Michael Clayton

On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss Frantz Fanon's decolonial classic, Black Skin, White Masks. The hosts work through the conversation surrounding his credentials as a psychoanalyst, his engagement with Freud, Lacan, Octave Mannoni, and Carl Jung, and his dialectical relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism and his Marxism.

On this episode, Ryan and Todd theorize the adaptation as a form of film. The episode takes its point of departure the continuing conversation over Nolan's Odyssey. Film adaptations, according to the hosts, must represent an intervention to the source text. This intervention can happen at a number of different levels but the most common is that film technology or conventions of filmmaking are altered, introduced, or changed in order to make a dynamic adaptation. The hosts discuss examples of film adaptations that bring a reading to bear on the source material and use the affordances of film to make this intervention clear, starting with the first ever film adaptation, Georges Méliès Cinderella (1899).

On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss Christopher Nolan's recent film. The conversation begins with Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey that Nolan consulted and adapted to the screen. Much of the conversation is focused on teasing out the consequences of the changes Nolan makes to the poem's narrative. It's spoiler-town so be wary after about 35 minutes. Apart from experiencing the technical feat of the film, the reason to see it is to see and consider the changes and alterations Nolan makes to the epic, its most famous sequences, and well-known characters. Referenced in this episode:Orson Welles "Frozen Peas" commercial outtakesEmily Wilson's Substack "On Complicated..."Notes on Odysseus' nameAlso, at the end, I (Ryan) repeated what I now know is a common misconception that the Incredible Hulk TV series used music from Rocky Horror Picture Show. That was totally an error. Not as much of an error as saying Ayn Rand's sales figures were equal to Tolkien's in the 20th century but an error still.

On this episode, Ryan & Todd theorize the World Cup as a public event that enables the non-expert to see complex theoretical notions, such as Alain Badiou's conceptualization of the event and Jean-Paul Sartre's idea of self-transcendence. The episode also discusses how the World Cup offers complex ways to view our relationship to the law, nationalism, and climate change.(Quick note: Thank you to every very early listener who noticed the previous upload was incorrect! Hope everyone enjoyed just Ryan's side of the audio. Todd said that probably made the episode better but, alas, we're back to parity now.)

On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the World Cup and its status as a unique theoretical object. As the hosts argue, the World Cup is a spectacle where the lay reader can and does see the sport (and sport in general) just as clearly as the heavily invested viewer. Their discussion includes reference to Badiou's theory of the event, Sartre's notion of self-transcendence, and the complex positioning on nationalism and one's relationship to the law that the World Cup affords.

On this episode, Ryan and Todd complete their Sartre inflected trifecta of episodes by engaging his 1947 essay series What Is Literature? The hosts begin by talking about how much Sartre's method has meant to them respectively before moving on to engage the text's most famous claim: literature appeals to the reader's freedom. Sartre's diagnosis and prescription is that literary works--as opposed to poetry, music, and visual arts--must uniquely enact a praxis of "committed writing." For Sartre, committed writing is constant and conscious political awareness. Each text, according to Sartre, situates the author to their political temporal moment. The hosts discuss how this text presages his later movement toward thinking the "group-in-fusion" of the more Marxist and much less existential Critique of Dialectical Reason some thirteen years later. Ultimately, the hosts find that while many of Sartre's claims are untenable (or even abandoned by Sartre himself), the tension points his argument presents are fecund for developing the podcast's on claims about the transcendence of literary works and the importance of separating urgency from immediacy.Quick note: to avoid any confusion, this text has also somewhat recently been reproduced as Literature and Existentialism. We refer to it exclusively by its more common and canonical name throughout the episode but it's possible some listeners may have a copy of this by a different title.

On this episode, Ryan and Todd cover writer-director Tony Gilroy's 2007 political thriller masterpiece, Michael Clayton. The hosts weave in Sartre's notion of committing oneself to a project from the previous episode and work through the narrative and formal elements that make Michael Clayton's intervention exceptional for Hollywood film.

On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss Jean-Paul Sartre's 1945 lecture titled "Existentialism is a Humanism." In it, Sartre answers criticism that existentialism has received from lay people, concerned Christians, and Marxists, and clarifies what existentialism means and (more importantly) what it hopes to do and inspire in action. The existential method that Sartre advocates is universal and optimistic, advocating for political change by encouraging everyone to see that their individual actions include every other person in them. Ryan and Todd discuss the main thrust of the lecture, Sartre's eventual shift to Marxism (covered in the Critique of Dialectical Reason episodes), how psychoanalytic theory intersects with and pushes back on Sartre's ideas, and why Total Recall is the perfect Sartrean film.

On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss Freud's idea of the "impossible professions." First articulated in 1925, Freud is drawn to the idea that psychoanalysis is like government and education in that it proposes a necessary function without end. The intrinsic endlessness to the impossible professions often leaves them ripe for tendentious scrutiny. As we've seen over the last decade, those with roles in education, government, and medicine have had their expertise routinely ridiculed and undermined. The hosts each add an idea to Freud's initial proposition with Ryan offering that each of the impossible professions has a necessary tie to the public trust that, in our era, must be won back while Todd offers that transference holds the impossible professions together and excludes others that might be included.

Following up some of the discussion points introduced in the previous episode on Ambition, this episode takes a stab at the deadly sin of Avarice. Beginning first with a historical and etymological look into Avarice and Greed, looking at when Greed overtook Avarice in common parlance and when the word moved from referring to a wider programming of miserly hoarding to a specific rapaciousness toward financial accumulation. Unsurprisingly, with the global adoption of capitalism, Avarice dropped out of common parlance and Greed saw a rebranding, with accumulation and self-interest becoming virtues rather than vices. Ultimately, Ryan and Todd try to move discussion of Avarice as a deadly sin away from strictly moral terrain and move it toward the political. (Episode may be triggering for former lifeguards at municipal pools.)