"The
story is a warning. Will we heed it?
2023-07-26T05:00:12-04:00
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carlos lozada
So we drove
out to the Midwest for vacation. And so I was like, oh, we’ll just audiobook
it. And between the drive back and forth, I barely had covered half of the book
because it was like 27 hours or something ridiculous.
lydia polgreen
Wait, you
subjected your family to the “Oppenheimer” audiobook?
carlos lozada
They loved
it. Or they lied to me.
michelle cottle
Either way.
carlos lozada
Well, I
mean, I read it when it came out. It’s like 17 years ago, so I mean, I don’t
remember.
ross douthat
So once
wasn’t enough.
carlos lozada
I just
remember that it was great.
michelle cottle
Nerd.
ross douthat
Uh-huh.
carlos lozada
So I had to
read it again.
ross douthat
Right, sure.
michelle cottle
Nerd! [MUSIC
PLAYING]
ross douthat
From New
York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat.
michelle cottle
I’m Michelle
Cottle.
carlos lozada
I’m Carlos
Lozada.
lydia polgreen
And I’m
Lydia Polgreen.
ross douthat
And this is
“Matter of Opinion.”
So last
week, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” came out, and all four of us saw it.
carlos lozada
Not
together.
ross douthat
Not
together, except in spirit, but so did a lot of other people. The movie has
already made more than 80 million bucks at the box office. Now, if you haven’t
seen it, I don’t know that anything we’ll discuss is the biggest spoiler, given
that the movie is based on extremely famous historical events, but we probably
shouldn’t promise not to have any spoilers, right?
carlos lozada
Spoiler, the
good guys won World War II.
ross douthat
Oh, well,
that itself is a controversial statement, Carlos, but we’ll be talking about
whether the movie is really about the good guys, what its moral vision is, what
it says about when politics and potentially world ending science collide. But
we’ll start with the basics. What did everybody think about the movie?
lydia polgreen
Silence.
ross douthat
Come on,
come on. What did you — let’s hear it.
michelle cottle
I’m going to
jump in.
carlos lozada
Fun family
fair.
michelle cottle
I’m going to
jump in. I thought the movie was spectacular. It’s obviously going to generate
some controversy about whether they were too soft on communism or made Oppenheimer
too much of a hero, but it was ambitious. It was, of course, gorgeous.
There were
some weirder moments in it that are kind of Christopher Nolan’s forte, but on
the whole, it took what was a sweeping, huge book, “American Prometheus.” It
won the Pulitzer. It is well worth a read and really gives it a good narrative
that drives you through what is an unacceptable three hours. No movie should be
three hours. But this one was good enough that I didn’t start to fidget like a
four-year-old until about 2 and 1/2 hours in, which is always a good sign.
lydia polgreen
Carlos, what
did you think?
carlos lozada
I really
enjoyed it. I wasn’t as troubled by the length because it sort of tells two
stories. It tells the story of the race to design and test the atom bomb. And
then it tells the story of how Oppenheimer was sort of cast aside by the very
government that had deployed him for war-making purposes when he was no longer
useful, when he became kind of an irritant. And I mean, those stories are woven
together in the movie. So to me, since there was so much that was worth getting
into, I wasn’t troubled by the length.
lydia polgreen
I didn’t
think it was too long at all. I love a biopic. I love an epic book. I love an
epic movie. I mean, the performances, I thought, were incredible. And I have to
say, I was astonished by the box office numbers that so many people wanted to
see this movie because I think most people who go to the movies during summer
blockbuster season aren’t necessarily looking to be challenged in this way. But
yeah, I found myself quite swept up with it.
ross douthat
Yeah, so the
box office was remarkable. And since one of my big things is the decline and
fall of the American movies and so on, I feel churlish saying anything negative
about “Oppenheimer” because it is terrific that it did so well. And Nolan is
terrific, and the cast was terrific. I wasn’t sure about the last hour of the
movie. So it does this sort of — there’s sort of the central forward momentum
narrative carrying you through the Manhattan Project, culminating in the big
explosion, right, which comes about 2/3 of the way through the movie.
And then
there’s the aftermath in the 1950s, which takes two forms. You follow both
Oppenheimer through the sort of closed, unfair kangaroo court hearing where he
loses his security clearance over his various ties to the many communists who
were associated with his social and intellectual world in the 1930 and ‘40s.
And then you also get the failed nomination to Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet of
Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey, Jr., in a really terrific performance.
Strauss was
a Republican hawk, and Oppenheimer famously became a critic of arms race
politics. But so the movie is sort of culminating in Lewis Strauss not getting
the Secretary of Commerceship. And you can see what Nolan is doing here, but
honestly, to me, there was just a pretty big gap between the drama of the
literal atomic bomb and the drama of Lewis Strauss’s cabinet nomination. And in
the end, I felt like that was an artistic failure.
michelle cottle
I totally
get your point, but in a blockbuster movie, you have to have a villain. And who
are we going to make the villain in a movie like this? It’s a very complicated,
weird subject. And you had to have an antagonist for Oppenheimer.
lydia polgreen
I actually
disagree, and I think it’s actually a fascinating artistic choice because
watching this movie, I thought, so much of it takes place in kind of the
perfect setting for a film that is, in a lot of ways, about the professional
managerial class. These dramas take place in these incredibly claustrophobic,
bureaucratic, drab meeting rooms.
And the only
reason that you know that this is an incredibly important proceeding is that
you have this assaultive score that’s coming at you with these incredible
strings playing. And I think that there is this symmetry that feels very real
to me. I guess it’s a metaphorical symmetry between the very real destruction
of the atomic bomb and the very real power of personal grudges and spite
between members of the professional managerial class over petty politics and
power. So to me, that felt like a central tension and storyline of the entire
movie.
carlos lozada
I agree that
that’s a critical element of this story. And in some ways, just as dramatic as the
race to develop the bomb, you can imagine the movie focusing on the Trinity
test and then on Oppenheimer’s transformation, and sort of an activist against
the H-bomb worrying about what he had unleashed.
But the
story is about how the government turns against him, how it found him
dangerous. And something kind of remarkable is that I don’t know if you all saw
the story, but just like last December of this past year, the Energy Secretary,
Jennifer Granholm, finally nullified the commission’s revoking of Oppenheimer’s
security clearance, saying that it had been, as more information came out about
what the hearing had been like and the unfairness of the process, that they
just couldn’t stand by it.
michelle cottle
I like the
fact that the book and the movie really drive home how confusing a political
time this was. So like well before the bomb or the hearings, you had this whole
concern about, on the one hand, the Nazis, and this is the major race you’re
fighting off. But even before Oppenheimer was drafted for this project, just
like so much churn about communism. And so you had these two competing
tensions, and he almost didn’t wind up in charge of the project because of his
relationships. I think people forget what just kind of a weird global time that
was. And this does a really good job of just trying to drive home how much
cloud there was around everything.
carlos lozada
Yeah, well,
I mean, it feels weird to say this with a three-hour movie, but you’re struck
by all the things that they kind of had to leave out. You see how, in the
movie, he’s this kind of immediately charismatic professor at Berkeley, right?
It starts with one student, and then suddenly it’s packed because he’s so
captivating. He was actually a terrible teacher initially. He was unintelligible.
He taught himself slowly to become a better teacher. And that cult of Oppie
kind of grew up around him.
What
Michelle mentions about the ferment of the moment is sort of even more alive in
the book, even around physics. The movie kind of glosses over this because you
don’t want to spend too much time on it, besides like, oh, look at all these
cool formulas on a chalkboard, you know? But his genius was in helping others
crystallize the ideas that they would pursue. And there’s a moment in the movie
when I think the Matt Damon character, Groves, asks him, why he hasn’t won a
Nobel Prize yet? Because everyone around him had Nobel’s. It’s super stressful
when you’re like the one guy with no Nobel.
ross douthat
Tell me
about it.
carlos lozada
And it’s that
the Nobel’s were awarded for super specific, deep contributions to a particular
field. And Oppenheimer was kind of interested in everything. He was too
distracted for that. He was a great enabler and crystallizer of other people’s
ideas.
ross douthat
I think one
of the interesting things about that particular moment in physics and science,
right, is that prior to World War II, prior to the Manhattan Project, there was
still a way in which science was operating outside of what we now think of as
kind of the American university model. It was much more European. There’s a
really strong aristocratic vibe. And Oppenheimer himself is much — he’s rich,
right? He’s a rich kid.
I’m not sure
this is completely, completely conveyed in the movie, though it’s clear that
he’s vacationing in New Mexico. Yeah, he basically puts the Manhattan Project
where he likes to go for vacation, right? It would be like, if you were like,
well, I really like this little town on the coast of Maine. Let’s build the
atomic bomb there. And there are a couple local lobster fishermen, but they
won’t object.
I guess I
wonder what, as the resident reactionary, I thought the movie up till the sort
of final 30 minutes was actually quite effective in making a case that maybe
Oppenheimer, once the project was over, shouldn’t have a security clearance. I
mean, I think the movie does a good job of portraying Oppenheimer as a very
complicated, fairly unstable figure, someone who literally poisoned the apple
of his professor while in graduate school, someone who was friends with tons of
communists, ran a program that was successfully infiltrated by communists,
apparently only had sex with either communists or ex-communists.
lydia polgreen
His brother
was a communist, don’t forget.
ross douthat
His brother
is a communist. The question is, should he have this security clearance? And
the moment when Leslie Groves, played really well, as always, by Matt Damon,
testifies and is asked based on the current Cold War era security guidelines,
would Oppenheimer pass muster, and he has to say no, I mean, he’s right, isn’t
he?
lydia polgreen
Yeah.
michelle cottle
Although I
thought the line was great because he said, no, but under the current system,
I’m not sure I would have cleared any of these guys, which kind of gets to the
period where scientists didn’t automatically going to think of themselves as
extensions of the political argument.
ross douthat
But it gets
to the period where under the circumstances of a war against national socialism
and imperial Japan, you have to say, yeah, if the best scientists are sort of
compromised by associations with communism, it doesn’t matter. You have to have
them in there. But then, once you’re in a Cold War environment with Soviet
Russia, you probably wouldn’t run the Manhattan Project the same way.
lydia polgreen
I think
that’s right, but I think that there’s also, to your point, Ross, there’s a
sort of a noblesse oblige around Oppenheimer. And that, I think, goes hand in
hand with another big theme of the book and the movie, which is his kind of
naivete. You see him floating in this world of ideas and theory and communism
and the Spanish Civil War as a romantic cause. And all of those things are
true. But they’re all taking place in an environment that’s outside of hard
politics and more in the realm of the theoretical.
And I think
that what you’re seeing in the film is this, and actually in history, is this
move towards a much harder and more concrete reality in which the people in
this world actually have to deal with the consequences of theory. And it seemed
that he saw losing his place in the establishment, the inner circle of decision
making about what the future of the country should be, and how we should be
dealing with these weapons, that it was a huge loss for him to lose his seat at
the table inside. And he assigned basically zero value to the kind of moral
mantle that he could and I think did pick up. It really gets at this kind of
like professional managerial class and sort of noblesse oblige clashing.
ross douthat
Yeah,
there’s a piece from Vox on that last point by Haydn Belfield that’s called
“Crybaby Scientist” that basically is just a — if you want to read the most
anti-Oppenheimer take in this movie environment, that’s the place to go. And
Belfield basically argues a version of what you just said, Lydia, that this was
a guy who imagined himself as this core decision-maker, but who basically
invented the bomb and gave it to the national security state and then was
totally unable to manage or master the forces that he’d unleashed, while
maintaining his desire to be seen as someone who was the insider sort of
steering the ship.
I think the
piece is unfair to Oppenheimer in many ways, but it’s worth reading the strong
anti-Oppenheimer take, which is also another question for you guys. There’s
also been a lot of criticism of the movie from the left, arguing that it’s just
too kind to Oppenheimer. It doesn’t spend enough time on the actual realities
of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, once again, Americans whitewashing
their own evils via Hollywood. What do you guys think of that critique?
michelle cottle
My response
to that is my response to a lot of these things, which is that not every movie
or every piece is about everything. So this was about Oppenheimer. You can
focus it on that. I mean, we can have another three-hour biopic on what about
the fallout in New Mexico. I mean, there’s been talk about it has ignored what
happened with the people who were downwind of the Trinity test. Yes, all of
these are like questions, but again, not every movie is about every piece of a
puzzle.
carlos lozada
It’d have to
be longer than three hours, Michelle. And you already oppose that, so.
michelle cottle
No, I object
on moral principle to movies that are that long.
lydia polgreen
I think,
first of all, it was a real choice not to portray or show anything from what
actually happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was utter and total and
complete devastation. And when I finished the movie, I took the subway home and
then immediately read John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” which is an extraordinary book
that really kind of gives you a sense of what took place there.
And I think
at the end of the day, I actually think that the way that the movie handled it
was probably right. It would have felt, I think, somewhat gratuitous to go
outside of the narrative of the movie and have newsreel footage or something
that sort of gestured at the kind of destruction that this bomb actually
wrought. And I felt that the moment where he’s speaking to a cheering, flag
waving crowd, and they’re stomping their feet at Los Alamos, excited and
celebrating that they’ve won the war by dropping this bomb on what was arguably
a largely defeated enemy, he sort of has this kind of moment of conscience and
what have you.
So I think
that was probably the right way to handle that. But the thing that was wild to
me is there’s this moment where Oppenheimer says, sort of justifying the use of
the bomb, that demonstrating the destruction of it will be so great that it’ll
usher in the greatest peace that mankind has ever known. And in one regard, he
was right in the sense that no one has ever deployed a nuclear weapon in a
conflict situation since then. But in another way, we have not actually seen
the greatest peace humankind has ever seen since then. So I don’t know. To me,
that moment in the film really stuck with me.
ross douthat
Yeah,
there’s a moment when I think they’re showing images from the actual atomic
bombings are being shown. And I think you see Oppenheimer looking away from it.
Right? So in a way, the movie is giving his perspective and his sort of showing
that for all his guilt and so on and sort of nightmares, there’s sort of the
nightmare scene that you referenced, Lydia, of the jeering crowd with the sort
of undertones of atomic destruction underneath it. For all that, Oppenheimer is
also sort of maybe refusing to see, right? The movie doesn’t show you because
Oppenheimer himself does not want to fully see what he did.
carlos lozada
The authors
make a distinction between Oppenheimer taking responsibility, like yes, he made
this thing, but not feeling guilt over it. And I felt that that was somewhat
portrayed in the movie. What I liked, Ross, about that moment you mentioned
when Oppenheimer looks away is that you see the colleagues around him, they’re all
flinching. They’re watching. And it’s it’s painful for them. But he sees
something and then immediately looks away.
lydia polgreen
Well, and
what’s also interesting is the justification, and I think actually, this has
sort of become the conventional wisdom, was that even though Japan was on the
verge of defeat, dropping the bomb saved lives, and you sort of see that in the
amazing scene of Gary Oldman playing Harry Truman, sort of waving away the
histrionic Oppenheimer saying he has blood on his hands.
So yes, I
mean, I think this notion that ultimately dropping the bomb saved lives has
become the kind of conventional wisdom. And “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb,”
which is a very influential essay by Paul Fussell in “The New Republic,” which
was published in 1981, I think really sort of articulates that view. But I also
think one of the things about the legacy of the atomic world in which we live
that nobody really ever talks about is the Cold War had real consequences, and
the fact that it couldn’t take place as a direct confrontation between the
Soviet Union and the United States meant that it pushed the conflict out into
essentially the decolonized world, right?
And the
proxy wars of the Cold War, I mean, it’s, depending on how you do the math,
somewhere between 10 and 25 million people died, depending on when you start
counting and who you count. But wars in Vietnam, in Congo, in Ethiopia, which
is my mother’s native land, Guatemala, all across Latin America. So it is
interesting that there’s this kind of binary choice between the peace and never
having a nuclear war, but boy, did it set off a huge number of proxy wars that
just happened to have as its victims, not the people of the United States or
Russia, but the people of largely the developing, poor, Black, Brown world.
ross douthat
Yeah, and I
don’t think you get a sense of that complexity from the end of the movie. My
reading, at least, of the end of the movie is, is much more sort of binary,
that it’s not that Oppenheimer created this sort of complex, new world where
maybe direct superpower conflict becomes rarer, but proxy wars become more
common. Instead, the movie ends with this vision of atmospheric destruction,
fire spreading across all of the Earth, the true apocalypse that we’ve all
lived in some kind of fear of ever since the 1940s.
So in that
sense, it’s presenting a vision of just sort of science slipping away from all
political control and/or politics just doing what it will with terrifying
technology. So let’s take a quick break here. And when we come back, we’re
going to try and bring the conversation about the intersection of science and
politics off the movie screen, out of the past, and into the present. So we’ll
be right back.
[MUSIC
PLAYING]
And we’re
back. So we’re going to talk now for a minute about not just what the story of
Oppenheimer says about history and the early Cold War and the life of the man
himself, but about our own future here, 80 years onward in the beginning of the
21st century, where the question hanging over lots of issues, nuclear
biowarfare and biotechnology, now artificial intelligence, is, can human beings
control and tame the technologies that we create that might have potentially
world destroying consequences?
So, for all
of you watching a three-hour movie about the first time, arguably, the human
race created such a technology, did it fill you with optimism about the human
capacity to restrain itself once we’ve let certain genies out of the bottle?
michelle cottle
I don’t
think we need to be feeling so optimistic. It’s not been around for that long.
There’s still plenty of time for us to blow ourselves up, Ross.
carlos lozada
So there’s
this one amazing moment in the book that I was hoping would appear in the
movie, and that’s that when Oppenheimer dies, one of his three eulogists is
George Kennan. So you have the father of the atom bomb being eulogized by the
father of containment. And containment, of course, was the policy that,
depending on how you interpret it, helped keep the two superpowers from going
to war with one another with nuclear weapons. He has an amazing line in the
eulogy. He says, on no one did there ever rest with greater cruelty the
dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature
out of all proportion to their moral strength. So it did not leave me with much
optimism.
michelle cottle
There’s also
this interesting development where Congress has looked at this movie and taken
the opportunity to reintroduce some ideas about how to get their arms around
it. I mean, we’ve seen Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts hawking his
proposal to ban AI from launching nuclear weapons. Now, I don’t think it’s
going anywhere, but it’s got a very Dr. Strangelove doomsday machine feel to it.
But it is what it is.
lydia polgreen
Yeah, I
mean, I think it’s so interesting because as I was watching the movie, I
actually thought a little bit about — and don’t be mad at me. I thought a
little bit about Elon Musk.
michelle cottle
[LAUGHS]:
Lydia.
lydia polgreen
He is not
the kind of Sanskrit-reading sophisticate that Oppenheimer was. And he is also
clearly of a different kind of political set of commitments, if you can even
call them commitments, than Oppenheimer. But just looking at the various points
of view that he’s taken, I think Musk shares this quality of bizarre naivete
about the way that politics actually works. And I think like Oppenheimer, Elon
Musk is a great synthesizer, perhaps not a great engineer of his own right.
But there is
this kind of protean quality that Elon Musk has. And in his naive replies to
right-wing, even anti-Semitic and other people with those kinds of political
views on Twitter, I do see kind of shades of a very crude version of
Oppenheimer, which makes me feel like we’re in for a fair bit more of this kind
of, quote unquote, “innovation” that is hurling forward without really thinking
a great deal about it. I mean, Elon Musk has just announced that Twitter is
going to become a company called X, which will be an everything company that is
driven by AI and do banking and God knows what else. So hold on to your butts,
guys. This is coming for us.
ross douthat
But what’s
interesting with Musk is that he is also a bit of an AI doomer, right, in the
sense that he has been sort of supportive of some of the people calling for a
pause in AI research. And a certain amount of Musk’s fascination with space
travel rests on his professed fears about human extinction, the idea that we’re
going to blow ourselves up in some way, shape, or form.
lydia polgreen
Yeah, Musk is sort of skeptical. But in some ways, that’s
the most dangerous, right? Because I think so was Oppenheimer, right? Like,
there’s this quality of being both aware of and smart enough to know how
destructive this thing could be, but also so smart and so curious and driven
that you can’t help but want to push it as far as it can go. And it’s actually
exactly in the hands of someone like Elon Musk, who professes to understand the
dangers, but nonetheless hears the siren song of the future calling and of
innovation and of science and of technology and sort of can’t resist following
where it leads.
ross douthat
Let me just
play, I guess, devil’s advocate for a minute on the specific nuclear question,
which I think is, it’s true, as Michelle said, that we’ve only had nuclear
weapons for 80 years, 80 odd years, slightly less. And it is very hard for me
to imagine a future in which they’re never used. There’s sort of a Chekhov’s
gun quality to nukes in the world.
At the same
time, we do have multiple generations now of evidence that human beings, when
given this awesome power, power to destroy whole countries, if not the whole
world, do flinch from it, right? The idea that if you hand human beings an
awesome, terrifying technology, they will just use it, has not been vindicated.
So far, politics has actually worked to contain the use of nuclear weapons.
The fear of AI is that it’s the fear of something that makes
decisions that aren’t human anymore, that lead to destruction not through the
sort of normal human power games and rivalries and so on that we’re all
familiar with, but through some sort of alien computational logic, where it
makes sense to fire all the nukes at once. And that, to me, feels like a
difference between some of the fears we have now and the fears people had at
the start of the nuclear age. Now it’s more like, well, we know what human
nature is like, and we haven’t used the weapons, but we don’t know what AI is
like. And maybe AI will use them.
What do you
guys think of that?
lydia polgreen
I mean,
there’s questions about loose nukes, dirty nukes. But I do think the point that
we have greater faith in the known frailty of human decision-making over the
unknown power of AI decision-making and of rationality is a really important
one.
And I think
that in some ways, it connects us back to the film in that science actually
should be under the control of politics because in a moment where we’re all
talking about we need to follow the science, follow the science, science is a
method. It’s not an answer. It is a way of thinking about the world. And it
needs to be balanced by other ways of thinking about the world. And those other
ways include politics. They include religion. They include all kinds of ways
that human beings organize their affairs and think about their values and
things like that. So to me, it’s absolutely critical that AI stays as far away
from these kinds of decisions as possible.
michelle cottle
Yeah, and I
don’t think we have to limit this just to, say, AI and nuclear weapons. I mean,
we did just come through a pandemic where there were serious questions about
whether this came out of a scientific experimental lab that then takes its toll
on the entire planet. I mean, and it’s just like people operate as though the
unthinkable won’t happen until, of course, the unthinkable does happen.
And even if
what the COVID-19 pandemic wound up coming from wasn’t, in that case, a lab,
which we may just never know, that doesn’t mean that the next one won’t. And we
have all of these things going on scientifically that we just don’t have a good
grasp on or as good a grasp as we should have.
carlos lozada
I think one
thing that would be certainly more useful is if there is just an ongoing,
vibrant conversation among all those arenas that Lydia mentioned — science,
politics, ethics, religion. And to the extent that a movie like “Oppenheimer”
and a book like “American Prometheus” cannot lionize scientists and say like,
they’ve got the answers. If only we’d listened, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera. But rather, enable this more of a give and take among these fields, I
think would be better off.
ross douthat
Well, on
that eloquent note, we’ll leave it there. And when we come back, we’ll be
talking about the geopolitical metaphors hidden inside the “Barbie” movie. No,
I’m kidding. When we come back, we’re going to get hot and cold.
[MUSIC
PLAYING]
And we’re
back. And now it’s time for Hot, Cold, where one of us shares something that
we’re into or over or somewhere on the thermometer in between. And Michelle, I
think you have something for us.
michelle cottle
All right,
it is perfection that Ross has mentioned “Barbie” because what I am hot on this
week is the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Now, I’m not talking about the movies. I
saw both of them. I enjoyed both of them. But what I enjoyed even more was the
way that this phenomenon, which is for those who haven’t been paying attention,
kind of the portmanteau sprung up on social media because these two wildly
different blockbusters were opening the same weekend, a challenge sprung up for
people to go see both movies. I love this because we’re at a period where going
to the theater has become a rare event. And seeing movies as a shared
experience is happening less and less and less.
So for something
like this to pop up just felt kind of delightfully communal. Movie theaters
were hosting costume parties and encouraging people to come in their pork pie
hats or their pink outfits. And you just had these groups of people, especially
with the Barbie crew, including my friends and I, taking pictures of each
other, complimenting each other’s outfits in the theater. It just had this
feel, which was so unusual at this point in time. And it’s something that I
think we need, especially after the last few years of isolation and grimness
and pandemic horror, just for people to have a moment where they can come
together, no matter how silly it is, and share this sort of thing.
ross douthat
And
celebrate the invention of the atomic bomb. Yes, that’s all —
michelle cottle
Hey, you can
argue that Mattel and Barbie have been its own kind of destructive force as
well.
ross douthat
Well, that’s
for a future episode. I was going to say that Mark Harris, the film writer,
said something, I think, on Twitter about how often unexpected hits are more
sort of shocking and disruptive in Hollywood than unexpected busts.
And I think
the hope right now for people who like the movies would be that Barbenheimer,
combined with the disappointment surrounding many, many superhero sequels and
Indiana Jones reboots and so on, will have some kind of substantial effect in
what kind of movies get greenlit and made over the next couple of years,
assuming, of course, that the writers’ strike ever ends, and that Hollywood
ever gets back to making movies in the first place.
carlos lozada
This reminds
me of a few years ago when Steve Martin was hosting the Academy Awards, and he
started off saying, look, I don’t know if you all know this, but I’m really
especially happy to host this year’s Academy Awards because all the proceeds
from tonight’s event are going to massive corporations. So not to be a Barben
whiner, but I don’t take such joy in kind of being manipulated effectively by
this kind of massive marketing campaign surrounding these two movies.
michelle cottle
If you’re
waiting for purity in your communal experience, you’re going to die lonely.
This is America.
carlos lozada
I don’t
think so. I think there are other ways to be communal beyond paying $35 for
popcorn and a soda.
michelle cottle
I’m just
saying, we’ve got to find a way to bring people back to communal events, rather
than sitting in their basements watching Netflix all the time. Then I’m all for
that.
lydia polgreen
I agree, and
I think I’ve really been bitten by the movie bug lately. I just recently signed
up for a membership at Film Forum. I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” a new
print. There was a new print of “Midnight Cowboy.” So I’m all in on the return
to the movies. And I don’t think any of those movies are putting money in the
pockets of giant corporations that exist as we know them today. So I can feel
really good about all of that.
ross douthat
Until a
Godard Cinematic Universe is launched.
lydia polgreen
Launches,
but I mean, I will say, one of the kind of leitmotifs of my summer has been
just an absolute joy at the return to kind of communal experiences. We’ve seen
real trouble in the world of theater, for example. I’m not talking about movie
theaters. I’m talking about acting and actors on stage and things like that. And
all of us need to vote with our feet and go and watch the theater, go to the
movies, do things like this if we want these things —
michelle cottle
Thank you,
Lydia.
lydia polgreen
— to be part
of our culture going forward. So I am with you, Michelle. I’ve got my bucket of
popcorn, my giant gallon jug of Diet Coke, and Twizzlers. And I’m ready to go.
So I guess I’ll see you at the movies.
michelle cottle
Fantastic.
I’ll be wearing my hot pink disco jumpsuit.
carlos lozada
And on that
note, as I clutch my Robert Oppenheimer action figure, that’s our show for the
week.
lydia polgreen
Bye, guys.
ross douthat
See you next
week."
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