SUBTEXT Literature and Film Podcast

By Wes Alwan and Erin O'Luanaigh

Society & Culture Arts Education

What's SUBTEXT Literature and Film Podcast about?

SUBTEXT is a podcast about the human condition, and what we can learn about it from the greatest inventions of the human imagination: fiction, film, drama, poetry, essays, and criticism. Each episode, philosopher Wes Alwan and poet Erin O’Luanaigh explore life’s big questions by conducting a close reading of a text or film and co-writing an audio essay about it in real time.

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Mortal Pretensions in John ...

03.13.2023

A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet— John Donne’s biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps its no wonder that his great subjects ...

SUBTEXT Literature and Film Podcast episodes:

03.13.2023 Mortal Pretensions in John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” (Holy Sonnet 10) A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet— John Donne’s biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps its no wonder that his great subjects ...
02.13.2023 Trauma and Repetition in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974) Roman Polanksi’s 1974 film “Chinatown” seems to have little to do with its titular neighborhood, which is the setting for only one horrible and final scene. Chinatown functions instead to represent the traumatic moment that drives this story just because ...
01.16.2023 Better and Bested in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It’s a play full of contradictions, secrets, lies, and unspoken rules. It’s a play decidedly for adults, but about a child—an imaginary one, no less. It takes place on a college campus, but it is absent of students. And it’s ...
12.19.2022 Pagan Poetics in “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens was an ungainly insurance executive, but his poetry is serene and secularly reverential. In particular, his poem “Sunday Morning” seems to suggest that the rhythm of the natural world—if we give it enough rapt attention—is as good as ...
11.21.2022 Production for Use in “His Girl Friday” Howard Hawks’s 1940 film His Girl Friday knits together two plots from two very different genres. One is a romantic comedy that intends to reunite its main couple in something like wedded bliss. The other is a dark drama of ...
10.24.2022 Post-Doctoral Bedevilment in Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” Dr. Faustus expected more from his education. After a lifetime of study, his professional options—philosophy, medicine, law, and theology—all seem disappointingly ordinary. He is of course not the first to have this experience. At a societal level, the promise of ...
09.26.2022 Fate and Blame in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” Who is to blame for Mary Tyrone’s morphine addiction? Is it Mary herself? Is it Edmund, her younger son, after whose difficult birth Mary was first prescribed the drug? Is it Jamie, her older son, who caused the death of ...
05.09.2022 Work as Madness in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957) In the beginning, Colonel Nicholson seems to be a stickler for principle, willing to die rather than have his officers do menial labor in a Japanese prison camp. In the end, his principles seem to be a cover for personal ...
04.11.2022 What Falls Upon the Living in James Joyce’s “The Dead” In 1906, presumably finished with his short story collection Dubliners, James Joyce wrote to his brother with dissatisfaction that, though he set about to create a comprehensive portrait of Ireland’s capital city, he had not managed to render its famous, ...
03.14.2022 Finding Home in Stephen Spielberg’s “E.T.” (1982) Stephen Spielberg once said that he was “still waiting to get out of [his] Peter Pan shoes and into [his] loafers.” Being a filmmaker, he said, was his way of remaining a child. Sort of. While his film “E.T.” is ...
02.28.2022 The Power of Calm: Two Wordsworth Sonnets William Wordsworth wrote no fewer than 523 sonnets over the course of his career. (By comparison, the second most prolific Romantic sonneteer was Keats with a paltry 67.) Two of Wordsworth’s best-loved efforts in the form are both Petrarchan sonnets ...
02.14.2022 What Nature Betrays: Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (Part 2) In Part 1 of our discussion of “Tintern Abbey,” we talked about whether Wordsworth was right to suggest that our experience of nature was good not just for restoring our weary spirits, but for helping us to mature and even ...
01.31.2022 Mother Nature’s Nurture in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (Part 1) After an absence of five years, the poet William Wordsworth returned to the idyllic ruins of a medieval monastery along the River Wye. The spot was perhaps not so very different from his last visit, but Wordsworth found that he ...
01.17.2022 The Fool Gets Hurt in Fellini’s “La Strada” (1954) Fellini called his film "La Strada" a dangerous representation of his identity, and had a nervous breakdown just before completing its shooting. Perhaps this identity, and its vulnerability, have something to do with the film’s portrayal of a disappointed hope ...
01.03.2022 False Roles and Fictitious Selves in “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin In the late 19th century, the “New Woman” was a term coined by Henry James for a particular kind of feminist who demanded freedom of behavior, dress, education, and sexuality. Out of that paradigm came "The Awakening," a novel that ...
12.27.2021 (post)script: Post-Wonderful Wes & Erin continue their discussion of "It's a Wonderful Life."
12.20.2021 The Pain of Anonymity in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) Though sometimes accused of a sentimentality dubbed “Capracorn,” Frank Capra’s films are clear-eyed about the suffering of the everyman. A quintessential director of the Great Depression and World War II eras, Capra expressed better than most the desperation at the ...
12.13.2021 (post)script: Is “Die Hard” a Christmas Movie? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of "Die Hard."
12.06.2021 Attachments “Die Hard” at Nakatomi Tower It’s a Christmas movie, some say, and in the end the holiday classic “Let it Snow” plays over the credits. But what counts as snow in the final scenes is a confetti of smoke, debris, and millions of dollars of ...
11.22.2021 Mad as Hell in “Network” (1976) Diana Christensen is a television executive in search of an angry show—something that articulates the rage of the average viewer. In Howard Beale, failed newscaster turned mad-as-hell prophet, she seems to get exactly what she’s looking for. Yet in doing ...
11.08.2021 Autonomy and Incest in Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex” His first claim to fame was the solution to a riddle that earned him a kingdom by sheer force of intellect. His second was a doomed attempt to escape the particularly gruesome fates of patricide and incest. With his first ...
10.25.2021 Gender Opera in “Tootsie” How do you become the many you truly are? Try becoming the woman you aren’t. While Michael Dorsey can take the blame for his desperate transformation into Dorothy Michaels, it’s she who gets the credit for making him a better ...
10.11.2021 Our Name is Subtext, Podcast of Podcasts. Hear our “Ozymandias” Discussion, Ye Listeners, and Despair! The land is not just ancient but “antique,” and while many of its artifacts end up as the possessions of distant museums, they may yet be capable of overpowering their audiences. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is traditionally taken as an ...
09.27.2021 Sex and Tech in “Alien” by Ridley Scott The Nostromo is a labyrinthine spaceship, a hulking ore refinery run on a sophisticated computer operating system and manned by a crew of seven. But somehow it’s not the most impressive piece of technology in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film "Alien." ...
09.13.2021 Dead Wall Reveries in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” is subtitled a “Story of Wall St.,” yet there is almost nothing in it of the bustle of city life, and entirely nothing in it of the hustle of the trading floor. The story’s walls block ...
08.30.2021 Cursed Kids or Psych-Au Pair? “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James The story begins and ends with two variations on the meaning of the title. On the one hand, to give another turn of the screw is to ratchet up the horror of a good ghost story, in this case by ...
08.16.2021 Gentility and Injustice in “Gone with the Wind” (1939) Gone with the Wind— adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film in American history— has undergone several critical reappraisals in the 82 years since its production and release. Certainly the film romanticizes the Antebellum South and the Confederacy while glossing over ...
08.02.2021 Realism as Cruelty in “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams In the transition from stage to screen, "A Streetcar Named Desire" retained its long-running Broadway cast with a single exception: the role of Blanche Dubois, which passed from Jessica Tandy to Vivien Leigh. Like Blanche, Leigh was the odd woman ...
07.19.2021 Prestidigitocracy in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) The Wizard of Oz is supposed by the land’s inhabitants to be its most powerful magician. But far from having any actual power, he is not even native to the place in which real magic is in plentiful supply. Oddly, ...
07.05.2021 Formulated Phrases in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: Part 2 Wes & Erin continue their analysis of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In Part 1, they covered roughly the first third of the poem. In Part 2, they begin with a discussion of Prufrock’s coffee ...
06.21.2021 Disturbing the Universe in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: Part 1 It was T. S. Eliot’s first published poem. Written when he was only in his early 20s, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” rode the crest of the wave of literary Modernism, predated World War I, and presaged an ...
06.14.2021 (post)script: Post-Apocalypse Wes & Erin continue their discussion of "Apocalypse Now." Wes apologizes for asking Erin to watch something so disturbing, and we further discuss dueling conceptions of the arts, one Platonic and the other Aristotelian. We agree that "Apocalypse Now," despite ...
06.07.2021 At Home with War in “Apocalypse Now” (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore doesn’t flinch for enemy fire, loves the smell of napalm in the morning, and would literally kill for good surfing and a beachside barbecue. His attempts to recreate home within the theater of war render him ...
05.24.2021 Unsound Methods in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” On his journey to the heart of the Congo, Marlow learns of a famed ivory trader named Kurtz— a remarkable man; a “universal genius;” a painter, poet, and musician; a man whose success in his trade has been unparalleled, but ...
05.10.2021 On the Lam with “Thelma & Louise” (1991) Two women—one a straight-laced waitress, the other a naive housewife—leave town for a quiet weekend getaway. But after a deadly encounter with a rapist, the two become unlikely...and then increasingly confident...outlaws. Though a kindly police officer tries to convince the ...
04.26.2021 Spiritual Matters in Chekhov’s “The Student” and “A Medical Case” In Chekhov’s stories, beautiful natural surroundings are often a setting for unnatural lives and ugly social conditions. This sets the stage for a reflection on the relationship between physical and spiritual needs. His story “The Student” suggests that material deprivation--whether ...
04.12.2021 Art and Action in Chekhov’s “The House with the Mezzanine” In this story, there are two sisters: one introverted, frail, and bookish; the other dominant, opinionated, and politically active. In meeting them, an accomplished artist seems to be confronted with a dilemma. Should art subordinate itself to the project of ...
03.29.2021 Nipped by Love in Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog” Dmitri Gurov does not take love seriously. His wife annoys him, long-term relationships scare him, and his love life consists of brief affairs with women he meets at vacation resorts. In Anna, he finds someone who appears to be the ...
03.01.2021 Business Gets Personal in “The Godfather” (1972) Out of the darkness of the opening frames comes a supplicant— Buonasera the undertaker. He pleads for the justice that the American legal system denied him. As the camera draws back, we see the outline of a face, a hand... ...
02.22.2021 (post)script: Post-Hall: Pimps, Pills, and Automobiles Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Annie Hall; Wes pines to revisit his many unwritten essays, including the one about love and nostalgia in Woody Allen films. We discuss whether Mike Nichols used crack, and the way Google's algorithms ...
02.15.2021 Love and Nostalgia in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” (1977) Alvy Singer is not, he tells us, a depressive character. It’s just that as a child he always worried that the expanding universe would one day break apart; and as an adult that romantic relationships must always fall apart. With ...
02.01.2021 Yielding to Suggestion in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” On the moors of medieval Scotland, three witches hail the nobleman Macbeth as the future king—despite the fact that King Duncan is very much alive, and Macbeth is not in line to the throne. At the suggestion of power, Macbeth’s ...
01.18.2021 Clever Hopes in W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” W. H. Auden hated this poem. He called it the most dishonest he had ever written, and eventually had it excluded from collections of his poetry. And yet it quickly became one of his most popular poems. And after the ...
01.04.2021 The “Human Position” of Suffering in W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” As war loomed in Europe, the poet W.H. Auden left Britain for the United States. One of the poems he wrote just before leaving is about the nature of human suffering—or as Auden puts it, the “human position” of suffering: ...
12.21.2020 Mutual Amusement in “The Awful Truth” (1937) It’s a romance that begins with a divorce. Lucy and Jerry Warriner suspect each other of affairs, so they file suit, battle for custody of their dog, see other people, and generally go wild. Despite the spectre of infidelities— real ...
12.07.2020 Against Specialization in Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” Hedda Gabler is not a fan of specialization: not in the professor she has married, and his esoteric scholarly interests; not in domesticity, and the specialized affections required by marriage and motherhood; not in any lover’s infatuated specialization in her; ...
11.23.2020 Kill Billy: Order and Innocence in Melville’s “Billy Budd” Bill Budd is a beautiful man. Not just good looking, but exquisitely good natured, something that costs him no effort and has required no instruction. And yet it is ultimately his beautiful soul and good nature that get Billy killed. ...
11.16.2020 (post)script: Post-Gatsby Wes & Erin continue their discussion of "The Great Gatsby"; the ongoing development of our approach to the discussions; Arnold Rothstein and the fixing of the 1919 World Series; Fitzgerald's neighbors on Long Island, including Ring Lardner and Ed Wynn; ...
11.09.2020 The American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” We all know this story, in part because it captures a period that will always have a special place in the American imagination. Prosperous and boozy, the Jazz Age seemed like one great party, held to celebrate the end of ...
10.26.2020 Being Yourself in John Cassavetes’s “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) John Cassavetes is known today as the father of American independent film, a pioneering writer, director, editor, actor who managed to make movies on his own terms, and has since inspired two generations of filmmakers. In his own day, however, ...

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