The 2026 Dionysus Awards

Josh Landy
What would you do if you found out that you were a robot?

Jorah Dannenberg
Can art do anything helpful in the face of tragedy?

Josh Landy
What if everyone in the world shared a single mind except you?

Jorah Dannenberg
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
….except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Jorah Dannenberg
And I’m Jorah Dannenberg sitting in for Ray Briggs, and we’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy.

Jorah Dannenberg
And at Brandeis University, where I teach philosophy,

Josh Landy
Jorah and I sometimes teach a class on film and philosophy, and we’re even scheming about doing a book together. So I’m overjoyed he’s joining me this year to celebrate the most philosophically compelling films of 2025—it’s the Dionysus Awards!

Jorah Dannenberg
So there were quite a few good movies this past year, Josh.

Josh Landy
Yeah, some of my favorites were the Norwegian film “Sentimental Value,” the Iranian film “It Was Just an Accident, and the American film “Train Dreams.”

Train Dreams
In the forest every least thing is important. It’s all threaded together. So you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins, if you really look at it.

Josh Landy
And there was some pretty amazing television this year too.

Jorah Dannenberg
In fact, later on, we’re even going to give an award for the best TV show that blows up all your theories of personal identity.

Josh Landy
We’ll also be giving out an award for best tweak on a classic that raises questions about parents and children.

Jorah Dannenberg
And of course, we’ll take some nominations from listeners like you who’ve written to us about other thought provoking, Dionysus worthy films

Josh Landy
But first: best future-facing fantasy that questions what makes us human, and whether that’s even a good thing.

Jorah Dannenberg
So we’ve got two contenders for this award: “Companion,” written and directed by Drew Hancock and “Mickey 17,” directed by Bong Joon Ho and written by him and Edward Ashton.

Josh Landy
You know Jorah, I really loved Companion. It’s a movie with a lot of twists, and we’re not going to be able to talk about without giving a few things away. So avert your ears for a bit if you haven’t yet seen it.

Jorah Dannenberg
So the first major twist in this film has to do with who the character Iris is.

Josh Landy
Yeah, exactly. Early on, we’re at a lake house with three couples. There’s cat and Sergey, Eli and Patrick and Josh and Iris. And about 25 minutes in, we learn that Iris is, in fact, a robot.

Companion
You’re joking, right? This is just a city Iris. What’s the weather? It’s currently 72 degrees with an 83% chance of rain in the evening. Are you still not convinced? Yeah, okay. Let’s see Iris. Do you know any foreign languages? Can you speak say Spanish? Josh, you know no sé hablar español. ¿Qué?

Jorah Dannenberg
Okay, we also learned that Josh, who’s human and initially seemed like a pretty nice, normal human guy, is actually a bit of a jerk, a lot of a jerk, totally Josh exploits Iris, insults her, tortures her, and eventually tries to kill her. Not exactly boyfriend of the year material. So how do we

Josh Landy
explain what he’s doing wrong? He’s clearly doing something wrong. But what is it? I mean, from his point of view, Iris is a machine. She’s a bit like his car, which also talks to him. And we don’t have any problem with Josh shutting down the car motor when he arrives somewhere, but we feel he’s doing something really egregious to Iris.

Companion
The plan hasn’t changed. I’m just adding one tiny extra step, just a final farewell, and then I will switch all of her settings back to normal. And then, yeah, I’ll shut her down permanently, and then nothing. Then we crack open a bottle of champagne and we wait for the cops to show up.

Josh Landy
What makes Iris more than a machine, what makes her a person, someone you need to treat with respect and kindness?

Jorah Dannenberg
So I bet I know what your answer is, Josh.

Josh Landy
Well, my answer is that the rationalists are right, people like Immanuel Kant. They said, Look, if some being is able to use reason than that being as a person, and Iris surely uses reason. It’s not just that she’s smart and can speak any language at the flip of a switch. It’s also that we see her deliberating. We see her weighing up her options.

Companion
All you got to do is backtrack through the woods, get to the lake house without Josh or his friends murdering you, and you’re all free.

Josh Landy
Kant would say she has reason, so she’s a person, so you can’t just treat her like a machine.

Jorah Dannenberg
I mean, what makes me confident that Iris deserves better than what she’s getting is not that she has a brain. It says she clearly has a heart. I’m seeing your Kant and I’m raising you Adam Smith and David Hume and the rest of the sentimentalist tradition. I mean, forget reason All that matters is whether you have feeling, if you feel pain and you feel other complicated human emotions. No one has the right to be cruel to you or treat you like you don’t matter.

Companion
I feel things, anger, guilt, sadness—I know what pain feels like. It’s programming. It’s just a way to make you seem more real. Everything you do your whole life is just an imitation of a life.

Josh Landy
I still think Kant’s right, but either way, it seems like the artificial beings in this movie are on a par with humans. In fact, I’d even go further, I think the artificial beings are better than us.

Jorah Dannenberg
Oh, interesting. Okay, so what do you mean by that?

Josh Landy
Well, the humans we see here, they are spigots of selfishness. They are fountains of falsehoods. But the robots never lie. They don’t even lie to themselves. Josh and Eli kind of want to live in fantasy land, but iris and Patrick, they want something real, not to mention the fact that they aren’t trying to own other people.

Jorah Dannenberg
That is Nicely put. Josh actually, Ken Taylor used to say this really insightful thing, that we human beings, what we want is machines that are smart enough to do everything we need, but not so smart or otherwise sophisticated that we actually have to treat them decently. And Ken said this is the same impulse at the origin of slavery. I’m I’m inclined to agree with him about that.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and it sure seems like Josh treats Iris like a slave, and he thinks that’s totally fine. He thinks that’s the way it should be, because human lives, he says, are worth more than the lives of these machines.

Companion
I’m a good guy. I’m decent. What do I have to show for it? A cramped, one bedroom apartment and a robot girlfriend. I don’t even own you, for Christ’s sakes, you’re a rental.

Jorah Dannenberg
All right. So how about this? Human beings are capable of love.

Josh Landy
A;; human beings? I don’t think these characters are capable of love.

Jorah Dannenberg
I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’ll grant you that Kat and Sergey are kind of just having fun together, as they say. And it’s also pretty clear that whatever it is that Josh feels towards Iris that ain’t love. But what about Eli? Eli sure thinks he’s in love with Patrick and vice versa. Patrick really seems to be in love with Eli in this film.

Companion
You know, I would never argue, right? You know that I wouldn’t treat you the way that Josh retires, right? I know that that’s insane for me to say that out loud, right?

Josh Landy
But Patrick’s a robot, and Eli can order him to do whatever he wants. Isn’t love all about reciprocity and being free to feel whatever it is you actually feel.

Jorah Dannenberg
Maybe, all right, on the other hand, remember what the pebble says in that fantastic William Blake poem. You know, love seeketh only self, to please, to bind another to its delight. Maybe that’s what human love really is. After all, maybe what we’re seeing in this film is is not so much a distortion of love, but kind of its essence, wanting to control somebody else.

Josh Landy
Well, I guess if Blake’s Pebble is right, then, okay, yeah, maybe Patrick and Eli are just two regular people in love. But if that’s true, then I don’t want to be a person anymore.

Jorah Dannenberg
All right. Well, let’s leave Blake’s cynical pebble theory behind, and maybe we can turn to our other movie, Mickey 17. Hopefully that one’s a little bit more cheerful. I don’t know how

Josh Landy
cheerful it’s gonna turn out to be. It’s a dystopian, futuristic movie where climate change has basically annihilated the earth, and everyone is forced to head out to different planets, and we are following a rather disturbing cult leader who’s about to found a colony on Planet Niflheim, and aboard his rocket is a man named Mickey.

Mickey 17
There was this one time in my fourth grade science class I messed with a lab frog. I just figured this all must be my punishment.

Jorah Dannenberg
So Mickey, in this film, is what they call an expendable or what we like to call adjunct faculty. He gets sent into dangerous situations, exposed to toxic gasses, and anytime he dies, they just make another clone of him. Hence the title of the movie, the Mickey we’re actually seeing in this film. He’s the 17th version of himself. And things get even

Josh Landy
more interesting when something goes wrong.

Jorah Dannenberg
Maybe we should issue another spoiler warning here. Josh

Josh Landy
agreed, spoilers ahead. Okay, so Mickey gets into trouble, and they think he’s dead, they make a new clone, Mickey 18 and Mickey 18, right? But Mickey 17 isn’t dead, and now there are two Mickeys running around and mayhem ensues.

Mickey 17
Why aren’t you dead? Oh, god. Oh god, no, 18. They printed you out. Today is going on, according to Timo, you should be sliding out of one of those creepers right about now. You don’t have to put it like that.

Jorah Dannenberg
So you can see why this movie is going to be catnip for philosophers. What does that do to questions of identity, like, which one of these two is the real Mickey? That’s exactly

Josh Landy
the kind of question Derek Parfit asked back in 1971 he said, basically, imagine a guy who gets cloned and then dies. Let’s call this fella Bob. The clone is exactly like him, looks like him, acts like him, has all his memories. Should we say the clone is Bob?

Jorah Dannenberg
Sure. Why not?

Josh Landy
Ok but now imagine something goes wrong, and you end up with two clones by mistake. Which one is Bob?

Jorah Dannenberg
I don’t know. I guess maybe neither. One of them is, I mean, you can’t have two people that are not identical to one another, but are each somehow identical to a third person. That doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Josh Landy
Okay, that sounds like a tip to answer. But now imagine a third scenario. Here. You try to clone two Bobs, but one of them dies, and you’re left with just one guy. Who is he?

Jorah Dannenberg
I mean, I want to say that this guy is Bob. He’s identical to the original dude and and there’s no one else around to kind of challenge him for the title of Bob. On the other hand, they were trying to make two of them, and they just failed. So that doesn’t sound right. I I feel kind of trapped.

Josh Landy
Exactly, Parfit is going to say, How come you get to be Bob only if somebody else dies? Doesn’t make any sense.

Jorah Dannenberg
So what should we say? Who is the real Bob in this situation? Parfitt says we don’t know. Oh, great. So if Bob owes me $5 I’m just not getting it back. I don’t know about that. Jorah, but the fact that we don’t know,

Josh Landy
Parfitt says, shows that we shouldn’t care. The thing that really matters is being like Bob not being the same as Bob.

Jorah Dannenberg
Okay, I see. So each of these guys is like Bob, and each can owe me $2.50

Mickey 17
human printing is a sin. Multiples are Satan’s work. However, I’ve been contemplating, how can we use this abomination for our common economic benefit.

Jorah Dannenberg
I mean, in a way, I see this right, like Mickey doesn’t mind being killed in all kinds of gruesome ways. He talks about it in terms of dying, but he’s very kind of easygoing about it. What he hates is the thought of not getting cloned after he dies. There’s a scene where Mickey 18 wants to kill him, and Mickey 17 gets pretty upset about that.

Mickey 17
Until now, I died and I was just born again. No, it felt like it was me continuing on. But now, once I die, it’ll be over for me, he’ll be you living on. You get what I mean?

Josh Landy
So there’s a question there, like, why is he so upset? I mean, why isn’t it good enough for Mickey 17 to live on in Mickey 18?

Jorah Dannenberg
So this is another aspect of the puzzle that we’ve been kind of kicking around here and and, in fact, I think things get even more complicated in this film, when love enters into the picture.

Mickey 17
This is mild Mickey. And this is habañero Mickey!

Jorah Dannenberg
So Mickey 18, he kind of takes a little bit of a shine to Mickey 17’s girlfriend, and Mickey 17 isn’t so happy au7 that.

Josh Landy
And that raises all kinds of moral questions. I mean, if my clone is me, can he steal my partner?

Jorah Dannenberg
And what about the partner? I mean, is she cheating on me with my clone or or is this some weird way of being faithful to one mega being made up out of the the two different bodies, me and my clone that are somehow one person?

Mickey 17
Mickey is not some cookie you can split in half, 17 and 18 are both Mickey—both my Mickey!

Josh Landy
These are great questions, and Mickey 17 raises even more of them, like, what happens if a criminal clones himself so he can give himself an alibi for heinous crimes?

Mickey 17
Are they accomplices, or did one act under the other’s orders? Are these separate and independent crimes? Or were they one person from the get go, they only get half portions in jail, or they get a full meal each?

Jorah Dannenberg
That’s part of what I love about both of these films. Actually, they do what the best thought experiments in philosophy do. They they set your mind in motion, but then they make you think for yourself.

Mickey 17
Police, legal experts, philosophers—veryone was stumped.

Josh Landy
Okay, so we got two terrific films in front of us, Mickey 17 and Companion. Which one should win the Dionysus award?

Jorah Dannenberg
You know, Josh, this one is a close call for me, but at the end of the day, I think I got to go with Mickey 17. I just found this movie more enjoyable on the whole but also kind of harder to think through. As a philosopher, I found myself really puzzled about these questions about personal identity we were just talking about.

Josh Landy
I’m with you, I have to say. So the 2026, Dionysus award for best future facing fantasy, that questions what makes us human goes to…

Jorah Dannenberg
Mickey 17!

Mickey 17
How many times is this? You’re Mickey 16? 17. Jerk.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our annual Dionysus awards honoring the most thought provoking movies of the past year.

Jorah Dannenberg
Coming up, we’re going to consider nominees in the categories of Best tweak on a classic that raises questions about parents and children, and best TV show that blows up all your theories of personal identity.

Josh Landy
Movies and TV shows about being yourself and not being a jerk, along with nominations from you our listeners, when Philosophy Talk continues

Josh, welcome back. It’s philosophy talks annual Dionysus awards.

Jorah Dannenberg
I’m Josh Landy and I’m Jorah Dannenberg, sitting in for Ray Briggs. We’re thinking about movies in the past year that challenged our assumptions and made us think about things in new ways.

Josh Landy
Two films that made me think about things in different ways were new takes on old classics, Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” and Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein.” These are our nominees for Best tweak on a classic that raises questions about parents and children.

Jorah Dannenberg
So we all know Mary Shelley’s brilliant gothic novel Frankenstein. And this year, Guillermo del Toro came out with a new adaptation set during the Crimean War.

Josh Landy
And Hamnet, that’s a beautiful adaptation of a novel by Maggie O’Farrell. It tells the story of William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and their children, one of whom is lost in the plague.

Jorah Dannenberg
It’s impossible to talk about that one without mentioning the ending. So be warned, spoilers to follow.

Josh Landy
These two films were nominated by Amy Coplan, professor of philosophy at Cal State Fullerton, and editor of a volume on Blade Runner. We asked her, what ties these two movies together.

Amy Coplan
Well, I think both are about inter subjectivity, or our connections to one another. I think both also really do appeal to us affectively, emotionally. I think they’re able to evoke really strong responses, and that’s a really important part of experience and and I think they capture it, and are able to convey something that is not always something that can be explained verbally in any other way besides art.

Josh Landy
So let’s start with Hamnet, because I found that one particularly moving. I mean, it’s as you say, it’s about emotion, but it’s also emotive. Can you say a little bit about what made it moving for you?

Amy Coplan
For the final 30 minutes of the film, I was sobbing, but it was and I was going back and forth between sad, but then also exhilarated, because of the way that Hamlet in the film, the play within the film, is speaking to Agnes, and the way in which, in that moment, she is able to find her son, she’s been looking for him ever since He died, and she’s seeing that will has been able to, in a sense, bring him back to life.

Hamnet
Our valiant Hamlet did slay his enemy.

Jorah Dannenberg
I really felt like the third act in many ways transformed the earlier parts of the film, and that I had sort of thought I was watching one kind of movie for the first two thirds or so, a movie that was sort of telling me the story of other members of will Shakespeare’s family. And then it turns out that actually, throughout the entire film, Shakespeare’s life and his emotions are a key part of the story. It’s just they’re sort of going on in the negative space that we’re not seeing and that it all kind of comes together. And we realize that, just as we’ve been sort of watching anya’s grieve and deal with what they’re dealing with as a family tragedy that he has been too and that we’re sort of backfilling his story during that time, I found that so powerful.

Josh Landy
It feels to me almost as though the film is really about the magic of art, right? It is magic. Yeah, magic, and yes, it has the power of herbs, right? So she knows the wisdom of mugwort, and she has this little line that she recites.

Hamnet
You’re called una the most ancient plant. You defy three, you defy 30, you defy venom, you defy hair, illness, you defy the horror that stalks the land.

Josh Landy
Actually what defies the horror that stalks the land is theater, and that’s incredibly powerful, right? I mean, or both.

Amy Coplan
I would say both, because I think she is, in a way, the whole time she’s trying to save Hamnet, and in that moment when he’s when she realizes he’s sick and not Judith and she starts, sort of in this furious haze, trying to get everything, all the different herbs she knows. And she is sort of like a witch a stone.

Hamnet
There’s a stone upstairs with a hole in the middle of it by his beds. I bring it down. I need it.

Amy Coplan
I think will does with art what she was doing with herbs. I think they are sort of these interesting counterparts doing something magical, although, in this case, his worked and hers didn’t.

Hamnet
I will never ever let you go.

Amy Coplan
The moment in the play within the film as Hamlet’s die. Thing when he sort of holds his hand out, and then Agnes puts her hand out, and you’re sort of thinking, Oh, no, don’t. And then the whole theater, and I believed it.

Jorah Dannenberg
One thing that makes that seem so powerful when, in a way, there’s this sort of fourth wall breach inside the Globe Theater and the audience reaches out to touch the actor. Is that up to that point, Anya has really felt like she’s grieving alone and and she can’t grieve the loss of her son even with her husband.

Hamnet
You’re caught by that place. What place, that place in your head is now more real to you than anywhere else. Not even the death of our child can keep you from it,

Jorah Dannenberg
And then somehow, by his transforming the loss into this incredible, powerful work of art, Anne just goes from being alone in her grief to surrounded by other strangers who are now a part of her grief for her Son, and in that moment, also then sees no no will. Has been grieving his way. He has been transforming his grief into this play, just as I have been, you know, dealing with my grief privately. And so there’s this final kind of catharsis that comes from this, because finally, they’re allowed to share their grief.

Amy Coplan
In fact, you’re right. She, he can. He can grieve with her, but she’s also giving Hamnet back to Agnes she couldn’t find him. And so our art is a way to make the unbearable bearable by giving us back something that we lost.

Josh Landy
So art ends up being a way to make the unspeakable speakable. I mean, there’s so much about the inarticulate you can’t speak about it, but you can at least build around it.

Hamnet
I thought you were a man of words. Master, tutor, yes. Are you not? Speaking with people is sometimes difficult for me.

Josh Landy
Let’s turn to Frankenstein, the new adaptation of the novel directed by Guillermo del Toro. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Amy? And what’s philosophically interesting here?

Amy Coplan
Well, Frankenstein, the book is great, and there’s so many adaptations, but I love it philosophically. I mean, the creature, it’s all I think. And I think Jacob Lord, He’s performance, is really the heart of the film. Elizabeth, the character of Elizabeth, says to Victor, heart, that’s the organ you know the least about, but the creature is all heart, but and body. And I think it’s also about the body, what it means to be in a body, but also the way in which we connect or fail to connect with

Josh Landy
other people. There’s a moment where the creature has this interesting realization, at least as he sees it,

Frankenstein
The hunter did not hate the wolf. The wolf did not hate the sheep, but violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps I thought this was the way of the wild.

Josh Landy
And that’s a really interesting it’s a tweak. It’s not there in Shelley. Shelley’s thinking a lot about where violence comes from, where antisocial behavior comes from, and she raises all kinds of I mean, the novel is brilliant, and deliberately doesn’t land right, deliberately leaves things open on this question. But this movie The Del Toro version of Frankenstein, is introducing a new question. I mean, is violence inevitable? Is it part of the the way of the world?

Amy Coplan
I think that’s a good question. And it’s set. The movie is set what, like maybe

Josh Landy
50 years later during the Crimean War, and they’re gathering bodies off the battlefield. Another thing I like that this version introduces.

Jorah Dannenberg
There’s another really nice kind of aspect of this question, which is the comparison between, on the one hand, the kind of natural violence of the wolf and then this incredibly cold, artificial, almost bureaucratic violence of what Dr Frankenstein, what Victor is doing. I mean, the thing that we haven’t said yet about this movie, the amount of Gore in this film, and the, you know, both of these films that we’re comparing, or you could say, are sort of a feast for the senses, but in very different way. You know, Hamnet is a, is a delicate, tasty meal. And this is a, you know, a plate of undercooked baby back ribs or something like that.

Frankenstein
Mass volume of blood, Father, muscular irrigation, quite there’s no spiritual content in tissue and no emotion in a muscle. Now describe the main function of the tricuspid valve, please.

Amy Coplan
I think that this Frankenstein is doing a lot with fathers and sons, with Victor’s father, who, in the book, is wonderful, but in the movie, he’s pretty awful to Victor as a kid, but then Victor’s even more awful to the creature. And. There’s the kind of coldness, like in the creation, and not worrying about it, not even thinking about it. But then there’s, I mean, he’s really mean to him when he’s in the bottom of the tower, and he’s frustrated when he’s not learning quickly enough.

Frankenstein
Frankenstein about hand? Can you say Hand? Hand? Him. Oh, you are afraid of me. Why? Why would you be afraid of me? I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt you. I made you, I am your maker. Stop it!

Josh Landy
This version of the Frankenstein story, I think, is really reductive, and it does so by kind of making everyone either a comic book hero or a comic book villain. So it makes the creature immortal. The creature can lift boats and take bullets and even be blown up. That’s not in the novel. And conversely, it makes everyone on the, you know, on the victor side of things, a complete monster. So his dad becomes a monster.

Amy Coplan
It is a very Manichaean world.

Josh Landy
And then his friend in the novel, it’s Clerval. He’s very sweet. In this movie, it’s an event in Hollander who asks Victor to flush the toilet for him and and Victor himself. You know, instead of being engaged to someone who’s the same age as him and who loves him, in this in this movie, he’s trying to steal away a younger woman from someone that she is engaged to.

Amy Coplan
His brother’s fiance, right?

Josh Landy
His brother’s fiance!

Amy Coplan
To me, it feels highly stylized. So they do seem and this partly goes with the formal dimensions of the film, which are very intense, and they’re they’re very Del Toro, but I mean the color, it’s super saturated, vivid with these sumptuous fabrics and costumes. I mean, the makeup on a lordy is incredible, but that, to me, made it seem more stylized. But the comic book that is fair, I think, but I I don’t think it’s necessarily reductive, as much as it is like Del Toro just doing this highly stylized interpretation. I mean, Del Toro leaves open this sort of hope and possibility, which I think Shelley’s a little more pessimistic, which I think is right. I mean, I think partly Shelley is saying, look, the hubris is not going to be rewarded here. It’s not going to work out.

Frankenstein
in you. I’ve created something truly horrible. Not something, someone. You made some one—me.

Josh Landy
So Jorah, we got two movies in front of us competing for best tweaking of a classic that raises questions about parents and children. We have Hamnet, and we have the new adaptation of Frankenstein. Which one do you think should win?

Jorah Dannenberg
Hands down Hamnet. I liked both of these movies, but Hamnet, I’m confident, will stay with me much longer and affected me much more powerfully, and in ways that I think I’ll be thinking about well into the next year’s Dionysus awards. So the 2026, Dionysus award for the best tweaking of a classic that raises questions about parents and children, goes to…

Josh Landy
Hamnet!

Hamnet
Will you be brave? Yes, yes. Will you be brave? Yes, I’ll be brave. I’ll be brave.

Jorah Dannenberg
Amy, thank you so much for joining us to talk about these films.

Amy Coplan
Thank you.

Josh Landy
Amy Coplan from Cal State Fullerton. You’re listening to philosophy talks annual Dionysus awards. I’m Josh Landy here with my fellow philosopher, Jorah Dannenberg,

Jorah Dannenberg
Time for a nomination from the floor. Gigi in San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Gigi
Thank you. Excited to be here.

Jorah Dannenberg
So what’s your nominee for a Dionysus award this year?

Gigi
My nomination is Eden. It’s a really intriguing film based on real events that took place in the late 1920s and was directed by Ron Howard, who became obsessed with the story while visiting the Galapagos.

Jorah Dannenberg
Oh, fantastic. Ron Howard, Opie, I’m a fan already. Why would we consider this for a Dionysus award?

Speaker 1
Well, it’s an inverted Robinson Crusoe survival tale where three distinct and disparate groups, one after another leave Europe, Germany, primarily to maroon themselves on an uninhabited island in the Galapagos and the survival challenges they face.

Josh Landy
And I think it’s relevant, right, that one of them is a philosopher. So there’s this chap named Friedrich Ritter who’s there with. Wife, Dori Strauch, and so at least one of these couples is very philosophical.

Eden
Ah, your book, Doctor. It’s not a book. It’s an entirely new paradigm. Yeah, it bridges Eastern and Western philosophy, and when published, will save humanity from itself. So it is a book.

Jorah Dannenberg
So this is about being trapped on a deserted island with a philosopher. It’s a horror film.

Speaker 1
I think it’s worthy of a Dionysus award due to the way not just the philosopher, but like each camp could be broken down to, there’s the philosopher, there are the pragmatists, and then there’s the opportunist and this colliding world views and behaviors on a rugged Island, resources are precarious, and then there’s a devastating drought that hits the island, and that’s where it plays out like an extreme social experiment on group dynamics under pressure.

Josh Landy
How does this film present the relationship between philosophy and life? I mean is, is this philosopher that we see living out his ideals? Are they good ideals? Where things go wrong? Is it because they’re bad beliefs or because they just don’t actually motivate him? They don’t motivate him to do the right thing?

Speaker 1
You know, part of his philosophy was a deep belief in raw foods and vegetarianism that one goes fast out the window, and it seemed like that once that crumbled, it seemed that he was in the weakest position.

Eden
Do not be fooled by our success. Herr witch, no one else has been able to survive, because life here is gruesome. Frustrating. Failure is inevitable.

Jorah Dannenberg
Sometimes being too reliant on a set of beliefs and inflexible about your ability to negotiate a world in which it’s hard to manage those beliefs can be the opposite of the key to resilience and thriving in adverse circumstances. It sounds like this philosopher did worse, because he was a philosopher and had some beliefs that he thought he really held fast to, and then immediately couldn’t keep keep them up in the circumstances.

Gigi
I think how it ends up, while our philosopher loses his religion, the other two other camps, and they don’t really budge from theirs. One could argue that they, too are governed by a kind of philosophy. So I don’t know it’s weird, because I I always think that in these situations, people driven by the most ambition and willing to win at all cost mindset generally succeed, but this film really puts that to rest, too.

Josh Landy
All right, Jorah, we have a nomination before us. It’s the film Eden, directed by Ron Howard. What do you think?

Jorah Dannenberg
This does sound to me like a pretty good film to think about what happens when philosophy goes awry. I’m prepared to go ahead and give it the award. Is it unanimous? Josh, will you sign on?

Josh Landy
Listen, I already liked the film, but I was particularly persuaded by Jesus brilliant observation that you have these three couples, and it’s not just the philosophy couple that’s driven by philosophy. Each of them is driven by a worldview, and it goes differently in all three cases, and that makes the movie really rich and subtle. So the 2026, Dionysus award for best film about philosophy gone horribly wrong goes to Eden Gigi. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Gigi
Thank you. That was really fun.

Jorah Dannenberg
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and we’re celebrating the most philosophically compelling movies of the past year for our annual Dionysus awards.

Josh Landy
Coming up: two very cinematic TV shows battle it out for best series that blows up all your theories of personal identity.

Jorah Dannenberg
More Dionysus winners, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
It’s the annual Dionysus awards. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Jorah Dannenberg
…except your intelligence. I’m Jorah Dannenberg, sitting in for Ray Briggs, and we’re talking about the most thought provoking movies and TV shows of the past year, up next two nominees for Best TV show that blows up all your theories of personal identity: “Pluribus” and “Severence.”

Josh Landy
Severance entered its second season last year, and it’s a show about a mysterious corporation whose employees have a chip implanted in their brain, one one that severs their work self from their home self. So while the main character, Mark is at work, he knows nothing about his home life, and while he’s at home, he remains blissfully ignorant of just how awful the office is.

Jorah Dannenberg
And Pluribus is a whole new show created by Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad fame, hard to describe exactly, but basically a space virus turns everyone on earth into. One gigantic hive mind, all except 13 lucky souls.

Josh Landy
Or unlucky souls.

Jorah Dannenberg
So as before, there are bound to be some pretty big spoilers in what’s to come.

Josh Landy
These two shows, Pluribus and Severance. They were nominated by my regular co host, Ray Briggs. Ray had this to say about them.

Ray Briggs
Philosophers love to talk about personal identity, what makes you you over time and the same you over time. And what would happen if you could sort of put two people together to make one person or split one person apart to make two wouldn’t that be strange and philosophically confusing? And both of these shows are thought experiments about personal identity, where you do put either many, many people together to form one hive mind, or split one person apart to form two minds.

Jorah Dannenberg
So why don’t you start us off with Pluribus? So tell us a little bit more about how the plot of Pluribus raises this kind of question about personal identity.

Ray Briggs
So at the very beginning of Pluribus, an alien virus infects almost all of the people of Earth, and one of about 13 who is left over is our protagonist, Carol, who is not happy that everybody is a hive mind and really wants to retain her individuality.

Josh Landy
It’s kind of an Invasion of the Body Snatchers type scenario where the people in the hive mind seem happy. They’re delighted to be in the hive mind, but our fearless individualist warrior, Carol resists.

Pluribus
Now I realize some of you think the world might be better off this way with all the newfound peace, love and understanding. Enjoy that opinion. Relish it, because it may be the last one you ever possess, and when the day comes that you have peace and love forced upon you, who knows, maybe in that last fleeting moment, you might just realize you treasured your individuality.

Josh Landy
Is she right to resist? How would we know whether she’s right to resist?

Ray Briggs
I think that this is a hard question, and I actually feel very conflicted about it, because Carol is kind of terrible, like her individual personality. I don’t know if I like her. I don’t know if I like there are people, right? She’s complicated, she’s funny and interesting and also deeply miserable, and can’t connect to anybody around her.

Jorah Dannenberg
I think there’s the kind of perpetual question about whether her resistance to joining the hive mind has a lot to do with these kind of quirky features of her personality, about how she can be, I don’t know, a little hard to get along with, shall we say, or whether, actually that’s kind of a red herring, and that actually the features that make her reluctant to join the hive mind are actually more common features of other people, and that even people who weren’t a little prickly the way that she can be or a little bit narcissistic, even the way that she can Be, would Nonetheless, if they were thinking clearly about the scenario, realize, whoa, wait a minute, you’re not talking to me about just kind of joining a club and getting you’re talking about getting rid of me. I’m not okay with that. So I think it’s a really great device that they use to kind of put in place these character traits that make it a little harder to know the answer to that question.

Ray Briggs
So one of the really beautiful and like revealing moments in the show, I think, is when Carol is talking about why she doesn’t like the hive mind, and she compares the people in the hive mind to the people of the conversion therapy camp that she was sent to as a teenager.

Pluribus
That was a terrible experience for you the counselor, is there some of the worst people I have ever known, and they smiled all the time, just like you. We’re sorry, Carol. As for us, we love and accept all beings equally. Oh, okay, if you’re so accepting, then what about what you’re trying to do to me now, make me just like you, even though you know I do not want that?

Ray Briggs
She’s captured something that is creepy about them. They’re happy, but they’ve kind of erased the things that make them individuals, although she does end up dating the hive mind in the form of another character, Zosia.

Josh Landy
okay, how do you date a hive mind?

Ray Briggs
I think you mostly don’t have a very good relationship because of Carol. But like, she’s, she’s not nice to the hive mind. She upsets it so much that it starts convulsing at multiple points, like, that’s, that’s not a good relationship. It has to leave because she’s such a bad partner.

Pluribus
Hello, Carol. This is a recording at the tone. You can leave a message to request anything you might need. We’ll do our best to provide it. Our feelings for you haven’t changed, Carol, but after everything that’s happened, we just need a little space.

Josh Landy
So one question is, can you even know whether you’re happy? I mean, the people in the hive mind seem happy. Could they be wrong about their own happiness? Is it possibly wrong about their own happiness? Then there’s the question of individuality. Is it Do you want to be an individual? Why is individuality good? Is individuality better than happiness? And then there’s this kind of Hegel style question, I guess, about whether you can actually be what you want to be and who you want to be alone. Can you actually be you outside of society?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I think that’s the thing. Is that the individuality of these characters, like, there’s an important separateness from others that they’re really onto, but they think of themselves as more separate than they really are. Like, manusos almost dies because he’s trying to, like, make his way through the jungle by himself, and then the hive mind rescues him and takes care of him in the hospital and lets him pretend to pay well.

Jorah Dannenberg
And just like, minus, oh, sort of needs the members of the hive mind for, you know, sort of medical and materials. I think one thing about Carol that becomes clear is she needs an audience, right? I mean, she’s a she’s an author, and she needs an audience, and she’s got to have somebody there to I think there is this nice kind of Hegelian thing, if there’s nobody there, kind of recognizing her for who she is. Is she really anybody at all?

Pluribus
Do you like my books? Oh, we love your books. What do you love about them? Everything. Your books are an expression of you, and we love you. Need you to be more specific, character arcs, plot turns, yes, yes. We love the character arcs and the plot turns. Which ones? All of them!

Josh Landy
We should pivot at this point to talk about our other show, severance. How does Severance raise philosophical questions about identity?

Ray Briggs
It’s kind of, in some ways, the opposite of Pluribus. Instead of having a bunch of people who are merged into one identity, we have individual people who are separated into two identities. Their kind of Audi, who is their life outside of work, and their ini, who exists solely for the productivity of the lumen Corporation, and who they never have to think about, and they don’t share memories. They kind of have, maybe importantly, different goals in life. And so there’s a question about whether these are the same person at all, or whether they’re kind of two different people.

Severance
You know what I think? I think the second you get your wife back, you forget I ever existed. I think that I disappear along with every inning down there. What do you want from me? We are in this together. Can’t you just trust me?

Josh Landy
It even raises these very interesting ethical questions. So there’s a there’s a scenario in which one of the characters is allowed to have a conjugal visit while at work, which is to say, well, either the SEP it’s the severed part, the INI part that we’re with, and this ini gets a visit from his wife, or his outie’s wife?

Ray Briggs
Maybe his outie’s wife.

Josh Landy
His outie’s wife, and they get sleep together. And so then the question is, is this wife cheating on her husband?

Severance
I told my husband about you and me this morning. Was he glad for us? No.

Ray Briggs
She hides this conjugal visit from the Audi, which suggests that she feels like it’s cheating. But then I guess there’s a further question, like maybe for a lot of things, if you feel like it’s cheating, it’s probably cheating.

Josh Landy
But I guess it raises the question whether we should think about personal identity being guaranteed by the body or by the mind, because if it’s your body that makes you who you are, then maybe we would think she’s not cheating. She’s with the same person because it’s the same body. But if we think, no, it’s actually the mind, or something about the mind that makes you who you are. And clearly, the INI seems to be living a very different kind of mental life than the Audi. Then she is cheating. So so do our intuitions about whether or not she’s cheating kind of track. Our intuitions about what it is that makes you you.

Ray Briggs
My intuitions come down pretty heavily on the side of it’s the mind and not the body, that makes you you. Like that said, I think, like, it’s a little bit ambiguous, again, partly because it’s ambiguous how much bleed through there is from the mind of the innie to the Audi, because there are these, like, weak, hard to stamp out psychological links that might come from just being in a body and having your body be the mechanism by which you remember things and feel emotion. And understand things.

Jorah Dannenberg
But suppose you could get rid of all that bleed through. You could be really confident there was no psychological bleed through whatsoever. Do you think an Audi upon hearing about some of the things being done to their innie should basically regard this as, oh, that’s not going to happen to me. Or should they, even though they know that they’re kind of not going to remember it’s having happened. Should they think, Oh, my God, I’m going to go to work today and they’re going to torture me, or they’re going to, you know, they’re going to chain me to the copy machine or so and and worse than that, I won’t even remember, is that just a that person’s just philosophically confused if they think about this as a really unfortunate thing that’s happening to them while they’re at work?

Ray Briggs
No, that’s fair, and I do think they should be upset. And in fact, there’s a character who her Audi, is not upset by this. So this is Helena slash Helle, who is part of the Egan family that runs the lumen Corporation, and decides that she loves this corporation so much that she’ll get severed herself and she’ll create an innie, and then is horrible to her ini and tells her, ini, you’re not a person, and doesn’t let her ini quit, even though her innie is so miserable that she tries to kill herself at work.

Speaker 2
I am a person. You are not. I make the decisions, you do not, and if you ever do anything to my fingers, know that I will keep you alive long enough to horribly regret that. Your resignation request is denied.

Ray Briggs
I think this is morally questionable, like, if the innie really is separate from her, then, like, that’s not an okay to thing to do to another person. But it’s also kind of questionable because it’s something that she’s sort of doing to herself. So maybe I want to back off this.

Josh Landy
That sounds a bit like Immanuel Kant, right? So Immanuel Kant thinks you, you can’t even use yourself as a mere means, right? It’s not just you. You’re not morally allowed to use other people as a mere means, exploit them, manipulate them and slave them and so on. You can’t even do that to yourself. Is that how you read that scene, or the series of scenes where you have a character who’s desperate to get out, desperate to be released, begs her Audi to set her free. And the Audi says, No, is that Audi kind of failing a Kantian moral test?

Ray Briggs
It’s definitely true that they’re using someone as a mere means, and that seems like failing a Kantian moral test. And then there’s this question, like, is it themself, or is it somebody else? And I think Jorah is right that, like those scenes, push very hard the intuition that it is, in fact, the character’s self, or at least raise that as a possibility.

Severance
They know everything we’re doing because Helena told them everything we’re doing. That wasn’t me. Mark, look, I’m not her. I’m not. I’m me Helly. And how do I know that?

Josh Landy
Alright, so we’ve got a decision to make here. We’ve got Pluribus and severance, both of which are up for Best TV series that blows up all your theories of personal identity, Ray, what’s your view about which one of those two should win?

Ray Briggs
I think I’m going to vote for Pluribus, partly because there’s more of a moral puzzle about whether to undergo this tricky procedure. I think in severance, the answer is obviously no. The Lubin Corporation is evil and going to ruin your life, but in Pluribus, I find myself genuinely unsure about whether I would want to join the hive mind or stay myself.

Josh Landy
What do you think, Jorah?

Jorah Dannenberg
I feel pretty confident that I would not want to join the hive mind. I don’t feel like it’s a big dilemma for me, but actually coming up with a sort of morally justifiable rationale for refusing to do so strikes me as harder. So I agree with Ray that one of the things that makes Pluribus maybe the winner here is that it’s the it’s the more morally challenging of the two shows. But, but I might locate the moral challenge and at just a slightly, subtly different place.

Josh Landy
So the 2026, Dionysus Award for Best TV series that blows up all your theories of personal identity goes to

Jorah Dannenberg
Pluribus!

Josh Landy
Ray. Thank you so much. You have totally convinced me, you’ve turned my views around about plurips, I’m joining your hive mind.

Ray Briggs
We’re so happy, Josh!

Jorah Dannenberg
If you’ve got a thought provoking movie from the past year that wasn’t discussed on today’s show, tell us about it. Send an email to comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco. Bay Area and the trustees of Leland, Stanford Junior University, copyright 2026.

Jorah Dannenberg
Our executive producer is James Kass. The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, Karen Ajluni, Steven Choy, and Linda Fagan.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Emma Lozman-Plum, Michael Aparicio, Tom Lockhart, Matt Porta, John Lehman, Nancy Smith, Robert Smith, Henry Rutkowski, and Elizabeth Reitmeyer.

Jorah Dannenberg
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or our other funders.

Jorah Dannenberg
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, Philosophytalk.org, where you can question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Jordan Dannenberg.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. Thank you for listening.

Jorah Dannenberg
And thank you for thinking.