, all of a sudden it's like...
Marc:You're neutered in your ability to be a cultural critic because it's like, but you know that guy.
Marc:Everyone's in on the behind the scenes thing.
Marc:And I remember being viscerally upset when they had sort of like when the first sort of, you know, Hollywood news shows started happening.
Marc:It's like, why are they they're going to ruin the mystery?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, if we, you know, if tabloidism becomes mainstream, the cultural dialogue is all tabloidism.
Marc:It's like there's no mystery to anything.
Guest:And if everyone can sort of be sold a kind of a fantasy of insiderdom, you know, which.
Guest:Which I think that social media also allows and encourages.
Guest:So everybody is already all wised up and cynical and knows what's going on and sort of, you know, in on the con in a way.
Guest:I think that's how people get really deeply conned, you know, is by thinking that they're not the Marxists.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:It's that it's it's it's an informed shallowness.
Marc:Really, what happens is that they don't realize they're being suckered like all the free thinkers.
Marc:It's just like what scares me about their particular mark them is that what they're being suckered into is the complete objectification of the other, which never leads anywhere.
Marc:Good.
Marc:No, no, right.
Marc:And that line is too porous for me at this point in time.
Marc:Like, you know, I was talking to that guy, that writer Beatty, the guy who wrote the sellout.
Marc:Oh, Paul Beatty.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I was just sort of like, you know, I just hope I know.
Marc:when it's time to go.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:You don't want to be the Jew who's like, Hitler's going to work with us.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:I don't know, but there's something about federalism that provides some weird sense of protection.
Marc:Who cares if the Midwest balkanizes?
Marc:I don't go there anyways.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know what happens, but what spoke to me about what you're doing, and certainly in this piece recently, was just that
Marc:You know, we aren't a collective anymore culturally.
Marc:There is nothing holding the culture together.
Marc:And, you know, when something like, you know, what's happening in comedy happens, the comedian that you were talking about from the 60s, who is the truth teller, that guy, like, he got co-opted.
Marc:So, you know, you can't tell that other truth.
Marc:Like, in my last special, I kind of dropped a throwaway line about the monoculture of free thinkers.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So that that's what that is.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So if you call it out like that, they're just going to act like Marvel fans.
Marc:Is what you're saying about?
Marc:It's not absorbing the criticism.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They're clearly an army of people.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Who are myopic in their worship of a particular way of thinking that is anything but funny.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you have to push back.
Guest:You have to push back.
Guest:I think you do.
Guest:I mean, I think as frustrating and demoralizing as it is, you have to sort of soldier on and, you know, keep doing what you're doing.
Guest:I'm certainly going to keep doing what I'm doing and just sort of like.
Guest:write as if and talk as if there is a reasonable person on the other end who is kind of interested in having a conversation and exchange of ideas, who doesn't necessarily agree.
Guest:You know, I don't ever really particularly care about being agreed with.
Guest:But you want to think that there are other thinking people.
Guest:You don't, I mean, the true craziness is to think that you're the last, you know, the last sane man on earth, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Why, why'd you do this for a life?
Guest:Um, I mean, yeah, it's, it, it just, I just kind of happened in a way as, as, as, you know, I mean, I was always interested in writing and I was always interested in, in reading.
Guest:I really was always interested in criticism.
Guest:I mean, it, it, people don't necessarily believe it.
Guest:Starting in college?
Guest:No, even before that, like I, I kind of, when I grew up just, just reading magazines and, and, and,
Guest:And newspapers.
Guest:You know, like I think my parents subscribed to The New Yorker and had The New York Times around.
Guest:But then I think for me what really the breakthrough was I started reading Rolling Stone in the late 70s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I was really into music.
Hunter?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A hundred times, but also like Griel Marcus and, and, and, you know, Ellen Willis and Robert Crisco.
Guest:They were, they were like a lot of really great writers and they were also, they were, they were older and their tastes were not mine.
Guest:Like I was really into, to, to punk rock and, and, and new wave and, and all, which, which Rolling Stone hated.
Guest:Rolling Stone was sort of programmatically anti, anti punk rock for a, for a very long time.
Guest:But yeah,
Guest:I think when I was maybe like 10 or 11, my parents got me for Christmas.
Guest:I remember it very vividly, like the Rolling Stone illustrated history of rock and roll, which was an anthology of critical essays on, and I read it cover to cover, I think more than I've ever read any other book.
Guest:And I like looked at the discographies and I went and, and, and, and bought the records.
Guest:And I, I,
Guest:And I argued, like, I had big problems with a lot of what they said about, you know, about the Velvet Underground or about David Bowie or about punk.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that just sort of got – but that sort of stimulated this idea that, oh, you can care about something and want to argue about something.
Guest:And a way to live is to be, you know, surrounded by other people who care about those things and want to argue with –
Guest:with you about them.
Guest:And that was just sort of an ideal.
Guest:And I think that all of my reading and my kind of fantasy life after that was sort of about that idea, that whether it was like those rock critics or, you know, the New York intellectuals in the 50s or whoever it was, a bunch of people sitting around arguing, you know, passionately,
Guest:with their friends about stuff that maybe everybody outside of the room thought was trivial or was garbage.
Marc:That seemed to me like the ideal.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it also seems to me like, you know, from reading that piece you wrote a few years ago about poker and just about, you know, how you grew up, that in order to sort of integrate because you moved around so much, you had to be able to sort of kind of read the room of, you know, the maleness you were up against.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I was like, I was, I was always the new kid.
Guest:So I was, I got, you know, bullied and beaten up and I had to, I had to learn, I was not, you know, I was never going to be physically imposing.
Guest:Um, so I, I, I had to learn to sort of, to, to adapt and to, and to, and to think on my feet and yeah.
Guest:And to sort of, and to figure stuff out, figure out, well, how does this work?
Marc:What do you do with that?
Marc:You become a, you know, if you use that talent to become a salesman or you use that talent to continue judging.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:To continue judging and credit and say, okay, I can, you know, I can, I can see through this.
Guest:This is what, you know, this is what these people think they're doing, but maybe this is what they're really doing.
Guest:And, and I did, you know, it was a sort of a, a long kind of, um, zigzagging route.
Guest:I went to, um,
Guest:I went to graduate school and studied that kind of criticism for a while.
Guest:Which kind?
Guest:Just the sort of the Northrop Fry, you know, sort of literary theory kind.
Guest:I was in a PhD program in English for very many years, not, you know, not writing a dissertation.
Guest:And I started just kind of writing book reviews on the side.
Guest:Just so I could have a piece of writing that I could finish and that somebody might read.
Guest:And then just as often happens in journalistic and other careers, it was just sort of a series of accidents that got me to where I am.
Guest:Did you finish your dissertation?
Guest:No, I didn't.
Guest:I wrote that criticism book instead.
Marc:Can you present that to them now?
No.
Guest:I might.
Guest:If any of them are still alive, you know, maybe I'll go down and say, okay, this is it.
Guest:Call me doctor.
Marc:You should.
Marc:That was like one of the ways I knew that we were in trouble actually was, you know, in referencing punk rock was like, you know, when Trump became president, there's people going like, man, the punk rock now is going to really, I'm like, no, it's not.
Marc:No, it's not.
Marc:way to the punk rock comes out from right right what are you talking about oh great also it's like and and that's not how it works it's just not how it works it was just like so disturbing but you have like you have kids i mean do you find hope there do you do you think like we're going to be okay or are you like they're in trouble
Guest:No, I'm a big fan of my kids.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I mean, I'm just generation.
Guest:Yeah, no, in general.
Guest:I mean, they're grown.
Guest:They're 25 and 22.
Guest:And, you know, and I teach college students.
Guest:I sort of have a side gig.
Guest:And I'm very – I like this generation or these generations who get, you know, who get a lot of shit.
Guest:But I think that they're –
Guest:You know, they're very sincere.
Guest:I think they're angry about the right things.
Guest:I think they are, you know, there's a lot of creativity and sort of intellectual toughness, even though there's a sort of reputation that young people have for being, you know, oversensitive and snowflakes and so on.
Guest:I think a lot of them, a lot of the ones that I know are thinking very hard about some difficult things and are in a situation, you know, that
Guest:our generations in a way have have put them in um that they're facing some very uh you know some very hard and serious choices and they're kind of not i don't know there's there's there's less bullshit to them maybe than than than to us right right yeah because we were you know that's what got us through was bullshit yes and
Marc:You know, they might be like, you know, given that there's so much bullshit, maybe this generation is sort of like they can see it.
Marc:This is a simulacra.
Marc:The simulacra is bullshit, you know.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So did you see Pig?
Guest:Did you see the movie Pig?
Guest:I haven't.
Guest:I missed the movie Pig.
Guest:I'm dying to see it.
Guest:Have you seen it?
Guest:I did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:And I loved it.
Marc:It was the first movie I saw out of quarantine, and I don't even know why.
Marc:I think because just the idea that Nick Cage chose to do a movie about a guy that's got to get his pig back, I was like, how is that going to be bad?
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I'm dying to see it because I feel like it's a kind of a year for truffle cinema.
Guest:There's this movie, this documentary called The Truffle Hunters about these Italian truffle hunting guys.
Guest:Yeah, which are sort of like real life movies.
Marc:northern italian versions of this nicholas cage character from what i've heard about pig in that i think you'll like it because i think it's more of a it's it's it's about it's about what what makes you know a quality life you know in light of profound grief i really think it's about grief i don't think it has anything to do with with truffles per se
Marc:But when I watched it, I had no idea what it was going to be about.
Marc:But again, it's not unlike Stillwater, that this is a movie that operates in sort of a filmic and poetic landscape that is at times reading as reality, but isn't quite...
Marc:And it is sort of about grief and about what makes life worth living.
Marc:It's good.
Marc:I think you'll like it.
Marc:I just haven't seen anyone read it that way.
Marc:And the way these movies are promoted, that's the disconnect between Stillwater.
Marc:You saw Stillwater, right?
Mm-hmm.
Marc:Yeah, I said to Damon, I said, you know, I really was anticipating, like, you're not going to, this isn't a franchise thing, right?
Marc:This guy's not going to go on to bungle up.
Guest:No, that's what you think, right?
Guest:You think, oh, this is, he's doing the Liam Neeson, you know, it's his turn to be the angry dad, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and also with Pig, you're like, is this deliverance?
Marc:I mean, is it, you know, it's like, what is this weird mountain shit?
Marc:It really takes place outside of contemporary Portland.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:It's not some weird kind of hillbilly movie.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:Yeah, I think you'll like it.
Marc:I'll look forward to that one.
Marc:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:It's great talking to you, man.
Guest:It's been a pleasure.
Guest:It's been really fun.
Guest:I hope we will again.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:Isn't this what you were talking about people need to do?
Marc:I think so.
Marc:It certainly keeps me going.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:It was great meeting you.
Marc:And have a good rest of your day.
Marc:You too.
Marc:Take care.
Marc:A.O.
Marc:Scott.
Marc:I thought I did good.
Marc:I thought I hung in.
Marc:I feel all right.
Marc:I didn't see it as a competition, but I just wanted to see if we jived.
Marc:You can read him regularly, Tony Scott, A.O.
Marc:Scott, regularly in the New York Times.
Marc:His book, Better Living Through Criticism, How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, is available wherever you get books.
Marc:Here we go.
Marc:Here we go.
Here we go.
Thank you.
Guest:guitar solo
Guest:Boomer lives.
Guest:Monkey and La Fonda.
Guest:Cat angels everywhere.
Guest:Sammy's balls.
Guest:Gone.
Guest:R.I.P.
Guest:Sammy's balls.