This week we're getting into Abel Ferrara's 2011 film 4:44 Last Day on Earth which follows an actor, Cisco (Willem DaFoe), and his painter partner, Skye (Shanyn Leigh), on....the last day on earth. With nods to some of our old favorites including Al Gore, the Norse conception of Ragnarok, as well as Joseph Campbell, the movie explores what two people go through when faced with the certain knowledge that the world will end at a specific time. We open the episode discussing Donald Trump's...

This week for Halloween we are covering "The Shadow over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft. We get into Lovecraft's troubling history of racism, showing how it works as a manifestation of the anxieties of white supremacist ideology. We also discuss the work of Mark Fisher, who has looked into Lovecraft's deployment of "the Weird." Lastly we consider Lovecraft's role in popularizing (inventing?) the idea that life on Earth was seeded by a mysterious race of "ancient aliens." To open the episode we ...

Is our genetic makeup our destiny, or is there someway we can overcome the code on which our bodies and minds are based? This is the question asked by this week's film, 1997's Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol. We get into the reality of the eugenics-obsessed world presented by this picture while pointing out some of the...other aspects of reality this single-minded focus on genetic destiny allows the inhabitants of this film to overlook. We also discuss the recent Louvre r...

We're finally covering the Norse vision of the apocalypse, Ragnarök. We go over the Norse pantheon of gods, Odin, Thor, Loki, all your favorites, and then we get into some of the events that presage the coming of doom before plunging fully into that doom itself, particularly the tragic death of the Baldr done by coward Loki. We also get into some of the classic Norse apocalyptic monsters, Fenrir, Jörmungandr, Hel, Garmr, and, of course, Surtr (who could forget Surtr?). It's a trip through Nor...

We're finally tackling 1981's Mad Max 2 or The Road Warrior. One of the most influential post-apocalyptic films of the last fifty years, it is also considered to be one of the greatest action movies of all time. So of course, Michael is ambivalent about it, and Stu is OUTRAGED by that ambivalence. By the end will our hosts reach some kind of accord, or will this be a friendship-ending episode? To find out, you must listen. We start out by discussing Trump's recent threats to invoke the dreade...

This week we have bowed to pressure and are at last covering a 2013 National Geographic documentary called "How to Survive the End of the World: Zombie Earth." This is the first entry in a six part series to which we shall be returning periodically. The zombie apocalypse scenario set out in this infotainment feature is really about rabies, and not just regular, terrifying rabies, no. The documentary dares to ask, "What if rabies went airborne?" It's interesting to look back on this cultural a...

At long last we are covering Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien. We go over how the film is really about, surprise, capitalism, and how the ultimate aim of capitalism is to discover the perfect war-making commodity, in this case, a merciless killing machine unburdened by illusions of "morality," as one character puts it. Great movie, really fun to discuss, and we were even joined briefly by a special cat guest as we were discussing the prominent role in the film played by Jones, the c...

This week we are talking about 2022's Triangle of Sadness. Directed by Ruben Östlund, the movie looks at class divisions in three stages, zooming out from the troubles in an individual romantic relationship, then looking at class as it works on a luxury cruise, before finally depicting a kind of post-apocalyptic, Lord-of-the-Flies-with-adults situation on a seemingly deserted island. Beautifully made and at moments hilarious, we both felt there were times when the film was a bit heavy-handed,...

We've gone back to a total classic of the apocalypse genre, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, to mark our return from our "brief sojourn" in the realms of the afterlife. We get into all sorts of stuff about childhood traumas caused by the film, the desirability of voiceover in movies, the ATM-hacking skills of young John Connor; it's all here. We open the episode by discussing the recently revealed "birthday letter" and consider what its implications might be, both for Trump's future and for ...

In the final installment (for now) of our afterlife miniseries, we are considering the ancient Vedic Religion, the ancestor of modern Hinduism which arose in northwestern India in the second millennium BCE. We talk about the idea of being reincarnated in other realms (as opposed to in this world), and the different factors that might alter the realm in which one finds oneself. We also get into various hypotheses about where the Vedic religion came from, discussing the Indo-European peoples as...

Moving in a parallel direction to our last topic, we are going over the afterlife beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians this week, touching on mummification, the pyramid texts, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the elusive Field of Reeds. We compare the classes afterlife of the Mesopotamians to the highly stratified beliefs of the Egyptians, while also noting that, for the first time in our series on the ancient world, there is an idea of an eternal paradise at the end in this vision. We st...

It's part three of our foray into the history of the afterlife, this time with a focus on Ancient Mesopotamia and the legendary Epic of Gilgamesh. We go over the conception of the afterlife presented in the poem, which is very egalitarian if not very comforting, and we then move on to consider the second half of the tale, which focuses on Gilgamesh's attempt to achieve immortality. This episode contains spoilers for The Epic of Gilgamesh. An English translation of the Epic in PDF f...

In the second installment of our afterlife miniseries we delve into the prehistoric realms, discussing the earliest evidence we have for some kind of a belief in the afterlife in prehistoric, neolithic peoples. We also consider the Neanderthal and Denisovans, cave paintings, early totemic art, and the practices of ceremonial burial. We also touch on Göbekli Tepe and other early ritual sites and end up by making reference to skull cults, everyone's favorite type of cult. We open the epis...

This week we are deviating from our normal subject matter slightly in covering Albert Brooks's wonderful 1991 film Defending Your Life as a way of introducing the miniseries we'll be running for the next month. The afterlife seems like a natural corollary to the show's typical focus on the end of the world, and Brooks's film felt like a good way in, as it explores a secular vision of the world to come, one ruled by a bureaucracy focused entirely assessing the extent to which you have succeede...

This week we are discussing right-wing paranoia about weather control and how it is being used as a comforting belief that enables one to evade accepting the reality of human influenced climate change. We go through the history of the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory, while also situating it in the earlier (and much more interesting) beliefs of Viennese Psychiatrist turned out-of-the-box thinker, Wilhelm Reich and his concept of orgone and his invention of cloudbusters. We also discuss the care...

This week we are discussing the recent furor over the Jeffrey Epstein case which has begun to surface divisions within the MAGA movement. We go over the actual history of the prosecutions of Epstein and Maxwell, look at the various ways Trump supporters have justified the administration's refusal to "release the files," while also speculating about what the reasons behind that refusal might be. Sources: Scott Adams' tortured defense of Trump Will Sommer on five MAGA responses to the Epstein '...

This week we are discussing the Biblical Antichrist. What does the New Testament have to say about this ominous figure? Why do some Christians maintain his return is a necessary precondition for the so-called "second coming" of Jesus Christ? What historical (or contemporary) figures have people asserted might just be this Antichrist? Is the Antichrist even a singular person or is it more of a generic turn for anyone who is a non-believer? We get into all of this and so much more. We als...

This week we are discussing Edgar Wright's zombie comedy about the mundanity of day to day life under late capitalism, Shaun of the Dead. Featuring star turns for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the movie examines the question of how to live a meaningful life through the familiar tropes of a zombie picture. We consider the ways the issues at play in this film from 20 years ago might be handled today, while comparing our own feelings about ambition and what it means to be "not a zombie" in a w...

For our 75th episode spectacular, we are discussing 28 Days Later, the 2002 film directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland that reinvigorated the zombie movie for the 2000s and launched a franchise that has been back in the news lately. We go over the film's links to Stu's favorite topic, Romanticism, while also comparing it favorably to such dystopian British pictures as Shaun of the Dead and Children of Men. We also note the similarities between the situation the pr...

This week we are talking about billionaires and what makes them different than the rest of us. Why do they put so much stock into utopian fantasies of human salvation on Mars? Who do they believe Artificial General Intelligence will solve all of Earth's problems if we just allow for it to be born (with as few regulations in place as possible)? Why do they seem to care so little about other people? Our guide on this episode is a recent article in Rolling Stone by Alex Morris that get...