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Welcome to the compact podcast. Today we'll discuss the Oscars and the new leader of Iran, Mujtaba Khamenei, who has been the source of much discussion and speculation in the White House and elsewhere. I'm joined by Steven Adubato, Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schillenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So, Jeff, that unmissable media event, the Academy Awards, you watched every minute and what did you make of the winners?
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Well, I did not watch every minute. I feel like this is my, whenever we're talking about some sort of mediatic pseudo event, I begin by saying I refuse to watch any of these things. I hate them. And then I, you know, will occasionally see some, see some clips afterwards. But basically I was not particularly surprised by the results. They seem to be more or less in line with what people had predicted. The big winners were One Battle After Another and Sinners. I think they are sort of interesting films in terms of to what extent they embody some kind of post woke Hollywood moment. We published a piece last week about the movies against MeToo, which Alec Mohibian specifically focuses on a movie that was not given any Oscar nominations, which is after the Hunt and the way that the movies have to some extent kind of responded or registered a kind of backlash against the peak Me Too moment moment. But, you know, the broader question would be we ostensibly experienced this vibe shift in 2024, 2025, and that would seem like, given the timeline of Hollywood production, it would be manifest or registered by the films that came out last year and were picked up by the Academy this year. And I think to some extent we could say that's true. I would say that the interesting thing about One Battle After Another and Sinners is that they were not, even though both were political films, both dealt with race, both dealt with sort of culture war type identity issues. Nonetheless, I think neither of them were particularly programmatic or propagandistic. With Sinners, we could connect it back to the sensationally popular get out from last decade, which was a horror film that very much registered the, the peak Black Lives Matter moment. And I would say get out is it's a very good film as a. As a piece of. As a piece of horror filmmaking, but it is extremely didactic and straightforward in its messaging. And so it works sort of as a. As a sort of dramatic construct, but it ultimately is not particularly open to multiple interpretations. I would say Sinners is a much messier film. It's not particularly tightly plotted. It's kind of this odd period piece, you know, very kind of beautifully reconstructed sort of Jim Crow South. And then it, within, it sort of has this just kind of slice and dice slasher movie or sort of vampire slash sort of zombie movie, you know, plot kind of encased or sandwiched between these kind of, you know, nicely constructed, sort of artful period piece, you know, sort of setting scene, setting sections. And so Sinners, I would say, is. It's kind of a mess as a. As a film. I thought it worked best as just. I mean, I went to see it like, early last summer. It was a good kind of summer.
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If.
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If you like going to see sort of horror movies with a lot of, you know, blood and guts being spilled, which I generally do, then it was. It was effective as that kind of entertainment. It was. It felt like a good kind of summer blockbuster. But I think it is actually quite sort of enigmatic in terms of what its underlying message is. You know, there's a part of it that seems to almost embody this, I'd say, a certain kind of Afro pessimism. But, you know, the thing that it seems to convey is kind of the. The strength and solidity of. Of, you know, of black communities in the Jim Crow south, which, interestingly, is a theme that, you know, kind of connects it to the thought of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom the ideal black subject is sort of this, you know, small business owner, patriarch figure like his. His own grandfather, whom he reveres and who, you know, essentially kind of created this protective structure in this very hostile world. And so there's a part of. Of the film that is. Is in a way quite wistful and nostalgic towards that. The way that, you know, these communities kind of took care of themselves and, you know, created a. In which people took care of each other again in this very hostile world. So that I'd say in some ways could be a very kind of conservative strain of Afropessimism that it embodies. And then the interesting thing is that vampirism is on one hand introduced into this community by white characters, specifically the lead vampires and Irishmen. So that's kind of interesting. And so he's a figure of the old world. He's a figure of a kind of Southern Gothic, you know, which is often associated with a sort of a strange carryover of some kind of ancien regime, you know, hierarchical social structure. If you think of like the work of Edgar Allan Poe, which is so central to the Southern Gothic aesthetic, but at the same time, the vampires are some kind of. They appear to be some kind of revolutionaries or some kind of emancipatory force. You know, when trying to essentially recruit these, you know, members of this black community into their vampire legion, you know, what they promise is the transcendence of race. Basically, they say, well, once you're a vampire, you know, we're all equal. And you don't have to worry about, you know, you don't have to worry about sort of the KKK or sort of these. These cracker thugs coming to, you know, try to kill you, which. Which does happen because you're a vampire and you can just slaughter them. So, you know, you're much stronger than them and so. And also you're immortal. So. So there's a kind of odd, you know, way that. That is also represented as, in some sense, appealing and emancipatory. And so I think in a way, the film sets up this kind of push and pull between those two visions, which is. Which is embodied in the struggle of the protagonist, whose father is a preacher in this small town who doesn't want him to go play music and, you know, knows that he'll. He can potentially be corrupted and drawn into sin by this. And, you know, but he goes anyway. And so. So obviously, like, the. The interesting other dimension of this is there's sort of the. The emancipatory power of. Of vampirism. And then there's also the emancipatory power of. Of the music itself, of the blues. But if we think of the lore of somebody like Robert Johnson, you know, it is often historically associated with these kind of dangerous and even satanic currents, which are both liberating and highly dangerous. So, you know, the film has some kind of. More like cringe, didactic moments, particularly this one sort of dance scene that I think many people commented on as being pretty awful. It's like the worst moment of the film, which gives off this kind of just kind of obnoxious, didactic multiculturalism. But other than that, I'd say the film is. Is interestingly ambiguous and. And, you know, not. I'd say again, it's. It's much more of a mess as a film than something like Get Out. But it's actually in some senses kind of thematically richer in terms of the conflicts that it embodies. And it says something similar about one battle after another, which is not, you know, it's certainly not a piece of agit prop. Even though I think some people on the right sort of thought, oh, they're so, you know, they're giving the award to this movie about, you know, that's celebrating these left wing terrorists. You know, the film is a bit ambiguous. It's not clear exactly when it's set. It's kind of set in this weird moment that is a little bit hard to pin down in time, you know, particularly the earlier moment of the peak of this left wing terrorist group. And so I think in some ways it's, it detaches itself from the specific chronologies of American politics and instead kind of explores the moral struggles of these characters and the kind of push and pull of different, you know, different visions of America, of, you know, of what our sort of guiding values should be. And you know, I think it's again, not a particularly, even though it's about and sort of has as its heroes and protagonists these sort of left wing terrorists, it's not a particularly glamorous or glorifying vision of them. But I also think, you know, in some ways it's a, it's a good, it's, I'd say something similar to Get Out. It's a very nicely constructed film, it's a good action film. But to me it ultimately ends up seeming like kind of a muddle in terms of what it's actually trying to do and what it's trying to convey. So I actually did think Sinners, even though it was a much more flawed film, just in purely artistic terms, was a kind of richer text. And so I don't know, I, I think both these films are, you know, that they're, they, they do reflect some sort of vibe shift. And then the final thing I'll mention is that one film that was, was highly touted at one point but ended up not really winning anything was Marty supreme, which, you know, I, I, I thought was an enjoyable, enjoyable film. Went to see it on, on Christmas. And it's interesting because in some ways I think it would have been a clearer signal of some sort of vibe shift because it really is a film in which you have to identify with and find some satisfaction in this intense male egotism and unbridled ambition. And you know, the film really does just expressly convey various currents that would be conceived of today as, as, you know, sort of instances of toxic masculinity. I mean, this guy is, you know, the, the protagonist. He's clearly not somebody you, you want as a friend, but you do have to because he's depicted as being extremely callous and you know, not, not particularly, you know, and extremely selfish and self serving and how he deals with his friends and lovers and so on. But you know, it does kind of force you to go along with the ride and find a certain appreciation of his just again, absolutely unbridled, egotistical,
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you
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know, kind of self glorifying, naked ambition and, and sort of hunger for personal advancement. And so it really is a film that, and, and it's set in a mid century post war moment when I think, you know, it obviously you sort of have various kind of works of literature and, and, and film from that era that, that convey something of this where you really can have this. It's, it's a, you know, an American, you know, sort of Horatio Alger subjectivity but with, with a kind of ugly, you know, highly aggressive and often often quite, you know, cruel sort of aspect to it. And at the same time it's, it's also, I should say, you know, about a kind of Jewish, you know, somebody coming from a, from a Jewish immigrant background who is really trying to, you know, carve out a place for himself in the world. Not through some sort of demand for, you know, group recognition or you know, struggle against prejudice or you know, struggle against exclusion, exclusionary rules, but instead just by pure force of personality and sheer, again, naked ambition. So I think the fact that that film, which I think did kind of force you to at least go along with and to some extent embrace all of those values, the fact that that film was not rewarded maybe showcases the limits of the vibe shift.
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Well, not only did I not watch the Oscars like you, Jeff, I didn't watch Marty supreme or Sinners or One Battle After Another. So maybe I should step back and let some other voices come to the fore. Well, Ashley, Steven, I'm gonna. What did you make of the Oscars?
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Look, look, here's where I can bring you in. Because the thing that I actually did watch the Oscars because my daughter was sick and it was very late at night. I am so she was up all night. So I was up all night. So I thought why not watch the Oscars? And you know, there was, I was struck by a number of things. The kind of nostalgia and this desire to kind of make the Oscars into this. This longing for a time that's very clearly gone. I mean, even the format of it is, Is in that vein. Like, it's so long, it, like it drags and drags. It's clearly from another moment. You know, we're in attention spans being much longer. And so it is that kind. It's like want to hark back to a time when it mattered and when films mattered, and we're making statements about the world that, you know, it's more about what people want films to be than what films actually are now. But, you know, just bringing it down to another level that they. Oh, the. There was this whole controversy about Timothy Chalamet and his comments about ballet and opera. Did you see that? So, you know, he said basically, nobody cares about these things and people are keeping them alive in spite of the fact that nobody actually watches. And I've actually seen an opera in my life, even though I'm the most uncultured person.
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B
In what context did he say that? Was he saying it to dismiss the significance of opera and ballet? What was the context or the point of that?
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A
I've only seen actually clips of this because the first time that I heard about it was on Times Radio, where Ella Whelan, who's actually written for us, was, Was commenting on it. And what I found more interesting than what he actually said was some of the response to it, you know, where people were. It's. I don't know. I, I, you know, what, what Ella said was, what he was doing was putting forward this kind of. Or, or representing this kind of reverse snobbery where high culture becomes associated with elitism and so on. And so you have this kind of weird elitism of hating the things that elite supposedly like. And she was saying that this is kind of what he was echoing in the culture. And I don't know whether or not that's fair to him, but I thought that she made an interesting point because you. Quite a lot with anything that takes education or time to appreciate is often seen as excessively white or colonial or, or exclusionary or something like that, which has this kind of ironic racism to it, you know, where it's like, well, you know, obviously black people can't grasp something that's difficult, so it must be exclusionary. Or. Andrew Doyle, in his book the End of Woke, he talks about how because Asians do well in school, they are. They become honorary whites, and so they don't get classed as different groups as a, As a, as my ethnic minorities. So to be an Ethnic minority is to be supposedly lesser. So if you're not, then you're not an ethnic minority. You become white. So you have this kind of odd racism about it. And, you know, I talked about this in my piece about, you know, are we not Catholics too, for compact about indigenous Catholicism, where I tried to make the point where the problem with residential schools wasn't that they tried to give a highbrow liberal arts education, it's that they didn't. And in the very few cases where they did, they brought people into a world of art and culture that they enjoyed and appreciated and that they saw as their legacy as well. So I just, I found that very interesting that there has been this, you know, it's, it's become kind of cool to mock ballet and opera as these kind of highbrow things that only rich people like and therefore are necessarily exclusionary because they take time, education and funds. It's true. To really appreciate. But at the same time there's this long kind of, this long history of people striving to reach these things of all classes, you know, that, you know, going back to the residential school example, like a lot of indigenous people saved money to send their kids to these schools because they thought they wanted them to get an education. And the, the horror is that they didn't get it like 98% of the time. Yeah. So I, I just found that really interesting that this was kind of being mocked like, oh, how could you say that? But at the same time, nobody really wants to go all in on, on, you know, defending the value of the arts like the, the high arts. We're kind of ambivalent about this as a culture. Whereas, you know, I think that there's, you know, something in it that, that it belongs to all of us. The best that human beings can do. And the best that human beings can do is often difficult. It's difficult to grasp. And we appreciate it because it's difficult to do grasp, understand and reach. And actually, Jeff, you know, kind of leading off from this. So I have to admit that also I did not see one battle after another. My excuse being that I live in the middle of nowhere and there's no theater near me and I've got small children, so it's a bit difficult. But I want to ask. So I, in hearing commentary about this, these kind. There's this kind of ambivalent relationship in the film, sort of following off of what, from what I was just saying, but towards these kinds of left wing revolutionaries that are. I, Well, I don't Know if they're. They're. Well, they're at least highlighted in the film. But they have this weird kind of politics, but which is. Appears to me, from what I can see or have heard about in commentary, be quite anti political where they, they wouldn't touch, you know, workers, anything to do with workers and the working class with a ten foot pole. And it's like these very vague kinds of slogans that they tend to organize around. Now I'm curious, was that consciously kind of skewered in the film or was it because it strikes me as like, oh, if, you know, if you think about, you know, I. Okay, so I was talking to somebody at a conference a few months back where she was like, why is it that the left idolizes violence so. So frequently? Like, why are, why, why did they. So many people on the left celebrate Hamas, like killing people? That seems crazy to me. I thought the left was all about kindness and so on. And I was like, well, look, coming from this kind of background myself, I remember when I first was like on the radical left when I was like 23 years old. It was a bit like, yeah, because the opportunity is not available to me and we aren't really organized. I can't be part of the violent armed struggle. But ideally I should be. Ideally I should be and I can. And now leaving that world of this kind of left wing delusion that I had. Well, not that I'm not. I'm still on the left. I would like the left left me is the cliche. But leaving this kind of delusion of like that, that somehow an armed struggle would of like a bunch of Weather Underground kind of people do something. It strikes me that people still have this kind of viewpoint. And so they see groups like Hamas is like, oh, they're the ones out there. They're doing what we ought to be doing. They're the ones who have the courage to do what we're unable to do. And I wonder if that film kind of also plays that out for the people watching. Even the, the Hollywood celebrities who are in the audience wanting, you know, being left wing. But you know, really, if I wasn't such a sad, weak little character, I too would be taking up arms. Is that kind of the message that was in the film or was it being skewered? Like, how is it portrayed there? I'm just curious, like, because I think of the Oscars as like lifting up films. Not that people necessarily watch, that they think they should watch or they think people ought to watch if they knew better.
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Yeah. So A few things. The film is adapted from a novel by Thomas Pynchon called Vineland. In that novel, you know, first of all, the terrorist group at the center of this is called the French 75. So if people are familiar with Pynchon, you know, he tends to be a little bit kind of parodic and cartoonish in the way he portrays a lot of things. So obviously if, you know, just by that, there is a kind of absurdity to the whole enterprise. And I think in Pynchon, you know, it's very clear that the novel is set in the 80s, you know, about these kind of washed up Weather Underground era revolutionaries. And so the chronology was relatively clear. It was about the. It was about the sort of children of the 60s who had been engaged in these kind of radical projects and then had had to, you know, kind of hole up in hiding. I mean, there was a whole generation of people who actually followed this path. You know, if you think of like the notorious Bill Ayers and people like that. So, I mean, the original novel is kind of, it's, it's a bit of a sort of wistful parody of all of that. It certainly isn't, you know, again, it calls them the French 75. So it's not exactly sort of glorifying or depicting them as aspirational. Beyond that, the film obviously, I think is maybe a bit more ambiguous than the novel. You know, it is successful at kind of creating this kind of thrilling ride of going along with these, these radicals as they're engaged in all kinds of subversive activities. It's, you know, it's very, it's just well done as an action movie, as I said before. So to that extent it kind of takes you along. The main characters are the protagonist played by Leonardo DiCaprio, the antagonist played by Sean Penn, who again is kind of a somewhat absurd and cartoonish figure. There's also this. The other sort of antagonists and counterparts of the left wing terrorists are these, these right. This sort of right wing paramilitary who call themselves the Christmas Adventurers. So again, there is just a lot of kind of absurd, absurdism in, in this whole thing. You know, Sean Penn's character is not, you know, he, he doesn't play it particularly realistically. He, he's sort of, you know, sort of cartoonish and hyperbolic as a villain. Now, you know, the interesting character, in a way is the, the consort sort of girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio, if people recall that there's a famous line which, you know, was, we published a thing about left wing terrorism in the 70s by Benjamin Young a few weeks ago. And there's a famous line from one of the Baader Meinhof gang, if and shooting are the same thing. So, in other words, that there was kind of an erotic charge to this terrorist activity, that, that it was a form of a kind of engaging in a kind of erotic ecstasy. And you see that with the. The woman, the. Again, her name is Perfidia, Beverly Hills, very Pinchonian, once again, who's Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriend and then the mother of the child that he ends up raising. And she's clearly depicted as somewhat. I mean, she really actually is the counterpart of the Sean Penn character because she's depicted as, you know, quite sociopathic. And ultimately, you know, she. She essentially abandons her. I mean, she. She betrays the cause, but she also, like, abandons her child. And, you know, so. So she's certainly depicted as kind of a. A deeply. A deeply problematic and compromised figure. So, again, I. I think the. The portrayal of all this is sort of ambivalent. There's a. There's a. A thrill in charge of kind of enjoying these spectacles of. Of subversion. But I think that there's also a great deal of. Kind of skeptical and again, sort of parodic distance from all of that as well. So this is why I'm saying I think it is ambivalent. You can sort of read it in a way that might emphasize the sort of glorification of these activities. And you could also read it more through these kind of distancing strategies that the narrative adopts. And so I think that's part of why it's kind of an interesting film. I mean, it's not. It's not clearly one thing or the other.
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D
I just wanted to take the Baudrillardian position and say that the Oscars did not take place. As far as I'm concerned. I just think they're totally irrelevant, and I did not bother to watch. So that's my hot take.
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But, Stephen, you are paying attention to the. To the war which. The war in the Middle east that's. It's a war in the Middle east that Butriard originally said didn't take place. And in particular, there's the reporting by the New York Post that President Trump has been briefed that Mojtaba Khamenei, the new leader of Iran, is gay. Apparently, this was a source of great amusement to Donald Trump. You're kind of our ayatollah of these matters of identity and sexuality. So what did you make of it?
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D
Yeah, I mean, my unbodriardian take is that, I mean, it's probably true, these rumors about the new Ayatollah's past.
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B
So your basis for this intelligence assessment is.
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D
So this is. Okay. So apparently, According to a US State Department cable that was intercepted back in 2008, the Nuayatola was going to England for treatment for his problems with impotence, which is apparently why he's had some issues with getting married. Apparently he didn't get married until he was 30, which is quite late, at least in Iran. Not for us millennials here in the US but then the other obstacle to his getting married young is apparently his father was very concerned about his sexuality. Apparently he made moves on his tutor when he was younger, when he was a minor. And you know, people heard about this. So his father was trying to squash the rumors. But I mean, as much as I think it's probably true that he was making moves on the Tudor, I mean, this isn't, you know, this isn't so far fetched in a lot of Middle Eastern cultures, especially in Iran where, I mean, you have this Persian Sufi poetry about, you know, pederasty between a mentor and his young student. I am going to make the argument that that doesn't count as being gay. I don't think that man, boy love thing, which we see, I mean, in the Middle east, you see in ancient Greece, in Rome, and it's not. Is it really gay? I don't, I don't think so. It's not haram, at least according to Islamic law.
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B
So, yeah, I guess I'm interested in the specific gay charge for the kind of reason you raise. It's obviously, it's a category that comes into focus, you know, in the modern west, the idea of being gay, this specific identity. And I guess it kind of gets back to a more basic question about the Iranian regime, which is to what extent is it a reflection of a kind of traditional and autochthonous Islam? And to what extent does it reflect Western philosophical, cultural and political occurrence? So there was kind of long standing, kind of recurring joke on Twitter where people would kind of retweet old posts from the Ayatollah Khamenei Bushtaba's father, where he was talking about reading Jane Austen
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or
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other or other books, and people joke, oh, well, he's a theory cell. He's a sensitive boy. And so some people felt that far from being this fiery, uncompromising, kind of totally foreign and exotic figure, he was in some ways familiarly Western. And this is a kind of question or ambiguity that's existed from before the revolution in terms of perceptions of these figures. And I think it's a question that's never been fully resolved. But I guess to the extent that you resolve that Mujtaba is gay, I think that conclusion would have to be reached not just on the basis of his own sexuality, but it would be a verdict on the extent to which the Islamic revolution as a whole and its leadership reflects kind of Western cultural currents, despite its. Its ancient and Eastern guise and on
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D
this point on the Western conception of sexuality. I've been reading this very interesting biography about Lord Byron. And the kind of main contention in this biography is that in the face of the homophobia that was rampant in 1800s England, very much a product of a puritanical breed of Protestant Christianity, part of what attracted Byron to the Middle east, to, you know, the exotic Orient, was that, you know, there was more space for homoeroticism. Again, not straight up homosexuality between two adult males, but this kind of pederastic boy love, which again, was like, kind of given a pass. It was. People turned a blind eye to it. So in addition to his fascination with the cultural element, I mean, he saw this kind of like sexual decadence in the Middle east, which again, like we. We kind of today we construed as, okay, like the Middle east is homophobic. In the west, we're very open to homosexuality. But again, it's like, how are we using these categories which are fairly recent?
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C
The real twist would be that that Maktaba, you know, has. Is actually familiar with the work of Michel Foucault, who infamously was an early enthusiast for the Iranian revolution. And it's often brought up, well, as sort of the. I think we've talked about this before, maybe, but the sort of prototype of Queers for Palestine, the kind of. Well, don't you know that they want to throw you off a building sort of sort of critique? But, you know. But anyway, the real twist would be that maybe he's sort of processed his own. His own desire through precisely the sort of critique that. That Stephen is bringing up. So that would be interesting. I. I have no idea whether I. Whether. I mean, it's notable that Higher up in the. Ali Larjani, Higher up in the Regime did a dissertation on Immanuel Kant. And so I don't know to what extent Foucault. So clearly there are people studying sort of Western European philosophy in Iran. I don't know to what extent Foucault has been, you know, studied within, within Iranian academia. But that would be interesting.
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B
News reports about Larjani say that he is no longer part of, part of the regime. He has passed on, passed on to a better place
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C
just now. Is this breaking news?
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B
Yes, well, yeah, as, as we record.
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C
So how will the regime survive without a Kantian in, in a high up position? I think that's really the death blow to the whole thing. Yeah, Once you don't have a Kant scholar, you just can't really survive anymore as a regime. Well, I mean, there was that whole thing about how that there was this kind of. I, I can't remember. There were a few books like in the 90s that were. And maybe the war on sort of 2000s war on terrier about how like, you know, the problem was that Islam had never had an enlightenment. So, you know, maybe by killing off the Kant scholar, we've, we've sort of made it even, even harder for the Middle east to undergo an enlightenment. I don't know.
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A
Well, maybe it's about to enter into a new, profoundly intersectional era because, you know, news reports say that Muqtaba might have lost a leg in the US Attacks and, and he's maybe homosexual. We don't know. But according to sources, there are no homosexuals in Iran. They do, however, provide support for sex change operations or sorry, gender affirming care. So you might wind up with a disabled trans man of color that the left can see as a beacon leading one of the most powerful countries against the United States. That is the future. We can see a disabled trans man of color and yeah, that's there. They don't need a Kantian. They need what's her face, the intersectional skull.
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C
I remember Angela Nagle had some remark back, I don't know, around the time she was sort of getting canceled by the left, that there was some ridiculous take about how if your revolution doesn't have disabled people on the front lines or something, it's not a real revolution. I just remember Angela having this line about like, come on, obviously, like disabled people are not going to lead the revolution, which, which obviously didn't make anyone happy, but now she's being proven wrong. So. Sorry, Angela.
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D
I mean, the other possibility that I don't think the EU wants you to consider is that he may have been a successful case with conversion therapy. I mean, maybe it did actually cure him, even though the EU is trying to ban it right now. So you never know.
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A
Oh, that is a good point. He did go to the UK three or four times. So he he married quite late in life at age 30 reportedly. And and this was apparently due to impotence.
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D
Well that might be the the euphemism for conversion therapy.
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B
Conversion therapy out impotence treatment is in and there are no gay people in Iran. Thanks to Steven, Jeff and Ashley. Thank you listeners. For more go to compactmag.com subscribe.
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A
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C
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A
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Com.