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July 15, 2018 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:25:13
Nina Paley: Animator Extraordinaire
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Music Music Music Music Music Music Music
So I'm talking today with Nina Paley who's a brilliant animator and she's making a variety of short films which I guess are going to be joined together into a longer film about that feature Old Testament themes and she's the creator of the animated musical feature Sita Sings the Blues.
Her adventures in our broken copyright system led her to join questioncopyright.org as artist in residence in 2008 Where she produced a series of animated shorts about intellectual freedom called Minute Memes.
More recently, she made This Land is Mine, which is absolutely brilliant, shocking, devastating, and also aesthetically impressive film about Israel, Palestine, Canaan, the Levant, and that's intended for her new feature film, Seder Masochism.
And you can find a lot of Nina's Pieces of that film online and I would highly recommend watching them.
We'll cut a couple of them into this interview so that you can see what she's up to.
So I guess there's two things that we could really talk about.
I think the most important one obviously is your work, but I guess the second one is your Concerns for intellectual freedom and your your feeling with regards to to copyrights Copying is not that Stealing a thing leaves one less left.
Copying it makes one thing more.
That's what copying's for.
Copying is not theft.
If I copy yours, you have it too.
One for me and one for you.
That's what copies can do.
If I steal your bicycle, you have to take the bus.
But if I just copy it, there's one for each of us.
Making more of a thing, that is what we call copying.
Sharing ideas with everyone, that's why copying is fun.
But let's start by talking about you first.
Tell my listeners and tell me who you are and where you come from and what you're about.
You want to know about my identity?
I guess that's it, yeah.
Trust me to identify myself.
I don't trust myself there.
Well, that's okay.
You're the best source we have today.
Actually, I'm not sure about that.
I mean, I think most of us would agree that I'm an artist.
And currently an animator.
I guess I've been doing animation since 1998.
Before that I was a newspaper cartoonist.
I still do comics from time to time, not very often.
I guess the thing is, I just came back from a bike ride, and I've just been thinking about identity all the time, and how incredibly unreliable it is, and how I don't respect it, including ways that I identify myself.
Well, I guess that's part of being an artist, you know, because people who are artistic are high in trade openness, and that gives them a very fluid identity.
I mean, it's an advantage, because people who are high in openness can think louderly, and they're always coming up with creative ideas, but it does tend to Make their identity rather pluralistic and sometimes unstable, and that can also be a problem.
Well, I guess it's not even that it's fluid.
It's not like, oh, I identify this way one day and this way another day.
It's just I don't really currently have much respect for the idea of identity at all.
And I could, you know, say all kinds of things about myself, but, you know, does that actually do me any good?
Well, let me ask you a couple of basic questions.
Where do you live?
Ah, good!
I live in Ravanna, Illinois.
That's verifiable.
Alright, and where were you born?
I was born in Urbana, Illinois.
You were, so you've been there your whole life, essentially.
No, I left when I was 20.
I moved to Santa Cruz, California.
I wanted to be a hippie.
I failed.
But then, you know, I was already out on my own, so I briefly moved to Austin, Texas.
That didn't work out.
I moved to San Francisco in 1991.
I lived there for 11 years.
In 2002, I followed my then boyfriend, actually we were legally married, so my then husband, to India.
Which is one of the subjects of Sita Sings the Blues.
And then later in 2002, I moved to Brooklyn, New York, and lived in various places in New York for a total of about 10 years.
I moved back to Urbana in 2012, right after my father died, and here I am.
And so why did you move back to Urbana after all that adventuring?
First, I was done with New York, even though I really loved New York, especially My first five years there was fantastic.
I kind of achieved more than I even expected I would be able to and started to just get I don't know, the love affair with New York kind of wore off, and I wanted a little more peace and quiet, and I wanted cooler summers, and I didn't want to smell garbage everywhere all the time.
I had an opportunity to move back here because my dad died, my mom was threatening to sell the house.
I joined the Occupy movement, Occupy Mom's house, trying to keep her from selling the house.
Ah, but so you actually had a specific demand with your Occupy movement.
But it failed!
She sold the house anyway.
But I'm living in her new house.
I see.
Yeah, I was dating somebody that lived here and that has ended.
But I actually really like it.
It's much more relaxed and inexpensive.
I get lots of fresh air.
I take lots of bike rides.
And I don't really care about the...
I'm just less stressed out.
I care for my identity less.
Yes, well you have plenty of adventures, obviously, so I guess it must take a fair bit of, I would think, time of quiet and some isolation in order to work on your animation.
Yeah, well, I achieved that quiet and isolation in New York, actually by just living in New York in an apartment by myself.
I would rather live in New York than visit New York, because when you live there, you can actually control your environment somewhat, and you can shut everything out, whereas when you're visiting, you usually have to be out all the time, being overstimulated.
Right, yes, well, it's definitely an overstimulating place.
So, when did you start doing your animation?
I started animating...
As an adult in 1998, before that I had done some animation when I was 13 years old using a borrowed Super 8 camera and I just completely stopped because I was in central Illinois and there was no support for doing animation.
There was no way I could have advanced beyond the neighbor's Super 8 camera.
But then in 1998 I was burning out of my daily comic strip And wanted to do something and borrowed somebody else's Super 8 camera and in 1998 it actually was easier to advance, especially in San Francisco where a lot of people were doing independent film.
And yeah, I just picked up where I left off.
I did, you know, plasticine clay stuff on Super 8 and shared that film with a band called Nick Phelps and the Sprocket Ensemble that did live music to animation.
And that was really fun.
I was being gratified by audience feedback, and so I made another film on 16mm, and then my next film was drawing and scratching on 35mm, and then my next film after that was drawing and scratching on IMAX film, which is 70mm, really big frames.
And then I got into Flash, Macromedia Flash, and I've been digital ever since.
And are you using Macromedia Flash now?
What's your primary technology?
A lot of those clips for satomasochism were animated in Macromedia Flash.
Adobe bought Flash and crippled it and ruined it, in the opinion of many Flash animators.
So I'm still using Macromedia Flash from 1990, no, 2000, 7?
Is that when my copy of Flash is from?
I don't know.
Macromedia Flash 8.
It only runs on older computers.
Actually, I think it might be from 2006 or 2005.
So I have this old Mac here running OS 10.6 because it won't run on any more recent machines.
And, you know, it's like impossible to integrate with A modern video editing system, so I have a new Mac as well.
And the newer parts of Seder Masochism, I'm using a program called Moho Pro 12, which is kept up and runs on modern computers.
Yeah, it's funny how sometimes software peaks in terms of complexity and usability and then goes downhill.
You know, I think we're seeing that not just with software, but with computers altogether.
Personal computers, I think, peaked around 2007, maybe 2010, and they've been getting worse ever since.
Any sort of upgrade to operating systems just means more surveillance and less user freedom at this point.
Yes, as well as a steep learning curve.
It's somewhat annoying if you happen to be an expert with the previous system.
Yeah.
Anyway, I don't know if I can keep animating digitally because, you know, like the software that I'm using now, Moho, I just found out that the person that created it and was an integral part of its team this whole time just left the company.
So, you know, Moho's fate is unclear and I'm like, if I have to learn A whole other piece of software again.
I just don't know if I can take this anymore.
I mean, I'm so fluent with Flash.
It took me years to become fluent at all with Moho.
Well, that's another thing is that, you know, it takes a long time to become an expert user of a complex software program.
And then when it shifts, the ground shifts from underneath you, it's rather disheartening because all of that expertise essentially disappears.
And I guess it's part of what we're experiencing as our technology advances Fast enough so that our lifespans are too long really to keep up.
We get outdated and superannuated on about a five-year rotation and it does get exhausting.
Yeah, well maybe I'll just die early and won't have to worry about it.
Oh yeah, that'll solve the problem.
Then you won't finish your film and that seems like a bad idea.
Well, I'm going to finish this film.
I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for satyr masochism.
Good for you.
So let me ask you some about that.
So now, you made This Land is Mine.
When was that?
That?
Was that in 2012?
I think it was.
That's the first scene that I made.
This land is mine.
God gave this land to me.
This brave and ancient land to me.
And when the morning sun reveals her hills and plains, then I'll see.
I see a land Where children can run free So take my hand And walk this land with me And walk this lovely way Though
I am just a man When you are by my side With the help of God I know I can be strong Though
I am only just a mile With the help of God I know I can be strong To make this land our home If
If I must fight, I will fight to make this land our own.
Until I die, this land is mine.
So it's going to be the last scene in the film, but it's the first one that I made.
I see.
And what possessed you to make that?
So I knew I wanted to make a movie about Passover, because I was raised observing Passover, although not much else.
And so I was doing research.
I'd never seen the movie Exodus.
You know that movie?
Yeah.
I'd never seen it, so I watched it as part of my research, and I learned that the theme music...
It had lyrics written to it by Pat Boone and that it was a really popular song in the 60s.
Tons of artists did it.
I had never even heard it before.
So I heard it and I just thought it was ridiculous, right?
This land is mine.
God gave this land to me.
I mean, everyone would say that, right?
Everybody, every group feels that way about the land that they're on.
Every single one.
So the absurdity of it was just apparent in the song and, you know, There wasn't even really a process of coming up with a concept for it.
It was just that was what the song evoked for me.
It was just showing how every single person, or not every single person, but every single tribe has that attitude towards their land.
And so saying that this land is yours and God gave this land to me gives you no authority at all because that's every, I mean, that's just what it is to be a tribe living on land.
So what sort of What sort of reaction did you garner from This Land Is Mine?
This Land Is Mine is the most popular thing I have ever made.
It's been viewed on various channels more than 10 million times.
And, you know, many people like it in terms of criticism.
The criticism seems equally divided between people that say that I'm a Zionist and people that say I'm an anti-Zionist.
So it's either a really anti-Zionist film or it's a really Zionist film.
I see.
So you can just add that criticism together and sum to zero and ignore it.
Yeah, well, I'm really flattered by it, right?
Because if people that passionately, you know, on...
Polar opposite sides are saying that then I feel like I've really done something right.
Well, you've definitely done something right.
I mean, I think that was the first film of yours that I saw and then I've watched many of them.
I think everyone I could get my hands on since then and It struck me in a variety of ways.
I mean the first thing that's it's let's say strange about your animation is that it's this First of all, you have great taste in music.
I copy the best.
You certainly do.
And how do you get permission?
I don't!
Oh, you don't?
I don't!
Really?
Really?
How's that working out for you?
Well, okay, in the case of This Land Is Mine, it's pretty clear-cut fair use because the film is parody.
Like I said, it's literally a parody of those lyrics and You know, that's fair use.
I actually think most of my uses are fair use, they're transformative, but a lot of uses are not as clear-cut as parody.
So that's actually a really interesting issue With the film and how is this film going to be released and how is it going to be shown?
Because there is no way I am going to ask for permission to use this music, particularly music that entered my head as a child, which I did not consent to and I had no control over it.
Of course, nobody has any control over what goes into your head, right?
Like you go out in the world and music is playing, it goes into your head.
And yet once it's there, that part of your head that it occupies belongs to a corporation.
And I'm just done asking corporations for permission to use what's in my head, which they put there.
Okay, so you basically solved the problem by saying, to hell with it, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do this no matter what.
And you're going to iron out whatever difficulties there are with that as you move along.
That's what it looks like.
It's an illegal film.
I mean, in the case of Sita Sings the Blues, I made Sita Sings the Blues when I was...
I was certainly questioning copyright, but I didn't really see it as a completely bankrupt institution.
So...
When that film was done, I cleared all the rights, which was an incredibly difficult process and required hiring intermediaries because the rights holders don't talk to normal people.
So if you do make a film and you don't have permission to use the music in it, you can't simply ask for permission.
They won't talk to you.
So you have to pay lawyers and intermediaries Just for them to even listen to you to tell you how much money they're demanding, which is inevitably an absurd amount that you can't afford.
But I ended up spending a mere $70,000 to make Sita Sings the Blues legal to show for free and legal to share for free.
If I wanted some other model, it would have been more than that.
$70,000!
Just to be able to give it away.
But I'm not doing that with a new film.
The new film I'm making, an illegal film, all of my music choices have to do not with their licenses but with the content and meaning and resonance of the songs.
Most songs have a kind of cultural resonance that is related to the point in time they were circulating.
For example, This land is mine, you know, refers directly to this period of the 60s.
Yeah.
It has a cultural resonance because of that, which a new song, if I, like, commissioned a new song sort of like that, it wouldn't have the same meaning at all.
No, definitely not.
Songs like that, they pick up.
It's really interesting to watch what happens to a song across time because it picks up It's embedded in a context, and that context grows and develops and transforms.
A song is really a mutable entity, you know?
It transforms tremendously as it moves across time.
Yeah, and that meaning comes from the audience.
It doesn't come from even the person that wrote it, let alone the copyright holder, right?
The value of it comes from us.
Okay, so back to This Land Is Mine.
So when I watched that, it produced a lot of mixed feelings.
I mean, the first was That it's very blackly humorous.
And you have this stirring, propagandistic, anthem-like music in the background.
It's sort of overblown the singer.
He amplifies the emotional resonance of it and then you have this just non-stop carnage in the background to this stirring music.
But what's really strange about it, as far as I was concerned, is that it's eerily beautiful.
And that's something that seems to be a perverse and remarkable element of all of your films, is that they deal with extremely harsh realities.
metaphysical and genuine, but you have this amazing capacity to generate these complex beautiful images and to set them in an equally beautiful relationship to the music.
And so, I mean, I didn't know and still don't know what to make of the film because you don't often see what you might describe as stunningly Stunningly beautiful artistic satire.
I don't know.
Mad Magazine was pretty stunningly beautiful back in the day.
It had like the best artists working for it.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true, but there's an element to what you're doing, especially with the juxtaposition of the music that seems to elevate it, in my opinion, to something like the level of high art.
What's high, what's low?
Well, thank you.
I thank you for the compliment.
I can't really respond to anything other than thanking you.
So, your aesthetic sense and the style that you've developed, do you have sources for that?
Do you have influences that helped you develop that particular style?
I mean, I know it's a foolish question to ask artists where they get their ideas, but I'm wondering how it is that you came up with the concepts that you're working with.
Well, graphically, some of the style is determined by the software that I use.
So, this land is mine, and all the song scenes and satyr masochism are flash, and flash, the way I use it, it's what we call a cut-out style, where I'll draw shapes, and I'll move them in relation to each other, but the shapes themselves Don't bend or anything.
They're just cut out.
It's an animation technique where people would literally cut out shapes from paper and move them around under a camera.
So that's part of the style.
With This Land is Mine in particular, I was looking at ancient Assyrian art and ancient Egyptian art.
Some of that is reflected.
There's like a little border of flowers which comes from Assyrian art.
Yeah, those are the main things.
Cut-out style and the Assyrian stuff.
So when you made This Land is Mine, did you have the Seder Masochism film in mind, or did that emerge afterwards?
No, I knew I wanted to make this film about Passover, and that's why I watched Exodus, and that's how Seder Masochism I mean, that's how This Land is Mine came to be.
So I just knew I wanted to do a film about Passover.
I didn't know what it was going to be because I had never read the Old Testament before.
And reading Exodus was, of course, an eye-opener.
And the film, I didn't imagine what the film was going to be like when I started it, other than the topic I would work around.
But the way the film is actually shaping up is a surprise to me.
So we should probably walk everyone who's listening through the film itself.
So you've created a variety of what appear at least to be, at the moment, to be animated shorts that detail out different episodes in the biblical narrative surrounding, essentially surrounding Moses.
There's more to it than that, but certainly surrounding Moses.
And so does the film...
Does the film essentially concentrate solely on Exodus, or are there other elements of Old Testament stories that you're including?
It's really just Exodus, but also, you know, Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Numbers all have bits of Exodus in them.
Right, right.
So it's basically the story of Moses.
It's the story of Moses, right.
It's the story of the Exodus and then the establishment of the You know, the tabernacle and the priesthood and the religion, right?
It's sort of the, I mean, it's regarded as the birth of the Jewish people.
Right.
Right.
And so, now you said that when you were growing up, you observed Passover, but not much else.
Yeah.
So, but it's not unreasonable, I think, to observe that there appears to be something like a deep religious sensibility in your work.
I mean, you seem to be treating the stories with a tremendous amount of respect.
And so, what do you think is welling up from inside of you to do that?
Well, I'm glad you recognize the respect.
Any respect for this was like...
I approached these stories with an open mind and an open heart and was expecting to find some wisdom in them.
When I began this project, I thought, I'm going to explore the religion of my father.
My father came from a religious Jewish family, but he wasn't really religious when I was growing up, although he had...
He wanted us to observe Passover, I guess, as part of our...
He wanted us to have some Jewish identity.
He wanted us to be in touch with our heritage as Jews.
But it was a bit muddled.
Like, we were forbidden from observing any Christian holidays.
There was no Christmas in our house, whereas a lot of secular Jews do observe Christmas.
There was like a really half-assed Hanukkah and there were no other high holy days and my dad was an atheist.
So after spending years reading many different versions of Exodus and commentary on it and things relating to it and trying to understand it and trying to find some way to connect to it.
What happened was I realized that I had found the religion of my father and that was atheism.
So I became sort of a born-again atheist reading this stuff.
My neutrality towards the religion changed to a kind of abhorrence towards it.
Which is not to take away from It's important, you know, it's a cultural foundation, right?
Like, I live in Western culture, and these texts are stories that everybody knows, to some extent.
And, you know, they're very important, and I respect them for that reason, that they're like a cultural touchstone for everyone.
But I did not emerge from Exodus I had less connection to God than I had ever had in my life.
I actually had a spiritual crisis.
It was really hard for me to have any kind of sense of a power greater than myself after reading this and working with it.
And that's also been the case as a consequence of doing the animation?
Yeah, because, you know, animation is like a meditation.
When you've made an old story, it's just a long, drawn-out meditation on it.
And sometimes insights can pop up while you're working on it.
I mean, it's just like in your face every day.
I mean, I have all...
There are insights that I have.
One of them, a lot of them are comparative religion insights because the previous film was Sita Sings the Blues.
Yeah.
So, in this film, I included Aaron a lot.
In Sita Sings the Blues, I left out Lakshman, who is Ram's brother, and I decided not to do that.
Here, even though with a lot of these stories, when they're turned into films, Aaron is made into this minor character, and a lot of things that Aaron does in movies, they show Moses doing them, like casting the staff down and it turns into a snake.
That was Aaron's business.
But anyway, I showed Aaron in this and I thought about how both stories have these brothers.
They have like the big important memorable brother and the other brother who actually carries out quite a bit of the work.
That's a similarity.
And of course both stories also have a really gruesome scene after what we normally think of as the end.
Like with Exodus, especially growing up with Passover, I'd always thought the story was You know, the Hebrews were slaves, and then, you know, they were free, right?
Like, the end is they're free!
They cross the Red Sea, they get away from the Egyptians, hooray!
And, of course, what actually happens in the story after that is there's this Hebrew-on-Hebrew slaughter because of the Golden Calf, and a whole bunch of those Hebrews who were liberated, they die.
Yeah, well, liberation turns out to be a very complicated thing.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny, when I watched the Americans go into Iraq, you know, with their initial optimism, and then the absolute disintegration of the Iraqi state, I thought, well, and then the failure to produce something, you know, stable as a consequence, I thought, well, a little bit of exodus would have gone a long ways.
It was quite funny in some sense, because in a black way, Because, of course, the people who invaded Iraq, who planned the invasion, were at least nominally committed Christians.
And I thought, well, they took out the tyrant, just as the Hebrews escaped from the tyrant, let's say.
But Exodus lays it out pretty clearly, as you escape from tyranny into the desert, And that's no joke.
And it's 40 years, right?
It's three generations before the desert disappears.
And in the desert, there's nothing but inter-tribal warfare and the conflict...
Around new emerging values, which is, of course, the conflict between the idolization of the golden calf and the necessity for the new rules that Moses imposes.
It's no picnic.
And I mean, a lot of the Old Testament is like that.
I've been doing a series of lectures.
I don't know if you know about this, but I've done 12 lectures on the Old Testament that I've actually become quite popular.
I think the first one has about three quarters of a million views and I've been attempting to treat the stories with as much respect as I can because like you I believe that they're foundational stories.
I would say that my respect for them has actually grown and my Relationship with whatever you might regard as transcendent has been improved by that, but be that as it may, even in the story of Abraham, you know, he's called forward by God to go out into the world.
He's an old man by that time, right?
He's 75 years old.
He should have left his family, his father's house and his kinsmen long before, but God calls him on an adventure to go out into the land of the stranger and to leave his home.
It just goes terribly badly for Abraham.
The first thing he encounters is a famine, and then he moves into the tyranny of Egypt, and then the Pharaoh takes his wife.
One of the things that you can say about the Old Testament is that it's not naively optimistic in any sense of the word.
But the Passover story kind of is, as people observe it.
Like, when you read the Passover story, it's just this nice part.
And that, like I say, that other part, that Later chapter, we never discussed that at Passover.
And, you know, the closest will come is 40 years in the desert.
Like, I did know that the Jews wandered the desert for 40 years.
I didn't know they killed each other.
Right.
And this is something that's similar to the Ramayana, because the Ramayana is frequently told without the last chapter, without the Uttarakhanda, which is the difficult part, right?
Which I think is the richest and most interesting part of the whole story.
So I focused on it in Sita Sings the Blues.
But yeah, I think that the most valuable parts of these stories are the most difficult and they're the parts that are left out and most people don't know about.
You have to actually read them.
Yeah, well they are the most useful parts because life is full of difficulty.
And so if you leap over the parts of the stories that are pessimistic and dark, then you miss part of what the stories are trying to teach you about how to prepare for catastrophe.
I mean, it says, obviously, in the Exodus story, The fact that the Hebrews escaped from tyranny is presented as a good thing, and even as something that God wills, but it's by no means a straightforward passage from tyranny to the Promised Land.
I mean, and Moses doesn't make it to the Promised Land, right?
He dies before he gets there.
Yeah, and even the Promised Land is not nearly as much fun as it's been As we have been led to believe, right?
Like, they're constantly, the Jews are constantly falling short, right?
They're constantly angering God.
They're never getting their shit together.
You know, God just keeps, you know, God's ambivalence towards them persists.
Yeah, yeah, well, and I also think that's very realistic because There are very few times in life where even if you're not suffering from the tyranny of other people or yourself, that it's very difficult to walk the proper straight and narrow path and to keep everything organized and to keep things going properly.
There's never any shortage of severe challenges.
Even if you're chosen by God, let's say, there's no shortage of severe challenges.
You also see that in all the other stories in the Old Testament.
Even when God is walking with someone, say like Abraham, or Noah for that matter, it's still pretty much non-stop carnage.
Noah has his family together and His generations are perfect, right?
And he walks with God, so he's properly oriented in the world, but he still has to build the ark and get through the damn storm and be humiliated by his children at the end.
It's a very rough business.
So, in one of your shorts, and I don't know the name of it, I guess it's the one that specifically deals with the Passover, where the Egyptian firstborns are all killed.
Yeah.
What's that one called?
Death of the First Born Egyptians.
There we go.
There we go.
An appropriate title.
I can't help but harbor the suspicion that you had a fair bit of sympathy for the Egyptians.
Yeah, well, you know, they had some great art.
Yes.
And you do a wonderful job, by the way, of incorporating that into that film.
That one is spectacularly beautiful.
Well, thank you.
And they had religion and...
I mean, so doing visual research for this project, there's not a lot of really great ancient Hebrew art.
Possibly or probably because it's against the religion to make art.
You're not supposed to make graven images.
In terms of coming up with a style that evoked this, I was looking at art from the region and I was like, oh, it's all Egyptian and Assyrian.
Those are the people there that made the art.
Fantastic art.
It breaks my heart that that's supposed to be evil, right?
That that art, which actually moves me when I look at it, Is what we're supposed to smash, right?
Like, that's what we're commanded to destroy.
Because it's all full of idols.
I am not down with that.
So I, you know, just naturally was going to sympathize with the Egyptians.
This is all...
Yeah, well, there's a real tension there that I think is worth...
Thinking about, you know, because I understand why, from a psychological perspective, I understand why there was an injunction against making images.
And, you know, you see the same thing acted out right now with ISIS, say, in the Middle East, where they're destroying, well, for example, all the great Buddhist art and all those ancient monuments, which, of course, is an absolute and utter catastrophe.
But they're following the religion.
I mean, they're following it better than we do.
Right, right.
Well, so the conundrum seems to me to be that, and this is also played out in the story of Exodus with the golden calf, is that the idea of God is supposed to be something, at least in principle, that you can't really grip, that you can't really encapsulate.
That you can't dogmatically represent because then it turns into an idol.
And an idol and ideology are very much the same thing.
And I think ideology is terribly dangerous, you know, because you take something concrete, like an axiom of some sort, that's very concrete, and then you make that your highest value and it narrows you.
And restricts you and also makes you incredibly dangerous and so the idea that there's a great danger in idolization I think is a is a very very powerful notion and so I think that's what informed the restrictions against making graven images of God because you end up confusing the image with the transcendent reality right and then you think that you understand it and you have it in your hands but it certainly does seem to have some pretty dramatically negative consequences when The
consequence of that is the absence of visual art in any profound sense and also this injunction to destroy the idols of the foreigner or of the person who's heretical.
I'm not exactly sure what the mediating path is between those two extremes.
I think a real artist, and I definitely think that you belong in that category, It's someone who isn't using idols as representation because you're using your artistic talent to push beyond what you already know.
It's a form of exploration rather than a form of canonization or categorization.
It's a It's a journey into the unknown and an extension of the way that people think.
And I think of that as a way of uniting with the transcendent rather than trying to encapsulate it in some sort of formulaic box.
But there is a great danger of that kind of formalization.
So, anyways.
There is that danger, and that is, of course, the commonest interpretation of the injunction against idols.
But I think that I mean, it's never borne out, right?
It's like any injunction against that kind of idolatry has never resulted in the absence of idolatry, ever.
And we can clearly do it with abstract concepts.
We can clearly do it, you know, we clearly don't need images to do this.
No, you could argue that you could do it with words just as effectively.
You can do it with anything!
Yes.
And so it doesn't work.
I wondered while I was working on the film whether it might have been a simple and misunderstood injunction against using Egyptian hieroglyphics and that it was a requirement to use Semitic written language.
Rather than Egyptian.
Because Egyptian hieroglyphics are full of things that fly in the air and things that crawl on the ground and things that swim in the sea and men and women, all that stuff.
Because I was working on these little animated hieroglyphs and I was like, maybe it was just this, which would have made sense, right?
Because they were anti-Egyptian when these stories were written down and they were promoting the Semitic language.
That's what you were supposed to use.
Right.
Well, now we put it in some sense in the same category as the dietary prescriptions, right?
Because the best evidence for the reason for those dietary prescriptions isn't hygiene or anything like that.
It's don't eat the food that the people who worship other gods eat, right?
Yeah.
There's a variety of Useful reasons for that and certainly one of them is that it, while it's a price and an advantage, is that the people you eat with are your kinsmen and your tribesmen, pretty much by definition.
And so if you share a palate, if you share a menu, and you share restrictions, it's much easier for you to socialize with the people who have the same restrictions that you do.
So it seems to be a reasonably intelligent way of keeping a culture cohesive.
Well, it certainly worked for a very long period of time.
So that would be an idea that's in keeping with that, is that you certainly don't use the idle representations of the people who you are not, because then you integrate with them and your culture disappears.
Right, and you don't use their language and you don't write down things that they can read.
Right.
But so much of the books of Moses were about, be different from your neighbors.
Like, don't let your neighbors corrupt you.
You are different from your neighbors.
And interestingly, I was raised with that, right?
Like, my father, the atheist Jew, was adamant about, you know, not doing the Christmas things.
When I went to school, you know, they would have Christmas projects.
In the winter, and he would say, just tell your teacher you don't have to do this project because you're Jewish.
He never said, you don't have to do the project because you're an atheist, just because you're Jewish.
Right, right.
And so we maintained some sort of difference in spite of not actually practicing Jewish religion, really.
Yeah, well, that's one of the things that's always been interesting to me about Judaism, particularly, and a mystery, I would say, and You know, I think there are very many ways of believing in God and one way of believing is conscious and that would be the sort of belief that you can state as I believe or I don't believe and I think in some sense that's the weakest form of belief and it's also the one that's most easily undermined.
I think the more profound forms of belief are ones that you act out.
They're like a dance in some sense and they're built into your behavioral coding and And they're not so easily criticized and undermined because they don't really operate at an intellectual level.
Like, for example, watching your videos.
They're not reducible to an intellectual exercise.
You know, I can't watch them and, first of all, I can't say exactly what it is that you're up to.
And even if I could lay out a reasonably comprehensive description of what you're up to, which would be by no means complete, it wouldn't be easy for me to mount an intellectual attack on that because Because of your use of dance, in some sense, with the cut-outs and your use of imagery and your use of music, it puts the entire discussion on a plane that can't be easily reducible to an intellectual discussion.
And so, in Judaism you see this, and this is the case, I think, with the atheist Jews, perhaps most self-evidently, is that the rituals are kept and the division is kept and the encoded actions are kept.
The person might say, well, I don't believe in God, and the proper objection to that might be something like, well, you might say that you don't believe in God, but you sure act it out.
It seems to me that, you know, people have asked me about my religious faith, which is a question that I find quite intrusive, and not that people don't have the right to ask it, because they certainly do, but I mean, I'm Sufficiently Ignorant about my own orientations in some sense to not know exactly how to answer that but one answer that I find quite useful and I think fairly truthful is that I certainly act as if there's a God and
And then the rest of it I leave I suppose in some sense in a cloud of on of as of yet Incompletely explored ignorance, because I do believe that human beings have a relationship with the transcendent.
Now, I see that manifest itself in great art, for example, where people seem to be able to reach beyond themselves to produce something that's of spectacular, lasting, intense, emotional, and practical significance.
That's the realm of inspiration, you know, and I don't think that we understand that very well at all.
I don't think that we understand consciousness very well as well, at all, in fact.
And I think it is a fundamental element of being.
But it is interesting.
And in your work, too, like I see, and it's interesting to hear you talk about it, I see a profound religious, what would you call it, Well, I see a profound religious spirit at work.
And it's so interesting to me that your experience of reading Exodus and also doing these animations has actually, for you, been an increased sense of divorce from, let's say, the realities of the text.
Yeah, but, you know, so the word I use to describe it is I was bereft after...
Spending all this time with them, because the more time I spent with the texts, the more time I spent working on this, the less connected to anything I would call God, I felt.
And after I finished those scenes, it took me a really long time to get inspiration for finishing the film.
I guess I finished the last scene of the film, Moses parts a year and a half ago and I just could not continue work on the film because I was thinking like more Moses more Old Testament and it just made me feel sick every time I approached it.
Well, is it possible just out of curiosity that that was a form of something like spiritual exhaustion?
Because I mean your films are very very serious and they're very complex and so I kind of wonder too if you just haven't like drained yourself of inspiration as a consequence of working on this for so long.
I mean they're very complex deep themes and As you said, they do sit at the bottom of the culture, and it's no joke to mess around with that kind of thing.
That's true, but I now see what I was missing.
My muse has returned, so I could say that I'm not religious, but I clearly practice like a religious person because I have a muse, and I'm inspired by my muse, and I have faith in my muse, and I even have prayer that I say to my muse.
So that's...
You know, that's a sort of religious lifestyle.
I would say so.
A spiritual one, anyway.
Yes, well, okay, so you said that you even pray to your muse.
Tell me about the muse.
Okay, well, would you like to hear my muse prayer?
Sure, definitely.
It may be amusing.
Okay.
Our idea, which art in the ether, that cannot be named, thy vision come, thy will be done, on earth as it is an abstraction.
Give us this day our daily spark, and forgive us our criticisms, as we forgive those who critique against us.
And lead us not into stagnation, but deliver us from ego.
For thine is the vision, the power, and the glory forever.
Amen.
Well, that certainly seems to me to be, like, I would think of that as a mantra.
To open up the gateway between you and this transcendent force that allows people religious inspiration.
I mean, and you're doing something like clearing out your ego.
And I think it is very interesting that it's associated with the Lord's Prayer.
Especially with regards to, you know, you make this interesting identity between criticism and temptation.
You know, and one of the things, of course, that does interfere with...
Stagnation!
Lead us not into stagnation.
Yes.
Yes, but deliver us from criticism, I think you said, didn't you?
Yeah, lead us not into stagnation, but deliver us...
Oh, wait, wait, but deliver us from ego.
Oh, boy.
Oh, forgive us our criticisms as we forgive those who critique against us.
Yes, yes, that...
Well, and the criticism, that's a very interesting element of it, too, because it's often the case...
One of the things that I teach my students when they're writing is to get the critical spirit the hell out of the way to begin with.
Because what people try to do is produce and edit at the same time.
And you actually can't do that.
What you have to do is open yourself up to the creative process and all of its errors.
Because when you first start, it's going to be very much error-ridden, but you have to allow yourself to manifest that error-ridden spark of creativity to begin with and keep the criticism at bay.
And also, the ego element, I think, is extremely interesting because To the degree that you're trying to bend your artistic production to the proximal demands of your ego, then you actually pollute it, you propagandize it, and you reduce it, I would say, to something like an idol, because then it's to serve some other master, rather than whatever it is that is supposed to be, in some sense, flowing through you.
Totally agree.
And that's serve the other master.
That's a good way to put it.
I have a real problem doing work for money.
I love money.
And what I like to do is do my work and then encourage people to send me money.
But this whole thing where somebody says, I'll give you this money if you do the work, I've done that.
It's just called being a professional artist.
It never works out for me.
I did this segment of this commercial film.
Ironically, it was Khalil Gibran's The Prophet.
All animated, and I did it for money.
I got paid well.
I thought I was never going to animate again after that because it burned me out so badly.
It was a really unpleasant process because the authority in this was not my muse.
The authority was the people with the money.
So you were subjugating the greater to the lesser.
Yeah, and if I do that even a little bit, The feeling is horrible.
I liken it to how I imagine prostitution, like all the warnings about prostitution and what it does to your soul, even if you think it's hunky-dory.
I can relate to that when I do the work for money.
It's really different than when I'm doing it.
Okay, so back to your prayer.
So...
Now, you modified the Lord's Prayer.
Yeah.
And so, did you write that down?
Like, how in the world did you come up with this?
And thank you for actually telling me.
I'm quite amazed that you did, because, of course, it's a peculiar thing.
And I mean that in the best possible sense.
Yeah.
But it seems also to be quite a private thing.
Well, I've been out about it since.
I mean, the thing with Sita Sings the Blues is it was like such a profoundly weird experience.
Making that film and it was so much like the channeling and it was so much just getting out of my own way that I did want to share that.
I mean, because people would ask me these questions, how did you make that?
And it's like, I don't really know.
Yeah, well you just said something I think that's quite profound.
You said you got out of your own way.
Yeah.
You know, and one of the things that I've been struck by with regards to both the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament and also the passion story in the New Testament is that there's a tremendous emphasis in those stories on getting out of your own way.
You know, because the idea is supposed to be, and this is part of the idea of the dying and resurrecting hero, of course, is that you're supposed to let everything in you that gets in your way burn away and die so that Whatever can flow through you that has true value and that's oriented towards the highest good,
let's say, which I think is what you're doing when you're establishing a relationship with your muse, is that there isn't anything that's part of the ego or part of the critical capacity that's inappropriate or part of, let's say, worldly concerns that's interfering with your ability to reach beyond yourself.
And that's a holy calling, I would say.
Maybe it's the primary holy calling.
I think, I certainly think it is.
It seems to me to be the case.
And I do think, in some sense, that's what artists act out when they're really being artists, because they're establishing a relationship with the source of inspiration, whatever that is.
And it's not like we understand that.
We don't understand that.
It's something that's very, very deep.
Yeah.
I do feel, or I do believe, if I have beliefs, I do believe that regarding it as something that comes from Elsewhere, something bigger than yourself is, for me, helpful.
I don't like this idea that it's all me.
I'm connected to other people.
I'm connected through culture and through language, which is culture, and through art, which is culture.
I mean, I'm just like a fish swimming in a sea of culture.
What we call creating is really absorbing and processing all of this culture that I'm a part of.
And just expressing a little bit out.
I'm very dubious of the idea of originality, for example.
I wrote an essay about that on the cult of originality.
I think that's delusional.
Yeah, well, maybe the cult part of the originality idea is that it's tied up with ego.
Yeah.
Because I think that people can be spectacularly original, but I don't know if you get to attribute You called me, and the mind is a very strange place because there's obviously a part of it that we identify with as ourselves.
That would be the me, that would be the ego, and it's the thing, I think, that is capable of generating egotistical criticisms and standing on principles for self-defense or for dominance display or something like that.
It's sort of a It operates at a relatively low level of moral virtue.
But then there's parts of us that are obviously far beyond ourselves, you know, and that's the part, for example, that generates dreams and visions and perhaps even ideas because, well, one of the things I really liked about reading Carl Jung, one of the things he made me really conscious of was the fact that, and Nietzsche, of course, talked about this in the same way to some degree, is that it's not so much that you have ideas, It's that, one, you could say, no, no, don't be so sure about that.
The ideas have you.
So there's that.
And then the next thing is, well, it isn't so much that you think up the ideas, it's that you encounter them.
If you open yourself up to the possibility of encountering them and it is like a process of discovery rather than a process of Origination let's say yeah, and that's also so you could say even if you're like a biological materialist which I actually don't think you can be because Biological materialism doesn't help us account for consciousness in the least so far.
We don't have a good theory of consciousness You're saying like a biological materialist theory of consciousness because I'm a biological materialist.
I mean, I think biology exists Well, yes, of course.
I just don't think that it provides, it isn't sophisticated enough to provide answers to some of the most fundamental questions about human existence, like the fact that we're conscious.
Right.
No, I agree with that.
And, you know, the idea that you just expressed that when you're in a creative, when you're engaging in the creative process with whatever it is that you're praying to, let's say, that You're opening yourself up to something that's beyond you.
Now, you could say that that comes from deep within the human psyche, which is a psychoanalytic way of thinking about it, and I think a reasonably appropriate way of thinking about it, but I don't think it's any more reasonable in some sense than generating the hypothesis that you're opening yourself up to unknown forces in the cosmos, because I think that's just as...
It's just as intelligent an account for the phenomena as the former one.
We are in contact with things that are beyond us and I do think that that's a large part of what the artist actually demonstrates and keeps in front of people.
I think beauty in particular is a powerful force for that.
That's I mean when I've watched your videos really they they're so beautiful that they they virtually bring me to tears especially in combination with the music because I'm very sensitive to music but you have this unbelievable capacity for for grace and for color and for and for deep respect for the music which I think is also really quite remarkable like you're I often see movies that use good music but that don't have much respect for the music.
They'll cut it in the middle of a phrase or something like that.
I remember the movie Magnolia was a real exception to that.
That movie uses music beautifully.
Woody Allen is very good at using music beautifully and so is, who is the director of The Shining?
Kubrick!
Kubrick!
I mean, he loves music and his work, Clockwork Orange, has some of the same kind of perverse beauty that some of your animation has, you know, because he used those Great Beethoven pieces that were transformed into electronic music by Walter, Wendy, Carlos, and set these brutal scenes of mayhem to beautiful music, which was also, I think, a very profound thing to do.
I mean, of course, Germany is the home of Nazism, and it's also the home of Beethoven and Bach, and so you really can't separate those things in some sense.
Okay, so let's go to the copyright issue to some degree now.
Now, you're not a fan of the idea of copyright and that's interesting to me because it has been arguably a reasonably efficient way for people to, let's say, protect themselves from theft of their intellectual property.
Although I would say that's broken down quite badly now for people like musicians because their work is so distributable.
Are you against copyright for all forms of intellectual property?
Why don't you tell us a little bit about your ideas?
Well, you say that as if intellectual property exists.
What is intellectual property?
Well, I guess to some degree I'll take the easy way out and say that's a legal issue.
But I would say that at least to some degree intellectual property is the consequence of abstract work.
Because it's certainly possible to work abstractly constructing something like you're constructing your movies or perhaps a book.
It seems to me that it's not unreasonable to propose that that deserves some of the same ownership protection that a physical entity would.
I'm not sure that there's There's some level of similarity between you owning your house and not allowing other people in and you owning the more abstract work that you've done, but I'm not and I'm certainly not Attempting to engage you in an argument about the benefits of copyright.
I presume that you have a very well thought through Stance on this and and well it begins with it begins with acknowledging that culture is not property and It just isn't.
And what we were just talking about a few minutes ago, where does this stuff come from?
You know, it comes from something bigger than ourself.
We were just talking about, you know, we do not actually originate this.
We certainly work, but I didn't originate any of the work that I'm putting out there.
I mean, I gestated it.
But we don't own children either.
We let our children go out into the world if you want to own your child for 96 years and control everything.
Well, then that serves you right.
You get exactly what you deserve if you do that.
You get a dead child, basically.
You get a crippled non-human being.
And the thing with cultural works is they...
Like I say, I'm a fish swimming in there.
It's like water.
What happens when you enclose water?
It becomes stagnant.
It becomes nasty.
It becomes toxic.
I know that for my own work, It has to go out in the world, and it has to continue circulating.
And for me personally, copyright interferes with that.
Because you put a monopoly around something.
If one person, or even if I license my copyrights to others, when it's centrally controlled, it does not move.
And I did a lot of experiments with Sita Sings the Blues, and by far the best way to get it into the world is to just let people carry it into the world.
Right.
Well, that's certainly what I've heard.
That's certainly what I've experienced as well, you know, and people are also taking my lectures and cutting them into pieces, which is not something I expected, and then putting up pieces of different length on the net.
And I've had companies contact me and say, you know, for a fee, we'll more or less hunt these people down and enforce your copyright.
And I thought, well, no, I'm more thinking about the message in a bottle approach to this, and I'm willing to let it go where...
To let the wind blow where it wants to blow, let's say.
He could put it that way.
And also, you're making more money that way because as you just pointed out, people want to support you.
They want to support you because they actually see your work, right?
If you were taking down all these instances of your work getting seen because of copyright, fewer people would see your work.
The audience is the most efficient distribution machine that exists.
Yes, well that's definitely been the case for me and I've been fortunate too because I've been involved in some political controversy over the last year and Some people that I know who have been involved in, say, let's say, broadly similar political controversies have been demonetized on YouTube.
And I'm outside of that because everything I put up is free and people are perfectly willing to support me.
But, I mean, it's also very fortunate and a new thing that these new platforms for direct support of creative people, let's say, have just emerged and developed, which is, you know, thank God for that, because it's very difficult for creative people to monetize their production.
Yep.
So now, alright, so...
Just to say something about more on this, with my films going out for free, the benefit to me is that far more people see them that way than would see them if I were trying to control them and trying to get people to pay me to see the thing.
So I made more money releasing Sita Sings the Blues for free than I ever had before in my career where everything was copyrighted.
The consequence of all my comic strips being copyrighted is that people just don't see them.
So just releasing it is good.
That's the benefit to me.
The benefit to society is that you overcome a form of societal brain damage when you ignore copyright.
And I gave a talk called Copyright is Brain Damage.
You can look that up.
But if you look at all of us are neurons in a great mind.
And all of us transmit and receive information.
Copyright blocks that function or in an attempt to control that function.
I mean, of course, you can't have a brain with totally uncontrolled firing of synapses.
That's madness.
But I really think that each human being shares work that they love.
So if you just let humans share work that they love and they naturally will not share work that they don't love, then you end up with a really healthy system And, you know, really good works are going to succeed in that system, whereas controlling things with copyright is this artificial damage to that system.
Well, there's also been a fair bit of crookedry in relationship to that in recent years, and I would say perhaps Disney is more responsible for that than any other organization, you know, and so It was Disney that was instrumental in getting copyright extended from 50 to 75 years and I really did think that that was a form of crime because some of those early Disney movies and I would put Pinocchio in that category particularly are incredibly culturally significant and to forestall proper
discussion of those cultural artifacts I think is truly damaging and it was a travesty that that copyright extension was granted.
Over and over again and Disney is not the only one.
I mean most of our cultural heritage is controlled by five big corporations.
Almost everything now.
I mean everything is owned by someone and once it's owned it can be sold to someone else and it all ends up in the hands of you know Viacom and Sony.
Everything.
So now with regards to copyright do you draw a distinction What about patents and things like that?
Do you think that they're technically different?
No, I have a problem with patents, although my expertise is not in the area of patents.
The one legal concept that is classified as intellectual property, which is a misnomer, that is not completely fundamentally bankrupt is trademark.
Because trademark theoretically has something to do with fraud and you know you need You don't need, but people desire some mechanism to control or punish fraud.
Trademark alone would be that it's not usually used that way.
It's usually abused as much as anything under the intellectual property label, but at least you could make some excuse for it to exist.
Right, right.
So, yeah, well, I mean, part of it, I guess, part of the claim for the protection of originality, we might say, is also the protection, you could argue, for genuineness.
I might want to know that, and maybe legal protection can help with this, that I might want to know that the thing that I'm watching or the thing that I'm consuming is actually produced by the person who said that they produced it.
So if I go on your website and I watch a Nina Paley animated short, I want to make sure that it isn't someone copying you and using your identity as a form of parasitism, essentially.
But the thing is, I don't have a lot of need for that, largely because I do free my work.
So most people are aware of something that's by me is by me.
You know, there's, I guess, some danger, or the way I might invoke trademark law is if somebody...
Edited something of mine.
Everyone's welcome to edit and redistribute it.
But if they said that the edit and redistribution was mine, they're like, no, the work I did is mine, but you have to take responsibility for that edit and redistribution.
I'm not responsible for your edit and redistribution.
So if they add some message to it that is not mine, I don't want that attributed to me.
And I suppose I could invoke Trademark or something to do that.
I don't know.
I could invoke something.
But really what I would do is just go and say, hey, I never said that.
Yes.
Well, that's a lot simpler than engaging in legal battles, which are roughly the equivalent of a fairly serious disease.
Yes.
I took a legal vow of nonviolence.
I just don't want to fix that system.
Yeah, well, it's certainly a way of keeping your life simpler, unless, you know, unless you get attacked by something that's truly malevolent, and of course that can happen from time to time.
Okay, so let's go back to Seder Masochism.
So it's going to come out in 2018, and I'm very much looking forward to that.
You too.
Yes, I bet.
Okay, so a couple of things.
You know, it's so interesting because when I watch your shorts, I remember a couple of them that have Moses wandering through the desert with the pillar of light leading him on.
The cloud.
The cloud, yes.
That's right, the cloud, yes.
And you've animated that in a very interesting way.
And it's got a kind of grandeur as well, which again spoke to me of something approximating a profound religious sensibility, which is partly why I was...
Surprised by your comments about let's say the intellectual effect of your endeavors on your on your relationship with belief, but you're just talking to my ego This interviewer, this is an ego to ego talk.
Well, you know, I think now and then we managed to make it a muse to muse talk Well, maybe a little bit, but interview me you're gonna hear from my ego.
Yes.
Well, that's always the danger in talking to artists and Yeah.
Right, because I think generally when you speak with artists, you speak to the inferior part of them.
Not because their ego is inferior compared to the ego of other people, but because the part of them that you would like to communicate with is actually the part that's generating the art.
Right.
It's already doing its communication.
Exactly.
That's why I would rather...
I mean, in general, it's like I speak better through my art than any other...
And then it's not even I anymore, right?
But whatever, my artistic expressions...
Yes, there's no substitute for it.
Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely.
And, I mean, part of the reason I wanted to do the interview, though, was to find out what your ego thinks of all this, as well as to take the opportunity, hopefully, to bring your work to, perhaps, to some people who don't know about it yet.
And, okay, so now you're making this magnificent production about Exodus and about the Old Testament, and that's a pretty strange thing to do, let's say, in the modern world.
Do you have any sense of what you're hoping that will accomplish?
I know that you want to launch it and see what happens and that there's curiosity associated with that, but do you have a hypothesis or a theory about what it is that this is doing in the broader sense?
How you're contributing to the cultural conversation?
I'm sure that I do.
I can't access those thoughts right now, but I'll learn a lot more once it goes out.
Alright, well, I'll focus it a bit more.
Okay.
You know, in the Pinocchio movie, of course, this is a very ancient theme, in order for the puppet, the marionette, whose strings are being pulled by forces beyond his control, In order for him to become real, there's a variety of things he has to do.
He has to learn to tell the truth, and he has to learn not to be a neurotic victim, and he has to learn not to be an impulsive, pleasure-seeking victim of totalitarian processes, all of those things.
But then, he has to go down to the bottom of chaos itself and rescue his father.
I can't help but think that that's part of what you're doing.
I mean, you said it yourself in the interview, right?
Because you said that you were attempting to make some connection with the belief of your father and to make some sense out of it.
And so you are in fact going into the void, let's say, to rescue your father from the belly of the whale.
And, you know, it seems to me that we're in a period of chaotic instability in our culture that actually has a fair bit of danger associated with it and that I've felt a strong impulse to go back to these original stories to find out what they are and to establish them, to re-establish them, let's say, as foundation or whatever that might mean.
It might be my imagination, but it seems to me that that's associated, that that's akin in some sense to what you're doing with Exodus.
Well, yes, and when I set out, I did set out to connect to my father, rescue my father.
But what I have learned in the past year is that actually I'm looking for my mother, and I think I found her.
Okay, well, now obviously I'm going to have to ask you to elaborate on that.
I don't know if I can in words, right?
Like, I'm still in the process of doing this, but it's like...
It's like I have been seeking to connect with this father, this God the Father, and also my own father, which I didn't have the best connection with.
Nothing, you know, nothing really terrible or anything.
Just never really connected with him.
And I've longed for that, right?
Like, a lot of my life, because the culture tells me that that's really important, you know?
And all the Psychologists say, you know, it's a really important thing.
So my whole life it's been like, oh, you know, maybe I wouldn't be messed up about this or that thing.
Maybe this is a daddy issue.
You know, I gotta get right with my dad even though he's dead.
And I'm just like looking and looking there and it's like, wait, I missed something.
Right?
Like, it's my mother.
It's all of our mothers.
And you talked about the original stories.
You referred to the Old Testament texts as the original stories.
Well, they're not.
You know, we have...
Most of the history of human religion was not these stories.
As far as...
As far as I have read or learned, the early human conception of the divine was female, everywhere.
And we have broken a connection to that.
And actually, the story of Exodus, to me, what it is, is it's the solidifying of that change.
That it was a long, gradual process of moving from goddess to gods and goddesses to just God, just one God.
But I'm reaching further back and I realize, you know, when I found that and when I started working with that earlier religion, where we have no text for it, All we have is some artifacts, many artifacts from all over the world, and beautiful symbols.
And of course, there's that book by Eric Neumann, The Great Mother, which talks about all the symbols.
Yes, I was just going to bring up that book.
I read that, sucker, cover to cover.
Have you read The Origins and History of Consciousness by Neumann?
I have not, but I did...
Well, I would highly recommend that.
Well, let me just finish this point.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I like that, although he writes like a lead weight.
It was just good to immerse myself in that.
Definitely.
That is what I was longing for.
And back to the Old Testament, those things are in the Old Testament.
They're all portrayed as the other and the enemies and what we're trying to stop out.
But they're in there.
So...
So in that way, I relate to the Old Testament, not the heroes of the Old Testament, Moses and Aaron and them.
I take inspiration from the stiff-necked people.
It's like, oh, the stiff-necked people, they're disobedient.
I'm like, yes!
That's great!
If there's any history to this, which there probably isn't, but it's like, those are the ones I'm descended from.
The bad ones.
Anyway, what was I? See, I don't know.
It's interesting because in the Pinocchio story and in the classic stories of Of journeying to the belly of the whale or journeying into the underworld.
It's often, but not always, males who are doing it and rescuing their father.
And it isn't obvious to me psychologically what happens when a woman goes to the underworld to rescue her father.
It isn't clear what she's going to discover there.
You know, and it seems to me that you're, you know, you're using your creative pseudopods to sort of feel out that territory and discover what might be there.
And that seems very important, too, because obviously there's a problem in our culture, and the problem is what is exactly the relationship between femininity and women and these, let's call them, patriarchal religions.
I mean, there's one of Jung's criticisms of Christianity, and of course this is also evident in Eric Neumann's work, is that there's There's a trinity, obviously, in Christianity, let's say, and it's fairly comprehensible.
There's God the Father, and that's tradition, and there's the Holy Spirit, and you might think about that as the muse, and there's God in the sun form, which is the human being who's vulnerable and mortal and who's destined to live on earth.
Those are nice elements of the divine, but there's a missing fourth as far as Jung was concerned, He thought of that as sometimes constituted by the figure of Satan, so that was where evil fit, but also sometimes constituted by femininity itself, and that those two things were often conflated as well because they were the other.
And that is a complicated technical problem because it's not obvious, it's not precisely obvious what the divine model is for women, especially now that they have control over their reproductive function, because they're sort of half women, In the traditional, classic, biological sense, half female, but also, in some sense, half male.
Because they have that freedom now.
...control over the reproductive functions, sadly.
I mean, if we lived in that world, we could talk that way, but no, practically speaking, women really don't.
You mean because it's unreliable?
Well, for one thing, are you talking about, like, hormonal pills?
Birth control pills?
I'm talking about birth control pills.
Okay, well, like, I can't take them, right?
Like, they, you know, they have horrible side effects for me and quite a few women.
Yes, definitely.
So it's not like, it's not like, oh, we invented this pill.
I mean, that's actually one of the, that's like a great example of, you know, our patriarchal society, right?
Like, a pill like that could be developed for men.
Men wouldn't tolerate the side effects.
In fact, they were developing a pill like that for men, and then they cut the experiments short because men weren't tolerating the side effects, which were no worse than the side effects for women, but women are going to tolerate that shit because they're- Yes, well, the price is much higher.
Yeah, we're physically more vulnerable.
Anyway, it never ends.
This is why I believe in biological reality, by the way.
This is why I'm a biological materialist, because regardless of my identity, regardless of my ideas, you know, every month I'm doubled over in pain and, you know, having like very real consequences of my biology.
Well, you just did a short about the Great Mother, and you know, I wondered if you had read Neumann's book when I saw that, because I thought, oh, there's...
Because that is an absolutely great book.
And as I said, I would recommend Origins and History of Consciousness.
I think it would help answer some of the questions that you were talking about today.
I believe you.
Yeah, so it was the book that Jung said he wished he would have written, which is a hell of a thing for someone like him to say because he was a remarkable genius.
So I guess that the new film, and what's it called, the one that features the Great Mother?
Godmother.
Yes, exactly.
And so is that...
Now, that seems importantly related to this issue that you brought up about rediscovering the connection with your mother by going to...
Yeah, yeah.
I don't mean my actual mother.
I mean the mother, you know, the great mother.
Right.
I mean, I live with my actual mother.
She's great and everything, but we're on a metaphorical plane with her.
Yeah, and that actually is the first scene of satyrmasochism.
So I did the last scene first, and then it took years...
For me to figure out what the first scene is.
Oh, very interesting.
Yeah, so that's just like, and there's going to be no introduction and no explanation.
It's just that's going to set the stage for the Exodus stories that follow.
Well, look, thank you for talking with me.
Thank you for being with me.
I think that I wish you the best of luck with your film, and I hope that exactly what should happen with it will happen.
Thank you.
And I'm going to steal liberally from your films to illustrate this interview, if you don't mind, and I'll try to be very respectful and careful with the editing.
Excellent.
But actually, you're going to be copying, not stealing.
Oh, yes.
Copying.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much.
It was a pleasure talking with you.
Thank you.
Likewise.
All right.
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