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[SPEAKER_00]: Hoor joy, fresh cuts, immediate reactions to your newest favorite movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sitting in a parking lot of an AMC and central Pennsylvania.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Just minutes from watching whale fall, Dr. By Brian Duffield.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is based on a book by Daniel Krauss, which is a beautiful book if you have not read it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You should.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What year for Daniel Krauss?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You won the Pulitzer Prize for Angel Down and now a major motion picture.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think a pretty good one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about this movie a little bit, but to do that, I want to tell you a story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I grew up in Southern California, close to the beach.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's been a lot of time in the ocean.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But somewhere along the way, I developed a fear of the deep ocean, or any kind of deep water.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The last of phobia, whatever you want to call it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But right at the border of fear is also fascination.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and any movie, any story that has to deal with anything underwater, especially in deep water, is something that I'm going to be interested in.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, if you watch that movie underwater from a few years back and you didn't love it, I get it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Personally, I would watch that every day.
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[SPEAKER_01]: love that movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Jaws, we started this podcast with Jaws.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The beast and 90s miniseries made for TV absolutely loved it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: At one point, I was so fascinated by stories about underwater.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it was also so disappointed that there weren't more of them, that I approached my brother-in-law, a reader of lots of fiction and I asked him, hey, is there any kind of fantasy or any fiction that deals with undersea monsters I need that in my life?
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[SPEAKER_01]: He thought for a little bit, and when I saw him next, he handed me a copy of At the Mountains of Madness.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you know this story, it's an Avela from HP Lovecraft, and it deals with a civilization in Antarctica.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe there's some underwater stuff, but it also led me to Kathulu.
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[SPEAKER_01]: really what it did is it led me down the path of weird fiction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I started reading weird fiction, started reading not only Lovecraft, but folks like
Load full transcript
Alginon Blackwood, and I kept reading, kept reading weird fiction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm an environmental philosopher.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I deal with environmental ethics, environmental thought, eco-phenomenology, all that stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I took my love of weird fiction and I turned it into something called the Ecobeard.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now in 2023, I got a fellowship at Brown University to study in the archives of HP Lovecraft.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Where am I going with this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Do you care about this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You're here for Willfall, am I right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yep.
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[SPEAKER_01]: While I was in Providence, which is where Brown is in Rhode Island, I saw that Paul Trembley, one of my favorite authors, who I would sometimes call a weird fiction
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[SPEAKER_01]: was having a book reading in a bookstore nearby.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I reached out, said, hey, I'm doing this thing, thinking about where you're fiction, thinking about the environment, I'd love to sit down and talk to you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Paul was gracious enough to do so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Before the reading, he sat down with me for a cup of coffee.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You let me interview him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe one day I'll really say interview.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the coolest thing that happened actually there's two really cool things that happened.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Number one I went to the reading and it was incredible and there I met somebody named Phil up to that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We've had Phil on the show.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He helped us talk through Nostraatu.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He also wrote one of my favorite movies of all time called Draupa report.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's a
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[SPEAKER_01]: But number two, after the reading, Paul said, you know what, a couple of my friends, we're not able to make it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We have reservations.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Would you like to go to dinner with us?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, I was in absolute awe.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Try to hide it, it's best I could, not sure I did.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Again, I went down this path of weird fiction and Paul Trembley, especially growing things, as a set of short stories and anthology, was one of my favorite things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So here's where I'm gonna connect everything together.
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[SPEAKER_01]: While I was there, he was with all of his kind of horror writer friends, a bunch
of really cool people including Victoria Delpby, who we've had on the pot, to talk about Celine Chate, and they were talking about things that they've blurred recently, things that they were excited about.
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[SPEAKER_01]: things that they wanted to talk about because when they read it, they were impressed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: A bunch of writers sitting around thinking about other writers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And Paul mentioned one book that he had gotten and had blurped and was really excited about.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think at that point it hadn't even come out yet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Of course that book was well-formed by Daniel Krauss.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now this connects all the way back to the very beginning of this podcast, the meeting of Paul Trembley, the opportunity to interview him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I interviewed Phil Jolatt as well on that trip, and the way that they interacted with each other and the amount of joy that they had talking about books was something that led me down the path of starting horror joy with Jeff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, three years later, we're sitting in a movie theater, watching Walefall.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Daniel Krauss is a really smart guy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He won the Pulitzer Prize, Angel Down is absolutely brilliant.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Walefall is incredibly smart.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a very complicated dynamic between the father and the son.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We've talked a lot about fathers and sons throughout the podcast.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How there's lots of times tense relationships between fathers and sons.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Crystal Ale, talked about his father, Luke Dumas, talked about his father.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Here we have a father and son that clearly have an incredibly tense relationship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The father dies, and the son feels like he has to go in a quest.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there are moments in this movie that are incredibly poignant.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The flashbacks, the memories, and in many ways it's a meditation on how even the tense relationships we have with those that we love.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Even the tensest relationships can equip us for the difficulties of life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not here in any way to justify abuse or abuse of parents.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I do not subscribe to the idea that you must be hard on your children in order to prepare them for life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, we have to reckon with our relationship, with our parents, with our families, with those around us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Watching whalefall, certainly one of those moments where I wish I had read Moby Dick before, I've recently tried.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's pretty long, it turns out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The thing about this movie, though, is the way that it navigates those poignant moments, the development of the father and son relationship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that it happens inside of a whale, if you don't know the story again, we're dealing with the grief of a lost father, a son goes on a quest to dive and find the remains of his father and get swallowed by a whale.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Besides those poignant points, this is a horror movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a family drama, but it's also a horror movie, and there are moments when if you
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[SPEAKER_01]: When the ship comes down and sucks up all the people, and they're in that little area being sucked up, it's horrifying, it's terrifying, or maybe you remember watching as above so below, and there are mixed reviews about this, but the claustrophobia of sneaking through very small spaces is used very well and well for.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Traveling inside of a whale for an hour, figuring out how to survive using all of the resources that are available.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of an incredible feat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: To imagine spending an hour and a half two hours watching somebody inside of a whale, flail about and they have to keep their oxygen tank.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever, they're re-brother.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what it's called.
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[SPEAKER_01]: in their mouth, at all times, because there's no oxygen inside of the whale's belly so we can't breathe.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The difficulty of trying to film a movie where the main character is a trapped inside of a whale and b cannot even talk out loud.
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[SPEAKER_01]: is a challenge.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And for me it works.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The claustrophobia, the flashbacks, the emotion, it all works.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But do not mishear me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is a horror movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there is some deep, deep horror.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're back to the claustrophobia.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're back to the idea that a whale can travel miles below the ocean.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where does it go?
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[SPEAKER_00]: We don't really know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's dark, and the pressure is too much for a human body.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is a place where people should not go.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Jeff
is not here, but we've talked a lot about how space is just not somewhere he ever wants to go.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not for us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think we could say the same thing about the deep ocean.
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[SPEAKER_01]: James Cameron be damned.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we shouldn't go there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Our bodies are not made for it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think Daniel Krauss is too smart for me personally to unwrap the metaphors of the whale in Moby Dick as God, the whale in whale fall as father.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, there's a theological relationship between father and God in Christianity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We won't go down that road very much.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The thing that I think really struck me, whether you've got a great relationship with your father, your great relationship with your parents, a great relationship with your family, there's something about the tension between wanting to encourage them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you've got kids, I've got kids encouraging them to both leave and stay at the same time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The tension for any person
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[SPEAKER_01]: to feel as if they are equipped for the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that there's something really terrifying about the prospect of escaping, but also of not being able to go back again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is why grief is so hard.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is why death is so hard.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When you have no possibility, no potential to go out and say something, anything, this is incredibly terrifying.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But it's also the existential question, who am I now, who do I want to be, and what's the gap in between?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Way of all offers this intense, incredible journey from the land to the ocean to the deep and back.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I really love Austin Abraham here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We saw him in a resident evil.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We've seen him in weapons.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I love that he's just here in our horror universes now.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Somebody said, can we please leave Austin Abraham alone finally?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm here to say, Austin, you're welcome anytime.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is an incredible job of showing emotions without being able to talk.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that is also a pretty incredible feat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The way that he's able to express his deepest fear and the jubilation as he
goes through this movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: incredible.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If I were to try to convince you to go see this movie, it of course always depends on what you want out of a movie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was here last week to see other mommy personally didn't love it, but I have seen so many people describe it as incredibly fun.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But whalefall, I don't think, is a fun movie in the same way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, there is an incredible amount of character development, there's an incredible amount of emotional weight, there's incredible amount of terror.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The claustrophobia, the fear of the dark, the fear of the deep.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think something that I really love about what whalefall does is that unlike something
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're not really dealing with something that's outside of its nature.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're not really dealing with a nature that is pushing back.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There are ecological claims here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's something interesting about the way that environmental knowledge is understood in people that are just in the space, in the ocean, on about dealing with the environment all the time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: but we're not really dealing with like an angry nature.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're just dealing with the way that the world works.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if we circle back all the way to the Call of Kathulu, what is HP Lovecraft's weird fiction other than the fear of being meaningless in the vast space of the universe?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kathulu is not angry at us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kathulu doesn't care about us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The whale is not angry with us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The whale just wants to eat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The dad, our family, the people around us, they might be angry with us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's that with which we have to reckon.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, in some way, this is an ecological horror because it happens inside the belly of a whale, on the other hand, this is something like a family horror.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's definitely a family drama.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's survival horror, it's ocean horror, it's ego horror, all of that wrap together.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the way that we think about the environment, the way that we think about animals, I think is displayed differently than if we saw this in some kind of, I don't know, the birds or even Godzilla.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No animal is acting outside of its nature in this film.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I like the way that we were shot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Personally, I could use more shots outside of the whale, but that's just because I want to see that kind of stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it really is needed for the story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And again, the ability to create a compelling movie inside of a whale, I think that's something to be amazed by.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Alright y'all, I'm not sure I've really said anything here, that's helpful, but I will say that this was an incredibly joyful move to watch.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The last of phobia and all.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Until next time folks remember, see you, joy, even in horror.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This has been an episode of Warjoy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Produced in conjunction with Axis Mundi Media.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for joining us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We want to hear from you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can find us at WarjoyPod on Instagram, or at horrorjoypod on YouTube.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can also email us at horrorjoypod at gmail.com all one word, and you can of course find us wherever you get your podcasts.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Give us a like, subscribe, leave a review.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Until next time, remember,