Hello, everybody and welcome to another episode of reverb. My name is Alex Helberg. And I'm joined on the mic as always by my co host and CO producer Calvin Pollak. How're you doing Calvin?
Doing good, Alex, how about you?
I'm doing good. I'm thrilled and chilled right now. It's spooky season. Have you been trying to get into the spirit a little bit the last few weeks?
I have been I'm going to a Halloween Beer Fest tomorrow. I'm really excited for that. Okay, and yeah, you know, just hanging out.
Excellent. Yeah, I'm going to a Halloween themed wedding this next weekend where? Yeah, I know that's a bold, bold choice. But if you're listening Abby and Nate's I love you. I'm not wearing a costume to your wedding. I'm sorry. But you know, I will. I will. I will be wearing one in spirits.
Just say you're dressing formally as a bit of a costume.
So I am probably a like, I think a typical black nerd who grew up with a kind of a, like a surplus of touchstones in the 80s and 90s, for cartoons, and science fiction, Action movies, and Star Trek The Next Generation. So that there were all of these little moments we could sort of grab on to, to form a kind of constellation of like, moments of blackness in a culture that really, I think guided us in our nerdiness until more recent years, when you started seeing more black authors attain prominence with science fiction and fantasy, and more blackness in popular media in big movies that were really successful. And I think that in a lot of ways, like, we have moved from the margins to the center of some of that, and being part of a nerd culture, and being a reader of comic books, and being a scholar and a fan of science fiction, those things flowed together in a really fun and intellectually fascinating way for me, they also just have kind of paid off in ways that working in academia is a particular kind of way to sort of make peace with and continue asking provocative questions about popular culture, from perspectives where those questions don't get asked as much because people don't often and really don't always go to black folks to understand like, what does the most popular popular culture mean to you? And now that we live in a world where like, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is where cinema makes the most money? It's newly necessary to ask people who have been paying attention and making demands of popular culture To kind of explain and and seek accountability for that space and culture in a way that I think we have always needed to do.
Yeah, absolutely. That's I'm so glad that you that you brought us straight to fan culture. And we do want to talk a lot about your sort of investment in studying fan culture as part of that, that social production and cultural production as well. But first, I thought it would be useful to define maybe for some of our listeners, who might not be familiar, as much with the term speculative fiction as they might be with sci fi. So is speculative fiction kind of a more sort of broad umbrella term? How does that relate in your mind to the sort of genre definition of sci fi?
They're, they're not interchangeable, but they're like, mutually intelligible. I think anyone who uses the term speculative fiction is really likely to know what you mean, if you make a distinction between science fiction and fantasy, but may or may not care. And I think anyone who writes in those genres, you know, whether it's for television or film, or, you know, fiction for adults published in magazines, or young adult fiction, or comics, or anything, is likely to operate with different versions of those terms for market purposes, and to kind of know who their readers are and who their editors are, and who's familiar with writers like themselves. But speculative fiction is usually used in a way to like to not have to say, the science in science fiction, but to also not have to really get caught up in the problem of like, the realistic infection, or the fantastic and the imaginative and fiction. And in that way, it's a really versatile term, if you press on it a little bit. But it's also a really useful kind of catch all for things that we can name really consistently, like, fantasy, or horror, a lot of the time and mystery depending on who you ask. And like counterfactual history, any of those things can be speculative fiction. And science fiction can also be that and just has a long history of being specifically called it.
Oh, yeah, um, para literary is like, the frame around the literary, and like the wall that it's on, right. But also like, it's, it's like the thing that holds the literary in place by being positioned at its edges or outside of it, I take my use of the word mostly from Samuel Delany to use in his own writing and to apply to his own writing, but also to kind of invoke the space where he and most writers and readers operate, which is like most of the reading we do isn't literature per se. But our literacy our ability to read is mostly not devoted to like the capital L literary it's really what we would call something other than what we would call the literary right so everything in a way that isn't literary is para literary, but we know that those boundaries shift all the time. And para literary is a useful way of saying like, Oh, if you're ever making a distinction or asking a question as to whether you know the jokes on on, like Bazooka Joe bubblegum, are literature or like the, the Snapple facts under the cap or literature like sure they're not. But what they are is para literary, if it matters to ask whether their literature or not. And by the same token, like mass market, paperback, romance fiction, and science fiction, and Western novels, and porn are all para literary, for the same reasons that the literary is a little more reserved to a little more narrow lane that has a lot of cultural capital invested in it and a lot of like, reputation and institutional authority holding it in place.
It's almost like in language studies, we have this this idea that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Right? Yeah, yeah. I remember learning that like my first year of college, and I was like, Oh, my gosh, that's true. Yeah.
And so it's like literature is, is the paraliterary with an army and a navy in a certain in a certain sense, in that it is sort of legitimated by cultural institutions like universities, like sort of scholarly and cultural honors. We can even say that some film becomes more more literary, when it starts to win Oscars. Right, right. Right.
Yeah, it's got an endowment instead of an army.
Right. Individual comic books are not literature in the way that trade paperbacks and collected all Names of comics are similar enough to book length, comic fiction that can be called graphic novels, that you start calling them graphic novels and start calling them literature. They're made of the same stuff. But they operate in the world differently. So we can talk about them differently. Yeah,
I was thinking, sorry, this is just a side riff. I was thinking recently about a guy like, I was just imagining a guy in my head. It's like a guy in a bookstore. He sees the section for graphic novels. And he goes, "graphic novels. I remember when we used to call those comic books", right? Like, exactly like a guy who's like, "Oh, they've got comics have gotten too big for their britches", you know, but it is it totally is a distinction that carries cultural cachet, right?
Yeah. And speculative fiction is kind of that, for sci fi, sci fi is easy to say, and it runs. And the vowels are different models, like the models and speculative are short, but there are more of them. And they just, they sound different, and different people say them on different occasions. But there's nothing unless an author tells you they don't want their work called that. And like you don't want to have a fight with them, you know, or you don't want to lose a fight with them, like, call people what they want to be called. And we can call modes of writing and things we read by different names and kind of pin down and figure out why we want to categorize them the way we do. I think speculative fiction is a more academically useful catch all. But in a lot of ways. It makes just as much sense to say sci fi and fantasy or to say science fiction, even if you want to say under your breath, technically, actually, it's fantasy. Like, it doesn't. It's, it's the thing that gets you out of the fight and onto the thing you're trying to talk about, is most useful. And I think of speculative fiction and parallel arrays operating kind of like that. Yeah.
And I think you know, towards that end, we wanted to turn a little bit more to your focus on fan culture. And the reason why that is so important, specifically to speculative fiction genres, a lot of your work thus far is focused on how fan culture is developing adds to our understandings of speculative fiction genres. So just to kind of transition us a little bit into talking about the subject of our conversation, Jordan Peele, how was your experience, both as a scholar of this genre, and as a fan of the genre, influenced the way that you engage with Jordan Peele's films.
it really, Jordan Peele making horror movies will make me go see horror movies, because I am a fraidy cat. And I am, I'm turned off by like gore, and body horror and the grotesque in movies. And I think I kind of get it in the same way that people who are into horror movies and particularly like gruesome and grotesque horror, I think, for the same reasons that that's what they're looking for. That's what turns me off about them. But Jordan Peele's movies do certain other things. And they're not that gory. So they're more watchable for somebody with like a weak stomach. But they're also really really engrossing for somebody who's interested in seeing a whole bunch of other things we like in movies in horror that we usually don't see. So it's, it's a real kind of, like, great crossover site and great like, way to be horror without being just for people who are fans of horror, and wouldn't expect to, you know, to find work by black directors and work with lots of black people in the cast there.
Right. And I feel like the, I mean, part of what I love about Jordan Peele's film so much is that you can see how much of a fan he is have other stuff in how he makes these movies and writes these movies. I think that I mean, one question that I had just generally before we get into specific movies, and I think we want to kind of like talk about each one because we've never done an episode discussing all three before we've talked about get out a little bit on one previous episode, but I mean, do you see that as well that he's like building in all of these kind of nerdy fan references to all kinds of media, and that that's like really, kind of shaping the direction of these movies? Yeah, definitely.
I'm, he's a real cinephiles Movie Maker. And I find it's actually it's more palatable. It's more like enjoyable and less of the sort of like, fear excitement, right? There's more there's the fear, excitement, and and the suspense excitement, but then also the like aesthetic, excitement, enjoyment of things you recognize and that are like baffling and marvelous it is films in the same way. A that films that are really cool to look at and make you think, are all there and movies that are not horror. And I think that's actually great because horror movies have had that the whole time. It's just the people like me are too chicken to look at them and look for it, right. But Peele of course is, you know, the kind of filmmaker whose films are about movies like good filmmakers tend to do, but also really deeply engaged with doing what horror movies do for their audience, which is like, scare them and make them think and make them laugh and sort of question, their nervousness and their sensibilities and make you uncomfortable. And I think all of that appeals to fans as much as it does to people who have been to film school, or people who are really deeply invested in like, the the lore and the canonical conventions of what movies are supposed to be like. They're very much movies for people who like watching movies and not just people who get whatever specific cinematic touchstones you have to be educated in to understand what you're seeing.
Yeah. 100% I mean, I, I am a fan of horror. I'll admit to that, like just about every new horror movie that comes out. That's like well reviewed, I will check out but
I'm with you, Andre. I'm also a big chicken. Jordan Peele is about all that I can. Sorry. I did. I should speak myself there. But yeah, I Jordan Peele and the kind of more cerebral horrors, typically what I get into as well. Yeah,
and but I think that part of what I enjoy about Jordan Peele's work, too, is that you can't easily pigeonhole it into a genre. I think that a lot of it is very sci fi inflected. So I rewatched get out this week in preparation for this conversation. And I almost feel that, in some ways, get out has been metabolized by our culture in a way that's deprived it of some of its original, like genius. And then honestly, just like, chilling to the bones, like weirdness and scary. I was really homing in when I watched it this time, on the actual procedure, you know, that is kind of the, the main terror of the movie. And just the basic sort of, like, underlying fact of what's happening, which is that like, you know, these wealthy white characters are using black men's bodies as kind of mechs right as like, as like mushy as machines. I mean, I wonder if I wonder if you read it the same way.
I see a lot of that. And that's the the way that it goes over so well, for people who are ready to see our horror movie tell that kind of story. But I also see like, I think that they're really successful movies, and they're really appealing for horror connoisseurs and fans and people who are reluctant to see her for what it is. Because it doesn't, it doesn't take the idea that horror can be a pigeonhole seriously. It really like kind of takes on whatever it's supposed to be burdened with, as something that's just genre film, right? Or like, just a big movie kind of movie and not like the main thing, the main event, and it really says like, but this is a kind of movie, right? So within those conventions, just like the romantic comedy has conventions, and the end, the historical drama has conventions, and the biopic has conventions. It can do whatever those kinds of movies can do, and it can depart from the formulas. But there's also so much in that basic plot of like, oh, no, what if the person is not who they appear to be. And also, holy crap, white people are always coming up with horrible, terrifying ways to make black people's bodies do things that are not what we want to do. And that is itself a horror concept, right? Doing all of that stuff that movies like that can do in a more or less formulaic way. And like in a more or less tongue in cheek way. Those are all really, like, if you press them far enough, they're really striking and really compelling. And they will really draw people in sometimes because they're, they're really ready to see like, oh, yeah, there's so much violence and mind control and not having control over your body. That's why I go see horror movies, right? And the next person like me, will go see that and will say like, oh, man, even though I don't usually see horror movies. Of course, this like, of course, I want to see this happening. And horror is kind of the best way to do it.
Yeah. And you have this concept that I found so generative, within your theory of the speculative fiction of blackness which is haunting, right? And you're drawing on the work of scholars like Avery Gordon, who, you know, I'm actually I want to read a quick quote from your book, where you're actually you're quoting Avery, Gordon's ghostly matters. And the quote is, quote, "haunting was precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and riggings are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving." And I was particularly struck by the moment when the character, Andre, who is like a friend of Chris, and Chris is TSA, but I can't remember, Lil Rel Howery, when they discover that their friend has been body snatched by this cabal of, of white demons, and he briefly like snaps out, of his possession. Right? And, and this is where you get the titular line in the movie, where he he runs towards Chris, and he says, Get out your job, and there is this ambiguity of whether he's warning, Chris, leave get out of here, or whether he's speaking to the white man who's possessing him right and saying, Get out. And I thought that was such a striking way of describing this like trope across black horror, that these moments of haunting was such a haunting moment for me.
Yeah, yeah, it's very much it is, to me, it's, it's one of the ways we can use what black people do in popular genres in which we're not typically the canonical authors, the authorities, but we are as present as fans and critics and people who you know, are invested in seeing what it means and making it meaningful for ourselves, where we can use that availability to make moments like that and to see moments like that, if you ask black people about haunting and the supernatural and possession, we give such interesting answers like, you know, the question of like, Can this be that person's soul still in their body in a way can this also be a way that this person whose rational mind is no longer in control of their body is trying to address another person who they hope can understand them on a non rational level, Tananarive Due, the horror writer has taught a class called the sunken place like about the use of this idea and this expansive kind of repertoire in black culture that it calls on to to kind of get at that haunted, and and non rational and non living place that, that the eeriness of moments like that come out of, because it's like it's there. But it's also like, not supposed to be there. And it's inherently kind of it's disturbing to think about, but it's also it's, it's moving, right? It makes you think about it.
Yeah, I really love that you that you invoked that concept of the sunken place. And we'll definitely plug Tananarive Due's work in the show notes as well, as a sort of preeminence black writer of horror herself, but the sunken place, you know, as kind of a concept. I was wondering if you had more thoughts about that. And the way that that is another sort of manifestation of this place within this movie that you know, is at once this kind of surreal representation of being stuck inside of someone's mind without being able to be in control yourself. It was a term that even back in 2019, I think Kanye West's now very controversial figure, but at the time, you know, was kind of invoking that to describe his own struggles with mental health. Yeah, I don't know. Did you have any other thoughts about the significance of the sunken place? It's kind of a center point of get out.
Yeah, it's, um, it's such a powerful trope. It's one of the things that Chip Delany sometimes calls a paraspace, where, like, within the work of imaginative fiction, there can be a kind of space of representation that's virtual or imaginary or separated from what's understood to be real for the purposes of the narrative, in which things that can't happen, according to the narratives rules, even if those rules are a little tweaked and far fetched or in the future or whatever. Are allowed to happen, or were that are there there, those possibilities are consigned to that space. And there's a kind of a use for a space like that metaphorically in get out in a bunch of ways, in part, because there is this notion that the physical substance of the brain and the identity makes this kind of control possible and makes this kind of exploitation and, and violence possible. But there's also a kind of iffy, literary figurative use of, you know, how limited our ability to express the function of the brain. And the concept of the mind, really, is that we are never fully sure what we're getting at when we try to make distinctions between those things. And we use literature for things like that. So if we're going to use cinematic imagery of one kind, to say, like, Oh, I'm going to tell a not quite strictly realist story about this, it makes perfect sense that there's room in that not quite realist story, for an even further from realist way of showing and playing out what it's like to have that happen. So a place where instead of, you know, the body ambling about and going through motions that it's capable of doing when another person's brain is in control, there's a notion of like, what what is left, if the rational part of your brain and your faculties are not available to you, like, and any number of images for where the rest of your consciousness is, if it is not in possession of your body, and your cognitive faculties, the notion of where that is, and what it's like, can can take a lot of aesthetic forms. And one of them is, what the sunken place looks like, it looks like a sort of permanent repetition of a state of trauma that Chris goes to when he's in it. And it also looks sort of like this, this forced process of distancing from yourself, that happens when he goes through the procedure, when he sinks into the floor and falls through this space, that that's induced by the hypnosis he's going through now. sink into the floor. So it's a it's a really salient image. And it's also I think, Jordan Peele had said, like, everybody's sunken places different, which is super creepy. And I wish he wouldn't say things like that. But it reminds you that like, oh, yeah, anybody's experience of losing control of their body of like possession and dispossession is going to be kind of subjective. But that doesn't mean it's, that doesn't mean it can't be imaged. And the image is going to be a creepy, weird, unsettling, painful one. For any given person, if that's the kind of experience it is.
Absolutely. I mean, yeah, for me, that was definitely just the most like bone chillingly before, like, existentially terrifying moments in that movie. But I mean, you know, and I mean, for all the reasons that you discuss the sort of dispossession of one's own body, the separation of you know, yourself from your mind. I mean, Chris literally, loses his voice when he's in the sunken place. And like all of his other senses and faculties. I mean, I guess, you know, I'd have a far simpler question, though. I've just, you know, we could talk about get out all day, but I wanted to hear from you. To you what was the scariest part of get out?
It was the way that being in the town, it's kind of the thing that's foreshadowed the thing that foreshadows nope, the, the thing that really informs the structure that leads Jordan Peele's films to note is that everything about it from the very beginning, sets up that black audience reaction of nope, nope, this is not okay. Get it, don't do it. Because you know, it's coming and the genre, one of the things that tells you is that it's a set of expectations, you know, how it's going to turn out and it's going to be bad, but you have to watch it happen and getting removed to this space where it's not safe. And where escape is impossible, and where people are antagonistic to you. And you're not understood. Right? All of that is what's most terrifying about it. Creepy, confused enters suburb series though, like a sore thumb. And it's the same stuff that's terrifying about lots of you know, so Survival horror movies and games. And that's terrifying about a lot of like, you know, one sole survivor and the final girl is in that state where everyone around her is dead or unavailable to her. Whatever makes those conditions happen. It's super scary for the protagonist and get out because he's going into this situation. And he has to willfully disbelieve that it's going to be like that. And then it ends up being like that. That's the scariest thing the whole time.
Yeah, like the I mean, it's, it seems like a very bad omen, what happens with the deer they hit on the road on the way to his girlfriend's house? And it's just like, from there just spirals? Yeah, no, I think I think one of the most interesting things that we're touching on when it comes to get out, is these sort of, I want to say like subterranean spaces between spaces that Jordan Peele seems to love to write into, and design and direct and his movies, moving us to talk about us. That's one of the most compelling parts of us, to me is this physical space of the underground tunnels that the Tethered, are living within. And so I wonder, like, how you think about that as a, as a space that's both haunting and surreal, and a kind of Otherhood, like a neighborhood for the othered, in this film.
Um, that is, audience, a shout out to Isiah lavender, who wrote the excellent book, the subject of race and American science fiction, and is way more daring than me in coming up with words. Because Otherhood, it's, it's this idea that can describe like a, like a, like a figurative or like a metaphorical space, or like an interpretation of space. That is, that is other like, rather than self. And that's what the tunnels are. And that's who the Tethered are in Us. It's not just the notion that there are these counterparts, these doppelgangers to everyone who suffer while people live through their lives. It's also that they're physically somewhere that can be released, which is a, it's a thing that makes all the things that are scary about them showing up in the movie, really threatening, also have this additional weight of like, you know, this, this terrible thing has been laying in weight has been like just under the surface has been, like kept there, and could have been unleashed at any time and could be unleashed any minute now. And because you can't see it, that just means that somewhere else coming to get you, it really enhances the drama in a way that like, if they just showed up one time from nowhere, it wouldn't have the same weight. But that actual space for them is what really doubles the impact.
Absolutely. And I think we could, we could even think about this metaphorically in terms of genre, in the sense that, like something else that I love about Jordan Peele's work is that, like, he kind of is always playing with multiple genres, like, revealing how all genres are inter generic with other genres, right. And so for some reason, that song "I Got Five On It", right, which kind of repeats throughout the movie, like when I hear that song, now I get scared, like I get, but I love that. I mean, you know, it's like, it's just like a good kind of classic hip hop song that would not be injected with those same stakes, outside of its usage in the film.
I also wanted to ask you about how you see comedy coming up in this film, because that's another way in which Jordan Peele is very eclectic in his incorporation of multiple genres. So both the usage of music for particular purposes, and like the way that characters always find opportunities to say super funny shit.
Yeah, it makes me want to watch the Key and Peele show more deliberately than I did when it was on because I saw sketches from it. And I was like, oh, yeah, these guys are super funny. And so I I could recognize Jordan Peele writing movies, I, I wouldn't have made that connection that they would be horrible these but of course, like when he started making movies, I was like, oh, yeah, of course, like these guys. Write rigorously, and do really clever things with genre and performance and irony. And so of course they can, it looks like they, in their performance, do things that also show they can write different kinds of things. And seeing that this is what it is. All of that comedic content is still there, too. I mean, the the people in Jordan Peele's movies, in part in a way that I think white people take for granted like so many things. They because they are mostly black people. They have seen horror movies, there's no notion that you would have people in a movie in which horror movies don't exist, that black people wouldn't have come up with that because we didn't create the American cinematic industry and its history. And we didn't codify its genre conventions, but we have inhabited them. And we've witnessed them, and we've interpreted them. And so to be in a position of control and authority and negotiation of them as a filmmaker and a performer. Of course, you acknowledge that it exists, that doesn't annihilate you, it doesn't threaten your ability to make meaning in this space. It's just something that you live with and elaborate on. I don't know why why people have trouble acknowledging that exists, do some introspection about it. But all of the characters in all of Jordan Peele's, movies have seen horror movies. So the daughter in in us at one point, she's like, "I get to drive the car, because I have the highest kill count in the family." And she and they reference Home Alone, when they're in the house and talking about setting buoy traps, because because of course they have seen movies, like people have seen movies. So people are in a situation that you know how to how to genre how to classify how to categorize how to make intelligible part of how you understand that is from seeing movie, so of course, you bring that into your experience of something, even if it's like super surreal, that it's happening in reality, and previously, it's only been fantasy. That's that, to me is is one of the blackest things about his movies is that they have that relationship to genre that doesn't teach it like culture, you know, sprang from the head of Zeus or formed from foam in the sea or fell from the heavens, like, it just treats storytelling and fantasy, like things that people make and inhabit and can get out of our hands sometimes.
Absolutely. I'm so glad that you went there with it, too. Because again, I think that's, you know, going back to this theme that we've that I think we're touching on again, which is Jordan Peele, and you know, yeah, all of his characters as themselves fans of horror and fans of the genre, right? Like, I mean, you can see it from if we want to go back to the very beginning of us, where, you know, they kind of like zoom in on the on the screen before the hands across America ad runs. You see a bunch of like VHS tapes on the side, one of them is C.H.U.D.: cannibalistic humanoid, underground dwellers, right? Like that's a specific reference to another film that is about a sort of underclass of people living in living in the sewers underneath a major city that have been, you know, irradiated by just, you know, careless government and corporate exploitation. Right. Which Yeah, I think I think that is, again, one of the things that like real real heads find super compelling about Jordan Peele's films is just a deep respect for and also, like you were saying, even deeper than that, and acknowledgement that these things are built on the works of others, right, like Jordan Peele is kind of clearly paying his dues with with a film like Us, I think.
Yeah, everything is, is, you know, so many of those Easter eggs in a way, they're not just like, they're not really hidden. I think in a lot of ways. They're also kind of fan service, there are rewards for people who are in on the joke. But they're a really nice kind of reassuring. And I think, in relation to the terrifying content, a kind of mitigating quality, where those moments of recognition and comfort and familiarity, they make the blows a little softer, like, they're always sort of their butter, they're on either side of like a horrible wound, or injury, or jumpscare, or something, which are still really affecting, but in a way those gestures help it all go down a little easier. And that's something I'm grateful for, as a viewer who has a hard time with the intensity of the violence, right? Like, it's necessary and it's rewarding, and it's compelling, but it's also like, it's a lot and it in a way like it wouldn't make sense for a movie like that, like for another movie. Great, but like for movies like these. I think it would be hard for those references to be seen. So constant and ubiquitous if they weren't kind of gestures of appreciation and like tips of the hat to other filmmakers and to its fans, and in that way, it's all like, oh, sure, you know, you know, it's a horror movie. So I'm gonna scare you. But also like, you know, it's a horror movie. So you're gonna be okay. But also not that, okay, because it'll still disturb like, I'm physically nervous remembering scenes from us now, even though I even though I know it's just a movie.
No, totally, I have one more easter egg that I really love in Us is where, multiple times throughout the movie, they're kind of showing this, a reference to a Bible passage, which is Jeremiah 11:11. And there's two layers to this, I think, which is that the first layer is just the quote, and I'll read the quote in a second because it's really chilling, and interesting. But there's also like, I know that when this movie was being made, Peele was working really closely with the director Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed Magnolia. And Magnolia does a similar thing where it has a biblical easter egg, like built into it, which is the passage Exodus 8:2, which is about frogs falling from the sky, which plays into the film--spoiler for a movie that came out in 1999. But I thought it was really cool that he builds that Easter egg in as kind of fanservice for fans of PTA, and also like a reference to someone who he was working really closely with, and then just the content of the quote, which I have right here, I'm going to read Jeremiah 11:11. "Therefore, this is what the Lord says, I will bring on them a disaster, they cannot escape. Although they cry out to Me, I will not listen to them." So that's the verse. And it makes me think about how Peele has written that he was thinking a lot about Trump, and the phenomenon of Trump becoming president when he made this movie. And so how do you read this within like a broader cultural political context? What you know, what is this movie telling us about the experience of like, social cultural life, that, you know, that this terrifying quote, I don't know how he found this quote from the Bible. It's probably the scariest shit in the Bible. It's up there.
It's right. Yeah, that's up there. Yeah, yeah, it's um, I think it's a it's it's like scary resonant. In a way. It's like realist scary in a way that like, so many biblical things are like, fantastic, scary and nightmare scary. It's like really scary, because the idea is like, is that these plagues and catastrophes have meaning, and that they're ordained, and maybe there could have been something to avert them, but you didn't. And that's why they happen, like, particularly the Old Testament stuff is like that. And black folks are always doing that with the Old Testament to like, the, the richness of black interpretation of the relationship of the old testament to the New Testament is part of a more complex, I think, black critical orientation than we can take for granted. Right? Like, if if biblical exegesis is one of the sort of like foundational approaches to understanding culture that people are going to practice as a way of cultivating their habits of critical thinking as a community, in the way that black folks interpret the Old Testaments relationship to the new and the way that that develops institutionally differently from how it does with majority white institutions, is really, really texturally important. And we learn that in teaching literature. And of course, Peele is part of that tradition. And looking at like, what does this this prophecy in a way that another prophet comes along to remind us about? And this prophecy that is both, like, fulfilled in it's telling, right, like a prophet is telling you the things in there already true. But like, what does it tell us? Right, that we should already know. And that sense of it is what makes it so trenchant and so persuasive? Like its content, doesn't necessarily have to map on to anything so specific that we really, really get it when we see it right. It could be as concrete and absurd as as the rain of frogs. It could be, like, surreal in that way. But it could also be like really real, like, they're all of these plagues, and the one that you really can't get away from is the one that's you, right? It's like, it's not just you brought this on yourselves, you should have seen The signs, but like you yourself are being the thing that does you so much harm. And it's a you that's that's really transcendent that's really collective. In a lot of ways. I think that knowing Peele is in that headspace and is a social observer with that outlook, when he's making that film, and that he knows it's going to go over in part in that way, is a reminder that he's not just saying, Oh, the Tethered are a particular interpretation of what black people live with in America. Right? It's not that because everybody has a tethered counterpart. It's just that black people are the main characters in our own stories. And in that story, the Us that we are that we have done that we have created, as the thing that's our own undoing includes us and includes our counterparts in a way that's deeper, and I think more of an indictment and more prophetic than just like, oh, yeah, of course, it's Elizabeth Moss, like she and her white family. And their keeping up with the Joneses drama with the family we're focusing on. That's the Us doing it to ourselves and the unfair, ill gotten gains and all of that that's us doing it to ourselves, we might even be ready to see that. But the idea that it's all of us is scarier, because then it's both. It's everybody's problem, which it certainly is in effect. And everybody is implicated in its cause, which is also like super scary.
That was, I mean, that literally is harkening to the line that I think terrified me, the most in us, and the one that really, I think hit me in the way that was most unexpected when I first watched it, which was when Red and Abraham and Umbrae and Pluto, the Tethered family corner them in the living room. "Who are you people? We are Americans." That was just like, oh, yeah, that was that was that was exactly what you described that that feeling of like, Oh, God, we're all implicated in this was just driven home so so profoundly. And just that one line I thought.
it did that had that kind of chilling effect, in that it was this sense of like, oh, no, they're speaking about themselves. And like the monster you've created. Those are Americans, but also the people who the monsters are doubles of? Oh, wait, they're Americans hold up. That that really does it. And when Red starts telling the story with once upon a time there was a girl, I was I got up. I wanted to walk out of the room. Because I was like, this is-- nope. Like, that's where a whole other movie gets started? Because I'm like, No, there's too much. I don't want it. Like, it's it's, that's, I don't want to hear that. Right. Like, I don't want the monster to know my language. I don't want the monster to be me. Right. I don't want to be the character in the monster story. Like, I don't want any of that. It's horrifying.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I really do have to give it up to I mean, Lupita Nyong'o Winston Duke, everybody in that family played their sort of double roles. So well, not just in the Yeah, the the sort of giving multiple voices or in some cases, you know, more, like nonlinguistic utterances. Yeah, yeah, I just thought that was an incredible, incredible stroke of being able to, as you know, as actors themselves be able to portray that sort of duality. So haunting lead throughout that and really drive home that same effect.
I think I can't like appreciate it enough how much thinking about and appreciating the talent behind the scenes and kind of giving, giving credit where credit's due to the filmmaker, as an art tour is a part of, I think, black appreciation for black horror in a certain way. But I think that is tied up with a thing that I I am particularly inclined to, to give a lot of weight to, which is the agency of performance, that whether the director is an autour, and is a really good one or not as good. And whether they're in the same cultural community that informs the decisions that go into eliciting the performance or not, like even in roles that are scripted by white writers and directors. When Black people claim a certain kind of agency and performance that really works. People get it and they see it, right and it's that need to rise to that demand that can make a story effective or not, or make it go over somebody's head or make it really good in a certain way, but not good enough to Make my scary ass go see that movie with Yahya Abdul Mateen. whose name I won't say? Because I don't want to see it because it's too scary. And if I would see it, it would be because the performances are really good. And the writing is really good. And I hoped near the cost against all the things for making that movie with that name. I won't say,
Yeah, very good. We won't say it. I think that we want to start to close things out here by talking about Nope, which is the most recent Jordan Peele film, and I did manage to rewatch it this week. And it was just as scary as the first time I saw it in theaters. And I think that it really does a lot of the same things that are so interesting, and so chilling about his first two films, which is definitely playing with space, playing with audio and music. Particularly, I think, the design of the sort of central monster or ship, whatever, whatever however we conceptualize it, and and the ways in which the space of it are portrayed and directed and designed, is really surreal and chilling. So I wonder what you thought of it, because I know you watched this fairly recently, right?
Yeah, I watched it. I'm not in the theater. But when it came out in streaming, I saw Us in the theater, like kind of like halfway through my hands, and then again, on video, and Get Out. I didn't have the same. I was like, I was ready to deal with the anxiety and going to movie theaters was a more regular thing, then. But yeah, seeing Nope, I saw it at home on streaming in the daytime. I asked people beforehand, like, is it really scary? And they said no, much more so than they would have said about his other films, and that I think they would have about a lot of horror films, even some that that might contain some of the same tropes and the same triggers. I think, part of that is that it's so unusual and weird to look at. And it's about that so much, that it's not just scary. Visually, it's scary. And also a bunch of other things that that add to the value of it being scary, and of it being about scary threatening things.
Right? Definitely. No, I think that it's, it's like the landscape of the movie is such a sort of central character, the kind of like, topographical landscape, and this, this ranch that they live on. But what did you think of the monster itself? Because I feel like that is kind of the most uncanny, most mysterious, most thought provoking part of the movie.
I have done more recently, research on Octavia Butler's fiction and on her creative, sort of her creative influences and background and practice. And one thing that she's so masterful about in writing, even prior to seeing her work, adapted for other media now, in her writing, she's so good at modeling aliens, who are, whose alterity is really consistent and really affecting. And she she achieved that really rigorously, she really studied anatomy of different animals and plants to craft imagery of aliens, that would produce sensory effects for readers, right, that you could describe with words that you didn't necessarily have to see, to get. But that if you did describe what you were seeing verbally, you could do it effectively. And I think Peele you know, his vocabulary is images, and figuring out in asking for in soliciting the imagery, like what we see a nope, it really achieves that effect of saying like, Okay, what does it feel like to look at this, you know, what are 10 people going to think, looking at this, what what is going to make the experience of looking at this really captivating, right? Like, literally, like it's going to be how the thing works. And it's also going to be strategic, right? All of those qualities that are really sort of narrated in the story, and that the, you know, the Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya that their characters have to understand in order to deal with the monster, it's that that need to really like, confront what images mean to us and like the impact of what things look like and what it's like to be looked at. It's like such an intense engagement with that, that really can produce like, the real confrontation right the real like monstrousness of like the absolute loot, spectacle that that thing constitutes. And it's a really, it's a really, like, forceful way to do that in a way that I think is sort of, you know, it's like the monster sort of like, like a Stephen King's It right where it looks like something that will be compelling and desirable in some way. And that's how it draws you in. But it's as if this thing has a stable form that just has that effect. Right, its form is is abstracted and nebulous, rather than having all these specific qualities, but it's really evolved to have those effects and that's a really challenging and I think very, Octavia Butler influenced science fiction, disciplined way to construct a monster.
I couldn't agree more. And I mean, it's it's kind of circling back to this point about Jordan Peele being somebody who I think really, you know, understands and appreciates the craft that goes into creating something that is just skin crawling ly terrifying, using an understanding of various parts of different anatomy, like, like, I mean, Calvin and I were talking about this back when we first saw it, that you know, like, what is Jean Jacket? Is it like, is it just is it a gigantic eyeball? Is it some kind of weird sea creature that is up in the sky? Like it has all these weird fluid movements? Its flesh is just like the scariest pale white sort of substance that you can imagine.
Yeah. And at various times in the film, it's implied that it it also is some kind of letterbox like a frame. Yes. Yeah. For an old school film camera.
Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, it's all of the scary things about the filmic image, right, it's all of the like threat of the image of you being your undoing. And it's also the problem of, of control, right, it is wanting to see and fix something that resists fixity, and has this this quality of movement and autonomy, that you really can't exert power over by looking at it, which makes it really, really threatening for people, because we, as a species seemed to want to do that in our reliance on the visual, but also, like, particular, people do it more than others. So the people in the film with an interest in doing that in their careers and in their character, tend to get into relationships with the monster that are all about that. And then the characters who are working through that are trying to find a way to not live in that same relationship to images and to control are trying to figure out some way to make it mean something different, like so that it doesn't mean it eats them. Right? But it means like, Can we can we visualize this indirectly? Can we have an interaction with it, in which our imaging of it is meaningful in the way that we live? But that doesn't inevitably result in us falling prey to it the same way everybody else does? Like, how are you going to figure it out. And I really love how their, their negotiation with it. It's a lot like a like Predator in that way, like, kind of a horror movie, kind of a kind of a action movie. Like, I don't know, these, this is not my field, that's not my job, but still are aliens, all this stuff. And it really is like the hunter becoming the hunted. And that effort to outwit, you know, the predator is doomed to fail. But it's also, you know, by understanding and respecting it, maybe it can happen differently. And that, I think, is what, you know, that's the The plot revolves around that effort. Yeah,
Absolutely. I mean, yeah, the whole idea of the concept of territory in general seems to imply that kind of like, that relationship between being, you know, having control or having ownership over space and places, as well as you know, to be in control of the gaze and where you are directing it, how you are exerting control through that. You touched on some of the characters that develop this kind of, you know, kind of a toxic relationship. So we say with Jean Jacket, the monster, in particular, Steven Yeun's character Jupe, who seems to you know, he for those of you that haven't seen it develops this sort of circus sideshow with the alien monster as its, as its centerpiece, you know, eating the horses that are being given or that are being sold to him by OJ and Em, the Haywood family, and Jupe seems to have this new question that he, you know, not only is his place called, you know, Jupiter's Claim, it's this kind of last stronghold this last territory that he sort of grasping onto with his, both figuratively with his fame and literally with the land. But also it seems to be this kind of odd space that he occupies where he is in control of, you know, what has been called in the interpretations of this film a bad miracle, right. And that's the thing that I think still confused me the most is, you know, if we want to go back to that theme of surrealism and how, you know, surreal elements are kind of, you know, driving the plot forward, I was really drawn to that the opening scene with Gordy's Home where the younger version of Jupe's character is confronted by this chimpanzee that murders the other actors on this TV set. And then later, we're introduced to the fact that there's this shoe that standing straight up right in the middle of the set, and that seems to hold some kind of odd significance to that that sort of surreal, sort of miraculous element coincides with the fact that, you know, Jupe did not suffer the same fate as his cast members. And yeah, I don't know, I wondered if you have any thoughts about that, because that was still something that was dogging me, I don't know quite how to police that in the sort of semiotic terrain of the movie.
I mean, I saw it as kind of, not to be the worst. And by the worst, I mean, not to be overcommitted to like a doctrinaire interpretation of what it has to mean for it to be meaningful at all. But if anything, it has a quality, that one image of the inexplicably suspended shoe, it's both it it's, you know, kind of a condensation of the spectacle, which is what the movie is all about spectacle, but it can't be the spectacle by itself. Right. And it also is something that no one else witnesses, right. So implicitly, we see it, we see it from a viewpoint that is so singular, that it really can't be a spectacle in the way that all the big deal spectacles in the film are about that they're collective, that they're shared, that the experience of interacting with them can be repeated. And then it can be solidified into a form that can be you know, made formulaic, and have a have a product, it can't be all of those things in a way, because it's a little more of like a weird, pure cinematic image for its own sake. And it's a lot of those things, right, some of which are very contradictory. And I think there's whatever it is, in a way it kind of positions, Jupe, it positions him in a way to be a certain kind of viewer, right? Maybe he's the one who knows the trick, right? Maybe he's the Prophet, he's in on it, he's figured it out. He knows sort of the language of God and like what it means, right? He's really in on it, so he can master this whole dynamic. But of course, he can't. And even if he could, the fact that we can see it means that it's not going to work. And I think that it's it's only by kind of reckoning with that, that OJ gets to do what he can do, right, that they can produce this image that's otherwise impossible to obtain. Because they kind of have to give up on having this spectacular but masterful relationship to what Jean Jacket is. And it kind of it has to fail in doing what is its nature, to, to be imaged in a certain way. That's the only way that it can happen. And I also think that it's really poignant, because it as much of the film has to do with like, humans and animals, and are they us are we them are all the secretly the same movie, like, the way that that's woven throughout these images, jean jacket as a as a non earthly and certainly non human kind of creature, really antagonizes the humans in a way that's really fundamentally about its alterity about how different that the chimpanzee is, and how its violence is justice expression of its nature. And that nature has nothing to do with whether human beings live or die. Right? So of course, jean jacket does what it does. And part of how you know that is that you know, it's not us, right? If you have a reason why you wouldn't do that. That's exactly what it doesn't have. So it's actually really poignant. Like it, I see it as suffering in the film, but it's also a way that like, that empathy isn't really meaningful. Like it certainly can't empathize back. Right. So it's not really it's not really getting it even kind of thinking of it as an animal who's just Doing animal things. So it's a it's a really powerful way to kind of get out, you know, how can this thing defy gravity? How can this thing? How can it have a relationship to you by virtue of you perceiving it? Right? And in the same way, that image that's totally impossible? How can that shoe be suspended? And how can looking at it, make it visible in a way where that's really what's happening? If it is just an effect of your perception? I don't know.
Yeah. I mean, that's, that is the most cogent and coherent explanation that I have ever heard for it. So I mean, I am I am more than willing to, I mean, I that also kind of just ties a nice bow around the entire movie itself, right. Like the, the way, the commentary that it has on the nature of spectacle, and the film industry in general, like, what, what it does to people, you know, the fact that the entire thing is framed by, you know, the history of black people in film, the fact that the person filmed was, was a black person riding a horse. And also that, you know, this is a family that is, you know, using that as kind of a way of marketing themselves in the current film industry, right, like, yeah,
I love that too, as a hook, in part, because it's a, it's another way of understanding what speculative fiction means that, um, the truth, the ground truth of that, right of like, the process of producing motion pictures and making cameras for films, do what they do, and capturing humans and animals on film, and all that stuff. All of the stuff that is true in that history doesn't have to be related to the characters personal histories in the film, because they can have a kind of a fictionalized biography that is speculative. So it's not necessarily, it's not important at all, whether the statements about those characters relationship to historically real individuals, and animals and events and occasions that can be documented. It's not important at all, whether that stuff is falsifiable for it to work as fiction. And more importantly, as narrative, it can still be the story if it's a true story, or a false one, because it's a story. And that kind of speculative fiction, that sense of it that I take from Julie Dash who made Daughters of the Dust, and Houston Baker who had conversations with her after the production of that film about how it, it deploys, and also imagines and reclaims possible and impossible scenes and moments in black people's histories and black, women's intimate lives. Those things are narrative. And they're imagery that's not narrative. And they're speculative. And that's a way of specifying that they are, they are fiction, but not fiction, in the sense that, oh, we know what the facts were. And this is a departure from it. But they're speculative in that, you know, the conditions of possibility for these stories are there. And the work of putting them into narrative is speculative, rather than a matter of making like statements with truth value. And that's very much what these characters have, like, they are representations of people with a relationship to the history of motion pictures, and their enactments of it is as much a matter of like, here's messing with the history of that. And what if there's an alien monster in that history? Right? That's as important to fictionalizing it as it is to say, like, is this what it really means? Did it really happen? Was the horse that tall? Why the horse had to be black? Like, those things are not the most important, just like the monster is not have does not have to be real. Right? It's the function they have in telling the story that makes it work.
Well, I mean, I, you know, not to put too fine a point on it. But I don't think that I don't think we could have arrived at any better sort of conclusion to wrapping up, you know, the works of Jordan Peele and its significance for the genre of speculative fiction. Any, any better than that. So we should probably leave it there. But this was a really, really fun and fascinating conversation. Dr. Andre Carrington, thank you so much, once again for joining us. Is there anything currently that you're either working on or that you've recently gotten out into, out into the world that you would like to plug?
Yeah, yeah, you can see on UCR and UC Riverside's website and probably in my social media accounts, and maybe the show notes. I'm participating in a year long seminar at UC Riverside called Un-archiving blackness. That is all about a on how the focus of African and African Diaspora Studies demands that we reconsider what archives mean to us and how we engage with archives like real and imagined. It's a series of public events and hybrid events that are streamed online, and lectures and workshops taking place on my campus, that some of my colleagues in history, and women's and gender studies and anthropology have dreamt up. And I'm so excited to take part in. And we are bringing wonderful people into conversation all year and staging programs that I hope people will pay attention to and check out.
That's brilliant. Yes, we will absolutely put that in the show notes and plug that in on our Twitter as well. Thank you once again, so much, Dr. Andre Carrington for joining us.
Thanks, Andre. This was I mean, this is such a great example of what we love to do, which is talking to people who are in adjacent fields of English studies and learning about your perspective on on stuff like this. And it's just it's been really generative for me, so thank you so much.
I'm so glad, this has been super.
Absolutely well, and from all of us at reverb, we hope that you have a wonderful spooky season, a happy Halloween. Don't get too scared out there. But if you haven't caught any Jordan Peele films, this is our high high recommendation. There's a lot to unpack within those. And they are just great entertainment on the side as well. From all of us here at reverb, we wish you a happy Halloween. We will talk to you next time. Bye bye. Trick or treat, trick or treat. Our show today was produced by Alex Helberg and Calvin Pollak with editing work by Alex. re:verb's co-producers at large are Ben Williams, Sophie Wodzak, and Mike Laudenbach. You can subscribe to reverb and leave us a review on Apple podcasts Stitcher, Android or wherever you listen to podcasts, check out our website at www.reverbcast.com. You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter where our handle is @reverb_cast. That's R E V E R B underscore C A S T. If you've enjoyed our show and want to help amplify more of our public scholarship work, please consider leaving us a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice and tell a friend about us. We sincerely appreciate the support of our listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in.
