Sorry for the late update, everybody - we got trapped in one of those two-person horse costumes for like 48 hours, really really scary. But we're back to talk pretty seriously about Paul Schrader's 2008 literary adaptation ADAM RESURRECTED, the story of a German Jewish clown who becomes a concentration camp commander's human dog and then finds himself the Van Wilder of an Israeli psychiatric facility after the war. It is at once a very relevant and profoundly unhelpful film for the current moment, but we do our best to get to the bottom of the ideas at work here. We recorded this a few weeks ago, so facts about Israel's genocide of the people of Palestine are that many weeks old as we post this, to say nothing of whenever you find yourself listening to it. But, as ever: free Palestine.
Further Reading:
Adam Resurrected by Yoram Kaniuk
"We Are Conquerors" by Adam Shatz
"Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Great Zionist" by Yuval Ben-Ami
"Israeli Writer Yoram Kaniuk, 83, On Pain And Peace"
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction ed. Sumaya Awad and brian bean
Further Viewing:
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (Forman, 1975)
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (Benigni, 1997)
THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED (just kidding)
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I've decided to keep a journal. Hey everybody welcome to Paul Cassidy for me podcast about film culture politics and Paul Schrader where we watch every film written and directed by American filmmaker Paul Schrader and explore how they speak to their moment and this one shows us two by two guys and one of the guy named Jake Sir one I'm one of the guy how come on guys he's one of the guys all right this is getting cut too early for love yeah I'm one of the guys I'm one of the guys my name is Ian Jake James Ian Jake yeah and you did that Jake Ian happened I thought that it would be a sign of respects for you I thought you would take this as a compliment any change to my environment causes me a lot of distress you know this new objects in my pleasure have to be introduced very carefully yeah I'm doing I'm doing all right I went to the DMV this morning you sure did I had a little that's fine I was texting you about a little bit you simply cannot say that that's one of those things you'll get canceled for saying you say the DMV was fine which way am I which way western man always okay it's one of the things that you're allowed to say in any direction you have to say either that it's good or that it's bad that's right I thought it was fine I have some points that were some some suggestions I could make for maybe like better a little bit of a smoother operation down there but but all in all took me about an hour and I haven't been to the DMV in like five or six years and I don't remember why I went the last time so an hour per five years yeah this is one of those things where okay it's weirdly gonna come up on the show this is actually gonna be important however for the moment let's just say that people will imagine because their lives are so frustratingly full of having to work 50 hour weeks pay your rent do insurance stuff there's so much nasty nonsense going on brush your teeth take your medicine yep there are people always tell me this yeah then the DMV you hate that hour because it is the hour in which you feel the weight of all those things when attracted think if you just think if I mean an hour come on yeah I mean it does resemble the airport but with no trip which sucks like if you go it's like going to the airport but then you don't get to either be in like Hawaii or at least in Sacramento to see your uncle you know there's no change of scenery you just walk in and walk out and that kind of sucks but and there's some good criticisms I'm sure we're about to hear a couple I'm interested in how you know why I think you know what I think would would improve things enormously you know I think would would get the the approval rating of the DMV up okay like three to four X is if they make the card there and they hand it to you I feel like come out of there it's like the lollipop after you after your shot you like to have something in hand if you had your your driver's license freshly pressed maybe it's a little warm from the machine or your whatever you're I mean I mostly it's driver's license or there was in there was a toddler in front of me getting a real ID whoa I mean there was a toddler being being taking a real ID yeah we sure hope so but then I did get to watch the very funny there was a very funny process by which his dad had to hold him sort of extended arms length up for the camera under the frame having a little symbol moment yeah that's cool shout out to that that the forearm strength on that to you because it's a big is a big kid you know it's a nice little challenge solid boy mm-hmm weird haircut I don't know I was wondering if like the kid freaked out at the scissors and they just yeah yeah I mean there was a guy next to me who grumbled big government and like that you and I talked about this but like we did it's actually the whole reason that it is taking so long is small government not big enough government probably people working too many hours or not getting rotated enough for having no other job opportunities and they probably shouldn't have been working there in the first place yep the rotation I thought was kind of cruel because they're already they have to do this difficult job under fluorescent lights and then the chairs are slowly turning them away from their workstation yeah yep it's great great wind yeah they put the pineapple only if you want it it's like a past or taco I guess I was imagining okay I'm confused are you having to make your tacos out bust or you know familiar with this food I am familiar with seeing it on the menu and getting something else I've never had it okay and I it's too late now yep it's too late for you to understand it's just classic meet on a stick circling in front of a fire oh oh from those from the wonderful Lebanese diaspora that's exactly right now he's a fucking expert all the sudden and he knows exactly where it came from okay I would have guess on next week show by the way the reverend I mean it is it is it like beef al-Allah shepherd the priest yeah yeah I mean past or like ship like literal shepherd not yes yeah metaphorical shepherd all right now I never had and they do okay so there's the rotation yeah it was a two a few too many steps but I'm glad we were able to hold hands and find our way yeah yeah there was a tweet I don't know who did it but there was a tweet like maybe a month ago where somebody said that at the the euro place there should be like a special price to let you run your fingers and I agree couldn't agree more yep I like that pleasant they got a little flame kissing it oh yeah that's cool that too yeah kissing in the back that's the podcast you formerly promised speaking of which you'd like to support the show subscribe to our patreon or for five Yankee dollars a Yankee month you'll get a bonus episode every other week ever including Clint Eastwood movies from before play Misty for me all kinds of Clint ephemera Paul Schrader ephemera who knows what we're getting up to over there helps us keep this feed free going yep ad free mm-hmm so please consider supporting us at patreon.com/podcastyformay thank you so much for considering it even that's real nice thanks for thinking about yeah typing in the boom dot com yep you know so yeah I went to the DMV it was fine I don't know there was there was a guy who had way too many questions and was like very comfortable just walking up to an open window and talking to whoever was right there this is one of our big theses right to say that one of the things that you're really mad at is that sometimes you live in a society where some of these somebody's gonna do something a little bit of knowing and that's that's just part of it you know and I like it here's the thing about the DMV also is that I think the people at the DM the people who work at the DMV spend I mean if we're talking like an hour every five years or whatever what is that like twenty thousand times more time at the DMV so like their understanding of how it works is astronaut every time you go into the DMV they should they should kind of think of visitors to the DMV as you born children I was gonna say it's like the first day of a restaurant that has like a complicated ordering system yeah yeah you just got to hold my hand yep I have an appointment where do I go I brought stuff I think I brought the right stuff can you tell me and and I noted this as well is that like every time you get to the next person you have to talk to I talked to four people okay talk to the naturally they give you a number person okay she was really nice that she was like it might not be need to be a person oh it was not just to give you a number person it's also the like hi what are you here for mm-hmm so they give you a number specifically based on what you're yeah even one of those clinics where you walk in and they tell you are you here for lab test move this is a Mexico thing but are you here for a vision exam are you here for such a person to catch to catch yeah and this is also they do several things because they also say do you have this this and this and if you don't then they say good come back waiting in the line stuff come back you are waiting in line to see this person but all right yeah and they have it in kind of like AMC a list or fast pass rules where they there's the appointments line and the walk-ins line yeah but but there's just one lady so all they do is they take like three appointment people one standby person three appointment people one standby person okay the appointment is free though so does all it does is reward you for thinking ahead and I guess having you know that's not crazy good a lot and then I talked to somebody else and she was like you know pretty nice okay talk to the then I talked to the photo guy he is exasperated because he had just been dealing with the the walks right up to the window guy who had a bunch of questions ah okay and then the last person I talked to it was like I had gotten her out of bed okay and she managed to even seem upset with me that I was done yeah I was your big your biggest mistake yep all done all done now here's one of my suggestions kind of silly kind of serious that I'm gonna have my suggestions this way yep that's right no we talk about mental institutions residential institutions is that maybe for a lot of the people who work there it should be like being in the army maybe you only work there for years and you get a little bonus like a pension for life and that's it because maybe it's a good most people's personalities aren't built to last well here's the here's a here's a question okay or here's a conundrum really okay which is that you know they they're they're there are these studies that'll say it takes anywhere from like six to 18 months to become proficient at a new job yeah and I would think that official official documentation is the kind of thing you would want skilled people sure in charge of yep and so I guess I just wonder if there's there isn't some kind of a tradeoff or some some need to I don't know maybe maybe you maybe you kind of there's a there's a sort of a sun setting period where your last year is like 20 hours a week where you're training the next batch of people the new agreements this is a classic system I love it a classic is this a classic system yeah oh yeah come on and talk about my overlap my emulator I just put together a an emulator system for a little my little video games you know the first first thing I went to emulate what was that the Christ Jesus Christ good good pick the second how's it going so far all Alan ah making a lot of good investments yeah yep the Apostle Paul yeah that's right uh no we're not talking about that that's for dorks that's also I'm ashamed okay um do you ever go to the DMV in Mexico you don't have a card on there no that'd be pretty crazy though so what are you doing here do you have like a kind of residence permit type thing uh I am always trying to get one and they are always trying to tell me you don't make enough money and I say okay I'll try again I'll see you guys later on dot com slash podcast you for me get this man a little car yes turns out you can be a citizen of pretty much whatever you want if you can pay for it you know that's I mean I've seen literal ads and magazines to this effect you don't like British airways you look at the in flight magazine yeah there's just like ads for like hey become a citizen of like Saint Kitts and Nevis for some mere two hundred and eighty five thousand yeah exactly yep yep yep yep yep you can even do it to um I was going to say real countries as a joke uh oh but you can do it to like Canada whatever to like it's not just a kind of um specifically you develop donations or like like offshore tax shelter countries right yeah uh no no it's all around us it's real ones too anyway how are you anything going on with you uh you know what honestly I feel like I'm on drugs I've slept more than more than seven hours the last two nights and I feel incredible I gotta tell you I feel like I'm blissed out after several weeks of yeah you were doing fewer than six hours a night this is something really special I mean the man is like I feel like you take it all and stride at this point he's he looks like he's glowing he looks yeah downright inseminated this man like God taking his biotin I guess you don't yeah wait do you take that when you what's the there's a prenatal vitamin the people take that also is supposed to make your own acid oh I don't know I don't know but then it maybe doesn't work don't know about that either that that seems to be the case for a lot of vitamins but I think usually what people mean is a lot of people just already have that vitamins then they say it's not working because you don't need more ah yes yes if you don't have enough then you do need the famous tennis ball pee yeah that's right the one is worth of pee yeah if vitamins have ever made your urine a funny color right in podcast you form a gmail dot com photos discouraged okay well that's a type of optional yep um usually to get into the two questions I would love to get into the two questions I began last time would you like to begin I would love to manacham begin oh I actually really really would not like to do that yeah I sure hope not this is going to be a whole we're gonna we'll take we'll get into it after the two questions but I when when he got on the call I was playing Adam's song yeah he was this is a new thing I've a new thing I think it is for funny for me yeah just not even a fun necessarily funny because like that's not a funny song it's I guess clever that I picked it or whatever that's the part that I think I enjoy I was gonna ask you were you are you now or have you ever been a blink 182 guy oh yeah definitely yeah did you call them blink because I always hated when people did that now I've grown and changed okay I would also describe it as growing and changing that was a real older brother band yep exactly right Dave Matthews band song that's huh I thought it was the type of music where you're like nodding your head like yeah this is cool I like this a lot me too and you as well that's why we both know we're we're big boys and then yeah and you're looking at the picture of the lady on the cover and you think that's hey pretty cool to see that but I'm feeling normal about it I can go about that I like a lot but also I can put it in words if I needed to but I'll find I'm not freaking out or anything yeah I'm not scared nope don't think we're gonna get in trouble for listening to this yeah and then later I discovered that I did like it and then they went away and I also matured and thought it was kind of a farm I mean kind of yeah yeah and then I realized that it's okay to make silly team music and that's kind of fun in its own way so I've come around and I view them yeah I don't think I have the the same abiding love that I have for for like the pixies or something that I have moved in through phases but I continue to think they're great bands I would say I look at blank and astrologically I think it's nice to fun to play that music why just because of Adam song just because of Adam song okay and I feel like all my questions related to this film are too substantive for this part of the show yeah fair enough what are you yeah I liked blink when I was a kid and Green Day and some 41 and all that kind of pop punk stuff but I did even then I had my weird little rules and for whatever reason MXPX or whatever I didn't like all right like no effects was out of yep that's out of the the running but then I was also like a little eight-year-old boy listening to the gorillas album on my on my little CD player one song in particular you know yeah tomorrow comes today yeah we we used to host a tomorrow comes today podcast we did why this makes sense yeah yeah we it was we would our guest would emerge from the speed force just his head like in film just as well you know um so yeah I and then I was like then I had my little I'm so too cool for this that I have to like look down on it kind of phase which is unpalatable unpleasant to me regretful and I think a big part of growth for me has been allowing things that are for young people or things that are maybe just like not intended to be high art to simply be fun yep I think that's a wonderful growth thank you I think I had a sometimes when I get really stressed out again and also yeah I get it sometimes when I get really stressed out I get an ulcer on my tonsillar pillar mmm which is like it's it's like a like a sore in the back of your throat and I went to the I went to the UCLA health center ones actually and a the doctor was an old man who said ah that's probably the nicest ulcer I've ever seen and I think he meant like textbook like right like perfect also but anyway a wonderful growth mm-hmm so yeah it's where I'm that's where I'm at with blink 182 I do think it's a little bit embarrassing that those guys are still doing it like that's kind of a different question when you realize that those people are are and were adults who are much older than teens at most of the times and I think them specifically like when they were first starting out they were like shockingly young I think they were like yeah I mean nobody likes you when you're 23 exactly you know yeah yeah no I think that's quite fair but it's also strange to keep playing exactly that type of music but I understand it maybe they just want to make people happy but Adam's a little clowns it's got it's got piano in it that's a serious number that's true yeah I died one of the things I thought I was just getting in trouble for listening to it because of sex stuff but I came to realize that it was also because of suicide and drug use yeah some kid on the some kid on the playground said that that song they there was like a kid who was discovered having hanged himself with a blink 182 wrong on repeat as well yeah his name was Adam no not the case actually not at all no did your brother Adam have any the feeling particular possessiveness or repulsion here's the interesting thing only to me he was the brother who told me about blink 182 I didn't wasn't sure yeah now this is something huh yeah do I have any listeners they were all Adam songs to me fuck god damn dude yeah cool that's my question what do you have for me cool I'll do a little quick one as well what is a historical person's name that you've almost entirely read in our super confident about how it's pronounced who that is a great question probably like this guy's too smart he doesn't know I think I know I think what's happening is that my brain is like running away from them I have a two part answer all right first one solid in can't be how you say it saladin I think probably yeah but that sounded like a I know a Mexican dish or something yeah okay well anything it's not an English you kind of say with a Spanish accent is over here so the problem that's certainly something you've accused me of no I think they I just happen to know they have a shared origin I think they have a lot of sure vowel sounds make sense make sense make sense yeah and then second my I think I don't know if I've told this story on the pod but my girlfriend works with children often children of immigrant families and she works she has a patient who is from Mongolia as parents are from Mongolia guy I mean he know about this yeah he was and the the kid was saying some stuff in Mongolia and and my girlfriend asked his mom what he was talking about and she was saying that he was kind of reciting the story of genius ha yeah and she said we don't know that guy what is that and and the mom said oh yeah what are you guys going again Genghis Khan yeah that's really good which is really good just like the sort of does oh yes you I suppose you would say Genghis Khan I mean we deserve that yeah absolutely I understand the origin of exonyms and yet I think every person who comes from that country has every right to say it's really weird that you guys haven't learned to just call it that by now and also the little boy was apparently just like reciting I am the son of Genghis Khan I mean extraordinarily hard so cool yeah and it was I think he was like he's just like memorized his his lineage but he gets cons like right which is a lot of guys first of luck yeah that's my answers what about you my answers will be revealed over the course of this okay I basically just assumed that you would either know or we would both be wrong and that's fine I mean I've heard some of these guys I'm a knock-and-bagan Meyer Cajun gold my year as I would say two out of the three of those want not gonna be that one I know about yep that one's pretty that one's pretty self-explanatory I don't know how to say is it do you think it's Theodore Herzl or Teodor Herzl or is it Herzl oh I I was assumed it was Theodore but it's almost definitely to adore of course why was it Herzl or Herzl in stinks momentary decision Herzl no no T in there well let's get into our discussion that leads us so beautifully to our discussion of Adam resurrected the film by Paul Schrader written written not by him written by Noah Stollman directed by Paul Schrader from the 1969 novel of the same name by the Israeli author Yoram Ken Kenyuk see I can tell you I knew this one was coming I feel good about your left it out for you I mean I mean you own Connie because that's fine yeah the the Hebrew title of the book is translates literally to Adam son of a dog and it's like several puns because Adam is Hebrew for man and son of a dog is sort of like son of a bitch yeah so it's like man son of a dog and also man son of a bitch and also its name is Adam right now speaking of names I have a question for it's sort of a more serious two question and also ground rules maybe for the discussion where are you on the tendency of many on the left many supporters of the rights of Palestinians to exist on the whole rejection of the terms of the state of Israel for example calling the idea of the IOF the Israeli offensive force or occupation force what do you what how and the Zionist entity instead of referring to the state of Israel that that one in particular smacks of that was a line in the online and yeah first of all like if you're trying to talk to somebody who doesn't already agree with you they're going to be very confused and it's also the problem you already identified the issue for me I absolutely understand people's thinking and it's sort of like we basically all have to agree or start to do it together because right the problem with saying IOF which I again I back completely the logic behind this this is just about practicality for me right if you're talking to people 98% of whom well some huge percentage of whom don't even know about this entity in the first place secondly if they know about it they know about it as the IDF so you're just dwindling down your possibility to communicate and I got to tell you leftists have not always historically succeeded particularly young activist leftists whom I admire very much I'm going to talk about in glowing terms later in the podcast but I not want to therefore taste for me historically pregnant terms yeah I think and just creating new terms that was a glowing that was a glowing joke I see all right great okay yeah I would just say that to me I'm prioritizing communication over everything else if you are talking to other historically aware people on the internet I think probably cool to say IOF if you are making a public facing statement if you want to explain why you're calling them that that's fine like so called Israeli defense there you go so wonderfully you're bringing people in your defense force which does a lot more offensive tactics correct defense and from its origins has always been an offensive force basically so look it's all there just just help people along it's all on second second point of order I was getting ready to kind of let people know this one was going to be like tough this is going to be a bummer of an episode but then I'm thinking is that sort of an insult to the many oppressed and transgressed against peoples that we talk about on other episodes if you don't want to oh sure oh that's a good point and is am I not also playing into the kind of uniqueness of the Holocaust narrative that is so much of of Israeli violence toward well and I I'm gonna say right away that absolutely a unique historical circumstances like so many other historical circumstances not unique just unique you know what I mean gotcha yes I mean all historical circumstances are right unique and you know who taught us that dr Ian Malcolm portrayed by Jeff Goldblum great point yeah now this this is going to be a bummer maybe even more than they usually are if only because we are planning to be more explicitly bombers on the show but I have a I have a couple things if if anyone is worried if anyone's getting this is going to be too much for anybody listening to this talking about this because let's face we're all extremely beaten down and have had our souls crushed just by watching what's happened to the people of Gaza in the West Bank let alone experiencing any of it being close to any any people who have been murdered by the idea of so if this is getting to be a lot for you first of all feel free to turn off the show yep I think that's totally fair yeah couple couple ideas for you first of all Ian the game that's a game I made for Ian's birthday that's a little little game where you you play as Ian eating pig shit and avoiding a goose mmm check that out on podcastingforming.com you need a little pick me up and also you know go outside and do the another Ian game go outside put your hand against a tree see if you communicate with it you feel this to me that's a more traditional game yeah I do make fun of you for but it also does sound really nice to do I mean it's something I'm very comfortable you make money fun of me for because of course it is ridiculous and felt quite nice a simpler time in my life that I don't you can't take the shine off it for me I think it's got to be good for you yeah it's gonna be good for you to make the attempt right like meditation is not yeah you're not the the point is trying all it is is trying yep yoda had it flat wrong stupid asshole yeah a little short little fucker yeah I hate that guy yeah I think I'll also just say I think this this is something that we are not gonna be hopefully spending most of the episodes listing the atrocities either of the Holocaust or of the subsequent removal of ethnic cleansing and removal of the people from their land to create a very very unconvincingly justified state I think we're just gonna be talking about yeah the way people talk about it we're gonna be talking about discourse around it we're gonna be talking about films related to it so I don't think it's gonna be a total slog come a couple of Raymond Carver's over here yeah hey you think there's a guy who like made a statue for the lobby of the Ubisoft headquarters and he himself named Raymond so I was thinking a sort of Rayman Carver ah okay yeah yeah yeah I thought you were gonna say Raymond Carver Carver do you do the music nope oh I started playing the circus music okay and then you were talking you were just like entry of the gladiators engagement probably knows sometimes translated as entrance of the gladiators by Julius I'm gonna guess food chick but his name is spelled fuck with an eye who couldn't see in the game Julius fuck yeah that was the first the first draft of American jig-a-lo the character that was Julius fuck damn good Adam resurrection yeah thank you now this is a film from 2008 but the add up this is apparently a very highly regarded novel in Israel although it's one of those sort of like canonized controversial novels you know what I mean like it was apparently it was you know like a Tropic of Cancer whatever like it was um considered controversial considered outside of the scope of what could be discussed upon its publication but was also very popular by more progressive literary types and has since become like a canonized classic of of Israeli literature it's also a very popular stage play and been staged many times I could imagine myself enjoying that more in fact the stage play yep sure I could I could maybe see that um and there were several attempts to get this movie sort of to get it adapted as a movie apparently by both Charles Chaplin uh and Orson Wells oh Wells wanted to play Stein himself which would have been quite something yeah that sure would have well many would have had the close-up magic part ready to go sure yep yep um and the ability to seamlessly occupy any racial identity that he was famous for exactly um did he play a fellow I believe he did right oh yeah yeah because I know he also staged uh he staged it was it was it an all-black cast of Julius Caesar he had an and oh that's news to me early among them well I pray not uh just an early Wells thing it was a stage production in the 40s maybe I hope it was I hope I'm not like totally making it up it was it was uh an all-black cast of some canonical work that was uh considered to be of course white at the time we'll figure it out right yeah I had a teacher in high school I guess I admire her her growing up a little bit clearly wanted us wanted us to see the Orson Wells that thello showed us a little bit of it and then we started like well now we have to just watch the Lawrence Fishburn one because we're not really supposed to yeah you know we don't really do that anymore Josh Hartnett oh could have done that of course you know yep uh you know speaking of speaking of high school stuff that you're not supposed to look at I had a substitute teacher who apparently like accidentally showed us the wrong documentary about the holocaust that just had like uh-uh way too much footage of dead bodies and stuff yeah um for ninth grade maybe eighth and I think the teacher had to send home a letter of apology that's too bad that's a little silly teacher make mistakes they sure do and uh this is a podcast hosted by two of them so would you like to give a plot summary such as it is for the film Adam resurrected so we can start talking about this thing yeah yeah um okay I think I liked what we did recently where I'm gonna give a super super brief one which will probably not be of great service but maybe allow people to hang on for the unabridged version basically yep great alright so we got a man used to be a clown in Germany now he's in a mental asylum a residential institutional facility a mental hospital many names for these places for holocaust survivors specifically in the desert of the nation called Israel and he has flashbacks to his time in a Nazi camp where a Willem Defoe as a Nazi officer made him act like a dog and he is trying to process the death of his family and maybe his uh complicit parts or guilt about surviving based on debasing himself and he meets a young boy also basically whatever abuse that he's been through makes him think he's a dog and they help each other to uh leave their state of mental illness I guess I don't know is that good basically basic coverage alright yeah I mean that's so we we've got kind of two two parallel lines of story yeah there's the pre-war into there's the kind of Weimar into well I guess it wasn't Weimar because it's already the Nazis are already in power but the pre-war to well I don't even know if they are meant to be in power at the very beginning this is like like post treaty of Versailles suffering in Germany into Nazi Germany yeah exactly and into the holocaust sequences which are in black and white and then the 1961 sequences in the psychiatric asylum are shots specifically in a certain kind of like blue teal tinge that I feel like you get so many asylum set uh so much asylum set media mmm this color grading I didn't think it was as over the top as some of the stuff that I've seen okay some it's also like it's like 60s and uh right asylum so like to me reminds me of leadin reminds me of like some pieces of madman outdoor madman shoots yeah girl and girl interrupted maybe um and uh throughout it's Adam Stein is played by jeff goldbloom now there's some you know I came to my attention that some of the folks who listen to the show follow us on on line and interact some of them are fans of this movie and I would like to say I love you I respect you thank you for listening to the show I don't know if I can I don't know if I can come with you to Adam resurrected his good territory what did you think about the movie here's what I'm gonna say I was dreading watching this figure would be challenging in the best case scenario and in the worst case scenario boring or upsetting or frustrating I think the best parts of it were decently interesting the problem for me is that the parts of it that are unsuccessful are unsuccessful in pretty boring ways that we've seen in lots and lots of times in holocaust film and film generally so I think that makes it tough for a films a target of like a grand reappraisal unless you're somebody who just says like I can basically just ignore those pieces because they are to me they are unsuccessful in a way that most most filmgoers would agree it's something that they wouldn't want to see at the sentiment I don't even think you have to be a a high art film fan cine-ass type person nor do you nor is this just a critique for the you know the mad and crowd or something I really feel like the the problems in the film most people would agree on does that mean that we disqualify the film no I think it's worth talking about I was relieved to see that I actually do think it's worth talking about but I think so I think so too I wouldn't go out and tell my my film friends you need to see this is not 15 17 to Paris this is not even like a patty herst or something under scene Jim I'm putting this below touch for me this touch I think has more interesting stuff going on that makes it worth watching I was surprised to find how much it has in common with touch I see it does have some in common you're not wrong superficially terms of like spontaneous miraculous bleeding yep yep immediately noticeable to me as well yeah but yeah I don't know I'm sorry I'm just trying to catch up on Schrader's Facebook okay he's in Syria bro catch cut this out it's okay he's he's for the film festival I think it was on a on a journal and then he also like he posted like a big scan of his not to get big like copy copy and paste of his page by accident like he like he took a screenshot of his Facebook page and posted that phone no he copied and pasted like a lot of the a lot of the text and then also included like it's literally like a chain letter about cancer well like he doesn't have cancer I don't know what he knows somebody who has cancer I'm sure he knows and yeah and then a lot of people probably saw he did a pretty cool rap squat in front of the plaque where gavrylo prince it popped off friends yeah yeah so that's kind of fun and then I was mostly scrolling back to find his weird Palestinian dog whistle mm-hmm yeah that wasn't saying maybe give it a Google yeah I'll find it but I mean I saw in the film what was most frustrating to me is that I see the way that it can could be a pretty sharp critique of the Israeli project and I don't think that that is there but I'm not even just not even just that I yeah I don't mean to cut you off but I think that goes hand in hand with a critique but kind of an open-minded critique of mental hospitals a look at activity in the Holocaust that was degrading in a way that maybe feels disqualifying for survivors writes and what you know questions sort of I think classic questions about people who get through an event like this doing things that they wouldn't be proud of how much should we judge those people there's a lot of really basic ideas here that I could see you know healing through contact with other people lots of stuff in theory I don't think it's just a Schrader problem though I think this goes to the oh yeah no I think this is from the this is from the source material and that's borne out by interviews I've read with Kenyuk who seems to be really confused yes and I think suffers from this particular cognitively dissonant madness that afflicts anyone trying to find a way that the state of Israel is not a catastrophic blight on the human the collective soul hey that's a band that's true yeah I just think first of all do you consider I don't know I'll let zero is probably how we're gonna say would you consider her historical figure whose name you're afraid to pronounce well pretty good for a while she isn't like yeah Nick you know sure 20 year career historical figures to some degree that's no Hana Aaron is going to come up saying something very similar uh is that a right I have always said it a rent always definitely Hana but uh Hana a rent here's the thing I would not name my kid Hana a rent because I feel like that is a there's such a weird glottal stop you have to make I don't know if it's a glottal stop I'm not I think it's pleasant Hana a rent you know yeah I don't know but that's that's gonna that's gonna come up but um I don't know where should we let's talk about let's talk about the founding of Israel and the Holocaust and the sort of okay should we go first where should we go first yeah this is great how about this though uh we can talk about how it comes up in the film and then get into it how does that feel to you that sounds great to me now the the beginning of the film this is another problem uh with films like this especially the asylum film the holocaust film I am immediately reminded of other better movies that I could be watching instead for example cabaret I'm immediately thinking why am I not watching cabaret instead here's the so this is to the film's credit I thought of cabaret I thought of lots of just like expressionist era German filmmaking because I think it does capture something I'm not just in the black and white I'm not that stupid right it's it gets to something so well so I've proven that I am but I'm talking about yeah expressionist filmmaking uh I don't know something about the way it's cut something about like the flatness of the stage in the way it's shot uh I don't know I thought it did a pretty decent job without doing these sort of like full recreation in uh like high grain film or something right you know without doing like a straight up we're shooting it as if it were metropolis or something right without without a pretty decent job yeah going going Robert Eggers mode or whatever exactly exactly I mean I the film is caught in visually caught in a weird space between like some of the the asylum stuff because of the starkness and kind of I don't know I'm not I'm not an architect or an architecture scholar so I'm gonna say brutalist knowing that that's probably wrong but I actually would have said the same thing so we can be going together how about that a lot of big cement yes straight-faced structures how about that yeah the kind of flat expanses of it yeah felt like they could be gesturing toward or could could be they could be photographed in a way that is Mishima ask in a way that is patty herst ask there's there's opportunities for shredders more uh abstract graphically-minded technique that's I think underexploited and then because much of the film kind of just it reminded me of like the walker in terms of let's get the camera let's get the camera into a place it's not gonna piss anybody off and start shooting you know I thought it was a little bit less functional than that a little bit uh less like shooting for TV it made some choices it's way toned down compared to old school strater and I do continually miss those strong choices and I don't know if we'll see them again until first formed and even then I think there's sort of view and far between in those or those that uh trilogy so yeah I still thought it was slightly more interesting the walker the walker felt like no it's I mean it's we talked about like state of play body of lies and stuff that's what it's no it's it doesn't look like television in the way that the walker does yeah it it but it looks like it's I think storyboarding was not top of mind for sure for Paul um yeah so it opens in uh the in in pre-war Germany where Adam Stein is the funniest man in Germany he's the he's the king of the clowns and he I think one of the more frustrating uh and more detrimental to the film's power uh parts of the story is his slight supernatural ability like why does this guy kind of have magic powers see this is the type of choice that didn't bother me as much in part I actually think it's you know it's getting into like the uh marks that trauma leaves on the body you know this is of course a big number of conversation these days uh for you know like the body keeps a score type yeah uh no I don't want to say self-help that's a little bit dismissed but uh let the bodies keep the score let the bot you know yeah no I do yeah uh it's bringing in that it's bringing in what does it mean to maybe be out of your mind slightly and then the traditional sense like what what does that mean as an as an experience for you does it go beyond what feels human is it is it just worse or is it higher and lower than a conventional sense of the of of reality have the world around you I don't know I understood all that here is where I think Goldblum is a big problem because he is playing I mean Jeff Goldblum already reads us on the border of sanity in his yeah that sounds a little bit curious what you mean by his acting style but what I'm saying is that I don't see any change across the faux film I don't see him like it's it's impossible for me to read as a viewer whether he is sane and doing a bit slightly insane and doing a bit completely insane and acting uh uh according to what he believes is happening um like I don't know where he is in terms of his emotional state throughout the film because he is so he's doing so many mannerisms he's doing an Israeli German accent whenever he feels like it that's correct he is he's doing magic tricks all the time um I mean I texted you that that his position in the asylum is basically Van Wilder he's like the Van Wilder of 1961 Israeli yeah he is they keep thinking he's graduated and he comes back he has all he has all the keys to everything he is uh he's too sexual to not to be contained yes he is constantly making sweet love to iollette zurr as gina gray the head nurse i hope she's the head nurse there's the whole classy ass thing which is i just hate yeah so much all right before we get too much further i want to dress right from your points here please i actually think in theory goldblum's casting makes a lot of sense because if i mean i'm not sure what experience you have dealing with people who are in like acute mental health crises i have some experience it is not something that is always immediately obvious to you it's sort of like a weird second guessing game of would they always have done that that's that seemed a little bit strange or this sure seems like they're talking about this a lot i don't know is that did they just not sleep well last night i don't think i i hear you entirely and i have plenty of experience but i think the film doesn't engage with that ambiguity the film is i think that's where i agree with it but i'm not sure i put that on goldblum's shoulders entirely because i actually think in i understand why they got involved because he reads the exact way that you're saying so i i can actually see the argument for bringing somebody in because i think if you pick a traditional actor somebody who's saying forum we recognize immediately that that does become less interesting to say like oh now he's having one of his episodes or something in that sure sure that seems uh sort of a pretty boring Stephen King Jack Nicholson uh consideration yeah there's a a wonderful uh review of the film by air kinds uh from reverse shot i think from around the release of the film where one of the things he mentions is how uh putting jeff goldblum in your movie immediately causes a uh a framing problem because he's so much taller and i which but i think also you know it it it gets also at the um it uh let me make sure that that is actually who he yes he he says uh always a fascinating screen presence goldblum's tall limber body presents a challenge to film framing he slopes two shots extends negative space or crowds the box and i think he also you know he he puts the whole tone of the film on a weird angle with his performance choices here as well that's that's the bigger stretch and i'm assuming that this may be inherited as well from the novel because i think part of what i it seemed like people objected to initially i didn't read as much as you did it sounds like but the idea of bringing clowning or acting like a dog into discussions of the Holocaust or discussions of the existence of israel or something right sort of inherently debasing in a in the traditional sense so i think goldblum being kind of a goofy guy captures that original frustration for some people maybe because it makes you say okay are you taking this seriously do you know the the gravity of which of the event at which you speak basic well holocaust clown corner it's time yeah for holocaust clown holocaust clown corner because there have been now a number of attempts at this sort of there sure have did you have a chance to watch life is beautiful i did not well i i had a chance i did not take it he didn't see he had plenty of chances yeah yeah lifetime worth i zagged i was busy playing brave fencer musashi on an emulated please that sure never played it's actually i mean this game is about me for real in that uh a big concern in it is uh making sure that you don't get too tired uh and also eating food before it goes bad sure and i swear to you i'll take a screen grab and send it to you i am currently when i when i enter the sub menu it says level one little turd that's real it's like a silly you didn't enter that name okay cool i don't recall no unless somebody maybe the guy who like ripped the rom put that in there to sure fuck with everybody you know you're gonna yeah if you rip that rom by guessing for me a dream like come we'd love to hear from you um no but but uh i did not have a chance to watch life is beautiful but that is one of the ones i'm talking about there's of course the day the clown cried the unreleased unfinished almost jerry louis film yeah i would argue that maybe no one has i think harry shearer is lying uh about that and all kinds of things i'm just inclined to distrust harry shearer i think i don't understand yeah i think i think gadard claimed to have seen it or maybe just said that he thought it was a good idea but french jerry louis this is a film that he made and disowned said he was like he was embarrassed when people talked about it even as a joke basically i think i think also the the sort of unreleasability because it's bad has has grown yeah in in legend because the idea of the film is so stupid what's what really happened initially is that the guy who put up the money the producer who put up the money for it hadn't actually like his his option expired before the film entered production then he was too broke to pay the like the screenwriter for the rights to make the movie and they never resolved it with her oh i didn't hear this okay but i think then afterward this gave everyone uh an important breathing period uh and then they could return to the film with fresh eyes and say that's and that is we can be grateful for that sometimes yeah something i learned uh jerry louis is not playing jewish in that film he's playing a german clown who is imprisoned uh and and later interned in a concentration camp for making fun of it already i say okay like in a bar yeah and then similar very similar to this film he ends up like he's clowning to impress the children or to to like make the children's uh make the children in the in the camp laugh and then this is uh taken advantage of by the camp administration who they have him sort of clown the children toward the gas chamber um and and he sees himself as kind of uh helping them in their final moments and and others see him as enabling genocide and it's sort of a question in the film and until he apparently at the end uh it's hard to say he kills himself because he simply uh goes into that gas chamber i mean he would have been killed otherwise i think yeah he allows himself to be killed yeah that's a tough way to describe so yeah uh then there's also life is beautiful which is a similar like yeah i haven't seen it in a decade my recollection is that yeah obviously he is uh imprisoned also and he is like trying to make the other prisoners laugh but also sometimes slightly wins over the guard some people get mad at him because they see it as like not a laughing situation right he's mostly hit the point of the film is that he's like hiding what's really happening from his son right that's correct yes so he's trying to like he's all a game yes that's it he presents it as a game he's trying to create this illusion to uh preserve his son's mind from trauma or something protect yeah um update to the the ongoing discussion of life is beautiful which has come up on this show so many times for some reason so i early in the show was stunned to learn that Roberto Benini is not jewish because i assumed who would do this if they weren't yeah at least a confused jewish person um it turns out while he's not jewish it is in part based on a book by an Italian Jew called like i beat hitler after all or something it's a memoir of a guy who basically says like you know i survived the holocaust and then had a uh fulfilling wonderful life afterwards so hitler can go screw which sure uh but then Benini's father also was interned at burg and belsen as a i think like as an Italian combatant or something there was a point late late in the war where it only became a co belligerence with the allies yep um so he does have some much closer connection to the holocaust than i previously thought that being said still a very bad idea for movie there's also Jacob the liar which has never seen Jacob the liar but uh it is uh sort of a pre holocaust movie it's about the war saw ghetto uh and and involves robin williams or the guy who plays jacob in the dink check film of it from the 70s um who is pretending to be receiving radio transmissions with good news uh okay and passing this on to his neighbors basically um keeping their spirits up and then it becomes a thing where like the nazis are like you know no one is supposed to have a radio in seghetto where is the radio we will find the radio and uh this is not real there's no yeah yeah and then he's forced to admit that there's no and then i think it ends with everybody getting in a fucking cattle car which like so why would you watch this we've wandered slightly from the state of israel but we are now arriving at another question which is is it possible to address an event like this filmically certainly seems very very difficult is that fair to say it does i think one of the things that that struck me watching this movie is how much it relies on your previous understanding of the holocaust i mean there's the famous michael hanaka thing about how in shindler's list another film i haven't seen uh spielberg makes entertainment basically makes a suspense of a gas chamber when you know there's like a close-up on a on a shower head and you don't know if it's gonna be cyclone b or uh or water water yes i agree with our friend hanaka here this is one of the spielberg films i know you make fun of me and say implies things like i don't like spielberg but in fact i agree with you that et drazic park and in jones some of the great the films jaws no uh i think he has the emotional maturity of a uh very smart child and i think that works really really well for films that rely on the emotional maturity of a child's all the ones that i mentioned i think it does not work for shindler's list say that the fablements does rely a lot on the emotional maturity of a child until the later parts of the film that's which i think are the worst parts of the film yeah we're not talking about the film we're not um not and i i was reminded of that in there's there's a part of this film where Schrader basically does the same thing he does like a tilt up uh above a building and you see that there's smoke coming out of the chimney and you sort of realize or maybe confirm that this is uh a gas chamber or a crematorium and there's i think there's an inherent difficulty because either of these films choose to go the route of even if it was a historical event we experienced it as individuals as people with families and so we're going to tell the story as a story of individuals as humans which is true to a certain extent right but of course that fails to capture like you're saying this sort of uh massive quality of it's right the the sort of like barely comprehensible quality or you try to capture that and that's similarly something the humans can't really wrap their heads around so that it becomes like so overpowering so all-in-goal thing that it is just kind of like an abstract exercise right then there's the question of like is it responsible for people further and further from this event to depict it for example if you are if you you know don't know anybody who survived the holocaust and don't know anybody you first of all you aren't a holocaust survivor or a and that includes like jews who left Germany in the 20s or whatever like a holocaust invader i guess uh and you aren't like related to anyone like that you know if someone making a holocaust film now like is that is there anything responsible about that unless you're making a documentary but if the answer to that is no then does it do we do we worry about it slipping from the the collective consciousness which i think is a fair concern i how many times have you heard maybe this is people being online but i think i've heard it even from older family members that sense of sort of like exhaustion that they feel like it's it overpowers fiction somehow and you know they're tired of saying it which i can understand being wary of that to say okay you're you're so ready to obliterate this historical events from your head i was so struck watching this movie because it's shot in germany in israel and i was thinking one of these people in the background of this these scenes there's at least one of these people who has shaved their head once before to be a holocaust extra yeah right yep like that must be like a thing is there somebody who keeps their head shaved like like uh like someone with a with an arm amputation who becomes a stuntman for whenever like the predator gets his arm cut off or whatever i mean but people stand in high much weirder yet and yeah but like you're saying the alternative does it only exist in history books people aren't great understanding things through history books either so do we eliminate this maybe condescending or reductive representations i don't know i that's that doesn't seem like a great option but then i you know i i think i sent you a photo of this from the bookstore was at the bernson noble football store you did so i mean um and i saw a cover of a new york times bestseller over one million copies sold very popular book that heard about since novel the tattooist of Auschwitz which has since been made into a mini-series starring harvey kitell from blue collar that's right but i sent you the the cover of this because it's it's got like this flowery script uh the the title is written in this script with this very sort of swoopy ligature between the c and the h in Auschwitz and something about this particular graphic design choice just really said to me like we've lost the thread here someone who approved this it's like somebody making a holocaust pinterest board parenthesis frowny face right exactly or like i mean have you have you seen the tiktok like holocaust victim roleplay stuff no i don't know i mean we don't have to get into it but it's like and i think this honestly can be chalked up to young people trying to make sense of the world through the the means of their time but it is like someone making a tiktok where they've literally i think taken like coffee grounds and like rubbed them on their face to make them look dirty and you know same like i'm 14 and i was kidnapped from my uncle's basement in war saw and now i'm dead or whatever like it's look i i actually think this is an illuminating example because something that i struggle with now is i grew up in an area we've talked about it rich and also decently liberal in california way and did all of the ways that you try to teach kids from a background like that about global suffering right you tell all the kids with blue eyes to go to this side of the room and then like then you get fired or you take them on an actual trip and then you're doing kind of disaster tourism or or property tourism and are they finger blasting each other on the charter bus yeah from the the plantation house like maybe and are they wrong i don't know you know and then maybe did they understand it less because they think they understand it because they went to go build houses in tifwan or something you know and it's like i don't i don't and then there's the whole thing about how like uh Auschwitz Birkenau and and these other like uh museums and sites of of the holocaust have to tell people to stop taking selfies in front of the yep r by mock fry like gate or whatever right i have a question for you do you think this film has a um more less or equally nuanced depiction of the holocaust to the opening of x-men or x-men too whichever one has i yeah x-men you're talking about the one that opens with eric i because i think that honestly it was more affecting but i can't tell that's because i was a child when i saw it well i think in one sense it does this give more time to an individual separation of a family yeah i don't know what do you think i i mean this is not a joke tif this is a very fair question and again i i do wonder if part of it was being ten years old however well that i was was when i saw x-men but i don't know i remember it affecting me more than anything in this film affected me i think this film is aiming for something higher in fairness to it i think it is it's trying to or or something more complex something money sure although the first scene of x-men pretty muddy but it almost immediately we almost like as soon as he gets to it's not booking about which one is it uh in this film yeah he is at do they say in a movie i don't know i i can't remember but as soon as he as soon as stein and his family get off the the train he is almost immediately and being instructed to act like a dog by a commandant client the the william defoe character um and he just like jumps into it and his wife and child are pulled away from him very quickly and sort of without well i know fair and it's not but it's not also it's it's also i think not successfully played like successfully underplayed to that too i agree with i think it actually is fair to go underplayed because i don't know that it's always uh you know cue the strings he tries to go back and the the knots he says if you look back at them one more time i'm gonna kill them right here and he big grudgingly gets down on all fours i don't think it has to be that way because the process is in real life was strange and arbitrary and sure sure give you time to react emotionally but i think maybe maybe then where the question the answer to the question of whether the holocaust should be depicted is it should be documentary there's only there's the only like documenting and and maybe if you feel compelled to make more holocaust documentaries drilling down further into specifics instances yep i think i think that can still move people catch people by surprise and i think something like the zone of interest is an important and and unexplored angle through which to make a movie about the holocaust i think the fact that it pissed a bunch of people off yeah and i disagree with all those people i think that suggests that it uh did something significant in a way that the tattooist of Auschwitz for example has not you and i agree about that and i also think that there's maybe a strong argument because most of the people in the world are closer to the to being in these zone of interest family position well most of the i should take that back not most people most of the people yes like most of the people who would see that film particularly as like a high-end art film that was only available year like the cine art or something yeah and the theater to being the Tarantino owns yeah yes exactly in that case i think it's possibly more important for you to see zone of interest than to see this film or to see Schindler's list or something but like where does i mean how many times have you seen like video of someone recently saying like this was the beach in Tel Aviv today is there a beach in Tel Aviv i don't know i don't know this was you know this is a beach in Israel today and it's a bunch of people dancing and playing volleyball and someone quote tweets it with zone of interest right exactly yeah yeah um but to sort of return to the film i think the one of the the underexplored potentiality the underexplored potential um bit of of substance here is this asylum as metaphor for the israeli project more broadly right i mean it's it's and it had the way that it goes about presenting that has its own problems because it's a you know it's a it's a newly built sort of technologically advanced edifice in the middle of the desert with some people involved having good intentions at least for some of the other people involved and it suggests first of all that there was nothing there before there's exactly one arab arabic speaking character in the file you're gonna address this when you're starting to do a little plot summary yourself because the film the film actually opens uh with him at his at the the pension where he lives at this place he does like that actually yeah and i actually think this is a nice bit of misdirection because it's unclear like what's happening and obviously there's some some uh reference reference and also because i think it says 1961 but in a way that i think reflects the the experience of mentally ill people in a lot of cases or extremely mentally ill but it's like there's just uncertainty about what's happening why it's happening is this the right thing should we feel good about this should we feel bad about this right maybe he arrives at the inferior exactly from his his landlating yep he arrives at the asylum and basically i don't mean to be too glib but it's like he daps up the black guy at the gate he does no he daps up the the palestinian man who like man he says what's up to him and arabic at the gates as sort of like look i i'm one of these wilder i'm one of these guys who like i like all the people it doesn't matter where they are and i yeah it's fucking it's fucking Ray Liotta going in the back of the copa like it's that exact but like it's specifically indicating his racial inclusivity and that he's not that's not one of the elements at play here we should all relax that's the only palestinian character in the film yep he i don't think says anything maybe at all but certainly not in english i think he seems yeah he seems to be like happily employed in a menial task that that serves the greater needs of these israeli settlers but i think so putting that aside for a second the fact that the the myth of this is as barren untapped yeah land waiting for the arrival of the the triumphant return of the jewish people uh you know it's it's a place where a bunch of people driven insane by the holocaust are brought to try to move forward as best they can with the help of lots of money from american and european jews and it's not really working that well and uh the famous jewish humor is of uncertain yeah questionable value yes is it is it allowing them to to continue on in this impossible scenario or is it a mask that hides actual trauma that needs to be addressed yeah um and the famous jewish humor uh i think black bile had to get no um i'm not gonna weigh in on that probably probably wait what are they there's yellow bile black bile blood and oh shit pos what is it um i don't know what the last one is i don't remember yeah there are four though uh anyway okay but that you know it's i think in my in my experience both as attempted purveyor of same and as uh occasional student of same it seems largely of the court jester type where it sort of acts as a pressure valve on the the state of things rather than uh transformational and it's it's uh well i think the film struggles with the idea of we also have in the form of uh a wolf a wits a character who is basically like dealing more explicitly with the trauma i mean at times i was gonna say at times in a way that's lightly affecting and lightly effective he's starting to narrate the the awful things that happened to his family having to hide his daughter in a sub basement but then it very quickly becomes him throwing sand at god and not in an underplayed like let us speak for itself but in the kind of way that you expect from a movie like this a little bit yeah and i i mean it you know it gets uh not necessarily the old boy prop what i've coined the old boy problem okay but like when he's talking about his this is maybe an issue with the holocaust fiction he's talking about his daughter basically being like trapped in a tiny whole beneath a basement with a perham crown on her head and like refusing to take off the crown and so she's like a japanese square watermelon like growing uh she's she's being tortured by by having a growth spurt inside of a confined space and like refuses to take the crown off so her head gets like a weird indentation in the crown and like unless this actually documentedly happened to someone you you're him can you you're making this up you have you have afflicted a fictional jewish child with i see what you're saying yeah that's tough though man i i think people had the same objections about jango and i i'm a little bit torn because there there were enough historical atrocities where i would say of course you could draw from them but is it better to pick one of the real ones i don't know that's well yeah i guess would you feel would you feel either option is great yeah would you feel excited to realize that this like or whatever they chose to represent was something that happened to people who were hiding i don't uh that wouldn't help me a ton it would maybe give it some weight i suppose if that's what you're looking for but yeah and i look i hope we are not sounding like we are minimizing the holocaust as an event i think we are questioning all all we're trying to do here is is like work out asking questions no all we're trying to do here is work out how do you even successfully address something like this that was so horrific but also maybe left a people or a subset of a people traumatized enough that they went on to make some uh genocidal or borderline genocidal decisions of their own well that is a terrific terrific segue okay so thank you for that sure um because i think one of the big things about holocaust fiction especially post like holocaust survivor fiction uh which this film is is a potent example is like how do you the question of how do you continue to live yeah in the face of this that's right and like what responsibilities do you have et cetera we talked about this a little bit on the when when i forgot when chronicle of a summer came up but i mentioned that that documentary where there's a woman in that film who is a holocaust survivor around the same i mean it's like 67 68 so a few years after this film takes place but like she's a woman who survived the holocaust and is now just like living her life as a citizen of paris and like you don't you don't really get any special privileges you just you had that experience and even closer to this in time i think it's like beginning of the sixties and it's uh yeah i think it it's a crazy absurd thing you've seen the the worst of human existence i think this is something that can't be asked again i'm not trying to like deflect away from the holocaust but i know other people who come from either families that abuse them or just truly miserable conditions like you know didn't have diapers we're walking around you know uh sitting on the floor as a child had diluted formula or something and at a certain point you say what expectations can we have for this person to just start working at the store or something or to like just be going into the movies and and uh bridal showers and whatever else and i had an experience like this a friend of mine was telling me about because i encountered this person in the context of this was another ucla student actually getting a phd and like he and his husband live in a very lovely apartment in like west la and they're cool they both have jobs in there you know their hair is combed and they're happy you know yeah and he mentioned growing up how sometimes dinner was ketchup packets from mcdonald's that his mom had had like squirreled away for just such a thing and at this point i'm then i'm thinking like well can we can we still like talk shit about the dining hall food you know sure yeah yeah are we and and i don't uh not to to minimize or suggest that he is he has caused me any no any problems but i think so much of so much of the way that we interact with the world is like predicating predicated a little bit on shared common experience shared common experience but also like ignorance of or or just rejection of of the fact of like horrific suffering and i also i totally agree and i also don't want to do what i believe is considered kind of like a revictimizing thing of making those people feel like they could never integrate in society or never participate in no he's integrated very well yeah so i absolutely believe people are capable of that and i hope i hope that for them i just mean that i don't think anybody should be mad or disappointed or or look down on somebody if that doesn't happen to be the way things like you know turn out in the end because i agree with you there is kind of a shared illusion or shared delusion about how we talk about the world based on ignorance or or negligence or or some amount of each and when you encounter somebody who hasn't had that experience i think it makes you aware of that i think that can be edifying but also i agree with you it makes you feel a little bit silly for us i mean we can i just pick ourselves to say oh what do you do with your time i spend a lot of time researching for my little podcast that i invented and sometimes i'll tell myself how to watch three or four movies for the episode sometimes i watch movies that i don't like and then i complain about how yep i had to watch a movie i didn't like and maybe that's bad for my mental health yeah and i'm not saying this is disqualifying for us i just would also not blame them for saying well that sounds like all that's fake and you didn't really like it's not a real issue you know it's like the the famous old joke of jewish humor food here is terrible and such small portions yes that's right um the human capacity for complaint infinite i mean that is that is one of the more interesting parts of of all the god's fiction where it explores persistent humanity and the worst circumstances which you know is also i think fascinating to see but then then speaking of which i mean like the the fellow who wrote um the book upon which life is beautiful is basically pulled this feller's name up um guy named uh rubino romeo salmani or salmani maybe Ruben salmon sounds pretty good russian dressing on it yeah um his book in the end i beat hitler uh when he died in 2011 the mayor of rome uh said of him quote a great called him quote a great man who with his courage and determination managed to save himself from the hell of oschwitz burcanel which really suggests that like the rest of the people have yeah everybody else with a loser yeah and i think that's that gets at the inherent some of the questions that this film is is looking at but also like some of the attitudes of the founders of israel so let's talk a little bit about let's do holocaust in the knockba yep um which by the way the uh famous heber term for the holocaust the showa and the knockba the arabic term both roughly translate to catastrophe so they both sort of they're similar words however yes it uh i believe was maybe still is illegal to conflate the two in israel like literally illegal to i am aware of that yeah argue that these things have anything in common yes and a big question of a big a big sort of justification at the center of a lot of the ethnic cleansing and uh international law defying uh behavior both by israel and the united states it's it's predicated on this idea of the unique suffering the unique like unimaginable evil of the holocaust and so nothing nothing can ever be that bad so anything is justified as long as it's not the holocaust which it can't be because it's no longer the one in german german yeah i think i wouldn't i want to just establish a couple like agreed upon pillars for our arguments here because also tonsil or pillar yep those are good starting points because i think a lot of the objections to all discussions about palestine rely on assuming that the pro palestine person is just not aware of these or refuses to acknowledge these these aspects one of those is the awful and on a scale unimaginable suffering of the holocaust right i texted you because i was looking for i'm i have read many texts about this conflict this question the history of it the modern iterations the the peace records that the seeking for peace may i even like calling it a conflict because that that suggests and why is some parody or some yeah i mean wait we're we'll get to it but i just wanted to say that basically i was trying to find for our discussion today somebody that israeli historians or uh you know like like liberal israeli is trying to find a two state solution type guys are okay with but part of the problem is almost universally their first objection is well either none of this stuff happened or it happened but it doesn't matter that you point out the massacres of the knock above because you didn't talk about the suffering of uh the european jus which was behind the thinking of this and i think that the problem is what if we just acknowledge that that suffering is like an incalculable amount how do we move from there in terms of moral thinking what doesn't that justify if for you that is the thing that needs to be taken to account when you're massacring a new village of people when you're displacing people when you're coming up with maybe this i would say somewhat fantastical vision of your justification for your historical roots for this new state what what isn't like on the board uh as an option and i think for for lots of israeli historians it strikes me that the answer to that is nothing is is not on the board there's nothing that couldn't be considered i think that's become just overwhelmingly true and i think in the face of that i do relate very much to the institutionalized uh broken minds of this film were in mind the one who's wrong is there something wrong with me that i'm not thinking right yeah i wanted to quote really fast benny morris so guy who was like kind of a he was part of this group of new historians in israel who were considered maybe questioning some of the founding of israel pointing out some of the atrocities that happened in the course of his founding but then around the time of the second intifada basically flipped the script and became like a one of these guys that i'm discussing and he was uh giving an interview to harit and he said i don't think that the explosions of 1948 were war crimes talking about the nakpa there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing i know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide the annihilation of your people i prefer ethnic cleansing and then he goes on to say uh talking about benghory and he says in the end he faltered if he had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country if he had carried out the full expulsion rather than a partial one he would have stabilized the state of israel for generations uh but he says it was impossible to leave a fifth column in the country meaning the palestinian people they had to be done away with there was no other way and then he gets into culture war stuff where he says that revenge plays a central part in the arab tribal culture therefore the people we are fighting in a society that sends them have no moral inhibitions so this is like the the degrading process that you see in the minds of all these people can i can i do a quick plot summary of Zionism yeah please yeah let's go back to pre world war two hersel stuff pre world war two so and a lot of my understanding of this in particular comes from palestinian socialist introduction which is a really great extremely uh accessible and straight to the point text from 2020 um so pretty upsetting to imagine people writing this in 2020 thinking that was bad as it could get um yeah so they sort of um they trace the beginnings of the Zionism to around the french revolution and the kind of um shift in in a mindset uh that that emerges then of of um establishing a a state based on principles rather than based on right um like specific geographical heritage or whatever ethno-nationalism which is funny um this idea sort of bounces around percolates for a long time um a man who really kicks it into gear is this guy named Theodore Herzl or Herzl who um together with a bunch of and didn't we talk about the british is realites or whatever at some point we have yeah there's are some there there's there's a very strange that there's a in uh inextricable entanglement between Zionism and the british empire sure was the people who had colonized this area and were in charge of what later became the mandate of palestinian and it took on like five different forms but yeah go on yes so um and anti-semitism was uh major fact of life for european jews for can i jump in to say that's i'm gonna call that pillar number two we're not ignoring the global anti-semitism of places such as the uk the us people who were rejecting jewish refugees at the time uh and in fact i think my co-host would join me in arguing that uh the war crimes uh committed by the state of israel are extremely i was gonna say i don't know if it's good or bad they are they are intensifying anti-semitism around the world they are creating more reasons that people are becoming anti-semitites they're adding fuel to the fire of anti-semitism yeah i don't want to say that there's any justification for anti-semitism but there is certainly the israeli argument is that we should be conflating uh Judaism and israel at all times and i think that is a huge mistake so uh there's lots of disagreement among the various uh zianist uh sort of uh what's the ideologues about what exactly should be done in order to create basically a jewish state a jewish homeland a jewish a safe place for jews in the world this is the thing that they want to make and there's all kinds of proposed places for it yuganda comes very close um as this is uh you know just to hammer home the the britishness of all this and also the uh inherent cause of displacement or the necessity of of displacement for this this kind of an idea unless you're going to like siberia maybe and it depends on which part of siberia um you're you're gonna have to displace some people if you want a fresh country correct at this point in time yep um and uh fast forward to world war one um the ottoman empire actually we're not fast-forwarding it okay the ottoman empire is uh they are they control palestine which has been sort of settled upon uh in the most at this point in the minds of zianists uh as the historic homeland of the jewish people you know it's the holy land it's the it's where uh many of the events of historic Judaism took place it's where kind of the the the talmud is set basically um the torah excuse me the talmud is the other one it's where the discussion one yeah the torah is set basic yeah um and so having settled on palestine uh one of the things harzel does for example uh was go to the ottoman's and suggest uh suggest that he could um sort of rally the jews to take the the ottoman's side in the Armenian genocide yep and that's correct downplay the Armenian genocide in exchange for uh settlement in palestine so this is from its from its inception this is a uh a project that is okay with genocide that is um often very deeply anti-Semitic itself lots of um playing into like this is the jewish character this is the jewish habit and literally using like Nazi words like calling the jews of eastern europe parasites and things like this yeah and just in case people were lost or had lost track in there we're talking about like the 1890s here this is yeah 1896 yeah he enters into negotiation with the turkish sultan um and he he says uh this is from historian lenny brenner it would have occurred to no one else in the broad jewish world who tried to hinder or interfere with the Armenians in their struggle nor would anyone have thought to support turkey in any of its wars and in the end Zionism gained nothing by its actions but what was demonstrated early in its history was that there was no criteria there were no criteria of ordinary humanism that the world Zionist organization considered itself bound to respect um he so he he um after the after world war one of course um the ottoman empire loses uh and the british come into control of much of the middle east and um so the seeds of basically every problem facing that region today um yeah that's right yeah and they uh they they drop the the mandate of palestine and uh it is under this mandate that yoram canyok is born he's born in palestine in 1930 um which is another weird angle on this that he is he found out later that he had like relatives who were killed in the holocaust but this is basically as abstract to him as um like it would be to jews born in america or something like it's you know it's not happening to he was under no threat the british uh there was apparently maybe a nazi plan to invade palestine but the british headed it off so like nazis never they never never got anywhere near there right um and uh then there's the balfour declaration which was a uh declaration by the british empire uh that the there should be a jewish state in palestine and it's uh it um had certain stipulations about how much of palestine uh would go to the jews and how much would go to the arabs but um it was considered sort of a start a foot in the door by the right the zionists and then after world world war two um there were you know uh plans were were set in motion to not only like fight against the british literally like sort of overthrow them as a as their own kind of perverse national independence movement uh but also to drive out the uh extant arab population 700 000 people were um driven from places that they had lived in their families that lived for you know hundreds thousands of years um and a big part of this is like ostensibly to create a home for and like a you know i basically like the i this is embarrassing but i was thinking about the fucking elves going into the west this is like a place where for the jews to come after this catastrophe has befallen them like a place for them all for all jews to retire or whatever away from the violence of the world that's that's sort of uh a rhetorical part of of this project but like you know a hundred thousand maybe a hundred thousand jews emigrated to palace nine during world war two and then afterward the number is i mean it's lower than 700 000 it's not like like holocaust survivors were by the boatload coming to replace one for each the palisinian who was murdered or expelled massively outnumbered which i will say is the beginning of uh we just don't have the the airtime to get into it but yeah any time you look up options that were offered as as like this was the peaceful solution that the nasty palisinians rejected always consider the amount of people that were being offered to live in each place the access to resources the access to the other parts of the same country basically every time it's we are going to be israel we're going to have access to most of the geographic geographically advantageous things and also we're going to have continuity in our country like geographic continuity and these people are going to be in weird atomized versions with way higher population density and you mentioned it jake but i really want to return to the fact that these people have been living here for conservatively like 1400 years all right and right part of the complexity if we go to the discussion of like what is the land of israel is that even going back to the bible or biblical times basically just the nature of of like canon and and babylon and all this but they were everybody was constantly being displaced and moving around and it's very hard to say like this was their place because the Egyptians come in and kick people out the Romans come in and kick people out right which is awful as that was bad for them at the time but it's hard to say like this land was theirs and then of course like you said it almost becomes irrelevant because how many hundreds of years have to pass i mean if if like south americans were frustrated with spanish colonialism and the real racism that they faced and they wanted to just go back to Cherokee territory which like you know hundreds or thousands of years earlier that's where humans descended into south america right right right does that make any sense i don't i mean it's i'm not trying to minimize the difficulty of of protecting yourself from racism but if you have never been to a place your family doesn't speak a language from this place and the people who do live there have photographs and heirlooms and farms that have been running for hundreds of years you know at what point does this just not make sense as a as a right plan of action well the only thing the only way you can sort of sell this to the rest of the world is through a just full court press anti-semination you guys don't want these nasty guys and you don't care about the guys where they're anyway right yes these are dogs these are uh beasts these are meaning the arabic population but also the kind of self-hatred of like do you want all these jewish people to come to your country there's that too and so much of of what david bingerian says what the ador hergal says what um all of the founders of israel say is like pretty similar to nazi depictions of the jew you know and like yep look my my dad's side of the family is jewish is is uh ashkenazi jewish from like russia and latvia lithuania right poland and i feel so frightened of israelis i feel no kinship yeah with israelis and i don't think that they feel kinship with me i mean it's like it's it's its own weird it's its own very weird uh like cultish um group that that claims to have a voice for the entirety of uh a very broad diasporic and and like really loosely held together sort of cultural identity um and i mean i want to read from um i want to read from from palisani social actually this is from the ethnic cleansing of palisani but is it elan pepet do you know how to say it i don't know but he's one of these guys that uh is really historians hate i will say he was also in this crew yes but he has several texts about this i think tenness about israel things like this yes this is his uh he's his description of gold in my years reaction after the knockball in 1948 she had first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked foods still stood on the tables children had left toys and books on the floor and life appeared to have frozen in an instant my ear had come to palestine from the u.s where her family had fled in the wake of pogroms in russia and the site she witnessed that day reminded her of the worst stories her family had told her about the russian brutality against jews decades earlier there's also plenty of descriptions of uh like holocaust survivors coming to israel and being offered the home of a palisinian family and returning to our media and stuff is that what you mean yeah rejecting this i admire this immensely because i admire them i i admire i admire not gold in my ear correct yeah no i just mean that the moral clarity of saying you know what i'm going to go back to the place where i know there's anti-semitism because i can see what's wrong with this that's uh yes very impressive look i mean that's why i think that the metaphor of the asylum for the whole israelis cure for holocaust thing is potent but it's not really it doesn't seem to be that much interest to to Schrader but this whole enterprise thinking about this is completely insane it is like to be it's it's there's there's a uh completely like unfathomable mechanized process of genocide in europe that kills most of european jewery and seven million people of all other types of uh apparently undesirable character right and and uh identities and then a group of people largely not from eastern europe anytime recently many of whom are russian or russian to the u.s like gold in my ear yep come in to uh an unrelated country and they're like this is ours because of the thing that happened to people who are like mystically related to us yes yeah um and then they do things that often look very very similar to the things that the nazis did to the point where victims of the nazis say you're doing the same thing i don't like it yeah uh and then they say actually no we aren't and they say if anybody who's not jewish says that you are an affluent anti-Semite if you are jewish you say that you're also an anti-Semite you're also anti-Semite yes and then there's i mean you we can drill down into this and find things we don't like anywhere right like Israeli memorials to the holocaust tend to downplay the the experiences of non-jewish holocaust victims for example correct in fact they another thing that they object to in a lot of these texts is anytime one of these historians tries to investigate like okay well how was this related to general social attitudes about homosexuality about being a um like a romani person or i'm not sure what their preferred term is these days but uh or a communist right how like what was what was part of the same thinking or was there a shared thinking between like eliminating these subversive elements and basically the israeli line is don't you dare compare anything else and and anything that highlights their suffering downplays jewish suffering which i would just encourage people to say unfortunately make room in your head for the suffering of lots of people simultaneous if you want to look at history it's a good strategy and so you know this is a crazy making enterprise in all sorts of ways what this has to do with acting like a dog yeah a boy who inexplicably also thinks he's a dog well i don't know even about this not to be the son of or not to be the grandson by the way i had a suspicion that this might be the grandson oh god that would have really upset me yeah what's your theory about the dog boy so i think in this film we he's looking at me he's looking at him here uh i think what helps me unlock this is of course our old friends Derek jacobee and he is in this film this is a big homie and he is of course in the film of hereafter all right and these two films share several pieces of DNA first of all i think that they are slightly shot in a similar manner sometimes yeah they have a similar color grading at points yeah that's right and also we have a person who suffered trauma maybe has supernatural ability now encounters a boy who's also suffered trauma and maybe figures out that his gift is not to heal himself but his to heal this boy and maybe be healed by this boy wow they're discovered together and what i think they really share which i think brings us back to that beautiful discussion of the history of design as a major software it is that they share this sense that the ultimate logic is personal humanistic logic which i'm a fan of certain types of humanism but where it falls short is the hyper liberal hyper self-focused type of humanism that says the ultimate logic is the logic of what feels nice to me and feels good to me and if i feel that i have suffered a lot and maybe i have but then what it basically whatever i want to do is justify it because my suffering is the realest suffering that there is and all other types of suffering are hypothetical to me which i i want to be clear i like the film of hereafter i think i was surprised by enjoying the the film of hereafter to a certain extent and i think the reason it's okay there is because it is about a guy with crazy psychic powers and he just wanders around and nothing matters and it's also about a broad sort of individual instances of capital s suffering like yes all types of matter exactly it's not it's not considering history it's not considering institutions it's not considering social attitudes it's just saying yes it sometimes sucks to feel bad and worry about death and lose people and feel like you don't know what to do in the world it doesn't work when you're talking about world historical events and forces that continue to victimize hundreds of thousands or or two million people in the case of gossants yeah i mean it's also just reading about the we're not comparing miseries we're not comparing suffering uh-huh yeah but reading about some of the sort of instances that like galvanized Zionism were uh pogroms where like a hundred people were killed and like a thousand people were injured yeah and then looking at that which is awful of course you personally the worst day of your entire life i'm sure would color the way you looked at the world until you're dressed in getting murdered or hurt by uh someone because the the out of like ethnic animus yeah that's awful that's unspeakably awful um but to look at the if you are the kind of person as many in many defenders of israel are who wants to kind of say this is okay because this this amount of suffering is okay because this other amount of suffering was worse yes yeah and if we're playing that numbers game it's still right is fucking crazy which yeah exactly they tried they're they're like just war approach to it is saying we are preserving the lives of of our children and the safety of our children and that the cost is just a bit could you could you think you could say that in about 14 words yeah between 13 and 15 words i could probably manage that thank you thank you yeah yeah i'm referring of course to the famous 14 words that's right that like hitler said about preserving the future for arian children or whatever that is a sort of Nazi dog whistle phrase dog whistle um which reminds me by the way of the palsinian dog whistle uh that paul shredder posted in april uh of this year he posted a weird like ai photo of a whistle that has dog ears that is the colors of the palsinian flag and he says for he posted the image without any explanation and then in a comment said that's the palsinian dog whistle you may have heard it on your local campus yes which is uh i think a that's about as much nuance and attention given to the question of like palsinian humanity as the the film has whereas it's giving a tremendous amount to how complex might the suffering of somebody who is in a concentration gap and that's a deserved consideration in the sense that you know it's way beyond just the simplicity of it was awful right it was awful and maybe since then all sorts of of interactions and relationship relationships have retraumatized them you know we'd uh we've mentioned the film phoenix on here before right films that explore like what is the fallout how do you continue to live how do you make sense of your own i don't think i could say i think it's in first class and x2 but i don't think dark phoenix has any holocaust stuff in it yeah it's a good point i think they were over it by that point sorry you know the uh the christian pet's old film phoenix that's right yes yeah and i mean i don't i'm i'm getting into dicey territ territory that feels dicey to me at this point but uh i'll describe my own reaction to something okay um holy should you know that christian bale is glorious dynum stepson whoa is that true she married his father who died three years later of brain lymphoma oh man what the fuck anyway there's a christian bale film called um what is that movie called the promise a 2016 film about the Armenian genocide mm-hmm that was like pitched as immediately read as like a piece of propaganda is the wrong word but as like uh an attempt by by an interest group to dramatize and make known to a wider audience a specific instance of historic suffering right yep and we're so familiar with like the holocaust film um i think in part because like look who's funding holocaust museums and the state of israel rich american jews yeah many of whom also work in the entertainment industry as a result of like historical forces that that caused uh will be on their control but marginalized in the industry yeah yeah are you gonna address the film of like the cloudlandsman film is this where you're gone i'm not actually i was not actually going there but what i was going to say is like you know if arab americans and palestinian americans uh were had had a hundred-year history as executives of uh movie studios we just have a lot of knockbook films and that's fair that's fair i've had the reason i mentioned show is that you know that it was commissioned by like israeli government officials initially uh they asked him to make a film about i don't think i knew that i had a dream probably probably in uh you know in the nightmares leading up to this the the fact of having to do this episode i had a weird dream where i was like i think i had to like pick a cloudlandsman film for people to for to to put on like a list but in my mind cloudlandsman had also done like i mean not it wasn't exactly this but basically like the chipmunks movies it was like it was a bunch of other like yeah yeah inessential junk and i was like oh right no it should be show up it should definitely what are we talking about why didn't i think of that it should definitely be show up yeah yeah yeah smart cloud dream dream drink out there dream drink out there but like yeah i i don't say that by the way to say like this is like a jewish trap or something i'm saying that no no it's just to point out that yeah when your people have suffered although it it does feel a little bit mercenary given what we know about how israelis often talk about holocaust survivors as being like weak or not the representations of of juneas and how much money how much money did the us just promise to send to to israel in terms of military aid like 20 billion dollars over 10 years or something yes yeah and then there was an article from 2022 about how one third of all holocaust survivors living in israel are below the poverty line right exactly that's bad there you go all you need to know like there's plenty of money uh but holocaust survivors in israel are uh like literally being fed by NGOs because the government won't support like 85 year olds uh that's exactly right get enough food and as my understanding 85 year olds don't need that much food it's pretty easy to feed them move quickly uh they're not hungry they're just they're like awake pretty early yeah they want like 300 degree mcdonald's coffee and like uh half a danish and then they say i'm full i know pretty easy yeah you've actually well i think you've you've set up a beautiful segue for the last topic that i want to address very quickly which is that if we're using this as a metaphor for israel or the founding of the israeli state uh i'd like to talk about you mentioned at the very beginning like asylum films films generally and and not the not the long list or studio that was completely transmorphers yeah absolutely right yeah no uh i mean like cuckoo's nest style traditional stuff about right the very real horrors if you really if you want to uh go a different way look up some different historical horrors look up what was happening in the united states mental institutions or global mental mental institutions specifically to people of color to women really just everybody uh i've heard even i'm not sure if this is apocryphal but stories of like walkways that allowed people to pay and visit institutions like freak shows at the circus a little bit uh so this is a level of smart that's just that's just paying you just making money two ways yeah it's the lights on yeah yeah everybody likes that you know yep we all like that and of course probably most of our listeners know about the 1980s closures of these institutions motivated by a mix of public awareness about suffering maybe brought about by films like uh one floor of the cuckoo's nest and also just reagan era cost cutting which was the reason that it made it through because they would never have allowed all these crazy to be out unless they felt like it was gonna save them a ton of government spending so big government yep well this is this is what i'm trying to do i'm trying to bring it all back to your initial discussion bring it all back to the gray ponytail guy that sat next to me at the DMV exactly right where it's a this is a difficult question this is a question that i feel a lot less moral clarity about but i will say based on my limited experience and reading and knowledge of the world seems like most people who experience mental health crises would be better served it's by like community-oriented services or perhaps better served just by having low-cost apartments to them or uh free apartments available to them or guaranteed food help getting work placement right these things without ever getting into questions of like forced uh drug application or something just would set people on a good path and then perhaps we do need some type of institution where people who are really suffering from florid psychosis or uh could be a harm to themselves or others may need like really active intervention and i gotta say i've been reading a lot of accounts the last few days of people who have been in these institutions work in these institutions both again like the patients and the the nursing and the staffing side and it seems like the most positive stories are people who just say hey you know what it's really nice when you go into one of these places and maybe you haven't had a lot of chances for people to care about you the people there don't seem overworked the food is nice you get a private room they ensure that you are active and have contact with the people you can safely have contact with and you are getting lots of one-on-one therapy and i gotta say this is a case where bringing it back to our film the asylum in the film looks pretty nice even though there's like some discussion about yeah as a as a prison ultimately there's a sense that like some of these people are maybe and we'll never be able to be reintegrated into society and maybe it's just nice that they can have a buffet that has wine and foie gras and i think the staff needs to eat at tables with them yeah exactly yeah that's that's a big thing and a lot of like um like mad activism and and uh institution like like psychiatric institution reform is like patience uh patient advocates and stuff yeah patient advocates and and to cut down on the like big burly men in white um uh the the stark distinction between staff and patient which makes people feel like they are in the movie shock corridor directed by sam four it's exactly right i mean honestly some of their claims are so achievable just saying like i would love to have a sense of like what my treatment plan is nobody like i part of the thing i was just scared because nobody told me what i was going to be doing or how long i was gonna be there or why i was taking drugs and stuff yeah if at any point i would like to know what does this medication do how does it work why have you why did you decide to give this to me instead of a different one i'm allowed to ask and you have to tell me exactly that kind of thing which i really dream and i think it's truly uh something that is so attainable for us i do think it speaks to maybe a difficult question which is sometimes there are social problems that we all acknowledge uh i mean if you just listen to any san francisco rhetoric right now it's so nasty in terms of we got to get these people off the street right this is untenable as a as a situation right whatever we need to do to these people has to happen right it's it's so baffling to me to think of it as like a a blight on the city with no origin like where exactly where is where do you think these people come from right why is this happening to them have you noticed any characteristics that they all share yep have you noticed like if you ask them maybe obstacles to their uh substance abuse recovery or getting back into a an apartment between perhaps their upbringing and yours yep um and like maybe some of the reasons that they don't know how to code exactly when you do i mean you're exactly right jake is to me that the feeling is actually it's really hard and complex and expensive to address root causes so let's just go back to mental institutions and then when these patient advocate type people say well can we at least make them really nice and focused on fair treatment rehabilitation they say well that sounds pretty expensive so i think what it comes down to is people i actually have i'm having a vision of a pretty wonderful residential mental health facility that's got like bean bag chairs and like rooms where you can nap and there's like always cereal available to you uh and you can you you can use 20 percent of your time for personal use right plenty of uh unlimited vacation the turning the vacation for some reason yeah they pay for they pay for you to take a seminar to learn how to do uh you know some new kind of language that comes out or whatever that's exactly right you get like uh uh a bonus to your salary if you do yoga for special reason plus picks you up at your house and takes you straight to work so you don't have to own a car it's talking about places like google.com of course i'm checking in a way yes uh yeah so this is speaking of uh speaking of speaking of medical staff that's right speaking of google.com yeah that she's the answer to all my search queries oh that's nice hey i certainly feel lucky like google oh it's cool yeah yep yeah i asked geeves and he sent me an angel of course she's mad she's mad about all that yeah she should be uh anyway i only say all this to point out that uh people are trying to come up with solutions to problems without wanting to commit any resources to them or make their lives even marginally worse despite how much they imply that these problems are ruining their lives right saying that homeless people are the worst thing that's ever happened to me or people experiencing homelessness are the worst thing that's ever happened to me so we should send them to them so we should send them to a place that's so bad that i basically don't have to pay for it nobody has to pay for it it's just uh they will either rot there forever or die quickly right yep um to which i have to say with Derek jack being gladiator yeah i think he is uh really behind all of those guys he is yeah actually you know what i think he is he's like one of his senators right he's in half of all he has like right of first refusal on movies about ancient rome yep no i think you're absolutely correct Derek jack could be on screen and stage out gay actor which i learned recently i did not know that about him he is in the film gladiator as grockus there he is all right uh he gives a rockus performance as grock yeah i think that's probably our episode i think that's probably our episode to have them resurrected um there's the whole last temptation of christ thing there is there's a burning bush with will mdefoe i i think any serious straighter heads this is the type of thing that maybe we should be pointing out but i i'm gonna read i'm gonna read some ericines this piece again okay uh stein's moment of revelation and honest to god water watershed moment of self reckoning has an odd ring to it his irreconcilable so his irreconcilable life haunted by unspeakable horrors and a totalizing guilt that makes the present untenable is shaped and defined by his being a european Jew or survive the holocaust yet when stein stumbles into the desert to battle his demons and confronts a burning bush that speaks with the voice of his nazi tormentor it's not the jewish god that we think of but martin score says he's with william defoe transmitted from jesus to nazi devil his strange almost perverse evocation of the last temptation of christ veers adam resurrected into a deep pocket of shredder esque christian symbolism i can't say if yorem canyok had this in mind when he wrote adam resurrected but it's the one moment when this film about a mad man is truly tremendously insane so yeah unfortunately i think uh we didn't mention this is this type of boring stuff i think he is this madness sequences are pretty boring the dream sequence stuff is pretty boring i mean i didn't find a lot in i really don't like movies about mental illness that uh fit the mental illness neatly into the needs of of a narrative i find that boring and um in poor taste i it should be if you're gonna try to represent artistically it should probably be as frustrating as it is to deal with and be around exactly in real life not not as uh like you're saying straight-edged right in the the narrative yeah there's kind of cool in the fuck what's a straight-edged band brand new played over the end credit yeah that of yeah the straight-edged band i don't know um now i can't remember what's the name of the bands who plays straight-edged like fugazi and minor threat yeah minor threat yeah yeah i don't know would have been cool to see Orson wells in the clown makeup that's for damn sure would have yeah would have maybe needed more than gold blue that's we have just volume wise i'm gonna assume that we also got old moorets blabtro and here and yeah old moorets from the walker our friend from the walker yep and uh yeah i mean fucking um Vincent de Navrio kingpin's girlfriend from correct Netflix daredevil show ayalitzerer who is again kind of a fairly good it or thematic dead ends for me not her fault to the rabbit but she does have to do a lot of barking like a dog for like sexual reasons which i suppose is brave yeah i guess um the kind of woman born to be in a zaxnider film there's something about this particular walk of woman who is in so many zaxnider films including her she's in man of steel or something she plays superman's mom mm-hmm little weird little weird to have an Israeli woman play the mother of the uber mesh i don't know is it i mean wasn't it written by two jewish guys to for that exact purpose i have to ask michael shabon chaben another historical figure yes that's um that's going to probably do it for us oh wait nope we got one more thing we got to do it's the sexual obsession chart you know my answer i thought about this one during the film for maybe the first time okay uh that's interesting i've been thinking about it during all of them because i tried to do my job but no i wait i didn't explain anything about this this is where uh paul so paul trader said this uh to an interviewer in a q and a a few months ago i'm never written a script about sexual obsession and so that's what i'm doing now and we here on the show we're doing our best to determine which films he has written that are not about sexual obsession and uh even what did you decide on during your doing for the film i'm gonna put this one we've done this before so i don't feel like it's cheating this one's a kind of for me there's a distinctly sexual obsessive aspect to this about being a dog about turning the objects of your attraction or degradation into dogs uh sex comes up a couple different ways in here so i'm gonna i'm gonna say is yeah he's a horn dog he is a horn dog that's i thought you're gonna bring that when we talked about gold loom is like it's also playing into the attractive but maybe so sexually aggressive that is this a bad thing yeah he's he's got a he's got a tinge of the creep to him but he is so charming but right so kind of skisie yep um so yeah i think i kind of there's sexual obsession is a is a big part of this and i think lots of films depicting narcissism yeah i was going to say because yeah the the sadistic instincts the degradation instincts you know right i noticed it a lot actually was an illsa she wolf of the s s yeah wow you're pretty keen i'd i don't remember that yeah pretty pretty smart guy i seen a lot of movies you sure yeah put a lot of uh the fuck is this game called musashi brave fensory yeah um guy looks just like me it's crazy anyway uh that's i think uh you know that's an episode of the show to an episode of the show i would say you know what i found myself in the surprising position of saying if you have some extra time maybe worth checking out if you don't i would watch something else which is maybe the most boring response possible to this film book i would put this in the pre previewing category or the pre the the this is of of the type of direct of of otter uh wilderness picture where i would have put hereafter before i saw it okay yeah but i think the hereafter actually has a lot more essentially on with it and i think i think the the kind of you might call it liberal like uh individual level humanism is is what we found so charming about many of clint's films and i think so too it's explored in opposition to some of his his inferior instincts and then here yeah Schrader seems aware of more specific political thought so this falls flat for me a little bit yeah weird stuff weird wild stuff weird wild stuff speaking of weird wild stuff next week is the canyons little be pretty strange um i already have my two question picked up wow let's just say it's locked and loaded okay uh with that remember to subscribe rate us write a review it helps us on the algorithm if you like the show tell a friend tell your dad uh write a novel i don't know follow us on twitter and instagram podcasting for me to have any comments questions or concerns you're interested in co-hosting a two-person paul Schrader podcast you can email us at podcastyformi.com that's not right you can email us at podcastyformi@gmail.com thank you to Jeremy Allison for our artwork canyons next week get your freaking um hiking boots on it's right yeah it's kind of like it that films like Jerry it's a lot like Jerry it's a lot like us fans and it's Jerry we will actually be doing sort of a two like a compare and contrast so see you there
