The 2022 Dionysus Awards

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Jeremy Sabol
…except your intelligence. I’m Jeremy Sabol, sitting in for Ray Briggs.

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

Jeremy Sabol
…continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh directs the philosophy and literature initiative, and I teach in Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education program.

Josh Landy
Jeremy is back for the third year in a row as special co-host for our ninth annual Dionysus Awards.

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

Josh Landy
You know, I didn’t get to the actual cinema much last year, but I did manage between variants to catch Dune on the big screen.

Jeremy Sabol
Oh, me too. What a beautiful film. I also managed to see The French Dispatch and Drive My Car.

Josh Landy
Oh, those are some great movies, which we don’t have time for today.

Jeremy Sabol
Yeah, but we do have some awesome films to talk about. We’re going to be talking to Alex King from Simon Fraser University, as well as your regular co-host Ray Briggs about some of the films that got them questioning their assumptions this year.

Josh Landy
And will talk to listeners like you who’ve written in with their nominations for Dionysus winners.

Jeremy Sabol
So Josh, one of this year’s audience favorites was the kind of do over for a 50 year old film about the world’s biggest pop group. So we sent our roving philosophical reporter Holly J. McDede, to find the philosophy in “The Beatles: Get Back.” She files this report.

Paul McCartney
Lennon was married happily, McCartney was going steady, and George Harrison was about to marry. Everything in the Beatle garden was rosy. But that was a long time ago.

Holly McDede
If you want to explore some philosophical questions about reality, look no further than myths and folklore about the Beatles. Fans like to speculate, who are John, Paul, George and Ringo, not as abstract ideas but as people?

Paul McCartney
Drugs, divorce, and a slipping image…

George Harrison
And if you were really yourself you wouldn’t be any of who are now.

John Lennon
Act naturally, then.

Holly McDede
Who are any of us? What is music? Peter Jackson’s docuseries “Get Back” takes footage shot in 1969 and restores it into a colorful, joyful, mundane, loony, playful long version of who the Beatles are. It culminates in the last Beatles concert.

T.J. Shanoff
To watch like a bootleg of Let It Be—it is both somber and literally dark.

Holly McDede
T.J. Shanoff is co host of the Untitled Beatles podcast and he says this is way different than the original documentary released in 1970.

T.J. Shanoff
Because it was made in the middle of the breakup, there is literal recency bias from the 70s showing the band dissolving without the joy.

Holly McDede
Tony Mendoza, another co-host of the Untitled Beatles podcast.

Tony Mendoza
50 years later, you can look back at all that stuff and reassess, what did they leave out? Oh, all that fun they were having.

Hannah Kim
And it’s like not even slice of life because you get a lot more than a slice at a time.

Holly McDede
Hannah Kim teaches philosophy at Macalester College. She says the vibrant colors make the Beatles feel up close.

Hannah Kim
They’re wearing neon green and bright orange, purple and pink and red and the fur jackets. It was just fun to see that.

Holly McDede
The film plays around with time.

George Harrison
Uh, I think I’ll be leaving the band now.

Hannah Kim
The second installment begins with this line that says the future of not only the project, but the group itself is now in doubt.

Paul McCartney
And then there were two.

Hannah Kim
Whose now? Like now in 1969, their now? Because we’re not talking about our now.

Unknown Speaker
It’s gonna be such an incredible sort of comical thing like in 50 years time. They broke up because Yoko sat on an amp.

Holly McDede
In this version, Yoko Ono is no longer cast as the destroyer of worlds. Instead, she hangs around quietly, mostly.

Ringo Starr
I know it sounds like Benny Goodman, but don’t worry, it’s the big sound of 1969.

Holly Tessler
While we’re watching these eight hours of film footage, The Beatles, the four of them, are seldom in a room by themselves.

Holly McDede
Holly Tessler leads a master’s degree program at the University of Liverpool titled “The Beatles: Music Industry. and Heritage.”

Holly Tessler
They are constantly surrounded by people coming and going and you know somebody bringing in tea or the post or people dropping in randomly. So I wonder if they get anything done.

Holly McDede
And within the mundane everyday activities, there’s the music.

Holly Tessler
What also really struck me as well, is how quickly they even when they’re just fooling around, they just, you know, go back and forth into any sort of song and breath, stuff they used to play in Hamburg in the early days. And you can see they have a great affection for it.

Holly McDede
As Tessler notes, Ringo is there dutifully with his drums, ready to get on with it. John has many moods. George comes and goes, there but not there, very talented, but very sullen.

George Harrison
I don’t care if you don’t want it, but I don’t give a fuck. It can go in me musical.

Holly McDede
It all reaches a peak with the rooftop performance.

Holly Tessler
Paul McCartney is looking over his shoulder and delighted by the fact that we’re getting shut down by the cops. It’s a little more performative than we might expect but just to see it unfold the way it did, especially in the cold and the misery of it all that it is sort of that just last shining moment in their career before it all starts to fall apart.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that report, Holly. Now let’s get back to two of us. I’m Josh Landy, along with my Stanford colleague, Jeremy Sabol, and we’re thinking about the most philosophical movies of the past year for our annual Dionysus Awards.

Jeremy Sabol
Our first category is best film about complicated mothers telling uncomfortable truths. And our two nominees are “The Lost Daughter” directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and “Parallel Mothers” directed by Pedro Almodovar.

Josh Landy
So maybe we should start with a disclaimer and neither Jeremy nor I are mothers or even parents.

Jeremy Sabol
We do have mothers and great ones I might add.

Josh Landy
But I feel like in every other way, we are completely ignorant when it comes to what it means to be a quote unquote, good mother, which is a question both of our films are raising.

Jeremy Sabol
So we’ll just be talking about what our movies have to say about that, starting with “The Lost Daughter.”

Josh Landy
That one’s based on a novel by Elena Ferrante. And it’s about a rather mysterious character called Leda who has a very complicated relationship to her daughters.

The Lost Daughter
I’m on holiday. I’m looking at over the most- okay. I love you, too. Bye.

Josh Landy
Walter Benjamin has this lovely line about the difference between a riddle and a mystery and a riddle is something a question you can solve and a mystery, something you can’t. So you look at the character Leda, as you see her today, I mean, a lot of the movie’s set in the past. But the Leda we see today, on the one hand, goes out of her way to go and find a young girl who’s lost and restore her to a mother, which is clearly you know, an act of great kindness. But we also see her stealing this child doll and hanging on to it, even though the child’s really upset. And how are you supposed to put those two things together?

Jeremy Sabol
So Leda as a character is quite mysterious in terms of her motivations. Why does she take this doll? Why does she keep the doll? And why did she kind of flaunt the fact that she’s stolen it? She keeps bringing it with her plate leaving it out, right? And then on the other hand, the other family, the family of this lost daughter, the family from whom she stolen the doll, Nina, the young mother is also fairly mysterious in that kind of quest for this doll becomes kind of mafia-like and you know, it’s equally bizarre.

The Lost Daughter
Whatever it took to get brain cancer. Oh, come on. It’s good stuff. You understand? The lack of toy, they take it? That’s it. Children are like kids. Yeah, it’s their mom, she’s [bleep] I spoke to Tony and the kids didn’t take anything. He’s lying. Don’t say that. That’s true. Don’t say it.

Josh Landy
I love that the central character of the film is such an impenetrable mystery. And as you say, you could think about the two main characters, both mothers, both with a complicated relationship to their nuclear family. We know it from that we have, spoiler alert, but we know from Leda’s past that she left her husband to pursue what started as an affair becomes a full blown relationship. Nina’s seems to be on the verge of doing something very similar. There’s something about the complexity of these characters that keeps at least for me, it kept gnawing away at me.

Jeremy Sabol
For me, there’s kind of two great mysteries. One is you know, how do these two women balance, it seems like a true commitment and love for their children, with their own emotional life, which isn’t stable, it was just not, you know, locked on to the nuclear family and its needs they, they’re individuals with desires, and they want to pursue those things as well. So that’s one complexity of the story. The other one I find fascinating is if it seems like the young Leda and her choices to pursue this affair with this professor, leave her children, somehow that’s the cause. Or it’s related, right? The film makes us think that it produces this very strange action later on in her life where she steals this doll and kind of keeps it around her they seem unrelated, the relationship is not obvious. And yet the film makes us think how the one is because of the other.

Josh Landy
And that conflict you’re talking about between sort of personal satisfactions and the satisfaction of being a parent. I think that’s really striking. And it’s kind of refreshing to see a film in which children are not an unequivocal blessing.

The Lost Daughter
Children are a crushing responsibility. Happy birthday!

Jeremy Sabol
Josh, I think that’s a perfect segue to start talking about “Parallel Mothers.”

Josh Landy
So it’s about two women who meet in the maternity ward while about to give birth. So there’s Janis, who’s somewhere in her late 30s. And there’s Ana who’s around 17 something when the film starts.

Parallel Mothers
And we’re going to have to give away a couple of plot points here to show how brilliantly complicated this movie is. So the two babies get swapped in the hospital. And Janis eventually finds out. But she’s already bonded with her baby. So she doesn’t say anything. But the baby doesn’t really look like her. The father of the baby immediately recognizes, doesn’t recognize himself in the baby. So early in the film, before we realize that the swap has happened, there’s this kind of confusion around, is it her baby or not?

Jeremy Sabol
But then Ana’s baby dies. So does Janis need to tell Ana that her baby is still alive?

Josh Landy
Right, and what does it mean to say it’s her baby? I mean, shortly after Janis discovers the baby she’s been taken care of isn’t her biological baby, her intuition is, you know, let sleeping dogs lie. Ana doesn’t know, she’s got a baby. She’s happy. I’m happy, we’re both bonded with our baby. Maybe it would sort of, I don’t know, unsettle everybody to tell Ana the truth about the biological origin of these two babies, why does it matter that there isn’t this blood bond? But then, in the later part of the movie, our intuitions are totally flipped, right? Why? Well, because Ana’s baby dies, and now it feels like it’s Janis’s responsibility to say actually, your baby didn’t really die. My baby died. Yeah. And so she’s sort of going overboard in a sense, right? She’s doing a kind of moral wrong to Ana in the process.

Parallel Mothers
Totally. And that moral wrong is so clear in the second half. But in the first half, you know, you think this is kind of a nature culture kind of a movie where there’s an objective truth, who is the real mother right cheek swab DNA. But then you also have this more subjective truth, right that you become a mother by being a mother, and Janis is the mother of this child that she has gotten attached to.

Josh Landy
Here, here’s the kind of wacky and interesting thing about this film, it starts and ends with a totally different subject.

Jeremy Sabol
So the bulk of the movie is, of course, about these two mothers but the start and end is about the mass killings of civilians by the Franco regime and kind of a contemporary effort to exhume the bodies of those murdered people and say the truth about what happened.

Josh Landy
I feel like the issue of truth seems maybe to hold them together because Janis ends up telling the truth about the babies. And Arturo who’s the father of Janis’ baby tells his wife about the affair that he had with Janis, and Ana tells Janis, the true story of how her baby came into being. And of course at the end, you know, Arturo, who also happens to be a filmmaker reveals the truth about the Franco regime’s killings.

Jeremy Sabol
I like how as the movie is progressing, particularly when we’re following the story of Janis and Ana, the truth telling moments are ambivalent. They have these kind of bad outcomes. They’re very disturbing to hear these truths. It unsettles both of the women at different points. So coughing up, revealing the truth seems kind of problematic and complicated, doesn’t always have good outcomes. But of course in the story of Spain and its past, right, the truth telling might also be uncomfortable and awkward, but it’s obviously morally necessary.

Josh Landy
So Jeremy, it’s time to make a decision. We’ve got “Parallel Mothers” and “The Lost Daughter” both about motherhood and truth telling. Which one is going to come away with our award today?

Jeremy Sabol
You know, I think the two stories of the two mothers and then this larger national story of Spain, in Parallel Mothers is so dramatic and so compelling and so original, I think that gets my vote.

Josh Landy
Mine too. And so the 2022 Dionysus Award for best film about complicated mothers telling uncomfortable truths goes to…

Jeremy Sabol
Parallel Mothers, directed by Pedro Almodovar.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s the ninth annual Dionysus Awards honoring the most philosophically compelling movies of the past year.

Jeremy Sabol
Coming up, we’ll consider nominees in the categories of best attempt to redeem 80 years of questionable ethics, along with best adapted novel about trauma, marginalization, self deception and the gap between appearance and reality.

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

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

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

Josh Landy
New ways? Did anything happen last year, I mean, I remember a few more Greek letter variants, but that’s about it. Wasn’t it just like a long, claustrophobic extension of 2020?

Jeremy Sabol
Come on, there were a few important events, the killer of George Floyd convicted, the transgender ban in the military lifted.

Josh Landy
Okay, fair enough. And this year’s movies reflect some pretty deep engagement with today’s pressing social issues. We’ve got two Dionysus nominees in the category of Best adapted novel about trauma, marginalization, self deception, and the gap between appearance and reality. Those nominees are “The Power of the Dog” directed by Jane Campion, and “Passing”, directed by Rebecca Hall.

Jeremy Sabol
These two films were nominated by our guest, Alex King. She’s Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University, where she writes about morality and aesthetics, including at her own philosophy of art blog, Aesthetics for Birds, we asked her how these films go together.

Alex King
One thing is, they’re both set in the 1920s, so that’s a kind of obvious connection between the two. But I think there’s a lot of sort of deeper connections between the characters and the way that different characters are kind of portrayed as relating to themselves in the external world, sort of social world around them. So both Power of the Dog and Passing have kind of two characters who are in a way each other’s foils with respect to how they present themselves and how they relate to their particular dimension of marginalization. In Power of the Dog, you have, Phil, the sort of older, sort of aspiring cowboy, and then Peter, the younger, not really interested in living that kind of life or, you know, they, the way that they relate to their masculinity is quite different.

Josh Landy
What do you think is the right way of thinking about that pairing, particularly in relation to gender norms?

Alex King
Yeah, my read of this is that to use the language of Passing, Phil is the one who passes for straight, right, he moves through spaces as a, almost like sexually repressed straight, hyper masculine figure. And Peter is sort of much more comfortable in his homosexuality, in his self presentation. He makes paper flowers, you know, the first scene we see him and he’s making paper flowers.

The Power of the Dog
Oh, wonder what little lady made these? Actually, I did this to her. My mother was a florist. So I made them to look like the ones in our garden. Oh, well, pardon me.

Alex King
One of the things that really struck me was at the very beginning, you know, you hear this voiceover from Peter.

The Power of the Dog
When my father passed, I wanted nothing more than my mother’s happiness. For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? I did not save her.

Alex King
And that actually, I think, slightly grates against the way that we want to sort of nowadays think of masculinity. Whereas when I first watched it through, I thought of like, Peter has got the clear moral high ground over Phil in the sense he’s like, escaped the bonds of toxic masculinity. But then when I rewatched, it, it was less clear to me that he had fully escaped those.

Jeremy Sabol
Yeah, Peter seems so like, even you know, for my stereotype idea of the 1920s in the West, like, shockingly open with his sexuality and his, you know, not conforming to conventional gender norms. But that you’re right that that voiceover kind of conflicts a little bit, it makes him a little more typical figure of his time.

Alex King
Yeah, it makes him sort of a more complex character, I think.

Josh Landy
Or you could think of him as a transitional figure, because why should we expect a character in the 1920s to have exactly the views that we have today?

Alex King
Right. Yeah.

Josh Landy
One of the things I’m curious to ask you about actually, Alex, is what you end up making of Phil because Phil’s a little bit of an enigma in the way that parts of him sort of, don’t go together. I mean, he’s this boorish guy who doesn’t bathe and is horrible to everyone around him, especially women, and clearly homophobic and you know, all these other things. But you know, he he studied classics at Yale. So you sort of wonder how, what do you make of that? How do all the parts of Phil pack together?

Alex King
I wonder if part of the point is that they don’t really fit together, is this kind of like fracturing, that, if you’re a certain kind of person inside, that toxic masculinity can sort of inflict on you. I think it’s a sort of less examined side of that, that toxic masculinity can also be really, like, psychically painful for the people who have to embody those stereotypes. And I see Phil as like, he, there’s this part of him that he doesn’t want to acknowledge. And so he represses that and kind of overcompensates by, like, beating the horse when he finds out that his brother has gotten married. He just runs into the stables and eats a horse.

Jeremy Sabol
Yeah, I completely agree, Alex. And I think that language of kind of the fracturing is really gets it at Phil and I and Josh, your idea about, you know, an enigma. I mean, I think one of the things that’s tragic about even maybe about both of these male characters, is that they’ve done such a good job of cultivating an exterior that is unified and has to do with gender norms, that their interior is not only an enigma to us, but you get the feeling like Phil doesn’t really know who he is. There’s a there’s an enigma, of his identity to himself. Like, he doesn’t know why he beats the horse. And I find that kind of lack of clarity about the self, a tragic part of the film.

The Power of the Dog
Oh, you’re Phil. So you weren’t eaten by a cougar? Not yet. Well, I am sorry to miss your conversation. I’ve heard that you’re brilliant. You’re gonna want to keep your distance.

Jeremy Sabol
This maybe helps us go along to talking about Passing directed by Rebecca Hall, which is based on the classic American novel by the same name by Nella Larsen. Maybe you could kick us off by talking about what you see in Passing that makes you think about Power of the Dog.

Alex King
Sure, yeah. So one of the things in Passing, we get Irene and Claire as those interesting foils to analyze against each other. And Irene is moving through life as a person of color in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. And Claire is moving through life as a white passing woman married to a white man, pretending that her child is white. You know, as with Phil and Peter, having really different relationships to masculinity norms, Irene and Claire have really different relationships to like race and self presentation in that same kind of way.

Passing
So you haven’t ever thought to? What? I’m asking have you ever thought of passing? No. Why should I? I mean, for convenience, occasionally, I suppose but no, I just mean I have everything I’ve ever wanted. Except perhaps a little more money. Of course, that’s all anybody ever wants. Little more money. Money is an awfully nice thing to have. In fact, all things considered, I think it’s entirely worth the price.

Jeremy Sabol
It seems to me kind of roughly that the movie, the first half of the movie really grounds us strongly in the issue of passing and the kind of growing friendship or the complicated friendship between these two women. But to me, the second half of the movie is kind of more about infidelity. And it it seems clear that both the novel and this film are really trying to get us to see these two issues as somehow related that the racial conflict in the movie and the racial inequality in the movie are somehow related to this issue of sexual infidelity in their marriage.

Alex King
I think it’s very important. Like one of the questions that the film keeps asking, or sort of hinting at is this question of infidelity. Like, is her husband cheating on her with Claire? And I think one of the things that’s- I don’t typically like intentional ambiguities in films, I think it’s often a bit hackneyed. But I think in this context, it works really well. Because it’s sort of immaterial whether or not he’s actually having an affair. What’s important is that Irene can’t tell whether or not he’s having an affair, and she’s sort of opaque to herself in an important way. Like, I think that Irene and Claire, one of the things that makes them really different from each other is Claire knows what she’s doing. And Claire is like, there’s various monologues where she’s like, I’m not safe, I would do anything to get what I want. She knows who she is. Whereas Irene is like, I would never pass. And yet in the first scene, we sort of see her passing, right. And there’s a lot of instances where she seems to sort of take the moral high ground, but it’s actually really unclear whether or not she is as morally upstanding a character as she sort of presents herself as being like, in one scene, she and her husband are talking in bed.

Passing
Do you think they’d be satisfied being white? Righ, who’s satisfied being anything?

Alex King
And she says, I am.

Passing
Satisfied.

Alex King
And that’s just a clear lie. Right? And I think that this is one of the kind of interesting things about self presentation, introspective opacity or clarity. Does Irene know who she is to other people? And does she know who she is to herself?

Josh Landy
So this brings me Alex, we’re putting you in the invidious position of having to choose which of these two fantastic films would you give the award to?

Alex King
I’m going to have to say that I’m giving it to Passing and the reason that I’m giving it to Passing is because I think I just really like this added layer of they don’t even fully know what they’re doing. And I just really think that the kind of ambiguous ending there is beautifully done.

Jeremy Sabol
I agree, Alex. The 2022 Dionysus Award for the Best film adapted from a novel that’s about trauma, marginalization, self deception, and the gap between appearance and reality goes to…

Josh Landy
Passing!

Passing
We’re all of us passing for something or other.

Josh Landy
Alex, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.

Alex King
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been lovely.

Josh Landy
Alex King from Simon Fraser University. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk’s ninth annual Dionysus Awards. I’m Josh Landy here with my Stanford colleague, Jeremy Sabol.

Jeremy Sabol
Time to take a nomination from the floor. Louise in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Louise
Well, thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
Louise, what film have you got for us?

Louise
I am nominating “The Last Duel.” with Matt Damon and Adam Driver and Jodie Comer.

Josh Landy
So that’s the movie that’s written by Nicole Holofcener, and directed by Ridley Scott. So tell us a little bit about what happens in this film.

Louise
Right. So the film is based on a series of true events that involved two men, a knight and a squire and the knight’s wife and the squire rapes the wife. So the film is structured in such a way that the Kurosawa film Rashomon is structured that we see the same period of time, depicted from three different points of view. First, from the knight’s point of view, second from the squire’s point of view, and then finally from the knight’s wife’s point of view. Unlike in Rashomon, however, the sort of basic facts of the case stay the thing we don’t see different facts, but we do see different significance assigned to them by each of the characters. And we do see the omission or the inclusion of different details depending on which character’s point of view is being presented.

The Last Duel
Jacques Le Gris re entered our home. He attacked me. The accusation is false. I am telling the truth, the truth does not matter. There is only the power of men.

Josh Landy
What I felt was the film was sort of tempting me because the first two points of view are male points of view, you have these two antagonists. And I thought the film was tempting me to adjudicate between them. Well, which one has the correct interpretation of events and of course, both are somewhat self serving and self glamourizing. But you come to the third, which is the point of view of the female protagonist, and you realize I was completely wrong. It doesn’t matter which of these two men had it right, because they’re more alike than we might think.

Louise
Well see, I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir, and drawing from existentialist thought, she says, look, it’s a human universal, that human beings in groups tend to regard people outside the group as other and it’s part of consciousness to construct other consciousnesses as others. So there’s kind of a relational aspect to subjectivity. But what Beauvoir argues is that it’s not reciprocal for women, that women are not constructed in a way by men that recognises their subjectivity and that women themselves internalize this subjectivity and have to struggle against it. So what struck me when Marguerite’s story was started was, we start seeing details that we just hadn’t, I hadn’t thought to wonder about. So it’s the absence of any recognition of what all of this stuff that’s going on means for Marguerite, the wife that I suddenly became aware of, in the two segments that depict the points of view, Jacques and John, the two male protagonists,

Jeremy Sabol
I’m curious, then, I mean, obviously, no movie, which takes as its central focus, a rape is a movie with that’s going to have a happy ending. But in a way, your account of it starts you know, in Beauvoir’s language, you’d say the presentation of Marguerite’s character- she’s imminent, right? She’s an object, she’s a man’s property. But by the third segment, she becomes transcendent, right? She’s a pure subjectivity, we get to see the world through her eyes. And is that do you see that as a kind of victory for Marguerite, I mean, is the account of the film, the kind of structure of the film supposed to end on a good note?

Louise
Well, she really is a kind of existentialist hero, because she’s, her husband carries the complaint into a direction that she didn’t want to. He says, I’m not going to appeal to the courts, I’m going to appeal to God by which he knows he’s going to have a duel to the death with Jacques, the Adam Driver character. And she’s terrified about this and doesn’t want to do it. But she only realizes later that if he loses, not only does he die, but she’ll be burned at the stake, and her being treated as completely imminent. Nobody bothered to bring that detail up right at the start, but she does make this existential choice she is going to tell the truth. She was wronged, and she wants justice. So I mean, I think these details that say, you know, wow, transcendence did work for her, but I don’t think it’s any kind of a lesson or a model being held up.

Josh Landy
So Jeremy, what are you thinking? Does this film, The Last Duel directed by Ridley Scott, do you think it wins that award this year?

Jeremy Sabol
I do. I think it’s deserving of a Dionysus Award. I’m going to propose that this film should be awarded the best Rashomon style film about patriarchal domination with an existentialist hero. Thanks, Louise. Thanks so much for joining us. This is a wonderful conversation. Thanks for bringing this film to our attention.

Louise
My pleasure, really. Thank you.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we are honoring the most philosophically compelling movies of 2021 for our annual Dionysus Awards.

Jeremy Sabol
In our next segment, we’ll hear from Josh’s regular co host Ray Briggs, who’s been thinking about a couple of movies from a philosophically surprising source.

Josh Landy
The best effort at redeeming 80 years of Disney’s questionable ethics, when Philosophy Talk continues

It’s the ninth 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 sitting in for Ray Briggs, and we’re talking about the most philosophically compelling movies of the past year.

Josh Landy
You know, Ray could have taken this week off, but they’d heard that Disney’s been making movies lately that are more inclusive with strong female leads and characters from all over the world. And they were especially intrigued by two of the most recent, Cruella and Encanto.

Ray Briggs
I really liked Encanto, which is set in Colombia. It follows a family who lives in a magic house and the magic house gives all of the kids superpowers except for the protagonist Mirabel who hasn’t got her superpowers for some reason. So that’s the conceit. I liked that there were not a lot of like Princess Princess plotlines. There is a beautiful princess Isabella, and she’s not the focus and she’s never wanted to marry her prince. I hope I didn’t spoil that too badly, but I liked it that it was about family dynamics and family relationships.

Jeremy Sabol
And what about Cruella?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so Cruella is exploring sort of something about 101 Dalmatians from the perspective of the villain, Cruella De Vil, who is such an iconic villain. I mean, they took almost nothing from the plot of the original. It’s all supposed to happen before 101 Dalmatians and Cruella doesn’t get even that evil so you wonder what happened to her next that she’s like, actually skinning dogs.

Josh Landy
And the question seems to go along with that, which is, you know, what’s her identity? Was she really, is she really the kind of mild mannered Estella, who’s basically a good soul at heart? Or is she really this, you know, evil Cruella who, you know, do anything to get her way and you know, take revenge on people in ways that we might or might not approve of?

Cruella
Who are you? You look vaguely familiar. I look stunning. I didn’t know about familiar. Your hair, is it real? I like to make an impact.

Josh Landy
Is Estella supposed to be the real her? Is Cruella supposed to be the real her or are they each a part of her?

Ray Briggs
So my first impulse is is like, oh, Cruella is the real her, because this is a discovery that she makes about herself. And it’s really brought out as a discovery. You know, I’m going to totally spoil the film. So turn it off now if you don’t want spoilers, but she discovers that she’s the Baroness’s daughter. And that’s why she’s got all of these personality traits of being so obstinate and so cruel. So that’s definitely a real part of her. And yet she takes off her wig, which is a disguise to show that she is not Estella. So my first impulse is like, yeah, obviously, she’s just Cruella. But actually, on second thought, I’m not so sure. Because, you know, her friends Jasper and Horace do prevail on her to pull back a little bit on her ruthlessness.

Jeremy Sabol
And I like that our confusion about who she is, she seems to share that confusion. She’s not it doesn’t seem like she’s quite sure. And there I think she’s trying on, the movie is trying on genres. Like she’s trying on dresses, like she’s trying to, it’s self-fashioning, right? She’s trying to build a self and she’s not quite sure what that self is.

Cruella
I’m not even paying. And I know that she caused it but you know, killing knows not gonna make that go away. I want to promise all right, cool, groovy. Say, really, really hefty.

Josh Landy
It felt like there was a kind of mapping onto nature versus nurture. Because she has these two mothers, right? She has her biological mother or the Baroness played by Emma Thompson, who is not a nice person, and in the movie seems to imply she inherits the bad stuff from her. But then she has this wonderful adoptive mother who’s all sweetness and light and so is the implication that you know, it’s a half of one and a half of the other and there’s the Estella side that comes from the wonderful adoptive mother. But then there’s the Cruella side that comes from the Baroness.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I like that reading. It also kind of explains why both she is like the Baroness in ways that she hates but also she really is connected to her adoptive mother like she keeps coming back to like the fountain where she keeps speaking to her dead adoptive mother.

Cruella
I guess you were always scared. Weren’t you? That I’d be a psycho like my real mom.

Jeremy Sabol
Even though it is a nature nurture thing, the fact that they’re both deterministic figures, right? It’s like built into the hair. It’s like there’s in a weird way that troubles the picture of this film as a movie about self determination of agency, right? Does she get to choose who she is? Or is it just the battle of the two moms? Is she just kind of a battleground for those two impulses that come from outside of her? Yeah,

Ray Briggs
I mean, she is shown as being a At least somewhat amenable to reason like I’m not sure that her Baroness side is amenable to reason. But other characters reason with her and talk to her. So that suggests that she’s got more agency than than just this like clockwork that is set in motion by these two forces.

Josh Landy
Let’s come back to Encanto for a moment if we can. So is there anything similar in there, is there some interesting philosophical moral question coming out of that one?

Ray Briggs
I think that there’s the how do families deal with like, real generational trauma in a way that is both empathetic to everybody and yet protective of the things that they need to hold on to to survive? Like, I think that’s kind of the central struggle is that Alma is trying to protect her family. So hard, so Alma’s the grandmother and the grand matriarch. And she’s very worried that bad things are going to happen to her magic house, which saved her from being murdered by soldiers. And so she gets very prescriptive about what she thinks the rest of her family members should be doing in ways that don’t really see their personality. And like the rest of her family trying to respond to this pretty unhelpful way that she is behaving with respect and empathy, I think is the central conflict.

Encanto
You have a cloud, I know. What do you want from me? Mama, be nice to Isabel. Okay. You know, tonight will be hard for. If the gifts ceremony doesn’t go well this time, tonight will be hard for us all.

Jeremy Sabol
I like how the kind of public discourse of the families everybody is special. And they all have powers and it’s so wonderful. But there’s clearly like favorites and a [unintelligible], right? You can you can be on the losing end in this family. And it’s so much intention with the kind of the brand of the family.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I love that observation. And our protagonist is sort of like struggling with not being one of the favorites.

Encanto
The whole town relies on our family, on our gifts. So the best way for some of us to help is to step aside, let the rest of the family do what they do best. Okay.

Josh Landy
I mean, I read the movie is didactic, and trying to sort of teach us a really important lesson, which is that everybody’s special, even if you’re not special. Right? But unfortunately, then the main character, spoiler coming, turns out, it’s all right to be special after all.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, no, I don’t think that the explicit agenda of the movie is the most interesting thing going on in the movie, I actually really think that the idea of safety is the most interesting thing going on in the movie. And the idea that this family has this kind of magical fortress that represents, you know, their material safety, that they’re acting like it’s under threat, and the image of the house just breaking for reasons that nobody understands. I feel like it’s even more powerful than the didactic message.

Jeremy Sabol
Totally, yeah, very troubling that the physical safety of the family and their reaction from trauma, is this kind of pulling away from the real world, right. Its superpowers and a Magic Valley that no one can get into. And you know, you could you could take from that escape, you know, that the way that we deal with trauma is to run away from reality, it’s to hide.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that is a depressing thought. And also makes me realize I want to talk more about Bruno, I know, it’s the one thing we don’t do is to talk about Bruno. But like Bruno is a kind of personification of everything that everybody in this family wants to deny, like, he tells them true things that they don’t want to hear. And they blame him for those things being true. And then banish him to inside the walls with the rats. Like, I found that a very powerful image.

Encanto
You left to protect me. I don’t know which way it’ll go, but my guess, the family, the Encanto, the fate of the miracle itself, it’s all going to come down to you. Or maybe I’m wrong.

Ray Briggs
And part of the reckoning of the family is having to like, address Bruno and like take him back into the family, which I think like is maybe not dealt with quite as deeply as I would ideally like, but that seems really important.

Josh Landy
So Jeremy, of these two movies, which is the better effort to redeem 80 years of questionable movie history?

Jeremy Sabol
Wow, this is a toughy. And I kind of want to go back to this idea that we had that Cruella is intentionally complex, whereas Encanto might be less intentionally, still complex. But I think for that reason, for its intentional complexity, I think this award should be given to Cruella.

Josh Landy
So the 2022 Dionysus award for a best effort to redeem 80 years of questionable movie history goes to…

Cruella
I’m Cruella. Born brilliant. Born bad. And a little bit mad.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for doing this Ray.

Ray Briggs
Oh yeah, thanks for having me.

Jeremy Sabol
Ray Briggs, Stanford philosopher and burgeoning Disney fan. So let’s get another nomination from the floor, Shipra in San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Shipra
Thank you.

Josh Landy
So you’ve got a movie to nominate for us.

Cuties
I do. Cuties is a 2020 French film directed by Maïmouna Doucouré. And it’s a coming of age drama that centers on Amy, played by Fatima Youssef, an 11 year old French Senegalese girl who joins a group of dancers and the Cuties explore their bourgeoning femininity and puberty through performance and their exploration of fashion.

Jeremy Sabol
Shipra, why do you think this movie is philosophical? What’s philosophical about it?

Shipra
Yeah, I really thought that this film was an honest exploration of Amy’s qualia, what it feels like to be Amy, this young girl, when she sees the Cuties dancing for the first time, or when she trades her baggy sweatshirt in for a crop top, the sense experiences create a qualia of freedom and belonging in Amy, but Amy’s inner feelings are in conflict with her traditional home. And here’s where I think the director does a beautiful job of communicating what it’s like to be an 11 year old Senegalese girl growing up in a housing project in Paris, with other friends who are 11 year old and what that experience or what that feeling is like for her. Can we really know?

Josh Landy
So this film, it seems like on the one hand, it’s staging within the plot, a desire to enter another sort of mental world, a different set of qualia, a different experience, but also doing the same for the viewer inviting us into a different way of seeing the world. Do you think it succeeds?

Shipra
I think this is where some of the controversy around the film plays in because I think while the director is really doing a great job of just giving us a sense of, of Amy’s qualia, what it feels like to be Amy, or the Cuties, we’re still the viewer, so we’re still like, we become the subject viewing this object. That’s a different thing than what it feels like to be Amy, because we I think, then project our own judgment onto what we’re seeing, you know, the girls, their dances, you know, it can be termed as being provocative or some folks might go as far as putting a value judgment on it. And that’s different than how I think they feel about themselves when they’re dancing.

Jeremy Sabol
For our listeners, there, there was a controversy over whether or not this film was criticizing or in fact, engaging in kind of hyper sexualizing, these young girls, this seems to be a problem that’s built into film itself, right? It seems like we’re trying to understand what it’s like to be Amy through looking at her. And in particular, if she is kind of having this, as you say burgeoning experience of femininity, looking at her is, in some ways, engaging in this kind of we’re part of this hyper sexualization, is that a problem that just film there’s no way around, if you’re making a film about this subject?

Shipra
I kind of wonder if that’s the case, because Amy and the Cuties then become the object and we’re objectifying them. And we’re kind of then moving away from just giving ourselves into that idea of like that feeling, trying to feel what they’re feeling in that moment, including some of the painful feelings, you know, that she has that that as I kind of mentioned, that psychic dissonance between her very conservative upbringing and family and this world she’s living in.

Josh Landy
I’m very curious to see Cuties directed by Maïmouna Doucouré. And I’m going to provisionally propose that we give this film The 2022 Dionysus Award for film that uses looking to get beyond looking. Shipra, thank you so much for calling in today and proposing this really interesting film.

Shipra
Thank you.

Jeremy Sabol
If you’ve got a thought provoking movie from the past year, if it wasn’t discussed on today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send an email to comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on our blog.

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

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.