Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Joshua McNeil to overthink the Grammys (a little bit), Dollhouse (a lot), agency and rights, knowledge-on-demand, and autotune.
This was our first experiment with livestreaming the podcast recording on Ustream (on the Overthinking It Podcast Page, where it will return next Sunday at 9:15pm ET/6:15pm PT). Though it was admittedly a little distracting and might have gotten in the way of a smooth opening, it seems to be a promising way of making the show more interactive and responsive to its audience.
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Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.
Download Episode 83 (MP3)
Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Josh McNeil to overthink the coming season of 24, the Golden Globes, the late night debacle on NBC (big winner: Arsenio Hall), and the misattribution of agency in argumentation.
Want new episodes of the Overthinking It Podcast to download automatically? Subscribe
in iTunes! (Or grab the podcast RSS feed directly.)
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s
(203) 285-6401.
Download Episode 81 (MP3)
Preface
I’m a BSG virgin.
Which is weird, I’ve gotta say, especially when you consider what a big nerd I am. You know what’s sitting on my nightstand right now? Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama. Yes, friends. I’m that nerdy.
Going into this new series, I only knew these few facts about BSG:
- It was about robots,
- one of the robots was Tricia Helfer,
- and basically everyone on the Internet hated the series finale.
So, yeah. I have that to look forward to.
Naw, to tell you the truth, I was super-excited that you folks picked Battlestar Galactica for me, and it was with gleeful anticipation that I snuggled up on a friend’s couch to watch the miniseries.
That glee was immediately dashed to the ground, its blood-glistening brains left to dry up on the floor. Because, my friends, Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries may be the bleakest, most misanthropic piece of television I have ever seen.*
That isn’t to say I don’t like the show, of course!
But that’s what I want to talk about today, in this first of a many part series on the new BSG. Bleakness. Depression. Ennui. Despair. Misanthropy.
Mmm! Sounds fun! But first, let me recap the miniseries for those of you whose minds haven’t been colonized by Cylons lately.
*Well, except for Neon Genesis Evangelion, maybe. Anyway, the race is close.
Originally, the OTI editorial staff was going to make this a break week for the Overthinking Lost series, as Mlawski is on vacation. However, rather than finding out what happens when we let the clock reach zero, I decided to race to my computer and punch in the numbers.
In addition, it has been a while since I have Overthought anything, so I saw this as the perfect opportunity for me to go back to the island.
Now might be a pretty good time (or in fact a bit too late for some readers) to mention that I’m going to depart from Mlawski’s cardinal rule—there will be substantial Lost spoilers in this post, so only read on if you’ve watched through the end of season 5 or don’t mind learning things that will substantially bias your viewing experience of the whole series thus far. There will also be major spoilers for The Wire.
Why would I gleefully break protocol after you’ve all been so careful not to reveal any of Lost’s big mysteries in the comments for the past few months?
Because I’m special—the rules don’t apply to me.
[Ed. Note: Seriously. There are substantial Lost spoilers after the jump, up to and including everything that has aired. And pretty substantial spoilers for The Wire as well, covering the whole series. Don't read on if you're not prepared.]
Preface
I’m a Lost virgin.
Really. You’d think such a thing would be impossible in today’s world. Lost has been on for, like, fifteen years by now. You can’t watch an episode of The Supernanny Bachelorette in a Shark Tank on ABC without being interrupted by some commercial announcing that This! Week’s! Lost! Will Change! Everything! And let’s not forget about the Lost converts who have just consumed the entire show on DVD from Netflix in two weeks flat and who will not sleep until they have converted another to their strange cultish religion. They’re not as bad as The Wire’s fans, but they’re close.
But I’ve felt recently that I haven’t been ingesting enough popular culture lately, and I had to fill that hole in my diet with empty calories, and ABC.com happened to have Lost streaming online for free. It’s like if someone left a box of cookies out in the open and said, “Go ahead. Eat the whole thing.” Except that every five cookies you ate, you had to watch a VISA ad.
So I have officially popped my Lost cherry and am here to overthink the series for you, in order, over the course of the next however many weeks. In case you’re curious, I included this overly long preface in this first of what will hopefully be a long and exciting series in order to emphasize that I have never seen an episode of Lost before this week. The only things I knew going into it were
1. There was an island.
2. One of the characters was named John Locke, which is not heavy-handed at all.
3. For some reason, polar bears.
Back in the fall, Wrather wrote an excellent series of posts on Gossip Girl in which he analyzed the literary, psychological, cultural, and socioeconomic aspects of the teen soap opera. However, six episodes into season, it seemed that the show’s second season was going to be a huge disappointment and that the exploits of Serena, Blair, Chuck and company were simply not deserving of that level of scrutiny. As a result, the project fell by the wayside. Since then, the series has not only supplied ample guilty pleasures (including girls going wild, drunken rooftop-ledge shouting matches, and illicit teacher-student affairs), but has also provided substantial food for (over)thought, most recently on the philosophical bases of punishment and the relationship between the police power of the state and economic elites.
When your correspondent first saw trailers for Crank back in 2006, he grew very excited for what he hoped was a revolution in action movie simplicity. Most action flicks, even the ones held together by cardboard and Elmer’s glue, try to graft some sort of deeper theme onto the narrative. So Jet Li isn’t just kicking a hundred guys in the head – he’s kicking a hundred guys in the head for honor. Tony Jaa doesn’t just travel to Thailand and break people’s arms – he travels to Thailand and breaks people’s arms to preserve the traditions of his village. But Crank seemed to promise a beautiful austerity – a premise that could be understood in the first six words of the trailer. “If you slow down, you die!” Brilliant! End of story! Now get to Jason Statham shooting people.
However, upon watching Crank again – in anticipation of the surprising release of Crank 2: High Voltage this Friday – one discovers new themes. This deceptively simple tale, of a British hitman fleeing the mob while under the effects of an adrenal inhibitor, has so much more beneath the surface. And there is a lot of surface – it’s a very superficial tale.
But what does Crank have to say about the human condition?
Movie junkies suffered a crippling blow to their understandings of the universe this week. If you put your ear to the ground in Hollywood, you could feel the vibrations as the Earth shifted to accommodate it.
I was blind, but now I see. In the dark.
As of this writing, Vin Diesel’s IMDB STARmeter is up 600%, week-over-week, and the entertainment windmills are spinning like industrial fans.
Fast & Furious made $72.5 million last weekend. That’s the largest April opening weekend ever. It’s the largest opening for a movie about cars ever. It’s the largest opening weekend of the year, annihilating pretenders like Watchmen and Monsters vs. Aliens. These are summer blockbuster numbers, people — and we’re not even in finals season yet.
Thankfully, Overthinking It is here to help you sort through the madness with a little philosophy about this strange world it turns out you’ve been living in all along — this world where Vin Diesel is a huge movie star —
This week marked the 10th anniversary of the sci-fi sleeper blockbuster, The Matrix. It’s hard to imagine, but there was a period in American culture when no one had heard of the Wachowski Brothers, Hugo Weaving or Propellerheads. Keanu Reeves and Lawrence Fishburne re-ignited their careers, playing freedom fighters armed with gravity-defying kung fu and submachine guns, locked in eternal war in a digital prison.
Audiences flocked to theaters for the blistering action, the revolutionary visual effects, the throbbing techno soundtrack and the wirework. But critics picked up The Matrix for another reason entirely – its throwaway references to classical philosophy.
Philosophy professors and hyper-literate college students (OTI’s target demographics) claimed that The Matrix showed clear influences from:
[A guest post today from John Perich. Let us know what you think in the comments! --Ed.]
Where can I get me some epistemology like that?
Dualism–the theory that mind and body are two distinct entities which interact with each other–has poisoned human behavior over the last thousand years or so. From dualism, we get the notion that the pleasures of the mind are “noble” while the pleasures of the flesh are “sinful.” We see the separation between inhumane logic and passionate emotion, never imagining that they spring from the same source. It’s taken scientists and philosophers centuries to beat back this curtain of ignorance; progress has been slow.
And then Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” comes along and undoes all the good work.
