Roman Bernard joins Richard to discuss Christopher Nolan’s archeo-futurist space epic, Interstellar. Does the modern world have to collapse for man to reach the stars? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
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| Roman, welcome back to the podcast. | |
| How are you? | |
| Hi, Richard. | |
| Fine, and you? | |
| Good. | |
| I'm doing quite well. | |
| It is very cold out here in the Pacific Northwest. | |
| How is the weather in Paris? | |
| Actually, you know, we are close to the British Channel, so the climate is quite oceanic, and winters are not that cold in Paris. | |
| Well, that is nice. | |
| So it's maybe 10 degrees Celsius. | |
| I don't know in your scale what it is, but it's nice. | |
| I don't know what that is in non-communist measurement units, but it's probably somewhat chilly. | |
| We should stop talking about the Earth and weather and things mundane, because we were meant to leave this Earth. | |
| So let's begin a discussion. | |
| About Interstellar, which is the film recently released, directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and others. | |
| Let's just jump into it. | |
| And I would say this before we begin. | |
| First off, I think this podcast is really a sketch, because I think there is a... | |
| There's a great deal involved with this movie. | |
| I think Christopher Nolan is raising many very important themes, and he's also raising a lot of issues that relate back to other classics of science fiction. | |
| I mean, you said in your review, Ramon, that... | |
| This is a remake of 2001. | |
| And maybe that's a little bit of a stretch, but I think actually it's right. | |
| It is a kind of remake in the sense that almost every science fiction movie is a remake of 2001 because you can't escape it. | |
| It's so iconic. | |
| It's everywhere. | |
| And also, I think he's raising some other important philosophical issues and some interesting scientific issues, including relativity and other things. | |
| And so I think this is a good start. | |
| I think we might need to revisit Interstellar later on. | |
| And I'd also say that if you haven't actually seen Interstellar and you're listening to this podcast, then all I could say is, why? | |
| We'll definitely spoil things. | |
| The movie is well worth seeing. | |
| So I would go out and watch it and then come back. | |
| Listen to Romana and I talk about it. | |
| So why don't we... | |
| I think a good place to start with this is in the apocalyptic nature of the film. | |
| And let me set this up a little bit, and then I'll let you talk. | |
| I mentioned 2001 before. | |
| 2001, you could say, is a... | |
| You could say that it is a propaganda film for the space age. | |
| And I think you could actually say that very literally. | |
| Actually, in one of the final cuts, not the final cut of the film, it actually included interviews with NASA scientists, and it was almost a presentation of, this is the great new world we're going to live in with NASA. | |
| Now, obviously, there are a lot of different aspects of the film, and in many ways, Kubrick paints a very... | |
| A dark picture of a society. | |
| But I would say that the society presented in 2001, at least the glimpses we get of it, is of a global scientific socialism society. | |
| And it is one that is capable of marvels. | |
| It's one for which space travel and exploring the universe is something just simply taken for granted. | |
| It's one where probably the USSR and the US are kind of interchangeable societies. | |
| They're certainly collaborating. | |
| But it's also a darker society. | |
| There's a society of lies and a society of bureaucracy and things like that. | |
| But 2001 paints a picture of a very positive picture of the world in 2001. | |
| Seeing that movie in 1968... | |
| It was a sense that we are going to accomplish miracles in 2001. | |
| We are going to be doing these things that we can't even imagine today. | |
| Let's fast forward to Interstellar. | |
| The world it presents is dramatically different. | |
| The world it presents is something like the 1930s Depression-era Dust Bowl, where society is regressing. | |
| As you mentioned in your article, Ramal, the world ends with a whimper and not a bang. | |
| It's not really a Mad Max scenario, and it's not a World War III, everyone's dead scenario. | |
| It seems to be just a... | |
| The world just has been getting worse for decades now. | |
| We can't do anything. | |
| People are starving. | |
| Farming has become, has reasserted itself as this extremely important, necessary profession. | |
| Farming is something now we take for granted. | |
| So I guess it's always been necessary. | |
| We've gone back in time. | |
| And there was a scene where John Lithgow, who plays... | |
| Matthew McConaughey's father, or does he play his father-in-law? | |
| Father-in-law. | |
| Father-in-law, excuse me. | |
| And Matthew McConaughey's character, Cooper, his wife has passed away due to cancer that could not be cured with modern, you know, MRA machines. | |
| Things like this. | |
| But he's, you know, John Lithgow, he's there and he's saying that, you know, he's remembering back, and you could tell that he's remembering back to, say, circa 2014. | |
| He's saying... | |
| Every day used to be like Christmas. | |
| First it was the iPhone 6, and then it was the iPhone 6 Plus, and then the 7. Basically, he said at one point also, everyone wanted to have it all. | |
| And I think he's getting at this consumerist society. | |
| You know, where we're obsessed with new jobs and getting new gadgets and entertaining ourselves in new ways. | |
| I think that's what he's gesturing. | |
| He's gesturing into our society. | |
| And I think what he's saying, if you conflate these two things, I think what he's saying is we ultimately live in a desert. | |
| And, you know, yes, there's some marvels to our society that are great. | |
| The fact that we can do all this stuff on touchscreens and smartphones. | |
| And that's a lot of fun, but at the end of the day, we're totally impoverished. | |
| So I really think, if you can see where I'm going, I think both Lithgow's memory and what... | |
| What Nolan presents as reality in the future in Interstellar, that's right now. | |
| I think that's a commentary that we live in an age of modern marvels, but it's all about to go away. | |
| We can kind of see that we're living on borrowed time, we're living on debt, and it's going to go away, and at the very least, it's an impoverished society where we no longer have that will or even that ability. | |
| To reach for the stars. | |
| We now think, you know, NASA, you know, as you mentioned, NASA has now abandoned its Faustian ambitions and instead is dedicated to raising the self-esteem of Muslims or fulfilling diversity It's no longer this industry that, you know, and it was an industry to get to the moon. | |
| We didn't just have a NASA program. | |
| We had huge industries all working together in unison for this big goal. | |
| We no longer have that. | |
| We have just one more government department that is concerned with equality and diversity and not superhuman ideals of going beyond ourselves into the unknown. | |
| So anyway, I think, and I've gone on too long, I'll let you talk now, Roma, but I think this is really Nolan's commentary on our modern world. | |
| We might think that it's full of marvels. | |
| And that it's scientific. | |
| But no, it's actually impoverished. | |
| It's actually a desert. | |
| And we're living on borrowed time. | |
| And we are experiencing a kind of collapse. | |
| A collapse of ourselves, of our ideals, of our ambitions. | |
| So what are your thoughts on just this background to the movie Interstellar? | |
| The fact that it took place in a depression? | |
| Well, you mentioned that, you know, And I mentioned it in my review, that Cooper's wife died because her tumor wasn't diagnosed in time. | |
| And what's interesting is that, you know, we live on borrowed time, and so the machines we use, we don't really deserve them in a way. | |
| But, you know, we are also, it's also a cognitive process. | |
| Degeneration. | |
| I mean that all these marvels have been created on the basis of science that were established between the 17th and the 19th century and the first half of the 20s. | |
| But, you know, when you take a generation now... | |
| Even if young people are studying science, I'm not sure we have the brain power not only to invent new things, but to really maintain them. | |
| I don't want to sound too reactionary, but there might be a time when... | |
| Students and researchers and engineers and professors are not gifted enough to maintain all these infrastructures like nuclear power plants. | |
| It's true in Anglo-Saxon countries and it's also true in France and actually many other countries. | |
| I think Russia has... | |
| You know, was a leading country under so-called communism in science, and it's less the case now. | |
| Maybe Germany is resisting, but only in very practical engineering, which is actually what Germans do best today, but before that they were leading researchers. | |
| And if you take... | |
| Really, a generation of engineers and researchers, I don't think we have the same talent as before. | |
| I might be wrong, because I'm not a scientific type, but, you know, it's really general, and also the fact that today scientists are really focused on their field, but they don't see the big picture. | |
| You don't have, like... | |
| You know, in most Western countries, you had in politics and in, you know, the printing press, the press, I mean, you know, publishing newspapers, even in arts, you had people who were trained in, you know, to be physicians or, you know, doctors or... | |
| You know, they had studied science, but then they developed their talents in other fields, and today you don't have that. | |
| Scientists are almost a kind of case, which is very powerful and important, but they don't... | |
| For example, you have many people who are very good at math or physics or biology, but... | |
| They are almost ignorant in other fields. | |
| And I don't think that science can maintain itself if it cuts itself from philosophy or history or literature. | |
| Well, I agree. | |
| I think you can look at this across all fields. | |
| I think that lack of an overriding purpose or a great dream or meaning, I think we have all become, to use a German word, Fock Mensch. | |
| We've become pigeonholed people. | |
| People are very good at a particular specialty, but beyond that, whether they think about anything is questionable. | |
| We shouldn't perhaps dilate on this too much, but I remember seeing this study that showed that the iPhone 5, which came out two years ago, That the computing power within one iPhone 5 is greater than the entire computing power of the world in 1965. | |
| I'll go look this up. | |
| Here they're wrong, but you get the general point. | |
| The ability, the amount of billions of transistors that we're carrying around every day in our smartphone or our watch soon or something like this, it's mind-boggling. | |
| It is really more power than these computers that would exist in a building 50 years ago. | |
| And do we deserve it? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Do we deserve it? | |
| But also, what are we doing? | |
| Think of Silicon Valley. | |
| I don't want to sound like a Luddite. | |
| I kind of hate. | |
| I think that's another thing. | |
| I don't want to sound like that. | |
| I don't want to sound like a reactionary. | |
| I don't want to sound like, oh, we should all go back to the fields and start farming. | |
| I admire a lot of these people. | |
| I think these people are the people who can come up with something or can craft the greatest smartphone. | |
| But at the end of the day, people are using their iPhone 5 or 6. To tweet about what they had for dinner while they're sitting on the toilet. | |
| The problem is more of the massified aspect of it. | |
| Right, that might be true. | |
| And that's how it is. | |
| Silicon Valley is wrong, because you have these people who are geniuses, like Steve Jobs. | |
| It's less the case for Bill Gates, but he's obviously a genius of some sort. | |
| I wouldn't say he's a genius. | |
| I would say he's a very, very, very clever man, but not a creative genius like Steve Jobs. | |
| So these guys are an elite, an intellectual and mental elite, and then they want to bring the fruit of their knowledge to the masses who maybe don't deserve it. | |
| And in Interstellar, to get back to the movie. | |
| We have the result of the massification of technologies. | |
| The problem is not that you have technology, even, you know, technology that is really, that can be bad for the environment, but only if you massify it. | |
| And, you know, the fact that we That the industry is producing cars and planes and computers is not a bad thing in itself. | |
| It's a bad thing when you have a nation, America, it's a little less the case in Europe, but still, with families having two or three cars. | |
| And it's obviously too much. | |
| And in Interstellar, everyone is paying the price for this idea that We could bring everything to everyone, even to idiots. | |
| And of course, there's a dysgenic aspect to it. | |
| And I'm not sure where Nolan stands on eugenics and dysgenics, but people in Interstellar, you know, when they watch a baseball game at the beginning of the movie. | |
| People look really degraded physically and mentally. | |
| And it's also the consequence of the fact that, you know, everything was brought to everyone and natural selection was not only stopped but reverted. | |
| And so you have the NASA types in the movie, in Interstellar, who don't have children or just one child like Professor Brand. | |
| And you have now, in Interstellar, you have more, you know, numerous families among lower classes. | |
| And by lower, I don't mean by the income, but by the quality. | |
| And it's also, it's not the consequence of technology or the industrial revolution, but of the fact that the prevailing ideas were egalitarian. | |
| So I'm repeating myself, but I really want to stress that we have an interest as a consequence of massified technology. | |
| Yeah, and I think Christopher Nolan really is gesturing towards these ideas that we're talking about. | |
| And again, he's gesturing towards them the way that a filmmaker would. | |
| If a filmmaker does not write essays, where every argument is explicit and buttressed with... | |
| A filmmaker gestures towards a feeling or an idea. | |
| And I think that is what he's talking about. | |
| It's interesting when Cooper first discovers NASA, I noticed that there was a kind of almost fairy tale or you could say Spielbergian aspect of this. | |
| He's getting a signal that he thinks might be from somewhere, and then he goes to NASA, and then they're like, oh, I'm glad we're here. | |
| Okay, get ready, we're going to send you into space. | |
| There was something kind of incredible about that, and fairytale-like, but maybe that was kind of fitting with this whole movie. | |
| Isn't it related to The Shine? | |
| I saw it as a reference to Shining, which we talked about maybe a year ago with John Morgan. | |
| Because oftentimes when, you know, the way we see reality through the five senses is, you know, there might be, so there was a movie like Sixth Sense, but Shining is about that too. | |
| Maybe it's just a Sixth Sense that Murph, so Coop's daughter has. | |
| She gets a signal. | |
| I don't want to spoil the movie too much, but we can say that, of course, the signals are coming from her father. | |
| But I know it's not credible, but it's also a supernatural movie, so it doesn't have to be realistic. | |
| I wasn't really disturbed by that. | |
| Where are you? | |
| No, I wasn't disturbed at all. | |
| I've seen some headlines of reviews of Interstellar where nerds are kind of like, well, you know, if a planet were that close to a black hole, then the waves wouldn't be... | |
| I mean, I'm just like, please, shut up. | |
| I mean, it's a film. | |
| It's not, you know... | |
| It's a movie. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| It should be imaginative. | |
| I don't... | |
| I mean, I would... | |
| Gods forbid that... | |
| People start making scientifically accurate science fiction films. | |
| They're going to be awful. | |
| Anyway, yeah, I just think that that is a totally wrong end. | |
| I think you have to see, they are taking real science. | |
| What I've heard is that the calculations that they made for Einsteinian relativity, that is, time is going to be dilated as you're... | |
| Closer to a gravitational force. | |
| I was able to understand this stuff at one point in my life, or I thought I could understand it. | |
| But if you're traveling closer and closer to the speed of light, obviously the speed of light is a constant. | |
| You can't travel. | |
| Theoretically, you can't travel faster than it. | |
| You're going to obviously experience time just like you would here. | |
| On Earth or anywhere. | |
| But your time is going to be... | |
| The time of someone closer to a gravitational body is going to be moving, from your perspective, much more slowly. | |
| And it was kind of interesting. | |
| You could see that there's something about this that Christopher Nolan is interested in. | |
| This kind of almost... | |
| This relativity and things like that. | |
| You see this in Inception where time would have different values at different places and something was happening. | |
| It was like a big watch where all the little parts were kind of moving and one was ticking very slowly, the other was spinning, but they were kind of all working together. | |
| I think there's something about that kind of conception that attracts Christopher Nolan. | |
| He's clearly interested in that. | |
| And Memento. | |
| Oh, yeah, Memento as well. | |
| Yeah, as you mentioned, it was a nonlinear story, but yet it all kind of fit together. | |
| Actually, I would say I don't... | |
| I think Memento is a dissatisfying film for me, but at the same time, you could see the germs of all these ideas that Nolan would develop later within it. | |
| Especially Inception and Interstellar. | |
| It is very interesting in that sense. | |
| I got off on a tangent. | |
| Let me try to climb back to where I was before. | |
| It's interesting that NASA itself is really underground. | |
| They're no longer getting funding. | |
| They're using the older parts. | |
| They're kind of like an underground society. | |
| Maybe if someone... | |
| If someone ever happened upon some of our private conferences... | |
| But it's also due to the fact that the state has almost collapsed. | |
| It's a kind of feudal state. | |
| I'm not saying that feudalism was bad, but in this situation it is. | |
| You have a government that is only actually focused on food production. | |
| But it doesn't really have the means to check everything that's going on. | |
| And actually, NASA is just taking a share of the territory. | |
| And we can imagine that formally it is still the United States, but maybe there are states or parts of states which seceded from the federal government. | |
| The infrastructures don't allow a modern state to function and therefore to check if everyone is paying taxes to the federal government or using the same currency or even the same language. | |
| It's kind of nice to think of it. | |
| I was thinking that huge data center in Ogden, Utah, I believe, where they're just collecting every call you make. | |
| They've got it there. | |
| Every email you send. | |
| But it's kind of fun to imagine that at one point no one even maintains this. | |
| So it's this big, you know, millions of terabytes of hard drive, but no one maintains it. | |
| It's collecting dust. | |
| No one knows how to turn it on anymore. | |
| The basement got flooded, and they lost half the data. | |
| I kind of like this idea. | |
| Actually, you're talking about dust, but it's literally what happens. | |
| You have to clean your house several times a day to avoid it being You know, just to breathe, but also to eat properly and to keep, you know, avoiding some infections you can have in the dust that's coming from the rotting crops. | |
| And so, obviously, in such a situation, you can't have a proper government. | |
| Right. | |
| In the way we think of it, which is, you know, you need efficient institutions and infrastructures, and you can't have it. | |
| So the fact that NASA is just keeping a base, you know, in the middle of nowhere is not really incredible. | |
| It's the way it would happen if, you know, if the government collapsed. | |
| And maybe that's going to happen in the Silicon Valley. | |
| If America goes down, there will be a kind of city-state around the Silicon Valley or something like that. | |
| And the rest of California will become part of a larger, greater Mexico, which means a third world country. | |
| I mean... | |
| Today, of course, it seems far-fetched, but it might happen. | |
| We can't rule this scenario out. | |
| Certainly not. | |
| I just wanted to mention that though the beginning is apocalyptic, there are also maybe good and, from an alt-right point of view, positive developments because Granted, | |
| you don't have institutions and infrastructures that work well, but people are more free, and it allows NASA to try to save mankind, which it couldn't in the present situation, because with the prevailing ideas now, you couldn't have scientists freely using rockets to save... | |
| A certain kind of people. | |
| You couldn't have that. | |
| Or risking their lives. | |
| So in a way, I like Interstellar's world better than ours. | |
| Because at least you can throw rockets in the sky and you don't have to justify that you took all the quotas. | |
| So, okay, there's a black man, but... | |
| It's like in Fight Club, you have blacks and Asians, but it don't really matter, obviously. | |
| And it's always about white people. | |
| And so maybe we need this kind of collapse to be able to throw literally or symbolically rockets to the sky. | |
| Yeah, I agree. | |
| It's both apocalyptic and it's also a way out. | |
| It's a fantasy. | |
| I agree with you that in the current situation, we, in a way, couldn't save mankind. | |
| It would be forbidden by law. | |
| Really? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And also just that we've become such a soft society. | |
| The notion that you would truly risk this much and you would send someone on a mission... | |
| Knowing that in all probability he will not return, he will be evaporated by a black hole, or he'll be launched out into another universe with no chance of coming back. | |
| We just can't do that. | |
| There would be opinion polls that would circulate on Twitter. | |
| TV channels, blogs, Facebook, and people, you would have women crying on TV saying that, how dare you leave your children and your wife? | |
| We would really witness that. | |
| A little like in a British TV series, which is called Black Mirror. | |
| And it's just, I'm going to do it short. | |
| The Princess of England, of course, it's a fiction. | |
| And the Princess of England has been kidnapped by a terrorist who asks the British Prime Minister to sodomize a pig on TV. | |
| Otherwise, he will kill her, of course. | |
| And at first, there are opinion polls and people say that... | |
| Downing Street shouldn't, you know, negotiate with terrorists, let alone accede to their demands. | |
| And then with a few hours of tweeting and Facebooking and TV and radio and other information, there is an opinion shift and most British people are, you know, in favor of... | |
| The Prime Minister is sodomizing this pig. | |
| So, to get back to your point, I'm sure today, if the expedition's mission was to send pioneers to death with the intention to save only a part of mankind, | |
| of course, not only would politicians and You know, the state would be against it, but not only journalists, but also the opinion. | |
| I think people would be against it and actually prefer, you know, that everybody dies instead of trying to save a part of mankind. | |
| They might literally do that, but I think, psychologically speaking, I think it would be slightly different. | |
| I think they would never... | |
| They would never face the reality that unless we do something dramatic, we all will die. | |
| I think in a way, Americans aren't really able to face the reality that their incomes are declining or that we're not going to be able to pay for all this. | |
| I'm not sure the world is ready for the notion that the current status quo is unsustainable. | |
| It has to change. | |
| We might need to do something dramatic to get out of it. | |
| I think even if they were living inside a dust bowl, they would still be talking about the American dream and how they're going to buy a new... | |
| You know, humans are really, we're a rationalizing creature. | |
| We're not a rational creature. | |
| And one of the more powerful things that you talk about is that, you know, the rocket on, or the ship, spaceship on Interstellar, that really was a Mayflower, or it was a Nina and Pinta and Santa Maria. | |
| It was this vessel that people got on. | |
| Knowing that the risks were very high and not knowing exactly where they were headed, but just going. | |
| I mean, it really is like... | |
| For the sake of it. | |
| Or like a pioneer, whether in the discovery of Siberia or the discovery of the New World, Lois and Clark. | |
| These people who set off on journeys not fully knowing how long it would take, not knowing exactly where they were going. | |
| Now that we've kind of seen everything and we travel through airplanes, airports, and we have Google Earth looking down upon us, we forget just this idea of the real frontier, of not knowing where the end is. | |
| And, you know, I think it's maybe... | |
| We can maybe... | |
| Mythologize Christopher Columbus as, you know, oh, he took off into the unknown, but he did. | |
| And I think that's something that, you know, we in this feminized society, this society that wants to be safe, that values security above all. | |
| I think we've really lost that. | |
| And maybe we do need some kind of collapse of this world so that some people will be able to explore. | |
| And not even just to save it, just for the fact that we need to... | |
| That's part of our soul, is this Faustian quest to reach the beyond. | |
| And to die doing it as well. | |
| Columbus, you know, all these expeditions by Portuguese and Spanish and Italian. | |
| He wasn't Spanish, but he was working for the Spanish crown. | |
| You know, it was a consequence of something really bad that happened to the European world, which was the fall of Byzantium. | |
| Because... | |
| As long as there was, of course Byzantium wasn't really a friend of the Western world, and it was largely the Western world's fault, because in the 13th century, actually Byzantium was sacked by the crusaders. | |
| But as long as the Byzantine Empire stood, you could have, you know, Actually be a kind of intermediary between India and China and the Western world for spices and other things. | |
| And then when the Turks took it, what it meant was that the road was blocked and we had to... | |
| So the first routes that were taken were, you know, to... | |
| Actually, sail around Africa, which was very long and very dangerous, because when you had to go take water on the coast, you could die. | |
| So it was a really problematic route to go to India. | |
| And then Columbus decided to go west, which simply is important for us. | |
| From a bad thing, a really bad thing, the fall of Byzantium, actually, as a Western world, managed to achieve its greatest success so far. | |
| And it's also what... | |
| The reason why I mention Columbus and the Mayflower is because in Interstellar, okay, the world is dying and it's... | |
| I'm not taking it lightly, but... | |
| And I wouldn't like, you know, if someone I care about suffers the same, you know, fate than Cooper's wife. | |
| But from this disaster, they are going to do something they would never have done otherwise. | |
| And so the Earth is dying. | |
| That's why they are going to accomplish the greatest progress in human history. | |
| If you take smaller things like, for example, the war in England led many people to escape it and then to found other colonies in America. | |
| And so there was the Mediterranean, which was a Muslim sea, which obliged Europeans to look to the Atlantic. | |
| You have disasters and out of these disasters we are doing something. | |
| But, you know, another case is that the spread of Islam in Europe, but the first spread, so in the 7th and 8th centuries, it's prompted people from Northern Europe to go south and crush them. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And then to regenerate Europe. | |
| And Vikings created kingdoms in Sicily. | |
| They took parts of Spain. | |
| They took parts of France. | |
| And so, again, at first, there was something bad and something good came out of it. | |
| And it would never have happened without this kind of, you know, dialectic challenge again. | |
| Yeah, it's a kind of... | |
| So in interstellar, it's... | |
| In a way, it's a similar situation. | |
| I agree. | |
| I think something is going to have to die for something new to be born. | |
| I think we even know this deep down. | |
| But I think we also have this very strong human tendency, which is totally natural, which is twofold. | |
| One of those is this quest for security. | |
| Security above all else. | |
| And I think that is the ultimate ideal of the last man. | |
| That is the ultimate ideal. | |
| Comfort and security is the ultimate ideal of the post-war West. | |
| And it's fine. | |
| I mean, I benefit from it. | |
| We all benefit from it. | |
| Yeah, but it has to be checked by something else. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And reversely. | |
| You can't... | |
| You know, it's... | |
| Because... | |
| There were good articles or even books written about that, but, you know, the French historian who committed suicide last year, Dominique Venner, said that the Faustian spirit of Europe should be checked by the Apollonian. | |
| But it works both ways, actually. | |
| And the only thing I don't agree about him, but again, I think it's a question of generations, is that I really don't have the feeling that we are living in a Faustian world today. | |
| And I wouldn't like to live in a purely Faustian world because, you know, it would mean, you know, not caring, but people would die in front of you. | |
| Things we don't really like. | |
| Having no sense of home as well. | |
| As well, yeah. | |
| And family. | |
| And so I wouldn't like to live in such a world, but our world is totally anti-Faustian, anti-tragic. | |
| And, you know, when children go to the swimming pool with their schools, they have to, you know... | |
| Undergo a lot of security rules and learn stupid survival techniques. | |
| I'm not kidding. | |
| It's really what I had in the late 80s and early 90s. | |
| And it's even worse now when children are going to visit a place with their school. | |
| There has to be one adult per a few children because, you know, once there was one which was, you know, who died because of a truck. | |
| And, you know, it's a world that is governed by, not directly by women, but by, you know, feminine impulses which are healthy. | |
| If they're not checked, it's just, you know, making us boring, fat, emasculated, and actually not really human. | |
| And so, at least in Interstellar, this aspect is really receding. | |
| You don't see much feminism, except in Nolan's plot, maybe, but that's another debate. | |
| Oh, I know. | |
| I mean, this is another thing. | |
| That we mentioned is that Nolan has often been criticized for this lack of romance or eroticism or heart or soul to his movies. | |
| His movies are very cold and there's really no love in his films. | |
| I mean, there's certainly no love in Memento. | |
| The Batman films, Batman really doesn't, I mean, I guess maybe Catwoman, but they... | |
| They seem to be attracted to one another. | |
| Batman sleeps with Talia, who's using him. | |
| And even the eroticism there is not much of anything. | |
| It's a very interesting thing. | |
| Interstellar. | |
| Excuse me. | |
| Inception. | |
| I don't even know. | |
| Love interest. | |
| He wants to get home to his children, but you never meet them. | |
| So it's, you know... | |
| We don't know. | |
| Yeah, we don't know. | |
| But Interstellar obviously had a lot more emotion. | |
| But I could, just to go back to what you were saying before, it is a non-feminist movie. | |
| I mean, the Jessica Murph, played by Jessica Chaston, she's really... | |
| Very annoying. | |
| Yeah, she's really a man. | |
| And I don't mean that to demean women. | |
| She definitely has a man's soul. | |
| She's fascinated by mathematics, exploration. | |
| She challenges people. | |
| She really is a... | |
| She's Cooper reincarnated. | |
| Anyway, I think this is an interesting thing. | |
| We live in a feminized world, but maybe this does have to give way a little bit so that some of these masculine perspectives can begin to predominate again. | |
| It's happening maybe slower than we would like, but feminism is really in crisis today. | |
| There's a famous video of This Jewish woman walking, showing her boobs in Manhattan and, you know, being, you know, complimented by black guys. | |
| You know, it's... | |
| The Rainbow Coalition is really collapsing. | |
| And it is happening now and it will take time, but... | |
| And feminism as we know it, and I certainly don't mean femininity or womanliness or something like that, but feminism as an ideology is without question an ideology of abundance and security. | |
| It's an ideology for rich people. | |
| This too shall pass. | |
| We just kind of need to get it over with and all of the human resource managers that run the world are going to have to find something else. | |
| Let's start pushing on this Faustian nature. | |
| There are a couple more themes I want to get to before we end this podcast. | |
| But let's kind of put pressure on this. | |
| Talk a little bit about maybe how the Faustian nature and interstellar, in a way it's a challenge to traditionalism. | |
| It's not just a challenge to a feminized society, but it's even a challenge to tradition or what you called identitarianism. | |
| Why don't you talk a little bit about this and then we'll kind of riff off that idea. | |
| Yeah, so my review was divided in three parts. | |
| And so two major themes were dealt with. | |
| The first one was the surly bones of Earth. | |
| We can talk about that. | |
| And then the challenge to... | |
| Identitarianism as it is conceived now. | |
| And I'm talking about a challenge and not a stop sign. | |
| Which means that I don't think it is impossible to overcome it. | |
| And I'm talking because I used to be close to the identitarians in France and Europe. | |
| Actually, I was their fundraiser for a year, so I wasn't really an activist. | |
| It meant that I was reading all their material and really what bothered me was, you know, this rigid attachment to the soil. | |
| And by that I mean that, of course, I like what Europe or even France is physically and I like this land. | |
| And the way Americans, which is Europeans, transform North America makes it familiar to me. | |
| So I like the land, but this really, you know, rigid bond that they would like us to have is not only... | |
| You know, it's a kind of... | |
| For us, not only is it counterproductive to have this, you know, ideology defined that way, but it's also a negation of what we really are. | |
| So, first off, Europeans are European ancestors, who were speaking one language and were living in... | |
| One area, they had to leave their land to conquer what is known today as Europe. | |
| So that's the first point. | |
| And the second point is that the identitarians in Europe would like us to be hobbits. | |
| We are not hobbits. | |
| We are not, you know, this low-grade type. | |
| We have shortcomings, but we are aiming at something higher than just, you know... | |
| Having wooden houses and drinking ale with our neighbors, which are fine things, of course, but it can't be our ideas. | |
| And the problem I see in today's Identitarianism is that they only glorify small things. | |
| And, of course, we shouldn't... | |
| Go to the other extreme, which leads to, you know, the ivory tower and ultimately to being small by, you know, pretending to aim at high things. | |
| But, you know, again, we have to balance, you know, mundane and parochial, you know, concerns like, you know, having nice neighbors You know, I have nothing against that. | |
| I'm joking now, but it's really positive things we should cherish. | |
| But if you define your project on it, it can't work, and it can't work because we are not like that. | |
| We are not like the other civilizations and the other races. | |
| We need something more, something that is higher than us. | |
| You know, there's a lot of criticisms about Christianity in our circles, and most are justified. | |
| But we have to give it to Christianity that at least it gave something high to, you know, claim it. | |
| Yeah, it valued truth, maybe overvalued truth. | |
| Truth at all costs. | |
| Truth at the cost of lives of human beings. | |
| But it made us deeper. | |
| In a way. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And even truth, Christianity puts a value on truth that even cuts into Christianity itself. | |
| You know, I mean... | |
| At Evangelist, that's what happened. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, I agree. | |
| I think, historically speaking, we almost... | |
| How do I say this? | |
| We took... | |
| There's something in us that took to this religion. | |
| Because, obviously, we value truth before this. | |
| I mean, you can look at pre-Christian civilizations. | |
| And Greeks. | |
| Greeks, obviously, but there's something about Christianity that spoke to us and maybe we needed it in our own evolution. | |
| Things don't happen at random. | |
| It's like the French Revolution or communism. | |
| Only conservatives can regret something that was almost bound to happen because there were serious flaws in society. | |
| In the way, you know, in the intellectual structure of society. | |
| And so it was necessary at some point. | |
| And again, what I reproach, but it's a friendly reproach, to identitarianism today is that, you know, it's the same when they, you know, they decry... | |
| Black and white or Muslim and white crimes. | |
| So they want security, which is fine. | |
| We need security to protect the children, the women, or to protect intelligent people from the resentment of the stupid and the ugly. | |
| So security is fine, but they value security above everything. | |
| So it's security and identity, their motto. | |
| It's even more narrow than blood and soil. | |
| And then I have to ask, okay, but do we really want to live in a kind of prison supermarket? | |
| Because eventually that's what it would amount to. | |
| And the way I'm a little bit disappointed by identitarianism, the European... | |
| You know, a strain of it is that a few years ago, you know, the identitarians were much more pro-youth against baby boomers. | |
| They were more futuristic and they were anti-statists. | |
| For example, they said it's not because there is crime that we should have cameras everywhere. | |
| And now more and more they are pro-security. | |
| And really, Interstellar, to get back again to the movie, it addresses this challenge, you know, to... | |
| I don't think Nolan thought any second of, you know, the so-called far right, but we should do as if he did. | |
| And just think for ourselves... | |
| Would Europeans today try to conquer Antarctica as they did a century ago? | |
| Or would they do again in vast numbers when they tried to conquer mountains like, of course, the Himalaya? | |
| I don't think they would. | |
| Or people who do that are disconnected from You know, there is really a split between people who keep doing fortunate things today, like in science, in technology, in sports, extreme sports, and people who care about what we are. | |
| this disconnect must be, you know, we must overcome it because we can't have people who do great things but who don't care about where they come from and people who only care about where they come from but don't want to go anywhere. | |
| I don't know if I'm clear. | |
| No, it's a dialectic. | |
| It's part of our soul. | |
| We want to go home, but then we want to explore. | |
| We need identitarianism in space. | |
| That shall be our new motto. | |
| We need some way that... | |
| We maintain our identity and we maintain our sense of home and place and family, but that we do that that also speaks to our own Faustian, you know, unbounded nature. | |
| And, you know, that is what we need. | |
| And again, I've said this in other contexts, but it is remarkable the ways that... | |
| Modern society is really pushing us towards this. | |
| The modern world is bringing us together in ways that are unimaginable. | |
| I can understand that I would love for Native American tribes out where I live or really anywhere. | |
| To become much more local, to become as local as they were before they met the white man, which was very local. | |
| They had different religions, different languages, and all this kind of thing. | |
| And I think that is wonderful, and I think that probably is their proper destiny, and I would support that for them. | |
| But do we really want that? | |
| Does that really speak to us, for us? | |
| I think the obvious answer is no. | |
| The notion of being bound by a square mile plot of land and not knowing anyone outside of your town, it just doesn't... | |
| We just have to look at our history. | |
| Exactly. | |
| We've never wanted that. | |
| Now, maybe we should also... | |
| What I don't really like in many nationalist or identitarian or racialist circles is its massified view, for example, which is typified by the fact that we always talk about mean IQ, which doesn't mean anything. | |
| Mean IQ is for an average man, which is the last man. | |
| And so it's true that for most of the population in Europe and even in North America, if you were a farmer, you would never go very far from your farm, a few miles. | |
| For many people in their life, you know, they would go to the village, to church, and then to some of the markets of the... | |
| Small regions they were living in, and that would be it. | |
| But it's not the people that are leading society, you know, and people who are leading Europe since we put the Europe world on it. | |
| So at least, you know, since Greeks, people who are leading this civilization are people who want to explore and conquer. | |
| That doesn't mean that, at the same time, you have people who want to live in a small area, which is fine. | |
| We don't need to be, you know, all the same. | |
| And there's a very scientific reason for that, is that we have, you know, our bell curve is not really, you know, it's very flat, actually. | |
| We have... | |
| Almost stupid people in vast numbers and geniuses, in important numbers, whereas Asians are all around the middle, the mean. | |
| A vertical bell curve. | |
| I think for group evolution, the flatter, wider bell curve is better. | |
| Yes, because it allows us to have... | |
| It might sound condescending, but it isn't. | |
| Maybe it's the tone of my voice, but I'm really not scornful towards people who are simple, because we need them. | |
| And if we only had intellectuals, it would really be impossible to live, actually. | |
| You just have to look at... | |
| All the feuds between alt-right writers, especially recent ones, to understand that we also need simple people who care about doing nice crafts work or farming the land properly which is really respectable. | |
| We need both, actually. | |
| Let me go off on this, but I think I would mention just that farming is actually a very difficult profession. | |
| You need to actually look into the future and plan ahead and things like that. | |
| But I definitely see your point. | |
| There's an earthiness to being a farmer that I think no farmer would deny. | |
| And simpleness in the proper sense of that term, not in the sense of being dumb or... | |
| Not deep, but just a kind of appreciation of those real basic things that I think no farmer would deny that. | |
| So I agree. | |
| I think society needs that. | |
| If society were a bunch of bohemian intellectuals, we would not be speaking here today because we would not be alive. | |
| But at the same time, I don't want to live in a world... | |
| Of all kind of good people, you know, good, solid folk. | |
| We need those people challenging us and testing us and, you know, needling us a little bit. | |
| We need that aspect. | |
| And I think group evolution is real, and I think we need to, again, I agree that the mean of a bell curve is deceptive. | |
| To go back to what you were talking about before, of Christopher Nolan made Interstellar in order to challenge our movement. | |
| Now, some might hear that sentence and think that we're being... | |
| Massively narcissistic. | |
| He's listening now. | |
| Well, he might very well. | |
| You never know who's listening. | |
| I would be very, very proud if someone told me that he read my review, but I know he didn't. | |
| I wouldn't be positive that he didn't. | |
| I would be very glad, actually. | |
| Anyway. | |
| If someone heard that sentence that he made this movie in order to challenge our movement, of course they would accuse us of being massive narcissists or just ridiculous people. | |
| But let's take it for what it's worth. | |
| I think it's kind of helping us. | |
| I think in a way what Nolan was saying through some characters and through some scenes, I think it was in a way a challenge to petty ethno-nationalism or landed... | |
| Earth and soil types. | |
| And if you look at Cooper's son, who's very different from Murph, his daughter. | |
| Murph is a Faustian man. | |
| And his son, who seems to be a decent person. | |
| When you meet him as a kid, he seems like a normal, good kid. | |
| And it's not like he's a bad person. | |
| But by the end of the film, he is so attached to his home site. | |
| That he and his wife are delusionally willing to allow their child to die of some kind of lung disease. | |
| And to be proud of burying the child in the garden, which is really sinister. | |
| Right, but it is very sinister and it's horrible. | |
| Oh, we all died here. | |
| And his Faustian sister is saving him, actually. | |
| But again, I don't think Christopher Nolan is saying that this... | |
| I'm forgetting his name. | |
| He's played by... | |
| I believe he's played by Casey Affleck. | |
| Ben Affleck's... | |
| Yes. | |
| The character's name is Tom. | |
| Tom. | |
| And I don't think Christopher Nolan's saying... | |
| I think Tom is tragic in his way. | |
| I don't think Christopher Nolan's saying that he's a bad person. | |
| It's just... | |
| It's a kind of... | |
| If we want to become identitarians, we're going to become Tom. | |
| And, you know, we're going to just, you know, dagnamment, I'm going to die here too. | |
| And there's something good about that. | |
| There is. | |
| But then there's obviously something that's not complete about it and that isn't European. | |
| And I think that is what Christian Nolan was saying. | |
| Just fast forward, near the end of the film, for a very short period of time, And again, we've already spoiled the movie. | |
| If anyone has listened to an hour of this podcast and has not seen it, again, why? | |
| But anyway, at the end of the movie, after Cooper descends into this massive black hole and experiences this very odd reality where time has become a dimension like space and all this, I'm not even sure if I bought it when I was watching that film. | |
| It was a little too Spielbergian where it was both mystical but then almost explained all at the same time. | |
| I thought it was almost too real and then too mystical both. | |
| Whereas the end of 2001 is only mystical and it's extremely ambiguous and you might think that Kubrick is saying something but... | |
| He keeps it in this almost abstract, surreal... | |
| Or maybe it's like the ending of Inception. | |
| Right. | |
| He's only dreaming. | |
| The whole thing's a dream. | |
| But I'm pretty satisfied by it. | |
| I have to say, I did like Interstellar. | |
| I might not have liked it as much as you did, but I did like it. | |
| I do want to see it many more times. | |
| And I want to talk about it more. | |
| I think it was a real attempt of a mainstream Hollywood director to speak about the human condition. | |
| And I appreciate that. | |
| It wasn't The Avengers. | |
| It was a major film. | |
| Anyway, to go back to what I was saying, after some of these aspects of the film that I was not satisfied with... | |
| Cooper, in a very 2001-y way, his body in a spacesuit is located outside of Saturn, and he's brought back, and what you have is that Brant's notion, the older Professor Brant's notion of having a satellite in space where you can protect Earth, that they have accomplished this. | |
| And so Cooper is actually brought into this satellite. | |
| And in a way, I think that that satellite, to take this, to go back to this silly notion of Christopher Nolan challenging our movement with this film, in a way, I thought that satellite was almost like the bad form of an ethnostate. | |
| Like Elysium. | |
| Or the bad form of a conservative suburban fantasy, which was Elysium. | |
| And so what you had is that they had basically created a simulacrum of Earth at some period of time, say Earth in the 50s. | |
| And it's almost like this desire that you see, you see this with Glenn Beck, you see this with other Americans, of building a suburban fantasy land. | |
| It looks like... | |
| It looks like an Indian reservation. | |
| Kind of like an Indian reservation. | |
| Yeah, it weirdly becomes like that. | |
| And it's not development. | |
| I mean, there are these suburbs in the United States. | |
| And in a way, all suburbs are like this. | |
| These suburbs in the United States where there's like a big Catholic suburb in Florida. | |
| And it's kind of like, let's recreate 1955. | |
| Not 1956, because by 1956, the sexual revolution was already going. | |
| It was irredeemable. | |
| And 1953, that's too early. | |
| It was too conservative. | |
| There was a war in Korea. | |
| And I'm joking, but I think this is what that satellite is. | |
| That satellite is a kind of white suburb, which is a lie about what humanity really is. | |
| And I think Cooper kind of rightly understands it. | |
| He's there for... | |
| But there are two mankind's eventually, because... | |
| If all the story is true and he's not dreaming, because he's just drifting, you know, and dying by lack of oxygen. | |
| If all is true, there will be two mankind. | |
| So one mankind around Saturn and another one on this new planet in the faraway galaxy. | |
| Maybe a more identitarian humanity. | |
| Around Saturn and a more Faustian one. | |
| In the other stellar system, it's not very clear eventually what tie will remain between the two settlements. | |
| But, you know, it's not like there's only the Atlantic Ocean between the two. | |
| There is a black hole. | |
| And it's not like a superhighway or... | |
| You know, a turnpike. | |
| It's really something to cross it. | |
| So, I don't know. | |
| But, you know, I really thought of Elysium and I didn't mention it in my review because I didn't want to go further than the launching of the first rocket. | |
| But, sorry for the self-promotion, but last year I wrote a review of Elysium because I... | |
| Thought it was an allegory of white flight. | |
| And actually, it disappeared when alt-right disappeared too. | |
| So it's impossible to find the article online today. | |
| We can find it somewhere. | |
| I'll find it and put it up, I promise. | |
| We're going to salvage it. | |
| And actually, because I was really mad when I read the reviews by... | |
| American identitarians. | |
| Then they were all saying that we should aim at an Elysium in the sky and actually I really didn't want to leave it. | |
| Of course it's better than what is Los Angeles in this movie because you are with educated people and they are not raping grandmothers and they eat other things as KFC and watermelon. | |
| Of course it's better, but in a way it's just the other side of the coin. | |
| You have boredom and suburban life and people saying hi and, you know, just waiting to die around their swimming pool and with their fridge that makes ice cubes and, you know, making... | |
| BBQs with a mulatto neighbor and raising the flag. | |
| And it seems to be merely based on wealth and not consciousness. | |
| It really is a rich... | |
| And it's the way society is defined today. | |
| And when we talk about social classes today, not we, but generally, people talk only about money. | |
| Which is really a delusion because when you look at David Cameron or Nicolas Sarkozy, it's really people who are culturally pros. | |
| They have bad tastes, they behave like dogs, and it's really not satisfying to define people by their wealth. | |
| But anyway, in Elysium, it's the only... | |
| The only criteria is wealth. | |
| And I don't think it would really be an interesting society. | |
| So you would have people with maybe nice swimming pools and hammers and, you know, they have an automatic machine for their garden. | |
| Okay, it's nicer than living in Detroit, for sure, but I don't think... | |
| We could have the conversation we're having now with such people. | |
| And so Elysium is a disaster. | |
| And that's right, that in Interstellar, finally we're talking about this movie. | |
| Maybe in Interstellar it's a kind of Elysium. | |
| We don't see this colony that much, so I can't be sure, but it looks like... | |
| Mankind just found a way to press pause and just stay there. | |
| And maybe Coop and Brent, so Professor Brent's daughter, are going to recreate a real mankind, something that goes forward. | |
| But the rest of mankind just didn't want to go even further and leaving Earth was enough for them. | |
| But they're just going to stay in their... | |
| Huge cylinder and waiting for death. | |
| Yeah, it is a kind of bad ethnostate. | |
| It would be as if America collapsed and our response to it was to create a simulacrum of America in Antarctica or in Australia in some desert. | |
| We recreated something that was doomed. | |
| I think this is a kind of saying. | |
| That's not the answer. | |
| That's a kind of bad identitarianism. | |
| Our real identity is to die exploring the moons of Jupiter. | |
| Flying into a black hole. | |
| It's a premium brand of identity. | |
| Several products on offer. | |
| There has to be a kind of product, so to speak, for everyone. | |
| Not everyone is supposed to die on Jupiter because it would be bad for the environment. | |
| But we can't all be people content with working in Home Depot. | |
| You know, buying cement for the garden. | |
| You know, the way I'm saying it sounds scornful, but the only bad thing about that is when it is the ideal of the society and politicians are talking about how to save these jobs, which is, you know, statesmen should talk about really, you know, high things, like how you organize. | |
| More efficiently, your state apparatus to be stronger and, you know, to conquer and to provide the best elements of your society, the opportunities to go higher and further, and not how we are going to preserve false jobs for, you know, overblown middle class. | |
| And that is a problem. | |
| And I don't really see a challenge to that in today's identitarianism. | |
| And it's one of the... | |
| Actually, one of the reasons is that the young people in these movements don't want to challenge their elders. | |
| And they have to. | |
| They have to overthrow them. | |
| Maybe not physically. | |
| I would like it, but... | |
| At least symbolically. | |
| And also, they have to stop being reactionary. | |
| And that's another problem in these movements. | |
| You experienced that in Hungary with Jobbik, who are really the worst kind of nationalists that we can imagine, I guess. | |
| I guess you agree with that. | |
| I'm afraid I do agree with you. | |
| But you have better versions of identitarianism like in France, which, of course, they are not as terrible as Jobbik, but I think they would blame Koop for trying to save mankind. | |
| And they would, you know, join the mob in blaming him. | |
| And so... | |
| Yeah, I agree. | |
| Just to go back to your article, I think we should put the symbolic bookmark in the conversation. | |
| But just to go back to your article, I think one interesting thing about Interstellar is that it is a challenge to us. | |
| And I think it's not too much to say that Though Christopher Nolan probably didn't make this movie for us, as I joked, he seems to think in ways that we do. | |
| He and his brother, Jonathan Nolan, and they have worked with other writers, and I think they've sometimes taken things from other writers and emphasized certain things and brought out certain themes. | |
| Both the Nolans seem to think like us, and I think that is interesting. | |
| And I agree that what he's saying is a great challenge to us, and it's something to think about. | |
| But let's do this. | |
| Let's put a bookmark in it. | |
| As many know, and as our commenters like to make fun of me, I do really get into these big sci-fi epics. | |
| 2001, Solaris, I think Interstellar could be on that mantle now, some others. | |
| And so I think we should at some point really return to these films and maybe even talk about all of them. | |
| Even a film I actually re-watched not too long ago, Contact, which is a kind of 1990s movie attempt at being interstellar. | |
| Not successful, but still kind of attempts and has a lot of the same themes and a lot of parallels in the plot as well. | |
| But anyway, I think it would be good to kind of return to this. | |
| I think the Faustian science fiction is a theme that is very important. | |
| But anyway, let's put a bookmark in it right now. | |
| And Romain, it's always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. |