Double Vision

Released less than one month apart at the start of 1985 are two satires of contemporary bureaucratic and consumer life, one an American novel and the other a British film. Don DeLillo's White Noise and Terry Gilliam's Brazil each stand up as profound visions of their late 20th century moment. With my guest Noah (@trycypress), we bring these two together to question what is really going on and what hope do we have to break through the white noise and the threat of state-created terminology.

In 2014, Alex Garland's film Ex Machina imagines a contest between two humans, structured narratively around an artificially intelligent humanoid robot. At the same time, Roger Scruton explores the concept of the sacred in The Soul of the World, addressing the ways in which we address ourselves to the face of the other and the face of the world, finding the presence of God and the presence of the soul through transcendent experience. With guest Adam Jesionowski (Counterengineer), we explore the film's attempts to locate the God from the machine, and Adam presents a tradhumanist alternative to the film's more popular transhumanist perspective.

The 1969 film Easy Rider and the late poetry of Yvor Winters offer a striking double vision of California and its place in both the American landscape and culture. The film stars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper as two motorcyclists struggling to take it easy in a hostile America, traveling east from California. Earlier, Winters traveled west to California, finding it conducive to his poetic imagination. Writer E. L. Brooks (PoetRegressive) joins me to discuss Winters' poetic theories and the dangers of unbound passion presented in Easy Rider.

Joined by guest poet Steff (@nameandnoun), we go back in time to explore intimacy, womanhood, family, and more in the year 2000. As seen prominently in Darren Aronofsky's film Requiem for a Dream, despair, addiction, and desperation tears through multiple lives. Meanwhile, Kim Addonizio explores these issues in her own way in her poetry collection Tell Me. Bringing these two visions together, we see a moment of deep social anxiety at the turn of the century.

In 1966, we find two distinct visions which become foundational for cyberpunk a decade and a half later. In Robert Stone's novel A Hall of Mirrors, a man gets taken on as a radio host, forming conspiratorial patterns in the news to guide public opinion. Then as predecessor to the sort of console cowboys who would later roam cyberspace, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly shows us a different set of opportunists. Are these figures immoral or amoral? What models are we offered here for imagining information exchanges? With my guest, James McGirk of Our Cyberpunk Now, we explore what we inherit from this double vision.