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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson.
- [01:08]
C
And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas.
- [01:09]
B
And we are two political science professors who have just watched the first two episodes of Pluribus, which is the new Apple TV show from Vince Gilligan, famous for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, two kind of really well regarded shows. A lot of anticipation for this show. We're going to talk about its themes, maybe some of its, the ideas that it's put on the table, maybe some of its politics, some of its ideas about individualism and collectivity and about utopia and dystopia and maybe about art and audience. I have to say, Geoff, I'm really sort of excited by this show. I thought the first two episodes were smart, were funny, were provocative, they looked beautiful. I think it's really put a lot of things on the table without really kind of fully showing its hand, revealing exactly what its thematic take is gonna be. But how could it in two episodes? But I'm pretty excited about this one, Jeff.
- [02:02]
C
Yeah, I enjoyed the first two episodes. I found them pretty entertaining. I agree. I think it look really, really good. The cinematography is really good.
- [02:11]
B
I think we wanted to talk about the show in a few different ways, on a few different levels. We want to talk about just what's going on, what's happening in the plot and maybe some of the show's generic kind of sensibilities, what genre it seems to be placed in. Then maybe talk about some of the big picture ideas or the metaphors. I mean, it's pretty clear that this is not a show about a virus, right? This is not like a techno scientific thriller. And it's not a straight kind of sci fi thriller or horror, a story about an alien invasion, although that may very well be what's going on, that it's operating on a metaphorical error. And then I wanted to talk a bit about, you know, a section I've called ard and audience, I think I might have an understanding of why Carol's immune from this virus and what role her particular form of misanthropy is playing and how it relates to her career as an author of Middle of the Road Drossi fantasy history kind of novels. Even. Even low brow. Even low brow. So in terms of kind of what's going on in the show, obviously the kind of inciting incident is this. This sort of SETI station receives a signal from outer space and it's a recipe for a virus. And of course, humans being the. The highly intelligent yet sort of utterly heedless species that we are, the first thing that we try and do is as well, let's cook up this recipe and you know, we'll feed it to some mice. But of course there's a. There's a lab leak and the virus kind escapes and it turns out to be this. This sort of virus that robs individuals of their individuality and makes them sort of quiescent and sort of satisfied. Actually, it's very much a kind of a happiness virus.
- [03:53]
C
A form of new world vibe going on.
- [03:55]
B
Yeah, exactly. Like kind of flattens out affect, makes affect only. Only exist in kind of the positive registers and creates sort of pacifist individuals who are. Who are intensely satisfied but also crucially are connected in sort of this hive mind way such, you know, everyone knows everything about everyone else and is sort of able to communicate instantaneously. And I thought in a scene that was very well accomplished, the central character questions a young boy about kind of how he would conduct a sort of pelvic examination. Because of course she's made the point that he's not only someone's son now, but he's also a gynecologist. He's also someone who can fly planes. He's every human being simultaneously. But of course, once you're every human being, you're also no human being.
- [04:42]
C
We as Us, we users, as the first episode is entitled.
- [04:45]
B
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And Pluribus or Plu. You do look at that, that title and you wonder, are we supposed to call it Plur one Bus? Because that, because that's how it's literally, literally written out. But that's the point it's making. Of course that puts the movie in the realm of a lot of textual comparators, I thought, most famously like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is definitely in there and all of its remakes and all of its. The things that have copied it.
- [05:08]
C
Yeah, I mean there's the zombie genre that sort of. That I think this text points to, but it also, it has kind of these slow boil horror elements to it. One of the things I noticed was that the background music seemed to be really important here, particularly in the first episode and in those initial scenes where Carol's driving the truck that she has absconded with and is kind of trying to get out of Albuquerque's sort of main central area and back to someplace that she hopes is not affected by the virus. Of course there is no place.
- [05:42]
B
Right.
- [05:42]
C
But all of those scenes are offset with this kind of. Again, it felt very like mid century kind of orchestral scores that were more reminiscent of something like Hitchcock's the Birds to me than they were the kinds of contemporary soundtracks that you tend to get out of these sorts of movies.
- [06:00]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really interesting comparison. Zombie movies I think of course are absolutely in the background here. I think we'd mentioned just off camera like the 28 days slash weeks Years kind of franchise. It really reminded us of that which.
- [06:13]
C
Also begins with a lab leak, which.
- [06:14]
B
Which begins with a lab le. But which is also fairly clearly it's about zombies, but not about zombies. It's. It's really about the ways that societies kind of organize themselves and thinks about, think for. Think for themselves or sometimes do great harm to themselves. Obviously in today's day and age, if you do a story about a virus that potentially leaks out of a lab, you're in the realm of pandemic fiction or Covid, you know, potentially reality. That's one explanation for Covid was that kind of lab leak. Anything is going to read. Anything pandemic related is going to read kind of quite raw to, you know, to people around today. It has a black humor tone, you know, and I thought there were parts of it that were genuinely funny. And I think Rhea Seehorn, the kind of actress is, you know, a viable central character here. It seems to me like she has the heft and the presence and also the character to fulfill the many roles shows, the many faces she's gonna have to show us to hold this thing together. Cause she's gotta be, you know, just in those first two episodes, she's gotta be grief stricken, totally disorientated, you know, you know, absolutely confused. But also sort of funny. And maintain her role of kind of knowing misanthrope.
- [07:28]
C
Yeah.
- [07:28]
B
You know, which is absolutely essential to her characterization.
- [07:32]
C
And cynical alcoholic.
- [07:34]
B
Cynical alcoholic. But also not just a. She's not a heartless person. Right. She's horrified at some things that she causes to happen and, and other things that are going on. And that's quite a lot of things for one character to bear. And the whole show is going to rise or fall on the sort of coherence of that performance. And I thought it was there in the first episodes. It's a utopia slash dystopia. You know, it's in that genre. I'm not sure it has a. Well, I don't know what its ultimate disposition towards utopia and dystopia is going to be. Obviously it's early in the show. It is at the moment taking a fairly standard view of utopia that people who don't study and work in utopian studies would take. Right. Which is utopia is this thing where, you know, everyone's going to be happy. It's going to be the provision of happiness by politics or sort of beyond politics, making politics not really necessary anymore in conflict not necessary anymore. But that to get there, that there'll be lots. It can only be imposed by coercion or by you know, extraneous force. It can't be done by agenda humans themselves. It has to be done to you either by kind of blood soaked territory, tyrannical regimes or in this case kind of some, some extraordinary external intervention. Which means that the utopia, if it's brought about, is brought about, you know, in, in sort of rivers of blood. And so you shouldn't really try. And actually the utopia, when it arrives will be profoundly dystopic because it's to sort of re engineer human emotions and interactions is, is going to inevitably lead to a. To a flattening out of kind of individuality. And that's a, that's a position I think that people who study and advocate for the maintenance of a principle of hope in politics and life recognize as a caricature of utopia. But nonetheless it is a fairly standard kind of mainstream reading of what utopia is.
- [09:25]
C
It's fairly standard and it reminds me of a movie that we potted on some time back called the Beast, in which the central conceit is pretty similar. I mean, here in that movie, you have human beings choosing. But it's kind of a soft choice. It's more like a soft coercion, I guess, into engaging in this treatment that essentially wipes them of their emotional life or empties of them and their emotional life. It's slightly different here because, as you say, it. It's not as though the. The Pluribus is. Has. Is having its emotions entirely wiped. It's that everything and all the effect exists in the register of what would conventionally be understood as positive. Yes, emotions.
- [10:11]
B
Right.
- [10:12]
C
But it. But it's also pretty flat. Right. And so it is. It's reminiscent in that way.
- [10:17]
B
Well, and shared and undifferentiated, crucially. Right. So. So it's. So it's conventional. All emotions are now lowest common denominator. Conventional sort of understandings of what would be good and nice emotions to have at this moment, which would make it.
- [10:33]
C
Which would make it truly Carol's nightmare world. Because, I mean, after all, what has she gotten rich and famous doing? She's gotten rich and famous by writing these trashy romance novels that effectively portray their characters in all of the exact ways that they're being portrayed when they become Pluribus.
- [10:53]
B
Yeah. So let's talk about that now. I thought that might be the kind of third thing we'd talk about this question of what makes Carol immune, which I think is tied to a broader theme of sort of art and audience and the role of artists, mass culture and artistic integrity and all the rest of it. And I think there is a. That is one of the metaphorical structures that is existing or one of the thematic lanes of possibility that the show has opened up that I'm actually very, very interested in. And I think you're right that this is a nightmare for Carol, who does not undergo the change. Right. Who is a misanthrope in the pre virus times and is a misanthrope in the post virus times.
- [11:33]
C
You know, what would the world look like if it was full of only people who are her superfans? Well, and so that's what we're getting here.
- [11:41]
B
Yeah. So episode one begins with a long scene in Barnes and Noble where, you know, fan after fan is kind of brought to her and they are very much seen through her eyes. Right. Which is weirdos. And she's sort of fairly open with them, or only. Only a notch below. Completely transparent with them. She's transparent to us that she thinks they're idiots and she thinks the books that she's written are stupid.
- [12:05]
C
Yeah. And she inscribes the ex. Same thing on every single.
- [12:09]
B
Where the wind be with you, or so the wind be at your back or something, you know, which is a.
- [12:13]
C
Swoon treatment of them is wholly undifferentiated as well.
- [12:16]
B
Well, exactly. And so they. That's. That's a smart thing the show is doing because they believe they are receiving an individualized experience, but they're actually receiving a commercialized and insincere expression of positivity from their. Their. Their artistic hero who thinks her own books are middle of the road dross. She says that they're like bad Star Trek, which I thought was an odd. An odd thing to say about those books. Speculative historical fantasy, which. That's not quite what Star Trek was. However, I think it is a clever meta point because there are Star Trek episodes that have the same storyline as Pluribus. Right. What has happened to these people on this world where everyone is having peace be upon you, brother, but actually there's something sinister in the background. So a bad version of Pluribus is a bad Star Trek episode. I don't think it is a bad version, but that's an important kind of meta point. Carol's wife says to her at one point something about if. If you make one person happy, you're making lots of people happy. If you make even one person happy. Maybe that's not art. Yeah, but. But it is something. It is important. And Carol's sort of struggling with this. You know, she has this secret serious book that she's wrestling with, firing off into the world, but hasn't quite got around to it. But she's definitely distraught at her own.
- [13:36]
C
Artistic output, but she's also afraid to release it because of something her white. When. When she asks her wife, she says, do you think it's good?
- [13:46]
B
Right.
- [13:46]
C
This. This unreleased manuscript, this is serious manuscript that she's been working on. And the wife doesn't say, I think it's good. She says, I think people will like it. Which is obviously calibrated to appeal to Carol in that moment, to Carol's sensibilities. But what it also indicates is that Carol, even in her fantasy life, it is not devoid of these commercial considerations. Right. Because if it was her wife's earlier point, if one person loves it, it's worthy, would articulate and would strike her. And it doesn't seem to. I think people will love it.
- [14:21]
B
Right, right, right. Well. And it's Carol wrestling with that insecurity, right, that she sort of has a panorama of self loathing. On the one hand, she loathes the thing that is making her successful and loathes that kind of artistic and therefore must at some level loathe herself for going through that. At another level, she, you know, is. Is too insecure to release the serious book into the. Into the world. And at a third level, she sort of hates herself for wanting, you know, in spite of knowing she should make an art a real artistic statement and believing she's capable of doing it, but just is not quite brave enough. She also secretly wants it to be both an artistic statement and super popular, you know, and I think there's a real commentary going on about the role of the. It's the role of cult writ large, but the role of the artist within culture and what is the artist's kind of responsibility. And one thing that occurred to me, because this is a show that while not explicitly about politics, has obvious political, as all utopias do, has obvious political resonances. One thing that occurred to me might be going on there is Carol is an elite and she wants the masses to like things that the masses don't like. And she's appalled and disgusted by the things that the masses do like. And it's particularly personal for her because the things that they do like are coming from her and she's simultaneously disgusted with them. And you know, we live in a. In a political time where lots of elites have been surprised and disgusted by. By what a lot of people actually seem to want from not only culture, but politics as well.
- [16:01]
C
Yes, but they're also just like. Carol is happy to profit off of it.
- [16:05]
B
Oh yeah.
- [16:05]
C
Or to use it to their own benefit. The other thing that strikes me that is sort of on this point, I think as well is that so when Carol writes for trashy historical fiction, she has what for her is the very damaging impact of a huge audience positively responding. So when she puts out her sort of false veneer of art, it's very positively received. When, however, she is her most authentic and genuine self. Right? Very angry, negative, honest, brutal and direct. What ends up happening, she ends up murdering millions and millions of people. So it's part of what's happening. You're right. It's this story of an artist who is not actually being genuine in their art or honest in their art. And. And in one context, like a kind of a commercial context, full of commodities and throwaway, cheap, unlasting, I suppose, products of entertainment. In that context, she's extremely successful in a material way. In the other context, when she is her authentic self. Right. The impact is grotesque.
- [17:21]
B
Yes.
- [17:22]
C
And so these two environments that she finds herself in ironically end up just sort of reinforcing her own ambivalence about what she's doing as an artist.
- [17:31]
B
Right, right, right. No, I think that's true. I think that's true. So I'm really interested to see how that kind of develops because I'm sure that's a theme that will be persistent throughout the series.
- [17:42]
C
The thing that I'm just thinking of now, and we're going to depart a little bit maybe from the script, but I'm curious about your thoughts on, is the method of transmission for this virus is to be forcibly kissed by somebody who you don't. You don't want to be kissed by. Well, yes, it's assault, Right?
- [17:59]
B
Yeah.
- [17:59]
C
But it's a very particular kind of assault. And it's assault. It's a kind of assault that is linked in a certain way with exactly the sort of trope of low brow romance. Right. In which it's frequently the case that like one character is not really. Is, you know, is taken by passion. Right. And passion on someone else who is not, not really into what's happening.
- [18:26]
B
Right.
- [18:27]
C
It's. So the exact mode of transmission into this nightmarish world of Carol is the one that she, you know, plays with herself for profit.
- [18:36]
B
Right? Yeah, yeah.
- [18:37]
C
So I, I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure which, if you had any thoughts about.
- [18:40]
B
Yeah, I definitely noticed that the virus, at least, at least at first was transmitted that way. I think they kind of.
- [18:46]
C
The only way was.
- [18:47]
B
I don't know, they were also swabbing their mouths and wiping them on donuts. I think there's a saliva or bodily fluids kind of thing. But it is true that the initial transmissions between the people in the lab were done through forcible kissing.
- [18:59]
C
And that's the other thing that I noticed. Right. So the, the conspiracy about chemtrails is old. It's old school.
- [19:05]
B
Oh, the planes that are flying in a line in the sky.
- [19:07]
C
Yeah. The chemical trails, like contain these kinds of mind control, you know, nanobots or whatever. That's a very old school American conspiratorial fantasy. So again, he's playing, it seems to me, Gilligan, with these kinds of playing knowingly, probably with these kinds of fantasies of destruction.
- [19:25]
B
Yeah, I think so. And I think it's very noticeable. Yes. The kind of forced kissing bit was going on. And what she's Writing is sort of erotica, right. Like all the people who. I mean, ironically, given Carol's. The inspiration for Carol's sort of male heroic character, erotic fantasy character in the book is definitely erotica. Right.
- [19:45]
C
I mean, her reading at Barnes and Noble is an erotica passage.
- [19:49]
B
Right.
- [19:49]
C
That she reads.
- [19:50]
B
Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I agree. That was very significant. And it does make you wonder because all of that's coming from inside Carol and is then sort of externalized. You know, it does make you wonder to what extent a lot of these are. As you say, nightmare is the right word. Right. It's like a. It's like almost a psychic projection. I mean, Carol, in some sense, is orchestrating this catastrophe. I mean, she's enormously significant on her. On a mass scale to what's going on. It's her sort of. She's the only one, I think, who gets angry and kills millions of people. Right.
- [20:25]
C
It's the only one we've seen so far.
- [20:26]
B
Because rather crucially, the setup is that the conflict is not Carol or is not only Carol and the hive mind. Right. There's also a third group which is similarly sort of immune people who are a very small number, but who are also, like, completely fine with it and actually see this as an improvement. I mean, for them, it is the utopia. And why are they. You know, why is Carol being so difficult and. And all the rest of it? And, you know, what's his name? Kumba is the. The. The great other character, I think, in this. The guy who turns up on Air Force One for his meeting with Carol, and he's decided what he's actually going to do here is sort of live like a king, and he's got a harem, and he's. You know, he's kind of having the highlight, famously.
- [21:07]
C
He's going to go to Las Vegas and stay in the suite of the king of rock and roll.
- [21:10]
B
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You know, and that those. Those people are all fine with it. And that's another conflict that's going on.
- [21:17]
C
They're all fine with it. And the only things that they're not fine with are things that Carol considers to be trivial. They're upset that the animals are out.
- [21:28]
B
Of the zoos or that she swears.
- [21:31]
C
Or that she swears or drinks or that the animals, they're going to take their dogs away. They can't keep their dogs anymore. And so it's stuff that Carol considers to be trivial and not the fundamental problem, which is this kind of the wiping of individuality en masse.
- [21:47]
B
Right.
- [21:48]
C
But you're right. There's that third set of conflicts right here and we haven't met the other. I presume that in future episodes we're going to meet the other immune people and I presume we're going to get a story about why they're immune. But there's a certain meta. I mean, I think what. One of the things that has come up as we've been talking is that there's a kind of a meta vision of what's going on here is that this is, this is Carol's nightmare. Yeah, it's Carol's series of deepest anxieties literalized in her life.
- [22:13]
B
Absolutely. So the, so the, the question of what is the kind of dominant illusion here? What is the dominant metaphor? I mean, you know, to the extent the Invasion of the Body Snatchers is this kind of dominant pretext here. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers very famously was read simultaneously as an indictment of or a fear of communist homogenization and a fear of kind of right wing homogenization. It was read as an anti communist film and an anti McCarthyite film in the 19. Whatever it was 1956 when it, when it came out. So, so a homogenization from the left and the right and the, the kind of. Deny, you're denying my individuality. You're trying to impose a, a group think on top of me by coercion is the critique of every ideology, about every other ideology, certainly in contem pre, you know, America.
- [23:06]
C
Yeah.
- [23:07]
B
You know, so this kind of structure that's been set up lends itself to a number of different readings as to what the, the target could be. Right. It could be read as a critique of like, you know, communism, socialism, that kind of thing. It could simultaneously be read and has been read in other contexts as a critique of, you know, neoliberalism or the, the unfettered market. A critique of commodity capitalized capitalism and the commodific. Everything including. And maybe especially culture. A critique of. And I think you, you think this is really going on in the show. A critique of contemporary online group think kind of with social media as the viral transmission thing and the hive mind being just the collective wisdom or own wisdom, but, but, but thinking anyway of, of the, the, the connected masses.
- [24:01]
C
Yeah, yeah, that, that's what I got.
- [24:02]
B
Okay.
- [24:03]
C
I mean, I think there's something happening for sure here about the, the, the mode of interact, the, the digitized virtual mode of interaction and the way that on one hand it promises extreme individuality, but the scripts for being individual are all so well set that everybody is individual in exactly all the same ways.
- [24:24]
B
Yeah.
- [24:25]
C
And you know, we see that, I think in the first half of the first episode we see there's a lot, you know, it. I think it's important that Carol doesn't seem to have a phone and everyone else does. And I think it's, it's symbolically important that Carol's wife is infected while she's staring at her phone, reading the comments of Carol's superfans.
- [24:48]
B
Yes.
- [24:49]
C
And like trying to do an impromptu, you know, ask me anything type deal with Carol. So I, I don't think that those are. I, I don't think that's accidental mental.
- [25:01]
B
Well, and then, and then when, and then she drops the phone when she becomes infected and the phone smashes in great sort of symbolic style.
- [25:08]
C
Yeah, yeah. So I, I mean, I, to the extent that there's an, I guess an other here, it, it feels to me like it's, it's. That's it. That's the, it's the method by which people have enslaved themselves.
- [25:21]
B
Yeah.
- [25:22]
C
Right. And so the, the questioning sort of classic American counter subversive thinking is going to be. Is there an external force that is orchestrating and conducting all of this? I mean, there almost always is.
- [25:34]
B
Right.
- [25:34]
C
In this manner of storytelling. And I suspect there probably is right. Because, I mean, somebody sent the transmission after all the recipe through the 600 million light years or whatever. And so one wonders if what we're seeing here is a kind of prelude to an eventual introduction of a kind of totalizing other, an alien force that's controlling humanity from afar.
- [26:00]
B
It'd be the perfect way to set up an invasion. Right. Like make it. Make everyone just quiescent and.
- [26:05]
C
Yeah.
- [26:05]
B
And kind of happy with anything goes. No, I think there's, I think there's definitely a lot of. Kind of.
- [26:10]
C
Well, and crucially unwilling to kill anything.
- [26:13]
B
Yes. And therefore not resist it in any way. Although, again, I don't think this is going to be a literal sci fi thriller. I don't think the aliens are going to turn up in kind of tripods. And if they turn up, they'll be so some darkly comic metaphor for something else. All right, so if you have thoughts on Pluribus, we'd really love to hear them. We really think this show is sort of so amenable to a lot of different readings and a lot of different interpretations that we want to kind of test ours with you, but also hear what yours are and get challenged by your thoughts. So please do that. I'm really looking forward to the next episode. I'm kind of really sort of into this.
- [26:54]
C
Yeah, I think I'm in.
- [26:55]
B
Good.
- [26:55]
C
Yeah.
- [26:55]
B
Okay. And so we will do a similar video after the next episode next week. But on that bombshell, Kay Jeweler's early Black Friday sale is happening now. Get up to 50% off Black Friday deals and up to 40% off everything else. Don't miss this sale. Start your season with savings only at K. Exclusions apply. See k.com exclusions for details.