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- [00:00]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
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]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson.
- [01:09]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas.
- [01:10]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And we are two political science professors who have just seen 28 years later, the Bone Temple. And we are going to give our fairly instant reactions and our breakdowns of its themes, its ideas, and its aesthetics. Jeff, I sat in the cinema watching this movie next to you, and for just about the whole movie, I had a big smile on my face. And it's not. It's not a. It is sometimes a funny movie, but it's also, at some points, a brutal movie. So the smile was not from the kind of tenor of the movie. It was more that this was a movie I thought that was hitting. It's intellectual and it's aesthetic marks again and again and again. And so the big smile I had on my face was just a real appreciation of a movie that I think is important, was fascinating, was a real esthetic and intellectual experience. So I'm really high in this movie. Really, really exc. To break it down with you.
- [02:04]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I really enjoyed the movie. And it was nice to be at an experience like that because I so rarely venture out into the wilds of an actual movie theater these days that it was nice to be out and seeing this kind of movie. This movie maybe. In particular, I thought the movie it looks great. It's got some pretty incredible set pieces. The kind of the third act set piece probably being the one that I think is almost certainly going to stick with me the most. And I think it's a movie that works so well on its own that if there were not the promised third, you know, sequel or third part of the trilogy coming for 28 years later, that would be fine. The movie, I think, succeeds really well on its own merits and if there were no more, I think it would be fine.
- [02:59]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, it really brings the story kind of full circle. There's a real satisfying ending, even though we know this is not the end. My sort of excitement, and I should say I was equally excited about 28 years later the, you know, the movie that these two were shot back to back. And you can, you can really tell the Sharer writer Alex Garland that it's a coherent intellectual project. I was really, really excited coming out of 28 years later because it had done something so unexpected, you know, as big fan of 28 Days later, but I sort of feared that any sequel would just kind of be a, be a retread and 28 years later had done something really unexpected, had made a series of, you know, really resonant kind of political commentary, political and social commentaries on our time. It was, it was a very British movie. It was commenting, I thought on, on British politics a lot. And I was equally excited last night watching the, the Bone Temple to see that again. There were a series of, I think, very insightful, very well staged, very deep, but not obscure points that were made about politics, about humanism, about our contemporary historical moments. And I was thinking as I came out of the movie and considering those two movies together 28 years later and 28 years later, the Bone Temple, you know, if you think about how our current social, political moments or era and you say, you know, we, we, we. We live through the pandemic, we're always going to remember that time of our lives. We're living now through a period without at all, you know, trying to get partisan or anything but a period of political contestation, a period in which lots of the pillars of, of an established order are kind of in flux and, and thrown up in the air and things are happening at kind of a rapid pace. And I think I'll always remember this period of, of my life, you know, pandemic to today. And what will I also remember as kind of worthy artistic commentaries or responses or just immediate, you know, kind of interpretations of what's going on. And I think those Movies together. These movies together are going to stand for me as things I'm going to return to if I want to remember. What were the big questions that were. That were posed by this period? What emotions did it provoke in me? What, what intellectual kind of thoughts did it, did it, did it have for me? And what were the ways that some of our artists tried to understand the moment we're living in, you know, as it was happening? And so, you know, I should say these videos we do in this one in particular, it's not really a straight movie review. It's not. It's intended to be something that puts the movie in some sort of interpretive context and tries to understand some of the ideas that the movie is, is playing with. So that's what we're going to try and accomplish here, I think.
- [05:37]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. And I think those are a really trenchant set of sharp points. And I think one of the real strengths of these two movies, and I agree they, I really. They ought to be. They're intended to be seen together. They ought to be seen together. There's a lot of connective tissue between the two movies that really helps you to keep them in mind in relation to one another, it seems to me. But one of the really interesting things here is that I think the reason why these movies work so well, one of the reasons they work so well is that they are not the standard fare, post apocalyptic entertainment genre, which when you go back and you watch 20 days later, 28 days later is very interesting because it's sort of the forerunner, right? It's the foundation piece for that staple set of genre pieces that have come in its wake. And the 28 years later is a very different kind of storytelling. And it seems to be entrenched in a very different kind of storytelling logic or storytelling register. This is how do societies move forward in the long run, right? Not in the next couple years after an apocalypse and certainly not in the next couple of months.
- [06:54]
Professor Stephen Dyson
But how.
- [06:55]
Professor Jeff Dudas
How do things change relatively permanently over the course of decades and decades? Or what's one plausible set of stories about how things might change? And that's what these two movies are doing so well. I mean, it's really meaningful to go back and to think about the first half of the 28 years later, last year's picture, which is really all about the sort of the island setting, right? And it's all about the ways in which this relatively coherent and robust group of people have reconsecrated a society. And as we talked about extensively in our review of that or in our discussion of it last year, that society on the island is really a kind of a. In certain ways, a kind of a pre modern society that returns to all of the kinds of cultural touchstones of what it means to exist outside of in contemporary society. And what we get in this movie is really different. Right. We do not return to the island at all. We have Spike, who's our kind of interlocutor. One of the reviews that I read, I thought made a sharp point, which is that Spike is really the audience, I think, in this movie. He's really. We are to see what's happening in the Bone Temple through Spike's eyes.
- [08:11]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, he's much less of a protagonist in this movie than he was in last year's 28 years later.
- [08:15]
Professor Jeff Dudas
His horror at the Jimmies, for example, is the audience's horror. And it's appropriate and satisfying. Why in the end, it's. The fateful knife thrust is made by Spike as a stand in for the audience.
- [08:28]
Professor Stephen Dyson
What we've all wanted to do the.
- [08:29]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Whole movie, do the whole movie. And so Spike is here. And Spike's connection with Kelson is very important as well. But that's not revealed until the very end. And so this is a very different kind of vision of the way that survivors have moved forward. And we get these two crucial characters.
- [08:51]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [08:51]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I think to your point, it points to each of them, I should say, point to different kinds of responses in a world that has been fully unsettled from its moorings.
- [09:02]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes. So we get. I think you're right. And that's maybe a good way to structure this is to talk about. Because it's the way the movie is structured, I think talk about the two central figures who are each engaged in a kind of project of influence or leadership or guidance over others. And I do think this is the core of the movie. On the one hand, you have Kelson and he is the doctor character. He is, I think, intended to. He is literally and he's intended to be a representative of a great strain of kind of humanism, of compassion. He's a person of learning, crucially, he's a person of science, but he's not a dogmatic rationalist. He's also a person of. He has great taste in music, he's a person of literature. And rather crucially, he has about the best bedside manner of any doctor I've ever seen. Right. He's such a person, a person of such great compassion. And his kind of project of guidance or leadership in this movie is primarily directed Towards Samson and Alpha Infected in whom he detects as he always had in all infected right of latent or residual or just inherent humanity. Right. Infected and non infected at some extent are humans and they're alike. And therefore they are worthy of not only a doctor's care, but a human care, a mutual regard. And that's kind of the Kelsen project. On the other hand you have Jimmy, who is a kind of allegory of a villain in contemporary British history called Jimmy Savile. But he's Jimmy Crystal in this movie. But he's dressed up kind of like Jimmy Savile. His project of leadership is towards his kind of cult like followers, the Jimmies. And his leadership posture is. Well, he's authoritarian, but he's also a charlatan. And in every way in which Kelson is sincere and sort of holistic and humanistic and other oriented, Jimmy is insincere, he's utilitarian. Well, he's instrumental in the way that he deals with others. He doesn't regard human beings as anything other than tools for the exertion of his own will and glory, which is quite often bend in a sadistic direction. Whereas Kelsen is a humanist and a person of science and believes in humans. Jimmy sort of appeals to a religious figure or a religious tradition, although it's a dark kind of satanic sadistic tradition. But even in that regard he's kind of full of bullshit, right? He's not a. He believes in it to the extent that it instrumentally advances his own aims and his. Whereas Kelson humanizes Jimmy crucially dehumanizes.
- [11:41]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. So on the. The humanizing versus dehumanizing, that's undoubtedly true. I do think that Jimmy's maybe a little more complicated in the sense that like all charlatans he does actually believe in his own bullshit, at least at some level. And I think the. Hear that first discussion, the first meeting between Kelson and Jimmy makes it clear that he actually has some investment in this vision that he is the son of Satan. That. And it comes from what we have learned about Jimmy, you know, from the previous movie in the kind of. The opening scene of the previous movie in which he's got this, you know, he's the. His father is a deacon who like, you know, kind of leads the hordes of the infected and considers the infected to be. Considers the virus and the infection to be sort of God's, you know, wrath upon a society that has. Has gone sinful. So there's kind of an old school Jeremiah you know, feature.
- [12:41]
Professor Stephen Dyson
So the leaf comes from a place of trauma.
- [12:43]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It comes from a place of trauma. And. But I think it's. There's a sincerity to it now with regard to sort of the. The leading of the Jimmies. I think that's quite right. Right. We are, we are shown over and over again that it's. It is authoritarian, it's ego based. It's. It's all about his own pumping up his own sense of inflated sense of importance. He, after all, refers to himself as Lord Jimmy Crystal. You know, not just Jimmy, right? That all of the followers have to. Have to look like him. They have to wear the same tracksuits, those ridiculous wigs. They all have the same names with slightly different appendages at the end of the name. And you know, crucially, one of them, I mean, Spike never. Spike is horrified by the whole thing. But you know, there's one sort of follower who sees through this really kind of from the beginning. And she ends up being the one person who can kind of survive the sadistic reign, I suppose, of being a Jimmy and walk out with Spike. But I think that's right. I mean, Kelson is about focusing on the humanity of the people around him, whether they're infected or not. And of course the bone temple itself is this monument to that. Because crucially, the bone temple is made up of bones that are not simply bones of the uninfected. Right? We know this from the beginning. He has treated both the corpses of both infected and uninfected with the same kind of dignity and the same sort of ceremonial gravitas, I suppose.
- [14:18]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, because for him, in the great humanistic tradition, right, the in essence, human beings are boiled down, I mean, literally, I guess, in this case, to the same thing, right? Which is that your physical existence on earth and so you retain that dignity even in circumstances of great disease and great plight, which is what, you know, the infected have. So they should be treated with equal dignity as opposed to a more sort of, I don't know, ethereal conception of humans as players in this great game of good and evil, where there are supernatural forces, whether they be God or the devil, that are really determining our worth and all the rest of it, which is, I think the movie is telling us those claims to anything other than. And this I think might be a controversial point. But from Kelson's standpoint, and therefore from the movie standpoint, claims to things other than a fairly straightforward Earth based humanism are susceptible to perversion and can lead people astray, right? Because they're going to be processed by imperfect humans in ways that allow for the perverted leadership of someone like Jimmy or the kinds of dehumanization that is going on throughout the movie. And I think that's another great theme of this movie, right. Which is how do bad things happen on earth? It's not the orchestration of supernatural evil. I think from the movie's perspective or from Kelsen's perspective, it's. It's through a process of perceptual dehumanization. We're shown why the infected attack people attack the uninfected. And it's not because the infected are evil or possessed by a supernatural force. It's because the virus has changed their perception of the uninfected to look demonic in the same way as the infected look demonic to humans. And we see this again and again. The Jimmies wear masks when they commit crimes. They dehumanize in order to, you know, exercise their torture on people. They have to dehumanize these people, and they have to kind of follow the sort of cult leader. And so that process of humanization and dehumanization driven by our perceptions of each other and our beliefs about each other's inherent value. And crucially, in ways that are maybe all too easily influenced by charismatic others, you know, Samson is brought back to humanizing perspective of others by Kelson's great leadership. Many of the Jimmies are brought down to a dehumanizing perception of others by following Jimmy's leadership. That's. That, I think, is a dynamic of human interaction that the movie's kind of pointing out. Yeah.
- [16:55]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And the other thing is that in the process of humanizing and dehumanizing, there is also the process of individualizing and deindividualizing. And that's the other thing that's happening here, is that we. So take the infected, for example. Right. Kelson's great insight, his great realization is that the virus is also a kind of a. An emotional and psychological virus in the ways that you've just indicated that it is something that breeds in the infected fear. Right. Fear of others. And so Kelson recognizes that that can be treated, Right. He may not be able to treat the physical elements of the virus or not know how to do that, but he does feel like there's a chance of treating the emotional or psychological ele of it. And he. He comes to this. This great realization, and it turns out to be. Seems to be true. Right. With regard to his engagements with Samson, Crucially, for Jimmy's form of kind of charismatic authority. It. It's all about deindividualizing his followers, right? It. It's about making them all the same, right? And why they have the unit, the wigs and the wigs, the same tracksuits, the same. All they talk about is Teletubbies, right? So, so the same form of entertainment, it's all a projection of self, right? And the masks, crucially, right. When it comes time to do you know what, what they call the charity work, right, the torture work.
- [18:14]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, that's all.
- [18:15]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Put the masks on that.
- [18:16]
Professor Stephen Dyson
That is crucial. That one thing Jimmy Savile, it's another play on. On. On who Jimmy Savile was. Because one thing he did was a lot of charity, right? His whole shtick was I do charity. And he was. That's how he got his. That's why he's sir, right? That's what he got his knighthood for was like services to charity. And in addition to having his, his show, Jim Will Fix it, where he, where he would kind of grant children wishes and also, you know, commit horrific acts under the COVID of. Of that Persona. He was always doing charitable works. He'd go on like these mega long run runs and walks when he'd raise a load of money for, for charity. And so Jimmy Crystal's perversion of what charity is. He calls charity the acts of torture. He always says that their charity is. Is another really acute commentary on, on the Jimmy Savile figure.
- [19:04]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I guess the, even the, the tag phrase. How's that?
- [19:09]
Professor Stephen Dyson
How's that? I think it comes from. I meant to look that up. I think, I think it does. Yeah. I have a sort of version of Jimmy Savile had all sorts of, you know, now then, now then he'd say all the time and maybe how is. That was also one of his, his catchphrases. Yeah.
- [19:22]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And then of course, so with that. That's a demand. It's a call and response demand in the same way, you know, it's very redolent of like certain forms of Christianity. And we're calling response as well, right. But again, perverted and satanic. And we get that we see it everywhere, right? We see the upside down crosses that the Jimmy wears. We see the upside down crosses that have been carved into the foreheads of the jimmies. And then of course, in the climactic third act, we see him being crucified upside down with the very conventional wound in the side that artistic representations of the crucifix almost always contain as well.
- [20:04]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. The body of Jesus Just as a matter of directional cinematography or pure aesthetic appreciation. That shot very near the end, which has three main. In the heart of the bone temple, which has three main components. Jimmy crucified, obviously, Christ like, but upside down in the. In the perversion of the crucifixion. Kelson, the great humanist, kind of by his side, you know, lying there dying. And Samson, the redeemed demon brought back to humanity, who we now, as the audience know, can speak and has cognition in society and so has been brought back to humanity. But to Jimmy, in his, you know, death throes, is perceived as a horned devil, you know, and that. Just that freeze frame or that composition just really encapsulated those scenes of beauty.
- [20:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. And as we talked about off screen earlier, even that scene is layered in meaning because it's a throwback to earlier in the movie, in which Samson presents what appears to be a deer head skull to Kelson to go into the bone temple. And so it's plausible when you first see Samson arriving from Jimmy's kind of perspective, his hallucinatory perspective, it's plausible that actually maybe we are seeing a figure who's wearing a horned head or a horned skull, and then it becomes clear sort of slowly, that this is hallucinatory.
- [21:39]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes.
- [21:39]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Very clever.
- [21:40]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, I agree. I agree. The other thing I thought was really clever. One of the thing I thought was really clever was, you know, Kelsen's great humanism is. Is displayed not. Not through kind of bravura. Bravura acts of. Of quoting from great literature and being ostentatiously, surely, you know, a person of the. Of the humanities and a person of great learning. But he's really into sort of pop culture. Yeah. And he has a. He has a solid sense. And this is, of course, how he bests Jimmy in the end. He has a solid sense of absurdity and a solid sense of, you know, the role that sacred symbols and profane symbols play when mediated through human popular culture.
- [22:21]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He puts on a good show.
- [22:22]
Professor Stephen Dyson
He puts on an amazing show. And this is, I think, something that's getting a lot of attention in reviews of the movie, and justifiably so. Yeah, but. But the great way that Kelson sort of bests Jimmy is he puts on a better show of demagoguery than Jimmy does in a spectacular pyrotechnic one. But he's able to do that entirely because he knows it's absurd. Right. He knows that humans are kind of susceptible to this kind of thing, and he knows it's absurd. And he's able to play with the absurdity before he puts on the great show. He says, let's turn this up to 11. In a callback to like Spinal Tap, he puts on an Iron Maiden record which is full of this kind of imagery and symbology of the devil that he's. But. But it's as mediated through a kind of not nudge and a wink sort of popular culture.
- [23:06]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And he's able to do that, I think in part because while he knows that this is absurd and he knows the popular culture performative elements of it, Jimmy and Jimmy's followers do not.
- [23:18]
Professor Stephen Dyson
No.
- [23:19]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. They're all too young. Right. To realize that. That this is in fact, you know, sort of an artifact of 1980s popular culture. So it's all very. I think that's right. It's all very cleverly done and done in a way that is far more persuasive as a performance than what Jimmy is offering to his followers. Which is in part why they're. Many of them are much more impressed with Kelson than they. Than they ever have been with Jimmy.
- [23:48]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [23:48]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Jimmy rules by sadism. Yeah, right. Not by performance.
- [23:52]
Professor Stephen Dyson
100%. And I think that the movie is making a broader point in that specific instance and at several other times about the importance of remembering and being a good custodian and a good teacher of our history. And that includes viewing, you know, contemporary history in clear eyed ways. So Kelsen at one point has a conversation with Jimmy where Jimmy says, I'm too young to remember the old world, really. I remember the Teletubbies, but. And Kelsen says, well, I was older. I don't remember it in specific. Lots of things in specific terms anyway. But I do remember I had a sense that it was. You had a sense that it was solid, that it had pillars that we thought were unshakable. And it turns out those pillars were very shakable. And I think one thing that Kelsen is saying is don't be, don't forget contemporary history and don't be entirely dismissive of what's gone before, particularly if you didn't live through it. Right. You can't always assume that the trajectory is upwards. We can lose ground on things, things can go backwards and things can go backwards in humanistic terms, particularly when you, when you forget about the triumphs and the disasters of the past. Yeah, right. And this is, I think, sort of hammered home in the movies Coda where we. Where the trilogy is sort of brought full circle and we reconnect with Jim with Cillian Murphy's character. And Jim is teaching his daughter about the history of the contemporary world, you know, before the fall, the post World War II period. And Jim is saying that one of the major lessons of European history in the post World War II years was never forget. And it's never forget that, you know, things like collective institutions were created for. For a purpose. Yeah, right. And it's. It's not just purely like for financial gain or all the rest of it. They. They were. They were created in order that you don't forget the disasters of the early and the mid 20th century. And if. If people did. The implied sort of point of that is if we did get to a point where no one remembered what happens when you engage in dehumanization, when you engage in, you know, modes of leadership or interaction with others that. That are purely instrumental, that don't have a collective, you know, spirit that way, where you see people who are not like you, who are not like you as less than when you engage in those things, you tend to find catastrophe. Yeah. And that's what's happened in the movie. And that, I think, is what Jim's saying to his. To his daughter. And also sort of without. Without being too on the nose about it also is being said to. To us in our contemporary moments.
- [26:33]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And this is the whole point of the bone temple itself, right? It is to remember, as you talked about earlier, the. The one common thing, right. That is humanity. And that's it. Right. And this is sort of Kelson's message over and over again. It's literalized in the form of a bone temple. I think it also appears pretty clearly in the relationship between Kelsen and Samson, which is this kind of thoroughgoing, I should say, doubling relationship. And it's one of the things that the movie does so well is. Presents Kelsen and Samson in various states of sort of taking on the other person's characteristics. So we see Kelson fairly early on in the movie in a state of full undress, right. In ways. And he's presented in ways that are reminiscent of how Samson looks. Right. But then as the movie goes on and Samson is becoming sort of. Is getting more back, you know, through the sort of the. The. The habitual addiction of the morphine, he's starting to. To seem more like Kelson. What does he end up doing? He's starting to. To kind of wear a. Like a little skirt, you know, the same sort of little skirt that Kelson wears is now showing up on. On Samson as well. And then there Are these, you know, there are these moments in which, in their, their mutual drug induced haze, they, they dance with one another. They, they, you know, they sort of stare at the moon together. And so there is this kind of doubling moment in which they are each coming towards one another in what I presume the movie wants to say is this kind of embrace of their mutual humanity. And so I think that's what, that's the, that is. Does appear to be the lesson of the movie.
- [28:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [28:25]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That, that even in these moments of tremendous uncertainty when the moorings have fallen away, that there is. The only thing that you can really count on anymore is that there is a kind of commonality, a mutuality. And that when the moorings fall away and that also that perception, as you say, or that sense of mutual mutuality falls away, that is when things spiral completely and totally out of control.
- [28:55]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [28:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I, I think the movie wants imaginatively to, to remind us of that in these moments.
- [29:04]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [29:04]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. And in these contemporary moments in particular.
- [29:07]
Professor Stephen Dyson
So, so what a joy. What a joy to see this movie. What a joy to talk about it. A movie that's, you know, I think it's important without, without being, you know, overwhelmingly heavy. It's fun, it's funny at times. I laughed out loud. It's not pretentious and it's aesthetically and intellectually really deep and rich. But also it is just a very pleasurable watching experience. It's everything you'd hope for if you go to the cinema.
- [29:29]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. Very highly recommended.
- [29:30]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. Okay. And please let us know what you thought of that movie. Did we get it right? Did we get it wrong? What things did we miss? What were we sort of correct about? We'd love to have some interaction with you in the comments section and on that bombshell.