292. Retaining Leg

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox and Merlin Mann. This week's challenge. No, seriously, watch the film.

MerlinIt's Do By Friday.

AlexHello. Good morning, Merlin Mann.

MerlinGood afternoon, Alexandra Cox. How are you?

AlexOh, that's right. It is fine. I'm great. How are you? I am actually really, really great.

MerlinOh, damn. I love that. You know, you know, well, why? Is there something different or better, if you can say?

AlexYes, yes. I'm sitting at my desk for the first time since I don't remember because my wonderful spouse cleared out our bedroom so I could get to my desk with my giant boot cast thing.

MerlinYou're Stephen King.

AlexOh, I got it. There we go.

MerlinWhen Tabby set up a typewriter for him that he could sit out with his busted ass leg.

AlexYeah.

MerlinBecause there was a dog back in the van trying to get some meat. He went into town to get some of those Maz's bars. You're so dedicated to your craft and you have such a supportive. Well, Stephen King calls Tabby his first reader. I don't know what you call Matt. But that's so nice.

AlexFirst responder.

MerlinYour dedication to the craft is really admirable. Does it feel good to be back in the saddle?

AlexYes, and not wearing wireless headphones that switch microphones, although it gives you an opportunity to make fun of me when the inputs and outputs on my computer change.

MerlinThis is two by Friday. Oh, sorry.

AlexYou'll have to choose one of the many other quirks to make fun of.

MerlinWell, where does one begin? I mean, that's kind of the point of the show. I feel like, you know, I want to say this often enough that people really internalize it. I don't want to know about the personal life of anyone that I know unless it's something that I really need to act upon. And even then I'd really rather not know. So I haven't asked, but can you – I have a note here in our shared Google document, which you are not currently in, which is that I want to do a check-in if you want to talk about it on your health. Which you've already – you've teed me up, as you say.

and I'd love to get a check-in on how you're doing. I want to talk about your convalescence. Scoot, scoot. And if you can say, just as I pass this prologue, what the fuck has been so difficult about you? You keep talking about offline about how, oh, it's so difficult to move from one place to another and I have to use these AirPods, I guess. Like what, in your time that you've been convalescing with your busted-ass foot, Alex has a busted-ass foot, because they got super drunk at a wedding

and fell down in lady shoes.

AlexNo. Yes, yes. I'm very cool and very drunk.

MerlinShow me the lie. Show me the lie. You couldn't even tell me if there was gravel. You were so fucked up and high on one of these second weddings you love and you fell down. Maybe there were babies there or dogs. I don't know. Real talk.

Say it however you want, But you've had some kind of a corrective boot to get around and it's hard to move. So what was so difficult? You live in a very small house, Alex.

AlexYeah, that's the only reason is that literal objects.

MerlinIs it hard to navigate around furniture and stuff? Is that it?

AlexYeah. Yeah. And the the layout of our bedroom slash my my corner of my office, it was just in a way that like even on crutches, I could just not fit through to my desk because in order to get.

MerlinI imagine that's what it was. You only have so much. I mean, for your day to day, even if you're being tidy, I'm tidy sometimes. I imagine you're mostly tidy. But I have a pretty narrow aperture in my office, for example, which is roughly – it's about 300 square feet, and it's roughly the shape of a shoebox. It's a shoebox with a door title. And the thing is I can't find my copy of Planet Hulk, the comic by the great Pac. So great Greg, great Greg Pac. So I've been tearing shit up going through all my mostly okay-labeled boxes, but I did have to get out my very good ladder.

I have an excellent ladder. and I had to get up and go through every box that might have trades, trade paperbacks in it. And that means I have like a Dick Cheney sclerotic artery where my aperture used to be. And now I'm practically falling down trying to get through the office. I'm saying in the day to day as one lives, it's hard enough to get around. But you're actually, if I could say, I'm not trying to body shame you, you're extra wide now that you are begrudged.

AlexOh, I am. Well, and I'm extra wide compared to most humans and not even talking about fitness, just shoulder to begin with. I am a gigantic human, although I'm the shortest person in my family.

MerlinIs this because you're a Polish Yeti? Polish Yeti, yes.

AlexBut on top of that-

MerlinSo you're a hairy monstrosity.

AlexI am. I am an absolute monstrosity. But for a while, I was also a monstrosity that needed to keep their leg elevated to 90 degrees. Oh, I see. Not anymore, motherfuckers. I'm sitting in a normal chair.

MerlinOh, man. I'm so happy for you. Well, my lady friend got knee surgery back in September. And by the way, the bitch is back.

AlexHell yeah. Running?

MerlinOh, fuck yeah. I am married to one narrow ass slender running woman who's fucking killing it right now. And I'm very happy for all of us. But I think it was. Well, you know, there's that thing you learn in first aid where they say like, you know, if you've got a wound, you try and keep the cut. Like I say you cut your finger. I don't know. I'm not a doctor. I'm not even a PhD.

Sorry, Don. But they say, it is said by the physician class, and you can tell because they always have a jacket with their fucking name on it, that you're supposed to keep the affected cut hand part above your heart, right? Higher up vertically than your heart. Now, with my lady friend, she had to keep her leg, I think, I'm trying to remember, but I think it was a similar thing where it's supposed to be, they give you like some rule of thumb about elevation.

Why did you have to elevate it? Would it fill with blood or something? To make it heal for pain? Why did you have to keep it at a 90 degree?

AlexPain and to prevent swelling and to keep blood flow.

MerlinOh, because of liquids. Yeah.

AlexYeah. And it wasn't like if my leg dropped, I would go to, yes. But I think we talked at one point, I'm like, gosh, my leg just isn't swollen. It just never was swollen. What the heck? Well, let me tell you, one time I put my leg down for like a half hour and what I would call my leg was no longer a thing. It was a balloon that had roughly the shape of a human leg.

MerlinI'm not saying doctors are always wrong. You can't prove a negative. I'm not saying doctors are always wrong. I'm saying they're always insufferable. But in this case, because you're retaining leg and liquid go down vis-a-vis gravity, you need to keep that up. And you saw the consequences of your sin when you swole.

AlexOh, yeah. It was very upsetting.

MerlinYou'd have to get on the couch. You'd have to get around. You'd have to move the cat. Sorry, that's a line from the great children's book, Olivia. She'd get up every morning. She'd move the cat. She'd brush her hair. She'd move the cat. Oh, God, Olivia's so good.

AlexOh, God, that's my life. Oh, wow, Olivia's a hero.

MerlinOh, my God, the book Olivia is very good. The cartoon is good, too, but the book is just the best. When she puts on the pantyhose, it's so cute. So you had to move the cat, and then you've got to get into these areas. And now, look at you.

AlexYes, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. I sit on chair. I walk through a doorway with crutches.

Speaker AKing in the castle. I just made a Borat joke on our program.

AlexI was zooming by it. iPod mini for girl.

MerlinIt's funnier than you think. It is very offensive and problematic, but it's way funnier than you think, and that's all I'm going to say about it. When he's taking a shit in front of Trump Tower, you tell me that's not funny? It is. That's very funny. Anyways, you're king in the castle.

AlexIt's anti-Semitic if you don't like Borat, in my opinion.

MerlinNumber one prostitute in the village. You know, he have a – I get a clock radio, he get a clock radio. I get a step, he get a step. Great success. He says in that funny voice.

And then he wants to throw the Jew down the well. I'm so happy that you're the, well, you're the they in the castle.

AlexAnd, oh, I sent you a picture of my scoot scoot.

MerlinOh, my God. It's all here in the document. Okay, so that's why you did that. But now, so now if, e.g., you just suddenly disappear and start doing something for your queer technology show, I'll know that's because you're having some kind of a neurological episode and not because your AirPod changed inputs.

AlexCorrect. Correct.

MerlinThat's a good feeling. I mean, I knew what I was getting into here. I've had plenty of opportunities to decide. Again, per the wisdom document, do you want 10 times more of this person? I can take 10 times more. You fucking bring it on. I find you entirely manageable. I have friends that are normal typical who are much more annoying to deal with. I like that you're desperately broken in every way. And, you know, here's the thing. Here's the thing. And this is the thing. And this is one of those dumb Merlin things. Costly and expensive.

What the fuck, man? Don't say loud. But, like, there's a reason that I believe. For example, I mean, an extreme example of this is when somebody is grieving. And I don't find it useful when people say this to me. And that's why I don't say to other people, feel better. And now you can imagine that emoji thing I invented with the cringing face and the thumbs up. Stay safe. Feel better.

No, what I will say if I have to say something and I usually, believe it or not, would prefer not to is I'll say, I hope it feels less terrible soon. because it will feel less terrible, but don't tell people to cheer up. But it's also the thing that I say when people are ill. Whoever, like if my lady friend, you know, she gets the migraines or as the English say, the migraines, you know, they also say lounge, which John hates. I'm going to start saying migraine just to piss him off. You know, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I'll say, hey, look, like kid's sick.

Maybe kid's got the barfies one night. And the next day you say, I'll say, hey, are you feeling less bad? because I think better has a specific meaning that it is useful to avoid because when you say better what you're saying to somebody was that they were broken and now they're fixed are you better like I think you know what I mean and I'm not better in the busted gut you know internet post uh that way but in the sense of like when you tell somebody like are you better

Are you asking them? Are you better? There's something like kind of like slightly, I don't know, shitty about that. The way that I don't know if you agree, but I feel like that's shitty. And that's why I like to say to people, are you feeling less bad? Does it hurt less? It lets them have expansiveness to talk about how they feel without you saying, are you ready to be the way I expect you to be?

AlexWell, I agree, except I disagree. I don't care. I've never thought – no, I've never thought – I've never gone that deep in terms of like – you know what? I apologize. I am not open-minded enough to think about like I might want to choose to have this broken foot my whole life. Like I don't know. You seem to – what's an issue?

MerlinHere's the thing. Here's the thing. I'm sorry. I'm changing the topic and I'm making it about me and that's what I do. What pisses me off is the implication. And again, and I feel like I've got to say this about the goddamn Wisdom Project and about everything, which is like, no, seriously, did you skip the part about how this is all stuff that I needed to hear? This is the most embarrassing thing that I could share with you because every fucking piece of this, however many thousand words, is me going, you know what? I should get better about that. I should get better about not just throwing leftovers in the refrigerator.

I should get better about not dropping my shit off at goodwill. It's all broken and unusable. Each one of those things in there is a disclosing and vulnerable way for me to say, hey, maybe you do this too. And maybe I could save you some aggravation by realizing that, like, you know, that stuff, right? And so what I'm trying to say here is I think there's a thing that people do and I very much know that I do. I have a long record of having done this shitty, often guy, assigned guy at birth thing, which is when you say to somebody, you better know.

It's all the equivalent of like, am I in trouble? You're basically saying to somebody, I find you manageable when you act this way that I expect. And when you act a way that's not what I expect, it's disruptive to me. And so under the guise of caring about somebody, you say something shitty like, are you better? You still mad? Are you still depressed? Are you still, you know what I mean? Like, that's the part I'm talking about. I'm not trying to be just a word nerd. I'm saying like, well, first of all, can we stipulate that maybe words do actually fucking mean things?

And you could be fucked to take a minute to learn what words mean. But also your tone matters. Because when you say you have to be careful that what you're not actually – you have to be careful that what you're saying doesn't come off as, hey, are you done being different than the way I expect you to be? That's what I mean.

AlexAre you done? Are you done? I don't know.

MerlinI'm never – I'm rarely, rarely done. I don't even really fall asleep. I just run out of steam and need to rest for a minute and I breathe heavily. I got a black market CPAP.

AlexAre we going to talk about that?

MerlinDo we get to talk about that? No.

AlexGive us your fucking doobbyfriday.com. After show. Yeah. Doobbyfriday. Wait. No. Patreon.com slash doobbyfriday.

MerlinSee, now we're also getting into a really bad habit of claiming we're going to talk about something. I'm going to stop saying I'm going to make you watch videos because I think that's misleading and no one cares. But we might talk about that. I'm in the midst of working some CPAP angles.

What I'm saying is if you can get a libertarian doctor, do it. The thing about this is I'm done. Talk.

AlexNo, I really want to go into libertarian doctors or anarchist doctors, but this probably isn't the thing.

MerlinWe're talking about your apology. Your very sincere apology to me about not letting me know soon enough you're back to the way I find you manageable.

AlexOh, yes, I am. Well, oh, let's not go that far. I mean, I still am.

MerlinI know what I was in for.

AlexI know what I was in for.

MerlinYou know? In for a dime, in for a neurotypical dollar. That's what they say in England. Gives me meat grains. It gives me meat grains, isn't it? Isn't it?

AlexAluminium.

MerlinAluminium. I need to schedule me aluminium. Schedule? Sorry, take two. I.

Speaker AWhat happens today? Anyways.

AlexDo you ever find that after you're watching a lot of British television and then you hear a podcast program by a friend of the show, Mike Hurley, who doesn't really sound like a Brit anymore?

MerlinHe's lost so much of his Britishness. He doesn't sound like a Brit. He sounds like an 11-year-old British girl. Yeah. Hello, Mike. Tap in the body of a 10-year-old British girl.

I get affected by accents. And sometimes like I just, S3 of Dairy Girls is not up on Netflix yet, but I've used my various trucks to locate it. And so I've been binging a little bit on S3 of Dairy Girls. And that show has an effect on me. Like English accents, the various – first of all, as people from England will tell you, there's no such thing as an English accent.

Like there are – you could have a Newcastle accent or you could have a London, like a posh received English. You know what I mean? There's no English accent. I mean there's also no English food, but that's a different matter.

If you find that ballatable, woof.

Speaker AEasy.

MerlinYou probably accidentally went to Europe, which it's not part of. But yeah, Mike lost a lot of that. What I was going to say here was, oh yeah, because you know the Northern Irish accent and the words. And Syracuse was on this before me. He's the one who recommended the show to me. And those words like weans or eons.

AlexOh, God, yeah. Eons.

MerlinYeah, like take care of the weans. Weans. And that will sometimes screw me up a little bit. When people speak English but with a very pronounced Wales, I love a Welsh accent.

AlexOh, Karen Gilliam.

MerlinOh, she's Welsh. I don't think I knew that.

AlexOh, I don't know. By Karen Gilliam, I do indeed mean Amy. Amy Pond? Yes, yes. So I don't know if she is actually Welsh. Oi.

MerlinI was going to start doing that more. I'm going to start going, oi.

Speaker AOi.

MerlinWhat's all this? That's just stupid fucking. What about you? Does that fuck you up? Right now, my kid and I are trying to learn how to speak with a New Zealand accent.

AlexOh, because of the vampires?

MerlinAlso, but Taika, but also like, and this is personal, it's insider stuff, but we feel we love the New Zealand's. We love, you know, I very much loved my visit to New Zealand, which is, you know, relatively short.

AlexYou made me cry. Yeah.

MerlinOh, fuck that. But the, thank you. I mean, no, but like the people there are just amazing. But there's a term that I think Syracuse ha coined on Rectis, secret Brit. You know, like when you watch a lot of TV shows, it's QED my entire life. Every night after 5 p.m., all I do is ask my wife what else this person was in and are they English, right? Secret Brits, people you never realize. But like not Sam Harris. He's the guy that does that bad podcast. Who's the guy in Jurassic Park and Hunt for the Wilder People?

Oh, fuck. You know the guy.

AlexYou know the guy. I mean, barely, but yes.

MerlinBut he was born in Ireland, but raised in, I think probably the Republic of Ireland, but I don't know. But then raised in New Zealand. So even when he speaks in his quote unquote New Zealand accent, it's kind of unusual. But no, we're a big Taika family. And now I feel like as a household, especially my kid and I, it's a running bit about like how we're cursed by people from New Zealand in particular. When you find out somebody's secretly in New Zealand, like Melanie Linsky.

Like when you watch, we watched. Oh, my God.

AlexRight.

MerlinOh, because you're the one who got me on. But I'm a cheerleader, which might now be one of my favorite movies. And when she talks, she's so cute with the glasses and that. Oh, my God. I love that movie. but when she's speaking and what I imagine is her natural accent you're like oh my god this is so fucking weird like even Charlize Theron I think that's how you say it the one max on the bar like she's from South Africa but like every interview she does I mean like Mel Gibson like speaks in what I

would call an American accent I don't think that's how she talks when she's in a bar with her kid looking at an iPad or when you know when Mel Gibson is castigating the Jews I bet he doesn't sound like –

AlexI thought that was Gwyneth Paltrow.

MerlinWas it Charlize Theron? No, I'm pretty sure it was Charlize Theron. I don't know.

AlexOh.

MerlinYeah, who also – no spoilers, but it appears he has a cameo in The Boys. But – no, but didn't you hear Taika? We just call him Taika. Like basically we're very into the Taika cinematic universe. And like sometimes especially when he's doing something like Korg in Ragnarok, even when he's doing Hitler, like there's a certain kind of – Like him and Reese Darby both have such like sharp, piquant, you know, New Zealand accents.

And like I would like to learn how to do that. I still sometimes if I'm not doing a Pepsi challenge side by side, New Zealand v. Australia, I still. I mean, like I feel like at this point I like I get that, especially that one like vowel sound that's like they would say pen, they might say pin. or like you know you watch enough wellington paranormal which is really good and like you

Alexstart picking all that up well wait wellington paranormal what there was a movie called what we

Merlindo in the shadows which has a spinoff tv hang on hang on spinoff tv show called what we do in the shadows but the i think probably much less known spinoff tv show is called wellington paranormal And there's a couple cops that show up, I think I want to say like late in the second act of the movie. And it's about these – you know what I mean? There's the man and the woman who show up in the movie. And Wellington Paranormal is the two of them working in Wellington, which I've been to, where I talked about –

AlexAnd they made me cry. Yeah.

MerlinSo they're cops, but they work for this guy. The guy's name is Maka, and he's amazing. And it's just a regular police outpost. But let me just pitch you on this. Maka is really, really funny and very regional. And their boss, the two cops, their boss is extremely into paranormal activity, which he can't really exactly investigate on Maine. And so he's created this tiny, tiny little – he turned a closet into an office just for talking about and dealing with paranormal things. And he'll pull the two of them in there.

And it's almost like a Monster of the Week show in some ways where they've got to go fight. And one of my favorite episodes is where all of the old technology is becoming like a rat king or like a transformer. Like the fax machine is turning into a monster. And, of course, there's lots of vampires and werewolves and stuff like that. But you should check it out. And I've got it on my thing if you need it. But I love that accent.

AlexOh, this is definitely a Matthew show. I'm going – oh, it's because Taika didn't necessarily work. Oh, executive producer. Oh, there we go. As soon as you said Wellington Paranormal, of course, I looked at it, even though I definitely do pay attention while I podcast and don't touch my keyboard.

MerlinI think it's a Jemaine. It might be a Jemaine thing. Jemaine, I think, is like the showmaker guy.

AlexYes.

MerlinHe's like the producer guy. And I think Taika is often like a creative producer, too. But I think he's, you know what I mean? Like Jemaine seems like a machine. He puts out a lot of what we think of as, you know, New Zealand documentary board content.

AlexWhat I kind of just realized, though, too, is I don't know how to put this in a way that doesn't sound weird, but they both Jemaine, Taika, whoever in that like club of actors.

MerlinYeah, Reese Darby, who was their manager on Flight of the Conchords. Yeah. And also, of course, famously, you've seen our flag is death, right?

AlexNope. Only the first episode.

MerlinOh, my fucking God.

AlexI know. I know. Listen.

MerlinThis is what happens when I don't give you homework.

AlexThere's a lot of gay content that other people have been making me watch. And I hear that there's something.

MerlinUnfortunately, there's absolutely no gay content in that. So bummer.

AlexYes, that's what I've been. Okay. Well, the people who they work with all have a very distinct look. Not distinct together. As soon as I looked up Wellington Paranormal, I'm like, oh, there's those. That's the lady. That's the guy who did it.

MerlinYeah, the cop, I'm forgetting their names right now. My kid would kill me. But the guy who's the male cop in that is in Hunt for the Wilder People. Did you ever see that one, Hunt for the Wilder People?

AlexNo.

MerlinDelightful. Taika Waititi movie starring not Sam Harris. I'm going to go ahead and look up this man's name. Actor Sam Jurassic Park. Oh.

AlexSam Neill? Yes. Is that possible? We're talking about the guy. Yeah, because it was a big deal. I remember since he was in a relationship with lady I had a crush on who, but they're like 20 years apart.

Maybe not. Who? God, fuck. Who is the cute lady?

MerlinHe's been married to Noriko Watanabe and Lisa Harrow. Does that help at all?

AlexNo.

MerlinMaybe he was just.

AlexHis co-star.

MerlinOh, Laura Dern?

AlexLaura Dern. Thank God.

MerlinOh, call the cops.

AlexI know. I know.

MerlinWe're scouring high and low for a Laura Dern minifig right now because we are, Our household is super into Laura Dern right now. She's amazing.

Speaker AOh, she's fucking amazing.

MerlinThe gays love her.

AlexWho doesn't?

MerlinThe best ugly crier in the business, so say I.

AlexMmm. Oh.

MerlinI would say it's worth your time to – when I first turned on Our Flag is Death, of course I was really pumped because it's part of this, you know, contingent. It's such a small country, and they make so much stuff that I love, including espresso. but like there's so many good shows and tv and all that stuff and actors and all these people from this tiny little country but um i first got it first started watching our flag is death and i was like i don't know man i think i said this but it seems pretty broad but i it really does start

to bloom i mean the first episode is really funny and it will be a thousand times funnier once you've watched more episodes but like the the guy who played hodor he's fucking great hodor's in it

AlexI saw the first episode and thought it was cute. It's a little broad, a little campy. Yeah, yes. And there's only so much violence I can take, which is why I've taken a break from the boys. Oh, boy. Yeah, that's understandable. But now apparently some people are mad and some people are happy and there's something to do with fascism. What? Who's bad?

MerlinWhat? What are you talking about?

AlexOh, doesn't one of the bad guys, like something bad happens and people were upset, but he's like a Trump allegory. and the conservatives who watched it were mad. I don't know. I'm not on Twitter that much, so I don't really understand anything that's going on on the Internet.

MerlinIt seems like you half or one-eighth understand quite a variety of things right now.

AlexYes. I mean, one-eighth is generous.

MerlinDoes that factor into the way you think about things? Are you aware of how little you actually understand about what you don't understand?

AlexConstantly.

MerlinIt's okay if you don't or do, but does that factor into it at all?

AlexI don't know anything about most things. Oh, okay. Everything is slightly confusing. And if people don't think they're confused all the time, I just wonder how much they actually –

MerlinOh, I'd be very suspicious. Yes. This is a problem with motivational people or life hack hucksters. I mean I've said this before, but it's like – are you sure you're fucked up in the way you think you are? You like to sell yourself as this person who used to not be good at stuff and now you are. and that qualifies you to like, you know, put your advice on people. But like, I don't trust self-help people who aren't a little bit fucked up. But like fucked up in the way within normal parameters,

like if you're fucked up because you're psychotic and like if you're basically, oh, I have some Keith Renier content. If you're fucked up and like a Keith Renier type who's out there, you know, playing women against each other and doing all kinds of fucked up stuff and having your book ghostwritten and that kind of stuff. That's broken in a way I don't find wholesome or useful. You know what I'm saying?

AlexOh, yes. Very much like all of those delightful young men in – it's not Pray and Obey. That's what they say. What's the – oh, Keep Sweet? Good God. Two episodes into that documentary series.

MerlinOh, my God. Oh, shit, dog. so did i mention in passing did i mention to you that i've been going around with my lady friend trying to figure out because i i started i told you this right like i started watching the key preo baby sweet show you know right and i said to my kid my kid said oh you're watching this i said

Alexoh yeah yeah i think i've seen it before did i tell you the story it's in the merlin podcast

Merlinuniverse i think and the kid goes oh this just came out a couple days ago and i'm like are you sure this came out a couple days ago? Because I know I watched a documentary about Warren Jeffs, and I'm losing my goddamn mind with my lady friend saying, like, I remember a different documentary about this, told from a different point of view, and much more focused on one of the very young women and, like, her journey. And she claims that she knows what it is, and she's told me, I don't remember it. With that said, how about this, dude? It's a Showtime

documentary from 2015 called Prophet. No, this is different, I'm pretty sure, but I made her watch this the other night. There are apparently at least three pieces of streaming content about what a piece of shit Warren Jeffs is. Okay? So there's that one, there's that one. Prophet's Prey, P-R-E-Y. Have you seen this? No, but it sounds familiar. It's about a 100-minute documentary from 2015. Imagine you took that whole series and smashed it down into 100 minutes, like got to the shittiness of Warren Jeffs a lot faster.

OK, it's really good. And and understanding now this is seven years before that that documentary came out. It's it's much earlier on. And it's all about John John Krakauer and talking to him. He's interviewed constantly. He's so great. He's constantly throughout it. You remember the really sweet guy who was an engineer and an inventor and they stole his company, his space shuttle company, and took his family away? He's in it. 2015. I'll put it in notes. Prophets Pray. Highly recommend it, even if you watch the series.

Is the series on Netflix? I feel like it is.

AlexNot Prophets Pray.

MerlinNo, no, no, no. The Keep Sweet Warren Jeffs one. It's going to feel very stretched out when you watch a super tight 100-minute documentary that goes from the origin of the church through Rulon through Warren's shit to Warren being in jail and running the church from jail in 101 minutes.

AlexGod. It's a documentary, Alex. You like a good documentary. I'm told they're okay. But I'm just thinking about all of these people who have escaped cults or survived cults, and they're just now in this documentary racket of being interviewed over and over and over.

MerlinOh, my God. It would be so insufferable.

AlexLike everyone who's gotten out of NXIVM.

MerlinIt would be like somebody showing up every few months and going, time to open your wound again. You ready?

AlexYeah. I mean, like, and then there's sometimes when someone doesn't want to be interviewed, there's like an ominous card of like, blah, blah, blah, declined, blah, blah, blah.

MerlinOh, like Doc Antle in Tiger King, the Tiger King sex spinoff.

AlexYeah.

MerlinDoc Antle would not speak to us for this.

AlexIt's like, well.

MerlinI wonder why.

AlexShocker.

MerlinThat guy's a piece of shit. What's it called? Bagram? Bagram? Bogwan? He's Bogwan is his name, right?

AlexI don't remember. I try to purge most of Tiger King from my mind. Not because it's not as good as people. I think it's very good. I just, hmm. I was on the Tiger King train, thought it was fantastic. And then when I heard, oh, Tiger King sequel, that'll be interesting. They're going to explore some of this more, right? And it just feels gross. I don't know.

MerlinWell, you know, another example of that that I think might be, I just sent you an upsetting photo. I apologize in advance. This features heavily in the 2015 documentary. Look at Warren and his bride.

AlexOh, my God.

MerlinShe's 12. She's 12 in that picture.

AlexOh, God. This is so fucked up.

MerlinYou know a good example of that? I thought, I don't know. I mean, don't drag me. I thought Making a Murderer was really well done, and I thought it was good storytelling. I mean, I'm not here to vouch for every single bit of any part of it, but like I thought Making a Murderer was really good. Do you remember the second season? And it was really all about the attorney, that woman, that attorney, that poor woman.

AlexI didn't watch the second season.

MerlinOh, it's not as good at all. And it really feels like from the beginning, I almost wonder if she produced it because it really is like this whole like, hey, look at me thing. Maybe she's representing Brendan, I want to say. They did me like Brendan Dassey.

Speaker ADid they?

MerlinNick and Murr dragged me out of bed wearing sweatpants. That's my John Mulaney voice.

AlexDid you know there's a subgenre of YouTube video of a piece of media being narrated by John Mulaney, but it's like pieces of John Mulaney.

MerlinOh, that sounds very TikTok. That sounds like the kind of thing that you watch is on TikTok.

AlexI mean, it was. Oh, actually, I think our editor Quinn sent me this. Hello, Quinn. John Mulaney giving commentary on the series Heartstopper, which is adorable.

MerlinOh, I've heard that's cute. It's very cute. You liked it? Okay.

AlexI did. I don't know if I love it.

MerlinIt's heartwarming and gay, right?

AlexIt's heartwarming and gay, but more importantly, you don't have the feeling of, oh my God, something bad's going to happen. Oh my God.

MerlinOh, I know. I love low stakes. I love a low stakes story.

AlexYes. Like the fact that like the worst thing that happens is bullying is astounding. And it was just a delight. Unlike, wait, I keep trying to pivot to Keith Raniere.

MerlinTo the John Mulaney. Oh, Keith Raniere. Oh, yeah.

AlexYeah. What's he?

MerlinOh, I don't know, man. I was just, I mean, this is a conversation that you have sometimes with your partner. and so what was i watching i was watching well you know okay so the so what we're talking about here keith renee is the guy um who's at the center of some pretty weird shit with a group called nexium and if you haven't seen it yet i would say it's so funny it's like the b movie and ants it's like you know that thing where like there'd be this like i don't know if this is an accident

but like two things will come out at roughly the same time. Like Studio City on the Sunset Strip and 30 Rock both came out about the same time. Two different shows with two different POVs about, you know, basically Saturday Night Live. If you were going to do like a Romana Clay sort, not a Romana Clay, but like, you know, about that world. Think about, oh God, it was ER. ER came out the same time as that other, was it Chicago Hope or something? It just seems like there'll be the two pieces of media. And it seems to happen a lot. I don't know if it's a Hollywood thing where a rumor gets out and you want to like beat somebody to it.

There's two different documentaries at least about Fyre Fest.

AlexIn that case, it was a race to who could get one out faster.

MerlinYeah. And like one tends to like maybe have a – if you're the kind of person that watches two different entire TV series, you may like one more than the other. And a similar thing has happened here. So there's a, I think, very good, maybe the canonical one about NXIVM is called Seduced. And that is, I don't, if it's not produced by the lady from Falcon Crest, it might as well be.

What is her name? The one whose daughter, China, like, or whatever her name is, India?

Speaker AIndia has a country name.

MerlinShe, her daughter getting wound up in NXIVM. And then remember her mother whose royalty gets involved in all of that. and I enjoyed NXIVM made me or the Seduced made me so mad and then I watched the other one which is more focused on that couple that were like the filmmakers inside NXIVM and

Alexoh I don't think I've seen this one

Merlinwell here's the thing having watched Seduced then I watched that one and I thought it succumbs to that thing we talk about with documentaries of like is this really about the topic or is this really kind of like a showcase for your deal?

AlexOh, like, oh, suddenly I'm in the story.

MerlinRight, but like from the outset, like they're sitting there being interviewed and it's like their movie. But you know, the thing is, I went back and I watched that one again and it was much more effective than I remembered and much better in some ways at focusing specifically on what the NXIVM experience was for women inside of there. I mean, obviously, because of the sexual abuse, ritualistic sexual abuse, but also just the, to call it gaslighting, does not even go near what was happening inside of NXIVM.

So Keith Reneer, the ding-a-ling behind all of this, he was playing so many people against so many other people, and he was just so manipulative of everybody. um i thought it was really good storytelling the thing i've been thinking about the last week and a half i i i think of the people i mean i guess you could set aside people like you know james jones because 900 people died but i think keith rainier might be one of the shittiest people

that ever conducted one of these things because of what he did like directly to people what he cause to have happen, the scale of what he was doing, it's international. But also just like, when you get into the weeds about what he did and what his group did operationally, it's... I guess he... I feel like he might narrowly nose out Warren Jeffs. Although Warren Jeffs did have kid stuff. But, you know what I'm saying? Keith Raniere, if you go back and

re-watch or think about it, that guy is fucking unbelievable. Just so like deliberately Part of his deal, I mean, with Warren Jeffs, I think he just he had a thing for young girls and he was compulsive. And I'm not trying to excuse it, but like because, again, in that second one, you get much more into like when he was principal of the school and would call girls in to talk about their wardrobe. And one guy who's like two or three different women in his family have been, you know, of different generations have been screwed up by him.

AlexRight. Like you understand the motivations. not that they are good or not that they aren't evil like keith reineer is more like an agent of

Merlinchaos like in addition to being the fucking worst and a total like you just even going back to his pyramid scheme stuff from the 90s like he's he's just this dumb huckster but he's sold everybody on this thing like starting with like i will just be kissing all of you on the mouth whenever i feel like it and then like what he what he does even like that the girl from smallville obviously does not come out looking great in that but a thing that's less heavily documented for obvious oh

katherine oxenberg in in the seduced one that katherine oxenberg's yeah that one i saw yeah yeah yeah i thought it was quite good but i guess but you know how like you become like a like a master and then like you control another woman's diet and all that stuff they they talk about that a lot in seduced but they go much more into like yeah but remember keith rainier who's a horrible sex man also comes from pyramid schemes and it isn't like there's one it's think

about a pyramid scheme for abuse where like when you become a they call it a master like and you basically have to like control another woman guess what she starts getting women that she controls like I don't know I guess that was in seduced but this is really depressing but the whole idea of like operationalizing this entire pyramid scheme for like making women we should probably giving them food issues let's say yeah but and then just

saying like master you know master may I eat three peas or like whatever and like you know And just exercising all of that control. But then also with the Warren Jeff stuff, like I think that documentary does a good job. The the sweet stay sweet, pray one, pray, pray love one like that does a good job of saying, hey, look, these people have fucking nothing their entire life. And it's easy if you're somebody who's a goddamn heathen, like you're not going to appreciate what it means because you think, oh, you went to college and you think you're smart.

Like, whatever the fuck you were raised in is very difficult to shed. And I was saying this to my wife because, like, you know, she's never had, she's never been anything but just kind of mean about religion and faith because that's how she was raised. She's from a flinty, left-wing, New England family.

AlexSo everything seems like a cult, basically.

MerlinRight. So everything is easy enough to write off. And I'm not saying she's saying this, but I think there is a theme amongst people who think their background was normal to look at anything that they think is not normal and go, oh, obviously you're in a cult. This whole God thing is a cult and that's how you are. But what I said to her was, you know, hey, like, what if your mom, who, again, one of my favorite people of all time, my mother-in-law, my late mother-in-law, I said, what if your mom had been told, hey, you know, to get along here, there's a new set of rules here.

And that is that you need to act like you're 40 IQ points dumber all the time. And so you can never say another clever thing. You need to ask people to explain things extra hard to you. You never understand any of the jokes on TV. You follow? You say to my late mother-in-law, from now on, you're part of a group and you need to act like you're 40 IQ points dumber, but also it's critically important that everybody in your family, well, the women, also act 40 IQ points dumber. Imagine how it would kill the flinty left-wing matriarch of that family to be expected to do something so antithetical to the way you'd lived your entire life.

OK, so so what's the point? Well, the point is whatever you think is normal is normal to you. And being really cutting. I mean, it's basically like hanging out with Catherine Hepburn and his family in the aviator. Like you would not tell somebody. I know your whole life you've really thrived on like your ability to succeed at what you do. And she went to college in the 50s, all that kind of stuff. But from now on, you need to act a lot dumber because that's a new way of doing things. Well, those people could tell you, well, you were raised in a cult of thinking that women don't need to bow before men.

Think of that in reverse. If every woman in your family has had sex with the same man and you were raised in that and you aren't allowed to have the color red in your life, you've never seen a play or a movie, you're not allowed to play with other children. Warren Jeffs outlawed all of that stuff just by fiat. But if you were raised in that and that's normal and that's like what you know, imagine what so suddenly, hey, guess what? You're free. You can wear jeans.

I don't want to be – I don't want to wear jeans. I want to be loved by the heavenly father and the prophet. You know what I'm saying? Like if we just always – like I think we tend to reject all this stuff that's not like what we consider to be normal and not understand. And certainly I do this all the time with the red hat people, which is like I don't fully understand what it's like there. Kieran Healy had a great tweet today. Lived experience, what we used to call experience. I don't know what somebody's life was like in West Virginia, right?

Growing up in a – or like in a dope sick type town. And like so it's really easy for me to go, boy, you bumpkins are so sad because you can't be coal miners. And it's like, well, I revere all the things that have made me fucked up in an interesting way. But yet I'm able to reject everything about other people because they're hillbillies and weirdos.

AlexIt really fascinates me how obsessed we all are with, I mean, true crime especially has been dissected to death, like why we enjoy it, but especially now cults. And yet we can't imagine how just someone living 20 miles from us has just a completely different, oh God, I almost said lived experience. Ah, hi, I'm one of them. I'm one.

MerlinNo, I understand.

AlexThe tweet's coming from inside my brain. But you just can't imagine the experience somebody else has had. And on top of it, like, we can be all smarty pants and dissect, ah, yeah, this is.

MerlinYeah, cult is a word we use about other people. Right. You would never talk about the cult that you're in. You might say, I used to be in a cult, like Jenny Thomas. You might want to say, boy, that shit's fucked up. You might even say like, oh, I recently got out of a cult. Nobody talks about the cult that they're looking forward to converting to because by calling it a cult, you've adjudged that this is a worthless thing, a terrible – not worthless even, but like a terrible malignant thing that deliberately makes life terrible for other people.

You know what I mean? It's like you basically reduce it to that and it's like – you could say, oh, you're in that Mac cult. And I guess I'm kind of in the Mac cult. I would say I'm a Mac enthusiast, but I take your point.

AlexI was going to ask, has anybody genuinely accused you of being in a cult?

MerlinWe had a rectus where this was, I think, the main topic one week was like John, because of course John's never done anything wrong. And we were talking about that. And what did I say? I mean, I do not at all consider my experience in the Protestant church to be at all cult-like. Others may disagree and that's okay. But what was the one example? Oh, shit. I had a really good example that involved – I'll have to go back and look. But yeah, I think I have been.

You know what I – oh, so I think one that I mentioned was that my mom, after my father died, started selling – became a real estate agent. And long story short, like I was kind of grew up around stuff like a lot of – I think one of the things – Admittedly, a small slice of the pie. But one of the things, if you're doing my backstory on how I ended up with a website about personal productivity in 2004, it would be dishonest of me to say the books that she had about sales, motivation, positive thinking, all of those things, that that didn't have any effect on me.

AlexInteresting.

MerlinAnd I do feel like, I don't think it's a cult exactly. Forgive me. I'm not saying that all sales is a cult. But I am saying that like there is a, at the very least, a herd mentality in which you are encouraged to believe that you might eventually become the lead dog. Salesman of the month type stuff. And I do, I have been in places where there's a lot of pressure. I've had jobs that are way closer to a cult in some ways. The job that I had in the early 90s with Dave the Marketing Guy, I mean, it wasn't a cult.

But it's definitely not a black mark, but it's not a high point in terms of my growth as a human being. I liked what I did. I liked the money that I made at that job, the egregious $22,000 a year that I made at that job. But I also did become very hardened because we were working for giant companies who were being sued in toxic tort litigations. And so part of our job was to try and make poor people who'd been contacted by some terrible attorney, try to make them look bad and try to think of any reason in the world we could come up with for why they were sick or claimed to be sick.

A ton of it was bullshit. And I don't mean this to sound like an excuse, but the truth is that if General Electric got sued and somebody wanted $50,000, that's chump change to them. It was more like if there are certain attorneys they would have to deal with who were really in the business, what you might call ambulance chasers. That was one where like...

AlexSlippin' Jimmy.

MerlinSorry. Slippin' Jimmy. I didn't know that I wouldn't consider that a cult, but I definitely was part of the herd. You know? Mm-hmm. And what about you?

AlexOh, absolutely. I've been told that I'm in a cult more since 2020 than any other time. And it's the trans cult.

MerlinWait, wait. Rewind that. Say that again.

AlexI have been called... I have... Sorry. I have been told I am in a cult in 2020 more than I ever have before. And I have often because of being Catholic.

MerlinReally? For different things or the same thing?

AlexFor being, for the trans, I am a trans pedophile. And that is like, I mean, it's something that you just, like a lot of queer things, you just get used to it pretty quickly. And I'm like, yep, that's the new slur. Okay. Because it's like, yeah, of course it's terrible.

MerlinI think nowadays we finally figured out that you people are, what's the word? Groomers. You like grooming is what I heard.

AlexOh, God. Love a good brush. Love it. Love it. But the only reason I started really thinking about it the other day, well, not by the other day. I mean, like last year, it was like we are so obsessed with, including me, so obsessed with cults. And we watch so much media, specifically, literally, watch people talking about cults. If there was a queer cult, how do you think we're working these angles?

And including things like East Coast elites. It's like, how do you...

MerlinIt's because you want to get Hillary Clinton all organ on, or whatever it is that you dissect from terrified children. Yeah, yeah. But like it also reflects that like in a minute I'm going to toss out a phrase that I love that I think relates to this. I think, you know, it is a very fast and easy way to discard a bunch of people and to make them seem dangerous. You know, my personal favorite, of course, is hypocrisy where like you accuse somebody of being a hypocrite, whether they actually are or not. But like from a remove with your long range rifle, you've decided that somebody is a hypocrite without knowing fuck all about their actual life.

and you know i think in a similar way here because why because on the internet once you're accused of being a hypocrite your life is over and you have to go and live under a rock with no internet and like it's just so there are certain kinds of phrases that or words that we use that function as a kind of smart person code for like oh you know you know what that means right here's that here's the phrase i think i've mentioned on here before but i love this phrase um thought terminating cliche. Internet science site. It's a form of loaded language, often passing as folk

wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance. Thought terminating cliche. Its function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, ending the debate with a cliche rather than a point. And I think in some ways, I could make an argument. I don't know if you'd be persuaded. I think you can make an argument that the word cult, which has a meaning. Like, yeah, 900 people dying at Jonestown? It seemed pretty culty to me. Keith Raniere in NXIVM, which is spelled very weird. Try to Google it.

Speaker AI hate it.

MerlinI hate it so much. And it reminds me of the worst of Apple, you know? Max and Max and X and X and 10 and X and fucking, you know. What are you, like Julius Caesar? Knock it off.

But a word like cult, yeah, it has a meaning, but like, what is a cliche, really? A cliche is kind of like a snap-to-grid model of the world. A cliche in some ways is like, I round off all of the interesting edges, and the snap-to-grid tells me, oh, you go in this pile. Thought-terminating cliche, though, I think it's a really valuable term to think about and to turn upon ourselves and go like, how often have, like, we had one opportunity with

the sorting hat on this idea five, 10, 40 years ago. And now we always just drop it into the same pile. And like, and we write it off with a word like cult. And it's like, well, is that, is your understanding of that word growing? Is your understanding of how you use it changing? And like, well, if you had to call, you know, like me and the whole, like, what's your second least favorite thing about this job? Like, okay, well, if this weren't a cult, give me the second or third next word that you would use to describe it. And I bet a lot of people would have trouble with that.

So your first answer might be, oh, if I'm not allowed to say it's a cult, I'll say it's a religious sect. Okay, we're getting a little better there. But like, if you're not allowed to use your one word, like the file card you use for everything that represents a certain kind of thing to you, tell me a different word. Give me five words for that that aren't cult. Let me watch you actually turn that over in your mind and come back with something. Because sure, sure enough, it could be what we all agree is a cult and it's bad and the tribe has to expel those bad people.

Isn't it ironic that there's a tribe inside of each of those quote unquote cults that feels the same way, but whatever.

AlexBad apples.

MerlinAll about throwing people out of the tribe. And, you know, that's I think, again, Merlin thinks words are valuable, you know, deal with it. Like, but valuable can also mean like valuable and like how do you even replace the power of words? If you've created this publish and subscribe idea that as soon as you don't understand a group of people that doesn't dress the way that you like or eat the way you like, you call it a cult. Or for that matter, gender the way you like, you just call them a cult. I don't know. It's a little bit lazy.

Alexyou're such a writer man oh shit i think you're right oh fuck that's the problem

Merlinit is i didn't really get that till now and now i see it i do that yep god damn it you're welcome

Alexyou're welcome

Merlindo you want to talk about the challenge yeah i think we should talk about the challenge um doga doga doga doga we psyched you out last week and now we're here again to say please watch the film in a very exciting way Christmas time movie.

Hi, everybody.

AlexOh, I think I'm in like a Hallmark cult. Oh, okay. Anyway, this week's challenge was to no seriously watch the film.

MerlinYeah. What happened was that Alex and I were both pretty excited about this movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once. And I honestly did not mean this as like a – at least I didn't intend it as – So we're going to watch everything. We're very excited to talk about it. And you would be forgiven, like my dear friend Alex, you could be forgiven for being extremely confused about last week's episode because I made so many references to stuff about the film.

I said what we do in the shadows. Everything everywhere. I made so many references to stuff that I learned from the director's commentary and Alex gamely played along. when I said stuff like, oh, when they say the chair is a practical effect. You now probably know what that means, but you didn't then.

AlexWait, yes, I... Sorry. How would you know that? Because I watched, like, every interview and everything I could get my hands on. Well, should we fucked up? Because I was so horny for this, yeah.

MerlinAnd so this is not going to be... So the thing was, though, it occurred to me that if Alex had not seen what I consider to be a very entertaining director's commentary, I just said like and we have a lot to say about this and we actually did at least I said a lot last week the idea was hit pause so to speak not do the challenge last week and if whether when you had the opportunity to watch the commentary I don't want to make this all about the commentary but I think talking about the movie could be more fun if you've seen the commentary and moreover

it also buys everybody another week if you don't want to watch this movie that's cool but like if you do want to watch the movie or okay save for the show but like if you do want to see the movie or if you want to see the movie and then watch the commentary if two people get to do that like welcome to my tribe everyone else is a cult

Speaker Aso the challenge this week is as

MerlinAlexandra said is no seriously watch everything everywhere all at once that was the episode we'll see you next time

AlexI fucking love this movie I fucking love this movie I don't even know if I have anything more

Merlinto say. Can we just call straight

Alexhere? Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

MerlinAnd we get the horn sound, Jason's horn sound. Okay, so seriously, Alex and I both think you might enjoy it. It's at least worth your time to check it out. But I don't want to dither about this. We dithered a lot last week about trying to avoid spoilers. We're going straight into full-on. We're not just going to spoil the movie. I'm not sure there's that much to spoil. But we are going to spoil the movie, but we're also going to spoil the commentary. So if you want to save that for yourself and keep it special, and enjoy it in your room after your parents have gone to bed, that's fine. But anyway, spoiler horn.

AlexOh, my God. Did you like the movie? Oh, my God. You know what? I'm feeling meh about it. But, okay, really, you didn't know who the Daniels were before this?

MerlinOh, I knew. I was just fucking with you.

AlexNo, I'm like, have you – so you hadn't seen any of – did later use –

MerlinI mean, what is the any? They have one other film, right?

AlexNo, no. But there's so many commercials and so many music videos. You're a big music boy.

MerlinOh, I love music. I've got all of those.

AlexWell, I thought that perhaps you might have come.

MerlinPlay me commercials and I guess music videos by whatever the Daniels is.

AlexYour friend was just one of the best commercial filmmakers. What? You know, I apologize. Mr. Sandwich is one of the best commercial filmmakers or filmmaking commercialers.

MerlinMr. Sandwich sounds like a canceled Sesame Street character. Every time you say it, it upsets me.

AlexMr. Sandwich.

Speaker AMr. Sandwich.

AlexHe's having problems. I'm just your second cousin. It'll be fine.

Speaker ASandwich, sandwich, sandwich.

MerlinWait, it's the Jingle Bells, right?

Speaker ASandwich, sandwich, sandwich. Sandwich, sandwich, sandwich.

AlexOh, boy.

MerlinHe almost sings every song, everything to the tune of Jingle Bells.

AlexNo. No.

Speaker AJacket, jacket, jacket. Jacket, jacket, jacket.

MerlinI got Noodle on the mind today. He's one of the most successful commercial filmmakers.

AlexOkay. How?

MerlinOh, boy. I'm not sure what that has to do with this movie.

AlexThis movie, Everything Everywhere, All at Once, I've been waiting. Not quite a decade. Well, I don't know. I think they have been working on this for so long. And every once in a while, one of the directors would pop up in an interview teasing this project they were working on, which was supposed to be this sci-fi, they called it a sci-fi action multiverse drama. And I'm like, what the fuck does that mean? But I want to see it.

MerlinBetween that and I guess probably, if you were to give me that, I don't know if that's not a log line, I guess, but that like genre description combined with, oh, and by the way, here's the cast. It's a bunch of people you've never heard of, plus James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis and the woman from Crouching Tiger and remember the little boy in the Indiana Jones movie? He's in a tune. He fights with a fanny pack. What was this movie about again?

James Hong, isn't he dead? No, he's only 93. He's only 93. He's got a coffee pot on his wheelchair and an adding machine.

AlexAnd he really likes playing with pudding. Oh, my God.

MerlinIt's special. Isn't it a special movie?

AlexIt's so, so. And it's, here's a word. It is unique. I truly don't think there is a movie that has ever been made that is like this, both in story and technique. The reason the director's commentary brought me so, so, so much joy, which is an iTunes extra, but you really have to want to dig for it.

MerlinSorry, just in passing. Do you agree, though? It's good.

AlexOh, it's brilliant. Yeah. I hope that they do more in the future.

MerlinThey're so cute and they're so down to earth and they do a thing that is considered unfashionable today, but they're really – they've entertained themselves. And they keep saying stuff like, I really love this shot or I really love – and they're very complimentary to everybody involved in the movie. But I love how giddy they are. Just real quickly, a framing device that I picked up anyway from the commentary is – it's like, hey, this is Daniel Kwan. And hey, Daniel, we're doing this. And like as they're beginning, like the credits are still running at the beginning.

The beautiful cut, that beautiful production credit that kicks it off. So good. But they're like – and we just started getting some of our first like reactions and not reviews even but like a lot of praise from people that we love. And you can tell they're a little bit giddy that it went okay. And on top of all that, then they have to go and they're like promoting the film. And then they have to like go into a studio and I guess in mostly one session do the commentary. So it's exciting because you can tell they're excited about the movie and they like the movie.

They're not sitting there like talking like it's like Cinema Callie or something. Like, you know what I mean? Like, they're like, oh, God, I love this shot. And look how it changes aspect ratio here. And oh, my God. It's really good.

AlexIt is my favorite, perhaps my favorite podcast of 2022. It is the Daniel's Director's Commentary. It just not just the way they talk about the movie and the way they talk about the art, but the way they talk to each other. And you get to see how their brains.

MerlinTwo different brains. Oh, exactly. They're so complimentary. You know, we're talking. It's funny. I finally made a diagram. I have two diagrams I've been working on this week with my kid. One is the rat king of northern European acting families that I always forget. Like, I know Mads Mikkelsen, and I know he's Danish, but he's, who's his brother? And it's, oh yeah, Mads Mikkelsen's brother is the guy in that episode of Sherlock where he licks the woman's face and has the mind palace.

Like, not to be confused with Dr. Selvig, or not to be confused with Michael Nyquist. Like, there's all these different people that I get really confused, right? The other one was pairs of actors. I'm like, wait a minute. Okay, I'm going to finally settle this. You got the Daniels. You've got the Cone brothers. You've got the Rousseau brothers who also worked on Community famously. But no, that was all new to me. But they just seem so young and full of life. And this has to have been – you watch that short but very fucking funny blooper thing.

At least in that, it looks like it was the most fun thing ever to do. But, oh, my God. Think about all the stunts. think about like all the having to reset for something where they just threw somebody into a wall and it didn't go right like all the details of making sure you can see this google eye and this scene like all it must a lot of care and love went into this movie it's nice that the

Alexcast got along but boy was a lot of work i i watching all of the little featurettes and then also listening to the commentary i'm kind of done with the whole idea of like fuck work isn't your family like sure yes under our you know i kind of mentioned work last week but yeah under like

Merlinthe capitalist notion of work like i like that alex well i was talking about this with like you know is it really that bad to have it's a very sure i don't know it feels like some shitty Sheryl Sandberg thing of like very privileged bullshit thing to be able to go, I have a separation between my life and your work. Well, lucky you. Like not everybody has that and not everybody wants that. I don't suffer from an overflow between those things. I learned to manage that at a time when I had an undoable project for work and an undoable

project in life called A Baby. Like I had to fucking manage it. But I agree with you. I agree with you. Yeah. You know what I mean though? that like it's a little not privileged i hate that word but you know what i mean it's a little shitty to like be making these pronouncements about how you're unhealthy because you haven't made even as you've worked from your fucking bedroom for two years you haven't made enough

Alexof a line between those do you even ski right and and it's like i i totally get it because it's like yes your boss isn't going it is not like your mom but also and i i love the title of that book and

Merlinthing i believe is your job can't love you that is very true yeah yeah keep that in mind and uh

Alexit's i don't know i just really believed multiple actors and crew members and i'm like honestly like we've not like they feel like family but it's like we've created like a really like weird little family here and and you know what when you're during he's only calling robinson we're all a big family we're all a big family when when you're on set you're family and then when he's on the bed he says it again i almost cry oh no oh fuck oh colin uh but um no when you're making a

movie and making a movie during covid where it's like yep you're gonna live you're you're just gonna live in this hotel for a while and only see these people of course you're going to form intense emotional connections and and then it was reinforced when they kept referencing who did what on the film while they were doing the commentary of like oh yeah this yeah a lot of

Merlintimes it was like this daniel did or that daniel did and then they're like well no actually like that was heavily influenced by this you know this stunt guy or this you know or at the very least

Alexthe team of like yeah our our production staff it's like an organ it's like an organism though

Merlinlike every every part everybody has like a like a little role and i haven't seen a director's

Alexcommentary like that in a very long time well actually i haven't seen a director's commentary like that for a long time but the reason i kind of dropped off watching a lot of them was it was very um i don't know sort of almost an incestuous like marketing thing of like yeah and there's hammer thor's hammer woo isn't that cool i i haven't seen if there is a director's commentary I don't know.

MerlinYou know, it's funny you should say that, though, because, oh, shit. Is it? Fuck. The guy from the problematic guy who did the first Avengers movie, Josh. Josh Whedon. Josh Whedon. Yes. Oh, my God. The director's commentary for Avengers, the first one, is so fucking good because it's just basically him just sort of apologizing for every shot in the movie because there wasn't enough budget for it. It's amazing. He's like, this is all done in one large room in Atlanta. like we did not have the time didn't have time to make this look better you just feel for the guy

Alexyou know oh god that man does not make good pr decisions uh but the uh but and then with the um the the way that they were talking about either specific people or what uh specific departments did on either whether it be a shot or an entire set piece, it was kind of mind-blowing to see two directors

who are still really entrenched in the process and they're not handing it off to the first and second DAs. It just felt really exciting.

MerlinThey're still young and hungry and they have energy and enthusiasm. to like it's not you know they're not like the ceo of the movie like they're really getting their

Alexhands dirty in a lot of this stuff and i didn't realize how little money they had like it's not that it's like a um you know a low budget movie but well i mean compared to most thing most like blockbusters it it really is i think it was what like five i i forget but god the amount like they didn't have um enough money to do what actor or uh what was this wasn't in a commentary but it was

like in a variety article but part of the reason they were so happy to use their choreography not

Merlinstaff um like the guy the guy who's like a puppy with the energy the well and also the uh officer

Alexor the like office guard man security that's what i'm talking about that's what i'm talking about

MerlinThe guy who comes out of the elevator and like that's one of our choreographers and we went to use him. But like it's so hard to get him to calm down and just act. They said he's like a puppy. Yeah.

AlexThe happy guy.

MerlinThe scene where he fights Wayman.

AlexOh, my God. The Jackie Chan like stances in that scene. God, I have no words because everything they said in that director's commentary. It's like, oh, good job, guys. because the thing that you wanted the audience to feel, I felt. And then on top of that, like watching it a third time, it's like, oh, yes, I see that little donut again. Oh, my God, there's another googly eye there. It was just...

MerlinIt's unbelievable.

AlexIt just feels so organic. And to realize that it probably was... Sorry, the movie just feels really, really organic.

MerlinWhat a great team effort, you know? Mm-hmm, yeah. Can I share something that's kind of odd? this is very strange. There's a woman that I ended up following on Twitter and I mean, this is classic, you know, internet 2022.

This is the first time I've ever made any attempt to say her name and I'm so sorry. Taffy Brodesser-Ackner. And she's just really, really fun on Twitter. I like her. And Madeline's like, oh yeah, she wrote, Fleischman is in trouble. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's her thing. She wrote Fleshman is in trouble. And she's like, that's a really good book. Like I read that a couple of years ago. It's like really good. And she's just fun on Twitter. And she has been on set while they make the Hulu TV series.

AlexThere's going to be a.

MerlinOh, so are you familiar with it?

AlexOh, I've read it. I love that book. Yeah.

MerlinOh, shit dog. You ready for this? Let me just pull this up real quick. We've got Jesse Eisenberg as Toby Fleshman. Lizzie motherfucking Kaplan as Libby. holy claire danes as rachel adam brody as seth and then other people include christian slater anyway she's been on set this whole time photographing it and talking about it and you can just tell like she's just giddy about the whole experience and so if you follow she's uh taffy akner so we'll put it in notes um taffy akner and it's just been really sweet she's

posted these wonderful photos is it from like a different time or is it from now but lots of Pictures of Claire Danes in like fun outfits and Lizzie Kaplan and Adam Birdie and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just been great. And things have started to wind down. And then I think today was the last day of production. But yesterday she said the sweetest thing. And I want to – this is apropos of you talking about the team and the family on a set. And I found this – I guess she should be a writer because I thought this was really good.

This is June 21st. Today is the last day of production on Fleischman. It was hard and good. And also it feels like the day I finished building my dream house with me and 250 of my best friend's hands and then celebrated by striking a match that would burn it and the city around it to ash.

AlexOh, that's so good. She should. She should be a writer. You guys should hang out.

MerlinIsn't that kind of what we're talking? I mean, like you think about like, I mean, I can I especially when I was younger. going into like a novel experience orientation week in college comes to mind the very terrible not very good awful time when i worked in the middle of the night doing basically garbage collection at a hardware store remodeling like it really seemed to like exist out of time and i got weirdly close think about jury duty you get weirdly close to people on jury duty but like in this case

Like my very good friend, friend of the show, Taffy, says, you build up this entire world and then you kind of burn it down. And like for the people who like change the gels or, you know, make the sets or whatever, like that's their job. And we can make this again if we have to. We save these flats. But to somebody who's a stranger to that world showing up there, it must feel heartbreaking to watch that world and the team that built it like disappear like a person at a time.

Speaker AYeah. What was that?

MerlinI think that... There's a scene in the S3E1 of Derry Girls. I get Claire and Aaron. I get their names confused.

Claire's the overachieving girl, and Aaron's the main girl. And she goes, I think it's time we need to address the elephant in the room. And Orla goes, where?

because it did sound like an elephant just went by a little bit.

AlexIt was adorable.

MerlinYeah, well, I do what I can. But yeah, yeah, this feeling. But like, I'm really seriously, you've earned your treat. If you've seen the movie, I think you should see the movie a couple of times before you see the, listen to the commentary, like I said, in the after show last week or whenever last week. But if you watch the movie, you can treat yourself to the bloopers. And man, what a delightful looking group. They just seem so fun.

AlexAnd so hard working, which sounds like a strange thing, I guess, to say.

MerlinBut like physically, like every scene where you see like a blooper where something happens, like you don't know how what time of day that was, which take that was. And there's so much, even if you're not doing every single stunt. And it looks like they did a fair number of their own stunts. I mean, Michelle Yao, is that right?

AlexYeah.

MerlinOK. Like, you know, she's in Crouching Tiger. She fucking rules. Like she knows what she's doing. I guess Wayman knows what he's doing a little bit too because like but like swinging a fanny pack around your neck and having it go back and like that's physically demanding work in that depressing little office you know that they're in. Oh my god. That's very demanding work and having to do things over and over and like even the paper cut scene or something.

AlexOh don't even say oh my god. Sorry.

MerlinThat ends when he gets that fourth cut and he does that amazing move where he like his right hand kind of flies off to the side and you get that perspective of that with a wonderful shot. It's like that's a lot of work.

AlexOK, I've seen a lot of grizzly things in movies. I know I'm the same way. Has made me curl up like, oh, it's like when a toenail falls off or something.

MerlinIt's just like you don't want to think about that.

AlexThe entire theater I was in, like, gasped the first time he tries to give himself a paper cut. And then, like, the noises.

MerlinAnd he, like, leans into it. And then, like, is it.

AlexGod, I can't. Oh, God. Oh, and even on the commentary, one of them was like, yeah, I didn't even know how upsetting this was going to be until we were on set. And I started retching.

MerlinBut also, I mean, if I could say just quickly in passing, there's so much to talk about with this movie. I'm kind of tired. But the – I woke up really early and rode a bike. Oh, by the way, there is a new segment I think might be coming. I got a couple headlines I like. I don't have a man of the week. But I do have a new segment, at least for this week, called a bike mishap of the week.

AlexGive us your fucking money.com. Give us your fucking money.

Speaker AWe'll do it Friday.

MerlinBut the small stakes. Like the stakes of what's happening in this movie are on the one hand, the entire universe, but on the other hand are about a family that's struggling. And a paper cut is a really big deal. you know it's like i i think i i so admire and i mean this is such a lame film fan thing to say but you know stuff like perhaps especially stuff like the avengers really gets us into this mindset of

like you know from from the avengers film 2014 i want to say through obviously the thanos thing that just goes on and on and on but like it's the the stakes of that stuff are so big And there's something, like, for example, Ant-Man. I think one of the numerous reasons Ant-Man, not least that Edgar Wright's fingerprints are still all over Ant-Man, even after they removed him, is that the stakes of that are not everything. And it doesn't make you care less. In some weird ways, it makes you care more.

Think about a movie like, you know, it's so funny to go into the Criterion channel and see, you know, I'm going to tell you, I pay for the Criterion channel. I watch maybe one movie a month on Criterion, but I love watching the trailers. I love watching the trailers they've made. I love all of that stuff. And I made my kid watch the trailer for Tampopo, which is a movie I saw in the theater and loved in probably my first year of college. And if you've never seen it, I'm going to give you the log line for Tampopo. Tampopo is basically, it's a Western about ramen.

And just let your mind go with that. So imagine that there's a Japanese movie about people trying to get great about making ramen, but it's really essentially like a Western. In a similar way to like in this movie, it's kind of a Kung Fu movie about saving the universe. But like Tempopo is endlessly, or think about Amelie. Like, you know, I guess it's a cliche to like Amelie. I think it's fucking great.

Speaker AAnd like, you know, hello, it's me, Amelie. Pick me up on DVD. You can see me.

MerlinBut like, you know, I like a small stakes movie And there are parts of me, I don't have enough examples to do a, you know, a SWOT analysis of this. But like the stakes of a movie being small does not in any way make me care about it less.

When I was coming up, there was a movie. You know, they rename everything now, you know, like the very long Proust novel that we used to call Remembrance of Things Past. Like now what do they call it? if I could save time in a bottle or something. But like, you know.

AlexWait, really?

MerlinNo, it's, well, no, they used to call it Remembrance of Things Past. I can't tell this is a bit. No, no, no, you know, I was the preeminent Proust scholar in the United States. No, but it used to be called Remembrance of Things Past and now it's called, In Search of Forgotten Time or something like that? I forget. But, okay, so like when I was coming up, there's a movie I'd never seen and I finally got to a point where in every list I would see, because I was a list boy, I see the name of this movie over and over and over. And the movie was an Italian movie from a realist,

Italian neorealist from the 50s called, at the time called The Bicycle Thief, which I think is now, a lot of people consider that up there with Citizen Kane, like one of the greatest movies of all time. And spoiler alert, but it's about a guy whose bicycle gets stolen. And like, that sounds like, you know, impossibly low stakes, but it isn't to that guy. Like that's his job. That's his life. His bike is everything. He can't provide for his kid if he doesn't have his bike. To somebody that's low stakes compared to fucking Thanos, I guess,

snapping his finger. But fine. It's fine. I know I like it. It's a spectacle. It's fine. But no, I like it. And I like it when all the characters show up. It's great. It's basically IP Bukkake.

AlexHi.

MerlinHi. I'm IP Bukkake.

AlexThey got rid of Edgar Roy. They almost got rid of James Gunn.

MerlinAnt-Man and Ant-Man 2 are so goddamn good. Oh my god. You don't like them? You don't like Ant-Man?

AlexThey got rid of Edgar Wright!

MerlinWow. In my second year of college, we would call that genetic criticism. Do you think that's really valid? Here's stuff I know about how I got made and now I'm mad. No! All I'm saying is that low stakes are not a bad thing. And this combination of low stakes and high stakes,

I don't know. I can't talk too much longer. But this movie, I totally disagree with you that this is for everybody. I wish that this were for everybody. I mean, I don't disagree. I wish it were for everybody. But for the certain right kind of weirdo, I can't think of a more exhilarating movie that I've seen in quite a while. And if you had to get my logline for this movie uh everything everywhere all at once it really fucking goes there

Alexwhat do you mean by that okay so i have to admit i think i said yeah i know i said this last week

Merlinoh yeah because we were talking i was talking about like the wire versus law and order and which is not to say i don't like law and order but just in the sense that once you found yourself in a genre movie or genre tv show to which you must pay at least 100 attention it's difficult sometimes to then go to these less substantial feeling as a as a fan of something that doesn't require even a similar amount of attention. Like if I could like give this the same amount of attention as I would give to like a Guy Fieri reality show.

I know Shane Eliminate. He seems like a fantastic guy. But like if this takes – if I can do other things while I'm watching this after I've watched something that I've seen four times and still keep finding stuff in, it's natural to feel like, oh, you know, that feels a little bit lesser. But like this movie pays off so big. Like Home Alone, like, I don't know, other movies like Home Alone, there's so much that they put in place early.

Chekhov's gun, right? there's so much stuff that you put into place

AlexChekhov's butt plug Chekhov's butt plug once you see a butt plug it's going somewhere

Merlina joke like that once you write it it stays in the act okay please capture that because that's pretty definitely the title holy shit Alex that was really good you know how you get an award like this you hear a lot of bullshit something like that

AlexI'm sure I stole that joke from somebody

Merlinprobably the commentary anyway i'm funny go on um is that there's so much stuff that is and not to beg on law and order but in so much like tv and movies i think i've heard jason snell call this hanging a lantern i know there's like a whole page on tv tropes about this that we can put in notes but hanging a lantern on something we're like you're really supposed to notice that oh, there's a fifth on the call

list child actor in this who has some special ability that we learn about in Act 1. And you're like but that gets used in Act 3. I mean, if it's a competently made film it is there for a reason. If it's The Room or Faithful Findings, it may not come up again. But in this case, and you get good at seeing that. My wife is the regent of this. My wife always figures fucking everything out so quickly and it makes me so goddamn mad

because there are things I notice, but there's so much stuff that doesn't feel, you don't recognize it as lantern hanging early in the film and then there's payoffs on so many levels. Let me just mention to you that, for example, Michelle Yao makes an understandable ESL error of referring to – what does she call raccoons? But remember where she confuses what a raccoon is?

AlexShe tries to – she's referring to the movie Ratatouille.

MerlinAnd does she call it raccoonie? And she says raccoonie.

AlexYeah.

MerlinOkay. And unless you're Alex and who notices fucking everything, you probably didn't notice, for example, there's a raccoon in the very first shot. Like there's a lot of things like that. But then, because we're in spoiler territory, guess what? Raccooni becomes part of the movie. Like that amazing actor from Crazy Rich, a very funny actor from Crazy Rich Asian. Guess what? He's being driven around by a fucking raccoon inside his chef's toque. and you're like, wait, are you fucking kidding me?

Speaker AOr like the hot dog finger stuff and the inclusion. At one point, there's a phrase that my kid's, you know,

Merlinpretty advanced and knows about stuff in a way that is sometimes a little bit, not upsetting, but like I'm a little bit like, you're not supposed to acknowledge that you know about these things.

AlexOh, no, that's upsetting. Very, very.

MerlinBut like a phrase that you've heard me use before. Oh, last week you heard me say that. I don't say fetish. I prefer to say somebody's special thing. And we're watching the bloopers where in the hot dog fingers timeline title, just for the record, in the hot dog fingers timeline when they're sticking their fingers in each other's mouth and then they're like, there's all the ketchup and mustard stuff with their mouth. And I had this thought and my kid said it before I did. I wonder if that's somebody's special thing.

we learned earlier i know i'm telling you guys stuff you've already seen the movie but like at the moment when waymond lets her know lets um evelyn know that she has to tell Jamie Lee Curtis, I love you. And she has to mean it. And she's like, ask me anything else in the world.

Like, I hate this person has disrupted my life so much. You know, she's been cocked by Evelyn for a pretty long time and is really hating how this has become. Gong Gong is there, and they got a lot of Gong Gong about their new business license, so they go to the IRS and deal with Jamie Lee Curtis. But that little, it doesn't feel like lantern hanging, because it's not. It's just part of the improbable thing that Evelyn has to say is I love you and Evelyn has to mean it. And then what's the payoff for that in the timeline?

She summons up the ability to do that because even though Evelyn Prime, I think she's called, even though Evelyn doesn't know it, they used to be in a very affectionate relationship in a different timeline where they have hot dogs for fingers. Imagine pitching that to a studio. Wait, wait, wait. So that's the movie? No, that's just one little part. There's another part where a raccoon drives the cook. What? Yeah, you ever go to like tappanyaki? You know, like a, you know, what's that place everybody goes? Benihana? Imagine going to Benihana and you discover that your chef, who's the best chef in the

place, is actually being driven by a raccoon. Oh, his name is Rekakuni and he loves him very much. Okay, so wait a minute. Does that have to do with the hot dog fingers? Yeah, everything has to do with everything. It's everything, everywhere, all at once.

AlexI don't have anything interesting to say about this movie because it's...

MerlinI don't either. It's just, I love just, I mentioned this. I don't know if you got this, there's so many references I feel like you didn't get last week. One of them was I mentioned the Memorex commercial. When I was a kid, I think it started as a magazine ad, but of course became a TV ad. And the idea was Memorex cassette tapes are so good and so powerful that you're going to be like this man sitting in a chair. And when he turns on his stereo, his hi-fi, as you say, it's so loud and so pristine sounding that it literally is like wind blowing you back in your chair.

That's how I feel when I watch a movie like this, where it's like I can just barely keep up with what's happening. And unlike my wife, I am admittedly a little slow sometimes at putting things together. I did not figure out until watching a recent episode of Community that maybe the reason because the dean is learning Excel and he says maybe they call it that because there's cells in it. And I went, wait a minute. They call it Excel because the spreadsheet has cells. And I turned to my family and I said, I've been using Excel since the late 80s and that never occurred to me until today.

AlexIt wasn't like 25 until I was like beetle?

MerlinThat's the Syracuse one. Yeah. Yeah. Or like the song that was popular when I was in military school. If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? Now, I thought there was one meaning for that, which was that, would you be mad at me if I said you had it? He's not saying that. He's saying, if I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? it takes me decades to get a lot of those. So in fairness, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I'm not the fastest wayman in the long.

But I love sitting there in that Memorex commercial and having a movie like this just blow past me. It's not unrelated to what I have said about reading Shakespeare. Obviously, if you can see a Shakespeare play, if you can hear a poem read out loud, generally, you will get a lot more out of it than reading it on a page, even or especially if it's like an E.E. Cummings or something. If you have to read Shakespeare and you can't see King Lear,

you can't read it too fast and you can't read it too slow. If you read it too fast, it won't make any sense. And if you read it too slow, it'll make even less sense. And in this case, sometimes I'm watching a certain kind of movie and I go, oh, I think I'm going to need to watch this at least one more time, which lets me then just sit and like basically be like a stoned person just sitting there and like taking it all in and then you know because of the glory of our times then you can go back it's not like the christmas episode of happy days we only get to see it you know once

or maybe twice we catch it again in july like in this instance we can go back we can rewind my kid hates it i could say hey dingus uh you know what did she just say and it rewinds or i can watch the whole movie again i could watch parts of it again and like i am in some ways i try to give a hundred percent of my attention to any new thing that i'm watching mostly unless it's you know fucking reality tv or whatever but you know what i mean there's something so gratifying about letting yourself be taken away by an experience like that you know so like for example like hawkeye like

arguably my favorite comic book series of all time. And then I turned on the TV show and I went, hmm, okay. So big, big, big, big, big number one. This is really not, they've taken all the iconography and characters from the comic, but like the tracksuit Draculas are there,

Speaker Abut it's not as good. It's not as engrossing. Yeah, it's not like the comic,

Merlinbut it's fine for what it is. But like Hawkeye is like the kind of thing you'd watch on a plane. if you've seen everything else, you know? But to get something where you come along and you go like, okay, I don't know much about this, and then it lands on you, and you just, like, get to be completely swept away by it. Some of the movies on those letterbox lists that I shared last week, those are very much those kinds of movies. It's not just that it's weird. I mean, like I say,

Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky, that's the best way, to my mind, to enjoy it. I would not overanalyze Christian iconography the use of like skinned goats on crucifixes or, you know, a like bearded dragon beauty pageant or like any of that stuff. That movie, or my favorite one, the guy gets shot and the bird flies out of the bullet wound. Fucking Jodorowsky. But you watch that and you're like, I'll have time to analyze this later. Right now I'm just going to sit and let the visuals of this

and the storytelling of this wash over me. And if everything doesn't make sense, that's okay. I can always go back. But that's what makes for, to me, for a rewarding rewatch is even or especially when I come back for a third rewatch with increasingly more of my attention, I'm still seeing stuff I didn't see before. Not trying to be clever, not trying to be cute, not trying to find all the numbers in the world's end, which is very satisfying also. That's what Edgar Wright does. Edgar Wright does this kind of stuff, that table setting and lantern hanging all the time for stuff that'll come to pay back later.

like did you catch the exact moment when it was revealed that martin freeman is actually an alien it's when he's in the stall and he comes out and he doesn't have the six on his head anymore because they healed him from the childhood injury that made him look like the antichrist like did you catch that exact moment like i bet you didn't i bet you didn't catch it until you re-watch the exact moment when that happens and it's the same thing here you know like when there's a scene and I'll probably in the janitor's closet, but there's when Wayman like basically,

um, not as you know, Bob's, but like drops the story and like set, not, you know, it says, Hey, look, here's what's going on. The universe is at stake. Like there's this stuff going on involving joy. And we've got to deal with this because we're at danger of having.

Speaker AAnd on the one hand, you're like, wow. Okay, cool.

MerlinCrazy, crazy way to lay that out. But like, i'm sorry i'm carrying on but like you know what carry carry you know what that was though i mean it is the end of the universe if she loses joy and while my wife disagrees on this and i think she's wrong my kid does agree for once i think this is in some ways a film about what you can tolerate in life, what you give away in life. And then in Evelyn's case, Evelyn, who's previously

as stipulated, tells her daughter she loves her by telling her she's getting fat. I think she, I don't want to put this too harshly, but I think a case could be made, especially when the rock, the second rock goes off the cliff, the googly-eyed rock. Jesus fuck. I think you can make a case that Evelyn realizes she can't have a universe without joy in it. She's going to follow her into the fucking bagel, which is, if you think about it, a pretty dark and yet beautiful idea is like I will always be your mother.

And there's the way that that plays out that and, you know, I think, you know, my friend Ryan on the Internet said, you know, there's parts of this where they like there's third act stuff that gets really sweet, but like that doesn't get completely resolved. But maybe that's necessary for a movie like this. But like I just keep thinking about this fucking movie all the time.

AlexWhat third act stuff that –

MerlinSoon for the show.

AlexOkay. All right.

MerlinBut you know what I mean? Like it's – the third or fourth time I watched this movie because as usual with me, I hadn't seen it to the end and there hadn't been an opportunity and my kid keeps getting mad because –

AlexHow could you not watch this to the end?

MerlinI'm a monster. Oh my god.

AlexYou are a monster.

MerlinBut I want to say the – okay, let's put it this way. The second time I saw through the end, I started sobbing uncontrollably in front of my wife. And I was doing that thing where, like, I'm not going to impersonate myself crying because it's pretty unseemly. But, like, I was Laura Dern crying title.

And then I was like, she realizes she can't go on without joy. It's not that she doesn't love joy. It's just, you know, everyone's got a lot of shit on her mind, and her husband's trying to divorce her. And, you know, everybody's life is different, but everybody's life is special and weird. And a movie like this, or another famous gimme of mine, Synecdoche, New York. Like, I get it if you don't like that movie. That's why it's a gimme. But, like, that movie destroys me.

I still continue to go back, and when I finally got my kid to watch a little bit of that, the scene where they're eating breakfast over the table, You notice on the newspaper that Caden is reading, there's three increasingly later dates on the newspaper. Oh, shit.

AlexOh, shit.

MerlinBecause time's already going by. We're already seeing time jumps inside of the beginning of the first act of that movie. I don't want to spoil this for you, but if you're weird like me, season X to New York, hopefully before you're a parent. But like where he just doesn't remember whole periods of time where his daughter suddenly became an adult. And that's really small stakes. Caden's trying to make a play about a play about life about a play. He's so deep in his own shit, related or unrelated, that his life has gone by and he's completely lost his daughter, who is now a fully grown person who's like a lesbian in Germany.

and it's like you're so I'm so taken away by Caden cutting himself in front of the mirror and by the tiny paintings and all the little things in that movie and all the wonderful god the actress performances in that movie is like four amazing actress performances in that movie and I'm level and in this movie by the time you get to this sort of denouement like I was wrecked I was totally wrecked by this dumb fucking movie about hot dog fingers it's not about hot dog it's about everything, Alex. Hot dog fingers are everything.

AlexIt's everything, all at once.

MerlinThis car is everything right now.

AlexIt's just a story of a girl. That is something I didn't notice until the fucking commentary. Santa? No, not Santa. Because I mentioned Santa

Merlinand you didn't know what I meant. The guy from I Think You Should Leave is in the laundromat.

AlexDid you notice that the song Story of the Girl, the tune of it is used everywhere and they had to license it. Is that that

MerlinBollywood song or whatever that was? No.

Alexno let me uh i'll put it in show notes but it's just this uh pop song and the and now it and then you notice it everywhere through the movie and like if i had watched it stone one time i would have been like haha it is the story of a girl get it haha no they meant to do that i didn't i didn't

Merlincatch that at all it's totally totally lost on me oh my gosh well now and also now you know okay for example sorry mind if i explain the last episode with you having not i'm making all these fucking references throughout the last goddamn episode. I'm so sorry I didn't know this. I really assumed you'd seen the commentary. But them mentioning, like you, I noticed that when she's running around in the laundromat and she does this weird kick to

Speaker Ascoot the stepstool over

Merlinand you're like, wait a minute. That's something out of a fucking kung fu movie. You know? And by the way, if you like those kinds of movies. I made a list for Dan one time of my suggested getting started with Kung Fu movies things. But this movie as they talk about repeatedly throughout this owes a very affectionate debt to a lot. I didn't know Wong Kar why I think of him as in the mood for love. I didn't know that he did an Ip Man

Kung Fu movie. I did not know that until they talked about The Grandmaster. I didn't realize that. I definitely, you know, I love Jackie Chan. And, like, I definitely kind of got that influence. But I have this fantasy. There's so many classes I wish I'd taken in college if I'd known more. I guess that's why I was there. But if I'd known more, there's so many classes I wish I'd taken. And because there was, you know, 500 students and 40 staff members,

like, or faculty members, I should say, like nine to one. And, like, there was a class. The classes wouldn't be offered every year. And the guy who was my sponsor, meaning my academic sponsor, the guy you do your academic contract with, he did a class every few years that I can't believe I didn't take called The Literary Substrata of the Wasteland. And obviously you start by reading the annotated, pound annotated version of TSLA's The Wasteland. But then you know what you read? Fucking everything that's referenced in The Wasteland.

Oh, Jesus. You read that book about the grail myth. You read Shakespeare. You read all these different things, including some very, very obscure stuff. I'm sorely tempted to go through that commentary. I probably won't do this, but I'm very tempted to go through that commentary and do cinematic substrata of everything, everywhere, all at once. Like the stuff that there's homages to, including Ratatouille, but also including like, oh, shit.

what's the guy's name the guy i always forget his name um the the director who plays two roles in kill bill i i won't yeah that guy his name is um oh shit he has an anglicized name but that guy has made so many fucking amazing god damn it stand by i can't continue like this i got up early and rode a bike i did a 10 mile bike ride i'm really fucking out of it fell off my bike but it was funny oh uh gordon lu gordon lu so gordon lu is an actor he plays two different roles in kill bill

he plays the head of the crazy 88s and he plays the guy with the beard who trains what's her name with the feet um but gordon lu has done he did oh jesus where do you fucking begin 36th uh shame chamber of shaolin which obviously has had an influence on people um he's but he does he's Stuff you see in this movie, like, for example, the, like, Ratatouille thing is not strictly a Ratatouille reference. There's another thing in certain kinds of, like, I want to say, like, Hong Kong movies.

There's a thing. There's one where, like, this character has to defend, help this woman defend herself against somebody who's attacking her. And he controls her body against the opponent. So he's doing kung fu using her body. like he kind of gives a little kick to her ankle and that kicks the other guy he's beating the shit out of this guy by using this woman who does not know kung fu as the vessel for the kung fu but the whole bit through the entire movie is this guy is never actually doing kung fu he's just

having he's just having a cup of tea but the way that that guy drinks a cup of tea as you can imagine so like when famously here Jackie Chan thing like where Wayman does the thing where he's take out the backpack and he's leaning against the wall before he grabs the gravel when he's sitting with his leg crossed. Stuff like that. Like, whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom. These four, four time moves were like, even drinking a cup of tea, he beats the shit out of somebody.

Speaker AStuff like that is like, it's so endlessly creative.

MerlinSo yeah, Raccoon Atooi, obviously a reference to a Pixar film, but also a reference to stuff like Gordon Lou movies. Somebody should do that. Put it all together. Letterboxd. Letterboxd is nuts.

AlexNo. No.

MerlinNo, no. None of that's good. No ding.

AlexDid you not have sort of any affinity with like, I don't know, you haven't mentioned the multiverse stuff as much as I would have thought? Because that is what, I mean, brings me to a lot of things.

MerlinSo basically she has, she learns that, and again, this is another one of those movies where I'm either missing something or it wasn't explained. And I bet it's a combination of both. But there's something about the Bluetooth thing. there's something about that computer like way of like finding unlikely things it's it's and i think they said as much it's a it's sort of like the what's this what's the thing called in um hitchhiker's guide but like we you have to like this ship is compelled by unlikely things right and in this movie yes you have a way it's not teleporting but you have a way to like

existentially hop to other universes. And so she eventually learns that she has the ability to call upon skills from Evelyn in other timelines. Is that a good way to describe it?

AlexNot just, okay. No, no, please go. I could get into a whole sci-fi thing of like not timelines, but other like universes in which things are just not possible.

MerlinBut the idea is it's like, you know, there's like two.

AlexThe only reason I say different timeline is because the these things are also happening at different points in time. Like in one universe, she goes back and it is just she's.

MerlinBut this is this is the maximalist idea of of multiple timelines, which is that it isn't just that it split at this point and went out independently. If I understand correctly, what we're saying here is like, no, like every single thing is constantly splitting into millions of timelines.

AlexYes.

MerlinAnd like that's the everything and the everywhere and to some extent the all at once is that like she can suddenly remember a thing. Like what's an example? I guess like the teppanyaki thing or like the kung fu stuff, but she can summon up some incredibly obscure skill that will be appropriate in exactly this moment, which is like the coolest X-Men kind of skill ever.

Alexbut they pull it off in a way that well maybe it doesn't make sense to you or didn't make sense to a lot of people but the way it's illustrated via the ui on the phone of like this is the web of universes and here is how they are constantly growing and branching and i just keep thinking about like the amount of ui testing that would have had to go into that like how did they figure out i mean they mentioned it briefly in the director's commentary but how to figure out

like not just the people in the universe of explaining yes here's where you are and in order to get your brain here you need to think about that and you'll be you'll slingshot to the rakakuni universe or you're going to slingshot to what fighting your daughter in a forest you learn they can get in too yeah yeah that's so good but then on top of that i'm like all right how do we How do we get this UI to translate to an audience as well as to the in universe?

It's so good.

MerlinAnd I mean, like, if there were that, if there were that, I mean, just to be a little bit of a pill for a minute, there's no way you could have done this, that it wouldn't be like, you know, impenetrable. But I don't think you would have the like, I'm a movie star universe. Like, that's not really, I think the UI label for that would probably be a little bit strange. it would probably be some like huge long hash but like whatever i mean well we don't know if this

Alextakes place in our universe we don't know if hashes exist but that's like having your mac

Merlincover with buttons that say click here to do something well and and there's probably a universe that has that i've been incepted i like multiverse media keep talking about that oh i do too i do This is why I'm always recommending – I love time travel stuff. It's like I'm always recommending Ryan North's – I mean his whole run on the Adventure Time comic was good. But there's one where – I think I've told you this. But one where Finn and Jake kind of like borrow Princess Bubblegum's time machine and Jake egregiously abuses it and creates all these different problems that then have to be cleaned up.

And you get all these little kind of views into these other worlds as they try to clean up their time travel mess. I mean I personally I love stuff like that but what connected with you about this?

AlexI can't believe you haven't seen Rick and Morty like it's

Merlinit's fine it's a lot like Back to the Future

Alexno it's not oh my god in that there is an old man and a boy yes there is an old man and a boy

MerlinI like the dog I like the dog in this suit

Alexoh yeah that very first episode well second episode

Merlinno you're a real fan of this program aren't you have you ever seen Community?

AlexGod

Merlinevil Troy and evil Abed oh my god when Betty White when Betty White does the Spanish language rap with Troy and Abed holy shit

Alexoh my god Betty White I dread

Merlinwell now I put all these together into a much more powerful weapon what even is anthropology god I love that show so much but keep talking I want to hear go

AlexRick and Morty is, I'm going to say it is my favorite cartoon possibly ever now. And it's not because ha ha Dan Harmon, ha ha Justin Roiland, the whole sort of multiverse genre.

MerlinI love the whole thing of like Morty being dragged along into these things. That actor, Justin Roiland, like his voice is so perfect for that whole like, oh, I think I should really get back.

AlexOh, geez. I'm in Rick.

MerlinI've watched probably half of season one. I keep meaning to really stick with it. No, no. I'm giving you shit. I'm giving you the Millennium Actress treatment. Is that your humming cat noise that you've minted recently?

AlexI think there is a dark part of my brain. And I guess you and your lady friend talked about of like, I was really thinking like, okay, what would Evelyn's life be like if her kid committed suicide or if like her husband died or if there was zero life on a planet?

MerlinShe never had to really think about like one of her problems arguably was God fucking Wayman, he's always here. I guess he'll be here forever. Enjoy. What a pain in my ass. And it's like, you know, the worst is like not having them.

AlexYeah. Yeah. I just like investigating those dark potential universes in my own mind for both good and bad. So just having a genre of that always brings me delight. When it's something, perhaps, like, oh, I don't even want to spoil the work and more for you. But typically, multiverse genres end up like, oh, this is the worst. Like, there's the worst timeline and the best time. Dan Harmon, we're in the darkest timeline.

MerlinWell, I mean, and this is literally not a bit, but think about Back to the Future 2. But, like, remember where, like, he goes to the, like, the Pottersville version where everything's terrible and Biff, like, runs everything. And it's, like, sort of along those lines, though, right? Like, Abed putting on the beard type universe.

Speaker AMm-hmm.

MerlinYou got a temporary blue streak in your hair and I lost an arm.

Alexyou know you're actually creating six timelines right now oh god oh my god i just want i the reason i loved everything everywhere all at once is tone also was the all right there are of the there in the multiverse there isn't just like one hooray yay like the the alpha verse they're not exactly the good guys like there's no like ultimate timeline there's no one best case scenario but but

Merlinlike but they don't think sort of don't they sort of um make it special but isn't there i'm trying to remember isn't there something about the alpha timeline that is special because she failed because she sucks so much at everything it puts her exactly in the position of like need like wasn't that kind of the conceit of it was like you're a loser and you need you're the only loser that

Alexcould help us win this the well the the that was what uh like alpha wayman says is like oh my god you suck so bad at everything you're basically a blank slate but then we but the alpha universe it's just that they were the first ones to reach out not that they are like they had their own agenda which is just ending joy and evelyn breaking free of the narrative of the alpha the universe is sort of like the is when she's able to be um omni i don't know how to um

universal i guess is able to see everything everywhere all at once just like joy yeah like

Merlinbut like you bring your you bring all your you bring your back or your baggage or whatever with

Speaker Ayou it's like you know in i can't i don't want to talk about time travel but yeah it's that thing

Merlinof like well yeah you you you did experience that but there's no way you can remember oh sorry day of the doctor how about day of the doctor like this moment is time locked and you're never going to remember that this is the day that you were finally the doctor oh my god i'm gonna fucking cry but in that case yeah you were here but like you you will not remember this it will do you no good you know but in her case she has that ability to retain it as she moves through the different

Alexplaces right and well and also the the alpha verse see i feel like i've done more drugs and watch this or may have watched this more time. I would say you definitely,

Merlinyou definitely use Facebook's VR.

AlexI have not done. I, I do. Well, unfortunately right now I can't because they, I have to use the fucking, I, you can't, you basically can't use an Oculus sitting. It's very problematic. Anyway.

MerlinOh my God. It's like that. They should get you a version like the Pete Buttigieg dance. So you can enjoy it. I'm not going to ding you out. I'm not going to ding you out.

AlexJesus Christ.

Merlinyou love your you love imagining you're anywhere but chicago right now not gonna get a ding keep going it's relentless i

Alexoh my god well no that's the that's why the alpha verse it they're essentially the baddies Like, notice it's, she's really sad when Alpha Wayman goes away. But that was the universe in which he was just searching for the Evelyn who would take down their daughter who had experienced, again, everything at all at once.

MerlinYeah, like, you need to be able to do this. This is bigger than you. Like, this is, yeah.

AlexBut that's, okay. We're having a very different reading of Alpha Wayman then. Because like the Alphaverse, they don't want people to experience. They think that if you experience everything, then you're inherently you're going to become evil like joy. Like you are going to be sucked into this black hole or what I think of as like ending your own life. And there's just no way to exist. But Evelyn has found the ability to do all of this because she rejects the, you know, alpha gong gongs like you just need to enter.

Like there's no she's like, no, I'm going to save my daughter, obviously. But it's only when she is able to get into her daughter's mind and also be able to see every single universe all at once in that she's able to, you know, metaphorically like save her own life. But I don't know. I saw Alpha, the Alphaverse as bad. And essentially Alpha Waymond is like really fucking this lady's life up by being like, no, no, no, there's only one way to do this.

And then, you know, it's not she doesn't learn. She doesn't want to learn to fight like alpha women with all the cool kung fu stuff. She the she ends up being like, quote, fighting by meeting each character on their own level. Like whether it be giving that one guy that she has to, quote, fight like a BDSM slap, which.

Speaker AOh, yeah.

AlexOne of the Daniels.

Speaker AOne of the Daniels.

AlexOr, you know, hot dog finger making out with Glenn Close. Not Glenn Close. Good Lord. Jamie Lee Curtis.

Speaker AI think I might be the one having a neurological.

AlexNo, no. Like when she's ascending, you know, when the one of the final scenes, she is ascending to the bagel hole. And instead of like punching people out, she is helping each person on the steps. Do you know when they're in the office building and Joy is trying to go through the big bagel hole?

MerlinOh, the part where she figures out like this is how I fight. The part where she's like going to be kind to everybody and give them like here's the perfume that Santa Claus remembers. Stuff like that.

AlexRight. But she was meeting them on all of their levels and in a different universe in which they are the happiest, best person of their self. No, that's so fucking special.

Speaker AI love that.

AlexYeah. And I don't know. I just found the whole thing lovely in that the – not the conclusion. Well, I guess the lesson is obviously like gay family, family is the most important thing. But not that the conclusion was finding the one correct universe. It was never like, yes, this is the one best life or this is the one correct thing and the one thing that you need to do in order to get all of these universes to align.

It was like, no, in every single one of these, I love you and I need you. And maybe I know that you delete your tweets even more than I do. So I don't know if I'll be able to see this, but I've seen some people have issues with theoretical plot holes. and it's like, no, no, no. It's just because we didn't see it doesn't mean that they don't exist. Those holes have been filled. You just can't see the holes anymore. There's lots of holes in this movie, Merlin.

Speaker AHoles.

AlexSorry, yeah. About two people will know what I'm talking about and agree with me and that's enough.

MerlinYou think so? Hmm.

AlexYou need to do more drugs and watch more multiverses. Okay, I will, I will.

MerlinYeah, a phrase that, one of my favorite scenes, when they're in the janitor's closet, like, before he gets attacked by, like, you know, people breaking through the door and everything. I just, it's, I wouldn't call it a throwaway line, but there's a line they pass by so fast that has been used as my Twitter location multiple times since that burner universe. It's okay, we found a burner universe.

What a diss. Like, oh, yeah, we came here because, like, you're living in this fucking burner universe. Like, this is a place where we can talk and people won't mess with us. Oh, my God. Gone, gone.

AlexYou need to watch it again and detach yourself from all of the feelings and the stories and just think about the metaphysical ramifications of each jump and then each – I promise.

MerlinOkay, I can do that. I can do that.

Alexand oh like having a they didn't get into this but i did have you ever thought about like pocket

Merlinuniverses i i don't exactly know what that means uh a universe within a universe yeah like one that i mean it gets it gets used a lot this is yeah i mean it's like the way you're gonna it's way uh you know it's a time lord art right you know you'll have hope like they're gonna freeze your planet and then the Daleks shoot each other. Spoiler alert. Is that right? No, I don't know. I think the only thing I've ever seen might be one episode of Doctor Who. I don't understand a lot of your references, but I love your enthusiasm.

AlexI don't know how someone as rational and

Speaker AWhy are you so mad at me? What is happening?

Alexenjoys Doctor Who. I want you to be as excited as I am. I'm very excited. I'm tired.

MerlinI woke up at four in the morning because the man out that lives in front of our house honks his horn all night and what do you want me to do about it? By the way, somebody got shot on Muni today. I hope that rises to their level of investigation. I'm really fucking tired. And then I fell off my bike because I was trying to go and get a better way of hearing an argument about a lawnmower. And then I fell off my bike. So it's been a long day already. I'm very excited about this movie. I never found out what was up with the lawnmower.

AlexOh, I'm sorry.

MerlinOh, that's okay. That's okay.

AlexYou probably did another universe it's okay just because the hole isn't filled doesn't mean it's not there do you think

Merlinyou could call upon a special skill from somewhere else do we would you have a way of knowing do you need a waymond and oh well you know let's talk about this well what's the deal with his name wayland well it's never mind it's kind of it sounds like you're making fun of an asian person so it sounds like you're saying saying raymond i think wong is the pronunciation pronunciation but It's spelled Wang and anglicized, right? So you could say, never mind. I'm going to get canceled.

But like Waymond. Why is his name Waymond? It sounds like you're trying to make fun of an Asian person. Say, oh, did you mean Raymond Wrong? No, I meant Waymond Wrong. It's racism all the way down.

Thank you.

Show notes

Transcript

292. Retaining Leg

Show notes

Transcript

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