Inspired or curious about something The Fundamentalists chatted about on the podcast? Browse these carefully curated show notes to reference and recap where you heard a particular mention, concept, or other thought. Did I miss something? Please let me know and and share your thoughts or suggestions!
Please note: These show notes were a personal passion project. As an avid listener of the show, I created these for a select number of episodes.
December 8, 2019
MENTIONS:
0.30 - Jay Bakker
2.02 - Beast Body
4.10 - Quid - One pound sterling. 'Pound' is the currency of Britain and other European counties. 'Quid,' on the other hand, is just the slang term for 'pound.' 'Pound' comes from the Latin word 'Libra' the currency of ancient Rome. 'Quid' comes from the Latin term 'quid pro quo,' which means 'something for something.' (source)
6.15 - Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by British literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, as the “most formidably brilliant” recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe. Žižek's work is infamously idiosyncratic. (source)
8.33 - “Greenlit” by a studio - In the movie business, a distribution deal is actually a minimum guarantee to put a movie into a certain territory for a certain duration. ... That is literally what it means, in the classic connotation (from the movie business), to be "greenlit". It means, basically: "How much do you need to get the project done?" (source)
12.05 - Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. (source)
24.44 - Walter Benjamin - Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism (source)
27.11 - Black Panther
31.15 - Valleyfolk - The Valleyfolk. The Valleyfolk is the lovechild of Joe Bereta, Steve Zaragoza, Elliott Morgan, and Lee Newton, the four comedians who birthed SourceFed and raised it into a dapper, well-mannered YouTube channel.
40.53 - Frozen 2
QUIPS and QUOTES:
3.54 - In philosophy there’s a distinction between knowledge and opinion and rumors. Opinion is how you felt, life experience, subjective
4.10 - Peter saw Joker in Belfast, opening weekend, at the Odeon in Victoria Square for eight quid
6.29 - The Joker could have been a disaster; could have psychologized the Joker and it didn’t
6.39 - “It was brilliant,” Peter’s opinion
6.48 - “What was your impression when you walked out?” Elliott asked.
”I thought, ‘That is a classic. That has something to say.” Peter responded. A culturally significant movie
7.25 - Elliott saw Joker in Chicago, rainy and murky. “I’ve never had an avalanche of feelings after having seen a movie.”
9.00 - So many pitfalls making the movie but they avoided psychologizing the Joker
9.55 - What is the psychological development of the Joker? A troupe within Hollywood
10.08 - The problem with Hollywood is when they psychologize
10:15 - When you go into “philosophy 101” there’s this question they ask, “Are you determined or are you free?” (Free choice or the result of a connected cause/effect)
11:14 - Whenever you psychologize a super-hero/villain, they are because of this, because of what happened to them
11:49 - Within existentialism it’s not the question whether you’re free or determined
12.05 - Jean-Paul Sartre, “You’re condemned to freedom,” You are freedom, it’s not that you do free acts, but you are explosion of freedom in the universe
12.25 - Subjectivity is the result of the fact that the universe is not at one with itself
13.11 - Subjectivity is the result of a type of deadlock within reality; a contradiction with reality where it twists a knot that means there’s a not-at-oneness
13.36 - If you go to analysis, you have your pasts traumas, things that happened to you
13.44 - A trauma is an inability to articulate something. A trauma is a failure to integrate something in the language. Something happens to you and you can’t conceptualize it. It’s a black hole in your symbolic reality.
14.04 - Go to therapy to try and interpret it; work toward understanding it; something that happened in your past, you’re working toward a future moment where you’ll understand your trauma
14.41 - Contradiction of this deadlock between past and future, making sense of y our past, but also creating it
15.25 - The Joker becomes the Joker not from some psychological reason but because there is this general discontent in Gotham City, alienation, horrible stuff. The Joker is this explosion of violence, the city unites around him, thinking he has the answer, which he does not… “the big other”
16.02 - The moment he becomes the Joker is the moment all of the masses say, “The Joker understands,” and becomes their mascot
16.57 - The symptom: Whenever you have a bad back it doesn’t mean anything but your anxiety can attach to it and then it becomes meaningful
17.10 - The Joker is the moment Gotham City becomes aware of the suffering, violence, inequality. That’s why it’s not a psychologization of Joker
17.34 - “That moment [Joker standing on the car at the end of the movie] made me want to applaud and also throw up at the same time.” Elliott
19.14 - When he’s standing on the car, you realize he’s the symptom of Gotham City - he is the articulation of the “Christ” or “Titanic,” the sinking of the ship, a symbol of the genius of humanity collapsing
20.22 - The Joker is this utterly pathetic, broken, individual who is violent and destructive, who incarnates the truth of Gotham City
22.03 - The “big other” doesn’t exist
22.12 - the last part of the cure is realizing the “big other” doesn’t have some secret insight; they are broken too
22.20 - The fiction of believing they have an insight is what allowed you to get an insight
22.40 - Batman can never get rid of (defeat) of Joker, he should be trying to understand Joker. The Joker is the city
23.23 - Christopher Nolan (Heath Ledger’s Joker) says, “We’re destine to do this forever.” Nolan realized that Batman and Joker are intertwined
24.20 - The Joker says to Batman in The Dark Knight, “You’re just too much fun.”
24.40 - Money/power doesn’t matter. The Joker doesn’t care about money
24.46 - Divine violence - a preserving of violence, which keeps the law of oppression. There’s law-making-violence which makes new laws. There’s law-destroying-violence which doesn’t care
25.02 - When the Joker burns all of the money, he doesn’t care; breaking the very law of society
25.16 - The Joker is an expression of divine violence of pure anarchy and chaos
25.28 - Batman represents money
25.49 - Batman doesn’t realize that that’s the problem - he’s making billions of dollars, and then he’s just spending money on toys
26.01 - On a storytelling level, the actual story of how to solve someone like the Joker, is not enticing to the general public, which plays into how we operate our lives
27.28-29.08 - US political realm discussion
29.11 - Perspective of Joker, group psychology
30.00 - Similarities between Joker, Titanic, Christ in that we often need a completely contingent, irrelevant someone/something that helps us become aware of the sufferings and deadlocks of society
30.30 - Joker becomes the figure, the symptom of Gotham that helps Gotham realize its own self
30.50 - The issue is, you have to overcome the Joker. You overcome the Joker by chowing the Joker doesn’t exist. He’s just a contingent event that helps you understand yourself
31.08 - If they are an expert they let you realize that they’re not an expert (therapists). That they’re broken as well
31.15 - Elliott and The Valley Folk had a corporate kind of counseling session
32.50 - “Death of the father,” when you realize your parents are just as divided/limited as you are
33.00 - Alienation/separation - when you feel distance from your parents
33.55 - Big takeaway from Joker - subjectivity is, things happen to you that are traumas, then you try to interpret them, believing they have meaning with the past and future, in the present while you’re working on them
34.50 - In that very process (conflict), you become aware of yourself, you become the subject
34.57 - City is falling apart, then the city thinks the Joker is the savior, the “messiah,” the one who understands. And with that belief, they make sense of and understand their own suffering - that is a very good insight into what a “symptom” is
35.27 - The only way to move beyond that is to then realize that the Joker has helped you come to articulate the suffering of the city, address that, and realize the Joker has no real insight at all - the Joker was just a fiction that you needed in order to become aware as a subject
35.51 - Just like you needed the fiction of the analyst to become a subject in therapy
35.55 - Emotional element of realizing that the mas that you’re rooting for is actually impotent and accepting it, “Oh shit!”
36.25 - But then there’s the whole contingency of people who refuse to go through the emotional process of realizing that they’re failures, the people they’re looking up to are failures
36.54 - “Oh! You were what made me realize that this is all broken, but also, you yourself are not the solution!”
37.09 - "Joker" is the first R-rated movie to make $1 billion at the global box office and wasn't even released in China. (source)
37.22 - In America you’re so secure that nothing will cause a disruption, that you don’t need to ban things. But in China it could cause a disruption
37.54 - Subtract your libidinal investment in the game itself - Christopher Nolan’s movie with 2 boats, Joker’s though experiment to blow one up or blow both up
38.20 - The only way to beat the Joker is to not play
39.26 - Elliott’s take-away - I’m very thankful that I live in an era where a Joker movie is getting made, I have this wonderful experience with The Valleyfolk that’s beautiful. But of course there are things I’d like to add/say to this. All gratitude, but more to say.
40.30 - Peter - I’d like to talk more about freedom… there’s other elements, the Joker will arise