Half the plot involves a man reuniting with his father—and his species—after being raised by Christmas elves. The other involves saving Christmas itself from the growing cynicism of humanity. And so like many of its genre, the film “Elf” connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities, despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Indeed, there’s a sense in which Christmas elves are, in making gifts, hard at work maintaining the social fabric against the forces of individual selfishness. But in this story, the elf in question turns out to be a bumbling man-child—a holy fool of sorts—who helps re-enchant communal life by holding up its social deficits to a naive mirror. Wes & Erin discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community.

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0:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: [email protected] subtextpodcast.

0:32 Wes Alwan: Half the plot involves a man reuniting with his father and his species after being raised by Christmas elves. The other involves saving Christmas itself from the growing cynicism of humanity. And so, like many of its genre, the film Elf connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Indeed, there's a sense in which Christmas elves are, in making gifts, hard at work maintaining the social fabric against the forces of individual selfishness. But in this story, the elf in question turns out to be a bumbling man child, a holy fool of sorts, who helps re enchant communal life by holding up its social deficits to a naive mirror. Today we discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, did you believe in Santa Claus growing up?

1:33 Erin O'Luanaigh: I did. I remember when I stopped believing.

1:36 Wes Alwan: How old were you?

1:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think I was maybe five. I asked my mom if Santa was real, and she said, what do you think? And that was when I knew. I think it was actually from watching so many Christmas movies in which kids don't believe. And there's actually an element of these movies that kind of gives it away for kids that are maybe too young to be watching them or not, you know, like the target audience, I think I was for many of them, but there are so many questioning children. So many, so much crisis of faith, crises of faith in these films. And I picked up on that. That's why I asked her. And then she said, what do you think? And I was like, if it's not an immediate yes, then I'm guessing it's a no.

2:22 Wes Alwan: Right?

2:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: How old are you?

2:24 Wes Alwan: I never believed in Santa Claus, actually.

2:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: That makes a lot of sense.

2:30 Wes Alwan: Really? Are you calling me a cynic? So Christmas was very, very exciting for me as a kid. Still, Santa Claus wasn't required. It felt very magical, anyway. And then it occurred to me. So, yeah, so what are we doing? Why are we deceiving children in this way? Why are we brainwashing them? To believe in something that they're going to eventually find out is not true.

2:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, if that's what you took from

2:59 Wes Alwan: this movie, couldn't we just do it with all the lights and presents and the. Do we need a mythical fat man giving out the presents, going down the chimney, doing all these very implausible things that with just a little rationality you can figure out? Yeah, that's not happening. I don't even have a chimney.

3:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. I liked that element in the Santa Claus, which we'll have to cover next year. But that element where they explain. Is that the movie where they explain how Santa comes into houses without chimneys and he goes through the radiator?

3:37 Wes Alwan: I don't know that I've seen it.

3:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: The Tim Allen Santa Claus. You've not seen it?

3:41 Wes Alwan: No, I haven't.

3:42 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, wow.

3:43 Wes Alwan: It's possible, but it would have been so long ago, but I don't remember. But I'm not a big Tim Allen fan, honestly.

3:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I can't say that I am either, but I think that came out when I was right at the age to watch it.

3:55 Wes Alwan: Do you still get the warm and fuzzy feeling from Christmas or.

3:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, of course. I love Christmas. I love Christmas. That's my favorite thing. I don't know if we're going to get. I'll be up front. I don't know if we're going to get more than half an hour out of this movie. Do you have a. Do you have a grand philosophical interpretation

4:15 Wes Alwan: of something you would.

4:18 Erin O'Luanaigh: I took a few years.

4:19 Wes Alwan: I did a little work on this. I did some research into.

4:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: You did.

4:25 Wes Alwan: I did some research into elves, actually. And then I thought, well, he's human. What the fuck am I doing? Like, he's not even a real elf. Why do I care? I was curious about how the history of the mythology. I didn't get too much into it. And then how that evolved into there being Christmas elves, which, you know, it turns out not to be that interesting. Someone put it in the story and Santa was called a jolly elf at one point, you know, in a story. And then he had these little helper elves. I liked the beginning of this movie where they sort of run through a few different elements of. Well, I don't know if it's. You would call it elf mythology, but one of them is. One is straight out of the Brothers Grimm, right? The cobbler goes to sleep and then the elves make the shoes. And I didn't reread the fairy tale. I remember reading it as a kid and enjoying it. A lot. And actually, it was just a few years ago. I think I reread every Grimm fairy tale, but I don't remember any of the other details. Like why wasn't the cobbler making his own shoes? Do you remember?

5:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, I have not read that, I think, since I was a kid. Yeah, yeah.

5:31 Wes Alwan: But in the film, the elves, as the narrator is describing all of this, you get little vignettes. And so in this one, the elves call the guy a lazy bum, which I thought was very interesting in light of all the other little riffs that they do on the industriousness of the elves as compared to human beings. And, you know. Right. So Buddy is. He's only making 85 etching sketches in the required time. Who knows? I don't remember if they said what that time is, if that's at every day, whereas the quota is 1000. Or the fact that the elves are happy being at work constantly. And as soon as Christmas is over, they celebrate. And you think it's the time for them to relax, but they just begin working again for. For the next Christmas. So that interested me, this idea of potentially as helpers, but something that offsets the fact. So they sort of become embodiments of industriousness and complement us to the extent that we lack it. If you go backwards in the mythology, they're a little bit more sinister elves. Right. And they could help or they could hurt, but they could be causes of sickness. And it's not really until, I think, the 18th and 19th century, they get. Well, actually, no, as early as Renaissance, and the Renaissance with Shakespeare, for instance, where they kind of get conflated with fairies. And so they might be mischievous, but not necessarily evil. Right. And then you get this evolution into what we see in Grimm and then what we see with Christmas. So they are sort of an ad hoc. A very ad hoc addition to a very ad hoc tradition, this Christmas pagan tradition that's been fused with Christianity.

7:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think in Tolkien, he makes this a little bit more explicit, but it's almost like they're angels.

7:20 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

7:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, there's an angelic quality where they're. They're there to sort of prop up humanity. For Christmas elves, it's just on the one day, I suppose. But, yeah, there's something like they spend their whole lives, like guardian angels or something, sort of taking care of, looking after humans. And I think in Tolkien, this, the extent. I don't know if there's. If there's a vast trove of secondary literature about the 2003 elf. But all I did was look at the IMDb trivia page, which actually I had to give up. There are so many hundreds of entries on the IMDb trivia page for Elf. But it was fascinating, and I reread the Roger Ebert review to see what he had to say, and not surprisingly, he loved it. But the IMDb trivia page mentioned that Jon Favreau put in so many Lord of the Rings references throughout the movie, which I thought I had picked up on at one point. I can't remember the exact point, but I had no idea the extent to which the two were overlapping. You know, even the. The shot of Buddy crossing the mountains, you know, the snowy mountaintop. Apparently that was footage from Lord of the Rings that I don't know. Yeah. Like, it didn't. It didn't go into detail. So maybe. And maybe it wasn't even correct, because I know these things can be added by users. So I don't even know how it looked very realistic. It didn't look like that was digitally added, that Buddy was digitally added in. So I don't know if that's even true. But it certainly looks like the snowy mountaintop that they're all going across in Fellowship.

8:43 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And Tolkien is working off a, you know, I guess a Nordic or Icelandic tradition in which elves can be these. Well, they're angelic, as you said. At a certain point in the history, they become something more and more angelic. And in any case, they always are mediators between humanity and another. Right. Supernatural world.

9:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right.

9:06 Wes Alwan: And a supernatural world that's more pagan, more associated with nature as opposed to. Right. A monotheistic, transcendent deity.

9:16 Erin O'Luanaigh: There's a reading of this film in which Walter is the protagonist and Will Ferrell, fulfilling the function of an elf in the film is kind of the Clarence who comes down to George Bailey.

9:29 Wes Alwan: I was going to make that comparison to Clarence. Yeah.

9:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: Even though he goes through his own crisis. There's the scene on the bridge that Buddy. It's clearly shot to reference It's Wonderful Life, the bridge scene where he's kind of giving up, and that's when he sees Santa's sleigh descending on Central Park. Oh, it was the Ringwraiths. That was it. It was the Central park rangers as the Ringwraiths. That was.

9:52 Wes Alwan: Oh, yes, yes, of course.

9:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: The moment that it triggered that connection to Lord of the Rings. And then I saw on the trivia page that that was quite deliberate.

10:00 Wes Alwan: Right, right. You brought up Clarence, who I think is sort of adjacent to this, there's this holy fool theme, right? So you see it in various movies, like being there, even Charlie Chaplin's Tramp. It's all over literature. Mishkin and Dostoevsky's the Idiot, Alyosha to some extent, and then film again. Forrest Gump, you know. And it's something that has deep roots in Christianity, of course, right? Mystic fools and prophets and things like that. And. And also in ancient Greece, right, The cynics who sort of ignore social conventions. So whether you're ignoring social conventions, I mean, the fool is oblivious to all these social conventions. So that sets up this interesting satire on society as we know it. Because it's too cynical, it's too self aware, in a sense. It's so self aware that it loses sight of itself. Its self awareness becomes too cynical.

10:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: When I was thinking about what we were going to talk about today on my notepad, the only thing that I had in the upper right hand corner, which is where I write themes that I'd like to talk about on the podcast, the only two words I had were cynicism and sugar. And I thought that looks like the world's most depressing breakfast cereal or something. Cynicism, sugar. But then luckily I did. I went for a walk and had a chance to sort of cogitate a little more about this. And. And I did think about certain religious connections in the film. I wanna address what you. What you've already said about work. It occurred to me how much the film is about work. And that also then made me think about. Of course I'm gonna think about this faith in works and the idea of the religious conversion as being sort of essential to the Christmas movie. So I mean, in a way that's kind of every movie. You could argue that whatever sort of growth the protagonist undergoes maybe is a religious conversion. But because this belief in Santa thing, a common trope in these Christmas movies, and usually a cynical parent has to undergo some faith conversion over the course of the film, or maybe a cynical kid or something. That seems like a stand in, of course, for a belief in some sort of larger religion. Larger than the belief in Santa Claus, if there is such a religion. But we could take either one of those things and I think it'll lead us back to the other eventually.

12:20 Wes Alwan: So work and faith, are you saying?

12:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, the connection maybe between creativity and work is one which is. Which really interested me. And maybe that would kind of lead us into faith as well, this creative idea. Because as you mentioned, there's a huge emphasis on work from the Very beginning of the film. And the elves, I don't know if they comply with union guidelines about working hours and stuff like that. I mean, there seems to be a great deal of creativity in what they do or sort of implied creativity, or they're extremely resourceful, even as there's a. An assembly line quality and a literal churning things out because you're 1,900 something behind the pace. And something about their work, which maybe in Elfland and in the North Pole seems a little bit rote to us. It translates as creativity in the human world somehow. And the elves seem very satisfied with it. This is their whole purpose. And they're really happy to make all this stuff. And they're really happy to start working again. As soon as Santa comes back from delivering all the presents, they're happy to start all over again. So I have all this energy. And so maybe creativity is slightly the wrong word. But their sort of Venn diagram, say, of this work and creativity or energy or something is sort of perfect circle. Whereas the atmosphere in New York City seems to be one of creative depletion. And that is a theme that's revisited again and again in all the New York scenes. You know that Walter, our first introduction to him, besides taking the books away from that nun, is. You know, that he signed off on a children's book that's missing two pages. May. Somebody would watch that and say he's abandoning his own inner child or something like that. But to me, he's just not doing a good job at his work. His head writers want to bring in another writer to save the publishing house to create this new. So the writers can't even do their job. They're sort of tapped or depleted creatively. Gimbels is kind of. We get the idea that it's sort of a sad place to work. Except for Buddy and his judging the toyland up. The supervisor assumes that Gimbels has sent someone in from corporate because it's too good. It's a little too good, I think he says. I even saw it in the world's best cup of coffee in that diner. That's sort of overly energetic and cliched marketing for what's ultimately a poor product. There's something missing. There's some spark that's gone. And Buddy imports that from the North Pole.

14:53 Wes Alwan: Well, just to back up a little bit, the reason why I asked you about whether you believed in Santa Claus is because I thought it was very interesting that in these films, right, at a. At a literal level, the thing that people are Being converted to believe is obviously something that we none of us believe. It's supposed to be this big magical moment when Santa Claus shows up in real life as if it's like the return of Christ or something like that. But you know, how are we supposed to get much feeling out of that when it's something none of us believe in? So I thought that was very interesting. In the end, of course it is about spirit. I think, as you were getting at, part of that is about creativity, but it's more about spirit in general. So in the movie it's specifically Christmas spirit, which depends on whether or not you believe in Santa Claus. And then probably more broadly about whether you're more generous or more cynical. And there's a lot of other associated qualities which I would just think of as maybe spirit in general. Part of the lack of spirit is about the day to day cynicism that develops because our social relations are so necessarily false. So that's what the world, you know, the world's best cup of coffee. We simply lie all the time. You know, you can call them white lies, right. So we don't think that the putting the world's best cup of coffee on a sign. We would never think, oh, that's ridiculous. Even though it is ridiculous at a literal level. It's not only a lie, it's just a crazy lie. This is the place of the world's best cup of coffee. So when you insert a character, that environment who does take everything literally and also in a childlike way expects people to be honest, it's kind of hilarious, right? On the one hand his naivete is funny, but on the other hand it's funny that we're so dishonest in these ways in our social interactions.

16:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that makes me think too of the theme of decline in the film. So there's the creative depletion in New York, but there's also the idea which we get from, from Santa, which I should say, you know, I don't know if you need Christmas spiritual of this movie or just 70s TV spirit, because I'm just happy to see Bob Newhart and Ed Asner. You know, I want to believe in Ed Asner, Lou Grant, the world's best boss. Of course he can. Of course he can inspire the troops. You know, there's this idea that there used to be an abundance of Christmas spirit, now there isn't. We get a little bit of this 60s kind of flavor with James Caan's relationship with Susan Wells and giving up Buddy for adoption and something being Lost there culturally. Because I was thinking about the fact that we could just argue that Will Ferrell is someone from the past. You know, reminded me of the movie Blast from the Past with Brendan Fraser, where he comes out of the bunker after 30 years. And, you know, I don't think I've seen it. Okay. It's literally. It's just a twist on a time travel movie. It's this idea of an idealized past where everybody had Christmas spirit, believed in things. You know, it was the forties or something like. And in a way, it's as though Will Ferrell's character is not from the North Pole. He's just from an idealized American past before some sort of rupture, the kind of rupture that the movie sort of gestures in the direction of with the James Caan thing, you know, with the backstory there, before some sort of rupture happened. And, you know, whatever. Vietnam and the entrance of this kind of mass cynicism and the decline of whatever mom and pop stores and apple pies cooling on windowsills or whatever. Whatever the. The, you know, the symbol of this. Right. So that seems to be an element there as well, that there was a time where maybe that sign, world's best cup of coffee was true. And Will Ferrell is taking that. Or Buddy, I should say, is taking that at face value in a way that somebody who got out of a time machine might take it at face value that it's not just this childlike thing, but a sort of collective innocence that he seems to represent there.

18:50 Wes Alwan: Yeah. I like this idea of an idealized past because it points to the fact that the impulse is to reform ourselves in the sense of becoming less cynical and doing all the things associated with that. And I think it probably means as well, Right. Being closer to one's family. So Walter, for instance, being a better dad and a better member of his family. And that's certainly. You know, that's certainly the thing. I mentioned Christmas being kind of magical. When I was a kid, I felt closeness to my family was a big part of it. And I had, like, five siblings. I had this desire, this hope that we would all live together forever. Little did I know how. Be careful what you wish for, but not that it happened. I guess it.

19:34 Erin O'Luanaigh: My case is the be careful what you wish for.

19:37 Wes Alwan: Right. Right. You learn as you get older that the idealized versions of these relationships go away and the real ones are much more complicated. And, of course, the idealized versions of the past that we have are not real. But I Think part of this is important because also too just the location. New York City plays this role, or at least it did at the time. And it plays this role a lot in 80s movies, I think, where it's sort of the gruff exterior with a heart of gold type of place, where New York is dog eat dog and it's a place of people are going to make it and make money and all these things. But you get this interesting combination in New York of incredible aspiration and desire to do important things, to do big things, which is really inspiring. And it's inspiring for me, just even when I'm in the city, it's an inspiring place. And then the undercurrent of cynicism that goes with that. So it's an interesting contradiction and a great location for a film like this because in some sense, what's happening right when the spirit is restored, when people believe in Santa again, you're kind of having your cake and eating it too. You're getting all this aspirational stuff, which the city already, in a sense, has. But you're cutting out the more competitive and maybe more narcissistic element of that. So the part of work, just getting back to this work theme which involves love, or love of what you're doing, and creativity is preserved in the part that's just competitive and about narcissism. Like with the Miles character. Right. The great children's author who's full of himself. Standish. Is that his name?

21:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Miles Finch.

21:13 Wes Alwan: Finch.

21:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: Different Miles. We just had Thanksgiving. Miles Standish is a pilgrim.

21:21 Wes Alwan: Right. That's crazy. That is crazy. Yeah. The unconscious is a weird thing. All right, so what's his name again? I can't even think of.

21:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: Miles Finch.

21:31 Wes Alwan: The real name. Miles Finch. Yeah, that's what I wanted to say. In line with your ideas about work. New York is a place of work and a place of creative work and great aspirations. And we. Part of the desire seems to be to give full voice to the parts of work that involve love and generosity and again, loving what you do. And then to de emphasize the parts that are more about self interest.

21:55 Erin O'Luanaigh: I like that. This characterization of the undercurrent of cynicism seems to have taken over the whole city. Right. With this creativity crisis that they're having. And it seems that Buddy is capable of seeing the city anew. It's almost like everybody has watched too many movies that take place in New York and they've become desensitized to the magic of the place and, you know, sort of symbolized in his Little snow globe, which.

22:21 Wes Alwan: Right. And the Empire State Building. I wanted to bring that up. Right. Yeah. This just sort of iconic symbol of emblem of ambition and aspiration.

22:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. Yeah. For me, it's the Chrysler Building. I always thought the Empire State Building was sort of ruined by being too blocky on the bottom.

22:36 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

22:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: But I still love it. I still love it. But, yeah, the snow globe, which you might think is just the kind of cheap trinket that you would get in New York. That would almost be too cliche or something to get a snow globe. Unless you're the kind of person who collects that sort of thing. But that's what he's about. Seeing the place anew. Seeing the. Rather than letting the cynicism be dominant, Letting the aspiration and the magic and the wonder of the city be dominant. And so getting excited about the elevator buttons that light up or the revolving doors or the Christmas trees, which, you know, everybody seems to be just walking by except for Buddy, who's really appreciating them, and then gets to see the Rockefeller center tree. So, yeah, I like that a lot.

23:15 Wes Alwan: I think the other aspect here, it's about family, as I mentioned, and about community. And that's something that. Right. The urban environment seems to undermine, as opposed to. Right. Smaller villages or communities. I think when you think of elves, you think of. And fairies, you think of these more rustic environments. Right. They're associated with nature, and they come from nature. And in a way, you might see it as representative of what the city excludes ultimately. So as it undermines community, it's unlivable for the spirit world.

23:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'd love to make more of this if we can, because I think there's something we could say about the fact that Walter doesn't even know he has this son. And in a way, that's sort of emblematic of an urban environment. Everybody is sort of estranged from each other, or strangers are living half on top of each other in this way that. I love the fact that this. That Gimbel's, you know, sort of imagined as being, I guess, in the vicinity of Macy's and therefore kind of close to the Empire State Building. That you don't quite know why Walter would be walking by the Gimbel store window on his way to the Empire State Building. But regardless, maybe he would. But, yeah, you know, he sees Buddy asleep in the window. So there's this coincidence element of everybody, like, being kind of thrown together. I might have mentioned this in our Rear Window episode. I'm not sure if I did, but I used to see there was a time where whenever I would go into the city, I would run into people that I knew. And there was a billboard that was right over the escalator in Grand Central in a place that I would always use this particular escalator because of where my train usually this was at a time when I was taking the train into New York three, four times a week. And the billboard said, 8 million people in this city. And you have to run into that guy or something. Something like that. You know, like the billboard was commenting on this phenomenon of somehow of everybody being half on top of you and having strangers half on top of you, but also that you could be next to on a subway, someone who you might have some sort of connection with and never know it because of the anonymity of that. So there's a closeness and yet emotional estrangement at the same time. And then the surprise when that's when you actually do see someone who you, in fact, recognize. And how uncanny that can be, specifically in the city environment where you're passing hundreds of faces which are anonymous to you in any given moment. And I wonder if there's something to be said about the flip side of that. Like the North Pole environment. I was thinking about the fact that everybody has names that are just like Ming Ming and Choo Choo. And there's a certain. You know, they all have the double names and they all. Because they're all the same height and. Except for Buddy, obviously, because they're all the same height and they're all the same. They have these elfin features. They all look like they're part of one family. But then there's also a kind of anonymity in that as well. Like, there are a few distinguishing features among them. I don't know whether that's a mirror of the urban environment in New York. If that's a sort of topsy turvy element, if it's pulled inside out, where you have an environment that's crowded but everybody looks like you, as opposed to a diverse, crowded environment. I'm not sure what to say about that, but I just want to bring it up because it seems relevant and it seems related to this idea of having a son you don't know about in the same city as you. He traveled to get there. But, you know, that kind of principle.

26:39 Wes Alwan: Yeah. It's interesting. You mentioned how, in a way, Walter is also the protagonist. Right? Buddy's the protagonist. Walter is the protagonist. On the one hand, Buddy is a kind of angelic figure like Clarence and helping Walter change, or like the spirits in A Christmas Carol with Scrooge or any other sort of mentor figure or catalyst figure. Although often there it's an interesting spin on that to make that person the holy fool. So Buddy gets his own problem that has to be solved because it seems like he's. He doesn't have any problems really. If you can enjoy pop tarts and candy on spaghetti, I don't think you need much else in life. Yeah, I guess. I guess the. The. His problem is twofold, right? Yeah. He finds himself in a. In a community. In it. Well, is it a real community? Right. It's a place of spirit, but it's a place of. If there's kind of a source of spirit in the world, that's the source. Maybe, but maybe it's too pure. Right. It's a place where people just love to do assembly line work, for instance. They've got the spirit, but it means they're willing to work 24 hours a day in the factory. And so it turns what would otherwise be a dystopian environment. And that's what the satire of the movie is playing with, right? This idea of these industrious helper elves being essentially depressed wage slaves or something like that. Well, without even a wage.

28:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: So just regular slaves.

28:10 Wes Alwan: So. So, right. So in other words, there's. There's something potentially superficial about that environment. You know, any idealized or mythological environment is necessarily superficial in one way or another, I think. So Buddy's problem, I think is. Is threefold, right? He finds out that he doesn't belong to that community because he's not of the right race or species. I don't know, which is an interesting way to put it. But. So, so he doesn't belong. But he also doesn't belong in the sense that he's human and an other world. It's a non human world, which is. Right. Something much more important than a racial distinction. Because the human world has this important relationship to the non human world, to the spiritual world. It needs that source, right? It needs that injection from this other world just to be the human world. The human world needs the alien in order to be what it is in this interesting way. But you can't just be off in that alien world fully and expect to belong to it. So Buddy doesn't have a community in the fullest sense up in the North Pole. He has to come back down to Earth, so to speak, to humanity to get that. And at the same time, it's gonna mean finding A father figure within that world. Not just an infinitely benign Bob Newhart type of father, but a real father.

29:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. That's good. That helps me to understand what's kind of weirdly similar about the North Pole and New York City. Because in the North Pole, of course, he stands out. He's six, three, or however tall he is. And, yeah, not of the same species or whatever we can say.

29:49 Wes Alwan: And he's Will Ferrell, which just adds a lot.

29:51 Erin O'Luanaigh: And he's Will Ferrell.

29:52 Wes Alwan: Craziness to him.

29:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly. And then, you know, and then in New York, he also doesn't fit in. So there are these two communities in which the elves are united by their love of assembly line work and their spirit, et cetera. And then the New York community is reunited by anonymity and cynicism. And that is also a world in which he does not. He's not a natural fit, though. He adapts and also gets it to adapt to him. I mean, there's a way that he's read immediately in the film. I mean, this is also the great thing about New York is that he could be walking down the street in this elf costume and people don't really look at him. But then he's instantly read in the Empire State Building as being a Christmas Graham, you know, so there's a way in which she doesn't actually attract all that much attention.

30:36 Wes Alwan: Remarkably, there's lots of people in costumes on the streets of New York.

30:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. You could be. Be whatever type of person you are, as long as you're cynical and keep to yourself.

30:46 Wes Alwan: Freak flag. Yeah. There should have been a nightclub scene or something.

30:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, Right.

30:53 Wes Alwan: He comes all the way to New York and he meets this manic pixie girl.

30:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, she's not in this film, but. Yeah.

30:59 Wes Alwan: You don't think she is.

31:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: She's pixie, like, I suppose, but she's not the. She's not the typical manicine dream girl.

31:06 Wes Alwan: I don't know where the manic pixie girl is.

31:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think. You don't? No. No offense. The. The. The trope is, you know, the muse who's this dreamy, you know, gets the guy to loosen up and connect him to his creative side. And the word manic in the title, as well as she's full of energy and Vim.

31:28 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking she's kind of quirky and. Yeah, right. So he's not the cynic. So he can't.

31:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: Her Persona is. She's a sort of deflated version of herself in this film. Yeah.

31:39 Wes Alwan: Right, right. There's the manic one, right, Buddy? Yeah. It's not like he's gonna be brought out of his shell, but yeah, she's a facilitator. So she's elf. Like, maybe the word pixie is what I'm focusing on, but there is an actual elf like quality to her. She's small and she dresses up as an elf department store. I just think they're taking that too seriously.

32:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, she has elfin features. You know, she has big eyes, elfin features, sort of heart shaped face.

32:06 Wes Alwan: And she's quite. What is the word? Chill.

32:09 Erin O'Luanaigh: Are elves chill?

32:11 Wes Alwan: No, but I'm thinking she stands out from the crowd.

32:16 Erin O'Luanaigh: She sings.

32:16 Wes Alwan: She sings. And that's an important part of the movie where she gets over her fear singing in public and facilitates singing with

32:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: crowd, which is what being an elf is all about.

32:26 Wes Alwan: Christmas cheer and Christmas spirit and get the sleigh running again. Let me just put it this way. She's an important mediator. And Buddy's adaptation to that environment, although I'm putting a question mark after that, is she. This is the way I was thinking of it. But does he need her in the film at all or is she just extra?

32:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think that in these Christmas movies, which are about belief, which is most Christmas movies, the person who's not being believed needs at least one ally. Right. Michael sort of fulfills that function. But Jovi, I think, needs to. I think it's important that he's propped up by more than one person. And, you know, it's funny because she's an elf, but she. I guess she sort of integrates the North Pole and New York perfectly in her person because she's also this personification of this cynical place with a heart of gold. Like, she's actually very mushy on the inside. And that's the appeal. That's why she's retracted to whatever it is that Buddy is offering her. A chance to not be cynical. That desire is very, very close to the surface in her, though. It doesn't seem to be.

33:28 Wes Alwan: I mean, she comes across as solemn and her water's been turned off and she's working a job that she doesn't particularly enjoy.

33:36 Erin O'Luanaigh: She can't make those six inches. We both went there right away.

33:41 Wes Alwan: Yeah. You really? Okay. It's impossible. I love that scene.

33:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: Inches. I love that guy. He's great.

33:48 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

33:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: Code word is Santa's got a brand new bag.

33:52 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Yeah. I just love the randomness of the whole. Yeah, you gotta cut the ribbons this way. It's impossible. So I guess am I trying to think of her as the mediator's mediator, in a way. But now you have me questioning whether she's really playing that role at all, any role in integrating him into this world, because. Right. So from one perspective, it's just a romantic subplot that every movie needs to have, or most movies need to have, especially comedy. But is it tacked on, or does it thematically line up in some interesting way? And I might just be working, trying too hard here.

34:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: So if the idea is that everybody needs every. Santa needs someone to believe in them in the movie when nobody believes that they're Santa or nobody believes that they're really an elf, if they need at least one person to verify their legitimacy or to prop them up a little bit. You know, I'm being a little tongue in cheek here, but maybe the idea is that New York has so many people in it that need to be converted that we need at least two people for this particular film. This film needs more. More people propping it up to believe in Buddy. And the more I think about the community element of New York, the more I think that this is really a theme in the film. It's trying to actually turn New York, over the course of the film into a small town, in a way. And the fact that Buddy would have these converts along the way and work on the place like he would if he were in a small town or having entered a small town where he could have these personal relationships. It seems that there are these other mediators who are needed because it's his two initial converts, it's Jovi and Michael who end up helping in that crucial way to get Santa's sleigh off the ground. And we have a local news anchor. Like, there are quite a bit of indications that Jovi and Michael are really the facilitators of Santa Slay getting off the ground in that final scene or almost final scene. And over the course of that scene, because of the list and because of the local news, you know, it's New York City, but it's local New York one. Right. Like, New York becomes a small town in that final scene. I think, you know, first of all, we have the fact that because they live off the park, Walter and Emily. Emily, right. I almost said Mary. Like, she's Mary Steenburgen. And it's also like Joseph, Mary, and they have a son. Anyway, you know, they are able to get there really fast because they live right off the park. And then there's this local news anchor who the guy is ribbing her for having just come from Buffalo. So she's moved up into the metropolitan area, but it's still local news. You know, she's doing a little puff piece about people thinking that they've seen Santa. And then when Michael starts reading out the names and everybody in the area is watching, there's this recognition. And Jovi is able to come because she sees it on the news, you know, so there's a. There's that drawing things in. So it's like they live in Mayberry, is what I'm trying to say. There's an element of this which is about belief, which we have to get into, but there's also an element of this that's about recognition. That's a crucial component of the belief, and it's about turning the stranger into someone who you know by name, which seems to be part of this de. Cynicization, you know, the way of cutting through the cynicism of New York, which seems, you know, related to. Part of what's so cynical about it is like the. The anonymity, what you can get away with because of the anonymity of the place. And so that knowing people, that recognition, knowing their name and then knowing what they want, too, that seems. That seems a crucial component of this as well.

37:27 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And that seems to be part of the way the Santa myth functions as well. Right. He's got everyone's name on a list. He knows if you're naughty or nice, and he's bringing presents to every single child in the world in one night, doing something impossible. But it shrinks everything, right?

37:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes.

37:46 Wes Alwan: You're supposed to suspend disbelief and think the entire world could be one tiny community in a sense, where. Yeah. If we lived in the village, we could be Santa Claus to that village. We could go around and provide a gift to every family, for instance. So it takes this village feeling, this small community feeling, as you're saying, and makes it feel like you can globalize it.

38:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And that seems to be that conversion that needs to happen where the world is shrunk. That's New York City. Coming out to meet Buddy. Right. Buddy has to adapt a little bit to. To New York, but it also seems important that New York adapt a little bit to him, that he's going to be a stranger either in the North Pole or New York City, so long as there isn't this adaptation. And it seems to be a mutual one. But I love that idea of shrinking the world as being central to the Santa myth. That's great.

38:39 Wes Alwan: Okay. That's the end of part one of our discussion of elf.

38:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: Can't believe we're making it to two parts. Sorry.

38:46 Wes Alwan: Well, the second part may not be so long, but we'll see.

38:51 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'm impressed.

38:51 Wes Alwan: We will. Yeah. I'm sure. I wonder how people are reacting to the, you know, the attempt.

38:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: We're taking this seriously.

38:59 Wes Alwan: We're doing it sophisticated. Yeah. Taking it so seriously. Is that a good thing or bad?

39:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: Sure.

39:03 Wes Alwan: But anyway, it is what it is. It's the format of our show. But yeah, so we will. [email protected] subtextpodcast or right on the Apple app. Or you can wait a week or so into the second part. Thank you.

39:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter njoysubtext.

Erin just published her first book, “Avail,” which you can order here: https://www.pauldrybooks.com/products/avail

“Avail” features a long prose-poem which titles the book and winds through sections of lineated, often formal poems. The prose-poem comprises a series of lyric meditations on the image of the veil—from religious and cultural veils, to veils imbedded in idiom and metaphor, to veiled women in art and classic films, to veils drawn and parted by illness and death—which slowly divulge the harrowing details of the poet’s blood disorder.

Throughout, allusions to classic film, literature, and art serve as the “veils” with which the poet attempts to obscure the self-estrangement and vulnerability her illness has induced—insecurities which follow her long after her recovery. In a poem about a break-up set during her career as a jazz singer and against the backdrop of a 1930s screwball comedy, she longs “to shake life by the martini (but stay self- / possessed), to star in the movie of myself / instead of playing second lead.” During a visit to Naples, Mt. Vesuvius becomes “a Crawford eyebrow / arched over the bay.” And in California, after a trip to the Getty Villa, she recalls Sontag’s “missive on allusion, that no part / of any work is new, that all is reproduction.” By the end of the collection, O’Luanaigh has fashioned from the sum of these various allusions her own poetic identity, unveiled in the poems themselves.

Upcoming Episodes: “The Third Man,” “Elf,” “Julius Caesar.”

Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail

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0:08 Wes Alwan: Today we have a very special episode of Subtext. We will be talking about Erin's forthcoming book, Avail. It'll be published on January 20, 2026 by Paul Drei Books. It won't surprise listeners that this is a really wonderful book. It reflects not just Erin's mastery of her craft, but also her extensive knowledge of the arts more generally and her interest in film. You can pre order it on Amazon.com right now. If you go to subtextpodcast.com avail, you'll be redirected to that Amazon page. You can also find Erin's poems in the Yale Review, Bad Lilies, Agni, the Southern Review, Subtropics, 32 poems, Wildcourt, the Hopkins Review, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Erin graduated from the University of Florida's MFA program. She's currently a PhD student in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she is a Stefanson Cannon Fellow and the Senior Poetry Editor of Quarterly West. She's also a co host of Subtext. Welcome to your own show, Erin.

1:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: Wow. It's great to be here. It's strange to be here in this capacity.

1:19 Wes Alwan: So we don't. Is this going to be an interview? Is this going to be a regular subtext discussion? Am I going to get in a big argument with you about what something means?

1:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: Who knows? I'm nervous. I'm nervous to be our first ever guest. It doesn't really count, does it?

1:33 Wes Alwan: Kind of counts. It's weird. You're playing two roles at once here.

1:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: I know.

1:37 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I feel a bit nervous, too. I don't know why. Like I told you, it's not my book. Why should I be nervous?

1:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, thank you so much for doing this. It's really sweet.

1:48 Wes Alwan: Well, it's sweet of you to. To be here and to be a successful poet that I'm co hosting the podcast with, as opposed to a failed poet. Finally, you've proven yourself as a successful poet. But I think most listeners know you're a poet, but I don't know if they've read your poetry. It's not like we're always advertising that on the podcast. They probably many may not know how well published you are, and I think we've very rarely touched on this forthcoming book. And the other thing they wouldn't know about you is really the autobiographical element of how it is that you ended up becoming a poet. They probably know that you're a classic film buff and that you're into the arts and maybe even at some point you mentioned being a jazz singer, but they Might be curious about how all of that comes together as it does in your book. But. But anyway. Erin. Yeah. How is it that you ended up becoming a poet?

2:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Have I ever told you this story? Maybe I mentioned it on the podcast. The story of the $500. Did you ever hear about this?

2:50 Wes Alwan: Nope.

2:51 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, I got into poetry as a money making scheme like you do.

2:54 Wes Alwan: As we. As we all do.

2:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: I was a senior in college. I wanted to go on a spring break trip to. I think I'm getting this right. Lake Lure, North Carolina. Yeah. Which was one of the filming locations of the great co classic Dirty Dancing. We were all going on a spring break trip there for some reason, or there was a spring break trip planned. Someone had done the math and figured out that for all of us to go down there for a week, including the gas and everything else, if we split everything, it was going to cost $500. And the same day that they came up with this figure, the English department bulletin board had posted this poetry contest and the prize was $500. So I thought, here's a great way that I can go on this spring break trip. I'll just write a poem. This is an absolutely true story. It's ridiculous. And I thought I was an English major. I loved reading poetry, loved literature. I hadn't really written it. I had written some things as a kid, like some sort of some juvenile. But I was singing at that point. I was really involved in the music department. I was ostensibly an English major, but turning in all my papers at the last possible minute because I was singing so much and spending so much time in the music building or traveling to shows or doing musical theater. And so I thought, well, I'll write a sonnet because that's short. And anyway, I wrote it. I won the $500. I went to the resort where they filmed Dirty Dancing. I had just an okay time, but the point was that it gave me some.

4:19 Wes Alwan: Didn't do any Dirty. Dirty Dancing.

4:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, I did not. It was a pretty tame trip though. There was. One of my friends was waking up at 10 o' clock in the morning, walking over to the fridge and immediately cracking a beer. It was. People were drinking all day long. I wasn't doing any of that. I didn't know how to have fun at that time in my life though. That's not my idea of fun. Anyway. I don't like beer, for one.

4:40 Wes Alwan: That's true. You know, that's interesting. I'd never thought about that. I'd never seen you drink a beer.

4:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: What's the point of the story.

4:47 Wes Alwan: You won a contest.

4:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Yeah. And one of my professors who read the poem said, you know, you should write a couple more of these. It was a poem about one of my aunts who I was very close to. And so I wrote, I think, two other poems about two other aunts. It's convenient that I had so many. And then I just really didn't think anything of it, though. This professor said, you know, I think you might. I think you might have a talent in this, and maybe you would want to pursue an MFA program. You know, I had obviously filed it away somewhere in my mind, but I thought, you know, as soon as I graduate, I'm gonna go into jazz singing, and I'm gonna try that out for a while and see what happens. You know, Basically, I did the jazz singing thing for a few years. It got burnt out. And I remembered what my professor had told me, got back in touch with him, wrote enough poems to make up the 10 pages or whatever that I needed to even apply to one of these places, and ended up going to the University of Florida for my mfa. You know, poetry, I think, was something that I did to back away from something else. I backed into poetry.

5:44 Wes Alwan: See, I thought you were gonna say that you found out that the money wasn't good enough in jazz, so then you had to switch to poetry.

5:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. You know, everything I've been involved with in my life is so lucrative.

5:54 Wes Alwan: You backing into it has me flashing to Homer Simpson backing into the bushes. Exactly that meme.

6:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. Yeah. That's my whole life right there.

6:03 Wes Alwan: Happened in on something you shouldn't have stepped into and back slowly out of the room, maybe.

6:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. So that's the story. It's silly.

6:14 Wes Alwan: That's a good segue to the book. So I wanted to ask you about the inspiration for your book because it really does bring together your many different interests, including singing and the arts and classic film, and combines that in a really interesting way with a certain autobiographical element. So including your childhood sickness with a blood disorder and your relationship with your grandfather, which was very close, and he had a role in the development of your interests in film. And then also your mother's more recent sickness. And then, of course, it's all tied together with this theme of the veil. And then the related idea of availing a V A I L, which is the title of your book. Shall we start with just how. It's a big. I know it's a big general question, but how all of that is all of that related thematically and what inspired you to. To go down that route?

7:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. So all these poems, I think, just reflect my interest, the interest that I've picked up over the course of my life. My grandfather was a classic movie buff, and so movies were a big part of my childhood and art was too. Going to art museums with them and music, they were very big into opera especially and all kinds of classical music. When I got sick, a TV was put in my room with a little built in vcr. And my grandfather would tape. You know, he would. We didn't have cable up there, so he would. He would tape things off of TCM onto VHS tape and bring it over to me and I would then watch the VHS tapes and. And so I became interested, even more interested in classic movies than I already was, which was which I already had a sort of natural affinity for them. I went through this experience of the blood disorder and then as soon as I got well enough to go back to school, I just didn't talk about it for years and years. A lot of people never knew that I had this problem. Even though it required maintenance and even though it's actually caused me problems on and off over the years, I always hid them. One of the things that the essay confronts was my reticence to talk about it. I think that became part of the story. Like, why was this something that I was not comfortable talking about that ended up being the thing that I had to confront as much as the experience of the disorder itself.

8:33 Wes Alwan: On page 84 of your book, there's a prose poem titled To Cast, Throw Draw Veil over and it begins with the line, your work does not contain the necessary self revelation. The list of things you'd rather not say is long. You claim to reveal yourself by hiding in your interests. Say that the shape of your preoccupations forms the outline of the body. There seems to be a connection there between the idea of veiling and then this question of the role of self revelation and poetry, which I've heard you talk a little bit about before, and your reluctance to do that. Did you want to say a little bit more about that?

9:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I think, you know, I went into my MFA program so green, and I was lucky enough to have a teacher and Angie Malingo in my very first workshop who encouraged us to think about our own origin stories or sort of personal mythologies. And this was the thing that was at the root of, you know, the blood disorder was. Was at the root of so many things that I was interested in. And yet it was something that at that time, the People who knew me really well, you know, some of my closest friends did not know about this. I had really buried it when. When someone did learn this story, they said, well, this is such a great story. And it's. It explains why you are interested in so many. So many of these things, you know, especially the old movies. And I didn't want to talk about myself. I was. I was reticent to do that. I wanted to talk about the things that I was interested in. And I thought that perhaps that was enough, that talking about these interests was enough, and that I didn't have to really involve myself at all. And then some very smart friends said that this was starting. You know, my lack of talking about this was starting to become its own issue. It was starting to exert a kind of force on the. On the poems. It started to become the elephant in the room. So finally, when I went into my PhD program, I thought, I really should talk about this. I really should find a way. And I realized that the way in would be to talk about my resistance, why I didn't want to talk about it. I was reading Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, in which she talks about this concept of eidos, which is this idea of having appropriate shame about something or shame in the presence of another. And this idea of decorum covering oneself, not wanting to reveal too much of oneself. And she specifically talks about the veil as a sort of metonym or symbol of this eidos that women would use the veil to keep themselves covered in some sort of appropriate way.

11:01 Wes Alwan: Eidos as an E, I, D, O, S, the ancient Greek word for form

11:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: or A I, D, O, s. Okay. Eidos. Eidos. I'm not sure how to say it.

11:10 Wes Alwan: What is that? What is that from?

11:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, she just describes it as shamefastness. That is the definition she gives. And this is Carson. Eidos is a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for the crisis of human contact. Instinctive and mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them.

11:30 Wes Alwan: Okay, so this is. This is a Greek goddess of modesty and shame. Yeah, so it looks like it is. It is some sort of minor goddess, but yeah, more personification.

11:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, yeah. And she writes, a chaste wife, like Penelope in Homer's Odyssey, holds her veil up on either side of her face when confronting suitors, while Medea's decision to abandon chastity for Jason is indicated by holding her veil aside. So this use of the veil as an expression of this sense of shame or Reluctance or this idea of the boundary that had a huge influence on me. So at the same time that I'm trying to write about this thing which I feel sort of shame around or which is a painful subject for me, or which, you know, which I've historically wanted to cover up, I felt that Carson, with this concept of eidos and of the veil, was giving me a way in.

12:18 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So the veil. So there's quite a bit in here. Yeah. That says something about poetry. And one can think of poetic use of language as a kind of veil, which is a way to get at some of these things which might otherwise be too. I don't know, quote, unquote, naked, too raw to talk about. So I'm just. I'm thinking of a line from your prose poem, the Mask versus the Veil, where you end with, the mask is a narrative, the veil is a lyric. And it sounded like the mask of something. Right. It's more rigid and opaque and potentially a false self. But the lyric, the poetic has to. Has to let something through. Maybe.

13:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I think that's right. It's the idea that you may. What do I say here? To see behind the mask is an unexpected privilege. But the veil, by its nature, creates a need for revelation. While one might wonder what is beneath the mask, one must wonder what is beneath the veil. I think that that's the. That's the tens interested in in the book is the idea that the. The veil is about this desire to hide, but it's also a kind of inherent teasing. It's hiding. It could be hiding in a sort of flirtatious way or in a way which really wants to be found. And that line I thought was so interesting. The more that I looked at veils, images of veils in. On film and in art, the more I saw quite clearly that. That tension being expressed between a woman being strong and putting on this veil to try to gird herself in the face of some obstacle, but also wanting to unveil or wanting to be seen for who she really was. Wanting to have someone look behind the veil, as it were.

14:05 Wes Alwan: It seemed like that could go for seduction or love, but also for religion. You have a prose poem about taking the veil as a. Having something to do with becoming the bride of Christ, but also something that suggests, quote, possibilities that may yet lie dormant in her. The promise of a vocation, a calling, a purpose. So the desire to be discovered in various different ways, including in one's aspiration. I think there's quite a bit in here about the concept of aspiration.

14:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: Thinking, too, about the blood disorder and what happened during that time. And having to revisit that through the essay, I think gave me. It was like excavating my past somehow gave me an insight into different parts of myself that I hadn't realized were there or had forgotten.

14:53 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I love that image of you as a bride for Halloween. How old are you in this?

15:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think it's five.

15:02 Wes Alwan: It included a veil that looked like a Vegas showgirl's loincloth. But I was just going to say, yeah. This picture of you in a veil, in this kind of funny way as a child, stands in some contrast to various pictures of your great grandmother and your grandmother and your mother in a veil, where there's sort of a different sentiment, really, that comes across in each of those. I don't know if I'm saying anything there that you can. You can respond to. I just. But I enjoyed this series of different snapshots or your descriptions of pictures of people in wedding veils. I sort of. I think the core articulation of the theme of the book comes on page 31, where there's two prose poems to veil and then to a Veil. Did you want to read those?

15:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: Sure. To veil, to say no. To cover the body. To hide the body. To prevent the gaze of the other. To forbid the gaze of the other. To guard the body as precious. To mark oneself as holy. To gather unto oneself, to store up one's resources. To set a boundary, to construct a barrier for the body. To sketch an outline of the body. To provide a negative image of my body. To hint at what lies beneath by limning the body's shape. To suggest, to tease, to torture, by withholding the body. To mark a potential availability, to imply a future unveiling. To signify yes by saying no. To avail. To say yes. To see a value, to explore a possibility. To take the opportunity to make use of, to respond to generosity, to accept an overture, to help oneself, to satisfy oneself. To have one's fill, to consume, to gorge oneself, to press an advantage, to exploit, to strong arm, to throw one's weight around. To take what is there for the taking. To pillage, to breach, to cross the barrier erected by another, to unveil, to destroy, to force a retreat to. To colonize, to procure another's. No.

17:24 Wes Alwan: It's interesting you name the book avail, but I think this is the one section that is explicitly about veiling versus availing. And the word veil, I think, only occurs five times. I actually counted the word veil. You know, this Book better than veiling is being veiled. And I was interested in the fact too. You know, you got me interested in the etymology of a veil or the usage of a veil because we generally today say avail oneself of. Right. And so veiling invites that, but also disinvites it, as you put it, to procure another's. No, but the original, you know, the. The use of the avail that is now archaic. I think it was just to. To benefit or assist. Right. So if you availed someone, you assisted them, and if something was availing, it was advantageous. And then. Right, and so the word available is related. Right. So I found it interesting that the sort of altruistic, original meaning of the word, when used reflexively became reversed into something that is potentially exploitative. Right. Or something that is potentially selfish. You avail oneself, or maybe you help yourself instead of helping someone, you help yourself to something. And I did that. And, you know, it got me looking into, well, how and why did that transition take place? So I'm pointing to that just because I think, yeah, the explicit use of this word veil kind of falls out and it's implicit everywhere.

18:55 Erin O'Luanaigh: Just as veiling also has a veiling in it where there's this desire for revelation. It's a sort of theatrical covering. Right. And so seems to demand that one at least be interested in whatever one is covering. And that kind of attention being drawn to the covered thing is exactly what I was wrestling with in choosing to disclose this personal story as well.

19:18 Wes Alwan: Angie Malenko connects this archaic meaning of the veil to descending and then descending into the underworld. But in this case, the underworld into which you descend is full of figures like Rita Hayworth. Much of this honors various, what I think are idols of yours from movies. I think

19:42 Erin O'Luanaigh: that's right.

19:43 Wes Alwan: That's correct to say, then, Rita Hayworth, I think she's the most often mentioned. She's mentioned in at least four or five places.

19:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: She's the sort of patron movie star of the book.

19:55 Wes Alwan: Yeah, yeah. What is that about?

19:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: In the book? It starts in Covergirl. Should I read CoverGirl? It was a hospital season, a grainy black and white reel. Exam rooms, waiting rooms, offices, hallways, my northwest facing bedroom, my closed eyes until the day you took me to the movies a Friday morning and I, the only child in a throng of gray why aren't you in school? Sat by you holding tightly to your arm and watched the whole bright world come roaring in alive so red, so red I sighed in the ice cream parlor afterward over her glorious technicolor hair, her Lips, her piked fingernails as we savored our usuals, pistachio yours and black raspberry mine at our blue window booth. While outside the pumpkin smiled back at me and the sunburnt leaves died floridly on the vine.

20:52 Wes Alwan: That's great.

20:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's the first thing I think I ever wrote about my illness, actually. I saw her on the big screen and this. They used to run these. They would actually bus seniors in for these Friday morning, you know, like 11am movies. And they would even give out little free mini popcorns. I think it was like $2 or maybe even a dollar to watch these movies that they got prints of. Most of them were really not good. But the first one that I ever saw was CoverGirl and on the big screen, Rita Hayworth with that red hair in Technicolor, which is. Which is more than color. You know, Technicolor is just fantastically vibrant.

21:29 Wes Alwan: And, yeah, there's an ongoing contrast in your book between the color red and the color white. And where I think whiteness is associated with pallor and nakedness and maybe the literal truth. And red gets associated with both vitality and being veiled. So, for instance, the redness of the cheek that you might have pinched to give it more vitality or, you know, lipstick being applied or makeup, something like that. And it starts in the very. I think it starts with the very first poem of the book called Snow. I don't know if you wanted to read that as well. I don't. Yeah, just stop me if I'm pushing you to read too many things, but, yeah, go ahead.

22:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: Snow. It drifts and it drifts as the finished VHS respools, its tinsel white bands flurrying across the glossy hilltop of the TV screen. A modern weather like the swirl of asbestos in Dorothy Gale's ear. The ivory soap flakes strewn over Bedford Falls, the sprayable foam it mocks, the snap pop of a stand of trees buckling under a blanket or a bucket's ice shell cracking above the heat of the tape's firelog. Its storm will kick up when I replay the movie. A grocery aisle now edged with blizzards. Anklets coated in hoarfrost. Summers forecasting a pixelated ice Age. Stanwyck snowing tears even as she smiles. And me rewinding the melting tape to the point of dissolution, whiting out each scene with a love that, like all love, distorts its object, glazes it with ice, swallows it like a mailbox in a mounting heap until the tape stops and only my Face bloodless winters, the blank screen.

23:24 Wes Alwan: And I can't help but as I was reading this partly because of what I know from you, but it's also there, just in context, provided by the book. Even when you're not mentioning your grandfather explicitly in his role in this, you see him kind of hovering behind the poem. So he's the one who, while you were sick, was giving you these VHS tapes and fostering your love of classic movies and giving you kind of a transfusion, so to speak. Something vital at a time when you were dealing with a loss of vitality.

23:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: I love that. Yeah. These films were like portals to a kind of glamour or, you know, what I imagined back when I was a kid as a kind of grown up world of sophistication and intrigue and interesting problems and beautiful faces and interesting people. So, yeah, and he supplied. He was my dealer, so. But I love. I love the idea that he was giving me these transfusions of this. This filmic vitality. Yeah.

24:27 Wes Alwan: Well, as I told you before we started recording, I did, you know, like a complete, like, thematic concordance of your book. Various themes, your illness, your mother's illness, your grandfather and I. And I. And also, as you also know, I like to find arcs and things. So I really thought I saw a progression in each sort of line. There's a lot in here about the death of your grandfather, but I think emotionally it sort of climaxes with the very last poem about him called March 27, where there's this very poignant image of him mourning for you, so to speak, because you're playing Evita and you're being paraded around in that glass casket.

25:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah.

25:08 Wes Alwan: And it made him tearful. So there's a beautiful juxtaposition of that and you confronting his death. And that includes scenes where you're seeing him in his coffin at the wake.

25:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, right. Yeah. You're noticing things in the structure that I had forgotten. It's funny because this book has been done now for over a year, so it's actually, you know, I had to prepare for this podcast myself by going back and rereading the book, but you're reminding me of some choices that I agonized over, so I'm glad they are. They're coming across.

25:40 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So speaking of thematic arcs, is that even a thing? So one of my favorite poems was Pacific Palisades, and I see that as sort of another climactic moment that sort of is a culmination of different thematic concerns. Were you surprised by the way that I chose that one?

26:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: No.

26:01 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Why?

26:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, we share this in our Die Hard episode. We got into trouble for this, but we share an Eastern sensibility. No.

26:14 Wes Alwan: Well, I was going to ask you about this because the poem begins with this wonderful first line, and I'll have you read the whole thing in a moment. But it's California. We've reached the end of taste. And I assumed you meant the end as in the telos of taste, the highest manifest of taste, not the. But we'll talk about what that word N means, because maybe you can read it as being polysemus. I wish people had listened to our Die Hard episode that way. Talk about taking things literally. Someone made a negative comment about subtext predicated. That's the idea that we are slagging off California and we were merely relating a stereotype.

26:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, luckily, you know, luckily all my Californian friends, when I read this out loud, were like, that's our favorite one. You know, I did a reading where there were a bunch of Californians there and they were laughing so hard at that. And the, you know, saw it for being the sort of tongue in cheek statement that it was, but we managed

27:11 Wes Alwan: to wake the one sleeping dragon. And that is a California.

27:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: Chill out, man.

27:15 Wes Alwan: California. Oh, so seriously, what's the point of being Californian if you take it.

27:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly. Sorry, Exactly.

27:23 Wes Alwan: Am I getting us in trouble again? Let's. Yeah. Do you want to read Pacific Palisades?

27:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: And sure, it's California. We've reached the end of taste. We're strolling on the Getty Villas bluff, Its merit weighed against the megalithic waste of historic reproduction. What's Egyptian about the Egyptian revival? Parisian in the Vegas strips Arc de Triomphe A supersized riff on the Villa de Papyri the original at least was blown to ash. We console ourselves beneath a marquee hawking lattes With a lobby built to recall an excavation. Its galleries house the hall of the thinking man's robber baron. A cache of heracleses curi, Hydra Hydrias A replica of a Pompeii fountain mapped with west coast shells. The coinage of Illyria Cycladic figures, the alleged Mazarin Venus gardens with herbs of ancient Roman genus A satyr reclining as in a Kardashian snap Visitors pose so thickly in the peristyles we struggle to escape another's selfie still in an atrium frisbeed with sundials I admit equal beguilement by counterfeit and bonafide alike. Who's to say what's legit? A Roman Original is a Greek man's copy called back from antiquity to the traffic rumbling below, where mention of Inceville's studio passes for ancient history, its epics, civilization widely deemed low brow, and the Italian whose hero nosed the prow of a gondola down Venice Beaches rills or further up where once lived Brecht, Adorno, Schonberg and the Magic man, all told, the Weimar by the sea in glass decked houses out of David Hockney we list for klempt. Out of the villa's gate, the novelist, when not apprising Hesse of his wanton lawn, the Eden in which he'd torment Leverkun, partied with Cagney, Jack Warner, Berlin and handed Tassen to a young Sontag, soon to take the devil's bargain for her own art. We quote her missive on illusion that no part of any work is new, that all is reproduction. Across the highway, we sink through coastal sage to watch the sunset on the proper shore against outcrops dated to the Miocene age. Like good Easterners, we shield our eyes from the vulgarity of pleasure, the paradise unearned, the honest falsehood, the easily adored.

29:56 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I like the fact that we start out in a museum of sorts and then we, at some point we end up partying with famous people. This is not the only typical California. That's right, it's California. We've reached the end of taste. I love that line because I just think of manifest destiny, right, and going west and then ending up on that shore, as well as the idea perhaps, that it's the endpoint of some logical development, for better or for worse. So something like a telos, but also perhaps tastelessness. Yeah. So do you want to piss off some Californians?

30:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, I'm afraid. I'm afraid to put my foot in it. Yeah. There's a falseness, of course. I mean, there are plenty of qualities about California which are really just qualities about America that you could see really clearly and all very wonderful. Exactly. No, it's, you know, there's a falseness to it. It's constructed as all of America is sort of constructed. And then you also have this, you know, it's built on this, people playing make believe, you know, I mean, specifically la. Obviously there are other, other parts of California which are quite different, but, you know, and I love that about California, you know, but the, the, you know, you can't love movies as I do and hate California.

31:20 Wes Alwan: Right.

31:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: But there's a, you know, there's a guilt for me. It's not an accident. And I think this is something that's coming out in the. The next manuscript that I'm working on that, you know, a lot of my favorite actresses are actually people who had rather fraught relationships with California and who were, in fact, New Englanders, like Bette Davis, like Katharine Hepb. And so, you know, there's a sort of sensibility clash, I think, involved in the relationship of those two particular actresses to that place, but also to a lot of people's experience of California or even just their experience of being an artist and of having this. Having to have a relationship to an audience or having to, you know, there are all kinds of things I think are implicated in that.

32:00 Wes Alwan: Having to please an audience and then the danger of selling out or the danger of becoming mere pop culture. Although pop culture can be wonderful as well. Is that the idea?

32:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think also. I don't know, being easy on yourself too, versus being hard on yourself. Right. I think that's. That's a little bit part of the subtext. Drunk at home. That's a little part of the subtext of the. Of the poem. And I'm very afraid of that. You know, I'm someone who's, you know, is probably secretly very concerned that I might just take it too easy one day and never, never, never do anything useful or interesting again. And so I have to constantly guard against that. And so places like California where everyone is just having a good time in theory, or where the weather. Weather is always nice, I'm just distrustful of. And I think it's hard. I think it's hard to create good work in Hollywood for lots of reasons, you know, not necessarily having to do with the climate or anything uniquely about. About California, but just. Yeah, the populism, the everything. So, yeah, so you have this. This. This Getty Villa, you know, this amazing place which has gorgeous collection of. Of ancient statues and just everything. And put in this, you know, kind of fake villa to make it look as though this was the Romans. You know, this is just part of their empire that somebody just stumbled across on the California coast. So, you know, the real, real things mixed with fake and then something being also real. And the fakeness too.

33:34 Wes Alwan: Yeah. It strikes me that there are better and worse versions of fakeness. Right. So obviously the fakeness of art is supposed to be the highest form of fakeness, as in. Right. Fictional narrative or poetry. The creation of illusions of sorts. The kind of thing that Plato didn't like because they were not the truth with a capital T, but on a More positive interpretation, trying to get at, like, larger truths. Right. So the emotional truths, thematic truths, you could tell a fictional narrative that says something true. And in that sense, the narrative becomes the veil, I suppose, of the thing that is being gestured at. And it can only be. It becomes. Right, trite or too simplistic, if you try any other approach. Right. So if you write a philosophical monograph on it, you lose a lot. It gets too abstract. We need appearance, we need representation, as falsifying as that might be. But in this case, it seems like there's always the danger that the level of appearance, that there's something, if it's not done right, that there could be something truly and tastelessly false about that. You're always on the edge of either making falsification serve the truth or having it to collapse into something more sinister, it seems. So I thought maybe. Yeah, maybe some of this is also about the anxiety of influence. Because it's right. You reference the Sontag. It's all reproduction. And all we can do is to take influence and to take everything that we've taken in, artistic products and somehow metabolize that. And then either we come out with something that's original or something that's derivative, but maybe there's not that much in between those two.

35:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think you're leading me into Phoenicians. Am I wrong about that?

35:29 Wes Alwan: I wasn't conscious of thinking about that, but I'm sure the wiser, unconscious part of me was doing that. Shall we? Yeah, let's do that. But. Yeah. Did I. Am I getting that right? As far as what you said, yeah.

35:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: I mean, okay. You know, you even worked in a veil there. I got a. Could have you follow me around and do my.

35:52 Wes Alwan: I could be your internal narrator if you want.

35:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: There you go.

35:56 Wes Alwan: Relate everything. Any veil, any theme you want. Go ahead.

36:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, here's the Phoenicians, transplants both like the palm trees that lend the landscape a tropical legibility. They live in an invented place, precarious as language. Squat, blank, rectangular, their house admits nothing, forms a single brick in a wall just one brick tall. All the neighbors seem to make a living in encryption. Their little boy can't learn the word for cloud but knows camel cactus de doo, his name for the bird that hovers over the dryscaping looking for a place to land. I walk him by the canal that runs its concrete vein through Scottsdale, feeds the pool at the Arizona Biltmore where once in a deck chair, Irving Berlin dreamt up white Christmas over a tequila sunrise, fighting the dual oppressions of happiness and heat who wouldn't long for snow, for history, for an end to the inveterate blinking of the neon signs that flash their native terms dominoes and just beneath it, guns. But at dusk the sky runs Tyrian purple and the saguaros on the hills throw their inscrutable Alphabet shadows across seraphs of agave. A living document, vigorous and prickly.

37:22 Wes Alwan: Yeah, So I love dominoes and guns. Frankly,

37:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: you'll be right at home in Phoenix.

37:31 Wes Alwan: It's a fan of the Phoenicians. Now, let's see. One of the things I loved about this poem and the reason why singled it out was just this final stanza. Inscrutable Alphabet shadows across rifts of agave. And then the other thing, you know, again, we get to party with a famous artist. We. We start out, we're in Arizona in the desert, and then all of a sudden, he's dreaming of something else. There's at least a te. I guess I'm just focusing on the drink. But it's so. I saw this. You know, you're by the canal one moment, and the next moment it's something far less mundane and more fabulous. And it sounds like it's a way of. To talk about Berlin dreaming up longing for a white Christmas in contrast to the oppressions of heat is a way of talking about your longing for that in this context. Or you're longing for something else. But. Yeah. What is this poem about? Is that a legitimate poetry interview question? What is this poem about?

38:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, that's. I think you're totally right. These friends have since moved out of Phoenix. But I'd gone a couple times down to Phoenix to see them and their young son. And. I don't know. I went to Phoenix and I just. I never had a bad time there. And I tried to think of what it was that was making me have such a good time.

38:58 Wes Alwan: It's the dry heat.

38:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: They say it's the dry heat. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, and there's. Of course, we could easily make an Arrested Development joke here where you show up in Phoenix and burn your hand on the car door. But anyway, I'd rather be.

39:13 Wes Alwan: What is it? I'd rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona.

39:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And, you know, these are just, you know, this one in Pacific Palisades, just about living in the west and trying to find. Trying to trace back, you know, like the vein, you know, trying to trace things back to some kind of source so that I can understand where these places are coming from. What's going on here? You know, what is this place really about? And when you have a place like Phoenix, which is a tertiary settlement, which is an entirely constructed place, I mean, it's really not habitable. And they've just given it these palm trees to try to make it look like a resort place. These palm trees are not native to the place. And again, thinking, well, none of us is native to this country unless we are Native Americans. None of us is native to this country. You know, what is this? What is this about? What's real about this? What is this trying to show me? Or what can this teach me? And then trying to find something good in it and something real. If I think it's unreal, how is it real? You know, this sort of self argument, I mean, that's just a larger insight into how I write poems, which is if I'm criticizing something, that's usually a good germ of a poem. Anger is usually a good. Anger is too strong of a word for something like this. Right. But some sort of irritation or some sort of annoyance maybe is usually a good engine for a poem because it's active and it makes you. Pushes you into language to say, why am I feeling this way? What do I want to articulate? And then trying to talk oneself out of it and saying, okay, what's the opposite of this? How can I have a sort of dialogue with myself here? And then, of course, in a poem like this, it's also sort of turning that back on language itself and thinking about language itself and how that's working.

40:53 Wes Alwan: Yeah. It begins with this idea of inscrutability. Right. So all the neighbors seem to make a living in encryption. But the house sounds like that as well. Right. Blank and rectangular. And despite the tropical legibility. Right. Despite these palm trees that are supposed to make the landscape somehow readable or legible. So there's that setup. It's not. It makes it sound intriguing. And then we get the walk by the canal, and then we get you associating to longing for something else, which is where I stopped in my characterization. I didn't really do full justice to the structure of the poem because there's a. Right, you get. You get to a negative characterization of dominoes and guns. But it ends with an attempt to explain what is so attractive about the place. So the sky running Tyrian purple, the cacti on the hills throwing their Alphabet shadows. But it's still inscrutable at the end. But there's something. There's a kind of vitality to it, despite the Fact that you're in the desert, it seems the prickliness, the vigorousness.

42:09 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right, yeah. Something real here.

42:11 Wes Alwan: After all, there's vitality. And I just thought, yeah, that, that is something that comes up quite a bit. Right, so the. And something that you associate with blood. Right. And the prickly cacti, I think we can imagine pricking ourselves on them and bleeding, but it being something that is vitality inducing. And that, that reminds me of your Salome. So this is page 58. So it reminded me of Salome and then Rita. Herwit, Rita Hayworth. So yeah, I love this line. Veiling and a veiling are collapsed. John the Baptist is beheaded by a stripper. So another point that one might argue is a climactic moment in the book where things really come together. And then you get Rita Hayworth, a flame with vitality, dancing with vigor, the dance of the seven veils, flaunting her vitality. And I take a bit of the aspiration for you to flaunt your vitality. So did you want to say something about that? There's a bit of a, there's a bit of an edge to this form of vitality though, since John the Baptist does get beheaded.

43:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that's right, yeah. And she flaunted in mine too. You know, there's something a little bit flaunted in my face too, I should say.

43:27 Wes Alwan: Oh, right, yeah.

43:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: I mean there's the desire for this, but there's the. You know, maybe what I am admiring in Phoenix is like it's self belief, you know, that's maybe the thing that the speaker has trouble accessing. See now I'm, now I'm saying the speaker of course separated from myself so that I have none of this is plausible deniability. Exactly right. This is me in air quotes. No, but I mean, you know, of course there's a bit of posing that goes on. So it's hard to. Or even just crystallizing something in some sort of definitive statement. There's always going to be a little bit of, you know, the real person wants to hedge a little bit and say, well, not exactly that. Right. The question of self confidence or self belief or the desire to escape oneself is certainly a problem that the speaker eye whatever, you know, has and when confronted with someone in the, in the sort of full force vigor of their, their personality, even if it's prickly or whatever, that can sometimes be shocking or upsetting or it could feel like a taunt or even an attack. So this girl is sometimes maybe a little bit Upset with Rita Hayworth. Maybe a little bit upset over this whole situation and a little sad and maybe a little self pitying too. Hopefully not too much.

44:45 Wes Alwan: You mentioned aspiration here, I think, and the connection to vitality, as I mentioned. I thought that comes up quite a bit in this book. And I also thought the Phoenicians. I kind of put the Phoenicians under that category as well. Several categories. Because something about associating to Berlin I thought was fit into this kind of category of aspiration. But I think my favorite reference to this is in the Awful truth on page 27. One of many great lines and ideas in here about shaking life by the martini. So what I wouldn't give for her glinty self confidence. Not the false courage I summoned to sing when I become a chanteuse version of myself. A Persona borrowed from the record shelf of a dusty basement in Connecticut to shake life by the martini. But to stay self possessed, to star in the movie of myself instead of playing second lead and so on. Sort of like the. I was going to call it a credo, but I. Maybe that's going a bit too far.

45:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. I think you're on to something there.

45:51 Wes Alwan: Yes.

45:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, it's hard to love these movies so much and have them all be full of confident women when you're just a normal woman.

46:02 Wes Alwan: Yeah, but something to aspire to. What's your favorite poem in here?

46:06 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, you mentioned a few that I really like. I think Pacific Palisades is one of my favorites. I think Black Eyed Susie's really captures a moment in my life. I like the Phoenicians.

46:17 Wes Alwan: Frances Gumm, another line I love. She believed in love poems. The Kennedys and the Efficacy of Tears. I hope this isn't vulgar, just me pulling out my favorite bits.

46:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no. That's really nice of you. Yeah. That's poor Judy. Yeah, she's my favorite. And she gets. I was a little sad that she got a little bit of a short shrift in this book, so I was happy that people liked Frances Gumm. But. Yeah, and Oxford, another one you liked. You liked a lot of my favorites, actually.

46:44 Wes Alwan: Your hair grew to Pre Raphaelite proportions.

46:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. You know this is true.

46:51 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I do, I do. It's funny because. Yeah, I've seen your hair like that. I think maybe my favorite line, though is in the Gold of Naples. Things kept reminding me of other things. I just love that as a beginning to a poem and then ending with the idea that resemblances are just the shadows of differences and I thought, has anyone ever said that? Just seems like the kind of thing that someone should have already said. And I googled it and no one has. No one has ever said that resemblances are just the shadows of differences. Yeah.

47:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: Really? I thought I was pulling that from something. I mean, in the. In the poem it suggests that it was something someone said.

47:26 Wes Alwan: And as a someone in the movie.

47:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, just a saying. I just thought it was a saying. Something like that.

47:33 Wes Alwan: Well, maybe in some other form it's been been said, but. Yeah, I hadn't. I hadn't heard it.

47:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'm glad I'm, you know, more original than I thought in this book about sort of not being original or not needing to be original.

47:49 Wes Alwan: Just remember, originality is just a shadow of.

47:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. Of unoriginality.

47:55 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Of borrowing, of stealing.

48:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: Should I end by reading the Gold of Naples and. Sure, then we'll sign off. All right. This is the last poem in the book. So people are, you know. But there are other things in here. I promise. We haven't quite, quite covered it all. The gold of Naples. Things kept reminding me of other things. The old ladies in the street were my aunts. A counterman at Cafe Mexico was Toto in a soda fountain hat. The rum babas were trumpet mutes. My hanging mocha pots were little men with barrel of monkeys arms. This garden looked like Barcelona. That piazza was a picture of a picture of Rome. Vesuvius was a Crawford eyebrow arched over the bay. My pizza oven of an apartment was. It really was the apartment in the Gold of Naples. And I was me or some baked and dusky version of myself. And I was alone and half delirious and overweight. An Aussie tourist by a bookstall turned to me and said, those Japanese experts say this place will blow at any moment. If you thought Pompeii was trouble, I did. Just wait. From my roof I watched the sunset through a bottle of Strega. And it was a John Martin painting. One of those camp apocalyptic bugaboos. Now, how does the saying go? Resemblances are just the shadows of differences. The end of my world is the beginning of yours.

49:23 Wes Alwan: I was hoping you were going to do the Aussie tourist in an accent.

49:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: Those Japanese. No, I can't do it.

49:31 Wes Alwan: I want to hear it.

49:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: I can't.

49:33 Wes Alwan: No, no, you can't do an Aussie accent.

49:36 Erin O'Luanaigh: I can, but I don't wanna. It would be a hate crime if

49:39 Wes Alwan: I did just say shrimp on the bar.

49:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'll say it off recording.

49:46 Wes Alwan: So you're associating You're. The things you're being reminded of are scenes are from a movie called the Golden Naples. Right. That's what I take this to be.

49:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, some of it. Yeah. I was really staying in this apartment that was in this movie. Sophia Lauren is in this movie. And Naples is a place that my family's from there. It's very. You know, it was an uncanny experience for me to walk around in Naples and to. Not really, you know, Naples isn't in the imagination the way that a lot of Italian cities are in American imaginations. You know, like, we could sort of see. We think of Rome, we could see the Colosseum and things like that. Naples is a very. It can be a very rough place. It's corrupt, it's. You know, but it's also extremely vital. It's a very vital place. It's very associated for me, of course, with blood, because I'm from there and with blood of Saint Janarius and with all of these people that walk around that look exactly like your family members, in my case, they look really. I kept. I just kept thinking that I was seeing people that I knew from my own family, and a couple times they were people I knew. So there was something extra uncanny about that because, of course, you know, I was partially there to visit family and to go to ancestral houses and stuff like that. So, yeah, I don't know, I just. It was. It was trippy. It was a trippy experience. That sense of familiarity and strangeness coming together was, I think, what I was after here.

51:15 Wes Alwan: They really thought Vesuvius was going to blow again.

51:18 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes, it will. It will blow again. And that's the other thing, is that you're there, and at the time, I think it was fresh in people's minds. I don't know if there was some update or if some. If they had taken fresh readings on Vesuvius or something like that, but people were talking about it. People on the streets were talking about it in Italian and Napolitan, and it was like, I just got in this place and it's there. I mean, have you been to Naples?

51:45 Wes Alwan: Uh, no. Maybe Pass through, but.

51:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, no, I had a little rooftop area that I would go up to, you know, just in the poem, and. And you look and there's Vesuvius. You know, you can't escape it. And you just think to yourself, why is everybody here? Why am I here? I don't know how many millions of people in total live in the impact zone of Vesuvius were it to erupt again, It Would be just massive catastrophic event. Started to really freak me out a little bit. The imposing. You go to Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it's very real, and it's there and it's smoking. Climbed up to the top, and it's just incredible.

52:25 Wes Alwan: So when you say the end of my world is the beginning of yours, who is the you and the yours at the end?

52:31 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think it's the reader. I think it's the reader. I'm writing to people. I think my background is a singer and a performer is. I think I'm conscious of responsibility to an audience to offer something to them. And so here I think I. You know, I wanted to end with a poem that directly gave a nod.

52:52 Wes Alwan: So resemblances of the shadows of differences, you know, reminds me of Plato. Resemblances are shadows of the. You know, things in themselves, the real. But here the difference seems to be the difference between. Between poetic imaginary world and then the reader's real world. And so the. The reader can take some of this and take it into the real world and into vitality. Is that the idea, or.

53:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think that's right, yeah. You know, the same thing that we were talking about with Pacific Palisades. What is really real and what isn't. What is more real? The movie that took place in this apartment or whatever took place while I was living there. You know, they're sort of both equally real and equally invisible, formed by each other. So that the representation becomes as real a part of one's experience. In the same way that I think that I'm experiencing films or artworks. In the book, you can have these formative experiences around your confrontation with the artwork. Such that, you know, a movie or a book read, you know, at an important time in your life becomes as much a part of what was happening to you at that time as whatever was really going on in your life, in your daily life. So there's some sort of collapse. I hope that happens at the end. Where these two things become so fused together that there's no difference that, you know, like. Like veiling and availing. You know, they're sort of two sides of the same coin. And that ultimately is like, maybe the ideal encounter with art.

54:22 Wes Alwan: Well, unfortunately, we're. We've reached the end. I want to say there is a lot more in here about. Right. So everything from love and singing and acting and sleep and the whole. The whole concept of metaphor to great descriptions of the body. It's a really great description of that. You do the veins and the heart and relating that to a veil. So I highly recommend this to listeners, and I guess it's time for us to borrow a phrase of yours. Slip behind the curtain like a metaphor.

54:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: Thank you so much, Wes. It's so kind of you.

55:01 Wes Alwan: Thank you.

55:04 Erin O'Luanaigh: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast, and on Twitter njoysubtext.

What happens when the Godzilla of superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

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0:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: patreon.com subtextpodcast.

0:31 Wes Alwan: Welcome to part two of our discussion of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. We just got done with an extended conversation about Nurse Ratched's personality. And I think I'll start by just adding one more thing about the glass, which I thought of, but I forgot to say, there's a kind of glassy eyed look, I think, to Nurse Ratched's.

0:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, that's good.

0:51 Wes Alwan: Yeah, the way she looks at things. And it occurred to me that some of the crowd that I roll with, the psychoanalytic crowd, would characterize her as psychotic, as kind of twisted at the point of psychotic being kind of quite out of touch with reality, or at least out of touch with emotional reality, which that glassy eyedness kind of conveys. And it occurred to me that, that, yeah, that little tiny office that she's in with the glass, sliding glass window further reflected that orientation to reality. And again, the kind of thing where she can watch from her perch while the chaos she's creating, a projective identification unfolds around her. And then she can do what she needs with that psychologically. And it's part of what helps keep her calm. That's her medication. The medication is going through the window both ways. She's handing it out, she's taking it in. Yeah.

1:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, I just wanted to comment on that in relation to this Christ parallel with McMurphy, because really it's a sort of dueling religion binary between the two of them because she also, that's sort of her rectory, if you will. The medication line. I can't not think of a communion line, especially when one of the patients opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue to receive the pill on the tongue. And also with this idea which I'm, you know, I keep sort of getting around it because I'm not quite sure ultimately what big picture to draw from it, but her catering to the weaker or the weakest and the most helpless in the Name of a kind of benevolence which seems like a Christian idea. Whereas McMurphy is about say the more militant half or the more active or engaged or proselytizing even part of Christianity, if there's a binary distinction to be made there. You know, it occurs to me that in trying to get Chief to respond to him and come out of a shell or, you know, he makes the. He tries to talk to Chief in his own language, which is a bit, a bit crass, a bit much, right. And then when he's trying to teach him basketball, he says it's an old Indian game called put the ball in the hole or something like that. And, and it occurs to me that that too is, is a. One of the classic methods of the conversion of, you know, non Western, say groups to Christianity when you're sending out missionaries is to put the Christian story or elements of Christian themes in terms of the local culture, that particular culture's terminology. So there's something in his extremely indelicate, granted and sort of brutish way, which is an attempt to be a missionary to reach this person on their level in terms that they will understand, to familiarize something, to make something less foreign to the audience with which you were trying to engage. There are a lot of elements. Of course, I didn't read anything about any secondary literature, so I don't know about McMurphy being a Christ figure. But of course the fishing trip was also something that. I could see it all. As soon as you said that, I started, you know, making the connection. But it occurred to me more that institutional religion was being critiqued on the Nurse Ratched side because of the communion line and keeping everybody sort of dialed docile. And you know, supposedly these are what, just sedatives to keep everybody from getting too rowdy.

4:17 Wes Alwan: They're probably antipsychotics, which are highly sedating in general. That's part of how they work. But teach a nut to fish, right, and set free, how would that saying go? But so let's say a little bit about what makes him Christ. Like, although again, I think he's more of a trickster. Satyr.

4:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, the Last Supper and the Resurrection, when they give him ect doesn't really work the second time.

4:49 Wes Alwan: And he is kind of betrayed by Billy. Billy could be Judas or maybe a combination of Judas and Peter. But I think the most self sacrificing moments involve. Well, there's two at the end, right? He's gonna, he's about to escape. He's given the men the big Party. Candy and Rose are waiting outside and he's got the window open and he's ready to escape. And then Billy is upset so he decides he's going to give Billy this sexual experience with Candy. And then at that point he, you know, he sets that up and then he sits down and you see him go into a state of reverie. And it's hard to say, you know, what is that state of reverie about? That's the calmest we've ever, I think we ever see him in the movie, the most peaceful. And he seems to be fantasizing either about his freedom or either what he's, you know, maybe what he's done for Billy. But that leads to him passing out and not escaping. Then he has a chance to escape again. The next morning he knocks out an orderly, gets the window open again. But then we hear Billy scream or no, someone scream. The pillbone screams because she finds Billy. And then he's going to have to go see what happened and strangle Nurse Ratched because that's what Jesus would do, obviously. What would Jesus do? Anyway, so the two self sacrificing moments are the two times he gives up escaping and then he's doing a lot of things that are helpful and therapeutic in the sense he's getting people out of their shelves. The motive though, the conscious motive is, seems to be virtually entirely selfish and being subversive. Right. So why does he take the men fishing? He gets chief to help him get over the fence. He gets into the bus. I mean he could drive off and escape at that point he could go be with Candy without having any interference with his sexual shenanigans. Instead he's going to take all these guys on a field trip, steal the bus, take them. That's a lot of work. I don't know that I would have ever done that even if it were a legit version of that. It's a lot of work. He puts in all the work to take these guys on a field trip. But it's difficult to distinguish between the transgressive motive, the fuck you to the law and order motive, and the motive that involves being helpful to these guys. Or maybe it's just wanting to see some vitality in these men, these men who are closed off. But you can see the conflict directly, right? Because he's one minute he's showing the men how to fish, the next minute he's trying to go underneath with Candy. But then the boat ends up going in a circle and then someone's catching a fish and Then he's immediately helping them catch the fish. So he is a creature of impulse, jumping from one thing to another. But it's somehow that impulsiveness, that closer relationship to his own instinctual side, to his own sexual side, has a kind of altruistic effect, which it need not, as we know. Right. The guy is a criminal and is convicted of statutory rape and is in prison and, as I've speculated, is probably pretty strong sociopathic character traits. But it's this part of him that they lack, which he can give them and which delights him to give them.

8:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I think his. For me, his motives are a little bit murkier in that I think he's. I think he feels sorry for these guys quite early on. This is later explicitly said in the scene, actually after the fishing trip, I believe, where he learns that the men are voluntarily committed. And he says, you're no crazier than the average guy out on the street. Something like that. And that's when Nurse Ratched says, those are very challenging observations, which I would love to unpack. I have. I have no idea why that sticks out so much to me. But by this time, I believe they've already gone on the fishing trip. Cause this is rather. This is in the last third of the film. And this is going to be the scene where the fist fight happens when he punches through the window and then he gets ect. So I think that's after the fishing trip. But this idea of fishing is set up early in the film because in Dr. Spivey's office, there's the picture of Dr. Spivey with his first Chinook that he caught, holding the fish up proudly in the picture. And also the doctor in the present moment is expressing Chinooker. Okay.

9:18 Wes Alwan: Is that the way it is in the script? I have.

9:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: Okay.

9:21 Wes Alwan: He's like, you didn't weigh the chain.

9:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, exactly. Right. You're supposed to be. Doctor, you're supposed to be in the business of weighing people's chains. Right. And yet they. He didn't think to weigh the chain, and it was extremely heavy. And again, we have the sense of the idea of strength and overcoming through physical strength, relating both to fighting and also overcoming one's sort of chains that hold one down or whatever the case may be. So all this stuff is sort of wrapped up in that moment. But I think he sees this doctor express pride in this fishing trip. And I think the seed is planted for him to later take these guys out so that they could have a little fun day of doing a guy Thing, you know, because all these guys really need to do is be guys. Come on, let's go fishing. Let's just get laid. And that occupational therapy is one which he seems to be consciously invoking. You know, we could make the connection back to, okay, we'll have these guys feel some pride in themselves if they go out and catch a fish. And he's encouraging them, you know, when Christopher Lloyd is putting the hook through the fish's eyes, which they're a little grossed out by, he eggs them on and is, you know, encourages them to keep going. And then they. They're sort of proud of themselves, too. And he says, you're not a lunatic now. You're a fisherman. So now I've given you a new occupation. I've given you a sense of purpose. You have a new noun to attach to yourself. I think his benevolence is about seeing that these men are not actually so badly off that they need to be committed and just wanting to give them a little bit of a push into something, some sort of liveliness or sense of fun, you know. And I think that McMurphy has this idea that if they just go out and have a good time, if they just walk, wet their whistle and watch the ball game, if they just get laid, then they will be better. And in fact, he's right every time. I mean, he. You know, he's right about the fishing trip. Billy loses his stutter because he gets laid. You know, he gets it back again immediately because Nurse Ratched emasculates him in a horrific scene. But that. That part of McMurphy's benevolence to me is actually a little. I mean, one doesn't look at it too closely, but that good part of him seems to me to be a little bit exaggerated. I think it's not accidental what he's doing. I think he takes an interest in these guys immediately and pities them and wants to see them feel confident.

11:50 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I still think there's a good helping of selfishness there and all that. And then we could think about his motives for wanting to manipulate these guys into doing these various things. Right. He's going to be doing something similar to Nurse Ratched. He's trying to get certain elements of his own psychological dynamics to unfold outside of him. So it might feel helpful without actually being helpful. But, yeah, the question. I mean, it's a good question. You ask whether he would consciously have any subjective desire to be helpful given the kind of character he is. He is otherwise. And then we can ask about the more realistic consequences of his actions. Because I want to say these men need structure. We had something in my house called day structure, which is actually very good for people. They had to be out of the house in the morning at 10am they had to have a job or some other way to spend 20 hours a week. Structure actually is good for people. I don't know about pacifying music or something like that, but this principle that he introduces, the more vital, instinctual sexual principle, is only good up to a point. This is the other thing that I see when people talk about dating. If they're not emotionally stable enough, I think, okay, right. They tell me a resident of my house would tell me started dating someone. I'm like, okay, here we go. This is going to be a hospital visit soon. So I just want to introduce the idea that this is. I mean, realistically, these men are having. They're shut down and they're having some vitality introduced into their life. And Ratchet represents too much superego, too little instinct, too much repression. But we don't want them turning into McMurphys. And also, they couldn't handle it. Like the way you can't handle the truth. You can't handle being McMurphy. They couldn't handle would be destabilizing. So I don't think. I think the movie is. Or maybe I'm just viewing it this way, but I think the Nurse Ratched, as horrible as she is, the principle that she represents isn't all wrong. Exactly. Do you know what I mean? We don't see what can go wrong with the McMurphy principle, but it can be very, very destructive.

14:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes, I agree with you that I personally think that Nurse Ratched is. I am sympathetic to her to a point. I think the problem that I'm finding in the film's message is I think that the film seems to be advancing the idea that these men are not sick, that Jack Nicholson is all too sane, and that we all need to take Jack Nicholson lessons like that is. And I think that's one of the reasons why I feel like this. The film lands. It's a little bit hard to believe at times, or it's a little bit hard to be on board with fully because it seems to be holding him up as this kind of paragon and therefore stepping on the wrong side of the misogyny divide. If this is really what it means to be a man, as the film seems to be saying, that's the impression that I got from the film, is that he's this life force that he is sane. You know, he knows more than the doctors. He, you know, can identify two cliches in a row. When the other doctor can't, he knows to weigh the chain. Yeah. And I think that's what the film is trying to say. Like look at this great guy who's wiser than the system. It's too bad that he then becomes a martyr to the system, a victim of the system. But he's inspired one person to make themselves free and perhaps the others. I know in the book that the other guys are all inspired by his example and they, you know, they're like Lazarus, they all get up and walk.

15:36 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I think to the extent that the film is saying that, that, yeah, that's not very realistic. Right. So it's one thing to say that we have to be in, we have to have more of the Dionysian principle. Right. But it's another to say that we simply go all the way to the Dionysian. So we want to offset that. And this is, by the way, this is one of Nietzsche's points. It's not that we get rid of the Apollonian or the scientific. We have a gay science, which is to say we have a Dionysian science. We have this fabulous fusion of the rational and the irrational. We get the optimum balance between the two. And the same thing I think with romantics like Wordsworth. Right. Didn't he explicitly say something similar? So it's not just to go to the opposite extreme. So yeah, hopefully I might be too charitably reading the movie, but I think we learn in the end that we don't just learn it in the end. We know that McMurphy is quite self destructive. That's how he ended up in prison and that's how he's getting into trouble with all these shenanigans. It's just that his self destructiveness can be helpful to others in this kind of accidental way, I think. And that becomes sacrifice for him. It becomes sacrifice because he ends up lobotomized and then ultimately dead because of it. And it's not that everyone needs this. Some people, they don't need more instinct, they need more superego and ego. They need to be repressed more. A lot of people could use a bit more repression.

17:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right.

17:12 Wes Alwan: You're not just trying to liberate them from their and then let the ID run wild. But some people, yeah, they can use more life drive, they can use more vitality, they can use more instinct as long as it's Harnessed correctly and integrated with the rest of the personality in a certain way. So you could see someone like Chief. He's the one character who could really benefit from this. I think the rest of the guys actually do need to be in the institution. They're not going to do well on the outside. On a more charitable reading of this movie, it's only Chief who's really configured to fully benefit in the long term from someone like McMurphy. Assuming that he does. Assuming he doesn't end up back in the hospital the next day. But if McMurphy can be transformative in the long term for someone, I think this is a good. Maybe it's time to talk about the Chief, this particular character that he can be especially helpful to.

18:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And maybe, maybe my idea that Nicholson, that the film is single mindedly on Nicholson's side is actually because I'm reading that character's effect too generously. But it seems to me that Harding doesn't need to be there. Billy is hurt by being there in the same way that he's hurt by living with his mother. Billy needs to be kind of, you know, like a lot of this is. I'm actually. In other words, maybe I see Nicholson or maybe I see the film as positing that Nicholson is having this tremendously positive influence because I see his influence as positive. And this goes back to, I think this. You know, the idea that I had that Nurse Ratched is like this overbearing mom and Nicholson is like this licentious dad. And these guys have too much of this overbearing mom in their lives and they need the dad. They need the. The dad who's gonna throw them in the deep end of the pool. Dad who's gonna say, let's go out and do something dangerous. When they go out on the fishing trip, everything turns out fine. You know, I mean, they get in trouble. They don't like run through the streets tearing their clothes off or crying and getting hysterical or, you know, like, you know, they're capable of being out in society, it seems.

19:14 Wes Alwan: Well, but they're in a very specific circumstance. They're on a boat. Right. Which I think is important. This little, as Melville calls it, a boat is a very important little microcosm. And yeah, I don't think they would function very well for the most part in society. Just, just based on my. Okay, my experience. And I think it. So someone like Harding might be there to avoid killing his wife. In other words, they are looking for their impulses to be restrained. If they're There voluntarily. You ever watch police videos where someone. You probably don't, but I watch these sometimes because I find it psychologically fascinating where people work very, very hard to get arrested by police by being confrontational, when otherwise they're just going to be let go and they can't help themselves. It's almost like they want to be locked up. It's almost like they're. And they're really, really out of control. And it's almost like they want someone else to keep them in control. So this dynamic goes both ways. Where Nurse Ratched wants to be a controller, some people want to be in control because they're afraid of what their impulses will do, even if they're incorrect. It might not be that Harding would kill his wife if he stays home, but as an obsessional character, which he's a perfect representative of, he could well be afraid of that impulse. That's why there's this double play on life and wife. You know, I'm talking about my life, not just about my wife. It's also talking about her life.

20:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think this reminds me, I was just thinking of this little anecdote before where, when I was in college and taking an American lit class, we were reading Emerson, who I adore. And I came into class and everybody was talking about how Emerson is just this crazy egomaniac. And I found it really inspiring. And I remember the professor said, you know, that basically that most. He finds that most of his students who are healthy psychologically find Emerson to be too much, but depressed students find him. Exactly, exactly. But depressed students find him to be really inspiring and, like, need the jolt of self confidence that Emerson is dishing out in these essays. It's good for them. That's what they really need. And so I remember walking away from that, first of all thinking, am I depressed? And second of all, really understanding, I think, what he meant by that, because there's something about, like, you need to be in the position to be able to receive that message. And, you know, Emerson is talking to the person that he's trying to reach, you know, that that particular person, which was me in part, one man's satyr, one man's Dionysus, one man's trickster, evil antichrist, whatever he is, Topsy turvy Christmas, is another man's motivational speaker, you know, and another man's positive paternal influence. And I think that what is frustrating about so many of these patients is that they. They seem to lack the ability to be decisive, to make a decision, to act, to do something. Your description of this need for control or perhaps need to be restrained as an angle, which I had not thought of. But I think more often than not, society or people's own inhibitions turns them into passive figures who need this jolt to get them out of that. And that seems to me to be something that. That principle is something that McMurphy is supplying to these men. You know, and I could be wrong, and I think, you know, maybe you're right about Harding, that he would attack his wife. But it seems to me that he need. That all these men need some. Just some chutzpah. They need some. Somebody to just give them a little jolt of confidence. Which is why, you know, sleeping with Candy works momentarily for Billy. At least in the film, it works.

23:19 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I'm having trouble figuring out which side you're coming down on here to the Ben.

23:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Just though I'm distrustful of the way that the film is setting up Nicholson to be a kind of a hero, I also feel as though within the universe that the film is creating, he is the hero. And that these characters, in the way that they're constructed and the way that they're responding to Nicholson are kind of proving that they need. I'm sorry to be using his name interchangeably with McMurphy, but they're, you know, one in the same. I imagine they seem to need what he's giving them. Yeah, it may not be actually true in terms of the way that what they would need in real life, but in the fictional world, they seem to need what he is supplying. Now, I find that to be troubling and somewhat, in terms of this relationship with women, somewhat misogynistic. But I also think these men need a positive paternal influence to help them get a little decisiveness in their lives. At least in the film. That seems to be what they are lacking, these characters, and he's supplying it. But maybe this would be an opportunity for us to talk about why this works on Chief and what makes Chief.

24:33 Wes Alwan: Well, let me, before we do that. So I think it is probably part of the social. You know, there's a very kind of 1970s social commentary to the film, which is anti establishment, probably, and anti bureaucratic and maybe even, you know, not happy with the concept of mental health. You know, you have people these days who are right against all psychiatric medication or. Which is foolish, but they don't. It just reflects the fact that they don't really know what they're talking about. But it's a little unclear to me on where the film is on that but it's crafted well enough to be a bit. It's ambiguous enough to me where you could give it a more charitable reading and say, well, they do need that in a sense, but it's very context dependent. So they can have a fun time on a boat and they are having a nice party, but that's in the hospital. They're still locked in and there's still going to be staff the next morning on a real world basis. It's not a sustainable thing for them. They do need a different relationship to the instinctual and they are shut down in various ways. The solution is not just, hey, let's be more instinctual. Freud made a big point of this because I think people misunderstood them. He wrote a. I gotta remember the title here. Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness in which he complains a lot about the sexual mores of the time and the fact that there basically isn't even really any dating, right. And just people end up with each other and then they're very unhappy. But he also makes a point in that essay to say, yeah, just saying, don't be uptight and let's have free love and let instincts reign. That is not a good solution. To say that some people need this more Dionysian element introduced is, I think, absolutely true. But how it's integrated is key. And it's like a long term therapeutic process. It's not enough to have this temporary paternal, lively figure. So this is a very temporary experience for these guys. It is therapeutic. Does say something about what could be different in that environment. Right. So if Nurse Ratched were a little more lively, that could be good. But of course she could be too lively. We wouldn't want Nurse ratched to be McMurphy. That would be. Yeah, not good for them either.

27:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, here's. Okay, maybe this is my bias or something, but one of the things I think that is detrimental to these guys or to anyone really is talking things to death. One of the things that he's doing is not necessarily just bringing in the instinctual. He's having them do things. It's like occupational therapy, you know, instead of just sitting around and being, you know, made to talk about these things which they don't want to talk about and which make them extremely uncomfortable and which make the men around them listening to it extremely uncomfortable. And instead of just this constant passive, this kind of like, you know, benevolent thing that Ratched is doing where you don't act at all, there's no activity and everything is suppressed. There's just the idea of let's watch the ball game together. Let's. Okay. Not necessarily getting drunk and sleeping with women and stuff like that, but going out and doing something. Just doing something. It seems that that's the big problem. These men want restraint. Well, it seems that they're already overly restrained in their behavior. They're inhibited in their behavior, and then all they want to do is talk about everything.

28:15 Wes Alwan: But we do know they're taken on field trips of some sort with that bus. We don't know exactly what they are. Right.

28:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: And they have the basketball court and they have cards.

28:27 Wes Alwan: Yeah. But it's pretty meager. Yeah, it's pretty.

28:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. That seems important. And that's the role that. I mean, they're being taken on these field trips by the orderlies. Right. So it seems as though the actual therapeutic element is not incorporating this kind of thing. It seems that recreation is their break from talk therapy, which is their only recourse and their own. The only way that they're being ministered to psychologically. That, I think, is a. That's a problem for these men. I think they need to feel. I mean, I don't know. What do I know? I'm not an expert, but. But I would seem to me that they would maybe need to feel useful, that they are doing an activity that gives them some pride, like fishing. Being able to catch a fish.

29:10 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

29:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Doing something that has an end result that they could feel accomplished. Not necessarily just sitting around and talking in circles like Harding does, or just getting embarrassed or, you know, talking all the time. Seems like something that. I mean, it's certainly something I don't want to do, you know, so if I were in this place, I wouldn't want to be constantly talking about my problems. That was. Seems to me that would be a very painful and detrimental thing if it were not broken up by some other form of therapy. Not electroshock.

29:42 Wes Alwan: Yeah. I think fishing field trips are a good idea. It's just the stealing the boat part.

29:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. But I mean, like, in a directed, therapeutic way, rather than just. What are they being taken, for instance, to a movie theater to just sit passively in front of a screen? I don't know. You know, we don't really know.

30:00 Wes Alwan: Yeah. We don't see that in the film. And that's. You know, that's. I thought was interesting because we could have had this. We could have been hit over the head with this. We could have been shown a very depressing field trip. And maybe there was. And maybe that was cut out of the movie. We could have been shown orderly. You know, the orderlies are cruel and not great at points, but they're not like caricatures of cruel orderlies.

30:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, not at all.

30:31 Wes Alwan: And they're not even as bad as stories I've heard of, you know, institutions here in Massachusetts of what goes on. Right. So we could have been hit over the head more in the movie with that type of thing. I think it's going for a little bit more ambiguity or nuance in that respect. I think at the points where Nurse Ratched gets really cruel and humiliates Billy, for instance, there's no longer any nuance. But it's true to her. I still think it's true in a sense. Right. It's not just caricature. This is her character and it fits. And she can be in general, she's not necessarily acting out like that, but she does it. She does in that context, in a key moment. So, yeah, I totally agree that activity helps. And I used to basically force people to do that, which they hated, including socialization time, which is one of the things they mentioned in the movie. Forced socialization, not letting people be isolated. I had to do that. And they often were not happy with that. But this is a good point about talking is not going to be enough. And part of what's therapeutic, I think the point you're making has to come from real life. So I know you would have taken them to the baseball game. Definitely.

31:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: Of course. Of course. I mean, this is a lot of this, a lot of where I sort of agree with the film is this idea that too much. There's too much rumination. This seems to me to be the extremely prevalent problem that too much rumination, not enough action. And maybe that's easy for me to say, I don't know, because then maybe if people were just acting instead of ruminating, the world would be in chaos. But I think action of any kind, any kind of positive action. But then again, I don't want this conversation to devolve just into what I would do if I were running the institution.

32:19 Wes Alwan: But, yeah, and I'm just saying they have to be made feel safe to act. They have to feel like their action is not going to kill anyone or whatever. Dangerous things come from the use of one's impulses.

32:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, and something about, actually, McMurphy coming back unscathed from ECT seems to increase everyone's feeling of safety. His resilience seems to inspire them with more courage, because that's when Cheswick gets upset over the cigarettes and fights back. And has some agency in that moment. It results in chaos because of Nurse Ratched's need for everything to be controlled and her refusal to sort of compromise with them or really listen to their concerns. I'm just interested in what you think in. Chief is particularly receptive to McMurphy. If I had to guess, I would say his being so inhibited as to not be able to speak or respond to people. McMurphy represents something that's. For him, you know, like a depressed person. Encountering Emerson, we somehow get to normal instead of from normal person to, you know, fascist dictator or whatever. The. Whatever the worrying effects of Emerson might be on someone. Too much confidence. But McMurphy's influence on him works like a tonic.

33:37 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So let's look at. Maybe let's look at what the Chief says about what's troubling him. Because, of course, he's. He's chosen not to speak and he's chosen to pretend that he's deaf, which. Who could blame him in that environment if he doesn't really want to communicate with all those people, he's there. He's using it more as a refuge. So, anyway, let's look. I think, yeah, it could help just to look at what the Chief says. So McMurphy says to him, chief, I can't take it no more. I gotta get out of here. And Chief says, he can't. And then McMurphy says, It's easier than you think, Chief. The Chief says, for you, maybe. You're a lot bigger than me. Which is a great line in the movie because we learn that, you know, despite his physical size the Chief thinks of himself as spiritually small, in a way. Murphy says, why, Chief? You're as big as a goddamn tree trunk. And then the Chief talks about his father. My papa's real big. He did like he pleased. So there's a reference to problems of impulse, which is one of the reasons why people shut down like this. That's why everybody worked on him. I don't know what that means exactly. The last time I seen my father, he was blind in the cedars from drinking. What does that mean, blind in the cedars? I mean, it sounds like he drank some bad alcohol and went blind. But blind in the Cedars or that just means blackout drunk.

35:04 Erin O'Luanaigh: I don't know.

35:04 Wes Alwan: Do you know what that means?

35:06 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, I don't.

35:07 Wes Alwan: The reason why I'm going to this speech is just. Yeah. I didn't have time to parse all of it, but I thought it was something we would come to, so. And Then he said it. And then every time he put the bottle to his mouth, he don't suck out of it. It sucks out of him until he shrunk, so wrinkled and yellow, even the dogs don't know him. So his father was real big, but got smaller because of his impulses. The impulse. The release of impulses, in the case of his father did not lead right to vitality. Chief has learned the lesson that.

35:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: But people working on him, too. I think that's related perhaps to the fact that people were also sucking the life out of him. They were leeching off of that vitality. So he was somehow being victimized by the people around him in addition to being ruled by his own impulses.

35:58 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I just. Again, that's a line I find really opaque. I don't know. But, yeah, I mean, what you're saying makes sense. But he did like he pleased. Yeah. That's why everybody worked on him, took advantage of him.

36:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Like McMurphy, his sort of overabundance of sanity or his bigness or his capacity seems to put a target on his back. And that's the. What do they call it? Tall Poppy syndrome. Okay, you want to cut the tall poppy. The thing that stands out, stands above.

36:29 Wes Alwan: Okay, I like this. Yeah, this makes sense. So the Chief. And there are elements of McMurphy and the Chief's father, but what he saw was the destructive side of that. So his father became small by having the life sucked out of him by liquor. Right. And Dionysus is the God of liquor as well. So he seems to make himself small preemptively. And that includes by not speaking, pretending like he can't hear, not communicating with people. He's such a big, strong person, but he doesn't want to. It seems to me like, again, this is another place where he doesn't want to do something with his impulses anyway. So wrinkled and yellow that even the dogs don't know him. And then McMurphy says, Killed him. And he says, I'm not saying they killed him. They just worked on him the way they're working on you. Yeah, I don't know exactly what exactly that means.

37:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that sort of taking him down. So it's almost implied that he was, you know, his propensity for liquor was encouraged by the people around him. His self destruction was perhaps, you could say a setup, but that's a little bit too obvious or a little bit too naked. It would be something more envious and pernicious. But that similar relationship that ratched has to McMurphy and the tall poppy who needs to be neutralized through lobotomy because he cannot be brought into the fold or restrained in the way that she wishes to restrain or pacified in the way that she wishes to pacify him.

38:03 Wes Alwan: I mean, we do get. McMurphy becomes lobotomized, and he really is, in a sense, deaf and dumb. Right. He really is what the Chief was pretending to be. Completely out of touch. That comparison is a little bit rough, but you can see how seeing that, seeing someone else made that way in another person, I think might have put Chief in touch with the desire to not preemptively do that to himself, or not to partially be self lobotomized, so to speak, at least at a social level. So I don't know. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out here what it is about McMurphy that could have been especially therapeutic for Chief, despite the fact that this kind of McMurphy, like, character, Chief's father, really, it was. For him, it was just entirely destructive. Right. Alcohol and impulse and all that.

38:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Maybe the desire to see McMurphy succeed where the father failed. So to see those two in parallel, and then ultimately, when McMurphy is made to fail, the decision to somehow. What can that mean? Decide that, you know, okay, if this is maybe an inevitability for those men who I find, great, then I'm going to let the world do it to me instead of doing it to myself. Perhaps. But that seems a pretty bleak way of interpreting that final act of freeing himself.

39:28 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And we know that it's not just seeing McMurphy lobotomized and then killing him. That. That's not entirely the catalyst for him breaking out. Because he says he's ready to do it, Right? He says, I knew you wouldn't leave without me. I was waiting for you. Now we can make it, Mac. I feel big as a damn mountain. So something has happened between the party and McMurphy's return to the ward. I guess that's enough for Chief to go from feeling too small to leave to feeling big enough to leave. And of course, there's that great symbolic act of throwing the. What is it, a hydrotherapy station or something? I don't know what. The big fixture. Anyway.

40:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah.

40:12 Wes Alwan: Waterfall. Taking that. Right. So he is literally physically big enough to lift it the way McMurphy wasn't and to tear it out of the floor and throw it through the window. And the parallel there, of course, is the psychological or spiritual lifting required.

40:31 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. This is almost not worth saying, but if McMurphy returns from the dead with ECT. That's his resurrection. Now, this is his 40 days on earth of teaching his final lessons before he then goes off. Right. So in a way, it's like, okay, he needed. And now he's converted his faithful, and then he sort of ascends into the ether, and the work has been done. The conversion work has been done on Chief, or the work of the Holy Spirit, whatever you want to call it. And so now it's as if McMurphy has ascended. He's left, he's died, and. Yeah, ascended into whatever kind of Heaven will accept McMurphy. Aka, you know, hey, whatever direction he's traveling in, he's traveled there.

41:29 Wes Alwan: Or it's purgatory. And purgatory is just like a psychiatric unit

41:34 Erin O'Luanaigh: and he has to help Martinis for the next thousand years. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So finally, teach Martini how to play blackjack.

41:43 Wes Alwan: Take people on fishing trips. Right.

41:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's a little too fun. It's not quite sufficiently purgatorial, especially if there's a candy on board. But anyway, yeah.

41:53 Wes Alwan: This is going to be the final word. Word. What you're saying. Oh.

41:55 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, no.

41:56 Wes Alwan: This Comparing.

41:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, no, no. Please, let's say something else.

42:01 Wes Alwan: This is the way the episode needs to end.

42:06 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, no. What did we miss? What did we. What final word can we end on

42:12 Wes Alwan: that isn't Massageous massages? Misogynist Jesus. What are some other good names? Evil Jesus. I don't know. He's died for our sins. And when I say for our sins, I mean so that we can continue.

42:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, exactly. Well,

42:36 Wes Alwan: do you have any other last words?

42:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: I can't. I feel my frontal lobe is not. Not communicating anymore with the rest of my.

42:47 Wes Alwan: Is there anything you would like to take back. For the sake of your soul?

42:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Many things. Many things.

43:00 Wes Alwan: All right, thank you.

43:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter njoysubtext.

Nurse Ratched likes a rigged game, according to R.P. McMurphy. And it’s true that the game he is playing—lawless and hedonistic, but also vital and free-spirited—is unwinnable on her sandlot. As their conflict develops, we seem to be asked to compare the therapeutic value of McMurphy’s introduction of the Dionysian, to Ratched’s attempt to enforce an ordered calm within the psychiatric ward over which she is absolute ruler. What happens when the Godzilla of superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Wes & Erin discuss the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

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0:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: [email protected] subtextpodcast.

0:32 Wes Alwan: Nurse Ratched likes a rigged game, according to RP McMurphy. And it's true that the game he is playing, lawless and hedonistic, but also vital and free spirited, is unwinnable on her sandlot. As their conflict develops, we seem to be asked to compare the therapeutic value of McMurphy's introduction of the Dionysian to Ratched's attempt to enforce an ordered calm within the psychiatric ward over which she is absolute ruler. What happens when the Godzilla of Superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Today we discuss the 1975 film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, what would you do if someone tried to stop you from watching the World Series? Would you start a riot?

1:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: I would and I have.

1:23 Wes Alwan: I know that baseball is very important to you.

1:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: It is, yeah. That was one of the more personally affecting moments in the film. I will say let them watch the World Series. The significance of the way he calls that imaginary game was not lost on me either. I thought, interesting that that was a series, which is a little painful for me to think about because the Yankees were swept in four games by the Dodgers. But he imagines that Sandy Koufax is being beaten by the batter, which, you know, not literally, but he's imagining that Koufax is. Is pitching and his. And the ball is being hit out of the park, which I think is, you know, a pretty anti authoritarian kind of statement in and of itself. You know, pitching is basically fascist and batters are. Batters are trying to resist the authority of the pitcher, which, you know, baseball is also the only, I think the only sport that I know of where the defense has the ball. Listeners can correct me if I'm wrong about that. Yeah. So he imagines that the. The anti authoritarian battery defeats the great pitcher Sandy Koufax in that moment, even though it's not literally true. It is a fantasy.

2:29 Wes Alwan: Did you know that from memory that

2:31 Erin O'Luanaigh: I know that the 63. Yeah, I know the record. I know that's an infamous World Series if you're a Yankees fan. So I don't know. The play by play. Somebody might have gotten a home run off of Koufax over the course of the series, but I just thought it was interesting that he was imagining they were getting beaten.

2:51 Wes Alwan: So this is set in 1963. I don't think I knew that. It's a 1975 movie. Right. Based on a novel. Do we know when the novel was set? I mean. Sorry. When the novel was published?

3:03 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, I think It's. I think 62, for some reason. So I don't.

3:06 Wes Alwan: Yeah, it is 62. Yeah. Ken Kesey. Ken Casey.

3:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Have you read it?

3:12 Wes Alwan: No, I haven't. I downloaded it. I thought I might read a little bit, but I didn't end up reading anything. Have. Have you. So I think that was his one big. He wrote another novel. I don't know if he had any other big successes, but. Yeah. When I. When I suggested we do this movie, I was curious about whether you were excited to do it or. Where does this movie stand for you? Well, yeah, there you go. This is what I thought I did. You didn't see that. Excited.

3:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: Is this the kind of movie I'm supposed to get excited about with? You know, I mean, I think the. The title. You know, when one thinks of this film, you don't think it's gonna necessarily be the most fun you've ever had,

3:54 Wes Alwan: but it's got Jack Nicholson, but it's.

3:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Acting like it has something.

3:59 Wes Alwan: Are we gonna get a Jack Nicholson impression from you?

4:01 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, I wouldn't dare. I wouldn't dare.

4:03 Wes Alwan: No. Because we got a compliment on your

4:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: Daniel. Plaintiff.

4:10 Wes Alwan: Your Daniel Plainfield.

4:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'm slipping.

4:12 Wes Alwan: That's my impression.

4:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, I mean, I think I had seen it in my early 20s and it had really disturbed me. You know, maybe not the best time personally for me to be watching a movie like that, frankly, but I think the prospect filled me with a little bit of dread because I wasn't really remembering that. There were a lot of funny moments. It seemed like it might be something that would be heavy in various ways, and it was. But I just came away with a real admiration for the performances. I mean, one of the best supporting casts ever, I think. I just absolutely love those group scenes.

4:51 Wes Alwan: Danny DeVito.

4:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: I know.

4:52 Wes Alwan: Getting the ball out of the park.

4:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah.

4:55 Wes Alwan: He can act, actually.

4:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: How dare you?

4:58 Wes Alwan: Oh, no. Because you like the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Is that the.

5:06 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, that's. Yeah, that's the. That's the bar, huh? No, like Romancing the Stone and. I don't know any of his sitcom performances.

5:18 Wes Alwan: Yeah, but in Romancing the Stone, you know, he's just doing his Danny DeVito thing.

5:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, but that's. That's. That's what I like.

5:24 Wes Alwan: He's a real character. He's not just himself. He's a. But. Yeah, so while I picked it, I was just looking at a list of. Maybe I was looking at that AFI list of Hundred greatest movies or something. Something I wanted to see. And specifically the 70s, of course, since that's the. For me, the golden age of filmmaking, it's gotta be in the 70s. But I didn't remember having any particular feeling about the movie, except, I mean, I think it had been so long since I watched it. I remember being impressed by it, but I remembered very little of it. I think, as I watched it, I remembered the ECT scene with Jack Nicholson. That was something that really stayed with me. The iconic final scene, of course, but also that's been parodied so much that, you know, how can you not know that scene even if you haven't seen the movie?

6:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: I had forgotten that scene.

6:19 Wes Alwan: Wow, that's interesting.

6:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah.

6:21 Wes Alwan: We'll have to discuss what that means.

6:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: That part of my brain was cut out.

6:27 Wes Alwan: The large part of you, the free. The large part of you, the big man yearning for freedom. I remembered Nurse Ratched and her general demeanor. Although I always thought her name was Nurse Ratched, I did not realize there was a D at the end of that name. And I wonder if when I hear people say it, am I just mishearing it or are they making the same mistake? I don't know, but it's a really clever name. And maybe we should just start with that because it seems to be combination of ratchet and wretched. And I think we could say she has both of those aspects to her character. Right. So Ratchet being a kind of wrench that you. You can move and only, you know, it's tightening will only happen in one direction. So you don't have to actually take the wrench off and put it back on and then tighten again. So if you're in a tight space, you can just do a back and forth motion. It's very convenient. So, you know, you can use it to loosen as much as to tighten. But I think we think of her as someone who is very tightened and also maybe someone who. The way she manipulates others in her very iconically passive aggressive way. You could think of the Ratchet as being involved in that. Winding people up, so to speak, during group therapy, which is not really what you're supposed to do. And then the other part of it is just wretched, we imagine. Well, the ratchet is the way to deal with the wretchedness in her case. And we're left to speculate about what her wretchedness entails. Although we can see in her character and her personality that there's a lack of vitality. There's a kind of flatness. Therapists would say her affect is flat. She does give off a sense of peace and serenity. I think before you get to know her. Right. You could call it a poker face of a certain sort. But we see that there's a lot of anger underneath all that.

8:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's one of those moments where I'm grateful to be hosting this podcast with a man, because I never would have thought of that ratchet. I don't actually know how ratchets work, so that's very helpful.

8:37 Wes Alwan: Well, you're also a big baseball fan, so I don't know.

8:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's one of the few things I can say.

8:44 Wes Alwan: I know pretty well. And I would not have been surprised if you were secretly a car mechanic.

8:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: I know, I know, I know. It would be very Marisa Tomei of me if I were. But alas, I'll just come out and say that I think there are some elements of misogyny in the film which bother me. I Wonder about dressing Ms. Ratched up in the Civil War nurse kind of cape at the beginning of the film. What we're supposed to ultimately glean from her character. I mean, she's certainly sadistic, and she certainly does wind these men up, and she certainly is no help to them in group therapy, and she's certainly an extremely emasculating presence. But are we supposed to get the sense from her that she believes she's helping?

9:29 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I would say at a conscious level.

9:31 Erin O'Luanaigh: Okay.

9:32 Wes Alwan: That's the impression I got.

9:33 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, we could say that she's sort of the ultimate evil mother figure and that she seems to want to keep these men in a state of dependence on her, which seems to counteract the therapeutic intentions behind her behavior. Basically keep them in this womb where they're not going to make any progress, where they're not going to have any agency or think for themselves in any way. And she seems also to have, I mean, I think this other nurse that Miss. What is it? Pilbo? Is that her name? You know, this is sort of silent. She does say a few things at the beginning of the film, but then it seems as though she reacts to Jack Nicholson's sort of characterological force by retreating more and more into herself. And then the only expression or noise that she makes past a certain point in the film is to scream at seeing Billy. So is her silence a result of Ratchet's dominance? Is it a result of Nicholson's force, which, you know, the force of his personality which seems to cause her to become more and more submissive or more and more silent or unable to move, or the battle of wills that goes on between Nicholson or I should say McMurphy and Ratched is really interesting because I remembered it being more aggressive than what actually happens, which is, in fact, very little. Except for when he's strangling her. There's.

11:01 Wes Alwan: Yes, yeah, maybe let's pause on that point because I think that's important, which is that if I had the same experience, if you re watch the movie, after some time, you'll think, oh, well, she's not so bad for a while.

11:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, Right.

11:17 Wes Alwan: She's. What is she? You know, she's dealing with a bunch of crazy people and she's keeping her calm and, you know. Yeah, her affect and the way she presents herself is a bit creepy, but it really is kind of a slow boil, I think, with our discovery of her sadism. I mean, we do get a sense of it in the. In group therapy with her, I think, actively trying to humiliate men around romantic relationships. Right. So with Harding talking about his wife and then with Billy, Billy seems to be very ashamed of his sexuality and she's really rubbing that in, which is important because in a way, Jack Nicholson's character, McMurphy as a sort of representative of Dionysius and a satyr and a sex criminal, you know, he's very much about anti shame when it comes to sexuality. So that's another sense in which he represents an opposing force to Ratchet. So I think we can speculate that she's in a situation. This is her way of relating to men. And it may be her only way of relating to men is being with men who she has complete control over men who are vulnerable because of their mental health. And then she plays out this thing which really has something to do with her by intruding into their sex lives. Right. So normal therapy and normal group therapy is not this intrusive. You don't. I think as McMurphy later objects or someone objects, you don't try to get people to talk about these things if they don't really want to. Yeah. So the point I was trying to get to, just to reinforce what you were saying is that she's likely entirely unconscious of her sadism and thinks that she's helping even as she's hurting. But this is something all therapists have to watch out for. So it's very easy to be convinced that what you're doing is in the spirit of being constructive and helpful. But maybe it's not right. Maybe the question you ask the patient about some detail in their life is not really about being helpful to them, but it's about your own morbid curiosity or your own even perverse curiosity, or it may be even something sadistic that's coming out some kind of enactment. And this is something we do all the time in relationships. You know, it's not. Not just in therapy and trying to get good at noticing these enactments. I mean, that's a real art and it's a lifelong project. But, yeah, she is deep into it.

13:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. I think certainly the group therapy sessions I saw as a form of ritual humiliation. And yet one of the things that bothered me about the film, one of the things I perceived as being perhaps misogynistic, is the fact that there's hardly a character in the film who is not there because of a woman or because of a problem with a woman. Even that opening scene where McMurphy comes in in those shackles that are attached to that, you know, that belt in the. I guess it's the atrium of the asylum, and there's that winding staircase above him and all of these matronly women in plain clothes, presumably the mothers of the patients that are visiting them, you know, looking down on him. It's like this, you know, this image of just incredible maternal oversight or overbearing.

14:34 Wes Alwan: Oh, I thought these were female patients.

14:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: They're in normal dress.

14:39 Wes Alwan: Are they?

14:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, and I don't know that they would be. You know, we don't get any indication that there are female patients in the build, I think. Would there not be hijinks to try and get to that supply of.

14:52 Wes Alwan: Well, I was thinking they were in a different ward or unit or something, but, yeah, maybe. Sounds like I hallucinated this.

14:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: So there's the idea that these men are here because of some negative relationship with a woman. Or in McMurphy's case, it's statutory rape. But women are somehow made to be responsible for their either voluntary or involuntary commitment, possibly accepting. Chief. But still, it seems that, yeah, the purpose of harping on this in these group therapy sessions is to humiliate them around these relationships so that she's protecting, particularly exploiting this. And, you know, I wonder what the position of a female nurse is or should be to these types of patients. Like, it seems just inappropriate to me that they would have a female nurse working with these men. I mean, that's like a huge problem right there. And then I also thought about the fact of her dress and what seemed to me to be a very clear sort of civil war coded like she looks like Florence Nightingale when she first comes into the building. There's a very Civil War era type of look to that cape. And I thought about the position of nurses historically, battlefield nurses, as women who are. They're in the position of serving men who have been wounded over the course of, you know, enacting this large scale aggression against each other. So that seems to be sort of inverted for Nurse Ratched or flipped on its head, whereby the only way that she can relate to men is in this wounded state, as I think you've already suggested, but that the more helpless they are, the more she seems to like them. Which seems to be why she's catering her treatment to the most emasculated or denatured of the men in the ward. You know, she's insistent that even men who are not coherent have a vote for the World Series. She's insistent that the music needs to be turned up for older men who may not be able to hear it, even if it affects those men with good hearing and makes it impossible for them to talk to each other or makes them aggravated so that everything is tailored or catered to the most wounded among them. So it seems that this is not about traditional nursing in which you would help these men get back to the state of vigor so that they could go back out and be men and fight on the battlefield in this particular case, but that you wish to keep them in a state of needing your care. And I wanted to tie that back to the fact that they seem to be there because of women. So that too seems to be a kind of, you know, she's not nursing them because they've been wounded in battle. They somehow had a wound to their masculinity. And rather than putting them in a position where that masculinity can be restored, Nurse Ratched is trying to leech more and more of that from them somehow, so that it's sort of a double bind that she has them in both in her position as a nurse and in her position as someone who's supposed to be helping men with a particular kind of wound.

18:04 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I think she has something important in common with those men, which is that she like them this is speculation, but I think this is what we're meant to believe. She, like them, cannot really be in a romantic relationship and this is a replacement. So for the men, they don't have the maturity or the mental health to do that. And that is part of why they're there. And romantic relationships, of course, features prominently in people's mental health problems or in their distress. And that includes the very first romantic relationship, the one with one's own mother, which is why. Part of why misogyny is such a prevalent thing in men and in women. Mothers get a lot of blame, consciously or unconsciously. And she is also, in a way, a quasi maternal figure. I think it's. It wouldn't be uncommon to have a woman running group therapy. And as you know, as I've mentioned on the show, I ran a halfway house for the mentally ill for seven years and that was a live in position. And I had four staff members and usually my staff members were female. And that's just based on the applications that I was getting. And mental health now is a very female dominated field.

19:16 Erin O'Luanaigh: But even in a specifically male, like in an institutional setting with only male inmates, it's just surprising to me that there are no men that are there to administer any kind of therapy.

19:29 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I mean, there's Dr. Spivey, but we don't see him very. Is that Spivak maybe?

19:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: Is the name Spivey. Spivey or Spivey, let's call him Doc like everyone else.

19:39 Wes Alwan: Yeah, Spivy. All right, Spivey. But we don't see much of him because Nurse Ratched is one of the most capable nurses.

19:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. Well, there's a. Did you see the sign at one point at the nurse's station that says if you would like to make an appointment to see the doctor, see Nurse Ratched, you have to go through her to see a male authority figure. And then those male authority figures, of course, are shown as being extremely ineffectual and ultimately under her thumb. They take her advice.

20:10 Wes Alwan: She's got a bunch of orderlies who are very much under her thumb. And then I think you're talking about the other administrators as well, anonymous administrators, because she is able to convince them to keep McMurphy there. And we'll talk about later why that's so important when they think he should be cut loose and sent loose, so to speak, and sent back to jail. I had a similar thought that it was odd in the sense that, well, the orderlies are there to deal with aggression. So there's that as Far as the safety factor goes. But there is an odd aspect of the setting in the sense that you have. Right. She can go behind the desk and there's a window there that can be closed, as if that's some element of safety. When, as we find out, it's easy for one of the patients to just go and open the door and go into that little office. And it was relatively easy for McMurphy to punch through that window when the time comes. So the window is window dressing, so to speak. And she is often out right on the floor anyway, so there's something interesting there about the division. Her sense in which she's a spectator, where she kind of remains aloof, remains behind that window. And the same thing with using the use of the microphone. Neither of them is really of that much use the microphone or the window. I mean, you know, she can make announcements on the yard, but it doesn't seem like there's much to do in that respect. I think it has more to do with how she needs to relate to the men, which is to have this position of control, but to do it at a distance.

21:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Thinking through that a little bit. The microphone allows her to never have to raise her voice so she can keep that same volume level and that sort of flat affect in the voice but amplify it through the microphone.

22:02 Wes Alwan: Very good. Yeah, very important.

22:04 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think there's probably something similar happening with the ultimate ineffectualness of the window in the nurse's station. And yet the idea that it's there to enforce some sort of sense of a barrier, even if the barrier doesn't really exist, or some sort of power distinction.

22:20 Wes Alwan: Role distinction. Yeah.

22:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: And also a sense of serenity as well. Like a sort of veneer of, you know, you have to go up and you have to knock on the window. And there's almost a. Come to think of it, you know, there's almost a kind of a courtliness about it, like they have to go up and they have to advance up to the window and make their request and, you know, Nurse Ratched has to then let down her hair or whatever, that kind of thing. There's a little bit of a fortification of her power which at the same time preserves a kind of femininity where she doesn't have to become aggressive or assert any kind of vim or vigor into what she does.

23:01 Wes Alwan: Yeah. I think the movie conveys this sense of serenity from the very beginning where we see her car driving in at a distance, you know, in the landscape. The one that Chief will end up running out into. In the end. And then she's, you know, she enters and walks down the hallway and says her good mornings. This will be bookended, you know, near the end of the movie when they find the aftermath of the party, those good mornings happen as well, but in a much different context. So she's saying her good mornings to the orderlies and then moving on to medication and then music. So there's a lot of alliteration. And then after that, McMurphy, morning, good morning, medication, music and McMurphy. But the. Yeah, the first three are all about serenity and pacification. Pacify them with medication, pacify them with pleasant music, but music that's too loud and so is in a passive aggressive way, driving them crazy at the same time, right? And so, yeah, it's a very Apollonian world, a world of peace. Right. That McMurphy, as a representative of Dionysius, I think, will intrude upon. He's given a very contrasting entrance, right? We see him come in through the same gate as Nurse Ratched comes in, but he, unlike her, is dancing and playing the fool and doing all that, being the satyr, being the trickster. We get that sense in the very beginning. We get the sense that these two people are characterological opposites. This power dynamic I think we're talking about, you can see it repeated in different ways. So, for instance, there's an interesting power dynamic between Harding and Cheswick, where Cheswick is almost like the helpless, dependent part of oneself. He's a bit of a baby. He can get stressed out and start crying easily. He's impressionable, maybe, and in need of someone in control. And then Harding is very, very much in control. And they seem to be a kind of pair, feeding off of each other in the beginning in their game, although McMurphy is going to very much interfere with that dynamic. But we can think of this as an intrapsychic dynamic as well, between the powerful side of oneself, the part of oneself that's in control, and then a potentially disavowed helpless part of oneself, what Jung would call like a shadow ego. So naturally, we'd speculate that this is a dynamic that's internal to Ratched's own psyche, her own character. And what she is ultimately fending off is her own sense of helplessness and humiliation. Something which, of course, is going to show up in the context of romantic relationships and keep her, if my speculation is correct, keep her from being able to engage in that. And the same thing for the men in this. This ward that's part of why they're not capable of engaging in these relationships because of the kinds of power dynamics involved in intimacy, surrender, helplessness. Things that just can be too unbearable if you don't have your psychical shit together, so to speak. So now she enacts this. She enacts her role as a nurse, a mental health nurse as a kind of substitute for a romantic relationship with a bunch of helpless men that she can be a helper to nominally but also engage in sadistic control of.

26:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's really well put. What do we take then of the fact that McMurphy seems to feed off of her as well? I mean, I thought one of the more interesting observations that these doctors make is that the person that McMurphy is closest to is also the person he dislikes the most. Right. They're in this. It's like mom and dad. Mom and dad are always fighting in the ward. And that, I don't know, need to put a bee in her bonnet, or however he puts it. Need to. The need to dress her down somehow seems to also be the compulsion that's driving him. I mean, one would, I suppose, say that he sees her as a repressed person who it's his job to sort of antagonize or bother out of her repression. And that's going to be his therapeutic role with her. I mean, I don't know if he sees her in those terms. He seems to view himself as a more proper therapist for the men than she is. So certainly has a therapeutic relationship to the other men. But I wonder if that extends to her as well or if he simply sees her as a sort of like, asexual, antagonistic force.

27:44 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I don't think he's thinking about being a therapeutic presence at all. I just think he inadvertently is. Right. He's, like, stealing from people. He's robbing all these people of her cigarettes. This becomes a big deal later on. And Ratched kind of has a good defense of herself. Keeping your cigarettes in the room, in the office so you won't get robbed by this guy. It's not. Not everything she's doing is completely unfair. Right. He's selfish. He's sexually. Right. He's sexually ravenous to the point of not really caring about the other person. I assume the two women in the movie are prostitutes. I think it's clear in the book. But that's probably about the kind of relationship that he can have, is a relationship with prostitutes. So he is also, you know, impaired, I think, in this way, as the other the other men are. But with Ratched. Let's look at that moment, because there's a moment where there's a card game. This is really kind of at the end of the first act, but at the end of the first act, there's a card game that goes awry.

28:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: Is this the Martini?

28:49 Wes Alwan: Oh, yeah.

28:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Martini, sing Hit Me over and over again.

28:53 Wes Alwan: Yes. But also, the way it starts out is hilarious because Martini wants to bet a nickel and so breaks the cigarette in half because each cigarette represents a dime. And McMurphy says, if you break it in half, you don't get two nickels, you get shit. Try and smoke it. You understand? Yes. At a certain point, this ends up with Martini impulsively asking McMurphy to hit him in blackjack. And then what happens?

29:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: He shows remarkable restraint and not hitting Martini. Same thing in the Monopoly game. I feel really bad for Harding, who

29:32 Wes Alwan: I love, by the way. So I'm just seeing this in my notes here. This is the first time, because I know some essays have compared him to a Christ figure, right? And is he Dionysius? Is he a trickster? Is he a Christ figure? And before I'd even seen any of that, this is the moment where I thought, God, this is like Jesus and the lepers. He's surrounded by all these needy people. He's inverse Jesus, of course, because he's just trying to take advantage of them, really have fun. But he is showing a certain amount of restraint towards them. And then he loses it. And. Right. And he doesn't take it out on them. He takes it out on the Pharisees, so to speak. So he's like, jesus Christ Almighty. Do you nuts want to play cards or do you want to fucking jerk off? Sounds like a lot like a lot like Jesus. Play the game. I can't even hear myself think already here. All right. Now, there's a good reason he can't hear himself think is because Martini is saying, hit me over and over again. These guys are off their rockers, but instead he heads towards the nurses station. In fact, he goes into the office and Pilbo screams when she sees him in there and says, stay back. Again, this is like the whole weird office thing where suddenly they're dangerous because they're in the office. You're around them on the floor all the time. But patients aren't allowed in the nurses station, as she said. So he's broken a rule. Law and order has been defied. So he has to get out of the office and get in line at the window and Ask for the music to be turned down. And then she'll say, that music is. And this is ratchet. Now, that music is for everyone, Mr. McMurphy. I know, but do you think we might ease it down a little so maybe the boys didn't have to shout? What you probably don't realize is that we have a lot of volt. And then she gives that explanation. She's not just trying to drive them all crazy with loud music. She's trying to do a good thing for the people who can't hear. In any case, that's the. After that, he will go back to the sit down with the other guys. And then he reveals that he hasn't actually taken his medication by blowing a pill onto Harding's forehead. And then he'll say, God almighty, she's got you guys coming and going. What do you think she is, some kind of champ or something? This way of viewing the world through the lens of sports, World Series or basketball, it's very important to understanding McMurphy's character. Is she a champion boxer? Do you think she's going to knock you out? And then Harding says, no, I thought you were the champ. And that's where he says, you want to bet? I bet in one week I can put a bug so far up her ass she won't know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch.

32:18 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that's a pretty good line.

32:20 Wes Alwan: Later on, of course, he's going to be upset with these guys. They didn't warn him. When he finds out that they can keep him here as long as they want. And he's got a lot to lose in this confrontation, he finds that upsetting. But at this point, he doesn't know that he has that much to lose. And after that first real confrontation with Ratched, yeah, he's ready to go to war, so to speak, or to be a kind of tormentor to her, to give her a taste of her own medicine in a way, right?

32:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, she doesn't. He's upset because she doesn't fight fair. And this is one of the things that's really subtly done early on. For instance, with Martini and the cards, right? He's counting the queen as a number card and doesn't recognize that the queen is somehow. That logic does not extend to the queen. You know, the queen is outside of the logic of numbers, right? And to a certain extent, you know, when these guys are being antagonized by a woman, there isn't really a way for them to fight back. I mean, eventually, McMurphy will fight back physically. You know, maybe this is related to the idea of the window I was thinking about. Okay. There's the sort of the soft window, if you will, of the nurses station and then the hard window of the outside of the building. Right. That they have to crash through. And this imagery of punching. And our introduction to McMurphy as a fighter who compares himself to Rocky Marciano and says, you know, he gets millions of dollars for fighting and how come I'm here? Because I'm a fighter. And. And again, yeah, the Ratched thing. Calling her a champ. But he's going to be upset because she doesn't fight fair.

33:51 Wes Alwan: She likes a rigged game.

33:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: She likes a rigged game, Right.

33:54 Wes Alwan: Speaking of the World Series.

33:55 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. Because she's the queen. She doesn't have. She's not a number. She's not, you know, one of these guys with. In McMurphy's case, maybe a number plate in the cases of the other guys, one of the numberless masses of inmates. Right.

34:10 Wes Alwan: And he's referring back to the rigged vote they take about the World Series, which is that she. They unanimously vote in group therapy to watch the World Series that evening. But she wants to include all the people left on the ward who can't communicate, which turns out to be nine people. And then he has to lobby them. And finally he gets the chief to raise his hand, but by the time. To vote for watching the World Series. But by the time he does that, she says the vote. Right. The meeting was terminated and the vote closed or something like that. Some very officious bureaucratic thing to say. So she rigs the game, so to speak. She rigs the vote on the watching of the game.

34:51 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. Again, this is the catering to the patients who are more debilitated. So keeping the volume up. Giving the catatonic patients a vote in the proceedings, even though they can't hear what's going on. And they're also, like, even too far away to hear, the majority of them, there's that old man who's always dancing, who's my favorite character, I think, but, you know, does not. Well, actually, I love Cheswick. He's. He's so adorable. I love that actor. But, yeah, the old man dancing is like a very fanciful. He seems like a fun guy. I don't know. Anyway, they're very concerned that he's gonna tire himself out, which seems to be, like, probably a good thing if they want him to stop, but whatever. I don't know. I don't have their qualifications. So what do I know. Yeah. So she's playing these passive aggressive games which seem related to this again, this queenliness or this idea that because she's the nurse and she's in this sort of untouchable and yet literally quite touchable little fortification, she can make these pronouncements and everybody just has to adhere to her rules. And she sort of hides behind catering to the most defenseless among the men, which seems like she's standing up for them, but which is in fact this way of enforcing passivity to emasculate those who are not passive or something. It's, it's this perverted feminine game that she is playing, which is one of the reasons why I find this, this very frustrating to watch. So she's sort of leaning on a certain kind of passive aggressive femininity as a way to enforce this control. I think, I think this is what it ultimately comes down to, though. I don't want to put things in those terms. It's like hitting a guy over and over again and saying, haha, you can't hit me back because I'm a woman. You know, there's an element of that to this dynamic.

36:48 Wes Alwan: Yeah, it's a very hidden form of violence, if you want to call it that. So I think psychoanalysts would call it project what she's doing, projective identification, where she takes emotions or parts of herself that are objectionable, like for instance, helplessness. And she finds suitable objects outside of herself to put that into. And it may already be there to some extent. Right. That makes them even more suitable. But she can create a little drama with a bunch of characters around her in this particular situation that are acting out her internal psychological dynamics so that she can see them outside of herself and get some sort of gratification from that and not have to feel as chaotic inside. She creates the chaos outside. You know, with men, men are often more likely to be just physically aggressive. So in my house, for instance, where I was residence director, I dealt with a lot of women with borderline personality disorder where this kind of projective identification dynamic is very common. Although we all do it right. It's really about a spectrum, men and women. We all do it. Borderline personality disorder is more common in women than men, although you see a few men narcissism common in both sexes. But what I didn't have, I didn't have physically violent men because those men usually just end up in prison like McMurphy. I had men who were schizophrenics, I had men who were depressed or bipolar, usually the aggression is turned inward in the type of people who are going to end up in a hospital setting like this, which is why McMurphy stands out. If I had a McMurphy, I could easily, and I may have been called Nurse Ratched at some point. I don't even know. Because you are trying to keep control and you're trying to keep calm and you're trying to get people to follow rules, and everyone thinks you're an asshole to some extent for doing that. So I'm very sympathetic to her. But if I'd seen someone with sociopathic qualities and had it happened maybe on a couple of occasions, including someone who I thought was very dangerous, in which case you really have to treat that person with kid gloves and a lot of respect, even as you're enforcing the rules. You have to be careful not to humiliate, not to shame, because that's a situation. It can legitimately lead to physical violence. And you can feel it. If you have any intuition. You. You know the situation you're in and you know you have to be careful. But again, very rare in the kind of setting I was in, because men like that tend to go straight to prison if they have a propensity for physical violence. But social violence, of course, much easier to get away with. And we all engage in it unconsciously to some extent. But what she's doing, she has a very toxic, extreme level of this. This passive aggression that Ratched is engaging in. And it doesn't help that she's in a position of power that where she can it facilitates her engaging in it. Right. Who knows if when she was younger she was in a better position where she wasn't tempted by that power to feed this part of her psyche. [email protected] subtextpodcast otherwise, you can wait a week to listen to it as a separate episode in the feed.

40:16 Erin O'Luanaigh: All right, thank you, thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter njoysubtext.

What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.”

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0:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: [email protected] subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. We're still talking about the birthmark. I think we're just about ready to wrap up. Wes. What have we missed? What more do we need to talk about here?

0:45 Wes Alwan: In line with the birthmark representing the instinctual or something about her effective life, is the fact that it's kind of like a mood ring, right? So it reflected every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart. And so again, I think the Hawthorne is more vague about this in it representing human frailty. But I want to highlight the sense in which it represents effective life. Emotions, feelings, the instinctual side of life. Because this is a theme that I think shows up repeatedly, right? So even in Medea with Jason and his kind of cold, he could have had acid stains on his hands, too. Been a pale scientist, Mr. Rational Jason versus Medea, who I thought was more representative of the instinctual. And I thought in a way the play was a warning about, in the Athenian classical period, the dangers of the rejection of the instinctual as well as the traditional, arguably, and rejection of a part of life that was less rational. It comes back to bite you in the ass and maybe it will cut up your brother and throw him in the ocean. But in any case. So here again, I think the rejection of what is instinctual in women, what is sexual in women, what is physical and women, this is psychologically quite common. And in this case, it shows up as a. It becomes a scientific project, right? What if I can turn her into a Madonna and completely spiritualize her by using science? It's like. It's almost like it's a very. Of course, it's a variation Frankenstein, which I guess was written 48 years before, right. Where he's not creating a monster out of graveyard parts. He's given up on trying to breathe life into matter and create life, but he's going to take imperfect life and create perfect spirit out of it, right?

2:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. I think this mood ring quality that you're pointing to is what hinted to me that Aylmer is likely impotent. We have the explanation of this quality. It says in the usual state of her complexion, a healthy, though delicate bloom, the mark wore a tint of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the surrounding rosiness. When she blushed, it gradually became more indistinct and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion caused her to turn pale, there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. So its appearance seems relative to the extent to which she blushes. Right. So if she's reddening because of anger, which she already has by the time we read this paragraph, then it disappears. But also a blush which is obviously sexually suggestive would cause it to disappear as well. So it seems to me that the fact that it stands out so strongly because she's always pale, because she's. Because he, you know, is always examining her rather than really being in any kind of relationship to her. You know, a marital relationship, a sexual relationship, Playing.

4:05 Wes Alwan: He's playing doctor with her.

4:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, but. But. But not in such a way that. That she.

4:12 Wes Alwan: Not in the fun way that kids.

4:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: Not in the fun way. That's right. That's right.

4:16 Wes Alwan: In the asexual, adult way.

4:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. I mean. I mean, not to make this a little too spicy or whatever, but, you know, the idea is that if she were blushing all the time, you would never see it. You know, if he was. If he was actually paying her, shall we say, the proper attentions, then it would become less distinct. But because of his relationship to her, which is one of, like a. Like a diagnostic or critical relation causing her pallor, it stands out all the more. Not that he could just be having sex with her all the time.

4:49 Wes Alwan: That's right.

4:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: But I'm just saying that it would,

4:52 Wes Alwan: you know, the hand is glowing again. All right. Time for sex. Yeah, that's really interesting. This is. I like this. And it's like this glaring reminder he hasn't. Pleasing his woman.

5:04 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly. Exactly. Yes.

5:08 Wes Alwan: It's an accusation. Yeah. Why the shape of a hand? What is that about? Other than. I mean, Hawthorne does give us some ideas, but did you have any ideas? Like, ultimately, it's something that's grasping her heart. Right. But there's this infantile, creepy quality to it. Like it's a little baby hand or fetus hand or something.

5:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: A doll hand. And the sleeves of Kristen Wiig.

5:33 Wes Alwan: Yes. I sent you the. Yeah. Because I couldn't help but be reminded of that Kristen Wiig skit in. Which is it? Dunes. And I did some research. I probably did more research on that than I did on the birthmark. But trying to figure out how did she get the idea for that skit. Because she kind of has these deformities like this huge forehead and she's in a musical group with a bunch of.

6:00 Erin O'Luanaigh: Was I looking at her through a bubble or does she attractive or is her forehead really big?

6:08 Wes Alwan: In contrast all these other attractive, well formed, let's just say women. And then she has the little, tiny, tiny hands, which are. Kristen Wiig uses these obviously fake doll hands for the tiny hands. And it is just. I remember when I first saw that skit and I just thought, I don't have any idea why this is so funny. It's just so random. But there is just something. I think the little doll hand extended all the way down into my heart and grabbed it.

6:38 Erin O'Luanaigh: There you go.

6:39 Wes Alwan: But there is a creepy quality. I wonder if that's readers reaction or if other readers have this reaction in general, whether during Hawthorne's time or contemporary readers, whether they get that same creeped out reaction to the fact that it's this little tiny hand that's on her cheek.

6:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, well, the hand is also called pretty. We're told had she been less beautiful if envy self could have found ought else to sneer at he meaning Elmer might have felt his affection heightened by the prettiness of this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart.

7:19 Wes Alwan: He does kiss it at one point, right? Gross.

7:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: He does once. He does once.

7:23 Wes Alwan: Shudders he tries to overcome his repulsion

7:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: but well, it's right as it's going to be leaving her that he sort of kisses it goodbye. In a way there's an element of fantasy, you know, it's imagined to be a fairy hand. And I think the flitting, you know, now you see it, now you don't kind of quality to it also has that sort of fantastical or magical or magical. Yeah, it's sort of toying with people. The idea that I had, I had a couple of them. But you know, one of them, of course, as I said, was this idea of the hand as sort of Aylmer's fancy or has been imprinted upon her cheek because of his desire to push her away. So it is in a way him pushing her away. And it's. And I think in the dream too we get this idea that, you know, as he's in the dream, as he's cutting into her with a knife and the hand is then grasping around her heart, the hand is responding to his, to the movements of the knife. So it does seem to be a kind of embodiment of something in him, responsive to him. But it's almost as though he's idealized her, then married her, had sex with her, and he himself has been the one who has stained her with this birthmark. Was another idea that I had.

8:37 Wes Alwan: Right, yeah, absolutely. He took her virginity. Yeah.

8:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: The other thing, though, that I thought was, I love the descriptions of the fairy hand, as I said, but also of the men who find this to be very charming. In other words, healthy men. Yeah.

8:54 Wes Alwan: Let me just read a little bit of this, what you're referring to here. So its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana's lovers were wont to say that some fairy, at her birth hour, had laid her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand. It must not be concealed, however, that the impression wrought by this fairy sign manual varied exceedingly. I love that fairy sign manual varied exceedingly according to the difference of temperament in the beholders. Some fastidious persons, but they were exclusively of her own sex, affirm that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Georgiana's beauty and rendered her countenance even hideous. And then he goes on to say that for some masculine observers, it heightened their admiration, as we mentioned before, and I think you were just about to speak to that.

10:01 Erin O'Luanaigh: I love the use of the word swain in that sentence. Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand.

10:10 Wes Alwan: What is a swain? Like a pirate or.

10:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, it's a male. It's a young attendant on a night, I think, and also a male suitor. So there's something quite knightly and courtly about that word. And then, of course, the sentiment or the action that the narrator imagines them wishing to do, pressing their lips to this mysterious hand is itself quite gentlemanly and courtly. Right to kiss a woman's hand, only this one is on her cheek. So that's what I think. I also was interested in with the fact that it is a hand. There's a sort of, you know, mise on a beam quality where we have this image of the hand nested within the cheek. So the gentlemanly or the courtly thing to do would be to kiss a lady's hand so that you stay. You express reverence for her and affection for her, but at arm's length, quite literally. Right. And that is then moved up close onto the face. So it seems to give permission to get closer or to think about her in more sexual terms, more intimate terms, whatever that may mean. And their fantasy of kissing it the way that they would a hand is only a fantasy because they couldn't dream of getting that close to her. They couldn't dream of kissing her on the cheek in this day and age, they would only be able to kiss the hand. So there's a duality there that seems to unite courtly, idealized love with sexual passion or intimacy, which doesn't have to be sexual intimacy, but a real closeness. And so it seems to me to be like this perfect symbol of a wonderful, respectful, intimate and yet respectful kind of relationship to her, which only. Only certain men can appreciate. But that. That sort of duality, I think, is involved in this idea. It's. It's a hand, but it's your face. You know, a knight would only ever kiss a hand.

12:02 Wes Alwan: It's really interesting, this idea that her magical endowments have come from. Some fairy has touched her cheek when she's an infant and given her these magical endowments, one of which the ones that sway hearts. So we assume her beauty at least, which is interesting because in that sense, there's an irony in the fact that she's got this birthmark which bothers some people and. But that her beauty, the rest of her beauty, which is very pure, comes from that. And then the other endowments would be personality. And the things that I've called character before, certain quirks, certain charms, certain things that are very, very specific to her and her character. Things that are endearing, things that someone might react to the feeling of endearment in the same way that she reacts to his scientific journal thinking. It's adorable. In that sense, the hand is almost like a belly button for character in a way. It's like as the umbilical cord is severed and we're left with that kind of aperture, that's the necessary mark of our having been created in that way, being a product of reproduction, but is also sort of like an incompleteness. Right? We haven't been fully sewed up somehow, you know. And so it gives us some sense of the cost of her beauty and character and other charms of character. And that includes, it turns out, as the paragraph proceeds, Envy. Right. From other women. And then they can point to the. You know, they can enviously be satisfied with this idea that the hand has ruined her beauty.

13:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. And in fact, we're told explicitly that had she been less beautiful, this birthmark would not be a problem. Right. So that too seems to be about the effect of the birthmark on the beauty and either as a particularly distinguishing mark or as something which is said to mar. And the fact of her being so beautiful also seems to have that kind of double edged sword quality to it. So that the mark is the response to it, is the same in a way as the response to beauty. I like what you're pointing out about the magical quality of it in this fairy origin. And I just wanted to point out too that Aylmer's science is repeatedly characterized as magic. Right. There's a connection between the fairy hand and what Aylmer seems to do for a living. Seems like the wrong. Seems like the wrong terminology. I don't know how he's making any money or what he's doing, but, you know, he calls himself a sorcerer. He says not to look in a sorcerer's books. When he shows Georgiana the time lapse flower, she cries out, it is magical. I dare not touch it. It seems like a lot of what he does is in fact job Bluth. Like party tricks.

14:58 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

14:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: So it's funny that he, you know, it's funny that this thing, which has the local reputation for being a kind of a result of magic, is one which the local magician wants to eradicate. Maybe he doesn't want competition from a fairy, I don't know. But it's funny that for all of this scientific advancement, the effects and it seems the purpose of a lot of this have a very distinct connection to the magical or the fantastical.

15:25 Wes Alwan: Yeah, well, it certainly is. It's magical thinking. And there's an element of desire for omnipotence in that. Right. To just have complete control of the world with one's mind without having to do anything but cast a spell, let's say, or to imagine what you want to happen and have it happen, or to have this fancy poison that can kill tyrants at a distance. And so that's where the magical gets this crossover into the technological into the scientific. They become hard to distinguish if the technology is powerful enough. But he makes a scientific project of getting rid of the hand on her cheek. And I think, however we interpret the hand, whether as character or as humanity and materiality, or sexuality or instinctuality, which all these Things. This type of project is actually quite common in relationships. In a more subtle way, people are trying to do this to each other. To iron out the quirks of the other person's character. For instance, to get them to behave in a different way. Or to regulate the sexuality of the other person. Especially men with women to basically exercise some degree of control over the love object. So that it conforms to their wishes. So that it does what the love object should do for them. And there's a whole discussion there which we don't have time to have. That discussion is around, well, what do we want from the love object? What are they doing for us? Because some of it is about intimacy. And not in the sexual sense, but in the sense of confiding and seeing and being seen. And being seen. Which significantly involves sharing one's effective life. Sharing these irrational elements of the self. And showing these non generic particular characterological parts of oneself to the other person. And then seeing oneself through the way they see you. So that your self knowledge, your knowledge of yourself and your sense of your own existence in a way are predicated on that intimacy. You're getting some of awareness of yourself through the reflection of the awareness of the other person. So that's the ideal way to do this. And it involves a certain amount of respect for the particularity of the person and for their character. But one might want to kind of enslave the other person, right? This is what Hegel's getting at with the master slave dynamic and the phenomenology of spirit. Not just to have the reciprocity of intimacy, but to be able to say, I need you to be the mirror for me that I want you to be. So instead of me being the mirror for your particular character, I'm actually going to perfect you in the way that I need to perfect you. So you can reflect back to me the kind of image that I need for myself. This story very much speaks to that larger reality. It's a science fiction story where he's doing something very crazy. But in a sense, it's what people will are often actually trying to do to each other. To kind of wipe out some aspect of the other person that is imperfect, you might want to say, but imperfect in the sense that it doesn't perform this mirror function adequately.

18:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think that might lead us in nicely to Drown's wooden image. You know, I was thinking about the magical process through which Drown seems to create his carving of this woman. And also the deep knowledge that comes from the love that inspires the work. Right so that he's able to so perfectly reproduce this woman who we can presume he's seen and interacted with and then sort of fallen in love with that. It gives him this special kind of knowledge of her, this insight, this new. How does he characterize it? He says, there has come a light into my mind. That's how he describes it. And this light which distinguishes this carving from all of his previous work, which he calls worthless abortions.

19:35 Wes Alwan: A little harsh.

19:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. This light has given him the ability to produce a sculpture in wood which looks like it is a real woman. And it turns out that the woman who inspired this is real. And Drown must have come in contact with her at some point and fallen in love with her, or else he wouldn't have been able to reproduce this so well. So that kind of the magical process, both with which the work is undertaken, where we don't really see him working at it and people are really. You know, there's a lot of gossip over what he's doing. He seems to be only working at night or at odd hours. Nobody really sees the chisel in his hand, so to speak. So the sort of magic with which this sculpture comes together and also the magical power that his love for this woman, which seems connected to this insight and this real knowledge, this real intimacy with her, seems to inform the greatness of the sculpture as well. But there's a big empty space at the center of this story when it comes to his actual interactions with her.

20:40 Wes Alwan: Right. How are you inferring love?

20:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: Copley says it. This is Copley. He looked earnestly at Drown and again saw that expression of human love, which, in a spiritual sense, as the artist could not help imagining, was the secret of the life that had been breathed into this block of wood. So love is the secret ingredient. It's love. It's love, you know, which is ultimately quite pat, maybe. You know, we get the explicit connection to Pygmalion, just as we do in Birthmark. As a matter of fact, we get a rumor that he has been seen kneeling at the feet of the oaken lady and gazing with a lover's passionate ardor into the face that his own hands had created.

21:19 Wes Alwan: Well, that's pretty obvious. Pretty clear.

21:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And then we get him called Pygmalion, explicitly. And then once it's done, once he's created it and it's been presumably mounted on the front of the ship and the ship takes off, he says that he wrought the sculpture in a kind of a dream. And now that he's Broad awake, he's going to go about his regular business, and he returns to his mechanical style, from which he was never known afterwards, to deviate. So it's as though a magical spell overtook him, and that spell turns out to be love. Here we go. The narrator tells us explicitly. We know not how to account for the inferiority of this quaint old figure, the one he's working on after the fact, as compared with the recorded excellence of the Oaken lady. Unless on the supposition that in every human spirit there is imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which, according to circumstances, may either be developed in this world or shrouded in a mask of dullness until another state of being to our friend drowned, there came a brief season of excitement kindled by love. It rendered him a genius for that one occasion, but, quenched in disappointment, left him again, the mechanical carver in wood, without the power even of appreciating the work that his own hand had wrought. So love has produced this magical ability in him and the magical effect of this woman. Which seems to be alive. Who seems to be alive.

22:43 Wes Alwan: Well, we assume she's not the first beautiful woman he's run into.

22:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's a good point.

22:49 Wes Alwan: But he's supposed to be the most. I don't know. Is boring the right word?

22:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: And dull.

22:55 Wes Alwan: Dull and creative, but not particularly talented or inspired or passionate about what he's doing, which is a. I'd say he's a craftsman.

23:06 Erin O'Luanaigh: Craftsman, as opposed to an artist.

23:08 Wes Alwan: Yeah, right, right. I wouldn't characterize the average craftsperson as necessarily dull. He seems to be going through the motions. Right.

23:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: I just mean. Yeah, yeah.

23:19 Wes Alwan: No, I wasn't saying. You were saying that. But he's going through the motions. So when a person like this gets animated by something or inspired by something passionate about something, it's quite a contrast. There's almost like a comedy to it, when a person like this kind of comes to life, so to speak. Right. And of course, there's a direct parallel to the idea that this carved figure in the wood has come to life, as it seems to the townspeople that it may have done, or to the life that he's breathing into the wood. But it's a peculiar form of inspiration is all I'm pointing out, because it seems to be predicated on the specular. Right. It's love at first sight. He just sees her. Or at least that's what we're left to infer. It's not like he was hanging out with her.

24:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes, exactly.

24:13 Wes Alwan: Watching Netflix, getting to know her, going out to coffee. She. She turns out to be a Portuguese lady of rank. So they're definitely of different classes. And so then naturally the question is, okay, well, he's seen plenty of ladies of rank. And what was it about this in particular? Not that I think the story necessarily answers this, but what about this woman in particular was so inspiring?

24:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: This is one of the mysteries for me, because, in fact, when we get descriptions of this woman, I mean, what in these descriptions stood out to you? There's the expression on her face, but then also I feel that the narrator is mostly describing her dress, her hat, the flowers in her hat, and her, you know, in other words, all of her accessories and her clothing rather than her, you know, we actually get very little of a physical description of this statue. And then when we see her real life counterpart, there's a sort of catalog of all of the items of clothing and the jewels and all the things that she's wearing that correspond to the statues. And that's sort of how we know that she is who she is. And then we say, you know, she also wore this expression, but an expression, too, is something you wear. We do get, I think, dark eyes and something about the mouth, but we don't. I don't think we even know what color hair she has. You know, she's sort of a blank in the middle of the descriptions of her finery.

25:46 Wes Alwan: You know, he does say there's a light vivacity and sportive mischief written in her countenance. This is the loving, the living version. She was observed to flutter her fan with such vehement rapidity that the elaborate delicacy of its workmanship gave way and it remained broken in her hand. Wait, is this the statue or the woman? Well, both.

26:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Both, because that's another thing that.

26:13 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

26:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: That lines up where the fan breaks in the real woman's hand and then soon drown, is seen to be fixing the fan in the hand of the statue, which has somehow also become broken. So it's like they share the life force or something. Or there's a voodoo doll quality, only in the reverse direction.

26:35 Wes Alwan: Interesting. Yeah. And here's another. I'm just trying to get at some of the character of her character that comes out on this. The face, with its brilliant depth of complexion, had the same piquancy of mirthful mischief that was fixed upon the countenance of the image, but which was here varied and continually shifting, yet always essentially the same, like the sunny gleam upon a bubbling fountain. On the whole, there was something so airy and yet so real. In the figure and withal, so perfectly did it represent Drown's image that people knew not whether to suppose the magic wood etherealized into a spirit or warmed and softened into an actual woman. So I think this. Yeah, this idea of a kind of mischief is repeated several times, and I think it comes up in the description of the. Earlier on in the description of the sculpture. Is the wrong word. Right. What's the right word?

27:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: Carving.

27:29 Wes Alwan: So, you know, as you pointed out. Yeah, most of it is about what she's wearing and the kind of an illustration of the skill that goes into it. Because he captures all these subtleties. I'm trying to look for the place where he. If I can find another place where this mischievousness is mentioned.

27:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, this is when they're describing how people, when they entered, felt impelled to remove their hats and pay such reverence as was due to the richly dressed and beautiful young lady who seemed to stand in a corner of the room with oaken chips and shavings scattered at her feet. I love that at the end of that paragraph, we get. And then her face in the dark eyes and around the voluptuous mouth. Okay, the voluptuous mouth. That's the descriptor. The mouth gets. There played a look made up of pride, coquetry, and a gleam of mirthfulness, which impressed Copley with the idea that the image was secretly enjoying the perplexing admiration of himself and other beholders.

28:24 Wes Alwan: Right. So pride, coquetry, and a gleam of mirthfulness. So, yeah, who wouldn't fall in love

28:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: at first sight, I suppose, though. And, you know, we do get that this is a beautiful woman, but. Yeah, it just. It just occurs to me that we get so much description of. Yeah. The expression she wears, the clothing she wears, the hat she wears with the flowers in the hat. And maybe. Maybe a lot of that is supposed to express how masterfully the carving is done in that in wood. He's been able to recreate all of these different textures. And, you know, because then the real woman is wearing fabric and a diamond on her finger and gold around her neck and a hat with flowers, you know, and so the fact that Drown has been able to capture all of these different materials of vastly different quality is part of the magic of the image, it seems. But maybe this speaks to what you're talking about when it comes to character. So we. So rather than telling us that she was, you know, she was 5, 7, and she weighed. She weighed 135 pounds and 36.

29:32 Wes Alwan: 24, 36 measurements.

29:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly. And she had an oval shaped face and almond eyes and whatever the case may be.

29:41 Wes Alwan: And she was into horseback riding, walking on the beach and. Yeah.

29:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Pina coladas. Yeah. So she. So instead we get actually this sort of satellite description or things which are suggestive of her taste in this sort of roundabout way, rather than her vital statistics, shall we say. And that ultimately produces this image of singular realism, transcendent realism. And I think this is why I was thinking of Drown in the middle of our conversation about Birthmark when you brought up this idea of character. Because it seems that Hawthorne is getting at something here about negative capability. Right. Because we have Drown's other wooden carvings all having that family resemblance, as he calls it, where they all look like they're part of the same wooden family, and that they all were created by sort of like Drown is the father and Wood is the mother. And they look, you know, like a combination of the two. Not that they look like Drown, but they look like something created by him. So they bear almost like too much of him as a paternal influence and also too much of the material. Somehow they haven't been transformed enough that it requires one more touch to take them from being, as Copley puts it, to take them from being wooden figures to being lifelike. We're also told that he chooses subjects which are often symbolic or allegorical in some way. He chooses, say, the female figure of Britannia. This is colonial Boston, we're made to understand. So he chooses an admiral. And on entering the shop, Copley looks around and it says he glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander, dame, and allegory that stood around on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part partook of the stolid transformation. So he has all of these wooden images, literally wooden and figuratively wooden images of types and allegories and generic figures. And somehow, through expressing the character of this woman in particular, which has largely come out in her dress and in her expression, which are things which are maybe not essential to her. Right. He really captures, like, a real life woman, so divorced from his kind of parental influence and just herself, without, almost. Without any kind of. Or the appearance of any kind of intervention on his part at all. Do you see where I'm drawing the connection to negative capability?

32:20 Wes Alwan: Yeah, this is really. This is really great. Yeah. So negative capability, right. As Keats put it, it's this ability to live with the unknown. With uncertainty, with doubt, without irritably reaching after facts and reasons. And that's the kind of capability that artists need. I mean, in Drown's case, he's too wooden and too literal, let's say. And this again reminds me of the part in the. In the birthmark where pictures aren't just about verisimilitude. They have something that, you know, like a little hand imprint on them. They have a little characterological mark that makes them something special that allows them, let's say, maybe to communicate the affective part of our existence, to communicate feeling as opposed to just. To communicate fact. So science is very different. Right. So for Aylmer and the birthmark, science is about the generic rather than the particular. And I'm sure this might be. Someone might argue with this. But science is all about reaching after fact and reaching after reasons as opposed to art. So in a way, Drown is very much like. Or there's some similarities to Aylmer, but he's trying to do wood carvings as if he were a kind of scientist. Or he's like one of these artists you see online that try to show you how they can get picture perfect quality using pencils or whatever.

33:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'm sure you've seen videos online.

33:52 Wes Alwan: Yeah. There's this confusion that the height of artistic ability is about complete verisimilitude to fact, when in fact one is trying to get at something underneath. I called it effective life, or maybe you could call it spiritual as well. So the very thing that. That Aylmer is trying to do with science, which is to squeeze spirit out of matter. Right. Art, in a way, does that. It takes its medium and squeezes something spiritual out of it in a way that science can't.

34:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And Drowns different relationship with this particular subject matter, which the narrator is calling love, is about letting things be exactly what they are. That is something, of course, that Aylmer is incapable of. And therefore he doesn't really love his wife. I mean, I think that's. I hope that was something we. We could take away from. From that conversation. Right. He doesn't actually love her. Right. He loves. He loves himself. He loves his idea of what she should be in his mind, which has nothing to do with her.

34:58 Wes Alwan: He loves her as the subject of a scientific experiment.

35:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. But I think he loves her insofar as. As she corresponds with what he thinks she should be, which is to say he's in love with himself. Right. That's sort of, at bottom, what idealization is. It's not about the other person at all. It's about your idea of him.

35:16 Wes Alwan: Yeah. The idealization is about creating, like I said, creating the mirror. That will help you with your own idealization of yourself, or at least help you with the kind of identity that you need for yourself to avoid feeling like you're going to fall apart.

35:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right.

35:31 Wes Alwan: Whether that identity is, you know, obviously idealized or not, it's always tainted with that for various reasons. But, yeah, so, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Getting so you could say, you know, I said he, as a scientific specimen, to the extent that he can make an experiment out of her, he loves her, which is the same thing. Right. The scientific project just is to create the ideal.

35:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: And Drown is taken up with this woman in a way that seems to suggest real love. He sees her for what she really is and is able to reproduce that. Or he's captured something fundamental about her and is able to reproduce who she is as she is to the extent that people can't tell the difference between this carving in her. And so that part of that seems to involve letting her be what she is without him changing anything about her to suit the carving. Right. Which is why this is a sort of anti. Mirror image of the birthmark. That seems to be the thing that Aylmer is unable to do is accept Georgiana as she is with the birthmark. You know, so there's a. There's a creativity that seems to imply this perfect collaboration with nature rather than Aylmer's criticism or, say, edit of Nature. You know, I think he has a critical stance towards Georgiana rather than a creative one. And what's interesting about that for Drown is that he's working in a natural. I mean, this would be the case if he were working with stone, too, but he's working in a living. A natural and living property for his sculpture. It's not marble, it's wood. So it was formerly, at least alive. And so one would say, well, what's the difference between. Is there a significant difference in, say, trying to edit the birthmark off of Georgiana's face and trying to edit the piece of lumber into a statue? You know, what. What would be the. The substantive difference between those two things and what we're told? Made me think of that apocryphal quote of Michelangelo's where he says something like, I saw the angel in the marble and set him free. Something along those lines. He almost certainly didn't say that, but he said something else which is related to that, which is just about how every block of stone has a statue in it, and he just has to let the statue out or cut away all that is not statue. Right, Right. Something along those lines. A similar sentiment is ascribed to Drown. The narrator says it seemed as if the Hamadryad of the oak had sheltered herself from the unimaginative world within the heart of her native tree, and that it was only necessary to remove the strange shapelessness that had encrusted her and reveal the grace and loveliness of a divinity.

38:16 Wes Alwan: She's like a dryad. Is that the right spirit freeing from the tree?

38:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: So that seems to me. I mean, so the difference there would be. I mean, of course, there are many differences other than the one that I'm pointing to. It's not like Georgiana is just some block of wood that he's just taking a little piece of bark off of or something. But it seems to imply a desire, the desire of this wood to be a statue in a strange kind of way. But another way of saying that is just a collaboration with nature. So he's working in tandem with his materials to create something new out of them, which is imitative of nature in a way that is respectful and admiring and which is not destructive or claiming ownership or something along those lines.

39:08 Wes Alwan: Yeah, you're reminding me of Aristotle, actually, believe it or not, who famously creates this analogy between the artist and nature because they both involve form and they both involve reproduction. So in nature, the form, it's in the. And he's thinking of biological creatures, it's in the. In the animal and the functioning of the animal, the form of the animal and all of its metabolic activities and so on. But it's also something that can be transferred from one generation to another, and we now know it as DNA. So the DNA in the animal corresponds to the artist's conception, or he's thinking especially of craftsman. What replaces the DNA in art is the conception or the plan in the mind of the artist, and then that's transferred into matter. In both cases, the form has to be put into matter. And in nature, what makes it nature is just this ability to provide itself with its own form and do it spontaneously. Right. The acorn, you don't need drowned to come along and turn the acorn into a tree. It does it by itself. And it's very suggestive of. The teleology of. It is very suggestive. Right. So for the ancients and medievals, right. It was a slam dunk case for the existence of God. There were other cases to be made as well, but this type of self Generating activity lent itself to an intelligent design theory where God had to be the ultimate artist. But the reason why I'm thinking of this is that I think you're. This idea that you had of the medium or the matter sort of calling out to have form put into it. Yeah. It made me think of the spontaneous ways in which, in nature, matter can just take on form without the intervention of an artist. But it also made me think that the artist must somehow respect the wishes of the matter or the medium and not do violent to it, let's say. Which I think fits with negative capability. Where the violence would be to. Part of the point of negative capability is you don't put messages into your art, for instance, or you're not moralizing, let's say. Which is kind of funny because Hawthorne was famously an allegorist, in a way, or he's accused of that. But you're trying to respect the truth of things, but not the literal truth of things, like I said, the psychological or effective or spiritual truth of things, and communicate that without doing the violence that the artist can do. And the violence just. Yeah, it comes from the more manic quality that Aylmer represents, in a way. I think it comes from the impulse to idealize too strongly. I think there's some of that there for the artist. But it has to be somehow tempered. Otherwise you get whatever the result is of the person, the manic person who thinks that they're a great artist and they hand you their manuscript, which is absolutely terrible. Doesn't reflect the. You know, it's not as good as they. As they think it is. So it. Do you see what I'm saying? I'm connecting negative capability to the resistance to this impulse to idealize and. Right. Hawthorne says science can mend or mar, but cannot create. But art can create under the right circumstances.

42:42 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. The removal of the birthmark seems to me to be the editing of the DNA. Right. So the birthmark, we might say, is an expression. It is literally and figuratively a symbol for the expression of one's genetic code or all the properties that make you you. And the idea is to capture those properties rather than to edit out the ones that we don't like and only portray the idealized person. Because I think the result of that would be pure allegory. So maybe we can say that Hawthorne does allegory one better or something like that. He's not quite there.

43:23 Wes Alwan: These stories worked very well together in a way that I hadn't actually anticipated, but. Yeah.

43:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: All right.

43:29 Wes Alwan: Thanks for recommending them.

43:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: I love Hawthorne. I could do 40 more. Not really.

43:35 Wes Alwan: So I think next time we're going to do One who Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and then Julius Caesar and then I don't think we have a plan after that yet, but yeah. All right.

43:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Thank you, thank you and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.

The short stories we cover in this episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on Nature’s design by removing a birthmark from his wife’s otherwise-perfect face. The varying results of these efforts seem to correspond to the extent with which love, that most magical of forces, underscores them. “You cannot love what shocks you,” the scientist’s wife remarks when her husband expresses how disturbed he is by her imperfection. What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin discuss two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.”

Upcoming Episodes: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.”

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0:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: [email protected] subtextpodcast. The short stories we're covering in today's episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on nature's design by removing a birthmark from his wife's otherwise perfect face. The varying results of these efforts seem to correspond to the extent with which love, that most magical of forces, underscores them. You cannot love what shocks you, the scientist's wife remarks when her husband expresses how disturbed he is by her imperfection. What's the difference between collaborating with nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative rather than the critical faculty? Today we're discussing two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Birthmark and Drown's Wooden Image. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Ellwyn, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I thought we would start with the Birthmark, which I realized is one inch away from being an episode of Frasier. I don't know if you're a Frasier fan, but I feel like this kind

1:52 Wes Alwan: of setup, I used to watch it, but. Yeah, tell me how that works.

1:55 Erin O'Luanaigh: Frasier is a perfectionist, you know, obsessively high standards. And I feel like there are a lot of these episodes where he wants to host a dinner party in his apartment or Niles wants to host a dinner party and some tiny flaw becomes their obsessive quest to fix. And then they spend the entire episode just dealing with the cascading problems that trying to fix this one little flaw causes. There's one where I think they're trying to move the father's recliner out of the living room so they could have a dinner party, and they drop it and they create a scratch on the floor. And the next thing you know, there's a team of guys who are rewiring the whole apartment because of all the, you know, the floorboards are coming up. I think at one point in that episode, the Father says something like, not everything has to be perfect, you know? And Frasier is like, that kind of attitude is what leads to shag carpeting. So. So, anyway, I'm. I suppose I'm making a connection to the fixation on the flaw, though how we might characterize. Is it Aylmer? When I say that, it sounds like I'm saying Aylmer with a deep Southern accent, so I don't. Aomar.

3:05 Wes Alwan: Yeah, well, it's a really different story if you imagine them both having thick Southern accents.

3:10 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's very different.

3:12 Wes Alwan: Aylmer Geddon here. Well, his claim to fame was he invented the glue. Right. Badoom poom. I was going to ask you how we're pronouncing. No, I looked up the name at some point, and then I've forgotten what the significance of the name is or what its provenance is. Is it biblical or is it.

3:31 Erin O'Luanaigh: I only found the high priest over there. His cellmate, Whatever.

3:36 Wes Alwan: Ahmedabad.

3:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Ahmadinejad, whatever his name is. Ahmed.

3:45 Wes Alwan: I say we bomb her. No, no bombing. Just gonna. So we don't know how to pronounce Aminadab.

3:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: Aminadab. And, yeah, like, if.

3:56 Wes Alwan: We'll call him Aylmer.

3:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Aylmer, as in what ails you? You know, I'm assuming.

4:00 Wes Alwan: I guess so.

4:01 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's anyway, not a great name, but Georgiana isn't much better, so.

4:05 Wes Alwan: Oh, you don't like Georgiana? It's pretty fancy.

4:09 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah.

4:10 Wes Alwan: Just like her boudoir. In comparison to his crappy laboratory.

4:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, he knows how to put a lot of effort into interior design. When put in the service of science, he puts in some effort. Anyway, I wonder what their dates were like.

4:28 Wes Alwan: So I reminded myself of the meaning of his name. It means noble, famous, renowned. It's from Old English, which makes sense, right? Because he has made himself famous, almost getting to the roots of life and getting to the point where he might be able to create life. Or. That's his claim. That's what he boasts. But it turns out, as Georgiana finds it, he does a lot of brilliant things, but he always fails to reach that aspiration. Right? To combine to make science do something spiritual, to make science, to kind of squeeze life or spirit out of matter, which would be the ultimate form of alchemy. That's his ambition and he fails to do that. But I guess that allowed him to get a woman. I love the line in here about just the very brief description of the way they get together, where he. What is it? He washes the acid stains off his hands.

5:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. He cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife.

5:37 Wes Alwan: There you go. Persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. Yeah, that's such a great sentence.

5:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: It is a great sentence, but, yeah, he's put in all this trouble to come unstained into the marriage and it's like, what does she bring to the table?

5:52 Wes Alwan: She couldn't have washed her cheek, right?

5:56 Erin O'Luanaigh: Come on, Georgiana. The entitlement.

5:58 Wes Alwan: When you're talking about Frasier, it made me think of Seinfeld, where he's always rejecting these very beautiful women because of one little quirk or another. And one of them, she has. There's like a woman with large hands.

6:10 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes.

6:11 Wes Alwan: She's very beautiful. And then you get to see these close ups, and obviously they have a man standing in and you just see these man hands. That's the one fatal flaw that he can't accept. So if he were Aylmer, you would be. Yeah, I'm just gonna resize your hands. Aimler is like the original plastic surgeon in a way, but, yeah, she could have ended up with looking like a really bad plastic surgery case. Huge lips and just a bad facelift.

6:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: They call that mar a lago face now.

6:46 Wes Alwan: I thought I. Right, mar a lago face. I thought I'd do a few other touch ups when I went in for the birthmark. So she suffered a better fate than that. But in any case. But I bring that up because at a certain point, Hawthorne points out that many men found the birthmark to be a kind of cute, quirky thing. And you could think about this in terms of human character as well. Often when people were attracted to each other or fall in love with each other, they find all the little quirks, including the things that they're later on going to find to be flaws and to be things that drive them crazy in the beginning. They find them to actually be charming. So it doesn't just have to be a birthmark on the face. It could be any quirk of character. And I thought that was interesting because that's the kind of thing that we think of as chemistry. It's the kind of thing that creates a chemical bond between people. Right. A strong bond, as opposed to them just being in proximity to each other. Like in a colloid. You mix things up and they could be a colloid, as my high school science teacher would say. They're just there hanging out together, but they don't react chemically. They don't create something New. But when people have chemistry, they come together, like the way hydrogen and oxygen come together to create water. And they create something entirely new by forming chemical bonds. But to do that, they have to be attracted to each other. And to be attracted to each other, they have to. Or maybe not, maybe half too is too strong. But often there are these little quirks of character. And so the kinds of bonds that they create. It's not like hydrogen and oxygen, where you could give generic scientific laws about what the attraction is and why the bond forms. People are sui generous in their characters, in the way they're unique, like a fingerprint. They don't belong to some general type, so their chemical reactions are that way too. They don't happen according to some general law. But in any case, the thing that can bring people together and bond them can be the thing that later on creates friction. And in the case of this story, it becomes a lot of friction indeed. Although Hawthorne doesn't say that he in particular, that Aylmer in particular was attracted by the birthmark. He says that after they get married, he starts to get concerned about it after it.

9:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: Talks about the series of reactions that this birthmark inspires. Says masculine observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a flaw after his marriage, for he thought little or nothing of the matter before Ajlmer discovered this was the case with himself.

9:45 Wes Alwan: Right. Okay, so this. This is exactly the passage I was looking for. Yeah. So men either thought it was charming or they wished it weren't there, but Aylmer just didn't pay attention somehow.

9:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, he thought little or nothing of it before their marriage. So he's taken her on somehow with this sort of indifference. I mean, he's selected a beautiful woman to become his wife. And it seems as though he's taken, in that sentence that we read earlier, you know, more care in preparing himself for something like the wedding day than he has in selecting this woman. I mean, it turns out that they really haven't had a chance to develop any kind of chemistry with each other because he seems to know her so little. Like, over the course of trying to remove the birthmark, he gets to know her character much better than he did previously. And she turns out to be a pretty astute and interesting and noble person, which he is discovering along with us, the reader. So it seems that he has selected this woman for the mere fact of her desirability without really Understanding anything about her and then over the course of trying to get rid of the mark, learns what makes her great. So for me, the birthmark isn't so much a sign of her, say, quirk or character flaw. The fact that he doesn't notice it until after their marriage, it seems to me to give an indication that this is really about him. Of course this is. I actually made a list or a log of all of the possible interpretations of the mark that come up over the course of the story. I think the most compelling of any of these, I mean, you know, we have this idea that it's a sign of her own mortality and that this is something which is distasteful to him because he's involved in, you know, the scientific experiments which you've already talked about, of wanting to sort of best nature or manifest spirit in matter. And therefore, this sign of mortality is an affront to him. So it seems to be speaking to him or responding to him in a very particular way. And one can also say it's a representation of himself somehow, that he doesn't notice it until their marriage because he, in a way, manifests it through the marriage or something. I don't know if that's taking things a little too far.

12:02 Wes Alwan: If we were to approach this with a hermeneutics of suspicion, right, in particular Freudian one, we would say, well, of course he noticed the birthmark, and of course it played a role in him getting with her. He just wasn't conscious of that. And we can speculate, right, he wanted a project. He wanted someone to tinker with. He couldn't create life. But as Hawthorne will say, at a certain point, science can't create life, but it can mend it a little or mar it. And then we have to ask the question whether he really wants to mend or marvel. But, yeah, at a conscious level, this is what's so great about the. You know, he married, he found a beautiful woman. How does he put it again?

12:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: I can't even persuaded a beautiful woman.

12:49 Wes Alwan: Yeah, persuaded a beautiful woman to marry him. So, yeah, a beautiful woman runs entirely against the whole quirk of character thing that I was talking about. So she's just a beautiful woman. And any beautiful woman will do, in the same way. To go back to my chemical analogy, for any oxygen atom, any two hydrogen atoms will do when they come together to make water. It's not personal. It's very impersonal. And in this case, it sounds very impersonal, even though she has this very unique personal quality about her. And presumably has many others. So it makes it sound as if her particular character were not that much, whether physical or spiritual, mental was not of that much interest to him, except that she be every certain very generic type, beautiful and probably of good breeding and whatever the other criteria are. And the main question, I think, from this wonderful first paragraph was whether a woman could compete with his love of science and then how he would integrate her into that type of life. At the very beginning of the paragraph, it sounds like who, not long before our story opens, had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. So the spiritual affinity for Georgiana. Right. But by the end of the paragraph, his love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two, but it could only be intertwining itself with his love of science and uniting the strength of the latter to its own. So we start out with the spiritual affinity being more attractive, and then by the end of it, it's a three way. Science is not going to lose out. They have to all come together as a threesome or it's not going to work out.

14:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. Well, this is, I think, giving credence. I think we're kind of both pointing to the same thing, which is the idea that he either unconsciously chose this woman specifically with this birthmark, or it somehow manifested as a result of his being married to her, where suddenly it seems to him to materialize because it's a way to keep her at arm's length. I mean, we might imagine that the hand is his hand sort of pushing her away. I get a strong suspicion of his impotence in the story. And we do see, later on she

15:18 Wes Alwan: can just say, talk to the hand

15:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: and then just turn her cheek.

15:21 Wes Alwan: Talk to the hand

15:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: that is tr. I think he's doing that to her, though.

15:26 Wes Alwan: Right? Right.

15:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, we see his fingerprints actually make a mark on her arm when she's gone in to look at the part of his laboratory that he hasn't turned into that crazy magical boudoir. He grips her arm and pulls her away. He's gripping her, but only to take her away from him. So again, there's a kind of like this push, pull dynamic where it seems to be about needing her to be a problem to be solved and therefore keeping her at arm's length. The birthmark is some sort of perfect excuse to register disgust with her at the very time that they should be. I mean, and the story even calls it, you know, the very time that they should be closest. He has this perfect excuse to recoil

16:09 Wes Alwan: from her the symbolism is very clear. And if it weren't clear, Hawthorne just tells us during the story what the birthmark means. So it has something to do with her mortality and her physicality and her imperfection as a human being. And we can also speculate with her sexuality, with her instinctual nature rather than her higher spiritual nature. All the things that are associated with being a physical being and menstruation, if you want to get very speculative, the sorts of things that a young virgin. Well, just kidding. Who knows? He probably saw some prostitutes before he got married. Right. I don't know how things worked back then, but he's dating it to be about in the 1700s. Right? He says in the last century.

16:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes, that's right.

16:59 Wes Alwan: In any case, he's experiencing, living with a woman for the first time and coming to terms with her humanness, including her physicality. And there's the sexual attraction component of that. But then there's also the discussed repulsion component of that.

17:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, we're also told that he is spirit and his assistant is matter. So, you know, we know he has problems with embodiment. Right. So, yeah, we're given a lot of interpretive help here, though I think that there's something about the plural interpretations provided both by the narrator, because there are. You know, we could splinter them out a little bit. I mean, there's an interesting part where the narrator calls it the fatal flaw of humanity, which nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. So from that, we could extract three different symbols. It's a symbol of mortality. It's a symbol of imperfection, which, again, we could say is maybe a subset of mortality. But it's also the symbol that perfection can only be earned somehow, and earned via suffering. So I think the narrator is actually giving us a few different interpretations. And I think that the very idea of interpretation that this mark is assigned to be interpreted seems to suggest there's literally more than what meets the eye here. I mean, it turns out, of course, to tether her. To tether her spirit to her body somehow. It's like a knot that's tying her soul together with her flesh. But I think there's a great deal of amateur semiotics going on just among the townspeople. Ultimately, Aylmer's discomfort with the idea that this mark has the potential of multiple interpretations is part of what makes him want to eliminate it. Right. Like, I think he's disturbed by how polysemus. I don't know the mark on her face is. And he wants to have the answers, and he wants to have the. To eliminate the possibility of a knowledge which he doesn't have access to or doesn't want to understand. Right. I think, again, this is a lot of. This is kind of just repeating what you've already said. Because I think this might be just his confrontation with a woman that is outside of his experience and which he may not have any kind of model of understanding.

19:31 Wes Alwan: Yeah. This is another way of saying that he's interested in the generic because he's interested in scientific law. And he's interested in a beautiful woman as opposed to this particular woman. And this is why he's making the contrast to character. And the idea that this is not something Hawthorne gives as an interpretation. It's my own, but that somehow the birthmark is kind of like a characterological thumbprint, but made visible. And it goes as deep as life itself. Or it extends all the way to the heart, I think, is the dream that he had. And she overheard him talking in his sleep about it. So the seemingly superficial thing and character often manifests itself that way in certain sorts of behaviors, even as subtle as body language and facial expressions, vocal tones, all of it. Just think about all the ways in which people express character, you might say, and gender is one form of that. So think of femininity as a form of character. One can always make the accusation, oh, well, that's just a role. That's all very superficial. But there's a sense in which I think that's wrong. Because character is also about dispositions to think and feel and behave in certain ways. Virtues like courage are examples of character, but so are pathologies like being a narcissist. That's a certain type of character. There's an outer facing aspect to it that one might say is superficial, but there's also inward part of it that has to do with the experience of the person, but also the identity of the person. So it does go deep as life itself in that sense. And to eradicate what seems to be superficial is actually to eradicate the person as a particular person. In a way, he's at war with particularity, which I think goes towards your point of wanting a single interpretation and be in the realm of the generic, of the universal, as a scientist might like to be, as opposed to being in the realm of the truly sui generis, the thing that can't be subjugated in any particular scientific law. Because each person has their own set of laws. Each person has their own science to them. I could ascribe a lot of character traits to you, but in the end, the only legitimate description of you as a character is just to say you have Eren ness, right? You are Eren. The rest of it is only a very, very rough approximation. And interestingly, there's a point where Aminabad Hawthorne makes the point of saying Aminabad is very comfortable with all the particulars of things. He's about doing all the precise things but doesn't know how anything works. And I think Elmer is a big picture guy. Amitabh is the. Elmer is the ideas man and Ahmedabad is the one who executes. He's the worker. So that sort of lends itself to this point as well. And then there's another little piece of evidence where when Aylmer is creating these bewitching scenes using science, but it seems like magic, right? He's giving her these little figures dancing around in the air. Or he shows her. It's almost like a hologram, I think, or a three dimensional movie. But he's showing her representations of actual life and very, very accurate representations. Representations, but they still have that bewitching, indescribable difference that makes pictures more attractive than the original. And this again is, I think, about character. This is something that art does, right? You don't just want. It's not just about doing an exact picture perfect representation of what's imitated. It's about capturing the uniqueness of what is imitated by capturing difference. And the uniqueness of the thing imitated can't be captured by perfect representation of the original. Because in a way that only gets at the generic in a weird sense, I'm not explaining that very well. So I think all these things go together.

23:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, I think you're right. I was thinking about. I mean, we'll get to this in Drown, but the extent to which particularity actually can transcend itself because Drown had me thinking about negative capability, I suppose. And would the elimination of these types of particularities be something to be wished on a certain level? Is character something that we have to transcend? And I think ultimately what Drown provides as an alternative to that is that it's through the particulars or through the character that you get at some sort of universal truth, right? There's the family resemblance of his. Of his wooden carvings, which are less than the masterpiece that he creates, which seem to be particular in a way that is different from the kind of particularity that we're talking about again, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, so maybe I shouldn't leave that alone. But I think your reading is absolutely correct. I love this idea of her particularity and her character being expressed through the mark. And I think to your point, you're reminding me of the moment where she's invited to touch the flower, that he's sort of created a time lapse, you know, the holograms or whatever. You know, I just think, like, oh, it's movies. You know, Hawthorne is such a genius. He's like predicting. He's predicting movies and cinema. And he also has, you know, this flower that's created via a sort of time lapse photography where we watch it, you know, grow suddenly and quickly out of the soil into a full, full grown flower and invites Georgiana to touch it. The narrator tells us she had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leave coal black, as if by the agency of fire. There was too powerful a stimulus, said Aylmer thoughtfully. So even he kind of gets it right. It's not that she's sort of tainted with this birthmark and she's a sort of manifestation of original sin or of death or any of these things that we might say are these sort of garden variety interpretations, but in fact, her power, her characterological power, her distinctness, gives her so much vitality that she causes the plant created in this lab environment, this false plant, this simulacrum, to wither under her touch.

26:13 Wes Alwan: You know, the plant is living its entire life and fast forward. So in a matter of a minute, maybe, I don't know how long exactly. So we know it's about to die, and he thinks that she's going to have a chance to pluck it and smell it before it withers and before its seeds start already creating the next generation. It's all going to happen that quickly, and then it withers right after she touches it. And so we don't know whether that's.

26:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, that's a good point.

26:41 Wes Alwan: Correlation or causation. But of course, he's going to go straight to causation, like a bad scientist. He's not going to say, oh, maybe it was a coincidence, but it was too strong a stimulus. Which is an interesting thing to say, right? In light of him as a stimulus to her. Right. There's a little story being told there, I think, about him and her as well. You can reverse it as well, and she can be in the position with the stimulus and him in the position of the one being Stimulated. But there's two ways to read it, and I think on one reading, it's him destroying her with too powerful a stimulus and maybe wanting too much to control her or perfect her.

27:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's good. Yeah. How do we square all this, then, with the fact that she's converted by him over the course of the story? I mean, part of this is just, you know, if we wanted to pathologize this relationship, he's just subjecting her to endless amounts of psychological abuse to the point where she. She hates the. The birthmark more than he does. He seems to convert her to a mindset which values the generic over the particular. Because ultimately she characterizes love as something generic and thus loftier than reality. So we're told her heart exalted while it trembled at his honorable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. So, you know, I mean, it's. It's winking at us as it. As it tells us this, right? But she comes to appreciate his love, which is one of demand and idealization rather than satisfaction and acceptance. So she's converted.

28:30 Wes Alwan: Well, it's interesting. Yeah, the conversion is a very interesting thing, because you would think the opposite would have happened. Because before all that happens, right? She witnesses him trying to show off. He does the airy figures and the fast flower, and then like a daguerreotype type of photograph that captures only the hand, and the rest of the face is out of focus. Hawthorne says, in a way, these are all failures, right. In each case, something has gone wrong. I forget what happens with the airy figures, why that would count as something going wrong. But in any case, after that, it's like he gets manic almost. He's. He does more showing off. He comes in with this powerful fragrance. Now he's like a perfume guy. It's like your friend who's doing a different career every different day and who thinks he's going to be great at it. And then he's got a crystal globe with poison in it. And he can kill any tyrant anywhere with that poison somehow. And then there's a cosmetic for freckles, but that remedy, that's too superficial, he's got for her problem. He can't just give her this cosmetic and have the hand go away. He needs something deeper for that. And then she reads his books and finds out that it's all about failure compared to his lofty standard, which is to make science do Something spiritual to create life or something in that domain. And the upshot of that, after reading his scientific journal, is that she trust his judgment less, Hawthorne says, but she reveres him all the more. That's the interesting way that she gets converted. She knows, in a way that he's doomed to failure in this project, but it's the thought that counts.

30:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes, A for effort.

30:26 Wes Alwan: Yeah. She's impressed by the loftiness and the purity of his goal, which is really sick. Right, because he wants her to not be human. And that is a thing with men. Right. Freud's whole thing about the Oedipus complex was predicated on this idea of a Madonna whore complex, where men essentially want to idealize women as maternal figures and they don't really want them to be human and are bothered by it, are bothered by women's sexuality, are bothered by women's physicality, bothered by all these things and want to perfect them by turning them into spirits, basically, which just means killing them, ultimately. So it's a sick kind of project. But somehow she thinks, well, isn't that sweet? That's the wrong thing to say. Isn't that noble? Isn't that noble?

31:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, he's succeeded in making life so untenable for her that she looks forward to the prospect of his failure as a way out. She's willing to. She expressly says that she's willing to die because life has lost any attraction for her so long as she has this birthmark.

31:40 Wes Alwan: She says something really interesting there, which is that she's like, yeah, go ahead and I'll drink this, but honestly, if it kills me, I prefer that. But the reason why is because she's become so morally advanced, she's become too good for this world. From her own perspective, she says life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Wow. Conceded much? Just kidding. But yeah, she. She fully identifies with. With this idealization and says, yeah, I'm too good for this world.

32:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, in a way, she knows she knows more than he does because she's then, by that time, read all of his experiments, seen more clearly than he, I think, is capable of. How idealistic and out of whack his aspirations are. So if you like, maybe this has put her into a kind of a maternal relationship to him. She gets him now. She gets what he's about. She's seen his failures and, you know, he's. He's become like a little boy to her, and she's going to play his little game of make believe they're gonna play toy soldiers with a real gun or something like that.

33:02 Wes Alwan: That's interesting. So you don't think she really buys in? You think she's just playing along?

33:06 Erin O'Luanaigh: I don't think she's playing along. I think that the insight that she has now to him, I don't think she lies at all or that her perceptions are called into question throughout the entire story in the way that his are. And I think, yes, here we go. Who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Exactly what degree that is, she doesn't quite say. She says, were I weaker and blinder, it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured, hopefully. So she, she's, she's quite accurate in her assessment.

33:40 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I've misinterpreted that. Yep.

33:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: And I think, I think she's absolutely right. I think that by turns she's revealed herself to be more sensitive and perhaps even more intelligent than he. And I think having seen this, this record of his life, it's as though she's gone through his, his. You know those baby books where you record, where parents like record all of their kids accomplishments and you know, they said this word on this date, you know, when they were 10 months old or whatever, you know, and they take the stamps of the baby's feet, you know, and have the footprints and the handprints in the book and just a log of everything that they've done.

34:20 Wes Alwan: And you say that's adorable.

34:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly. It's his experiment book. It seems to be a record of his mind up until the point that they married. And now it's like she knows him. She knows him really well. And she knows him in a way which, you know, she's then able to, with this sort of like perfect sense of balance and accuracy, gauge how she's able to respond to that. And it seems to me that she pities him or decides that she's just going to die to please him or something. It seems to me to become very maternal.

34:58 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I'm not so sure I agree that she's dying to please him. I mean, I think this is very important what you've pointed out, because her degree of moral advancement, it's not like she thinks she's become an angel. Right. She's advanced enough to be too good for this world, but not enough to withstand the dissonance that her goodness now puts her in, in relationship to the world. That's the way I would say.

35:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: And to him I would say, yeah, yeah.

35:26 Wes Alwan: And then methinks I am, of all mortals, the most fit to die. So there is a grandiose element to that. But she's most fit to die precisely because she hasn't been perfected enough. She's been perfected enough to be put in a spot, but not perfected enough to be able to endure the predicament that she's been put in, by the way. Most fit to die, or fit to die. That should have been a James Bond movie title. Fit, Fit to die. I think she's attracted to the loftiness of his goals and the sort of tragic loftiness of his goals, their unobtainability. Let's see, when she reads his volumes. And at that point, she realizes he's already kind of drugging her, doing things to her without telling her. She starts out by reading. There's romances, there's poetry. And then she gets into these alchemist figures who she realizes are kind of ridiculous. They think they're going to change metals into gold and all that stuff, but they also think they're going to create life and do the thing when we haven't talked about this yet, but really that only women can do but use science to arrogate for themselves this kind of reproductive capacity, this capacity to actually create life. Or you could say a divine capacity to create life. She kind of thinks it's quaint. They falsely imagine themselves to have sway over the spiritual world. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and therefore were believed and perhaps imagined themselves to have acquired from the investigation of nature a power above nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual world. So, yes, also the subjection of the spiritual to the scientific in the material, and then moving on from there. Right. He's recorded every experiment in this book, this journal of his. And so here's her reaction to the book. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them, yet spiritualized them all and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp, the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly than ever, but with less entire dependence on his judgment than heretofore. I love that. Less entire dependence. Meaning, yeah, she realizes he's whacked. She can't rely on his judgment. He's whacked out but there's something admirable about it.

38:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. And this is where I get. I'm glad you pointed to her reaction to his library. And this, I think this is where I'm getting this maternal idea coming in. You know, she's now seen everything he has to offer, and she's in a position of judgment over him now. And it seems like. Yeah. You know when kids show you something that they've done and you're like, wow, that's great, honey. Good job, you know, that's wonderful. That's really cute. Oh, you want to kill me now as part of this game that you're playing? Okay, I guess. I mean, you're a huge disappointment. So what do I really have to live for?

38:46 Wes Alwan: If it'll make you feel strong and powerful. Okay, go ahead and.

38:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly, exactly.

38:51 Wes Alwan: That's what you need for your self esteem, honey.

38:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, right. And the key to this, I think, is dropped in very early on when she says, you cannot love what shocks you. What I love about that. I ended up doing a little bit of reading into galvanism and things like that because I figured out what. What the early part of the story was referencing with this idea of the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of nature seem to open paths into the region of a miracle. So I was reading about galvani sending the electrical impulses through the frog's legs, Right. And getting them to twitch as if alive. And how, I guess Mary Shelley had been just reading about that in the run up to the contest there in which she wrote Frankenstein. So I was thinking about just the great duality of that line. You cannot love what shocks you. Right. It works both ways. He can't love her and recoil at her, and at the same time, he is shocking her, so to speak. Right. He's making her the recipient of his experiments, his efforts at improvement. His critical gaze, you might say. Right. And I think so long as he is treating her like an experiment, or so long as his relationship to her is one of this desire for improvement or one in which he's somehow tinkering with her, I think the relationship would not survive even if she survived and the experiment was successful.

40:18 Wes Alwan: Right.

40:18 Erin O'Luanaigh: Because it just. It's creating this. This relationship of scientist and subject. It's creating a relationship which I think is untenable in any kind of a marriage. And I think that that's one of. That she knows or realizes that she knows at the point when she decides to die. There's no way back from this. We could say that there's no way back from him treating her like a science experiment. And maybe there's also no way back for the relationship so long as she realizes that there's something ridiculous and like a little boy about him. And they're always going to be unequal in that regard. So somehow the inequality has now gone in both directions to such an extent that the marriage can't work, can't go forward. Not that it was working before, but, you know, it's really broken.

41:08 Wes Alwan: She realizes she's just married to this unemployed crackpot.

41:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, you know, the most shocking part of the whole story is finding out that he was actually respected in Europe.

41:19 Wes Alwan: You know, I mean, he's famous. It's important that he's famous in this.

41:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right? It's. And it's dropped in. In the middle that, oh, by the way, he was actually famous for this stuff because for a long time you think that he's just, you know, he has his, like, toy science kit that he got for Christmas one year, and he's just been. Been playing around and I guess independently wealthy enough to have a, you know, an assistant who's. Who he's paying to do his. His amateur science experiments. But turns out they're real. And though also a lot of this was undertaken a long time ago. Right. There's a strange. Something weird happens with time where it seems as though he's giving up his experiments to get married. As soon as they're married, all these problems happen. And then when she's looking back into his log, she sees that these were things that he had undertaken years and years ago. You know, so there's a. Something odd is happening with time.

42:14 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

42:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: He tries to brush off his failures as though they happened a long time ago. And now he's figured it out in the same way that I should say, too. He also tells her that he's been thinking about her birthmark for a really long time, even though they've just gotten married. That's another weird time. He wouldn't have had time to think so deeply about it. It's clearly something that is just, oh, I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm sure I could fix you. Right? And it seems to happen within like 48 hours of their wedding day that he. That this thing, which he claims not to have noticed until they've been married, is something he's somehow been thinking forever about and knows the solution for. Right. So there's a time lapse with this plant and also somehow with his own sense of his Advancement in his studies,

43:03 Wes Alwan: these things that he earlier on made discoveries about. So during his toilsome youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental powers of nature that had roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe. Seated calmly in his laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the. So he discovered the nimbus cloud, apparently, and of the profoundest minds. It's good to have a little practical engineering stuff going on. He had satisfied himself of all of the causes that kindled and kept alive the fires of the volcano, and had explained the mystery of fountains and how it. And how it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure and others with such rich medicinal virtues, from the dark bosom of the earth. So he's investigated, high and low, everything from the heavens all the way down into the depths of the earth. And then it turns out he's discovered the human frame, what's in the middle. Studied the wonders of the human frame and attempted to fathom the very process by which nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air and from the spiritual world to create and foster man her masterpiece. The latter pursuit, however, Aomer had long laid aside an unwilling recognition of the truth against which all seekers sooner or later stumble. That our great creative mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, results, as opposed to the mechanisms that underlie the results. She permits us indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and like a jealous patentee, on no account to make. Now, however, Aylmer resumed these half forgotten investigations, not, of course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested them, but because they involved much physiological truth. I love that phrase, much physiological truth, and lay in the path of his proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana. I love the phrase much physiological truth because it speaks to the physiological truth of sexual interaction as well, which I think is partly what's underneath all this. But I do want to say, just going to. I like your reading a lot where she's kind of humoring him, and ultimately her self sacrifice is a form of maternal condescension, but she does. I just want to look at one more area where she's engaged in these rapt musings about his character. This is where I thought she fully buys into his idealization. And now I'm wondering if I'm wrong about this. In Lydia, you're reading so Georgiana became wrapped in musings. She considered the character of Amler and did it completer justice than in any previous moment. This goes to your point where she's actually, genuinely getting to know him. Her heart exalted while it trembled at this honorable love, so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection, nor miserably make itself contented with and earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. Yeah, so this is the part that I thought was a bit sick. She felt how much more precious was a sentiment than of the meaner kind, which would have borne with the imperfection for her sake and have been guilty of treason to holy love by degrading its perfect idea to the level of the actual. And with her whole spirit, she prayed for a single moment that for a single moment she might satisfy his highest and deepest conceptions. So this is. You know, I'm sure feminists have written about this as her kind of being in the male gaze and sort of going with it. Right. So trying to live up to his idealization longer than one moment, she well knew it could not be, for his spirit was ever on the march, ever ascending, and each instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant before.

46:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: Okay, I love that. So one more moment seems to undo. Yeah, exactly. She's there, and then she thinks about it a little bit more, and she somehow gets beyond him. It's as though he's convinced her to, instead of loving their family dog, to love, loyalty or something. Right. He convinces her for one second to conceive of everything as being in the world of forms or something like that, and to stay up there. And then she immediately knows that nothing can stay up there and that she is never going to satisfy him, and he is never going to be satisfied. And he's just going to keep trying to climb this ladder of abstractions into the point of the singularity, into nothingness. Right.

47:47 Wes Alwan: But I do think she still is enamored of his idealism. And even though she knows she can't live up to it, and I think you're right, there's a condescension to her approach, you know, to what she does, in the end, she still finds it. And maybe it's just she finds it endearing the way, you know, as you pointed out, you might find a child's accomplishments endearing. But this paragraph suggested to me that she's excited by this idea of purity.

48:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: She's giving his behavior the most generous possible read still in this paragraph. But, you know, it's about virtue. Is what I'm trying to say. She sees this as the pursuit of the virtuous, that there's something in the generic, in the dissolving of character. If we all are just these spirit beings and we are untethered to our bodies, we can all live perfectly virtuous lives and everything will be okay. So I think she sees his aspirations perhaps as having a virtuous intent here, and then in the next moment realizes that it's also wholly impractical and that she can't follow him there. And she's trying to understand what he's about and what attracts him to this, even as she appreciates its impracticality and ultimate folly. I suppose it's not just about trying to fix her so that he could finally touch her or whatever. It's about an ideal of virtue. I don't know if I'm. If I'm characterizing that correctly or I'm just sort of thinking out loud. But in other words, she thinks of him less as a critic in this new insight that she has into him and more of a pure idealist. And the latter she seems able to appreciate and admire, even as she understands how silly it is in practicality.

49:36 Wes Alwan: Well, yeah, I think she's kind of fatally attracted to the impracticality in a way. But over time. Let's wrap up part one and part two. We will continue our discussion of the birthmark, and if we can have time, we'll get to the other story, Drowned's wooden image. [email protected] subtextpodcast or just subscribe right here on the Apple Podcast app if that's what you're using to listen. Otherwise, you'll hear the second part in a week. All right, thank you, thank you.

50:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter njoysubtext.

What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.”

For more analysis, check out Way Too Close on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J3usJ4fqOJU

Upcoming Episodes: Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.”

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0:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: [email protected] subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of There Will Be Blood. We spent a long time in part one talking about Daniel and his psychology and his relationship with oil and that symbology. And I think now we're about to move into his relationship with HW and the way that that might triangulate his relationship with oil a little bit or his relationship with himself maybe, and redemption that that might represent for him psychologically, which ultimately doesn't pan out. This is another reason why I think I like Daniel as a character to a point, is that his scenes with HW before the accident are very sweet. I mean, except for when he's actively deceiving people and just using HW as a prop in the background. I should have mentioned this first thing. Have you seen the SNL There Will Be Blood excuse for Bill Hader to do an impression of Daniel of Daniel Plainview?

1:29 Wes Alwan: I probably saw it, but I don't remember it. But it sounds great.

1:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's so good. You gotta. I'll send you the link as soon as we're. As soon as we're done. But it's just he has a show on the Food Network where he goes around drinking other people's milkshakes at various. And Amy Poehler plays H.W. in the underrated performance of that episode. It's just that she's in the background with these huge eyes and she says nothing and just has the sort of like silent, you know, look on her face. This is a funny look. I love that episode. And Anton Shigura is a guest on the. On the show.

2:04 Wes Alwan: Oh, wow.

2:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: So he also, like, kills somebody with a cattle gun. Anyway, so they have a surprisingly, I think, tender and wonderful relationship which. Which would seem on the surface to sort of belial of Daniel's own stated principles and behaviors. But I think this gets to his. To the ambivalence of oil, which is Daniel's own ambivalence about origins and a desire for connection and a desire actually for support. As he says to Henry later, I can't keep doing this alone or I can't keep doing this by myself. Something like that. So he needs a prop at all times for being Mr. Self Made Man. He usually needs a prop.

2:47 Wes Alwan: I guess his business partner gets killed at some point. When HW is what, two?

2:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, one or two. Yeah.

2:54 Wes Alwan: He has the boy from a young age and he's a single dad. Yeah, I think you're right. There's a lot of sweet moments. And again, I think it represents a possibility for redemption. And I think he, you know, if HW hadn't been injured, you could speculate that there would be a different course for Daniel, that he might have. It's possible that that relationship could change him. But they lose. Their ability to communicate is significantly impaired. That's one problem. So HW's ability to actually affect Daniel and to produce any change in him is compromised. And then the other problem is I don't think Daniel likes weakness. And that's what the deafness in HW represents. And then there's the guilt. Right. He's embarrassed. Well, there's guilt and embarrassment. I think he feels guilty about what happens to hw, or maybe. But at the very least, he doesn't like how it looks. Right. So that the conflict he gets in with those other businessmen, potential business partners, is about the idea that he's not taking proper care of his family because he sent HW off by that point. Right?

4:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think, yeah.

4:14 Wes Alwan: So there's the implication that he didn't properly take care of his. Of HW and hw's getting injured. And then there's the implication he's not properly taken care of him by. Or that he's abandoned hw. And those two criticisms. Or that criticism, sorry, really, really bothers him. And then so we have to ask why it bothers him. Is it really part of his identity to seem to want, to seem caring to other people? I don't think so exactly. But yeah, how do we explain that? Why is he bothered so much by HW's injury and by this criticism of abandonment?

4:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: Does abandonment apply an abdication of duty or being unequal to a challenge?

4:59 Wes Alwan: That second one, I think sounds right to me. Weakness, maybe.

5:03 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. So HW becomes quite a sticking point then. You're helping me see that with him. He's a symbol of weakness because he's. Because he's.

5:11 Wes Alwan: Deaf.

5:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: And therefore Daniel might become someone who's pitied for having a son with a disability, but without him, he's also accused of not being able to handle it. So HW can't exist for Daniel at all. His very existence becomes something which is inherently going to cause problems for Daniel. Now.

5:32 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Can we say more about the deafness thing. And why that's such a big problem? Because he's really cruel about that. Towards the end of the movie, flapping your lips or. No, what is he saying? Your hands.

5:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: Sorry. And your little dog talks for you or whatever.

5:47 Wes Alwan: You're beneath a bastard or worth.

5:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Bastard in a basket. There's so many. So many lines that I just like that I say so many times, and that's one of them.

6:04 Wes Alwan: I would love to see the outtakes from that.

6:06 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, exactly.

6:07 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

6:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, Bastard from a basket. That's what it is. Bastard from a basket. So this is the flip side. So I think that in Daniel's universe, he wants to get rid of the idea of luck. I think I'm then tweezing luck from a gift or something like that. But anything which is not the result of work, maybe anything which you might luck into or which might be given to you as a gift, Daniel hates Daniel, doesn't want any part of it. And I think what happens to HW actually proves the existence of luck, namely, like the existence of bad luck. It proves that things can happen to you that are not the result of anything that you've done to either deserve punishment or earn praise or Reward. Right. Because H.W. is up there. Because he is kind of following his father's example by tending to the derrick. Right? He's. He's sort of like, you know, I had this idea that. That Daniel is like this shepherd of oil derricks, you know, and you could say that that's kind of what HW is doing. You know, they're all waiting for the oil to come in and sort of watching. And HW is up there, you know, like a. Like a shepherd lying in the grass in some kind of pastoral painting, only he's lying on the roof of a shed in a sort of like, hellscape in which nothing. He's not doing anything wrong. He's not. He just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So that's proof of a force outside of the forces that Daniel wants to acknowledge. Eli, of course, will connect it to the fact that the well wasn't blessed. And then we have, I think, what Daniel is about, which is about playing God and being a creator. So I'm going to reject any connection to things that were given to me that I didn't necessarily earn, including a family. But, like, I will turn someone who isn't family into family. I like, I will make them my family member. And it's very important that he does that. Absent of a woman. Because that would involve collaboration. So this is sort of like this Shakespearean idea of, you know, the perfect print of the father without the intervention of the woman, which can be hairy and difficult for instances of paternity and stuff like that. Right. So Shakespearean characters are very interested in the workaround for that. So the idea of a perfect self. And the only way that Daniel knows how to be himself is through this rhetoric. Right. And so he teach it. We see him teaching H.W. telling him, here's what we're going to do. This is earthquake oil. So HW can no longer be a perfect copy of his father because Daniel can't reach him anymore. Because Daniel's not interested in becoming a different or a better person or a person other than what he is. And so that lack of communication means that Daniel would have to change and that HW can no longer be a perfect copy created by Daniel in his image.

9:08 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I think that's a very good point. I think that you're reminding me of how sweet that transition into the third act is with HW is getting signing lessons at the end of the second act, and then Mary is doing that with him, which is very sweet. Right. Daniel is not. So there's already love there. And then you jump into the third act is them getting married. So there's a big time transition as well. But there's something that is like, for me, was the most emotionally impactful moment of the movie. And there's love in that. And I think maybe this is part of the problem with hw. You could say Daniel has done a really good thing by putting HW into a community. Right now he's used him and used this idea of community to get what he wants and to serve this envious project. But he really did all these things. He really did irrigate the land and help create a community and also give HW a community. And that, I think, has been formative for hw, and it's given him a possibility of love where there is none for Daniel. So my point here is that by the time we get to the end of the movie, then this all happens very quickly. Right? It's sweet. He's married, and that is just horrible. But HW has been formed by forces which are more than just Daniel. This is going towards your point with printing and all that. So it's not just about that there's no woman imprinting on hw, but also that there's a competition for the communal forces. And I think that's what unconsciously would gall someone Like Daniel, HW is more than his because he's the communities. And HW is loved and can be loving, and that's not a possibility for Daniel. And in that sense, because of those things, HW can be an individual who's not just an extension, an extension of Daniel. So it's sort of a narcissistic appendage. And that's what's represented by HW saying, I am off to Mexico with Mary and I'm gonna start my own business. And that makes him a competitor in Daniel's mind. But I think in Daniel's mind, any individual is a competitor. Anyone who's not an extension of him represents a competitive threat. So H.W. has escaped his orbit in various ways. In the external action, the escape comes with, I'm going to go to Mexico and start my own business. But psychologically, the seeds of the escape are already there in the fact that he's got these communal opportunities and opportunities for love. And ironically, of course. Right. Yeah. Daniel puts HW into that very position. So his project of exploitation goes wrong there because he's. By making use of community, he loses control over this one person that he had a relationship with and that, you know, where the relationship was happening under his. On his terms, which is complete control.

12:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that's great. I just want to tease that out a little bit more because I'm thinking about the fact that he first puts HW into the community of Little Boston, giving him the ability to write, to meet Mary, the person he will marry. And then the deafness because of that lack of communication, it forces HW into a reliance on people. Right. So he ends up going. And it's. This is done so subtly and skillfully in the film, but we sort of know that the school he must have been sent to must have been a Catholic school or at least some kind of high church school. Right. Because H.W. and Mary are being married in a much more traditional looking church. Right. So we can sort of imply, intuit that the school for the deaf was one, which is probably a Catholic community. Right.

13:11 Wes Alwan: There's not any snake handling that's gonna happen.

13:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, I don't think so. I think.

13:16 Wes Alwan: Get out, devil. Get out.

13:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, you know, I think that the film is obviously very suspicious of both Daniel and Eli. The cult of personality church, that is Eli's church, you know, in. In Little Boston, Sunday doesn't mean Jesus, it means Eli. Right. So he's gone into the, you might say, you know, the most community community of all the communities. Right. The. The Catholic Church. The one in which there is an extremely structured idea of communal responsibility, of charity, of, you know, one which would. Develops a social doctrine, etc. So I think that, you know, I was thinking about, well, why. Well, why is Daniel upset at the end that HW is going off for himself? And why does he construe him as a competitor? Why would he not admire that? Because one would think that Daniel would actually be, you know, would create the conditions whereby HW would inherit all this money and live a life of ease and wouldn't have to work. And that would be the thing that would make Daniel resent him, would be to inherit this money. But no, I think it turns out that as you're pointing out, there's a collaboration now inherent in HW's person. So he's going to be going out and using the knowledge that Daniel gave him in those early years of training in order to drill in Mexico. But he's also now been the. The feminine principle in him. You know, the mother or the other parent has become potentially the Catholic Church or some sort of like high church. Right. It could be Anglican. Right. Some sort of high church influence, which is representative of community, which is representative of the feminine, I think. And this weakness, this, this deafness which he's construing, which Daniel construes as weakness, that needs that community coming in and being the mother to this child, which means that Daniel can no longer sees him as a competitor. Because you're not my kid, you know, you're your mother's kid now.

15:24 Wes Alwan: I mean, the irony here is that HW has just kind of become a regular guy. Like, he's not, as far as we can tell, doesn't have some extreme personality disorder like Daniel does. So he's really not in that sense a competitor, some raging narcissist who wants to take over the empire or something like that. He's not little Trump Jr. Or something like that with all the same personality pathologies that's going to compete with him in that sense. So competitor, in a way is a rather. At the external level is a rather weak accusation. But psychologically it's spot on. Right, Because HW has bested him. He's got a more mature personality than Daniel does. He's a bastard in the sense that he's just not completely fucking insane like his father.

16:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. So how can we square this with Henry? I mean, I think I want to make sure though, that we talk about the fact that Henry represents an alternate vision, maybe. Of what? Of how Daniel might make copies of himself in the world. I think Henry is this possibility that Daniel hadn't considered, which is, if he's my brother from another mother, that's important. I think maybe he is like me, through the father, through whatever paternal forces Daniel imagines have affected him and his personality. Perhaps Henry could be the same way, coming from the same place, under the same conditions. But having moved away like this is important, too. I think he's had this long journey to find Daniel. So both of them have moved away from Fond du Lac, which I know means bottom of the lake. So it's about water. But you can't think of Lac, Lac and Wisconsin and not also think of milk. Right. So they've both moved away from a kind of maternal force, which is also like the. You know, water is also, of course, a maternal force as well. So I think it works both ways, but they've both moved away from that. So I think that's another possibility for him. Of course, the deception and the idea that Daniel has been made a fool of in having been deceived by Henry makes this a very different kind of family lease than the one in which he was deceiving the child, HW or other people into believing that he was the father of this boy. Daniel can't be made a fool of. So Henry has to die.

17:49 Wes Alwan: Yeah. It's interesting. He comes right at the midpoint of the movie. So it's another redemptive possibility. It's another possibility for some kind of actual relationship for Daniel. But then we quickly see that. We see that HW Intuits that there's a way in which Henry might supplant him. And so that's how you get, you know, he lights that fire. I think part of it, he's. He intuitively understands that Henry is a fraud. And I think he gets into the diary. It's a little vague for me, but you get the sense that he's. He's on to Henry in a way, but also knows that. Right. HW has been Daniel's entire life. And now here comes Henry, and that's exactly what happens. Right. Henry is then sent away. And then Daniel and Henry have their little bromance road trip, surveying for the

18:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: pipeline, which returns them to water, briefly

18:44 Wes Alwan: ending up in the ocean, splashing about like having gale time in San Francisco. Is that where they are in San Francisco?

18:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think they're a little further south, barking up the wrong tree there.

18:58 Wes Alwan: I guess it's rather stale to point to the homoerotic element of that, but, you know, de rigueur for criticism, but. But anyway. But it's probably a little bit legitimate to point that out and to point to the fact that it ends in violence partly because of that. But really, when all one needs say is that Daniel allowed himself to get too close to Henry and that's why Henry had to die. You know, again, there's an external line of action that justifies it. And in a way, Daniel is sort of let off the hook. Right. He has an excuse to kill off Henry, but I think that that's his fundamental impulse anyway, is to do that sort of thing, to get rid of that relationship. But in any case, Good news for HW. Well, his rival is gone.

19:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. But HW's relationship with Daniel is over. And then. Yeah, so that might have been a redemption and I think Henry might have been another one. Not as effective. But, you know, Henry makes him open up.

19:57 Wes Alwan: Exactly.

19:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: Returns him to water. Returns him to the possibility of connection with other people. Even if at the same time he's saying, I probably couldn't look at that house again, it would make me sick. He talks about the Peach Tree Dance. He actually talks about being with women. Right. He actually is suddenly open to water, to the possibility of collaboration with somebody on the basis of a family tie.

20:20 Wes Alwan: Henry is the one. He tells about his envy, he's confiding all these things. And as you said, it's the only time in the movie where we get any of Daniel's inner life through his interactions, as far as I can tell, with Henry, any sort of self. Actual self disclosure. So it is significant, it is redemptive to some extent, or it goes in that direction and then of course goes sideways.

20:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. And what's so fabulous about that is that it's the exact same scenario as hw, only this time Daniel is not in control. So he's ceded a little bit of control to these forces outside of himself under Henry's influence, and then discovered that Henry was not actually his real brother and cries. He cries. That's important.

21:04 Wes Alwan: Yeah. When he discovers this, he has a fair amount of control because he. Because Henry relies on him for money. And we get the info, the hint that that money is being doled out very, very by drip, by drip. Right. That happens in the saloon where Henry has to repeatedly ask Daniel for money and.

21:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, right.

21:30 Wes Alwan: At that point Daniel is furious. And so at that point in the movie, I'm wondering, is he furious because of his dislike of sexuality? Is he furious because of Henry's weakness? Weakness for women, but also the weakness implicit in Asking him for money. The dependence. And I think that's part of it. Right. So he needs dependence. He needs people like H.W. or Henry to be dependent on him. That's the only position in which he can tolerate the relationship. But dependence is also weakness, and he doesn't like weakness. So he seems to be disgusted by Henry's weakness. I guess we're supposed to also infer at that point he already knows that Henry's not his brother.

22:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, yes, he knows.

22:12 Wes Alwan: Yeah. When does he find out?

22:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's the Peach Tree dance.

22:15 Wes Alwan: Okay.

22:16 Erin O'Luanaigh: He says we could get all dressed up and take him to the Peach Tree Petri. Yeah, we can get all dressed to the petri dish. Petri dish. The Peach Tree Dance. And Henry clearly does not know what he's talking about. Whatever the staple of Wisconsin Fond du Lac society is, which is so funny. And this is. So this is h. This has to be a Paul Anderson invention in the script. Right. Because remember in Sierra Madre, Curtain wants to grow. Grow peaches. And then he goes off with Cody, has that peach orchard. And so he's left his wife and this peach orchard to apparently go to seed. Unless Curtain goes there and takes his place. Anyway. Yeah. So he gets this fantasy fulfilled of this wife in the peach orchard. Yeah. So that's the tell.

23:07 Wes Alwan: I see.

23:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: And it's at that moment with this idea of women and place and connection that he realizes.

23:14 Wes Alwan: I see.

23:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah.

23:15 Wes Alwan: Yeah. I think I missed that. I mean, I think I concluded there had to have been a tell that I missed, but. Right. Yeah. It's. In a way, it provides him with an excuse, probably to unleash aggression, you know, built up irritation just with having, you know, having. Being. Being in a relationship with a person, getting close, the humiliation of having confided all those things. For instance, that in and of itself, you know, is enough to make you want to kill someone. How dare you know these things about you?

23:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: About me?

23:47 Wes Alwan: How you dare you know my weaknesses.

23:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, Right.

23:51 Wes Alwan: That's the way I used to feel going to. Going to therapy. It's like, did I really. Did I really say all those things to my therapist? God. Oh, my gosh, I hate her for knowing that.

24:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'm just. I'm. I have no boundaries and I'm obsessed with self disclosure, so that doesn't. I'm like, oh, finally, I feel close to you now that you know all my darkest secrets. Thank you, checkout person.

24:18 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Well, self disclosure is at the very essence of. Yeah. Friendship. But it's got to be regulated.

24:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes.

24:26 Wes Alwan: You say too Much the other person's got to die.

24:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. I hate it. I hate it when that happens. I've killed so many people.

24:35 Wes Alwan: That's why you got to keep a little pistol on your body at all times.

24:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. Then William Bandy always finds out.

24:44 Wes Alwan: I thought we were having a good time. Remember what I told you? Never tell anyone.

24:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Don't tell anyone. No, but, I mean, I revisited the moment where Henry comes into Daniel's life, which is a scene that I love because it's shot from so far away, so we don't see Henry up close for a very long time. Just this real distancing effect that goes on there. And he keeps asking Henry who he is, and he keeps just saying his first name. He doesn't say Henry Plainview. So he's. And there's this. This obsession, I think, with naming and names in the film. I mean, not only because the names are so, you know, loaded, but that's a really significant tell, I think. Henry. I'm Henry. You know, I'm just some guy named Henry. I'm not Henry Plainview. Necessary, necessarily. And then I'm your brother, which, you know, which could have a lot of different meanings. So in a way, he, like, almost doesn't lie to him. Of course he does. But, you know, in a sense. And then when he holds the gun to Henry's head and he asks him again, who are you? Henry says, I'm nobody.

25:47 Wes Alwan: This is a really good. Yeah. This is really interesting. Yeah. I hadn't thought of this fact that this kind of identity thing bookends the whole relationship. It starts out with this who are you? Thing, and then it ends with this who are you? Thing.

25:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: And the. The idea to, you know, the. Maybe the idea of making your name is part of this, too. You know, you think of the fact that hws father, you know, who you only kind of realize is the father after the fact. Because it's so difficult to tell in the oil who anybody is. Right. Because they're covered in the goop, which is. So whatever you want to say about that.

26:19 Wes Alwan: Right.

26:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: Amniotic.

26:21 Wes Alwan: Fungible and amniotic. Yep. Right.

26:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: And there are so many, you know, like, those accidents where you could be anybody, it could happen to anybody, and it literally happens to people who. You don't even know who they are. Right. Because they're working with you, but they're. You maybe know nothing about them. And that the anonymity of the west, which could be. Either you get a fresh start, or it could be you Die in a hole and nobody even knows your name, you know, versus, like, Daniel Plainview. I'm an oil man.

26:52 Wes Alwan: I'm an oil man.

26:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. And becoming this guy with this enormous house on the. On the coast, making. Making your name in that way, identity. I don't know. There's. There's more to be said about that. Yeah. Making your name versus being given a name like Eli Sunday. Who. Who's. Yeah, who's all. Who's all about.

27:09 Wes Alwan: Good transition. Yeah. Let's talk about him getting bludgeoned to death.

27:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, yeah. With the bowling pin, which is just, you know, love everything about this movie.

27:22 Wes Alwan: You hated violence.

27:24 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that part is. That part is, you know. Well, I mean, I was going to start with the joke that There Will Be Blood was the original title of my first book, but so I, you know, I do and I don't. I love blood. Under certain circumstances, I'm very interested in blood. So, father named Abel, twin brother named Paul. Very confusing moment. I remember first watching theater.

27:50 Wes Alwan: Yeah. I was very confused. I thought when Eli was introducing himself to Daniel that it was Paul and that they were pretending not to know. I was. And it turns out originally they weren't twin brothers. There was a different actor. Yeah, right. And then that actor was not very enthusiastic about his job, let's just put it that way, and even admitted that. But so anyway, he got fired. And then the actor who plays Eli, who's wonderful. What's his name?

28:20 Erin O'Luanaigh: Paul Dano.

28:21 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Paul Dano plays both parts, but they don't really. I don't think they draw attention to the fact that they're twin brothers. You just have to figure it out. Right.

28:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: Daniel and H.W. do give each other a look, because of course, they can't say, like, oh, we saw your brother Paul. He tipped us off. Right.

28:37 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

28:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: So it's very, very subtly handled.

28:41 Wes Alwan: It is very interesting. Yeah. So you have the one son who. The chosen one is the one who tips him off and goes on to make a fortune. If Daniel is telling the truth, apparently Paul becomes a oil man himself.

28:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: He doesn't. He just makes that up to torture Eli because he said he gave him $1,000 instead of 500 and.

29:04 Wes Alwan: Right, right, right.

29:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: I gave him a million dollars.

29:08 Wes Alwan: Yeah. There is this Cain and Abel element. Right. Am I wrong to read that into this?

29:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, you're not wrong. Even between father and son. I mean.

29:19 Wes Alwan: Right. Yes, of course. But I'm thinking between Daniel and Eli. So when. Because. Right, so, okay, so here's the. Here it is, from Genesis. Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil. Oil that is just kidding. Fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering, fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering. But on Cain and his offering, he did not look with favor, which is always just find so confusing and funny. But so Cain was very angry and his face was downcast and I would be too. And if God didn't even tell me why, what did I do wrong? I'm the crop guy and the brother is the flock guy. Right? We. This has got to be someone for everything. Why am I the. But anyway, it. And I was looking online like why does. Why does. It's just Googling. Why does the Lord, you know, not favor Cain? And I. I saw someone on Reddit say because that's God's prerogative with all caps.

30:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: You can't argue with that.

30:37 Wes Alwan: Literally one way of looking, looking at it. And I'm sure you know a lot more about the interpretation of this than me, but. But just from my amateur point of view, it looks a little bit like the Abel is in the position, the more spiritual position with a flock. Right. And leading. Leading a flock and doing all that as opposed to taking something out of the. Or from the ground or something like that. I don't know. So I was associating Daniel's envy with Cain's envy of Abel and you know, Daniel's envy in the general sense that we talked about, but also his envy of. Of Eli. So he envies Eli in the sense of having this position to be of being a spiritual benefactor to people. Right. To leading a flock and envious people in general, of course, in the sense of their possibility for actual connection to others. Daniel can only be connected to the ground. Others can be connected to each other. And his envy ultimately is about, you know, he thinks he needs to defeat people, but ultimately he needs to connect. And that's. That's what is torturing him. But so that's my sort of reading Cain and Abel onto this, which is the. Why I think the bludgeoning is so apt. I don't know. Tell me, tell me what I'm getting wrong or right in that.

31:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, I think that's totally right. I think, you know, he envies Eli in the same way that he envies women and Fond du Lac and water and. Right. Anything that he can't control or that he isn't Totally playing God over. I mean, there's so many things I could say about this. Just one of the elements that I meant to talk about with land is also the fact that land and ownership is, of course, fundamentally. There's already a kind of mental gymnastics that you have to. That you have to do with yourself to even think about ownership of land, period. Never mind ownership of land in America or in the West. Which is. Which is maybe a hint that when Eli calls himself, you know, the son of these hills, that's. That's what he wants Daniel to call him, and that having some authority to it is already kind of suspect. So, you know, they're both flimflam men, it turns out, right? They're both. They're both orators who are manipulating people and trying to get something out of people. They both have gift for speech in a certain way. So Eli sets himself up as being the inheritor of the land, someone who's connected to the place, someone who has territorial rights that supersede Daniel's, and someone who's also a son of God and also a father to the flock. And I think Daniel actually envies, come to think of it, in this discussion of Abel, Eli's father, Abel. I think he also envies Abel for having a daughter like Mary. I think this is something that Daniel is interested in. I mean, you know, you.

33:26 Wes Alwan: You.

33:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: You've alluded to this already, but when Daniel pulls the switcheroo on. On Eli and doesn't let him give the blessing of the well, Daniel himself does the blessing, right? He's. He's constantly putting himself in the position of God to Eli rhetorically. And he instead positions himself. Oh, he says Mary. He steals Eli's language and says, Mary is a proud daughter of these hills. And he puts, like, his hand on her shoulder, right? So he does this leasing thing, even with Mary leasing family members, leasing land, right? Where he's like. He then installs himself as the surrogate father of Mary and therefore grandfathers himself into the town. You know, like, I'm a member of this town, too. I'm gonna be the guy who's part of the town. Eli, I think he views the fact that he has this oil under the Sunday ranch as a gift that he's been given that he has the right to because he owns the land. And the negotiation scene where Daniel comes clean, basically, he's not just quail hunting, that I wrote down the dialogue. Eli says, we have oil here. That's worth something. Daniel says, oh, do you have someone who can drill for it. And he says, it's very expensive to drill and to get it up and out of the ground. You ever tried that before? You know, like you don't know what you're doing, you know, you moron. How much is it? Costly. And Eli says, well, our. Our oil sits right up on top of the ground. I have this gift that everyone can see. My gift of healing people. Right. My guy, like, I'm. I'm an. I'm a child of God. I'm, you know, I'm part of the body of Christ. I'm member of a church, of a family. All of these things, I think, are twinned in there. So. So Daniel says, I believe that's called seepage. Doesn't necessarily mean there's something underneath.

35:09 Wes Alwan: Seepage versus drainage.

35:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Seepage versus drainage. Right. Yeah. Where Eli says, what would you give us for it? And Daniel says, I don't know. And Eli goes, something? You don't know? And Daniel says, that's right. What would you like, Eli? And Eli says, $10,000. And Daniel says, for what? And Eli says, for my church. I love that moment. And. And Daniel, like, has to concede. That's good. That's a good one. Because he's expecting to be answered with, for what? Like, what do you want the $10,000 for in terms of what they already have? For what? For the land and plus the oil. But instead, Eli answers with what he wants, what he's going to use the money for. So it's like an oil answer. I'm going to take this money, and I'm going to do this with it. Right. It's about getting you somewhere. But it's also a strategic answer in a way that is showing Daniel that Eli is a match for him, I think, because he can't object to it without objecting to the church. And, you know, he has to play ball with these people. And part of playing ball is being like, I enjoy all faiths. I

36:12 Wes Alwan: love it.

36:13 Erin O'Luanaigh: Depends on what you are. Are you a Methodist? Oh, that's what I am. You tell me what you are first.

36:19 Wes Alwan: Which one of these mixed nuts would you like? I enjoy all the nuts. Even a macadamia.

36:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: And so, yeah, so he. So he can't object with that without objecting to churches, churches, the church itself, like the community itself. And he's trying to win them over. And it ties a decision about a fair price up with charity. So again, we have this, you know, opposition between the two of them as being somehow about religion. And when. When Eli accuses Abel of having Squandered everything or given everything away. Abel says, I listened to his word. Right. So Daniel has this competing gospel that is in competition with Eli's, and Eli's is also kind of in competition with the gospel. But that's a. That's a question for another podcast.

37:07 Wes Alwan: No, these are all good points. It's. And you're reminding me of. Yeah, Eli does not come across very well in that scene. Yeah, it's the scene after. So Daniel has beaten him up or humiliated him and rubbed mud in his face. Right. And then he's going to do something similar to his father, take it out on his father, Abel. But we do see this dark side of Eli there, and we do get the sense that there's a little bit of Paul in him. Right. He's also after. His intentions are not pure. Even though he wants to use the money for the church, there's a fair amount of self aggrandizement in that. Most like he wants to be a cult leader or something like that. In the end, I think he seems less ambitious. You know, he's coming to Daniel for money, but he's really fallen, you know, his willingness to say that, what is it? I'm a false prophet and God is a superstition.

38:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: God is a superstition.

38:04 Wes Alwan: Right. So this is Daniel's revenge for Eli getting him to say earlier on that I abandoned my son, you know, over and over again. Yeah, it seems. It seems like Eli has quite different. I don't know what he's been doing out there. And Would you say he's trying to do a radio show? The podcast? What?

38:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, he's trying to be one of these. Yeah, exactly. No, he's. He's been trying to be one of these faith healer celebrities, you know. Do you know the story of Amy Semple McPherson? This is a. No, you got it. You just got to read this woman's Wikipedia page. That's all I have to tell you. It would take way too long. But basically, one of these people who becomes famous for being a kind of like a revival church, slash cult leader, slash, give me your money and I will, you know, keep performing miracles for people, et cetera, you know, the very, very earliest forms of a kind of a televangelist made popular by radio. And there was always this charismatic Protestant element to it with supposed healings and stuff like that that they could perform, you know, which is. Which is the heart of Eli's supposed gift, you know, the gift of healing. And that's one of the things I actually wanted to talk about in relation to HW but in that final scene, you know, God is a superstition that's related to luck. But when he comes into the house, he says, your. Your home is a miracle, right? Perfectly designed. And maybe, maybe he doesn't even know it, but perfectly designed to really rankle Daniel, right? Like it's a miracle. It just appeared out of nowhere. You know, you didn't do anything to earn it. That's just great way to get Daniel to already be. I mean, he's already pissed at everybody, especially Eli. But, you know, every. Everything is about this supposed communication with God, which he is special for being privy to. So in the same way that Daniel is special because he's better than everybody, he's more skilled than everybody. Eli is special because he has this gift, because he. Because God talks to him, God tells him things. But also God has mysteries and that. That causes him some problems, as he says.

40:16 Wes Alwan: I hadn't thought about this. You know, why Daniel gets so angry at him and kills him. But this seems to be spot on about. By trying to sort of attribute Daniel's success to God in a certain way.

40:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: I wonder about Eli's flexibility, shall we say, as opposed to Daniel's. So Daniel's problem seems to be his inflexibility. Eli's problem, I think, is something a little bit different from that. Even though they're sort of mirror images of each other and they interpret things according to the same. According to similarly strict rubrics of how to interpret behavior, signs, events. They're very different rubrics, but they're very strict. But something Eli says when he. When he performs the healing of the old woman or what might be whatever, you know, the performance, which is one of the things that Daniel hates about him is that he's all show. He doesn't actually do anything. Right. That was one hell of a show. But he introduces that by saying that God has given him a new way to heal or to cast out the ghost or however he. However he formulates it, that he's not going to cast it out with fire, but it's a gentle voice that God has given him. I thought that was really interesting in light of the fact that Daniel won't change his. His mode of communication. So this is what I'm relating to HW Daniel won't learn sign language. He won't be flexible in his mode of communication. And if you can't hear his message, he wants nothing to do with you. You're not somebody who. He's going to Talk to like he walks away from the town that is fighting with each other because he doesn't need it, he doesn't need the trouble. And I'm certainly sympathetic to that moment when he, when he walks out because they're all fighting over who has the rights to the land and who's gonna get more money and stuff like that. But he walks away. He doesn't try to negotiate with them. I, like I said, I see that as, you know, probably a useful tactic to walk away, but he won't try a different way in. He has his way and that's it. Eli introduces himself to us in the arena of the church as someone who is changing his voice, changing his method of approach. I don't know if that makes, if that gives him maybe something that we could say about him that is positive, that we could put in the positive column. Because Eli to me tends to be a little bit more, I mean, if it's possible, a little bit less likable than Daniel.

42:41 Wes Alwan: Yeah, he is.

42:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: And maybe that's why I think that Daniel comes out better than he does. Yeah, he's really creepy. Maybe that flexibility, maybe that's another way that he is of that he works his flim flam. Maybe that's part of it. Maybe it's to show that he has multiple voices, that God gives him multiple gifts, multiple ways of manifesting the Holy Spirit or whatever. But just that flexibility. I thought there's a, there's a very clear difference being established between the two men in that statement.

43:12 Wes Alwan: In the statement of, in the statement

43:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: of I have a new voice, God has given me a new way to communicate.

43:18 Wes Alwan: Interesting. Okay, so pointing to his greater flexibility.

43:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. Is that just a tactic? Is that just part of his inflexible belief in himself?

43:28 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I don't know. You know, I'm, I, yeah, he's quite. Eli is quite opaque to me, actually. I mean, in the end the veil falls to some extent and he seems self serving and cynical to some degree. But that, that seems like the place to which he's gotten at that point. But yeah, I find, I find Eli opaque. I don't know psychologically.

43:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: I know a lot of people felt maybe because of the stories around that casting necessity that Dano wasn't really up to the challenge of competing with Daniel Day Lewis. But I think as time has gone on, people have admired that performance more and more. And now I think it's, I think he's the equal of Daniel Day Lewis in the film.

44:11 Wes Alwan: Absolutely.

44:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: But it's, but it's Just such a very different kind of performance, too, which is, I think, like, really essential. It's so much more obviously about performing, though. Daniel is too performing all the time for these communities, at these public assemblies, et cetera. But I did want to say that that opening scene with the silver mine, you could say, is very evocative of the film industry as a symbol. Right. He's in that really, really dark shaft, and then he comes out to the blinking, blinding sun, and there's something of, like, coming out of the movie theater with the, you know, silver. Silver screen. It's 1898, so, you know, the infancy of films, the silver screen as a term I looked up and it says descriptions of a silver screen used in the presentation of films as early as 1897. So right around that time. And I think that drive to keep producing new things, that oil symbology is very much connected to art and the idea of, you know, sort of a dissatisfaction, always needing to be working on something. Maybe the sort of, like, egomaniacal tendency that it takes to be a film director, maybe. So a lot of. A lot of statements might be made there, but yeah, a lot of the film is just about. I think it's about sneakily, about performance and maybe about movies, too. And that, at least in that early scene.

45:35 Wes Alwan: Interesting. Okay, well, I think that is a good final word.

45:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: Okay, thank you.

45:41 Wes Alwan: Thank you,

45:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to letters at subtextpodcast. Com. If we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.

The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family, and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he’s earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic, rather than communal, ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.”

For more analysis, check out Way Too Close on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J3usJ4fqOJU

Upcoming Episodes: Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.”

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0:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: [email protected] subtextpodcast. The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he's earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic rather than communal ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Today we're discussing Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film there will Be Blood. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, when I had suggested that we watch this film, I was having trouble deciding between this one and no country for Old Men, which came out in 2007, which filmed in the same place. I don't know if you read about the story where the oil derrick burning down, that whole scene was actually causing problems for no country because they were filming so close together that the smoke was getting into the no country for Old Men shots in the background. And, you know, I know there's a lot of conversation about these two films being possibly the two greatest films of the 21st century so far. So I was wondering which. Which you think is better.

2:12 Wes Alwan: Hmm. Well, it's been quite a while since I've seen no country for Old Men, so I would have trouble saying I don't remember no country for Old Men well enough.

2:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: As much as I love There Will Be Blood, I think actually I prefer no country, strangely. But I thought this one would be, in a way, more fun to talk about. I mean, did you look at all at Oil, the Upton Sinclair novel? You know, this is, I guess, a bit more of a free adaptation, or it's just an adaptation, really, of the first hundred pages of oil. Not an adaptation in the way that no country is of its source material.

2:47 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I did look at Oil and it's loosely based on it departs pretty quickly.

2:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: But, yeah, so I thought. I thought, in a way would be easier to do because I think with no country would have to be continually looking over our shoulder at McCarthy if we were to just cover the film. But I don't know. I mean, the older I get, the more I like, the more I like There Will Be Blood. And I do wonder if it's actually more fun to watch. Like, the performances are so fun to watch, and it's so funny. But I don't know if you would agree if you found this particularly funny or what's your experience with the film, because I've seen it now quite a few times, including just recently on the big screen, which was great. Art House theater was running it. So about a month ago, I saw it on the big screen for the first time since it came out. What's your experience?

3:34 Wes Alwan: Well, it had been so long since I had seen it. I only had one memory of the film, and that was a memory of Eli killing Daniel at the end.

3:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, whoa.

3:47 Wes Alwan: I think I reversed it.

3:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: Wow.

3:49 Wes Alwan: Imagine coming with a gun and killing Daniel. So I think, you know, when I first saw it, I thought it was brilliant. Like, it didn't have the huge. A huge emotional impact on me. And I think that's because of the darkness of the Daniel character and the fact that, Right. He doesn't change very much, except that he just sort of drills in, so to speak, into his existing character structure, which involves a lot of envy and anger, and just deepens it and deepens it and deepens it. You know, it's almost. I was just thinking, now, is there something tragic about it? I mean, he's sort of. You know, I wouldn't call tragic in the sense that he's very focused on achieving this destiny of his, which is to kind of flesh out his envy, as he puts it. He's an envious man. He's angry. He hates people. He wants to get away from people, to have enough money to get away from people. And that's his project, and that's what he does. So there's no redemption. There's little hints of what might be redemptive, for instance, in his relationship with his son. But it always goes sideways. That, for me, subtracts from the. Or it doesn't subtract from the emotional impact. The emotional impact is just unpleasant.

5:08 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, you don't admire him at all, though. I mean, I'm interested in the idea. This idea of envy.

5:13 Wes Alwan: And, I mean, he is very handsome. I'm just kidding.

5:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: I just looked at you with disgust.

5:21 Wes Alwan: He's got a good. He's got a good job. Oh, you don't think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome?

5:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think Daniel Day Lewis is handsome. I think Daniel Plain Lewis. Daniel Dayview. Daniel Days in the hotel magnate.

5:44 Wes Alwan: That's great.

5:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think he's a little oily, actually. No, I mean, that whole opening sequence is. You know, you're on his side at first. That whole opening sequence is so incredible. I love that. You know, almost no dialogue and just him and the silver mine. You've got to admire him.

6:04 Wes Alwan: No, so I look at all that retrospectively now in terms of his larger project. Yes. But in the beginning, he's someone who is willing to put all this physical work and also to sacrifice life and limb, potentially. And he hurts his leg, of course, and has a permanent limb from it. To do what? To get rich, I think. And I. Yeah, you have to admire the sort of determination, I guess, in a way. But one of the very early scenes is of him prostrate in that office as another person is counting the silver for him. And it's a very nice visual image of the idol he's sort of bowing down to. He's prostrate before this project of becoming rich, and he's made lame by it.

6:54 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, you know, it is about getting rich. Right. But I think there's also something deeper at work there which maybe speaks to the idea of oil. You know, I know we talked about gold in our episode on the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And of course, we also have silver here as kind of a foil foil to oil. I think getting rich for Daniel might be proof of a kind of competence or dominance, domination, but it's. It's almost a kind of a side effect or. Or proof of his success on a business level. So I think that that's why when he gets rich, he doesn't know what to do with himself anymore. Or he's ultimately hobbled by that more than he is hobbled by, you know, the work itself, though literally. That's not true. But, you know, this idea of being envious. I mean, he also needs people. You know, I was thinking about the setting of the film often and the fact that it starts so relatively late in the history of Western expansion, you know, so we have. We have a person who hates people, who sees other people as competition, and yet who also has to build his entire business model around rhetoric and manipulation and sort of selling yourself and your qualifications to an audience because you're not Just one man out prospecting in the middle of nowhere. You have a continent filling up, so you have land already owned by people. You know, you have the Sunday family, for instance, on their ranch that they own. And we have people, you know, like. Like the camping trip is such a great symbol of this, right? Like the fact that Daniel takes HW On a camping trip. That's their excuse. You know, they're camping and quail hunting, so they have their little packs on their backs. That is so interesting to me that we are now at a point in time where you could be going out in California just on a camping trip and not because you're a pioneer who's doing this because of, you know, some kind of compulsion to move into the west or for necessity, maybe. So we have this, you know, immediate confrontation here between this lone oil man and a lifestyle which. Which is about kind of not really being part of the community. And then the most successful of those oil men are the ones who can bridge that gap with society, I think. And obviously, this is why HW is so important to give the appearance of the family business. So. So he needs them, and he's sort of reliant on them. And part of his skill is about this manipulation, both the rhetoric and ultimately what that comes down to is lies and strategizing in a way that kind of is using and manipulating people. That ambivalence, that envying them but also needing them, goes right to the heart of his character. I think it's why he's ultimately so obsessed with family, why he becomes attracted to the idea of Henry, his brother. Because I think there's something that Eli has that Daniel is actually quite attracted to, though he doesn't maybe see it that way.

9:52 Wes Alwan: Yeah, his motive. Right. So I said, you know, getting rich. He's focused on getting rich. And yet there's another motive that goes beyond that, and that is, you know, I've called it envy. So these are the lines from the movie where his brother says no. He says to his brother or his supposed brother, are you envious? Do you get envious? And this, by the way, is one of the. Maybe the only time we try to see him confide in someone or get them to confide in him. So there's almost none of that in his life. And then Henry says, I don't think so, no. And then Daniel says, I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. Henry says, that part of me is gone. And then he says, work and not succeeding. All my failures have left me. And then Daniel says, I just don't. I just don't care. And he says, there's times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money so I can get away from everyone. What'll you do about your boy? I don't know. Maybe it'll change. Maybe it'll change

10:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Daniel Plainview. We have to do that.

10:59 Wes Alwan: Maybe. Yeah. I don't know how to.

11:01 Erin O'Luanaigh: I'm an oil man.

11:03 Wes Alwan: There you go. That's great. That's a great impersonation.

11:06 Erin O'Luanaigh: I do so many lines from this movie. He completely failed to alert me to the recent panic in our economy.

11:17 Wes Alwan: That's great. So there's that central. So he knows, right. He's not someone who doesn't know that part of himself, that envious part of himself. Now, one might say, well, what he really envies in others is the capacity to connect. It's actually capacity for some sort of community. I think that is the part that he doesn't quite know about himself. But otherwise he's very conscious of his envy. And he has a certain project which is to dominate people because he hates them and to be able to maintain some sort of distance from them. And, yeah, as you're pointing out, he uses the idea of community to sell himself. And he sees this little boy that he's adopted as just a means to an end. But it's not entirely cynical. I think we get hints of the fact that this relationship, it's a real relationship in the end, he doesn't fully connect with hw. His temperamental hatred overcomes that connection in part because in a way, his pride is injured by HW's injury. He can't deal with the fact of that injury. And that's a pivotal moment in the movie where any redemptive possibility in that relationship is lost at the very moment that he's hitting oil kills off the redemptive possibility of that relationship with hw. But the other important thing that you're pointing to, I think, is that he puts himself in the place of being someone who can provide for a community. Right. So he's in Little Boston, Right? There's no bread. Let's look at his speech real quick. To my mind, it's an abomination to consider that any man, woman or child in this magnificent country of ours should have to look upon a loaf of bread as a luxury. We're going to dig water wells here, and water wells means irrigation. Irrigation means cultivation. We're going to raise. Raise crops here where before it just simply wasn't possible. You're going to have more grain than you know what to do with. All right, so this looks a lot like Jesus, you know, one of Jesus's miracles. And he's put himself into direct conflict with Eli here. Eli was supposed to do the blessing, wanted to do the blessing. And Daniel stepped into his place and said, look, my material providence is better than your spiritual providence. It's part and parcel of the envy and the competition that's in him. He can't have Eli being the one who's going to provide in some way for these people. He's got to be the one. Now it puts him in a kind of constructive position with regard to others and he does have that in him. When he says there's going to be no more hitting for Mary, he has certain constructive impulses that are evident here, but they all seem to get co opted by envy. Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm joining this up in the end. I forget where you got at the end of your comment.

14:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: The idea of his ultimate desire for connection or his reliance on people ultimately.

14:09 Wes Alwan: Okay, yes. So he's also relying on people, which is something he hates and doesn't really want to do. But he's got to have workers.

14:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. And he has to use other people's land because he doesn't have any. I mean, I think this is central too to the ambivalence within oil itself as a symbol. I'm interested in Daniel and Eli as oppositional in terms of this idea of what you earn and what's just given to you. Things we, we do and don't earn. And I think Daniel is obsessed with what you earn, that is with like acquisition on the basis of skill, of not having anything and then getting it. Whereas Eli is interested in the idea of a gift. You know, he's the faith healer. He's interested in faith, period, which is about grace, which is fundamentally something that you don't earn. He is a pastor and therefore a maker of people to join this faith family. You know, the faith is conceived of as a, as a family and he can make more family members. Daniel believes that he gets his worth out of earning things and doing things himself. Therefore that makes him better than other people who might just luck into things or just inherit things, you know, things that we can inherit our family or land or faith or whatever. And I think this is oil too. Like oil has this duality to it where it's about. It's certainly on the one hand about luck and you can strike oil. Some people strike it, some people don't. Some people have the gift. Right. Some people have oil underneath their land like the Sundays do, and some people don't. But we also get the idea that some places that have oil don't know how to get at it. Right. And Daniel himself introduces this idea, you know, okay, oh, you have oil here. Well, how are you going to get it? You know, it's. It's in the ground. How are you going to get it out of the ground? He repeatedly asked this question. So you can have this as a gift, but it's also about strategy about acquiring that oil, about getting it out of the ground, about management and managing of the people that own. You know, if you don't believe in land as a representative of a kind of a legacy or an investment in a place or being a part of a community, which I think land all represents, then part of your skill and your management and your acquisition of the oil is about convincing somebody to lease you their land. So I think that kind of duality is inherent in the acquisition of the oil itself. Right. You can't just, you have this deposit and you may know it's there, but you still can't get at it because you don't have the resources to do so. Insofar as we can say you either have oil or you don't. It's like Eli, right? You either have faith or you don't. You either have the gift to heal or you don't. But insofar as you can say that, you can either get at it or you can't. It's like Daniel in that you need the skill, the resources kind of stored up over year. Right. Because he uses the silver money ultimately to get into oil too. So it's like this long planned out, long thought out kind of strategy about being able to even have the resources to think about getting the oil out of the ground.

17:14 Wes Alwan: Yeah. But will God look favorably upon his offering? Anyway, we'll get to Cain and Abel later, but I thought a bit about Treasurer of the Sierra Madre as well, and I think it's a good maybe compare and contrast for his particular motive. Because it sounds like you're pointing to the sort of industriousness in his character. Is that right?

17:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: Okay.

17:38 Wes Alwan: All right. So the hard work and that. So it had me thinking about Howard's speech in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And really he's trying to convince the other two. He's trying to get them worked up about going on an expedition, but he's doing that by saying all the wrong things. Saying how gold makes men crazy and people blow one fortune trying to find another. And prospecting is like gambling. It's physically dangerous. If you do it alone, it's too lonely. But if you do it with others, it creates this kind of paranoia and these violent rifts between people. And that's his elevator pitch. And it gets the others excited. What they're excited by is that it is in a way like gambling in one sense, because you can go from nothing to everything very, very quickly. And as you point out, it involves an element of luck. But on the other hand, it's not just abstract, like tossing a coin or something. It's not abstract and it doesn't involve no work. You get to do work and you get to do physical work. And to be in contact with the land and all of that stuff. There's almost a wholesome element to it. If it weren't for the fact that it's exploitation of the land and trying to scoop out the resources that are in the land. So I think in Treasure of the Sierra Madre there's something about the promise of this highly risky contact with both the physical world and the social world, right? So mining is physically dangerous and then there's the danger of paranoia. So there's social risk that you put yourself in this extremely risky situation and then if you succeed, you transcend those worlds. As with Daniel, you don't have to be around people or you're in a position where you have power over them and can control them. And the same thing with physical work. You wouldn't have to necessarily do any physical work anymore. And there's kind of an abstractness in the power that comes with being rich. So it's a physical project. It's not like the boredom of office job or even being a stockbroker. I guess being a stockbroker is exciting, but it's not the same physically risky thing. But you get to acquire riches without the tedium that necessarily the tediousness involved. So there's that again, that element of the excitement of gambling. But with Daniel I don't see much of anything of that. With him it's almost like self punishment from the very beginning. That's the kind of vibe I get from him. He's self hating and self punishing. It's grueling. He's doing it. There's no exciting prospect or fantasy that's leading him on except for domination of others and revenge against others and envy and all that stuff. And the point isn't even necessarily to get over his envy. It's just to deepen it. As I said, it's kind of to drill down into it. To drill down into his own character and to make it more and more what it is. More and more bitter, more and more empty. And that's what you get. Even his mansion in the end, right? That's just a place of squalor. You can't imagine him really enjoying the luxuries that go along with being rich. And he's at the saloon with Henry. There's no indication that he's even interested in women or any of the things that money might help him get. The only thing that seems to interest him is the grueling, laborious project of getting there. So now the question is that you have me thinking about. Yeah. How does that compare or contrast to industriousness where people are just. They work hard because, I mean, there are many different reasons. Obviously, they could do that. They might work hard just simply because they love the work. They might work hard because they're ambitious or because it alleviates anxiety for many, many different reasons. But. But in his case, I'd link it, again to envy. It's definitely industriousness, but it's tainted with that, I guess, in my view.

21:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: I know we've talked about this in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre episode as well, but you've gotten me thinking about this interesting duality inherent in any kind of treasure seeking, in which we might say that there's a strange conversion to work inherent in the mechanism of the real work, the reality of the work which was undertaken to escape work. So if that makes any sense. Right. So the fantasy is you strike it rich, you never have to work again. What happens is you have to work so hard to get the means by which you never have to work again, that what might end up happening is you're converted to the desire for work. Suddenly having the riches and not knowing what to do with yourself is a far scarier prospect than always having another mountain to climb and, you know, something to dig up or. Right. So I think that what happens over the course of this. Because they are two incredibly grue, both gold and oil are incredibly grueling and dangerous and difficult things to acquire. I think what happens is you then get people becoming addicted to the chase, to finding the deposit somewhere new, to the excitement of what that means, and also to the satisfaction of the work itself, which then renders the fruit of that labor beside the point or even ultimately destructive. Because once you are In a life of leisure, you have no way of exercising that whatever. I mean, if it's an addiction, it's a sort of positive one. I suppose you could become a workaholic or whatever, right? But that addiction may be to something like excitement and pride in being able to accomplish something. You know, I should say that during the filming of There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre every night. You know, so it was constantly on his mind. I think the differences here. Okay, so I've already kind of maybe made this distinction, right? But oil is newer. Oil is about sort of. We've reached a certain point in the Industrial revolution where the acquisition of oil is occurring in tandem with the car and various other things that make its acquisition more. I mean, it was always sort of useful, right? And it was always around, but particularly pertinent. And so it's a sort of a. Later. We're talking about drilling in this film. In a continent which has already been filled up. Gold is kind of, you know, you go into the middle of nowhere or you try to find the places that people haven't been already to try and get the gold. But the initial gold rush was at a very early stage in Western expansion, before all of those deposits were extracted and there was nothing left. Oil is required by and also demands more engagement with society, I think, than gold does. Gold panning is technically something you could do by yourself, right? I mean, you get a higher return if you have a group of guys, as they do in Treasure of Sierra Madre, than you do if you just by yourself in a river. But you could technically do it by yourself. And it is something which can be dangerous and difficult if you're going off by yourself into the wilderness to do it. But it doesn't require, I think, an infrastructure the way the oil industry does, which, again, is that something that kind of is necessitating a community. So the work for Daniel is about scratching, I think, two kinds of itches. The oil work is both about doing something really difficult and physically demanding, and also getting to cheat other people, basically getting to manipulate them, like getting back at people. So the engagement with society that oil is necessitating is distasteful to him, but it's also giving him an outlet to get out his anger and aggression against people with these tactics of manipulation and, you know, selling. Selling the land out from under. Under people's feet and taking something right from under their nose. That is a big part of the appeal for him as well, that kind of engagement, something like revenge Maybe, yeah.

25:54 Wes Alwan: I think there's something about, in particular about the subterranean element here that is attractive to him. It starts out with silver and then moves on to oil. And I think we know why you can't do the milkshake trick with silver. His envy. He wants to take things away from people. He doesn't want them to have it. That's part of the envy. And there's something really neat about oil, which is drainage. You don't actually have to be right above the oil deposit in order to get at the oil deposit. So you can stick your straw right into someone else's milkshake and drain it without them even knowing it. And then they find out that they've been depleted after that. That is a perfect picture of a very sneaky kind of envy where you. It's almost something vampiric about it where you suck someone dry without them knowing it. And then when they're finally aware of it, yeah, they're desiccated, they're dry. And they don't have what's theirs. He has what's theirs. So, yeah, there's something in particular about going underground. And something that's liquid again, that can be drained out from another is almost as if it were their blood. That's really important.

27:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: That helps me understand the difference really well. Because I think ultimately in Sierra Madre, you know, the idea of management there of the gold is really about self management. I think it's. It's about, like, how do you deal with the goal? I mean, you know, there's this envy and this paranoia that comes with it. But I think ultimately what that comes down to is like controlling your own mind so that you don't get out of control and have that mind, that paranoid mind affect, you know, the actual state of things. Whereas this is a very different. This is much more inherently about other people's minds or control of other people in this envious way that you're describing, which is, I think, very different from personal greed and the desire to sort of gather to oneself everything that is out there in the world. Right. This is about reaching out and taking from other people. You know, I think it's also about stealing from people in this. I love this way that you're describing of like sucking their blood. It's very similar, I think, to the dynamic of water in Chinatown as well, where. Where we have this. You're stealing the future from people too. You know, you're. You're controlling the future. And I think oil is very much, very much functioning in the same way. Oil is about what. It's about finding it and then putting in your car and driving to the next destination where you can find more oil, you know, so there's sort of like a perpetual motion machine element to extends, I think, in kind of two directions. It's about the past because it's about vast deposits of decayed creatures millions of years old. But it's also. It's finite and it's consumable, but it's sort of abundant with possibility because it could be put to so many different uses. I think water. Water sort of works in the same way where it has that duality. It's. It's sort of a finite resource in a way, because it's consumable and it could become tainted and stuff like that. But it's also sort of an infinite ecosystem. So it seems like Daniel's domination is both personal and general over people. He's draining the oil from your particular land that you are trying to sell in order to humiliate you. And he is also taking all the oil for himself in a way that is symbolic of sort of an entire community or even a country's future. So he gets to play God in this way that is about more than like, personal vendettas. It's like a vendetta against all of. All of creation. Just as he doesn't. He's not interested in women because. Because he's not interested in. In creation that he hasn't stolen. Right. Or he's not interested in water and blood.

30:09 Wes Alwan: Right. Well, the nv, the nz, is that there are many forms of envy that would come along with that. Right? The envy of her procreative ability and the fact that she, as a woman, would have something that he wants that is always going to be outside of him, even if he's in relation to it. He needs to be more than in a relationship. He needs to suck it out, suck out the essence and keep it for himself. That's not related, that's not relational.

30:39 Erin O'Luanaigh: You're making me like him a lot less than I did going into this. Not that I liked him, but you know what I mean? Like, I thought, you know, there's something. Something to admire about him.

30:49 Wes Alwan: Well, that's a good question. I mean, is there anything that one might admire in the. In the manner that, you know, you would admire a tragic hero for all his villainous. Some of them are villainous, I guess. So Some tragic heroes you might. You might admire for their villainous traits or for their other flaws, because there's supposedly some element of greatness to them. And then the question is, is there an element of greatness here and is there something tragic about it? And I think the initial comment I made about the tragic thing here is it's a little bit oblique to that in a way. Why is that? I don't know. Do you have something to say about that? Yeah. Is this tragic? Is he great?

31:29 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, my idea is he's missing half of himself and Eli is missing the other half. Right. Together they would be one perfect person. Maybe, I don't know. But the half of him that he has is somehow less distasteful to me than the half that Eli has, you know, because he's so controlled. I mean, that starts to slip with the whiskey drinking. Right. But he is so much in control and he has so many skills and such a. Such a work ethic. I mean, he does such a heroic thing at the beginning of the movie, dragging himself all the way into town from this mind that he was just working by himself. I can't watch that and not think every time, even though I know what's going to happen to him. Like, wow, this is a spectacular person.

32:15 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

32:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: That takes so much. What does it take? I don't know, it takes so much discipline or something. What's the right word for that? It's just skill. I just keep coming back to skill.

32:24 Wes Alwan: Well, there's industriousness and there's hard work and again the willingness to sacrifice his body and just the sheer amount of physical exertion involved. But again, I think of this partly in terms of self punishment and the desire to punish others. And then also I haven't been able to articulate it, but there's something doesn't rise to the level of tragic hero in this. Is there a greatness? Yeah, it's hard for me to want to say that there's something great about him.

32:57 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, I think ultimately his. He's small minded in ways that I think you've articulated well. You know, all of this. If there is greatness there, it's put to such warped and twisted and small minded ends.

33:08 Wes Alwan: Yeah. One might say of someone, they had huge ambitions, but there was hubris or something like that. And his ambitions in a way are huge, but they're also not. They're very narrow.

33:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, he wins in the end, but he, you know, so he doesn't have huge ambitions which are. Then, you know, usually the second half of that sentence would be but he failed. But he didn't fail. So it's, it's more about the manner that he went about acquiring and it's. Though oil, I think, has this huge symbolic weight to it. What his actions are actually about is going family by family, strategically across the area that he wants to, and getting these innocent or naive farm people who don't know about this industry, who are just. Just uninformed, to sign their land away to him. Right. And that, I think there's an ugliness in that. Like it takes industry to go. To go, you know, family by family to do that. But ultimately, yeah, it's a. It's a bit of an ugly thing. And we discover over the course of the, you know, the first third of the film what a liar he is and how manipulative he has to be to do this effectively. So it sort of like requires selling his soul in a thousand tiny little ways every day. In the end, he gets everything, I mean, everything according to a certain standard of fantasy.

34:31 Wes Alwan: Brings me back to the contrast you're making between oil and water. Because water is sort of a paradigmatic example of something that belongs in common to the community and has to be managed at that level. And it's elemental, it's necessary to life. Right. And it's one of the ancient elements, according to the ancients, one of the basic building blocks of the universe. Oil, on the other hand, is not that, unless you compared it to the element fire. Right. Aristotle puzzles over the pre Socratics and their elements because where do you get motion from? Where do you get force from? It's not a very dynamic picture of the world. Unless you say that fire does that. And if oil is of course, what does that, it lights these fires that can run these machines and. And produce ultimately all sorts of technology and really transform the world. But it's not necessary as such to life. It's really techne. It really is technology and it amplifies and transforms life in these radical ways. So when he takes away, what he does is he provides water to the community. Again, he's sort of like a Jesus stand in. In that sense. He really does these things for the community. He provides for the communal, the material aspects of the communal good, which he wants to supplant the spiritual aspects altogether. He wants them to eclipse the spiritual aspects. But in doing that, that's not what interests him. He's not interested in necessarily taking that stuff away from people and maybe immiserating them or pauperizing them. Exactly. He wants this particular stuff. He's going to prevent them from being rich. He's going to take away that possibility from them, he's going to take away any possibility of them competing with him, of being rivals. But he doesn't necessarily just want to kill them off entirely, as far as I can tell. And then again, the thing that he's interested in, this substance, you could argue this is another thing that should be part of the common good. It should be a communal possession, maybe the way it is in some Middle Eastern countries, But in this case, it's just, does your land happen to have it? Okay, you're lucky you're rich now or you don't have it, you're not lucky, you're not rich. And the whole milkshake and straw thing points to this idea that, well, does it really matter that it's under someone else's land? Is this anyone's in particular if it can be accessed from over here? It points to this weirdness of not treating it as maybe a communal possession, given all the potential that it has to not only transform an individual person's life in the sense of making them rich, but in the sense that it's going to transform the world. It's going to radically transform the world. So that's power that he's at. He's not getting at the good, but he's getting at power.

37:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah. You have me thinking about luck and what luck would mean under these circumstances. Because I wonder if there's a distinction we can make then between the gift of oil and the luck of. Or a certain kind of luck. I mean, to me, you're lucky if you can actually make use of it. Lucky would be you have land that has oil under it and a derrick falls from the sky, and you have a way of getting it out right? Instead, I think the idea of the gift is like, okay, you have this land and you may have oil, but you may not know how to what to do with it. Luck is something which is. Which is sort of quick activating. It's something which is a true fluke that comes with a reward instantly. You know, a gift is something that has to be. It's just something you're given and you just have to. You then have to do something with it. You know, it's like you're given a Lego set and then you have to put it together. Or gift is your family. You're born into a family, but you have to tend to that. You have to. You have to nurture those relationships. You can't just say, I mean, to a certain extent you can. That's the whole mother thing, right? To a certain extent, you could say I'll. I could do whatever I want and I'll still have a mother. That's true. But you can't actually, with most relationships in the family, you can't treat people however you want and then. Or like, try to kill them or shoot them in the head. Okay, he's not really family, but you can't. You can. You can't do that. And then. And then still expect that gift to be something which will give you something. I don't know if that's right, because my idea of Eli is of someone who, in theory, he's a faith healer, which is something to me and probably more to you is something suspect. Right. But if he has this gift, he has to control it properly and use it properly and give it the proper. Whatever you might call it. Cultivation seems like the wrong word, but something. He needs a control. And ultimately what we find by the end of the film is that he's. He doesn't have that ability to control the gift. Right. He squanders the gift. And that's why he's. What's the word? It seems like he's. He's tried to become, you know, a radio personality and one of the. One of these like Amy Semple McPherson kind of figures who uses this in a mass media kind of way and then. But has no self control and then destroys himself.

40:01 Wes Alwan: Well, he lacks the discipline that Daniel has. So maybe that's the point where we admire Daniel and we definitely don't admire Eli. Although it's not apparent in the beginning, it only becomes apparent in the end, I think how lacking in discipline he is and how susceptible he is to temptation and even lacking in integrity in the end, where he's gonna renounce God in order to get some money. But is that what you were getting at?

40:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, yeah. And admiring Daniel, to go back to that. I mean, I think I also. I think it's this yearning spirit to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Right. You get back onto the ship and you go back out even after you just got home, after, you know, being away for 20 years. There's something about that that I really love. That's maybe what I admire in Daniel, and that's what makes the ending so tragic, is that he's achieved a level of success that means that he can no longer go out and do the striving and do the work. But that love of work, even if what the work constitutes sometimes is pretty ugly, the physical components of it and those which require strategy, that are not about manipulation and that labor and the desire to keep laboring and keep working at something. I mean, there's a very good chance. I'm also attracted to the self punishment element of that. But there's something, I think that. Which is very admirable in that like you're never. You're never just resting on what you have. You're never just self contented and lazy. That drive, I think is what I admire in Daniel.

41:38 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I think the way I look at his industriousness and discipline. There's not a big dream there. There's not a big ambition. Because the ambition is just to want to get away from people. I mean, there's not even like an evil ambition. I'm going to take over the world and do evil things. And he's definitely not a do gooder. I'm going to do all kinds of good things. If I can do this or I'm going to. Once I have all this money, I'm going to. What does he say in Treasure of the Sierra Madre about dames?

42:12 Erin O'Luanaigh: Get the dames. Rings on the fingers of swell dame.

42:17 Wes Alwan: Swell dames. Yeah. So there's not even some sort of fantasy of pleasure seeking or love or. There's only one little narrow focus. So like when he gets the mansion, I mean, I think he talks to his brother at one point about the house. What does he say about that? Or talks to Henry about it. We get the sense that there might be some sort of ambition to have a nice house. Right. So there's the house in Fond du Lac that John Hollister built. Do you remember it? I thought as a boy that the most. It was the most beautiful house I'd ever seen and wanted it. I wanted to live in it and eat in it and clean it. And even as a boy I wanted to have children to run around in it. And then Henry says, so there's a real. Right. That's an aspiration. That's the aspiration he has as a boy. He doesn't have that aspiration anymore. And Henry says, you can have anything you'd like now, Daniel, and you should. Where are you going to build it? Then? He said, here maybe near the ocean. Would you make it look like that house? I think if I saw that house now, it'd make me sick. And then Henry goes into wanting to get, you know, get some women. And then they have that unpleasant time. Well, Henry's enjoying himself with the ladies, but Daniel is not. And then Henry is going to have a really bad time. Shortly after that, he's going to pay for his sins. But anyway. But. Yeah, but my point here is that there's no. That kind of aspiration is actually gone. One might think that that would be the typical kind of motivation behind all this industriousness and discipline. Even if there's workaholism and love of the work itself. And in a way, I don't. Again, because of the self punishment aspect and just his general character, I don't get that feeling of, oh, he loves the work. And I just love being outside and in contact with mother Nature.

44:11 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, I think he does.

44:13 Wes Alwan: He wants to. But I think he envies Mother Nature as well. He wants to take. He wants to exploit nature and take what's in it. Yeah.

44:23 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yes. No, I'm just. Yeah. I don't think he. I don't think he loves Mother Nature. I think he gets excited by the oil coming in. I think there is. I see the love of the work. I see it when they go on the Sunday property.

44:35 Wes Alwan: But it's to me, it's like addictive, hateful. It's like it's a fulfillment of hate. Like.

44:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, well, you're revealing to me. You're revealing to me why I. Why I think in a way he's so noble is because there is no.

44:48 Wes Alwan: His motives are very.

44:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: His motives are pure. Exactly, exactly. In that there is no motivation. The motivation is more work. Like, there's no pleasure. That. That seems to me to be the purest thing of all. In other words, I'm not doing this so that I can be rich. I'm not doing this so that I could have a nice house. I'm not doing this so that I'm going to get a lot of pleasure from it. I'm. I'm doing it. And then when I'm done doing it, I'm gonna do it again and I'm gonna do more. Just like I said with the oil thing. That's what oil is about. Oil is about getting more oil. Oil is about finding more oil. Even the silver he gets in an oily way. He uses the silver to get to the oil. Silver and gold are ends in and of themselves, as we've talked about in the Sierra Madre episode. You know, it's about putting rings on your fingers, showing how much wealth you have in silver and gold. It's about wealth and greed itself. Oil is about working to get more oil. Oil is about going somewhere. You're always going, going, going. And that is. That is very interesting to me that there is no end.

45:49 Wes Alwan: Yeah, that's. Yeah, well, Put. I mean, I think the way I would put it is he. He's an empty person. And there's a way in which he's not. He's not just trying to fill himself up, right? He's not just trying to take what's in the earth and put it inside him in some way psychologically. He's just trying to expand his emptiness over everything else. He's trying to create emptiness in the earth by removing the oil. He's trying to be above others and away from others. So to create all this negative space that is his psyche, to push it out into the world as much as possible.

46:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: You have me thinking about the crisscross at the heart of Christianity or any religion in which there is a promised afterlife. Right. That's the reward, in a way. I mean, it always seemed to me as a kid, heaven shouldn't exist because your motives are always going to be tainted, you know? So Daniel reminds me of that, maybe that. That impulse in myself to be suspicious of heaven. So the idea is, the way you get out of that is that you're doing something for the people around you, hopefully. Now Daniel isn't doing that. He's manipulating them. But he has HW to do things with and for. And he has this promise. I mean, maybe it's just. Ultimately, it's just about being a big man and getting other people to admire him as they. As he thinks they should so that he could give out the. You know, he can irrigate the land and give out the bread. But so long as he had this relationship with H.W. he had a way. There was not emptiness. At least he's showing the kid how to do it, too. So he's doing something for someone else, helping them in some way, even if it's just educating them in this, yeah, complicated and interesting kind of knowledge.

47:32 Wes Alwan: So, yeah, maybe let's start with that relationship in part two, then. That relationship. His relationship with Eli. Yeah. That relationship in particular has represented a possibility for redemption that doesn't come to fruition.

47:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: Okay, so we'll talk about Daniel's relationship with H.W. and Eli and Henry in part two. Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter njoysubtext.

In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education.

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0:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: [email protected] Subtext podcast.

0:31 Wes Alwan: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Last time, we talked a lot about the two different conceptions of health and vitality at work in the play. One associated with the mayor and more conservative, and one associated with Dr. Stockman and more progressive. We wanted to start out here in the second part of our conversation by talking about the moment where Dr. Stockman delivers the news about the pollution of the water to his family. So in the lead up to this, we get an interesting conversation after Petra comes in and talks about slaving away while they're having fun.

1:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: And poor Petra.

1:18 Wes Alwan: But then we get this talk of one of her younger brothers saying she must be sinful because work is punishment, and says he wants to be a Viking instead, but that would require becoming a pagan, which Billing endorses. And then Mrs. Stockman says, all right, time for bed. I don't want to. Don't want the kids to be corrupted by this. And Billings says, we'll all be pagans soon. And then the younger brother, Morton says, and then we can do exactly what we want. So we get these little hints about the dangers of the progressive point of view. Right? Which is that. And the rejection of the old values, which is that there are no new values. It's just nihilism. People can just do whatever they want.

2:03 Erin O'Luanaigh: Or you might become Wallace Stevens, something like that.

2:07 Wes Alwan: Take a little existentialist solution, maybe. But then, yeah, Petra complains a bit about the hypocrisy of school and having to teach kids things she doesn't believe, presumably religion. We'll find out later. She won't translate a story for the paper because it's too religious. So it's a kind of conversation you would expect among people of a progressive temperament, let's say. And then it's after that. But Stockman, who's been in his study with his letter that he finally received from Petra because she stole it from the mailman. He would have gotten it sooner if it weren't for her. He comes in with a letter, very excited, and he says, this news will get the town talking, believe me. Exclamation point.

2:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: And of course, that's the most important thing, is to make the masses talking.

2:58 Wes Alwan: Sorry, there's a lot of exclamation points for him. And he'll make a point of telling Aslaxon that. Don't take any exclamation points out of my. The thing you're publishing in the newspaper. Steve McQueen takes all the exclamation points out as far as I can tell. Maybe in fact add a few, heats up later. Yeah, right, yeah, add a few.

3:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that's a great funny line.

3:22 Wes Alwan: So then he says now let them come and say as always, that it's all some fanciful notion and the ideas of a madman. Right? So we know now that he's been accused of being a flake before and he wants to prove everyone wrong. And then he says, but they'll think twice. All right, Haha, they'll think twice, I'm sure. Sorry, I know this is very bad.

3:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, it's great, it's great.

3:45 Wes Alwan: And then he's wishing that the mayor were there and it says, it shows how we human beings go around passing judgment like the blindest of moles, which is a bit double edged. Right. He's think he's thinking of everyone, including himself there, that blindness of judgment. But in a way we really suspect that of course it's directed at the mayor and others who don't know as much as he does. Right. He comes at this from a position of real whether or not my skepticism about the report is warned. It's not really skepticism about the report, it's more skepticism about his attitude, which is one of utterances, certainty. He's both at the level of the waters being polluted, but also for values. He is an absolute epistemic authority and he cannot be questioned. And so later on he'll say this thing. And he also delights in this reversal, in his discovery where fair is foul on foul is fair. This thing, the spa institute, that was the artery, the nerve center and billing chimes in and says the beating heart. Right, let's up the ante here. In reality, the entire spa is a cesspit. This thing that's supposed to be a source of health and life that we can later on will be obviously a metaphor for the existing norms, the existing values of society and a representative authority. This is a. He also calls it a poison sepulcher. There's so much delight in that that that's one of the interesting things about the play. It's not as Steve McQueen delivers it, just some very sober person who's obviously concerned about the well being of the community delivering the speech. It's someone who, Ibsen puts a lot of work into making his motives suspect or at least double, you know, multi determined.

5:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that's right. You know, going back a little ways in the same act, you know, Stockman says several times to his brother that he's he, that a man of Science ought to live in a little style or something like that. Like, he ranks himself with the top governor of the municipality or whatever the. Whatever the terminology might be. This idea, as we've already talked about in part one of this natural aristocracy is one, you know, which he seems to espouse. But it. It's related to this idea of expertise. He's the expert, and therefore we should. We should believe him. And he is so sure, because he's the expert. Like, there's. There's a little bit of a. There's a little bit of circular logic there. He's the doctor, so he can diagnose. And what gives him the authority to diagnose is that he's the doctor. He has this real grandiosity about himself. And then I love this idea of the blind as a mole thing that you're pointing to, because I hadn't noticed that before. And of course, it makes sense then that he would. He would take this authority upon himself as a doctor and related to this idea of being expert because he's the only one who can see it, right? We're all blind. But because he has, you know, gotten these microbes tested which are naked to our eyes, he knows he has the expertise and only he has the eyes to see what the problem is. I mean, I think you're right that he speaks generally of being like a mole. But now his eyes have been opened, and his job is to open other people's eyes and make sure that they take his expertise, his authority seriously. And then he. The first. I think this. This might be wrong, but one of the first, if not the first metaphors that he uses. You know, you talked about the. The cesspool and. And the. Or cesspit and sepulcher. But the way that he constructs that is he says this spa institute, which has been described as the town's artery, the town's nerve center and the devil knows what. And Billing cuts in and says, the beating heart of our town. I allowed myself once in a festive moment to. And he. Stockman cuts him off. Yes, that too. But do you know what it is in reality, this great, splendid, lauded spa institute that has cost so much money? Do you know what it is? The entire spa is a cesspit. And of course, he says this with great enthusiasm, but I think it's so key that the first thing he connects it to is a body. The spa is a body, and he's going to diagnose what's wrong with it. So if society is a body, if whatever it is that you're looking at is a body and you're a doctor, then of course you should be number one in town. Of course you should live like the governor. You know, you're better than the governor. You could see. You could see and diagnose what other people can't. It's so important to understanding. His grandiosity is this idea of himself as being expert in this way that no one else. He has a knowledge that no one else has access to. His delight in that discovery and that knowledge seems to be part of what's really feeding his mania in this moment. I love the note. Walking contentedly about, you know, he's like walking around the room, you know, going on and on about his great. You know, his great discovery.

8:58 Wes Alwan: Yeah. You would think. Right. Well, I've got some really bad news. Sit down. Right. Because this is going to hurt. No. Elated to deliver this news. And then. Right. And he thinks the university sample, you know, he said the samples he sent to the university for analysis, they prove there's, you know, decayed organic matter in the water in fusoria, in vast quantities. It's seriously harmful to the health whether taken internally or externally. Yeah. Has the lab told him that as well? Did the lab draw that scientific conclusion about the harm? Right. Do we know that it really comes from the sludge? I think if I sent samples from my bathtub to the university, they might come back with some disturbing.

9:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right. As I took a drink of water

9:50 Wes Alwan: infusoria, we got a bunch of pasty bodies going into the water and bringing their own infusoria with them. Of course, there's decayed organic matter in the water. That scene in Caddyshack. Now I'm thinking of where Bill Murray finds a Baby Ruth in the pool. Everyone thinks it's these. Right. Not to be overly. Not to be gratuitously skeptical about this, but I think it fits in with the rest of the characterization of Stockman's elation and then his level of certainty about this, which we, at least as an audience, we don't get the picture that it's entirely warranted. Right. If Ibsen wanted to make sure that we were. That we knew that we should share Stockman's certainty. You know, maybe you could say this is like the third lab I sent it to. I wanted a second opinion. I did this. We could have gotten a lot more information about the samples being tested, but in particular about the scientific opinion that they are harmful whether taken internally or externally. Right. Because we could imagine that. Yeah. This is not water you would want to drink, but this is kind of water people bathe in. Yeah, pretty much. It could be something like that. So lots of little subtle hints here that I think are important.

11:07 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that's right. You know, one of the interesting elements of the Ray film from the 80s, and I think one of the ways in which he makes the doctor so straightforward is that there is actually a scene where he goes to. In this, it's the temple water which is contaminated. And so they have, like, all these pilgrims coming to the temple. And therefore, that's sort of how the. There's an interesting, like, faith element, you know, that comes in with that as well. Well, these are supposed to be healing waters. And how dare you say, you know, it's like saying that, you know, to put it in. In my terms of reference, you know, don't take the water at Lourdes. It's gonna make you sick. And it's like, well, how. How would it make you sick? It's supposed to be. It's supposed to heal. You actually did not do the reverse. Right. So you actually have a scene where the Stockman figure goes down to the temple and watches the pilgrims actually sip the water, like, throw it on their face, you know, hold it in their hands. And it's a moment of real power because you actually see people in the water, you know, like the spa. There's no sense that it even exists in this. This play. Right. I mean, of course it does, but, like, there's no real world sort of consequence, it seems. There's no scene that we get where we see people getting sick. There's no discussion, really interesting to have

12:27 Wes Alwan: a scene at the spa.

12:28 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, right, right, exactly. Yeah. There's not.

12:30 Wes Alwan: The only location scene is at the printers. Yeah.

12:33 Erin O'Luanaigh: So it's so interesting that this symbology that the doctor is going to properly diagnose this town and heal this town from its problems, is actually so divorced from real bodies, the real consequences of this problem. And then by that same token, he's going to use his expertise to fix the problem, because he's going to give you, you know, he's going to write in his prescription pad. And as he says, we have to get the situation put right naturally. And Hofstad says, so that's possible. And Dr. Stockman says it has to be possible, otherwise the whole spa is unusable, ruined. But there's no need for alarm. I'm very clear about what needs doing, as you've already pointed out. And then he later says in his conversation with as laxson and Hofstad, when they're talking about using this as a political metaphor, he says, we don't need to go to all this trouble and get all these people to support us and all this other stuff because he says, I feel this matter should take care of itself. Now, I don't know if that means that he has such naivete that he thinks that just presenting his findings to the spa board will mean that it'll be solved internally or if he has some idea as to exactly how the infusoria can be killed, reduced. But the fact that he has this solution that he never ever expressly says. And then in that moment where he says the problem will take care of

13:57 Wes Alwan: itself except for moving the water pipes up higher. Right?

14:01 Erin O'Luanaigh: Moving the pipes. But isn't that really the idea that the. That the mayor gives to him?

14:06 Wes Alwan: No. I think so. It's in the. It's in the next. So after he says he's clear about what needs doing and then he's on about. He's going to tell. He wants Petra to tell the badger to tell Krill about this because he thinks Krill is gonna. Right. The badger sees him as a crack. As cracked in the head. The badger is gonna, you know, see that Stockman is not as cracked in the head as he thought. He's gonna have the report sent to. To the mayor. And then he says, he rubs his hands, right? As he imagines the. To do in the town, the controversy that this is going to create. Rubs his hands and then he says all the water pipes must be relayed and moved higher up. Right. It's like a physical version of revolution. There's no incremental or partial fix here. It's got to be redone. And in light of his competition with his brother. Right. Who gets the credit for this idea? Right. The mayor is very upset when people say that Stockman gets the credit. And like, well, I'm the one who did it. So you can see that. Likewise, Stockman is annoyed by the idea that the mayor is the only one who does things. And he did things the wrong way. He did things against his advice, and lo and behold, he did a little investigation to find out that they should have done it his way all along. And now it has to be redone according to his specifications. Very, very suspicious. But, yeah. Am I wrong about that? Did the mayor give him this idea? You're saying he might have given him this idea earlier?

15:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think you're right about that. Yeah. Because certainly he says, yes, all the water pipes must be relayed that's early. That's early enough that. Yes, this is his idea. And he says, I wrote opposing them when they were to start building, but back then nobody wanted to listen to me. Well, now I'll launch a broadside at them, believe me. Yes, I've written a report for the spa's board. I love the fact that he already wrote the report before getting the confirmation, too. That's key. It's been sitting here ready for a whole week. I've just been waiting for this. And now I'll go. It'll go off this instant. Look, four closely written pages. He holds it up and it's all scribbles, you know,

16:19 Wes Alwan: like. And stuff.

16:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, Exactly. It's a total nonsense.

16:23 Wes Alwan: What do they call it? Someone just writes and writes and writes anyway.

16:26 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, right.

16:28 Wes Alwan: Fia. Or something. Anyway.

16:30 Erin O'Luanaigh: But yeah, he. Well, you know, and, and, and to that point, I mean, when his brother sees the report before he meets with Stockman, he actually goes down to the engineer, or claims he does go down to the engineer to actually get an idea of the cost of this whole thing. So we have Stockman writing the report before he gets confirmation from the university. And then we have the mayor claiming that he doesn't believe the doctor. But then before he even goes to see. See him, has already gone down to the engineer to see how much this would cost. Which is an indication to me that. That the report must be. Must show something conclusive, you know, to give a little credit to the doctor. Right. That. That seems to me like something you would do only if you really thought that this wasn't bunk to go and see what. How it would actually be. How much it would actually cost to fix things. But there's. There's sort of mirror images in that way. I mean, just as you have. Just as you have Stockman, you know, referring to his expertise, referring to the town as the body, and he's the. He's the one that's going to fix everything. You also have the mayor taking on that kind. I mean, everyone is using this symbology, but the mayor says that he can't convince himself of the truth of Stockman's report. And he repeatedly uses. You know, I cannot get myself to believe this. I cannot convince myself. He repeatedly uses this odd sort of splitting language where he's splitting himself into two people. You know, there's him and then there's the little hostage inside him that refuses to believe that. That this report is true. And then subsequently after that, he. He. He refers to himself. He actually uses the Royal we for himself. And he says, I've been unable to persuade myself there is any actual imminent danger. And then he says, we consider it an unavoidable necessity that you make a public statement of the kind I have demanded. We as though, you know, he's more than one person. So he becomes the people in some strange way, he becomes the town. He takes on the entire town and even the spa himself, right? Like he wants to be known as being responsible for the spa. He wants to be the thing that people come to to right themselves. He wants to be the engine of economic stability for the town. So there were a few things too, that I won't be able to find now that indicated that he sort of identifies his person with the town. Of course, he's the mayor, so that would. That also stands to reason, but associates his person with the town and with the spa. And then the splitting seems to. It seems to suggest to me that he also is the people itself. And therefore Stockman's attempt to say that there's something wrong with the town or that there's something in the town's body that needs to be fixed or diagnosed pits them against each other in this crucial way. Like, I'm not sick. No, you are, and I'm going to heal you, you know.

19:15 Wes Alwan: And Stockman really misreads this at the end of the first act. And Petra says, what will the mayor think? Stockman says, surely he can't be anything but pleased at such a vital truth coming to light. And then they all have this big fantasy about how he's going to be the first man in the town and everyone's going to be celebrating him. They get induced by his mania, and they have this really unrealistic expectation of how people are going to react. And interestingly, at the beginning of Act 2, this question of how the mayor will respond comes up again, right? And Stockman gives a very different answer. So Mrs. Stockman asks him how he thinks the mayor will react. Stockman says he won't be pleased I made the discovery. I'm paraphrasing here, you know, he won't be pleased that it was I. I'm the one who made the discovery, not him. He's so damned afraid that anyone else might accomplish something for the good of the town. So we see that Stockman's kind of manic misreading of the mayor is corrected early on here. So now we get a series of other inducements. The first is Keel the Badger, his wife's father, coming by. And Stockman had. Had the fantasy that Keel would see that he wasn't cracked in the head because of his discovery. And of course that was a completely unrealistic expectation because Kiel doesn't believe in little Infusoria. I don't believe in your goddamn science and these supposed microbes. But Kiel is delighted by the fact that he's going to play monkey tricks on the mayor because he has a beef with the mayor. He was kicked. Kiel was kicked off the council, who, you know, they think they're so much clever than us oldies. And he even says, I'll give you some money. Press on with your monkey tricks. I'll give you some money. In a way you get the impression that Kiel is like, even his name sounds like he's the microbe, right? He's the creepy crawly one. Well, it's right after that that Hofstad wants to kind of expand the scope of this and will say it's not the swamp, but Muladalin, that's critical. But it's the entire municipal life, right? Bureaucrats, authorities, stubborn bigots. And Stockman even defends them. He says, well, look, we need experts. And then Hafsa reminds him, well, they screwed up the laying of the water pipes and says putting it right will require press involvement. Early on, Stockman hadn't thought necessarily that they needed to give a lot of bad publicity and embarrass a lot of people in the way that Hofstad wants to do. And he hadn't yet had the idea that the toxicity comes from the swamp in which our entire municipal life stands rotting. That translation into the social sickness, from actual physical sickness to the social sickness for which the physical sickness becomes a metaphor, is created by Hofstad. And then you see Stockman get induced by that. And then Billing goes even farther with revolutionary talk. Stockman gets induced by that. It's as Laxon who's sort of the undercurrent with the whole idea of doing what's prudent or temperate, staying with prudence and temperance. But the others drag him along into a more extreme position.

22:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right? I suppose the most generous reading of Stockman that we can give is just of a man who's so professorial and so delighted by science that he is, you know, an absent minded professor type, because what all of his behavior reveals is the fact that he has very little self knowledge, frankly, and of the way that he comes off and of the fact that he is so easily contaged by other people and also just very little understanding of people in general. You know, his wife is far savvier about knowing when to sort of kiss the mayor's behind a little. A little bit and making sure that he feels not so under attack. Whereas Stockman's just. Just totally unaware of his brother's feelings or aware of them, but only in the sense that he wants to play on them when he can and toy with his brother a bit. Had he an understanding of people, he would not, for instance, I mean, if he really thought this was something that could have just been taken care of by the Spa board behind closed doors, that none of this needed to get out, or the press didn't need to be involved, the homeowners association didn't need to be involved, then of course, the first thing he should not have done is open this report when he has members of the press in his house or any outsider in his house in a small Norwegian town that operates solely on gossip and then start parading around talking about how something needs to be done about it. If he had any understanding of people, he could have just gone to the Spa board, handled it privately.

24:10 Wes Alwan: These are the young people who are supposed to be the source of vitality, Right?

24:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right.

24:15 Wes Alwan: And he does, you know, he does find himself resisting Hofstad, as I've said. He defends the idea we need experts. And Hofstad said, these fine gentlemen can be dispensed with, speaking about the authorities. And Stockman says, dispensed with perhaps, but we still owe them a huge debt of gratitude, right? And you can read him as saying the same thing about values, right? The values that have been bequeathed to us. So Stockman is willing to try to be a bit. A bit moderate here. Hofstad presses the point. The myth of the infallibility of those who govern us must be shaken. Such notions must be eradicated like any other superstition. I think Stockman's going to use this word later on, right. In a speech that makes him sound a bit like Adolf Hitler in certain places with the eradication of vermin and the people become the vermin, as you pointed out, there's an element of naivete about getting elated about his new discovery. With the press present, he's not thinking about what they might want to do with it. And then, of course, Havstad is thinking about his own importance, right? About. Well, really, it's the agent of change here is going to be the press, not necessarily Stockman in particular. So again, everyone wants in on it, right?

25:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: And ultimately what it comes down to is power, it seems, which is slightly different than money. But Money is a big part of it. I mean, as Laxon, when he's talking to Stockman and is touting his position in the town, says, I come in contact with a lot of people and being known as a prudent and law abiding citizen, as you said yourself, Doctor, I have a certain influence in the town, a sort of modicum of power, I may say. And he brags that it would be a simple matter for me to get a petition together if it comes to the crunch. So it's really funny as Laxon's position is the funniest. You know, I interpret Stockman's defense of expertise in that moment as being a kind of defense of himself. And in fact, he sees himself as the expert. And if he goes around saying that the regular people are. Need to rise up and depose the experts, well, that would include Stockman and it would include his brother. They must come from some wealth, some family wealth or something like that, even though Stockman is not doing so well for himself before the play starts and

26:39 Wes Alwan: has apparently been supported by the mayor.

26:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, right. The brothers needed to set him up in this, in this job, but they must come from, from a pro, at least a prominent, if not a wealthy family in this town, because the brother's the mayor. He's a prominent doctor by the mayor's beneficence, it seems, but still. And so he's included in this, in this aristocracy. And so, so Hofstad seems to have this idea that he has power as a result of being associated with the press and being able to form public opinion and as Jackson curiously has, has power masses, you know, because he understands the people and is one of them. And that gives him a power. He suggests, you know, he's, he's going to run a petition of thanks, for instance, for bringing this important public matter forward. And everything has to be done with temperance. So he's, he's like this, he gets his power from being so middle of the road that he's like right in the dead center of, of the people. And that somehow gives him, I mean, it does in practical effect give him a tremendous amount of power in this play. I mean, he's able to silence the doctor. I mean, partially because he's been made the arm of, of what the mayor wishes to do at the assembly, but still.

27:53 Wes Alwan: Right? I mean, yeah, as Laxon will say, he wants to do a petition, but he. It should be composed with the property temperance, so it doesn't upset the authorities. Hofstadt tries to object, and as Laxon jumps in and says, no, you know, there should can't be any disrespect towards the authorities, no opposition against the people with whom our lives are so closely bound. Not just closely bound, but in a way we stand on the shoulders of the authority of previous generations. If we're thinking about values, they are formative influences for us and we challenge them at our. In a sense, we want to challenge them, but they're so constitutive of our identity that it can feel in a way like self destruction to do so. And then when a Slaxon leaves, Hofstad slags him off. He's one of those in the swamp, right? Stockman defends him. Yep, but well meaning. And then Hofstad says again, the worship of authority must be eradicated in this town. This grossly inexcusable error with the water system system must be made apparent to every voting citizen. Stockman will go on to say, well, I think this is just going to go smoothly. I don't think it's going to really require this big conflict in the Hofstad. It's basically okay, yeah, we'll see. He wants a fight, he wants a fight. But yeah, as you pointed out with S. Laxon, we get someone who's in a kind of weird middle position where he's willing to challenge authority up to a point. Later on he'll say local, we can do it with the government, the national government, but local authority we have to be careful about because it's too dependent on local authority and we could end up with incompetent people if we just simply just have a revolution. So he's willing to be more rebellious at a more global and abstract level. But if there's going to be consequences to homeowners, that's another matter.

29:46 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right? And those consequences ultimately just come down to. Yeah, to lost income. Ultimately, it's about the town losing the economic opportunity that the spa represents and then showing up late to the party if they have to delay the SPAs running by two years while they fix the pipes. I think is the two years is the amount of time. And then in the meantime, that would give the surrounding seatowns a chance to catch up and to develop their own competing resorts. It's certainly a good point the mayor makes that that once this gets out, nobody's gonna wanna come to this town, whether it's whether the pipes are fixed or not. I mean, you know, I wouldn't specifically go to this spa town even if I had every assurance that it was no longer contaminated. With toxic sludge, I would probably choose a different resort.

30:34 Wes Alwan: So, yeah, you know, you gotta sympathize a bit, I think, with absolutely the practicalities of this. I mean, I would at least get a second opinion.

30:44 Erin O'Luanaigh: I mean, amity means friendship. And really, aren't we, aren't we trying to project a certain image here?

30:50 Wes Alwan: Isn't there a shark? Who knows?

30:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, right.

30:54 Wes Alwan: You know, it could have been a propeller. It's like a tooth, you know, sticking out of the flesh. Well, what's this? I think it's a propeller. But anyway, yeah, it's. They get him worked up and then the mayor comes to him and says, yeah, you know, this is. I can't convince myself and you use strident language and it's going to cost a lot. And Stockman, who's been worked up by his buddies, by the youngsters, says he has the solid majority on his side, right? So he's got the idea that he'll have the people behind him and that's where they, you know, I guess when he's having his little fight with his brother, the mayor criticizes him for his compulsion to write on every topic. And Stockman says it's a duty for citizens to share ideas with the general public. And the mayor says the general public has no need whatsoever for new ideas. The public is best served by the good old accepted ideas it already has. Ultimately, the mayor will accuse him of, in blind obstinacy, cutting off the town's primary source of sustenance. So again, this idea that the town is made healthy economically by the existence of the spa. Stockman. The solid majority is on my side, the liberal minded press, blah, blah, blah. In act three, we get. I'm being a little synoptic here because we're running out of time, but in Act 3 we get billing involved. And now this word revolution is coming up. Billing says we'll go on striking blow after blow until the whole feudal elite come tumbling down. When I sat in here reading this, it was as though I glimpsed the revolution coming from afar. Then Stockman's fantasizing about writing more articles and, and in this very grandiose vein, tells Ask Laxon he wants his manuscript treated like it's gold. No misprints. Right. All that quickly collapses. Of course, as we know, it doesn't take much. The mayor just has to come in and chat briefly with Slackson and Hofstad and Billing. They turn tail quickly and essentially betray Stockman.

33:04 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, yeah, he says when he and his brother are having an argument, I have the Press in front of me and the, the solid majority behind me or whatever. Yeah. So he's, he's very quickly left pretty naked. I love this idea of that between the new and the old ideas. Everything is so abstract. I love the point in Act 4 when he finally gives the speech and he's going on about all these crusty old ideas. And finally someone in the crowd basically says, like, give me an example, you know, what, what are you even been talking about? Because so it's so funny that they've been talking in these grandiose terms or these rather just these abstract terms this whole time. And then, then finally he's enjoined upon to give an example. And basically the, the thing that he says is that regular people are idiots. That's his, that's his new idea. Or, or the, the old idea is that they're great and really, in fact it's a lie because regular people are dumb. That Stock Stockman's whole bag.

34:03 Wes Alwan: Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. I mean, so he's gagged at the meeting. He's not allowed to talk about the water supply. Right. The general will is against him. And it's the editor's obligation, Hofstad will say, to, I think to promote the welfare of like minded readers. He should be more concerned with his family and needy children. And so Stockman says, well, yeah, I don't need to talk about the quote unquote trifling matter of our water supply being poisoned, our spiritual wells are poisoned, and our entire civic community rests on a plague infested ground of lies. We get a lot of great speeches here. It'll start out with his eyes were open when he saw the idiocy of the authorities. They should be eradicated like any other vermin, which the people laugh at. That, that talks a bit about these old men with the world of dying ideas and that these dying ideas are the actual thing that are poisoning our spiritual wells. Hofstad says the majority always have the right on their side. That's when Stockman will say the majority, they never do because it's the intelligent who are the minority. And the stupid should not be ruling over the intelligent. Now we're getting kind of republican position. Right. They're right. Thinking of ultimately of Plato's Republic, where it's the philosopher kings who should rule. Or at the very least we should have representative government and the masses should not be directly ruling over us. I agree with that.

35:37 Erin O'Luanaigh: None of us want mob rule. That's right.

35:39 Wes Alwan: Right. But he'll say the right is with myself and a few other solitary individuals, the minority is always in the right. Sounding more and more Nietzsche, here I am thinking of the few, those individuals among us who have embraced all the new, vigorous truths. They stand at outposts, truths that are newly born into the world of conscious or too newly born into the world of consciousness to have gained majority support. In any case, I just wanted to get a few of these ideas. From the end of this, he gets more and more extreme, and then we'll start insulting the. The common people as well. So he moves from disdain for the authorities to disdain for their old values, and then finally to disdain for the common people. But as you point out, it's in response to a question about an example. Do you know where that. About give us an example of this.

36:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, it's actually Hofsted who asks for an example. Stockman saying, don't talk of certain truths. The truths that the masses, the public, approve, are truths that the fighters at the outpost held to be certain in our grandfather's day. You already remember. Read that. And then Hofstad says, instead of standing there talking up in the air like that, it would be amusing to hear what these marrowous old truths are that we all live on. And thank you, Hofstad. Finally, he proves himself to be an interesting newspaperman. And Stockman says, it's the doctrine you've inherited from your forefathers that you preach mindlessly far and wide. The doctrine that the common folk, the hordes, the masses are the nation's core, that it is the very people itself, that the common man, the ignorant and uncultivated men, member of society, has as much right to condemn or approve to govern and control as the few spiritually noble individuals.

37:21 Wes Alwan: Yeah.

37:21 Erin O'Luanaigh: So is that regular people are just stupid, you know, I wonder if there's a buzzfeed quiz you. You could take. Maybe that's an outdated reference, but I wonder if there's a buzzfeed quiz you could take. Like, am I a poodle human or a mongrel human?

37:36 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I love the contrast between poodle humans and mongrel humans, especially because poodle

37:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: just sounds so much worse. I mean, it's just a ridiculous word. And so to have it pop up in this, in this translation. I mean, maybe it sounds more dignified in Norwegian, but, yeah, if it's a

37:52 Wes Alwan: literal dog, I'd rather have a mutt.

37:53 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, tell me about it. Like, first of all, they have, like, if we're actually comparing this to dogs, basically, like, any breed has so many physical problems that they are like, you know, genetic inbreeding. There's the Habsburg issue at the far extreme end when she is a doctor should appreciate.

38:13 Wes Alwan: Right.

38:14 Erin O'Luanaigh: But the, you know, the end of Act 3 and going into Act 4, I just noticed, I just accidentally opened to this page. He says that he wants to see if lily livered cowardice has the power to muzzle the patriot who wants to cleanse society. And so yeah, so we have this idea of cleansing being so, so suggestive there. And yeah, I put in the margin, I just put Nazi. So them. Anyway, yeah.

38:40 Wes Alwan: And then yeah, he'll, he'll criticize like the sort of socialist pretensions of the newspaper, the. What is it called?

38:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: The People's Messenger.

38:49 Wes Alwan: The People's messenger, yeah. So he turns on the. Yeah, the socialist pretensions of these guys. And because Hovstad says, you know, he's proud to have his roots among the common folk that, you know, that are being insulted. And that's when Stockman turns to the idea. Well, it's not just, I'm not just talking about, you know, literally about lower class people. Right. The mayor is a commoner himself. So here's what he says. He thinks the thoughts of his superiors and believes what his superiors believe, people who do that are spiritual commoners. And then he criticizes the paper for this false doctrine that the solid majority are liberal minded and moral, whereas vice and spiritual depravity ooze out of high culture. So there's sort of an anti elitist cast to the paper that includes an anti elitism when it comes to high culture. And we can kind of see that right. In the religious story that Petra doesn't really want to translate. But they're like, well, we have to give the masses their opiate a little bit so that we can. Otherwise we can kind of settle them down so that we can feed them these truths about politics.

40:01 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that's such a great tautology ultimately. Right. Like even, even the People's messenger is in a way suggestive of this because it's such an anodyne name. It's suggestive on the one hand of a socialist paper, but on the other hand it's sort of kowtowing to, you know, it's, it's a, it's in service of what the people want to hear. We have to give the masses their opiate. We have to give them their silly little stories in order to placate them. And on the other hand, they are the only true authority. We have to have them rise up. You know, there's always this there's always this fascinating blend between talking down to your core demographic and believing that they're all secretly idiots. And also like wanting to, wanting to elevate them and put them in a position of power and give them all of this authority. It's like, which is it? Are you the, the messenger to the people or are you delivering the people the message they want to hear?

40:51 Wes Alwan: No. You know, and he also says it's not high culture that corrupts people and makes them right. Like an effete limousine liberal, to bring back a very dated phrase that was once used in our politics. But yeah, but it's the lower living condition you can romanticize. Well, people live in poverty and crappy conditions and they're the salt of the earth. But he says no, it's ignorance, poverty, ugly living conditions that do the devil's work. Like if an untidy house is bad for the soul and people lose the capacity to think or act morally. And here's another very Nietzsche phrase, lack of oxygen debilitates the conscience. Right? You got to air the house out. So when he's called the enemy of the people, yeah, he's made himself the enemy of the people, right.

41:42 Erin O'Luanaigh: In the end, he makes himself the Antichrist.

41:46 Wes Alwan: There's an equivocation there. There's enemy of the people in the sense of someone opposed to their well being, and then there's enemy of the people in the sense of someone who has their well being in mind but is willing to slag them off, is willing not to flatter their sense of worth, insult them, maybe tell a little bit of the truth about them. And this is an annoying. It's hard not to. Maybe this is a bad thing to admit, but to enjoy a lot of this, because a lot of political life involves this sort of pandering, right? You pander to the masses and oh, you're the salt of the earth and you're the best and society ought to be run by you and no society ought to be run by the elites, the experts, the people who know better. And yeah, they suck too, in their own way. But the elitist in me sympathizes with these sorts of tirades. But of course they. He goes too far. So, yeah. So what do we make of him at the end of this? Well, I guess there's a new note at the very end when he turns to the idea of staying and fighting it out and being an educator. Right. That again, is the more positive spin on this, right?

42:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, but I take that final burst of loquaciousness from him at the end of the play to be evidence of his insanity. He's finally just lost it. Yeah, okay.

43:09 Wes Alwan: To me, it's ambiguous. Right. And the rest of them seem kind of pleased with him. You know, Petra grabs his hands. Mrs. Stockman is smiling and shaking her head. Oh, here he goes again.

43:22 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, they've all been, you know, these

43:24 Wes Alwan: poor people are one of his harebrained schemes. And it's like everything's going to be. It's a comedic ending and everything's. Is everything going to be fine? Have they been through this before? His hair brain scheme goes wrong. Maybe moving up north was one of those schemes, but he always lands on his feet. You don't know whether if this were a more serious ending than the turn towards the possibility of educating people, including street urchins. You could take that seriously and say, okay, well, he's climbed down off his elitist pedestal. He's calmed down, and now he has a more realistic idea of what he can do that's constructive in this context. But yeah, as you point out, we kind of don't know because it seems like he just could just be crazy and that this is an entirely unrealistic plan that he has.

44:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: It seems like one more manic outburst, you know, oh, now I'm going to throw all this away. And now I'm going to. Now I'm going to homeschool, which is always a bad sign. No, I'm joking. I could say that I was homeschooling schooled.

44:33 Wes Alwan: Someone is homeschooled.

44:34 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, everyone is bad. Now I just have to start my own school. And I'm going to say, you know, this is like one step away from being like, I, you know what? I'm going to. I'm going to form my own country where only smart people will be allowed

44:45 Wes Alwan: to come in, you know, start a cult.

44:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, exactly.

44:48 Wes Alwan: Starting with the street urchins and.

44:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Exactly, exactly. Of course, you know, everything that starts that way ends with Stockman drinking hemlock. But.

44:59 Wes Alwan: Or a bunch of people drinking Kool Aid.

45:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: Or a bunch of people drinking Kool Aid. That's right.

45:05 Wes Alwan: Which he is good at making people drink the proverbial Kool aid and getting them excited.

45:10 Erin O'Luanaigh: Is he.

45:12 Wes Alwan: The reaction to Mrs. Stockman is odd, right? Smiling and shaking her head. Oh, Tomas, no, He's just ruined their lives and now they're going to do this wildly risky thing. It's not, it's not like the end of a sitcom episode. Oh, there you go again. You know that that's not really what the moment calls for.

45:33 Erin O'Luanaigh: Could you imagine this sitcom where every single setup was like a, like a five act, you know, it's like a three hour episode where the end is like just another hare brain scheme in the life of Dr. Thomas.

45:45 Wes Alwan: Did I do that?

45:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: The next episode he starts his school and like there's an outbreak of lice and he. I don't know.

45:53 Wes Alwan: Anyway, he's like chastising the kids. You're the vermin.

46:03 Erin O'Luanaigh: No, no, but I think like, you know, Mrs. Stockman flip flops too, in the, in the play, but only because I think she's seen. Only because she sees him go through so much betrayal at the end that she's finally convinced to stand by him. Right. So, yeah, so in the end, maybe, maybe she's the one who's also gone nuts and just is like, oh, here he goes again. Because the only way she can, she can survive in this life is to just treat everything he does like some cute little flight of fancy.

46:32 Wes Alwan: Yep. And I just, you know, I think, you know, as we end, as we close here, it's just. Yet my impression is that we are, as an audience, we're left in a state of doubt where. Doubt about Stockman's credibility when it comes to the report, doubt about whether he's about to launch a more constructive enterprise or whether he's just crazy. Ibsen is not giving us an easy identification with a heroic protagonist here. It's something much more subtle and unresolved in a way.

47:09 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. And though I don't think this is such a. This is as great an example of this kind of phenomenon in Ibsen as, say, A Doll's House. One of the things I really love about Ibsen is that the plays always end at a moment which is not an ending so much as a threshold. So we can imagine. You know, Doll's House is like. People have written about the fact that that whole play could just be the prequel to whatever the real story of Nora's life is going to be. Right. She stands. I mean, at the end she closes, closes the door, but in so doing, she stands on the precipice of an entirely new life. And a great drama could be made out of whatever happens to her when she leaves that house. You know, maybe she goes right back in and the whole drama is moot.

47:49 Wes Alwan: But.

47:49 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right, but, but one can imagine any number of things which might happen to her after that. And I think this is not so extreme an example, but it's something of the same, Same idea here. I think this is true. The majority, if not all, of Ibsen's plays. You know what? But we could imagine a play starting right at the end of this one. Okay, this guy is hated by everybody in the community and he's cast out. What does he do? You know, it seems like the moment that Ibsen selects for the drama of his plays is always so well selected but also so resonant that one could imagine he could have chosen a different dramatic moment later on and it had been just as. Just as successful anyway. He's just these. He's such a genius. Just the mayor complaining about indigestion in the first moments of us seeing him. And it's like, Right, it's all about acid and clogged pipes. Here we go. You know, everything is so perfect anyway.

48:45 Wes Alwan: Yeah, okay. I think that's a good place to end it. Of course, there's always the next adventure that comes after this and ending, which is a movie.

48:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: And tbd. Thank you, tbd.

In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education.

Upcoming Episodes: “There Will Be Blood,” “Julius Caesar,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

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0:19 Erin O'Luanaigh: [email protected] subtextpodcast.

0:32 Wes Alwan: In Ibsen's An Enemy of the people, two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockman's is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brothers is conservative, focused on the use of authority and aesthetic self restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism and expressions of contempt, respectively, for both past and future. Today we discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the role of education. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and you're listening to Subtext. So Erin, what do you think of that Stockman report? Do you think it's credible?

1:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: I believe it if I see it. And if these infusoria are. Yeah, I know, exactly. And they seem pretty microscopic. I just think it's all bunk.

1:45 Wes Alwan: I guess they were on the cusp at this time of believing in the little tiny creatures that we call bacteria as causes of disease. Or maybe, obviously a man of science like Dr. Stockman would believe in them, but not his father in law. He thinks it's the funniest thing in the world that anyone would believe in these things.

2:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, the animals he deals with are much larger and you know.

2:09 Wes Alwan: At the tannery.

2:10 Erin O'Luanaigh: At the tannery, yeah.

2:11 Wes Alwan: Yeah. So I thought it was interesting that there are two important claims that I don't think are ever really justified very much or explored. One of them is by the mayor, his brother. That's the idea that it's going to cost $200,000 to repair the water system for the spa. And it sounded a little suspicious when he pulled that number out. I don't see him as trustworthy. And then at the end of the play in the community meeting, he says it's $100,000. So the number changes, which I think is meant to be a signal that we're not meant to actually trust that

2:47 Erin O'Luanaigh: I hadn't Realized it changed.

2:49 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Unless I'm. Unless I'm misremembering.

2:51 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, what's even more. More suspicious is that he's talking about American dollars when they live in Norway. No.

2:57 Wes Alwan: Oh, did I say dollars and not kroner?

2:59 Erin O'Luanaigh: Oh, okay. No, you're good.

3:01 Wes Alwan: Well, it's an exact one to one. For some reason. It might be actually. I don't know. Sounds. Yeah.

3:10 Erin O'Luanaigh: How much is it?

3:12 Wes Alwan: Be funny if it were just a hundred dollars, but. Right, exactly that time. A hot dog costs 5 cents, but anyway. Actually, 5 cents would be a lot.

3:25 Erin O'Luanaigh: I know.

3:25 Wes Alwan: Probably even less in the late 19th century, but. Yeah. I'm not sure about Stockman's credibility. He does get a report back from a laboratory, an independent laboratory, confirming that there's organic. Decayed organic matter. So the water is polluted. But what does that mean? How polluted is it? How dangerous is it? We don't get a lot of specifics, and also we find out that Stockman has a lot of extraneous motives. There's an element of kind of vindictiveness and almost manic elation when he first opens that letter and reports it to others. It's funny because I tried to watch the Steve McQueen version of this. Have you ever seen that? The film version?

4:17 Erin O'Luanaigh: No. I was going to watch it and I thought I just couldn't.

4:22 Wes Alwan: It's well rated, but it's. And I didn't get through that much, but I thought it was terrible, specifically terrible for McQueen's acting and the way his choices regarding Stockman, where he tries to play Stockman in this very reserved way. It's almost like he's trying to enhance the credibility of Stockman, which is hard to do given the original play, because Stockman is often kind of in hysterics and. Or a bit manic or a bit grandiose. In one way or another, I'm gonna be the savior of the community or screw the community. So in one direction or another, there's a real question around him. He's not a sober personage, and McQueen tries to make him into this sober, melancholic, serious person. So not to dwell a lot on whether the water is really polluted or as polluted as Stockman says it is, because ultimately that doesn't matter. But I think we're meant to be a bit suspicious of Stockman or. I don't know, is there a real hero in this play? Is there a real protagonist? Because this story could have been told as a. And maybe this is what McQueen ultimately ends up doing with it. You could say this is a story about government corruption and here's someone standing up to it, and here's the very obvious hero of the story. That's not what Ibsen does here. He makes it a lot more complicated.

5:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. I would have been interested to see, but I haven't. I'll probably watch it later. But I would have been interested to see the BBC adaptation set in Scotland, I think it is. I wonder what liberties they take with that.

6:01 Wes Alwan: I watched a bit of that. I mean, I just watched like a minute or two, and it looks very good. I didn't end up watching it because it was deviate so much.

6:10 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that's what I. I thought it might confuse me, actually.

6:14 Wes Alwan: Yeah. Then I realized, actually, after looking at it a little bit again yesterday, it actually is probably quite true to the substance I see, and maybe truer than McQueen's film, which is based on an adaptation by Arthur Miller.

6:27 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think that's one of the things I wanted to talk about with the play, because you're absolutely right this time around. Reading it for the first time in a few years, I really thought Dr. Stockman is. I think, you know, you and I both now we receive media that we know. We're going to do a podcast on, sort of like through the other person's eyes. And I remember thinking that you would think that Stockman was manic and also that maybe the report was just bunk and he was making it up. So the McQueen adaptation is based on the Miller retooling of Enemy and. Which was supposed to be a parable about huac. And I think I had also mentioned that I had watched an adaptation by Ray set in an Indian town, in which the Stockman character. I forget what his name is in the film, but the guy who's supposed to be the Doctor is a hero fighting against the corruption of the town. And then there was a Jeremy Strong stage version, which was adapted by Amy Herzog, which I felt like I was the only person who had not seen that adaptation in New York. I know a bunch of people who saw it who all basically said that the speech of Stockman was retooled for that certain character. A lot. A lot of times you get characters taken out, I guess, or maybe something like a collapsing of Hofstad and Billing. And basically what all of these adaptations come down to, from what I understand when they're being used toward a certain end, is to make Stockman a straightforward hero and to use the speech as, you know, to sort of insert in the filling of the Stockman speech. Whatever political opinions they want, Stockman they think are sort of adapted to the time. And so from what I heard, the Herzog adaptation was very self consciously trying to invoke the present political moment and make a bunch of statements about. I don't know what particular political stance it was, but basically some critique of the Trump administration. You know, it strikes me that this play is so. It's treated so similarly to the way that Lear was treated in Victorian England, where they would do, you know, they would change up the ending so it wasn't so bleak. And Lear was just like this workshop for the playwright of the day to just use to kind of give it his own spin, adapt the ending in the way that whoever was retooling it saw fit. And it seems that that, like something about Lear and something about Enemy of the People inspire this desire to want to make things nicer or easier to swallow in some way. And I think Stockman is just such, ultimately such a difficult character to root for that people have this desire to go in and turn him into something that on the page he's really not. I mean, you could see him as being the villain of the play if you wanted to. I mean, not quite. I mean, everybody's terrible. There's no, there's no good character in the. But that's one of the problems is he's not the hero, it seems to me.

9:36 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I think it's a matter of people might want this to be the kind of play that it's not right with this straightforward hero resisting the system narrative. But, you know, in light of the fact that it's not that I was curious about, well, what, you know, what is Ibsen up to here? And I think, you know, we know enough about Ibsen to say that in some ways he's identified with the character of Dr. Dr. Stockman and even in his more intemperate moments, kind of shares some of these elitist condemnations that Stockman is going to make at the end of, well, a certain point in the play where he becomes disillusioned and becomes the enemy of the people. So here's what he said in a letter to the critic George Brandes. Well, here's one relevant quotation. What are we to say of the attitude taken up by the so called liberal press? I am more and more confirmed in my belief that there is something demoralizing in engaging in politics and joining parties. I, at any rate, shall never, never be able to join a party that has the majority on its side, Bjornsson says the majority is always right. I, on the contrary, of necessity, say the minority is always right. I hold that the man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future. So very obviously identified in that quotation with the views of the Stockman character. He says in another letter that he's unsure whether it's a comedy or a drama. Here's another thing he said to Brandes. I'm still under the impression of the confusion and disturbance created by ghosts. So I had to write this new play, An Enemy of the People. It is a reaction against the mass hysteria, against the tyranny of the majority, against the lie which is enthroned in society. So I think there's a sense, and I think he basically admitted in a way that he is Stockman in a sense. So I thought, okay, so what is he up to here? Is he just so cantankerous that he doesn't know that Stockman comes across as a hysteric? Or is he just enjoying leaning into that idea and ribbing people? I think it's the latter. That he's approaching his own proclivities with some sense of irony and enjoying the fact, right. He gets to emit all this bile through Stockman. And it is partly against society and the sorts of people that he wants to criticize. And I think this sort of attitude actually pervades those plays of his that I've read. A certain amount of bitterness towards society.

12:18 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's certainly right. I think, too, he really flirted with social Darwinism for quite seriously for a while there. I think he later. Later changed his mind. But certainly there's an element of self parody. And he takes it as far as he can. What you've noted about the play being comic is key. That's really the only way to understand this play, I think. I mean, all of Act 2 is literally a farce. The mayor is hiding in a room. You know, it could be a bedroom comedy in a way. You know, with people running in and out and people hiding behind doors. It's so ridiculous. It's so over the top. And everyone, including Stockman, is over the top. And I think we're meant to laugh at some of the things that he says in the play. Certainly in the first scene.

13:00 Wes Alwan: This is what I was hoping for from McQueen, I thought. Cause I couldn't find any other real versions available on video. And I wanted to see. Okay, is this played in the way that I think it should be played? Is this some of the farcical quality of it and the over topness of Stockman. Yeah, and McQueen doesn't do that. I think in the other thing that I found is, and this is from the critical heritage, is that early adaptations in London are the earliest adaptation in the earliest production in English in translation in English. This is in London, 1893. They had this very oddly tall person play, Stockman, and they really amped up the comedic element. And this is what you, you know, the critics at the time. I think there's some disagreement about whether that should have been the case. Some critics really liked that a lot. Others found it questionable. I think that's a very good, that's actually a very good choice. As you point out. You were pointing out that there's a way in which it becomes farcical.

14:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, it's a good visual symbol so that we immediately see that this man is self inflated, first of all. And second of all, a bit ridiculous and out of place. And I think that is important to signal, I mean, it can't be overstated how maybe a good word would be bilious, how biliously that ghost was received. I mean, how upset people got over that production. And you know, we mentioned a bit of this, I think in the Doll's House episode.

14:29 Wes Alwan: Well, remind me of that a little bit. Yeah. Cause I'm not.

14:32 Erin O'Luanaigh: People were horrified. I mean, it was a moral outrage. And this was the reason, I think, why people create that club or subscription service or whatever it was that allowed people to see Ibsen plays because he was considered so outrageous because of Ghost and Ghosts is, you know, it's such a funny play for people to have gotten so, so upset about. Like, I, I, I dislike ghosts the most of any of the Ibsen. I think I've read all of his plays and I, I, Ghosts is my least favorite because nothing happens. It's just people talking about something that happened a long time ago. And what happened a long time ago was this Mr. Alving had syphilis. And that's, that's the terrible, you know, this terrible thing.

15:13 Wes Alwan: I mean, is there not, is there any play in which someone doesn't have syphilis?

15:16 Erin O'Luanaigh: I, if there is, I don't want. Yeah, no, it's not really a play if there's no syphilis. But this was the play written immediately after Ghosts. And gosh, I'm, you know, I'm working off of long, long memory here, but I know that, I know that Ibsen said something to the effect of this one at least won't cause any controversy. I know this one's going to be okay. Like, he wrote it in response to the reaction for Ghosts in order to try and get himself back on top. So he just wanted to write a go ahead hit that would offend and bother nobody. And that's pretty incredible when you look at the content of Stockman's speech, to think that Ibsen was so sure that this wouldn't offend anybody. That can only be possible if you understand the comedic element of it.

16:01 Wes Alwan: Right.

16:01 Erin O'Luanaigh: I mean, if he's really espousing these views through Stockman in a way that people are perceiving as very serious, then I can't imagine that it wouldn't be controversial. But as it was, it was a huge hit and he was totally right. Everybody loved it and it was a big, you know, it sold big and everything. So I highly doubt that. That the. These ideas of social Darwinism were so acceptable back then. I think it had to have been that Stockman's flaws were so evident that it was not controversial.

16:32 Wes Alwan: I see, yeah. So people weren't necessarily taking all that criticism of the masses as being, what. What does he call them?

16:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Mongrels.

16:41 Wes Alwan: Mongrels, yeah, yeah.

16:43 Erin O'Luanaigh: Animals.

16:44 Wes Alwan: They weren't taking that personally. They weren't taking that as Ibsen's considered view.

16:50 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, right, right.

16:51 Wes Alwan: It seems plausible because to the extent that you identify that with. With then that sort of. I think it. To anyone, that kind of elitism is cloying, even if you can sympathize with it to some extent. Maybe at least in one's, you know, more cantankerous moments. You can sympathize with all these things that he's saying, of course, but he does sound. Start to sound a little bit like, you know, Nietzsche.

17:15 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right.

17:15 Wes Alwan: Which may be curious about whether he had read any Nietzsche and he claimed that he hadn't because, you know, he had someone write to him saying, you know, you ought to check this guy out. I think Nietzsche did read Ibsen and had a very positive opinion of Ibsen. I might have said that in our. One of our previous recordings, but, yeah. So these ideas, of course, are floating around, but some of these speeches that Stockman gives. Yeah, they could be straight out of Nietzsche.

17:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: It's a little difficult to detect in Act 1 when you're still sort of learning the characters. Right. But if you go back and you look at Stockman's very first words in the play, all of his flaws are very much in evidence. And I think one of the pieces of evidence to your point about his mania or about the fact that the report might not be legitimate. Or it might be him. What, catastrophizing or drawing a conclusion which maybe can't be drawn. I'm unsure about how to. How to characterize what might be wrong with the report. But we do know from. Granted, from unreliable sources like the mayor. That Stockman has a reputation. For always having a bee in his bonnet about something. And also, we see in his own words, you know, when he first comes on stage. He's been out for a walk during the. Shortly after dinner. And so various people have come into the house before we see Stockman. But when he comes back in, he's waxing poetic to the mayor about. I feel so indescribably content. With all this budding, bursting life around me. Which I take to be pretty. Pretty suggestive. Because, of course, he's talking about how great this place is, how happy he is. He's pointing out all these things, you know, which is really lovely. Pointing out all these nice things that he's been able to afford. Because he's been up in the north, really struggling. We also find out that he's been struggling. Partly because he's felt so bereft of the company of real human beings. But because he's such an elitist. He basically calls the townspeople where he was no better than animals. But, you know, he's. He's happy to be successful. He's so excited. He calls this a thriving metropolis, you know. But one laughs at this idea of. Of all the life bursting around him. Because, of course, during this entire scene. He keeps asking if the postman has come. And we. We learn very soon that this whole time that he's been talking about how wonderful this place is. He has strongly suspected and needed the report only to confirm his suspicion that the waters at the spa are contaminated. And that, in fact, the idea of this place as being sort of teeming with life. Is, if we're to take his report seriously. A good kind of metaphor for the. Whatever the spike of microorganisms is. That has caused some problems in the water source. So how could he be so excited about living here. And so excited about the prospect of what's going on around him. When he knows that this report is coming down the pike? It's as though he's wishing for this report. He's wishing for something to happen. He's hinting to his brother at first about what. What he's waiting on. And says there may be a great many things that are extraordinary about the circumstances. Which he's alluding to whatever is going to be in the report, or then again, absolutely nothing. It may be that it's just a figment of my imagination. So he has all this excitement about being there, but in a certain light, it could be seen as excitement about stirring up trouble, about finding something wrong, about getting to crusade for something, as though he's wishing for. For. For there to be something wrong with the water.

20:40 Wes Alwan: Yeah. When he delivers the news to his family, he's quite elated in an inappropriate way. He doesn't think about the possibility that this might be bad news for people to find out that this thing that the town, in a way relies on or is coming to rely on for its prosperity could be, you know, built on a cesspool. I think the phrase he uses, you know, he does. And then he casually says, oh, it can all be fixed very easily, which is not clear that it can be fixed very easily. So that's. He's not thinking often. He's not thinking about a. How other people might feel about this. He's not thinking about the fact that his brother might be right. Someone points out to him that the mayor, his brother, might be jealous of him. Making this discovery brings up the question of what the mayor will think of this. And I think Stockman says, oh, he'll be happy to learn about this. So there's a lot of naivete that's highlighted on the part of Stockman.

21:40 Erin O'Luanaigh: Well, you might almost think that if Stockman is happy about this discovery, it's because he knows that when they're building it, it's done shoddily. Or that something like this might happen. Right. Because they don't actually take his plans for the building of the pipes. So it does seem. I mean, there's a reading of the play in which all of this does come down to a rivalry between the brothers.

22:02 Wes Alwan: Right.

22:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: You know, where the mayor seems more obviously jealous of the brother. But. But really, if we look at the subtext, everybody drink at home, then the doctor is just as jealous of the mayor or just as undermining as attempting to be undermining of the mayor's authority or to prove that he did something wrong, that he's not as smart as the doctor is, et cetera. But if we are to take seriously the idea that Stockman is thrilled at this discovery, it occurred to me that his desire for there to be something wrong with the spa, regardless of whether or not it's. It's about competing with a brother or just about his desire to crusade for something or just I don't know. Whatever it may be, it occurs to me that it's. It's quite similar to the spa itself, the sort of functioning of the spa itself. Someone talks about the fact. I think it's. I think it's the mayor in that early scene, talks about the fact that he hopes that a lot of invalids will come. And do you remember this? He makes some really funny comment, which it's clear that the mayor himself doesn't understand is funny.

23:11 Wes Alwan: Yeah. The mayor says early on, the mayor is enthusiastic about the spa as an economic foundation for the town. And there's a good flow of money between people. There's life and activity. Right. This is in direct parallel to what Stockman will say about vitality. There's two competing conceptions of vitality here, which I want to get into in a second. And then Hofstede says, oh, and the unemployment's falling. So Hofstede is thinking now not about business and the taxpayer, but about the poor people. And then the mayor turns that into the burden of the poor. Rates on the property classes has been reduced most pleasingly. So he twists it into the economic benefit to the middle class. And that's when he says the thing about invalids. Yeah, if you want to read them.

24:02 Erin O'Luanaigh: But yeah, he says, a substantial volume of visitors, a good number of invalids, to spread the institute's reputation. You know, I love this idea that. And this probably speaks to your idea of vitality, this idea that, are we building things on health or are we building things on sickness? It's reminiscent to. Of what Billings says in regards to his desire to run for a position at the magistrate's office. When Hofstad says, you know, I can assure you you won't get it, billing responds, you think I don't know that already? But that's exactly what's so dear to me, not to get it. A rebuttal like that fires your fighting spirit. It gives you a kind of supply of fresh bile. And that can certainly be needed in a dull backwater like this, where hardly anything really rousing ever happens. I thought that was so fascinating and so maybe insightful, too, about Stockman's frame of mind, if he was wishing for there to be something wrong with the spa. So in the same way that the spa seems to be. I mean, economically, it feeds off of sick people coming to partake of it, hopefully being cured. But it needs an influx of sickness. Right, in order to produce some sort of positive result. It seems Billing operates in the same way regarding getting riled up resistance, negativity, riles him up and gives him something to react against. And perhaps that's Stockman's idea as well, which is, oh, now I have a cause. Something's wrong with the spa. Hooray. Now I have something to get angry about, and that's going to give me this influx of energy or something so that I can live to rally another day.

25:41 Wes Alwan: Yeah. And I think this is key to Stockman's early conception of what vitality is, as opposed to the mayor's. So for the mayor, it seems to be. And this gets us back to the very beginning of the play where there's a lot of great characterization of the mayor because he's come in and he's greeted warmly. He rejects food because it would hurt his digestion. He likes a plain and economical diet. We get the impression that when, you know, Mrs. Stockman says just for once. Right. There's an indication that he rarely or never accepts those invitations to eat with them. And then she worries that he'll think that they're spendthrifts. It's another thing that comes up again and again, I think, in Ibsen. And then the mayor says, not you. So little backhanded swipes against his brother. And then we find out that, as you pointed out, Stockman is out getting his 10,000 steps, but the mayor thinks that's unhealthy. That's really interesting. So he has this conception of health, which is conservative, you could say politically defensive. It's about what you have to preserve, or maybe in the case of the spa, it's about being sick and then bringing yourself back to baseline or preventing sickness. So it's in that negative territory. Whereas for Stockman, it's all about vitality. And he's going to associate that ultimately with youthfulness and progressivism and change. So when Stockman arrives and then he offers the mayor a toddy, and the mayor goes, toddy too, right. So comment about the fact that they're libertines, that they're drinking. I don't partake in toddy parties. And then he criticizes the amount of food people are eating. And Stockman says it's a joy to see young people eating. And he's thinking of their appetite and the sustenance that they get, which will increase their strength because they're the ones, the quote, ones who will dig about in the fermenting stuff of the future. So all of this warm social environment that Stockman is trying to create for the youth, who, by the way, are. There's Petra. But it's mainly Halvstad and Billing. The youngsters who will betray him and turn out not to be have any real vitality. Right. Or there's a progressivism there, but they're willing to and even a revolutionary fervor. And I think they get Stockman amped up beyond what he's originally wanting to do, but they'll abandon that very quickly. Unlike Stockman, Stockman's idea of what health is, is associated or vitality is associated with youth and overflowing and change as opposed to the more conservative position of preserving what you have. And that'll be carried over into the realm of values. Right. Because later Stockman is going to say the old values are like the decayed organic matter in the waters. They actually make us sick. They only have a lifespan of up to 20 years. And then we need new values to become healthy again. For the mayor, it's the old values which are the healthy things and the health producing values and the sorts of values that must be preserved because they're tried and true and also because they support this top down conception of health where the authorities look out for the well being of the people. For Stockman, it's bottom up, right. It's the young, it's those who are growing into the future. It's change. For the mayor, it's top down and it's let's keep things the same.

29:41 Erin O'Luanaigh: I wonder too if this also then goes along with this idea of using the sludge, using opposition as fuel. So it's sort of, you know, the doctor has this idea that the grit in the oyster is going to be something that produces ultimately greater strength. It's going to cause this energetic response that's going to then produce the revolutionary spirit that will result in an upheaval and a sort of cleansing. Whereas the mayor wants to get rid of the grit entirely so that things stay on that even keel, as I think you're, you're suggesting.

30:15 Wes Alwan: Yeah, I mean, this is the connection I was trying to make to what you were saying. And thanks for bringing us back there because it's important. What if there is nothing to resist and fight against? Right. What if it is just all good and then what do the young people do? Is there a form of vitality that doesn't involve yelling at your parents when you're a teenager and smoking pot and being rebellious and then overturning going to overthrow the system, man. Yeah. How do we express vitality if that's not available to us for whatever reason?

30:52 Erin O'Luanaigh: One heck of a pertinent question. What do we do except tear it all down and what do we put up in its place? But, but that's interesting, though, that, that these. That these two things are twins. Like, there's. One would think that a greater vitality and the sort of like, say the higher. Higher peaks of vitality that you're talking about with Stockman versus sort of like safe, subdued, you know, no, wa. That the mayor suggests, you know, that. That those peaks wouldn't go along with this grit in the oyster idea or this sludge idea. But maybe I'm being naive. Maybe in order to get those peaks, you need the. You need the troughs. But one would think that, that that kind of idea of vitality would not go along with. Would not go along with this toxicity. But of course, that's the immune response, for instance, you know. Right. We spike with vitality as a way to. As a way to kill the invasion, the infection of bacteria. Of course, this is why people, you know, when they feel they're on the brink of revolution and are trying to incite, you know, the population, they're hoping that the government behaves as badly as possible so that people will be the most fed up that they can be, so that the revolution will actually happen. Right. It sort of exists on that kind of energy. What can we make then? I mean, I don't know. I don't know the answer to this question myself, but what can we make then that. That of this rivalry piece. Both the doctor and the mayor come from the same family. You know, there's no, no talk of their parents. They seem to have sprung up out of nowhere. Both Mrs. Stockman and in a way, Captain Horster have paternal figures or the. Or the conspicuous absence of a paternal figure in their lives, which kind of hangs over the play. And this idea of inheritance seems. What you say about this, in a way, Stockman's idea about inheritance are rather conservative ultimately. No, I mean, in his family, he. He has two radically different personalities. His wife is the descendant of three generations of Tanners, which Stockman married into. I don't know. There. There just seem to be two different tracks. We have this idea of health and of. Of preserving the present self, and then we have this idea of lineage. And what in our present selves do we owe? All of these things seem to be knotted up, and the sibling rivalry and this idea of genetics, but I don't know how to. So I'm just throwing a lot of things at you. I'm not sure how to untangle all of that.

33:21 Wes Alwan: Yeah. He'll accuse the mayor of being a spiritual mongrel. And then we have to ask the question, right, well, why isn't Stockman a spiritual mongrel? And then you wonder, well, which is the older sibling? And you think, well, the mayor seems kind of like the older siblings sibling because he's more controlling and grown up. But in a way it would be funnier and maybe truer if he's the younger sibling fighting to be the. In Stockman and his older brother, he has not the most stable of father figures, if there ever was that. Right. If there's a bit of a gap in their ages, for instance, which might explain some difference in character. And then you have kind of this goofy person as your secondary father figure and then overreact, becoming this kind of hard ass, tight ass, which is what the mayor is. Either way you go, yeah, you think about an interesting family dynamic in which these two different versions of the principle of vitality have shunted themselves into two different branches, right, let's say of the same tree. And we know that these are two fundamental tendencies that we have to honor. In some sense they reflect a tension within the human psyche and we can't really ultimately discard either one of them. Right. So the more conservative instinct and the idea of relying on the values of a previous generation, which includes all the formative influences and includes culture, which is one of the things that Stockman will appeal to at the end. High culture, that all comes from the past, but also it includes, as I've said, the rear guard action of trying to heal people who are sick with the spa, but then also the financial element. So the well being of the community can. Can be measured to some extent in terms of economics, which is boring and dry, and it's the taxpayers and the housing association and all that nonsense. And it seems almost those sorts of material conditions seem like a demeaning thing to focus on, unless you're focusing on the deprivation of the proletariat and the need for revolution to equalize this disparity between them and the authorities. One of the things I like about this play is with the way these two principles just sort of break off into these two different sibling characters. And they are siblings in important ways and they have this dynamic interaction that you were pointing to, which is that Stockman's version of vitality, which involves youthfulness and growth and progress, also involves fighting against a reaction to what has come before. Right. He says, I think you've already quoted this, but he says, I have an infinite number of things to work and fight and to fight for. That's one of the things he's so excited about, being back in his hometown. And then the question is, yeah, can you find a form of vitality that doesn't necessarily involve that sort of fight? The other aspect of Stockman's version of vitality involves. It's another kind of overflowing, I think, which involves his prolificness as a writer and just wanting to spat on every opinion that he has. So it's about speech, right? And that could be political speech. That could be revolutionary, or it could be editorials complaining about the state of things, or however you want to think about it. It could be the thing that Hofstadt and Billing are very focused on, speech for the sake of representing, let's say, politically disenfranchised. But it also can be what Stockman talks about at the end of the play, which is high culture. That's one form, ultimately, of vitality, the aesthetic, the artistic, which we don't hear a lot about in the play. But until Stockman is insulting people for being uncultured, insulting the masses for being uncultured, mongrels. One of the themes I revisit a lot in the podcast. But, yeah, as a form of sublimation, we get a. We get a possibility of a form of vitality which isn't necessarily part of either one of these two different poles, the defensive conservative instinct or the progressive instinct. It sort of transcends it, maybe.

37:51 Erin O'Luanaigh: I think you're pointing out for me a couple of things about Stockman which are quite confused and speak to the complexity of his character, perhaps, that we have. On the one hand, I love this idea that you're pointing to of how prolific he is and how he seems to always have something to sort of rally on about. And yet, at the same time, as I think you also pointed out, he's very easily contaged by other people's ideas. It's kind of funny how little true conviction politically he actually seems to have prior to Hofstad and Billing getting to him and convincing him that this could be the vehicle for revolution. So those two things seem to sort of work opposite each other. Like, we can imagine him as someone who writes a lot of editorials, and yet, at least in the play, and what we see of him taking up a cause on his own, it's not native to him. He becomes convinced of this idea that it speaks to a larger political problem over the course of the play, and only then does he espouse these types of revolutionary ideas.

38:52 Wes Alwan: Yeah, he's induced by. I think Billing is the more revolutionary of the two newspaper guys. Hofstad's a little bit more moderate in the beginning. Well, first of all, they get kind of contaged or induced by him. Everyone wants to get in on it. In my notes, I call them hop ons, right? You have Hofstad, Billing and S. Laxon. They all get contaged with the grandiose quality that Stockman has. Okay, I'm going to be. Now I'm an important person who's going to do something for the good of the community. They all get quite grandiose. But Stockman is carried along by this wave. Ironically, they're the ones. Billing is the one. Stockman's a little bit nervous when Billing is saying, rah, rah, rah, revolution. At first. He's carried along reluctantly at first, but he doesn't put up too much resistance. And then he's like, okay, yeah, I guess I'm a revolutionary, too.

39:45 Erin O'Luanaigh: That's right. Yeah. There's that conflict in Stockman, and then there's the other one which you're pointing to, which is this conflict between. And maybe you characterized it a bit differently, but there are conservative elements, it seems to me, of Stockman's at least of his way of life, certainly. I mean, he's not living like a bohemian. He has. He has his job at the SPA Institute. He has his private practice. He has a normal family life, a home life. And in fact, he's gone back to this unnamed town from being out in the wilderness. He's come back to it. And if anything, if the mayor and if the doctor have a parentage, it's the town itself, right? So in a way, the town is like the Howards end of. Of. Of the play. You know, it's the symbol of maybe all of Norway or of the past or just of society itself and determining where it'll go at the end. His last words are about standing alone. So he seems to want to remove himself from society, to stand outside it, to achieve this freedom. Of course, he's not alone. That's one of the problems is that he has this family that he's affecting with everything that he does. And we're all part of society. None of us can step outside of it. But he has this. This hatred of the masses and yet a certain reverence for, you know, as you said, culture, high culture, which is a result of civilization and of many of the things which he seems to be rallying against. And also his ideas of social Darwinism are Also I think ultimately a bit confused. He has this idea of a genetic inherited mongrelism in terms of some people are just not as good as other people, according to him. But then in the end he's going to take up this school idea which who knows if this will get, you know, catch on. Five minutes after this plays over, maybe he'll be on to another idea. But he has this idea that perhaps these mongrel children who would be in his school would somehow have some hidden ability which you know, maybe would speak to a Darwinian idea of genetic mutation. But still it's a bit. Yeah, it's just a bit confusing.

41:55 Wes Alwan: At a certain point he wants to explain himself and say he means this spiritually rather than literally with the genetics. But yeah, the reference to education is sort of in the same line as the hopefulness about the possibility of education at the end of the play is in line with the embrace of high culture and in the embrace of aesthetic speech. He doesn't embrace that, but I've introduced that idea. Embrace of the artistic. So the idea is that it's another bottom up idea. Right. It's not like revolution exactly, but bottom up idea is that you educate people to make them amenable to good government. This is a current theme philosophically as well. Right. Schiller wrote letters on an aesthetic education that the idea there is that revolution is not going to work if people aren't ready for it, if they don't have the virtues, if they don't have the character that you need for that. And that's why the French Revolution turned out so badly. That was the idea. So in the end you get a different. It's a more elitist conception of a bottom up approach, which is that you have to educate people. We can't just have top down authority. We can't just force society to be good if people in their characters are not good. But we can do it from the bottom up. We can make good citizens through the right sort of education. So what it does is it really reveals that there's this elitist tendency within Stockman's conception of vitality that very much resembles his brother. His brother in the beginning, the mayor is slagging off the inferiors, the peasants. I think he accuses Hofstad of not having any tact because he's of peasant stock. And so you can see in, in the beginning Stockman is very pro masses. And then when he feels insulted, he switches and the elitist tendency comes out. But the idea of education is a more positive possibility. That flows out of that elitist component.

43:58 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, that's good. I think with this idea of hop ons as well. I love that term. The reason why we have people very, very quickly, you know, I think you've demonstrated well that Stockman sort of switches a bit, but, you know, everyone in the play ultimately will switch position except for the mayor. Is that right? And, and Horster, you know, everyone eventually will flip and join a different side. And I think part of the reason why that is is because maybe Petra, it's pretty constant. That's right, Petra. Petra is pretty constant too.

44:31 Wes Alwan: Like a rock. Sorry.

44:35 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, but that doesn't work because the mayor's name is Peter too, so. Well, actually, no, it does because they both. They're both similarly. There you go. That's because I was wondering why is her name.

44:46 Wes Alwan: She's stable, right?

44:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: Yeah, but they're both. They both don't move. That's good because I kept trying to find the connection why they would have the same name. But maybe the reason for that flip flopping is regardless of party or one's ideas about the solution to the problem, you know, everyone pretty much treats the sludge, or whatever we want to call it as a symbol. No one really treats it like a real problem. It just immediately becomes the cudgel with which everyone is going to push through their own agenda. It's. It's a rhetorical device that's being used by every character to make some kind of point. And so none of the character seems to actually care about the threat to health that this sludge potentially, I mean, if we're gonna take Stockman's word for it, that it potentially represents, and therefore this idea of the masses and of the people, you know, that too is kind of used very symbolically. I mean, the idea that the doctor is the enemy of the people too, seems to me to be signaling this. You know, we don't actually care that, that people, that real people who live in this town are going to get sick from these waters. Rather, we care about the people as an idea used as support or in defense of certain values or against certain values. Because Stockman, from the very beginning, as we've already said, he's delighted, he seems delighted to have found this problem. And one of the reasons why he's discovered this problem is because people have already been getting sick. That seems to be the last thing on everyone's mind.

46:27 Wes Alwan: This is another thing that makes it a bit suspect because he says, at first I thought they were bringing the sickness with them, which makes sense. Right. They're sick when they come. So how do you know that they're getting sick? From the. It's a bit. He thinks he's discovered this incredible reversal. What is supposed to make healthy is making sick. And the people don't. They may come sick, but they leave sicker.

46:48 Erin O'Luanaigh: Right.

46:49 Wes Alwan: So, yeah, I think in light of what you've been talking about with the hop ons, let's just visit of those moments. I think let's visit in our second half. We're going to stop here for the first half, but in the second half we'll visit the point where maybe we can pull out a few quotes from where Stockman delivers his news just to kind of justify what we've been saying about his mania. Because maybe, I don't know if this reading is going to get on people's nerves where we're so, so hard on Stockman and we're not just reading him as a hero, but anyway. And then we could look at those moments where other people get induced by him with revolutionary fervor and turn this right, turn the concrete issue about the pollution of the waters into something that's mainly symbolic. Right. Mainly a tool for fighting a kind of partisan political war. Listeners can listen to that right now. patreon.com subtextpodcast or you can wait a week and listen for free. Thank you, thank you.

48:05 Erin O'Luanaigh: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter njoysubtext.