Russell chats to Oscar-winning actor, Tim Robbins about redemption and his beliefs around the pandemic. How Covid vaccines became politically divisive and the need for compassion. They discuss liberalism and censorship on social media. Check out 'Stay Free with Russell Brand' on Rumble - https://rumble.com/c/russellbrand Join the 'Stay Free AF Community' with access to watch interviews and ask questions! https://russellbrand.locals.com/Check out COMMUNITY 2023 - 3 day festival with WIM HOF, Vandana Shiva and Biet Simkin - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
♪ I'm all to you, so I'm looking for the CEO ♪ ♪ Looking for the CEO ♪
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Today's episode is subcutaneous, which means we get under the skin and dive deep with great minds and free thinkers.
Previously on the show, we've had Jordan Peterson, Eckhart Tolle, Maya, Jocko Willink, Vandana Shiva.
All of those interviews are available in full on Rumble.
And my guest today is the Oscar-winning actor.
Tim Robbins, the Shawshank Redeemer, himself the player.
Oscar.
It goes to Tim Robbins.
It was a protest, an anti-lockdown protest.
And I went out to join the protest because I was curious about what was going on.
And I saw the way that they were being described in the press and it wasn't true.
It's a belligerent idiocy.
We were told it was a unique health emergency and that the measures undertaken were necessary.
But as this has unfolded, the position has to be amended.
It turned into you should fucking die because you have not complied.
Tim Robbins represents a particular strain of American politics, notably liberalism.
But the time that Tim Robbins has been a vocal advocate for what most people understand as liberalism, social liberalism, inclusivity, tolerance, Love of diversity, opposition to war.
The entire political sphere has changed.
Tim Robbins straddles this change.
What does liberalism mean now?
Has liberalism become the new authoritarianism?
When Tim Robbins spoke out during the pandemic against public health measures, the manner in which they were being spoken, the way that unvaccinated people were being condemned, Tim Robbins, I think, came to symbolise a transition that was taking place both in media and in politics.
And today we can talk about what does liberalism mean now?
What is authoritarianism now?
Is it possible to have a difficult conversation Is it possible to confront establishment power?
We're going to be talking about censorship, we're going to be talking about the pandemic, we're going to be talking about the Ukraine war, and we're going to be talking mostly about the new authoritarianism and the ways in which it prevents conversation and therefore ultimately democracy.
Let's meet Tim Robbins in what I'm calling the Covid Redemption.
Tim, thanks so much for joining me on Subcutaneous.
Pleasure to be here in the snow.
Yeah, here we are in this cabin, surrounded by festivity and joy, entering into a potentially complex conversation because I feel that many of the things you said during the pandemic amounted to a kind of liberal apostasy, a disavowalment of an accepted ideology, while somehow simultaneously demonstrating the principles that I'd long believed to be at the heart of that ideology.
Why did you feel it necessary to speak out against some of the measures that took place socially during the period of the pandemic?
What was important and significant about it for you?
Well, first let me say that I didn't at first.
I bought into it.
I was someone that, you know, I went through a pretty unique experience in Los Angeles.
And, you know, was locked down there.
I have a non-profit theater company that had to shutter and we started doing our work online and I was masking everywhere.
I was keeping my social distance.
I was adhering to the requests made of me and I felt, you know, angry at people that didn't.
Do that.
I felt angry.
There was a protest in Orange County.
I remember people that didn't want to put masks on.
They're very angry about that.
And as time progressed, I eventually got out of Los Angeles.
I drove cross country and saw areas of the country that We're not adhering to the policies and eventually wound up isolating myself in New York State for a good seven months and it wasn't until I came to the UK in January of 2021 that I started to have questions and I was here on a job and I noticed that people, this was in the midst of the worst part of the lockdown here,
And I noticed a lot of people were not adhering again to these requests made by their government and I thought, well, they're going to have a hard day coming up, you know, that there'll be some serious death here.
And, you know, I kept my.
I kept my mask on and I kept adhering to the policies.
But it wasn't until much later that I started to have questions.
And when I saw that there wasn't a huge death rate here, after I had witnessed personally what was happening, I started to wonder more and more about what we were being told.
And whether it was true or not.
And so, it took a while for me to speak about it.
I was staying in Soho and I was there one Saturday morning and I heard a lot of noise outside.
And it was a protest, an anti-lockdown protest.
And I went out.
I had a bicycle and I went out and I joined the protest.
Not because I was joining the protest, because I was curious about what was going on.
And I started talking to people.
And I saw the way that they were being described in the press and it wasn't true.
These were not, you know, National Front Nazis.
These were liberals and lefties and people that believed in personal freedom.
I began to educate myself and I began to open my mind to what was going on.
It was a very different political environment in the United States.
Very divisive.
Very much based on politics.
Uh, if you were, well it changed.
At first, if you were a Democrat when Trump was President.
Well, you aren't going to take that vaccine because it was Trump's vaccine.
And then that seemed to somehow change.
It was kind of Orwellian.
It was like we are no longer at war with East Asia.
It was now we were thinking about it a different way.
And if you didn't take the vaccine, you were a Republican.
And it wasn't that way here in England.
It was a much more tolerant attitude towards the diversity of opinion.
And so I was really grateful to have been in this experience so that I could get a different perspective.
Perhaps part of your perspective was born of a kind of Swiftian travel, and you would be a good Gulliver because you are a giant in numerous contexts, but like, because I would say that that kind of authoritarianism and the certainty that necessarily accompanies it was present in the media and the state dictates in this country also.
What I find interesting and again, laudable in what you've done is that you've undertaken your own journey from what
was a de facto position of like, we were told it was a unique health emergency and that the measures undertaken
were necessary in order to protect human life, what more noble goal could there be?
But as this has unfolded, the position has to be amended.
It's become clear that many of the original measures were not as rigidly undergirded as was first claimed.
And in fact, as you've explained, there is a lot more political ideology at play than is perhaps wise, prudent or
even honest when the claim that's being made is that we are following science, that's irrefutable evidence-based
measures.
So, Tim, what is...
If or worse.
Something like a pandemic becomes politicized to this degree.
If conversation becomes shut down, if condemnation of unvaccinated people becomes as sanctioned, like, you know, on CNN when Don Lemon was saying that, you know, these people are idiots and we should shame them, when certain people were saying that they should be denied health care, when Joe Rogan was condemned for sort of having a conversation, It indicates that the climate that we're living in is radically altered.
One of the things that I like to continually reiterate is that nobody here is saying that the vaccines don't have a positive impact or that we oughtn't do everything in our power to protect human life.
It's simply that if you have authoritarianism where conversation is shut down, you are losing One of the great treasures, perhaps the primary treasure of democracy.
Do you feel, Tim, that the pandemic revealed something about the nature of establishment power, the aesthetics of establishment power, and perhaps the way that liberalism itself is changing?
Well, I think it started to reveal itself when we became aware of the idea that the vaccinated could spread it and catch it like the unvaccinated.
To continue the policy of lockdowns or mandates after that didn't seem to be following the science.
It seemed to be following a political agenda.
And so that's where I really started to have problems with it.
There were a few instances that were Really disturbing to me.
One was when the, I believe it was the CDC or the FDA, changed the definition of a vaccine on their website.
Another was that when they denied that natural immunity was something.
So there was an awful lot of people that got COVID early on.
I believe I did in February of 2020.
I was in Seattle on tour with a play with the Actors Gang and I got very sick.
In the past, natural immunity is one of the building blocks to moving forward.
Some people get vaccinated, some people have natural immunity, and eventually we have, what do they call that?
Herd immunity.
So, the fact that there were these Change of definitions was something that my, you know, my alarm bells went off.
And so I wondered what is going on, what is beyond the very real idea of taking care of people and making sure that we don't have a terrible death rate.
But then we also became aware that The most people at risk were either immunocompromised or elderly.
And then when you consider that the WHO, the World Health Organization, changed its protocol on virus outbreaks, which in the past had been you lock down the vulnerable, you take care of them, you make sure they're taken care of, but you let society go on so that it can build its herd immunity.
This was changed as well.
We went into lockdown with healthy people and with children and that didn't seem to be wise to me.
So I'm not a scientist.
I'm not a doctor.
I don't know the intricacies of data on this.
All I can respond to is as someone that is concerned about what The result of those doctrines that policy had on us as human beings.
And it's not good.
We turned into tribal, angry, vengeful people.
And I don't think that's something that is sustainable for the Earth.
That we start demonizing people that don't agree with our particular health policies and turn them into monsters,
turn them into pariahs, say that they don't deserve hospital bed. I think about,
you know, people that have made bad mistakes in their lives where they take too many
drugs and they overdose and that's totally their choice, that's totally their
responsibility, yet we take care of them, yet we bring them to the hospital, yet we save their lives
because we're compassionate, because we want to make sure that people live. And this
turned.
It turned into you should fucking die because you have not complied.
That's incredibly dangerous.
Yeah, it's also a terrifying revelation of a previously sublimated but evidently present vengeful tendency.
Because of course, yeah, as you're saying, you could apply that mentality of you created this situation for yourself, therefore we're gonna deny you compassion to obese people, people that have cancer, people that smoke, people that drink, There is an endless litany and of course the reason we don't do that is because when you look at the cultural conditions that might lead to obesity smoking and addiction you have to acknowledge a kind of cultural conditioning that leads to those kind of outcomes.
I like your point too Tim that whenever we know a change in the meaning of words it's likely that something foul is afoot.
I'm a person of course that believes that inclusivity and individuals' rights to identify
however they want to, to express themselves without harming others of course, is paramount.
That's what libertarianism or individual freedom has to mean.
But when we reach a point where conversation is being shut down, where we're being invited
to forget the events of a couple of months or a couple of years ago, our media had the
unbelievable disingenuity and cojones, shall we say, to lord the protests in China while
forgetting that lockdowns were condemned a matter of months before.
It's clear that their actions and their words are not underwritten by any principles.
What you've evidently undertaken is a personal journey of discovery based on actual principles
and learning.
And what I feel like is that this is precisely what's required.
Not to increase polarity, not to increase polemicism, which even the words themselves in their purest form indicate would create intransigence.
Once something's magnetized to a particular position, there is no possibility of fluidity, there is no possibility of change.
I would say That we ought to see more culpability from Big Pharma and from the media saying, this is what we thought at first, we were wrong.
This is what we should have said.
We ought to have continued that conversation a little more openly.
use the data and their inability to do that I think is an indication of something significant
that we're being moved to a new type of authoritarianism.
Even within your most recent musings and answer let's call it to my latest outburst
you talked about the WHO and their ability to set decrees even on certain media
platforms the WHO's edicts are what determines policy for example specifically on YouTube and this is an
unelected body we don't know where they're getting their information from we do know where
they're getting their funding from and it's at best undemocratic and at worst a kind of monopolization
of truth.
We're seeing, I think, with a new aesthetic, that the politics that, you know, 20 or 30 years ago, liberalism meant we care about vulnerable people, conversation is necessary, freedom literally is...
Of speech, freedom of movement.
Yes.
Freedom now has become like a right-wing trope.
How about anti-war?
Right, anti-war.
Between the Iraq war and the Ukraine war, we've moved from a position where it would be a liberal position to oppose a war, to if you oppose a war now you're like a stooge of Putin.
Like, this makes me feel that there are no real values or principles underwriting that entire, what we might call, establishment liberalism.
And I wonder, where do you find yourself feeling like a vagrant?
How do you align yourself?
Albeit a well-groomed vagrant!
How do you position yourself when these transitions indicate a complete lack of real values?
It disturbs me.
I feel that people I know and trust and love are acting in ways that I don't recognize.
I see people that I marched with against the Iraq War, supporting this endless flow of money into the Ukraine.
I don't know to what purpose.
I don't know why.
I see people that have always been staunchly for bodily autonomy.
Supporting a forced or coerced vaccination.
Quite frankly, I don't know.
I don't want to judge.
I want to believe this is a chapter and that when we get to the next chapter that people might return to certain values.
I don't know if that's possible for some people because I think it's very difficult If people are without the information and without the data to support it, I don't know whether they are going to be able to change their opinions.
I guess I've been mostly concentrating inward, concentrating on the people that I love in my life.
Protecting my non-profit so that it survives.
But not... I don't want to judge.
I don't want to condemn people that I love.
I just want to try to appeal to reason and to compassion and to empathy.
And I want to remind people that this isn't a political thing.
The people's decisions that they make for their own health are their own decisions to make.
And to condemn them is a dangerous thing.
I think we have less and less ability to reach across our political differences to talk to each other.
I try in my own life to do that.
I play hockey every week with people that I know don't agree with everything I say, and I love them and support them.
I have friends that are What some people might consider the enemies of the state, you know, people that are police officers, and I believe that.
What we're dealing with here is is kind of an extension of.
What happens when your political discourse and your communal experience is here in an online forum?
It's very easy to be hateful and divisive when you're in your dark room.
Typing missives at people you disagree with.
It's very difficult to do that in person.
Eye to eye with a human being next to you.
Hatred is very difficult for human beings.
It's a lot easier here, because it's abstracted.
It's part of this, you know, I'll just... No, but you can't do that in person.
And I discovered this during the Iraq War, when I was being vilified online as, you know, a terrorist supporter, and a Saddam lover, and all these terrible things, because I wanted to know whether there were weapons of mass destruction before we invaded, right?
And I was, if you went online, you would, I would, you could, I could make the conclusion that my life's not safe.
I can't go out.
But yet I was living in New York City at the time.
I was walking my kids to school every day and not one person, not one person on the street said anything like that.
And it made me realize this is an abstraction.
This is something that's not real.
It's something that stirs up hatred, stirs up division, and serves someone or some entity that benefits from our division.
Yes.
It seems that a dehumanizing discourse where we can easily condemn one another, where extreme voices are amplified in order to generate more extreme emotions, somehow enhances the ability of powerful centralized interests to fulfill their agenda.
It's somehow beneficial for us to be lost in inhumane condemnation and criticism.
It's divide and conquer.
It's as old as the hills.
Yeah.
You know the first colony in the United States, Jamestown, 1609 I believe it was, the first law they passed in Jamestown was that the indentured servants, it was a crime for the indentured servants to so much as talk to one of the indigenous population.
Wow.
Hey wait a minute, we've got quite a lot in common.
What if we were to unite?
Because they knew, the aristocracy, or what is listed on the Boat Manifest as gentlemen, knew that the indentured servants would have far more in common with the indigenous than the aristocracy.
One of the second laws, or a few years later, another law that was passed when the first African slaves arrived, was that it was illegal for the white indentured to speak with the black Africans.
Yeah, you see more and more that what is being prevented actually are sort of natural human traits.
Our tendency to trust, our tendency to form alliances, our love of freedom.
Once it becomes easy to condemn people either as conspiracy theorists, as right-wing extremists, what you're essentially saying is we no longer need to engage in discourse with those people.
They are inhuman.
They can be condemned.
One of the things that surprised me most, I suppose, Tim, is that I felt that I would know what fascism and authoritarianism would look like because of the misadventures of the last century.
I didn't realize how useful ideals of civil rights would be in separating people.
The necessary debate around people being able to identify how they want to be able to identify, the inclusion of Diverse races and religious groups, inclusivity as a principle, all very powerful ideas.
I didn't realise that ultimately that that would be used to condemn swathes of an entire population.
I think from Trump onward it seems like your country became absolutely bewildered and willing to just life off and condemn like 50% of its population as basket of deplorables, as people that can't be included in the conversation.
And that there's been the continual amplification And I'm astonished, when I consume the kind of media that I've always watched, at how easy it is to criticize Trump supporters.
And again, what's difficult for me is, I'm not a pro-Republican person.
I don't look to Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis for answers.
Where I am is, I feel like I'm now in a new territory.
Now, we had a great conversation with Glenn Greenwald, who now is ludicrously condemned as being a right-wing fascist, in spite of the fact that he's Out gay married man married to a left-wing politician in Brazil and broke perhaps one of the most significant stories in revealing the nature of the military-industrial complex and the way that they, in collusion with the state, are able to pursue their agenda in the very war that you're talking about protesting against.
I said, how is it that we have found ourselves in this position where establishment liberalism,
neo-liberalism and authoritarianism has lost its function, its commitment to making the
lives of ordinary people better?
When did this happen?
And Greenwald explained that with the advent of Blair, with the advent of Clinton, the
economic changes were made to the way that those parties were funded that meant that
their interests now align with the financial industry and with the military industrial
complex and the over support of civil rights issues amounts to little more than window
dressing again at best and at worst is a convenient tool in dividing people because like your
experience of, oh, where is all this hatred when I'm strolling around New York?
Most people I feel want to just get on with their lives.
They're not governed by, I hate people so much, I'm going to determine, I'm going to
spend all my time hating on people that are different than me.
I think we expect and accept that people have different values and ideals and as long as
we are allowed our own freedom, most people are pretty happy to leave that alone.
And I suppose that, how do you, as a question Tim, because after all this is an interview,
like where are we, how do you feel when it's like left to Ron DeSantis to be the person
that says we're going to have a statewide investigation into the efficacy of vaccines
or when it's Floridians that are the people that are most vocal in supporting free speech?
How do you feel as someone that's always had that kind of metropolitan alliance with liberalism?
What does this tell us?
And if the only dissent in voices are right-wing voices, which I would imagine at some point are not underwritten by Well, I don't believe that's true actually.
I believe there's an awful lot of people that would consider themselves to be left that are for personal freedom.
It's the fact that DeSantis is the one that's saying it, you know, that's unfortunate for the Democratic Party, but because they seem to have excluded that voice from their own world.
I mean, listen, there is an awful lot of people that don't want to speak.
Yeah.
They feel a certain way.
I've talked to people that I agree with you, but I can't say anything, you know.
I know people in the film industry that use fake vax cards.
I would never out them because I'm not that kind of person.
I grew up in a mafia neighborhood and you don't do that kind of thing.
You're not a rat.
You can't be a rat.
I feel that the tide is shifting.
I think more and more people feel empowered to speak.
I hope that continues.
I think that there's a good case to be made for a change of policy in progressive circles.
I know it's not easy to do because it may make people angry.
But ultimately, everyone has to follow their own heart and their own idea of what will make them safe.
And I don't condemn people or judge them for not speaking.
I just feel it's reductive to say it's a left-right thing.
I don't believe it is.
I know personally people that have voted for Trump and I don't I talk to them.
They're not evil people.
They just feel a different way.
And we used to live in a country where if our neighbor got sick, we'd bring soup over to them.
We wouldn't give them a political litmus test before we brought soup over to them.
This was one of the big challenges in reopening my theater in Los Angeles.
It took us a year to reopen because It would have been possible four or five months before, but we would have had to have a litmus test at the door.
We would have had to say, are you vaccinated or not vaccinated?
Right.
And those that weren't vaccinated wouldn't be allowed in the theater.
And I just felt that betrayed the whole concept of community, of the whole idea of theater, is that it's different people from different opinions coming into a communal space.
And the actors take them through a story and raise important questions.
And the audience has to deal with it.
But they share emotion together.
They share laughter.
They share tears.
They are brought to a communal experience by the actors.
It's not a political meeting.
If you don't comply with our way of thinking, you cannot come in this theater.
That ruins the whole spirit.
Alright, back to the Greeks.
That is a betrayal of what theater is supposed to be.
And this is another thing I found very refreshing about being in London, was that the West End didn't have the restrictions that Broadway did.
The West End said, you know what?
If you're vaccinated, show us your card.
If you're not, show us a negative test.
We're all you all can come in.
Yeah, it was still the idea of theater is a community, right?
And we all might have different opinions on various things.
We all might have different immune systems.
Some of you might be immunocompromised.
Some of you might not be able to take this thing, but we're not going to exclude you for that.
Yes, I think that Again, in what you're saying, Tim, I can feel that the commodification of entertainment means that seldom does theatre or film or television aspire to the kind of goals that you've just described, that the point of us having a communal experience where we're confronted with a moral quandary, where we're given a narrative that invites us to consider where we stand ethically, once the entertainment has become commercialised,
Once everything has become a subset of a dominant ideology that masks itself, and I'm talking just of corporatism of an extreme form of late capitalism that's been sort of financially bailed out, propped up through quantitative easing that can't even survive in its own modality that's protecting itself and preventing its own failure through measures that are antithetical to its own ideology.
That it becomes impossible to have the kind of community that you're describing.
When you talk about the unwillingness of people that you know to speak out as you have done,
I imagine that that's ultimately financially motivated, that they know that they will be at risk of cancellation
or certain financial interests being immediately foreclosed.
And I feel that then, that what we have is a culture that has lost its values.
And when I say that it's left to, in my view, Trump became a kind of a berserker,
kind of like that he was willing to attack the establishment
in a way that felt like extraordinary.
Whilst what I would contest, and I know a lot of people watching this
will disagree with me, that in government he was unable to deliver
on those promises in pretty much the way that any ordinary politician
wouldn't be able to deliver on those promises, in the same way that Biden hasn't delivered
on those promises, in the same way that even a figure like Bernie,
who a lot of people look to, and I know that you personally were a fan,
has ultimately sort of kowtowed when it comes to sort of military action and foreign policy.
But the system itself has a way of stripping away ethics, that we're living in a culture now
have what just used to be considered ordinary community values that we share, we communicate,
we tolerate the people, have differences.
And I relate this too to what you said about the stripping off humanity that becomes available
through online communication.
We lose things that are fundamental, that the rate of change through technology, the
ability to turn everything into data points means that we're losing something that amounts,
in my view, to spirit.
That all of the values that used to underwrite, you know, Western democracy were drawn one way or another from Christianity and perhaps ideals that preceded it.
of solidarity, the brotherhood and sisterhood, service of one another. These values were
sort of cherished and treasured and were not perfectly executed and had inbuilt biases
that are sort of ordinary among human beings. But now it seems that they're being absolutely
deracinated from any real value, only used if they can advance an agenda. It feels like
the agenda is becoming everything. So the role of art, I think, becomes a little more
significant, but less likely to be able to have an impact because we're only allowed
to listen to voices within our own little silos.
And I feel, and again I was talking with Glenn about this yesterday, that there is a nullified, castrated and co-opted Democrat party and A Republican Party that ultimately I feel that won't deliver for ordinary Americans, or like, you know, our right-wing parties similarly ultimately operate on behalf of corporate interests, is my opinion, means that there is a necessity for a kind of new humanism, a political movement that from the beginning is truly inclusive and is about individual freedom and therefore accepts at its heart
Other people's right to live differently, whether that's around medications or culture or sexuality or, you know, all of the old, what would have once regarded as the old liberal issues, as well as some new ideas around progressivism and traditionalism.
It seems that the system itself has been utterly co-opted.
There's no place for someone like you or I, old school lefties, establishment liberals, artsy liberals, but that's gone now.
So it seems like we, by default, have to become kind of radical.
Because what else is there to do, Tim?
The disenfranchised left.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, you know, yes, I agree.
That is where we are.
What do we do about it?
Well, we just continue.
We just continue with love, you know, we continue with tolerance of even that.
And, you know, it's the big challenge is when you're trying to resist that or oppose that, how not to become your enemy.
Yeah, and I think that's part of what happened to what you, I won't even call it the left, what happened to the Democrats is that I think Trump drove them batshit fucking crazy, you know?
And drove me fucking crazy.
I didn't want to hear him anymore.
I was like, God, you know?
And at first, when he got off Twitter, I was like, God, that's a really... I don't know if that's a good idea, but I'm really glad that he's not living in my head, right?
I could have easily just turned the damn thing off.
I don't know if it's wise to de-platform people.
I think you have to win in the court of public opinion.
I think you have to make your case as best you can and debate it as best you can and try to win over hearts and minds that way.
Censoring people historically just doesn't work.
It prolongs the problem.
And I don't know what the answer is.
I don't know how we go forward.
All I do know is that it's absolutely essential to, if we believe in inclusivity, if we believe in democracy, if we believe in free speech, it's going to get messy at times.
Yeah.
And it's going to get uncomfortable at times.
But we have to have an absolutism about those freedoms.
If you start making compromises, it will dissemble.
I've seen some beautiful comments coming through.
People saying that leading with love is necessary.
A lot of people liked it.
Arshela saying that they love the batshit crazy thing about Trump there.
And I was very interested to see the way that the template that appeared to be put in place
during the pandemic was easily placed almost in the same way over the reporting around
Ukraine and Russia.
A couple of days ago, we pulled up some writing from The Guardian in 2014, where they were
openly saying NATO's infringement on Russian territory is contrary to the agreements that
were made with Gorbachev in the 1990s.
We're essentially supporting a coup in 2014.
This is unwise.
There are elements within Ukraine that are destabilizing it.
All of this stuff was in The Guardian like six years ago and now that would be entirely censored.
It's a real good time to reread 1984.
It really is.
It really is.
It's all in 1984.
All of it.
Everything from what Winston Smith's job is, is to rewrite history, is to go into the archives and change what had been said before so that it matches with what is said now.
Even when O'Brien, who Winston thought was the rebel leader, No, sorry, who O'Brien thought was with the rebel leader Goldstein, or sympathetic towards him.
When he says to Winston, the best way to control a rebellion is to start it yourself.
Wow.
That's here now.
What is controlled opposition?
What does that mean?
When people are fighting for a change, and there's infiltration within that mindset or that movement, and someone says something, again, batshit crazy, that completely discredits the movement.
That's something to be aware of as well.
We are seeing increasingly through Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi's releases of the Twitter files how deep and insidious the censorship was during the last election and how deep that censorship continues to be.
For example, Andrew Dice Clyde was a comedian I didn't particularly care for, and I found him offensive.
But I never had the thought that we should exclude him from culture.
I just didn't listen.
I didn't go to his shows.
I didn't buy his thing.
That was my way of like, okay, You're crazy in a way that I don't appreciate.
I think it's insensitive to women.
But I never had the thought, let's cancel him.
He shouldn't have a platform.
He had a platform and a lot of people liked it and appreciated it.
It's not for me to say that he shouldn't have that platform.
I think that what you're talking about is an important conversation to have about our proclivity to cancel people.
I think that's bad for comedy.
I think we know that.
Would George Carlin have been cancelled?
Would Richard Pryor have been cancelled?
It's like, no, we have to allow for different ways of being.
And if someone is offensive to you, you just don't need to listen to it.
I think Kanye's a different thing.
It's because what we're witnessing is really dark.
And I don't believe that The people in his life that can influence him are being responsible to him right now.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think that's perhaps a distinct case and the cancellation challenge will lead to homogenization.
The idea that there are a set of values and ways that we treat each other and that we aren't racist and we're not knee-jerk condemnatory and we don't treat people appallingly.
All of these ideas and values ought be in place in the culture but it can't be used as a way of extracting people from the culture At will, because where does that certainty come from?
And ultimately, who does that authority rest with?
Where does it stop?
I mean, here's the dangerous part of it.
If you support it now, if the tides shift, it could be you that's in the crosshairs.
That's precisely the argument, that when you're Grant in authoritarianism, you don't know where the lens will next fall.
What James Baldwin said famously, that what kind of culture needs to create the category of the Negro?
What is the culture incapable of owning about itself?
that it creates a separate, distinct, shadow self upon which it places blame and aspects
of the dominant culture's own nature that it is unwilling to own.
I think we're witnessing a kind of mass unconsciousness, or at least a requirement,
I should perhaps clarify, for a new consciousness that is not being born.
I think that we are starting to experience what happens with overt secularism, a reliance
on materialism and rationalism.
When you talk about the experience that can happen in a secular culture, congregationally,
in a theatre, it's something that most people don't have a version of.
I know that there are a lot of people that have a religious faith, certainly in America, but it feels to me that we don't have a shared set of values anymore.
Allow us to have inclusivity.
Allow us to acknowledge that human beings are, by default, fallible.
The salts and nits and line between good and evil runs not between nations and creeds and races, but through every human heart.
The possibility for redemption, the possibility for failure, the possibility for growth, Like, even if we take where we started this conversation, moving from a position of broadly accepting the measures were necessary in order to countenance a new and novel threat, to hang on, we've given too much authority to people, they're not even playing by the rules of science that they laid out for us as being the reason for these measures.
That conversation isn't possible anymore.
We're not being afforded the right to have that conversation.
And the same thing's playing out around Russia.
The same thing's playing out around conversations around gender and identity.
That censorship and the granting of this paternal authority to a state that always offers us safety, to a corporate sector that always offers us convenience, All the while, I think, banalizing the human experience, turning us into data, extracting the possibility for wild and organic connections between one another and a connection to the planet.
It seems to me that unless this conversation really broadens out and allows a little polarity and allows a little bit of mud in, that we're going to end up somewhere sort of sanitary but very ugly.
Could it be that this is a new religion?
Because it's acting like a religion.
Yeah.
It's dogmatic.
It's absolute.
It's, if you do not believe in it, you are condemned to hell.
It's, you know, maybe this is, I mean, it's maybe this is a new religion.
Do you think that it's being posed as politics, but it's behaving like a religion?
Seems like it.
It seems like it has some of those aspects, at least.
I think it's worth thinking about.
Did you know that I used the word apostasy at the very beginning?
I did.
I was very impressed.
Thank you.
You know, to see apostasy in front of a Christmas tree is...
That's the kind of visual paradoxes, Tim, that we're looking to create here.
Yeah, it's extraordinary, isn't it?
I suppose, look, there was a time where people didn't like entertainers even to, like, have opinions.
Oh, who are you to, like, an actor, like a decorated actor, but nonetheless, who gives a shit what you think?
And now... I still think that.
That's still part of the conversation.
That's OK.
But now it's becoming increasingly necessary that it's more likely to be entertainers and comedians that raise anti-authoritarian points because the dominant culture has become so sanitized.
Well, most won't, right?
I mean, most... Listen, I don't blame movies.
It's, you know... I'm at an age, a stage in my career where I, you know, I'm not that concerned with that, you know.
I like the idea of, you know, remember when we were young, if you were really successful, you retired when you were 60.
And then, you know, you could retire at 65.
And now it seems like nobody retires anymore.
The idea that We could, you know, you work your life to gain something and then you just retire, right?
Nobody wants to retire.
Yeah.
And what is that all about?
I suppose it's like the purpose has become work.
Your purpose is your ability to participate in the system.
And also, now that attention is mind, I don't even just mean data mining, but your attention is co-opted and continually owned.
That your work doesn't finish when you go home.
You're continually available for work on screen.
That your value as a human being is your value to the system.
And that's what affords us the ability to have true vacancy.
Your value to the system last week.
Right?
Not in total.
That's another thing about show business that's a little weird is that, you know, you're only successful if you're recently successful.
And so we're kind of programmed to think that we always must reinvent or do better than we've done before in order to be
considered significant.
There's no respect for what you've done, right?
And I've been so, so lucky to have been in a movie that is considered to be, like,
most people's favorite movie, right?
The Shawshank Redemption.
It's constantly on IMDb.
It's like the top choice of their favorite movie, right?
And I can now, I can say, well, I can't, I can't up on that.
I can't get better than that.
So I don't, I don't put the pressure on myself to try to continue to outdo my previous Success, which I think is a fool's game as an artist because you should be able to be content with, or any profession for that matter, you should be content with your achievements and not feel less about yourself because you can't do another Shawshank Redemption, right?
It's true!
This time it's personal!
This time it's personal!
What happened on that beach?
You can only decorate that boat for a couple of months.
Once it's seaworthy, spring break.
It's hard to annihilate the legacy of that.
I was just thinking that while you were talking about it, there is a story about innocence and how it is irrelevant that you are innocent if you are condemned.
That's kind of a Kafka-esque idea.
And then I was thinking about what is the redemption that we're talking about?
The redemption is that Morgan Freeman's character recovers spirit as a result of the love between the two protagonists.
Yes, and I deal with this all the time in prison, you know?
Yeah, yeah, you've gone all into prison.
They must like to see you there!
Yeah they do!
How many people go, have you got a teaspoon and a poster of Bay Davis?
But what I'm constantly reminded of in those environments.
What is your prison work by the way, just for people that don't know?
Okay, so we're in 14 yards in 12 prisons in the state of California.
We have rehabilitative programs.
We go in and we take a disparate group of people from different gangs, different races, and we take them through theater exercises, theater games, and then we teach them about the characters of the Commedia dell'arte.
And through these characters, This character being the buffer, it's not them expressing the emotion, it's the character of the pantalone or the arlechino expressing the emotion.
We allow them to express emotions that are inaccessible, for the most part, in prison.
Or at least emotions that can compromise them or their safety in prison.
Like?
Like fear.
You don't show fear in prison.
You don't show happiness.
You don't show sadness.
You'll be trounced.
Your only fear, your, as they say, our mask, is anger.
And what these exercises allow are this liberation of, hey, I am worth more than just being an angry person.
I have these other emotions.
And when they are expressing them with each other in a room, It becomes liberating for them and rehabilitative for them.
One particular exercise that we take them through is we take them to a funeral of one of the characters.
And they all have to put a flower down on the grave and say something under their breath.
Words of goodbye to this person they either loved or didn't love.
And then they stand around the grave.
And then the facilitator says, now look at each other.
And that's a moment where change happens.
Because they see in the eyes of their former enemy a human being with empathy and sadness.
And they have a shared sadness together.
They see the humanity in that person.
And it's a moment that changes people.
And the whole exercise, all the exercises, change people.
So that they create these bonds with each other that are deep.
That happened in this room.
And, you know, one of them told me once that, you know, occasionally they'll be told there's going to be a fight on the yard tomorrow, right?
And they all have to be tribal.
They have to be in their own racial group or their gang, and they have to fight against other racial groups or gangs.
And a couple of them came up and said, you know, we did, you know, this is a two people that were in separate gangs.
I said, what we did was we found each other during the fight and we rolled around the ground.
We pretended to fight.
Oh, that's adorable.
Yes.
And this, this is what I, what we said, brought it up is because I am totally convinced and I've witnessed personal transformations.
People are capable of change.
Yeah.
And to condemn someone for something that they did, yes, they are serving their time.
They are, they are, that's what society has prescribed for them.
That is their punishment.
They accept the punishment.
They do the time.
But when they get out, must they continue to be defined as someone that did something 30, 40 years ago?
Or can they take this new liberation and make something of their life?
And I've seen them do it again and again and again.
I know it's possible.
I've seen transformation in children that we work with.
Going from introverted, you know, staring at the floor, into sentient leaders.
It's possible through art and it's possible every human being is possible of change.
I suppose the difference between art and craft is the element of mystery that is difficult to discern and the allusion to beauty.
It seems that what you're doing there in them prisons is creating ritualized space that grant access to emotions or states that wouldn't be ordinarily accessible in the I wonder what is being accessed through ritual.
within, whether they are controlled by the penitentiary or by the cultures that seem
similarly turgid. I wonder what is being accessed through ritual. I wonder what is being lost
through our loss of ritual by living in cultures that do not afford the value of the anonymity
of the mosque or the access to the elder or the ways that seem to have been inhered in
us for potentially hundreds of thousands of years, all now replaced by commercialized
ritual space, symbols that do not refer to anything other than themselves, not symbols
that allude to a connection, a deep and profound connection.
I'm very interested in that type of work that you're doing.
Are they literally wearing masks and in their moments of connection, because it reminds me of, have you ever seen that documentary called The Work, in which they go into Folsom Prison, I think, and this is around like, because of my connection to addiction and in particular 12-step recovery, I'm interested in men's work where men are, through role play and stuff, able to confront abusers from their past or catharsise their own experiences of, for example, violence.
In that environment, similarly, you see men from rival fractions being able to come together and deal with one another differently.
I suppose one of the messages of optimism that can be found in that is the acceptance that That your identity is temporal, that change and redemption are all possible, and that the foreclosing on those ideas, that our culture seems to be sort of willfully instantiating that everything is separate, everything is polarised, everything is absolute, everything, but that they're using science as a dogma, when science itself is fluid and progressive and discursive and conversational and live.
And when I've spoken to what I'll call the scientists that are devotees, devout, that's one of the things that appears to be most important to them, that you don't approach from a position of dogma, you approach from a position of inclusion and uncertainty, and the revelations that are made within science continually draw reference to, oh my God, we know nothing!
We know nothing.
And even our potential for knowledge within our limitations is so liminal that we're going to have to have faith of some kind.
We're going to have to deal with ritual.
We're going to have to deal with uncertainty.
And that's something best faced together, communally, rather than in isolation.
This is what's essential as an artist or, you know, to have a sense of, well, I don't know.
It's an important thing.
Never trust the expert.
Never trust the virtuous expert.
I got this.
I tell my actors when I'm working with them, if you ever have that feeling, just let it go.
You don't got this.
Every new audience is a new experience.
The actor that comes out with arrogance is going to have a bad show.
You have to know that this is a new chemistry out there.
The Friday night show, if you do it again on Saturday night, they're not going to like it because you're not doing a show for them.
And I had the great fortune to talk with Peter Brook before he died, and he talks a lot about this in his books, about the essence of acting and what it is to go out on the stage with this sense of unknowing, not knowing, as would happen if you were in this story.
You don't know what you're going to say.
Yes, of course you learn your lines, but if to create reality, you don't know what you're going to say.
Like, you know, the person that's all angry and, you know, he wants to go and talk to his girlfriend and say, this is what I want to say to you.
And he's cooking it over his brain over and over again.
And then he walks in and she's gorgeous.
And she says, I'm so sorry.
Everything changes!
The whole dialogue changes.
All that stuff that was written in the head isn't there anymore.
And it becomes a new dialogue.
And that's the brilliance of great writers, is that they're able to know that part of what the dialogue is, is the unknown.
The surprise, or the lie.
I'm going to tell you something, but I'm not going to tell you directly.
But as an artist, or as any human being, to feel this arrogance of knowledge, It's very dangerous for growth.
You'll never grow, you'll never learn if you know everything, and you walk into every social situation like, I got this, I know everything, right?
No, I want to go with mystery.
I want to go, I don't know what is going to happen.
I don't know everything about my, even my craft, I don't know.
Yeah.
I've done it for a long time, but I still am I love the mystery of it.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
It seems you're talking about something quite sacred here.
In that moment of spontaneity, there is alchemy, there is the real creation, and yet you deny yourself that, even speaking as a performer.
If you arrive with, this is how I deliver that line, this is what that's about.
Peter Brook talks about watching Paul Scofield do King Lear and he says, I never saw him do the same performance twice.
He's present all the time.
He's like genuinely feeling it.
Oh no, the weather's changed.
Oh, my kids!
He's in there, he's in there.
But that's extraordinary, and I suppose that does map onto the human experience.
I've been thinking of this a lot lately, that energy requires polarity.
You cannot have motion without polarity.
You need positive and negative.
Art has got something to offer us.
It is in this sacredness, in this spontaneity.
I'm trying to think about what I try and do as a performer, that it amounts to staying present, and how significant that is in spirituality, that the presence is all you have, that you have to absolutely commit to being present.
And how do you apply that to walking into a room with people that might not agree with you?
How do you apply this sense of humility To a conversation where you can walk out of the conversation changed.
You're denying your own, like, what I think is, you deny your own fallibility.
When you talked about that virtuous expert idea, like, I know, and I'm virtuous, I know what a fucking human being is.
So I know they're fallible.
I know that on some level they must have doubt.
I mean, one of the things that made me sort of infatuated, shall we say, with Trump, or infatuated from a comedic perspective rather than a political one, to be honest, is like, Oh my god, this guy, I don't have no doubt, it's sort of amazing to watch someone behave like that, like, because me, I don't know what fucking shoes to put on, I don't know how to deal with the day, you know, but like, he's such a grotesque and wonderfully caricatured example, but like, you see it everywhere, because now it's sort of like this sterile, puritanical certainty, and I think, you're a human being, like me, you're living in the moment like me, and this order is resting upon chaos,
And I think that that's why, yeah, that there is a deliberate kind of, I want to sort of say, like a kind of a fascist imposition on spirit itself, because where is it going to come from?
The reason for all this censorship, the reason for all this control, is that in human beings there is this very febrile potential for human beings just to change in the manner of the man that's going to go home to confront his girlfriend and just whose heart may melt, that we may melt into love with one one another. At any moment we might realize who we really
are and who we are not.
And they have to continually sort of apply the kind of astringency to that to
stop the vitality chain. And aren't the most moving stories the story of someone's transformation
from one way of being into another way of being? Yeah. The revelatory journey.
It's in myth.
It's in every creation myth, and every story about how we got here, and the relationship between us and God, and our own hubris in that, and our own unknowing in that, and how essential that is, and how moving that is.
When you witness a character's transformation.
Yeah.
And shouldn't we all be applying that to our lives, you know?
Shouldn't we all be entering into the next phase with humility and knowing that, you know, I just don't know.
I want to talk to you so that I can Grow.
I want to be challenged.
I want, I see you're a human being.
I want to find our shared humanity rather than you suck.
He says I suck.
Fuck you.
And the conversation's over.
And that's, that's what we're living in right now.
We're living in this constant conflict and it's, it's, it's, it's madness, complete madness.
We should be suspicious of a regime that is offering us such bland fare, that is saying that we cannot be involved in potentially contentious discourse, because that contentious discourse is what will lead to change.
It's like that authoritarianism suggests to me they think they've got the future sewn up, that this is how it's going to be.
They want to foreclose on possibility.
The virtuous expert.
Yeah, the virtuous expert wants globalism, wants no democracy, wants the appearance of inclusivity, but absolutely centralised power.
Because I know and you don't.
Yeah.
Because I know, based on what I've studied, and based on my, you know, my way, I'm doing this for your own good.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, no.
Yeah, I think that that's, perhaps this is a place that there can be a unification of these apparently bifurcated political spaces, because surely, whether you're traditional left or traditional right, The idea of freedom, your freedom to be who you are, the uncertainty, the possibility that together something new can be created is the adventure that we can all embark on rather than sort of settling into.
Right.
And where do we learn this?
We learn this from the most, we learn this from farmers.
Farmers, you know, they know a certain way.
Right?
But the weather changes.
So they have to adapt.
It's not a hard and fast formula.
It has to adapt.
There's no sun.
So you water less.
You adapt.
You're in the unknowing.
And you're in a relationship, a communal relationship, with what you're trying to grow out of the earth.
And to try to manifest an expertise on that and a technology on that.
It's very dangerous because it's not adaptable.
Yes.
You can apply it to every profession.
Humility is a virtue that we really should look at as something that can truly affect change.
Yes.
Not expertise.
Expertise is dangerous.
Tim, thank you so much for this beautiful conversation about redemption, inclusion, change, the possibility of new futures, the necessity for conversation, the power of art, the necessary suspicion of anybody who claims to have both virtue, expertise, and answers in what has to be an ongoing discourse to new discoveries together.
Thanks so much, Tim.
My pleasure.
That was cool.
Cheers.
Thanks.
Ho, ho, ho!
Merry Christmas!
We could put on some Commedia Della Tema or just Father Christmas.
I suppose an elf, ultimately, given the dynamic, you would probably take the Papa Noel centre, the Mundus centre figure, the benevolent, giving father, me, Puckish, at least in this relationship.
Thank you for joining us this week.
Next week, I'll be talking to Barry Weiss about the latest Twitterphile revelations, and comedian Duncan Trussell will be joining us for rasping revelation.
He coined the phrase, from Q to woo.
No, from woo to Q. Like the hippie people might go all sort of like Q-Anon.
I like that phrase, from woo to queer, from woo to queer.
Fuck it, I'm not going to do that anymore.
Join us next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
