Andrew Clavin skewers progressive science as "irrational"—mocking evolution, climate denialism, and abortion advocacy—before pivoting to 2016’s Gold Star Khan clash, framing Obama’s "unfit" jab as a desperate distraction from his IRS scandal and economic legacy. He praises Trump’s ISIS crackdown but ridicules Planned Parenthood’s "kick babies out" tweet as proof of leftist hypocrisy, then dismisses BLM’s reparations demands as delusional. Ending with a rant on art vs. morality, he ties cultural decay to nihilism, urging listeners to abandon civility for local activism and his memoir The Great Good Thing. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, when I think back on the most exciting moments of the Democratic National Convention, I generally find I regain consciousness about two hours later, standing by the side of the freeway in my underwear, holding a sign that reads, we'll mow lawns if you'll just please kill me.
But perhaps the most inspiring moment of the convention was when Hillary Clinton said this.
I believe in science.
She just looked so darn happy with that creepy smile of hers that I found it really uplifting to see how her simple faith in science gave her so much joy.
And then of course there was the way all the Democrats started clapping for science as if they were trying to bring science back to life the way they did with Tinkerbell during the Democrat class trip to see Peter Pan.
So I said to myself, Clem, it's time you stopped clinging to your Bible and your gun and started believing in some of this here science stuff yourself.
And I got insulted because I called myself Clem and that's not my name.
So I took out my gun and shot myself.
Luckily, the Bible was in my pocket and stopped the bullet.
But how is a simple knuckle-dragging conservative like me supposed to understand anything as sophisticated and Democrat-like as science?
Well, I got down to work and here's what I learned.
Democrats believe in evolution.
That means that over thousands and thousands of years, nature has shaped human beings for reproduction, making women beautiful and nurturing so that they can attract powerful, successful men who will impregnate them and protect them while the women take care of their young.
And these gender roles are completely constructed by an oppressive society and can be thrown off like an old coat to make life more fair.
Democrats believe that the earth is at the mercy of natural forces that brought it from a hot, molten state to a cooler, solid one, then through ice ages in which glaciers formed and then melted to create many of our great lakes, and then new ice ages came and ended.
And today, if the temperature drops half a degree in 50 years, it's a sign that driving your car is causing the apocalypse and the government has to take over the oil industry.
Democrats believe in building brilliant new machines that can look right inside a woman's body and see a tiny baby forming in the womb with completely shaped fingers and toes and a beating heart and a brain, images that must never be shown on television so you won't feel bad when you rip the baby to pieces because you really wanted a Sagittarius and you're due in June.
So, after I learned about all these things, I said to myself, Homer, I may just be a dumb Republican, but I'm not so dumb that I'm going to believe in anything as irrational as Democrat science, no matter how much it makes Hillary Clinton smile that creepy smile.
Then I said to myself, stop calling me Homer.
That's not my name.
Damn it.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clayton Show.
Party's Worry Over Trump00:13:28
I know I'm going to get home tonight.
My wife is going, what was that about?
Living with a woman 40 years, and she still doesn't understand what I'm saying, and neither do I.
But that's, all right, it's mailbag day.
Woohoo.
We can't, yeah, we can't really do woohoo because Lindsay's not here, but we have woohoo in our hearts because we're going to be answering all your questions.
That's later in the show.
So if you're watching live on Facebook, you only get 15 minutes, then you've got to come to the Daily Wire and hear the rest, and then you must subscribe.
Pry your greedy fingers off your lousy eight bucks and pay eight bucks a month to subscribe, then you can not only watch the show, but be part of the mailbag and ask your questions and have all your problems solved.
Also, this is the day that I sometimes like to just plug my upcoming book, my memoir, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
You can pre-order it on Amazon and you'll get it probably, probably sometime this month.
It's due out in September, but it'll probably be available toward the end of August.
Get it, you will like it, I promise.
All right, we are going to wrap up this discussion of Donald Trump and the great Wrath of Khan controversy and what's been going on because you know the media has just drummed this into the ground because they smell blood.
They think they've got him this time and maybe they do.
Maybe this is the time when finally even his supporters just have had enough.
He's insulted a gold star, you know, he's insulted gold star parents and he doesn't can't restrain himself and what's wrong with him.
But I hate to point this out, but it is kind of detracting from the fact that we're not talking about any of the issues that these people are supposed to run on.
You know, what is Hillary Clinton going to be like?
What's she going to do?
What's Trump going to do if they get elected president?
And what would they, it's all about this kind of flashpoints that the media love.
And of course, they're only flashpoints if Trump does them and not if Hillary Clinton does.
You know, yesterday, our own, the Daily Wire's Robert Krachik, had a piece up on the site.
It's still up there about the questions that they asked Hillary Clinton when she appeared at a campaign event in Ashland, Ohio.
And the press surrounded her.
This is a presidential candidate who has not given a press conference since Jesus was here, I think, was the last time.
I think she gave a joint press conference with Pontius Pilate.
It was the last time this woman gave a press conference.
So they surround her, and these are the questions, the tough questions they ask.
One, do you think Donald Trump crossed the line in his comments about the Khan family?
That's a tough one.
She was reeling from that one.
How about two?
What do you think it says about Donald Trump's character?
Three, do you believe the election, when we look back on it, do you believe what happened with Mr. Khan is potentially a turning point?
Well, they were really getting down to it.
You know, hard to know how she handled these things.
Have you reached out to Captain Khan's mother?
Have you reached out to Mrs. Khan?
Five, the totality of what you said.
Why do you think Republicans are continuing to stand by Donald Trump?
And six, do you worry that Americans are becoming desensitized to this kind of nasty Trumpian?
I mean, this is like insane.
You know, I mean, it would really serve them right if people elected Donald Trump just to push him in their face.
I mean, I would almost do it, just to see them like, you know, cringe as they do it, because they're so unfair.
They're so one-sided.
Anyway, this is a victory, of course, for Hillary, because if she can make the election about what a psycho Donald Trump is, and he is a psycho, then she wins.
If she makes the election about what a, if the election becomes about Obama's record, her record, her lying, her dishonesty, her corruption, then who knows?
Who knows which way it goes?
But the really interesting thing was Obama, smelling blood, you know, because these guys now have got it, they're on it, he made one of his rare political mistakes yesterday.
And the thing about Obama, you know, it's not that Obama's a political genius, it's just easy not to make mistakes when the press corps essentially lives in your lower intestine.
You know, when Scott Pelly's head is so far up Barack Obama's backside that he can actually see out of his mouth, it's hard to make mistakes.
You know, how do you make mistakes when the press is covering up for you, essentially?
But yesterday, I felt he made a mistake.
He was at a presser with the prime minister of Singapore, and a reporter asks him, throws him one of these easy questions.
Do you think Donald Trump is unfit to be president?
Remember, this is a president.
He's not running for office again.
He's not part of this election.
Total classless reply from Obama, but that's not why it was a mistake.
Let's listen first to Obama, what Obama said about this.
I think the Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president.
I said so last week, and he keeps on proving it.
The notion that he would attack a gold star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country.
The fact that he doesn't appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, means that he's woefully unprepared to do this job.
Now, this is very uncommon for a president who is not running for re-election to attack, to really mix it up in politics.
I mean, it's one thing for him to say, I support our candidate and all this stuff, but to really go after this guy like this.
So Obama really smells blood.
He really thinks he's got this guy, you know, and it's like he's really going after him.
And he goes after the party as well.
Play the second cut.
This is not just my opinion.
I think what's been interesting is the repeated denunciations of his statements by leading Republicans, including the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader and prominent Republicans like John McCain.
And the question I think that they have to ask themselves is, if you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?
What does this say about your party that this is your standard bearer?
See, now, just to remind you, this is the president who personally, he personally did this, used the Internal Revenue Service in a scandal that would be far worse than Richard Nixon if anybody covered it.
You know, you should read the intimidation game by Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal.
She lays it out how Obama and Lois Lerner and the IRS and the Justice Department politicized our core law, our core law enforcement agency and our core tax collection agency, which is obviously the most powerful agency in the country, to intimidate the Tea Party and shut up, silence the Democrats, to silence them.
And he did it knowingly, and then he lied about it, and he said there was not a smidgen of corruption, and everybody gave him a pass on that.
They're still doing it.
They're still doing it right now.
Those Tea Party guys who didn't get tax exemption so they could participate in elections, they still haven't received it.
It's still going on, and it's in absolute silence, totally non-cover.
So this guy says to me, you know, yeah, I've silenced you.
I've stepped on your throat.
I've used the Justice Department and the IRS to silence you.
Now, let me tell you what you should do to be a moral person.
You know, what's the response to that?
I can't say it because this is a family show.
I can't say what the only response to that is.
But it's quick, it's brief.
And, you know, I think everybody, and this also is a party, by the way, where John McCain and Paul Ryan, they've said that, you know, Trump said the wrong thing.
This is a party where there are principled people trying to find their way with this wild man as their candidate.
Whereas the Democrats, there's no division there.
There's nobody who's saying, yeah, I don't think Hillary Clinton should lie all the time.
I don't think she should sell our resources to Russia.
I don't think she should sell the government to government services for cash.
Maybe she shouldn't do that.
There's no Democrat saying that.
There's nobody saying it's all about Trump and he's got a big mouth and all this stuff.
The reason this is a mistake, though, it's not just a mistake for that.
So the reason it's a mistake is because it draws the attention back to Obama, and he's a failure.
Everything he's done has failed.
And, you know, he's only walking on water because the press is bee-stung, is snakebit by the color of his skin.
A. He's the first black president, so he's got to be a genius.
He's got to be the savior.
And, of course, they agree with his basic socialism and his basic socialistic policy, so they're protecting him.
But this gives Trump a chance to actually do what Trump should be doing: to respond.
He was on the O'Reilly show, and this is his response.
I think he's the worst president maybe in the history of our country.
I think he's been a disaster.
He's been weak.
He's been ineffective.
You look at this so-called recovery.
It's setting record lows.
It's, I guess, not since 1949 has there been anything like it.
You look at home ownership.
Look at what happened as an example.
He talks about Ukraine.
I believe I know far more about foreign policy than he knows.
Look at Ukraine.
He talks about Ukraine.
Well, you know, how tough he is, right?
How tough he is with Russia.
In the meantime, they took over Crimea.
And I understood that.
And most papers covered what I said accurately.
Some didn't because the press is so dishonest.
But Crimea, I mean, the Russians took it over under Obama's very powerful leadership.
And, you know, he talks about me with Russia.
Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing, frankly, if we actually got along with Russia and worked out some kind of a deal where we go in and knock the hell out of ISIS along with NATO and along with countries that are in the area?
Wouldn't that be wonderful as opposed to fighting?
But Crimea was taken over.
And you know this better than anybody because you were covering it a couple of years ago.
It was taken over during Obama's regime, big tough president.
This is the kind of thing that Obama never hears.
And he needs to, you know, he issued, Trump issued a statement that was great.
Here's what it said: Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya, and Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi.
Then they put Iran on the path to nuclear weapons.
Then they allowed dozens of veterans to die waiting for medical care that never came.
Hillary Clinton put the whole country at risk with her illegal email server, deleted evidence of her crime, and lied repeatedly about her conduct, which endangered us all.
They released criminal aliens into our country who killed one innocent American after another and have repeatedly admitted migrants later implicated in terrorism.
They have produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression.
They have shipped millions of our best jobs overseas to appease their global special interests.
They have betrayed our security and our workers, and Hillary Clinton has proven herself unfit to serve in any government office.
That's all true.
What is he talking about, Conflict?
You know what else he was talking about yesterday?
He told the Wall Street Journal reporter he's not going to endorse Paul Ryan and John McCain because John McCain and Paul Ryan have criticized him.
So he used Paul, he threw Paul Ryan's words back at him.
You know, I'm not quite there yet, whatever Ryan said.
He said it back to him.
You know, this is what he does.
He had this.
Any Republican probably had this if he would say what he just said in that statement.
Obama made the mistake of allowing him to do that.
But of course, Trump has no capability to stick to the program and do what he has to do.
I have to say goodbye to Facebook.
Come on over to The Daily Wire and hear the mailbag.
Whoa.
I feel like I should charge over a hill or something like that.
So Trump, you know, so Trump can't do what he has to do because he's a psycho.
However, one of the things that was on the news did crack me up, and I will tell you why, and it will ease us into the next conversation we're going to have, is Trump had this thing with the baby.
I'm sure most of you have heard this, where the baby started crying during his speech.
So just play the way.
First, he says it's okay, and then not so much.
The biggest in the world, a Chinese bank.
Don't worry about that, baby.
I love babies.
I love banks.
I hear that baby crying.
I like.
I like it.
What a baby.
What a beautiful baby.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
The mom's running around like, don't worry about it, you know.
It's young and beautiful and healthy, and that's what we want.
Okay, but look, look.
We have the piggy bank.
They have ripped us to shreds.
Ripped us absolutely to shreds.
Actually, I was only kidding.
You can get the baby out of here.
That's all right.
Don't worry.
I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I'm speaking.
That's okay.
Argument Over Democracy00:09:32
People don't understand.
That's okay.
I love it.
Now, what gets me about this, though, that, of course, was widely reported.
You have to report Trump stepping on a baby.
It's like Shapiro tweeted out, like, you know, in the old days, I would have taken that baby out in a stretcher.
But here's the tweet that I loved.
Here was my favorite tweet of yesterday, all right?
They attack Donald Trump.
They say, add babies to the list of people Donald Trump would kick out of his campaign rallies.
Who do you think sent out that tweet?
Planned Parenthood.
So help me.
You don't just kick them, you should kill them.
You know, rip them to pieces.
That baby should never have been born.
This is the thing.
This is the thing I want to talk about because after this election is over, no matter which disaster we're facing, we still have this culture, this insane left-wing culture that thinks, that really does think it's worse to tell a mom to take a crying baby out of a speech, which, by the way, I have some sympathy for.
And who wants to hear a baby crying during a speech?
It thinks that's worse than killing the baby.
You know what I mean?
It's like as long as it's giving you freedom.
You know, there was another thing that I've been wanting and wanting to get to all week.
This coalition of Black Lives Matter organizations put out their demands, their six demands.
Let me read you just a few of them.
We demand an end to the war against black people.
Since this country's inception, there have been named and unnamed wars in our communities.
We demand an end to the criminalization, incarceration, and killing of our people.
An immediate end to the criminalization and dehumanization of black youth across all areas of society, including, but not limited to, our nation's justice and education system, social service agencies, and media and pop culture.
So no more arresting these black criminals because they're black, so they don't get, you know, that's going to be great for those neighborhoods.
You know, the majority of people in those neighborhoods are law-abiding people trying to get by, and they're the victims.
They're the victims of the criminals.
Doesn't matter.
We demand reparations for past and continuing harms.
People who have never, you know, they've never been discriminated against by the government, which was the problem.
It wasn't the problem that individuals discriminate against everybody, but the problem was that the government was actually discriminating against black people.
These people never have experienced that.
They want to be paid back for history.
They want us to make history right.
That's not the way it works.
If that could be done, I would do it, but it's not going to work.
You know, this is the thing.
Our culture is so polluted with this stuff.
And it's not going to come back together.
It's we who are going to have to do it individually.
And we should be fighting so much more locally for power, for our representatives, for our senators, and all this stuff, because whatever happens at the presidential level at this point, it's going to be bad news, you know.
So this is the culture we're going to be fighting, and that's why I talk so much about the culture.
All right, let's do the mailbag.
Let's get to the mailbag.
All right, we're going to start with Mathias, Mathias, who says, I'm just looking, I'm looking at Mathis here.
I just want to, you know, are you sending me questions?
I'll know if there's like, you stupid son.
I'll know it, y'all recognizes you.
All right, your show is awesome and I can't wait to read your new book.
I appreciate it.
I have been seeing a lot of these sappy unity posts on social media lately, the kind that call for us to come together and such, and I can't help thinking what a crock.
The people calling for unity are usually the first to throw the ism accusation, so I'm curious to hear if you think we are too divided to come together again, or is there still hope?
Unity is a crock.
There is no question about it.
This is a democracy.
We disagree.
That's the way it works.
You disagree, you fight, you compromise, you get places.
I do think we have this incredible deadlock that has come from the poisonous relationship of our media to our politics.
I mean, I think that that's what's causing it.
Some of this is on the right, too, by the way.
I think there is extremism.
It's easy to sit behind a keyboard, easy to sit behind a microphone and tell people that every single principle has to be 100% pure and anybody who compromises on anything is a traitor.
It's so easy to do that.
We do that on the right.
On the left, they never have to make an argument because nobody criticizes them.
They're surrounded in cotton candy.
The media tells them they're fine, that Hollywood tells them they're fine.
And when somebody disagrees with them, they start screaming like a stuck pig because they think they've been offended.
Oh, you offended me by saying I was wrong.
That's the way democracy works.
Healthy argument, vigorous argument, a little bit of name-calling.
Every democracy has some name-calling, all this stuff.
That would be a healthy thing.
It's not the unity we're looking for.
And it's not civility we're looking for either, by the way, because civility means that Rush Limbaugh should shut up.
Civility never means that Barack Obama shouldn't call us terrorists as he did.
That's not uncivil.
It's only uncivil when the right does it.
So civility is ridiculous.
Unity is ridiculous.
But compromise and process are part of the system.
And that's the kind of thing that we get away from when you have a media that is totally one-sided and a reactive right-wing media because we have reacted to the left.
They've driven us insane, as we see from the fact that we've nominated Donald Trump as our presidential candidate.
All right, from George, you mentioned a few months ago that you were working with an artist on a graphic novel.
Is that still happening?
If so, can you reveal any information?
And do you have any new novels in the pipeline?
Yes, it's still happening.
The graphic novel is coming out.
I'm not sure when, you know, I actually have to ask them that.
It's called Jenny and the Darkness, and it's about a fearless female prosecutor and a hitman who has a conversion experience.
And basically, he's the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried because he buried them.
And now suddenly he's on the run because he doesn't want to do it anymore.
And he and this woman team up.
So it's called Jenny in the Darkness.
And I'll let you know when I know more about it.
Do I have any new novels in the pipeline?
No, I don't.
Really, for the first time.
I took some time off from writing novels.
I have just this, well, really last week, started to prepare a new novel.
So hopefully I'll have it done by the end sometime next year and then it'll come out.
All right, from Frank, given your interest in philosophy and art, have you encountered the works of Francis Schaefer?
And if so, what are your views on his work?
I would also like to thank you for your work.
As a black conservative, there are really no media outlets that are tolerable for me.
I don't blame you.
The liberals are using my people as their political slaves, and they love it.
And a general majority of the conservative media does not seem to have interest in the black conservative American due to most blacks being default Democrats.
Your podcast is my safe space, but all jokes aside, you're doing a great job, brother.
Thank you, Frank.
I really appreciate hearing that.
That's a good thing to hear.
Francis Schaefer, I read his book two years ago, The God Who Is There, and I'm being just bluntly honest when I tell you I can't remember that much about it.
I think his argument was, I remember kind of enjoying it, but it didn't make a big impression on me.
But I remember his argument.
He does have an argument about the fact that reality remains the same whether you believe in God or not, as I recall, which is one of the things I love to talk about, the fact that reality, this is the thing I think Christians get wrong.
Reality, as we know it, doesn't change simply because you have faith.
It's still the same.
There's an old story about two men in a jungle, and they stumble on a well-kept garden.
And one of them says, obviously, somebody tended this garden.
And the other one says, no, it's just an accident.
And the point is, the garden is there for both of them.
The jungle is there for both of them.
It's all a question of interpretation and which one makes more sense.
As for the issue of black conservatism, it is a real problem.
Obviously, there's no problem on the left because they're in the catbird seat.
They've got like 90% of the black vote.
They don't do anything for black people.
Every city where black people are suffering most is not just a Democrat-run city.
It hasn't seen a Republican in 50 years.
Detroit, Chicago, all these cities where black people die, where black people suffer, where black people are stuck in poverty.
They're all run by Democrats.
And in fact, there is a movement of blacks to Republican cities where there are jobs.
All the middle-class blacks have left San Francisco, for instance.
And you're absolutely right.
Conservatives have not got the guts to walk into these neighborhoods, to walk into black churches, to walk into black organizations and tell the truth.
Not, you know, oh, Black Lives Matter have a point, but police lives matters too.
Black Lives Matter have no point.
They're wrong.
Their statistics are wrong.
Their point of view is wrong.
Everything they say is untrue.
Who is going to have the courage to bell that cat, to walk in and do these things?
The minute they do, they will start to slowly, slowly garner some of the black vote back, and then there'll be hope.
You know, then there'll be hope because once the Democrats lose this solid block, they will be destroyed unless they open the gates of the country and let all the Mexicans in.
And they'll only have them for a generation because they'll catch on too.
All right.
Yeah, I'll do one more.
I'll do one more, except I lost it.
There it is.
From Kemi.
It would be great if you could put the things I like in the description so your fans can read, watch, experience your recommendations, love your work.
Lindsay is working on this.
Unbeknownst to me, she wrote me a note saying she is actually putting together a catalog of stuff I like, which is great because I'm always afraid of repeating it, you know, because I forget myself.
I didn't keep a list, you know.
Good Stuff Catalog00:06:18
There's only so much stuff I like after all.
So that is on the way.
All right, we're going to move on.
We'll come back to the mailbag next week.
So peel off your eight bucks and start talking and start sending us questions.
Stuff I like.
We've been talking about the culture and the way in which sometimes good art sells bad stuff and how to interpret it and how to deal with it.
Because if you're constantly condemning art for too much sex, too much violence, you make yourself irrelevant.
You say like, oh, I only want to watch the things I enjoy.
Fine, I get that.
But art and the culture have a huge effect.
I mean, this is the famous Andrew Breitbart line that politics is downstream from culture.
By the time people are voting, the election is already decided.
Because we were talking before about, oh, Donald Trump said something nasty about a baby.
It says planned parenthood who kills like a billion babies every 20 minutes.
That's the culture.
That is the culture.
Black people, you see them on TTV with this self-righteousness.
You've got to stop arresting black people so more of us can be killed because we need more dead money.
It's like insane.
And the fact is, they have all the means of producing culture and we have got to take it back.
And you can't just take it back by cranking all the time.
You have to start making stuff.
You have to start making good stuff.
And you have to start going to the good stuff that gets made.
And that good stuff is not PGG-rated stuff that tells you everything is fine if you believe in Jesus because that's not true.
Everything's not fine, even if you believe in Jesus.
I'm sorry, but that's not the way life works.
So it's a good thing to talk about how culture gets made and why it is some of this stuff that looks like it sells something bad might actually be selling something beautiful and good.
So today we were talking about tough guy stuff yesterday, and I want to talk about a film called Body Heat.
Body Heat is 1981, Lawrence Kasden, who went on to make what's the film about the generation, Big Chill, I think.
So Lawrence Kasden directed and wrote it.
William Hurt stars as a lawyer, and Kathleen Turner is this rich wife, and they have an affair, and it leads, of course, to all kinds of mayhem.
And it's based on—let's take a look at William Hurt picking up Kathleen Turner in Body Heat.
You can stand here with me if you want, but you'll have to agree not to talk about the heat.
I'm a married woman.
Meaning what?
Meaning I'm not looking for company.
You should have said I'm a happily married woman.
That's my business.
What?
How happy I am.
And how happy is that?
You're not too smart, are you?
I like that in a man.
What else do you like?
Lazy, ugly, horny?
I got them all.
You don't look lazy.
Tell me, does chat like this work with most women?
Some, if they haven't been around much.
I wondered.
Thought maybe I was out of touch.
I buy you a drink.
I told you, I've got a husband.
I'll buy him one, too.
He's out of town.
My favorite kind.
We'll drink to him.
Only comes up on weekends.
I'm liking him better all the time.
It's good stuff, good dialogue, very sexy.
A lot of big sex scenes that made a big splash in 1981 when it came out.
It's from a strain.
We were talking about the invention of the tough guy, Tough Guy American Fiction, which was like jazz, one of the great American art forms, and how it was an attempt to form, to deal with the fact that the social structure of the West had collapsed during World War I, that World War I had basically put the West in disrepute.
And so you had Dashel Hammett trying to create an existential detective who did the right things for existential reasons.
You had Raymond Chandler trying to recreate the chivalrous detective who did the right thing because he held the ideal of chivalry inside him.
But the third strain of this was James M. Kane, who basically was a nihilist.
He basically said people have the hots for each other, then they kill each other, then they become afraid of each other, and the fear turns love to hate.
That was his great line.
One drop of fear turns love to hate.
And I've before, in Stuff I Like, had talked about one of the great American novels by James M. Kaine, which is The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Gotta read it.
It's just a terrific novel, takes about 20 minutes to read.
Body Heat is simply really a remake almost of that.
It's just a redoing of it.
It's in that genre of The Postman Always Rings Twice.
The movie's not bad either, the original movie, not the Jack Nicholson one, the old one with Garfield in it.
It was a description of a world in which all the standards had collapsed, and there was nothing left but desire and greed.
Nothing left but desire and greed.
And it was essentially telling you that this was all there is now because Christ is gone, the West is gone, the standards are gone, there is nothing left but desire and greed.
And it was a beautiful description in a way.
And yes, is it titillating?
You bet it is.
Is it exciting?
Yes.
The murder scene in The Postman Always Rings Twice is one of the hottest scenes ever written.
It is a scene that when I was a little kid, I think I started out, I went through puberty simply by reading that scene.
I think I started reading it before I was in puberty.
When I finished reading that scene, I had actually gone through puberty just from that scene.
It's a spectacular, spectacular thing because sex becomes, again, a metaphor for passion, a metaphor for love sometimes.
You know, Alfred Hitchcock said, you should never, there are two things you should never show in a movie.
You should never show people praying and you should never show them having sex.
And the reason is when you show those things, they become empty because they're completely internal experiences.
The experience of sex is not an external experience.
I mean, I always used to tell this.
this story, an absolutely true story.
When I lived in New York, I lived on a narrow street.
I could see through the window across the street, and this young couple moved in and started having sex in front of the open window across the street.
It was like riveting.
I mean, first of all, they were absolutely gorgeous.
And I would sit there and I said to my wife, look at what these people are doing.
It's obscene.
And my wife said, we do all those things.
And I thought, oh, yeah, because when you're doing it internally, it matters.
It means something.
It's the inner life that matters, not the outer life.
Metaphors Become Reality00:00:48
And that's the problem with the movies.
That's why a culture that is based on visual art becomes stupid, where a culture that's based on writing becomes wise.
That really is the difference between England and us.
We're a visual culture.
And a culture becomes stupid because the metaphors become reality.
We start to believe that sex is the important thing, not the internal experience.
And that's one of the lies of the movies.
And the only way to counteract that is to criticize it, to speak about it, not to attack it, not to say, take that sex thing out, but to simply explain it, that it's a metaphor.
It's something they're telling you something.
It's what the movie is about, not what you're seeing necessarily directly on screen.
All right, we'll talk more about this.
Oh, I have some good news about the Clavenless weekend coming up.