>> Well, excited to have the Modern the Situation crew back for another episode on movies. Mark, thanks for joining again. Yes. Excited.

>> So, we want to go deeper into some of our favorite movies. Mark, I know from watching movies with you that one of your genres you enjoy is movies about Hollywood. And so, we wanted to start with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Why don't you talk about what's so remarkable about that or why you wanted to talk about it?

>> The reason I like movies about Hollywood, I mean, one is they tend to be very entertaining because of course the people who make movies about Hollywood are from Hollywood and they know where all the bodies are buried. And they tend to put them all in the movies. And so they're all spectacular Hollywood movies. So for people who haven't seen, I would recommend Mulholland Drive. It's one of Eric's favorites.

>> nightmares run it

>> and, and then The Player, which also is an all-time one there. You know, there's a bunch of, of course, famous ones like Sunset Boulevard, but the iconic, you know, clearly the iconic Hollywood movie now is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino.

>> The reason I like Hollywood movies is because there are a handful of cities that have a claim to be like the ultimate American city. New York City is one of those. I think San Francisco in some ways, where we are is. Los Angeles and Las Vegas also put on the list. But, by the way, for Las Vegas, see Bugsy, we can talk about that another time. But that's the iconic Vegas movie.

>> But LA in a lot of ways is sort of you could describe it as the archetypal American city. And literally, there's a great book we can put in the notes called Thinking Big where it goes into the creation of the city of Los Angeles. And basically, Los Angeles you could argue is the ultimate American city because it was the ultimate "fake it until you make it" thing. Like it was the Theranos of cities. And very specifically, it was desert, like there was absolutely nothing in LA. And then it was like a land development deal by a bunch of wealthy families in the late 1800s. And they literally placed newspaper ads in eastern newspapers. This is before photography made it into newspapers. And so when there was a picture of something in a newspaper, it'd be a drawing. And so they would list land plots for sale in Los Angeles and they would have like line drawings of orchards and beautiful everything's green and palm trees. And then people would buy the land, move across the country, and discover that it was just like blasted out desert.

>> And then they famously created the city, they carved it out of the desert. And then they famously, it's a famous saga of how they went to get the water, which turned into another great LA movie, Chinatown. And you know, as you'd expect, Hollywood kind of goes for a certain interpretation of history. And so it, you know, sort of painted in retrospect as like a purely evil activity, but there's actually a very kind of straightforward reading, which is like this is what was actually required to create a city. And it wasn't as black and white as the Hollywood history has it. It was a more complex story, but still, very, very interesting, amazing story. And, you know, cities like Los Angeles aren't created every day. So that's a pretty big deal.

>> So anyway, like movies about LA, I think when they reach the level of capital A art, they become movies about America. It's like a great test bed or a great subject, or a great lens through which to look at the history of America. And Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is, I would say, one of the top movies along that theme.

>> Let me start by saying if anybody watching this hasn't seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, pause the podcast immediately. Go watch the movie and then come back because we are going to spoil it. And it's tremendously fun to watch if you haven't read about it. By the way, I'd also say it's a tremendously entertaining movie. Like it's one of the most entertaining movies. It's like infinitely rewatchable. The cast is ridiculous. Every frame of the thing is amazing. So it's also a very fun movie.

>> So okay, so here's the larger significance of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or my view of it, which is it captures a time and place that was absolutely critical to the evolution of modern America. And I think Katherine, you'll remind me, but I think the year was it '69?

>> '69, yeah.

>> '69, yeah. '69. And so to put this in context, and the movie kind of goes through this, but the movie doesn't explain all the cultural backstory. It shows you what happened, but it doesn't explain the backstory, so I'll just go through the backstory.

>> So, basically, what we now consider to be the cultural revolution of the 1960s really started probably in around 1964 with the Berkeley free speech movement and then kind of expanded or metastasized to include the hippie movements and then the birth of like modern rock and roll and the rise of the counterculture. And all of a sudden everybody has long hair and they've got beads and they're wearing suede jackets and they're not washing their Levis's. And sort of the whole counterculture.

>> And so there was this incredible explosion of, this is when the baby boomers were coming of age as basically high school and college kids, this incredible explosion of art, culture, creativity, social innovation, the birth of the communes, the entire hippie movement. And then, of course, this is also when the Vietnam war was ramping up. And so this was the ramp up in conscription of American kids being sent off to Vietnam, but say non-volunteers. And so, the anti-war movement kicked in, the college protest kicked in.

>> And the entire thing was, and we kind of remember it as this incredibly spontaneous and largely positive explosion of breaking out of the stultified cultural norms of the 1940s, 1950s, the creation of the modern kind of liberated American society. By the way, obviously also right alongside that, the civil rights movement and feminism, the gay rights and kind of all the whole explosion of modern morality through that period.

>> And anyway, from if you read the histories of the time, basically from '64 to '69 it was just basically this glorious, wonderful thing with absolutely no downside. Like these kids that were rioting on their college campuses or protesting in the streets or getting stoned all day or having their whole hippie thing or moving to communes and going back to the earth, they had discovered a far superior way to live, right? They had discovered a far superior way to coexist with nature and to fight against the man and to fight against evil corporations and fight for the environment, to fight for the planet, fight for peace and the whole thing. And so it was this incredible kind of wave of positivity.

>> And look, a very good argument that there was a lot to it. A lot of people do believe that. And then, it was a time of great cultural creativity that led to enormous amounts of amazing art that we still have today. And so there's a lot to like about it. And then basically what happened is in 1969, the positivity came to a screeching halt. And sort of the movement basically turned very much to the dark side and that sort of began the long slide into the 1970s.

>> And that slide was basically a slide into, variously among other things, it was a slide into drugs going very bad, drug overdoses, the shift from soft drugs to hard drugs. A lot of people who participated in this cultural movement of the 60s ended up dying. We'll talk about the death later on because the movie directly hits that, but there's just an extraordinary amount of death that followed, degradation. And it turned into, you know, the sexual liberation, it turns out, has dark sides and maybe it isn't so great for everybody and specifically maybe it isn't so great for women, at least in some ways.

>> And then in the '70s it was like Vietnam went very bad and then the energy crisis and economic recession and then inflation and just this very kind of bitter, divisive politics. In a lot of ways, the beginning of the political kind of dynamic that we see playing out today. And so the '70s, things went really bad. And the bookending movie, Once Upon a Time is the movie sort of about that pivot point. I'll talk about that. And then, Boogie Nights is maybe the movie on the other side of that, right? Which is like, once the culture is kind of sliding down a hill into chaos and madness and disease of death, Boogie Nights captures that on the other side. But for the purpose of today's discussion, we can focus on 1969.

>> And so if you read the history of the time, basically what happened was it was the Charles Manson murders, specifically in Los Angeles. And then sort of on behalf of America, it was the Manson murders that basically were the turning point. It's the Manson murders are the thing that people point to and they kind of say, "Oh, that was the moment when we all kind of realized, oh, like there's a dark side of this whole thing and like, oh my god, here we go."

>> And so let's talk about that at length. Let me just close off this introductory part though with kind of the most amazing thing about the movie that I found, which is if you know the history of that period, you know about the Manson murders. They were super famous at the time. They're still famous in American culture. Kind of everybody knows that there was this guy Charles Manson that had this death cult. He was able to get these kids to like go out and kill random people. And there's still like all these questions like, how the hell did he do that?

>> Everybody knows that he was kind of intertwined with Hollywood and intertwined with the movie industry and the music industry and he was part of that whole thing. And then specifically for people who know anything about that, they're sort of famously the Manson murders are also known as the Sharon Tate murders. Because there was this incredibly vivacious, attractive, bubbly, enthusiastic young blonde actress named Sharon Tate. Who at the time famously was actually married to Roman Polanski who was one of the leading, new Hollywood movie directors of that time. They were this basically this new Hollywood glamour power couple. And then Sharon Tate and among other people, Sharon Tate was one of the people murdered.

>> So Quentin Tarantino comes out, when he first announces the movie, he comes out and he says, Quentin Tarantino is going to make the movie about the Charles Manson murders, right? And if you've seen any other Tarantino movie like Pulp Fiction, for example, you're just like, "Oh my god, this is going to be horrible." Like the Manson murders are bad enough, but turning them into a Tarantino style mass slaughter violence, you know, Reservoir Dogs, just like blood and guts, basically super high exploitation movie as he had done in the past, it was a horror show.

>> And I was actually personally worried about it because my wife got all excited to see the movie because it's going to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt and it's going to be about Hollywood and it's about fashion and design and all this creativity. And she's like, "We got to go see this movie." And I'm like, "We can't go see the movie because you are going to be so traumatized by what he puts on screen, that you're never going to want to ever see a movie ever again. And you're going to hold it against me for the rest of my life that I didn't prevent you from seeing this movie because it's obviously just going to be a complete horror show. Like, it's just going to be a disaster." And actually Sharon Tate's family actually came out and basically said when this movie was first announced, "Wait a minute, hold on. We don't want the memory of our family member, who we still love many decades later, turned into basically fodder for Hollywood exploitation."

>> And then there was this amazing thing that happened, and nobody knew anything about the movie, which is Tarantino, at least the way the story is recorded, actually let, I think it was Sharon Tate's sister or something like that, read the script. And immediately the family did a 180 and they came right out and they said we completely approved. And I remember at the time reading that and I was like, what the hell? How is it that he could possibly get the Tate family of all people on board with putting this on screen? And of course, that leads to kind of that, the movie sort of turns into a valentine to Hollywood and to America and specifically to Sharon Tate. It really kind of restores her memory in an amazing way.

>> He did something very smart in the movie for those of us who love Tarantino and follow his work. So, I think that was the common theme, was like, "Oh god, this is going to be horrific." Right? And especially if you've read about the Manson murders, if you've read about how gruesome they are, yes, that was the dominant theme. But his last other fantastic Tarantino film was the revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, which is of course, again, could have been extremely gruesome, but at the same time, it's a revenge fantasy of what could have happened. What could have happened if someone had killed Hitler? And so in the very beginning of the movie, there's a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio where it shows all of his films and he has the famous flamethrower from Inglourious Basterds. And so if you're a Tarantino fan, you're like, "Wait, wait, wait. Which direction are we going in? Are we going in gruesome violence with no purpose, or are we going in a different direction, a little more fantastical, a little more what could have happened?"

>> And so for those of us with the eagle eye in the theater, I think we kind of knew, you know, especially as you said, like the family said, "Oh, it's great. It's going to be fine." We kind of knew, okay, this film is not going to be nearly as bad. And Tarantino is going to take us in a different direction, but he did put that little Easter egg in there for us in like the first 10 minutes of the film.

>> So, it's funny you bring that up because I of course totally missed that when I was watching the movie. I just thought it was like a throwaway. Leo DiCaprio plays a sort of a Steven McQueen style movie star in the 1960s named Rick. As the movie starts, his career is imploding. He's trying to figure out how to turn things around or stay relevant to the times and it shows these clips from his prior movies in the universe. And I just figured it was just like a throwaway. Oh yeah, I see with the flamethrower. That's funny. Haha. Like it didn't even for a minute occur to me. I mean, since we're going to spoil it, we'll just say the flamethrower plays a critical role.

>> >> A very critical role.

>> Have you ever been happier to see the flamethrower get taken out than at the end of that movie? But yeah, I mean I enjoyed the movie so much when I was watching it, but I did not know. I mean, I knew it had to be something amazing that I wasn't expecting in order to get the Tate family on board, but I still was sitting there in a state of dread throughout the entire movie, still anticipating that he would somehow...

>> Anyway, so to spoil the movie, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he basically tells you the story of the Manson cult in Hollywood at that time and sort of how that all intertwined. And he takes it all the way up to the night of the murders, but then he takes a left turn in the history as he does this alternative history. And so the Manson cultists who in real life murdered Tate, in the movie they go in the house next door which is Leo's house.

>> With Leo's friend Brad Pitt. And Brad Pitt's character, by the way, I don't know if you know the backstory on the Brad Pitt character, but it explains a lot, which is basically Tarantino's conception of him is he's basically the most deadly man in the world at that time. So he's like a Green Beret, like a super highly decorated, basically super soldier who's become a Hollywood stunt man. And so basically the Manson killers basically walked exactly to the wrong house because number one, they're up against this guy who basically spent the preceding 20 years killing people for America. Basically Captain America. And then number two, it turns out Leo still had the flamethrower in his garage.

>> >> that final scene... there's no way you can anticipate how genius the run-up to it is. And then also the final scene, because there's this whole other thing that happens in the movie where you forget that you're watching a movie about the Mansons. You forget that you're watching this horrific thing. There's a 30-minute scene of Rick Dalton, who's this aging actor losing his place in Hollywood, at a loss for why he's no longer powerful. And he has this moment where he stars in this kind of cheesy western with this 11-year-old girl, and it's like a movie within a movie. And it is probably the best encapsulation of what happens to actors in Hollywood. So you kind of lose track of the fact that here's Sharon Tate and she's at the Playboy Mansion. She's dancing. She's this new generation, but here's this old generation of like hyper masculine figures who can't get work.

>> >> And there's this genius movie within a movie where the little girl says to him, and it's probably one of the most memorable lines, she's like, "That's the best acting I've ever seen in my whole life." And I mean, even if they'd stopped the movie there, it would have been just as brilliant, right? But then it goes on to this other sequence where you're like, "Oh yeah, we're about to see the most gruesome possible thing." And I can imagine, it's like if it happened to Jennifer Lawrence or if it happened to Margot Robbie, who's actually playing her, right? It would just be this horrific thing. But you kind of forget because there's all of these just beautiful, hilarious sequences that run up to it. You forget that you're watching a movie that's supposed to end in this horrific violence.

>> >> And of course, it doesn't. It ends in a different type of horrific violence, but not the female-on-female violence that characterized the Manson murders, which I think is another kind of subtext of the film. It's just how gory and violent the actual episode is, but you don't actually see that.

>> The little girl actress, who was she intended to be in real life?

>> I don't know, actually.

>> Jodie Foster. She's representative of new Hollywood. So Jodie Foster was in that era a rising child star. And then she had her breakup role in Taxi Driver where she's just like, you know, it's an incredibly revolutionary acting performance. And so she's sort of representative of the new Hollywood with the much more naturalistic acting style that took over from the much more stylized style of the 50s and 60s.

>> So basically, the macro relevance of this, just to restate the thesis, is if the Manson murders were where the cultural revolution of the 1960s went bad, then Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is sort of the fantasy or the love letter to a different America in which that didn't happen, right? And things kept going in a much more positive direction. But by putting on screen the alternate direction, my view is like he really highlights how bad it was that that's not what happened.

>> And so that the tragedy of the Manson murders was not just the tragedy for the people who were killed and for their families, which is a profound tragedy, but the tragedy was for basically for all of LA. Because if you talk to people who were around during that period, like things got dark in LA very quickly. People were so freaked out by the Manson murders. They didn't know how many other serial killers were running around. They didn't know how many other cults there were. Everybody all of a sudden had to lock their doors. People stopped going out. And this was the beginning of the heyday of the serial killer, you know, with Ted Bundy and it was the beginning of this wave of these things where people got really, really seriously freaked out.

>> >> I went back and watched the beginning of the sequence because it's actually a long sequence of violence. But what I remember so much, I read the reviews before, and critics were very divided. It was like, "This is so violent. This is extremely violent." And what's funny about seeing it in the theater is that the reaction from the audience is extreme laughter.

>> Yes.

>> You are laughing during the most violent sequence for 20 minutes. And what's really funny about what's happening on screen too is that Cliff, the stuntman, right before, he smokes an LSD cigarette.

>> >> Yes. So he is high as a kite when these guys come in, which is also a funny part of it. The music that is playing when they come in is The Supremes' "Set Me Free Why Don't You Babe." So it's this perfect moment of "set me free" and these guys come in, he's high, and he's like, "Is this real?" But Cliff's response is laughter. He's laughing at these women, right? And these women, they have their knives, they are ready to do the deed.

>> >> And he's laughing. And I think in some ways, Tarantino always has these takes on masculine violence. Can you take the power out of whatever situation happened in history by just this extreme violence? If the Manson family had been met with laughter, right? Instead, they were met with fear. They were seen as the most evil, taken by the devil. That set off serial killers. It gave power to this extraordinary evil for decades. And I think the point of it is, what if Cliff, the most masculine, deadly man in the room, had just been high and laughed and, you know, sicked his pitbull on these women who are kind of silly and high themselves? And the whole thing had become a comedy?

>> >> Which it turns into, like 20 minutes of just sheer hilarity. Like just absolute hilarity, even though it's the most violent thing you've probably seen in the last several years. The Brad Pitt character beats a woman to death with a telephone and it's just the funniest thing you've ever seen.

>> >> And the flamethrower shows up, right? You could not conceive of the type of violence. It meets the most horrific violence that we know is coming. And that's the backstory to this too, is like you know what really happened. So you have this weird cathartic response of, you know what actually happened and it's so tragic. And it was women on women. The Manson family called themselves "family," it was a perversion of the family, and they actually killed a woman who was 8 months pregnant starting a family. So there's this horrific narrative to this. But the fact that it's met with even more extreme violence... it's this very strange moviegoing experience that is both delightful but also like, you know, a lot of mixed emotions.

>> Yeah. And then if you kind of telescope up one notch, it's like the ultimate square in the form of Rick Dalton, who's still putting Brylcreem in his hair and trying to be like a James Dean tough guy, when that's not what the world wants. And then, basically, Captain America, like an icon of the American military, at the time of Vietnam in which the military was not viewed at the level of respect that American culture has for it today. The fact that those two end up basically beating and roasting a bunch of hippies to death at the height of the counterculture. It's an incredibly crowd-pleasing movie. And that happened very close to peak woke during our cultural revolution of the last decade. I don't know if it's properly characterized as like a reactionary movie, but it definitely was not the moral arc of other attempts at art during that time period.

>> >> Totally. And just even the final scene of him getting invited over and her sort of being blissfully unaware this happened. I mean that's all magical. In the same way that Inglourious Basterds was a revenge drama of what could have possibly happened, this is also like the Once Upon a Time in America story, like what could have happened. And it was a weird moviegoing experience in 2019 to be surrounded by people who were laughing, who loved it. It kind of went against everything you were reading in the news, which is that no one agrees with this alternative history. I mean, it was just a brilliant film.

>> Tarantino actually wrote a paperback novelization of the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And he specifically wrote it as a paperback novelization. And so it came out in paperback, as an homage to this. But of course being Tarantino, it actually turns out, it's not just a paperback novelization. It turns out it's like an entirely new novel. And it's actually funny because it's set in the same world of the movie and goes much deeper into the themes of the movie, but he doesn't even care at all about having the plot of the movie actually in the novel. And so he just throws it away right up front in the novel. I think very few people have read it, but I think it has a reasonable claim on being a great American novel because it goes much deeper into all the themes that we're talking about.

>> I think there's a very direct analogy of let's call it 1964 to 1972 or something with the re-election of Richard Nixon. That cultural revolution that happened during the '60s, the hippie Vietnam revolution. I think what we in America have been through the last decade is sort of another version of that. Like we went through our version of that. It started around, I would date it to like 2014-2015, and then that era sort of ended November 2024. Obviously, if you're on the right, you're like, "Oh my god, thank god that's over." and the world could move on. If you're on the left, of course, you're like, "Oh my god, what just happened? How did the revolution go so bad?" That is precisely what happened at the end of the revolution in the 1960s.

>> Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968 and it was a hard-fought race. But then he was reelected in 1972 in a landslide, like a 49-state landslide. So it's like the American people basically rose up and basically said, "Yeah, no more of this. It's over." And the echoes are just profound of how this played out. And they're echoes, right? It's not exactly comparable. But still, there was a cultural revolution. It was either glorious or terrible for some period of time and then it ended. I would argue that's exactly the process kicked off in '69 with the Manson murders and then sort of bookended with '72 with Nixon's re-election and then kind of the slide into the 1970s and then ultimately 1980s. And I would argue that's precisely the same kind of transition that we're going through right now.

>> >> I want to transition to the best Vietnam war film ever made.

>> Okay. This is everything we've said up until now is milquetoast as compared to the extremely controversial claim that Katherine is about to make.

>> The best Vietnam war film ever made is Tropic Thunder. It also happens to be one of the best films about Hollywood. I would actually say that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, while it is an incredible film, is more about America, but Tropic Thunder is also about America in different ways and reveals a lot about America, but is by far the best Hollywood film ever made.

>> >> It was 2008, which is actually very important. Because 2008 was also the year where we had a POW from the Vietnam War running for office against the first black president in history. And that is a very important context for all of the themes dealt with inside of Tropic Thunder, which of course is a comedy. It's a satire, but it satirizes everything in the kind of "Before Times" of 2008.

>> One of the most amazing things about it is, the great actor Robert Downey Jr. plays the entire movie in blackface. And not only plays the entire movie in blackface, I would say extraordinarily commits to the bit.

>> Yes, he's a method actor playing a method actor.

>> In the same way that the Tate family was terrified of what would happen in the film, there was a whole kind of terror of what is going to happen. Like Robert Downey Jr. is destroying his career. But when you get into the film, it is handled so beautifully and delicately, and actually, it was satirizing Hollywood actors who will go through any extreme length to win an Oscar.

>> >> When it came out, it was so clearly satirizing white actors who were trying to win an Oscar, right? So it was universally beloved. So much so that Robert Downey Jr. was nominated for an Oscar. But I believe it was like 2017 or 2018 when this sort of new crop of young people came through journalism and said, "This is horrible." They tried to sort of cancel him. But clearly, they did not cancel Robert Downey Jr. for doing a satirization of the role he played.

>> So, just to fill this in, Robert Downey Jr., a white American actor, plays a white Australian actor who is a method actor, playing a southern black man in blackface for the entire movie. On top of that, he's actually in a platoon with an actual black guy, a young black actor, and the way they play off each other is brilliant.

>> >> The other smart thing that they did, by the way, is they also have Tom Cruise in the movie as the producer who's based on Harvey Weinstein. But they didn't want anyone to know Tom Cruise was in the film. So they actually sued any of the paparazzi who took pictures of him before because they wanted people to come to the theater and not know that Tom Cruise was in it.

>> >> Everyone focuses on Robert Downey Jr., but there are at least four other untouchable things that happened in that film. The disability advocates actually, when the film came out, the people who were most upset in 2008 were the disability advocates because of the commentary on "never go full retard." Which was okay to say in 2008 except for the disability advocates who were very upset about it.

>> >> The other thing is that it is so much of a commentary on Vietnam War films because a lot of Vietnam war memoirs in later years have been proven to be completely disingenuous. And so in the storyline in the film, the guy whose memoir the movie is actually based on is a member of the Coast Guard who never got sent to Vietnam. So there's this brilliant commentary also on veterans' issues. This movie is so brilliant and the levels of commentary are remarkable to this day.

>> So, let's start with Oppenheimer. I'm an enormous Christopher Nolan fan. I've seen all his movies. I love all his movies. And I think Oppenheimer was an incredibly well-made movie. I will argue that it did not reach our level of capital A art. I think it actually quite badly fell short on morality and ultimately in importance to our culture.

>> My critique is the morality of the movie I think is very badly upside down. And it's upside down in a way that kind of flatters our current politics but is very badly upside down in terms of what actually happened at the time. The movie sort of sets up both Oppenheimer and actually also specifically Albert Einstein as sort of the key moral authorities of the era with respect to the use of nuclear weapons. Both claims of which I believe are like deeply incorrect on substance.

>> The first half of the movie I think is actually quite historically grounded. It's one of the only recreations on film of what American elite culture and society and the research establishment of the 1920s and 30s, like how thoroughly saturated that world was with communism. There's a joke in the movie that half the Berkeley faculty are communists. The issue becomes, okay, now they're working on a classified weapons program. There's this very big concern that the secrets of the atomic bomb were going to walk their way out the door from Los Alamos. And by the way, spoiler alert, that's exactly what happened. The nuclear secrets did walk right out the door.

>> So like all of the security concerns that are kind of a setup to what is sort of portrayed as the persecution of Robert Oppenheimer, they were all completely legitimate security concerns. And in fact, the worst case scenario actually did happen. The first Soviet atomic bomb was wire-for-wire compatible with the US Nagasaki bomb.

>> The movie paints this as like a great act of moral heroism on his part where basically he wanted credit for the little bomb, but he didn't want the big bomb to happen. But there's another version of the story which is you were completely in favor of beating Germany and Japan and then but the minute it came to beating the Soviet Union, you got cold feet. Hm. Isn't that interesting?

>> And then there's my most stinging indictment of the movie, which is Einstein was the exact opposite of a moral exemplar. Einstein was a Stalinist. There's a book that goes through this called When Reason Goes on Holiday. The movie kind of presents Oppenheimer and Einstein as the moral adults in the room, to a degree that I just think is basically at this point bizarre. And the reason it's bizarre is because we're sitting here 80 years later and the thing that we know today is World War III didn't happen. And the reason World War III didn't happen is sort of fairly obvious, which was mutually assured destruction. The fact that both sides had nukes basically meant that neither side could go to war with the other.

>> I just thought the movie really cheated on the morality of it because it kind of presented this as slam dunk that the nuke was bad and that these people were bad and the whole thing was bad and that both Einstein and Oppenheimer were moral heroes to some extent kind of trying to line up against this. And I just thought that that really cheated the audience.

>> Fight Club. I think it's 100% true art with a capital A. I think it's amazing. I think it's definitely going to stand the test of time. It's one of those movies that has that characteristic where you can kind of use it as a prism on our society. It's amazing in retrospect. My social political analysis of it would be like it was clearly intended as a left-wing movie at the time because it was sort of left-wing anti-capitalism of that era, left-wing anarchism.

>> You watch it today and you're just like, "Wow, it's like ultra right-wing." Because to start with, it's a white guy. You view it today and you're like, wow, it's a privileged white male incel, basically, with every advantage in the world who suddenly nevertheless has built up this persecution complex. And the argument the movie makes about capitalism is the great atomization of society and nobody has anything and people are just interchangeable cogs in the great machine of modernity. All concept of family and community is completely ruptured. Sitting here today, that's a right-wing critique.

>> I did talk to somebody who was involved in the making of the movie and I laid out my theory that it was a left-wing movie at the time and now it's a right-wing movie. And this person basically said, "Oh, no. It's very clear in the movie that at the end, he greatly regrets what he's doing." And I was like, "Oh, well then if you just like used AI to just go in there and tweak the final scene of the Ed Norton character standing, watching the buildings come down and if you just tweak the final scene to where he would have like a sly little smile on his face, like all of a sudden the entire movie becomes like this, you know, basically ultra right-wing from start to finish."

>> >> That movie came out in 1999.

>> 1999, which is kind of universally, I remember, a year of absolutely amazing movies.

>> >> Yes. Maybe the best single year for movies in the last like 40 years.

>> >> I feel like it's the consummate '90s film, right? The critique on consumerism, the early critique on consumerism affecting masculine traits. The whole reaction of, "We're going to have a fight club to kind of reclaim our masculinity and sort of our life." That felt like it was actually a '90s conversation. It's interesting because it's the same conversation that's happening right now, but it really was also a '90s conversation. At the time it was Walmart and capitalism are destroying you. Now it's like tech is destroying you.