Episode 68: Maybe It’s Ghibelline

This week’s prompts: Charcoal, Record, 1265, Story

Neal and Lauren dive into political chaos, medieval poetry beef, and paranoid thrillers for an episode that swings from 13th-century Florence to 1980s Philadelphia.

Lauren takes the year 1265 and spins it into a fiery tour through Dante Alighieri’s life, exile, enemies, and the giant, cosmic fanfiction we now call The Divine Comedy. She breaks down the Guelphs vs. Ghibellines feud (and then the even pettier White vs. Black Guelph split), how Dante wrote in Italian instead of Latin to reshape an entire language, and why Beatrice lives rent-free in the author’s imagination. From the nine circles of Hell to that iconic three-part afterlife road trip with Virgil as tour guide, Lauren untangles how one poet turned politics, heartbreak, and theology into the most influential self-insert narrative in history.

Meanwhile, Neal takes “Record” literally with Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) — the sound-obsessed, paranoia-drenched thriller where John Travolta accidentally captures audio evidence of an assassination. Neal digs into De Palma’s cinematic lineage, how Blow Out riffs on Blow-Up and The Conversation, why the film basically invented its own genre of political dread, and the glorious insanity of the director’s beloved split-diopter shots. Expect Travolta love, Nancy Allen appreciation, Lithgow creepiness, and a crash-course in De Palma’s entire filmmaking DNA.

PLUS:
🔥 Dante’s exile and the pettiest political grudges of medieval Italy
📚 Why The Divine Comedy shaped the afterlife in Western art
🎙️ Blow Out and the conspiracy thriller hall of fame
🔪 John Lithgow doing John Lithgow things
🎥 Split diopters, deep focus, and De Palma’s visual mischief

BLOW OUT FULL FILM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z20y1YqCc0Y

SPLIT DIOPTER SHORT EXPLANATION:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6HkQvH5QvM

Next week’s prompts: Turquoise, 110, Watermark

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