Episode 241
ROB AGER - Kubrick's Hidden Codes: How Film Critics Decode Movie Mind Control
Rob Ager is a culture, film and video game critic with more than 280,000 subscribers on YouTube who specializes in deep psychological analysis of classic films. In this conversation he reveals how his early study of hypnosis led him to discover hidden layers in movies by directors like Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. The episode explores how filmmakers use subliminal techniques to manipulate audience consciousness and why modern cinema has declined in artistic depth compared to classics from the 1970s-80s.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Hypnosis techniques overlap significantly with cinematic storytelling methods used by master directors
- Kubrick encoded multiple layers of meaning using visual symbols, spatial design, and psychological manipulation
- The monolith in 2001 represents the movie screen itself, not an alien artifact
- The Shining depicts generational cycles of family abuse rather than supernatural horror
- Modern films rely on CGI spectacle over practical effects and genuine psychological depth
- Political correctness has created conformity that stifles creative originality in contemporary cinema
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Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker B:Hello and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.
Speaker B:This is a weekly interview show where I sit down and talk with authors, thought leaders and influencers who have help us understand our changing world.
Speaker B:New episodes drop every week.
Speaker B:My guest this week is Rob Ager.
Speaker B:Rob is a culture, film and video game critic with more than 280,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Speaker B:His content focuses on in depth analysis of classic films by directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan and more.
Speaker B:Rob broke away from a childhood of impoverishment in Liverpool, England via self education and has worked in the fields of computer animation, social work and filmmaking.
Speaker B:His videos have been viewed 40 million times by viewers around the world who, like me, appreciate his sharp mind, attention to detail and commitment to creating an educated movie going audience.
Speaker B:Rob Baker, welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.
Speaker A:Thanks for inviting me on and thanks for a lovely intro there.
Speaker A:That was a very flattering summary.
Speaker A:Thanks.
Speaker B:Well, thank you.
Speaker B:We were talking a little bit before the interview and I was preparing for this conversation and just going through your YouTube channel and as I mentioned, I think I've probably watched your videos more than any other channel on YouTube.
Speaker B:I was surprised to see see how many of your videos, which can be quite long, I was surprised to see how many of them I've watched in full.
Speaker B:So thank you so much for your work and the education that you've offered to me.
Speaker A:That's great.
Speaker A:Thanks very much.
Speaker B:So to help introduce the viewers to you and to your work, maybe you can give a bit of background about how you got into doing in depth film analysis on YouTube.
Speaker B:I shared a little bit of your upbringing and background, but how did you get into this line specifically?
Speaker A:Well, I'll give you a slightly different explanation to what I've given to other podcasters because I don't want to repeat the same thing that's been said many times before.
Speaker A:So I'll go down a slightly different route on this one and that is that in my mid teens I'd started studying hypnosis, a lot of psychology books.
Speaker A:My dad was a psychiatric nurse.
Speaker A:He got me into reading psychology books and stuff when I was a kid and he was always talking about psychology stuff.
Speaker A:So I got good little sort of broad early education on that.
Speaker A:In my teens I started studying hypnosis and other forms of sorts of controversial types of psychology that fall outside of the academic realm of psychology.
Speaker A:And these were other forms of psychology that seemed to get much better results with people.
Speaker A:And I was learning stuff about how the unconscious works and especially with the hypnosis stuff.
Speaker A:I was Learning about subliminals, about the subtext of language.
Speaker A:Because if you ever watch, like, Derren Brown or any of the famous hypnotists doing stage shows, they.
Speaker A:They use a lot of subtext in the language that they speak in order to embed messages in a person's mind and get them into a hypnotic trance.
Speaker A:And it definitely works.
Speaker A:You see it happen time and time again.
Speaker A:You know, I've been to live hypnos shows in my life, and I've seen, like, friends and family go up on the stage and get hypnotized.
Speaker A:And I know that they were not actors, they were not pretending.
Speaker A:And then they come back down, they'd be like, I don't know what the hell he did to me.
Speaker A:You know, he just seemed to take control.
Speaker A:But I was.
Speaker A:I was beginning to understand that stuff because of all the reading I was doing on it.
Speaker A:And I was going to practice groups learning how to do hypnosis.
Speaker A:And, you know, it's not just about the verbal subtext.
Speaker A:It's about the body language as well, the different things you can do with your voice, tone and the speed that you speak and things like that.
Speaker A:And it gets really, really detailed.
Speaker A:And a skilled hypnotist like Darren Brown, they talk really fast and move fast, but they are bombarding the person with, like, dozens of messages every couple of seconds, you know, and, like, he's become so good at it that it's, like, natural for him.
Speaker A:And so, because I've been studying that for years and I've been learning a bit about Hitchcock's Freudian psychology and things like that, and the Freudian symbolism going into his movies, which I'm not the only one to talk about that.
Speaker A:That was talked about before I was born.
Speaker A:I think he was like the godfather in movies of putting deep psychology into movies.
Speaker A:Before Kubrick did it, before David lynch did it, Hitchcock was the guy who really melded psychology and movies together.
Speaker A:So because I was studying all that stuff, I was getting a lot more observant about the details in any situation in life, really.
Speaker A:And then when I got into filmmaking, I finally had an opportunity to do that, because I'd always wanted to do it.
Speaker A:I started studying the movies in detail.
Speaker A:And then that's where I was picking up on, oh, my God.
Speaker A:All these little hypnosis type tricks have been used by certain filmmakers.
Speaker A:The filmmakers might not have realized that what they were doing matched up with hypnosis.
Speaker A:They might not have studied hypnosis.
Speaker A:But I think a lot, a lot of the subtext and aesthetics that go into really good quality films that has kind of evolved as a language of its own as cinema has evolved.
Speaker A:And it's got a lot of overlaps with hypnosis and other forms of deep psychology, whether the filmmakers realize it or not.
Speaker A:But some filmmakers do realize it.
Speaker A:You know, Kubrick was into reading Freud and Carl Jung and Hitchcock, definitely.
Speaker A:He must have read some Freud.
Speaker A:And I'm pretty sure I've heard David lynch talk about some of the famous psychologists and the psychological theories when he's talked about his films.
Speaker A:So some filmmakers do it deliberately, but some of them, it's more of a.
Speaker A:More of an inspired way where they're doing it sort of unconsciously or they're using techniques that they've learned from other filmmakers, but they don't realize it's got overlaps with hypnosis and things like that.
Speaker A:So, yeah, it was.
Speaker A:It was my study of hypnosis started to make me notice how it gets used in movies.
Speaker B:That actually.
Speaker B:That makes a lot of sense because it reminds me of the first video of yours that I think I saw where.
Speaker B:Which was your analysis of the gold watch scene in Pulp Fiction.
Speaker B:I don't know how I was served that video, but I just remember I watched that video and the level of detail and the things that you had picked out to pull apart that don't just add to.
Speaker B:They're not like little Easter eggs that Quentin Tarantino put in.
Speaker B:They're actually really important elements to the cinematography and the colors and all of that that tend to put the viewer in the position of actually being in the Vietnam War camp.
Speaker B:Just sort of try and communicate that impression, that feeling.
Speaker B:But totally subconsciously, as in, if I had not seen your video on that, I never would have picked up on that.
Speaker B:But the feeling was still very much there.
Speaker B:So that actually makes a lot of sense that your study of subconscious and hypnosis would apply so well to film where it's kind of elevated to a high art form, but almost like, subconsciously, I guess.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, I mean.
Speaker A:I mean, Tarantino is a funny one because, you know, he's got a huge fan base, of course, very dedicated fan base.
Speaker A:He's.
Speaker A:There's also a lot of people who really don't like Tarantino, which amazes me.
Speaker A:I mean, I don't like all of his films.
Speaker A:I mean, I love the earlier stuff.
Speaker A:Later on, it became hit and miss for me.
Speaker A:But he's always been interesting.
Speaker A:And I know, like, he throws in lots of Easter egg references to his favorite movies and stuff.
Speaker A:And that.
Speaker A:That's fine.
Speaker A:That doesn't really bother me so much because usually he's doing other things in his movies that are more original and interesting.
Speaker A:He's not just referencing other movies for the sake of it.
Speaker A:You know, he's expressing his love for those classic movies.
Speaker A:But he does also put his own deep subtext into a lot of his movies as well.
Speaker A:And it was there right at the beginning with Reservoir Dogs.
Speaker A:I mean, there was one aspect of that film that I really enjoyed when I was doing a study of that, which was that you've got characters who make stories up.
Speaker A:And, you know, there's a big scene in the middle of the movie where.
Speaker A:What's his name?
Speaker A:Roth.
Speaker A:What's the actor's name?
Speaker A:Tim.
Speaker A:Tim Roth.
Speaker A:Have you seen Roswell Dogs?
Speaker B:Tim Roth?
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:Tim Roth.
Speaker B:Yes, I have a long time.
Speaker A:Seen Roswell Dogs.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Well, I mean, there's a scene in the middle of the movie where Tim Roth is with his.
Speaker A:His police cop boss, who is this black guy who teaches him how to infiltrate gangs and pass off yourself as a gangster.
Speaker A:And he's.
Speaker A:He's saying to Tim Roth's character, he's like, you got to memorize every detail of the story.
Speaker A:You got to make it absolutely convincing.
Speaker A:You got to get it just right and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker A:And that's all great.
Speaker A:But when you study the other scenes with the other gangsters in the film, they've got that going on as well.
Speaker A:They are always telling stories about things that happened, and they are exaggerating and fabricating just like he is.
Speaker A:I love that aspect of the film.
Speaker A:And there was a little scene where I think there's four of them sat in the car, and they're preparing for this robbery that they're gonna do.
Speaker A:And Tim Roth has sat in the back of the car, and Chris Penn, I think he was in the driving seat, and he's talking about a guy he knew who used to beat up his girlfriend.
Speaker A:And he's clearly making up a story, and he's embellishing and exaggerating.
Speaker A:And Tim Roth's character in the back starts asking a few questions.
Speaker A:What did he do?
Speaker A:Did he beat her up?
Speaker A:What did he do to her?
Speaker A:What?
Speaker A:And the other guy just sort of brushes him off.
Speaker A:Like, look, he just used to just do stuff to it, all right?
Speaker A:And it was like, yeah, Tim Roth's character is just sussed out that he's making things up.
Speaker A:So that's a fantastic aspect of Reservoir Dogs.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:When I stumbled across that, I was like, yeah, yeah, Tarantino's good.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So as you were.
Speaker B:What was the first movie you started looking at this in?
Speaker B:Because you mentioned a background and understanding, fascination with hypnosis.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker B:And as you begin moving into the field of film analysis, what were some of the doorways in where you started realizing there was more going on beneath the surface?
Speaker B:Like some of the key films, some of the key moments, like Reservoir Dogs perhaps, where you said, there's a lot going on here that perhaps even you had missed.
Speaker A:The earliest examples of that were from, like, quite early in my childhood, things that my dad had pointed out in a couple of movies, because he was.
Speaker A:I mean, he didn't get into movies the level that I do now.
Speaker A:Nothing near it.
Speaker A:But occasionally he picked up on some powerful things.
Speaker A:You know, he was quite observant, my dad, and he knew a lot of psychology, and particularly with Hitchcock, he was always saying, oh, look at this.
Speaker A:And there was a couple of examples that stood out.
Speaker A:One was in Hitchcock's Psycho, which my dad and I were big fans of, Psycho and Psycho 2, both amazing movies.
Speaker A:And in Psycho 1, my dad had pointed out how when Marion Crane, who was the girl who gets murdered in the shower halfway through the movie, not long before she gets murdered, she's driving her car on the road at night in the rain, and she's hearing voices in her head because she stole some money, and she's hearing the voices of her boss, the cops, and what they might be saying about hair and how they're gonna catch her and how long it's gonna take them to figure out how much money she got and stuff like that.
Speaker A:And so she's basically hallucinating voices just like Norman Bates does with his own mother.
Speaker A:I was like, so she's psycho as well, in a way.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:So there was that.
Speaker A:And then the detail that he pointed out that really blew my mind at the time was as she's driving, she's hearing all these voices, and we get a camera shot from her point of view looking out the window, and the rain is lashing down on the windscreen of the car, and the windscreen wiper is like a knife, and it's setting you up subliminally for the shower scene.
Speaker A:And my dad pointed that out, and I was like, wow, amazing.
Speaker A:You know, and there was one other one that I remember that he pointed out to me, which was another Hitchcock film called Frenzy.
Speaker A:This is a lesser known Hitchcock film, but it's probably my favorite Hitchcock film.
Speaker A: olor one that he did in early: Speaker A:Have you seen Frenzy, the Hitchcock?
Speaker B:I haven't, no.
Speaker A:It's, it's amazing.
Speaker A:Seriously, if you like Psycho, check out Frenzy.
Speaker A:Well, he's an ex high strangler.
Speaker A:He goes around, he's like raping and strangling women and there's a very dark, powerful rape and strangulation scene.
Speaker A:And there's some scenes where he is in his apartment and people come to visit him and talk to him and they don't realize yet that he's this necktie strangler and he's got these pictures of women on his walls with blue faces.
Speaker A: ures that were popular in the: Speaker A:I don't know why and I can't remember who the author was, but I remember my parents had these pictures as well.
Speaker A:They were so popular.
Speaker A:Somebody had painted these, these lovely p of sort of like African looking women, but they had blue skin.
Speaker A:And there was a handful of them, maybe five pictures that were very popular.
Speaker A:And Hitchcock had took those particular pictures and put them in this guy's apartment as kind of a representation of women who were being strangled, you know, so he was taking a real life prop and putting it in there as a clue.
Speaker A:This guy's the strangler.
Speaker A:Look at all the, the blue faced women.
Speaker A:Strangulation in his apartment.
Speaker A:And when you see how the shots are framed to get those women into the shots on either side of the characters and stuff, it's like, okay, there was a clue.
Speaker A:So yeah, those were early examples that my dad pointed me to.
Speaker A:And then.
Speaker A:But I never ever sort of took it upon myself to, oh, I'm going to study movies now and break things down.
Speaker A:I did notice things now and then in movies like everybody does.
Speaker A:You know, our favorite movies, we all pick up on little things here and there.
Speaker A:At least I hope people do.
Speaker A:Um, but it was after I'd been, you know, making films of my own.
Speaker A:I've been writing and directing films of my own.
Speaker A:And I, I made a short film called the Victim which was a, a 35 minute sort of serial killer thriller drama.
Speaker A:It was very, it was a little bit immature because I was only like 27 when I wrote it and directed it.
Speaker A:But because I've been studying all this psychology stuff, I decided I'm gonna put all this stuff into my own movie.
Speaker A:I'm gonna use color stuff.
Speaker A:I'm gonna use certain pictures on walls like Hitchcock had done.
Speaker A:I'm gonna put subliminal things into these paintings on the walls.
Speaker A:And I painted the pictures myself.
Speaker A:To put them onto the set in the background.
Speaker A:And, yeah, I encoded a load of stuff in that film visually.
Speaker A:And it did work, because sometimes the film actually wasn't very violent.
Speaker A:The film threatened a lot of violence to the characters, but hardly anything was shown.
Speaker A:It was all done subliminally.
Speaker A:And it worked so well that there was some people who came back to me and said they were really disturbed or some of them even had to turn the film off because they were so scared of the direction it was going.
Speaker A:But it never became particularly gory or sadistic.
Speaker A:Everything was implied with subliminals.
Speaker A:So I'd started doing that myself there, not realizing that other filmmakers had already done it to a level way beyond what I was trying to do.
Speaker A:I thought I was being really pushing the mold, you know, as I thought I was breaking new ground with filmmaking and doing this at the time.
Speaker A:And I thought, I'm gonna make a load of movies like this.
Speaker A:So I did that one.
Speaker A:I did some more short films, and then I sort of sat down.
Speaker A:I was like, okay, I'm gonna study some scenes from Psycho, Alien and the Shining and the Road warrior.
Speaker A:Mad Max 2.
Speaker A:The road warrior.
Speaker A:It's my favorite movie.
Speaker A:I love it.
Speaker A:So those four movies were the ones that I sat down with.
Speaker A:And there were specific scenes that I wanted to study.
Speaker A:Not looking for hidden messages, just wanting to study the camera work, the editing, stuff like that, just to find out what it was that made these scenes really magical.
Speaker A:And then that by accident, then I started going, oh, my God, there's all these hidden themes in there that I hadn't noticed.
Speaker A:And, you know, because then I started noticing little sort of symbolic details.
Speaker A:I wasn't looking for symbolic details, but that's what I started finding.
Speaker A:So it was almost an accident, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So that actually explains why your channel focuses heavily on Alien and the Shining.
Speaker B:And I think you said Psycho was the third one.
Speaker B:But I think I've watched a lot of your content, particularly about Alien and.
Speaker B:And the Shining.
Speaker B:In fact, I just watched a. I just watched a couple videos about the Shining last night and today to prepare for this.
Speaker B:But it actually makes a lot of sense.
Speaker B:Why did you.
Speaker B:Why did you choose those three.
Speaker B:Why did you choose those three movies in particular?
Speaker B:And which scenes from them did you choose with?
Speaker A:The first one that I think I wanted to study was Alien.
Speaker A:And there wasn't a specific scene in Alien that I wanted to study.
Speaker A:I just felt that there was more going on.
Speaker A:I was like, why is this film so mesmerizing?
Speaker A:I Mean, you could.
Speaker A:I could put that film on anytime and just get right into it and just dive into that world anytime.
Speaker A:It's never boring.
Speaker A:Even though it's a slow movie, I knew that there was hypnotic stuff going on with the soundtrack and the slowness and the lighting and stuff like that.
Speaker A:So I was kind of studying it for that.
Speaker A:And then I started noticing all the best trauma themes to do with.
Speaker A:You know, there's an old idea in the realm of psychology that being born is a great trauma because you're coming out of the womb, out of the safety, out of the warmth, and you're coming into this big, scary world with loud noises and bright lights, and it's like, oh, my God, terror, you know?
Speaker A: ay back to something like the: Speaker A:The idea that we each carry with us an unconscious memory of our own birth that is traumatic.
Speaker A:And we carry with us a lifelong desire to return to the comfort of the womb.
Speaker A:You know, we love cuddling up under blankets, you know, and we.
Speaker A:We like warm, soft spaces and stuff like that.
Speaker A:We want to get back to the womb, you know, And I started noticing in the movie Alien that there was a lot of stuff to do with that.
Speaker A:It's like the characters are in the hypersleep beds, and it's like a womb, you know, comfort, warm, soft.
Speaker A:And you look at the set designs around it, and it's like fleshy colors and nice padding and stuff like that, like a womb.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And then, you know, reading the production, it's like, oh, Ridley Scott used to call the.
Speaker A:The mother.
Speaker A:The mother ship.
Speaker A:You know, the mother computer on the ship.
Speaker A:There's your obvious reference right there.
Speaker A:And I was reading at.
Speaker A:Scott used to call the room where you interface with the mother, which is like a fleshy room, and you can hear, like, breathing sounds in it, like the type of things that a baby would hear.
Speaker A:And he used to call that set the womb room.
Speaker A:I was like, he's just virtually admitted.
Speaker B:It there, you know, Amazing.
Speaker A:So then I'm going through the movie, and I'm realizing there's a lot of stuff in that film about the human desire to get back to the womb.
Speaker A:And that's what Ripley does at the end of the film.
Speaker A:She defeats the alien, she ejects it out of the ship, and then she goes back to the comfort of hypersleep.
Speaker A:It's like the womb.
Speaker A:You know, it's a very nihilistic Film on that level.
Speaker A:It's like we humans are forever wanting to get back to the womb, and we feel like we're lost in a big, cavernous, empty, open, dangerous, scary place, you know?
Speaker A:So, yeah, that.
Speaker A:That was the first thing with Alien that really came to the front.
Speaker A:And I wasn't looking for specific scenes in it.
Speaker B:Then.
Speaker A:I was looking at.
Speaker A:I think the Shining was the second one I looked at.
Speaker A:And I was specifically interested in the scene where Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall argue and she ends up batting them on the head, knocking him down the stairs.
Speaker A:Because that's a long scene, you know, and it's really good acting from both of them, you know, and it's.
Speaker A:It's a fantastic, engaging scene.
Speaker A:And the lighting from those windows is so hypnotic and stuff like that.
Speaker A:And the actual room itself is huge and makes the characters look small and vulnerable in this huge.
Speaker A:And the hotel itself is like a big, massive maze.
Speaker A:And it's like you are.
Speaker A:It's like even the adult characters look like children within the size of this huge, huge hotel.
Speaker A:So studying that specific scene and.
Speaker A:And actually, one of the reasons I was doing that is because I was a member of a film club, a filmmaking club here in Liverpool called the Basement Film Unit.
Speaker A:And funny enough, this was a film club film club that Clive Barker was a member of just before he made Hellraiser.
Speaker A:But I missed him by about 10 or 15 years.
Speaker A:Yeah, because he was in that club for a little while because he was from Liverpool.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:Yeah, so that's where he got started, learning how to do filmmaking stuff.
Speaker A:And then he went off and did Hellraiser and all that.
Speaker A:So, yeah, I was in that club, and I used to run little workshops in the group on how to do filmmaking.
Speaker A:And one of the ones I did was I sort of.
Speaker A:I wanted to sit down with everyone in the room and say, let's take a classic scene from a movie.
Speaker A:And we're gonna sit and watch it and we're gonna pause it.
Speaker A:I'm gonna talk about it.
Speaker A:I'm gonna let it play.
Speaker A:I'm gonna pause it, point a few things out.
Speaker A:And I chose that scene from the Shining with the bat fight.
Speaker A:And, yeah, I spent about half an hour with the audience in that room going through that scene and breaking down little detail, and they enjoyed it.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:But still, at that point, I didn't think that there was any other subtext in the Shining.
Speaker A:I was just interested in the craft of how Kubrick directed it.
Speaker A:And then after that, the thing that I discovered I wasn't the only one to discover this.
Speaker A:Others have found it as well because it's.
Speaker A:One of the more obvious ones, is the genocide of Native Americans theme that is there throughout much of the movie.
Speaker A:It's not the center of the movie, but it's a major subtext, you know.
Speaker A:So, yeah, started to discover that one and.
Speaker A:And then other things started popping.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So those are the first two, and.
Speaker B:I think those are two really great examples of some of the things that I've learned from watching your videos about how to watch and understand movies.
Speaker B:Because I think that you've touched on something important, that there was a time.
Speaker B:And maybe it's true always.
Speaker B:Like, maybe it's still true today.
Speaker B: up with, Godfather, Shining,: Speaker B:Road Warrior, there are expressions of the contemporary psychology.
Speaker B:I think even Predator is part of that.
Speaker B:And there's a way in which there was a depth of artistry that those films were made with that attempted to channel what was going on in the American mind in the Western psyche at the time, and made with real skill and real care and a real attempt to say something important to the audience that facilitated this connection with these movies that we don't see today.
Speaker B:But I think movies are still trying to express that psychology, but not necessarily in good ways.
Speaker B:And I think it's the Shining in particular.
Speaker B:I think that's probably the most number of videos that I've watched from you, though I have watched quite a few that really touches on this unique psychology, I think that was made in the late 60s or early 70s, something like that.
Speaker B:Or was it the 80s?
Speaker A: It was: Speaker A:It was released, yeah.
Speaker B:Was it really?
Speaker B:Okay, yeah.
Speaker B:It captures a unique moment, I think, in American history.
Speaker B:And maybe we can talk just.
Speaker B:But I want to talk about Stanley Kubrick because I tried to think about how can I make this conversation, have a way in for people who haven't watched too much of your material?
Speaker B:What can they kind of hang their hat on to understand kind of the things that we're talking about?
Speaker B:So let's start by talking about Stanley Kubrick.
Speaker B: ining or Full metal jacket or: Speaker B:But he's a name that we don't hear too much anymore.
Speaker B:And I think you've done exceptional work showing the level of artistry that he achieved.
Speaker B:And so let's start by talking about him and what his background Was.
Speaker B:And then we can move to talking about the Shining.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:I've had a lot of people ask over the years, how the hell did Kubrick learn how to do this stuff?
Speaker A:And some of that is still a mystery to me as well.
Speaker A:Like, this guy's an alien who's come from somewhere who's, like, brought this, like, level of creative intellect that is just almost unheard of, you know?
Speaker A:Well, you know, going through the biographies and looking at his history and stuff, he wasn't really into academia.
Speaker A:He wasn't into school, college, university.
Speaker A:He didn't even go and do any formal training in film.
Speaker A:But the.
Speaker A:The desire was there.
Speaker A:And, you know, he.
Speaker A:Obviously, he loved movies when he was younger.
Speaker A:I mean, that comes across in his biographies as well.
Speaker A:But, you know, he became a photographer for look magazine when he was younger.
Speaker A:This is well known.
Speaker A:But I think the photography thing was really important with him because when you're taking photographs, you're having to communicate non verbally.
Speaker A:You know, you're trying to set up shots and situations that you're taking photographs of, and you're trying to say as much as you can with sometimes just a single photograph.
Speaker A:So you want to make the best use of angles, props, costume elements, things like that.
Speaker A:At the same time, you want to get people looking natural.
Speaker A:So photography, doing really good photography work is a complex thing to do.
Speaker A:And Kubrick got really, really good at that.
Speaker A:So that development of visual communication skill was already going on intensely for him.
Speaker A:And he talked in some interviews about when he was a photographer for look magazine.
Speaker A:They had him traveling around all over America doing photographs of this event, that event, and he was going to a lot of events that had a lot of celebrities.
Speaker A:So he got to meet a lot of celebrities.
Speaker A:And he was photographing things like Salvador Dali exhibitions and stuff like that.
Speaker A:I don't know if he actually met Salvador Dali, but I'm pretty sure Kubrick would have been absolutely fascinated with Salvador Dali's work.
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm very sure of that, because I know that he was also interested in Magritte, who was a surrealist.
Speaker A:Have you ever seen Magritte's work?
Speaker B:Of course.
Speaker B:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Renee Magritte?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I have to make sure to ask you because it's surprising how many people don't know Magritte.
Speaker A:You know, a lot of people know Salvador Dali, but they don't know Magritte.
Speaker A: ound some concept artwork for: Speaker A:And there was loads of blatant Magritte references in there, stuff to do with, you know, like, he used to always have those, like, silver balls floating in the sky.
Speaker A:There'd be two of them, and they had circles around them.
Speaker A: Pitches concept paintings for: Speaker A:So I'm pretty sure that Kubrick was into McGreece and Salvador Dali and people like that.
Speaker A:So, yeah, he was going around doing the look magazine stuff and not just becoming good at visual communication, but meeting a lot of people across a broad spectrum of society.
Speaker A:And he said it really developed his confidence.
Speaker A:So there was all that.
Speaker A:And then he was learning to play chess, learning how to.
Speaker A:I mean, if you're going to play chess, you have to learn how to lie to people.
Speaker A:You have to learn how to hide what you're doing.
Speaker A:You have to learn how to anticipate others and all chess is a very psychologically brutal game.
Speaker A:It's a.
Speaker A:It's a game of mental dominance, isn't it?
Speaker A:You know, through manipulation and deception?
Speaker A:And he got.
Speaker A:Came really, really good at that.
Speaker A:And he always said that crossed over into other things he was doing in his life as well.
Speaker A:So he became a chess tactician when it came to getting his movies made and putting in the messages that he wanted to put in, regardless of what the critics wanted or the producers wanted, and being able to bypass those people and getting his stuff out there, it was all big chess moves he was doing, you know, but as for the very, very specific forms of visual encoding that he was doing, I'm not totally sure exactly how he came up with that.
Speaker A:It seems almost like he put together his own little manual of how to do it, how to create cross references between scenes, how to use this prop to do that and stuff like that.
Speaker A:Maybe it was simply a case that lots of other filmmakers had been doing that stuff, but only in bits and pieces here and there, and he was noticing it and picking up on all the techniques that all these other filmmakers are doing.
Speaker A:And maybe he just compiled all that into a condensed little toolkit of encoding methods.
Speaker A:And then he's like, right, I'm going to take this next level.
Speaker A:I think probably that is the way he did it, I think.
Speaker B: particularly the videos about: Speaker B:It's almost incomprehensible.
Speaker B:Like, I look at some of the details that you pull out, the things that you point to, and I'm like, there's no way that.
Speaker B:But he put that in consciously, especially when you put all the videos together and you see the different layers of symbolism and representation.
Speaker B:But I can't come up with another explanation than.
Speaker B:It was very conscious and very intelligently done.
Speaker B: e started the interview, both: Speaker B:So you can watch them and you can appreciate them as a science fiction film and as a.
Speaker B:As a horror thriller.
Speaker B:But really, underneath, Kubrick is doing much, much more for those who want to look.
Speaker B:So let's talk about those two movies and the different layers that they're working on.
Speaker A:Yeah, okay.
Speaker A:There's a.
Speaker A:There's a funny little moment in.
Speaker A:In the Shining that I'd never really picked up on the significance of this line until recently.
Speaker A:And I was like, aha.
Speaker A:When Jack Torrance and his wife are getting shown around the Overlook Hotel, oh, here's the Gold Room.
Speaker A:Here's the maze.
Speaker A:Here's this.
Speaker A:And they're like, oh, this is beautiful.
Speaker A:You know, and there's one little bit where they're walking with Mr. Ullman and that other creepy guy who walks behind them all the time, who's always staring at the back of Jack's head.
Speaker A:Still don't know what the hell's going on with that fella.
Speaker A:I know there's theories about him, but.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:They're walking down this hallway, and Wendy, she says to Mr. Ullman, she says, it's amazing how much activity is going on today.
Speaker A:And I was like, I think that's Kubrick saying, look, the amount of detail I've put into this film.
Speaker A:Yeah, blow your mind.
Speaker A:I think that was a sly reference to.
Speaker A:He was like, sort of showing off about how much he was doing with the movie.
Speaker A:Well, I sort of did a little test years ago because I thought, is it possible for a filmmaker to do this, to have to do all of that with that level of complexity?
Speaker A:How the hell do you prepare to do that?
Speaker A:How do you keep track of it all while you're doing it?
Speaker A:And I wanted to have a try at doing it myself.
Speaker A:And so I made this really low budget experimental feature film called Turn in your Grave.
Speaker A:It's like a horror film on the surface.
Speaker A:And I knew that when I made this film, there was no way I was gonna get it properly distributed because I was shooting on really, really low grade cameras.
Speaker A:There's no way the cinema chains would be like, oh yeah, we're gonna show this film that looks like it's been shot on home video.
Speaker A:But I was like, it's the only way I'm ever gonna get a feature film made and have that level of creative control is to just say, to hell with all of the technical perfection.
Speaker A:I'm just gonna go all out for the symbolism stuff and I'm just gonna use cheap cameras to do it.
Speaker A:So I did that and I think I spent about maybe nine months a year preparing to shoot this film.
Speaker A:And then we shot it in the space of two or three weeks or something like that.
Speaker A:And in that year of preparation, I was like, right, I've got all these different themes I want to encode in the film and I'm not going to tell the cast and crew about it.
Speaker A:I want to see how much they noticed.
Speaker A:But I also, when I did shoot the film, I didn't hide completely what I was doing.
Speaker A:I told the cast and crew, oh, by the way, I'm gonna be encoding lots of hidden stuff in the movie as we go along.
Speaker A:And they were like, oh.
Speaker A:And I said, maybe you guys can figure it out as with as we're filming it.
Speaker A:Because I wanted to do ad lib scenes with the actors and I wanted the actors to be responding to what they were noticing about how I was making the film.
Speaker A:So this was getting into some meta territory stuff.
Speaker A:Meta territory stuff.
Speaker A:And so that was all fun to do.
Speaker A:But when I was preparing to shoot the film, you know, I was storyboarding things and I was getting props together and costumes and things like that.
Speaker A:I was making a lot of props for the film and there was a lot of monster characters in the film with like these creepy masks and stuff, you know, And I had this whole team of people making these monster masks and I was designing them on paper and I was encoding all kinds of hidden details in the monster masks and things and having these, these, these artists make the masks and whether they understood what they were making, I don't know.
Speaker A:Hardly any of them came back and asked, what's this detail all about?
Speaker A:You know, and.
Speaker A:But I had all these charts up on my walls where I'd written down dozens of different themes and hidden conc that I wanted to be in the film.
Speaker A:And I had them all Cross referenced.
Speaker A:It was like a huge mind map.
Speaker A:And I had multiple charts of this.
Speaker A:So when it came to shoot the film, all of that stuff, I'd.
Speaker A:I'd memorized most of it.
Speaker A:I'd spent so long preparing it and memorizing all these themes that when it came to the actual shoot, I was able to encode tons and tons of detail just off the cuff.
Speaker A:I would never have been able to do that without the preparation.
Speaker A:And when you look at.
Speaker A:I mean, I'm not comparing myself to Kubrick as a filmmaker at all.
Speaker A:This was an experiment that I did.
Speaker A:And, you know, the film, in the end, some people watching go, that's utter crap.
Speaker A:And other people watch it and go, I've never seen anything like that before.
Speaker A:I don't know what to make of it.
Speaker A:Some people really like this.
Speaker A:Some people really hated it, and so on.
Speaker A:But the one thing I always got from people was that it was an unusual experience.
Speaker A:They'd never seen anything like it.
Speaker A:One.
Speaker A:One friend of mine actually said, never mind Eraserhead, this film, my head up way more than Eraserhead by David Lynch.
Speaker A:I was like, whoa, okay.
Speaker A:Because I thought Eraserhead was a real mind.
Speaker A:So, yeah, I did that as an experiment to see how hard it is to do this kind of encoding in a movie.
Speaker A:And it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be to do.
Speaker A:As long as you do all the preparation in advance and memorize what you're doing.
Speaker A:And when you look at Kubrick's productions, he wasn't spending one year preparing to make a movie.
Speaker A:He was spending many years preparing, and he was doing it with a great deal more resources than I had and with a great deal more experience and knowledge than I had.
Speaker A:So I think, yeah, by the time he shot the films, he'd done so much preparation and he'd already conceived all of this complexity for the films, and he must have slowly developed it during the production.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:Oh, I'll add this concept in.
Speaker A:Oh, I could also add that one.
Speaker A:And he just keeps layering it and layering it and layering it.
Speaker A:By the time he gets to the shoot, it's like he can just make it and everyone on the crew doesn't have the slightest clue what the hell he's doing.
Speaker A:And when I shot my film and used that kind of technique, most of the cast and crew had no clue what the hell I was doing.
Speaker A:Even though I told them to look for it, they still couldn't figure a lot of it out.
Speaker B:Yeah, so that's a That's.
Speaker B:That's really incredible.
Speaker B:And I think it points to a question that I think is underlying a lot of this.
Speaker B:I think I touched on some of it earlier.
Speaker B:The power of film.
Speaker B:Yeah, I touched on it before we started recording the power of film as an artistic medium.
Speaker B:I think movies are the most powerful artistic medium available.
Speaker B:I think books will probably ultimately have a longer lasting impact than film will, especially because film was really only excellent for like 50 or so years.
Speaker B:And books, of course, last forever.
Speaker B:But I think movies have a particular way of manipulating our consciousness through hypnosis, but also through the ability to layer symbols and sounds and performances and subtleties of all of that.
Speaker B:And I hadn't realized just how much lands on the responsibility of the director.
Speaker B:We hear all about directors with gigantic egos, right?
Speaker B:And we hear about that, but we don't really understand why.
Speaker B:But here you have big budget Hollywood directors that are given the responsibility for managing hundreds of millions of dollars and dozens of other egos, like actors and other production.
Speaker B:Other production professionals, to produce something that achieves at the highest level.
Speaker B:So maybe you can unpack a little bit for people who will never direct a film.
Speaker B:I was.
Speaker B: roduced a documentary film in: Speaker B:So maybe you can unpack, just for the listeners, the sort of things a director has to do, just how creatively powerful that role is.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, in terms of being involved in film shoots, myself, I wrote and directed and edited and produced.
Speaker A:I think it's important to do all of the different roles because when you have to do all of the roles, you learn how to cross reference the skills from each of those roles.
Speaker A:Whereas a lot of people go into the film industry and they just specialize in one area, and outside of that, they just get told what to do.
Speaker A:So they don't really get to mentally branch out into all the different nuances of filmmaking.
Speaker A:But when you're doing low budget stuff where you are in charge of the creativity on all aspects of it and the practicalities of production, I think the learning process there is much, much stronger.
Speaker A:And a lot of the best filmmakers, they multitask in that way.
Speaker A:Scorsese, great producer, great writer, great director.
Speaker A:Hitchcock would get involved in everything Kubrick did, David Lynch.
Speaker A:But most of these great directors, they're not just directors, they get involved in everything else, the writing and all that kind of Stuff.
Speaker A:So I think that's a key thing.
Speaker A:Excuse me, a little drink of water here before we continue?
Speaker B:Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker A:Another sort of aspect of it is that it takes a really strong level of confidence to take on all those roles.
Speaker A:You have to be egotistic to do it because it's insane.
Speaker A:It's like, I mean, I know for me, I, I had other filmmakers saying, what you're doing here is so insanely ambitious.
Speaker A:Like you've never made a film, but you've never been on a film set before.
Speaker A:I'd never, I'd never been on anybody's film shoot.
Speaker A:And I dove straight in, directing and writing and editing and producing a 35 minute short film.
Speaker A:Not like a two minute short film, not a 10 minute one at 30 minute, with a crew of about 30 people.
Speaker A:And we took a week to shoot that film.
Speaker A:And I learned so much just in that one week because you just dive in at the deep end and you learn super fast.
Speaker A:It's, it's good to jump in and make huge mistakes quickly so that you learn quickly.
Speaker A:I mean, I didn't even know what a master shot was on the first day of shooting until one of the actors said, are you going to do a master shot?
Speaker A:And I was like, what's that?
Speaker A:And he's like, oh, well, that's like a wide coverage shot that gets everything in and then you can edit away to the other small things.
Speaker A:And I was like, didn't even know that.
Speaker A:So then I've learned that the first day master shot, okay.
Speaker A:And I was picking up things every day.
Speaker A:And within seven days, my knowledge of filmmaking went from all to, oh, now I'm not too bad at this, you know, but yeah, you have to have a strong ego to, to even take the risk of doing that.
Speaker A:But people are afraid of criticism and people are afraid of failure.
Speaker A:But I think you have to take the approach of like a kid playing with toys.
Speaker A:You know, a kid playing with Lego isn't like, oh, I'm not gonna build something because somebody might not like what I build.
Speaker A:They just experiment and play and they, as they do it, they learn, oh, I can do this, I can do that.
Speaker A:And they build it up and build it up.
Speaker A:The lack of self consciousness allows them to learn and grow.
Speaker A:And as we get older and we face so many situations in life where people have criticized and pointed and said, oh, you thought you could do this, but you actually couldn't.
Speaker A:Ha.
Speaker A:People get knocked down by that fear of humiliation and fear of failure, fear of being seen as a Failure and so on.
Speaker A:And I think that really restricts most people's creativity.
Speaker A:And so in order to do that kind of work where you're just going out there and taking on way more than you can chew in the hope that you'll actually finish it and do it and, you know, produce something decent, I don't.
Speaker A:I've said that you have to have a big ego, but maybe not.
Speaker A:I think you just have to have a level of humility where you stop caring whether people like it or not.
Speaker A:You stop caring whether you're going to be seen as a failure.
Speaker A:I mean, anybody who goes out and makes a movie of their own on a shoestring budget, anybody who gets the film finished, I'm like, because it's so hard.
Speaker A:So many people start making a movie and they fail.
Speaker A:I've been on film sets where people were trying to shoot stuff and they planned it badly and it all went wrong and the footage was a wreck and they couldn't finish the film, or they got all the way close to production, but they'd took on all the actors and everybody too early in production.
Speaker A:And so by the time it came to the shoot, everyone was bored waiting and they all left.
Speaker A:So the film never got made.
Speaker A:So, I mean, that was a key thing I learned over the years when I was making films, was do as much as you can yourself first.
Speaker A:Get it as close to the shooting date as you can, and then bring everybody on board, because then they're all excited.
Speaker A:They're all like, oh, my God, this is going to be shooting next month.
Speaker A:I'm in.
Speaker A:And that they see that you've got storyboards ready.
Speaker A:Oh, you've got half the cast in place, you've got the props, you got, I'm in.
Speaker A:And so you get them all at that point, and then your film actually gets made.
Speaker A:You know, things like that.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:But yeah, having the willingness to say, I'm going to experiment, I'm going to give this a go.
Speaker A:I don't care whether I fail.
Speaker A:I don't care how people see it.
Speaker A:I'm just going to do it and enjoy it.
Speaker A:And if it fails, so what?
Speaker A:At least I had to go.
Speaker A:And it was an enjoyable experience.
Speaker A:That's the attitude, I think that needs to be taken.
Speaker A:That's the attitude I always took.
Speaker A:And, yeah, I used to get all the filmmakers saying, what?
Speaker A:You're gonna make this feature film with all these.
Speaker A:Read the script and you've got all these monsters and people being eaten alive and stuff, like, well, how the hell are you Gonna do all this.
Speaker A:This is insane.
Speaker A:And then they come on the set and they'd be like, wow, you've actually done this.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So big ego or humility, whatever you want to call it, you've got to have that.
Speaker A:The willingness to fail and be seen as a failure and not care about it.
Speaker B: we've all seen, whether it be: Speaker B:I watched the breakdown that you did of Christopher Nolan's the Dark Knight and the Overrated, and I was like, I could not agree with you more about that movie.
Speaker B:And I want to get to that for sure.
Speaker B:But you see these guys that have made, you know, before we knew their names.
Speaker B:I think of David Fincher, for example, I think his first big budget film was Alien 3.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:But before then, and then seven, of course, which is.
Speaker B:Was one of my favorite movies for a long time.
Speaker B:I don't think I could watch it now.
Speaker B:But these men have been working on films for their whole lives.
Speaker B:Spielberg, for example, famously, you know, started when he was like a little kid, I think, just with cameras and stuff.
Speaker B:And so they've developed that courage and that process and that familiarity with all the different aspects of it, so that when they finally get invested with a multimillion dollar, big budget Hollywood feature, that this has come over years of developing proficiency to be able to trust their own creative vision, to be able to manage other people with egos of their own.
Speaker B:And essentially they have their own process in place so that they know, like you discovered, that when they start on day one, their process of getting prepared for that has already been going on for months or potentially even years to develop the product.
Speaker B:And I don't think we have a good sense of the significance, the power that's in the hand of directors today.
Speaker B:We feel it when it works, but we don't really understand why.
Speaker B:And I think that was a beautiful breakdown you gave right there.
Speaker A:Thanks.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I mean, I actually only partially answered your question there.
Speaker A:I was talking about how to have the courage to even make a film in the first place.
Speaker A:But yeah, I mean, especially if you.
Speaker A:If you've written the film and you're producing it, directing it, and you're going to be editing it as well, and you're doing low budget and you haven't got like a.
Speaker A:What do they call it?
Speaker A:A production designer.
Speaker A:A production designer is basically somebody who organizes resources so that the director doesn't have to do it.
Speaker A:But on most low Budget, really low budget movies.
Speaker A:The director, if they happen to be the producer, they are having to do the production design and arrange all the resources.
Speaker A:So just that the physical aspects of making sure you've got everything you need in the right place at the right time to shoot something.
Speaker A:And oh, that props missing.
Speaker A:Oh, no, disaster.
Speaker A:You know, we forgot to invite this cast member in.
Speaker A:You know, making sure that everything is available.
Speaker A:That, that is a logistical nightmare depending on what you're shooting.
Speaker A:So you got to do all that and you got to do the creative stuff at the same time.
Speaker A:And you know, if you, if you direct a particular scene, most of the time, I think most directors are largely just paying attention to the actors and whether they like the performance.
Speaker A:And there's action.
Speaker A:Watch the actors.
Speaker A:Okay, cut.
Speaker A:Can you just act out a little bit differently?
Speaker A:And I mean, I've watched other people direct because I, I've been on other people's film shoots because I wasn't just interested in making films myself.
Speaker A:I wanted to be in the lesser roles so I could learn from that.
Speaker A:So I would do some movies for other people where I would be their cinematographer or I would be their editor and things like that.
Speaker A:And sometimes I would help other people do production design because that was where most films failed was the, the, the failure to organize resources to physically make sure that the film actually got made.
Speaker A:That was the big failure.
Speaker A:So I used to help everybody with that where I could.
Speaker A:But yeah, it's, it's a big juggling thing.
Speaker A:You got all these different things.
Speaker A:Oh my God.
Speaker A:But yeah, preparation, you know, it's super important.
Speaker A:So there's something else that you just said there.
Speaker A:I was going to respond to and I forgot what it was.
Speaker A:What was the last thing that you said there?
Speaker B:Oh, that's okay.
Speaker B:Remember maybe about the significance of being granted a multi million dollar budget.
Speaker B:And we know when things, we can identify when things go really well with like that's a legendary film, but we don't actually know when things go wrong.
Speaker B:Could that be it?
Speaker A:Well, yeah.
Speaker A:It is a funny thing about films where you, you know that something is wrong.
Speaker A:And there's an old saying that, you know, like George Lucas, Star Wars.
Speaker A:There's an old saying, it's a very mistaken saying.
Speaker A:They say, oh, Star wars was saved in the editing room as if it was a crap movie.
Speaker A:And they just magically made it really good with fancy editing, which is absolute garbage because I mean, if you just look at the cinematography alone in that film, it looks fantastic in a way that cannot be manipulated by Editing.
Speaker A:There are individual shots in that film that are not cutting to anything else that look amazing.
Speaker A:That's not saved in the editing room.
Speaker A:But I think the people who say that about Star wars often have got no experience of editing.
Speaker A:From what I've seen with both my own film projects and with helping other people to edit their films.
Speaker A:And also from reading about famous filmmakers and the early cuts of their films that they hated.
Speaker A:All films are saved in the editing room.
Speaker A:Hardly anybody ever makes a movie where the first cut is amazing.
Speaker A:They make a first cut, they get the basics in place.
Speaker A:This doesn't look right.
Speaker A:This doesn't feel right.
Speaker A:That drags on too long.
Speaker A:And they get people to watch it.
Speaker A:Test audiences and they go, you know, even with, like, Goodfellas, which is one of the best edited films I've ever seen, it's fantastic pacing.
Speaker A:Test audiences were like, nah, regarding the final act of the movie.
Speaker A:They just found it too boring and slow to final act.
Speaker A:And then Thelma, was it Thelma Schoonmaker?
Speaker A:She was.
Speaker A:I think it was her who edited all of Scorsese's great films.
Speaker A:She's one of the best editors in the business.
Speaker A:She got hold of that ending and she changed it all.
Speaker A:And she put in faster pace, threw all kinds of songs in and stuff like that and just really speeded it up and condensed the whole ending.
Speaker A:And then the audiences were much better with it, you know, so on that level, you could say, oh, Goodfellas was saved in the editing room.
Speaker A:But I think all movies are saved in the editing room.
Speaker A:There was one thing I was going to say in response there, where you said that a lot of the filmmakers have worked their way up in the industry and they've done the little different roles.
Speaker A:And that is generally the view of how you become a director.
Speaker A:Some people who start off making the tea on the set and you observe, and then you might get a job holding the microphone and then you gradually, oh, suddenly I'm a cinematographer or something like that.
Speaker A:And then you gradually work your way through.
Speaker A:And then eventually you've got the courage to go, I think I'll make a short film.
Speaker A:And I'm like, no, make the short film right at the beginning.
Speaker A:You don't need to build up to that.
Speaker A:Just do it now, you know, and learn faster.
Speaker A:And there are plenty filmmakers who didn't go that slow, creeping route up the ladder.
Speaker A:They just jumped to the ladder.
Speaker A:And Kubrick was one of them.
Speaker A:I was surprised.
Speaker A:There was one interview where he was asked by this interviewer something about what do you think about the way you direct compared to the way other people direct?
Speaker A:And Kubrick said, I don't know.
Speaker A:I've never watched anybody else direct.
Speaker A:I was like, wow, that's.
Speaker A:That's amazing.
Speaker A:But that showed that he didn't work his way up.
Speaker A:You know, he just went in right off at the beginning.
Speaker A:And, you know, Clive Barker, Hellraiser, he'd never made a film before, and he just went straight in and directed Hellraiser and made one of the best horror movies ever made.
Speaker A:For my money, anyway.
Speaker A:And that movie is full of deep themes.
Speaker A:It's as good as Hitchcock stuff.
Speaker A:It's as good as Kubrick stuff.
Speaker A:It's a very appreciated movie for its special effects and.
Speaker A:And its gore and stuff like that.
Speaker A:But the psychological depths of that movie are hardly appreciated by anybody.
Speaker A:I've made it, a few videos on it, but, yeah, you know, sometimes filmmakers can just dive in at the deep ends right from the beginning.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So I want.
Speaker B:I wanted to bring this back to Stanley Kubrick and say, and maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the level of detail, some of the things that are going on in the Shining.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So what I learned from watching your movies, you know, from watching your, is the Shining presents itself as a horror film.
Speaker B:It borrows from Stephen King's book the Shining, but it borrows quite liberally from it and then kind of throws away a lot of the more supernatural aspects of what Stephen King generally does.
Speaker B:And it presents itself as a horror film, but beneath it are layers of psychological depth that it's actually trying to say something else very different.
Speaker B:And so I guess what I had learned from watching your movies is that Kubrick had.
Speaker B:It's not that he worked his way up through the industry.
Speaker B:It's that he had started with small, lower budget films and worked his way up to gradually having bigger budget films with, you know, Jack Nicholson and stuff like that.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:But I want to talk about the Shining specifically because there is so much going on in that movie that if you just watch the movie, this is a really scary movie.
Speaker B:Jack Nicholson's performance is incredible.
Speaker B:There's the gore and the horror and all these different aspects of it.
Speaker B:But upon multiple watchings, there are things that begin to surface.
Speaker B:The one that comes to mind right now is the spatial disorientation.
Speaker B:That was something that I was like, oh, wow, that's right.
Speaker B:Where it creates this impression of unease that you can't quite put your finger on, but that it's there because there are angles that are impossible and maybe we can start talking about some of the layered details in the Shining that communicate there's more going on than just a horror film.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, I mean, with my work, I had already done some videos on the Shining in the early days of YouTube, and they did okay, and they caught on a little bit.
Speaker A:But it was when I did the video on the set design stuff, that one just exploded.
Speaker A:And I got a massive increase in subscribers from that one.
Speaker A:But funnily enough, it wasn't me who discovered it.
Speaker A:I've never hidden this.
Speaker A:I've cited it in the video where I talked about it, is that somebody was making a mod for the video game Doom, and they wanted to create the Overlook Hotel as a level to fight in in the Doom game.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And when they were trying to do that, they were like, hang.
Speaker A:Oh, hang on.
Speaker A:This doesn't make sense.
Speaker A:Where does that.
Speaker A:That hallway doesn't match up.
Speaker A:There's a window there that shouldn't be there in Orman's office.
Speaker A:And I don't know if it was the modder themselves or somebody else who played the mod, who contacted me and said, have you seen this almonds window doesn't exist.
Speaker A:That the reception area of the Overlook Hotel doesn't.
Speaker A:It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker A:And the modder had just noticed a couple of things like that, and that sparked me off, but they were the one I got to give them.
Speaker A:I don't even know the modder's name, because if I did, I would be very happy to come out and give them credit for it for making that little discovery.
Speaker A:I don't think they realized that Kubrick had done it on purpose, but they had noticed the discrepancies, some of them, the big ones.
Speaker A:And that was what sparked me off and made me go, okay, I'm gonna look at these other sets here, because that's bizarre.
Speaker A:And then once I started going through the other sets, it was like, oh, my God, these set design anomalies are all over the place in this film.
Speaker A:All right, okay.
Speaker A:This is why this hotel that looks beautiful and pretty and colorful and all that.
Speaker A:This is why it feels so bloody disturbing.
Speaker A:It's because I don't know where the hell I am in this hotel.
Speaker A:I don't know which side of the hotel I'm on, which floor, which hallway, you know, which direction I'm facing in this.
Speaker A:This part and that part, and how this part connects to that one.
Speaker A:And, yeah, it was like, okay, yeah, yeah, this.
Speaker A:This has got to have been done on purpose, because the errors are way too blatant and too many for a known perfectionist like Kubrick to just allow that stuff to slide, you know?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So that was where all that came from.
Speaker A:Funnily enough, I've been planning to do an updated video on that spatial awareness thing.
Speaker A:I won't go into detail about that right now, though, because I don't want to give the idea for some other YouTuber to do it.
Speaker A:I shouldn't have brought that up, but I. Yeah, I'll be doing an update on that video.
Speaker A:That's going to be quite interesting.
Speaker B:So I began digging in.
Speaker A:You asked about multiple things.
Speaker A:Oh, please.
Speaker A:Yeah, you asked about multiple things.
Speaker A:I only get.
Speaker A:I only mentioned one.
Speaker A:Yeah, so.
Speaker A:So, yeah, I mean, the.
Speaker A:The set design stuff that came at this.
Speaker A:The Native American stuff found earlier.
Speaker A:And then a lot of it was the foreshadowing stuff as well, where things happen in the hotel that foreshadow what's going to happen later.
Speaker A:You've got Jack Nicholson throwing the tennis ball at the wall, and it's making a banging noise, which is like a foreshadow of him chopping the door with an axe.
Speaker A:You know, stuff like that.
Speaker A:So loads of foreshadowing stuff, which fits in with the very concept of the movie itself in the supernatural sense.
Speaker A:When you shine, you can see events that are coming in the future.
Speaker A:And Kubrick is doing that to us with the foreshadowing stuff.
Speaker A:He didn't invent foreshadowing.
Speaker A:It been done before, like I mentioned, with Hitchcock, with the.
Speaker A:The knife, with the rain, in the car.
Speaker A:That was foreshadowing, you know.
Speaker A:So Kubrick didn't invent that, but he took it to next level in the Shining.
Speaker A:And then there was the spatial awareness stuff.
Speaker A:And then later on, I was finding things about how the lighting was being manipulated and the.
Speaker A:The furniture.
Speaker A:You get furniture moves around in the hotel between shots, and you watch something like Poltergeist, and you actually see the furnit.
Speaker A:But Kubrick's like, I'm not going to let you see it move.
Speaker A:I'm just going to shift it between shots and see if you notice it or whether it hits you subconsciously.
Speaker A:And then there's other moments where, like, a light will be on in a part of the hotel, and then the camera moves around and comes back, and then the light is off or the other way around.
Speaker A:A really good example of that is Wendy finds the dead body of Halloran, and she creeps down the hallway and it's dark.
Speaker A:She sees the body of Halloran and then she anticipates that this ghost guy has stood behind her with a glass of wine.
Speaker A:Great party, isn't it?
Speaker A:You know, that guy.
Speaker A:And she sort of screams before she even goes and looks at him.
Speaker A:So it's like she's anticipated that he's there.
Speaker A:And when she spins around and looks at him, suddenly the light is on above the guy.
Speaker A:That hallway was dark a few seconds before.
Speaker A:So you've got lights going on and off in different parts of the hotel between shots.
Speaker A:Whereas you watch things like Poltergeist.
Speaker A:I mean, I love Poltergeist.
Speaker A:I think it's an amazing horror movie.
Speaker A:But most horror movies do these things in a very obvious, conscious way.
Speaker A:Oh, my God.
Speaker A:The lights flickered while we were playing with the Ouija board.
Speaker A:Kubrick's like, no, I'm gonna do it in a way that you cannot consciously notice it.
Speaker A:And it's just gonna affect you subliminally underneath.
Speaker A:So, yeah, all these layers over the years just been discovered.
Speaker A:It is mind boggling.
Speaker A:But I have this thing where I've got a little bit of a frustration with the Shining because I want people to take as much interest in other Kubrick movies as they do in the Shining, but doesn't seem to be happening.
Speaker A: I mean, I think: Speaker A: I would say: Speaker A:It's not the Shining, and I love Clockwork Orange as well, but hardly anybody talks about it.
Speaker A:That's a very deep film, very challenging, and Full Metal Jacket doesn't get appreciated for its depths.
Speaker A:So for some reason, the Shining has really, really connected with tons of people in terms of subliminal stuff.
Speaker A:And it's done it in a way that Kubrick's other films haven't managed to do.
Speaker A:And I'm still not totally sure why that is.
Speaker B:And I understand what you mean by that, because I think the Shining presents itself as a more accessible film to understand the plot.
Speaker B:Like, you can watch the Shining and it's very linear.
Speaker B:If you want to go diving into the depths of it, you can start taking the whole thing apart and arrive at the a psychological family based conclusion that you got to.
Speaker B:Which I would really love to talk about.
Speaker B:But I don't want to spoil it.
Speaker B:Like, I think it's such a.
Speaker B:It's such a big thing that you touched on with related to the generations, let's say in that movie that I kind of want to talk about it, but I want to give it away.
Speaker B: But: Speaker B:Like, it doesn't.
Speaker B:There's no actor.
Speaker B:Like, the actors are robotic and the robot is, of course, you know, Hal is robotic.
Speaker B:And so it doesn't really invite the viewer in.
Speaker B:And then the end is so strange.
Speaker B:And so you have the star child and you have the astronaut in the bed, aging, and it was that.
Speaker B:But you took all that apart as well.
Speaker B:Again, you've done so much work on this that's helped me see movies and these movies in a new way.
Speaker B: t why people should be giving: Speaker A:Well, first of all, I think you're absolutely right in your summation of why people relate to the Shining more than Kubrick's other films.
Speaker A:I didn't think to put it that way myself, but I think you're right.
Speaker A:It's a.
Speaker A:It's a very accessible, straightforward ghost story narrative on the surface.
Speaker A:Anybody can watch that movie and enjoy it, really.
Speaker A:You know, it's.
Speaker A:You don't have to think deeply.
Speaker A:But Full Metal Jacket, the second half, the movie freaks people out because it's not an obvious war narrative in the traditional sense.
Speaker A:So people get freaked by the second half.
Speaker A:Even though the first half of the movie is universally loved.
Speaker A:Loved the second half, Kubrick's like, no, I'm going to take away your comfortable narrative here and confuse you, and you've got to figure it out.
Speaker A: And he did that with: Speaker A: nd the entire end sequence of: Speaker A: When I first saw: Speaker A:It felt like I'd watched a bloody horror film.
Speaker A:It was like an existential fear, where the hell am I?
Speaker A:Where's the narrative?
Speaker A:I felt like I was lost in the void with that ending.
Speaker A:It freaked me out.
Speaker A:And I watched it loads of times trying to figure it out when I was younger, but I didn't have the perceptual skill set to suss it out at the time.
Speaker A:Eyes Wide Shut freaks people as well, because it's like, oh, here's a bunch of elitists doing these orgies.
Speaker A:And audiences are like, oh, hang on, is Kubrick saying, this is real?
Speaker A:I don't want this to be real?
Speaker A:And they'd run away from it, you know, Clockwork Orange gets way too political.
Speaker A:Freaks people out.
Speaker A:And the level of.
Speaker A:Of sadistic violence and stuff, and it's too much for people to take.
Speaker A:I actually don't think Clockwork Orange is that violent a film in terms of what's actually shown in the violence.
Speaker A:There's much worse movies out there.
Speaker A:Way worse.
Speaker A:I mean, Tarantino's movies are far more violent than Clockwork Orange.
Speaker A:But Clockwork Orange hits people with a sort of psychological violence that disturbs people a great deal more because it involves a lot of humiliation and stuff like that.
Speaker A:You know, Alex, the lead character, he beats and rapes people and he enjoys it so much and he likes to humiliate his victims.
Speaker A:People don't like humiliation and violence with movies.
Speaker A:When you.
Speaker A:When you see a character who's being nasty to other people in the movie is doing violent things and they are laughing as they do it, or.
Speaker A:Oh, especially critics as well, hate that.
Speaker A:A really good example of that is Daisy Harry, you know, the Clint Eastwood, the.
Speaker A:The villain character.
Speaker A:And that was amazing.
Speaker A:But he took such sadistic glee in what he did in that film that a lot of critics were really, really upset by it.
Speaker A:And that always confuses me because I'm like, what?
Speaker A:So if the criminal does something nasty to someone and they're not laughing about it, that somehow makes it less disturbing to me?
Speaker A:It doesn't.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker A:But yeah, Clockwork Orange had that humiliation combined with violence that people can't handle.
Speaker A:So, yeah, I think you're absolutely right there about the.
Speaker A:The Shinings appeal because it.
Speaker A:It's surface narrative is very accessible, even though it's such a bloody scary film in certain places, you know.
Speaker A:Sorry, what?
Speaker A:There was another direction we were going in with that stuff.
Speaker A: , yeah, you wanted to discuss: Speaker B: Space: Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:After I did the early videos on Alien and the Shining and Psycho and the Road Warrior and there was a few others.
Speaker A:And I think at that point that the channel had boosted up to about maybe 10 or 15,000 subscribers very quickly, within the first month or so of it there posting the stuff.
Speaker A: g all these people, please do: Speaker A:I was like, okay, I can understand why they're asking this one.
Speaker A:That's a real mind of a movie.
Speaker A:And I was like, oh, can't you ask me to do something easier?
Speaker A:And yeah, and then it was basically.
Speaker A: s amazed how quickly that the: Speaker A:The very first thing that I wrote down broke through the, the core, the, the surface narrative.
Speaker A:And that was the movie starts out.
Speaker A:You've got a plain black screen where you've got all this music playing.
Speaker A:What, what do they call it?
Speaker A:There's a lot of movies used to have this where they would start off with a black screen playing some overture, like an overture of music at the beginning of the movie.
Speaker A: I think The Olive Oliver,: Speaker A:A lot of movies used to have that.
Speaker A: So Kubrick did it with: Speaker A:And I'm sat in there and I'm like, why the hell's he showing us this music with a black screen?
Speaker A:Soon as I asked that question, it was like, oh my God.
Speaker A:God.
Speaker A:Black screen, rectangle, monolith.
Speaker A:Oh.
Speaker A:Oh, I couldn't believe it.
Speaker A:I was like, I hadn't, hadn't even got to the first scene of the movie.
Speaker A:Just that alone kicked in and I was like, as, as soon as I noticed that suddenly about half a dozen other scenes in the movie, all from the memory of the film, all fell into place.
Speaker A:I was like, okay, the Stargate tunnel starts off with a vertical tunnel, vertical horizon.
Speaker A:And then it rotate it, it suddenly flips 90 degrees.
Speaker A:You know, like you, you take the, the monolith and you rotate it 90 degrees and it becomes the movie screen shape, you know, so you got that.
Speaker A:I was like, okay, that, that explains the, the tunnel with the flip to 90 degrees.
Speaker A:And then there's an explosion of awareness.
Speaker A:Like a.
Speaker A:You see like this cosmic explosion.
Speaker A:It's like you have arrived.
Speaker A:You've figured it out.
Speaker A:Well done.
Speaker A:You've sussed out that the monolith is the movie screen.
Speaker A:It's not a friggin alien thing.
Speaker A:That's just a fantasy.
Speaker A:And, and then, yeah, all these other scenes in the film where Kubrick had embedded monolith shaped objects in the sets in different ways, and sometimes he had them rotating and stuff like that.
Speaker A:So that, that absolutely blew my head off at that point.
Speaker A:I was like, okay, this guy was a, a legitimate creative genius.
Speaker A:That was just unbelievable.
Speaker A:I mean, I've seen this movie Dozens of times in my life, I've tried to figure it out again and again.
Speaker A:And this simple sensory metaphor, I'd missed it all those years.
Speaker A:I was blown away.
Speaker A:I went to bed that night, and I think I dreamt about it and everything.
Speaker A:And for days afterwards, I was just knocked out by it, you know?
Speaker A:And then I started studying the rest of the film and finding other things.
Speaker A:But that was the big portal to open that movie.
Speaker A:Ethiopia.
Speaker B:So the.
Speaker B:So the.
Speaker B:The metaphor that.
Speaker B: That: Speaker B:This.
Speaker B:This mysterious object that appears throughout the film that seems to guide, you know, whether it be apes or.
Speaker B:Or humanity or the astronaut.
Speaker B:I can't remember, Dave.
Speaker B:To a higher degree of consciousness.
Speaker B:That's.
Speaker B:That's the.
Speaker B:The narrative function of this monolith, this strange alien object.
Speaker B:Object.
Speaker B:What Kubrick is actually saying is that the monolith is a metaphor for the TV screen or for the movie screen.
Speaker B:That the movie screen is itself the object that facilitates, quote, unquote, higher consciousness for the audience.
Speaker A:Yeah, and we are the apes, you know, And I was like.
Speaker A:I felt like an ape who just touched the monolith when I come across that one.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Mind blown.
Speaker A:And then it's like, well, okay, the entire alien narrative has just fell apart because there's nothing in the movie to confirm the presence of aliens except the monolith itself.
Speaker A:And once you notice that the monolith represents something else, the whole alien narrative disappears and the movie becomes an entirely different experience.
Speaker A:And so, yeah, as Dennis started digging into the production history and is finding out how Kubrick fooled the investors, you know, they.
Speaker A:They thought they were getting this movie that was pro artificial intelligence and pro corporate technology going into space and pro space race and all that stuff.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And then I realized he'd absolutely suck at them all within a grandmaster chess move.
Speaker A:Yeah, I won't go on about that because I've talked about it in other videos, but.
Speaker A:Yeah, still.
Speaker A:Still, to this day, I consider that to be the greatest chess move that Kubrick ever made in all of his stuff that I've studied.
Speaker A: That manipulation of the: Speaker A:Yeah, it's ultimate chess move, but, yeah.
Speaker A:And then.
Speaker A:But after that, I started to get a different understanding of Kubrick films because up until that point, I was familiar with the Shining, Full Metal Jacket and to a lesser extent, Clockwork Orange, which I always just viewed as funny.
Speaker A:I just thought Clockwork Orange was absolutely hilarious.
Speaker A:I never had thought about it deeply.
Speaker A: ll Metal jacket, the Shining,: Speaker A:And I hadn't even seen Eyes Wide Shut at that point.
Speaker A:I think it was just those three Kubrick films that I really knew quite well.
Speaker A:Or at least I'd seen them lots of times.
Speaker A:I hadn't studied them, but I hadn't seen Eyes Wide Shut because I'd heard from everybody that it was crap.
Speaker A:So I didn't watch it.
Speaker A:And plus, Kubrick took so long to make it after Full Metal Jacket.
Speaker A:The Kubrick had fell.
Speaker A:Fallen off my radar anyway.
Speaker A:And then he died after Eyes Wide Shut was released.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And the trailer for Eyes Wide Shut didn't grab me.
Speaker A:I was like, okay, Tom Cruise and the kun.
Speaker A:Nicole, Nicole.
Speaker A:Nicole Kidman.
Speaker A:Getting it on.
Speaker A:Big deal.
Speaker A:Does porn, you know, what the hell do I need to watch that for?
Speaker A:I'm not really interested.
Speaker A:So I'd ignored Eyes Wide Shut.
Speaker A: ese things in The Shining and: Speaker A:I think I'll go and watch that Eyes Wide Shut film.
Speaker A:And then it's like, oh, my God.
Speaker A:He's got all this elitism stuff with these secret societies.
Speaker A:And I'd never been exposed to that stuff before.
Speaker A:I barely knew anything.
Speaker A:I didn't even know what Freemasons were or anything like that.
Speaker A:So that freaked me out and was like, okay, this.
Speaker A:There's more going on with this Kubrick guy.
Speaker A:He was trying to tell us things about various things with the world and stuff like that, you know?
Speaker A:And then I went and watched Dr.
Speaker A:Strange, Love.
Speaker A:Have you seen that?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:No, I haven't seen Doctor Strange Love.
Speaker B:The ones that I know I need to watch.
Speaker A:When you watch that one, yeah.
Speaker A:It becomes absolutely clear that Kubrick was extremely political and that he really had it in for the elites and the establishment.
Speaker A:He hated them.
Speaker A:When you watch Dr. Strangelove, it's so blatant.
Speaker A:And the movie makes a total mockery of the CIA.
Speaker A:CIA, The Pentagon, the top military officials who were pushing the Cold War and all these Megadeth scenarios.
Speaker A:And the band Megadeth get their name from the term Megadeth that was used by these warmongers.
Speaker A:They used to set out in their documentation.
Speaker A:The documentation was bloody public as well, which freaked out the.
Speaker A:The enemy.
Speaker A:And they would talk about all these different nuclear war scenarios.
Speaker A:Oh, if we do.
Speaker A:If we attack in this way, we end up with 20 megadeths, which means 20 million dead.
Speaker A:But if we attack in that way, it results in 150 megadeths.
Speaker A:That's not acceptable.
Speaker A:But this way over here, if we do that one, we only end up with 10 megadeths.
Speaker A:That's acceptable, isn't it?
Speaker A:10 million dead.
Speaker A:You know, these people were lunatics.
Speaker A:And Kubrick had been reading all of their stuff and he made the Dr. Strangelove movie to show how insane and stupid they were.
Speaker A:They were nowhere near as good tacticians as they thought they were.
Speaker A:For one thing, they were putting all these plans out publicly for the enemy to see.
Speaker A:You know, so when you watch Dr. Strangelove, you realize that early in his career, Kubrick had it in for the elites.
Speaker A:He familiarized themselves with aspects of their psychology and he wanted to expose some of the things that they were doing.
Speaker A:So when he did it with Dr. Strangelove, he did it very blatantly.
Speaker A:There was still hidden stuff going on in there.
Speaker A:Still got a lot of psychological things, especially his weird sexual stuff in that film.
Speaker A:But then after Dr. Strangelove and he'd made some enemies then he had to go more covert about what he was doing.
Speaker A: And so he made: Speaker A:And that way he protected himself from being attacked by his enemies who he was trying to expose.
Speaker A:And it just.
Speaker A:It seems to me that what he did with the rest of his career is he just made these movies that had a nice commercial surface level.
Speaker A:And underneath it all, he was putting this stuff in.
Speaker A:It wasn't just political, by the way.
Speaker A:There was a lot of other stuff.
Speaker A:He was interested in general psychology, about the human condition.
Speaker A:He was especially interested in duality.
Speaker A:The Full Metal Jackets got that.
Speaker A:And he spent all his career making these movies and not bloody telling anybody about the hidden aspects of it.
Speaker A:And I think.
Speaker A:I suspect that what he was doing was, on one level, he was thinking, these hidden things in the movies are gonna affect a lot of people subconsciously.
Speaker A:They won't even realize that they're being educated about things.
Speaker A:I think that was part of it.
Speaker A:But the other part is, I think he figured when I die, then people will look closer and discover all this stuff.
Speaker A:I think that was another.
Speaker A:In fact, that was probably a bigger grandson.
Speaker A:Grandmaster chess move.
Speaker A:I'll encode all this stuff and leave it as a legacy for people to explore after I'm dead.
Speaker A:And once I'm dead, nobody can attack me, nobody can destroy me.
Speaker A:And the movies are already out there.
Speaker A:They're all over the world, and they can't be taken away from the public because everyone's got the DVDs and everything else, you know.
Speaker A:And then something I found in the Stanley Kubrick archives book that I think really supports this is that one of Kubrick's favorite books was.
Speaker A:In fact, I've got it on the shelf here behind me, I think.
Speaker A:Yeah, there it is.
Speaker A:This one.
Speaker A:This is the Code breakers by Herman Kahn or David Kahn.
Speaker A:Who's Herman Kahn?
Speaker A:Herman Kahn is somebody else.
Speaker A:I've got him confused.
Speaker A:Yeah, David Kahn wrote the Code Breakers.
Speaker A:This is the history of secret writing, I think it's also known as.
Speaker A:And basically what this book is about.
Speaker A:It's about the history of encoding hidden messages and the efforts to break those codes.
Speaker A:And most of the book tells about it in the military sense.
Speaker A:And this goes back centuries here in Britain.
Speaker A:We had.
Speaker A:What was her name?
Speaker A:Mary Queen of Scots.
Speaker A:Apparently, there was all kinds of controversial things going on with hair.
Speaker A:I don't know much about the history of hair at all.
Speaker A:I just read bits of it in that book.
Speaker A:And she was in prison, I think, for a long time, and she was sending messages out encoded in letters.
Speaker A:She was using mathematical encoding systems that she learned to communicate with people outside prison via these letters.
Speaker A:So the book goes into that, and it goes into all these historical coding and encoding examples that go throughout history.
Speaker A:It's gone on for as long as military conflicts have gone on.
Speaker A:Encoding has gone on because, you know, in a war, you have to be able to get your message to other people.
Speaker A:You know, before they had electronic communications, they had to be able to send letters to other people.
Speaker A:You know, there's a.
Speaker A:There's a commander out in the battlefield hundreds of miles away.
Speaker A:We need to get a written message to them, but we don't want the other side to intercept it and know what the plans are.
Speaker A:So we will have an encoded message.
Speaker A:And the commander is already familiar with how that code should be broken down.
Speaker A:He's already been taught how to break that code.
Speaker A:So the message gets to him.
Speaker A:He decodes it.
Speaker A:Oh, I know what the plan is.
Speaker A:This is what is what we're doing next.
Speaker A:So Kubrick was really fascinated with all that.
Speaker A:And as I'm sure you know, he was fascinated with Napoleon and he made a lot of war movies and stuff.
Speaker A:So, yeah, apparently that was one of Kubrick's favorite books.
Speaker A:And that fits right in there with the idea that he was putting hidden messages in his own movies and designing his own codes.
Speaker A:And there's an aspect of encoding in that book which is called an Open code.
Speaker A:Now, an open code is where you put your message out, but it's not just sent directly to the person who you're trying to get the message to.
Speaker A:Like, in that battlefield scenario I was talking about, an open code would be something like what happened in the Pearl harbor attacks, because the Japanese spent about 6 months sending encoded messages all over the Pacific.
Speaker A:And the Americans knew that these encoded messages were going on.
Speaker A:And the Americans had all these teams of people trying to crack these codes, but loads of the codes were fake codes that were just there to confuse them.
Speaker A:And that's called a resource ban, where you exhaust the enemy's intelligence by with a stupid message that there's no point figuring out.
Speaker A:And they get their mathematical experts spending ages trying to suss this stuff.
Speaker A:So, yeah, the Japanese did a masterful set of encoding messages to confuse.
Speaker A:But in amongst them, there was an open code that was put out via.
Speaker A:It was put out via a weather report.
Speaker A:So the Japanese had weather reports put out on the radio for all of the ships to listen to and stuff like that.
Speaker A:And they then coded the attack messages in the weather reports.
Speaker A:And it was something like if a certain sentence was repeated twice, you know, northwest, north, east, winds, northeast, winds.
Speaker A:If it was said twice, that meant something, you know, and that's how they gave the go ahead for the Pearl harbor attack to actually happen.
Speaker A:And it's an open code because that weather report was going out to lots and lots of different sources, was being listened to by thousands and thousands of different people.
Speaker A:So one of the problems with encoding is if you do a direct encoding message, even if the other side don't break the code, at least they know who you've communicated with.
Speaker A:Does this all make sense, by the way?
Speaker A:I hope I'm not confusing you too much.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So you can tell, like.
Speaker B:Yeah, no, I get.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:The other side could say, oh, well, you sent an encoded message to that person.
Speaker A:Well, we don't know what you've said, but we know that that person is about to do something, so we'll attack them.
Speaker A:But when you send it as an open code and it goes all over the place, the other side have got no idea who the recipient was.
Speaker A:And that gives an advantage.
Speaker A:That's an open code.
Speaker A:And I think what Kubrick did with his movies was an open code.
Speaker A:He wasn't sending it to anyone specific.
Speaker A:He was sending it out to the whole world via those movies.
Speaker A:And then whoever starts to figure it out starts to break it down.
Speaker A:Great.
Speaker A:You know, and.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think that's basically how he did it.
Speaker A:And I think that's why it was one of his favorite books.
Speaker A:Books.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And that little bit helps me understand so much more your three part series on whether or not Stanley Kubrick was killed.
Speaker B:Because I've heard, of course, in the conspiracy world that, you know, as a result of Eyes Wide Shut, that he disclosed the secrets of the Freemasonic occult elites.
Speaker B:And so as a result, he was killed.
Speaker B:That was the last movie he released.
Speaker B:But I, I enjoyed that debunking video that you made about that, that, that claim.
Speaker B:But I mean, in a sense, like they were onto something with him.
Speaker B:Like he was really trying to spill what was going on behind the scenes.
Speaker B:But not in this overt way that Eyes Wide Shut makes it seem like he's really over the course of his career lampooning, ridiculing, you know, spilling the beans for everybody.
Speaker B:But it would take years for people to crack the code.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And the surface narrative of Eyes Wide Shut where it's like, oh my God, here's the big smoking gun conspiracy of a secret society that was so ham fisted.
Speaker A:It was too obvious.
Speaker A:Obvious for Kubrick.
Speaker A:He wouldn't have done it in that way.
Speaker A:He'd have done it in a more secretive, encoded way where you had to figure out for yourself.
Speaker A:And there was, there was an old quote of his.
Speaker A:He said something like, if you communicate something directly, it only goes in about half an inch, but if you put the audience in a position where they have to really think about what you're getting at and then they have to figure it out for themselves, then what they learn goes straight to the heart.
Speaker A:And so, yeah, I think that was too ham fisted.
Speaker A:That, that middle section, the, the secret society and Eyes Wide Shut, it was too obvious.
Speaker A:And I, I did a short little video on this a while ago for YouTube.
Speaker A:It was just basically explaining my, my core concept of what that scene is going on.
Speaker A:Because people are like, who are this secret society who he shows?
Speaker A:And I'm like, it's not any specific one.
Speaker A:He's took all of the major secret societies, the OT Freemasons and all the rest of them, and the Skull and Bones and all of them.
Speaker A:He's took them all and he's just fused them into one hybrid archetype society that's presented in the middle of the film.
Speaker A:And everyone's going to be guessing, oh, is it that group?
Speaker A:Is it that group?
Speaker A:Is it that group?
Speaker A:No, it's all of them.
Speaker A:He was attacking all of them at once, you know, and once you figure that out, it's like, okay, yeah, it makes the film a lot easier to understand.
Speaker B:This is a big reason why I was excited to talk to you because, you know, have a Christian podcast, Christian audience.
Speaker B:And so, you know, Christians are in a place like we would like to be able to enjoy many Hollywood films, but of course they're filled with so many unchristian and in many ways anti Christian themes.
Speaker B:And so there are a lot of podcasts that try to break that down.
Speaker B:But, you know, one of the ways that people can enjoy these movies without, you know, absorbing the values is to be critical about what they're watching.
Speaker B:To have their discernment up, to have their.
Speaker B:To have their minds going and not simply passively accept what's being present it to them, but instead to ask deep questions.
Speaker B:And I think, I think of some of the videos you've made, like the subconscious sex scene of the first.
Speaker B:The Suit for Superman movie, you know, where he, where, where Clark, where Superman takes Lois Lane flying and, and how they're, how the filmmakers are kind of what's going on, but we're not going to be so, so tasteful.
Speaker B:And then the, and then it's a brilliant.
Speaker A:It's a beautiful scene.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Actually, let's talk about it.
Speaker B:Go ahead and, go ahead and talk about it.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:For just.
Speaker B:It's the.
Speaker B:It's delay.
Speaker B:We're skipped out.
Speaker B:Please go ahead and talk about.
Speaker A:You skipped out for a moment there.
Speaker A:You skipped out for a moment.
Speaker A:I couldn't hear what you said.
Speaker A:There was a bit of lag or something.
Speaker A:You were talking about Superman with the subliminal sex scene.
Speaker A:And then.
Speaker A:I didn't hear what you said after that.
Speaker B:Oh, I was gonna say let's, let's go ahead and talk about that scene just as a brief overview and then I'll link to the video in the show notes because that's a way that filmmakers used to communicate things in a very subtle and refined way without beating you over the head with it.
Speaker B:So let's, let's talk about that scene to give people a sense of what's going on.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, Very glad to.
Speaker A:Because Superman, I think, is the best.
Speaker A:The first Superman movie for me is by far the best superhero movie ever made.
Speaker A:It's the most well written.
Speaker A:It's got the most powerful themes, it's got the most human truth.
Speaker A:I mean, yeah, that scene is absolutely gorgeous.
Speaker A:You know, it's a sex scene between Superman and Lois Lane, but it's presented as a beautiful flight in the clouds.
Speaker A:And, and when you get onto it it's so obvious.
Speaker A:Cause she's.
Speaker A:You can hear her voice, and she's saying.
Speaker A:She's saying all these things about them.
Speaker A:And you can fly and do you realize what you do to me?
Speaker A:The way you touch me?
Speaker A:And I was like, she's talking about shagging here.
Speaker A:Yeah, it is.
Speaker A:It's incredibly tasteful.
Speaker A:I do think kids movies that are made for kids and adults are a fantastic example throughout film history of how filmmakers, not just Kubrick, but other filmmakers, have made movies that have got double narratives.
Speaker A:They make one straightforward, easy, nice narrative for the kids and they have a subtext for the adults.
Speaker A:That's been going on with.
Speaker A:With movies since, like, the wizard of Oz.
Speaker A:The wizard of Oz is a fantastic movie for all the family.
Speaker A:As an adult, I still love it just as much as when I was a kid.
Speaker A:It's so much depth to it.
Speaker A:And, yeah, I mean, you know, the kids films are fantastic for that.
Speaker A:And Superman is a great example.
Speaker A:There's one aspect of that film which is extremely rare in cinema, and I think it makes this.
Speaker A:For me, this is the key thing that makes that film so special and makes the character so special is that a lot of the movie heroes that we have, even the ones that I love of, they tend to be very angry and cynical and quite negative.
Speaker A:And they tend to have a lot of vengefulness to them.
Speaker A:You know, that I'm gonna kill the bad guys and, oh, is the bad guy.
Speaker A:I'm gonna blow his kneecaps off and then blow his head off.
Speaker A:And so.
Speaker A:And we, the audience, are like, yeah, they deserve that, you know.
Speaker A:But Superman gets away from all of that.
Speaker A:Superman is like, here's a guy who, for the first hour of the movie, he suffers trauma after trauma.
Speaker A:His race gets killed.
Speaker A:He loses his parents.
Speaker A:He gets stranded on an alien planet with a race he doesn't belong to.
Speaker A:He grows up having to hide who he really is.
Speaker A:Then he loses a second father.
Speaker A:His second father, who was as important to him as the first one.
Speaker A:That father dies.
Speaker A:And the first hour of the movie is tragedy, tragedy, tragedy.
Speaker A:It's dark, and by the time you get to him putting on the Superman costume, you can't wait for Superman to show up because there's been so much sadness in the film.
Speaker A:In the first half, you're like, at last he's here with his bright, colorful cape and his flying.
Speaker A:Now we can enjoy some nice positivity.
Speaker A:Film is very clever on that level.
Speaker A:Whereas you watch other Superman movies that have come since, and they have to start off with A big action scene right at the beginning, and Superman's punching this person and hitting that person, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker A:But that first Superman movie goes down that route and.
Speaker A:But even though Superman has suffered and suffered and he's got as much reason to be negative and cynical as most people have more reason.
Speaker A:He could be a miserable git, but he's not.
Speaker A:He's this super polite, nice guy who sheds away all of the anger, and he's polite to people.
Speaker A:And he.
Speaker A:You know, even, like, there's a funny moment where just before he saves Lois Lane from falling off the building with the helicopter, he.
Speaker A:He runs into, like, a turnstile, and he changes quickly from Clark Kenton to Superman, and he comes running out the door.
Speaker A:And this is the first moment that anybody in the city sees him in that ridiculous, colorful suit.
Speaker A:And it is ridiculous.
Speaker A:It's silly.
Speaker A:And he comes out.
Speaker A:And the filmmakers, they capitalize on the comedy of the moment.
Speaker A:Instead of trying to fool the audience into thinking the guy looks super cool, they have this pimp look at him and go, whoa, man, that's a bad outfit.
Speaker A:And everyone laughs.
Speaker A:So the filmmakers take the audience's natural laughter at the ridiculous of the costume and they incorporate it into the scene and make it work on that level.
Speaker A:So that.
Speaker A:That was really cool.
Speaker A:But Superman then responds to the pimp.
Speaker A:Actually, there's arguments online about whether that guy is actually a pimp or not, but he looks like one.
Speaker A:And Superman just turns to and says, excuse me.
Speaker A:He's polite enough to say excuse me when he's trying to save this girl, top of the film.
Speaker A:Even then, he's polite, you know, So I just think he.
Speaker A:He's a very beautiful character in terms of how nice he is all the time.
Speaker A:And he never lets any kind of suffering turn him into a negative, angry, cynical, you know, and for some reason.
Speaker A:Reason, that heroic trait is largely missing just about everywhere else in cinema.
Speaker A:There probably are some other examples, but I can't think of any offhand.
Speaker A:He's the best example of it.
Speaker B:Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker B:I just actually saw that today in your Dark Knight Overrated video.
Speaker B:Just because I remember that movie from when I was a little kid.
Speaker B:And that's a really great point, is that there's something about the original Superman character where he's just.
Speaker B:He's polite, he's gracious, he's gentlemanly.
Speaker B:But of course, he's also, like, super powerful and doesn't mess around.
Speaker B:And then you compare that with superheroes today that are tending to get more gritty and more real.
Speaker B:And they're kind of the watchmen antihero kind of thing, where we've lost a sense of nobility in our heroes.
Speaker B:We've lost a sense of, like, being magnanimous, where we've lost that sense of real heroism.
Speaker B:And we take people with these crazy level of powers, and then we attempt to humanize them, like, who we would be.
Speaker B:Like, maybe the boys is a great example.
Speaker B:Like, all the pettiness that every person has.
Speaker B:And then you give that petty, egotistical person superpowers.
Speaker B:And those are our superheroes today.
Speaker B:And I think we've really lost something in that.
Speaker B:We've lost the notion of what it means to be heroic.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:I mean, there's great philosophy moments in the Superman film from Marlon Brando.
Speaker A:I mean, I know he got paid a huge amount of money for the little scenes that he did in that film, but I think he earned it because, you know, when he's saying goodbye to his baby son, I get almost tearful at that.
Speaker A:You know, he looks so earnest, and he's talking.
Speaker A:I leave everything to you.
Speaker A:And the father lives through.
Speaker A:The son, the son lives through.
Speaker A:Oh, my God.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker A:And then later on, when he's got all these memory crystals, where Superman's got his little sort of ice palace in the Arctic or whatever, he's got all these memory crystals from his father, and his father is talking to him, and his father's saying, you know, don't let ego, let the better of you.
Speaker A:Don't let vanity take over.
Speaker A:You know, keep some humility here.
Speaker A:But we never get that with the superhero movies.
Speaker A:There just seems to be a. I think that is part of a larger trend that has been going on for a long time that I really don't like.
Speaker A:I've really turned against this, where the hero has to be a victim in order to be a hero.
Speaker A:I'm a victim now.
Speaker A:I'm angry, and now I'm going to take revenge.
Speaker A:Revenge is not a heroic trait.
Speaker A:Revenge to make yourself feel better about something that happened to your past.
Speaker A:It's not heroic at all.
Speaker A:It's a pretty pathetic thing, really, if you're using violence as a last resort to do something constructive in the world.
Speaker A:World that's going to help people.
Speaker A:You know, fine, that can be good.
Speaker A:But don't use any more violence than you have to.
Speaker A:And don't take emotional glee in the violence.
Speaker A:You're not doing it for the enjoyments of it.
Speaker A:You're doing it because it's the only result that you've got the Only tactic you've got left to try and achieve this important thing.
Speaker A:But yeah, this, it's been going on across music as well.
Speaker A:You know, it's in the 90s.
Speaker A: I loved a lot of music in the: Speaker A:You listen to all these heavy metal bands like Korn and bands like that.
Speaker A:I got bullied at school.
Speaker A:I'm so angry.
Speaker A:Ra and it's like this was.
Speaker A:You were back in school.
Speaker A:Get over it, you idiot.
Speaker A:And, and I bet what the band went through in school wasn't even nearly as bad as what I saw on the streets here in Liverpool.
Speaker A:I carried a lot of that myself throughout my life.
Speaker A:And it's, it's, it's been like the last five or 10 years that I've really been like, no, I'm going to take all that anger and all that sense of victimhood and I'm going to push it all aside.
Speaker A:I am not a victim.
Speaker A:I had some bad things happen to me that were quite unfair in places.
Speaker A:Had some really bad things happened.
Speaker A:But I don't deserve anything, I don't deserve any praise for what I went through.
Speaker A:The world doesn't owe me jack for what I went through.
Speaker A:It just happened and it's gone and it's done and just move on and be like Superman.
Speaker A:Be happy and cheerful and polite and nice.
Speaker A:Don't go treating the world the way you got treated in the past.
Speaker A:Set a better example.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:But yeah, for some reason this victimhood thing and the anger that goes with it has become associated with movie heroes.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I'm tired of it.
Speaker B:I really appreciate you saying that because that's been something that's kind of been going on.
Speaker B:And in my corner I do a lot of work with men and there's been a rising sense of young men being feeling like they're victimized and feeling like they can be entitled to activity certain immature ways as a result.
Speaker B:And I always point them back to movie characters like Frodo Baggins or William Wallace.
Speaker B:These were men that genuinely suffered and they never let their suffering compromise their moral character.
Speaker B:And that used to be something that we just understood about heroes, is that the way that you establish your heroic credentials is that you suffer and you don't compromise your principles.
Speaker B:That's always the big question.
Speaker B:How is the hero going to defeat the villain without compromising his one PR principle.
Speaker B:But now it's almost like we have to tear down our heroes a little bit and have them stop being heroic.
Speaker A:So we turn them into villains.
Speaker A:Justified villains.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Batman's a great example.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:He's a miserable guest.
Speaker A:I actually, I've said this before and it pisses off the fans of Nolan.
Speaker A: I prefer the: Speaker B:Yeah, we'll talk about that.
Speaker B:Because in some, in some quarters those Batman Chris Nolan films are like, they're considered high art.
Speaker B:And you know, I've.
Speaker B:I've watched the Dark Knight many times.
Speaker B:I enjoy Heath Ledger's performance.
Speaker B:I think that's probably why people like it.
Speaker B:But I just remember watching the chase scene, the underground chase scene through the.
Speaker B:Through the tunnels of Chicago and I'm like, this is the most incoherent chase scene I've ever seen.
Speaker B:I can't tell what's going on.
Speaker B:And that was sort of a gateway to like, maybe there's.
Speaker B:Maybe this movie isn't as good as people think it is.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:I do think it's massively overrated.
Speaker A:But like you just said, I also love the Heath.
Speaker A:Heath Ledger performance as the Joker and the way the character's written is the most interesting aspect of the movie as well.
Speaker A:It's funny this because I sorted.
Speaker A:I mean, I'm writing the book on film studies at the moment.
Speaker A:I've been writing it for ages.
Speaker A:But I've got a chapter that I want to do which is all about a different type of hero that exists in movies.
Speaker A:Which is what?
Speaker A:Where the villain defies the surface narrative and Heath Ledger's Joker does that.
Speaker A:You know, Batman's got his big victim, save the city narrative and Joker comes along and is like, I'm just going to laugh at that narrative and spit in its face and I'm going to cause chaos.
Speaker A:And he is out to destroy the surface narrative of the movie.
Speaker A:Basically.
Speaker A:He's destroying everybody's narrative.
Speaker A:And I think a lot of people actually view him as a hero because of his defiance of narratives.
Speaker A:I would say if anything, that's probably the central appeal of that movie.
Speaker A:And it's an appeal that holds for me as well.
Speaker A:And I did make a list somewhere of other movie characters who do similar things.
Speaker A:Try to think of some examples off the top.
Speaker A:I may have head.
Speaker A:Oh yeah.
Speaker A:A very pretentiously written hero movie was Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner.
Speaker A:Did you ever see that one?
Speaker A: It was an old: Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Have you seen it?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Everything I do well, you know.
Speaker A:Do it for you.
Speaker B:Yeah, of course.
Speaker A:Ah, well, you know who I'm talking about.
Speaker A:Alan Rickman is the bad guy in that.
Speaker A:He's the hero who makes that.
Speaker A:I mean, a lot of people enjoyed that film, and I went to watch it, and everyone loved his scenes, Alan Rickman's scenes, because his character was defying the bull, conventional narrative, and was just, like, throwing it all in different new directions.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think there's a lot of villains in cinema who do this thing where they destroy the narrative.
Speaker A:They might get killed at the end of the film, but along the way, they.
Speaker A:They pretty much destroy the narrative and the.
Speaker A:I think the audience unconsciously view them as a role model, a hero.
Speaker A:And I think Hannibal Lecter has got an element of that in Silence of the Lambs as well, but done in a less comical way, because this is one of my favorite scenes in the history of cinema is when he's in the cage in the middle of the room, and he's got, like, this godlike.
Speaker A:Like godlike light shining down on him.
Speaker A:And he's questioning her about this experience as a kid where she was trying to sa Lambs and she couldn't do it.
Speaker A:So she's haunted by that memory.
Speaker A:And now she wants to save poor Catherine from the serial killer so that she will be relieved of this unconscious pain of this childhood memory.
Speaker A:And that is really powerful because it's like, how much does she really care about this victim of this serial killer?
Speaker A:Is it that she cares?
Speaker A:Or is it she just wants to reveal her, relieve herself of that memory?
Speaker A:She wants to push that memory back into the unconscious, so she feels that she has to save this girl for that.
Speaker A:That reason.
Speaker A:And Lecter sees through that, and he's like, nah.
Speaker A:And he tears apart the surface narrative that all these cops, they're all just out there to save victims from serial killers and FBI agents and all that.
Speaker A:They're all there to be the hero who does the right thing and saves the victim.
Speaker A:But reality isn't quite like that because a lot of them, they're there making money.
Speaker A:If they weren't getting paid, they wouldn't be there.
Speaker A:Some of them are there because they enjoy the prestige of being seen as the hero who saves people from serial killers or who catches them, or the prestige of being the person who psychologically broke down what was going on with the serial killer and figured them out and stuff like that.
Speaker A:There's a lot of selfishness in that area.
Speaker A:And you look at, like, psychologists who do studies of psychopaths.
Speaker A:And stuff like that.
Speaker A:And you read this stuff a lot of the time.
Speaker A:Those psychologists are incredibly egotistical.
Speaker A:And you realize this isn't even about the serial killers, this is about themselves, you know, And I mean, I get people saying this to me, it's like, oh, you're just doing these film studies to show how smart you are.
Speaker A:You could make that argument.
Speaker A:And you know, I'm not going to deny it.
Speaker A:That's probably a motive of mine.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:But yeah, I'm not going to deny that everybody's got this selfish element where, where we do things in the world which we say are for the good of other people.
Speaker A:And some of it is, of course, I don't think people are completely selfish, but I think almost all of the time when people do good deeds, there is a selfish element to it where they want to be seen to be doing the good deed.
Speaker A:And the people who go out and do the good deeds, where they're not going to be receiving recognition for it.
Speaker A:Those are the people who I go, oh, wow, okay, you had actually had nothing to gain from this personally, but you went out and did this good stuff anyway.
Speaker A:To me, those are like real heroes, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So no idea how I got off on that tangent?
Speaker A:Oh yeah, it was, yeah, the Hannibal Lecter tearing apart that, that narrative, you know, and, and Hannibal Lecter's actually got a very wicked sense of humor as well.
Speaker A:He's always mocking everybody around them, around them.
Speaker A:And the psychiatrist, he hates the, the psychiatrist who's got him in prison, he is an example of the self centered psychiatrist who doesn't really care.
Speaker A:He's just in it for the prestige.
Speaker A:And Lecter sees it a mile away and hates the guy and it's implied that he kills that guy at the end of the film and stuff.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So yeah, I love these heroes in villains clothing.
Speaker A:You could call it that.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:You touched on something a little bit earlier and I was thinking about this, like there's a way in which I think you were talking about Clockwork Orange, how Clockwork Orange is a violent movie, but you don't feel like it's as violent as some films today.
Speaker B:And I actually agree with you.
Speaker B:And that got me thinking that there's a way in which movies of the past, you know, like whether it be the Godfather is the one that's coming to mind right now, like that's a violent movie and there's all kinds of adult themes.
Speaker B:But I don't watch, I don't walk away from having seen classic films of the 70s and 80s, 80s feeling gross.
Speaker B:Like there's a way in which the films are presented with such skill that I'm able to watch what's going on and feel troubled or disturbed or appropriately moved by it.
Speaker B:But I don't walk away feeling like, oh, I need to take a shower.
Speaker B:But there's a way in which films today, they are not as skillfully made in a way, because I watch them and I walk away feeling like, oh, I just.
Speaker B:I wish I had never seen that.
Speaker B:And what do you think has happened to movies over the past maybe 20 or 30 years, years where that change has come across?
Speaker B:Or is that something that you've noticed as well?
Speaker A:Oh, yeah, definitely I've noticed it and I'm not too keen on it.
Speaker A:I've had a lot of debates with this.
Speaker A:About this subject with people on Facebook and stuff.
Speaker A:I've got like a Facebook group on film studies and stuff.
Speaker A:And I've had a lot of debates for people on there about it and I've discussed it with other people about certain horror movies.
Speaker A: I mean, the: Speaker A:60s.
Speaker A:And you know, there are scenes from films in that era which I still look back at and I'm thinking you might have gone a bit too far there.
Speaker A:I still think the Exorcist crucifix masturbation scene, both morally and in terms of the violence on screen, I think that was.
Speaker A:I like the film.
Speaker A:I've done studies on it, but I think that went a little bit too far.
Speaker A:I remember when I was a couple kid, I wasn't too disturbed by it myself because I read the novel when I was like nine and then I saw the movie.
Speaker A:So I was prepared for it.
Speaker A:But I know that other kids in the teens and stuff who saw it were deeply, deeply disturbed by that scene.
Speaker A:And they tears, you know, And I think they went a bit far with that one in the Exorcist.
Speaker A:But overall the movie is still incredibly powerful.
Speaker A:And there's some other examples of extreme violence.
Speaker A:And garba.
Speaker A:Somehow it was.
Speaker A:It didn't really go too far in most examples.
Speaker A:I mean, two.
Speaker A:Two examples that I find interesting is like both John Carpenter's the Thing and Hellraiser are both incredibly gory on a physical, visceral level, but somehow they're not really too sickening.
Speaker A:At least I don't find that they are.
Speaker A:I know some people are.
Speaker A:Have been.
Speaker A:Critics were quite disturbed by the thing when it came out and it showed in their negative reviews.
Speaker A:But I think like with the thing, because it was a surrealistic monster changing shape, the level of gore didn't feel real.
Speaker A:It just felt like bizarre.
Speaker A:You know, it felt like, like something out of a dream or a nightmare.
Speaker A:It didn't, didn't feel like you were watching real vibe violence, even though it looked amazing on screen.
Speaker A:And then with Clive Barker's Hellraiser, extremely violent.
Speaker A:But it's all done in a magical framing.
Speaker A:You know, you've got like magical hooks flying out on chains and pulling things, parts, people's body apart and stuff like that.
Speaker A:But this is stuff that would never happen in reality.
Speaker A:So there's a disconnect by the fact that it's magical.
Speaker A:I think Hellraiser is very clever on that level.
Speaker A:I know a lot of people are still grossed about grossed out by it anyway.
Speaker A: o decline, I would say in the: Speaker A:There was still a lot of good stuff made in the 90s, but the downhill slope had started there.
Speaker A: the great horror films of the: Speaker A:And they had the amazing scripts to go with it and stuff like that.
Speaker A: And then in the: Speaker A:And so I think they started resorting to the gross out torture type stuff.
Speaker A:And like the first Saw movie was all about here's a load of different ways that a person could be tortured to death.
Speaker A:And I know it's got a lot of fans and I've had good friends from over the years who told me that this is like their favorite movie or one of their favorite movies.
Speaker A:And you mentioned it earlier that it was one of your favorite movies as well.
Speaker A:77 never really did it for me.
Speaker A:I think Finch is a good director.
Speaker A:I think he directs the film quite well.
Speaker A:But to me the film was just a showcase of nastiness.
Speaker A:It doesn't show most of it on screen, but it's just like, oh my God, someone got tortured to death in this way.
Speaker A:And then you got this saw 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Speaker A:And you had all the Hellraiser movies that came after that that never had the psychological magic of the first film and just seemed to be this market emerging of these sadistic movies.
Speaker A: hough we did have that in the: Speaker A:But because there was great horror movies coming out, those video nasty movies just got shoved aside and forgotten because they were trash.
Speaker A:But nowadays we don't really have many great horror movies that are outshining the stupid sadistic ones.
Speaker A: of the video nasties from the: Speaker A:Those are being redone now, but they're being done with higher budgets to make them look slick like proper Hollywood productions.
Speaker A:But conceptually they're no better than those old stupid video nasties.
Speaker A:The one exception among those video nasties that I think is a work of art is a Texas Chainsaw Matt Massacre.
Speaker A:There's a ton of depth to that film, especially to do with animal rights and stuff like that.
Speaker A:It's a powerful movie and it's not nearly as gory as those other video nasties.
Speaker A: u had with heavy metal in the: Speaker A:And it's like, okay, is someone gonna come along, make some well composed music now?
Speaker A:You know, and that seems to be going on with the films.
Speaker A:So you've got the Saw movies and stuff like that and the, the terrifier movies that have come out, which like a next level sadisticness that have got virtually nothing interesting going on conceptually.
Speaker A:But because there's an absence of really, really good psychological horror movies, it's like a lot of people just lapping up these sadistic movies because they don't know what the hell else to do.
Speaker A: Hereditary, that came out in: Speaker A:For me, that was a rare example, modern example of a horror movie that was really, really deep.
Speaker A: What was the one from: Speaker A:It's an Australian movie about a woman and her kid.
Speaker A:The Babadook.
Speaker A:Did you ever see the Babadook horror film?
Speaker A: I think that was: Speaker A:That's a good.
Speaker B:I'm not a big horror fan.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:Well, the Babadook is not gory, deeply psychological, very well made.
Speaker A: Hereditary as well from: Speaker A:But those are such rare examples in horror.
Speaker A:But yeah, just this.
Speaker A:In your face, black gore.
Speaker A:We're going to show you new ways of being Sadistic to people.
Speaker A:That's what it's become.
Speaker A:And how far do we let it go?
Speaker A:Because I'm not one for censorship generally.
Speaker A:I don't like it generally, but I know from the.
Speaker A:The books that I've read on real serial killer cases and, and some of the people I worked with, you know, when I worked in mental health, I worked with pedophiles and stuff like that, and I read some of their case files and I knew some of the stuff that went on there.
Speaker A:I'm like, are we going to let these movies just carry.
Speaker A:Carry on in those directions?
Speaker A:Are we going to get to the point where you're going to start seeing kids tortured to death?
Speaker A:Because that's what the Terrifier films are starting to move towards.
Speaker A:That director has been putting little things in his movies where he's making it clear that he wants to show kids being tortured to death.
Speaker A:And even the trailer for Terrifier 3 showed a kid going down to open his Christmas presents, and then you see the villain there with an axe, ready to chop the kid up.
Speaker A:And that is the central appeal of the trailer.
Speaker A:Hey, watch this movie, and you might see a kid being axed to death, you know, and it's really, really pathetic because I know how far.
Speaker A:How much further it can go based upon the real cases.
Speaker A:I mean, I won't go into any details here about the stuff that I've come across over the years and studying real cases, but there's real stuff that's gone on that's way worse than even in the terrifying movies.
Speaker A:And I don't ever want to see anybody put that stuff on screen.
Speaker A:But I'm not seeing the critics calling out these filmmakers and saying, why are you increasing the levels of sadism year by, by year?
Speaker A:When is it going to stop and when is it going to become illegal to show these levels of sadism?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Oh, dark and cynical, but, yeah, that's.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:No, I. I appreciate you.
Speaker B:I appreciate you saying that because I think of.
Speaker B:I think of the it movies, you know, which is essentially about, you know, a killer alien from outer space who eats children.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:But thanks, Stephen King, for that.
Speaker B:That.
Speaker B:And I. I think about the.
Speaker B:The movie, the American version of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where you go down into the torture basement, you know, of.
Speaker B:Of a otherwise seemingly normal guy and just the increasing.
Speaker A:What.
Speaker B:What I liked about.
Speaker B:What I liked about 7 wasn't the.
Speaker B:It wasn't the torture aspect of it.
Speaker B:I actually found a lot of that stuff really disturbing.
Speaker B:But I.
Speaker B:But I appreciate it.
Speaker B:It posed the question to the audience at the end.
Speaker B:End.
Speaker B:Like, how would you handle this situation?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Like, is there.
Speaker B:Is there a place for vengeance?
Speaker B:Like, it's a.
Speaker B:It's a. I appreciated the question of that paradox.
Speaker B:I don't think I could watch the movie now, but at least it.
Speaker B:It raised an interesting thought.
Speaker B:Like, how do you.
Speaker B:How do you handle this situation?
Speaker B:Like, what's the right.
Speaker B:What is the objectively right thing to do here?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:You do give the guy what he wants.
Speaker B:Or do you.
Speaker B:Or do you not?
Speaker B:How do you.
Speaker B:How do you navigate that?
Speaker B:But the.
Speaker B:But I think you point out something very real, like the increasing sadistic.
Speaker B:That.
Speaker B:Which seems to be.
Speaker B:Like, it's all.
Speaker B:It's pornographic in nature.
Speaker B:You know, it's meant for spectacle as opposed to sending any deeper message.
Speaker B:Please go ahead.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, it's.
Speaker A:I mentioned much earlier on we were talking about humiliation combined with violence and in movies, and that's something we've started to see in some of these sadistic movies as well, is not only are we gonna see people tortured to death in really horrific ways, but it's gonna be presented as if it's funny and enjoyable.
Speaker A:And I've had arguments with people about these terrifier films where they've made the argument that, oh, no, it's just presented as being funny.
Speaker A:And I'm like, what's funny about that?
Speaker A:What's funny about someone being tortured to death?
Speaker A:Nothing.
Speaker A: ck to, you know, like, in the: Speaker A:You know, they weren't intelligent, but there was an interesting psychology to those movies that I've always wanted to explore, since somehow the.
Speaker A:The Friday the 13th movies were different to what we're getting now.
Speaker A:They had gore, they had little bits of sadism, but it wasn't about the sadism so much.
Speaker A:And a lot of the deaths were funny.
Speaker A:And I remember used to watch Friday the 13th movies in my teens with my friends and when I was a kid as well, and we used to laugh at the deaths, but I think part of why we were laughing at the deaths is because the special effects were a bit crap a lot of the time, and the level of sadism wasn't over the top.
Speaker A:Somehow it was different to what we're getting now.
Speaker A:And not that I'm.
Speaker A:I'm not saying that The Friday the 13th movie is a great art or anything like that, you know?
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:But, yeah, I don't.
Speaker A:I don't know what's going to happen with this increasing level of sadism thing.
Speaker A:I think sooner or later some filmmaker is going to come along and make something that is so sick that it causes a huge backlash.
Speaker A:Sometimes that does happen in movies.
Speaker A:But I suppose it has happened in the respect that some of these really horrible movies have been utter commercial failures because.
Speaker A:Because of the depravity that they've gone to.
Speaker A:So I guess a lot of them pay the price.
Speaker A:But I am finding it interesting that audiences seem to be getting more and more interested in watching higher levels of sadism in movies.
Speaker A:It's not just the filmmakers.
Speaker A:I mean, they're responding to an audience desire.
Speaker A:And maybe that all ties back in with what we were talking about earlier about the victimhood mentality and the wanting to have angry, vengeful heroes.
Speaker A:Maybe this is an extension of that, where the sadistic villain in the horror movie is like a hero.
Speaker A:I guess that's always existed to an extent with horror movies.
Speaker A:And Freddy Krueger, he's an interesting one, isn't he?
Speaker A:A kind of sadistic.
Speaker A:But people get posters of him like he's a hero.
Speaker A:You know, stuff like that.
Speaker A:And this is a very interesting aspect of audience psyche, how they love the heroes.
Speaker A:But yeah, I mean, I don't know.
Speaker A:There seems to be a lot of anger in society, a lot of sense of victimhood.
Speaker A:And we're seeing it playing out in movies and in politics.
Speaker A:It's like everybody wants to see it be seen as the victim group so that they can claim.
Speaker A:So that they can be entirely entitled.
Speaker A:It's funny because you've got like one group that says, we don't like that group over there because they are entitled and they've victimized us.
Speaker A:So now we're the victims and now we're the entitled ones.
Speaker A:They weren't pissed off about them being entitled.
Speaker A:They just wanted to have that entitlement for themselves.
Speaker A:And I'm seeing a lot of that going on.
Speaker A:So you're getting these groups that criticize another group for being nasty to everybody.
Speaker A:They claim they're the victim, and then they're brutal to that group and then they become the nasty ones.
Speaker A:You know, there's loads of that going on.
Speaker A:And I don't know if it's being encouraged on purpose.
Speaker A:I don't know if it's just part of some bizarre psychological trend.
Speaker A:And then different groups are all competing with each other to be who can be the angriest victim and therefore the most entitled to privilege privileges.
Speaker A:You know, there's loads of that going on.
Speaker A:In the politics and stuff.
Speaker A:And I think that crosses over with the enthusiasm for anger from our movie heroes and movie villains and the.
Speaker A:The nasties.
Speaker A:Like a lot of people in the political sphere, they want to see their political opponents killed and they want to see them killed painfully and humiliated.
Speaker A:Humiliated, even tortured.
Speaker A:Remember when Colonel Gaddafi was killed in Libya and the footage came out and there was some photos.
Speaker A:It didn't really see much, but he was dragged out of a hole.
Speaker A:And I. I don't know exactly how much, but I got the impression that he was tortured to death.
Speaker A:And you could see these asshole politicians like Hillary Clinton cheering and they're loving it.
Speaker A:You know, they're not just glad that he was killed, they're glad that he died painfully and that it was brutal and sadistic.
Speaker A:And we're seeing that from these various political and social camps where the hatred for the other is so much that it's almost on serial killer level.
Speaker A:They want the other side to suffer painfully and die and be executed.
Speaker A:We're seeing loads of that.
Speaker A:And somebody gets.
Speaker A:If somebody gets killed another.
Speaker A:Another social group.
Speaker A:Cheers for it, you know, So I wasn't expecting this conversation to go in this way, by the way.
Speaker A:But, yeah, I think that broader thing going on in society is being reflected in the way that movies have gone.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, no, I appreciate us getting here because as I've enjoyed your content over the years, I've seen from time to time you'll do more meta analyses of various trends in filmmaking.
Speaker B:Particularly the one that I listened to recently was the decline of strong male heroes.
Speaker B:Not physically strong superheroes, but men of character.
Speaker B:Character.
Speaker B:The strong man of character.
Speaker B:That was a trend that I had been noticing in films for a while, and especially the trend to subvert classic male heroes.
Speaker B:You know, like we have to subvert the Terminator, Jean Luc Picard and, you know, Indiana Jones and all this.
Speaker B:We have to undo all of their mythologies.
Speaker B:And so I've seen you comment on that, and I think there was a video of yours that I was looking for.
Speaker B:Why films have declined since the 90s.
Speaker B:I think maybe I'm not.
Speaker B:Maybe I'm misremembering the title, but I.
Speaker A:Was asking what it's been like.
Speaker A:Sorry, you cut out there.
Speaker A:I couldn't hear that.
Speaker A:Oh, yeah, yeah, that.
Speaker A:That video, you're Fancy.
Speaker A:That was on the second channel.
Speaker A:That was.
Speaker A:That video was why Modern movies are so Awful or something like that.
Speaker A:But yeah, yeah, I was.
Speaker A:That.
Speaker A:That was like a one hour just talking to the camera presentation.
Speaker A:I was pretty surprised at how positive the engagement was with that video because so many people feel it.
Speaker A:And you know, every now and then I got people come along and say, no, you're just being nostalgic about the past and.
Speaker A:Which is garbage.
Speaker A:I am always looking for great new content, modern content to cover because I want to, I want to be able to talk to younger audiences who are not familiar with these old movies and stuff, but I am not finding this level of depth with the modern movies.
Speaker A:You know, when I get people say, oh, it's nostalgia, I'm like, well, please point me to a modern movie that has the depth of Alien or the Thing or the Godfather or Goodfellas or whatever where.
Speaker A:And they can hardly ever point me to one.
Speaker A:You know, they might say Joker, but Joker's a ripoff of Taxi Driver and the King of Comedy.
Speaker A:It's, it's, it's, it's crap.
Speaker A:It's, it's rubbish.
Speaker A:It's not even that well made.
Speaker A:And the, the, the, the performance of the lead actor was nowhere near as good as performances he did in movies like the Master.
Speaker A:You know, the Master was really good.
Speaker A:But yeah, I'm always looking for modern movies to praise and when I find them, I do.
Speaker A:I loved Hereditary.
Speaker A:I liked S. Craig Zala's films Dragged Across Concrete and Brawl and cell block 99.
Speaker A:They are very brutal and sadistic and violent.
Speaker A:Probably a bit over the top in that respect, but they are deep as well, and intelligent.
Speaker A:So I've given those praise.
Speaker A:I've praised some kids movies that have come out and stuff like that, but I'm search high on low for modern movies to really dig into and I just can hardly find it anywhere.
Speaker A:It's weird the way it's all gone.
Speaker A:The, the, the, the level of creativity has gone downhill.
Speaker A:And I mean, actually there's a video I've got planned on this about the increasing amount of artificiality that's going on.
Speaker A:And it's like.
Speaker A:It seems to me that most people today who are trying to, to do creative art, they're just trying to imitate previous art that's gone in the past.
Speaker A:I started noticing this in the filmmaking community when I was involved and I was making films.
Speaker A:I would meet so many people who were writing scripts where they were just trying to imitate Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and there was no personal expression, there was no new ideas.
Speaker A:It's just like I just want to jump on the bandwagon of something great that somebody else was, has made and I want to achieve the, the, the Coolery of Tarantino or Scorsese or whatever.
Speaker A:And same with music as well.
Speaker A:I've been finding that a severe lack of originality in music.
Speaker A:There is still some out there, but not much.
Speaker A: The: Speaker A:There was a lot of unusual styles coming out then and, but then it died off and for the last 20, 25 years, I've hardly been hearing any new music that doesn't sound like a million songs I've heard before.
Speaker A:And seeing it with movies as well.
Speaker A:Video games have started to go like that as well.
Speaker A:But video games have had the advantage of technical advancements over the last few decades.
Speaker A:But that's kind of flatlined as well because the video games have reached a level of quality and graphics.
Speaker A:I would say going back at least 10 years ago, the graphical quality of video games was at a high enough level that it didn't need to become any more realistic looking.
Speaker A:Okay, we've got this new console coming out and it's in 4K.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:Big deal.
Speaker A:So what the image is in 4K, it doesn't make the gameplay any better.
Speaker A:And so video games, the creativity seems to be flatlining a lot because the technology is not moving forward.
Speaker A:Probably the same with music as well.
Speaker A:If people started inventing new instruments that no one had heard before, then we could get new music that comes out of that.
Speaker A:That would be great, wouldn't it?
Speaker A:Oh, I've invented five new instruments to give us new types of sounds in our head.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:I listen, I'll be first there to listen.
Speaker A:And yeah, the, the, the, the, the filmmaking technology with movies is flatlined and as well, because we've had CGI for years.
Speaker A:You can show anything with CGI and it's boring because no matter what you put on screen, I know it's CGI and I know it's just somebody who's just been fiddling around with vector graphics on a computer and stuff.
Speaker A:And yeah, so what?
Speaker A:I've already seen this a million times.
Speaker A:It doesn't matter if you've got 5,000 things moving around on screen at once.
Speaker A:Fancy flashing lights and everything.
Speaker A:It's just the same, same crap.
Speaker A:And I was, I was thinking about this a while ago.
Speaker A:It's like if you go and watch a stage magician where they're, they're doing things like card tricks and oh, I'm going to soar a person in half and then, oh, we split the box and you can see the person's legs and the person and there's no blood and the audience are like, how the hell has that been done?
Speaker A:And, you know, you get the stage magicians who do these amazing physical things on stage.
Speaker A:You're like, how.
Speaker A:How are they tricking my mind with that?
Speaker A:That is impressive.
Speaker A:But if you just replace that stage magician with a screen and a CGI version of the magic trick, the magic is gone because it's like somebody just did that with a computer.
Speaker A:There's no real trick there.
Speaker A:So I think with the practical effects in movies when people know the thing was actually in front of the camera, it was a proper model.
Speaker A:It was like those fabulous creatures in the John Carpenter's the Thing, it was actually in front of the camera and they've used like animatronics and they've covered the thing with egg yolk and, and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker A:And there's somehow they've made this thing that looks totally real.
Speaker A:The fact that, you know, it was done in front of a camera is like, wow.
Speaker A:But you, you could show the exact same thing and it's done with cgi.
Speaker A:And I'm like, so.
Speaker A:Or what?
Speaker A:There's.
Speaker A:There's no magic trick there.
Speaker A:You know, there's a real artistry to be able.
Speaker A:Being able to create physical effects that are convincing where you've actually done it with physical objects instead of just a computer manipulation.
Speaker A:I think that's why practical effects still rule over cgi, but that's all being forgotten now and it's all becoming CGI and.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So there seems to be a social trend of artificiality where anybody who wants to achieve anything creatively, they think that the way to do it is to copy someone else.
Speaker A:And I suspect that conformity, modern day conformity, is a major aspect of this.
Speaker A:In the same way that people are scared to say what they think and believe in case it offends somebody.
Speaker A:I think people are afraid to do anything in the creative art that is original.
Speaker A:Original.
Speaker A:In case somebody is offended or doesn't like it or disapproves.
Speaker A:So they go the safe route.
Speaker A:Oh, audiences and critics were okay with that.
Speaker A:They approved of it.
Speaker A:So if I copy that, I'm safe.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So there's a general fear of actually doing creative work because you're putting yourself on the line when you do that.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:It's funny that you say all this because, you know, a lot of my friends, friends and I, we talk a lot about the Lord of the Rings movies, the first three.
Speaker B:And what a difference it was between the first Lord of the Rings movies that emphasized practical effects and handmade all the different suits of armor out of a chain link.
Speaker B:I've actually been to the Weta Workshop in New Zealand.
Speaker B:And then you have the Hobbit movies that came next by Peter Jackson and those relied on CGI and sort of an inflated set of plot points that he just kind of invented out of whole cloth.
Speaker B:And just the difference between the first three Star wars films, the original trilogy versus the prequel trilogy versus the sequels, and how they just don't.
Speaker B:They don't connect with audiences.
Speaker B:In fact, I haven't watched it, but I've heard the reason why people are enjoying andor is because there's been more of an emphasis on practical effects versus CGI or story and acting.
Speaker B:People, no matter who they are, no matter what generation they're from, they connect with what is human.
Speaker B:The great stories, great performances, and even a photograph of something through the lens of a camera versus something crafted in a digital artificial environment.
Speaker B:But it's being forced on us that these are the options that we have to pull from rather than movies or TV shows that are made with artistry and skill.
Speaker B:It's like, ah, we'll just throw the actor in front of a green screen and comp in the background.
Speaker B:It's like, no, just shoot the film.
Speaker B:But it seems like we don't have that option anymore.
Speaker A:Yeah, it seems to be all disappearance.
Speaker A:It seems to be part of a massive trend, or a push, whichever you want to call it, towards just making everything digital.
Speaker A:And I find this a real bother because it disturbs me how addicted people are getting to mobile phones.
Speaker A:And I've avoided it for years.
Speaker A:I mean, my, my main mobile phone that I use only does text messages and phone calls.
Speaker A:It's, it's a, it's an Android phone, but I deliberately have not enabled Internet access on it.
Speaker A:I don't want to be swiping the net on this little screen like this.
Speaker A:When I do stuff on the Internet, I'm doing it at home with the big screen screen and the desktop computer or on a laptop.
Speaker A:I do not want to be doing Internet on my mobile phone.
Speaker A:I don't want to be emailing people or doing Facebook messages on a mobile phone.
Speaker A:I don't like it aesthetically this stupid little thing in your hand.
Speaker A:And I don't want to be carrying the Internet with me everywhere in everyday life.
Speaker A:So for years I've been doing a thing of.
Speaker A:Sometimes I'll go out for the day and I'll leave the phone at home.
Speaker A:And a lot of people now, amazing.
Speaker A:You tell them, you tell people, oh, Yeah, I left my phone at home today.
Speaker A:I just left at home for about five or six hours.
Speaker A:And they have this look of like, you went out without your phone, you were disconnected for six hours.
Speaker A:Oh, my God.
Speaker A:Disaster.
Speaker A:It's pathetic how people have been suckered into this and they are living through this little divine device.
Speaker A:And of course, the.
Speaker A:The technocrats love this because they want to get everybody just constantly hooked up digitally.
Speaker A:So everywhere you go and everything you do is constantly tracked and traced, and it's used to market things to you.
Speaker A:And before long it's like, oh, you can't do your banking unless it's through a mobile phone and you can't do this.
Speaker A:And they want it so that you.
Speaker A:You.
Speaker A:You have to use your mobile phone for everybody, everything.
Speaker A:And that basically becomes your embedded chip.
Speaker A:They can't persuade us to embed a chip in our arms, so we're tracked and traced.
Speaker A:So instead that is being sold to us via the mobile phone.
Speaker A:And it's gradually being put into people's lives as an increasingly dependent thing that you can't do without.
Speaker A:You can't go anywhere without it.
Speaker A:I actually bought a couple of weeks, weeks ago a Faraday blocker, which is like a pouch that you can put your mobile phone in, and it blocks all signal.
Speaker A:So now I can take my phone out with me, go where I want, and if I do need to use the phone, I can just pull it out of the Faraday block and just use it for five minutes and put it back in.
Speaker A:But nobody's going to be seeing Facebook things that says, Rob Ager is in this location having lunch with this person.
Speaker A:Oh, isn't that great?
Speaker A:I don't want anybody knowing where the hell I am and what I'm doing.
Speaker A:So, you know.
Speaker A:But yeah, there's.
Speaker A:There seems to be far too few people fighting back against this increasing imposition of mobile phone dependency.
Speaker A:And the kids as well, they're getting addicted to them big time from an early age.
Speaker A:Yeah, I don't like this stuff.
Speaker A: warning about this as well in: Speaker A:And as far as I'm concerned, that whole sequence where they are fighting with HAL is basically symbolic of humanity as a whole fighting back against the technocrats who just want to digitize everything and have constant surveillance.
Speaker A: s onto that stuff way back in: Speaker A:It's still relevant today.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So for.
Speaker B:So for my listeners, you know, who are who I would imagine agree and empathize, you know, with your point of view.
Speaker B:I certainly do.
Speaker B:What sort of films do you recommend that are, like, genuinely wholesome?
Speaker B:Like, we talked about Superman earlier.
Speaker B:Earlier that Superman is a superhero film.
Speaker B:And super Superman is not dark, he's not angsty, he has every reason to be, but instead he's gracious and gentlemanly.
Speaker B:And it's a wholesome film that even depicts kind of a love scene in a way that, you know, you can watch it.
Speaker B:You don't really know what's going on unless you start unpacking it.
Speaker B:What are some films that you would recommend that have really stood the test of time as being genuinely wholesome?
Speaker B:Like, there's no.
Speaker B:You don't have to fast forward through anything or cover your eyes.
Speaker B:Is like, this is a film that presents genuine virtue in a way that has stood the test of time and is truly edifying instead of something you have to shrink back from.
Speaker A:Oh, yeah, it's a good question.
Speaker A:I'm trying to.
Speaker A: e that springs to mind is the: Speaker A:Oliver Twist, have you seen that one?
Speaker B:Maybe years ago.
Speaker A:Have you seen it?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I think that's an absolutely amazing, amazing film on all levels.
Speaker A:Beautifully crafted, and I don't like musicals, but that one, I think is absolutely fantastic.
Speaker A:There's like.
Speaker A:There's a.
Speaker A:There's a.
Speaker A:There's a kind of honesty in that film.
Speaker A:I mean, the Oliver Twist story was great because it exposed the workhouses and how the kids were treated in the warehouses.
Speaker A:They were slaves, basically.
Speaker A:And the poverty of the people in London trying to survive at the time and stuff like that.
Speaker A:Like that.
Speaker A:I think that's an amazing movie.
Speaker A:There's some that I can think of and I can't remember the names of them.
Speaker A:Some of them are all black and white ones.
Speaker A:There was a movie I saw for the first time about six or eight months ago, which somebody had recommended to me.
Speaker A:And I can't remember the name of this film for the life of me, but you could probably find it in an Internet search.
Speaker A: nyone who's watching it was a: Speaker A:And he likes to design buildings the way he likes to design them.
Speaker A:He doesn't like to be pressurized by investors into imitating some other building or doing something that the critics will like or Whatever.
Speaker A:He is a true artist.
Speaker A:Artist of building architecture.
Speaker A:And the movie is all about his struggles to maintain his vision of the kind of buildings that he wants to design.
Speaker A:Now, this sounds probably quite boring to a lot of people.
Speaker A:I want to watch a movie about an architect trying to keep creative control over how he designs buildings.
Speaker A:I was blown away by this movie.
Speaker A:The Diaspora dialogue was gorgeous throughout.
Speaker A:There was a really unusual relationship that the guy had with a woman in the film.
Speaker A:And she was super smart and she was aware of how powerful people with money in the architecture industry were going to try and destroy him and destroy his reputation because he wasn't toeing the line creatively.
Speaker A:And she was trying to warn him about.
Speaker A:About it.
Speaker A:And there was a chemistry between him and this girl, and you could see that they were ready to fall in love, but she kept resisting them and wouldn't go out with him.
Speaker A:And instead she goes out with this other guy who's an architect, who's a total.
Speaker A:Well, he's not an.
Speaker A:He's just a very formal, conformist architect or something like that.
Speaker A:I think that's who she went out with.
Speaker A:Her.
Speaker A:It might have even been a friend of his.
Speaker A:So she goes out with this other guy who she claims clearly doesn't want to be with, and she marries him.
Speaker A:And later on she reveals that she married this other guy so that she couldn't marry the creative architect.
Speaker A:And the reason she didn't want to marry the creative architect is because she did not want to fall in love with them and then have to watch him be destroyed.
Speaker A:I was like, that's beautiful.
Speaker A:And deep, you know?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I cannot remember the name of this movie.
Speaker B:Is it the Fountain?
Speaker B:It's the Fountain Head.
Speaker A:The Fountain Head.
Speaker A:Have you seen it yet?
Speaker A:How did you know the name of the movie?
Speaker B:I've read the book because it's a famous book by Ein.
Speaker B:Ayn Rand.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I haven't read the book.
Speaker A:I do need to read it, but I loved the movie.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So you know, what a beautiful book.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:You know how beautiful that is?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:That is one of the most.
Speaker A:That was the first.
Speaker A:First time in many years I'd watched a movie that I'd not seen before, where I came out of it feeling incredibly uplifted and wholesome and inspired and.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:That was a great one.
Speaker A:And then the old one, there was a movie called It's a Beautiful Life.
Speaker A:Was it It's a Wonderful Life?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:That's incredibly wholesome.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Who was in it?
Speaker A:Was it Gary Cooper or somebody else or Gregory Peck or somebody.
Speaker A:It was Gary Cooper.
Speaker A:Cooper was.
Speaker A:He.
Speaker A:Can't remember.
Speaker B:Oh, my goodness.
Speaker B:Yeah, No, I can't think of his name right now.
Speaker B:Terrible.
Speaker B:I usually.
Speaker A:The guy who was in a lot of Hitchcock films, actually, I think it was.
Speaker A:Wasn't Gary Cooper.
Speaker A:It was somebody else.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Jimmy Stewart.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Was it?
Speaker B:Jimmy Stewart is a.
Speaker B:That's it.
Speaker B:Yep.
Speaker A:Yeah, Jimmy Stewart.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah, that.
Speaker A:That's a great, wholesome film.
Speaker A:But, yeah, you know what?
Speaker A:I'm really struggling to think of other ones off the top of my head.
Speaker A:I know there are lots of.
Speaker A:To them, but I. I've forgotten them.
Speaker A:I. I guess I've just seen too many dark films as well, you know?
Speaker B:Yeah, well, that's.
Speaker B:That's why I appreciate your analysis of Kubrick's films because, you know, here's a obviously incredibly talented filmmaker who tells very deep stories.
Speaker B:And of course, they can be very visually striking and violent and in many cases.
Speaker B:But he's actually trying to say something to the audience that they need deep.
Speaker B: Like, for example,: Speaker B:And the Shining is, of course, about.
Speaker B:As you've explained so wonderfully, it's sort of about family trauma and abuse cycles, which I never would have picked up on.
Speaker B:And so there's a way that a film can be difficult to watch, and yet it leaves you edified.
Speaker B:But now we're watching films that are just difficult to watch for the sake of it.
Speaker B:You don't walk away edified.
Speaker B:You walk away with spectacular, practical.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And not lift it up at all.
Speaker B:So maybe there's cause to go focus on.
Speaker B:Well, maybe these earlier films wanted to say something really wholesome to us in a way that is forbidden now.
Speaker B:And so that's.
Speaker B:That's why I wanted to know.
Speaker B:It's like, where can we turn if we want to see something wholesome that isn't the Lord of the rings for the 15th time?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Well, it's.
Speaker A:Recently, this.
Speaker A:This past year, I've become really interested in language.
Speaker A:Language and how people's thinking is limited by language that we're taught to use.
Speaker A:Because almost all of the words that we speak are not words that we created.
Speaker A:Somebody else created those words.
Speaker A:I'm not saying it's all like a big conspiracy, but we're handed all of these verbal descriptions of the word and these.
Speaker A:These little puzzle piece words that we sort of piece together to create sentences.
Speaker A:And very rare, Rarely, very rarely do human beings actually stop and go.
Speaker A:You know, what I'm not going to use the words that I've been taught.
Speaker A:I'm going to invent new words that nobody else has ever heard.
Speaker A:I'm going to invent new words for concepts that I've thought of and I'm going to incorporate those words into my thinking and I'm going to start speaking those words to other people.
Speaker A:I've gotten really interested in this as a way of expanding the thinking and I've got like a file that I've put together, a word file that's got something like, I don't know, 150 words that I've invented.
Speaker A:Some of them I've memorized and put them into my thinking.
Speaker A:But I want to start making videos on this stuff because I think this could be something pretty powerful.
Speaker A:I've not seen anybody else doing this, not, not in a planned way, you know, but it was, it was just the last few days it occurred to me that I mean what you're talking about there, where people are afraid to say what they're thinking and express things.
Speaker A:You know, a lot of it's down to what they call political correctness.
Speaker A:That term has been going around everywhere.
Speaker A:Political correctness.
Speaker A:Political correctness.
Speaker A:And I was questioning it the other day and I was like, why the hell do we call it political correctness?
Speaker A:There's nothing correct about it.
Speaker A:Let's start calling it political wrongness.
Speaker A:That's the new phrase that I'm going to use for that from now on.
Speaker A:I am not into political wrongness.
Speaker A:Don't give me political wrong wrongness.
Speaker A:That's so much more powerful way of responding to that phrase.
Speaker A:But yeah, it seems like political wrongness has taken hold of people where they are afraid to express anything other than things that have been pre approved by the lie machine news media or another phrase that I now use, use for the, the news media is the defamation industry because so much of the content that they put out is just out to just destroy people's reputations and stuff, you know, and I've got a lot of personal experience with this as well, which I'm due to make a video of because I, I caught out somebody many years ago who had been conducting a very, very nasty long term smear campaign against me online using all kinds of fake accounts and stuff like that.
Speaker A:And this was done with corporate connections as well.
Speaker A:And I uncovered this guy was a, a journalist who used to work for the sun newspaper.
Speaker A:Nasty guy.
Speaker A:At least in my experience he was a nasty guy.
Speaker A:And yeah, I finally uncovered him and got him on camera and exposed them.
Speaker A:I didn't make it public online line, but I used it in a court case to sue the company and that brought all that to an end.
Speaker A:So I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of the defamation industry.
Speaker A:And yeah, people have been beaten into fear of saying what they really think and stuff like that.
Speaker A:And I think something that some of that is starting to break down over the years.
Speaker A:A lot of things, these political wrongness narratives have started to fall apart in ways that are extremely embarrassing for the people who've been pushing them.
Speaker A:So yeah, it's great to see a lot of that falling apart, but it's slowly falling apart.
Speaker A:But I think of it as like, say like the people in North Korea who are just so mind controlled and restricted.
Speaker A:If you took those people out of North Korea and brought them into the rest of the world, they wouldn't all just suddenly go, hey, I'm free now I can behave in a more free, exaggerated way.
Speaker A:They would continue to be subservient, afraid to say what they're thinking.
Speaker A:And very slowly they would recover or develop their ability to think and act freely.
Speaker A:And I think that's going on with the political wrongness.
Speaker A:It is being destroyed.
Speaker A:It's fallen apart part.
Speaker A:It's losing its credibility.
Speaker A:The people who are pushing it are themselves becoming the defamed ones as they deserve to be.
Speaker A:But it's going to take a while for society to gradually recover from the trauma of restricted speech.
Speaker A:And it's going to take people a while to start having the courage to go, oh, I'm going to make some unusual music.
Speaker A:I'm going to make an unusual movie that gets into some kind of concepts that are not pre approved by the media.
Speaker A:I don't know how long that's going to take.
Speaker A:I would like it to take one year, but I suspect it might take a decade or two.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:And we're actually seeing quite a lot of anger in response to that which we've talked about in this conversation about how as the political wrongness sort of breaks down, the response isn't relief, the response is an outburst of anger that's expressing itself in all of these different ways ways in heroic and in anti heroic ways.
Speaker B:That's the part that I've identified that's quite scary and it's natural.
Speaker B:But again, I love the example of Superman that it's like, no, he never let himself fall down to that level.
Speaker B:He always held himself above in that level.
Speaker B:There's an image of heroism there that I Think we're losing touch with.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:It probably does all connect.
Speaker A:All of that political wrongness stuff where people have been suppressed and they've hated that stuff for many years, really hated it.
Speaker A:I mean, when you talk to people privately about it, I find they go off on a rant.
Speaker A:Most people, I find, more often than not, they go off on a rant about how they hate it, what they call political correctness, which I now call political wrongness.
Speaker A:And it's built up a lot of anger in them.
Speaker A:And yeah, maybe that's fueling this.
Speaker A:The, the, the, the desire for vengeful heroes.
Speaker A:And you can understand people going, well, you know, we've been psychologically suppressed by these for years, restricted what we can say, what we can do and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker A:And, and now I want to see those people punished.
Speaker A:There's probably a lot of that going on.
Speaker A:So, I mean, I found it interesting.
Speaker A:There was one the other week and like, the whole Israel versus Iran thing, I'm not going to go off a political rant here.
Speaker A:This is an example of.
Speaker A:I don't take either side in that conflict.
Speaker A:I'm not really interested in it.
Speaker A:For me, it's just a conflict that's separate to me.
Speaker A:I don't buy into either of the ideologies or archaic beliefs of either of those societies.
Speaker A:As far as I'm concerned, it's.
Speaker A:You want to attack each other, you work it out yourselves, you know.
Speaker A:But, you know, there's the thing of Greta Thunberg.
Speaker A:She went over to try and campaign for the Gazan people and, and then she got arrested by the Israelis and, and then shipped back on a plane.
Speaker A:And a lot of people hate Greta Thunberg, and I don't even know what the hell she was doing in the political arena in the first place.
Speaker A:She's just some angry kid.
Speaker A:And again, that's an example.
Speaker A:Example of the anger.
Speaker A:She's, you know, she's.
Speaker A:They brought her up in front of the UN and she's like that rant, rant, rant.
Speaker A:Anger, anger.
Speaker A:Oh, she's a big hero because she's angry.
Speaker A:But yeah, she got sent back from Israel and the people who hate her were so happy about it, they were just posting endless memes about it.
Speaker A:A lot of them with like, AI generated pictures of her sitting on a plane with a Jewish guy offering us some meat and stuff.
Speaker A:And a lot of it was very fun, but I was kind of like, you're not doing the Superman thing here.
Speaker A:You should be more nice about this stuff.
Speaker A:And, yeah, so I think there's a ton of anger in society about this political wrongness movement.
Speaker A:And I think a lot of those people want to see violence done to the people who've been suppressing their speech for a long time.
Speaker A:There's a lot of anger there, I think.
Speaker A:Don't know how that will go.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And I think maybe we can just.
Speaker B:We can bring it back to.
Speaker B:We can bring it back to Kubrick then, and we can close on this as maybe tie this a little bit to the Shining.
Speaker B:And again, I don't want to give away what you've sussed out from the film, because I think it's very important, but maybe give the listeners or the viewers sort of a clue about what might be going on in that film that relates to some of the things that we're seeing, maybe generationally.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Well, we've got the Jack Torrance character flipping back and forth along US history.
Speaker A: He shows up in a: Speaker A:In the photograph at the end of the film, he shows up in a bar with a bartender who is clearly not from his generation.
Speaker A:It seems to me that Jack Nicholson, I don't think he realized this, but I think this is what Kubrick was doing.
Speaker A:Jack Kubrick was making it so that Jack Nicholson was playing multiple generations of the same family.
Speaker A: o Jack Nicholson is playing a: Speaker A:And throughout the film, whenever the timeline is bouncing around these different areas, we are seeing generations of Jack Torrance who was abusive to his family and attacks his own family.
Speaker A:You get to the next generation, it happens again.
Speaker A:And the thing about axe murdering and stuff, that's surface level, traditional horror, but I think the axe murder and stuff and attacking the family, it's not literally about murder.
Speaker A:When it comes to the conceptual side of it with the family generations, the.
Speaker A:The murder thing is just as it symbolizes abuse of his own family.
Speaker A:So you get the father who was abusive to his wife and his kid, and then it moves on.
Speaker A:And the next, The.
Speaker A:The kid grows up and becomes the abuser to his.
Speaker A:To his wife and kid, and then that kid grows up and does it the same.
Speaker A:And you got the cycle of abuse, abuse going again and again between different generations of the Torrance family.
Speaker A: y you see Jack Nicholson in a: Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And that's why you see him in a bar talking to Lloyd, but his name is never mentioned.
Speaker A:And that's why you See him talking to Delbert Grady.
Speaker A:But first names are never mentioned.
Speaker A:It's always Mr. Torrance.
Speaker A:It's never the first name.
Speaker A:And, yeah, I mean, it's a bit complex to try and break it down now without showing the scenes from the movie.
Speaker A:But I think that's the sort of core thing that's going on.
Speaker A:Cycles of abuse across generations.
Speaker A:And Kubrick had done this before as well.
Speaker A:He'd done it specifically before the Shining in the movie before it called Barry Lyndon, where you've got this character who comes from poverty and he gets involved in various wars.
Speaker A:He fights, he gets.
Speaker A:He suffers a lot of abuse from military commanders.
Speaker A:And as he moves up the social ranks of society and eventually becomes one of the establishment by marrying a woman who's got lots of money, he then becomes an abuser towards his stepson.
Speaker A:And he is treating his stepson in ways that he was treated in the past past.
Speaker A:And funny enough, his own son and stepson in that movie, they look very much like Danny Torrance in the Shining.
Speaker A:I think there's a parallel there going on between the two movies.
Speaker A:So you got that generational abuse thing going on in Barry Lyndon, and then you've got it in the Shining as well.
Speaker A:The father abuses the family.
Speaker A:The kid grows up having learned from the father how to be an abuser and thinks that's the way to be.
Speaker A:A man does the same.
Speaker A:And it goes on generation after generation.
Speaker A:And we see this in real life with real families.
Speaker A:It doesn't have to just be abusive father, by the way.
Speaker A:It can be abusive mother.
Speaker A:Abusive parent.
Speaker A:Creates kids who then go on and think that's normal and abuse.
Speaker A:And Kubrick was very aware of that.
Speaker A:Not just at the family level, but at the generational level in terms of politics and economics as well.
Speaker A:We have generations of elitists who Kubrick didn't like.
Speaker A:And he knew their son psychology quite well.
Speaker A:And just like Jack Torrance in the film and his generation of forefathers, those elites, they sort of abuse society and they teach their own offspring how to become the next abusers of society.
Speaker A:And on and on and on it goes.
Speaker A:And you see clear examples of that, like would say George Bush Senior and George Bush Junior.
Speaker A:You know, one of them is the asshole president who does a load of bad things.
Speaker A:Things.
Speaker A:And then his son comes along and does bad things as well.
Speaker A:You know, you.
Speaker A:You literally see it at the family level with these elitist societies.
Speaker A:A lot of the time, they pass on their abusive ideology to their kids.
Speaker A:I think Kubrick was aware of that.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And breaking those cycles is.
Speaker B:Is so important to choose a.
Speaker B:To choose a higher road and say, okay, I. I see the cycles that I'm participating in, and I don't want to be a part of that at all.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:How do you get people to do that, though?
Speaker A:I guess you have to educate them about the pattern that they are caught up in, because they don't really realize, you know, I think Kubrick is trying to make people aware of that historical pattern.
Speaker A:By making people aware, they then have more of a chance of breaking out a bit.
Speaker A:I mean, I know this just to bring that.
Speaker B:Go ahead.
Speaker A:There's elements of this that have gone on in my own life I know of, because, you know, I grew up in neighborhoods with people who were very emotionally brutal, nasty, humiliating people.
Speaker A:And I became one of them because it's like, I felt like that's how you sort of survive in that kind of environment.
Speaker A:And I carry.
Speaker A:Carried that psychological brutality with me for many years afterwards.
Speaker A:And I. I was.
Speaker A:I was very capable of saying cutting horrible things to people, to knock them down if I didn't like them.
Speaker A:And, yeah, I've chosen to break out of that, you know, to try and become a lot more nice to people.
Speaker A:You know, I've still got that in reserve in case it's ever needed if someone's trying to destroy me, you know, So I. I don't totally regret having learned how to do that.
Speaker A:Well, like, I'm not sure how much I want to say this, but I'm going to give it a go anyway.
Speaker A:My father had a nasty mouth on him at times as well.
Speaker A:He was a very cool guy in a lot of ways.
Speaker A:He was a psychiatric nurse.
Speaker A:He knew how to help people when he wanted to.
Speaker A:But he could also be very emotionally cruel to people in his comments.
Speaker A:He could be extremely humiliating to people.
Speaker A:He was to me at times and to my little brother.
Speaker A:But other times, he would be extremely loving.
Speaker A:He was never violent to us, though.
Speaker A:But emotionally, he could hit you with words like a punch, you know?
Speaker A:But the reason he was like that is because he got treated that way by certain people in his own family.
Speaker A:When he was younger and the neighborhoods he grew up in, he was treated like that.
Speaker A:It was passed on to him.
Speaker A:Him.
Speaker A:And I got treated like that by him and by people in my neighborhood, and I became like that.
Speaker A:And, yeah, I recognized the pattern and was like, no, I'm not going to be like that.
Speaker A:I'm going to break out of that.
Speaker A:And I think I managed to do that.
Speaker A:Fairly early in life actually, because, you know, studying all the psychology in my late teens and early 20s and that was at a point where I decided, right, who's influenced me and how have they influenced me and am I happy with that influence?
Speaker A:So I started assessing all the influences of major people in my life and what those people had instilled in me behaviorally and mentally.
Speaker A:And then stopping and ask myself and say, well, I will choose to keep that, but I'm going to discard that.
Speaker A:That was something that all these self help and psychology books prompted me into doing that.
Speaker A:Yeah, but if I wasn't prompted by those books, I'm not sure that I'd be a very nice person today.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, praise God for that.
Speaker B:Praise God that you found the resources that you did that helped you, that helped you break free of all that.
Speaker B:Because I think as a result of that, you've been able to establish yourself in things that you're good at, find your own skills, find your own abilities and take your mind and take your incisive observations to apply it to something pro social and production productive and bless millions of people around the world.
Speaker B:This is what it's all about.
Speaker B:It's not throwing out our childhood entirely, but harvesting what's good and polishing off the rest and then applying it for the benefit of civilization, of humanity, of people.
Speaker A:Yeah, and there's tons and tons of people doing it as well.
Speaker A:It's brilliant.
Speaker A:I mean, I know we've talked a lot in this conversation about a lot of bad stuff going on in the world and a lot of bad social trends, but I do love that there's so many people on social media media who are trying really hard.
Speaker A:I mean, you're an example of it yourself.
Speaker A:You know, there's so many people with various amounts of followers, you know, even how many subscribers you got on your channel now, is it?
Speaker A:I think I checked.
Speaker B:11,000.
Speaker A:Yeah, 11,000.
Speaker A:But still, that's great.
Speaker A:That's fantastic.
Speaker A:11,000 people.
Speaker A:And you add up all of the videos that you've done and all the people who see them, it has an effect.
Speaker A:It's worth doing.
Speaker A:Even if you only get 10,000 subscribers subscribers, it's still worth doing because you're still having an influence in a good way, you know, so it's funny that the term influencer gets used in a negative way and yet so much of it is positive.
Speaker A:And yeah, I feel really proud that there are so many people out there online who are really trying hard to learn about all this stuff, teach each other, learn from each other.
Speaker A:It's an amazing time for that kind of thing.
Speaker A:And I think overall.
Speaker A:Overall, we are winning against the political wrongness.
Speaker A:I think we're beating them.
Speaker A:We have been beating them for years now, and it seems to be continuing along that path.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker B:Well, I'm definitely grateful to you and for your work, as I think I've mentioned a few times, because you've taught me how to think about a lot of this stuff in ways that I don't know how I would have learned otherwise.
Speaker B:I don't know how I would have learned to watch a scene in.
Speaker B:In a movie or to see things through a director's eyes and try and understand the subtext and the subliminal and subconscious aspects of what's going on so that I can better shield myself against propaganda, but also enjoy movies to a deeper level.
Speaker B:And I think everyone listening today has probably gotten a sense of why that's the case.
Speaker B:So I'm very grateful for you and for your work and for your story.
Speaker A:Thanks very much.
Speaker A:This is one of the best interviews I've ever done with anyone.
Speaker A:You've asked really, really good question questions.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So I think you've probably drawn more out of me in this conversation than anyone has in any podcast interview.
Speaker A:So, yeah, thanks.
Speaker A:It's been very enjoyable for me.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Thank you, sir.
Speaker B:I'm very blessed by that.
Speaker B:Praise God.
Speaker B:So where would you like to send people to find more about you, find out more about you and what you do?
Speaker A:Well, the website collativelearning.com, c o l L A T I V E. I'm sure you can put that on the screen or in the link in the video description.
Speaker A:The main channel is also called Collated of Learning.
Speaker A:We're a couple of other channels.
Speaker A:One's just called Rob Aga.
Speaker A:Another one's on gaming called AEGA Games.
Speaker A:That's a new channel.
Speaker A:And doing a lot of stuff on games there, because games is a very interesting area that I'm curious about.
Speaker A:I think there's an art form going on there that is.
Speaker A:That could lead to great things.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So, I mean, if you.
Speaker A:If you just search film analysis Rob Aga on YouTube, you'll find a ton of stuff there.
Speaker B:Yeah, wonderful.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Games.
Speaker B:Games will be our next conversation because I have a lot of experience in that world as well, so perhaps next time.
Speaker A:Yeah, sounds great.
Speaker A:Okay, great.
Speaker B:Thank you so much, Rob.
Speaker A:All right, thanks.
Speaker B:Sa.
