The 2020 Dionysus Awards

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk program that questions everything…

Jeremy Sabol
…except your intelligence. I’m Jeremy Sabol.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Jeremy Sabol
Continuing conversations that begin philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature Initiative, and I teach in Stanford’s program in Structures Liberal Education.

Josh Landy
Jeremy teaches philosophy. He’s got a background in philosophy. And he’s also involved in film, which is why I’m especially happy to welcome him as a co-host, because today, it’s our seventh annual Dionysus Awarda show.

Jeremy Sabol
The Dionysus Awards are presented each year to some of our favorite most thought-provoking movies of the past 12 months.

Josh Landy
One of which turned out to be a big winner at this year’s Oscars. That’s Parasite by Bong Joon-ho. Later in the show, we’ll ask Jinhee Choi from King’s College London, whether she thinks it also deserves the Dionysus Award for Most Morally Stimulating and/or Desensitizing Movie of the year.

Jeremy Sabol
We’ll also consider a pair of nominations for the Most Stimulating and Stressful Vision of today’s America, as well as a couple of more or less nonfiction films competing for Dopest Doctored Documentary.

Josh Landy
And to help us get started, we sent our roving philosophical reporter, Holly J. McDede, to explore some music-themed movies of the past year: documentaries, biopics, and more. She files this report.

Holly McDede
You don’t usually go to the movie theater to see musicians. But if you went to the movies in 2019, you probably heard a lot of music and saw actors playing the best and worst versions of your favorite singers. There was “Rocket Man,” where Elton John becomes famous, struggles to accept his sexuality and—spoiler alert—eventually goes to rehab for addiction.

Elton John
People don’t pay to see Reginald Dwight—they pay to see Elton John!

Holly McDede
There was “Judy”, where Judy Garland is already famous does not go to rehab and, another SPOILER ALERT, dies shortly after belting out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Judy Garland
This next one… It isn’t a song about getting anywhere. It’s about walking toward somewhere that you’ve dreamed of.

Holly McDede
these movies all include some fiction to capture the singers lives, or at least how we want to remember them.

Bob Dylan
Boy, Sure hope we get to Boston on time.

Holly McDede
But the film “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story” is on a whole different level.

Bob Dylan
When you say “marriage,” I assumed you meant marriage between two people. Yeah. Did you? No, well mental marriage. Ah that’s interesting.

Holly McDede
The film uses real footage from Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. But it’s filled with made-up stories and people who only pretend they were there. It’s a weird film.

Stefan van Drop
First what I wanted to show was musicians working together, making music together.

Sharon Stone
A couple of days later, he said, “How about if you just come on the road with us?”

Jack Tanner
He’s the guy who got me in to the Rolling Thunder concert that night—Jimmy Carter.

Holly McDede
But some film critics have argued there’s no better way to capture the spirit of Bob Dylan than through trickery and games. The movie, I have since learned, is meant to be a kind of riddle—like the 60s, like the singer himself.

Bob Dylan
Because it’s not—it’s about nothing. It’s just something that happened 40 years ago. And that’s the truth. Okay, we can. Let’s go.

Holly McDede
Bob Dylan is known for surrounding himself in mystery and obscurity. Bruce Springsteen, though—he tells it like it is. The movie “Blinded By the Light” is straightforward. It’s not about musicians so much as the fans.

Blinded By the Light
So tell me about the Boss. Bruce is the direct line to all that is true in this world.

Holly McDede
The film centers around a Pakistani teenager living in 1980s England who discovers the Boss.

Blinded By the Light
It’s like, Bruce knows everything I’ve ever felt, everything I’ve ever wanted. I mean, “sometimes I feel so weak. I just want to explode, explode and tear this whole town apart, take a knife and cut this pain from my heart.”

Holly McDede
The film “Yesterday” is also about fandom, but in reverse. It imagines a world where the Beatles have been totally forgotten. Only one guy remembers them and he attempts to capitalize on all their songs.

Yesterday
Hey, dude, are you sure? He’s right. It’s so much better. Is he? Is it? Yeah, “hey dude, don’t make it fast…” Definitely gonna be one of the best songs of the generation. Wake up!

Holly McDede
Musicians can inspire tragic, weird, uplifting and surreal movies. And many of these films make us think about fame and loneliness, the value of songs, and how we connect with each other. But to be honest—and maybe this was the point—most of these films just made me want to listen to the music instead. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy and I’m here with my Stanford colleague, Jeremy Sabol. Today we’re thinking about the most philosophical movies of 2019 for our annual Dionysus Awards.

Jeremy Sabol
So one of the movies that Holly mentioned was Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.” Holly said it was a controversial film.

Josh Landy
No kidding!

Jeremy Sabol
Right, which is why it’s a candidate for our Dopest Doctored Documentary award. The other film in this category is a very different kind of film, which—full disclosure—came out at the very end of 2018: “They Shall Not Grow Old” by Peter Jackson. This is a film assembled out of old footage from the Imperial War Museum out of interviews with British servicemen about World War One.

Josh Landy
Hey, I think I see where you’re going with these, right. These are both documentaries. But they’re both the tinkered with little bit, right. In the case of Peter Jackson, he’s taking this original footage, but he’s colorized it, he’s slowed it down so that looks a bit more realistic, as we would say. And added sound, right. You can hear the horses and hear the cannons and things like that. And then in the case of Scorsese,…what’s going on there, Jeremy?

Jeremy Sabol
Yeah, well, so Josh, there’s a number of elements of the film which are fictionalized and they don’t announce themselves as such. So, for example, there is a filmmaker who is ostensibly responsible for the archival footage of this tour.

Josh Landy
Stefan van Drop.

Stefan van Drop
I wanted to show the land of pet rocks and super Slurpees from 7-11. “L’Amérique insolite.” I would go on the road with the Rolling Thunder Revue.

Josh Landy
So Scorsese has shot this footage in such a way as to make it seem real.

Jeremy Sabol
And artfully added Stefan Van Dorp’s avoice to the archival footage. So it sounds like as they’re going backstage, up the stairs, he’s right there with them, talking about what’s going to happen next.

Josh Landy
Asking Dylan questions, and Dylan is sort of refusing to answer.

Bob Dylan
Van Dorp—I want to tell you something.

Jeremy Sabol
What’s he doing? Well, I’m a little befuddled by Scorsese’s choices. We could defend him saying that, as Dylan’s a fabulous, so is he. And that kind of playful messing with us is certainly something that comes out in the film, and is not only coming from Dylan but Joan Baez, right, who who talks about moments not onstage but offstage where she impersonates Dylan and people believe that she’s actually Dylan and she’s got the hat on the weird makeup and the mask.

Joan Baez
And there was this table of like food and catering and coffee. And Louis was there and I said, “Hey, gimme some coffee!” And so people got me some coffee like that. And you want this, do you want this? You want milk? Do you want sugar? And I just had a cigarette in my hand going like that. And they treated me that way they treated Bob. Do you want this? Do you want that? What can we do? It was amazing.

Jeremy Sabol
So that element is present in the film and Scorsese’s own echo of it or mimicking of it doesn’t feel necessarily out of place, but I’m not really sure what it adds. I mean, I feel like the fascinating aspect of Dylan and in this case, Joan Baez, doing that kind of stands on its own, and Scorsese’s kind of just muddying the water.

Josh Landy
Right. There’s all these weird omissions. I mean, at the turn of this tour, Dylan is filming a fiction film, “Renaldo and Clara,” that stars him and his wife, Sarah. He’s singing the song “Sarah” pretty much every spot on that tour. But Sarah doesn’t make any appearance in this movie. There’s no discussion of the greatness of the songs. There’s all kinds of things that aren’t there, and then on the other hand, there’s all this stuff that wasn’t happening that just seems to get added for no reason at all and that could risk convincing certain people, Ugh I guess he can’t trust anything. How about the other film that you mentioned, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” that wonderful film by Peter Jackson about WWI? Because WWI obviously still resonates with us as an important event. But it’s so far away in history now that it almost as though it’s the Peloponnesian War or something. But watching this film, it feels like a thing that happened. In fact, it feels like a that’s happening.

They Shall Not Grow Old
Machine gun blitz came after flights of hailstones. I didn’t realize that it was swish switch were bullets. On the ground, and people were dropping around you. I mean, they just faded away, you know, on either side of you. And I thought, What’re they shooting at me for?

Josh Landy
Peter Jackson said a lovely thing about this, that the folks who fought in World War One saw a war in color, they didn’t see it in black and whitet. So there’s a way in which his tweaking of the footage actually makes it more real as opposed to less real.

Jeremy Sabol
Yeah, right. And there, you know, we could imagine a defense of all kinds of imaginative reconstructions like what’s historical fiction about right, so maybe that’s the same kind of impulses. But we’re making stuff up. And maybe we should, in this historical moment, on the same principle, be skeptical, be worried about Jackson’s directorial impulse to bring this event back to life and give it a particular coherence and an angle. And here, Josh, I’m not only thinking about this masterful kind of technical job that he’s done, but also in this kind of weaving together of the visual experience of these very young soldiers with the recordings of the the soldiers, the participants in this war, much later on in their lives, looking back retrospectively. So two acts of memory, right, this kind of cultural act of memory by Jackson, but also these individual soldiers looking back on their own experience as we’re seeing them as young men on the screen, were hearing these older men reflect on their experiences. And some of those recollections seemed very odd to me.

They Shall Not Grow Old
I could only say one thing, I wouldn’t have missed it. It was terrible at times, but I wouldn’t have missed it. Oh yes, if I could have that time again, I’d go through it all over again, because I enjoyed the service life.

Jeremy Sabol
And this is a aspect of the film, which actually ties it strangely back to one of the other redeemable features of the Scorsese Ddylan project which is this strange cognitive dissonance between the characters we’re seeing the archival footage—Dylan and Baez principally—and the interviews with them in the contemporary moment that were filmed for Scorsese’s film, where we hear them say very different things than the things we’re seeing. So there’s this kind of conflict between the retrospective voice versus the kind of naive, young, enthusiastic participant in the fray that we see on screen in the footage. But it still remains a big question that we have, which is we have to decide which of these two films, “They Shall Not Grow Old” and “Rolling Thunder Ruvue,” is in fact, for this year, the Dopest Doctored Focumentary.

Josh Landy
Well, I mean, for me, it’s no question. The project of Peter Jackson—that’s a coherent project. I think it makes the movie if anything more real rather than less real. Whereas on the side of Scorsese, it’s not clear what the plan was. And I really do fear that it’s just another drop in that big bucket of confusion about what is real and what is.

Jeremy Sabol
So you’re saying that the Dionysus Award for 2020, the Dopest Doctored Documentary, should go to…

Josh Landy
They Shall Not Grow Old

They Shall Not Grow Old
No Regrets, no horrors. Because if you survive that you survive anything.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our seventh annual Dionysus award show, honoring the most philosophically compelling movies of 2019.

Jeremy Sabol
Coming up, Josh and I will announce winners in the categories of Most Stimulating and Stressful Vision of Today’s America, and Most Morally Enthralling and/or Desensitizing Film.

Josh Landy
More Dionysus winners, along with nominations from you, our listeners—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Bob Dylan
I laid on beach and I looked at the sky, when the children were babies on the beach.

Josh Landy
Welcome back. It’s Philosophy Talk’s annual Dionysus Awards show. I’m Josh Landy.

Jeremy Sabol
And I’m Jeremy Sabol. We’re thinking about movies from the past year that challenged our assumptions and made us think about things in new ways.

Josh Landy
You know, it’s rare that a Dionysus nominee also wins big at the Oscars, but “Parasite.” directed by Bong Joon-ho recently won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. So will it also take the Dionysus Award for most morally stimulating and or desensitizing film of the year?

Jeremy Sabol
We’re joined now by Jinhee Choi. She’s a professor of Film Studies at King’s College London, and the author of “The South Korean film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs.” Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Jinhee.

Jinhee Choi
Thanks for the invitation.

Jeremy Sabol
So what to you made this film “Parasite” so interesting and important?

Jinhee Choi
Well, I think bone is one of the few Korean directors who are are working both in the commercial sector and also abroad like for “Snowpiercer” and “Okja” partly, but “Parasite” is a film that he went back to Korea for the production. And I think he was a little bit more sensitive of the social condition of South Korea through this film. So I think that’s one of the fascinating thing about parasite, but the film was really well received both critically and by the audience in general. And there’s a little bit of like little humors, and that kind of dialogue that also attracted many audiences in South Korea. So that was seems to be a little bit more of the economic disparity that seems to appeal to the general audience in South Korea.

Jeremy Sabol
Yes. So that’s a question I had when watching the film. Because I I saw the film and felt both that it was a critique or an exploration of class relations and class conflict in South Korea. But I also immensely enjoyed the film. And I wonder if there’s a tension there between its wild success it can this be a film that is really forcing us to confront economic disparity and class division? If it’s so wildly popular? Or does its popularity suggest, in fact that it’s more an apology or something to make us feel better about those class conflicts?

Jinhee Choi
Well, I think it through well registers the kind of the concerns of the general public, and especially kind of tension between generations about the kind of economic disparity, lack of social mobility, the film registers that kind of despair of the younger generation. I mean, it is a critique, but I think it’s kind of registering the social atmosphere, rather than reflection. I guess that’s the way I would like to put it.

Josh Landy
That makes perfect sense. I mean, there there does feel to be a kind of critical edge to it. You know, who’s the parasite? Right? Here’s the real parasite, right? Is it really poor people who are struggling to get by and might have to cut a few corners? Or are the is the rich family, maybe the the real parasite, this guy, this is still he knows, I personally, feel close. To increase the skill appeal, I can just get on well, Simpson was over there as well. But at the same time, I feel like the movie also complexify things I mean, you know, movie begins in this light, comedic, almost picturesque kind of vein, and gets pretty serious and pretty dog. And I feel like, you know, kind of destabilizes us morally, what, what’s your feeling about that? Jenny?

Jinhee Choi
I think you’re right, like both, I think the rich family and the poor family are parasites. And the another one, actually, you know, kind of in the basement, I think all three families are kind of interdependent. And the kind of moral complexity is that like, at one point we align with one may be family, and then another, and the kind of the catastrophe at the end, makes everything a little bit destabilize, I think so I agree with you that there’s this kind of can’t not constantly like shift between different families, and rely of characters. But then at the same time, what happens each character kind of somehow makes us rethink about how we felt about the other characters originally. So kind of reposition ourselves in relation to various characters throughout the film.

Josh Landy
I think of this film as my favorite kinds of genre films, a film that takes us morally by surprise. You know, we thought we knew what we were, we have a very deserving family that we’re rooting for who are unjustly and this is true, they’re unjustly in a inferior social position. There’s nothing that legitimates them being in the position that they are, they’re resourceful, they’re smart, industrious, and so on. So we root for them, and when they kick the housekeeper out, we root for them and, and so on and so on. But when bad things start happening, we have to question ourselves, where did we something went wrong and our moral reasoning that led us hear?

Jeremy Sabol
Another aspect of the film “Parasite” which I think adds a kind of a different tension to the film, and that’s the conflict between what we might call economic values and family values. And it seems like particularly when we think about the Kim father, key take, he’s struggling a little bit with the impulse to survive, but also the impulse to keep his family together.

Jinhee Choi
But I thought it’s the mother who actually does that. Yeah. On the family members of like, you know, the Kim’s family. The father is the most inefficient person, right? Even like folding boxes for pizza deliveries and thoughts as the mother and other families were more efficient rather than the father figure.

Josh Landy
So you see, ultimately, the characters in this film is still remaining within traditional patriarchal archetypes.

Jinhee Choi
I think he’s critiquing enough, I think he’s kind of playing with kind of gender roles throughout his other films. But all the kind of female characters disappear either in a by death, right or somehow off screen. And so it becomes, again father son relationship and some of the film scholars working on Korean cinema. It’s all about like, in a crisis in masculinity. And it’s not just men or but women also struggle in under this kind of economic conditions, to have a career and in a kind of manage a family and thought, but somehow, they kind of like conveniently disappear.

Jeremy Sabol
Jenny, you said something nice, which is maybe he’s, you know, raising up ideas of femininity for critique of it, he’s not critiquing enough. Would you say that about the film in general, that it’s maybe bringing up social issues, like economic disparity and class conflict, but maybe not going far enough?

Josh Landy
I should say that the reception in this country has been fascinating to me, I don’t know what it’s been like in Britain. But over here, we’ve had to, you know, among other responses to very extreme positions, one of which says, this movie is just wonderful propaganda. You know, this is a wonderful call to arms. And on the other side, people saying this is a justification of impoverishment, right, it presents poor people as deserving to be poor, which I think is weird reading of the movie. So where do you stand on this? You know, what you critical of the film’s politics? Or do you think it’s handling things in a subtle, sophisticated way? Where are you on this?

Jinhee Choi
I think the film acknowledges the problem. I think he kind of like, poses a question. And then acknowledges it, but I don’t think he he wants to provide an any solution. But I think there’s a point of like acknowledging it, and somehow dealing with fat through commercial conventions. And so I think that might be the strength of like bones film, although he can be a little bit more sensitive about gender representation.

Josh Landy
That seems like a very reasonable critique. Yes. So what do we do with “Parasite” by Bong Joon-ho, Jemmy? Should we give it the award for most morally stimulating movie of the year or the award for the most morally desensitizing movie of the year? What is this chloroform or caffeine?

Jeremy Sabol
Well, Josh, I got to go with caffeine on this one. I found both watching the film and having this great discussion with Jin Hee che really quite stimulating. And in a non simplistic, I don’t know where to turn on this film, what it’s what if it’s telling us anything? Or if it’s simply giving us questions that we’ve got to consider more at length, so much

Josh Landy
the better I listen, I I’m totally with Jinhee on. She’s put it beautifully about this film constantly keeping us off our balance constantly keeping us destabilized, making us think making us talk as we’re doing today. So the 2020 Dionysus Award for the Most Morally Stimulating Film of the Year goes to…

Jeremy Sabol
Parasite

Josh Landy
Thank you so much, and he for joining us today.

Jinhee Choi
Excellent. Thank you.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk’s annual Dionysus Awards, honoring the most philosophically compelling movies of 2019. I’m Josh Landy.

Jeremy Sabol
And I’m Jeremy Sabol. Next up: nominees for the most Atimulating and Stressful Vision of Today’s America.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Matthew Strohl. He’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana. And he also writes about film at his blog, Stroholtopia. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Matt.

Matthew Strohl
Hello. Happy to be here.

Josh Landy
So Matt, what two films that you nominating for the category of most stimulating and stressful vision of today’s America?

Matthew Strohl
Well, the two films are on the one hand “Luce,” which is a film about a young black man who started out his life as a child soldier in Eritrea, and has been adopted by white parents and become the high school valedictorian. The other movie is “Give Me Liberty.” And it’s about a Russian van driver in Milwaukee, who was supposed to be getting various clients to work but ends up sidetracked by a mission to get a large group of older Russian immigrants to a funeral.

Josh Landy
Give Me Liberty—that’s a film that’s written by Alice Austin and Carol Makowski. And I think it’s a really fascinating vision of contemporary America. What’s your sense?

Matthew Strohl
You know, I think an interesting film to compare it to is uncut gems, right, which also released this last year, where of course, like you have the Adam Sandler character in that film, making a series of bad decisions that snowball into a very chaotic, stressful situation that that turns out tragically, and I feel as though this film Give Me Liberty is in a way the opposite, right? So it’s a film where the central character similarly makes a lot of misguided decisions, right? So there’s a running joke in the movie, where he’s supposed to be getting all of these people to their destinations on time, and he’s constantly forecasting 10 minutes tops right? As he continues to make decisions that make that goal utterly impossible to achieve. So there’s a similar sense of escalating anxiety, losing control of the situation. But in this case, his aims are entirely good hearted, right? He’s just trying to do the best he can for everyone around him, Get everyone where they need to go. But there’s this similar result of escalating anxiety and chaos.

Give Me Liberty
Yeah, I know. I’m on my way. 10 minutes tops. I’m on my way, I’ll be there in 10 minutes.

Matthew Strohl
Part of what is so appealing about the film is that so many different people get thrown together in the course of the narrative, right? You have this large group of elderly Russians, and then you have a number of younger black people. You have this cantankerous blind man who doesn’t understand why everyone’s protesting all the time, right? And these people are all sort of thrown together in this chaotic, humorous situation.

Josh Landy
Yeah, what is this togetherness, right? Is this a potential vision, whether positive or negative, of America? Because the main character whose name is Vic, the van driver, he seems, on the one hand to want to live in a world of rules, you know, where everything’s kind of say stable and predictable, and his day isn’t going completely bananas. But on the other hand, there’s something kind of attractive about a world of openness and warmth and flexibility and difference in variety.

Matthew Strohl
Well, my sense is I watched it was that the order is coming from outside, right. So it’s like in order to participate in the economy, to have a job, you have to sort of be at a certain place at a certain time, you have to fit into certain structures. And he’s trying his best to do that. But he’s also he’s so good hearted, right? That he’s unable to say no, to any sincere requests. So these people like I need to get to this funeral. You have to get me there. And he can’t turn them down. Right. And so his good heartedness, his sort of openness to the needs of his community is in conflict with the order that the economy is imposing on him.

Jeremy Sabol
There’s this wonderful moment where Vic says, “rules are rules.”

Josh Landy
No, it’s Dima—Dima says it.

Matthew Strohl
Dima, who’s the boxer.

Give Me Liberty
I’m sorry about your hand, but I cannot help you. You have to call up the manager’s office on Monday. Okay, I understand. Rules. Rules are rules. I understand.

Jeremy Sabol
The stress of the film weirdly, you know, it lodges some of the complexity of that film in the viewers experience. So we err on the side of Vic making the wrong decision. We want him to stop being so nice, right? We want him to actually get there in 10 minutes, but we should be rooting for his moral instincts and he keeps making the wrong decision. But we’re kind of on the wrong team in a way wanting the stress to be relieved.

Matthew Strohl
Right. It reminded me of the Farrelly brothers Dumb and Dumber, right where they keep picking up hitchhikers. Right. And and then everyone ends up singing songs. And of course, there’s an echo of that in this movie, right? Where all of the Russians in the van start singing Let my people go. And one of the characters says, This is a wonderful song. This is a song both for black people and for people like us. Right. So the film is set amidst the 2016 Milwaukee protests in response to a police shooting, right? And most of the characters in the film that aren’t black express a confusion about why anyone would be protesting like why would anyone be complaining? No, get it. But by the end of the film, you have the Russian character, the boxer Deema chanting and joining the protest along with everyone else, right. So there’s this sort of very endearingly clumsy portrait of how these barriers are breached simply through contact, like just throw all these people in a bus. And by the end, they actually managed to hash out some kind of understanding however clumsy it is.

Josh Landy
So let’s turn to “Luce.” This is a film directed by a Nigerian director Julius Onah, based on a play by JC Lee. Tell us a little bit about what you think the questions are that this film is raising for us, Matt.

Matthew Strohl
What I think is especially interesting about “Luce,” righ—so the film it, it was a 2019 film, but it’s based on a play that originally debuted I believe in 2013 and was written during the Obama era, right. So “Luce” is I think, quite clearly supposed to put us in mind of Barack Obama, right. And the Barack Obama character sort of standard character in the movie is not the hero of the film. Right? Indeed, it is a highly problematic character. And so again, what what draws me towards loose among the the sort of huge roster of topical films about race in America right now is that it’s one of the only recent films that has the courage to be complex, right to to not paint a simplistic moralistic picture where there’s one side is right and one side is wrong.

Josh Landy
I love that there’s a moment in the movie where the school teacher may Wilson says, it’s not that simple and Luce says, “nothing ever is.”

Luce
So it’s about what’s reasonable. That’s what courts are for. Really it’s just about people though, right—whether they conform to what we think they are? It’s not that simple. Nothing ever is.

Josh Landy
One thing I love about “Luce” is that it credits us with intelligence, it credits us with the ability to recognize that a fictional character is flawed. And yet, they may be saying things that are true, you know, that the two things don’t, they can come apart, you know, and, and this is a film it’s full of different moral frameworks, it’s often that there’s the law, there’s morality, which is different from the law, the school teacher point that out, there’s violence, right? The France fanola Amazingly, comes up in this movie, a philosopher who, who preaches the necessity of revolutionary violence, but also love, right, the school teacher is talking about language bringing us all together. And then there’s a fifth category, which is kind of family closeness, and, and privileging your, your nearest and dearest over maybe somebody else. And so it’s a it’s just a roiling mass of different possibilities. And it gives us the credit to think that maybe we can find our way in that without being preached to.

Jeremy Sabol
You know, early on, we have this idea of Mrs. Wilson as being this character that puts people into boxes, and we see her right, our very first scene of her in the classroom, both kind of dividing the classroom or around race lines and putting people in boxes. So we have that view of her. But in fact, she’s the only one that actually sees loose not in terms of categories but in terms of who He really is like she she sees something wrong with him from the very beginning and, and that’s what condemned her in our eyes is that her she, she correctly perceives him,

Matthew Strohl
Right, there’s a light at the end of the film where she says, It’s America that put you in a box, right? And she says something like it’s dirty, and it’s cramped, and it’s stinky, and very little light gets in.

Luce
Why do we have to be perfect to be accepted? That’s a lie. No, you’re’s just so desperate for approval that you eat children alive just to get it. Whose approval? Who you think? Everyone who made you feel that being black wasn’t good enough. But I don’t need their approval. I’m not gonna be somebody’s symbol just to make them feel better. You still don’t get it.

Matthew Strohl
And she sees her own role as the bearer of that harsh truth. So when she’s dividing people up into boxes, she’s not the one doing it. She’s just letting them know they’re in that box whether they like it or not. And I take it that one of the themes of the film is that it’s it’s looking at the idea that deep down do we feel like there’s some taint to coming from a place like where Luce comes from, and that’s that’s our deepest anxiety is that all the middle class upbringing in the world can’t cleanse the taint of whatever we imagine looses upbringing has shaped him to be okay Jeremy.

Josh Landy
So we’ve got loose”Luce” by Nigerian director Julius Onah. And we’ve got “Give Me Liberty” by Alice Austin and Carol Makowski. Which of these two films wins this year for most stimulating and stressful vision of today’s America?

Jeremy Sabol
Gosh, Josh, this conversation was stimulating and now this vote is stressful. I think my vote goes to “Luce”—incredibly stressful movie, stressful even to talk about afterwards.

Josh Landy
I agree. But also amazing movie to watch. You won’t just be stressed, you’ll think hard, and you’ll be moved. So the Dionysus Award for the Most Stimulating and Stressful Vision of Today’s America in 2019 goes to…

Jeremy Sabol
Luce!

Josh Landy
Matt, thank you so much for joining us today.

Matthew Strohl
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be here.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re taking a philosophical look at the movies of 2019 for our seventh annual Dionysus Awards.

Jeremy Sabol
In our next segment, we’ll take nominations from listeners around the country for their favorite thought provoking movies of the past year.

Josh Landy
Suggestions from the floor and so much more, when Philosophy Talk continues.

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

Jeremy Sabol
…except your intelligence. I’m Jeremy Sabol. And we’re talking about the most philosophically compelling movies of 2019. It’s time for nominations from our community of thinkers. Michaela in Tallahassee, Florida. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Michaela
Thanks, thanks for having me.

Jeremy Sabol
So Michaela, you’ve got a nomination for us.

Michaela
That’s right. So my nomination is Mati Diop’s “Atlantique” from 2019, this year

Josh Landy
In English I believe they translated it as “Atlantics.”

Michaela
Yes. So it’s a little bit confusing because she also has a short film from 2009 called “Atlantiques” with an S. One thing that’s so captivating and moving about the film is that it’s about the anguish and peril of migration in Senegal. But there’s this really important turning point in about the midpoint of the film, where it takes a supernatural turn.

Josh Landy
And suddenly becomes a ghost story.

Michaela
Exactly. And so the men who have gone out to sea come back and actually haunt the women that they’ve left behind. And in one case, Suleyman, the love interest. He haunts the detective who’s looking for him as it were. And so it’s really moving, because you get these scenes where the two lovers are brought back together, but the other she’s like looking at her love interested in the wrong body.

Jeremy Sabol
I’m a fan of ghost stories and stories of possession. So I don’t need convincing why you should make movies like this. But you could imagine a film going through similar material and working over themes like this without recourse to the supernatural. Is it important that this film, use that genre? Or what, what role does that fill in the film?

Michaela
So one is that the boys actually get to come back and tell their story, which is something that you can’t do without having recourse to this level of fantasy. So you get the story of like the last their last minutes of life, which is heartbreaking. And so part of the plot is that they’re actually construction workers and there, they were not paid their last four months wages or something like that. And so they’re working on this really futuristic looking, building into car. And then at the very end, Tevez, one of the female characters who’s describing who’s now like, possessed by the spirit of one of the boys who left, she’s telling the story of seeing this huge wave comment and collapse on top of the boay. And she says, It collapsed like a building like the boat collapsed, like a building.

Atlantique
A new god, but to go, that’s cool.

Maryam
You get these sort of impossible stories like told from the mouths of the person who lived them, but it’s the consciousness of that person, not necessarily that body.

Josh Landy
I mean, it’s such an interesting device, isn’t it? And it reminds me a little bit of magic realism. I think if someone like Isabel Allende, or Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, or even Toni Morrison, where you have these novels that are profoundly enmeshed in in painful realities of injustice and oppression, but that also include supernatural elements. And, you know, you might worry was this blunting the, the edge of the critique, but it doesn’t seem to feel that way. It feels like it sharpens the edge, and maybe even does another thing, perhaps, which is to nudge gently nudge our neurons a little bit, and make us more receptive to different kinds of future possibilities.

Maryam
Yeah, and I mean, one really interesting thing that Multijet that said in an interview, is the experience of showing this film actually in Senegal, and like the different audience reactions to it in terms of like the ontological difference between seeing like your lover return and seeing the spirit of your lover return. And so she pitched this as really a gothic film that was deep that it’s fantasy, but it came from a deep need to make a reality, speak to different populations or speak to Europe in a way that would make them feel for refugees, make them feel for migrants. But she said that when she showed this film in Senegal, and she had asked audiences about it for the first time, they said, Oh, this isn’t a fantasy film. This is this is our reality, like living with death, living with departure living with exile like this is a this is a reality, but on the level of the haunting, as well.

Jeremy Sabol
I’m thinking that “Atlantique” or “Atlantics” by Mati Diop should be nominated for a Dionysus Award of the Best Ghost Story Aout the Real World.

Josh Landy
Michaela, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a wonderful conversation.

Michaela
Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
Let’s get another nomination from the floor. Tom in Northampton, Massachusetts. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Tom
Oh, thank you very much. It’s nice to be here.

Josh Landy
So you’ve got a movie you’d like to nominate?

Tom
I do: “A Hidden Life.”

Jeremy Sabol
This is a historical drama written and directed by Terrence Malick.

Tom
Yeah, so it’s a really interesting film. It takes place in Austria, right as the Angelus the Nazis taking over power. And the main character whose name I don’t remember, is a farmer. And he lives in this rural town. And he’s basically it’s not an anti Nazi, but he refuses to do anything to sort of show his allegiance to them. So he won’t get the Hitler salute and save the Kyle even more significantly, when he is drafted, which turns out he is he won’t sign a loyalty pledge to Hitler, which all the recruits were required to do. And what happens eventually is that he gets imprisoned. And what the reason I think it’s so interesting philosophically is that you really get to see someone who stands up for his beliefs no matter what the consequences are. Now, it’s a very interesting philosophical filmmaker in general, because he was actually a philosophy graduate student. And he wound up translating one of Heidegger’s books. He’s the guy who translated it.

Josh Landy
I know there are traces of Heidegger in “The Thin Red Line.” Do you see any traces of Heidegger in a hidden life?

Tom
I think there’s this sort of notion of being true to yourself and being authentic. I guess there’s a sort of a society that people sort of trying to make him do something socially acceptable, so they won’t have to endure the punishment that he endures. But you can sort of see the voices that say, I think it’s pretty strong there.

Josh Landy
So it’s Heidegger’s philosophy, working against Heidegger’s own life commitments. Right, if you if you’re a real Heidegger, and maybe you don’t sign up with a Nazi Party.

Tom
I think it’s more nuanced. I mean, in part, it’s because his family suffers because of the persecution by the townspeople, and they’re made to feel horrible. And so you can see how, even if he feels like he’s doing what he has to do to himself, there’s a real poll because He asked to see what the effects are on his wife, and child and his wife is actually very supportive. And she keeps saying to him that whatever you do, I’m willing, I’m with you. It’s up to you.

A Hidden Life
Whatever you do, whatever comes, I’m with you.

Josh Landy
It sounds like the movies asking a couple of questions in the domain of moral theory, one of which is, is it legitimate for me to decide for others? So let’s say I decide that the right thing to do is to stand up to the Nazis? Well, I’m nonetheless choosing a future for my family as well. So to what extent do I have the right to that? And another question is, what about will in all this? Where does my motivation come from it? There’s a French thinker I forget who maybe Jeremy member who says, you know, we have all of the good Maxim’s in the world, the only thing that’s lacking is the will to put them into action. We don’t we don’t, we’re not short of principles.

Tom
Yeah. And I think what you see in this film is how difficult it is that it really shows you all the ways in which this guy feels incredible pressure from everybody that he comes into contact with, to basically conform. I think mallets idea is that religious faith is the thing that allows you to maintain your own personal integrity in the face of all these pressures.

Josh Landy
So Jeremy, I’m tempted to nominate “A Hidden Life for Most Morally Sophisticated Film about Resistance to Conformity.

Jeremy Sabol
Well, that’s much better—my categories going to be Best Heideggerian Film Which Opposes Heidegger.” But Tom, you decide which one the film receives.

Tom
I like the latter one. Okay.

Josh Landy
Excellent. Tom, thank you so much for calling in.

Tom
I enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Jeremy Sabol
Let’s hear from another listener—Maryam in San Francisco, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Maryam
Thank you. I’m enchanted.

Jeremy Sabol
So we hear there’s a film you’d like to nominate for an Dionysus Award.

Maryam
Absolutely. Pedro Almodovar movie, his latest one which is called “Pain and Glory.” This boy and his mother, they’re very close. But level of communication is a you know, very poor. There’s a lot of loss. But there’s also a lot of pain because of the misunderstanding and the misunderstanding goes to a level where each party in this relationship makes a lot of presumptions and a lot of assumptions and therefore their own perception on what the other person is thinking or judging or saying in their mind. And it basically translates into somewhat of a epigenetic pain for for the boy. And as he grows up, he internalizes all this pain and it becomes grossly, more than psychosomatic, it becomes very physical and eventually The ends up with opioid addiction. So impacts his work, it impacts his relationship. And the mother and son have a lot of misunderstanding towards the end of the mother’s life. And eventually the son. You know, he goes through a lot of pain and then he loses the mother.

Jeremy Sabol
So at this point, I feel like Almodovar could have called this film just “Pain.” But can you tell us a little bit about the glory?

Maryam
The glory part is that I’m at the bar. This is on auto auto fiction as they call that in in Spanish auto pixie on. So the auto fix Seon is about him in a fiction fictitious screenplay, but it’s about him. So the glory comes to the point where he finally releases the pain by finding a voice in one of the actors that defined him initially in in couple of his plays, and did not do justice to his work and abandon the play. He finds this actor and the actor also is going through a lot of personal pain. And the actor take one of his final works and act it out on a monologue on stage. And it’s a huge success.

Pain and Glory
Despues intenté a salvar a Marcello y salvarme yo. Si Marcello se salvó fue lejos de mi.

Maryam
This actor not only took his work and voiced it out for him, he also provided him with opiates to numb his pain. So on two levels, for him, it was glory because he could release the pain and he would find recognition again, amongst his audience.

Josh Landy
So it sounds like painting glory, raises quite a number of philosophical questions. So among other things, how much access can we have to the interstates of other people? It sounds like there’s a lot of obstruction and it’s a lot of confusion assumptions being made that aren’t that are right. Sounds like there’s a question there about whether the truth is always the thing we want just because this film, after all, is autobiographical, but it’s an on by biographical fiction. And maybe the the fictional part is a good version of the opiates don’t take opiates write a write an auto fiction instead, right? But But a third thought I have and this one I really want to run by you is inspired by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who might have looked at this and said, Yeah, that’s the way to go about it. If you’ve had a painful childhood, or anything painful in your earlier life, see, if you can’t find a way to redeem it by turning it into something positive. Is that a reasonable way of thinking about pain and glory, that it’s the story of someone who redeems a childhood of suffering by turning it into art that would not have been possible without that suffering?

Maryam
Absolutely. As a child, Almmodvar, was able to give so much to a person who was illiterate. And then at the same time, he was able to redeem himself later in life finding that this person that Almodovar educated, was in fact, a brilliant artist. So, as a child, he gave something he was trusted by an individual who learned so much from him. And then later in life. The var doubted his trust with his own mother, but then found his trust in his audience, in this artists and also in himself.

Josh Landy
Jeremy I want to nominate “Pain and Glory” by Almodovar for Best Fictional Autobiography that Raises Questions about Other Minds and the Redemption of Suffering. What do you say?

Jeremy Sabol
I gotta agree with that, Josh, I’d say yes.

Josh Landy
Maryam, thank you so much for joining us today.

Maryam
Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Josh Landy
If you’ve got a Dionysus-worthy movie from 2019, that wasn’t discussed on today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send your suggestions to comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog. Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2020.

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

Jeremy Sabol
Not even when they’re true and reasonable!

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a Partner in our Community of Thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Jeremy Sabol
And I’m Jeremy Sabol. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.