The 2019 Dionysus Awards

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

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy, we’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco.Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

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

Ken Taylor
Continuing conversations that begin that Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the philosophy and literature initiative.

Josh Landy
Today, it’s our sixth annual Dionysus Awards show.

Ken Taylor
The Dionysus Awards are presented to the most philosophically interesting movies of the past year.

Josh Landy
We”ll talk to philosophers, critics, and listeners like you to find out what movies challenged our assumptions and made us think about things in new ways. We’ll be discussing superhero movies, the Coen Brothers, and the Year in Black Cinema.

Ken Taylor
Speaking of Black cinema, Josh, did you know that more Hollywood movies were directed by Black filmmakers last year than that any time in movie history? And a lot of those films depicted a scene that’s all too familiar in contemporary life: police shooting unarmed Black men.

Josh Landy
And that’s why we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to examine the ways directors have been representing police brutality on the big screen. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Reggie Ugwu is a pop culture reporter for the New York Times. He remembers watching film after film last year where black protagonists witness police brutality. Films like…

Reggie Ugwu
The Hate U Give.

Holly McDede
And Monsters and Men. Also

Reggie Ugwu
BlacKkKlansman and Blindspotting.

Holly McDede
All in one year.

Reggie Ugwu
Within a few months of each other.

Holly McDede
These films were all released around four years after Eric Garner died when a New York cop put him in a chokehold. Before he went limp, Garner whispered the words “I can’t breathe.” The next month, Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

Michael Brown
Police shot this boy outside my apartment.

Holly McDede
The off-screen horrors of police brutality and racial injustice are still unfolding in real time. So Reggie watched these movies in rapid fire succession, examining them like historical documents. He wrote a New York Times piece called “The Unreality of Racial Justice Cinema,” about whether these films can ever be truthful.

Reggie Ugwu
You can look at that as a first crack at very recent history. You know, what is the story that we’re telling ourselves? What it’s like to be black and alive in this country right now.

Holly McDede
Reggie was most fascinated by the way the movies ended. It just didn’t feel real. Spoiler alert: they either end with protagonist who become empowered after witnessing police brutality, or with protagonist getting vengeance and unlikely scenarios. One movie that shows that superhero transformation is “The Hate U Give.” It’s about a teenager named Star, who witnesses her childhood friend shot and killed by a cop during a traffic stop.

The Hate U Give
Offer needs help. Shots fired, one suspect down, the other in custody, request an ambulance. What did you do? Be quiet, ma’am!

Holly McDede
Throughout the movie, Star struggles to decide whether to testify and the cop. In the end she does. The trauma of witnessing her friend die seems to empower her. She speaks up in front of a crowd during a protest, stands up to her racist friends, and confronts her boyfriend who feigns colorblindness.

The Hate U Give
Star, I just told you I don’t see color. I see people for who they are the exact same way I see you. If you don’t see my blackness you don’t see me.

Holly McDede
Reggie says it’s like a superhero movie. But instead of being bitten by a bug like Spiderman, Star is exposed to state violence and police brutality. He says this approach to cinematic endings is upbeat, but it feels like a fantasy.

Reggie Ugwu
The film sort of uses this tragedy as a catalytic event that leads to her transformation.

Holly McDede
Other films rely on what Reggie calls the revenge fantasy option. “Blindspotting” is an example. That film is about a guy named Colin who’s trying to finish up the last three days of probation without getting in trouble. But his best friend keeps getting in the way by starting fights and buying guns in the back of cars.

Blindspotting
Why are there six guns in your car? Oh, Collin, I like yours. This is not mine, also stop pointing that at me. They’re not loaded, bruh. Those are fosho loaded. Oh okay!

Holly McDede
Early in the film, Collins sees a police officer shoot and kill a man and another spoiler alert. The movie ends when Collin points a gun at the cop. He then unleashes a biting freestyle rap on the sobbing police officer.

Blindspotting
You think you know what’s happening / but you don’t feel like it like we do / to feel it it has to be you / how come everytime you come around you got me feeling like a monster in my own town.

Holly McDede
Before he takes off, Colin says to the cop…

Blindspotting
The difference between me and you is I’m not a killer.

Holly McDede
Reggie says we’re so saturated with constant images of black men being killed that it’s become almost atmospheric, like background noise. We’re used to cops who don’t get prosecuted. So endings like these are attempts at closure. A chance for the audience to see evil in the face, and get their revenge. But that’s not how it usually plays out in real life.

Reggie Ugwu
I can imagine, if you’re trying to make a film, and trying to sell tickets, and you’re asking people to go along with you on this journey, maybe you want to have as an ending the thing they’ve seen at home, that they’ve watched with dread, maybe you want to give them something else.

Holly McDede
But, Reggie says, if these films are intended to be historical documents, the truth is important. “BlacKkKlansman” is a movie with many endings. One of those endings shows footage of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

BlacKkKlansman
Blood and soil! Blood and soil!

Holly McDede
Reggie writes about this in his New York Times piece. The footage is not uplifting, and it is not satisfying. It may not feel like an ending, but the story of racial injustice in America doesn’t have an ending yet. He describes it like this: A vision of a society as likely to eat itself as to heal. And for him, that sequence feels real. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that report, Holly. We’re going to talk more about BlacKkKlansman and other African American themed movies later in the show. But one black centered film that didn’t come up in Holly’s report was actually one of the biggest movies of the year: Black Panther.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, Black Panther was one of THE films of 2018—a great African American movie, a great superhero movie, and just a great movie.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I agree. It was a stellar year for superhero movies in general. But I got two questions about this genre. First of all, is it art? And second, why should philosophers care about superhero movies?

Josh Landy
Maybe those two questions are intertwined. I mean, I think one of the ways in which something could qualify for art, whatever that means, it would be that they’re philosophically rich. They’re not just of course, they’re entertaining, big explosions and excitement and thrills. But I think in some cases, they’re they’re also more ambitious. They want to get us thinking about things.

Ken Taylor
Okay, three of them are nominated for Academy Award: Black Panther, The Incredibles 2, and Into the Spiderverse. Now okay, I want you to tell me, are these art are these philosophically ambitious movies?

Josh Landy
Yeah, listen, I think they’re all terrific. And one thing they all have in common is they raise questions about identity. So if you think about obviously, Black Panther raises the issue of race, I mean, among many other issues that the movie raises. Spiderman—I don’t want to give too much away, but this is a fascinating reboot, where the Spiderman of the movie has an African American father and a Puerto Rican mother.

Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
Where’s my laptop? If you want me to drive you, we gotta go now! No, no, I’ll walk. Personal chauffeur going once. Miles, you gotta go! In a minute!

Josh Landy
There’s gender issues—think about The Incredibles, you know, kind of foregrounds questions of gender roles.

Ken Taylor
That’s true. That’s true.

Josh Landy
In general, superhero movies kind of are interested in identity, because everyone has a secret identity. And then Incredibles—Incredibles isn’t necessarily a totally fully realized movie. But I love what it’s doing with this question, because it has this kind of debate between whether you are a superhero, regardless of whether you’re actually doing super things, or whether in fact its your actions that make you the superhero.

The Incredibles 2
Where’s mom? She said her new job doing hero work. And I thought superheroes were still illegal they are for now. So mom is getting paid to break the law. She’s not break. She’s an advocate for superheroes. It’s a new job.

Josh Landy
You have characters in Incredibles 2, who think that the world is a worse place for the existence of superheroes, which I think is fascinating, because, you know, the thought is supposed to be… I mean, so one way of thinking about it is, well, they kind of mess everything up and don’t really get much done. But a more interesting way of thinking about it is they deprive us of our agency. So that there’s a bad guy called the Screen Slaver, who in spite of being the baddie kind of articulates a really interesting challenge, which is, look, if you believe that there are these heroes waiting to save us, you’ll just kind of relax and not really make the effort to change the world yourself.

The Incredibles 2
Superheroes to protect you and make yourself ever more powerless in the process. Or you tell yourself you’re being served rights upheld, so that the system can keep stealing from us.

Ken Taylor
But there’s also Black Panther. Some people find it very controversial. There’s a philosopher Chris LeBron who said Black Panther is not the superhero movie we deserve, although he praises the role of the women and all that stuff. But I do think it had one profound thought. The profound thought, which I think is perhaps true is that history that the world is broken. History breaks everything it touches. Everybody who participated in history gets broken, right? And the reason Wakanda is not broken is because it stood outside of history. But then there’s this fundamental dilemma that it raises for Wakanda, right? Well, you’re standing apart from the world, you’re standing apart from the struggle for black liberation with all these people, you got all this super technology, you got all these superpowers, you use it to ameliorate the world. But if you use it to ameliorate the world, that means you have to join history. And since history breaks everything, you’ll be broken too.

Black Panther
Our weapons will not be used to wage war on the world. It is not our way to be judge, jury, and executioner for people who are not our own. Not your own. But didn’t life start right here on this continent? So ain’t all people your people? I am not king of all people. I am King of Wakanda.

Ken Taylor
It raises the question of what makes that people are people in the end, the Wakanda does claim the world as its people, but so I think that’s a profound thing. I do think the movie kind of wimps out at the end, right? Because it says oh, how are we going to participate in history? We’re going to build some community centers.

Josh Landy
Yeah, yeah, that’s a little bathetic at the end, a little bathos. But I love that point kind of makes a really great interpretation of the film and and I think maybe it gets me know you’re asking earlier: are these films art? And maybe this recognition of tragedy could be part of what’s, you know, changed about the way in which superhero movies movies getting made. Tthere’s a certain kind of grim, almost grim realism, if that doesn’t seem so too strange to say in the context of superhero movie.

Black Panther
This is what you would have me leave the daughter for—to bring our children into this world where they become conquerors. Our children will be leaders of a truly free weworld—not just a tiny country where we had to hide everything that makes us great.

Ken Taylor
Okay, I want to talk about Into the Spiderverse. Do you think it measures up to that standard?

Josh Landy
I’m I’m very tempted to put it up for Dionysus Award. I’m not sure it totally measures up. Let me tell you what, let me think about something I like it’s my I don’t like Okay, one thing I love is that it’s so fresh visually, and it’s, you know, almost has the feel of reading a comic book. Yeah. And I love it. It’s going into parallel universes that’s completely fascinating. I love that kind of reboots with a spider man who’s a kid whose dad is African American, his mother’s Puerto Rican, and so was able to get issues of racial identity into the mix. The only thing I’m a little disappointed by is that if there’s if there’s one thing worse than a preachy movie, it’s a preachy movie. That doesn’t make sense. And you know, this movie, this movie ends with some tagline about how we can all be superheroes, but yet, we’re not all bitten by a radioactive spider. So how is this supposed to work out exactly?

Ken Taylor
Well, I mean, the Superman story is sort of like this too. Because why is Superman Superman, cuz he was cast out into the universe to wonder about and found a plant and landed on the planet with a Yellow Sun, which I interacted with is Kryptonian. Biochemistry, somehow, they’ve never explained that to make the thrust upon him superpowers, which he did not ask for. Well, the radioactive spider, you could find any of us. And that’s kind of the point of the movie, anybody could be a superhero. Because a life could thrust upon you circumstances that give you these unique opportunities. And the superhero in you. The true superhero in you is the person who doesn’t run from such opportunities, but says embracing them, and Black Panther. Kind of these are ordinary human beings. And they have all this cool technology, but they’re other because they’re not part of history. Right? Okay, so we got three movies that I think are plausible candidates for a diagnosis award, Black Panther spider into the spider verse, And Incredibles two but you know, frankly, I really can’t decide. So, what do you think?

Josh Landy
Listen, you have convinced me, that Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse is worthy of some consideration. I think I would give it a runner-up award. But the 2019 Dionysus Award for The Least Superficial Superhero Movie goes to… Black Panther.

Black Panther
Look at this: handheld sonic cannon, powerful enough to stop a tank. Untraceable by metal detectors. And ee got thousands of them. The world’s gonna find out exactly who we are.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our sixth annual Dionysus Award show. We’re honoring the most philosophically compelling movies of 2018

Josh Landy
Coming up, we’ll be taking listener nominations. And Ken and I will be announcing winners in the categories of Best Thought Experiment about the Possibility of Racial Justice and Most Profound Existentialist Cowboy Movie.

Ken Taylor
More Dionysus winners—plus nominations from the floor, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back. This is Philosophy Talk. It’s our annual Dionysus Awarda show for the most thought provoking films of 2018. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. What movies did you see last year that challenged your assumptions and made you think about things in new ways? Email us comments@philosophytalk.org. Or tweet us—our handle is @philtalkradio.

Ken Taylor
We’re joined now by Karla Oeler. She’s a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, where she teaches Film and Media Studies. Karla, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Karla Oeler
Thank you for inviting me.

Josh Landy
So you got a movie that you loved in 2018 that you’d like to nominate for Dionysus Award? Which one is it?

Karla Oeler
It’s BlacKkKlansman directed by Spike Lee.

Ken Taylor
That’s a great film, controversial film. Why do you think this is not just a good movie, but a philosophically interesting movie?

Karla Oeler
I think it’s philosophically interesting, because it is blatantly fictional, in its story world, and the fictionality has to do with character played by John David Washington, who simply wants to become a police officer. And it’s as if all the questions of race in America and the idea that we don’t live up to the aspiration that everyone be equal under the law falls away for him, so that he never has an identity crisis himself about his work.

Josh Landy
So this is obviously a young African American man who wants to become a police officer.

Ken Taylor
In the 70s

Josh Landy
the 1970s, where it’s not at all obvious, right. But that’s interesting, because there’s a conversation that he has, with Patrice a young woman that he meets, where she says to him—I mean, she doesn’t know he’s, he’s a cop. But she’s talking in general about cops and saying, you know, it would be really tough for an African American to be a cop because of what DuBois says about double consciousness, you would be torn apart.

BlacKkKlansman
We fight from black people really need black liberation. Right. So can you do that from the inside? No, you can’t. The white man won’t give up his position and power without a struggle. What did DuBois say about double consciousness? Two-ness, being an American and a negro, two warring ideals inside one dark body?

Josh Landy
So you’re saying, Karla, I take it is, surprisingly, he’s not torn apart by a kind of double consciousness. He’s just able to be a be a cop and be African American and there’s no tension between those two things.

Karla Oeler
Yes, John, David Washington gives a performance of insouciance, I would say, where he is not terribly expressive, but neither is he evacuated. And it’s really almost Buster Keaton esque in the way he plays this role. And that enables him to be this kind of contrast with Patrice, who actually has very strong political views and a very clear sense of of the way racial discrimination works. And so the way the two of them work together, raises this question about what it would look like if everyone were equal under the law versus the reality that we don’t live up to that aspiration.

Ken Taylor
The situation in this movie is complicated, right? His first assignment as an undercover cop is to infiltrate the student Black Student Union or radical group that’s inviting kilometer a to campus. He goes to this talk in which Kwame Turay is giving a kind of nationalist speech. And he falls in love with this, the president of the Black Student Union who’s very radicalized, and they have the searing conversations about this, and and also on the police force are clearly racist cops that confronts Patrice the president of the Black Student Union. So the situation I don’t know about him and his internality but the situation raises the question, searingly what is a black man in those times at that place doing being a cop?

BlacKkKlansman
Are you a pig? Excuse me? And you pig? You mean a cop? Are you a cop? I’m in construction but more importantly, I’m a black man who qants to get to know a strong, intelligent, beautiful sister—the very one I’m looking at right now.

Ken Taylor
Boots Riley criticizes Spike Lee for making this easy fiction that makes it possible to see the cops as an ally in the struggle for racial justice when in that time, in reality, Boots Riley seems to say no, that’s not possible.

Karla Oeler
That’s absolutely correct. Boots Riley criticizes the film for fabricating history, in order to make a black cop and his counterparts look like allies in the fight against racism. That’s actually a direct quote from Boots Riley’s critique. And my question is, does the film as Riley argues, make unreality appear to be real? And what I would argue is the film is blatantly unrealistic, and it actually flaunts its unreality.

Josh Landy
But there are these moments when—one of my favorite moments is Isaiah Whitlock, Jr, who plays Clay Davis on The Wire, and was famous for a word I can’t say on the radio, but a very lengthened swear word. And Spike Lee has him come on BlackKkKlansmen, and say the same famous catchphrase. I mean, if that’s not a blatant indication that this film is fiction, I don’t know what is.

Karla Oeler
Yes, Spike Lee is, in my view, one of the great living American filmmakers who has a deep knowledge of cinema, and he is tapping into the aspirational tradition of American cinema and aspirational tradition that perhaps speaks to World War II combat films that when American armed forces were segregated, made them appear as if they were all fighting side by side. And I realized that that’s on the one hand a lie. But on the other hand, I also feel that there’s an aspirational quality to it. And I feel that black Klansmen has that aspirational quality, even as it undercuts it as an untruth as fiction by including that documentary footage at the end.

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s interesting. I mean, I do think there’s an aspirational thing, there’s an aspiration to represent a possibility. Right? And the possibility is that diverse people because, you know, the Jewish cop, the black cop, most of the white cops in the end, right gang up to out the racist cop, the, the black militant student, cooperate with them to out the racist cop, and they arrest him in this bar, and all this sort of stuff. That’s one of the scenes that Boots Riley really objects to, you know.

BlacKkKlansman
I wish the two of you had been blow up instead of good white folks. Get it? I do get it. Do you get it, Patrice? Yeah, I totally and completely get it. Jimmy, did you get it? Oh, yes, I got it. Flip, did you get? Oh, yeah, I got it. Chief, do you get it? Oh, I really, really get it—you’re under arrest!

Ken Taylor
Not just because it’s not realistic—it’s not morally honest. Right. That’s what I think he thinks.

Karla Oeler
And here is where I would agree but go a step further. Which is that that scene is perhaps the most blatantly unrealistic scene in the film, as we all know, it’s very likely that police forces cover up their brutalization of minority populations. But I feel that the fictionality of that particular scene makes itself felt in sometimes in very subtle ways, because the music playing in that scene is Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Oh, What a lucky man he was. And that lucky man is ambiguous. It could refer to Ron Stallworth and Patrice for whom in the fictionalized story, world, violence is evaded. But it can also refer to the man and Oh, What a lucky man, the white man he was, and this aspiration that a society where some are luckier than others, that the aspiration is that that would not be the case much longer.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our annual Dionysus award show. We’re talking to Karla Oeler from Stanford University about Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman.” I don’t know if you’ve seen “Sorry To Bother You.” It’s a critique of the logic of capitalism, right. And it’s got a complicated view about race and class. It’s mostly about class and about his authenticity as a black man because he gets a class privilege that’s at odds with his kind of lack of race privilege. And capitalism just does that to you would take some people and divide them and privileges and then at the end of it is just the stark reality.

Sorry To Bother You
I’m Cassius Green calling on behalf of stop a month old dot com. Sorry to bother you—

Josh Landy
That part of the movie I thought was very strong but I think it’s kind of funny that Boots Riley is criticizing Spike Lee for a lack of realism in BlacKkKlansmen when his own movie Sorry To Bother You—it’s highly stylized, and even at the kind of the allegorical level it’s a little simplistic. So that’s a curious tension.

Ken Taylor
But would you deny that it’s a powerful movie?

Josh Landy
I think it’s a really interesting and bold movie. And it has in a great way of kind of flavor of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” But I also think it’s a slightly flawed movie.

Ken Taylor
What’s the main flaw?

Josh Landy
To me the main flaw is at the kind of conceptual level, you know—needs more Foucault. You’ve got a world in which things are going terribly, especially for the African American population, but even for the broader population.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, cuz it’s kind of a Marxist thing because Ccass antagonisms are deeper than racial antagonism.

Josh Landy
That’s exactly right, in the case of this movie. The problem with it as I see it, is that maybe this is just the exigencies of Hollywood but basically, there’s one villain.

Sorry To Bother You
Worryfree CEO Steve Lift was interviewed on Oprah today. No. Conclusively, no. Our workers do not sign contracts under threats of physical violence. So therefore the comparison to slavery is just ludicrous—and offensive. We’re transforming life itself. We’re saving the economy. I mean, we’re we’re saving lives.

Ken Taylor
There’s one more movie I do want to get into, because it’s again, controversial and its black-themed, but it’s not made by a black creative voice. “Green Book,” I think “Green Book,” directed by Peter Farrelly,who’s just a white guy is a very fine movie about race and racial identification and racial recognition. But it’s a reason all this controversy, right, because the main characters—there’s a black musician, and his Italian guy who he hires to drive him on a concert tour through the South in 1962, before the public accommodations bill was passed, so that—I remember going to the south when I was young kid, and my parents had this Green Book. I remember, we stopped once to use the restroom. My dad is an army drill sergeant. We stopped at this gas station and said “May we use the restroom boy, sir?” to this like gas station attendant, they don’t have those anymore but in those days, they had gas station attendants. And he says “Around the back, boy!” Calls my dad a boy, right? My dad’s big strong guy. And we walk around past the restroom that says ladies and then past the one that says gentlemen, and in the back is a really gross place that says colored, right. And I’m like seven years old or something and I’m like, I’m gonna use that restroom. I had never seen anything so gross. So here’s this world class musician, voluntarily doing a tour in the south accompanied by this racist Italian driver.

Green Book
We will be attending many events before and after the concerts, interacting with some of the wealthiest and most highly educated people in the country. It is my feeling that your diction, however charming it may be in the tri-state area could use some finessing. You mean diction, like in what way? Like in the only way the word has ever used.

Josh Landy
I’ve seen criticisms that it’s a white-savior movie. I don’t see it that way at all. I mean, it seems to me that only one person is saving one person and that’s, you know, Don Shirley is saving Tony Vallelonga from his racism.

Ken Taylor
I actually think they’re saving each other. Because Don Shirley is so disconnected. There’s this wonderful scene in that movie, which I think a lot of people will find objectionable, but I think it’s a powerful scene in which Don truly talks about his own felt inauthenticity. He’s not black enough for black people, right. He’s not a white person. Where does he belong? Who is he? And the Tony character is, I know who I am.

Green Book
You don’t know—you all people. You, Mr. Big Shot, doing concerts for rich people. So if I’m not black enough, and I’m not white enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?

Ken Taylor
But here’s a question I have for you, more general philosophical question: can a white person write black subjectivity? Can a black person write white subjectivity? We seem to have gotten ourselves in a position where we don’t believe I can write anybody’s subjectivity—as an author, as a director as a filmmaker—except a subjectivity like my own.

Karla Oeler
I think that in terms of cinema, Spike Lee’s position is that we saw—I think he says this somewhere—we saw a black president before we saw a black CEO of a major entertainment corporation. And I think it’s very important to live in a society where you have the resources and the ability to tell your own story. And when a society doesn’t make those resources available for everyone to tell their own story, then It becomes difficult to have this greater aspiration, which is that everyone has the imaginative capability to put themselves in another person’s shoes, even if those shoes are quite different. And so, again, it’s a complicated question, it relies on a kind of idealism.

Josh Landy
I agree. And I think, look, the argument mostly here is one shouldn’t talk about other people’s experiences. There’s something morally wrong about that. I think one shouldn’t not talk about other people’s experiences, There’s something you know—our task as human beings is to imagine our way into other ways of life and other experiences and other backgrounds.

Karla Oeler
I absolutely agree. We have to do that, with the recognition that doing that is, to some extent, always going to be impossible. And so when we do it, we also have to do it not just with a degree of responsibility, but with a degree of humility, and of recognition that we can be wrong. And that’s what I was trying to say when I was saying that we’re doing it in an imperfect society. So to do so is both necessary, but also very fraught. And I think that BlacKkKlansmen brings together these two qualities. One is the aspiration of equal justice for all. And the other is the reality of the world in which we have that aspiration, but we haven’t quite achieved it, and showing how that has implications. Then, in the story world, among these three different characters, namely, Patrice, Ron Stallworth, and also Flip Zimmerman, where Patrice and Flip are both having serious identity crises at various points in the film, but Ron Stallworth doesn’t really have an identity crisis about his inspiration to be a police officer, because he’s operating on that idea that the law is there to protect all citizens equally. And it’s as if he doesn’t really see the actual historical circumstances in which he’s working.

Ken Taylor
Okay—so therefore, the Dionysus award for the Best Thought Experiment in the Possibility of Racial Justice goes to…

Josh Landy
BlacKkKlansmen!

BlacKkKlansman
Mr. Duke, favor to ask. Nobody’s gonna believe me when I tell them that I was your personal bodyguard today. Care to take a Polaroid with me?

Josh Landy
Karla, thank you so much for recommending BlacKkKlansmen, for having this stimulating conversation with us.

Karla Oeler
Thank you. My pleasure. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re taking a philosophical look at the movies of 2018 for out sixth annual Dionysus Awards.

Josh Landy
In our next segment, we’ll take nominations from our listeners and from an old friend of the show. He’ll be nominating the latest offering from the ever-thoughtful Coen Brothers

Ken Taylor
Suggestions from the floor and so much more—hen Philosophy Talk continues.

It’s the sixth annual Dionysus Awards. I’m Ken Taylor, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy and we’re talking about the most philosophically compelling movies of 2018.

Ken Taylor
We’re joined now by an old friend of the show, Troy Jollimore. He’s a professor of philosophy at Chico State University. He’s an award winning poet, and he’s a huge fan of some very philosophical filmmakers, the Coen Brothers. Troy, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Troy Jollimore
Good to be here.

Josh Landy
So Troy, you convinced us to watch the Coen Brothers new movie, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” And it seems like you think it’s philosophical. So tell us why that is.

Troy Jollimore
I certainly think it’s very philosophical. It’s a unique film unique for the Coen Brothers and unique generally, in that it’s not a single narrative from beginning to end, it’s an anthology film, six distinct stories, each of the stories as a very different feel from the rest, there aren’t any characters that recur in different stories, they’re all completely independent that way. And even in terms of musically, visually, and so on, they’re all very different from each other. The magically, they’re all in some way about death. Which makes sense because the western genre has always been about death.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I think of this movie as death stalks you, in many ways. It’s sort of like, it’s sort of like Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Ivan Ilyich is just spending his whole life trying to avoid this thing. And then, at the end of it, you read about the it for looming it which was always there around the corner, this this, these vignettes always have that same feel.

Troy Jollimore
I think that’s right. I think the clearest sense of that we get in this particular film is in the second segment, the one with James Franco, where he plays a cowboy who robs a bank. And of course, it’s inevitable that he’s going to be hanged. He gets hanged essentially twice in the film, the short film early on, he manages to escape through a series of ludicrous chants and so on. But before too long one thing after another happens and he ends up being up there again at the gallows and getting hanged.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Hmm…. First time?

Josh Landy
There’s something lovely about that particular episode because, I mean, obviously it’s about death. And there’s, you know, this set of films as a whole is a little bit bleak, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. But the way in which they’ve handled the story, the way in which they tell the story, there’s a kind of aesthetics to this, that it offsets the bleakness. So in that, in the case of that story about the bank robbery, you have a character who was about to get hanged for a crime he did do and gets spared. And then goes on to get hanged for crime he didn’t do. And that’s a beautiful little symmetry. And in the very same vignette, you have a guy who’s shot through the neck with an arrow, and pulls it out and he’s fine. And a second later gets shot in exactly the same spot and dies. So there’s this kind of war in the in the movie between these bleak forces of death and destruction and demoralisation. And you’ve got this gallows humor, this comedy. And the final line when he’s looking at a pretty girl in the crowd and saying, there’s a pretty girl.

Troy Jollimore
Luck is such a deep part of the Coens’ worldview, the idea that things don’t really happen for reasons and don’t make sense. The world is unintelligible and we try to make sense of it, and we just can’t. We always fail.

Josh Landy
And it’s also present right in the segment called “The Gal Who Got Rattled.” That’s the young woman traveling on the Oregon Trail. And she’s talking about her, her rather bossy brother—bossy and inept brother—who was always certain about everything. And he always had a, you know, he always had a, an idiom ready to hand to explain everything.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
He would upbraid me for being wishy-washy. I never had his certainties. I suppose it is a defect. I don’t think it’s a defect at all. Uncertainty—that is appropriate for matters this world. Only regarding the next dowe vouchsafe certainty.

Ken Taylor
That speech that you’re talking about, but also in the whole final vignette, I think they’re giving the viewers instructions as to, this is what I want you to go back. You may not have noticed these themes. But hey, I gave you a hint in the middle. And when we get to the end, I’m laying it on you. Go back and watch this movie, and make sure you pick up on these themes.

Troy Jollimore
I completely agree with that. And so in this final segment, again, “The Mortal Remains” with the five characters and the stagecoach and so on, the character that ends up essentially speaking for them and who is in many ways like them, is a very evil character—he is essentially Death himself. So by putting these words into the mouth of a character that of course no one would want to identify with, I think they’re distancing from that.

Josh Landy
But even there, I mean, this is a very bleak, fictional universe. I don’t think this is the actual universe of the Coen brothers. You know, this is—I mean, we’ve talked about death. Obviously, death is an important motif. But there’s also isolation. Even when you’re not dead, in the world of this movie, you’re probably not very happy. You’re going to be isolated. These people very rarely have any significant human connections. This is not the world the Coen brothers are actually living in.

Ken Taylor
Wait a minute, there’s another line—I thought this was one of the more profound moves in the mortal remains. Because I think it also says something about the way stories work, the way watching works. Because there’s these two partners in the death business, right, two bounty hunters,

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
I like to say that we’re reapers—harvesters of souls. We help people who have been adjudged to be ripe.

Ken Taylor
One of the reapers says, Well, my job is to tell them stories.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
They’re so easily taken when they’re distracted people. So I’m the distractor. With a little story, a little conversation, a song, a sparkle. And Clarence does the thumping while their attention is on me. He’s very good, this one, you should see him. No, he’s good. I can’t pump.

Ken Taylor
They tell us, in the mouth of the Grim Reaper, one of the functions of storytelling.

Josh Landy
Well, so that’s—I find that really interesting question in this movie, because you actually see different possibilities for that, to the answers that answers that question: what is the function of storytelling? Because you have, you know, some, I mean, a pretty negative theory that storytelling is just a distraction, bad thing. And then you have a kind of neutral one, w ell, storytelling is entertainment. I mean, think about that traveling showman who has an orator who reads these beautiful speeches, and it’s just to make money. And but then, you know, on the, on the other side, well, storytelling could be something kind of constellation storytelling could be a vehicle for people to reflect on their lives. So yes, death is one important theme in Ballad of Buster Scruggs, but I think isolation is another, I think we have to take seriously the idea that these stories might be, among other things, ways of bringing us together.

Troy Jollimore
Yeah, isolation, the isolation of the Western hero is such a hallmark of the genre. So it’s no surprise that the Coen brothers would be drawn to this genre. There’s such aesthetic directors in terms of visual beauty in the western affords such wonderful opportunities for beauty. The beauty in this film, and Joshua brought this up earlier. And you mentioned the bit about James Franco. In the second segment, the bank robber again about to be hanged, suddenly noticing this pretty girl in the crowd. And apparently, as far as we can tell, wholeheartedly, noticing her, you know, just forgetting for the moment that he’s gonna die or not caring is suddenly he’s fully in that moment, which is what you know, Zen people saw and I was telling us, we’re supposed to be as fully in the moment. And that really struck me on the second viewing because it was one of the very few moments in the film where anyone seems to have any kind of aesthetic experience. They are wandering around these incredibly gorgeous landscapes, and never stopping to notice the beauty of it all.

Ken Taylor
Well the prospector played by Tom Waits in the fourth vignette, “All Gold Canyon,” I loved that story. Okay, he doesn’t quite have an aesthetic experience, but he has this kind of epiphany type type of experience

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Hello, Mr. Pocket. Hello, Mr. Pocket!

Josh Landy
I’m thinking of that lovely vignette that has the traveling showman with his orator, and the orator recites every night, these poems and speeches. And you know, he’s done a lot and it’s kind of road but there’s one night, when he suddenly feeling it. He’s been through something and all of a sudden, Shakespeare sonnet 29—he’s feeling it.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
When in disgrace, with Fortune, and men’s eyes. I all alone beweep my outcast state.

Josh Landy
I feel like that’s another possibility they’re presenting for us, that these works of art are vehicles for us to feel our feelings through. Maybe we can’t do anything about death. But maybe that maybe we need to feel the feelings that we have about death in a way that we don’t necessarily always.

Troy Jollimore
I think that’s very good. And I would say in the final segment, again, the mortal remains, when Clarence sings the song, it’s a beautiful moment. It takes you entirely almost out of the film, in a sense, out of the narrative that’s going on. It’s simply a beautiful song. We stop to enjoy it. I found that moment personally.

Josh Landy
And the Englishman is moved!

Troy Jollimore
He cries—this death incarnate, he has a sentimental side.

Ken Taylor
So the votes are in, and the winner for the 2019 Most Profound Existentialist Cowboy Movie is…

Josh Landy
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs!

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Get six pretty maidens to carry my coffin, and six pretty maidens to bear up my pall. And give to each of bunches over roses, that they may not snow me as they go along.

Josh Landy
Thank you so much again for getting us to watch this amazing movie and for joining us today.

Troy Jollimore
It’s been a pleasure, thanks.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk’s sixth annual Dionysus Awards, for the most philosophically compelling movies of 2018.

Josh Landy
And it’s time for a nomination from the floor—Pradeep in Ojai, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Pradeep
Thank you. Glad to be here.

Ken Taylor
So you got a movie you want to recommend for a diagnosis award?

Pradeep
Um, yes, I think “The Children’s Act,” directed by Richard Eyre, I believe it is, with Emma Thompson in the lead and screenplay by Ian McEwen. Based on his novel of the same name, I think it really cuts to the heart of the relationship between ethics and the law. And the ways in which our best motivated laws can run into situations because experience outcomes, any thing we can say about the world, and bring them to focus the inhumanity that’s possible with certain best intentions.

Ken Taylor
Tell me more about the story so I can see how these questions arise.

Josh Landy
The basic plot question i, whether it’s okay for the state to intervene to force a 16 year old boy to get a blood transfusion even though he’s a Jehovah’s Witness. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness. He doesn’t want to get a blood transfusion. He may need one. Emma Thompson is the the high court judge who’s called upon to decide, perhaps for him. And so there are questions about paternalism their questions about multiculturalism, how much respect is owed by the state in cases where somebody’s life may be lost.

The Children’s Act
Some people think you’ve been unduly influenced by your parents and the elders. And others think that you’re awfully clever, and we should just let you get on with it. Should we… let you do yourself in? Somehow I’ve got to decide. I think it’s my choice. I’m afraid the law doesn’t agree. The law is an ass.

Josh Landy
So the movie begins with a case of conjoined twins, where if you separate them one will die, if you don’t separate them, both will die. And it’s like a real life example of the trolley problem, right? And, you know, some of us have the intuition, that we’re less culpable and we allow a bad thing to happen than when we make a bad thing happen. So I guess we shouldn’t do anything and let them both out. But that’s clearly a bad intuition that we have. So the movie is really amazing about—

Ken Taylor
But does the movie rais those questions? Does it take us through the agonizing reason that one would have to get it? Does it settle anything? Or does it just raise these questions? What do you think, Pradeep?

Pradeep
Oh, I think it does, I think, you know, the case that you just mentioned that the movie starts out with then leads us on to this case, the traveler confusion case. And it really takes us through issue, you know, the the young man, very motivated to not be transfused and to lose his life as a consequence, because of his commitment to his community and his belief. And then her commitment, the state, she represents the state against her commitment to offering a judgment in favor, that promotes the welfare of the child, he is just three months short of being 18, and being able to make that decision on his own. So she sees him as completely autonomous, capable of reasoning, and all the marks that we would look for someone to make his or her own decision, and yet she is moved by his intelligence and His grace. And she says, He’s a lovely, lovely boy.

Josh Landy
The boy is 100% confident that he knows what the right thing to do is. And he has an account of this. He said, You know, God, implants in us a sense of what’s right and wrong. But what’s interesting is, in the course of the movie, this same young man changes his mind. So it really is raising the question of where our moral sense comes from. Does it come from God? Does it come from our culture, the droning other as you talk about, Ken.

Ken Taylor
So his religion is not presented as something merely to be tolerated, but as a deep source of reasons for him? And—because you might think, Oh, he’s a Jehovah’s Witness—that’s benightedness. Why, you know—okay, the state has to tolerate it. But why should I, as the watcher think it’s anything more than a benighted attitude? Right. But it sounds like, I have some sympathy. I’m led to have some kind of sympathetic hearing of his religiosity.

Pradeep
Absolutely. And actually, it’s interesting that there is an effort by the lawyer who speaks on behalf of the hospital, to present it to the court as a benighted way of, you know, believing, but the lawyers are speaking on behalf of the parents and the child actually invokes human rights, that he has a choice. He is rational.

Josh Landy
And this debate in the courtroom is fascinating, because it becomes almost theological, where one of the counselors is saying, Well, you know, Jehovah’s Witnesses only decided in 1945, that blood transfusions were not acceptable. And then there’s a there’s an very nice counter argument. Yes. But you know, that was always in the mind of God. Yeah. So it’s, it’s doing a lot of interesting philosophical and theological work.

Ken Taylor
And it’s presented with great artistry, it sounds like. Sounds like this deserves a Dionysus Award.

Josh Landy
So… the Dionysus Award for the Best Philosophical Theological Thought Experiment of 2018 goes to…

Ken Taylor
The Children’s Act!

The Children’s Act
Okay, if you think you’re too grand, I have a right to my choice. Your teacher’s out there waiting for you, Adam. Remember: all of life… and love.

Ken Taylor
So Pradeep, thank you so much for joining us.

Pradeep
Thank you.

Ken Taylor
You can see a list of all this year’s award winners at our website, philosophytalk.org

Josh Landy
And if you’ve got a Dionysus-worthy movie from 2018 that wasn’t discussed on today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send your nominations to comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature them on blog

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2019.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Tina Pamintuan.

Ken Taylor
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from Stanford University and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

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

Ken Taylor
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.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.