It's been a while since we released a new episode and, for one reason and another, it's going to be a little while before we release another (though we still hope to make our monthly quota of two new public episodes and one new backer-only bonus) so, to tide you over, and make sure you don't forget about us, here's the first of our bonus episodes - on Peter Watkins' Punishment Park (1971) - originally released exclusively for our patrons back in January. If you wish you'd been able to hear this six months ago, consider bunging us some cash. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to each white nationalists, white supremacists, and
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And welcome to special episode bonus.
Number one bonus episode one.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's either special episode one or it's episode 78.
We're not doing that.
We're not doing this.
We're not doing the like numbering convention.
We're no, it's bonus episode one.
That's the way we're doing this.
That's what we're doing.
Okay.
I'm making I'm making.
I am making the dictatorial advert.
Not advert.
What's the word I'm looking for?
Decree?
Decree.
That's what I'm doing.
I'm saying we are doing it my way because it would be really annoying to do it the other way.
Also, The Daily Show does it that way.
OK, right.
We don't want to copy them.
OK, well, there you go.
Daniel's a dictator-in-waiting and he's issued his first decree and this is special episode Patreon backer special exclusive whatever episode number one and we're it's possible this might be You know, sometime down the line this might be released for a more widespread audience.
I figure we'll put them out a couple of months.
I mean, you know, give people the content eventually.
But, you know, just the added inducement to give us a dollar.
That's it, yeah.
So, for the benefit of anybody listening in the future, we're recording this on the 20th of January 2021, an entirely insignificant date upon which nothing happened.
Which is kind of true, really, because nothing particularly significant did happen today, really, did it?
Yes.
It was just a presidential inauguration.
It is the degree to which it looks like this might not happen, and had January 6th of 2021 not happened the way it did, I suspect you would have seen a lot more today than you actually saw.
But as it was, you know.
Yeah, we saw an inauguration.
Having been caught napping, either deliberately or accidentally, on January the 6th, the forces of American law enforcement were ready this time.
And so it passed off pretty much without incident, I believe, didn't it?
Yeah, pretty much.
Tens of thousands of National Guard soldiers in the US Capitol.
Enforcing an effective police state for the last weekend or so.
I'm sure that bodes perfectly well for the foreseeable future.
They're saying that the new security defenses around the Capitol building are going to be permanent.
So, yeah, it's, you know, you remember that thing, the Patriot Act, which was enacted shortly after September 11th, and that had some draconian features and then was immediately discarded the second it was no longer immediately necessary.
Oh, no, wait, it's still in effect 19 years later.
I suspect the events of January 6th will be felt long down the line, and will not be pointed at the right-wing dipshits that actually did the very stupid coup attempt.
So yeah, it's going to be fine.
Apparently one of Biden's priorities is going to be domestic terrorist legislation, or anti-terrorism legislation, which is going to be fine.
There's no problems there.
Well, at least we do have some people in the American government.
I mean, Rashida Tlaib, among others, has been basically putting out statements saying, no, we actually don't need these enhanced surveillance powers and domestic terrorism.
We have laws that do this already.
This would be a bad thing.
Of course, the Biden administration is definitely going to listen to that.
Definitely going to listen to Rashida Tlaib, yeah.
They should.
They should.
And that, you know, those draconian new domestic terrorism powers that they're going to put in definitely won't be used against the left or anything down the line.
Yeah.
So that's fine.
I feel like we might get into a movie here shortly.
Yeah.
This was the day when Donald Trump left the White House and Joe Biden moved in.
So it's, you know, hello, Daniel, greetings, you know, to a newly free, liberated America.
To Biden's America.
It must be a great relief, now that all the problems are over.
You know, I've been trying not to talk too much about like sort of the the proposed bills and the policies that are kind of being announced and Talked about and you know, what is and is not likely to pass I'm really just kind of I'm letting people have their day, you know Yeah, let people enjoy things.
They're announcing the $15 minimum wage, which they should have done 10 years ago, and now it should be more like a $22 an hour minimum wage.
So I feel very, you know, they're announcing the $15 minimum wage, which they should have done 10 years ago.
And now it should be more like a $22 an hour minimum wage.
I do not personally make $22 an hour, by the way.
But, you know, they're announcing it.
And it does feel like, yeah, that's the thing that they're going to announce and then immediately cave on the second Joe Manchin doesn't get on board.
You know, the second, you know, well, we've got a compromise with the Republicans somewhere, you know.
Yeah.
You know, yeah, no, it'll be.
And in particular, the tipped minimum wage in the United States.
I don't know if you know how this works.
but, If you're a tipped employee in the United States if you're a server in a restaurant You can be paid.
I think it's like 223 an hour or something like that But because your tips are supposed to make up for the gap there And so if you don't make enough in tips Then your employer is obligated to pay you up to what you would have made minimum wage which effectively never happens because like Servers typically make enough or if they don't you know
So, anyway, one of the things that this Biden plan is doing is saying, no, we actually are going to make restaurants, etc., pay their tipped employees an actual wage, an actual
They're gonna they're gonna have to pay the also the $15 minimum wage which the if the they say they're working with the Restaurant Association on this and That's basically like the consortium of billionaires that run Applebee's and all the various like chain restaurants if that actually passes, you know, there is some kind of a Bullshit that they're pulling in the background.
Because that's something they have fought tooth and nail against for decades.
So if in the middle of the pandemic... I don't know, it just feels like the sort of thing to wear.
It's just this juicy plum that looks really nice on a white paper to get the progressives on board.
that they're going to immediately cave on or they're going to pass but basically make all those people who work in those restaurants gig workers or something so that they get paid so that they don't count as full employees or something.
I don't know.
Like, it just feels like – yeah, that feels very pie in the sky to me.
Like, when it's passed, I will applaud it.
And I want it to happen.
But, like, I don't know.
It feels – it feels like not a thing.
Anyway... Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know, all that boring stuff aside, Daniel, have you considered, you know, Lady Gaga singing the national anthem?
Lady Gaga.
Lady Gaga at the inauguration, you know.
Yeah.
You haven't factored that in, have you?
All this complaining.
The memes of Biden and Lady Gaga, there was a photo of her sitting on a couch next to him, and there were a lot of people captioning it with things like, you know, your new mother and I think you really need to go down and get a job.
I love it.
Yeah, so, anyway.
Anyway, yes.
All the actual politics aside, we have a light and fluffy, just entertainment only film to discuss.
Yeah, it's a bit of fun.
It is actually part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, isn't it?
I think there's probably a tie-in to, well, I mean, the Air Force is technically involved in this, right?
So, you know, I'm sure Captain Marvel's somewhere in the back.
Nick Fury is one of the soldiers in training.
I would believe this would fit into the MCU.
Yes, we can write it that way.
Well, the terrifying thing about the MCU is, you know, it can assimilate anything.
It's like the Borg, you know.
Right, right.
Yeah, this is a special episode in which, this is one of our special episodes for backers only, at least for the foreseeable, in which we talk about, you know, it might be a Q&A, it might be just a current events thing or, you know, a lot of the time it's going to be movies.
To go along with our main episodes, which will continue to be publicly released for free.
And this first one is about Peter Watkins' Punishment Park from 1971, which you can watch completely for free if you want to.
It's on YouTube, the whole thing.
Yeah, I found it there.
It's also, if you have Amazon Prime, you can get the Fandor channel and it's available there if you prefer to.
um support that in whatever way um i would link to the youtube version but i choose uh you know i wouldn't want to get us uh shut down by nazis who uh accuse us for being pirates and also the name of the channel that was hosting that one was a bit of a slur so we'll uh we'll leave that aside for now but uh it's searchable you can find it you can um But yeah, this is interesting because you just sort of messaged me completely out of the blue and said, you know, I want to talk about this movie Punishment Park.
And I was kind of, I was sort of stunned because I, you know, this is a huge movie for me.
I love this movie.
Oh sure.
And I didn't, you know, I don't think we'd ever talked about it or Peter Watkins generally before.
Yeah, I hadn't heard of Watkins.
And I mean, you know, people, I think people listen to this podcast, certainly if they're Patreon backers, should probably know enough about our background.
I know that we were, you know, we were like, we talked about Doctor Who together, and we kind of got our start kind of talking about movies and, you know, that sort of thing.
And we've shared a lot of, you know, kind of pop culture ephemera back and forth.
And I was just kind of doing my thing of like watching YouTube channels, and I had a Recently kind of gotten into Maggie Mae Fish and she had done a a video on like kind of talking about like the American desert and sort of the cinema of the American desert and was talking about and compared contrasted this with Breaking Bad and talked about sort of the the imagery of the Americas and the flag and Uh, the water.
It's a good video.
Go check it out.
It's probably not something we're not going to reference a whole lot of that here.
Um, but I never heard of the movie until then and I was like, wow, that looks really fascinating.
And, um, I, after I watched the video, I then, you know, kind of messaged you because I was like, I'd like to see this and doing it for IDSG would give me a reason.
To put the time into it.
Not that I wouldn't want to do it anyway, because it looked pretty good.
But also, I was like, hey, if you heard this, it sounds really good.
And you were like, do you mean the Watkins Punishment Park?
And I'm like, oh, is it not good?
And you're like, no, no, it's very good.
Let's do this.
And I'm like, great.
So, yeah.
That's the best of the backstory here so now it's funny that like I never heard of this and it is like one of those things of you know I'm sure you and I both have pop culture nuggets in the back of our brains from like well of course Jack knows this and you're like of course Daniel knows this other thing and.
We never, never the twain shall meet unless we just sit down and start comparing notes.
That's kind of the problem, right?
So yeah, Punishment Park.
Yeah, as I say, this is a huge film for me.
I'm a big Watkins fan.
I mean, Watkins has legitimately made some of my all-time favorite movies.
You know, you're kind of giving yourself away if you say that, because Watkins has made movies about, he's made a six hour movie about the artist Edvard Munch, you know?
Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he's made a movie about the Paris Commune, which again, I don't know how long it is, it's about four hours long or something like that.
Well, maybe we'll do some more of them.
Maybe we'll do some more of them, because on the strength of Punishment Park, I definitely would like to see some more of Watkins' work.
I guess, why don't you summarize what this is for the audience?
Because I feel like this is one where, even though we've given people the ability to watch it, I feel like it's one that people may not know very well, at least here in the States.
Like, if I'd never heard of it, then I suspect most of our audience is going to kind of be in the same boat, right?
Yeah, this is very little known.
Largely because when it was released, as I say, in 1971, it was hardly released at all.
No mainstream studios or distributors wanted to touch this with a ten foot pole.
And it got a very, very limited release in, I think it was actually released in like one art house cinema in Greenwich Village or something like that.
And it's basically never been shown anywhere since.
It's never been on television that I know of.
Not even late night on BBC2, you know, introduced by Alex Cox or something like that.
But as far as I know, that's never happened.
It's on DVD and Blu-ray.
I own the Blu-ray.
So, you know, it's seeable.
But it's because of what it is.
It's just one of those things, particularly at the time when it was Very, very incendiary.
It was, as I say, the mainstream just didn't want to touch it.
This is... Peter Watkins has, throughout his entire career, his style has been... it's evolved.
Very markedly he's one of those film directors who's very interesting to watch In chronological order, you know to see his style evolving, but his style has always essentially been What can be very loosely called the pseudo documentary?
He began his well, I don't think it's actually the first thing he directed but the first big thing the first notable thing His work was a television drama for the BBC about the Battle of Culloden, which was filmed like a news report.
And I think very, very deliberately and very obviously modelled on war reporting, in the style of Vietnam War reporting, because of course this was in the 60s, the Vietnam War was anyway.
So, the style of it is... I mean, I encourage everybody to go and see these films.
Watkins has very severe criticisms of his early work, because, as I say, he's an artist who's evolved very markedly, and yet always within this particular style, which is, as I say, the pseudo-documentary.
And in Culloden, what he does is, it's a dramatisation of the events of the Battle of Culloden, which... there's a whole complicated history there, but, you know, boil it down to the essentials, the English Invade Scotland and you know, that's There's all sorts of complexities here.
Don't don't act me to correct me history nerds But you know the English invade Scotland and they they fight the the the jacobite rebels and it's a it's a famously brutal exercise in Colonial I would certainly say colonial suppression and brutality now and Watkins dramatises it like he's a television crew, a documentary television news crew that's actually there, complete with interviews, you know?
So it's directly anachronistic.
You have television interviews with people taking part in the battle and stuff like that.
I just imagine there being like a boom mic hanging in the shot and like, you know They're being like a Chiron or something like I'm imagining that's I don't think that's what he did But that's sort of the I have not seen this film I do want to see it based on what I read about it because I did do kind of a cursory look through his other films And this one does sound like but but I do I do kind of get the sense of like it's kind of sort of like Winking and nudging at you.
It's it's forcing its artificiality on you.
I Well, throughout Watkin's career he's playing around with what constitutes realism.
Right.
Because obviously there's two layers of realism that don't match overlaid upon each other here.
There's the realism of the news report, which if you film events like that with the shaky camera, shaky handheld camera, and you know this is very relevant to Punishment Park.
And it's filmed like there's a television news crew running around following people around and the performances are very spontaneous and naturalistic Certainly again, he's an evolving artist.
So as he goes on there's less and less scripted stuff.
There's more and more improvisation There's more and more using real people instead of actors, etc.
Again, very relevant to Punishment Park.
So you get that sense of intense realism from the aesthetics of a Television, news, documentary, film crew, following people around and interviewing them and getting that very unguarded, very unactorly, that very direct, not scripted, not rehearsed, not performed, just response.
And yet at the same time, of course, it's very, very deliberately drawing attention to itself as artificial.
It's almost Brechtian in that sense, because obviously there weren't television documentary news crews at the Battle of Culloden.
So it's screaming at you, this isn't real.
This can't be real.
So that's a perfect sort of thesis statement at the start of Watkin's career of this.
Of this investigation that he's going to be carrying all the way through his career into what realism even is and how it works and what it means and so on and so forth.
Obviously with something like Punishment Park, that's less apparent because you're not dealing with an anachronism.
You're not dealing with something that's technically impossible.
Because it's supposed to be set in the present day, which at the time, of course, is 1971.
And yet Punishment Park is, again, very, very concerned with that.
With that investigation of realism, and the aesthetics of realism, and the political meaning of realism.
Yeah, that's definitely something that I was hoping, I mean, that's something that would obviously come up just for, you know, again, I just, I watched this a couple weeks ago when we first started talking about doing this, and then I rewatched it last night as we were recording, as we're recording, so, like, I have not done the deep dive of trying to, you know, kind of dig into every detail.
I didn't take a lot of notes.
I was just trying to kind of watch the film and kind of come at it fairly fresh on this.
So, but yeah, no, the sense of realism, I mean, it exists in this sort of, I guess it's not really an alternate history.
It's sort of an alternate present in 1903.
It's existing in this kind of a world in which there has been a different response to the protests around the Vietnam War, a more heightened response from the Nixon administration, but using what is an actual real piece of legislation passed in the 50s to do so.
Yeah, the McCarran Act.
Which was, essentially, it was a piece of legislation which allowed the President of the United States to set up concentration camps in the United States for political dissidents, which obviously was aimed at suppressing communists.
It's part of the Red Scare, it's part of that kind of McCarthy era, and from what I understand, it actually passed over Truman's veto in the early 50s, which, you know...
Given what we know of Truman, that does say something.
So again, I did some cursory reading on Wikipedia, and that's about as far as I got in terms of researching the McCarran Act.
So the film, it describes this Legal process by which I mean it is this kind of pseudo documentary style and it follows a actually kind of two groups of people of young people of dissidents of leftists of various stripes who have been brought to this to the desert in California.
And who are given the choice between, you know, kind of serving a long prison sentence.
They're being sentenced here in a tent, and they can either serve that sentence or they can undergo punishment park.
And that's a, like, a three-day walk through the desert.
It's something like 57 miles.
And if you get to the end of it, then you get your freedom or whatever.
From what we see, every person who is brought here to face this tribunal chooses Punishment Park, and it sort of cuts between a group that is being currently sentenced and another group that is undergoing the travails of the park itself, which is really, again, just...
Being in the open desert without food or water.
And being chased by the National Guard on training exercises.
It's actually explicitly a coalition of various... It's a coalition of the National Guard, the police, and the federal marshals.
And all of them are ostensibly taking part in a training exercise.
Right.
And, you know, I think given that bare description, it doesn't, like it sounds, like it almost sounds cliched, right?
It almost sounds like, you know, oh, we've seen this before, but... Certainly to us now, it's, you know, people hearing the description might think, oh, well, that's like The Hunger Games.
Right.
You know, Battle Royale.
The thing that it reminded me of actually, and I still don't know if you've actually read this, but one of the Bachman books, one of Stephen King's original novels he wrote when he was very young, was The Long Walk.
And this is a...
Yes.
I don't know, have you read The Long Walk?
I have indeed, yes.
Okay.
I was struck, I actually did, with a mutual friend of ours, Kit Power, I did a podcast about The Long Walk a couple of years ago.
Yeah.
And one of the things that I found in re-watching or re-reading that book a couple of times for that podcast was the sort of the pressure of Vietnam.
Because while that book wasn't published until I think the late 70s or early 80s, it was written when Stephen King was very young and kind of subject to the draft himself.
And you can kind of see this, you know, this kind of forced march of young people wearing civilian clothes, tracked by, you know, tracked by, you know, military men and police officers in this kind of dystopian future, or dystopian kind of alternate present.
Like it does, you know, it rang very similar to me.
So I don't know if you'd made that connection yourself, or if you have any thoughts about that.
I actually hadn't.
That hadn't occurred to me at all, but the instant you said it... It's funny, when you started talking about the Bachman books, I immediately started thinking The Running Man, because that's a game show.
Of course, people who've only seen the film will have a distorted idea of what the story might be.
In the original story, it's very different.
I do.
I grew up on the movie.
It's a perfectly fine Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie from the late 80s.
I like the movie.
It has very little to do with the book.
Our mutual friend, as you say, Kit, and I have talked about the movie on a podcast that we did to mark the rise of Trump about four years ago.
We did a podcast about The Running Man and The Dead Zone, which we thought would be most...
The most relevant Stephen King books.
It's funny, we need to revisit a lot of the stuff that we did around that time and go like, yeah, The Running Man seemed pretty prescient.
Yeah, I get that.
Yeah, completely.
Yeah, but in the film The Running Man, it's very much a game show.
I suppose it is a game show in the book, but it's not like the hero is in a controlled environment with cameras constantly trained on him.
He's let loose into the world.
And the world follows his ongoing attempts to evade capture.
And that's, again, that's quite similar to Punishment Park.
Except that Punishment Park doesn't really have this aspect to do with making the whole thing into an explicitly public spectacle.
What seems to be What's fascinating to audiences, or writers anyway, and directors about this sort of storyline, is the idea of it being a public spectacle.
Because as I say, there's been The Running Man, there's been Battle Royale and The Hunger Games, you know, the motif of the evil game show where the dissident is hunted by the government for the cameras and the delectation of the people at home watching it.
That's almost a sub-genre of science fiction or dystopian fiction now.
And it's so cuddly and soft and palatable that it's YA.
It's like a constant, very familiar, very comfortable trope of fiction for teenagers now.
We're just completely comfortable with it.
I think in the social media era, in the social media era, I think the sense of like we live in public and so our punishment is also public and you know, it feels like I kind of get how it feels kind of YA.
Like if you're 15 years old now, The Hungry Games just feels like how you live your life in a way.
I don't know.
It's kind of this weird kind of thing.
Anyway, but you were, you were contrasting that to Punishment Park and I think I, I know where you're going, but, and I agree.
So please continue.
Yeah.
Interestingly, Peter Watkins made another film, which is much more... I mean, it's still not very much like The Hunger Games, but it's more like The Hunger Games in the sense that it's like a movie about a future where instead of having wars, young people have to fight each other, you know?
This is... I think that was before this?
I can't quite remember.
The Gladiators, maybe?
The Gladiators, that's right.
And I think it was before Punishment Park.
Yeah, 69.
I have the Wikipedia page in front of me because I cheat.
No, that's fine.
Punishment Park is very much...
I mean, it's immeasurably more brutal than anything in that genre that we're talking about.
And it's not really immeasurably more brutal because there's more explicit on-screen violence.
There is on-screen violence, but it's not, you know...
You don't see blood and guts everywhere.
What you do see on screen is very, very realistic depictions of suffering, probably because the young people are actually suffering, because they're in the middle of the baking hot California desert, you know, in just inhuman temperatures.
And you see depictions of cruelty and sadism, and even more disturbing than that, Indifference and Rationalization of cruelty and even more disturbing than that I would say that the core of the film for me is not really it doesn't really take place in the park The core of the film for me takes place in the tent where they have the tribunals I mean you you said you described the film as they're they're brought to this place in the desert and they pick between Prison.
Very, what would have seemed to people at that time anyway, very long draconian prison sentences.
That's one aspect of the film that now seems almost quaint.
We're definitely going to have to talk about that, yes.
Yes, continue.
But they're brought to this tent and they're forced to choose between the prison sentences and the punishment park.
They do actually have a trial first, by the standards of this world that it takes place in, this sort of one millimetre to the side version of 1971.
They have a trial, they face a tribunal, they get to have their say, the whole thing is very legal and it's very punctilious.
As you know, in its own mind, so to speak, the process is very legal and careful and punctilious about, you know, there's lines about the officers are under strict instructions not to mistreat you, they all get to sit in front of the tribunal, they all get questioned, and the people on the tribunal... They get to make long statements, they get to, you know, yell, or they get to, you know, yeah, they get to have their say.
They even have a defense attorney who is denied his every motion, and who was probably the... I don't know, can I have a favorite part of this movie as the defense attorney?
That seemed like such a powerful bit to me, is that there is a defense attorney, but he can do nothing.
Yeah.
No, that's fantastic.
That's fantastic.
When it dawns on you...
As you're watching the film, that this guy, not only is he, his presence as their defence attorney, I mean, firstly, he's obviously not being allowed, by the structure of the setup, he's not being allowed to do anything approaching what would be, you know, an effective or fair job for these people.
But he's there, and as you say, his every motion, his every objection is just knocked down summarily.
And he makes actually quite a powerful speech at one point.
There's a moment of quite powerful rhetoric, where he reads out this spiel, which exactly mirrors the sorts of things that the Tribunal is saying, and the ideological rationale of the Tribunal, and it turns out to be a quote from... It turns out to be Adolf Hitler.
You'll never guess!
It turns out to be a quote from Adolf Hitler!
I mean, what he is he's a he's a he's a An online lib, you know, he's a lib centrist reply guy.
He thinks he can pull that maneuver and it's like people will go.
Oh My God, he's right!
I've become Adolf Hitler!
What am I doing in these clothes?
This short-sleeved shirt with pens in the breast pocket?
What am I doing?
I must change!
I must not be like this!
And of course it has no effect whatsoever.
And as it dawns on you watching the film that this guy, he's not just not helping, he's actually... he's part of the problem because his presence legitimises it.
You know, there is... I'm gonna...
I agree with you.
There are people who do the grinding, painful work of impact litigation, and you spend years and years fighting some massive corporation, and in the end you make some tiny, marginal progress.
You know, if you do it right, you're doing like you're doing, you're actually doing some good in the world, despite, you know, not really doing much at all.
And I don't know, we see so little of sort of the outside world's view of this, like we get some like sort of hint that Punishment Park is a Like kind of a political football that it's something that they're allowing these cameras in as a way of sort of like proving how like just and fair the system is etc, etc But you don't get the sense of like do these like are we seeing like for instance?
God, there's so much to go into here.
But you know, like this is a very dense text.
We're not even gonna scratch the surface of it.
Like is this a You know, is this kind of an intended death sentence for everyone?
Like, are there people who have gotten out and who have gone on to describe the conditions here?
How long has this been going on?
I mean, you know, some of the, like, one of the things that I don't want to do but I could spend some time doing is kind of pick at the world building of this.
Like, the point of this is not, the point of Punishment Park is not to build a, like, kind of consistent and wholly realized world.
It is to shine a funhaus mirror on the world on the actual world of 1971 at one and by extension our world today, you know, and so I think that picking at those details does It does the film a disservice if you're trying to talk about the effect of it and certainly kind of in this format I don't want to kind of dwell on that but there was a lot especially kind of rewatching it and then sort of like I actually rewatched bits of it today just to kind of find little moments and see kind of what was being said in particular moments and I
I did find some of the, you know, my kind of my hard science fiction brain kind of starts asking questions about, like, what is and is not being said?
What is, you know, what is kind of implied?
And I don't know, depending on the answers to some of those questions, you can kind of come away with different interpretations of the actions of certain characters.
And I think that this question about the defense attorney kind of gets into that, because if we do have people who have been released, then the defense attorney maybe is doing something worthwhile, even if it is largely futile.
And which, you know, public defenders in the current criminal justice system have a similar response of, you know, they run into judges and are continually denied on every single motion and stuff.
Like occasionally you can find that one where you have that one good argument and suddenly You can reduce somebody's sentence by five years or something and like that matters a lot to that guy So I mean, you know again it is kind of a it just kind of depend on how we want to approach those kinds of questions as to how you want to interpret it, but I agree with you that the in this this gets into the
Kind of what I think the point of the film is because we see these two separate groups You see a sentencing group and we see a group that's on the on the in the park and the second group there Well, actually the first group chronologically the part the group that's in the park splits in two between sort of a militant wing and I sort of like well let's work within the system wing and get to the end of the thing and Yeah.
And then, in the end, both groups die.
One, the militant group dies because they actually sort of attack the soldiers and they die in combat.
And the non-militant wing dies because they just are killed because the soldiers are angry at the... Either this was the intended goal all along, or the soldiers and the cops We're angry about the killing of some of their number by members of that group and they were taking out their kind of frustration and rage on the members of the group and it's just sort of like well this is just kind of what happens and who's here to judge us except for the cameras.
And so I come at this and my overall kind of thought is like man this is really fucking bleak.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, it is like the film.
It's it's incredibly effective, especially in this moment with Joe Biden's inauguration and with like this, you know, the left in the United States being both more active than it's been in decades and also being completely crushed out of any You know, real authority within kind of the structures of power for the foreseeable future.
And it's like, well, you can work outside of the system, in which case you will get nowhere and be crushed immediately.
Or you can work within the system, in which case you may get some marginal response, but overall you are just going to be crushed completely.
And there is no larger answer to any of this, you know.
Yeah, that's kind of... I mean, it's just, I don't know, like watching it in this moment was a... I mean, it's a real downer.
And, you know, I say this as someone who...
It consumes a lot of material that a lot of people think is a real downer, but this film, as energizing as it is in terms of its quality, it really does not... It's really hard to recommend it to somebody kind of looking for, like, here's something that's going to give you some kind of solution.
I mean, the film is almost saying there is no solution.
You're just going to get crushed.
That's what the film is ultimately saying.
Yeah, and I think you have to look at the moment of its creation.
I mean, it's from 1971, it's not from 1967 or 1968.
1968 is the peak of the post-war moment of struggle and the revolutionary moment.
And it starts to, you know, as Hunter S. Thompson said in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, There's the moment when the wave crashes and then it starts to recede.
The tide starts to roll back.
And I think already, by this point, that revolutionary moment is in recess.
It is entering a process of long, slow defeat.
You know, this is after, I believe, the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
This is in the context of the Chicago 7, Bobby Seale and Abby Hoffman.
I mean, I think Bobby Seale is very directly referenced in this film, to be honest, in that one of the African-American defendants is actually and gagged because they just cannot tolerate the things he's saying.
They're so scandalized, you know, outraged by the things he's saying that he must be silenced.
And I think Kent State is just around the corner, isn't it?
Kent State is referenced in the film.
Has it already happened by this point?
Yeah, it's already happened.
It happened in 1970, so it would have been, like, depending on how long the scripting process, I don't know what the production process was on this or anything, but, you know, like, uh, it would have been, it would have been, like, almost like an immediate sense memory for the people, like, in production of this film.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think just the election of Nixon in 68, you know, it's just such a crushing... Like, Kent State is probably closer to the production of this film than the murder of George Floyd was to the production of this podcast, if that, you know, tells you anything.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think this is, I mean...
You know, a book I have always been and will always be fascinated by is 1984 by George Orwell, which people listening to this might find a little surprising.
And I know George Orwell, he's very out of fashion these days on the left, but I continue to be fascinated by that book.
But I think you have to view Orwell in the context of, you know, his writing takes place in an era of historic defeat for the left.
And I think you have to view this in something of a similar vein.
This is obviously very much a product, this is a work of art that's a product of a revolutionary moment.
But I think it is a product of a revolutionary moment that's in crisis and is in the process of fragmenting under heavy demoralizing defeats.
And I think which feels very again very current in 2020.
Yeah Yeah, very very much is a moment where I think you know, my Twitter feed is just filled with you know Like again not to make it personal or anything, but it is it is filled with people kind of going.
Well, what do we do now?
Like, what's the, like, what's even the option, you know?
And, you know, people reach out to me, like, what can I do to help?
And it's like, just feed somebody.
Like, that's the only answer I have right now.
Like, you know, like, just help somebody.
Like, give somebody material help.
And I hate that that's the only answer I have.
I wish I had a better answer.
But, you know, it's not like I haven't thought about it.
Nobody has the answer at this point.
We're just kind of stuck in this.
And if I can kind of veer back to the movie and back into the other thing that you touched on, but I think we really should highlight, 1971 is before the rise of mass incarceration in the United States.
Yeah.
If you look at the graphs of number of imprisoned people in the United States, right around 1971 is when you start to see kind of an uptick, and then it kind of goes up through kind of the mid-70s, and then it just skyrockets in the 80s.
And it's only in the last kind of couple of years started to slightly decrease as the increasing calls for the end of mass incarceration have had some effect.
But one of the things that's interesting is that there are a lot of like theories and they're kind of competing theories about how this works and what really drives mass incarceration and I'm not intimately familiar with the kind of the white papers in the literature to really kind of like have a
To have a long discussion, but people are pretty familiar with the 13th documentary and the John Pfaff book, Locked In, and there are a couple of other books that cover this main topic.
And one of the things that really drives mass incarceration, it's not necessarily The crimes that people go to prison for, but the length of the sentences that people go to prison for.
And what in your country might be a six-month prison sentence can get you 10 or 15 years over here.
And this is especially relevant to protesting and to kind of riot charges and that sort of thing.
So, um, Jake Hanrahan, who is deeply, deeply problematic, but whom I have some respect for, um, as a journalist.
I think he's a good journalist, and I think he's a really shitty person on Twitter, um, will often, uh, kind of comment, uh, I don't know him personally, but I know people who, I mean, you know, I'm friends with people who know him personally, so, you know, like, professional respect and all that, but like, just get off Twitter and you'll be much better to the world.
Jake Hanrahan.
He'll often sort of come out, and he's a British man like yourself, and he will comment on U.S.
protest footage, and basically call American anti-fascists and American protesters pussies, because, well, why didn't you just punch that cop?
I've seen, come on, the French are doing all this great stuff out in the Yellow Vests and all this sort of thing.
We see so much more aggressive stuff.
And like you Americans, I mean, you're just, you're just, I mean, he doesn't quite say it this way, but he's basically saying, yeah, you're a bunch of pussies.
And, uh, what, you know, gets like carefully explained to, to him is, um, the charges that you can draw for like lightly assaulting a police officer in the United States.
Like you can go to, you can go to prison for life with a couple of like priors with that, you know?
Like, it's not a question.
Also, like, in America, you know, if you start getting, if you start swinging at a protest in the United States, there's probably some right-wing dipshit with a gun not too far from you, which is not something you can say in most places in Europe, right?
Yeah.
And I say all this because you look back to the radical left movements of the 70s, you look back to the Weather Underground, you look back to the Yippies, and you look back to a lot of that stuff, and they were doing all kinds of really revolutionary stuff.
But none of that ever, like, we're not nearly to that level in terms of, you know, like the most violent Antifa protests or the Black Lives Matter, you know, somebody's burning, you know, Burger King wrappers in front of a federal building in protest, like, you know, and that's like, you know, violent leftist activity.
Yeah.
And it really is that, like, there is a sense of... You know, by the time that finds its way onto Twitter, that's Black Lives Matter burning American cities to the ground.
Exactly, exactly.
But so much of the lack of...
Kind of force there comes from the fact that the state has repressed.
It has, like, cracked down on this stuff to the degree that it has.
And people rightfully are unwilling to, you know, engage in this kind of action.
And so, like, there is this sense in which the mass incarceration works at doing the thing that it's meant to do, which is to repress
You know leftist and the african-american community like it it is doing it's it is doing the job It is doing the job of the police state, you know, like that's what the mass incarceration the united states is doing and I Sorry, it may feel slightly off-center off the point of the no no movie but the thing that the movie that like the version of reality like the thing that the movie tells us is These kids, they do protest songs.
They're leftists, they're seditious, they refuse to go to war, etc.
And they're given the option of three days in the desert, in which case they will probably die at the end, or a few years in prison.
And you get that now for stealing a car stereo.
Again, just to talk about the horrors of the American penal system, Liberal, you know, progressive, you know, like, beacon to the world California pays prison labor pennies on the hour to fight forest fires every year.
Oh, yeah.
And those conditions are significantly worse than the ones that the kids are given at Bonishment Park, right?
Sure, and that's and that's like yeah, you get you don't it's not like do this for three days and go home It's like you get to do this for you know, this can be instead of like working in the washing dishes you can go fight forest fires and we'll pay you an extra 25 cents an hour or something like it's It's it's just I feel like again like talking about this and talking about like the American, you know Like I feel like people don't believe how terrible the American justice system actually is
People, certainly in Britain, they don't understand or know anything about the horrors of the British incarceration system.
I don't think people in this country would believe a tenth of stuff that's common knowledge in America about how your prisons work.
There's a very good piece in Mother Jones by Shane Bower who went inside Angola prison.
Yes, I read that.
Yeah, and Angola is essentially, just for the listeners who may not know, Angola is effectively, it was a slave plantation back when that was legal, and then it basically turned into a prison.
Because by the 13th Amendment, you can assign people slave labor as long as they've been convicted of a crime.
Yeah.
And so it didn't really change.
It's, like, effectively, you know, the historians who have studied Angola prison basically say, like, no, it is doing now what it was doing then.
The conditions inside have not changed.
If you want to see what a modern plantation, what a 19th century plantation looked like, look to Angola State Prison.
And that piece is...
And I still look inside.
Yeah, and that's how it works now.
You don't just put people in plantation slavery for being black.
You have to have an intermediary stage where you basically criminalize existing in America with black skin, wait for them to go out and do something, and then arrest them.
And then you can put them into plantation slavery.
Well, we mentioned George Floyd, right?
And I'm not making light of this, right?
But he was murdered for allegedly he had a fake $20 bill or a fake check.
I think it was initially reported as a check, but it ended up being a fake $20 bill, which they say was fake.
But even if we say he had a fake $20 bill,
And he was they knelt on his neck for for eight minutes and killed him That might actually be kinder than sending him back to prison for you know for 10 years for passing a $20 like and I'm not again I'm not trying to make light of that and I'm not trying to like make light of his life Or you know to say his life was valueless, but if he was going to be sent to prison That's not the point the point is the system like the system of criminal justice itself is so intrinsically bad that
To examine it is to, to examine it to any length at all is to, with any empathy at all, should be to want to destroy everything about it.
Yes.
And it's just interesting to me, and again to bring it back to the film, that the dystopia, the terrible dystopia that is Punishment Park is actually significantly lighter than the real world that we live in today.
Yeah, and I think it's undoubted that there are aspects of this film that do look now to us, as I said, a little bit quaint, because it is very much a product of its time.
And, I mean, this is pre-neoliberalism.
And, I mean, there's disagreements about when neoliberalism starts, etc.
I mean, there's no day when somebody sort of switches it on, you know, but some people say it starts around about 1972, some people place it in the later 70s, etc, etc.
There's all sorts of debates.
I think Carter is probably the one that kind of sets that in motion for real.
I don't have a dog in the fight with the debate there, but you know.
This is an interesting academic debate, but for our part, it's certainly before the major cultural shift that we now live in.
But as with mass incarceration, again, just an interesting parallel, which starts arguably around the same time, because there is this debate about when the era of mass incarceration really begins.
You can kind of say 74, like 72-74, when Nixon starts doing the war on drugs.
You can kind of say late 70s, and most people kind of go Reagan is when it really gets going for good.
The same parallel goes for kind of neoliberalism, in which there are kind of like rumblings of it, there are kind of precursors and things that You kind of say, well, this is the kind of clear beginning, but certainly by the Reagan administration, it's ascendant.
It's this ascendant ideology and like it looks very kind of similar culturally.
You can disagree with that if you want, but like I'm just kind of drawing that parallel there.
On the contrary, I mean, I subscribe to a strong version of that.
The version of the theory of neoliberalism to which I subscribe.
Neoliberalism sees the two things as inextricably linked, if indeed they're not actually the same thing in different aspects.
Neoliberalism has this reputation as being about reducing the power of the state.
Yes, in some respects, the power of the state to control the movement of capital, certainly.
In other respects, neoliberalism is intensely statist.
It's authoritarian and carceral and it involves I mean the militarisation of the police, the prison industrial complex, that's a problematic theory but it has some water.
These are integral aspects of neoliberalism.
The sort of crude example of it is the thing about you cancel social services and to compensate what you do is Fund the police up and build prisons.
You cope with the social dysphoria created by reduced social services because you're basically looting all social wealth and funneling it upwards.
You cope with the social effects of that, the maladroit social effects of that, are coped with by increasing the budget and the powers of the police and building prisons.
And that's crude, but that is basically the mechanism.
And Punishment Park is from a point before that process had gotten underway, certainly to the extent that we see it now.
But it sees what's happening.
It sees in sort of like embryonic form the thing that's happening by looking at the way that sort of the Vietnam protesters and the draft dodgers and the leftists and the kind of socialists
In the early 70s in the in the kind of in that kind of late 60s early 70s and that kind of second Nixon term their first Nixon term are kind of treated it sees everything that's going on and they sort of like projects that into a into an uncertain future and if it wasn't if it wasn't able to accurately predict just how terrible things were going to get at least it sort of sees in the right at least sort of sees in the right direction right it's it's it's it's accurate as far as it goes
That's exactly what I was trying to get to, which is that as quaint as it might seem in some respects, in its alternate version, it's just ever so slightly shifted to 1mm version of 1971, it is nonetheless, because it's a heavily metaphorical text.
I mean this is one of the things I was talking about before with Peter Watkins.
He's intensely concerned about the relationship between realism, artifice and how you use realism to create broader and broader metaphorical ramifications.
The film is intensely metaphorical.
Despite it's... I mean, they went out of their way to make it look quote-unquote real.
They deliberately distorted the film around the edge to give it that fluttery, unstable look that makes it look more... Like they desaturated the colors.
They do all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, they do.
It looks like an old home movie, you know?
And loads of the quote-unquote actors are not actors at all, they're real people.
I mean, that's an entire sort of huge separate topic.
It's fascinating to watch the debates, quote-unquote debates, in the tribunal because to a large extent you are watching actual members of the Nixonian early 70s moral majority People like that, debating from their actual positions with actual left-wing activists, black liberation activists, anti-war activists, etc.
And the confrontations are just... I mean, to me, anyway, watching them every single time I watch this film, it's just white-knuckle time.
I'm just gripping whatever I'm sitting on, you know, just absolutely on the edge of my seat with these debates.
Well, and it's interesting that, like, not all of the leftists even agree with one another.
Like, this is something that really struck me on the second watch, is that you've got kind of the more, like, well, I agree with everything as long as it's nonviolent.
You've got sort of the pacifists, you've got the social democrats, and you've got kind of like the radical, you know, the kind of revolutionary radicals.
And they're all kind of being lumped together into one group and sent off to their death, which, you know, kind of, yeah, which seems very intentional.
It seems very deliberate on Watkins' part.
Yeah.
But he gave these people an enormous amount of autonomy.
What he basically does is he sets up the scenario and then he says to these people, you know, this is the scenario, this is what's happening, this is your position in it, this is your position in it, we're now going to run it.
And he basically puts these people in the position For real.
I mean, obviously it's not for real.
Again, these Watkins movies are intensely concerned with these layers of artifice and reality.
But he puts these people in this situation as if they were actually doing it.
And then says, go on.
Go ahead.
Have, you know, do what you would do in this situation.
And they do.
And it's fascinating to hear these people talk.
But again, I'm veering off what I was trying to say, which was that the film goes to intense lengths to make itself seem real in the service, I think, of this wider metaphorical application.
It's an intensely metaphorical movie.
It's set in the desert.
You have parts of it taking place in deserted, ruined pueblos.
You know, you have the whole business with the flag and water, these elemental aspects that are crying out to be read metaphorically.
And I think, yeah, that's why, because it has that intense, it's intensely of its time and place, because it's intensely keyed into those debates between those people at that particular instant of history.
But it's precisely through that that it manages to have this metaphorical universality to it, which has allowed it, despite, as I say, being very dated, to, in some ways, to predict where we were going.
And that feeling you were talking about before, of bleakness, of endless defeat, I mean, I think that's slightly mitigated by the fact there's a double-edged feeling about the fact that these convoys of young people keep arriving.
So on the one hand you get this sense of the punishment park system is kind of like this machine that's having an endless parade of young people fed into it, you know, like a great big mincer.
But you also have a feeling of just there's an endless supply of these people and this system is never going to be able to destroy them all.
There's just more and more and more and more and more if they're going to do it this way.
If they're going to insist upon bringing them in in groups of like six and having these tribunals and having these debates where they absolutely insist upon this punctilious legality and then they insist upon the debate where they get to shout you down and prove you wrong and ridicule your ideas which gives them permission to just feed you into the mincer.
If they're going to insist upon doing it this way they're never going to be able to catch up with the number of people.
So there is a double-edged feeling to that, which is that the resistance is just too big for this system to cope with.
But nevertheless, there is a bleak feeling about it.
And I think that bleak feeling really does... That is one of the most prophetic things about it, because let's face it, you know, they won.
So far, anyway, they won.
is it worth making films like this?
Right?
And let me back up and reframe that.
Because this film existed...
This film, I mean, it still exists.
It was released at the time.
And because of various factors, it had very little effect beyond being seen by people like you when you were younger and people like me today.
And it is an abject lesson.
It teaches us all sorts of lessons.
But ultimately, you know, Peter Watkins didn't make this documentary.
And then, you know, and then suddenly, like, everybody woke up and went like, oh, no, mass incarceration is terrible.
And let's end the war in Vietnam.
Yeah.
On the flip side, one of the things that you can kind of look at in terms of hope is that within the world of Punishment Park, the documentary Punishment Park presumably aired, right?
And they were given access to, kind of open access to the events that occur, including open murder of some of these people, and torturous...
Putting people on the ground and putting them in chains and, you know, this sort of thing.
Like, the documentary exists because they were given access and they filmed things and then it aired, at least in Britain, and I think they imply they aired on, like, NBC or whatever.
And there's a parallel out there too, and I think this is a deliberate parallel by Watkins, and you know more about this than I do, to the Vietnam footage, to the body bags that were coming home to America from Vietnam at the time, and the fact that you did have journalists We're on the ground just filming what they saw.
And it was like that footage, this years of footage of watching atrocities and watching body bags come home to no great effect in terms of the economic and, you know, material realities of the people watching the footage, like that sort of drove And sort of drove the negative response to the Vietnam War and that arguably eventually ended the war, right?
And that like it was just kind of normal people seeing it on TV, even more so than the kind of anti-war activists in a weird way that had like that kind of like numbing effect that eventually led to this kind of the malaise and kind of the end of Vietnam.
And we have not gotten into a ground war on that scale again precisely because Um, you didn't, the, the U S government does not want to see, uh, casualties like that.
And instead we do everything by air war.
So, you know, uh, you know, so, so, so there, but there, so, so what I'm getting at is like, so within the world of punishment park, this documentary serves the purpose of forcing people to watch the body bags come home from Vietnam did in our world.
And in our world, that footage absolutely did have a real material effect, at least in the long term, and in the sense that it merely transformed the form that American Empire takes abroad.
But yeah, I mean, I asked you, was this film worth making?
And I guess I'm just trying to kind of think it out loud.
What do you think about all that?
What's your response there?
Well, I think is this worth making is one of the questions that the film asks.
Right.
You can ask legitimate questions about the status, moral, political, institutional, etc.
of the film crew.
Because the film crew are themselves characters in the film, you don't really see them, but you of course feel their presence because the camera is diegetic and you hear the voice of the film director, it's Peter Watkins himself, but he's not just being a neutral non-character and he's not being Peter Watkins, he's being the director of this film that's being made in a fictional world.
The question I ask is whether the documentary crew had access to food and water during this period.
Exactly!
That is a question.
If I had to criticize the film on any specific point, I would say the fact that it's never depicted any of the prisoners in the park asking the film crew for water.
And that for me feels like a glaring omission because I can't believe that the film crew wouldn't be in there without water because there's no reason for them to not be in there with water and in fact they'd be endangering their lives if they went in there without water.
And there's no reason for the authorities, although I suppose the authorities could say you're not allowed to take water in because the prisoners might take it from you.
But if that's what happened, then we need to see that.
We need to see that scene, or we need a scene where the prisoners ask the film crew for water.
And that could have been a really interesting scene.
Like, what does the film crew do there?
Because the film crews, they're like nature photographers, you know, with the camera trained on the cheetah that's hunting the antelope or whatever.
They're not intervening, they're just training the camera.
And of course, the idea is that they're there as neutral observers, they're just recording it, and then they're going to come back with their report and people get to judge for themselves.
And I think...
That is something that the film very deliberately deconstructs because the film crew are diegetically there.
They don't help the people in the park whatsoever.
They are neutral.
They just ask questions.
They don't argue with the tribunal.
They don't try to intervene at all.
Until you get towards the end of the film where the director sort of loses it.
And it's very interesting, he loses it with the cops because he suddenly perceives that the game is rigged.
It's like when they get to the flag, because the whole thing is, I don't know if we adequately explained this for the listeners, but the prisoners are supposed to make it across the park To an American flag, you know, metaphor again, which is just planted in this clump of rocks, and they have to get there.
And if they get there without being apprehended by any officers, then they're supposedly free to go.
Of course, when they get there, the group that do get there, they find that the flag is surrounded by officers.
And when they try to approach the flag, they're gunned down.
Again, ostensibly, again this is open, you can interpret this as many things in the film, like the dead officer earlier in the film, that the officers then get all self-righteous and moralistic about, you know, my men want revenge for the officer they killed.
We don't see that happen, we don't know who that person is, that dead body, we don't know who killed him, we don't know what happened.
So again, towards the end, the flag is crowned by... Maybe he showed sympathy towards the prisoners and was trying to give them some food.
Yeah, or maybe it's a prisoner dressed up in a policeman's outfit that they just use as a pretext, you know, we don't know.
But at the end of the film, some prisoners do make it to the flag and it's surrounded by cops and the cops gun them down.
Some of them, it appears by accident, you know, because they're saying, You know, stay where you are, and the person approaching apparently doesn't hear them.
And the film director, the guy behind the camera, Peter Watkins' voice, he starts screaming at the guy with the gun, he can't hear you, he can't hear you, and he screams at the guy who's approaching, stop, he's going to shoot you.
And they do, they gun loads of them down.
And the film director just loses it, and he's screaming, you bastards, etc.
at the cops.
And the film is very deliberately asking, you know, can you be neutral in situations like this?
Can you just be a neutral reporter?
And obviously you can't.
If you're there just neutrally filming it and not intervening and not taking a side, then again, a bit like that lawyer in the in the tribunal proceedings, you're legitimizing the process.
You're becoming part of the process.
You're becoming part of how it works, you know.
And I think I think parallels to Vietnam are very deliberate and the awareness of the parallels with Vietnam war reporting and war footage are very deliberate as well.
And I think the film is very, again, through its intense focused realism, it's asking a much wider question through this prism of metaphor about what role reporting actually serves in a situation like that.
And again, you know, people have written about this.
Noam Chomsky's written about this.
The vast majority of the war reporting on Vietnam was not this adversarial, undermining, stab in the back, you know, undermining the government, undermining the war effort, attacking the troops thing of legend, of conservative legend.
It's slavishly pro-American effort in Vietnam, you know, is enough being done to win the war?
Is the war still winnable?
Etc.
That's the way it's framed.
It's not for sure.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to apply otherwise.
I was just kind of remarking on the sheer amount of footage that was coming through.
Like, the footage speaks for itself to a certain degree.
I agree.
I agree.
The footage that came back did have that effect, despite the ideological framing.
Just the sheer... and of course, the American Empire has been a lot more careful since Vietnam about what it lets people see.
You know, you have the whole phenomenon of embedded reporters.
That's about controlling reporters. - We could have a whole, we could do a whole hour on embedded reporters. - Yeah.
So we'll table that. - We will table that for a possible future episode. - But I agree with you.
But I think an interesting, this is another thing that Noam Chomsky has pointed out, An interesting thing is, there were basically no protests against the Vietnam War when it started.
The protests evolved over the course of the war.
And, you know, you can't demand ideological perfection of protest movements.
Some of it would have been people who were objecting to the war on grounds that you and I might want to argue with.
You know, is it unwinnable?
Stuff like that.
As indeed a lot of the protests against, like, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A lot of the protest, I was on the big anti-war march in 2003.
I was marching alongside people whose specific positions on that, you know, I'd probably want to have an argument about it with them.
But nevertheless, there was a massive, just an unprecedentedly massive march against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And as Noam Chomsky pointed out, it started before the war started.
You know?
And that's almost unprecedented.
So I think you can see there the accumulation of consciousness on the part of masses of people as to what this sort of thing means.
And I think if work like Punishment Park has long-term value, I think that's what it is.
I think it's this accumulation of consciousness.
I do agree with that.
I mean, I don't think that there's a distance between us on that.
I was just kind of thinking in that direction.
And particularly in terms of the way that sort of...
The right wing certainly today they've learned their they've learned the lessons from these kinds of things and they've kind of taken and gone like well Yeah, this looks like a fucking game show, right?
This looks like you know, nobody would do this in reality like the conditions aren't that bad and you know you had again referring to prisoners of war from from in Guantanamo Bay and You know, you had people on, people, senators, standing up and pointing out, like, look at all the great food that these people are given.
They live lives of luxury compared to the lives of you and me.
And, you know, that kind of propaganda just kind of moves forward, right?
And, but they use examples like Punishment Park or The Hunger Games or kind of the, you know, some of the more simplistic Rachel Maddow level Trump is Hitler, Orange Man, bad stuff as like Look at the hysterical libs.
Look at the hysterical people on the left who, like, clearly Trump isn't building concentration camps that are going to murder all the Jews.
I mean, these are just camps full of brown children who came across the border And we've got to do something with them because they broke the law, right?
Their parents chose to come here knowing it was against the law.
It's the parents' fault.
It's the parents' fault.
And this is the very, like, nice liberal position.
And I guess to extend this into, this is the one other bit that really struck me in this There were a lot of bits that struck me in this movie.
I think you and I could go through, like, we could just take this movie five minutes at a time and just discuss all the, like, things that are in that, like, five minutes.
Like, that, you know, Punishment Park, the podcast, like, let's, you know.
Actually, I think maybe we could just do Peter Watkins, you know, five minutes at a time.
Just start with Culloden, the first five minutes of Culloden.
Not having seen Culloden, I feel like we could probably do that if, you know, Patreon backers, let us know if you want to listen to that.
But there's one moment that really struck me in particular, and it's leading into a future episode of I Don't Speak German.
There's a bit where all the kind of very nice liberals who are kind of perpetuating the system are sitting outside under a tent and having lunch.
Having a picnic.
And one of them was asked, you know, like, you know the documentary and the Watkins is asking Questions to them like oh, what how do you feel about what's happening here?
What if you're you know, what if your daughter got into this?
What if your son was in here and there's a lot of like well my you know, my my daughter knows better They're not they're not that kind of people but there's one who like Santa starts to sit and talk like well, you know my daughter and I had you know, there was about a year in which we had some But I just had to give them the discipline.
I had to make sure I had to give them the discipline and after it was a tough year but now everything's fine and you just like there's a whole movie there's a whole story there's a whole other thing going on in just that 30 seconds of footage that's Buried in the dialogue like it's like it's overt like it's we're meant to envision that like what does that mean exactly?
Yeah, and what does that cycle of abuse really mean and that's why you know That's why I kind of keep coming back to this and going like there is so much in these films there's so much in this film that you could
That you could take just that little bit of it out and have, and that could be a whole other thing that we could have a big conversation about, you know, because how these cycles reproduce themselves through parenting and through abusive, you know, capitalist, fascist systems.
That's, you know, there's a, there's a, there's an entire field of study dedicated to that and Watkins sort of gets at the core of it in, you know, two minutes of runtime.
And I think that's fascinating.
Yeah, no, I mean another another way in which the film is densely metaphorical is that it is intensely about the relationships between parents and children, particularly at that era.
One of the ways in which it seems quaint is that there's lots of.
One of the things that the people on the tribunal are very worried about is orgies and long hair and stuff like that, which of course is very dated.
But yeah, I know exactly the scene you're talking about.
He actually says something like, you know, I kept punishing her until she came round or something like that.
And in a film called Punishment Park, in a setting called Punishment Park, using the word punish, which I didn't remember, but if you're remembering accurately, use the word punish.
That has deep metaphorical implications.
You're absolutely right.
Absolutely yeah and I think I mean the most fascinating scenes in the film for me are undoubtedly the scenes with the with the quote-unquote debates you know between the the tribunal of nice people like there's again a fascinating detail is one of the you know there's like one of the guys on the on the tribunal is the the chair of the draft board one of them's a manufacturing executives executive one of them is this woman who's I can't remember what she is but she's
She's the Karen.
Yeah, she's the head of a morality and public life group or something.
She's sort of an American equivalent of Mary Whitehouse type person.
She's Tipper Gore.
One of them is a union guy and he's got this exact same sort of, you know, working man respectability politics that meshes perfectly with like, you know, the Senate representative and the guy from the American Legion and the Taxpayers Alliance and all this stuff.
That's fascinating.
Yeah, I mean, those scenes, just the absolute fury.
And it's real and unfeigned as well, because these are real people.
And it's a real confrontation of values between these two groups, the generations and also social groups.
And when these young people come in there and they...
They're brought in and they start saying these things and it's just you you you cannot say this You just can't say this.
How dare you say this?
I loved the songwriter going like, you know, lick my asshole and it's like, oh Yeah, but it's not just the swear words, it's the things they're saying as well, it's the content of their speech, the effrontery and the way these people are absolutely scandalised by the things these kids are saying.
They're screaming at them, they're thumping the table, shut him up, shut him up!
You know, he must not say this, to the point where, particularly when it's the young black man of course, it's just beyond scandalous.
He has to actually be wrestled to the ground and gagged.
And he's kept in a gag the entire time because it's just, you know, you cannot say these things.
It is just an existential scandal that you say these things to us, you know, and the fury of the oppressor.
And the fact that they're convinced they're the party that's being offended against as well.
It's so fascinating.
I don't know of a better document of the psychological dynamics of the oppressor, of how the oppressor thinks.
And it's so completely recognisable.
They even do the fucking, well, Martin Luther King was opposed to your violence thing.
They even moralistically quote Martin Luther King back at them.
I actually do know a better document than this about the logic of the oppressor, but that's because I have watched a lot of the Dark Horse podcasts with Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying.
Which, I swear, they've been really pissing me off lately.
Like, this is, like, they, they, and Not pissing me off in the sense of I'm personally offended by the things that they say, although they say some offensive things, but in the sense of they are emblematic to me in terms of talking about the violence, the riots, the protests in Portland over the summer.
And the need for the government just has to step in eventually you just need to have You know an adult to step in and say no and like what does that mean in that context except?
Overt physical like opening fire on protesters like that like there's blood at the end of that like that's that's what that means Yeah, yeah, you know based on the violence.
It was already done to the protesters in Portland over over last summer you know like like there's no other logical conclusion, but like you know had a hundred people been shot by you know and the Portland police or by the National Guard or whoever in Portland over the summer and
Um, they would have said, well, that's a very, um, of course I abhor that kind of violence and it's so sickening to see, but ultimately it's something that had to be done to maintain order.
And that's the, that's the, that's the kind of the, the, the liberal vision.
And like, look, I know we have liberals listening who kind of object to kind of us using the word liberal in that way.
And I hope you kind of join us more on the left and understand that like, If you're seeing things systemically, if you're leaning our way, I understand.
I am a reformed liberal myself, and please don't take it quite that personally, but if you're more concerned with maintaining quote-unquote order than you are with gaining justice, then You're just gonna side with the fascists in the end.
Like, you just are.
Because the fascists will offer you order.
And I don't offer you order.
I offer you justice.
Like that, I mean, you know.
Sorry, that's my thing.
That's where I land on this.
I offer justice.
And that's complicated and messy and difficult, and it's a difficult thing to get there.
But there is no order until we have justice, because order without justice isn't order at all.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think... Sorry, I got a little... It's a moment.
It's a moment in our history.
It's Inauguration Day.
I got a little philosophical there.
I apologize for sort of pushing that.
That's fine, you're allowed.
You've got a special license, don't worry.
Yeah, today and today only.
Yeah, that's right, it's a 24-hour license.
It's about to expire, so don't do it again.
On pain of punishment.
In the park, yeah.
We've been going a while now.
We wanted to kind of get in and get out with this, so I don't know, I could talk about this a lot more, but I'm happy to wrap up there if you are.
Yeah, I feel like we've...
I feel like we've hit the high point, so we can always come back and talk about it again if we need to.
I don't want to make these too long.
I don't know, I feel like our audience is split between make them four hours and make them 45 minutes.
I feel like it's one or the other with our audience, so I feel like an hour to an hour and a half is a nice...
Like hitting the midpoint there, but yeah, yeah, that's ideal.
Yeah Yeah, if you are a if you are a make them four hours type person then you might I mean I would say everybody check out this movie If you're interested in these sorts of issues you I mean, I think this is an incredibly dense Fascinating and worthwhile text, you know this will this really is a document of the psychology of oppression that you know from everything from the fight with the family dynamic to the The the class dynamic and everything.
It's incredibly freighted and insightful.
But, yeah, if you like long stuff, check out Peter Watkins, you know, because he makes, certainly these days, he makes, like, six-hour movies.
So it's fine with me.
Well, and for me, it's like, you know.
Punishment Park is a crisp 90 minutes.
Yeah, no, and it's like it's a, you know, I don't want to say it's an easy watch, but it's a, you know, it's a pretty brisk walk, you know.
Like, it doesn't waste its time with you, you know.
I watched a lot of stuff from the 70s that, you know, yeah, you could have cut 30 minutes from that 89-minute movie for sure.
That's not the case here.
You really could expand this to six hours and to really kind of get a lot of the details of it.
I really want, like, the Hoop Dreams length version of Punishment Park.
Um, no, what I was gonna say, like, there's also the thing, if people really do want, like, the four-hour versions of these podcasts, we could certainly do, uh...
Upper patreon tiers or something where we do like the four-hour discussion and that only goes out to like the $10 a month people or something like Let us know.
Yeah, let us know I mean because if you want that like that's just a I mean the trouble is always just you know Like having to prepare enough material to kind of go the like super instantly We could do like all right.
We're cutting off at 90 minutes the $10 a month people you get another two and a half hours Past the past the cut here, but you know so So, yeah, let us know.
As I say, I could spend, you know, a lot more time talking about this movie if people want to hear that sort of thing.
Also, for four hour conversations, we really have to have, like, we definitely have to make sure we have, like, certain kinds of content really don't justify that, but Punishment Park would.
But we're just we're just not gonna produce that so yeah, so yeah, I think Thanks to this is our first patreon bonus episode Thanks to everybody who is behind the paywall Thank you for this and we resisted this for a while, but I think we had a really nice conversation.
I think this is worthwhile We appreciate your support Very much.
Yeah, you know other patreons do other other people do like reading out all the names of the people or something and I always felt like that was just kind of like a waste of time But if people want to hear that I mean we can do that, you know, everybody who's thinking, uh I don't know.
Let us know what you want since this is the first one I've always I've always been slightly leery of that as well because of the the content, you know, we do an anti-fascist podcast which is
Listened to by Nazis and I've always thought like specifically naming people Yeah, we definitely shouldn't like I deliberately avoid naming people who like message me But uh, yeah One of the things that I'm planning to do on the main series episodes going forward is to do like a question that I get in my DMS every episode because I get a lot of questions that I don't have time to answer so we'll do Something like that.
And so we may do like Q&A's here in the future.
What these bonus episodes are kind of depends on those of you listening, just kind of letting us know what you'd like to hear.
Like I kind of conceive of it as, you know, a bonus content.
Maybe Jack and I'll talk politics that aren't fascist politics for a while.
He can explain Marxism to me.
Or, you know, we can do Q&A or we can do more movies.
Movies are easy because it's like, oh, you sit down and watch a movie a time or two, And you can kind of sit down and have a conversation about it.
It's fun times.
Jack and I are very familiar with this kind of podcasting, so it's much easier to produce than like the main series ones, which usually require like 20 hours of effort on my part just to get the research together and put it together for our consumption.
So yeah, I know we're trying to wrap up here, but I'm just trying to explain to our Patreon subscribers.
Please, tell us what you want to see, and we will do our best.
Yeah, yeah.
Get in touch and give us some ideas, give us some suggestions.
We want to know what you would like to hear.
And also, if you do want to see us do movies, or you do want to hear us do movies, let us know which movies you like as well.
Yes!
Because we've got a long list, and certainly... I mean, this isn't binding.
I'm not saying we're only going to take the ones that people recommend, because ultimately I think Jack and I are going to do the stuff that we find interesting.
And I do get suggestions from movies where I'm like, I know why you suggested that, but also I have little interest in doing it.
I think we both kind of get some of that stuff.
I don't know about you, but some of the obvious ones, like movies about literal skinheads and stuff like that, I just...
They're not very interesting.
I mean, I know we've done American History X, which is kind of interesting for its context and its wider social ramifications, but like people say, you know, I'll do Romper Stomper, and it's like, I'm really not interested in that, you know?
Right.
I mean, you know, like, I mean, we could do it, like, if enough people want us to.
I don't mind doing it, but, like, I'd much rather do something that you and I find more interesting.
I mean, I think the ones that really, for me, it's like people want us to do, like, Downfall, the 2004 people are dying in the bunker movie, which is a great movie, and I think we could have, like, it's not that we wouldn't have a nice conversation about it, and I'm just kind of like, I mean, I think I might be more into that than you, I don't know.
And I think I might be more into the skinhead documentaries than you, because I'd be able to plug into the things that are left out of those documentaries, and I think you'd be able to plug into the stuff that's left out of the story of 1940s fascism.
So maybe we should, it's weird, you and I... Maybe the stuff we're reluctant to do is precisely the stuff we should have to do.
Right.
This is the Patreon bonus stuff where you and I, like, debating what we should do as part of the episode, maybe?
But, like, there is this, like, I think there is a tension between Jack and myself in terms of, like, what kind of content works that I think makes the podcast better, despite the fact that it makes one or the other of us uncomfortable from time to time.
And so, like, Yeah.
Yeah, we definitely have our separate approaches, you know.
But I think it's a constructive tension, I think, most of the time.
No, no, no, I agree, I agree.
I mean, I think that's something that, like, as we've gotten deeper in this, and kind of done it more, and as the audience grows, I think it becomes, like, the best episodes are the ones where there is a little bit of a push-pull, not in the sense that we disagree, but in the sense that we come at things from different angles, and we bring different tools to this, you know?
And one of the things that I feel really, and I say this for the Patreon backers and not in public, because I wouldn't want people to get embarrassed.
I wouldn't want, you know, people to think I wasn't, like, the super badass.
But, you know, one of the things that I run into is, you know, people think this podcast is all me.
And, like, Jack is easily, you know, 50% of this podcast in terms of, like, I know what he brings to it.
And I know what the backend work that he does and all that other sort of thing.
And like, there's no question that Jack is as much a part of making this podcast happen as I am.
Um, like if it wasn't for Jack, this podcast would not exist in its current form in the slightest.
So, um, you know, please go support Jack.
Oh, shucks.
Yeah.
OK.
Well, thanks for listening, everybody.
And thanks for those kind words, Daniel.
And thanks to the listeners for, you know, if you're listening to this, at least initially, then you're backing us on Patreon, which is incredibly nice of you.
It really is appreciated, you know, particularly in these precarious times.
It genuinely does help.
It helps us do this.
It helps us be a bit more secure in our lives, which, of course, is part of our ability to do this.
And it helps us stay Independent and yeah, it's just yeah, it's just it's just such a morale boost to have the support, you know to have you get you get that little Notification and it says, you know, you've got a new patron and it's just a little dopamine.
It's just yeah.
Wow.
Thank you I don't know.
It means a lot to me.
I'm getting sort of embarrassingly sincere here, but it genuinely does Yeah, it doesn't let you do sincerity.
He doesn't like to do feelings because he's stiff upper-lip British man, but you know like Yeah, no, it's more that I'm sort of a glib asshole, more than a stiff upper lip.
Well, you know, you and me both, buddy.
That's the essential similarity that binds us together, despite our...
That's it, yeah.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
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