UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series 2 | Teal Swan: Art & Artifice (w/Paola Marino)
In this episode of the Swan Song Series, Matthew interviews Paola Marino about why she found Teal Swan a fascinating subject to film for 2018’s “Open Shadow.” They discuss aesthetics, the mystery of personality, why Swan’s parents agreed to sit down with her. Matthew also surprised her with the newly-revealed translations of Swan’s coded journal pages.Prefacing the interview is a discussion between Julian and Matthew about art, artifice, the risks of doing and not doing hard journalism on the subjects we cover. They discuss James Joyce’s proverb about noble art, in which he describes “aesthetic arrest” as the middle way between propaganda and pornography.Marino’s work attempts to find that path, while Jon Kasbe’s The Deep End falters to both sides. On one hand Kasbe’s film titillates viewers with high drama. On the other hand it tells viewers what they should think. And in both cases it creates a story where the truth would suffice.The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. —James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManShow Notes
Open Shadow—Paola MarinoGizmodo Launches 'The Gateway,' an Investigative Podcast About a Controversial Internet Spiritual Guru
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Hello Conspiratuality listeners, it's Matthew here.
This is a special, unlocked episode from our Patreon Early Access Swan Song series.
We'll be dropping these periodically into our main feed.
Thanks so much for your support.
Welcome to an episode of a Conspiratuality Podcast bonus collection, the Swan Song series, a tour through the paradoxes of Teal Swan, an influencer who embodies the tangled history and whiplash contradictions of our beat.
This collection will be accessible first through our Patreon feed, but we will release each episode to the public over time in our regular feed in addition to our Thursday episodes.
Topics will revolve around the method, the myth, the impacts and implications of one of the most unsettling conspirituality figures alive.
Content warnings always apply for this material.
Themes include suicide and child sexual abuse.
To our Patreon subscribers, thank you for helping keep our platform ad-free and editorially independent.
And to everyone else, thanks for listening, including followers of Teal Swan.
We hope this is all useful to you as you consider your relationship to Teal's story and influence.
Well, here we go with installment number two of the Swan Song series.
This one is called Teal Swan Art and Artifice, and we're joined by Paola Marino.
Hey, Julian.
Here we are.
How are you doing?
Doing okay.
I mean, you know, just riding this news cycle between politics and hearings and COVID and all the rest of it, like everyone else, but I have to say this project is engrossing in terms of the research and the creative work.
Yeah, well, I'm glad you think so.
I'm enjoying it too.
I mean, sometimes I'm hating it.
One thing I really hate right now and I have to work on it is I have a burning disgust for Lawrence Pazder that I really have to get my shit together about because he's the co-author of Michelle Remembers, which we'll start to look at in our next episode.
Wait, is he the warm-eyed, lithe-bodied, sandy-haired handsome man from Michelle Remembers?
Yes, he is the devout Catholic psychiatrist who actually rejects psychiatry through that book.
And describes himself in very flattering terms.
He does.
Yeah.
But I mean, when my blood pressure is down, certain things are becoming clearer.
And I think the first thing that I think about is that looking at Casby's film has me looking in the mirror more closely as a cult journalist and starting to interrogate some of my own snap reactions and tendencies towards vigilantism.
And what I appreciate about this topic today and the interview that I was able to do with Paolo Marino is that it's pushing me all to, first of all, really look carefully at how I frame a figure like Teal Swan, like how quickly I come to my own thoughts about how to frame the content.
Secondly, I'm really, I think, considering more carefully who the audience is for this analysis and how they can be either engaged or isolated.
And then, thirdly, particularly to Swan's case, to, I'd say, increasingly humanize a figure who has taken on superhuman dimensions by recognizing that there are really normal, horrible things going on underneath the surfaces of the satanic panic.
And that I think Ockham's razor is really useful when thinking in a de-escalatory way about what's plausible in really bizarre stories.
Although I don't like the image of Ockham's razor.
I think I'm in favor of something gentler, maybe Ockham's garden trowel.
Yeah.
Ockham's spatula.
I don't know if you have an option.
Ockham's detangler, right, is really what we're trying to do.
We're trying to detangle The mundane real-world abuse and the scars that it creates from these fantastical sort of deflections or I don't know, it's so complex.
Yeah, elaborations, shifts to the symbolic order, certainly cries for help.
And before we get to all of that though, I just want to look back to our first episode and thank you again for being so forthcoming with your story.
And judging by the responses on Patreon, I know that it was illuminating and helpful for a lot of people, and I just wanted to ask you how it felt to put it all out.
Yeah, you know, those comments were really nice.
I appreciated all of those kind and supportive responses, and of course then people also, as our Patreons will know, sort of opened up about some of their own experiences, which is lovely.
I mean, I think for me, with the podcast, I really enjoy the work, and I really appreciate The recognition and the fact that we have found an audience who appreciates what we're doing, but more than anything, whenever there's an individual who feels that their personal struggle is positively impacted or supported or we become a resource for them.
That's, that's the best.
Yeah, that's gold.
Yeah, yeah.
So, and then in terms of my own process, it felt good to make sense of it anew through the lenses that we're currently applying and also to be contextualized within What we're looking at for this series.
It's not as emotionally intense, certainly as it used to be many years ago, and even as it was the first time when I discussed it here.
That was a year, maybe 18 months ago.
But I will say I had a very profoundly good cry while I was watching The Deep End, and it was sharing that with you which sort of clued us into the idea that revisiting my own experience might be useful.
It's alive in me and I'm grateful for another turn of the wheel in terms of processing and integrating and making sense of it all.
Yeah, and hopefully the wheel didn't turn too hard, because listeners might appreciate hearing that as we got closer to the end, I started getting really excited, maybe a little bit long-winded and technical in my questions.
And at the same time, of course, you were getting pretty tired out.
Yeah.
And because of your tech setup, you're running your device on a battery, and I asked you something complex, and you sighed.
And you said, My battery is about to die, so... And I edited that bit out, but afterwards you said, like, you were talking about your own battery.
Yeah, so this is pretty funny.
This is the place where I reveal that actually I am an AI.
I actually am a transhumanist, as some of the conspiracy theorists believe is the case, that that's what the vaccine does to you.
It was my laptop battery, but Your words were definitely swimming together in my mind as I tried to keep track of what you were saying at that point.
And some of it is also just being so in the reverie of like an emotional process of remembering things and remembering how things felt that have been particularly consequential in my life, for which I have had a lot of conflict, you know.
I think it's exhausting, but it's also like I'm not in analytical intellectual mode.
So it was like, I don't know what the fuck Matthew's talking about right now.
Right.
Yeah, I don't think we often respect those category shifts and boundaries.
Or, I mean, I think we're sort of intuitively aware of them.
And then, you know, it's the point at which a conversation or an interview starts to sort of fall apart often, I think, is that one person or the other has like misattuned to the fact that, oh, now we've shifted out of, you know, our heart space and now we're moving into our mind space.
But that's not coordinated with the other person.
Totally.
Anyway, there is one kind of moving forward question that I did want to ask that I felt was left hanging.
I asked about how you felt your daughter might be negotiating this difficult, you know, early childhood she's had that's had significant You know, medical trauma, confusion, perhaps feelings of betrayal.
And you basically explained that in your house, you let her take the lead in discovering that these experiences are, yes, really bad, but also eventually understandable and reparable through love and attunement and support.
And so, I asked you that, but then there was something else as well, and I wanted to get to that.
Yeah, I mean, with regard to everything she's been through, she had a really difficult birth.
She had a bad pneumonia, a double pneumonia that ended up having to be hospitalized, but they couldn't figure out what it was at first.
She's had multiple ear infections and terrible bouts with constipation.
And we've been in the emergency room or urgent care probably at least 10 times in her short life so far.
She's four.
That's amazing.
She's just turned four.
That's a lot.
Yeah.
And a lot of it was actually really close together.
But there have been several moments since then where she's brought up those memories.
She said, Hey, I remember when this happened, or she's just sort of like crumpled to the floor, like in a crouch and said, you know, and started talking about something that happened.
And we're just very aware of making space for further discussion and emotional attunement in those times, asking her questions, telling her what we remember about the story.
And you will ask her before we go to the doctor if she remembers the last time she was at that doctor or in that building.
We tell her how proud we were of her and also remind her that everything that happened was really to help her get better.
I have found the fact that she has specifically herself, unsolicited, asked to go to the doctor when she's seen the first signs of an ear infection, for example, or when she's been super constipated.
She's like, can you take me to the doctor today?
That seems like a good sign.
Yeah, I would say so.
Yeah, and she also incorporates some role play as she has a little doctor set that someone gave her at some point, unconnected to any of this.
She will do sort of doctoring with caring for her dolls and her stuffies and she'll do the whole thing where she's like, now this is going to hurt a little bit, but I need you to be brave and it's to help you because, you know, we really care about you and want you to get better.
She's working through it in a way that seems really, really positive.
And it's one of those things, as you know, I think it's not until you're a parent and you have to negotiate those kinds of Almost impossible seeming emotional trade-offs where, you know, either you're going to risk her feeling betrayed, either we're going to risk her feeling betrayed and traumatized, or she's potentially, you know, going to be very, very sick or die.
You sort of choose the one you have to choose.
And it can be hard not to feel like you're rationalizing it when you say to her later, you know, it was for your own good, because that's what someone would say if they were evil, but we're not.
We're caring for her.
And I think that there's also a very...
One of the things I find helpful is remembering how much of communication is implicit, how much of it is body language, tone of voice, facial expression, and that you can't really fake that.
Either the love is coming through, or it isn't.
And that's how, I think, when we're very young, that's much more impactful than anything else.
I think I mentioned this during the last episode, but the moment in which you described her glance of
Betrayal is not something that I've ever experienced as a parent because in our own emergency room trips, I've actually been able to feel like the protector pretty much all the way through the sort of the sequence and not as the person who would be sort of complicit in some kind of
You know, procedure that wasn't understood, but rather the person that the child could come back to.
But you're describing a much more stressful situation, so I really empathize with that.
The moments where we've had to hold her down so she could be, receive an IV or have blood taken and she's looking in horror at her own blood, some of which may be like spurting up or something, you know, like go splashing.
It's like really grotesque.
And yet it's, you know, it's those moments when you're also reminded that as sophisticated as medical science is and as how incredibly fortunate we are to have it, there's also something incredibly like gothic and macabre about it.
Yeah, and that's never going to go away.
No, because it's bodies.
Because it's bodies, right.
It's the insides of bodies.
Yeah.
But here's the question that I wanted to end with last episode.
It's kind of two parts.
What's your advice for the person seeking therapy who feels that they want or they need to explore early childhood experiences that are possibly traumatic?
What should they be aware of, knowing what you know?
Well, yeah.
And, I guess secondly, should I do the two parts?
Okay.
What is the first feeling that a person might have when they are being led into a distorted view of their past?
And are there internal cues that might help someone put the brakes on?
Yeah, I mean I think we live in a time where there's so much good literature out there and there are so many good books that have been written for a broader audience, for a non-professional audience.
People like Pat Ogden and Peter Levine and Dan Siegel and Rick Hansen, there's just so much really good stuff out there about trauma and the nervous system and what neuroscience and Somatic psychology, you know, as it's continued to progress, can tell us.
And so much of that has moved completely in the other direction of all of this repressed memory stuff.
So I think learning about that, if you do have a trauma history or if you're You know, considering that you might have a trauma history learning about just doing some reading I think is really good and probably staying away from some of the glamorous Instagram influencers who claim to be experts on trauma and you know instead get be immersed in some good solid literature.
And in that same sort of vein I would say seek out a therapist who is up to date on the current trauma models and a lot are these days.
They're going to be more somatically informed about the brain and the nervous system.
They're going to give you tools and techniques to help self-regulate and to help process any intense memories that do come up really carefully and in bite-sized chunks so that it's not this big kind of overwhelming cathartic thing where you're rushing to interpret things too quickly, which would be one of the red flags for me.
I think that A sober therapist is not going to over-interpret memories that may be more impressionistic by speculating that you have these kinds of repressed memories about something specific.
They're going to have a very patient and accepting attitude toward letting the material come up as it needs to and supporting each step and just letting it sometimes be loose-ended.
I think that they're going to take the educated stance that some traumatic experience doesn't really require narrative certainty in order to be processed and resolved.
I think that's sort of one of the dominant perspectives these days is that you can work through the nervous system charge.
And how it affects you in your daily life.
And perhaps accept that you, you know, you might not be 100% clear where it comes from.
And that sometimes it's not as literal as that.
You're not going to find the newspaper archive that records the event.
That's right.
Yeah.
And along those lines, you know, memories change over time.
We know now that memory is much less like a read-only digital recording of an event that you can go in and access, like you're saying with the newspaper article.
It's much more like a simulation that is being accessed and sort of recreated each time.
And it's very permeable to ideas, beliefs, emotions, relational dynamics.
Um, whatever's present in the moment, interpersonally, while you are accessing the memory.
So each time it sort of gets rewritten.
It's a draft process, much more so than a completely clear record.
So I would say, you know, any sense that you're being coached or pushed or told what it is that you can't recall is never good.
Technically, we know this sets up a heightened transference, in which the patient will now be seeking the approval of the therapist, who's sort of a stand-in parent, and that approval is going to be linked to the pressure to perform accessing more awful memories, as I know we're going to talk about with Michelle Remembers next time.
And so then, in terms of internal cues, My sense is that, and my experience is that, trauma-informed therapists are going to actually help you to establish those internal cues.
Concepts like grounding and orienting and resourcing, which are all sort of under the heading of self-regulation, of learning how to manage your internal state a little more smoothly.
This can really help Feel more of a sense that the organic cycles of intensification and soothing or arousal and sort of calming back down can be more sustainable.
And if the therapy isn't doing that, if the therapy isn't Smoothing out those cycles and creating more of a sense of being grounded and in touch with reality in a sort of interpersonal and emotionally attuned way, then I would say get out.
Because it's probably unsafe.
You know, I just want to pick up one thread on How to engage with or, you know, take in the professional credibility of the person who mainly presents themselves on Instagram.
I mean, everybody's using that.
It's not necessarily a problem.
You know, there is this phenomenon that we'll see in Michelle Remembers and that I think is echoed in some of the dynamics from what we know of the available information between Teal Swan and Barbara Snow that the more the therapist seems to be making a public name for themselves as an advocate for a particular type of
phenomenon or a new finding, I would say that's something to treat with caution as well because it's quite clear when we get to Lawrence Pazdur and Michelle Smith that he has transformed her and continued to exploit her as his project
And there are hints of that in what we know about the interactions between Barbara Snow and Teal Swan, in the sense that, you know, she facilitates the initial reporting, and it also seems that Teal Swan was doing some kind of maybe informal recruiting on Snow's behalf.
And so I think if the identity of the therapist is wrapped up in the achievement of the therapy, or the aspirations that you have, that that is a real sort of machine for transference, heightened transference, and then counter transference as well.
Yeah, and learning some of those concepts, I think, is also really helpful because it's just the water that you're swimming in whenever you're doing therapy.
I'll just share very quickly that one of my closest friends who really did suffer horrific abuse growing up ended up in analysis.
You know, like real, solid, you know, institutional, rigorous therapeutic modality with a person who was getting their PhD in Kleinian psychoanalysis and who, as it turned out, rigorous therapeutic modality with a person who was getting their PhD in Kleinian psychoanalysis and Their dissertation on the work with my friend and with some other people.
Oh, for Christ's sake.
And took her down this, because Klein, I don't know if you're familiar with the Klein stuff.
A lot of it is about, it's about how infants and small children have like incredible hostility toward their parents.
And a lot of it is about owning that hostility.
So she really did a number on my friend's head over the course of several years around how
You know, she may have instigated a lot of this abuse through her own hostility that she really needed to look at or maybe, you know, like, like, I won't go into details, but yeah, so it can, it can be present, you know, whether it's the Instagram influencer who's done a weekend training and how to use theta brainwaves to heal your trauma, or it's the person who's deep in, in the, in the bowels of institutional rigor, you know, we're all susceptible.
Right, somebody who needs their doctorate, somebody who needs more citations or more fieldwork.
Oh, shit.
Okay, moving on.
We have a really interesting interview with Paola Marina, her role, and we'll get to that.
I'm going to link to her documentary, which is called Open Shadow, in the show notes, and I'm going to link also to Jennings Brown's The Gateway once again, which we've described as kind of a high watermark in teal reporting.
Now, The Gateway came out in 2018, and Marino's film Open Shadows came out in 2017, and it followed Teal Swan through encounter sessions while focusing primarily on her sort of dream-weaving aesthetics.
So we see in this film Teal Swan in action, but also in a kind of privacy.
We hear people like Blake and her own parents transparently discussing her mystique, what they love about her, but also what they find disquieting.
Now, I have a memory of watching this film many years ago, so watching it this time around wasn't new to me.
But after The Deep End came out, I went back and dug it up because I was reminded of it through comments in a Teal Critical Facebook group.
Now, people at that point in this Facebook group had only gotten through the first two episodes of The Deep End, and they were already saying that John Casby had made as much of an idealizing piece about SWAN as Marino had.
And, of course, the full series put that comparison aside because they don't wind up in the same place at all.
So, I went back and watched Open Secret.
Julian, you had seen this film before or not, but what were or are your impressions about it?
No, I had not seen it before.
So I came totally fresh to it after having watched the first three episodes of The Deep End, before the fourth one came out that was so controversial.
You know, my first impression is it just seemed like a puff piece by someone who admired her.
It's really artistic and intimate.
It's beautifully shot and edited.
I didn't realize at that point that these were, you know, unique, that they had unique access in terms of the interviews.
But I thought the interviews were really, you know, just gentle and accommodating.
It was interesting to watch and yeah, I think there's more to explore here.
You know, the film, back when I first saw it, at first did raise my hackles because Marino doesn't really do anything to push back against the spell of her subject.
In fact, she really is there to document it.
And I think that my mindset at the time, and at that time I think I was completely absorbed in writing my book about the cult at the center of Ashtanga Yoga and the abuses of its leader, Patapi Joyce.
And I just didn't really have time for a non-investigative look at something in this landscape.
But the thing is that I didn't start my writing life as an investigator.
I started as a poet and a novelist.
And, you know, I have to admit that I was primarily in that mode, in that, you know, artistry part of my life, attracted to the weird, the transgressive, the surreal.
And for the most part, I would describe my writing as a kind of extended teenage rebellion against hypocrisy.
You know, my first novel was heavily inspired by Coen's Beautiful Losers.
My second novel was heavily inspired by Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Oh, that old chestnut.
That old chestnut.
Right.
And when I say heavily inspired, yeah.
Why not Ulysses?
Right.
Yeah.
When I say heavily inspired, I mean, you know, kind of derivative.
But with a few turns of the screw, Like, I definitely could have written a novel with a Teal Swan-like character at the center as a hero.
And, you know, I think that these novels were okay, but a little too derivative, as I say, maybe a little too straight, a little too square.
But, you know, whatever.
I was 26 when that part of my life was over.
And what I remember most was the writerly eye, in which I wasn't really looking for crimes.
I wasn't looking for answers, necessarily, but for kind of shards of glitter.
So, the poems that I would write, the scenes and chapters that evolved into the two novels would evolve out of You know sometimes strange often inexplicable obsessions that would come in a dream or a waking intrusive thought and then I follow it and you know I don't know where it's going to lead but I go.
Let me say about that I had a very similar experience.
I would say all through my 20s there was a lot of dream journaling there was a lot of Working on creative writing that is impressionistic and Very, and very open to the possibilities of altered states of consciousness.
I mean, I remember working on a novel in which a man's wife had died, but he was discovering a sort of access to the spirit world through a melody that he discovered on the piano that would then sort of bring, you know, colors into the periphery of his vision, kind of like a, what do they call that pre-seizure kind of, they call it an aura.
The aura, right.
Yeah, just very fascinated with discovering layers of hidden meaning and other worlds and something beyond the everyday sort of limitations of growing up into what felt like a very limiting adulthood as a creative person.
It's really interesting that your character hears a melody because you're also a guitarist and I think if you're talking about guitar, that fragment is a lick that can hang out and be there and develop and ferment and then turn into something else.
Am I right about that?
Because I never play guitar.
Yeah, I mean...
There's this, I think for me the fascination with music has always been that it is, it's this non-verbal language that through the physics of vibration, to sound like a new ager here, but it really is the case.
You know, the difference between hello, hello, and hello, hello, the difference between that major and minor third is an emotional resonance that somehow hits our nervous system a particular way because of How they vibrate together.
Yeah.
So that's that's always been fascinating to me.
And how phrases, you know, music, music is made up of phrases and a phrase is a snippet of language.
And what is it that it's conveying in terms of pattern and correspondence and some kind of geometric, you know, color filled like synesthete, alternative way of experiencing things.
I think for me as a teenager, The archetype that was always hovering in the background of being a guitar player and what drew me into playing in bands and being in music school and all the rest of it was, it's just that single sustained note, whether it's Santana or Jimi Hendrix or David Gilmour from Pink Floyd, just holding that emotionally searing note that just
Penetrates and soars above everything else as some kind of timeless transcendent moment in which, as a performer, you can bring a whole group of people together into some kind of truth that is there in that aesthetic, emotional, expressive moment.
Yeah, if only in your own head while you're on stage.
Because it depends on what state they're all in and how many drugs are being consumed.
Well, yeah, and that's the fantasy, right?
The fantasy is that you are channeling something in a transcendent way, even if that's not from a supernatural kind of perspective, but that there's some kind of breaking on through to the other side to mention one of my old heroes.
Yeah, and of course there's a piece of that that's just grandiose and solipsistic.
You know, we've given John Casby a really hard time in a bunch of episodes and I just want to note that I think that he, actually I don't think, I have no doubt that he has these impulses too.
And, that if he were to limit himself to art films, like No Harm, No Foul, or like singing songs at the coffee house, but with a deep end for whatever reason, money pressures, market demands, naivety, he crossed over into a kind of myth-making that took a turn into a kind of anti-cult propaganda.
And I think if you want to be truly artistic about things, you really have to earn it.
Ooh, isn't that the truth, right?
That's sort of the struggle of coming into some kind of maturity as a creative person.
I really feel that tension.
I felt that tension going to music school and wanting to just be a savant, but having to buckle down and be like, oh god, this is hard and I suck at it and I need to struggle and I need to learn and I have to earn.
The privilege of being able to be in the company of these people who I admire, who I aspire to emulate.
The reason that I was really happy to speak with Paula Moreno is that I think she shows that she keeps her artistic stance and identity really clear and centered.
You know, she's there to observe, not objectively, but artistically.
And it's like she's searching magpie-like for things that are shiny and sharp.
But also, as I mentioned to her in the interview, sometimes what she winds up finding is actually boring.
And there's a real value to that.
You know, it's put me in the frame of mind that I always recall when I think of this dear friend and mentor who taught me more than anyone else about writing because he used to say, if nothing else, you have to make sure that you surprise yourself.
Because if you don't, you'll be serving your conditioning, you'll be serving the dominant culture, perhaps even you'll serve the state.
I think in the case of The Deep End, you know, the team might wind up serving the content streaming overlords, right?
And this is even as, or if, you know, Casby professes to go in with an open mind, to not know where the story's going to wind up.
Somehow, even so, the story wound up in an over-determined place at the expense of honest editing.
And in the end, this belies the artistic aspirations.
You know, it's so interesting.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's making me think, you know, I mentioned James Joyce jokingly a little bit ago, but Joseph Campbell would always reference this particular, I don't know if it's a chapter or an essay or something that James Joyce wrote about art and how he felt that art had the function of creating a moment of aesthetic arrest and that on either side of that kind of sacred moment of aesthetic arrest, you have either propaganda or pornography.
Yes, yes, yes.
I was trying to remember that quote, actually, this week, because that's stuck in my mind from years and years ago.
Yeah, so that either you are telling people what to think, in which case you are creating a propaganda piece.
Just in terms of the tone of it, or you are titillating people in a way that seduces them into some other kind of experience that you're manipulating and that he refers to as pornography.
And I want to just say that with, you know, I just said something about, you know, we were talking about Casby kind of having to earn that artistic Freedom, and I will say that, you know, he's very, very skillful at what he does do in terms of the filmmaking.
Totally.
And I'll also say about Paula that, and it's great having listened to the interview, that she is very clear about where she stands and where she's coming from and what is fascinating to her, what calls her to create a piece and that she's not a journalist and she's not someone who's doing, you know, cult analysis or anything like that.
I mean I have to remember this principle of surprising myself and through surprising myself earning the right to a kind of artistry.
I have to remember that like every day because if I don't surprise myself.
I probably think that I'm heading into research, but I'm in fact really just hunting down my own suspicions.
And there's a difference between learning in a way that surprises you and working to confirm your own cynicism.
And I think the former happens through open listening, and the latter happens through predatory listening, which I know the feeling of.
Sometimes this podcast project has actually exacerbated that feeling in me that I'm sort of watching the feeds for the thing that is wrong.
And what I really want to find is the thing that is most wrong.
And that is, you know, that has its use and it also has its limitations.
Yeah.
important figure in my writing world, though I never met him, because by the time he died, he died at the age of 44.
I was only 17.
This was a Canadian experimental poet named B.P.
Nickel, and by the time he died, he had attained this quasi-saint-like status in the Toronto literary world.
And, you know, for Americans or anybody else in the world who might not know him, he might be compared to somebody like Richard Brodigan, I think.
But his output of books, broadsides, cartoons, paintings, word games, puzzles, he did early computer programs.
This is like the late 70s.
Wow.
And it was just unbelievable.
And he was definitely a prodigy, definitely neurotypical, and absolutely committed to endless immersive aesthetic meditation.
But what he would say is, I have come to serve the language.
To speak to Joyce's point, right?
And that what he meant was that there was a lot to gain by exploring aesthetics, exploring the language itself, investigating the moods and mysteries that accumulate through etymology and grammar and rhythm.
And the other path that he was hinting at was that using language didactically or politically was something altogether different.
That it put the writer in a zone in which they could not be sure that they weren't producing propaganda.
So, I get a kind of Nickel-like feeling from Marino's artistic approach, that her primary focus is to serve the aesthetic, to let that tell a story.
And of course, the liability is that if Swan is a cult leader who weaponizes charismatic aesthetics, that kind of film plays to her advantage as kind of a calling card.
And, you know, if people really lean into that, that piece of art can take on a recruitment function.
So, not looking at that question is fair, but it's also a risk.
So, I have to say right here that In different ways, I think both Marino and Casby did that.
When we watched the first three episodes of The Deep End, there was a sense of, like, coming from me, like, oh, I feel like this could be recruitment material because they make it seem so edgy and alternative and kind of noble and beautiful and...
It's a lifestyle, you know, it's the Teal Swan lifestyle and we're taking you in to see how it feels.
And then with Merino, like, it is, it's really lovely art and it's intriguing.
The difference being, of course, that with the deep end, with Merino she's sort of accommodating and with the deep end they end up betraying.
And I think it's one of the reasons why Jennings Brown has a little bit of a minor heroic status for us, because he cut right through the center, and he's doing something else altogether separate from the Joycean-like structure or proposition, because he's doing
The best kind of high-integrity journalism that he can and trying to be really cautious and so in that caution he is able to sidestep either being overly aesthetic in a way that is Alright Julian, I think that's enough chit chat and artistic meta-revery.
Thank you for sharing this watery territory with me.
Let's roll the interview, shall we?
I knew all along it was a cult.
She made people commit suicide.
Like he doesn't do that.
All right, Julian.
I think that's enough chit chat and artistic meta reverie.
Thank you for sharing this watery territory with me.
Let's roll the interview, shall we?
Yeah, it's a good one.
Paola Marino, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you for taking the time.
Thank you for having me.
I wanted to start by asking about the moment you knew for sure that you wanted to follow Teal Swan and capture some of her world on film.
Hmm.
The very first time.
Well, it's interesting because, um, The first time actually I saw Teal and it was a period of my life when I was following some other spiritual teachers or wise, you know, people on YouTube and I remember
That you know how YouTube suggests other videos related to the same topic and on the very top of the suggestions I could see all the time the thumbnail with Teal.
And actually my very first impression was, oh no, this is not possible that, you know, such a beautiful lady with makeup and the way she, you know, portrays herself is connected to spirituality.
This is not possible.
No.
And I would disregard.
I mean, this is a scam.
My God, it's a scam.
And then actually, there was one day, she was interviewed, it was in the thumbnail, the person who interviewed her.
And the same person interviewed somebody I respected back then.
And I said, Oh my God, he's interviewing this lady.
I want to listen.
And that's when I Got really interested, you know, in her personality.
And also then I did some research.
So I wasn't a follower.
That's not, you know, it's not like her content that drew me in.
It was actually her story that I found very interesting.
Can you remember who the interviewer was and who you had trusted?
Do you remember who the other person was?
Because I'm interested in how these bits of content get meshed together by the algorithm.
Unfortunately, I don't remember his name anymore.
It was back then in 2012, I believe, 2013, so I don't really remember because I haven't followed.
But you say that it was the story that really captivated you.
Yeah, first of all, the personality.
I was really interested in her personality.
She was really passionate, you know?
And what so many people might mistake as, she's angry.
No, for me, it was like passionate, really passionate and really straightforward.
No bullshit, you know?
Can I swear on this?
Yeah, by all means, for sure.
So, I mean, swear.
So no bullshit, nothing.
So I felt that she was very relatable.
She wasn't like everybody else.
She was kind of different.
That's what really attracted me.
You know, I'm a former novelist.
I have never made a film, but what I remember about initiating a project was somehow becoming fixated on a particular scene, an object, sometimes a dream-like sequence, and then simply entering into the story from there.
You're saying that you were attracted to her personality and to her story, but was there an image as well?
Something that happened for you in that way?
Yes, there was.
Okay, now I'm going to actually answer your question.
Okay.
Because I kind of digressed there.
Then after this, basically I had a dream.
And Tia came into my dreams and she was this very abstract image that was coming and going.
And she was saying, everything is movement.
Everything is movement.
And that's when I woke up and I said, I need to make a documentary about this person.
Do you remember her saying everything is movement in the first interview that you saw?
Yes.
Something, no, everything moves, everything moves.
That's exactly what she said in my dream.
No, but did she say that in the documentary or did you, you, you dreamt, you dreamt her voice saying that from what you knew of her from the, from what you'd seen?
No, it's just, yeah, it was just in my dream.
It was just in my dream.
It's not in the documentary.
It's not just a dream that I had.
And that's what really, it was that time when I understood I wanted to make a documentary about her.
I don't know if I answered your question.
You did, definitely, and I think that from watching the documentary several times, everything is moving is a good sort of hermeneutic that you've used because, or that went on to inform the way that you filmed it, because definitely everything is moving in the film.
You know, looking back through your catalog, the aesthetic that stands out as foreshadowing of Open Shadow, I think becomes a little bit clear in these montage pieces you made to celebrate opera.
Yes.
So there are clips of Cherubino, of Carmen, of Delilah.
And there are many fragments of Open Shadow that bring that same kind of drama forward.
Is that a fair line to draw, do you think?
Yes, absolutely.
It's interesting and thank you for saying that because I wasn't coming, when I decided to make this documentary, I wasn't really coming from documentary making.
I was coming from music videos, video art And in fact, the very first idea of doing a project about Teal was really, I really wanted to go into the abstract, more experimental, not so much documentary.
But then, you know, it became, you know, like a documentary, basically.
But I was more inclined to make a more abstract piece on her.
I don't know.
I felt that people wouldn't understand it.
I felt that I should have gone more mainstream.
they wouldn't understand it.
You know, I felt that I should have gone more mainstream.
So I kind of was like, you know, in between.
I think, and I think that's evident from the final product, is that it does straddle this line between, you know, these montages of, for instance, you know, she's standing on the Great Salt Lake and And she's wading through what seems to be some sort of large baptismal pool.
But then you also zero in on Talking head interviews with Blake and with her parents.
And so there is this kind of two methodologies being used.
So I can imagine coming from music video production, realizing that there's also something about this story that has to be documented in a particular way, but maybe not having the planning for all of that?
Yeah.
Yeah, I consider actually the footage that I had like a studio of, you know, when you paint, you do a painting and there is a studio and then you go into the actual painting.
For me, this was actually a studio.
If I had more time, if I had more freedom, because all of a sudden things started happening, money started coming, the pressure of, you know, delivering a product, the expiry date, the deadlines and all of that expiry date too, in certain ways.
But yeah, so that pressured me and really Took me away from my initial ideas.
Yeah.
I think one of the places where I think I see your original approach is in a fairly extended monologue that Thiel gives over footage of her painting.
Yes.
And there's one thing related to both the artistry of the film and to her own art is that this kind of shows her to be utterly focused on her own internal work.
And I'm not that partial to the actual painting.
It's not a painting that I would put on my walls.
But I did really appreciate the concentration and the focus.
And it made me think about how The world in general knows this person as an extremely online extrovert and performer in some ways, but it seems that you also captured a very solitary person as well.
Absolutely, yes.
And she has those moments.
That, you know, it's very difficult to, you know, to, to, you don't, you would never know if they are not captured, you know, and put out there because she, she's there in the public as a public figure, as a person who talks, teaches and so on.
So, Right.
You know, and it's funny because the whole feeling of this film captures some of a lost intimacy from what I would call like a pre-digital age.
Like, this does not feel like she's running out of the painting room to go be on Instagram.
It's slow moving and it almost feels pre-digital.
You know, it is obviously it's digital film.
Obviously, you know, she's an online presence and you're filming with digital equipment, but it has an older feeling to it that almost predates the chaos of social media.
That's a very nice observation, actually.
Very, very nice.
I like this observation and it feels like that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, because I think so much of what becomes of Teal Swan's story in the following years is really both the product of and exacerbated by a kind of social media echo chamber that she knows how to manage in many ways, but that is also in a strange way beyond her control.
So I have this strange feeling that she's a very particular person who has a life and a method of communication that predates a certain level of online chaos and then she is somebody who also has to exist Beyond that threshold and into a very volatile world of now mass and increasing exposure.
So, what I appreciate is that your film sort of captures maybe the last moments of a more private person.
Yes.
Yes.
Thank you.
You know, in... Yeah, go ahead.
No, it was very...
This is actually what I was aiming at, and to capture these intimate moments, what people never see, basically, to give a more whole picture of what she is and who she is.
So yeah.
You know, I'm going to ask you your thoughts on the deep end in a bit, but one of the main differences is that you're not making any attempt to recapture narrative scenes in which she's interacting with people.
There are shots of her on stage doing the encounter work, But it's not like you're shooting interiors in which we get to see how she's interacting with, you know, her close core of people.
And that is, it's interesting because I think what the deep end tries to do is to capture, again, what people don't see.
And yet all of these problems emerge when it becomes clear that the final product is not as accurate as the raw footage would suggest.
Yeah.
So, a difficult project that they undertook.
So, I'll get to that in a moment, but on this subject between of are you capturing the sort of dreamlike presence of this person's personality, or are you doing a more journalistic documentary, and are you captured by her kind of archetypal image or are you captured by her story?
You know, her actual story of childhood abuse comes forward in certain places in the documentary as though it's kind of established fact.
And so I'm wondering when you got the full sort of list of details on what she says happened to her from the ages of 6 to 19, Were you in the position to verify any of those claims or to corroborate them?
Was that part of your job, did you see?
Yeah, well, of course I was questioning myself because of course there were things that she tells about and things that happened when she was in the cults and things that the abuser did to her that I was questioning many things because there are things that to me felt a bit far-fetched.
But of course it's very difficult to verify because it's a cold case.
There was nothing, no proof, nothing to work with.
But I had some validations though.
And, uh, like, I remember, uh, one day going to the cabin where she was spending her summers with her parents.
And it's, uh, north of Logan, I believe.
And, uh, uh, so I went there with Graciela.
And, uh, uh, Till didn't come with us because, you know, she triggers when she goes to the same way and so on.
So we got there, but we couldn't find the cabin.
And Graciela insisted because she'd never been there and she wanted to see it.
So, and we went up on this mountain and there was a road, the road was really like full of, you know, it wasn't, there was no asphalt so it was very difficult to drive on with a small car.
But anyway, we got up there and at the end of this very narrow path, There is a circle that opens up a space, an open space, like a circular shape.
We went on the other side, we parked the car, and I was looking at the panorama, the landscape.
Graciela was looking around to see if there was a cabin, and all of a sudden I see an SUV, a white truck, basically.
Coming in from the path, which was the only path, basically, to that circular spot.
And two people got off the truck and I started feeling very unsafe.
And I told Graciela, let's get into the car, let's go.
As soon as they saw us getting into the car, they ran to their truck.
And they started the engine and they blocked this path.
And that's when I started kind of freaking out, of course, because there was no phone line.
There was no, you know, we couldn't even call anybody and say, hey, we are here just in case we disappear.
So in the meantime, there was another part of me that was telling me, do not
Uh, so, okay, first, first, uh, I approached the truck, the truck was in front of me, and the Cinquecento was so small that I was able to kind of, there was just a little bit space for me, half of it was, you know, out of this path, and the other half was on the path, and a voice in my head said, do not run because these people, because you're gonna look like the prey, and these are the predators.
And so I decided to just park beside their truck.
I stopped there and I started engaging with them.
There was this old man and a much younger man sitting close to him and the young man had a smirk on his face.
And the old man, I looked into his eyes and they were like glass, like there was nothing.
You know, you look into people's eyes and you feel like there is something, there is something in there, right?
But it was horrifying.
It was absolutely horrifying looking at this man.
And I said, Hey, I pretended, you know, to be cool.
Hey, we are looking here for a cabin where some friends of ours were spending the summer.
Do you know if there is any cabin?
And they said, Oh no, no, we don't know of any cabin here.
All right, all right.
Okay, thank you.
Have a nice day.
And then, boom!
We passed the truck, and then we went, and then as soon as we got down to the main road, I stopped the car to reach for my phone that was in the back of the car, and I see them coming after us.
And I said, okay, forget about the phone.
I went onto the main road and drove to Logan.
Before getting into Logan, the truck made a U-turn and went back.
So when we got home, I said, Oh my gosh, Theo, this, this happened to us.
We went, we went up to them, blah, blah.
Oh, you were close to my cabin and you guys happened to be, she, you know how she talks and you guys happened to be in the blah, blah, blah.
And she said the name of the pit of this place and said that you guys went where they're holding rituals.
You happen to be there.
They hold rituals.
They keep all their stuff, to hold rituals, there, hidden.
And they keep an eye on the spot.
As soon as they see people going there, they go and check to make sure that people are not nosing about and discover their stuff.
So that, her answer was so quick.
It was like, dismissive, like, oh gosh, of course, you happen to be there, da-da-da-da.
And she gave this measure.
For me, that, That was a validation.
That was a validation of the fact that, you know, she might have actually gone through those things that she talks about.
She might, you know, tell stories that are far-fetched, maybe because I said, I thought in my head, you know, she was under the effect of ketamine, and it's a drug that makes you have sometimes hallucinations, you know, see things that are not there, and she remembers them as memories, right?
Did she ever talk about the possible Distorting effects of ketamine on her own memory?
No, actually, this is something that I thought about it later when I was when I was editing the footage.
And yeah, and I regretted that I never asked her about that.
Yes, indeed.
As I said, it was a studio.
You know, if I had more time, I would have gone a bit deeper on that.
Right.
Now, There's a 2014 interview, I don't know if you saw it, it was with an Idaho news station, and it's I think one of the first times that she comes forward and presents her entire story.
Now in 2014 the story was actually clipped down so that she's only on camera for maybe five minutes or something like that.
But the raw footage is is like two and a quarter hours and it was released in 2016 on YouTube.
So I wanted to just ask if you saw that full interview before Open Shadow was released the following year.
I think I saw, was she wearing like a white dress?
She was wearing a white tunic type dress.
Exactly, I think it was that, I remember that.
Yeah, and she looks extremely, she looks quite young, you know, and there's a
There's an interesting way in which she, there's almost like a mismatch of affect to content where she's describing incredibly horrible abject details, but also perhaps defensively, perhaps awkwardly smiling as she's doing so.
And so I'm wondering if that was also of interest to you with regard to the personality.
I did think about, you know, the reaction to this.
And, uh, I know that, uh, there are people who, um, the smiling is not really like a smiling.
It's almost a nervous reaction to a story or a trauma, like it's a traumatic event.
Maybe they, they, this, they kind of dissociate themselves.
Like there is a kind of a, uh, detachment at one point.
And, uh, But I have also other theories which are a bit more complex.
I don't know if I should share them, but it's just my opinion.
Well, I'd be interested in hearing because, I mean, I understand the basic premise of defensive self-protection through, you know, putting on a brave face or smiling or laughing almost sarcastically at particular details.
But, you know, I also know that there's a lot of research on how, for instance, You know, survivors of domestic violence give testimony in court and how they might do things that appear to be contradictory to the emotional reality that they're describing.
So, yeah, what are your other ideas there?
No, basically, I prefer not to share it, actually.
Sure.
Okay, okay, good.
Your film comes out in 2017 and then in 2018 Jennings Brown produces The Gateway Podcast.
Yes.
And so I'm wondering what it felt like listening to that.
It was very compelling.
It was very well done, very well narrated and stuff.
Clearly he goes there with his own ideas.
And I can tell already that he's going to read, interpret Teal and what she does in our community in his own way, which is, okay, this is a cult and they're doing this and this is not okay and so on and so forth.
There are many elements of How should I say, like the horror story, you know?
Make it even more compelling, I guess.
Yeah, so he went there with an idea in mind already set.
Okay.
So, but yeah.
Do you have any more questions about it?
I do.
I mean, I think that, you know, he perhaps had some questions or some problems that he wanted to solve.
I think right off of the first episode, he's talking about how within a few sort of rounds of Looking into her content, she also comes across online criticisms from former members.
She comes across news about Leslie, who he sort of focuses on as Teal's first client who dies of suicide, and that becomes kind of the mystery that ostensibly he sets out to solve.
And he doesn't really solve, and he admits that he doesn't solve it.
Because there can't really be a causal relationship made between what Teal Swan said to her, whatever she said to her, and her dying of suicide.
And that's true of all of the suicide cases, actually.
Exactly.
Right.
I mean, you can make correlations if you like, but you really can't go farther than that.
I think that what I really appreciated was that he nailed together what a complex historical figure she is by showing that she had a therapeutic encounter with Barbara Snow, who was known within Utah for being a satanic panic therapist, and she was on probation.
She'd been accused of planting false memories and so on.
So, was that news to you?
Had you heard of Snow before your film opened?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes, I heard about Barbara Snow and she talks about it with her friend Lauren in, I believe, I don't know if it's in the bonus footage.
I think it's in the main, I wanted to ask, I wanted to confirm that that was Lauren actually.
I wanted to confirm that that was Lauren, that she was there.
It looked like her, I don't think she's named in the film, in a caption or anything like that, but I could recognize her because Lauren's actually re-emerged, I don't know if you've seen this, but in the wake of the Deep End, there's a Person named Diana Ribera, who has come forward and said, well, I was Teal Swan's neighbor in, you know, this small town in Utah.
And, you know, I pretty much can tell you that what she says about her childhood can't have happened because of these reasons.
Yeah, and then Lauren comes back to visit and they're on Instagram together with Teal saying, this was actually my real friend when I was a child, which is very confusing.
But okay, so that is Lauren in your film.
I think she's saying that she met her least favorite, I think the quote is that she met her least favorite psychologist at the age of 16.
Who said that, you know, if she didn't sort herself out, if she didn't get help, that she might be institutionalized or she might not live a long life or something like that.
But I had the impression that, or my understanding from the documentation, is that Swan actually met Barbara Snow at about 19 years old.
So maybe she's talking about somebody else.
But in any case, you had heard of Barbara Snow.
Yes, yes.
I heard about it and there is this whole thing about false memory and so on, implanting false memory.
And well, Tia, she says that for her it was different because she actually remembered everything that happened to her.
So that puts her in a different category, I guess, according to her claims, right?
So yeah, I mean, false memory is a very... It's a very delicate thing because there are like horrible stories of fathers who were accused of having abused their kids and they've been put in jail and they were completely innocent.
So it's...
double how do you say double double uh double blades double double bladed sword right exactly it's a knife in italian in the sense that in the sense in the sense that um
Ostensibly, it would be good to recall what has happened, if one seems to be feeling the after-effects of a traumatic experience, and the liability is that it might be invented or exaggerated or implanted, right?
Exactly.
When it's implanted, it can be very dangerous, as we can imagine.
You know, speaking of memory and documentation, I think one of the most notable things about your film is, and the extended footage, is that you have maybe 20 or 25 minutes with the Bosworths. is that you have maybe 20 or 25 minutes with
And so, I wanted to ask about that because they seem very forthcoming, very empathetic with regard to this child who they tried to understand.
Yes.
But in the interview in 2014, Swan says, quite shockingly to me, that she forgives her main alleged abuser, but not her parents, who she calls bystanders.
And so I'm wondering, while you're interviewing them, did you have the sense of her anger or lack of resolution at them hovering in the background of that interview?
No, it's interesting.
The only thing that she said is that you're going to be the only one that my parents will trust with an interview.
That's all she said.
Why did she think that?
Maybe because I, um, I don't abuse of the, maybe because I have an ethical approach to when I am with a camera in front of people.
If, uh, if like you, like you had, like you said, if there is something that you don't want me to put, I'm not going to put it.
And it's, it's extremely, it's extremely respectful, you know?
And, uh, um, I don't know.
I mean, I talked to her parents before.
I connected with them through Skype back then.
And, uh, they were very reticent.
They didn't, at the beginning they wanted, then they had, uh, kind of a fight with Teal.
So they didn't want to be part of the documentary.
Then I talked to them again and, uh, they said, okay.
And I said, look, if there is something that you don't want me to put at the end, I will cut it and you can sign the release form.
Right.
So, and, uh, so they, they, Yeah, we liked each other.
There was a good feeling, a good vibe.
Tia was okay with me going and interviewing them.
Absolutely okay.
She didn't say anything except for the fact that she observed, oh, I think you're going to be the only one that will be able to interview my parents or something along those lines.
It feels like your general approach is non-intrusive, that you're observant, that you would like to record, and you would like to capture both the aesthetics and the feeling of the thing.
I'm wondering if part of what made that a trustworthy experience is that It doesn't sound like you pride very much.
I mean, I can imagine myself or other interviewers sitting down with the Bosworths and saying, you know what Teal says about her childhood, is this true or not?
And I don't think that would work.
That would be a very short interview.
No, actually, I asked them about the abuser and they didn't make the cut because they asked me not to put it.
Ah, okay.
I was going to... that was my next question, actually, was whether you asked them directly about Doc.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
And, yeah, they said that they found very, very, very strange that all of a sudden this man disappeared from town without saying a word, just when Teal moved to Park City.
And they couldn't understand why.
Why, you know, he didn't say anything.
And, uh, so there are other things they didn't want me to put in.
So, and I had also validation about certain things through the parents, through her parents.
So yeah, it's, uh, I had to respect that I couldn't use the footage.
So.
Given the fact that, that you're keeping confidence here, I wonder if there's a way for me to ask this, but when I ask you, Were you doubtful of some of these stories, or did you have confirmation?
And you described the story on the mountaintop.
Would you say that what you heard in your interview with the Bosworths, but weren't able to publish, also gave you some confidence in the backstory?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes, it did.
Yeah.
And so the public just won't have, can't have access to that?
No.
No.
It's a very, it's a conundrum, right?
It's a, it's a very, it's a very deep, uh, it's a mystery.
Yeah.
Um, for me, you know, I, I'm not, I don't have the nature of the journalist.
I don't have the nature of the investigator.
That's not me.
That's the thing.
Um, because, um, in this particular case, at least I can see the complexity First and foremost, like, T.O. is very, like, multifaceted kind of person.
And so it's, I think, I feel like whatever I can say about her, her story, who she is, it will never say it all.
It will never.
And, uh, I'd rather not to say or to keep a little bit, you know, in, uh, yeah, being superficial, actually.
Like, uh, superficial in a way, like, uh, maybe superficial is not, I don't know, but being, um, I don't know what's the right term here, but, uh, maybe diplomatic.
I don't know.
No, it's not even, Do you know, there's a kind of an academic term that comes to mind, which is that it's not over-determined.
My understanding of that term is that the viewer of the media will not be strongly pushed towards a conclusion.
Exactly, yes.
Yeah, I mean superficial I think it works if we really limit it to the meaning of aesthetic.
Exactly.
That's what I had in mind.
Aesthetic.
Yes.
Exactly.
I mean, you're also, it sounds like you're also expressing a kind of philosophy of observation as well.
Like when you say, no matter how much I included about Teal Swan in this film, it would never be complete.
Yeah.
But that's actually true of the investigator's report as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
But I don't know, does it matter?
That's what, in this case, because there are many, many other cases where it matters.
I saw documentaries where, you know, it's good to know that they're there and they're talking about what certain people do because they can really, there are criminal acts and like that.
But in this particular case, where I didn't I wasn't dealing with any criminal, you know?
So, does it matter?
It's such a great question.
It's such a great question.
I mean, when we interviewed John Casby, we said, we asked There's nothing in your documentary about her claims.
You don't cover what she discusses about her childhood at all, really.
And there's no reference to the history of Barbara Snow.
There's no reference to the details of the cultic abuse.
And so, Was that, we asked, was that a directorial choice to keep things in the present moment or is she also de-emphasizing those things?
And he says, well, we were with her for three years and she never brought it up.
It's something that she's not emphasizing.
And so when you ask, does it matter?
That's a really good question in terms of how much a part of her authority with regard to her followers Is that material still in play, right?
Are people attracted to her because they believe what she said about her childhood if she's not really saying it anymore?
It's a really interesting question.
Yeah.
At one point she decided to put the past aside.
She didn't want to be She didn't want to bring it up so much.
So I guess that that was like coming out in the open with her story at the beginning was important for her because maybe she was healing in that way by being public and talking about it.
And yeah.
A cynical view would be she's putting the story aside because the internet has found it out and it's not going to fly anymore.
A more generous view is...
I don't need to rely on that story anymore and so I'm going to stop telling it.
But either way, the story begins to recede into the background and I think the real issues that she brings up with regard to What is depression and where does it come from and what do people do when they don't have access to mental health care or what do people do when they can't trust authority figures?
Those things kind of get obscured by this issue of what can be corroborated and what can be verified, I find.
Now, what did you think of The Deep End?
Oh boy.
Well, I was shocked.
First of all, I was shocked at the way they manipulated the footage.
Because this is to fit their narrative.
Was it very obvious to you?
It was very obvious.
Absolutely.
Because you're a filmmaker and you edit your own work?
Yes.
Yes, I do.
I do, you know, together with others sometimes, but I do anything a lot and I can't recognize it right away.
And not only that, like, um, it really, there is like a, when you document, you make a documentary about somebody, I mean, at least that's not the document.
That's like a fictional story, but we're real people in it.
Right.
So they build it like that, but they forgot that these people are actually existing.
These are not actors who shed the role and then they are somebody else who goes home and they have their families and that's it.
You know, the movies in the theaters and everything.
Maybe they forgot about that, but I found it very unethical of them to play with real humans in order to make this movie.
So I wouldn't consider that a documentary.
Of course, there are certain things that are not manipulated.
They're there, and Certain moments where, like, there are certain instances that, you know, they show Teal saying things, being maybe mean or expressing thoughts, expressing her anger and stuff like that.
There are moments when I didn't feel very comfortable with the way she was dealing with certain things in a certain way.
So, and those are there.
But when you have, so I recognize that this is not cool to me, that she's doing this, this is not cool, it's not cool, okay.
But when you have, but this is not all, Teal is not only that.
Teal is more than that.
And they didn't show who else Teal is.
They just depicted this image of a villain.
As opposed to Blake and Juliana as the heroes.
And that's it.
It's very restricted and very limited.
It's like a movie.
Very entertaining, absolutely, for the people who know these characters.
But highly unethical, in my view.
You know, you have in your bonus footage, you have an extended scene that's a little bit boring, to be honest.
I agree.
That features Teal and Blake just cooking.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So when you say there's a selection of cuts and scenes to produce a particular image, there was no boring hanging out with teal swan cooking in the kitchen.
No.
No.
Nothing that would lend a sense of a side of normalcy to this person who might have abrasive or perhaps even narcissistic qualities but like is also just a person living in the world doing normal things.
It's interesting what you said about they forgot that these weren't actors in the world because of course, not being actors in the world, they're coming forward now and they're saying, hey, I didn't believe, I can't believe how you edited this thing.
What's going on with that?
Have you followed some of those reactions?
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah, the reactions from the followers.
From the followers?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because you might be still, you said that you went on that trip to the mountaintop with Graciela, and she's one of the people who's come out and said on Facebook a number of times, look, I am, so when she says, let me ask you this, when she says this film is corrupted by editing because I am depicted as being in scenes that I wasn't in.
You, as somebody who was there also filming her, do you immediately believe her?
Yes, absolutely.
Well, yeah.
Because one of the things that happens with the polarization here is that people who believe the filmmaking automatically think that she's lying and defending a cult leader.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It's a disaster.
Yeah.
I think that this could have been really a beautiful, beautiful documentary, where the authors missed the chance, I think, to explore this idea that this might be a cult, because it presents characteristics of being a cult.
There's no denying about it.
Under a different angle, maybe not just, you know, so black and white contrasting, you know.
It's this idea that, you know, if it's a cult, we have to be afraid of that.
There is fear around the idea of a cult.
This might sound a little bit controversial, what I'm about to say.
I don't belong to a cult.
I've never been a follower of Thiel.
And just because of my personality, I couldn't fit in a cult.
I mean, my own sister, at one point, she wanted to join a convent and become a nun.
And they had exactly the same rules, like, you know, you are going to be married to God, and that's your, the mission is your first priority.
Family comes after, right?
So, and whether this mission is to do good, or to be, this is something, it's another story, or to do bad, it's another story.
But yeah, they missed the chance to explore this in a more open way, maybe with some narration, like a narrating voice, like the podcast people did.
Right.
Jennings could have narrated for sure.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
I have a feeling that you could have narrated as well, though.
I know, that's very interesting that you're saying that.
Right, if you had had the, you know, you could have been hired on in a production role, I think, if you had also been handed all of the journalistic data and then made decisions and had help in deciding what to include and what not to include.
But you're making a good point about how they attempt to create this I mean, John's words in the interview that we did were he wanted to create a vérité experience, which is kind of ironic because it's not vérité at all, given the editing.
And part of that was to exclude expertise, narration, talking heads, people who could give a little bit of context to it.
It's interesting because that's not your style of filmmaking either, but I think that you could have probably participated in it in a way that gave a more generous or less over-determined view.
Well, they actually contacted me back in December.
And, uh, they were introduced to me, Bitsola contacted me, the producer.
Then I had a brief, just brief, uh, talk with, uh, John.
And, uh, it was back in December, Blake introduced us.
And, uh, and at that point they told me that, uh, they liked TL a lot, that, uh, they even, you know, they, uh, they were very sad at the way, um, The haters were attacking her unjustly because she doesn't deserve it.
And, uh, and, uh, so I, uh, and then they said, I, we have this material.
So it's almost like they got stuck with all this footage.
And I even told them, uh, you know, you can, uh, if you, you know, you can even approach it as, you know, Like, as I was saying before, like, if it's, you can approach it under the angle, can this be a cult, can TL be a cult leader?
And going through this angle and with the narration and stuff and see what you perceive about this community.
Maybe leaving an open ending, something that to give people, people then decide what they want to do about it.
I even suggested that dance.
And then at the end of the conversation, Bits seemed to be very, very interested in exploring my footage, the footage that I've never put out there.
And I felt very... I bet.
I bet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I felt very uncomfortable.
At one point I said, I'm sorry, I don't feel very comfortable.
Uh, to show you my footage.
I couldn't understand.
I mean, you guys collected so much footage in three years that you were with her, around her, and so on.
So I couldn't understand why.
Why would I want to see my footage?
It looks strange.
So, now that I watched this documentary, I started thinking, maybe I should confront them and ask them, right, clearly.
Why?
Were you already, did you already know you were going towards this direction back then?
And you just, you just wanted, you know, to see the footage to look for more?
I don't know.
There's two mysteries there, because to even think about using your footage would make what they produced discontinuous with their own formal constraint, which was, we're going to keep this in the present moment, and we're going to make sure that… I mean, I don't think there was anything that was… that was anachronistic.
There was no old footage of anything, I don't believe.
No, no.
So that's one thing.
But also what you're saying about the producer suggesting that they were very sympathetic with Swan syncs up with what she says about the fraternization that she had with the film crew over those three years.
That they did birthday parties together.
She says that they received some therapeutic techniques from some of the group members.
She was under the impression that it was going to be a sympathetic engagement.
And so I think they're dealing with the fallout of that being very surprising.
And it's not that, you know, a critical view as to what she's doing and whether or not she has undue influence over people and whether or not she's providing uncredited psychotherapy to millions those are things that are all valid questions but it's not like this film manages to ask them yeah you know i wanted to um i wanted to end with something that might surprise you a little bit and uh i wanted to get your response and
And if it's difficult to respond to it, then we'll just let it go, but I have been talking to Jennings about His work about the deep end, we're going to interview him soon, about his notes and his thoughts about how this story has evolved.
Also about the very strange process of watching his very solid and fact-checked reporting become the kind of content skeleton for something that ends up being completely different and how You know, we move from journalism into big-money Netflix-style streaming, you know, documentary filmmaking, which I did not know this, but I have now learned.
I'm a journalist.
I understand what fact-checking is.
I know what that process is.
Apparently, that just doesn't exist as an industry standard in the documentary world.
Which is shocking to me.
I went on Twitter and I said, do I know anybody who is in video production, documentary production, who can tell me how fact-checking works as per industry standard?
Got nothing.
Because the only way I can imagine it happening is With people spending many hours sitting in a room comparing raw footage to final edits.
And saying, okay, that is a reasonable depiction of those events, and that's not.
Can you fix that, please?
Anyway, here's the surprise.
I've been talking to Jennings, and he shared with me something that didn't make it into the gateway, but it came up after his team watched your film.
And they took this interest in the scene in which Teal shows parts of a journal that she's written in in a kind of code.
Yes.
And so they actually did some cryptography.
Yes.
And they came up with a fairly simple alphabetical translation key.
Okay.
And so I've got some fragments here that they translated.
Oh my gosh!
And I verified them by translating again, like the alphabet key works.
We're having him on and he's going to give more details about that.
But you know what's really fascinating and kind of speaks to how complex this story is, is that I believe that those pages are presented by her as these are the things that were too difficult to talk about.
And one of the translation fragments looks like it's written as a children's book fantasy, or it's part of it.
So it says, We were like water sprites.
My father, King Samaj, was prince of a race of dwarfs.
He's short and fat and a great king.
And a loving father, I was his only child.
Wow, great.
Right.
So this is... Yeah, we took the screenshots of the code, alien language, and a cryptographer worked out an alphabetical key.
That's crazy!
And we did translations.
Okay, now here's the second one that I'll give you, which is very tender, actually.
Okay.
Okay, so it's a little bit broken, the sentence.
It says, it starts in mid-sentence, "...me to have convinced myself of things, because I so much for them." Want, I guess.
So much for them to be true.
What if my talents are only a way to cover being fucked up with uniqueness?
What if the basis of my life and beliefs are wrong?
Is it possible for me to be any less credible in other people's eyes?
They never trust me.
Not if I write in this language, wear my kind of clothes, and have the mind that I do.
Not if I can't seem more real.
Can someone believe?
That's really fascinating.
Isn't it?
Isn't it amazing?
I want to talk.
I want to talk to Jennings.
I'm sure you will.
I'm sure.
I will.
I will absolutely put you in touch because I was very moved to hear this story because, you know, not only does it make The backstory of Teal Swan, that much more complicated, but also that much more understandable and childlike.
Yes.
It also, like, from an artistic perspective, which I think is where your real wheelhouse is, the question is, when she shows you that, does she remember?
what the code said?
Or is she actually telling you a secret for you to find out later, right? - Now I don't remember if I published that, but you, because I don't, I haven't watched my documentary, The Bonus Foodies, in a long time.
So I don't know what I put out there and what I didn't.
Is there when, Is there any point when she talks about this language, which is where she comes from?
She said, this is the language where I come from.
I will have to go back and look, but I don't think she implies that it comes from somewhere else.
I think she uses the word code.
Yeah I don't I yeah and she says this this is language where I come from and the language that we use is like linear and she said these are circular concepts and they are based on emotions.
She does not say she does not say that in your footage.
I have that footage okay because I remember thinking this is stuff I want to develop Because I followed very closely, I read about it, the story of Hildegarda.
Hildegarda, she's a nun, just to pull it up.
Oh, Hildegarda of Benin.
Exactly, exactly.
And she also had a secret language in code.
I did not know that.
So I want... I knew she was a polymath and that she wrote mathematics and philosophy and music, but you're saying she wrote in code as well?
And Federico, Frederick Barbarossa Redbeard, I don't know the name, the emperor was using her for her psychic gifts to know whether he had to go to war or not and so on.
What, and she would write the instructions in code?
No, no, no, no, no.
She had also psychic abilities, as you know, just to, you know, she was a confidant of the Emperor, as she was used as.
So she was, she's this incredible character.
And, and I saw some parallel with, with Teal, especially with this language and so on.
Because it's interesting because the, her parents, Teal's parents had this writings checked by experts, language experts, and they didn't know what it was.
They really didn't know.
They brought the notebooks to somebody, people who worked in linguistics?
Exactly.
People who work in linguistics.
And they said, this is the error make.
Oh, the assumption was that it was a language and not a code.
Exactly, exactly.
I see.
Wow.
But now that you're saying that you guys did this, this is amazing.
I mean, I'm super excited right now.
Right, right.
Well, I will put you in touch and who knows what will come of it because if you have other footage where it's a little bit more clear what that symbology is, yeah.
And I even told, I even suggested to BitSolar that there is so much more about Teal that has not come out, like, yet, has not come out yet.
Because we are focusing so much into, oh, she's a cult leader, oh, she's jealous, she's manipulative, she's this, she's that, that there are so much more.
And it's, which is very interesting, which can be super interesting, at least.
And it might not, it might not fit the true crime genre, of course.
It doesn't, but you know, now that I think about it, there is also, uh, okay, now a movie has been made using real actors.
Um, a studio, according to me, has been made, um, Now I can, maybe I can ask Delia if she wants to be in an operatic movie.
I mean, she's perfect.
All the emotions are there.
All the voices out there with the operatic music, seeing tears walking with their...
I can see this operatic music all over.
Yeah, and then the question amongst cult researchers like myself and other critics would be, are you helping to rehabilitate or create an international operatic singing star out of this person who actually might have some bad ideas?
Yeah.
And then it would go, but it would just turn.
The wheel of media would turn.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, good.
Interesting.
Paola, thank you so much for taking the time.
It's a real pleasure to speak with you and I'm glad that you're still following this story and that you still have a sensitive eye to it because I think that's what's going to help.
This is a very important cultural figure and I think understanding her in superficial ways is not helpful at all.
