The 2021 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 from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

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 also a filmmaker, so I’m especially happy to welcome him back as a co-host for our eighth annual Dionysus Awards.

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

Josh Landy
Movie theaters have been closed and Hollywood’s mostly on hiatus, but there’s still been some amazing cinema. It was a great year for adaptations, a new “David Copperfield,” a new “Emma.”

Jeremy Sabol
Yes, and an equally great year for films based on American history — “The Five Bloods,” “Judas and the Black Messiah,” “The Trial of the Chicago Seven.”

Josh Landy
Not to mention movies about hope and adversity. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede to check out two of them. She files this report.

Holly McDede
There are a lot of films that criticize the American dream. There’s “There Will Be Blood,” a 2007 film about a ruthless silver miner in oil-rich California.

There Will Be Blood
When do we get our money? I look at people and I see nothing worth like. I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.

Holly McDede
Or the film “Goodfellas,” a 1990 film about ambition and the mob.

Goodfellas
If we wanted something, we just took it, and you didn’t even think about it. It was better than Citibank.

Holly McDede
These films are dramatic. But two more recent movies about the American dream, “Minari” and “Nomadland,” center around people who seem a bit less ruthless and over the top. In “Nomadland,” a woman in her 60s named Fern loses her husband and her home. She moves into a van named Vanguard after the economic collapse of her mining town.

Nomadland
My mom says that you’re homeless. Is that true? No, I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right? Yeah.

Holly McDede
Fern wanders the American West looking for seasonal work and finds a community of other van dwellers.

Nomadland
Most of us in this lifestyle use a five gallon bucket. Most of us are in vans or something larger. I’m in a Prius, so I use a two gallon bucket. If you have bad knees, you can use a seven gallon bucket.

Holly McDede
In the end, Fern looks at at the mountains and wilderness before her. “Minari” is a film about a Korean American family who moves to a farm in rural Arkansas. When the film begins, the Yi family arrives at a trailer in the middle of the field. The mother says, “What is this place?” and the father says “Our new home.” The kids go to inspect. They’re surrounded by the great American landscape.

Anne Chang
I immediately have this flashback.

Holly McDede
Anne Chang is a professor of English at Princeton University. As a preteen in the 70s, she moved from Taipei to the rural American South. She remembers seeing land that stretched for miles.

Anne Chang
It was this moment of tremendous freedom, but also of feeling tremendously lost. And it’s that combination of liberty and also being, you know, out of place, that I thought the movie captured so well.

Holly McDede
The film shows a lot of struggle, and spoiler alert, it ends with a fire. Chang says it was almost a necessary outcome after so much tension, the tension of trying to make it in America. The American dream, she says, is circular. It’s about constantly restarting and never arriving. And it’s poignant for Asian Americans

Anne Chang
Because Asian Americans have been thought of as perpetual foreigners, it seems like they’re always arriving still, no matter how many, you know, generations that they have been here.

Holly McDede
There are no big speeches or dramatic revelations. The ending feels quiet. After the fire, the movie closes with the father and his son at a creek picking the Minari plant the grandmother had planted a year before. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that excellent report, Holly. 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. So let’s get right to the first category, Jeremy.

Jeremy Sabol
Okay, let’s do it. This past year has been a trippy one, to say the least. And we’ve got two nominees for the trippiest exploration of that eternal philosophical puzzle, identity. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” directed by Charlie Kaufman, and “Soul,” the animated film from Pixar.

Josh Landy
To help us pick a winner, we’re joined by Stacie Friend. She’s a professor of philosophy at the University of London in the UK, my old country, and the author of “Fiction and Emotion” in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination. Stacie, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Stacie Friend
Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Jeremy Sabol
So Stacie, for those who may not have seen them, tell us a little bit about these movies.

Stacie Friend
Sure. “Soul” is about a music teacher who dies on the cusp of an exciting event and finds himself in the afterlife, or rather the before life, dealing with some other souls and trying to get back to our reality. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a kind of creepy, suspenseful film about a boyfriend and girlfriend traveling to have dinner with his parents, which has a lot of intercut issues that are really hard to follow.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things
I’m thinking of ending things. Huh? What? Did you say something? No, I don’t think so. Weird. Yeah.

Josh Landy
So tell us a little bit about the philosophical issues in— let’s start with “Soul.” What’s going on in that?

Stacie Friend
Well, in “Soul,” we have a version, perhaps a more sophisticated version of a standard idea that the person you are, the self that you are, is really tied up in your psychology, so that you can be departed from your body and retain your own self. So in the case of that film, the main character ends up in the body of a cat, while a different soul ends up in his body.

Soul
Doc, you gotta help me. That’s my body, but I’m trapped— *meows.* Oh no, they can’t understand me!

Josh Landy
Okay, so that’s an old philosophical thought experiment, right, the prince and the cobbler switch bodies or switch minds, whichever way you think about it. What’s underneath that thought experiment?

Stacie Friend
So that original thought experiment where a prince and a cobbler switch their consciousnesses comes from John Locke, the 17th century philosopher, and he was arguing that our self, or what makes us the same person over time, is constituted by our memory, our memory of ourselves in the past. And more recent philosophers have elaborated on that theory by arguing that the self is essentially psychological. It has to do with our thoughts and feelings, and the way we think of ourselves from the first person, so that changing bodies is at least a logical possibility, and you could still be the self in a different body.

Jeremy Sabol
And Stacie, another kind of related issue in the film — so in this kind of pre-life, not the afterlife, but the pre-life, that our personalities are entirely formed is kind of almost a Platonist piece of the film in which we don’t develop over time, we kind of are who we are from the get go.

Soul
Wait a minute, this is where personalities come from? Of course, do you think people are just born with them?

Stacie Friend
It’s tricky, because by the end, we come to understand that the spark that makes people want to be a person, want to be on the earth, turns out not to be entirely determined. And I might add that even the body switching element is more complex than in some other films because the soul that inhabits Joe’s body, the soul called 22, that ends up inhabiting Joe’s body, turns out to be able to access many of his memories and thoughts and ideas, whereas we don’t see Joe himself, who’s a cat, adopting any particularly cat-like personality traits.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Well, what’s it gonna be, Kitty? Yeah.

Jeremy Sabol
Our other film, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” is kind of a roadtrip movie, a quest movie, and really a quest that goes pretty much absolutely nowhere. I mean, where are we going in that movie?

Stacie Friend
Well, I think it’s a difficult film to interpret. But in my view, what we’re faced with is really a trip into the mental life of the main character, Jake. The way the film is made misleads you because you start out feeling that you’re getting an insight into the thoughts of the female character, who’s called Lucy at least to start, and then has various other names. But it becomes clear that it’s not at all clear whether she exists or whether she’s a single person or a set of different memories in Jake’s mind. She is sufficiently inconsistent, so she seems like one kind of person, and then suddenly, she’s speaking in a totally different way.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Only by women liberationists who are willing to accept textbook spinoffs as art. You know, ask Jenna Roland. This is Cassavetes, this prodigious actress, and she never lets go with the character. I agree. I thought she was great, and then roll.

Stacie Friend
Here she appears to be either parroting Pauline Kell’s film reviews, or perhaps, other people whom Jake has dated. But to the extent that we identify and re-identify her as the same, despite all the massive changes, we are clearly relying on a bodily criterion of personal identity, the exact opposite of Locke’s claim, because we’re identifying her as the same because she looks and sounds the same, even though her personality changes dramatically.

Josh Landy
And the other thing we might add into that is the question of authenticity, where it turns out her paintings aren’t hers, her poems are hers, her story’s taken from the musical “Oklahoma.” And my favorite part of this is when she she quotes Oscar Wilde, saying,

I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, her lives and mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Josh Landy
The line about nothing being original is itself not original.

Stacie Friend
Not original.

Josh Landy
So in all these ways, we might want to say, there’s no self here, and yet insuperbly we feel like there is. So for you, Stacie, that’s because of the bodily criterion for identity.

Stacie Friend
Well, I think our impression that she’s the same, right, is given just by the fact that it’s the same or mostly the same actress playing the role. So the fact that she changes her clothes, of course, makes no difference, that wouldn’t make any difference. But the fact that she changes her personality and her memory and all of this, we seem to go along with her still being the same person. But notice how easily we do the opposite in “Soul.” We’re happy to dispense with the physical attributes. And I think one thing that’s really interesting about this for someone interested in the way the philosophical literature develops on these topics, is that these look like two thought experiments that motivate us in totally different directions in thinking about when we think of someone as the same person over time, and that maybe threatens the idea that we should rely on these thought experiments, since we’re so easily moved in either direction. I mean, thinking about philosophical thought experiments, again, one of the key features of them is that they isolate the topic, and they ask you to set aside everything else in order to focus on something. And this film does something very similar by setting it in this atmosphere where everything seems completely trapped, right. What’s moving is the snow most of the time, everything else seems stuck.

Jeremy Sabol
And that feeling of being stuck, I mean, I think there’s probably a good hour of the film where I personally felt stuck. And the movie is just, you know, this drive, they spent about an hour driving, and they only make it to the ice cream store in town. You know, the movie is supposed to gesture at something kind of interminable. But I also think the movie was just a little too darn long.

Josh Landy
I agree about “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”; I think it should have been about half an hour shorter. But I also think the same thing about “Soul.” “Soul” seems like it ends, and it seems like it ends so satisfyingly at least for grownups.

Soul
But Joe, this means you won’t get to— it’s okay. I already did. Now it’s your turn.

Josh Landy
And then it goes on.

Soul
We’re in the business of inspiration, Joe, but it’s not often we find ourselves inspired. Huh, really? So we all decided to give you another chance.

Josh Landy
It’s had such a great opportunity to be a really moving tragedy where a character—

Stacie Friend
Exactly.

Josh Landy
The sacrifice is meaningful. And it’s satisfying in that special way that tragedies are, but it had to go for the Hollywood ending.

Stacie Friend
They snatched it away. Yes, it’s too much of a Hollywood ending.

Jeremy Sabol
So Josh, we’ve talked about these two films, “Soul” and “I’m Thinking of Ending things.” And we’ve agreed they’re both wild explorations of personal identity, but both of them maybe a little too long.

Josh Landy
Yes [laughs]. I have to say, I really like “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” the Charlie Kaufman film. I think it’s a fascinating exploration of identity and coming at it from so many different angles at once. But gee, it needed to be about half as long. Hey, you know, less snow, less driving. So I’m not sure I could really in good conscience give the Dionysus to “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.”

Jeremy Sabol
So, the Dionysus Award for the trippiest investigation of identity that should have ended earlier goes to…”Soul.”

Stacie Friend
I can’t say I disagree.

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

Stacie Friend
It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
Stacie Friend from the University of London. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our eighth annual Dionysus Awards show, honoring the most philosophically compelling movies of the past year.

Jeremy Sabol
Coming up, we’ll consider nominees for best film painting a world without men, and best picture that packs all of American history into one room.

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 challenge our assumptions and made us think about things in new ways.

Josh Landy
One way a lot of us thought differently last year was by doing most of our thinking in one room. So we’ve got two Dionysus nominees for best picture that packs all of American history into one room: “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “One Night in Miami,” both of which were adapted from stage plays.

Jeremy Sabol
So for some dramatic help, we’re joined by Harry Elam. He’s the president of Occidental College, where he’s also a professor of theatre and a renowned expert on the playwright August Wilson. Harry, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Harry Elam
It’s a pleasure to be with you again.

Josh Landy
So Harry, how do you see these two films going together?

Harry Elam
Well, in a couple of ways. One, both were plays turned into film, and in the case of “Ma Rainey,” it’s about a real historic figure, Ma Rainey, she’s right at the center of the titles, clearly. And in the case of “One Night in Miami,” you’ve got these real life figures, Malcolm X, and Sam Cooke, etc, within so you’ve got that trying to deal with history creating and sort of making history. Suzan Lori Parks once said, “There wasn’t enough history out there, so I made some up.” And they both are making up history in around this meeting of these four men after Ali’s fight.

Josh Landy
Yeah.

Harry Elam
And also in this moment of the recording studio. So in both plays, you’ve got black men talking to each other and considering the fate of what should happen in terms of race, and we’re look at [19]64 or 65 in “One Night in Miami,” looking at much earlier in 1927 in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” but the question that is asked then and by the character Toledo, “what’s the black man going to do for himself?” is a question that is, in fact, answered in some way or pursued even further in the more recent play, the 65,64 play “One Night in Miami.”

One Night in Miami
When, when is this party going down? Yeah, that’s a good question. What’s on the agenda, Malcolm? Well, I thought this would be a wonderful chance for us to reflect on what’s happened tonight, like our young brothers said, there’s no denying that greater forces were at work. You mean, no one else is coming?

Jeremy Sabol
I’m fascinated by this kind of use of a very particular, precise historical moment to stand for a kind of metonymically much broader, ambitious, historical picture. And I think, especially with “Ma Rainey,” I feel like it’s reaching backwards into the 19th century. But it’s also kind of, I mean, I feel like this movie is trying to speak to even the contemporary moment in American life. Do you see that as well? Do you think it’s speaking to a now for us?

Harry Elam
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that question that I asked, you know, what happens to the black man, and we’re getting, say what a black person’s going to do for themselves now. And so that sense of what action, at a time when we’re considering, you know, we have a president talking about Black Lives Matter, then systemic racism, and the real attention to issues around race that we’re grappling with now. So the presence of the past is something that Wilson is keen on. Also, in terms of history, he sets his plays that transitional junctures in American history, and we could see some parallel to that in “One Night in Miami.” It’s a transitional moment. It’s right after Ali has had this major fight, and his career is about the change. He’s going to go from being Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, so those transitions are happening there, and transitions for every one of the men; Jim Brown, the football player’s going to stop being a football player and become the movie star. I am sure he wouldn’t say *the* movie star. But looking back at Ma Rainey and thinking about it, so we’ve got that year 27, and what the transition was from the jug band and tent show music and southern rural music, expressions of jazz and blues moving into the more urban sound, which is sort of represented by Levee. And so that moment of transition, so it pits Ma against Levee in a confrontation as we know that Levy does not win.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Levee, what were you doing? Why are you playing all the notes, you playing 10 notes for every one you supposed to play, it don’t call for all that. He’s supposed to improvise on a thing.

That’s what I was doing. You’re supposed to play the song like I sing, everybody else play. I was playing a song, I was playing the way I felt, trying to sing my song, you messin’ up my ear. You call it playing music. I know what I’m doing.

Josh Landy
Maybe through this, the play and now the movie, are thinking about different models of community, like a community can be basically a monarchy, where you have, you know, whatever Ma Rainey says, that’s what we do. Or it can be anarchy. Like Levee wants, perhaps. Everyone just does whatever they want. But then maybe in the middle is something like a community, maybe a bit more like jazz and blues, perhaps, where there’s a kind of shared endeavor, but everyone also does their own thing and their own thing doesn’t conflict with the shared endeavor. It contributes to it.

Harry Elam
Yeah, I mean, the sense of community, I think, is a really interesting question. And let’s add gender in there. Ma is someone who is unusual, she’s the head— the real figure and the figure in the play, is in charge of a band of men, you know, and has to keep them in control. And since so, how she manages that community is an interesting dynamic. Levee, on the other hand, he is trying to belong to this community of older men. He’s younger, he’s trying to fit in in a way, he’s trying to prove his worth. So yes, you get the sense of different views on it, but the music in Wilson is interesting for a variety of reasons as well. I mean, one, he considers all his work “blues plays” and after he heard the blues in the 1960s, Bessie Smith, he had felt that blues were a way of explaining for a black audience, an early black audience, a way of surviving a way, so you would channel your energy into the art of the blues.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Blues help you get out of bed and more. You get up knowing you ain’t alone. Something else in the world…something been added by that song.

Harry Elam
So she uses, within that frame, her power in a very interesting way. Levee isn’t as astute. Levee is more dependent on and gets taken advantage of because he is dependent on [unintelligible]. You got to hear me play them, Mr. Steadman. You ain’t heard me play them? That’s what’s gonna make them sound right. Levee, I don’t doubt that really. It’s just that, well, I don’t think they’d sell like Ma’s records. I could take them off your hands for you.

Wilson believes in the power black musicianship as a metaphor for a way to, you know, it’s a control or the artistry as a way to channel efforts and as a form of a virtually revolutionary figure. And so Ma is that, you know, she’s a performer, she has a little bit of control. The band Toledo talks about, they’re lucky, they can be performers and don’t understand, you know, in a sense what they have that others don’t. So that sense of the power of the blues musician, and the creation of music and song is something that we see in Wilson consistently. So that’s another form of community in answer to your question.

Jeremy Sabol
Yeah and Harry, to me, just as you’re talking, I’m thinking about parallels here to “One Night in Miami” where, right, in Malcolm X’s kind of capacious vision of what black power should be, right, he’s drawing on entertainment, right? He’s drawing on sports, and he’s also reaching out to black music, right? He’s got that same vision for Sam Cooke and calling on Sam Cooke to harness the power of black music in this much wider picture of what black power should be.

One Night in Miami
That is why, brother Sam, this movement that we are in is called a struggle. Because we are fighting for our lives. And what words are we hearing from you, brother? Mmm, that’s the soul.

Harry Elam
Malcolm so much understands that the power of Sam Cooke, and we see Sam Cooke come around to it, that he’ll move from singing songs that are just about, you know, feeling good to a song that change is going to come, you know, and then it’s such a powerful and incredible song, and the moment that art has that sort of power to impact and it’s interesting that comes from Malcolm, and also said he’s converting Cassius Clay, because you can see, you know, that that’s another space in terms of sports or in terms of entertainment that has a really impact on the audiences he’s trying to reach.

Jeremy Sabol
I think you’re right Harry, and that’s what I love about Ma Rainey is that it’s about the politics of the music industry, right, so it’s internal, the politics are internal to the business, and this co-opting of black music that is the kind of sad end of the film, but it’s also about that music can and is, right, remains political, that there’s a political force to black music that we see today too. This is a contemporary force to African American music that has a political valence to it that matters.

Harry Elam
Yeah, so the question then is who— I mean and it’s set up at the beginning— is who owns or who gets to control black music. Throughout Wilson, there’s a theme that happens where there’s trying to be white control of black music, so the piano and piano lesson, the white former master is trying to control the piano, and you find the theme working through all the plays where that sense of the power of black music is trying to be controlled. This is one of the few plays that he, of the 10 play cycle, that has white characters, and it’s interesting, white characters start to play. You know, that’s the first thing we see are them talking about controlling the studio session, you know, and we get race music and how they work and often it’s set in terms of visually where a certain man is in in control room up above the recording studio, so you’ve got that hierarchy with this sort of white overseer looking over all that is below or controlling, protected by glass potentially, in front of him. So you’ve got them as sort of guardians at the gate or controlling this session as much, and it’s interesting if you parallel who’s at the gate in terms of the room that the guys enter into in “One Night in Miami,” it’s the black Muslims trying to control what happens with in terms of Malcolm as he’s about to break out of that as well, so that dynamic of, you know, negotiating control and in one place is in black voice in music, another it’s this dynamic entity or force for change that is Malcolm.

One Night in Miami
Everything all right, Brother Malcolm? What do you want? I don’t think so. Our job here is to protect the brother minister. I don’t need your protection brother. Now that that’s settled, away you go. Negro, I will leave when- You best think long and hard before you wag that tongue at me.

Josh Landy
Okay, listen, Jeremy, you have a difficult choice before us. We’ve got “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and we’ve got “One Night in Miami.” Which one of those do you think deserves a Dionysus this year?

Jeremy Sabol
Well, Josh, I think the Dionysus Award for best picture that packs all of American history into one room goes to… “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

Josh Landy
Harry, thank you so much for helping us think about it today.

Harry Elam
My pleasure. Thanks for having me again, and good choice of “Ma Rainey.”

Josh Landy
August Wilson expert Harry Elam, president of Occidental College. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk’s eighth annual Dionysus Awards. I’m Josh Landy, here with my Stanford colleague, Jeremy Sabol.

Jeremy Sabol
You know, Josh, before we move on, I just want to make a case for giving a Dionysus Award to one of our favorite movies of last year, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

Josh Landy
Oh yeah, that’s gonna be a really hard sell, Jeremy. I mean, I’m one of this film’s biggest fans, but tell everyone what this movie is about.

Jeremy Sabol
Sure. Well, so first of all, “Portrait of a Lady On Fire” is a French historical drama. It’s set in the late 18th century. It’s directed by Céline Sciamma, written and directed by Sciamma, and it tells the story of love affair between an aristocrat, a daughter of an aristocrat, and a painter who comes and is commissioned to paint her portrait.

Josh Landy
It’s an incredible film, but to play devil’s advocate, Jeremy, what’s philosophically interesting about it?

Jeremy Sabol
Well, I think it’s kind of a commonplace about this film, that it’s, it’s a film in which there’s almost no men at all. We see a couple of men sailors in the very first scene, and then there’s a man at the end. But the film was really a story about women filmed from a woman’s perspective. And it’s people bandy about the phrase, female gaze. But what I find really fascinating about the film is the way it sets up kind of human relationships, as I guess it gives two models for human relationships. And the first is very explicitly transactional and economic. So we have these women, the mother, who’s hired an artist, a painter, to paint the portrait of her daughter, so that she can essentially sell her daughter to a wealthy Italian aristocrat. So it’s an entirely an economic affair, the painter is coming to do it for money. She’s getting rid of her daughter to this wealthy family. It’s an entirely economic transactional affair that’s really about men owning property, women in this case, and yet there are no men to be seen, right, the women are carrying out the dirty work. So that’s the kind of setup. But as this painter and this young woman begin to get to know each other, first of all, the painter doesn’t get to reveal that she’s painting the portrait, so it’s got to be in secret. So she kind of spends time with the daughter, and then at nighttime quickly paints the portrait. And as they get to know each other, this kind of transactional relationship begins to fall apart. And it’s replaced by a much more authentic model of what it means to get to know someone and to really see them, right. A painter is someone that sees someone and tries to record what they see. So that initial transactional model gets eventually replaced by this very heartwarming story of two people that are really looking at each other. And that’s what I find philosophically fascinating about the film.

Josh Landy
I love that. I mean, this film really sort of flips everything on its head, right? I mean, you’ve got a kind of space of freedom within heavily limited, right, really oppressive, patriarchal society. You’ve got this male gaze that’s flipped here into a female gaze, sort of, you know, it’s your point about a different kind of community, these people are looking at each other, not just one looking at the other. But then there’s also the Orpheus, they talk quite a bit about the Orpheus, right?

Jeremy Sabol
Yes.

Josh Landy
Where I take it the thought of a myth is, you know, to look is to lose if you, you know, if you look at something you sort of put it out of reach and Orpheus, of course, is an artist. And so maybe the thought there would be something like, you know, artists are sort of removed or removed themselves from the world they depict, but not here. Not here, right?

Jeremy Sabol
That’s right.

Josh Landy
It’s a turning on its head of that girl of art and a turning on its head of that model of human interaction.

Jeremy Sabol
That’s wonderful, Josh, and in some ways, we have the kind of the model of looking as owning, and then we have the model of looking as losing. And then this kind of fragile, limited and temporary looking as a way of communicating, this kind of authentic, reciprocal looking, which is just what’s so beautiful about the film.

Josh Landy
Jeremy, frankly, you didn’t need to do much convincing. I already love this film. But let us give the 2021 Dionysus Award for best film painting a world without men to…

Jeremy Sabol
Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

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

Jeremy Sabol
In our next segment, we’ll hear from listeners across the country about their favorite, thought-provoking movies of 2020.

Josh Landy
Nominations from the floor, when Philosophy Talk continues.

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

Unknown Speaker
…except your intelligence. I’m Jeremy Sabol, and we’re talking about the most philosophically compelling movies of the past year.

Josh Landy
Time for some nominations from our community of thinkers. Rob in Washington, DC, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Rob
Thank you, happy to be here.

Jeremy Sabol
Rob, we hear that you have a film to nominate for the Dionysus Awards for this year.

Rob
I do, it’s “First Cow.”

Josh Landy
That’s the film by Kelly Reichert. Is that right?

Rob
Yes.

Josh Landy
So tell us a little bit about that movie.

Rob
Well, it’s a different take on the American West and growth idea, where there’s a man who was trained as a baker, but he was being a cook for a fur trapping troupe. And he runs into a Chinese man who is out west just trying to figure out how to make his way also, and they sort of team up just because they’re both not quite equipped to really be out west in the wilderness, alone anyway. At least just, you know, that one of them has the cooking skills to survive, but that’s about it. But they stumble on a cow that is in sort of the word of this, I believe they’re up in Oregon, but the cow is owned by, you know, sort of the man of the most landed gentry there is up there at the time, and they start stealing the milk from the cow so the cook can make biscuits and things for the people, and they sell their ideas to raise money to go on and further their adventures until they get caught stealing the milk from the cow.

Josh Landy
You know, this sounds like another kind of American origin story where it says sort of rags to potential riches via, you know, industry ingenuity and a little bit of amorality.

Rob
Yeah, I think that’s it exactly. Even early on, when , King Lu, the Chinese man, decides he wants- they should steal the milk from the cow, the cook, he shakes his head no, he doesn’t want to do it, but they end up doing it. So they make the moral compromise there to start doing this, and then they both see the success in here. It’s sort of the arrogance of the man who brought the cow to this part of the world anyway, he wanted to have the first livestock there, but he doesn’t really know anything about it, he hires people to do all that for him, of course. And then there’s the people who do know what to do with the cow, but they don’t have access to the cow, so they have to go there at night and milk it.

Jeremy Sabol
So Rob, this is making me think kind of, as you call it, you know, this original impulse to have the first cow in this area. This is a frontier story, right, about being first, kind of laying stake to something, and it seems from your characterization of it, that there’s there’s kind of competing impulses in the film, there’s the one impulse, which is ambitious to be first, to have something, to stake claims. But it sounds like the baker is more like no, let’s just live off the cow.

Rob
It’s not even that, because he didn’t want to steal the milk from the cow initially. But he was doing it, and he’s happy just to do that when people start giving him accolades for the quality of the dough that he’s making the biscuits, that he’s making for people. You can just see the plot, he’s like, that’s it, I’m making people happy with my food. And that’s all he seems to really want. His ambition is just that: let me do the thing that I do. Whereas King Lu is like, no, we can take this, and it can be grander.

First Cow
A hotel and a bakery. With wild huckleberry pots, you could do that here. Some place warmer.

Josh Landy
So do you see that? Rob, you know, in this film, in “First Cow,” do you see that as sort of an allegory for the founding of America that it’s this sort of heady mix of different kinds of intention, because the first cow clearly gestures in the direction of the existing inhabitants. Now, these people aren’t actually the first people there, this may be the first cow. But these are not the first people there. And so is there a question there about, well, look, you know, people come to this area, from other places with different kinds of ambitions. And some of us just, they just want to help out and some of them just want to bake nice cookies, but others maybe want to make money and, you know—

Rob
Yeah, I think all of that’s clearly sort of as clear as that movie is about anything. All of that is there. There’s the character, the guy who wants to cower. I forgot what his title was, but he’s clearly the—

Jeremy Sabol
The Chief Factor, I believe.

Rob
Yeah, the Chief Factor, so he’s clearly the ambitious one, the one for whatever reason, he is sort of the government there, the head man. And then he has a guest, I guess he’s a captain or an ammo, you know, high military ranking person in the area. And then there’s the people with the fort. And of the natives that you see in the film, they’re mostly either sitting outside the fort selling their wares, or they’re the help for the white people. Then there’s the one Chinese guy there. So even King Lu does say in the film early on, that everybody is here, who’s going to make something out of this?

Jeremy Sabol
Rob, you know, I just think we have some cliches, well, I don’t know if they’re cliches, but we have a, we have a picture of the Chinese immigrant experience in America. And of course, the more we learn about the American West, the more we see a picture of exploitation, in which Chinese immigrants are really used as labor. And you know, from your characterization, it seems like King Lu is the kind of ambitious go-get-em person who’s like, yeah, we all are here, but he’s got a grander picture. Do you think there’s some commentary going on there? What do you think that, why does the Chinese character have this ambition in the film, do you think?

Rob
Well, to be completely honest with all of this, I come to this movie with other things. My wife is Chinese, and her father was first generation here in America. So I see the Chinese, you know, immigration story in King Lu really plainly to me. You come here with ambition and drive and you want to succeed. You just got to figure out how to game the game so you can succeed.

Jeremy Sabol
Right.

Rob
And that’s what King Lu is doing. And he’s doing it with the only skills he has — his ambition, and just sort of wily guile to make things happen for himself.

Josh Landy
I wanted to ask you, Rob, about the epigraph for “First Cow,” it starts with this lovely quote from William Blake: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship,” which is so beautiful and enigmatic and what is it that the film thinks about friendship? I mean, clearly, it’s, it’s throughout a film, among other things about two people who come together in this profound bond of friendship. But how does that make friendship a nest or a web?

Rob
I think that’s part of the thing that we don’t— the American idea is the myth of the rugged individualist, but no one ever has really ever done it alone. And so you have to partner up on some level, whether you even become friends, and I think they do. Cookie and King Lu do, to a certain degree, become friends, but they’re really partners in an adventure. And like when they get discovered, and they have to kind of separate their ways when they’re being chased, they do come back to the same place eventually, but they were both kind of mentally prepared to well, I’m alone now and going on it again. And I think that’s part of the myth that the film is deconstructing is that nobody ever does this alone.

Jeremy Sabol
Well, what do you think, Josh? Does “First Cow” deserve a Dionysus Award?

Josh Landy
Rob has absolutely convinced me. I mean, I think what: best frontier film about wily guile?

Rob
There you go.

Josh Landy
With a whole lot of moral ambiguity thrown in and yeah, and it’s kind of tortured reflection about identity, and frankly, about the founding of this nation.

Rob
Great.

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

Rob
Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you.

Josh Landy
It’s Philosophy Talk’s annual Dionysus Award Show.

Jeremy Sabol
Let’s get another nomination from the floor. Kate in Oberlin, Ohio. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Kate
Thank you. Nice to be here.

Josh Landy
So Kate, I gather you have a movie to recommend to us.

Kate
I do. I wanted to recommend “Coded Bias” by Shalini Kantayya from last year, it’s a documentary that gives us insight into the nature of algorithmic bias and the very human costs it has, for all kinds of people.

Jeremy Sabol
Maybe tell us a little more about what algorithmic bias is?

Kate
Yeah, sure. So there are some great cases, examples that perhaps make it clear as what it is, the film spends a lot of time on the problems with facial recognition software, the way it’s been designed, it has trouble detecting the faces of darker skinned people as faces, it also has trouble given the kind of data that’s usually fed into the system, for example, data from watch lists, it tends to have an incredibly high rate of inaccuracy when it’s matching faces recorded on the street with people on say, terrorist or criminal activity lists. And then there are a whole range of hidden predictive algorithms that are used in scoring on job performance, mortgage rates, anything you can think of, really, where you’re being sort of offered something or pushed into something by some corporation.

Jeremy Sabol
So it seems like one of the overarching issues is that we kind of expect or want computers to be unbiased, and yet they seem to be bringing in the biases that we’re all kind of worried about, injustice in our society, inequalities, they’re somehow getting into the code.

Kate
Yeah, it’s that, on the one hand, the data being fed in is data that reflects the current state of society, right, who’s in charge, who has the most advantages, who’s making the decisions, designing the software, and it reflects the fact that there are, you know, depending on your race, gender, disability, class background, etc, you can have a higher recidivism rate, or more or less opportunity to pay back a mortgage and so on. So it takes data that reflects a highly unjust system, and then works with that to classify, so it just kind of reinforces and embeds existing injustices and inequities in order to continue to disadvantage those who are already disadvantaged. So there’s a worry about the data going in, right? But then there’s also the black box worry, which is that nobody knows, including the programmers, how the machine does what it does. So you put in all the data and the initial instructions for what it’s supposed to do with that data, and then the machine learns. And how it learns, and then how certain systematic errors occur, is inaccessible to programmers, designers and users.

Coded Bias
It’s not just base classification, it’s any data-centric technology, who gets hired who gets housing…I am making predictions for your life right now.

Kate
The people that have control of this software who are using it, putting money into it, are at least in this country, it’s private corporations, who benefit financially from having these accurate predictions based on the state of things, where the state of things includes systemic injustice, right. So the only way they’re going to be able to use their algorithms successfully, to say, target you for shopping in a certain kind of way, is if they take into account that, you know, women tend to buy more makeup, and you’re a woman, therefore, it might be worth, you know, sending you targeted ads for makeup, right? So they profits from the biases, essentially, because it makes their predictive software effective for their purposes. You know, the fact of the matter is, people have this colored skin habit, or this racial background, this class background, have these tendencies. So we factor those in when we’re deciding whether to give them a loan, or whether they’re going back to prison or something.

Jeremy Sabol
Yeah, so Kate, I saw this film, and I got freaked out, like the film is supposed to get us to freak out a little bit, and I did so in a constructive way, I think. And I like your language of it being a kind of a call to arms. It’s not just scaring us, it’s also—

Kate
No.

Jeremy Sabol
Particularly through this kind of protagonist, this programmer Joy, who she’s kind of going through this evolution, where, you know, first, she was just kind of building this cool app, you know, like young people want to do. And she wasn’t terribly worried about social justice. She was, you know, a good old fashioned nerd, you know, wanting to build cool apps. And she starts to see the problems. And her awareness grows deeper, and the scope of her awareness of it grows deeper, and also her leadership, she starts to become this kind of superstar of algorithmic justice. And I’m just wondering, so as a viewer of the film, I felt like I was kind of, I mean, I wasn’t becoming a superstar, but my awareness of the scope, and the depth of the problem was also growing, as was my fear. And I’m just, you think the film was trying to do that, trying to map us onto Joy’s experience, like, what, what was going on with making her the heroine of the film? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Kate
Yeah, the film is, it’s beautifully made. I mean, the cinematography is beautiful, and the editing is very stylish and effective. And it is telling this story that the- well, there’s sort of a main line of narrative, which is this person, Joy Buolamwini. And then there are stories within her story about particular, other people who are struggling with the effects of this kind of bias. And yeah, we, I think, are very much led along in Joy’s development, you know, thinking that how cool the technology is, and firing her for being so brilliant at coding and all that stuff, to being like, oh shoot, there’s this massive problem, and then seeing her take it on, and she’s so articulate, and she presents herself so compellingly. And then we get to the point, there’s this natural climax, where we see her testify to Congress. And then the very last bit is where people who she’s talked to during the film, who are facing various problems, watch her testimony and comment on her testimony. So, yeah, you feel like, okay, I’m not, you know, a brilliant researcher at the MIT Media Lab. But, you know, there are things you can write to your congressperson, or you can look at, because Joy also founds the algorithmic Justice League, which is, you know, pushing for legislation that can monitor the outcomes of the use of these algorithms in all areas of life.

Josh Landy
So, Jeremy, do you think “Coded Bias” deserves a Dionysus Award this year?

Jeremy Sabol
Well, yeah, I think definitely. And, you know, if I were going to give this an award, I would want it to be in the category of best film that makes us worried about our phones. Right, does that sound right?

Kate
I think that’s a great category. But I also think, you know, it is a hopeful film. It’s an empowering film as well, so we’re scared, but we’re not just paralyzed.

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

Kate
Oh, no, thank you.

Jeremy Sabol
If you’ve got a Dionysus-worthy movie from the past year that wasn’t discussed on today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send your suggestion to comments@philosophy talk.org and we may feature it on our blog.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2021.

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
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Josh Landy
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Jeremy Sabol
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Josh Landy
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