Culture Gabfest “Is The Resort a White Lotus Ripoff?” Edition
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Stephen Metcalf: I’m Stephen Metcalf and this is the sleek culture Gabfest is the resort a white lotus Ripoff addition. It’s Wednesday, August 10th, 2022. On today’s show, In the Resort, a young woman finds a long lost cell phone, which may hold the clues to a multiple homicide. It may not. It’s a comedy mystery thriller. It’s on Peacock stars William Jackson Harper and Cristin Milioti, and then the justly beloved Jenny Slade’s equally beloved creation, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On now has his own feature film. The mockumentary combines stop motion animation and live action and co-stars Diane Fletcher Camp and finally, the Wicked Witch, Little Nell, Radio Raheem. What do they all have in common? They’re on Dan Kois, his list of 50 greatest fictional deaths of all time. Kois will join us to discuss. But first, I’m joined by Julia Turner, deputy managing editor of the L.A. Times. Julia, how’s it going?
Julia Turner: Hello. Hello. How are you?
Stephen Metcalf: Yeah, good, thanks. And of course, Dana Stevens is the film critic for Slate. Hey, Dana.
Dana Stevens: Hey, Steven.
Stephen Metcalf: Shall we. Shall we do it? Make a show. Here.
Dana Stevens: Let us do.
Stephen Metcalf: Okay. In Peacock’s show, the resort. Emma and Noah are young, married couple who’ve reached the slow death stage in their relationship, at least as depicted in the show. In an attempt to revive it, they had to an all inclusive resort in Mexico. That turns out to be a big backfire. Until that is Emma happens upon an old lost flip phone starts going through it. It’s filled with pics and texts of a young man who disappeared back in 2007. All of a sudden with a mystery to solve, the relationship sparks to life. The show comes from one of the writers of Palm Springs. It stars William Jackson, Harper’s Noah, Cristin Milioti as Emma. Why don’t we listen to a clip? Okay. You’re about to hear the two main characters, Noah and Emma, talking about the new mystery they’ve stumbled upon and what it might mean for their marriage. Let’s listen. What are you planning to do with all of this?
Julia Turner: I’m going to figure it out. I want to get answers. I’m going to bring some closure.
Stephen Metcalf: And what if there are no answers?
Julia Turner: Well, there have to be, because otherwise, what is the fucking point?
Speaker 4: What what is the. What do you. Okay, hang on. What do you mean?
Stephen Metcalf: What is the point?
Julia Turner: I miss it.
Stephen Metcalf: That’s what.
Julia Turner: I’m starting to forget things. Who I am.
Dana Stevens: Who we.
Julia Turner: Are.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, Julia, let me start with you. The show’s getting a lot of guff about being possibly a White Lotus Ripoff. What do you think? Fresh or a little bit played?
Julia Turner: I think the White Lotus comparisons. I understand why people are making them, but I don’t think they’re entirely fair. And given the timing of these, it seems unlikely that this is a, you know, created in response to the success of the White Lotus. I’m sure it was in development in parallel. Andy TCR, the creator, as you noted, is the guy behind Palm Springs and also Lodge 49 and is someone who is interested in mystery, especially cosmic metaphysical mysteries that are related to, you know, what it means to be human and alive and have a good life. And this feels like it is of a piece with his knack for using low key comic actors to explore human themes in a strange and loping way. And I did find watching it that I sort of wished it were a movie like it. It felt like it had ideas and an arc.
Julia Turner: And I really liked Palm Springs, but the sort of suspense and whodunit and are they going to get, you know, out of the crumbling ruin, the live type questions seemed. Not the point. It seemed like the structure of the show was cutting against what the what was interesting about it and what it was trying to do, which is sort of the momentum and the strangeness. Like when you pause between episodes, you’re like, there’s a nefarious group of tailors. But if you were just in the world, there’s a nefarious group of tailors, by the way. Or at least they seem nefarious. But when you’re in the world, you kind of go with it. So I feel an indulgent sense of warmth and positivity and encouragement towards the career of Andy Crow. But I can’t say I really loved this.
Stephen Metcalf: Dana, what about you? What do you make of this?
Dana Stevens: I actually this really won me over by the middle. I’ve seen the first four episodes, which is all that’s been released so far, so half of the show. I agree that it could probably have been a movie or at least a shorter show, maybe six episodes. It feels a little bit padded and spun out, but it got more interesting as it went along. I feared at the beginning that this really was going to be a White Lotus rip off or something of a genre that we’re very familiar with, which is sort of a couple who’s having trouble goes on some kind of retreat from the world. And then, you know, bad things happen and they intermingle with others in their place of hospitality. That feels like White Lotus aside, is is an overfamiliar structure.
Dana Stevens: But this this has its own curious pacing and especially interesting choices that have to do with the casting. And that made me want to talk more about the creative team behind it, because in addition to Andy Sierra, the creator of Palm Springs, the director of Palm Springs, who’s, I guess kind of the showrunner, like the producer of the whole thing, there has been Sinclair from High Maintenance, who both played the lead role of the nameless weed guy in High Maintenance and was also one of the co-creators of the show. He directed the first four episodes of this, I believe, and he also appears in a really interesting two episode arc, halfway in playing a very different character, someone who sort of comes off as this schlubby hippie at first, but then struggling with mental illness, and it takes the show in a completely different direction. It’s kind of shaggy. You could argue that it doesn’t quite belong tonally with the rest, but it’s also a beautiful performance and a really interesting moment in the show.
Dana Stevens: And one of the things I always used to love about high maintenance, which I’ve raved about before on on the Gabfest, especially those early high maintenance episodes before it went to HBO and it was a, you know, an online series or that the casting was incredible. It always just chose the most interesting faces and managed to put people even in small roles that you couldn’t forget. And I feel like this this series does that as well.
Dana Stevens: So Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper, familiar faces right here from the good place. And she from Palm Springs and other places really seem like a married couple. I think they’re really good together. Even when the mystery is a little superfluous, you still care about their relationship and why they’re exploring the mystery. Cristin Milioti in particular. I feel like I was excited about her as people were about Emma Stone when she made her entrance on the scene. And she has a little of an Emma Stone vibe, like a deadpan, dry sense of humor and those big anime eyes, you know, they’re fantastic. But then in smaller roles, you have Nick Offerman playing the father of one of the kids who disappeared. Wonderful, wonderful performance from Nick Offerman. That, again, just brings a completely different tone into the show, something really kind of melancholy.
Dana Stevens: And then Skyler DeSanto, who is this great face? If you saw Licorice Pizza, you know who he is. He’s sort of the romantic rival of the main character and has this really, really funny just seventies face. I just laugh the minute I look at him and and he’s really good in this in this backstory, too. So this this show to me did not have the problem that Multithreaded shows often have, where you care a lot more about one thread than another thread, and you sort of dread the appearance of one, you know, whole time frame instead of characters. I thought it balanced all that really well, and I will keep watching it. In spite of its shakiness and over length.
Stephen Metcalf: I would say that originality is less a function of like premise and world than it is of kind of execution, right? Like so for example, analyze this and Sopranos come out at exactly the same time with exactly the same premise. My boss goes to see a shrink and it it didn’t matter. They were so distinct from one another. They bore so idiosyncratically the sensibilities of each one of their creators.
Stephen Metcalf: You know, that that you know, David Chase and Kenneth Lonergan were just all over introspectively. They were totally different in tone. You could watch both. You wouldn’t think that somehow tired or play it or redundant or anything like that. This one, my issue isn’t that it reminded me of White Lotus, a TV show I didn’t like to begin with. My problem was I really didn’t like being around them as a couple. I thought I thought I loved those performers. And I think they’re struggling with a really weak script.
Stephen Metcalf: There’s a bizarre opening sequence of banter on a beach right at the beginning of episode two about whether or not the water people are swimming in a sewage water. And it goes on and on, as if the phrase due to water is funny. I like the turn that said of the flip phone suddenly providing their relationship with an external focus which allows them suddenly to be conspiratorial again and collaborative in a meaningful way. And that just warms everything up in the show got marginally better. I thought the question of, I mean, there’s just this. Kind of MacGuffin or something that’s not turning in the phone to the police.
Stephen Metcalf: They almost. I mean, I hate to be niggling. I don’t actually. But they they come so close to a really great observation, which is. You know, these people should be looking for. They want the mystery in order to enliven their boring marriage so desperately that they’re not going to do the obvious thing, which is turn the phone that could have been played so beautifully. And instead they just kind of move through it very quickly. It’s not funny. It’s not sharply observed. I was like, Hey, I got to tell you that. Really by the end of episode two, for me, this was that was a hard no, I, I really reacted against it. I, I just found none of it. I just, I, there’s no, there’s no genuine pizzazz here. But you’re telling me I should stick with it and I’ll find myself charmed?
Dana Stevens: I mean, I don’t know. I will say that it swerves in episode three and four to some different places. Yeah, I mean, it’s a TV show, like it’s not going to reshape the human culture, but I thought it had more to offer than it seemed to on on first glance, and that if nothing else, it is not it is not a cookie cutter framework kind of show that it has ideas and characters that it wants to explore. I agree. That is not particularly funny. I don’t think it’s trying to be a fall down laughing sitcom, but I believe in the characters. And in particular, I think Cristin Milioti just I find her is such a charmer. She has so much intelligence and fire and wit in her performances that even if the script isn’t up to par, I’ll watch her in anything.
Julia Turner: I do think, Steve, that it’s about I mean, I’ve watched Haddish’s first Dana and I think it’s about that question that’s frustrating you. And maybe that circles back around to my critique of like, I wish you could watch it in one gulp because I think it’s ideas kind of I think if you could swallow them in one gulp, you’d get to that part faster, whereas that the episodic structure leaves you feeling it’s almost like cliffhangers that cut against it in that at the beginning of the first show, it seems like kind of a dumb show. And then at the beginning, at the end of the second show, it seems like a slightly smarter show. And at the end of the third episode it seems like, Oh, maybe this is an even smarter show. And then the fourth, they’re like, Well, this is like a metaphysical show, but, but you really got to, you know, in the current marketplace of content, I’m not sure you get people through episode four unless they’re talking about it for a podcast. I will agree with Dana to that.
Julia Turner: Skyler Zondo is incredible and does have an unusual face and the other sort of white lotus parallel is that he is not Fred Hechinger, who played the kind of funny faced, disaffected kid in White Lotus. But he has a bit of Fred Hechinger energy. Like I’m I’m waiting for the Skyler just kind of Fred Hechinger movie that’s.
Dana Stevens: Yeah they could maybe take away to be brothers he made me think of a young Richard Dreyfus or something. He was like a nebbish from a different generation of movies. And I think Peter really captures that in Licorice Pizza. Like his face belongs to a different time. So even though the time frame he’s in is only 15 years back, it’s 27. There’s something kind of retro about his presence. Anyway, I predict big things for Alexander. Oh, he’s awesome.
Julia Turner: I mean, the other thing that I that I think suffers from the episodic structure is I can’t figure out what the show is doing with place yet. White Lotus was so specifically about the relationship between the fantasy world of these resorts and the exploitation of the surrounding community and that relationship and the kind of toxicity of it.
Julia Turner: And this show seems to be situated in sort of a like more of a la la land, like there are hotel staffers and in the show and there is this sort of, you know, almost mystical, nefarious or are they tailor cult? And it sort of feels it feels like a Fantasia in a way that makes it less about the actual economics of a resort or a place like that. And I curious where the show is going with that and how that ends up sitting over, you know, the portrayal of tourism and in Mexico or in environments like this.
Dana Stevens: Yeah, I see what you’re saying, Julia. This doesn’t set out to be a social satire in the way that White Lotus does. And I loved White Lotus, and it doesn’t have to set out to be a social satire, but it is sort of unclear what it’s doing with the upstairs downstairs element of the story and the characters who work at the resort versus stay at it.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, we’re you know, we’re sort of split on it. You guys think it’s worth sticking with? I’ll go back to it. All right. It’s the resort. It’s on the peacock, the NBC affiliated streamer. Check it out. All right. Moving on. All right. Now is the moment in a podcast we typically discuss business. I’m sure we have some Dana. What’s what’s up this week?
Dana Stevens: Stephen. Our only item of business this week is to tell you about our Slate Plus bonus segment.
Dana Stevens: This week, we’re going to answer a listener question from a listener named Samuel, who wrote in to ask how we feel about the ending credits of TV shows and movies we’ve talked before. I think about opening titles. I think it was after Sal Bastide, the great title designer, and we talked about the more old fashioned mode of opening up a movie with titles, but that happens a lot less now. Most of the information comes at the end of the movies and sometimes very long scrolls of end credits, and that’s what we’re going to talk about.
Dana Stevens: Do we stay for the whole thing? Is there any special information that we look for? Do we hate them, love them, think they’re too long, we want them to be longer. If you’re a Slate Plus member, you will hear us talk about our relationship to end credits at the end of the show. And if you’re not a Slate Plus member, you can sign up today at Slate.com, slash culture. Plus, when you’re a member, you’ll get ad free podcasts, you’ll get bonus content, like the segment I just described, which is available on lots of other podcasts too. And if you’re a member, you will get unlimited access to all of the writing on Slate.com. You’ll never hit a paywall if you’re a Slate Plus member. Also, of course, you’ll be supporting our work and the work of our brilliant colleagues. These memberships matter a lot for Slate, so please sign up today at Slate.com slash culture. Plus once again that Slate.com slash culture plus.
Dana Stevens: Okay, Steve, back to our show.
Stephen Metcalf: About ten or so years ago, the writer, actress and SNL alumna Jenny Slate, along with the filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp, created a series of mockumentary shorts featuring a tiny little talking shell. Marcel The shell with shoes on was one eyed and shod, as the title suggests, and voiced ever so plaintively by Slate herself. It was a huge, huge hit on YouTube, I think also played festivals and racked up tens of millions of views. It’s now a feature film, same title, also in the mockumentary format. It begins with sweet, silly set pieces. If you’re a Marcel fan, just kind of lap it right up. But it deepens into something quite different, into a poetic reverie of old age and loss. It sneaks up on you. It’s quite beautifully done. It heavily features Fleischer Camp playing some kind of version of himself and Isabella Rossellini voices.
Stephen Metcalf: Marcel’s grandmother, but in the clip are about to hear. Marcel has lost much of his community. It got whisked away in a man’s luggage and he’s musing on what it’s been like to live without the support of his community. The first voice you’ll hear in the clip, though, is is Dean Fleischer camps. Let’s listen. Is it hard for you? Has it been hard for you since?
Speaker 5: Not in the way that I think you would think it would be. But, uh, it’s pretty much common knowledge that it takes at least 20 shells to have a community that, at a minimum, you need to survive. So I think at first I was thinking, we’re not going to make it. But sometimes you just have to disregard those rules and think, well, actually the rule is that I want to be having a good life and stay alive and and not just survive, but have a good life.
Stephen Metcalf: Dana, you must start with you. You pushed to this film. I’m very glad you did. You know, one one wants to say the key to this is that incredible voicing by Jenny Slate. But it’s also the animation. It’s Fletcher Camp’s performance. It’s it’s kind of the whole thing. So talk about what you love about the Marcel series.
Dana Stevens: Oh, I just love it so much. I really was was hoping that this would transfer to the big screen with any kind of fidelity to the way that those shorts from the 20 tens felt because they’re very homemade, they’re very handcrafted feeling, and they don’t feel like they were made to be turned into a franchise or a movie or anything like that. The fact I think the back story of Marcel is a big part of why I’m so moved by it. And you hear it just in the in the voice, you know, that very endearing oddball voice that you heard in the clip just there that that slate does. I just love the back story that this came out of a voice that, you know, a wife invented to amuse her husband.
Dana Stevens: Fleischer Camp and Slate were married at the time. They created Marcel in 2010 and have since split up and are still making something wonderful together. That’s completely true to the spirit of that sort of in-joke that turned into a character that turned into these clips. And they did two children’s books and and now this movie. And yet it doesn’t have the feeling of, you know, we are launching a piece of IP. It really feels to me like two people that are playing, you know, in creating something together and turning it into a story. That’s one thing that I loved about it.
Dana Stevens: I think also just the subject matter, you know, the idea that you could have a stop motion animation movie that isn’t necessarily for kids, I think older kids could enjoy this. But really, given that the subject matter includes, you know, dementia, the onset of dementia and the grandmother character and as you said, you know, their entire community being taken away from them and kind of split up before the movie ever begins.
Dana Stevens: It ends. I won’t spoil the ending, but it ends on a really melancholy kind of note of solitude, even though it’s on, on the whole, not an extremely bleak ending. It doesn’t at all in the way a typical animated movie would. And I just appreciated that it had the courage of its own convictions to remain the little handcrafted thing that it is. I think if you liked the voice in that in that little clip we played, you’ll like this movie. And if for some reason you find that twee or cloying, then maybe you’ll find this movie that way. But I really had my radar up as to whether this would have been turned into something that would be more cloying and commercial and really felt that they they cleared that bar extremely in a very high fashion and is one of my favorite movies of the year so far.
Stephen Metcalf: Oh, wow, Julia. That’s that that was the question going in, right? Is this short form gem stretched out over 90 minutes might be something of a challenge. How do you think they pulled it off?
Julia Turner: I think I come at this from a slightly different perspective than Dana, which is that I liked those shorts fine. You know, that was an era where there was less viral stuff. And then I watched them and I liked them, but I didn’t. I actually think that the characters seemed charming but twee and kind of of the moment in the shorts. And I loved how the character in the world matured and deepened and grew wiser in the last however many years in the way that, you know, everybody hopefully does as they get older.
Julia Turner: But also. There’s like a hopeful world weariness in this that feels of the moment. I mean, there you know, I also think the craft of the filmmaking is incredible. And if you read interviews with Dean Fleischer Camp about how they did this and the work that went into kind of maintaining the low fi stop motion spirit of the viral videos, but giving it the kind of movement and ability to support the storytelling construct that this is a, you know, depressed documentarian in an Airbnb who befriends a shell and like decides to make a movie about it, like the work that they did to capture the camera movement that would happen, you know, if if in fact, this were something to happen.
Julia Turner: It’s incredible how labored over this was and how I think you use the word diaphanous in your review. Dana And I loved it. Like, it really feels like like a beautiful little spider web, you know, studded with do or something like it. It feels like kind of miraculous that it works the way that it does, given the absurdity of the concept, the viral video, nature of its origin and the technical difficulties.
Julia Turner: So yeah, I felt really moved. I mean, really moved both in what it had to say about individual losses of people that you love, people aren’t or shells. And then also what it had to say about the loss of community like the set up that Steve described, you know, all the people in a way, is not not a metaphor for the last few years on planet Earth, whether you lost a sense of community through, you know, isolation or staying at home or you lost a sense of community because so many people in your community died, that sense of like forging ahead with the construction of a life, even in the wake of that absence, felt really profound. And then you’re like, But it’s a movie about a shell. I just was really impressed with it.
Dana Stevens: I just want to note on top of that, everything you said I think is completely true, but I wanted to note the playfulness of the movie on top of that. I mean, there are there is a lot of fun with just miniatures and kind of crazy, childlike ideas about what the shell would do and what different household objects he would use for different things. And so it also awakes that part of you that I mean, I know as a child I loved playing with miniatures and I still have a total weakness for dollhouses and things like that. And so it has a little of that charm, which I also see in things like, you know, Wes Anderson’s fantastic Mr. Fox, one of my favorite Wes Anderson movies, anything that involves that sort of toy like quality. And when the creators seem to appreciate that and enjoy it themselves, I have a weakness for that.
Stephen Metcalf: Yeah. I mean, these these guys made something really, really beautiful and true. And I’m so grateful, Dana, that you insisted we do it. It reminded me of something, and not that it was wholly original, and I’m sure they didn’t even have this in mind, but it reminded me in a good way of, you know, Nick Park is who’s better known for Wallace and Gromit, I think started his career with but about a five minute short called creature comforts. And he went and interviewed residents of a housing estate in England, public housing in England and another set of residents of Old People’s Home. And then he people stop motion, animated them as animals in a zoo. And it was very much about and it’s it’s very humane it is not in any way belittling to these interviewees.
Stephen Metcalf: But you get these completely candid, totally true to life confessions about what it’s like to. You know, sort of both love and hate. A very confining living situation. You know, powerfully depicted by animals behind bars. And it’s that same kind of. Weird artifice of stop motion and the total artifice of a little one eyed show wearing shoes with legs and. And it’s hitting one emotionally true note after another. It’s an amazing achievement, to which I’d add absolutely into the whimsy of it, the playfulness of it, the fun of it that allows the other parts of it to sneak up on you.
Stephen Metcalf: And there’s this kind of MacGuffin thing of of, you know, the Marcel’s community being whisked away in a man’s luggage or whatever, leaving and bereft. And that sense of loss is very real. But you never feel as though the movie is going to, in some high concept way, fulfill the premise with a lot of predigested beats, you know, a blockbuster film which just doesn’t go in that direction at all.
Stephen Metcalf: And but the one that really sneaks up on you is the relationship with Rossellini. Rossellini is one of the most distinctive voices in cinematic history, and you become fully aware of it. I have no. She may have done it dozens of times. I have no memory of her as a voice actress and so do not have her sort of extraordinary physical presence, but only the voice. You realize this is the warmest, most delicious ocean I’ve ever immersed myself in and sort of floated for hours within. It’s like amniotic in its comfort and beauty in a way and texture.
Speaker 5: My house was very popular. I had lots of friends. And if you told me then many years ago that I would have spent so much time in a garden, I said, Are you kidding?
Stephen Metcalf: You see this to me, the emotional focus of the movie is this very subtly depicted loss of her full mental faculties. Right? She begins to slip into the dimension. It’s clearly becomes a movie about her loss and the specter of Marcel being completely left alone and his and also, by the way, the real life divorce. I didn’t know that they’d been married and divorced when I saw the movie, but the real life relationship between Jenny Slate and Fleischer Camp also puts this note of truth in it as well. I mean, Marcel turns the tables on the filmmaker saying, maybe if you came out from behind that camera, you know, you’d be something along the lines of your relationships would be truer. I mean, they’re just. The amount of sort of truth contained in it. And then it doesn’t spoil anything.
Stephen Metcalf: But right at the end of the movie, I think it may even be the closing bit of the movie, you know, in the middle of the movie. Not only does the Isabella Rossellini character read my favorite poem by Philip Larkin The Trees, which was just a full on pop culture nirvana for me at that moment there at the end of the movie, I feel like my entire Yale graduate education in romantic poetry was being.
Stephen Metcalf: Channeled by Jenny Slate, the authoress, in the final speech of Marcel the Shell, which is one of the most beautiful and succinct. Expressions of the romantic sublime. There’s just no other way to put it like that. Shell is talking about what it is like. To both inhabit yourself fully and exit yourself to the extent that you can feel as though you’re one with the universe. And it’s like, Did I really just see what I saw? Am I fucking high? Because that. That was beautiful. That was genius. I really I really I really adored this. This was this was quite special.
Dana Stevens: Oh, I’m so happy. I was a little bit afraid that you guys would come in saying, Oh, she built it up too much. It’s just a cute kids movie or something, but there is something special about it. I saw it with a really close friend and we both came out just misty eyed, you know, just. Just really, really moved.
Stephen Metcalf: I mean, the only caveat I’d send people to the theaters or whatever, you know, with is its strength, is its quiet strength. It’s like it’s a gentleness and it’s bides its fricking time and it’s going to, you know, will sneak up on you less, maybe having heard us, you know, rhapsodized about it. But but let it sneak up on you if you want to. And I love Pixar movies, by and large, but this is not a slight on Pixar. But if you want a Pixar movie, this isn’t it. This is a totally different kind of experience, really. All right. It’s Marcel the shell with shoes on. As of now, you need to go to a movie theater to see it. I’m sure that will change soon enough. Do try to catch it and communicate with us how you how you felt.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Moving on. All right. Well, the death scene is one of the sharpest tools in a writer’s toolbox. So writes Dan Kois in Slate. He goes on to say, it’s as likely to wound the writer themself as the reader. For if a well-written death scene can be thrilling, terrifying or filled with despair, so can a poorly written one be authentic, stupid and eye rolling? Dan I love it when you walk the fine line between thrilling and pathetic for us.
Stephen Metcalf: Welcome back to the show. Dan Kois, of course, is Slate editor and writer, is the author of The World Only Spins Forward Oral History of Angels in America. But also, Dan, you have a novel forthcoming in January vintage contemporary is. Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 4: I do. It’s set in New York on either side of the millennium, and it’s about book publishing and friendship and making art, even when you’re not really sure if you’re good at it.
Stephen Metcalf: I’m very, very, very eager to read it and discuss it on our podcast. But for now. So you did this feature the 50 greatest fictional deaths of all time for Slate. It’s up now. It’s very fun. I love the way your prose swoons along to the swooning prose of the dead that has many highlights Little Nell, Wicked Witch, Henry Blake and MASH. A lot of familiar names that what they all have in common is their fictionalized deaths. What I like about this feature, Dan, is that it it’s simultaneously clickbait and it paints a huge target on the writer’s back, a.k.a. you will get two exclusions later. But let me just start with a general question, like kind of laying all these out in a list of 50 on the page, thinking them through. Were you able to arrive at a fresh to you generalization at the end of it? Is there something they all maybe have in common? What did you learn?
Speaker 4: No, I wasn’t able. I thought I would. But in fact, it complicated the death scene for me a lot because I realized that I had not thought deeply about not only the classical ways that it is used to move an audience. It’s sort of by move, I mean broadly to emotionally affect an audience with sadness or anger or or bloodlust or satisfaction, but also the ways that it’s been tweaked and subverted, especially in the last 50 to 60 years.
Speaker 4: And the deaths in the second half of the list often ended up serving to me as kind of responses to the deaths in the first half of the last. You know, the way that the death, the Jack twist death in Brokeback Mountain, for example, gets underplayed and questioned even at the moment that it’s delivered, seemed like a kind of response to the great emotional death scenes of 19th century literature.
Speaker 4: The little novels, as you say, are often teens. And so, you know, in in doing this package, I interviewed a bunch of the writers who are responsible for some of the deaths on the list. And, you know, one of them was Stephen King. And I asked them all what makes for a good death scene? And he said, well, what matters the most is that you you really have to care about the characters, even if you’ve only been introduce them to them for a second. But even that turned out not to be true, I don’t think, because there are so many fun and interesting death scenes that depend. In fact, they get their weird power from us not having any particular emotional attachment, instead being able to step back and admire the artistry or insanity of the death itself.
Stephen Metcalf: Oh, that’s great. So give us an example or two of that.
Speaker 4: So, you know, one fun death on this list. I love saying fun death. Sorry. One delightful death on this list is is the death of Pac-Man and the video game certainly iconic. It was suggested for the list. You know, many of these deaths were suggested by Slate staffers at the beginning of this process. And Marissa martinelli, who is a writer at Slate and an editor, suggested Pac-Man. And I instantly sort of thought, oh, that’s an iconic and interesting artistic death. And what’s interesting about it is how it endlessly repeats and how we don’t actually care about the character at all. What matters is that it frustrates us, but also becomes existential through endless repetition. And and I found that a a an interesting way to think about what deaths do in different works of art.
Speaker 4: And we have, you know, we have a different video game death in this list to the death of a character named Innocent Final Fantasy, which which was shattering and sad and also metatextual for players of that video game when it first came out. But even in video games, you could use death in a couple of different ways to have different effects on the user, the viewer or the player.
Dana Stevens: Dan, I wanted to ask you about the process of making this. You tweeted something when it came out, when the list came out about having worked on it for three years. And I wanted to know what those. Three years were like, was it the pandemic that made it take three years or did you just decide, I’m going to keep compiling it, whatever pace I need to, because this is obviously an evergreen subject, if there ever was one. Or how did that timing and pacing work?
Speaker 4: The subject that shall never die. It’s true. No, it was purely the pandemic. It was that the idea for this package came up at a meeting and that, you know, in 19 2019 and we had a lot of the package ready by the beginning of 2020, and then all of a sudden, all of you will understand that it just no longer seemed like such a great idea to do a big package about how fun and interesting death is, when suddenly death stalked the land, you know, in a much more palpable way. And so we waited and waited and waited and waited and waited and waited and waited until the news seemed to slow down enough that we felt like we could throw it out there and not seem hideously insensitive. And I’m sure that it does still seem hideously insensitive in some ways. But but I hope in the ways that it always would have done.
Julia Turner: I got to say that the if this is about death and humans disappearing and failing to leave a mark upon the land or, you know, look upon my work, see my body in despair, it’s very recent centric. You know, you jump from Shakespeare to Dickens, you throw in a few pre Shakespeares. But there’s a lot of recency bias here, which, you know, is understandable given the period in which we live and how human memory and culture work. But did you ever feel like I really I really got to go dig in there? What about Dante? You know, there’s some, like, big deaths elsewhere in the in the in the past of our culture. But how did you think about the time frame?
Speaker 4: I thought about it a lot. And one argument in favor of recency bias and a list like that is that the novel, for example, is mostly a contemporary invention, and that if you think about the entire, let’s say, accumulated mass of extant culture that exists right now, you know, mass media simply means that 98% of all culture that has ever been created, basically, and still exists for us to read, see or listen to was created in the last 70 years.
Speaker 4: And that does create this enormous weight in favor of the present, in the memories and minds of people who are reading this. It also means that the stuff that has lasted, you know, 2000 or 3000 years is deathless and, you know, in its way. It’s that’s the stuff of whether by often it only comes to us by accident, but nevertheless, it is the stuff that has persisted.
Speaker 4: And so I wanted to make sure that that classic work was represented, that we had a Greek tragedy, that we had Shakespeare. But like, come on, you could make a list of the 50 greatest Shakespeare deaths, and they would all be incredible. And they would all probably see the same different kinds of things about death scenes as the 50 deaths spread across 3000 years in this list. Do Shakespeare even has a metatextual funny exit pursued by a bear type death long before Pac-Man ever did it? But I do think that in the end, what I wanted was a list that would be really fun to argue about and yell about. And for that purpose, weighting it a little more heavily toward the contemporary seemed useful. Nevertheless, you know, 20 of these 50 deaths happened before like 1960, which to me still is pretty solid in terms of respect for the past.
Julia Turner: I’ve recently lived through a death scene. My father died last year and I was surprised. I spent a lot of the year. He was sick, anticipatory, sad about the fact that he would be dead. Like that part really seemed like a bummer, and I was really dreading it. And it turns out it’s not great. It’s true what they say better in the people you love are alive.
Julia Turner: But the the the dying part also sucked. I did not feel sufficiently prepared for the dying. And what struck me reading this list is that like none of these felt like they were about the modern experience of medicalized death. And and my dad had a good death like he had. We wanted to get all the way into it. But like he he had the death he planned, which was still shitty, dying and shitty. But I was curious if you thought about that. I mean, my father’s death wasn’t the first time I’ve experienced modern medical death. I’ve been in the, you know, inner circle of other modern medical deaths. But did you ever think about that?
Speaker 4: One reason that that the contemporary medical death doesn’t really appear in this list? Is that the one? Well, there’s so there’s a boring reason and that an interesting reason. The boring reason is that the I think the best example of it is in terms of endearment, where it’s still play is still tear jerking and it doesn’t exactly reflect what the experience is actually like for most people, which is long periods of boredom, mixed with sadness, mixed with a kind of anti-climax often. And I don’t want to say that’s necessarily what it was like for you, but that has certainly been the experience for many people, I think.
Speaker 4: And a, I didn’t end up using Terms of Endearment because I already had Larry McMurtry all over this list. He’s already in two other places on this list and in Lonesome Dove and Brokeback Mountain. But also because. Because the way that it’s played for tears is incredibly effective, but also doesn’t exactly reflect that reality, I thought. And so it didn’t seem representative, the one that ended up seeming most about the way we experienced loved ones dying most often. Was were too was was Beth and Little Women, which was presented explicitly as a kind of idealized version of the perfect death and as such serves as a kind of. A counter example to prepare us for what it will not actually be like. It will never be that sweet.
Speaker 4: And then the other Beth Beth Emhoff, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in Contagion, who, of course, dies a terrible death in a hospital in under extreme circumstances. But just as important to that scene is not just her head getting cut open, but the scene that follows it, which the screenwriter Scott Burns talk to me about, and a piece in which Matt Damon, who plays her husband, has this very difficult to watch conversation with the doctor in which the doctor has to very clearly over and over and over again explain to him that his wife has died because he can’t process that. And in fact, just simply keeps asking, okay, well, what’s the next thing that you’re going to do? And I found that at least representative of what the experience of many people when a loved one dies in the hands of doctors that seemed representative, at least.
Julia Turner: That’s so interesting. I thought of that scene as the as the pandemic scene. But it’s interesting to think of it as having something to say about more humdrum medical deaths.
Dana Stevens: Dan, we may have gone over already and not have time to shout at our own deaths. I personally was saying, Where the hell are Captain Ahab and Frank Grimes from The Simpsons and also Ambrose Bierce, a story occurrence at Al Creek Bridge. And I’m not even a big list nit picker, but this is the kind of list that really, really invites pushback and feedback. And you got a ton from readers, in fact, so much so that Slate later ran a piece that was listeners contributions of why the hell was this not on the list? And I wonder if you could talk about that wave of response and which of those, if any, you regret not putting on.
Speaker 4: I really loved having people in me instantly write back saying, Where is this? This death hit me incredibly hard. Why did you leave this off? And and people always accompany them with gifs or video. And each one of them was like this little creative curve from someone who couldn’t believe that a thing that meant so much to them didn’t mean enough to go on this list, which is, of course, you know, the whole reason to make a list like this is to make people think not only about the stuff that’s on it, but the stuff that isn’t the main one that people yelled at me about that I that I deeply regret not putting on.
Speaker 4: And I don’t I don’t really exactly know why I ended up not putting it on as Alan Rickman and die hard like an all time great villain Death. And there aren’t that many great villain deaths on the list. One of the one good ones, we have ended up getting revoked later. It’s Moriarty and I’m in Sherlock Holmes, who similarly falls from a great height. But Alan Rickman, his death is so iconic, that character is so good and it’s so satisfying.
Speaker 4: Plus, Dana, as you mentioned on Twitter, the story behind its creation is so funny and surprising that Alan Rickman that the director told him will count to three and let you go and then they let him go at one to really capture that surprise that I made, that made me sad that I didn’t end up including that. And I can’t exactly remember over the course of the three years how he fell off. But then there were other ones that people suggested where I was like, It is great that you have a deep emotional response to Optimus Prime dying in the Transformers movie, but I simply cannot relate to that.
Stephen Metcalf: Well, listen, Dad, we could talk about this for another half hour. Unfortunately, we’ve got to go. This was total pleasure. And so tell me again, vintage contemporaries, your novel that’s out in January, is that right?
Speaker 4: January 2023.
Stephen Metcalf: Okay. And you’ll be back to talk about it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I hope so. Thanks, guys.
Stephen Metcalf: Superb. All right. Well.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, now is the moment in our podcast when we endorse Dana. What? What do you have this week?
Dana Stevens: Steve For my endorsement, I have Carl Wilson, Slate’s beloved music critic and a frequent guest on this show to thank because he mentioned the existence of this song yesterday and it introduced me to an entire album I didn’t know about. So yesterday, the day before, we are taping the show, Olivia Newton-John, the wonderful Australian pop singer ubiquitous presence in seventies eighties pop culture died at age 73 and there was an outpouring of grief for her online before the news about Trump’s house getting raided, broke and people were suddenly talking about something else.
Dana Stevens: But during that time, Karl Wilson happened to tweet a cover of an Olivia Newton-John song that was really beautiful and sent me down a little rabbit hole. It was by Juliana Hatfield beloved indie singer songwriter. I mean, why do we associate her with, I guess Blake Babies was her first band and she was in The Lemonheads, and she collaborated with Paul Westerberg of The Replacements. She’s just been on the indie music scene for decades now, since the eighties. And unbeknownst to me in 2018, just a few years ago, she came out with an entire record of Olivia Newton-John covers is just called Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John. And the song that Carl had posted that got me going on listening to this album was A Little More Love, one of the many songs that I know every single line of because it was on AM radio every second of my childhood.
Dana Stevens: And as I myself was tweeting about last night, I mean, Olivia Newton-John was just someone if you were a teenager in the 1780s, I mean, she was just in the firmament. You know, you didn’t have to be a fan. You just knew all of her songs, knew her movies, you know, knew her dance routines from Let’s Get Physical because she was everywhere and she was just this sort of angelic, you know, voice in pop culture.
Dana Stevens: And Juliana Hatfield really gets that and has a lot of respect for the songs in their original form. She doesn’t mess with them that much. Obviously she changes the instrumentation, etc., but she’s not trying to do some indie emo take on them or anything. She really appreciates the pop craft and the sweetness and just the incredible catchiness of the Olivia Newton-John catalog and sings a lot of her biggest songs, including one from Grease. So Juliana Hatfield sings Olivia Newton-John and whatever that sends you down, because then maybe like me, you’ll start listening to some of the originals and grooving on them too. So R.i.p Olivia and thanks.
Stephen Metcalf: Juliana Brilliant.
Stephen Metcalf: Julia What do you have?
Julia Turner: Why do I feel like a failed Bostonian and not having kept up with this chapter of Juliana Hatfield career? I can’t believe you didn’t say cool Bostonian as her as her main. I have to go check that out. I mean, when we Bostonians, you know, we horde our list of cool Bostonians jealously. Sorry, guys. I’m out here in California and got this garden. I’m just going to be recipe Julia for for a few more weeks here. I’m drowning in peppers now. Many, many peppers. And a friend of mine and friend of the program, Rebecca Onion, Slate’s editor and writer extraordinaire and sometime called her first guest, pointed me to the Six Seasons Cookbook and the recipe there for Pepper Anada. Have either of you guys ever eaten or made Pepper Anana have eaten?
Dana Stevens: Have not made.
Stephen Metcalf: Neither.
Julia Turner: So you basically just like stew peppers like you saute them down in garlic and olive oil and chili flake until they with a little bit of fresh tomato, until they turn into kind of like a big, hearty, saucy paste. And then you can serve it over polenta or you can serve it with eggs or you can serve it on toast. I didn’t have any polenta, but I didn’t know very many sweet peppers, so I made cornbread to get a little sweet and I just kind of spooned it over some cornbread. What a delicious meal.
Julia Turner: And I’m. I’m just the carnivorous by nature. Like, I don’t feel satisfied often easily by only vegetable meals. I want my starch or by protein, and I often choose the animal proteins. But this was so hearty and satisfying like it, you know, all the ingredients were things you might put in a salad, but somehow stewing them gave that kind of richness and depth and thickness that made it a really satisfying meal. So six seasons, Pepper, Renata, you can make a bunch, you can freeze it, you can use it in all kinds of iterations. Strong recommend if you are pepper adjacent at the moment.
Stephen Metcalf: Mm. That sounds amazing.
Stephen Metcalf: All right. Well, briefly, a pre endorsement endorsement. That sunny red record out of the blue, right?
Julia Turner: Julia Oh, my God. Steve That was the other thing I meant to mention. I’ve been listening to that album nonstop since you recommended it last week. It’s so good. It’s like up in the Red Garland read alone pantheon of Steve Music Rex of just deep listening ability never get tired of ability and ambient vibe ability without seeming treacly or it’s it’s a fabulous, fabulous album.
Dana Stevens: I got to get on this. I haven’t heard it yet.
Stephen Metcalf: It’s a really bewitching record and it’s just to me one of these mysteries why an artist who just flies under the radar is thought of as a backbencher. Second teamer just transcends themselves, like once in their career. And that’s what Sonny Red appears to have done this early sixth sixties record. Out of the blue is I agree with Julia’s description of it very briefly, I’m going to my actual endorsement is I thought I kind of knew the big star catalog top to bottom. I at one point I did I had forgotten about a song called Watch the Sunrise. I didn’t realize there were there was a perfect big star song I either didn’t know or had forgotten. And to the degree that we are throwing off the weariness in favor of some hope, I really I hope on behalf of hope at this point in our collective lives. I dare I dare to feel a little bit of hope on many, many related fronts.
Stephen Metcalf: The spirit of the song from the opening chiming acoustic guitar is so uplifting. And it’s it’s like it’s it to the extent someone can write a song whose theme. Seems to be time to wake up and smile like. Like the sun rises every day. You know, let that inform your view of the world and your feelings about yourself and it not be just a pile of treacle. I think that’s an amazing thing.
Speaker 6: It will be long.
Stephen Metcalf: Sky.
Speaker 6: It’s a. To look outside the. By.
Stephen Metcalf: Watch the sun. And for you, guitar bows out there. It’s just a great, amazing example of, you know, the Chilton acoustic doodad piece where he takes, you know, an acoustic guitar and just gets these noodling shiny riffs off of it that somehow no one had ever found before in the hands of people playing acoustic guitar. They sound totally original, but like they were there all along. And for you, guitar bows. It’s an open gee, and it’s really fun to play. Check it out. Watch the sunrise by the band Big Star. Julia, thank you so much.
Julia Turner: Thank you, Steve.
Stephen Metcalf: Thanks a lot to you.
Dana Stevens: Thanks to you.
Stephen Metcalf: Yeah. Good show. You’ll find links to some of the things we talked about today on our show page. That’s Slate.com slash Culturefest. We do love it when you email us. That’s at Culturefest at Slate.com. Our introductory music is by the composer Nick Patel. Our production assistant is Nadira Goffe. Our producer is Cameron Drews for Dana Stevens and Julia Turner and Dan Kois. I’m Stephen Metcalf. Thank you so much for joining us. Will see you soon.
Julia Turner: Hello and welcome to this blues segment of the Slate Culture Gabfest. Today we take a listener question from Samuel, who, when listening to you guys, discussed streaming a few weeks ago, I had a thought that came to mind. I hate it that the streaming services all nowadays basically force autoplay on you, making it hard to just relax and watch the credits, which I really enjoy as a space to process what I’ve just seen.
Julia Turner: This brings me to a slate plus segment idea. I’d like to know how you treat credits. Do you watch them or skip over them? What do you look for when you do watch them? Have you seen any films that do them especially well or poorly? I’m going to start Dana with you as someone whose job requires you to actually describe the films you’ve just seen and sometimes even heap praise or scorn upon some of those names that appear in the credits for the skill they brought to the picture and what they achieved with those with their talents. How do you watch the credits if you do?
Dana Stevens: Yeah, it was my idea to do this listener question. I think Samuel for it, because I think it’s a great thing to think and talk about it. And I have no idea what you two are going to say about it. I’ve had a changing relationships to credits, and now I would say that like Samuel, I’m a full on credit watcher all the way through. I really don’t like the thing where streamers switch to the next and hop to the next. Interrupting the song and not only the names that are scrolling by, but the flow of whatever song the creators have chosen or music they’ve chosen to put under the credits. And if there is a default way to set every streamer so that it doesn’t do that, please some listener tell me about it, because I would change to that setting.
Dana Stevens: And in movies, I actually have a little story there. I don’t think I used to always stay for credits, even after I became a critic. I think sometimes, you know, I was so rushed to get off and start writing about the movie and meet whatever deadline I was on that I would unless it was a movie that was going to obviously have a stinger, right. As, as Marvel movies, etc.. Big franchise movies often do. I would cut out early, but I was once at the Sundance Film Festival serving on a jury for best dramatic film. And Leonard Maltin, a legendary film critic, film historian, was also on that jury. And I remember starting to get up during a credit sequence after a movie we had watched together because I was going to go try to grab lunch before the next one or whatever. And him saying, oh, no, I’ll stay, always watch the credits because you always learn something from them. And it was just so great to have this sort of senior, you know, mentor figure saying, well, you know, I’m still trying to learn every possible thing I can from every moment of the movie. And he was really right. And since that, I think I didn’t even leave lunch for lunch early that day. I sat there and watched the credits next to Leonard Maltin and have ever since then.
Dana Stevens: And it’s true that you always learn something, even if it’s just, you know, what location was the movie shot at? You know, where were the you can sometimes tell where the post-production was done based on the names right of every single name is a South Asian name. You know, it was probably probably post produced in India. I mean, you can learn about like labor issues. It might have existed on the set and I don’t know, there’s just then there’s playful things that appear in credits. Obviously there can be, you know, animations or moments from the movie that they go through. Pixar credits always have really, really inventive, you know, things going on visually on the sides. They also have the name, the list of all the babies, the production babies born during the shoot, which is great, you know, so different companies will have different personalities as to what they put in credits.
Dana Stevens: And even if you just learn things about nepotism, like, hey, everybody has the same last name, there’s a lot of family members working on this, right? I mean, it’s really, really true that if you just make your eyes continue to look at that scroll, you become less annoyed with how long it’s less lasting and instead start thinking about, you know, just the craft of putting a movie or a show together and the hundreds and thousands of hours that had to go in from all of these departments you never thought about before. You know, and that’s true even on small productions. Well, think about even on Marcel the Shell, the movie we talked about today, very small, delicate movie, but that, you know, involved thousands of man hours to make those little creatures move around just the way they did. So, yeah, I’m a full on credits fan at this point, and I’m always annoyed when the credits are snatched away from me by streamers.
Stephen Metcalf: This listener question made me think of two features or or experiences of seeing a movie in in the theater that I just hadn’t thought about in a long time. One is that when you’re watching a movie in a theater, you’re far less conscious of how close it is to ending. You have a much less precise sense, you know, you pause your video at home to go get a lemonade or something. You’ll see 14 minutes, 30 seconds left. I mean, you you you’re you’re not necessarily. Paced enough to know when a film exactly is going to end.
Stephen Metcalf: And so that was a very powerful experience of seeing movies, right? Like, are they going to give more exposition, more explanation? Am I going to live with this these people in this fully now alive world to me much longer? Or am I going to suddenly be cut off from it? Are we going to fade out or are we going to pull back or are we going to cut the black bean all out? Like when the credits come and how they come was not an incidental feature of the very end of the movie. And I think that it breaks down the two categories for me. In one sense, there’s the call me by your name where you’re tight on the crying face of Timothy Charlemagne and the full extent of the. Power of the relationship that now feels definitively over to him in that moment at least is coming home to him and us. Right?
Stephen Metcalf: So there’s this lingering long shot where the credits start to roll. And it’s funny because having the credits roll simultaneous to the weeping, very quietly, somewhat surreptitiously weeping, I think Elio is his name is actually quite a powerful effect because it’s both saying the story is over, but the pain is going to go on.
Stephen Metcalf: Right. Like the credits are rolling. We know we’re not getting any more dialogue. That story is over. The relationship between I know there’s a sequel, but for the attention purposes of that movie, that relationship is now over. It’s a thing of his past, and now it’s going to be a formative experience for his life. And and so the moviegoing experiences is in some sense over. But the quote unquote, real life experience of the character is going to continue on that beautifully brought home.
Stephen Metcalf: There’s the End of Eternal Sunshine, the only back song I’ve ever liked. It’s a cover everybody’s got to learn some time. And the fighting in the snow or whatever, playing in the snow, the couple. And it’s, you know, the whole movie obviously is about the engineered disappearance of these memories in order to finally be able to live with the pain of it. And it just fades to this like whiteout conditions, basically, and then come credits.
Stephen Metcalf: That’s really beautiful, you know, and of Silence of the Lambs, a great ending credits sequence and that you have the button on the relationship of of Lecter and Clarice Starling and he tells her the world is a much better place with you in it affirming what we’ve known all along, which that he loves and respects her and would never harm her, in fact, would would go out of his way to save her and help her.
Stephen Metcalf: And, you know, and then he says, and I’m having a friend for dinner, and we realize it’s the sort of horrible villain he’s about to kill and eat. So we still. Lecter I mean, it’s so beautifully done. Like I’m still a forgettable and a sociopath, but you’re my carve out. You’re my exception. I still love you. And then it just ends and it just sort of pulls up on the streetscape, and it’s like, that’s such a trope of seventies and and I know it’s an early nineties movie, but it feels like a trope that I became very familiar with in seventies movies that kind of, what is it, a crane shot, I guess, or whatever, where you sort of pull away from the world but not out of it as a way of saying this is just one story that happened among the billions that are unfolding all the time.
Stephen Metcalf: And now we are slowly transitioning away from it and the credits begin to roll. So it’s just talk about a thing that you’d never I never thought about, really. And and the trunk nations and sort of the technological, you know, freedom of. Watching at home. Just make this disappear. I mean, in theory, right? Julia, you should be riveted to your crushed velvet seat in a movie theater. Given the experience you just had. Right, you should be a little bit wrung, dry by thrills or emotions or whatever. And. And that’s simply the reason why you’re sitting there watching these otherwise meaningless names. Scroll by as you’re absorbing the emotional impact of the movie. And that’s gone on, you know, next step clicking on next episode or you know, or whatever.
Julia Turner: Yeah. I mean, there is an aesthetic to them and there is a craft to them. And it’s about this release into the world and back into back into life. Right. And I find myself enjoying definition like I don’t like it when I can’t tell if the watching part is over. You know, the Marvel Stingers, at least you know there’s going to be one. But sometimes I’ll go to a movie that’s not a marvel movie, but it seems like the kind of movie that would have like a goofy scene halfway through. And I just sit there full of resentment being like and responses and these are going to be more stuff. Or like, I just, I like definition and so sometimes I find myself resenting the uncertainty there. But I do love watching and reading the names sometimes depending on where I’m going and what I’m doing. And I almost never stay to the end.
Julia Turner: And especially now that in the age of VFX, I think the credits are longer. I mean, maybe I’m wrong, but just the the dozens and dozens and hundreds and hundreds of people who do the computer version of the movie on top of the, you know, the hundreds you’ve always been in there who actually do the physical mechanical production of the movie. I do think they’re extended lists of names, but I always love the close reads. I mean, it reminds me of reading the acknowledgements of a book, which I never don’t read the acknowledgements like. I love to read the acknowledgments because it feels like this window into the creative brain behind the experience I’ve just had. And for the same reason that it kind of like eases you out into the world, like you’ve finished the book and then you kind of have a moment to be like, and who, who, who was this, who created this experience that I’ve just been, you know, submersed in so I, I’m not a stair to the end or I am like sit there and just enjoy names.
Julia Turner: Like, I also like just the aesthetics of names, like some names we’ve all goofy names or sometimes they have fascinating names or yes, the nepotism watch is also I’ve done that to Dana or and sometimes there sometimes there’s a cluster of family names in one of the crafts and you’re like you you were Matt conjured this whole, you know, roving band of sibling costumers or something. And it’s a text like any other.
Julia Turner: But I do even even in Marcel, there’s sort of a little bit of coda that runs under the beginning of the credits, and then it seems to dissipate in the credits, turn into more like we’re just going to keep showing you names, credits. And I felt a little bit of like one of those more or so, but I think there’s not. But I want to go upstairs or so I have a perhaps unimaginative or ungenerous resistance to too much unexpected or unpredictable content in the credits chunk of the movies.
Julia Turner: Nonetheless, I do both find it useful the autoplay feature on streaming and then find it annoying. When I want to be in the moment, I feel like they should give you the option. You know how they give you the skip intro option and you can decide if you want to skip the intro or not. I feel like they should give you like a skip credits, but I suppose that wouldn’t work for them because then you might be more likely to be like, It’s really bedtime. I shouldn’t watch three more of these. And the autoplay is the thing that keeps us, you know, drugged and hooked up to our streaming systems. But I would prefer that as a user interface.
Dana Stevens: Yeah. The fact that they, they force you into it in that you can’t jump in just, just makes me angry. My one follow up to what you were just saying, Julia, about staying to the end and wanting to know when it’s over, is that. Yeah, I am generally annoyed by stingers as well, if only because it’s so predictable. And the whole idea that they’re a surprise has completely disappeared with big franchise movies because, you know, there’s going to be that kind of material. But I do like a genuine surprise stinger. And here I’m thinking of like Ferris Bueller popping up at the end of Ferris Bueller credits and saying, You can go home now. You know, that’s an actual gift to the watcher instead of being something that we’re forced to an ad essentially that were forced to sit and watch.
Julia Turner: Right. The notion of just like a trailer for a movie that’s not even made yet, that’s coming in four years. And that also is never enticing. Like, I feel like so many of those Marvel Stingers are just like brooding and. Gray and I don’t know.
Dana Stevens: And there’s no fan service. I mean, if you know the characters, then you’re gasping because Harry Styles is playing so and so. But if you’re not a big comics reader who knows the character, you’re just thinking, Why is Harry Styles in tights making everyone scream?
Julia Turner: And on that note, we’ll wrap. Thank you so much, Sleepless listeners, for supporting this show, for supporting Slate and its work, and for listening to this bonus episode of the Slate Culture Gabfest. We will see you next week.
