S4E24.5: White Noise

I am a couple of months late but i just went through the comments and only saw 1 passing mention of the drawing. I immediately thought of the Mr. Gray character's first appearence, which you didnt talk about unfortunately, when Adam Drivers character sees him in a nightmare replacing Babette in bed next to him, seeing the scar, the hair but not the face. This is mirrored later when he sees Babette in the motel TV, her picture overlaid perfectly (but mirrored) on Mr Grays reflection (her entering him, funny enough). Mr Gray has also, when appearing in the nightmare or on the lawn, been depicted ambigously androgynous before Babette names him as "Mr." Gray and with he/him pronouns, thereby fixing his identity somewhat.

How is brain uploading specifically capitalist? Even the whole AI resurrection thing was predated by Russian Cosmism. Also, uploading isn't like an impossibility or anything. They've done it to rat brains already.

As a non theist Quaker, the point about finding belief in each other is pretty much spot on

Did the conversation about death remind anyone else of Star Trek IV? just me then?

i think as someone whos had debilitating health anxiety stemming from a fear of death and flirted with shopping addiction... this episode would be my hypothetical one id be qualified to guest. my town was also hit with an environmental disaster abt a year ago... 🤣🦩

The supermarket talk just kept making me think of someone I know who went on a study abroad to the Soviet Union. When she got back to the US she ended up crying in the middle of the grocery store because there were so many kinds of shampoo and she couldn't handle the decision

Abby going out doing her own stunts

Suspicious Minds here

You know it really surprised me but I found this movie misogynistic. Often the dad and the son are the only ones talking any sense, and the girls just babble misinfo and ignore them. Especially the scenes where they’re escaping in the truck, at the gas station and in the river, they felt so ‘resentful dad doesn’t get the respect he deserves’. It really didn’t hit for me, I had this sense underneath it about women/family/modernity all being linked as sources of failure in this weird unpleasant way. I didn’t get what November was saying about a sense of romance in the scene where Babette explains Mr Gray raping her, he just seems so cold and angry and they never confront it. I think Abi is right when she calls this conservative.

I'm pausing because I need a brief little break from death talk (my father died a month ago, death talk is more than half the talk I've been doing) to say: Nightmare Before Christmas is a heist movie. You know what else is a heist movie? Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I will not stop bringing this up. I will be dragged out of a room shouting this. Also, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is about religion.

Being Towards Death? More like Being Away From Death, am I right?

There is one really good Horror Heist movie and it's Wes Craven's The People Under The Stairs!!!

Goebel Beer is real. That's not a joke. (Or rather, not just a joke) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goebel_Brewing_Company

If ya kinda side eye it, you could claim that From Dusk Till Dawn is a horror heist movie. Plus it says A LOT about masculinity 😬

I can't tell you how much I want an "EMERGENCY SEMIOLOGIST" jacket

If yall are looking for a horror heist can I recommend Zach Snyders army of the dead? It’s a zombie heist movie

Are my husband and I are the only ones who accidentally watched the 2005 Michael Keaton white noise before this and then read the description and got real confused? The joys of recreational marijuana.

On the subject of Atheist Belief films for religion season, you guys should check out Serenity, the sci fi Big Damn Movie of Firefly

I looked up Lars Eidinger bc I haven't watched Babylon Berlin but was sure I'd heard the name before & immediately I was like "Oh shit I know this guy! I've seen this man's penis live on stage"

As a goth when I'm in relationships I talk quite a lot about death.

Mystery Train

I feel like the dance sequence was also a callback to one of what had to be this movie’s spiritual ancestors: Mulholland Drive.

You seriously need to watch The VVitch for religion season, it is an amazing anti-religion/feminine liberation movie.

Yo, as a religion/halloween crossover suggestion, what about the excellent Spanish film “Rec”?

Sexy Beast and White Noise forming "loving your wife is heaven" mini-season

It's a shame we're going to leave religion season behind without an episode on the most important religious film of our time (Assassin 33 A.D.)

I could be misunderstanding the way the 80s-era gas pump works or this could be an unintended goof, but at 48:18 in the film while getting gas the "Total Sale" counter increments upward (with audible clacks) while the "Gallons" counter remains at 0. Adam Driver's character leans towards the car and says "It's workin'!". It's a fun little detail to tie into the themes of the movie

Two movies immediately leapt to mind as soon as they said, "Horror movie about masculinity," and yes, yes, I could have just as easily misheard them. I also know they've chosen the movie, but I'm still throwing these out as--well, takes, I guess, on movies. John Carpenter's The Thing Manly men doing very manly rugged stuff in a hostile environment without any women folk to hold them back. Faced with the reality that some of their fellow rugged, manly men are faking it. Some of their fellow men are gross, filled with slime and goo and other gross, disgusting unmanly things. Being corrupted by this unmanly gross thing without their knowledge and consent. And if you think the movie is silly in the lengths it goes to show how rugged and manly these men are, try reading the novella it's based on. The Shining The manly art of providing for your family and what happens when you think you're a failure for being less than the perfect, hard drinking, manly man provider. Why, you turn on that family. You've gone to extreme lengths to remove distractions. There's nothing to stand in the way of being the perfect, rugged, manly provider, and you still fail. It was you all along. Now, go kill your family so they'll never know you weren't the perfectly manly man provider.

My analysis for the first half of this movie was that Heideggerian Being-Towards-Death type thing. The fact that life is limited and death will inevitably come is what allows us to create meaning. It allows us to parce out particular things in life that we can find valuable, where's in a life without this ever present knowledge of death everything becomes indistinguishable and meaningless white noise. All things are equally meaningless and meaningful, but we can choose what we find to be meaningful when we are confronted with death, instead of living in this indeterminate, superficial, ideological vapidness that puts Hitler and Elvis as equally important historical figures worthy of academic scholarship. However, the second half of this movie seems to be far more concerned with the fear of death and the various ways we cope with that fear, and ultimately seems to just settle into the idea of just continuing to go along with life as it already was instead of seriously confronting that mortality and finding a renewed vigger and meaningfulness, which I intensely disagree with. I mean, seriously? Finding comfort in a fucking supermarket? I can't think of anything more pathetic and useless. Even continuing Christian charity just because it's the structure of what you're already doing but not for any thought out constructive reason. This shared constructed meaning is just as hollow if you haven't collectively confronted these things, it's still just blind ideology. You have accomplished nothing, you have changed nothing for the better, this issue will simply persist and continue to haunt you. Cope doesn't last. I guess I'm reacting this way because I don't have the same sort of ever present fear of death that others do. It's not something that concerns me that much. Death will come, but I won't be alive when that happens, who why worry that much about it? I'm alive right now, all that matters is what I'm doing in life with the time I have. I just feel like it's a bad cope to deal with fear by hiding from it, by not thinking about it. I 100% agree with Abby's criticism at the end.

The work of Stanislaw Lem is what made me an atheist, so I am really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Solaris.

Supermarkets are disgustingly banal houses of excess. They are the foundation for the rebirth of America because this wretched country is built on the privilege provided by super exploitation.

Damn Devon, good Elvis song pic. Additional shout-out to "In The Ghetto".

While Solaris is a great post religion season movie, would also recommend Stalker in the same vein.

Well I hope none of the hosts die prematurely but Abigail becoming a tragic legend in the film community after dying in a spectacular stunt gone wrong is something that I could imagine happening. Also in relation to conservative religious films have you planned to watch any of the awful Christian Nationalist propaganda that is the God's Not Dead series?

"The People Under the Stairs" is a leftist horror heist movie

American supermarkets are just UK shopping centres but all in one room for some reason, I just look at them then think 'this should be a town with separate shops'

Abi is going to die when Agent 47 swaps a prop sword for a real one And will live on in the parasocial memories of people who think she would have agreed with everything they think, despite never having met or understood her, memories that infiltrate the past and erased the real Abi from her own actions

Hell of an episode to listen to while supermarket shopping 😅

Suspicious Minds. And favourite conservative art, the 2002 Jet Li movie, Hero.

So this is a bit off topic, but I’m dying to hear your take on The Mastermind. And it’s extra topical right now because it’s about a museum heist AND masculinity.

I hear that y'all decided on The Descent for Halloween, but if you're still looking for a Halloween-themed heist movie, might I recommend Henry Selick's Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas

American supermarkets suck idk what you are talking about

Wasn't Being John Malkovich kind of about cheating death by joining something larger that yourself? Also technically a kind of heist.

ALSO if you enjoyed this movie but might want a similar but more pulpy/comic/ playing with semiotics in a beach book way may I suggest THE SEVENTH FUCTION OF LANGUAGE by Laurent Binet

31 minutes in I realized I read the synopsis of a different White Noise and this movie doesn't involve the characters talking to ghosts using radio waves

I think the absence of gay people (and the inclusion of the drawing specifically in the Trash) is a point made about how they aren't American. The world's a simulation, and people who aren't part of a traditional white picket fence are simply not considered, because they're abnormal. ESPECIALLY for the 1970s. If you remade it today, sure, gay people are generally* accepted, but they still aren't Normal. Also when discussing a massive medical disaster that the government goes "let's see how this plays out" if we include gay people it's going to draw comparisons with aids and the response to it in the 1970s was basically "don't worry about it it doesn't affect Normal people".

I haven't finished the episode (nor seen the movie, but did read the book) but I was struck by Abby's mention of it being a piece of conservative art that you like. I agree, though I would use reactionary rather than conservative. Much in the same way that One Battle After Another and Hail Caesar are reactionary movies even though the authors may not try to be at all, in that they displace struggle and revolution to the future and/or the next generation through the idea of faith. Theoretical or practical struggle is painted as being futile and vaguely ridiculous (both Pat in OBAA and the Marxist writers in HC) for trying to change things now instead of having faith things will work out. This is something that Walter Benjamin would criticize the German social democrats for. (I realize this is an entertainment podcast)

Yeah so as a disabled person (disabled BY the airborne toxic event!) the American Supermarket is actually hell. It is too big, too loud, too full of random stimulus, has too many choices, is badly ventilated, and continues actively disable its workers, so. I cannot lib out about that concept either. I am not fooled by the beguiles of capitalisms.

"Killing Zöe" is also a horror heist with religious undertones, direct references to Murnau's Nosferatu and very badly aged cinematic tropes...

Is Barton Fink a religious or existentialist film? Anyway, I adore this review of a film not nearly enough people have yet seen... I owe Nova a bottle of something nice for saying "Panasonic" exactly where I simulheard "Panacea", hell if you ever manage to tour Canada (waits for massive uproar against Canada being a real country), I'll subsidize your bar tab, and you can all drink to long life for free.

I haven’t listened yet and I don’t know if it gets addressed but this is the only good movie about COVID

Last temptation of Christ please please please

so, I _am_ a butcher that works in an amercan supermarket and I am extremely aware that my entire job is in the service of death

Abi has clearly not been in a Piggy Wiggly, Walmart Neighborhood Grocery, or Food Lion. Grim they are. Dingy they are.

The School of the Americas took students to supermarkets as a deliberate part of their indoctrination. To spell that out: green berets took death squad trainees to American grocery stores to cement their anti communism and loyalty to America

entertained by November's thesis being "religion is the opiate of the masses (positive) 😇"

love love love the credits dance sequence in this movie, even if you don't watch the movie look it up it goes hard

Can confirm, lecturing can be exhilarating. The problem is that academia is a paperclip-maximising machine, but for managers and management, and if delivering a lecture exhilarates you, you're probably not a manager by vocation. It ends up inculcating a "seabird stuck in a tar pit" kind of frustrated despair.

Petition to add the Stallone classic "Oscar" to robbery season, unless of course you're planning a Mafia season in the future.

Dunno which season this could possibly slot into, but I so desperately want you folks to see the 1985 film 'Water' Michael Caine, Billy Connolly, doing an anti-colonial thatcher-era film?? I think you'd have SO MUCH to say about it.

“The People Under the Stairs” and “Don’t Breathe” are both horror heists! The former probably having more juice between the two

I've been absolutely on the edge of my seat for this episode cause I actually got to be an extra in this movie. They were filming at a bunch of colleges in my area and my school was one of them. So I got to be a college student in the background during the cafeteria scene where they are talking about pissing in sinks. It was such a cool experience and I've been really wanting to do it again, so it's especially cool to hear it be talked about on the show.

i thought this was going to be about the 2005 supernatural thriller of the same name. pleasantly surprised!

"Because he's been here the whole time, just like death, and Hitler" And Sam Reich?

Mine's "A Little Less Conversation"

Absolutely Diabolik of you for the opening

It was pretty surreal to watch this film a week before the train derailment in East Palestine, OH.

Abby dies trying to rekindle a romance with a certain heiress to an italian gun manufacturer

Completely irrelevant, but I'm going Harpo Marx feral imagining them covering Grosse Pointe Blank Trying to remember if there are many conservative/reactionary pieces of art that I like. The Fables comic book series is one of the most on the nose, fourth wall breaking right wing capitalist Zionist works I've ever read, something which took me a little bit to notice cuz I initially read it before really educating myself. I know a lot of anarchists like Lord of the Rings, but it's fair to say that it's monarchist Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a mask" is interesting because it's a half-closeted gay fascist exploring his sexuality "Blue Christmas" I worked in a supermarket since I was 15 years old. I'm 34 now. There was about 1 year in that intervening time when I did not work in a supermarket. I worked at Publix, which was particularly about the façade/ideal. Basically the Disney of grocery stores. Men were not allowed to have beards or long hair until a few years ago. I basically learned social interaction with people my own age from working as a bagger. A category 5 hurricane hit in 2018 and destroyed our city, and I was working about a week later. We were the hub that provided people with food including fried chicken.