Premium Episode 132: White Squall (Movie Night) Sample
The origin of "Where We Go One We Go All" — the main slogan of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement — is this 1996 Ridley Scott film. It portrays Jeff Bridges leading a band of beautiful boys on a pirate ship through Cuban waters, and, for some of them, to their deaths. Join us for the ultimate QAnon movie night and brave the White Squall.
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Episode music by Pontus Berghe
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 132 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the White Squall movie night episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokotansky, Liv Agar, Finally, it is here.
The movie night for White Squall, which is the actual source of the Where We Go 1 slogan, which you'll find out more about in a little bit, but is also one of the finest assortments of young men striving together under a watchful Jeff Bridges, his wife, some sort of anti-communist Cuban cook, and… And a guy who only speaks ancient Greek and is essentially just there to be the chorus, yelling along with the boys to remind them that they're not just a bunch of rich kids dying, they're actually on an epic quest across the sea and that they might even end up, if they're lucky, on the Isle of Lesbos.
So, before jumping into this masterpiece by Ridley Scott, by the way, a man who did make Alien, and Prometheus, which I liked a lot, and Raised by Wolves, which is a pretty cool series, and Blade Runner, That is true and Blade Runner.
But this is, I think, his 1996... I don't know.
It's like a pocket in time.
I feel like this is like the zone.
You enter this movie and the rules of physics change.
It's a disorienting experience.
I can't wait to jump into it.
I am actually doubtful that Jake will stand behind this movie as he has in the past with all the other crummy movies we watch.
So, we'll see.
Yeah, this is a movie that I feel nothing about.
I had a very busy weekend and so I began my journey of watching White Squall for the very first time, I had never seen it, at approximately 11.30 p.m.
last night.
Over the course of two hours, I went from hating the movie to loving it, to feeling indifferent about it, to feeling confused by it.
And really, this probably is the sloppiest Movie Night episode that I have ever prepared.
You know, so join us and let's dive in.
For those who like it sloppy, this is your episode.
You're getting repped hard in this episode.
I've only been on, this is my second movie night, but I gotta say I enjoyed this movie more than my first movie night.
I enjoyed this movie more than Signs.
Me too.
Yeah, I don't know if that's a hot take.
I don't know how you're feeling about that, Jake.
I, you know, I think I'm just more...
I'm more naturally interested in a takeover by a race of water-hating aliens than I am about a group of attractive young men going into the water on an old boat.
Perhaps the subject matter is less appealing to me, and that's why I'm a little bit more sort of blasé about the film.
Let's see where we get to by the end of the episode.
The audience for this movie was just like ancient Greek men.
You sort of mentioned this with the chorus part.
It's a bunch of boys hanging out in a ship by themselves.
Honestly, a proclivity for boys and their beautiful bodies would almost make this movie a masterpiece.
Never has there been a film that is less pilled, has less to do with QAnon or politics at large, than the 1996 film White Squall, directed by Ridley Scott.
I will make the exact opposite argument shortly.
The film is based on a real-life story of the Brigantine Albatross and is essentially about
a group of handsome young boys living aboard a working pirate ship with a stoic captain
played by Jeff Bridges and his insane wife.
Having just watched the film for the first time only minutes ago,
I have no idea what to make of it and shake my head trying to figure out how it became a war cry
to believers in an insane conspiracy theory that Democrats drink the blood of children.
To make matters worse, the scene referenced by many QAnon believers, where the entire crew is chanting their favorite phrase, isn't even in the final film.
No, it exists only in the trailer, and so help me God, this really doesn't get any better from here.
I will do my very best to draw vague, forced allusions to the QAnon movement, but I'll admit right up front, for me, it's going to be a stretch.
It's not a movie that is pilled.
It's a movie that mirrors their movement in its actual construction and in its failures.
Yeah.
I would agree with that.
I am personally, you know, as a screenwriter myself, from a plot and content perspective, I think we will get into later how the meta of the film is a weird foil for QAnon.
I mean, these are boys LARPing as pirates.
They're joining an idiotic man who's choosing an antiquated ship on purpose.
He's basically trying to recreate the drowning of young boys.
And he's just been doing this his whole life, his career.
Just a path of dead boys.
And I do like sick fuck Jeff Bridges because he's so likable in it that there's a good argument for him as a great psychopath in this movie.
Which is perfect given that Jeff Bridges is Donald Trump.
Yes.
In terms of the allegory between the Q movement and this ship of boys.
Absolutely.
Ship of boys should have been the name of this movie.
Ship of boys.
Barrel of boys.
Wet, glistening boys.
Like, when it capsizes, Geoffrey, I just should have been like, help!
My ship of boys is falling apart!
I've abandoned my ship of boys!
They should also remake this movie into a reality show where the boys go out and vibe for each other's love and respect as men, obviously nothing homosexual, but they get tossed overboard like every day.
People vote one off.
Um, so like I was saying, it was released by Buena Vista Pictures, which is a smaller company within the Walt Disney Motion Picture Company.
This is technically a Disney movie.
It was also produced by Hollywood Pictures, which is in the Disney family.
It's also worth mentioning that was produced by Scott Free, the Ridley Scott's production company, spelled Scott with two Ts.
And one time in a tweet in 2018, Trump tweeted Scott Free misspelling it with two Ts, and a lot of QAnon people thought this was a reference to this movie that Trump was secretly making.
That's right.
Amazing.
Goddamn.
Layers.
In many ways, Trump is the xenomorph bursting out of the stomach of America.
So, yeah.
It's one of those rare Disney films that has a pretty fair PG-13 rating for implied sexual scenes as well as some legitimate at-sea horror.
The movie cost $38 million to make and brought in a mere $10.3 million at the box office.
Critics were pretty middle-of-the-road on it, criticizing its on-the-nose dialogue but praising Ridley's cinematography and action sequences.
I will not bore you too much with what I read on Wikipedia, but the Albatross was an actual ship that did sink at the beginning of May in 1961.
There was a group of students on board and there were casualties.
The ship had been built in 1920 as a pilot boat and was put to work in the North Seas before it was purchased by the Germans in 1937 and served as a radio station for communications with submarines during World War II.
After that, it was purchased by a Dutch royal to use as a training ship, and again changed hands in 1954 to become a Hollywood vessel used in films like Twilight for the Gods, which starred Rock Hudson.
Shortly thereafter, in 1959, the ship's last captain, Christopher Sheldon, portrayed in the film by Jeff Bridges, bought it so that he could operate what he called the Ocean Academy.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Sea Org!
Yeah, so this is an insane-sounding program for teenage boys that sort of combined college preparatory courses along with an at-sea ropes course where the boys built character by learning how to sail a 40-year-old pirate ship.
Just the dumbest fucking idea.
This is why it's so perfect is because yes, it's a LARP.
They're fucking floating an old pirate ship for no reason other than it's gonna be hard on the boys.
*laughter* I was wondering, I don't know if you're talking about this,
but is there actually a trial of the ship captain in real life?
Yes.
Okay, excellent.
There was a trial, yes, to whether he was responsible for the deaths of the boys.
Which lady?
The boys!
Yeah, he was.
Oh, he did.
Yeah, but the parents are just as responsible.
The parents are like, oh, what's that?
Some fucking weird professor's doing like a child molesting adventure on the high sea in a pirate boat?
Yeah, that'll teach this wimp or this kid who's been like burning cats, you know, in the backyard.
That'll teach him how to shape up.
So this is where our story begins.
Per usual, I will be breaking down the movie using a handful of select scenes, and because it's Ridley Scott, not being overly critical or rude.
I'll take that.
I guess the more I write, I'm sort of deciding that I did kind of enjoy the film.
The dialogue is pretty straightforward and sometimes cheesy, but you've got a talented young cast featuring future movie stars like Scott Wolf, Party of Five, Ryan Felipe, Cruel Intentions, Ethan Embry from Can't Hardly Wait and Jeremy Sisto from Clueless.
So 90s stars, I guess.
And a very solid performance from Jeff Bridges, who just looks very cool in the movie.
He's got a great haircut.
His hair looks very thick.
I think they just couldn't, like, choose a look for him.
Like, the first look, he's almost like a young-cut Jeff Lebowski.
And then, he's like, but actually, like, his actual personality, if you kind of go beyond what the film is trying to represent, he wants to take these boys in the middle of nowhere, out on the ocean, and he gets to be, like, their army instructor in whatever way he pleases.
And also, they're all drinking booze.
His wife is there.
He can't even, like, not get laid for a trip.
Like, this guy, he rocks.
I mean, he brought a cook.
Very smart.
I also would like to say the movie is very cigarette-friendly, especially for a Disney film, and just about every scene features teenagers chain-smoking, which I quite liked.
I mean, yeah, it was a quite edgy edition, I thought.
I mean, it was, I suppose, as accurate to early 60s.
Yeah.
The story begins with the film's narrator, Charles Geig, played by Scott Wolf, who also happens to be the survivor whose book the film is based on.
He has a very lame father who visibly disapproves of his desire to spend nearly a year at sea training for the SATs.
His mother is supportive, but is completely overshadowed by the 1960s, you know, square dad.
He wants his son to go to an Ivy League school like his brother, but that's just not for Chuck.
He wants to carve his own path, make his own way, and spending a year on a rickety old pirate ship with a bunch of smokers with loads of baggage is exactly where he wants to be.
Yeah, think about the kid who dreamt of basically submitting to this tyranny.
I can understand the kid who flipped out and fucking shot the dolphin more emotionally.
I would have hated this.
People don't actually understand the desire to just break out, to just do something that's hard and dangerous and exciting and new and weird and exotic.
But do you just not understand that it's also just a LARP and if everybody ends up dead, like, was it worth it?
Everything's a fucking LARP.
Oh my god, he agrees with this movie!
Going to college is a fucking LARP, alright?
He agrees with the morality of this movie.
This is going to be fascinating.
Might as well LARP something exciting.
You know what?
You become what you LARP, so you might as well LARP something fun.
It's not fun to be under the iron fist of some psycho out on the sea who keeps saying, I'm gonna fist fight you or fucking climb the ladder and then the kid pisses himself.
That's not...
How is that cool?
But that's fun for a certain group of people, especially people who are like you.
Jason, you want to submit to Daddy Jeff, what is it, Jeff Bridges?
The bored children of people who are inextricably in just a giant network of cruelty and abuse.
And they're like, man, I just want this, but like not from my dad.
And if it could be in a pirate ship, awesome.
That's it.
Even better.
And they're rightfully trying to just get pussy the whole time.
So that sounds cool.
The way you describe it, you're trying to make it sound bad.
You're selling it better than I am.
No, I think that's, I'm saying that's a natural reaction to being stuck with a psychotic captain is trying to have sex with every Cuban and or vaguely Nordic girl that you come across on the adventure.
But they were Dutch.
But the way the Dutch, but they were Dutch.
But then at the end, she says, I'm from Denmark.
So really consistent.
Awesome.
Cool.
Well, there was no subtitles, so me, a single-language person, lost the context there.
It might have been a joke, and Americans don't know the difference, but it also might have been an inconsistency.
I'd have to re-watch.
So, Chuck's parents drop him off at the train station, and his adventure begins.
Before long, he meets up with the other group of young rapscallions as they board the Albatross for the first time.
They're shown around by a very short boy, the ship's first mate, who himself is only 15 years old.
They meet the cook, and one of their teachers, a cigar chomping Robin Williams wannabe, who speaks almost exclusively in old Shakespeare lines and wailing hymns.
Also on board the ship is Dr. Alice Sheldon, who is Jeff Bridges' wife.
She's one of the ship's teachers, as well as the onboard doctor.
Initially, the skipper is nowhere to be found.
The guys are given their first test, to jump off the boat to prove that they can swim.
All the alphas are flexing as the boys try to establish dominance amongst themselves, when out of nowhere, Jeff Bridges appears with some old sea wisdom and our first mention of the now infamous catchphrase.
You know what's out there?
Wind and rain and some damn big waves.
Reefs and rocks and sandbars.
And enough fog and night to hide it all.
So why the hell do it then?
Builds character, Mr. Preston.
Of which you are in desperately short supply.
The kind you only find on mountaintops, deserts or battlefields.
And across oceans.
Nice dive, Preston.
If we don't have order, we have nothing.
Where we go one, we go all.
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