ACFmovie podcast: Recent Episodes
Titus Techera
author of children's books about his new book for America's 250th an., The Book of American Fables. Education, the imagination, children's books, patriotism, the formation of the soul--everything is in the conversation...
Nathan Pinkoski discuss the new English translation of Jean Raspail's novel The Camp Of The Saints.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry talk about Michael Mann's movies -- the visual beauty, the music, the statuesque actors, the night shots, the alienated, romantic manliness -- the last cinematic stand against feminism.
Titus & David Polansky talk about David Lynch's LA Neo-noir Lost Highway, on the occasion of Lynch's death.
Titus & Heather Mac Donald discuss the bad conscience & despotic tendencies of liberalism in light of the elections. We also discuss the civilizational questions of crime & punishment, Enlightenment & irrationality.
Titus & Oliver Traldi discuss the films of Whit Stillman & his thoughts on the problems of love, art, & society.
Titus & Ryan Shinkel complete their discussion of Dune with the first very successful adaptation, Denis Villeneuve two movies. We look at the story to understand its success with audiences, especially young men, but also the director's interest, especially reviving the skepticism of manly heroism that defined Herbert's novel.
Titus & Ryan Shinkel continue their series on Dune with David Lynch's ambitous attempt to create out of Frank Herbert's galactic empire politics a moral fable about a young man coming of age.
Titus & Ryan Shinkel discuss Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune, science fiction & fantasy, modern rationalism & imperial history, mid-century America & the young men who made the story the greatest success in its genre for three generatons.
Titus & Jeremy Carl talk about Carl's new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart -- we discuss the changes in conservatism & America, the attack on equality before the law & what needs doing to restore it.
Titus & Prof. William Allen discuss his new translation of Montesquieu's The Spirit of The Laws.
Titus & Miles Smith IV discuss Visconti's adaptation of the most famous 20th c. Italian novel, Lampedusa's Gattopardo. The end of the aristocracy, the beginning of the bourgeoisie, the problem beauty poses for art.
Titus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni talk about The Young Pope, Paolo Sorrentino's HBO comic miniseries about a reactionary American pope calling the modern world to account before the mystery of God!
Titus & Joshua Steinman discuss the Coen Bros.' Hail Caesar, a vision of the American mid-century, the post-war moment when glamour & technology competed in Los Angeles, when the beautiful visions of the past held sway & science had not yet replaced them.
Titus & Chris Rufo discuss the last remarkable Peter Sellers film, Hal Ashby's Being There, a satire on Washington, D.C., but also an existential drama with a philosophical interest in the problem of nihilism. We touch on everything from the zombie Biden presidency to Heidegger's Dasein!
Titus & Lafayette Lee talk Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath Of God -- conquistadors in the Amazon, El Dorado & terror, a journey into the heart of darkness, a return to the origins of monsters & heroes. Manly nihilism, the indifference & hostility of nature, incest.
Titus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni talk Italian politics & Paolo Sorrentino's artistic vision of the Italian republic in Il Divo, the secrets of the politicians & the transformation brought about by democracy...
Titus & David Polasnky discuss dystopia & the transformation of elite opinion in the 50 years since Soylent Green came out--a movie whose horrors of poverty are now offered as policy proposals for a progressive future.
Titus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni talk about Paolo Sorrentino's second movie, his first romantic story, or at least novelistic character study, starring the greatest Italian actor of the 21st c., Toni Servillo. Sorrentino comes up with a beautiful story about the secret power of love & morality over the heart of modern man, & a striking admiration for the past.
Titus & Steve Sailer discuss his upcoming anthology of articles, columns, speeches, & essays -- the first volume of a lifetime of noticing important facts about American society that respectable institutions don't want to talk about. This time around, we talk about the Sailer Law of Female Journalism.
Titus & Peachy Keenan discuss her new book Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, a funny but spirited battlecry, to rouse the moms of America, for family & also for faith.
Titus Techera & Lafayette Lee discuss No Country For Old Men, the Coen Bros. novel & the Cormac McCarthy novel it's based on. We talk about manliness & war, confrontations with evil, & the transformations of America, North & South in their influence on the West, the 60s, & our world now...
Titus & David Polansky discuss the wonderful war-time movie The Life & Death of Col. Blimp, a Powell-Pressburger combination of propaganda & art, & a rare opportunity to reflect on British character through the Imperial wars & the World Wars, as well as on America & its wars in the comparison.
Titus & Jack Fowler talk about Battleground, the first major cinematic depiction of the Battle of the Bulge, the end of WW2, & the conflict that revealed American character. Happy Memorial Day!
Titus & Ryan Shinkel discuss David Lynch's Blue velvet, a movie about suburbia & the city, a boy growing up to be a man by facing evil, & the predicament of American freedom, which might mean ignoring evil or embracing it...
Titus & L0m3z discuss David Fincher's Fight Club & its relation to right-wing Twitter anons -- the age of agonizing men looking for causes, who attack capitalism & matriarchy but find it difficult to associate or be productive.
Titus & David Polansky discuss Terry Gilliam's Brazil, a dark comedy, a tale of future tyranny, also a Romantic fantasy--we talk about the ways in which it describes our troubles, & more adequately than the more famous entries in dystopian science fiction.
Titus & Steve Sailer discuss the unpleasant facts of political life in America & the study of those facts through the use of statistics. Steve talks about how he studies patterns of behavior and what conclusions this leads him to about the two major political coalitions & the ways of life they make possible, as opposed to the rhetoric & the ideology peddled by pundits in the mass-media.
Titus & Sohrab Ahmari discuss Mulholland Dr., David Lynch's story of Hollywood, love of the beautiful leading to murder--the glamour that sustains FantasyLand & the misery that leads to corruption--dreams & morality!
Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss Paul Newman's Thanksgiving movie, Nobody's fool, a story about a man returning to family & learning what he might have that he should give thanks for. We talk about upstate New York, a rural setting, post-industrial, becoming impoverished, & how people have to deal with aging & mortality. I compare this setting, full of quarrels & tinged by despair, with social media!
Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about the working class buddy cop action comedy, the relationship between friendship & justice for men, & the succsess of the Lethal Weapon franchise.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about the most famous buddy cop action comedy--justice for Christmas, Los Angeles summoning heroic men to do daring deeds, the superiority of noble sacrifice to therapy when it comes to men grieving.
Titus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni discuss the elections in Italy & the new gov't of Giorgia Meloni, a right-wing politician dedicated to the Italian nation & who quotes the conservative sages of our times--Roger Scruton. We talk about the economic, immigration, & foreign affairs problems facing Italy.
Titus & Aaron Kheriaty discuss Aaron's new book, The New Abnormal, a report on the biomedical security state & a warning about the threats to civil liberties rising in response to the pandemic.
Titus & John Presnall talk about Brian De Palma's transsexual thriller, a poetic attack on psychiatry & a look at the transformation of society after the sexual revolution, as marriage, love, & even individual identity become fragile & threaten to collapse.
Titus & John Presnall talk about Brian De Palma's most famous horror movie, Carrie, 1976, adapting Stephen King's debut novel. We're in important ways rehearsing the '70s as a society, so it's worth thinking about the stories that were intended as warnings at the time about the great changes in society, especially in the '60s. Carrie, especially in its conclusion, is a remarkably clever view of American society & the future, the children.
Titus & Scot Bertram talk about Dirty Harry, whose 50th an. in 2021 went largely unnoticed--the virtues of the character & of the story are now embarrassing to elites & perhaps to many other people--the criticism of society offered by the artists, however, is more timely than we could possibly wish & deserves attention!
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about the Oscar-nominated Czech movie Divided we fall, a somewhat comic drama about survival & salvation in Bohemia in WWII, or the character of a people caught between Nazis & Soviets.
Titus & John Presnall talk about Brian De Palma's The Fury, a horror about the deep state, about the idealism of education (brain powers) & globalization (the UN) turning into espionage, experiments on people, & terrifying violence. At the point America runs the world, the family is most endangered.
Titus & Sebastian discuss Paolo Sorrentino's most famous movie, Oscar-winner La Grande Bellezza, a worthy heir to Fellini as an examination of European decadence & the problem of nihilism in the midst of the most celebrated civilization, in Rome.
Titus is interviewed by Scot Bertram of Hillsdale--the subject is Bruce Willis's career, the blue collar action movie, the citizen-hero, & all the ways in which these movies were prescient about political problems, the vulnerability of American society, & the corruption of moral virtue by glamour or celebrity worship or entertainment.
Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss The Teacher, a Czech movie set in Slovakia in the last years of communism, the true story of the moral corruption of a small community where ideology & privilege blight the possibility of a decent life & of the parents' hope of restoring morality through the school, for the sake of the children.
Titus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni praise Sorrentino's The Hand Of God (E Stata La Mano Di Dio), the only Oscar-nominated movie that can plausibly be compared to great cinema, as Sorrentino is the only director who can be compared to a master, & who continues the tradition of Italian cinema. We talk about Naples & Italy, the ages of Rome & the future of art, the nation, & faith. We also talk about Sorrentino's autobiography & the attempt to make suffering into art.
Titus & Eric Cook continue our series on D.W. Griffith & the origins of cinema as the democratic form of art with Intolerance, an attempt to give a visual history of humanity that can inspire people to turn away from cruelty & make the democratic age unlike the previous splendid, but catastrophic ages. A fond hope, at the outset of the World Wars.
Titus & Aaron Sibarium discuss his reporting on the practice for dictatorship now thriving in elite institutions & educating a next generation of elites, while America is busy with other matters--woke censorship & epidemic demands on college campuses, by both students & administrators, in hospitals, in NGOs, &c.
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk The Courier, the true story Cold War spy thriller set during the Cuban Missile Crisis--a study in the friendship of two men, British gentleman Greville Wynne & Russian spymaster Oleg Penkovsky, who embody civilization even as they help save it. It's a fine movie, see it!
Titus & Ben Sixsmith discuss Ben's new volume of short stories, Noughties: Eleven echoes of a dismal decade. These are scenes from the decadence of British culture, contemporary recollections of the various ideas of celebrity, influence, soft power, political transformation that thrived in that deluded decade, the beginning of the 21st c.
Titus & Hannah Long talk about Terrence Malick's The New World for Thanksgiving! The origins of America, love & war, pirates & Puritans, England & the quest for the Indies. Happy Thanksgiving!
Titus & Hannah Long talk about Capra's dark Halloween comedy, his satire on WASP America & his comic hopefulness about democratic America, the horror-comedy as America's pride & how to have a Halloween without the sordid.
Titus & Eric Cook continue our discussion of Griffith's Birth of a nation, we talk about the amazing achievements of the movie & the way they're connected with its damning fault--the strange way in which Progressive pacifism & racism all the way to white supremacy could go together in art. We also talk about the difficulty of giving an account of the Civil War that takes seriously both justice & honor. We've moved on from the old romance that did injustice to blacks to a dark new one that does injustice to everyone starting with Lincoln...
Titus & Eric Cook of SPEAKING ABOUT SILENTS begin a series on the great achievements of D.W. Griffith, America's first visionary director, a self-made artist, entrepreneur, & aspiring prophet. We talk about The Birth of a Nation, a wonderful picture that's also morally repellant--from the beginning, cinema was powerful & dangerous! Artistic genius in the cause of injustice, animated by a philanthropic desire to bring everyone together! History & lost cause propaganda. Progressive racism, pacifist cruelty! Paradoxes & drama!
Titus & Paul Seaton & Carl Eric Scott complete our overview of the work of the greatest living French thinker, Pierre Manent,.with special attention to his book, The Metamorphoses Of The City. We talk political philosophy & history, & what it means to be a post-modern conservative.
Titus & Telly Davidson talk about the effect of 9/11 on cinema & TV: The darkening of the mood of 21st c. cinema, fantasy as 9/11 reenactment, the absence of great directors in the national memory of 9/11, the difficulty of dramatizing the event & the demeaning ways it's treated out of sentimentality, & finally the madness of the post 9/11 espionage & war shows.
Titus talks about Oliver Stone's most unexpected, most patriotic movie, WTC< a true story that reveals American character at its best--citizenship, public service, nobility, faith, as well as its basis in the middle class family way of life.
Titus & Justin Lee & Dave Woods talk about David Lowery's Arthurian tale, The Green Knight, a reflection on mythical decadence & what it might mean for the young to become men. The movie gives you the confrontation of pagan heroism & Christian faith, of ancient & modern ideas, of fear of death & fear of life.
Titus & Peter Robinson & John Yoo talk about Master & Commander, the Peter Weir seafaring adventure movie, about the Aubrey-Maturin novels on which it was based, about the charm of military adventures & the series we've been reading. Also, we talk about the detective & lawyer novel series & TV shows--Bosch, Lincoln Lawyer--that fascinate us & which will be our next podcast.
Titus & Noah Millman talk about Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro's novels--The Remains Of The Day, Never Let Me Go, Klara & The Sun. All three are about transformations in society & in the soul, the outsourcing of humanity from masters to servants or from humans to robots, the jeopardizing of human longing or love, both through technology & in other ways.
Titus, Carl Eric Scott, and Paul Seaton introduce a series of podcasts on the greatest living French thinker, Pierre Manent, a Catholic Straussian, a critic of liberalism & defender of the democratic nation-state, a political theorist. We will acquaint you with the man’s thought, his questions in political philosophy, & some of his books.
Titus & Sam Goldman talk about Whit Stillman's Barcelona, a story of Americans & Europeans, of two young men looking for love, as well as for manliness, responsibility, adulthood, service, at the point where a vibrant & lawless democracy sweeps such ideals from society! A romantic comedy about how to be an American!
Titus & Mike Anton talk about Machiavelli's republicanism, his fighting spirit, his education for rash young men, & the attempt to educate the very online right away from extremism, toward political success.
Titus & Telly Davidson talk Wag The Dog, David Mamet & Barry Levinson's satire on media & politics in the 90s, the merger of Hollywood & D.C., of news & entertainment, the collapse of politics into rhetoric, & the corruption of elites.
Titus & Sam Goldman talk Ripley, the novel & 1999 movie adaptation, the 50s, the strange transformations of the WASP elite & the middle class, America & Europe, bourgeoisie & aristocracy, art & therapy, evil & the desire for acceptance.
Titus & Geoff Schulenberger talk about erotic thrillers & tragedy, about the neo-noir of the 80s-90s, & the disappearance of stories about dangerous women.
Titus & Armond White talk Zack Snyder--the artist of the year, with Justice League & Army Of The Dead giving us a beautiful & a dark vision of the American future. We talk about the power of his imagery, the way he's taken up Spielberg's mantle as America's leading cinematic humanist, & how he stands up for the part of America that's now silenced--faith, heroism, patriotism...
Titus & Sam Goldman talk about Whit Stillman, Metropolitan, & the twilight of WASPs: The romance of the Doomed Bourgeois in Love facing democracy--the reaction on the left & the right to the abolition of gentlemanship--the Tocquevillian view of middle class societies & the middlebrow art that typically reflects their experience.
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about the remarkable HBO series Chernobyl, the only serious cinematic treatment of the peace time event that came closest to nuclear Armageddon. We talk about the Soviet regime, Russian character & Russian humor, the friendship & conflict between science & politics, & the limits of liberalism when it comes to storytelling, to say nothing of globalization.
Titus & David Goldman discuss Chins & America, the two models for political assimilation on a continental scale in modern politics. We talk about competition, the hard teaching war offers, & the requirements for leadership, national vision, & respect for knowledge in a society.
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about the best movie of 2020, Konchalovsky's story of a suppressed revolt in Soviet Russia, where the very existence of revolt is suppressed ideologically. A story about a mother & daughter, about private life, our embodied nature, yearning for holiness, & how politics can turn all of these things into crimes.
Titus & Angelo Codevilla talk about cancel culture as a tool of oligarchy & the way democratic politics could overcome it: Cancellation is a two-way street, the more it's wielded, the more oligarchs & their minions isolate themselves from the people.
Titus & Matt Shapiro (Polimath) talk about his data project on COVID--cases, deaths, state by state, across the US. We also talk about the great big good news story the media isn't dealing with well: America's vaccination success, which seems to augur a return to normal life--or a chance to put life back together again--by summer. (We also talk about Looney Tunes!)
Titus & Flagg discuss Andrzej Wajda's last movie, a portrait of Poland's most famous painter, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, his struggle against Communism, how tyranny destroyed him, & his activity as a teacher.
Titus & Oliver Traldi talk about slacking & slackers--music, movies, & the attitude of the 90s--how slack has been replaced by activists, therapy, & work; what there is to learn from slacking--how Socrates was a slacker; & why even serious endeavors require slacking, idleness, leisure, to afford inspiration.
Titus & Scott Yenor talk about his new book, The Recovery Of Family Life, the problem of loneliness, lack of marriage character, & of a public education that puts career above anything else. Feminism is a great success in achieving what it promised--autonomy, freedom, choice--but not so when it comes to happiness...
Titus & Pete Spiliakos continue their discussion on rhetoric & politics with criticism of the corruption of political institutions & the need to create a new political elite, that's populist & interested in governing.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about Peter Lawler as pundit, how he influenced Pete as he became a pundit, Peter's realism about political matters & the distinction between politics & rhetoric. Then we talk about our political drama.
Titus & Armond White discuss Spielberg, America's preeminent pop artist, the most important Hollywood director of the last half-century, & Armond's new collection of essays & reviews on Spielberg.
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about A Hidden Life, the new Terrence Malick movie, a beautiful portrait of faith & sacrifice, as well as an examination of the political corruption of the simple life of peasants in light of Plato's Republic. A true story!
Titus & Zena Hitz discuss The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, the last of our series of five Sturges comedies--going back to war, small town America, & rescuing losers from their fate, Sturges employs the powers of comedy to save a girl from the dishonor of being pregnant without a husband & a young man from the dishonor of failing to serve in the war, rededicating America to babies, hope, & peace in the process!
Titus & Zena Hitz discus Preston Sturges's war comedy--how the military transforms America into a very fun, very rambunctious democracy, & a small town boy can become mayor! Down with the business oligarchy, up with the public spirited--this is his most Capra-esque story.
Titus & Brandon Weichert discuss space power, the new space race & America's vulnerabilities, the new generational conflict with China, the need for a new vision & a transformation of national security bureaucracies & political leadership in D.C. to defend American assets in orbit & the need for a new high tech manufacturing push, with government R&D, to give the young generation something worth doing.
Titus & Zena Hitz talk Sturges' very popular solution to the money problem in a marriage--be astonishingly beautiful & not too moral. Money & images are twin themes in America, in politics as much as in the movies, since we're all trying to figure out what we want, what we're chasing after, & how to get it. We also talk about Zena's other love--Frank Capra, & a preview of coming attractions...
Titus & Zena Hitz talk about The Lady Eve, Preston Sturges's most wonderful romantic comedy, or The Pratfall of Man. Comedy may seem an unlikely candidate to fix the problems of modern woman, but Sturges suggests, this is the way to the altar.
Titus & Carl Eric Scott talk about Peter Lawler & PostModern Conservative, the dissident conservative blog where we began our work of cultural criticism, Carl in music criticism, me in movies, sometimes overlapping. We talk about Peter's Tocquevillian insights & manner of looking at America, about The Restless Mind, & wrap up with Carl's Rock Songbook.
Titus & Armond White & Matt Zoller Seitz & Godfrey Cheshire talk about their new book of film criticism, covering the 1991-2011 period, & the 90s in cinema--the new works by the masters of the 70s, the new indie cinema, & the new possibilities of film criticism at that time, just before print collapsed & everything was reduced to content...
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about the late Peter Lawler--his Tocquevillian teaching & his comic manner of reaching his audience, some of his impressive or amusing observations, & our friendship at Postmodern Conservative, Peter's attempt to offer liberal arts thought to the broad audience.
Titus & Tom Harmon talk education guided by Peter Lawler's thoughts--about what's wrong with America's cognitive elites, the new ruling class, how come it's got such a powerful effect on conservative and Republican elites, too, and how we might help conservatives who opt for homeschooling and classical schools.
Titus & Lucas Morel talk about the professor's new book on Lincoln & the Founding--the needed civic education for our times, the teaching of equal freedom & natural rights, its importance for Lincoln, the greatest American, & its relevance to our times & the tyrannical temptations undermining equal protection of the laws today.
Titus & Jody Bottum & Armond White discuss novels & cinema, adaptations, when & how the movies improve on literature, as well as the difficulties facing the translation of narration into performance.
Titus & Paul Seaton remember the late Peter Lawler on the anniversary of his birth. We talk about his intellectual development--his broadening interests from American politics through Tocqueville to French thinkers like Manent & del Sol, as well as through Pascal to Augustinian theology--but always in the service of understanding & helping along the great American experiment.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos offer our third annual report on the catastrophic oligarchy in our two parties, with special attention to the suicide of the Republican party, which won everything in 2016 only to succumb to zombie Reaganism...
Titus & Brian Smith talk about Peter Lawler's example of generosity, his teaching of relational being, & how to think about our crisis in light of Tocqueville's insight that the American mind is restless, anxious, even miserable in the midst of prosperity.
Titus & Gregory Collins talk about his book on Edmund Burke's political economy--manners & commerce, America & France, empire & freedom. Burke is a founder of modern political conservatism, a modernizer & a liberal, but one dedicated to preventing the madness of revolution & preserving tradition as much as possible.
Titus & Dan Mahoney talk about Peter Lawler's reflection on the human being as person--both individual & relational, defined by wondering & wandering, not fully at home in the world, but at home with homelessness inasmuch community make being a self-conscious mortal being worthwhile.
Titus & Mark Henrie talk about Peter Lawler--his work as the ISI to teach political philosophy to young conservative academic elites, his life & his family, his heritage as a Catholic, & finally his work in appreciation of Whit Stillman.
Titus & Yuval Levin talk about Peter Lawler--their work together on the President's Council on Bioethics, Peter's understanding of modern & American dignity, & the necessity for institutions, moderation, & a realistic estimation of our abilities & the challenges we face.
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about the new Agnieszka Holland movie about Stalin's starvation of the Ukrainians, the Holodomor, & the liberal conspiracy to conceal the truth, orchestrated by Pulitzer winner Walter Duranty (the NYT never returned the prize).
Titus & Richard Reinsch talk about our late friend Peter Lawler, their work on Orestes Brownson's American Republic, & the broader them of the complexity of American life & politics, our need to restore our relational life after a long series of excesses in the name of individualism, & the move to a new conservative majority.
Titus & Ben Sixsmith talk about the riots defacing national memorials in the UK, the weakness & vacillation of authorities that were eagerly harassing law-abiding citizens until the day before yesterday, but now find themselves suddenly meek & accommodating, & the disappointment of Boris Johnson as a PM. After all, Macron has been far more serious...
Titus & Pat Deneen talk about Peter Lawler, the late professor of political philosophy & public intellectual, the postmodern conservative that gave us our series name. Post-modern conservatism is an attempt to correct the excesses of modernity by retrieving our pre-modern inheritance.
Titus & John Wilson & Jody Bottum talk about Stray Dog, Kurosawa's movie about the honor of the police facing Japan's catastrophic war & need for refounding. In a new world of democracy & individual rights, the police bear witness to the misery & confusion of an entire generation of young Japanese survivors whose future was stolen.
Titus & Justin Lee talk about Dark City, the Alex Proyas sci-fi neo-noir cult hit--we talk tragedy & science, Plato's cave, soul & the divine spark in men, reanimated corpses & behavioral psychology...
Titus & Zena Hitz talk about Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges's great comedy about the place of comedy & storytelling in America, the difficulties with bleeding heart liberalism, & the importance of dignity, community, & Christianity.
Titus & Chris Wolfe talk about Kurosawa's first story confronting Enlightenment & Japan's past--a doctor in a slum in post-war Japan tries to save a beautiful young yakuza from death by TB, only to be caught up in the intrigues of organized crime. Everything from equality for women to the place of science in the regime to the other elements of the influence of America is packed into this story.
Titus & Michael Kochin discuss his new book, An Independent Empire, on the American founding--empire means domination of land and people and American politicians from the beginning were decided on dominating the vast continent, in face of hostile Indian tribes and European powers.
Titus & Chris Arnade discuss front row & back row America, the new educational elite & the people they have forsaken--the way community is built around McDonald's--the difficulty of pointing out the importance of dignity & the indignity of the federal bureaucracy, the failures of liberal institutionalism & the need to help out the worst off among us.
Titus & Jody Bottum & John Wilson discuss The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa's harshest criticism of the corruption of modern Japan, which leads to the destruction of the noble & the weak alike. The combination of private traditionalism & public deference to superiors creates not patriarchy, but mere oligarchy.
Titus & Scott Beauchamp discuss the view of America from the military--what knowledge of honor, ritual, traditions, hierarchy, & community adds to understanding what's missing in our culture, in our lives, & even in the way we think about our longings. To begin with, we've replaced honor with celebrity.
Titus & Tanner Greer discuss the future of conservatism, the conflicting ideas about what will replace the previous Republican consensus, & the varieties of Very Online ideologies & cults counter-attacking elite liberalism's woke theology. While older conservatives look back in shock at the 2016 elections, younger conservatives look forward in fear of the unfolding Great Awokening that started around 2014.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about politics in the age of the plague--what's so insane about supply-side economics, what it means to think politically & prudentially, what the common good requires, & how to understand our weaknesses & what we may do to deal with them.
Titus & Oliver Traldi talk about Progress, liberalism, the IDW, the transformation of the internet, generational politics, & also Aristotle's treatise on the soul!
Titus & Telly Davidson talk about Paddy Chayefsky's Network, a satire of TV's effect on America, turning everything from news to terrorism into fantasies on screen. Liberalism's Enlightenment dreams turn into madness & fear for America replaces mid-century confidence.
Titus & Rod Dreher talk about traditional conservatism & Christianity under attack by the Pink Police State--kink not only approved, but mandated by power. We talk about his books Crunchy Cons, The Benedict Option, & the upcoming Live Not By Lies, about what we learn from Christians who survived totalitarian persecution, & what faith may do for communities in the near future.
Titus & Jody Bottum & John Wilson discuss Kurosawa's view of modern nihilism in his last modern movie--High & Low, or Paradise & Inferno, a movie about the class differences in post-War Japan, where envy, resentment, & a Dostoevskian crime lead to the downfall of a titan of industry.
Titus & Peter Paik discuss this year's Best Picture Oscar winner, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, a character study set among the conemporary Korean middle class, where the desire to avoid suffering & secure comfort leads to tragedy.
Titus & Chris Wolfe talk about our generation's Christmas movie--Die Hard, a story of an unlikely redeemer come in the thick of winter. Seriously, we're talking about the redemption of Sgt. Al Powell, the importance of his friendship with John McClane, & the redemption of America, faced with an elitist temptation.
Titus & Henry Olsen discuss the angry democracy of our times--very high turnout in elections, parties & politicians that cannot get a hold of their electorates, much less represent them, increasing distrust in elections that seem to not even lead to the formation of stable governments, much less sound policy, & the possible path, by way of crisis, to a new majority coalition, & tranquility.
Titus & Scott Beauchamp discuss his new book on his war experience, on becoming a man & a writer, & on what the military taught him about what's wrong with society in an age of individualism & consumership. We talk about community & honor, about the need to make sense of uncertain times & to know on what to rely, as well as the difficulties with talking seriously about our predicament in the first place, given our anxiety about what's coming next.
Titus & Oliver Traldi talk about the origins of the Intellectual Dark Web--online culture & wokeness in academia clashing to produce a backlash of academics calling bullishit on Progressive pieties, tactics, & habits. We talk about the attempt to create a new etiquette & ideology for a class that defines itself by TED talks intellectualism--& the reaction of the dark parts of the internet that resent & mock that ideology.
Titus & Terry Teachout discuss L.A. Confidential, another story about the origins of Los Angeles & the modern America of glamour. We have a reversal of the noir--the femme fatale helps redeem rather than damn protagonists who were corrupt before they came to make a serious moral decision. Curtis Hanson's movie makes for a revision a heroism away from noir's tragic destiny toward American drama, where happy ends are possible, in limited ways, for some of the people who deserve them,
Titus & Steven Fairchild discuss Red, the conclusion of Kieslowski's Colors Trilogy--the movie where the disjunction between what people want out of life & what modern society is arranged for is most shocking. Kieslowski treats his theme, abandonment, through desire this time, its fickleness & the way it is aroused & disappointed by technology.
Titus & Steven Fairchild talk about White, the centerpiece of Kieslowski's Colors Trilogy, the story of equality--where the theme of abandonment is treated through revenge, the need to get even, inflicting suffering repaying suffering incurred, desire returning as hatred. As with love, so also with France & Poland, & the EU.
Titus & Steven Fairchild discuss Kieslowski's Colors Trilogy--starting with Blue, the movie about liberty presented as loneliness. Juliette Binoche plays a woman who, faced with a catastrophe, tries to abandon everything so that she may be herself, only to find herself drawn to her duties to dead & living together.
Titus & Tyler Malone talk Kubrick--the erotic thriller, the possibility that love leads to horror, the strange education eros offers in its attack on morality & the stranger politics of elite corruption.
Titus & Jody Bottum talk about Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, a wonderful combination of history & comedy that reveals uniquely Kurosawa's vision of justice for Japan, a remarkable story about a young girl's transformation into a princess, & the movie where Toshiro Mifune assumes his full grandeur.
Titus & Peter Paik & George done complete our discussion of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy--after Oldboy, Lady Vengeance. A femme fatale who is also an angel of death becomes the necessary agent of justice for a number of bereaved families; Korea is modernizing, but the future turns out to be childless; the needs of punishment face the challenge of Christian forgiveness. A number of themes come together in a double plot, about hateful vengeance & a mother's love for her daughter, at the conclusion of which citizens deal with justice & look for grace.
Titus & John Presnall talk about The Black Dahlia, Brian De Palma's story about the corrupt origins of Hollywood, the aristocratic habit of concealing cruelty behind splendor, & the necessary violence involved in glamour.
Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Chinatown, a story about the origins of Los Angeles & the doomed attempt to learn the ugly truth about these origins. John Huston plays the grand, corrupt aristocrat, Jack Nicholson the petty, corrupt democrat & they come to fight over the future of America.
Titus & John Presnall conclude their discussion of Scarface, the tragedy of freedom, desire, and chasing after dreams. We talk about the description of politics in tragedy and also reveal the logic of the plot in relation to the cycle of regimes in Plato's Republic.
Titus & John Presnall talk Scarface--Brian De Palma's most infamous movie & the most influential, the tragedy of American freedom. Desire leads to violence--as Rene Girard says, desire is imitative, creates competition, & leads to catastrophe. Hence, both liberal tolerance, not to say optimism, & conservative insistence on property rights, not to say pessimism, reach a crisis when commerce & immigration create a catastrophe by fulfilling dreams with cocaine.
Titus & George Dunn & Peter Paik discuss Park Chan-wook's Oldboy, the centerpiece of his vengeance trilogy, which won him the Palme d'Or in Cannes. Korea's transformation into a prosperous democracy & one man's transformation into a superman go together to first conceal & then reveal the dark secret at the foundation of civil society: The sacred law on which politics is based is the family, which must obey public laws.
Titus & Molly McGrath discuss Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa's finest movie about the problem of justice. We talk through the different contradictory testimonies which deepen the crisis of justice--the conventional lies lead gradually to the full collapse of honor--but also about the relationship between humility, telling the truth, & saving a baby. Human nature emerges not only in its ugliness, but also in its beauty. Rashomon is both a story about Japan's collapse in WWII & a counsel of hope that times of decay need not lead to chaos.
Titus & Ben Sixsmith talk about writing & audiences in the age of social media. Digital technology has rapidly democratized communications, turning broadcasting into narrow-casting & exposing everyone to the promise of access, interaction, & even celebrity. This has fostered not a brave new world, but serious political & social conflicts we discuss. The public space has been unwittingly privatized in the keep of a handful of tech corporations now facing a lot of hatred & with no sense of what the future holds!
Titus & Eric Cook talk about Hitchcock's Catholic movie, I confess, about the conflict between justice & faith, public & private, secular law & holy men. Monty Clift plays a priest who receives confession of a murder only to gradually see himself get accused of that murder. A seeming accident turns into the theologico-political problem.
Titus & Eric Cook return to the Hitchcock series with Strangers on a train--a kind of companion piece to Rope. Both movies about murders committed out of enlightened immorality, one set among education elites in New York, the other among political elites in Washington--both stories about social climbers who have to face up to the ugliness of the elites they want to join & therefore warnings about the problems post-war liberalism will face.
Titus & Paul Cantor talk about David Milch's most famous achievement, Deadwood--the movie & the TV show both: A lawless, but orderly vision of America. An America with commerce but without religion, with freedom but without equality--what kind of community & what kind of justice is possible in such a situation?
Titus & Peter Paik discuss Alan Moore's comics, which have made for a number of movie adaptations, few of which are successes. Zack Snyder's Watchmen is good. HBO is now making a series which looks terrible. The Wachawski's V for Vendetta was rather bad, as also From Hell. We try to explain why with reference to two themes that recur in Moore's stories--radical political change & the power of suffering to make for greatness, both ideas simply to be rejected in an End-of-History version of liberal politics. We also discuss Miracleman for one of Moore's depictions of such a realized End of History.
Titus & Telly Davidson, critic & author of Culture War, a book about the 90s, return to Citizen Kane to wrap the discussion of the tyrannic soul, the erotic man who wants to be loved by everyone, & the characterization through love & friendship that helps us grasp what kind of man Kane was. We also talk about politics & media, how technology changes our situation & how we try to adapt to it.
Titus & Telly Davidson talk about Citizen Kane, the story of politics & media technologies, the transformations radio brought to public & private lives, & the arrival of the fully erotic man--the tyrant-soul who wants to be loved by everyone. We also talk about transformations since Kane: TV & the internet, & the political, social, & cultural changes they've brought.
Titus & Spotted Toad talk about education, the experience of the teacher, the crisis in public education & how to rethink it in the present circumstances. We talk about his book--13 Ways Of Going On A Field Trip--about his ten years teaching science in New York & the place of nature in our attempt to become rational.
Titus & Terry Teachout talk about North by Northwest, Hitchcock's perfect comedy. We move by way of thriller from the noir to what it would take for a noir hero, betrayed by a beautiful woman, nevertheless to find his way to romance in the element of comedy. Cary Grant pulls off a performance by turns comic & tragic, trying to make sense of life in modern America, & end up getting married.
Titus & Paul Cantor continue discussing his new book, Pop Culture & The Dark Side Of The American Dream: Today we talk about The Walking Dead as a post-modern Western. What's American character like in absence of institutions & technology? Can there be any meaningful freedom in the state of nature?
Titus & Paul Cantor talk about Breaking Bad--the Macbeth of Meth. We talk about the dark side of the American Dream, the new situation created by institutional failure, agonized manliness, & the desire to escape the middle class in the direction of excellence &, indeed, tyranny.
Titus & John Marini wrap up a trilogy on Sam Peckinpah's Westerns with his most comic, least violent picture: The Ballad Of Cable Hogue. The only movie he made about a Founding also turns out to be his story about dealing with movability, mutability, & mortality in America. Progress is a killer, but human beings can remember their love of the natural, tranquil life. It's also Peckinpah's Lockean Western, where labor mixed with nature creates property & leads to a common good for a community!
Titus & John Marini discuss Sam Peckinpah's first Western, Ride The High Country, a story about the collapse of nobility. Joel McCrea & Randolph Scott are veteran marshals of the Old West who sign up for one last job hoping to make something for themselves & of themselves. We also talk about his great, if short-lived series The Westerner. before that.
Titus & Carl Eric Scott & Flagg Taylor discuss Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's new movie, Never Look Away, a beautiful meditation on art & tyranny, on the changes of regime in Germany from the Nazis to Communist East Germany to the democratic West Germany, & the task of the artist in modern society.
Titus & Theodore Gioia discuss how classical music, originally a source of ennobling characterization in Hollywood, turned into the specific soundtrack of evil, of mastermind villains like Hannibal Lecter--the way TV & pop music overwhelmed America's middlebrow settlement & replaced it with a demotic source of authenticity, connection to the audience, & historical relevance--& how things might change again!
Titus & Paul Cantor celebrate our 100th episode at the ACF with a conversation about Tim Burton's first decade: Pee Wee's Big Adventure--Beetlejuice--Batman--Edward Scissorhands--Batman Returns--Ed Wood. The cinema of freaks, what it means not to be part of the majority opinion in America, & where art stands to all this!
Titus & James Poulos, author of The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us From Ourselves & Executive Editor of American Mind, discuss the collapse of elite liberalism & the challenge we face as we transition to digital technology through the destruction of all forms of celebrity. We talk about political transformations in America & around the globe, the world after history restarts, & the possible revival of nations & peoples...
Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Pitfall, the fine 1948 noir starring Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, & Raymond Burr as the heavy! It's a story about post-war America, men dissatisfied with suburban happiness, & the dangers middle-class life is facing. You get the insurance business & people whose lives are tied up with fraud. You get two attitudes to danger, risk, & getting what you want.
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk Pawlikowski again--Cold War, a beautiful tragedy by the preeminent Polish director of our times. After Ida, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Cold War, which won the Palme D'or & the director prize in Cannes (& was nominated for three Oscars). After a story of devotion & divine love, a story about merely human love & shared suffering. Set in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia, & Paris, this is the story of a couple who go West & East across the Iron Curtain, trying to live well together.
Titus & Flagg Taylor continue our series on Polish movies--& more broadly, movies about totalitarianism in Europe--turning to Pawel Pawlikowski, now at the top of his fame--nominated for the Oscars, a winner in Cannes, & finally making movies about his native Poland. We start with Ida, a movie about a young woman in the Poland of 1962, about to take her vows as a nun, who first has to learn about her family & their fate.
Titus & Paul Cantor discuss H.G. Wells's War of The Worlds, his remarkable imagination & his penchant for scientific tyranny both--then the famous Orson Welles radio show--then alien invasion movies. War of The Worlds, both the Cold War George Pal version and & the post-9/11 Spielberg, then Tim Burton's Mars Attacks & the flying saucer movies by which it was inspired.
Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss Katyn, the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda's fourth & last Oscar-nominated film--his story about honor & prudence, about faith & suffering--about the Nazi-Soviet dismemberment of Poland, the Soviet massacres at Katyn, & the subsequent totalitarian propaganda & the Polish struggle to remember & retain their national identity. It is also his own family story, since his father was murdered at Katyn.
Titus & Flagg Taylor switch chairs: ACF President Flagg today interviews ACF Exec. Director Titus Techera--about the American Cinema Foundation, its past, its plans, & its projects, about his learning about movies in post-Communist Eastern Europe & coming to America, to writing, & cultural criticism, & about the future--digital cinema, education, & heroism.
Titus & Armond White discuss the great movies of 1968, especially the Godard pictures then first brought to America, Les Carabiniers ('63), Weekend, & La Chinoise ('67), which form a sort of trilogy of the past, present, & future of Europe--from war to revolution. (We also talk about his latest, The Image Book.) We focus on Godard's ironic documentary style & prophecies about modern society, his criticism of left-wing terrorism & right-wing consumerism--both versions of materialism. We also point to one of his signs of the alternative: Goethe.
Titus & Caitlin Peartree get to our fourth Wallace Stevens podcast--this time, we talk about the uncertainty that can get in the way of recognizing a human being & the existential implications of such an event. This is also the poem in which Stevens says he will illustrate his principle of poetry: The poem should resist the intellect almost successfully. Education & wisdom are involved in seeing that man is uncanny!
Titus & Jody Bottum talk about Michael Crichton & his most unusual novel, Eaters Of The Dead, as well as the movie that was based on it, The 13th Warrior--directed by the great John McTiernan.
Titus & Sonny Bunch discuss Watchmen, the super-hero movie most dedicated to super-heroes, their tragic & all-American character. We also talk about Zack Snyder as auteur--a man who has managed to bring a cinematic style to blockbuster production.
Titus & Caitlin Peartree continue their series of interpretations of poems by Wallace Stevens with Of Mere Being, one of the latest of his works, a brief statement on the separation between the beautiful & happiness, or the limits of human experience.
Titus & Terry Teachout turn to Out Of The Past, Bob Mitchum's best noir, his defining role as a chump, & a great variation on the femme fatale & the corrupted noble man. This is a rare story for juxtaposing the morality of the small town & the corruption of the city, the erotic lawlessness South of the border with the disheartening unhappiness of American life, & then showing how erotic tragedy grows out of this opposition between innocence & experience. The corruption of glamour is the them, & it's all-American.
Titus & Henry Olsen (Senior Fellow at EPPC, editor Unherd.com) continue the PostModern Conservative criticism of elite corruption & incompetence with a look at the coalitional, demographic, & electoral changes of recent decades--especially our elections since 2014. We show how far the electorate has moved from the elite & what a crisis is stirred by institutions & elites that no longer represent the majority.
Titus & John Presnall complete their trilogy on liberalism in the age of total surveillance with De Palma's Blow Out, which puts together image & sound, Antonioni's Blow-Up & Coppola's The Conversation, turning these theoretical studies of art & technology into a practical matter--where does art stand to corrupt politics in our world.
Titus & John Presnall continue their trilogy on liberalism in the age of total surveillance with Coppola's The Conversation. We go through the plot, what it means to want to hear the ugly truth, what it might mean to fear anyone learning your secrets, & how the invasion of secrecy was shamelessly advertised in American corporate capitalism. Listen to our conversation & be ready fora shock!
Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss Harold Ramis's attack on institutional authority in his 80s comedies: Caddyshack, Back To School, & Ghostbusters. Pete calls Ramis a prophet of Trump: A comic writer whose reprehensible protagonists nevertheless triumph over hypocritical & complacent elites.
Titus & Paul Cantor discuss Frankenstein on its 200th an.--the novel, its history on the stage in the 19th c., & various movie adaptations in the 20th c. We talk about the genius of Mary Shelley & the rarity of a new myth being created by a single person under the historical spotlight! We talk about Enlightenment, Romantic poetry, & how new technologies of communication provoke nostalgic storytelling.
Titus & Joseph Bottum do the Christmas podcast--caroling, Dickens's A Christmas carol, reflections on the neediness & joy of being human, the modern American Christmas, & the childhood that prepares us for Christmas. We start & end with two of Jody's carols!
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about Brooklyn, a beautiful work of selective nostalgia on the America of the 50s, from the point of view of an Irish immigrant played by the lovely, talented Saoirse Ronan. The story dramatizes the promises & perils of American freedom & the institutions needed to guide people to a decent happiness in America.
Titus & Scott Beauchamp turn from the Catholic horror The Exorcist to the scientific/atheist horror The Thing. We talk about the powers of science & the daring of facing the cold, inhospitable cosmos; about facing the horror of life as mere, but deadly self-reproduction; & the collapse of a community faced with this threat into paranoia. Listen & share!
Titus & Scott Beauchamp discuss William Friedkin's The Exorcist as a Catholic horror, where the confrontation with evil is part of man's supernatural destiny. Horror both issues from the revelations of our modern scientific powers & also investigates their limits. It makes the case for faith in our humanity at the same time it opens up the possibility that being human isn't special. Body horror especially makes us ask ourselves whether being human really is special.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss Rocky & its many sequels. Why did it shoot to fame? Because its a Frank Capra movie! Because Rocky's a boy scout. Because it's very realistic about the suffering of the lower classes & the way it complicates patriotism. Rocky is a boxing movie with very little boxing; it's a feel good-movie where the protagonist loses. It's a marvel of middlebrow art.
Titus & Terry Teachout talk about the pluperfect noir: Double Indemnity, written by Billy Wilder & Raymond Chandler. Every element of the all-American tragedy is present here, for the first time. We talk about the conflict between love & law, the different claims of eroticism & friendship, & also where insurance stands to the all-American future.
Titus & John Presnall talk Antonioni's Blow-Up, a movie about the erotic revolution of the '60s & what it meant to art, artists, the young, & society. Blow-up offers a version of a tragic hero--a man who thinks himself king of London because he's on top of the new erotic & artistic production of beauty. He thinks he's in control. Then he encounters mortality.
Titus & Paul Cantor, America's eminent Shakespearian, talk movies, TV shows, & tragedy. From Godfather to Breaking Bad, from Aristotle to Mark Twain, we talk about how to understand pop culture & how to understand America's great love affair with tragic heroes (now called anti-heroes).
Titus & Richard Brookhiser, famed biographer of the Founders, get to their third discussion--this time introducing his newest book, out just after the election, about the great Chief Justice, John Marshall. We talk about his life & his work in making the Supreme Court an institution to rival the presidency & Congress. We also talk about the Federalists' vision of the American people.
Titus & Terry Teachout discuss In A Lonely Place, the 1950 Nicholas Ray noir, Bogart's most daring performance--a movie with a modern feel, with sophisticated adult characters, men & women, who nevertheless suffer great misery. We talk about Ray's talent for bending genre to tell stories that feel true to characters he establishes within genre. We also talk about film noir's connection to tragedy, to post-war America, & to our own times. Listen & share!
Titus & John Presnall talk Al Capone & Eliot Ness--Brian De Palma & David Mamet's The Untouchables, their answer to Coppola's Godfather. We talk about law & justice, populism & rights, Puritans & Catholics, WASPs & immigrant Irish & Catholics, America & Europe, democracy & tyranny. Listen & share, friends!
Titus & John Presnall discuss Apocalypse Now, which ended the 70s, the decade of vastly ambitious Coppola movies which started with the Godfather. We talk about Coppola's vision of America & the Vietnam war, his exploration of varieties of manliness, some more insane, others less, his ideas about British imperialism--his allusions to Kipling, Conrad, & T.S.Eliot--& the amazing & awful qualities of the movie, which lead the audience to discover, in the emerging chaos of war, possibilities that had seemed foreclosed by civilization & thus forgotten, but which come alive again as humanity regresses symbolically & thematically back beyond peace, war, & the cosmos.
Titus & Carl Eric Scott discuss Cameron Crowe's autobiographical story Almost Famous, his touch of greatness! We talk about rock music & the era when it defined the identities of vast numbers of young Americans. About the rock demigods, especially Dylan, Bowie, & Led Zeppelin. About the need for community around music & the way American youth has changed. & about Carl's Rock Songbook, the series of essays to read on rock music!
Titus & James Lileks talk about Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, the new Amazon series, & the original Jack Ryan movie, John McTiernan's The Hunt for Red October. We talk about the portrayal of heroism in relation to national security, about analysts rather than fighting heroes, about national threats & whether commerce & public respectability allow the realistic portrayal of political enmity, & how the kid from the Office turned into an action star. Listen & share, friends!
Titus & Terry Teachout talk noir! Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, the best Robert Ryan noir--a story that moves between social criticism & Romanticism effortlessly, the tragic story of a man who believes in justice & who learns to believe in innocence, too. We talk about the many attractions of the movie--Ida Lupino, the Bernard Hermann score, George Diskant's cinematography, Ward Bond's remarkable portrayal of a father mad to avenge his daughter's murder--& we also talk about noir, genre pictures, social criticism, how America learned about tragedy in WWII, & the new depth of character in story-telling this ushered in. Listen & share!
Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about Die Hard on its 30th anniversary. We talk about the everyman role that made Bruce Willis a star & how director John McTiernan arranged an entire story about arrogant, failing institutions--corporations, the media, the police, FBI, &c.--& the moral virtues of working class Americans like John McClane. We also talk about the skill & care put into making the movie--the action, the design, the characterization, & the sequences in the plot. Die Hard redefined action just like it defined a sort of populist patriotism. We then turn to how action movies failed as a genre & were replaced by superhero movies & the new situation--economic, political, social, technological--in which nobody finds it possible to imagine a working class hero. We try to show what middlebrow art does in bringing social concerns & storytelling together, as well as how it might be done again.
Titus is joined by Richard Rushfield, newshound extraordinaire, author of the Ankler newslater, the favorite Hollywood commentary at the American Cinema Foundation. We talk Netflix, Amazon, Disney--the changes in our entertainment & technology--as well as how the conflict between them is shaping up in America's fight for a monopoly in the glamour business.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos return to PoMoCon, the post-modern conservative podcast, & discuss the various political & intellectual forms of corruption afflicting elites. We find things to notice, & criticize, among both parties & all ideological points on the compass. Sure to make us popular.
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about Agniezska Holland's story in honor of Jan Palach, Burning Bush. This is the 50th anniversary of the violent end of the Prague Spring, so we talk about the promise of freedom in in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet invasion that ended it, & the noble self-immolation of the young student Palach in protest against tyranny. We talk about the moral realism & the technical competence of the Burning Bush mini-series & connect it to Charter77 & the collapse of communism in 1989.
Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Charles Laughton's directorial debut, The Night Of The Hunter, a remarkable movie about false prophets--the possibility that the devil would come among us in the clothes of a preacher. We talk at length about the various aspects of the making of the movie--actors, script, production, score, & even some editing & cinematography. & we also talk about the moral seriousness served by all these crafts & Laughton's unity of conception.
Titus & John Marini discuss the most impressive of Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, The Wild Bunch. We talk about Peckinpah's ambivalent view of Progress, his Rousseauan attempt to ground human happiness in an innocent state of nature that recalls Eden, & his thoughts on nobility--what does it mean to have integrity, to be a man of one's word, & to stick together with other men. Peckinpah made the Western into a tragedy & raised the spectacle of freedom to the pitch of agony & is for this reason the worthy counterpart to John Ford's epic grandeur.
Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about Comedy & Communism--under the banner of Middlebrow, we talk about the recent movie The Death of Stalin, but also about Milan Kundera's Joke & the plays of Vaclav Havel, about Solzhenitsyn & Leo Strauss, about the tragic movie The lives of others & about the black Soviet comedies of Ilf & Petrov... We talk about comedy as truth-telling & retrieval of nature under the threat of ideological tyranny, about comedy's relation to evil, & about how we in democracies can understand life under tyranny.
Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Laura, the most beautiful noir movie--a beautiful noir about the beautiful. We talk about the great achievements of the actors--the cinematography--the score--the direction--the source novel--in every way we try to bring out what a surprising collaboration of talents this movie is, rather than the handiwork of one single author. More, we discuss the achievement of middlebrow culture in Laura & the meaning of noir!
Titus & Richard Brookhiser, famed biographer of the Founders, discuss the Gentleman Revolutionary, Gouverneur Morris, The Rake Who Wrote The Constitution, as the Brookhiser bio is titled. Morris was the most aristocratic of the Founders & he is the one with the best seats for both world-changing events. We talk about his many accomplishments, from writing the New York Constitution & the US Constitution to the Erie Canal, & his impressive career & the character that made it possible.
Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss the last Western--& the movie that won Clint Eastwood his first Oscars. Unforgiven is a movie about the origins of law in sacred law--not in mere order. It shows what fearful deeds are required to establish the equal natural rights of all human beings, whereas an orderly system might simply treat women as prostitutes & property.
Titus & Richard Brookhiser, famed biographer of the Founders, discuss Alexander Hamilton, the most romantically or adventurously heroic of the Founders, recently the object of a very successful Broadway musical. We discuss the greatness of Hamilton & the view it gives of the American Founding--for this is the highest subject of storytelling & the greatness has to be understood first in order to be dramatized.
Titus & John Marini talk about My Darling Clementine, Ford's first post-war Western--his most Romantic & least ugly picture, an attempt to revisit the foundation of the rule of law after the political & economic catastrophes of the first half of the 20th c.
Titus & John Marini discuss Stagecoach, the movie that made John Wayne a star & the Western an art-form, John Ford's way to establish America's national form of poetry.
Titus & Terry Teachout celebrate the ACF podcast's first anniversary! The celebrated critic, playwright, musician, joins Titus to discuss Vertigo, Hitchcock's most daring artistic endeavor. We talk about actors, studios, performances, music, the character of the tragedy & the darkness in Hitchcock himself.
Titus & John Marini continue their series on John Ford's Westerns with a discussion of Liberty Valance, the story of the emergence of the rule of law from the desert. We talk about love & violence, about civilization & progress, about the desert & the train, the free range & the city, gunfights & newspapers.
Titus & John Marini talk about John Ford's The Searchers--the best Western for the discussion of the sacred law of the family & the fundamental questions that emerge when law is as yet to be installed. We also talk about the Western & its place in American life, how Ford turned it into an art, & what Jorge Luis Borges called "our epic duties".
Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss Never let me go, the 2010 movie made from Nobel Prize Winner Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel about a dystopia where clones are exploited for organs & have to discover their humanity. Flagg is a poli.sci professor & has taught the novel in a course on dystopias, along with Orwell, Huxley, C.S. Lewis, & Koestler. We talk about the troubling realism of the story & the way a scientific take over of human lives reflects our society.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss the impressive (Ben Solo) & the disappointing (everything else) parts of The Last Jedi. We talk about structural problems, mistakes concerning character relationships, & how to dramatize moral conflicts. We also talk about what was great about Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, what gems were scattered in Anakin Skywalker's story in the prequel trilogy, & how the same problems & opportunities will show up in Episode IX.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss in detail the promise & the catastrophe that is Justice League. We go over the touches of cinematic greatness, the possibilities of the characters & the ideas of the creators--but also the unique example of studio executives destroying the most talented & successful partnerships of writers & directors in studio history.
Titus & George Dunn & Jason Eberl return in trio formation to discuss more Nolan movie-making--this time Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy's Westworld. They bring their academic expertise with them & we go through lots of philosophical ideas that are important to Westworld, to the story of American self-creation & its tech-empowered & tech-endangered future.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about the great box office success A quiet place & its theme: Helicopter parenting. As all good horror movies do, it offers a moral teaching about the causes of fear & the path to moderation. The movie reflects on American society, suburbia, the loss of control & the fear of downward mobility, but it also restores birth-giving to its exalted place among the human experiences.
Titus & Matt Zoller Seitz, famed critic, discuss Alex Garland's Annihilation. We go through the beautiful & the weird things en route to MZS's theory of the sci-fi as a cinema of ideas. I add a parallel theory of the horror movie. We talk Kubrick, Malick, Lynch, & Spielberg--on whom more in a future episode--to get at the grandeur of the director-poets who confront the crisis of our time.
Titus & Carl Eric Scott & Flagg Taylor discuss Jeff Nichols's Mud (2012, nominated for the Palme D'or in Cannes). It's a coming of age story set in Nichols's native Arkansas, on the Mississippi, & owes a lot to both Mark Twain's Huck Finn & Flannery O'Connor's violence & religion storytelling. It's all-American in the best way, not least because it showcases the full humanity of the drama of rural communities that seem to have run out of future.
Titus & James Lileks discuss Steven Spielberg's magic-at-the-movies legacy before the release of Ready Player One, which might be his last attempt to win over a big audience. We talk about the darkness & manly danger in his movies, but also about the childish wonder & longing for beauty. We talk about Jaws & Close Encounters of the Third Kind, about Indiana Jones & Jurassic Park!
Titus & John Presnall discuss Brian De Palma's Body double, a movie we're both fascinated with, but which is obviously artful & obviously immoral. It's both vulgar & sophisticated. This combination hints at De Palma's touch of genius. He shows what sex & violence are in their interest to audiences, directors, & society. This is also De Palma's assertion of taking up the mantle from Hitchcock. Why is he Hitchcock's true heir? Because he knows horror is a moralistic genre.
Titus & John Presnall discuss another 70s movie about political crisis--Martin Scorsese & Paul Schrader's Taxi Driver. We talk about Travis Bickle's self-destruction & his insight into the corruption of the times, & how madness becomes the way to see clearly in a society where respectability means denying there is evil.
Titus & John Presnall discuss Steven Spielberg's career-making turn directing Jaws. We look at the New England township in light of Tocqueville, with all its failures of deliberation & association. We talk about the social crises of the 70s. We also then talk about the Western half of the movie, men trying their hand at heroism & the strange brotherhood that creates. We also talk about the ways in which Progress obviates the need for manliness, with good & bad effects...
Titus & Carl Eric Scott discuss Roman J. Israel, Esq., the movie that earned Denzel Washington his newest Oscar nomination, written & directed by Dan Gilroy (who was nominated as writer for Nightcrawler). This is the best film on civil rights & the question of justice in America's criminal defense law (plea bargaining is the central & symbolic issue)since at least Separate but equal (the Thurgood Marshall movie starring Sidney Poitier, writtern & directed by George Stevens Jr. in 1991). It is also an investigation in the sources of law & the yearning for divine justice. Critics have maligned the movie, misunderstanding it, but here's hoping the Oscars are going to give it a new life!
Titus & Peter Paik discuss Alex Garland's directorial debut, Ex Machina. Sci-fi is the last place for heroes, where movie-makers and audiences explore together human nature and confront the future. In this case, technological creation & the Biblical account of creation in Genesis are juxtaposed in order to bring out the complicated relationship between freedom & control. This movie is a morality play of sorts, a warning about the mistakes we're liable to make, but also an affirmation of the human desire for freedom. Listen & share!
Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss Blade I & II, focusing on class conflict & David S. Goyer's great writing in a Marxian tradition, as well as the pinnacle of Wesley Snipes's career as a working class black hero. We also get to Goyer's Dark city, to other Marxian awakening stories like the Roddy Piper movie They live & the Wachawski's Matrix, We also get to look at Guillermo del Toro's work on Blade II, which takes visual ideas from John McTiernan's Predator, James Cameron's Aliens, & Murnau's Nosferatu.
Titus & Eric Cook talk about Hitchcock's Rope: 2018 is the movie's 70th anniversary! This should be a classic--it's Hitchcock's thematic examination of class aspirations in relation to Enlightenment & a certain view of meritocracy. Hitchcock marries his usual moral depth with an unusual idea--you know who done it in advance. It's all about what the catastrophe means about mid-century America.
Titus & Caitlin Peartree discuss the poetic art of Wallace Stevens: 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. In 13 brief poems, Stevens reveals the natural temptation to make metaphors; the imaginative element in which the intellect does its work; & the need for a new poetry that can reveal human nature at work by arousing it to do the work--by coming up with images & thoughts that recall us to our basic experiences as ensouled beings.
Titus & Robert Tracinski discuss Groundhog Day on its 25th anniversary. We bring out the comedic theme, the inescapability of character, & the confrontation between American restlessness & the limits necessary to relational being & intellectual development. We talk about the confrontation of the big city & the small town. We talk about Toqvueville. We talk about Hollywood doubles, movies that come out at about the same time with the same subject, from different studios. We talk about Deep Impact & Michael Bay's Armageddon; about Bill Murray in The man who knew too little & Michael Douglas in The game. We talk about comic actors turning to drama, like Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, & then Robin Williams and his movie What dreams may come.
Titus & Caitlin Peartree discuss Wallace Stevens's poem about the all-important role played by poets in making sense of being & being human, The Idea of Order at Key West. Listen & marvel at the poet's "blessed rage for order". This is a poem you should compare to Hemingway's Old man & the sea; or to Pindar's first Olympian ode.
Titus & Armond White discuss the Better Than list summarizing 2017 in movies, in counter-cultural terms. We talk about Lady Bird & A quiet passion (the Emily Dickinson biopic), Valerian (the Luc Besson galactic blockbuster), & finally about Theo & Hugo & Call me by your name. The Better Than list is the only counter-cultural idea for awards season! Listen & share!
Titus & John Presnall conclude their discussion of the Godfather trilogy with the moral grandeur of tragedy. We see a third Corleone generation & we think about the similarities of character & the different fates that Americanization produces. We compare the Corleone with the Adams family, America's first political dynasty! We discuss the importance of Sicily, Rome, & Europe the Old World-New World conflict at the core of the Godfather. & we explain the Shakespearean sets of characters!
Titus & John Presnall complete their discussion of the Godfather--they look at how Part II reverses the structure of the original & completes the portrayals of Vito & Michael Corleone. They discuss the all-American story of an immigrant family, of making it in New York, moving out West, & going international (Cuba). The Corleones rehearse American history & this changes the non-American Sicilian principle of true friendship Vito tries to adapt to the New World.
Titus & Paul Rahe, Professor of political science, discuss assigning the Godfather to college students so that they understand the fundamental modern & ancient political alternatives, the transformation of concepts of justice, & the diversity of cultures contained within America, as well as their transformations. Then the discussion moves to Scorsese's Silence & its magisterial description of the conflict between Caesar & Christ in the case of late-medieval Japan. The Prof. explains the importance of learning about fundamental political alternatives for the student of foreign affairs, for diplomacy & for the press, as well as the delusion that globalization has annihilated great differences between regimes, countries, & ways of organizing life & faith.
Titus & Armond White talk about the collapse of criticism & cultural journalism. The triumph of a shallow liberal ideology in several, maybe most, mass media has made both art & ideology invisible in ways that cause them to deteriorate.
Titus & Eric Cook offer a brief history of American Christmas. We talk about the great tradition of the war on Christmas, starting with the Puritans, who made Christmas illegal! We talk about how all the parts of the American Christmas came together: Santa Claus, gifts, the feast, the Christmas tree, toys, shopping, and everything else!
Titus & John Presnall talk about the Godfather. What's new to be said about the most admired tragedy to come out of Hollywood? Two things: 1. How the story reflects on changes in American society & the twisting relationship between power & legitimacy. 2. How we see, starting with Sollozzo, the arrival of Machiavelli as political philosopher, which of course also has to do with politics & economics in America.
Titus & Eric Cook discuss the lovely, hilarious Christmas movie Elf! The humor turns out to conceal a sophisticated, realistic look at the collapse of the American civil religion seen from the point of view of the family Christmas & it deals well with how to deal with this situation.
Titus & James Lileks discuss the experience of seeing Star Wars, again & again, in the summer of '77 & how a generation took that childhood love & ran with it well into the Social Security years. The future of Star Wars in an age where it's a movie a year plus tv on the internet plus, inevitably, VR, is also in discussion. The imagination is not what it used to be.
Titus & James Lileks discuss the cultural mark left by movies & how they affect generations. From Casablanca to Star Trek to Aliens to Radio Days to Last action hero, we talk about the personal & social impact of movies & how we try to share these passions, as movie lovers & as family members.
Titus & James Lileks are back with ruminations on middlebrow, this time going through post-war Christmas movies/animations/TV specials. Varieties of A Christmas Carol--old comedies like Christmas in Connecticut--fantasies like The bishop's wife--the 60s animations--A Christmas story--&, a recent one, Arthur Christmas.
Titus & James Lileks talk about middlebrow & mid-century America. We've got lots to offer: 1. Cultural archaeology & commercial archaeology--our fascination with what life was like in America before. 2. Hitchcock & the movies as inadvertent documentaries. 3. The great fracturing in the 50s: Freudianism--youthful alienation--smarmy rebels you want to slap the cool out of--The heiress (1949)--Monty Clift--Henry James. 4. The collapse of the culture, as work of the most successful classes, who most should have defended their taste & habits. 5. Middlebrow is inescapable, but inherently unstable. Technology pulls us in the direction of progress, but a sense of taste makes us want to bring back some formalities, mores, & pleasures that depend on us all doing the same thing... We cannot tolerate too much imposition on our freedom, but so soon as we make small concessions to comfort or whim, a deluge follows.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos complete their discussion of Blade Runner with the new Blade Runner 2049. The question of soul shifts here to the question of birth. Self-knowledge shifts to our self-understanding as relational beings (we start from family relations & end with citizenship). Similarly, tyranny completely shifts from the state to corporations & we discuss the possibility that getting what we want, imposing our wills as consumers, might lead us to a libertarian nightmare.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss Blade Runner from the point of view of political philosophy. Pete's big insights are political: The story recalls the slavery question in the Americas & adumbrates a new threat to humanity, inasmuch as being the persons we are seems harder & harder. I bring up the possibility that the fantasies & philosophies of the Old World are taking over the New World, with inequalities more horrifying than any previously known to man.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos (First Things online columnist) discuss the GOP as a budding oligarchy. We talk about the failed presidential ambitions of Senators & Governors; the principled constitutionalist conservatives who cannot seem to grapple with the big political questions of the day; the party's oligarchic turn and the threat of collapse following on the greatest electoral successes its had in more than 160 years.
Titus & Carl Eric Scott & Flagg Taylor talk about the great movie The lives of others, dramatizing communism in East Germany through the relationship between a playwright & the Stasi agent (secret police) monitoring him. Carl & Flagg have co-edited the best book on the movie, Totalitarianism on screen, & talk about that as well.
Titus & Carl Eric Scott wrap up their discussion of Whit Stillman. After their Damsels in Distress podcast, they discuss Last days of disco, a lovely comedy of manners that tried to discuss the sentimental education of young Americans in terms of cocktails, dancing, & conversation.
Titus & James Poulos discuss Twin Peaks, the original series & the new season, the meaning of morality in an almost hopeless world, & the importance of art as a reflection on our predicament.
Titus & John Presnall discuss the most thoughtful gangster movie of our times, Carlito's Way. Brian de Palma manages to provide a kind of sequel & a kind of improvement over the much more famous Scarface. Like Scarface, this is also a running commentary on how America remembers the Bogart of Casablanca, but not the earlier gangster films. The movie is also a comparison with the famous Italian gangster movies of Coppola and especially Scorsese. It's New York setting, in the Seventies, revisits the glory & misery of lawlessness, but does so in order to bring out a version of the American dream.
Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss the business & culture of franchises & sequels, the importance of character arcs & stories built on psychological realism, & the fundamental philosophical & political bases of DC & Marvel superhero movies as tragedies & comedies. We're trying to educate writers, critics, & audiences all at once, so you're in for a treat!
Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about the recent James Cameron quarrel about whether Wonderwoman is a strong woman--we go through characters from the first movies about Gen X-ers coming of age--we look at the difficulty of becoming an adult in suburbia & the heroines that emerge in these horror stories.
Titus & Carl Eric Scott & Flagg Taylor discuss Whit Stillman's most artful comedy, Damsels in distress (2012), about four college girls running a depression center on campus on a mission to save American youth from the social wasteland by inventing a dance craze.
Titus & Jason Eberl & George Dunn take a look at several movie made by the Nolan Brothers, Christopher & Jonathan, in light of various philosophical theories, from Aristotle's ethics of individual to Augustine, Kant's moral theory, & eventually Rene Girard's mimetic theory. Enjoy pop culture & philosophy!
Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss the Christopher Nolan superhero movies & look at the DC superheroes from the point of view of themes in political philosophy: installing the rule of law, the relation between citizenship & humanity, & the relationship between human beings & powers beyond control or grasp.
Titus delivers a lecture on American society & cinema, from Tocqueville to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The ACF goes to college!
Titus & Eric Cook discuss Dunkirk, the new Christopher Nolan movie--the sources of heroism, patriotism, & prudence Nolan is working with. We talk about Churchill's speeches, the Homeric view of war, & the epic scope of movie-making. About sound design & the musical quotation from Elgar's Nimrod. About the range of forms of heroism on display in the story. About one of the strangely British heroes portrayed in the movie, Charles Lightoller, who had been second officer of the Titanic when she sank, before Dunkirk!
Titus & Eric Cook discuss The birds as a companion piece to Psycho--what is it about modern women leaving town in a hurry? What is it about remote houses from a bygone America that inspires tragedy? What does the scare in a horror movie conceal? Why did Hitchcock talk about his movies as comedies? Listen & share!
Titus & Felix discuss Predator, on its 30th anniversary this June. This was John McTiernan's first studio movie, & is an excellent study of varieties of manliness faced with a kind of natural horror. Seven men descend into the jungle, then the jungle begins to swallow them up, one by one.
Titus & Eric Cook discuss Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho--the conflict of innocence & respectability playing out against modern liberation. In post-war prosperity, people get a sense of the horror lying beyond the city--the ancient Biblical-Greek tragedy identification of the home as the place of tragedy & the modern discovery of meaningless crimes of passion. Redemption collapses into justice, justice into a search for truth. Society, the law / the police, & the modern science of psychiatry doom innocence by ignoring the problem of evil. Biblical stories & Renaissance art are in conflict.
Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss Gran Torino & Clint Eastwood's last great character, Walt Kowalski, the old Polish Catholic Korean War veteran who becomes the hero America needs.
Titus & Felix discuss Alien: Covenant. Ridley Scott sets up his story and explains the elusive villain, David, by a series of works of art, a music piece by Wagner, a painting by Piero della Francesca, and others. In this podcast the sophisticated references are analyzed, as well as the relationship between the human maker of technology and his technological creation.
Titus & Felix discuss Ridley's Scott's Alien & his legacy in the introductory movie podcast of the American Cinema Foundation, bringing together the rebooted Alien and Blade Runner franchises through robots / synthetic humans , the original alien movie & how horror came to science fiction movies.